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1.‘Classtravels, trips and plansTSE's 1942 British Council mission to Sweden;e4;a3n of 1910: Fiftieth Anniversary Report’ (1959?): ‘IBritish Counciland TSE's mission to Sweden;a1 had five weeks in Stockholm in 1942 …’ – for the British Council. For details of the trip to Sweden, see blog on ‘Cultural Warfare: Eliot’s work with the British Council’, tseliot.com. In addition, see TSE’s letters to Lord Vansittart, 9 Jan. 1942; Henry Eliot, 1 June 1942; Christina Morley, 27 July 1942.

Matthews, Great Tom, 129: ‘There are chapters, or at least paragraphs, in Eliot’s life that cannot be set forth with any certainty … Such a paragraph is the five weeks in May and June 1942 that Eliot spent in Stockholm with his friend Bishop Bell. It is known that a delegation of anti-Hitler Germans, including Hans Schönfield and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, went to Stockholm and had a series of meetings with Bishop Bell – about plans to overthrow Hitler and end the war – and that Bell later reported to Anthony Eden and that nothing came of it. Whether or not Eliot was privy to these abortive talks we do not know. At any rate, he was not present when the Bishop reported to the Foreign Secretary.’

2.‘TheClassics and the Man of Letters, Thereception;a7 Classics and the Man of Letters’: address delivered on 15 Apr. 1942. See ‘Literature and the Classics’, The Times, 16 Apr. 1942, 5: ‘The Classical Association, which has often heard presidential addresses from representative men in public life or from eminent scholars, listened yesterday at Cambridge to a man of letters. It was in that capacity that Mr T. S. ELIOT spoke. Men of letters, whatever grades and ranks there may be among them, provide a writer with his earliest models, constitute his first readers and critics, and help to guard and ensure the identity and continuity of English literature. And English literature, as Mr ELIOT says, is more than a succession of great authors; it is an entity and part of the larger entity of European literature. It is also a growth, and if a growing organism is wantonly destroyed there can be no putting it together again. Until quite recently all our men of letters were bred on the ancient classics, which also include the Bible; whether they were scholars in the academic sense or not, they all breathed the same atmosphere. On this broad ground Mr ELIOT bases the case for the continued study of the classics in schools, and for a more general study of the ancient languages than would serve to produce a few specialists. He views the problem not as one set before those who have to work out educational time-tables, but as a spiritual problem, on the solution of which depends the future of English literature.

‘Not very long ago MR ELIOT’s plea might have seemed superfluous. But various symptoms now make it welcome. There are iconoclasts who deny the value of the old literature; Latin and Greek are on the defensive in the schools, and the Bible is no longer the national reading that it was. These changes affect the general atmosphere in which writers do their work, while criticism for want of familiarity with the best is in danger of weakening its credentials. Mr ELIOT is well aware of the extremes to which criticism often tends to run – how the old critic can often see nothing good in new writing, for instance. But that is beside the point. Neither critic nor author can have too wide a general culture or too much sense of history or knowledge of the origins of English literature. To be a creative writer, or a critic worth the name, demands, in Mr ELIOT’s contention, a longer and more arduous initiation than apprenticeship to the other arts; and if the classical background to letters, a source of literary innovation and adventure in the past, is to be ignored, the loss will be a spiritual loss. Genius may not need the background, or may not appear to need it; for in fact SHAKESPEARE the unscholarly had it as much as MILTON the scholar. But genius is always rare, and Mr ELIOT is thinking rather of the general body of writers, who have served their generation and helped to maintain and enrich and renovate the tradition. It is not a question of obstinate conservatism, but of the recognition that the best of the past has its permanent claims on the living, who turn their backs on it to their own loss and, if they are writers, to the impoverishment of their public.’

See too ‘Classics and Men of Letters: Mr Eliot on Continuity’, Ibid, 7: ‘Mr T. S. Eliot, speaking on “The Classics and the Man of Letters” in his presidential address to the Classical Association at its annual meeting at Cambridge yesterday, held that the maintenance of classical education is essential to the maintenance of the continuity of English literature.

‘The President said that the standards of the highest classical scholarship had to be kept up, and the work of research honoured. That there would continue to be a place for the great scholar – without whom the fabric of classical education crumbled – he did not doubt; what was less certain was that in the future he would be discovered young enough to be given the proper training, and allowed any greater role than that of preparing a few younger men to carry on his work, without prospect of wider influence. A second category was that of non-professional scholarship, and of scholarship in other fields in which a reading knowledge of the classical languages was or should be required. But the maintenance of those types of scholarship was not enough unless some knowledge of the civilizations of Greece and Rome, some respect for their achievements, some understanding of their historical relation to our own, and some acquaintance with their literature and their wisdom in translation could be cultivated among a very much larger number of people.

