[22 Paradise Rd., Northampton, Mass.]
I am going to try one more Air letter, so please let me know the date on which you receive this. IEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother)sends list of securities;e5 had to cable to Henry last week for a list of securities; he sent it off apparently by Air mail, and it reached me in a week. But it may be simply that such letters have a better chance of catching the first boat. What with the weather we have been having laterly [sc. lately] – wind and torrents of rain – it hardly seems likely that aeroplanes are crossing the Atlantic.
Have I told you that I marked my towels and napkins – some time ago – and they are now in commission, a towel and a napkin a week. I have no news of much interest. As you will know if my letter of Sunday arrived before this, I staid in London for the weekend: thisTandys, thehost TSE in Dorset;b3 weekend I have to go at last to the Tandys (I must get a new ribbon) in Dorset, but that will be somewhat mitigated by being transported by car both ways – in the daytime – and Dorset will be prettier, dryer and more cheerful than Hampton ever was. IChristian News-Letter (CNL)TSE's way of writing for;a2 spendOldham, Josephsent drafts for CNL;d1 some of my time writing criticisms to Oldham as drafts of material for the Christian News Letter: thisNiebuhr, Reinholdoffers paper on adolescence;a4 morning a criticism of a paper offered by Reinhold Niebuhr, and of a note on the Problem of the Adolescent age 14 to 18. INew English Weekly;b2 shall also probably do notes for the New English Weekly from time to time. AndBoutwood Lectures (afterwards The Idea of a Christian Society)published as Christian Society;b2 now that my second book has come out – to-day1 – ICocktail Party, Theplot ruminated;a4 shall be better able to turn my attention to Plots for Plays: I have one in mind for a play which should have a simple surface. But I see that I must be prepared to scrap a plot even after considerable elaboration of detail, and look for a new one; so it may be the end of the year before I can really settle down to one and get on with the writing. Thewritingplot;b8 trying thing about thinking up a plot is, that after a morning’s brooding one has not the satisfaction of feeling that one has done a morning’s work – whereas, if one has spent the morning writing out words, there is the work to show for it: even if one scraps most of what one has written. I always have to do a good deal of work before I can get my self-confidence up to the point necessary for doing good work: so it is this preliminary work that is the most painful.
By next week I shall have had my third and last inoculation for colds, and shall have my teeth finished: there was not nearly so much to do as I had expected, I retain all the teeth I have, and the prospect of a dental plate is postponed to an indefinite future.
TheChristian News-Letter (CNL)first number;a4 Christian News Letter has come out – the first number – and I think it is rather dull.2 WhetherOldham, Josephas editor of CNL;d2 Oldham can produce something that will really catch on I don’t know. IHale, Emilysent first CNL;m6 am sending you the first number, andSheffield, Ada Eliot (TSE's sister)subscribed to CNL;g8 shallBell, Bernard Iddingssubscribed to CNL;a7 take out a few subscriptions for you and others – well, only Ada and perhaps Iddings Bell – in America. But you must not expect to find anything by me in it – all the collaborators do is to criticise, and provide suggestions and material to be rewritten by Oldham. If I do write more for the N.E.W. I shall get that sent to you regularly.
TheRobertses, theevacuate to Penrith;a1Roberts, Andrew
IMorley, Frank Vigorsounds depressed in America;i9 had a letter from Frank, at last, in his own writing. He has bought a house, and Christina (confidential) is to have a baby: but I thought I detected a note of depression, as if they were trying to find reasons for being contented, and were trying to force themselves to settle down (at ‘Meadow Road’, Riverside, Connecticut), which was rather sad. And although the war gives them practical reason to congratulate themselves on the move, yet it also makes them feel more homesick and cut off. I must try to see her parents when I next go to Cambridge. Everyone feels a little uprooted, if one [sc. only] because many of one’s friends are. GeoffreyTandy, Geoffrey;c4, however, is in fairly good form, because he now has a bicycle and cycles every day to save petrol; and the exercise is good for him.
ISunderland-Taylor, Alice Maud Maryand the last days of Chipping Campden;a6 wonder if anyone has heard from Miss Sunderland-Taylor. She comes into my mind very often, of course, becausetravels, trips and plansEH's 1939 England visit;d5in TSE's memory;b3 the last days at Campden are always with me: I think of them always with a large balance of happiness and glory – a sufficient stock, I think, to carry me through until the next meeting. Need I say that you are more continuously in my thoughts than ever?
1.This was an error on TSE’s part: Idea of a Christian Society was to be published a week after this date.
2.TheChristian News-Letter (CNL)described;a3n Christian News-Letter was launched (on 18 Oct. 1939), with a promotional issue (no. ‘0’) posted out to 32,000 potential subscribers. Publication got under way in Nov. and closed, after 341 issues, on 6 July 1949. By Feb. 1940 there were 9,081 ‘members’, and subscription peaked in Feb. 1941 with about 11,500 subscribers. TSE was one of a five-person core editorial team that would meet weekly. (There were also about 50 editorial ‘collaborators’, as Oldham designated them.) See further Roger Kojecky, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (1971), 163–97; Marjorie Reeves and Elaine Kaye, ‘Tracts for Wartime: The Christian News-Letter’, in Christian Thinking and Social Order: Conviction Politics from the 1930s to the Present Day, ed. Marjorie Reeves (1999), 49–79; Stefan Collini, ‘The European Modernist as Anglican Moralist: The Later Social Criticism of T. S. Eliot’, in Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture, ed. Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Dietle (Stanford, 2000), 207–27; Jeremy Diaper, ‘A Christian Community: T. S. Eliot and the Christian News-Letter’, in T. S. Eliot and Organicism, 99–142; and (notably) John Carter Wood, This is your hour: Christian intellectuals in Britain and the crisis of Europe, 1937–49 (Manchester, 2019).
