Emily Hale specified in her will that her letters from T.S. Eliot, written from 1930 to 1956 be donated to Princeton and only unsealed 50 years after her death. They've only been available to read in person at Princeton until now.

Some posthumous relationship drama: Eliot gave a sealed statement to the Eliot Collection at Harvard with instructions that it be made public at the same time as the Princeton letters.

Does he use a lot of intertextual references, I.e, copying multiple lines of someone else’s work, like he does in The Waste Land? Allusions are allusions but, dude, lifting like, line after line….

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He's the Girl Talk of modernism bro don't hate on him 🔥

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ok, what was the point of this request?

I liked this comment very much.

I hope I never attain the kind of fame that makes people seek out any and all correspondence I’ve had with anyone after my death.

>Eliot gave a sealed statement to the Eliot Collection at Harvard with instructions that it be made public at the same time as the Princeton letters.

Has it? Where would you go about finding it if it has been?

Please elaborate, first time I’m hearing of this!

well what else did he wear rolled?

https://tseliot.com/the-eliot-hale-letters/the-statements

I started to read them today.

I think they are beautiful, which makes me sad that he felt the need to release a statement that he never loved her.

That makes 1 of 2 things the truth - 1) everything he ever wrote to her was bullshit, or 2) he did love her and lied to save face.

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Much appreciated, that was a very interesting read

This is more specifically the intrigue-ridden correspondence Eliot had with his longtime muse and mistress, one of the most significant people in his life.

He alludes to classical works and other poems in his work, which is very common in poetry and literature in general, almost a way of having a conversation.

It's not plagiarism; he wasn't trying to pass off another person's work as his own, and critics and readers of his time were well aware of that.

Could be a little of both.

Did he dare?

Yes but it might be interesting if you were able to correspond after your death.

your butt….

quakes. like summer leaves in preparation

fall

   down

       booty call

I didn’t read his statement as he “never loved her” more of he loved her at one time but had changed and realized he was in love with who she was, and who he was, back when he first fell in love with her. Can confirm this happens and it can be heartbreaking to realize and difficult to admit to one’s self.

It would be. I’ll let you know if it works out.

One has to imagine this was more common before telephones and internet made it easier to remember the current version of a person vs the memory that was held on to

I understand this context. And it seems they made arrangements for their release. My statement still stands though. I wouldn’t want this type of stuff released after my death.

You can put an end to your worries by ensuring that any relatives who survive you are the Estate of James Joyce.

Or I’ll just continue my current trajectory of living and dying in obscurity

I'm deleting my email now just in case.

You have to do/be something/one of such note that would warrant the public to even want to read your letters.

Have you done anything that would reach that threshold?

Or are you just a nobody like the rest of us and this 'scenario' would never be an actual thing?

Edit: Lots of people be thinking they are the main character at life I guess.

I hope I do so people will realize that we're all a little screwed up and should quit being so judgemental of each other over it

You should see the entire field of study dedicated to H. P. Lovecraft's letters. Of course, that motherfucker wrote more letters in his life than most people ever dream possible, so it kind of makes sense.

I haven’t claimed to be anyone of significance. My statement still stands.

> I hope I never attain the kind of fame ...

Pretty sure they already answered your questions.

Yes, but he was one of the people who defined modernism and he’s T.S. Eliot.

Memory all alone in the moonlight.

Dude was hilarious. Anyway, there was actually a lot of debate about using others’ works without crediting them back then. These writers intended it to be more of an homage than straight up plagiarism.

For example, Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror is basically The Tempest fanfiction, but it’s brilliant for so many reasons that makes it literary art on its own. Allusions to other work was a trademark of modernism. Commenting on tropes and breaking the fourth wall is when modernism starts to fade and post-modernism becomes in vogue.

Beautiful. I would buy a whole series of poems like this.

Not really.

What else did he part from behind?

Still remember when I was young, my family going to the same vacation spot and seeing my summer friends once a year. The changes between a full year are so much more pronounced, especially for growing kids. I guess at this point this experience is almost entirely gone now, with people uploading selfies daily. Would have been nice to have the internet then but I enjoyed that experience as well.

Are you just generally this abrasive to everyone you meet as a matter of principle?

