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. Philosophy in Marburg, War in Europe In March , Eliot was awarded a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship for the coming academic year, –, to study philosophy at Merton College, Oxford, where the subject of his dissertation, F. H. Bradley, had taught and where Bradley’s student, Harold Joachim, offered classes in which Eliot intended to enroll.We do not have Eliot’s letter to his father informing him of the fellowship, but we have his father’s four-line reply—the only letter from his father to appear in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, dated April , : “I am much pleased that you have rec[eive]d the Scholarship, on ac[coun]t of the honor, as you couldn’t get it unless you deserved it. You have never been a ‘burden’ to me, my dear fellow. A parent is always in debt to a son who has been as dutiful and affectionate as you have been. Yrs. P.” (LTSE, ).We are left to imagine the nature of the self-deprecating letter Eliot must have written—primarily from the word “burden,” which he must have used to describe himself in relation to his father. And the reserved words of praise from father to son—“dutiful and affectionate”—suggest something of the depth of reserve on both sides in what seemed to have been a mainly formal relationship. Eliot included minor messages to his father in letters to his mother for the next five years, until his father’s early death on January , [7] –      () Philosophy in Marburg, War in Europe, ; () London Interlude: Pound and Russell, ; () Oxford, –: Reconsidering Philosophy, ; () New Friends and Old: Culpin, Blanshard, Pound, Lewis, ; () The Mystery of Emily Hale: “The Aspern Papers in Reverse,”  , by which time it had become clear to the father that his son had not been as “dutiful” as he had expected. In June of  Eliot left America earlier than his fellowship dictated in order to travel in Europe, visiting cities he had come to know rather well during his – year in France—Paris,Munich,and apparently London— and continuing to Marburg, Germany, where he planned to attend lectures given by the German philosopher Rudolf Eucken at the University of Marburg . No doubt Eliot would have visited his friend Jean Verdenal in France had he been able to track him down.But Verdenal,whose military service had been deferred in  and  to allow him to study medicine in Paris, had renounced further deferment in March , and entered the eighteenth infantry regiment in the French army, where he was to be appointed a “medical officer”in November  (Watson,George,).In early July ,Eliot passed through London, according to the chronology provided by Valerie Eliot in her edition for the first volume of Eliot’s letters (oddly, she does not mention his visits to Paris and Munich) (LTSE, xxi). It may be that the only evidence to indicate that Eliot “passed through” London is that a letter was posted there to his favorite cousin (on his mother’s side), Eleanor Hinkley— a letter that he had written while on board the ship crossing the Atlantic and postmarked “London  July ” (). Eliot assumes a familiar voice in describing his voyage to his cousin:“Free from the cares and irks of city life, indifferent to my whilom duties, I sit in my snug little cabin lazily watching the little clouds slip across the sky and the trunks slide across the floor. From my tiny round window I can see a flock of lovely birds dip and skim athwart the zenith (sparrows I believe—I am not much on ornithology)” (–). It is important to remember that, during Eliot’s early days, ocean travel to Europe was not only prolonged but also rough and uncomfortable. What little we know about Eliot’s life in Europe in  before his settling down in England is to be found in the few letters he wrote from Marburg to two faithful correspondents: two to his Harvard friend Conrad Aiken, and one to his cousin Eleanor. In a letter dated July  to Aiken (then in London), Eliot asked Aiken to pick up a valise Eliot had left with American Express in London and send it to him in Germany. The letter is filled with the details of a young, somewhat world-weary and hard-to-impress sightseer visiting cities and museums that he hasn’t seen before:“Bruges is charming if you like that sort of thing . . . but has a sort of post-putridity about...

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