The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (40 page)

1–‘The Borderline of Prose’.
NS
9 (12 May 1917), 157–9.

2–Harriet Shaw Weaver, editor of the
Egoist
.

3–H. D and her husband RA rented a large room at 44 Mecklenburgh Square. In
Bid Me to Live
(1960), H. D. gave a fictional account of her life there after the departure of RA.

4–John Quinn, wealthy New York lawyer and literary patron: see Glossary of Names. On 11 Aug. 1915, EP had written to him about TSE: ‘I have more or less discovered him … I think young Eliot is the first person I should like to have confer with you. He has more entrails than might appear from his quiet exterior, I think.’

5–He did not do so.

6–Grandmother Stearns had lived in North Lexington, Massachusetts.

MS
Houghton

28 May 1917

18 Crawford Mansions

Dearest Mother,

This is a ‘bank holiday’ in London: that is to say, yesterday, being Whitsunday (Pentecost) was a Religious Feast, and the next day is a holiday. So I have been sitting at home writing an article for the
New
Statesman
.
¹
It is very warm and bright; the gramophones across the court have been going without intermission, and the streets are full of people. As soon as I finish this letter for the mail, we are going out walking. It is also Vivien’s [twenty-ninth] birthday. We had two very nice letters from you
and one from father this morning. One of them was
open
, the one which also contained a comic picture from the newspaper and Roger Amory’s bill.
²
There was nothing else in it, was there? The other contained the receipt to the above. Thank you very much for paying it; though I hate to think of the money going to that purpose.

I daresay the hernia might make a difference, though there is no indication of its still being open. The doctor told me at the time that there was usually a family predisposition in such cases. I don’t believe that Henry would be accepted for anything. He seems very anxious to go; I am afraid that is largely dissatisfaction with himself and his present life; but I think that the best thing he can do is to stay in one place long enough to have a really settled life. He ought, of course, as everyone has always said, to be married; being a very affectionate domestic person without great or absorbing ambitions. He
was
, of course, the sort who would be quite as likely to marry the wrong woman as the right, but that might not be so likely now.

I am sorry to hear about Marian’s throat but very likely the change of climate will do her good. St Louis is very smoky. And Millis
³
ought to be very pleasant now.

We have not been very well lately. It is partly the sudden and extreme change in the weather. I must send this letter off now or it will not catch the boat. I will write by next mail.

Very devotedly
your son
Tom.

1–Apparently not completed or not published.

2–Roger Amory (1887–1960), Harvard class of 1910, became Class Treasurer in 1916; later president of the Consolidated Investment Trust.

3–Millis, Massachusetts, is a rural town in Norfolk County, about thirty miles south-west of Boston, where TSE’s sister Charlotte and her family lived.

MS
Houghton

13 June 1917

18 Crawford Mansions

My dear father,

I resume communication after not having written for some time. I have been getting your letters regularly, with enclosures, and have heard more regularly from Henry than for some time past. He seems very restless and unsettled and longing for a chance to escape at any price. The trouble is
that he has never been in contact with any but one sort of reality – that of the most disagreeable business experience – and that he is still longing for experience in general – which makes him seem in a way very immature. Perhaps the same thing is true of many young or even almost middle-aged business men. I think it is this feeling as much as anything which makes him so anxious to come abroad.1 It might of course freshen him up and give him more satisfaction with his existence; on the other hand it might not make him any happier to return to what he has been doing. I think everyone sooner or later must come to a point – in order to be happy at all – where one is simply content to cultivate one’s garden and do one’s work in peace and a certain security.

To me all this war
enthusiasm
seems a bit unreal, because of the mixture of motives. But I see the war partly through the eyes of men who have been and returned, and who view it, even when convinced of the rightness of the cause, in a very different way: as something very sordid and disagreeable which must be put through. That would be my spirit.

I have been particularly busy at the bank this week, and in the excessive humid heat it has been rather tiring. The man who taught me my job has gone on his holiday, and I have full control over it now. All the money coming in
for
foreign banks (‘Correspondents’) passes through my hands, and I also have charge of documents (bills of lading etc.) to be delivered against payment (one for fifty bales of
old clothes
imported from Rotterdam, over which I had some correspondence with a Jewish lady in Whitechapel). I have had to find a good many things out for myself. At a time like the present one has much more opportunity of stepping into important work and having an interesting job. The foreign work is I believe the most interesting part of banking, especially at the present time, when one can from time to time see very big things happening in which one plays a small part without really knowing what is going on.

