T.S. Eliot in love, Madeleine L'Engle in doubt, & plague literature

Dear friends,

In early January, the dreams of biographers came true when Princeton University opened a cache of more than 1,100 letters from T.S. Eliot to Emily Hale, his first love, with whom he corresponded for the better part of thirty years. According to Hale's account, Eliot confessed his love to her in 1914, but she did not return his feelings. They met again in 1922 and began writing to each other in 1930, when he was forty-two and she was thirty-nine. Eliot avowed his love for Hale repeatedly but refused to divorce his wife, Vivienne, who by then was in a sanatorium. But after Vivienne died, he chose not to marry Hale, and later married his second wife, Valerie. In a statement written in 1960 to accompany the eventual release of the letters, Eliot expressed his dismay at Hale's decision to donate them to Princeton and claimed he had never truly loved her. "Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me," he wrote, and concluded, chillingly, "May we all rest in peace."

Since Hale’s death, in 1969, the letters have waited, sealed in wooden boxes, their contents a matter of intense speculation. "There was always a possibility that the opening of the Hale letters would turn out to be a disappointment,” Eliot scholar Frances Dickey wrote, live-blogging her reading of the letters for the International T.S. Eliot Society. “However, the first box dismisses any such worry.” I followed breathlessly on Twitter as friends posted the choicest nuggets from Dickey’s reports—which are, in fact, astonishing. Eliot credits Hale with his spritual awakening and with inspiring many of his poems, including “Ash-Wednesday” and “Burnt Norton.” (Hale, it turns out, is the never-identified “hyacinth girl” of The Waste-Land; “Marie” in that poem, also previously unknown, is a woman named Marie von Moritz whom Eliot met in Munich, whose conversation he transcribed verbatim.) He writes about his interest in art, music, and drama, and encloses handwritten notes from other authors, including Woolf and Joyce. Sprinkled with jokes and poetic endearments, the letters also reveal Eliot’s playful, romantic side. Dickey writes of “heart-stopping passages” such as one in which he apparently uses a line from The Waste-Land to describe his feelings when he first told Hale of his love: “the heart of light, the silence.” (I can’t be more specific because Dickey’s accounts, owing to copyright restrictions, are largely paraphrases.) And he agonizes over the stalemate of his marriage, the impossibility of divorce, his desire to drink, and his longing for Hale. 
 
Early in their correspondence, Eliot told Hale that her letters should be preserved alongside his: “without her words, the truth about him cannot be told,” Dickey writes. Alas, he had her letters destroyed. But it’s clear from his that their correspondence offers a key to his poetry: not just in terms of the references scholars hadn't been able to track, but in revealing some of the moments in Eliot’s life that inspired them. This idea, of course, goes against everything readers of my generation were taught about reading poets like Eliot, whose works are supposed to stand alone, without recourse to biographical data for explanation. We’ll have to wait for the publication of the entire correspondence—scheduled for next year—to learn the full story. But in the meantime, I’ll be watching the blog with fascination.
 
What I've been writing 
* “We always feel like we’re living at the end of the world,” Emily St. John Mandel has said. I reviewed her kaleidoscopic new novel, The Glass Hotel, for the Atlantic. If you haven’t already read her masterpiece, Station Eleven, don’t read it now—it’s an all-too-vivid exploration of what the world would look like in the wake of a global pandemic. And if you have read it—well, I can’t stop thinking about it either.
 
* And I wrote this essay for the New York Review of Books about Madeleine l’Engle as a Christian writer, based on the two Library of America volumes of her work as well as some of her spiritual writing, the latter of which I found, frankly, hard going. I knew A Wrinkle in Time was a Christian book, but I didn’t realize how deeply l’Engle’s Christianity pervaded her work. But is it faith she’s writing about, or doubt? 
 
All best,
Ruth
 
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." —Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House