by T. S. Eliot
TS Lilly
27 June 1922
9 Clarence Gate Gdns
Dear Ezra,
Tom reported your conversation to me about glands a little while after he got home. I was very much interested, and I have been trying to write to you ever since, but have had a great many practical things to do in the way of moving from Wigmore Street to here for instance, and have also been in very much worse health for the last month than for a very long time. I could not even write now but for having someone to take it down for me.
I was forced to go to a specialist about a fortnight ago for my skin, and he mentioned glands as being the probable cause of some of my troubles. I must say I have often thought of this as a possibility myself. This doctor also found Colitis which of course I knew I had, and has given me a very violent treatment which I do not think will be of any use. He gave me some glands to take called Ovarian Opocaps and told me that this was a ‘shot in the dark’. I think that English doctors are more fond of ‘shots in the dark’ than any treatment based on scientific knowledge. It appeals to the ‘sporting’ side of the English character. I have taken these glands (they are in cachets) for a fortnight, and so far of course have not noticed any result whatever. I shall go on with them for a month as he told me to. Meanwhile I should be more than glad if you could make enquiries as you suggested to Tom, and so I will now give you a list of symptoms.
First of all, Colitis. This is, I am told, a symptom in itself. It may apparently be a symptom of anything, nobody seems to know what.
Temperature. I very often have a temperature of 99.4 for two or three weeks at a time for no obvious reason.
Increasing mental incapacity. I have a horror of using my mind and spend most of my time in trying to avoid contact with people or anything that will force me to use my mind.
Physical Exhaustion.
Insomnia. This has been going on for eight years.
Migraines.
I cannot think of anything else at the moment, but I should think this should be enough to go on with. I should have great faith in anything you suggest, and I only hope you are still as interested in the subject of glands as you were when Tom saw you in Italy. It is so dreadful to be stuck in ill-health as I am, and one becomes at last dull and hopeless about it.
This is an extremely stupid letter.
Unless any disaster prevents it I am going to Paris on September 29th with Tom who will then take a week’s holiday. I hope I shall see you then. If I am no better by then I shall be prepared to go on to Switzerland or Germany, or any place with intelligent doctors. I have taken a cottage in the country for two months and am going there in a fortnight. Give my love to Dorothy.
Tom received a sort of memorandum from Liveright which was extremely vague and unsatisfactory, so much so that Tom decided that he could not sign it. He thought the best thing to do would be cable to Quinn and put the whole matter of the contract into his hands. He has done this and Quinn has replied that he will gladly see to it and take all responsibility.
Yours ever
Vivien
[In TSE’s hand:]
Vivien has shown me this letter and I think it is quite inadequate as a description of her case, but she is very ill and exhausted and I do not think she can do any better now. I will write to you a little later and go much more into detail and the history of her illness, as I am sure there is a lot more you would like to know.
Yrs always
T.
TO Richard Cobden-Sanderson
TS Beinecke
27 June 1922
9 Clarence Gate Gdns
Dear Cobden-Sanderson,
I have delayed answering your letter of the 23rd June until after discussing the matter with Lady Rothermere.
We both think that owing to the delays which the ‘Review’ has suffered and the current rumours of its having been abandoned, that it is highly desirable that an announcement should appear as soon as possible, and I think that I explained to you my personal reasons for believing that this would be a good step.
Of course, neither Lady Rothermere or myself knows what the expense of such a circular would be. As soon as I can get a copy for the circular into your hands, would it be possible for you to obtain an estimate in the course of a few days? I think that the circular should be out by the middle of July. Of course it would be only a preliminary announcement and a more detailed circular would follow in September. As you say, the first circular may not have much effect upon the general recipients, but I think that the effect upon certain groups in London should justify its existence.
I gather that you do not think that the preliminary circular would actually have an injurious effect, but it is simply, from a publishing point of view, a superfluity?
I raised with Lady Rothermere the question of the title and brought out the points upon which you and I agreed that ‘London Review’ was a weak name.
We have finally decided upon The Criterion, a title suggested by my wife which I think combines the various advantages which we sought. Do you not think so?
I will let you have the copy for the circular quickly and if necessary will arrange to see you at once with regard to any points about it that need discussion.
Meanwhile I hope to hear from you, and hope to get you to dine with me as soon as my affairs are in order.
Yours sincerely,
T. S. Eliot
Thank you very much for your letter.
TO T. Sturge Moore
TS Texas
27 June 1922
9 Clarence Gate Gdns
Dear Mr Sturge Moore,
Thank you for your letter of the 22nd June.
I am very sorry to ask any contributor and especially yourself to condense his work, and I hope that as the review develops this will cease to be necessary. Of course I should not wish you to omit any important part of the essay, but I fear that it will be impossible at present to exceed very far the limit of 5000 words inasmuch as the total contents of the review will probably not exceed 30,000 words. It is entirely a question of the means at our disposal.
