Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922

  Charlotte Eliot (1874–1926), TSE’s third eldest sister, married George Lawrence Smith, an architect, in September 1903. She studied art at college in St Louis and then in Boston, with sculpture being her especial interest.

  Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot (1843–1929), the poet’s mother, was born on 22 October in Baltimore, Maryland, the second child and second daughter of Thomas Stearns (1811–96) and Charlotte Blood Stearns (1818–93). She went first to private schools in Boston and Sandwich, followed by three years at the State Normal School, Framingham, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1862. After teaching for a while at private schools in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she spent two years with a Quaker family in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. She then taught at Antioch College, Ohio, 1865–7; at her Framingham School; and at St Louis Normal School. It was while she was at the last post that she met Henry Ware Eliot, entrepreneur, whom she married on 27 October 1868. She was secretary of the Mission Free School of the Church of the Messiah for many years. As her youngest child (TSE) was growing up, she became more thoroughly involved in social work through the Humanity Club of St Louis, whose members were disturbed by knowing that young offenders awaiting trial were being held for long periods with adults. In 1899, a committee of two was appointed, with Mrs Eliot as chairman, to bring about reform. It was in large part due to her campaigning and persistence over several years that the Probation Law of 1901 was approved; and in 1903, by mandate of the Juvenile Court Law, a juvenile court was established with its own probation officer and a separate place of detention. As a girl, Charlotte had nursed literary ambitions, and throughout her life wrote poems, some of which (such as ‘Easter Songs’ and ‘Poems on the Apostles’) were printed in the Christian Register. In 1904 she published William Greenleaf Eliot: Minister, Educator, Philanthropist, a memoir of her beloved father-in-law; and it came as a great joy to her when TSE arranged for the publication of her Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem, with an introduction by himself (London, 1926). When she was shown the issue of Smith Academy Record containing TSE’s ‘A Lyric’ (1905), she said (as TSE would remember) ‘that she thought it better than anything in verse she had ever written’. TSE reflected on that fine declaration: ‘I knew what her verse meant to her. We did not discuss the matter further.’ Inspired by a keen ethic of public service, she was a member of both the Wednesday Club of St Louis and the Missouri Society of the Colonial Dames of America, serving successively as secretary, vicepresident, and president. She chaired a committee to award a Washington University scholarship that required the beneficiary to do a certain amount of patriotic work; and in 1917–18 she did further service as chair of the War Work Committee of the Colonial Dames. After the death of her husband in January 1919, she moved home to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Henry Ware Eliot Snr (1843–1919), the poet’s father, was the son of the Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot (1811–87) and Abby Adams Cranch (1817–1908). Born on 25 November 1843, he was educated at Washington University, St Louis. To his father’s disappointment, he eschewed the ministry –‘too much pudding choked the dog’, he maintained in his unpublished memoirs ‘The Reminiscences of a Simpleton’ (1910-11) – in favour of a business career. After several years with a grocery firm, Reed and Green, he went into partnership as a manufacturing chemist, Eliot and Larkin. When flood and fire contributed to the firm’s failure, he borrowed money from his father to meet his debts, later repaying the money tenfold. In 1868 he met Charlotte Champe Stearns, whom he married on 27 October that year. They had seven children and settled at 2653 Locust Street, St Louis. In 1874 he became Secretary of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company and subsequently its President and Treasurer. On his retirement at seventy, he was appointed Chairman and attended the office until his death. From 1877 to 1919 he was a member of the board of directors of Washington University. As a consequence of scarlet fever as a boy, he was handicapped by deafness: Eliot said he had such an acute sense of smell that he could identify which of his daughters owned a stray handkerchief.

