The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922
Page 66
2–See J.W. N. Sullivan, ‘The Reasonable Life’, A., 30 July 1920: ‘the wisest volume of essays that has appeared in our time’.
3–The first of five volumes by Santayana comprising The Life of Reason (1905–6).
4–Santayana wrote in A., 1919–20, a series of ‘Soliloquies from England’: collected in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922).
5–They had visited Garsington with the Aldous Huxleys and the painter Mark Gertler.
TO Conrad Aiken
MS Huntington
Wednesday [4 August 1920]
18 Crawford Mansions
I am much disappointed that you can’t come.1 I wish we could have made arrangements sooner, and perhaps you would have come. Shall we see you before I go? I shall be here till the 14th. Do let me know when you get back to London. I wish you were going to stay this winter.
T.S.E.
1–Aiken was due to join TSE for a holiday in France.
TO The Editor of The Athenaeum1
Published 6 August 1920
Sir,
Mr Hannay doubts whether I have justified my distinction between the critic and the philosopher, and suspects that I am making a distinction between a kind of philosophical criticism of which I approve and another kind of which I disapprove. If I have made this distinction between kinds to Mr Hannay’s satisfaction, and not merely shown that I like some critical writings and not others, then I ought to be content. The frontier cannot be clearly defined; at all events I trust that Mr Hannay would agree that Hegel’s Philosophy of Art adds very little to our enjoyment or understanding of art, though it fills a gap in Hegel’s philosophy.2 I have in mind a rather celebrated passage towards the end of Taine’s History of English Literature (I have not the book by me) in which he compares Tennyson and Musset. Taine is a person for whom I have considerable respect, but this passage does not seem to me to be good as criticism; the comparative vision of French and English life does not seem to me to issue quite ingenuously out of an appreciation of the two poets;3 I should say that Taine was here philosophizing rather than ‘developing his sensibility into a generalized structure.’
I do not understand Mr Hannay’s request that I should quote an instance of ‘this generalization which is neither itself poetry nor discursive reasoning.’ I find in Chambers (the only dictionary within reach) that ‘discursive’ means ‘desultory’, ‘rational’, or ‘proceeding regularly from premises to conclusion’. Surely I have not pretended that criticism should avoid ‘discursive reasoning’ in this last sense?
As to the question whether my article on ‘The Perfect Critic’ was itself philosophy or perfect criticism, I need only refer Mr Hannay to the Principia Mathematica4 Chap. II, especially p. 65 (The Theory of Types and the Cretan Liar: ‘Hence the statement of Epimenides does not fall within its own scope, and therefore no contradiction emerges’).
I am, Sir,
Your obliged obedient servant,
T. S. Eliot
1–This letter was written in response to a letter from A. H. Hannay (30 July), questioning TSE’s ‘The Perfect Critic’ (9 and 23 July).
2–G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. W. Hastie (1886).
3–The French critic and literary historian Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) wrote in History of English Literature: ‘The favourite poet of a nation, it seems, is he whose works a man, setting out on a journey, prefers to put in his pocket. Nowadays it would be Tennyson in England and Alfred de Musset in France. The two publics differ: so do their modes of life, their reading, their pleasures’ (Bk V, ch. vi).
4–BR and Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (3 vols, 1910–13).
TO Van Wyck Brooks1
MS Beinecke
9 August 1920
18 Crawford Mansions
My dear Van Wyck Brooks,
I remember you very much better than you think, when I was a Freshman at Harvard and you were a prominent man of letters there;2 and later in New York at a certain French restaurant the name of which I think was Petitpas. I did not know that you were connected with the Freeman and I had not seen the paper until you sent it to me. It is the most interesting of the New York weeklies now, I should say; interesting enough, I should think, to be regarded unfavourably by the Police.
I have just finished a book, and am going abroad for a fortnight, tired and uninspired. I must explain that I write in the evenings and Sundays left me by a banking existence, and am always tempted to promise much more than I can perform. It’s very rare now that I want to review any book – unless it is some expensive scholarly work that I happen to covet. I wished last winter that I had had a chance to review Irving Babbitt’s book.3But I should probably write so seldom or so irregularly that it is no use indicating any ‘sort of books’. What I have always wanted to do for some American paper is to write occasional London letters.4 I should like to do, of course, any books by a very small number of people in London (when they appear) whose work I admire. But of course they would have to be published in America before you would want to review them, I suppose?
If you ever see Max Perkins remember me to him.5 You would do me a service if you gave me Tom Thomas’s6 address. I suppose he still lives in Italy.
Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot
1–Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963), literary historian and critic; author of TheOrdeal of Mark Twain (1920); associate editor of the Freeman, a political and aesthetic magazine, 1920–4.
2–Brooks graduated in 1908, and his first book, The Wine of the Puritans, was the occasion of TSE’s first review for the Harvard Advocate, 7 May 1909: Brooks had exposed, wrote TSE, ‘the reasons for the failure of American life (at present)’.
