In September 1921 T.S. Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown. The causes were numerous: anxiety over the mental health of his wife Vivien; delay in launching the Criterion, whose first issue did not appear until a year later; concern for the postwar state of the nation, with its two million unemployed; and concern for the state of the long poem he had planned, which should have been finished months before yet still refused to take shape. But the event that triggered his collapse was a visit that summer from his mother, whom he hadn’t seen for six years.
Eliot’s austere New England parents had disapproved of his marriage in 1915 and of his decision to remain and work in England after completing his doctoral thesis. Charlotte’s visit to London, though eagerly anticipated by her son, promised to be difficult: ‘another anxiety and a joy’ as he put it in a letter to his friend and patron John Quinn. His mother’s health was frail, Vivien’s was unpredictable, and moreover he felt the need to justify his new life.
Charlotte turned up with his sister Marian and older brother Henry. Her visit appears to have gone smoothly, though the fact of her presence may have been reproach enough. Shortly after her departure he collapsed.
David Seabrook, All the Devils are Here, excerto do excerto da Granta.
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