  Henry Ware Eliot, Jr (1879–1947), TSE’s elder brother, went to school at Smith Academy, and then passed two years at Washington University, St Louis, before progressing to Harvard. At Harvard, he displayed a gift for light verse in Harvard Celebrities (Cambridge, Mass., 1901), illustrated with ‘Caricatures and Decorative Drawings’ by two fellow undergraduates. After graduating, he spent a year at law school, but subsequently followed a career in printing, publishing and advertising. He attained a partnership in Husband&Thomas (later the Buchen Company), a Chicago advertising agency, from 1917 to 1929, during which time he gave financial assistance to TSE and advised him on investments. He accompanied their mother on her visit to London in the summer of 1921, his first trip away from the USA. In February 1926, he married Theresa Anne Garrett (1884–1981), and later the same year the couple went on holiday to Italy along with TSE and Vivien. He was one of TSE’s most regular and trusted correspondents. It was not until late in life that he found his true calling, as a research fellow in anthropology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard. He was instrumental in building up the T. S. Eliot collection at Eliot House. Of slighter build than his brother – who remarked upon his ‘Fred Astaire figure’ – Henry suffered from deafness owing to scarlet fever as a child, and this may have contributed to his diffidence. Unselfishly devoted to TSE, whose growing up he movingly recorded with his camera, Henry took him to his first Broadway musical, The Merry Widow, which remained a favourite. It was with his brother in mind that TSE wrote: ‘The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing’ (‘Preludes’ IV).

  Margaret Dawes Eliot (1871–1956): the second child in the Eliot family.

  Marion Cushing Eliot (1877–1964), the fourth child of Henry Ware and Charlotte Champe Eliot, studied at Miss Folsom’s school for social service in Boston. She was Eliot’s favourite sister and visited him in London with his mother in 1921.

  Vivien Eliot, née Haigh-Wood (1888–1947). Born in Lancashire, she was brought up in Hampstead from the age of three. Having met TSE in company with Scofield Thayer in Oxford in the spring of 1915, she and TSE hastened to be married just a few weeks later, on 26 June 1915. She developed close friendships with Mary Hutchinson, Ottoline Morrell and others in TSE’s circle. Despite chronic personal and medical difficulties, they remained together until 1933, when TSE finally resolved to separate from her during his visit to America. She was never reconciled to their separation, became increasingly ill and unhappy, and in 1938 was confined to a psychiatric hospital, where she died in 1947. She is the dedicatee of Ash Wednesday (1930). She published a number of sketches and stories in the Criterion (under various pseudonyms with the initials ‘F. M.’), and collaborated with TSE on the Criterion and other works. See Carole Seymour-Smith, Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot (2001).

  Charles Haigh-Wood (1854–1927): TSE’s father-in-law. Born Charles Haigh Wood, in Bury, Lancashire, the son of a carver and gilder who prospered, he was educated privately, at the local grammar school, and (from 1873) the Royal Academy School in London. He started exhibiting in the Academy three years later. He became a member of the RA, and pursued a successful career as a minor portrait and genre painter. On his mother’s death, he inherited her properties in Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) in Ireland, as well as Eglinton House, and thereafter he was supported by the rents of his tenants. In 1885 he married Rose Esther Robinson (1861–1941). They moved to Hampstead in 1891, settling at 3 Compayne Gardens, where they lived for the rest of his life. According to TSE (Oct. 1920), Vivien was ‘particularly fond of her father; she takes more after him and his side of the family, and understands him better than the others do’.

  Maurice Haigh-Wood (1896–1980): TSE’s brother-in-law. He was six years younger than his sister Vivien, and after attending Ovingdean prep school and Malvern School, trained at Sandhurst Military Academy, before receiving his commission on 11 May 1915 as a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion, the Manchester Regiment. He served in
the infantry for the war, and on regular visits home gave TSE his closest contact with the nightmare of life in the trenches. After the war, he found it difficult to get himself established, but became a stockbroker, and he remained friendly with, and respectful towards, TSE even after his separation from Vivien in 1933. In 1930 he married a 25-year-old American dancer, Ahmé Hoagland, and they had two children.

