[41 Brimmer St., Boston]
IWu Mi;a2 have just returned from lunching with a Chinese friend of Ivor Richards, whose name is Mr. Wu! He is ever so polite, but frightened me on our first meeting by saying ‘I want to hear you talk. Will you please talk as long as you can? That is why I come.’ I was so terrified by this that I asked him to lunch to-day in order to get rid of him; and at lunch he was less frightening. Talk of RussellRussell, Bertrand;a4, DeweyDewey, John;a1,1 BabbittBabbitt, Irving;a12 and China of to-day.
First of all, was it Miss Ware’s birthday or yours?3 I do not know what day your birthday is, and I think I have a right to know, so will you tell me please. It is a satisfaction to me to think that I shall always be three years older than you.
I believe that I must have sat in the room you describe: you know once or twice, years and years ago, Kirk Ware took me to that house to dinner with MissWare, Mary Leein TSE's recollection;a1 Ware? She would not remember me. Was there not a room overlooking the river? But why a black dress, and a cap – is that the fashion now? IHale, Emilyappearance and characteristics;v7her shapely neck;a1 should like the earrings, if it means that your hair is drawn back so as to show your ears, which you ought to do; I am not sure whether I approve of the hair down on the neck because that conceals the form of your neck. You had a very pretty smart dress and hat when I saw you, but under the hat I could not see how your hair was done. But I like to think of you having nice things, and attending to your dress and coiffure. IHale, Emilyappearance and characteristics;v7TSE's memory for certain of her old dresses;a2 could describe several dresses that you have forgotten.
As to the way of writing: you are to know first, that each letter I have had from you has been exactly what I wanted and needed, and that you have only to write as comes into your head in order to give me happiness. And also, I have had the same anxieties about how I wrote to you; and if we both have felt the same worry, is it not rather silly to worry at all? Only, if I ever offend you even the tiniest bit, you are to say so; for you cannot realise how very humble I feel towards you. After your last letter, IHale, EmilyTSE's love for;x2and TSE's desire to be EH's spiritual possession;a4 became more conscious of a growing feeling in myself, humble and yet very proud, of simply belonging to you; a kind of feeling which does not come suddenly but which grows with time, and which somehow helps to balance the seesaw of exaltation and depression; and a feeling which helps to make the situation more natural and acceptable. I am happy too to think that we have something between us which can and will grow and develop, a future with good things unimagined.
Your lovely letter came on Saturday. I have taken to coming in on Saturdays, and I am always particularly eager to find a letter from you on that day of the week, when there is no one about, and I can have my delight alone. But now I have just moved into a nice little room all to myself. FrankMorley, Frank VigorTSE on sharing an office with;a1 Morley4 is a very good fellow (I like him much better than his brother Christopher)5 but it is tiresome to have to share a room, and have no privacy; andHill, Laura Maude (TSE's secretary);a1 the secretaries Miss Hill6 and Miss Wilberforce7 running about. On Friday morning I was nearly mad: when I arrived the flamboyant Mr. Alfred A. KnopfKnopf, Alfred Abrahamwastes TSE's morning;a1 8 of New York (Inc.) with brilliant tie and stickpin was filling the whole room talking to Morley, and then he collared me, and wasted most of the morning jawing about nothing, and when he left GeneralHamilton, General Sir Ianvisits F&F;a1 Sir Ian Hamilton, all mustachios, arrived;9 so my morning was wasted. NowFaber and Faber (F&F)TSE's office in;a1 I have a small room high up overlooking Woburn Square and Gordon Square at the end, and I need not see secretaries or visitors unless I want to; thereBlake, GeorgeTSE's office neighbour;a1 is only George Blake10 in the next room. My room is in cream yellow with bookcases, (for review books etc.) two chairs and a desk and an armchair, a green carpet (to come) a grate and an electric stove, very high looking over Woburn Square.
If you had many days like the one you described I should begin to worry about another nervous breakdown. It is worse than politics. ButHale, Emilyas teacher;w1as a career;a2 I was going to ask you, in any case, about the practical aspect of lecturing. Whether it is a profession with a future? I mean can one ‘build a practice’ and eventually make a decent living out of it? if so it is justified. Is it affected by the present hard times? TeachingHighgate SchoolTSE's recollections of;a1 is very hard work – I was a failure at it myself, but that was when I first tried to make a living here, and I was nervously completely shattered anyway – but there is a satisfaction in living through the young; I give more time to trying to help young men than perhaps I should if circumstances gave me more fulfilment otherwise. I should dread your taking any position which took you still further away by mail than you are; but that is petty selfishness. Is your small legacy sagely invested, my dear? I have a tiny property myself, but one which is essential for my scraping along at all, for I have considerable expenses, and much of my work is unremunerative, which is in charge of the Old Colony Trust Co. I rage a little bit at your having these worries, when I should be so happy if I could take all your financial anxieties upon myself.
