The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922
Page 21
Maurice1 was home for five days leave this week. It was really the first time I had seen anything of him, as he had been away, first at Sandhurst and then with his regiment, almost all the time until he left for France, which was the very day we were married. I was awfully pleased with him, and feel a strong affection for him now, so that I can understand the way his family feel while he is away. He is a very handsome boy, with a great deal of breeding – very aristocratic, and very simple too. It seems very strange that a boy of nineteen should have such experiences – often twelve hours alone in his ‘dug-out’ in the trenches, and at night, when he cannot sleep, occupying himself by shooting rats with a revolver. What he tells about rats and vermin is incredible – Northern France is swarming, and the rats are as big as cats. His dug-out, where he sleeps, is underground, and gets no sunlight.2
I saw him several times. His family had their Christmas dinner when he was here, as he may not be home for another five or six months. It was awfully touching, and a bit melancholy – everyone trying to be gay and cheerful – the immediate family and a few aunts. But everyone was at their best and kindliest, and kept up the usual Christmas diversions. There was cranberry sauce in my honour – they did not know that it ought to be served with the turkey! and had it as a dessert! but I pretended it was right, as they had taken pains with it. The pudding came in blazing properly, with an American flag on it. Mrs Haigh-Wood did everything to show that she was fond of me. I rather expected, naturally, to take a back seat when Maurice was at home, but they all treated me with more cordiality than ever, and I felt very fond of them. The presence of Maurice, his loveableness and goodness, made the evening different from what family parties usually are. I was glad not to see him off – it was more painful than his first leavings: there were many, I heard both officers and men, at the station, returning: the men mostly drunk, and their women crying; the officers and their women very quiet. Vivien was pretty well knocked out by it, and has had neuralgia in consequence. And unfortunately one of Maurice’s best friends was killed just after he had returned from leave.
The weeks seem to go by very quickly now, and I begin to measure the time – four weeks until Christmas. The holidays are nearly five weeks. I love to be in London, especially as I begin to know more people there. I want to know all sorts of people – political and social as well as literary and philosophical.
You will be having Thanksgiving dinner soon – I shall think of you on that day – it is next Thursday.
Always your loving son
Tom
1–Maurice Haigh-Wood, VHE’s brother: see Glossary of Names.
2–Colonel H. C. Wylly’s History of the Manchester Regiment (1923), II, 131, records that in this month, ‘Another party went out from No. 26 Fire trench, composed of Second Lieutenant Haigh-Wood, Corporal Herbert, and three men. On two bombs being flung into the enemy sap, a heavy fire commenced and Corporal Herbert was at once hit, and was only brought in with great difficulty by his party.’
TO Wyndham Lewis
TS Cornell
[November? 1915]
Sydney Cottage, Conegra Road,
High Wycombe, Bucks
Dear Lewis,
Will it suit you equally well to come in Sunday night instead of Saturday night at the same hour, about 8.30? I find we have got to go and dance on Saturday. I hope very much that Sunday will do for you equally well. Let me know and please don’t disappoint me. I want to hear about the preface.1
I shall be at 34 Russell Chambers, Bury Street, W.C. on Saturday morning.
Yours ever
Eliot
1–WL’s preface to H. E. Clifton and James Wood, Mayvale, in Cambridge Magazine 5: 8 (4 Dec. 1915), 173.
Bertrand Russell TO Charlotte C. Eliot
MS Houghton
3 December 1915
34 Russell Chambers, Bury Street,
London W.C.
Dear Mrs Eliot
Please accept my very best thanks for your kindness in sending me your biography of Dr William G. Eliot, which has arrived safely, and which I am most glad to possess.1 I am sending you my Philosophical Essays [1910] though I fear most of them are rather uninteresting.
I have continued to see a good deal of your son and his wife. It has been a great pleasure having them staying in my flat, and I am sorry to lose them now that they have a flat of their own. She has done a great deal of work for me, chiefly typing, and consequently I have come to know her well.2 I have a great respect and liking for her: she has a good mind, and is able to be a real help to a literary career, besides having a rare strength and charm of character.
Tom read me his review of Balfour’s Gifford Lectures, which I thought admirable, and so did the Editor of the International Journal of Ethics. I am glad he is joining the Aristotelian Society.3 It is a good thing for him to be moving to Highgate,4 as, besides a slight increase of salary, it makes it easier for him to get to know philosophical people in London. I hope to introduce him to several during the Christmas vacation. It seems to me that he would have every reason to hope for a distinguished philosophical career in this country if it were not for the worry and the great fatigue of his present struggle to make both ends meet. I have an affection for him which has made it a happiness to be able to help him, and I hope opportunities may occur again in the future.5
Wishing you the compliments of the season,
I remain
Yours very truly
Bertrand Russell
1–CCE’s biography of her father-in-law: William Greenleaf Eliot: Minister, Educator, Philanthropist (Boston and New York, 1904).
2–VHE had helped BR to prepare a collection of his articles, Justice in War-Time (1915).
