In 1948, in a letter to a Canadian friend, Lewis noted that he was living in London, ‘the capital of a dying empire’. To his eyes, post-Second World War Britain was falling to pieces. In letters to David Kahma, a young and aspiring Canadian writer, Geoffrey Stone, a New York-based American critic, and Edgar Preston Richardson, Director of the Detroit Institute of the Arts, Lewis was able both to maintain the transatlantic connection that was important to his thinking and his work, and to offer insight into the political and literary culture of the country that he cared for yet was growing to despise.
To David Kahma
London
25 Aug 1947
Dear Mr Kahma …
The situation in this country is distressing: for there is no possible end to it. As a result of two great wars for the position of cock of the walk in Europe both England and Germany are finally ruined, and naturally the rest of Europe with them. Whether the type of state socialism which will take the place of the mercantile prosperity of Europe at the beginning of the century will be a good or a bad thing for the ‘Greatest Number’ I cannot tell you. But the art of writing and the other arts will gradually be extinguished. Much more life is to be found in Paris than here. There always was. But it is very doubtful if it could survive another blow – such as a war or revolution. Even as it is the world of Sartre and Camus is a very sick one indeed …
Mr Orwell (as they call him here ‘bore-well’) is an excitable idiot, who spends his time affixing political labels to people. There is no foundation whatever for the rumour you mention that I become a politician. I impartially dislike all factions: and I am not susceptible as is silly Mr Orwell, to the fascination of political Stars (nor ever have been). I have always been inclined to keep a stupid old bitch known as Brittania out of dog-fights, that is all.
She is still my only political attachment (pace the London correspondent of the Partisan Rev.). – This letter has been all about myself… My next communication will be about yourself.
With my sincerest thanks,
To Geoffrey Stone
London, W.II
Jan. 15 1948
My dear Stone …
As to conditions in these islands. We now get no eggs at all, or at most one a piece every month. (But we prefer no eggs to powdered eggs). The ingredients of the bread is said by medical men to be actually injurious to health and is so dry and gritty as to be disagreeable to eat. We eat no bread. We buy baps; but they contain no yeast, which it seems is a serious deficiency. In general, absence of fats of all kinds from the diet is the worst feature … The water is now so heavily chlorinated it is almost undrinkable. When the taste of the chlorine wears off, you taste the sewage, which is worse. The reason for this is that it has not been possible to renew the filters at the waterworks. We have found that sometimes for a short while the water tastes quite normal again and we fill our jugs (I suppose garbage has ceased momentarily to flow into it, or they have run out of chlorine). These are just a few details. The most horrible thing of all is that everything gets worse monthly and is certain never to stop getting worse. Consider. This is the capital of a dying empire – not crashing down in flames and smoke but expiring in a peculiar muffled way. The 47 million people on these islands can by no means be fed because they have to be nourished by means of imported food which a great rich empire could buy but not the present dwindling polity in this greatly altered world. Also, why it is certain to become worser and worser for us is that we are in the midst of a socialist experiment (on the Swedish pattern) and we shall be squeezed more and more…. At this point (Jan 15) a series of upheavals occurred: we had been living in the upstairs part of our apartment, the workmen entrenched on the floor beneath. But at last they announced their desire to come up. Everything had thereupon to be moved down. Everything got lost: for days and nights I was living in a whirlpool of furniture and food and blow lamps and typewriters. At last things are relatively quiet: and it is Jan. 25! In the meantime your admirable essay ‘American Life and Catholic Culture’ has turned up, and I have perused it with the greatest interest. You do not say quite enough about American Life, I think. Why not boldly imagine a Catholic American? Where did you get your idea of a catholic ghetto from – observation of the social ostracism of the irish catholics in Boston? – I enjoyed the writing of your article throughout. What I felt to be a mistake was the introduction in so short a piece of a special definition of the terms ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’. But that would be my only criticism. Are you, may I ask, a Maritain devotee: or do you consider what he writes dangerous doctrine, as many do? Are you on the side of the Louvain teaching – in brief do you consider that the existence of God can be mathematically proved, and that the missionary should go to work on those lines? Or are you more of a mystic than that? … We both hate the ‘purchase tax’ more than we have ever hated anything. Next to that we loathe an expression which our conquerors never cease to employ.
