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The Braselton News
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Opinion
Book on Nobel Prize winning
poet reveals influences
of nearly 30-year love affair
david r.
altman
You don’t have to be a fan of the poet T.S. Eliot to
read an extraordinary book about the woman he loved
most of his life, though she was not one of two wom
en he would marry.
The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse, the
latest work from Eliot historian Lyndall Gordon,
portrays one of the greatest (and least known) love
stories in modern literature.
Many of us know some of Eliot’s
poetry, including such well-known
classics as “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock” and, what many
consider the greatest poem writ
ten in the 20th century. The Waste
Land.
However, in The Hyacinth Girl,
Lyndall Gordon successfully reveals
that the true inspiration for Eliot’s
love was neither of his two mar
riages, but an affair of the heart that
lasted more than 30 years.
Born in St. Louis to a wealthy family whose roots
were back in Boston, his mother, Charlotte, gave birth
to Thomas Sterns Eliot, the youngest of her children,
when she was 45.
After attending prep school in Boston, Eliot went
on to earn degrees at Harvard in literature and philos
ophy.
After World War I, he had relocated to London,
where he found a welcoming literary community and
where he would meet the great poet and editor Ezra
Pound, who also not only nurtured Eliot, but a number
of other famous writers, including Hemingway, Joyce
and Fitzgerald.
Eliot surprised the literary world by announcing in
1915 that he had married a young woman whom he
had dated for only a few months, a British governess
named Vivienne Haigh-Wood. According to an article
in The New Yorker, “...Eliot was twenty-six, almost
certainly, a frustrated virgin” when they married.
However, the marriage was doomed from the start
(not just with sexual incompatibility), as both suffered
from depression, and eventually the two separated,
with Eliot visiting a psychiatric hospital in Switzer
land (where he would write much of The Waste Land)
and his wife Vivienne was institutionalized in London
by her family for the remainder of her life. Eliot never
visited his wife during her 12 years in the asylum.
In The Hyacinth Girl, the author details the difficul
ty both endured. However, it was not Vivienne Haigh-
Wood Eliot that author Lyndall Gordon introduces to
us as Eliot’s ‘Hidden Muse". It was Emily Hale—his
first love from his undergraduate days at Harvard.
Only those who have studied Eliot’s life would
probably know about Emily Hale, the theater major
that Eliot met at Harvard and who was a driving influ
ence in his writing. Their love—at first unrequited by
Hale—grew in a most unusual way.
The T.S. Eliot-Emily Hale love affair was largely
manifested through an exchange of more than 1,100
deeply personal letters over a 27-year-period. These
letters were eventually made public some fifty years
after the death of Hale. Her decision to make the let
ters public had been reluctantly agreed to by Eliot—
although Hale’s letters back to Eliot were destroyed
by the poet, so literary history invites us into only one
side of their exhaustive, historic long-distance affair.
As we find in this book by Lyndall Gordon, El
iot’s letters revealed “... a relationship at the core of
Eliot’s creativity, spanning his life from the age of
twenty-four to his late sixties.”
These letters, highlighted artfully in Gordon’s
book, were often quite explicit, but all expressed his
undying love for Hale, including this quote partly
paraphrased by Gordon from one of the letters sent by
Eliot back to the U.S.: “... you have all my love and
devotion always”, that he was longing to stroke her
“radiantly beautiful” forehead and that he would be
“extremely jealous” of any other man who “cared for
you as I have”.
Later. Eliot would write to Hale, “I should make
you know how one man’s life and work has been
formed about you.”
References to his love and feelings toward Hale
would come up in much of his poetry, including, most
famously, in the opening to The Waste Land, where
he gave voice to Hale (one of many ‘voices’ in that
poem) without naming her:
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago/They called
me the hyacinth girl.”
Then Eliot, in his ‘voice’, continues. “Yet when we
came back. late, from the Hyacinth garden/Yours 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.”
Those lines were from an actual meeting the two
had on Eliot’s 47th birthday in East Coker, a small,
rural village where Eliot had traced his ancestors.
