The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (80 page)

1–Edward Cranch Eliot (1858–1928), lawyer. The family felt that he should not charge a widowed relative his full professional fees.

MS
Houghton

15 February 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

My dear dear Mother,

The last letter I have from you is one of January 27. It gave me pleasure of course but it did not answer my question. I wanted to know definitely whether you would come to England this year, so as to
arrange my holidays
, which arrangement is made in March. The point is that if
I
come I must
take my holiday
for it. I shall not get another.

I want to see you
soon
, not wait until conditions are perfectly favourable. Now just consider what it will be if I try to come to America:

I shall have to fix my holiday late in the year, so as not to conflict with others . I shall have to ask for a week or so extra, in order to have at most ten days or two weeks with you, and I shall have to take this
without salary.
I shall then have to hurry back after these
very few
days, having seen just enough of you to make the parting very painful. This hurried visit will have been my
only holiday
for a year, we shall be worried and distracted by the thought of time, and will be completely prostrated at the end.

Now is this worth it, while you are still
physically able
to come here? For you to come and have
time
, settle down for a time and
live
with us? Unless I can see you
once
again for something better than the breathless visit I have described, I shall
never
be really happy to the end of my life.

Is anything so important as that? does anything else really matter? Do you want to come?

Have you worked out just what you will lose in money by coming? Have you seriously considered putting your real estate in the hands of the Mercantile Trust Co, or some company like that <, and leaving power to Henry to act if necessary>? I feel that
time
is
more important
in our meeting than in the sale of property. It seems incredible that there is no one you can trust to do these things for you.

You will
have
to come east
anyway for the three hot months – your children will not allow you to stay in St Louis as long as you did last year –
and if you can go as far as
Boston
,
why not
London
? Will just that difference mean financial ruin?

As to the
expense
. You have only to consider the
fare
– that will be double the cost of my coming to you, because of Marian coming too. That is the
only
difference. The cost of living
here
would be
less
than the cost of a summer in Massachusetts. 1) Because the cost of living is, still, lower than in America 2) Because your dollars would buy many more pounds than in normal times.

So please consider the practical question of a summer
here
, for you and Marian, compared with a summer in Boston. I say nothing about the benefit I think you would both get (after your worries of the past year) from the voyage and the change. I only repeat that if you cannot come, if I can never again see you for more than ten days or two weeks, that I shall never be happy. And if you come, it must be
quickly
, soon.

 

I do not want to speak of anything else in this letter. I am busy at the Bank, having been put in charge of settling all the pre-War Debts between the Bank and Germans, which is an important appointment, full of interesting legal questions. I shall have several assistants.

Your devoted son
Tom.

MS
Texas

Sunday [15 February 1920]

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Ottoline,

I found your card on getting back from Marlow this evening. I should have liked so much to come tomorrow night, but I cannot. I am disappointed at having seen so little of you during this very brief visit, in fact, only having made the beginning of seeing you at all. For you, I am sure, the visit to town will have been an unqualified success. I hope we can make the most of Wednesday evening.

Vivien can come tomorrow night, and would like to, very much, but says that if you have anything else you care to do will you please wire to her not to come. She will come unless she hears from you. She is dreading your leaving, too.

Till Wednesday, then –

Yours
Tom.

I enclose the Phoenix letter. You could never go, of course, but if you know any people who you think ought to join, would you let them know? Do you think Miss Sands would take tickets?
¹
It seems as if there ought to be enough people in London to fill the Lyric five times a year, who could afford to join the Phoenix.

1–Ethel Sands (1873–1962), wealthy American-born painter; pupil of Walter Sickert and friend of OM. For the Phoenix Society, see letter to
The Athenaeum
, 27 Feb.

MS
BL

17 February 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Lytton,

It is delightful to hear from you
¹
sitting alone in Pangbourne ‘like a Sage escaped from the inanity of Life’s battle’,
²
but I hear that you were lately in town and did not apprise me. So how should I believe you when you say you wish I was in Pangbourne too? Nevertheless I wish you were here. How extraordinarily difficult London is. One bleeds to death very slowly here. I find that Dryden is a very great man, and I am trying to read Clarendon’s
History
³
– is it a good book? Why are you distracted?

Yours
TSE

1–Lytton Strachey wrote on 15 Feb.: ‘How good, Eliot, your Blake article! It makes me feel the splendour of Poetry’; he was referring to TSE’s ‘The Naked Man’, a review of Charles Gardner,
William Blake the Man
, in A., 13 Feb. 1920; repr. as ‘William Blake’ in
SE.

2–Thomas Carlyle, in
Life of John Sterling
(1851), described Coleridge sitting ‘on the brow of Highgate Hill like a sage escaped from the inanity of life’s battle’ (69). Strachey had written to TSE: ‘I’m here all alone – a little distressed and distracted – heaven knows why.’

