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reality of sin in all its influences and phases; she was the turning wind of his spiritual storm. Vivien herself understood this with the canniness of a seer: “As to Tom’s
mind
,” she once said, “I am his mind.” The abyss of that mind, and its effect on Eliot as it disintegrated, led him first through a vortex of flight, and then to tormented contemplation, and finally to the religious calm of “Burnt Norton”:
    Time present and time past
    Are both perhaps present in time future
.
    And time future contained in time past
.
    Time past marked the psychological anarchy of his youthful work, that vacuous ignorance of sin that had produced “Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Hollow Men,”
The Waste Land
. Not to acknowledge the real presence of sin is to be helpless in one’s degradation. Consequently Prufrock is a wraith “pinned and wriggling on the wall,” uncertain how to “spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways”; Gerontion is “a dry brain in a dry season”; the hollow men “filled with straw” cannot falter through to the end of a prayer—“For Thine is / Life is / For Thine is the”; the voice of
The Waste Land
—“burning burning burning burning”—is unable to imagine prayer. And the chastening “future contained in time past” is almost surely the inferno that was Vivien: what else could that earlier hollowness have arrived at if not a retributive burning? The waste land—a dry season of naked endurance without God—had earned him the ordeal with Vivien; but the ordeal with Vivien was to serve both time past and time future. Time past: he would escape from the formless wastes of past metaphysical drift only because Vivien had jolted him into a sense of sin. And time future: only because she had jolted him into a sense of sin would he uncover the means to future absolution—the genuine avowal of himself as sinner. To the inferno of Vivien he owed clarification of what had been. To the inferno of Vivien he owed clarification of what might yet be. If Vivien was Eliot’s mind, she had lodged Medusa there, and Medusa became both raging muse and purifying savior. She was the motive for exorcism, confession, and penitence. She gave him “Ash-Wednesday,” a poem of supplication. She gave him
Four Quartets
, a subdued lyric of near-forgiveness, with long passages of serenely prosaic lines (occasionally burned out into the monotone of philosophic fatigue), recording the threshold of the shriven soul:
    … 
music heard so deeply
    That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
    While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses
,
    Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
    Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action
.
    The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation
.
    What makes such “reading backward” possible, of course, is the biographies. (I have relied on Peter Ackroyd and Lyndall Gordon for much of the narrative of Eliot’s life.) Knowledge of the life interprets—decodes—the poems: exactly what Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative was designed to prevent. Occasionally the illuminations cast by reading backward provoke the uneasy effect of looking through a forbidden keyhole with a flashlight:
    “
My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me
.
    “
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak
.
    “
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
    “
I never know what you are thinking. Think
.”
         
I think we are in rats’ alley
    Where the dead men lost their bones
.
    That, wailing out of a jagged interval in
The Waste Land
, can only be Vivien’s hysteria, and Eliot’s recoil from it. But it hardly requires such explicitness (and there is little else that is so clearly explicit) to recognize that his biographers have broken the code of Eliot’s reticence—that programmatic reticence embodied in his doctrine of impersonality. The objective correlative was intended to direct the reader to a symbolic