At the beginning of their separation she began, briefly, to enjoy her freedoms. To paint her mouth red and go out dancing in nightclubs. “To dance was to forget, to annihilate, meaning,” she wrote in one of her Sibylla stories. Her rapid-fire flapperness in her notebooks. “To be bored was perhaps the only fear that Sibylla ever really knew.”
A different Vivien(ne) begins to emerge here, dangerous, madcap, a bobbed trainwreck — I think it is this Viv I would like to have known. At dinner parties she begrudgingly participated in to keep up some bourgeois illusion of a “we,” she would jokingly threaten people with knives. At some point she briefly decided to leave Tom (for another man?). He “hushed” up the scandal by committing Viv to a sanitorium in Malmaison outside Paris — the very same one Zelda was committed to during her first breakdown. Eventually a few days later he brought home a “shamefaced and penitent Vivien.” His conversion to Anglicanism made divorce impossible. He planned instead for his stint teaching at Harvard; he was to go without her.
A biographer writes that she went into “grande hysterie” as Tom’s departure grew near. Perhaps she didn’t suddenly want something so irrevocable, public. She perennially threatened suicide. She would erupt in tears. She was capable of screaming with her body, of putting on such a bravura performance of protest. Saying things like: I am useless and better dead. Or: I ought never to have married you.
And he never returned to her. And with that, the final gesture of exclusion. The madwoman stricken from the public sphere. No longer the poet’s wife. The Bloomsbury women acted as agents, smuggling him in. He was secretive about his address. They gossiped about it, gleefully. Did you hear? Did you hear? They knew he would never see her again.
He has abandoned her. She becomes banned.
(God, the experience of reading her life. So abject and gooshy. It makes me cringe. I experience an absolute intimacy coupled with a desire to protect myself by distancing. Like a toxic girlfirend. I lose a sense of equilibrium reading these books — I get too inside.)
When he returned to England and he never appeared, if the mythology is to be believed, she became terrified he was a “victim of a conspiracy.” She began to think his “enemies” were the reasons he deserted her. Even though his last letter to her was “a very cold and brutal document.” She was so blind when it came to him.
He would communicate with her solely through solicitors. She refused to accept the separation — and still sent out Christmas cards signed by Mr. and Mrs. T.S. Eliot. For who was she anymore if she was no longer the wife of the Famous Poet? These women’s whole lives bound to that identity.
Before the separation, she taped a newspaper cutting of Constance Wilde, Oscar’s bride-beard, into her scrapbook. Perhaps this is how she saw herself.
“One of her last acts was to buy some sheet music at Selfridges: ‘Can’t Help Loving that Man of Mine,’ from Showboat.”
She convinced herself in their separation that Eliot was prevented from seeing her. Some sort of plot to keep him from her. She would wait outside houses, record car numbers, spy on men in gray suits she thought could be Tom. She left the front door open for a half hour every evening. At his publishing company screwing up her handkerchief as she wept, Eliot’s secretaries entrusted with calming her down while he hid in the bathroom.
She put up the good fight. An advert she tried to place in The Times once he had left her, address unknown:
“Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home, 68 Clarence Gate Gardens, which he abandoned Sept. 17th, 1932.”
She frequented his plays, an apparition that refused to be forgotten, a vengeful Fury like that which haunts the hero in Eliot’s play The Family Reunion, the cast-off wife (literally, cast off the boat). She went to see his play Murder in the Cathedral nine times. She wanted to be the wife, the celebrity. At the back of one theatre she allegedly carried a sign that said: “I am the wife he abandoned.” I love the theatricality of this. Like the Code Pink protester being carried away during Senate hearings, yelling: “I have a voice!” A puncture in decorum. How horrified he must have been. Then she toyed with blackmail, writing letters to solicitors wondering about his proximity to certain young men. Tom said in 1954: “I was afraid of the dreadfully untrue things she said of me and afraid that my friends believed her.”
She said his “callous cruelty” made her “act in a queer and abnormal way.”
She only once got through the screen of resistance (fortified by the Bloomsbury clique and his secretaries at Faber), at one of his public lectures. In 1935 she was carrying their terrier under her arm and wearing her black-shirts costume of the British Union of Fascists (the uniform a big marketing tool for women, it was actually quite fetching, in its sleek beret and white skirt, black shirt and tie, with high heels). She asked him when he was coming home. “How do you do, I cannot talk now,” he replied.
We are told by Eliot biographers that her diaries of the 1930s are full of memories, “perhaps distorted, and to be read with caution.” The ones that can be found, anyway. Allegedly she only kept a diary for one year of her early married life (1919). Yet: later in her life, ostracized and alone, she is still fervently writing in her notebooks.
Should we believe Vivien(ne)? That men pushed through her door, pushed her down, stole books, papers?
In her flat now she felt “incessantly molested and my nervous system shaken and ruined.” This is when she tried to assume a double identity. She mirrored herself with this character, Daisy Miller. Daisy who is also thought to be vulgar and common, who is ostracized by the elitist expat society, just like she was, Daisy who meets an early death. She became a character in fiction. How literary this all is. She began to communicate about herself in the third person in letters. “You know how terribly nervous and timid she is, and how she is apt to lose her wits and go all to pieces.”
She became, now, a fugitive of her life. She is certain she is being followed. Paranoid on the streets, convinced she was going to be kidnapped or murdered. Paranoia probably a feature of the bromism as well. Although she was under surveillance by Eliot’s man-servant, a rather ominous fellow who censored and interrupted her mail.
She performed night watches in the street, her protection: her uniform and terrier Polly. “I am always driven out, to tramp the streets — this way and that until I get such a horror of the streets that the streets only understand.” A wonderful line from her journals, which reminds me of Anna Kavan’s Asylum Piece (published in 1940). It is 1936. The year Scott Fitzgerald cracked up, but his wife was already put away. The year of publication of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, which Eliot edited. Robin Vote wandering lost and zombie-like through city streets. The first year of the war. Viv lived from hotel to hotel, like Jean Rhys, like Rhys’ character Sasha Jensen in Good Morning, Midnight (published in 1939).
A four-year struggle over family money. Her “reckless spending.” Tom a trustee of the Haigh-Wood estate. He still carried her checkbook in his briefcase. She is paid an allowance, tries to see her father’s will, which led to her finally being committed, after earlier unsuccessful plots by her brother and the family. She was certified and confined in an asylum in 1938. For Viv the Involuntary Reception Order, in force prior to the Mental Health Act of 1959, did not provide for rights of appeal, individuals could be confined at the sole request of relatives.