[No surviving envelope]
Letter 19.
Your lovely letter of October 12 reached me two days ago and brought me a measure of serenity: when I have absorbed it more fully I shall write in reply to it, at the end of the week. In some other respects, it was not so reassuring. Grand Manan proves to have been as solitary a hermitage as I had feared, though I do not know that in the circumstances you could have made a better choice, at a time in which one does not want either solitude or society, and in which, unless one can be with exactly the right person or persons, one may want not to be with those one knows best. And as for the physical disabilities the doctor’s account does not throw as much light upon them as I had hoped: and as the cause remains so obscure, so must also the course of the convalescence remain unpredictable. So that I still have a good deal to worry about, including the question of what plans you should make for the rest of the winter. IHale, Emilyreligious beliefs and practices;x1source of worry to EH;b1 have some inkling about the desert you have been passing through, and the struggles you have had on the way. ItFirst World Warin retrospect, from the 1930s;a3 is the sort of experience one was hardly prepared for in the middle years.1 Twenty-fiveSecond World Warin relation to the First;d6 years ago, if one had thought about what life would be twenty-five years hence, one would have expected that all the tempests and dangers would be over, and that whatever the sufferings and disasters in the meantime, one would eventually reach a point of being able to look forward to a long period of comparative tranquillity in which at least [one] would know what the rest of life would be.2 Many men of our generation, in England, must have felt, when the war came, ‘why should this happen all over again, when we are neither young enough to accept it as an incident nor old enough to be indifferent – coming to bring disorder into life just as we were settled: another twenty years might have seen us through’. That is only an outward experience, less acute than when the crisis comes to one separately and personally, which brings home to us more deeply that ‘the road winds uphill to the very end’.3 I do admire the nobility with which you are facing it; anyone who takes it in that way can triumph over it by becoming a greater person.
My abortive cold – the struggle of what would have been a cold, against the antitoxins in me – is about ended; and tomorrow I go to town again for the usual three nights. LittleLittle Giddingpublished;c1 Gidding has been published, and the copies will soon be on the way to America. I dare say they will arrive about Christmas time. EachChristianitythe Church Year;d8in wartime;b1 Christmas, since 1939, is stranger than the last.
IEliot, Theresa Garrett (TSE's sister-in-law)a 'lovely person';b9 am so glad that Theresa has been so good; she is indeed a lovely person.
1.Cf. TSE to Paul Elmer More, 2 June 1930 (Letters 5, 208–11): ‘To me, religion has brought at least the perception of something above morals, and therefore extremely terrifying; it has brought me not happiness, but the sense of something above happiness and therefore more terrifying than ordinary pain and misery; the very dark night and the desert …’
See too Reilly’s speech in The Cocktail Party:
Do you imagine that the Saint in the desert
With spiritual evil always at his shoulder
Suffered any less from hunger, damp, exposure,—————470
Bowel trouble, and the fear of lions,
Cold of the night and heat of the day, than we should?
An early draft of the play makes it clear that TSE had in mind St Anthony the Great:
Do you suppose that Anthony in the desert […]
Anthony of Egypt (ca. 251–356) took to a life of asceticism in the desert. His biography was written by St Athanasius of Alexandria (298–356).
2.Cf. ‘East Coker’, V:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years –
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
3.Christina Rossetti, ‘Up-Hill’: ‘Does the road wind up-hill all the way? / Yes, to the very end.’