Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922

by T. S. Eliot

  I wish Henry could come over here. Do you not think it would be good for Henry? I know it would be good for Tom. We are both pretty sure that Henry could find war work once he got here. There is a great deal to do with transport etc. Also the health standards for Red Cross are here much lower.

  We have had beautiful spring weather this last week, quite hot and brilliant sunshine. But it is not very welcome I assure you. Thank you so much for the tea. It was a delight – do, if you can, send some more. Tom does so appreciate good tea. For myself unless I have china tea I never can drink it at all. It is difficult now to get any tea but the most inferior kinds.

  Affectly,

  Vivien.

  Tom has got two new suits – one very dark and thick – the other a lightish one. Also a very jolly-looking over-coat. Also a new hat.

  We have received all the parcels now and are most grateful.

  Sweater

  Muffler (this is very useful)

  Pyjamas

  Tea

  Vivien Eliot TO Mary Hutchinson

  MS Texas

  Wed[nesday] 13 March 1918

  Flat [18 Crawford Mansions]

  My dear Mrs Hutchinson

  It was awfully good of you to ask us to this dance. I have really never disliked having to refuse an invitation so much as I did that. It was so tempting to me. Dances are so few, and as you know, they mean a lot to me. I am trying to earn an honest (for a change) penny, by cinema acting, and have attained an unexpected success. I had to refuse the Sitwells – last night – for the same reason.

  I do not like it. But one must do something, and I have been spending recklessly lately. I get so fearfully tired, for I am really a wretched crock, and always have been, but I hate to own it. So I can never do two things, but only one at a time. I have been envying you tonight.

  I have lots to say to you, and I do so want to see you. It was really nice of you to ask us. I appreciated it. Will you come to lunch, at 2 o’clock, on Saturday week? Please do. I do want you to. It is the first time we have free. Please let me know, and do say yes.

  Tom is impossible at present – very American and obstinate! Let me know about Sat. week – and do not say no. I have wanted a talk with you for a long time.

  I had the delight of seeing Ottoline enter Selfridges today! It was wonderful. Write here and say yes to Saturday.

  Yrs

  V.E.

  TO The Editor of The Egoist

  Published March 1918

  Little Tichester,1 Bucks

  Madam,

  I shall be grateful if you will allow me to state in your columns (in response to numerous inquiries) that to the best of my knowledge and belief Captain Arthur Eliot, joint author of The Better ’Ole,2 is not, roughly speaking, a member of my family.

  Yours, etc.,

  T. S. Eliot

  1–The fake address alludes to the music-hall comedian Little Tich (1867–1928), whose acts TSE later described as ‘an orgy of parody of the human race’ (‘In Memoriam: Marie Lloyd’, C. 1: 2, Jan. 1923, 193).

  2–The Better ’Ole, ‘A Fragment from France’, by Bruce Bairnsfather and Arthur Eliot, with music by Herman Darewski, opened at the Oxford Theatre, London, on 4 Aug. 1917. It ran for 811 performances, and was made into a silent film in 1918. Osbert Sitwell recorded that in the 1920s, visitors to TSE’s flat, 38 Burleigh Mansions, were told by TSE to ask at the lodge for ‘Captain Eliot’.

  TO His Mother

  MS Houghton

  24 March 1918

  18 Crawford Mansions,

  Crawford St, W.1

  My dearest Mother,

  I should be very much pained if you thought it was not worthwhile to write so often, just because you hear from me so seldom. I always look forward to your letters; of course they do not arrive so regularly as they are written, but I like to think of you, writing every Sunday. And I am always interested in what you have to say, and it doesn’t matter what you write about. It is, of course a check to one in writing, always finding oneself running up against subjects which it is wiser not to mention, and everything seems to lead to such subjects now. Do you remember the letters I wrote at the beginning of the war? I used to enjoy describing the appearances of London then. And even if one wrote so freely now, one would do it only as a kind of duty of letting people at a distance know.

  The spring has come very early and very warm and dry. Yesterday was a boiling day for this time of year, the sky absolutely cloudless. We had five people to lunch, the most ambitious attempt we have ever made, and our small dining-library was packed. But it went off very well; we are excellent hosts, I think; and our servant did admirably. It is easier to have people to lunch than to dinner, of course, because of the impossibility of serving meat; at lunch fish and spaghetti suffice. Of course, entertaining is in some respects cheaper because of the restrictions.

  This week brings me two holidays, Good Friday and the Monday after Easter. Also, after tomorrow, no lectures for a fortnight; and then only two weeks more of lectures after that. Then I shall be able to do something for the Little Review. I will send you a number of the Egoist. If you see the Nation, there is a review of mine (Mysticism and Logic) in this week’s (Sat. 23d Mch) issue.1

  I had a nice letter from Ada this week, enclosing their wedding present. Has Shef had any rise in salary? She does not say so.

  I look forward always to your next letter. In the last you mention sending the pyjamas. In case my letter went astray, I acknowledge them again, with much thanks. They will be very nice for Summer.

