In 1949, eight years after James Joyce died, his letters began to travel the world. Thanks to microfilm technology, popularized a few years earlier, the contents of his archive at the University of Buffalo became more accessible to curious readers and meddlesome critics than ever before. T. S. Eliot encountered them thousands of miles away, at the British Museum, in London, where he came face to face with a past self: his own letters to the Irish writer, lit up on a projection screen before him. Such exposure made Eliot uneasy. Later, in a letter sent across the ocean to Emily Hale, a teacher at a boarding school in Massachusetts, Eliot recalled the anxiety he’d experienced that day in the museum: “I thought, how fortunate that I did not know Joyce intimately enough to have made personal revelations or to have expressed adverse opinions, or repeated gossip or scandal, about living people!”
Eliot’s letters to Hale, who for nearly seventeen years was his confidante, his beloved, and his muse, were another matter. They don’t just repeat “gossip and scandal,” they produce it. Scholars have known about this correspondence since Hale donated Eliot’s letters to Princeton, in 1956, but for decades, the trove of documents remained a tantalizing secret—kept sealed, at Eliot’s insistence, until fifty years after both he and Hale had died.
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On January 2nd of this year, 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale were unearthed from the basement of Princeton’s Firestone Library and made available to the public. The line to read them began forming at 8 A.M. The first surprise awaiting scholars was not a letter to Hale but, in essence, one addressed to them: a four-page statement that Eliot had written in 1960, with instructions that it be released on the same day that the Princeton letters were unveiled (or whenever, as he feared, they were leaked).
In the statement, Eliot implies that Hale saved his correspondence in order to exact revenge on him for refusing to marry her. As for his own part in the drama, Eliot suggests that he was simply deluded, “that the letters I had been writing to her were the letters of an hallucinated man.” (He also claims, with a legalistic precision worthy of Bill Clinton, that he “never at any time had any sexual relations with Emily Hale.”) Eliot’s dissociation from his earlier self—from the man who wrote to Hale passionately, almost daily, for nearly two decades—epitomizes the strange swerves between intimacy and detachment that characterize his side of their long and fraught relationship.
The real subject of Eliot’s statement isn’t love but poetry. “Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me,” he insists. By attempting to renege on the undying love he had promised Hale, Eliot also hopes to revoke a more complex vow, one that these letters keep: the promise of a poet to his muse. There is no way to say whether marrying Hale would have destroyed Eliot’s art. What reading his letters makes clear, however, is that the deferral of his desire—the ascetic refusal to make his most enduring love ever truly complete—was what sustained it.
In 1913, Thomas Stearns Eliot and Emily Hale performed in a theatrical adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” in a parlor room right off Harvard’s campus. Eliot was a Ph.D. student in philosophy: gawky and painfully shy. Hale, with her trained singer’s voice and cultivated grace, had an arresting presence. After more than a year of operagoing and ice skating, Eliot proclaimed his love to Hale, stopping just short of proposing marriage. Hale was caught off guard; she could not reciprocate. Heartbroken, Eliot left to study in England.
Just a year later, he had completely transformed his life: in June, 1915, he published his first major poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in Poetry magazine, and married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an English governess who was passionate about the arts and, unbeknownst to Eliot, prone to mental illness. For the decade and a half that followed, there is little record of Eliot and Hale’s relationship. There appear to be many years of silence and at least one miserable encounter in London. What we do know is that they met again in 1930, and, shortly thereafter, the still-married poet poured his heart out to Hale in a transatlantic confession, sixteen years after his first, futile proclamation. “[L]oving and adoring you,” he wrote by hand, “has given me the very best I have had in my life . . . in the midst of agony a deep peace + resignation springs.” The best included his Christian faith; Eliot implies that his 1927 conversion to Anglo-Catholicism owed something to Hale’s devotion as a Unitarian. And, of course, it included his poetry. At this point, he considered Hale both his saintly muse and his ideal reader. “There is no need to explain ‘Ash Wednesday’ to you,” he told her. “No one else will ever understand it.” (In his wife’s copy of “Poems 1909-1925,” he had written, “For my dearest Vivienne, this book, which no one else will quite understand.”)
