I think you just volunteered to instigate the petition, Holly.

Thanks for this whole thread. The pictures were helpful, as was the information.
Living in New York City, and having a great deal of trouble accepting the sale of air-rights left and right, the theme-park of Manhattan, where I live (in a cheap apartment-hotel), and what we really do with all our waste, T.S Eliot is about right for the times.
peace

Good news! T.S. Eliot's shelter in Margate has now been officially listed and is safe from the developers (but not unfortunately the vandals who like to carve their nasty names there). A piece in my local paper confounds those critics who said Eliot hardly wrote anything of 'The Waste Land' while he was resting up at Margate after his breakdown. They print part of a letter he penned to the novelist Sydney Schiff:

I have done a rough draft of part III but do not know whether it will do and must wait for Vivien's opinion as to whether it is printable. I have done this while sitting in a shelter on the front - as I am out all day except when taking rest.

How splendid. Eliot is surely the ONLY literary person who has put Margate on the map. Are we going to get a plaque?

I can see yobs ripping off Tom's plaque and using it as a frisbee. John Betjeman spent time in Margate and wrote several poems about the place, here's one:


MARGATE (1940)

From out The Queen's Highcliffe for weeks at a stretch
I watched how the mower evaded the vetch,
So that over the putting-course rashes were seen
Of pink and of yellow among the burnt green.

How restful to putt, when the strains of a band
Announced a thé dansant was on at The Grand,
While over the privet, comminglingly clear,
I heard lesser Co-Optimists down by the pier.

How lightly municipal, meltingly tarr'd,
Were the walks through the lawns by the Queen's Promenade
As soft over Cliftonville languished the light
Down Harold Road, Norfolk Road, into the night.

Oh! then what a pleasure to see the ground floor
With tables for two laid as tables for four,
And bottles of sauce and Kia-Ora and squash
Awaiting their owners who'd gone up to wash -

Who had gone up to wash the ozone from their skins
The sand from their legs and the rock from their chins,
To prepare for an evening of dancing and cards
And forget the sea-breeze on the dry promenades.

From third floor and fourth floor the children looked down
Upon ribbons of light in the salt-scented town;
And drowning the trams roared the sound of the sea
As it washed in the shingle the scraps of their tea.

Beside The Queen's Highcliffe now rank grows the vetch,
Now dark is the terrace, a storm-battered stretch;
And I think, as the fairy-lit sights I recall,
It is those we are fighting for, foremost of all.

The new edition of Eliot's 1920s letters makes for uncomfortable reading for devoted fans. On the plus side his devotion to Vivienne at this time is perfectly clear. Unfortunately the anti-Semitism hinted at in The Waste Land though common enough in British middle-class society at the time is all too apparent in his correspondence.
Having an insatiable appetite for 20th century murder trials, I was particularly interested in his letter to The Daily Mail virulently insisting Edith Thompson should be hanged for her part in the Bywaters murder. For those unfamiliar with this case, here's a link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_T...erick_Bywaters

Well, she was, and so she should have been. Well not hanged. In general I'm against that, though for Tony Blair... But she put him up to it, and he fell for it, the dumb klutz. Yes the anti-semitism is not nice, but so utterly all pervading among the upper and upper middle class. Dorothy Sayers is excellent on this. Some of the comments of her characters (not Lord Peter and Harriet of course) in Whose Body particularly.. I wouldn't dare quote them here.

Holly,
I have never enjoyed reading the letters of people whose work I admire. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that the part of them that I admired was in their work and the rest was the detritus which we all carry about with us. The astringent quality of Eliot's poetry hints at what you observe in your post. Often, the information we discover about admired figures gets in the way of our interaction with the distilled experiences which attracted us in the first place.

The anti-Semitism is worst--because more than just tepid modishness--in After Strange Gods, the lecture series he later tried to keep out of print. The most recent thorough consideration I know of is TS Eliot, Anti-semitism and Literary Form by Anthony Julius.

RHE

Here's the book: After Strange Gods. This reference on page 19 is certainly anti-semitic: “The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” I've probably missed something on my quick flash-through read, but so far it's all I've found.