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Emily, as well as Eliot's family back in St. Louis, was jolted by the news in 1915 that the 27-year-old student had married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an Englishwoman of his own age about whom they knew nothing. She was pretty, intense, to some degree artistic, talented, and a disaster for the poet.
There seems to have been no period of happiness. She was not only ill and unbalanced, but early in the marriage apparently allowed herself to be seduced by Philosopher Bertrand Russell. Eliot at the time was working in a bank to feed himself, writing book reviews to supplement his income, editing his own literary journal, the Criterion, and weekending with Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set. Very soon he was forced to add another task, that of being an almost full-time nurse during Vivienne's steady affliction from migraine headaches.
Parochial Coziness. The marriage broke up in 1932 when Eliot moved out. Nevertheless, he felt almost as guilty as a murderer for leaving her and regarded himself as married to her for life. The ailing Vivienne, who never resigned herself to the separation, died 15 years later in a mental hospital. In 1957, at the age of 69, Eliot married Valerie Fletcher, his secretary. She was cheerful and loving, he was old and affectionate. There is no mystery about this happy second marriage.
The story of Ezra Pound's great hearted help to Eliot in the early London years is familiar, especially since the recent discovery of Eliot's original Waste Land manuscript with Pound's extensive excisions and imperious editorial notes. In dealing with it, Matthews tends to overvalue many of the lines Pound cut and to assume that if Pound had failed him, Eliot would never have got round to cutting them himself.
Matthews served as TIME's managing editor from 1943-49. In some ways his own life has paralleled that of his subject. He was born in the American Midwest only a few years after Eliot, was educated privately in the East, and like Eliot — though much later in life — emigrated to England, married there and became an Anglo-Catholic. This commonality serves him well as a cultivated cicerone to the poet's life, though when Matthews discusses Eliot's extreme religiosity, a note of parochial coziness sometimes slips in.
Faults and all, the book may help stir fresh interest in what is central: those crystalline obscurities, Eliot's poems.
John Skow