The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (71 page)

1–A. M. Ludovici (1882–1971), author and illustrator, was serving in Military Intelligence.

MS
Northwestern

29 July 1919

[London]

Dear J. M.,

Thank you very much. I think I know which of the poems you mean already, although I have had the book
²
by me only for a day; but you must not give me credit for any more insight than I can prove to you. What I want is to be able to talk them over with you in quiet and leisure after I have had several days with them.

I hardly dare say what some of them seem to me to reveal – for it might seem an impertinence.

Your letter gave me a great deal of pleasure – more than pleasure. You must realise that it has been a great event to me to know you, but you do not know yet the full meaning of this phrase as I write it.

Yrs always
T.S.E.

1–John Middleton Murry: see Glossary of Names.

2–JMM,
Poems
: 1917–18
(1918).

MS
Texas

5 August 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

My dear Monro,

Your letter arrived this evening. I should have been really very glad indeed to have contributed to such an interesting critical symposium, but I see that you go to press on Sept. 1st.
²
I am just out of bed and on Saturday expect to leave for three weeks in France,
³
returning on the 1st (probably). I shall not be doing any writing during that time, even my usual work for the
Athenaeum
. In fact, I am very much run down and this is my first real rest for two years. 

So I can only say that I am very sorry that your request should have come at this time. I shall at least look forward to reading the number.

Yours sincerely
T. S. Eliot

1–Harold Monro (1879–1932), poet and owner of the Poetry Bookshop: see Glossary of Names.

2–The Sept. issue of
The Chapbook
was meant to contain ‘Five Critical Essays on the Present State of English Poetry’, but this item was postponed.

3–EP wrote to Quinn, 6 Aug.: ‘Expect Eliot here in a weeks time, hope to put him through course of sun, air & sulphur baths & return him to London intact.’ TSE left three days later, met EP for a walking tour in Périgueux in the middle of the month, and returned to London on 31 Aug.

MS
Texas

6 August 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mary,

Thanks for books received today. How very kind of you. I shall do my best – you know what a slow reader I am, and I shall only take one volume with me.
¹
Have you read them all? The amount I read must depend on the state of the weather and the extent of my recuperation. I have crawled out of bed today to go to the dentist and the French consulate, after several days in bed, and feel very languid. I have just strength to observe that groups are at least as intelligent as most so-called individuals and as tolerable. It’s when one expects intelligence from the constituents of the groups that one is completely disappointed. If the group is dominated by an individual the
group
does not count; if it is
not
, then its members do not count as individuals. This is not clearly put. Second I don’t know what is the ‘intellectual intelligence’ and ‘dandyism in ideas’. I mean simply that the words convey nothing to me. I thought that ideas should be
clarae et
distinctae
,
²
and also that they should more or less work: but you
must
show me a sample swanky idea and I will put on my best bombazine to meet it. Have one for me when I get back. Perhaps Flaubert will help me?

Please
send
Gerontion
back to me at once. I leave Saturday night, and I must revise it in France, so
just
put it in an envelope and send it by return.

I am
very
tired (as you will have seen from this letter) and very glad to be getting out of London. Perhaps I won’t ever come back!

Thank you again for Flaubert.

Yours
Tom.

1–The following day he sent a telegram: ‘Vivien says books were gift forgive apparent ingratitude writing from France when address settled Tom.’ It is possible that he had returned to MH most of the books she had sent over to him, not realising that they were all a gift outright.

2–‘clear and distinct’, alluding to a phrase in Descartes’s
Meditatio
VI, 15.

MS
BL

6 August 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Lytton,

How propitious that you should have written just before I disappear into central France where no letters will reach me. I have not been away, but in London, in my office or among my books or (several times) in bed, and have frequently imagined you sitting on the lawn at Pangbourne or in a garden, conducting your clinic of Queen Victoria with perfect concentration – but I had not imagined you disturbed by my heresies in the
Athenaeum
.
¹
You have frightened me, because I always expect you to be right, and because I know I shall never be able to retaliate upon your finely woven fabric. I have lately read an article of yours on Voltaire
²
which made me envious. I was amazed by your statement about Erasmus,
³
but I am sure you can back it. Besides, my dear Lytton, I am a very ill-read person.

