[No surviving envelope]
Itravels, trips and plansEH's 1950 summer in England;h1TSE books EH's hotel room for;a2 am very glad that you wrote about your mistake in the days, as I had got it into my head that you were arriving on Saturday the 17th June. However, the room at the Basil Street Hotel (Basil Street runs off Sloane Street just by the corner of Knightsbridge) is reserved from the 12th (so as to be available however early in the morning of the 13th you arrive. Please let me know your ‘flight number’ so that I shall be able to make enquiries about your plane. If you were held up by fog you might even be a day late, and I should want to notify the hotel to keep the room. Also, if you decide not to go at once to the country, but stop in London a little longer to rest, cable me. Also, I should like to know what your address will be for two or three days before you fly, in case I have any arrangements to cable you about. I do hope everything will go smoothly.
MarianEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister);g4 hasPerkinses, the;n8 been informing me about the Perkins’s, asPerkins, Edith (EH's aunt);j7 she goes in to see Aunt Edith and has seen both of them. IKrauss, Sophie M.tending to the Perkinses;b1 am so glad that Sophie Krauss has been with them.
I have had a very tiring time lately. TheJoyce, JamesTSE opens exhibition dedicated to;e1 worst of the 13th is that I have to ‘open’ an exhibition of James Joyce manuscripts etc. at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Oxford Street at 8.30 p.m. on the 13th, and I can’t get out of that.1 I imagine that you will want to stay in that evening, even if you don’t go straight to bed on arrival and stay there until the next day.
TheCocktail Party, The1950 New Theatre production;e1opening night;a3 first night went off well, and also the party I had to give afterwards at the Savoy. JohnHayward, Johnarranges first-night party for Cocktail Party;n5 made all the arrangements for that. There were about 60 guests – practically none of my personal inviting – the cast, everybody connected with the theatre and production also the Arts Council, the four ambassadors who were present – some important people were missed out, but by the time we knew they were coming the table accommodation in the room was all filled. RexHarrison, Rexin The Cocktail Party;a1 HarrisonGuinness, Alecsuperior to Rex Harrison;b3 is a less subtle and varied Reilly than Guinness, but a very finished actor indeed, and very agreeable to deal with. NorLeighton, Margaretcompared to Irene Worth in Cocktail Party;a1 doWorth, Irenecompared to Margaret Leighton;a5 I like Margaret Leighton2 so well as Irene Worth, but most people like her just as well. TheBoot, Gladysin The Cocktail Party;a1 others are all good, and Gladys Boot (from the Liverpool Repertory) is a real discovery.3
I had to go to Cambridge for that weekend, andAlliance FrançaiseAnnual Meeting in Newcastle;a9 have to go tomorrow to Newcastle for the Annual Meeting of the Alliance Française, which will be trying; and I have kept postponing writing any long letters about the performance – this is the only letter I have yet written to anybody. AndUniversity of Chicago'The Aims of Education' being prepared for;a2 I am now regretting my engagement in Chicago in October – but it seemed the only way of getting over this year, because I shall have my nose to the grindstone writing lectures all the summer. INason, Margaret ('Meg') Geraldine;c3 wonder if Meg will ask me down for a night while you are there: I could stay at the Lygon Arms4 or anywhere that a room can be found, for I don’t suppose there would be a room for me at the Bindery.
1.The exhibition ‘James Joyce 1882–1941’, mounted at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, 17–18 Dover Street, Piccadilly, W.1, ran from Weds. 14 June to Weds. 12 July 1950.
