The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (73 page)

1–‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ and ‘Sweeney Erect’.

2–In ‘Recent United States Poetry’, Jepson had derided Edgar Lee Masters’ poem ‘All Life in A Life’, which included the line ‘His hair was black as a sheep’s wool that is black.’

3–Part of the page is torn away.

4–The Egoist Press did not print Jepson’s essays.

MS
BL

24 September 1919

[London]

My dear Schiff,

I return herewith your poem, as you perhaps want my opinion at once. I have seen Hy King’s
¹
name in the
Athenaeum
. This poem
²
strikes me as a clever
gâchis
[hash] of Laforgue, the Elizabethans, several
contemporaries
, sentiment, and selfconsciousness. A poem should be very good to justify such length. Still, the writer walks nearer to the light than most.

I will let you have my prose attempt
³
by the end of this week. I am glad to hear that you are pleased with the material for this number – Do you mean that there is a
loss
of £400 a year?
⁴
I cannot understand why it should be so heavy as that, even if subscribers were very few. And there is no other paper to compete with it.

You shall hear from me in a few days.

Always cordially,
T. S. Eliot.

1–Apparently neither TSE nor SS knew that ‘Henry King’ was a pseud. of JMM.

2–‘The Train Journey’, A., 8 Aug. 1919, 713.

3–‘Some Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe’,
Art & Letters
2 (Autumn 1919).

4–SS replied on 27 Sept. that subsidising
Art & Letters
cost him £400 ‘and more’.

MS
Texas

Friday 26 Sep. [1919] (Tom’s birthday!)

Bosham

My dear Mary

I only hung about Chichester for about three hours, not getting your wire until I got back here, tired and cross!

But I believe yr. visit tired you very much, and so perhaps it is a good thing we did not meet.

I am going home tomorrow Saturday afternoon.
¹
The last week has been too wintry, and now I have your complaint, and I want warmth and comfort, and I think
I
shall take to going to bed at these times! But you have so trained yr. household, and I believe my dragon would not be at all pleased if I went to bed ‘for nothing’.

This is written in the middle of packing, and with a headache. I suppose you are unaware of the simple fact that to feel relief in mechanical
occupations, and yr. letter says you do just now – means mental fatigue. If I were you, well, of course I couldn’t be. But I dont see how you get along with so few brain-resting occupations. Where should I be without my dirty piece of crochet which I have been doing for five years, or my failures of dresses and underclothes? I fly to them with a frenzy of relief and when you are bored, but must not read! How invaluable! While I stayed chez Schiff I made a dress, the whole time, in public!

It was rather a shock to hear you were so exhausted after the night I spent at Wittering. I cant understand it. Of course I expect to be exhausted myself (and I was simply dizzy) but I dont expect you to be.

I have a good store of things ready to be said to you. I shall probably forget most. About Tom and Bloomsbury for instance. Jack got me on to that on Sunday, I agreed with everything he said! But I have thought that out, and I dont think it will come off. I begin to think you (I mean you, Mary) can only like people on two conditions. And then about giving oneself up to people. I had never seen before we spoke how much I have done that with Tom. Also how little
you
were prepared to do it with anyone. Also how much one gains by doing it, how much one loses; and, how much one
loses by not ever doing it.

‘Now the trouble with you is that there’s so much you are oblivious to.’ I am quoting, but not exact words.
But
I think it is true. I feel at a point now where there is ever so much to say to you, or, we must retire a few paces.

Well look ’ere, will you come to dinner at Crawford Mansions on Tuesday night? And Jack of course? I want you to and I shall be very upset if you will not. You must please. If not, then we must all dine out together on Wednesday. I cant have you to dinner on Wed. because it is Ellen’s day off. Please write to the flat
at once. And send me back that one film of mine you still have. Do not dare to forget. If you have lost it
——

[unsigned]

almost
giving him up! He is abominable. Is he laughing?>
²

1–VHE wrote in her diary: ‘Tom’s birthday. Wish I had gone back. Stormy weather. Got blackberries all morning. Felt ill.
Migraine
. Faceache. Swollen face (slightly).’

2–‘Episode XI’ of
Ulysses
had appeared in
Little Review
6: 4 & 5 (Aug. & Sept. 1919).

