The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (61 page)

1–After her husband’s death, Mrs Eliot moved from St Louis to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as TSE had hoped.

2–Rev. Andrew Eliot (1718–78), TSE’s great-great-great grandfather, Minister of the New North Church of Boston, and author of works including
An Evil and Adulterous Generation
(1753); Rev. Theodore Parker (1810–60), radical Boston preacher; Rev. Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–92), TSE’s great-uncle, poet and painter, and member of the Transcendental Club; Rev. Rufus Dawes (1803–59), author of volumes of poetry including
Geraldine
(1839), which TSE characterised as an ‘emasculated pastiche’ of Byron (‘Israfel’, N&A 7 [21 May 1927] 219.

3–William Prescott (1796–1859),
The History of the Conquest of Mexico
(3 vols, 1843).

4–
France and England in the New World
by Francis Parkman (1823–93), US historian.

5–A series of popular children’s books, inc.
Rollo at Work
(1839), by Jacob Abbott (1803–79).

6–Presumably Thomas Jefferson,
Writings
, ed. H. A. Washington (9 vols, 1853–4).

MS
Texas  

4 March 1919

18 Crawford Mansions  

Dear Mary,  

Vivien says she is lunching with you on Thursday. Won’t you come on later (at 5.45) and dance at a place near Baker Street. They teach the new dances and steps, which I don’t know and want to learn. I hope you won’t mind my being rather out of date. It is over by half past seven, and we could dine afterwards. I think it would be rather fun, and the people ought to be a source of amusement. Do come.  

Sincerely
T.S.E.

MS
Beinecke  

4 March 1919

18 Crawford Mansions  

Dear Mr Jepson,  

I shall be very glad to come and hear you on Sunday at 3 (?) and if you leave any opening shall defend the Elizabethans. I am pretty sure I can come.  

I had been meaning to write (but had mislaid your address) to acknowledge your bold championship in
The Egoist
. I wonder if Monroe will have anything more to say! It was, by the way, to me that she wrote to ask to have the correspondence printed in
The Egoist.
¹
 

Sincerely yours,
T. S. Eliot

1–In ‘Recent United States Poetry’ (
English Review
, 26 May 1918), Jepson had written dismissively of the poems by Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Frost to which
Poetry
had awarded prizes. It seemed ‘incredible’, he said, that in the year when
Poetry
had published TSE’s ‘La Figlia Che Piange’, its first prize should go to ‘that lumbering fakement, “All Life in a Life” [by Masters]’. When Austin Harrison, editor of the
English Review
, refused to print Harriet Monroe’s indignant response, it appeared in the Nov.–Dec. issue of the Egoist, together with his reply and a further letter by her. An unrepentant Jepson intervened in the Jan.–Feb. 1919 number, and was criticised by Monroe and Aiken in Sept. (A condensed form of Jepson’s attack in the
Little Review
in May also provoked a reply from William Carlos Williams.)

MS
Houghton  

12 March 1919

18 Crawford Mansions  

My dearest Mother  

I have had two letters from you since I wrote last, and one enclosing some old letters that father wrote me twenty years ago. I should have written last Sunday but that I have been engrossed in a problem which has come before me; and taking counsel of friends. I have just had a very flattering offer. It will of course be decided in the course of a few days, but while I am writing I might as well tell you about it. I have been asked to become the assistant editor of the
Athenaeum,
¹
on a two years contract, at £500 per annum. It is an old paper, for many years a (purely) literary weekly, with a very high standing in London. More recently it was changed to a monthly, and lost its character, but now it has been bought by a rich man who is turning it into a literary weekly again. The man who is to be editor
²
is very anxious to get me as assistant, and says he would rather have me than anyone in England.  

The advantages are:  

1. Social Prestige.  
   
2. Probably more leisure.  
   
3. More money at once.  
   

The disadvantages are:  

1. It is practically a new paper: it may succeed or fail.  
   
2. In the latter case I should be in difficulties at the end of my contract. Against this, some probability that the distinction of having held the position would assure me getting something else.  
   
3. No assurance that the salary would rise. At the bank I am sure of that.  
   
4. The work
   might
   be more exhausting than the bank work; and would have no more relation to my own serious work than the bank work has.
   
