[5 Clement Circle, Cambridge, Mass.: forwarded to 154 Riverway, Boston, c/o Dr J. C. Perkins]
First I want to thank you for your letter received in Paris (that was a very good surprise) and for your letter by the Normandie which was waiting for me on my return, and for your letter by the Queen Mary which arrived yesterday morning. (GeorgeBlake, George;a9 Blake, who went over and came back on the Queen Mary at the invitation of the company, to broadcast, came in yesterday, and said that he had never seen such an exhibition of vulgarity as that of the first-class passengers, both ways, and added that the New York broadcasting people, who entertained him while there, were the toughest boys he had ever met). How beautifully you time your letters!
Thentravels, trips and plansTSE's spring/summer 1936 trip to Paris;c2recounted;a6 as for my visit, it was quite successful, I think. WeMorleys, thein Paris with TSE;h5 went to a small hotel which Morley had found before, which I recommend: the Hotel de Beaujolais, behind, or rather in, the Palais Royal. You get rooms looking out on the garden of the Palais Royal, so that you have both quiet and a beautiful outlook; and 30 fcs. a night for a room with a bath is not dear. WeGilbert, Stuartin Paris;a4 had the Stuart Gilberts to lunch on Friday (he is a retired I.C.S. judge with a French wife, who has written a book about Joyce).1 In the evening I think the Morleys went to a cinema, becauseJoyces, thedinner in Paris with;a3Joyce, James
IHavens, Paulappointed President of Wilson College;a2 will write to Paul Havens; I return Mrs. Havens’ letter herewith.9 I am very glad indeed for his good fortune; and as you suggest, the gradual disappearance of your friends from Claremont will make the place less regrettable; and I am sure you will find people you like in Northampton. And before this letter arrives you will be in Cambridge, to which I address it. It will be pleasant, won’t it, to be able to see your friends there more readily? As for August, you seem to have changed your plans, forFletcher, John Gould ('J. G.');a2 you had spoken first of going to the MacDowell Colony10 (if you went there you might run across an old friend of mine named John Gould Fletcher). TheHale, Emilyas actor;v8potentially in summer theatre company;c2 summer theatre company sounds very pleasant, but I am a little afraid of your getting fatigued – on the other hand the dramatic work may be a refreshing change, and you will be among younger people. I shan’t attempt to influence your decision! In your letter of May 26th, the one which I found here on my return, there was more than a note of weariness – in relation to circumstances which I think I understand very well, and will therefore say no more about now. I am glad that you are thinking of replenishing your wardrobe, and hope also that you will have comfortable clothing for the hot weather.
ByKrausses, the;a5Krauss, Arthur
This has been a dull letter, I know, with so much ‘diary’ to clear off: but I do like to keep you posted about the incidents of my ordinary life. This month is a busy one, in one way and other [sic]; tomorrowRichmonds, theTSE's Netherhampton weekends with;a7 to the Richmonds at Salisbury for the weekend, andEnglandEast Coker, Somerset;e9reasons for visiting;a3 thenEast CokerTSE's own plan to visit eponymous village;a3, if the weather is fine, IEnglandYeovil, Somerset;k6visited en route to East Coker;a1 shall make my sentimental journey to Yeovil (less than an hour from Salisbury) on Monday, to have a look at East Coker. It’sEnglandDevon ('Devonshire');e5the Eliots pre-Somerset home;a2 where my people lived for about a hundred and fifty years after they left Devonshire, and from which they came to Massachusetts; but I believe there are no traces of them left. AndWilliams, CharlesCranmer;b4 the following Saturday evening to see ‘Cranmer’ at Canterbury: It will be dismal to return to Canterbury without either St. Thomas or you. So if I go to Yeovil I shall not be able to write again until Wednesday.
Nowtravels, trips and plansTSE's 1936 American trip;c4efforts to coordinate with EH;a8 that you are in Cambridge, ISheffields, the;c1 wish you would discuss the September problem with Ada. AsAmericaRandolph, New Hampshire;g9the Eliot siblings return to;a2 for the week at Randolph, it’s a question whether she will feel it necessary to ask Henry and Theresa and Marian to come too, as they did in 1933. If it was you and I and Ada and Sheff, that seems to me possible, but the presence of so many more of my relatives – including two whom you have never met – and the necessity of giving everybody a certain amount of attention – and Henry and Marian are very fond of me, I believe – and of doing things collectively, would rather rob the occasion of delight. In any case, it is at best an extra.
1.I.C.S.: Indian Civil Service
2.SylviaBeach, Sylviathanks TSE;a3n Beach to TSE, Sunday 7 June 1936: ‘Please let me thank you again, Mr Eliot, for the pleasure you gave us last night! We admired you so much and were so moved, and felt indeed that we were privileged mortals’ (Princeton).
