The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (17 page)

1–Professor L. B. R. Briggs (1855–1934), Dean of Harvard University, 1878–1934. In his article ‘Donne in our Time’, in
A Garland for John Donne
, ed. Theodore Spencer (1931), TSE was to recall how Briggs ‘read, with great persuasiveness and charm, verses of Donne to the Freshmen at Harvard’, which was ‘enough to attract to private reading at least one Freshman who had already absorbed some of the Elizabethan dramatists, but who had not yet approached the metaphysicals’.

MS
Professor David G. Williams

5 October 1914

Merton College, Oxford

My dear Professor Woods,

I received your letter of the 22nd September by the last boat. I repent of having caused you such a mass of correspondence, and forward my apologies and thanks.

I am going up to Oxford tomorrow. I shall not forget your request, and will keep for your inspection any notes I may take or get; and if anything turns up that may be of immediate use to you I will see to having it copied. I believe that I told you that Joachim
²
expected to have no other pupils, but would go through the
Post
[
erior
]-
Anal
[
ytics
]
³
and perhaps the
de
Interp
[
retatione
] with me alone.

I have been plugging away at Hüsserl, and find it terribly hard, but very interesting; and I like very much what I think I understand of it. I have also broken ground by going through most of the
Metaphysics
for the first time in Greek.

I hope that you have had a restful as well as fruitful summer at Rockport.

Very sincerely
Thomas S. Eliot

If you hear anything of German universities being open for neutrals in the spring, I hope you will let me know, as we have no communication with Germany from here. But it would greatly surprise me to hear that work there was possible.

1–James Haughton Woods, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, see Glossary of Names.

2–H. H. Joachim, philosophy tutor at Merton College, Oxford: see Glossary of Names.

3–TSE invoked ‘the opening phrases of the
Posterior Analytics
’ in ‘The Perfect Critic’ [II], A., 23 July 1920; SW, 9.

TS
Houghton

14 October 1914

Merton College, Oxford

My dear Eleanor:

A letter crossing one of yours can hardly be regarded as an answer to it, and so I am writing again. This is a good time for writing letters; I always have half an hour or so before breakfast. You see, we have to report to a roll call at ten minutes before eight – that is, rush across two quadrangles and sign one’s name to a blank paper, and breakfast never seems to appear till about half past eight. The discipline is excellent practice in getting up early, at least; it is a great many years since I have made a practice of rising at quarter past seven, and please do not say that it will be very good for me, for I am sure that it will have not the slightest effect upon my character one way or another. There are a certain number of other regulations here, but I forgive that for the sake of being taken care of, as I hate having to look out for myself. You don’t have to think about meals, and the day is pretty well divided up for you. I do not object to the boarding school discipline in the least – for a time. I suppose that everyone will want to know how I like Oxford, and of course I shall be quite unable to give an unqualified answer one way or another. I like it quite well enough to wish that I had come here earlier and spent two or three years; perhaps even before the end of my college course at home, for I am sure that I should have got more profit from both my work and my play. I think that I should have gotten along with the undergraduates better and made more friends than I made at Harvard, though I should be very sorry to have to give up those whom I did make. On the one hand I like the English very much, and on the other hand I don’t think that I should ever feel at home in England, as I do for instance in France. Perhaps I admire the English more in some ways but find the French more congenial. I should always, I think, be aware of a certain sense of confinement in England, and repression; one puts up with it in one’s native land, and is simply more conscious of it in a country in which one does not
have
to live. But even these qualifications ought to be qualified, and I do not want to give the impression that my admiration for Oxford is of a grudging sort. I only mean that Oxford is not intellectually stimulating – but that would be a good deal to ask of a university atmosphere. At least, if it isn’t stimulating, it is relaxing, and that is a good deal in itself. It is a dreadful climate, I know, but one seems able to eat and sleep very well, and keep very healthy.

