The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922
Page 14
I haven’t very many
BRILLIANTS
Scout (breaking a tumbler with his thumb before my very eyes):
Kind o’ light for college use, aint they, sir?
I’m only a plain man, Effie, but I love you.
(Thanksgiving Day sermon): … And what are we, the young men of America, doing to help build the city of God? … (Silence, followed by breathing).
Affectionately
Tom
You will be interested in Hawkes, one of the most attractive men (and the best scholar) in the college, who is engaged to a German girl, and doesn’t want to go to fight in the least.4 It seems a pity that he couldn’t have broken his ancle last summer, instead of little Bulmer,5 who I think regrets his incapacity. These things don’t happen only in civil-war plays, you see.
1–The foxtrot, invented by the vaudeville star Harry Fox in New York in the summer of 1914, was danced to ragtime music.
2–Lily Jones, with her sister Pauline, taught dancing and was involved in the theatre.
3–TSE made a marginal line against this paragraph and wrote ‘What syntax’.
4–Frederick Hawkes (1892–1974) served in the war, after which he married his German fiancée. He ultimately became President of the College of Estate Management and Master of the Worshipful Company of Farmers.
5–John Legge Bulmer went up to Merton in 1913. As a second lieutenant in the 5th Oxford and Bucks. Light Infantry, he was reported missing, presumed killed, in action in France, on
TO Norbert Wiener
TS MIT
[December 1914]
Swanage, Dorsetshire
Dear Wiener,
Did you ever get a note from me? I addressed it to ‘Malcolm’ Street, but it occurred to me afterwards that you might have meant ‘Magdalen St’1 and I had misread it.2 If you are in London any time during the vac. you will probably find me at the address below.
Sincerely,
T. S. Eliot
1 Gordon St
Gordon Square
W.C.
1 May 1917, aged twenty-two.
2–Magdalene; Magdalen is the spelling used in Oxford.
3–He had been right the first time: on 7 Jan. 1915 he sent a postcard to Scofield Thayer, reading: ‘I forgot to say that Wiener’s address is 26 Malcolm St.’ The postcard shows Rembrandt’s Le Philosophe en Méditation (Louvre), with its spiral staircase, and to the right of the picture, TSE wrote: ‘Something pour faire descendre la dame aux cheveux rouges. Moralité de [?] Toujours prêt’ [‘Something to make the lady with the red hair come down. Ready made morality’].
TO Conrad Aiken
MS Huntington
31 December 1914
[London]
My dear Conrad,
Thank you very much for performing my commission so cleverly; I hope that it did not give you great inconvenience; and I hope that you will let me know if there were any extra expenses in the way of express or messenger commissions; also let me know (to appease mere curiosity), how you informed yourself of the place and time.
I am back in London now till January 15, not at your old home, which had run down fearfully in cooking, but at a pension off Gordon Square,1 in rather a nice street, where the houses are neither named nor painted. The inhabitants however are not interesting, but are mostly Americans – including two middlewestern professors and their families. We have six weeks vacation, of which I spent nearly three at the seashore [at Swanage] in Dorsetshire.
Oxford is all very well, but I come back to London with great relief. I like London, now. In Oxford I have the feeling that I am not quite alive – that my body is walking about with a bit of my brain inside it, and nothing else. As you know, I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books, and hideous pictures on the walls. I have decided to have no pictures on the walls, but I should like some good china. Of my own choosing: solid glowing colours, and a few Indian silks, and perhaps a terracotta by Maillol.2 Outside I should have two bell pulls, viz – and the second should have no bell. Come let us desert our wives and fly to a land where there are no Medici prints, nothing but concubinage and conversation. That is my objection to Italian Art: the originals are all right, but I don’t care for the reproductions.
Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead. I don’t think I should stay there another year, in any case; but I should not mind being in London, to work at the British Museum. How much more self-conscious one is in a big city! Have you noticed it? Just at present this is an inconvenience, for I have been going through one of those nervous sexual attacks which I suffer from when alone in a city. Why I had almost none last fall I don’t know – this is the worst since Paris. I never have them in the country. Wiener, like a great wonderful fat toad bloated with wisdom, has returned to Cambridge; Scofield Thayer, who has developed a good deal and promises to be a fine dilettante and talker if he loses all literary ambition, has also gone to Cambridge to see Santayana;3 Pound and Russell I have not yet found; Armstrong is in camp in Putney, where I have written to him; and another man is in the country. So for a couple of days I have seen no one but the humble folk of the pension. I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society); and feel the deprivation at Oxford – one reason why I should not care to remain longer – but there, with the exercise and routine, the deprivation takes the form of numbness only; while in the city it is more lively and acute. One walks about the street with one’s desires, and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches. I should be better off, I sometimes think, if I had disposed of my virginity and shyness several years ago: and indeed I still think sometimes that it would be well to do so before marriage.
I hope you will write soon and tell me about yourself. I think one’s letters ought to be about oneself (I live up to this theory!) – what else is there to talk about? Letters should be indiscretions – otherwise they are simply official bulletins.
Always yours
Tom
1–At 1 Gordon Street.
2–Aristide Maillol (1861–1944): French sculptor who specialised in classical female nudes.
3–George Santayana, writer and philosopher: see Glossary of Names. On 15 Nov. he spoke at the Cambridge Heretics on ‘An Interpretation of Transcendentalism’. In Mar. 1915 Thayer would address the Heretics on ‘The Aesthetic Value of Orthodoxy’.
1915
TO Eleanor Hinkley
MS Houghton
3 January 19151
London
Dear Eleanor,
Just a line to bear to you and yours the ringing greeting of friend to friend at the season of high festival – may the New Year (a baby face with golden promise fraught)2 bring fulfilment of all desires and rare heart’s ease.
I promised to tell you more of my heroines, but have only time for three of those particularly dead gone on our Wilfred. First there is
PAPRIKA!
Mexican dancer (pianola voluntary: ‘Carmen’).3 This part is created for Amy.4 Huge eyes and a stiletto. Easily offended. Does a dance with castanets. Rejected by Wilfred. Swears revenge, and is aided by her admirer DOMINGO and his band of banditti. She is to be one of our best eyerollers. A more sympathetic part is that of
EARLY BIRD
Indian maiden. Proud, but noble. She has a wonderful prose style:
SHALL EARLY BIRD, DAUGHTER OF OOPALOOMPAH, CHIEF OF THE BOOZAWAYS DO OBEISANCE TO THE GREAT WHITE FATHER OF THE PALEFACES? NOT WHILE THE BISON STAMPS UPON THE PLAINS OF MY FOREFATHERS.
She is engaged to Night Hawk, but throws him over when Wilfred appears. Later, she is killed while saving W.’s life.
There is a more cheerful part
PEGOON
the Irish lass (pianola voluntary: ‘Wearin’ o’ the Green’.5 Tremendous applause in S. Boston) daughter of Mrs Flaherty, who runs the hash house. She has thirty-one cowboy admirers (I forgot to say the Paprika had thirty-one Mexican ‘greaser
’ admirers – there is a battle later) headed by Grizzly Joe, a tremendous fellow with large feet (comic). Scene: in the hash house. thirty-one admirers eating pork and beans. Pegoon enters. thirty-one attempts to kiss her. Thirty-one slaps on the face (comic). Enter Wilfred. Evident admiration on the part of Pegoon. Evident jealousy on the part of the thirty-one. Grizzly Joe (so called because he once slew a bear by hugging it to death) challenges him to a wrestling match. Wilfred (very slender, with curly hair) knows jiu jitsu and throws Joe into the horsetrough. Splash (comic). Reconciliation.
BOYS, THIS YERE TENDERFOOT BEATS US ALL. SHAKE ON IT PARD!
The thirty-one help in several rescues, and Pegoon ultimately marries Joe.
