In many ways, this year of Eliot’s life is the personal calm before the storm, although that is scarcely obvious from the public and professional nature of his letters.
At the end of 1931, Eliot accepts a year-long post at Harvard; on 11 December, his wife, Vivienne, writes to Ottoline Morrell: “I was so happy at your house today ”¦. Particularly it did strike me, for I had just been through such a fearful time with T. All of a sudden.” “T” is clearly her husband, and it seems likely that they were discussing his near departure.
This year will be the last that he and Vivienne spend together; on his return from Harvard he will endure a horrible and disturbing separation from her as she will enter a sanatorium where she will remain for the rest of her life.
The utter tragedy of this personal story, though, is rarely glimpsed in Eliot’s letters, and the always excellent footnotes provide much of the back story, with excerpts from letters written by Virginia Woolf or Morrell, who detail Vivienne’s increasingly erratic behaviour (Vivienne tells them both she keeps hornets “in her bed”).
I hesitate to go say a critical word about T. S. Eliot, who has so many admirers, but there is a growing consensus that his treatment of his first wife, Vivienne, was shabby, and certainly that she did not deserve incarceration in a mental institution. See:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/165448.article