[Grace Toll Hall, Scripps College, Claremont]
My dear Lady,
IHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3EH importuned to write more;d6 had hoped that I might receive a little note this morning. Whether it is that I have now flown to the extreme of underestimating the length of time necessary, or simply that with the distance reduced by 3000 miles, and daily trains instead of bi-weekly boats, I have become more greedy and importunate, I do not know. IPerkins, Edith (EH's aunt)asks TSE to dinner;a3 had a cordial letter from Mrs. Perkins this morning – I thought their address was 27 Marlborough Street, but she writes from the Hotel Ludlow. She asks me to dinner on Saturday or Monday: unfortunatelyWoods, Professor James Haughton;a2 I have to dine with Professor Woods on Saturday andWellesley Collegepost-reading supper with English Department of;a2 to sup with the English Department at Wellesley on Monday (after my reading) so I have written to offer myself for tea on Sunday, or for Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday of next week. I hope that one of those days will suit them.
Now that the preliminaries are over, and as soon as you can snatch the time, I hope you will sit down and write a long letter, telling me everything you can think of about the place you are in and the people (both faculty and pupils) you are with. DidHinkleys, theTSE repents of criticising;c5 I give you, then, the impression of being captious and over-critical of the people I had seen? and perhaps, especially, of the Hinkleys. I hope I am not wholly unappreciative. IHinkley, Barbara (TSE's first cousin)TSE on;a6 cannot imagine Barbara as being anything than what she is; and I think she is very good-hearted and affectionate. EleanorHinkley, Eleanor Holmes (TSE's first cousin)unworldly;b1 is not intellectual or profound, but she has naturally quick and refined perceptions, and a sense of humour, and I feel that if she had been brought up in a different way, and had learned as much of life as most people are forced to learn by her age, we might have been so much more intimate companions than we ever have been or can be. But I dare say she or anybody might make a similar remark about me! MerrimanMerriman, Roger Bigelowpraised;a2 is I believe a generous and kind man, and probably an excellent Head of the House; LowellLowell, Abbott LawrenceTSE despairs of liking;a2 I don’t think I could ever take to!1 AndEliot HouseTSE's compeers at;b2 the men at Eliot house are all very friendly and helpful; some of the younger dons, indeed, tend to be almost exasperatingly respectful. So far, I have not met a single undergraduate; that is my next initiation, when I start next week my Wednesday afternoon Informals. OneLowes, John LivingstonTSE takes to;a2 of the professors whom I especially like is Lowes. DidBabbitt, Irving'considerably mellowed';a3 I tell you that I thought Irving Babbitt considerably mellowed, and not so arrogant as he used to be? I used to feel that he did not care to have a younger man approach him except in the spirit of complete discipleship; he seemed to me now more modest and human.
I await your communications, my dearest, as and when you think fit to vouchsafe them, and meanwhile subscribe myself,
1.Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856–1943), President of Harvard University, 1909–33.
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.
6.BarbaraHinkley, Barbara (TSE's first cousin) Hinkley (1889–1958) was married in July 1928 to Roger Wolcott (1877–1965), an attorney; they lived at 125 Beacon Hill, Boston, and at 1733 Canton Avenue, Milton, Mass.
5.EleanorHinkley, Eleanor Holmes (TSE's first cousin) Holmes Hinkley (1891–1971), playwright; TSE’s first cousin; daughter of Susan Heywood Stearns – TSE’s maternal aunt – and Holmes Hinkley: see Biographical Register.
1.AbbottLowell, Abbott Lawrence Lawrence Lowell (1856–1943), educator and legal scholar; President of Harvard University, 1909–33.
1.JohnLowes, John Livingston Livingston Lowes (1867–1945), American scholar of English literature – author of the seminal study of Coleridge’s sources, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927) – taught for some years, 1909–18, at Washington University, St. Louis, where he was known to TSE’s family. He later taught at Harvard, 1918–39.
3.RogerMerriman, Roger Bigelow Bigelow Merriman (1876–1945), the first Master of Eliot House, Harvard, which was opened in 1931. Born in Boston and educated at Harvard (PhD, 1902), he studied also at Balliol College, Oxford, and in Berlin. He was appointed Professor of History at Harvard in 1918. His writings include Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (1902), Rise of the Spanish Empire (4 vols, 1918–34) and Suleiman the Magnificent (1944). He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a vice-president of the Massachusetts Historical Society; and he received honorary degrees from Oxford, Glasgow and Cambridge. Robert Speaight was to say of him, in The Property Basket: Recollections of a Divided Life (1970), 187: ‘A ripe character and erudite historian of the Spanish Empire, Merriman was Balliol to the backbone. At Oxford he was known as “Lumps” and at Harvard he was known as “Frisky”, and while his appearance suggested the first his ebullience did not contradict the second.’
2.JamesWoods, Professor James Haughton Haughton Woods (1864–1935), Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, 1913–34. He gave courses in Indian philosophy, and his Yoga System of Patanjali (1914) was the first American scholarly study of Indian philosophy. TSE studied Greek Philosophy with Woods in 1911–12, and ‘Philosophical Sanskrit’ in 1912–13. After TSE submitted his thesis, Woods told him he wanted to create a ‘berth’ for him in the Philosophy Department at Harvard. TSE was later to record that ‘a year in the mazes of Patanjali’s metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods left me in a state of enlightened mystification’ (After Strange Gods, 40).