The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (143 page)

Emily Hale
(1891–1969) came from a similar Bostonian milieu to the Eliot family. Her father was an architect turned Unitarian preacher who taught at Harvard Divinity School, and her uncle was a music critic for the
Boston Herald.
Her mother was a mental invalid from early in life. Eliot met Emily at the home of his cousin Eleanor Hinkley in 1912, and in an unpublished memoir wrote that he fell in love with her before leaving for Europe in 1914. However, after his marriage in 1915, he did not see her again for many years. Although she did not go to college, a fact which handicapped her career, Emily was a passionate theatre-goer, amateur actor and director, and was to forge a career as a drama teacher. In 1921 she took a post as administrator and drama tutor at Milwaukee-Downer College, a private women’s school, and later taught at Smith College, Concord Academy, and Abbott Academy. During the 1930s and 1940s, Eliot once again took up his relationship with her, and they saw a lot of one another both in England, where they visited Burnt Norton together in 1934–5, and during his trips to the USA. Following Vivien’s death in 1947, Emily was disappointed that Eliot did not want to marry her, and there was a cooling of their friendship. Towards the end of his life Eliot apparently ordered
her letters to him to be destroyed, while his letters to her are at Princeton, where they are sealed until 2020. See Lyndall Gordon,
T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life
(1998).

Eleanor Holmes Hinkley
(1891–1971): Eliot’s cousin, the second daughter of Susan Heywood Stearns (1860–1948) – Eliot’s mother’s sister – and Holmes Hinkley (1853–91), a scholar ‘of rare modesty and delicacy of temperament’, who died shortly before her birth. Eleanor studied at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Among the advanced courses she took there was Professor George Baker’s 47 Workshop. She went on to act with Baker’s group as well as write a number of plays for it: see
Plays of 47 Workshop
(New York, 1920). One of these,
Dear Jane
, a comedy about Jane Austen in three acts, was to be produced by Eva Le Gallienne at the Civic Repertory Theater, New York, in 1932. It was through amateur theatricals held at her family home, 1 Berkeley Place, Cambridge, Mass., that Eliot met and fell in love with Emily Hale in 1912. According to Valerie Eliot, there was always an affectionate understanding between the cousins and he appreciated her joyous sense of the absurd. Eliot’s correspondence with her is full of humour and playful social observation, and it shows a shared love of theatre.

Mary Hutchinson,
née Barnes (1889–1977): a half-cousin of Lytton Strachey, married St John (‘Jack’) Hutchinson in 1910. A prominent Bloomsbury hostess, she was for several years the acknowledged mistress of the art critic, Clive Bell, and became a close, supportive friend of both TSE and Vivien. TSE published one of her stories (‘War’) in the
Egoist
, and she later brought out a book of sketches,
Fugitive Pieces
(1927) under the imprint of the Hogarth Press. She wrote a short unpublished memoir of TSE (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin) and was for a time in the late 1910s a very intimate friend of his. See David Bradshaw ‘“Those Extraordinary Parakeets”: Clive Bell and Mary Hutchinson’,
The Charleston Magazine
1997/1998, 16 & 17.

Edgar Jepson
(1863–1938), English novelist and journalist, and author of two volumes of autobiography,
Memoirs of a Victorian
(1933) and
Memoirs of an Edwardian
(1937). He studied Greats at Oxford, under Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893), taught for a while in Barbados, and in the absence of Frank Harris edited
Vanity Fair
for six months. He wrote novels, including detective stories and supernatural and fantastic fictions, and children’s stories including
The Second Pollyooly Book
(1914). He
was a friend and champion of Pound and Eliot, and in his essay ‘Recent United States Poetry’ (
The English Review
, 26May 1918) he praised their work at the expense of their American contemporaries.

