[No surviving envelope]
Your letter came from Grand Manan a few days before I left for Edinburgh, and I did not feel that I could answer it then – though, if I had not heard from you I would have written before Edinburgh. In any case, IEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister)1949 visit to England with Dodo;g1return from Southwold;a8 had been livingSmith, Theodora ('Dodo') Eliot (TSE's niece)1949 visit to England;d1then to Southwold;a6 in a turmoil ever since returning from Southwold, with rehearsals taking a good deal of time. We got back from Edinburgh on Saturday evening, after a very full and tiring week there. During the following days I spent every evening with Marion and Theodora, and saw them off last night to New York. SoFabers, thehost TSE for weekend;h9 now I have a comparatively free interval – I shall take a long weekend with the Fabers in Sussex; andtravels, trips and plansTSE's October–November 1949 trip to Germany;g8;a4 hope to be sufficiently restored by that to be able to start on three addresses which I have to prepare for Germany.1 My tour, by the way, has been put forward to the 26th October (returning on the 18th November) so that my visit to university towns may fall after the students have reassembled. The combination of the work, the emotional strain, and the calls upon my time, have left me very tired indeed.
ICocktail Party, The1949 Edinburgh Festival production;d1reviewed;a6 enclose three cuttings of newspaper notices – The Times2 and the Telegraph of London3 and the Evening Record of Glasgow.4 These are the most interesting; some, of course were far from flattering; but all were obliged to admit the excellence of production and acting; and the general effect is to give the play a very good start for London. IGuinness, Alec;a7 understandFlemyng, Robert;a1 that thereJeans, Ursula;a2 must be an interval, as Guinness, Fleming [sc. Flemyng]5 and Ursula Jeans all have immediate contracts to fulfil, but that it is intended to open in London in November, with, I hope, nearly the entire cast, because there is not one whom I should wish to dispense with. ThisBrowne, Elliott Martin1949 Edinburgh Cocktail Party;e7surpasses himself with production;b1 is by far the best production that Martin has done so far, and I am inclined to withdraw my less favourable opinion – this was thoroughly professional and most intelligent. IBrowne, Henzie (née Raeburn)as Cocktail Party understudy;b4 must say that one of the reasons why this is his best is that Henzie is not in it.
That remains a difficult and delicate situation; and I am prepared for the question of Henzie as a possible understudy may <to> arise in London. It is quite clear that she was bitterly disappointed: but I do hold to the opinion that a producer should not cast his wife for a part unless she is a very good actress indeed. ISherek, Henryconfounds TSE's expectations;a2 think that it has been good for Martin to be working under a shrewd commercial producer as able and intelligent as Henry Sherek – an extraordinary man who looks about as tough a businessman in the entertainment industry as one could imagine, but who is apparently not Jewish and is an Etonian. Sherek was extremely useful to me in the press conference; and, although he made me appear at the end of the first night, on the stage, said wisely that he did not want me to make a speech.
ItWorth, Irenereputation enhanced by Cocktail Party;a1 is a satisfaction toNesbitt, Cathleen (née Kathleen Mary Nesbitt)reputation enhanced by Cocktail Party;a2 think that the production will, if anything, enhance the reputation of all who acted in it; that it will give Irene Worth (who has never done anything so conspicuous before) the prospect of good engagements – she gave a most moving rendering6 – and that it starts Cathleen Nesbitt in a type of role which she can carry on with as long as she acts at all – and she needs the money as she has a husband and two children to keep.
