The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (32 page)

MS
McMaster

23 May 1916

4446 Westminster Place [St Louis]

Dear Mr Russell,

Your letter relative to a cablegram sent us, was received some little time ago. I write now to thank you for the affection that inspired it. It was natural you should feel as you did with the awful tragedy of the
Sussex
¹
of such recent occurrence. Mr Eliot did not believe it possible that even the Germans, (a synonym for all that is most frightful,) would attack an American liner. It would be manifestly against their interest. Yet I am aware there is still a possibility of war between Germany and America. The more we learn of German methods, open and
secret
, the greater is the moral 
indignation of many Americans. I am glad all our ancestors are English with a French ancestry far back on one line. I am sending Tom a copy of a letter written by his Great-great-grandfather in 1811, giving an account of his grandfather (
one
of them) who was born about 1676 – in the county of Devon, England – Christopher Pearse.

I am sure your influence in every way will confirm my son in his choice of Philosophy as a life work. Professor Wood speaks of his thesis as being of exceptional value. I had hoped he would seek a University appointment next year. If he does not I shall feel regret. I have absolute faith in his Philosophy but not in the
vers libres.

Tom is very grateful to you for your sympathy and kindness. This gratitude I share.

Sincerely yours,
Charlotte C. Eliot

1–On 24 Mar. 1916, the London Brighton and South Coast Railway cross-Channel steamer,
Sussex
, was torpedoed off Dieppe with a loss of some fifty lives. Three Americans were among the injured. The sinking of the
Sussex
led to President Wilson’s ultimatum to the German government on 18 Apr., condemning Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic. 

MS
Houghton

1 June 1916

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St, London w.

Dear Henry

I got your letter from New York only two days ago – so you see I am losing no time in answering. We
both
wish that you would write to us more often – please do! Make a rule of writing once a fortnight, and we will do the same – it is the only way to keep in touch. And I think we all ought to keep in touch – don’t you? I am going to buy some films for my camera today, and then we shall send you some photos of ourselves and our flat. We are very proud of this flat. It is the tiniest place imaginable – just a dining room – a drawing room – a large bedroom – a kitchen and a nice bathroom. We have constant hot water, which is a
luxury
in England, and as this building is quite new, we have ‘every modern convenience’! I chose all the papers, and we have some rather original effects. We have an
orange
paper in our dining room, (which is also Tom’s dressing room and study!) and black and white stripes in the Hall.

I don’t know if all these details interest you I’m sure!

We were both interested in your descriptions of the Preparedness procession.
¹
But, as Tom says, what are they preparing for? – do they
know? He says they just don’t want to feel out of it! There is a good deal of bitter feeling about America, over here. It is horrid, I hate it. I am afraid it will take years before it calms down. People talk in a slighting way about America.

I am enclosing to you a letter from my brother – the latest I’ve received, just so that you can see the manner of boy he is. And also, his tone is
typically
English – army English. And of course England is
all
army now. The letter is full of foolish little family jokes and references – but you will understand that. You will return it, won’t you?

We are glad you have gone to New York – there was no future in St Louis. Tom is
wonderful
. I have never met a man who gets so much pushing and helping and who impresses people so much with the feeling that he is
worth
helping. Just now we are faced with a problem. If he goes on teaching – it means that he must throw away innumerable chances and openings for writing, and just do the little scraps that he has time, and energy, for – after school. And school tires him very much – and chances don’t come twice. If he leaves school-mastering (for which he is
too
good, and
not
fitted) – it is a gamble, at first. He would win in time, but in the first year or two – how should we live?

I can’t write more now. T. will write soon. Please write, as soon as you can.

Vivien

My brother is not one of K[itchener]’s army (which by the way, were mostly put in Khaki directly they joined). He is of the regular army – and of course there is some feeling of ‘class distinction’.

1–Preparedness parades were held across the USA in the summer of 1916, to demonstrate America’s readiness for war. The
Sunday Star
reported on 27 May that 80,000 people processed through Boston: it was the biggest parade in the city’s history. 

MS
Chicago

7 June 1916

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Miss Monroe,

Your letter to me sent to the American address has just reached me. I deeply regret not having got it before. But the misadventure was not to be foreseen.

As for the ‘Prufrock’: you see, I shall probably have a small volume coming out just about the same time as your anthology, in the autumn, in New York. If it were much before or much after I should probably be quite glad to enter ‘Prufrock’ in both, but it seems to me that to synchronise would be inadvisable. It is so much longer and confessedly so much better, than anything else I have done, that I cannot afford (or so I think) to scatter
my forces. If there is anything else that would do, I hope you will accept a substitute; the ‘Portrait’, or perhaps the ‘Figlia che piange’ which I believe Pound has sent you. Will you forgive me?