  Goodbye, dear Mother

  Your devoted son

  Tom.

  1–TSE, ‘Style and Thought’, unsigned review of BR, Mysticism and Logic (1917). On 17 June, Russell wrote to Miss Rinder of the No-Conscription Fellowship: ‘Much the best review of Mysticism, the only one with distinction, was Eliot’s in Nation’ (quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 519).

  TO Eleanor Hinkley

  TS Houghton

  1 April 1918

  18 Crawford Mansions

  Dear Eleanor,

  I just received your charming letter this morning, and as today is a bank-holiday, I felt that I ought to try to make a more adequate return to it than the scrap I sent off to you yesterday. So you will be astonished to receive two letters at once.

  I like your letters, especially lately, (if I can speak of your last before this as ‘lately’) because they give me more positively than anyone’s else from America the impression that everything is the same, and at the same time the impression that you are interestingly changing. You always begin by conjuring up the exact image of a Sunday afternoon and evening with baked beans and toast and cocoa and other nice things and firelight, quite as it always was, and conversation about little odd new people whom we had just met. But what is larger, your letter gave me the impression of your being quite untouched by the war, and as pursuing your own way quietly and persistently. Perhaps you think it was simply an accident or because the subject is depressing that you omitted all reference, and perhaps you hardly realise consciously yet what the effort to keep oneself unaffected by the war means, but I think it was instinctive force of character. Everyone else in America who writes to me is quite lost in the war and become quite uninteresting, and it makes me feel much more remote from them than if they lived in an oasis where the war had never been heard of. Most people cease to develop, or develop only in the same unpleasant way as each other. Of course in England the sentimental heroic phase is gone, but there are very few people who have been able quite to preserve values and stick to their own business. I think that the play writing has probably done a lot for you. I imagine that you have changed a great deal since I knew you, but changed in ways that I should like and understand; and I fancy that when I see you again it will be like making a new and interesting friend and at the same time an understood old one, I am looking to the hope that you will come over here for a long stay after the war, and I shall gladly take the
responsibility of its being worth your while.

  You appear to have been making a good many acquaintances. I think one ought always to be meeting new people, and indeed to spend more time with them than with one’s old friends, for various reasons – partly that they demand more of one, (the former) and that one mustn’t lose one’s curiosity and adaptability.

  I am very glad you like James. You have read some of the best. I believe that the Aspern Papers, the American Scene, and the Middle Years are very good. He is a wonderful conscientious artist, one of the very few, and more European than most English or Americans. I think he has about the keenest sense of Situation of any novelist, and his always alert intelligence is a perpetual delight. As a critic of America he is certainly unique. I am reading R[oderick] Hudson now in preparation for an article for the James number of the Little Review [August 1918]. I am writing on the Hawthorne influence on James, which comes out at the end in an astonishing unfinished book The Sense of the Past (read the scenario at the end). Hudson I find dull and stilted and old fashioned; but it is a very early one. I think you might like Turgenev. I admire him as much as any novelist, but especially in the Sportsman’s Sketches. His method looks simple and slight, but he is a consummate master with it. A House of Gentlefolk is good. I come more and more to demand that novels should be well written, and perceive more clearly the virtue and defects of the Victorians. George Eliot had a great talent, and wrote one great story, Amos Barton, and went steadily down hill afterwards.1 Her best stunt was just this exact realism of country life, as good in its way as anything in Russian, and she thought her business was philosophic tragedy. Romola is the most inartistic novel I have ever read. Every novelist has a knack for doing some one stunt, and the Victorians none of them were selfconscious enough. Thackeray could do the Yellowplush Papers and the Steyne part of Vanity Fair, but he had a picture of himself as a kindly satirist. Not at all, he hadn’t brains enough, nor courage enough to find out really what he could do well, which was high society sordidness, and do it. Standards of good writing in English are deplorably low. Meredith knew what he was doing, but unfortunately it wasn’t worth doing, don’t read him. The Way of All Flesh was written by a man who was not an artist and had no sense of style; it is too long, and the beginning of the book and the adventures of Ernest are dull, but the character of Christina is amazing. Butler just happened to know this phase of English life particularly well; Christina is one of the finest pieces of dissection of mental dishonesty that I know anywhere; Butler pursues her relentlessly to her death. It is a book you must read.

  But one simply must read French; let there be no nonsense about that; it is the most serious modern literature.2 Both for prose and poetry. It is hard work, and one will never know the language thoroughly, but no one can ever have a really trained taste with English alone. English writing is mostly very careless. When you can afford it I think you ought to subscribe to the Little Review. I would send it to you but it is published in New York. There is a good deal about it that is offensively aggressive, but it will keep one’s brain active. Make them send you back numbers for several months, so as to have James Joyce’s novel complete and you ought to have the February number, which is a most valuable collection and guide to modern French verse.3 Your account of Shef’s criticism is amusing. Of course Shef is wholly a schoolmaster, and a very good one, but with little or no literary critical sense. No, he has more than that; I am unjust; he has extremely good ‘native perceptions’; but nothing does more harm to these perceptions than the profession of teaching; the conscientiousness which comes with responsibility toward young people. He is terribly conscientious. He has not preserved any wildness, any liberty.4

  I must really stop now. Thank you for your letter!