Those MSN chat logs are coming back to haunt you

T.S. Neil Cicierega

The way he did it was revolutionary at the time. He segues his description of the mass of London commuters with Dante's descriptions of the indecisive angels at the vestibule of hell is amazing. And the contrast of the Philemon/Tereus story in a game of chess with it's mythology of mutilation with the conversation about demob soldiers and their girlfriends and their own sexual fulfilment (or lack). It's still so artfully done

The Waste Land was essentially rewritten/edited by Ezra Pound

>I wouldn’t want this type of stuff released after my death.

I'm fairly certain, once you're dead, you won't care.

He is very clear in the letter that he did love her before he left for England. What he's saying is that he was naive about matters of love and continued to idealize her even as he outgrew those feelings. Eventually his "love" was nothing more than the memory of having loved her once. As an older and wiser man he realized marrying her would have meant living the prosaic life of a professor, never excelling at anything, which was most important to him.

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I understand this completely.

Can confirm as well. This does happen.

I think it might have been a pair of ragged claws...

I read his statement, and my take was a bit different from yours but more in line with your second option. When he mentions early in the statement that he could never write an autobiography and explains why - that along with his love for Valerie and his request that his letters to Emily Hale be destroyed, makes me believe that he did love Emily Hale.

I think perhaps at some point he realized that Emily Hale would be detrimental to his being a poet. I can understand this. I’m with a very grounded science fellow who has no interest in poetry. The difference is he cares about me so much that he cares about what inspires me. If Emily did not respect the soul of a poet within Eliot, I can see where marriage to her would mean the death of the poet within him.

Meanwhile, if he didn’t marry Emily, her very presence in a off-limits way would allow him to love her from a distance and allow that love to serve as a muse. Also, he clearly loved Valerie and did not want her to feel that his love for her was diminished or less.

I question if he would have requested his letters to Emily be destroyed if he had felt completely confident in the letters not being made public for fifty years after his death. I wonder if perhaps Emily went against his wishes in sending the letters to Princeton while they both yet lived and that was the final thing that made him decide she did not value him as he had her. His statement, I think, wouldn’t mention Emily valuing her uncle’s opinion more and perhaps caring more about his reputation than for him IF he wasn’t nursing some wounded feelings over the letters being given to Princeton early.

This is of course just my own thinking about the circumstances. I might be completely in error.

Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu,

Mein Irisch Kind

Wo weilest du?

That context doesn't make invading privacy a justifiable thing.

I was going to ask if they were the disturbing, fucking out farts type of letters...then I remembered T.S. Elliot was not James Joyce.

the 50 year request you mean? I'm guessing it was to protect the feelings of anyone who knew them. Anais Nin did something similar with her unedited memoirs.

Under the little known pen name Leever Hangin

It's to make sure no one cares enough to dig into their personal correspondence after they've kicked the bucket.

Sometimes love just ain’t enough. ☹️

What a big brain move loll

TIL that T.S. Eliot was either a liar or a cad.

He's no mozart?

I'm sure our era's posting records and messages will be fished back out for cash by our descendents. Like genaeology+

Any of them good? (good in this sense meaning applicable to literary theory, writing, etc?)

It depends entirely on how much you like reading about things like xenophobia, bigotry, and antisemitism. And classism. Never forget classism.

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Correct, it merely challenges the other person's suggestion that this event represents "people seek[ing] out any and all correspondence I’ve had with anyone after my death."

This correspondence is notable for its content and recipient; it's not just "any and all with anyone." There aren't teams of researchers trying to track down Eliot's tossed-off thank-you note to his catsitter.

Take my English degree for asking this, but what’s the larger drama here about their relationship?

Like sampling.

Yeah he hated everyone who wasn't a wealthy white educated Christian city dwelling New Englander of British descent

Call Ouija me!

Yeah somewhat, he wrote to other writers a lot and he often discussed, well, writing and his thoughts on various aspects of, well everything.

That said when i say the man has a lot of letters, there's something like 3500 of them set to be printed when they finish up volumes 22 and 23...

At it’s root, it seems quite a lot of it is classism.

Hold on, writing erotic letters about farty women

Yup. It becomes a memory of love, he was fond of her still, but he couldn't grow with her.

He was about as racist as a New Englander at the time (very racist).