TS
NYPL (MS)

28 September 1919

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1

Dear Mr Quinn,

I cabled you ‘Accept’ on receipt of your letter. I am very sorry that I failed to confirm this immediately; I had several articles promised that I had to write, and so did not have time to alter the poem which I enclose.
¹

I want first to express my heartfelt thanks and appreciation of all the pains that you have taken, and of your letter, which gave me great pleasure. I do not understand how you manage to accomplish so much on behalf of other people, in the midst of your heavy professional duties, to say nothing of your private affairs.

I am quite satisfied with any contract that you may make for me with Knopf. I understand that I get 12% from all sales, and that Knopf has exclusive rights to the American edition for some definite period of years. That the copyright after that is mine (as in Pound’s case) and that my rights to arrange or dispose of any English edition are not restricted in any way by the Knopf contract. You see, I want a fresh edition here in the spring, which would naturally contain any poems I write in the interval. This would give it an advantage over Knopf’s book, but of course I should not have any of the English edition exported to America. Weaver will print it, and she would not export any copies without my consent. At present my poems are out of print here.

I think that you now have all the poems, viz:

         ‘Gerontion’

         ‘Burbank with a Baedeker’

         ‘Sweeney Erect’

         *‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’

         *‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’

         *‘Whispers of Immortality’

         *‘The Hippopotamus’

         ‘A Cooking Egg’

         *‘Lune de miel’

         ‘Dans le restaurant’

         *‘Le Spectateur’

         *‘Mélange adultère de tout’

The ones marked * being in the small book of the Hogarth Press which I sent you.
²

I wish I could guess when this will reach you.
³
I shall make enquiries as to whether there is any provision for carrying overseas mails to the boats; this strike threatens at the moment to be a serious affair, and we are in the dark as to its real cause and its probable course. My own views are Liberal and strongly opposed to the Government in almost everything; but I cannot regard this present expression of labour discontent without grave apprehension and distrust.

With repeated expression of thanks for your action and for the encouragement of your letter.

Yours sincerely,
T. S. Eliot

I enclose a letter to Knopf which you may hand them if you think fit.

1–‘Gerontion’.

2–Quinn wrote to TSE on 22 Nov.: ‘I received no book of the Hogarth Press. I have a recollection of receiving the “Sweeney” poems and the other new ones, but they were not in a book but were on pages that were taken out of a book or what I thought was a magazine.’

3–Delayed by the railway strike of 26 Sept.–5 Oct., it arrived on 31 Oct.

CC
NYPL (MS)

29 September 1919

[New York]

Dear Mr Eliot:

On September 17th I received your cable as follows:
          ‘Quinn,
                Thirtyone Nassau Street, New York.
          Accept.
          (Signed) Eliot’

This was in accordance with the word named on page 3 of my letter of August 26th, 1919. I at once communicated with Knopf and told him of your decision. I had one letter from him and a talk with him on the telephone last week. He was going to put the book in a small format of about 5 inches by 3½, similar to one or two other books of the kind, but I objected to it and said that it would be a dumpy book and undignified. Knopf very willingly agreed to change it to 12mo. I am writing him a letter today, of which I enclose you a copy, telling him everything that you mentioned in your letter of July 9, 1919 to me regarding the book of poems. I agreed with Knopf that I would look over the contract between you and him and sign it on your behalf. That is all that remains for me to do. The rest of it is between you and him.

I congratulate you on getting him for a publisher. I think that my recommendation that the book of poems be separated from the prose was a sound one. That will give you more time on the prose. After this book is out, so that you are no longer a new man, then the regular literary agents are the ones for you to deal through, both regarding your magazine or review publication of poems or prose and regarding books. One of the best men I know is a man that used to be John Lane’s manager over here, a very decent Englishman. His name is Harold Paget. The following is the name and address of his agency:

    The Paget Agency,
               500 Fifth Avenue,
                      New York City.

I was glad to do this pioneer work for you here on this book, but when a man once has one book published pioneer work is no longer necessary from a man like me. Your next book of prose ought to be handled, it seems to me, through an agent over here.

And that reminds me that I have the copy for your prose volume. Perhaps you would think that now that the prose that I have was not enough for a prose volume. Perhaps you would like to have me return it to you by registered post for reconsideration and rearrangement. Or perhaps you would want me to send it to some literary agency like the Paget Agency. I shall be very glad to do whatever you wish to have done.

