John Haffenden
@johnhaffenden
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Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London. Professor Emeritus, University of Sheffield. Editor of the Letters of T. S. Eliot.
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Joined February 2014
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This guy spends a lot of time sleeping over me as I work. The funny thing is, he never sees me through the glass: he finds it inscrutable to think that the ground beneath him is anything other than impenetrably solid & opaque.
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Friends of Fergus the Fox - my roofmate - may like to know that he is in luxuriating mood today. He owns this sprawly pose. I don't know whether he thinks me beneath him. But I am underneath him - editing & envying.
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Emma Barnett to Nadine Dorries, on 'Woman's Hour':
"That's not how it works here. You don't get to answer the questions you'd like to be asked."
Brilliant. A lesson for all journalists and interviewers.
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Fergus is trying to distract me by casting silhouettes. Do I see a crocodile's jaw? Or is it the shadow of a cat in trousers hovering like Batman? But I won't be outfoxed...
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Fergus is such a heliolater! Here he is catching the sun’s last rays … before heading out on his nightly forays.
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With his four neat paws and a flourishing brush, Fergus surveys the drear day before heading out for his supper.
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Fergus is pretending to be taxidermized: he thinks I won't notice him all the while he plays possum. (Try turning the image sideways.) But please don't worry: he is still a lively chap: last evening I was sitting in the room above and his face appeared grinningly at the window!
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@JaneDunnAuthor
Yes, that side of the house catches the sun. But I suspect he has more energy than I do - after all, he stays up most of the night, invigilating the mice & rats & leftovers of the neighbourhood.
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@ahistoryinart
Everyone used to do this. My grandmother taught me this very way. A thick body of bread doesn't break up when you butter it: a thin slice will crumble.
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Forthcoming from Faber! The Centenary Edition of The Waste Land. A freshly revised presentation of the facsimile originally edited by Valerie Eliot (it is fifty years since her edition was first published) - now in full colour!
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I know I’ve been at this for a while, but surely not that long!
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T. S. Eliot will be 134 years old tomorrow. "The Waste Land", which is 100 years old, is still where it's at.
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@RezekJoe
Feeling decidedly seen. (But why are you chasing a primary source when, as you say, you already know that it does not say what everyone else says it says?)
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Did T. S. Eliot ever write anything about April? I'm struggling to tell from my feed...
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Publication Day today! I wish you all joy of it.
Delighted to see finished copies of the Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 9, to be published on 2 Sept. My warmest thanks to the Eliot Estate
@eliotfoundation
my colleagues & friends at
@FaberBooks
@RalitsaCh
@lcosinger
& the many others who have helped to birth this beautiful book.
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The poet & critic William Empson's home in Hampstead, from the late 1940s until his death in 1984. No blue plaque as yet. The porthole window on the southeast side, rising just above the pavement, was his study-bedroom in his final years. What stories this great house could tell!
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I've been staying at an Oxford hotel, where this was my room key. When I'm not chasing him, he is chasing me...
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The Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, refulgent in the glorious golden sunshine of late summer. (No filter, honest.)
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Delighted to see finished copies of the Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 9, to be published on 2 Sept. My warmest thanks to the Eliot Estate
@eliotfoundation
my colleagues & friends at
@FaberBooks
@RalitsaCh
@lcosinger
& the many others who have helped to birth this beautiful book.
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With my friend William Graves at Ca n'Alluny, the house that Robert G built, at Deià, Mallorca. William is keen to encourage research on his father's works - RG's output of poetry, fiction, mythography, translation &c was prodigious - & not merely the biographical imbroglios.
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Warning: not a humblebrag. Hannah Sullivan on the Eliot-Hale letters, TLS, 3 Mar: "As an example of subtle, historically patient, verbally acute editing, it is hard to think of anything in modern literary scholarship that can rival Haffenden’s work on Eliot’s correspondence."
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This house in Red Lion Square, nr Holborn, London - a square ravaged by war & awful postwar development (& with buses hurtling down its western flank) - deserves a prouder plaque than this dim and easily-missed notice.
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@thebooksdesk
Not a celebrity as such but close to one. In 1976, at an Ezra Pound conference, I found myself sitting next to Pound's son Omar at one lecture. I must have betrayed a slight restlessness (or maybe boredom), because Omar lent over & remarked: "It helps if you think of some music."
