[No surviving envelope]

Your letter of February 7 arrived two days ago. I was very very glad to get it, for I had been wondering how to proceed until I had heard from you in reply to my two brief ejaculatory letters. Yet I should have written sooner, but that I have had another slight bronchial cold – theWolpe, Bertholddines with TSE;a1 result of dining on a cold night in the cold house of the expert typographer of Faber & Faber, a gentle German Jew with an English wife.1 And it is not irrelevant to say something about the conditions under which we have been living lately; because they have been so disturbing and distracting that it has been hard to attend to even the most vital personal affairs. FurthermoreEnglandpost-war;b8, the hardships of cold and inconvenience are so numbing to the mind, that I almost despair of grappling with any intellectual problem. I presume that the American papers have given them some attention. Sincewinterof 1947;a8 the beginning of the year, we have had the longest spell of severe cold, and heavy snow, within living memory.2 The electricity and gas has been much reduced for a long time past: the glow of an electric heater has been so dim that one has sat huddled over it. And for the past week we have had no heating at all for five hours a day – between 9 and 12, and 2 and 4. Convalescence, under such conditions, is very difficult. In twentyfive minutes I shall be able to put the heater on. In this vicinity, the current is not turned off, because there is a children’s hospital almost next door; but one is expected to obey the rules, and indeed there are fines and imprisonment ready for those who are found out in breaking them. One is warmer moving about out of doors. I am sitting in two undervests, two wool jerseys, snowboots, and having great difficulty in concentration. And there is no immediate prospect of alleviation: all one can hope for is a break in the weather, of which there is no sign. Meanwhile the situation of the country deteriorates alarmingly.

I tell you all this primarily to explain the fact that I think, and write, with difficulty and very slowly, and I may not express myself satisfactorily. First of all, your letter was a very good letter, and a very kind and considerate one. And at least, it seems to indicate that the more extreme kind of misunderstanding is not likely: for I do not see how, at this stage, you or anybody could possibly have understood any more clearly than you do. IEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)marriage to;e6TSE reflects on;b4 can admit that most of what you say is true – except, of course, that I cannot know of how much or how little value my life has been to others. But as for conscience – the conscience about events for which one has been responsible in the past, so far as these can be detached from what one is now, that is one thing: so far as anything is past, one can go through penitence and arrive at serenity. IFamily Reunion, TheVHE's death calls to mind;i4 find myself strangely <impalled [sc. impelled]> to quote my own dramatic character, in the belief that I was there expressing something which I had not yet come to experience, when I made him say ‘it goes a great deal deeper than what people call their conscience’.3 For it goes deeper than a sense of guilt for specific delimitable acts.

I am obliged to write a letter like this piecemeal, as my brain is so torpid during the three morning hours. After lunch I try to be out of doors as long as I can, because one is warmer out of doors. Yesterday I went to my office at 3, and had a cold hour there, as there was of course a mass of accumulated matter which was easiest to go through in my own room. OnFabers, the;h3 Monday I23 Russell Square, Londontemperature of;a5 shall try the Fabers’ flat, where there is gas heating; but the gas is being cut still further too.

During those bitter seventeen years, when I lived a life in some respects as solitary as if I had been alone on a desert island, I suppose that a certain side of me remained undeveloped. I was never quite a whole man. TheEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)marriage to;e6painful yet stimulating;b5 agonypoetryand marriage to VHE;c5 forced some genuine poetry out of me, certainly, which would never have been written if I had been happy: in that respect perhaps I may be said to have had the life I needed – perhaps even the passionate unconscious desire for that particular fulfilment in words and rhythms, led me to choose a fate which could not fail to mean pain – but this is making guesses about something about which one can never truly know. ThenHale, Emilyrelationship with TSE;w9TSE reflects generally on;g1 in the fifteen years that followed I had a kind of flowering. But this itself was an adaptation to a peculiar situation. AtEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)her death;f3formerly wished for;a4 the beginning, I found in myself the wish that Vivienne might die. I recognised this to be sinful, and overcame it – the more easily, perhaps, because there seemed no reason why she should not live to a normal old age. So no alternative to one way of life presented itself, there was no question of choice. And during this period also I think that there was some partial failure of development. InEnglandChipping Campden, Gloucestershire;e1treasured in TSE's memory;b2 those summers, the happiest of my life, when I came constantly to Campden, I was escaping from my life and getting through the little door, and while I was in the garden I became a young man again.4 But there were still two lives alternating, of youth and age.

IEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)her death;f3TSE's shifting response to;a3 had no idea until the moment came, of the way in which a death – the death of someone never loved or desired – would make me see myself. For her I felt only a detached relief from a life which was hardly worth living, since it was very improbable that more years would have brought her any greater understanding or progress on the road to eternity: for the rights and wrongs, for my own share of culpability, or for any harm that I may have done her, I felt merely that the balance had been struck, whatever it was, and that there was no use thinking of that more. I should never know – and on that plane, the chapter was indeed closed. But when the coffin was settled in the grave, and I turned away, I felt – without emotion, in the usual sense – that a great deal that was myself was dead. I have no knowledge whether the old story is true, that an Egyptian mummy is preserved in its wrappings exactly as it was at the moment of embalming, and that when it is exposed and unwrapped, we see it for a moment as it was four thousand years ago – and that then it crumbles into dust in a few moments until nothing is left but the bones. But I felt as if something of the sort had happened to me. Suddenly I felt as if I had been preserved in a mummified youth, and at that moment I became my chronological age – not a young man to whom opportunities are open, but a senior who had lived his life, such as it was, a man getting on for fifty-nine, with limited possibilities for the remaining years, and no resiliency or capacity for fresh adaptation. And up to this moment, I have felt like that steadily.

That, in fact, was the real shock. That I am my past, and the whole of it, whether I like it or not; and that I meet myself face to face as a stranger5 whom I have got to live with, and make the best of, whether I like him or not; and while I still love you, and all those whom I love in various relations and degrees, as much as ever, it is this previously unknown man whom I, and they, will have to get to know.

Probably it is not worth while trying to say anything more in this letter. I have been struggling all my life with problems of putting things into words, on paper, which seemed almost impossible to find words for; but this is the most difficult problem of putting into words, of groping and fumbling, that I have ever met.6 It’s an exploration, and as much a difficulty of explaining to myself as to you or anybody else. So I may sometimes show inconsistencies, sometimes have to re-think everything and try a new set of words to express it.