3–Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919). Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), Professor of French at Harvard, where TSE had taken his course on literary criticism in France. See TSE’s ‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt’, Forum 80: 1 (July 1928); reprinted in SE. TSE later wrote that Babbitt’s ‘ideas are permanently with one, as a measurement and test of one’s own’ (Irving Babbitt: Man and Teacher, 1941, 103–4).
4–In Oct. 1920 TSE would agree to write a monthly ‘London Letter’ for the Dial: his first piece came out in Apr. 1921.
5–Maxwell Perkins (1884–1947), future editor at Charles Scribner’s of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. 6–Thomas Head Thomas (1881–1963) taught art at Harvard after graduating in 1903, then moved to Europe where he wrote French Portrait Engraving of the XVII and XVIII Centuries (1910). A friend of HWE, he saw some of TSE’s poems in the Harvard Advocate and wrote (said TSE) ‘a most enthusiastic letter and cheered me up. And I wish I had his letters still. I was very grateful to him for giving me that encouragement’ (‘The Art of Poetry’).
FROM His Mother
TS Houghton
[August? 1920]
List of Books, the property of Thomas Stearns Eliot1
Robert Browning* 6 Volumes Baudelaire *
Christopher Marlowe 1 Volume Rostand
Ben Jonson 3 Volumes Petronii Saturae†
Chaucer 6 Volumes Rand’s Philosophy
Shakespeare* 38 Volumes Bakewell’s Ancient Philosophy
Meredith’s Poems 2 Volumes Plato, Horatius Comina
Austin Dobson Anthologia Lyrica
Poe’s Poems Apuleius Metamorphoses†
Shelley Propertius, Ditto translated*
Rossetti English Literature, Schofield*
Coleridge (large) De Heredia*
Robert Browning Reynolds on Art
Keats Monologues, Browning
Chestertons Essay on Comedy
Pope Reading Gaol, Wilde
Helicon Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity
Carew Tolstoy on Shakespeare
Wither Pre-Shakespearean Drama, Manley
Marvell Art of Musician, Hanchett
Campion Wood Engraving
Burns Nature and Man, Shaler
Dryden Defoe
&
nbsp; Tennyson 1830–1863 Spingarn’s Renaissance
Scott’s Poems Drawing (Ruskin)
Milton’s Poems Sartor Resartus
Walter Pater,* 31 volumes Religio Medici
Sheridan Chapman’s Birds*2
Rostand Archer Alexander*3
Theocritus, Bion and Moschus* Essays on Addison
Aeschylus†
Goethe’s Conversations (Two Volumes)†
Petronius
Aeschylus Tragedies
Benvenuto Cellini
Biographia Literaria, Coleridge
Dearest Tom:
This is a list of two boxes of books I packed. I do not know whether it includes all. I wish you would mark all you would like, and I will send them when I can. Are there others?
[in TSE’s hand:]
Marked what I want! Some more in the box Shef sent last year. But there is also
Century Dictionary §
Certain French Books
2 little Sanskrit books. § §
There was a set of La Nouvelle Revue Française. I do not want them. I’d like any family photographs (Greenleaf etc) that I had, except any I gave away, to Ada, or others.
1–At a later date, TSE has written at the head, ‘This memo was sent to TSE by CCE just before she moved from St Louis to Cambridge in 1920 and was returned by him to her, checked.’ * = checked by TSE; † = marked by TSE as ‘sent’; § = ticked by TSE.
2–Corrected to ‘4’ by TSE.
3–Frank M. Chapman’s Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America is quoted in the note to The Waste Land, l. 356 (misnumbered 357). TSE’s copy of the 6th edn (1902) is inscribed ‘A much coveted birthday present on my 14th birthday T. S. Eliot. 18 June 1928’ (King’s).
4–The Story of Archer Alexander (1885) by TSE’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, tells the story of an escaped slave who came to work for him. Charlotte C. Eliot wrote, in William Greenleaf Eliot: ‘Dr Eliot declared that there is nothing in all the scenes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to which he himself could not find a parallel in all he had seen and known in St Louis previous to the war of secession. To such books as The Life of Archer Alexander the student of history must turn for reliable information regarding “the peculiar institution”.’
TO His Mother
MS Houghton
9 August 1920
18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St, W.1
My dearest mother,
I hope that you have recovered from your little trouble by this time. I am sure you are well taken care of. I hope you will have a resting spell and enjoy the country before you begin to work. Cambridge can be very hot and oppressive in September, and lovely in October. I am delighted with the situation you have chosen. I wish you had a photograph of the house to show me.
I shall of course send you a copy of my book as soon as it is out – in October or November, but you shall not send me a draft for it. I have posted the Manuscript today – I have been working on it up to now. There will be several things in it that you have not seen before. It is a great relief to have finished it. Methuen is going to offer Knopf the American rights, but it will hardly be published in America for another nine months.
