The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (75 page)

1–In his unsigned leading article ‘Our Inaccessible Heritage’ (11 July), JMM complained that many English classics, such as the Elizabethan dramatists, were unprocurable, and suggested that the university presses, or failing them the government, should provide cheap reprints. Among the letters that followed, R.W. Chapman at the Clarendon Press felt that the public did not take the opportunity to purchase the classics already available. ‘Experience has shown that even the nimble shilling was inadequate to create new appetites … the rate of production cannot be accelerated unless the demand grows in range and volume.’ J.M. Dent, publisher of the Temple Classics, found that the works of Fielding, Goldsmith, Sterne, etc. ‘hardly had enough buyers to enable us to keep the books in stock’.

MS
Texas

Wednesday 29 October [1919]

18 Crawford Mansions

Thank you, Mary dear, for your nasty letter. I always love to hear from you. I hope your chill is better.

As Tom is not a French artist, or a Flirt, or Amusing or even Rather Fun, your absence from his lecture was no surprise to him. But I should have loved to sit by you and poke you in the ribs. Instead, I played the
Dormouse to Pasha Schiff’s and his concubine’s March Hare and Mad Hatter. They leaned heavily on either side of me, in the middle of the front row.

Dear Mary, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity of forwarding yr. invitation to my great friend Mrs Aldous Huxley.
¹
You have a delicious sense of humour. Tom and I will come to your party with so much pleasure. I need not reply formally? need I?

You did not send me the film, little cat, even now. And I have all the latest photographs to show you, which are
kolossal
. They almost shock me.

I hope I shall see you at Edith’s party, – you will know me by my paisley shawl.
²

Goodnight my dear. When may I come and spend the night? I embrace you.

V.

1–AH had proposed to Maria Nys, a Belgian protégée of OM, at Garsington in 1916, and they married on 10 July 1919. MH wrote, in an unpublished memoir: ‘Of the two Huxleys –Maria and Aldous –Maria was the one I loved … She always seemed to be sweetly scented, oiled and voluptuous’ (‘Aldous Huxley’; Texas). According to to AH’s biographer, during the 1920s Aldous and Maria Huxley and Mary Hutchinson were involved in a
ménage à trois
(Nicholas Murray,
Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual
[2002], 143).

2–VHE wrote in her diary (31 Oct.), ‘Edith Sitwell’s party. Wore my shawl dress. Fairly good. Dull party.’

MS
Beinecke

31 October 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mr Jepson,

Yes, I should like that, as I don’t want that lecture to go to press in this country until it has undergone your criticisms. I fully realised, by the way, that you forebore to press your point the other night, and was grateful, as yours was the one criticism which appeared to me damaging.

Unfortunately, we happen to be going to Marlow this weekend. This is what happened the last time you asked us, so instead of waiting may I ask you if the
following
Sunday would do? If not, we must try again.

Yours sincerely
T. S. Eliot

I am trying your lecture on
A
[
rt
]&
L
[
etters
]. If that doesn’t come off, may I speak to Weaver about it?

TS
Valerie Eliot

2 November 1919

The Hogarth Press, Hogarth House,
Richmond, Surrey

Dear Eliot,

I have been meaning to let you know that we have so far sold 140 odd copies of your
Poems
, and they are still selling slowly. The receipts up to date have been £12-14-10 and the cost £5-19-4 leaving a profit of £6-15-6 of which your share is £1-13-10 for which I enclose a cheque.

Yours sincerely
Leonard Woolf

MS
Beinecke

Monday [3 November? 1919]

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1

Dear Mr Jepson,

I wrote and suggested next Sunday. I have not heard from you – but I now realise that I have an important article to finish by Monday and that I ought to stay in all Sunday to do it.
¹
So might we come the week
after
(Sunday week)? I hope this is possible if you can plan for so far ahead, and please accept my apologies for this confusion.

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

 1–‘Ben Jonson’, a review of G. Gregory Smith,
Ben Jonson
, in
TLS
, 13 Nov. 1919, 637–8 (
SW
). It was TSE’s first piece for the
TLS
, and unsigned (
TLS
practice until 1974).

TS
NYPL (MS)

5 November 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mr Quinn:

This is to thank you for your kind letter of the 3rd October, long unanswered.
¹

I am entirely unexperienced in such matters, but I should have accepted any form of contract that you approved; the contract you enclosed is quite satisfactory to me. I have written to Knopf saying that I have received it
and that I confirm your action in signing on my behalf. I am sorry that I bothered you by an unnecessary letter of instructions which might just as well have gone direct to Knopf. I earnestly hope that my affairs will not take any more of your time and thought; if you took no further interest in them whatever you would still have earned my lifelong gratitude, which, I assure you, you shall have.

At your leisure, you can have the Prose in your possession returned to me. Some of it I shall probably use; some of it I shall certainly suppress; I do not want to use any of it without thorough revision. It is in fact a great relief to me that it will not reach print in the form in which you have it. Some of it I may work into a book which the
Egoist
will print in the spring, and which I think will be a series of connected essays on the Art of Poetry. But the nucleus of the book will be a lecture which I delivered last week for an organisation called the Arts League of Service, on Poetry.
²
It was one of a series in which Lewis spoke on Painting;
³
it was, I believe, successful, and I want to expand and continue this lecture for a small book. If I do something that satisfies me, I do not see why I should not offer
that
to Knopf as my next book; if he turns it down I am quit of obligation to him, and if he takes it I shall be pleased. It was the preparation of this lecture that delayed my writing to you. I am now at work on an article ordered by
The Times
, and when that is off I hope to get started on a poem that I have in mind.
⁴

Again with most grateful thanks.

sincerely yours,
T. S. Eliot

1–Quinn enclosed an amended contract for TSE’s
Poems
, limiting Knopf’s control of the copyright to ten years.

