by T. S. Eliot
I am sorry you had Margaret on your hands. It must have been torture.3 I want to write to you again soon about other things.
Always your affectionate brother,
[T. S. E.]
1–HWE had written on 24 Sept. about TSE’s stock in the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, asking whether to sell the shares immediately so as to profit from the exchange rate.
2–HWE had reported, ‘rumor has it that England is planning to float a large loan in the United States with the purpose of establishing here large British credits. If this should be true, the effect upon foreign exchange rates would probably be favorable.’
3–HWE had related that their sister Margaret had been to stay with him in Chicago. ‘You can have no idea of what acute boredom is unless you have Margaret talk to you for an hour. It is not mere ennui; it is an excruciating pain; it is like being killed by light taps of the bastinado.’
TO Wyndham Lewis
MS Cornell
15 October 1920
18 Crawford Mansions
Dear Lewis,
Thanks for your address. I should have communicated before but have been in almost hourly consultation with somebody or other about the flat which I am trying to take from an insane she-hyaena. As it is still uncertain what day I can move or whether she will make it impossible for me to move at all I have been able to form no plans and make no engagements. As it appears that I can get you on the telephone I shall ring up at the first moment I find myself free.
Yours
T. S. E.
TO Edgar Jepson
MS Beinecke
15 October 1920
18 Crawford Mansions
Dear Jepson,
Please forgive my unpardonable delay in replying to your kind invitation – which has been due to pressure of business of the most agonizing description. I shall be very much pleased if I may come to your supper on Sunday evening.
Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot
TO Scofield Thayer
TS Beinecke
17 October 1920
18 Crawford Mansions
Dear Scofield,
Thank you very much for your charming letter, written on my birthday, and also for the interesting cheque enclosed therein, which came to hand at a most opportune moment.1 I also observe your sagacious consideration in withholding payment until you had raised the rate.
Upon due reflection, and after perusal of Mr Shanks’s2 contributions, I shall be glad to undertake a contribution every other month under the name of ‘London Letter’, dealing with the literary life of the metropolis. I suppose it will turn out to be mostly an attempt to diagnose the reasons for there not being more life than there is; but I will endeavour to spot any germs of vitality that appear, lest our American public should find the London spectacle too depressing. As soon as my personal affairs, which means at the moment protracted negotiations over a flat, have quieted down a bit, I will compose something to send you.
Mr Shanks, by the way, has just been presented with a silver medal for writing the most beautiful poem for the year 1919,3 so he will probably retain enough conviction of his own merit to tide him over. I do not suppose that Pound will have any objection to the change.
Meanwhile I will not publish this matter abroad.
I received last night by the post a package bearing a label which indicated that it came from the offices of The Dial. When opened, it was found to contain The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken, and nothing else.4 There was no enclosure or inscription to indicate why the volume was sent to me. It occurred to me that it might be intended for review: and if so, I fear it was a piece of naughtiness on your part at Conrad’s expense. I have glanced through the book and it appears to me that the workmen called in to build this house were Swinburne and myself; the Dust being provided by Conrad. I trust that this criticism will not appear egotistic on my part, but I can point to a quotation on page 83.5 So will you tell me what I am to do with the book? I will forward it to anyone in America or the United Kingdom whom you designate. I have always, of course, had the most friendly relations with Conrad; and I shrink from straining our friendship by reviewing his book.
Vivienne has recently been approached by a certain person of our acquaintance with the request that she should forward to you a manuscript which had already been rejected by Pound. To which she replied that as Pound occupied the position of Foreign Editor of the Dial, it would be considered a violation of etiquette. But, she said suavely, that the person was quite at liberty to send the manuscript direct. However, the individual in question has (very wisely, in my opinion) decided not to risk it.
Vivienne sends her love, and thanks you for your letter.
This address will continue to find us until further notice. My cable address in case of need is ‘Eliot, Information, Branchage, Stock-London’.
