The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 2: 1923-1925

The Letters of T.S. Eliot #2

by T.S. Eliot, Valerie Eliot (Editor), Hugh Houghton (Editor)

Volume Two covers the early years of his editorship of "The Criterion" (the periodical that Eliot launched with Lady Rothermere's backing in 1922), publication of "The Hollow Men" and the course of Eliot's thinking about poetry and poetics after "The Waste Land". The correspondence charts Eliot's intellectual journey towards conversion to the Anglican faith in 1927, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher, ending with his appointment as a director of the new publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, in late 1925, and the appearance of "Poems 1909-1925", Eliot's first publication with the house with which he would be associated for the rest of his life. It was partly because of Eliot's profoundly influential work as cultural commentator and editor that the correspondence is so prolific and so various, and Volume Two of the "Letters" fully demonstrates the emerging continuities between poet, essayist, editor and letter-writer.

Genres: Poetry

912 pages, cloth

First published June 30, 2009

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

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

At 72, I can honestly say - with the determined influence of the love of my life - that I am at last in control of my life, as Epictetus abjures us. For with the help of my meds I can control my desires, dislikes, and hitherto wildly various and unconscious moods.

In the Inchiridion he calls that freedom. I am lucky.

Tom Eliot was not, at 35. Mid-life crisis played him for a fool.

Impulsive, adamant, stridently opinionated, he was trapped by his Daemon, Pride.

I bought these letters as they were published. Snapped them up like the bargains they were not. I wanted, you see, to find the point of his career at which divine CONVICTION shook him like a rag doll. That's what he needed in these letters.

Well, we don't get to that point till the Great Depression, when all would-be superstars were indeed depressed, and for very good reason.

And for Eliot that was the point when the contrite Ash Wednesday appeared: 1932.
***

Conviction, indeed is a Purgatorial Fire -

Of which the flame is Roses
And the smoke, Briars.

Conviction is the -

Absolute Paternal Care
That will not leave us, BUT PREVENTS US EVERYWHERE.

Get it? That Paternal Care is the Roses. The "prevention" is the Briars. For conviction is first and foremost, a change in our hearts in what we pay attention to. It is Rebirth from the Ashes of our old self.

From the Old Fallen Adam to God.

Charles Spurgeon said it best:

We get the Deal of a Lifetime in conviction!

Why?

Because by giving all our sins to God -

We are given Superabundant Life in return.

Make no mistake...

It's TRUE.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

We had to wait a long time for this 2d volume of Eliot's letters. But it was worth the wait. In my opinion the value of the collection is the man himself revealed by these letters which go to the end of 1925. Very few of them mention his own work. Most of the correspondence deals with his editorship of the quarterly, Criterion. I had an impression of Eliot as a cold, intellectually focused man. The personal letters included, however, show he felt a great deal of warmth for those he genuinely cared for, especially Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Mary Hutchinson, and Wyndham Lewis. What he wrote to them, and to others, says a lot about the person he really was. He could also be very funny when he wanted to be. The letters to Pound are a hoot.

Eliot often mentions his own health and that of his wife, Vivien. The portrait one forms of Vivien from her correspondence and what Eliot himself wrote is different from that I'd had when I began the book. My impression of her was as a sort of cipher overshadowed and swamped by his enormous learning and talent. But I've learned that she was quite perceptive and was a talented writer in her own right. At the same time she does seem to have been emotionally fragile and may have been a hypochondriac. By the end of 1925 what she was mailing to acquaintances began to show some of the erratic behavior Eliot had to deal with. Her illnesses became increasingly burdensome to him at a time when he was working at a bank during the day, editing Criterion in the evenings, and trying to find time for his own writing. He became intolerant of her poor health and its demands on him. It might be that the health issues of his own chronicled here resulted from the pressure cooker of stress he couldn't seem to escape.

This is an enormous book. However, Eliot's fluid language makes for easy reading. And the comprehensive notes and the glossary of names provide the details explaining the obscurities in the letters. By the time you come to the end of the book it's likely you'll have begun to like Old Tom at least a little bit, despite his crusty reputation.

[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?”

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are the years in which Eliot started the Criterion. There are a lot of tedious business letters. Still, just seeing how he did business is interesting.

These were hard years for him, as letters about his wife’s prostrations, his indignation at doctors, his own exhaustion and frequent near-collapse, the effort and expense that went into living with an invalid, working at the bank, editing the Criterion for free, and keeping up an intellectual life all show. At the end there are letters between Eliot and Faber, the deal is arranged, his resignation from the bank, his contract at F & G, the glimpses of the deterioration of the situation with his wife all appear. "And I have made so many mistakes in the past, that I often feel no confidence whatever in my judgment, and act like a frightened rat."

There is much in these 900 pages. On 11 December 1925, just to mention a curious detail, Eliot wrote Richard Aldington, a steady correspondent, wanting to buy together a set of Migne (standard cheap edition of the Greek and Latin Christian works from the patristic era through the Middle Ages). Eliot’s idea was to divide it between themselves and exchange tomes from time to time, according to the interest of each. One of the things Eliot wanted for himself was Periphyseon.

You will also find, of course, other curiosities in here, and criticism. One chap, for example, had his essay rejected with some advice, which Eliot apologized for, thinking it could come across as forward and perhaps condescending to do so. But he says the chap has a brain and he would like to see him learn to write better. What does he recommend? Study of Swift and Newman.

I’m glad to have lived to see the day of the publication of these tomes. They are well annotated too. Good for studying, good for perusing, good for occasional reading. I must get the next one.

[Rabishu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a huge Eliot fan, but this is a substantial book (912 pages), and sections of it were a struggle. There's the odd letter which is incredibly compelling--particularly the ones between him and his brother, or ones written by his wife when she was institutionalised--but plenty which are just kind of day-to-day mundane housekeeping things to do with the running of the Criterion. Definite moments, and compulsory reading for serious Eliotites, but I don't know I'd recommend it to anyone else.

Also I dare anyone to read this and to come away not thinking that Wyndham Lewis is an (admittedly brilliant) asshole.