The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (55 page)

1–They included J. C. Squire, Graham Wallas, St John Hutchinson, Philip Jourdain, F. S. Boas and the Dean of Merton.

2–Bronson Cutting (1888–1935), publisher; later a US Senator. A Harvard contemporary of TSE, he was Assistant Military Attaché in London, 1917–18.

3–G. H. Palmer.

MS
Houghton

4 November 1918

18 Crawford Mansions

My dear Henry,

After all your goodness in cabling and working and writing and providing funds it seems very shabby that you should be in doubt because I have not even let you know when I received money from you. As a matter of fact,
all
the money came, as I wrote you last week, so I trust you will advise the banks which stopped payment. I cannot tell you how grateful we both have been for this money, it was providential. Even now, I am in rather a bad way, owing to the fact that the Navy have promised me a job and induced me to leave the bank on a certain date, and have then kept me waiting two weeks (without pay) on account of certain technical difficulties which have involved much cabling to Washington. I feel very sore about it, and it is not settled yet. I have just written explaining in full to father, and I hope he will send the letter on to you, as it took three closely typed pages to explain.

There are a great many things I want to write to you about, but I can’t put my mind on them now. Three months of trying for a job, and for a month or so expecting to get it any day, has told on my nerves; and I feel very old at present, and mentally quite exhausted.

I can’t help feeling, after seeing more of my fellow countrymen lately than I have for four years – that I get on very much better with [the] English. I am not speaking only of my friends, but of the ordinary people one’s in contact with in both countries. Americans now impress me, almost invariably, as very immature.

Can you not take a couple of months, when the war is finally settled and your colleagues are back, and come over here on a holiday? Keep thinking about it.

As always affectionately
Tom.

MS
Gardner Museum

7 November 1918

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mrs Gardner,

I have been intending throughout the summer to answer your letter of June 2nd. I must have appeared unaccountably rude both to you and to everyone else of my friends in America: even my family have had to cable
to me once or twice for assurance of my continued existence. This has been the most terribly exhausting year I have ever known, and one unfortunate event has crowded another. In the first place my wife’s health was so affected by the terrible events of the winter that we had to leave London, and the material discomforts, deprivations and expenses of living in the country (I came to town every day) made a considerable total of embarrassment. On top of that I have spent an immense amount of energy, time, and have been at great expense in trying to get into some branch of government work for which I was fitted. As I was declared unfit for active service I tried to get into either the Army or Navy Intelligence, for which it seemed to me that I was highly qualified, but some official difficulty or other has always arisen. It seems an impossibility for a man to secure any position for which he is really fitted. Only lately I was invited by the Navy to come in to their Intelligence; and threw up my position in Lloyds Bank upon their offer. When the time arrived for me to come in they discovered some technical flaw in the process, and have been cabling to Washington ever since. The only result, so far as I am concerned, is that I have lost a considerable amount of money through having given up my position upon the Navy’s assurances, and that I have no likelihood of getting this money back. So apparently my only course is to appeal for exemption on the ground of a dependent wife, and being partially unfit physically, and await events. Possibly in the course of time the army will discover that they need me to peel potatoes.

But I do not want to take up this delayed letter with my grievances. I have of course been unable to do any serious work. My contributions to the last two numbers of the
Little Review
(which I hope you will like!) were written in the spring. Of course I have the
Egoist
editing, and a series of lectures on Elizabethan literature, on my hands as well as my daily work in the Foreign Department of Lloyds Bank. The latter will sound odd to you, but it is the most interesting business work there is, and offers a secure livelihood, and enables me to live in London and pursue my interests and see my friends and the bank have been very appreciative and encouraging. So I shall go back to them, after this disastrous fiasco with the navy, if they will take me.

I think there will be a certain literary activity in London after the war. I think that my friends Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis are the ablest literary men in London, and I hope we can do something. Do you know any of Lewis’s work, either in drawing or painting, or his novel
Tarr
? He is, in my opinion, the most interesting man in London Society. The army has temporarily robbed literature and art to make an artillery officer of 
him, but he has lately been doing some work for Beaverbrook.
¹
I also think that a younger friend of mine named Sacheverell Sitwell has unusual poetic merit. What do you think of Joyce? I admire
Ulysses
immensely. Lytton Strachey
²
has suddenly become a social lion on the strength of his
Eminent
Victorians
which is really very entertaining.

I hope I shall be able to write to you again and give more literary and art gossip soon, if I get my own affairs in order. I wish I could state my case in Washington. Please write to me and tell me about yourself, and Boston – if there is anything to say about the latter. I hope you keep that torpid pool stirred up a little!

Sincerely yours,
T. S. Eliot

1–WL had left the Royal Artillery to join Lord Beaverbrook’s ‘War Memorials’ project, commissioning war artists such as Augustus John and C. R. W. Nevinson to record the part played by Canadians in the war.

2–Lytton Strachey, critic and biographer; see Glossary of Names.
Eminent Victorians
had been published in May. In an undated letter to MH, VHE wrote: ‘Tom
would
like to see more of Lytton. And I feel it’s been my fault. That was one of my indiscretions. But I know Tom rather wants him. He is lonely. How can he be otherwise? And Lytton is such a dear, and surely they
could
be friends?’ (Texas).

MS
Virginia

7 November 1918

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Rodker

Would you care to exercise your critical acumen by doing an article
¹
of any length or brevity you please
à propos
of a number of volumes of verse (inc. Fletcher, Sitwells, etc.) for the
Egoist
. I hope you will and I will see to getting the books to you.

Our attempts to meet have usually been abortive. I have been engrossed in personal difficulties connected with the Military. But would you care to come here and dine with me solus on Saturday night? I am alone, my wife is still in the country.

