[Grace Toll Hall, Scripps College, Claremont]
I postponed writing for 24 hours in the hope that I might have some letter to which to reply; but I ought not to do that. Not very much has happened since I wrote on Friday night. OfThayer, ScofieldTSE on visiting;a3 my visit to Scofield perhaps the less said the better, as you did not know him well. I found him iller than I expected, and in my opinion incurable. His attitude to me was not hostile, but extremely formal; his attention is entirely taken up by the persecution to which he believes he has been subjected during a period in which we were not in contact, and in which everyone he knows well is implicated, including his mother. He had some symptoms quite familiar to me, and others which were quite new. He is a case with which it is difficult to have much sympathy; the disease is so patently an exaggeration of extreme egotism. I staid with him only about forty minutes, as he seemed to be exciting himself, and I felt pretty limp by that time.1 WhenSheffield, Ada Eliot (TSE's sister);b6 I got back I had to look in at a small teaparty given by O’Brien, a Magdalen man here, for a friend of his in the British Embassy, and then dined at Ada’s.
OnSociety of Saint John the Evangelist, Cambridge, Mass.TSE attends early Mass at;a2 Sunday I went to early Mass as usual, andKing's Chapel, Bostonwhom he hears preach there;a9 after breakfast to Boston to King’s Chapel, where your uncle preached (very well, I thought). YourPerkins, Edith (EH's aunt)shares pew with TSE;a7 aunt spied me and asked me into her pew, but I did not have any words with her, as she stopped for Communion. (IPerkinses, the;b4 am dining with them on Friday, however). IChristianityliturgy;b9High Mass over Mattins;a7 liked the service very much; it is very much like Anglican Mattins, and some of the prayers and collects are identical. Mattins is the usual Sunday morning service in ‘Low Church’ services; in the Catholic form it ordinarily precedes a High Mass, and I ordinarily attend the latter (as an obligation, unless I have been to a Low Mass at 8) and not the former, which is optional. IChurch of St. John the Evangelist, Bowdoin StreetTSE's preferred Boston church;a2 shall go there once a month or so, as I feel that I ought to go usually to St. John the Evangelist in Bowdoin Street. IBabbitts, thelunch with;a1Babbitt, Dora D.
MondayEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister)recommends TSE hairdresser for baldness;b2 a wet day; wentappearance (TSE's)baldness;b6unlikely treatment for;a3 over to Mrs. Bainbridge, my sister Marion’s little masseuse-hairdresser in Wendell Street, who is starting to give me regular shampoo and electric treatment for my baldness. I believe she will help the hair to grow, and the treatment itself is very refreshing. (She said: ‘You have a twang just like my husband. He’s an Englishman’). InSpencer, Theodore;a8 the evening dined informally with Spencer at the Tavern Club; a pleasant, boyish company of men of all ages – oneChoate, Robert ('Beanie');a1 Choate, said to be editor of the Herald,5 andLongfellow, Alexander Wadsworth, Jr. ('Waddy');a1 a delightful old comic named Waddy Longfellow, who told very amusing, and not at all improper, long stories in Cape Cod dialect.6 IOxford and Cambridge Clubwinningly anti-social;a5 shouldAmericaits horrors;c2over-social clubs;a5 find American club life too sociable for my taste, except as an occasional event; I prefer my little place in Pall Mall, where you could spend twentyfour hours without anybody seeing you, and where you can lunch and dine at a table to yourself.
Tuesday wet again; wentEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister);b3 lateWentworth, Elizabeth;a2 to tea with Marion, where was Elizabeth Wentworth, andSheffields, theRadcliffe Club paper rehearsed with;a5 to supper at Ada’s, where I read them for criticism the paper which I have written for the Radcliffe Club next week. I think it is a fairly good one. The rest of to-day will be fatiguing: I have my weekly tea party, and then go straight on to dinner with ‘The Englishmen’ (they are all Americans, I believe) at Kirkland House, and talk to them afterwards, with, I suppose, a discussion; I shall be tired by bedtime! IAmericaits glories;c1cheap shoes;a2 have bought two pairs of shoes, badly needed, and they seem so cheap here. IThayer, Lucy Elywrites to TSE from London;a6 haveNelson, Mabel;a4 several letters from London about matters there, which I shall send you for perusal when I have answered them and written other letters in the same context: one from Lucy and one from Mrs. Nelson. IEnglandTSE's patriotic homesickness for;a5 think that on the whole I am happy here – as happy as possible – or shall be if I can feel that I am a successful lecturer. Everyone is very kind. It seems to me at present that I should not care where in the world I lived, if I had ordinary comforts and a few congenial people, so long as I had peace and no nightmares in my life. But I admit to a longing for English ways and English minds, and all my public feelings are absorbed by British affairs; I am really quite patriotic, and the sight of an English ship and a British Ensign would thrill me. I can take but little interest in the politics of America; and in England I feel that public affairs are involved with one’s private life; one is not necessarily ineffectual; and even I may be of some importance. It is interesting that I should feel in this way, as I have never had a happy moment there; but my attach[ment] is quite profound.