That Emily Hale’s letters would become a part of his literary monument was a possibility Eliot considered only two months after his confession of love. He told her of a “locked tin box” he kept for his literary executor, with “a closed envelope marked ‘to be burnt at once’ ”—her letters, of course. Yet he couldn’t quite bear the thought of their destruction, and entertained the opposite fantasy, too: “But what I wish to do is to mark it ‘to be given to the Bodleian Library, not to be opened for 60 years.’ ” He wanted her to be remembered always as the Beatrice to his Dante, the moral force behind his religious conversion, and the inspiration behind some of his most beautiful poems.
Most readers know Eliot as the arch-impersonal poet, who bewildered the world with “The Waste Land” and proclaimed that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.” Readers of this Eliot might, at first, have difficulty recognizing the gushy, hyperbolic admirer who signed his letters to Hale as “Tom.” In many of the letters, he described Hale as a kind of divinity, or at least nobility: “my Dove,” “my paragon”; his “one Fixed Point in this world.” Yet Eliot’s grandiloquent devotion can also sound like a kind of escape from certain messy feelings—the turmoil of his marriage, his uncertainty about his career—into something closer to what he sometimes called an “art emotion,” an impersonal, transcendent feeling. In his famous 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot wrote, “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” In 1936, when Hale had at last returned his affection, Eliot marvelled to find himself engaged in a “perpetual daily surrender” to Hale, “and yet at the same time . . . to something bigger than either ‘me’ or ‘you’ – to something that only you and I together can look at.” Something, perhaps, like a poem.
Writing to Hale was also therapeutic. “I like to be able to write to you and curse the people I am fondest of,” Eliot confessed:
Eliot divulged a great deal in his letters—about his family resentments, about his sexual experience (or lack thereof), and even about the men who had made physical and emotional advances on him. (His friendship with Lytton Strachey ended, he said, when the Bloomsbury writer “went down on his knees and kissed me.”) As an Anglo-Catholic, Eliot already had a confessor, but his relationship with Hale was beyond confessional—she did not have the power to absolve him but to absorb him.
Eliot wrote to her obsessively, often twice a week. He learned when the ships carrying mail departed from England and kept track of which ones sailed fastest. Hale, for her part, was clearly burdened by Eliot’s unceasing correspondence. Much later, in a statement she wrote to accompany the archive, she would describe herself in this period as “the confidante by letters of all which was pent up in this gifted, emotional, grasping personality.” Hale, by then teaching at Scripps College, was overworked, and her health, although she tried to hide it from Eliot, was faltering. Her neuritis made it difficult for her to write. It wasn’t only Eliot’s insatiable demand for letters that taxed her. She was growing attached to him, and he was still married. From 1931 to 1934, Hale suggested at least five times that Eliot consider divorcing his wife. Eventually, Hale’s deteriorating health compelled her to take leave from Scripps. Only then did Eliot acknowledge his own hand in her collapse: “by constantly pressing myself upon your attention, and importuning you with my correspondence, I was really tampering insidiously with your mind.” The melodrama of his self-censure—“I see myself as a blood-sucker”—is especially telling. Like a vampire, he had not only drawn what he needed out of Hale but also, in the process, transformed her. She was falling in love.
