The structure of the play itself is of two acts and not the traditional three. It started life as the latter to reflect the triptych that was a continual theme. However, the difficulties presented by The Waste Land (discussed further in Chapter 3), and the less direct reference to The Hollow Men (as a poem rather than a chorus) led me to cut the running time of the play. The rather sudden ending of the second act, as the couple return to the impasse of ‘What shall we ever do?’ and Vivienne is left with the inhumanity of being abandoned by a phone call, is rather more poignant than if I had ploughed on with my increasingly uninspired treatment of the poetry. Indeed this ending rather more reflects Eliot’s running away from his wife in 1933 when he went to America, but never came back to her.
There are parallels in the setting of this play and ‘The Marat/Sade’ by Peter Weiss, but no direct references. There is also, for me, the acknowledgement of the political and theological arguments that rage between the characters of Marat and Sade, made apparent by their absence – for neither man appears in my play, where Eliot the man and Eliot the academic could easily encompass both. The lunatics of my play are far more genteel than the mad men of the German piece, but they are committed (however well behaved they seem) and the doctors and nurses are still jailors.
Eliot’s work as a critic and a man of letters is also wide-ranging but outside of the remit for this project. I am not looking for what he wrote about others, I simply want to find the stimuli for what he offered of himself. What I did find very curious, however, was his work as a playwright. In his lifetime plays such as the verse-drama, ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ were not the huge success Eliot was hoping for. One reason could be the speed with which the theatre was developing in new and more radical areas that seem closed to the classicist – always looking backwards to create his modernity. ‘The Cocktail Party’ has obvious allusions to his first marriage. However, ‘Sweeney Agnostics’ was more interesting for my purposes. Of all Eliot’s works this seems the most poetically autobiographical of his deepest feelings (this is in contrast to Vivienne’s, whose every line drips with introspection and caricature of those around her). Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama also appear in the 2002 edition of the ‘Collected Poems 1909 – 1962’ and here it sits with unquiet ease alongside the more recognised works of poetry. He had consulted Arnold Bennett on this work, seeing the playwright as one who ‘understood public taste and the craftsmanship necessary in order to appeal to it successfully.’ (Ackroyd, 145) He wanted to mould his understanding of public life in all its sordidness and create something that the same public would flock to see. He abandoned it when it was clear that the play was not emerging in any promising form, ‘Eliot himself believed that Sweeney Agonistes was the most original of his compositions, but he was never able to complete it and, characteristically, refused to speculate on what it might have been like if he had done so.’ (Ackroyd, 146) Taking an unfinished work and trying to create something complete is a staple of the re-write genre.
Further parallels are illuminated in Lyndall Gordon’s biography, ‘The dreaming that connects Sweeney Agonistes, ‘Doris’s Dream Songs’, and ‘The Hollow Men’ seems to veer between supernatural terror and grace that have their source in Eliot’s contrasting relations to his wife and Emily Hale.’ (Gordon, 203) It was by this time that Eliot was demonising his wife and idolising Emily. That the two women come together in my play is a sign of their (mis) treatment at the hand of the poet. Women in his life and subsequently his art are treated with superficial contempt. They are the corrupters, the evil ones forcing his hand. Thinly veiled in his well-known poetry, this misogyny is celebrated in his more lurid poetry, as Gordon writes, ‘There’s a sick fury …, an obsessional hatred of women and sex, punitive in its virulence.’ (Gordon, 77) It is even more obvious in ‘Sweeney Agnostics’ from the paranoia in the epigraph, ‘You don’t see them, you don’t – but I see them: / they are hunting me down, I must move on.’ (and after all it is the furies, the ‘Hoo ha ha’s that get him in the end) – to the repeated contempt given to ‘I knew a man once did a girl in’. However, Peter Ackroyd counters this argument with his own reading of this side to Eliot’s character, ‘’it is also true that his expressions of anti-semitism occur in the Twenties or just before, when he was inclined to make misogynistic remarks also; it was a period when his own personality threatened to break apart, and it seems likely that his distrust of Jews and women was the sign of an uneasy and vulnerable temperament in which aggression and insecurity were compounded.’ (Ackroyd, 304)
Discussions such as these I tried to hold within my play. This one, dealing with the fear of the furies, is there in the form of the two women, Vivienne and Emily Hale, opening Act 1. They are the first people seen on stage and as such hold the initial sympathies of the audience. The opening of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock sets up the play: Vivienne is the director, and Emily Hale (a one-time confidant and friend to Eliot) the patient who finds the line-learning an arduous task. They take the roles of the women who ‘come and go / Talking of Michelangelo’. They alone have the freedom to become part of the audience and do so a number of times in the play. This forms a sympathetic connection that gives both women, but particularly Viv (as she is the key character) a power that remains unbroken by Eliot even as he exits the stage for the final time. Instead of leaving with him, the audience remain behind, with Viv, in the sanatorium – they have become members of the hospital. I felt that for Eliot to be faced with the two women he betrayed now in a position of control would add to his sense of unease; he is somewhat reluctant in his role of actor to his first wife’s direction. The repeated use of the negative in his first line, ‘I never came here Vivienne. I never came to see you.’ Is seen to be impotent as he allows himself to be taken into the performing space by his own creation, admitting that he has indeed learnt his lines.
