Oh, another unhappy poet

Put this in the drawer marked "Reasons all parents of teenagers should be happy if their child says they don't have any interest in writing poetry":  a review of a new book about TS Eliot enlightens me about his unhappy personal life.   Sure, sure, there must have been happy famous poets - just that they seem to be in the serious minority:

In 1915 Eliot proposed to Vivien Haigh-Wood, partly out of desire for sexual experience, which he was too shy to seek in other ways. Following “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract,” the young poet found himself shackled to a needy, fragile woman he grew to dislike, then pity and finally loathe. He would turn for love and sympathetic understanding elsewhere....

This second half of Crawford’s biography begins with a brief account of Eliot’s short-lived, unsatisfactory affair with the rich, notoriously promiscuous Nancy Cunard. Soon, though, this unhappy husband found his thoughts returning to the girl he had left behind in America, Emily Hale. In due course, Eliot and Hale embarked on an intense correspondence that would continue for more than 20 years. Any guise of mere friendship was soon abandoned: “I would literally give my eyesight to be able to marry you. … If I ever am free I shall ask you to marry me.”  ...

His eventual commitment to an exceptionally austere Anglicanism revolutionized Eliot’s later life but ruined Hale’s. The bonds of matrimony, he repeatedly told her, were sacrosanct. There could be no divorce. Nonetheless, the two would meet occasionally during the interwar years — both in America and in England — for what seem to have been afternoons of decorous yearning. Hale would long cherish the remembrance of their few kisses ...

Both Vivien and Eliot almost continually suffered from an array of illnesses. Hers included intestinal inflammation, shortness of breath, influenza, shingles, emotional and mental instability, and drastic weight loss — at one point she was down to 80 pounds — while Eliot ran his wife a respectable second with recurrent colds, bronchial trouble, seriously decayed teeth (five were extracted on one dental visit), a hernia that required a truss, surgery on his finger and frequent periods of nervous exhaustion. He also drank impressively, as many as five gin drinks during dinner...

Crawford estimates that in 1925 alone the couple spent a third of their income on doctors, medicines, and stays in hospitals or sanatoria. During the ’30s, Eliot arranged for the increasingly troubled Vivien — at one point he wondered if she might be suffering from “demonic possession” — to be cared for in various rest homes, and in 1938 he signed papers committing her to an asylum. With typical Prufrockian cowardice, he did this by letter while out of the country. He never saw her again....

Then, get this!:

...in 1947, Vivien died. At this point the now-free Eliot suddenly recoiled at the prospect of actually marrying Hale, to whom he wrote, “I cannot, cannot, start life again, and adapt myself (which means not merely one moment, but a perpetual adaptation for the rest of life) to any other person.” Hale was crushed but hoped he’d change his mind.

He went on, at age 68, to do this, after lodging with " wheelchair-bound bibliophile John Hayward."

Eliot’s bedroom was flamboyantly ascetic: a single bed, an ebony crucifix, a bare lightbulb hanging from a chain. Very early one morning in 1957, though, Hayward’s “lodger” announced — without warning, through a letter — that he wouldn’t be back the next day or, indeed, ever. The 68-year-old Eliot had proposed — via letter! — to his adoring 30-year-old secretary, Valerie Fletcher, and been accepted. In due course, Hale received her own letter, disclosing this ultimate betrayal. For the final years of his life Eliot was soppily besotted with his new young bride, and the two grew inseparable. He died in 1965 at age 76.

Sounds quite the cad.