Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922

by T. S. Eliot

  Harold Monro (1879–1932): poet, editor and publisher. In 1913 he founded the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street, London, where poets would meet and give readings and lectures. In 1912 he briefly edited the Poetry Review for the Poetry Society; then his own periodicals, Poetry and Drama, 1913–14, and the Chapbook (originally the Monthly Chapbook), 1919–25. From the Poetry Bookshop, Monro published the five volumes of Georgian Poetry, ed. Edward Marsh (1872–1953), between 1912 and 1922, and the first volumes of poetry by writers including Richard Aldington and Robert Graves, and some of his own collections including Children of Love (1915) and Strange Meetings (1917). He married in 1920 Alida Klemantaski (daughter of a Polish-Jewish trader), with whom he never cohabited but who remained loving, loyal and supportive to him; both endeared themselves to Eliot, who would often use the premises of the Poetry Bookshop for meetings with contributors to the Criterion. After his death, TSE wrote a ‘Critical Note’ to The Collected Poems of Harold Monro (1933). See Joy Grant, Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop (1967); Dominic Hibberd, Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age (2001).

  Harriet Monroe (1860–1936): American poet and editor, based in Chicago. Monroe was the editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which she founded in 1912 – when she was already over fifty – and continued to edit until 1936. It provided a crucial launching place for many modern poets, including Eliot (whose ‘Prufrock’ was published there in 1915), Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, W. B. Yeats and Robert Frost. She was co-editor, with Alice Corbin Henderson (first associate editor of Poetry), of The New Poetry: An Anthology (New York, 1917), which TSE reviewed in Egoist 4: 9 (Oct. 1917). Her autobiography, A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World, appeared posthumously in 1937. See also A History of Poetry in Letters, ed. Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young (2002).

  Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938): daughter of Lieutenant-General Arthur Bentinck and half-sister to the Duke of Portland. In 1902 she married Philip Morrell (1870–1941), Liberal MP for South Oxfordshire 1902–18. A patron of the arts, she entertained a notable literary and artistic circle, first at 44 Bedford Square, then at Garsington Manor, nr. Oxford, where she moved in 1915. She was a lover of Bertrand Russell, who introduced her to TSE, and her many friends included Lytton Strachey, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, the Woolfs, and the Eliots. Her memoirs (ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy) appeared as Ottoline (1963) and Ottoline at Garsington (1974). See Miranda Seymour, Life on the Grand Scale: Lady Ottoline Morrell (1992, 1998).

  John Middleton Murry (1889–1957): influential English writer, critic and editor, founded the magazine Rhythm, 1911–13, and worked as a reviewer for the Westminster Gazette, 1912–14, and the Times Literary Supplement, 1914–18, before becoming editor from 1919 to 1921 of the Athenaeum, which he turned for a time into a lively cultural forum – in a letter of 2 July 1919, TSE called it ‘the best literary weekly in the Anglo-Saxon world’. In a ‘London Letter’ in Dial 72: 5 (May 1921), Eliot said he considered Murry as editor ‘genuinely studious to maintain a serious criticism’, but he disagreed with his ‘particular tastes, as well as his general statements’. After the demise of the Athenaeum, Murry went on to edit the Adelphi. 1923–48. In 1918, he married Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923. He was friend and biographer of D. H. Lawrence; and as an editor he provided a platform for writers as various as George Santayana, Paul Valéry, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and TSE. His first notable critical work was Dostoevsky (1916); his most influential critical study, The Problem of Style (1922). Though as a Romanticist he was an intellectual opponent of the avowedly ‘Classicist’ Eliot, Murry offered Eliot in 1919 the post of assistant editor on the Athenaeum (which Eliot had to decline); in addition, he recommended him to be the Clark lecturer at Cambridge in 1926, and was a steadfast friend to both TSE and his wife Vivien. See F. A. Lea, The Life of John Middleton Murry (1959); and David Goldie, A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919–1928 (1998).

  Brigit Patmore, née Ethel Elizabeth Morrison-Scott (1882–1965): Irish author who married John Deighton Patmore (grandson of the poet Coventry Patmore), and became a popular hostess in London. Her friends included Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and H. D. She wrote novels including The Impassioned Onlooker (1926), as well as a memoir, My Friends When Young (1968), which offers a sympathetic picture of Vivien Eliot.

