The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (81 page)

Published 27 February 1920

Sir,

The Phoenix Society, which has recently produced a play of Webster [
The Duchess of Malfi
] and a play of Dryden [
Marriage à la Mode
], is appealing to its subscribers, of whom I am one, to endeavour to secure more subscribers at reduced rates for the remaining three performances of the season. It appears that the receipts from subscriptions have been inadequate to the expense of the production.

The so-called cultivated and civilised class is not expected to relieve the necessities of either literature or painting. It is assumed that poetry only pays if it is bought by thousands of people one has never heard of; and that painting only pays if it is bought by some rich people whom one is not otherwise anxious to know; but a Society like the Phoenix can appeal only to the
intelligentsia
, and at a price quite within the
intelligentsia’s
means. Here then was an opportunity for the
intelligentsia
to declare its convictions: but the sounds are forced, and the notes very few.

Whether the performances have been good or bad has nothing to do with the matter. Apathy is more flagitious than abuse; we can almost condone the offence of Mr William Archer, whom we never supposed to be a member of the
intelligentsia
; we cannot excuse the torpor of people who would despise Mr Archer. The performance of Dryden’s play seemed to me praiseworthy, and the actors had devoted hard work to a production which certainly could not add to their popular notoriety. But the point is that Dryden is a great poet and a great dramatist, and the Civilised Class has not supported the people who would support him, the Civilised Class has not supported Dryden against Archer. If, at the next performance of the Phoenix, the Civilised Class has not taken advantage of the reduced rates, I shall no longer be able to stifle my suspicion that the Civilised Class is a myth.

I am, Sir,
Your obliged obedient servant,
T. S. Eliot

PC
Beinecke

Sunday [1 March 1920]

[London]

My article [‘A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry’] was not I fear a very good one and certainly not what it might have been under more favourable conditions; but did you get it?

Posted a week ago.

T.S.E.

MS
Beinecke

[5? March 1920]

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Monro

Here is a revision. You will infer from its form that it was done under the most unfavourable conditions. My wife being ill. I hope it is legible – I have tried to make it legible. I am fully sensible of its faults, but I don’t understand your suggestion that you were ‘meant to disagree’
¹
with anything – I do not know what your opinions are, and I certainly should not choose this opportunity for attacking them if I did.

I have tried to prolong it.

Yrs.
TSE

1–While admitting ‘the article’s full of good things’, Monro had continued: ‘I disagree of course with the “Campion, Dryden, Coleridge, Gourmont” statements and with some other things – with which, probably, I am meant to disagree.’ All the same, since AH had submitted a short piece, he asked TSE to lengthen his by three inches – even though he had already noted ‘a little padding’ in it, ‘or the extra page would look silly’.

TS
Houghton

16 March 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

My dearest mother,

The mails seem to be very slow. I have your letter of February 8 and your letter of February 15 telling of the sale of the house. It seems very little to get for it; I can only explain it nowadays by supposing that everyone who would pay more for such a house insists on having one much farther out of town. I only hope that you will be able to get one as
warm and sound and comfortable in Boston. And also that in leaving you will not be tempted to dispose of too many things which you may want later.

You say that you will have to board, and that you will not be able to get a house in Boston before midsummer. Well, you evidently have not yet had my long letter about your coming here, as you make no mention of it. And you say in this that you might be able to come here next spring. Now it is certain to me that
this
spring, as soon as ever you can pack, is the time to come. You have no house, nothing but uncomfortable and expensive lodgings, and it would be astonishing if we could not make you more comfortable here. Just now, for a few months, you are free. You say yourself that you can do nothing till late summer. You would have just the best part of the year, the most beautiful season, in England. You will never again find it so cheap in England as it is now, because the value of the pound will rise by next year. And you will not again find it so easy and simple to come.

If I were dangerously ill I believe you would come no matter how inconvenient it was; so why not come when it is convenient even though I am not ill.

I might like, for example, to travel at some time in Spain. But I am perfectly willing to postpone it for a dozen years, or twenty, because meanwhile there are other things I want to do more. But there isn’t anything I want more than to see you. If you could not come here, if I could only see you by coming for a few days, to you, I would not hesitate; and another year I shall. But I want to see you at least once for longer than that, for long enough to live together a little bit. And I want you to see England.

The future is always precarious. Something will always
appear
to stand in the way of coming at any particular time. It is only when something really serious does prevent that you will see that nothing serious prevents now. I am so convinced that no time will ever be better than this year that if you do not seize the opportunity I shall give up the hope that you are ever coming.

Yet you will only be one week’s distance from me.

You see, you speak very vaguely in your letter about ‘next year’, as if it did not matter when. I have made clear, I hope, in the letter which you have not yet received, that I must arrange my summer
at once.

So please consider everything, and read my two letters carefully, and answer. If you have any definite difficulties, please think them out. And then let me hear them. I want at least to have something clear to deal with.
It would be unkind not to give me at least clear reasons that I can understand. But we must not delay about it. I ought to know
now
.
¹

Always your very devoted son,
Tom

1–HWE would write to their mother on 3May: ‘As to going over to England, I have not been able to make up my mind. I thought at first that it would be a tax on your strength, but the ocean trip would probably be restful and I think your mind would be refreshed and taken off its worries by the visit. I have a short letter from Tom almost entirely about the question of your coming; in fact that is about all that he has written about to me for a long time. It seems to me now that the time to do it, if you do it, is before you rent a house in Cambridge … Tom seems to be worrying himself sick over the prospect of your not going; it seems to be on his mind all the time.’

