[No surviving envelope]
I was immensely relieved to get your letter this morning – or rather at lunch time; for the post does not come till after I have left for my 9 o’clock (IHarvard UniversityEnglish 26 (Modern English Literature);a7on Joyce contra Lawrence;b1 lecturedJoyce, JamesDubliners;e5taught in English 26;a1 particularly well this morning, onLawrence, David Herbert ('D. H.')'The Prussian Officer';b2 Joyce and Lawrence, taking ‘Dubliners’ and ‘The Prussian Officer’ as my texts) and then had to hurry in to town for the long Easter Even Mass, arriving half an hour late, but this service is so long – nearly three hours – that people come in and out during it. I think I held out very well through the fortnight, but it was rather a stab when nothing came on Friday afternoon – I wasn[']t exactly worrying, because I felt sure that if anything had happened to you or your motor tour Mrs. Perkins would telephone me – but I was uneasy; andHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3TSE's dread of EH rationing;e5 am afraid that I have always at the back of my mind, after a long interval, the thought that perhaps your design is to begin spacing your letters at longer intervals: I should not be in a position to complain of that, and whatever Emily does is right; only in that event I should prefer frankness to misplaced gentleness! IHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3TSE's efforts to moderate himself within;e6 hope you will not mind my candour in saying that I have of course noticed a change, or readjustment, in your attitude <over a period of 2 years 6 mo.> – I have tried to conform to this to some extent, as I must recognise that it is right, but it has meant sometimes re-writing letters in which I expressed myself too ardently.
IHale, Emilytakes motoring holiday via San Francisco;c4 am glad that your trip was accomplished happily and successfully, I trust with no accidents; and I hope that you saw new people. But such a deal of driving amazes me; you must be a proficient driver by now; and I got the impression that Marie knew her way about a car pretty well. I should have found it extremely tiring. Your nerve and coolness astound me. And I am glad that you went to Ontario for Maundy Thursday, and am curious to know what you thought of it; and that you have had a Good Friday service in the oratory. YesBabbitt, Irvingailing in bed;a4, I am rather tired; but I had of course no social engagements – exceptBabbitt, Dora D.TSE has sombre lunch with;a1 once to lunch quietly with Mrs. Babbitt1 andFoester, Norman;a1 Norman Foerster2 – poor Babbitt is in bed again, I begin to fear that he will never recover – andSpencer, Anna Morris (née Murray);a3 Mrs. Ted Spencer has something similar, but she is young. I fasted throughout the week till lunch to-day, and find that I am naturally carnivorous, though I don’t want meat more than once a day. TheChristianityliturgy;b9Tenebrae;b1 PrincipalChurch of St. John the Evangelist, Bowdoin Streetduring Holy Week;a5 services were the very lovely ‘Tenebrae’ on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday evenings at St. John’s. During the service, which is chanted to a wailing kind of plainchant, the lights are gradually put out, and the last verses are read in darkness. Then Mass of Maundy Thursday, and I went in again in the afternoon with my rosary to watch before the Blessed Sacrament in the Chapel of Repose for an hour, and a third time to Tenebrae. ToChristianityliturgy;b9Mass of the Pre-sanctified;a2 my great mortification I missed Mass Good Friday – the ‘Mass of the Pre-Sanctified’ – one of the most impressive services in the whole Liturgy. I set my alarum clock for 5:30 as I had to be in Boston again at 7; but having got up at that hour on Thursday, andGraham, Gerald S.burns midnight oil;a4 having sat up too late (it was really my fault) drinking beer with Gerald Graham, who always has a letter from his wife to pull out of his pocket and read to me, and who asks my advice on the most intimate matters, and then reading, I did not hear it, and woke up at 7; so, seeing it was too late, I turned back and slept till 10. Which I needed, as I was up till 1:30 this morning preparing this morning’s lecture. ButChristianitysins, vices, faults;d5daydreaming;b3 perhaps it was a good thing that I did. I mean that for a little time after a confession one is apt to feel too clean and off guard; and what might be considered a minor fault like this serves to make one more watchful. Certain faults, like daydreaming, I am really trying to amend. It is at my stage – not in youth – that this afflicts one; when one has to live without hope in this world, except of useful endeavour, and for oneself only more of what one is sated with. ThereChristianitytemptation;d7to action/busyness;a1 is the temptation to be a man of action rather than a man of thought: a Samson Agonistes. TheMore, Paul Elmerquoted on the virtues;a7 virtuesChristianityvirtues heavenly and capital;e1purity;e2 IChristianityvirtues heavenly and capital;e1TSE's intentness on;a5 keepChristianityvirtues heavenly and capital;e1greatest of the virtues;b8 before my mind are humility, purity and charity, in that order (which is the way dear Paul More puts it)3 (by the way, I should like to have his letter back, it is a document in the case); and I am aware of being pitifully petty.
IEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)the possibility of divorcing;f2against what TSE symbolises;a2 thinkChristianityChristendom;b2TSE on his prominence within;a2 that I can say with no vanity or vainglory (which would be vain enough, in my case) that I have become, for a considerable number of persons that I do not know, a kind of symbol. The world always needs symbols, and selects them with very little knowledge of the person who serves as the symbol. These strangers writing to me to say how much this or that has meant to them have made me conscious of it. Not only strangers, IHayward, Johnwhat TSE represents to;a4 feelCurtis, Revd Geoffrey;a1 thatSpender, Stephenwhat TSE represents to;a3 I am a symbol for instance to John Hayward or to Geoffrey Curtis;4 even to Stephen Spender perhaps – who is all that I should dislike, being a half-Jew, an invert and a communist, but in whom I feel a curious physical attraction in spite of all that. It means a restriction on behaviour in some ways; things that other people could do I can’t: IEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)the possibility of divorcing;f2likened to Newman's conversion;a3 can say wholly withoutGladstone, Williamon Newman's conversion;a1 overestimating my importance that if I had a divorce it would be the greatest misfortune to the Anglican Church since Newman went over to Rome – and Gladstone called that a ‘catastrophe’. ItJoyce, JamesTSE appreciates loneliness of;b6 alsoLawrence, David Herbert ('D. H.')TSE appreciates loneliness of;a5 means a peculiar loneliness – aPound, Ezradistinguished from Joyce and Lawrence;a9 loneliness which I recognise sadly in Joyce and Lawrence, and interestingly enough, I don’t see in Pound, though I do not say that it is not there because I fail to see it – yesPound, EzraHugh Selwyn Mauberley;e6, there is something of it in ‘Mauberley’, so far his greatest poem. And the only consolation, and at the same time correction towards humility, is contained in the words: ‘can ye drink of the cup that I drink of ?’5
ByHotson, Marynot quite an Eliot;a2 the way, you are incorrect in referring to Mary Hotson as Leslie’s ‘Eliot wife’. Her name was Peabody, and she is no relation of mine, but a cousin of the Christopher Eliots’ on the mother’s side.
SoHale, Emilyas director ('producer');v9Lady Gregory's The Dragon;a2 I was right, and it is ‘Dragon’. But I can’t find the play. Will they all attempt brogues? I hope not.
I suppose I have written enough for one letter. So adieu, chère Emilie; I shall re-read your letter on Easter Day. I had two of my ‘scraps’ to enclose; but on second thoughts I have burnt them, and included some of their content herein. They are flaming on the hearth now. I shall go on being malicious about people. It should give you a vicarious pleasure like being malicious yourself, without any of the moral responsibility: I am extremely considerate of your Conscience.
1.DoraBabbitt, Dora D. D. Babbitt (1877–1944), wife of Irving Babbitt (1865–1933).
2.NormanFoester, Norman Foerster (1887–1972) – he was a contemporary of TSE’s at Harvard, though they did not meet at the time – taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; then as Director of the School of Letters, University of Iowa, 1930–44. See Robert Falk and Robert E. Lee, ‘In Memoriam: Norman Foerster 1887–1972’, American Literature 44 (Jan. 1972), 679–80; J. David Hoeveler Jr., The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 1900–1940 (1977).