  Harold Peters (1888–1941): friend and sailing companion of Eliot at Harvard. After graduation, he went into real estate, and served in the Massachusetts Naval Militia during WW1, and on leaving the navy spent most of the rest of his life at sea. L. M. Little records that at Harvard Eliot and Peters ‘were an odd and very interesting pair’, and that ‘it was Peters who chided [Eliot] about his frail physique’, thus prompting Eliot’s regular attendance at August’s Gymnasium, as well as his boxing lessons, rowing and ‘small-boat cruising’. Peters and Eliot would spend many happy and dangerous hours sailing together, sometimes in thick fog, off the Dry Salvages. In 1932, Peters sailed round the world for two years as skipper of an 85-foot auxiliary schooner, having previously participated in the transatlantic race from Newport to Plymouth, and the Fastnet Race. In 1941 he died after falling from a hoisted motor-boat into a dry dock at Marblehead.

  Ezra Pound (1885–1972), American poet and critic, was one of the prime impresarios of the modernist movement in London and Paris, and played a major part in launching Eliot – as well as Joyce, Lewis, and many other modernists. Eliot called on him at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, on 22 Sept. 1914, with an introduction from Conrad Aiken. On 30 Sept. 1914, Pound hailed ‘Prufrock’ as ‘the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American’; and on 3 October called Eliot ‘the last intelligent man I’ve found – a young American T. S. Eliot … worth watching – mind “not primitive”’ (Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 40–1). Pound was instrumental in arranging for ‘Prufrock’ to be published in Poetry in 1915, and helped to shape The Waste Land (1922), which Eliot dedicated to him as ‘il miglior fabbro’. After their first meeting, the poets became friends, and remained in loyal correspondence for the rest of their lives. Having initially dismissed Pound’s poetry (to Aiken, 30 Sept. 1914) as ‘well-meaning but touchingly incompetent’, Eliot went on to champion his work, writing to Gilbert Seldes (27 Dec. 1922): ‘I sincerely consider Ezra Pound the most important living poet in the English language.’ He wrote an early study of Pound, Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (1917), and went on, as editor of the Criterion and publisher at Faber & Faber, to publish most of Pound’s work in the UK, including Selected Shorter Poems, The Cantos and Selected Literary Essays. After his move to Italy in the 1920s, Pound became increasingly sceptical about the direction of TSE’s convictions and poetry, but they continued to correspond. After Eliot’s death, Pound said of him: ‘His was the true Dantescan voice – not honoured enough, and deserving more than I ever gave him.’ See A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and his Work I: The Young Genius 1885–1920 (2007), Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character (1988), and The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (1950).

  John Quinn (1870–1924): Irish-American corporate lawyer in New York; major patron of modernist writers and artists; and collector of manuscripts. He afforded generous support, both financial and legal, to writers including Conrad, Yeats, Joyce and Ezra Pound. TSE began corresponding with him at the urgent prompting of Pound, who had read about him as a patron, in the New Age in January 1915: the correspondence ran until Quinn’s death. Pound urged TSE’s importance upon Quinn (‘I have more or less discovered him,’ he proclaimed). Quinn bought from TSE (for a fair price) the drafts of The Waste Land, which he later bequeathed to the New York Public Library. Though a supporter of the Irish nationalist cause, he worked for the British intelligence services, helping to report upon agents provocateurs who were working in the USA to mobilise anti-British groups of Irish and Germans. See B. L. Reid, The Ma
n from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (1969).

