The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume 1: 1898-1922, Revised Edition

The Letters of T.S. Eliot #1

by T.S. Eliot, Valerie Eliot, Faber & Faber Ltd.

"Volume 1898-1922" presents some 1,400 letters encompassing the years of Eliot's childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, through 1922, by which time the poet had settled in England, married his first wife, and published "The Waste Land." Since the first publication of this volume in 1988, many new materials from British and American sources have come to light. More than two hundred of these newly discovered letters are now included, filling crucial gaps in the record and shedding new light on Eliot's activities in London during and after the First World War."Volume 1923-1925" covers the early years of Eliot's editorship of "The Criterion," publication of "The Hollow Men," and his developing thought about poetry and poetics. The volume offers 1,400 letters, charting Eliot's journey toward conversion to the Anglican faith, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher and his appointment as director of the new publishing house Faber & Gwyer. The prolific and various correspondence of this volume testifies to Eliot's growing influence as cultural commentator and editor.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Nonfiction, Writing, Literature, Memoir, Reference

912 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot

Reviews

[Diann Blakely]

Of course Eliot would have opined that most letters should be burnt rather than slid into a postal bin, but those who love his work will glory in Yale’s recent publication of both volumes. While I found William Logan’s review in the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/boo...) rather sniffy--Logan suggested I substitute the word “spiffy,” but that’s for readers to decide--we agree that the frighteningly erudite but amusing Eliot would have been welcome at our dinner tables anytime. Though the letters themselves are a delicious success, I find particularly enticing his early predilection for green face powder and mascara; and I offer my thanks to Ivan C. Lett at Yale University Press for sending me Harold Bloom’s THE SHADOW OF A GREAT ROCK and these two volumes. Lett understands as few do the imperiled state of serious book reviewing in this country as how those who pursue the thankless task with integrity are increasingly being forced online or onto such venues as the NBCC-Goodreads.

Consider also Denis Donoghue’s NEW CRITERION essay, which begins with the full quotation from Eliot about destroying correspondence (http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.... Donoghue agrees about two or three of Eliot’s own. One he finds particularly offensive is addressed to Marianne Moore in particular, but what the critic views as petulance, the poet sees as an example of husbandly protectiveness; furthermore, “Moore had the good grace not to press the issue, and their association was soon restored. Eliot forgave himself, and contributed an appreciative Introduction to Moore’s SELECTED POEMS (1935).” But would Donoghue, whose WORDS ALONE: THE POET T.S. ELIOT (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) remains among the most penetrating and superb in the last two decades, truly prefer not to have the letter to Moore? If so, why did he quote it? Moreover, can’t mere scraps left behind by our favorite writers provide comfort and tutelage in the habit of art? What will we do once the epistolary age has vanished? NBA and NBCC nominee Bruce Smith, the author of this piece’s benediction, calls these questions essential, recalling where he was when he read the letters of Flaubert, Chekhov, Woolf, Faulkner, O’Connor, Sexton, and Plath; also where he heard authors read for the first time, e.g. Bishop and Lowell at the 92nd St. Y, in that famous appearance just before his death. So argue with Smith.

Or argue with Louis Menand, whose NEW YORKER essay (http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2011...) about Eliot’s letters, actually a biographical overview emphasizing Eliot as master manipulator, and although how, in his later years, he sought to hide permanently behind a mask of far-right conservatism in politics and religion, it was too late: Ol’ Possum’s cat was already out of the bag. What even Menand neglects to quote is the most salient part of Eliot’s famous remark on the necessity of poetic “impersonality”: “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from those things.” An immersion in these letters makes clear just how much Eliot needed some passage out of domestic chaos. If his abandonment of her was undeniably cruel, and his later politics seem deplorable to us now, think about some of Mary Gaitskill’s words on Nat Turner (http://www.diannblakely.com/newupdate...) before you judge THE WASTE LAND’s author too harshly. Or read the poem again: in his own PARIS REVIEW interview, Eliot indicates that the slender amount of work he’d accomplished hadn’t been worth the pain that provoked it, but how many of us would trade what he left behind for a biography full of crumpets and tea by comfortable hearths, even “evening[s] with the photograph album?”

