The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (84 page)

1–Rodker’s Ovid Press published
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
in an edition of 200 copies.

TS
Beinecke

30 Maggio [May] 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

Cher E.,

Tengo en mi poder su honrada del 13 cnte.
¹
I at last must face the fact that I cannot join you in June, nor, probably, in July. My book is far from forward, but, although it is promised for the end of June, that would not alone have the force to stand in my way. But I am still engaged in pourparlers with my family, and it is likely that I go to America in Oct or Nov, though, if my mother continues to believe that she will come here next May, I shall point out the great expense of two voyages in the family at such a short interval. Furthermore, we are both (i.e. Vivien and myself) in a state bordering on prostration from flathunting, and faced with the prospect of having to pay about 250% above what we pay now, if we get anything at all. However, we must go on with it. Kind friends remark, Why not live a little way out of town … No prospect of a job at £1000 a year for anybody. I am mindful of your hint before you left that you would probably not go to Italy next year, and it is therefore great sorrow to me. I will transmit the article to Lewis whom I shall see this week after many moons. He is said to be working, but was lately seen with a new female of suburban appearance (Ealing?) outside Verrey’s.
²
Berry is promising everyone soundproof studio flats at a trifling rent in six months’ time. Conrad Aiken is here; stupider than I remember him; in fact, stupid. Also Bodenheim, the American Max,
³
who arrived in the steerage on Monday with a wife and a baby which will see the light in a few weeks (‘Almost any time, in fact’ Mrs B. says). He is a bit upset at not finding Rodker, and is asking for Bosschère.
⁴
He is not unintelligent, anyhow better than Aiken, and being Semites I suppose they will survive somehow. He reports that Hecht
⁵
has decided to make a million dollars in a year, and has become press agent for the Baptist Church. When asked could not recall anyone else of intelligence in America. I am sending you article on Bolshevist poetry in the
Morning
Post
.
⁶
Lewis thinks he has discovered a poet named J. J. Adams.
⁷
O god to be out of England, in June.
⁸

yrs affexionately
T.S.E.

I gather that you want me to offer Murry a section of
Moberley
to print. Will act on that and suggest ‘Moluccas’ but leave choice to him.
⁹
Art & Letters
is going out of existence. Schiff (and others) pleased by your Arthur Symons.
¹⁰
Schiff here and very depressed about the state of English literature, a gloom which I did nothing to alleviate.

Boston Ev.Transcript
says I am An Exotic Poet.
¹¹
(‘Closed room … stale perfumes … memories of lusts … open the window’).

1–‘I am in receipt of your esteemed letter of the 13th inst.’ (Spanish).

2–Verrey’s Café, Regent St, a favourite of WL’s.

3–Max Bodenheim (1893–1954), American poet, novelist and (with Ben Hecht) playwright. He published in
The Egoist
and other little magazines.

4–Jean de Bosschère (1881–1953), Belgian engraver, poet and novelist.

5–Ben Hecht (1894–1964), American novelist and dramatist.

6–E. B. Osborne, in ‘Certain American Poets: The Bolshevist Touch’,
Morning Post
(28May), claimed that EP was ‘capable of clever work’, but that ‘the best of his stuff’ seemed ‘like mustard-and-cress grown on a red flannel petticoat in a suburban hothouse’.

7–A mysterious British poet, author of ‘Café Cannibale’,
Tyro
1, Apr. 1921.

8–Cf. Browning, ‘Home Thoughts, From Abroad’: ‘Oh to be in England / Now that April’s there.’

9–EP’s
Mauberley
IV begins ‘Scattered Moluccas …’ JMM did not publish any part of the poem.

10–EP, ‘Arthur Symons’, A., 21 May 1920, 663–4.

11–A hostile review of
Poems
by W[illiam] S[tanley] B[raithwaite],
Boston Evening Transcript
, 14 Apr. 1920. TSE’s volume reprinted his poem ‘The Boston Evening Transcript’. HWE wrote to their mother on 27 Apr.: ‘I don’t know whether it would be well to write to the
Transcript
about that review or not. It would be good advertising for the book; but it might inspire the reviewer to reply. That is, presuming you want a letter to be published in the
Transcript
. I have a copy of the book. I like of course most of the older poems; the later ones I do not understand. All I can see is that there are occasional beautiful lines in them. They are like something in cipher. There is nothing in them that could be called sensual; though occasionally something expressive of a horror of sensuality. The review was mischievously misleading.’

ts Beinecke

[June? 1920]

[London]

Dear Ez.,

Your three letters to hand and contents seriously noted. I expect to see murry this week and shall endeavour to guide him to the poems i consider most suitable for him. A person named Boulestin may be writing to you to ask you for a poem for an anglo French anthology he wants to publish.
¹
He runs a painted furniture shop in George street portman square. He
offers no money but only the advertisement of appearing with so many distinguished anglo french names. lewis has
promised
him a drawing and I have promised a poem if I write one by the end of the month, that is not a very compromising promise. edition on japanese vellum price eighteen and six illustrated by such people as marie laurencin laboureur texte by max jacob giraudoux salmon
²
and such aldington huxley sitwell.

please write to say how long you will be in paris as vivien may come over in july. will you be there till the end of the month?

Private and confidential:
³

Bank Lst. 500 including bonus

Regards to Dorothy. I may have to take my holiday in August now. Any suggestions as to what to do with them?

Yours ever
T.

