The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (105 page)

TS
Texas  

13 October 1921

9 Clarence Gate Gdns  

Dear Jack,  

I think your [London] Letter is admirable,
¹
and very much to the point. There is only one thing that occurred to me afterwards. In the
Dial
’s last note to me acknowledging my October Letter I thought I detected a slight note of disapproval at my having said so much about Shaw’s book
²
which had already been reviewed. I had been very hard put about to find enough material for that Letter.
³
It struck me that what you say about George Moore tended toward the review, and I think that for the
Dial
’s purposes it would be better if you could condense or shorten it a bit. One treats books rather from the cover inward, so to speak, and can divagate as much as one likes, but not stop too long over anything. The
Chauve Souris
⁴
can serve as a starting point for anything that comes into your head about the theatre –  

Anyway, I am sure it will be first rate. We are off tomorrow to Margate. With love to Mary and best wishes  

yours ever
T.S.E.  

I am very grateful to you for writing this Letter. It’s a great help.

1–Hutchinson’s effort was to be rejected by the
Dial
.

2–Bernard Shaw,
Back to Methuselah
(1921).

3–‘This is lively at least and surprisingly tolerant of Shaw,’ TSE wrote on Valerie Eliot’s copy in 1959.

4–
Le Chauve-Souris
, a Paris review produced by the Russian theatre director Nikita Balieff, was brought to the London Pavilion by C. B. Cochran on 2 Sept. It was extremely successful and moved to the Apollo Theatre on 10 Oct.

MS
Beinecke  

13 October 1921

9 Clarence Gate Gdns  

Dear Scofield,  

Tom has had rather a serious breakdown, and has had to stop all work and go away for three months. He has to follow a strict regimen, and may only read (for pleasure, not profit) two hours a day. Before he went he fortunately secured St John Hutchinson to do the London Letter for the
Dial
. I have just written to Mr Seldes to tell him, and also to say that Hutchinson would do the next one if this is satisfactory.  

Do you want to wait until February for the review of Marianne Moore’s poems? If so, Tom could do it for you in January, and would like to. I forgot to mention this to Mr Seldes, so now I suppose I shall have to write again! Unless you will – you have nothing to do I presume, and look at
my
position. I have not nearly finished my own nervous breakdown yet.  

Tom is going to be in England for about a month from now, (he is at Margate) and then will be able to go and occupy Lady Rothermere’s villa at La Tourbie [in the Alpes Maritimes]. By this you will see that T. and Lady Rothermere have clicked. A Quarterly had been arranged between them, which Tom was to edit in his ‘spare’ time, and to get what pickings he could from the inadequate sum laid down by her in the name of Literature. Everything is now postponed until January.  

Towards the end of November I
want
to go – somewhere. I don’t know yet, and it doesn’t much matter, but I must escape from England or it will smother me. Have been trying to escape for five–six years!  

I
do
expect to come to London in the spring or perhaps before. Meanwhile I may appear in Vienna.  

Vivien  

Tom sent his love to you.

PC
Texas

[Postmark 15 October 1921]

[London]

The review of Murry in
TLS
. is a revolting mess of torrid tastelessness and hypocritical insensibility.
¹
I have been further exasperated by insults from the American Consulate, who furthermore wish to collect Income Tax
from me. I must get my naturalisation papers in order and wish I knew some prominent person in the Home Office to press it forward. It is difficult to keep calm!

T.

 1–[Ernest de Selincourt], ‘Buried Treasure’, a review of JMM’s
Poems
1916–1920,
TLS
, 13 Oct. 1921.

MS
BL

Wed[nesday] 26 October 1921

The Albemarle Hotel, Cliftonville,
Margate

My dear Violet,

I have been so anxious to know how you were. I have tried to write each day, but have had so many letters to write for Tom. And it is so difficult to write with people about. The last I heard of you was that you had
another
temperature. I do wish you could have the cause of your temperatures discovered. It would give me hope that mine might one day be fathomed. As you know I have just exactly the same lot as yourself, hateful stupid temperatures for no real reason at all. Do write and let us hear how you
both
are. We wonder every day. You will be pleased to hear that Tom is getting on
amazingly
. It is not quite a fortnight yet, but he looks already younger, and fatter and nicer. He is quite good, and not unhappy, keeping regular hours and being out in this wonderful air nearly all day.

I am going back tomorrow. Tom will stay here at any rate for another two weeks. Please let us hear news of you.

With love,
Yours ever
Vivien

This is such a nice, comfortable, and
inexpensive
little hotel. Very lucky.

