As the critic Herbert Read predicted in 1967, posterity has been unkind to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, T.S. Eliot's first wife. Carole Seymour-Jones's biography sets out to rescue Vivienne from literary oblivion, to reinstate her as a central influence on the composition of some of her husband's greatest poems. However altruistic the intention, though, Painted Shadow cannot avoid certain hard truths about Vivienne's role in the disastrous Eliot mΘsalliance. At times there are elements of farce in Seymour-Jones's description of just how titanically mismatched the couple were when they married after only three months' acquaintance. Eliot was emotionally crippled by attachment to his domineering mother, and was too horrified by his wife's body and too mortified by the abdominal truss he wore to consummate the marriage; Vivienne's mood swings, dysmenorrhoea, sexual demands and sedative addiction seem to have provoked an instinctive repulsion in him that only deepened as their marriage progressed.
The book presents a convincing and compelling psychological portrait of the hell's brew of tortured affection, neurosis, financial guilt, and pathological co-dependence that kept them together for far too long. What is less convincing is the book's assertion that it presents a "strikingly new picture" of the first Mrs. Eliot. The stunts Vivienne pulled during and after the marriage have been maliciously documented in the writings of the Bloomsbury coterie, most notably by the odious Virginia Woolf, who wrote that Vivienne made her "almost vomit, so scented, so powdered, so egotistic, so morbid, so weakly . . . this bag of ferrets is what Tom wears round his neck". In the sentimental and superficial film Tom and Viv, Miranda Richardson's Vivienne seemed full of whimsical high-jinks, accosting Woolf and Ottoline Morrell with a fake knife or prankishly pouring chocolate through the letter box of the Faber Offices (a favourite suffragette strategy). Seymour-Jones makes it clear that the truth was much more complex, pathetic, and painful, but she still cannot make Vivienne seem more than the pitiful, victimised character she undoubtedly was.
Instead, the powerful characters with whom Vivienne became haplessly and passively entangled during the course of her life have a tendency to dominate Seymour-Jones's narrative. This is perhaps inevitable, given the dearth of Vivienne's own first-hand records of her liaisons and the determination of Eliot to effectively write her out of his life, as well as the inevitably biased opinions of the snooty and prurient Bloomsberries who were gleeful witnesses to the Eliot folie-α-deux. But, despite her by now well-known editorial interventions in The Waste Land (far less significant than Pound's), Vivienne seems only to have drifted from one fad to another (dancing, drawing, music, writing, and eventually fascism) in a pathetic attempt to assert her intellectual independence from her adored but emotionally and sexually unreachable husband.
Her hysterical outbursts and constant invalidism, Seymour-Jones implies, were probably instinctive attempts to provoke Eliot into responding to her needs. It was a Sisyphean task.
Seymour-Jones never quite explicitly states that Eliot had an active homosexual life (evidence for this seems mainly to rest on second-hand accounts and inference from his fondness for bawdy verse, high Anglican vicars and Diaghilev's Ballet Russes), but the book presents a portrait of Eliot as constitutionally homosexual, albeit too morally conflicted and solicitous of his own reputation ever to admit it openly. Seymour-Jones adduces the pervasive and disgusted misogyny of his poetry in support of her opinion. Certainly, Eliot seems to have disliked women's bodies, as when in 'Lune de Miel' (1917) he writes of "une forte odeur de chienne" ("the strong stink of bitch") which Seymour-Jones suggests refers directly to his own distressing honeymoon experiences. Eliot's devastating sexual rejection of Vivienne drove her into the Mephistophelean embraces of Bertrand Russell, who bankrolled the Eliots for some time, paying for Vivienne's dancing lessons and dresses (her taste in clothes was expensive) and, it seems, relieving Eliot of his more burdensome conjugal duties. Seymour-Jones claims that Eliot was effectively his wife's pimp during this time, a role which was to leave a lasting burden of guilt as well as unfairly reinforcing his disgust at Vivienne's increasingly erratic behaviour. He satirised the priapic Russell as "Mr Apollinax" and was appalled by the emotional disturbances his wife underwent after Russell coldly dropped her in favour of the next in a long line of sexual conquests.
But Russell's behaviour was an early premonition of the last sad years of the Eliot union. When in 1932 Eliot set sail for the U.S. and the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard, he sent Vivienne a note reassuring her that he would not be absent for more than seven months or so. It was the last she was to hear from him. After the American interlude he resumed his job at Faber and had a deed of separation served upon Vivienne, which she refused to sign.
There followed four years during which, in deep and paranoid denial, she never ceased to write to him, imploring him to return to her. Their mutual acquaintances closed ranks around "poor Tom" and Vivienne spiralled into the anorexia, drug-dependency and mental instability that eventually enabled her appalling brother Maurice Haigh-Wood, in cahoots with Eliot and other erstwhile friends, to have her committed. In 1947, aged 58, she died in a nursing home of what Seymour-Jones suggests was probably an overdose. Painted Shadow is an absorbing and well-researched portrait of a destructive, disturbing relationship. The book's autobiographical reinterpretations of Eliot's poetry, in particular The Waste Land, are also sensitive and illuminating. As this might indicate, however, and despite the author's best intentions, the book is finally more valuable for what it has to say about Eliot's dark and rebarbative personality than for what it clarifies about his unfortunate wife's.
Caitr∅ona O'Reilly's poetry collection, The Nowhere Birds was published earlier this year by Bloodaxe Books