  Emily Hale (1891–1969) came from a similar Bostonian milieu to the Eliot family. Her father was an architect turned Unitarian preacher who taught at Harvard Divinity School, and her uncle was a music critic for the Boston Herald. Her mother was a mental invalid from early in life. Eliot met Emily at the home of his cousin Eleanor Hinkley in 1912, and in an unpublished memoir wrote that he fell in love with her before leaving for Europe in 1914. However, after his marriage in 1915, he did not see her again for many years. Although she did not go to college, a fact which handicapped her career, Emily was a passionate theatre-goer, amateur actor and director, and was to forge a career as a drama teacher. In 1921 she took a post as administrator and drama tutor at Milwaukee-Downer College, a private women’s school, and later taught at Smith College, Concord Academy, and Abbott Academy. During the 1930s and 1940s, Eliot once again took up his relationship with her, and they saw a lot of one another both in England, where they visited Burnt Norton together in 1934–5, and during his trips to the USA. Following Vivien’s death in 1947, Emily was disappointed that Eliot did not want to marry her, and there was a cooling of their friendship. Towards the end of his life Eliot apparently ordered her letters to him to be destroyed, while his letters to her are at Princeton, where they are sealed until 2020. See Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1998).

  Eleanor Holmes Hinkley (1891–1971): Eliot’s cousin, the second daughter of Susan Heywood Stearns (1860–1948) – Eliot’s mother’s sister – and Holmes Hinkley (1853–91), a scholar ‘of rare modesty and delicacy of temperament’, who died shortly before her birth. Eleanor studied at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Among the advanced courses she took there was Professor George Baker’s 47 Workshop. She went on to act with Baker’s group as well as write a number of plays for it: see Plays of 47 Workshop (New York, 1920). One of these, Dear Jane, a comedy about Jane Austen in three acts, was to be produced by Eva Le Gallienne at the Civic Repertory Theater, New York, in 1932. It was through amateur theatricals held at her family home, 1 Berkeley Place, Cambridge, Mass., that Eliot met and fell in love with Emily Hale in 1912. According to Valerie Eliot, there was always an affectionate understanding between the cousins and he appreciated her joyous sense of the absurd. Eliot’s correspondence with her is full of humour and playful social observation, and it shows a shared love of theatre.

  Mary Hutchinson, née Barnes (1889–1977): a half-cousin of Lytton Strachey, married St John (‘Jack’) Hutchinson in 1910. A prominent Bloomsbury hostess, she was for several years the acknowledged mistress of the art critic, Clive Bell, and became a close, supportive friend of both TSE and Vivien. TSE published one of her stories (‘War’) in the Egoist, and she later brought out a book of sketches, Fugitive Pieces (1927) under the imprint of the Hogarth Press. She wrote a short unpublished memoir of TSE (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin) and was for a time in the late 1910s a very intimate friend of his. See David Bradshaw ‘“Those Extraordinary Parakeets”: Clive Bell and Mary Hutchinson’, The Charleston Magazine 1997/1998, 16 & 17.

  Edgar Jepson (1863–1938), English novelist and journalist, and author of two volumes of autobiography, Memoirs of a Victorian (1933) and Memoirs of an Edwardian (1937). He studied Greats at Oxford, under Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893), taught for a while in Barbados, and in the absence of Frank Harris edited Vanity Fair for six months. He wrote novels, including detective stories and supernatural and fantastic fictions, and children’s stories including The Second Pollyooly Book (1914). He was a friend and champion of Pound and Eliot, and in his essay ‘Recent United States Poetry’ (The English Review, 26May 1918) he praised their work at the expense of their American contemporaries.

