[41 Brimmer St.; forwardedHale, Emilyholidays in Castine;b3 to c/o RuthAmericaCastine, Maine;d6EH holidays in;a1 Lyons, Castine, Maine]
This is another busy week. WednesdayMirsky, Dmitri S.his farewell lunch;a5 was my farewell lunch with Prince Mirsky before he departs forever to Moscow; atCulpin, Rexi;a4 the end of the afternoon IEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood);b7 picked up V. at Rexi Culpin’s who has her blonde Hungarian friend staying with her who is pleasant but talks the worst French I ever heard; inNoyes, Penelope Barker;b4 the evening we had expected Penelope after dinner, who didn’t come; butGertler, Markdines chez Eliot;a1 MarkEliots, the T. S.host Mark Gertler and wife;e1 Gertler (the painter)1 whom we had not seen for years came with his wife whom we had never met; ThursdayGascoyne-Cecil, Mary Alice, Lady Hartingtonat OM's tea;a1 the usual tea at the Morrell’s, had to talk to Lady Hartington,2 amiable but dull like most of one’s second cousins, andBudberg, Maria (Moura);a1 an exotic Russian woman whom I did not like, butWells, Herbert George ('H. G.')TSE meets ex-mistress of;a1 whoGorky, Maxim;a1 seems to exist on the reputation of having been the mistress of Gorki and H. G. Wells in succession;3 tonightFaber and Faber (F&F)hosts summer garden-party;a9 Faber’s big garden party of the year, which I must attend because all of our successful authors are invited. It looks, of course, like rain. Afterfinances (TSE's)TSE's Income Tax;a1 that I hope for a quiet weekend in which to make out my U.S.A. Income Tax return which is overdue. Next week is just a round of committees and teaparties: V. hasEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)hosts various writers to tea;b8 a tea on Monday – DavidCecil, Lord Davidinvited to tea by VHE;a2 Cecil, MrsBowen, Elizabeth (Mrs Cameron)at the Eliots' tea;a1. Cameron,4 JamesStephens, JamesVHE invites to tea;a5 Stephens, and I think one or two of the Old Vic troupe; Board meeting on Tuesday; Book Committee followedEnglish Church UnionLiterature Committee;a1 by an E.C.U5 Literature Committee on Thursday; lunchHodgson, Ralph;a9 with Hodgson on Tuesday at Ridgway’s in Piccadilly; FridayUnderhill, Evelyn;a6 IShakespear, Oliviatakes tea with TSE;a1 fear another teaparty with Evelyn Underhill (Mrs. Stuart Moore) and Mrs. Shakespear (Ezra Pound’s mother-in-law).6 AndCriterion, The1932 contributors' gathering;a6 the following Tuesday (July 5th) the last Criterion reception of the year.
It is very difficult to evade engagements except by leaving town; and it is difficult to leave town in such a way as to be at all restful. You will also understand that as I am leaving in September, it is all the more difficult to insist upon getting away by myself meanwhile; I even feel a certain compunction about it. I mean to go to a doctor next week and get a general diagnosis of my health. IAmericaits horrors;c2climate;a2 dare say that one of the risks, on first getting to America, is that the climate is so much more stimulating than this (andEnglandthe English weather;c3preferred to America's;a3 I am now so adapted to the English climate that I find a day of very bright sunshine rather trying) that [I] may feel at first an illusory vitality. Ialcoholas aid to sleep;a6 shall also have to learn again the habit of natural sleep, and do without the bottles of beer which I must take as sedatives at night under my usual conditions. But I have come perfectly to loathe the taste of Bass and Guiness [sc. Guinness], and I don’t think it agrees with my stomach: Iappearance (TSE's)figure;b8;a2 hope in America to get rid of some of my superfluous middleaged fat, which is in all the wrong places.