TS
Harvard

17 March 1920

Department of Philosophy and
Psychology, Harvard University

Dear Eliot:

The time of year for new appointments in the Department is upon us. In spite of what you told me last summer I cannot help lingering over my regret that I cannot think of you. In any case, I should be delighted to have a word from you, and especially if there is even a slight change in your plans. It is quite an unworthy thought to tell you that members of the Faculty receive half as much again as ever before. I do not write this to you to tempt you, but that you may rejoice with the young instructors who are relieved from anxiety and pain.

Another year I must return to Aristotle, and if the remainder of the notes on the
Analytics
is not too great and too costly a demand upon your time, I should be very grateful for the labor which you would expend.

May I hope that perhaps you and Mrs Eliot may decide to visit Cambridge this year? It is possible that I shall go abroad, but I have not yet decided. Meantime, we have appointed Demos and Eaton
¹
to instructorships. I am not sure whether they were your contemporaries, but I am sure you know Demos, if not both.

With best regards to you both,

Sincerely yours,
J. H. Woods

1–Ralph M. Eaton (1892–1932), author of
Symbolism and Truth: An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge
(1925) and
General Logic
(1931).

MS
Cornell

[19? March 1920]

[London]

Dear Lewis,

I suppose you will be printing a brief rejoinder to Bell?
¹
He has certainly not replied, but merely shaken his finger in the way indicated.

Do you ever see Wilenski? I suppose you are having an article in this week.

But what C. B. says does not amount to anything as a retort, and I understand that your letter gave several people considerable pleasure, so it is only
desirable
necessary, perhaps, not to let him have the last of it.

Yrs
TSE

 1–Clive Bell had attacked the Exhibition of Imperial War Pictures at Burlington House, for its poor quality and the ‘hearty self applause’ of the artists who believed their friends’ praises (‘Wilcoxism’,
A.
, 5Mar. 1920). ‘At any given moment the best painter in England is unlikely to be better than a first-rate man in the French second-class’, yet the critic R. H. Wilenski (1887–1975) claimed that WL was ‘more than a match for Matisse and Derain’ and the equal of da Vinci. WL replied (12 Mar.) that since Bell had written that Duncan Grant was greater than Blake or Hogarth, he was impudent to object to Wilenski’s assertion that WL ‘possesses certain affinities with Leonardo’. Bell repeated the comparison to Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who believed that her obscure friends were literary geniuses (19 Mar.).

MS
Texas

Sunday [21 March 1920]

[London]

Dear Ottoline,

We both want to thank you very very much for your letters – they gave very great pleasure and it has only been a pain that we have not been able to reply. But a series of deplorable accidents has kept us from writing, from moment to moment. Vivien has been very ill indeed all this week; her stomach is altogether out of order, and she has never been without pains in the head. We have simply been living from moment to moment. I cannot tell you how worried I am.

You may be sure that we miss you in London, and that we both are glad to think how much better we know you for this winter.

Vivien has shown me your last letter inviting us to Garsington for Easter. You do not need to be assured that we should like that. It is always my difficulty that my holidays are so few and I always find several delightful things to do and have to make some sacrifice. My plan for months past has
been to take Vivien with me to Paris for Easter. I have only just been able to secure leave of absence for the Saturday – it is not a general bank holiday, and have therefore just begun to see about the passports. If it comes off we shall have at most three days there, but I do feel though, that it would be worth it. It is the greatest change we could have. Vivien has not been out of England for six years, and I believe that it would be very good for her. And I feel that the only way I can sustain the London grind, and prevent it from deadening my brain altogether is to take
every
opportunity I can of refreshing it in this way. Because it will be every year the same, and I
must
get into the habit of making the best of it – or rather get out of the mental habits engendered by routine work.

Especially because in order to contemplate going to Paris in this way means an effort of the will which few people not in my position could appreciate.

I have not discussed this with anyone else – do you think I am right?

So very few of one’s acquaintance realise what it means to have sold the whole of all of one’s days, – except at most a month a year – and old age – to a huge impersonal thing like a Bank.

What do you think of the progress of the Lewis–Bell controversy? To my mind, Bell has shown himself up in a way to excite only horror and disgust. It really makes me shudder. But I am afraid that the majority of people will not see through his ‘stale’ conjuring tricks, or refuse to take his clumsy affectation of superiority at its face value. What horrifies me [is] the
glaring complete indifference
to the question of Lewis’s work. If I had never heard of Lewis before that would be self evident to me – Bell’s prostitution of art criticism to vulgar spite. I wish that someone would write and suggest that what we should really like to know is his
opinions
of Lewis’s work, his reasons for these opinions, and what works of Lewis he has seen on which to base these opinions. But I really can’t bear to talk about it.

I have just finished an article on Dante
¹
– under difficulties, as you may imagine: and I feel that anything I can say about such a subject is trivial. I feel so completely inferior in his presence – there seems really nothing to do but to point to him and be silent.

Vivien says to tell you she will write as soon as she can, and we both send love. I do hope you are still better than when you came back from Brighton.

Tom