‘East Coker’, the title of the second of the poet’s Four
Quartets, one of Eliot’s greatest poems, was where
they had walked in a beautiful garden enjoying the
hyacinths. Eliot’s ashes were interred in East Coker
on Easter Sunday 1965.
The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse,
surges with romantic energy, reflecting the complex
ity and range of emotions that were present in Eliot’s
verse.
Whether you enjoy poetry or not, you will find
an unforgettable love story in these pages that will
make you think about your own romances, past and
present, and how they might have influenced your
decisions and, perhaps, determined your fate.
David R. Altman lives in Hoschton with his wife,
Lisa. His second poetry chapbook, “Cold Remem
bered” (Finishing Line Press, 2023), can be pur
chased on line or at The Inside Story Bookstore
and Cafe in Hoschton. Altman is a former Georgia
Author of the Year nominee.
About cotton
In the last fortnight, I rode by a farm in South
Georgia where cotton was making its way toward har
vest—it takes 200 days for cotton to mature into the
fluffy white stuff which is most valuable to growers.
This brought about down-on-the-farm nostalgia,
good and bad, but was also a reminder of how import
ant this cash crop has been to farmers and agribusi
nessmen historically in the South.
Georgia ranks third nationally
among the cotton producing states
in acres planted and also production.
Cotton has always held sway in eco
nomic impact in our state.
Two things make cotton farming
today different than in yesteryear:
Most significantly, the eradication of
the boll weevil and the prevalence of
mechanical cotton-picking machines.
Picking cotton was back breaking
work yesteryear, but the profit from
cotton was so significant that doctors
and lawyers, for example, plied their
respective trade in town but owned cotton producing
land out in the county.
In 1785, many Georgians imported Sea Island
cotton from the West Indies. Sea Island cotton had a
long, strong fiber and was much in demand, but when
Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in Savannah in
1793, that brought about an opportunity for the short
er staple varieties of cotton to flourish. Unfortunately,
that brought about the demand for cheap labor, hence
slavery. Originally Georgia was not a slave state, but
Whitney’s invention changed that.
Cotton’s annual value to our state’s economy is
$1.5 billion. It remains a boon to big time farming.
My daddy rented his farm of 300 acres and depended
on a good cotton crop to pay bills, buy a little some
thing special for the family. Nothing he admired more
than to survey his field of robust cotton blooming
and maturing for harvest. He would walk out into the
gleaming rows of cotton, smile and whisper a prayer
of thanks as he bowed his head in reverence.
He worked long hours to make ends meet, maintain
ing faith that there would always be a productive har
vest. He prayed for rain when it was dry. He prayed
for enough good days in late summer and early fall
that would enable him to get the cotton picked before
and the state
a hurricane came up from Florida and rained on the
harvest.
He prayed that his crop dusting would kill the boll
weevil, the bane of cotton farmers since the pest came
up from Mexico in the early 1900’s. He never worried
about having a problem with toxic insecticides. He
didn’t smoke and he was an advocate of clean living.
Most of all, he had to provide for his family, and he
felt the risk was worth it. His instincts were correct in
that he lived to the ripe old age of 92.
A philosophical advocate of the Golden Rule, he
did hold unrelenting contempt for the dastardly boll
weevil, which he castigated for its cowardly ways, ru
ining a cotton crop like a thief in the night. When Tex
Ritter sang the “Boll Weevil” song, depicting the boll
weevil looking for a home, my father was not amused.
The lyrics were clever, but prophetic. When the boll
weevil found a home, it meant that there was nothing
left to get out of debt in November.
There have been several songs written about cotton,
in addition to the “Boll Weevil” song. It was Huddie
William Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, who
wrote the lyrics to “The Cotton Song” in 1940.
It was later recorded by Harry Belafonte. who died
recently, and Johnny Cash among others.
It was a mournful tune that again testified to the
wrath of the boll weevil. “When them cotton balls
get rotten, you couldn’t pick very much cotton,” Lead
Belly wrote. It was the boll weevil which made the
cotton rotten.
The community of Enterprise, Alabama, used
the boll weevil to turn a lemon into lemonade. An
enterprising farmer talked his neighbors into planting
peanuts instead of cotton. It worked. He made peanuts
his main cash crop.