‘Earlier in his address Mr Eliot made it clear that he did not pretend that a classical education was essential for the writer of genius. But a great literature was more than the sum of a number of great writers. The term ‘men of letters” included men of the second or third or lower ranks as well as the greatest; and those secondary writers furnished an important part of the environment of the great writer, as well as his first audience, his first appreciators, and his first critical correctors. The continuity of a literature was essential to its greatness. It was very largely the function of secondary writers to preserve that continuity and to provide a body of writing which, although not necessarily read by posterity, played a great part in forming the link between those writers who would continue to be read.’

3.PeggyAshcroft, Peggy Ashcroft (1907–91), celebrated British stage actor, was at this time married to the barrister Jeremy Hutchinson (son of TSE’s old friends St John and Mary Hutchinson).

4.VictorMallet, Victor Mallet (1893–1969), diplomat and author – who had served in Tehran, Buenos Aires, Brussels and Washington, DC – was Envoy to Sweden, 1940–5; later Ambassador to Spain, and to Italy; knighted, 1944; awarded GCMG, 1952. His wife was Christiana Jean Andreae.

SeeHinks, Rogerrecalls TSE in Sweden;a6n TheMallets, thewhere Roger Hinks remembers them;a2Mallet, VictorMallets, the Gymnasium of the Mind: The Journals of Roger Hinks 1933–1963, ed. John Goldsmith (1984), 84: ‘21 May 1942, Stockholm. Tom and I dined with the Mallets alone this evening. At table the conversation turned upon the intricacies of Swedish pronunciation, Peggy remarking that it was difficult when you could not tell the difference, by looking at things, between “anden”, the duck, and “Anden”, the Holy Ghost. Victor, without looking up from his fish, muttered: “How like the Swedes not to be able to tell the difference between a duck and a pigeon …” Afterwards V and P went upstairs, leaving Tom and me for a last talk before he goes back to London. WeMorgan, CharlesTSE's obiter dictum on;a2n discussed possible successors in the series of lectures. Charles Morgan and Herbert Read were mentioned. “Well,” said Tom, “if Charles Morgan came, I don’t suppose he’d do much harm to anything … except culture.” OfRead, Herberthis political persuasions;c4n Herbert he observed: “He would do, if his reputation as an anarchist had not preceded him. And even that might not matter, if only you could persuade people here that Herbert had some private reason for calling himself an anarchist when he is really only a social-democrat …” In the end we found ourselves talking about the nature of poetry. I confessed that I had really no idea why or how a poem ever came to be written. “A poem,” said Tom, “is the result of an urgent need to make a whole out of things which have nothing to do with each other.”’

5.DikterEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother)as curator of Eliotana;e9n I Urval [‘Selected Poems’] (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1942). TSE to Henry Eliot, 1 June 1942: ‘As soon as my books arrive I will send you a copy of Dikter i Urval, a volume of translations of my verse by Swedish poets, which was arranged to appear during my visit. This was a great help in publicity. I met most of the poets, as well as bishops, theatrical people (Murder was performed there, with considerable success, in 1938), a few cabinet ministers, publishers, and miscellaneous people.’

6.Prince Wilhelm, Duke of Södermanland (1884–1965), Swedish and Norwegian prince, published a number of books under the name Prins Wilhelm.

7.PaulineBrunius, Pauline Brunius (1881–1954), stage and film actor; director; managing director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, 1938–48. (TSE attended a performance of Strindberg’s Gustav Vasa, at the Rikstheater: see ‘Strindbergs inflytande på T. S. Eliot berydande’, CProse 7, 318–21.)

8.Gustaf AulénAulén, Gustaf (1879–1977), Lutheran theologian; Bishop of Strängnäs in the Church of Sweden; author of influential works including The Faith of the Christian Church (1923; trans. into English, 1948) and Christus Victor: A Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement (1930; English, 1931). His wife (m. 1907) was Kristine Björnstad. TSE to George Every, 27 May 1942: ‘I had a very happy day at Strangnass with Bishop Aulen and his family and liked them almost more than anyone I met in Sweden.’

9.George Bell, Bishop of Chichester.