Yours as ever
T. S. E.
1–A cheque in payment for ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’, Dial 79: 5 (Nov. 1920).
2–Edward Shanks (1892–1953), English poet, novelist and critic, had written three London Letters for the Dial (Apr., June, Aug.), the last on TSE and English criticism. TSE’s first London Letter would appear in Apr. 1921.
3–Shanks’s The Queen of China and Other Poems (1919) was awarded the first Hawthornden Prize.
4–Conrad Aiken, The House of Dust (1920).
5–Aiken: ‘Sometimes, I say, I’m just like John the Baptist – / You have my head before you … on a platter’ (III, vii, 9–10). TSE: ‘Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, / I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter’ (‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ll. 82–3).
TO Wyndham Lewis
MS Cornell
18 October 1920
18 Crawford Mansions
My dear Lewis,
You may already have left for Hastings, but if not I trust it will do you good and that the strike1 will not prevent your coming back. Don’t let it. It is true that we are having great trouble and I rather doubt if we can move at all. This fills me with despair. Just had a party of Schiff, Ottoline, and Siegfried Sassoon (all accidentally). Come and see us directly you get back.
Write to this address.
Yrs –
T.S.E.
1–A national miners’ strike began on the day of this letter; it was triggered by wage reductions consequent upon the de-controlling of mines on 31 Mar.
TO Leonard Woolf
TS Berg
23 October 1920
18 Crawford Mansions
My dear Woolf,
I have been most anxious to come out and see you and Mrs Woolf, since you have returned to town; but have been prevented by a series of calamities. I have been engaged in long and most vexing legal negotiations over a new flat, and got partially moved in last week; since then my father-in-law was taken suddenly ill, and I have not been able to attend to anything else. He had to have an operation very suddenly on Friday, and I did not get to bed till Saturday night; he was just at the point of death, and we do not know from hour to hour whether he will survive. My wife has been on the edge of collapse in consequence.
There have been several minor complications too, such as a minor operation on my Nose. But at present my father-in-law’s condition is the only concern on my mind, and we have to hold ourselves in readiness at any moment.
I have not forgotten, however, that you promised to review my book, and as the author’s copies have just come in, I suppose it will be in the hands of the Athenaeum. So I have written to Murry tonight to say that I have asked you to do it, and to ask him to send it to you; and I very much hope he will. I am looking forward with great curiosity to finding out what you think of these essays.1
Please tell your wife that I am disappointed at not having seen her since my visit2 which I enjoyed so much, and disappointed at being now in a position such that I can neither ask you to come and see us, nor come to see you.
Sincerely,
T. S. Eliot
1–LW’s review of SW appeared as ‘Back to Aristotle’, A., 17 Dec. 1920.
2–TSE had visited the Woolfs at Rodmell on 18 Sept. VW records in her diary for 19–20 Sept.: ‘He is a consistent specimen of his type, which is opposed to ours. Unfortunately the living writers he admires are Wyndham Lewis & Pound. – Joyce too … We had some talk after tea … about his writing. I suspect him of a good deal of concealed vanity & even anxiety about this.’ TSE ‘wants to write a verse play in which the 4 characters of Sweeny act the parts. A personal upheaval of some kind came after Prufrock, & turned him aside from his inclination – to develop in the manner of Henry James. Now he wants to describe externals. Joyce gives internals’ (Diary, II, 67–8).
TO The Editor of The Times Literary Supplement
Published 28 October 1920
Sir,
I hope that I am not too late in raising one or two questions suggested by the important article in your issue of September 30 entitled ‘A French Romantic’.1 I have been delayed by personal preoccupations; I am excused for writing now, if I am excused at all, by the importance of the subject, the interest of the article, and the fact that no other correspondent has anticipated me.
