[No surviving envelope]
IMairet, Philip;a4 did not write last night – I was dining with Philip Mairet and his wife1 in any case, because I preferred to have a letter for you for your arrival. Unfortunately I left my typewriter to be repaired when I fetched yours. I meant to bring an office typewriter back this evening; but I had yours in one hand & my case in the other. IHale, Emilylodges at 19 Rosary Gardens;h1 called at 19 Rosary Gdns. & left yours: the servant seemed promising. So I have nothing to write with & this letter will be a poor brief one.
I wanted to welcome you, because I did not need to read to the end of your letter to notice a forlorn tone. YouEnglandLondon;h1its fogs;a5 are arriving in London in foggy damp October, having left a lovely village where you have made yourself loved, and having had no doubt a trying time in lodgings in Oxford, dreading the town, and not knowing the future – having nothing to look forward to. So you need a great deal of comforting: and I want to do everything in my power to make this period as pleasant as possible in itself.
For the immediate future. I should like to look in for a few minutes tomorrow evening, as you suggest it. If you prefer not, you can telephone me at the office, orMorley, Frank Vigor;e5 to Oxford & Cambridge Club at dinner time, where I shall be dining with Morley & his father. I would come about 9.15 for ½ hour. But I am free for lunch or dinner on Thursday, and at any time on Saturday & Sunday except Sunday eveningStudent Christian Movementpoetry reading for;a1 when I must read to the Student Christian Movement. ThereBach, Johann SebastianBusch Quartet's Brandenburg;a2 is I am told the Busch Quartette doing the Brandenburg at the Queen’s Hall Thursday night if you would like to hear it. NextWoolf, VirginiaEH taken to tea with;c2 week, if I can arrange it, I should like to take you to Virginia’s for tea. IMorrell, Lady Ottoline;f5 must have a small teaparty for Ottoline. AndSweeney AgonistesEH taken to revival;c3 willMurdocks, thetaken to Sweeney Agonistes;a3 you come to the next Group Theatre production (not Sweeney) to help me out, as I ought to do something for the Murdocks?
I can’t go to the 1st night of ‘Murder’ either with you or behind scenes, becauseMaritain, JacquesTSE chairs talk by;b4 that is the night on which I take the chair for Maritain.2 I should like you to meet him, as Jeanie likes him.
Please (1) I want to see as much of you as I can (2) I am always at your disposal for any purpose (tel: Western 1670) (3) I don’t want to impose myself upon you.
But if you prefer that I should not come in tomorrow night, please speak to me (not to B.O’D.!) on the telephone and tell me when I may see you.
ISweeney AgonistesEH's opinion on;c4 agree with you (1) Sweeney is not suitable for a theatre. (But I think it one of the best things I have written). (2) ThatCriterion, TheOctober 1935;c8which TSE regrets as too personal;a2 bit of the commentary was wrong: I should never be personal in that place: it was in bad taste.3 I was racking my brain to think of something to write about to fill up space.
So you need not feel ‘shy’ in making criticisms! I like it!
TellPerkins, Dr John Carroll (EH's uncle)comes by The Achievement of T. S. Eliot;c3 ‘J.C.P.’ 4 thatMatthiessen, Francis Otto ('F. O.');a5 IMatthiessen, Francis Otto ('F. O.')The Achievement of T. S. Eliot;b1 had been hoping Matthiessen’s ‘Achievement of T.S.E.’5 would not reach your household. The book embarrassed me: undiscriminating praise; it will do me no good – But he is such a nice man.
When have I written such a long letter by hand? Is it legible? I shan’t write any more tonight! This is only to bring a message of sympathy & devotion, at a moment when I think you need it.
Be careful to keep warm, hot water bottles etc.
1.Ethel Mairet (1872–1952), British hand-loom weaver; author of Hand-weaving To-Day: Traditions and Changes (F&F, 1939, 1944).
2.TSE was to chair Maritain’s lecture, ‘Science et sagesse’ on 29 Oct. at the Warburg Institute.
