To mark the publication of the latest volume of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, we reproduce here John Haffenden’s preface, courtesy of Faber & Faber. The book can be purchased here.
Preface to The Letters of T. S. Eliot,
Volume 10: 1942-1944
What is accomplished by this sort of cultural warfare is impossible to say, but it is a part of total warfare which one must, as an individual, accept one’s part in
Letter to Henry Eliot, 1 June 1942
In 1942, at the age of 53, T. S. Eliot was not required to sign up for service in the armed forces. However, notwithstanding his supposedly privileged status, Eliot knew in deepest conscience that he just had to do more: to make contributions to the national war effort. He was ready to undertake what he called ‘war work’ just as much as his regular business as editor and publisher.
He wrote talks for the BBC; and he read poems for the Czechoslovak Centre, for ‘Aid to Russia’, and for the ‘French in Britain Fund’. He lectured on ‘The Music of Poetry’ in Glasgow; addressed the Classical Association; talked at the ‘Moot’, and visited organisations including the Anglo-Swedish Society and the British-Norwegian Institute; and he worked for the Christian News-Letter. He served as President of the English Circle of ‘Books Across the Sea’, and as first President of the Virgil Society. At times he felt nearly exhausted by travel and performance, but he remained stalwart.
Contacts and correspondents during these dark days included the film director George Hollering for whom he struggled to adapt his play Murder in the Cathedral, Kenneth Clark, David Jones, Lawrence Durrell, Mary Trevelyan, Karl Mannheim, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, M. J. Tambimuttu, and Reinhold Niebuhr.
His strategic mission, throughout the war, was to do his best to help to sustain the cultural life of the United Kingdom; and when duty called, to be a cultural emissary to Europe. In spite of his apprehensiveness about travel and his dread of dubious accommodations, as well as his social anxiety, he was prompt to answer the call of the British Council. Specifically, he was requested by the poet Ronald Bottrall, British Council representative, to support Great Britain’s relations with Sweden. Bottrall’s appeal, posted from Stockholm in 1941, was keenly couched to appeal to Eliot’s patriotism and internationalism:
The Swedes feel that they have been badly starved by England during the last eighteen months and it is vitally necessary that we should do something to offset the enormous pressure of Germany on this country… It will, however, not do to send anyone over who is not already well known in Sweden. I am certain that you would have a great reception, as I have had the most urgent calls for you… The fact that America has entered the war will give your appearance in this country a double value.
In the event, the six-week trip, which included lecturing in Stockholm, Uppsala, Lund and Gothenburg, turned out to be ‘interesting’ for Eliot. Yet it had been staggering to be ‘ENTERTAINED’ (his capitals) all the time – ‘that is no joke … Sometimes one day seemed to run into two or three, what with there being so little darkness, and the parties being so late.’ It was nerve-wracking too to have to fly in noisy discomfort both ways over the precarious North Sea from Scotland. But despite having to be socially active while in Sweden – to perform his reluctant social self – he was
proud to have fulfilled the task. Moreover, the trip was undertaken in subterfuge: Eliot was officially forbidden to tell anyone where he was for the weeks he was away. Only when he came back to the UK could he recount his adventures to others.[1]
During the period covered by this volume his weekly routine remained peripatetic. He had no ‘settled abode’ and had to divide his weeks between Bloomsbury – where he lodged as often as he could in a small flat maintained by the Fabers in the Faber building on Russell Square – and staying at a country-house retreat located up a lane in the village of Shamley Green near Guildford. His host was the gracious octogenarian Emily Lina Mirrlees, mother of his friend Hope Mirrlees (who was also in residence). Eliot insisted on being a paying guest, even though the kindly ‘Mappie’ Mirrlees would have accommodated the favoured guest for nothing (her staff included a cook, a housekeeper, and an old gardener who was frightened of mice) – and as often as he could, and with limited domestic skills (he could boil eggs but little else), Eliot helped with the upkeep of the place, including mowing the lawn. But being unused to manual labour, he would feel sorry for his cramping hands. ‘I have found that my hands have got out of hand, and I have lost control of my finger muscles … so that any simple action is like trying to open an oyster with a limp paper-knife…’ He volunteered self-mockingly to another correspondent, ‘I am getting to be a wambling old codger, increasingly aware of my minor complaints.’ On working weekdays, he would spend two or three nights at the Faber offices in London, where he transacted his business as editor, read submissions, dictated letters to his staunch secretary, attended the weekly Book Committee – which sometimes went on, in the words of his sometime colleague Frank Morley, ‘from lunch to exhaustion’ – and entertained visitors. But any ‘solid work’, as he termed it – writing book reports, drafting lectures and essays, composing poetry – could only be managed in the relative peace of Shamley Wood.
Even in Surrey, however, the nights were disturbed by the Luftwaffe, and at times bombs would fall in the vicinity – one of them striking a religious house not far from the hilltop haven of Shamley Wood. By mid-July 1944 Eliot was describing himself as ‘dodging between bombs in London and bombs in Surrey.’ And even in Surrey, the house was often chockful of other guests, and Eliot was rattled by their many overindulged, yappy little dogs.
In time, the visitors to Eliot’s London office came to include American servicemen who were genuinely keen for cultural conversations and evenings of beer-drinking in his office. He enjoyed their company, and he was gratified to discover that mercifully few of the G.I.s brought portfolios of their poems for his opinion. He extended hospitality too to the officers who introduced themselves to him – commenting with amusement, ‘Isn’t it surprising that all American officers turn out to be Professors of English Literature in private life, it wouldn’t surprise me now to learn that Gen. Eisenhower was on leave from Colorado College…’
One of his additional official duties at the Russell Square building was a weekly stint of fire-watching. He would share the all-night shift with two of his colleagues, according to a rota, with each member of the team putting his head down between whiles. ‘I have taken to sleeping in my teeth,’ he wrote. He confided to a friend, ‘I don’t like clambering out on roofs; and I was always afraid I should have to tackle a fire-bomb in some dizzy place.’ In theory, it was possible to take some time to sleep in pyjamas, but Eliot chose not to undress but to remain in the truss that protected his double hernia. He described his predicament to Hayward: ‘On Tuesday nights, I sleep (by snatches) in a third floor back room… Geoffrey, I and whoever is the third man … divide the night up into 2½ hour watches; I haven’t got enough phlegm to undress completely, and think it best to sleep in my truss in case of sudden blasting, which is not very comfortable, so I should be no more comfortable in pyjamas.’
One night in June 1944, a missile – one of the first of the VI bombs, known as buzz bombs or fly bombs – hit the dead middle of Russell Square. It demolished the pagoda located there, and shattered the front windows of the Faber offices to the northwest, and the blast wave brought down some of the ceilings. Luckily, neither Eliot nor Geoffrey Faber was present in the building, and no one else was injured. However, given the damage, both arranged thenceforth to come into town on just one day a week: they continued to do their share of the firewatching, and to bed down on bare office floors.
If Eliot was ready in wartime freely to give as much time and energy as he could afford to causes and institutions that he valued – cultural and educational, national and international – he was just as eager to support individuals and families whom he knew to be deserving. To his several godchildren, he was always generous. For Polly Tandy, mother of his godchild Anthea, he undertook to contribute most of the school fees for Anthea and her sister Alison to attend the Godolphin School in Salisbury.
Similarly, when a Russian academic-in-exile named N. M. Tereshchenko came into his orbit, Eliot admired the book he had published, Friendship-Love in Adolescence (1936), and felt compassion for the deeply insecure man, who had a wife and two children to support in his late forties. Tereshchenko was engaged on a temporary part-time basis to lecture in psychology at Balliol College, Oxford, and Eliot went to tireless lengths to petition the Master of the college to retain him. He eventually undertook to pay his retainer for two years, so that his friend could be sure of a regular income – and he pressed outside funding bodies to award the poor, anguished man additional funds. Likewise, when Eliot learned that the Cambridge academic F. R. Leavis was having difficulty in putting out the periodical Scrutiny – not least because of the scarcity of rationed paper – he recruited the support of notable individuals including Herbert Read, and Margaret Storm Jameson of the writers’ organisation PEN, to secure a sufficient allocation of paper for the benighted editor; and he sought assistance too from the diplomat Sir Malcolm Robertson, Chair of the British Council, to exercise his influence in favour of Leavis’s languishing periodical.
