[41 Brimmer St., Boston]
(BecauseHale, EmilyTSE's names, nicknames and terms of endearment for;x3TSE's reason for calling her 'Dove';a5 I must always have one particular name for you that no one else calls you – I hope no one does). I had a lovely letter on Friday and another to-day; so if I were not happy to-day I never should be. Often I lie awake at night and think of you, and of what you are, and what you are to me, and we are to each other; and can lie still quite happily so. First, about the play. I am delighted by your success. Oh I wish I could have seen you. I should like to know more about Miss Davidson, but I don’t believe she ‘created’ the part for you at all. But what the letter gave me particularly was a glimmering of the part that acting has played in your development, and has helped, I am sure, to make you so exceptional a person – though dozens of others could act the same parts, and act them pretty well, and get nothing out of it permanent. You must now tell me gradually about some of your past roles; it will be a further help to me. RoxaneHale, Emilyas actor;v8as Roxane in Cyrano in 1915/16;a3 especially. I should be willing to be Cyrano, if it was that Roxane, but perhaps it wasn’t.1 ActingAmericaBoston, Massachusetts;d1its influence on TSE;a2 must have freed you (anyway something has) from many of the restrictions which Boston birth and breeding imposes upon one.
TheHale, Emilyappearance and characteristics;v7which TSE then describes;a4 apricot dress had fur trimming, and was one of the prettiest. Another I was attached to was blue with a red band round the waist; and there was a green one with tablier effect skirt which you spilt hot water on at a teaparty, and there was a light flowered one in ‘The Mollusc’.2 And so on – and have you got a ‘sailor hat’ now with a large brim as designed by Patou?3
For your second letter, I shall try to write a separate reply this afternoon. Thank you again and again for all your delicacy and fineness of insight and perception. It is a great relief to have written and to have heard; because I had been coming to feel more and more that my reserves would break down more and more completely with you – I hope not beyond your strength; and do take great care of yourself in every way.
I have had every possible interruption, and must take the time out of a committee this afternoon to write again. Tomorrow I have a meeting all the morning which I call the Sewing Circle because I don’t know what to call it; they meet (canons and such) to discuss the conversion of Europe to Christianity, or something cognate.
I'Thoughts After Lambeth'commended by Lord Halifax;a6 also have had a certain success to-day; IWood, Charles, 2nd Viscount Halifaxcommends 'Thoughts After Lambeth';a1 have just had letters, which I shall send you, commending my pamphlet, the one from Lord Halifax is the most important, and he is the head of the Catholic party.4 I have sent you a little book about myself, not because it is good, but merely because it is about me.5 You will be able to detect some of the places where Tom Mac Greevy’s interpretations are wrong – MarieWaste Land, Thethe figure of 'Marie';a3 von Moritz was a lady about the age I am now, I guess, who was living in my pension in Munich, and whom I sometimes took walks with. But her conversation is almost word for word!6
Dear dear Emily.
1.Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), by Edmond Rostand; in the acclaimed blank-verse translation (1923) by the American poet and librettist Brian Hooker (1880–1946). Roxane is the heroine.
EH had appeared as Roxane in a Boston Players production by Edward Vroom (who took the part of Cyrano de Bergerac), at the Jordan Hall, Boston, on 16 Nov. 1915.
2.Herbert Henry Davies, The Mollusc (comedy, 1907). EH had played the female lead – Dulcie Baxter, the ‘mollusc’ – in a production by the Cambridge Social Dramatic Society.
3.Jean Patou (1887–1936), French couturier and designer.
4.C. L. WoodWood, Charles, 2nd Viscount Halifax, 2nd Viscount Halifax (1839–1934), Anglo-Catholic ecumenist: President of the English Church Union, 1868–1919, 1927–34 – lived at Hickleton Hall, Doncaster, S. Yorkshire, where TSE visited him in Oct. 1927. TSE to his mother, 5 Oct. 1927: ‘He is a very saintly man – he is already over 89 – much older than you – but leads a very busy and active life’ (Letters 3, 736). Lord Halifax wrote on 27 Feb., ‘I have read your pamphlet with the greatest interest, &, if I may say so without the great impertinence, or presumption, think it quite admirable.’ (This letter was evidently not sent to EH.)
5.Thomas McGreevyMcGreevy, ThomasThomas Stearns Eliot: A Study;a1, Thomas Stearns Eliot: A Study (published on 22 Jan. 1931).
6.‘Mr Eliot has something of the fear of natural life that every sensitive man of experience has. It fits in with his Christianity, but it is personal too. As he has much to say in his later work for spiritual summer, so he had here something to say for nature’s winter, since one is less at the mercy of one’s dangerous natural delight in winter than one is in summer … Rain and water are very important in the imagery of the poem, and I take them to be symbolical of spiritual fertility (as thunder symbolizes the Fear of God). The passage goes on:
we stopped in the colonnade [quoting 10 lines of Marie’s speech].’ (McGreevy, 41)
InWaste Land, Thethe figure of 'Marie';a3 the margin of his copy of Herbert Howarth’s Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. Eliot, Eliotanti-Semitismand Marie von Moritz;a1n scribbled – against a passage (p. 198) describing how the figure of ‘Marie’ in The Waste Land ‘is touched with the quality of a passage from Hofmannsthal. Eliot built it, a critic has shown, from a passage in a book of memoirs …’ – this notation: ‘Verbatim from a conversation with Marie von Moritz, a Balt (said the Duke of Liechtenstein was a cousin). Not a very likeable character. Anti-semite, rather.’
Cf. Poems, I, 604–5.
4.C. L. WoodWood, Charles, 2nd Viscount Halifax, 2nd Viscount Halifax (1839–1934), Anglo-Catholic ecumenist: President of the English Church Union, 1868–1919, 1927–34 – lived at Hickleton Hall, Doncaster, S. Yorkshire, where TSE visited him in Oct. 1927. TSE to his mother, 5 Oct. 1927: ‘He is a very saintly man – he is already over 89 – much older than you – but leads a very busy and active life’ (Letters 3, 736). Lord Halifax wrote on 27 Feb., ‘I have read your pamphlet with the greatest interest, &, if I may say so without the great impertinence, or presumption, think it quite admirable.’ (This letter was evidently not sent to EH.)