by T. S. Eliot
I hope you are enjoying yourself and look forward to dining next week. In haste
Yrs –
T. S. Eliot
TO John Quinn
TS NYPL (MS)
27 December 1922
9 Clarence Gate Gdns
Dear Mr Quinn,
Thank you very much for your kind letter of the 4th. It contained a filing card from the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, certifying that The Waste Land was Copyright in my name.1 I repeat this merely because the letter was stamped ‘Received unsealed’ and was officially sealed by the post office department, so that I want to be quite certain that there was no other enclosure except of course a copy of your letter to Gilbert Seldes. I am perpetually grateful for your continuous and unremitting devotion to my interests, in the midst I am sure, of innumerable other duties apart from your own affairs; and I am immensely grateful always for your continued support and encouragement.
What I particularly want to mention, in a letter which must be a very brief one, is to ask you whether you have received the manuscript of all my poems which I sent you some weeks ago. I sent it by registered post and it should have reached you long since.2 If you have not received it please let me know so that I may institute inquiries at once. If it has gone astray, my only but very deep regret will be that it was my only means of expressing my gratitude for all that you have done for me.
I am very glad that you like the Criterion.3 It has taken a great deal of time and thought, and the approval of my friends is the only reward that I can at present expect. I hope that we can make the thing a real success. I shall ask Cobden-Sanderson to get into touch with Liveright. I am not sure that he has not already made some temporary arrangement with Brentano,4 but if a pushing publisher like Liveright would take hold of the thing I have no doubt that it would be more satisfactory in the long run. I am very much obliged to you for having spoken to Liveright about it.
I hope to write to you again soon – but you will think that I live perpetually in the hope of writing and never fulfill my promises.
I trust that you are able this winter to take a little better care of your health and not sacrifice it to all the calls that are made upon you.
Yours very sincerely,
T. S. Eliot
1–‘For the first term of 28 years’.
2–The March Hare notebook and the drafts of The Waste Land reached Quinn on 17 Jan. 1923.
3–Quinn called the first issue (he had been sent a ‘sample editorial’ copy on 13 Dec.) a ‘beautiful thing, beautifully printed’. He had discussed American distribution with Liveright, who ‘might consider it if the thing was presented to him’, and suggested that RC-S approach Liveright directly.
4–The New York bookseller.
TO Herbert Read
TS Victoria
27 December 1922
The Criterion, 9 Clarence Gate Gdns
My dear Read,
I have at last had time over the holidays to read pretty carefully your essay1 although it is very solid reading, and I am going to read it again; and I must tell you that I like it very much indeed. I had been considering whether it would be possible to divide it into two parts but I am anxious if possible to avoid mutilating it in this fashion and it does appear as far as I can make out that we shall be able to publish it entire in No. 3. This depends of course on two or three contributors keeping their word and confining themselves to the limits which they promised. If it is necessary to print the article in two I shall of course ask your permission and leave it to you to indicate the division, but as I say I am anxious to respect the construction of your article.
I hope for an opportunity to discuss it with you at more length. Forgive this hasty and tardy acknowledgement and thanks,
Yours ever,
T. S. Eliot
1–‘The Nature of Metaphysical Poetry’, C. 1: 3 (Apr. 1923), 246–66.
TO Gilbert Seldes
TS Timothy and Marian Seldes
27 December 1922
9 Clarence Gate Gdns
My dear Mr Seldes,
I thank you very much for your letter of the 14th December. Although I gather from your letter that you are going to be absent, presumably for a needed holiday, I am addressing one more letter to you. This is merely to acknowledge the December Dial and your article in the Nation which has reached me.1 I can say without flattery that I prefer your remarks about The Waste Land to those of Mr Wilson which are somewhat more sensational in tone. I do not mean that I do not like his article, but that the whole thing was just a little too highly coloured. At the same time, he made some rather acute remarks which showed me how people may be affected by certain elements in the poem that I do not myself very much like. I do not think that I can put this any more clearly at present.