[Elisabeth Goemans]

dit waren wel heel veel brieven

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the letters of T.S. Eliot, or anyone's letters provided they are not an utterly boring person, famous or not, is fascinating. It's rather like being a Peeping Tom. Or should I say a "Peeping T." Sorry. Terrible joke. On to the review.

On the front of this book, there is a blurb by the Boston Globe that reads, "A joy to read...as they reveal the man for good and ill." I was about halfway through when I realized that there is much more of the "for good" than the for "ill," unless "ill" literally refers to illness. In fact, there wasn't really anything about Eliot as a person I didn't like.

In these letters, everyone of them from boyhood to 1922, when The Wasteland was published, Eliot comes off as an eminently sympathetic, eminently likable guy. He is a concerned, caring, sensitive person who is constantly worried about the comfort level and quality of life of everyone surrounding him. I mean, he's not a selfless martyr. He does a fair amount of complaining about his own hardships, and strained emotional states, but none of it is done with even a hint of bitterness. Bitterness for whom, you may ask?

Reading these letters, it's hard to say exactly where the circle of symbiotic neurosis starts and stops vis a vis Eliot and the woman he married after only a few months of courtship, Vivien (but that's the way they did it back then, right?) Whether it was her incessant worrying and "neuralgia" that fed his nervous energy or vice versa is something of a Gordian knot. They both seem to susceptible to excessive strain from the travails of life, though, I do have to say she rubbed me the wrong way more than once during the course of reading these letters. For one, she doesn't have a job but instead stays all day laid up in bed with some version of a head ache, while he worked full-time at a bank during the day and dedicated his nights to writing (both poetry but mostly criticism because it was, seemingly, easier for Eliot to write). She also seems to really relish the gossipy side of the literary quarrels that Eliot found himself in which he didn't have the fortitude to enjoy. Incidentially, one wonders what their love life was like and how this contributed to their respective neuroses.

For me, Eliot's correspondence letters with Ezra Pound are probably the most fascinating of the letters in the book. The contrast in their respective personalties is stark. Where Pound is didactic and aggressive, Eliot is measured. Where Pound never tires of polemics and ranting in American colloquialisms (no doubt ironically, though I'm sure he also felt comfortable in that style), Eliot's thoughts are lucid and his prose elegant. One wonders what their face-to-face conversations were like. While they were both American, born and bred, it's not hard to understand why Pound ended up settling in Italy and Eliot staying in England. Their respective temperaments fit those climes exactly.

If there is anything critical one can say about Eliot, it's that he is perhaps a little too refined, too effete for anything but the most well-educated and well-mannered in society. The sometimes sycophantic devotion he expresses to his mother often crosses the line past being "healthy". The epithet "mama's boy" comes to mind. Taken together, however, I see this more as the downside of being an incredibly intelligent, well-educated and sensitive man, which is something I see no reason to deride.

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for my dissertation, but I enjoyed researching into Eliot’s personal life!

[Roanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

T.S. Eliot is the best of correspondents. He is intelligent, witty, seemingly sincere, gracious, kind. I enjoyed his letters. I don't, however, know if I'd have liked him in person, IRL. He comes across to me as cheap, ambitious, avaricious. My impression, of course, could be wrong, but he seems to use people; any friend, any connection, no matter how slight, is fair game to get what he wants. I expected him to be a "momma's boy" and he was, but I was surprised by just how much he expected his family to carry him financially, even far into adulthood. At the end of the first volume he was still receiving money from his family, his brother, and also letting his friends start up some sort of society to support him financially so he could stop working his day job at the bank. He speaks of personal pride, but I don't know how he could have much.

And then there's Viv, his intelligent, crazed wife, sick so often she's considered an invalid.

But what I've written gives the impression that I didn't like this book. On the contrary, I liked it very much. He writes quite wonderful letters, and his is a rather fascinating correspondence. I will definitely buy Volume II, whenever it finally makes it into print.

[Garry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Autobiography in its rawest form. There is something harsh and beautiful to flip through someone's old letters, seeing what they want to communicate about themselves. I've been a big fan of Eliot's poetry. I'm now being drawn to his critical work. Bits and pieces of that appear in the letters, as well as the ongoing battles of London literary society. Its not for everyone..

