The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (117 page)

1–JMM had published two books in Mar.:
The Things We Are
(a novel) and
The Problem of Style
.

PC
Texas

Wednesday [19 April 1922]

Thank you for your suggestion. Come to the Piccadilly at 5.15 and I will look out for you – inside the Regent St entrance. That will be the best place for me as I too shall be on my way somewhere.

T.S.E. 

MS
BL

20 April 1922

12 Wigmore St

My dear Sydney,

I return herewith the letter from Squire
¹
which I think ought to be preserved. You have all my sympathy for having had to receive such an insult. It is much worse even than I should have expected. You see, don’t you, that no truce is possible with such people when anything out of the ordinary merely provokes a sneer, in the very first sentence. I like his saying that it doesn’t ‘bowl us over’! Please look at the sort of thing they
‘find room for’
in the last number. I know how you must feel about it.

I am glad to hear that you are finding Paris profitable, with new people of interest as well as old friends; and it is very satisfactory to know that
Elinor Colhouse
is to be translated into French. Had I not fallen ill, I should have written to ask you, as I had in mind, whether you wished Vanderpyl to know that you are a writer.

It has been rather difficult, as Vivien has had a bad time recovering herself and has had me on her hands as well. I am behindhand with a lot of work – a week in bed is a serious loss for a man in my position – and am about ready to chuck up literature altogether and retire; I don’t see why I should go on for ever fighting a rearguard action against time, fatigue and illness and complete lack of recognition of these three facts.

Always yours aff. T.S.E. 

1–The letter from J. C. Squire does not survive.

MS
Beinecke

20 April 1922

12 Wigmore St

It is very pleasant to hear from you again. O dear, I should have liked to come to supper on Sunday, but I have been laid up for several days with a chill, and shan’t be out in the evening anyway. Is there any chance of a subsequent Sunday?

Yours sincerely
T. S. Eliot

TS
Beinecke

23 April 1922

Dear Thayer:

Thanks for permission to use Turk. Night.

I shd. be very glad to use The Hungarian Night; as it appeared in The Dial = but I’m afraid the damn technicalities of my contract oblige me to make a new translation.
¹
it is a waste = but I have done it. Have done it here where I cdn’t compare it to the anonymous Dial version. I don’t think I have improved on it.

Will of course make due acknowledgments to Dial.

Re. Eliot. he is again ill, I hear.

Order of facts in face of anomaly.

1.  I tried to get him to finish poem & send it to you from Paris (in January I think)
   1a. Wrote to Eliot to send poem.
   
2. I wrote to X to see that T. S. E. sent poem to you.
   
3.  Spoke with friend, returning to London saying he shd persuade T. S. E. to send poem.
   
4.  Eliot writes me (as I think I mentioned in a p.s.) that Geo Moore is getting special rates from the Dial. (also S. Anderson)
   
5.  That being the case I can hardly reprove Eliot – if you have put the thing on a commercial basis, for holding out for as high a price as he can get. i.e. if the Dial is a business house, it gets business treatment. If the Dial is a patron of literature T. contends it should not pay extra rates for ‘mere senility’. All of which is extreme theory-ism, perhaps, on his part.
   

I do not concur in his refusing to let you publish the poem. (In fact I have emphatically dis-concurred with a number of his recent movements re/ another matter.)

I don’t from your note, know precicely what he thinks I concur in, or what he has led you to think I concur in.

I cannot relish being paid less than a senile bunch of tripes like Geo. Moore, any more than does Eliot. But then you and I haven’t the long personal background, that you and he have and I am possibly less mercurial in these matters. – my health is better than his.

I happen to think his poem worth more than a whole vol. or six vols. of Geo. M. – especially since the old souse has taken to gingerbread fake antiques.

I shd. prefer one good review to several less good ones.

I have, as I think you know, always wanted to see a concentration of the authors I believe in, in one review. The Dial perhaps looks better to me than it does to Eliot. (life in general does.)

However if you and Lady R. and the ‘Times’ want him I can’t but concur in his holding out for the highest bid. (Though I think it is a little rough of him to drag me into the auction rooms – where I have no desire to be.[)]

I have, I must have, bored you to death reiterating my belief that the way to make a literature is to provide the few men capable of producing it, with leisure.

This ‘few’ does not, alas, include all of your contributors.

It would mean in a perfect state of things, very high payment for a piece of real work. If you haven’t even seen the
mss.
it is rather unreasonable of Tom to expect you to believe that it is a masterpiece.

But as I’m not au courant with Geo. M’s prices, etc. etc. etc. I cannot go into details about price. I have never I think, gone much into details about my own prices (am perhaps an awful warning to T.) & I cannot be expected to go into details about other peoples prices. THERE IS MORE OF THIS LETTER TO COME
²

Yours
Ezra Pound   
over
for P.S.

Have recd. two letters from America mentioning the Dial, one thought it was improving. Tother complained that Dial readers were probably too ‘Sherwood-Andersonized’ to take in any extraneous idea. – but then I hardly hear from anyone who isn’t more or less on my side of the fences: international high vs. localism. E. P

1–Paul Morand’s ‘Turkish Night’, trans. by EP,
Dial
, Sept. 1921, and ‘Hungarian Night’,
Dial
, Nov. 1920. An English edition was envisaged but not achieved.

2–Thayer replied to EP on 30 Apr. that TSE’s letter of 16 Mar. had accused him of lying about the rates paid by the
Dial
. ‘In offering to accept his poem without having seen it and in offering to pay him a round sum for it I went beyond the limit of what an editor should do. And in answer I received a telegram which I could take only as an insult’ (
Pound, Thayer, Watson, and The Dial
). 

