Patrick Comerford
Today marks the birthday of TS Eliot, who was born 136 years ago in St Louis, Missouri, on 26 September 1888. I was in Hampstead this week to discuss the launch of a book in London next week, and I found myself in an irresistible search for some of the connections in Hamstead with TS Eliot.
Thomas Stearns Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915 and they lived for two years with her parents in Compayne Gardens in West Hampstead.
Three of us met earlier this week at Hampstead Underground station, which was built in 1907 and is the deepest station on the London Underground network, and had lunch around the corner in Flask Walk – a narrow pedestrianised Regency street with antique shops and cafés.
It had been many years since I had spent any time in Hampstead, which is known for its bohemian and literary connections and for what is sometimes labelled dismissively as ‘Hampstead Liberalism’. ‘Hampstead Liberals’ are supposed to be a Guardian-reading North London subspecies of ‘Champagne Socialists’. In its obituary of Peter Jay on Tuesday, the Guardian referred to him being ‘born into the Hampstead Labour aristocracy.’
Certainly, during the Brexit referendum in 2016, it is said 75% or more in Hampstead voted to remain in the EU, so that alliterations sometimes invite comparisons between Hampstead and Hartlepool and Hull, post-industrial northern ‘red wall’ towns that voted to leave and turned from Labour to the Conservatives.
Hampstead has its coffee shops, an eclectic mix of restaurants and bars, Georgian and Regency architecture, antique shops, niche furniture outlets, colourful cobbled side-streets and centuries-old churches.
Hampstead also has many literary associations, with numerous plaques to writers from Agatha Christie to Edith Sitwell. John Keats lived in a Regency Villa beside Hampstead Heath now known as Keats House, where it is said he wrote ‘Ode To a Nightingale’ in the garden. George Orwell worked at a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead called Booklovers’ Corner around 1935-1936. John Betjeman wrote with affection about North London and his childhood in Hampstead and his feelings of ‘being safe in a world of trains and buttered toast.’
Evelyn Underhill, one of only 18 modern women whose lives are commemorated in the Church of England Calendar of Holy Days, is buried in the Additional Burial Ground of Hampstead Parish Church. Penelope Fitzgerald, Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer, lived in Hampstead and is buried in the churchyard.
The poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and a central figure in English literature, was married in Hampstead and lived in south Hampstead for about two years.
Eliot was born 136 years ago today, on 26 September 1888. He was a visiting student at Merton College, Oxford, when he met Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and they were married in Hampstead Registry office on Haverstock Hill with no formal announcement. They were both 26 and had known each other for just three months. The witnesses were Lucy Ely Thayer, a sister of the poet and publisher Scofield Thayer who introduced the couple, and Vivienne’s aunt, Lillia C Symes.
The couple moved in with her parents at 3 Compayne Gardens, an 1870s house in South Hampstead that Eliot found ‘rather gloomy, with long dark corridors.’ Her father, the artist Charles Haigh-Wood (1854-1927), inherited a property portfolio from his Irish-born mother Mary (Haigh) Wood, including the rental from a group of six houses on Haigh Terrace, between the Mariners’ Church and Upper George’s Street in Dún Laoghaire, and a seventh house on Upper George’s Street, on the corner with Haigh Terrace.
During Eliot’s two years in South Hampstead, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock was published in Chicago in 1915, although Eliot had written it four years earlier in 1911.
The actor and writer Edward Petherbridge has produced a short film, While the Music Lasts, about Eliot’s time in South Hampstead during World War I. He claims that during those two years the seeds were sown of The Waste Land. It was later published in 1922 and is one of Eliot’s most seminal works, his eulogy to culture in a world he felt had forgotten its roots.
Petherbridge’s film features a portrait of Eliot and some London street scenes by another former resident of South Hampstead, photographer Bill Brandt, whose work offers documentary of 20th century British life. The film also refers to the life of Mina Loy, the woman known as the ‘forgotten Modernist’, who grew up in Compayne Gardens.
The marriage was difficult, and ended in separation in 1933. Eliot said later: ‘To her the marriage brought no happiness … to me it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.’ Vivienne died in 1947, and the story of their tumultuous marriage is told in the film Tom and Viv (1994).
Three years after their separation and 20 years after he had lived at Compayne Gardens, Eliot recalled Hampstead as one the ‘gloomy hills of London’. In Burnt Norton (1936), he speaks of
… the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
Next year marks the 110th anniversary of Eliot’s marriage in Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915 and 60th anniversary of his death on 4 January 1965.
1 comment:
Thayer was on his way back to America when they got married.
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