[41 Brimmer St., Boston]
I think I will start a letter this morning, to be sure of writing it at all: I have half an hour before anyone is to come to see me, but I may be interrupted by other things. TheThorps, the;b6 ThorpsEliots, the T. S.;c9 are coming to dinner tomorrow night, I believe. V. hasNoyes, Penelope Barker;a6 had a letter from Penelope toNoyes, James Atkins;a1 say that she and her father would arrive in London; I wonder if you knew that, or if you often see Penelope or not. I was rather surprised, as I thought that after missing one year Mr. Noyes would feel too infirm to resume his annual visits. I shall be glad to see them. She is very good to him, I imagine; of course it is easier to be good when you have plenty of money and can spend your life where you choose; but I think that these visits to England are chiefly to keep Mr. Noyes amused.
TheSadler's Wells TheatreTwelfth Night at;a1 performance of Twelfth Night was at Sadlers’ [sic] Wells, an old theatre or rather a new one on the old site, in Clerkenwell back of the City. IOld Vic, Therelationship to Sadler's Wells;a1 suppose you have heard of the Old Vic, and possibly have been there. The two theatres are under the same management, and alternate programmes: drama one week (mostly Shakespeare) and opera the next; the same companies for both. RecentlySadler's Wells TheatreThe Friends of Sadler's Wells;b3how TSE became involved with;a1 Sadlers’ Wells was in danger of having to close down for lack of support; the aim being to give repertory of Shakespeare etc. at the lowest prices; andMorrell, Philipat Friends of Sadler's Wells;a2 Philip Morrell interested himself and others, gotSmith, William Henry, 3rd Lord Hambleden;a1 hold of some rich folk like Lord Hambleden,1 and the prospects are better. He has started something called The Friends of Sadlers’ Wells, who are to issue an appeal, and asked me to serve, or at least give my name for the committee. Which I was very glad to do. Therefore they wanted us to see the theatre and a performance there. It was, as I said, extremely well done; and it was a happy afternoon, as the Morrells were so delighted with our enthusiasm. ParticularlySpeaight, Robertsingled out as Malvolio;a1 good was the Malvolio of a young actor named Speight [sc. Speaight2]: a very interested and tragic Malvolio. TheShakespeare, WilliamTwelfth Night;d3 play is so commonly produced as a sort of frisking Christmas pantomime, that it was all the more interesting to see a performance which brought out all the sombreness and the acid satire which is just as much there as the lyrical beauty and the really amazingly amusing comedy. (How wonderful some of Sir Toby’s phrases are). But it convinced me that a good repertory company is the best kind of company: these people are used to playing together, and one feels that unity immediately: no jealous desire to make the most of a part, to the point of upsetting the balance, but a real desire to make the most of the play as a whole. And often the person who has an important rôle in one play will have to take a very small one in another. InSadler's Wells TheatreHamlet at;a2 May they are doing a run of Hamlet, with two of their best men alternating in the title part: an interesting experiment, and I should like to see both. ThisNational Theatre, Thequestioned in principle;a1 kind of repertory theatre seems to me far more hopeful than a state-endowed ‘National Theatre’ would be. But I suppose that there are a number of such repertory companies in America.
IAmericaand the Great Depression;a5 should like to know whether you see very obvious evidence of the destitution and disorganisation of everything, in Boston, that the papers sometimes talk of as general in America. IWilson, Edmund 'Bunny'American Jitters: A Year of the Slump;a6 have just been glancing at a new book by Edmund Wilson which gives appalling pictures of the situation in various places; andAmericaChicago, Illinois;d8reportedly bankrupt;a2 we keep hearing of the bankruptcy of Chicago and other cities.3
FRIDAY:–
I do not know whether the pleasure is greater, in receiving finally a belated expected letter, or in receiving a wholly unexpected one. The latter to-day, in getting your letter of the 13th per ‘Mauretania’; (so you see that putting the steamship on does help sometimes: for myself, I know that mails go out from England on Tuesdays and Fridays, and I try to get one off by each mail). It is always a glorious week in which I have two; and I have practiced myself to expect none the following week. AsHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3TSE's horror of sounding sermonic;c3 for this letter: to think that I should read you a ‘sermon’! my dear, I am not so presumptuous – on the other hand, I was anxious lest you overtax yourself with distractions; and you know that no one can preach against any particular sin better than the sinner. I am quite aware that there is little difference. I did not suppose that you had anything to ‘offer apology’ for; and you are the last person to ask for pity – but I hope you will surely allow me sometimes to commiserate with you. As for myself, I know that it is impossible, in my life as it is, to advance far or rapidly in spiritual progress; I can I hope diminish my faults and direct my stubborn impulses better; I'drugs'necessity;a2 try to keep in mind that I must not allow myself to become as habituated to this busy various life toujours à quatre chemins, as to become incapable of enduring, and taking the best advantage of, stillness and tranquillity if it ever comes. That, I think, is the most important: not to allow necessity to become a drug.
