[22 Paradise Rd., Northampton, Mass.]

1.By the date of this letter various Japanese forces had captured most of the Philippines and the Malayan peninsula, plus a growing number of islands in the Dutch East Indies. American forces in the Philippines had retreated to the Bataan Peninsula on Luzon and were resisting strongly there, but with no prospect of ultimate success.

2.Garrick’s Villa – bought in 1750 by the renowned actor-manager David Garrick (1717–79) – lies on Hampton Court Road, in Richmond, London; it was converted into flats in 1922.

3.TSE contributed to a series, ‘We Speak to India’, BBC Indian Service, 20 Jan. 1942; published as ‘“The Voice of His Time”: T. S. Eliot on Tennyson’s In Memoriam’, Listener 27 (12 Feb. 1942), 211–12: CProse 6, 261–7. The ‘umbrella man’ was Z. A. Bokhari.

4.G. W. StonierChoice of Kipling's Verse, Areviewed;b3, ‘Kipling’s Verse’, New Statesman & Nation 23 (3 Jan. 1942), 210–11. ‘Unlike Carlyle and Lawrence, impatient prophets, Kipling was the reporter, the spectacled onlooker keeping his anonymity and following his story to the end. His copy came fresh, barrack rooms and parade squares and troopships fascinated, and a skirmish to him was like a bullfight to Hemingway. These discoveries by the soldat manqué – more lifelike than if he had found his home in an officer’s mess – produced, I think, his best verse. He had an eye and an ear; above all, he had a nose. He sniffed. Glory led to the glory-hole, and on closer acquaintance it stank. Ça pue! is the reaction of the sensitive, but Kipling’s whiff is his tartest, most genuine quality. The brute smell of humanity, grinning, trudging, suffering and killing stoically, underdogs of one breed trampling underdogs of another, excited him naturally, and in later years disagreeably; but there is a sharp sweetness, too, as of an onion, in the cockney whine and swagger of the early ballads […] What disgusts about Kipling isn’t his scratch or his howl, but the holy purr of contentment that rises from his contemplation of cruelties […] Kipling (as Mr Eliot points out) always took exactly into account the audience he was addressing; as a poem Recessional wouldn’t stir men to action, but as a hymn —! This cunning over-awareness of an audience is both the strength and the weakness of Kipling as a poet; it ensures a means, it precludes either intimacy or style; and it seems to me inseparable from Kipling’s conception of the craftsman as against the artist. The poet becomes a word-craftsman, the soldier an empire-craftsman, God is the master-craftsman […]

‘Kipling is not a great poet. Mr Eliot distinguishes between great poetry and great verse, and argues that Kipling achieved the latter; unfortunately, in making this distinction, he provides neither definition nor examples […]

‘The problem of poetry and verse leads Mr Eliot to another point, which is that Kipling aimed only at the writing of verse and cannot be judged by other standards. This is true of the barrack-room Kipling (in my opinion, the most interesting) and even of the hymn-singing Kipling; but there is a good deal of verse-writing in between which aims at being poetry and misses. Even in Mr Eliot’s very acute and personal selection there are examples of mongrel forms, cheap rhetoric and a general wordiness that Kipling rarely escapes from at his best […] Mr Eliot’s introduction puts forward warily a case for Kipling. It is – for Mr Eliot – a very long piece of critical writing that walks round and round its subject, to dart in with an occasional brilliance. I am not convinced; and I don’t pretend to understand the claim made on the wrapper that A Choice of Kipling’s Verse is “something of a landmark in the history of English literature.” A surprise is hardly a landmark.

‘Mr Eliot rejects the idea that there is any Fascist tendency or even any “flattery of national, racial or imperial vanity” in Kipling. The second of these accusations seems to me proved by many passages, some of them reprinted here. The first is more questionable, but if mob appeal, appeal to cruelty, hatred of intellect, and the propagation of a politico-religious race doctrine are indications of a near-Fascist or pre-Fascist writer, then Kipling is one. His aims, it seems to me, made it impossible for him to be a great poet. Fascism itself appears to rule out the possibility of any good art, and we must expect its forerunners to share the taint.’

5.Comment on a lecture by Van Wyck Brooks on ‘Primary Literature and Coterie Literature’, Partisan Review 9: 2 (Mar./Apr. 1942), 115–16: CProse 6, 268–71.

6.Introducing James Joyce: A Selection of Joyce’s Prose, ed. TSE, with a preface by TSE (F&F, 1942); see further CProse 6, 329–31.

7.WilliamSaroyan, William Saroyan (1908–81): American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist; author of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934) and The Time of Your Life (play, 1939), winner of the Pulitzer Prize (declined) and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and adapted for a 1948 film starring James Cagney.

BestSaroyan, WilliamTSE's blurbs for;a2 Stories of William Saroyan (F&F, Spr. 1942) carried this blurb by TSE: ‘Obviously, this title is too good to be true. The editor of this volume did his best to justify the title: but those who know the inexhaustible variety of this daring trapeze artist of the short story, will know that it is impossible honestly to declare that his best stories can be contained in one volume. We therefore dishonestly declare that these are the Best Stories of Saroyan: and honestly add that we have done our best, at least to provide a representative selection. If you have not room in your house to house all of the works of Saroyan, you can make do with this selection. And if you have any friends who have not acquired the Saroyan habit, you can tempt them with this book.’

8.There were fifteen entries to the translation prize sponsored by the Belgian review Message.