The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (60 page)

MS
Houghton  

26 January 1919

18 Crawford Mansions  

My dearest Mother,  

I have had no letter from you for a very long time. Of course I expected there would be an interval when I should not have any letter from you, but you can judge how impatient I am. Until I either hear from you or of you it hardly seems worthwhile to write, especially as I may get a letter tomorrow or next day. Still, I do not like to have a Sunday go by without writing.

My lectures go on – the one course. That was originally an appointment for three years, you know – if the class held together for that length of time. Of course I should not have liked to desert them in any case before the expiry of that time. And the money is still very welcome. I suppose prices will go down later (though not to what they were before the war) but they are very high now. I am lecturing on Elizabethan Lyric verse tomorrow – Shakespeare, Jonson, Campion, Barnfield etc. Then I go on to the Sonnet and afterwards to prose – Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon etc. I think I sent you the syllabus. I hope to get some of the material for a book on Elizabethan blank verse out of the course.

I shall reply just as soon as I hear from you. How long it seems.

Always your devoted son
Tom.

MS
Berg

29 January 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mrs Woolf,

I return you the proof,
¹
which seems to me admirable.

I shall be very glad indeed to dine with you on Sunday, and talk matters over.
²

Looking forward to seeing you –

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

1–
Poems
was to be published by the Hogarth Press on 12 May, at 2s 6d. Fewer than 250 copies were printed.  

2–Writing to Vanessa Bell at about this time, VW asked for the return of some decorated papers ‘before Sunday, as I want to show them to Eliot’ (
Letters
, II, 323).

MS
Berg

3 February 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Bertie,

I shall be glad to see you on the 12th and will keep the evening free. If you come, you will let me know place and time.

It is not the case that Vivien ‘won’t reply’. I have taken the whole business of Marlow into my own hands, as she cannot have anything to do
with this or with anything else that would interfere with the success of her doctor’s treatment.

Before I heard from you the people in the house had offered to keep it on for some time if they could have it at a considerably lower rent (as they contend that it is not furnished). I naturally agreed to this. I only heard on Saturday that they will leave on March the 29th, so that after that date I shall be able to get at your things.
¹

I will expect to hear from you about the 12th. I have a great deal to talk to you about.

Yours
TSE

1–In Jan. 1918, after quarrelling with his mistress Lady Constance Malleson, BR intended to spend more time at Marlow, but he changed his mind after they were reconciled. While BR was in prison in July, TSE had sent word that he was having difficulty finding anyone to share the cost of the house. BR replied that it was unfortunate as he would probably have to withdraw his own support at the end of the year. He was now anxious to recover his possessions.

PC
Beinecke

5 February 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Thanks for your letter. I shall await the finished product with interest, and hope that it will not be so finished that it will take a long time.

Yours truly,
T. S. Eliot  

1–Edgar Jepson, English novelist and autobiographer: see Glossary of Names.

MS
McMaster  

14 February 1919

18 Crawford Mansions  

Dear Bertie,  

When I came home the other night I found that the sick woman [the Eliots’ servant] was much worse; the doctor was there and said she had pneumonia. From then on till last night we have not had a chance to think or speak, hardly to eat and drink. Otherwise I should have written you sooner.  

Last night was the first opportunity I had of speaking of our meeting to Vivien. I am afraid that that night I was only thinking of my own point of
view towards Marlow. The idea of parting with the house altogether had not before occurred to me; with so many worries on my mind I lost sight of how attached Vivien is to the house and garden. When at last I had an opportunity of telling her of our meeting I found she was extraordinarily upset at the thought of parting with it. She worked very hard at it during all the spring and summer and put so much thought and so many hopes into it. – The garden in particular is such a great joy and source of activity to her that now there are so few things she may do, as you know, I am sure it would be a mistake to deprive her of this interest. She is always thinking about the garden and even while tenants have been in the house has been several times to Marlow to look after it. It seems also that she has even now begun to look forward to happier times; she is expecting the return before the end of this year of her friend Lucy Thayer, when all kinds of things will be possible for Vivien that she cannot do now. She will be so much better when she has a companion, we are sure.

So that I think after all we must go on as we are, and hope that there will be fewer misfortunes in the future. But thank you very much indeed for offering to take over the house.

Yours ever,
T.S.E.

I am sending round the small table and some books I still have (I am ashamed not to have returned them.) The other things you shall have in six weeks, as I said. 

TS
Houghton  

27 February 1919

18 Crawford Mansions  

Dear Henry,  

I have not yet answered your long letter of the 11th January, though I have sent one or two messages to you through mother, which I suppose you got, and perhaps she has sent you my letters to peruse. Perhaps also you have been in St Louis.  

I am writing now because the doctor has made me take a week at home, mostly in bed. I did not want to do it, because Vivien has had all the housework to do for several weeks past, and is very tired and looks very ill. Nursing the charwoman through the first and the most critical part of pneumonia was very trying for her. The woman (who is now at her cousin’s house) is getting on very well, but she will not be able to return to work for weeks, and meanwhile it is quite impossible to get a woman for more
than an odd hour or two. There has been a great deal of pneumonic influenza about and if one of us got it he would have to go to a hospital. Vivien’s parents have no servants either and have been unable to get any for months. Her mother has been ill in bed and she is out there now to do what she can for her. So you see the situation is a difficult one.

