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The Fall of a Sparrow by Ann Pasternak Slater review – TS Eliot's troubled first wife

Vivien Haigh-Wood married TS Eliot in 1915, and right from the start, things were difficult: if not a disaster precisely, then one well in the making. In the London flat they shared part-time with its owner, Bertrand Russell, the poet slept not in the couple’s bedroom, but in a deckchair in the hall. His new wife, who liked dancing and would quite soon go to bed with their landlord, was already showing signs of the mental illness that would ruin her life. She kept erratic hours, and her impulses tended towards cruelty. Both were crashing snobs, and thanks to this, they were all too painfully aware of what their equally superior Bloomsbury friends made of them. No one much liked Viv: “this teashop creature”, as a quivering Katherine Mansfield put it. They thought her vulgar, and vain, and quite useless.

Was she, though? Useless, I mean. There are two schools of thought about poor Viv, who died in 1947 in the institution where she had been incarcerated for almost a decade, and to which her husband never came. The first, and hoariest, is that she was a madwoman whose principle contribution to the life and work of TS Eliot was the immense distress she caused him, pain that helped him to write The Waste Land (the line taken by Michael Hastings, whose 1984 play about the couple became the film Tom & Viv, in which the latter was played by Miranda Richardson). The second approach posits her as a victim both of Eliot’s coldness and cruelty, and of the assorted quacks who did so little to help her following her breakdowns (the crudely feminist stance taken by her somewhat unreliable 2001 biographer, Carole Seymour-Jones). Either way, it has always been hard to see Vivien as a person in her own right. We cannot say if Virginia Woolf and the rest were justified in thinking her a twittering spare part, for the simple reason that if she exists on the page, she does so only in relation to the man who unaccountably married her even though he was then in love with another woman, Emily Hale.

Her latest biographer, Ann Pasternak Slater, is in one sense, at least, determined to see her as a person in her own right. Published in cooperation with the TS Eliot estate, The Fall of a Sparrow comprises two sections, the second of which is a complete annotated edition of Vivien’s stories and poems (Eliot rather proudly published his wife in the Criterion, which he edited in the 20s; the two of them also wrote together). But, alas, it’s here that the problems begin. Pasternak Slater, with good reason, isn’t convinced by Vivien’s writing, referring to her disdainfully as a “sub-modernist”; she has turned up no minor masterpieces, nor anything much worth reading at all, unless you’re a scholar desperately chasing references for some more than usually arcane paper. Which takes us back to square one: isn’t she only of interest at all because she drove the author of Prufrock halfway round the bend?

What woman, sane or not, hasn’t felt the need for reinvention on being abandoned?

Perhaps this is one reason, turning to the front of the book, why Pasternak Slater’s biography is problematic. Having read every word Vivien ever scribbled down (she has also edited her diaries, which can be read online), she wants for a certain conviction in the matter of writing her life, however diligent she is about the facts (and she is meticulous). But there are others, too. The book begins, for instance, only in 1914, just as her subject is about to meet Eliot for the first time. This would be odd in any biography, but in the case of someone with severe mental illness, it’s bizarre. What happened in Viv’s childhood? Were other members of her family similarly afflicted? Such questions are never answered, though Pasternak Slater is bold enough to suggest later that Viv had both Munchausen’s syndrome and dissociative identity disorder (her explanation, in a note, of what the latter involves is taken from Wikipedia).

How do her armchair diagnoses of such serious conditions sit alongside her seeming belief that Viv’s illness was, at points, willed? After Eliot left her in 1933, Vivien had an “unformulated need” to create a new identity, writes Pasternak Slater: a “psychic bricolage” that replaced the debris of her marriage. She seems to want it both ways. But in any case, the concept of choice here is a moot point. What woman, sane or not, hasn’t felt the need for reinvention on being abandoned? And who wouldn’t have been distressed by behaviour like Eliot’s? Once he had decided on a separation – as an Anglo-Catholic, he would not divorce her – he came back from America, where he’d been lecturing, without telling her, and promptly removed himself to a secret address; thereafter, he communicated with her only through lawyers.

Pasternak Slater traces Vivien’s too short life (she died unexpectedly, of heart failure) year by year in small sections, carefully separating fact from hearsay. Yes, we know, as the author notes, that there’s no right or wrong here; that both Viv and Tom were caught up in the “remorseless machinery of unhappiness”. But for the reader, the result is a little like being in a courtroom during a case whose verdict will involve no real jeopardy. Where is the colour? The dash? Hundreds of pages in, I still couldn’t quite picture Viv and her world. I’ve always believed, to pinch from Diane Johnson, whose 1972 book about Mary Ellen Peacock, the first and much-maligned wife of George Meredith, could not be more involving if it tried, that so-called “lesser lives” are frequently as interesting, and even as important, as major ones: the wife, the mother, the muse. Feminism still has work to do here. But as Johnson also writes, the biographer’s job isn’t only to unearth facts, to blow dust from manuscripts. She should have something of the novelist in her, too. She must be a storyteller, and a snoop.

• The Fall of a Sparrow: Vivien Eliot’s Life and Writings by Ann Pasternak Slater is published by Faber (£35). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply