The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922
Page 53
Absurd creature!
I feel rather uncomfortable writing to Gordon Sq. Please keep my letter to yourself!2
Our ‘day’ was wonderful – I have such an admiration for you Mary. You are all that [I] admire, and I consider it is flattering to me that I admire you so! You are such a ‘civilised’ rebel.
Jack is coming to dinner tomorrow. I shall kiss him.
[unsigned]
1–Premiere of the Ballets Russes production (22 July) of Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, conducted by Ernst Ansermet, with choreography by Massine (who also danced the role of the Miller), and with curtains, sets and costumes by Picasso. VHE wrote in her diary: ‘Went to ballet with Sachie [Sitwell] & party … Very interesting & the music very good. Massine really wonderful. But on the whole nothing like the Boutique Fantastique. Saw Mary, Clive, Jack, Ottoline (with the Duke), Read, Aldington, Viola, Nina etc. etc. Did not feel well & looked horrible.’ TSE also went the following evening with the Hutchinsons to see The Three-Cornered Hat for a second time, as well as Papillons and Prince Igor.
2–Clive Bell, MH’s lover, lived at 46 Gordon Square.
FROM Richard Aldington1
MS Houghton
18 July 1919
Authors’ Club,
2 Whitehall Court, S.W.1
Dear Eliot,
I have several times recently felt impelled to write you my admiration for your critical articles and put it off in the hope of meeting you. Your article in the current Egoist2 again stird my admiration and (I admit) my envy. You have a power of apprehension, of analysis, of the dissociation of ideas,3 with a humour and ease of expression which make you not the best but the only modern writer of prose criticism in English. I read your essays in the Athenaeum with the greatest pleasure; I hope that some day you will collect these and other essays into book form.
Having said this much, with complete sincerity, I feel compelled to add that I dislike your poetry very much; it is over-intellectual and afraid of those essential emotions which make poetry.4
Excuse the impertinence of all this and its rather heavy style, due to a sort of pious terror.
Yrs
Richard Aldington
1–Richard Aldington, author and critic: see Glossary of Names.
2–TSE, ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’ [IV], Egoist 6: 5 (July 1919), 39–40.
3–See TSE, ‘Marivaux’: ‘Critics are impersonal people, engaged usefully in dissociating ideas’ (Arts & Letters 2: 1, Spring 1919).
4–RA wrote later: ‘Mr. Eliot’s poetry is often attacked as incomprehensible and heartless, which is simply another way of saying that it is subtle and not sentimental’ (‘The Poetry of T. S. Eliot’, Outlook 49, July 1922).
TO Violet Schiff1
MS BL
21 July 1919 18
Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St, w.1
Dear Violet,
I must write to tell you how thoroughly we both enjoyed our holiday with you2 – but I believe Vivien is writing too so I will merely speak for myself. Incidentally, I feel much better for it. I was really glad of the bad weather as it gave excuse for more conversation – there are very few people to whom one could say that sincerely!
I am very glad you are going to be at Eastbourne when Vivien is there, but I hope you will be in London for a time before you leave the country, so that I can see something of you.
I send the poem back, – as I said, I don’t want anyone to see it but yourselves.
By the way, John put a Napoleon3 into my bag by mistake. I noticed another copy, so I hope you won’t mind if I keep it a few days in the hope of being able to look at it. I will post it back carefully.
With best wishes to both of you.
Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot
1–Violet Beddington (1876–1962) married SS as his second wife in May 1911. A gifted musician, she had studied singing under Paolo Tosti.
2–VHE wrote in her diary on 20 July: ‘Rather unsatisfactory weekend. Schiffs very fatiguing and irritating to me. T. got on all right.’
3–Napoleon, a play by Herbert Trench (1919), favourably reviewed by JMM, A., 11 July.
FROM Charles W. Eliot1
TS Houghton
25 July 1919
Asticon, Maine
Dear Mr Eliot:
Your letter of July 9th from 18 Crawford Mansions, London, reached me July 23rd. I suppose I asked in my letter of January 4th the questions to which you refer in your present letter partly because I felt interested in the career of a member of the Eliot clan, and partly because I always feel much interested in an exceptional or peculiar career of a well-trained Harvard graduate, – especially if that career be literary or scientific.
From what you tell me, I should suppose you had been distinctly successful so far in your efforts to procure a livelihood in foreign parts and at the same time win reputation as a writer. Your employment in a bank recalls the cases of Lamb, Grote, and Lubbock.2 In a bank or a Government Bureau one can work a few hours a day for a livelihood and yet be fresh several hours a day for literary or scientific labors. Your living in London needs no justification. You are quite within your rights in practicing on your belief that living in London is good for you spiritually and also leads quicker than by any other route to established success in literature.
It is, nevertheless, quite unintelligible to me how you or any other young American scholar can forego the privilege of living in the genuine American atmosphere – a bright atmosphere of freedom and hope. I have never lived long in England – about six months in all – but I have never got used to the manners and customs of any class in English society, high, middle, or low. After a stay of two weeks or two months in England it has been delightful for me to escape to either France or America; although I have had English and Scotch friends whom I have greatly admired and loved.
Then, too, I have never been able to understand how any American man of letters can forego the privilege of being of use primarily to Americans of the present and future generations, as Emerson, Bryant, Lowell, and Whittier were.3 Literature seems to me highly climatic and national as yet; and will it not be long before it becomes independent of these local influences, and addresses itself to an international mind?
You mention in your letter the name of Henry James. I knew his father well, and his brother William very well; and I had some conversation with Henry at different times during his life. I have a vivid remembrance of a talk with him during his last visit to America. It seemed to me all along that his English residence for so many years contributed neither to the happy development of his art nor to his personal happiness.
I conceive that you have a real claim on my attention and interest, – hence this letter. My last word is that if you wish to speak through your own work to people of the ‘finest New England spirit’ you had better not live much longer in the English atmosphere. The New England spirit has been nurtured in the American atmosphere.
Sincerely yours
Charles W. Eliot
1–Charles W. Eliot (1834–1926), President of Harvard University, 1869–1909; a third cousin once removed of TSE’s grandfather.
2–The essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was a clerk in the India House; the historian George Grote (1794–1871) worked in his father’s bank; and the astronomer and mathematician Sir John Lubbock (1803–65) became a partner in the family bank.
3–TSE had already dismissed ‘such men as Bryant and Whittier as absolute plebieans’ (‘The Hawthorne Aspect’, Little Review, Aug. 1918, 48). Elsewhere he identified Poe, Whitman and Hawthorne as the ‘important’ American writers, adding that ‘the essays of Emerson are already an incumbrance’ (‘American Literature’, A., 25 Apr. 1919, 237).
TO Sydney Schiff
MS BL
25 July 1919
18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St, W.1
Dear Mr Schiff,
Thank you for your letter, for the Little Review, w
hich I will keep for Pound, and for your book. Of course I have not had time even to look into it yet, but I am looking forward to it with much interest. I want to see at what point if any, it joins the curve of development of Richard Kurt. I see in R. K. a process of crystallisation in the later part of the book which interests me and which I think may in future lead you further away from or beyond your theory of the novel than you think.
I am appreciative of your careful study of ‘Gerontion’ and shall be glad always to hear anything further you may have to say about it. If I have not another poem by the time I will do an article for A. & L. [Art & Letters] – not on any current book, as I do enough of that for the Athenaeum.
I should really much prefer it if you would write to Rodker yourself. I am only a contributor, you know! and I am sure he would be quite as likely to send something serviceable if you wrote. His address, if you do not know it, is John Rodker, 43 Belsize Park Gardens, N.W.3.
But I believe that Aldington would be a better person to acquire, and is a good prose writer too. He is more mature than Rodker and I expect him to become one of the few to count. His tendency is in the right direction – he really seems to me an important person to have. Richard Aldington’s address is c/o the Authors’ Club, 2Whitehall Court, S.W.1. I have an article by Pound for your next number which I will send you.
I do not know who Ludovici1 is. What little I have seen of [D. H.] Lawrence lately makes me think him thoroughly dégringolé [run down].
However, I must stop now.
With best wishes
Sincerely
T. S. Eliot
1–A. M. Ludovici (1882–1971), author and illustrator, was serving in Military Intelligence.
TO John Middleton Murry1
MS Northwestern
29 July 1919
[London]
Dear J. M.,
Thank you very much. I think I know which of the poems you mean already, although I have had the book2 by me only for a day; but you must not give me credit for any more insight than I can prove to you. What I want is to be able to talk them over with you in quiet and leisure after I have had several days with them.
I hardly dare say what some of them seem to me to reveal – for it might seem an impertinence.
Your letter gave me a great deal of pleasure – more than pleasure. You must realise that it has been a great event to me to know you, but you do not know yet the full meaning of this phrase as I write it.
Yrs always
T.S.E.
1–John Middleton Murry: see Glossary of Names.
2–JMM, Poems: 1917–18 (1918).
TO Harold Monro1
MS Texas
5 August 1919
18 Crawford Mansions
My dear Monro,
Your letter arrived this evening. I should have been really very glad indeed to have contributed to such an interesting critical symposium, but I see that you go to press on Sept. 1st.2 I am just out of bed and on Saturday expect to leave for three weeks in France,3 returning on the 1st (probably). I shall not be doing any writing during that time, even my usual work for the Athenaeum. In fact, I am very much run down and this is my first real rest for two years.
So I can only say that I am very sorry that your request should have come at this time. I shall at least look forward to reading the number.
Yours sincerely
T. S. Eliot
1–Harold Monro (1879–1932), poet and owner of the Poetry Bookshop: see Glossary of Names.
2–The Sept. issue of The Chapbook was meant to contain ‘Five Critical Essays on the Present State of English Poetry’, but this item was postponed.
3–EP wrote to Quinn, 6 Aug.: ‘Expect Eliot here in a weeks time, hope to put him through course of sun, air & sulphur baths & return him to London intact.’ TSE left three days later, met EP for a walking tour in Périgueux in the middle of the month, and returned to London on 31 Aug.
TO Mary Hutchinson
MS Texas
6 August 1919
18 Crawford Mansions
Dear Mary,
Thanks for books received today. How very kind of you. I shall do my best – you know what a slow reader I am, and I shall only take one volume with me.1 Have you read them all? The amount I read must depend on the state of the weather and the extent of my recuperation. I have crawled out of bed today to go to the dentist and the French consulate, after several days in bed, and feel very languid. I have just strength to observe that groups are at least as intelligent as most so-called individuals and as tolerable. It’s when one expects intelligence from the constituents of the groups that one is completely disappointed. If the group is dominated by an individual the group does not count; if it is not, then its members do not count as individuals. This is not clearly put. Second I don’t know what is the ‘intellectual intelligence’ and ‘dandyism in ideas’. I mean simply that the words convey nothing to me. I thought that ideas should be clarae et distinctae,2 and also that they should more or less work: but you must show me a sample swanky idea and I will put on my best bombazine to meet it. Have one for me when I get back. Perhaps Flaubert will help me?
Please send Gerontion back to me at once. I leave Saturday night, and I must revise it in France, so just put it in an envelope and send it by return.
I am very tired (as you will have seen from this letter) and very glad to be getting out of London. Perhaps I won’t ever come back!
Thank you again for Flaubert.
Yours
Tom.
1–The following day he sent a telegram: ‘Vivien says books were gift forgive apparent ingratitude writing from France when address settled Tom.’ It is possible that he had returned to MH most of the books she had sent over to him, not realising that they were all a gift outright.
2–‘clear and distinct’, alluding to a phrase in Descartes’s Meditatio VI, 15.
TO Lytton Strachey
MS BL
6 August 1919
18 Crawford Mansions
Dear Lytton,
How propitious that you should have written just before I disappear into central France where no letters will reach me. I have not been away, but in London, in my office or among my books or (several times) in bed, and have frequently imagined you sitting on the lawn at Pangbourne or in a garden, conducting your clinic of Queen Victoria with perfect concentration – but I had not imagined you disturbed by my heresies in the Athenaeum.1 You have frightened me, because I always expect you to be right, and because I know I shall never be able to retaliate upon your finely woven fabric. I have lately read an article of yours on Voltaire2 which made me envious. I was amazed by your statement about Erasmus,3 but I am sure you can back it. Besides, my dear Lytton, I am a very ill-read person.
I am going to France, to the Dordogne, on Saturday, for three weeks. I wonder if you would write if I sent you a card from there – but perhaps I should have left before you decided to do so, if you did.
Yours ever
T. S. Eliot
1–The biographies in Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) were regarded by some as heretical, and he was planning his biography of Queen Victoria. Among TSE’s thirteen pieces for A. so far in 1919 was ‘The Education of Taste’ (27 June), a scathing review of J. W. Cunliffe’s English Literature during the Last Half-Century.
2–Lytton Strachey, ‘Voltaire’, A., 1 Aug. 1919, 677–9: a review of Voltaire in his Letters, trans. S. G. Tallentyre.
3–‘Erasmus was a tragic figure. The great revolution in the human mind, of which he had been the presiding genius, ended in failure; he lived to see the tide of barbarism rising once more over the world; and it was left to Voltaire to carry off the final victory.’
TO Lytton Strachey
PC BL
[25? August 1919]
[France]
I have been walking the whole time since I arrived and so have had no address at all. Through Dordogne and the Corrèze, sunburnt – melons, ceps, truffles, eggs, good wi
ne and good cheese and cheerful people. It is a complete relief from London. I hope to get to Ussel.
Yours
T.S.E.
FROM John Quinn
CC NYPL (MS)
26 August 1919
[New York]
My dear Mr Eliot:
I think I sent you a copy of a letter which I dictated Sunday, June 29th, to Liveright,1 telling of their damned impertinence to me regarding your book and putting me off for two or three months about it. A few days before that I had had a letter from you saying that you had some later work in prose and verse. I cabled you to send the later work, poems and prose, and in my absence Mr Curtin of my office confirmed the cable by letter. The later work came. Meantime I had had the matter submitted to the John Lane Company of this city, telling them that I would be willing to advance $150 toward the setting up of the book and making of plates. Early in August a letter came in apologizing for the delay in sending a reply but stating that the writer had been out of town, and concluding:
‘Mr Eliot’s work is no doubt brilliant, but it is not exactly the kind of material we care to add to our list. Nevertheless, we appreciate your kindness in bringing it to our attention and regret that we cannot give you a favorable reply.’