Not the least of those to whom Eliot gave unremitting support was Ezra Pound’s teenage son Omar, who was a boarder at Charterhouse School in the UK. Exiled from his parents in Italy, Omar understandably experienced a good deal of anxiety during the constrained war years. He was blessed with a thoughtful housemaster in the person of Walter Sellar – a man who enjoyed prestige as co-author of the classic comedy 1066 and All That (1930). Also, out of term, Omar lodged in the home in Streatham, in suburban London, of a decent, generous man named Arthur Moore, head clerk of a firm of solicitors called Shakespear & Parkyn. Despite all this professional support, Omar was yet a rather lost figure who missed his parents horribly and suffered from nerves. Not least when it became known that Ezra Pound was broadcasting for the Fascists over Rome Radio, there was the added anxiety that other youths might rag the vulnerable boy. Eliot sought to aid the insecure young man in every way possible, visiting the school to offer affectionate counsel, and to make sure he could afford necessary expenses. He took pains too to seek out the best treatment for the troubled lad, and to pay the fees of clinical consultants; there is no doubt that all of his interventions were sincere and well-meaning. To his credit, he thought it unwise ‘to submit a boy of that age to a course of direct psycho-analysis.’
When the Moores’ house was damaged by a bomb, Eliot arranged for Omar to stay at the farmstead in Devon of the poet Ronald Duncan; he rather hoped that the youth’s health would be improved by helping out with jobs around the farm, and that he might even see his way to making a career of it. In the event, Omar chose when he left school in 1943 to take an apprenticeship in hotel management at the Waldorf Hotel in London, and Eliot took care to keep an eye out for his continuing welfare.
As for Ezra Pound himself, Eliot had scant news, only the disturbing knowledge that Pound had elected to remain in Italy even after Italy declared war on the USA, and had determined to support Mussolini. Omar was creditably loyal to his parents – anxious for their wellbeing – just as Eliot kept up his own lifelong sense of indebtedness to Pound for the support he had received from Pound when he himself was a young visitor to London in the 1910s. Eliot spelled out his divided mind to a correspondent; Pound, he held, ‘was a vehement supporter of the fascist regime and is an outcast from his own country; and their situation, whatever it may be, is a cause for great anxiety to all those who were ever their friends. [Pound] is an honest though a very silly man; I owe him much gratitude for kindness in the past: I remain as much admiring his poetry and literary criticism, as exasperated by his political opinions.’
There was no shortage in the war years of writers eager to get their efforts into print with Faber & Faber, yet the rationing of paper kept every publishing house stymied throughout the war. Eliot gave all of the poems that arrived in the post his best attention, sometimes holding them for weeks while reviewing them in different contexts and moods, to be certain of his opinions. (His tastes in poetry were more eclectic than may be assumed: he was ‘distinctly impressed in 1932, for instance, by the work of the sometime ‘Whitechapel Boy’ Lazarus Aaronson.) ‘I am kept busy,’ he regretted in October 1942, ‘NOT publishing people’s poetry: the most difficult cases are saying NO to the relatives of dead airmen.’ At times he turned to Anne Ridler, whose evaluations were clear and persuasive, for independent readings: he knew the calibre of her judgement from the years when she had worked as his secretary. However, ultimately, wartime restrictions meant, as he adroitly put it to the Irish poet Robeaird O’Farachain, ‘in these times we must decline everything about which we have any kind of doubt instead of accepting everything in which we have any kind of faith.’
Remarkable poets whom he did recruit to the Faber fold at this period included Lawrence Durrell, Ronald Duncan, Henry Treece, Vernon Watkins, Edwin Muir, Norman Nicholson, Idris Davies and Anne Ridler. However, to be turned down by T. S. Eliot at an early stage of one’s career was no shame. Good poets went on to learn from his advice. When Allen Tate introduced Eliot in 1943 to the work of the young American Robert Lowell, he held back in the belief that maturity would lead Lowell to write even better poetry. Lowell, he said, had ‘an interesting mind and certainly a gift of words. I don’t feel that his religious convictions have yet sunk down through the surface to that unconscious level of experience which I think such convictions have to reach to rise again as material for poetry. Something similar seems to be lacking still in his verse as poetry. I don’t think he has altogether assimilated his models, and his words in general seem a little self-conscious.’ All the same, he closed his letter to Tate, Lowell’s work was ‘obviously something out of the ordinary.’ Yet it took a further seven years finally to persuade Eliot to add Lowell to the Faber list, with Poems 1939-1949 (1950). Once on the list, most poets were kept on the list.
