[41 Brimmer St., Boston]
I am almost dreading tomorrow morning, lest I come in and find no letter – my last one was on last Wednesday, so that I look for one – but what if there is none?
I think that the experience you told me of was perfectly good, normal and right for both you and the girl. Similar experiences happen to thousands, according to their degree of sensibility and refinement; nothing is more natural than for a sensitive young person to feel this attraction and admiration for an elder of their own sex, and the influence can be very great for good, of the right person. And innumerable teachers, priests, and people in such positions have had the same experience. IHighgate SchoolTSE's recollections of;a1 once, whenhomosexualitywhich reminds TSE of his own experiences teaching;a2 I was a schoolmaster at Highgate, had something of that feeling towards one of my boys, but it was not reciprocated, and I do not think he was even aware of me. The only danger in such a relationship seems to me to be this: In the more intimate relation of a man and a woman there is a kind of equality which comes from reciprocity of power. Each one has both the sense of dominating and the sense of being dominated – at least in a right adaptation of two congenial persons, – and is both dominant and submissive. But in the other relationship, with the same sex and considerable difference of age, the power is all on one side – or mostly. I am sure that yours was exerted all for good – I am only pointing out that the relationship is a right one though it can be abused. YearsFranceParis;b7TSE's 1910–11 year in;a1 ago, when IhomosexualityTSE's experiences in Paris;a3 was in Paris in 1910–11, I was very much under the influence of an Englishman much older than myself, named Matthew PrichardPrichard, Matthewhis influence on TSE;a1, a strange intense fanatical fellow, who did at that time very much modify my life, and influenced deeply my views on art and philosophy.1 In some respects, it was very much to the good, and I owe him a great debt. In others it was not, and IChristianityspiritual progress and direction;d6TSE's crisis of 1910–11;a1 felt simultaneously a fascination and an aversion which was a great mental strain and precipitated at one moment a kind of mystical crisis which was awful. I felt afterwards that the man had an abnormal love of power over younger men which sprang from some sexual distortion (his life however was most ascetic) or possibly from some early and crushing blow to his pride. Certainly, he only consorted with very young men, which was a bad sign, and in the course of his career many had been his temporary disciples. He is living in London now, and from time to time I come across young men who are seeing him: but I have not seen him for twenty years. InPrichard, Matthew'Mr Silvero' in 'Gerontion';a2 a poem called Gerontion'Gerontion'and Matthew Prichard;a1 I referred to him as Mr. Silvero).2
Even this however is quite separated from real sexual inversion. Some twelve years ago or more, I struck up a friendship with Lytton StracheyStrachey, Lyttonkissed TSE;a1,3 which terminated one evening when he went down on his knees and kissed me – I was completely taken aback, and in such a shock my first impulse was to laugh, for there was something farcical about it; and then I felt terribly ashamed for him – and sometimes it is more painful to feel ashamed for another person than for oneself. I am afraid he was really hurt; he is a sensitive person, and after all he can’t help being like that, and I do like him otherwise, and like all his family very much. We never met again except in company.
Perhaps it is inexcusable for me to be led so far away from the point. The excuse was that you said you sometimes felt troubled in retrospect; and I wanted to put the whole matter in perspective and show you that you had nothing at which to be troubled or anything but glad. The one torment of conscience which one never gets rid of is the thought of the harm one has done to others; and you have never done any harm; and it is bad for you to worry needlessly about what was really good.
As for my belief in you – well, dear, that is one thing you can be sure is permanent and unshakeable. And I myself live on my belief in you, and always have done and always shall. It is the one fixed point in this world for me.4 My pride in you is my only substantial pride. I believe I appreciate more keenly what I have now, than I ever should without the experience of loneliness and the experience of the world that I have had. You and I know what solitude is, better than most people.
