The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (67 page)

MS
Texas  

Tuesday [10 June 1919]

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1
 

Dear Mary  

About half a mile further the car collapsed completely and at the same moment punctured a tire, in the middle of a vast plain. Nothing passed but two brakes full of boy scouts so I proceeded on foot followed by three ducks, and arrived at Chichester, dusty but triumphant, in time for a glass
of beer at the Woodman just before the train. I reached C. Mansions at a quarter to 2! However, I enjoyed the Pentecost very much indeed – you were very charming.

Yrs.
Tom

MS
Texas

Sunday [15? June 1919]

[18 Crawford Mansions]

Dear Mary,

My scrawl was despatched in some haste on a hurried day, and did not express much of the pleasure with which I am still looking back on the two days at Wittering. I preserve – at least the illusion – that it was not a drifting fog but was rather only something interrupted or suspended. <
Credo, quia impossibile est?
>
¹
I wonder what your second impression is. My mind is not very active at the present moment: I have been occupied on another of my furiously laboured articles, perhaps the most laboured of the lot (you don’t know how crude and undigested and indigestible they often seem to me when I see them in print). I thought that there was a moment of fog – or which threatened to end that way – on Sunday afternoon – which I thought afterwards had been saved from exercising further influence by our confession of cross purposes almost directly afterwards. It wasn’t cleared up, but it did no harm. I am still wanting to know what your dilemma was – though I am sure it will be settled by you, if at all, without anyone’s opinion having had the slightest effect. I am not sure that I should see it just as you do, mind. I think you are capable of being quite incomprehensible and unaccountable, except to yourself. There is something odd in you which makes you appear independent and
self-sufficient
to a degree – at least to the degree of only wanting from
anybody
what you deliberately want to want from them. It is very interesting.

I shall send you some of Pound’s poems as soon as I can, and hope you will see why I like them so much. Finer Grain
(short stories) or the
Ambassadors?
>

I must interrupt this at some point –

Yours
Tom.

You haven’t written to Vivien –

I have to go to Garsington on my next return –

I wonder who wrote in the last
Times
?
²
He found my joints in one or two places very cleverly.

Lewis is
not
a sham, but a simple natural innocent, like myself.

1–‘I believe it because it is impossible’, a common variant of Tertullian’s rule of faith ‘
Certum est, quia impossible est
’ (‘It is certain, because it is impossible’).

2–‘Not Here, O Apollo’, TLS 12 June, was by Arthur Clutton-Brock. ‘Mr. Eliot, like Browning, likes [in
Poems
] to display out-of-the-way learning, he likes to surprise you by every trick he can think of’ but is ‘fatally handicapping himself with his own inhibitions’.

MS
Beinecke  

15 June 1919

[in transit]

Dear Brigit

This is a hasty greeting in the midst of my pilgrimages. I have been in London several times, but neither seen people nor had time to write satisfactory letters to anyone – the only exception a Whitsun visit to some friends in Sussex – the most of my time rushed about in interviews in Birmingham, Manchester and elsewhere. I wonder if you could give a satisfactory account of yourself – but I shan’t attack you because I know perfectly well that you are
pleased
to be lectured to – that is what irritates me. It doesn’t worry you a bit, and it’s not a bit of use. And it’s boring.

I have had a very interesting time on the whole, very crowded, especially including an article and correspondence to be done on Sundays. But mostly a very specialised exercise of intelligence, and rather restful – reading nothing but commercial reviews, and seeing new and strange people.

If I can get back by Saturday I have promised to go down to Oxfordshire over Sunday – otherwise I may be here in the middle of the week, and if not then, not until the middle of the following week, possibly. You see what a nomadic life it is! I hope we can meet by July anyway – unless you have disappeared to your country seat by then. Are you still at this address, in case –?

Yours
T.S.E.

MS
Houghton

17 June 1919

8 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1

Dear Eleanor,

I am rather ahead with my writing this week, so I can at last consecrate an hour to writing to you. It is 10 p.m. I am alone with Dinah Brooks (Yorkshire terrier). It is very hot. Vivien I have left in Bosham (Sussex) for a much needed holiday, and the servant is also taking a fortnight’s holiday at Margate, presumably making herself ill on prawns and winkles. But as she says of everything ‘it makes a change’ (i.e. when she bakes potatoes instead of boiling them).

It was a very nice letter dated April 8 that I had from you, and I wish I could have answered it before. This spring has been, however, a
very
busy one for me. My lectures ended only in May. Then I have been writing long articles for the
Athenaeum
which not only take time but make me more conspicuous and bring indirectly social engagements. Then I have produced a certain amount of copy for a quarterly called
Art & Letters
.
¹
Then I have had one small book brought out and am preparing a larger one (limited edition). Then I have been corresponding with a publisher about a possible prose book (I dare say it will fall through). Then several stripling poets want their long poems criticised. Then to show you what social life entails, I will retail or detail one incident:—

