[41 Brimmer St., Boston]
Your lovely and saintly letter arrived on Saturday. I Must [sic] write to thank you and to say a little more; and as that little more is so much more than my feeble hand can write, that I must type it – I never keep carbons of private letters – however strange such things will look to me in type. I am not a very good typist, even.
Well, I had been in a state of torment for a full month. I went over and over in my mind every possible reply to my letter that I would think of; and I believed that I was reconciled to anything my Lady1 might say; the only possibility I could not bear to contemplate was that she might not write at all. Now you have made me perfectly happy: that is, Happier than I have ever been in my life; the only kind of happiness now possible for the rest of my life, is now with me; and though it is the deepest happiness which is identical with my deepest love and sorrow, it is a kind of supernatural ecstasy.
And the moment of your letter’s coming seemed also a Gift of Divine Grace. The day before, I had made a confession; andUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wellsreceives TSE's confession of love for EH;a1 Fr. Underhill2 had told me that it was not wrong for me to love you and to cherish your thought and image in my heart, but that it was a gift of God to help me in troubles and for spiritual development. That made me more serene, and the next day, the Saturday, I made my communion, and stopped and prayed for a quarter of an hour – it was All Saints Day – and felt happier still. Then I had to go to the LondonLondon Library;a1 Library for some books, and I thought I would look in here and see if there was a letter from you. And when I saw the handwriting that always thrills me I was thankful that it was a Saturday with no secretaries or other people about to see my agitation; and I could sit down all alone with you. And too, your letter has come as a support – the one thing that could – in a time of particular trouble. And I want you to know how utterly, from now, I shall depend upon you as a friend, and as long as you are in this world I shall want to stay here too.
I could not help writing; I could not endure concealment any longer. And I am glad for this reason also, thatHale, Emilyvisits the Eliots for tea;a1 we met, though it was torment to me at the time, and I was so afraid of spilling tea that I was a very poor host. Because when I saw your blessed face I knew at once that even since we last met you had been through great pain; that you had reached an unusual spiritual maturity and knowledge; it made you more radiantly beautiful, though I did want to stroke your forhead [sic]. Forgive me for writing like this, just once.
What further I want to say is merely to explain, in as few words as possible, what I think you should understand. WhenHale, Emilyrelationship with TSE;w9TSE's first acquaintance with;a1 I first knew you I was immature for my age, timid, discouraged, and intensely egotistical. (That is my consolation: that it is better for me to have lost you to become a little more worthy of you, than to have won you when I was unworthy. But the mystery of pain is why you, Love, who have never needed chastisement, should have had to have a life of pain. – I know nothing, your whole life for 15 years is a gap to me, but I feel that it is so). AtOxford UniversityTSE's time at;a1 OxfordAmericaTSE on not returning in 1915;a1EnglandOxford, Oxfordshire;i2as recollected by TSE;a1 I was in a very disturbed state; for I knew that I should never be a good professor of philosophy, that my heart was not in it, that my mind even was not good enough. I did want to write poetry, and I felt obscurely that I should never write in America; andHale, EmilyTSE's love for;x2in 1915;a3 so I suppose I persuaded myself gradually that I did not love you after all. I did not know till 1916 what price I had paid. ItEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)marriage to;e6TSE on entering into;a1 is a greater sin to marry without any feeling at all, I consider, than to marry even from low passion; for a year I was merely dazed and numbed, and did not know what was the matter; then, quite suddenly, I awoke. Well, I did not know how much, if any, harm I had done to you; but I could know quite well, the harm I had done which was under my eyes; and I came to see that this at all events I must expiate with the rest of my life.
I did try, again and again, to love as I had promised; but failed utterly; and no one could thrive on what I had left to give. AndCunard, NancyTSE's liaison with;a1 then, a year before I saw you first, having failed to do right, I tried to do wrong. I was living then largely in a society in which the liaison is always condoned, even when not practiced, and in which it is practised almost without concealment by persons received everywhere. So I tried to have a love affair with a young society woman who was living apart from her husband, and who was, I am afraid, rather notorious, and in spite of wealth and position was even looked at askance by some.3 I tell you all this, which may horrify you, because I love you too much to want you to think better of me than is right, so I take that risk. It was the first and last occasion on which I have ever committed adultery. It was over almost before it was begun, and it left a taste of ashes which I can never forget.4 I describe the person, who after all is a goodhearted woman who was corrupted by a bad mother, merely to say that I am sure I did her no harm: she found another lover almost at once. There was great provocation at the time; and then I had no moral scruples. I learned something, about the world and about myself, andRussell, Bertrandhis malign influence;a1 then I escaped finally from the influence of Bertie Russell – not that he had any hand in that case.5
But even then I still tried to persuade myself that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by persuading myself that my heart was dead: at any rate, I resigned myself to celibate old age; IWaste Land, Theonce seemed like a consummation;a1 had done The Waste Land, and I thought my life was done. When I saw you at EcclestonHale, EmilyTSE's love for;x2and their conversation in Eccleston Square;a1 Square, I had convinced myself that you were only a sentimental memory, and that seeing you would prove it. And you must know now, looking back, that pretense went down like a house of cards, and I found myself for a time quite lost, everything had to be reorganised. ItChristianityAnglo-Catholicism;a8which he dates to Eccleston Square meeting;a2 is from then that my active spiritual life dates, also two years of increasing difficulty, and the rest I do not need to tell.
