[No surviving envelope]
Letter 30.
I suppose you are at the moment at Nahant (asAmericaBoston, Massachusetts;d1on Labour Day;c2 I remember Labour Day, it is always very fine and hot, and everyone tried to be out of Boston to escape the parades): I hope you will have a more restful time at Woods Holl [sic] or New Bedford afterwards, before starting in Concord. TheHale, Irene (née Baumgras)yet still exhausting;d1 company of your Aunt Irene, even for a few days, does not allow complete relaxation. I am taking actually a fortnight off. LastFabers, the1944 Minsted summer stay;g6 Thursday I went to the Fabers – as of course they have very little petrol that meant train to Haslemere and then two buses, both crowded – for two nights: thatFaber, Ann;b1 was pleasant, andFaber, Thomas Erle ('Tom', TSE's godson);b9 Anne [sc. Ann] as well as Tom was there – itFaber, Richard ('Dick')serving on cruiser;a8 was hoped that Dick might get leave from his cruiser, but he didn’t. Minsted as infested with wasps as Shamley: EnidFaber, Enid Eleanor;c2 and her cook had both been badly stung – this is a phenomenal season for wasps. ThenMackworth, Margaret Haig, 2nd Viscountess Rhondda (née Thomas);a5 back to Shamley on Saturday afternoon: LadyBosanquet, Theodoravisits Shamley;a1 Rhonnda [sic] didn’t come on Sunday, as sheTrevelyan, Mary;a4 hadPeake, Charles;a1 more guests than could be packed into one car, so sent only Theodora Bosanquet, Mary Trevelyan, and Charles Peake. I have had four days of doing nothing whatever useful – I meant to mow the lawn but a shower of rain damped the grass – and have written no letters to anybody till now – though my substitute secretary, anxious to err on the right side, is sending on almost everything, including Portuguese propaganda and letters from Hindu poets. It is very restful to have two weeks without the journey to and from London. AMorley, Christina (née Innes)for which she thanks him;c8 letter from Christina, thanking me for my condolences over the death of her father, mentions having heard of the damage at the office, so I suppose someone has mentioned it in a letter: and I infer from that, that there is now no harm in my mentioning it. ItFaber and Faber (F&F)offices damaged by V-1;f2 occurred very early in the fly-bomb period: neither I nor the Fabers were there that night, which was lucky, as we should all have got very dirty from the ceilings coming down, and they might have got some fragments of glass. ItFaber, Geoffreyand TSE rearrange attic at 23 Russell Square;j9 was curious that he and I had been up in the loft just the night before, and had discovered some old bathroom fixtures, washbasins (what queer junk gets left in attics) at a point just over the head of their beds, and had moved them to a remote corner: what was also curious is that they did not come through the ceiling. All the glass, most of the ceilings, on one side of the house were brought down; and some of the doors wrenched off; but no one was hurt, and the business was able to carry on as usual.1 That was the primary reason for stopping at present only one night a week in town, as a small office room with my bed moved into it is not so comfortable. My books are very dirty from plaster dust. LondonEnglandLondon;h1in wartime;d4 has been quieter lately, and we may hope to get through the rest of the war with no further damage. TheSecond World War;e6 news lately has been so astonishing that if a news bulletin contains no startling announcement, life seems very dull.
ISaroyan, Williamfinally meets TSE;a3 have at last met Mr. William Saroyan. To my surprise, I quite liked him: talked very sensibly, and not at all bumptious.
I have your last letter from Grand Manan (August 11) andAmericaBay of Fundy;c8EH sailing in;a1 like to think of you skippering a boat in the Bay of Fundy. That is the sort of summer I should choose, and for you too. I also have your welcome airgraph of August 17 (but how I wish that I could get a reading glass, since these airgraphs were invented! I have just made it out, and will now address you at 54 Main Street, Concord[)]. (I'Note on War Poetry, A';a4 don’t remember ‘London Calling’ unless it is a collection for the Red Cross that Storm Jameson asked me to contribute to – but what I did for that, about War Poetry, was in VERSE).2 This answers your question about a holiday. LettersEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother);i4 from Henry and from Christina also report great heat: I do hope that it will be over before the 15th, as Concord must be a hot place in hot weather.
1.TSEFaber and Faber (F&F)offices damaged by V-1;f2 to John Hayward, 23 June 1944: ‘a buzz bomb fell in the middle of Russell Square early this morning. No one was hurt; and I understand that the office will be able to carry on; but that the ceilings are down, the windows out and most of the doors off, and everything in a horrible mess. I don’t suppose that we are any worse off than the rest of the square. The flat won’t be habitable for some time. If we had been there we should have got the ceiling on our heads; and I expect that the three old heavy lavatory basins, which Geoffrey found stored in the attic (what strange junk there is in attics) and spent some of Tuesday evening shifting to a position from which they wouldnt be so likely to brain any of us, have come through into the box room. In one way, I am rather glad that the flat is spoilt (though I have yet to see what is left of my books); as I felt distinctly uncomfortable sleeping there this week. We may rig up beds lower down, but I expect that for some time to come, I shall spend Tuesday nights camping out on the ground floor (for fire watching!) Wednesday nights at some hotel, and return to Shamley on Thursdays’ (King’s).
