The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (20 page)

1–At 1 Gordon Street.

2–Aristide Maillol (1861–1944): French sculptor who specialised in classical female nudes.

3–George Santayana, writer and philosopher: see Glossary of Names. On 15 Nov. he spoke at the Cambridge Heretics on ‘An Interpretation of Transcendentalism’. In Mar. 1915 Thayer would address the Heretics on ‘The Aesthetic Value of Orthodoxy’. 

MS
Houghton

3 January 1915
¹

London

Dear Eleanor,

Just a line to bear to you and yours the ringing greeting of friend to friend at the season of high festival – may the New Year (a baby face with golden promise fraught)
²
bring fulfilment of all desires and rare heart’s ease.

I promised to tell you more of my heroines, but have only time for three of those particularly dead gone on our Wilfred. First there is

PAPRIKA!

Mexican dancer (pianola voluntary: ‘Carmen’).
³
This part is created for Amy.
⁴
Huge eyes and a stiletto. Easily offended. Does a dance with castanets. Rejected by Wilfred. Swears revenge, and is aided by her admirer DOMINGO and his band of banditti. She is to be one of our best eyerollers. A more sympathetic part is that of

EARLY BIRD

Indian maiden. Proud, but noble. She has a wonderful prose style:

SHALL EARLY BIRD, DAUGHTER OF OOPALOOMPAH, CHIEF OF THE BOOZAWAYS DO OBEISANCE TO THE GREAT WHITE FATHER OF THE PALEFACES? NOT WHILE THE BISON STAMPS UPON THE PLAINS OF MY FOREFATHERS.

She is engaged to Night Hawk, but throws him over when Wilfred appears. Later, she is killed while saving W.’s life.

There is a more cheerful part

PEGOON

the Irish lass (pianola voluntary: ‘Wearin’ o’ the Green’.
⁵
Tremendous applause in S. Boston) daughter of Mrs Flaherty, who runs the hash house. She has thirty-one cowboy admirers (I forgot to say the Paprika had
thirty-one
Mexican ‘greaser’ admirers – there is a battle later) headed by Grizzly Joe, a tremendous fellow with large feet (comic). Scene: in the hash house. thirty-one admirers eating pork and beans. Pegoon enters. thirty-one attempts to kiss her. Thirty-one slaps on the face (comic). Enter Wilfred. Evident admiration on the part of Pegoon. Evident jealousy on the part of the thirty-one. Grizzly Joe (so called because he once slew a bear by hugging it to death) challenges him to a wrestling match. Wilfred (very slender, with curly hair) knows jiu jitsu and throws Joe into the horsetrough. Splash (comic). Reconciliation.

BOYS, THIS YERE TENDERFOOT BEATS US ALL. SHAKE ON IT PARD!

The thirty-one help in several rescues, and Pegoon ultimately marries Joe.

I have just thought of a part for Frederic.
⁶
It is the

REV. HAMMOND AIGS

comic negro minister, of the ‘come breddern’ type. Beyond a tendency to gin, chicken-stealing and prayer, I have not elaborated his part. (Adalbert is still getting in the hay in Turkestan. A good part for Harvey).
⁷

I have just been to a cubist tea. There were two cubist painters, a futurist novelist, a vorticist poet and his wife, a cubist lady black-and-white artist, another cubist lady, and a retired army officer who has been living in the east end and studying Japanese (now thinking of going to Central America to avoid rheumatism). We discussed poetry, art, religion, and the war, all in quite an intelligent way, I thought. On the way home was accosted by an elderly person in spectacles, who asked if it did not at once strike my eye that he was perfectly sober? I said yes; and he proceeded to inform me that he was a Scotchman, not a Scotchman from Scotland, but a Scotchman from Ceylon, and asked me if I could put him in the way of a job in the Electrical Way? Or in the Medical Way? The lords of the Admiralty, said he, educated him both as an Electrician and as a medico
(yes, medico – you can see I’ve been to the grammar school, sir). Are ye an American, noo? Then I insist on shakin’ hands with you, sir; I’ve been in America. From Boston? Then I’ll shake hands again, I was in the north, too, in Toronto. – I thought his eloquence worth a sixpence (for bread and cheese, yes, and a cup o’ cold water, as the parson says).

My Christmas day was passed very quietly; and dined with Norbert Wiener, who is a vegetarian, and the lightest eater I have ever seen.

