[22 Paradise Rd., Northampton, Mass.]
Your welcome card arrived from Charleston this morning, and I am happy to think of your basking in summer warmth and tropical flowers. I only hope that on your return after Easter you will not be plunged back into winter. I can imagine that you had a busy three days in Boston, and I shall not expect a real letter from you until you are settled in Northampton again.
IOldham, Josephfirst Moot meeting;c3 hadMoot, Thefirst meeting;a1 an interesting but tiring weekend at High Leigh, Hoddesdon (which is a regular conference-house). Eight or nine hours a day of talking and listening. The company got on very well, under Oldham’s masterly directions. IMurry, John Middletonat first Moot meeting;a8 had not seen Middleton Murry for some years, but it was no strain. But now that he has become a Christian (though I am [not] sure yet how orthodox he is) we seem to be likely to drift together again. ThereLöwe, Adolfat first Moot meeting;a1 was a rather charming little German Jew economist who has got a job at Manchester:1 he was rather puzzled that such serious and weighty people as Oldham, and the vice-chancellor of Manchester, and the professor of philosophy of another provincial university, and such like people, should be so childish as to crowd round a loud-speaker to hear the commentary on the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race (Oxford won by two lengths, by the way).
NextUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wellsperhaps, as Bishop, above receiving TSE's confession;d2 week of course I have no engagements, apart from church services; and shall take other work lightly. I have not heard from Underhill, so do not expect to go to Wells: IBacon, Fr Philip G.stands in as TSE's confessor;a1 shall go instead to a Father Bacon, whom I have dealt with once before, and thought intelligent and experienced.2 I somehow got the impression when I last saw Underhill that his hand was out in the matter of hearing confessions, and that he was becoming quickly very much the Bishop, and would be absorbed in affairs of higher administration. I think he will be a very good bishop, but I always felt that he was something of a snob – at least, he likes the right people: and I want somebody a little more austere; and anyway an ecclesiastic cannot be expected to fill all roles at once. I may be doing him an injustice.
Notravels, trips and plansTSE's 1938 trip to Lisbon;c9;a4 news from Portugal, either. I only hope they will not give me inconveniently short notice. But I have procured a new passport, as my old one had run out in November.
It does not look as if there would be a violent crisis in the summer. SomeHitler, Adolfand Mussolini;a4 peopleMussolini, Benitohis usefulness to Hitler;a5 wonder whether HitlerStalin, Josephpost-Anschluss;a2 will not now tend to come to an understanding with Stalin, as he does not seem to have much more to gain from Mussolini, and needs rather an outlet to the Mediterranean; and whether Italy may not be coaxed back into a kind of entente. The great anxiety at the moment is the extreme disruption of French politics, and the possibility of some internal crisis there which might lead even to civil war or dictatorship.
1.Adolf LöweLöwe, Adolf (or Adolph Lowe/Loewe; 1893–1995) – economist and sociologist. Born in Stuttgart, he was educated in Munich and Berlin, gained his doctorate at Tübingen, and served in the German Army, 1914–15. Following a period as an economic adviser to the Weimar Government, 1918–24, and as head of international statistics at the Federal Bureau of Statistics, 1924–6, he taught at the University of Kiel. From 1926 to 1931 he was Director of Research and Educational Studies and Professor of Economics at the Institute of World Economics. He became Professor of Economics, University of Frankfurt (associating with the ‘Frankfurt School’ of sociology), 1931–3 – whereupon, in the spring of 1933, having been dismissed as a ‘dangerous intellectual’ by the Nazis, Löwe (who was Jewish) wisely fled with his family to Britain, where he became a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and taught at the University of Manchester. In Sept. 1939 he became a naturalised British subject. In 1940 he left Britain for the USA, where he became Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, New York, retiring in 1978. His works include Economics and Sociology: A plea for cooperation in the social sciences (1935), The Price of Liberty: A German on contemporary Britain (1936), On Economic Knowledge: Toward a science of political economics (1965), and The Path of Economic Growth (1976).
2.FatherBacon, Fr Philip G. Philip G. Bacon, then of the Society of Retreat Conductors. Father Bacon (St Simon’s, Kentish Town, London) was to be quoted at the Requiem Mass for TSE at St Stephen’s, 17 Feb. 1965: ‘Eliot had, along with that full grown stature of mind, a truly child-like heart – the result of his sense of dependence on GOD. And along with it he had the sense of responsibility to GOD for the use of his talents. To his refinedness of character is due the fact that like his poetry he himself was not easily understood – but unbelievers always recognized his faith’ (St Stephen’s Church Magazine, Apr. 1965, 9).
2.FatherBacon, Fr Philip G. Philip G. Bacon, then of the Society of Retreat Conductors. Father Bacon (St Simon’s, Kentish Town, London) was to be quoted at the Requiem Mass for TSE at St Stephen’s, 17 Feb. 1965: ‘Eliot had, along with that full grown stature of mind, a truly child-like heart – the result of his sense of dependence on GOD. And along with it he had the sense of responsibility to GOD for the use of his talents. To his refinedness of character is due the fact that like his poetry he himself was not easily understood – but unbelievers always recognized his faith’ (St Stephen’s Church Magazine, Apr. 1965, 9).
1.Adolf LöweLöwe, Adolf (or Adolph Lowe/Loewe; 1893–1995) – economist and sociologist. Born in Stuttgart, he was educated in Munich and Berlin, gained his doctorate at Tübingen, and served in the German Army, 1914–15. Following a period as an economic adviser to the Weimar Government, 1918–24, and as head of international statistics at the Federal Bureau of Statistics, 1924–6, he taught at the University of Kiel. From 1926 to 1931 he was Director of Research and Educational Studies and Professor of Economics at the Institute of World Economics. He became Professor of Economics, University of Frankfurt (associating with the ‘Frankfurt School’ of sociology), 1931–3 – whereupon, in the spring of 1933, having been dismissed as a ‘dangerous intellectual’ by the Nazis, Löwe (who was Jewish) wisely fled with his family to Britain, where he became a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and taught at the University of Manchester. In Sept. 1939 he became a naturalised British subject. In 1940 he left Britain for the USA, where he became Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, New York, retiring in 1978. His works include Economics and Sociology: A plea for cooperation in the social sciences (1935), The Price of Liberty: A German on contemporary Britain (1936), On Economic Knowledge: Toward a science of political economics (1965), and The Path of Economic Growth (1976).
1.JohnMurry, John Middleton Middleton Murry (1889–1957), English writer and critic; editor of the Athenaeum, 1919–21; The Adelphi, 1923–48. In 1918, he married Katherine Mansfield. He was friend and biographer of D. H. Lawrence. His first notable critical work was Dostoevsky (1916); his most influential study, The Problem of Style (1922). Though as a Romanticist he was an intellectual opponent of the avowedly ‘Classicist’ Eliot, Murry offered Eliot in 1919 the post of assistant editor on the Athenaeum (which Eliot had to decline); in addition, he recommended him to be Clark Lecturer at Cambridge in 1926, and was a steadfast friend to both TSE and his wife Vivien. See F. A. Lea, The Life of John Middleton Murry (1959); David Goldie, A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919–1928 (1998).
8.JosephOldham, Joseph (‘Joe’) Houldsworth Oldham (1874–1969), missionary, adviser, organiser: see Biographical Register.
2.Revd Francis UnderhillUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wells, DD (1878–1943), TSE’s spiritual counsellor: see Biographical Register.