On Sun, 24 Jun 2012 15:02:48 -0700, P <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> My goodness, CR, in one stroke you have answered my
> question, at least in part. Eliot was self-conscious in
> his letter writing. My question goes one step
> further. Did Eliot actually play to the gallery in his
> letters; did he actually address future readers as much
> as if not more than the intended reader?
>
> Congrats on the great find. I'll bet even the Duke of
> URL envies you that one.

I do. I was quite impressed on seeing that
quotation. CR, could you tell us just a bit more on
that -- when and where he said/wrote that.  I don't
have access to jstor.

Never mind, it just occurred to me to Google it instead.
It is in a book by Pritchard. It's from a lost 1933 lecture
by Eliot with the specific sentences recorded by Eliot's brother.
http://books.google.com/books?id=J2Seaka_F5kC&pg=PA27

But now I have to redeem my reputation somewhat more so I
submit to the list something else on Eliot and letters:

   Eliot engages in theological discussion with Middleton
   Murry (the American-born Eliot will become both an
   Anglican and a British citizen during this period), and
   hints at how he copes with Vivien and the appeal of
   religion: "I have found my own love for a woman
   enhanced, intensified and purified by meditation on the
   Virgin."

   He also shares some rather contradictory thoughts on
   biography. "I do not want a biography, if it is ever
   written -- and I hope it won't -- to have anything
   private in it. I don't like reading other people's
   private correspondence in print, and I do not want
   other people to read mine," he writes to his mother in
   April 1927. But in August he writes to Geoffrey Faber
   about a biography of Swift, "I do think Swift's sexual
   life ought to be studied carefully and sympathetically"
   -- though he demurs, "I don't know that I should
   recommend putting it into one's book".


The Independent
The Letters of TS Eliot Volume 3: 1927-27, Ed Valerie
Yours faithfully, kindly and with modesty, Tom
Lesley McDowell
Sunday 24 June 2012
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-letters-of-ts\
-eliot-volume-3-192727-ed-valerie-7878493.html

Regards,
   Rick Parker


On Sun, 24 Jun 2012 10:43:52 -0700, Chokh Raj <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Epistolary Eliot
> William H. Pritchard
> The Hudson Review
> Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 141-148
> Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3851175
>
> "The desire to write a letter, to put down what you
> don't want anybody else to see but the person you are
> writing to, but which you do not want to be destroyed,
> but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete
> strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want to confess
> ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not
> always want to feel that no one but those friends will
> ever read what we have written." -- TS Eliot