What Eliot hankered to do was to write a third play, to follow Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939); in particular, he believed that the latter was faulty in construction, and he now believed he knew how to do better. But as the months passed he was beset by further expectations as to how he ought to spend his time – for example, to write a tirade-in-a-pamphlet – a ‘philippic’ – entitled Reunion by Destruction: Reflections on a Scheme for Church Union in South India: Addressed to the Laity (1943). He considered it his bounden duty to protest at a plan to unite churches in a way that would compromise and even betray the doctrines and dogmas of the Church to which he had committed himself.
Yet that too he thought a parergon, as on a jaundiced self-judging day in 1944:
I am sure that when I am eventually weighed in the balance it will be only the poetry (such as it is) which will tip the beam in my favour: everything else will be feathers. And while I can get a certain satisfaction from the thought of even my early poems, I cannot bear to look at any of my prose six months after it is published… As for other activities, there is partly … the inherited Social Conscience and the desire to show (to myself) that I can count for something in the kind of activities that my family have pursued for centuries; and partly, of course, the normal sediment of vanity and sloth (it is sloth that makes one do a great deal of work)…
When the Austrian director George Hoellering requested him to hurry up with the additional script he needed to fit his scenario for a projected movie of Murder in the Cathedral – ‘the picturisation or zoetropismatic metamorphosis of Murder,’ as Eliot satirised the prospect – Eliot shied too at the enormous effort he would need to make to shift his creative consciousness back into the vein of the play that he thought he had finished in 1935. He told Hayward: ‘My life is being plagued by the Napoleon of Cinematography, Mr Hoellering, and I shall know no peace until I have written my bits of text for him; but obstinately my mind refuses to do its best at the réchauffé of Murder, until it has eased itself of Little Gidding.’
Happily, with Hayward’s epistolary assistance at a distance (Hayward had to spend the war years in a house in Cambridge owned by his friend Lord Rothschild), Eliot was finally enabled through the latter part of 1942 to bring to completion the fourth and final part of the supernal poetic sequence Four Quartets. The stream of letters to Hayward revealingly addresses the shaping of the poem primarily in terms of technical and strategic problems: in large part, metrical and lexical sticking-points. The sympathetic Hayward was available to meet the poet’s requests in such respects, feeling understandably pleased (and indeed flattered) to evaluate the various drafts as they arrived in the post. As Hayward ventured reservations and suggestions, Eliot would respond along these lines: ‘I am sorry to surrender the word “descension” which you will discover from the OED is an astronomical term… [I]t was necessary to get rid of Brunetto … the visionary figure has now become somewhat more definite and will no doubt be identified by some readers with Yeats though I do not mean anything so precise as that.’ On 2 September, Eliot made this tally: ‘I have altered nine passages according to your suggestions, rejected six suggestions and remained uncertain about two others.’ Unfortunately, not every one of Hayward’s letters of criticism and advice has been preserved – Eliot donated to Magdalene College, Cambridge, all of Hayward’s letters relating to Little Gidding, though it seems that a few have gone missing – but enough of Hayward’s side of a unique collaborative dialogue has survived for readers to follow this energetically engaged correspondence. The poet was eager to acknowledge Hayward’s advisory input, telling Frank Morley: ‘he gave me so much and such valuable help, both of criticism and of suggestion of alternative words & phrases a number of which I have accepted…’ Equally, Eliot knew when the time had come to finish with the dialogue, telling Hayward on 19 September, ‘I think that there is a point beyond which one cannot go without sacrifice of meaning to euphony… After a time one loses the original feeling of the impulse, and then it is no longer safe to alter.’ That remark is consistent with observations that he made to other writers, as in a letter to Ronald Duncan of 19 October 1942 relating to what he called ‘the proper humility of the writer towards the thing-to-be-written. One lets the thing-to-be-said look after itself. The opposite method produces expression of ideas, of personal sentiment, or usually a mush of undigested ideas and vomited emotions. All the thought about what the poem is to say should take place some time before the poem is started. Once begun, it becomes an exercise in form.’ In the case of Little Gidding, he was thus able to work on the form – ‘making words come alive,’ as it put it elsewhere – in epistolary conversation, if not collaboration, with the congenial Hayward, without feeling that this process was trammelling with the primary charge of inspiration. He explained further to another friend, ‘Fortunately for me, my mind ticks rather slowly, so that I can spend a year or more, off and on, over the same poem and perhaps get it finished before I have outgrown it.’ As the poet and critic Stephen Romer has well remarked, Eliot was unwilling to force the mystery involved in the composition of an authentic poem. Just so was Eliot’s poem written.