1–
The New Keepsake for the Year 1921
(1920), ed. X. M. Boulestin (1878–1943), would include no contributions from TSE, WL or EP.

2–Marie Laurencin (1883–1956) and Jean-Émile Laboureur (1877–1947), painters; Max Jacob (1876–1944), poet, critic and painter; Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944), dramatist, novelist and diplomat; André Salmon (1881–1969), poet and art critic.

3–EP was trying to establish the terms on which TSE was prepared to leave the Bank.

MS
Texas

Sunday [Postmark 6 June 1920]

Dear Mary do you think we could have dinner a bit earlier tomorrow as we are now such a long journey from Hammersmith that we shall have to leave very early and it gives so little time for conversation after dinner? I shall be with you by half past seven. with love from

Tom.

MS
Huntington

9 June 1920

Lloyds

I am very sorry I had unexpectedly to be away yesterday and did not have time to let you know. I shall be here tomorrow if you will do me the favour.

T.S.E.

MS
Huntington

Thursday [10 June 1920]

18 Crawford Mansions,

Crawford St,
W.1

Dear Conrad

Can you come in to tea
tomorrow
at 5.15 at this address, and do
bring
[Martin] Armstrong with you, or ask him to come from his office, if he cares to. We should be delighted.

You can’t answer of course. It is just off Edgware Road (toward Baker St) just near the end of the Marylebone Road. Do come.

Yrs.
Tom

ms Victoria

20 June 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

My dear Read,

I had been waiting, since the appearance of your first book, to see what you would do when you demobilised your talents. Not having had that experience myself – I speak not from extreme age but from the advantage or disadvantage of a C2 rating which kept me out of the army – I have been a disinterested spectator of the struggles of others with war and peace. My first impression is that you have managed wisely (for there must be a very large part of conscious management) in conserving your forces (instead of making Kneeshaw go violently to peace,
¹
as many would have done) and therefore managed better than some contemporaries. I think I like the first series the best of the book;
²
they support each other and
produce a cumulative effect, as such still life pieces should do. I might question, from my own point of view, the word ‘soul’, which is too easy a substitute for any state of consciousness, but I have been an offender myself. Afterwards ‘Unicume’ interests me, but it is different, and I don’t quite understand it.
³

However, here is one person who has enjoyed your book – so success to it and the next.

Yours sincerely
T. S. Eliot

1–TSE, in ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’ [IV], had described parts of ‘Kneeshaw Goes to War’, in HR’s second collection
Naked Warriors
(1919), as ‘decidedly successful’.

2–HR,
Eclogues
,
A Book of Poems
(1919). This collection included ‘The Sorrow of Unicume’.

3–HR replied on 27 June: ‘I don’t think
Eclogues
is in any sense the “demobilisation of my talents”.’ Apart from ‘Etude’ and ‘Unicume’, the poems ‘were all either contemporaneous with or anterior to my war stuff … they are a few unconscious scraps gathered over the last few years’. He said too that he had sent the ‘silly book’ to TSE because he was ‘one of the few living people’ who gave him ‘the feeling of a gradient of thought’; and he hankered to be ‘in with’ him in some sense.

Published 25 June 1920

Sir,

Mr William H. Polack’s perplexity (
Athenaeum
, June 18, p. 810) is a spectacle before which it is impossible for me to remain passive.
¹
He encourages me by saying that he is anxious to learn; and if the knowledge of what I do not believe is a possession which he would dignify with the name of learning, he is welcome to it.

First, then, I am not in the least ‘indifferent as to what is expressed.’ If I were, I might have a higher opinion of Massinger; for if Mr Polack has done me the honour of reading that review, he must see that my judgment at that point was simply that Massinger had very little personality – very little to express. This misunderstanding is related to the other. I do not believe that a work of art is
any
‘complete and precise expression of personality’. There are all sorts of expressions of personality, complete or precise or both, which have nothing to do with art; so that the phrase
seems to me of very little use for literary criticism. Mr Polack will notice furthermore that I said in my article ‘transformation’,
not
‘expression’. Transformation is what I meant: the creation of a work of art is like some other forms of creation, a painful and unpleasant business; it is a sacrifice of the man to the work, it is a kind of death.

I should be glad if Mr Polack would study my quotations from Gourmont in their context in the
Problème du Style
, and also Dujardin’s ‘Stéphane Mallarmé’ (
Mercure de France
).

Mr Polack ‘feels that T. S. E. deplores the fact that Dickens was not an artist’. I feel that Mr Polack’s feelings have run away with him. (So look’d he once, when in an angry parle He smote …)
²
But if Mr Polack is again mistaken, what then?

I am, Sir,
Your obliged obedient servant,
T.S.E.

1–William H. Polack had written in response to TSE’s ‘The Old Comedy’, a review of A. H. Cruickshank,
Philip Massinger
, A., 11 June 1920 (repr. as ‘Philip Massinger’ [II],
SW
). Dickens had not been mentioned by TSE, but Polack contrasted his views with those expressed by JMM in a leading article on the novelist: ‘T.S.E. is indifferent as to what is expressed, provided the expression be complete and precise, whereas M. hints that the point to which criticism should apply itself is the nature of that which is expressed … I feel that T.S.E. deplores the fact that Dickens was not an artist, but (perhaps) a man of genius; while M. thanks God for it.’

2–‘… the sledded Polacks on the ice’ (
Hamlet
I. i. 66).