Discretion and Indiscretion in the Letters of T. S. Eliot

Writing from London, at the age of 26, to a friend back in America, T. S. Eliot ends his letter:

I hope you will write soon and tell me about yourself. I think one's letters ought to be about oneself (I live up to this theory!) - what else is there to talk about? Letters should be indiscretions - otherwise they are simply official bulletins.

Always yours

Tom

(i. 82)

Reading letters, too, should feel like an indiscretion. At least in some measure, we might remember that what are reading was not intended for our eyes. This is easily forgotten when we're not sifting through a hidden cache of papers tied with a ribbon, or when we're not negotiating the faults of a quill or spills of 'purblue' that Keats wrote of ('these last lines are in a much better style of penmanship thof [for 'though'] a little disfigured by the smear of blackcurrant jelly'); but, also, indiscretion is forgotten, perhaps, when we are numbly reading emails that we've been copied into, but that we don't wish to see, or even reading a volume handsomely turned out by Faber & Faber, with smoky portraits of T. S. Eliot's face peering out from the darknesses of the covers. The epigraph to the first of these two lavish volumes goes some way to attempting to assuage the conscience:

'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.'

from 'English Poets as Letter Writers',         an unpreserved lecture given by TSEat Sprague Memorial Hall, Yale University,         23^rd November 1933.This fragment was recorded by his brother.

(MS Houghton)

Enigmatic, even epitaphic, this epigraph: Eliot imagines how we throw our voices in letters and part of his voice whispers through his brother's memory, through Memorial Hall, retained somewhere in a manuscript box in the library at Harvard. Strange, too, the way the first sentence seems to stutter over its qualifications ('but the person', 'but which you do not', 'but perhaps hope') and then sinks down upon 'is ineradicable'. By emphasising that the desire to write a letter cannot be eradicated, this conjures up the possibility that letters themselves can easily be eradicated in a cloud of smoke. The phrasing might be accused of coyness, a kind of cautious discretion edging towards the mealy-mouthed, but Eliot might also be attempting to capture the uncertainty of a compositional state of mind as it writes letters. After all, he's writing about imagining the future.

Eliot's early letter to Conrad Aiken lives up to its theory of being indiscreet, or at least of making calculated indiscretions. Tom talks to Conrad about himself, with that double acoustic particular to letters and itself perhaps one kind of indiscretion, where the writer walks a tightrope between talking to another person and talking to himself: 'In Oxford I have the feeling that I am not quite alive . . . As you know, I hate university towns and university people'; 'Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead'; 'How much more self-conscious one is in a big city! Have you noticed it? Just at present this is an inconvenience, for I have been going through one of those nervous sexual attacks which I suffer from when alone in a city'; 'I should be better off, I sometimes think, if I had disposed of my virginity and shyness several years ago: and indeed I still think sometimes that it would be...