The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922

by T. S. Eliot

  So I had to go to the theatre, which I detest, and walked for miles and miles yesterday showing him the East End and the docks; and I feel completely exhausted and especially depressed by my awareness of having lost contact with Americans and their ways, and by the hopelessness of ever making them understand so many things. I could go on indefinitely with this, but it is probably tiresome, and it was only to explain how much I should have preferred sitting on the lawn with you at Garsington, and to justify my proposing myself again after failing in this way. Will you please ask me soon after the next weekend? I wish Mrs Woolf could be there too: I have not seen her for a long time.

  You said, by the way, about my poems, some of the things I should like people to say, and which none of the reviewers have said. So I naturally choose to believe that you were ‘on the right track’!

  Sincerely

  T. S. Eliot

  I am sending some Joyce.

  Vivien Eliot TO Ottoline Morrell

  MS Texas

  Wednesday [25? June 1919]

  South View, Bosham,

  Chichester, Sussex

  My dear Ottoline

  What a fiasco about poor Tom’s weekend! I don’t expect you have altogether realised the tragedy of it. The man [Harold Peters] who turned up is a friend of Tom’s youth, an American with the development of an average boy of ten. Boring! He always makes me perfectly ill, – prostrate. He is so devoted to Tom that he has no other thought but to spend every minute of his leaves in just sitting, waiting for the few odd minutes Tom could spare him out of his days. He has been known to sit at the Bank, for hours, quite passive and contented, waiting for Tom to come out. This, you see, was his last leave, and he went back to America on Monday, and it would have simply broken his heart if Tom had left him. He knows no one in England, takes no interest in anything, and I can’t see what he would have done. But of course you will understand, because you do admit loyalty and kindness, don’t you?

  I have thought about you very much while I have been here. You have no idea how I love this place. It is the only place in England, outside London, that really satisfies me. I never get used to it. I am awfully happy here, and never want to go back. It is so nice to have Mary so near, too. We have glorious picnics together.

  I wish you were near, and that we could have some picnics too. Write and tell me what you have been doing, and reading, and who has been at Garsington. You spoke of Lowes Dickinson. I’ve only met him a few times, but I am afraid I like him about as little as I like anyone! It was quite a shock to hear you found him sympathetic!

  I hope you are going to ask Tom again, and that you really do understand. But please, my dear, don’t ask him until after the weekend July 5th–7th, as a favour to me, because I do want him to come down here and stay with me. I never see him now.

  Do write to me. With love

  Affectly

  Vivien

  TO His Mother

  MS Houghton

  29 June 1919

  [18 Crawford Mansions]

  My dearest Mother,

  The reason I did not write last Sunday was this: on the previous Thursday Harold Peters arrived, and staid until Monday, and I had to be with him every minute until he left. I got very tired, but I was very anxious to give him a good time: he had been minesweeping in the Orkneys, and is just demobilised and has sailed for home; he came all the way from Liverpool just to see me. I was going to Lady Ottoline’s for Sunday but put it off. I say I got tired: you know what Pete is, and he has no point of contact with any of my interests or thoughts, but he is the most lovable fellow in the world, and I think really devoted to me, and time cannot alter that. So we went to the theatre (at his expense) and to the Zoo’, and for a long walk down the river to the docks – and after all I enjoyed him very much. When he goes back he is expecting to go on a sailing vessel, as navigating officer to Hayti. But he would never go away from Boston for very long; he is devoted to his mother.

  So that cut up one week, and the first two days of this week I was too tired to be good for anything. Then I did another review, which took two days. Sat. I went to Bosham to see Vivien; Arthur Dakyns came with his motor car; on Sunday we hired a boat and sailed with Sacheverell Sitwell and Mary Hutchinson down Chichester Harbour to Wittering, where the Hutchinsons live. We had lunch there, and Vivien took some pictures, which I hope will be good enough to send you. The sailing was rather disastrous. There is no proper place to land, and we put the boat up on the beach. Going out the wind was dead ahead and we got stuck on a sandbank; the tide receded rapidly and left us high but not very dry. I broke a boat hook and finally threw out an anchor and we waded ashore – on planks, because the soft mud would suck you up. Vivien is splendid in a boat, she took off her stockings and jumped off and tried to push. We returned very muddy to the Hutchinsons for tea and returned in the motor, just in time for me to catch my train. I expect the boatman will be furious.

  I have a busy day tomorrow. After the bank I must call on a publisher [Martin Secker] – another one – who wants me to write a book on Stendhal the French novelist, but he is not so good as the other publisher I spoke of [Sir Algernon Methuen], so I may hold off. Then I must leave some books for Ottoline, who is in hospital, fetch our dog who has been at V.’s aunts, and go to see a doctor about the varicose veins in my legs, which are increasing. Next day to the dentist’s.

  Dear Mother: I am sending this to Ada’s, as I don’t know where you are. I am so anxious that the house should be sold. I should like the bath robe. I must stop now. I think of you often. Goodnight.

