[240 Crescent St., Northampton, Mass.]
I have not yet thanked you for your letter of the 23d. I have been very grateful for your writing so often as you have, in the midst of new work and new people, and for so often writing at such length. I should like to have been present invisible at the reading at Smith. ILieder, Paul Robert;a1 don’t remember Theobald – I remember Lieder of course, as I spent an evening at his house, after my talk at Smith.1 I had never known him at Harvard, but knew his face very well; I think he had taken some courses of lectures with me. When I met him at Smith, I found him very agreeable. I can imagine the torment of correcting papers and of giving marks for a kind of work which as you say is almost impossible to rate, since natural gifts of voice and family environment must give to some insuperable advantages over others. IAbbott, Senda Berenson;a1 do not remember Mrs. Abbott,2 butPerry, Rachel Berensona friend;a2 Mrs. Ralph Perry 3 was one of the most cultivated and agreeable women in Cambridge, and I regarded her as a friend. HerPerry, Ralph Barton;a2 husband was very dependent upon her, I think.
I hope you did not go to Boston for Thanksgiving; for in view of the shortness of time, and the fatigue, I don’t feel that you were called upon to do so. Christmas seems a very different matter. I hope you will be letting me know exactly where you will be for Christmas, both so that I can think of you there, and have the satisfaction, such as it is, of sending you a cable.
IBlunt, Alfred, Bishop of Bradford;a2 encloseBarnes, Ernest, Bishop of Birminghamand the Abdication Crisis;a2 the cuttings omitted from last night, though they will be ancient history by the time you get them. I am inclined to believe that the Bishop of Bradford was quite innocent of any intent to comment upon private life; though even so I regard one sentence of his speech as going farther than was necessary. It is all the more a pity, in that his rebuke to the Bishop of Birmingham was both called for and well expressed, and the bulk of his speech was first rate. I do not know him, but from what I have read of him have always regarded him as one of the best on the bench.
IChristianityretreat and solitude;c9the need for;a3 can well understand your depression of spirits especially at weekends, though for myself periods of solitude are what I must struggle to get. But I think that when one does not get enough of social life and personal relationships, it is difficult to make what one should out of solitude, and when one does not get enough of solitude, it is difficult to make the best of society and people and work among them. It is so very hard in life to keep the right balance, both in activity, opinions and feelings. Just asChristianitypolitics;c5Christianity versus Fascism and Communism;a5 it is so much easier to ‘take sides’ violently – theEuropethrough the 1930s;a2 whole of Europe might be described now as one great international civil war, both overt and latent, between sides neither of which in itself seems to me quite compatible with Christianity; and the attraction of thinking and feeling exactly like a great group of people deadens the feeling of loneliness which everyone has and which drives people to every sort of evasion and escape. SoEliot, Margaret Dawes (TSE's sister)in response to 1930s controversies;c3 also one sees on the one hand people like my sister Margaret, whose original interest in society was only so far as society ministered to her, finally removing themselves from society altogether and living a twilight life wrapped up in themselves: and on the other hand people so throwing themselves into the world, even if it is purely for good works, that they almost cease to exist when they are alone. I think to exist to the most of one’s capacity one needs both a deliberate and intelligent absorption in the affairs of other people and in the affairs of the world, and a deliberate and intelligent abstention and cultivation of oneself. Either'drugs'either public or inner life;a5 alone may defeat its own end: either social interest or self-training in one’s spiritual, mental and emotional life may become just a drug and a way of escape. We can’t criticise ourselves unless we live both inwardly and outwardly. One’s aim, I think, should be that both one’s social life and solitary life should be positive, so that one should not be merely a form of relief and escape from the other.
Sometimes the best help one can give another, I believe, is to expose one’s own needs, experience, and shortcomings also, and perhaps generalise them, rather than to talk too narrowly and precisely about the other person’s situation. For to see ourselves in a larger pattern (not simply to see the larger patterns and lose sight of ourselves) is one of our aims in making the best of ourselves.
When one is alone one tends either to do solitary work – thinking, writing, or reading discursively – or to idle and fritter. There are times for all these things of course; but the hard thing is to meditate, either in prayer or in very slow reading in which one concentrates on the effort to extract more and more meaning from a few words.
YesterdayWu Wen-Tsao;a1 I had Mr. and Mrs. Wu, two charming Chinese introduced by Ada, to tea;4 andAuden, Wystan Hugh ('W. H.')preoccupied with Byron and Barcelona;b4 also Wystan Auden, who is just finishing a book for us5 and a film for some film company, and at the end of the year intends to go to Barcelona to fight among some volunteers on the government side. That accounts for his having been thinking about Byron lately.6 Well, I hope he will come back.
ThecommunismTSE asked to sign Christian manifesto against;b2 day beforefascismTSE asked to sign Christian manifesto against;b1 I had to interview a young man who wanted me to sign a manifesto – to do with a sort of united Christian Front for democracy against fascism and communism (in England this is apt to mean wholly against fascism and for a mild socialism). HeTemple, William, Archbishop of York (later of Canterbury)incorrigible signatory;a8 seemed to think that because the Archbishop of York was going to sign it that ought to be good enough for me. I could not tell him straight out that I thought the Archbishop of York signed too many manifestoes. But I do think it is a dangerous illusion for people to think that when they have got up a manifesto they have done something, and satisfy their consciences so. A manifesto is merely a beginning of action, and usually they are so vague that they can lead to nothing – the moment people begin to be precise they begin to disagree. This young man’s mind was so vague that I simply could not be clear myself, because there seemed no point at which to begin; and I am sure that when he left he thought I was just a very crabbed and cranky fellow, and possibly an extreme reactionary. So that I was left fatigued and dissatisfied. But collective talking is no substitute for individual action and example. He said (it is a current kind of phrase) ‘we have only about three years in which to work before everything goes smash’; so I said, [‘]very likely there will be a smash, but if I thought that Christianity could not survive the smash I should consider that I had very little faith indeed’. But that got us nowhere. No doubt it is the weariness of talk and the desire to do something, individually, that makes Auden want to shoulder a musket in Catalonia.
