The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (90 page)

1–HWE had written on 20 July that their mother had been diagnosed with incipient diabetes, and on 4 Aug. that he had sold $800 of Liberty Bonds and was sending money to TSE.

TS
BL

Friday [17 September 1920]
¹

[London]

Dear Sydney,

I don’t quite know where to send this, but you said you were leaving on the 18th, so I hope it will catch you. You say nothing about dates in your letter, but I trust you will be in London from next week.

I never see the
New Age.
²
I had the impression that you were rather bored with it, but from what you say it appears to be improving. Certainly there is no other political weekly, at any rate, that is anything but dormitive.

Of course Arnold is tarred with his own brush. He is not really a free man, in the best sense of the word; who in England was, at his time?
³
Who
in England is now? I wish someone with more leisure and more scholarship than myself would make a study of the spiritual decadence of England which should not be a web of generalisations about the Puritan revolution etc. but a skilful collocation of facts. But I must not write any more; I have had an immoderately busy week and have not finished getting my proofs into shape. But for that – I have not had a moment free – I should have written to Violet to say how much I enjoyed the weekend. We must not let our theatricals drop!

What is the connexion of Rodker with the
New Age?
⁴

Yours affly.,
T.S.E.

Besides, I am using Arnold a little as a stalking horse, or as a cloak of invisibility-respectability to protect me from the elderly. I wanted him as a scarecrow with a real gun under his arm.

1–Tentatively dated a week earlier in the first edition of these
Letters
, but redated in the light of the new letter of 5 Sept.

2–
The New Age
, which ran from 1909 to 1922, was a Socialist and literary paper edited by A. R. Orage (1873–1934), later founder of the
New English Weekly
and an advocate of Social Credit.

3–TSE is evidently referring to the Introduction to
SW
, which takes its bearings from
Essays in Criticism
(1865, 1888), by Matthew Arnold (1822–88). TSE observed that ‘what makes Arnold seem all the more remarkable is, that if he were our exact contemporary, he would find all his labour to perform again’ (ix). The notion of the critic as ‘free’ recurs in the essay ‘The Perfect Critic’, where TSE hails ‘the free intelligence’ as ‘that which is wholly devoted to inquiry’ (12).

4–Rodker was only a contributor.

TS
Houghton

20 September 1920

[London]

My dearest mother,

I had been expecting a period when I could devote several leisurely evenings to writing a long letter and including an account of my visit to France with Wyndham Lewis. But I came back only to make up my mind to try again to find us a new flat. I think I have found one, it has taken a lot of trouble and will take more before we are in. Of course it is considerably more expensive, but I believe it to be very much more respectable, very much less noisy, and in a better neighbourhood in which not so many people are arrested.
¹
In any case, we shall I think be free from the neighbourhood of prostitution. This new flat has absorbed most of my time out of bank hours – seeing the landlord, writing to him, trying to get him to make alterations, etc. I will let you know when to change the address. Also, at the same time the proof for my book turned up and has had to be corrected very rapidly in order to get it through in time for publication this autumn. I got Pound and his wife [Dorothy] also to help
in correcting it, but even so it entailed a lot of work, what with all the quotations in various languages which had to be verified and were found to have lots of mistakes in them.

I have another ten days holiday due to me in October, and want to take Vivien away for that period; it may unfortunately fall within the time which we shall have to devote to overseeing preparations and moving. I do not suppose that I shall be properly settled at work again till November; I have several things I want to do; and I want a period of tranquility to do a poem that I have in mind.

I am anxiously waiting to hear that you have got right in your new house. Henry has sent a photograph of it which looks very attractive and quiet. I hope that the street cars will not be a nuisance. You have never lived on a street car line. I hope and expect that you feel perfectly well again.

Abby has left with a friend for a trip in Belgium and Holland before returning to America. She was very anxious to go to Berlin, but we finally dissuaded her from attempting that.

I must write again at the end of the week. It is just striking 12. I am only writing this that you may not get discouraged and stop writing again, for I depend dearly on your letter every week.

your very affectionate son
Tom

1–‘There are evil neighbourhoods of noise and evil neighbourhoods of silence, and Eeldrop and Appleplex preferred the latter, as being the more evil … From time to time the silence of the street was broken; whenever a malefactor was apprehended, a wave of excitement curled into the street and broke upon the doors of the police station’ (TSE, ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’ [I]).

MS
Texas

Wednesday [22 September 1920]

18 Crawford Mansions

My dear Mary,

It would be far more reasonable to ask if you had forgotten me, and if something had suddenly recalled me to your memory. If so, what was it? It would be interesting to know. In answer to your questions: 1. I am not well, and amabout to have an operation. 2. I have been engaged in activity tending toward a new flat, varied by agreeable weekend visits. 3. My pamphlet will emerge into obscurity during October
hoffentlich
[it is to be hoped]. 4. Am I writing much? Only signing my name to leases and agreements.

I had a very pleasant time with Lewis in France; we started in Brittany and went up the Loire on bicycles. We stopped in Paris long enough to see and dine with Vanderpyl, Croce
¹
and Joyce twice. I should like you to meet Joyce.

