You gave me hyacinths first a year ago
In January 2020, Princeton University Library unsealed a thousand letters from the American poet T.S. Eliot to Emily Hale, drama teacher, actress, and perhaps his greatest love. Kept confidential for more than fifty years, these letters show a man deeply devoted to both his art and his religion, a devotion he shared intimately with Hale, a woman whose talent, intelligence and kindness first caught Eliot’s attention in 1912. Emily Hale was a young student when she was introduced to Eliot by his cousin. Her beauty and charm delighted him; her acting talents were far beyond the minor amusements of a young person. Hale was serious about her art and Eliot saw in her a kindred seriousness for Permanent Things. In Hale’s letter to Princeton University Library, the place she would bequeath these letters, Hale writes that Eliot’s affections for her grew from their first meeting, and, if they were not at first reciprocated by her in her youth, she grew to share in this intense love, a love that would be immortalized in many of his poems. Most notably, the letters reveal that she is the “hyacinth girl,” the mysterious figure of Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Lyndall Gordon, Eliot scholar and literary biographer, analyzes this revelation in her work, The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse (2022). Gordon expertly works Eliot and Hale’s respective biographies into what proves to be integral insight on Eliot the man and the poet. Unlike other more critical, literary considerations of Eliot’s works, Gordon’s treatment of his humanity, in its flawed and concrete senses, gives fair rise to Hale as a woman strong enough to hold her own against this complicated man. Eliot wrote to Hale in a multifaceted way; she was his muse, yes, but Gordon also analyzes the confessional tone of Eliot’s letters, how he used them as a way to express the ineffable parts of himself. Hale was his truest confidante, the one with whom he could share his fears, anxieties and desires. Eliot’s work reflects his complexity, and his letters to Hale, at times, reveal a man insecure in his ability to integrate his desires with his own self-perception.
The Hyacinth Girl gives Hale the voice she sealed up out of loyalty to Eliot. Gordon highlights Hale’s personal and professional fortitude, her intelligence and patience. Hale’s bright eyes and beautiful features, qualities that would not dim with age, distinguished her in both large audiences and intimate crowds. Her confidence and erudite study of drama, talents that came with much scholarship but also a seemingly inherent nature to excel, brought Hale to women’s colleges and girls preparatory schools in Massachusetts and California. And while she was teaching, Hale was responding to the letters of the foremost poet of the modern age. She ameliorated his fears, weathered his harsh comments, accepted his poetic advances, and reminded him that she was not an ethereal muse, but a real individual with hopes and desires.
T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale in Dorset, Vermont, summer 1946
These hopes and desires, however, would not be actualized. Working through the Eliot-Hale chronology, Gordon writes, with deep respect, of the great disappointment; after years of Eliot’s promises that Hale was his most profound love, Eliot married his second wife, Valerie Fletcher, in a small ceremony. Hale heard about this in a short letter. Ever gracious, Hale moved on from Eliot’s promises, and considered how fortunate she was to have lived such a great friendship.
This should prompt some uncomfortable reflections for the reader, whether a fan of Eliot or casual acquaintance. And Gordon, in her erudite and talented style, does not provoke the reader to one opinion or another. She presents readers with this story and encourages us to engage in serious analysis. Gordon is not exposing Eliot’s personal life for some thin-paged tabloid, but asks a fundamental question of literary criticism: what part does the author’s life have in his art? And if this woman, Emily Hale, had as much significance in Eliot’s life as he himself said she did, what do we do?
Gordon, perhaps, has the simplest answer, given form in her book: we learn about who Emily Hale was, and accept the parts she played in Eliot’s oeuvre. There is no writing her out of him. Hale, was the means by which Eliot understood himself, worked through his more difficult emotions, and created works the likes of which are impossible to replicate. But she was also silenced and restrained by Eliot’s intense scruples, his staunch traditional stances, and more private emotional, physical and psychological struggles. She was his muse. At times, she was his nurse. But she would never be his wife. Given the intense nature of a correspondence that was more passionate than fraternal, this difficult reality is one the reader will carry past the last page. Emily Hale is, indeed, “the hyacinth girl” -
‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.1
She is perceived but unable to be grasped, accepts more than she receives, and is left in the garden to a vision of what could have been but never was.
Art has its depth in tragedy. Emily Hale was a tragic heroine, gracious in her love for a man who, for whatever reasons, would not consummate their relationship beyond the page. Lyndall Gordon does not exploit this relationship. This book is not written to discredit Eliot. The Hyacinth Girl is a powerful, important account of one of the most complex and intimate partnerships of the twentieth century.