Cotton is a survivor, however. It has been around
for over 8,000 years. Its multiple uses are all about us
every day—from clothing, underwear, bed sheets and
towels. Also woven fabrics such as canvas and denim.
Then there is cottonseed oil which you find in salad
dressing and margarine: soap, candles and cometic
products such as makeup.
We have whipped the unprintable boll weevil and
nobody has a backache from stooping over in the hot
sun. Hallelujah!
Loran Smith is a longtime UGA football radio per
sonality and syndicated columnist.
loran
smith
The High
Cost of Crisco
From the car, I toted in bags of heavy groceries. I
have become my mama.
Mama mostly bought staples: five-pound sacks of
flour and cornmeal as well as gallon jugs of sweet
milk and buttermilk.
Whenever I took her grocery shopping, she would
pop outta the car and sashay toward the screen door,
saying, “Ronda. bring in my groceries.”
I’d bring them in, all the while complaining, “You
buy the heaviest groceries.”
The other day, I went shopping
for items I believe a Southern cook
should always have in her pantry:
flour, cornmeal, Crisco (solid and
oil), and buttermilk.
“We need to keep beans, rice,
cornmeal. and flour in the freezer.”
I say to Tink. “Then, no matter
what comes, we can survive.”
Only someone raised in family
who almost starved to death during
the Civil War and the years after,
and then again during Hoover
Days as they called them, known
otherwise as the Great Depression,
would think this way. Mama and
Daddy were always mindful to keep food on hand
should hard times come again.
We had a summer garden, laying chickens, raised
our own beef and pork and, in the early years of my
life, we had a cow for milk and butter. Some of my
earliest memories are of Mama picking up a tin pail
and saying, “I’m goin’ to milk the cow.”
Mountain wisdom always maintained that a hun
dred quarts of “put up” vegetables and soup (canned
in a canner) would see a family through the hardest
winters.
We even had a sausage machine. Aunt Kathleen and
Uncle Delbert would come over to help. They’d lay
out choice cuts of pork from a hog that Daddy had
recently downed, with one perfect shot, and they’d go
to work.
Have you ever heard the saying, “Don’t watch sau
sage being made?” To me, that isn’t true. I watched it
until I was grown and gone. It was good meat put into
the top of a huge, cumbersome grinder, then churned
out into a beautiful spiral to be made into sausage
patties or one-pound packages.
The other day, while I was choosing flour and
Crisco, a local preacher came down the aisle, pushing
his buggy. I said, “We need stop right here and have
a prayer service in this grocery aisle. How are people
affording this?”
“Don’t go over to the eggs,” he cautioned.
Now at home, I was unpacking the few groceries
when Tink came into the kitchen. I held up a can of
Crisco, necessary for biscuit making.
“Do you know how much Crisco costs now?”
“No idea.” Not a startling answer.
“Nine dollars!”
Tink mused over it for a second before replying,
“When I was growing up, we NEVER had a can of
Crisco. I never saw it in a kitchen until I moved here.”
I shook my head. “I don’t believe I’d tell that if I
were you.”
Tink’s mother was admirable in many ways. Her
faith was steadfast. We have her worn-out Bible with
numerous underlining and copious notes. The pages
are falling out. She was solid. Strong.
But she wasn’t much of a cook. She fed the family
mostly from store bought cans. To this day, Tink, ow
ing to his mother’s cooking, believes that burnt toast is
delicious.
“I thought about buying lard. It makes the best
biscuits.” Tink shuddered. “But it was $12. We use to
make lard when we killed a hog.”
There is something else Mama used to do which I,
in turn, do but I’m going to be more dedicated. She
saved all her bacon grease. She kept it in a container
on the stove. Then, using it to fry potatoes, she’d drop
a dollop into a pot of green beans and such.
I have a beautiful, colorful ceramic-lidded dish from
Italy. I keep the bacon grease in that, in the fridge.
I’ll be using it more. It’s free grease.
Ronda Rich is a best-selling author. Visit www.rond-
arich.com to sign up for her free weekly newsletter.
ronda
rich
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