Ever since he first heard the initial stanzas of TS Eliot’s Prufrock, author Steven Carroll has had a long fascination and engagement with the poet.
“One of the very first things I ever wrote was a play about Eliot, his first marriage and the writing of The Waste Land,” says the 73-year-old Australian author. “Then I heard about a play called Tom and Viv and the production plans were shelved. But the idea stayed there.”
Like so many good ideas, this one sat in his mind, percolating for years, before finding another form: his 2007 novel The Lost Life, which centres on the relationship between Eliot and his muse and confidante Emily Hale, over one month in 1934. “I thought it was a one-off,” says Carroll. “But on a flight from Brisbane I was talking to [book critic] Geordie Williamson and he said, ‘You could do the whole Four Quartets’. And by the time I got back to Melbourne, the ideas were there.”
The Lost Life was followed by three sequels that make up Carroll’s Eliot Quartet, with each novel reimagining points in the poet’s life. A World of Other People sees Eliot volunteering as an aircraft spotter during the Blitz in 1941. In A New England Affair, it is 1965, Eliot is dead and Emily Hale, now 72 years old, confronts her position as the poet’s muse. And finally, the recently released Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, which follows Eliot’s first wife Vivienne, after she was committed to an asylum while married to him.
“Right from the start I decided that Eliot would not be a character, but a presence,” says Carroll. “It was too daunting to go into the mind of TS Eliot. Instead you have a portrait of him from all different people, incorporating all sorts of facets of Eliot – something that one portrayal in one novel couldn’t do. The Eliot you meet in The Lost Life is quite different from the Eliot in Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight.”
In real life, Vivienne was committed to a London asylum in 1938 and died there in 1947; her estranged husband never visited her while she was there. But Carroll imagines a different life for her: Vivienne escapes the asylum and goes into hiding.
“I know a fair bit about Vivienne,” he says. “I read all her diaries. It’s quite fascinating to look at her handwriting – she had quite a tragic life. She had all sorts of illnesses and was put on drugs by doctors at a very early age. The diaries are fascinating. She would have been an amazing person to meet, but an exhausting one as well.”
Vivienne suffered from extreme mood swings and Carroll believes she may have had endometriosis. “Her bleeding was highly irregular and very heavy. She suffered a lot of pain,” he says. “Even though I know quite a lot about Vivienne Eliot from research, we can never know the core of anyone. But I knew how tragic and sad her life was.”
Part of the tragedy of Tom and Vivienne was that they should never have got married, he thinks: “It was a complete mismatch. When they married, they didn’t tell their parents, despite being quite old at the time, at 27. Eliot came from a puritanical background, he both craved sex and was afraid of it. If they knew more of the world and each other, they would have had a six-week affair and parted ways. It was a marriage eventually made in hell, not helped by Eliot’s aloofness. But when it came time to help each other with their writing – they were extraordinary. [Eliot’s sister said that] she broke him as a human being, but made him as a writer.”
Carroll is one of Australia’s most prolific literary names. While many writers are lucky to produce a book or two a decade, Carroll, the author of 12 novels and winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary award and the Miles Franklin, is usually onto his next work before the previous is out: “It’s something I did right from the very beginning, in case I got bad reviews, and your confidence gets knocked about – writing is a confidence game.”
While he is a quick writer – Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight was written in seven weeks during lockdown in Melbourne – Carroll spends a lot of time planning, having spent a year mapping the novel’s plot before even putting pen to paper. (He writes the first 10,000 words of his novels by hand.)
“Some days I was writing 3,000 words a day. These Eliot books are written very quickly but I take a long time planning them, working through my themes and thinking,” he says. “It’s a habit I get from being a playwright – and when I hit the deck running, I tend to write quickly. There is no substitute for knowing what you want to say and where the story is going.”
Lockdown played to Carroll’s strengths. “I wrote from the cabin in my backyard in Brunswick. You couldn’t go anywhere, you couldn’t do anything. I don’t mix with writers much anyway and I don’t go out much. I tend to stay at home quite a bit. It was business as usual, with a very surreal ambience to it.”
But despite the lack of change in his world, Carroll thinks that the pandemic found its way into Vivienne’s.
“I wonder if that impulse to take Vivienne out of the asylum and grant her some freedom was connected to the lockdowns?” he asks. “We were all craving freedom, after all.”
Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight by Steven Carroll is published by HarperCollins in Australia ($12.99)
This article was amended on 23 March. An earlier version incorrectly quoted Carroll as saying he sometimes writes 7000 words a day.