Biographically Eliot found the loss of control that a director brings to a script very difficult to accept, ‘In fact the Group Theatre itself, with Rupert Doone as its guiding spirit, was planning to stage the first public performance of Sweeney Agonistics, the play which Eliot had abandoned some ten years before. It was given at the Group’s headquarters in Great Newport Street in November 1934; the actors wore masks, and the entire performance lasted for a little over half an hour. The American accents, ‘the programme notes stated, ‘are meant to be impressionistic and not authentic’. Eliot attended the performance but was rather puzzled by the fact that it had been conceived in a manner quite different from his own understanding of the play.’ (Ackroyd, 215) It was performed, according to one member of the audience, in a farcical manner which negated the more tragic elements of the play. Sub-consciously I, too, was finding the role of a director frustrating. I was unwilling to allow the script to speak for itself. It was taking on a commentary of its own as the footnotes tracked my thought processes and influences and the stage directions became more like those on a director’s copy. Actors and more particularly the director would bring to the play something far more visual and dynamic as they worked with the words that I offered. However, due to the copyright laws on the estate my play will never be seen. Therefore I have not the problem of interpretation that ‘puzzled’ Eliot when he saw a staging of his play.
During the February of 1925, in a letter to Ottoline Morrel, Eliot described ‘the horror of his life with Vivien, which was the trigger for the ‘sort of avocation’, the ‘much more revolutionary style [crossed out] thing’ he was experimenting with, and which would become ‘Sweeney Agnostics’, Eliot’s own hysterical narrative, in which he explored the theme of wife murder:
We have been very ill,’ he wrote (bulletins of the Eliots’ health were often collective). … Some part of his strength had left him ‘forever’. The fact was that he had been very much more ill than he knew: ‘It was a real breakdown.’ Vivien, too, had collapsed a fortnight before that: she had simply got out of bed and fallen down with utter exhaustion of body and spirit. Even a few minutes conversation with him, said Tom in a revealing confession sent her temperature up. (Seymour-Jones, 408-9)
The lines of Eliot’s fragmented play were rather a late addition to my own, but the misogynist and murderous ones that occur near the end of Act II sound like Eliot’s undiluted voice.
As ‘Sweeney Agnostics’ took shape in Eliot’s mind between 1923 and 1926, Vivienne worsened. A collapse of morale in 1925 seems to mark the start of irreversible decline. Gordon uses an extract of her correspondence to make his case:
‘Am ill (still ill) not ill again (always ill)’, she told Pound, with insistent, rhythmic cries, like the wild wife in The Waste Land.
Current opinion held that a woman who showed signs of strain should be stopped from writing. The case was similar to Virginia Woolf’s, and Eliot approached Leonard Woolf for advice. They exchanged more than thirty letters at this time and lunched together weekly. (Gordon, 199-200)
A line from the letter is utilised in my play:
The letter is a clear plea against the enforced curtailing, by Eliot, of her creativity and this is a facet of their life that I picked up and used in my play. The more ‘authentic’ voice I could find for Vivienne the more it counter pointed and legitimised the words I gave her that were pure fiction. By utilising more of Eliot’s words (with ‘Sweeney Agnostics’) even those that remained unfinished and counter pointing them with more of the physical enacting of this forced cessation of Vivienne’s creativity I hoped to highlight the frustration of one who is not allowed a voice. Eliot considers murder ‘Ill be the cannibal’ states Sweeney in a most matter of fact way to Doris (in my play TSE and Viv take these characters lines respectively) and does effect the death of her prose.
It was 1925 that Eliot resolved to make a fundamental change to his life and so gave up the banking business to become a director of the publishing house Faber and Gwyer – later to become Faber and Faber. However, even at this time when Vivienne had got what she had always claimed to be fighting for – her husband in a more fittingly literary working environment - he was not the only one of the partnership to consider murder. This violence manifested itself in one of her sketches: ‘Then as I am to understand that you are indifferent about everything I take it,’ said Sibylla slightly more menacingly ‘that you are indifferent as to whether you are dead or alive.’ She stood the knife upright on its handle, and tapped it on the table. She glared at the knife, then again at Mike, who did not answer.’ Both their murderous intentions were betrayed in their writing, but always Viv was the more transparent. In every story she wrote she adapted one character (here it is Sibylla) and casts Eliot as another (in this case Mike). This is one of the reasons that I wrote the play from her point of view – she (at first) seems more willing to put their relationship under the microscope.
This is not to say that Eliot was not intensely aware of the rich creative potential of his marriage. ‘Pound wrote ‘photography’ on the draft of the first marital scene in ‘A Game of Chess’. The man longs to escape, ‘he shuns the physical proximity of his wife, refusing to notice her barrage of anxious questions’ … ‘The gaps are filled with silent denial of her frantic plea for communication.’ (Gordon, 179). This I felt to be profoundly moving and most visual. On stage, silence is a powerful and evocative tool. As Eliot uses his wife’s frustration for inspiration she is being slowly driven mad by his lack of response. In my play this is to be shown by the increasingly claustrophobic proxemics of each character until they are all but entangled: TSE keeping his mental distance only with extreme concentration.
In the opening, Prufrock considers the question of action. This links to Hamlet’s great existential questioning (some 300 years before the critical conception of Existentialism) which circles back to the inclusion of Hamlet both in The Waste Land and when the Hollow Man actor declaims Hamlet’s rant from III i:
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God
has given you one face, and you make yourselves
another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and
nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness
your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath
made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages:
those that are married already, all but one, shall
live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a
nunnery, go.