I shall indeed be delighted to contribute a morsel to your prose section whenever you will let me. Would you like (1) comments on some of the theories in Pound’s
Gaudier-Brzeska
,
¹
or (2) a few comments on several 17th C writers who seem to me of importance for contemporaries (e.g. Webster, Ford) or (3) comments on a few poets whom the age neglects (e.g. Malherbe, Swift, Voltaire, as
poets
). I should be glad to review any new versifier when you want it done. – You see I want to find out what you would be willing to endure.

With all best wishes

believe me
sincerely yours
T. Stearns Eliot

Let us then leave the
Dial
to posterity.

1–EP,
Gaudier-Brzeska:
A Memoir. Including the published writings of the sculptor and a selection from his letters
(1916). 

MS
McMaster

7 June 1916

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Bertie

Thanks awfully for the books – the second lot arrived today. They will come in most usefully, and I shall be extremely grateful for them. Jourdain wants another article on Leibniz first – monads again – by July 15, so I shall have to shelve the idealists for a time – He will lend me your book, and Latta and Montgomery
¹
(the latter I have however). Do you know of any books – chiefly
historical
– dealing with Leibniz other than those I am acquainted with, which I could get anything out of?

I am glad to hear you like the Nietzsche review. It seemed to me rather inferior at the time. Have not yet heard from the
N. Statesman
as to whether they want the reviews I sent them.
²
 

I rejoiced to hear such good accounts of your defence.
³
It must have been a great success, in the only way in which you expected or wished it to succeed.

I am glad your term is nearly over. I hope I shall see you next week.

Affectionately
T. S. E.

1–BR,
A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900); G. W. Leibniz, The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. Robert Latta (1898); G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, and Monadology
, trans. George R. Montgomery (1902).

2–TSE’s reviews of Paul Elmer More,
Aristocracy and Justice
(24 June), and Charles Sarolea,
The French Renascence
(1 July).

3–In Apr. 1916 the No-Conscription Fellowship had issued a leaflet in protest at the sentence of two years’ hard labour passed on a conscientious objector, Ernest Everett, for refusing to obey military orders as a member of the Non-Combatant Corps. When six men were imprisoned for distributing the leaflet, Russell wrote to
The Times
(17 May), saying he was the author and if anyone was to be prosecuted he was the person primarily responsible. On 5 June he was tried before the Lord Mayor of London on a charge of making, in a printed publication, ‘statements likely to prejudice the recruiting discipline of His Majesty’s forces’. Russell defended himself and, according to Lytton Strachey who was present with OM, ‘spoke for about an hour – quite well – but simply a propaganda speech’. Found guilty, Russell was fined £100 with £10 costs, with the alternative of sixty-one days’ imprisonment. When his appeal failed on 29 June he refused to pay the fine so the authorities seized some of his books for public auction, at which a group of his friends bid £100 for the first volume offered and so settled the debt. 

TS
Harvard

23 June 1916

Department of Philosophy and Psychology, Harvard University

Dear Eliot,

The Division of Philosophy has accepted your thesis without the least hesitation. Prof. Royce
¹
regards it as the work of an expert. Prof. Hoernlé
²
has written a criticism which I will send you later. Meantime we will keep the MS. here.
³
I hope that we can arrange some time which will make it more convenient for you to take the rest of the examination. In any case, please let us be reassured that your interest in Philosophy is as strong as before.

With kindest regards to Mrs Eliot and to yourself,

Sincerely yours,
James H. Woods

1–Josiah Royce (1855–1916), Professor of the History of Philosophy from 1892. TSE had attended his graduate seminar in Comparative Methodology, 1913–14.

2–R. F. Alfred Hoernlé (1880–1943), Assistant Professor of Philosophy, 1914–20, had written to Woods on 13 June: ‘He knows his Bradley excellently, and has done a most valuable piece of work in bringing together and treating systematically B’s scattered dicta on feeling, experience, thought, etc.’

3–Now at Houghton. Published as
Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley
(1964). 

TS
Huntington

21 August 1916

18 Crawford Mansions, Crawford St, London w.

My dear Conrad,

What do you think of me? Have you written to me at all since you sent me your book?1 If so it went astray, or rather went to a deserted address, and the people at Culworth House, St John’s Wood, have not shown themselves over zealous in forwarding mail. Will you accept the present screed for the scramble of pedagogy and journalism (NOT forgetfulness or intentional insult) of the past three months? I am not even sure of your address; but it
was
Chestnut Street, and I hope that if I put on the wrong number the post-office will try every door in the street and then send it on to your aunt Mrs Potter’s in Sparks Street, Cambridge.

First to explain myself. You know that my wife has been very ill all the winter. She has been getting gradually better, but very slowly. At present we are at Bosham, near Chichester in Sussex, for most of the holidays, and she has improved a great deal here, so I feel encouraged. But it was a great anxiety all winter and spring, as she kept having incidental troubles like teeth which set her back. I may say that this was not a case of maternity in any degree. Most people imagine so unless I explain. It has been nerves, complicated by physical ailments, and induced largely by the most acute neuralgia. This has been one leading cause for my neglect of correspondence with everybody in America except my immediate family.