Well, my dear Birdie, I must stop and collect my thoughts for this evening; and I hope always that I may have a letter from you tomorrow. If they are not [sc. to] be but one a week, I wish that they might always arrive on the same day.
1.This was the last occasion on which TSE would see Thayer, as he told Alyse Gregory, 17 Dec. 1948: ‘I have not seen him since I visited him in a sanatorium in 1932. I am distressed, but not surprised, by what you say about the present and the probable future.’
2.Thomas Head Thomas (1881–1963).
3.24 Concord Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
4.MaryThomas, Mary Ann Davenport (née Perkins) Ann Davenport Thomas, née Perkins (1880–1951), bore five children.
5.RobertChoate, Robert ('Beanie') ‘Beanie’ Choate (1898–1965), editor and publisher of the Boston Herald.
6.AlexanderLongfellow, Alexander Wadsworth, Jr. ('Waddy') Wadsworth ‘Waddy Longfellow, Jr. (1854–1934) – nephew of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – was a noted Colonial Revival architect.
5.RobertChoate, Robert ('Beanie') ‘Beanie’ Choate (1898–1965), editor and publisher of the Boston Herald.
6.CharlotteEliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns (TSE's mother) Champe Stearns Eliot (1843–1929): see Biographical Register.
1.Marian/MarionEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister) Cushing Eliot (1877–1964), fourth child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Eliot: see Biographical Register.
6.AlexanderLongfellow, Alexander Wadsworth, Jr. ('Waddy') Wadsworth ‘Waddy Longfellow, Jr. (1854–1934) – nephew of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – was a noted Colonial Revival architect.
2.RobertNelson, Mabel SencourtGeorge, Robert Esmonde Gordon ('Robert Sencourt');b8nSencourt, Robert
2.E. KennardRand, Edward Kennard Rand (1871–1945), classicist and medievalist, taught at Harvard from 1901, becoming Pope Professor of Latin, 1931–42. Founded the Medieval Academy of America, 1925, and edited the journal Speculum. Author of Ovid and His Influence (1925); Studies in the Script of Tours (2 vols, 1929–34); The Building of Eternal Rome (Lowell Lectures, 1943). TSE to Gladys H. McCafferty, 19 June 1958: ‘Ken Rand was one of my teachers at Harvard for whom I have the warmest personal affection …’
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.
2.TheodoreSpencer, Theodore Spencer (1902–48), writer, poet and critic, taught at Harvard, 1927–49: see Biographical Register.
1.LucyThayer, Lucy Ely Ely Thayer (1887–1952) – a cousin of TSE’s old friend Scofield Thayer, and a friend and confidante of Vivien Eliot – had been a witness at the Eliots’ wedding on 26 June 1915.
11.ScofieldThayer, Scofield Thayer (1890–1982), American poet and publisher; pioneering editor of the Dial. Thayer came from a wealthy New England family, which enabled him to travel and to become a patron of the arts. He was a friend of TSE from Milton Academy, where he was his junior by a year. Like TSE, he went on to Harvard and Oxford, where from 1914 he spent two years studying philosophy at Magdalen College: it was in his rooms there that TSE met Vivien Haigh-Wood in 1915. From 1919 to 1925 he was editor of the Dial, having joined forces with James Sibley Watson (who became president of the magazine) to save it from closure. Re-launched as a monthly in January 1920, the Dial became the most enterprising cultural and arts magazine in the USA. It published TSE’s ‘London Letters’ and The Waste Land as well as important essays by him such as ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’; Yeats, Pound, Cummings, Joyce and others of the most important Anglophone modernists; and influential European writers including Mann, Hofmannsthal and Valéry. A meeting between Thayer and Lady Rothermere prompted her to finance the Criterion, with Eliot as editor.
4.MaryThomas, Mary Ann Davenport (née Perkins) Ann Davenport Thomas, née Perkins (1880–1951), bore five children.