  Affectionately

  Tom

  1–TSE wrote in ‘The Hawthorne Aspect’ that all of George Eliot’s ‘genuine feeling went into the visual realism of Amos Barton’ (Little Review 5: 4, Aug. 1918).

  2–In ‘Contemporanea’ (on anthologies of French poetry), TSE professed: ‘any one who is writing or seriously criticizing indigenous verse should know the French’ (Egoist 5: 6, June– July 1918).

  3–The first episode of Ulysses had appeared in the Mar. issue; EP’s ‘A Study in French Poets’ came out in Feb.

  4–TSE’s brother-in-law Alfred Sheffield. On 13 Nov. 1917, Robert Frost, who had been taught by him at Harvard, wrote to his daughter Lesley Frost, who was taught by him at Wellesley: ‘Sheffield is a clever cut-and-dried mind, but he is a survival. Remember how he drove me out of Harvard.’

  TO Bertrand Russell

  MS McMaster

  13 April 1918

  [London]

  Dear Bertie,

  I wanted to write you a line before Tuesday – as I should not, of course, be able to be present, as unfortunately on previous occasions.1 I am glad to hear that Bosanquet and others have turned out so well2 – I think that is awfully gratifying. Demos3 told me that he had been giving you bibliography on behaviourism. I am not convinced that Watson4 and those people are really very important. But the avenue of investigation which you suggested to me in a conversation a few weeks ago impressed me very deeply, and I hope you will go in for it very hard. It struck me as important as anything to be done; besides, it would be very amusing to stand the biological sciences on their heads that way.

  With all sincerest good wishes.

  Yours as ever

  Tom

  1–BR was coming to the end of a course of eight lectures on ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’, which were printed in The Monist between Oct. 1918 and July 1919, and collected in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, ed. Robert C. Marsh (1956).

  2–Writing in a weekly newspaper, The Tribunal, on 3 Jan., BR alleged that American soldiers would be employed as strike-breakers in England, ‘an occupation to which [they were] accustomed when at home’. He was charged at Bow Street on 10 Feb. with ‘having in a printed publication made certain statements likely to prejudice His Majesty’s relations with the United States of America’, found guilty, and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in the Second Division. Wishing to continue his work in Brixton, and to enjoy maximum privileges, he sought a transfer to the First Division by asking ‘eminent philosophers’, including Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), to petition the Home Secretary. The appeal was successful, and TSE was able to visit him in prison.

  3–Raphael Demos (1892–1968), philosopher, had reached Harvard from Asia Minor in 1913, and worked as a waiter to pay his doctoral fees. An assistant in philosophy, 1916–17, he was planning to spend a year at Cambridge before returning to Harvard as an instructor. While in England he would call on TSE at the bank, and assist him with modern Greek translation. He was ultimately to become Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, 1919–62; author of The Philosophy of Plato (1939).

  4–John Watson (1878–1958), American psychologist and founder of behaviourism; author of Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1914). BR attacked him in The Analysis of Mind (1921).

  TO His Mother

  MS Houghton

  28 April 1918

  18 Crawford Mansions

  Dearest Mother,

  I received a letter from you and two newspapers by the last mail. I was very glad to get both. The newspapers, however, made me think that while America is very conscientiously ‘conserving foodstuffs’ etc. she is as wasteful of paper as ever. I fear it would take very serious privation indeed to make Americans realise the wastefulness of such huge papers filled with nonsense and personalities. But can nothing be said? Will you not tell people that all through Europe the greatest economy is now exercised in the use of paper; that newspapers are reduced to the smallest possible compass, and that the public has lost nothing thereby? The forests won’t hold out indefinitely in any case; and if less pulp were wasted on newspapers, good books could perhaps be printed more cheaply.

  Judging from American newspapers, the war seems
to have affected the country not very seriously yet. I don’t mean that it is not the chief subject of interest, but that it is simply the chief subject of interest, and not the obsessing nightmare that it is to Europe. And we can’t make you realise three thousand miles away all that that means. Even with all your privations and difficulties. Your papers talk about the ‘fight for civilisation’; do they realise either what civilisation means or what the fight for it means? We are all immeasurably and irremediably altered over here by the last three years.

  Harold Peters has been in Scotland lately; I have been hoping that he can get up to London. That would be very interesting.

  We should be glad of anything you can send, but I do not know what things are possible.

  My courses are over, I am glad to say. Both classes want me back next year, one for a course on Elizabethan Literature, the other for a course on the Development of English Poetry. I shall keep up the first one, if it continues, but the other class, the one which started this year, I do not think will be worth my while. They paid me one pound per lecture, but out of that travelling expenses and a dinner in town (not having time to go back) always took 3/-, and the time, by no means inconsiderable, of preparation must be counted too. So I might devote my time more profitably to other things.