Read The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 Online
Authors: T. S. Eliot
1–TSE was staying at Pension Bürger, Luisenstrasse 50, Munich.
2–Unidentified.
3–Paul Verlaine (1844–96), poet; Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), author of
À Rebours;
Maurice Barrès (1862–1923), nationalist intellectual and polemicist; Francis Jammes (1868–1938), poet; Charles Péguy (1873–1914), poet and Catholic nationalist, discussed by TSE in
NS
8 (7 Oct. 1916); Paul Bourget (1852–1935), novelist, whose
Lazarine
was reviewed by TSE in NS 9 (25 Aug. 1917, unsigned); Paul Claudel (1868–1955), influential Catholic poet, dramatist and essayist, to whom TSE paid tribute (
Le Figaro Littéraire
10, 5 Mar. 1955); Louis Le Cardonnel (1862–1936), religious poet.
4–Charles Péguy,
Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc
(1909). Much of Péguy’s drama takes the form of a theological dialogue between Madame Gervaise and Jeanne. Mme Gervaise’s meditation on the Passion includes: ‘Vie commence à Bethlehem et finie à Jerusalem / Vie comprise entre Bethlehem et Jerusalem. / Vie inscrite entre Bethlehem et Jerusalem … / Vie commence à Bethlehem et qui ne finit pas à Jerusalem’ (
Oeuvres poétiques complètes
[1975], 437).
5–The Hungarian Arthur Nikisch (1855–1922) became in 1895 principal conductor of both the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Berlin Philarmonic.
Götterdämmerung
(‘The Twilight of the Gods’) is the last opera in Wagner’s tetralogy
The Ring of the Nibelungs:
TSE refers to the song of the Rheinmaidens in his notes to l. 266 of TWL.
6–Matthew Prichard (1865–1936), English aesthete who had become secretary to the Director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1902. Henry Eliot had given TSE an introduction to him.
7–
Translation
: My dear friend, I have received your letter just as I am on the point of leaving Paris to go down for a fortnight to the Pyrenees. Everyone has already gone, apart from Fellows; and the house is filled with ephemeral visitors, almost all corresponding to the label ‘elderly American spinster’. No more need be said.
Paris has presented quite an interesting spectacle recently (14 July, Bastille Day). Together with the period around Shrove Tuesday, it is the true Parisian holiday, now that ‘the antique renewal of age-old feast-days no longer flowers on the ancient cobblestones of this hard century’. I even believe that it takes a more artistic form than Shrove Tuesday; nothing is out of key. Official illuminations, march-past, patriotic rosettes, the common folk dancing in the streets; appalling bands playing overpoweringly emotional waltzes; the atmosphere is warm, dusty and sweaty, under a blazing sky; a tricolour, State-commissioned atmosphere, and the populace enjoys itself up to the hilt. In the afternoon, the children take over, wretched urchins blowing tin trumpets; the evening is filled with an ever-mounting sensual excitement; sweat makes the girls’ hair stick to their temples; lottery wheels spin; a merry-go-round, attractively lit and alluring, also revolves, and with every jerk of the wooden horses, the whores brace their supple busts and a shapely leg can be glimpsed through the slit of a ‘fashionably split skirt’; a heavy, sensuous gust flows warmly by.
All this outward demonstration corresponds, without doubt, to the present dominant tendency among the Parisian populace. Not being a very elevated tendency, it is materialistic, but I would not call it coarse, since your average Parisian, even so, remains subtle, sceptical and refined; in time of danger, he will, I believe, know how to behave generously. There is reason to think that the Parisian working class is undergoing the same evolution as the aristocracy in the eighteenth century. Today, you constantly come across examples of the ‘educated, intelligent worker’; he no longer believes in the old stories dating from the past; many of them believe in science (!) but, what is more important, many have repressed their good inner impulses through a desire to think rationally. (No doubt, most of them remain nice people and decent fellows, intuitively and in spite of all this, but, logically, they are doomed by their system.) You can hear upper-class people remarking with a smile that ‘semi-culture, semi-science and semi-intellectualism will bring them no advantage’. But, my dear, good people, will complete intellectualism give you much more? While positivism (materialism poorly disguised) spreads downwards through society, an aspiration towards the Idea can be seen growing daily stronger among the Elite. The end of the nineteenth century is permeated by it, and it shows itself most markedly, no doubt, in modern poetry, then in music. It frequently takes the form of a return to Christianity, whether Catholic or Galilean and evangelical. What value is there in the innumerable and varied works showing this feature? What differences appear, indeed, as soon as you think of a few names! (Verlaine, Huysmans, Barrès, Francis Jammes, Péguy, Bourget, Claudel, Le Cardonnel, etc.). I deliberately quote them at random to show the sorting out to be done. We’ll talk about all this again some time, if you like. It would be appropriate to decide, in each case, how far various causes have operated: snobbishness, self-interest, sincere repentance, flawed intelligence, literal Catholic belief in the dogma, social attitudes (national, provincial, traditional, sectarian), harking back to the past, literary artifice, pragmatism, etc. But the main thing is to say, in the case of each,
how far he can influence our inner life towards the knowledge of the supreme good.
