The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, with Sara Fitzgerald (episode 319)

Transcript

Jake:
[0:05] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.

Introduction to Emily Hale

Jake:
[0:15] This is episode 319, The Silenced Muse, Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, with Sara Fitzgerald. Hi, I’m Jake. In just a few moments, I’m going to be joined by Sara Fitzgerald, who’s the author of the first book-length biography of Emily Hale, the longtime love and secret creative muse of poet T.S. Eliot. Eliot wrote Emily Hale over 1,100 letters through the course of the decades of their complicated relationship, but their letters were locked away for 50 years after their deaths. By the time those letters were opened in January 2020, few scholars understood the depth of that relationship. This book reestablishes Hale as not only a major influence on T.S. Eliot’s body of work, but also as her own woman. From Hale’s upbringing in Chestnut Hill to their first flirtation in a Harvard Square parlor, Fitzgerald traces the intertwining lives of Hale and Eliot over a half-century, revolving around the intellectual center of gravity that is Boston.

Jake:
[1:26] Before we bring in Sara Fitzgerald, I just want to plug a couple of other projects. I recently joined Lee Stabert on her excellent podcast, Explain Boston to Me. She invited me on the show to talk about landmaking in Boston, which is one of my favorite topics, and one that has not yet become an episode of Hub History. You can find a link to the podcast in the show notes this week, or just look for Explain Boston to Me in your favorite podcast player. I also want to mention the upcoming mega-awesome, super-huge, wicked-fun podcast playdate. If you have younger kids and you’re looking for a history podcast that’s a little more family-friendly than Hub History tends to be, check out the live taping of The Past and the Curious at noon on February 16th. Host Mick Sullivan is a really creative guy, and his performance will be history-focused and include some unusual figures, some laughs, And the whole thing will end with an original musical performance and a story about John Banvard, the man who painted the longest painting in the world in the mid-1800s. I’ll have a link to more information about that in the show notes as well.

Podcast Projects and Gratitude

Jake:
[2:41] Now, before we talk about Emily Hale and her relationship with T.S. Elliott, I just want to pause and say thank you to everyone who supports Hub History on Patreon. Thanks to our sponsors, I can focus on researching and writing about historical topics for the show, instead of worrying about how I’m going to pay for things like website hosting and security, podcast media hosting, AI tools, newspaper archives, and transcription fees. As I mentioned in a recent show, our sponsors also allowed me to subscribe to a modern digital audio workstation that lets me edit audio by editing the transcript like a document. That tool really came in handy this week because Sara and I ended up talking for well over two hours. So being able to quickly scan the transcript and cut some repetitive questions and rambling asides from the host really came in handy this week.

Jake:
[3:36] Listeners who commit to chipping in as little as $2 or as much as $20 or more per month provide the financial security that lets me experiment with audio tools like that. While one-time gifts on PayPal help offset the unexpected podcasting costs that crop up from time to time. To everyone who’s already supporting the show, thank you. If you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com slash hubhistory or visit hubhistory.com and click on the Support Us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

Meet Sara Fitzgerald

Jake:
[4:14] I’m joined now by Sara Fitzgerald. Sara’s a retired journalist, having written for the St. Petersburg Times, the Miami Herald, and the Akron Beacon Journal. She was at the Washington Post for 15 years, where she edited the very first online edition in 1980, long before Jeff Bezos ran that paper into the ground. She started writing poems and novels as a sideline while working as a journalist, and her first work of non-fiction was a biography of Ellie Peterson, one of the only women with a national political reputation in mid-20th century America. Just before T.S. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale were opened in January 2020, she published a book of historic fiction about the pair that was titled The Poet’s Girl. And her ongoing research in the archives resulted in this biography of Hale titled The Silenced Muse, Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime.

Jake:
[5:13] Before we start, I just want to note that I had some problems with my audio setup for this interview. Instead of making Sara wait through all my troubleshooting steps, I used a cheap USB headset to record my end of the conversation instead of my usual mic, so you might notice that I sound a little bit different. I had a moment of panic about 20 minutes into our conversation that I wasn’t recording myself at all, and so I started a backup on my phone. But that came out so rough that we should all be very glad that I had the headset on hand, and that it was in fact working. Otherwise, you’d hear me sound a little bit like this.

backup:
[5:51] Just a few months after you’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature, you was really cleaning up at that point.

Jake:
[5:59] Aren’t you glad you’re getting the real jake instead all right with no further introduction sara fitzgerald welcome to the show thanks.

T.S. Eliot’s Literary Legacy

Sara Fitzgerald:
[6:08] Very much jake.

Jake:
[6:08] I know that the focus of your new book the silenced muse is really about emily hale but a lot of the book is framed through her relationship with and her letters to and from T.S. Eliot. I basically only know T.S. Eliot through novelists who have used quotes from The Wasteland as epigraphs in their novels. So for listeners whose literary education is as woefully lacking as mine is, can you give us a brief introduction to T.S. Eliot before we jump into the life and letters of Emily Hale?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[6:42] T.S. Eliot is a Nobel Prize winning poet and playwright. He comes from a family that was long connected to the Boston area, even though he himself was born in St. Louis. He attended Milton Academy and then Harvard University. It was interesting to me as I started to research more about Emily Hale’s life and Elliot’s life to learn how much Boston thought of him as one of their own because of those connections, even though he left Boston as a young man and actually became a British citizen and had a long period of time before he came back to Boston and to his family. He was primarily noted for his poetry. Many people my age may remember reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in their high school English classes as sort of the quintessential poem of modernist poetry. He made a big splash internationally with the publication of the poem The Wasteland in 1922.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[7:53] And then he went on to write more poems. He became well-known as a critic. He worked for a book publishing company. He was a man of letters. And by the time he died, he was really an international celebrity. A lot of people, as you mentioned, know Eliot like you did in terms of phrases that come to mind from his poems that keep popping up in pop culture. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper is one, and there are others. But sometimes people are surprised to learn, oh, that’s a line of Eliot. I know it very well. I didn’t realize he was the one who wrote it. And so that’s some more background to put him in the context that you might be able to identify with him.

Jake:
[8:38] Well, I appreciate that. And I appreciate you filling in his connections to Boston because going through the book, it was clear that Boston embraced him as a transplanted Bostonian even for those few years.

Emily Hale’s Early Life

Jake:
[8:52] Will you give us a little background on Emily Hale’s early life before she really got acquainted with T.S. Eliot?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[8:58] Hale’s family was also very well connected to Boston. Her father had taught at Harvard Divinity School. He was one of the early pastors of the First Church of Chestnut Hill. She was actually born in East Orange, New Jersey. Her father was starting a Unitarian church there. He was big in the Unitarian denomination.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[9:22] Her great-aunt was the founder of the Boston Cooking School and was the highest-ranking woman in the Unitarian denomination late in her life. She held the job that was the highest job a woman could aspire to in Unitarianism. Her uncle was, for a time, the pastor of King’s Chapel, the mother church of Unitarianism. And so Hale moved back to Boston, or rather she moved to Boston for the first time when she was about five, and her father was called back to take over the Chestnut Hill Church and continue teaching at Harvard Divinity School. And she was educated at the Berkeley Street School in Cambridge.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[10:02] She came back to Boston as a young woman, lived with her father in Chestnut Hill. And in her early 20s, she was a very active amateur actress in Boston theaters, including the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club. She was in the Amateurs. She was in the Footlight Club, which is still a theater performing in the Boston area. And after her father died, she had to take a job, go to work for the first time, and she became a dorm matron at Simmons College, now Simmons University. She was there during the flu epidemic of 1918. It was a very interesting chapter of her life. And she came back to Boston later on in her career teaching school at Abbott Academy in Andover and at Concord Academy in Concord.

