The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (93 page)

1–
The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
was dedicated to his brother. Of the US edition (Feb. 1921), his mother wrote to HWE, ‘I have felt quite badly about it because of the savage criticisms. I do not like the name [and] I think $2.50 is too high a price.’ HWE would write to their mother on 22 Mar. 1921: ‘When I get out of the wilderness of his allusions to writers of whom I have never heard, I like the book; the style is clear, clean-cut, economical of words; the phrases are clear, exact, not mussy or vague. The thought is hard to follow sometimes, though, not because it is obscure, but because it is subtle or complex.’

MS
Lilly

2 November 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Sir Algernon Methuen,

Thank you for your letter about your anthology.
¹
I should be very pleased to have you use any poem of mine in an anthology. I am only not quite certain whether I have anything suitable for your purpose? I take it for granted, perhaps mistakenly, that you mean to use poems
that have already been published. I have no unpublished verse at the present time.

The only poem that strikes me as possible is one called ‘
La figlia che piange
’. If you still have the small volume I sent you, you will find it at the end. Many people seem to like it who do not like the other things.

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

I am very much pleased with the format of the ‘
Sacred Wood
’.

1–
An Anthology of Modern Verse
, ed. A[lgernon]M[ethuen] (1921) was to include ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ (pp. 69–70). Methuen’s request for a poem had specified (30 Oct.) that ‘it must be of a lyrical and moderately intelligible character. Please forgive this insult … the book is not only for the general reader but also for use in schools.’

MS
De la Mare Estate

5 November 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mr de la Mare,

Harold Monro gave me your very kind invitation, and I had a faint hope of being able to come. But I have been in bed for three days, and even if I am up it will be impossible. We have had very critical illness in my wife’s family lately, and the crisis is not yet past.

I hope you will ask me again before very long, as I should very much like to meet you. Also, when I am settled in the flat into which I am trying to move, I should be delighted if you would do me the honour of coming to dinner.

I have never had the opportunity of meeting you before and am very much disappointed.

Yours sincerely,
T. S. Eliot

Please forgive my posting this without a stamp.
²
But I only heard from Monro definitely this morning, and, not being able to go out I forgot to ask anyone else to get stamps.

1–Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), poet and author. Order of Merit, 1953. In due course, TSE became his publisher at Faber&Faber, issuing
Collected Rhymes and Verses
(1942) and
Collected Poems
(1948); and he wrote ‘To Walter de la Mare’ for
A
T
ribute to Walter de la Mare
(1948).

2–De la Mare paid 4d on receipt of the letter.

MS
Beinecke

Friday [5 November 1920]

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Monro,

I am writing to de la Mare to express my regrets and to say that I want to come to see him when I am better. Also, I want to try to get him, and you, to come and dine at my new flat. It is true that I was doubtful of being able to come, as my father in law has been at the point of death: now I have been in bed for three days with a cold brought on by fatigue. When I am about, and a bit straightened out, I will write and try to get hold of you. But I still hope to be able to come to your party on the 10th.

I am awfully sorry about Sunday.

Yours ever
T. S. E.

MS
De la Mare Estate

8 November 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mr de la Mare,

I hope you will pardon my curious behaviour – which was due to the fact that I wanted to come. After being laid up with a cold myself, I infected my wife with it, which is a much more serious matter, as it is apt to lead to complications to which I am immune. I tried all the morning to get someone who could stay with her this evening, but without success.

I do not know whether you can ever be tempted to town of an evening, but I shall try to do so. My new flat will be one stop from Baker Street Station. If you will not, I shall invite myself to see you, but I should rather you came to see me first.

Yours sincerely,
T. S. Eliot

PC
Texas

[Postmark 16 November 1920]

9 Clarence Gate Gdns

Again I should like to help you, but am involved in personal anxieties which take all my time – I shall not even be able to fulfil my promises made, much less make new. Better luck some other time.

T. S. Eliot

1–Russell Green, who had won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford with his poem ‘Venice’ (1916), was editing the seventh number of
Coterie
. TSE had contributed ‘A Cooking Egg’ to
Coterie
1 (May 1919).

CC
BL

16 November 1920

9 Clarence Gate Gdns

Dear Mrs Dawson Scott,

I should be very glad to take the chair for Mr Jepson: I hope you will let me have a reminder in February so that I shall be ready for it in good time. I should also be glad to talk at some time, if you care to have me do so.

