[No surviving envelope]

1.GilbertHorobin, GilbertTangent;a1n Horobin, Tangent (1946).

BrowneBrowne, Elliott Martinurges TSE to concentrate on theatre;e2n to TSE, 1 Sept. 1946: ‘Regarding The Family Reunion, I agree that the best course is to leave it alone. If you find, as I can well understand you may, that one change inevitably leads to the necessity of another, it is not worth expending a long time on such a revision … I expect to get to it in October or at latest November, unless Tangent proves a bigger success than I anticipate. That opens on Sept: 7th, and I hope you will come and look at it (Stuart Latham’s production, by the way).

‘I am the more willing to agree that The Family Reunion stays as it is if that brings the new play any nearer. I confess to some bitterness when I read of two other books half-finished, and the promised play not begun. That I am constantly assailed about this, by the Arts Council and others, and that the continuance of our Poets’ Theatre does depend to some extent upon it, is not the main point. What I do press is this: you are the father and the master of modern English poetry and in particular of poetic drama: all the poets and all those in the theatre who are trying to help them need, not so much your advice, as your creative leadership. This, being a matter of creation, is a more important use for the years of the creative master’s life than exegesis in even the profoundest subjects of literary or theological criticism. We need your poetry and your drama: don’t put off giving for too long! Immediate things are also ephemeral: leave them to those whose minds are of ephemeral quality.’

2.StephenSpender, Stephentakes issue with Roy Campbell;c9 SpenderCampbell, Royliterary fracas surrounding Talking Bronco;a2 objected to what heMacNeice, Louisand the Spender–Campbell spat;a8n consideredDay Lewis, Ceciland the Spender–Campbell spat;a3n the untruths that Roy Campbell had uttered in his latest volume of poems, Talking Bronco (F&F, 1946), which expressed scorn – most egregiously in the title poem – for ‘Our British intellectuals [who had] played in Spain’, that is, those poets whom he disdained by the portmanteau term ‘MacSpaunday’: ‘joint MacSpaunday’ and ‘Brave MacSpaunday’. OnFaber, Geoffreyand the Spender–Campbell spat;k6n 2 June 1946 he wrote this angry letter to Campbell (with copies being sent straight off to Geoffrey Faber, MacNeice and Day-Lewis):

You are a liar, a gross slanderer, an empty-headed boaster, a coward, a bully and a Fascist.

The vilest combination of all these qualities is contained in the lines of your poem in which, addressing your MacSpaunday (by whom you undoubtedly mean MacNeice, Auden, Day Lewis and myself) you write:-

While in the rear you fattened and grew cosy,

By painting sham Utopias pink and rosy,

For which you’d never risk a scratch yourself,

But only brewed the dope for stolen pelf.

[…]

This is an infamous slander not only on four English poets but on the Spanish Republic.

I defy you to produce any evidence whatever that any of the four writers concerned received a penny in payment from the Spanish Republic. As a matter of fact, we all offered our services free to Spain, and paid our own expenses while we were there […] I reserve to myself the right to contest your lies and slanders publicly and privately wherever and whenever I think fit.

Sean Day-Lewis, in C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980) maintained: ‘T. S. Eliot, at his most vague and unworldly, had accepted Talking Bronco for Faber without realizing that the “satires” were directed more or less libellously, and without camouflage, at four poets for whom he expressed considerably admiration. When told what he had published he was shocked. Fortunately for him and Campbell none of the poets felt inclined to pursue the matter very far.’ InLehmann, Johnslandered by Roy Campbell;a2n truth, Eliot had spent several weeks, from January to March 1946, adroitly encouraging Campbell to swerve the libellous in the language and names of his drafts for this volume, which had indeed included potential libels on figures including W. H. Auden and John Lehmann (most being ultimately excised). He advised Campbell, 23 January: ‘Our general principle is that it is possible to say almost anything, certainly everything that you have said, about Left Wing poets in general but that direct obvious allusions to particular poets ought to be avoided … You will understand that it would not do for us to publish any direct attack on the character or physical courage of one of our authors.’ After spending one pleasant evening as a dinner guest of Campbell and his wife – primarily with the intention of coaxing him towards correctitude – Eliot wrote to him, candidly and judiciously, on 26 Mar.:

Of course I have the additional reason for never expressing an opinion about any modern poetry, that I am a publisher, and therefore not in a position to do so: but even if I wasn’t, I should think twice about it, because if I said exactly what I think about a great deal of it, it would simply be put about that I was jealous and didn’t want any younger men to be successful.

Incidentally, as for Auden, my sympathies are now rather on his side: for I have begun to suspect that some of his friends who have (more or less) faced the terrors of London, are now ready to cold-shoulder him – and it takes the form of deprecating his recent work. I don’t think that anyone who has not actually gone and fought, or shown his readiness to, is in a position to adopt this attitude towards him.

All the same, despite paying close attention to aspects of the precarious wording of Campbell’s scathing poems, Eliot candidly admitted that one feature had indeed escaped his attention at the time. He was to tell W. H. Gardner, on 9 Sept. 1960: ‘Campbell’s TALKING BRONCO gave me the devil of a time trying to pick out the offensive parts about other Faber poets, especially Spender, Auden and MacNeice. I thought I had gone through his script with a fine tooth comb, and every time I discovered something new. And then at the end, what seems almost incredible, I quite missed the MacSpaunday allusion. Of course if I had twigged that I would have had it out too. The other ones must have been very obvious indeed to blind me to that one. You can disclose this if you like. During the preparation of that book and for some time after I was not feeling very contented with Roy Campbell.’ To Gardner, 28 Oct. 1960: ‘I must add that I did sympathise with Stephen Spender in objecting to MacSpaunday, which of course I would never have allowed if my wits had not been dulled after repeated expurgations of other vituperative words!’ Geoffrey Faber, who likewise admitted that the – essentially innocuous and inconsequential – coinage had likewise slipped by him, wrote to Spender on 6 June 1946: ‘I don’t suppose you will find it easy to believe me – and I realise that it is a mark of a very feeble intelligence – when I say that I hadn’t even spotted the corporate derivation of MacSpaunday. Once pointed out, it is of course perfectly obvious.’