I heard he repudiated some of his racist beliefs towards the end of his life but I could never find a source for this.

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I agree. Reading and writing is significantly harder nowadays because there is no established corpus, hence a lot of literature falls back again to work upon archetypal themes.

But to add to your comment, writing is always based on former writings, and one of the great achievement of modernism is a more conscious awareness of the sources at work in the creative process, seeing the potential this had to exploit it for intertextual purposes.

Elliot greatest achievement is, to put it in your words, creating a conversation, a dialogue, between vastly different sources, to make something wholly new emerge - this is more clear in his latter work, like Four Quartets.

It was very much assumed that any reader would be able to recognize and know his references, at the very least they'd have to go hunting for it.

Plus it's like saying "ahhhh ahhh, Tenacious D ripped off Zeppelin in Tribute"....congratulations you missed the joke.

> Eliot’s letters to Hale, who for nearly seventeen years was his confidante, his beloved, and his muse, were another matter. They don’t just repeat “gossip and scandal,” they produce it. Scholars have known about this correspondence since Hale donated Eliot’s letters to Princeton, in 1956, but for decades, the trove of documents remained a tantalizing secret—kept sealed, at Eliot’s insistence, until fifty years after both he and Hale had died.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-secret-history-of-t-s-eliots-muse

Responses:

1. And yet, they're still alive so they care.
2. If there is no afterlife, then yes, it doesn't matter. If there is an afterlife, I'm fairly certain they'll still care.

wow I think I want to learn more about his first wife, instead.

There’s one he wrote near the end of his life where he realizes how fucked up his thinking was and started to sound very left wing. Then died a couple weeks after

Yep!!

And fucking a glove

Hiding Houdini tried that but no luck

If you read the article you’d see that these were all written prior to his death.

His request was that her letters to him be destroyed.

ee cummings

Or?

Where do fish people figure into all this?

He never said he didn't love her, did you read his note? He thought he did love her and those notes were sincere, but he realized that he loved the ghost of her. So your 1 of 2 things is just not true.

Communism killed him. Got it.

I have a feeling you're about to be the victim of a very colorful and exciting murder.

If there's an afterlife where you're in eternal bliss or torture, I'm fairly certain they wouldn't care much about how their correspondence makes them look.

Be fair, he was way more racist than a normal New Englander. To be clear, the average New Englander was pretty damn racist, but H. P. Lovecraft would have placed first in the racism Olympics, but he refused to compete on the grounds that lesser people would be there.

Thalassophobia. Plus racism.

Fear of misceganation, and the past or future corruption of your bloodline.

Yeah, dude. It’s like saying any music artist who ever used sampling is a plagiarist. Back then, it was different. You were basically flexing if you knew about this obscure Etruscan myth and were adding the translation or references into your poem.

That’s what she said.

That was heartbreaking. Thank you for the link though.

In what way was he more racist? Like, was he a KKK member during its New England revival in the 1920's?

I'd honestly be interested to hear. I wonder if it's more that his racist views are more accessible to us than the idle thoughts of a random New Englander.

Lovecraft was considered racist by the people of his time.

I enjoy his works but he was seriously like a wet bunched up grey flannel shirt of a person.

I have Twitter

So...a conservative

It’s an interesting philosophical question. Should the wishes of dead people be respected?

Let’s say a dying person says “please, my last wish is for all my organs to stay in my body and be buried with me. It’s very important and I won’t get into heaven otherwise.” You say “okay buddy.”

They bleed out. There are five people in the hospital whose lives can be saved by this guy’s organs. Do you let them die according to his wishes? Or do you figure he has no wishes now that he’s dead, so scavenge those organs.

And what if the stakes aren’t so high? What if somebody says “my last wish is for you to keep my flower garden presentable.” Do you have any obligation to do so after they die?

Would you be okay with me fucking your grimacing corpse on live television? Current-you may say no, but by your logic, it doesn’t matter what alive-you wants.

> Hiding Houdini tried that but no luck

Well there’s your problem! He’s just hiding!

I’m sure just as soon as he’s dead he will contact us. Any minute now.

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“his relationship with Hale was beyond confessional—she did not have the power to absolve him but to absorb him.”

This was a fascinating, really informative read. Thank you!

I’ll be too old to wait; just send the letters direct to Princeton. Best wishes.

examining your yelp reviews for some residue of genius.