This pension is not a very interesting one. There is Prof. Ellwood
⁸
and his family, from the University of Missouri (says my mother is one of his three dearest friends in St Louis), a Prof. Cajore and his wife from Colorado, with whom I talk about mathematics, of which I know nothing; Dr and Mrs Greever, just out of Harvard graduate school (Dept of English), Dr McLeod, ditto,
⁹
Miss Morgan, middle-aged English lady who likes to talk French, Mrs Nichols an elderly white rabbit with a very small timid daughter who plays solitaire when it rains, Mrs Cook and Miss Cook (New Zealand) with red hair who sleeps very late; Mr and Miss Mott his daughter, very mysterious, talk English with a slight German accent, and talk English
to eacher other
–Miss Mott rouges very badly in the evening; Miss Bosche (?) American art student who hates the Germans and is afraid of Zeppelins. – Not a very remarkable outfit, is it?

I have been passing my days at the British Museum library, with occasional walks, and tea when there is anyone to have it with. I like London – not that I don’t like Oxford, as universities go, but I could never endure to live there – and London agrees with me – better in fact than the seashore did. I had a pleasant fortnight there however, with the most intelligent of the Englishmen at Merton,
¹⁰
and an American,
¹¹
who, if not intelligent, was at least an excellent butt for discourse, as he defended with
great zeal all the great American fallacies, and exhibited all the typical American middle class confusion of thought – anxious to be broadminded (that is, to be vague), to have wide interests (that is to say, diffuse ones), to be tolerant (of the wrong things) etc., and very amiable, though I think he has come to regard me as an unscrupulous sophist – as I always took either the ultra conservative or the ultra radical view. But I think one can discuss the difference between ideas in process of development and ideas which have gone as far as they will ever go – and his (at twenty-three) were the latter, so I was myself the less tolerant.

BRILLIANTS

So you’re one of the Harvard young men? And what is your home state, Mr Eliot?

From Effie the Waif:

‘Welcome my lord and lady’ cried old Blenkinsop the housekeeper, in her quavering silvery voice, ‘Welcome back to East Lynne!’
¹²

Affectionately
Tom

Do tell me all about your part in the 47 play.
¹³
Thank you much for the cards.

Did Bill Green[e] never come to call? I sent a card to him long ago (c/o Harv. Univ’y).

1–Misdated 1914.

2–Cf. perhaps ‘But soon – like any human life / The golden promise of whose dawn doth fail’ (James Thomson, ‘The Doom of a City I’).

3–A popular ‘Carmen Potpourri’ from Bizet’s opera
Carmen
was adapted for pianola.

4–Amy de Gozzaldi (d. 1981) – who had played the part of his wife Fanny to TSE’s Lord Bantock in the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club production of Jerome K. Jerome’s
Fanny and the Servant Problem
(1908), in 1912–13 – married Richard Hall (1889–1966), a classmate of TSE.

5–‘The Wearin’ o’ the Green’ was an anonymous street-ballad of 1798 popularised by the playwright Dion Boucicault (1822–90) and recorded by John McCormack,
c
.1914.

6–TSE’s cousin, the Revd Frederick May Eliot (1889–1958), graduated in 1911 from Harvard Divinity School and in 1915 became associate minister of the First Parish in Cambridge; later president of the American Unitarian Association.

7–George Harvey Hull (1879–1974), lawyer.

8–Charles A. Ellwood (1873–1946) had founded in 1900 the Department of Sociology at the University of Missouri; later author of
Sociology and Modern Social Problems
(1935).

9–Gustave Greever and Malcolm McLeod were also Sheldon Travelling Fellows from Harvard.

10–Karl Culpin (1893–1917), of Anglo-German parentage, was TSE’s closest friend at Merton. He went as an exhibitioner to Oxford from Doncaster Grammar School, taking a first in Modern History in 1915. His call-up was delayed owing to poor eyesight, but he became a second lieutenant in the Gloucestershire Regiment and died of wounds received in action, 15 May 1917.

11–Brand Blanshard (1892–1987) – Professor of Philosophy at Yale, 1945–61 – recalled how on this holiday, TSE ‘sat at the dining room table each morning with a huge volume of Russell and Whitehead’s
Principia Mathematica
propped open before him. He had a certain facility in dealing with its kind of symbols; he said that manipulating them gave him a curious sense of power’ (‘Eliot at Oxford’, in
T. S. Eliot: Essays from the ‘Southern Review’,
ed. James Olney [1988]).

12–Mrs Henry Wood’s best-selling sensation novel
East Lynne
(1861) enjoyed considerable success in a stage adaptation featuring the famous line ‘Gone! And never called me mother!’

13–She was playing Margaret West by in Mark W. Reed’s farce,
In for Himself.
 

MS
MIT

6 January 1915

1 Gordon St, Gordon Square, w.c.

Dear Wiener,

I am returning herewith the essay on relativism
¹
and the paper on the rearrangement of integers.
²
The latter I have only glanced at, but I know that it would take me so long to puzzle the paper out that I had better return it at once in the hope that I may obtain a copy at some later date. 