I am sorry that the script of my play was so badly packed. (IncidentallyEliot, Esmé Valerie (née Fletcher, TSE's second wife)comes highly recommended as secretary;a1, I have now engaged a new secretary,7 who will start in ten days time – highlyBrooks, Collinrecommends EVE as secretary;a1 recommended by the Editor of ‘Truth’, whom I know,8 andMorgan, CharlesEVE's quondam employer;a3 formerly secretary to Charles Morgan! She left that post recently because she was dissatisfied, apparently the Morgans got her to do housekeeping work, and she wanted secretarial duties rather than making out laundry lists). ICocktail Party, TheTSE disavows autobiographical basis;d4 was, of course, very much distressed and unhappy over your own distress. I don’t know yet whether you are not – as seems to me – reading into the play much which I should deny to be there. In the first place, neither the situations nor the characters are in any way ‘personal’. IFamily Reunion, Themore 'personal' than Cocktail Party;j2 recognise that element in The Family Reunion; but I think that I have now worked through that to something pretty objective. I see no trace of myself, or of you, or of anybody else, in the characters: I took elements of Julia and Alex from two people I know, but there is a good deal else there too; and even if the two people concerned should recognise the borrowing, I don’t think they could be anything but flattered. The situations, and the relations between the characters, have no foundation whatever in my own experience. The mentality of Edward is wholly different from my own; his feelings towards his wife utterly different from anything in my experience; and the only personal echo that I recognise is some lines about feeling old – which particularly appealed to Robert Flemyng as he is getting to an age at which he thinks he understands them. ThereBrocklebank, Charlotte Carissima ('Cara')provides inspiration for 'Celia';b4 is no original for Lavinia, and as for Celia, only a very remote suggestion came to me from Cara Brocklebank’s telling me about a friend of hers, who had been a lively society girl just after the first war, and who had become an anchoress – that is, the most austere possible religious life – whose prayers were of very great help to people. The play is in fact, about the making of a saint; and nowadays, it is necessary to give people a very violent shock indeed, to make them take holiness seriously. The purpose of the social setting, and of the sub-plots of the Chamberlaynes and Peter, is solely to set this forth in the sharpest relief.
So, if there are any misunderstandings to be cleared up, I hope this will go some way towards doing so.
I am afraid you reached Grand Manan in a very exhausted condition, after being so long with the Perkins’s in that terrific heat; and I do hope that the summer will have abated before you return, and that you will not have to start work in anything like the temperature you left. Oh dear.
1.See ‘Remarks in German to German audiences’, CProse 7, 372–5. Sponsored by the German Foreign Office in London, TSE gave lectures and some readings in English in Hamburg, Berlin, Hanover, Göttingen, Münster, Bonn and Cologne; he also spoke in Heidelberg and Munich. The three major talks were ‘The Aims of Poetic Drama’ (‘Die Aufgaben des Versdramas’); ‘The Idea of a European Society’ (‘Die Idee einer europäischen Gesellschaft’); and ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse’ (‘Shakespeares Verskunst’).
2.‘TheTimes, Thereviews The Cocktail Party;a4n Edinburgh Festival: “The Cocktail Party” by T. S. Eliot from our dramatic critic’, The Times, 24 Aug. 1949: ‘In this brilliantly entertaining analysis of problems long since staled by conventional stage treatment Mr Eliot achieves a remarkable refinement of his dramatic style. His earlier plays have been successive moves towards simplicity and now his thought, wholly undiluted, flows with certainty and a new sparkle of wit along present-day theatrical channels. The framework of ritual sat a little heavily on Murder in the Cathedral. Greek props gave an air of embarrassing artificiality to the narrative of The Family Reunion. These he has now dispensed with; and in lucid, unallusive verse which endows everyday speech with a delicate precision and a strictly occasional poetic intensity he presents in the shape of a fashionable West End comedy a story highly ingenious in its construction, witty in its repartee, and impregnated with Christian feeling […]
‘London can scarcely afford to ignore entertainment of so much distinction, and it is to be hoped that when the play reaches a more permanent stage the company seen here at the Royal Lyceum Theatre will remain quite unchanged. MrGuinness, Alecpraised by The Times;a8n Alec Guinness as the humorous visionary of Harley Street, MissWorth, Irenepraised by The Times;a2n Irene Worth as the girl who is at once a potential Bright Young Thing and a potential saint, Mr Donald Houston as the film writer illustrating in his own way the limitations of the individual, MissNesbitt, Cathleen (née Kathleen Mary Nesbitt)praised by The Times;a3n Cathleen Nesbitt, Mr Robert Flemyng, Mr Ernest Clark – they are a splendid team directed unobtrusively well by Mr E. Martin Browne.’
3.W. A. DarlingtonDaily Telegraphreviews The Cocktail Party;a5n, ‘Fine Play by T. S. Eliot: Close-Packed Work’, Daily Telegraph, 23 Aug. 1949, 5: ‘With the production of T. S. Eliot’s new play, “The Cocktail Party”, modestly called by its author a comedy, the Edinburgh Festival attains its highest point of distinction so far on the dramatic side. Unless I am carried away by the excitement of the moment, this play is one of the finest dramatic achievements of our time.
‘One might complain of it that it is packed too closely – that it is so full of philosophy, wit and epigram and swings so quickly and so far between the deepest seriousness and the lightest of comic touches that the mind cannot grasp it. This is true to some extent. Yet Mr Eliot contrives by sheer narrative skill to keep his tale simple amid all the complicated talk.