Yrs.
T. S. Eliot

1–Apart from a poem, his first contribution was ‘Blackwelliana’,
Egoist
6 (Sept. 1919).

MS
Virginia

7 November 1918

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Goldring,

I am writing to tell you that the delay over your manuscript is due to myself. Pound gave it to me and I intended to see Miss Weaver at once and put it in her hands. Owing to complications in my private affairs connected with military service I failed to do so.

I have given her the stuff now and she will be writing to you herself. We shall be very glad to print some or all of what you send; but it is very doubtful whether we should be able to offer any remuneration. The finances are in not a flourishing state, owing to the war, and there is very little cash available, so perhaps you won’t consider it worthwhile.

What about the cuttings from
New Ireland
?
²
I enjoyed these very much, as my opinions nearly coincide with yours, and I want to send them on to the Sitwells who have not seen them.

I hope you will be back in this country before long.

I enjoyed the
Fortune
, as my review testified.
³

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

1–Douglas Goldring (1887–1960), novelist and travel writer. Beginning in Nov.–Dec., the
Egoist
carried consecutive articles by him on ‘Three Georgian Novelists’ (Compton Mackenzie, Hugh Walpole and Gilbert Cannan).

2–Goldring had published anonymously
Dublin: Explorations and Reflections
By An Englishman (1917), in which he mocked
Ireland’s Literary Renaissanc
e
(New York, 1916) by the Irish author and journalist Ernest A. Boyd (1887–1946). The two went on sparring for weeks in
The New Ireland
, a Dublin weekly paper, throughout May and June.

3–TSE found the first half of
The Fortune
(Dublin, 1918) ‘boring’, but thought its portrayal of English Society on the eve of war made it ‘unquestionably a brilliant novel’ (
Egoist
, Jan. 1918).

MS
Houghton

7 November 1918

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Miss Monroe

I have handed your correspondence re Mr Jepson to Miss Weaver, who I expect will include it at my request in the next issue of the
Egoist
, deleting the phrases mentioned.
¹

I confidently hoped that I should be able to send you the article at the time promised, but various personal matters have so broken up my summer that I have done no work at all. I still hope to let you have it this autumn. As for verse – I have so very little nowadays that I have been able to provide enough only for one issue of the
Little Review
in the past year.

With all best wishes for the future success of
Poetry
.

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

4–Monroe was to publish in Egoist 5: 10 (Nov.–Dec. 1918) a protest against Edgar Jepson’s review, ‘Recent United States Poetry’ (
English Review,
May 1918); this included related correspondence with Austin Harrison, editor of the
English Review.
Jepson had written with advice from EP: see
Selected Letters of Ezra Pound
1907–1941 [1951], 135.

Published 9 November 1918

Sir,

As an American of some years’ residence in this country, I feel impelled to call attention to the conflict actually taking place between President Wilson and his domestic opponents. The information obtainable through English newspapers is meagre and the importance of the issue may easily be overlooked. It bears not only on the coming peace conference, but on future Anglo-American relations.

The Republican party, now the opposition, has for some time past applied itself to the publication of its grievances against the party in power. Many of these grievances, including charges of administrative incompetence, concern the American people alone. Many are quite likely to be well founded; with the exception of a small number of men close to the President, the Democratic party is probably inferior to the Republican in the quality of its leaders. More recently, however, the Republicans have not confined themselves to criticism of internal policy or internal blunders; some of their spokesmen have attacked Mr Wilson’s foreign policy, or maintained tenets wholly opposed to that policy.

The effect of this campaign will soon be patent, if it is not already visible, in this country. So long as it was supposed that Mr Wilson was unanimously supported by his own countrymen, his policy was acclaimed with universal approval by the English Press; now that domestic dissension has asserted itself, we may expect to discover who are and who are not Mr Wilson’s sincere supporters in England.

You have stated in
The Nation
that ‘The old guard of the Republican party, with Senator Lodge at its head, is undoubtedly opposing, as openly as it dare, the whole League of Nations idea.’
¹
 

An examination of some of Mr Lodge’s speeches confirms the accuracy of this allegation. The attitude of Senator Lodge and his friends will not find favor with those elements in this country which have favored President Wilson’s peace programme. My question is, whether it should commend itself to any English opinion whatever.

Henry Cabot Lodge has been senator from Massachusetts for some years, and he has the best connexions in Boston society. He belongs to a section of the American public which has loyally supported Great Britain from the beginning of the war. And his peace programme certainly appears to offer as much material advantage to England as England could ask. He would seem, in short, to be at least as good a friend to England as President Wilson is. But his policy is potentially even more nationalistic than it is at present pro-British.
²
The ‘Old Guard’ of his party is traditionally associated with a high protective tariff, and Senator Lodge is traditionally associated with the Old Guard. The history and composition of the Republican party and the present emergencies of its more conservative elements do not encourage one to believe that it would sacrifice business interest to international amity.

It would mean universal disaster if the participation of America in the war does not lead to closer friendships and understanding, to freer intercourse of ideas, between America and England. No understanding based on economic interest alone could survive; even the legitimate interests of the two countries may cause delicate situations; the economic interests of America and England are compatible, but not identical; there are difficulties to be solved, and suspicions to be dispelled. Should affairs be simultaneously directed by Extremist factions in both countries, it is hardly to be expected that the extremes would meet.

Nothing but ideas can bind the two countries together. Since the entry of America into the War, the Republican party has not yet succeeded in producing a single idea of importance. The question whether America should not have entered the war earlier is now a dead issue. The policy of President Wilson is the only one which offers any security for the continuance and development of Anglo-American harmony.

Yours, etc.,
T. S. Eliot.