The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922
Page 17
I remain, my dear Mrs Gardner, devotedly yours
Thomas S. Eliot
I was extraordinarily impressed by Flemish art, especially van Eyck –
1–Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), prominent Boston hostess and art collector, who bequeathed her Venetian-style house, Fenway Court, with its contents, to the city. Her guest book records two visits by TSE in 1912, on 16 Sept. and between 31 Oct. and 3 Nov.
2–Okakura Kakuzo (1862–1913), Japanese scholar and writer; author of The Book of Tea (New York, 1906). From 1906 until his death he was Curator of Chinese and Japanese Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1910 he had taken TSE to meet Matisse.
3–Henry Furst (1893–1967), American journalist and translator of many books into Italian. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, 1913–14.
4–Matthew Prichard, whom TSE had last seen in Munich in Sept. 1911, was interned by the Germans for the duration of the war. He had known Mrs Gardner since his Boston days, and they kept in touch when he left America in 1907.
5–George Santayana, ‘Spanish Opinion on the War’, New Republic, 10 Apr. 1915.
6–Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915), French sculptor, was killed in action two months later. EP wrote on him in ‘Affirmations … V. Gaudier-Brzeska’, New Age 16: 13 (Feb. 1915), and later in his Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916).
7–T. E. Hulme (1883–1917), poet and critic, volunteered at the outbreak of war, serving in the trenches until being wounded in Apr. 1915. Back in Britain, he wrote ‘War Notes’ for the New Age (using the pseudonym ‘North Staffs’) in most weeks from Nov. 1915 to Feb. 1916. He returned to the front in May 1917 and was killed by a shell in Flanders on 28 Sept. Through his anti-romanticism and his dedication to the idea of ‘original sin’, Hulme exercised a considerable intellectual influence on English modernism. When HR edited his papers as Speculations (1924), TSE described him as ‘classical, reactionary, and revolutionary’, and as ‘the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind’ (C. 2: 9, Apr. 1924).
8–Jacob Epstein (1880–1959), American sculptor championed by EP and WL; naturalised British subject from 1907. He designed the tomb of Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise, and his Rock-Drill was sculpted during his Vorticist period. In 1951 he was to execute a fine bronze head of TSE.
9–Edward Wadsworth (1889–1949), painter and printmaker, served as an intelligence officer with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in the eastern Mediterranean. After being invalided home, he worked on naval camouflage. In ‘Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist. An authorised appreciation’, EP remarked: ‘The vorticist movement is not less unanimous because its two best known painters, Mr. Lewis and Mr. Wadsworth, are quite different … Turbulent energy: repose. Anger: placidity, and so on’ (Egoist 1: 16, 15 Aug. 1914).
10–The Second London Group Exhibition (Mar. 1915) included many of the Vorticists backed by EP, including WL, Epstein and Wadsworth. The Vorticists held their own exhibition at the Doré Gallery in July.
11–The second and final issue of Blast, in July 1915, contained the four ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’.
12–Jessica Dismorr (1885–1939), English artist, had signed the Vorticist Manifesto in the first issue of Blast (20 June 1914), and contributed poems and notes to the second. She appears in William Roberts’s painting The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915.
13–Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932), Irish playwright, folklorist and translator, had founded in 1903 (with WBY and J. M. Synge) the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Shanwalla opened on 8 Apr.
TO Ezra Pound
TS Beinecke
15 April [1915]
Merton College, Oxford
Dear Pound:
I hope that my delay in returning the manifesto1 has not inconvenienced you. A number of criticisms have formed themselves in my head and disintegrated again during the course of the week. I think that a thing of the sort has to be written by one man, and cannot be made up like an Appropriation Bill to please the congressman from Louisiana and Dakotah. Doubtless the enlightened public will see the work of your hands, and I trust that you will keep the same order – i.e. an alphabetical taxis for all the names except your own.
How much is implied by the word Alliance? Is the alliance anything more than for the purposes of the manifesto? Of course I don’t know the work of any of these men myself, but that doesn’t matter. But I should like to know in what way this is to be promulgated and how followed up.
I have made only one in the text, and they can be easily erased. As to the rest, I should have liked a more crystallised statement of the function of the university and the need for an intellectual capital. The reference to the war does strike me as platitudinous, and I wonder if one could not get the thing said more concretely and immediately, without the use of such generalisations.
It might be pointed out
The Degradation of Women in American Society.
Pardon these ravings: I am suffering from the effects of a debauch and have done nothing but play tennis today, so I am not in a state to talk intelligently. I am likely to be coming up to town for the day on Friday or Saturday next, and should like to see you. Would you be in about tea time perhaps? Or would you be at Lewis’s3 on Saturday?
