[No surviving envelope]
Letter 45.
Your letter of July 27 arrived in very quick time; as one of my letters to you must have done: in consequence your comments on what I said seem startlingly immediate. OfFour QuartetsEnglish edition of;a7 course you would have had a copy of the English ‘Quartets’ if it had been published! ThatEast Cokersales;b4 won’t be until nextDry Salvages, Thesales;b3 spring: youLittle Giddingsales;c2 see we published them all separately (as you know) and theyBurnt Nortonsales;c1 go on selling very well: E. Coker about 23,000 up to date; Gidding about 20,000 and Salvages a poor third for some reason which I cannot fathom, with about 15,000. Norton a little under that: but that is better than I should expect, considering that it was already available in the collected poems. ISweeney, James Johnsonapparently writing book on Four Quartets;a2 believeEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother)friend to J. J. Sweeney;h4 Henry’s industrious friend, the remarkable sleuth J. J. Sweeney, is at work on an elaborate commentary on the whole lot. IMatthiessen, Francis Otto ('F. O.')compared as critic to Sweeney;a8 prefer his expositions to those of Matthiessen, who is a trifle solemn and humourless.
Now that the Guest Book is ready, may I (shamefacedly) ask you to repeat the suggestion of an inscription to offer, which you very thoughtfully made withEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother)as curator of Eliotana;e9 a view to doing some justice to Henry’s patient and loving labours? It becomes more and more impossible to find which letter it was in; and I can’t wait until I have read them all through from the beginning! IEast Coker;c3 amEnglandEast Coker, Somerset;e9photographs of;a8 glad to hear about the photographs of E. Coker: she might make a tour of the other places with her camera. TheDry Salvages, The;b4 only one that will never change is the Salvages; the mostEnglandBurnt Norton, Gloucestershire;d5its imagined fate;a3 likely to have altered is Burnt Norton, if (as I seem to have heard) it is again inhabited: probably a lot of soldiers there now, or Waafs.1 I have never heard of any reader of the poem finding it; and I don’t see how they can unless we tell them. I like to think of it as a secret garden, permanently untenanted.
NoBuchan, John, 1st Baron TweedsmuirTSE on;a1, I never knew Buchan.2 HeBarrie, Sir James Matthew ('J. M.')likened to John Buchan;a7 struck me as rather pathetic, an example of the poor Scottish boy making his way in the world, fired by great ambition, like Barrie, and perhaps not, like Barrie, finding vanity at the end. He must have had charm, to become the intimate of so many exalted personages. HisBuchan, Anna Masterton ('O . Douglas')Pink Sugar;a1 sister writes sentimental fiction under the name of O. Douglas: her masterpiece is ‘Pink Sugar’.3 IBuchan, John, 1st Baron TweedsmuirHuntingtower;a2 liked ‘Huntingtower’;4 butStevenson, Robert Louisas model for John Buchan;a2 generally as a writer of fiction he is distinctly second-rate, a humble follower of Stevenson, whose writing has been a model for so many Scots, andQuiller-Couch, Sir Arthurhis debt to R. L. Stevenson;a3 indeed for Quiller Couch too. But I believe that some of his historical books, such as ‘Montrose’ and ‘Cromwell’ are very good; though not as good as Lord Eustace Percy’s ‘John Knox’.5
IMcPherrin, Jeanetteaccompanied TSE and EH to Burford;e7 do rather think thatEnglandBurford, Oxfordshire;d4;a3 we went to Burford with Jeanie, but she would remember. I remember your pointing out to me Sheep Street, and a house where you and the Perkins’s had stayed in 1930.6
IAmericaBay of Fundy;c8 am not surprised by your having Fog: I have always understood that the Bay of Fundy was the home of Fog. But if you have put on weight and tan, there must have been some sun too. I am sorry that you are leaving so soon (I shall send this to Commonwealth Avenue). I still hope about that position. I trust that you will not stop long in Boston, which is so sultry in August and September.
I was able to have a less eventful week, last week. TomorrowBrownes, the Martintheir sons;c5 I have tea with the Brownes, who have taken a flat near Great Portland Street, in expectation of their boys’ return: one is to study architecture (that one is a pacifist) and the younger one is to go as a day boy to Harrow. OnMostyn Red Cross Club;a1 Wednesday evening I have to go to meet some soldiers at an American Red Cross Hostel, who have expressed a wish to meet me (at least, a few of them have)7 andEliot, Thomas Hopkinson;a3 on Thursday I have invited Thomas Eliot to dinner: but if he doesn’t accept I shall be able to return to the country that night and have an extra day’s work. IBooks Across the Sea;a2 haveDickens, CharlesBleak House;a7 written a Presidential'Presidential Message to Books Across the Sea';a2 Message to ‘Books Across the Sea’, and'Message to Aguedal';a2 a message to a French review published in Morocco:8 on the carpet are another broadcast to India and an article for Russia.9 MrsDickens, CharlesTSE and Mrs Jellyby;a5. Jellaby [sc. Jellyby] my name should be.10
The little room I now have as a study is very warm, looking south east and I think over some room which adjoins the kitchen: I ought to benefit by this in the winter – and if we have to supply coal to the Mediterranean countries a warm room is very desirable. I don’t seem to put on weight, but I am rather brown, from doing my reading and napping in the garden on every fine day. IHale, Emilyphotographs of;w7surround TSE at Shamley;e5 have your photograph (I don’t like the profile, but the other will do) on my desk, and also the little one (aged 9?) in a gilt frame: there is a tiny one in my pocket book.
