Writers Between the Covers: The Scandalous Romantic Lives of Legendary Literary Casanovas, Coquettes, and Cads

Rendon, Joni; Schmidt, Shannon McKenna

ISBN 10: 1452614857 ISBN 13: 9781452614854

Publisher: Tantor Audio, 2013

Synopsis

Why did Norman Mailer stab his second wife at a party? Who was Edith Wharton's secret transatlantic lover? What motivated Anaïs Nin to become a bigamist?

Writers Between the Covers rips the sheets off these and other real-life love stories of the literati—some with fairy tale endings and others that resulted in break-ups, breakdowns, and brawls. Among the writers laid bare are Agatha Christie, who sparked the largest-ever manhunt in England as her marriage fell apart; Arthur Miller, whose jaw-dropping pairing with Marilyn Monroe proved that opposites attract, at least initially; and T. S. Eliot, who slept in a deckchair on his disastrous honeymoon.

From the best break-up letters to the stormiest love triangles to the boldest cougars and cradle-robbers, this fun and accessible volume reveals literary history's most titillating loves, lusts, and longings.

About this title

About the Author:

Joni Rendon, a freelance writer with a passion for reading and travel, spent ten years in marketing and editorial in the book publishing industry. She is coauthor, with Shannon McKenna Schmidt, of Novel Destinations.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.***

 Copyright © 2013 by Joni Rendon and Shannon McKenna Schmidt 

 

The Love Song of T. S. Eliot

 

T.S. Eliot

 

*

 

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

—T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

 

During his disastrous honeymoon, T. S. Eliot reportedly spent the night in a deck chair while his bride barri­caded herself inside their hotel room. The neurotic pair’s eighteen-year partnership produced numerous nervous breakdowns and some of the twentieth cen­tury’s finest poetry.

*

The truth will all come out, if not in our life—then after it,” promised Vivienne Eliot, wife of famed modernist poet t. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, from the asylum where she had been committed against her will in 1938. She blamed Eliot’s cruelty for causing her breakdown and longed for the world to know her side of the story.

Although she was eccentric and plagued by a nervous disposi­tion, Vivienne may not have been the “mad” Ophelia that history has made her out to be. Decades after her death in 1947, her brother, who signed her incarceration papers, admitted, “It was only when I saw Vivie in the asylum for the last time I realised I had done something very wrong. . . . She was as sane as I was.” Like Zelda Fitzgerald, the neurotic wife of another famous writer, Vivi­enne died while institutionalized.

She had spent her last hours of freedom wandering the streets of London in a delusional state, not unlike the tortured wife in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, who proclaims in desperation, “I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street.” When her brother was sum­moned to collect her, he wrote alarmingly to the vacationing poet that Vivienne was “full of the most fantastic suspicions. She asked me if it was true that you had been beheaded.”

Vivienne’s grip on reality had steadily loosened after Eliot de­serted her five years earlier. Coldly, he had informed her of his de­sire to separate in a letter from his solicitor, sent while he was abroad teaching. His cowardly action avoided a painful confronta­tion, which he continued to forestall after his return to England by going into hiding.

Denied even the chance to meet with her husband, Vivienne refused to accept their breakup and became convinced she could change his mind if she could only speak to him again in person. Eliot refused, insisting through his lawyers that further discussions were “fruitless and unnecessary.” His abrupt and inexplicable with­drawal would have driven even the sanest of wives to the brink, but for a woman already plagued by abandonment issues, it spelled di­saster. Overcome with a growing sense of helplessness and hyste­ria, Vivienne began to stalk him.

Her attempts to track him down through the passport office and their dentist were foiled by his frequent moves, and she took to haunting his workplace. Embarrassingly, she would sit weeping in the waiting room while Eliot slipped out the back door, alerted by a special ring from his secretary. Evenings would find her canvas­sing performances of his plays, hoping for a sighting.

Out of options, she attempted to place an advertisement in the Times personals, which the newspaper withheld from publication. The ad pleaded: “Will t. S. Eliot please return to his home 68 Clar­ence Gate Gardens which he abandoned Sept. 17th, 1932.” even after bailiffs raided her apartment to repossess her estranged hus­band’s belongings, she clung to the hope that he might return and would often leave the door ajar.

After three long years, Vivienne’s perseverance was briefly re­warded when she tracked Eliot down at a book signing. She ap­proached him but was swiftly rebuffed: “I cannot talk to you now,” Eliot said dismissively, before rushing off. He never again made an effort to see her, either before or during her nine-year incarcera­tion. Although he was said to be acting on the advice of her doctors, his complete disengagement seems unfeeling and inhumane.