Yours ever
Th. Eliot
1–This manifesto was probably connected with EP’s (anonymous) ‘Preliminary Announcement of the College of Arts’, Egoist 1: 21 (2 Nov. 1914), 413–14; reprinted as a leaflet in the same month. See Letters of Ezra Pound, 81–3.
2–The second of three articles under this title, published in Poetry Feb., Mar. and May. TSE included them in his choice of Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1954).
3–In his memoir Blasting and Bombardiering [1937], WL recounts his first meeting with TSE in EP’s flat in Kensington at some time between June 1914 and July 1915. ‘A sleek, tall, attractive transatlantic apparition – with a sort of Giaconda smile. I looked up one day from a brooding interval … And there, sitting down with a certain stealth, not above a couple of feet away from me, was the author of Prufrock – indeed, it was Prufrock himself: but a Prufrock to whom the mermaids would decidedly have sung … For this was a very attractive young Prufrock indeed, with an alert and dancing eye – moqueur to the marrow, bashfully ironic, blushfully taquineur. But still a Prufrock!’ (282–3).
TO Eleanor Hinkley
MS Houghton
24 April [1915]
Merton College
Dear Eleanor,
This will be a short and rambling letter: take it simply as a sort of outlet, for when one returns from a place where one has a number of delightful friends to a place where one has very few, one turns to correspondence for relief. I admit that my preference of London to Oxford is partly the preference of health to indigestion, but as I acquire more frie
nds in the city the difference between English metropolitan and provincial life presents itself more acutely; the latter is so much like New England, and the former quite unique. There are at least a dozen people in London whom I like exceedingly. I had lunch with Russell a few days ago, and he talked most brilliantly. (We walked along the Embankment afterwards. He said suddenly ‘Do you remember what Mrs Elton’s Christian name is?’ ‘No.’ ‘It is mentioned once – Harriet Smith says to Emma: “He calls her Augusta. How delightful!!”’).1
I have been mostly among poets and artists, but I have also met a few ladies, and have even danced. The large hotels have dances on Saturday nights, to which one can go by paying or by taking dinner there. By being admitted to two dancing parties I have met several English girls, mostly about my own age, and especially two who are very good dancers. The English style of dancing is very stiff and old fashioned, and I terrified one poor girl (she is Spanish at that) by starting to dip in my one-step. The two I mentioned are more adaptable, and caught the American style very quickly. As they are emancipated Londoners I have been out to tea or dinner with them several times, and find them quite different from anything I have known at home or here. (I fear my previous generalisations were misleading – they do not seem to apply to London girls over twentyfive.) They are charmingly sophisticated (even ‘disillusioned’) without being hardened; and I confess to taking great pleasure in seeing women smoke, though for that matter I do not know any English girls who do not. These English girls have such amusing names – I have met two named ‘Phyllis’ – and one named ‘Vivien’.2
I went very little to the theatre – saw Fanny’s First Play3 which I enjoyed very much – and have been to a few music-halls, and to the cinema with a most amusing French woman who is the only interesting acquaintance at my boarding house. There is a tall English Department Ph.D named Malcolm Macleod to whom I thought of giving an introduction to you, until he pronounced ‘moustache’ twice with the accent on the first syllable. Have you come across Bill Greene at all? It is not a serious loss if you have not.
I have had a card from Elmer Keith in regard to his engagement: very happy and sentimental. I told him that I was not surprised, because he would be an anomaly as a bachelor. I have looked into a crystal and seen them sitting side by side on a sofa, he reading Francis Thompson aloud, she darning socks. I have a premonition that she wears flannel waists and likes to hear him talk.
There is an interesting rumour about. Keith said that Ann Van Ness told him I was planning to work in the British Museum next winter. A few days later came a letter from Ann, saying that Keith had told her I was planning to work in the British Museum next winter. It seems to be quite settled.
I hope to have news of you before long. You have not told me much about your dramatics.
Affectionately
Tom
1–Jane Austen, Emma ch. 32. (The name is in fact used on three later occasions in the novel.)
2–TSE met Vivien Haigh-Wood in Mar. 1915 at a lunch party in Scofield Thayer’s rooms in Magdalen College, Oxford, after which they went punting and dancing: see Vivien Eliot in Glossary of Names.
3–First performed in 1911, Shaw’s Fanny’s First Play had been revived in the spring of 1915 at the Kingsway Theatre, starring Henry Ainley and Miles Malleson.
TO J. H. Woods
MS Professor David G. Williams
6 May [1915]
Merton College
Dear Professor Woods,
I enclose a letter from Mr Hardie, which reached me this morning. If you wish to accept his offer, I could bring the books myself, though I dare say they would be quite as well off by express.