My dear fellow, I shall be here in September, and very pleased to see you again; all friendly greetings.
Jean Verdenal
1) I have read
The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc
. I particularly liked Madame Gervaise’s account of the Passion (Bethlehem and Jerusalem, life beginning at Bethlehem and ending in Jerusalem). J. V.
2) Try, if possible, to hear something by Wagner in Munich. I went the other day to the
Götterdämmerung
, conducted by Nikisch; the end must be one of the highest points ever reached by man.
3) Another thing I forgot to tell you is that, the previous week, I had the pleasure of going several times with Prichard to drink mineral water and eat French beans, in various restaurants. A fine, strong nature, but a little stiff until one gets to know him.
MS
Houghton
25 July 1911
2 rue Cassini [Paris]
Mon cher ami,
Combien je vous suis reconnaissant des renseignements que vous avez pris la peine de m’envoyer sur cette littérature anglaise que je connais si superficiellement et que je désirerais tant connaître!
Je vais me faire acheter, les uns après les autres, tous les livres que vous m’avez indiqués. Mais quand vais-je pouvoir les lire?
En ce moment j’achève le livre de Ford
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que vous m’avez donné et où je trouve tant de fièvre et tant de pathétique beauté.
Durant quelques jours de vacances que j’ai pris à la campagne, j’ai achevé la lecture facile de
Catriona
de Stevenson. Je trouve là les qualités les plus françaises de subtilité, de grâce et d’héroisme, le talent de romancier le plus fin et le plus précis mis au service des aventures le plus délibérément invraisemblables …
Je suis aussi en train de lire le
Typhon
de Conrad que vous m’avez indiqué, et je vais acheter
Youth
.
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Je n’ai que peu de temps à vous consacrer aujourd’hui. Je veux seulement m’excuser de mon retard et remettre à plus tard une lettre plus importante. Savez-vous que le jeune homme à qui je donnais des leçons de philosophie pour le bachot a été reçu avec ‘mention’ grace à des notes de philos. renversantes. 17/20 à l’oral. Le professeur l’a gardé près d’une demi-heure et lui a dit que depuis trois ans il n’avait pas mis une note aussi forte!
Voyez que, si je suis bon chroniqueur, je n’aurais pas été non plus trop mauvais professeur. N’importe, je crois que je ne me risquerais plus à vous donner des leçons de Philosophie. Tout au plus de français, si vous voulez, mais vous n’en avez guère besoin, si j’en juge par votre lettre.
Ce que vous me dites des Allemands m’intéresse infiniment. Moi qui étais internationaliste il y a quatre ou cinq ans, je partirais aujourd’hui bien volontiers contre eux. Et je crois que la majorité des Français est comme moi.
J’ai entendu dire déjà que leur architecture était parfois intéressante.
Je suis allé porter vos paquets de livres rue St Jacques, mais vous étiez déjà parti. Je suivrai vos instructions sur ce point, car, hélas, je ne serai pas à Paris au commencement de Septembre. Je pars le 26 août à Mirande (Gers) faire une période de manoeuvres de vingt-quatre jours.
Ne manquez pas de me tenir au courant de tout ce qui vous arrive et de tout ce qui vous intéresse et croyez-moi
Votre bien sympathiquement dévoué
Alain-Fournier
PS Lire quelque chose de moi dans la
Nouvelle Revue Française
de 1er Septembre.
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[On envelope] Un de mes amis désire savoir dans quelles parties de l’Allemagne on parle l’allemand le plus pur. Pourriez-vous le renseigner? Il désirerait résider dans la banlieue d’une ville agréable. A. F.