TSE wrote in ‘American Critics’, TLS, 10 Jan. 1929 – a review of The Reinterpretation of American Literature, ed. Foerster – ‘Mr Norman Foerster is one of the most brilliant of Mr Babbitt’s disciples, and one of those nearest to the master. His recent work, American Criticism … contains, besides much sound criticism, an authoritative exposition of the “New Humanism”.’ He would characterise Foerster, in Thoughts after Lambeth (1931), as ‘the fugleman of Humanism. Mr Foerster, who has the honest simplicity to admit that he has very little acquaintance with Christianity beyond a narrow Protestantism which he repudiates, offers Humanism because it appeals to those “who can find in themselves no vocation for spiritual humility”! without perceiving at all that this is an exact parallel to saying that Companionate Marriage “appeals to those who can find in themselves no vocation for spiritual continence” … One can now be a distinguished professor, and a professional moralist to boot, without understanding the devotional sense of the word vocation or the theological sense of the virtue humility; a virtue, indeed, not conspicuous among modern men of letters’ (Selected Essays, 359–60; CProse 3, 568–73).
3.See TSE to More, Letters 6, 582.
4.RevdCurtis, Revd Geoffrey Geoffrey Curtis (1902–81), Anglican priest, scholar and teacher: see Biographical Register.
5.Matthew 20: 20–2: ‘Then came to him the mother of Zebedee’s children with her sons, worshipping him, and desiring a certain thing of him. And he said unto her, What wilt thou? She saith unto him, Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom. But Jesus answered and said, Ye know what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?’
1.DoraBabbitt, Dora D. D. Babbitt (1877–1944), wife of Irving Babbitt (1865–1933).
2.IrvingBabbitt, Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), American academic and literary and cultural critic; Harvard University Professor of French Literature (TSE had taken his course on literary criticism in France); antagonist of Rousseau and romanticism; promulgator (with Paul Elmer More) of ‘New Humanism’. His publications include Literature and the American College (1908); Rousseau and Romanticism (1919); Democracy and Leadership (1924). See TSE, ‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt’ (1928), in Selected Essays (1950); ‘XIII by T. S. Eliot’, in Irving Babbitt: Man and Teacher, ed. F. Manchester and Odell Shepard (1941): CProse 6, 186–9.
4.RevdCurtis, Revd Geoffrey Geoffrey Curtis (1902–81), Anglican priest, scholar and teacher: see Biographical Register.
2.NormanFoester, Norman Foerster (1887–1972) – he was a contemporary of TSE’s at Harvard, though they did not meet at the time – taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; then as Director of the School of Letters, University of Iowa, 1930–44. See Robert Falk and Robert E. Lee, ‘In Memoriam: Norman Foerster 1887–1972’, American Literature 44 (Jan. 1972), 679–80; J. David Hoeveler Jr., The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 1900–1940 (1977).
5.GeraldGraham, Gerald S. S. Graham (1903–88), a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, was Instructor in History at Harvard, 1930–6, where he was befriended by TSE. After a period as Assistant Professor of History at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, he was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1940–1; and during WW2 he served in the Canadian Army. Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London, 1949–70; Life-Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal Commonwealth Society; general editor of the Oxford West African History series. An authority on naval power and the British Empire, his works include Sea Power and British North America, 1783–1820: A Study in British Colonial Policy (1941) and The Politics of Naval Supremacy (1967). See further Perspectives of Empire: Essays presented to Gerald S. Graham, ed. J. E. Flint and Glyndwyr Williams (1973). TSE told Mary Trevelyan, 15 June 1949, he was ‘giving dinner to Professor Graham, the very meritorious Professor of Canadian History at London University whom I knew when he was tutor at Eliot House’.
11.JohnHayward, John Davy Hayward (1905–65), editor and critic: see Biographical Register.
6.TSEHotson, Leslie stayed with Leslie andHotson, Mary Mary Hotson at Haverford College, where he lectured on ‘The Development of Shakespearean Criticism’ in Roberts Hall on 24 Mar.
1.JamesJoyce, James Joyce (1882–1941), Irish novelist, playwright, poet; author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939).
4.PaulMore, Paul Elmer Elmer More (1864–1937), critic, scholar, philosopher: see Biographical Register.
3.Ezra PoundPound, Ezra (1885–1972), American poet and critic: see Biographical Register.
13.SpencerSpencer, Anna Morris (née Murray) married Anna Morris Murray (b. 1902) in 1927.
12.Stephen SpenderSpender, Stephen (1909–95), poet and critic: see Biographical Register.