[No surviving envelope]
I am writing this note partly before and partly after dinner, before going to the rehearsal at 8.30. First, we are to dress as last night, and I will call for you at 6.30. SecondMaritains, thedine with EH and TSE;a2, toHale, Emilydines with the Maritains;h4 thankMaritain, Jacqueswhich EH attends;b5 you again for coming to the lecture, and still more for coming to dinner – and I hope that you have not been feeling very tired to-day. Even if you have, may I say that it was worth it, so to speak, to me: becauseMcPherrin, Jeanette;d5 I wanted you to meet the people whom Jeanie had met and liked, and because I wanted you to meet a man for whom I have so much admiration and affection, and because it was a great help to me to have you there. During dinner and afterwards, I felt dropping with fatigue; but now it is over, I am very happy that it was done, and pleased with the way it went. (Also, pleased and supported by your ability to deal with any situation with dignity, grace and charm – and by your fluency and apparent ease of manner!) I have a note from Maritain this morning, expressing their enjoyment of the evening, and enclosing the manifeste.1 So I hope that you will not regard it as an evening wasted.
I should have liked to enquire why you were so tired, and (I thought) sad: but I thought that that would only have meant making you more tired still, to speak of it.
I have a letter from the most difficult case of the young men, which I should have liked to show you before answering, but he wants an answer by Friday, so I must write to him first.
I will explain about those ‘manifestoes’ later.
I hope you will be resting to-day and tomorrow. AboutHale, EmilyTSE's love for;x2and TSE's desire to be EH's spiritual possession;a4 Sunday evening, I only want now to say one thing: and that is, that for me it marked again a new stage. I have had ever since, a feeling that I surrendered myself more completely than ever before – though I should not have thought it possible – that I gave up some right over myself that I had retained (and it rather took my breath away, but I would not have it back!) – that henceforth I was responsible to you for everything I do and think, and exposed and humble and dependent as never before. And I don’t mean a feeling of the moment, but the experience of a change which is permanent and can never be undone. It is like a feeling I have had before, but of much deeper significance. I feel less free than four days ago, and like it, and it is as if I was ‘possessed’ by you.
1.JacquesMaritain, Jacquesthanks TSE for hospitality;b6n Maritain wrote from London (n.d.): ‘Très cher ami … Laissez-moi vous remercier encore de tout coeur de votre accueil si fraternel, et vous dire la profonde joie que nous avons eue, ma femme at moi, de cette soirée passé avec vous’ (MS EVE). ‘Very dear friend … Let me thank you again with all my heart for your fraternal welcome, and tell you the deep joy we had, my wife and I, for this evening spent with you.’
2.JeanetteMcPherrin, Jeanette McPherrin (1911–92), postgraduate student at Scripps College; friend of EH: 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.