The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (23 page)

1–He had confused his host with Ernest Rhys (1859–1946), the editor of Everyman’s Library. Sir John (1840–1915) was Principal of Jesus College and Professor of Celtic. His daughters were My fanwy and Olwen.

2–Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), American poet and social reformer; author of ‘The Battle-Hymn of the Republic’.

3–Charles Dickens,
Pickwick Papers,
ch. xv: ‘Can I view thee panting, lying / On thy stomach, without sighing; / Can I unmoved see thee dying / On a log, / Expiring frog!’

4–Samuel Slater (1768–1835), English-born founder of the American cotton manufacturing industry. 

MS
Gardner Museum

4 April [1915]

Merton College [Oxford]

My dear Mrs Gardner,

I wonder if you would care for a brief word from London. I have been meaning to write to you for some time. Quite two months ago I think it may have been (or six weeks) I made the acquaintance (at a meeting of the Buddhist Society!) of a man who attracted me by a certain serenity of
manner, and by mentioning Mr Okakura.
²
His name was Henry Furst,
³
and as he said he was about to write to you, I asked him to write of me and my intentions. I am sorry not to have seen anything of him since; he said he was going to live at Marston, outside of Oxford; I was unable, during the time I remained in Oxford, to get out to him; and though I have written to him, (at a not very definite address), I have not had a reply. I breakfasted with him once. He showed me a photograph and a letter of poor Matt Prichard, of whom I had heard nothing whatever.
⁴
I did not realise that we had been so near to each other when the war broke out, he at Freiburg and I at Marburg. As I seem to have lost contact with Furst, and am not in touch with any other of Matt’s friends, I should be more than indebted to you if you would let me have word about him: if he is eventually released, especially. Furst spoke of him as very happy, in being able to help other people in the camp. I can imagine its bringing out exclusively the best in his restless spirit; and now that I know that he is there, it seems to me the happiest and best and most appropriate thing for him at such a time as this: a certain curious symbolism about it.

The war is very real and very frightful to me, as I know the country and the people so recently. On the 14 Juillet I was in Brussels, having come from Ostende, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp. Two days later I was in Germany, and in a fortnight I wished myself well out of Germany. Not that the people were not very kind to me – the Germans have that hospitality and cordiality which characterises the less civilised peoples. And not that I wish the Germans to be crushed – but France is so important, and defeat would do the French so much harm! This alone outweighs any consideration of right and wrong in my mind. I found that Santayana takes a similar view. At Cambridge, where he has been living, (in hideous lodgings), I discovered him writing an article for the
New
Republic
on Spanish feeling toward the war.
⁵
To turn from these dismal topics; I have been having a very interesting time in London – which grows upon me more and more: – there are at least a dozen people whom I like in London, and that is a great deal. I have been seeing a good deal of some
of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared. One of the most interesting of the radicals – Gaudier-Brzeska
⁶
– do you know of him? – is in the trenches, (as is the interesting T. E. Hulme);
⁷
cubism is still represented by Wyndham Lewis, by Jacob Epstein,
⁸
and a man whose work I like exceedingly, Edward Wadsworth.
⁹
There has been an exhibition – a very ill-assorted one – at the Goupil gallery:
¹⁰
Lewis had a fine canvas, Wadsworth two good woodcuts, Brzeska an interesting small marble, and nothing else of the slightest merit; unless one excepts Epstein’s four things, which are certainly extraordinarily
habile
[clever], but did not please me, though once or twice his wood statues (one is painted red) give something suggesting the vigour of a central African image.

I do not know whether you have heard of a certain infamous soi-disant quarterly called
Blast
,
¹¹
only one number of which has so far appeared. If the second ever does appear – it has been impending for two months – I am thinking of sending you a copy, on the supposition that you would not in America see it otherwise; because it might at least amuse you and incidentally because it promises to contain a few things of my own. There
will be some poems by a girl named Jessie Dismorr,
¹²
which I think might interest you.

I see the charming Bertie Russell from time to time; having in fact been to Cambridge recently … Of my work in Oxford there is little to say; it is satisfactory, but London is infinitely more attractive, and since I am in London now, I talk of that instead! The last time I was here I had the pleasure of meeting Yeats: he is now in Ireland, I believe because a play of Lady Gregory’s is coming on at the Abbey.
¹³
I am hoping for his return – he is a very agreeable talker.

I remain, my dear Mrs Gardner, devotedly yours

Thomas S. Eliot

I was extraordinarily impressed by Flemish art, especially van Eyck – 

1–Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), prominent Boston hostess and art collector, who bequeathed her Venetian-style house, Fenway Court, with its contents, to the city. Her guest book records two visits by TSE in 1912, on 16 Sept. and between 31 Oct. and 3 Nov.

2–Okakura Kakuzo (1862–1913), Japanese scholar and writer; author of
The Book of Tea
(New York, 1906). From 1906 until his death he was Curator of Chinese and Japanese Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1910 he had taken TSE to meet Matisse.

3–Henry Furst (1893–1967), American journalist and translator of many books into Italian. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, 1913–14.

4–Matthew Prichard, whom TSE had last seen in Munich in Sept. 1911, was interned by the Germans for the duration of the war. He had known Mrs Gardner since his Boston days, and they kept in touch when he left America in 1907.

5–George Santayana, ‘Spanish Opinion on the War’,
New Republic
, 10 Apr. 1915.

6–Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915), French sculptor, was killed in action two months later. EP wrote on him in ‘Affirmations … V. Gaudier-Brzeska’,
New Age
16: 13 (Feb. 1915), and later in his
Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir
(1916).