I am going to France, to the Dordogne, on Saturday, for three weeks. I wonder if you would write if I sent you a card from there – but perhaps I should have left before you decided to do so, if you did.

Yours ever
T. S. Eliot

1–The biographies in Strachey’s
Eminent Victorians
(1918) were regarded by some as heretical, and he was planning his biography of Queen Victoria. Among TSE’s thirteen pieces for A. so far in 1919 was ‘The Education of Taste’ (27 June), a scathing review of J. W. Cunliffe’s
English Literature during the Last Half-Century.

2–Lytton Strachey, ‘Voltaire’,
A
., 1 Aug. 1919, 677–9: a review of
Voltaire in his Letters,
trans. S. G. Tallentyre.

3–‘Erasmus was a tragic figure. The great revolution in the human mind, of which he had been the presiding genius, ended in failure; he lived to see the tide of barbarism rising once more over the world; and it was left to Voltaire to carry off the final victory.’

PC
BL

[25? August 1919]

[France]

I have been walking the whole time since I arrived and so have had no address at all. Through Dordogne and the Corrèze, sunburnt – melons, ceps, truffles, eggs, good wine and good cheese and cheerful people. It is a complete relief from London. I hope to get to Ussel.

Yours
T.S.E.

CC
NYPL (MS)

26 August 1919

[New York]

My dear Mr Eliot:

I think I sent you a copy of a letter which I dictated Sunday, June 29th, to Liveright,
¹
telling of their damned impertinence to me regarding your book and putting me off for two or three months about it. A few days before that I had had a letter from you saying that you had some later work in prose and verse. I cabled you to send the later work, poems and prose, and in my absence Mr Curtin of my office confirmed the cable by letter. The later work came. Meantime I had had the matter submitted to the John Lane Company of this city, telling them that I would be willing to advance $150 toward the setting up of the book and making of plates. Early in August a letter came in apologizing for the delay in sending a reply but stating that the writer had been out of town, and concluding:

I then took the matter up with Knopf, telling him of the new poems and that I had come to the conclusion, in view of the new poems, that a book of poems alone would be the best thing for you. He said that he would be glad to look at the new poems. I then sent the whole thing, poems and prose, including the new poems and prose, to Knopf. He telephoned me a few days later that he was willing and anxious to publish the poems in a volume by themselves. I think that you now have enough poems to make one good volume. I think therefore that you should revise your desire to have the poems and prose in one book. Everyone seems to agree that a hybrid book of that sort does not get anywhere. Max Eastman had a small book of prose and verse published and it fell flat,
²
and others have had the same experience. All the publishers are dead against it. It looks too much like the literary ‘remains’ of a writer, or a writer who is neither one thing nor the other. When your poems and prose were first submitted to Knopf I insisted upon both going together because I thought there were not enough poems for a book. But with the new poems I think you have enough for a separate volume. I agreed with Knopf that the book should
be entitled
Poems by T. S. Eliot.
I dislike, apparently as much as Knopf dislikes, the name
Prufrock
in the title. He thinks that title would hurt the sale. I agree with him. Knopf pays Pound 10% royalty on
Lustra
up to 5,000 copies. I hope Pound and I will live to see the sale of 5,000 copies of
Lustra
but at the present rate of sale that would insure our living a long time. Beyond 5,000 copies I believe Pound is to get 12½%. I got Knopf to agree to increase the royalty to you from 10 to 12% on all copies sold.  

