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While I was still pondering over my reply to your letter of March 12, there arrived your letter of March 16, and also an envelope withHale, Emilyas director ('producer');v9Richard II;b3 the programme and the cutting about your play. So first let me say how delighted I am to know of the success of the production: I thought that Miss Tucker, in writing to the newspaper, might have paid a rather more direct tribute to your work. As your last production for the school, it seems to have been all that the last production should be.
As a reply to your letter of March 16, I need only say that I was going to write, anyway, this morning, to say first that I thanked you and appreciated your patience in what you said in the letter of the 12th! So you see that what appeared in retrospect a little impatient and self-centred, to yourself, impressed me very differently. For it is really very difficult to be patient with what is not intelligible. IHale, Emilyrelationship with TSE;w9following VHE's death;f8 had felt, in writing these letters, that I might give the impression of being very self-absorbed: yet it seemed that I could not do otherwise, as the subject was myself; and I try to look at that subject objectively. But really, the subject is ultimately myself and you, or myself in relation to you. It may have read in places as if I was callously indifferent to your feelings, and unappreciative of the affection I receive from my family. But if that were the case, the torments I have experienced would have been absent. It is my failure towards other human beings that concerns me, my egotism, weakness and self-deceptions. I have not been one whole person. So that when you contrast the two aspects of myself the existence of which you recognise, it is not safe to say that one of them (the one you prefer) is the real person, and the other not: the real person must be one in which these are united, and therefore different from either side alone.
YouEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)her death;f3TSE's shifting response to;a3 will see perhaps a little, how Vivienne’s sudden death brought about a new awareness. I am far from sure that I yet know the truth about myself, but I am sure that no one else can. The feeling which took possession of me – and I was so surprised by it that I did not recognise it at first for what it was – wasHale, Emilyrelationship with TSE;w9TSE's reasons against marrying;c5 that I was wholly unfitted for married life; that I had made one appalling mistake which had brought much misery to others (I am not pretending to be wholly altruistic about this! butEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)marriage to;e6painful yet stimulating;b5 my re-living of my own sufferings is criticised by a voice within me which whispers that without that wretchedness my creative work would not have been squeezed out of me) and that I could not risk it again. There is in this an element which could be called just loss of nerve, and also an element of rationality. Recognition of having grown in to one relatively satisfactory way of life, in which I found myself, as a man alone, able to reach out to a number and variety of people in human affection and friendliness, in contrast to the complete isolation of married misery; recognition of inability now to carry out the continuous self-adaptation to another personality, and memory of the strain and the complete failure of purely external adaptation against which one’s nature rebels. And I also ought to know by experience that it is impossible to make another person happy unless one is happy oneself.
YouEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)marriage to;e6TSE on entering into;a1 see, I had qualms and terrors within the brief interval between an impromptu engagement and marriage: which only came to the surface in the form of wondering what was wrong with myself? why didn’t I feel anything? ThereEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)marriage to;e6sexual relations;a3 wasn’t even physical infatuation to cloud my judgment or conceal my more genuine feelings towards a person. So I simply went through the ceremony, and committed myself, because I had not the courage, first to face my real feelings, and second to act upon them. When one is in a trap, one rationalises one’s paralysis that prevents any attempt to escape, as the performance of a duty, as the taking the consequences of one’s own behaviour.
You will not, I trust, make the mistake of thinking that I am drawing a parallel: either between persons or among my own feelings. The situation, and the persons, could not be more different. And please do not think, as you rather suggested in your letter of the 12th, that I have forgotten, or am overlooking anything: I have gone over and over the past, from fifteen years ago until recently, trying to understand and fit in every item of it. But a person like myself is a difficult enough social and domestic problem at best, for there must remain a part of him essentially solitary, if he is to survive and do his work (such as it is, if that does not sound like mock-humility: but it is a question of the kind of work, and not of his degree of success and importance in doing it). And I ask myself again and again whether I am now capable of any other mode of life than that in which I am: when it is a question of ten years, of fifteen years at most, of activity.
You will see, I hope, that it is the experience of the distant past, coming back upon me in a wave, since January 22, that makes me passionately sure that the first thing is to be quite honest with myself, and that the giving of myself must be first and foremost the gift of honesty. Indeed, it would be a lack of respect to you, and a lack of love, to dissimulate anything. (I know again from experience that keeping up a pretence, being unable to speak one’s mind freely to a person, has something degrading about it: the exasperation of the impossibility of treating another human being on terms of equality).
I know that I am not very well at present, though I think that that is more due to the exhaustion of wandering in this mental labyrinth, than to physical circumstances of this appalling winter and the apprehensions about the future of this country. I must wait with an open mind for any more truth that may come to me as a result of my visit. But it is not a question of my being able to see more clearly when on your side of the Atlantic; it is a necessity to come to see things in a way which will hold good for both sides.
I shall not wait for your next letter before writing again. Meanwhile, I thank you for your two good and patient letters. Remember that I never have, and never could, love any woman but yourself.