However, as Sean Day-Lewis correctly remarked, the gathering storm soon passed: having vented his spleen, Spender was not prepared to take any legal steps against Campbell.

See too John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (2004), 317–18.

WithinSpender, Stephenexchanges conciliatory sonnets with TSE;d1n a very short while, on 21 Aug. 1946, Spender – who gave his address as ‘Organisation des Nations Unies pour L’Education, La Science & La Culture, 46 Belgrave Square, London S.W.1 – sent these complimentary, or maybe conciliatory, verses to Eliot:

TO THE MASTER OF RUSSELL SQUARE

When those aged eagle eyes which look

Through human flesh as through a book,

Swivel an instant from the page

To ignite the luminous image

With the match that lights his smoke

Then let the case be transparent

And let the cigarettes, apparent

To his xray vision, lie

As clear as rhyme and image to his eye.

The lines, inscribed ‘To Tom with love from Stephen’, accompanied the gift of a transparent cigarette case. (First published in The Oxford Book of Letters, ed. Frank and Anita Kermode (Oxford, 1995), 523.)

TSE responded with these verses:

A l’Organisateur des Nations Unies
pour l’Education, la Science et la Culture

The sudden unexpected gift

——Is more precious in the eyes

——Than the ordinary prize

Of slow approach or movement swift,

While the cigarette is whiffed

——And the tapping finger plies

——Here upon the table lies

—The fair transparency. I lift

——The eyelids of the aging owl

——At twenty minutes to eleven

——Wednesday evening (summer time)

——To salute the younger fowl

——With this feeble halting rhyme

——The kind, the Admirable Stephen.

———————————To Stephen, from Tom

AccordingHayward, Johnundermines TSE's aura of poetic facility;m7n to John Sutherland (Stephen Spender, 325), John Hayward ‘mischievously divulged’ that TSE had stayed up ‘all night’ composing his sonnet.

3.TSESpender, Stephenobject of Rowse's anger;d2 toRowse, Alfred Leslie ('A. L.')takes issue with Spender;a8 Christina Morley, 5 Sept. 1946: ‘The Spender–Campbell situation has eased a bit because of the more recent feud between Spender and A. L. Rowse.’ See Richard Ollard, A Man of Contradictions: A Life of A. L. Rowse (1999), 180–1: ‘A particular source of irritation [for Rowse] was the neglect of his poetry by the fashionmakers in criticism and the attention paid to that of contemporaries whom he thought his inferiors, notably Stephen Spender. Spender had compounded his offence by disparaging Rowse’s work and, in his capacity as assistant to Cyril Connolly at Horizon, waving away suggested contributions. That Spender was also prominent on the Faber poetry list may have weighed with Rowse in choosing to go to Macmillan but this cannot have been more than a minor consideration.’

4.TheRundle, StanleyLanguage as a Social and Political Factor;a2 book complained of was Stanley Rundle, Language as a Social and Political Factor (1946). Rundle (1913–78), who was educated at the University of Milan and the University of London, earned a doctorate in comparative linguistics. He was active for many years in the Liberal Party.

5.AubreyJones, AubreyThe Pendulum of Politics;a1 Jones, The Pendulum of Politics (F&F, 1946), carried this blurb by TSE: ‘In an age like ours, which tends to assume that it is only in economics that principles are to be looked for, an age therefore in which politics is more and more abandoned to prejudice and passion, a book on principles in politics is very much needed. We commonly agree that the age in which we live is one of tumult, disorder and disintegration. Captain Jones is concerned with the causes of this state of affairs, so far as they be revealed by our errors of political principle or our desertion of political principle. In this book he has written his defence of what he has come to consider to be the true ideals of politics. Freedom he describes as a matter of balance; and he contends that, owing to our failure to discern that truth, we are proceeding to destroy freedom. We are no longer content to remedy the abuses of our inherited institutions; we have forgotten what purposes these institutions served; and, as we destroy, so step by step we create new abuses and new tyrannies.

‘Much confusion is found in current thinking in the use of such terms as democracy and collective security. The author of this book attempts to define afresh the deeper meanings of the various party attitudes, of Liberalism, Socialism and Conservatism. Whilst indicating the point of view which he has himself reached, his book is yet critical of all parties, and contains salutary truth to be recommended to all.

‘Captain Aubrey Jones is the son of a Welsh mine worker, and took a distinguished degree at the London School of Economics. Not the least interesting and impressive element in the book is the evidence of the evolution of his own opinions since the period at which he was a pupil of Professor Laski. We predict that much more will be heard of him, whether in practical politics or in political journalism; but this book is itself a notable achievement in the neglected study of politics.’

TSE to Christina Morley, 5 Sept. 1946: ‘C. K. Ogden demands that we withdraw a book in which he says Basic English is maligned, and Lionel Robbins complains at length because he says a blurb of mine identifies the London School of Economics with H. J. Laski. Nobody has become any saner’ (Berg).