Eternal Beauty, Eternal Martyr

Reviewing T. S. Eliot's letters to Emily Hale in the London Review of Books, Paul Keegan remarks upon one of the poet's convictions about mental illness: that 'people who are suffering from unreal things do not suffer as much as those who see things sanely as they really are.'

In a wonderful and rich overview of an enormous tranche of letters, you are left feeling unsympathetic to Eliot who has misled, manipulated, and finally shorn off all contact with Hale, a woman who has patiently waited for her married but separated correspondent to become available. However, when Vivienne Eliot finally dies, Eliot gets cold feet and draws away.

Vivienne and T. S. Eliot

Marriage to Vivienne, who was committed to a mental hospital for the last decade of her life, means that there is no disputing that Eliot had first-hand knowledge of this kind of illness. Yet there is something self-serving and unempathetic in his contention that those in the throes of a violent mental disorder are somehow in a better place than those observing.

Interesting, then, to see a similar thought occasionally voiced in Craig Robert's new film Eternal Beauty. Jane - played by Sally Hawkins in a high-wire act of a performance, awash with hand gestures, nervous tics, and vocal idiosyncrasies - is a woman living with paranoid schizophrenia. Through this portrayal, we get a bold hint of what it might be like to live with such a condition. And whilst the film doesn't shirk in showing just how miserable and isolating serious mental illness can be - one scene that shows a traumatized Jane crawling into the tiny space beneath a sideboard is both heartbreaking and terrifying - there are moments that partially bear out Eliot's contention. When Jane tells one of her sisters that "I have more friends than you", referencing the voices in her head, you pick up on something that is not just darkly comic but also very provocative. 

I've spent the last few days wondering what to think about this film. Initial thoughts, that it was tactless and  jarring, another addition to the long cinematic history of 'mental illness as freak-show', have given way to seeing it as a daring and poignant sketch that draws you into a nuanced, complex and frightening world. At one point - stop reading and jump to the next paragraph if you're sensitive to having plot-pivots revealed - a montage signals that we are bound for the land of schmaltzy, oddball rom-coms, but then the rug is tugged roughly out from under our feet.

Sally Hawkins as Jane in Eternal Beauty

It is an excellent film, but one with flaws. Billie Piper is Jane's nastier sister Nicola, a sibling whose casual cruelty seems over-heightened - although hyperbolic viciousness is definitely one way in which people deal with difficult relatives. But then again, since everything is being channelled through Jane's head - I love the odd yet penetrable phrase 'in my oils' as a state of mind to aim for - we can parse the behaviour of Jane's relatives as subjective interpretations. Indeed, the presence of a kitschy painting of a person on a beach standing at the water's edge, that crops up in many of the film's interiors, shows we are firmly in the realm of Jane's mind, and the film's empathetic reach allows us to temporarily reside there.

Returning to Eliot, I don't think there is much wrong, subjectively speaking, in his contention - after all, it was his experience - but what the thousands of letters to Hale seem to indicate (and, indeed, many other moments in his personal life), is that his empathy could often find itself buried beneath his undoubted genius. What is new to me, though, are the levels of self-pity that are revealed in his letters (and I'm drawing on those glosses and excerpts that Keegan includes in his review). There's a real sense of the poet as martyr in them.

Saint Sebastian, Botticelli (1474)

Curious then, that after making room for Brian Gilbert's 1994 film Tom & Viv, a biopic of the poet's relationship with his first wife - a film that is firmly on the side of Vivienne, not least in that Willam Dafoe's jawline is too scary to take on the guise of a closeted bard - that it too features a wandering painting, albeit one that doesn't move around in someone's mind, but rather passes through a selection of Eliot's Bloomsbury studies: a print of Botticelli's Saint Sebastian. I would love to know if the holey martyr actually adorned Eliot's walls. If his letters to Hale are any indication, it wouldn't surprise me at all.