3.AdrienneMonnier, Adrienne Monnier (1892–1955), bookseller, publisher, essayist, translator; founder in 1915 of the bookshop La Maison des Amis des Livres; close associate of Sylvia Beach at her English-language bookshop Shakespeare & Company. In June 1925 Monnier launched a magazine, Le Navire d’Argent (‘The Silver Boat’), featuring a translation by Monnier and Beach of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: the first French translation of any poem by TSE. The magazine, which promoted works by European and American authors, ran for twelve issues. See The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, memoirs trans. Richard McDougall (1976). In response to a request for a contribution to a memorial (8 July 1955), TSE wrote to Françoise Hartmann, 31 July 1955: ‘My memories of Mlle. Monnier go back to the years immediately after the first world war … I have several memories of her and of her bookshop in the period between the wars; and when I revisited Paris in June 1945, I took the first opportunity of returning to that shop, to bring an offering of tea and soap, and to partake of a magnificent cake which Adrienne had baked for the occasion. With the death of Adrienne Monnier another large part of the Paris that I knew has been transferred from the world of actuality to the world of memory.’
4.HarveyGide, AndréTSE on;a3n Breit, New York Times Book Review, 21 Nov. 1948: ‘Mr Eliot feels that André Gide, last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, deserved the award. “However one feels about Gide’s content,” he said, “for forty years he has been an immense figure (‘figger,’ Mr Eliot says). There is no question about his style. Si le grain ne meurt is a remarkable book. I read Gide as long ago as 1910. He makes an impression on you. There is good evidence of it in Charles DuBos [sic], who was a fine writer and a close friend of Gide’s and who fundamentally disagrees with him as much as I do. But you have to cope with Gide. Travels in the Congo is a wonderful book. So is the Russian book”’ (The Writer Observed, 1956).
5.JeanSchlumberger, Jean Schlumberger (1877–1968), novelist, dramatist, and poet; co-founder of the Nouvelle Revue Française. His writings include L’Inquiete paternité (1911), Un Homme heureux (1921), Saint-Saturnin (1931), Plaisirs à Corneille (1937) and Éveils (1950).
6.See Frank Morley to TSE, 17 Aug. 1937: ‘EnGide, AndréMorley on;a4n France … I am quite willing for you to talk to Gide and me never to say him or hear him a word again: andKahane, Jack;a2n you can have Jack Cahane [sc. Kahane] too: and I think Henry Miller and Anais Nin: and I doubt if StJin Perse [sic] has really anything to tell me that I don’t get better in his English rivals: I mean that the Frenchness of France is just one of those I will make a detour of and an allowance for.’
7.DesmondHarmsworth, Desmond Harmsworth (1903–90), British publisher, artist and poet. Son of the politician Cecil Harmsworth; nephew of the press barons Lord Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth and Lord Rothermere, he was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and worked for a few years in the family publishing and newspaper business, before striking out to study art in Paris. In the 1930s he launched his own publishing house, Desmond Harmsworth Ltd, which was for a while brilliantly successful. The imprint brought out works by authors including Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Norman Douglas, Ezra Pound and Mulk Raj Anand; and his most remarkable production (co-published with the Obelisk Press, Paris) was a limited edition of James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach, with illustrations by Joyce’s daughter Lucia (1932). His own writings included a notable verse translation of Paul Valéry’s Le Cimetière marin. He succeeded to the title of 2nd Baron Harmsworth on the death of his father in 1948.
8.JackKahane, Jack Kahane (1887–1939), Manchester-born novelist and publisher, founded in 1929 – with Henry Babou of the Vendôme Press (which published Norah James’s Sleeveless Errand, a novel that had been prosecuted in England in 1929; and which in 1930 issued Joyce’s fragment Haveth Childers Everywhere) – the Obelisk Press, with the purpose of publishing in Paris books that were either banned or deemed to be unprintable in the UK and USA. Obelisk Press published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach (1932), and works by D. H. Lawrence, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Cyril Connolly, Richard Aldington and Frank Harris – thirty-eight works over ten years. Kahane’s son was Maurice Girodias, founder of the Olympia Press. See Neil Pearson, Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press (2007); Gary Miers and James Armstrong, Of Obelisks and Daffodils: The Publishing History of the Obelisk Press (1929–1939) (2011).
9.Paul Havens, EH’s good friend from Scripps, had just been appointed President of Wilson College, Pennsylvania. (Mrs Havens’s letter not found.)
TSEHavens, Paulcongratulated on appointment;a3 to Havens, 10 July 1936: ‘My dear Mr Havens, / I have heard from Emily of your appointment to the Presidency of Wilson College, and have been meaning to write to congratulate you. It is a double congratulation: for besides the obvious distinction and advantage – and no doubt extremely interesting work of a new kind, and power to carry out your own ideas in office – and in spite of leaving such a pleasant society and such a delightful climate – I understand that you will be freed from certain kinds of strain.
‘I hope also that the change will give you and Mrs Havens more opportunity for visiting England: it will not be so far away.
