The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (19 page)

1–Cf. the opening of Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
: ‘they order these matters better in France.’

2–Cf. ‘Tell it not in Gath, Publish it not in the streets of Askelon’ (2 Samuel 1. 20).

3–His crew, of which he was stroke, beat the only other four-oar that could be mustered in wartime Oxford. Later his prized pewter mug was stolen during a removal.

4–Byron,
Don Juan
IV v: ‘I don’t pretend that I quite understand / My own meaning when I would be
very
fine; / But the fact is that I have nothing planned, / Unless it were to be a moment merry.’ In 1933 TSE wrote that he had thought of prefixing this stanza to
Ash
-
Wednesday
if ever it went into a second edition: ‘There is some sound critical admonition in these lines’ (
TUPUC
30–1).

MS
Huntington

Saturday 21 November [1914]

Junior Common Room,
Merton College, Oxford

Dear Conrad,

Will you do me a great favour? I enclose a money order for $4. Will you go to Galvin, or to Howard in Cambridge, and order some red or pink roses, Killarney I suppose. I understand that Emily [Hale] is to act in the Cambridge Dramatic play which will be early in December – I suppose the 5th or the 12th; you will have to find out which date, if you can. I enclose a card; please put it in a small envelope and address it to her simply Miss Hale, ‘Brattle Hall’, and have the roses for the
Saturday
night performance. The name of the play is
Mrs Bumpstead-Leigh.
¹
If you can’t find out when the play comes off, or if you can’t find out without conspicuous inquiry, or if, as is quite possible, this reaches you too late, simply hold the money and send the flowers at Christmas. In that case the address is

                           5 Circuit Road,
                               Chestnut Hill.

I have lent your book to Scofield Thayer,
²
who has expressed himself quite enthusiastic over it. He thinks, as I do, that the title poem is decidedly the most successful and unusual.

Yours
Tom

1–
Mrs Bumpstead-Leigh
(1911) is a comedy by Harry James Smith (1880–1918).

2–Scofield Thayer, the future editor of
The Dial
, had known TSE at Milton Academy and Harvard, and was now studying philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford. See Glossary of Names.

MS
Houghton

27 November 1914

Merton College

Dear Eleanor,

I regretted very much that I could not share your supper with you, but I was satisfied on the whole to have the letter for myself. I really feel quite as much
au courant
of Cambridge life as anyone can who has not yet learned the fox trot.
¹
In the same mail with your letter came this picture, which I enclose without comment, to indicate my state of mind. I expect 
when I return to put myself into the hands of Lily
²
for a month of the strictest training: rise at six, run around Fresh Pond, bath, breakfast of one egg followed by ancle exercises for one hour, knee exercises one hour, and so on; and perhaps by the time I emerge I shall be able to appear in society without your having to blush for me. I was able to make use of the fox trot in a debate in the college common room a few evenings ago. The subject was ‘Resolved that this society abhors the threatened Americanisation of Oxford’. I supported the negative: I pointed out to them frankly how much they owed to Amurrican culcher in the drayma (including the movies) in music, in the cocktail, and in the dance. And see, said I, what we the few Americans here are losing while we are bending our energies toward your uplift (building the city beautiful, as a young clergyman so aptly put it); we the outposts of progress are compelled to remain in ignorance of the fox trot. You will be interested to hear that my side won the debate by two votes.

Lily may have forgotten to tell you what struck me very much at the time, that the name of the druggist in whose shop we met was Jones. A really striking motive for EFFIE THE WAIF. How can I work it in? At present I am engaged in drilling and giving names to all the comic and villainous characters who fall in love with EFFIE, and all the villainous and comic characters who fall in love with WILFRED (the hero – his name was Walter, but I thought Wilfred better). As the drayma takes place chiefly on the plains (you must have either the plains or the desert if you expect a good pursuit) there is of course DANCING BEAR the chief of the Pottawottobottommies, a terrible fellow, given to drink, and no end treacherous. Then there is Traihi Sheik, the maharaja of Chowwannugger. You simply have to have either a red Indian or an East Indian, and I see no reason why you should not have both. They will be distinguished from each other by the fact that Bear wears feathers and a very old silk hat (for comic effect a red Indian is absolutely worthless without an old silk hat); while Traihi wears a turban and polo boots (he was at Christ Church): otherwise they are exactly alike, except perhaps that Traihi is a shade the more treacherous and given to drink of the two. The way I bring the latter in I consider especially ingenious. Guendolyne Lady Chumleyumley, who is really Effie’s mother, though everybody has guessed it, has been getting lonelier and lonelier all alone in her baronial halls all alone with fifty-five devoted servants (to whom I have not yet given names, but who will all play some part); this process of increasing loneliness has been going on for
eighteen years (Effie was lost at the age of one – the audience now computes Effie’s age by a sum in higher mathematics similar to that by which I learned the age of my old flame Hannah in Germany). Finally she decides, having had no sleep throughout this time, eighteen years, that something must be done. She receives a tip that there is an old faquir in India who has been very successful in recovering lost umbrellas, etc. It was in India that Effie was stolen. Shall she return to these scenes, so painful to her memory?

