Customer Reviews

Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot

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3 star:		(1)
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700 pages of commonplace minutiae is probably tons more than anyone wants to know about Vivienne Eliot but, even allowing for such proffered particulars as V.E.'s 1934 cockroach problems, the story told by Carole Seymour-Jones is fascininating...and repulsive. If they are ever to pick up The Collected Works again without a shudder, devotees of T. S. Eliot will have to study a juggling denial/avoidance, while those who regard him as little more than a purveyor of era-bogged, clever-dick party pieces, will receive broad permission from this volume to dismissively despise him as an appalling, conniving, cheating, embezzling, slug-under-a-rock. (Of the "Uncollected" works , the less said the better.)

Difficult as it may be to generate sympathy for a person who set up household shrines to Oswald Mosley, Jones leaves us little doubt that Vivienne Eliot was certainly as talented as many another Bloomsburian, disgracefully dealt with--abused--by Eliot and her own family, but simplemindedly, to her captive last, holding out for the theory that Tom was not to blame.

With so much material to deal with, it is not surprising Jones occasionally seems to lose track of precisely what went before (early on she lays it out that TSE at least enabled V's affair with Bertrand Russell, certainly profited by it, possibly connived at it; hundreds of pages later Jones speaks of how hurt Eliot was by her infidelity). Jones' oracular certainty of who-felt-what, who-thought-what, who-did-what-why and her psychological pontificating become irksome to anyone not willing to concede her omniscience.But for a microscopic view of a time-dated literary milieu and its peculiar, self-aggrandizing denizens, and a disturbing look at what intellectual creeps can get up to, this book will reward even the non-trivialists among us.

I read the book in 2002 while living temporarily in London. I disagree with critics who pan this biography, and say instead that it is a refreshing thing that this woman, long in the grave ( I blame TS Eliot in part), has finally been given a chance to be shown as a real woman, as something other than a footnote of Eliot's fame. What struck a chord with me was, in part, the unveiling of a tricky malfeasance by TS Eliot and Vivienne's brother. If she went insane, it was the two of these men who drove her into the asylum!

The woman was brilliant in her own right as a writer, reviewer, as well as editor and advisor (along with Pound) to TS as he composed the rantings that would become The Wasteland. In fact, I have a hunch that part of the writing is hers, not TS. As a woman who once suffered from early peri-menopause, I can say that Vivienne was likely such a sufferer. In her day, we did not help these women because we chose to lump all such "female complaints" as crazy, hypochondriac ravings, or as manipulative. I think the book shows the pitiable state she was in at the end of her life, and I take her behaviour to be at worst sad and at best brave. Seymour-Jones wrote a masterful biography. Those who moan on and on about its being ponderous or whining are simply WRONG. A biography does not need to be simply scholarly. Sometimes being empathetic is enough.

This book, with much more detail than I wanted to know, opens up the "secret" life of Eliot as no other writer has done. Vivienne is no sympathetic character here, but she clearly did not deserve the way she was treated by Tom and his buddies. While he needed to keep his homosexuality in the closet for good reasons, it was a criminal offense, he could have managed to contain his hatred of women physically by leaving her soon after the marriage. It does not appear that he used the marriage as camouflage, but he certainly behaved as if he did. I suppose one can defend the oversupply of detail as needed because her subject is still "controversial," why I do not know. The book can also be recommended as a depressing picture of the treatment of mentally ill people at that time. And her portrayal of the social set to which they belonged reminds me of nothing so much as the twitter society of today's teenagers, all gossip and drama queen behavior, floating at a level of pampered imbecility.

Carole Seymour-Jones has created a ponderous tome without a great deal of innuendo. She has allowed the reader, if willing to slog through the mire, an opportunity to come to their own conclusions about the marriage of Vivienne and Thomas Stearns Eliot. Ample use of largely unedited letters, diaries and detailed sources allow a slowly emerging picture of a completely dysfunctional marriage built on lies and misrepresentations on all sides. Ms. Seymour-Jones clearly has a bias towards Vivienne Eliot, yet I would be naive to believe that Vivienne was an entirely hapless victim in the dreadfully destructive relationship. There is little doubt of T.S. Eliot's homosexual leanings in the excerpted letters to Ezra Pound, and the infidelities that occurred on both sides are obvious. Perhaps the most disturbing picture that emerges was the absolute power of Vivienne's devotion to a man that clearly was not dedicated to her in any way. This inequitable situation eventually led to a schism in her personality that led to frank mental illness. Her plight was also compounded by medical problems that ravaged her from youth, and were untreatable in her lifetime. Her condition was treated with bromide, a poisonous neurotoxin that was a widely used medicine at the time. The constellation of characters (or villains) that made up the British literary intelligentsia, including the Bloomsbury Group is highlighted as well, including Bertrand Russell, Lady Violet Ottoline, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Ford Maddox Ford. Let's just say that after you have read this book, the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" will never sound as sweet.

A fascinating read, revealing the tragic relationship between an adored and celebrated husband and the eclipsed and wasted life of a wife who posssessed intelligence and promise. The abuses of a system that allowed "difficult"

spouses to be locked out of sight in asylums will both enrage the reader and make his/her blood run cold.