3–The prestigious Aristotelian Society held regular meetings in London; from 1888 it published Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, an important outlet for philosophical debate.
4–After a term at High Wycombe, TSE had accepted a better post (£160 a year with dinner and tea) at Highgate Junior School, where the headmaster kept a place on the staff for young men of literary aspirations who needed to earn some money while trying to make their way. TSE taught French, Latin, lower mathematics, drawing, swimming, geography, history and baseball. John Betjeman, a pupil aged ten, presented ‘that dear good man’ with some poems headed The Best of Betjeman, but TSE never revealed his opinion of Betjeman’s work, only laughing when pressed by the author at intervals during their lifelong friendship. In a letter to TSE (17 Dec. 1936), Betjeman wrote: ‘I do remember you at Highgate … You were known as the American Master and I remember that a boy told me you were a poet but I didn’t believe it’ (John Betjeman, Letters, I, 1926–1951, ed. Candida Lycett Green, 163).
5–BR told OM on 10 Nov. that he loved TSE ‘as if he were my son’; and he added, ‘he is becoming much more of a man. He has a profound & quite unselfish devotion to his wife, & she really is very fond of him, but has impulses of cruelty from time to time’ (quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1996), 444).
TO J. H. Woods
MS Professor David G. Williams
28 December 1915
3 Compayne Gdns, London N.W.
Dear Professor Woods,
I am very glad to hear from you at last, and I shall be very glad to answer your questions and perform your commissions. But I cannot help thinking that a letter I sent you about two months ago went astray, as you ask a question which I thought I had answered, and do not answer some which I asked.
As for the typewritten notes, they were presented me by a man who borrowed mine to have a copy taken for himself. As I have my illegible original, I presented the copy to you.
I will write to Joachim at once about your inquiry. I have no reason for doubting that he will be in Oxford next year, or J. A. Smith either. These are undoubtedly the two best men in Oxford. Ross1 I suppose will be back at the end of the war. Beare2 in Dublin is awfully good of course; but I do not think there is anyone in Oxford to touch Joachim
and Smith.
Now as to my own questions. I should like to know as soon as possible whether I could take my examinations in April. I have a month’s holiday then, and could perhaps be two weeks in Cambridge, if I took the first boat west and the last east. I could not stay longer. Of course I should prefer to come in the summer, and if it were in any way possible to take my examinations in August, I should prefer to do so. But I could not get to America before the first week in August. I hope you can let me know very soon what arrangements I can make. I should also very much like to know more detail as to reading for the topicals: ancient philosophy to Aristotle, modern to Kant, especially psychology and logic, and either:
metaphysics
modern phil. from Kant
ancient ” ” Aristotle.
Should you advise me to choose the latter? I have not read any in Greek, except some Plotinus, but I should like to take it.
I should be very grateful if you could answer these questions.
I hope you will send me the Patañjali here. It will revive very pleasant memories.
I should like to write you a more personal letter than this, and tell you of my own affairs and my life for the past three months – but I must postpone it until I write again.
With all best wishes for the New Year to yourself and Mrs Woods.
Very sincerely
Thomas S. Eliot
1–William Davis Ross (1877–1971), tutor in Philosophy at Oriel College, 1902–29, was in the Ministry of Munitions. TSE’s annotated copy of his translation of the Metaphysica (1908), purchased 1912, is in his library.
2–John Isaac Beare (1857?–1918), Regius Professor of Greek, University of Dublin, 1902–15, and a translator of Aristotle.
1916
TO Conrad Aiken
MS Huntington
10 January 1916
3 Compayne Gdns, London N.W.
(please forward)
Dear Conrad
I owe you many apologies, but I have been most frightfully busy. The news is that I am to be at Highgate School, near town, next term, that I am starting to rewrite my thesis, that my wife has been very ill, that I have been taken up with the worries of finance and Vivien’s health, that my friend Jean Verdenal has been killed,1 that nothing has been seen of [Martin] Armstrong, who is now a captain in Kitchener’s army, that compulsion is coming in,2 that my putative publisher will probably be conscripted, that we are very blue about the war, that living is going up, and that
King Bolo’s big black bassturd kween
That airy fairy hairy un
She led the dance on Golder’s Green
With Cardinal Bessarian
I am keen about rhymes in-een:
King Bolo’s big black bassturd kween
Her taste was kalm and klassic
And as for anything obscene
She said it made her ass sick.
As for literature, have you seen our Katholick Anthology? (Elk. Matthews).3 It has not done very well, in spite of the name of Yeats. I have written nothing lately, too much absorbed by practical worries. Your idea of a kwaterly is very attractive but
King Bolo’s big black bassturd kween
Was awf’ly sweet and pure
She interrupted prayers one day
With a shout of Pig’s Manure.
But I repeat that
K. B. b. b. b. k.
Was awf’ly sweet and pure
She said ‘I don’t know what you mean!’
When the chaplain* whistled to her
* Charles, the Chaplain.
