T. S. Eliot’s letters: ‘a painfully suffering soul’
By middle age Eliot felt that “life is, as always, intolerable. Neither religious nor artistic treatment of past agony is, in my experience, a pain killer.” He lamented, “most of the time I feel perfectly well; but I get tired quickly; and if I work too long, or stay out of doors too long, or have to meet people I don’t know well, I am apt to have a slight relapse.” He recalled that the death of his aged mother had been a frightening experience, which cut him off from connection to precious memories of the past and was a loss beyond consolation: “I know that the death of one’s second parent brings a sudden realisation of the pastness of the past, and of the impossibility of finding one’s way back to it. I had special causes for feeling a terrifying isolation, an awareness of the whole life of the dead person in an aspect of intolerable pathos.”
Eliot’s Letters, Volume 9, 1939-1941 (written between the ages of 51 and 53), edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (Faber, 2021, lxix plus 1,072pp), has a full cloth pink binding, a detailed Chronology, Brief Lives of the major correspondents, and Haffenden’s excellent Preface and footnotes. It seems wrong to credit Eliot’s widow Valerie, who died in 2012, as the leading co-editor, when Haffenden seems to have done most of the work. The interest in this volume is diminished by the absence of Eliot’s mentally ill wife Vivien. He remained celibate for 20 years between placing Vivien in an asylum in 1938 and marrying his former secretary Valerie Fletcher in 1957.
He was constantly in demand as a greatly valued weekend guest, friend, benefactor, adviser, advocate, speaker, editor, poet and playwright. In London he usually stayed at home in the morning to do his own work, and came to the Faber office only in the afternoon. Later on, he spent a couple of nights a week in town to do publishing business, and retired to Surrey for long weekends to write. He found “all this moving about, and living in other people’s houses, and never five nights in the same bed, very tiring”.
Eliot soldiered on as a publisher during the difficult wartime conditions and shortage of paper. He wrote, “The publishing business feels its way in the dark, not knowing what to publish. I think the wise thing is to plod along at Faber so long as there is anything for me to do there. It was certainly my policy not to bother about publishing poets once their names were made, but to publish stuff by men who needed a chance to establish themselves.” He thought there were very few critics in England who could equal the Americans: Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate or even Richard Blackmur.
“My pencil has a chronic itch to comment on the margins,” Eliot noted, “I have put my pencil droppings over your fair pages.” He told an obscure poet, “the best don’t seem to me quite as good as the author could make them,” and sort of encouraged another by saying, “the trouble is that I like the poems individually much better than I like the book.” He cryptically admired the young poet David Gascoyne: “I think too well of him, and also not well enough.” He tactfully softened rejections with expert advice and cushions of praise, and offered cold comfort: “anyone who really has something to say is willing to suffer and labour for years in order to learn the right way of saying it.” His cogent warning is even more relevant today: “the deadening of the auditory imagination, the slackness of craftsmanship in contemporary poetry, seems to me ominous.”
He urged Keith Douglas to persist by stating, “ ‘Song’ is very nearly written.” Even before the talented poets Douglas, Sidney Keyes and Alun Lewis were killed in World War II, he thought cultural leaders should be exempted from military service. He called my friend Hugh Gordon Porteus, with a proviso, “Best art critic in London. Intelligent and shiftless.” Despite Eliot’s caveat, Porteus served with the RAF in the Middle East.
It’s sometimes difficult to determine if Eliot’s habitual self-deprecation was genuine or a mask of false modesty. He often began his letters with groveling regrets for his late response: “I must apologise for the oversight. Please accept my expression of deep regret at this apparent rudeness.” In May 1939 he confessed, “I have written nothing in the last two years except my play The Family Reunion.” John Haffenden observes that in the play “Eliot was aware he had not contrived a satisfying moral and artistic conclusion: his audience might well go away feeling puzzled and even antagonistic.” Eliot was “not at all pleased” with his Clark Lectures on Metaphysical Poetry, delivered in Cambridge in February-March 1926, “in spite of having taken a good deal of pains over them”. His “difficulty was being simple, sensuous and passionate” at the same time.
Eliot sought the same kind of expert advice on the Four Quartets from his close friend John Hayward and his publishing partner Geoffrey Faber that he’d received from Ezra Pound on The Waste Land. He welcomed but suspected the popular success of “East Coker,” and found “it hard to believe that a poem of mine which sells nearly 12,000 copies can really be good.” He suspected that “Little Gidding” was a “flop,” and felt that “any word of appreciation would be an encouragement.”
He challenged Stephen Spender’s implication that he was pompous and “that it was something of an exception for me not to play the ‘great man’”. Wyndham Lewis had deflated Eliot’s episcopal self-importance by exclaiming: “He doesn’t come in here disguised as Westminster Abbey.” Eliot’s income was variable and precarious, and he prophesied that “my financial future seems to depend upon Cats”.
