[No surviving envelope]
IMaritain, JacquesTSE chairs talk by;b4 must drop you a line tonight, after writing to Maritain about his lecture next week andMaritain, Raïssa (née Oumansoff)thanked for her poems;a1 to Madame Maritain to thank her for her book of poems,1 and before outlining my short speech for tomorrow: firstwritingto someone as against speaking;b4 because I have not written for some time, and because unless I were seeing you for some time every day, quietly and alone, I should always feel the need to write as well. The times in your company as this morning and afternoon, are also very dear, and count very much in the accumulation of common experience of years, but they have not the intimacy of writing. WhatMurder in the Cathedral1935–6 Mercury Theatre revival;d8which EH attends;a3 I get out of an occasion like this morning, is a delightful feeling of your collaborating with me in production – even though I do not feel qualified to take much part, and you are too modest to do so. I hope that this afternoon gave pleasure; because I much enjoyed having them. IMorley, Frank Vigor;e6 thought that the incursion of Morley, even if I laid a sort of ambuscade for him, would be amusing; and I know that he can always carry off such occasions very well.
I thought that if there is nothing to be done about Sunday evening, we might, if you cared, go to a theatre on Friday evening, as a birthday occasion: weHale, Emilyand TSE visit Kenwood House;h3 should probably feel too tired after tramping about Hampstead Heath and Ken Wood2 on Saturday, to want to go that night. If you feel like it, and there is anything you would care to see, speak of it on Thursday morning, when I shall call for you, as to-day, to go to the Albert Hall. AlternativelySpeaight, Robert;b2, there is a rehearsal with chorus on Friday night, but it will not be complete as Speaight can’t be there.
Would you care to ask the Brownes to tea one day.
And now this is just to wish you good night, as if I were alone in the room with you, saying goodnight and goodbye until the next day.
I thought you looked very lovely this afternoon.
1.RaïssaMaritain, Raïssa (née Oumansoff) Maritain, née Oumansoff (1883–1960), Russian-born poet and philosopher, married Jacques Maritain in 1904. There is no book of her poems in TSE’s library.
2.Kenwood House is a seventeenth-century stately home situated on the northern boundary of Hampstead Heath: house and grounds have been open to the public since the late 1920s.
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.
1.RaïssaMaritain, Raïssa (née Oumansoff) Maritain, née Oumansoff (1883–1960), Russian-born poet and philosopher, married Jacques Maritain in 1904. There is no book of her poems in TSE’s library.
4.FrankMorley, Frank Vigor Vigor Morley (1899–1980), American publisher and author; a founding editor of F&F, 1929–39: see Biographical Register.
2.RobertSpeaight, Robert Speaight (1904–77), actor, producer and author, was to create the role of Becket in Murder in the Cathedral in 1935: see Biographical Register.