‘With most cordial good wishes to both,
——Yours very sincerely, / T. S. Eliot’—(Wilson College).
10.The MacDowell Colony is an artists’ colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, founded in 1908 by the composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, the pianist Marian MacDowell.
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.
10.GeorgeBlake, George Blake (1893–1961), novelist, journalist, publisher: see Biographical Register.
8.JohnFletcher, John Gould ('J. G.') Gould Fletcher (1886–1950), American poet and critic: 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.
7.DesmondHarmsworth, Desmond Harmsworth (1903–90), British publisher, artist and poet. Son of the politician Cecil Harmsworth; nephew of the press barons Lord Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth and Lord Rothermere, he was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and worked for a few years in the family publishing and newspaper business, before striking out to study art in Paris. In the 1930s he launched his own publishing house, Desmond Harmsworth Ltd, which was for a while brilliantly successful. The imprint brought out works by authors including Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Norman Douglas, Ezra Pound and Mulk Raj Anand; and his most remarkable production (co-published with the Obelisk Press, Paris) was a limited edition of James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach, with illustrations by Joyce’s daughter Lucia (1932). His own writings included a notable verse translation of Paul Valéry’s Le Cimetière marin. He succeeded to the title of 2nd Baron Harmsworth on the death of his father in 1948.
1.JamesJoyce, James Joyce (1882–1941), Irish novelist, playwright, poet; author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939).
2.LuciaJoyce, Lucia Joyce (1907–82), daughter of James Joyce – trained as a dancer, talented as an illustrator – was deemed to suffer from schizophrenia and in consequence spent much of her life incarcerated in asylums. See Carol Loeb Schloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003).
8.JackKahane, Jack Kahane (1887–1939), Manchester-born novelist and publisher, founded in 1929 – with Henry Babou of the Vendôme Press (which published Norah James’s Sleeveless Errand, a novel that had been prosecuted in England in 1929; and which in 1930 issued Joyce’s fragment Haveth Childers Everywhere) – the Obelisk Press, with the purpose of publishing in Paris books that were either banned or deemed to be unprintable in the UK and USA. Obelisk Press published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach (1932), and works by D. H. Lawrence, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Cyril Connolly, Richard Aldington and Frank Harris – thirty-eight works over ten years. Kahane’s son was Maurice Girodias, founder of the Olympia Press. See Neil Pearson, Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press (2007); Gary Miers and James Armstrong, Of Obelisks and Daffodils: The Publishing History of the Obelisk Press (1929–1939) (2011).
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.
13.ThierryMaulnier, Thierry Maulnier (1909–88), journalist, essayist, literary critic and dramatist. The article promised by Maulnier was to have discussed the subject of surrealism.
3.AdrienneMonnier, Adrienne Monnier (1892–1955), bookseller, publisher, essayist, translator; founder in 1915 of the bookshop La Maison des Amis des Livres; close associate of Sylvia Beach at her English-language bookshop Shakespeare & Company. In June 1925 Monnier launched a magazine, Le Navire d’Argent (‘The Silver Boat’), featuring a translation by Monnier and Beach of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: the first French translation of any poem by TSE. The magazine, which promoted works by European and American authors, ran for twelve issues. See The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, memoirs trans. Richard McDougall (1976). In response to a request for a contribution to a memorial (8 July 1955), TSE wrote to Françoise Hartmann, 31 July 1955: ‘My memories of Mlle. Monnier go back to the years immediately after the first world war … I have several memories of her and of her bookshop in the period between the wars; and when I revisited Paris in June 1945, I took the first opportunity of returning to that shop, to bring an offering of tea and soap, and to partake of a magnificent cake which Adrienne had baked for the occasion. With the death of Adrienne Monnier another large part of the Paris that I knew has been transferred from the world of actuality to the world of memory.’
4.FrankMorley, Frank Vigor Vigor Morley (1899–1980), American publisher and author; a founding editor of F&F, 1929–39: see Biographical Register.
1.JeanPaulhan, Jean Paulhan (1884–1968), editor of Nouvelle Revue Française, 1925–40, 1946–68. He was active in the French Resistance during WW2. His works include Entretiens sur des fait-divers (1930); Les Fleurs de Tarbes, ou, La Terreur dans les lettres (1936); and On Poetry and Politics, ed. Jennifer Bajorek et al. (2010). See William Marx, ‘Two Modernisms: T. S. Eliot and La Nouvelle Revue Française’, in The International Reception of T. S. Eliot, ed. Elisabeth Däumer and Shyamal Bagchee (2007), 25–33.
5.JeanSchlumberger, Jean Schlumberger (1877–1968), novelist, dramatist, and poet; co-founder of the Nouvelle Revue Française. His writings include L’Inquiete paternité (1911), Un Homme heureux (1921), Saint-Saturnin (1931), Plaisirs à Corneille (1937) and Éveils (1950).