Eliot in wartime
Like John Milton, Samuel Johnson and Samuel Coleridge, Eliot was the most learned poet of his age. This is especially clear in his wartime correspondence, collected in Letters, Volume 10, 1942-l944, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (Faber, 2025. lv+1080, £60).
His long letters to his close friend and lively gossip John Hayward (1905-65) are the most unbuttoned and revealing—far more interesting than his dutiful ecclesiastical correspondence. Since Hayward, crippled by muscular dystrophy and confined to a wheelchair since the 1920s, was in far worse shape than Eliot, the sickly poet couldn’t complain about his own physical problems. Hayward gave him valuable criticism and suggestions for “Little Gidding,” the last of his Four Quartets.
His serious letters to Hayward are packed with amusing and satiric observations. Eliot visited Llanfairpwllgwyngyll in Wales. Buckingham Palace paints a black line on the bathtub to save water. He nicknamed the female writer Storm Jameson “Hurricane Jim”. He called a serpentine female architect “Lady Boa-Bore Reconstructor”. The Fellows of All Souls were “Arse Holes” and at an Oxford dinner party “the standard of senility seems pretty high”. He thought “the trouble with having psychic researchers is that it leads people to telling ghost stories,” and “there is something particularly depressing about schoolmasters; much worse than a company of clergy.” He complained that the film producer of Murder in the Cathedral, “with the connivance of the Archbishop and the Red Dean, wants to turn Canterbury into a highbrow film studio, which rather horrifies me.” He caerphilly chose his cheese, and complained that the wartime product had the taste and consistency of soap. He could also mock himself. Wyndham Lewis quoted him fastidiously saying, “I daren’t take cake and jam’s too much trouble.” In one summer, he timidly told Hayward, “I did not bathe, as the weather was not torrid enough.”
Eliot liked to portray himself as procrastinating and idle, but was actually driven to demanding work by discipline, duty and conscience. John Haffenden writes, “His strategic mission, throughout the war, was to do his best to help sustain the cultural life of the United Kingdom; and, when duty called, to be a cultural emissary to Europe.” He had no “settled abode”, and divided the week between lodging with his publishing partner Geoffrey Faber in Bloomsbury and staying with friends in a country house in Surrey. Extremely busy and sempre in gamba though frequently ill, Eliot (who had a congenital hernia) had to carry his heavy suitcase through crowded and unreliable wartime trains and buses.
In June-July 1942, he spent five weeks lecturing on poetry in Sweden, “not without interest but with a good deal of fatigue.” Haffenden doesn’t mention that this cultural goodwill mission had political and strategic importance. Sweden, though neutral in World War II, was condemned by the Allies for selling iron ore and ball bearings to Germany, and for allowing German troops to pass through their country from Norway to Finland. Eliot was part of the intense propaganda effort to persuade Sweden, if not to join the Allies during the Occupation of Denmark and Norway, then at least to maintain strict neutrality. The British Council also planned his lecture tour to Iceland, but “the doctor says that I should not contemplate visiting so boreal a place as Reykyavik [sic] ‘unless you want to sign your Death Warrant.’ ” The Council planned his lecture tours to Morocco and to France, which also had to be cancelled.
Eliot was not only an expert judge and critic but also, after eight years’ experience of working at Lloyds Bank, was shrewd about the financial aspects of publishing. He insisted, “after taking a considerable amount of pains over a book which we cannot expect to be really profitable, we may only acquire odium among the authors and an undeserved reputation for parsimony.” But he did publish an arcane book on “the symbolism of the hare in myth and fable from around the world”, which was not destined to excite great interest.
As a publisher he read submissions, dictated letters and attended the weekly Book Committee to make the final decisions. He also did fire-watching on the roof of their Russell Square office. He said of an aspiring writer, “I fear that his gifts for poetry are not equal to his zeal for it.” He somewhat cryptically observed, “In these times we must decline everything in which we have any kind of doubt instead of accepting everything in which we have any kind of faith.” But he also noted, “the publishing world is extremely busy and indeed prosperous, as any book you print can be sold, and it is impossible to keep up with the demand.” He decided that Robert Lowell has “an interesting mind and certainly a gift of words”, but correctly believed that Lowell would eventually write even better poetry and did not make an immediate offer for his work.
He wrote, “What I should like would be for the Public to consider me a Simpleton, and my Colleagues at Faber & Faber to consider me a shrewd man of business.” The Simpleton role would disguise his formidable persona and make him easier to deal with. His shrewdness would make his colleagues defer to his judgment. He described himself as “a misfit with a tendency to colds and fevers,” but more precisely resembled his description of an American ambassador, “one of those elderly, precise, cultured Americans who seem to have been born wearing a stiff collar.”