To eat a peach?

Mark Twain wanted his autobiography published 100 years after his death, which is pretty close

>Let’s say a dying person says “please, my last wish is for all my organs to stay in my body and be buried with me. It’s very important and I won’t get into heaven otherwise.” You say “okay buddy.”

Personally, I am 100% in favor of organ donation being neither opt-in, or opt-out, I think it should be mandatory, and there should be no exemptions.

>They bleed out. There are five people in the hospital whose lives can be saved by this guy’s organs. Do you let them die according to his wishes? Or do you figure he has no wishes now that he’s dead, so scavenge those organs.

It is insane to me that people anywhere die, because someone needs to be sure all of the organs decompose into dirt with their corpse.

>And what if the stakes aren’t so high? What if somebody says “my last wish is for you to keep my flower garden presentable.” Do you have any obligation to do so after they die?

To me this is the philosophical question, no on is hurt by the action or inaction, is your commitment to the person valid after their death, I have no idea.

>Would you be okay with me fucking your grimacing corpse on live television? Current-you may say no, but by your logic, it doesn’t matter what alive-you wants.

My friend, if you can get it (my corpse) once I'm dead, and they've taken anything usable from it for organ donation, feel free to go to town, afterlife, or no, I'll be done with it.

I like your perspective! It seems internally consistent. That’s rare these days.

Do you think there should be exemptions for religious beliefs if, as in my original question, some people truly believe that they need all their pieces together? This isn’t a gotcha, I personally think religion is dumb, if you answered no, I would agree.

This ties into something that a lot of people don't actually realize, a personal will is a incredibly weak legal document in many jurisdictions that only carries weight until somebody contests it. Lets say you are a perfectly mentally competent person but decide to leave your entire multi-million dollar fortune in a trust to take care of your poodle should you pass away because you don't particularly like your family. Your family can absolutely contest that decision, they don't even have to prove you were incompetent in any way, they can just say "its dumb to use all this money to care for a poodle, we are their kids, we want the money" and if a judge finds this to be a reasonable assertion they can just override your wishes. Any respect given to your wishes after you die are either due to the niceties of your family and friends respecting those wishes, or a judge deciding they are reasonable to follow.

That sounds nearly believable, but… I have a hard time believing any pets would be getting 100 million dollars if it were that easy to disrupt. Right? Like, people get very weird around money. Are you saying that those people’s families just happen to be very nice and not have any problem with the poodle getting all the money? Or just that the judge happened to think it was a reasonable use of the money.

Thank you so much for posting. This is a very interesting read.

They were both very insufferable. She spends her entire letter basically reminiscing about him and vilifying the first wife. And he spends castigating Emily Hill and his praising the second wife, basically saving face.

They both would have done good to just burn the letters and keep their secrets to themselves.

Ha that's what I said in my comment above. He spends his whole letter vindicating her and saving face.

I died 37 years ago, during the Regan administration, due to a mishap involving cocaine, a bowling pin, a bowl of sukiyaki and one of those little paddle boats that's shaped like a swan. One moment I was on top of the 80's, and the next I was unable to do any more drugs and could only communicate thru my Cellular Phone. Now, thanks to advances in technology, it's much easier for me to interact with the living. So, long story short, do more blow because when you die...you end up a ghost on reddit.

Pretty close 13 years ago?

Death by wokeness.

Ey...lemme borrow your phone a sec.

ol Hidin’ Houdini, that rapscallion

Yeah I was going to go wiki but I saw a new Yorker non deadwall article and figured that would be slightly more fun.

Tarantino does this in film and people hail him as a god.

Like, no, he just watches a lot of movies.

I mean we had Roman's in the 30s writing shit about Roman's in 300BC writing about Greeks in 600BC.

It's how you get sentences in Latin that you translate, and then require a 20 minute English explanation to understand who to the how. This is how you get nerds.

Don't remember that, but to be honest, is that such a bad thing?

Pretty close to the idea of corresponding after death.

Of course, 13 years ago is also considerably closer than when it was written, so, yes?

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*Mozfart

I love T.S. Eliot.

Let us go then. You and I. When the evening is spread out against the sky. Like a patient etherized on a table.

