[No surviving envelope]

1.TheodoreHarvard UniversityEnglish 26 (Modern English Literature);a7class described;a3nEnglish 26 (Modern English Literature)Harvard University Spencer assisted TSE in all of his classes for ‘English Literature from 1890 to the Present Day’, which ran from 7 Feb. to 4 May 1933, with a final examination on 9 June. TSE’s students on the course included Cyrus L. Sulzberger (1912–93) – scion of the family that owned the New York Times; later a prominent journalist on the Times and author – who was to recall: ‘We were illumined by his brilliant mind … Timid and withdrawn as Eliot was in class, he had a talent for banging the piano and singing a huge number of limericks, some of which I suspect he had written himself. I liked him despite the fact that he gave me a poor mark on my term paper. Its subject was “The Undergraduate Poetry of T. S. Eliot”’ (A Long Row of Candles: Memoirs and Diaries 1914–1954 [New York, 1969], 9.

2.See too ‘T. S. Eliot to Lecture on Shelley and Keats’, Crimson Review, 17 Feb. 1933: ‘T. S. Eliot ’10, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, will deliver the fifth lecture in the series on “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism” tonight at 8 o’clock in the New Lecture Hall. The subject will be “The practice of Shelley and Keats.”

‘“AnWordsworth, Williamin amongst the Romantics;a1n age of revolution is not a good one for poetry,” stated Eliot to a CRIMSON reporter last night. “Perhaps that is why there are few poems of this period which satisfy me completely, and those rather short ones, and chiefly of Wordsworth.

‘“GoodChristianitybelief;b1and good poetry;a1n poetryDante Alighierihis didacticism compared to Shelley's;a3n, according to my view, should be written by good Catholics and good atheists: not by a man with a religion of his own. Shelley’sShelley, Percy Byssheas against Dante;a1n didactiveness compares unfavorably with Dante’s for that reason. Dante assumes that we accept the scheme of the Catholic Church; Shelley tries to convince us of the scheme itself. Thepoetryas against didacticism;a4n poet cannot afford to teach; he is quite at liberty to expound ideas, so long as they aren’t his own ideas, for then there is a chance that he will make poetry of it.”

‘Eliot attributes the greatness of both Shelley and Keats to the promise they showed, rather than their actual accomplishments. “In the case of Shelley one is giving him the benefit of the doubt; theKeats, Johnhis letters guarantee his talent;a5n letters of Keats, on the other hand, prove, I am sure, that he was headed in the right direction.”’

3.GeorgeThroop, George R. R. Throop (1882–1949), classicist; Chancellor of Washington University, St Louis, 1927–44.

4.Arlington Street Church: Unitarian Universalist church facing the Public Garden, Boston.

5.The Belle Creole was a Missouri paddle steamer, built in 1823. See too Susan Clement, ‘“All Abroad for Natchez, Cairo and St Louis”: The Source of a draft heading of T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday I’, Notes and Queries, Mar. 1996, 57–9.

6.‘JanuaryUniversity of Minnesotalecture to;a2 19, 11:30 a.m. TSE'Tendency of Some Modern Poetry, The';a2n addressed an all-university convocation in Northrop Memorial Auditorium at the University of Minnesota on “The Tendency of Some Modern Poetry”. He predicted that future poetry will take two new forms: in the first, satire will be seriously developed; in the second, a new kind of poetic drama will emerge. The modern poet serves no essential function; only the worst and best poets are known; the former are published in newspapers, while the latter are appreciated only by the cultured minority’ (Loucks, ‘The Exile’s Return’, 23).

7.‘Hail, Minnesota’, written in 1904 by students at the University of Minnesota, was to be adopted as the official State Song in 1945.

