Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922

by T. S. Eliot

  I tell you all this in the strictest confidence, of course: I particularly don’t want it mentioned at present. It is so vague. We have done all we can at present, and Vivien, who has been invaluable, is going back to the country at once. She is worn out. I had already got my brother in to live with me (at Wigmore Street) as we did not expect her to come back, and it is very confined and uncomfortable quarters for three people.

  Of course I did not expect to do any work while my family were here; but I have not even attended to ordinary and necessary business correspondence.

  I am taking a short holiday at the end of next week, till the 2nd. Vivien sends her love and is very anxious about you, and will write soon. I am looking forward to seeing you in August –

  Affectionately

  Tom.

  1–In June 1921, DHL had published Women in Love, in which the character of Hermione Crich is based partly upon OM. When she read a typescript in 1917, she claimed to have been libelled and investigated the possibility of legal action, but none was taken.

  2–Mary Lilian Harmsworth, née Share (d. 1937): Lady Rothermere. Daughter of George Wade Share, in 1893 she married Harold Sydney Harmsworth, first Viscount Rothermere (1868–1940). It was owing to Scofield Thayer, whom she met in New York, that she became the backer of TSE’s periodical The Criterion, 1922–5. The first issue (Oct. 1922) was to feature the first UK publication of The Waste Land.

  Vivien Eliot TO Scofield Thayer

  ms Beinecke

  20 July [1921]

  9 Clarence Gate Gdns

  Dear Scofield

  Tom is so tired and hot, and is busy finishing off various things before he goes away for ten days of his holiday, that I am writing for him, altho’ my mind has left me and I am becoming gradually insane.

  T. says that there is no reason whatever for your leaving your 103º in the sun for the cool breezes of this island – because, so far, nothing in the least definite has been done by Lady Rothermere. She seems to be anxious to postpone any positive action, for private reasons of her own, – and nothing at present can be done. (In my own opinion there is nothing in the whole business). However, the one definite utterance I can report, from several sources, is that she does not wish or intend to amalgamate in any journal or to spill her cash for the cause of Literature. If she really puts her mind to anything it will be to purchase and run a small paper of her own. I am sorry, and Tom is sorry. The other would have been a good idea.

  You must excuse Tom for any dilatoriness in writing, he has had his family on his hands since early in June. We have given up our at least cool and civilised flat to them, while we are encamped in an attic with a glass roof. So you see other people have troubles as well as yourself, and I believe you invited me to come and drown myself with you, once. I am ready at any moment. T. says delighted to review Joyce. That at least is definite. Will let you know if anything happens to, or with, Lady R., not that you will have any interest.

  Well, go and frizzle – we shall be in Paris in October, many D’s V.

  Yrs.

  Vivien

  TO Gilbert Seldes1

  MS Timothy and Marian Seldes

  6 August 1921

  9 Clarence Gate Gdns

  Dear Mr Seldes

  Thank you very much for the draft £10 10s 6d. I hope my next letter will arrive in better season.2

  I am glad to find that you also are an admirer of Swift – and an acute one.3

  Sincerely yours

  T. S. Eliot

  1–Gilbert Seldes (1893–1970): American writer and cultural critic; managing editor of The Dial; see Glossary of Names.

  2–Payment for TSE’s ‘London Letter’ in Dial 71: 2 (Aug. 1921).

  3–Seldes’s review of Shaw, Back to Methuselah, compared it to Gulliver’s Travels (‘Struldbrugs and Supermen’, Dial 71: 2).

  TO John Rodker

  MS Mrs Burnham Finney

  8 August 1921

  9 Clarence Gate Gdns

  Dear Rodker,

  I am very sorry to hear that the press has had to come to an end, after doing such good (and improving) work. I shan’t bother you about the £5.15.9 – I hope you will succeed in emerging from your difficulties. I wish you could put your experience in with someone else who wanted to run a press. I had been hoping to see Ulysses emerge from your press. Is there no chance of your being associated with a printing business again?

  Yours

  T.S.E.

  TO Hugh Walpole

  MS Valerie Eliot

  8 August 1921

  9 Clarence Gate Gdns

  My dear Walpole,

  I am sorry. But do come on Thursday at any time – but 12.30 is a good time as the restaurants are not so full. I am at Lloyds Bank (Foreign Dept.) 20 King William Street, near either Bank (Central London) or Monument (District) stations. A messenger will lead you to my cave.

  Yours always sincerely

  T. S. Eliot

  TO Mary Hutchinson

  MS Texas

  15 August 1921

  9 Clarence Gate Gdns

  Dear Mary

  I should be delighted to come to Wittering, but the 1st October is the first date I can manage. I have had to devote the last two weekends to taking various members of my family to Garsington, and I must simply stay in town for the next month to save expense but chiefly to tackle a special piece of work. Do write and let me know if that date is possible, as I shall be very disappointed as it is. Do we meet in six weeks time?

