Invited to join the Royal Society of Literature by Walter de la Mare, Eliot, now a highly clubbable director at the London publishing firm Faber and Faber, reflects ironically that he had once been called a 'literary bolshevik’. Opening a piece of fan mail from a young man in Chelsea, the esteemed poet finds himself frankly informed that his admirer felt an 'overwhelming homesickness’ for The Waste Land after being disappointed by Ash-Wednesday (1930), his long poem on converting to Anglo-Catholicism. Replying to a friend who has asked whether its hallucinatory 'leopards’ and 'unicorns’ have a learned origin (like the many allusions in The Waste Land) Eliot grumbles: 'Can’t I sometimes invent nonsense, instead of always being supposed to borrow it?’. By the end of the volume, he is in the unhappy situation of having to explain to the wife of a young poet suffering from paranoia that The Waste Land could not possibly contain coded allusions to the couple.