Sincerely yours
[T. S. E.]

1–Fixtures secretary of the Tomorrow Club, which met weekly at Caxton Hall to hear speakers mostly on literary topics.

MS
Texas

[17 November 1920]

9 Clarence Gate Gdns
Note new address –!
Telephone. Pad[dington] 3331

Dear Mary,

I hope you have not thought me unfriendly. If you will believe me I have
longed
to see you and talk to you all these horrible weeks. But I see no one, hear of no one, go nowhere. It only amazes me that life
can
be like this, and one goes on. It is just 5 weeks today, and I have been fighting, every minute, a long losing battle against
horrible
illness, unimaginable pain, doctors’ mistakes – obstinacy – stupidity – delays – family’s blindness. The only thing on
my
side has been my father’s courage and determination. But I am afraid we’re going to lose after all, and after so much fighting it will be very hard to bear.

You see I never can make an engagement more than an hour ahead. There are changes every few hours, and every single complication and misadventure happens. I never go to bed without fear, and to ring up first thing every morning takes all one’s courage. If you could, when you have a perfectly free afternoon,
ring me up
, (if you would like to see me) about 2 o’clock, I would come over then and there if it happened to be one of the afternoons when I feel a little security. If I am not in, get Ellen to ring me up and give me your message, because she always knows where I am.

I’ve been out of ‘the great world’
¹
so long I am afraid I shall soon fade away altogether.

Your very affect.
Vivien

1–Byron,
Don
Juan
xi, xlv.

MS
BL

30 November 1920

9 Clarence Gate Gdns, London
N.W.1

My dear Sydney,

We were much distressed at hearing of Violet’s last misfortune, and wait to hear how serious it will prove. I pray that it will not retard and complicate her recovery from her illness and operation. Do give her our warm sympathy.

Certainly this is the way in which I have known disasters to follow each other, and always when one has drawn up one’s plans with the greatest exactness. Events succeed one another, apparently for the purpose of making one’s mind useless to one. There are times, I think, when one must try to seal one’s intellect hermetically, to prevent it from being destroyed by circumstances which it cannot mend.

Vivien’s father has kept much in the same state, with some improvement but alarming fluctuations which cause great anxiety to the family. The surgeon was called for a consultation today, and Vivien spent the day at Hampstead and is completely exhausted by the agitations. I am much concerned about her health; she manages to keep up and do a great deal, at the price of a migraine once a week, and bad nights. I have not at all been in a mood for work.

What you say about my book gives me great pleasure – but notwithstanding this and the respect I have for your good opinion – it makes me a little apprehensive. I fear that in the course of time you will
find that it is not quite so remarkable as you had thought, and that you will then cease to find any merit in it: I only hope that you will express your opinion as frankly then as now.

You have no reason for not saying what you think about Murry. His criticism is dictated by emotion, which is not the same thing as saying that he feels strongly about the things he criticises. Even when he is right, he is the victim of an emotion, and the rightness seems an accident. He never surrenders himself,
¹
but uses what he is talking about as an outlet for some feeling; and this is a sort of irreverence for reason which is hard to bear. It is quite tolerable for an artist, scientist or workman to be an egotist if he will give himself up to the one thing, but Murry I believe is an egotist in that too – hopelessly isolated from persons and causes.

I saw Trench
²
last night, but am sorry that I got no chance to talk to him – at a dinner given by the ‘Poetry Circle’ of the Lycaeum Club (Ladies).
³
It was an odd gathering – we all (i.e. the speakers) – seemed to be lions of various sizes, from the Dean Inge
⁴
to Edith Sitwell and myself – but no one seemed very clear as to what we were or what we did.

Are any doctors or nurses ever satisfactory?

With, again, sympathy for you and for Violet, and hoping to hear soon that things are better

Affectionately
T.S.E.

1–‘What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’ (‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’;
SW
, 52–3).

2–Herbert Trench (1865–1923), poet and playwright; author of
Ode from Italy in Time of War
(1915).

3–For further accounts of the occasion, at which he made his first after-dinner speech and met the woman who was to introduce him to the Tarot pack, see both the next letter (to his mother, 2 Dec.) and
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume
, ed. Julian Huxley (1965).

4–W. R. Inge (1860–1954), Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, 1911–34.

