Towards the end, she is the creeping woman like at the end of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” She has lost her self. On the street Vivien(ne) bumps into former acquaintances: “No, no, you don’t know me. You have mistaken me again for that terrible woman who is so like me.”
My femme fatales, my deadly women, so often left to die.
Once she was finally certified The Family Reunion could be performed.
It’s difficult not to read Vivien(ne) as this pathetic spectacle of illness and dependence. The ultimate grotesque of femininity, like Freud’s hysteric/housewife (both Dora and her mother). But channeling her, imagining an interior life, I can sense her early inner spirit and see it squelched and doomed into sickness and submission. Under different circumstances and with more strength and less of a mother who crafted her as an invalid from childhood, she could have been an author. Maybe. Or maybe if she had not married Eliot it would never have occurred to her. Or perhaps without the suffering (of illness, of the isolation of her marriage) she never would have come into consciousness to write. She who was always kept in the shadows. She did not write on the whole despite it all, or: she did not write enough, or: she did not publish enough to be seen and saved as a writer. (The New Zealand novelist Janet Frame spent eight years in a mental institution under the mistaken diagnosis of schizophrenia, was subject to over 200 electroshock treatments. In 1952 she was finally saved from a lobotomy and released when an official at the hospital read that her poetry collection had won a prize.)
Vivien(ne) is depicted so often as the femme fatale, the black widow, the vampire.
Yet Tom seems bolder, more vital, more alive as she declines. Jaunty in top hat and cane outside of Faber & Gwyer.
Yet he was the one who dressed up as Dr. Crippen, the famous wife-murderer, for a fancy-dress party. The first time Vivien(ne) went along with the gag, playing his secretary/mistress Ethel le Neve, disguised as the cabin boy for their transatlantic escape. Six months after Vivien(ne) was committed, never to appear again, he donned the disguise again for another costume party.
He played the part of the martyr to perfection. Strange, is Tom wearing green face powder? All of Bloomsbury sided with him. “You see, sir, one must make allowances for artists.” Genius always excuses ill behavior. And she? She with the clever words? She who lacked discipline? She who preferred life to writing? He the object of pity — she of scorn.
Viv was ardent that the Bodleian Library at Oxford get her notebooks and papers, so that she would be remembered, so that her version would be read. Around her neck she wore the key to the safe at Selfridges where they were deposited. A diary entry of August 1934: “You who in later years will read these very words of mine and will be able to trace a true history of this epoch, by my Diaries and Papers.”
I would love to read her unpublished texts, described briefly in her biography, although the Bodleian informs me I would have to get permisson from Valerie Eliot, Eliot’s second wife, to photocopy them. After Michael Hastings’ play Valerie asserted copyright over Vivien(ne)’s papers. The Eliot estate as litigious as Tom Cruise’s (some would argue for the same reasons).
SUPPRESS EVERYTHING SUPPRESSIBLE
Suppressed even after death — she cannot be read easily.
I receive this in my inbox:
Thank you for your email. I’m afraid that in the absence of a Vivien(ne) Eliot expert the citations you give aren’t sufficient for us to be able to quickly identify the material you are interested in. However, before we start tracking down these items, perhaps you can let the Library know that you have obtained the permission of the copyright owner of the MSS, to whom all requests for quotation and copying for publication purposes (rather than private study) must be obtained. This is:
The Estate of T.S. Eliot
Faber & Faber Ltd.
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC 1B 3DA
I find this note remarkable for so many reasons. Even the very phrase “the absence of a Vivien(ne) Eliot expert.” Or: “private study” outside of some larger discourse (she is still held captive, outside). So much of modernism is myth-making — who gets to be remembered? Whose writing is preserved and whose is not?
The implicit threat is made here. Where does fair use begin and end? In this context, this almost becomes a matter of zombie civil rights: who speaks up for the voice of the dead, and who is allowed to suppress it? Who is the keeper of this charge? The answer to this is here: “‘permission…for quotation and copying for publication purposes…must be obtained’ from ‘The Estate of T.S. Eliot,’” keeper of the primary material even after death.
There appears to be a project to destroy these remnants, these reminders. To destroy these women. And I have married a keeper of archives.
I feel compelled to act as the literary executor of the dead and erased. I’m responsible for guarding their legacy.
In 1947 Viv died at 58. The cause of death on her death certificate was “heart attack.” Perhaps by medical negligence or overdose. The wrong date was carved on her tombstone. The next year her husband won the Nobel Prize. (And Bertrand Russell then two years later — has anyone, before or since, bedded two Nobel Prizes in literature?)
An erasure. The line “To My Wife” dropped from his poem “Ash Wednesday.” Bertrand Russell wrote her out of his memoirs.
All mentions of the first Mrs. Eliot eradicated from history. Or this is the project, it seems.
Tom’s childhood sweetheart Emily Hale thought that Tom would marry her after his first wife died. After her hopes were shattered, she too had a breakdown and was institutionalized. He ordered that her letters to him be burned. His letters to her are sealed up at Princeton.
Most people threw away their letters from Viv but kept the ones from Tom. When her brother Maurice delivered papers to the Bodleian there was much missing. The diaries delivered were only from 1914, 1919, and the later period when she was already separated from her husband, ending in 1936. “The many other sources for Vivienne’s life remain buried within the collections of more famous figures.”
Jane Bowles’ fragments trapped in a notebook begging to be freed. Later after the stroke a mind trapped inside of itself. Such cruel fate. For a writer to lose her words. Or for one’s words to be lost. Vivien(ne)’s notebooks mouldering in the basement of the Bodleian. Many went up in a garage fire. Others ominously went missing. We do not have entrance to the last three years of Sylvia Plath’s journaled life. One of these bound journals “disappeared.” Ted burned the second “maroon-backed ledger,” containing entries up to three days before her suicide. For the children. We are told 1919 was the only year Vivien(ne) kept a diary during her married life. Is that true? What stopped her from writing during those other years? SUPPRESS EVERYTHING SUPPRESSIBLE. Their words are suppressed. Scott forbade the publishing of Zelda’s journals.
What to make of this disappearance or willful destruction of these archives of these wives? A disappearance could just (potentially) show neglect. Destruction, however, reveals the danger these femme fatales posed. Of course I could just be like paranoid Vivien(ne), feeling she was being watched and followed (but she was, the men who came and broke down the door).
Did she write while inside? Did Zelda? Their asylum pieces? It is impossible to know. Most likely they were not given pens or pencils (thought of as weapons, weapons to prove one’s own reason). Yet even though their writing instruments were taken from these women (along with their humanity, their dignity, their agency), somehow some still wrote. A desperate need to communicate to the outside world.