When Vivienne’s brother rang in 1947 to tell him she had un­expectedly died (possibly from a deliberate overdose), the poet is said to have become profoundly distressed, crying out, “Oh God, oh God.” Despite his conviction that leaving had been a necessary act of self-preservation, he was nonetheless tormented by his deci­sion. His autobiographical play The Family Reunion, about a tortured man who may or may not have killed his wife, is thought to have been an attempt to grapple with his conflicted feelings.

For a repressed man who spent a lifetime fleeing emotion, Eliot’s choice of a flamboyant, high-strung bride like Vivienne is puz­zling. The mismatched pair had wed after a whirlwind courtship while the shy American poet was a student at Oxford. Cracks in their marriage began showing immediately, when Vivienne’s un­predictable menstrual period arrived on their honeymoon.

It’s hard to say who was more distressed, the nervous bride or the inexperienced poet, who was still a virgin and squeamish about female sexuality. The reluctant Romeo was also hamstrung by em­barrassment over his hernia, and the abortive first night of passion did little to boost his confidence. Vivienne’s insistence on bringing home the soiled sheets for laundering only prolonged the painful ordeal.

Flummoxed by her husband’s disinterest in sex, Vivienne con­soled herself in the arms of his former teacher, the philosopher Ber­trand Russell. Eliot may have tacitly condoned the affair, happy to be off the hook in the bedroom. At the time, he was preoccupied with his dawning awareness of Vivienne’s many maladies. In addi­tion to suffering from manic depression and a hormonal imbalance, she had debilitating migraines, neuralgia, rheumatism, and later developed an eating disorder and addiction to pain medication.

Vivienne’s illnesses blighted every aspect of their existence, but Eliot stuck it out for more than a decade. He bore her difficul­ties with saintly patience, even giving up teaching for a higher-paid job in a bank so he could afford her mounting medical expenses. His round-the-clock ministrations brought on his own collapses, which would render him bedridden for weeks at a time.

Still, there were unexpected compensations. “Vivienne ruined him as a man but she made him as a poet,” claimed an acquaintance. Eliot himself later admitted, “to her the marriage brought no hap­piness . . . to me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.” the 434-line confessional poem, considered one of the greatest of the twentieth century, was largely composed in a Swiss sanitarium while he was being treated for his own breakdown.

Eliot’s illnesses and heavy drinking offered him a refuge from his marriage as his wife’s bizarre behavior intensified. Among other eccentricities, she took to carrying a toy knife in her handbag, once using it to threaten Virginia Woolf, whom she accused of being Eliot’s mistress. Sympathetic to the poet, Woolf spoke of Vivienne as a “bag of ferrets” around his neck, forever “biting, wriggling, raving, scratching.” Vivienne’s erratic actions, Eliot’s compensa­tory drinking, and their constant mutual sniping hampered their social life. Friends described being sucked dry by their presence, and many refused to see the dysfunctional pair together anymore.

As the marriage reached its inexorable conclusion, Eliot laid the foundations for a separate life by joining the Church of England and taking a vow of chastity, an insurance policy against any more bad sex. He also began a secret correspondence with Bostonian Emily Hale, who had been his first love while he was a student at Harvard. Both of their families had assumed the sweethearts would marry, until Eliot’s move to Europe and his impulsive decision to wed Vivi­enne. Twelve years after being thrown over, Emily wrote to her for­mer flame, instigating a furtive but chaste cross-Atlantic friendship.

Over the next three decades, the poet penned her more than a thousand letters, and she frequently visited him in England. When Vivienne was found wandering the streets and committed to an asylum, Emily and Eliot were away together. Despite their close­ness, Eliot imposed a wall of secrecy around their relationship and few in his circle knew of Emily’s existence.

Emily acquiesced to remaining in the shadows, believing her virtuous silence would be rewarded with a walk down the aisle. But after Vivienne passed away, she was dismayed to find Eliot un­willing to make a commitment. Instead he claimed he felt incapable of ever sharing a life with anyone again. Their friendship continued in spite of the crushing rejection, perhaps because Emily, like Vivi­enne before her, did not give up hope that he might reconsider.

She might have reacted differently if she had known that the unlikely playboy had another gal pal in the wings. Englishwoman Mary Trevelyan had been Eliot’s confidante and frequent escort to social events since the year of Vivienne’s confinement. Although he gave off mixed signals by sending her presents and sometimes hold­ing her hand, he also discouraged intimacy by limiting their contact to once every two weeks. Undeterred by Eliot’s standoffishness, Mary proposed to him three times. Each time the poet demurred, claiming he thought they were just friends and that the idea of re­marrying was like a nightmare.