I happen to make to a lady I know pretty well named A. some flippant remarks about a lady B. Later I get to know B. and get on with her quite well. B. repeats to others the compliments I paid her on one of her books. Then a sudden coolness. Next C. a mutual friend asks me if I ever said that I disliked B. and thought her book rubbish because B. has been told that I said it, and was much upset. I may remark that B. has occasionally suffered from melancholia. I deny the remarks, but say that some time ago I had made some light comments which might have been twisted that way. C. promises to report to B. Meanwhile A. gets in a funk lest I hear of this and trace it to her, and anxiously confides in Vivien. A. you see hates B. and also is jealous of her. She therefore repeats my remarks to D. a man friend of hers (A.’s) who dislikes me because A. likes me. D. is a connection of B. and when he hears her repeat my compliments, is irritated, and tells her, with alterations, what I said elsewhere. B.’s husband says he is going to
tax me with it. A. hearing of this is frightened and rings up B. to say not to tax me with it, as D. may have made a mistake. This leaves the situation with D. more hating me than ever, as he is put in rather an awkward situation, with B. still suspicious, and A. very humble and contrite, although she is not
quite
sure that I know anything about it. This puts me in a position to make A. uncomfortable by innuendoes. I leave B. quite alone. A.’s husband in conversation constantly tries to hint to me how vain and perverse B. is, and tries to make me say something uncomplimentary to her work. I dodge this, and praise her. I also take the trouble to be very good friends with C., E. and F. all close friends of B.

The sequel is this. G. another woman, is jealous of A. She hears that I spent a weekend at A.’s house. She promptly invites me for a weekend and says that B. is coming. This is very clever, for she knows that I have had no opportunity of a
rapprochement
with B. and that I dare not refuse to come for fear of offending B. In either case G. will be pleased: if I don’t go, I shall be out with B. forever, and no woman likes one to be on good terms with another; if I do go, she will get back one on A. So I must go smiling on Saturday, knowing that there will be a large party, all knowing all the facts, to see how I shall get on with B. and knowing also that G. will do her best to get me to say something unpleasant about A., and also that A. will want to know later what G. said about her. Meanwhile I believe that D. is spreading the report that I am very conceited, he being annoyed at my having been asked for a weekend to A.’s, where I bathed in the sea and played with the children, and talked about aesthetics with F. And I like A. and B. very much and don’t hate even D.
²

This is an illustration. It will seem to you foolish. But think of this sort of thing as going on continually in a society where everyone is very sensitive, very perceptive and very quick and you will see that a dinner party demands more skill and exercises one’s psychological gifts more than the best fencing match or duel.

The first thing one tries to notice in entering a room is everyone’s frame of mind and attitude towards everyone else, individually, which may have changed in twenty-four hours! It does use one’s brains! Only, one needs to retire from time to time and rest.

I have written to Emily – I hope it was a nice letter. I should, I think, like her to know what a keen interest I take in everything that happens to her.

I like your letters very much. But I
wish
you would send me copies of any of your printed plays, and I should like to know how you look on your work, and its relation to literature, and what experience of life you think is required for it. But I must defer that till another letter. I take it unkindly that you never write.

Always affectionately
Tom

1–‘Marivaux’ in
Art & Letters
1 (Spring 1919); ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ and ‘Sweeney Erect’ in 2 (Summer).

2–The scenario seems to be as follows: A = Mary Hutchinson; B = Virginia Woolf; D = Clive Bell; F = Roger Fry; and G = Ottoline Morrell. For C and E there are several possibilities: C may have been John Middleton Murry and E Lytton Strachey. VWhad reported on 17 Apr. that when she visited the Murrys, ‘the mystery of Eliot was further thickened by hearing how he praised me to the skies to them’ (
Letters
, II, 350); and she had written to Duncan Grant the same day: ‘we have a letter asking us to dinner, and I’m determined, in spite of Mary [Hutchinson] to draw the rat from his hole’ (
Letters
, II, 350). VHE wrote to MH on 17 June 1919: ‘Tom is going to Garsington, think of Virginia, Tom and Ottoline! O think of it.’

MS
Texas

Monday [23 June 1919]

18 Crawf
o
rd Mansions

Dear Lady Ottoline,

Finally I have a chance to write and tell you what happened. First of all, I was bitterly disappointed. And will you let me come very soon? I expect to be settled here again after this week, and after that I should love to come for a weekend if you would ask me.

The man [Harold Peters] who turned up so suddenly is a lieutenant with the American navy and he is the oldest and loyalest American friend I have. He was here about two months ago for two nights, and I begged him to come again before he went back to the States. He has been mine sweeping in the Orkneys; now he is suddenly demobilised, and came down from Liverpool entirely to see me before leaving Europe finally tomorrow. I got a wire from him, and when he arrived I realised that I should have to give up my weekend – at first I thought that I could take an earlier train back to town on Sunday, but there wasn’t any. And I saw that it would be a bitter blow to him if he could not have me for the whole of the short time. He would never have got over it; he had come from Liverpool only to see me, and he will probably never be in this country again, and he would not have understood, so I gave up. I could not let him think that anything was different from what it was five years ago. He had been almost the only man in my class at Harvard whom I could endure; and we had been through various adventures and physical risks together; I don’t feel at all sentimental about it, but I could not let him go back to America thinking that our relations were altered.

So I had to go to the theatre, which I detest, and walked for miles and miles yesterday showing him the East End and the docks; and I feel completely exhausted and especially depressed by my awareness of having
lost contact with Americans and their ways, and by the hopelessness of ever making them understand so many things. I could go on indefinitely with this, but it is probably tiresome, and it was only to explain how much I should have preferred sitting on the lawn with you at Garsington, and to justify my proposing myself again after failing in this way. Will you please ask me
soon
after the next weekend? I wish Mrs Woolf could be there too: I have not seen her for a long time.

You said, by the way, about my poems, some of the things I should like people to say, and which none of the reviewers have said. So I naturally choose to believe that you were ‘on the right track’!

Sincerely
T. S. Eliot

I am sending some Joyce.