[Diann Blakely]

For many years, THE WASTE LAND seemed the perfect New Critical text-as-verbal-icon - allusion, paradox. irony. and most important, impersonality...it had them all and to spare. Yet after 20 years of scholarship devoted to explicating the poem's various references to Jacobean drama, folklore, quest legend, comparative religion and Greek myth, it was an essay by Randall Jarrell, not only the student of one of the New Criticism's best practitioners. John Crowe Ransom, but also trained in psychology, which began to teach us truly how to read our century's most famous poem.

"'Won't the future say to us in helpless astonishment,'” Jarrell wrote, “‘but did you actually believe all those things about objective correlatives, classicism, the tradition. applied to his poetry? Surely you must have seen that be was one of the most subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived, the victim and heIpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions?'” Of course Jarrell was right, it has seemed clear for some time, and his case has been made well-nigh irrefutable by the long-awaited second edition of Eliot's first two volumes of letters.

The raw material for every work Eliot produced--essays, plays, and of course the poetry, from his macabre college verses on martyred saints to his hymn to the "lady of silences" in ASH WEDNESDAY--exists within these letters, which range from his earliest preserved correspondence with his mother to friends to letters to John Quinn concerning copyright ownership of THE WASTE LAND. About two hundred missives have been added to this newest edition, and the annotation is more helpful and extensive. In fact, much in THE LETTERS OF T.S. ELIOT, VOLUME 1: 1898-1922 isn't written by, but addressed to, the poet, including those from the dedicatee of PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS (1917), Jean Verdenal, *mort aux Dardanelles,* or, as Eliot wrote, in “another way of putting it,” “mixed with the mud at Gallipoli”; and Eliot’s tutor, Alain-Fournier. The other early letters of interest here are those to and from his mother, and the relationship between Charlotte Eliot and her son seems to have been warm, close, solicitous, and loving on both sides. Yet it was from Charlotte that the young Eliot received his first ideas--and ideals--about women, and the image of a mother who, affectionate. was morally stringent in all things including poetics.

Indeed, it’s not until 1914 that Eliot himself begins to appear, and in such a way that tragedy seems inevitable. The tremulous sexuality, the stated dependance on women--which always, for the independently minded of either gender, carries with it a certain amount of hatred, for who wants to be reminded of our ur-helplessness, the infantile state?--which Eliot confides to Conrad Aiken, is deeply touching: I don’t find the emotional effect besmutted by the King Bolo doggerel but enhanced once understood as a certain amount of male bravado, an early mask of a man who wore many, in this case born of fear:

"I am very dependent upon … female society… and feel the deprivation at Oxford—one reason why I should not care to remain longer—but there, with the exercise and routine, the deprivation takes the form of numbness only; while in the city it is more lively and acute. One walks about the street with one’s desires, and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches. I should be better off, I sometimes think, if I had disposed of my virginity and shyness several years ago: and indeed I still think sometimes that it would be well to do so before marriage."

Thus when Eliot wedded the high-strung, neurasthenic, but vivacious and sensually alive Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the ensuing difficulties were predictable. Yet what a partnership--or co-conspiracy--this was! Each lived, as Sir Stephen Spender put the matter in the PBS broadcast, VOICES AND VISIONS, off the other's nerves. As THE WASTE LAND stands as its poetic testament, this first volume of letters, which contains correspondence from both Eliot and Vivienne, gives us the same domestic situation in more prosaic but no less moving form.

Accounts of Vivienne's poor health, both physical and emotional, have appeared in other studies; and as we have ceased to read Eliot as the poet completely anonymous, who can ignore her? Yet is anything as telling as Eliot's remark after two years of marriage that "Vivienne had a severe migraine today in consequence" of her making blackberry jam the day before? Or that "Vivienne has been doing all ... the washing, and it is really beyond her strength"?

And Vivienne's mental state seems to have been fairly stable at the time Eliot wrote these reports to his mother--the worst was yet to come. It's no wonder that Eliot began increasingly to stand for a distancing from feeling, in theory, at least; he writes to a childhood friend of a short story she had sent him that she "had got thoroughly inside the feeling, but hadn't quite got out again."