My only exercise so far has been walking. The country about here is beautifully adapted for long walks, as perhaps you know, and at the
present time, at least, is not infested with automobiles. There is a dear little village named Cumnor, which perhaps you know, with low thatched cottages, where I have walked. I think that the English countryside is more beautiful than the French; at any rate the scenery seems more solid and massive, and the trees are bigger and more beautiful; the little villages more picturesque, if also dirtier. The middle class localities, the rows of semidetached villas, are certainly far uglier than anything I can remember in France, and the middle class life must be more drab and dismal. I hope to take up a little rowing, if we can gather enough Americans and such English as are too-short-sighted to be acceptable for the Training corps. There will of course (I have just put on a new ribbon) be no regular sports here this year, as the university is too much depleted. We have about forty men up in this college, and that is more in proportion than Magdalen, for example; and all the able-bodied English will be worked in to the officers training corps. Doubtless some of them will get commissions later; so that by the end of the year, I am afraid, the university will be sensibly reduced even below its present numbers, which are about a third of the ordinary enrollment. Four recent Magdalen graduates have been killed already. I should have liked to have gone in to the training corps myself, for the sake of being able to take my exercise with the Englishmen, but they won’t take a foreigner. It is not pleasant to think that if the Germans
did
get over here I should be obliged to sit still and not even look out of the window, but I suppose that the contingency is a remote one. Francis Thwing, by the way, says that he is having himself naturalised as an Englishman and is to join the corps; and he hopes to get a commission.
¹
I certainly shall not go to that length. But one feels very much the strain of the present situation even in Oxford; and no doubt you do in America too. I hope that we may not have to stand another year of it.

Just now I am working on my great ten-reel cinema drama, EFFIE THE WAIF, with which I hope to provide funds for the visiting housekeeper. It is to be staged at vast expense, the first reel to be in the mountains of Wyoming, but I expect some difficulty in assembling all my actors, as for the role of SPIKE CASSIDY the reformed gambler, I want W. J. Bryan
²
Carl
³
would do> and for that of SEEDY SAM, the blackmailer,
Pa Noyes,
⁴
and the others in proportion. Here is the scenario for the first reel:

MEDICINE HAT, Wyoming, Christmas Eve. Spike Cassidy, the most notorious gambling house proprietor in the county, (ever since the early death of his wife, his only good influence), returns from the saloon, where he has won all the money and shot a man, to find a small bundle on his doorstep. He stops and stoops. A feeble cry from the bundle – it squirms, it is warm, it is alive! He takes it tenderly in his arms. Large snow flakes begin to fall, the clock strikes twelve, and the small organ in the orchestra plays softly ‘peace on earth, goodwill to men’.

Scene: YE POOR LITTLE MOTHERLESS BRAT.

REEL TWO

Spike, reformed by the sweet insidious influence of the child, has managed to make virtue pay, and is now mayor and the richest man in the county. Effie believes herself his daughter, is just returned from the convent in Paris where she has been receiving all the fixings that money can buy.

Scene: (Sitting on the arm of the old man’s chair and patting his grey locks):

FATHER, WONT YOU TELL ME SOMETHING ABOUT MOTHER NOW?

SOME OTHER TIME, DEAR.

REEL THREE

But there is a canker in the rose. Seedy Sam, the partner of Spike’s (now the Hon. Daniel Cassidy) early crimes, has returned, a ruined and desperate man, with his son Peter (a comic simpleton, this part to be taken by Raymond Smyth).
⁵

Scene: YOUR DAUGHTER’S HAND FOR MY SON PETER. OR I DENOUNCE YOU FORTHWITH.

REEL FOUR

Walter Desborough (a good role for Tracy)
⁶
scion of one of Harlem’s oldest and richest families, goes west to seek his fortune. His father has been swindled out of all his wealth, and has died of the shock. There is one property left – a mine, value unknown, near Medicine Hat, Wy. Walter leaves his weeping widowed mother to seek his fortune in new fields. As the canal boat carries him westward up the Erie he turns and gazes at the Statue of Liberty disappearing on the horizon (not strictly accurate geography, but a fine scene) – 

Scene: CAN I WHO REALLY REMEMBER EVER FORGET?