3–Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon,
The History of the Rebellion
(1717).

MS
Texas

21 February 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mary,

I will call for you on Tuesday if that is convenient, as I do not see how to find any other time this week. I suppose you mean about 5.30. The only question is whether I might be delayed, and am excessively busy at the Bank; but in that case I should try to ring up 15 Henrietta Street and let you know.

Yours
Tom.

I enclose a letter from the Phoenix, in case you might care to join, and if you could show it to other people. It seems to me a very important thing to support. I am trying to do what I can; it is strange that there is so little interest.

TS
Beinecke

21 February 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Monro,

Here it is, such as it is.
¹
If I had made it any longer I should have found myself repeating things I have used elsewhere.

Will you send me proof?

I hope that you had a successful visit. I shall look forward to seeing you before long.

Yours
T. S. Eliot

1–‘A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry’, Chapbook:
Three Critical Essays on Modern English Poetry
, 2: 9 (Mar. 1920), 1–10.

TS
Houghton

Sunday 22 February 1920
¹

[London]

Dearest Mother,

I have had a particularly busy week in all ways. In the first place my work on German Debts has been very heavy. Next week I shall have an assistant and a typist to write my letters and do card indexing, but last week I have had to struggle through chaos myself, receiving hundreds of reports from Branches of the bank, classifying them, picking out the points that needed immediate attention, interviewing other banks and Government Departments and trying to elucidate knotty points in that appalling document the Peace Treaty.

My evenings have been busy too. Monday and Tuesday, working on a longish essay on Contemporary Criticism of Poetry which is to go to the printer this week. Wednesday, dined with Vivien at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s, Vivien spending the night with her. Thursday, we had Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell and Aldous Huxley to dinner. Made a bad break referring to Lord Russell’s term in prison, as Osbert’s mother, Lady Ida,
²
who is not quite right in her head, had the same experience. We went to Ottoline’s Thursday evening reception afterwards, where there was a great
mass of people, including that charming old man Augustine Birrell.
³
A Japanese in costume got up and did a sort of hara-kiri sword dance, uttering horrid cries and disembowelling himself with a fan, and then sang the most dismal songs and wouldn’t stop until some duchess or other who had brought him managed to soothe him with a cup of tea.

Friday went to dine with the Woolfs.
⁴
Virginia Woolf is a daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, who knew Charles Norton quite well, and a very charming woman. Sydney Waterlow was there. He has become Lord Robert Cecil’s right hand man, apparently, in the Foreign Office, and is very pompous and smokes cigars.

Saturday and today finished the essay I spoke of, wrote to Sir Algernon Methuen in answer to the letter I enclose,
⁵
and am writing to you. It is beautiful weather again, we have had no winter yet, all the bushes and shrubs are out in bud, and will probably be nipped later. I think I shall consult a specialist about my nose. The spray has done it no good, and I hardly breathe through it at all at night. Perhaps cauterisation will be enough, and perhaps something ought to be cut out. I think it’s being stopped up is the cause of the peculiar pressure I often feel in the middle of my forehead. Besides, I think a stoppage in the nose is dangerous to the ears.

I must write a number of letters this evening to try to get subscribers for the Phoenix Society,
⁶
a society for producing Old Plays (Jonson, Dryden, and the like) on behalf of which I have been trying to fight against William Archer, who is down on it.
⁷

This is only a little note. I will not repeat in this letter all that I said in the last, but I shall go on and go all over it next time. In your last letter someone had just come to look at the house.

Very lovingly,
Tom.

1–Misdated 21 Feb.

2–Lady Sitwell had been sentenced in 1915 to three months’ imprisonment for debt to moneylenders, having been cheated by an unscrupulous middle man.

3–Augustine Birrell (1850–1933), author and politician. Through his sayings and
Obiter Dicta
(1884, 1887, 1924), his surname passed into the language as ‘Birrelling’: to comment on life gently, discursively and ironically.

4–VW recorded of the occasion: ‘A happy evening. Eliot & Sidney dine’ (
Diary
, II,21).

5–Methuen had written on 18 Feb., ‘I am not sure whether your Poems would be likely to have a sale that is attractive to a publisher, but I should like very much to consider the possibility of bringing out a volume of your Essays.’

6–The Phoenix Society was founded in 1919 under the auspices of the Stage Society: see next letter.

7–William Archer (1856–1924), Scottish drama critic; champion of Ibsen in England. Of the Phoenix production of
The Duchess of Malfi
(Nov. 1919), he wrote: ‘The privilege of listening to the Duchess of Malfi’s beauties of diction was felt to be dearly bought at the price of enduring three hours of coarse and sanguinary melodrama’ (‘John Webster’,
Nineteenth Century
87, Jan. 1920).