The Love of Her Life: Emily Hale'S Theatrical career
Additional Information
By Sara Fitzgerald
Peer Reviewed Article made AVailable through CC By License
“Do you know,” T. S. Eliot wrote Emily Hale in mid-December 1935, “that my long desire to write plays is chiefly your doing, because I wanted your applause?”[i] The world of theater brought Eliot and Hale together when they were young and provided the common ground for their maturing relationship as they moved into middle age. Eliot’s 1,131 letters to Hale shed new light on the role Hale played in stimulating Eliot’s interest in drama and providing practical adviceB and emotional support for the staging of his productions.
Up to now little has been known about Hale’s own dramatic experience and the ways in which she supported Eliot’s theatrical work—partly because she wanted it that way. When E. Martin Browne, Eliot’s longtime director, was working on his memoir of Eliot’s productions after his death, he apparently wrote Hale to ask whether he should mention her in his book. At that point, it had been a decade since Hale had donated Eliot’s letters to Princeton, a gift the university was still not publicly acknowledging. Hale’s response to Browne is not preserved, but after receiving it, Browne wrote back in November 1966: “Thank you too for all you say about the T.S.E. matter. I entirely understand that you would want to remain in the background, without personal mention, in my account, in all the circumstances.”[ii]Browne respected Hale’s wishes and did not name her.
But the letters from Eliot and others that Hale donated to Princeton make clear that she played an important role in critiquing and promoting some of his dramatic works. As he was finishing The Family Reunion in September 1938, Eliot wrote her: “I have not told you how invaluable has been, not only your criticisms and suggestions, but your encouragement over the play at the stage at which its satisfactory improvement seemed almost beyond my powers. . . .” He told her that he was now anxious to make it successful, “because if it is a success, we can say that you have had far more to do with it than with anything I have written before” (September 22, 1938).
Suggestions Hale made to drafts of The Family Reunion have been preserved but details of other advice she may have given were lost when Eliot arranged for her letters to be destroyed. Still, a review of Hale’s own theatrical work provides insights that can help scholars understand how she may have influenced Eliot’s work.
Hale had extensive experience, both as an amateur actress and a director of productions, large and small. She studied drama at the university level and at a school that was then one of the country’s best. She was the niece of the man who was Boston’s preeminent music and drama critic in the first third of the twentieth century.[iii] She worked with actors and actresses who had already performed on the Broadway and London stages or who would work there or in Hollywood later in their careers. She performed with some of the oldest little theater companies in America, and some of the best of her time. In addition, she worked with celebrated set designers and took the art of set design very seriously herself.
This paper is based on reading many, but not all, of the letters Eliot sent Hale between 1930 and 1957. It also draws on the author’s research into Hale’s life, including accounts from newspapers and from the archives of colleges where she taught speech and drama. While Hale continued to be involved with theater for most of her life, the paper will focus on the experience she brought to the table when Eliot turned his attention to playwriting in the early 1930s.
In his letters, Eliot recalled making Hale’s acquaintance in 1905, when he arrived in Boston to attend Milton Academy. He was seventeen and she was then fourteen, a childhood friend of his cousin Eleanor Hinkley. Hale was the daughter and niece of Unitarian clergymen, and her father had taught at Harvard Divinity School. She attended the Berkeley Street School in Cambridge with Eleanor and other young women who became friends with Eliot, and then went on to attend Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. Although some Eliot biographers described her as an orphan who was raised by her aunt and uncle, it appears she spent most of her childhood in the Boston area, living with her father.[iv]
While they may have known each other as teenagers, it was not until Eliot’s graduate school days at Harvard that he took an interest in Hale. His feeling for her took root in a theatrical context, while playing impromptu charades at the Hinkleys’ home in Cambridge—specifically, when he stepped on her foot. After that, he explained, “I wanted dreadfully to see you again.” When his cousin recruited him to perform opposite Hale in a “Stunt Show” she organized in her home on February 17, 1913, Eliot’s weekly rehearsals with Hale enabled him “to realise what had happened to me” (August 18, 1932 and July 21, 1931). Later that year, Eliot accompanied Hale to a performance of the opera Tristan und Isolde. After that night, he recalled years later, he was “completely conscious” of his love for her, “and quite shaken to pieces” (July 24, 1931).[v] Thus, from the outset, Eliot’s love for Hale was framed by theatrical spaces and encounters and, later, by the “roles” they were called on to play.