The poem is equally in accord with his own theory of the impersonality of the poem – as first laid down in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) – which has long teased or vexed readers. It is of crucial importance for the poet (he told another pupil-poet, Rufus Noel-Buxton) to have ‘deep enough roots in the subsoil of intense personal experience from which poetry draws its sustenance…’ Only poets of the calibre of Milton and Wordsworth, he went on, can justify ‘public verse’: ‘the rest of us have to be personal first, and concern ourselves with the trifles which we have genuinely known and felt, and perhaps let our private secret just peep out, and play hide and seek, and never quite disclose itself.’ It is no secret that Little Gidding is to a large extent a public, intensely patriotic poem – he said so too – but one has to wonder what he was winking at with the notion of a ‘private secret just peep[ing] out’.[2]
The series of Eliot’s letters to Hayward amounts to a tour de force of the art: full of news, mischief and merriment. Despite the fact that Hayward had no religious faith, he and Eliot were genuinely compatible friends of long-standing. Hayward, the ‘only begetter’ of Bustopher Jones and Skimbleshanks, was the ‘Man in White Spats’ to whom Eliot gave thanks in Old Possum’s Book. Eliot knew well that Hayward was a Londoner through and through, and that being wheelchair-bound with muscular dystrophy he was obliged to spend all the years of the war in exile from every good old friend in London. That being the case, part of Eliot’s initial motivation for sending Hayward regular newsy missives was to relieve his friend’s loneliness. But in truth they had much in common, loved to share jokes and to engage in a running commentary on friends and foes, and on current affairs. Accordingly, the constructive correspondence relating to Little Gidding marked the natural acme of their friendship.
Hayward and Emily Hale were the two correspondents to whom Eliot wrote most frequently through the war; and – since all of his letters to Hale have already been published online at tseliot.com – this present volume may be in danger of appearing to present a false impression of the strict regularity with which the poet kept in touch with both of his dear friends. It is therefore worthwhile to read the Hale letters alongside this volume: while many of the same stories are retailed in the two sets, there are shifts of tenor and tone between them. At times, indeed, it is possible to discern that Eliot would indite a funny, outspoken letter to Hayward and then – whether consciously or unconsciously – use that letter as the model for a more considered, pensive letter to Hale. Not surprisingly, he assumed a different demeanour for two such unlike persons.
However, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Hayward was an inveterate gossip, while Eliot was a man of total discretion who guarded his private life with a strained intensity. It is equally true that Eliot genuinely relished exchanging gossip with Hayward, as these letters demonstrate. Eliot well knew that Hayward could be sharp-tongued and prankish; he also admired his courage, found him supportive, and admired his editorial talent and judgement. And so he coined this paradoxical maxim:
A thoroughgoing gossip is usually discreet: it’s the people who never gossip who give things away Letter to Frank Morley, 12 Nov. 1944.
Nevertheless, Eliot did not share with Hayward any details of his private life: his friend was never trusted with the knowledge of Eliot’s relationship with Emily Hale.
John Haffenden, April 2025
[1] It has sometimes been suggested that Eliot must have been party while in Sweden to the import of the secret meeting between the anti-Nazi German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his ally Bishop Bell of Chichester – Bonhoeffer enabled Bell to report in secret to the British Government that certain officers of the Wehrmacht were planning an assassination attempt upon the life of Adolf Hitler – but in truth Bell arrived in Stockholm only on the day that Eliot flew back out. It was only in a later year that like others, Eliot learned what was conveyed at that clandestine encounter.
[2] Ironically, the poet clung for some time to his desire to call the work ‘Kensington Quartets’; it took quite a while for Hayward and other correspondents to persuade him that such a title would not meet the case because of the indelible association of Kensington with J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.