7–T. E. Hulme (1883–1917), poet and critic, volunteered at the outbreak of war, serving in the trenches until being wounded in Apr. 1915. Back in Britain, he wrote ‘War Notes’ for the
New Age
(using the pseudonym ‘North Staffs’) in most weeks from Nov. 1915 to Feb. 1916. He returned to the front in May 1917 and was killed by a shell in Flanders on 28 Sept. Through his anti-romanticism and his dedication to the idea of ‘original sin’, Hulme exercised a considerable intellectual influence on English modernism. When HR edited his papers as
Speculations
(1924), TSE described him as ‘classical, reactionary, and revolutionary’, and as ‘the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind’ (C. 2: 9, Apr. 1924).

8–Jacob Epstein (1880–1959), American sculptor championed by EP and WL; naturalised British subject from 1907. He designed the tomb of Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise, and his
Rock
-
Drill
was sculpted during his Vorticist period. In 1951 he was to execute a fine bronze head of TSE.

9–Edward Wadsworth (1889–1949), painter and printmaker, served as an intelligence officer with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in the eastern Mediterranean. After being invalided home, he worked on naval camouflage. In ‘Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist. An authorised appreciation’, EP remarked: ‘The vorticist movement is not less unanimous because its two best known painters, Mr. Lewis and Mr. Wadsworth, are quite different … Turbulent energy: repose. Anger: placidity, and so on’ (
Egoist
1: 16, 15 Aug. 1914).

10–The Second London Group Exhibition (Mar. 1915) included many of the Vorticists backed by EP, including WL, Epstein and Wadsworth. The Vorticists held their own exhibition at the Doré Gallery in July.

11–The second and final issue of
Blast
, in July 1915, contained the four ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’.

12–Jessica Dismorr (1885–1939), English artist, had signed the Vorticist Manifesto in the first issue of
Blast
(20 June 1914), and contributed poems and notes to the second. She appears in William Roberts’s painting
The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring
1915.

13–Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932), Irish playwright, folklorist and translator, had founded in 1903 (with WBY and J. M. Synge) the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
Shanwalla
opened on 8 Apr. 

TS
Beinecke

15 April [1915]

Merton College, Oxford

Dear Pound:

I hope that my delay in returning the manifesto
¹
has not inconvenienced you. A number of criticisms have formed themselves in my head and disintegrated again during the course of the week. I think that a thing of the sort has to be written by one man, and cannot be made up like an Appropriation Bill to please the congressman from Louisiana and Dakotah. Doubtless the enlightened public will see the work of your hands, and I trust that you will keep the same order – i.e. an alphabetical taxis for all the names except your own.

How much is implied by the word Alliance? Is the alliance anything more than for the purposes of the manifesto? Of course I don’t know the work of any of these men myself, but that doesn’t matter. But I should like to know in what way this is to be promulgated and how followed up.

I have made only
one
comment in the text, and they can be easily erased. As to the rest, I should have liked a more crystallised
statement of the function of the university and the need for an intellectual capital. The reference to the war does strike me as platitudinous, and I wonder if one could not get the thing said more concretely and immediately, without the use of such generalisations. I mean, I like the mention of Stendhal, James, etc., and again in your article ‘The Renaissance’
²
you succeed. If you pointed out the need to have our universities situated in and their life merged in the life of a metropolis; the pernicious influence of athletics, social helpfulness and sermons; if it could be mentioned that a university is not the same thing as a school of agriculture, but that America has schools of agriculture which are better and honester places than its universities; because they have a work to do which they can take seriously; and that the function of the university is not to turn out Culcher and Civic Pageants. At present, you see, I am more alarmed at the Americanisation than at the Prussianisation of our universities. The Germans have at least a few facts, and we have only words; they have Archaeologie and we have How to Appreciate the Hundred Best Paintings, the Maiden Aunt and the Social Worker. Something might be said (at another time) about the Evil Influence of Virginity on American Civilisation.

It might be pointed out that literature has rights of its own which extend beyond Uplift and Recreation. Of course it is imprudent to sneer at the monopolisation of literature by women.

The Degradation of Women in American Society.

Pardon these ravings: I am suffering from the effects of a debauch and have done nothing but play tennis today, so I am not in a state to talk intelligently. I am likely to be coming up to town for the day on Friday or Saturday next, and should like to see you. Would you be in about tea time perhaps? Or would you be at Lewis’s
³
on Saturday?

Yours ever
Th. Eliot

1–This manifesto was probably connected with EP’s (anonymous) ‘Preliminary Announcement of the College of Arts’, Egoist 1: 21 (2 Nov. 1914), 413–14; reprinted as a leaflet in the same month. See
Letters of Ezra Pound
, 81–3.

2–The second of three articles under this title, published in
Poetry
Feb., Mar. and May. TSE included them in his choice of
Literary Essays of Ezra Pound
(1954).

3–In his memoir
Blasting
and Bombardiering
[1937], WL recounts his first meeting with TSE in EP’s flat in Kensington at some time between June 1914 and July 1915. ‘A sleek, tall, attractive transatlantic apparition – with a sort of Giaconda smile. I looked up one day from a brooding interval … And there, sitting down with a certain stealth, not above a couple of feet away from me, was the author of Prufrock – indeed, it was Prufrock himself: but a Prufrock to whom the mermaids would decidedly have sung … For this was a very attractive young Prufrock indeed, with an alert and dancing eye –
moqueur
to the marrow, bashfully ironic, blushfully
taquineur
. But still a Prufrock!’ (282–3).