I have simply had a sort of collapse; I slept almost continuously for two days, and now I am up, I feel very weak and easily exhausted.

Thank you very much for your letter. I was very grateful to you for all the detail, and the actions and attitudes of all the persons appeared very characteristic and real. My first thought was that mother must leave St Louis, and I was glad to find that such was her intention. Her first letters cheered me up a good deal about her, and I still think (you will probably agree with me) that she may have a ‘new lease of life’ in the sense of power over her affairs, and as you say that she may expand and include her relatives outside the immediate family in her interests. She would certainly enjoy Cambridge. But I do not think that this is so certain that it can endure an indefinite postponement: the sooner she leaves St Louis the better. Her mind is of course revolving over and over and occupying itself with questions of the disposal of small personal affairs. She evidently put no end of care into making up some parcels she sent me – father’s underwear and a book and a few drawings I asked for. She has been awfully kind to me, and keeps saying ‘this has been very hard on you – you were so far away’. I think it was probably more completely unexpected to me than to anyone else, as I was never told that his trouble last summer was heart disease; and all the more recent reports had spoken of his great improvement in health. My mind keeps recurring to little bits of images in the memory, of Locust Street and Gloucester, I imagine much as it does in old age. I wished at first that father could have had more satisfaction out of his children, yet I cannot think (so far as I know) that his life was a very unhappy one, and after all none of his children was made for the kinds of success that he could have appreciated. I don’t think that Ada’s distinction
¹
ever meant very much to him, and he would probably have extracted more satisfaction out of the sort of domestic citizenship you speak of than out of the most brilliant success. I always tried to give as powerful an impression as I could of my position here but it was a prominence essentially too esoteric to be of much use in that way. Now, I find that I think more of his own youthful possibilities that never came to anything:
and yet with a great deal of satisfaction; his old-fashioned scholarship! his flute-playing, his drawing. Two of the Cats that I have seem to me quite remarkable. I feel that both he and mother in spite of the strength of their affection were lonely people, and that he was the more lonely of the two, that he hardly knew himself what he was like. In my experience everyone except the fools seem to me warped or stunted.

My MSS. has not yet found a berth. Knopf, the publisher in New York, wrote to Pound that the success of his book
Pavannes and Divisions
had not been sufficient to warrant his undertaking any new contracts with him or Wyndham Lewis or myself. So I have asked John Quinn, the art patron in New York, to take the MSS. He has been kind to me and had previously offered to find a better publisher for it. You see it is both prose and verse, as I have written so little, I have had so little time to write. Arnold Bennett told me he could get a volume of verse alone published for me, but I haven’t enough verse for that. I hope I shall be able to give up lectures next year. There has been so much to worry about that my evening and Sunday and holiday time has never been clear, and often I am too tired. I feel very played out at present. Vivien wants me to take my holidays on the continent this summer, if I can get over there.

Always affectionately
Tom

Write soon.

1–Ada Eliot won distinction in social work in Boston: she was Director of the Research Bureau on Social Case Work, 1919–27. See Glossary of Names.

TS
Houghton

Thursday 27 February [1919]

[London]

Dearest mother,

I am just writing a line in response to your letter of February 6th although I know you will get my previous one by the same mail. The reason is that I had a little bit of a collapse and did not go out on Monday, so the letter I wrote on Sunday was overlooked. I have been away from business since then, the first two days in bed. We were afraid it might be influenza at first, but it appears to have been only exhaustion. At first I slept almost continuously. I am much better but still feel very weak. I think it is more the result of all the trying events and worries of the past two months than anything else, as I have not been over-working.

I have been and am still afraid of Vivien’s breaking down. The care of the sick woman was very fatiguing and unpleasant, and of course we can get no one in to work regularly. Besides the housework and nursing me
she has been out this afternoon to nurse her mother, who has no servants and is ill in bed.

I do not suppose that you will sacrifice any of the furniture, books and pictures which is worth taking east with you.
¹
Of course the portraits will be a great anxiety in transportation. As for the books, I presume you will take all of any intrinsic value, and as I cannot remember what else there is I can hardly suggest any that I should like to have saved. Perhaps there are a certain number of books of interest as documents of New England civilisation, i.e. sermons of Andrew Eliot, Theodore Parker, anything to do with Emerson and his circle, poems of Cranch or Dawes,
²
or American History. I remember a set of Prescott
³
(I don’t mean Marion’s Parkman).
⁴
I have an idea that such of these things as you could save would be of use to me eventually. Of course I should like the Latin and Greek, but I have Aeschylus and Sophocles. I know other voices will be raised to protect the Rollo books!
⁵
I am also strong for the preservation of any family antiquities in the way of books, genealogical works etc.

This has been a very hard winter to get through, and I hope we shall all feel stronger when the mild weather comes. There will soon be signs of spring here.

With very much love

your son
Tom.

I don’t know what to say about Jefferson.
⁶
If it is very bulky I expect you had better let it go. I should be sorry, as father gave it to me, but it is probably not worth the cost of sending about.