It is too late for the fall list. The fall list of books is already out and published. I told Knopf that I would write you urging you to accept Knopf’s proposition of a book of poems and ask you to cable me. On receipt of your cable I will sign a contract with Knopf similar to Pound’s contract with him for
Lustra,
at 12% royalty, and Knopf will start printing. The volume will have to go in the spring list which will be out in two or three months and the book itself ‘will be published early in the year’. In fact the spring list is now about complete. So I had better be cabled one word, ‘Accept’, either by you or Pound, which I will understand as authorizing me to close with Knopf for the publication of the volume of poems. A separate volume of prose, critical and other prose, may be arranged later.  

Now as to time: Assuming that you would want page proofs before final printing, Knopf should have the final copy not later than October 1st. If therefore you have written any new poems which you want to include in the volume, they will have to be sent by the middle of September so as to get here by October 1st.  

In a letter that I had from you just before I went away, dated May 25th, you wanted to alter the MS. for the book so as to add two or three other essays, feeling that the new essays were better than any in the MS. But these questions can be dealt with when you come to publish a separate book of prose.  

There was received at my office on July 22nd your letter of July 9th enclosing the additional MS. of new poems and prose. I understand where you want the new poems to go, namely, that they should be put at the head of the new poems, the ones not in the
Prufrock
volume, and that if you had put the new poems in front of the
Prufrock
ones then these new poems enclosed in your letter of July 9th should head the new book. Knopf said that he liked the old poems better than the new ones and I am inclined to agree with him, but they are all interesting and it will make a corking book. If you agree to my suggestion that the poems be put in one volume, then there will be more time to discuss the prose and to pass upon the various questions touched upon by you in your letter of July 9, 1919 to me
regarding titles, acknowledgments to other publishers, and the possible dropping of the ‘Eeldrop and Appleplexes’. You wrote that you wished that you were anywhere near satisfied with the book. I think that putting the poems in one volume and taking more time on the prose will make you more satisfied with the two books. In your letter of July 9th you left it in my hands ‘in all confidence’, but at the same time I feel it is better to get a cable from you, and if you should have one or two more poems that you want to include please send them to me and I will put them in the book. Even though they get here by October 15th it will be time enough, although Knopf mentioned October 1st.  

I had not seen the reference to you in the
New Republic.
I will call it to Knopf’s attention and he might be able to use it on the jacket of the book of poems.  

Thank you for thinking of sending me a copy of your book of poems when it is printed by Rodker with designs by Wadsworth.  

There is no good book on Stendhal in English. If Secker commissions you to write such a book it will be a big job, and I agree with you that £25 does not seem enough for such a big job.  

Regarding my defense of
Ulysses,
I shall have to read it again before I can give permission to have it published in the
Egoist.
I dictated that one evening in the office at the close of a hard day’s work, and I remember that I had a dinner engagement that evening. I started to dictate it at ten minutes of six and finished the dictation at twenty minutes after seven. So I hesitate to agree that a mere lawyer’s brief, on which he has spent just one hour and twenty minutes, should be perpetuated in a paper like the
Egoist
which has published so much real literature. I am sorry that the publishers of the
Egoist
have decided to stop, but from the financial point of view I think they are right to devote the money at their disposal to book publication, even though it does rob Pound and you of an organ where you can express yourselves editorially and freely. I congratulate you upon your work with the
Athenaeum.
Knopf had heard of it.  

Your letter of July 9th was forwarded to me in the mountains and it was refreshing to read it. I was delighted with its fine spirit and its hopefulness. The best advice I can give you is to ‘play your own game’, to think of yourself and your own work and not be carried away by enthusiasms for others unless they are good friends of yours like Pound, and in that way help you to play your own game or advance work that you are interested in in common.

In a note that I had from Pound today from Dordogne he said that he expected you there in a week’s time, so I am sending the original of this
letter to you in London and a copy of it I am sending in a letter that I am writing to Pound, so that I will get you either way and you can cable me as requested, and if you have any new poems you can send them to me.  

This, I believe, covers the whole thing.  

I am glad that you are going down there to have long walks and good talks with Pound. It will be a good thing for you to get away from business for three or four weeks.  

With kind regards, I am  

Sincerely yours,
[unsigned]