‘The play is written in what my ear takes to be rhythmic and disciplined prose, though it may be poetry in form as well as in essence. Whatever it is, it makes a fluent and flexible medium.
‘A group of sophisticated people meet at a cocktail party and gradually they unfold their unhappiness, their fears of loneliness, their craving for love and understanding, their shrinking from responsibility. One aloof stranger, whose presence at the party is unexplained, seems in some way to hold the key to these mysteries.
‘Later he turns out to be a doctor, with a material enough address in Harley-street but an atmosphere of the fourth dimension about him, and to him come for help an unhappy married couple and a bewildered girl with a sense of sin. He reveals these groping souls to themselves.
‘I have left myself little space to give adequate praise to the acting or to the work of E. Martin Browne as director. Robert Flemyng and Ursula Jeans as husband and wife, Irene Worth as the girl, Alec Guinness as the doctor are admirable, and Cathleen Nesbitt is quite irresistible in a part full of contrasts and surprises.’
4.TSE has conflated the names of various Glasgow-based newspapers; in fact the review was by Mary Carson in Glasgow Herald, 31 Aug. 1949. Extrapolated in Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays, 233.
5.RobertFlemyng, Robert Flemyng (1912–95): British actor of stage and screen, came to prominence in Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears (1936) and in a Ben Travers farce, Banana Ridge (1938). After distinguished service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, for which he was awarded the Military Cross and appointed OBE, he played Edward Chamberlayne in The Cocktail Party. He later starred in stage productions; films including The Blue Lamp (1950) and The Quiller Memorandum (1966); and episodes of the 1960s British TV series Compact.
6.IreneWorth, Irene Worth (1916–2002), hugely talented American stage and screen actor, was to progress from TSE’s play to international stardom on stage and screen. She joined the Old Vic company in 1951, as a leading actor under Tyrone Guthrie; and in 1953 she appeared at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, where her appearances included a further partnership with Alec Guinness (Hotel Paradiso). In 1962 she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, where her roles included a remorseless Goneril to Paul Scofield’s Lear in Peter Brook’s production of King Lear. In 1968 she played a dynamic Jocasta in Brook’s production of Seneca’s Oedipus (trans. Ted Hughes) – featuring a huge golden phallus – alongside John Gielgud. Numerous acting awards fell to her remarkable work: a BAFTA, and three Tony Awards including the award for Best Actress in a Play for Tiny Alice (1965), and yet another Tony for Best Featured Actress in Lost in Yonkers (1991).
7.EsméEliot, Esmé Valerie (née Fletcher, TSE's second wife) Valerie Fletcher (1926–2012) started work as TSE’s secretary on 12 Sept. 1949, and became his second wife on 10 Jan. 1957; after his death in Jan. 1965, his literary executor and editor: see 'Valerie Eliot' in Biographical Register.
8.CollinBrooks, Collin Brooks, MC (1893–1959): journalist, editor, broadcaster and prolific author. Although he had left school at the age of fifteen, his long experience of journalism included stints as editor of the Financial News and of the Sunday Dispatch. He was chair and editor of Truth, 1941–53; and in 1953 he was to join the Daily Express group. In later years he participated in the BBC broadcast programmes Any Questions and The Brains Trust. By origin a northerner, and a longstanding friend of Valerie Fletcher’s parents, he came to know that TSE was looking for a new secretary and recommended Valerie to apply. Two of Brooks’s books in the Eliot library, Tavern Talk (1950) and More Tavern Talk (1952), are inscribed to Valerie. TSE was to send Brooks a copy of On Poetry and Poets, inscribed ‘to Collin Brooks in gratitude and affection from T. S. Eliot 13.9.57.’ See TSE, ‘Memorial Talk for Collin Brooks’, The Statist, 30 May 1959, 1–2: CProse 8, 334–8.
TSE to Polly Tandy, ‘Monday after the XIII Sunday after Trinity [30 Sept.] 1949’, on ‘having to have a new secretary which her name is Valerie and she was secretary for Charles Morgan & wife only they made her do cooking and laundry lists etc. which she did not like to do.’
ValerieEliot, Esmé Valerie (née Fletcher, TSE's second wife)which she recalls becoming;a2n Eliot to Aimée and Rosamond Lamb, 12 Sept. 1959: ‘Ten years ago to-day I became Tom’s secretary – and how terrified I was! – and he has remembered the occasion with red roses. Isn’t he a pet?’ (Boston Athenaeum).