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My bargain of the year - £9.99 from
@OxfamOnlineShop
. The addiction continues! (I feel sure I will enjoy it.)
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T S Eliot taught at Highgate School - French, Latin, maths, drawing, swimming, geography, history - for four terms in 1916, at £160 p.a. with "dinner and tea". John Betjeman fondly recalled "The American master, Mr Eliot / That dear good man." TSE found he did not like teaching.
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My Catholic father, a divorcé, died in the conviction that he was damned to Hell, since his parish priest refused to marry him & the Catholic woman he adored, & with whom he lived for the last 20 years of his life. My reflections about Cardinal Nichols are steeped in anger today.
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T. S. Eliot & his wife Vivien lived in a series of flats on Clarence Gate, now Glentworth St. - around the corner from Baker St. - & worshipped every day at the 8.30 a.m. mass at St Cyprian's (at the far end of the street). One flat was a long place with 'balcony' on this corner.
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Virginia Woolf’s copy of debut novel The Voyage Out featuring handwritten notes rediscovered and digitised by University of Sydney
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Shelves of T. S. Eliot … complete with drawing pin. Drawing pin?! Pinned & wriggling? No … Shelved against my ruins? No, no…
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Philip Larkin: 'I should like to write poems about how beautiful the world is and how wonderful people are, but the words somehow refuse to come... "Send No Money" is the one I repeat to myself. Don't judge me by them. Some are better than me, but I add up to more than they do.'
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@melnickjeffrey1
It's even more breathtaking & gratifying when a student comes up & says, "You taught my dad, and he thought you were great." (Dad had been a slight, gifted, geeky boy who went off one summer to learn dry stone walling, & came back to university as a built geek - the first ever.)
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"Academia" has just asked me if I wrote "The Duchess of Malfi". I'm not usually susceptible to idle flattery, but this I like.
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A brilliant, richly informative “Arena” TV programme about James Joyce & Ulysses, directed by the great Adam Low, & narrated by the wonderful Catherine Heaney. Watch it here:
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T. S. Eliot's blurb for Robert Graves's "The White Goddess" might perhaps win a Booker of Blurbs: "This is a prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable book: the outcome of vast reading & curious researches into strange territories of folk-lore, legend, religion and magic."
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The only surviving multi-storey stables in (East) London, near the canal. The horses were taken up not by lift but via ramps within the structure. I hope these builders don’t muck about with it too much.
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I wish people would stop writing brainless pieces about T. S. Eliot. Every time they do, I have to comfort-eat a pound of cheese!
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I am of a mind to attend the Gaza march this weekend. I am not anti-Semitic, nor am I anti-Israel. I am not a hater; nor am I an (elderly) yob.
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The memorial tablet to T. S. Eliot at St Stephen’s Church, Gloucester Road, London
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I can't wait for this volume, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York) in August this year. It will include a previously unpublished autobiographical study of Lowell's childhood, plus memoirs of figures including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, and others.
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"Teach us to care and not to care"
- T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"
- is one of the most breathtakingly deep, true, kind and consoling reflections in all literature.
It should be on tote bags everywhere.
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Happy New Year to all beautiful, square, grumpy cats ... and to all my lovely friends on Twitter!
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Cobwebs crumpled by the freezing fog,
in Victoria Park, London
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The finale of my odd old findings today. Beautiful lettered jackets by
@faberbooks
, and both of these books were acquired, edited and blurbed by T. S. Eliot.
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T. S. Eliot on Christopher Smart's lovely "Cat Jeoffry": "His poem about his cat is to all other poems about cats what the 'Iliad' is to all other poems on war."
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For stans of W. H. Auden, this tome is a must-have. The editing, by the brilliant, sedulous Edward Mendelson, is first-rate. He tells all of the amazing tales of the texts. Sadly, it's not published in the UK - Princeton has world rights - so I'm eagerly awaiting volume 1 by ebay
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Point of information: T. S. Eliot's letters to Emily Hale are to be published by Faber & Faber on behalf of the Estate of T. S. Eliot, almost certainly in 2021 -- so no one will need to wait until Princeton Univ publishes them online in 2035.
50 years after the death of Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot's purported muse, Princeton University has unveiled hundreds of passionate — and deeply revealing — letters he wrote to her
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Everything appears to be so astoundingly big and bright since my cataract operation. I must try to get used to it.
