[1418 East 63d St., Seattle]
If the Air Mail makes any difference at all, my letters will certainly reach you in higglety-pigglety. Saturday’s note went off with the blue stamp, but this letter cannot, as I shall not have time to get to the Holborn Post Office this afternoon. ItWilson, R. S.;a2 should have been written and posted this morning, but for an unexpected visit from the Scotch Minister of Ecclefechan, who has written a book on the celebrated heretic Marcion.1
Your letter of August 5th arrived this morning, with a considerable American mail. It is odd that you should in this letter say that ‘in rereading my letters to you, few would convey any flashes of brilliance, or charm of spirit’ – in view of what I said to the contrary in my letter of Saturday. As for your and my epistolary styles – well, we shall see, when I get to Harvard, and have time, I hope, to sit down at the end of the evening when my thoughts flow the most freely, and I hope do not have to write letters broken up by interviews and telephone calls (or will they be?) whether I can write to you more grammatically. ButHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3excites TSE too much to write smoothly;d2 I don’t think, with all due respect, that I shall ever be able to take very great pains over style in writing to you! for I am always (however dull the contents of my letter may be) in a kind of excitement which precludes very polished writing.
Shalltravels, trips and plansTSE's 1932–3 year in America;a7TSE's itinerary;a8 I give you my dates once more? I sail Tourist Third on the AUSONIA from Southampton to Montreal sailing the 17th September, and arrive at Montreal on the 25th or 26th. I shall certainly ask for & expect a birthday letter on arrival. AndSheffield, Ada Eliot (TSE's sister)to host TSE on Boston return;a4 I shall spend a night or two with my sister (Mrs. Sheffield, 31 Madison Street; I heard from her this morning). Yes, I am glad to say I have a cabin to myself.
Now I have very little time left as I have been interrupted about two manuscripts. AboutScripps College, ClaremontEH reassured about feeling 'inadequate';b8 Scripps, I believe that you will feel very much happier once you have got to work there, and will no longer have time to worry about your ‘inadequacy’ (IHarvard Universitymakes TSE feel inadequate;a4 feel inadequate to Harvard, indeed); andAmericaBoston, Massachusetts;d1Scripps as EH's release from;a9 the break with your Boston life will be completed. And it was not a very happy two years in Boston, I think. I believe and hope that in the activity and routine of college work, and the discovery of the more intelligent and hopeful girls, you will come to feel less lonely than in the perhaps more varied, but also more scrappy life of Boston. Not that I should like to think of your having to spend more than two or three years in California.
IHale, Emilyhealth, physical and mental;w6TSE compares 'nightmares' with;a2 think that it is quite natural to have ‘nightmares’ more acutely for a time in a period of leisure and distraction from the life out of which they arose: I may well have some form of them on my voyage. Perhaps they are more troublesome to you, now, than to me, in one respect: that I have suffered in this way for a great many years – I might virtually say, all my mature life. I suppose that to the end of my days, or until old age abates my feelings and cravings, I shall suffer. But the perpetual struggle to see the natural in relation to the supernatural, rather than merely in relation to the unnatural situation which one can hardly help resenting, is very valuable, indeed all that I can yet see. IChristianityvirtues heavenly and capital;e1TSE lacks vocation for;b1 fear that I have no ‘vocation’ towards the monastic and celibate life; yet even if I had, I should still suffer, in another way, from my circumstances. Please do not tell me ever any more about yourself than at the moment comes easily to you to tell – I would not have you confide anything which [you] would regret confiding to me – but do believe, my dear saint, that you will always find comprehension and sympathy – as well as prayers, the admiration and the adoration of your
1.Revd Robert Smith Wilson, The Manse, Ecclefechan, Lockerbie, Scotland; author of Marcion: A study of a second-century heretic (J. Clarke & Co., 1933).
2.AdaSheffield, Ada Eliot (TSE's sister) Eliot Sheffield (1869–1943), eldest of the seven Eliot children; author of The Social Case History: Its Construction and Content (1920) and Social Insight in Case Situations (1937): see Biographical Register.