If she had had more gumption she would probably have done so long before, but that would have spoiled everything. She arrives in India. Everyone wonders who the strange memsahib is, so liberal with backsheesh (here a street scene, with camels, monkeys (comic) and pythons), but who has never been seen to smile. (She has not smiled for eighteen years). Still beautiful, she has a troupe of comic and villainous lovers of her own, but she
will
remain faithful to the memory of her Adalbert – perhaps he too is still alive (of course he is: but he is still in captivity in Turkestan, where he works on the farm, and we won’t get him out for several reels yet). Finally she interviews the faquir. After a lot of hocus pocus, he produces a crystal sphere into which she gazes. The next reel of course shows what she saw in the sphere: the whole history of the foul abduction of her husband and her babe from their station in Kashmeer, with the aid of a monkey, a cobra, and a man-eating tiger. I shall elaborate this later; the point is that she is finally shown Effie in her present position in the act of spurning Peter (Effie is going to be awfully good at spurning before she gets through). Here she faints dead away. Meanwhile Traihi Sheik has been hanging about in the ante room waiting to see the faquir about a matter of a purloined jewel which weighs ten pounds and has religious associations as well, has got tired of waiting, and bursts in just in time to look over her Ladyship’s shoulder and catch a glimpse of Effie’s face in the crystal. Of course it’s all off at once. He turns to the audience, rolls his eyes and tears at his shirt in the usual oriental fashion to show passion.

SCENE: I WILL FIND HER IF SHE LIVES UPON THIS GLOBE. BE SHE PRINCESS OR BE SHE PEASANT MAID. I WILL MAKE HER MAHARANEE OF CHOWWANNUGGER.

I started to tell you all about Effie’s lovers, and I hoped to do them up in one letter, but I shall have to postpone the rest. I will only briefly mention Karl Wurst, who works in the barber shop in Medecine Hat. You see, I thought it would be so novel and interesting to have a German spy, and it doesn’t interfere with his business in the least to have him in love
with Effie (he sees her waiting in the carryall while her so-called father the hon. Cassidy is being shaved: comic scene, Karl slices a bit off his ear while looking out of window at Effie). Of course Karl is really Lieutenant Prince Karl of Katzenkraut-Schwerin, occupied in doing some plans of the local gas-works.

This is nearly the end of the term. I am planning to spend a fortnight or so somewhere on the south coast with two friends – one an Amurrican, the other an Englishman, and then return to London, which I find has a strong attraction for one.

I think that you understand poor Harry [Child] exceedingly well, and you say some things which had not occurred to me. It’s just because the whole thing seems so strained and forced, and yet that
given
the premisses, he carries out the programme with so much pluck and modesty and temperateness and sense, that he is particularly appealing and pathetic. And he is what a good many people engaged in religion are not, not because they have more sense or wisdom, but simply because they have not the fortitude or feeling. I feel a particular sympathy with him, because I know that I may have come very near to drifting (if you would use the word drift – err is perhaps better) into something rather similar, though with very different dogmas; it begins with having intelligence and not applying it to some subject matter which should be at once personal, and solid enough to let one’s personality develop freely without allowing it to wander into freaks and vagaries. Anyway, I have had for several years a distrust of strong convictions in any theory or creed which can be formulated. One must have theories, but one need not believe in them! I wish I could see how it was going to end for Harry. I don’t believe he has anything very serious on his conscience, but even two or three merely wasted years are something which such a man may never be able to forget or smile at.
³

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

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’].

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