THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
If
Eliot talks seriously about all subjects, he can also talk serious–
ly about serious ones, including poetry. At this first luncheon, he
asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said "be a poet." "I
can understand your wanting to write poems, but I don't quite know
what you mean by 'being a poet'," he objected. I said I didn't only
want to write poems, I wanted to do other things as well. He said
that poetry was a task which required the energy of a whole lifetime.
I said I would like to write novels as well as poems like, well, like
Thomas Hardy. He answered that the poems of Hardy had always
struck him as being the poems of someone who wrote novels. "What
about Goethe?" I asked. He replied that he thought the case of Goethe
was rather similar to that of Hardy.
This was indeed serious, and still gives me much food for thought.
On another occasion, at a party in the drawing room of Lady Ottoline
Morrell, there was a group of people hostile to orthodox religion,
though in other ways extremely conventional, and also Eliot. One of
them said in the voice of the self-righteously irreligious, while the
others waited in silence : "Tom, please tell us, what do you feel when
you pray?" There was a silence during which Eliot bowed his head
and then in a voice stronger than usual he described conscientiously
and scrupulously his struggle to pray, and, as often in his poetry,
there was an impression of wings striving towards a throne.
Quite early in our relationship, I wrote a review of a volume
of his essays, criticizing Eliot's political attitudes and some of the
implications of his traditionalism. After I had published this, it
grieved me to have done so, and I sent a copy of the review to him
with a letter. Eliot wrote back a letter which, while disagreeing with
one or two points in my review, was full of warmth and gentleness.
He ended by saying that I must always feel free to say exactly what
I felt when I criticized him and that this had no connection with our
personal relationship.
At about the same time as I received
this
letter from Eliot,
Harold Nicolson told me of a painful experience he had had after
criticizing rather unfavorably the novel of a friend. Grieving, as I
had done, he wrote a letter of explanation and apology to this friend.
A few days later he got back a letter which ran (as I remember)
something like this: "Little as I can forgive you for stabbing me in
the back in public, I can forgive still less that you should apologize
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