Free The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 by T. S. Eliot Page A

Lire quelque chose de moi dans la Nouvelle Revue Française de 1er Septembre. 4
     
     
    [On envelope] Un de mes amis désire savoir dans quelles parties de l’Allemagne on parle l’allemand le plus pur. Pourriez-vous le renseigner? Il désirerait résider dans la banlieue d’une ville agréable. A. F. 5  
    1–Henri-Alban Fournier (1886–1914): author, under the pseudonym Alain-Fournier, of Le Grand Meaulnes (1913). He tutored TSE in French language and literature, and made him recite passages from the classics. Fournier shared with his pupil his delight in Gide, Péguy  Stendhal, Marivaux, and the novels of Dostoevsky in French translation. (On 11 Apr. 1911, TSE saw the first dramatisation of The Brothers Karamazov , adapted by Jacques Copeau and Jean Croué, at the Théâtre des Arts: see Nancy Hargrove, ‘T. S. Eliot and the Parisian Theatre World, 1910–11’, South Atlantic Review 66: 4, Autumn 2001.) TSE would remember Fournier’s ‘exquisite refinement, quiet humour and his great personal charm’: see Robert Gibson, The Quest of Alain-Fournier (1953).
    2–Possibly Ford Madox Ford’s Ladies Whose Bright Eyes: A Romance (1911), which TSE later recommended to William Turner Levy as a ‘treat in store’ ( Affectionately T. S. Eliot , 1968, 136), although the novelist did not change his name from Hueffer to Ford until 1919.
    3–Igor Stravinsky recorded TSE saying in his later years that Youth and ‘The End of the Tether’ were ‘the finest stories of their kind I know’ ( Themes and Conclusions [1972], 71).
    4–‘Portrait’, NRF 3: 33 (1 Sept. 1911) – the last of Fournier’s short stories – is a brief memoir of a school acquaintance who came to a tragic end.
    5– Translation : My dear friend, I am most grateful to you for the information you have taken the trouble to send me about English literature, a subject with which I am very superficially acquainted and that I would so much like to know more about.
    I am going to order, in turn, all the books you mention. But when shall I be able to read them?
    At the moment, I am finishing the book by Ford you gave me, and in which I find so much feverish emotion and heart-rending beauty.
    During a few days’ holiday in the country I finished Stevenson’s Catriona , an easy book to read. I find in it the eminently French qualities of subtlety, grace and heroic feeling, together with the most delicate novelist’s gift, put at the service of the most deliberately incredible adventures …
    I am also busy reading Typhoon by Conrad, which you mentioned to me, and I am going to buy Youth .
    I have only a little time to spare today. I merely wish to apologise for my delay in replying, while postponing the writing of a more substantial letter until later.
    Would you believe it – the young man I was coaching in philosophy for the baccalauréat has passed with distinction thanks to some staggering philosophy marks? Seventeen out of twenty for the oral. The examiner kept him talking for half an hour and said he had not given anyone such a good mark for the last three years!
    So you see, I may be a good story-teller, but I would not have been too bad a teacher either. Even so, I don’t think I would ever again venture to give you philosophy lessons. French lessons, at a pinch, if you like, but, to judge by your letter, you hardly need any.
    I am greatly interested by what you say about the Germans. Although I was an internationalist only four or five years ago, I would now very willingly march against them. And I think the majority of Frenchmen are like me.
    I have been told that German architecture is not without interest.
    I took your parcels of books to the rue Saint-Jacques, but you had already left. Tell me what I should do about them because, unfortunately, I shall not be in Paris at the beginning of September. I am leaving on 26 August for Mirande (Gers) to take part in manoeuvres lasting