Although Eliot had sought a formal separation from his wife in 1933, he made it clear to Hale that, as a converted Anglo-Catholic, he was both unwilling and unable to get a divorce. But for this constraint, he reminded her when pressed, “I would literally give my eyesight to be able to marry you.” He dwelled instead on the ways in which he felt them to be already bonded—the feeling of “simply belonging,” which, he said, had “something eternal about it.” His avowals became more pronounced in 1934, when Hale began an eighteen-month holiday in England and Europe. Whenever Hale came to London during her trip, Eliot let her borrow his flat—a spartan apartment in a Kensington clergy house. The two of them spent the night before she left for America together, with Eliot literally at Hale’s feet. “I am filled with wretchedness and rejoicing,” he wrote, almost as soon as she was gone, “and when I go to bed I shall imagine you kissing me; and when you take off your stocking you must imagine me kissing your dear dear feet and striving to approach your beautiful saintly soul.” (In January, 1936, Eliot wrote, “I love your foot, and to kiss it has special symbolism, because you have to take off your stocking to let me kiss it, and that is a kind of special act of consent.”) Marking this consummation, of sorts, they even exchanged rings. “This ring means to me all that a wedding ring can mean,” he promised, “and I love to wake up and feel it binding my finger, and know that it will always bind that finger.”
But he was bound to his wife, too. Eliot and Hale’s impasse on the issue of divorce seems to have fatigued them. Their summer visits were filled with raptures, but overshadowed by bitter theological arguments and, eventually, by the looming spectre of a terrible war. At the end of August, in 1943, Eliot wrote to Emily that he wore his ring every day, removing it only to bathe: “the cold water makes my fingers shrink and I am afraid of the ring slipping off.”
“What we call the beginning is often the end,” Eliot famously wrote in “Little Gidding,” “And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.” Eliot knew the truth of this lovely and cryptic phrase all too well. For Hale—who found “Four Quartets” too “obscure” for her liking—this circularity would be a painful lesson.
One of Eliot’s earliest poems, “La Figlia Che Piange” (“The Girl Who Weeps”), meditates on the poetic gain that comes out of romantic loss. Written in 1911 or 1912, around the time that Eliot first met Hale, it reads now as an eerie prefiguration of their relationship. The speaker observes a forlorn girl and her erstwhile suitor from afar:
The prospect of the lovers’ togetherness, including the sexual fulfillment that is suggested by the woman’s “arms full of flowers,” tantalizes the speaker, but it also threatens him: such joyous connection is beyond the purview of his poetry, and all he can know is that gaining it would mean losing his art. Only pain, this poem asserts, can produce the “gesture and a pose” that turns life into literature.
Longing, then, is essential to the poet, and Eliot knew what he got from his longing for Hale. “Unsatisfied desires can play a most important part in keeping the soul alive and urging one higher,” he wrote to her. For him, the alternative to “unsatisfied desires” was not satisfied ones but, rather, “just deadening feeling.” He yearned for a world of “significance,” one that would do more than simply please the man, because it would “amaze” the poet.
On January 22, 1947, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot died, of heart failure, at Northumberland House, the mental hospital where she had been confined for almost a decade. She was fifty-eight years old. Later, Eliot’s friend and flatmate John Hayward reported that when the poet received the news, he cried out “Oh God! Oh God!” and buried his face in his hands. Eliot wrote to Emily that same day, suggesting that they keep their “plans and deliberations” a secret, but promising that they would “talk about the future” on his next visit to the U.S.
Then he began to change his mind. On Valentine’s Day, he wrote to Hale about Vivienne’s funeral: “I felt—without emotion, in the usual sense—that a great deal that was myself was dead.” He was like a mummy that, unwrapped, “crumbles into dust in a few moments.” At the same time, he felt like he had a chance at “a new beginning.” But neither despair nor hope, it seemed, led him toward Hale: on Easter, he told her that he “recoiled violently from the prospect of marriage.” As he admitted to Hale, “A woman usually wants a husband: some men want a kind of divinity, a sort of human surrogate for the B.V.M. [Blessed Virgin Mary] I have had this.” Many poets conveniently choose a muse who has already died, who cannot set the terms for her compensation. Eliot claimed that the man who had needed the muse was dead, and therefore unable to pay his debts.