3.KathleenRaine, Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), poet and scholar, read Natural Sciences and Psychology at Girton College, Cambridge, graduating in 1929. Briefly married in 1929 to Hugh Sykes Davies, she then married Charles Madge, though that marriage was almost as short-lived. She was a Research Fellow at Girton College, 1955–61; and Andrew Mellon Lecturer at the National Gallery of Arts in Washington, DC, in 1962. Her early poetry was published by Tambimuttu (founder of Poetry London): her first volume was Stone and Flower (1943), with illustrations by Barbara Hepworth; other collections include The Year One (1952) and Collected Poems (1956, 2000). Critical works include Blake and Tradition (2 vols, 1968–9) – ‘It makes all other studies of Blake obsolete,’ said C. S. Lewis – Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings (1969); William Blake (1970), and Yeats, The Tarot and the Golden Dawn (1972); and she published four volumes of autobiography: Farewell Happy Fields (1972), The Land Unknown (1975), The Lion’s Mouth (1977), India Seen Afar (1990). In 1968 she failed to win the Oxford Chair of Poetry; and in 1991 she turned down an invitation from the Royal Society of Literature to become one of its ten Companions of Literature. She won the W. H. Smith Literary Award 1972, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 1992; and in 2000 she was appointed both CBE and Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1980 she launched Temenos (‘Sacred Enclosure’), a review ‘devoted to the arts of the imagination’ and stressing ‘the intimate link between the arts and the sacred’; and in 1990, with patronage from the Prince of Wales, she founded the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, which she styled ‘a school of wisdom’.
3.BernardBell, Bernard Iddings Iddings Bell, DD (1886–1958), American Episcopal priest, author and cultural commentator; Warden of Bard College, 1919–33. In his last years he was made Canon of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, Chicago, and a William Vaughn Lecturer at the University of Chicago.
3.HenryEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother) Ware Eliot (1879–1947), TSE’s older brother: see Biographical Register.
4.FrankMorley, Frank Vigor Vigor Morley (1899–1980), American publisher and author; a founding editor of F&F, 1929–39: see Biographical Register.
3.ReinholdNiebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), influential theologian, ethicist, philosopher, and polemical commentator on politics and public affairs: see Biographical Register.
8.JosephOldham, Joseph (‘Joe’) Houldsworth Oldham (1874–1969), missionary, adviser, organiser: see Biographical Register.
3.KathleenRaine, Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), poet and scholar, read Natural Sciences and Psychology at Girton College, Cambridge, graduating in 1929. Briefly married in 1929 to Hugh Sykes Davies, she then married Charles Madge, though that marriage was almost as short-lived. She was a Research Fellow at Girton College, 1955–61; and Andrew Mellon Lecturer at the National Gallery of Arts in Washington, DC, in 1962. Her early poetry was published by Tambimuttu (founder of Poetry London): her first volume was Stone and Flower (1943), with illustrations by Barbara Hepworth; other collections include The Year One (1952) and Collected Poems (1956, 2000). Critical works include Blake and Tradition (2 vols, 1968–9) – ‘It makes all other studies of Blake obsolete,’ said C. S. Lewis – Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings (1969); William Blake (1970), and Yeats, The Tarot and the Golden Dawn (1972); and she published four volumes of autobiography: Farewell Happy Fields (1972), The Land Unknown (1975), The Lion’s Mouth (1977), India Seen Afar (1990). In 1968 she failed to win the Oxford Chair of Poetry; and in 1991 she turned down an invitation from the Royal Society of Literature to become one of its ten Companions of Literature. She won the W. H. Smith Literary Award 1972, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 1992; and in 2000 she was appointed both CBE and Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1980 she launched Temenos (‘Sacred Enclosure’), a review ‘devoted to the arts of the imagination’ and stressing ‘the intimate link between the arts and the sacred’; and in 1990, with patronage from the Prince of Wales, she founded the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, which she styled ‘a school of wisdom’.
2.AdaSheffield, Ada Eliot (TSE's sister) Eliot Sheffield (1869–1943), eldest of the seven Eliot children; author of The Social Case History: Its Construction and Content (1920) and Social Insight in Case Situations (1937): see Biographical Register.
6.AliceSunderland-Taylor, Alice Maud Mary Maud Mary Sunderland-Taylor (1872–1942), owner of Stamford House, Chipping Campden, which the Perkinses were renting for the season. (Sunderland-Taylor, a spinster and retired schoolteacher from Stamford, Lincolnshire, liked to spend her summers in Yugoslavia.) Edith Perkins wrote from Aban Court Hotel, Harrington Gardens, South Kensington, London, to invite TSE to meet Sunderland-Taylor at dinner on Mon. 29 Nov.
2.GeoffreyTandy, Geoffrey Tandy (1900–69), marine biologist; Assistant Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum, London, 1926–47; did broadcast readings for the BBC (including the first reading of TSE’s Practical Cats on Christmas Day 1937): see Biographical Register.