[No surviving envelope]
J’ai l’honneur de vous accuser réception de votre honorée du 12 courant, qui a été l’objêt de mon attention soutenue, au Pays de Galles, et qui pourrait me donner l’occasion de quelques réflexions à coté, étant susceptible à des interpretations disparates.1 Also I must thank you for the post card, the humour of which, being simple and direct, was tout à fait au niveau de mon intelligence.2 I would not have you suppose that I missed your delicate irony: I did observe that the Post Office allowed ‘Five Words of a Complimentary Character ½d.’ and that although you imposed the ½d. stamp you were unable to think of 5 words of a complimentary character. WellFabers, the1934 summer holiday with;c1. Mytravels, trips and plansTSE's 1934 Faber summer holiday;b5described;a4 week in Wales passed off very pleasantly; nothing much has happened in Cardiganshire; the news since last year is that Mr. Stewart shot a hitherto unknown species of lion in the Lybian Desert last winter, andVaughan, Ernest, 7th Earl of Lisburnemourns favourite gun-dog;a1 thatdogsdeath of Lord Lisburne's gun-dog;a7 Lord Lisburne is just coming out of mourning – that is to say, he shot his favorite gun-dog accidentally, and so refrained from shooting all through August. My pneumatic boat, and theatrical make-up set were well received, and the children gave a performance of Jinglebie’s Circus; also my matchbox with a jumping frog inside it, floating sugar lumps etc. produced their due effect. I enclose a few photographs, but respecting your tastes do not send those of Bathing Beauties (that is, Faber and myself ) butFaber, AnnTSE pleased with photos of;a3 I think the ones of Ann are rather charming. AndHale, Emilyphotographs of;w7in bacchanalian pose;b9 they illustrate the pneumatic boat. I also rather like the two photographs of yourself which I enclose, especially the bacchanalian pose before the front door. The photographs for which you ask will not be ready before the end of the week, as I am having them enlarged. YesGalitzi, Dr Christine;b4, I sent the set of books to Miss Galitzi, inscribed yes, before I went to Wales.
AUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wellsconsulted on question of divorce;c1 pleasant weekend in Rochester – made my summer confession – had a long talk with the Dean – which does not alter, but confirms, the position – so I will not go into detail. Returned to find myself very busy, and with dinner engagements for every night this week – MondayCulpin, Johanna ('Aunt Johanna', née Staengel)reports Nazi horrors;a6 to old Jan Culpin, back from Germany with fresh tales of Nazi horrors – TuesdayCheetham, Revd Eric;a5 with the Vicar – tonightPound, Dorothy Shakespear;a2 withShakespear, Olivia;a2 Dorothy Pound and her mother Olivia Shakespear – tomorrowBussys, the;a1 with the Bussys (MadamBussy, Dorothy (née Strachey)TSE on;a2 Bussy was one of Lytton Strachey’s sisters, and a really charming woman)3 andMarichalar, Antonio;a1 Friday with Don Antonio Marichalar,4 inconveniently turned up from Madrid – SundayHayward, John;b4 with John Hayward. Also in the daytime – tea tomorrow with Elizabeth Wentworth, one of Marian’s great friends. ThisEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)separation from;f1efforts to retrieve TSE's property;c5 morningBird, ErnestTSE's consultations with;a2 an interview with my solicitor Bird, and finally instructed him to obtain a writ in the King’s Bench Division of the High Court for my property.5 IEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)mental state;e8post-separation;a8 have reason to believe that V. is more deranged, or certainly as deranged as ever; and I don’t know what effect this will have upon her, but I am determined to see the thing through. If she should contest it, and if the evening papers should be short of scandals, there may be publicity; but I don’t believe she will do anything. But meanwhile the affair must always be on my mind. TheUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wellssupportive over TSE's separation;c2 Dean considers that I am right to pursue the matter in this way, and I feel no scruples whatever, and am not afraid of publicity.
Intravels, trips and plansEH's 1934–5 year in Europe;b4TSE's plans to entertain EH en route to Europe;b2 spite of what you say, I hope at least that I may be permitted to see you once or twice during your stay in London, if there is a stay – but I should not be surprised if you all went directly from Campden to Rome. Nottravels, trips and plansEH's 1934–5 year in Europe;b4EH's continental itinerary;b3 that IItalyRome;b3not a museum;a1 don’t like the idea of your spending the winter in Rome: ifChristianityRome;d2;a1 youfascismcorrupts TSE's image of Rome;a5 can only, only let Rome make the impression upon you that it should, detached from all and any fascist fuss, Rome as the centre of the civilised world, not Rome as a museum of antiquities, but Rome as the Rock of the world we live in.
