The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (37 page)

MS
LSE

23 March 1917

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.

Dear Mr Wallas,

I am writing to inform you of my having at last hooked something – a very small fish, it is true. I am now in the Foreign department of Lloyds bank, living in hopes of a rise in salary. Anyway, it is a relief to be no longer on the hunt, and a nuisance to everyone I know. The work is neither difficult nor exhausting nor uninteresting; it is done under very comfortable conditions, and leaves me less fatigued than teaching, so that I can read and write in the evenings. I should like to think that I shall come to learn something of that extraordinary science of banking, if I can grasp any of it.

Mr Boas
¹
has been very kind to me, and hopes to get me some evening work next autumn. What I should like especially would be another tutorial class, but there seems faint hope of that. Thank you again for getting me into contact with Mr Boas.

I hope I may see you again soon.

With kind regards to Mrs Wallas and your daughter.

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

And after all I forgot to thank you for writing to Hobhouse.
²
I was much disappointed over the
Manchester Guardian
, but apparently the place has been filled.

1–Graham Wallas (1858–1932), Professor of Political Science, London School of Economics, 1914–23. An early Fabian, he had protested against the war in 1914. His writings included
Human Nature in Politics
(1908) and
The Great Society
(1914).

2–F. S. Boas (1862–1957), Divisional Inspector for Higher Education for London County Council from 1905; scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; Professor of English Literature, Queen’s College, Belfast, 1901–5; author of
Shakespeare and his Predecessors
(1902).

3–L. T. Hobhouse (1846–1929), first Professor of Sociology, London University, 1907–29. Previously on the staff of the
Manchester Guardian
, he was a friend of the editor, C. P. Scott (1864–1932).

TS
Houghton

23 March 1917

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1

Dear Eleanor,

I am seizing a spare moment to write a page to you, as always if I wait to write a letter it is never written. I have wondered often whether you ever received a longish letter from me last summer from Bosham, as I have not heard from you since. There has never been a time in the last two years when I have not had to leave as many things undone as I have done, and much of what I have done has been at the expense of more or less of one’s lawful amount of sleep every night, so you will understand my not writing oftener.

At present – as both writing and lecturing are so restricted and precarious under present conditions – I am working at Lloyds Bank (not to be confused with the shipping people) during the day, and doing my writing in the evening. I sit in a small office with a mahogany desk and a tall filing cabinet, and feel much more important than my salary warrants, as I have charge of all the balance sheets of their foreign correspondents, filing and tabulating and reporting on them. Not that I know anything 
about banking, but the business is so huge that I don’t suppose more than half a dozen men in the bank know more than their own little corner of it. I share an office with Mr McKnight,
¹
who lives in a suburb, cultivates a kitchen garden out of hours, polishes his silk hat with great care when he goes out, and talks about his eldest boy.

My greatest pleasure however is my workingmen’s class in English Literature on Monday evenings. I have steered them through Browning (who arouses great enthusiasm), Carlyle, Meredith, Arnold, and am now conducting them through Ruskin. There are not many working
men
at present, except one very intelligent grocer who reads Ruskin behind his counter; most of them are (female) elementary schoolteachers, who work very hard with large classes of refractory children all day but come with unabated eagerness to get culture in the evening (stimulated, I hope, by my personal magnetism). I sit at the head of a table flanked by Mrs Howells and Mrs Sloggett. Both are mad. Mrs Howells is a spiritualist, and wanted to give me mental treatment for a cold in the head. She writes articles on the New Mysticism etc., for a paper called the
Superman
,
²
and presents them to me. Mrs Sloggett writes me letters beginning Dear Teacher, Philosopher and Friend,
³
and her special interests are astrology and politics. She has written a character study of me (very flattering) which I should like to send you; and spends some of her time writing letters to cabinet ministers. Still, at the present time she does not seem to me much madder than most people. The rest of the class are quite sane, and some of them are remarkably clever, and I have to do my best to keep up with them in discussion. This class of person is really the most attractive in England, in many ways; it is not so petrified in snobbism and prejudice as the middle classes, and yet is very humble. To an American, the English working classes are impressive because of their fundamental conservatism; they are not, as a whole, aggressive and insolent like the same people in America.

You will perhaps be interested to hear whom I met about a fortnight ago. I was at a gathering of a curious zoo of people known as the Omega 
Club,
⁴
and was sitting on a mat (as is the custom in such circles) discussing psychical research with William Butler Yeats (the only thing he ever talks about, except Dublin gossip)
⁵
when a red-faced, sprucely dressed man with an air of impertinent prosperity and the aspect of a successful wholesale grocer came up and interrupted us with a most disagreeable Cockney accent (and you may hear accents in Amurka but the lower middle class cockney beats them all). I was so irritated by the man that I left for another part of the room almost at once – later I found out that it was Arnold Bennett.
⁶

I must stop now; I have written far more than I expected to. Do write to me some time. Give my love to Aunt Susie, and believe me

Always affectionately
Tom

1–TSE said to Valerie Eliot that he based the character Eggerson, in
The Confidential Clerk
, on Mr McKnight.

2–First published in Mar. 1915 as
Man: all about him from his horoscope, hands, head, face, handwriting etc.,
this monthly magazine continued (from Apr. 1915) as
Superman
, and ran, with a gap of six months, until Oct. 1916.

3–‘Shall then this verse to future age pretend / Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend?’ (Pope,
Essay on Man
IV, 390).

4–Founded in Feb. or Mar. 1917, the Omega Club (an offshoot of Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops begun in 1913) met on Thursday evenings in Fitzroy Square. VW wrote on 26 Apr. to her sister Vanessa Bell: ‘I hear from Lytton that the Omega Club is doomed – very few go, and only the dullest’ (
Letters of Virginia Woolf
, Vol. 2, 1912–22:
The Question of Things Happening
, ed. Nigel Nicolson [1976], 150).

