Is it worth writing a biography with information that is not particularly new to scholarship? It is if that information logically depicts a series of events in a life whose course has been intentionally mis-represented, as Vivienne Eliot's has been. There is no question that Eliot scholarship has cast the poet's un-lucky first wife in the role of a lunatic harpy from whom he escaped by the skin of his teeth. A biography of Vivienne Eliot, then, as well as addressing her constant, and unsatisfactorily diagnosed illnesses, should articulate her very real contribution to Eliot's oeuvre and artistic experience: as secretary, creative editor, and as an author herself. It could then demonstrate how these accomplishments were side-lined in the interests of her husband's much more insistent talent. Vivienne did certainly fill up much of what would otherwise have been empty space in the Criterion under various pseudonyms, and her quasi-fictional portrayals of Bloomsbury life are often droll. Moreover, her short stories about unhappy wives wouldn't seem out of place in Jean Rhys's body of work-although I'm not personally convinced that is such a huge compliment. Meanwhile, Seymour-Jones' biography articulates Vivienne's own artistic accomplishments to a very small extent indeed.
The only truly logical choice Seymour-Jones has made with this biography is its title, for a 'painted shadow' is all Vivenne Eliot is to a biographer who spends most of her time gleefully detailing T.S. Eliot's sexual exploits, which, again, she does with little original material. Seymour-Jones even neglects to point the reader toward an interesting passage in E.M. Forster's Maurice, where Forster describes the 'waste land' of emotion that 'inverts', or homosexuals, experienced. This would at least lend some small degree of logical empathy. Instead, she points to Eliot's rude 'King Bolo' series, and dwells with a gossip's satisfaction on his alleged homosexual affairs. I'm not denying that Eliot was most likely extremely unfair in his treatment of his first wife (though I wouldn't know, not having been an intimate of theirs…), but if the point is that Eliot was a secret homosexual, or bisexual, who was nasty to his wife because she couldn't ever be what he actually desired (a man), then surely scandal mongering is not conducive to erasing the prejudice that would generate such a situation in the first place? I'll leave the reader to conclude what such an approach is conducive to.
When not busy painting T.S. Eliot as a debauch, Seymour-Jones attempts, over-zealously, to redress the balance of sanity in Vivienne's favour, which I suppose we should give her some brief credit for though her efforts to do so appear to me as an illogical over-spending of false empathy. Basically, relying on Mary Trevellyan's account of her time with Eliot as his good 'friend,' with all the amorphous connotations that that word possesses, Seymour-Jones interprets what were clearly Eliot's auditory hypnogogia of 'voices' as 'auditory hallucinations,' effectively suggesting that Eliot was bordering on psychosis. Yes, the hypnogogia frightened Eliot, and yes, his anxiety concerning them is apparent in his essays and poems. The vital point, though, is that they occurred on the brink of sleep, as hynogogical phenomena do, not while he was taking his tea. So much for Seymour-Jones the clinician.
Overall, Seymour-Jones has re-worked Lyndall Gordon's marvellous biography of Eliot to bad effect. What original scholarship there is is misappropriated in the interests of selling books. The reader who is not an Eliot scholar will be left with the impression that Vivenne Eliot was a poor thing who took a good photograph, and that there was a hell of a lot more to T.S. Eliot than Cats lets on, both of which are true, but not, perhaps, worthy of five-hundred and eighty pages weakly masquerading as self-righteous feminism.
Reviewed by Amanda Jeremin Harris