1.WAAF: a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (established in 1939).
2.JohnBuchan, John, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (1875–1940) – Scottish novelist, historian, Unionist politician; Governor-General of Canada – was author of novels including The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916).
3.AnnaBuchan, Anna Masterton ('O . Douglas') Masterton Buchan (1877–1948) wrote under the name O. Douglas. Pink Sugar was published in 1924.
4.Huntingtower (1922): novel by John Buchan.
5.John Knox (1937), by Eustace Percy, 1st Baron Percy of Newcastle (1887–1958), diplomat and politician; styled Lord Eustace Percy from 1899 to 1953.
6.Burford: charming medieval town in the Cotswolds, on the River Windrush.
7.See TSE to Hayward, 15 Aug. 1943, on ‘an evening with the boys at the Mostyn Red Cross Club in Portman Square. The last turned out better than I had expected: Lady George Cholmondeley had selected the right number and obviously selected them well. Chumblie’s Jumblies asked good questions (about poetry); all privates or N.C.O.’s.’
8.See ‘Message to Aguedal’, CProse 6, 482–3.
9.‘Kipling – The People’s Poet’, The British Ally (Britansky Soyuznik) issue 41 (8 Oct. 1944), 6; and issue 42 (15 Oct. 1944), 6: in CProse 6, 533–40. The British Ally, a weekly newspaper, was published in Moscow by the British Ministry of Information, 1942–8.
10.Mrs Jellyby is a satirical character in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–3) who ignores the needs of her own family and neighbourhood in preference for an African mission.
5.SirBarrie, Sir James Matthew ('J. M.') James Barrie, Bt, OM (1860–1937), Scottish novelist and dramatist; world-renowned for Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904).
2.JohnBuchan, John, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (1875–1940) – Scottish novelist, historian, Unionist politician; Governor-General of Canada – was author of novels including The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916).
3.HenryEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother) Ware Eliot (1879–1947), TSE’s older brother: see Biographical Register.
1.ThomasEliot, Thomas Hopkinson H. Eliot (1907–91), son of Samuel Atkins Eliot (1862–1950); lawyer, politician, academic and author. Educated at Harvard, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the Harvard Law School, he practised as a lawyer from 1933 (also lecturing on Government at Harvard, 1937–8). He was a Democratic member of Congress, 1941–Jan. 1943. In 1943 he became Director of the British Division, Office of War Information in London (where he was also a special assistant to the U.S. Ambassador); and in 1944 he did further war service with the Office of Strategic Services. For five years after the war, he was in practice as a lawyer in Boston, before taking up an appointment as Professor of Political Science at Washington University, St Louis. After a period as Professor of Constitutional Law, 1958–61, he became Chancellor of Washington University, 1962–71; and he served on various government bodies.
2.JeanetteMcPherrin, Jeanette McPherrin (1911–92), postgraduate student at Scripps College; friend of EH: see Biographical Register.
7.F. O. MatthiessenMatthiessen, Francis Otto ('F. O.') (1902–50) taught for 21 years in the English Department at Harvard, where he specialised in American literature and Shakespeare, becoming Professor of History and Literature in 1942. The first Senior Tutor at Eliot House, he was a Resident Tutor, 1933–9. Works include The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935) and American Renaissance (1941).
2.SirQuiller-Couch, Sir Arthur Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944) – ‘Q’ – critic, poet, novelist, editor and anthologist; King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, Cambridge, Fellow of Jesus College. His publications include the Oxford Book of English Verse 1250– 1900 (1900) and On the Art of Writing (lectures, 1916). See further A. L. Rowse, Quiller Couch: A Portrait of ‘Q’ (1988).
4.JamesSweeney, James Johnson Johnson Sweeney (1900–86), museum curator and writer on modern art; Curator of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935–45; Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1952–60. Sweeney wrote ‘East Coker: A Reading’, Southern Review 6 (Spring 1941), 771–91 – an essay that TSE enjoyed – and ‘Little Gidding: Introductory to a Reading’, Poetry 62 (July 1943), 214–23. He did not complete a book-length study of TSE’s works.