My dinner at the House of Commons was rather tiring.5 ItEnglish Review;a1 was an assemblage of people got together to elaborate a political and social anti-Fabian programme particularly for the ventilation in the English Review. Mostly politicians present – IWallop, Gerard, Viscount Lymington (later 9th Earl of Portsmouth)also at anti-Fabian dinner;a1 had an ingenuous young M.P. named Lord Lymington,6 and a rather drearyCavendish, Edward William Spencer, Marquess of Hartington (later 10th Duke of Devonshire);a1 Marquess of Hartington,7 to talk to. InterminableLloyd, George;a1 speeches of course, leading nowhere – Lord Lloyd8 spoke to the point, he is one of the ablest of the conservatives; but JackSquire, Sir John Collings ('J. C.')bores TSE;a1 Squire9 got up and yarned on and on the utterest balderdash. I left as soon as he had finished, so escaped having to say anything myself. I have no patience with people who find it easier to speak than to stop speaking. I doubt if there is enough brains in the lot to accomplish anything.
To-day I lunch with Aldous HuxleyHuxley, Aldous;a110 – rather a charming letter the enclosed is I think11 – tomorrowBell, Clivelunches TSE and the Woolfs;a1 withWoolfs, the;a1 Clive Bell 12 and the Woolfs13 – Thursday is confessionUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wellsconfession with;a4 and lunch after with Canon Underhill. It sounds very social, doesn’t it? but is not so gay as it sounds. NextChristianityliturgy;b9Mass of the Pre-sanctified;a2 week is Holy Week, the last in Lent, which means daily church, and the terrific Mass of the Pre-sanctified on Good Friday.
I do hope I may have a letter tomorrow. And what are you writing now, and are you quite well and rested?
I shall write again as soon as I have my letter.
What a prosy letter! I’ll do better next time.14
1.MatthewPrichard, Matthew Prichard (1865–1936), charismatic English aesthete who had served as Assistant Director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1904–7, where he met the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, the artist and curator Okakura Kakuzo (1862–1913), and the critic Roger Fry (who was then working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A devotee of Henri Bergson, Prichard advocated a non-representational theory of aesthetics; and while living in Paris in 1908–14 introduced Henri Matisse to Byzantine art. TSE fell under the influence of Prichard after being introduced to him by his brother Henry. From 1918 until his death on 15 Oct. 1936, Prichard lived in London, where he attracted a group of staunch admirers at the Gargoyle Club (including John Pope-Hennessy and the club’s owner).
See further John D. Morgenstern’s fine essay ‘The Modern Bacchanal: Eliot and Matisse’, in The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts, ed. Frances Dickey & John D. Morgenstern (Edinburgh, 2016), 51–68.
2.‘Mr Silvero / with caressing hands, at Limoges / Who walked all night in the next room’ (Gerontion, 23–5).
3.LyttonStrachey, Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), writer and critic; a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group. Works include Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921). See Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography (1971); The Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. Paul Levy (1972).
4.See Hebrews 12.2 and 13 for Jesus as the ‘fixed point’. TSE is here flirting with heresy.
Cf. ‘Burnt Norton’:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
5.Details unknown.
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).
7.EdwardCavendish, Edward William Spencer, Marquess of Hartington (later 10th Duke of Devonshire) William Spencer Cavendish (1895–1950), Conservative politician, was Marquess of Hartington, 1908–38, before succeeding his father as 10th Duke of Devonshire.
8.GeorgeLloyd, George Lloyd (1879–1941), Conservative politician, Anglo-Catholic, opponent of the National Government, whom Tories of the far right (such as Jerrold) wished to replace Baldwin.
9.J. C. SquireSquire, Sir John Collings ('J. C.') (1884–1958), poet, essayist and parodist, was literary editor of the New Statesman; founding editor, 1919–34, of London Mercury – in which he was antipathetic to modernism; he sniffed at The Waste Land: ‘it is a pity that a man who can write as well as Mr Eliot does in this poem should be so bored (not passionately disgusted) with existence that he doesn’t mind what comes next, or who understands it’ (23 Oct. 1922). Evelyn Waugh mocked him – as ‘Jack Spire’, editor of the London Hercules – in Decline and Fall (1928). Knighted 1933.
10.AldousHuxley, Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), novelist, poet, essayist: see Biographical Register.
11.HuxleyHuxley, Aldouscritiques 'Thoughts After Lambeth';a2n wrote'Thoughts After Lambeth'critiqued by Aldous Huxley;a7n from Dalmeny Court, Duke Street, London S.W.1, on ‘Thursday’ (n.d.): ‘My dear Tom, / I waited to write & thank you for your pamphlet till I was back again in England, when a letter might be followed up by a conversation.