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A very interesting, keen, well-judged piece on Matthew Hollis's "biography" of The Waste Land.
The Waste Land Remains Contemporary | City Journal
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Shocked to be reminded that a letter to me, dating from 51 years ago, is buried in the big volume of Saul Bellow's Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor (2010). But of course I wasn't beginning research for the biography: I was just a presumptuous postgraduate researcher, a tactless brat.
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This year marks 50 years since I became Lecturer in English at Exeter University, where part of my job required me to teach phonetics to delightful European students on a Testamur course: I loved them. After a party at my low-grade cottage, Moelwyn Merchant fell in a muddy ditch.
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I'm happy to say that Letters are to be published by Faber & Faber for the Estate of T. S. Eliot within a few months. (Footnote for now: Vivienne Haigh-Wood was not a "Cambridge governess": wherever did that one start?!)
TS Eliot’s intimate letters to confidante unveiled after 60 years
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So wrapped up in my research today that I took a tumble on my way from the Faber Archive to the British Library. Head in the clouds, & then on the pavement! Nothing to worry about: I'm fine.
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Greatly appreciated Helen Vendler’s lucid, generous & informed essay on Matthew Hollis’s new study “The Waste Land”, in the TLS this week.
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My room at a recent hotel. How on earth did they know?!
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This feels v. weird, to become a tiny part of the text of this excellent edition of the Letters of Thom Gunn, ed. Nott, Kleinzahler, Wilmer
@FaberBooks
. It's what I do to others every day of my life, while editing the letters of T. S. Eliot. It feels like being turned inside out.
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I have a joke about J. Alfred Prufrock, but do I dare to tell it?
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One of the best views in London: St Paul’s from Tate Modern. The wonder is that they ever thought to build a Power Station directly south across the river from East Minster, the cathedral on a hill.
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T. S. Eliot, on reading the poems of “The Less Deceived”, told his young editorial colleague Charles Monteith, of Philip Larkin: “Yes - he often makes words do what he wants. Certainly worth encouraging.”
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Ralph Fiennes brings TS Eliot’s Four Quartets to the screen — review
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Research Project suggestion. T. S. Eliot used to say he wrote 'innumerable' comments & suggestions on submissions by young poets during his time as an editor at Faber & Faber. Where are these MSS now - some in archives, others still in private hands - & what can be made of them?
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Warmest thanks to Seamus Perry for his generous, appreciative review of the Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 9, in the TLS today.
@FaberBooks
@eliotfoundation
@TSEliotSocUK
@IntlTSEliotSoc
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The Oxfam Bookshop on Bloomsbury St, London, near the British Museum, has two copies of The Letters of Seamus Heaney at half price.
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“A poem,” said Tom, “is the result of an urgent need to make a whole out of things which have nothing to do with each other."
- noted down by Roger Hinks after a dinner party at the British Minister's home in Stockholm, May 1942.
"Tom" was T. S. Eliot.
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My first ever award of any kind! A nice remembrance. I believe I owe it to the legendarily generous Michael Holroyd, who recruited me to the Society of Authors.
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Erm ... in contradiction to what I tweeted yesterday, this medium-sized volume (first published forty years ago!) crashed onto my doorstep early this morning. Still, it is slimline in contrast to my usual publications.
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Burleigh Mansions, St Martin's Lane, London, where T S Eliot and his wife Vivien rented flat no. 38 for a while in the early 1920s. He told Mary Hutchinson: "Ask the concierge to take you up to Captain Eliot’s, as the rooms are very difficult to find. Knock at the door 3 times."
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Bliss of the day! I hadn’t seen or tasted a Greggs vanilla slice for fifteen years, not since I left Sheffield! I found this bad boy in Richmond upon Thames, of all places. Still a foretaste of Heaven!
@GreggsOfficial
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The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis – genesis of a masterpiece
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Shades of “Heart of Darkness”, by the Regent’s Canal in London.
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Now that's what I call a bookshop -
@ToppingsBath
- though I've already read all of these!
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151 bis rue St Jacques, Paris (around the corner from the Panthéon), where the 22-yr-old T. S. Eliot lodged from October 1910, and where he wrote 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. A fellow lodger and friend was a young man named Jean Verdenal, who was to be killed in WW1.
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Delighted by advance proof copy of Faber & Faber: The Untold History of a Great Publishing House, by Toby Faber
@Toby_Faber
:
@FaberBooks
, 2 May : it's shrewd, capacious, absorbing - a tremendous contribution to publishing history and literary history: enlightening & entertaining.