Harold Joachim
(1868–1938): fellow and tutor in philosophy in Merton College, Oxford, 1897–1919; British Idealist philosopher and follower of F. H. Bradley; author of
The Nature of Truth
(1906), an influential account of the ‘coherence theory’ of truth. TSE recalled buying Joachim’s
The Nature of Truth
at Harvard, and taking it with him in 1914 to Oxford, where Joachim was his tutor. According to Brand Blanshard, it was claimed that ‘if you started any sentence in the
Nichomachean Ethics
of Aristotle, Joachim could complete it for you, of course in Greek’ (‘Eliot at Oxford’, in
T.S. Eliot: Essays from the Southern Review
, ed. James Olney, 1988). TSE wrote an obituary letter in
The Times
(4 Aug. 1938; ‘to his criticism of my papers I owe an appreciation of the fact that good writing is impossible without clear and distinct ideas’), and also paid tribute to him in the introduction to
Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley
(1964). In a late letter, he said ‘he taught me more about how to write good prose than any other teacher I have ever had’ as well as revealing ‘the importance of punctuation in the interpretation of a text such as that of the
Posterior Analytics
’ (24 June 1963: ts Merton College). TSE’s systematic notes on Joachim’s lectures on Aristotle’s
Nichomachean
Ethics
at Oxford 1914–15 are at Houghton.

James Joyce
(1882–1941), expatriate Irish novelist, playwright and poet. Having lived in Zurich and Trieste, Joyce moved to Paris in 1920, where he became a centre of expatriate writers, including Pound and Stein. In
Blasting and Bombadiering
(1937), Wyndham Lewis recounts his and TSE’s first encounter with Joyce there in August 1920 when bringing him a parcel of shoes. Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist
was serialised in the
Egoist
, and
Ulysses
in the
Little Review
up to 1920. When
Ulysses
appeared in book form in 1922, the same year as
The Waste Land
, TSE called it ‘the most important expression which the present age has found’– ‘a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape’ (‘
Ulysses
, Order and Myth’,
Dial
75: 5, November 1923). TSE published in the
Criterion
a number of pieces by and about Joyce, and at Faber he was responsible for the publication of
Finnegans Wake
(1940). See
The Letters of James Joyce
, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann (3 vols, 1957, 1966); Richard Ellmann,
James Joyce
(2nd edn, 1982).

Alfred Knopf
(1892–1984), New York publisher; founded Alfred A. Knopf Inc. in 1915. He was responsible for publishing in the USA numerous important European authors, and he was to bring out not only Eliot’s
Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry
(1917) but also
Poems
(1920) and
The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
(1921).

Wyndham Lewis
(1882–1957) was a painter, portraitist, novelist, philosopher and critic; and one of the major modernist writers. A friend of Ezra Pound, Lewis was the leading artist associated with Vorticism, and editor of
BLAST
, the movement’s journal, 1914–15, in which TSE’s ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a windy night’ appeared (in issue 2, July 1915). Lewis served as a bombardier and war-artist on the Western Front, 1916–18, and later wrote memorable accounts of the period in his memoir
Blasting and Bombardiering
(1937), including brilliant portraits of TSE, Pound and Joyce, and wartime and modernist London. TSE reviewed Lewis’s first novel
Tarr
(1918) in the
Egoist
5: 8 (Sept. 1918), describing him as ‘the most fascinating personality of our time’, in whose work ‘we recognize the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave-man’. Lewis considered Eliot ‘the most interesting man in London society’ (7 Nov. 1918). TSE went on to publish Lewis in the
Criterion
and, even though Lewis was notoriously querulous, carried on a lifetime’s friendship and correspondence with him. Lewis did a number of drawings of TSE, one of which hung in Eliot’s flat, and his portrait of TSE is in the National Portrait Gallery. On Lewis’s death, TSE wrote ‘The Importance of Wyndham Lewis’ in the
Sunday Times
(10March 1957), and a memoir in
Hudson Review
X: 2 (Summer 1957): ‘He was … a highly strung, nervous man, who was conscious of his own abilities, and sensitive to slight or neglect … He was independent, outspoken, and difficult. Temperament and circumstances combined to make him a great satirist … I remember Lewis, at the time when I first knew him, and for some years thereafter, as incomparably witty and amusing in company …’ See
The Letters of Wyndham Lewis
, ed. W.K. Rose (1963), and Paul O’Keeffe,
Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis
(2000).

Katherine Mansfield
(1888–1923), short-story writer, was born in New Zealand. Her first stories were published in A. R. Orage’s periodical
The New Age and
collected in
In a German Pension
(1911). She met John Middleton Murry in 1911, and presently became friends with many writers of the day including D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, and Virginia Woolf (who published
Prelude
in 1918), and hovered on the fringes of the
Bloomsbury Group. She married Murry in 1918, and went on to publish
Bliss
(1920) and
The Garden Party
(1922). After her death from tuberculosis at the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainebleau, Murry published two collections of her stories, and her Journal (1927) and
Letters
(1928). See Claire Tomalin,
Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life
(1987).

