[No surviving envelope]
1642 E. 56th Street,
Jackson Park, Chicago.
Your letter of the 23d saddened me still further. First, I can imagine the strain of the present situation at Commonwealth Avenue. IPerkins, Edith (EH's aunt)faced with husband's death;j8 am not surprised by what you tell me of Aunt Edith’s preparations. It is in character: I think that many people try instinctively to deaden the pain by attending to even the most trivial details. I remember a friend of mine telling me, after his father’s death, that his mother seemed chiefly concerned for some days with counting her letters of condolence, and thinking out who had, and who had not, among her acquaintance, written to her. That is one way of getting through things, for some persons: concentrating on forms and ceremony. But while this makes it easier for her, it undoubtedly makes it all more painful for you.
IHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3TSE rebuked for impersonality;i7 am sorry that my letters have not seemed more personal: buttravels, trips and plansTSE's 1950 visit to America;h2the Chicago leg;a2 perhaps I too cover things up by attending to activities of one kind and another: IUniversity of ChicagoTSE's sojourn at;a3 regarded these weeks in Chicago simply as something that had to be lived through, because it had been at the time the only possible way of getting to America, and seeing you and my family. (It is certainly not so bad as a lecture tour). But one’s private life seems almost something to put into storage, under such conditions as these. And one has to pretend to like it. Then I have felt very homesick and depayse1 too. I never feel quite myself on these crowded visits: perhaps I shall not be able to think again until I get home. ButHale, Emilyrelationship with TSE;w9its new dispensation;g7, if I seem impersonal, remember also that I don’t feel quite at ease, that I can’t feel quite at ease in these circumstances and with you as things are now. That may improve with time, I hope and pray it will; but the awareness that my feelings are something that I cannot explain, and that cannot be understood, makes me feel that I must seem to you a remote and far from likeable character. So that any expression of tenderness and affection seems almost an impertinence; and it is easier to appear on terms of greater intimacy with many people whom I know and care less about. You must see that I cannot be quite relaxed or spontaneous at present! And it is all a source of great unhappiness.
Tonight'Aims of Education, The'second lecture;a4 my second lecture, tomorrowHutchins, Robert Maynard;a2 a party of the Hutchins’s, SaturdayGurian, Waldemar;a1 Professor Waldemar Gurian (a former contributor to the Criterion, before he had to leave for Germany),2 ‘Qu’est-ceAnouilh, Jeanquoted;a2 qu’ilAnouilh, JeanAntigone;a4 y a à cinq heures?’ ‘A cinq heures, monsieur, il y a conseil’. ‘Eh bien, s’il y a conseil, nous allons y aller’ (the ‘Antigone’ of Anouilh).3
IPerkins, Dr John Carroll (EH's uncle);i7 pray that you may get some rest from this terrible strain. And that if Uncle John dies while I am in America, it will be at such a moment that I can come to the funeral. IPound, Ezravisited by TSE in Washington;d4 cannot forego my visit to Washington, because I feel that to go to see Pound, once, whenever I am in this country, is a debt of honour.
P.S. MyHarvard UniversityTheodore Spencer Memorial Lecture;c8 Spencer'Poetry and Drama';a2 lecture has now to be in the afternoon (Nov. 21) I suppose at 4.30,4 becauseWilder, ThorntonThe Skin of Our Teeth;a2 Sanders Theatre is to be in use for ‘The Skin of your [sc. Our] Teeth’ in the evenings.5 IfLevin, Harry;a1 you will let me know that you can come then, and that you want to come, I will ask Harry Levin to have a ticket reserved for you.6
1.dépaysé (Fr.) = disorientated.
2.WaldemarGurian, Waldemar Gurian (1902–1954): German–Armenian political scientist and journalist; commentator on Catholicism and Communism; friend of Maritain and Massis; author of Bolshevism: Theory and Practice, trans. E. I. Watkin (1932). In fact, Gurian did not contribute to the Criterion; but his book on Bolshevism was reviewed by A. J. Penty in 1933.
3.CREON. What have we on at five o’clock?
PAGE. Cabinet meeting, sir.
CREON. Cabinet meeting. Then we had better go along to it.—trans. Lewis Galantière (1951).
4.‘PoetryHarvard UniversityTheodore Spencer Memorial Lecture;c8English 26 (Modern English Literature)
See too ‘New Recorder to Greet T. S. Eliot’, Harvard Crimson, 15 Nov. 1950: ‘T. S. Eliot will be put on a new kind of tape when he lectures on drama here Tuesday.
‘A $1,000 tape recorder, purchased by the Theatre and Poetry Departments of the University Library and the Summer School last July will record the words of the author of “Wasteland” as well as the other forthcoming Spenser [sic] Drama lectures and Gray poetry readings. They will be transferred to discs and added to the collection in the Woodbury Poetry Room in Lamont …
‘When Eliot spoke here two years ago, 200 people waited in vain outside the hall to hear him. Now those who don’t get seated will be able to hear the first Spenser lecturer when the record is cut and placed in the files of the Woodbury Room.’
5.Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942): winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
6.Harry Levin (1912–94) graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1934; an authority on Renaissance Literature, and nineteenth-and twentieth-century American, British and French Literature, he rose to become Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature; author of James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (1941). See Levin, ‘T. S. Eliot: A Reminiscence’, Harvard Advocate 100: 3–4 (Fall 1966), 34–5; ‘Old Possum at Possum House’, in T. S. Eliot: Essays from the ‘Southern Review’, ed. James Olney (1988), 154.
2.WaldemarGurian, Waldemar Gurian (1902–1954): German–Armenian political scientist and journalist; commentator on Catholicism and Communism; friend of Maritain and Massis; author of Bolshevism: Theory and Practice, trans. E. I. Watkin (1932). In fact, Gurian did not contribute to the Criterion; but his book on Bolshevism was reviewed by A. J. Penty in 1933.
6.RobertHutchins, Robert Maynard Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977): graduate of Yale, philosopher and educational theorist; President of the University of Chicago, 1929–45; Chancellor, 1945–51. He served on the Executive Committee of the Committee on Social Thought. Chairman of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, 1943–74, he was the author of No Friendly Voice (1936), The Higher Learning in America (1936) and Education for Freedom (1943).
3.DrPerkins, Dr John Carroll (EH's uncle) John Carroll Perkins (1862–1950), Minister of King’s Chapel, Boston: see Biographical Register.
3.Ezra PoundPound, Ezra (1885–1972), American poet and critic: see Biographical Register.