Final Happiness

Abstract

In 1949 a momentous change had taken place in Eliot’s office when he appointed a new secretary. This was Valerie Fletcher, whose interest in his poetry was awakened at the age of fourteen, when she first heard John Gielgud’s recording of ‘Journey of the Magi’. A friend of her family who knew Eliot persuaded him to autograph a copy of his poems for her, and her interest became such an obsession that her one ambition was to become his secretary. With this in mind she left her home in Leeds, against her parents’ wishes, to train at a secretarial college. She disliked this so much that she left, and engaged an agency to find secretarial work with a writer; her second employer was Charles Morgan. She left him after a year, and this proved to be a recommendation when Eliot interviewed her. Before leaving her application she had walked about Russell Square for nearly two hours. During the interview he smoked hard; at the end he told her that no decision could be made until he had seen the other candidates. He pointed to her bandaged hand, and expressed the hope that she would be able to type again in ten days. Two days later she was offered the appointment.