To turn from banking to literature. I have been too tired the last few hot days to do much. My book [
Prufrock and Other Observations
] is out, and you will probably get a copy by the time this arrives. The cover is not all that I desire, but one must take what one can get in times like these, and I am lucky to get it printed at all without cost to myself. There ought to be a few reviews in a few weeks.

The
Egoist
I believe you can get in Boston, at one or two shops, but I will enquire.

We are going to the Jourdains
²
on Sunday, with the Waterlows. We are dreading it a bit, as it means a train journey of over an hour and a long walk from the station, but Jourdain has been so kind to me that I thought I ought to accept, for both of us. Vivien will be very tired afterwards. We are going to occupy her parents’ house for a time, as they have gone away. They will pay and feed the servant, and we shall have only our own expenses, with a change of air. I long for the country or rather the seaside now; the City (as the business district is called) is full of flowers for sale very cheap.

I must stop now. I like to think of you at Gloucester soon. The submarines won’t go there! I long to see you, every day.

Your devoted son
Tom

1–HWE did not travel outside the USA until he visited England with his mother in 1921.

2–The Jourdains lived in Crookham, Hampshire.

Published 23 June 1917

Sir –

I enclose herewith an extract from a letter lately received from a young officer which I hope may interest some of your readers. I may add that the officer in question entered the Army directly from a public school, and began his service in the trenches before he was nineteen.
²
– Yours etc.,

T. S. Eliot
18 Crawford Mansions, Crawford Street,
W.1.
June 17th, 1917.                                    

1–The magazine ran a series of letters from the trenches.

2–VHE’s brother Maurice Haigh-Wood.

                                           ‘June 8th, 1917

‘Dear — — —, There is rather a good article in
The Nation
this last week called “On Leave”.
¹
You should read it. I have often heard it said that the curious thing about those who have been to the front is their complete indifference. They appear to be practically untouched by what they have seen and gone through, they talk of war in a callous and humorous way, they even joke about its horrors. The impression one has from them is that it is, on the whole, a dreary and unpleasant business,
with its anxious moments and its bright moments, but not nearly such a hell as one really knows it to be.

‘In the case of the vast majority, however, this is an attitude, a screen – I speak of educated, thinking men – and it is not granted to many who have not shared the same experiences to see behind the screen. The reason for this, as the article points out, is the practical impossibility of the uninitiated to realize or imagine even dimly the actual conditions of war. And a man who has been through it and seen and taken part in the unspeakable tragedies that are the ordinary routine, feels that he has something, possesses something, which others can never possess.

‘It is morally impossible for him to talk seriously of these things to people who cannot even approach comprehension. It is hideously exasperating to hear people talking the glib commonplaces about the war and distributing cheap sympathy to its victims.

‘Perhaps you are tempted to give them a picture of a leprous earth, scattered with the swollen and blackening corpses of hundreds of young men. The appalling stench of rotting carrion mingled with the sickening smell of exploded lyddite and ammonal. Mud like porridge, trenches like shallow and sloping cracks in the porridge – porridge that stinks in the sun. Swarms of flies and bluebottles clustering on the pits of offal. Wounded men lying in the shell holes among the decaying corpses: helpless under the scorching sun and bitter nights, under repeated shelling. Men with bowels dropping out, lungs shot away, with blinded, smashed faces, or limbs blown into space. Men screaming and gibbering. Wounded men hanging in agony on the barbed wire, until a friendly spout of liquid fire shrivels them up like a fly in a candle. But these are only words, and probably only convey a fraction of their meaning to their hearers. They shudder, and it is forgotten….

‘I need hardly say that on a great number of men war does produce this effect; of these the old regular army officer is a type – blunt, kindly, jolly good fellows – who have never stopped to think in their lives.’

1–By H. M. T [omlinson], 2 June 1917, describing London as seen by a soldier home from the front.

MS
Houghton

27 June 1917

[3 Compayne Gdns, London
N.W.
]

My dearest mother,

This will be only a line, even after not having written for
ever
so long – I think a fortnight. For I am very busy and very tired; I have been going to bed very early lately and am consequently behindhand in my work. I have 
been frightfully tired lately for some reason. I think I have told you about the things I have been working on.

