Driven to distraction — the unhappy life of Vivien Eliot

Do you think your mother slept with T.S. Eliot? That was the question I needed to ask the 98-year-old in front of me. It wasn’t easy. I’d never met him before. After some preliminary chat, though, I realised this affable man knew exactly where our conversation was heading and had pondered the question a good deal himself.

The barrister Jeremy Hutchinson — Baron Hutchinson of Lullington — was the son of Mary Hutchinson, Eliot’s close friend. Infatuated with the poet for a time, she had met ‘Tom’ and his wife Vivien before Vivien’s adultery with Bertrand Russell, and some years before the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. When I spoke to Jeremy Hutchinson, he was the only person still alive who remembered the young, London-based American Eliot in the period before the publication of his most famous poem.

Hutchinson thought his mother had not slept with Eliot. Her memoir implies their relationship was full of ‘what ifs’. By the time Jeremy spoke to me, it was clear from Eliot’s published letters that the poet had committed adultery, but not evident with whom or when. Could it have been with Emily Hale, the woman he had fallen in love with in America before he left in 1914, and to whom he wrote more than 1,100 letters throughout six decades? Or was it with someone else?

In a sensationalising 2007 biography of Nancy Cunard, Lois Gordon suggested Eliot had an affair with the socialite Cunard, sometimes seen as the original of ‘the amorous Fresca’, a sybarite who features in The Waste Land’s manuscripts. Eliot is not just one of the greatest poets. He is also a great poet of love gone wrong. His work, which grew darker around the time of Vivien’s adultery, is powered by suppressed passion. So his love life is bound to be of interest.