Oh'Thoughts After Lambeth';a3, I havent got the pamphlet off my shoulders yet! that was the first draft: since then I have been in communication with various authorities viz.: the Archbishop of York, the Bp. of Chichester, the DeanNorris, William Foxley, Dean of Westminster (formerly of York)consulted on 'Thoughts After Lambeth';a1 of Westminster,11 PrebendaryHarris, Revd Charlesconsulted on 'Thoughts After Lambeth';a1 Harris,12 CanonUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wellsconsulted on 'Thoughts After Lambeth';a2 Underhill, Kenneth IngramIngram, Kennethconsulted on 'Thoughts After Lambeth';a1;13 and the more I think the more difficult it is to finish. And when that is done (this week I hope) I have several arrears to take up.
As for potions, ma chère saint, j’en sais plus long que toi.14 YouWagner, RichardTristan und Isolde;a3TSE remembers attending with EH;a1 do not remember taking me to Tristan,15 with your parents, MargaretThorp, Margaret (née Farrand)accompanied TSE and EH to Tristan;a1 Farrand16 and Durant who married Barbara Layton.17 But I do.18
I shall write every Monday or Tuesday, unless some slight illness (I am almost never ill) should prevent. WHERE is my photograph? I enclose a few more scraps of correspondence, to give another glimpse of my daily life. TheWoolf, Virginiacharacteristic letter from;a2 one from Virginia Woolf is characteristic of her slightly ironic highflown style in writing to her friends.19 I will tell you more about her, and the Stephens and Stracheys, later. None of such letters need be returned; keep or destroy as you like.
IHale, Emilywritings;x4an article on 'Weimar';a1 am writing to The Spectator20
1.JohnDewey, John Dewey (1859–1952), philosopher, psychologist, progressive educationalist, pragmatist. His works include Psychology (1887); The School and Society (1889); Moral Principles in Education (1909); Experience and Education (1938). See The Essential Dewey , vols 1 & 2, ed. Larry Hickman and Thomas Alexander (Indiana University Press, 1998).
2.IrvingBabbitt, Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), American academic and literary and cultural critic; Harvard University Professor of French Literature (TSE had taken his course on literary criticism in France); antagonist of Rousseau and romanticism; promulgator (with Paul Elmer More) of ‘New Humanism’. His publications include Literature and the American College (1908); Rousseau and Romanticism (1919); Democracy and Leadership (1924). See TSE, ‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt’ (1928), in Selected Essays (1950); ‘XIII by T. S. Eliot’, in Irving Babbitt: Man and Teacher, ed. F. Manchester and Odell Shepard (1941): CProse 6, 186–9.
3.MaryWare, Mary Lee Lee Ware (1858–1937), independently wealthy Bostonian, friend and landlady of EH at 41 Brimmer Street: see Biographical Register.
4.FrankMorley, Frank Vigor Vigor Morley (1899–1980), American publisher and author; a founding editor of F&F, 1929–39: see Biographical Register.
5.ChristopherMorley, Christopher Morley (1890–1957), noted journalist, novelist, essayist, poet. Educated at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, and as a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, he made his name as a journalist with the New York Evening Post, and he was co-founder of and contributor to the Saturday Review of Literature. A passionate Sherlock Holmesian, he was to be co-founder in 1934 of ‘The Baker Street Irregulars’. Works include Kitty Foyle (novel, 1939).
Frank Morley to Christopher Morley, 22 Aug. 1932: ‘Eliot sails Sept 17 … Eliot hopes you can save him somewhat from the lop-eared intellectuals … keep him (E) from getting pawed at by sassiety & twill be a[n] international service.’ Frank Morley to Christopher Morley, 2 Jan. 1933: ‘Hope you can see Eliot en passant. He was very pleased by being accepted by an undergraduate Club at Harvard with the speech “We’re glad to have Tom Eliot with us, & what I want to say is, he’s just a good old Fart like the rest of us’ (Columbia).
6.LauraHill, Laura Maude (TSE's secretary) Maude Hill was TSE’s secretary, for a while, before the advent of Pamela Wilberforce.
