[41 Brimmer St., Boston]
Your very informative long letter of the 8th arrived yesterday, in the correct ten days. Also the second cutting about yourself: pleaseHale, Emilyas actor;v8in The Yellow Jacket;b1 remember that it gives me great delight to get any cuttings commendatory of you and your work; it gives me more pride than if I had done it myself ! And I am very happy to know that your part in The Yellow Jacket was a success; and that you were not yellow, after all, but natural colour. AndScripps College, Claremontsounds picturesque;b2 how romantically exotic Scripps College and its environment looks! I suppose the young women who inhabit it are not quite so picturesque as their setting. – I am still waiting to learn where Scripps College is. YouHall, Mary;a1 mention several friends whom I have never heard of before – I thought that Miss Mary Hall who is sharing the house with you was Miss Ware’s secretary.1 IPerkinses, the;a5 shall hope to see the Perkins’s in Boston, but some time before I come you must tell me just how much they know about me.
SoHighgate SchoolTSE's recollections of;a1 now you will be busier than ever, and phonetics is a horrid subject which I could never master; butWycombe Grammar SchoolTSE recalls his time at;a1 I was perfectly incompetent as a teacher anyway.2 What is the Elizabethan programme, I wonder. I wish that I could have seen The Yellow Jacket.
ItChristianityUnitarianism;d9the Eliots' as against EH's;a1 is interesting to hear of your church establishing a Retreat House. Much that you say about King’s Chapel is difficult for me to fit in with the Unitarian forms in which I was brought up, but which perhaps was [sic] singularly arid; but perhaps there are new developments too. Though ‘ministers and their families’ sounds odd; do they all go together, and are they allowed to talk to each other, I wonder. Perhaps you can go there yourself and tell me about it.
YesBennett, Dilysthen writes to;a4, I did answer Dilys Bennett; I hope she will be sufficiently encouraged.3
Your letter suggests many things to say. IHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3EH would withhold from the Bodleian bequest;b7 thoughtBodleian Library, Oxfordintended repository for EH's letters;a1 that I made the Bodleian matter quite clear at the time; but I expect that you have destroyed that letter. I shall try to explain again, and will go into the matter more fully at the beginning of the week. The terms were that my papers were to remain unopened for sixty years after my death. But if you are kept out of them there will be little to throw any new light whatever; and on that stipulation – which you did not make at the time, because I did ask your permission first, and I can prove that – I should never have bothered to make the arrangement at all! ThereHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3from which TSE tries to dissuade her;b8 will be so much in existence to give a very false impression of me, and so few clues to the truth. Can I make clear to you my feeling, I wonder. IHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3TSE exalts as authoritative;a2 admit that it is egotistic and perhaps selfish; but is it not natural, when one has had to live in a mask all one’s life, to be able to hope that some day people can know the truth, if they want it. I have again and again seen the impression I have made, and have longed to be able to cry ‘no you are all wrong about me, it isn’t like that at all;4 the truth is perfectly simple and intelligible, and here it is in a few words’. I shall revert to this. But meanwhile be assured that however painful to myself, the decision shall be in your hands. But I hope meanwhile to persuade you to my view.
1.MaryHall, Mary Hall: cousin of Mary Lee Ware. (Possibly wife of Ware’s cousin Edward Brooks Hall.)
2.In 1915 TSE spent a term teaching at Wycombe Grammar School, High Wycombe, for a salary of £140 a year with free suppers: he taught French, mathematics, history, drawing and swimming. He then took a better post (£160 a year with dinner and tea) at Highgate Junior School, where the headmaster kept a place on the staff for young men of literary aspirations who needed to earn extra money while trying to make their way. TSE taught French, Latin, lower mathematics, drawing, swimming, geography, history and baseball. John Betjeman, a pupil aged ten, presented ‘the American master’ – ‘that dear good man’ – with a sheaf of poems headed ‘The Best of Betjeman’, but TSE never revealed his opinion of Betjeman’s work, only laughing when pressed by the author at intervals during their lifelong friendship.
3.See letter to Dilys Bennett, 3 Feb. 1932 (Letters 6, 76).
4.Cf. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1920), 109–10:
‘That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.’
1.DilysBennett, Dilys Bennett (1906–60), poet and author. Born in Wales, she married in 1936 Alexander Laing, a Dartmouth College academic, and became an American citizen. Works include Another England (New York, 1941) and The Collected Poems of Dilys Laing (Cleveland, 1967).
1.MaryHall, Mary Hall: cousin of Mary Lee Ware. (Possibly wife of Ware’s cousin Edward Brooks Hall.)