  Harold Joachim (1868–1938): fellow and tutor in philosophy in Merton College, Oxford, 1897–1919; British Idealist philosopher and follower of F. H. Bradley; author of The Nature of Truth (1906), an influential account of the ‘coherence theory’ of truth. TSE recalled buying Joachim’s The Nature of Truth at Harvard, and taking it with him in 1914 to Oxford, where Joachim was his tutor. According to Brand Blanshard, it was claimed that ‘if you started any sentence in the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle, Joachim could complete it for you, of course in Greek’ (‘Eliot at Oxford’, in T.S. Eliot: Essays from the Southern Review, ed. James Olney, 1988). TSE wrote an obituary letter in The Times (4 Aug. 1938; ‘to his criticism of my papers I owe an appreciation of the fact that good writing is impossible without clear and distinct ideas’), and also paid tribute to him in the introduction to Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley (1964). In a late letter, he said ‘he taught me more about how to write good prose than any other teacher I have ever had’ as well as revealing ‘the importance of punctuation in the interpretation of a text such as that of the Posterior Analytics’ (24 June 1963: ts Merton College). TSE’s systematic notes on Joachim’s lectures on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics at Oxford 1914–15 are at Houghton.

  James Joyce (1882–1941), expatriate Irish novelist, playwright and poet. Having lived in Zurich and Trieste, Joyce moved to Paris in 1920, where he became a centre of expatriate writers, including Pound and Stein. In Blasting and Bombadiering (1937), Wyndham Lewis recounts his and TSE’s first encounter with Joyce there in August 1920 when bringing him a parcel of shoes. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist was serialised in the Egoist, and Ulysses in the Little Review up to 1920. When Ulysses appeared in book form in 1922, the same year as The Waste Land, TSE called it ‘the most important expression which the present age has found’– ‘a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape’ (‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, Dial 75: 5, November 1923). TSE published in the Criterion a number of pieces by and about Joyce, and at Faber he was responsible for the publication of Finnegans Wake (1940). See The Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann (3 vols, 1957, 1966); Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (2nd edn, 1982).

  Alfred Knopf (1892–1984), New York publisher; founded Alfred A. Knopf Inc. in 1915. He was responsible for publishing in the USA numerous important European authors, and he was to bring out not only Eliot’s Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (1917) but also Poems (1920) and The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1921).

  Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) was a painter, portraitist, novelist, philosopher and critic; and one of the major modernist writers. A friend of Ezra Pound, Lewis was the leading artist associated with Vorticism, and editor of BLAST, the movement’s journal, 1914–15, in which TSE’s ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a windy night’ appeared (in issue 2, July 1915). Lewis served as a bombardier and war-artist on the Western Front, 1916–18, and later wrote memorable accounts of the period in his memoir Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), including brilliant portraits of TSE, Pound and Joyce, and wartime and modernist London. TSE reviewed Lewis’s first novel Tarr (1918) in the Egoist 5: 8 (Sept. 1918), describing him as ‘the most fascinating personality of our time’, in whose work ‘we recognize the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave-man’. Lewis considered Eliot ‘the most interesting man in London society’ (7 Nov. 1918). TSE went on to publish Lewis in the Criterion and, even though Lewis was notoriously querulous, carried on a lifetime’s friendship and correspondence with him. Lewis did a number of drawings of TSE, one of which hung in Eliot’s flat, and his portrait of TSE is in the National Portrait Gallery. On Lewis’s death, TSE wrote ‘The Importance of Wyndham Lewis’ in the Sunday Times (10March 1957), and a memoir in Hudson Review X: 2 (Summer 1957): ‘He was … a highly strung, nervous man, who was conscious of his own abilities, and sensitive to slight or neglect … He
was independent, outspoken, and difficult. Temperament and circumstances combined to make him a great satirist … I remember Lewis, at the time when I first knew him, and for some years thereafter, as incomparably witty and amusing in company …’ See The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W.K. Rose (1963), and Paul O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (2000).

  Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), short-story writer, was born in New Zealand. Her first stories were published in A. R. Orage’s periodical The New Age and collected in In a German Pension (1911). She met John Middleton Murry in 1911, and presently became friends with many writers of the day including D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, and Virginia Woolf (who published Prelude in 1918), and hovered on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group. She married Murry in 1918, and went on to publish Bliss (1920) and The Garden Party (1922). After her death from tuberculosis at the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainebleau, Murry published two collections of her stories, and her Journal (1927) and Letters (1928). See Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987).