[No surviving envelope]
Your letter of the 11th arrived this morning, via Bremen,1 acknowledging receipt of mine of the 29th January and of the 4th Feb.; but not mentioning two I wrote on the 31st January, and one on the 2nd February – so I presume those travelled by slower boats, and have been received subsequently. I am glad the Dublin letter gave satisfaction, butFogerty, Elsieher chorus versus Dublin chorus;b2 I am not sure that you would have really preferred the Dublin chorus to the Fogerty one. Fogerty’s method is not Greek, and does not pretend to be (that was presumably a kind of chant or song to music anyway), but I don’t think anyone can beat Fogerty’s arrangement of voices: the Dublin production was very much cruder, and its advantages were partly accidental – it’s easier for Irish girls to make themselves into old peasant women than for English girls, and they definitely became peasants, not lower middle class women such as I had in mind.
You will be glad to know that I have no more speaking engagements; and the two I have made for the autumn are provisional. I decline two or three every week, it seems to me. IGwynne, M. Brooke;a4 have told Miss O’D. to rearrange for Miss Brooke-Gwynne to come to tea soon, andTrouncer, Margareton warpath with second book;a7 also for Mrs. Trouncer, who is already agitating about her next book (although this one is not yet out) which she wants to write about Madame de Pompadour. But it is a battle to get things out of the way so as to get a long period to work on what I want to do. ISchumann, Robert;a1 was glad to have your enclosure about Schumann (I know nothing about his life) and for its encouragement. I don’t know what you mean about ‘looking better in the face’! butHale, Emilyappearance and characteristics;v7EH encouraged to gain weight;a8 I hope you are a little fatter in the neck, and I am delighted to hear that you are using creams and care. WellSheffields, thetheir marriage analysed;b7, as for Ada, she is a queer one. As a matter of fact I have never really understood her relations with Sheff: I think she is very fond of him – as who would not be? – and I know that she was very disappointed not to have children –but I cannot imagine that there was ever any very passionate feeling, or any very profound intimacy below the level of words – and of course there is a certain class incompatibility between them too – her attitude towards him always seemed to me somewhat like that she might have taken towards an adopted child. SheSheffield, Ada Eliot (TSE's sister)within the Eliot family dynamic;f4 is very proud, and her life has always been coloured by domestic bitterness. Her mental abilities were not appreciated at home, mother always admired Margaret much more, both for supposed beauty and supposed gifts; she had to fight to get a college education (my grandfather, I believe, disapproved of higher education for women) and to get away to earn her own living: and our parents, though very good people, were not exactly very good parents. All this has made a certain bond between us of a negative nature. AtHinkley, Susan Heywood (TSE's aunt, née Stearns)eventually repelled Ada;b9 one time, I believe, she was more intimate with Susie than with anyone. But quite naturally Susie became absorbed with her children and descendants, and then that streak of vulgarity and snobbishness in Susie rubbed her the wrong way. She knew that she had greater abilities than any of her sisters, and felt that she was the ugly duckling and unappreciated. You don’t know what complications of emotion and what cross currents there can be in a large family! But I am only trying to give a hint of why Ada has always been a bit distorted, and I think lonely, and has never, I think, had any adequate emotional life.
MyEliot, Henry Ware (TSE's father)as person and parent;a8 parentsEliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns (TSE's mother)as parent;b2 always seemed rather remote to me too. They were very kind and indulgent in some ways – I think too indulgent for one’s own good – and negligent and thoughtless in others. I could never have confided in them; andEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother)the favourite of TSE's parents;c5 I think they were fonder of Henry than of me – his weaknesses were more tolerable than mine. FromEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)marriage to;e6TSE's father's reaction;b1 the time I married I determined to make no appeal to them, and I felt that my father would consider that I had got what I deserved and ought to put up with it. My mother came to take a pride in my reputation which consoled her for the literary reputation she would have liked to have herself; but there was never any intimacy; and I was concerned chiefly, in her later years, with keeping up for her benefit the pretense of being happy and successful. So I am a very reserved and constricted person myself – perhaps more than you realise, because I am so much less with you than with anyone else; and I think I remain absurdly reserved with Ada. SoSheffield, Ada Eliot (TSE's sister)seems 'reserved' to EH;f5 if she is very reserved with you, that may be partly an effect of my reservation with her. But it is difficult to expose to her my relations with you, because I feel that they do not correspond to anything of which she has had experience. She will always remain something of a mystery to me, I fear. YouHale, Emilyrelationship with TSE;w9and TSE's habitual reserve;a4 must understand that I am a different person with you than with anyone else (and perhaps you are with me?)[.] It isn’t so much that I am sure that you will always understand what I mean (what two people can say that?) but what is more important, that I don’t stop to worry whether you will or not, before saying a thing. I don’t with you, as one mostly does, indeed I think more than one is conscious of, make myself up or make a selection of myself in order to meet what I believe you to be – I think I come very near to being perfectly natural! There has been so much communication between us (and during what a short period) both when we have been alone in the evening, and during our expeditions – communication that was not of words, or was being conducted at a deeper level while we were talking of other things. I do feel as if we had taken root in each other, and that we could not survive the roots’ being pulled up: it is both nature and growth.
I shall write again tomorrow or Friday. I love you so dreadfully and I put my arm round you and draw you close to me.
1.A Norddeutscher Lloyd liner.
6.CharlotteEliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns (TSE's mother) Champe Stearns Eliot (1843–1929): see Biographical Register.
3.HenryEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother) Ware Eliot (1879–1947), TSE’s older brother: see Biographical Register.
2.ElsieFogerty, Elsie Fogerty, CBE, LRAM (1865–1945), teacher of elocution and drama training; founder in 1906 of the Central School of Speech and Drama (Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft were favourite pupils). Fogerty was to train the chorus for the Canterbury premiere in 1935 of TSE’s Murder in the Cathedral.
4.M. BrookeGwynne, M. Brooke Gwynne, University of London Institute of Education – ‘a Training College for Graduate students’ – invited TSE on 19 Jan. to participate in their Weds.-morning seminar: ‘Emily Hale suggested that you might possibly consent to come to the Institute to talk to our students; otherwise I should have not felt justified in asking you … The teaching of poetry is the subject most hotly discussed & the subject we should like you to choose if possible.’
2.AdaSheffield, Ada Eliot (TSE's sister) Eliot Sheffield (1869–1943), eldest of the seven Eliot children; author of The Social Case History: Its Construction and Content (1920) and Social Insight in Case Situations (1937): see Biographical Register.
2.MargaretTrouncer, Margaret Trouncer (1903–82), author of A Courtesan of Paradise: The Romantic Story of Louise de la Vallière, Mistress of Louis XIV (F&F, 1936). See http://archive.thetablet.co.uk/article/18th-december-1982/23/obituary-margaret-trouncer