The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (121 page)

1–Quinn pledged $300 per annum for five years.

2–In his efforts to liberate TSE from Lloyds Bank, EP was seeking thirty guarantors of £10 a year for an indefinite period.

3–RA, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’,
TLS
, 29 June 1922, 417–18.

TS
Princeton

1 July 1922

9 Clarence Gate Gdns

Dear Leonard,

I am waiting hopefully to know whether the Dostoevski plan or the Tolstoi letters are possible;
¹
as I want to send one advance circular to the printer in a few days time, I should very much like to know. Either, of course, would be extremely valuable; I would publish them as soon as was desirable for your own purposes, or give you as long as need be for their preparation.

I do not want to bother Virginia, who I hope is better than she was, but I should like to remind her that she promised me a title.
²
If time worries her, I could just manage until January, but I should like to promise the public that something of hers would appear in an early number. I hope your silence does not mean that she has not been so well. My own faith in the omniscience of physicians has been very much disturbed in the last year or two.

Sincerely yours,
T. S. Eliot

If you see Roger Fry, tell him that I very much hope for something from him soon.

Could you also let me know the name of the woman [Mrs Green] you spoke of who translates from German, as I have not yet found anyone else? I should like to try her on something in the first number. 

1–TSE’s hopes were to be realised with the publication of ‘A Few Extracts from Letters exchanged between Leo Nicolayevich Tolstoy and N. N. Strakhov relating to F. M. Dostoevsky’, trans. S. S. Koteliansky, in C. 3: 10 (Jan. 1925), 164–9.

2–VW had written on 14 Apr. to say she would try to write something of ‘less than 5,000 words’ by 15 Aug.; she would ‘very much like to be edited’ by TSE. VW’s story ‘In the Orchard’ was to appear in C. 1: 3 (Apr. 1923).

TS/MS
BL

4 July 1922

9 Clarence Gate Gdns

My dear
Schiff
Sydney,

I have your two notices and Violet’s postcard. I am very grateful to you for having written to Proust at once as I realise how difficult it is to turn to such a task in the midst of preparations for departure. I have also written to him, and as you suggested have sent it to his private address. I await consequences eagerly.

In my letter I said that I did not know of anyone but yourself who was competent to translate him into English, but that you had volunteered to do it if he was willing to let something of his appear.

I will send the books to Einstein as you suggest. We hope to hear soon that you are benefiting from Crowborough and getting a great deal of work done there.

Affectionately yours,
Tom.

Vivien wishes me to say that she does greatly appreciate and realise the interest which you and Violet take in her health and welfare. She also is grateful for your understanding of her circumstances, a thing which she never even expects from anyone else.

As the review draws near I find my correspondence in connection with it so overwhelming, moreover as I cannot altogether drop my attempts to make money by writing, that I have been absolutely forced to employ a shorthand typist two evenings a week for correspondence. Hence anything strained or impersonal you may notice in my letters. 

TS
Texas

4 July 1922

9 Clarence Gate Gdns

My dear Richard,

I was very glad indeed to get your two long letters and the typed translation, which I have not yet had time to examine and which I want to discuss with you later. Probably the only question about it will be the question that arises first – whether it is possible to include a contribution of such length into a periodical of the small dimensions to which we shall be limited at first, – but the dimensions after the first two numbers will depend on the sales and on the contributions.

I subscribe light heartedly to your terms. All of the subjects you mention sound delightful, but if for the first number of you can think of something of a more immediate pertinence I shall be grateful. I think that £10 was rather a meagre payment but I may have told you that I had some friction with the
Dial
on the question of payment which I thought inadequate for my poem, considering the amount of work I had put into it and also considering the vast amount of verse, which in comparison with most writers, I refrained from writing. I subsequently arranged for publication as a book with Liveright, but I am not pleased with his form of contract and I have now put the whole matter in the hands of Quinn.

Be sure that I fully appreciate all of the difficulties you experience in struggling to accomplish something for me. It certainly cannot interfere with our relations – that is an absurd suggestion – but I only fear that the sporadic activities bursting up unexpectedly in various parts of the world will completely block the progress of the main scheme and everybody concerned be made ridiculous.

I shall henceforward be going down to Bosham for my weekends. I only hope that there is some prospect of your being in town for a night in the immediate future?

I am anxious now to find reliable and not too expensive translators for various languages; at the moment French, German and Spanish, but later I shall probably want Italian and Scandinavian as well. Do you think that [Bruce] Richmond can put me on to anybody? I mean from among the people who write short notices on books in various foreign languages in the Supplement [
TLS
]. And also would you have time and would it be worth your while to do from time to time a certain amount of translation (at the translator’s rates to be fixed) from French and Italian?

Yours affectionately,
Tom.

The Criterion
– Vivien’s suggestion.>

MS
Princeton

5 July 1922

9 Clarence Gate Gdns

Dear Leonard,

Thank you for your letter of the 3d. I am disappointed over the Tolstoi, and should still like to believe that I might have a few [of Tolstoi’s letters] to publish at least just before you published the lot as a book. Do you not think that there might be a few suitable for the review, at least by November 1st? My first number should be out by October 1st.