W, B. Yeats’ Oxford Anthology of Modern Verse (1936) warned him “that a poet is not always the best judge of the poetry of his own contemporaries.” The Pope of Russell Square was usually polite and helpful, though he sometimes unleashed his anger, lashed out at hopeless poetasters and was willing to wound. He gave the historian A. L. Rowse a backhanded compliment: “You do not seem to me to be taking the meticulous pains to write badly which is evident in some of your earlier work.” He ordered a cousin of the Queen, with lèse-majesté, “to show more respect for the ordinary rules of GRAMMAR”; punctured another victim by stating, “I have never read poetry that irritated me more than yours”; and felled a third hard case with: “The book is not the work of a practised writer: the style, even when it can not be described as slipshod, lacks pungency; and there is a monotony about the sentence structure that would tend to deter any reader.”
Eliot’s put-down of the anti-modern American critic Van Wyck Books revealed that it was dangerous to mess with Tom: “the tone of his writing suggests that he should be treated gently as a psychological case. I am impressed by the catholicity of his distaste.” Eliot also put the knife in The Virgin Birth by a Catholic priest, which he called insincere, unpleasant, unworthy, vague, trite, cheap, crude, sneering, petulant and abusive. Amazingly, Eliot respectfully published this book in 1943. He also savaged a shoddy British Council anthology: “The project seems to me to be ill conceived; the authors oddly chosen, so that I do not know whether inclusions or exclusions are more surprising; and the letter-press of poor quality.” This vitriolic judgment echoed Samuel Johnson’s condemnation of a wretched meal: “It is as bad as bad can be: it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest.”
Eliot wasn’t really interested in collecting early editions of his own work, and told an importunate editor, “I never have any unpublished poems on hand except such as are either destined to destruction or fixed in their destination.” He believed that his poems achieved greater historical depth by alluding to other great periods. In “Little Gidding” he deliberately challenged readers by introducing a refrain from the medieval mystic Juliana of Norwich and a line from the 14th-century Christian mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing. He struggled with “Litle Gidding” for years, but finally made the words come alive, finished the poem and was ready to let go: “After a time one loses the original feeling of the impulse, and then it is no longer safe to alter. It is time to close the chapter.” He thought the work “belongs to that small residue of insoluble problems which remain as a sediment in any but the most perfect poem of this length.”
He could also be self-critical. He was unaware that boudin, the name chosen at random for a character in his poem “Animula” (1929) “is the French for black pudding. This is to me a nauseous dish.” He thought his Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1926 were “very poor stuff”. The structure of his play The Family Reunion (1939) “is very defective theatrically and the audience will find that nothing at all is happening.” Asked to give a reading of “What the Thunder Said” from The Waste Land, he “sometimes wished it had never said anything.” Eliot complained, as if he were running a creative writing class for untalented students, “I see a great many American sergeants and they all write poetry: nobody realizes that I HATE poetry.”
Reluctant to condemn his old mentor, Eliot wrote that “Pound is an honest though a very silly man; I owe him much gratitude for kindness in the past. I remain as much admiring his poetry and literary criticism, as exasperated by his political opinions.” “Silly” and “exasperated” are inexcusably apologetic words to describe Pound’s rabid anti-Semitism and fanatical fascism.
Omar Pound was not “the son of Ezra,” but the issue of Ezra’s wife and an Egyptian army officer who gave him an Arabic name. Her affair was retaliation for Ezra’s permanent liaison with the American violinist Olga Rudge.
Eliot, who assumed parental responsibility when Omar’s mother was confined to Italy during the war, noted that his Levantine appearance was not at all like Ezra’s Nordic features. Omar had been persecuted at Charterhouse School because of Ezra’s wartime fascist broadcasts on Italian radio. At the age of 18, Omar was still wetting his bed and being treated by a psychoanalyst. Eliot called him a difficult and pitiful case, who had a nervous condition and the mental and physical difficulties of an undeveloped adolescent. He was struck by the narrowness of his chest, shoulders and head as well as by his poor eyesight, and thought he was not normal enough to live in lodgings on his own. He never knew his real father and had the wartime burden of being Ezra’s putative son. I knew Omar and can testify that he was extremely unpleasant, offensively aggressive and screwed up.
In October 1942 George Orwell invited Eliot to take part—with William Empson, Herbert Read and Orwell himself—in several BBC broadcasts to India and to speak about John Dryden, Edgar Poe and James Joyce. Eliot thought Poe “is sometimes slipshod about precise meanings and gets his effects more exclusively by the rhythmical value of the poem as a whole.” Orwell and Eliot had social as well as professional relations. In December during the Blitz in London, Orwell asked, “can you come to my house one night and stay the night?” Eliot replied, “I am rather averse to bedding out more than I have to because of having to move twice a week anyway.” He did stay overnight with Orwell and his wife, though neither man recorded their conversation.
Eliot was concerned about Orwell’s quite obvious poor health: “I wondered whether Orwell was ill. I’m afraid that he hasn’t the constitution for this sort of life; he hoped that he could get to West Africa which he thought would suit him better.” Orwell had spent four months in Morocco in 1938-39 but never made it to West Africa, whose hot humid climate would have had a disastrous effect on his tuberculosis. He went instead to the harsh climate of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides, which was just as bad for his poor health. Eliot noted, “Sometimes Orwell is so very good: but I fear that he is physically a very sick man. Why he seeks my company, considering how he disapproves of my more recent verse, I don’t know.” He concluded, “He was a man whose integrity I highly respected and I liked him personally. I am sorry for my own sake that I did not know him well enough to have correspondence with him.”