Eliot loved to play with unusual words. He wrote John Hayward: “So far as the augurs, soothsayers and haruspices can determine, assisted by all the arts of geomancy, horoscopy and entrails of birds and Old Moore, the autumn season should open.” His cozening letter to a friend’s wife was based on Elizabethan slang: “I am a rude, cuffish, curmudgeonly old chough; a loose, gaming, dicing, drabbing coystrel; a simpering, fantastical pomandered dandiprat; a rustical ill-mannered hobbinol.”
The poet could be witty as well as erudite. He noted the riff-raff in the RAF, and that “Russian nicknames are just as long as the original name”. He thriftily mentioned, “I always dress for dinner in the country, so as to make my corduroys last longer.” During the heat wave the pale Eliot “even acquired a thin and evanescent coat of tan”. He asked the West Country historian A. L. Rowse, “Why was Cornwall so crammed with saints? They must have been evacuated there” during a war. Alluding to Rowse’s initials and adopting American gangster lingo, he warned, “You know me, Al: I’m a nice guy, but rough—vurry, vurry rough.” Having invited an Indian writer to dine, he mocked the Raj and asked a fellow member, “are you sure he will be allowed to sit down with the Sahibs of the Reform Club?”
Eliot recalled the “bright electric fire and interesting claret” during his congenial evenings with the sympathetic and intelligent John Hayward. The poet and turophile observed, “I am afraid that economic conditions are gradually forcing the great English cheeses out of existence. A proper Wensleydale is probably the most interesting of all cheeses. When a good cheese is in good condition, its peculiarity is that no two mouthfuls taste exactly alike.” He told Hayward that “my own infancy, by comparison with yours, seems to have been remarkably protected from, at least, such sexual precocity” and delightfully recalled his childhood girlfriends. The nicknames of his school friends included Butch, Buster, Doodle, Dago, Snowball, Skimbo, Chicken, Gander, Fido and—worst of all—Elephant-mouth.
Astonishingly out of touch with and unconcerned about current military events, Eliot saw World War II as a personal inconvenience. He was very different from his friend George Orwell, who frequently warned about the coming war, served in the Home Guard and was a war correspondent in Germany in 1945. Eliot confessed, “I never see a news sheet or hear the news in the morning: that is a point of principle with me: a punctilio.” On August 31, 1939, the day before World War II began, he blithely dismissed the cataclysm: “My intentions will be carried out as soon as possible if the immediate unpleasantness blows over.” On September 1, 1939 he discussed a projected book on ballet. Ten days later he failed to see a Nazi leader as a threat: “I listened to that charming clown, Herr Goering, on the radio the other night. He made one capital joke about Chamberlain’s umbrella” at Munich. On September 26, 1939 Eliot still expected “this unpleasantness to blow over”.
On November 15, 1939 Eliot wondered, “all this about the German invasion of Holland—was it just one of our newspaper rackets?” By May 14, 1940 the disastrous Allied defeats had still not sunk in: “Whether the new circumstances connected with the Low Countries make any difference I have no idea.” The next day, only three weeks before Italy joined the Axis on June 10, 1940, he wisely cancelled his plan to give six lectures for the British Council in Italy and wangle an audience with Pope Pius XII, narrowly avoiding internment as an enemy alien. On December 10, 1941, three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought America into the war, he still planned to spend Christmas in Dublin “unless the Japanese affair is going to put an end to all leave”. Unfortunately, on December 26, 1941, “Christmas dinner was somewhat diminished in gaiety by the collapse of Hong Kong.”
Bowing to the inevitable as German bombs fell during the London Blitz in July 1940, the dutiful churchwarden became an Air Raid Warden. Haffenden writes: “He was trained in clearing the streets during a raid, directing people to shelters, extinguishing small fires, assisting civilian casualties, making basic first aid interventions and blackout inspections.” The experienced Eliot concluded, “The first thing to do, when you hear the Syrens or gunfire is to have a good Piss.”
Eliot had saintly patience with the bombastic and bigoted Pound. When Pound’s letters erupted on the scene, Eliot could have recalled the Book of Ezra (9:3): “And when I heard this thing, I rent my garment and my mantle, and plucked off the hair of my head and of my beard, and sat down astonied.” He told his old friend, with considerable understatement, “that idea of yours for a book on Hieroglyphs, Frobenius and sociology is a little difficult to sell.” Ez wrote to Tom, portraying his publishing partner Frank Morley as a marine mammal and Eliot as ex-editor of his journal: “the Whhale’s outswim eggsPlanes the defunction of the criterrerium.” To Ez, with considerable exasperation, he declared, “As usual, ‘why didn’t you SAY WHAT YOU Meant?’ I never know where I am with you anyway because you seldom answer a letter but just write another letter.” Despite Eliot’s pleas to get moving on the publishing front, the next letter, “being typically Ezra, is completely obscure to everybody else. One of his peculiarities is an inability to explain anything to anybody.”
Eliot didn’t want his inferior early work reprinted by Pound and begged him: “If you cd. help me to SUPPRESS much of what I have written, instead of trying to resurrect what I have SUPPRESSED, you would be bein Useful & Practical.” Pound not only savagely condemned the Jews who were being rounded up and sent to the death camps, but falsely attributed his own fanatical views to Benjamin Franklin.