This is to make quite clear that seeing you last month was not at all the revival of something dead; I knew exactly how I felt and had known for years. Had it been a sudden flash, as in certain other unnamed circumstances, I should have no right to tell you. I want to convince you that my love for you has been the one great thing all through my life.
It is hard for me to believe that no man has cared for you as I have; though I should be extremely jealous. But I like to believe that I am capable to [sic] knowing you and appreciating you as no one else can – I do appreciate spirituality when I meet it, and by that word I mean something very rare and precious indeed. And I like to believe a little that I am capable of more intense and deep devotion to one person than are most men.
I pray you only to have the charity to forgive me for all I have told you, and to let me have a line to say so. And now I think I have said all I need to say. I believe also that you can understand me as no one else in the world can.
SinceEliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns (TSE's mother)effect of her death on TSE;a1 my mother6 died I have felt very much alone, and youHale, Emilylikened to TSE's mother;a3 will take some of her place for me too. I loved her very much, and felt much sympathy with her, and like to think that you and she are somewhat alike.
I feel that my remark about ‘friends’ was a little unkind; I have so much kindness and even, I think, some affection. MyWhibley, Charlesas friend;a1 dearest friend, Charles Whibley, died this year.7 But I shall want to write to you from time to time, not like this letter, but about my friends and my interests, and any impersonal matters like theology and politics and poetry. And I want to know if you got the three parcels of books, and about your lecture. AndWaste Land, Thethose lines addressed to EH;a2 I want to ask you please, to re-read the hyacinth lines in <Part I.> The Waste Land, and the lines toward the very end beginning ‘friend, blood shaking my heart’ (where we of course means privately of course I) and compare them with Pipit'Cooking Egg, A'and EH;a18 on the one hand and AshAsh Wednesdayinspired by EH;a1 Wednesday9 on the other, and see if they do not convince you that my love for you has steadily grown into something finer and finer. And I shall always write primarily for you.
1.Jewel Spears Brooker, ‘Eliot’s Ghost Story: Reflections on his Letters to Emily Hale’, Time Present: The Newsletter of the International T. S. Eliot Society, no. 101 (Summer 2020), 10: ‘In the initiatory letters, Hale is “My Lady”; like Beatrice, she is the adored absentee who unbeknownst to her influenced his conversion; she is the font of “supernatural ecstasy”.’ See further the 'Lady' addressed in Ash-Wednesday (1930).
2.Revd Francis UnderhillUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wells, DD (1878–1943), TSE’s spiritual counsellor: see Biographical Register.
3.The pointer that TSE gives here puts it beyond doubt that the ‘young society woman’ in question was Nancy Cunard (1896–1965). Writer, journalist, publisher and political activist, Nancy was the daughter of Sir Bache Cunard, heir to the Cunard Line shipping business, and of the American heiress Maud Alice Burke, who flourished as a London hostess under the name of ‘Emerald’ Lady Cunard (1871–1945). Nancy cultivated lovers and friends including Michael Arlen, Aldous Huxley and Louis Aragon. In 1920 she moved to Normandy where she ran the Hours Press (successor to Three Mountains Press), 1928–34, whose productions included works by Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett. Her own works include Black Man and White Ladyship (1931); Negro: An Anthology (1934); Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937) – a pamphlet sponsored by Left Review – and Poems for France (1944); memoirs of Norman Douglas (1954) and George Moore (1956); and These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Réanville and Paris, 1928–1932 (1969). See Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel 1896–1965, ed. Hugh Ford (1968); Anne Chisholm, Nancy Cunard: A Biography (1981); Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (1986); François Buot, Nancy Cunard (Paris, 2008); and Judith Mackrell, Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (2013). Cunard was married in 1916 to a cricketer and army officer named Sydney Fairbairn, but they separated in 1919 and were divorced in 1925.
SandeepCunard, NancyTSE's liaison with;a1n Parmar, in her introduction to Selected Poems of Nancy Cunard (Manchester, 2016), notesYeats, William Butler ('W. B.')known to TSE from 1916;a1n that Cunard was introduced to
the avant-garde circles of wartime London, populated by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Pound was already known to Cunard’s mother, as was T. S. Eliot; both had been guests at her Cavendish Square soirées, includingYeats, William Butler ('W. B.')At the Hawk's Well;c5 the first performance of W. B. Yeats’s play At the Hawk’s Well in London in 1916 … Years later, on hearing of Eliot’s death in January 1965, Nancy wrote a poem titled “LetterCunard, Nancy'Letter';a4” (published here for the first time) in which she recalled first meeting him at one of her mother’s society balls.
—We met, you and I, first, that summer night of 1922,
At a ball – You in ‘smoking’, I in a panniered dress
Of Poiret: red, gold with cascading white tulle on the hips.
The P. of W. was there (so polite, lovely face) and we danced together;
The hostess, that small termagent, in all her glitterings,
Brilliant was she, the hostess, at this sort of thing.