The greatest mistake of Eliot’s publishing career was rejecting Orwell’s Animal Farm in July 1944. He called it “the best English satire since Swift” and “agreed that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skilfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane—and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver.” But he felt unwilling to satirise and offend Britain’s Russian allies during the war, and perversely concluded: “Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore best qualified to run the farm, so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.” Orwell’s brilliant and enduring novel has sold more than 11 million copies.
Eliot explained that “my abilities lie rather in the direction of practical wisdom than of abstract thought”, and found “Samuel Johnson so congenial a mind, and so exemplary for the present time.” In Rasselas (1759), Johnson objected to the idea of aeroplanes that could be used in warfare; Eliot anticipated the atomic age by warning, “if you put such a tool in the hands of human beings, what unexpected devilish use will they put it to?” Like Johnson, Eliot also offered practical wisdom for our own time. He regretted that a recent publishers’ list contains “no Poetry, Literary Criticism or Literary Scholarship AT ALL.” He warned that the decay of the Liberal Arts in our universities would make it easy for professors to slide into “the alarming symptom of totalitarianism disguised as democracy” and concluded, “I don’t think the outlook for Europe has been worse these 1500 years.”
John Haffenden has mastered the vast scholarship on Eliot and his social and intellectual circle, and usefully quotes many letters written to Eliot. Haffenden’s Preface, brief biographies, footnotes and index are, as always, excellent. The footnotes also contain interesting facts. Piskies is slang for Scottish Episcopalians. Field Marshal Wavell lost an eye in the war. Sir Humphrey Rolleston died after being scalded in his bath. Adrian Earle, a compulsive criminal, “was found dead in mysterious circumstances in a Madrid hotel.” The sewing machine heiress Winnaretta, Princesse de Polignac, “one of the 24 children of Isaac Singer, was a great lesbian and illustrious patron of the arts.” Djuna Barnes “treated Eliot with an easy affectionate camaraderie that caused him to respond with an equally easy gaiety never seen in him before.”
CODA: More useful information could be added to clarify the notes:
593n- should be “sister of Tom.” 543n2 should be “Cunard.”
916- antrum operation – sinus or stomach surgery.
666- American ATS – Army Transport Service.
664- Mogador, a town in Morocco, was the weird name of William Empson’s son.
678- Paz Subercaseaux was born in 1923.
219- S. L. Bethell, author of 1066 and All That (1930), died in 1951.
349- Eliot’s niece Charlotte Stearns Smith died in 1999.
189- Christopher Columbus was Italian, not Portuguese.
667- Bossu and La Harpe were 18th-century French explorers.
780- Little Annie Oakley (1860-1926) was a famous American sharpshooter.
546- Crévecoeur wrote Letters from an American Farmer (1782).
645- Geoffrey Faber’s poem “Spyder, Spyder” echoed William Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger” (1794).
789- Mr. Midshipman Faber alludes to Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836) by Frederick Marryat.
319- Job Trotter in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (1837) was a cunning and wily servant.
894- Alcman – Spartan poet.
894- Holiday House – classic children’s book by Catherine Sinclair (1839).
459- The House of Mirth (1905) – novel by Edith Wharton.
945- C.I.F – Cost, Insurance and Freight, an international shipping agreement, quoted in The Waste Land (1922).
992- The French translation of The Waste Land, La terre mis à nu, echoed Charles Baudelaire’s Mon coeur mis à nu (My Heart Laid Bare), posthumously published in 1887.
44- Tam Mas Domov, the Czech translation of The Four Quartets (1943), unhelpfully means “There’s a Home.”
333- The Christian name Bice, the familiar form of Dante’s Beatrice, appealed to the Pre-Raphaelites.
946- Arthur Sheen, the Australian soldier and translator of All Quiet on the Western Front, “performed an incredible act of valor in the last war.” – He repeatedly sprinted into heavy enemy fire to keep communication lines intact.
308- “American critics and professors have been so excited about Melville.” – Billy Budd was posthumously published in 1924. Eliot’s remark, “I imagine that bell buoys sound very much the same the world over” was fatuous.
788- “What ho! Who wonneth here?” – Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941).
890- Skeleton Key – to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell (1944).
38- “A comparison between Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and parts of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov would be extremely interesting to work out.” – The interrogations of the Grand Inquisitor (1880) and of Rubashov (1940) are similar.
559- Eliot combines Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587), “with occidental pomp panoplied,” Churchill, Roosevelt and the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King at the Quebec Conference in August 1943, and Eliot’s poem “Gerontion” (1920): “in Quebec, great Winston gnaw’d / With toothless gums.”
560- John Hayward’s “hours spent in instructing the children in the Torah” remains a mystery.
Haffenden doesn’t mention that Gerald Heard was a crank, F. O. Matthiessen killed himself and Howard Nemerov committed incest with his sister Diane Arbus.
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, had thirty-four books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents. Parallel Lives (2024) and Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway (2025) came out with LSU Press. The Biographer’s Quest appeared with Mercer University Press in April 2026.
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