  Your loving son

  Tom.

  FROM John Quinn

  Telegram NYPL (MS)

  30 June 1919

  New York

  SEND ADDITIONAL ESSAYS AND POEMS IMMEDIATELY INDICATING ORDER INSERTION COPY YOUR BOOK

  QUINN1

  1–In a letter the same day, Quinn wrote that Boni & Liveright had tried to force him to stand guaranty, instead of which he had withdrawn the book and sent it to Jeanne Foster to offer to John Lane. She was to insist that the poems and essays run together, and to guarantee $150. ‘P.S. I think the title for your book should be A Book of Verse and Prose by T. S. Eliot. I think Prufrock is a bad title, one that would hurt the sale of the book. I shall be glad to have you let me know about this when you send the additional essays and poems.’

  TO Mary Hutchinson

  MS Texas

  Tuesday [1 July 1919]

  18 Crawford Mansions,

  Crawford St, W.1

  Dear Mary,

  Thank you for wiring to the ferryman. I shall have to see him about it if I come this week, but I presume he understands that he will be settled with.

  I am sending Personae – perhaps you will have read some Pound when I see you next.1 But really I don’t know what are your particular points of intensity in poetry, do I? Your discoveries. ‘All one can do is to point’2 but I hope you will find something in this stuff.

  I am sorry to have given you this trouble about the boat.

  Yours

  Tom

  1–EP, Personae (1909).

  2–TSE, ‘The Education of Taste’: ‘The instructor has a course which he can follow: he can point to good literature and then be silent’ (A., 27 June 1919).

  TO Henry Eliot

  MS Houghton

  2 July 1919

  18 Crawford Mansions

  Dear Henry,

  It is a long time since I have written. My time has been taken up – but I have not written any poetry – though I have acquired some notoriety. Some friends of mine brought out a small book of my recent verse – you have seen it in Little Review – and as they are rather influential it has been reviewed at length in the Times, in the Athenaeum,1 and I believe in the Nation.2 Mother will show you some of the reviews. Also, as a result of my Athenaeum articles, I have had proposals for books from two publishers – Sir Algernon Methuen3 and Martin Secker4 – and hope to arrange something with one or the other.
Does the Athenaeum reach Chicago? I have arranged to have it sent to mother, but it costs £1 10s per annum so if you want it you will have to send for it, but you could do good work by forcing it on any clubs, millionaires, etc. as the best literary weekly in the Anglo-Saxon world. Art & Letters I will send you. I write in the Athenaeum about three weeks out of four.

  I must say that your life, as especially in your last letter to Vivien, is depressing. I suppose that the difficulty is that you must keep on good terms with the firm, and the general difficulty is that no one in America has any understanding or respect for the individual. The gregariousness of the life appals me. Here, for instance, if you go to stay with friends in the country, you can say you want to write or read or sit in the garden alone, and no one objects. The only thing required (on a short visit) is to be as brilliant as possible in the evenings – which does not necessarily imply intellectual. London is big; most people live alone, and don’t see the same friends more than once a week or two. But I don’t know how much is in your own hands: you seem to me to spend a great deal of time simply in morbid and fruitless consciousness of your own misery. Can’t you insist on being alone – can’t you say you are writing a book – can’t you find time for reading and thinking? You are really completely alone. You are unfortunate in having a consciousness – though not a clear one – of how barbarous life in America is. If you had, like all other Americans, no consciousness at all, you would be happier.

  Don’t think that I find it easy to live over here. It is damned hard work to live with a foreign nation and cope with them – one is always coming up against differences of feeling that make one feel humiliated and lonely. One remains always a foreigner – only the lower classes can assimilate. It is like being always on dress parade – one can never relax. It is a great strain. And life society is in a way much harder, not gentler. People are more aware of you, more critical, and they have no pity for one’s mistakes or stupidities. They are more spontaneous, and also more deliberate. They seek your company because they expect something particular from you, and if they don’t get it, they drop you. They are always intriguing and caballing; one must be very alert. They are sensitive, and easily become enemies. But it is never dull; and the intense awareness of individual personality – when I do meet Americans now, they always irritate me by never observing – by having no curiosity about what sort of a person one is.

  London is something one has to fight very hard in, in order to survive. What strikes me about all your friends – about my American friends – about any Americans I meet, is their immaturity of feeling, childishness.

  But really, your letters, some of the things in them, give me a great deal of pain. I am fonder of you than of any man living. We have some of the same faults and weaknesses – what has preserved me – if I am preserved, which I often doubt (you are not in a position to know) is something which has nothing to do with my conscious character (that is weak enough) but is either a very hidden deep force or just luck, or Vivien’s assistance, in large part.

  Do you know exactly what you want – is it merely a strong but confused dissatisfaction with Chicago and America, or have you any ideas as to the sort of world you want to live in? What do you expect from the people in it? Is it impossible to live in a self-respecting way in Chicago?

  You never speak of the possibility of coming here for a visit, even a month. Surely you could if you persuaded yourself that you must have it.

