The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (24 page)

1–Jane Austen,
Emma
ch. 32. (The name is in fact used on three later occasions in the novel.)

2–TSE met Vivien Haigh-Wood in Mar. 1915 at a lunch party in Scofield Thayer’s rooms in Magdalen College, Oxford, after which they went punting and dancing: see Vivien Eliot in Glossary of Names.

3–First performed in 1911, Shaw’s
Fanny’s First Play
had been revived in the spring of 1915 at the Kingsway Theatre, starring Henry Ainley and Miles Malleson. 

MS
Professor David G. Williams

6 May [1915]

Merton College

Dear Professor Woods,

I enclose a letter from Mr Hardie, which reached me this morning. If you wish to accept his offer, I could bring the books myself, though I dare say they would be quite as well off by express.

As I have not heard from you for some time, I wonder if you have received two notes, two packages of lecture-notes, and a text of the
Organon
.

I hope you will let me know about next year, because, if I do not have a reappointment, financial conditions make it desirable for me to get as much assistant’s work at Harvard as I can adequately perform in addition
to my own affairs – in case there is room for me. I certainly should not resign in the middle of the year.

I am attending the remainder of Joachim’s
Ethics
lectures, some lectures by J. A. Smith on the Concept of Value, a short course by McDougall,1 and am finishing the
Posterior Analytics
. I am writing papers for Joachim on Aristotle.

Oxford is very charming at this time of year and rather more healthy than at most times [of] year – I have found the climate (and the food!) very difficult.

Santayana is here now, I believe, though I have not been to see him yet.

Very sincerely
Thomas S. Eliot

1–William McDougall (1871–1938), author of
Introduction to Social Psychology
(1908), was then Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford.

TS
Houghton

[Postmark 28 June 1915]

London

Dear Sir,

Your son asked me to write this letter, I think he expects me to send you some sort of apologia for the literary life in general, and for London literary life in particular.

I can only cite my own case as proof that it is possible to exist by letters, not only by popular fiction but by unpopular writing, and I have gone
through difficulties which it seems needless for T.S.E. to encounter. I may as well be explicit. I came to London in 1908, for some years I have made enough to live on with some comfort. I knew no one when I came, I have written no fiction. I have indeed written scarcely anything save poetry, a few grave articles in the heavier reviews and a certain amount of current criticism.

T.S.E. begins in rather better position. I have already hammered the fact that he can write into [the] heads of four editors (e.g. ‘Prufrock’ in
Poetry
for June), the most intelligent of the editors needed no demonstration.
Poetry
pays rather well, there are of course other magazines with which it would be advisable for him to get in touch by his own initiative. If (or when) I succeed in organizing a weekly paper I should certainly take on your son. That event is however (at least for the present) so uncertain that one cannot count upon it solidly. And failing that he will hardly be able to make all his expenses right away at the start. On the other hand I am now much better off than if I had kept on my professorship in Indiana,
¹
and I believe I am as well off as various of my friends who had plugged away at law, medicine, and preaching. At any rate I have had an infinitely more interesting life.

As to T.S.E.’s work, I think it the most interesting stuff that has appeared since my own first books, five years ago. Of the conceit of artists there is of course no end, but this letter is between ourselves and I see no reason to beat about the bush. I do not imagine that my name is known to you, or if it is it is merely a name, like another, appearing now and again in the newspapers. Stripped of a certain amount of flimsy notoriety we may say that I have brought something new into English poetry, that I have engineered a new school of verse now known in England, France and America, and incidentally that I have introduced certain young poets to the public. At least I am as closely in touch with what is being done here and in France as it is possible for a man to be, and when I make a criticism of your son’s work it is not an amateur criticism. There are a certain number of young men doing good work, of one sort or another, I have in one place and another blamed or commended them. Edgar Lee Masters has just brought out a new book
²
which is, I believe, having a very great success, but Masters is an older man than T.S.E. and even his work seems to me less unusual.

I don’t know to what extent these critical minutiae
entertain
³
you, but I may as well set down my own thought as clearly as possible and you can take it or leave it. Apart from all question of ‘inspiration’ and ‘star born genius’ I should say that the arts, as the sciences, progress by infinitesimal stages, that each inventor does little more than make some slight, but revolutionizing change, alteration in the work of his predecessors. Browning
⁴
in his
Dramatis Personae
and in his
Men and Women
developed a form of poem which had lain dormant since Ovid’s Heroides or since Theocritus. Ovid’s poems are, to be sure, written as if they were letters, from Helen to Paris, from Paris to Oenone, etc. In Theocritus (IV. 2 I think) we have a monologue comparable to those of Browning (much more passionate, to be sure, but still comparable as a form).

The Anglo Saxon ‘Seafarer’ and Rihaku’s ‘Exile’s Letter’ are also poems of this sort.
⁵
Nevertheless Browning’s poems came as a new thing in their day. In my own first book I tried to rid this sort of poem of all irrelevant discussion, of Browning’s talk
about
this, that and the other, to confine my words strictly to what might have been the emotional speech of the character under such or such crisis. Browning had cast his poems mostly in Renaissance Italy, I cast mine in mediaeval Provence, which was a change without any essential difference. T.S.E. has gone farther and, begun with the much more difficult job of setting his ‘personae’ in modern life, with the discouragingly ‘unpoetic’ modern surroundings.

(For what my position is worth, I am willing to say this about him, in print, as soon as the right time comes, for the present I should be glad if you would keep it for family consumption, as the difficulties of an author having a certain number of friends in the same profession are not diminished by having them all know that he thinks much more highly of one than of all the rest.)

