Either way, it has always been hard to see Vivien as a person in her own right. The second approach posits her as a victim both of Eliot’s coldness and cruelty, and of the assorted quacks who did so little to help her following her breakdowns (the crudely feminist stance taken by her somewhat unreliable 2001 biographer, Carole Seymour-Jones). The first, and hoariest, is that she was a madwoman whose principle contribution to the life and work of TS Eliot was the immense distress she caused him, pain that helped him to write The Waste Land (the line taken by Michael Hastings, whose 1984 play about the couple became the film Tom & Viv, in which the latter was played by Miranda Richardson). There are two schools of thought about poor Viv, who died in 1947 in the institution where she had been incarcerated for almost a decade, and to which her husband never came. They thought her vulgar, and vain, and quite useless. No one much liked Viv: “this teashop creature”, as a quivering Katherine Mansfield put it. Both were crashing snobs, and thanks to this, they were all too painfully aware of what their equally superior Bloomsbury friends made of them. She kept erratic hours, and her impulses tended towards cruelty. His new wife, who liked dancing and would quite soon go to bed with their landlord, was already showing signs of the mental illness that would ruin her life. In the London flat they shared part-time with its owner, Bertrand Russell, the poet slept not in the couple’s bedroom, but in a deckchair in the hall. V ivien Haigh-Wood married TS Eliot in 1915, and right from the start, things were difficult: if not a disaster precisely, then one well in the making.
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