Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922

by T. S. Eliot

  With kindest regards to Mrs Eliot and to yourself,

  Sincerely yours,

  James H. Woods

  1–Josiah Royce (1855–1916), Professor of the History of Philosophy from 1892. TSE had attended his graduate seminar in Comparative Methodology, 1913–14.

  2–R. F. Alfred Hoernlé (1880–1943), Assistant Professor of Philosophy, 1914–20, had written to Woods on 13 June: ‘He knows his Bradley excellently, and has done a most valuable piece of work in bringing together and treating systematically B’s scattered dicta on feeling, experience, thought, etc.’

  3–Now at Houghton. Published as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (1964).

  TO Conrad Aiken

  TS Huntington

  21 August 1916

  18 Crawford Mansions, Crawford St, London w.

  My dear Conrad,

  What do you think of me? Have you written to me at all since you sent me your book?1 If so it went astray, or rather went to a deserted address, and the people at Culworth House, St John’s Wood, have not shown themselves over zealous in forwarding mail. Will you accept the present screed for the scramble of pedagogy and journalism (NOT forgetfulness or intentional insult) of the past three months? I am not even sure of your address; but it was Chestnut Street, and I hope that if I put on the wrong number the post-office will try every door in the street and then send it on to your aunt Mrs Potter’s in Sparks Street, Cambridge.

  First to explain myself. You know that my wife has been very ill all the winter. She has been getting gradually better, but very slowly. At present we are at Bosham, near Chichester in Sussex, for most of the holidays, and she has improved a great deal here, so I feel encouraged. But it was a great anxiety all winter and spring, as she kept having incidental troubles like teeth which set her back. I may say that this was not a case of maternity in any degree. Most people imagine so unless I explain. It has been nerves, complicated by physical ailments, and induced largely by the most acute neuralgia. This has been one leading cause for my neglect of correspondence with everybody in America except my immediate family.

  Another cause is the mentioned scramble. The school takes up most of my days, and in my spare (sic) time I have been writing: philosophy for the Monist and the International Journal of Ethics, reviews for the New Statesman, the Manchester Guardian and the Westminster Gazette. The first two I got in with through Bertrand Russell, the others through a man named Sidney [sic]Waterlow. I am now trying to get an introduction to the Nation. The papers are rather hard up for good reviewers at present. On the other hand they are devoting much less space to books than they used to do. I have reviewed some good books and much trash. It is good practice in writing, and teaches one speed both in reading and writing. It is bad in this way, that one acquires an extraordinary appetite for volumes, and exults at the mass of printed matter which one has devoured and evacuated. I crave a new book every few days. The New Statesman is rather the best fun to review for. They give me pretty good books, and as soon as I have time I am going to approach them with an article. I am doing a long review on Charles Péguy2 for them now. Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

  This autumn will find me busier than ever, as I am preparing a set of six lectures on contemporary intellectual movements in France to deliver under the auspices of Oxford to the general public3 – mostly, I believe, ladies. If they come off, I ought to be able to secure plenty of lecturing, at least enough to keep us. And I have several distinguished predecessors on the Oxford lecturing circuit – Belloc4 and F. E. Smith5 for instance. You will see that I have been very busy grinding axes. Of poetry I have not written a line; I have been far too worried and nervous. I hope that the end of another year will see me in a position to think about verse a bit.

  Nearly everyone has faded away from London, or is there very rarely. The vorticists are non-existent. Lewis is a gunner in the R.G.A.,6 Wadsworth is something in the navy and is out in the Mediterranean, F. M. Hueffer is settled to an army career in the Welsh Guards and is in France,7 T. E. Hulme has been in France for ages. As for the Hampstead school, I haven’t the remotest idea whether Aldington is conscripted or not,8 and don’t care and as a matter of fact have never met him, but I believe H. D.9 is doing his part of the Egoist, and is pegging away at Greek. There are no conscientious objectors among the Vortex, they are all in another set, mostly localised in Bloomsbury. One of them, Gilbert Cannan (novelist)10 I met down here at Bosham not long ago; a cadaverous silent person. There are a few rather nice people about here – G. Lowes Dickinson11 is one. Ezra holds out in London, and refuses to rusticate; he has one or two Japs with whom he fences. He has just translated (with untiring energy) Laforgue’s ‘Salome’, and wants me to do the ‘Hamlet’12 to go to make up a volume between us of the Moralités Légendaires, and I have done a few pages of it.

