BIOGRAPHICAL COMMENTARY 1928-1929

1928 JANUARY - TSE seeks to raise money to keep The Criterion in business. The sum of £750 a year is needed to subsidise the magazine. Arnold Bennett, after a personal appeal by TSE and Humbert Wolfe, refuses immediate help. 'I showed little interest,' Bennett recorded in his journal. 'The New Criterion is a dull production and always will be.' 13 JANUARY - TSE dines with the businessman F. S. Oliver, who proves to be a generous benefactor: he contributes towards the production of the magazine no less than £250 a year for three years. In time, nine other guarantors (assiduously cultivated) come forward with significant support: TSE's affluent and well-connected cousin Marguerite Caetani, Princesse de Bassiano; Charles Whibley; Bruce Richmond (editor of the TLS); May Sinclair, novelist; Alan Lubbock; D. O. Malcolm, diplomat and businessman (Director of the British South Africa Company); J. Hugh Smith; Ethel Sands, American heiress and artist; and Conrad Ormond (director of Doubleday Doran & Co., publishers). 16-23 JANUARY - TSE, in Paris, reports that Vivien 'is not fit' to come home from Malmaison. He loyally defends the right-wing writer Charles Maurras against charges that he is anti-Christian. In 'The Action Française, M. Maurras and Mr Ward', The Monthly Criterion (March 1928), TSE says he has been 'a reader of the work of M. Maurras for eighteen years', and, far from 'drawing him away from' Christianity - during 1926 Maurras was even condemned by the Pope, with five of his books being placed on the Index - Maurras's writings had had the opposite effect on himself. 31 JANUARY - Vivien writes to Ottoline Morrell: 'I am very miserable, & it is all quite useless. You must have gathered from Tom what a horrible mess all this is. But as you can see, he simply hates the sight of me. And I don't know what to do.' FEBRUARY - TSE publishes 'From Anabase' (extracted from his translation of Anabase, by St-John Perse) in The Monthly Criterion 7. By mid-February he is in Paris once more. Vivien returns with TSE to London in the third week of the month. TSE tells Morrell (20 February), 'It may not be a bad thing.' Seven years later, VHE will write in her diary, remembering this moment: 'My dear Tom brought me back with him, but he did not want to. He would have much preferred for me to remain in France . [T]hey were all furious at my leaving . It was a very bad time & I felt terribly frightened at what I had done. So that I was out of my mind, & so behaved badly to Tom & got very excited. It seemed that everything he said was a sneer or an insult. When we got to Victoria we were met by Mother & Maurice & their behaviour was sinister & unkind.' Vivien calls on Morrell and writes to her afterwards, 'I am sorry I talked so much about Tom - of course he is a very old friend of yours - & a great friend & no one likes hearing their old friends spoken against. I am very unhappy, & as you agreed with me - quite defenceless. So there it is. If you hear of me being murdered, don't be surprised!' 23 FEBRUARY - TSE attends the Pepys Feast at Magdalene College, Cambridge, as the guest of I. A. Richards. MARCH - TSE makes his first confession, to Father Francis Underhill (whom he calls 'my spiritual director'). He tells William Force Stead: 'I . feel as if I had crossed a very wide and deep river.' He takes a vow of celibacy. 1 MARCH - publication of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, with an Introduction by TSE ('The World's Classics no. 316': 5,000 copies printed); it will be republished in SE as 'Wilkie Collins and Dickens'. TSE gives a talk on Tennyson and Whitman at the Poetry Bookshop, London. Mid-month, Vivien suffers from influenza. 25 MARCH - TSE delivers 'Preface' and 'A Dialogue on Poetic Drama' for publication in Of Dramatick Poesie: An Essay 1668 by John Dryden (London: Frederick Etchells & Hugh Macdonald, 1928). In the Spring of 1928, he publishes 'Perch'io non spero' (with the English text facing a French translation by Jean de Menasce), in Commerce: the poem will be Part I of Ash-Wednesday (1930). TSE assures Paul Elmer More, who is on a visit to England, that he is a 'strong High Churchman and an enemy to Rome'. 