8.Loucks'Formation of Taste, The';a2n, ‘The Exile’s Return’, 21–2: ‘January 6, 1 p.m. At the University of California, Los Angeles, Eliot gave a lecture and poetry reading in Royce Hall auditorium on “The Formation of Taste”. TSE identified four stages in the development of poetic taste, from childhood to maturity, the final phase involving the whole person. Characterizing his own taste as capricious and limited, heGoethe, Johann Wolfgang vonTSE's failure to appreciate;a1 admittedWordsworth, WilliamTSE's failure to appreciate;a2n he had never been able to appreciate Goethe and some of Wordsworth. “I do not affirm that what I like in poetry is good. If one is sincere, he will not enjoy a thing because he is told it is great. He must be true to his own feelings. Self knowledge is the most important factor in knowing what we really feel.”’ Henry Eliot reported, copying directly from TSE’s lecture-notes, these remarks: ‘For at no point has our development been merely a development of Taste, that is, an approximation to a discerning, appreciative enjoyment of all of the poetry worth reading, in its proper kind and degree. Such an ambition is a phantom, the pursuit of which we may leave to those whose aim in life is to be “cultivated” or “cultured” – I do not know which is the right word to use. Such people treat art as a luxury, and commonly end by becoming themselves luxury articles. The ideal is unattainable, and I think is in some sense even undesirable.’ The lecture at the Women’s Club of St Paul was evidently a reprisal.

9.AliceMartin, Alice Eliot (TSE's cousin) Eliot (1889–1967) was married to Leonard Martin (1887–1971).

10.RuthPorter, Ruth Wadsworth Furness Wadsworth Furness Porter (1875–1942) – whose ancestors included famous New Englanders, and who was related to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and TSE – graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1896. Cultivated and gregarious, she was married in 1898 to James Foster Porter (1871–1939), who ran a trust by the name of the Porter Realty Trust – the family inheritance included a large farm that would become the Chicago Loop. They lived in a grand lakeside home at 1085 Sheridan Avenue, Hubbard Woods, Winnetka, Illinois, and enjoyed too a holiday home in Maine. Their five children included the renowned painter Fairfield Porter (1907–75): see Justin Spring, Fairfield Porter; A Life in Art (Yale University Press, 2000); Material Witness: The Selected Letters of Fairfield Porter, ed. Ted Leigh (University of Michigan Press, 2005).

11.HenryEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother)his business in Chicago;b5n Eliot had worked for the Buchen Company, a Chicago advertising business, in 1917–29.

12.ThomasEliot, Thomas Dawes (TSE's first cousin) Dawes Eliot (1889–1973) was married to Sigrid Victoria Wijnbladh (1888–1942).

13.TSE had given his lecture, ‘Edward Lear and Modern Poetry’, in Balch Hall at Scripps on 5 Jan. 1933: see William Baker, ‘TSE on Edward Lear’, English Studies 64 (1983), 564–6.

14.OscarCampbell, Oscar Campbell (1879–1970), Professor of English, State University of New York at Buffalo; author of Shakespeare’s Satire (1943); The Reader’s Encyclopedia of Shakespeare (1966).

15.ClarenceLittle, Clarence C. C. Little (1888–1971) – known to Harvard friends as ‘Pete’ – scion of an upper-class Boston family; science researcher specialising in mammalian genetics and cancer; President of the University of Maine, 1922–5; the University of Michigan, 1925–9; founding director of the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory at Bar Harbor; managing director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer (later the American Cancer Society); twice President of the American Society for Cancer Research, President of the American Eugenics Society; and, most controversially, Scientific Director of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (later the Council for Tobacco Research), 1954–69.

Little’sAndrewes, Katharine Day first wife (m. 1911), was Katharine Day Andrews, who bore three children: the couple divorced in 1929. In 1930, Little married Beatrice Winifred Johnson (1899–1973), a scientific researcher who worked as his laboratory assistant: they had two children.

16.HenryPerry, Henry Ten Eyck Ten Eyck Perry (1890–1973), Professor of English, University of Buffalo.

17.Elizabeth Perkins Bigelow, daughter of Henry Bryant Bigelow, was to die of an embolism from horse-riding in 1934.

18.PalfreyPerkins, Palfrey Perkins (1883–1976), who graduated from the Harvard Divinity School, was Unitarian Minister in Buffalo, New York, 1926–33; later of King’s Chapel, Boston, 1933–53.

19.GeorgeBoas, George Boas (1891–1980), Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University.

20.Boas had married Simone Brangier, a sculptor, in 1921.

21.LoucksPercy Graeme Turnbull Memorial Lectures, The (otherwise The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry)described;a5n, ‘The Exile’s Return’, 23: ‘January 30, February 1 and 3, 5 p.m. TSE presented a series of lectures, “The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry”, in Latrobe Hall at the Johns Hopkins University on the occasion of the 29th Percy Graeme Turnbull Memorial Lectures (“TSE on Puritan Poets”; Schuchard, Introduction to Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, vii, 234). Individual lecture topics were “Toward a Definition of Metaphysical Poetry”; “The Conceit in Donne and Crashaw”; and “Laforgue and Corbière in our Time” (Schuchard vii) … February 2, evening. Appearing before the Poetry Society of Maryland, TSE lectured on the charge of obscurity in modern poetry, then read from his work (Schuchard 236).’

The Baltimore Sun reported on Tues., 31 Jan. 1933, 20: ‘T. S. Eliot Asserts Advantage Of Being Critic Is That It Pays: American-Born Poet, Who Became British Citizen, Gives First Of Three Percy Turnbull Memorial Lectures at Johns Hopkins:

It pays better to criticize poetry than to write it, T. S. Eliot has learned.

The eminent poet and leader of a reactionary movement in poetry said as much while discussing his calling yesterday after a lecture at the Johns Hopkins University. He gave the first of the three Percy Turnbull Memorial Lectures for this year. Speaking on The Metaphysical Poets, he will complete the season with lectures at 3 P.M. Wednesday and Friday in Latrobe Hall.

When asked how he could account for his success as both poet and critic, in view of the general rule that a great poet is seldom a great critic, he said:

‘Well, I don’t know about that. My chief reason for being a critic at present is the fact that you can make a little money out of an essay on criticism.’

It was the second time this month that a poet from the British Isles visiting Baltimore has intimated that writing poetry is not a lucrative profession. Several weeks ago William Butler Yeats, leader of the renaissance of Irish literature, said that the Irish were great ‘appreciators of poetry, if not readers of it.’ They honored him as a personality, he admitted, even though they did not read his books.

Mr Eliot, born in St Louis, aroused much speculation when he became a British citizen in 1927. Some said at the time that it was the case of a thinker seeking seclusion, like a mediæval monk going into the monastery.

Asked if he found London conducive to the contemplative life, he replied:

‘PerhapsEnglandLondon;h1affords solitude and anonymity;a3East Coker, SomersetEnglandBurnt Norton, GloucestershireEnglandLittle Gidding, CambridgeshireEnglandChipping CampdenEnglandCambridge, CambridgeshireEnglandLondonEnglandOxford, OxfordshireEngland so. I think that London, being the largest city in the world, is the best place in the world to lose yourself … New York is not even second best. It is too noisy … In London you can always find some place where you can be alone. There people don’t go out of their way to find you when you want quiet.’

For his lecture Latrobe Hall was packed with well over 400 persons. Prof. H. C. Lancaster, chairman of the department of romance languages, introducing the speaker, said, ‘Our English cousins are generous in sending us poets and other lecturers to help us in our war against Philistines and other barbarians. We are indebted to them, but we ask for no cancellation nor moratorium. Our debt is well paid, for we have given them Henry James and T. S. Eliot.’

TSEPercy Graeme Turnbull Memorial Lectures, The (otherwise The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry)their fate;a6nVarieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ThePercy Graeme Turnbull Memorial Lectures, The (otherwise The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry) told John Quentin Feller, Jr. (Baltimore), 22 Dec. 1960: ‘Do you know, I have completely forgotten the subject of the Turnbull lectures which I gave in 1933, and I must have destroyed the text. I gave a great many single lectures, as well as the series at Harvard and the series at the University of Virginia, during the nine months of my stay in America because, to tell the truth, I was badly in arrears with payment of income tax and had to earn all the money I could in order to pay off my debts to the Inland Revenue. It seems very odd now that I should have given three lectures, preserved no copy, and forgotten the subject, but there it is.’

22.MargaretTurnbull, Margaret Turnbull (1887–1981), a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, had gained a Masters in History from the University of Pennsylvania. Her husband was Bayard Turnbull (1879–1954).

23.Matthew Bruccoli related in The Life of Scott Fitzgerald, 404: ‘When T. S. Eliot lectured on the metaphysical poets at Johns Hopkins University in February 1933, the Turnbulls invited Fitzgerald to a dinner they gave for Eliot [at “Trimbush”, the Turnbulls’ estate at Rodgers’ Forge in Towson, north of Baltimore]. Fitzgerald regarded him as the greatest living poet and had been gratified by his praise of The Great Gatsby. On this occasion Fitzgerald was asked to read Eliot’s poems [including a section of The Waste Land] aloud, which he did effectively.’ FitzgeraldFitzgerald, F. Scotton meeting TSE;a2n to Edmund Wilson (ca. Feb. 1933): ‘T. S. Eliot and I had an afternoon + evening together last week. I read him some of his poems and he seemed to think they were pretty good. I liked him fine. Very broken and sad + shrunk inside’ (F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Bruccoli [1994, 2005], 227). See also Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur (1981), 345; Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1965), 249.

T. S. Matthews adds (Great Tom, 115): ‘On the afternoon of Eliot’s arrival at the Turnbull House Fitzgerald came to see him, and the two went off for a long walk. Mrs Turnbull remembers seeing them start off across the lawn … When Eliot returned from his walk, Mrs Turnbull showed him her copy of The Divine Comedy, and told him with some pride that she had read it. “Begun to read it,” he corrected her.’

OnFitzgerald, F. Scottin TSE's recollection;a3n 30 Oct. 1958 TSE wrote to Andrew Turnbull (son of Mr and Mrs Bayard Turnbull), who was at work on a biography, Scott Fitzgerald (1962): ‘Fitzgerald seemed to me a very sick man at the time I saw him in Baltimore. I liked him and enjoyed our conversation, though I cannot now remember what topics were discussed. I can remember the carboy of gin which he produced from a cupboard toward my refreshment, very similar indeed to a carboy of gin which one of my friends at Harvard provided for me <regularly! $300 a gallon> during that period. I also remember that you paid me a sort of compliment, or so I was told afterwards. Someone said that you had remarked about me that I had the manners of a titmouse and the strength of a lion. I do not know quite what the manners of titmouse would be and I have certainly never felt myself to be very leonine, but the impression made by the remark was rather pleasant’.

TSE wrote on 22 Sept. 1960 to John Quentin Feller. Jr.: ‘I did go to see Scott Fitzgerald and his wife in 1933 when I went down to Baltimore to deliver the Turnbull lectures there and was a guest of the Turnbulls. Fitzgerald and his wife were then living in a house on the Turnbull Estate which had been put at their disposal by Miss Turnbull. I called on them one afternoon. It was the first and only occasion of my meeting with Scott Fitzgerald in person. I remember that he looked a very sick man and I remember that he produced from a cupboard the usual prohibited carboy of bootlegged gin for my entertainment. But what we talked about I do not remember. It was a friendly occasion and I liked the man, but I retain a strong impression of sadness. And I have never read Tender is the Night, though I am proud to possess a copy inscribed to me by him. I still regard The Great Gatsby as a very fine and remarkable novel’ (Cited in Bauman Rare Books Catalogue, 1996).

FitzgeraldFitzgerald, F. ScottTender is the Night;a5 inscribed a copy of Tender is the Night: A Romance (New York, 1934):

‘T. S. Eliot from F. Scott Fitzgerald

with all admiration

——all respect

——all ———

All everything from one who believes that Dr. Johnson’s sneer at “reciprocal courtesy between authors,” must have been tossed off in a bitter moment.’ (TSE Library)

TSE’sFitzgerald, F. ScottThe Great Gatsby;a4 copy of The Great Gatsby, which Fitzgerald sent him in Dec. 1925, is inscribed: ‘For T. S. Elliott [sic] / Greatest of Living Poets / from his enthusiastic / worshipper / F. Scott Fitzgerald. / Paris. / Oct. / 1925.’ But TSE lamented to Jack L. Morris (Tallahassee, Fla.), 3 Sept. 1959: ‘Oh dear, I wish I knew what had become of the copy he inscribed for me, but – like so many of my books – it has vanished.’ TSE’s secretary told Jeffrey Hart, 26 Mar. 1964: ‘Mr Eliot does not think that his copy of The Great Gatsby was inscribed by Scott Fitzgerald. In fact he is almost certain that he bought it for himself, but he cannot verify this because unfortunately he has mislaid it.’ (See too Jeffrey Hart, ‘Scott Fitzgerald’s America’, National Review, 19 Nov. 1963, 443–4.) Valerie Eliot wrote to a Swiss researcher, Eugen Huonder, 17 Mar. 1970: ‘Alas, I am sorry to say that my husband’s inscribed copy of The Great Gatsby disappeared many years ago and there is no record of the inscription’ (EVE carbon). See Daniel G. Siegel, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Copy of Gatsby’, Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1971, 291–3. TSE’s copy of The Great Gatsby, inscribed by FSF, was donated in Dec. 2007 to the John Hay Library, Brown University, by Daniel Siegel of M & S Rare Books, Providence, RI.

TSE told Marie P. Harris (19 Feb. 1952) likewise: ‘I liked Fitzgerald personally, and rated The Great Gatsby very high indeed.’

OnAsh Wednesdayinscribed to Scott Fitzgerald;a7n 3 Feb. 1933 TSE wrote in a copy of Ash-Wednesday (1930) on the title page: ‘Inscribed to Scott Fitzgerald with the author’s homage T. S. Eliot’.

TSE would later inscribe his copy of Fitzgerald’s posthumous collection The Crack-Up (1945), for Valerie Eliot: ‘I met S. F. only once: in Baltimore in 1933.’

TSE told John Quentin Feller, 22 Dec. 1960: ‘You can tell Miss Turnbull, who I have no doubt is a very charming lady, that I am as shocked by her intolerance of Scott Fitzgerald’s weakness [for alcohol] as she is by Scott Fitzgerald himself.’

24.EleanorTurnbull, Eleanor Turnbull (1875–1964), scholar and translator of Spanish poetry.

25.SallyKinsolving, Sally Bruce (née Sally Archer Bruce) Bruce Kinsolving, née Sally Archer Bruce (1876–1962), author of David and Bathsheba and Other Poems (1922) and Grey Heather (1930).

26.RevdKinsolving, Revd Arthur Barksdale Arthur Barksdale Kinsolving (1861–1951), minister of St James, Baltimore, 1906–42.

27.InStillman, Charles Chaunceyendows Charles Eliot Norton Chair;a1n 1925 Charles Chauncey Stillman, class of 1898, philanthropist, gave $200,000 to endow the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry, in memory of Professor Charles Eliot Norton.

28.AliceJames, Alice Rutherford Runnels Rutherford Runnels James (1884–1957), wife of William (‘Willie’) James Jr. (1882–1961) – son of psychologist William James (brother of Henry) – American artist and painting critic for the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; acting director, 1930–7.

29.Edward Burlingame Hill (1872–1960), American composer, taught at Harvard from 1906; Professor, 1928–40. His students included Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Virgil Thomson.

30.LangdonWarner, Langdon Warner (1881–1955), American archaeologist and art historian; specialist in East Asian art; Professor at Harvard; Curator of the Fogg Museum – and reputedly one of the models for Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones. Katharine Sansom thought him ‘a jolly sort of buccaneer … the gentlest of men and a passionate aesthete’ (Sir George Sansom and Japan, 20).

31.Henry Copley Greene (1871–1951), Harvard alumnus, writer and social worker. He was for many years Clerk of the Boston Art Commission. His wife was Rosalind Huidekoper.

32.For Sears, see below.

33.William Ellery Sedgwick, Jr. (1872–1960), editor of the Atlantic Monthly, 1908–38; his wife was Mabel Cabot.

34.DanielSargent, Daniel Sargent (1890–1987), historian, biographer, and poet, taught at Harvard, 1914–34, and was thereafter a full-time writer. Author of eleven books including Thomas More (1933). He lived at 30 The Fenway, Boston Mass., and was Secretary of the Boston Art Commission.

35.AnnieLamb, Annie Lawrence (TSE's cousin) Lawrence (Rotch) Lamb (1857–1950) was married to Horatio Appleton Lamb (1850–1926).

36.JanPaderewski, Jan IgnaceTSE attends concert given by;a1 Ignace Paderewski (1860–1941), world-famous pianist and composer – and advocate of Polish independence. As well as his hugely successful concert career (which meant he spent little time in Poland after the 1880s), Paderewski was briefly Prime Minister of the newly independent Poland in 1919 and also played a leading role in the exile government in 1939–40 after Poland was occupied by Hitler and Stalin.

37.Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring, Class of 1901 Professor of Rhetoric and Composition.

38.IsabelSmith, Isabel Fothergill Fothergill Smith (1890–1990), first Dean of Scripps, 1929–35; Professor of Geology and Tutor in Sciences, 1929–35. See Jill Stephanie Schneiderman, ‘Growth and Development of a Woman Scientist and Educator’, Earth Sciences History 11: 1 (1992), 37–9.

39.PresumablyStephenson, Martha Tucker Mazyck Martha Tucker Mazyck Stephenson, wife of Nathaniel Wright Stephenson (1867–1935), Professor of History and Biography at Scripps College, 1927–35: author of Lincoln and the Union (1919); Nelson W. Aldrich (1930); A History of the American People (2 vols, 1934).

40.DrJaqua, Ernest J. Ernest J. Jaqua (1882–1974), first President of Scripps College, 1927–42.

41.‘Der Gedanke enthält die Mölichkeit der Sachlage die er denkt. Was denkbar ist, ist auch möglich’: ‘The thought contains the possibility of the state of affairs which it thinks. What is thinkable is also possible’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein, proposition 302, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K Ogden, with the assistance of F. P. Ramsey (1922), 42–3). William Empson, ‘This Last Pain’: ‘“What is conceivable can happen too,” said Wittgenstein …’

42.MarieMcSpadden, Marie McSpadden, in a letter to Kay Koeninger, 16 Jan. 1982: ‘Emily Hale, his dear friend, was an intimate of mine … I think he sent me the poem, “Marina”, because I was a typical California “sailor girl”, tanned, tall, and used to the sailing and swimming and out-of-door living that went with the locale. And very extrovert.’ A student at Scripps College, McSpadden went on to take an MA at Stanford University, and was to work for a while as assistant to Lou Henry Hoover (1874–1944) – wife of Herbert Hoover (1874–1964), President of the USA, 1929–33 – when she served as the National President of the Girl Scouts of the USA, 1935–7.

43.Richard Ainley (1910–67), stage, screen and radio actor.

44.EthelGlendinning, Ethel Glendinning (1910–96), stage and screen actor.