  We are vegetating and gaining health against the coming term on a backwater [Bosham] near Portsmouth harbour, where the tide is either very much in or very much out; the place alternates between mud and water, and is very charming. I have been working always in the morning, and bathing, boating and bicycling in the afternoon.

  I was awfully glad to have your book, and very much pleased at your sending it to me. And now that I have come up from the country for a night, I find it safely locked away from me in a bookcase of which my wife has the key. I marked a number of pages with marks of admiration or disapproval, and meant to quote them to you, but this will probably be at Christmas, as I may not have time for another letter before then. And I am too tired out from a day at the British Museum to flow with ideas at this midnight. All I can say now is that I liked the book, some of the poems very much, some less. It seemed to me a distinct advance in workmanship over the first book. You have gone a good way. I think the title poems on the whole by far the best.13 I don’t say that I like them – but you will probably be more flattered by the emotion they did produce. Anything which can provoke as strong nausea with life as those did in me is well done. They affect me like Maupassant. And your whole viewpoint at present, my dear Conrad, what is it? I mean, how do you feel early in the morning and on Sunday afternoons? That is the real test, and I wish you would come out with it in a letter. There is a kind of cynicism in some of the poems (the sequel to Earth Triumphant I am thinking of)14 which I should like to analyse … And then your blessed materialism I suppose … I am still a relativist, a cracker of small theories like nuts, essentially an egoist perhaps, but I have not the leisure to be cynical, a good thing perhaps, life is always positively something or the opposite, it has a sens, if only that[:]

  the torch-bearers, advancing from behind the throne which King Artaphernes15 had just vacated, progressed two by two into the centre of the hall. To the shrill piping of the quowhombom and the muffled rattle of the bass trpaxli mingled with the plaintive wail of the thirty captive kings, they circled thrice forwards and thrice backwards, clockwise and counterclockwise, according to the sacred ritual of the rpat, and finally when the signal was given by the pswhadi or high priest, they turned a flip flop somersault and disappeared down their own throats, leaving the assembly in darkness.

  But if you still believe in my sanity, and receive this letter, write to me. I will write, for I find that this letter contains nothing of the slightest interest.

  yours ever

  Tom

  1–Aiken, Turns and Movies, and other tales in verse (1916).

  2–TSE’s review of Victor Boudon, Avec Charles Péguy, de la Lorraine à la Marne (août– septembre, 1914), appeared in NS 8: 183 (7 Oct. 1916).

  3–Between 3 Oct. and 12 Dec., TSE gave afternoon lectures and classes on modern French literature at Ilkley in Yorkshire. The average attendance at each of the lectures was fiftyeight, dropping to fifteen at the discussion classes which followed. In his r
eports he regretted ‘that no papers were offered as I missed this means of observing the reaction of the audience. The subject was difficult and involved, and most of the writers discussed were new to the majority of the students.’ Shyness prevented questions being asked ‘which might have proved interesting and useful’. Owing to the war there were few men and the local secretary noted the unpopularity of the hour, which meant that most teachers could not attend. Some members were engaged in nursing, while others were ‘too busy or too tired to attend regularly or to read’. For this and TSE’s other lecture series, see Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel (1999), 25–51.

  4–Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), poet, author, and Liberal MP 1906–10.

  5–F. E. Smith, created first Earl of Birkenhead in 1919 (1872–1930), lawyer, wit and statesman, had given university extension lectures on modern history.

  6–Having volunteered for the Royal Garrison Artillery in Mar., WL spent the rest of the year in military camps in Britain.