2–TSE’s lecture, given on 28 Oct. at the Conference Hall, Westminster, later appeared as ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’,
Shama’a
I: 1 (1920).

3–WL’s extemporised lecture, on 22 Oct., was chaired by Bernard Shaw.

4–
The Waste Land.

Published 7 November 1919

Sir,

Mr Pound’s letter of last week
¹
appears to me quite superfluous. It is perfectly obvious that he must have been indebted to someone, unless he is a Chinese scholar, which nobody supposes; I am perfectly willing to
believe that his creditor is the late Mr Fenollosa;
²
but the gist of my criticism is that Mr Pound is less indebted to previous translators – Giles
³
and Legge
⁴
– than subsequent translators are indebted to Mr Pound.

As for his suspicion that I did not enjoy his Propertius,
⁵
I did not think the question of public interest:
his non plebecula gaudet.
⁶

I am, Sir, yours, etc.,
T.S.E.

1–EP’s letter, headed ‘Mr Pound and his Poetry’ (A., 31 Oct.), took exception to TSE’s review, ‘The Method of Mr Pound’ (24 Oct. 1919, 1065–6), of EP’s
Quia Pauper Amavi.

2–As literary executor of the American Orientalist scholar Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), EP had edited his essay ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’,
Little Review
6 (Sept.–Dec. 1919). In his letter to the A., EP declared himself ‘most decidedly indebted, if not to the Chinese, at any rate to Ernest Fenollosa’s profound insight into the Chinese written character as a poetic medium. This debt is so great that I would not have it lightly forgotten.’

3–H. A. Giles (1845–1935), Professor of Chinese, Cambridge University, 1897–1932; author of
A History of Chinese Literature
(1901) and
Chinese Poetry in English Verse
(1898).

4–James Legge (1815–97), first Professor of Chinese, Oxford University, 1875–97.

5–EP’s book included the first publication in full of ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’. However, TSE was to omit ‘Homage’ from EP’s
Selected Poems
(1928) on the grounds that it was ‘too much a “translation” to be intelligible to any but the accomplished student of Pound’s poetry’ (xxiii).

6–‘the common people do not rejoice in these things’ (Horace,
Epistles
2. 1, 186), a rejoinder to the Latin tag in EP’s letter, ‘
Mollia, Pegasides, date vestro serta
’ [‘Muses, grant a delicate garland to your poet’] (Propertius, III, 19). The quotation from Horace is used as the epigraph to Ben Jonson’s
Catiline
, which TSE was reading.

TS
Northwestern

[November? 1919]

[London]

Dear JM,

Lloyds Bank Limited, 75 Lombard Street, (Bank Station), 1st Floor,
Information
Department, at 12.30. It is quite easy to find. Take a bus to the bank.

Will you please bring the Jepson article with you, if as I expect it is of no use to you, as I shall put it into the last
Egoist
.
¹

Yrs,
TSE

1–Jepson’s article did not appear in the
Egoist
.

2–TSE adapts his own verses ‘Airs of Palestine, No. 2’ (‘God from a Cloud to Spender spoke’), which probably date from 1917 (
IMH
, 84–5). Cf. Numbers 20.11: ‘And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also.’ J. C. Squire had relinquished his literary editorship of the
New Statesman
to found
The London Mercury
, which he was to edit from Nov. 1919 until 1934. In addition, he edited
Land &Water
from 1914 until 1920 (when it was incorporated into
The Field
), advised Robert Graves about his short-lived
Owl
, 1919, and contributed to the
Westminster Gazette.

MS
Houghton

10 November 1919

[London]

My dear dear Mother,

I wired to you day before yesterday, because I had not written to you for some time. I keep saying to myself that I should write just half a page, but the desire to write a really
good
letter is too strong for me, and I postpone it to the next night. And the trouble is also that I want to write you several letters at once: one about my and our personal affairs, one about literature, one about your affairs, and one just affection.

Now I have not heard from
you
for some time, and I am worrying about strikes in America. From what little is in our papers the situation appears very critical;
¹
it is quite impossible here to understand what is going on or the motives of both combatants. But I see it always as it may affect you, both financially and worse than personal inconvenience. I have felt that at such a time I must have you over here where you would be safe. My dearest wish is that you may get rid of the real estate, and get east, and then I can come and fetch you to stay with us for months.

The particular causes of my being so busy have been two, of both of which I sent you notices. My lecture was said to be a great success. There were about three hundred present – the room was full, and a good many
poets etc. came prepared to ask questions. I had, in a sense, both a hostile chairman and a hostile audience. The chairman, Binyon,
²
is a middle aged poetic celebrity who evidently knew nothing about me except that I was supposed to be the latest rage and he didn’t understand it and didn’t like it. He did his best, but thought it his duty in his introductory speech to refute – or at least deny – everything he thought I would say. I carefully avoided mentioning any living poet by name, which disappointed the people who had come to hear me praise Pound or condemn Rupert Brooke, or put my foot into it in any of the ways in which I might bring popular fury onto myself. There was a heavy fire of heckling afterward, out of which I managed to escape by the philosophic method of replying to any question by another question.

It took me a long time to prepare the lecture. I have sent it off to the Secretary of the Arts League of Service, who wants it for a Review in India.
³
I am going to develop the various parts of it, divide it into separate essays or chapters, and make a small book of it.

The other thing was a long essay on Ben Jonson for the
Times Literary Supplement
, which I have just finished; about twice as long as an
Athenaeum
review. It should appear on Thursday, and I will send it you. You will therefore be interested in the letter which I enclose.

I must stop now – this is already too long for a short letter! I will write again on Sunday, and I owe letters to Marion, Charlotte, Ada and Shef. The books have arrived, beautifully packed.

Your very loving son
Tom.