Ispringtroubles;a5 find myself that spring, with the first smells of vegetation and early flowers in gardens and parks and squares; andautumndisturbs;a2 autumn, with its new smells of decaying vegetation, the smoke of leaves, and so forth, are the two most troubling seasons. It is surely best to be quite honest with oneself about these feelings; otherwise how can one cope with them? I sometimes wonder what is the state of feeling of those people all of whose emotional needs have been satisfied – and rightly satisfied, I mean – in life: how different are they from mine? Do they live as acutely, or perhaps more so, or is it just different? DearChristianityspiritual progress and direction;d6TSE's sense of;a4 Emily, I often, at the darkest moments, wonder whether I have made any progress at all in life; whether, with all these struggles, I have done any more than offer myself delusive substitutes, all the more a delusion because they are the shadow of the real thing beyond life which is that of which the satisfaction in life is itself only the incarnate representative. I have faith, however, that this is not quite so, because I know that what I have won is at least substantial to me in that now I cannot do without it, and that I could no longer ever accept anything else which involved giving that up. Is this frightfully obscure? I think that I understand what you are saying, or I feel that I do. What a difficult fight it all is: and there is an evil angel always in wait for my thoughts when I wake at five o’clock in the morning. But'drugs'activity ('being useful');a1 the other problems, that of becoming the slave of one’s Martha activities, is easier to put into words. Dear me, even and especially when I am writing so obscurely, I am talking more frankly than I have ever talked to anyone.
IMirsky, Dmitri S.TSE praises for article on TSE;a1 sendMirsky, Dmitri S.'The End of Bourgeois Poetry';a6 the leaves of an article by my friend Prince Mirsky (who has become a bolshevik convert) which is about the most brilliant thing I have read about myself, as a whole; allowing for his point of view, I think there is much insight in it.4
AsHale, Emilyas actor;v8cast as an octogenarian;b4 for E.’s play, and you as a lady of 85 (heavens!) and other things, till Tuesday.
1.WilliamSmith, William Henry, 3rd Lord Hambleden Henry Smith, 3rd Lord Hambleden (1903–48), Governing Director of W. H. Smith.
2.RobertSpeaight, Robert Speaight (1904–77), actor, producer and author, was to create the role of Becket in Murder in the Cathedral in 1935: see Biographical Register.
3.Edmund Wilson, American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (New York, 1932). For Wilson, see letter of 1 June 1933, below.
4.DmitriMirsky, Dmitri S. S. Mirsky (1890–1939), son of Prince P. D. Svyatopolk-Mirsky, army officer and civil servant. Educated at the University of St Petersburg, where he read Oriental Languages and Classics, he served as an army officer and was wounded during WW1 while fighting on the German front; later he served in the White Army. In 1921, he was appointed Lecturer in Russian at the School of Slavonic Studies, London (under Sir Bernard Pares), where his cultivation and command of languages brought him to the attention of a wide literary circle. His works include Contemporary Russian Literature (2 vols, 1926) and A History of Russian Literature from the Earliest Times to the Death of Dostoevsky, 1881 (1927). In 1931 he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (see ‘Why I became a Marxist’, Daily Worker, 30 June 1931), and in 1932 returned to Russia where he worked as a Soviet literary critic (and met Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Muggeridge). In 1937 he was arrested in the Stalinist purge, found guilty of ‘suspected espionage’, and sentenced to eight years of correctional labour: he died in a labour camp in Siberia. See G. S. Smith, D. S. Mirsky: A Russian–English Life, 1980–1939 (2000). Mirsky later did TSE this crude disservice: ‘The classicists led by T. S. Eliot, came forward as conscious supporters of the re-establishment of classical discipline, of a hierarchy, and as open enemies of democracy and liberalism – in short, as the organized vanguard of theoreticians of a capitalist class going fascist’ (The Intelligentsia of Great Britain, trans. Alec Brown [1935], 123).