I willingly concede the point, contested by Mr Cyril Falls, that M. Maurras is a ‘romantic’.2M. Maurras has been handled very competently by M. Julien Benda in an appendix to Belphégor.3 So much for M. Maurras. It is in attempting to apprehend your critic’s definitions of the terms ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’ that my intellect is confused and my serenity disturbed. We are told that Lamartine ‘floundered in romanticism’ partly because ‘the sense of the mystery of things remained with him.’ Later we learn that ‘Romanticism is an excess of emotion’; but we are not informed what balance can be struck between excess of emotion (which is surely a fault) and a sense of the mystery of things (which cannot be altogether a bad sense to have). The writer treats Romanticism on the whole with disapproval until he suddenly declares that the period of classical production in France was also ‘a great romantic period’. This period is not the 17th century, which is dismissed as a period of ‘formalism’: it is a period which is represented by the Cathedrals and by Jeanne d’Arc (but not, apparently, by Agnes Sorel). I should be interested to know how the ‘cathedrals’ are more classical, or more romantic either, than Vézelay, St Benoît-sur-Loire, or Périgueux; but that is not the point: the point is, what is meant by applying both terms to their elucidation?
I suggest that the difficulties which veil most critics’ theories of Romanticism (and I include such writers as Pierre Lasserre4 and Irving Babbitt) are largely due to two errors. One is that the critic applies the same term ‘romantic’ to epochs and to individual artists, not perceiving that it assumes a difference of meaning; and the other is that he assumes that the terms ‘romantic’ and ‘classic’ are mutually exclusive and even antithetical, without actually enforcing this exclusiveness in the examination of particular works of art.
Another difficulty is that these writers do not always appear to distinguish between definitions and propositions. Again, your critic introduces unexpected terms which are not defined. I cite ‘intellectual and emotional integrity’, ‘spiritual purpose’, and ‘larger integration’. The alternatives are to elaborate a rigidly deductive system, or to employ the terms ‘romantic’ and ‘classic’ merely as convenient historical tags, never stretching their meaning beyond the acceptance of the intelligent reader. And it would perhaps be beneficial if we employed both terms as little as possible, if we even forgot these terms altogether, and looked steadily for the intelligence and sensibility which each work of art contains.
I am, Sir, your obliged obedient servant,
T. S. Eliot
1–[Basil de Selincourt], ‘A French Romantic’, a review of Albert Thibaudet, Les Idées de Charles Maurras (Paris, 1920), TLS, 28 Oct. 1920.
2–Charles Maurras (1868–1952), French poet, critic, political philosopher and polemical journalist, was founding editor of the reactionary and extreme monarchist paper, L’Action Française (1908–44). Building on ‘three traditions’ – classicisim, Catholicism, monarchism – the thrust of Maurras’s ideology was to become increasingly right-wing, authoritarian and anti-democratic. TSE later wrote ‘The Action Française, M. Maurras and Mr. Ward’, in NC 7: 3 (Mar. 1928), an issue that included his translation of Maurras’s essay ‘Prologue to an Essay on Criticism’. TSE said he had been ‘a reader of the work of M. Maurras for eighteen years’, and, far from ‘drawing him away from’ Christianity – in 1926 Maurras was condemned by the Pope, with five of his books being placed on the Index – it had had the opposite effect. In a later essay, TSE named Maurras as one of the ‘three best writers of invective of their time’ (SE, 499). Cyril Falls, in a letter to the TLS (7 Oct.), defended Maurras against the charge of political extremism: he is ‘a convinced classicist’ who has written ‘many denunciations of romanticism’.
3–Benda wrote, ‘The eulogies bestowed daily on the high-priest of the Action Française for “returning to the manners of the classic style” make us smile when we consider his enthusiasm for his own doctrines, the violence of his arguments, and especially the virulent, contemptuous tone he uses towards his adversary’ (Belphégor, trans. S. J. I. Lawson [1929], 156).