2.CharlotteBrocklebank, Charlotte Carissima ('Cara') Carissima (‘Cara’) Brocklebank (1885–1948), only surviving daughter of Gen. Sir Bindon and Lady Blood, married in 1910 Lt.-Col. Richard Hugh Royds Brocklebank, DSO (1881–1965). They lived at 18 Hyde Park Square, London W.2, and at Alveston House, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire: see Biographical Register.
8.CollinBrooks, Collin Brooks, MC (1893–1959): journalist, editor, broadcaster and prolific author. Although he had left school at the age of fifteen, his long experience of journalism included stints as editor of the Financial News and of the Sunday Dispatch. He was chair and editor of Truth, 1941–53; and in 1953 he was to join the Daily Express group. In later years he participated in the BBC broadcast programmes Any Questions and The Brains Trust. By origin a northerner, and a longstanding friend of Valerie Fletcher’s parents, he came to know that TSE was looking for a new secretary and recommended Valerie to apply. Two of Brooks’s books in the Eliot library, Tavern Talk (1950) and More Tavern Talk (1952), are inscribed to Valerie. TSE was to send Brooks a copy of On Poetry and Poets, inscribed ‘to Collin Brooks in gratitude and affection from T. S. Eliot 13.9.57.’ See TSE, ‘Memorial Talk for Collin Brooks’, The Statist, 30 May 1959, 1–2: CProse 8, 334–8.
4.E. MartinBrowne, Elliott Martin Browne (1900–80), English director and producer, was to direct the first production of Murder in the Cathedral: see Biographical Register.
7.EsméEliot, Esmé Valerie (née Fletcher, TSE's second wife) Valerie Fletcher (1926–2012) started work as TSE’s secretary on 12 Sept. 1949, and became his second wife on 10 Jan. 1957; after his death in Jan. 1965, his literary executor and editor: see 'Valerie Eliot' in Biographical Register.
1.Marian/MarionEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister) Cushing Eliot (1877–1964), fourth child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Eliot: see Biographical Register.
5.RobertFlemyng, Robert Flemyng (1912–95): British actor of stage and screen, came to prominence in Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears (1936) and in a Ben Travers farce, Banana Ridge (1938). After distinguished service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, for which he was awarded the Military Cross and appointed OBE, he played Edward Chamberlayne in The Cocktail Party. He later starred in stage productions; films including The Blue Lamp (1950) and The Quiller Memorandum (1966); and episodes of the 1960s British TV series Compact.
5.AlecGuinness, Alec Guinness (1914–2000), distinguished English actor: see Biographical Register.
2.RogerLivesey, Roger Livesey (1906–76), Welsh stage and screen actor, was marriedJeans, Ursula to the English stage and film actor Ursula Jeans (1906–73) – Lavinia Chamberlayne in The Cocktail Party.
1.CathleenNesbitt, Cathleen (née Kathleen Mary Nesbitt) Nesbitt, née Kathleen Mary Nesbitt (1888–1982), English actor of stage, screen and TV (she was encouraged to take up acting by Sarah Bernhardt, a friend of her father’s). Educated at Queen’s University, Belfast, and at the Sorbonne, she first acted in a revival of Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Cabinet Minister (1910). In 1912 she became the fiancée of the poet Rupert Brooke (who was to die in the war). She starred as the mischievously perceptive Julia Shuttlethwaite in The Cocktail Party. Later best known for her roles in film, she starred as Mrs Higgins in My Fair Lady (with Rex Harrison, 1956); as Cary Grant’s grandmother in An Affair to Remember (1957); as Lady Matheson in Separate Tables (1958), and in Alfred Hitchcock’s final film Family Plot (1976). Appointed CBE for her services to drama, 1978.
4.HenrySherek, Henry Sherek (1900–1967), theatre producer: see Biographical Register.
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’.
6.IreneWorth, Irene Worth (1916–2002), hugely talented American stage and screen actor, was to progress from TSE’s play to international stardom on stage and screen. She joined the Old Vic company in 1951, as a leading actor under Tyrone Guthrie; and in 1953 she appeared at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, where her appearances included a further partnership with Alec Guinness (Hotel Paradiso). In 1962 she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, where her roles included a remorseless Goneril to Paul Scofield’s Lear in Peter Brook’s production of King Lear. In 1968 she played a dynamic Jocasta in Brook’s production of Seneca’s Oedipus (trans. Ted Hughes) – featuring a huge golden phallus – alongside John Gielgud. Numerous acting awards fell to her remarkable work: a BAFTA, and three Tony Awards including the award for Best Actress in a Play for Tiny Alice (1965), and yet another Tony for Best Featured Actress in Lost in Yonkers (1991).