But there are plenty of other folk who have as much to worry about as I. IJoyce, Jameswrites to TSE about daughter;b3 had aJoyce, Luciahas nervous breakdown;a2 letter from Joyce yesterday in which he tells me that his daughter has had a nervous breakdown following a love affair; that she has had to be taken to an expensive French sanatorium; and that in consequence he is too poor to go to his oculist in Zurich.7 I fear that the result will be that his eyesight will fail again; and he may never get that book finished.
Itravels, trips and plansEH's 1932 summer holidays;a3;a2 shall be relieved to hear that you have finally got off to the Country or the seaside, for a much needed rest. I shall expect letters to take longer, of course; and am preparing myself already not to expect to hear from you on Monday. But I do hope that when the next letter comes it will tell me the exact day when you leave for the West.
IScripps College, Claremont;b3 am not at all sure that I want you to hear me lecture, anywhere! I should be extremely flustered: I am afraid that I cannot satisfy your high standards of public oratory. But if I come to Scripps I suppose I must reconcile myself to having you in the audience, or even on the platform. But I hope you will not have to introduce me!
And the Lady of the Lake? ton dévoué
1.MarkGertler, Mark – orig. Marks – Gertler (1891–1939), British artist of Polish Jewish descent, studied at the Slade School of Art (where contemporaries included Paul Nash, C. R. W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer and Isaac Rosenberg); was supported variously by Ottoline Morrell, Edward Marsh and Gilbert Canaan, and was for many years infatuated with Dora Carrington; suffered from tuberculosis for much of his adult life. See Sarah MacDougall, Mark Gertler (2002), David Boyd Hancock, A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (2009).
2.MaryGascoyne-Cecil, Mary Alice, Lady Hartington Alice Gascoyne-Cecil, who married in 1917 Edward Cavendish, Lord Hartington (later 10th Duke of Devonshire).
3.MariaBudberg, Maria (Moura) (Moura) Budberg (ca. 1891–1974), daughter of a Russian nobleman and diplomat, is believed to have been a double agent for OGPU and the British Intelligence Service – becoming known as the ‘Mata Hari’ of Russia. Married in 1911 to Count Johann von Benckendorff (who was killed in 1918), she was secretary and common-law wife to Maxim Gorky, 1922–33. From 1920, and again from 1933 until his death, she was mistress of H. G. Wells (she declined to marry him). Finally she was married, briefly, to Baron Nikolai von Budberg-Bönningshausen. She was in addition a writer, and worked on the scripts for films including The Sea Gull, directed by Sidney Lumet (1968), and Three Sisters, dir. Laurence Olivier (1970). See further Nina Berberova, Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg (New York, 2005).
4.ElizabethBowen, Elizabeth (Mrs Cameron) Bowen (1899–1973) – Mrs Alan Cameron – Irish-born novelist; author of The Last September (1929), The Death of the Heart (1938), The Heat of the Day (1949). See Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (1977); Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (1981). TSE to Desmond Hawkins, 3 Feb. 1937: ‘She has a very definite place, and a pretty high one, amongst novelists of her kind.’
5.English Church Union.
6.OliviaShakespear, Olivia Shakespear (1863–1938), novelist and playwright; mother of Dorothy Pound, made an unhappy marriage in 1885 with Henry Hope Shakespear (1849–1923), a solicitor. She published novels including Love on a Mortal Lease (1894) and The Devotees (1904). Through a cousin, the poet Lionel Johnson (1867–1902), she arranged a meeting with W. B. Yeats, which resulted in a brief affair and a lifetime’s friendship. Yeats wrote at least two poems for her, and she was the ‘Diana Vernon’ of his Memoirs (ed. Denis Donoghue, 1972). See Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909–1914, ed. Omar S. Pound and A. Walton Litz (1984), 356–7.
7.JoyceJoyce, Jameswrites to TSE about daughter;b3 wrote from 2 Avenue S. Philibert, Passy, Paris, 20 June 1932: ‘I have not been able to do a stroke of work for the past two months. My daughter had a serious nervous breakdown and is in a maison de repos. I do not know when I can resume work – certainly not till some semi-solution of her case is arrived at. She has an extreme form of abulia, caused, it is thought, by an unknown affection coupled with a proposal of marriage on the part of another person. She is quite lucid but dejected and undecided […] The repose, with a young nurse-companion and two doctors and a specialist (neurologist) costs about £18 a week and it is to be followed by a journey somewhere. I am hanging on to this furnished flat, unable to take an empty one and get it up as nobody seems to know what is going to happen to money everywhere. […] I cannot go to Zurich, of course’ (published in part in Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert (F&F, 1957), 320.
