[Grace Toll Hall, Scripps College, Claremont]

1.See ‘TeaNew Yorkerreports on TSE's tea-party;a1n: MrEliot HouseTSE's tea-parties in;b3n T. S. Eliot, this year’s occupant of the Norton poetry chair at Harvard’, New Yorker, 7 Jan. 1933, 11: ‘Mr T. S. Eliot, this year’s occupant of the Norton poetry chair at Harvard, has been carrying a notice in the Crimson that he is at home to members of the university on Wednesday afternoons at five. One recent Wednesday he was surprised by the arrival of fifteen freshmen en masse, obviously curious to see what a poet looked like. After he had got them all seated, he was at a loss how to open the conversation. He opened rather weakly by apologizing for not having tea. One eager freshman took this cue and started gaily off on the general subject of tea. At the end of five minutes, he was describing how the leaves are pulled back on the stalk; at the end of ten, how they are dried. He then took up rather thoroughly the blending and breeding of various brands, explaining how some of them got their names.

‘At the end of about twenty minutes, everybody was nervous and jumpy, including Mr Eliot, who took to snapping the joints of his fingers. Some of those behind the speaker were making faces and signs. Eventually the self-expressing youngster had to pause to swallow. A determined voice came out of the shadows in the back of the room. “MrMansfield, Katherine;a3n. Eliot, apropos of tea, do you not consider Katherine Mansfield the most sensuous of modern writers?” The room sighed in relief, and the conversation swung into proper intellectual channels, everybody grateful to the keen-witted young man who remembered that Katherine Mansfield had once written a story called “A Cup of Tea”.’

HenryEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother)disputes New Yorker profile of TSE;a9n Eliot forthwith protested that his brother never cracked his knuckles: ‘Error: Another experience of Mr Eliot, the poet, with the young at Harvard …’, New Yorker, 21 Jan. 1933.

TheDerrickson, Howarddescribes TSE's tea-party in the New Yorker;a1n teller of the teatime tale-out-of-school was a Harvard sophomore named Howard Derrickson (later art critic for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, and editorialist and educator), who later published this explanation: ‘This story stemmed from a Wednesday afternoon tea in Eliot’s study in December 1932. Only sophomores were invited; I was among 12 attending. First in line as Eliot sat ready to pour, however, stood a party-crashing freshman, unknown to the rest of us. Asked how he’d have his tea, the stranger spewed a torrent of irrelevant data on the growing and drying of tea. When he paused for breath, sophomore C. L. Barber (in his maturity an Eliot scholar) posed an apt literary query: “Apropos of tea, Mr Eliot, don’t you regard Katherine Mansfield as a most sensuous writer?” The host beamed and agreed as most of us sighed in relief. Perhaps only Barber and Eliot knew Mansfield as the author of the story “A Cup of Tea”. But from then on the chat was properly literary.

‘Barber filled me in later, and an obliging Harvard Crimson candidate typed my New Yorker copy. To sharpen focus on TSE, the friend inserted an imaginative touch: that as the freshman droned on about tea, TSE grew nervous and took to snapping the joints of his fingers.

‘WithinNew Yorkerissues correction over knuckle-cracking;a2n the magazine office, other embarrassing changes crept into my story, which I nonetheless showed to Ted Spencer in print. Shortly thereafter Ted displayed to me what I recall as a two-column New Yorker headline: “DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION AND AMPLIFICATION: Kin Defends Bard’s Knuckles.” The magazine had run a full letter from the poet’s elder brother. Henry Ware Eliot protested that, under far more trying circumstances than any tea party, “Tom has never cracked his knuckles.”’ (Reminiscences: With TSE at Harvard in ’32, T. S. Eliot Society News & Notes, no. 3 (Fall 1987), 3.)

Another anonymous report of TSE attempting sociability in his rooms was to appear as ‘Side Show’, Boston Herald, 5 Mar. 1933, 8: ‘Every Wednesday afternoon the greatest living poet has open tea out at Harvard. His name is T. S. Eliot. He was born in St Louis and lives in London. That he is the greatest poet now living in the world one must take on faith on the assurance of some hundreds of undergraduates who pack Harvard’s largest lecture hall to hear him talk, and on the profound searchings of numerous learned critics.

‘When the daylight comes slanting down on the ice chunks floating in the Charles, tea is ready in Eliot House, one of the units which the Harkness millions built. T. S. Eliot is one of the Boston Eliots, a second cousin, once removed, of President Eliot and Charles Eliot Norton. He is lecturing on the Charles Eliot Norton fellowship. His rooms are in Eliot House, on the ground floor, looking out toward the river.

‘He sits in a stiff wooden armchair beside the never used fireplace, back to the declining light, which falls through the many panes of huge window, narrow curtained at the ends and valanced with a light, inoffensive, yellow-white material. The door opens almost into his arms. When visitors enter he rises heavily to his considerable height, and shakes hands like the village pump. Everyone calls him “Sir.” Sir is the most frequently heard word, as in boarding schools of the Groton–St. Marks–St Paul’s type.