Here Hamlet contemplates murder, as do they all at some point, and Eliot may as well have done the same to Vivienne, as her life was over when he abandoned her to the asylum. There is much in ‘They Do The Poet in Different Voices’ that echoes this murderous sentiment. Seymour-Jones makes a claim for the turning-point in Vivienne’s final mental deterioration to be, ‘the realisation that Tom hated her: the savagery of his feelings led on occasions to bizarre behaviour. A disturbed Conrad Aiken recalled how, in 1925, he wrote to compliment Eliot on a new volume of poetry. In reply the poet sent him a page torn out of the Midwives’ Gazette, on which he had underlined various forms of vaginal discharge. The words blood, mucus and shreds of mucus were also underlined, as well as the phrase purulent offensive discharge.’ (Seymour-Jones, 457-8) It was part of her illness that Vivienne suffered almost overlapping periods of menstruation and would have uncontrollable discharges that disgusted Eliot and led him to constantly question his having married Vivienne: ‘I say, we will have no more marriages’.
Chapter 2.
Tom and Vivienne Eliot are feeling unwell.
The nurse represents the illnesses that are a prominent feature in the Eliots’ lives, and also his poetry and her unpublished sketches. There are the physical illnesses: the constant colds, flus, trouble with nerves; and more importantly the mental problems – the breakdowns, voices and irrational behaviour. It would be wrong to believe that there was no overlap between them both. However, T. S. Eliot did have a level of control that Vivienne lacked, Northumberland House (the inspiration for the setting of ‘They do the Poet in Different Voices’) was not the first time that Eliot had her committed. At the end of October 1925 ‘Tom sent her ‘to the country’’, a euphemism for the sanatorium near Watford, where he had ‘placed Vivien […] against her will.’ (Seymour-Jones, 411.) Vivienne’s desperation at that time manifests itself as an almost physical need to ‘read and think’. The overwhelming feelings of paranoia and injustice are clearly expressed as she writes to Ezra Pound. However, the faith in her husband (also evident in this extract) is more reflective of her is echoed by her belief in my play that Tom did indeed see her in the final sanatorium.
Tell T. not to be a fool. He pretends to think I hate him, but its just a lie. … Speak to Tom. Ask him, dear Ezra, make him rescue me before Xmas. I am well now. At least I shd be well with/given one half grain of happiness, peace of mind, assurance, and time and opportunity to read and think. But O the starvation with all these things missing … I want a few books, my liberty, & peace. Is that too much? T. is unbalanced, and in the toils of … one Higgins. (Seymour-Jones, 411.)
What is important to note is that Vivienne was not the only one to break down. She claims, ‘T. is unbalanced,’ and she is vindicated in her belief by his collapses. However, whilst she was institutionalised, Eliot turned his mental aberrations into poetry;
'On Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.
(The Waste Land, lines 305 – 10)
It was to Margate that he went to recover when he broke down in 1921. Far from alienating Vivienne he seemed to look to her more than before, and he clearly needed her opinion on the poetry that he was writing. Lyndall Gordon quotes one of his telling letters in her biography, ‘’I do not know whether it will do, & must wait for Vivien’s opinion as to whether it is printable, ‘ he informed Schiff. ‘I have done this while sitting in a shelter on the front – as I am out all day except when taking rest.’’ (Gordon, 172) Thus if the ‘A Game of Chess’ section of The Waste Land is to be read only as a breakdown of a marriage, then it looses much of its richness. As Ackroyd clearly acknowledges in his biography, ‘Two years before his death, he [Eliot] had told Herbert Read that the best of his poetry had cost him dearly in experience.’ (Ackroyd, 334)
An example of that wealth of biographic connotation can be seen through tracking the role of doctors in the Eliots’ lives. Just as they are influential in making Vivienne take the most inappropriate of cures for her aliments that all but kill her on occasion, so they offer legitimacy for the way Eliot treats her.
Vivienne herself had no illusions about doctors, whose tampering usually did her more harm than good. One doctor, obsessed with glands, started her on ‘a very violent treatment’ in 1922. Another time she was ‘crying with rage’ against a Dr West, who was convinced that all her ills lay in a rock-hard liver. She hammered poor Pound with sarcastic questions:
Is West alrite?
Do you know?
Do you believe in Vichy [for cures of the liver]?
Do you believe in Liver?
(Gordon, 201)
This torrent of breathless questions is picked up by Eliot in The Waste Land and echoed by myself in my play. The pace of this section is very prescriptive in order to achieve the effect that it is almost as if the voices in Eliot’s head where his wife’s: ‘As to Tom’s mind, I am his mind.’ (Seymour Jones, 156) This symbiotic relationship is indicated by Gordon: ‘Eliot’s tie with his wife meant more to him than legal responsibility: she gripped his imagination because her lashing, uncontrolled emotions reflected some part of his own nature.’ (Gordon, 180) When Vivienne read this section of the poem she scrawled an emphatic ‘Yes!’ in the margin of the manuscript.
