The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (31 page)

1–The lectures were cancelled because the Foreign Office refused BR a passport. 

MS
McMaster

Monday [6 March? 1916]

3 Culworth House

Dear Bertie

We went to the dentist this afternoon. I was not able to go with Vivien, but I arrived a few minutes later and talked to the doctor afterwards. Vivien was very much shaken by the interview, and is now in very great pain, both neuralgia and stomach. I think the dentist quite failed in tact, and did not understand what was required, though I had talked to him and also written to him last night. I saw that she had had a shock, and was puzzled when he made light of the matter in talking to me afterwards. He said it could be easily attended to, required no anaesthetic, could wait for some little time, and meant no great pain or risk. He said that there was probably some decay in the crowned tooth, and that the nerve of the other tooth was dead; that the pain it had given was in the process of dying. He told me that he
had
not told her this – I then found that he had told her and also, what he had
not
told me, that there was a possibility of an
abscess. He evidently thought that I was the person to be calmed down, and that I had communicated my fears to Vivien, and evidently he had not understood what I had told him. I have no doubt he is a good dentist, but the interview has done no good, and has taken it out of her very much indeed. How much this will postpone her recovery I cannot yet tell. She is very low tonight. I think that the teeth will take care of themselves until she is ready to have them attended to. She is very ill tonight, and I am very very sorry that she went through this. It has been too great a strain upon her will.

I will write to you tomorrow, and see you soon and talk to you.

Yours aff.
Tom

MS
Professor David G. Williams

6 March 1916

3 Culworth House, Henry St,
St John’s Wood, London
N.W.

Dear Professor Woods,

I enclose the form1 which was sent me by the secretary.

I shall sail, if all goes well, on the first of April. This will I suppose compel me to have all the examinations in the week of April 10th as (I presume) the spring holidays occupy the week of April 17th. I hope that this will not inconvenience the department.

I trust that no international developments will prevent my sailing. If a breach with Germany should occur, either to make it impossible to sail or
to jeopardise my return, I hope such an unfortunate occurrence might be considered only a postponement.

I am sending my thesis in a few days in any case, and will write you a line by the same mail. If it should
not
prove acceptable, there might just be time to cable to me before my sailing; but I hope that it will not be found unsatisfactory.

Sincerely yours
Thomas Stearns Eliot

Cable address:
‘LINEN’, London
.

MS
Chicago

27 March 1916

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St, London
W.

Dear Miss Monroe

I hope that I have not seriously inconvenienced you by not writing before in regard to your inquiry about putting my ‘Prufrock’ into your anthology.
¹
I can only excuse myself by saying that I have been busier than most men are in a lifetime – and I find it very hard to keep anything on my mind. I do hope your plans have not been put out by my delay.

I am very much pleased that you want to reprint the poem; but as it has already appeared in the
Catholic Anthology
here, and as it will form the ballast of a
very
small volume in the future, I really feel that I should be making a mistake in reprinting it again in an Anthology before it appears in a book.

If there is anything else of mine which you would care to use instead, I wish you would make use of it. But I suppose you are using only material which has already appeared in
Poetry
, or I should suggest some things of mine which appeared in
Blast
and
Others
.

Thank you for the clippings in regard to the
Dial
episode.
²
Does the battle still go on? I should be glad to participate with a few quotations which the critic would perhaps not identify. 

From the 9th to the 22nd April my address will be c/o J. K. Clement Esq.,
³
Wayland, Mass. U.S.A. Otherwise, I have a new London address which you see above.

Yours faithfully,
T. Stearns Eliot

1–
The New Poetry: An Anthology,
ed. Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson (New York, 1917). TSE discussed it in ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’ [III], Egoist 4: 10 (Nov. 1917).

2–
The Dial
had been attacking Monroe and her anthology, and in its issue of 25 Nov. it condemned her for being negligent in allowing TSE’s ‘plagiarism’, in ‘Cousin Nancy’, of George Meredith’s line ‘The army of unalterable law’.

3–James Clement (1889–1973), Harvard Class of 1911, had married Marguerite C. Burrel in 1913. In later years TSE visited them annually in Geneva. 

MS
Professor David G. Williams

7 April 1916

Hydraulic-Press Brick Company,
Central National Bank Building,
St Louis, Mo.

My dear Sir:

I thank you for your kind letter of the 3rd. Mrs Eliot and I will use every effort to induce my son to take his examinations later. Doubtless his decision was much influenced by Prof. Russell who cabled to me as follows:

‘
STRONGLY ADVISE CABLING TOM AGAINST SAILING UNDER PRESENT PECULIARLY DANGEROUS CONDITIONS UNLESS IMMEDIATE DEGREE IS WORTH RISKING LIFE.’
¹

The day following, Tom cabled final decision. I was not greatly pleased with the language of Prof. Russell’s cablegram.

I shall send Tom a copy of your letter, which has comforted me much.

