The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (82 page)

1–TSE, ‘Dante as a “Spiritual Leader”’, a review of Henry Dwight Sidgwick,
Dante
, in
A.
,

2 Apr. 1920; repr. with revisions in
SW
.

MS
BL

24 March 1920

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1

Dear Sydney,

This cannot pretend to be an answer to all of your letters since I last wrote. But you must understand that there is no one from whom I more enjoy hearing than yourself, and no one to whom I should write more at length if I could.

All that you say about my work is a great pleasure and encouragement to me.

I only wish that Stephen Hudson appeared to have found Cap Martin
¹
a release from preoccupations, and that he could manage for six months to cast them off wholly and write.

Now, I have had your letter of the 16th before me, recounting your difficulties with
A[rt] & L[etters]
which do not in the least surprise me. I know how little there ever is worth printing. I will send Rutter a prose and if possible a short poem as well but I can’t promise this. But do
not
let
my
contributions go toward inducing you to bring out the paper when you have not enough else. I don’t know whether you have seen the Sitwells on their way to Italy; but I don’t suppose anything is to be expected of them when on their travels. They have left Edith as their literary executor. But unless people write prose as well as verse – or at least write verse of a very wide range of emotion and thought – they cannot exactly provide the backbone of a paper.

Certainly, no new material of any merit has come into my sight lately. The
Little Review
and possibly the
Dial
(which has lately been bought and is being run by a friend of mine) are the only American periodicals I know of where one can ever look in the hope of finding anything. I have no idea what sort of stuff is
sent in
to
Art & Letters.

You must not mind pressing people. Lewis of course ought to devote himself to painting for some time to come. He has dispersed his energies far too much. His drawings, to my mind, have a
classical
quality, give me a conviction of permanence, that even his best writing does not. I am much interested in your comparison with Mantegna, because I have always felt that. Mantegna is a painter for whom I have a particular admiration – there is none who appeals to me more strongly. Do you know the
St Sebastian in the Franchetti’s house on the Grand Canal? I imagine somehow that you must know the Franchetti family.

I should like to know how long you intend to stay in Roquebrune. Are you coming north, to Paris, or are you coming to England for the summer season?

With kindest regards to Violet

Affectionately
T. S. Eliot

I met Major Douglas
²
not long ago at Pound’s and liked him. His book is interesting, but fearfully difficult and obscurely written.

I agree with what you say about contemporary English periodicals. Be sure that I have it on my mind to do all I can for
A&L
and I think I see most of your difficulties pretty well.

The
Chapbook
I am sending is an essay written hastily and spasmodically over considerable time. All I can say is that it contains a few ideas which I want to make better use of later. I shall want to know your opinion of my Dante (
Athenaeum
).

Write to me about Hudson.

I want to write to you a separate letter about Tchehov.

TSE

1–In his letter of 22 Feb., SS wrote that moving into his new house, ‘Villa Violet’, at Roquebrune, Cap Martin, had been exhausting. TSE refers to SS in the third person by his
nom-de-plume
, Stephen Hudson.

2–C. H. Douglas (1879–1952), a British engineer, conceived the theory of Social Credit, which meant supplementing the amount of money available to consumers to enable them to buy all the goods produced.
Economic Democracy
(1920) was enthusiastically reviewed by EP (
Little Review
, Apr. 1920); and in the 1930s both
New Age
and
New English Weekly
supported Social Credit.

MS
Texas

Thursday [25 March 1920]

Dear Mary,

I should like very much to meet Tonks,
¹
and I shall come to supper on Sunday with great pleasure.

I have had your enquiry in mind and should have answered it before now if I had had time. Perhaps I can answer more intelligibly verbally.

Yrs.

Tom.

And I have a question to ask Jack.
I suppose you are at River House [in London], not at Wittering.

1–Henry Tonks (1862–1937), Professor of Fine Art at the Slade, 1917–30, a champion of traditional drawing who considered Augustus John ‘the greatest draughtsman since Michelangelo’. He taught WL, and was a friend of the Hutchinsons (he had exhibited a pastel of MH at the New English Arts Club, 1913).

