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IMerriman, Roger BigelowLenten dinner with;a6 should not like Ash Wednesday to pass without a note to you. Tonight I have dined with the Master – and although there are obvious irritating features about Merriman, he is in some ways a person of considerable delicacy – I said in accepting that I should be glad to dine if I might be allowed to dine à jeun1 – and I found that the whole dinner was arranged so that I could, on this day, eat it. ThenDekker, ThomasThe Shoemaker's Holiday;a1 toSpencer, Theodoreand Matthiessen co-direct Dekker;b3 aMatthiessen, Francis Otto ('F. O.')and Spencer co-direct Dekker;a2 performance of Dekker’s ‘Shoemaker’s Holiday’ in the House Hall; very well done, considering, the boys entering into it with excellent spirit – it was done entirely by House boys under the direction of Spencer and Matthiessen; and a great help and justification of the ‘House Plan’ to have this sort of thing. I was rather dejected to-day; partly from not getting enough sleep, so that my work flagged; partlyLittle, Clarence C.appals TSE;a2 from dining at the Littles (I mean the Reverend Littles) in Brookline, and meeting my old friend Clarence (‘Pete’) Little again for the first time in so many years, and finding that I really was miserable in his company. That again comes of being old-fashioned; but there was nothing to be done about it; his ideas and his feelings are abhorrent to me; and to hear him talk complacently about his daughter’s enforced marriage (to legitimise a child) was immonde:2 there is nothing to be done about it. IChristianityorthodoxy;c4sets TSE at odds with modernity;a3 don’t feel at home in this modern world, and I have no disciples.
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.
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).
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.TheodoreSpencer, Theodore Spencer (1902–48), writer, poet and critic, taught at Harvard, 1927–49: see Biographical Register.