4.ElizabethBowen, Elizabeth (Mrs Cameron) Bowen (1899–1973) – Mrs Alan Cameron – Irish-born novelist; author of The Last September (1929), The Death of the Heart (1938), The Heat of the Day (1949). See Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (1977); Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (1981). TSE to Desmond Hawkins, 3 Feb. 1937: ‘She has a very definite place, and a pretty high one, amongst novelists of her kind.’
3.MariaBudberg, Maria (Moura) (Moura) Budberg (ca. 1891–1974), daughter of a Russian nobleman and diplomat, is believed to have been a double agent for OGPU and the British Intelligence Service – becoming known as the ‘Mata Hari’ of Russia. Married in 1911 to Count Johann von Benckendorff (who was killed in 1918), she was secretary and common-law wife to Maxim Gorky, 1922–33. From 1920, and again from 1933 until his death, she was mistress of H. G. Wells (she declined to marry him). Finally she was married, briefly, to Baron Nikolai von Budberg-Bönningshausen. She was in addition a writer, and worked on the scripts for films including The Sea Gull, directed by Sidney Lumet (1968), and Three Sisters, dir. Laurence Olivier (1970). See further Nina Berberova, Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg (New York, 2005).
5.LordCecil, Lord David David Cecil (1902–86), historian, critic, biographer; Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, 1924–30; Fellow of New College, Oxford, 1939–69; Professor of English, Oxford, 1948–70; author of The Stricken Deer (1929), Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (1934), Jane Austen (1936) and studies of other writers including Hardy, Shakespeare, Scott.
3.RexiCulpin, Rexi Culpin, wife of Jack Culpin (surviving son of TSE’s old friend Jan Culpin).
2.MaryGascoyne-Cecil, Mary Alice, Lady Hartington Alice Gascoyne-Cecil, who married in 1917 Edward Cavendish, Lord Hartington (later 10th Duke of Devonshire).
1.MarkGertler, Mark – orig. Marks – Gertler (1891–1939), British artist of Polish Jewish descent, studied at the Slade School of Art (where contemporaries included Paul Nash, C. R. W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer and Isaac Rosenberg); was supported variously by Ottoline Morrell, Edward Marsh and Gilbert Canaan, and was for many years infatuated with Dora Carrington; suffered from tuberculosis for much of his adult life. See Sarah MacDougall, Mark Gertler (2002), David Boyd Hancock, A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (2009).
4.RalphHodgson, Ralph Hodgson (1871–1962), Yorkshire-born poet; fond friend of TSE: 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).
2.LuciaJoyce, Lucia Joyce (1907–82), daughter of James Joyce – trained as a dancer, talented as an illustrator – was deemed to suffer from schizophrenia and in consequence spent much of her life incarcerated in asylums. See Carol Loeb Schloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003).
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).
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.
6.OliviaShakespear, Olivia Shakespear (1863–1938), novelist and playwright; mother of Dorothy Pound, made an unhappy marriage in 1885 with Henry Hope Shakespear (1849–1923), a solicitor. She published novels including Love on a Mortal Lease (1894) and The Devotees (1904). Through a cousin, the poet Lionel Johnson (1867–1902), she arranged a meeting with W. B. Yeats, which resulted in a brief affair and a lifetime’s friendship. Yeats wrote at least two poems for her, and she was the ‘Diana Vernon’ of his Memoirs (ed. Denis Donoghue, 1972). See Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909–1914, ed. Omar S. Pound and A. Walton Litz (1984), 356–7.
7.JamesStephens, James Stephens (?1882–1950), Irish novelist and poet; close friend of OM.