While I wish to express my appreciation of Mr Wilson’s praise, there is one point in Mr Wilson’s article to which I must strongly take exception. I do very much object to be made use of by anyone for the purpose of disparaging the work of Ezra Pound.2 I am infinitely in his debt as a poet, as well as a personal friend, and I do resent being praised at his expense. Besides, what Mr Wilson said of him was most unfair. I sincerely consider Ezra Pound the most important living poet in the English language. And you will see that in view of my great debt to him in literature it is most painful to me to have such comments made.
I have always on my mind the articles which I am to write for you and be assured that the delay has been through no fault of mine.
By the way, in response to your earlier question, there are a certain number of copies of the first number of The Criterion available and you will be able to get one from Brentano. If not, I have two of my own, and I can save one for you.
I am very deeply aware of the honour which The Dial has bestowed upon me as well as of the financial assistance which will be a very great help at a difficult time. May I be able to give The Dial still better work in the future!
With many thanks for your letter
Yours always sincerely,
T. S. Eliot
1–The Dial 75: 6 (Dec. 1922) included both TSE’s final ‘London Letter’ and Edmund Wilson’s ‘The Poetry of Drouth’, a review of TWL (‘So Mr Eliot hears in his own parched cry the voices of all the thirsty men of the past – of the author of Ecclesiastes in majestic bitterness at life’s futility, of the Children of Israel weeping for Zion by the unrefreshing rivers of Babylon, of the disciples after the Crucifixion meeting the phantom of Christ on their journey; of … Dante’s astonishment at the weary hordes of Hell, and of the sinister dirge with which Webster blessed the “friendless bodies of unburied men”’). Seldes’s ‘T. S. Eliot’ appeared in Nation [NY]. 115 (6 Dec. 1922); repr. in T. S. Eliot, ed. Grant, 144–51.
2–Wilson criticised the ‘extremely ill-focussed Eight Cantos of [Eliot’s] imitator Mr. Ezra Pound’.
TO Lady Ottoline Morrell
MS Texas
29 December 1922
9 Clarence Gate Gdns
My dear Ottoline,
Thank you so much for your present which surprised me on Christmas morning – the beautiful little diary is now in my pocket waiting for the new year – through which it will remind me of you as well as of my engagements – and I hope that your name will occur in it from time to time. I hope that next year will have a brighter record of engagements than this!
Vivien is longing to write to you, and will, soon, to thank you and to answer your letter. But this week has brought her a fresh attack of neuritis alternating with neuralgia, and she has been quite used up since Christmas. It’s wonderful how keen her mind keeps with such pain. With love and best wishes from both of us.
Yours affectionately
Tom
TO Richard Cobden-Sanderson
TS Beinecke
31 December 1922
The Criterion, 9 Clarence Gate Gdns
Dear Cobden-Sanderson,
Thanks for your letter of the 27th inst. I trust that you hav
e had a satisfactory holiday in spite of the miserable weather, and greet you on your return with the compliments of the season. I am looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday and hope that you will not object on this occasion to dining here with me instead of my going to your club. Will you accept my hospitality at 7?.
About the Hachettes’ name I thought that you had arranged that in some way with Lady Rothermere. I think it would be a good thing if their name as French agents appeared somewhere in the paper. 800 seems to me definitely the maximum that we ought to print. But we can talk this matter over and also discuss the question of the amount of advertising to be done when we meet.
Yours ever,
T. S. Eliot
PS Did I ask you to send a press copy to Les Ecrits du Nord, 1385, Chaussée de Waterloo, Uccle, Brussels, Belgium. I thought I had done so but I have heard from the Editor who says that he has not received it. This can wait however until No. 2 is out and I will give you a fresh list of foreign press copies.
There is a parcel of rejected MSS. ready for your man.
TO Henry Eliot
TS Houghton
31 December 1922
9 Clarence Gate Gdns
My dear Henry,
Your very nice letter of the 3rd December arrived just before Christmas with your drafts and we were overwhelmed at your kindness and generosity. I hope that you have received the shirt from me and the book from Vivien undamaged.
