The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (41 page)

MS
Houghton

1 July 1917

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1

Dearest Mother,

I was more than glad to get your two letters after not having heard for so long, but disappointed to find that father’s letter in spite of its vast size, contained no letter, but only enclosures, though I was interested and approved Lodge’s speech.
¹
I was particularly interested in your Colonial Dames
²
circular which I thought very well written and a model of its kind. You must have been very busy about these things, and I hope you will take a rest now at Gloucester.

I am sure that I acknowledged your cheque, but in any case I will do so again now, in duplicate, for both Vivien’s and my own, with very grateful thanks. My suit I have had for some time; it is very satisfactory, and I believe will last very well.

It is as you say very hard to keep house on small means now. I suppose conditions are the same all over the world. I do not think that anyone could manage more economically than Vivien. She finds it somewhat more expensive here (Hampstead) than at Crawford Mansions, partly because provisions cost more than they do near us, and partly because she has to use another person’s servant and another person’s method. But the Haigh-Woods send money to cover the servant’s food, and of course her pay. V. has our Rose at Crawford Mansions very well in hand, and keeps the provisions locked up, doling out from day to day, which makes a great difference.

We are both better for being here. We had some tennis yesterday – myself and Maurice, and Ezra Pound and a man named Dakyns,
³
a friend of ours. Maurice has come back from Lincolnshire and is going to have a three 
weeks ‘course’ at Chelsea Barracks (London) so he will be near us for that time. It is a course given to select officers who have already had experience in France. We are very glad to have him here.

I have done three pieces of work lately – part of a dialogue for the
Little Review
, a review for the
Egoist
, and a review for the
New Statesman
.
⁴
I am to get £3 per month from the
Egoist
, and £2 per month from the
Little Review
. The best I can hope at present is to see my income rise at the same rate as the cost of living!

I have been very busy at the bank – an enormous foreign mail lately. I have a dozen letters to dictate early tomorrow. So I think I will go to bed and write again on Wednesday. I like to address letters ‘Eastern Point’.

With very fond love
Tom

1–Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924), a leading Republican senator. TSE is probably referring to his ‘Speech delivered in the Senate on the declaration of war with Germany, 4 April 1917’, reprinted in
War Addresses
1915–17
(1917); also distributed as a government offprint.

2–Mrs Eliot was a charter member, and successively Secretary, Vice-President and President of the Missouri Society of the Colonial Dames of America. At this period she was serving as chairman of the War Work committee.

3–Arthur Dakyns (1883–1941), barrister-at-law, worked at the Ministry of Labour 1917–20; later Lecturer in Public Administration, Manchester University, 1926–36.

4–TSE, ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’ [I],
Little Review
, May 1917; a review of
Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats
, ed. EP,
Egoist
, July 1917; and a review of Paul Bourget’s
Lazarine, NS
, 25 Aug. 1917.

MS
Texas

2 July 1917

3 Compayne Gdns London
N.W.

Dear Mrs Hutchinson,

Your letter was finally forwarded to me here, where we are staying for the present. My wife was just on the point of writing to explain why we were so rude as not to acknowledge your card of the week before, and so I will answer both in one. The truth is that she read the card ‘July 25’, and as we were not sure about that far off date we did not see the card again until too late. We were very much mortified.

It would be very nice to dine with you this week, but we find we cannot fit it in at all. The only free evening is one when my wife has a dancing practice so late as to make it impossible to appear anywhere afterwards. We hope we can come to see you some time before long. In any case will you not be at Wittering this summer? We shall be at Bosham for a time at the end of July – not as long as last summer, unfortunately.

It is good of you to speak well of
Prufrock
– I fear it will simply appear a
réchauffée
to most of my friends – they are growing tired of waiting for something better from me.

With many regrets

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

TS
Houghton

23 July 1917

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1

Dear Eleanor,

I was delighted to get your letter this evening, and felt as if telegraphic communications with the transpontine continent had at last been repaired. In fact I had thought several times of writing to you briefly and brusquely to ask if it was a fact that both my letters had been sunk or engulphed in the censor’s office; or if not to ask you to state succinctly exactly why you hated me. You have just stopped a crisp epistle.

You have given me a long arrears of news. I am surprised to hear that so little has changed. Life moves so rapidly over here that one never hears twice of the same person as being in the same place or doing quite the same thing. It is either killed or wounded, or fever, or going to gaol, or being let out of gaol, or being tried, or summoned before a tribunal of some kind. I have been living in one of Dostoevsky’s novels, you see, not in one of Jane Austen’s.
¹
If I have not seen the battlefield, I have seen other strange things, and I have signed a cheque for £200,000 while bombs fell about me. I have dined with a princess and with a man who expected two years hard labour; and it all seems like a dream. The most real thing was a little dance we went to a few days ago, something like yours used to be, in a studio with a gramophone;
²
I am sure you would have liked it and the people there.

At present I work from 9.15 till 5.30 in Lloyds Bank Limited, Foreign Department, consigning vast sums of money to various destinations, writing letters to banks in such places as Toronto, Japan, Copenhagen, Mauritius, or Buenos Aires. I feel very important, and should feel more so if I got more money from it. My other occupations are editing the Egoist (assistant) of which I will send you a copy, writing for the
Little Review
, for the
New Statesman
(and also helping the editor thereof to read proof, while he listens at the telephone for the latest news from the House of Commons).
³
My book seems to have sold pretty well, although it has not 
been much reviewed yet. I also go to the dentist. My teeth are falling to pieces, I have to wear spectacles to read, and from time to time I am contorted with rheumatism – otherwise I am pretty well. I managed to play a game of tennis Saturday.

