[1418 East 63d St., Seattle]

1.Georges Pitoëff (1884–1939), Russian-born theatre director and producer. See Letters 3, 444.

2.Cocteau was younger than TSE by ten months: born on 5 July 1889.

3.TSE’s letter to Huxley not found.

4.‘He seemed so utterably [sic] dead and gone. And yet I ought to have had faith. I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Haven’t I been repeating that Sunday after Sunday, all my life? …’ (The World of Light: A Comedy in Three Acts [1931], II: ii, 47).

5.InHuxley, AldousThose Barren Leaves;c1;a1n Those Barren Leaves (1925), a poet, Francis Chelifer – ‘Quite the little poet’ (he likens himself to Keats, but is given to ‘alembicated’ verse) – passes his days between Gog’s Court in the City of London and Miss Carruther’s boarding-house in Chelsea. Extracts from his diary are given and he has a brief, romantically disillusioning affair with one Barbara Waters (a ‘tangible’ young woman whom he idealises), while based during the war at Bolo House. He works as editor of ‘The Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette’, and has a ‘Sphingine smile’ (perhaps not unlike TSE).

The novel includes this parody of TSE’s early satirical verses such as ‘The Hippopotamus’:

The Holy Ghost comes sliding down

On Ilford, Golders Green and Penge.

His hosts infect him as they rot;

The victims take their just revenge.

For if of old the sons of squires

And livery stable keepers turned

To flowers and hope, to Greece and God,

We in our later age have learned

That we are native where we walk

Through the dim streets of Camden Town.

But hopeful still through twice-breathed air

The Holy Ghost comes shining down.

In Part II of the novel, ‘Autobiography of Francis Chelifer’, the eponym’s reflections include a citation of the phrase ‘defunctive music’ that TSE took from ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ and put to use in ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’: ‘How does it come about that a commonplace thought embodied by a poet in some abracadabrical form seems bottomlessly profound, while a positively false and stupid notion may be made by its expression to seem true? Frankly, I don’t know. And what is more, I have never found any one who could give an answer to the riddle. What is it that makes the two words “defunctive music” as moving as that dead march out of the Eroica and the close of Coriolan?’

6.HaroldPeters, Harold Peters (1888–1943), close friend of TSE at Harvard, 1906–9. After graduation, he worked in real estate, and saw active service in the Massachusetts Naval Militia during WW1, and on leaving the navy he spent most of the rest of his life at sea. Leon M. Little, ‘Eliot: A Reminiscence’, Harvard Advocate, 100: 3.4 (Fall 1966), 33: ‘[TSE’sPeters, Haroldas TSE's quondam sailing companion;a2n] really closest friend was Harold Peters, and they were an odd but a very interesting pair. Peters and Eliot spent happy hours sailing together, sometimes in thick fog, off the Dry Salvages. In 1932 Peters sailed round the world for two years as skipper of an 85-foot auxiliary schooner, Pilgrim, having previously participated in the transatlantic race from Newport to Plymouth, and in the Fastnet Race. In 1943 he died after falling from a motor-boat that was in process of being hoisted into a dry dock at Marblehead.

Peters wrote of himself in the 25th Anniversary Report of Harvard Class of 1910 (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), 596: ‘I am now what is technically known as “on the beach”.’

Rear Admiral Samuel E. Morison (sailor and historian, and TSE’s cousin) said of Peters (whom he had known slightly) in a letter to TSE of 27 Aug. 1964: ‘He was one of the best amateur sailors on the N.E. coast.’ Corresponding in the last months of his life with Morison about the meaning and history of the Dry Salvages (see ‘The Dry Salvages and the Thatcher’s Shipwreck’, American Neptune 25 [1965], 233–47), TSE was to recall something of the adventure of his youth: ‘I cruised with Harold Peters several times up and down that coast and one of the most picturesque spots I remember was Roque Island which is really two islands with a kind of lagoon in between. Harold and I were once storm-bound there for a couple of days and lived chiefly on lobster.’

Richard Walworth Hall characterised Peters and TSE, in an obituary notice for TSE, as ‘an odd pair’: ‘It was Peters who chided [Eliot] about his frail physique, which led to his regular attendance at August’s Gymnasium, which was in the basement of Apley Hall. He took this work seriously and developed into quite a muscular specimen. It also led to some boxing lessons somewhere in Boston’s South End. He took up rowing in a wherry, and finally worked up to a single shell. Peters also introduced him to small-boat cruising and they made many cruises between Marblehead and the Canadian border. On one of these trips, in a 19-foot knockabout, before the days of power, they rounded Mt. Desert Rock in a dungeon of fog, a rough sea and a two reef breeze. The log book, the next day, shows a sketch of Tom in the tender in a heavy wind unmooring from an enormous pile mooring at Duck Island. The title of the sketch is “Heroic work by a swab”, and beside this title, “Yes, and I never worked harder. T. S. E.”’