T.S. Eliot’s preoccupations in wartime Britain

In her essay ‘A House of One’s Own’, about Vanessa Bell, Janet Malcolm says memorably that Bloomsbury is a fiction, and that compared with letters and first-hand material, biography is like canned vegetables compared with fresh fruit.

We read the letters of writers because they are informal, unguarded, unbuttoned, intimate and candid, revealing not only the secrets of composition but, we hope, glimpses of the writer in the flesh, with his trousers down. This is T.S. Eliot, on 26 December 1941, thanking the editor and critic John Hayward for a gift of toilet paper:

BROMO is, as you know, and as the manufacturers state, so well known that lengthy description is not necessary… I shall try to be frugal, if not parcimonious [sic], in using what you have so generously provided: and on each occasion, will bless your name.

John Haffenden’s typically assiduous editorial note informs us:

Bromo Toilet Paper was manufactured by the Diamond Mills Paper Company, New York. JDH [Hayward] responded, 30 Dec.: I am pleased you like the now very precious torche-cul. The sergeant, x in the old tale, advised the economically-minded Quartermaster that the men were ordered to limit their requirements to three sheets: 1 UP – 1 DOWN – 1 BURNISHER.

Throughout this volume, Eliot encourages Hayward to garner the unconsidered trifles that make up the texture of life: ‘I am happy to think that the Recherche du temps perdu is stirring in your mind.’ The analogy with Proust’s omnium gatherum needs no explanation, though the project was inevitably never completed. These letters give us the idea in practice: ‘I can’t remember whether I reported our Air Raid (with the story of the Old Lady who lost her knickers)…’ We learn about Eliot’s ‘emerods’ and the consequences of a plumbing failure:

Then there is the horror of having nowhere to rear.