Valerie Eliot, who died this week, devoted her life to guarding her husband's legacy. Did she do more harm than good? By Aida Edemariam
IIn her subtle and authoritative 1998 book The Imperfect Life of TS Eliot, Lyndall Gordon argues that the poet's second marriage, entered into when he was 67 years old, was a symbolically as well as personally satisfying final chapter: "For him, paradise followed purgatory with the same logic that purgatory had followed the hell of his first marriage." Valerie Eliot, who died this week, put it more earthily – if, on closer reading, slightly disturbingly: "He obviously needed to have a happy marriage. He wouldn't die until he'd had it. There was a little boy in him that had never been released." Ever since the age of 14, when she heard John Gielgud's recording of "Journey of the Magi", her life was geared towards meeting Eliot; she was 38 when he died, eight years after they married, and she spent nearly 50 years guarding, burnishing and managing his memory.
This was, necessarily, both a privileged and a sometimes complicated and uncomfortable position to occupy. Eliot wanted nothing to do with a biography, so Valerie never authorised one. The Eliot estate charged for anything more than "fair use", which often meant no more than five or six lines of the poetry. Peter Ackroyd, in his 1984 biography, was forced to resort to paraphrase (and then to endure reviewers cavilling at the quality of his rewordings). Gordon was under the same strictures, though, she says now, "the truth is, I hardly paraphrased – I hardly changed things." But Valerie – according to former Faber managing director and chairman Matthew Evans, who supported the deal – was so "bowled over" by a private performance of the songs for Cats that she also gave entire poems to Andrew Lloyd Webber. Cats took £1.4bn in world-wide box office, £130m in London alone, a good proportion of which went to Valerie and the Eliot estate and then to various prizes and charities. It also made Faber's financial position much more secure. Initially, Eliot wanted no correspondence published at all, but she "appreciated its importance and fascination" and teased him into compliance of a sort: letters could only be published if she did the selecting and the editing. She spent years editing the first volume, tracking down letter after letter, citation after citation; the second volume took 11 years to appear; alongside a revised first volume, which by this time had acquired a co-editor, Hugh Haughton. The third volume appeared this July, and covers one year, 1926-27. Eliot died in 1965; many of the intervening 38 years of letters – the boxes and boxes that were in her private possession, for instance – will probably not be properly accessible for years.
When Valerie Fletcher finally achieved her dream – announced to her headmistress when she left public school – of becoming Eliot's secretary, she hid her love so successfully that Eliot wasn't even sure she liked him. Things changed only when a mutual friend asked them both to visit her in Italy; Eliot wrote back to say "I can't: I'm in love with her." So, as Valerie later put it, the friend wrote back and said: "Get on with it." As Robert McCrum wrote some years ago, when she showed him their personal scrapbooks, Eliot planned their wedding meticulously, and in total secrecy: only her parents and the priest, who doubled as best man, were present at the 7:15am ceremony, which was followed by a wedding breakfast and a flight to the south of France. "I have so much to tell you on Monday so prepare to do no work!" wrote Valerie to her colleagues in the typing pool at Faber. "A Daily Express photographer caught us in the lounge this evening and a Daily Mail man pursued us to Roquebrune! A lovely honeymoon apart from TSE catching flu, and cracking a tooth." They quickly settled into happy domesticity. "We used to stay at home and drink Drambuie and eat cheese and play Scrabble," Valerie once said. "He loved to win at cards, and I always made a point of losing by the time we went to bed." Every Sunday night he left a love letter by her bed; "I have kept every one and would want them to be published after I die."
Evans, who arrived at Faber the year before Eliot died, and left in 2002, says that she was "incredibly supportive and kind, a very loyal and good shareholder". Stephen Page is the current publisher and chief executive (both men stress that her death changes nothing at Faber, financially). He remembers meetings at her flat where, an Epstein bust of Eliot peering over her shoulder, she served tea and "nice biscuits", and they discussed a trolley-full of new books set carefully between them. Little had been changed in the flat since Eliot's death. "It was extraordinary working on the correspondence," Haughton says. "One could be sitting at Eliot's desk, with his crucifix on the wall, his books around you, his editions of Aristotle or of Indian texts. Almost all of them would be signed to Valerie with love – he had really wanted to have his love for her recognised, all over the place. There was an extraordinary sense of him handing everything on to her. There are albums of their early married life – every concert, every meal, every journey – archived with little comments about what he thought. He was certainly absolutely religiously dedicated to commemorating their shared life."
Within six years of his death she had edited and published the facsimile and manuscripts of The Waste Land, a feat of deciphering handwriting and collating manuscripts still considered standard. Her second editorial feat, says Gordon, was the first volume of the letters. "I was publishing Eliot's New Life [the second volume of her biography, now joined to the first in The Imperfect Life] and I was very clued up about the details and the letters and I must say it was totally accurate. It was very impressive." But then it was followed by an increasingly frustrating silence. "The charitable view of Mrs Eliot," says Gordon, "was that she was always afraid that more material would turn up."
In the last few years of her life Valerie finally opened the way for a series of projects: the Complete Prose of TS Eliot online, fully annotated under the general editorship of Ronald Schuchard (there proved to be too much of it to print), will be published jointly by Faber and Johns Hopkins University Press this coming spring; the Collected Prose, edited by Archie Burnett (but without annotations), is to be published in six print volumes in 2014, as is The Complete Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. A collected and annotated edition of the plays by John Haffenden is due for delivery in 2014; he is also overseeing the publication of the letters.
"I think that the dedication to the collecting and publication of the letters will be the most important and greatly positive thing she did," Haughton says. He believes that even after Eliot died, Valerie did what she had always done; at some profound level, she "continued, as it were, to take dictation". "But as keeper of the flame and shielding Eliot from the attention of biographers – that will be the question mark over her legacy. Her refusal to countenance biography has I think been very unhelpful."
"Inevitably, there was some harm done to his reputation in the absence of access and permission, but it won't be lasting harm," Schuchard believes. "On balance I think she took the right, hard course over the long haul. Eliot's work will stand for itself; he needs no apologists." Having said that, "The new editions of his letters, poetry, prose and drama will dramatically change the way we see him."
And she brought something to the books she edited that very few others could. "She loved poetry, and she loved Eliot's work," Gordon says. "She saw that there was a simplicity to Eliot in spite of the apparent difficulty. She saw him in the best light, and he probably was at his best with her. I think she honestly saw the very good side of him and that was her good fortune."
