TS Eliot’s letters to an early love to be unsealed

Famed 20th century poet TS Eliot’s trove of letters to an early love will finally be unsealed this October.

What secrets will they hold?

’I am very dependent upon women,” Eliot had told his Harvard University friend and fellow poet, Conrad Aiken, in 1914.

Eliot’s life had been shaped by four women who became part of his work.

His first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, companion Mary Trevelyan, and Valerie Fletcher, his secretary at Faber & Faber, who became his second wife, are all well known, but there was another woman who came first Emily Hale.

For decades, this was a relationship under wraps, as Eliot’s Faber colleague, Peter du Sautoy, put it.

In the course of their correspondence, from the late 1920s to 1957, Eliot wrote Hale about 1,133 letters many more than he wrote to any other person.

Almost all of his letters to Hale have never been seen.

In 1963, less than two years before his death, Eliot gave Du Sautoy a large box packed with Hale’s letters to him.

He was asked to burn them.

Du Sautoy said it had been a point of honour not to read the letters before destroying them.

On his own letters to Hale, Eliot imposed the longest embargo.

Hale delivered the letters to Princeton’s librarian, William Dix, in 1956, and they were sealed in 12 boxes.

Valerie, the poet’s second wife, asked to see them, but the terms of the bequest, forbidding all eyes, did not allow this.

The boxes were not to be opened until 50 years after the death of the survivor of the correspondence.

Eliot died on January 4 1965 and Hale nearly five years later, on October 12 1969.

This October, the steel security bands will be cut and the treasure unsealed.

Curator Don Skemer will take two to three months to sort the letters, then release them to readers in January 2020.

“Their opening will finally resolve over a half-century of speculation,” Skemer said.

“I will be there in January to fulfil my belief that Eliot’s secret attachment to Hale is central to understanding him.”

Eliot and Hale met in about 1912 through her friend, Eleanor Hinkley, who was Eliot’s cousin in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Her home was a short walk from Harvard, where Eliot was then a philosophy student.

All three were keen on drama and, in February 1913, Eliot and Hale performed together in a scene from Jane Austen’s Emma, dramatised by Hinkley

He later affirmed according to Valerie that he had been in love with Hale, but that she had not reciprocated his feelings.

In 1914, Eliot left Boston for England and, months later, married an Englishwoman he barely knew.

His disastrous first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood coincided with 12 years of separation from Hale.

She became an accomplished speech and drama teacher, and director of plays, and drama remained a bond with Eliot.

During the later 1930s, some years after they had resumed contact, Hale advised him on early drafts of his most confessional play, The Family Reunion (1939), where she herself figures as a homebody whom the hero might marry, but has to set aside.

She is also the source for rejected lovers in two other Eliot plays, The Cocktail Party (1949) and The Elder Statesman (1958).

But before they renewed their attachment, Hale had played an elevating role in Eliot’s poetic imagination.

In The Waste Land (1922) there is the memory of a “hyacinth girl” who lifts love beyond desire into sublimity; in Ash-Wednesday (1927-1930), she is the guiding “Lady of silences”, a Beatrice figure out of Dante.

Eliot’s poetry repeatedly calls up a woman who is screened from sight: nameless, faceless, a ghost of “memory and desire”, hovering in the purview of a wasted life.

Only when hints and clues came together did it later become clear the person referred to was Hale.