TOM AND VIV
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
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But while Viv was acting the muse she was suffering from an ineptly treated hormonal imbalance; ignorant society doctors (like Sir Frederick Treves, discoverer of the “Elephant Man”) prescribed various starvation diets and mutually potentiating, addictive drugs loaded down with morphine and alcohol.
During drug-induced mood swings Viv set fire to hotel curtains, hurled herself onto the steering wheel of a moving car, poured chocolate into a publisher’s letter box (ruining valuable manuscripts), and picketed Eliot’s lectures carrying a placard proclaiming “I am the wife he deserted.” She was rumored to change her bed linen twice a day and carry a knife in her handbag (it was only a toy). Worse, at one point she even I tried to deny she was Eliot’s wife.
By process of elimination we’re left to feel for lonely Viv. Hastings paints her as intense and excitable–and throughout 32 years awesomely faithful to the man whose career she helped secure, the same one who put her away (while Tom is never for one moment shown defending his wife). She’s certainly the only character who shows passion, even in understatement–“Tom and I aren’t very good at being alone together.”
If half of what’s decorously implied in Tom and Viv is true, you don’t need to read T.S. Eliot’s verse to find the waste. It was those 14 years Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot spent in the booby hatch.
