PAINTED SHADOW

English biographer Seymour-Jones (Beatrice Webb, 1992) clinically dissects at agonizing length what surely must be one of the unhappiest marriages in literary history.

T.S. Eliot was one of the great modernist poets and a shining star of Anglican orthodoxy, but he certainly wasn’t a nice man, especially insofar as his first wife was concerned. The author stirringly defends Vivienne Eliot, remembered by literary history as a harridan who made her husband miserable primarily because the gossipy Virginia Woolf disliked the lowborn Mrs. Eliot. (“This bag of ferrets is what Tom wears around his neck,” Woolf famously wrote.) Eliot was largely responsible, Seymour-Jones argues, for driving the already unhinged Vivienne into full-tilt madness. While relying on her as a muse and borrowing her Cockney voice for The Waste Land, he kept his distance, treated her cruelly, and fairly pushed her into the arms of father-figure Bertrand Russell in exchange for cash and academic favors. Why all this nastiness? Eliot was gay, Seymour-Jones charges, though he could never really bring himself to admit it and threatened suit against critics and journalists who suggested as much; “at the core of the revulsion Eliot felt for Vivienne,” she writes, “was her very femininity, which reminded him of the shameful, feared feminine part of himself.” Though she relies on indirect evidence and more than a little speculation, and though she goes on much too long, Seymour-Jones makes her case. In doing so, she rescues poor Vivienne Eliot from the dustbin of history, even though literary scholars may be loath to incorporate her findings into their accounts of the revered poet who gave the world “Ash Wednesday”—but also, let it be remembered, Cats.

Convincingly damns Eliot not for his sexual orientation, whatever it may have been, but for his inhumanity and hypocrisy.