Harold Monro
(1879–1932): poet, editor and publisher. In 1913 he founded the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street, London, where poets would meet and give readings and lectures. In 1912 he briefly edited the
Poetry Review
for the Poetry Society; then his own periodicals,
Poetry and Drama
, 1913–14, and the
Chapbook
(originally the
Monthly Chapbook
), 1919–25. From the Poetry Bookshop, Monro published the five volumes of
Georgian Poetry
, ed. Edward Marsh (1872–1953), between 1912 and 1922, and the first volumes of poetry by writers including Richard Aldington and Robert Graves, and some of his own collections including
Children of Love
(1915) and
Strange Meetings
(1917). He married in 1920 Alida Klemantaski (daughter of a Polish-Jewish trader), with whom he never cohabited but who remained loving, loyal and supportive to him; both endeared themselves to Eliot, who would often use the premises of the Poetry Bookshop for meetings with contributors to the
Criterion.
After his death, TSE wrote a ‘Critical Note’ to
The Collected Poems of Harold Monro
(1933). See Joy Grant,
Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop
(1967); Dominic Hibberd,
Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age
(2001).

Harriet Monroe
(1860–1936): American poet and editor, based in Chicago. Monroe was the editor of
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse
, which she founded in 1912 – when she was already over fifty – and continued to edit until 1936. It provided a crucial launching place for many modern poets, including Eliot (whose ‘Prufrock’ was published there in 1915), Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, W. B. Yeats and Robert Frost. She was co-editor, with Alice Corbin Henderson (first associate editor of
Poetry
), of
The New Poetry:
An Anthology
(New York, 1917), which TSE reviewed in
Egoist
4: 9 (Oct. 1917). Her autobiography,
A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World
, appeared posthumously in 1937. See also
A History of Poetry in Letters
, ed. Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young (2002).

Lady Ottoline Morrell
(1873–1938): daughter of Lieutenant-General Arthur Bentinck and half-sister to the Duke of Portland. In 1902 she married Philip Morrell (1870–1941), Liberal MP for South Oxfordshire
1902–18. A patron of the arts, she entertained a notable literary and artistic circle, first at 44 Bedford Square, then at Garsington Manor, nr. Oxford, where she moved in 1915. She was a lover of Bertrand Russell, who introduced her to TSE, and her many friends included Lytton Strachey, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, the Woolfs, and the Eliots. Her memoirs (ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy) appeared as
Ottoline
(1963) and
Ottoline at Garsington
(1974). See Miranda Seymour,
Life on the Grand Scale: Lady Ottoline Morrell
(1992, 1998).

John Middleton Murry
(1889–1957): influential English writer, critic and editor, founded the magazine
Rhythm
, 1911–13, and worked as a reviewer for the
Westminster Gazette
, 1912–14, and the
Times Literary Supplement
, 1914–18, before becoming editor from 1919 to 1921 of the
Athenaeum
, which he turned for a time into a lively cultural forum – in a letter of 2 July 1919, TSE called it ‘the best literary weekly in the Anglo-Saxon world’. In a ‘London Letter’ in Dial 72: 5 (May 1921), Eliot said he considered Murry as editor ‘genuinely studious to maintain a serious criticism’, but he disagreed with his ‘particular tastes, as well as his general statements’. After the demise of the
Athenaeum
, Murry went on to edit the
Adelphi.
1923–48. In 1918, he married Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923. He was friend and biographer of D. H. Lawrence; and as an editor he provided a platform for writers as various as George Santayana, Paul Valéry, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and TSE. His first notable critical work was
Dostoevsky
(1916); his most influential critical study,
The Problem of Style
(1922). Though as a Romanticist he was an intellectual opponent of the avowedly ‘Classicist’ Eliot, Murry offered Eliot in 1919 the post of assistant editor on the
Athenaeum
(which Eliot had to decline); in addition, he recommended him to be the Clark lecturer at Cambridge in 1926, and was a steadfast friend to both TSE and his wife Vivien. See F. A. Lea,
The Life of John Middleton Murry
(1959); and David Goldie,
A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism
,
1919–1928
(1998).