See too Geoffrey Faber’s diary, Fri. 16 June 1944: ‘During the night I heard some odd sounding planes, & realized that the pilotless plane had arrived over London. One came very low over the top of no 24 [Russell Square]. I saw one flying about 1000 feet up. Didn’t see any explode. Lots of wild shooting. Enid slept imperturbably through it all. Must confess I was worried, tho’ not actually frightened.’
2.‘A Note on War Poetry’, in London Calling, ed. Storm Jameson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), 237–8.
3.TheodoraBosanquet, Theodora Bosanquet (1880–1961) had been Henry James’s amanuensis, 1907–16. See Larry McMurty, ‘Almost Forgotten Women’ (on Bosanquet and Lady Rhondda), New York Review of Books, 7 Nov. 2002, 51–2.
3.HenryEliot, Henry Ware, Jr. (TSE's brother) Ware Eliot (1879–1947), TSE’s older brother: see Biographical Register.
AnnFaber, Ann Faber (1922–78) was born and registered in Hampshire: her mother would teasingly refer to her as a ‘Hampshire hog’. She was a boarder at Downe House School, Berkshire, and read history at Somerville College, Oxford (where she became engaged to Alan Watt, who was to be killed at El Alamein). After Oxford, she spent time with the Wrens in Liverpool. Following her military service Ann was employed as secretary by the classical scholar Gilbert Murray in Oxford. She then moved to London where she worked for the family firm in editorial and publicity, as well as writing and publishing a novel of her own, The Imago. However, in Aug. 1952 she suffered a life-changing accident when she crashed her motorcycle, which resulted in the loss of the use of her left arm. (In the mid-1960s she was still doing a little freelance work for Faber, reading manuscripts for Charles Monteith and – in 1967 – arranging a lunch party at her home for the science fiction writers James Blish and Brian Aldiss and their wives.) In Apr. 1958 she married John Corlett, who had two children – Anthony and Brione – from his first marriage, which had ended in divorce. Ann and John did not have children of their own. In the early to mid-1960s Ann and John spent some weeks or months of most years in the West Indies. John had launched and Ann helped with a business called Inter-Continental Air Guides: their firm sold advertising space to hotels and other tourist destinations for inclusion in guidebooks which Ann compiled. In 1966 Ann and John moved from their flat in Highgate to Wiltshire. In the late 1960s or early 1970s John contracted polio while on a work trip to Hong Kong. He became a paraplegic and for the remainder of Ann’s life she was his primary carer, with financial assistance from her mother. During all the years that she had her own property, whether in London or in Wiltshire, Ann’s great love was her garden. Ann died of cancer in March 1978. John survived her by two or three years.
1.TSE was mistaken here. EnidFaber, Enid Eleanor Eleanor Faber (1901–95) was the daughter of Sir Henry Erle Richards (1861–1922), Fellow of All Souls College and Chichele Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at Oxford University, and Mary Isabel Butler (1868–1945).
11.GeoffreyFaber, Geoffrey Faber (1889–1961), publisher and poet: see Biographical Register.
4.ThomasFaber, Thomas Erle ('Tom', TSE's godson) Erle Faber (1927–2004), TSE’s godson and principal dedicatee of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, was to become a physicist, teaching at Cambridge, first at Trinity, then for fifty years at Corpus Christi. He served too as chairman of the Geoffrey Faber holding company.
3.IreneHale, Irene (née Baumgras) Hale, née Baumgras, widow of Philip Hale, celebrated as the prolific and influential music critic of the Boston Herald. Irene Hale, who was herself an accomplished pianist, had studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, where she gained the Springer Gold Medal 1881, and continued with her studies in Europe under Raif and Moritz Mosckowski: she later wrote music under the name Victor Rene.
2.MargaretMackworth, Margaret Haig, 2nd Viscountess Rhondda (née Thomas) Haig Thomas, Viscountess Rhondda (1883–1958), writer and feminist, was proprietor and editor from 1926 of Time & Tide. See Angela V. John, Turning the Tide: The Life of Lady Rhondda (Cardigan, 2013); Catherine Clay, ‘Time and Tide’: The feminist and cultural politics of a modern magazine (Edinburgh, 2018).
4.CharlesPeake, Charles Peake (1897–1958), British diplomat; 1939, Head of the Foreign Office News Department and chief press adviser to the Ministry of Information. In 1941 he became Acting Counsellor in Washington, DC. Knighted in 1956.
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.
2.MaryTrevelyan, Mary Trevelyan (1897–1983), Warden of Student Movement House, worked devotedly to support the needs of overseas students in London (her institution was based at 32 Russell Square, close to the offices of F&F; later at 103 Gower Street); founder and first governor of International Students House, London. Trevelyan left an unpublished memoir of her friendship with TSE – ‘The Pope of Russell Square’ – whom she long desired to marry. See further Biographical Register.