It is now one o’clock, and this must do instead of a letter. Well. I am very dissatisfied with it. The most pleasant thought of the moment is, that although Vanderbilt is probably the better skipper, Sopwith has undoubtedly the better boat and I hope he will win.6 I read that revelations are promised about the private life of Monsieur Prince: they are probably fabricated by the French Police.7 MiddletoneconomicsSocial Credit;a6 MurryMurry, John Middletonattacks TSE over Social Credit;a5 has attacked me as a representative of monetary reformers, and I must do something about it.8
Oh yes, I knew I had forgotten something. YesterdayEyre, Mary B.TSE on;b1 I took out to lunch Miss Mary B. Eyre.9 Just come from Derbyshire, where the Eyres were very important people about 1390. She is an odd woman – a mixture of perceptivity and wooliness – flirtatious but it has all gone into psychology – but a Lady – and spoke very appreciatively, according to her lights, of You, which mattered most.Narquoise.10 I wonder if you make her out better than I do.
1.‘I have the honour to acknowledge receipt of your honour of the 12th instant, which was the object of my sustained attention in Wales, and would give me the opportunity for some reflections besides being susceptible to disparate interpretations.’
2.‘quite at the level of my intelligence’.
3.DorothyBussy, Dorothy (née Strachey) Bussy (1865–1960) – one of thirteen children of Sir Richard and Jane Strachey; sister of Lytton – was married to the French painter Simon Bussy. Chief translator of André Gide, and his intimate. Her novel, Olivia, was published anonymously by the Hogarth Press. See Barbara Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford, 2005).
4.AntonioMarichalar, Antonio Marichalar, Marquis of Montesa (1893–1973), author, critic, biographer; contributor to the newspaper El Sol and the periodical Revista de Occidente (on subjects including Claudel, Joyce, Valéry and Virginia Woolf). Works include Mentira desnuda: ‘The Naked Lie’ (essays on European and US culture, 1933); Riesgo y ventura del duque de Osuna (1932): The Perils and Fortune of the Duke of Orsuna, trans. H. de Onís; Julián Romero (1952).
5.See TSE to Maurice Haigh-Wood, 19 Sept. 1934, Letters 7, 322–3.
6.In the America’s Cup 1934, the American Harold Vanderbilt helmed Rainbow (defender), and the British aircraft pioneer Sir Thomas Sopwith piloted the J Class yacht Endeavour (challenger). The American won, but the race was one of the closest ever.
7.In the wake of the presumed assassination in Jan. 1934 of the Polish-born French fraudster Alexandre Stavitsky, an event which exposed the connivance of several leading statesmen (even the President of the Council of Ministers, Camille Chautemps, had been forced to resign) – see TSE’s letter to EH, 23 Mar. 1934, above – a French Judge in Appeal named Albert Prince was tricked into travelling from the capital to Dijon (his ailing mother was in a nursing home there), where his mutilated body was found on a railway line. A post-mortem examination discovered traces of a toxic substance in his blood, indicating that he had almost certainly been poisoned before his body was dumped in the path of a train. M. Prince had been due to give evidence before the parliamentary committee investigating the Stavisky scandal, so it was rumoured that he had become a victim of a ruthless government cover-up.
8.JohnMurry, John Middletonattacks TSE over Social Credit;a5 Middleton Murry, ‘The Treason of the Clerks’, The Adelphi 8: 6 (Sept. 1934), 381–8:
SinceeconomicsSocial Credit;a6Douglas, Major Clifford Hugh ('C. H.')
More than ever, I am convinced that Socialism is the only solution to our present ills. That conviction, with which and because of which I entered upon Socialist politics, has been confirmed and deepened. But, on the other hand, I have learned that Socialists are really few and far between, and that is it inordinately difficult to convince people of the necessity of Socialism. Very few members of the working-class really believe in Socialism. Naturally, they desire better conditions; but they cannot easily see that the only way to secure conditions which are permanently better, conditions indeed which are not (for the working-class as a whole) conditions of gradual decline in the standard of living, is to make the radical change in the ownership of the land and capital of the nation which is Socialism. And the “intelligent” people who are perturbed by the situation almost always yield to their desire to believe that there is an easy way out of the impasse of capitalist society. They have a powerful instinctive resistance not merely to accepting the Marxian analysis of capitalist society, but to making any real effort to understand it. (I understand this resistance well enough, from personal experience. It cost me a considerable effort to expose myself to the acid solvent of the Marxist critique.) And the most notable form which this resistance takes in the modern intellectual is to pose as the mental and moral superior of the Socialist. Thus I find, in a recent number of New Britain, the following tell-tale observation from Mr. T. S. Eliot:
There is another ground for rejecting Communism and Fascism, which is simply that they do not appear to have any solution, or even any awareness of our real and urgent economic problems. Indeed, I gather from an article in The Adelphi that Social Credit Reform is to be deprecated because it might make people so contented that they would turn a deaf ear to the spiritual consolations of Communism.