‘The study is not large, while wainscoted, and with a ceiling too high for its proportions, like most of the house plan rooms. Coats are left in a side room. Intellectual undergraduates crowd the place, sitting on the sofa and in straight chairs around the walls. They are a special type, ranging from fat and tall to small with weak mustaches. But they are all intellectual.

‘The host puts cups on the floor and pours tea into them clumsily. He remarks that the tea is a new kind, so he cannot tell the strength from the color. The guests take the cups gingerly, and hold them up and away from them. They have not come for tea. Moreover, they are not particularly used to it. There are generous plates of sandwiches, but Eliot is their principal eater. Nobody touches the cakes.

‘There is silence, and the sipping of tea. Every one settles back in expectation. Victor Hugo used to bask in this sort of atmosphere, only in a much larger room. Once, after a long pause, he remarked briefly, “I believe in God.” Again there was silence, and at last the voice of a woman rose like a sigh. “Oh wonderful! A god who believes in God.”

‘ByHuxley, Aldousdismissed as novelist;a6n this time the quiet is broken by the faintly nasal voice of an intellectual undergraduate. “What do you think,” he begins, and follows up with the inevitable “Sir.” The subject becomes Aldous Huxley. The trouble with Aldous Huxley is that he is a journalist trying to write novels. As T. S. Eliot puts it, “the emotional picture is blurred by irrelevant narrative.”

‘The conversation is limited to purely literary subjects. The host may digress, if he likes, to tell how some idiots once routed him from his London bed to explain a passage in his poems. The wires had to be repaired the next day. But the guests stick sternly to Art.

‘At times the conversation is so literary that it hurts. A look of brief pain and long bewilderment fogs the poetic face, during the discussion of Poe’s “Raven.” A youthful specialist in Poe has caught at his favorite subject and will not let it go. There follows a brief monologue on the symbolic significance of the Raven, brief because the others have come to hear the poet talk, and somewhat themselves.

‘When Eliot does talk, it is in rather a low, monotonous but resonant voice. Sometimes he talks into his handkerchief, which he half extracts from his left sleeve. When he pronounces figure, he says “figger,” as in English. His accent is an obvious pose.’

2.À Nous la liberté (1931): French film dir. René Clair.

3.SydneyWaterlow, Sydney Waterlow, KCMG (1878–1944) joined the diplomatic service in 1900 and served as attaché and third secretary in Washington. TSE met him in 1915, when Waterlow invited him to review for the International Journal of Ethics (Waterlow was a member of the editorial committee). In 1919 Waterlow served at the Paris Peace Conference (helping to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles), and in 1920 he was re-appointed to the Foreign Office, later serving as Minister to Bangkok, 1926–8; Sofia, 1929–33; Athens, 1933–9. See further Sarah M. Head, Before Leonard: The Early Suitors of Virginia Woolf (2006).

4.ChaunceyTinker, Chauncey Brewster Brewster Tinker (1876–1963), Sterling Professor of English Literature, Yale University. 1923–45.

5.JosephSchumpeter, Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), influential Austrian-born political economist; Finance Minister of German-Austria, 1919. Professor of Economics, Harvard University.

6.WilliamCastle, William R., Jr. R. Castle, Jr. (1878–1963), teacher and distinguished diplomat, joined the U.S. State Department in 1919; Ambassador to Japan in 1930; subsequently Under Secretary of State. At Harvard he had been an Instructor in English, 1904–13; co-founder of the Fox Club. See Diplomatic Realism: William R. Castle Jr. and American Foreign Policy, 1919–1953, ed, Alfred L. Castle and Michael E. MacMillan (University of Hawaii Press, 1998).

7.F. O. MatthiessenMatthiessen, Francis Otto ('F. O.') (1902–50) taught for 21 years in the English Department at Harvard, where he specialised in American literature and Shakespeare, becoming Professor of History and Literature in 1942. The first Senior Tutor at Eliot House, he was a Resident Tutor, 1933–9. Works include The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935) and American Renaissance (1941).

Matthiessen’s first chat with TSE took place on 24 Oct. 1932: he recorded on 3 Nov., ‘Ted [Spencer] and I had our first real talk with Eliot last night, and got him going on his poetry. A very interesting experience.’ James F. Loucks (‘The Exile’s Return: Fragment of a T. S. Eliot Chronology’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 9: 2 (1996), 18–19) notes: ‘On November 14 Matthiessen invited TSE to tea, heard the poet praise Joyce, and concluded that he was both warm and kindly (Hyde 223).’

TSEMatthiessen, Francis Otto ('F. O.')The Achievement of T. S. Eliot;b1 to Charles Williams, 22 July 1944: ‘Matthiessen’s book [The Achievement of T. S. Eliot] was, I think, a very good book of its date (1933 [sic]): and he had the inestimable advantage, while working on it, of having me in daily view, at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sometimes for bootleg evenings, in Cambridge Mass. It is the work of a Professor of English Literature, and I was rather overawed by it; for he showed such an appalling consistency of philosophy and purpose, and such consistency between essays written at different times and under the spur of the need of money, that I felt I had been merely the trance medium for some intellectual giant of the spirit world. The notes are the most amusing part of the book.’

See further F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950): A Collective Portrait, ed. Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman (New York, 1950); F. O. Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement, ed. Giles B. Gunn (Washington University Press, 1975).