Correspondence with
Tom Ginn

Thank you for your birthday greetings and the beautiful card. I am not very strong on birthdays but they do bring [us] to the eternal question, who am I and for what purpose.

I also want to thank you for the "Saturday Review." It is my favorite magazine. By the way, they had two very good accounts of T. S. Eliot. He was never a special favorite of mine but I like his brother, Alexander Eliot.² I have his very inspiring book, Sight and Insight.³ It might be good for Sue.

I notice that among your studies is the fourth gospel. I recommend Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel;⁴ I got a great deal from it.

It was good of you to write that nice, long letter. I enjoyed your clippings. The "Churchill" [sermon] of Dr. F's was indeed good and perhaps even more I enjoyed his sermon of Feb. 14, "One Sure Thing," because he says so much about Teilhard.⁵ Mary's cousin knew T. S. Eliot personally and used to call him Tom. I said I'd as soon think of calling Homer by his first name. Perhaps the same should apply to your calling Dr. F, Ted.

The fourth gospel may have been written by an Alexandrian Jew, but it was not ghost written in the ordinary sense because the central character is obviously an ideal figure. The question of authorship, however, is of minor importance for the gospel is clearly a record of direct experience and the writer was setting forth the ONE TRUTH in a way acceptable to Greek ears. The important thing to me is [the evidence of] Jewish rather than Greek, or Gnostic influence, as has been thought by scholars generally. The gospel does not adopt the intellectual Greek Logos philosophy, and what is more the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls shows that it follows the Qumran Manual of Discipline rather closely. The Logos idea has a Persian source; the Greeks developed it one way, the gospel another.

I was much touched by your keeping that prayer. These are terrible times but I am sure all will come out right in the end if we keep on trying. I am glad to live in these difficult times and add my bit of ATTITUDE. As Nietzche put it: All beings hitherto created something above themselves; will ye be the ebb of this tide and rather revert to the beast than surmount Man?

I notice that Dr. F has started his summer vacation. In consorting with the Methodists, I hope he understands the real meaning of "rapprochement," which is far beyond getting as much as you can out of the other fellow.

I like the Christian Science Monitor very much. The interview with Bishop "Honest-to-God" added nothing to his thought, but the photograph was very interesting on account of its youthful appearance.⁶

I now enclose a page on Yeats which I am sure will interest you; also a Negro clipping, but I hope they will not try to go ahead faster than their actual physical and mental equipment permits so that the wire finally bursts as did that of Nietzche, for instance.⁷

Mary joins me in wishing you a good new year. I know you will make it good whatever happens.

Don't overtax yourself, T. The wise man of old said haste is of the devil.

I now enclose clippings on Cushing, Saltonstall and Brooke but I don't suppose there is anything new for you. I only hope that his fellow blacks do not call Brooke an Uncle Tom nigger and tear out his tongue.⁸

Thank you for the birthday card. I shall strive until the horse is shot <from> under me.

I now send the following articles: Vienna choir boys, two Boston jokes, Cardinal Cushing, the recent Boston explosion, the suicide of Bishop Pike's son. The last shows you were right.

I consider death a commencement. We graduate.

Thank you for sending the Lenten schedule, recommended books and the new books in the Parish library. The first of the recommended books, The Protestant Mystics, edited by Anne Fremantle, is outstanding because with almost uncanny wisdom she has chosen very inferior quotations from each mystic. However, the introduction by W. H. Auden has some worthwhile passages.

I am sending you some things that might interest you; the Boston youths wrangle, Dickens in Boston and a quotation from the book Mrs. Jack.⁹

I agree with you about Bishop Pike [that he was an exhibitionist] but I am hoping that the catastrophe he has gone through will awaken him to reality.¹⁰

¹ All square-bracketed text in these excerpts inserted by Thea Wheelwright. Angle-bracketed text inserted by the site proprietor.

² Note by Thea Wheelwright: "No trace of this relationship." Note by the site proprietor: T. S. Eliot did not have a brother Alexander.

³ Alexander Eliot (1919–2015), great-grandson of the transformational Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, was a respected writer on art, myth, and spirituality. His third published book, written on a Guggenheim fellowship, was Sight and Insight: Connecting with Works of Art. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1959.

⁴ Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel. 2 vols. Edited by Davey Francis Noel. London: Faber & Faber, 1942.

⁵ "Dr. F" may refer to Theodore Parker Ferris, rector of Trinity Church (Boston) 1942–1972.

⁶ John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God. London: SCM Press, 1963. According to Wikipedia, "Honest to God is a book written by the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich John A.T. Robinson, criticising traditional Christian theology. It aroused a storm of controversy on its original publication . . ."

⁷ Nietzsche famously lost his critical faculties and reverted to a childlike state at age 44. The probable cause was not a metaphoric burst wire but rather a strain of syphilis also contracted (in Germany) by the American composer MacDowell, who was affected similarly and at the same age. The comparison of an American ethnic underclass to a syphilitic German philosopher speaks for itself.

⁸ Mr. Brown is probably referring to Edward Brooke, who at the time of this letter was a Republican running for U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. Later in 1966 Brooke became the first black person elected by popular vote to the Senate.

⁹ Louise Hall Tharp, Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1965.

¹⁰ A longer and concomitantly more nuanced passage on Bishop Pike and his son's suicide is found in the correspondence with Arnie and Rita Gluck (under Miscellaneous Correspondence).