I have been infernally busy with the Criterion which takes up more time than in the circumstances I should wish to give to it. Of course the hope is that in a year’s time it may have got on to such a footing as to provide a certain amount of income for me; if it can be made absolutely solid, and either self-supporting (but that would take very much longer than one year) or else important enough and with a large enough circulation and sphere of influence to attract more support it might provide at least a partial way out of my problem of living a double or triple life. If the paper did not arrive at something like this point within a year it would obviously be folly for me to go on with it indefinitely. In any case if I can get out a year or so of really good numbers so as obviously to make it the best paper of its kind in England it will give me standing as an editor and perhaps invite other openings. So you see I have perfectly practical aims and motives for undertaking the work. If it were not for these possibilities, it would be only a curse, for even the interest of the work and contact with interesting people would not justify my almost complete inability to do any writing of my own which the Criterion enforces. All this of course is only for your private consideration and not to be mentioned to anyone else.
The Dial prize also may improve my standing and add to the circulation of my books and perhaps make my work of all kinds more sought after. But of course under present conditions I could not make use of such advantages because I have not the time to do so. I sometimes envy you for having an occasional evening in which you can sit down and read a book; for at least I am sure that you have read much more than I have done in the past year. I know in a general way what is going on and glance at contemporary work with a view to finding new contributors but what I particularly long for is time to fill in the innumerable gaps in my education in past literature and history. There is very little contemporary writing that affords me any satisfaction whatever; there is certainly no contemporary novelist except D. H. Lawrence and of course Joyce in his way, whom I care to read. But there are all the things that I ought to have read long ago and so much that I should like to know in the various sciences.
Does your work keep you very long hours now and do you find it very fatiguing? And if circumstances improved sufficiently, do you intend to leave Rush Street and find rooms by yourself?
Vivien has been very tired since Christmas. She sat up to dinner in the evening on that day for the first time in months. As I have said before, she has been living since last July under the severest and most spartan regimen that I have ever known, which has been much more difficult than any regimen in a nursing home or sanatorium because living it in the midst of ordinary life imposes much more responsibility on her and requires infinite tenacity of purpose; she has not been able to deviate in the slightest from the most limited and particular diet, and she has not been able to take ordinary exercise, only the special exercises prescribed for her and she has hardly seen anybody. I have never known anybody stick to a thing with such persistence and courage, often with relapses which made her feel that the whole thing was useless. She has certainly made great gains by it, but I think that the strain of such a mode of life is beginning to tell on her, and lately she has been sleeping very badly indeed. If I were not tied to the bank I could have gone abroad with her for a time; as it is she is not only under the strain of her own treatment but the strain of our very tense and always rushed and overworked mode of life.
We thought of you a great deal on Christmas day and wished that you were here. Do write again very soon and tell me also in what health you find the family in Cambridge.
Always affectionately
Tom.
V. has read me some bits of Babbitt.1 It has some good things in it.
1–Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922), a novel.
GLOSSARY OF NAMES
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973): American poet and critic. Though he and Eliot were a year apart at Harvard, they became close friends, and fellow editors of The Harvard Advocate. TSE said he had ‘gone in for psychoanalysis with a Swinburnian equipment’ and did not ‘escape the fatal American introspectiveness’ (‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, Egoist 6: 3, July 1919). Aiken wrote a witty memoir of their times together, ‘King Bolo and Others’, in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, ed. Richard Marsh and Tambimuttu (1948), describing how they revelled in the comic strips of ‘Krazy Kat, and Mutt and Jeff’ and in ‘American slang’. His writings include volumes of poetry among them Earth Triumphant (1914); the Eliot-influenced House of Dust (1921); and Selected Poems (1929), which won the Pulitzer Prize 1930; editions of Modern American Poets (1922), and Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924); and essays gathered up in Scepticisms (1923) and Collected Criticism (1968). His eccentric autobiographical novel Ushant: An Essay (1952) provides a satirical portrait of TSE as ‘Tsetse’.