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Heartiest congratulations to Ron Schuchard and his great team of co-editors on the publication of the Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot
@JHUPress
@TSEliotSocUK
@IntlTSEliotSoc
. (Sadly, this edition is not for sale in the UK.)
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T. S. Eliot lived at 19 Carlyle Mansions (3rd floor) from late 1945, along with his friend John Hayward - who occupied the front rooms with views over the Thames. (Henry James had once resided in the same building.) TSE joked that his telegraphic address could be “Sage, Chelsea”.
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In Memoriam T. S. Eliot (d. 1965).
Prof. Denis Saurat, in a letter to Eliot, 6 Apr. 1940:
"in conversation I find you a source of hope and somehow I derive an opposite impression from your poetry... Yet when your poetry is looked into carefully it contains deathless optimism."
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I heartily recommend 'Sargent and Fashion' at Tate Britain. Everything is large & luminous, & gives one an insight into S's genius, his kindness (not all of his sitters were beauties, but he gives them such beauty), and his hints of social criticism. A caricature by Max Beerbohm.
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@henrymance
@GMonaha
Yes, he treated the Queen with contempt - he lied to her, and made no public apology when the High Court condemned him for the lie.
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P. L. Travers (1899-1996) - a pen name - came to England at the age of 26 & found fame with "Mary Poppins" (1934). She served for some years on the editorial committee of New English Weekly, along with T. S. Eliot, who helped to secure her Exit Visa for an American tour in 1940.
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It’s the battered storage boxes in the corner that make this scene from “Saltburn” a totally authentic representation of an academic room!
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T. S. Eliot, The disembodied voice | TLS
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Eccleston Square, nr Victoria, where T. S. Eliot & Emily Hale met up, at an uncertain date in the 1920s, for the first time since he quit the USA for Europe in 1914. If they'd strolled here a few years earlier, they might have bumped into Winston Churchill, who once dwelt here.
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Part of my holiday reading - a nice edition - though it seems unkind to incorporate Eliot's nose in the crossbar of the 4.
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This biography by the great scholar Katherine Bucknell, forthcoming in June, will have been well worth the wait.
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I hugely enjoyed my day of discussing Eliot & annotation last week - the students were lovely, keen & kind - & I believe they enjoyed it as much as I did (along with my great colleague Tony Cuda). Do sign up for the Summer School, to be held for the first time at Merton College.
A stellar lineup of speakers for July! Check their bios and register to hear them at the link!
@TSEliotSocUK
@IntlTSEliotSoc
@eliotfoundation
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How sweet of him to remember - but do I dare to eat them!
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The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis review – a classic laid bare -
#GoogleAlerts
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Ez woz here. Rapallo (on a wet, grey day). Ezra Pound lived & worked for many years on the top floor of this building. He would cross the road to thrash about in the sea. Tennis nearby.
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Wishing a very Happy Christmas to all my twitter friends, and no writers' tears in the New Year - except in the form of this excellent whiskey! 🎉🥳
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For those (remotely) interested, the Dept of English Literature at Sheffield - headed by the legendary poet and critic William Empson - was situated in the terraced houses to the right. On one occasion Empson was late for a meeting and made up time by entering through the window.
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I'd love to read an historical study of 20th C literary agents, their work & influence. There are studies of editors & publishers, but has anyone put out an authoritative account of agents? There are many fine archives, inc. the James B. Pinker & Son collection at the Berg, NYPL.
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In my experience, good librarians and archivists are wonderfully well informed, and very often eye-openingly learned, and they are graciously generous in sharing their knowledge of the deepest reaches of their collections. They are a human resource to treasure and applaud.
I left a box of chocolates for Michael Boggins in the
@britishlibrary
Manuscripts Room after he traced the provenance of some mss for me. He said no reader had ever thanked him! Each time I went to the main desk after that, the staff smiled and said, “It’s the chocolates lady!”
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I'm sorry to have to report that the BL needs to get its act together. They require a personal interview simply to renew a reader's card, when it should be really easy to do the job online. You can renew your passport online - but not a BL card! (I've been a member for 50 years.)
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Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound are instantly identifiable. But who are the rest of them? Location: London... There's a whole lockdown quiz in this wonderfully odd, rich painting.
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