That THE WASTE LAND stands as testimony to both Eliot's “turning loose of emotion" and his escape from it through the forms art offers has been noted before, yet in light of the remark above, his courageous determination to get inside feelings he knew it was possible not to get back out of deserves comment--and commendation--as well. Now cheaply known as “risk-taking,” for Eliot, like our greatest poets, this was no mere sleight-of-hand, but a matter of life and death.

Thus the inclusion of letters from Vivienne to various recipients, such as Eliot's childhood friend Mary Hutchinson, are invaluable, limning a nightmarish amalgam of emotional extremity, financial worries, physical ailments, growing estrangement, and, sadly and most paradoxically of all, great mutual respect and devotion. When Eliot wrote Aiken in 1916 that he had done no writing of late but had "lived through material enough for a score of long poems” we see that this poet, despite the New Critical precept of impersonality he was instrumental in helping to form, not only meets Jarrell’s description, but also and again, another "way of putting it," as Eliot wrote in EAST COKER, might be that of all the great modernists, Eliot was perhaps the most heartbreakingly personal, and arguably the best.

[Kieran Forster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting to realise the person who wrote the Wasteland was somewhat different than the post-success Eliot. IMO artists channel the special voice. It is not coming from the specifics of personality, which changes over the years. The power of any art is the archetypal and universal the artist summons or allows. The older Eliot not only cdnt write the Wasteland, he was quite capable of trivialising it as whining about unhappiness. It was and is a lot more than that.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having done extensive study of Eliot's work, thirty years ago, I have felt like I should go back at some point and meet the man himself. Reading these letters has been a very interesting way to return to TSE, and connect with him a little more intimately, free from the inevitable heavy hand of the biographer.

Naturally, in letters there is more of a self-consciousness, a false self which arises and tries to impress the reader. One must be like a daddy long legs, standing above the depths, observing all, but not overwhelmed. To do this, I found that a light approach was needed. Better to skim along the surface, and then dive down into the places where there seemed to be incongruities, or richness, and just let the rest roll off your back. This approach feels like cheating, but it's far less intense and gives you plenty to think about.

For my own pleasure, and perhaps for anyone who doesn't want to read the letters, but wants to learn about them, I share a few things which leapt out at me: First, the deep care that young Tom is given by his parents in his later teen years as he is about to head off for an extra year at Milton Academy. His mother is very aware of her son as an individual, his needs, his health, his prospects. Her letters to the head of school are quite measured, warm and business-like, but they reveal a deep and loving interest in her youngest child which I find refreshing. It has none of the sappy sentimentality that you find in so many letters where mothers are trying to arrange things for their children. Her letters reveal her to be a level-headed, warm hearted and caring mother, and I was charmed by her manner.

Second, reading Eliot through the years, I've always found him a cold-fish, and assumed he was quite wrapped up in himself. Reading his letters, proved that to be true. When he writes, he can hardly ever focus on life beyond his own skin and Vivien's (they shared the one it often seems, they were so enmeshed...)

While I knew that Vivien was often physically ill (colitis and perhaps a thyroid condition? -- my speculation) I really had no idea how much time and energy TSE spent (at least through 1922) fussing and complaining about his own ill health. Hardly a week passes where he isn't asserting hat he is ill, he is suffering, he is in a state of near total collapse...Was this a strategy he learned at home when he needed his mother's love and attention? Or was it that Vivien's focus on her symptoms drove Eliot to do the same? They were, it seems, totally enmeshed, though of course understanding of the subconscious, latent desire, neurosis were all in their infancy, so it's no wonder they were so bollixed- up.

And finally, I must say that I would be quite rich if I had a nickel for every apology TSE & his wife issued to the recipients of their missives -- apologies for taking so long to respond; apologies for leaving half written letters on desk; apologies for misunderstandings, miscommunication etc.

[R. C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

All too often personal letters have no innate merit, obviously published only because of the fame won the author by his more carefully composed, revised and selected works. That is clearly not the case here. Every few sentences there was one I wanted to pull out and trot all over the internet. Or maybe make a magnet. Or a bumper sticker. No, too literate and soul-solidifying for a bumper sticker. Might cause accidents.

[Tawna · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like Eliot, you will love getting more insight into his character and life via these letters to and from his friends. I can't understand half of Eliot's poems but am fascinated by him as a person and loved this book.

[Jonnie Enloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timeless, particularly if you are an Elliot fan.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The lost art of letter writing.