Added to this mix I brought in the beginnings of the text of The Hollow Men - an eerie, unsettling poem written in 1924, the tone achieved in no small measure by the almost nursery rhyme simplicity of the rhythm: ‘in The Hollow Men we see for the first time his use of clear and simple images, of repeated statement and of an uncomplicated accentual metre much closer to speech than any of the poetry he had composed before.’ (Ackroyd, 147) Peter Ackroyd has identified many structural features of a play, the simplicity of image, repetition and speech patterns. To me the clarity of the poem is sharpened when TSE and Viv are cast as the two voices that ‘whisper together / [and] Are quiet and meaningless.’ I have added more comprehensive directorial stage directions to this extract in order to try and recreate on the page what I would want to see on the stage:
In this final stage direction Stetson works as a metaphor for Jean Verdenal. Verdenal was his friend in Paris in 1911 who served to introduce him to so much that would be an influence through his life, they shared an enthusiasm for the French poet Laforgue, whose work is parodied in the metre of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, ‘In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.’ It is Verdenal to whom this poem is dedicated and his loss (when he was killed in the 175th infantry regiment in February 1915) remained with Eliot for the rest of his life. This is shown clearly by the clairvoyant in The Waste Land who speaks of ‘your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor’. The line occurs in ‘Death by Water’ and it is pertinent to note how Verdendal spent his last days, for it was only two days before his death when, ‘Scarcely recovered from pleurisy, he did not hesitate to spend much of the night in the water up to his waist helping to evacuate the wounded by sea, thus giving a notable example of self-sacrifice.’ (as quoted in Seymour-Jones, 79) His obsession with his friend does not end there, for ‘-Yet when we came ack, late, from the hyacinth garen, ‘ Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not ‘ speak, and my eyes failed,’ (The Waste Land, 37 – 9) is also an allusion to Eliot’s lost love/life. Part of the complexity of the poem to be embraced and celebrated is that it has many interpretations and hidden readings. Its complicated intensity becomes a source of inspiration and frustration by turn.
The marriage of the Eliots was always held under some suspicion by their friends and enemies alike. Gossip was rife in the Bloomsbury group as to how ill Vivienne actually was and how much she used her malady in order to keep Eliot close to her. Certainly the medical bills were enormously draining of their income and his parents were extremely unhappy at giving Eliot his due inheritance for fear he would spend it all on ‘cures’ for his wife. Certainly at the recommendation of Ottoline Morrel and Virginia Woolf many extremely dubious treatments were given to Vivienne. However, it is clear that she was not the only one ill; Eliot too suffered from indefinable maladies, and sometimes these overlapped:
Rather than leave Vivien, Eliot joined her in August 1926 at the Sanatorium de la Malmaison in Rueil, near Paris, for a joint cure: he apparently needed help for his own dependency problems.’ They did not receive one, ‘and they continued to travel Europe as medical tourists.
(Seymour-Jones, 435)
Seymour-Jones uses the extended metaphor of the dance as it relates to illness to show how the couple existed, ‘in a state of co-dependence in which psychological need and distress played a large part in illnesses which often had no organic basis. Many letters bear witness to the dance of disease the Eliots shared, taking it in turns to be ill.’ (Seymour-Jones, 319)
It was the phrase ‘dance of disease’ that hit a resonant note in its neat alliteration. The couple shared an adoration of the Ballets Russes, although Eliot’s fascination with the lead male dancer, Léonide Massine, became much stronger during Vivienne’s illness of 1921. Gordon suggests that all three, the poem, the ballet and the sickness were all inextricably linked: ‘Whilst The Waste Land gestated in his mind, Eliot found an answer in the Russian ballet.’ (Gordon, 175) From her early days Vivienne adored dancing, so that much of her lines in this extract come from her personal correspondence: she was a gifted amateur with dreams of a career. When she was young it was her exuberance that marked her steps, but later, when she hit the darkest of times as she realised Eliot was preparing himself to leave her, the dance became more mechanically desperate. This is to be reflected in the play by Viv’s initial fluidity of movement that gradually staccatos as Act I becomes Act II at the final curtain.
The movement on stage also works on another level as Eliot’s claustrophobia, noted by all the biographers, is rendered physical in the play. ‘His growing sense of entrapment was heightened by the effects of Dr Marten’s treatment [in 1925] which, recorded Virginia [Woolf] in April, ‘set V. off thinking of her childhood terror of loneliness, & now she cant let him, Tom, out of her sight.’ (Seymour-Jones, 405). This is shown through the proxemics of the play as she follows Eliot round the stage, first with her eyes, her constant attention and then with her movement and suffocating closeness. As Act II shows the disintegration of their marriage, so she becomes debilitated and her influence on him is weakened and movement reverts back to her eyes as she is confined to her bed. In fact, he tried to sue this particular doctor, such was his disgust at the treatment. (Of course he did break the circle – he committed his wife and then buried both the memory and her influence.)
The dance becomes one of co-dependencies. They were both ill, both had breakdowns, both claimed to be the sole support in the marriage. The Chemist’s shop therefore seems a more than appropriate place for the public scene of the private dance:
Therefore the dance is one of the crucial themes in the Eliots’ lives, and for Vivienne there was a longing to be a dancer with all the freedom of movement that it entailed. Both at the beginning of their courtship and then later when he abandons her and she tries to recreate the sexual expectation of such a freedom. She also wrote about it in one of her notebooks, sometime after September 17th 1924, (Sibylla being her alter ego this time),
That night Sibylla had a worse night than ever. (Towards morning she said to) “I want to be an exhibition dancer” she said to André, “an exhibition dancer. It’s the only thing to be. Don’t you see? You simply dance and then you are finished. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to act. All you have to do is to dance. You just dance once and everybody claps and then it’s over. And then you can lie down on a sofa and give it up till you dance again. I don’t want to be a film star” she shrieked, getting excited, “No no” shouted André, “not a film star”.
Part of this has been picked up in my script. It is not only the style of writing that betrays her mode of speech for here the cadence can be guessed, ‘she shrieked, getting excited,’. For the actress playing Viv I would take my cue from her writing of Sibylla.