—Bored by it all was I. After many dances we went down
Alone, by the grand staircase to the supper room.
It was then; Eliot, you came in, alone too, for the first time to my eyes;
Well-advised of you was I, already somewhat versed in you:
I mean Prufrock.
… In ‘Letter’ she goes on to describe a gin-fuelled tryst with Eliot in front of a gas fire in a private room above Soho’s Eiffel Tower restaurant.—(xiv–xv)
In Jan. 1965 Cunard sent her verses to John Hayward, who urged her to be discreet: not to pass them around. She concurred: ‘As for the personal element in my “Letter” to you (called “Letter” on purpose). I meant it that way. So you understand. I wondered, thinking you would.’
Cunard’s desultory, nudging ‘Letter’ includes these lines:
—We were alone in that vainglorious room,
Both of us thinking, ‘Much can be talked about,
It seems.’ And so it was, despite others coming in,
For perhaps two hours on end and maybe more,
About, about, what about? Nor you, nor I
Could now recall – champagne and lobster well to hand.
So entranced was I by you I suggest ‘a tryst’
For the next night. You certainly came to it.—(Selected Poems, 227)
Parmar ventures, too, upon this surmise: ‘Unbeknownst to Cunard, T. S. Eliot made a cruel and inaccurate caricature of her as the whoreish “Fresca” in drafts of The Waste Land, a seventy-two line section wisely redacted by Ezra Pound from the final manuscript.’ (For the Fresca section, see Poems I, 332–4 and commentary.)
Lois G. Gordon, in Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Activist (2007), was the first biographer to postulate that Cunard sought out TSE, whose poetry she loved, and had a liaison, almost certainly a one-night stand, with him.
4.TSE to Geoffrey Faber, 18 Sept. 1927: ‘I like good food, probably more than you do: I remember a dinner in Bordeaux, two or three dinners in Paris, a certain wine in Fontevrault, and shall never forget them; Ialcoholas pleasure;a1n remember also minor pleasures of drunkenness and adultery …’
5.Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), one of the most influential twentieth-century British philosophers; co-author (with Alfred North Whitehead) of Principia Mathematica (1910–13), and author of innumerable other books including the popular Problems of Philosophy (1912), Mysticism and Logic (1918) – which was reviewed by TSE in ‘Style and Thought’ (Nation 22, 23 March 1918) – and History of Western Philosophy (1945). In 1914, Russell gave the Lowell lectures on ‘Our Knowledge of the External World’ at Harvard, where he encountered Eliot. OnRussell, Bertrandfirst impressions of TSE;a2n 27 March 1914, Russell described Eliot as ‘very well dressed and polished, with manners of the finest Etonian type’. He later characterised him as ‘proficient in Plato, intimate with French literature from Villon to Vildrach, and capable of exquisiteness of appreciation, but lacking in the crude insistent passion that one must have in order to achieve anything’. After their accidental meeting in 1914, Russell played an important role in introducing TSE to British intellectual life, as well as getting him launched as a reviewer for International Journal of Ethics and The Monist. HoweverEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)marriage to;e6alleged affair with Bertrand Russell;a2n, it has been alleged that, not long after TSE’s marriage, Russell had a brief affair with his wife Vivien – though in later years Russell would deny any such thing; on 28 May 1968 he wrote to Robert SencourtRussell, Bertrandimpressions of VHE;a3n: ‘I never had any intimate sexual relations with Vivienne. The difficulty between Eliot and Vivienne sprang chiefly from her taking of drugs and the consequent hallucinations.’ The three friends had shared lodgings for a period in [1916] at Russell’s flat in London. Russell was a Conscientious Objector and vocal opponent of WW1, which led to a brief prison sentence in Wandsworth. In later years, TSE saw little of his one-time professor and friend, and he attacked Russell’s philosophical and ethical views, in his ‘Commentary’ in the Criterion (April 1924) and elsewhere. Russell provides a partial account of his relationship with the Eliots in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell II: 1914–1944 (1968). See further Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1996); Ann Pasternak Slater, The Fall of a Sparrow: Vivien Eliot’s Life and Writings (2020).
6.CharlotteEliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns (TSE's mother) Champe Stearns Eliot (1843–1929): see Biographical Register.
7.CharlesWhibley, Charles Whibley (1859–1930), journalist and author: see Biographical Register.
8.‘A Cooking Egg’ (1919): see The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. I (2015), ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (hereafter Poems 1 & 2), 38–9. See further Lyndall Gordon, The Hyacinth Girl (2022), 83–96.
9.Ash-Wednesday (1930): Poems I, 85–97.
6.CharlotteEliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns (TSE's mother) Champe Stearns Eliot (1843–1929): see Biographical Register.
2.Revd Francis UnderhillUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wells, DD (1878–1943), TSE’s spiritual counsellor: see Biographical Register.
7.CharlesWhibley, Charles Whibley (1859–1930), journalist and author: see Biographical Register.
4.W. B. YeatsYeats, William Butler ('W. B.') (1865–1939), Irish poet and playwright: see Biographical Register.