The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (66 page)

1–It is not clear which VW review MH had sent to TSE, but his comment relates to Gustav Flaubert,
Madame Bovary
, ch. 2.

2–TSE, ‘Beyle and Balzac’, a review of George Saintsbury’s
A History of the French Novel, to the Close of the Nineteenth Century
, vol. 2, in A., 30 May 1919, 392–3.

MS
Beinecke

Tuesday [27 May? 1919]

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Brigit,

This is a letter crowded into the end of an evening of writing, and won’t amount to much. But I can’t see that it is really a question of expression, but simply of complete integrity – if one is quite honest and fair to oneself the personality will be sufficiently there. There is such a difference between seeing the point of view of people one is with and accepting it. And I don’t believe there is such a frame of mind as pure receptivity. I think that when one is most alert to impressions one is also doing the most immediate thinking. And I cannot see that there is a contest between reason and intuition – the most intuitive people I have known have also had the clearest minds – if they cannot give a reason for their opinion they can at all events state it clearly. One can be very alive to any person or situation and at the same time go on with one’s own mind undisturbed.

Perhaps all I have to say is that one must develop a hard exterior in order to be spontaneous – one cannot be that unless nothing can touch what is inside.

But then one never does actually understand other people by thinking in this abstract way – understanding is a by-product of seeing them in different situations, talking of particular and concrete things.

Perhaps we could meet before long though it would have to be at rather short notice on my side. I shall join Vivien for this weekend and next also – perhaps you would be free and perhaps I should, one evening next week.

Yrs.
TSE

MS
Texas

1 June 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mary

Whatever your doubts as to your epistolary genius on May 29, your Seidlitz powder blue
¹
was very welcome when I returned on May 31st to deliver a lecture and pass Sunday trying to write a review. In spite of the stimulus of your real or pretended enjoyment of Adams I was unable to get on very fast:
²
Robert Lynd’s collected papers
³
stuck in my throat, or clogged my liver – and in revenge he shan’t go in this week, but Murry will provide a disquisition on Gerard Hopkins.
⁴
So you see it will never be clear whether he or Roger was first over the fence. Anyhow, Father Hopkins (fact) has been dead, I gather from J.M.M.,
déjà quelques années
[some years already]. I am glad Roger is coming, and also glad to have an afternoon and evening first: I see you expect accounts of my provincial
amours
, but if you are too prying I shall reveal all the gossip of the tinplate industry. I am off to Manchester. I shall probably not leave there till Friday night or Saturday morning early; there is a train which gets to Chichester at 4.4 Saturday afternoon. There I suppose I charter a taxi to your house, unless I hear other instructions from you. I shall pass by Crawford Mansions on my way; of course I shall have to do so to fetch flannels. You
will be ready to pour out tea when I arrive? I will try to be intelligent more so than usual.

Yours
Tom.

1–Effervescent laxative.

2–TSE, ‘A Sceptical Patrician’ (on Henry Adams).

3–TSE, ‘Criticism in England’, A., 13 June 1919: a review of
Old Men and New Masters
by Robert Lynd (1879–1949), Irish journalist and essayist; literary editor of the
Daily News
.

4–JMM, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins’, A., 6 June 1919: a review of Hopkins,
Poems
, ed. Robert Bridges. The book was not reviewed by Roger Fry.

1 June 1919

[18 Crawford Mansions]

…Whether one writes a piece of work well or not seems to me a matter of crystallization – the good sentence, the good word, is only the final stage in the process. One can groan enough over the choice of a word, but there is something much more important to groan over first. It seems to me just the same in poetry – the words come easily enough, in comparison to the core of it – the
tone
– and nobody can help one in the least with that. Anything
I
have picked up about writing is due to having spent (as I once thought, wasted) a year absorbing the style of F. H. Bradley – the finest philosopher in English –
Appearance and Reality
is the
Education Sentimentale
of abstract thought.

You are very – ingenuous – if you can conceive me conversing with rural deans in the cathedral close. I do not go to cathedral towns but to centres of industry. My thoughts are absorbed in questions more important than ever enter the heads of deans – as
why
it is cheaper to buy steel bars from America than from Middlesborough, and the probable effect – the exchange difficulties with Poland – and the appreciation of the rupee. My evenings in Bridge. The effect is to make me regard London with disdain, and divide mankind into supermen, termites and wireworms. I am sojourning among the termites. At any rate that coheres. I feel sufficiently specialized, at present, to inspect or hear any ideas with impunity.

1–Text from Michael Holroyd,
Lytton Strachey
, II,
T
he Years of Achievement
1910–1932
(1968), 364–5. The letter disappeared from James Strachey’s files shortly before his death.

MS
Virginia

1 June 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Rodker,

I have been back over Sunday and leave again tomorrow. It occurred to me after leaving that I had most rudely forgotten to thank you for the
Gaudier.
¹
It was good of you to send it to me, and it seems to me very well done. I should have preferred slightly thicker paper.

If you haven’t a
Prufrock
I will get Weaver to send you one. I am sending you Virginia Woolf’s book which seems to me very well done. There is one other French poem, which is in one of the later
L
ittle Reviews
,
²
along with some others – you have that have you not? These and the three I sent you and one half-finished one
³
are all I have up to date. Oh, also the thing in
Coterie
.
⁴

You can put me down for the
L.R.
if you like –
if
they pay for their contributions – but candidly my hands are likely to be pretty full, with the work I am doing for the
Athenaeum
.

