Eliot and Hardy and Saturday

 Dull and cold here this morning.  Yesterday was sunny but cold.  We have had frosts everyday for a few days.  Spring is here but the cold weather has not yet gone away. 

Yesterday I met my Saturday friend for coffee when she called me early to say she was ready for some normality again.  That is what we call our meetings, normality.   My Saturday friend, S, lost her husband to cancer in January and is in the process of slowly getting back to normal.  He suffered for a long time as I have mentioned before here spending several months between hospital, nursing homes and a hospice and never actually coming home again after he was hospitalised six months before.  It has obviously been a particularly difficult time for her.  In March her mother died too whch has heaped misery upon misery although her mother was 97.  S is attending the funeral this week in Essex and will be getting the train down to Chelmsford.  

So normality is what we do together.  We talk for a couple of hours and only about death, house sorting, red tape following death,  if she wants to.   I buy my papers and she does a big shop.  I hope she stays living here but as she is not local and only moved here with her husband a few years ago and now has no ties here I think it is likely she will return to Essex.  But time will tell. 

Her husband worked in the oil industry and regularly flew to Baku. So sometimes we have talked about my trip to Baku and she was able to tell her husband that I was going.    S taught languages to businessmen and speaks fluently in Spanish and French.  Her teaching was business language which makes her language skills and teaching quite different to school French.  There is a French lady who works in the café so they chat in French which I love to hear.  S did her language courses in City and Guilds in the 1960s and never went to university as was the way in those days, evening classes and City and Guilds examinations played a very important part of education for many.  

In the evening I watched two documentaries and part of a third.  The first was on T. S Eliot, the poet and writer, the second on Thomas Hardy, and the third, which I didn't finish because I was tired and went to bed, was  The Brothers Grimm.  All of these documentaries are available free on Prime. Whilst watching Eliot and Hardy it occurred to me that writers of that time in the  late 19th and early 20th centuries were writing in troubled times and apart from wars and hardship they were also very troubled men in their private lives.  This can also be attributed in part to the times in which they lived when the openness and freedom that we take for granted were not so free and open as today.  Things like divorce and sexual feelings were kept to oneself and often marriages lasted merely because one or other was too ashamed or felt rigidly tied by family values to not seek divorce. This was the case for Eliot where he did not believe in divorce.  

Thomas Hardy was awful to his wife Emma and she confined herself to the attic rooms of their house to keep out of his way.  She was sad, neglected and badly treated by him.   He belittled her and insulted her and yet when she died unexpectedly he was full of remorse and this released in him his best writing and two years of outpourings of poetry about his love for her.  Too late for poor Emma though.   His marital experiences fed into his books and Emma knew this and was insulted by it.  He later took another woman to the house whilst Emma was still his wife and rubbed salt into the wounds.  

Eliot was also troubled man and this fed into his works, The Wastelands and J. Alfred Prufrock and Four Quartets  and many others. He had a terrible first marriage to Valerie who was by all accounts quite mad but Eliot did not divorce her.  Eliot took a one year teaching post in America to escape and when he came back to England he never went back to her again.  She was eventually put into an asylum by her brother and died there and only then was Eliot free, but by then middle-aged.  His parents in America were also very disappointed that he decided to live in England and effectively become an Englishman.  This weighed heavily on him.  He met with the Bloomsbury Group by night and worked in Lloyds bank by day, but still found it difficult to off-load and be free and Virginia Woolf observed that nobody ever got close to Eliot.  He later found happiness in his final years when he married his secretary Vivienne who had had a crush on him since she was 14.   Throughout all these troubled times and war in London he still wrote plays and poems of the highest quality.  Vivienne was later to release Old Possum Book of Practical Cats  to the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and this became the highly successful Cats musical and some of the profits fed into Faber and Faber and helped many young writers in later years. (Eliot had joined Fabers in 1925 as an editor).  Vivienne said that Eliot would have loved the musical. 

 I was fortunate to go to a reading of Four Quartets a few years ago.  I wrote about it on my other blog at the time.  The reader who spoke from memory and knew every word, spoke the whole thing as if he was speaking to me alone.   This led to me being asked by a number of audience members if the reader knew me but he did not.  The reading was in a small chapel.   

It occurred to me  in lamenting that I can never find a good book to read today and today's authors seem to lean on the side of fairly lightweight stuff in the  contemporary writing that maybe times are too easy for us and we do not have the angst that these writers I describe went through.  Does a troubled life bring out the best in writers that feeds into their own work?  Of course I read only a very narrow section of fiction in that I don't read crime which is very popular these days and I don't read science fiction, also very popular. But an awful lot of what is published feels to me to be shallow and crass.  Perhaps that is a reflection of life today with social media, tattoos, microwaves, fast food, and frontless dresses feeding the minds of the writers. Storylines that are not deep and writers like Sally Rooney raved about and described as fantastic and exhilerating leave me unsatisfied at the end of a book.    

So many things written on X (Twitter) are now starting with "if this is true" or "if what you are saying is true".   It is really putting me off.   There is much fake news of great gravity written and so many join in because the space for it is open to all and people just seem to get bolder by the week.   Sorry that was a bit off topic but still a sign of the times.