It is this: Too much money chasing too few goods’. – But farewell, and best wishes from Froanna and myself,
Yours
W. L.
To Edgar Preston Richardson
London, W.II
Oct. 27 1948
My dear Richardson.
It was a very pleasant surprise to see Detroit and the rest of the address on the envelope, and upon opening it to be with you again …
Let me speak of the first year of the Peace, upon our return. That first twelvemonth I could do nothing but struggle with the environment. England has become a very difficult place. National bankruptcy plus socialism is no joke. Let me say at once that I am not anti-socialist. It would be stupid to be that: at this stage in human history some form of it seems indicated – though of course it is a necessary but disagreeable phase imposed by humanity’s natural backwardness and wickedness, not a splendid culmination of human genius and endeavour. But there is one piece of political information I have most painfully and unwillingly acquired. State-socialism (in contrast to some other types of socialism) is not a theory of the state. It is a very grave complaint to which human society is apt to fall victim. – National bankruptcy is – well, let us say very bad for the patient – for a nation suffering from state-socialism. – I read this morning that, as well as medicine, law is going to be nationalized. Nationalization, of course, and state-socialism are inseparable.
Conditions here are not the straightforward disaster of a country the currency of which has become worthless – as in Germany after world war i. Disaster is disguised as ‘austerity’. As a result to an outsider the mere registering of actual conditions must have a sound of unwarranted complaint. – And very little complaint – alas – is heard here: dunning rulers in the past have carefully trained this people to ‘keep a stiff upper lip’, to ‘keep smiling’, to be fine fellows who can ‘take it’ …
You cannot defeat the English. You can publicly rob them and fool them; ruin them, and eventually enslave them. But you cannot defeat them. They do not [as has so often been said) know when they’re beaten!
… It all looks the same you see – but it isn’t quite the same! It is the most hypocritical and insidious type of inflation. Most writers have crowded into safe official jobs – B.B.C., Brit. Council, or a Ministry. Literature does not benefit… Then, as a limit of 5 shillings per meal per person is now statutory, (plus a ‘cover charge’) it is impossible to nourish oneself in a restaurant. A lunch at the Café Royal for instance is just the negation of sustenance. A couple of months ago we lunched with James Sweeney and his wife at a hotel in Half Moon Street, off Piccadilly. The restaurant is well-known, smallish and expensive. (The most reckless of my dealers always takes me there for lunch). The dish that was one of the two pièces de resistance I could not eat, because it was putrid … But enough of these miseries …
Yrs
WYNDHAM LEWIS
T. S. Eliot
[1888–1965]
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri. His grandfather was a prominent Unitarian minister and a zealous missionary in his efforts to advance the causes of education, religion and community, and his example was to have a profound effect on Eliot’s childhood and career. In 1906 Eliot entered Harvard University, completing his BA in 1909 and his MA in 1911. While embarking on his academic career at Harvard, he became interested in the French Symbolist movement in literature and began writing his own ironic versions of Symbolist poems. In 1910 he took a year out from Harvard and attended the Sorbonne in Paris, where he took part in the demonstrations of the Camelots du Roi, a right-wing, anti-Dreyfusard organization. He returned to Harvard in 1912, and was appointed an assistant in philosophy under the guidance of Irving Babbitt and Bertrand Russell. Two years later, he was awarded a scholarship to study philosophy at Merton College, Oxford. After his arrival in 1914, Eliot made England his permanent home.