Despite his seemingly implacable stance on marriage, at the age of sixty-eight Eliot stunned everyone by tying the knot with his thirty-year-old secretary, Valerie Fletcher. The couple exchanged vows in a secret ceremony that took place at 7:00 a.m. to avoid publicity, and was witnessed only by the bride’s parents and a single friend. Not a soul had known of this covert office romance. After hearing the shocking news, Mary Trevelyan stopped speaking to him, while Emily Hale had a nervous breakdown.

Eliot’s second marriage brought him immense happiness. He and Valerie were inseparable, and those who knew him marveled at his profound contentment. Not known for sentimentality or romanti­cism, he broke the stereotype by publishing a love poem called “a Dedication to My Wife.” the verse describes an ideal union between two people “Who think the same thoughts without need of speech / and babble the same speech without need of meaning.”

The second Mrs. Eliot was equally besotted, having been a dev­otee of the poet since age fourteen when she heard a recording of his poem “Journey of the Magi.” Fate was on her side when, after train­ing as a secretary, she learned of an opening working for Eliot at the publishing firm Faber and Faber. During Valerie’s seven years as his devoted employee, the couple’s feelings quietly blossomed until she received Eliot’s coy handwritten proposal in a batch of typing.

Cynics claim the ailing poet, who suffered from emphysema and heart problems, had married to secure a trustworthy nurse­maid and literary executor, though Valerie disputed this interpreta­tion. “He obviously needed to have a happy marriage. He wouldn’t die until he’d had it,” she said. “There was a little boy in him that needed to be released.”

 

*

 

BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

 

*

Before social media made saying sayonara as easy as changing your Facebook status, the time-honored tradi­tion of the breakup letter did the dirty work.

To have and have not. Prior to earning his macho reputation as a love ’em and leave ’em ladies man, eighteen-­year-old Ernest Hemingway had his heart broken by an older woman during World War I. While serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, the writer was injured by exploding shrapnel and tended to by Agnes von Kurowsky, a pretty American Red Cross nurse. A heady romance ensued, but their plans to marry were dashed when Agnes (the model for Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms) fell for someone else and crushed him with a Dear John letter:

For quite awhile before you left, I was trying to con­vince myself it was a real love-affair. . . . Now, after a couple of months away from you, I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart.

Valley girl. Before Jacqueline Susann found stardom with her tale of bed-hopping, pill-popping starlets, Valley of the Dolls, the struggling actress funded her glamorous life­style by marrying wealthy publicist Irving Mansfield. The two sybarites enjoyed the good life, living in a posh New York City hotel and dining on steak and Dom Pérignon. But after Irving was drafted into the army, Susann fell for someone else. She composed a heartlessly humorous kiss-off letter and read it aloud to her shocked cast mates before mailing it to Mansfield:

Irving, when we were at the Essex House and I had room service and I could buy all my Florence Lustig dresses, I found that I loved you very much, but now that you’re in the army and getting $56 a month, I feel that my love has waned.

It’s not you; it’s me. Like her famous character Jane Eyre, who turned down a marriage proposal from a man she didn’t love, Charlotte Brontë did the same when her best friend’s brother popped the question. Although the twenty­-three-year-old novelist thought herself unattractive and doubted other offers would come her way, she refused to make a passionless match simply for the sake of security. Re­buffing her dull clergyman-suitor, she gently explained that she was not the right wife for him:

My answer to your proposal must be a decided nega­tive. . . . I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you—but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you. . . . I am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose.

Exile on Main Street. The marriage between Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis and foreign correspondent Dorothy Thompson was troubled from the start. Thompson mistak­enly thought she could reform the notorious alcoholic, while the insecure author of classics like Babbitt and Main Street was jealous of his wife’s political clout. (Once, while they were in bed together, President Roosevelt rang for Dorothy.) After more than a decade of marriage, Lewis stormed out, claiming his wife’s success had robbed him of his creativity. While Dorothy was reluctant to part ways, she finally agreed to call it quits four years later:

Go ahead and get a divorce. I won’t oppose it. I also won’t get it. For God’s sake, let’s be honest. You left me, I didn’t leave you. You want it. I don’t. You get it. On any ground your lawyers can fake up. Say I “de­serted” you. Make a case for mental cruelty. You can make a case. Go and get it.

 

Beautiful and Damned

 

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

 

*

 

Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold.

—Zelda Fitzgerald, “The Big Top”

 

During one unforgettable week in 1920, F. Scott Fitzger­ald published his debut novel, Thi...

About this edition

• Publisher: Tantor Audio
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1452614857
• ISBN 13: 9781452614854
• Binding: Audio CD