Another cause is the mentioned scramble. The school takes up most of my days, and in my spare (sic) time I have been writing: philosophy for the
Monist
and the
International Journal of Ethics
, reviews for the
New Statesman
, the
Manchester Guardian
and the
Westminster Gazette
. The first two I got in with through Bertrand Russell, the others through a man named Sidney [
sic
]Waterlow. I am now trying to get an introduction to the
Nation
. The papers are rather hard up for good reviewers at present. On the other hand they are devoting much less space to books than they used to do. I have reviewed some good books and much trash. It is good practice in writing, and teaches one speed both in reading and writing. It is bad in this way, that one acquires an extraordinary appetite for volumes, and exults at the mass of printed matter which one has devoured and evacuated. I crave a new book every few days. The
New Statesman
is rather the best fun to review for. They give me pretty good books, and as 
soon as I have time I am going to approach them with an article. I am doing a long review on Charles Péguy
²
for them now. Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

This autumn will find me busier than ever, as I am preparing a set of six lectures on contemporary intellectual movements in France to deliver under the auspices of Oxford to the general public
³
– mostly, I believe, ladies. If they come off, I ought to be able to secure plenty of lecturing, at least enough to keep us. And I have several distinguished predecessors on the Oxford lecturing circuit – Belloc
⁴
and F. E. Smith
⁵
for instance. You will see that I have been very busy grinding axes. Of poetry I have not written a line; I have been far too worried and nervous. I hope that the end of another year will see me in a position to think about verse a bit.

Nearly everyone has faded away from London, or is there very rarely. The vorticists are non-existent. Lewis is a gunner in the R.G.A.,
⁶
Wadsworth is something in the navy and is out in the Mediterranean, F. M. Hueffer is settled to an army career in the Welsh Guards and is in France,
⁷
T. E. Hulme has been in France for ages. As for the Hampstead school, I haven’t the remotest idea whether Aldington is conscripted or not,
⁸
and 
don’t care and as a matter of fact have never met him, but I believe H. D.
⁹
is doing his part of the
Egoist
, and is pegging away at Greek. There are no conscientious objectors among the Vortex, they are all in another set, mostly localised in Bloomsbury. One of them, Gilbert Cannan (novelist)
¹⁰
I met down here at Bosham not long ago; a cadaverous silent person. There are a few rather nice people about here – G. Lowes Dickinson
¹¹
is one. Ezra holds out in London, and refuses to rusticate; he has one or two Japs with whom he fences. He has just translated (with untiring energy) Laforgue’s ‘Salome’, and wants me to do the ‘Hamlet’
¹²
to go to make up a volume between us of the
Moralités Légendaires
, and I have done a few pages of it.

We are vegetating and gaining health against the coming term on a backwater [Bosham] near Portsmouth harbour, where the tide is either very much in or very much out; the place alternates between mud and water, and is very charming. I have been working always in the morning, and bathing, boating and bicycling in the afternoon.

I was awfully glad to have your book, and very much pleased at your sending it to me. And now that I have come up from the country for a night, I find it safely locked away from me in a bookcase of which my wife has the key. I marked a number of pages with marks of admiration or disapproval, and meant to quote them to you, but this will probably be at Christmas, as I may not have time for another letter before then. And I am too tired out from a day at the British Museum to flow with ideas at this midnight. All I can say now is that I liked the book, some of the poems very much, some less. It seemed to me a distinct advance in workmanship over the first book. You have gone a good way. I think the title poems on 
the whole by far the best.
¹³
I don’t say that I like them – but you will probably be more flattered by the emotion they did produce. Anything which can provoke as strong nausea with life as those did in me is well done. They affect me like Maupassant. And your whole viewpoint at present, my dear Conrad, what is it? I mean, how do you feel early in the morning and on Sunday afternoons? That is the real test, and I wish you would come out with it in a letter. There is a kind of cynicism in some of the poems (the sequel to
Earth Triumphant
I am thinking of)
¹⁴
which I should like to analyse … And then your blessed materialism I suppose … I am still a relativist, a cracker of small theories like nuts, essentially an egoist perhaps, but I have not the leisure to be cynical, a good thing perhaps, life is always positively something or the opposite, it has a
sens
, if only that[:]
 

the torch-bearers, advancing from behind the throne which King Artaphernes
¹⁵
had just vacated, progressed two by two into the centre of the hall. To the shrill piping of the quowhombom and the muffled rattle of the bass trpaxli mingled with the plaintive wail of the thirty captive kings, they circled thrice forwards and thrice backwards, clockwise and counterclockwise, according to the sacred ritual of the rpat, and finally when the signal was given by the pswhadi or high priest, they turned a flip flop somersault and disappeared down their own throats, leaving the assembly in darkness.
 

But if you still believe in my sanity, and receive this letter, write to me. I will write, for I find that this letter contains nothing of the slightest interest.

yours ever
Tom