You mentioned the ‘Highest Good’
³
and the ‘Synthetic Logic’
⁴
as the ones I may keep. There are two more – the Logic of Relations
⁵
and the Relative Position
⁶
– which have ‘compliments of the author’ written on the cover. As however you do not refer to them in your letter, pray let me know in case you wish these returned also. With many thanks.

The Relativism I cordially agree with, but nearly all of the subject matter I think we had already touched upon, at one time or another, in conversation. I hope that you will have reprints taken of it, in order that the doctrine may be promulgated. Such a doctrine can however, as it seems to me, be worked out, under different hands, with an infinite variety of detail. One can, I should think, be a relative idealist or a relative realist. What it seems to me to lend itself to most naturally, is a relative materialism – or at least this is the way in which my sympathies incline. The only way in which we can talk about the ‘universe’ at all, it seems to me, is with reference to the universe of physical science; or, in other words the mechanistic world is that to which one would tend to conform.
⁷

In a sense, of course, all philosophising is a perversion of reality: for, in a sense, no philosophic theory makes any difference to practice. It has no working by which we can test it. It is an attempt to organise the confused and contradictory world of common sense, and an attempt which invariably meets with partial failure – and with partial success. It invariably involves cramming both feet into one shoe: almost every philosophy seems to begin as a revolt of common sense against some other theory, and ends – as it becomes itself more developed and approaches completeness – by itself becoming equally preposterous – to everyone but its author. The theories are certainly, all of them, implicit in the inexact experience of every day, but once extracted they make the world appear as strange as Bottom in his ass’s head.

– These are all obvious remarks which I need not weary you with: but the upshot is (or would be if I continued till I had really expressed my meaning) that relativism, strictly interpreted, is not an antidote for the other systems: one can have a relative absolute if one likes, for it is all one
if one call the Absolute, Reality or Value. It does not exist for me, but I cannot say that it does not exist for Mr Bradley. And Mr Bradley may say that the Absolute is implied
for
me
in
my thought – and who is to be the referee?

Of course one cannot avoid metaphysics altogether, because nowhere can a sharp line be drawn – to draw a sharp line between metaphysics and common sense would itself be metaphysics and not common sense. But relativism does I think
suggest
this recommendation: not to pursue any theory to a conclusion, and to avoid complete consistency. Now the world of natural science may be unsatisfying, but after all it is the most satisfactory that we know, so far as it goes. And it is the only one which we must
all
accept. One cannot, of course, hope to separate Reality from Value. Some philosophies are only a play upon this ambiguity of the word Reality. In a way the most valuable is the most real, and the beauty of a work of art is in this way more real to me than its ultimate (or relatively ultimate) physical constituents. But one has got to neglect some aspects of the situation, and what relativism does, it seems to me, is to neglect
consciously
where realism protests that there is nothing to neglect, and idealism that it has neglected nothing. Thus I put, frankly arbitrarily, Reality and Value as opposite ends of a scale. Nowhere, of course, is either
utterly
absent. But I am content to say figuratively that the goal to which ‘reality’ strives is the world of the materialist. One is equally free to say that it ‘strives’ toward the other end too. Of course it does not get there, in either case.

I am quite ready to admit that the lesson of relativism is: to avoid philosophy and devote oneself to either
real
art or
real
science. (For philosophy is an unloved guest in either company). Still, this would be to draw a sharp line, and relativism preaches compromise. For
me
, as for Santayana, philosophy is chiefly literary criticism and conversation about life;
⁸
and you have the logic, which seems to me of great value. The only reason why relativism does not do away with philosophy altogether, after all, is that there is no such thing to abolish! There is art, and there is science. And there are works of art, and perhaps of science, which would never have occurred had not many people been under the impression that there was philosophy. 

However, I took a piece of fairly technical philosophy for my thesis, and my relativism made me see so many sides to questions that I became hopelessly involved, and wrote a thesis perfectly unintelligible to anyone but myself; and so I wished to rewrite it. It’s about Bradley’s theory of judgment, and I think the second version will be entirely destructive. I shall attack first ‘Reality’ second ‘Idea’ or ideal content, and then try to show sufficient reason for attempting to get along without any theory of judgment whatsoever. In other words, there are many objects in the world (I say many, as if one could draw a sharp line, though in point of fact it is degree everywhere) which can be handled as things sufficiently for ordinary purposes, but not
exactly
enough to be subject matter for a science – no definition of judgment, that is, is formally either right or wrong; and it simply is a waste of time to define judgment at all.

Well, I think I have bored you with these commonplaces long enough. Do let me know if you wish the other papers back. I thank you for sending them to me.

I have given a card of introduction to you to a friend of mine Thayer, an American (Harvard’13) now in Oxford. I do not know whether you will find much in common, but he was anxious to meet you, and is intelligent. He is a friend and admirer of Santayana’s.

Sincerely
Eliot