I gave an early draft of this script to my sixth formers to make of it what they could. This section was particularly successful. In a short space of time the automated dance of sneezes and coughs became part of a graceful ensemble movement. It echoed the strangeness of this very private, public marriage. The Eliots seemed to want to draw all their friends into their disconcerting world and were always writing to their friends, colleagues (most of whom were members of the Bloomsbury Group), their families and even people they regarded as enemies (again the members of the Bloomsbury Group were key in this category) seeking to draw them into their lives, to help, and offer advice and, more crucially, money. Ezra Pound and Bertrand Russell also played a significant part in the creation of Eliot’s early poetry, but after their job had been done many were pushed out, or indeed, chose to leave this suffocating relationship.
This next section was not so successful during the classroom staging. It is more ‘wordy’ and as I did not have the time to fully direct the actors, it became clear that they required much more of the background to both the Eliot’s lives and his poetry. Without this they read the lines and followed the direction on the page but with growing confusion and so the result lacked the spark of the earlier section. As a writer with the knowledge afforded me by this project I feel this could be the more interesting section theatrically. However, the work did highlight how far I had moved from the original premise that I had wanted to make Eliot’s work accessible to all. Perhaps my goal had become a script that could work on stage. Full audience understanding of the subtle nuances would only come with study of the poetry and life of T.S. Eliot: It was when I realised this that I reassessed my original aim to make Eliot’s work more accessible. Now it was reflecting and celebrating the complexity of the work – perhaps there was no point in trying to play down the importance of the level of thought one must bring to these poems.
This ‘girl’ in the dance was indeed Vivienne, perhaps she had unwittingly realised her ambition.
One thing above all others that Eliot despised was people gossiping or even laughing at him. The desperateness of his marriage must have been the scandal generated by the scenes created (for the most part) by his wife. By the end of the year (1925) Eliot had left her at a Health Institute in Watford. She sent a note (Gordon calls it an SOS) via Pound, ‘all I can utter are abstract yells.’ Ezra must make Tom ‘rescue’ her at once’. When Eliot rushed back to England [he was in Rapallo at the time] he found her fairly normal. She was affectionate, but he could not respond.’ (Gordon, 201) He in turn wrote to Pound complaining of her behaviour saying she could turn into a vampire if she continued like this and promptly returned to Italy. ‘Vivienne took on the role of a doomed Little Nell, and declared herself, ‘anxious to die’.’ (Gordon, 201) This whole drama is close to the threatening world of ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ – the epigraph to the early typescript to this drama is the same as the words Eliot used to describe the end of his first marriage; they come from Brutus, the assassin in ‘Julius Caesar’:
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.
‘’ (2.1.69-75)
His ‘hideous dream’, Vivienne, is already in the hospital when my play opens. For her this is when life ended: any of Eliot’s work from after that period is closed to her and so, for the purposes of this exercise, to me.
Chapter 3.
‘That is not what I meant at all.’
The title of this chapter comes from a line in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but it is pithy in its summing up of the problems that nearly overwhelmed the play in the second act. To begin with I return to the unequal symmetry of the threesomes that made up the Eliots’ lives. The lines 359 to 365 of The Waste Land bear testament to their importance:
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
But who is that on the other side of you?
Whilst Viv never takes another role, Emily does, as she is simply another member of the Hollow Men chorus, but then Emily Hale was a suspected lover of Eliot’s and Vivienne was never aware of the relationship. This is reflected in the play, but in rather an obscure way – ‘Does she know?’ asks Emily, in one of the one-liners that can be interpreted in a number of ways. The ‘she’ could actually be about either of the women, for if the ‘third who walks always beside you’ could be Jean Verdenel as easily as it could be Emily.
The theme of threesomes runs throughout the Eliots’ lives together, from the ghost Verdendel, the threat and solace, by turns, of Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf as confidant to both parties, amending her views to suit to whom she was speaking. These uneasy trios are held within the lines of The Waste Land.
There were always more than the two of them in this marriage, from Bertrand Russell in the earliest days to different members of the Bloomsbury group when Eliot’s star was rising and in a synchronised form there was always more than one person with a hand in Eliot’s poetry, for Ezra Pound’s influence in The Waste Land was significant. Even here the interdependence between life and art is evident for it was the same people who inspired and then edited the poems. The acknowledgement of this dichotomy between the public and private and its simultaneous dismissal is held within the exchange between husband and wife:
What had been working so fluidly for me in my dealings with the first poem now began to seem unprofitable by the time I reached the second Act – I was bringing nothing new to the play, simply sharing out the lines of Eliot’s work and allowing them to gain dominance. What was becoming increasingly clear was a developing pattern: as the two Eliots narrated the lines to each other the Hollow men chorus were acting it out behind them. This was lazy and frustrating work. I realised that what I needed was the input that actors could bring to the work. In an ideal world I relish the chance to workshop this poem. I would allow them to read the poems, I would explain my views and interpretations of them and then let them improvise ways of showing ideas on stage. I have often worked in this way with my sixth formers and even with such fledgling talent it is electric how much an individual writer can learn from this collective process so favoured in ensemble groups.
The Waste Land itself is a crafting of ten poems into one (by Pound as much as by Eliot) and although the result of this is a cohesive work it was overwhelming and dehumanising my play. The only central figure of the poem, Tiresus, had no place in my envisagement of the mental hospital. I worried over complicated lighting and tableaux vivents to recreate trench life in the First World War. I even contemplated acrobatic work from the actors in an attempt to use movement to show the ‘Unreal City.’ It was not working anymore.