  Yes, it was too bad that you couldn’t come down, but I thought you were coming to see Vivien.

  Yours affectionately

  Tom.

  TO Richard Aldington

  MS Texas

  16 August 1921

  9 Clarence Gate Gdns

  Dear R.A.,

  Monday will suit me capitally and the Cock is excellent. If you could make it 12.15 so much the better: I can get out as early as I like, but must always at the latest be back by 1.30.

  I should like to meet [Holbrook] Jackson and think it worthwhile and I appreciate the trouble you take to introduce me to people. As for the Outlook, the simple fact is that I have not sent anything: whether, beyond that, we have been outmanoeuvred, I do not know. The only man I know who writes for it regularly is a small fellow named Martin Armstrong, who sometimes comes to lunch with me; he seems quite friendly. However, that is neither here nor there. MacCarthy is of course an Irishman, that is to say he belongs to a race which I cannot understand. He seemed eager to get Manning, and it is quite possible that his attitude is nothing more than vagueness. I had a letter from him asking me formally to contribute and suggesting some books. Unfortunately he said he was immediately leaving for three weeks, so I suppose my reply will be dealt with by someone else. I suggested that you were the most competent person.

  What I must explain at this point is, in strict confidence, that there is a possibility of a new literary venture, to be financed up to a certain (too certain) point, in which (if it comes off) I shall be deeply involved. This should soon be decided, and I shall then want to discuss it with you at length. But if it is realised, I shall probably have little time for outside writing. It will not yield me much beyond the price of my own contributions, if that, but it might be interesting.

  Yours ever

  T.S.E.

  My family leave on Saturday, and I shall then return to 9 Clarence Gate Gardens.

  TO Dorothy Pound

  MS Lilly

  21 August 1921

  9 Clarence Gate Gdns

  Dear Dorothy,

  Tuesday is excellent,1 but Clarence Gate is not, as my family have just vacated it and it is being prepared and cleaned. I am not even there yet. So will you come around to the Kensington Palace Hotel, I think it is, around the corner from Church Street. I will be in the hall at 7.15, Tuesday.

  Yours

  T.S.E.

  1–TSE had sent a telegram on 18 Aug.: ‘Will you dine on Monday or Tuesday?�
�� (Lilly).

  TO His Mother

  MS Houghton

  [23 August 1921]

  [9 Clarence Gate Gdns]

  Dearest mother,

  I am waiting anxiously for next Tuesday to hear of your arrival in Cambridge. But still more I am anxious for the first letters telling how you are. Remember what I said to you before you left about keeping up and keeping strong for your next visit.

  We do not move back till the end of the week. We both said we could hardly bear to go back there – the flat seems to belong to you now and is very strange and desolate without you in it.1 Although it seems as if you had only been here a few days, it is very difficult to realise that you have gone. But I think that the distance will seem less great and less important now, don’t you? It was wonderful to have you all with us.

  Your devoted son

  Tom.

  1–CCE would write to HWE on 14 Oct. 1921: ‘Now I come to the painful part of my letter. I am enclosing a letter from Tom – a beautiful one. I think he missed us very much. He is devoted to Vivien, too much so I think, for she expects so much. And now as I always expected, he is the one to break down. I am surprised at his saying that when we were in the flat it had a cosiness which it misses now. I think the poor boy misses the affection that makes no demands from him, but longs to help him. Vivien loves Tom, and he her, although I think he is afraid of her. The only time he failed in his beautiful attitude of affection for me was when I did not go to see Vivien two days in succession after she returned from Itchenor, and that was the day I received the deed and was busy. (I went one day, but not the next.)’

  Vivien Eliot TO Henry Eliot

  MS Texas

  Tuesday 23 [August 1921]

  Wigmore St

  Dear Henry,

  I am writing to you very quickly because we want to thank you at once for what I found in the typewriter. It was quite a shock when you opened it. It is terrible that you should be so generous. We want to open an account here in your name and put that money away for you so that you shall have a small fund, to which you can contribute occasionally if you like, ready for you when you come back.

  And the typewriter?1 What does that mean please? You can hardly have mistaken them in (as Tom insists) the circumstances. But whatever it means, you are shown up as an angel. A bloody angel, as they say over here.

  Now I want you to tell me something truly. You are not to lie. Did your mother and sister show, think, say or intimate that I behaved like ‘no lady’, and just like a wild animal when [we] saw you off? I was perfectly stunned on that occasion. I had no idea what I was doing. I have been more or less stunned for many months now and when I come to, I suppose it seems dreadful, to an American. I have worried all the time since. Tom said it was perfectly allright, etc, but I am sure he has lived here so long he hardly realises how very much less English people mind showing their emotions than Americans – or perhaps he does realise it so perfectly. But I was extremely anxious to show no emotion before your family at any time, and then I ended in a fit!