As I have not heard from you for some time, I wonder if you have received two notes, two packages of lecture-notes, and a text of the Organon.
I hope you will let me know about next year, because, if I do not have a reappointment, financial conditions make it desirable for me to get as much assistant’s work at Harvard as I can adequately perform in addition to my own affairs – in case there is room for me. I certainly should not resign in the middle of the year.
I am attending the remainder of Joachim’s Ethics lectures, some lectures by J. A. Smith on the Concept of Value, a short course by McDougall,1 and am finishing the Posterior Analytics. I am writing papers for Joachim on Aristotle.
Oxford is very charming at this time of year and rather more healthy than at most times [of] year – I have found the climate (and the food!) very difficult.
Santayana is here now, I believe, though I have not been to see him yet.
Very sincerely
Thomas S. Eliot
1–William McDougall (1871–1938), author of Introduction to Social Psychology (1908), was then Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford.
On 26 June TSE married Vivienne Haigh-Wood at Hampstead Register Office in the presence of her aunt Lillia Symes and her close friend Lucy Thayer (cousin of TSE’s friend Scofield Thayer). Their respective parents knew nothing of the wedding beforehand. Bride and groom were both stated to be twenty-six, although she had just turned twenty-seven. TSE was recorded as ‘of no occupation’ and living at 35 Greek Street, Soho. His father was described as a ‘Brick Manufacturer’, and Vivienne’s father as an ‘Artist (Painter)’.
Ezra Pound to Henry Ware Eliot
TS Houghton
[Postmark 28 June 1915]
London
Dear Sir,
Your son asked me to write this letter, I think he expects me to send you some sort of apologia for the literary life in general, and for London literary life in particular.
I can only cite my own case as proof that it is possible to exist by letters, not only by popular fiction but by unpopular writing, and I have gone through difficulties which it seems needless for T.S.E. to encounter. I may as well be explicit. I came to London in 1908, for some years I have made enough to live on with some comfort. I knew no one when I came, I have written no fiction. I have indeed written scarcely anything save poetry, a few grave articles in the heavier reviews and a certain amount of current criticism.
T.S.E. begins in rather better position. I have already hammered the fact that he can write into [the] heads of four editors (e.g. ‘Prufrock’ in Poetry for June), the most intelligent of the editors needed no demonstration. Poetry pays rather well, there are of course other magazines with which it would be advisable for him to get in touch by his own initiative.
As to T.S.E.’s work, I think it the most interesting stuff that has appeared since my own first books, five years ago. Of the conceit of artists there is of course no end, but this letter is between ourselves and I see no reason to beat about the bush. I do not imagine that my name is known to you, or if it is it is merely a name, like another, appearing now and again in the newspapers. Stripped of a certain amount of flimsy notoriety we may say that I have brought something new into English poetry, that I have engineered a new school of verse now known in England, France and America, and incidentally that I have introduced certain young poets to the public. At least I am as closely in touch with what is being done here and in France as it is possible for a man to be, and when I make a criticism of your son’s work it is not an amateur criticism. There are a certain number of young men doing good work, of one sort or another, I have in one place and another blamed or commended them. Edgar Lee Masters has just brought out a new book2 which is, I believe,
having a very great success, but Masters is an older man than T.S.E. and even his work seems to me less unusual.
I don’t know to what extent these critical minutiae entertain3 you, but I may as well set down my own thought as clearly as possible and you can take it or leave it. Apart from all question of ‘inspiration’ and ‘star born genius’ I should say that the arts, as the sciences, progress by infinitesimal stages, that each inventor does little more than make some slight, but revolutionizing change, alteration in the work of his predecessors. Browning4 in his Dramatis Personae and in his Men and Women developed a form of poem which had lain dormant since Ovid’s Heroides or since Theocritus. Ovid’s poems are, to be sure, written as if they were letters, from Helen to Paris, from Paris to Oenone, etc. In Theocritus (IV. 2 I think) we have a monologue comparable to those of Browning (much more passionate, to be sure, but still comparable as a form).
The Anglo Saxon ‘Seafarer’ and Rihaku’s ‘Exile’s Letter’ are also poems of this sort.5 Nevertheless Browning’s poems came as a new thing in their day. In my own first book I tried to rid this sort of poem of all irrelevant discussion, of Browning’s talk about this, that and the other, to confine my words strictly to what might have been the emotional speech of the character under such or such crisis. Browning had cast his poems mostly in Renaissance Italy, I cast mine in mediaeval Provence, which was a change without any essential difference. T.S.E. has gone farther and, begun with the much more difficult job of setting his ‘personae’ in modern life, with the discouragingly ‘unpoetic’ modern surroundings.