5. I have lately been shifted into new and much more interesting work in the bank which is not routine but research – practically economics and in fact am a sort of department or bureau by myself.  
   

I am to see the General Manager about this.  

The chief fact militating against the acceptance is the insecurity after two years, and the fact that there would be a lot of drudgery in journalism
which would be fatiguing. There is of course as much difference between journalism and literature as between teaching and literature.

There it is in brief, but I assure you I have thought hard and am still thinking. I shall decide in a few days – the question is how soon I shall be getting a really good salary at the bank.

Anyway, it is a great compliment.

 

I am anxious for you to get settled in Cambridge. Then I shall come to visit you and bring you back with me.

Very affectionately
your son Tom.

1–Founded in 1828, the
Athenaeum
had recently been bought by Arthur Rowntree.

2–John Middleton Murry, critic and editor: see Glossary of Names.

MS
Beinecke

12 March 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Jepson,

Will you let me have your paper to press on Weaver for the
Egoist
?
¹
(I can’t swear how long it is, but lost count of time in listening to it). If you will I should like that and would write or attempt some sort of reply. You know you promised another when you had put it in shape, but I have given up hopes of that.  

Yrs.
T. S. Eliot  

I have just been given a decadent work of sentiment on the ‘New Elizabethans’
²
which makes me feel that some of the sewers of the elder period ought to be aired.  

Damn Lamb, Swinburne, J. A. Symonds, Dekker, Heywood and domestic tragedy
except
Yorkshire Tr
[
agedy
].
³
 

Glad you put in a word for Tourneur – he is a great poet. Think you quite wrong on B. Jonson.
⁴

1–TSE had attended a talk on Elizabethan literature by Jepson on 9Mar. Jepson’s paper was not used in the
Egoist
.

2–TSE wrote an unsigned review of E. B. Osborn,
The New Elizabethans: A First Selection of the Lives of Young Men Who Have Fallen in the Great War,
in A., 4 Apr. 1919.

3–TSE wrote later, in ‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’: ‘The accepted attitude toward Elizabethan drama was established on the publication of Charles Lamb’s
Specimens
[
of English Dramatic Poets, who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare
(1808)] … For the
Specimens
made it possible to read the plays as poetry while neglecting their function on the stage’ (C. 2: 6, Feb. 1924;
SE
).

4–TSE had a high regard for Jonson as poet and dramatist: ‘Ben Jonson’,
TLS
, 13 Nov. 1919;
SE
).

MS
Berg

26 March 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mrs Woolf,

Thank you so much for sending me the patterns,
¹
and so many of them. I still think that the one originally chosen is the best, and would probably also be best liked by the people who might buy the book. The dark blue one is also good. But these may be rather expensive, so I have chosen one of the others (marked 3) as an alternative, and it is only reasonable to leave the choice between these three to you.

I wonder if your husband got my note. We were very annoyed at having made an engagement for Saturday so far ahead that it could not be broken, but I do hope you will ask us again.

I look forward to seeing you. It is very good of you to have taken so much trouble over the papers.

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

1–Papers of various designs and textures were used to cover copies of
Poems
, issued on 12May.

MS
University of Victoria

26 March 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Read,

Thanks for your book.
²
I like it. I read most of it in the train this morning, and when I have read it again I should like to discuss it with you.

I want No. 19 of Wadsworth’s Landscape in two colours.
³
Framed. Only I can’t pay for it till after the 1st of the month.

Shall see you Friday.
Yours
T. S. E.

1–Herbert Read, art and literary critic, poet and novelist, friend of TSE: see Glossary of Names.

2–HR had sent his collection,
Naked Warriors
(1919), with a note: ‘Here is my gory
war-book
. You might like “Comeliness”.’ TSE later called it ‘the best war poetry that I can remember having seen’ (‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’,
Egoist
6: 3, July 1919).

3–TSE had seen the picture at Frank Rutter’s new Adelphi Gallery, where Edward Wadsworth was exhibiting his drawings and woodcuts. Frank Rutter (1876–1937), art critic and curator, and active supporter of women’s suffrage, edited (with HR) the journal
Art & Letters,
1917–20. He had been editor of
To-Day,
1902–4, and curator of Leeds City Art Gallery, 1912–18; and he was art critic of the
Sunday Times
from 1903 until his death.

