[41 Brimmer St., Boston]
After much chafing, I received your letter of the 6th late yesterday afternoon: I can’t understand the mails (I never tried to before); the post office seems every week to make my letter one day later. So though I have little time this morning, I must write a line or two, in case I have still less time tomorrow. And your letter gives me so much to say in addition to what I have to say anyhow.
I have sent two poses of my photograph from Vandyk.1 I meant to send all three, but they stupidly made up two of one instead. Tell me if you do not really like either, and I will have the third one done. My damned shyness or something prevented me from signing them – perhaps also the feeling that if I couldn’t write on them just as I wanted to write I preferred not to write at all; and leave the real message so to speak in invisible ink.
One thing I hesitate to ask – but it has been worrying me – so forgive me, dear, if it is intrusive – but do you find your visits to your mother very exhausting? Of course cases differ infinitely, according to the original character of the patient: but, you know, at three different periods I have had to visit constantly a patient in such a sanatorium – and I have never known more complete exhaustion of spirit.
Now, you are not to suppose that I have reached any appreciable or secure degree of spiritual development. Howalcoholwhisky as necessity;a4 can a man, who has to ration his own whisky, who has to struggle daily with the craving for oblivion, with his own irritable and hysterical temper, with physical and mental exhaustion, and with rebellious desires, have got very far? I have only just sufficient stubbornness of will never to abandon the struggle to make something better, the best, out of what I have.
To be quite candid – for it is better to expose you to my moods from day to day than to try to have one set mood to write to you in – your letter saddened me, and I felt for a time more rebellious and insurgent against circumstances than usual. It is partly perhaps that the weather is suddenly whollyspringtormenting;a1 springlike, and the lilacsflowers and floralilacs;b9in Russell and Woburn Squares;a1 are pushing out in Russell and Woburn Squares. (by the way this is W.C.1 not W.1.) and there are times when one has a sudden rush of useless natural vitality, and feels how much there is in the world to enjoy and how incredible that one should be cut off from it, when so many people – though not so many perhaps after all – can take it all freely. ICarroll, LewisTSE's personal torment suggests Alice in Wonderland;a1 think that one passage in Alice in Wonderland expresses subtly a great deal of human tragedy: do you remember that when she was the right size to get through the door into the garden she was too small to reach the key, and when she got the key she was too big to squeeze through the door, and could only lie flat and peep through?2
IhomosexualityEH's experience with former pupil;a1 want next Monday to write in response to the most intimate part of your letter – that about the young girl in Milwaukee.3 But I am sure that as it was, it was a good and normal experience, good for her and for you, and that you have nothing to regret.
I wonder still whether you can understand quite how much your letters mean to me. And I want you to understand that I am a kind of spiritual cripple; I know I have had much experience denied to most men, but also that I have never had full emotional realisation in this life, and have only looked at the happiness or ecstasy of others through a little window.
1.C. Vandyk Ltd, court photographer.
2.See Alice in Wonderland, ch 1: ‘Down the Rabbit-Hole’.
3.EHHale, Emilyas teacher;w1at Milwaukee-Downer College, Mich.;a3n worked for eight years from 1921 at Milwaukee-Downer College, Michigan, where she was in charge of vocal expression and dramatic work. She taught drama, directed plays at a club called The Mountebanks, and presided over Johnson Hall – a handsome red-brick dormitory building on Downer Avenue – where she had her own room. The salary was $1,000 per annum. Among other activities, she helped to organise a roster of visiting speakers, including Robert Frost and Edna St Vincent Millay in 1924; Helen Keller in 1925. See Phil Hanrahan, ‘T. S. Eliot’s secret love’, Lawrence Today 81: 4 (Summer 2001), 10–12.
It was in Apr. 1927, while on vacation in Florence (on leave from Downer College), that EH penned a letter to TSE.
(SheHale, Emilyas teacher;w1at Simmons College, Boston;a4n had previously spent three years, 1918–21, as a dormitory matron and official drama coach at Simmons College in Boston.)
4.‘I kiss both of your hands.’