Theatre
Ill-defined
Christopher Edwards
Tom and Viv (Royal Court) How difficult to meet Mr Eliot might 'have been the subtitle to Michael Hastings's hit play and sometime succes de scandal which has now returned to the Royal Court. The introduction to the Penguin edition of Tom and Viv recounts Michael Hastings's difficulty in obtaining any cooperation from a closed literary establishment, reticent and intensely pro- tective about the dignity and standing of our century's greatest poet. The following remarks set the tone of Hastings's in- quiries; he has just explained to a figure, well placed to assist, that he wishes to write a play about Eliot's marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood: 'What a perfectly filthy idea . . . . What are you? A jerk, a twister, a scandalmaker? . . . Where were you edu- cated?' This is the stuff of those mythical letters to the Daily Telegraph from the prolific pens of disgusted Tonbridge Col- onels, but in fact the remark is attributed to a director of Faber & Faber. L.C. Knights is quoted from a letter to the TLS: 'prurient delight . . . abounding gutter', and Sir Stephen Spender is said to have remarked: 'This play is implausible, un- pleasant, and of absolutely no substance'. Sir Stephen's blimpishness is suitably qual- ified by his apparent refusal either to see or read the play. While one may wonder at the strength of Sir Stephen's rebuttal I would say he was following a reasonable instinct of fastidiousness. Indeed, I think most lovers of Eliot's poetry harbour, if not a fastidious Knight, then certainly a Tonbridge Colonel somewhere in their hearts. More accurately it could be called a protective instinct about Eliot's private life based partly upon a reluctance to see him trivialised, partly upon feelings of delicacy — to the quick as much as to the dead.
At the same time, however, what harm can be done? There is the poetry, and we still await a definitive biography based upon all the available primary material. Speculative critical fictions on the stage can, it is true, create a lasting impression of a historical personality but, if it needs to be, the record will be set straight by some scholar quite soon.
Only then, perhaps, will a full account of Eliot's sexuality be available, and those most interested will then be able to see how much it matters to an understanding of the poetry. I doubt, in the meantime, whether Tom and Viv has done much harm to anyone's understanding of Eliot.
The focus of the piece is the anguish at the heart of a marriage whose collapse led to two events: the poem called 'The Waste Land', and the incarceration in an institu- tion of Vivienne Eliot at the instance of her husband and her family. For all his huffing and puffing about being denied access to archival material, Michael Hastings seems to have obtained the information he re- quired from Vivienne's brother Maurice just before he died. In the end this in- formation is used both to indict Eliot — 'What Tom and I did was wrong. And mother. I did everything Tom told me to . . — and to support Edith Sitwell's remark that when Eliot went mad he promptly certified his wife. Incidentally, Maurice emerges from the interview as a very engaging, bluff military gentleman who made a hash of a career in finance: 'I'm quite interesting too. After all, I'm the only broker known to history who lost half his fortune investing in Slater Walker in the middle of the property boom . . • • Hastings brilliantly recreates this character in the play to express a sort of Edwardian .obtuseness and hypocrisy and turns him into a successfully comic persona worthy of a place in the 'Dear Bill' page of Private Eye.
The play is in seven parts covering the years 1915 to 1947. The narrative is han- dled by a mixture of brief scenes linked, from time to time, by a straightforward historical account from one of the charac- ters. We meet Tom (Edward Herrmann) and Viv (Julie Covington) just before their elopement at a the dansant in Oxford. Herrmann comes across as cold and prissily gauche: 'I find it an enormous effort to be trivial', Covington as brittle, gay and clev- er. She also transmits a love of life partially dampened by her own neurosis as well as by Herrmann's frigid and spinsterish mien: Make an absolute arse of yourself . • • • Oh, Tom! Plunge! Just plunge!' Instead of plunging Herrmann brings out Tom's dis- gust at matters physical. At the same time as plotting their physical apartness Hast- ings successfully creates a sense of Tora's own dependence upon Viv's neurotic ener- gy which she reasonably sums up as: Toot Tom, life lingers for him. So I make hial race on past it with me, together.' These two key performances are beautifully ba- lanced and deserve all the considerable praise they have received. The play itself struck me as uneven. The dialogue is well spiced with mordant wit' cisms from Viv that take on a desperate, edge as she senses her reason being pushea to breaking point by Tom and her familY• At these points the writing is concentrated and there are moments of emotional pony' er. But I found crass the interlacing ef quotation from the poems into the dia- logue, for instance Tom's response when, Viv delivers a very personal exposition 0' his poem: 'That's not what I meant at O. Hastings appears more at ease with his characters when they behave as creatures of fragmentation. The scene where he tries to show a moment of fruitful communion with Viv contributing to the poetry, is awfully heavy. We see them seated on piles of books, he dictating recent lines to her, she commenting and amending. There was a forced mateyness here, and a touch of the hackneyed as Tom shyly offers a scribbled phrase to her, written down on the inside of a cigarette packet. I never had a particularly strong impression of Eliot the man, save for a glimpse given through some of Pound and Wyndam Lewis's an? dotes. After seeing Tom and Viv nothing much has changed. What we are given is a portrait of a marriage containing some moments of inventive power, and sonic moments of trite reconstruction where you might encounter a possible T. S. Eliot.
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