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."
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