MS
McMaster

26 March 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Bertie,

We had been considering the means of getting your things back to you when your letter came.
¹
The people will be leaving at the end of this week. Vivien will not be able to go down on that day, but if the weather moderates so as to make the journey possible for her she will begin to send the things on by the latter part of next week. She will be using the house a good deal this spring; but it does not look as if the weather would permit her to do so for some little time. She will however go down as presently as possible and look after your articles.

Sincerely
T.S.E.

1–Russell had written asking for the return of his belongings from the Marlow cottage. ‘You needn’t bring the things all at once, if it is easier to bring them by degrees,’ he wrote on 19 Mar.; but he wanted the ‘tea-table & coffee-grinder as soon as possible’, and enclosed a list including ‘check trousers, thick overcoat, top hat, fur for neck, long coat or cloak for term, rough coat for country, and day dress for term and day dress for country’.

MS
Houghton

29 March 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

My dearest Mother,

I have neglected you this week, but it is so hard to write about affairs when you know that they will be decided even before the recipient gets the letter. They are decided now. I am staying in the bank. The bank people were very anxious for me to stay. They are organising some new work, a new department, in fact, of a very interesting and important kind – not ordinary bank work at all, but economic work – I cannot go into further details about it, but I am started on it already; and it will be on a large scale, with numerous assistants. There is a man from the Foreign Office coming in too. As for the salary, I shall know in a few days what it will be. It will be better than my present one, and in a few years ought to be beyond the £500 offered by the
Athenaeum.
The work gives opportunity for initiative and is work for which they wish men of higher education. It will give much more responsibility, and therefore more freedom.

I was moved to this conclusion for several reasons. First the insecurity of a paper. A weekly which is
practically
a
new
one, and which must build
up a new circulation, is a great venture. If it failed I should have to begin a new struggle – in journalism. I should be
worrying all the time
about whether it would succeed. The bank work offers prospects of a
very
good salary. I know the people and like them, and they like me very much. I know where I am with them.

But there is another argument besides the financial one. I felt that the constant turning out of ‘copy’ for a weekly paper would exhaust me for genuine creative work. It would
never
be my first interest, any more than finance is. Finance I can get away from at the end of a day; but review writing would stay by me; I should always be toiling to make my work better than it need be for ephemeral reading. I could not turn it out mechanically and then go to my own work.

Then, if I turned out a good deal of second rate stuff it would not in the end add to my reputation – and to make everything first rate would take too much out of me.

As it is, I occupy rather a privileged position. I am out of the intrigues and personal hatreds of journalism, and everyone respects me for working in a bank. My social position is quite as good as it would be as editor of a paper. I only write what I want to –
now
– and everyone knows that anything I do write is good. I can influence London opinion and English literature in a better way. I am known to be disinterested. Even through the
Egoist
I am getting to be looked up to by people who are far better known to the general public than I. There is a small and select public which regards me as the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England. I shall of course write for the
Ath
. and keep my finger in it. I am much in sympathy with the editor, who is one of my most cordial admirers. With that and the
Egoist
and a young quarterly review
¹
which I am interested in, and which is glad to take anything I will give, I can have more than enough power to satisfy me. I really think that I have far more
influence
on English letters than any other American has ever had, unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me, and I can remain isolated and detached.

All this sounds very conceited, but I am sure it is true, and as there is no outsider from whom you would hear it, and America really knows very little of what goes on in London, I must say it myself. Because it will give you pleasure if you believe it, and it will help to explain my point of view.

I will send you the
Athenaeum
when there are things of mine in it. There will be one on Friday.
²
I suppose it will be in the library too.

I have written this long letter all about myself, but only on one point, and with none of the personal details about ourselves that ought to go into a letter. And of course too I am very anxious for more news from
you
.

But just now I am very busy. I have promised to do a good deal of work for Murry (the editor-in-chief) until he finds someone else, because he has been so kind to me.
³
And with the new bank work, I shall find my hands quite full for a time.

Always your devoted son
Tom