TS Eliot

London, Nov. 1 (PTI): A collection of letters has debunked the myth that T.S. Eliot was a cruel husband and an anti-Semite.

Eliot, widely considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, had been lacerated by criticism of his cruelty throughout his later years.

Now, more than 40 years after his death, the letters have restored the personal reputation of the troubled writer, The Sunday Times, London, has reported.

The correspondence, mostly written by and to Eliot during the 1920s, shows that the American-born poet was often deeply concerned about the severe ill-health of his wife, Vivien a former Cambridge governess. The couple had married in 1915 when Eliot was 26.

He was so driven to despair by her undiagnosed and debilitating medical and mental problems that he railed at her doctors, calling one a charlatan and another a “German brute”. He even wrote: “I have tried to kill myself.”

In April 1924, Eliot wrote to his brother: “The last illness of V’s has been indescribable. She suffered more in spirit than ever before. I have not been able to leave her for three months.”

Eliot, who became a British subject in 1927, wrote to novelist and critic John Middleton Murry that his wife had been so ill that for three days she felt her mind had left her body.

He wrote of his own agony: “I have deliberately killed my senses — I’ve deliberately died — in order to go on with the outward form of living.”

The letters, to be published this week, have been complied with the help of Eliot’s second wife,Valerie.

The poet continued with his job as a clerk at Lloyds bank in London only to earn money for his sick wife. At the same time he was also exhausting himself by writing poems and editing The Criterion, a literary magazine.

Many of the letters show his concern for his wife. In April 1923, he wrote to Murry: “Vivien was very ill indeed — in fact for hours at the point of death. It is the worst time she has ever had — she just escaped by indomitable luck.”

The correspondence also reveals that Eliot had a number of close Jewish friends, which might dismiss the argument that he was anti-Semitic. One friend was Horace Kallen, an American academic. Their correspondence shows that Eliot helped European Jewish refugees reach America during the Second World War.