Robert Frost has, let us admit, done a book of New England eclogues.
⁶
(Incidentally, it was I who insisted or ‘suggested’ that he should do it. He brought me one or two poems that now appear in that book and spoke of more in the making, and he might have brought out the present book without meeting me. However I was one of the first critics to acclaim him and I certainly had some part in getting him to do that series of ‘eclogues’.)
Still a set of provincial studies, local, a bit dull, is a very different thing from poetry which accepts the tone and difficulties of contemporary civilization.

Again with Masters, the work is rough, given the form of poem, it is much easier to do a series such as he has done than it is to bring in a sort of new element, which I think T.S.E. does and will do. His newer things show a great advance in workmanship.

Pardon this flood of detail. I suppose it reduces itself to this: there are a few noteworthy new poets, there are a dozen or so young men with charm, with temperaments, with excellent ‘poetic’ interiors, some of whom, most of whom seem to me likely to stay stuck plumb where they now are, for the rest of their natural lives (if they don’t get fat headed and worse) simply because they ‘ain’t got the sense’ to get on or to invent anything. (I beg you to accept this in the secrecy of the confessional, as I like several of these young men and have no desire for more quarrels than I now have on hand, and no desire to hurt people’s feelings unduly, or unduly discourage them.) In some cases they suffer from a deficient culture, for which they cannot be held in any way responsible.

T.S.E. is (as the
Spectator
said of me some years since) ‘that rare thing among modern poets, a scholar’.
⁷
That means not only an advantage in the initial sprint, it means much more: a chance of being able really to finish ‘a long distance race’, a chance of having matter and volume enough in one to keep on writing more and more interestingly, with increasing precision and development. Mental stamina … which I do not see in a number of the advertised writers of the passing year and moment.

As to his coming to London, anything else is a waste of time and energy. No one in London cares a hang what is written in America. After getting an American audience a man has to begin all over again here if he plans for an international hearing. He even begins at a disadvantage. London likes discovering her own gods. Again in a literary career mediocrity is worse than useless. Either a man goes in to go the whole hog or he had better take to selling soap and gents furnishings. The situation has been very well summed up in the sentence: ‘Henry James stayed in Paris and read Turgenev and Flaubert, Mr Howells returned to America and read Henry James.’
⁸

Now on the practical side a writer making one thousand dollars per year here is, I should say much better off than if he were making five thousand a year in America. In fact so long as he can pay his board and washing and keep a decent coat on his back, he has all his luxuries free and has the most interesting life in the world at his disposal.

(Even if his career is to be half scholastic, any philological job of the first rank must start and get its orientation in the British Museum.)

As for American publication you have readier access, I think, to American magazines from this side of the water, whereas English publication is practically impossible for any man out of England unless he is fully established. (That is to say Kipling might live where he liked).

Again if a man is doing the fine thing and the rare thing, London is the only possible place for him to exist. Only here is there a disciplinary body of fine taste, of powerful writers who ‘keep the editors under’, who make it imperative that a publisher act in accordance, occasionally, with some dictates other than those of sheer commercialism.

I should, of course, advise T.S.E. to meet personally as many American editors of good standing as is possible, before he returns, and to work his American social connections to the utmost so as to have that anchor to westward. But still you may bear in mind that London imposes her acceptance of a man’s work on all the English speaking world and that she accepts no other standard than her own … and after some lapse of years that of Paris. At any rate if T.S.E. is set on a literary career, this is the place to begin it and any other start would be very bad economy.

I expect to give him a trial run with the British reviewers this autumn. That is to say I shall give him the first eight or ten pages in an anthology which I expect to bring out this autumn unless war conditions prevent. I have merely the publishers’ verbal agreement to print the book in September (which means according to publishers habits, possibly November).
⁹

The last Anthology I brought out has provided a new word for France, England and America
¹⁰
and the battle of ink is still raging. The
Mercure de France
in the current number (June 1, 1915) is sufficiently excited to consider ‘l’imagisme comme une preuve de la vitalité de la race anglaise.’
¹¹
(Which it isn’t). We have not, as they say ‘renouvelé la poésie au bruit du canon occidental’
¹²
we did the job before the war started and we are mostly Americans so the
race anglaise
has nothing much proved about it one way or the other. (Again I beg the secrecy of the confessional, for I have no desire that this last fact should be rubbed into the English publishers and reviewers, who won’t like to be reminded of it.)

I don’t know what more I can say except to repeat that I am very much interested in T.S.E.’s work and that if (or when) he comes back to London I shall continue to use such influence, as I have, in his behalf to get his work recognized. It has already excited the interest of several of the best critics of my acquaintance beside my own. As to the times and places of publication, of course a man who is not under the lash of necessity can do better than one who is. It is better to
begin
in the best magazines and at good rates. It is much better to sell one article at twenty pounds than thirty articles at one pound or than ten articles at two pounds.

It is better not to publish a book of poems until one has a book that will ‘get through’. The amount of actually good work that is done, is so small that a few people more or less control the output, and with proper discretion, I think we may say that ordinary business conditions prevail. ‘A man succeeds either by the scarceness or the abundance of his copy.’ If he cares for the really fine thing and if his standard is decently high, it is only by the first road that he will attempt to go forward.

Sincerely yours

On reading this through it seems that I might add, that a literary man’s income depends very much on how rigidly he insists on doing exactly what he himself wants to do. It depends on his connection, which he makes himself. It depends on the number of feuds that he takes on for the sake of his aesthetic beliefs. T.S.E. does not seem to be so pugnacious as I am and his course should be the smoother and swifter. Still, it is possible for a man to do exactly what he pleases,
and
live.

sincerely yours
Ezra Pound

As to exact sums, or the amount a man actually needs to begin on, I should think that if a fellow had five hundred dollars for the first year and two hundred and fifty for the second he ought to be able to make the rest of his keep and get decently started.