The Stunt Show Connection

Jake:
[10:53] In the book, you frame the beginning of Emily Hale’s relationship with T.S. Eliot around an event in February 1913 that’s described as a stunt show, which I want to get a little bit more information about what that means. But it sounds like they had actually met earlier, maybe even while Eliot was at Milton Academy. How well did they know each other as teenagers? Yeah.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[11:17] Well, it’s a little bit unclear because, of course, some of that is not recorded. We think that Elliot met Hale through his cousin, Eleanor Hinckley. When the Elliot family lived in St. Louis, they would come to Gloucester in the summertime and spend time with their Boston cousins. And the kids were young and close in age and playing together. And then Elliot returned to attend Milton Academy when he was a teenager getting ready to attend Harvard. And so it would make sense that he would visit his cousin and her family. And she was a school friend of Emily Hale’s, and they all lived close by at that time. Referring to the stunt show, Eleanor Hinckley, Elliot’s cousin, was also very interested in theater. She envisioned herself as a playwright, started writing plays. And back at that time in Boston, there were a lot of amateur theater companies that would perform to benefit various charities. I think it was a socially acceptable thing to do. And so Eleanor got the idea of organizing what she called a stunt show in her home. She recruited some of her friends, some Harvard men, including Elliot, because he was her cousin, to come perform.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[12:36] The skit that Hale and Elliot performed in was taken from Jane Austen’s book, Emma. Emily Hale also sang several songs on that occasion to break up the show.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[12:49] Hale, another interesting connection she had to Boston Society was that her uncle, Philip Hale, was Boston’s leading director. Theater and music critic at the time. And he wrote all the notes for the Boston Symphony concerts for the first half of the 20th century. So again, that was a great connection she had. It was interesting to learn a lot about the culture of Boston and society and all these people who circulated around the world of Harvard at that time and how many prominent people that were involved.

Early Relationship Dynamics

Sara Fitzgerald:
[13:25] One of the young men who performed in this same Emma skit was named Tracy Putnam. He went to Harvard Medical School, and he ended up, his claim to fame was being one of the key persons who helped discover the treatment for epilepsy. And so as you research these people, it was always fascinating to me to discover how prominent many of them became later in life.

Jake:
[13:53] At the time of this stunt show, I was trying to do some back-of-the-envelope math. I think Hale was 21 and Elliot was about 24 or so. Had he already graduated from Harvard at that point?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[14:06] He graduated from Harvard as an undergrad and he’d gone to Europe, took a break, and then came back and was pursuing a graduate degree in philosophy. At the point he left Boston in 1914, he was going over to Europe for what was to be a year’s sabbatical year of study at Oxford. And then the plan was he was going to come back and finish his doctorate. He actually arrived in Germany, was going for the summer to Marburg, Germany when World War I broke out. And so he had a little bit of challenge to get out of Germany and back to England at that point. And it was during that year in England when he actually, at the start, planned to come back to Boston that he met the poet Ezra Pound. He started making connections. Pound persuaded him that if he wanted to be a serious poet, he should really break with his American past, his Boston Unitarianism, and he should stay in England and get published.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[15:11] And part of that strategy was he met an English woman named Vivian Haywood and ended up marrying her very quickly. And it was shocking to his family because he hadn’t known her very long. They knew nothing about her. They had expected he was going to come back to Boston at the end of his year there. He came back the summer of 1915, and then he didn’t come back for another 17 years until he came back now as a celebrated poet to teach for a year at Harvard.

Jake:
[15:43] Now, at the time that he’s sort of making this transition, he’s already in correspondence with Emily Hale at that point, right? Are they already exchanging letters?

The Complexity of Love

Sara Fitzgerald:
[15:53] Zoe exchanged letters after he left in 1914. And what we know of the story is that when he left Boston to go off on that year’s sabbatical as a graduate student, he told her that he was in love with her, but he did not propose. He felt that he did not have a secure enough future as a philosophy professor. He felt you shouldn’t offer to marry someone unless you can fully support her.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[16:25] He later wrote that when he told her he loved her, she gave him no sign that she reciprocated it in any way. It sounded kind of cruel, like she put him down. What I really think happened was that Elliot was so shy and such an inept quarter that she didn’t realize he was in love with her. She later described it when he told her this, that she was surprised and embarrassed because she hadn’t known that he felt that way about her. But his friends told her, you’re the only girl that he cares about. And so she started to think, well, we’ll see what happens when he comes back from England. Maybe I could grow to love him. And he did write to her up until the time he got married. And she continued to perform in theaters around Boston. He would occasionally send her flowers for opening night and that sort of thing. What we know is somewhat limited in terms of which letters were actually saved. One of the challenges in approaching this whole story is that Elliot, over the course of their relationship, wrote her at least 1,131 letters between 1930 and 1957. We don’t have any of the letters that he wrote her before that, we know that there were some because he made reference to them.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[17:52] Hale, we know, wrote Elliot back, but he arranged for the bulk of her correspondence to be destroyed after he married for the second time. And so, we are forced to recreate their relationship, unfortunately, with only one side of the correspondence available.

Jake:
[18:12] You know, it’s funny you mention that Hale may not have even realized that he was courting her and that she didn’t then accept another offer. Because we’re led to believe that women during that period were just so desperate to marry as soon as possible because that was their only chance for stability and success.

Women’s Independence in the Era

Jake:
[18:30] But that’s not at all the case for Emily Hale. If you don’t mind, describe a little bit about what was happening in the sort of social circles that she moved in that made her self-assured enough to pursue her acting career, her other prospects, other than just marriage.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[18:48] One of the stereotypes, I think, is that women of that era were desperate to get married. Because when I started to research this, I realized that most of Emily Hale’s friends remained single for all of their lives. Eleanor Hinckley did. She lived at home with her mother, took over her house in Cambridge. There was another prominent friend who was also a friend of Elliot’s, Penelope Noyes. She grew up in Cambridge. She, too, stayed home with her father. This was an era of when well-educated women, many of them working in progressive causes, didn’t necessarily rush into marriage.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[19:29] Hale also had women she knew who had been active in the theater. In one case, a woman named Zona Gale, who was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama, who was from Wisconsin. And Hale later performed her play in Wisconsin with Gale in the audience. Gale did not get married until her 50s. And so we think that all these women are rushing out to get married when the reality was they weren’t. And one fascinating book I came across in the course of my research was Belita Tau’s Who’s Who of American Women, the 1914 edition. And in the introduction, the man who wrote the book said that I think as many as 30 to 40% of the women in the book were what he called maidens. They were single women. So a lot of women at the time were making their marks and not getting married. Another factor is in terms of higher education at the time, and I learned something about this because Emily Hale went on to teach speech and drama at several American colleges, was if you were teaching at a women’s college like Milwaukee Downer College in Milwaukee, which was a major women’s college in the Midwest. It has since merged with Lawrence University.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[20:52] If you got married and you were on that staff, you had to give up your teaching job. So, there was that aspect as well. Women who became teachers and professors were expected to remain single if they wanted to continue in those roles. And so, I think some of those women, you know, did make that decision.

Jake:
[21:10] It’s nothing like Emily Hale’s career, but my grandmother, she was a schoolteacher in rural Appalachia and had to hide her marriage from her bosses. And when they eventually found out, she was sent to a very remote posting that was seen as like a punitive posting for being married. And just about the same time that Emily Hale’s career was taking off.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[21:30] My mother was a few years, she’s younger than Emily Hale was, but I remember her talking about friends who went to nursing school hiding their marriages because if you were a working woman, you weren’t expected to be married. You’d have to give up your job.

Emily Hale’s Career Path

Sara Fitzgerald:
[21:45] So, there was a time in our history when that was certainly the case.

Jake:
[21:49] Emily Hale at first wasn’t – her first love wasn’t teaching. She came to an academic career through her acting. But she was an amateur actor here in Boston. How did she sort of parlay a very accomplished amateur thespian career into a job at Simmons College.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[22:08] Before she went to Simmons as a dorm matron, and I think it was tied to an anniversary related to Shakespeare, and there was a big emphasis on, in America, we’re all going to go out and do Shakespearean plays this year to celebrate it.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[22:24] And she knew a woman named Lucia Briggs, who was the daughter of the man who was then head of Radcliffe. Lucia Briggs taught at Simmons and knew Emily Hale slightly, I think, because their mothers had been friends in Cambridge. And the two women went over to Simmons and offered to try to start a drama club. And Simmons was still at that time a very new college for women. They were building up the extracurricular activities. And I think it was a combination of their volunteer work with Boston area theaters and seeing a need there. So the two of them went over, started directing plays at Simmons. And so Hale had that kind of connection into Simmons before she was hired as the dorm matron. And sort of once she got her foot in the door, they started recognizing her natural talents for directing plays. And she was able to parlay it into instructional work, in part because she would say, if you’re going to be trained to be a teacher, a sales clerk, a businesswoman, as Simmons was specializing on back then, you need to be able to speak properly. And so she evolved into a speech instructor.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[23:46] And then Lucia Briggs was recruited to become president of Milwaukee Downer College in Milwaukee. And based on her experience with Hale, She knew that Hale really had the spark of being a good director.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[24:03] And said, I’d like to bring her to teach speech and drama at Milwaukee Downer. And her predecessor expressed concern because Hale did not have a college degree. And it was one of the things that became a problem for her as her career went on and academic standards toughened. Colleges were being accredited. Their faculty needed to have those kinds of credentials.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[24:32] But Lucia Briggs said, I know this woman. I know she can really do it. She’s got good references from all the people that she worked with at Simmons, and I’m going to go ahead and hire. And she did. And so that was when Hale was first hired for a formal job teaching drama and speech at these women’s colleges. And one of the things I feel very fortunate about is at various times after Hale’s relationship with Elliot became known, reporters would get interested in her. And it was when her students were still alive, both first at Milwaukee Downer, later at Scripps College in California, and in my own case at Abbott Academy. And to go and interview women who were then in their late 70s or 80s who still remember this teacher and how important she was and how much encouragement she gave them. It said something about the impact she had as a teacher that all these different groups of students really admired her and talked about her and how she had inspired them in all facets of their schoolwork.