I am very glad to have your title and look forward to reading the first part of your essay as soon as it is ready. Do you think it would be possible for you to have the first part for me by the 1st of August?
Yours sincerely,
T. S. Eliot
TO Richard Aldington
TS Texas
30 June 1922
9 Clarence Gate Gdns
My dear Richard,
It has been one of my first desires to write to you fully ever since I got back, but there have been very great preoccupations.
As for myself, my holiday in Switzerland was extremely successful as the weather was perfect and I passed my time in boating, bathing, eating, sleeping and making little trips about the lake. It is sufficient to say that I continue to be in very much better health than before I left; in fact in better physical health than I was when I came back from Switzerland in January.
During the last three weeks we have had all the horrors of moving back to this flat involving a great deal of detail, and also quarrelling with the landlord of the other flat as well as the labour of extracting damages from the tenant I had in this flat. At the same time my wife’s health has got very much worse, no doubt accelerated in its decline by removing, during which process she has had the fatigue and strain of interviewing two Harley Street men. The first one prescribed two days complete starvation which only had the effect of weakening her resources still further. The other one decided against the starvation and has given considerable useful advice, but no explanation. They agreed that she is a very bad case of Colitis, and one of them considers that there is also a defective secretion of glands.
We have taken a very small cottage near Bosham, but of course I shall only be able to go at weekends. If we can get a satisfactory woman to come in by the day I am sure that the country would be beneficial.
When my wife received your letter enclosing Ezra’s while
I was away she immediately wired to you to ask for Ezra’s address. She did not however get your letter for several days as she was at Eastbourne, and that is the reason why she wired instead of writing. I cannot understand why the wire was never received.
As you probably know, I went to Verona and had about two days with Ezra. He was extremely delightful, but I must say that the scheme which we discussed is at present in such a nebulous state that the time has not yet come either for accusing me of excessive cautiousness or of endeavouring to bring influence upon me through my wife who has felt quite rightly that she could not accept the responsibility of endeavouring to influence me.
You see, she was at the time very much in favour of me accepting the post which Murry offered me on the Athenaeum, and as I rejected that offer upon my own instinct, and as my instinct proved entirely correct, she would be all the more hesitant on a second occasion.
Ezra says that the kind of subscribers whom he is likely to get in France and in America are people of small means who could not afford to put down bonds; in fact he says that some of them have only guaranteed a subscription for five years. He was very vague as to the methods being used in America. He appears to have delegated two or three women in New York and had also written to Quinn but had not yet received his reply.1 He expressed himself as approving the conditions I laid down so far as it was possible to obtain subscribers of sufficient means.2 He intended to take no part in a campaign in this country and considers the whole thing here should be left in your hands, and that Wyndham Lewis, Schiff, or anyone else in this country should communicate with you, and act only in concert with you. He kept saying that the principal feature of the Bel Esprit was its extreme flexibility so that people in each country could keep their own methods. His idea of the financial machinery seems to be that people in America should send cheques to him and that he should pass them on to me as received.
Altogether the whole thing is very unsatisfactory, and unless a dignified committee can be formed immediately I see no hope for it whatever. Of course until some definite and reasonable estimate can be formed both of the income, tenure and security, there is nothing that I can either accept or reject. I see no advantage for myself in an indefinite income for five or ten years only.
I say all this without having been in communication with you for many weeks. The situation is embarrassing and fatiguing to me in spite of the motives, which I appreciate. I don’t want to find myself in the end offered some unsatisfactory solution. I think you will agree with me on many points and also that the method proposed by Ezra is rather bordering on the precarious and slightly undignified charity. At the bank I am at least independent of the people whom I know, and a doubtful income, which I should be obliged to attempt to double by literary work, would not be of the slightest advantage from anyone’s point of view.
I am sorry to recur to this subject which I wish was not necessary for me to mention.
I was very much interested by your leader in the Times3and I thought that the verses quoted had considerable beauty.
Can you do me an article by the first of August? I want to have all the contributions for my first number in by this date as the printers estimate will be based upon them. I depend upon you for the first number and I hope you will lead off by an article reviving the past traditions of criticism. I do not want to launch in a campaign against Murry or [Clutton-]Brock; in fact I wish to be very careful especially at first, not to appear to use the paper as a weapon. I should like to have from you for your first article some piece of criticism of quite a contemporary application rather than the more historical work which I hope you will let me have later. I am putting in the first two sections of my poem and the rest in the second number. Sturge Moore has promised a long essay in two parts.
This has been rather an impersonal letter and there are many more things I should like to say to you.
I hope you will answer all the enquiries about yourself which you know I would make and I shall write to you again very soon.
Yours affectionately,
Tom
I am now forced to employ a typist for a couple of hours twice a week, and I have dictated this letter to her – hence any peculiarities of forced style!