7.PamelaWilberforce, Pamela Margaret (TSE's secretary) Margaret Wilberforce (1909–97), scion of the Wilberforce family (granddaughter of Samuel Wilberforce) and graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, was appointed ‘secretary-typist’ to the Chairman’s office on 1 July 1930, at a salary of £2.10.0 a week. She was required to learn typing and shorthand; she asked too for time to improve her German.
8.AlfredKnopf, Alfred Abraham A. Knopf (1892–1984), founder (with his wife Blanche) of the eponymous American publishing house.
9.GeneralHamilton, General Sir Ian Sir Ian Hamilton (1853–1947), distinguished army officer; sometimes unfairly blamed for the failure of the Gallipoli Campaign during WW1. F&F were to publish his memoir When I Was a Boy (1939).
10.GeorgeBlake, George Blake (1893–1961), novelist, journalist, publisher: see Biographical Register.
11.William Foxley Norris (1859–1937), Dean of Westminster from 1925.
12.RevdHarris, Revd Charles Charles Harris, DD (1865–1936), Prebendary of Hereford Cathedral from 1925; Vicar of South Leigh, Witney, Oxfordshire, 1929–34; Chairman of the Book Committee of the (English) Church Union since 1923; Assistant Editor of Literature and Worship, 1932. Works include Creeds or No Creeds? (1922); First Steps in the Philosophy of Religion (1927). TSE to Group Captain Paul J. Harris (son), 12 July 1961: ‘I was very happy to work with him many years ago on the Literature Committee of the Anglo-Catholic Congress. Your father was, incidentally, an extremely able and dynamic Secretary of the Committee and the publications reached a high level of importance and authority during his term of office.’
13.KennethIngram, Kenneth Ingram (1882–1965), author and barrister, founded and edited Green Quarterly (The Society of SS Peter & Paul, Westminster House, London) in 1924. He wrote too for the Anglo Catholic Chronicle. At a later date he was Vice-Chairman of the National Peace Council. His works include Why I Believe (1928) and Has the Church Failed? (1929).
14.ma chère saint, j’en sais plus long que toi: ‘my dear saint, I know more than you do.’
15.TSE’s allusion to the fateful love-potion that Isolde causes to be administered to Tristan – in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865), with the composer’s libretto derived from the romance of Gottfried von Strassburg – is, to say the least, painfully ironic in this context. The potion causes hero and heroine to fall avidly in love, but both are ultimately to be killed by it.
16.MargaretThorp, Margaret (née Farrand) Farrand (1891–1970), author and journalist – see Margaret Thorp in Biographical Register.
17.Not identified.
18.See Jewel Spears Brooker, ‘Eliot’s Ghost Story: Reflections on his Letters to Emily Hale’, Time Present: The Newsletter of the International T. S. Eliot Society, no. 101 (Summer 2020), 1, 10–11.
19.TSE wrote to Virginia Woolf on 20 Nov. 1932, and she replied on 15 Jan. 1933, mentioning inter alia: ‘Your letter told me all I can absorb of life at Harvard. The Cabots and the Sedgwicks and the Wolcotts and the soap. And the sponge shaped like a brick … [O]f course we go on reading MSS; and of course they are mostly about a man called Eliot, or in the manner of a man called Eliot – how I detest that man called Eliot! Eliot for breakfast, Eliot for dinner – thank God Eliot is at Harvard. But why? Come back soon; and write again, to your old humble servant Virginia.’ Woolf’s letter (Denison Library) is printed in full in M. J. Dunbar, ‘Virginia Woolf to T. S. Eliot: Two Letters’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 12 (Spring 1979), 2.
20.EH had evidently submitted an article to the Spectator, on the subject of ‘Weimar’.
The Spectator replied to TSE’s letter (which has not been traced), 26 Jan. 1931: ‘I imagine that the article to which you refer in your letter of January 22nd must be one which appears in our Post Book as having reached us on September 26th from Miss E. Hale, Ford’s Hotel, Manchester Street, W., and is marked as having been returned about the same date.
‘We can find no other trace of the article you mention.’
2.IrvingBabbitt, Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), American academic and literary and cultural critic; Harvard University Professor of French Literature (TSE had taken his course on literary criticism in France); antagonist of Rousseau and romanticism; promulgator (with Paul Elmer More) of ‘New Humanism’. His publications include Literature and the American College (1908); Rousseau and Romanticism (1919); Democracy and Leadership (1924). See TSE, ‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt’ (1928), in Selected Essays (1950); ‘XIII by T. S. Eliot’, in Irving Babbitt: Man and Teacher, ed. F. Manchester and Odell Shepard (1941): CProse 6, 186–9.
