New volume of TS Eliot’s letters tells of tragic marriage

CAIRO – 10 June 2017: The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume 7 will be issued by U.K.-based publishing house Faber & Faber on June 22, according to the U.K. newspaper The Guardian. It is the seventh of a series of 20 planned volumes recording the Nobel Laureate’s written correspondence during his lifetime.

The 950-page edition of the British poet’s letters will reveal details of his relationship with his first wife Vivien Haigh-Wood and the deterioration of her mental health that lead to their ultimate legal separation, through a series of letters exchanged between the writer, his wife and others from 1934 and 1935.

Eliot married Haigh-Wood in 1915, but shortly after her mental health symptoms hindered the continuation of their relationship. The couple remained separated until she died 1947 in a mental health asylum aged 58.

According to Haigh-Wood’s diaries edited by Professor John Haffenden, Emeritus Professor at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., she was unable to accept that Eliot had left her. “The only thing I yearn for and bleed for is the day when Tom calmly turns the keys in this front door, walks leisurely in, finds the room door key and then has a good look all round, smiles with quiet satisfaction, draws a long breath, and goes quietly to his dear books and to his bed. And if he can then say, God bless my little Welsh wife Vivienne. Surely he will say that,” Haigh-Wood expresses in her letters.

According to Haffenden’s statements to the Guardian, Haigh-Wood attempted to stalk Eliot and continued to write to him for the rest of her life. He added that later on 1957 Eliot married his secretary, Esmé Valerie Fletcher, whom his first wife described as “a great big bullying looking woman.”

Despite sharing the same lover, it was Eliot’s second wife who pushed for Haigh-Wood’s diaries and letters to be published following Eliot’s. She said that readers of Eliot’s letters should also be able to read Vivien’s thoughts and edited Volume 6 of Eliot’s letter along with Haffenden, as reported by the U.K. newspaper The Independent in February 2016.

For his “outstanding and pioneer contribution to present-day poetry,” Eliot won the 1948 Noble Prize for Literature after publishing a number of the best-known poems in the English language including The Waste Land in 1922, The Hollow Men in 1925, Ash Wednesday in 1930 and Four Quartets in 1943.