I hope that you have had some vacation.

You will see from my letter to Knopf that I suggest that he send the page proofs to you but that I have told him that I should be very glad to look over the general format of the book.

My time is so much taken up that I want to end as many outside personal matters as possible before the busy court days of October begin, and they extend through to the end of June. That is why I tried to make my letter to Knopf a final and comprehensive one. But we will have to have a meeting to go over and sign the contract, and that will involve a letter from me to you sending you the contract. But I have tried to deal with the matter fully in this letter to you. I am glad to have been of service in getting your first book of poems published in this country. It will be a book of high distinction.

With kind regards, I am
Sincerely yours,
[unsigned]

PS You will see from my letter to Knopf that I have suggested my stopping in at his place some day to look over the general format of the book. You
will also see that in my letter to Knopf I refer to a letter that I had from Lewis a few days ago in which Lewis spoke of your having written a new long poem [‘Gerontion’], and that I have suggested to Knopf that perhaps you might be willing to include that new long poem in the volume which Knopf is bringing out, thus increasing not only its size but its interest and importance. So if that new long poem is finished you might send a copy of it to Knopf at once and tell him where it should appear in the volume.

I am sorry that the book of poems won’t be out for the autumn but it will be out, as I think I wrote you, early in the year, that is, in February or March. Boni and Liveright played a low trick on me in holding up their decision about this for over two or three months. They are responsible and solely responsible for the delay that there has been and for the fact that the book won’t be out this autumn. However, that is past and it does no good to think too much of the past. I am glad to have been able to be of some service to you. As I have said in my letter to Knopf, I will stop in at his office some day and look over the general format of the book to see that the titles are in good taste and so on, and that the style of the book is attractive both inside and outside, and try to get it on as good paper as I can.

With kind regards, I am

Yours very truly,
[unsigned]

MS
Houghton

2 October 1919

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1

My dearest mother,

There is supposed to be a mail tomorrow, and although the services are not yet normal, I have hopes that this may reach you by some boat sailing soon. The paper says that the boats are not leaving New York, on account of our strike; I have not heard from you for some time, but a letter reached me today, fortunately, as I expect to have to wait some time for another. As mine have been directed to Saint Louis, you will just have received them. The general opinion, I think, is favorable to the demands of the strikers, but strongly opposed to their summary methods. There is also some evidence of the growing resentment of the bourgeoisie at the continual demands and continual higher wages of the ‘working class’. Certainly the bourgeoisie has turned out amazingly quickly to take the
strikers’ place; all the underground railways, and a surprising number of trains through the country, are running more or less thanks to volunteers. What is also notable is the cheerfulness with which people have insisted on going about their business, walking miles, or even camping out in their offices and shops; I had a four mile walk to work, and back, for three days, but now I can get underground trains. The omnibuses were so crowded that I could not get on. We have suffered other privations – we only get half a pint of milk a day (for three people) and all foods are strictly rationed.

I have had an invitation to lecture this winter but have declined it. It was in a suburb not easy of access. Such work is really a disadvantage to me now as it would consume the time which I can devote to writing which will give me notoriety and in the end more money. I enclose a letter which shows that I have been asked to write for the
Times Literary Supplement
¹
– to write the Leading Article from time to time. This is the highest honour possible in the critical world of literature, and we are pleased. It is certain that I shall have three and possibly four books out next year: one, perhaps two, of essays, a new edition of poems, and as the other enclosed letter shows, an edition in New York. I thought the letter would interest you, and it shows how kind John Quinn has been to me. He is an important lawyer in New York. I cabled my acceptance.

I think you write very well, and was much interested in your letter to the
Herald.
²
I am not really competent to declare on the merits of the questions; what is going on in the Senate is at present eclipsed in our papers by the strike. But it is certain that at the Peace Conference the one strong figure was Clemenceau, who knew just what he wanted, and that Wilson went down utterly before European diplomacy. It is obviously a bad peace, in which the major European powers tried to get as much as they could, and appease or ingratiate as far as possible the various puppet nationalities which they have
constituted and will try to dominate. That is exactly what we expected. And I believe that Wilson made a grave mistake in coming to Europe.

I must write you two more letters at once; one for what I have not had time to put into this, and one solely to recount the rest of my holiday, and for nothing else – otherwise, it will never get written!

Always your very loving son
Tom.