[22 Paradise Rd., Northampton, Mass.]
I did not write earlier this week, because I was too uncertain of my future movements and wanted to wait until I was sure. Youtravels, trips and plansTSE's abortive 1940 Italian mission;d8cancelled;a9 will have had the not very communicative cable I sent; but I thought that if reports in the American press had been alarming or sensational, it would serve to reassure you. ISheffield, Ada Eliot (TSE's sister);h4 sent the same message to Ada, who was the only other person there whom I had informed of my plans, and I had asked her not to divulge them lest they might get embroidered by other members of the family. I don’t know that I ought to say very much more even in writing; and in any case you will know soon enough whether the apprehensions were justified. I may say that the authority was a high one, and that at the end the decision was taken out of my hands. And it was not based on a definite prediction, but on a guess of chances, and weighing the possible inconvenience and complications against the relative unimportance of the mission.1
Of course I was not unprepared, even at the beginning, that my labours might be for nothing; still, I feel somewhat at a loose end at the moment. (TheFaber, Geoffrey;h3 decision was a relief to Faber; 2 and what with the gradual shrinkage of the junior staff there is plenty of work to be done in the business). The lectures I shall keep on the chance of using [them] somewhere else abroad: they are hardly suitable to an English-speaking audience. And even with expenses paid, the expedition would have left me somewhat out of pocket. ButSecond World Warits effect on TSE;b3 IHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3constrained by war;g8 mustwritingthe effect of war on;c7 try to get quickly into some piece of work, to revive the rhythm of life, and also to help to stand the strain under which, as you will have already realised – much more fully than any one I know in America can – the strain of life on everyone at this time. If I have seemed, or if I shall seem, a little remote and unemotional during these times, even rather impersonal in expression – you will I hope understand, my dear, that it is merely the effect of this tension which tends to numb and temporarily anaesthetise one’s personal feelings. That is no doubt partly self-protective; and also due to one’s own life seeming such a small and relatively unimportant thing in the midst of such events upon which the world’s future hangs. I have never before felt so keenly, indeed as a kind of agony, the feeling for which ‘patriotism’ is an inadequate term – because it is a term which seems to connote rather the active expression of an emotion than the emotion itself. What I mean is the feeling of one’s own life being merely a small part of the life of a country, the awareness of suffering directly from things which are not directly happening to oneself. I cannot say more about this now, or indeed about anything else; but you may be sure that I count and depend all the more upon your letters, and upon their continuing to tell me something of your own daily life too; and that this letter carries
1.TSE’stravels, trips and plansTSE's abortive 1940 Italian mission;d8cancelled;a9 lecture tour of Italy had been cancelled at the express direction of Robert Vansittart at the Foreign Office. See TSE to Hayward, 15 May 1940 (Letters 9, 524). For the moment neutral, Italy was to enter the war as an Axis power on 10 June 1940: counting on the fall of France, Mussolini sought to wage war against the British Empire in North and East Africa.
2.Geoffrey Faber to Frank Morley, 17 May 1940: ‘Tom is as usual, & is not going to Italy, God be praised.’
11.GeoffreyFaber, Geoffrey Faber (1889–1961), publisher and poet: see Biographical Register.
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.