I have a long-standing interest in T.S.Eliot, at times bordering on obsession.  He's someone whose thinking I find enormously powerful. At times the racism and anti-semitism of his work (which is, I fear, more than superficial, more than ornamental) can be overwhelming.  His politics, especially through much of the 30s, remain antediluvian to me.  But he rewards re-reading, time and again.  He may seem a distant mountain nowadays, unreachable by almost anyone, and perilous to those who may wish to scale it; but still he looms.

Today, or perhaps it was yesterday, Eliot's love letters (of a sort) to Emily Hale, written between 1932 and 1947, were finally opened in the Princeton University Library archive to scholars.  Here is an article about them; here is Princeton's press release.  You may expect more such pieces, and dribbles of revelations, to come out as well.  There will no doubt me many newspaper articles, magazine articles, and eventually books about the pieces.

I knew this was coming eventually, but I did not know that 2020 was the year.  And I did not know that Eliot had written a letter, heretofore also kept out of circulation, about the Hale correspondence.  Here it is.  It seems to me a classic Eliotic production--both revelatory and occluding, expressing painfully intimate vulnerability and yet also frostily arctic.  And of course I love the Henry James allusion.

Most immediately, the experience of reading, just now, a letter from T.S.Eliot that has not (so far as I know) been read before, at least not by anyone willing to talk publicly about it, is strangely moving.  I may come back to this--I mean, come back to talking about it; I'll definitely be following this story.  For now, I leave it with you.