Subjectivity in the Diaries of Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot

At London Review of Books, Mary-Kay Wilmers gives an account of working at Faber & Faber, where T.S. Eliot was once an editor. Wilmers recalls hearing stories of Eliot's wife, Vivien:

[Vivien] was no longer alive in my day – she died in a mental hospital in 1947. In my mind it was the fact that she was crazy, or crazy-ish, that made her so much more suitable to be the wife of a poet, but it’s also the fact that she was crazy – by the last ten or fifteen years of her life properly crazy – that makes her so appealing to me even now. In the late 1930s, before she was committed, she’d sometimes come to Faber in search of her husband, and while Eliot slipped out of the back door his current secretary would go downstairs to explain to Vivien that it wasn’t possible for her to see him. She was a ‘pathetic, worried figure, badly dressed and very unhappy, her hands screwing up her handkerchief as she wept’, one of those secretaries later recalled. But she was also a very determined, stubborn woman, unlikely to give any ground. When she wasn’t allowed to leave some of her husband’s favourite hot chocolate for him she poured it through the letterbox, and if she got to know that he was giving a lecture somewhere in London she would stand outside the hall holding a placard that read, as I’ve always (and wrongly) remembered it: ‘This is the wife he abandoned.’ Sadly, but no doubt accurately, the various biographies substitute ‘I am’ for ‘This is’.

It wouldn’t have been unlike her to say ‘this is the wife he abandoned.’ For her, as for him, there was no clear demarcation between objective and subjective reality. It is far more important, Eliot said, to have a sense of sin than to be good or bad. And in Vivien’s diaries her own subjectivity presides like a god, or a prophet who should have known better. ‘King Albert of Belgium is killed,’ she noted in February 1934. Unlike other Belgian kings he was a popular figure who died in a mysterious climbing accident. ‘I should have foreseen this on Ash Wednesday,’ Vivien wrote, ‘when Jack put the ashes in the Rose ashtray. Or before that, when I passed St Cyprian’s last night, and the dry leaves of the Bay tree shivered in the cold wind, and a queer figure passed me and slipped into the Church. Or when I found a tiny dead leaf outside the Pink room door.’