Below, T.S. Eliot writes to Lady Ottoline Morrell, a patron of the arts who entertained a circle of writers and artists at Garsington Manor near Oxford. Her salon was frequented by Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Max Gertler and Dora Carrington, among others. Eliot and Lady Ottoline met through Bertrand Russell. Here Eliot discusses a recent visit from Harold Peters, who was apparently “one of the best amateur sailors on the North-East Coast.” He had been a good friend of Eliot’s at Harvard, and they spent much time together sailing off the Dry Salvages in Cape Ann, Massachusetts. The friendship did not endure, however; Eliot laments the necessity of touring Peters around London, doing so out of polite consideration of their prior attachment rather than a genuine impulse.
18 Crawford Mansions
Monday [23 June 1919]
Dear Lady Ottoline,
Finally I have a chance to write and tell you what happened. First of all, I was bitterly disappointed. And will you let me come very soon? I expect to be settled here again after this week, and after that I should love to come for a weekend if you would ask me.
The man who turned up so suddenly is a lieutenant with the American navy and he is the oldest and loyalist American friend I have. He was here about two months ago for two nights, and I begged him to come again before he went back to the States. He has been mine sweeping in the Orkneys; now he is suddenly demobilised, and came down from Liverpool entirely to see me before leaving Europe finally tomorrow. I got a wire from him, and when he arrived I realised that I should have to give up my weekend—at first I thought that I could take an earlier train back to town on Sunday, but there wasn’t any. And I saw that it would be a bitter blow to him if he could not have me for the whole for the short time. He would never have got over it; he had come from Liverpool only to see me, and he will probably never be in this country again, and he would not have understood, so I gave up. I could not let him think that anything was different from what it was five years ago. He had been almost the only man in my class at Harvard whom I could endure; and we have been through various adventures and physical risks together; I don’t feel at all sentimental about it, but I could not let him go back to America thinking that our relations were altered.
So I had to go to the theatre, which I detest, and walked for miles and miles yesterday showing him the East End and the docks; and I feel completely exhausted and especially depressed by my awareness of having lost contact with Americans and their ways, and by the hopelessness of ever making them understand so many things. I could go on indefinitely with this, but it is probably tiresome, and it was only to explain how much I should have preferred sitting on the lawn with you at Garsington, and to justify my proposing myself again after failing in this way. Will you please ask me soon after the next weekend? I wish Mrs. Woolf could be there too: I have not seen her for a long time.
You said, by the way, about my poems, some of the things I should like people to say, and which none of the reviewers have said. So I naturally choose to believe that you were “on the right track”!
Sincerely
T.S. Eliot
I am sending some Joyce.
From The Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922, Volume 1. Edited by Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1988. pp. 306-7.
FURTHER READING
View portraits of Lady Ottoline at the National Portrait Gallery, painted or photographed by her artist friends and her husband, Philip Edward Morrell.
Hear T.S. Eliot read The Dry Salvages, the third poem in his Four Quartets.
Read about the artistic legacy of the Garsington Manor circle.