In the next scene we are carried back to the stately manor where Gwendoline, Lady Chomleyumley, still mourns the loss of her infant daughter, torn from her at a tender age by her wicked brother-in-law. This is as much as I have completed, but you see its possibilities. I have not chosen any candidate for the role of Effie. Do you think that Ann Van Ness could fill it competently? By the way, before she left she said that she ‘would be glad to hear from me’. I don’t find myself particularly keen about writing to her. Not that I don’t like her very much; but there are moments when I don’t; and there are many people whom one likes to know very much up to a certain point – and you don’t know where that point is until you hit it. Perhaps it is simply that I thought her father rather plebeian (I have cast him for a comic postman in EFFIE THE WAIF.) I don’t know what you will think of me for talking this way.

I had a pleasant time in London, and saw several pleasant people. Do you remember Bertie Russell,
⁷
whom you admired? I met him on the street and found that he was living quite near me, and went and had tea with him.
⁸
As I expected, he is a pacifist,
⁹
but he talked very interestingly on the European situation. It was he who said that the Germans made the same mistakes in their warmaking that he had always found in their scholarship – where, said he, a German writer had always read every book under the sun except the one which counted: so in war they were careful to provide their soldiers with forceps for cutting barbed wire but managed their diplomacy in just such a way as to unite everybody against them. – He has a little apartment furnished in very good taste, not overcrowded, in fact almost preciously simple, with only one picture on the wall.

I will send Bill Greene a card. I hear, by the way, that he only got a fourth in Greats last summer – a great shock to everyone. Keith had a second, which is very good, and Bill was rather expected to secure a first. I mention this as possibly he may be a bit sensitive about it, so one can talk about other things.

I appreciate your Social Column of Births, Funerals, and Broken Hearts – it is rather an Agony column. I have nothing to offer in return but to continue my column of

BRILLIANTS

‘Est-ce-vous dansez le verrry-mussstard?’

HOW did you learn to speak such good English? I’d never know you were a foreigner … Well I never! I thought all this time you were one of the Belgians! Bertha! this young man’s a countryman of ours!

My nephew was in Germany and he had a terrible time. You see, he’s a sort of literary young man, and he’s very reticent. He’s had a good education, and he loves his books, but he’s so reticent I suppose they thought he was a spy. Well, as I wrote his mother, it’s bad for his nervous system, but it’ll be good for his moral character.

You can leave the curtain up, sir. It ud take a seven footer to look in your window. That ouse hoppisite? Ho, that’s honly the warden’s ouse, sir.

_________________

I am sure that you must have liked the Haven, even if Pete [Little] didn’t recognise you, and it’s awfully healthy. I hope that Emily [Hale]
¹⁰
is not very tired and will have a good servant, as she speaks as if she were going to start in acting very soon. Tell me what you are going to do at Radcliffe
¹¹
this Fall. I was surprised to find that girls attend the lectures here – come right into the college buildings, and attend the same lectures as the men. PS No one looks at them.

Affectionately
Tom
(signed)

PS I think I am the only man in this college who takes
cold
baths.

BRILLIANT: ‘Do you keep it hup all winter, Sir?’

1–Francis Butler-Thwing (1891–1964). After graduating from Harvard he spent a term at New College, Oxford, then entered Sandhurst Military College. Twice wounded in the war he retired, a captain in the Coldstream Guards, in 1922.

2–W. J. Bryan (1860–1925), unsuccessful Democratic Presidential candidate, and Secretary of State under President Wilson, was an advocate of ‘free silver’.

3–Unidentified.

4–James Noyes, father of Eleanor Hinkley’s close friend Penelope.

5–Raymond Smyth (1888–1918), metallurgical engineer.

6–Tracy Putnam (1894–1975), who became a physician.

7–Bertrand Russell (see Glossary of Names) had lectured at Harvard in spring 1914.

8–Russell was living at Russell Chambers, Bury Street, nr. the British Museum, just a short walk away from TSE’s lodgings at 28 Bedford Place.

9–Though not describing himself as a pacifist, Russell was a vocal conscientious objector.

10–TSE had met Emily Hale at Eleanor Hinkley’s home in 1912 (both in Glossary of Names).

11–Radcliffe College (chartered in 1894): the women’s college associated with Harvard.