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IAll Souls College, Oxfordfestivities at;a6 was very tired last week after threeChrist Church, OxfordGaudy at;a3 nights in Oxford, with a dinner party each night – first the Warden of All Souls’, then the Christchurch [sic] ‘Gaudy’, at which I had, at fortyeight hours’ notice, to respond to the toast of ‘the guests’ (andBlum, Léon;a4 a little difficult to have to speak after M. Léon Blum, with all the resources of the French language and a lifetime of speech-making)1 andAlliance Françaisewhere TSE stays;a5 finally a dinner at the Maison Française in honour of M. and Mme. Blum – I spent the last night there, and perhaps the final fatigue was having to talk French all the time for a day at the end. So that last weekend I spent doing as near to nothing as possible, and sleeping a good deal. At the end of a second weekend, I feel more rested. I have not, this year, been going to my office on a Friday; I try to keep Saturday entirely free and see nobody; and this week I have had three days without conversation – a great restorative, especially as most of the people one sees in this life (and I think as one becomes older it is a high proportion) are exhausting rather than contributing. I say ‘contributing’ because I do not mean stimulating: one needs a certain amount of social stimulation, no doubt; but stimulation means exciting to give out rather than to receive.
NowFabers, the1948 Minsted summer stay;h7 I hope for a fairly quiet life for the rest of this month; thenPrinceton Universityand TSE's Institute for Advanced Study position;e3 I may go to the Fabers’ for ten days or so, and possibly pay a visit to Cornwall to a farm in August; andtravels, trips and plansTSE's 1948 trip to America;g5;a6 in September prepare for Princeton. IFrom Poe to Valéryrevised from Aix lecture;a1 shallPoe, Edgar AllanFrom Poe to Valéry;a3 have to refurbish myLibrary of Congress, Washingtonfor which TSE revamps Poe lecture;a3 Poe lecture for the Library of Congress;2 and'Leadership and Letters';a1 IMilton Academy, BostonTSE's War Memorial Lecture for;a8 have to compose the War Memorial Lecture for Milton (both of these, I expect will take place in November);3 otherwise I shall give no lectures, and I hope no readings in public. AndCocktail Party, Thebeing written;b5 I hope to finish my first draft this month. I have two more scenes to write. That sounds as [if] I had nearly finished! But indeed I count this first draft only as preparing the framework. It will be too short, but at the same time I am sure that a good many lines will have to come out. It is not only the whole scheme, and proportion, that present difficult problems for me; it is especially those scenes in which a change or development of emotion must be operated. I know the state of feeling in which I want my characters to open the scene; and I have a pretty definite idea of the state of feeling (the feelings of each and also the combination they are to make) at which I want to arrive at the end. The difficulty is to select the right moments of change, and plot a curve which will give the effect of a continuous development and not of a series of leaps from one static condition to another. There too one needs to find out how what one writes affects other people: by oneself, it is so easy to skip a stage in development without noticing it.
You are now, I suppose, at Commonwealth Avenue, where I shall address you until August (I have got rather confused with ‘The Flying Jib’ and ‘The Anchorage’); but I hope you will, as you suggest the possibility, pay a few visits; for I should want you to be out of the heat as much as possible. IPerkinses, the;m9 am very sorry that the Perkins’s cannot go away to the country or seaside; thoughPerkins, Edith (EH's aunt);i4 I can see, that even if they were the guests of good friends, Aunt Edith would be tried by the difficulty of finding her way about in another house: but it often seems that old people do not suffer from heat as much as younger ones.
ItEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister)abortive 1948 summer in England;f5cancelled;a6 nowSmith, Theodora ('Dodo') Eliot (TSE's niece);c7 seems certain that Marion and Theodora will not come.
1.At the Oxford Encaenia ceremony on 23 June 1948, TSE received the degree of DLitt. There were five other honorary graduands: the American Ambassador Lewis Williams Douglas; Léon Blum, former prime minister of France; Sir Arnold McNair, KC: Isaiah Bowman, geographer and President of Johns Hopkins University; and Linus Pauling, theoretical chemist. TSE’s speech, at the Christ Church ‘Gaudy’ in the evening of the same day, was in reply to the toast of ‘The Guests’: see CProse 8, 172–5. HeMerton College, OxfordTSE on his time at;a4n enjoyed the opportunity to reminisce, in part, on his own ‘short and undistinguished career’ as ‘a somewhat elderly American student’ – as Sheldon Travelling Fellow in Philosophy at Merton College, 1914–15. ‘I took no degree. I competed for no prizes; I left with my only trophy a pewter mug obtained for stroking a college junior four at a time when all the real oarsmen were fighting for England and France.’ NeverthelessJoachim, Harold Henry ('H. H.')as influence on TSE's punctuation;a3n, he went on, he learned from his tutor, Harold Joachim, ‘the importance of punctuation. Some readers of my verse have maintained that this is a subject of which I am profoundly ignorant: so I would assure them that I could not have violated punctuation so outrageously, had I not devoted some attention to its study.’
2.The lecture, ‘Edgar Poe et la France’, first given in French at Aix-en-Provence in Apr. 1948, was revised for delivery at the Library of Congress on 19 Nov. 1948; it was published as From Poe to Valéry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1948): CProse 8, 290–308.
3.The Seventeenth Lecture of the Alumni War Memorial, ‘Leadership and Letters’, was delivered at Milton Academy on Weds. 3 Nov. 1948; printed in Milton Bulletin 12 (Feb. 1949), 3–16: CProse 8, 324–9.
3.LéonBlum, Léon Blum (1872–1950): French socialist politician – Prime Minister in a Popular Front government, 1936–7, 1938. During the war, as a Jew and stout antagonist of Vichy France, he had been incarcerated in Buchenwald concentration camp. TSE to Elena Richmond, 27 June 1948, of Blum: ‘a most charming man, who recites poetry with learning, taste and expressiveness, but who struck me as, like other socialists, a mediocre political philosopher’.
1.Marian/MarionEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister) Cushing Eliot (1877–1964), fourth child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Eliot: see Biographical Register.
1.‘Professor H. H. Joachim’, The Times, 2 Aug. 1938, 12. JoachimJoachim, Harold Henry ('H. H.') was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, 1897–1919; Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford, 1919–35. TSE was his pupil at Merton in 1914–15. See TSE’s tribute in The Times: CProse 5, 646–7.
2.TheodoraSmith, Theodora ('Dodo') Eliot (TSE's niece) Eliot Smith (1904–92) – ‘Dodo’ – daughter of George Lawrence and Charlotte E. Smith: see Biographical Register. Theodora’sSmith, Charlotte ('Chardy') Stearns (TSE's niece) sister was Charlotte Stearns Smith (b. 1911), known as ‘Chardy’.