Impact of World Events

Jake:
[25:49] I was struck by the timing of her entry into Simmons. It sounded like she moved into the North Hall at Simmons within days of the influenza outbreak really being supercharged when it broke out a Commonwealth pier in Boston. And then she was also there during sort of the last year or two of sort of intense protest around the suffrage movement. Do you know how much exposure Emily Hale had to either of those sort of climactic worldwide events that were happening around Boston and the Simmons campus at that time?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[26:25] Just to recap, her father died in March, I think, and she realized she was going to have to sell the home that they owned in Chestnut Hill. I think the house was sold in August.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[26:39] She was hired, I think, in June. It was right after she had completed work on one of these plays. So again, she was well connected with Simmons. But you’re right, she started work. And it was fascinating to me to read the Boston Globes from those days and to follow how the epidemic unfolded in Boston. And I first wrote about Emily Hale for a novel that was published in 2020. And so in a fictional way, I described the arrival of the epidemic. There was actually a Simmons student who died. Students were housed in the infirmary. the Simmons nursing students left college and went to work in the Boston hospitals and was left to faculty members to stay with the students who weren’t going home and some of whom were becoming sick. And I think I’ve reasoned that Emily Hale volunteered for that duty because she had no other family in Boston, unlike people who might have children or spouses or whatever, but she was there and something she decided she wanted to do. And there were also stories about…

Sara Fitzgerald:
[27:55] The students who were stuck in the dorm putting on plays, you know, when the girls came back. And so I think she had a hand in that as well.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[28:04] Regarding the suffrage movement, that’s something that’s a little more puzzling to me there. I haven’t seen evidence in terms of at Simmons, but maybe I didn’t deeply enough, or maybe she was really too involved with her theater work. I did come across one play that she did that was for the benefit of the Massachusetts that’s anti-suffrage organization. And a lot of well-educated women were on both sides of that issue. And I don’t know whether she did it just because of the acting opportunity or whether she had any real affinity for that side. I do know that pretty quickly after women got the vote, she became involved with the League of Women Voters. And she was in a performance that was organized by the Massachusetts League of Women Voters and whatever was an organization that was backing the League of Nations at the time. And they did a reenactment of how the League of Nations had intervened in a border dispute in its early history. And Hale played the role of, I think, like the ambassador to Paraguay or something like that. And among the people who were involved with it where the daughter of Woodrow Wilson, she and her husband were prominent in Massachusetts society at the time, and some other prominent women who were involved with Massachusetts colleges.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[29:31] So then she remained active in the League of Women Voters in retirement.

Teaching at Milwaukee Downer

Sara Fitzgerald:
[29:35] So I don’t have anything on suffrage, but it’s an interesting question.

Jake:
[29:40] Yeah, just the timing struck me. But, Emily Hale was at Simmons, it sounds like, for about three years. And you mentioned that she went on to Milwaukee Downer College. And one thing that stood out to me in your description of that campus was that it was an all-women’s campus, not just among the student body, but also among the university leadership. What was that atmosphere like, do you think, for the folks who taught or studied there?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[30:04] Elliot referred to it, although he didn’t know her very well when she was teaching there, but it’s sort of a nunnery. I mean, it was women who made a commitment to teach there, and many of them were there for a long time. And Hale made a decision to leave there in 1929. And I was a little puzzled as to why did she make that decision? And I kind of tested some different theories.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[30:31] And I think one of the ones that makes most sense is that she looked around and she decided that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her career teaching there the way some of her peers were. I think she still had a little bit of an acting bug. She had a performance bug. She liked doing lectures and poetry readings. And she made a decision to try to become a professional lecturer. The problem for her was that she made that decision in the summer of 1929. And so talking about other world events, it’s not great to launch a career based on the discretionary income of wealthy people at a time when the depression is about to hit. She kept at it for a few years, But then in the early 1930s,

Transition to Scripps College

Sara Fitzgerald:
[31:24] which was when she became back involved with Eliot, I think she concluded that. This isn’t going to work out, I’m not making enough. And she then at that point was when she got hired by Scripps College out in California. It was interesting to me because all of these places where she taught had very interesting cultures and differences.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[31:48] Scripps at that time, it was the second of the Claremont colleges founded after Pomona College. And it had both the male and female faculty, but it had been founded by a woman and it was in its first year. So it was just starting out building traditions compared to some of the other places where she had taught that had traditions that had dated for decades. And so I think it had a kind of exciting feel of being all new.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[32:19] Elliot actually visited her there. It was the only time he got west of St. Louis in the United States. One of the things that amused me for someone who had attended Harvard and was obviously a very well-educated man, he had no idea where Stanford or Berkeley were located. He was trying to figure out, can I find a college close to you that’ll come pay for me to speak so I can sort of use it as an excuse to come visit you? And so the fact he was so clueless about these things in California, I think, says something about the Bostonian in him. But he made that trip. And it was also amusing to me that arriving in Claremont, California, in January, when the temperatures were all like in the 60s or 70s, I think, during the time he was there, he thought California was just, excuse the expression, a vast wasteland. You know, I think he associated it with Hollywood, obviously, and lowbrow culture. But it’s like, you think this is a terrible place and you live in London and Boston in the winter?

Reunion and Emotional Struggles

Jake:
[33:31] As long as we’re bringing T.S. Eliot back into the narrative, there has to be some intervening points between going off to Europe in 1915 and trying to get himself appointed to a college to be near Emily Hale in the 1930s. When did they first see each other again after that 1915 departure?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[33:53] They had a meeting that’s a little bit mysterious in 1923 in London. When the correspondence started up, he referenced it. And it’s unclear whether it was an accidental meeting or something that they arranged. And if it was arranged, who reached out to whom, we’re not sure. When they met, I think he declared that he was still in love with her. And I think she said to if you were in love with me, why did you marry your first wife? And he did not have a particularly good answer. He came to conclude and explained to her that a year after marrying Vivian, who was a woman who had a lot of mental and physical health problems, he concluded that he had made a mistake and he felt that he was still in love with Emily Hale. But he got caught up in managing this relationship and feeling loyal to his first wife. He also, along the way, in addition to becoming a British citizen.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[34:58] He converted to Anglicanism and rejected his Unitarian past. And that helped define his attitude towards women and divorce and things like that. Then in 1927, I think there’s a reference, Hale was over in England for a while on a sabbatical of her own. And she apparently wrote Elliot a letter from Florence. And there’s a reference. One of Elliot’s friends remembered a time when they went for a walk, and he said, I got a letter from a girl I had known and had brought back such wonderful memories. And so it was thought that that was a letter that Emily Hale had sent him at the time. When the correspondence started in 1930, Hale was over in England for the summer, and he invited her to come have tea with his wife. Now, you don’t usually think in terms of starting a relationship by inviting somebody to have tea with your wife. But then after they had that meeting, he wrote her and he said, seeing you again, I realized I was still passionately in love with you. In fact, I almost spilled my teacup. I was so overcome.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[36:09] And he waited for her to write back to see what her reaction would be. And apparently within a month, she did write him back a sympathetic letter. I think at first, she didn’t know quite what to make of it. She was flattered. She found him interesting. I don’t think she would have declared herself in love with him. And in fact, when he first started talking about coming back to the United States for this visit, he acted as if he was really worried about seeing her at all.

