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wayward young relative.
    It is, nevertheless, quite unintelligible to me how you or any other young American scholar can forego the privilege of living in the genuine American atmosphere—a bright atmosphere of freedom and hope. I have never lived long in England—about six months in all—but I have never got used to the manners and customs of any class in English society, high, middle, or low. After a stay of two weeks or two months in England it has been delightful for me to escape …
    Then, too, I have never been able to understand how any American man of letters can forego the privilege of being of use primarily to Americans of the present and future generations, as Emerson, Bryant, Lowell, and Whittier were. Literature seems to me highly climatic and national … You mention in your letter the name of Henry James. I knew his father well, and his brother William very well; and I had some conversation with Henry at different times during his life. I have a vivid remembrance of a talk with him during his last visit to America. It seemed to me all along that his English residence for so manyyears contributed neither to the happy development of his art nor to his personal happiness.
    … My last word is that if you wish to speak through your work to people of the “finest New England spirit” you had better not live much longer in the English atmosphere. The New England spirit has been nurtured in the American atmosphere.
    What Eliot thought—three years before the publication of
The Waste Land
—of this tribal lecture, and particularly of its recommendation that he aspire to the mantle of the author of “Thanatopsis,” one may cheerfully imagine. In any case it was too late, and had long been too late. The campaign was lost before the first parental shot. Eliot’s tie to England was past revocation. While still at Oxford he was introduced to Vivien Haigh-Wood, a high-spirited, high-strung, artistic young woman, the daughter of a cultivated upper-class family; her father painted landscapes and portraits. Eliot, shy and apparently not yet relieved of his virginity, was attracted to her rather theatrical personality. Bertrand Russell sensed in her something brasher, perhaps rasher, than mere vivaciousness—he judged her light, vulgar, and adventurous. Eliot married her only weeks after they met. The marriage, he knew, was the seal on his determination to stay in England, the seal his parents could not break and against which they would be helpless. After the honeymoon, Russell (through pure chance Eliot had bumped into him on a London street) took the new couple in for six months, from July to Christmas—he had a closet-size spare room—and helped them out financially in other ways. He also launched Eliot as a reviewer by putting him in touch with the literary editor of the
New Statesman
, for whom Eliot now began to write intensively. Probably Russell’s most useful service was his arranging for Eliot to be welcomed into the intellectual and literary circle around Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington, her country estate. Though invitations went to leading artists and writers, Garsington was not simply a salon: the Morrells were principled pacifists who provided farm work during the war for conscientious objectors. Here Eliot found Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Katherine Mansfield, the painter Mark Gertler,Clive Bell, and, eventually, Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Lady Ottoline complained at first that Eliot had no spontaneity, that he barely moved his lips when he spoke, and that his voice was “mandarin.” But Russell had carried him—in his arms, as it were—into the inmost eye of the most sophisticated whorl of contemporary English letters. The American newcomer who had left Harvard on a student fellowship in 1914 was already, by the middle of 1915, at the core of the London literary milieu he had dreamed of. And with so many models around him, he was working on disposing of whatever