  I found the emotionless condition a great strain, all the time. I used to think I should burst out and scream and dance. That’s why I used to think you were so terribly failing me. But I won’t talk about that now, except to ask you if ever two people made such a fearful mess of their obvious possibilities. I don’t understand, and I never shall. Twenty-four hours of contact out of two months. Both flats are equally unbearable to us, so we stay here morosely. We miss you dreadfully – for me, especially in the morning and late at night. We have not even had the spirit to buy wine, yet when the evening comes we curse and abuse each other for not having seen we want it all the more now. I believe we shall become pussyfeet. Your roses have lived till now, but are dying so miserably as I write. Sorry about having to scratch out so many words, but you should be flattered that I write to you at all.

  Tom has plunged deep into the ‘Quarterly’ now, and set things going. It is going to be the most awful affair, so difficult and tiresome, all the business I mean. I see rocks ahead. However she Lady R. might not accept the terms even now, there were two slight alterations in the letter, on father’s advice. I have not got near father to give his pipe, but he knows about it, and gave a loud roar, T. says. I had my worst headache, lasting twenty hours, from Saturday night, so haven’t pulled up yet.

  See the Marble Halls we might have dwelt in this month – this is the Sitwell country house.2 Show it to your mother because I think it’s rather nice. And here’s a photograph Otto[line] took. Keep it, it is the only one I have.

  Write at once and don’t wait ‘for the mood’. The mood comes, in writing.

  Tom will write about the typewriter.

  Anyhow we leave on October 1.

  Good-bye Henry. And be personal, you must be personal, or else it’s no good. Nothing’s any good.

  Vivien

  1–HWE had left his own typewriter and taken TSE’s, which was worn out.

  2–‘I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls / With vassals and serfs at my side’ (from Michael Balfe’s opera The Bohemian Girl, 1843). Enclosed was a photograph of Renishaw Hall, the ancestral home of the Sitwells in Derbyshire.

  FROM Lady Rothermere

  TS Valerie Eliot copy

  23 August 1921

  9 Clarence Gate Gdns, N.W.1

  Dear Sir,

  I beg to confirm the arrangement made between us for your appointment as the sole responsible Editor of the Quarterly Magazine to be called the London Quarterly or some similar title approved by us jointly, which I am about to inaugurate,1 as follows:-

  1. I will provide £600 (six hundred pounds) a year for each of the first three years to meet with any receipts from sales and advertisements the expenses involved in getting up, printing, issuing and advertising the Magazine. You are to be entitled to any surplus which the £600 and any such receipts may give in excess of the expenses as remuneration for your services and/or the extension or improvement of the Magazine as you may think fit, but you are in any event to retain out of each annual instalment of £600, £100 for your services if you think fit. The sums I am to provide will be paid by me in annual instalments of £600 to an account to be opened by you at the Lloyds Bank Limited in your name ‘L. Q. Account’ at the commencement of each year, the first payment to be made by me immediately on your formal acceptance of this letter. All receipts are to be paid into the same account. The banking account to be operated by you solely, but for the purposes of the Magazine solely.

  2. The accounts are to be audited by an Accountant nominated by me either annually or semi-annually as I think fit, all facilities for the audit to be afforded by you. If and when the business is in a position to warrant the expense of a business manager, I am to be at liberty to appoint some person selected by me, but approved by you to that post on terms to be agreed with you.

  3. Except with my express consent all expenses, including payments to Contributors, are to be met out of the annual sum of £600 provided by me and any such receipts as above mentioned. You are during the three years to have the entire control of the literary contents of the paper and sole authority to solicit and accept and reject contributions but in the event of your withdrawing from the editorship at any time, thereafter the Banking Account is to be operated by me or my appointee.

  (Signed) Lilian Rothermere

  23d August 1921.

  1–The title of the new periodical was ultimately to be The Criterion.

  TO Sydney Schiff

  MS BL

  25 August 1921

  9 Clarence Gate Gdns

  My dear Sydney,

  I was exceedingly sorry to hear this afternoon that you too have broken down and have been in bed. I am not surprised, with the work and worries you have had. I only hope you will be able to get away to some bracing place in a few days time. I am anxious to have the most accurate reports of both of you.

  I should have communicated before, but the whole of last week was engrossed by the departu
re of my family, and I cannot tell you how exhausting we both found it – the reaction from the strain of it has been paralysing.

  I have seen Mr Broad [a solicitor], and have had him draw up a letter which Lady Rothermere has now returned signed. I confess I feel more worried than anything, and shall not get any pleasure from the paper until I have seen enough issues appear to believe it a success.

  I shall ring up again and will come to see you as soon as you are fit for it, but I do not wish to bother you until you are able to bear it. I am anxious to know how both Violet and you are. Vivien is not at all well.

  Aff.

  Tom

  We return to Clarence in a few days time.

  TO Mary Hutchinson

  MS Texas

  1 September 1921