Driven to distraction — the unhappy life of Vivien Eliot

Do you think your mother slept with T.S. Eliot? That was the question I needed to ask the 98-year-old in front of me. It wasn’t easy. I’d never met him before. After some preliminary chat, though, I realised this affable man knew exactly where our conversation was heading and had pondered the question a good deal himself.

The barrister Jeremy Hutchinson — Baron Hutchinson of Lullington — was the son of Mary Hutchinson, Eliot’s close friend. Infatuated with the poet for a time, she had met ‘Tom’ and his wife Vivien before Vivien’s adultery with Bertrand Russell, and some years before the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. When I spoke to Jeremy Hutchinson, he was the only person still alive who remembered the young, London-based American Eliot in the period before the publication of his most famous poem.

Hutchinson thought his mother had not slept with Eliot. Her memoir implies their relationship was full of ‘what ifs’.