The Nature of Their Relationship

Sara Fitzgerald:
[36:42] He didn’t know how he would react. It might be too much for him emotionally. But he did decide after she took this job out at Scripps College that he was going to come and visit her.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[36:54] And they spent 10 days together out there. And it was actually, I think, the longest period of continuous time they spent with each other. After she had that time with him, she decided she was in love with him. We have a letter that one of her closest friends wrote back to her of giving her advice about this and sort of saying, you know, if you think you can wait until maybe his situation with his marriage changes and maybe, you know, keep yourself open to meeting somebody else, why not enjoy it for what it is. And so it was a relationship basically built through letters and certainly a huge volume of them in terms of Eliot’s case and the number we actually know.

Jake:
[37:42] Especially at first, your description makes it sound like Elliot’s early letters were just this outpouring of late night second thoughts, emotions, just almost on stuff. Like you’d start the next letter almost before you had finished the first one and just a steady stream of correspondence off to Emily Hale. Mixed signals doesn’t even begin to describe what Hale was getting. I mean, what happens the next time they have a chance to meet up?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[38:08] Well, when he came over to Harvard and they had this time in California, it solidified his decision that he should seek a formal separation from his wife, which he did when he went back to England. And it was difficult because he really felt he had to hide out from her. She was not accepting this. And he wanted to make a break. He thought it would be best for both of them. But she was not eager to do this, and because of her mental illness, she didn’t fully understand what was going on. Hale started coming to England then in the mid-30s, staying in a town called Chipping Canvan in the Cotswolds, and would visit with her aunt. Her aunt and uncle would rent a place, and she would stay there. And Ellie would come out for visits on the weekends and became close to her aunt and uncle as well. And then in 1934.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[39:07] And Hale took a break from Scripps and she said, she wrote the president and she said, my doctor says I have to take a break from teaching for health reasons. I hope that within a year I might be able to come back to Scripps. She’d had a positive relationship there. The president said, well, you know, I can’t hold your job open, but we certainly like you and hope you’ll come back. She went off to Europe, and so over a period of about 18 months, she saw Eliot in London and various places. At the end of 1935, when the time had come for her to come back to the States.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[39:48] They had, from the letters that Eliot wrote her, a very romantic time in London before she went back. It’s really kind of amazingly, if you know anything about romance novels, to read the level of passion and the kissing of feet and all these things. Both of them said their relationship was never consummated. But in my view, they may have spent the night sleeping in each other’s arms or something like that. But Hale, unfortunately, had a miscommunication with Scripps, and they didn’t think she was coming back, and they hired somebody else to take her job.

Challenges of Love and Loyalty

Sara Fitzgerald:
[40:26] So now she was out of a job again, going back to the States with her family. And, you know, the kind of their relationship kept having these ups and downs of missed opportunities. But also, you know, I think on both of their parts, they were very discreet people. I think Elliot in particular was concerned of how he introduced Hale, even to his closest friends, doing something that would be outside the bounds of polite society. And so I think that even among his closest friends, they didn’t realize the role Emily Hale was playing in his life, in part because he didn’t tell them.

Jake:
[41:09] In private, he was really wrestling with the idea of a divorce. Where was that coming from?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[41:18] Well, I don’t think he struggled a lot. He kind of took the position, I’m an Anglican. I’m a very prominent Anglican because I converted to Anglicanism. And it was then against the rules of the Anglican Church to get a divorce under various restrictive situations that he didn’t feel, you know, they could engineer any kind of pseudo adultery or anything. And Emily Hale, as the years went by, she kind of kept pushing him in part because the civil divorce laws in England were becoming less restrictive.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[41:57] One of the things, you know, apparently the laws were changed that if your spouse was institutionalized for a certain number of years, that could be cause for seeking a divorce, and he passed that threshold. But in his eyes, in the eyes of the church, it was something he couldn’t bring himself to do. And interestingly, he had actually had a civil marriage, not a marriage in a church, so technically he could have done it. But it was a code that he took upon for himself. And one of the, I’m always interested, as we’ve talked before, of the historical context in which these events occur. And one of the things that struck me was, you know, this was the era where King Edward VIII abdicated the throne for the woman he loved, who was an American divorcee. And this, again, was well covered in the Boston papers. When it wasn’t in the papers in England, as soon as Edward took the throne, they were speculating which of these European princesses is he going to marry? And then it became clear he wasn’t going to marry any of them. But I had to think Emily Hale’s reading the news and thinking, gosh, the king of England can give up his throne for the woman he loves. Why can’t my guy do something similar?

Jake:
[43:15] After this very, a very tender time together in London, Emily comes back home and it’s just, it’s the height of the Great Depression.

Career Setbacks and New Opportunities

Jake:
[43:25] And it sounds like she considered a lot of different ways to earn her keep. She might have become a caretaker for an elderly man who needed help. She applied to be a director of plays at a college in Virginia. She kept writing the scripts to say, hey, is that job opening back up? Can I come back in here? And at one point, she even flirted with maybe being a political operative. How did the job that she actually got, I think it’s Smith College next, stack up to what she was hoping for in that time of her life?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[44:00] It was the case in the Depression, you had to be grateful for what you could get. I think she was grateful to have the job at Smith. It was obviously a good, prominent women’s school. Again, it was a much larger college than the ones at which she had previously taught. And I think that was a little bit of a challenge for her. She was used to being a bigger fish in a smaller pond than she was going to be at Smith. And what complicated the situation at Smith, it had a speech department that did speech instruction very rigorously. In some ways, you read it now with amusement in which all the students were screened for speech impediments and then assigned.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[44:45] You know, this was something that the professors were going to work on because that was part of being a graduate of Smith. If you, you know, all the things you learn, being able to talk well was going to be one of them. And I think it was frustrating for Hale because she wasn’t teaching drama. She wasn’t doing theatrical work there. And it was really the thing that she felt passionately about. And I think that, you know, she was as a teacher talented at. And so I think it was a difficult time for her. If you got into the records of Smith College, it was going under a big, undergoing a big change at the time. With a new president coming in, one that in retrospect was not thought to be a very good administrator, but one who had very definite ideas about how he wanted to transform Smith and brought in a woman who actually was an associate of Elliott who had led the Federal Theater Project and taught at Vassar to take over the theater program. But in the politics of a college campus, this woman, Hallie Flanagan, she didn’t have a PhD and he installed her as dean. And so all the faculty was up in arms because who was this woman? She was a theater type and what credentials does she have? So the new president actually set about dismantling.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[46:09] The speech department that Hale was in. And so she soon found herself out of a job again. It’s kind of interesting because some of what she went through on that time is some of the people who are teaching humanities now are going through some of the same problems with declining enrollments and administrators, you know, scaling back their departments and those that don’t have tenure, losing their jobs. One of her challenges was she lacked a college degree. And so her next jobs were at prominent girls’ private schools in the Boston area that were good schools, but it was down from the college level. But she was back directing plays. And so I think, again, she was She was much happier in those roles.

Navigating Time Apart

Jake:
[47:00] With Emily sort of sequestered in Western Mass for a long time and Elliot speaking and appearing all over, how did they make time for each other in the years when Hale was at Smith?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[47:13] Well, in all those years when she was working, she was pretty much limited to summer vacations. That would be the time she would go over to England and have an opportunity to see him. But that, again, was somewhat constrained by some of Eliot’s actions. He had other friends and relatives coming over, and he would travel around with them. He had a regular vacation with the family of one of his publishing colleagues that they would take at their second home in Wales. And I was interested that he never seemed to say, hey, could I bring my friend Emily along? Again, it was this sense of keeping up appearances and all. And he had siblings who were in the Boston area at that time. His favorite sibling had died during World War II, and his brother died in 1947. But he still had family ties back in Boston, and so he would come back and visit them. I mean, he’d have old friends from Harvard days or publishing colleagues. And so he was always fitting her around, and it was more like an annual visit rather than more regularly than that.