1–Quinn pledged $300 per annum for five years.
2–In his efforts to liberate TSE from Lloyds Bank, EP was seeking thirty guarantors of £10 a year for an indefinite period.
3–RA, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’, TLS, 29 June 1922, 417–18.
TO Leonard Woolf
TS Princeton
1 July 1922
9 Clarence Gate Gdns
Dear Leonard,
I am waiting hopefully to know whether the Dostoevski plan or the Tolstoi letters are possible;1 as I want to send one advance circular to the printer in a few days time, I should very much like to know. Either, of course, would be extremely valuable; I would publish them as soon as was desirable for your own purposes, or give you as long as need be for their preparation.
I do not want to bother Virginia, who I hope is better than she was, but I should like to remind her that she promised me a title.2 If time worries her, I could just manage until January, but I should like to promise the public that something of hers would appear in an early number. I hope your silence does not mean that she has not been so well. My own faith in the omniscience of physicians has been very much disturbed in the last year or two.
Sincerely yours,
T. S. Eliot
If you see Roger Fry, tell him that I very much hope for something from him soon.
Could you also let me know the name of the woman [Mrs Green] you spoke of who translates from German, as I have not yet found anyone else? I should like to try her on something in the first number.
1–TSE’s hopes were to be realised with the publication of ‘A Few Extracts from Letters exchanged between Leo Nicolayevich Tolstoy and N. N. Strakhov relating to F. M. Dostoevsky’, trans. S. S. Koteliansky, in C. 3: 10 (Jan. 1925), 164–9.
2–VW had written on 14 Apr. to say she would try to write something of ‘less than 5,000 words’ by 15 Aug.; she would ‘very much like to be edited’ by TSE. VW’s story ‘In the Orchard’ was to appear in C. 1: 3 (Apr. 1923).
TO Sydney Schiff
TS/MS BL
4 July 1922
9 Clarence Gate Gdns
My dear Schiff Sydney,
I have your two notices and Violet’s postcard. I am very grateful to you for having written to Proust at once as I realise how difficult it is to turn to such a task in the midst of preparations for departure. I have also written to him, and as you suggested have sent it to his private address. I await consequences eagerly.
In my letter I said that I did not know of anyone but yourself who was competent to translate him into English, but that you had volunteered to do it if he was willing to let something of his appear.
I will send the books to Einstein as you suggest. We hope to hear soon that you are benefiting from Crowborough and getting a great deal of work done there.
Affectionately yours,
Tom.
Vivien wishes me to say that she does greatly appreciate and realise the interest which you and Violet take in her health and welfare. She also is grateful for your understanding of her circumstances, a thing which she never even expects from anyone else.
* * *
As the review draws near I find my correspondence in connection with it so overwhelming, moreover as I cannot altogether drop my attempts to make money by writing, that I have been absolutely forced to employ a shorthand typist two evenings a week for correspondence. Hence anything strained or impersonal you may notice in my letters.
TO Richard Aldington
TS Texas
4 July 1922
9 Clarence Gate Gdns
My dear Richard,
I was very glad indeed to get your two long letters and the typed translation, which I have not yet had time to examine and which I want to discuss with you later. Probably the only qu
estion about it will be the question that arises first – whether it is possible to include a contribution of such length into a periodical of the small dimensions to which we shall be limited at first, – but the dimensions after the first two numbers will depend on the sales and on the contributions.
I subscribe light heartedly to your terms. All of the subjects you mention sound delightful, but if for the first number of you can think of something of a more immediate pertinence I shall be grateful. I think that £10 was rather a meagre payment but I may have told you that I had some friction with the Dial on the question of payment which I thought inadequate for my poem, considering the amount of work I had put into it and also considering the vast amount of verse, which in comparison with most writers, I refrained from writing. I subsequently arranged for publication as a book with Liveright, but I am not pleased with his form of contract and I have now put the whole matter in the hands of Quinn.
Be sure that I fully appreciate all of the difficulties you experience in struggling to accomplish something for me. It certainly cannot interfere with our relations – that is an absurd suggestion – but I only fear that the sporadic activities bursting up unexpectedly in various parts of the world will completely block the progress of the main scheme and everybody concerned be made ridiculous.
I shall henceforward be going down to Bosham for my weekends. I only hope that there is some prospect of your being in town for a night in the immediate future?
I am anxious now to find reliable and not too expensive translators for various languages; at the moment French, German and Spanish, but later I shall probably want Italian and Scandinavian as well. Do you think that [Bruce] Richmond can put me on to anybody? I mean from among the people who write short notices on books in various foreign languages in the Supplement [TLS]. And also would you have time and would it be worth your while to do from time to time a certain amount of translation (at the translator’s rates to be fixed) from French and Italian?