T.S. Eliot’s letters to her are sequestered in the Princeton Univ. vault until the year 2019.
This article for some background
My interests: how the people we know affect us, affect our creative endeavors. the subtleties of friendship and love. define romance, define loneliness. the question of privacy of public individuals. the death of letter writing. what did he write her? was she really so worthwhile or had he made her into something she was not? (because that’s what we do to people, isn’t it?). will this shed new light on his meanings? (i sometimes prefer not understanding or misunderstanding)
This New Yorker article (Sept. 2002, by Louis Menand, about the book Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot… by Carole Seymour-Jones) becomes an exploration of Eliot’s sex life or lack of.
“The sex in Eliot’s poetry is almost always bad sex, either libidinally limp or morally vicious. But that’s because for Eliot bad sex was the symptom of a failure of civilization, and it is a fallacy to conclude that, because sex in his poems is disgusting, Eliot was disgusted by sex. Eliot was disgusted by modern life, period. That he found a way to express that disgust through lurid sexual characterization was one of the reasons his poetry seemed, in its time, so compelling.”
“It has always seemed miraculous to me that words actually do communicate meanings. That’s not to say, of course, that they’re reliable. T.S. Eliot knew precisely how language fails us. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies…” The Archivist by Martha Cooley, p. 320, 1998