Jake:
[48:22] I thought it was interesting that – well, there are a couple things in this period that I thought were interesting. One being that Eliot seemed to be having the time of his life during this period. He was living separately from his wife, Vivian. He had freedom in his personal life. At the same time, Hale seemed to be looking for something more public, to have their relationship be more openly acknowledged. Where do you think that tension came from or how did that tension get expressed? Why did you come to that conclusion?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[48:51] 1939, when war broke out in Europe, Hale had been over visiting England when the war broke out. She went back home with her uncle and aunt. And she did actually write Elliot and say, hey, I’d be glad to come over to England and volunteer and do something and try to help England in the war effort. And Elliot pretty much said to her something along the lines of, no, don’t do that. That’ll just give the British one more mouth they have to feed. It was sort of implying that any contribution she might be able to make wouldn’t be substantive enough that she should do that. And besides, I’ll worry about you if you’re here. So then obviously in 1941, America entered the war, but still they were on their different sides of the ocean, still writing.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[49:44] But Hale kept sort of saying, oh, wouldn’t you like to come teach at Princeton? I think we could, you know, with my friends, they’re interested in having you looking for reasons for him to come back. And during that time, his oldest sister, who he was closest to,

War and Separation

Sara Fitzgerald:
[50:01] was dying of cancer, and he didn’t come back during that time. So there was this tension of this World War II separation. And at the end of it, in mid-1945, as the war was coming to an end, at least in the European theater, she wrote him a letter. And this was a letter she kept, which I think is kind of significant because she didn’t make copies of her letters. And she wrote and she said, we’ve been separated for many years. The war may have changed things. Of course, the war had changed things for couples all over the world who were separated by war. And she said, do you still feel He was still the same way about me. She was pretty much giving him a way out. And he said he still did not feel he could marry her. His wife was still alive, but she had been institutionalized in a mental asylum for nearly a decade. But he said, if I were free to marry, you would still be the woman I would want to marry. So the war ended, and he came over, finally came over in 1946.

Rekindling Romance

Sara Fitzgerald:
[51:09] That summer, she was performing in Summerstock Theater in Dorset, Vermont. And he came and saw her perform in a play. And they had, again, a kind of rekindled romantic relationship. And they were still battling over some things. Interestingly, one of the things that Eliot got very annoyed about was that Hale, as a Unitarian, still felt she could take communion in Catholic or Anglican churches. And he thought she was doing this to get under his skin. The Unitarians at that stage still practiced communion. And I think she just thought, you know, I can do it. I don’t have to follow the specific rules. but this was something that became very important to him. And they argued a little bit about it in their letters. And they finally, he sort of said, you know, this is the kind of thing we should discuss when we’re with each other for the time being, we’ll agree to disagree.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[52:09] In January of 1947, he was shocked to get a phone call one morning and learn that his wife had died. And so, I mean, this is the thing that, Emily Hale and presumably Elliot had been waiting for, you know, for 17 years or whatever. He’s finally free to marry her. But something happens to him. He has a real spiritual crisis. He freaks out. He just starts to, he feels very guilty about what happened with his first wife. His only brother is also dying of leukemia back in Boston. And meanwhile, Elliot’s coming back to visit his brother. He’s told Hale that his feelings have changed. He hasn’t been real specific about it, but again, she’s kind of thinking, we’ll wait and talk about it when you get here. And then meanwhile, his life is really chaotic. That year, not only did Harvard give him an honorary degree in the first big flush of honorary degrees after the war, he also got one from Princeton and Yale. So he’s coming back to this chaotic time. His brother dies when he’s back there suddenly.

A Letter of Heartbreak

Sara Fitzgerald:
[53:23] And as I said, if he had the advantage of late 20th century grief counseling, Emily Hale would have said, look, wait a year. Don’t rush out and make any decisions. You’ve got all these terrible things happening in your life. Don’t make any decisions. But instead, he tells her, I’ve come to the conclusion I can’t marry you. I just don’t feel I’m cut out for marriage again. which, after waiting all these years, is pretty disappointing to her. And we’re lucky in that she did write a letter to one of her good friends from Scripps College days and that that woman hung on to the letter. And so it’s one of these snapshots that… We have preserved of how she felt at the time. But Elliot didn’t change his mind. And she eventually reconciled herself that he wasn’t going to change his mind.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[54:18] She decided to remain friends with him. Some people say, why did she decide to do that? Well, you know, it’s sort of like if you’re in your 50s, and a worldwide celebrity once was in love with you, and he still wants to be your friend, hey, why not? But their relationship changed, and Hale, for her part, she said to Elliot, you can’t keep writing me so often when you feel this way. Write me once a month.

Boundaries and Friendships

Sara Fitzgerald:
[54:45] It’s like I’m going to put some boundaries around how you’re demanding something from me. So it did drop off. They had some tension even over that and how he was still relying on her for emotional support. They remained, maintained a friendly correspondence for another 10 years. And there was a period of time where some women suggested she liked to leave the impression that she had been engaged to Elliot and might have told some of them and they may have taken her seriously or not. But none of these women knew the volume of letters that Elliot had written her until his first biographer sort of revealed that to the world.

Jake:
[55:27] In fairness to Emily Hale, she may not have had a diamond on her finger, but for years, they had had an exchange of letters that really made it sound like they were going to be married. And so, while it wasn’t formal, there is some truth to her saying we were engaged because that was her understanding.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[55:43] Oh, yeah. And in fact, he did give her rings, and they were described in the letters and why he picked it out. And sometimes he would say, oh, I’d really like to get you a more expensive ring, until then suddenly he shacked all of his friends by marrying his secretary, who was 38 years younger than he was.

Jake:
[56:02] Then Elliot authors this new play called The Cocktail Party, and Emily Hale, it seems like, is really shaken up by some of the elements of herself that she sees in this play.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[56:15] Interestingly, Elliot’s earliest plays, he sought Hale’s advice when he wrote

The Play’s Impact

Sara Fitzgerald:
[56:24] them in part because she knew a lot about the theater, obviously. But he sought her help in terms of how do you move people across the stage? How do you manage the actors you’re going to hire? One of the interesting things about the cocktail party is he did not send her the script to review until it was virtually ready to be premiered at the Edinburgh Festival.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[56:47] And it’s fair to say she was shocked on two grounds, one of which there’s a character who’s the mistress of the protagonist, the same role that Hale was in. The protagonist in this play was in An Unhappy Marriage. She had this mistress on the side, and Hale felt that as she read the script, that some of the dialogue brought back memories of when she and Elliot had had their confrontation about the future of their relationship, and him telling her that I could no longer bring myself to marry you, and how she responded. And so I think it had cut very close to the bone for her in that respect. And then the other aspect was that in the final act of this play, he kills off this character in a particularly gruesome way. The character is described, it happens offstage, but it’s described that she’s become a missionary to a fictional third world country. And she’s been crucified and left to die, her body smeared with juice that the ants are all crawling all over.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[58:02] And when Eliot’s theatrical producing partners read this, they said, whoa, that’s way over the line. It’s just you’re going to shock the audiences and nobody wants to hear that about a character who was otherwise attractive. And he was eventually persuaded, particularly after the first reviews came out, to tone that language down some. But the woman still dies. And so again, it’s sort of sending a message to Hale, both in terms of he’s reconstructing this painful scene that they had, and in a sense, also possibly killing her off. Now, she actually confronted him about this, and some of the letters that, Hale sent Elliot after 1947 were not destroyed like all the earlier ones were. And I believe it’s because he kept them in a different place,

Confronting the Past

Sara Fitzgerald:
[58:58] possibly at his home, because they were not as intimate or sensitive as the earlier ones. And so we have the letter that she wrote him after she read this. And she took it very personally. He wrote back, oh no, you weren’t possibly the model for this. It was based on a story I heard from a friend who had a society girl after World War I who became a nun, and she did lots of good works and all of that.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[59:28] And Hale always would bounce back and be cheery. So two or three letters later, she’s complimenting him on his, she’s back to cheering him up, supporting him in his theatrical career. And so whatever she felt, she managed to kind of put it aside and, okay, I’m going to get by this. We’re going to still be friends. I’m still going to be encouraging her. And ironically, he actually won the Tony Award for this play.

Jake:
[59:56] Just a few months after you’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was cleaning up at that point.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:00:01] Everything was happening at once. And it’s interesting because the play was described as a comedy. And there were some critics who raved about it, other critics who were mystified about it. I discovered Eleanor Roosevelt, who had a column at the time, went to see it. And she was mystified by it. And she wrote what I thought was a pretty accurate comment of sort of a sense that everybody, it’s kind of Emperor’s New Clothes. We think this is a great play because it was written by T.S. Eliot, and we think he’s a great man. But I don’t understand what it’s about. Maybe because of that, that’s why it’s so great.