We have not heard from you for over a
fortnight
– I hope for a letter tomorrow. One of us usually goes into Crawford Mansions every day for the mail.

We have been thankful to be here during the hot weather – and in a month we shall be going away. I love to think of you as being at Gloucester. I imagine how everything looks and think of the summers when I was at Gloucester before you and saw you and father coming across the path with your luggage, and climbing over the stone wall where it is broken down; and going to meet you. The only thing I don’t like to think of is the
Elsa
.1

We are going to have tennis on Saturday – I am, that is. Vivien is going to write to you tomorrow. I only wrote tonight at bedtime to say how often I thought of you.

Your devoted son Tom –

1–TSE’s catboat (EVE); see plate 21. Catboats were originally East Coast fishing boats, with gaff-rigged sails, but adapted for racing and cruising around the turn of the nineteenth century: see Stan Grayson,
Cape Cod Catboats
(Marblehead, Mass., 2002).

MS
Houghton

28 June 1917

3 Compayne Gdns, London
N.W.6

Dear Mrs Eliot

I am putting this letter in with Tom’s, which he left open for me. He was so desperately tired – he wanted badly to write a longer letter – but he was too tired. I wish he was going to have a long holiday with you at Eastern Point, or with me, at Bosham. I worry very much about his health – it seems he has not average strength – and added to that he lives as no average man does. The incessant, never ending grind, day and evening – and always
too
much to do, so that he is always behind hand, never up to date – therefore always tormented – and if
forced
to rest or stop a minute it only torments him the more to feel that inexorable pile of work piling up against him.

He got your letter this
morning
– dated June 3rd, and was glad of it.

I wrote you a
long
time ago thanking you for the birthday present you sent me. I do hope you got it in the end.

I also told you about Tom’s new suit. He has had it about a month. I also bought him two pairs of pyjamas, and one shirt, and six prs. of socks. These were absolute necessities.

Tom enjoys and revels in the
large
and airy rooms in this house, the peace and quiet of the neighbourhood, and the green-ness of the open square behind and the creeper-covered houses in front. My mother’s two servants are very efficient and nice girls, and everything works so smoothly and quietly. It would be ideal if we did not find that it does cost us considerably more to just live here,
even though
Father pays us £1 a week for the servants’ food. The reason of this is that they are used to a more liberal way of living here, and not being
my
servants, I cannot possibly change the ways, and adopt here my own
rigid
, locking-upeverything principles – which I have had to evolve since my marriage. In the flat, if we have a woman, I lock up every mortal thing, and not a grain of rice or a crust of bread is eaten without my knowledge. Naturally one does not enjoy having to practise such parsimonious ways – but when it is a choice between that and practically starvating as it has been with us – there is of course no question. It seems strange to me, very strange, to be back here in this home of mine, with Tom,
living
here, after these two years of noisy struggle. I had almost forgotten that life could be so pleasant, so smooth. It is the old tale, I suppose, of no-one’s ever appreciating anything until they have lost it. I was also going to add that life in a suburb is
more
expensive than it is nearer the heart of town, because the shops are dearer, and all of one standard – and one is in their hands. Also, life is more conventional – there are people one knows, or who know one, about – one has to keep up appearances. Living where
we
do (Crawford Mansions) in a little noisy corner, with slums and low streets and poor shops close around us – (and yet within a stone’s throw of great squares with big houses and one of the most expensive residential districts) it is like being in a wilderness, we are just two waifs who live perched up in our little flat – no-one around us knows us, or sees us, or bothers to care how we live or what we do, or whether we live or not. Tom says, Americans who have never been here cannot and never do realise how
vast
London is. It is so enormous – well, you can’t imagine it and all the differences – I know.

Food prices are, as you say, extremely high, and, we are constantly told, will go on rising. In fact they
do
rise, week by week, and it becomes more and more difficult and harassing to procure proper nourishment on the money which Tom is earning. It is almost impossible. I think that Tom most certainly
ought
to be getting a larger salary. £2.10 a week, for the work he is doing, seems to me absurd. He is now doing far more difficult work than he did at first – and has quite a position. I dont know what will happen if he does not get a rise soon. 

I must stop now, I ought to write to Henry and to my friend Lucy Thayer. With much love to you all

Vivien