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Posted by Tom Herbert on May 27, 19103 at 14:27:09:
In Reply to: Re: Jean Verdenal posted by Tom Herbert on May 27, 19103 at 13:48:12:
: : if you find anything out about verdenal then can you post a little message up hear so i can get in touch because i'd like to hear about it.
The most extensive discussion about the relationshp between T. S. Eliot and Jean Verdenal that I've run across is in the book by Carole Seymour-Jones "Painted Shadow", a biography about Eliot's first wife, Vivienne. Seymour-Jones hypothesizes that Eliot and Verdenal were lovers while Eliot was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. They met, if I remember correctly, in 1910 (Eliot would have been 22 at the time since he was born in 1888) and kept in touch with one another for several years, primarily via letters.
Several of Verdenal's letters to Eliot have survived and are in the Houghton Library at Harvard University while, to my knowledge, none of Eliot's letters to Verdenal have survived.
Eliot dedicated "The Waste Land" to Verdenal and, if I remember correctly, "Prufrock" as well. (I'm trying to remember the dates of publication, which seem to be circa 1922 and 1917 respectively, but don't hold me to that, please).
The reference in "The Waste Land" to the Phonecian Sailor is thought to be a reference to Verdenal, as are Eliot's numerous poetic references to death by water. Personally, and this is just my two cents worth, I think the stanza in "East Coker" beginning with "The wounded surgeon plies the steel ...." is a reference to Verdenal as well, rather than a reference to the crucifixion of Christ, as I think is commonly umed.
Verdenal was studying to be a doctor at the time he met Eliot and finished his medical exams in time to enlist in the French army in WW I. He was killed in action at the age of 24 while providing medical attention to the wounded, apparently while waist-deep in water in the Dardenelles strait, during the Gallipoli (sp ?) campaign, in 1915.
It is possible, of course, that Eliot and Verdenal had a platonic, brotherly love sort of relationship without any ual component ociated with it at all, though I'd want to read the letters at Harvard before drawing any conclusions about that one way or the other, which I haven't had a chance to do yet. From what I've read, however, if they weren't lovers, they were certainly best friends and shared a deep, emotional bond with one another.
-- Tom
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart
-- from "East Coker"
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