Yours truly,
H. W. Eliot

1–BR had also written to OM on 29 Mar. that VHE’s nerves were ‘all to pieces. It is the worry of his going that upset her. She was afraid he would be sunk by a submarine’ (
Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years,
56). TSE had been due to sail on 1 Apr. 

MS
Professor David G. Williams

3 May 1916

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St, London w.

Dear Dr Woods

I must apologise for not having written to you before, after my cable. I need not say how disappointed I was not to be able to come, after the winter of work, and after you had made all the arrangements for me.
Transportation has been so irregular during the war that I might have foreseen what occurred – my boat postponed for five days at the last moment. Coming on top of all the difficulties I had encountered, this was a crushing blow and I could not bear for some time to let myself think about it. I am still in a state of mental confusion, but am trying, after a few days in the country, to settle down to writing an article and a review, for which I got the opportunities through Sydney Waterlow and P. E. B. Jourdain. Our holidays were taken up, first with the details of a necessary emigration from one flat to another, and then with a much needed week in the country for both of us.

I hope you will let me know 1. whether my thesis was satisfactory 2. whether it will still hold good at my next opportunity for taking the examinations 3. if satisfactory, with what margin or by what squeak.

I shall come
at the first opportunity
. I hope that the war will be over, as naturally I do not like to leave my wife here, or venture the waves myself, while it is still on.

I do not know whether to urge you to persist in coming to England next winter. I hope that you will – but I should be sorry not to be examined by you in Cambridge. I hope that Mrs Woods’s health is not such as to prevent your both coming.

Do accept all my thanks, and my deepest regrets at not being able to see you in Cambridge this April. I hope I shall see you there within a year, unless you will grant me your presence here. Please also thank all the faculty for their kindness in writing to me, and for giving me the chance of taking my degree at an irregular time.

Very sincerely yours
Thomas Stearns Eliot

MS
Beinecke

7 May 1916

18 Crawford Mansions

My dear Scofield

Can it be that a year ago you and I were charming the eyes (and ears) of Char-flappers1 from one virginal punt, I by my voracity for bread and butter and you by Sidneian showers of discourse upon Art, Life, Sex and Philosophy? Yes! I recognise the Scofield of Magdalen, the connoisseur of puberty and lilies, in the Scofield of Washington Square, about to wed the 
Madonna of the mantelpiece,
¹
whose praises from your lips I have not forgotten. – So you have hit upon the Fountain of Eternal Youth, not in Florida, but Troy. ‘Only the soul can cure the senses, and only the senses can cure the soul’.
²
And the century of sonnets?
³
And have I not St Praxed’s ear to pray horses for you, and brown Greek manuscripts?
⁴
… to pray that domestic felicity may not extinguish the amateur, to pray that possession of beauty may not quench that ardour of curiosity and that passionate detachment which your friends admired and your admirers envied.

And I hope that within an interior of dim light drifting through heavy curtains, by a Buhl table holding a Greek figurine, and a volume of Faust bound in green and powdered with gold, with a bust of Dante, and perhaps a screen by Kōrin,
⁵
a drawing by Watteau – a room heavy with the scent of lilies, you will enshrine such a treasure as that with which you rightly credited me, – a wife who is not wifely.

Treasure me in thy heart, and remember that when Mr and Mrs Scofield Thayer come to visit London, Mr and Mrs Stearns Eliot will be outraged if they are not the first to entertain them.

Yours always
Thomas Stearns Eliot

1–He married Elaine Eliot Orr on 21 June. After their divorce in the 1920s, she became the first wife of E. E. Cummings.

2–‘To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul!’ (Oscar Wilde,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
[1891], ch. 16).

3–‘Rafael made a century of sonnets … Else he only used to draw Madonnas’ (Browning, ‘One Word More’, 5–8).

4–‘And have I not Saint Praxed’s ear to pray / Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts, / And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?’ (Browning, ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’, 73–5).

5–Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), Japanese artist whose Matsushima screen is in the Boston Museum. 

MS
Beinecke

8 May [1916]
¹

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Scofield,

How nice that you are going to be married! Nothing could be better! Try black silk sheets and pillow covers – they are extraordinarily effective – so long as you are willing to sacrifice
yourself
.

I was never more delighted than when I heard that you have an orange wallpaper. We have one, in our dining room. 

Do come and see us when you bring her to see Europe. You can do us and the Tower of London on the same day.

With congratulations of the most fervent.

Vivien S-E.

1–The envelope was ‘Opened by the censor’. 

MS
McMaster

14 May [1916]

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Bertie,

Vivien told me about the books. I did not quite know how to thank you, at first. I was awfully touched. This sort of gift is a peculiar sort of symbol, and its position in a future when no one can guess what will have become of all of our lives renders it much more of an attachment, somehow, than if you were ninety and at death’s door. There is more kindness in it than people will ever see.

Affectionately
Tom

Vivien has been quite ill all today. She must have eaten something which disagreed with her last night, as she was very ill in the night, and was not fit to do anything today. She meant to write to you, but will write tomorrow. She seems very overdone.