3.‘CommentaryCriterion, TheOctober 1935;c8'Commentary';a1n’, Criterion 15: 58 (Oct. 1935), 68–9: ‘I suppose that I am a defeatist. This suspicion had not occurred to my mind until it was implanted and confirmed by a writer in The Modern Churchman, a few days ago. It is not a very recent issue of The Modern Churchman: it is dated January–February 1935; but I am not a modern churchman myself, and the spring comes slowly up my way. The Rev. J. C. Hardwicke, M.A., B.Sc., says that the Intellectuals are in retreat. He uses the term “retreat” in the military, rather than the religious sense, although the two meanings seem to have something in common for him, and that something derogatory. His company of Intellectuals is miscellaneous, and holds all the views that he disapproves of, whether these views are consistent or not. I am not surprised to find myself mentioned with Mr Alfred Noyes as “these two modern poets”, because a clergyman absorbed in being a modern churchman can hardly be expected to be careful of other meanings of the word “modern”. Nor am I really astonished to find myself in the company of Berdyaev and Bergson, two quite different philosophers with whom I am not aware of having much affinity. It is pleasant to find Plato and Mr Christopher Dawson by my side in the line of retreating intellectuals; not so pleasant to be told that I have had “an unhealthy influence upon the cultural underworld”: that is to say that under my protecting wings had grown up Buchmanism, which is to be an ally of fascism – though on the other hand the intellectuals “imagine that they can prevent war, for example, by preaching pacifism”. And I and my queer associates behave in a way than which “nothing is more sinister and more cowardly and indolent”…
‘For Mr Hardwicke – I only take him as a common type of verbal zealot – the intellectual is a person who repudiates reason, and at the same time evades more tasks. One moral task surely is to endeavour to make a more patient analysis than Mr Hardwicke has made; another to make a more coherent synthesis than our newspapers encourage us to make; a third to accept no palliative for a local malady without endeavouring to find out what is wrong with the whole body; another to find out by what principles men ought to be moved, and another to acquaint ourselves with men’s actual motives. It is those to whom the facts of life have only become visible in the last twenty years, who can be surprised at the situation to which we have come. T. S. E.’
4.John Carroll Perkins.
5.F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1935).
8.PhilipMairet, Philip Mairet (1886–1975): designer; journalist; editor of the New English Weekly: see Biographical Register.
5.JacquesMaritain, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), philosopher and littérateur, was at first a disciple of Bergson, but revoked that allegiance (L’Evolutionnisme de M. Bergson, 1911; La Philosophie bergsonienne, 1914) and became a Roman Catholic and foremost exponent of Neo-Thomism. For a while in the 1920s he was associated with Action Française, but the connection ended in 1926. Works include Art et scolastique (1920); Saint Thomas d’Aquin apôtre des temps modernes (1923); Réflexions sur l’intelligence (1924); Trois Réformateurs (1925); Primauté du spirituel (1927), Humanisme intégral (1936), Scholasticism and Politics (1940), Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953). TSE told Ranjee Shahani (John O’London’s Weekly, 19 Aug. 1949, 497–8) that Maritain ‘filled an important role in our generation by uniting philosophy and theology, and also by enlarging the circle of readers who regard Christian philosophy seriously’. See Walter Raubicheck, ‘Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, and the Romantics’, Renascence 46:1 (Fall 1993), 71–9; Shun’ichi Takayanagi, ‘T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and Neo-Thomism’, The Modern Schoolman 73: 1 (Nov. 1995), 71–90; Jason Harding, ‘“The Just Impartiality of a Christian Philosopher”: Jacques Maritain and T. S. Eliot’, in The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, ed. J. Heynickx and J. De Maeyer (Leuven, 2010), 180–91; James Matthew Wilson, ‘“I bought and praised but did not read Aquinas”: T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and the Ontology of the Sign’, Yeats Eliot Review 27: 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2010), 21; and Carter Wood, This Is Your Hour: Christian Intellectuals in Britain and the Crisis of Europe, 1937–40 (Manchester, 2019), 69–72.
7.F. O. MatthiessenMatthiessen, Francis Otto ('F. O.') (1902–50) taught for 21 years in the English Department at Harvard, where he specialised in American literature and Shakespeare, becoming Professor of History and Literature in 1942. The first Senior Tutor at Eliot House, he was a Resident Tutor, 1933–9. Works include The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935) and American Renaissance (1941).
4.FrankMorley, Frank Vigor Vigor Morley (1899–1980), American publisher and author; a founding editor of F&F, 1929–39: see Biographical Register.
4.LadyMorrell, Lady Ottoline Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938), hostess and patron: see Biographical Register.
3.DrPerkins, Dr John Carroll (EH's uncle) John Carroll Perkins (1862–1950), Minister of King’s Chapel, Boston: see Biographical Register.
1.VirginiaWoolf, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), novelist, essayist and critic: see Biographical Register.