The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (100 page)

1–‘now’.

2–‘Circe’ (subject of the detailed comments in this paragraph), ‘Eumaeus’ and ‘Oxen of the Sun’.

3–RA, ‘The Influence of Mr. James Joyce’,
English Review
32 (Apr. 1921), 333–41. RA considered
Ulysses
‘a tremendous libel on humanity’ and a damaging influence on young writers.

4–No letter was published. TSE responded in ‘
Ulysses
, Order and Myth’,
Dial
75: 5 (Nov. 1923), 480–3.

5–On 3 June JJ moved into Valery Larbaud’s flat in the rue du Cardinal Lemoine, where he spent four months, rent-free, during its owner’s absence.

TS
Beinecke  

22 May 1921
¹

9 Clarence Gate Gdns  

Dear Bob,  

I was glad to hear from you. I will go through your poems
²
at leisure if I may, and write you about them in due course. I’m glad to hear that you like Paris; the right way of course is to take it as a place and a tradition, rather than as a congeries of people, who are mostly futile and timewasting, except when you want to pass an evening agreeably in a café. The chief danger about Paris is that it is such a strong stimulus, and like most stimulants incites to rushing about and produces a pleasant illusion of great mental activity rather than the solid results of hard work. When I was living there years ago I had only the genuine stimulus of the place, and not the artificial stimulus of the people, as I knew no one whatever, in the literary and artistic world, as a companion – knew them rather as spectacles, listened to, at rare occasions, but never spoken to. I am sure Julien Benda is worth knowing and possibly Paul Valéry. But Paris is still alive. What is wonderful about French literature is its solidarity: you don’t know one part of it, even the most contemporary, unless you know the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and more too, in a way in which Pound and [Clive] Bell don’t – Pound because he has never taken the trouble, and Bell because he couldn’t. Bell is a most agreeable person, if you don’t take him seriously, but a great waster of time if you do, or if you expect to get any profound knowledge or original thought out of him, and his Paris is a useless one. If I came to live in Paris the first thing to do would be to cut myself off from it, and not depend upon it. Joyce I admire as a person who seems to be independent of outside stimulus, and who therefore is likely to go on producing first-rate work until he dies.  

I should not worry at all about what Thayer says. I thought his witticisms in the May number very tasteless and pointless.
³
Why do our
compatriots try so hard to be clever? Furthermore, his language is so opaque, through his cleverness, that it is unintelligible gibberish. Cummings has the same exasperating vice.  

But Joyce has form – immensely careful. And as for literary – one of the last things he sent me contains a marvellous parody of nearly every style in English prose from 1600 to the
Daily Mail.
⁴
One needs a pretty considerable knowledge of English literature to understand it. No! you can’t generalize, in the end it is a question of whether a man has genius and can do what he sets out to do. Small formulas support small people. Aren’t the arty aesthetes you mention simply the people without brains?  

Write to me again soon, yours,  

Tom

1–Misdated 2 May in the first edn. of these
Letters
.

2–Robert McAlmon,
The Portrait of a Generation
(1926).

3–In an unsigned ‘Comment’, Thayer sniped at William Carlos Williams’s suggestion that Alfred Kreymborg should be given ‘one hundred thousand dollars’: ‘one hundred thousand dollars! O Hieronimo! Robert Menzies McAlmon, where are you now? Matrimony always was a roundabout way to arrive at anything.’ He explained in a footnote that ‘Mr McAlmon recently took to wife a young British woman’ – on 14 Feb., McAlmon married Winifred Ellerman (1894–1983), daughter of a shipping magnate – and ‘forthwith dispatched himself and her to the British capital’ with ‘the notion of buying print-paper in her country cheap’. The implication was that McAlmon’s need for cheap paper for his magazine
Contact
‘antedated’ his wedding (
Dial
70: 5, May 1921, 606–10).

4–The first part of Episode xiv of
Ulysses
(‘The Oxen of the Sun’) had appeared in
Little Review
7: 3 (Sept.–Dec. 1920), 81–92. JJ wrote to Weaver on 23 Apr. 1921, asking her to ‘pass on to Mr Eliot when you have read them the two episodes Mr Pound sent and also the typescript of
Oxen of the Sun
’ (
Letters of James Joyce
, III, ed. Richard Ellmann, 1966, 41).

TS
Lilly  

22 May 1921

9 Clarence Gate Gdns  

My dear Dorothy,  

So you are living at Vivien’s old hotel!
¹
I am delighted to have your address at last, in an official channel, and to know that you are installed so near the ghost of Rémy.
²
Yes, Vivien was in bed for eight or nearly nine weeks, and then had a bad attack of gastric influenza when she got up. I think that not only the anxiety, but the standing so much by her father’s bed precipitated internal displacements.  

I shall be in Paris for some time in October – probably not before then. Presumably you will not move south until December. My mother will be here in June. I don’t suppose that you will betray your mysterious movements, but I shall go to your hotel in October and at least enquire after. Postcards with no address are not really very good means of tracing people.

