[No surviving envelope]
I had a quiet enough Christmas, onlyRobertses, thein mourning;b2Roberts, Andrew
ThenPusey House, OxfordTSE engaged to speak at;a1 a very old chicken came home to roost, when'Lambeth and Education: The Report Criticised';a1 I found in November that I had promised a year ago to go down and read a paper at Pusey House, Oxford. So that has taken this weekend: I am only giving them some rough notes on the section of the Lambeth Report dealing with education. This is to be the 29th: but I wanted to get it off my mind at once, so as to return to the play, which I shall be able to do tomorrow: there are more letters to be written, but most of them can wait for odd moments.
IFamily Reunion, TheSwedish National Theatre production;i8 wish I had kept a copy of that letter about Stockholm, because I may not have put as much in it about the performance of ‘The Family Reunion’ as I should have written to you. At the risk of repeating, Iactors and actressesin Sweden;a7 will say that I was interested by the highly melodramatic style of Swedish acting – the tendency to rant, scream, and clutch their heads in their hands. My hero was so excited from the moment he came in, that he left no room for any crescendo. The effect was extremely sombre, and of something extremely morbid – which is what they like. Iappearance (TSE's)of a superior comic actor;b2 am sending you one of the three photographs which may amuse you, but it makes me appear so like a superior comic actor that I add another, taken at Princeton, which is more dignified. The lady who appears to be avoiding the camera (Agatha) was much the best and was really rather fine: she disappeared immediately after the curtain – her husband had died two days before, and I thought it was gallant of her to continue to act, and I felt grateful, so that I wrote her a letter of thanks and appreciation afterwards.
While I have been grateful for the comparative obscurity into which one can retire in London, I have not yet been relieved of all the consequences of publicity. IP. E. N. Club;a1 have succeeded in avoiding the giving of a dinner in my honour by the P.E.N. Club, butAlliance Françaisehonours TSE with dinner;a6 not a dinner of the Alliance Française, as the Ambassador is to be in the chair (but I shall insist on speaking in English); and I am wondering whether I can avoid a lunch with the Rotary Club of Chelsea. Then'Strindbergs inflytande på T. S. Eliot betydande';a1 there is a Stockholm paper which has been badgering me for a tribute to Strindberg, none of whose plays I have read since I was eighteen or nineteen.2 NowCocktail Party, Theend in prospect;c5 I have set the end of June as the date for finishing the play, and shall decline to pay my visit to Germany until I see the end in sight.
IPrinceton Universityand TSE's Institute for Advanced Study position;e3 don’t think that the Institute of Advanced Study, even if it should want me to repeat my visit, is a very satisfactory solution of the problem of American visits. Whenever I came to Boston I had the feeling that I was playing truant; and as I felt that I should only draw on the funds they provided, for my normal expenses while there, I still had the problem of financing my visit to Boston (as well as for purchases of clothing) by lectures: fortunately my two lectures each paid five hundred dollars, andBryn Mawr College, Pennsylvaniareads at again in 1948;a2 I got two hundred and fifty very easily by spending a night at Bryn Mawr, soEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister)TSE leaves money with;f9 that IEliot, Margaret Dawes (TSE's sister)TSE leaves money with;d4 was able to leave a little money for my sisters (for heaven’s sake keep this to yourself!) Itravels, trips and plansTSE's 1950 visit to America;h2and TSE's possible Chicago post;a1 think that a few lectures, in the right places, would leave me freer and give me a higher proportion of my time in Cambridge. But I think the ideal time would be the latest possible moment in the spring when lectures at colleges can be given. For seeing yourself, term time is very unsatisfactory, and the period just before Christmas, when you are over worked, is perhaps the worst of all. Of course, I was especially tired, and harassed by being a public figure. But I should like to know from you what moment in the year is least unsatisfactory from your point of view.
I hope I may get a letter soon, now that your brief holiday will be over: IKnowles, Sylvia Hathaway;b2 hope you had a restful visit to Sylvia Knowles’. WhenElsmith, Dorothy Olcottin New Zealand;c4 does Dorothy Elsmith return from New Zealand? I lit a candle for you on Christmas Eve and before the New Year’s Day Communion.
my pen has just run out.
1.Michael Roberts died of leukaemia on 13 Dec. 1948. TSE in New English Weekly, 14 (13 Jan. 1949), 164.
2.See ‘Strindbergs inflytande på T. S. Eliot betydande’ (‘Strindberg’s Influence on T. S. Eliot Considerable’), CProse 7, 318–21; from a letter, 6 Jan. 1949 to Karl Ragnar Gierow, literary editor of the Svenska Dagbladet. ‘[Ibsen and Strindberg] are extremely different from each other; what they had in common, so far as my own interests were concerned, was a poetic apprehension of their material […] and at that time the type of literary exercise in which I engaged was not of a kind for which I could take these dramatists as models for conscious imitation.’
3.HenryEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother) Ware Eliot (1879–1947), TSE’s older brother: see Biographical Register.
6.MargaretEliot, Margaret Dawes (TSE's sister) Dawes Eliot (1871–1956), TSE's second-oldest sister sister, resident in Cambridge, Mass. In an undated letter (1952) to his Harvard friend Leon M. Little, TSE wrote: ‘Margaret is 83, deaf, eccentric, recluse (I don’t think she has bought any new clothes since 1900).’
1.Marian/MarionEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister) Cushing Eliot (1877–1964), fourth child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Eliot: see Biographical Register.
4.TSEElsmiths, theseminal Woods Hole stay with;a1Elsmith, Dorothy Olcott
2.SylviaKnowles, Sylvia Hathaway Hathaway Knowles (1891–1979), of New Bedford, Mass. – a descendant of a long-established merchant and business family based there – was a friend and room-mate of EH from their schooldays at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Vermont.
4.EdwardRoberts, Edward Adam Adam Roberts (b. 29 Aug. 1940) was in due course to be Montague Burton Professor of International Relations and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford; President of the British Academy. Knighted in 2002.
1.MichaelRoberts, Michael Roberts (1902–48), critic, editor, poet: see Biographical Register.