The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (85 page)

MS
Beinecke

1 July 1920

[London]

Dear Monro,

Thank you very much for your letter of the 25th. I shall be delighted to give you an option on the execution of any idea that comes which appears suitable for the
Chapbook
– which, being
sui generis
, is an extremely useful periodical for any writer to be able to contribute to.

I don’t suppose I shall have a single idea until I have my book off my mind and a couple of months rest. But I hope to be replenished later.

Yrs sincerely
T. S. Eliot

I’ll write again when I have time and try to have some ‘ideas’ for you!

TS
Beinecke

3 July 1920

at 31 West St, Marlow

Dear EP

I have not yet received the Benda of which you speak.
¹
I recall his name as a colleague of Péguy. Is that the same man? I will try to do it as soon as
possible but shall be rushed for the next three or four weeks trying to finish polishing the essays for my book. You appear to have made a pretty clean sweep of Paris, on which I congratulate you. With all this stuff and the best English it ought to be possible to extend the circulation of the
Dial
even into England. I certainly cannot think of any other French writer worth having. I am afraid there won’t be so much in this country. I am sending Scofield two articles I have just done on criticism, which I hope he will use soon if at all as I must use them for the book.
²

I expect to be here until July 25 (about) after which address Crawford Mansions but I expect you will be in this country by that time. I plan to go to France in September. I wish to go to the country for ten days or two weeks (any suggestions for itinerary welcomed) and the rest of the time in Paris, where I should like to see anybody worth seeing. Vivien will probably join me in Paris, and therefore there is now no chance of her going there in July.

Is there any chance of Joyce staying in Paris or coming to London, so that he could be seen?

Bodenheim now says he is returning to New York at the earliest possible opportunity. He has discovered that it is very difficult to make a living in London, Murry after preliminary effusiveness has dropped him altogether, and he has put the backs up against him of most of the native English whom he has met. I don’t know that there is anything to be done for him (I fear a contribution toward his travelling expenses will be necessary – Mr B. Mrs B. and Master Max junior). He is in some ways more intelligent than the native Britons and excites hostility in that and other ways. Do you take any interest in this case? Lewis finds him much more tolerable than Rodker. But I can’t see any means by which Bodenheim might be made self-supporting here; can you?

I have seen a copy of
Instigations
which was sent to Lewis.
³
It makes a very favourable impression.

I await your further news. Regards to Dorothy, and hope that Paris is not too oppressively hot and humid for her.

Yours
T

I meant to begin with this: I have seen Murry and secured a vague understanding that he would print a few of the poems (I said
not more
than five) but he has not read them yet. I must say that he is much more difficult to deal with when K. M. is about, and I have an impression that she terrorises him. He told Ottoline that K. M. was the only living writer of English prose (this is as Ott. reports it). I believe her to be a dangerous WOMAN; and of course two sentimentalists together are more than two times as noxious as one. She is going back to San Remo for the winter, in September.
⁴

1–Julien Benda (1867–1956), French critic and essayist; author of
LaTrahison des Clercs
(1927).

2–TSE’s first contributions to the
Dial
: ‘The Possibility of Poetic Drama’ (Nov. 1920) and ‘The Second-Order Mind’ (Dec. 1920). The first was reprinted in
SW
; the second formed part of the introduction.

3–EP’s essays (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920).

4–Although OM had been close to Katherine Mansfield and her husband JMM, there had been rows in 1917 when JMM told his wife that OM was in love with him, and in 1918, when JMM gave a hostile review of Siegfried Sassoon which led OM to write, ‘A mighty quarrel is raging between JMMand myself’ (Seymour,
Life on the Grand Scale
, 299). It is not clear why TSE felt such hostility towards Mansfield. However, he and VHE had recently dined with JMM and Mansfield, who took a violent dislike to VHE, as she explained in a letter to Violet Schiff on 14 May: ‘The Elliots [
sic
] have dined with us tonight. They are just gone – and the whole room is
quivering
. John has gone downstairs to see them off. Mrs E’s voice rises “O don’t commiserate Tom; he’s
quite
happy.” I know its extravagant … but I dislike her so
immensely
. She really repels me … And Elliott, leaning towards her, admiring, listening, making the most of her – really minding whether she disliked the country or not … I am so fond of Elliot … But this teashop creature …’ (
Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield
IV, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, 1966).

TS
Houghton

3 July 1920

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1

Dearest Mother,

I believe it is over three weeks since I have written to you, not counting enclosures sent you to peruse. I have been first very busy trying to find a flat, and have not succeeded, and second, have been trying to do my book. First then, I have received the power of attorney forms several days ago,
¹
and did not have time to attend to them for two or three days. Then I went to my solicitor, Mr Leigh Hunt (of James & James) to do it for me, and he said he would have to get a proper notary for it, but that he would do to identify me. So I am to see him tomorrow, and will cable you the same day. I am sorry for the delay, but I did not know any notary or government official who could swear to my identity, so I am doing it this way.