D. S. MirskyMirsky, Dmitri S.which TSE responds to;a2n, ‘T. S. EliotMirsky, Dmitri S.'The End of Bourgeois Poetry';a6 et la fin de la poésie bourgeoise’, Échanges 5 (Oct./Dec. 1931), 44–58; an abridged translation appeared as ‘The End of Bourgeois Poetry’, New Masses, 13 Nov. 1934, 17–19. TSE would later write that Mirsky’s article ‘considerably exceeds the importance of the nominal subject’ (‘Commentary’, Criterion 11 [July 1932], 678). TSE glosses in his ‘Commentary’ the ‘modern theory of art’ to which Mirsky addressed himself: ‘It is (to put it crudely) that art is entirely a form of social expression, that it is determined in its forms by social and economic conditions, that it is wholly relative to these conditions and has no meaning beyond them. I cannot, of course, hold this view myself: it seems to me that this would reduce all art, once the society which produced it had passed away, to mere archæological remains or at best, object-lessons or obscure prophecies. And anyone who is committed to religious dogma must also be committed to a theory of art which insists upon the permanent as well as the changing …’
5.‘Deeply, with all my heart’.
4.DmitriMirsky, Dmitri S. S. Mirsky (1890–1939), son of Prince P. D. Svyatopolk-Mirsky, army officer and civil servant. Educated at the University of St Petersburg, where he read Oriental Languages and Classics, he served as an army officer and was wounded during WW1 while fighting on the German front; later he served in the White Army. In 1921, he was appointed Lecturer in Russian at the School of Slavonic Studies, London (under Sir Bernard Pares), where his cultivation and command of languages brought him to the attention of a wide literary circle. His works include Contemporary Russian Literature (2 vols, 1926) and A History of Russian Literature from the Earliest Times to the Death of Dostoevsky, 1881 (1927). In 1931 he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (see ‘Why I became a Marxist’, Daily Worker, 30 June 1931), and in 1932 returned to Russia where he worked as a Soviet literary critic (and met Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Muggeridge). In 1937 he was arrested in the Stalinist purge, found guilty of ‘suspected espionage’, and sentenced to eight years of correctional labour: he died in a labour camp in Siberia. See G. S. Smith, D. S. Mirsky: A Russian–English Life, 1980–1939 (2000). Mirsky later did TSE this crude disservice: ‘The classicists led by T. S. Eliot, came forward as conscious supporters of the re-establishment of classical discipline, of a hierarchy, and as open enemies of democracy and liberalism – in short, as the organized vanguard of theoreticians of a capitalist class going fascist’ (The Intelligentsia of Great Britain, trans. Alec Brown [1935], 123).
2.PhilipMorrell, Philip Morrell (1870–1943), a scion of the Morrell’s Brewing Company, was a Liberal MP, 1906–18.
6.JamesNoyes, James Atkins Atkins Noyes (1857–1945), mutual acquaintance in Cambridge, Mass., pursued library and genealogical work, 1895–1905; a great clubman. Father of EH’s friend Penelope Noyes.
12.PenelopeNoyes, Penelope Barker Barker Noyes (1891–1977), who was descended from settlers of the Plymouth Colony, lived in a historic colonial house (built in 1894 for her father James Atkins Noyes) at 1 Highland Street, Cambridge, MA. Unitarian. She was a close friend of EH.
1.WilliamSmith, William Henry, 3rd Lord Hambleden Henry Smith, 3rd Lord Hambleden (1903–48), Governing Director of W. H. Smith.
2.RobertSpeaight, Robert Speaight (1904–77), actor, producer and author, was to create the role of Becket in Murder in the Cathedral in 1935: see Biographical Register.
3.EdmundWilson, Edmund 'Bunny' ‘Bunny’ Wilson (1895–1972), influential literary critic, cultural commentator and memoirist, worked in the 1920s as managing editor of Vanity Fair; later as associate editor of The New Republic and as a prolific book reviewer. Works include Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931) – which includes a chapter on TSE – The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (1941); and the posthumous Letters on Literature and Politics 1912–1972 (ed. Elena Wilson, 1977).