Directing Men

Jake:
[1:00:47] Elliot may have gotten the Tony, but Emily Hale was not retired from the theater by any means at that point. This is a time when she’s very active as a director. I learned from your book that she was able to direct co-ed casts. And among the co-ed cast she was directing were young Sam Watterston, who we all know now from Grace and Frankie and a little while back from Law and Order. How did some of those engagements come around where she was, I guess, able to direct men for the first time?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:01:19] She was teaching at Abbott Academy, which at the time was the sister’s school of Phillips, Andover. And it was interesting because you’ve been talking to students from that era, which I have women who are now in their 80s, as well as reading between the lines. The faculty of the two schools were trying to keep the students apart because, you know, they didn’t want things to happen among teenagers. But the Brooks School, which is where Waterston’s father was director of drama and the leading English teacher, was a bit farther away. And so that was it was safer to do projects with them because, you know, if you met somebody in the cast or whatever, it was going to be hard to continue to see them. And so I think Hale did embrace those opportunities because I think it’s more satisfying to see men and women acting together as opposed to women playing the roles of men, which they often did at these girls’ schools. And so I did actually…

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:02:29] I was thrilled. I wrote Sam Waterston and one day opened up my email box and there was an email back from him. And my question was, did he remember this particular play that I knew he had been in that Emily Hale had co-directed? And in her papers was the letter that his father had written Hale and telling her what a great experience it was to work with her and saying, you know, the girls at Abbott really brought out so much more of the cast. And it’s like this one particular student, the teachers say what has come over him. He’s now focused on his work and all. And so it was really a charming letter. So having found this in Hale’s papers, I sent it to Waterston because I figured he would like it. And we had a little bit of exchange. He did remember working with Emily Hale. He did not specifically remember this play, which was Antigone by Jean-Anouis, which was an interesting choice, a modern playwright who had written this play at the end of World War II, I think. But he did remember his father sort of telling him to be good around Emily Hale. He had the sense that she was an imposing figure and he should mind his manners.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:03:46] He felt his main memories were because he’d been 12, he was playing with the big kids, he had a very small role in this play, was thrilled to be acting under his father’s direction.

Donating the Letters

Jake:
[1:04:01] Not too long after that, she was hard up against a mandatory retirement age for Abbott. She was going to be forced into retirement at 65 years old, whether she wanted it or not. But I know that they had talked in maybe more vague terms pretty early on in their exchange of letters about preserving them somewhere. But this is the time when that talk gets really serious, it sounds like.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:04:24] It was Elliot who had, early in their correspondence, pushed her to keep them. He said he wanted it to be a monument to her and their love. And this was a bit of a surprise because, you know, the way the myths about Emily Hale had come down over the 50 years that the letters were embargoed, you were led to believe that she was the one who gave them away and out of a bit of vindictiveness over her anger over his second marriage.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:04:57] At another time, she apparently said to him something along the lines of, I know that some parts of these letters would be of interest to literary scholars. Maybe what we should do is, you know, I’ll have my friends go through and, say what would be of interest and will redact all the most intimate parts. She was a very private person. But I think as the years went on and she hung on to him, and, you know, I thought it was no small feat to hang on to them because she didn’t have a permanent home. She was moving around these jobs. She was in, you know, they might have been in storage at various times. I sort of, as you said, speculated that as she was approaching another one of these transitions where she was going to have to move, find a new job, it seemed like a good time to do it. And in fact, at the time she made this decision, she did not know that Elliot was becoming attracted to his secretary and then eventually making arrangements to marry her. So they had some discussion. And at one point, there had been a suggestion that they might be united at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A lot of the Eliot papers were going there. But he sort of said to her, whether your letters, you can give them to whomever you want. And she was very close to two scholars at Princeton.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:06:19] One, Margaret Farron Thorpe had been her childhood friend since she was five. The women had exchanged letters apparently every two weeks. And Margaret Thorpe’s husband, Willard, was the founder of the American Civilization program at Princeton, and he had done a lot of work of trying to attract and collect letters for the Princeton Library.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:06:42] She was close to these people. She had confidence they would do what she wanted. And I think she also realized correctly that they would be thrilled to get the letters. It would be a feather in their cap if they did. And in fact, when she told them, I’ve decided I’m going to donate them to you, they were excited because they had gotten them and Harvard and Yale hadn’t. So it was considered to be a real coup for Princeton. So she told Elliot she was going to do this. And, you know, Elliot had always thought that she would leave the letters and they would be donated at the point she died. But I think Hale wanted to have the satisfaction of being a donor. And even if the letters were going to be kept secret and private, it, she was still going to have the satisfaction of hearing from these scholars how much they appreciated with it. So she’d made the decision to donate them while she was still alive.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:07:39] And Elliot had always told her he thought a 50-year embargo was the right length of time, and so she was willing to do that. Now, the recipients at Princeton, they, of course, were eager to read the letters. And they said, why don’t you propose to Elliot to shorten the embargo to 25 years? So she threw that out to him, and he said, no, absolutely not, that’s too short. And they also said, can’t you get him to give…

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:08:11] You know, you, your letter, so they could be together. And she would ask him that. And, and, you know, he was still at that point hanging on to them. One of the interesting little twists is that she originally proposed that the embargo would be 50 years from the date of her gift. And Elliot said, no, I want it to be 50 years from the latter of our two deaths. And she thought, well, what’s the big deal? I’ll go along with it. Well, it turned out, and she and the people at Princeton didn’t know this, that this was when Elliot was planning to remarry. And if it had been 50 years from the date of her gift, his second wife would have still been alive when the letters were opened. Because of the later date,

Surprise Marriages

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:09:04] she died about eight years before the letters were open. So, she was spared all the details of this relationship, which I don’t think her husband was very forthcoming in telling her what it had been like at the time.

Jake:
[1:09:20] It sounds like Emily Hale was very much blindsided by Elliot’s second marriage to a woman named Valerie Fletcher. And not only was Hale very surprised, but a woman named Mary Trevelyan, I believe the last name would be, had to be equally surprised. We have T.S. Elliot, who has been scrupulously single since his first wife passed and very reticent about divorce during her lifetime, suddenly keeping three potential boos very much separated from one another. They don’t really know of each other’s existence. Can you tell us, just give us a character sketch of Mary and Valerie and how they come into the story? Yeah.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:10:05] So Mary Trevelyan was a very interesting woman in her own right, and she had been director of a student Christian movement home in London that was connected to the University of London, and it was where foreign students coming to study at the university could live. And this was, you know, back in the days when, you know, there might be discrimination against students from India or African colonies, nations, and so forth. And she had gotten to know Elliot when he was doing talks and all. And then she was away from England for a while and came back. And this was during the war years when Emily Hale wasn’t around. They became friends. They started going to church together. She would chauffeur him around. And as he got older and more infirm, I mean, she was helping him with doctor’s appointments, really kind of managing his life for him in a close, friendly sort of way. And she proceeded to fall in love with him. And in her case, she was actually the one who proposed to him during this period of time after his first wife had died. But he had decided he couldn’t marry Emily Hale.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:11:25] And Elliot pretty much told her, there was a woman in my past that I might have married, but I didn’t marry her. And, you know, I really don’t think I can marry. but they maintained this very close relationship.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:11:41] Hale and Trevelyan really didn’t know each other about each other. They kind of figured it out, and Elliot would occasionally mention Trevelyan in letters to Hale, but didn’t tell her how much he was really seeing her. Again, as you said, he wanted to keep, I think, the women separate. In some ways, Elliot was crueler to marry Trevelyan than he was to Hale because he had seen her like days or weeks before he got married. She went off on vacation and came back to find a note from him saying, hi, while you were gone, I married my secretary. And his secretary, he had found a younger woman who he was taking on as his nurse, in a way, caretaker when he got older. Now, Valerie Fletcher, meanwhile, she had become obsessed by Elliot after hearing John Gielgud recite one of his poems when she was a schoolgirl. And she decided, you know, she sort of said as a goal, it’s kind of hard to believe that I want to become secretary to this man. And she went to secretarial school. She networked up connections she had of working for people who were friends of Elliot.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:12:56] And at one point, the job in his publishing house opened up, and she went and interviewed. She actually said she was so nervous about the interview that she sliced her hand with a knife the night before the interview, showed up at the interview with a big bandage on her hand, and Elliot said, well, I hope you’ll be able to type in a week or two. But for whatever reasons, he chose to hire her, and she was reported to Hale as being very efficient, very competent. She managed a lot of the interactions when Elliot had a heart attack. She would be reassuring the press about his condition. But all of their co-workers, including the fellow secretaries, were totally shocked when she ended up engaged to him and then suddenly going off and having this dawn marriage with very few people. They went off on a honeymoon on the Riviera, and when they came back, it’s kind of another signal of… Elliot’s celebrity at the time, it was like coming back from their honeymoon, they were met by paparazzi. I mean, I laugh and I said, if People magazine had been around then, they would have been on the cover like, you know, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Right.

