Good and Evil in Eliot's Letters to Emily Hale

Good and Evil in Eliot's Letters to Emily Hale

THE GLASS NUMBER 33 AUTUMN 2020 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year Valentine Cunningham 4 Saints under an empty sky – Time and Space in Camus’s La Peste Marie Kawthar Daouda 10 Good and Evil in Eliot’s Lett ers to Emily Hale Jewel Spears Brooker 19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit David Jasper 26 Seeking Light: Ruskin after Jesus Andrew Tate 32 Pilgrim Plays for a New Elizabethan Age Margaret Wiedemann Hunt 39 The dramatic transformation of Samson Agonistes Irene Montori 48 ‘So They Say’: An Experiment in Reading Curse, Lament and Persona in Psalm 109 Richard S. Briggs 55 Book reviews 62 Roy Flechner, Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland’s Patron Saint Colin McAllister, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature Carolyn Muessig, The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Michael L. Peterson, C. S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain Notes on Contributors 74 News and Notes 76 Published by the Christian Literary Studies Group, a Literary Society in association with the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship. Editorial and subscriptions: The Glass, 10 Dene Road, Northwood, Middlesex HA6 2AA. CLSG www.clsg.org [email protected] © the contributors 2020 ISSN 0269-770X (Print) ISSN 2515-3307 (Online) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitt ed in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. The views of the contributors do not necessarily refl ect editorial stance. The CLSG holds personal details on computer for the purpose of mailing in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018. Good and Evil in Eliot’s Letters to Emily Hale Jewel Spears Brooker . S. Eliot arrived in Boston on his forty-fourth birthday, ₂₆ September ₁₉₃₂, to begin an academic year at Harvard. He had gone to England in 1914 to study at TOxford and now, in response to an invitation to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, he was returning to his alma mater as a celebrated poet and critic. In addition to a commitment to give the Norton Lectures (published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism), he agreed to teach a course in English literature and to crisscross America from Baltimore to Los Angeles and Chicago to Charlott esville for readings and speeches. In November and December, he gave four Norton lectures, initiating a hectic schedule that found him at year’s end in California where he gave talks at Scripps College, UCLA, and Berkeley. In January 1933, on the way back to Boston, he paused for lectures in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, and Buff alo. The feverish round continued throughout the spring, highlighted by three remaining Norton Lectures, the Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins, the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, and twice-weekly lectures to students at Harvard. Before leaving England, Eliot told Emily Hale, a Bostonian teacher and actress he had known at least since 1912, that he was eager to return to America and to re- connect with his family, a longing alleviated by visits with siblings and cousins in Boston and other cities.1 In St. Louis, he visited his Aunt Rose (Mrs. Holmes Smith) and the graves of his parents, and lectured at Washington University, where he was feted as the grandson of its founder. At the same time, and in spite of the fact that for over a year he had been writing love lett ers to her, he told Emily Hale that he was reluctant to see her and nudged her to leave Boston for a position at Scripps College in California. In late December 1932 and early January 1933, he spent a few days with her at Scripps, lectured to her students, and att ended church services. The lett ers that he wrote following this brief rendez-vous are among the most revealing in the Emily Hale archive. The essential context is the confl uence of his visit with Hale in California, his encounter with familial ghosts in St. Louis, and his refl ections on the texts he was teaching in ‘English 26’ at Harvard. This convergence forced him to deal with irreconcilable diff erences between Unitarianism (the faith of his family and Miss Hale) and the Anglo-Catholicism he had embraced in 1927. Chief among these, addressed in both his lett ers and his lectures, was a diff erent understanding of the nature of good and evil. Eliot began teaching English 26 a week or so after returning to Boston. The class, in which he was assisted by Professor Theodore Spencer, met twice a week from 7 February to 4 May 1933.2 On 7 