I may be hypercritical in these matters, but I detect shallowness even in the half-deliberate confusion of Social Credit and Credit Reform. Both those phrases have meaning; but Social Credit Reform has none. I conclude that Mr Eliot, one of the chief apostles of intellectual seriousness in this generation, is not serious enough to take even Social Credit seriously. It is a handy stick to beat the Socialist, but nothing more. Mr Eliot scents danger. If he were to take even Social Credit seriously, he might find himself compelled to recognise the insufficiency of that doctrine, for it is an insufficiency of a kind wherein Mr Eliot is a connoisseur – the insuffiency which derives from the arbitrary and artificial abstraction of the economics of a society from the structure of society itself. Mr Eliot’s article concludes with these words:
We must remember that it is the Christians who must provide the emotional intensity that is necessary [to “abolish an order in which the distinctions are merely between the wealthy, the well-to-do, the poor and the destitute”]. And we must also remember that it is our Christian duty to think as well as to feel; to think as clearly, as consistently and as thoroughly as we can.
The juxtaposition of those two passages in a single brief article fills me with despondency. To my mind the whole article is a conspicuous example of thinking which is neither clear nor consistent nor thorough. When it comes to the point – and it comes to the point very early – Mr Eliot takes refuge from his professed obligation to think clearly and consistently and thoroughly behind his lack of training in economic and political thinking. “I suffer (he says) like most of my generation is not having been brought up to think about politics and economics.” He hastens to add: “But if we had, we would certainly have been taught wrong.” So that what, in fact, Mr Eliot suffers from, is not having been brought up to think wrongly about politics and economics. One would have thought this a happy escape and not a disability. But not at all.
Substantially, there are for Mr Eliot two possibilities, and only two: the one to have been taught to think wrong about politics and economics, the other not to think about them at all. Having escaped the former, he succumbs gracefully and gratefully to the latter destiny. This may perhaps be reckoned Christian earnestness in these queer days; I call it an elegant jem’enfichisme. Beneath this attitude of Mr Eliot I discern a triviality which frightens me.
For I retain, from former association and disputation, a measure of respect for Mr Eliot. I desire to respect him still. I desire to believe that, however incomprehensible to me may be the positions which he takes up, he is incapable of cheapness and superficiality. And when I am forced to the judgment that he is being cheap and superficial, I am frightened. I say to myself: if this is how Mr Eliot behaves, what of the rest? Because the case of Mr Eliot seems to me a sinister example of what M. Benda has called, in a quite different connection, la trahison des clercs – the treason of the clerisy.
See too ‘The Money System’ – letter signed by Lascelles Abercrombie, Bonamy Dobrée, TSE, Aldous Huxley, Hewlett Johnson, Edwin Muir, Hamish Miles, Herbert Read, I. A. Richards – The Times, 5 Apr. 1934, 6: ‘It would appear that the possibilities of production throughout the world have enormously increased, so as to give each individual a certainty of adequate provision for the necessities of life. There appears to be lacking some machinery of distribution, by means of which the enormous values inherent in the national capacity to produce could be made available to every man and woman. One such scheme has been before the public for some years, and is attracting increasing attention; and, though it has been severely criticized, the scheme shows a surprising vitality.’
Inevitably, in a follow-up letter – ‘The Monetary System’, The Times, 10 May 1934, 10 – the signatories felt obliged to affirm that the scheme they had in mind ‘as notably requiring thorough discussion is that concerned with Social Credit and associated in particular with the name of Major C. H. Douglas’.
TSE to C. Marshall Hattersley, 13 June 1934 (Letters 7, 225): ‘The cause of monetary reform, whether or not one accepts Douglas’s scheme, or any other, in its entirety, is something for which it is now a public duty for every man to use his influence; and if I believed that I could forward it by addressing the Social Credit Association, I would put aside any other engagement. But I do not believe that this cause will benefit by speeches from those who would only appear to be incompetent zealots. At present, the best that I can do is to let it be known publicly that I believe in the necessity for reform or revolution on Social Credit lines.’
9.Mary B. Eyre (BA, MA, Stanford), Professor of Psychology at Scripps College.
10.Narquoise (Fr.): sly.
3.DorothyBussy, Dorothy (née Strachey) Bussy (1865–1960) – one of thirteen children of Sir Richard and Jane Strachey; sister of Lytton – was married to the French painter Simon Bussy. Chief translator of André Gide, and his intimate. Her novel, Olivia, was published anonymously by the Hogarth Press. See Barbara Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford, 2005).
