Revealed: 1,000 letters TS Eliot wrote to secret American muse
Literary event of decade, say academics
MORE than 1,000 letters from TS Eliot to his secret ‘muse’ are set to shed light on the poet’s life.
Locked away in a library for more than 60 years, the correspondence will be unveiled for the first time in the US today in what Eliot aficionados have called ‘the literary event of the decade’.
Drama teacher Emily Hale is said by scholars to be the silent figure behind some of Eliot’s greatest poems, including Burnt Norton, from The Four Quartets, and Ash Wednesday.
She donated the 1,131 letters to Princeton University in 1956, where they have remained in a sealed container under strict orders that they must not be opened until 50 years after her death or Eliot’s, whoever survived the other. Eliot died in 1965 and Hale in 1969.
Eliot, who once inscribed an early transcript of Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats ‘for Miss Emily Hale’, had ordered her letters to him to be burned. Excited scholars hope the trove will offer important new insights into his life and complex relationship with Hale.
She had hopes of marrying him after his first wife Vivienne died, but once told a friend: ‘He loves me... but apparently not in the way usual to men less gifted, ie with complete love thro’ a married relationship.’
US-born Eliot and Hale first met when they both took part in an amateur dramatics evening in America in 1912, when he was a 24-year-old philosophy student at Harvard and she was 21.
He moved to study at Oxford in 1914, but they rekindled their relationship in 1927. By then, his disastrous marriage to Vivienne had begun and he had found fame with The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land.
Hale and Eliot exchanged letters for about 25 years, beginning in 1930. Experts were finally able to open the 14 boxes containing his letters following the 50th anniversary of her death last October.
The letters, with accompanying photos, clippings and other ephemera, were then catalogued, but their contents have not previously been revealed publicly.
They will not be made available online but scholars from around the world are expected to travel to Princeton to study them.
Anthony Cuda, an Eliot scholar and director of the TS Eliot International Summer School, said: ‘I think it’s perhaps the literary event of the decade. I don’t know of anything more awaited or significant.’
He said Eliot and Hale’s relationship ‘must have been incredibly important and their correspondence must have been remarkably intimate for him to be so concerned about the publication’.
Daniel Linke, from Princeton’s Firestone Library, said: ‘It will be the special collections equivalent of a stampede at a rock concert.’
Eliot scholar Frances Dickey said Burnt Norton piques the interest of Eliot enthusiasts because of lines that suggest missed opportunities with his muse, such as: ‘Time past and time future/ What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present.’
It is already known that the poem is named after a home in England that Eliot visited with Hale in 1934. ‘His relationship with her seems to be deep and meaningful and it’s a door he chose not to open,’ Dickey said.
Whatever else she was, Hale was a link to the life Eliot had left behind in the United States as a young man, Dickey added.
‘He was really thinking more about the United States and his childhood during the period where he was in correspondence with Hale,’ she said.
‘I have a feeling that having a relationship with an American woman helped him to uncover his past in a way.’
The letters could also reveal more about Anglophile Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism – something he deeply cherished, Dickey said.
Eliot married Vivienne in 1914. They formally separated in 1933 and, five years later, her brother had her committed to a mental hospital – against her will – where she remained until her death from heart disease aged 58 in 1947.
Ten years later, Eliot married his secretary Valerie Fletcher when he was 68 and she was 30. The poet died in 1965, aged 76, at his home in Kensington, west London. Two years later, Eliot was honoured with a plaque in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.
From the letters, scholars and Eliot fans are also likely to learn more about his personal and professional experiences as a writer, critic and editor at the publishing house Faber & Faber, and his thoughts regarding the contemporary literary scene.
Susan Stewart, professor of English at Princeton, said: ‘We will begin to learn far more about Eliot’s thoughts during this period of historical and, for him, personal upheaval. The contribution of the letters to our understanding of his work promises to be immeasurable.’
‘Remarkably intimate’