by T. S. Eliot
TO His Mother
MS Houghton
15 November 1917
The Egoist, Oakley House,
Bloomsbury St, W.C.
My dearest Mother,
I have your letter of October 22, and feel very sad at not having written on your birthday [22 Oct.]. And I can hardly believe that you are seventy-four. No one would know it. You are certainly the most wonderful woman of seventy-four I have ever heard of, and I am very proud of you. I should be glad to think of having half your force and youth at that age. You don’t know how much satisfaction it has been to me through the last two years to think that I have parents whom I can be so convincedly proud of, who represent to me absolutely the best that America can produce; and by right of whom I feel that I can claim equality with anybody. Just to have ordinary good commonplace parents would be inconceivably depressing – would destroy one’s confidence in all directions.
Vivien has been trying to get a place (against my wishes) in a government office, and she has failed; they tell her that having married an American is a complete bar. I am only sorry because I am afraid she will now want to look elsewhere, and would take something where the people are less agreeable and the hours longer than in a Government office. I do not think she could stand the sort of work she would be given to do in a Bank; the hours are too long, she would have to arrive at the same time, 9, every day in spite of sleepless nights and headaches, work probably in a noisy office. It would be much harder on her than on me, even if she had my health; I am in a particularly nice department where I am rather petted. She is possessed with the idea that she ought to earn money, and if she had average health and could find congenial work, I should not object. But I should be very much alarmed, as it is.
I don’t think I have anything else of importance to mention this time. I am writing at the Bank, having hurried back from Lunch to do so.
I am much interested in the letter you have from the Mayor of Remilly.1
Your very loving son
Tom.
1–CCE’s letter does not survive.
TO Mary Hutchinson
MS Texas
15 November 1917
18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St, W.1
Dear Mrs Hutchinson,
I have been meaning to write to tell you about your ‘War’, but I had looked forward to seeing you on Sunday, and so postponed it. The Weaver found that she did not have room, and printed a rather bad story instead.1 It turns out that your story is longish and will occupy about three pages, so we are taking the liberty of printing it in December; when there will be more room, as Tarr is at an end this month.2 The number will be sent you ‘in due course’. We are very grateful to have your story for the December number, as it is otherwise vacuous; and the January number is devoted to Henry James, and after that we hope to have some of Joyce’s new novel on hand.3
I am looking forward to discussing the story with you in detail.
Vivien is very anxious about a ‘shabby old pin’ which she thinks she left at your house. It was given her by a Russian anarchist, and precious by associations. A sort of flat oblong head and the pin part very bent. If you find it she would like you to keep it until she sees you again.
Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot
I will ask Weaver to send you the proofs, but it usually demurs – however I shall insist. But if you make changes besides corrections, Weaver will have fits, as all changes have to be paid for.
1–Iris Barry, ‘Pay Agatha Penrhys …’, Egoist 4: 10 (Nov. 1917), 157–8.
2–The Egoist was to serialise Tarr, by WL.
3–The Egoist published episodes II, III, VI and X of Ulysses.
TO Bertrand Russell
MS McMaster
Sunday [November 1917?]
The Dolphin Hotel, Chichester
Dear Bertie
Have just found that they have two single rooms at this hotel, so thought I had better book them. I found I could let you know by post instead of wiring, as post leaves at 10 p.m. If you object to this better wire at once. V. has quite worn herself out trying to find a place – there is not an inch of room anywhere. Fearful crowds.
Yrs
Tom.
TO His Father
MS Houghton
22 November 1917
The Egoist, Oakley House,
Bloomsbury St, London, W.C.
My dear Father,
I have just half an hour now at the end of the day, and can write a letter I should have written last night had I not had to finish an article I was writing. We were as a matter of fact supposed to go to a small dance last night, but when the time came Vivien had caught a chill and I had other things to do, and we did not go. H. G. Wells and a lot of people of that sort were to be there. Vivien has not been very well ever since she got back from the country. She was very anxious to get into a government office; and she had applied, and had an interview with a Board which asked her all sorts of questions, then kept her in suspense some days and then flatly rejected her. She was very much disappointed. But I disapproved of the plan from the first, as I am sure she could not stand it. She is ever so much healthier in the country, and I should be delighted if we could find a small cottage, such as she and Miss Thayer had before quite near town at 8/-(eight shillings) a week. And of course at the present time she is very nervous in town.
I suppose everyone is busy at home with knitting. After reading the poem you sent, I suggest that you should do what my old head master Mr Kelly1 at Highgate did. He had a small lathe, and turned crutches beautifully, and you could make just as good ones. He made them long, to be cut to size afterwards. The wood (old broomsticks) was provided by some red cross agency. Other people made splints, and bedtables, and other things. However, I think you have done as much as anyone can be expected to do in one lifetime.