When James Joyce, another old friend, died in January 1941, Eliot defended him against the “abominably stupid obituary notices,” just as E. M. Forster had defended D. H. Lawrence in 1930. In March 1941 Eliot exclaimed that “Virginia Woolf’s death was certainly a great shock to me,” and told Leonard Woolf that he was surprised by her suicide: “I only learned the news yesterday afternoon, have had no previous intimation. For myself and others it is the end of a world. I merely feel quite numb at the moment.” Both Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath killed themselves because they feared they would become insane again and be permanently confined in an asylum. Virginia Woolf clearly meant more to Eliot than he did to her. Always critical, she called him “a very self-centred, self-torturing & self-examining man”. But Eliot’s kindness and generosity provide a striking contrast to the egoistic behaviour of Virginia Woolf, who rarely did anything for anyone.
Coda: Some useful additions can be made to John Haffenden’s thousands of learned footnotes, some of them as long as three pages in small print, which amount to a parallel book and illuminate many minor correspondents. The bisexual American poet Charles Henri Ford, for example, was the accommodating lover of both the author Djuna Barnes and the Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchew.
A photo in this book shows John Hayward disguised as Lytton Strachey.
80n- Recollections should be in italics.
Translations: 48-Pound’s Latin title Quia Pauper Amavi – Because I’ve loved poverty.
20- Hochverräter – guilty of high treason.
579- embusqués – draft dodgers.
279n- Jules Laforgue, Derniers vers (1890): “Noire bise, averse glapissante” – “Black north wind, yapping shower.”
Annotations: 766- “WANGEREI” is a city in the North Island of New Zealand.
242- In 1925 Leslie Hotson discovered that Christopher Marlowe had been murdered.
277- The “portrait of Thomas Carlyle” (1873) was painted by James McNeill Whistler.
865- Ernest Thesiger (1879-1961) was an English actor with severe features and an angular nose.
780- “that horrid term ‘modernist’ was first used I think by Edith Sitwell.” – Robert Graves and Laura Riding first wrote A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927).
532n- “I should not much fancy the prospect of reviving Bertie Russell’s acquaintance: that belongs to a chapter of the past which I should prefer not to open again.” – Russell had seduced the mentally unstable Vivien soon after her marriage to Eliot in 1915.
364- Eliot recommended the poets and Greek translators Robert Fitzgerald and Dudley Fitts
for Guggenheims in 1940, but neither won the Award.
Allusions: Eliot had hundreds of lines of poetry in his head and many of them seeped into his letters.
804- The Old Man of the Sea.” – A water god in Greek mythology.
564- “One of us.”- Genesis 3:22: “like one of us, knowing good and evil.”
695- “the Fat of the Land.” – Genesis 45:18: “you shall eat from the fat of the land.”
655- “going up and down and to and fro.” – Job 2:2: “going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it.”
149- “He never spins without a purpose.” – Matthew 6:28: “Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin.”
214n- “partly to learn & partly to teach.” – Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (1400), on the Clerk of Oxford: “gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.”
792- “a temptation stoutly to be resisted.” – Shakespeare, Hamlet (1601): “a consummation / Devoutly to be wished.”
226- “Old Moore” – Old Moore’s Almanac of predictions (1764).
712n- “I don’t know if you are a fountain or a cistern.” – William Blake, Proverbs of Hell (1794): “The cistern contains; the fountain overflows.”
778- “writing a poem in cold blood, that is the only way I have been able to write at all, and Wordsworth said the same thing in a grander way.” – Wordsworth, in his “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), said quite the opposite and advocated “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.
781- “the meeting of the waters.” – Song by the Irish poet Tom Moore (1808).
699- “he was ceasing to be.” – John Keats, “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (1818).
498- “Ezra’s own explanations only make things look much more obscure.” – Lord Byron, Don Juan (1824) on Coleridge: “I wish he would explain his explanation.”
795- Wee Willie Winkie. – Story by Rudyard Kipling (1888).
691- “let these letters go the way of all paper.” – Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903).
1023- “Emily Hale speaks only to Eliot, and Eliot speaks only to God.” – Humorous Boston poem: “Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, / And the Cabots talk only to God” (1910).
777- “You know me, Al.” – Ring Lardner, You Know Me Al (1916).
646- “retired Indian majors at the Post.” – Siegfried Sassoon, “Base Details” (1918): “I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base.”
894- “the pastness of the past” – Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919): “the pastness of the past.”
292- “I go out a little in the evenings.” – The Waste Land (1922): “I go south in the winter.”
838- Alex Comfort’s Cities of the Plain took the title of Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust’s novel, Cities of the Plain (1928).
800- “Guineas are good for me says the doctor.” – Ad for Irish stout: “Guinness is good for you” (1929).
556- “I hope that no bombs will fall on Cambridge.” – John Betjeman, “Slough” (1937): “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!”
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, had thirty-four books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents. Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway came out with LSU Press in November 2025. The Biographer’s Quest appeared with Mercer University Press in April 2026.
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