‘As I can’t have what I want, which is of course to have you with me day and night always,’ Eliot wrote to her, ‘all that I want is to pursue and develop the mutual sympathy and understanding and companionship through letters.’ This was an Emily of words, an epistolary Emily. But for the most part he ‘kissed’ Emily’s signature. By November 1935, Eliot had enjoyed enough kisses from that Raspberrymouth at meetings in London, Chipping Campden and California that he lamented losing count of them. Eliot soon had to follow it with a letter, explaining that hearing her voice had left him ‘nearly speechless, and partly imbecile, and afraid of being too emotional’. Fortunately for biographers, the call was difficult. One opening for talk came when Eliot went to the US to give the Norton Lectures at Harvard in October 1932. Yet speech between Emily and Tom was rare. She was an assistant professor of oral English at Simmons, Scripps and Smith Colleges, and taught elocution and voice training for actors. Letters to Emily, typed from his desk, were a vital part of his amatory and auditory imagination – part of the rhythm of his life across the major years of his mature work. Take this letter from December 1935: ‘When I go to bed I shall imagine you kissing me and when you take off your stocking you must imagine me kissing your dear dear feet and striving to approach your beautiful saintly soul.’ Eliot was a creature of habit: in the mornings, communion at St Stephen’s in the afternoons, business at Faber, dictating innumerable letters writing in the evenings rosaries in the early hours. She was a spur to his imagination, as he tested out new words for deep feeling, and the object of some comic erotic-spiritual exercises. Eliot’s love for Emily, his ‘Tall Girl’, retained all the shy ardour he felt when he first met her as a young student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1912. That’s what he called her in the love letters they began exchanging in 1927, a correspondence that intensified in the early 1930s, and continued through the awkward years of their disentanglement after the death of his first wife, Vivien, in 1947. E mily Hale was Eliot’s ‘Raspberrymouth’.
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