"Glowed into words": Vivien Eliot, Philomela, and the Poet's Tortured Corpse

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Shannon McRae

If, as the note provided by Valerie (itself a retrospective interpretation) suggests, Eliot regarded The Waste Land as essentially the problematic literary offspring of his deeply unhappy union with Vivien, then his masterpiece is born as much out of her suffering as his. To read the poem as strictly biographical, however, as merely the chronicle of a failed marriage, and all of the subsequent layers of editing and reformulation as Eliot's guilt-driven burial of the textual evidence of that failure, is overly reductive. In The Waste Land as in much of Eliot's early poetry, the everyday and mythic realms thoroughly infuse each other; the poem results from the poet's painstaking attempt to maintain his reason in the face of forces that threaten to shatter it. Vivien's importance to the poem, therefore, lies in this same fusion of biography and myth. If the Grail legend forms the mythic core of Eliot's poem, and his marriage to Vivien a significant part of its emotional scaffolding, how exactly do the very real miseries of their marriage become mythic, and in what ways might exploring that interaction offer a relevant interpretation? The specifics of the Eliot marriage remain unknown and unknowable. Over-rehearsing them is an interpretive dead end. But if we cannot, in the long run, fully read the marriage, we can certainly more carefully read the myths, and thereby trace the resonances between literature and life, that charged space from which the poem is made.

Although the Grail legends vary, and no definitive version exists, all concern a Christian knight--Gawain, Percival, or Galahad--who finds himself in a mysterious, hidden castle. In the castle, the knight has a vision of a grail, a spear, and a beautiful woman. In some versions he gains information about a king who is debilitated by a wound in his thigh. This king, known as the Fisher King, is impotent, and for that reason his land is barren.

The various Celtic and medieval European legends from which the Grail legend is derived are similar in kind both to the classical myths of the dying god and to the Mystery traditions described by writers such as Ovid, so many turn-of-the-century scholars such as James Frazer, whose work inspired Weston, conflated them. In the dying-god myths the young hero kills the old king, mates with the goddess to restore fertility, and thus earns his kingship. But Frazer found a crucial source for his theories in the Irish historical kingship tales that form precursors to the Grail legend, many of which had just been translated when he was doing his research. In these Celtic precursors, the king attains his right to rule only after the sovereignty goddess accepts him as her lover. Usually in these tales, his most significant trial is facing the goddess at her most hideous. He resolves it by offering to sleep with her, whereupon she rewards him by transforming into a beautiful woman. Her transformation signals his attainment of kingship. Because the goddess is also the land, the land could only prosper if their mating is fruitful. If the king is impotent, the land likewise becomes sterile. (2)