I have just thought of a part for Frederic.6 It is the
REV. HAMMOND AIGS
comic negro minister, of the ‘come breddern’ type. Beyond a tendency to gin, chicken-stealing and prayer, I have not elaborated his part. (Adalbert is still getting in the hay in Turkestan. A good part for Harvey).7
I have just been to a cubist tea. There were two cubist painters, a futurist novelist, a vorticist poet and his wife, a cubist lady black-and-white artist, another cubist lady, and a retired army officer who has been living in the east end and studying Japanese (now thinking of going to Central America to avoid rheumatism). We discussed poetry, art, religion, and the war, all in quite an intelligent way, I thought. On the way home was accosted by an elderly person in spectacles, who asked if it did not at once strike my eye that he was perfectly sober? I said yes; and he proceeded to inform me that he was a Scotchman, not a Scotchman from Scotland, but a Scotchman from Ceylon, and asked me if I could put him in the way of a job in the Electrical Way? Or in the Medical Way? The lords of the Admiralty, said he, educated him both as an Electrician and as a medico (yes, medico – you can see I’ve been to the grammar school, sir). Are ye an American, noo? Then I insist on shakin’ hands with you, sir; I’ve been in America. From Boston? Then I’ll shake hands again, I was in the north, too, in Toronto. – I thought his eloquence worth a sixpence (for bread and cheese, yes, and a cup o’ cold water, as the parson says).
My Christmas day was passed very quietly; and dined with Norbert Wiener, who is a vegetarian, and the lightest eater I have ever seen.
This pension is not a very interesting one. There is Prof. Ellwood8 and his family, from the University of Missouri (says my mother is one of his three dearest friends in St Louis), a Prof. Cajore and his wife from Colorado, with whom I talk about mathematics, of which I know nothing; Dr and Mrs Greever, just out of Harvard graduate school (Dept of English), Dr McLeod, ditto,9 Miss Morgan, middle-aged English lady who likes to talk French, Mrs Nichols an elderly white rabbit with a very small timid daughter who plays solitaire when it rains, Mrs Cook and Miss Cook (New Zealand) with red hair who sleeps very late; Mr and Miss Mott his daughter, very mysterious, talk English with a slight German accent, and talk English to eacher other –Miss Mott rouges very badly in the evening; Miss Bosche (?) American art student who hates the Germans and is afraid of Zeppelins. – Not a very remarkable outfit, is it?
I have been passing my days at the British Museum library, with occasional walks, and tea when there is anyone to have it with. I like London – not that I don’t like Oxford, as universities go, but I could never endure to live there – and London agrees with me – better in fact than the seashore did. I had a pleasant fortnight there however, with the most intelligent of the Englishmen at Merton,10 and an American,11 who, if not intelligent, was at least an excellent butt for discourse, as he defended with great zeal all the great American fallacies, and exhibited all the typical American middle class confusion of thought – anxious to be broadminded (that is, to be vague), to have wide interests (that is to say, diffuse ones), to be tolerant (of the wrong things) etc., and very amiable, though I think he has come to regard me as an unscrupulous sophist – as I always took either the ultra conservative or the ultra radical view. But I think one can discuss the difference between ideas in process of development and ideas which have gone as far as they will ever go – and his (at twenty-three) were the latter, so I was myself the less tolerant.
BRILLIANTS
So you’re one of the Harvard young men? And what is your home state, Mr Eliot?
From Effie the Waif:
‘Welcome my lord and lady’ cried old Blenkinsop the housekeeper, in her quavering silvery voice, ‘Welcome back to East Lynne!’12
Affectionately
Tom
Do tell me all about your part in the 47 play.13 Thank you much for the cards.
Did Bill Green[e] never come to call? I sent a card to him long ago (c/o Harv. Univ’y).
1–Misdated 1914.
2–Cf. perhaps ‘But soon – like any human life / The golden promise of whose dawn doth fail’ (James Thomson, ‘The Doom of a City I’).
3–A popular ‘Carmen Potpourri’ from Bizet’s opera Carmen was adapted for pianola.