MS
Texas

26 April 1922

12 Wigmore St, w.1

My dear Ottoline,

I was so glad to get your letter – I was just on the point of writing to you too. Vivien sends you her love. We have both had incessant illness since a week before Easter – neither of us has seen anyone for some time. What we want is to go for a few weeks somewhere near enough for me to get up to town, as I can’t get any holiday just now. We want to get braced up. We have never been to Brighton, and I know you know it and I should be very grateful if you could recommend a hotel there to start with. Even if it was expensive for us, it would not matter so much, as we could look about for a cheaper one when we got there. Brighton is a very easy journey with good early trains. It is no use my wasting time looking about – so could you tell me of the hotels you know there?

We should both love to come to Garsington as soon as we are back and recuperated. If we stayed away as long as three weeks the 20th would be too soon, but might we fix the week or the fortnight afterwards? I will get [Wyndham] Lewis – I have not seen him for a number of weeks. Unless he is particularly interested in Eights Week!

I did enjoy seeing you, so much, that brief afternoon, and you
looked
so well – I hope you are. Vivien will write very soon, and longs to see you; she had been intending to write for some days, but not up to it.

Have you read Murry’s books? I cannot get up enough interest at the moment.

Yours always affectionately
Tom.

MS
Texas

Thursday [27 April 1922]

[12 Wigmore St]

My dear Mary

Be it so – I trust your judgment. I hope your news of Massine
¹
at the Coliseum is true, as I have been to see him and thought him more brilliant and beautiful than ever – if what you said was sincere it is I consider a
great compliment, as I (having never been so close before) quite fell in love with him. I want to meet him more than ever, and he is a genius.

About us to dinner – we are both so run down that I am writing to one or two places near London with a view to our going away for two or three weeks, where I can get up to town. We should try to get away toward the end of the week, or sooner if possible, so we can make no engagements at the moment. We should have loved to come, but – and this Wigmore [Street flat] is a difficult place to live in, and we can’t get back till June, and are both
very
seedy, so I think it is a good idea. But I hope to see Massine with you. I enjoyed our Piccadilly tea so much.

Yrs ever aff
T.

Will ring you up early in the week.

1–Léonide Massine (1896–1979), Russian dancer and choreographer, joined Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. TSE called him ‘the greatest mimetic dancer in the world’ (‘Commentary’, C. 3: 9, Oct. 1924, 5).

MS
Berg

6 May 1922

12 Wigmore St

Dear Leonard

I am so sorry and anxious to hear that Virginia is ill again.
¹
I pray that it is not serious, and hope to hear of her progress. Do give her my sincere sympathy: we know what constant illness is, and I think very few people do.
²
I hope that I shall see you both soon.

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

1–VW had told Roger Fry on 6 Apr. that she had ‘the most violent cold in the whole parish’ (
Letters
, II, 525).

2–He was to publish her essay ‘On Being Ill’,
NC
4: 1 (Jan. 1926).

MS
Texas

7 May 1922

12 Wigmore St

Monsieur,

I am writing to express my thanks for your admirable translation of my chronicle.
²
It is not simply that you have been faithful to the sense, but
that you have improved the expression; so that the article is actually
better written
than it was in English. I have compared the text, and note several pleonasms and bad phrases which you have ingeniously removed. Your knowledge of English must be quite remarkable, and I shall hope and trust that anything I write will pass through your hands.

I hope also that we may meet on my next visit to Paris.

Je vous prie, Monsieur, d’accepter l’expression de mes sentiments empressés.
³

T. S. Eliot 

1–Charles du Bos (1882–1939), French man of letters.

2–‘Lettre d’Angleterre’,
NRF
18 (May 1922), 617–24. Jacques Rivière also said the
chronique
was excellent (4 Mar. 1922). A revised English text appeared, as ‘A Preface to Modern Literature: Being a Conspectus Chiefly of English Poetry, Addressed to an Intelligent and Inquiring Foreigner’, in
Vanity Fair
21: 3 (Nov. 1923), 44, 118.

3–‘I beg you, sir, to accept an assurance of my attentive regards.’

PC
Texas

[Postmark 12 May 1922]

Castle Hotel, Tunbridge Wells

Thanks very much for your two letters, will answer on Sunday. Have retired here for a needed change of air, coming up every day – Very grateful thanks.

Aff.
T. 

MS
Texas

[17? May 1922]

Castle Hotel, Tunbridge Wells [Kent]

My dear Ottoline

You see we have finally come to Tunbridge Wells. We had to give up the idea of Brighton because it proved to be too far for me to come up every day. Lewis rang me up on Saturday and said that you wished to change our visit to the 16th June. That will suit us very well, and is a happy coincidence. I have just had an invitation from my father-in-law to spend a fortnight in Italy, and have just arranged to get away for a fortnight of my holiday at the end of the week so I should have been writing to you today in any case. So I shall be away from the 20th May till the
4th June,
and shall look forward to seeing you the following weekend. Vivien is here with me; she cannot decide whether to take the opportunity to come as far as Paris with me and stay there while I am in Italy, or to go miserably to the seaside in further search of health. She is very seedy, and also in the middle of an attack of your kind of neuralgia. She sends you her love, and
says that in any case she will be back in time for the weekend at Garsington.

I think this visit to Italy will just save me from another breakdown, which I felt was impending.

Yours affectionately
Tom.