Many thanks again for the Gaudier.

Yours
T. S. Eliot 

 1–
Twenty Drawings from the Note-books of H. Gaudier-Brzeska
(Ovid Press, 1919).

2–‘Dans le Restaurant’,
Little Review 5
(Sept. 1918).

3–‘Gerontion’ was to be completed during the summer.

4–‘A Cooking Egg’,
Coterie
1 (May 1919).

MS
Texas

Wednesday [4 June? 1919]

18 Crawford Mansions

My dear – the letter you sent to Marlow reached me this morning. There was no one in the house to forward it, and it missed me there by a post, I think. I left there more than a week ago. I didn’t mean to when I wrote to you. I felt very upset when I read your letter this morning. But in spite of everything you ought not to say ‘that was a quick change etc. affair’. Believe me it wasn’t. I know I should have written, even without getting your Marlow letter. But I could not write, not to anyone on earth, and have not. I have been ill in a sort of way, and I had to go into a sort of retirement which is so necessary to me at times that I should die without it. It is a seemingly selfish, closed up, kind of affair, but without something like it at frequent intervals I should cease to exist as a person at all. I am perfectly certain that no one has so little resistance to human contacts as I. I do not expect even you to realise how beaten upon and worn by the most ordinary amount of human intercourse I became. I don’t want to bore you but some day I shall insist on forcing you to realise it! Of course I have been thinking about you. That is the worst of it! I had to. By the way you must never never show anyone my letters. But of course you never would.

I am amused by your description of Bertie’s weekend at Garsington. He came straight from there to this flat, in the early hours of a Monday morning, to fetch away another instalment of possessions I had fetched from Marlow. He seemed dreadfully out of temper. Unfortunately I was not dressed, so had to shout to him from the bathroom, as cheerfully as I could. But the response was painful. I was sorry, really, I had asked him to come to tea when he fetched them, and I had come up from Marlow specially. I thought we might have talked a little and come to, at any rate, amicable relations. But it is no good. I will make no more attempts at all. But it is strange how one does miss him! Isn’t it hard to put him
quite
out of one’s mind? Did you get the tulip box, because I did send it back.

Tom is not abroad. Only backwards and forwards to various parts of England, such as Manchester and Birmingham and Cardiff!! But it is doing him good, even that. He is better. Do you really love England? I used to, but since the war I cannot feel that I really do. That is very painful. If I had known you were in London for that one night I
should
have come to find you. That would be easier than anything – just to walk, after dark, to that nice old hotel
¹
and find you there. Tell me what your new dress is like. I really
should like
to know. Tom’s pyjamas are still at Garsington. Do keep them as a hostage! I can wear them when I come.

Until I have been to Bosham I shall be too tired to see anyone, too stupid and boring and hideous altogether. Everyone thinks I am away or dead. But will you write to me? and give me the chance to write to you. Please.

I am going
next
Thursday. So this address until then. With love.

Affectly
Vivien E.

1–Garland’s Hotel, Suffolk Street, Haymarket (destroyed by bombs in 1943).

MS
BL

5 June 1919

The Egoist
, Oakley House,
Bloomsbury St, London,
W.C.

Dear Miss Weaver,

Thank you for your letter and the cheque for £6. I am much pleased by the expression of your and Miss Marsden’s wishes. Certainly the
Egoist
will always have all the support I can give it, and you can depend upon me
as a Contributor.
¹
I hope when the time comes I shall be in a position to do at least as much as I have done in the past. Of course my life is further complicated by my regular long contributions to the
Athenaeum
, and I am anxious to find time to devote to independent writing and to verse. But I am still very jaded.

For your other suggestion, I shall probably be able to tell you definitely in July whether I can produce such a book.
²
I have had overtures from a publisher who has also left town, on a holiday, and whom I shall not see till into July, but what I may propose to him is an entirely new book which would take some time to prepare. I do not know when your final number will be out, but I presume in August, which would leave time. I have written to Blackwell for
Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit
, so if it comes will you send it to me and I shall use that for my contribution.
³

I shall meanwhile be in town weekends, but I expect to find it impossible to see people, as I have to answer accumulated correspondence and do my
Athenaeum
article
⁴
then. So I shall not count on seeing you till early in July.

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

1–The printer had refused since Jan. to publish any more of
Ulysses,
robbing Weaver of a prime incentive for continuing her financial support. At the end of May, she found that although the paper was smaller than before, costs had risen, and she was losing as much as ever, so she and Dora Marsden planned to suspend it for a while to enable Marsden to complete her book of philosophy.

2–The final issue of the
Egoist
, Dec. 1919, announced that the Egoist Press promised publication of
The Art of Poetry
by TSE in early spring, and a flyer for ‘The Egoist Press Publications’ announced it as ‘in preparation’. It did not appear.

3–Robert Greene,
Groats-worth of Wit
, reprinted in the Sheldonian Series, 1919. TSE did not write about it.

4–TSE, ‘Criticism in England’.