Eliot rapidly became involved with the avant-garde movement that was dominating the arts in London at the time. With the help of the poet Ezra Pound, another expatriate American whom he met in London in 1914, Eliot published his poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in Poetry (1915). Pound went on to act as Eliot’s agent and editor, a role that led to his significant editorial contribution to Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922). In 1915 Eliot married Vivien Haigh-Wood, who was from a conventional English upper-middle-class family. An unhappy marriage, it was the source of Eliot’s bleak vision of matrimony in his poems and plays.
During this time, to earn his living, Eliot taught in grammar schools in High Wycombe and Highgate. Then in 1917 he joined the colonial and foreign department of Lloyds Bank in London, remaining there, despite attempts to enter into the US Navy in 1918, until 1925. Meanwhile, in his spare time, Eliot’s literary career was taking shape. He published a collection of his early poetry written in America, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), followed by two more collections, Poems (1919) and Ara vos prec (1920), both severe satires of English and European post-war culture. By now he was also becoming well known as a critic. He was assistant editor of The Egoist (1917–19) and published his polemical book The Sacred Wood (1920), a collection of essays on criticism, poetic drama and poets.
Due to the pressures of his professional, literary and personal life, in 1921 Eliot was on the verge of a physical and mental breakdown and was granted a period of leave from Lloyds Bank. During his months of recovery in Margate, and then in Switzerland, Eliot wrote the majority of The Waste Land. Unquestionably one of the landmarks of twentieth-century poetry, the poem focuses on personal (many critics say his own) and cultural ruin in post-war London, and created a new poetic form. The Waste Land first appeared in the inaugural issue of The Criterion, a highly influential literary journal which Eliot founded in 1922 and edited until 1939.
In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds and joined the publishers Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber) as a director. He published a series of books on literary criticism which, along with his commentaries in The Criterion, firmly established him as one of the leading literary critics of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, though, Eliot had increasing problems with his cultural identity. By approaching the matter in a distinctly traditionalist way – he described himself as ‘classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’ – he almost inevitably, in 1927, became a member of the Anglican Church and a British citizen.
Following his conversion, Eliot published a series of poems on religious themes, including ‘Ash Wednesday’ (1930), which dealt with his struggle in converting to Anglicanism. It was at this point that his wife’s mental and physical state, which had plagued Eliot throughout their marriage, deteriorated to such a degree that in 1932 he decided upon a legal separation. She later died in a private mental home in 1947. In the 1930s Eliot turned increasingly to verse drama in a concentrated effort to move away from the personal nature of his poetry and towards a clearer sense of social responsibility. This began with the short Sweeney Agonistes (1932), and was followed by the highly successful Murder in the Cathedral (1935), which marked the beginning of his reputation as the poet who revived verse drama. His following plays, The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954) and The Elder Statesman (1959), were aimed more specifically at the West End and attempted to reconcile Christianity with classical drama, modern poetry and the popular play. Towards the beginning of his career in the theatre, Eliot produced what most people regard as his greatest poetic work, Four Quartets (1943). Comprising four philosophical and religious meditations, it was to be Eliot’s last major poem.
After the war, Eliot’s career as a critic subsided. The small number of reviews and essays, most of which were published between 1945 and 1947, lacked the energy of his pre-war criticism. In 1948, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Order of Merit. Following this, apart from his three ‘West End’ plays, Eliot settled back to reap the rewards of his long writing career, and in 1957 he married his private secretary, Valerie Fletcher. By 1964 Eliot had received enormous public acclaim, including both Britain’s and the United States’ highest civilian honours and seventeen honorary doctorates from American, English and European institutions. He died in London in 1965.
Eliot arrived in Britain at a time of great trauma for the nation. The country was about to he plunged into the horrors of the First World War and Eliot, already well travelled in Europe, was trying to understand both the English and England. His letters to his brother Henry and his beloved cousin Eleanor Hinkley reveal his early anxieties about how he might adjust to England, but they also betray his quiet determination to take part in a society that already held a firm grip on his imagination.
To Henry Eliot
28 Bedford Place, Russell Square,