4–Pierre Lasserre (1867–1930), literary critic; director of L’École des Hautes-Etudes; author of the first study of Maurras, Charles Maurras et la Renaissance classique (Paris, 1902). Lasserre was a friend of Péguy and a disciple of Sorel, who broke with Maurras and the Action Française in 1914.
TO Mary Hutchinson
PC Texas
[Postmark 30 October 1920]
18 Crawford Mansions
I am so sorry about these postponements. Vivien’s father is dangerously ill and was operated upon last night
aff.
T. S. E.
We cannot predict from hour to hour.
1–His second emergency operation.
TO His Mother
TS Houghton
31 October 1920
18 Crawford Mansions
My dearest mother,
I am afraid you will be anxious on account of my not having written for so long. I do not think that I have ever had so many difficult things on my mind at once. For the last ten days Vivien’s father has been very ill. It appeared at first to be ptomaine poisoning from some tinned sardines, but they finally decided that the poisoning was only the occasion of something more serious. I was called over Friday afternoon. The specialists had a consultation at half past six, and at quarter past eight they operated in the house. After the operation the surgeon said that he would have been dead in another five or ten minutes. There was an enormous abscess in his abdomen, which was just beginning to break. They were not certain even after the operation that he would live through the night, and none of us got to bed at all.
He had suffered very great agony for days, and was very weak indeed. We had two nurses, but of course there was work all the time for everybody. So far, he has recovered wonderfully well, and in spite of the discomfort of having to sit up in bed with a tube in the wound to draw out the suppuration, is in very good spirits. He has not been told that although the surgeons were able to get out the abscess, they confess themselves quite at a loss to know the cause of the abscess. They say that they will have to operate again, but they hope to be able to postpone it until he is over the shock of this operation and is stronger.
Vivien is now nearly prostrated. The news that the operation was necessary was very sudden, and the doctors held out very little hope of his surviving it. She held out through the night, so long as there was work to do, but she has been in bed with a terrible migraine yesterday, and [is] now very weak. To add to the difficulty Mrs Haigh-Wood’s servant (she has only one now) was taken with a bad cold
and fever Friday, and had to go home. We have lent them our Ellen for a few days, as Vivien’s mother cannot do all the work, help with her father, and cook for the family and two nurses as well. So we are doing our own work and are to go out for meals.
Her father is not strong and we fear a sudden relapse at any time. We are not on the telephone here which makes Vivien very uneasy, as they could not get at us at night, and with the nurses there is nowhere in the house for Vivien to sleep. We shall not be able to breathe freely for weeks; but it is almost miraculous that he should have lasted up to this point.
I should be very grateful to you if you would write to Mrs Haigh-Wood and give her your sympathy.
Vivien is particularly fond of her father; she takes more after him and his side of the family, and understands him better than the others
Previous to this, I have been engaged as I told you, in negotiations over my new flat. The negotiations proved to be much more trying and complicated than there was any reason to expect, and in the end Mr Haigh-Wood (just before he fell ill) had to help me straighten them out. I took the flat over from a very selfish, cranky, and insanely suspicious grasping old spinster, who insisted on all sorts of formalities, made her solicitors draw up elaborate documents to be signed, then objected to the way they were drawn up and began all over again, then stipulated that I should pay her solicitors’ fees, charged a prodigious price for the oilcloth and fittings of the flat, which we had to buy, insisted on the money down before signing the lease, insulted us when she left, and maliciously had the electricity, gas, and telephone cut off so as to put me to the trouble of putting them on again. Of course, in the circumstances, I had to employ solicitors too. So the whole thing has come very expensive. But it is a very nice flat, and the actual rent of it will be only £15 more than the rent of Crawford Mansions will be on a new lease. It is a much better block, very respectable looking and in a good neighbourhood. It has one more room than this flat, and the rooms are rather bigger. It will do beautifully for you when you come, it is only one flight up, and there is a lift as well, and anthracite stoves which you can keep going all the time to provide a constant temperature, and constant hot water supply.