TheJoyce, JamesTSE on the Joyce corpus;e2n broadsheet catalogue included this statement by TSE:
One of the greatest capacities of genius is the power of development. The volume of a man’s work should correspond to this capacity in him: what he leaves behind should be no more and no less than what is needed to realise each definite stage of his development. While an artist is still living and working, we see his development rather as change. According to his own capacities, we see this change as for the better or for the worse, in relation to that one of his works which we elect as ‘the best’. Thus, there may have been readers of Dubliners who regarded the Portrait as an aberration; there were certainly admirers of the Portrait who deplored Ulysses; there were still more admirers of Ulysses who viewed Finnegans Wake as the raving of genius in decay, or as the futile effort of a man who had achieved his masterpiece, to find something new to say and a new way of saying it. But now at last, I think, the question ‘which was Joyce’s greatest work?’ should appear as pointless as the question ‘which is Shakespeare’s greatest play?’ Joyce’s writings form a whole; we can neither reject the early work as stages, of no intrinsic interest, of his progress towards the latter, nor reject the later work as the outcome of decline. As with Shakespeare, his later work must be understood through the earlier, and the first through the last; it is the whole journey, not any one stage of it, that assures him his place among the great.
————Nativity of the B.V.M. [8 September]: 1949
The catalogue also reprinted TSE’s piece ‘The Approach to James Joyce’, from The Listener, 14 Oct. 1941.
2.MargaretLeighton, Margaret Leighton (1922–76): British stage and film actor whose credits included roles in Henry IV (1946), with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson; and The Winslow Boy (1948). For The Go-Between (1971), she was to win a BAFTA and an Academy Award. TSE to Polly Tandy, 10 Aug. 1953: ‘The rehearsals are going well: the females in the cast – Margaret Leighton, Isabel Jeans, and Alison Leggat – are all well cast for their parts, and I seem to be able to judge the female actresses more quickly than the male actors – partly, perhaps, because I seem for some reason to be better at writing the female roles than the male.’
3.GladysBoot, Gladys Boot (1890–1964): stage and screen actor (a sometime student of TSE’s old collaborator Elsie Fogerty), emerged as a leading lady while at the Liverpool Playhouse.
4.The Lygon Arms, a former coaching inn, was one of only two hotels in Chipping Campden; the other was the Noel Arms.
3.GladysBoot, Gladys Boot (1890–1964): stage and screen actor (a sometime student of TSE’s old collaborator Elsie Fogerty), emerged as a leading lady while at the Liverpool Playhouse.
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.AlecGuinness, Alec Guinness (1914–2000), distinguished English actor: see Biographical Register.
2.RexHarrison, Rex Harrison (1908–90): award-winning English actor of stage and screen; successful in comedies and musicals, but also in more serious roles, from the 1930s. He won a Tony award and an Oscar as Professor Higgins in versions of My Fair Lady.
11.JohnHayward, John Davy Hayward (1905–65), editor and critic: see Biographical Register.
1.JamesJoyce, James Joyce (1882–1941), Irish novelist, playwright, poet; author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939).
1.SophieKrauss, Sophie M. M. Krauss (b. 1891), wife of Arthur Jeffrey Krauss (1884–1947), Episcopalian, who had resided in Seattle since 1921. Arthur Krauss ran the Krauss Brothers Lumber Company and was to retire in 1938 when the business was wound up in the area. They lived at 128 40th Avenue N., Seattle, with Lillie Cook (49) and Lucy Williams (28) – presumably their servants. See too Lyndall Gordon, The Hyacinth Girl, 183.
2.MargaretLeighton, Margaret Leighton (1922–76): British stage and film actor whose credits included roles in Henry IV (1946), with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson; and The Winslow Boy (1948). For The Go-Between (1971), she was to win a BAFTA and an Academy Award. TSE to Polly Tandy, 10 Aug. 1953: ‘The rehearsals are going well: the females in the cast – Margaret Leighton, Isabel Jeans, and Alison Leggat – are all well cast for their parts, and I seem to be able to judge the female actresses more quickly than the male actors – partly, perhaps, because I seem for some reason to be better at writing the female roles than the male.’
1.MargaretNason, Margaret ('Meg') Geraldine (Meg) Geraldine Nason (1900–86), proprietor of the Bindery tea rooms, Broadway, Worcestershire, whom TSE and EH befriended on visits to Chipping Campden.
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).