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Lot 194

ELIOT (T.S.)
Five typed letters signed ("T.S. Eliot"). to Lady Violet Powell ("Dear Violet") and her husband, the novelist Anthony Powell ("Dear Tony"), about mutual friends, social engagements and the reception of honours, 24 Russell Square, 1945-1956

15 June 2016, 14:00 BST
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £2,250 inc. premium

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ELIOT (T.S.)

Five typed letters signed ("T.S. Eliot"). to Lady Violet Powell ("Dear Violet") and her husband, the novelist Anthony Powell ("Dear Tony"), the first letter about their mutual friend Margaret Behrens, and Eliot's move with John Hayward to Carlyle Mansions ("...The flat proceeds in a very lopsided fashion, which keeps me in a state of misgiving: it looks as if the decorations might be finished before the lease is signed...And at the end there looms the appalling problem of getting a housekeeper, so what with one thing and another, some time may elapse before we can entertain you there. I hope that you are flourishing, and that Tony's typewriter is running smoothly..."); others about social engagements, his teeth, and the reception of honours (Powell's CBE, Eliot's Nobel); three letters to Lady Violet, two to Powell; one signed with initials, one with an autograph postscript, 5 pages, headed paper, 4to and 8vo, 24 Russell Square, 1945-1956

Footnotes

ʻTHE APPALLING PROBLEM OF GETTING A HOUSEKEEPER' – T.S. Eliot to Anthony Powell and his wife. The Powells had got to know Eliot through Margaret Behrens, who had offered them a country refuge from London during the V2 raids, and her companion Hope Mirrlees: ʻAfter one came to know him better Tom Eliot was inscrutable only in his mild amiability... Eliot, encountered in the Mirrlees household, drinking a pint or two of cider in the pub, dropping in at our bungalow on the cliffs at the end of one of his long solitary walks (wearing a cap and carrying a stick), always kept conversation to light topics... This amalgam of tea-party cosiness with cold intellectuality, the more menacing because strictly implicit rather than explicit, gave Tom Eliot's personality that very peculiar flavour, which even the most high-powered of his contemporaries seem at times to have found, if not exactly intimidating, at least restraining' (To Keep the Ball Rolling, pp.309-10).

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