Emily’s Reaction

Jake:
[1:14:14] So, with this shocking news of Elliot’s marriage to Valerie Fletcher, right at the moment that they’re finalizing the gift of his letters to Princeton, how does Emily react to that in her letters to the new Mrs. Elliot, and then also separately in her more private correspondence with her other acquaintances?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:14:36] The donation of the letters was consummated before the marriage took place.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:14:43] Elliot came to believe that the archivists at Princeton had started reading the letters because of a letter that Hale had sent him. So he got very angry at her about people reading the letters already. Now, that was not the case. What he didn’t know was that an appraiser had looked at the letters. So somebody had looked at the letters to establish the amount that Emily Hale could take as a tax deduction, even though there’s no evidence that she was doing it for that reason. But she was smart enough she was going to try to manage it sensibly. So she apologized and said, I’m sorry you thought that. That isn’t what happened. And I’m really upset that you’re angry at me over this thing we’ve talked about for years. and then Elliot said, it’s okay, Christmas is approaching, let’s still be friends and I hate to have this kind of fight at this time of year. She sends him some Christmas presents and he writes her a thank you note and there’s this kind of vague reference, I’m going to be writing you soon about other things. Elliot did write Hale and his sister in Boston to say I’m getting married and seems to have timed the letters exactly the day the news broke in the papers. And it was a pretty big story in the Boston Globe, which I incorporate into my book.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:16:09] And Emily Hale has gotten this letter, but she’s shocked. She can also read it in the newspaper. And she writes her best friend, Margaret Farron, who was the recipient of the letters. Sort of the first letter is, I just can’t believe this news. What do you make of it and Margaret Farrenthorpe, who was also a friend of Elliot’s, she was equally shocked. And then a few days later, Hale writes another letter, and by then she’s kind of more bitter about, well, he’s just another old guy, married his young secretary, and he’s just like any other guy. But she’s got enough sort of, I think, brahmin politeness in her that she sits down and she writes a letter to the Elliotts, congratulating them on their marriage. I think the letters that she wrote to Valerie had a little tinge of possessiveness about, you know, I’ve known him for so long, and you’re going to know him in a new way after working for him for seven years. So there was a little bit of that. She did eventually meet Valerie.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:17:17] Elliot’s cousin, Eleanor Hinckley, urged the two women after Elliot died to meet each other, in part because Eleanor thought people are going to continue to gossip about you until you do. And so they did meet again. Hale wrote Mrs. Elliot a nice bread and butter, pleasant note about this. But we know that And on the side, Hale had done imitations, mimicry of Valerie Elliott as a joke to one of her closest friends. And the friend told Elliott’s biographer about this as an example of Hale’s both good sense of humor and her acting ability.

Misunderstood Emotions

Jake:
[1:18:02] Well, speaking of gossip, it seems like in the 50 years that the letters were embargoed, a lot of T.S. Eliot’s biographers came to the conclusion that Emily Hale had this nervous breakdown as a result of the news of his marriage. Your reconstruction in the book of this time in her life doesn’t reflect that. What did you find about her non-breakdown, I guess you would say? And why do you think that narrative is so sticky for people, if it’s anything besides just simple sexism and people assuming women had breakdowns so easily?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:18:41] You said, there are stereotypes that that’s how a woman would respond. And I think she had a period of depression in the summer of 1957, which was also tied to her teaching career coming to an end. And she decided to go back over to Chip and Camden. And she made noise like she was going to try to visit Elliot. I think he was very nervous that she would show up so soon in his marriage. But they didn’t connect. She had some health issues when she was in Chipping Camden. It might have been some sort of depression. And so she went back home. And we have a letter. Eleanor Hinckley had dinner with her when she came back. And she wrote a pretty thoughtful letter to Elliot, kind of explaining what Emily was going through. And part of it was needing to find a place to live. And just, I think she was at a real crossroads of her life. But she went out and she found another job at a girls’ school in Maine. But she was, I don’t think she was very happy there. And she quit after a short period of time and then retired. And around that time, her aunt who by that point was in a nursing home died and so I think it freed her up from some of her caregiving responsibilities and it may have also freed up some more financial support uh.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:20:10] If she inherited whatever was left of their estate. And she moved out to first Northampton and then to Concord. And if you, again, you looked at the record, she started performing in plays, she started joining committees, becoming active in the community. Some of her students at Abbott Academy saw her perform when they were attending college in Smith, and they were really astounded at what a good comic actress she was playing a role that was for a much younger woman. And a lot of her students stayed in touch with her.

A Resilient Life

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:20:42] And so you knew as the years went on, she was starting to have more physical problems, as everybody does. But you got the sense that whatever happened, she did pick herself up emotionally and got on with her life. And on some level could be proud that she had been a supportive person in the life of this famous writer. But I think particularly after Elliot died, again, her Brahmin politeness kicked in, and she now felt more sympathy for his widow. And she pulled back some of the most more intimate, detailed versions of their relationship. And I think she became more concerned about how this might play out with Mrs. Elliott if she knew more about it.

Jake:
[1:21:35] It sounds like she took a few different cracks about how she would tell the story of their relationship in the last few years of her life and the last few years of Elliott’s life. Because she wrote at least a couple of versions of their shared story, maybe different versions before and after his death.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:21:53] The Thorpes had pushed her to write a more detailed version and it even kind of helped her by saying well you’re used to to talking and making speeches why don’t you do it into a tape recorder and we’ll make arrangements to have it transcribed and then you can edit it so they were kind of pushing her to do this more detailed version and that one I think was the second of the three she wrote, and that was the one that she asked to be pulled back because she thought it was too intimate, and she didn’t want all those secrets now to be shared. But I think she also felt when the letters were finally released, they would, in effect, speak for themselves, and people would be able to see the kinds of words that Eliot wrote her and understand and why she had taken them as she had previously.

Jake:
[1:22:46] In the end, Emily Hale passes away just a couple of weeks before she was going to turn 78 in October 1969, and that starts the countdown for the letters to become public. They were so tightly guarded at Princeton that they were almost forgotten about. Can you just describe a little bit about how some of the information about this collection trickled out ahead of the release, and then what the moment when the archive is opened, what that was like in January 2020?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:23:16] Well, one of the things that I uncovered in the course of my research were the papers of the first biographer of Eliot, a man, T.S. Matthews. Ironically, his first name, his initials are T.S. And so when he died, his heirs and executors gave all of his papers to Princeton. When you got into his papers, you realized that he missed a couple of early clues that Emily Hale existed. And at one point, he wrote William Dix, the archivist at Princeton, and said, I’d like to get copies of these two Eliot poems that are in your collection. They were actually poems that Emily Hale had given to Princeton. And can you let me know if you got anything else in your collection that might be of interest? And Dix wrote back and said, well, one thing we have are more than 1,100 letters that were written by Elliot to this woman, Emily Hale, but they’re governed by a 50-year embargo, so you’re not going to be able to see them. And a few months go by, and he apparently pulls out this letter again, and he sends Dix a letter that says, was that a typo? Did you really mean 100 letters, not 1,100?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:24:37] And Dix wrote back and said, I can appreciate that you thought it was a typo, but no, it’s 1,100 letters. So at that point, it’s like Matthews probably did an expletive because he suddenly realizes this is a big part of the story and I know nothing about it. So he scrambled to try to find out about her. So when they’d go to these former colleagues and say, did you know Elliot wrote her 1,100 letters? Everybody was dumbfounded. They had no idea. So the Matthews biography was the first that sort of put the letters on the map. The collection at Princeton, I asked the archivist when we finally got into the letters, they had been bound in steel bands and crates and things. And I said, how many other collections in the archive are locked up that tightly?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:25:31] And he said, that’s an easy question. There’s only one. So the years go by and Princeton at one point said, okay, as you mentioned, Hale died in October. It’s going to take us a little bit of time. So we’ll set January 2nd, 2020 is the date the letters will be open. What they hadn’t counted on was the advent of digitization. So the library decided they had to digitize all of these letters and envelopes. And so they made a decision that all the letters are published online and can be read for free. So that’s a great boon to scholars. They’re also searchable.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:26:13] The Princeton Library, meanwhile, made three copies available on three computer terminals, and they announced in advance that the letters would be made available for researchers starting on January 2nd on a first-come, first-served basis. I had previously written a novel about this relationship, but I was so, by this point, such an Emily Hale geek, I decided I had to be there on opening day. It was a very cold January morning. Fortunately, the library led us into the lobby before the special collections room organized. We got to meet one another. The first six people were all women researchers. Later, we were joined by two reporters representing London papers who were there to do inserts for stories that were going to be written in the London papers. I was fourth in line, and so the first two women wanted to read the digitized files. And the advantage to doing that was that you could jump around anywhere in the collection.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:27:14] The third woman, she really liked letters, and she wanted to fondle the letters in the envelopes and look at them closely. And so because she made that choice, I was able to read the digitized files, which I appreciated because I was going to be more limited in my time. And so I wanted to jump around at various key points in their relationship, like what did he tell her in 1956? and how did he break the news that he wasn’t going to marry her some of those key questions and then the shock, came later that morning, and you sort of started to hear this hubbub around the room, and it turned out that back in the early 60s.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:27:54] Elliot had written a secret letter and sent it to Harvard’s Houghton Library