TS
Beinecke

26 March 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Scofield,

I am appreciative of your thoughtfulness in cabling to me; my reply will have made evident to you that I found your question difficult to answer. I know Cummings
¹
only as a contributor to the two numbers of the
Dial
that I have seen, and the writer (in one of them) of a critical article on a man whom I know nothing about.
²
I could have suggested someone in England – Huxley, for example – but that I supposed you would not want the delay of giving the book to an English reviewer. But as you were so astute as to take it away from Untermeyer
³
and not let it be engulphed in a common fate with Osbert Sitwell’s, I feel that I am perfectly safe in leaving it to your discretion. In spite of my personal affection for Osbert, I should certainly prefer to be reviewed separately.

I will discuss the matter with Pound and enquire his intentions the next time I see him. I shall willingly let you print anything of mine that appears here that seems to me worth reprinting. I have so little time that I shall not often be able to offer entirely fresh material. I have two sets of essays in contemplation at present; and if you come across anything of mine in any English paper that you would care to reprint either verbatim or in a somewhat altered form, let me know about it.

I am sorry that you cannot come to England this summer, and I hope that the affairs of the
Dial
will take such a direction that you will at least be able to come in the autumn.

Always cordially,
Tom.

1–Thayer had cabled to say he had asked the poet and artist E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) to review
Poems
. TSE did not realise that Cummings had played Second Footman to his Lord Bantock in
Fanny and the Servant Problem
, 1913 (letter to Eleanor Hinkley, 3 Jan. 1915). However, Cummings, who had been at Harvard at the same time as TSE, remembered that the hero had been brilliantly played by a ‘cold and aloof’ person. See his review of
Poems
, in Dial 68: 6 (June 1920).

2–Cummings had contributed some poems and drawings to
Dial
68: 1 (Jan. 1920), and an article on Gaston Lachaise (1882–1935), the French-born American sculptor (who in 1924 would execute a bust of Cummings), to
Dial
68: 2 (Feb. 1920).

3–Louis Untermeyer (1885–1977), poet and anthologist. His review of
Poems
showed how Sitwell, in
Argonaut and Juggernaut
, ‘frankly models his new quatrains on the plan of “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”’ (
Freeman
, 30 June 1920).

TS
Houghton

26 March 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Henry,

I have not written to you for some time, except a long letter about mother and my anxiety that she should visit England as soon as possible; to which I hope I shall soon have a reply from you. It has been much more on my mind than you can imagine, and has been infinitely exasperating. Mother’s mention of the subject so far has been vague and procrastinating, meanwhile I cannot make any plans or arrangements for our summer, which I ought to have done already, and I see the time slipping by. I told her that when she sold the house and began to move east would be exactly the most suitable time in her whole life to come, and now she has sold the house, and wants to wait until she is settled in Boston. And I have not heard from her for a fortnight now. I wish
you
could make her see that
this
is an opportunity that may not come again. It is almost impossible for any of our family to make up their minds. In a few years she may be too infirm to come, and then she will regret not having come now, and I shall regret it all the rest of my life. Just now she is or should be free – she will never be any freer; and if she would only examine the future, and her own state of mind, she would find I think that the latter exhibits the same procrastination and hesitation that she has deplored in her father and in her children. Will you try to see how I look at the situation?

I am returning the letters which you asked for.
²
At the same time I must say this: that I think, as you had enough confidence in me to write to me so fully once, you ought in fairness to me to write more fully now. If you think that I cared then – and I think you would not have written as you did unless [illegible words] of sympathy you could not have had from anyone else – I think you ought to realise that I still feel and think a great deal about you. If I thought that you had written merely to relieve yourself to somebody, merely to write a letter about you, I should not easily forgive your giving so much pain; but I do not think that.