In October I shall be ready for a little mountain air, after I have finished a little poem which I am at present engaged upon. I see that the mountain air is about to produce
Ulysses
, which I am mightily pleased to know, as the unpublished manuscript is even finer stuff than the printed. Tell Ezra
that I am awaiting a testimonial to the ozone in the shape of some considerable opus from his Corona [typewriter], and that the
Dial
appears to be in need of a Paris letter from him.  

Yours ever affectionately
T.S.E.

1–Hôtel du Pas de Calais, 59 rue des Sts Pères, Paris VI.

2–Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915), French novelist and critic, had lived at No. 73.

TS
Victoria  

2 June 1921

9 Clarence Gate Gdns  

My dear Read,  

I am humiliated, after such a long silence, to be writing to you on a purely practical subject – but circumstances all this winter and spring – a great deal of anxious illness, not my own – have been very unfavourable to the correspondence I had hoped for. To come to the point, I am looking for a bed-sitting room in this neighbourhood, (Baker Street Station) for my brother, who is to arrive from America next week, and I know that you once, before your marriage, dwelt in Nottingham Terrace, next to Tussaud’s.  

I have forgotten the address you had then, but is that a place that would be suitable for a single gentleman, bed and breakfast, by the week?  

I have been looking at ‘Apartments’ in the neighbourhood, and find them all dilapidated, and the proprietors unprepossessing.  

Are you writing at all now, or only reading? Or do you find that the Treasury work is too exhausting? You have, from what I have heard, been making such a success as a civil servant, that you may find no time or strength left to serve the Muses. I hope that is not so. It would be a great pleasure to hear from you again.  

Yours always
T. S. Eliot

 

On 10 J
une, T
SE’s mother, brother and sister Marian arrived in London for a two-month visit. His mother and sister were to occupy the Eliots’ flat in Clarence Gate Gardens until 20 August, while TSE and Vivien rented Lucy Thayer’s smaller flat
at 12 Wigmore Street.

 

MS
Berg  

15 June 1921

(post address)
9 Clarence Gate Gdns,
N.W.1
 

My dear Woolf,  

I am very sorry to hear that your wife is not well, and hope that it may be nothing serious. I was disappointed that your dinner did not take place. I must apologise for the delay – your card arrived after we had moved out and my mother was moving in, and I only discovered it, among others, two days ago: otherwise I would have accepted for us at once. I hope you will be able to have another and will ask us again, and I hope you can both go to
Bartholomew
Fair
on the 26th.
¹
 

Please give your wife our sympathy and tell her I hope she will soon be well.  

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

1–The first performance of Jonson’s play since 1731, by the Phoenix Society at the New Oxford Theatre.

MS
Texas  

[Postmark 16 June 1921]

9 Clarence Gate Gdns  

Dear Mary,  

I have spotted a telephone at 41 Gordon Square under the name of Alix.
¹
Of course it may have been turned off while in Vienna but I rang up Vanessa
²
and arranged to look at the room tomorrow afternoon. If the telephone works the place seems ideal. Do you think the neighbourhood of Oliver Strachey would have a good or bad influence upon young Henry [Eliot]?
³
Henry, a low name in this country, Henery, but still current in America. In any case, I want to get a room at Birrell’s for my unhappy brother in July – reply reply, to whom should I apply: Francis Birrell Esqre.? Or Garnett?
⁴
or someone else.

I do not feel that I have really seen you for many weeks, or know about you. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the other evening very much. —  

Always affectionately
Tom.

1–Alix Strachey (
née
Sargant-Florence, 1892–1973), psychoanalyst, had married James Strachey in 1920. They had a flat at 41 Gordon Square, but were currently in Vienna for analysis with Freud.  

2–Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant lived at 37 Gordon Square.  

3–Oliver Strachey, a musician and civil servant, brother of Lytton and James, lived at 42 Gordon Square.  

4–The critic and journalist Francis Birrell (1889–1935) and the novelist David Garnett (1892–1981) ran the Bloomsbury Bookshop in Taviton Street.

MS
Texas  

21 June 1921

9 Clarence Gate Gdns  

My dear Ottoline,  

We are waiting anxiously to hear how you stood the journey and how you are now. I did sympathise with your desire to get away from the nursing home, but it seems to me that you must have been very weak for a journey. In fact, we were quite frightened.  

I hope you will be thoroughly rested before you have my mother and me. May we fix on a date now? If it is possible, I should like to bring her early in August (the 6th or the 13th?) but that is only
if it makes no difference to you
– I believe you mentioned the 9th of July to Vivien and if that suits you better I easily can arrange it. I should bring my mother over from Oxford or else take her there on Sunday evening.
¹
But do let me know what suits you best, and at the same time say how you have been.  

My mother is very excited at the prospect of Garsington and of meeting you whom she has heard so much about!  

Vivien is very tired again and can do nothing at all. She sends quantities of love and sympathy.  

Affectionately yours
Tom