  It is late now, and I have work to do. I hope to write more frequently – but something is bound to turn up.

  Tom.

  1–‘Is This Poetry?’, A., 20 June 1919, 491: an unsigned review by LWand VWof Poems and JMM’s The Critic in Judgment (both Hogarth Press books). VWwrote to TSE, 28 July 1920: ‘We felt awkward at reviewing our own publications, and agreed to share the guilt: he reviewed you, and I reviewed Murry’ (Letters, II).

  2–No review appeared in N.

  3–Algernon Methuen (1856–1924), founder of Methuen & Co. in 1889. Baronet 1916.

  4–Martin Secker (1872–1978), publisher renowned for fiction and European authors in translation. He had recently published DHL’s New Poems (1918).

  TO Mary Hutchinson

  MS Texas

  Wednesday [9? July? 1919]

  18 Crawford Mansions

  Dear Mary

  Here is the poem for which you asked, out of politeness I dare say.1 I don’t feel at all finally satisfied with it, so please don’t let anyone see it, but let me have your candid opinion upon it when you will, and also please on ‘Bleistein’ in Art & Letters. ‘Bleistein’ (like ‘S[weeney] among the Nightingales’) is meant to be very serious! and ‘Hippopotamus’ and Webster aren’t –

  I am not sure whether you thought that Hulme is a really great poet, as I do, or not.2 I can’t think of anything as good as two of his poems since Blake. And of course you are unjust to Pound. One must learn to appreciate his ‘literary-appreciative’ style as a medium for expressing something of his own. And I think the ‘Cathay’ and the ‘Seafarer’ in Ripostes are wonderfully good.1 I daresay he seems to you derivative. But I can show you in the thing I enclose how I have borrowed from half a dozen sources just as boldly as Shakespeare borrowed from North. But I am as traditionalist as a Chinaman, or a Yankee.

  I thought that Sunday was very delightful, though it was broken off at an interesting moment. How could I have said ‘superior’, and what is a Henry James young woman?

  Yours

  T.S.E.

  1–‘“Cathay” will, I believe, rank with the “Sea-Farer” in the future among Mr. Pound’s original work’ (Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, 27; To Criticise the Critic, 181).

  TO John Rodker

  MS Virginia

  9 July 1919

  18 Crawford Mansions

  Dear Rodker,

  I have the new poem I spoke of – about seventy-five lines – which will not have appeared anywhere – but I am withholding it until I know you want it, as I may make alterations. It is also quite possible that I may have another about the same length by August 1. So I hope that the book may be more nearly what you had in mind. I think you have all the newer poems: beside the Woolf volume there is a French poem in L. Review (‘Dans le Restaurant’), ‘Bleistein’ and ‘Sweeney Erect’, ‘Cooking Egg’ – of which I enclose revised version with quotations – and this new one, ‘Gerontion’.

  I hope you are getting on well with the Lewis.1

  Yours ever

  T. S. Eliot

  What’s this latest row of L. Review with American censorship?2

  1–WL, Fifteen Drawings (Ovid Press, 1919).

  2–In June 1919, the US Post Office determined that the Little Review was in violation of Postal Laws and Regulations, due to the ‘obscene’ content of Ulysses which it had started to serialise after the Egoist was unable to continue doing so (for similar reasons); it refused to distribute copies

  TO John Quinn

  TS NYPL (MS)

  9 July 1919

  18 Crawford Mansions

  Dear Mr Quinn,

  Thank you very much indeed for cabling to me. I enclose the additional MSS. The four poems can go, I think, in the order given. Unfortunately I have lost my list giving the order in which the various poems and articles were to be printed. But I think that these should be put at the head of the new poems – the ones not in the Prufrock volume; and if I have put the new poems in front of the Prufrock ones, then these should head the new book.

  The articles enclosed are a selection of what I consider the best of those I have been contributing to the Athenaeum, and might follow those already in your hands. I have arranged them in the order I thought the best. The two entitled ‘A Romantic Patrician’ and ‘A Sceptical Patrician’ I want to go under one heading: ‘Two Types’ as I and II with the sub-headings as above.

  I thought that the Elizabethan article would be suitable because of the American interest in War poets; and that the popularity of Adams’s book ought
to lend an interest in that essay. I wonder what American opinion would think of my article on Adams, but it is a type that I ought to know better than any other. And the article on American literature seemed to me appropriate.

  In each case the title of the book reviewed ought to go below as a footnote instead of where it is, at the top.

  Also of course I ought to acknowledge obligation

  for various poems: to Poetry, Blast, Art & Letters, The Little Review.

  for prose: The Egoist, The New Statesman, The Little Review, The Athenaeum.

  If there is enough material otherwise, I should prefer to withdraw the Eeldrop and Appleplexes, which seem to me to be crude stuff. But I don’t feel certain about this and I should like to leave it to your judgment whether it is better, even if the stuff is poor, to have some prose which is not purely critical.