I have another letter from you, written two years ago shortly after the first, in which you wished to retract much of what you had said. You have never in all the time referred to it again. It has seemed to me that for some time past you have written much less frequently, and much more impersonally when you did write, and without very much curiosity in my
affairs. You say that you are ashamed of yourself, because you [are] too ‘introspective’ and ‘garrulous’. On the contrary, I felt rather that I wanted to know more about your life than you told me, because I am always trying to picture and imagine it. What I found was more unhappiness than introspection.
³

If you interpreted my silence correctly, you saw that it meant that I thought the thing was done with, and if so there was no need for anything more to be said. If it was not done with, I think that you might let me know, and what I want to know now is whether you still see her.

I may say that I have kept quite distinct the impression I got of the person and the impression I got of the affair. And I was sure that giving her every good quality, she was still bad for you, and you could never be good for her, and that the only healthy solution was for it to drop altogether. Nothing shocks me except morbidity, and I know that a morbid relation never becomes a healthy one. I live among a set of people some of whom would probably shock your friends (all of them) terribly by varieties of ‘immorality’ with no pretense; but these people are capable of being shocked in the way that I am. (They may consider myself and Vivien exceptionally moral, but they do not think any the worse of us for that – it merely seems to them interesting).

[Incomplete]

1–Text taken from an unreliable photocopy of a transcript; the original is mislaid.

2–On 25 Dec. 1919, HWE had written: ‘About February 1, 1918, I sent you a long letter, about 25 pages long, with enclosure of a note. Will you send that back to me?’

3–HWE had written: ‘I wish that I might give you a picture of myself, in my present environment (Chicago). I am not sure whether it would interest you, bore you, or puzzle you. Your attitude might be somewhat like that of a naturalist studying a colony of ants. I have a horror of your ceasing altogether to think of me as a sentient, rational, self-conscious being.’

MS
NYPL (MS)

26 March 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mr Quinn,

Thank you very much indeed for your letter of the 6th instant, received yesterday.
¹
I shall always be conscious of my very great obligations to you, and I shall not forget that but for you the book would never have been published at all.

I am very glad that Thayer is in contact with you and I hope that he will make something good out of the
Dial
. It is free from some of the
drawbacks of the
Little Review
; whether it has others of its own I do not know. Certain criticisms came to my mind at once, of course. It struck me as having far too much in it: one cannot keep so bulky a paper up to a very high standard, and the good stuff might easily be swamped. I thought there were too many articles, all flung in on the same footing; and that it ought to be split up into departments to be made more readable. The
London Mercury
is a despicable volume, but it is well arranged and its appearance is attractive. I warned Thayer against taking the
Mercury
seriously, or entering into close relations with it. That would damage the
Dial
in the eyes of the better English writers.

I am glad you suggested Pound. I will ask him about your letter and his intentions. At any rate it will cheer him up a bit. He has just finished a new long poem which I think has some very good things in it.
²

Thayer has just cabled to me to ask if Cummings should review my book. I cabled back (at his request) to say that I know nothing whatever about Cummings, and I took the liberty of asking him to consult you.
³
I dislike always putting any further burden on your shoulders (I do not understand how you accomplish as much as you do) but I really could not think of anyone else in New York whose opinion I could trust. I could have suggested someone in London. Middleton Murry or Aldous Huxley even – but I thought that probably Thayer wanted the review done at once, and that perhaps having the review appear a month earlier would be an advantage. In any case I suppose the book will be given to someone who likes it. Thayer tells me in a letter I have today that he rescued it from Untermeyer, who wanted to review it with Osbert Sitwell. It seems rather astute of Thayer to have stopped this. I know little of Untermeyer, but Heaven preserve me from being reviewed in the company of Osbert. I may say that any poems of his which appear to have any affinity with any of mine were published
subsequent
to mine.

Rodker told me that you had ordered three signed copies of his edition, so that I thought it might be no particular gratification to you to receive another from me; but I have one that I kept for you, if you wish it.

A serious operation is, I know, something that can upset the nerves for a very long time, and I fear you draw upon your nerves pretty heavily. You
must have the foundation of a strong constitution, but I hope that you really are regaining strength as well.

Very cordially yours
T. S. Eliot

I am gradually putting a prose book together – I think much more solid than the first attempt; and there is a possibility of getting a good publisher to take it here. But London ‘good publishers’ are very cautious.