‘I liked the pamphlet in the main, (in spite of the banderillos you plant in my rump) & agree with what you say on the need for an asceticism based on some inward consent to denial, some acceptance of a hierarchy of values. You say that the only possible hierarchy is the Christian. It may be; but I don’t feel convinced. The world was civilized – & with a civilization in many respects superior to mediaeval & modern civilization – for at least 4000 years before the rise of Christianity & probably for much longer. This being so, I don’t see why the “experiment of attempting to form a civilized, but non-Christian mentality” [Thoughts After Lambeth] should necessarily fail. It was done before; so it can presumably be done again. True, it seems improbable that it can be done on the current Wells–Ford lines: but there are other lines. Whether in fact the other lines (including the Christian line) are followable, I don’t know. Perhaps the modern circumstances are inevitably imposing Wells & Ford. PerhapsHuxley, AldousBrave New World;b7;a1n we’re doomed to Utopia – for the real horror of Utopia is that it can be realized. Machines & the new psychological & physiological techniques (of Pavlov, of Watson etc) make it possible. A most horrible thought. I am at present trying to write of the horror in a fable about the Future – the realized Utopia & a rising against it (naturally suppressed in the end: it wd have no chance).
‘I am harried at the moment by the rehearsals of a comedy of mine which is shortly to be produced: but hope none the less to see you. Wd there be a chance of getting you to lunch on Monday, say, or Tuesday next? Either at the Athenaeum or, if that were too far from Russell Sq, somewhere in the shade of the British Museum. I do hope so; & also that you are well & Vivienne too. Please give her my love. / Yours / Aldous H.’
12.CliveBell, Clive Bell (1881–1964), author and critic of art: see Biographical Register.
13.LeonardWoolf, Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), writer and publisher; husband of Virginia Woolf: see Biographical Register.
14.This line added by hand.
12.CliveBell, Clive Bell (1881–1964), author and critic of art: see Biographical Register.
7.EdwardCavendish, Edward William Spencer, Marquess of Hartington (later 10th Duke of Devonshire) William Spencer Cavendish (1895–1950), Conservative politician, was Marquess of Hartington, 1908–38, before succeeding his father as 10th Duke of Devonshire.
10.AldousHuxley, Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), novelist, poet, essayist: see Biographical Register.
8.GeorgeLloyd, George Lloyd (1879–1941), Conservative politician, Anglo-Catholic, opponent of the National Government, whom Tories of the far right (such as Jerrold) wished to replace Baldwin.
1.MatthewPrichard, Matthew Prichard (1865–1936), charismatic English aesthete who had served as Assistant Director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1904–7, where he met the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, the artist and curator Okakura Kakuzo (1862–1913), and the critic Roger Fry (who was then working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A devotee of Henri Bergson, Prichard advocated a non-representational theory of aesthetics; and while living in Paris in 1908–14 introduced Henri Matisse to Byzantine art. TSE fell under the influence of Prichard after being introduced to him by his brother Henry. From 1918 until his death on 15 Oct. 1936, Prichard lived in London, where he attracted a group of staunch admirers at the Gargoyle Club (including John Pope-Hennessy and the club’s owner).
9.J. C. SquireSquire, Sir John Collings ('J. C.') (1884–1958), poet, essayist and parodist, was literary editor of the New Statesman; founding editor, 1919–34, of London Mercury – in which he was antipathetic to modernism; he sniffed at The Waste Land: ‘it is a pity that a man who can write as well as Mr Eliot does in this poem should be so bored (not passionately disgusted) with existence that he doesn’t mind what comes next, or who understands it’ (23 Oct. 1922). Evelyn Waugh mocked him – as ‘Jack Spire’, editor of the London Hercules – in Decline and Fall (1928). Knighted 1933.
3.LyttonStrachey, Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), writer and critic; a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group. Works include Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921). See Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography (1971); The Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. Paul Levy (1972).
2.Revd Francis UnderhillUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wells, DD (1878–1943), TSE’s spiritual counsellor: see Biographical Register.
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).
13.LeonardWoolf, Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), writer and publisher; husband of Virginia Woolf: see Biographical Register.