TS
Houghton

2 December 1920

9 Clarence Gate Gdns

My dearest mother,

You will I know understand why I have not written for such a long time again. Nevertheless I have been thinking about you and wondering about your health a great deal, and I was very glad to get a letter from Marion yesterday which sounded very cheerful and happy. I am delighted to think
that you are seeing so many people and entering into so many activities, and I like to imagine you going about Cambridge. I like seeing many people myself; I even enjoy large crowds and public occasions. And then the most complete solitude to recuperate in.

We have of course been on pins and needles about Vivien’s father the whole time. When we think that the surgeon, one of the most skilled in London, was so horrified when he opened him, at the second operation, at what he found inside that he wanted simply to sew him up and let him die in peace – we are absolutely terrified to believe that it is now possible, and even probable, that he will recover. I am really uneasy the whole time, thinking what would happen to Vivien and her mother
now
should a new complication arise – as it might do at a moment’s notice. When there seemed no hope they could keep up, because there was always something to be done and they were quite prepared for the worst, but they could not possibly go through it again. Even if things continue for the best, it will take them a long time to recuperate. And there have been all sorts of minor difficulties: the two nurses did not get on together; the two servants Mrs H. had to have are unsatisfactory and don’t want to stay in a house with an invalid, and so on.

I went out to see Mr Haigh-Wood this afternoon after the bank, and found him very bright and hopeful and patient.

Vivien has had to be at home most of the time, housekeeping and shopping and so on, and has not seen any friends or been out in the evening for six weeks. I have been out twice lately, once to Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s, where I found Lowes Dickinson,
¹
and once to a dinner at a Ladies Club called the Lycaeum Club. That was rather amusing. Their ‘Poetry Circle’ gives a large dinner once a year and invites men of letters to speak. There were seven speakers:Maurice Hewlett,
²
Dean Inge (better known as ‘The gloomy dean’), Sturge Moore the poet,
³
St John Irvine (a dramatist), Edith Sitwell, Aldous Huxley, and myself. I had been asked to
speak on ‘Modern Tendencies of Dramatic Poetry’, but when I got there and saw the list I found that the subject was given to someone else, and mine was ‘Modern
Audiences
of Dramatic Poetry’. So I had to prepare an entirely new speech while the others were speaking. Then Huxley, who was ahead of me, fainted in the middle of his speech, the atmosphere being rather close, and I had to speak five minutes before I had expected to! However, I described the sort of audience I should like to have, and the sort I should not want to have, if I were having a verse play produced, and it appeared to be received very well.
⁴
Some of them read their speeches from a manuscript which seems to me a mistake, and the gloomy dean’s speech consisted almost wholly of quotations. I sat next to an elderly lady who asked me if I knew a poem called ‘The Thin Red Line’,
⁵
so I lied and said yes, and she said she had written it. She was Scotch and believed firmly in ghosts, and invited me to a ‘Celtic concert’.

Knopf, who brought out my poems, has bought 350 copies of my book, but I do not know whether bound copies or merely the pages, so I do not know how soon it will be out, but I certainly expect before Christmas. It would be quicker if you wrote yourself to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 220West 42nd Street, and asked him about it, than if I wrote and told you. It has been very well received so far, and I hope it will sell. Several other books of essays have appeared simultaneously, and one, by Clutton-Brock,
⁶
at the same price and in the same binding; I do not know whether that will affect the sales adversely, but if so it is Methuen’s fault, as he published both books. There is one by Murry too.
⁷

I am rather tired of the book now, as I am so anxious to get on to new work, and I should more enjoy being praised if I were engaged on something which I thought better or more important. I think I shall be able to do so, soon. Having Peters and his friends on my mind has worried me too a good deal. One of them is ill in a nursing-home and they may be here till nearly Christmas.

Poor Maurice [Haigh-Wood] has been pluckily struggling to prepare for an examination for a new post which he greatly covets, and the examination is tomorrow. He has been under insuperable disadvantages;
the nurse is installed in his room and he has not even a room to himself to work in uninterruptedly in the evenings, besides having to run out for medicines and things often, and to do his work at the Ministry of Labour in the daytime.

I must stop now and go to bed. I shall attempt to write to Marion and to Henry in the course of a few days. Mrs Haigh-Wood was delighted with your letter, and so was Mr Haigh-Wood; so it did much good.

Always your devoted son,
Tom