I must stop now, or I shall be turned out of the Bank by the cleaners. You mentioned money. I find I have had £55 from you this year, and if I could have the other £10 of the rent I should be very grateful. I shall run pretty low shortly (on my current account) and the rise in my salary and the first instalment on my lectures does not come until January. I have a sneaking hope they may raise me more than they said they would; the manager told me the other day that I had done extremely well with a difficult job; but reason tells me that the larger increase will not be for another six months.
With very much love
Your devoted son
Tom.
Will you cable the money?
1–E. H. Kelly was Master of Highgate Junior School, 1903–23.
Vivien Eliot TO Charlotte C. Eliot
MS Houghton
Thursday 22 November 1917
18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St, W.1
Dear Mrs Eliot
At last I can send you an account of the money you sent for T.’s underclothing. I waited for Mother to be able to go with me, and so far the weather has been, and is, so unusually warm that neither Tom nor I have made any change in our underclothing since the summer! It is a good thing in a way, but it is very damp and enervating at present. I hope you will not be disappointed that the money only reached to so few things. The fact is that woollens of all kinds are just double (at least) what they were, and are getting ever more expensive. We went carefully thro’ all Tom’s winter underwear, and found that the vests he has are very much thicker and also much less worn than the pants. (I think you call them ‘underdrawers’ – Tom objects to the word ‘pants’, but it is always used here!) The vests, with some more darning are quite good for another winter, but the pants are all thin and almost beyond further mending. So we thought we had better get just two good pairs of pants – and have done so. They are very thick and good quality. I enclose receipts. There was just 6d over – and it was no use getting one of anything, so Mother advised getting this chest protector – as Tom always has a tickling cough in the winter. The chest protector is quilted satin, and fits ro
und the neck and has a double breasted chest part. It is particularly valuable for when he goes out in evening dress – which leaves the chest much less protected than in day clothes. My father has one of these, and Maurice did when he wore civilian clothes – (‘civvies’, as they are called).
So I hope you will think the money was made good use of. Tom has a good stock of socks, for I bought him some a few months ago, and many of his old thick ones are still very good. He is still worse provided with pyjamas than anything, although I got him two pairs in the summer. The others, the old ones, are now nearly all in rags. He is very rough with his pyjamas, and shirts – tears them unmercifully! I should have liked him to have a new winter suit, but he is wearing his old dark brown one, and altho’ very shabby it is still intact. His overcoats are very shabby too. However, he need not be cold this winter.
I was so sorry when I heard that I had missed your birthday. I should have liked to send you something. For Xmas I shall send you a little crochet lace I have made myself – I am afraid it is rather useless –
I cannot find a country cottage anywhere. The rush out of London has been incredible. It is a pity, as B. R. has promised to go shares with us in the rent of it, as he needs some quiet place of refuge himself. We did not intend it instead of living in town. Tom finds it essential to have his headquarters in London, we simply longed for a refuge, somewhere we could go to at any time when things are bad in town. For weekends, too. But I am afraid the scheme must be abandoned. I have already spent more money than I could spare on going about to look for such a place.
I do so often wish we were in America. The very minute the war is over we shall do our utmost to come, but the ‘end of the war’ seems further off than ever.
Tom has told you that I tried to get work but was refused on account of my ‘nationality’.
With love to you and Mr Eliot,
Affectionately
Vivien
I hope you received my letter from the country, a few weeks ago.
To The Editor of The Egoist1
Published December 1917
Your writer on ‘Elizabethan Classicists’2 struck me, if I may say so without offence, as straining with youthful zeal after original opinions. His attempted rehabilitation of Ovid merely shows that the true taste for the Classics has gone out with the old classical curriculum; and as for his belittling of Milton3 – well, I do not believe that he could get a single one of the living Masters of criticism (Mr Edmund Gosse, for example, or Sir Sidney Colvin) to even entertain such views.
J. A. D. Spence
Thridlingston Grammar School.
1–Masquerading as readers’ letters, these ‘excerpts’ were written as fillers by TSE.
2–EP had been contributing a monthly series, ‘Elizabethan Classicists’, since Sept.
3–EP argued that Milton merely followed in the rhetorical wake of the dramatists, ‘adding to their high-soundingness his passion for latinization, the latinization of a language peculiarly unfitted for his sort of latinization … His real place is nearer to Drummond of Hawthornden than to “Shakespear” and “Dante”’ (Nov. 1917).
… I have, I pride myself, kept abreast of the times in literature; at least, if I have not, the times have moved very speedily indeed. I was therefore surprised, in what was otherwise an intelligent review (so far as I can judge, without having read the authors mentioned), to find Rupert Brooke dismissed abruptly with the words ‘He is not absent.’1 Brooke’s early poems exhibit a youthful exuberance of passion, and an occasional coarseness of utterance, which offended finer tastes; but these were but dross which, as his last sonnets show, was purged away (if I may be permitted this word) in the fire of the Great Ordeal which is proving the well-spring of a Renaissance of English poetry.
Helen B. Trundlett
Batton, Kent.