10.Seetravels, trips and plansTSE's 1942 British Council mission to Sweden;e4as recounted to JDH;a4n too TSE to John Hayward, 14 June 1942: ‘IBritish Counciland TSE's mission to Sweden;a1 might have expected that when the British Council (in the person of Bridges Adams) assured me that I would be gone for three weeks, the British Council (in the person of Bottrall) would have arranged a programme for four: I might also have expected that after that I should have to wait day by day for a week for a plane. The weather was usually either too foggy in Scotland, or too fine in the Skaggerack. You can surely imagine for yourself the lunch, dinner and/or supper parties with the sppeches speeches [sic] complimentary by the host with the first glass of wone [sic], and the reply complimentary by the guest with the last glass of wine, the fluent English of every sort, the reception (in each place) by the Student Body, with Student Songs and performances on the Lute (the favourite instrument of the great barok poet Bellman) the perpetual handshaking and thanks and bowing; the visit to the local cathedral, art museum, modern theatre and/or concert hall; the supper the the [sic] PEN Club in the Bellman Rooms at the Gyldene Freden Restaurant which as everyone knows was bequeathed to the Swedish Academy by Anders Zorn; with Prins Wilhelm tall and lank and so completely Savile Row and Burlington Arcade that you could see he was a forreigner a mile off (‘and how is good old London?’ ‘cheerio!’) and poetry readings and performances on the Lute which was the favorite instrument of the poet Bellman who frequented the Gyldene Freden which was given to the Swedish Academy by the Painter Anders Zorn. I did manage NOT to look at the interior of the Town Hall. Roger Hinks shares with his chum Knapp Fisher a palatial flat in Strandvägen just above the Japanese Legation, with a card on the door: ROGER HINKS deuxième secrétaire de la legation britannique; Bill Pollock lives in a coquet villa on the side of the lake and plays records of Bela Bartok; there is a bouncing boy named Peter Tennant who says he knows you and who seems to talk Swedish better than English. He took me sailing one afternoon with two other attachés, Hubert Howard and Andrew Croft: you know the kind of expedition – most of the time spent in getting started and in picking up the mooring again, but a very pleasant relief from Swedish parties. There was also the bishops (mostly rather cagey and suspicious of Russia) and the Theatrical World – remarkably like the theatrical world everywhere else – Anders somebody who played Becket, with a portfolio full of photographs of himself as Hamlet, Othello etc., Mrs. Pauline Brunius the Sibyl Thorndike of Sweden who gave me tickets to Gustav Vasa historical play by Strindberg which seems to be modelled on Shakespeare’s historical plays but also contains several neurotic Swedish characters who are not very Shakespearean, where I sat next to a newspaper editor who is notoriously in the pay of the Nazis, several young laides ladies not laides but lovelies with interests in the films. Some of the parties were rather late. Large dinner by the Bonniers where I made my most moving speech; Mr. Svenson rather in the background but particularly agreeable person; another dinner by a rival publisher Bergk whom I have to give lunch to on Tuesday; and a number of Characters who turned up at almost any party, some of whom have presented me with their works. The books I collected have been sent on after me, with the exception of the copy of Money in the Bank which I particularly wanted for you as a curiosity, a first Swedish edition of the fallen Wodehouse; but I trust you have received Dikter I Urval. Bottrall skipping about with feverish energy. Newspaper interviews. Photographs: magnesium popping. The Grand Hotel very Phillips Oppenheim, full of international agents and Japs chattering in German. Last two weeks spent very pleasantly at the Legation: Mrs. Mallet gave me 2 neckties, a pleasant Sunday afternoon at the Races. Journey over very cold, in a flying suit and harness; journey back very hot. Still feeling very exhausted. I had hoped to come to Cambridge for Whitsun: but didnt get away from Bromma airport till that afternoon.’

TSE to Christina Morley, 27 July 1942: ‘Prince Wilhelm … says “cheerio” instead of “skol”.’

11.ByFabers, themove to Minsted;f2nFaber, Richard ('Dick')Fabers, theFaber, AnnFabers, theFaber, Enid EleanorFabers, theFaber, GeoffreyFabers, theFaber, Thomas Erle ('Tom', TSE's godson)Fabers, the arrangement with All Souls College, the Fabers presently took up residence at Minsted House, Midhurst, W. Sussex, where the property included a farm (as well as swimming pool). TSEMorley, Christina (née Innes);c5n to Christina Morley, 27 July 1942: ‘You may have heard of the great Faber migration: Ty Glyn sold to a Scotch Admiral, Oak Hill Park being dismantled, a flat in Russell Square being furnished, with a bedroom for me, but very little prospect of a charwoman, and the Cambrian Squire becoming a feudatory of the Bursar of All Souls’ in Sussex. (The new Seat I have not yet seen, but it seems to have one of the largest cow barns in existence).’

12.JamesCockburn, James Hutchinson Hutchison Cockburn (1882–1973), Church of Scotland clergyman and scholar; Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1941–2. William Belden Lecturer at Harvard, 1942. From 1944 he was to be Chaplain to King George VI.