Wednesday, January 29, 2020

EMILY HALE - HER ENIGMATIC LOVE LIFE.


                                    
            A sudden interest in the life of the American Drama teacher Emily Hale has cropped up,
with the opening of her cache of 1131 love letters, fifty years after her death. These letters had been deposited in the Princeton University Library in 1956, and was opened in January 2020, in accordance with her wishes. The letters will be of interest because they will reveal the secret love life of a woman, who was not just the muse of the poet T.S. Eliot, but also his lover and confidante.
            Emily Hale was born on October 27th 1891, in New Jersey, to Reverend Edward Hale a Unitarian minister and his wife. But she was brought up by her aunt Edith Perkins and her uncle Reverend John Carrol Perkins in Boston. She attended Berkley Street School in Cambridge and Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, but did not go to college. She became a Speech and Drama teacher and worked in many universities in the US. Emily always wanted to be an actor but was prevented from doing so by her conservative aunt and uncle. She became a member of the Amateur Cambridge Theatre and took part in many plays that were well received.
            Emily first met T.S. Eliot the poet in 1912, at his cousin’s house. He was then doing a course in Philosophy at Harvard. In 1913, the Amateur Theatre group produced a scene from Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ in which Emily and Eliot performed. Eliot seemed to have fallen in love with this slim, graceful girl with a smiling face, and he professed his love for her before he returned to England in 1914. However, in spite of his confession of love for Emily, he went back and got married to a girl called Vivienne Haigh-Wood.
            In 1932-1933, Eliot visited Emily and decided to seek separation from his wife on grounds of sexual incompatibility. He could not divorce her because he was of the Anglican faith. Vivienne became mentally ill and had to be admitted to a mental hospital, where she died in 1947.
            Emily spent her summers with her uncle and aunt at Campden, Gloucestershire between the years 1935-1939. During these visits, her friendship with Eliot was revived and they spent many hours together. In 1935, he even wrote a poem ‘Burnt Norton’ named after a home in England which they had visited. He said it was his love poem to her. This was the first of many poems he wrote, declaring that Emily was his muse. It was the beginning of their epistolary romance which saw many letters exchanged between them. But the contents of her letters to Eliot were never known as he burnt them all. Emily preserved each one carefully, secretly exulting in the love he professed. Their correspondence lasted from 1930-1956.
            If Emily hoped that Eliot would marry her after Vivienne’s death, she was sorely disappointed. Many of his friends thought she was too prim and boring. She had to settle for platonic love in their relationship. Eliot’s last letter to her was in 1956.
            But when Eliot married his secretary Valerie Fletcher, thirty years his junior in 1957, Emily could bear it no more. She came to know of it through a mention in the Boston Globe. She had a nervous breakdown and had to undergo therapy. Some wise man had cautioned “Never date a poet. He’ll always do a dirty on you,” and that is what happened. Was it Emily’s lack of self love and self esteem that permitted Eliot to ride roughshod over her emotions? In the end Eliot had the gall to say “Emily would have killed the poet in me.” He died in 1965.
            In time, Emily snapped out of her ‘Broken Heart syndrome’ with surprising resilience. She began to work again and continued to teach at the Abbot Academy of Drama from 1947- 1959.
            Emily led a quiet life after her retirement until her death on October 12th 1969. Unworthy as he was, she kept a photo of Eliot on the bureau in her apartment. Though her life was nothing but emotional chaos, she never bared her heart to the world. Now that those letters from Eliot are open to scrutiny, the literary world will have more details of that ambiguous relationship. As Anthony Curd an Eliot scholar said, “This is perhaps the literary event of the decade. I don’t know anything more awaited or significant. It is momentous to have these letters come out.”


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