I hope that Sohier
⁴
will let us know when he gets to England. He will surely come to London. I don’t know whether I shall be called up in the course of time or not; perhaps I shall be if things go to pieces in Russia.
⁵
But I am not sure that I should pass the medical examination.

I am delighted to hear of your dramatic triumphs. I am sure that I could never write a play. I wish that I could see yours.
⁶

I have a small Jewish messenger boy named Joseph, in brass buttons. He said today: ‘I know what I should do if I had £5000’. This precocious creature is about eleven. ‘What would you do?’ ‘I’d invest it in Canadian Pacific preferred.
⁷
But not now’, continued the loquacious youth, ‘this is not a good time. If I had it now, I’d have a good dinner – duckling and green peas, gooseberry tart and cream. Duckling is nicer than duck, the bones are tenderer’. Such is the society I move in in the City. My typist is Mrs Lord, whose husband is a captain in the regular army – she carries his D.S.O. medal about.

Write soon again, and give my love to your mother.

Always affectionately
Tom

1–TSE is alluding to the Austen-inspired sketch in which he had acted with Hinkley in 1913.

2–Though not writing of this occasion, Stella Bowen remembered ‘our flattered pleasure when T. S. Eliot turned up, with his gentle, benevolent smile and a black satin chest protector, at some of our beer and gramophone parties’ (
Drawn from the Life: Reminiscences
[1941], 61).

3–J. C. Squire, a founder member of the Fabian Society, had been a parliamentary reporter until 1912, and stood unsuccessfully as the Labour candidate for Cambridge in the election of 1918.

4–Her brother-in-law, Edward Sohier Welch.

5–Following its disastrous June offensive, the Russian Army was collapsing, and there were fears that Russia would withdraw from the war, making American support for the Western Allies essential to prevent a German victory. The Bolshevik Revolution was to begin in November.

6–She had completed
The Clam Digger
, a tragedy in three acts, in the spring, and
Their Flesh and Blood
, an earlier comedy in four acts, was to be produced later in the year in the 47 Workshop.

7–‘The Empire’s Greatest Railway’ had been in the news, having taken over the Allan Line shipping company.

TS
Mrs Charlton

8 August 1917

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mr Nichols,

It was a very great pleasure to me to receive your letter. I found it yesterday on my return from a short holiday. Oddly enough, I had seen 
St John Hutchinson
²
in Sussex the day before, and he had spoken of you. I also know of you of course from Aldous Huxley and (if you do not mind my mentioning it!) from the
Times
. So I am sure that there is enough basis for correspondence! I sincerely hope that when you are next in London you will not find it too much trouble to look me up – or even to let me know in advance – as I can always be found at this address. It would be a pleasant anticipation for me.

Your more than appreciative praise gave me great pleasure. I have heard very little of my book, since it was published, and have ceased to look for reviews. Still I fear that I have had too much appreciation rather than too little. I am not anxious to write more – or rather I feel that the best promise of continuing is for one to be able to forget, in a way, what one has written already; to be able to detach it completely from one’s present self and begin quite afresh, with only the technical experience preserved. This struggle to preserve the advantages of practice and at the same time to defecate the emotions one has expressed already is one of the hardest I know. I wonder if you will agree with me.

I remember getting hold of Laforgue years ago at Harvard, purely through reading Symons,
³
and then sending to Paris for the texts. I puzzled it out as best I could, not finding half the words in my dictionary, and it was several years later before I came across anyone who had read him or could be persuaded to read him.
⁴
I do feel more grateful to him than to anyone else, and I do not think that I have come across any other writer since who has meant so much to me as he did at that particular moment, or that particular year.

Let me say that I do not think you have any more reason to be downcast at being praised by the
Times
than I have for not being. I have not yet seen your book; I hope that I may do so.
⁵

With every hope of meeting you

Yours sincerely
T. S. Eliot

1–Robert Nichols (1893–1944), war poet, novelist and playwright. He joined the Royal Field Artillery in Oct. 1914, fought at the Battle of Loos in 1915, and was invalided out with shell-shock. Professor of English, Imperial University, Tokyo, 1921–4.

2–St John ‘Jack’ Hutchinson (1884–1942), barrister-at-law; husband of MH.

3–
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
(1899) by Arthur Symons (1867–1945). ‘But for having read his book, I should not, in the year 1908, have heard of Laforgue or Rimbaud: I should probably not have begun to read Verlaine; and but for reading Verlaine, I should not have heard of Corbière. So the Symons book is one of those which have affected the course of my life’ (review of Peter Quennell,
Baudelaire and the Symbolists
, in NC 9 [Jan. 1930], 357).

4–While TSE was in Paris in 1910–11, his friend and French teacher Alain-Fournier discussed Laforgue several times in his literary column in
Paris-Journal
.

5–Nichols’s
Ardours and Endurances
(1917) received a glowing review: ‘Nothing can prevent poetry like this from taking its place among those permanent possessions of the race which will remain to tell the great-grandchildren of our soldiers to what pure heights of the spirit Englishmen rose out of the great war’s horror of waste and ugliness, noise and pain and death!’ (
TLS
, 12 July).