For inspiration I read some of the many critical works that line the library shelves. They were illuminating and interesting in their readings of this great poem, but every line held so much possibility that they too became more of a hindrance than a help as I tried to force these ideas onto the stage. Realisation was slow in coming, but as with all good ideas, obvious once grasped, Robert Langaum, put it as concisely as any I read in his essay ‘New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land’, ‘Compared to the characters in The Waste Land, Prufrock, for all his lack of vitality, has the sharp external delineation of characters in, say, Henry James. The characters in The Waste Land, however, are nameless, faceless, isolated, and have no clear idea of themselves.’ (Litz, 95) A play needs a driving force. My play had the thrust of character and for me London is an inspiration for The Waste Land. There is an analogy to be made between London and the sanatorium, but as with so much that I found in my research for this project, now was not the time or place to do that.
There was a desperate fragmentation that betrayed Eliot’s mind as he convalesced in Margate. It is a sense of increasing, and very real, anxiety that would need a play of its own to do justice to. I did not have the room in my play so it was with great reluctance, but some catharsis, that I discarded the greater part of the second act that dealt with the last three parts of The Waste Land. With this went the inclusion of text of The Hollow Men, as in this earlier draft it had been creeping in as a rebellious chant that the inmates were muttering. Instead I returned to what had been so vital in the first act, and found it to be the counter pointing that Vivienne leant the piece. A visit to the Bodleian library afforded me direct access to her work and so her voice was reinstated.
I returned to both Eliot’s and Vivienne’s work and read them aloud to try and hear the voices contained within. At this later stage in its conception I found my biographical knowledge and familiarity with the poetry meant I could make instinctive yet informed decisions as to what to include and how to make it fit. The writer’s block was swept away in a wave of words.
There was also the challenge of retaining an underlying theme – I attempted to do this with the story of Prometheus, just as Eliot did with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Dante’s Inferno. The only definite moment is from the third-hand parody of the man unable to break a cycle of torture. First came the Greek story of the mortal who stole fire from the Gods, then Simon Amidon’s retelling of the tale by transferring it to an old warehouse play with the city stockbroker protagonist getting entwined in the wires of his telephones before he turns his attention to the audience:
There was the click of a phone hanging up, followed by the loud dial tone. …
‘You don’t know what it’s like, do you? To work and sweat and strain, only to find in the end that all you’ve done is forge your own chains. To come to a point where everything you’ve done and created is only an image of your slavery …’
He bent forward, toward the audience.
‘Come a little closer and I’ll tell you a secret…’
A few of the nearest people leaned forward. The man quickly put the match to his lips and spat a long sheet of flame just over their heads.
(‘Splitting the Atom’, 160)
The other allusions became lost in rewrites and when I realised what had happened and tried to retrieve it the play had grown past the point that it could be reintegrated. However, the phone remained and grew strong. It was the sound, the insistence that the machine has to be answered, attended to, that first attracted me. It is an inanimate object that can safely distance two people whilst seemingly bringing them together. A dichotomy that sits well with the Eliot marriage and so the telephone appears throughout my play – it even ends it with the dial tone.
Conclusion.
‘As to Tom’s mind, I am his mind’.
The endings of all three of the core biographies are interesting for their differences. Each has a relevance to my work. Ackroyd ends with Eliot’s memorial tablet and then the biographer’s own epitaph, ‘perhaps we can say now of Eliot what he once said of another poet, ‘We also understand the poetry better when we know more about the man.’ (Ackroyd, 335) I strongly concur with this philosophy. His life was not an easy one and the telling of it will lead you up blind alleys and into places where, perhaps, you do not want to go. However, each one will add a new dimension to the poetry he created and so whilst it does not become any easier to categorise, as discussed in the introduction, it becomes richer and more personal.
By adopting a similar working process of reclamation I found that I too was creating something from diverse fragments and the result, in turn, illuminated the lines of the original. It is a tenuous relationship, for so much that can be held in thought at one time cannot necessarily be explained in a commentary or alluded to in a script. Therefore I am not sure that I have made his work more accessible in a wider sense, only on a personal level.
Her life was bound up in her husband’s, ‘After Vivienne was certified, she was made a Ward in Chancery, and Eliot never visited her in the asylum where she was held, incommunicado, for the rest of her life.’ (Ackroyd, 310) Thus in the play Eliot reminds her that ‘I never came to see you’ and Vivienne, as she did in her lifetime, refused to accept this abandonment. The starkness of the ending, with the click from the disconnected line being the last thing to be heard on stage, is a reflection of the anti-apocalyptic resolution of The Hollow Men: as their world ends, so does hers, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ It is the ‘energy of bare survival’ (Kenner, 158) that is echoed through the syntax of this poem that sustained Vivienne in her last years in the mental hospitalHer ease of sanity returned with the menopause, yet by then she had been irreversibly institutionalised.
Carole Seymour-Jones ends her biography with the poignant tribute that was left for Vivienne:
She was buried in Pinner Cemetery, her grave close to her mother’s, although her wish had been to be buried beside her father in Eastbourne. The headstone, ordered by Maurice, reads: ‘In Loving Memory of Vivien Haigh-Eliot, Died 20th January 1947.’ The stone-mason carved the wrong date. No one troubled to correct it.
