| Chapter 1: | Eliot and Shelley: Influence, Renunciation, and Accommodation |
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As prestigious as the Norton appointment was, Eliot had strong personal reasons for accepting the invitation from his alma mater, for he planned to use the year as a period of separation from Vivienne that would open the way for divorce proceedings to follow. The mental and physical health of his wife had been deteriorating steadily since their marriage, but by the early 1930s the situation was reaching a crisis, with Vivienne moving from one sanatorium to the next with no sign of improvement. The resultant strain on Eliot was immense, and he found poetic composition impossible at this time, taking refuge in bouts of increasingly heavy drinking. “They say Eliot is always drunk these days…” confided Anthony Powell to his diary around this time. (Cited in Ackroyd 168) The death of his mother in September 1929 had prompted a deepening of this crisis, as he felt that in choosing the precarious existence of writing poetry over the relative safety of an academic career, and marrying without her consent or even consulting her, he had gone against everything she had personified. With her death had gone any chance of his being able to atone for failing to live up to her expectations.
In addition to the turmoil of Eliot’s marital crisis, his sense of identity was further complicated around this time by issues of nationality. In becoming a British citizen in November 1927, he had publicly affirmed that he felt he belonged more to his adopted home than his natural one, although a marked ‘American’ element arguably remained at the core of his work.4