  7–Ford Madox Hueffer (1873–1939), novelist, memoirist and critic, joined the Welsh Guards in 1915, and fought on the Somme and at Ypres before being invalided out in 1917. The four novels of Parade’s End (1924–8) drew on his experiences.

  8–Though he volunteered at the outbreak of war, RA’s enlistment was deferred for medical reasons. He was sent to France in Dec. 1916. See Glossary of Names.

  9–Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), American-born poet and novelist, who wrote as H. D. at EP’s instigation. She moved to London in 1911, and in 1913 she had married RA, assistant editor of The Egoist.

  10–Gilbert Cannan (1884–1955), novelist and dramatist; a founder of the Manchester Repertory Theatre.

  11–Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862–1932), historian, pacifist, and promoter of the League of Nations; Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge; Apostle. OM thought him ‘a rare and gentle Pagan Saint … by temperament religious and poetical’ (Ottoline at Garsington [1974], 117–19).

  12–Laforgue retold the stories of Salomé and Hamlet in his Moralités Légendaires (1887). EP’s version of the ‘Salomé’ appeared as ‘Our Tetrarchal Précieuse’, Little Review 5: 3 (July 1918). TSE’s ‘few pages’ of the ‘Hamlet’ do not survive, and it is unlikely that he persevered with the task, especially in the light of EP’s remark that translations of Laforgue’s prose were held up by copyright laws (‘Irony, Laforgue, and Some Satire’, Poetry 11: 2, Nov. 1917). In ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ TSE wrote: ‘The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse’ (SW, 102).

  13–‘Turns and Movies’ is a narrative and dramatic sequence of fifteen poems about dancers and performers and their amours.

  14–Earth Triumphant (1914) had been Aiken’s first book, and the last poem in Turns and Movies, ‘This Dance of Life’, was subtitled ‘Earth Triumphant: Part Two’.

  15–Brother of Darius the Great (King of Persia 522–486 bc), King Artaphernes figures in books V and VI of Herodotus’ Histories. TSE is parodying the ethnography of classical historians.

  TO Eleanor Hinkley

  TS Houghton

  5 September 1916

  18 Crawford Mansions

  Dear Eleanor,

  You will not believe that this is really the first time that I have been able to write to you! I am in despair at being able to make it clear to everyone how little time I have now. And the more time passes, the better and longer letter one feels that one ought to write, to make up. So in consequence I have been losing my correspondents, except Jim Clement, who writes whether I write or not, though his letters consist chiefly of complaints at my not writing. But then as I have never written to you all this year, you have reason to be offended with me. But I hope you will write to me this fall. I used to depend on your letters, and I am hopelessly out of touch with Cambridge gossip, too.

  I am writing now because I see no chance of more time later. So you will, I hope, accept this scrap as the best I can do. I have just come back to town from our holidays, leaving Vivien behind for a few days to see if she can snatch a little more benefit from the country before the long winter. She had a bad attack of neuralgia just last week, lasting five days, and it undid, I am afraid, most of the good that the previous weeks had done. I am very anxious, as London winters are horrible. I do not know when I shall be able to bring her to America, either from the point of view of time or her health. But I really hope that she will have a somewhat better winter than last.