Vivienne’s life had been a tragic one, but Seymour-Jones does restate her case for the biography of this remarkable woman in the epilogue, ‘in old age, during the seven years of his second marriage, he wrote neither poetry nor plays of distinction, in contrast to the outpouring from the ‘sacred wood’ which had marked his seventeen years with Vivienne.’ (Seymour-Jones, 580) It was these years that I had focused on in my rewrite. The play was seeking a common voice and I believe the one I found was the personal dialogue of marriage that existed between Vivienne and Tom Eliot.
My project began with T. S. Eliot and his poetry but ended with Vivienne Eliot and her struggle with the enforced silence. I do not believe that my play, even if performed, would bring Eliot to the masses (Lloyd Webber has done that already). However, I have found a voice between the stanzas and it is not a comfortable one. The alienated loneliness of Prufrock’s dramatic internal monologue ran through The Waste Land echoed by the layered fragmented snatches of conversation and characterisation and came to a bitter conclusion in The Hollow Men. ‘But by 1927 the thirty-nine-year-old poet no longer needed Vivien as a helpmate, as from September 1926 he was comfortably established at Faber & Gwyer. The fervent anguish of The Waste Land had given way to the paralysis of The Hollow Men,’ (Seymour-Jones, 439)
Lyndall Gordon calls the life of T. S. Eliot ‘An Imperfect Life’, she ends her biography with his quest for a perfect life, the spiritual longing for sainthood that haunted his early years. ‘If he could not live the perfect life himself, if he could not speak directly to his contemporaries, he still hoped his story would tell with generations to come, ‘in a world of time beyond me’. (Gordon, 536) Certainly his words live on past the volumes of poetry or the scripts, critics or essays, but however hard I work at the erudite works I return again and again to the sounds of the poetry – somewhere between those images is something that slips tantalisingly out of reach. I cannot pin it down, but then I don’t think I want to anymore.
Eliot’s was a life of contractions: the more suffocating and frustrating, the more conducive to the starkly, disconcertingly theatrical poetry. Vivienne was part of this inspiration: if it cost Eliot ‘dearly’, it cost her far more. However, such is her loyal deference to his genius that the only allusion made to his breakdown, his weakness, is at the very end:
The most poignant ending of all, for me, though is that of Eloit’s, The Hollow Men:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
It is a lot to ask of a single sound, but somehow I want that final telephone click to evoke this extreme sadness and sense of futility and disillusionment. If not for him, then for her.
‘They do the Poet in Different Voices’, remains a working script with all its connotations, inferences and references noted and footnoted within it. Comprehensive stage directions are there to lend the reader the visual clues and so render him an audience. What has been discussed in this commentary is not an exhaustive study of the work that went into the play. There is too much to discuss in detail all the ideas and possibilities that this study of T. S. Eliot has afforded me. Where necessary for ease of argument sections of the script have been quoted within the commentary, as for the play in its entirety, that has been attached to this dissertation as an appendix. Although it is an academic response to a most fascinating man I also hope that it can be read for its own sake.
They do the Poet in Different Voices
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962. Faber and Faber, London: 2002
Eliot, T. S. The Collected Poems and Plays. Faber and Faber, London: 1969
Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow. The Life of Vivienne Eliot. Robinson, London: 2001
Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot. Cardinal, London: 1984
Gordon, Lyndall, T. S. Eliot. An Imperfect Life. Revised Edition. Vintage, London: 1998
For the Play
Armidon, Stephen. Splitting the Atom. Bloomsbury, London: 1990
Beckett, Samuel. Krapp’s Last Tape. Faber and Faber, London: 1998
Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature. ed. Marion Wynne-Davies. Bloomsbury, London: 1989
Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye. Penguin, London: 1959
Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose - Reflections on 'Vers Libre'. Penguin Books, London: 1953
Myers, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature Fifth Edition, Bedford, Boston: 2002
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Bedford Books, London: 1994
Weiss, Peter. Marat/Sade. Marion Boyes, London: 2001
Unpublished drafts of Vivienne Eliot’s sketches are to be found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS. Eng. Misc. d.936/1-4. Most particularly: Notebook 2 contains, ‘Medecine a la Mode’ edited by T. S. Eliot and the sketch ‘Sibylla and Mike’
For the Commentary
Basu, Tapan Kumar. T. S. Eliot An Anthology of Recent Criticism. Pencraft, Delhi: 2001
Brooks, Harold F. Brooks, T. S. Eliot as Literary Critic. Cecil Woolf, London: 1987
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Penguin, London: 1949
Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Methune, London: 1920 – this collection contains the essay, ‘The Problem with Hamlet’.
Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet T. S. Eliot. Methuen, London: 1960
Litz, A. Walton. Eliot is His Time. Princeton, New Jersey: 1972
Southam, B. C. A Student’s guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. Faber and Faber, London: 1994
Film / Televised work
Hastings, Michael. Tom and Viv. 1994
Eyre, Richard. Changing Stages, The Law of Gravity. 2000
Lectures
Matthews, Professor Steven. The fascination of what's difficult: presence and perplexity in modern poetry. Brookes university, Oxford: 2003
Websites
http:// world.std.com/raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html
> Edward Stark’s ‘The Muse of Dance’s Lyricism’
http://www.usask.ca/english/prufrock/recstart.htm
Quoted from his lecture, ‘The fascination of what's difficult: presence and perplexity in modern poetry’ given on the 18th of November, 2003 at Brookes University. When I went to see Professor Matthews (to discuss how my work was progressing) I was having cause to sympathise more personally with his statement: I read Eliot every day, had faith that I would finish my play, but was still some way off an understanding.