10.GeorgeBlake, George Blake (1893–1961), novelist, journalist, publisher: see Biographical Register.
1.JohnDewey, John Dewey (1859–1952), philosopher, psychologist, progressive educationalist, pragmatist. His works include Psychology (1887); The School and Society (1889); Moral Principles in Education (1909); Experience and Education (1938). See The Essential Dewey , vols 1 & 2, ed. Larry Hickman and Thomas Alexander (Indiana University Press, 1998).
9.GeneralHamilton, General Sir Ian Sir Ian Hamilton (1853–1947), distinguished army officer; sometimes unfairly blamed for the failure of the Gallipoli Campaign during WW1. F&F were to publish his memoir When I Was a Boy (1939).
12.RevdHarris, Revd Charles Charles Harris, DD (1865–1936), Prebendary of Hereford Cathedral from 1925; Vicar of South Leigh, Witney, Oxfordshire, 1929–34; Chairman of the Book Committee of the (English) Church Union since 1923; Assistant Editor of Literature and Worship, 1932. Works include Creeds or No Creeds? (1922); First Steps in the Philosophy of Religion (1927). TSE to Group Captain Paul J. Harris (son), 12 July 1961: ‘I was very happy to work with him many years ago on the Literature Committee of the Anglo-Catholic Congress. Your father was, incidentally, an extremely able and dynamic Secretary of the Committee and the publications reached a high level of importance and authority during his term of office.’
6.LauraHill, Laura Maude (TSE's secretary) Maude Hill was TSE’s secretary, for a while, before the advent of Pamela Wilberforce.
13.KennethIngram, Kenneth Ingram (1882–1965), author and barrister, founded and edited Green Quarterly (The Society of SS Peter & Paul, Westminster House, London) in 1924. He wrote too for the Anglo Catholic Chronicle. At a later date he was Vice-Chairman of the National Peace Council. His works include Why I Believe (1928) and Has the Church Failed? (1929).
8.AlfredKnopf, Alfred Abraham A. Knopf (1892–1984), founder (with his wife Blanche) of the eponymous American publishing house.
5.ChristopherMorley, Christopher Morley (1890–1957), noted journalist, novelist, essayist, poet. Educated at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, and as a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, he made his name as a journalist with the New York Evening Post, and he was co-founder of and contributor to the Saturday Review of Literature. A passionate Sherlock Holmesian, he was to be co-founder in 1934 of ‘The Baker Street Irregulars’. Works include Kitty Foyle (novel, 1939).
4.FrankMorley, Frank Vigor Vigor Morley (1899–1980), American publisher and author; a founding editor of F&F, 1929–39: see Biographical Register.
16.MargaretThorp, Margaret (née Farrand) Farrand (1891–1970), author and journalist – see Margaret Thorp in Biographical Register.
2.Revd Francis UnderhillUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wells, DD (1878–1943), TSE’s spiritual counsellor: see Biographical Register.
3.MaryWare, Mary Lee Lee Ware (1858–1937), independently wealthy Bostonian, friend and landlady of EH at 41 Brimmer Street: see Biographical Register.
7.PamelaWilberforce, Pamela Margaret (TSE's secretary) Margaret Wilberforce (1909–97), scion of the Wilberforce family (granddaughter of Samuel Wilberforce) and graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, was appointed ‘secretary-typist’ to the Chairman’s office on 1 July 1930, at a salary of £2.10.0 a week. She was required to learn typing and shorthand; she asked too for time to improve her German.
1.VirginiaWoolf, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), novelist, essayist and critic: see Biographical Register.
2.WuWu Mi Mi (1894–1978), Professor of Comparative Literature, Tsinghua University. I. A. Richards had given him this introduction. ‘He is young, naïve, simple as a Huron, very scholarly in the old style, the leader of the movement against a vernacular literary Chinese & in favour of the old classic language. He also lectures on Romantic Poetry! at Tsing Hua University. (Heaven knows what he says about it!) Also editor of what comes nearest to a Literary Supplement for Northern China. And his name is Mr. Wu. (Chinese Wu Mi) I’m sure he could do you something interesting on the literary problem (or tangle) of modern China – where they have quite as difficult a job on as the West had in passing from Latin to vernaculars as literary languages. He is one of the few youngish Chinese who does know Old Style Chinese well & is esteemed as a writer of it.’