MS
Fondren

26 October 1921

The Albemarle Hotel, Cliftonville

Dear Huxley,

I hope you will not mind my writing to you for advice. I have been ordered away from London for three months by a nerve specialist, and have been here a fortnight. I went to this specialist on account of his great name, which I knew would bear weight with my employers. But since I have been here I have wondered whether he is quite the best man for me,
as he is known as a nerve man, and I want rather a specialist in psychological troubles. Ottoline Morrell has strongly advised me to go to Vittoz,
¹
in Lausanne, and incidentally mentioned that you had been to him. This is all that I know about him. There are so few good specialists in this line that one wants to have more precise testimony of a man’s value before trying him – especially as I cannot afford to go to Switzerland, which is so expensive, unless the benefit is likely to justify the expense.

So would you mind letting me know, as soon as you can, whether you consider that Vittoz benefited you, and how brilliant a physician you think him? I should be
very
grateful indeed.

If you recommend him, perhaps you know also of some moderate priced pension or hotel in Lausanne?

I hope that this address will find you without loss of time. I ought to have confirmed it from Aldous whom I saw just before leaving town, but I did not think seriously about Vittoz till the last few days. I particularly want your opinion of him as a psychologist.

With best wishes,

Sincerely yours,
T. S. Eliot

1–Dr Roger Vittoz, Swiss psychiatrist, see Glossary of Names. In his copy of the third French edn (1921) of Vittoz’s
Traitement des Psychonévroses par la Rééducation du Controle Cérébral
, TSE marked a paragraph concerning ‘
Aboulie
’ (‘want of will’) (35); the sentence ‘There is, in fact, often an excessive excitability which makes the sufferer aware of the slightest noise and is frequently a cause of insomnia’ (37); and against ‘The muscles are at first more or less contracted and sometimes painful’ (47), he wrote ‘handwriting’.

MS
Texas

Friday 28 October [1921]

The Albemarle Hotel, Cliftonville

My dear Mary,

How are you?

I have started Tom well, and he shows great improvement already. He looks younger and better looking. This is a very nice tiny hotel,
marvellously
comfortable and inexpensive. Margate is rather queer, and we don’t dislike it.

I am leaving on Sunday or Monday. I think Tom will do quite well here for another two or three weeks. He is not, so far, unhappy, or minding anything. Do write him a nice letter. He really must not write letters, so perhaps he would only send a short answer but you would understand that.
I hope you will let me come to tea next week, if you have any time? Did you go to Rothermere’s ‘intellectual party’? What a woman. With love, and from Tom

Affect
Vivien

PC
Texas

[Postmark 29 October 1921]

The Albemarle Hotel, Cliftonville

I have done my best, not having seen the book.
¹
That makes four: Ezra’s
Mauberley
,
²
M. Moore,
³
and Edith Sitwell.
⁴
I am quite distressed about E. P. I’m afraid MacC is no good.
⁵
Thanks for letters
, I have much I should like to say to you.

Yrs. affcty
T.S.E.

Did you do Cazamian’s book?
⁶
Should like to see it some time, though it sounds shallow. Should like to discuss Marivaux
⁷
with you.

1–TSE had written to Bruce Richmond about the reviewing of poetry in the
TLS
, where notices were all unsigned (see postcard to RA, 3 Nov. 1921 below). RA took offence at a notice by F. T. Dalton (1855–1927), an assistant editor, likening the poems in
Hymen
, by his wife H. D., to ‘prose sentences capriciously cut into strips’ (27 Oct.). An unsigned review in the
NS
(3 Dec.) retorted: ‘At no work could be flung with less justice the customary taunt, “prose cut up into lengths”.’

2–See brief notice (author unrecorded) of EP,
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
, in
TLS
, 1 July 1920, 427: ‘The poems in this beautifully printed book have the qualities of structure, rhythm, and sincerity, but they are needlessly obscure … If he could forget this enmity [to the semi-artistic public], his poems would be sweeter and more effective. As they are, they have a mathematical charm.’

3–See review [by F. T. Dalton] of Marianne Moore,
Poems
, in
TLS
, 21 July 1921, 471: ‘Miss Moore does not seem to have very much to say … she has no poetic style.’

4–See review [by Basil de Selincourt] of Edith Sitwell,
The Wooden Pegasus
, in
TLS
, 8 July 1920, 43: ‘The paraphernalia of verse are instruments of her disdain, metaphor is the chief mode in which she reveals her alienation from the rest of the world.’

5–
NS
(ed. MacCarthy) did not review the volumes by EP, Moore and Sitwell.

6–[Edgell Rickword], review of Louis Cazamian,
L’Evolution Psychologique et la Littérature en Angleterre
1600–1914, in
TLS
, 20 Oct. 1921.

7–Pierre de Marivaux (1688–1763), dramatist.

