The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 4: 1928-1929

The Letters of T.S. Eliot #4

by T.S. Eliot, Valerie Eliot (Editor), John Haffenden (Editor)

T. S. Eliot writes the letters contained in this volume during a period of weighty responsibilities as husband and increasing demands as editor and publisher. He cultivates the support of prominent guarantors to secure the future of his periodical, The Monthly Criterion, even as he loyally looks after his wife, Vivien, now home after months in a French psychiatric hospital.

Eliot corresponds with writers throughout Great Britain, Europe, and the United States while also forging links with the foremost reviews in London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, and Milan. He generously promotes many other writers, among them Louis Zukofsky and Edward Dahlberg, and manages to complete a variety of writings himself, including the much-loved poem A Song for Simeon, a brilliant introduction to Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, and many more.

Genres: Biography

864 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

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

[Sam Schulman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Waste Land of Every Reader. Reading this book has one reward - that plodding through its mostly businesslike letters, punctuated by occasional moments of candor when he reveals himself, is a grim business, but offers a way to become TS Eliot, in the way that Pierre Menard became Cervantes.
Otherwise, prepare to don a hairshirt when you open this book, which begins after Lady Rothermere has withdrawn her capital from the Criterion. First comes letter after letter explaining why the magazine has been suspended, then letter after letter begging for funds to keep the monthly publshing as a quarterly, then letter after letter asking for articles, explaining delays in printing articles, refusing articles. At the same time Eliot is a key player in the predecessor book publishing company to Faber & Faber, at that time joined in the same company as a very profitable trade magazine for nurses. Eliot extracted F&F from the larger enterprise, controlled by a man who hated Faber and could easily have crushed the infant F&F in a rage provoked by Faber himself.
At one point, Eliot gives this account of a publishing career to a young man who asked for his advice and help (young men and women were constantly asking Eliot for such help, and just as constantly received more than they asked for - introductions to other publishers, letters to foundations and universities, etc): A publishing career involves

perpetual struggle between one’s ideals and htting the market, you are interested in poetry and you sit up half the night laying out a book on cricket, insensibly it becomes harder to read any book for profit and enjoyment, or to judge any book except commercially. You have to work just as hard, and just as commercially, as in any other business, and this business somehow has an odious connexion with your intellectual interests which befouls them."640

These are also the years when he published For Lancelot Andrewes, in which he proclaims himself a Royalist in politics and an Anglo-Catholic, and in which he became a British subject - all hurting his mother, irritating his wife and trendy people like the Virginia Woolfs, and putting him in touch with people he found boring in the anglophone world - not glamorous like the French masters Maurras, etc. His wife is released, perhaps too early, from a Paris pychiatric hospital, and her unhappiness causes them to move three times in a single year: "Stupidly, I let Tom choose the flat. It is hideous. And the noise. Bang bang bang...." He writes anxious letters to his mother,who dies before he can see her after his conversion. His wife writes to his friends: "When I can drive the Morris Minor I shall feel free-er. But I have my own views about driving & Tom has his. They are not identical.”
So when Eliot makes a real friend, as he does with !.A. Richards and A.L.Rowse, the reader feels so happy - particularly because the editor quotes generously from all the letters to which TSE letters respond, and Richards is a wonderful man. But they are infrequent. For the most part, Eliot writes in the same tone to a woman who applies for a non-existent secretarial job as he does to the Archbishop of York (to her he says, although he can't possibly hire her because the magazine is still losing money, the desire of such a well qualified person [she was the secretary of the Headmistress of Roedean!] to work for him "gives me pleasure.") It also give him real pleasure to read anything about himself, he says sweetly to a person I've forgotten, who sent a long piece published perhaps in the States to TSE hoping for a reaction. His reaction was to say (here I'm quoting from memory): "I never have any opinion about anything anybody writes about my work, and thus no opinion about your paper. But I am always perfectly delighted to read anything about myself in print, whatever the author may say about me, and so I thank you for this!" To a savage review criticizing his personality written by a semi-friend (John Middleton Murry, I think), he says more or less the same thing, only adding a clause: "you may be right" - and going on to write a perfectly friendly letter talking about getting together for lunch.
When he is writing his Archbish type letters, he is supple, polite, admirable, and you might think this style is inescapable, except when you see an occasional letter to Ezra Pound, to old schoolmates from Milton Academy, to his brother, to Conrad Aiken (towards whom he felt guilty, because he says somewhere else that Aiken was the one poet of his generation who was just as good as he was, but had received nothing like the same attention) - he becomes a jokster, a wit, a friend, and adopts different voices that are funny and subtle (nothing like the agonizing facetiousness of Old Ezra, for those who suffer under it).
I also commend his kindness to the young Edward Dahlberg, marooned in Europe almost pennilesss. Dahlberg has been told by friends that "Eliot doesn't like Jews." But when Dahlberg does approach him, Eliot takes him to lunch, writes about him to all his friends in publishing and academia, recommends him for grants, gives him painstaking advice, reads "Bottom Dogs" which he dislikes but reocmmends - it's a wonderful episode which made me want to read or re-read Dahlberg, who grew old in his Bohemianism and was a mainstay of the New Directions paperbacks on sale at the Medici Bookstore of my childhood.
Finally, a Wodehousian episode. Talking about the religious writer Leo Ward who had, Eliot thinks, gotten the facts and significance of the Vatican's condemnation of Action Francaise wrong, Eliot describes his recent contact with him:

The pamphlet itself is not very good and not very important but it is the first book on the subject to appear in England and therefore I think it ought to be dealt with. I have talked to Leo Ward about the subject and have lunched with him and shall probably have to invite him to have lunch with me but in spite of this exchange of hospitality I consider him a worm."

Eliot and anyone who gets through this volume can bear a great deal of reality, though in a letter after his mother dies, he confesses that (aged 41) he is tired, very tired.