Having got this off, we spent the weekend at Eastbourne, visiting some friends called Schiff – very nice Jews. They had, besides ourselves, an Italian named Emanueli, an important editor in Rome, a Lady Tosti, whose husband was a noted musician,1 and Wyndham Lewis. So we all talked several languages at once, and went motoring along the cliffs, and the weather was very beautiful. We will send you some photographs of the party.2 The weather has been hot and brilliant. I am taking two weeks holiday on Saturday. I am going to France, and Wyndham Lewis is to come with me if he can get a passport in time. If he comes we shall go to the coast, as he wants to paint there, and I shall bathe. Later, in October, I shall have ten days more, and Vivien and I will go away somewhere. I will send you cards from France.
I have cashed the dividend. I find that when the dividend is sent, the bank sells it, and puts it to my account less income tax at six shillings in the pound. But if your income is small, you can get back part of this from the Government later. So that the only disadvantage of your sending the dividend itself instead of a draft, is that I do not get about £9 of the money for a year! But if it was a draft, I should only have to pay the smaller amount of tax myself, later on. This is hard to explain in a few words.
I have never taken much interest in [Robert] Frost’s poetry, although I know he is much better than most others.
I am sending enclosed some photographs of Vivien taken by Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington, near Oxford. They do not really show her face, but I think they give a very attractive general impression. Lady Ottoline wants Vivien to come and stay with her while I am away.
Abby has been in town, and we took her to the theatre last week. She is a nice girl. She seems very young for her age.3
Dear Mother, I am looking forward to seeing you.
Your loving son
Tom
1–Sir Francesco Paolo Tosti (1846–1916), Italian composer and music teacher.
2–Now at King’s.
3–Writing to CCE on 3 May, HWE reported seeing Abigail Eliot’s parents, who said that ‘Abby enjoyed tremendously seeing Tom and Vivien, thought she [VHE] was lovely, and that they were so hospitable and delightful and had such charming friends, interesting people’ (Houghton).
TO Ezra Pound
MS Beinecke
[9? August 1920]
[London]
Dear E. P.
Many thanks – extraordinary promptitude. Davray1 has sent pass and a most amiable letter – I shd like to drop in on Thursday evening if convenient, with pictures and map and suitcase. It is possible that I may change my destination. Vivien has been worrying a good deal about my health and my going walking so far away alone. This question arose also at Schiffs on Sunday and it transpired that Lewis (who was present) wants to go over about the same time and suggested company if I would come to the coast as he wants to work there. I shd not have thought of going with him if it had not occurred in this way; but in case he misses the train, fails to get a passport in time etc. I want the other plan ready, liking the itinerary suggested.
Please give me Joyce’s address.
Yrs.
T.
1–Henry D. Davray (1873–1944), French author, journalist and translator, was responsible for foreign literature at the Mercure de France.
TO Scofield Thayer
MS Beinecke
10 August 1920
18 Crawford Mansions
Dear Scofield
I hope you will pardon this long silence, as I have from week to week intended writing at some length. I have finally given Pound two contributions which he seems to think acceptable and if so has forwarded by this time. I have been engrossed (in such time as I can spare from banking, flat-i.e. apartment-hunting, income tax and such petty matters) in a book I have been preparing for Methuen to publish in the autumn.
I think Pound has been doing wonderfully well with his French campaign. The Gourmont stuff is a great scoop,1 and Benda’s book is ripping. I hope you can print it in full.2 There is nothing like the Dial here and I see no reason why it should not have an appreciable English circulation. It is unfortunate that there are not so many good writers here as in France, but there is no reason why you should not get what there are.
That strange Bodenheim has been in London and has now disappeared. I was anxious to help him, but it proved very difficult, as you may imagine, to persuade the English of his merit. Finally, as a result of our missing each other at an appointment, he became suspicious of my good intentions and dropped me altogether. I am very sorry about it, and if you see him, I hope you will persuade him that I am not a crook and was only anxious for further opportunity to assist. He did, as a matter of fact, run up against one or two people who treated him rather shabbily, but even without that London is a tough nut to crack.
&
nbsp; I am just off for a holiday and hope to be able to offer you some verse later. When are you coming?
Yrs ever
T.S.E.
1–Rémy de Gourmont, ‘Dust for Sparrows’, trans. EP, Dial, Sept. 1920, 219–24; the first of seven sections.
2–‘Bélphegor: An essay on the Aesthetic of Contemporary French Society’, a translation of Julien Benda’s book, was serialised in four parts in the Dial (Sept.–Dec. 1920).
TO James Joyce1
MS Buffalo
11 August 1920
18 Crawford Mansions
Dear Mr Joyce,
Ezra Pound has given me a package for you. I shall be in Paris Sunday the 15th and shall be leaving on Monday. I shall be at the Hôtel de l’Élysée, 3 rue de Beaune, where Pound was. I hope you can dine with me that evening. Please. Can you meet me there about 6.30, or up to 7? You can take the parcel and I should very much like to meet you, at last.2
You won’t have time to answer. But please come.
Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot
1–James Joyce, Irish novelist and poet: see Glossary of Names.
2–The parcel, which TSE had toted all the way from London, contained a pair of old brown shoes: EP thought JJ had need of them. See WL, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), 270–6.
TO Edgar Jepson
MS Beinecke