1–‘Rupert Brooke is not absent’ had been TSE’s terse comment in his review of Monroe and Henderson’s The New Poetry (Egoist 4: 10, Nov. 1917, 151).
… There was a serious and instructive article on Constantinople by a Mr Symons which I greatly enjoyed.1 It is good for us to keep our minds open and liberal by contemplation of foreign ways, and though the danse du ventre is repellent to the British imagination, we ought to know that these things exist. I cannot speak so pleasantly of Mr Lewis’s …
Charles James Grimble
The Vicarage, Leays.
1–Arthur Symons, ‘Notes taken in Constantinople and Sofia’ (Egoist 4: 10, Nov. 1917, 153).
… The philosophical articles interest me enormously; though they make me reflect that much water has flowed under many bridges since the days of my dear old Oxford tutor, Thomas Hill Green. And I am accustomed to more documentation; I like to know where writers get their ideas from …
Charles Augustus Conybeare
The Carlton Club, Liverpool.
… Is not Mr Lewis’s objection to the Grin1 really a slur upon the cheery philosophy of our brave boys in the trenches, which has been so happily caught by the witty pen of Captain Bairnsfather?2 And we all know that a little nonsense now and then …
Muriel A. Schwarz
60 Alexandra Gdns, Hampstead, N.W.
1–‘The Englishman should become ashamed of his Grin as he is at present ashamed of solemnity … he should cease to be ashamed of his “feelings”: then he would automatically become less proud of his Grin’ (WL, ‘Epilogue’ to Tarr, Egoist 4: 10, Nov. 1917).
2–While hospitalised for shell-shock in 1915, Bruce Bairnsfather (1888–1959) was commissioned by The Bystander magazine to draw weekly cartoons, which became immensely popular. TSE wrote later that the ‘savage comic humour’ of Marlowe had ‘nothing in common with J. M. Barrie, Captain Bairnsfather, or Punch’ (‘Some Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe’, Art & Letters 2: 4, Autumn 1919; SW).
Vivien Eliot TO Mary Hutchinson
MS Texas
[December 1917?]
18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St, W.1
Dear Mrs Hutchinson,
I had a very exciting time with you on Thursday. In fact, I have been ill ever since! I gave you lots of false impressions, but I hope I shall be able to put them right some day.
There seem to be some difficulties about having a dance at Dakyns’ house – but as I shall not see him until tomorrow night I am not sure about it. If he won’t I wish you would have one! I can imagine it being a wonderful occasion. You must like dancing.1
And, as your husband likes ‘crowds’, you’d be doing him such a good turn too!
We are going to a dance tonight at a Studio in Kensington. Also one on Wednesday night.
Most of this week I shall spend looking for a cottage. I do think you and I both ought to have one – it would be the only way we could live.
I will write when I have seen Dakyns. Thank you for keeping my pin.
Yrs.
V. H. E.
1–BR told OM in 1916: ‘The passion of her life is dancing & ever since I have known her I have paid for her to have dancing lessons whenever she has been well enough. I don’t suppose she will ever be any good, because of her health, but it is such a passion that I can’t bear to baulk it’ (Texas; quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude [1996], 469).
Vivien Eliot TO Mary Hutchinson
MS Texas
[December 1917?]
18 Crawford Mansions
My dear Mrs Hutchinson,
I am writing quickly to say that I do not think I had better come to see you next Thursday, because I am coming up on that day for a lesson, and I should be tired and the time limited and so I am sure it would not be satisfactory. I would far rather come up one day just to see you and nothing else. That would have to be the week after, and I will leave you to fix a day. Will you? Meanwhile, will you be nice and come to tea next Saturday (tomorrow week)? You have never been to see us, and we want you to. Saturday is Tom’s only afternoon at home. I should like to ask a few other people if you
came, and I wonder if it would amuse you at all to meet the Pounds, or if you’d rather not? You might just mention that when you write. O I do hope this will not be the weekend you go away, but I expect it will! I shall be wretched, if so.
We both positively loved your party, and I was furious at being torn away. And also I must tell you that I have seldom seen Tom so stimulated by anything as he was last night. I am so glad I got the little china man cut of the ham pie.
I liked Miss Sitwell much better yesterday, so I take it back (I told you I did not like her).
Hoping you will write and say you will come.
Yrs.
Vivien Eliot
Vivien Eliot TO Mary Hutchinson
MS Texas
Tuesday [December? 1917]
The Flat [18 Crawford Mansions]
I am so glad you are coming on Saturday, and thank you for that very nice letter. I have thought of this flat as a ‘remote tower’, somehow it seems so secret and shut off, all the street noises.
You know I have loved this flat, and I think I shall never like the Marlow house so much. But somehow I think I shall like it more if you will really come there. You must come alone sometimes, when it is very hot, and we can be just three by ourselves. And then I keep thinking of and planning a very ripping weekend party, if only people won’t mind the scarcity of the furniture and the food. We could go on the river in punts in the day, and perhaps we should dance in the evening. Do nice things that one plans ever really happen, now?