10 APRIL - he tells Force Stead, of his progress in religion: 'I do not expect myself to make great progress at present, only to "keep my soul alive" by prayer and regular devotions . I feel that nothing could be too ascetic, too violent, for my own needs.' In mid-month his invaluable secretary Irene Pearl Fassett falls gravely ill with tuberculosis and can no longer go to work: she offers her resignation. Still it is finally decided that the Criterion will continue as a quarterly; disingenuously, F&G puts out this statement: 'We are now able to announce that in consequence of reorganisation, and in conformity with the preference of many supporters, The MONTHLY CRITERION will henceforth appear in QUARTERLY form, resuming its original title, THE CRITERION. The next number will be published in June . The form will be similar to that of THE CRITERION immediately before its conversion into a Monthly, but the scope will be gradually extended.' MAY - TSE's essay 'The Humanism of Irving Babbitt' is accepted for publication in The Forum (New York): he is paid $125 for it. The second edition of The Sacred Wood is published. 'A Dialogue on Poetic Drama' is published in an edition of John Dryden's Of Dramatick Poesie: An Essay. 2 MAY - TSE visits Cambridge to speak to the Heretics Society: he stays at King's College. The following week, 16 MAY, he visits University College, Oxford, where he dines and talks to the Martlets. Vivien undergoes an operation on her teeth. Throughout the summer, the Eliots' house at 57 Chester Terrace has to be repaired and decorated: but the work is found to have been done so sloppily that in places it has to be done all over again. JUNE - Early in the month, Ottoline Morrell chats with TSE and subsequently gossips to Virginia Woolf; whereupon Woolf conveys the gossip to her sister: 'Tom is in a great taking with Vivien as mad as a hare, but not confined, and they give parties, where she suddenly accuses him of being in love with Ottoline (and me, but this Ott: threw in as a sop) and Tom drinks, and Vivien suddenly says when talk dies down "You're the bloodiest snob I ever knew" - so I have refused to dine there.' In MID-JUNE, TSE is happy to report to Caetani, 'We have been managing . very much better this spring, and I am hopeful. Vivien has been running her house well and we have seen a good many people.' 26 JUNE - TSE and VHE go to dinner at the Hutchinsons. TSE later writes to Mary Hutchinson: 'I was . extremely nervous as I anticipated that V. would make some statement: I hope it was not too trying for you, but she had had it disturbing her mind for so long that it was perhaps best to get it off.' At the dinner, VHE had managed to break a pearl necklace, which is recovered and returned to her only at the end of September. JULY - TSE goes on a weekend retreat. He publishes 'The Humanism of Irving Babbitt' in The Forum. Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More visit TSE in London, which he enjoys. TSE later writes of More that in him he found what he called 'an auxiliary to my own progress of thought, which no English theologian could have given me . I might almost say that I never met any Christians until after I had made up my mind to become one. It was of the greatest importance, then, to meet the work of a man who had come by somewhat the same route, to the same conclusions, at almost the same time: with a maturity, a weight of scholarship, a discipline of thinking, which I did not, and never shall, possess . My first meeting with [More] in London . seemed more like the renewal of an old acquaintance than the formation of a new one.' In the final week of the month, the death of Pearl Fassett causes considerable upset to both TSE and Vivien. AUTUMN - Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Mary Hutchinson and E. McKnight Kauffer discuss TSE's poetry at Chester Terrace. Woolf notes her recollections of TSE reciting poems in his 'curious monotonous sing-song'. 17 SEPTEMBER - TSE contributes a 'Preface' to This American World, by Edgar Ansel Mowrer: 1,000 copies are printed. He registers his sense of permanent displacement: 'it was not until years of maturity that I perceived that I myself had always been a New Englander in the South West, and a South Westerner in New England.' 24 SEPTEMBER - he publishes A Song for Simeon (Ariel Poem no. 16), illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer: 3,500 copies. 26 SEPTEMBER - his fortieth birthday. 4 OCTOBER - TSE contributes an anonymous 'Preface' (recalling the town of Gloucester where he had spent his summers as a child) to Fishermen of the Banks, a collection of short stories by James B. Connolly. 11 OCTOBER - Geoffrey Faber invites TSE to write a pamphlet on Dante for publication in the F&G series 'The Poets on the...