The Secret Letter

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:28:00] with instructions that it be opened on the day Emily Hale’s letters finally became public. So in this letter, he described their relationship, and he said he had been in love with her when they They were students. But then over the course of their relationship, he had decided that they didn’t have much in common. She didn’t like his poetry. If he had married her, he never would have become the famous poet he became. It was really awful. You sort of felt that this man was trashing a woman who had given him a lot of emotional support during a difficult time in his life. And the end of the letter concluded by saying, and I never met as wonderful of a woman as my second wife, Valerie. She’s a woman beyond compare. And it was so over the top. We actually, this group of women researchers, we later had arguments over, is it possible Valerie wrote that section of the letter. But we didn’t reach a conclusion on that. But at the end of this letter, he confirmed that he had arranged for all of Emily Hale’s letters to be destroyed.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:29:07] It was one of the reasons why I titled my book, The Silenced Muse.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:29:12] Because he, in effect, silenced Hale. Now, one thing that Eliot had not counted on was when this letter was opened, it arrived in the middle of the Me Too movement. So I’ve sort of argued that suddenly mainstream media in the United States was taking a lot more notice of the opening of the Emily Hale letters because he had created this kind of he said, she said soap opera. And New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, PBS NewsHour all did stories on this, and I really doubted that they might have done it just based on the fact of the literary content of the letters suddenly becoming available. But the scholars who were there, the letters exceeded their expectations in terms of how revelatory they were, not only just in terms of understanding the relationship between Hale and Eliot and, you know, the role she had played. One of the things that was shocking to the scholarly world was that Eliot specifically said, this person was the inspiration for this poem and this person, you inspired the wasteland and these parts of that poem.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:30:28] And he’d always, you know, argued that doesn’t mean anything, I’m impersonal. And that had been kind of what people had come to believe. And so these letters argued that.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:30:42] Different kind of approach, as did, you know, as we talked before about the cocktail party, and that that might have reflected some of his experiences with Emily Hale. But because he wrote these letters, as you referenced earlier, stream of conscience, late at night, you almost felt it was like a man coming home from the office, and pouring out to a sympathetic wife, this is what my day was like, right, that the letters are filled with all sorts of fascinating observations about other people, the literary world.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:31:17] And late in life, when Hale was discussing the fact that she was going to donate these letters, one of the reasons Eliot expressed for why he wanted the 50-year embargo, he said, it’s not because of what it shows about our relationship. That’s not the big deal. I’m worried because he made so many candid, often nasty catty comments about people, some of whom were still alive, some of whom he was close to their relatives, and some of them was even about relatives of him, himself, that that’s what he was concerned about, people reading too quickly while they might still be alive.

Jake:
[1:32:00] What do we make of Emily Hale? Now that the archive is open,

Rediscovering Emily Hale

Jake:
[1:32:03] we can see at least the reflection of Emily in T.S. Eliot’s letters. In the past, she was cast as a supporting character in the drama of T.S. Eliot’s life. If we put her back at the center of the story, who’s Emily Hale?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:32:20] Well, I have no doubt that if Emily Hale had not had the relationship with T.S. Eliot, I’m sure I would not have been able to find a publisher who would publish her biography. That said, I think she’s a story worth telling. I think there’s lots of interesting aspects about the history that surrounded her, women’s colleges, women’s education, the 20th century, the theater world and how it evolved. It’s important to set the record straight, particularly after the letter that Eliot sent to Harvard, which I think mischaracterized the nature of their relationship. I think it’s important to create some myths that took hold about her, in part because she was a woman who was reticent, didn’t talk about her relationship with Eliot. And then we had the passage of these 50 years in which people made assumptions, some of which were based on stereotypes and other occasions where people might have been trying to change the story a little bit. So I felt it was important to get her story right, to tell the story from her point of view rather than Eliot’s. And that’s what I tried to do in my book. When you write a biography, there’s always questions left, and certainly in a biography of someone for whom a big part of her record was destroyed.

Jake:
[1:33:44] If people want to find out more about Emily Hale, or if they want to follow you and your work online, where should we point people today?

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:33:55] I have a website, www.sarafitzgerald.com. That’s Sara without an H. There I’ve put a combination of things, not only about my books, but one thing I created there was a photo essay called Emily’s World. I made a trip to Boston, and one of my trips, I went around to a lot of the places where Emily Hale lived and worked and captured photographs, which was not only for me a visual record, so I could go back and try to recreate those scenes, but I think it’s also fun to look at those pictures as well.

Sara Fitzgerald:
[1:34:36] Another thing I did is when I wrote my novel about their relationship, when the letters were first opened, I created another section in which I acknowledged the things I got wrong. But we also corrected some of the assumptions that biographers had made, or in some cases I know of interviews with 80-year-old friends of Emily Hale, who either were confused about the record or distorted it to be supportive of hers. I’m going to be participating at something called the T.S. Eliot Summer School at Oxford, England this summer. It’s an opportunity for people who are really into Eliot to study his works. So there is still a lot of interest in T.S. Eliot. And one of the things that’s fascinated me is to run into men of about my age who had loved reading Eliot when they were in high school and college. Didn’t become English majors, though, became bankers or real estate agents or lawyers. But now that they’re in retirement, they’re finding time to come back to that interest and turning up at some of these conferences I go to. And some of them even going back to school and doing projects of their own. So, that’s been fun as well.

Jake:
[1:35:50] Yeah, I feel like Eliot has a grip on the men of a certain generation in the sort of way that like a Rudyard Kipling did, maybe an earlier generation. Well, Sara Fitzgerald, I just want to say thank you very much for joining us today and for spending way more time than we had planned for talking about Emily Hale and the book The Silenced Muse. To learn more about Emily Hale and her relationship with T.S. Eliot, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com slash 319. I’ll include a link where you can support independent bookstores and the podcast when you purchase Sara Fitzgerald’s book, The Silenced Muse, Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and The Role of a Lifetime. I’ll also include links to Sara’s author website and directly to the photo gallery that she mentioned, where you can see pictures of sites in Cambridge, Boston, and Chestnut Hill, where Emily Hale lived and worked. I’ll also have a link to my interview about landmaking in Boston on the Explain Boston to Me podcast, as well as more information about the mega-awesome, super-huge, wicked-fun podcast Playdate on February 16th.

Jake:
[1:37:05] If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubhistory.com. I still have profiles for Hub History on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, but I’ve been having a really good time lately on Blue Sky, where I’m posting and interacting with listeners and just generally trying to have a good time on social media again. You can find me over there by searching for hubhistory.com. I haven’t been as active on Mastodon, but you can find me over there as athubhistoryatbetter.boston. If none of that’s up your alley, just go to hubhistory.com and click on the Contact Us link. While you’re on the site, hit the Subscribe link, and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line, and I’ll send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.