Of course, failing these, and the Dostoevski plan, I should like to have the Stavrogine. Can you tell me (1) whether the version you would offer me would be the one you already showed me or the other (2) when your other version would appear (3) which is longer? I suppose that either version would occupy two numbers.

Please thank Virginia for her title [‘In the Orchard’], which of course she will be at liberty to change; but I trust that will not be necessary. I do hope that Rodmell will be enough to set the doctors’ suspicions at rest;
and tell her that when she can write again, I hope that this will be the first thing she will do.

Yours
T. S. Eliot

Roger Fry has promised to get something done on his return.
¹

1–Roger Fry, ‘Mallarmé’s “Herodiade”’, C. 1: 2 (Jan. 1923), 119–26.

MS
Lilly

9 July 1922

9 Clarence Gate Gdns

Caro Ezra,

The title of the Review is
The Criterion
. This title was suggested by Vivien, as
The London Review
seemed colourless and perhaps misleading, and had just been accepted and approved; and your letter arrived as a most auspicious confirmation. I told Lady R. that you had suggested the same title as had been agreed upon two days before, and she was mightily pleased.

Thanks also for your notes on the slave trade,
¹
which I am keeping by me, but don’t think it is quite the thing to make an impression in an early number – the meaning or implications being too subtle to strike the subscribing public. What about the article on Impressionism which you promised
²
(no need to
boost
joyce as I am reprinting part of Larbaud’s essay
³
as testimony that the Review approves of J. J.)? Are you to be relied upon to promise this
by Nov
.
1
?

About the ‘2Worlds’,
⁴
please let me know about the organisers of it and who the probable star and second star or planetary contributors will be? Is it run and edited by women? Does it approve of the Baroness?

I don’t ask for Cantos simply because I know you can get more money from the
Dial
, and I don’t want at present to use things which appear
previously
in the
Dial
, and it is difficult to arrange for simultaneous
publication in a monthly and a quarterly. Otherwise they would be most particularly sought after.
⁵

I shall be glad to have a conversation with Berman
⁶
if he arrives in this country.

I am now waiting to hear whether Quinn has managed to screw Liveright down to a legal contract or not. I hear from other sources that Liveright is an excellent publisher if you have him pinned down by every legal written safeguard – and that he is quite merciless if you don’t. Quinn seemed quite willing, and I have had a very amiable letter from him.

Do you recommend anybody in France for the
Criterion
? Also, have you come across anyone who is [at] all informed about Scandinavia? I am
not
anxious to get many French people for the
first two
numbers, more anxious to get other (foreign) nationalities: the French business is so usual (in London) that it doesn’t raise a quiver; the only name worth getting is
Proust
, whom I am fishing for. But later, yes, any French stuff that is really
good
no matter who signs it; after two or three numbers could perhaps even afford e.g. Picabia and Benda in the same number. Do you know where Benda is now?

Until the next, if you answer at least some of my questions, O student of the Kama-Sutra […]
⁷
grow fat and libidinous.

Yours ever
T.

Have you ever heard of a man in England named Hogben,
⁸
in connexion with glands?

Vivien is being treated (and the doctor seems to have supplied a very sensible regimen) for colitis, which she has a bad case of; but the doctor himself says that colitis is not a disease but a symptom, and that it may be
a symptom of all sorts of more deep seated maladies, and there seems no reason why colitis also should not be a symptom of glandular trouble. Meanwhile she continues to take animal gland capsules thrice daily. 

1–Not found.

2–EP responded: ‘
On me demande l’histoire de l’impressionisme littéraire en Albion le perfide
’ [‘I have been asked for a history of literary impressionism in perfidious Albion’]. See EP, ‘On Criticism in General’, C. 1: 2 (Jan. 1923), 143–56.

3–Valery Larbaud, ‘The “Ulysses” of James Joyce’.

4–There may have been plans to launch Samuel Roth’s magazine
Two Worlds
(New York), but it did not appear until Sept. 1925 (it ran for eight issues, until Sept. 1926).

5–C. did in fact publish the next instalment of EP’s
magnum opus
, ‘Malatesta Cantos’, in July 1923.

6–Dr Louis Berman (1893–1946), New York endocrinologist; author of
The Glands Regulating Personality
(1921). EP wrote about his glandular medicine in ‘The New Therapy’ (New Age, Mar. 1922). On 4 July, EP told Quinn: ‘Eliot has always been reserved about his domestic situation, so much so that I thought Mrs. E. had syph … Last time I saw him I got down to brass tacks, and find the girl really has a long complication of things, tuberculosis in infancy,
supposed
to have been cured. Symptoms, so far as I now see, point to pituitary trouble, Berman, author of that gland book, turned up here on Sunday, on his way to a medical conference in Edinburgh. I am sending him to Eliot, and hope he will get best gland specialists onto the job’
(Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915–1924
, ed. Timothy Materer).

3–TSE has tried his hand at 
the Devanagari script for Ka-ma-Su-tra. His pencilled transcription is too faint to reproduce.

8–Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975), biologist and writer.