Thursday, September 18, 2008

Domestic strife ...

... Where Have You Gone, T.S. Eliot?.

Virginia Woolf, who knew a thing or two about mental illness, noted in her diary: "Vivienne! Was there ever such torture since life began! — to bear her on one's shoulders, biting, wriggling, raving, scratching, unwholesome, powdered, insane, yet sane to the point of insanity."

A quibble: Eliot (like C.S. Lewis) converted to Anglo-Catholicism, not Roman Catholicism. When I was in grade school we used to pray that Lewis would take the further step.

3 comments:

  1. Oops, I'll correct it on my copy. Thanks for pointing that out!

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  2. Thought you really outdid yourself on this posting, Bill, when I read it yesterday. Great piece on a difficult duo. Utterly absorbing reading. Made my day. Reminded me of the condition he believed he had (and for which Vittoz seems to have treated him, "neurasthenia").

    Thanks.

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  3. Of course, for accuracy's sake, I should add that Eliot later decided it wasn't neurasthenia at all; rather, he concluded, he'd been hit with "aboulia" (from the French, aboulie). Thus, "on the advice of Ottoline Morrell and Julian Huxley," the sorta hypochondriac — to sway the least — returned to Dr. Roger Vittoz's clinic in Lausanne for further treatment.

    Source? Peter Akroyd, T. S. Eliot (1984).

    All things considered, if my parents had given me a name that spelled "toilet" backwards sans "s," I might be a little on the wonky side meself; it was Marshall McLuhan (a huge EliotiCan fan), after all, who noted, paraphrastically, in Understanding Media, "For the name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers." (It was either MM or JJ, at any rate; should you require further accuracy or clarification on this point concerning my source/s, I shall happily supply same.)

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