[No surviving envelope]
IPerkinses, the;k4 cabled to-day to the Perkins’s a message to be passed on to you, saying that I had been ill for a fortnight and was now writing. IHale, Emilyhealth, physical and mental;w6convalesces on Grand Manan;b9 didCanadaGrand Manan Island, New Brunswick;a2EH spends autumn on;a3 this because I felt so doubtful whether ‘c/o Miss Briggs, Grand Manan’ would be a sufficient address, so I thought it safest to communicate via Commonwealth Avenue until I get confirmation and perhaps completion of the address. My immediate thought was that Grand Manan was a very bleak and exposed place in which to roost until Christmas, with very limited amenities, no company, no reading matter, and intermittent connexion with the main land; but I have only seen that headland on the horizon and await fuller information about the life there. ItPerkins, Edith (EH's aunt);f3 was, in any case, a great relief to get your cable, and a reassuring one a little earlier from Mrs. Perkins. I trust that you will let me know what the doctors told you and what régime is prescribed for you for the next three months. ThisHale, Emilyfamily;w4EH's relations with aunt and uncle;a6 period was a great strain – for me, but I know that it must have been for you, especially with having to keep the Perkins’s spirits up and having no one about with whom you could relax.
First to reply to a question in an earlier letter, which did not seem worth worrying about during this anxiety. OfHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3EH free to dispose of, within limits;h3 course my letters and anything else are yours to dispose of in any way you wish and see fit. MyEliot Houserepository for Eliotana;b8 ownMagdalene College, Cambridgerepository for Eliotana;a9 two repositories, of course, for manuscripts and such (notEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother)as curator of Eliotana;e9 that I think in my heart that manuscripts ought to be preserved, but giving them gives pleasure to others, and especially to Henry) are Eliot House and Magdalene. But I have no particular wish in the matter: and I certainly should not like to think that you felt obliged to preserve anything that you were tempted to destroy. IThorps, theTSE against leaving letters to;d7 do confess to some hesitation about the Thorps, not that I do not like them personally very much, but I fear the ruling passion of the academic mind, especially when seated in a chair of English Literature – the craving to publicise and edit with annotations. I should not like it to be possible for any really private correspondence to be published or made available to the public or made use of in any way for 50 years after my death – this is a very common provision about letters and private diaries. Primarily for the reason that I think that I have often referred very frankly to relatives and friends – things that (so far as I remember) were proper enough to say in private, but might give pain to living people. Second, I want to continue to feel that I am writing to you alone, and not with the Thorps or anyone else in the background: for otherwise I should feel a kind of invisible censorship, and would be hampered in speaking freely in the future – I should always be thinking of some future curious reader. It is always a very delicate and difficult question, to whom private letters may be entrusted. OfAdams, John Quincyletters censored by Eliot family member;a1 course, when it came to my Aunt Rose censoring letters from John Quincy Adams to my great grandfather, that is carrying discretion too far!1
YourHale, Emilyspends time in Maine;o8 letter of August 28, from ‘Sebasco Estates’ (which I naturally thought was a part of Sebasco) reached me just as I was incubating a cold, and I brought it down here to read. (I should explain that I had gone up to town that week in my summer clothes, and that the weather changed suddenly – asde la Mares, thegive TSE wartime refuge;a6 theFabers, themove to Minsted;f2 Fabers were in Sussex I had gone to the De la Mares, which is a rather cold house anyway. I was imprudently trying to wear my light clothes as long as possible, because this is to be a cold unheated winter, with few fires and baths, and I wanted to save the warmth of clothing until later – a mistaken idea. A cold for me means a temperature – not a very high one ever, but enough to keep me in bed: I got up after a week and my temperature went up again, so I had to have a second week in bed. Now it is simply a question of taking tonics and not getting over-tired).
I was very touched that you should have remembered to send me a birthday cable, in the midst of your waiting and uncertainty. INason, Margaret ('Meg') Geraldinesends TSE box of toffee;a4 had also a sweet letter from Meg Nason, with a box of toffee which she had made. They are still working very hard at the Bindery, have plenty of custom, but of course difficulties with supplies and regulations. She asked after you, saying that she had not heard from you for a long time. I told her that you had been ill, and were now going away for convalescence, but that the only address I felt sure of was care of the Perkins’s.2
Even had I not been ill at the time, I think that I should have had to wait for some days before trying to reply to your letter. I do not know how painful it may have been to write, but it was very painful to read – one might as well be frank, mightn’t one? – and for several days I felt plunged in a mist of perplexity and depression such as, it seemed to me for several days, I had not known since 1915: but perhaps that was the temperature. I am puzzled, first of all, to learn that my letter made an impression on you as if of a very different person than what you know. I don’t think that what you believe I really am is any deception: but I do think that we all have several sides to us, and that no one sees the whole of anybody. But I was certainly not repudiating the past or anything that I have felt, or the reality of the communion. And for that my gratitude must be endless. But when this cannot take its natural conclusion, and at a certain point an absolute moral law comes between, then even that is a quickening which cannot be borne continuously. ButHale, Emilyreligious beliefs and practices;x1the issue of communion;a8 the point which provoked my question about the possibility of communication, was a practical one. IHale, Emilyreligious beliefs and practices;x1compared to TSE's;a5 know that you do not accept what I call Christianity – or shall we say, full Christian doctrine – you do accept some fragments of it: at an earlier time, I did, I confess, have a tiny hope that you might come gradually in that direction and find peace in it: but a different view of life is deeply ingrained, and I must, as with many friends less dear to me, just resign myself to the difference. But I did think that you were able to accept the fact of my holding certain beliefs and trying to act according to them; and I cannot see that I am any more ‘self-centred’ in doing so than a man is self-centred who has moral scruples against murder as a means of getting an inconvenient person out of the way. Whether the laws of the Church have touched the real me, or not is of course open to question, and nobody can claim to be as wholly ‘touched’ by his beliefs as he should aim to be: but I am sure that they have touched me enough for any violation of them, on my part, to be a violation of myself. I am quite ready to agree that if I could live with you I might become a finer man; but that could hardly happen, alas, if in order to live with you I had to do what I believed wrong.
YouEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)the possibility of divorcing;f2in common and canon law;a5 say that you have pointed out to me several times in the past that my Church sanctions dissolution: and I think that I have several times pointed out to you that this is not so, and that although irregularities do occur, the law of the Church remains, for those who are conscientious, the same as it was before the Reformation. (There are of course people like the vicar of Campden, who, to my manifest disapproval, sanctioned your communions). IEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)marriage to;e6unrecognised by TSE;b2 certainly do not consider my marriage a real marriage: but in order to get it broken I should have to consent first to admit that it was real. (I have tried to explain, before, the difference between nullification and dissolution). IUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wellsconsulted on question of divorce;c1 am sure that I reported to you going into this matter with Francis Underhill, when he was still at Rochester. TheHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3particularly constrained by EH's letter of 1939;h4 lasttravels, trips and plansEH's 1939 England visit;d5memory vitiated by EH's subsequent letter;b4 time you raised this question – afterHale, EmilyTSE's love for;x2thwarted by question of divorce;e6 I had supposed that it was settled – was after your return in 1939: can’t you see that the effect of that was to make me wonder whether the summer, when I had been so happy in your company, had only been possible because you thought that the future was more open than it really was – and that this wretched feeling came down upon me as a restraint upon any further expression of feeling? You almost, now, put me in the strange position of an unwilling lover, whose slowness and hesitancy, perhaps whose cowardice, make it necessary to force a decision: a decision which, had I been free to make, I would have been the first to urge as speedily as possible. This is the kind of misunderstanding I have been talking about. What is appalling is the feeling which I cannot escape, that somehow the misunderstanding must be my fault, and that brings an intolerable and terrifying sense of guilt (is this self-centred of me?); yet I swear that at least three times I thought that I made myself perfectly clear.
You will see, after all this, that I cannot help feeling that I am talking into the dark, and that I fear to put down every word lest it convey something different from what I intend: and after that to try to find out what it has conveyed, so as to start again to put it right. I know what pain I have felt, but I do not know how much I give. I think and pray for you constantly, and I am always the same at least in the respect of being
1.The source of this family gossip has not been ascertained.
According to reliable calculation, TSE was 18th cousin once removed from John Quincy Adams, sixth U.S. President. TSE’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, was married to Abigail Adams Cranch, whose grandmother, Mary Smith, was the older sister of Abigail Smith – better known as Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, second U.S. President. Thus Pres. John Adams was not a direct Eliot ancestor; but his son, John Quincy Adams, and his son, the ambassador Charles Francis Adams, and his son, the author and historian Henry Adams were TSE’s distant cousins. (Other remote cousins included James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Lowell.)
2.See TSE to Meg Nason, 13 Oct. 1942: ‘Emily has been rather ill this summer. In the first place, her college has been retrenching expenses and reducing staff; and as she was one of the junior members, and had no degree, she was one of those who went. I don’t suppose that this had anything to do with her illness; but the illness has prevented her from accepting any engagement for the coming year. A cable from her says she is to go to Grand Manan (an island where she often goes in the summer) for convalescence, but I am not sure of the full address, and so am writing still c/o Dr. J. C. Perkins, 90 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston. I gather that she is recovering well: she does not make much of the illness in writing’ (BL).
See too Cara Brocklebank to TSE, 2 Dec. (1942): ‘I am awfully sorry to hear that Miss Hale is not well, I wish we could get her here as a liason [sic] officer; she’d be invaluable in that position: I shall suggest it to her in my Xmas letter …’.
3.HenryEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother) Ware Eliot (1879–1947), TSE’s older brother: see Biographical Register.
1.MargaretNason, Margaret ('Meg') Geraldine (Meg) Geraldine Nason (1900–86), proprietor of the Bindery tea rooms, Broadway, Worcestershire, whom TSE and EH befriended on visits to Chipping Campden.
2.Revd Francis UnderhillUnderhill, Revd Francis, Bishop of Bath and Wells, DD (1878–1943), TSE’s spiritual counsellor: see Biographical Register.