  We enjoyed Bosham very much. It is a tiny fishing village, with no hotels, not on the open sea, but up an inlet at the head of a bay, not very far from Portsmouth. It is very informal, and I lived most of the time in a shirt and flannel trowsers.1 The chief occupations bathing, boating, and bicycling. There are lovely walks back toward the Sussex downs. The natives are charming, much like New England country people, both in aspect and accent, they use ‘sir’ rather more, but are equally keen on making money out of visitors. But I must say that only a few days ago, when we were out walking, we stopped in at a farmhouse where we were given as many mushrooms as we could take away for sixpence. We had lodgings, with meals in our own rooms in the usual way, and a bouncing kindly landlady, named Miss Kate Smith, a very good cook. Her brother-in-law, Mr Tillett (he would be ‘Capn’ with us), is an authority on the weather, and informed us every night exactly what the prospects for tomorrow would be, but as he always prophesied rain, and also gravely informed me that the barometer in Bosham usually went contrariwise, I came to place very little faith in him. When we had my brother-in-law for a few days (he has been invalided home for insomnia) we had a sail boat twice, a very slow one, but it was the first time I had been in a sail boat for two years, and I enjoyed it as much as Vivien and Maurice. He is a tall, rather stylish boy, with a bristly little moustache, and looks nearer twenty-five than twenty. He is thoroughly WORN OUT and from some of the horrors which he once entertained us with I am not surprised. A boy of nineteen (for he had his twentieth birthday with us) who is quite used to the sight of disjecta membra and has spent nights when he couldn’t sleep in shooting rats with a revolver, makes me feel comparatively immature. But his life has not made him callous at all. And he is very open minded, much more so really than my own family or our friend Roscoe Thayer2 of Cambridge, in certain respects.

  There were a number of friends of mine at or near Bosham for some time, including a man named Lowes Dickinson, who has just been lecturing in America. So that we were by no means lonely. Then I had a good deal of work to do there, reviewing, which has to be punctual, and some preparation for the course of lectures which I am to give in the winter, or rather in the next three months. I will send you the prospectus3 for them when it is out, it looks very impressive, but I am wondering how I can acquire knowledge of all the things which I have therein engaged myself to talk about. That is what I have come up for, to read at the British Museum, and write out full analyses of the lectures. It will be rather trying at first, and I am hoping that the attendance will not be large.

  Do write to me. There is so much that I want to hear about. Tell me what Frederick is preaching about.4 Tell me how Emily [Hale] is. And about the aunts and uncles. I must try to write to Aunt Mattie.5 And lastly, tell me a lot about your immediate family and then about yourself. It will take you at least six of your typed pages. Remember that you are going to see me again as soon as I can come, and that I hate to lose contact in the meantime. Give my love to Aunt Susie, and Believe me

  Your affectionate cousin

  Tom

  I enclose a picture – made for my Identity Book, to go to Sussex. Do I look the same?

  Remember that this and all letters are read by the censors. Give my affection to Harry Child, if you see him.

  1–‘I shall wear white flannel trowsers, and walk upon the beach’ (‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 123 (TSE’s spelling is the same as in his TSS, and in Poetry and Catholic Anthology).

  2–William Roscoe Thayer (1859
–1923), Harvard-educated author and editor.

  3–TSE’s lectures at Ilkley, Yorkshire, from 3 Oct. to 12 Dec.: ‘Syllabus of a Course of Six Lectures on Modern French Literature by T. Stearns Eliot, MA (Harvard)’. See Schuchard, ‘In the Lecture Halls’, Eliot’s Dark Angel, 27–32.

  4–TSE’s cousin Frederick Eliot was Associate Unitarian Minister of the First Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1915–17. TSE remarked in a later year, ‘some Eliots are wiser than others, and my cousin Frederick … is an ass’ (quoted in Mary Trevelyan, ‘The Pope of Russell Square’).

  5–Martha Laurens Stearns (1849–1919), unmarried younger sister of TSE’s mother.

  TO His Mother

  TS Houghton

  6 September 1916

  18 Crawford Mansions

  Dearest Mother,

  Before I mention anything else I must speak of the letter which you enclosed to me, else I shall forget it. It is quite true that there is a picture which I forgot, in the scramble and confusion, to deliver. It is a small water colour of Oriel College, and is wrapped in brown paper, addressed to E. D. Keith, Phoenix Mills, North Brookfield. It should be in a drawer of my bureau at Gloucester, or else on the shelf of the closet. If you do not find it in either place it might be in the drawer of the little smelley table, or in the steamer trunk which I took and left behind. I hope you will be able to find it, as I feel very much ashamed at having failed in the commission. If you do find it, will you send it on for me to E. D. Keith, ‘Plumstead’, North Brookfield, Mass.? I will write to him as well. He was a nice fellow, and roomed at Miss Carroll’s on my floor. He has been married since.