Beschreibung:

Series of nearly fifty typed letters signed ("Uncle Tom" etc), to his first godson Thomas Erle Faber, son of his publisher and colleague Geoffrey Faber, the first eleven letters dating between 1930 and 1936 during the composition of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, dedicated to him (see note below); the letters written throughout with great affection, especially when his godson himself faces difficult decisions ("...you have my sympathy and I hope some understanding. When I say 'sympathy' I mean it literally: I found myself, at 26, chucking up the results of four or five years' preparation, and embarking on a new, precarious way of life with a very uncongenial and unpromising means of livelihood. I hope you won't have to go through anything like that..."), and the series as a whole revealing Eliot at his most genial and humorous, often giving himself to flights of fancy or facetious digressions: on subjects such as hospital diet ("...after experiencing all the ways in which Spam can be disguised, I can declare that there is only one proper way to eat Spam, and that is straight out of the tin..."), his typewriter ("...if the typing of my last letter caused you anxiety about my infirmities, let me assure you that the trouble is not chilblains, or gout, or a lesion in the cerebral cortex, but the increasing infirmities of this Baby Empire de Luxe. Not that it was ever quite normal: even when it was quite new it insisted on writing ccritical and surprisee, instead of critical and surprised... But it was made in Switzerland, and I suspect was brought up to write in Zurich dialect..."), godfatherly presents ("...calculated to coincide with no festival or special occasion having any relation to the recipient: and shall in future be distributed so as to call your attention to some important anniversary which you might otherwise overlook, thus enlarging your knowledge of history both sacred and profane..."), American academics ("...I should like to put you in touch with Mr. Mandelbaum of New York, who is writing a thesis on the Dynamics of Audience-Response to the Cocktail Party. This is called Sociology, and is an American disease. I do not know whether Mr. M. has seen the play..."), Chicago ("...apart from Cicero and the gangsters, Chicago is full of ravening hostesses, professors, professors' wives, refugee intellectuals, vice-presidents of the University, English Speaking Unions, P.E.N. clubs, and every kind of creature including Julian Huxley. I lecture and the folk seem easily pleased. I give a 'seminar', nobody knows what about. I read poetry aloud. I go to cocktail parties, dinners and lunches. It is a terrible life..."), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton ("...This letter paper is the most appropriate for writing to you on; and you had better not smile at it, for if you do you will be smiling on the Other Side of your Face before many years are out, when you will using it yourself, when you have become (temporarily) one of Bob Oppenheimer's boys, and foxtrotting with lady atom-bombers from Japan..."), days out in Cambridge during Tom's residence at Trinity ("...I would suggest however that if you cut down your weeping for the martyrdom of SS. Timothy, Hippolytus and Symphorian by fifteen minutes each, you might give three quarters of an hour to REJOICING,