Eliot’s behavior hardly changed after these revelations: he continued to write to Hale with almost as much regularity as before—until Hale set him a strict limit of one letter per month. Sometimes, Hale would bring up their relationship, and Eliot would reassure her of his love: “there has been no other woman in my life at all”; “I always long to be in touch with you”; “your unhappiness is mine.” They were hardly in the same situation. Eliot had become a Nobel Laureate in 1948. Hale, whose academic employment had been increasingly precarious, had had trouble finding work. For the most part, however, the letters were filled (as they always had been) with the mundane details of his life, and requests for Hale’s feedback on his scripts. Even through her stretches of deliberate silence, Eliot continued to send her drafts of his plays.
Then, ten years after Vivienne died, Eliot shocked even his closest friends by marrying, at the age of sixty-eight, his thirty-year-old secretary, Esmé Valerie Fletcher. (In the letters Hale preserved, he had mentioned Fletcher only twice, calling her “very willing and efficient.”) A proper Bostonian to her core, Hale wrote separate letters of congratulation to both the bride and the groom. Eliot’s reply to Hale, his final letter to her, is painfully cordial: “Valerie was very much pleased by your writing to her, and will write to thank you.” If she did, Hale did not keep the note.
Although they were rarely apart, Eliot wrote Valerie a letter every week for the rest of his life. In 1965, he died, and his former secretary spent the next forty-seven years guarding his legacy—protecting the rights to his work, editing and publishing the manuscripts of “The Waste Land,” annotating his collected letters, and even saving his publishing company from financial collapse. In his wife, as in Hale, Eliot seemed to have found another muse, although his poems to her—including the very unfortunate “How the Tall Girl’s Breasts Are”—make for decidedly less impressive reading.
In the end, both women did immeasurable work to shape the poet’s legacy, but they did it quietly, perhaps not always by choice. In “Ash Wednesday,” Eliot depicted Hale as his “lady of silences.” Burning her letters (which he probably did, not when she asked him to, in 1943, but when she wanted them back, twenty years later) was one way of insuring that silence.
Often, muses are depicted as the breath of inspiration that moves through the poet, the secret author of the bard’s song. The poet depicts himself as her faithful servant, but his prayers are littered with commands: “Sing to me”! “Tell me of the man”! This painfully thin pretense of subservience and humility does little to mask the truth: that it is the muse who serves as the instrument, while the poet places his words in her more comely mouth.
And the muse—because she loves the poetry, or because she loves the man, or because she can’t tell if there’s a difference—lets him. When the poet gives himself over, as Eliot gave up life and happiness, what’s left is his voice. When the muse surrenders herself, what can she hope to leave behind? What good are words to a woman whom no one can hear?
Without her side of the correspondence, it is impossible to know why Hale loved Eliot—or what her love looked like. Hale’s voice comes to us only in whispers—heard, or half-heard, between the lines of Eliot’s poems, in the rustling leaves of the archive. In August, 1931, after they had been corresponding for almost a year, she sent Eliot a sonnet. We know this because he sent her back a copy of it with his annotations. The poem, titled “An Etching,” is an ekphrasis, a description of a work of art —in this case, a picture of a man and a woman “of an ancient eastern race.” The woman wears a veil. Next to her, the man prays with what seems to be a kind of obsessive frustration:
If Hale was trying, with her imagery of grim shrouds and steely resolve, to tell Eliot that she felt trapped and doomed in their relationship, he could not, or perhaps would not, hear her. Instead, he reassured her that he liked her poem, and limited his feedback to matters of craft.
In her sonnet, Hale describes the act of etching as one of “instant comprehension.” Eliot, in turn, reminds her that it is “a slow kind of work.” Eliot may have been the poet, but Hale had her own sort of expertise in the price that art exacts. Etching works by making literal scars, a brutal creativity that works on the drawing’s canvas, and on Hale’s speaker, too: the picture “stabs [her] memory.” Yet even in pain, she faithfully reproduces what she has seen, hoping, perhaps, that when she falls silent, the image will speak for itself.
Michelle Taylor is a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard.
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