TS
Houghton

30 October 1921

1037 Rush St, Chicago

Dear Mother:

It has been rainy today and Saturday, and I have spent a luxurious Sunday reading. It is my intention to move from this flat and find a single room, for the reason (which will be exceedingly difficult to explain to anyone) that I wish to do a lot of regular and serious reading. That idea will be so incomprehensible to most of the people I know that I am sure that they will think I am disappointed in love or that I am a neurotic crank. But I find such social life as I know here very trifling; possibly my travels have given me a new point of view, but I know that I have always wanted to read and never want to go about much. Peckham likes social life but it amazes me that people do not outgrow that sort of thing. It seems to me to belong to one’s youth.

Peckham says that the preamble to your will, in which you describe yourself as a citizen of Missouri, is not evidence that you are such. The fact that you were a citizen of Missouri when you made your will, in other words, can easily be disproved by evidence that you have changed your citizenship since. However, I would get legal advice on that, and would do whatever is necessary to settle your status as a citizen of Massachusetts. I cannot believe that Mr Shepley is right. I think it might be well for me to go down to St Louis to see him before you finally decide to change your will. I shall have to go there to get the stock certificates, and I might as well do whatever other business I can while there. How about your Missouri state income tax? Did you make a return, or was it unnecessary? I cannot remember.

Uncle Ed has written asking me to handle the printing of his family history. I was very strongly tempted to write him that our firm would charge him a fee of $200 for the work. Of course Uncle Ed expects me to do the work free, which exasperates me in view of his charges for family work. I have, however, written him that I will do it. I am afraid that if I retaliate in that way he will retaliate further by sending you a bill for consultation. Has he ever sent any additional bill for advice, since he settled the estate? I do not think that I or any of us are in a position to offend him, since we never know when we may want to call upon him for some matter, as he is the only member of the family in St Louis now. I do not think he intends to send you any bill for miscellaneous advice, or for things such as this Mercantile matter.

I do not think the oversight of the printing of this book
¹
will be very burdensome or take much time, though it is rather a nuisance. I am also getting a Christmas card printed for Tom Dawes [Eliot].
²
I do not mind things much unless they take my evenings or Sundays. Last Sunday I went to the Harveys for supper – fare $2.80 – staying overnight. I also went to the South Side in the morning to hear a Dr Pulsford preach. I had read one of his sermons and thought it good. He is a friend of Sally Scott’s, or rather she is one of his admirers. I had also thought of getting a room in that neighborhood (it is close to Chicago University). Dr Pulsford said that Sally Scott was going to spend the winter taking a course of some sort at the University. Since hearing that, I am not sure that I want to go down there. I am afraid she has a tendency to fasten herself on relatives. The buildings of Chicago University are very beautiful, and the grounds are wide and well kept. It is on the great wide boulevard which was, at the time of the World’s Fair, the Midway Plaisance. I should like to take a correspondence course there, and to have access to their library. The buildings, which are of stone and very fine, reminded me, in a way, of Oxford; and the suggestion of books and leisure was delightful. I believe there are a good many very nice people in that neighborhood. I wish I knew people who were interested in books and study. The general atmosphere of this flat is like a college dormitory—no privacy or quiet.

Vivien always recites some account of her migraines and malaises in her letters. But I suppose that is natural; it is a relief to talk about one’s pains. I do not think she takes proper care of herself, though. I have seen her drink coffee at midnight. I have a feeling that sub-consciously (or unconsciously) she likes the role of invalid; and that, liking as she does to be petted, ‘made a fuss over’, condoled and consoled, she unconsciously encourages her breakdowns instead of throwing them off by a sort of nervous resistance. It is hard to tell how much is physical and how much mental and uncontrollable by will power; but I think that if she had more of ‘the Will to Be Well’ she would have less suffering. To acquire this sort of willpower unaided is something like pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps; but I think some strong impulse from outside, some change in her circumstances, might call forth the necessary willpower to be well. She needs something to take her mind off herself; something to absorb her entire attention. The same, of course, is true of Margaret. Of course, Vivien really suffers pain, and on the other hand, she is not so supine as Margaret.

A good long period of quiet will do Tom immense good. Of course complete solitude might be depressing, and what he needs, I think, is change more than rest. It may be better for him to have Vivien along for a while, at least better than having no one to talk to, but I think it would be good for him to be with congenial friends without her for a while, too. The great thing is to relax. The idea of going to Lady Rothermere’s villa near Monte Carlo sounds fine to me.
³
New and beautiful scenes will be good for him. I hope he can do that.

If you give a Boston lawyer your copy of the will to make a new one from, I think you had better send me a copy of the new will before you sign if, and let me take it to Mr Shepley and see whether it conforms to their notions of their part as ‘ancillary administrator’ or whatever it is. I should like to write Mr Shepley or see him and find out just what he means by his statements as to Missouri claiming you as citizen. I think he misunderstood.

Your affectionate son,
Henry

Have you a cook or are you still eating outside?