  Herbert Read (1893–1968): English poet and literary critic, and one of the most influential art critics of the century. Son of a tenant farmer, Read spent his first years in rural Yorkshire; at sixteen, he went to work as a bank clerk, then studied law and economics at Leeds University; later still, he joined the Civil Service, working first in the Ministry of Labour and then at the Treasury. During his years of service in WW1, he rose to be a captain in a Yorkshire regiment, the Green Howards (his war poems were published in Naked Warriors, 1919); and when on leave to receive the Military Cross in 1917, he arranged to dine with TSE at the Monico Restaurant in Piccadilly Circus. This launched a life-long friendship which he was to recall in ‘T. S. E. – A Memoir’, in T. S. Eliot: The Man and his Work, ed. Allen Tate (1966). Within the year, he had also become acquainted with the Sitwells, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington and Ford Madox Ford. He co-founded the journal Art & Letters, 1917–20, and wrote essays too for A. R. Orage, editor of the New Age. In 1922 he was appointed a curator in the department of ceramics and glass at the Victoria and Albert Museum; and in later years he was to work for the publishers Routledge & Kegan Paul, and as editor of the Burlington Magazine, 1933–9. By 1923 he was writing for the Criterion: he was to be one of Eliot’s regular leading contributors and a reliable ally and advisor. In 1924 he edited T. E. Hulme’s posthumous Speculations. His later works include Art Now (1933); the introduction to the catalogue of the International Surrealist Exhibition held at the New Burlington Galleries, London, 1936; Art and Society (1937); Education through Art (1943); and A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959). In 1947 he founded (with Roland Penrose) the Institute of Contemporary Art; and in 1953 he was knighted for services to literature. Eliot, he was to recall (perhaps only half in jest), was ‘rather like a gloomy priest presiding over my affections and spontaneity’. See Herbert Read, Annals of Innocence and Experience (1940); James King, The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read (1990); Herbert Read Reassessed, ed. D. Goodway (1998); and Jason Harding (The ‘Criterion’: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain [2002]), who states that Read contributed sixty-eight book reviews, four articles, and five poems to the Criterion.

  Bruce Richmond (1871–1964), editor, was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, and called to the Bar in 1897. However, he never practised as a barrister. Instead, George Buckle, editor of The Times, appointed him an assistant editor in 1899, and in 1902 he assumed the editorship of the fledgling Times Literary Supplement, which he commanded for thirty-five years. During this period, the TLS established itself as the premier academic and critical periodical in Britain. He was knighted in 1935. TSE, who was introduced to Richmond by Richard Aldington in 1919, enthused to his mother that year that writing the leading article for the TLS was the highest honour ‘in the critical world of literature’. In a tribute, he recalled Richmond as possessing ‘a bird-like alertness of eye, body and mind … It was from Bruce Richmond that I learnt editorial standards … I learnt from him that it is the business of an editor to know his contributors personally, to keep in touch with them and to make suggestions to them. I tried [at the Criterion] to form a nucleus of writers (some of them, indeed, recruited from the Times Literary Supplement, and introduced to me by Richmond) on whom I could depend, differing from each other in many things, but not in love of literature and seriousness of purpose. And I learnt from Richmond that I must read every word of what was to appear in print … It is a final tribute to Richmond’s genius as an editor that some of his troupe of regular contributors (I am thinking of myself as well as of others) produced some of their most distinguished critical essays as leaders for the Literary Supplement … Good literary criticism requires good editors as well as good critics. And Bruce Richmond was a great editor’ (‘Bruce Lyttelton Richmond’, TLS, 13 Jan. 1961, 17).

  John Rodker (1894–1955): poet, novelist and publisher. Born in Manchester, of an immigrant Jewish family, he published his Poems in 1914. During WW1, Rodker was a conscientious objector, and after going on the run, sheltering with the poet R. C. Trevelyan, he was imprisoned in Dartmoor Prison. In 1919 he started up the Ovid Press (a small press which lasted about a year), and published TSE’s Poems (1920), Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and his own Hymns (1920), as well as portfolios of drawings by Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Edward Wadsworth. In 1919, he took over briefly from Pound as foreign editor of the Little Review. In the 1920s he spent time in Paris on the second edition of Joyce’s Ulysses and set up the Casanova Press. He published his Collected Poems, 1912–1925 (1930), and later worked with Anna Freud on the Imago Press in order to publish translations of Freud.