So long as you hold the shares for me I suppose that you will pay the insurance out of it, keeping the policy there, but if you sold the shares and remitted me the money to invest here, you would send me the policy so that I could pay the premiums myself. I agree with you about not selling at the
present time. I hope that the labour over this transfer has not added much to what you must have gone through in leaving St Louis. You must be thoroughly exhausted, and on top of that you have to go househunting. I shall wait anxiously for reports of your health. I know that househunting is the most tiring thing one could do. We have looked at a few houses too. A few were slightly cheaper than some of the flats we have seen, but we calculated that they would be very much more expensive to run. They all needed cleaning, painting, and papering to begin with, they would use much more coal and gas, and an extra servant now and then. We want something that we could manage without any servant if necessary. The flats have run from two to four times what we pay now. In addition, everybody has been waiting for the new rents act to pass Parliament.
²
Rents have been limited during the war, but people have been demanding ‘premiums’: £200–£500 down on signing the lease, besides the regular rent. They say premiums will be illegal, but prices will certainly go up 40% now. Flats are very much in demand, because English
houses
were constructed when it was easy to get servants very cheap, and are very difficult to run without servants. If we lost the woman we have now, we should have to pay twice as much for another who would probably work shorter hours. And if we move to very far from where we are, she will not be able to come to us from where she lives. So it is a very difficult problem, and we have been utterly tormented. We may
have
to stay where we are. Yet there are flats to be had – only at such prices! And Crawford Mansions we have come to loathe on account of the noise and sordidness.

All this has been very unsettling for taking a vacation. I made enquiries, some time ago, and was told by the Cunard that I could not get a passage to America before November. When I come I shall have to come by that line, because it is much the quickest. This year the boats are crowded with American travellers. So, as we both are so unsettled and homeless, and as I do not like to be far away in case of losing a chance to secure a flat, it seems to me much better to leave it till spring. If you are in a position to come then, that will be the best thing in the world for me; and if not, you will know by February
definitely
, and I will come in March. It must be one or the other. You said in one letter ‘don’t you want to come to America?’ It is not at all that I don’t want to come. But I
do
rather dread
coming for such a very very short time, because I know that there will [be] so much pain about seeing you for such a short time. If I could come for six weeks I should be wild with impatience to come. And if I can’t see you here next spring I must come, because I should regret it every hour of my life if I did not.

My book is supposed to be out in the autumn, and therefore I must try to get it finished by the end of this month. There will not be much in it that you will not have seen already. But it will be a satisfaction to have a prose book. Methuen suggests that I should follow it up with another on English prose, so I hope that this will succeed so that he will want another. I want to do a book on the Elizabethan era, going in to it rather more profoundly than any of the former critics have done.

I enclose review from the
Dial
. It is very flattering, but silly and pretentious.1 When I get a scrapbook and paste all my reviews in it I will send it to you to read. If reviews sell a book, mine ought to be a success, but that is not certain.

I am to contribute to the
Dial
when I can. Pound is English editor, and is now in Paris getting French contributors. I have been invited to collaborate in a review in Geneva,
³
and Wyndham Lewis wants me to help him with an art and literature review,
Art & Letters
having gone out of existence. I cannot do all of these things.

I do not accept the interpretation of me which the
Times Literary
Supplement
is accustomed to make, elsewhere as well as in the review of Huxley’s book which you read. I have a very low opinion of this book. Huxley has, of course, like a number of other young men, borrowed a good deal from my poetry.3 Aldington is an exception – he does not like my poetry, and says so frankly, but I like him none the less. I do not know why it is, but men five years younger than I seem to me much younger, and if they become my friends I feel a sort of paternal responsibility, yet men five years older seem to me about the same age. Murry is my age, Pound is four years older, Lewis is five years older, and Strachey is nearly forty; so is Sydney Waterlow. But Osbert Sitwell and his brother,
Aldington, Huxley, Herbert Read, and several Americans whom I only know by correspondence, all seem children almost.

Conrad Aiken is in London – I think you have heard me speak of him, I knew him at Harvard, and he is now quite a flourishing poet in America. He is very nice, but in comparison with Englishmen seems to have had rather a soft and easy intellectual existence – not the hard knocking about that one gets among men of brains here. There is an odd American Jew here named Bodenheim; rather pathetic, although foolish. He is a vagrant poet and man of letters at home, and thought that he could pick up a living just as easily here. He received his first blow when he found that no one had heard of him. I told him my history here, and left him to consider whether an American Jew, of only a common school education and no university degree, with no money, no connections, and no social polish or experience, could make a living in London. Of course I did not say all this; but I made him see that getting recognised in English letters is like breaking open a safe – for an American, and that only about three had ever done it. The worst is that he has a wife – they came in the steerage – and his wife is having a baby, and now he wants to go back, and cannot get a passage, and his wife is not well enough to travel, and I do not believe he has any money. What is one to do! it is very distressing, but I think it is better that he should go back. Yet he has a better mind than most of the people here, though he has never been taught to write properly; a much better mind than Aiken, who gets on much better (he has an independent income too).

I want to know where you are, and what you are doing, and especially how you are. Are you at Millis? I hope it is cool and comfortable there.

With very very much love

your son
Tom

1–E. E. Cummings, in ‘T. S. Eliot’ (
Dial
69: 6, June 1920), characterised
Poems
as ‘an accurate and incorpulent collection of instupidities’, and praised its ‘overwhelming sense of technique’ and ‘delicate and careful murderings … of established tempos by oral rhythms’.

2–
La Revue de Genève.

3–‘The Old Grimace’,
TLS
, 27 May 1920, a review [by Arthur Clutton-Brock] of AH’s
Leda
, noted that many of AH’s poems ‘remind one, in mood and even in manner, of Mr. T. S. Eliot; they express the fact that to the writer life is absurd in its traditional delights and, for the rest, tiresome’ (327).