‘Hamlet in Pieces’ was a re-write of mine from June 2003 where the Prince literally ‘drops out of the play’ and using critical, theatrical and psuedo-psychological means tries to re-find his own identity.
Eliot used a snatch of ‘our Mutual Friends’ ‘He do the Police in Different Voices’, as his working title on typescripts of parts I and II of The Waste Land. He refers to the orphan Sloppy who read the newspaper statements of London policemen ‘in different voices’.
Prufrock, conceived in 1917, is a good example of this use of internal monologue.
‘the panoramic range of ‘Our Mutual Friend’, where disconnected fragments of lives on the river and all over London gradually cohere in the horror of the reader.’ (Gordon, 175)
The last line from The Hollow Men
Kurtz is the self-styled demi-God of Conrad’s novella. A multi-talented man who is corrupted by Africa. He is dying when we meet him, with Marlow, in the book, and is increasingly referred to as a voice rather than a flesh and blood person – a highly symbolic character, and one that Eliot obviously felt much affinity with.
Interestingly, for this project, the 1994 film was originally a play by Michael Hastings which was first directed by Max Stafford Clarke at the Royal Court Theatre in 1984.
‘Faded’ is rather a genteel way of putting it, for Vivienne was part of Eliot’s re-written history. When writing her biography of his first wife, Seymour-Jones was surprised how many people were unaware of her existence. During her lifetime she was edited out of society in her institution. Her will bequeathed her writings to the Bodleian library where she believed it would remain for future scholar’s reference. In a rather cruel twist there is now one volume of the diary missing ‘lost’ from the main library in 1990 – the Modern Manuscript section have now microfilmed the lot (which makes the reading of it rather tedious) and make veiled comments about the security of the main building when you ask for the collection.
‘A Painted Shadow’, published in 2002.
The Waste Land, line 134, where the singular pronoun has been doubled in a rather desperate manner.
Lines from ‘Sweeney Agonistes’.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, lines 13 and 14.
Indeed it was interesting that when given to my six form students the actor playing TSE did admit to being ‘bossed around unfairly’ by the two women in their opening scene.
When this begins to spurt [her inner spirit] it is intolerable to choke it up, & will lead to my going mad. It is agony either way, of course, but I think at first, until one has to the spout of his long discussed fountain clear, it is better to let the water burst out when it will & so force away the accumulation of decayed vegetation, moss, slime & dead fish which are thick upon & around it. (as quoted in Gordon, 200)
It must be noted that even when she was published, as in The Criterion, it was always under a series of pseudonyms.
Sibylla as a name has allusions of the Sybila as described in Bulfinch’s Mytholgoy of 1855 and which is alluded to by Eliot in his notes to The Waste Land. She was a woman of Greek myth who had prophetic power. In her cave she inscirbed leaves with the names and fates of certain individuals. If the winds disturbed these leaves then she would not re-order them and so the oracle was lost. There are many tales told of the Sibyl, but the Cumaean Sibyl of both Ovid and Virgil is the most celebrated. Her mortal life is protracted and old age is a burden to her. Eliot quotes the Satyicon of petronius (d. A.D. 66), chapter 48 with his epigraph to The Waste Land: With my own eyes I saw the Sybil of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys said to her: “Sybil, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to die”. http:// world.std.com/raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html. This is shockingly close to Vivienne’s claims when she ‘took on the role of a doomed Little Nell, and declared herself, ‘anxious to die’.’ (Gordon, 201)
From one of the notebooks microfiched in the Bodleian, The papers of Vivienne Haigh Eliot, MS. Eng. Misc. d. 936/2, Book 3 page 41
Higgins is their doctor, another one who charged beyond the couple’s means to pay him, but did rather more to exacerbate rather than alleviate the situation.
They both remain centre stage for the majority of the play thus making the eventual separation more critical.
‘Vivien was able to use her sick body to get what she wanted – Tom’s attention and presence – she could not stop his growing determination to break out from the circle of co-dependence.’ (Seymour-Jones, 405)
Briget Patmore, a member of he South Lodge Circle dance club quoted in Seymour-Jones 146.
The ‘Dance of Death’ was the original title of the ballet, however, a line in Seymour-Jones, though rather dramatic did fit the bill, she calls the relationship the couple shared one of symbiosis – theirs was, ‘the dance of the disease’ (319)
Quoted from Edward Stark’s ‘The Muse of Dance’s Lyricism’ found at
Briget Patmore, a member of he South Lodge Circle dance club quoted in CS-J 146.
from one of Viviane Eliot’s stories and quoted in Seymour-Jones (328)
From one of the notebooks microfilched in the Bodleian, The papers of Vivienne Haigh Eliot, Reel 2 of 3, MSS. Eng. Lett. C. 384, pages 59-60
I teach Theatre Studies to A Level students.
A detailed programme would have to be produced!
Stravinsky quoted from – this may have been the dance that they had all seen.
Briget Patmore, a member of he South Lodge Circle dance club quoted in CS-J 146.
An extract of this letter is quoted on page 13.
There is another link between my sources as, ‘it was during the period of frustration [1924] over the play that he began writing some short poems which over a number of months took the shape of a sequence known as The Hollow Men: poems which he said, were related to ‘Sweeney Agonistes’. Certainly in their incantatory measure, and their eschewal of the allusive poetic modes of The Waste Land, they manage to achieve something of the directness which he had been attempting to bring to the play. (Ackroyd, 147)
From The Waste Land, line 207, The Fire Sermon
Eliot was speaking of Edwin Muir in a BBC broadcast 5 May 1959.