It is very kind of you to invite me to Wittering in October, but I am rather afraid that my operation and the removal will get in the way. I heard from Jack and was very sorry I couldn’t arrange to meet him, but am writing to him to suggest a date when he gets back. Please do not dread the winter in London. Why should you? It might be so nice. I can think of ways in which it might be.

Yrs
Thomas Eliot.

1–Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), Italian philosopher, critic and senator; author of
The Philosophy of Spirit
(4 vols, 1902–17).

MS
Arkansas

23 September 1920

18 Crawford Mansions  

My dear Fletcher,

Thank you vDateery much for writing me so fully. But I hope also that you will let me see or even if possible have a copy of the article when it appears.
²
My article, of course, was (at best) and could only be a partial statement of what I take to be a neglected aspect.3 Certainly I don’t deny the importance of emotion. I often find it present to me when other people find only frigidity – or vice versa.
⁴
One writes about the world one has experienced: and experience without emotion (of
some
kind) is almost a contradiction. I think there is an important distinction between the emotions which are in the experience which is one’s material and the emotion in the writing – the two seem to me very different. But I do not believe that my view is very different from yours. It differs very much from Aiken’s.

Have you tried any critical articles on the
Athenaeum
? Your
Chapbook
summary of America seemed to me excellent.
⁵

Yours sincerely,
T. S. Eliot

I was appalled by Lindsay.
⁶

1–For Fletcher see note to TSE’s letter to Scofield Thayer, 30 June 1918, above.

2–Apparently unpublished, this article is not among Fletcher’s papers at Arkansas.

3–‘The Perfect Critic’. Fletcher preferred the second part.

4–‘Emotional people – such as stockbrokers, politicians, men of science – and a few people who pride themselves on being unemotional – detest or applaud great writers such as Spinoza or Stendhal because of their “frigidity”’ (‘The Perfect Critic’ [II]).

5–John Gould Fletcher, ‘Some Contemporary American Poets’,
Chapbook
2: 2 (May 1920), 1–31.

6–Vachel Lindsay, ‘The Broncho that would not be Broken’, ibid., 38–9. 

MS
Princeton

23 September 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Sirs,

I thank you for your letter of the 24th August. I can only say that I am pleased at being asked to contribute verse to your paper, and, as I have not a shred of verse about me at present, I can only keep your invitation in mind, which I shall do.

Yours faithfully,
T. S. Eliot

1–The editor of the
New Republic
was Ridgely Torrence (1875–1950).

MS
Texas

28 September 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

My dear Mary,

My letter had, if no other, the merit of provoking yours. I am more than most people dependent on my friends’ good will (though I hate to keep invoking it). Since I have come back I have been too immersed in private affairs of the most trying sort to seek out anyone. So I have only seen a very few people who looked me out. I have assumed that those were the only ones who wanted to see me at all. So I was very much pleased to hear from you and Jack.

But as for not seeing us! You asked us to Wittering for the weekend when I was leaving for France, and so Vivien suggested September instead. Then neither of us heard from you till well into September, after our month was settled. So that is why we have not met.

I quite believe you when you say you like living in the country, but still I wonder if you would like it if you had to choose finally and cut yourself off from town or from country. That is what it has come to for me – for I do not see how I can afford both. One of the things about living in the country is that it simplifies existence (or plays at simplifying it, which is pleasanter still) but for me it only complicates it.
You
seem to me to have obtained so to speak a life lease on the pre-war terms, and to have been guaranteed against the horrible waste of time, energy, life, of the struggle with post-war machinery of life. If you take this as a reproach you will lose the whole point of it: it is merely a statement.

I think life in London would be more tolerable if there were more mixing: if there were more people entertaining who were capable of bringing very diverse people together and making them combine well. That is a great point in the Schiffs’ favour. They won’t have anyone about whom they don’t really like: so the atmosphere preserves one from boredom. One result is that everyone is ready to expand and play the fool if necessary. We got up some good acting at Eastbourne and they have started to take a great interest in it and are going to have acting parties at Cambridge Square.

Please let me know when you come back?

Yours affectionately
Thomas Eliot

We are moving in three weeks.

MS
Texas

[28? September 1920]

[18 Crawford Mansions]

Dear Mary,

I think it is nice of you to have written like that, and very nice to offer us Eleanor.
¹
I do not know yet when Tom will have his operation, but I shall know on Thursday. I will write and tell you. I want him to put it off until we have moved, and until we know just
how
ruined we are by the transaction, and until we have decided about Paris. But I suppose he will do just as the doctor advises (on Thursday). We are moving in three weeks.

I think it
would
be good for him to go to Eleanor after the operation, and I hope it may be arranged. But, Mary, I could not possibly go with him. It is a pity, but there are some things I can’t do, and that is one of them.

Would there be anyone in the village who could come in and cook his meals?

I do not bear you a grudge – it is not that. But I hope you will come back to London soon, if only for a few days, and see me then. I should like to talk to you.

It would have been nice if you had come to Eastbourne to find me.
I wish
you had.

Please let me know at once when you will be in London.

V.

Send these photographs back
, because they are the
only prints
I have and are destined for America. But if you like either I will have a print done for you.