4.RevdCheetham, Revd Eric Eric Cheetham (1892–1957): vicar of St Stephen’s Church, Gloucester Road, London, 1929–56 – ‘a fine ecclesiastical showman’, as E. W. F. Tomlin dubbed him. TSE’s landlord and friend at presbytery-houses in S. Kensington, 1934–9. See Letters 7, 34–8.
3.MaryEyre, Mary B. B. Eyre, Professor of Psychology, lived in a pretty frame house on College Avenue, Claremont, where TSE stayed during his visit to EH at Scripps College.
AnnFaber, Ann Faber (1922–78) was born and registered in Hampshire: her mother would teasingly refer to her as a ‘Hampshire hog’. She was a boarder at Downe House School, Berkshire, and read history at Somerville College, Oxford (where she became engaged to Alan Watt, who was to be killed at El Alamein). After Oxford, she spent time with the Wrens in Liverpool. Following her military service Ann was employed as secretary by the classical scholar Gilbert Murray in Oxford. She then moved to London where she worked for the family firm in editorial and publicity, as well as writing and publishing a novel of her own, The Imago. However, in Aug. 1952 she suffered a life-changing accident when she crashed her motorcycle, which resulted in the loss of the use of her left arm. (In the mid-1960s she was still doing a little freelance work for Faber, reading manuscripts for Charles Monteith and – in 1967 – arranging a lunch party at her home for the science fiction writers James Blish and Brian Aldiss and their wives.) In Apr. 1958 she married John Corlett, who had two children – Anthony and Brione – from his first marriage, which had ended in divorce. Ann and John did not have children of their own. In the early to mid-1960s Ann and John spent some weeks or months of most years in the West Indies. John had launched and Ann helped with a business called Inter-Continental Air Guides: their firm sold advertising space to hotels and other tourist destinations for inclusion in guidebooks which Ann compiled. In 1966 Ann and John moved from their flat in Highgate to Wiltshire. In the late 1960s or early 1970s John contracted polio while on a work trip to Hong Kong. He became a paraplegic and for the remainder of Ann’s life she was his primary carer, with financial assistance from her mother. During all the years that she had her own property, whether in London or in Wiltshire, Ann’s great love was her garden. Ann died of cancer in March 1978. John survived her by two or three years.
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).
11.JohnHayward, John Davy Hayward (1905–65), editor and critic: see Biographical Register.
4.AntonioMarichalar, Antonio Marichalar, Marquis of Montesa (1893–1973), author, critic, biographer; contributor to the newspaper El Sol and the periodical Revista de Occidente (on subjects including Claudel, Joyce, Valéry and Virginia Woolf). Works include Mentira desnuda: ‘The Naked Lie’ (essays on European and US culture, 1933); Riesgo y ventura del duque de Osuna (1932): The Perils and Fortune of the Duke of Orsuna, trans. H. de Onís; Julián Romero (1952).
1.JohnMurry, John Middleton Middleton Murry (1889–1957), English writer and critic; editor of the Athenaeum, 1919–21; The Adelphi, 1923–48. In 1918, he married Katherine Mansfield. He was friend and biographer of D. H. Lawrence. His first notable critical work was Dostoevsky (1916); his most influential study, The Problem of Style (1922). Though as a Romanticist he was an intellectual opponent of the avowedly ‘Classicist’ Eliot, Murry offered Eliot in 1919 the post of assistant editor on the Athenaeum (which Eliot had to decline); in addition, he recommended him to be Clark Lecturer at Cambridge in 1926, and was a steadfast friend to both TSE and his wife Vivien. See F. A. Lea, The Life of John Middleton Murry (1959); David Goldie, A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919–1928 (1998).
4.DorothyPound, Dorothy Shakespear Shakespear Pound (1886–1973), artist and book illustrator, married Ezra Pound (whom she met in 1908) in 1914: see Biographical Register.
6.OliviaShakespear, Olivia Shakespear (1863–1938), novelist and playwright; mother of Dorothy Pound, made an unhappy marriage in 1885 with Henry Hope Shakespear (1849–1923), a solicitor. She published novels including Love on a Mortal Lease (1894) and The Devotees (1904). Through a cousin, the poet Lionel Johnson (1867–1902), she arranged a meeting with W. B. Yeats, which resulted in a brief affair and a lifetime’s friendship. Yeats wrote at least two poems for her, and she was the ‘Diana Vernon’ of his Memoirs (ed. Denis Donoghue, 1972). See Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909–1914, ed. Omar S. Pound and A. Walton Litz (1984), 356–7.