NowAll Souls Club, Theto discuss 'Church, Community and State';a6 I must stop and go to the club to arrange with the steward about my old buffers dinner of the All Souls Club on Monday. We are to discuss ‘Church Community and State’, and I must make some notes for the purpose of leading off the discussion.
1.PaulLieder, Paul Robert Robert Lieder (1889–1956) – BA Harvard, 1910; MA, 1912; PhD, 1915 – was Professor of English Language and Literature, Smith College, 1925–54.
2.SendaAbbott, Senda Berenson Berenson Abbott, née Valvrojenski (1868–1954), a Lithuanian Jew by origin, was a sister of the art connoisseur and historian Bernard Berenson. At Smith College she was Director of the Gymnasium and Instructor of Physical Culture, introducing the first rules of women’s basketball and organising the first women’s college basketball game. In 1911 she married Herbert Vaughan Abbott, Professor of English at Smith College.
3.Rachel Berenson Perry (1880–1933), wife of Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957), Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, Harvard, from 1930; author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning study The Thought and Character of William James (1935).
4.AdaWu Wen-Tsao Sheffield explained to TSE, in an undated letter, that Wu Wen-Tsao represented Yenching University at the Harvard Tercentenary celebration. Mrs Wu, who wrote poetry in Chinese, was a graduate student at Wellesley and taught at Yenching until her marriage.
5.LettersAuden, Wystan Hugh ('W. H.')Letters from Iceland (with MacNeice);c8 from Iceland, by Auden and Louis MacNeice, was scheduled for publication on 8 July 1937; it actually came out on 6 Aug. Faber Spring Books catalogue 1937, 33, on Iceland (as the book was provisionally titled): ‘We understand that the book will take the form of a series of letters, some in verse, some in prose, written from Iceland in the summer of 1936. The recipients of the letters include Lord Byron, a tourist, an employee of Shell-Mex, a member of the Oxford City Council, a Cambridge lady don, an Icelandic journalist, and a well-known young painter. In addition, Mr MacNeice contributes an eclogue between two tourists and the ghost of Grettir, Mr Auden some amateur photographs, and Mr William Coldstream some pen-and-ink sketches.
‘There may be a good many other books about Iceland and about other expeditions, but this is the only book by Mr Auden and Mr MacNeice.’
6.SeeAuden, Wystan Hugh ('W. H.')TSE on 'Letter to Lord Byron';b5n ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, in Letters from Iceland, by Auden and Louis MacNeice (1937). TSE to Auden, 10 Dec. 1936: ‘I must say that I started with as much prejudice against it as if you had told me that you had done something like the Rape of the Lock, only rather better. But actually it seems to me extremely successful, and is very different from a pastiche. I congratulate you.’ (Ezra Pound had ‘induced’ TSE to ‘destroy’ his own pastiche of The Rape of the Lock from the drafts of the ‘Fire Sermon’: see The Waste Land: A Fascimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot [1971], 23, 127.)
2.SendaAbbott, Senda Berenson Berenson Abbott, née Valvrojenski (1868–1954), a Lithuanian Jew by origin, was a sister of the art connoisseur and historian Bernard Berenson. At Smith College she was Director of the Gymnasium and Instructor of Physical Culture, introducing the first rules of women’s basketball and organising the first women’s college basketball game. In 1911 she married Herbert Vaughan Abbott, Professor of English at Smith College.
10.W. H. AudenAuden, Wystan Hugh ('W. H.') (1907–73), poet, playwright, librettist, translator, essayist, editor: see Biographical Register.
3.ErnestBarnes, Ernest, Bishop of Birmingham Barnes (1874–1953), controversially liberal Bishop of Birmingham, 1924–53. An extreme modernist, he was later criticised for doubting the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection.
6.MargaretEliot, Margaret Dawes (TSE's sister) Dawes Eliot (1871–1956), TSE's second-oldest sister sister, resident in Cambridge, Mass. In an undated letter (1952) to his Harvard friend Leon M. Little, TSE wrote: ‘Margaret is 83, deaf, eccentric, recluse (I don’t think she has bought any new clothes since 1900).’
1.PaulLieder, Paul Robert Robert Lieder (1889–1956) – BA Harvard, 1910; MA, 1912; PhD, 1915 – was Professor of English Language and Literature, Smith College, 1925–54.
4.RachelPerry, Rachel Berenson Berenson Perry (1880–1933), wifePerry, Ralph Barton of Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957), Chair of the Philosophy Department at Harvard University, 1906–14; from 1930, Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy; author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning study The Thought and Character of William James (1935).
4.RachelPerry, Rachel Berenson Berenson Perry (1880–1933), wifePerry, Ralph Barton of Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957), Chair of the Philosophy Department at Harvard University, 1906–14; from 1930, Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy; author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning study The Thought and Character of William James (1935).
10.WilliamTemple, William, Archbishop of York (later of Canterbury) Temple (1881–1944), Anglican clergyman, Archbishop of York and later of Canterbury: see Biographical Register.
4.AdaWu Wen-Tsao Sheffield explained to TSE, in an undated letter, that Wu Wen-Tsao represented Yenching University at the Harvard Tercentenary celebration. Mrs Wu, who wrote poetry in Chinese, was a graduate student at Wellesley and taught at Yenching until her marriage.