March, in lectures on Conrad and James, he discussed 1 In a 1960 retrospective, Eliot says that he fell in love with Emily Hale (1891-1969) two years before leaving for graduate study in Europe. Following his joyless marriage in 1915, he cultivated a reminiscent longing for Miss Hale which unbeknownst to her inspired some of his greatest poems, notably Ash-Wednesday, and played a role in his conversion. He revealed his love to her in 1930, and over the next two decades, sent her over one thousand lett ers. In 1956, Hale placed his lett ers at Princeton University and stipulated that they should remain sealed for fi fty years after her death. At the end of his life Eliot destroyed her lett ers to him. The lett ers from Eliot to Hale were opened to the public on 2 January, 2020. Emily Hale Lett ers from T. S. Eliot; Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 2 At the end of the course, Eliot gave his lecture notes and outlines to Spencer. Spencer in turn 19 THE GLASS the brilliance with which ‘Real Evil’ was evoked in Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw.3 ‘Real Evil is much more than an Act; . [it] is to Bad as Saintliness and Heroism to Decent Behaviour’ (Prose 4.773). It is not the participation in native rites by Kurtz or the use of vile language by Miles at school that is disturbing, but rather, the suggestion that both characters are in touch with another world, conveyed to the reader by an intersection of natural and supernatural realms of being. Only writers with an ‘exceptional awareness of spiritual reality’ are able to suggest the mystery of evil; only writers with ‘a perception of life as on several planes at once,’ can credibly summon the spirits (Prose 4.773). Eliot is here recalling a 1924 lecture in which he noted that in reading The Brothers Karamazov, one is aware ‘that there are everywhere two planes of reality, and that the scene before our eyes is only the screen and veil of another action which is taking place behind it’ (Prose 2.553). Returning via Conrad to James, Eliot declares: ‘The last word on James: “The Horror! The Horror”’ (Prose 4.771). Two months later, in his lectures in Virginia, he repeats the point, claiming that in the work of Conrad, James, and Sophocles, ‘we are in a world of Good and Evil’ (Prose 5.42). On 6 March (the night before his class on Conrad and James), Eliot wrote to Hale that he had spent the day thinking about The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, and Heart of Darkness, adding that the juxtaposition of Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw had brought to mind an old acquaintance, Matt Prichard.4 Eliot had met the English aesthete and Bergson enthusiast in Paris late in 1910 and recalls that he immediately felt a spiritual aversion to him. He was perhaps the only Evil infl uence that I have ever known; … I have known others … who wanted my body.… But I don’t think I have ever known anybody who wanted my Soul like Matt Prichard.… He wanted to dominate, to possess … as no one I have ever known has wanted to possess a young man’s Soul.5 Eliot then describes his own Conradian experience of ‘The Horror’. He was alone in his boarding room when Prichard appeared and in some unspecifi ed way att empted to ensnare his soul. I just was sure that I had gone over the edge: and I had a vision of hell which I must believe few people ever get: I just hung on, but thinking I was completely gone, blown to pieces. It was going back about fi fty thousand years in evolution, and down into the utt ermost abyss. In twenty seconds or so, ‘it was all over’. Eliot says that the vision vanished and he gave them to Harvard, and they are now printed in volume 4, pages 768-73 of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. 8 vols. Ronald Schuchard (Gen. ed.). Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2014-2019. Subsequent references are identifi ed in text with volume and page number. 3 Here, as in After Strange Gods (lectures given at the University of Virginia at the end of his Harvard class), Eliot capitalises ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ to distinguish moral from behavioral issues. 4 Eliot fi rst mentioned Matt hew Prichard (1865-1936) to Hale on 24 March 1931. Prichard, who lived in Paris from 1908-1914, was known for his Bergsonian aesthetics and his drawings of Romanesque details of architecture in southern France. In 1926, Eliot told Herbert Read that he was ‘in many ways deeply indebted’ to Prichard, a fanatical artist/thinker with a personality ‘so intense that his conversation has an almost hypnotic infl uence.’ The Lett ers of T.

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