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970): one of the most influential twentieth-century British philosophers; co-author (with Alfred North Whitehead) of Principia Mathematica (1910–13), and author of innumerable other books including the popular Problems of Philosophy (1912), Mysticism and Logic (1918) – which was reviewed by TSE in ‘Style and Thought’ (Nation 22, 23March 1918) – and History of Western Philosophy (1945). In 1914, Russell gave the Lowell Lectures on ‘Our Knowledge of the External World’ at Harvard, where he encountered Eliot. On 27 March 1914, Russell described Eliot as ‘very well dressed and polished, with manners of the finest Etonian type’. He later characterised him as ‘proficient in Plato, intimate with French literature from Villon to Vildrach, and capable of exquisiteness of appreciation, but lacking in the crude insistent passion that one must have in order to achieve anything’. After their accidental meeting in 1914, Russell played an important role in introducing TSE to British intellectual life, as well as getting him launched as a reviewer for International Journal of Ethics and the Monist. However, it has been alleged that, not long after TSE’s marriage, Russell may have had a brief affair with his wife Vivien. The three friends shared lodgings for a while at Russell’s flat in London. Russell was a conscientious objector and vocal opponent of WW1, which led to a brief prison sentence in Wandsworth. In later years, TSE saw little of his one-time professor and friend, and he later attacked Russell’s philosophical and ethical views, in his ‘Commentary’ in the Criterion (April 1924), and elsewhere. Russell provides a partial account of his relationship with the Eliots in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell II: 1914–1944 (1968). See also Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1996).

  George Santayana (1863–1952), Spanish-born American philosopher, studied at Harvard under William James and Josiah Royce, and was author of many philosophical, literary and autobiographical books, including The Sense of Beauty (1896), The Life of Reason (1905), and Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (1910). At Harvard, Eliot took his courses in the History of Modern Philosophy, 1907-8, and the Philosophy of History (‘Ideals of Society, Religion, Art, and Science, in their historical development’), 1909-10. Following his mother’s death in 1912, Santayana moved to Europe and lived in Paris and Oxford before settling in Italy. Conrad Aiken called him ‘that Merlin, that Prospero, with his wizard mantle from Spain’; and he was hugely influential in Harvard philosophy during Eliot’s time there. The Harvard Monthly declared in March 1912 that Santayana had ‘attained a following which in enthusiasm and intensity … is impossible to parallel’. In 1918 Eliot remarked upon the ‘imperial and slightly amused gaze of Mr. Santayana’, while in The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry he observed that, though Three Philosophical Poets was ‘one of the most brilliant’ of his books, Santayana was ‘more interested in poetical philosophy than philosophical poetry’.

  Sydney Schiff (1868–1944): novelist and translator, and patron of the arts. In 1911 Schiff married his second wife Violet Zillah Beddington (1874– 1962), sister of Oscar Wilde’s friend Ada Leverson, and a gifted musician who had studied singing under Paolo Tosti. Schiff soon began writing fiction and engaging in patronage of the arts. His first novel, Concessions (1913), was published under his own name, but War-Time Silhouettes (1916) and
later novels appeared under the nom-de-plume ‘Stephen Hudson’. The pseudonym was adopted in anticipation of the appearance of Richard Kurt (1919), the first of a sequence of autobiographical novels – the series would be gathered up in a volume advisedly called A True Story (1930). Schiff came from a wealthy Jewish family (his father having been a successful stockbroker), and he chose to support Isaac Rosenberg among other writers and artists; he would subsidise the short-lived but notable periodical Art & Letters (1918–20), as well as contributing to it and editing one issue. He was a major champion of Marcel Proust (and he would ultimately translate Le temps retrouvé), a friend of several other writers (Vivien Eliot dubbed him ‘the Sitwells’ Holy Ghost’), and a supporter of Wyndham Lewis (who painted a commissioned portrait of him and then went on to satirise him in The Apes of God). He and his wife were to become close friends of the Eliots: his first surviving letter to TSE dates from 3May 1919. Though always ready to salute greater talents than his own, Schiff was still his own man, with decidedly independent views: he was for example prompt to dispute with TSE the value of the posthumously collected writings of the philosopher T. E. Hulme. On the death of Violet Schiff, TSE wrote in tribute to the couple: ‘In the 1920s the Schiffs’ hospitality, generosity, and encouragement meant much to a number of young artists and writers of whom I was one. The Schiffs’ acquaintance was cosmopolitan, and their interests embraced all the arts. At their house I met, for example, Delius and Arthur Symons, and the first Viscountess Rothermere, who founded the Criterion under my editorship. Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield knew their house, and Wyndham Lewis and Charles Scott-Moncrieff, and many others … I write primarily to pay homage to a beloved friend, but also in the hope that some future chronicler of the history of art and letters in our time may give to Sydney and Violet Schiff the place which is their due.’ (See ‘Mrs Violet Schiff: All-Embracing Interest in the Arts’, The Times, 9 July 1962.) See also Richard Davenport-Hines, A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922 (2006).