[No surviving envelope]
I have not heard from you since your little note of May 19th, but also I have missed two boats this week by having had a slight cold to nurse, which I had to cure before going to Paris, and therefore going to bed in the evening. I am troubled by the long gap that this will leave in my correspondence, but I hope you will not worry. You have had my letter by the Queen Mary, and one after that, intravels, trips and plansTSE's 1936 American trip;c4efforts to coordinate with EH;a8 which I asked you to let me know when Smith started the term, and when and where I could see you – for as many days as possible – because I ought to make my reservation.
My cold was very slight, and was due to trying to pretend that we were having June weather when we weren’t. I haven[']t had a chance to put on my new spring suit yet, and I am now wearing exactly the clothing that I should wear in January. This has been the most steadily cold spring that I can remember – cold weather in June is not unusual for a few days, but it is usually preceded and followed by warm spells. Theresummerpainfully reminiscent of Gloucestershire;a7 has not been one summer day since I went to Little Gidding. AnywayEnglandGloucestershire;f6its countryside associated with EH;a3, it makes the spring more tolerable in a way, as otherwise I should have been thinking of summer in Gloucestershire.
IKrausses, the;a4 have sent a line to the Krauss’s, and I hope I may see them at least for a moment, and I should be glad to lunch with them if they would. ButJoyces, thedinner in Paris with;a3 Friday night we have to see the Joyce’s [sic], Saturday night I give my ‘lecture de poésies’, SundayBeach, Sylviadinner in Paris with Gide and;a2 nightGide, Andrédinner in Paris with Beach and;a2 dine with Sylvia Beach and André Gide (of all people!) andGilbert, Stuartin Paris;a4 Monday night with the Stuart Gilberts’. AndMassis, Henriand TSE's 1936 visit to Paris;a4 IMaritain, Jacquesand TSE's Paris itinerary;b7 want to see Massis and if possible Maritain. I shall be back by Wednesday morning (the 10th) at the latest; but I will try to make time for a letter from Paris – it won’t be a very good one, because it will have to be done in pen and ink!
I hope that you will soon have some plans for the earlier part of your summer, to tell me. I do wish that you could get quite away from every nervous strain and from older people, for two solid months; and not have to spend your time working up your course for the autumn. INeilson, William Allanconfers assistant professorship on EH;a3 am delighted with all that you tell me about Neilson, and his giving you your title of Assistant Professor. But I cannot help wishing bitterly that I could have the looking after you for the summer months and see that you rested and were built up properly for the winter.
So now, my dear Love, good-bye, as I shan’t be able to write you a proper letter until next Wednesday evening.
2.SylviaBeach, Sylvia Beach (1887–1962), American expatriate; proprietor (with Adrienne Monnier) of Shakespeare & Company, Paris, a bookshop and lending library. Her customers included James Joyce (she published Ulysses), André Gide and Ezra Pound: see Biographical Register.
5.AndréGide, André Gide (1869–1951), novelist, essayist, diarist, travel writer, translator, critic and anti-colonialist; co-founder of the Nouvelle Revue Française, 1908; author of numerous works in various genres including the novels L’Immoraliste (1902), La Porte étroite (1909), Les Caves du Vatican (1914), Corydon (1924) and Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925); and journals and autobiographies including Si Le Grain ne meurt (1924). Nobel Prize laureate, 1947.
4.StuartGilbert, Stuart Gilbert (1883–1969), English literary scholar and translator, was educated at Hertford College, Oxford (1st class in Classics), and worked in the Indian Civil Service; and then, following military service, as a judge on the Court of Assizes in Burma. It was only after his retirement in 1925 that he undertook work on Joyce, having admired Ulysses while in Burma. After befriending Joyce and others in his Paris circle (including Sylvia Beach and Valery Larbaud), he wrote James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Study (F&F, 1930). He helped Joyce with the French translation of Ulysses; and in 1957 edited Letters of James Joyce (with advice from TSE). In addition, he translated works by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Roger Martin du Gard, Paul Valéry, André Malraux, Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Georges Simenon.
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.
5.Henri MassisMassis, Henri (1886–1970), right-wing Roman Catholic critic; contributor to L’ Action Française; co-founder and editor of La Revue Universelle: see Biographical Register.
8.WilliamNeilson, William Allan Allan Neilson (1869–1946), Scottish-American scholar, educator, lexicographer, author (works include studies of Shakespeare and Robert Burns; editions of Shakespeare): President of Smith College, 1917–39. See Margaret Farrand Thorp, Neilson of Smith (1956).