Letters in which TS Eliot discloses himself as a man both haunted and magically tender-hearted are to be auctioned in London. In the most striking, the poet goes further than in almost anything he wrote in betraying his torment over his marriage to his first wife, Vivien, whom he committed to a mental hospital.
The morning after hearing of her death in January 1947, he wrote to a friend: "You will not know how helpful it was to me to dine with you last night. I am going through an infernal passage which, like all infernos, is incommunicable, though perhaps some of it may be explainable at a late time, and any support from the few friends upon whom one can lean is a great help."
On Thursday, the auction house Bonham's called the letter remarkable: "For a man who wore many masks during his lifetime, this correspondence reveals aspects of his character previously hidden."
The letter, to be sold on Sept. 10, was to Enid Faber, the wife of Eliot's publishing colleague, Geoffrey Faber. Other letters show that she comforted him by being one of the few to attend Vivien's lonely funeral -- and that he countermanded Vivien's intention that Geoffrey Faber should be appointed an executive to her will.
After he died in 1965, Eliot was blamed for causing, or contributing to, Vivien's mental instability -- a theme of the play and film Tom and Viv.
At the time they married, in 1917, she had been acknowledged as a woman of high talent, believed to have contributed to The Waste Land and to Eliot's other poems. They parted, though she pressed continually for a reconciliation until, in 1938, she was committed.
Other letters from their relationship have yet to be published.
Of Virginia Woolf's death, he wrote: "She was a personal friend who seemed to be ... like a member of my own family; and I miss her dreadfully. But ... my admiration for the idea of her milieu, now rather old fashioned, is decidedly qualified."
However, beside this dig at the novelist, others among the letters are "tremendous fun."
For the third birthday of Enid's son -- Tom, to whom Eliot was godfather -- he introduced his cat verses by writing of one feline: "Its Name is JELLYORUM and its one Idea is to be Useful!! For Instance It Straightens The Pictures -- It Does The Grates -- Looks Into the Larder To See What's Needed."
Then he sent an invitation for Tom's fourth birthday: "Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats!/Come from your Kennels & Houses & Flats."
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS