[No surviving envelope]
IColumbia Universityconfers degree on TSE;a1 have just had a letter – dubious, it is true, because the dictator of it forgot to sign it – which purports that I am to be given the degree of Litt.D. by Columbia University in June. I am asked not to divulge the fact, so don’t you. It is interesting, as one gets older, that one is pleased – tickled in fact – by trifles of this sort which would have seemed indifferent and outrageous in youth. Perhaps it is that in age one has learnt to be content, in this world, with trifles. NowCorpus Christi College, Cambridgehonorary fellowship coveted at;a3 IUniversity of CambridgeTSE dreams of professorship at;a3 wantEnglandEnglish traditions;c4Order of Merit;a2 three things: I want to be a Fellow of Corpus, Cambridge; I want to be King Edward VII Professor of Literature in Cambridge University; and I want an O.M. How nice it is for one to want a few things still which are still within the bounds of possibility!
MemGalitzi, Dr Christine;a2: I must write to Miss Galitzi.
SuperbSears, the;a3 dinner at these people named Sears’s. They must have, or have had till Sunday night, the deuce of a lot of money. The beef-steak was the best I have ever eaten; the champagne was not bad; and what’s more surprising still, the salad was not badly dressed. SomeEnglandthe English;c1its Tories;a7 odd folk present; some named Domenico, seemingly (as a cockney servant would say) shady financiers; aLodge, Henry Cabot'a nincompoop';a1 young Henry Cabot Lodge & his nice wife – a nincompoop I thought him;1 thereWallop, Gerard, Viscount Lymington (later 9th Earl of Portsmouth)compared to American conservatives;a2 is more vitality, and more sense of reality, in some of my young English tories like Lymington.
YouEliot family, thehave public not private lives;a4 upbraid me for my extreme reserve – I am more reserved than most Eliots only by the fact that most of them have nothing to be reserved about, inasmuch as they notoriously have no private lives but only public ones; butAmericaits horrors;c2excessively polite;a5 what I object to in most Americans is that they are so BLOODY Polite always that you never know where you are with them. They may be disapproving of you totally and not say it, because they are too polite. IPerkinses, thetoo polite;c6 feel it with the Perkins’s, I feel it with all my relatives, ISheffields, thetoo polite;b2 feel it even with the Sheffields, of all people. I hate even to have my friends & relatives say ‘I beg your pardon?’ in that cumbrous way when they don’t quite catch what you say. I do feel that politeness is the curse of American society. OnceEnglandthe English;c1more blunt than Americans;a8, I remember, I invited some English friends to the theatre with us, and owing to a difference in idiom (I should phrase it differently now) they thought that they were expected to pay for their seats – they made it painfully evident that they had seen the play before and that they didn’t want to come although they came. When they discovered that they were invited guests at my expense the situation changed. But I now like that sort of frankness, though once I thought it brutal. Youappearance (TSE's)teeth;c2EH severe on the state of;a3 have been brutally frank with me* two or three times: (e.g. to take a small example, about my teeth), and you don’t know how joyously I welcome it – it seems like home to me – I begin to think that you are no more an American than I am, andFrancethe French;b6more blunt than Americans;a2 that you could hold your own in English or French society in a fraction of the time that it took me to learn – and I did have to learn how to take blows smiling, and then give them back (IBell, Cliveduels with TSE at dinner-party;a6 remember Clive Bell saying at a dinner party ‘Tom had his family here and wouldn’t let anyone see them’ – and being able to answer ‘I introduced them to a few of the sort of people I thought they would like to know’ – my first successful attempt).
ToHutchinson, Maryquondam admirer of TSE;a6 be fair to Clive, that was at a time when his mistress2 was for a brief moment infatuated (unsuccessfully) with me – I have succeeded in remaining on the best of terms with him, withHutchinson, St. Johncordial with TSE;a1 the lady’s husband, and what is most surprising, with herself: I think that speaks well for everyone concerned, especially for her.3
* in a mild way
1.The Searses could trace their lineage back to thirteenth-century England. The family included Phyllis (Sears) Tuckerman, Bostonian heiress, who in 1916 married Bayard Tuckerman Jr. (1889–1974), jockey, businessman, politician; and Eleanor Randolph Sears (1881–1968), champion tennis player and athlete; daughter of a Boston businessman – andLodge, Henry Cabot cousin of Henry Cabot Lodge (1902–85), who was to become Senator for Massachusetts; a distinguished, much-decorated soldier in WW2; vice-presidential running-mate to Richard Nixon; and later Ambassador to the United Nations, West Germany, and Vietnam. Henry Eliot had written to TSE, 15 May 1932: ‘when you come to New York, I should like to have you go to tea at the Tuckerman ladies’. They are charming representatives of the old regime; you would almost think yourself back in London. They have been most cordial to us.’
2.Mary Hutchinson.
3.Last three words added by hand.
12.CliveBell, Clive Bell (1881–1964), author and critic of art: see Biographical Register.
1.DrGalitzi, Dr Christine Christine Galitzi (b. 1899), Assistant Professor of French and Sociology, Scripps College. Born in Greece and educated in Romania, and at the Sorbonne and Columbia University, New York, she was author of Romanians in the USA: A Study of Assimilation among the Romanians in the USA (New York, 1968), as well as authoritative articles in the journal Sociologie româneascu. In 1938–9 she was to be secretary of the committee for the 14th International Congress of Sociology due to be held in Bucharest. Her husband (date of marriage unknown) was to be a Romanian military officer named Constantin Bratescu (1892–1971).
3.MaryHutchinson, Mary Hutchinson (1889–1977), literary hostess and author: see Biographical Register.
1.The Searses could trace their lineage back to thirteenth-century England. The family included Phyllis (Sears) Tuckerman, Bostonian heiress, who in 1916 married Bayard Tuckerman Jr. (1889–1974), jockey, businessman, politician; and Eleanor Randolph Sears (1881–1968), champion tennis player and athlete; daughter of a Boston businessman – andLodge, Henry Cabot cousin of Henry Cabot Lodge (1902–85), who was to become Senator for Massachusetts; a distinguished, much-decorated soldier in WW2; vice-presidential running-mate to Richard Nixon; and later Ambassador to the United Nations, West Germany, and Vietnam. Henry Eliot had written to TSE, 15 May 1932: ‘when you come to New York, I should like to have you go to tea at the Tuckerman ladies’. They are charming representatives of the old regime; you would almost think yourself back in London. They have been most cordial to us.’
6.GerardWallop, Gerard, Viscount Lymington (later 9th Earl of Portsmouth) Wallop (1898–1984), farmer, landowner (Fairleigh House, Farleigh Wallop, Basingstoke), politician, writer on agricultural topics, was Viscount Lymington, 1925–43, before succeeding his father as 9th Earl of Portsmouth. Conservative Member of Parliament for Basingstoke, 1929–34. Active through the 1930s in the organic husbandry movement, and, in right-wing politics, he edited New Pioneer, 1938–40. Works include Famine in England (1938); Alternative to Death (F&F, 1943). See Philip Conford, ‘Organic Society: Agriculture and Radical Politics in the Career of Gerard Wallop, Ninth Earl of Portsmouth (1898–1984)’, The Agricultural History Review 53: 1 (2005), 78–96; Craig Raine, T. S. Eliot (Oxford, 2006), 190–4; and Jeremy Diaper, T. S. Eliot and Organicism (Clemson, S. C., 2018).