Richard Aldington (1892–1962): poet, critic, translator, biographer, novelist. A friend of Ezra Pound, he was one of the founders of the Imagist movement; a contributor to Des Imagistes (1914); and assistant editor of The Egoist. In 1913 he married the American poet H. D., though they were soon estranged. In 1914 he volunteered for WW1, but his enlistment was deferred for medical reasons; he went on active service in June 1916 and was sent to France in December (TSE replaced him as literary editor of The Egoist). During the war, he rose from the ranks to be an acting captain in the Royal Sussex Regiment. He drew on his experiences in the poems of Images of War (1919) and the novel Death of a Hero (1929). After WW1, he became friends with TSE, working as his assistant on the Criterion and introducing him to Bruce Richmond, editor of the TLS (for which TSE wrote some of his finest essays). From 1919 Aldington himself was a regular reviewer of French literature for the TLS. In 1928 he went to live in France, where, except for a period in the USA (1935–47), he spent the rest of his life. He is best known for his early Imagist poetry and translations. In 1931, he published Stepping Heavenward, a lampoon of TSE – who is portrayed as ‘Blessed Jeremy Cibber’: ‘Father Cibber, O.S.B.’ – and Vivien (as ‘Adele Palaeologue’). This ended their friendship. His growing estrangement from Eliot was further publicised in an essay written in the 1930s but published only in 1954, Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot: A Lecture, which takes both poets to task for their putatively plagiaristic poetry. He also wrote an autobiography, Life for Life’s Sake (1941), controversial biographies of D. H. Lawrence and T. E. Lawrence; and Complete Poems (1948). See also Richard Aldington: An Intimate Portrait, ed. Alister Kershaw and Frédéric-Jacques Temple (1965), which includes a brief tribute by Eliot; ‘Richard Aldington’s Letters to Herbert R
ead’, ed. David S. Thatcher, The Malahat Review 15 (July 1970), 5–44; Charles Doyle, Richard Aldington: A Biography (1989); Richard Aldington: A Life in Letters, ed. Norman T. Gates (1992); Richard Aldington & H.D.: Their lives in letters 1918–61, ed. Caroline Zilboorg (2003).
Richard Cobden-Sanderson (1884–1964), printer and publisher, was the son of the bookbinder and printer, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson (1840–1922), who was Bertrand Russell’s godfather; and grandson of the politician and economist Richard Cobden (1804–65). He became the publisher of the Criterion from its first number in October 1922 until it was taken over by Faber&Gwyer in 1925. He also published three books with introductions by TSE: Le Serpent by Paul Valéry (1924), Charlotte Eliot’s Savonarola (1926), and Harold Monro’s Collected Poems (1933). In addition, his firm produced books by Edmund Blunden and David Gascoyne, editions of Shelley, and volumes illustrated by Rex Whistler. He became a dependable friend as well as a colleague of TSE.
Ada Eliot (1869–1943): Eliot’s eldest sister – whom he liked to describe as the Mycroft to his Sherlock Holmes – and wife of Alfred Dwight Sheffield. A prominent Boston social worker, she was a graduate of the Mary Institute, St Louis, Missouri, and went on to further study at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was district secretary of the Family Welfare Society, Boston, 1897–1900; Secretary of the Dependent Children’s Committee, New York Charity Organization Society, 1900–1. She served too in many other capacities: Probation Officer, New York City, 1901–4; Massachusetts State Board of Charities, 1909–14; President of the Society for Aiding Destitute Mothers and Infants, Boston, 1914–18; Director of the Research Bureau on Social Case Work, 1919–27; member of the Advisory Board of the Massachusetts Public Welfare Commission, 1919–34; and member of the Board of the Boston Children’s Mission, 1927–39. Her writings included ‘The Social Case History’ (1920); ‘Case Study Possibilities’ (1922); and ‘Social Insight in Case Situations’ (1937).