4–Amy de Gozzaldi (d. 1981) – who had played the part of his wife Fanny to TSE’s Lord Bantock in the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club production of Jerome K. Jerome’s Fanny and the Servant Problem (1908), in 1912–13 – married Richard Hall (1889–1966), a classmate of TSE.
5–‘The Wearin’ o’ the Green’ was an anonymous street-ballad of 1798 popularised by the playwright Dion Boucicault (1822–90) and recorded by John McCormack, c.1914.
6–TSE’s cousin, the Revd Frederick May Eliot (1889–1958), graduated in 1911 from Harvard Divinity School and in 1915 became associate minister of the First Parish in Cambridge; later president of the American Unitarian Association.
7–George Harvey Hull (1879–1974), lawyer.
8–Charles A. Ellwood (1873–1946) had founded in 1900 the Department of Sociology at the University of Missouri; later author of Sociology and Modern Social Problems (1935).
9–Gustave Greever and Malcolm McLeod were also Sheldon Travelling Fellows from Harvard.
10–Karl Culpin (1893–1917), of Anglo-German parentage, was TSE’s closest friend at Merton. He went as an exhibitioner to Oxford from Doncaster Grammar School, taking a first in Modern History in 1915. His call-up was delayed owing to poor eyesight, but he became a second lieutenant in the Gloucestershire Regiment and died of wounds received in action, 15 May 1917.
11–Brand Blanshard (1892–1987) – Professor of Philosophy at Yale, 1945–61 – recalled how on this holiday, TSE ‘sat at the dining room table each morning with a huge volume of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica propped open before him. He had a certain facility in dealing with its kind of symbols; he said that manipulating them gave him a curious sense of power’ (‘Eliot at Oxford’, in T. S. Eliot: Essays from the ‘Southern Review’, ed. James Olney [1988]).
12–Mrs Henry Wood’s best-selling sensation novel East Lynne (1861) enjoyed considerable success in a stage adaptation featuring the famous line ‘Gone! And never called me mother!’
13–She was playing Margaret West by in Mark W. Reed’s farce, In for Himself.
TO Norbert Wiener
MS MIT
6 January 1915
1 Gordon St, Gordon Square, w.c.
Dear Wiener,
I am returning herewith the essay on relativism1 and the paper on the rearrangement of integers.2 The latter I have only glanced at, but I know that it would take me so long to puzzle the paper out that I had better return it at once in the hope that I may obtain a copy at some later date.
You mentioned the ‘Highest Good’3 and the ‘Synthetic Logic’4 as the ones I may keep. There are two more – the Logic of Relations5 and the Relative Position6 – which have ‘compliments of the author’ written on the cover. As however you do not refer to them in your letter, pray let me know in case you wish these returned also. With many thanks.
The Relativism I cordially agree with, but nearly all of the subject matter I think we had already touched upon, at one time or another, in conversation. I hope that you will have reprints taken of it
, in order that the doctrine may be promulgated. Such a doctrine can however, as it seems to me, be worked out, under different hands, with an infinite variety of detail. One can, I should think, be a relative idealist or a relative realist. What it seems to me to lend itself to most naturally, is a relative materialism – or at least this is the way in which my sympathies incline. The only way in which we can talk about the ‘universe’ at all, it seems to me, is with reference to the universe of physical science; or, in other words the mechanistic world is that to which one would tend to conform.7
In a sense, of course, all philosophising is a perversion of reality: for, in a sense, no philosophic theory makes any difference to practice. It has no working by which we can test it. It is an attempt to organise the confused and contradictory world of common sense, and an attempt which invariably meets with partial failure – and with partial success. It invariably involves cramming both feet into one shoe: almost every philosophy seems to begin as a revolt of common sense against some other theory, and ends – as it becomes itself more developed and approaches completeness – by itself becoming equally preposterous – to everyone but its author. The theories are certainly, all of them, implicit in the inexact experience of every day, but once extracted they make the world appear as strange as Bottom in his ass’s head.