But about the P[oetry] Journal, you see I would be thrown out of Poetry if I wrote for that, and Poetry pays – which is everything to me. My only paying publications are Poetry and the Int. Journal of Ethics. Do you know anything about some sons of bitches named Sherman French and Co.?4 They wrote asking me to send them a book, and when I wrote back asking for terms they said they hadn’t known I was an Englishman and they could only boom books by native talent. If you are in with them you might tell them to butter their asses and bugger themselves, or something like that on my behalf, that my great-aunt Hannah married a Cabot,5 and that I have written their name on bumwash.
I hope to write, when I have more detachment. But I am having a wonderful life nevertheless. I have lived through material for a score of long poems, in the last six months. An entirely different life from that I looked forward to two years ago. Cambridge seems to me a dull nightmare now – but then – it’s a good enough life in its way.
Living is going up. Eggs are three pence. Income tax heavy. Still, one can get a good dinner cheap, if one knows where to go. The heaviest item in London is rent – you can’t get a good flat much under £65, unless you go well out of town. How is your baby?6 Paget7 I see from time to time, and from him I hear that Armstrong says he has ‘left the old life behind him’ i.e. is a soldier and doesn’t care to see his pacific acquaintances. Myers8 married a Belgian.
I have few ideas, and much work to do. Come to England in the spring? We shall be in London through July.
Yours ever
Tom.
Remember me to Jessie.
Congratters on the New book.9 Who will have it here? I shall get one.
1–TSE had last seen him in autumn 1911. TSE’s Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) was to be dedicated ‘To Jean Verdenal 1889–1915’; and in P 1909–1925, the dedication of ‘Prufrock and Other Observations’ became ‘For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915. Mort aux Dardanelles’.
2–Prime Minister Herbert Asquith introduced a Bill for the ‘compulsory attestation of single men of military age’ on 5 Jan., which led to conscription for single men (extended to married men in May).
3–EP claimed that Francis Meynell and other Roman Catholics had protested to Elkin Mathews about the title. Copies were still available in 1936.
4–Sherman French & Co., Beacon St, Boston: publishers of poetry books including Louis Untermeyer’s First Love (1911).
5–It was in fact TSE’s great-aunt Martha Stearns (Hannah’s sister) who married Joseph Sebastian Cabot. The Cabots were Boston Brahmins: one of the First Families of the City.
6–Conrad and Jessie Aiken’s baby John, b. Oct. 1913.
7–Unidentified.
8–R. H. Myers (1892–1985), music critic and writer, who was involved in postal censorship 1915–18.
9–Conrad Aiken, Turns and Movies, and other tales in verse (Boston, 1916).
TO Bertrand Russell
MS McMaster
Tuesday [11 January 1916]
[34 Russell Chambers, Bury St,
London W.C.]
Dear Bertie,
This is wonderfully kind of you – really the last straw (so to speak) of generosity.1 I am very sorry you have to come back – and Vivien says you have been an angel to her – but of course I shall jump at the opportunity with the utmost gratitude. I am sure you have done everything possible and handled her in the very best way – better than I. I often wonder how things would have turned out but for you – I believe we shall owe her life to you, even.
I shall take the 10.30, and look forward to a talk with you before you go. Mrs Saich2 is expecting you. She has made me very comfortable here.
Aff.
Tom
1–BR had taken VHE to Devon for a change of air. On 3 Jan. he told OM that he had ‘made a valiant attempt to get out of going away with Mrs E’, but that ‘the whole thing rather amused me, because it was so unlike the way things are conventionally supposed to happen’. He had talked to TSE, and felt ‘the responsibility for her health’, and that TSE was ‘willing to take my place, but reluctant on account of his work (He has to take a Ph.D degree at Harvard, and his only time for preparation is during the school holidays)’ (Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years 1914–1970, ed. Nicholas Griffin [2001], 51). When BR returned to London, after five days, he invited TSE to join her in Devon at his expense.
2–The charwoman.
TO His Father
MS Houghton
14 January 1916
Torbay Hotel, Torquay
My dear father
I wrote to mother yesterday, and I want this to go by the same boat, as I have not written to you for so long. This is a very towny seaside place, but much more attractive than Eastbourne (Vivien is massaging my head, so my writing will be rather scrawly) with a real bay and a little harbour just in front of the hotel, with boats. It is wonderful to be here at the seaside in January, warm enough to go out without an overcoat. If I had some old clothes I should be inevitably tempted to seize a boat and put to sea – except that Vivien couldn’t come with me. There are some signs of war even in this remote western country – a torpedo boat from time to time, and a naval officer at the hotel who goes out in a motor boat, looking for submarines.
The west country is very lovely – rich and green, with bright red soil. We passed through Eliot country getting here – Somerset1 – quite near.
The post-time has nearly come, and Vivien wants to put in a word, as she hasn’t been able to write to you lately
[In Vivien’s hand:]
1–TSE’s ancestor Andrew Eliot (1627–1703), a cordwainer, emigrated in about 1669 from East Coker, near Yeovil, Somerset, to Salem, Massachusetts.