Let us go through half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats Of one night (ugh, can’t remember!) Of sawdust restaurants and oyster shells?

Oh, do not ask, what is it Let us go and make our visit

In the room, the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo

"May we all rest in peace." I've never read that sentence before.

Well the answer to that I think is that stories of these animals with trusts set up in wills are mostly apocryphal, though you could set up a trust while you were still alive if you had the cash and bypass the whole process.

Both of these statements just come off as so self-absorbed and self-important.

His feelings were made of jade. What I mean by that: I knew a girl who I had a huge crush on. She was just so cool and gorgeous and good at everything. I’d get so nervous anytime she was in the room. When I did talk to her, I was honestly a little intimidated by her intensity and the sort of things she spent her time doing. The more I got to know her the more I realized we really didn’t have anything in common, but I still felt these intense feelings towards her, not all of them pleasant. I somehow felt upset at her for not being like I wanted her to be. I realized I’d built up this idea of her in my mind and was more attracted to that than I was to her. She was named after a jewel, and so after I had a moment of clarity about how I was feeling, I renamed the idea of her after a different jewel, Jade. Now whenever I start to have these parasocial feelings or start to put someone up on a pedestal I stop and remind myself that those things aren’t real, they’re just made of jade.

Definitely happened to me at least three times in my life already. Remembering someone that used to exist for years after I've lost touch with them, only to realise the person I loved doesn't exist anymore. They changed.

Ah, that makes a lot more sense.

Better leak all the embarrassing DMs now and get it over with while you’re still alive.

Oh, those are dead and gone.... Would be a reasonable thing to assume in a better world.

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J. Alfred Prufrock for the win.

{{heroines}} kate zambreno

Hey, if someone's offed you in the last several hours you've already done it!

This is so great. I researched Eliot as part of my Master's thesis in the 80s. Had to get special permission but I actually got to put my (gloved) hands on The Inventions of The March Hare at the NYPL and correspondence archived at the U of MD. Hard to believe material like this is accessable now so conveniently.

It kinda still is a flex

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I’ll have what she’s having

LOL, I'll leave it as is because it's too funny

You've responded more or less exactly the way I meant to. All I'd like to add is that, in the case of the flower garden, there is no obligation created by the fact that the request doesn't hurt anyone. You may wish to care for the flower garden, whether it's because of a choice to honor the dead person's wish, or just because you like flower gardens, but the fundamental question doesn't change just because the request harms no one. A dead person's wishes carry no obligation for the living beyond those the living choose themselves.

So you're saying you became jaded (well, not really, I just like the pun 😅)

Oh, Seth Meyers is going to love this

What the fuck did I just read :)

>In 1949, eight years after James Joyce died, his letters began to travel the world. Thanks to microfilm technology, popularized a few years earlier, the contents of his archive at the University of Buffalo became more accessible to curious readers and meddlesome critics than ever before.

>T. S. Eliot encountered them thousands of miles away, at the British Museum, in London, where he came face to face with a past self: his own letters to the Irish writer, lit up on a projection screen before him. Such exposure made Eliot uneasy. Later, in a letter sent across the ocean to Emily Hale, a teacher at a boarding school in Massachusetts, Eliot recalled the anxiety he’d experienced that day in the museum: “I thought, how fortunate that I did not know Joyce intimately enough to have made personal revelations or to have expressed adverse opinions, or repeated gossip or scandal, about living people!”

From the New Yorker piece about it

I'm trying to figure out the psychology of someone who wants personal letters made public... eventually. Is the person protecting the privacy of the other recipients and senders of the letters? In that case, why ever make them public? More likely, is it ultra-egoism and a need to control? (C'mon, do you really think the famous people are preserving the letters for History?)

Hunter S. Thompson has entered the chat

The answer is very simple: do what the owner of the body wishes. Since the owner is dead, the ownership passes to the next of kin. Now it is their body and they can do with it what they want.

Which is probably to fulfil the dead person’s wishes.

My brain will not allow me to conceptualize a person with that name existing during any other time period than the 18th century. I don’t know why, it’s just got such a colonial ring to it.

T. S. Eliot? No....

You probably did too 😉

James Joyce wanting to smell his wife's farts is my favourite tho.

Out of the loop… who and what?

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Are any of the letters signed "Washington Irving?"

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