5
1–Henri-Alban Fournier (1886–1914): author, under the pseudonym Alain-Fournier, of
Le Grand Meaulnes
(1913). He tutored TSE in French language and literature, and made him recite passages from the classics. Fournier shared with his pupil his delight in Gide, Péguy Stendhal, Marivaux, and the novels of Dostoevsky in French translation. (On 11 Apr. 1911, TSE saw the first dramatisation of
The Brothers Karamazov
, adapted by Jacques Copeau and Jean Croué, at the Théâtre des Arts: see Nancy Hargrove, ‘T. S. Eliot and the Parisian Theatre World, 1910–11’,
South Atlantic Review
66: 4, Autumn 2001.) TSE would remember Fournier’s ‘exquisite refinement, quiet humour and his great personal charm’: see Robert Gibson,
The Quest of Alain-Fournier
(1953).
2–Possibly Ford Madox Ford’s
Ladies Whose Bright Eyes: A Romance
(1911), which TSE later recommended to William Turner Levy as a ‘treat in store’ (
Affectionately T. S. Eliot
, 1968, 136), although the novelist did not change his name from Hueffer to Ford until 1919.
3–Igor Stravinsky recorded TSE saying in his later years that
Youth
and ‘The End of the Tether’ were ‘the finest stories of their kind I know’ (
Themes and Conclusions
[1972], 71).
4–‘Portrait’,
NRF
3: 33 (1 Sept. 1911) – the last of Fournier’s short stories – is a brief memoir of a school acquaintance who came to a tragic end.
5–
Translation
: My dear friend, I am most grateful to you for the information you have taken the trouble to send me about English literature, a subject with which I am very superficially acquainted and that I would so much like to know more about.
I am going to order, in turn, all the books you mention. But when shall I be able to read them?
At the moment, I am finishing the book by Ford you gave me, and in which I find so much feverish emotion and heart-rending beauty.
During a few days’ holiday in the country I finished Stevenson’s
Catriona
, an easy book to read. I find in it the eminently French qualities of subtlety, grace and heroic feeling, together with the most delicate novelist’s gift, put at the service of the most deliberately incredible adventures …
I am also busy reading
Typhoon
by Conrad, which you mentioned to me, and I am going to buy
Youth
.
I have only a little time to spare today. I merely wish to apologise for my delay in replying, while postponing the writing of a more substantial letter until later.
Would you believe it – the young man I was coaching in philosophy for the
baccalauréat
has passed with distinction thanks to some staggering philosophy marks? Seventeen out of twenty for the oral. The examiner kept him talking for half an hour and said he had not given anyone such a good mark for the last three years!
So you see, I may be a good story-teller, but I would not have been too bad a teacher either. Even so, I don’t think I would ever again venture to give you philosophy lessons. French lessons, at a pinch, if you like, but, to judge by your letter, you hardly need any.
I am greatly interested by what you say about the Germans. Although I was an internationalist only four or five years ago, I would now very willingly march against them. And I think the majority of Frenchmen are like me.
I have been told that German architecture is not without interest.
I took your parcels of books to the rue Saint-Jacques, but you had already left. Tell me what I should do about them because, unfortunately, I shall not be in Paris at the beginning of September. I am leaving on 26 August for Mirande (Gers) to take part in manoeuvres lasting twenty-four days.
Don’t fail to keep me informed of everything that happens to you or interests you, and believe me. Yours most truly, Alain-Fournier
PS You can read something by me in
La Nouvelle Revue Française
of 1 September.
[On envelope] One of my friends would like to know in which parts of Germany they speak the purest German. Could you tell him? He would like to stay on the outskirts of some pleasant town. A. F.
MS
Houghton
Mardi 17
1
Octobre [1911]
[Paris]
Ne croyez pas que je vous oublie. Mais pour quelques semaines encore je travaille douze heures par jour. Sans grand espoir, je passe les diverses épreuves à quelque faible distance de ce qu’il faudrait pour réussir; je m’entends chaque jour répéter que je suis trop jeune. Je continue avec la vitesse acquise, assez fatigué mais excité heureusement comme il convient.
Excusez ma hâte à vous quitter. Votre lettre m’a fait plaisir; nous causerons un autre jour.
Cordialement je vous envoie mille choses affectueuses.
J. Verdenal
PS J’ai quelquefois déjeuné avec Prichard qui me semble engagé sur une mauvaise voie – ‘artificielle’ dirais-je – à propos de la morale (?)
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