5–According to Arnold Bennett’s
Journal
, WBY, with Roger Fry and Bennett himself, had attended a spiritualist séance at Mme Van der Velde’s on 8 Feb. Roy Foster reports that WBY had at this time ‘embarked upon one of his most bizarre and credulous involvements yet’ in psychical research. The episode involved a ‘mildly deranged chemist’ who had invented a machine for communicating with the spirit world: this was investigated by the Society for Psychical Research, and declared by WBY to be ‘the greatest discovery of the modern world’ (
Yeats: A Life: The Arch-Poet
, 2003, 74).

6–Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), novelist, playwright and diarist; author of
The Old Wives’ Tale
(1908) and
The Clayhanger Trilogy
(1910–16).

MS
Professor David G. Williams

23 March 1917

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Dr Woods,

It was very good to hear from you at last. I was afraid that my letter had never reached you, and was on the point of writing again. I have been hoping that you might turn up in London, and still hope so, as I cannot possibly come to France.
¹
I am very sorry indeed to hear that Mrs Woods has been ill; I can sympathise with you fully, as my wife has suffered so much. I suppose you will stay with her during the Easter holidays: could you not come over here in July or August?

First of all, let me report on C. E. B.
²
Russell says of him

‘B. is alright. A little supercilious, but no harm in him. Very scholarly and learned, not profoundly original but more or less so.’ Joachim says

     ‘I only met B. once and B. R. knows him much better than I do. My impression of him is that he is so fearfully competent that he makes me feel very incompetent. However, on reflection out of his presence I don’t think I am so feeble after all. He is perhaps rather lacking in “intuition”. His views on things like war and friendship and logic are very sympathetic to me, and he has always been most flattering when he wrote about me. So I am most grateful to him, but still on intellectual matters I manage to look up to him!’

This is all I have gathered. I know one or two other people who might know him, but probably not well.

I will finish the
Organon
. I should have done so ere now but that I did not know where to send it. There is not very much to add. The
de Anima
is a more difficult question. The notes are on interleaves and in such small writing (mostly in the original Latin to boot) that I fear no one could possibly decipher them but myself. I do not quite like to trust the fruit of so much labour to the submarines in the Channel, but perhaps I can offer it as an inducement to you to come and fetch it, until I can transcribe it. I will send you a copy of an article I wrote for the
Monist
– I fear not a very good one, done under trying conditions – on Leibniz and Aristotle. I promised Jourdain some months ago an article comparing Leibniz’ logic to Aristotle’s, for
Scientia
, but I have had no time for such a gigantic undertaking.
³
Also, I projected a series for him on Green and other Victorian idealists, not a word of which is yet written.
⁴
I am doing a good deal of reviewing for him; he is enlarging the reviewing of the
Monist
; he takes charge of mathematics, chemistry and physics, and I of philosophy, religion, biology, and anthropology.

I am also writing more or less for the
New Statesman
. As for my poems, I believe they will be published; it is a question as to whether the printer
can do it for £15, which is all the publisher is prepared to spend. I shall of course send you a copy if the book appears. The other book (the
Catholic Anthology
) got me a very favourable notice from the (London)
Nation
.

I have an evening class in English literature (mostly social and religious topics, Arnold, Ruskin, etc.) under London University, a class of working people, which I enjoy very much. This class of people is the most agreeable in England to me – you see I am by way of being a Labourite in England, though a conservative at home. The middle class – including most of the people one knows, or at least their families, is hopelessly stupid. Its family life is hideous. When of sufficient means, the middle classes want their sons to go to public schools; but the only motive is snobism, and the lack of respect for education is amazing … Some day I shall write a book on the English; it is my impression that no one in America knows anything about them. They are in fact very different from ourselves.

Have you seen B. R.’s book?
⁵
It is very weak. I don’t know now when I shall be able to go to America for my exams. It doesn’t look like it at present, and if we go to war, I shall want the government to give me something to do. Now I am working by day in Lloyds Bank as a stop-gap. Literature and journalistic work is not in great demand, nor is lecturing or teaching, except school teaching, which I refuse to return to – it is altogether too exhausting. So I have charge of the balance-sheets of the foreign correspondents of Lloyds. It is not uninteresting, and it is pleasant to work in a bank where tea is served at 4 p.m., but I wish it were more remunerative.

Life here simply consists in waiting for the war to stop – if one thought of that too much it would have the same effect as Chancery on Richard Carstone in
Bleak House
.
⁶
What is the use of plans? one thinks often.

I must stop. Do give my and my wife’s sympathy to Mrs Woods, and let me hear from you soon again.

Yours ever
Thomas S. Eliot

1–Woods was in France on an exchange professorship, and as organiser of the American University Union in Paris.

2–Despite the middle initial, C. E. B. was probably Charles Dunbar Broad (1887–1971), who had studied under Russell, and was now a fellow of Trinity College and lecturer in logic at St Andrews. He was Knightsbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, 1933–53.

3–The article was never written.

4–TSE’s interest in T. H. Green (1826–1882) – political and religious philosopher, philosophy tutor at Balliol College, Oxford; later Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy; leading member of the British Idealist movement – was probably a product of his work on F. H. Bradley, who was taught by Green. Other notable British Idealists included Harold Joachim and J. M. E. McTaggart.

5–
Why Men Fight
, the US edition of
Principles of Social Reconstruction
, had been published in Jan.

6–Richard Carstone is destroyed by his obsession with a case in the Court of Chancery. TSE later called
Bleak House
Dickens’s ‘best novel’ (‘Wilkie Collins and Dickens’,
SE
, 461).