The program from the “Stunt Show” is preserved, as are many others from Hale’s acting career, providing a window into the Cambridge amateur theatrical world in which both Hale and Eliot acted as young adults. In addition to performing with Eliot in “An Afternoon with Mr. Woodhouse,” a skit Hinkley adapted from Jane Austen’s Emma, Hale started off each of the evening’s two acts by singing three popular songs of the day. Eliot performed opposite Amy de Gozzaldi, another friend of Hinkley’s and Hale’s, in a second skit that night.[vi]
A number of reviews and appreciative notes written by friends and fellow actors suggest that Hale was talented enough that she could have performed professionally. Several Eliot biographers wrote that Hale longed to do so, but that her family prevented her.[vii] It’s a reasonable observation for a Boston Brahmin of that time and social class, and at least one of Hale’s college students said her teacher had told that story.[viii] But a contrary view was taken by the Rev. Joseph Bassett, who became pastor of Hale’s father’s church, First Unitarian Church of Chestnut Hill, around the time Hale died. Bassett contrasted Hale’s life story with that of Mary Lee, another church member who was a year younger than Hale. Lee traveled to Europe during World War I then moved to New York to pursue a career as a writer. Bassett contended that Hale did not possess the same kind of independence and courage that Lee did, and that a young woman would have needed to pursue a professional acting career at that time.[ix] Indeed, Hale may have used her family as an excuse for her more limited ambitions, and in Eliot’s voluminous correspondence, there is no suggestion that her acting was constrained by her relatives.
The years between 1913 and 1918 were among Hale’s busiest as an actress—and one reason she may have been somewhat oblivious to the emotional turmoil Eliot said he experienced when he first fell in love with her. In April 1913, she played the female lead in the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club’s production of Hubert Henry Davies’s The Mollusc, a role Davies described as “a pretty, honest-looking English girl about twenty-four.”[x] The club was a longtime Cambridge institution, enabling young people, particularly those attending Harvard and Radcliffe, to put on productions and then socialize after the curtain came down. Eighteen years later, Eliot could still recall the “light, flowered” dress that Hale had worn in the role (March 2, 1931).
The play’s script and themes may have resonated for both Eliot and Hale throughout their years. Hale played an orphan who had become a governess, but who had reached the limits of her own education. By the end of the play, she was rescued from a life of spinsterhood by the arrival of the brother of the woman whose apathy gives the play its title. (In a reversal of Hale’s own trans-Atlantic crossings, the English heroine is swept off to a life in Colorado.) Her suitor calls out his lazy sister’s behavior, likening her to “a mollusc of the sea, which clings to a rock and lets the tide flow over its head. People who spend all their energy and ingenuity in sticking instead of moving. . .” At another point in the play, the script called for Hale to say, “If you knew how I sometimes long to be free to do whatever I like just for one day. When I see other girls . . . enjoying themselves—it comes over me so dreadfully what I am missing . . .”[xi]
Two months before Eliot recalled the dress Hale had worn, he wrote her:
I understand about reserve; for it is very hard for me too; and in some essential ways I am quite as inexperienced as you, and I have never in my life before felt “unreserved”with anybody; indeed, my life has made me even more clam-like than I am by nature. I think that the few women who have offered me quite desirable and pleasant friendships have always found me singularly stiff, formal and roundabout. (January 27, 1931)
In May 1913, Eliot performed in the last of the Cambridge club’s regular offerings that season, playing the male lead, Lord Bantock, in its production of The New Lady Bantock or Fanny and the Servant Problem. The performance was later remembered by club members for the boldness with which a youthful e. e. cummings had kissed Amy de Gozzaldi.[xii]
The Mollusc was the only performance of Hale’s that Eliot recalled seeing during the sixteen months between the “Stunt Show” and when he left for Oxford in June 1914. The play was typical of the early twentieth-century comedies that audiences enjoyed and in which Hale often performed—and later directed. Eliot’s biographer Robert Crawford neatly summed up the genre when he wrote: “In such English plays, well-bred men fall in love with actresses; upper-crust characters sport names like Agatha; situations unfold in country houses; upper-class mores and cockney dialect mix; scenarios are clever and traditionally plotted.”[xiii] In December 1913, Hale’s original cast was reunited for a benefit performance of Davies’s play at Boston’s Plymouth Theatre.
Hale was remembered for her skill as a comic actress, but she could also perform classical roles. In April 1914, she played Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with the Unitarian-affiliated Lend-a-Hand Dramatic Club. The play was performed at both Boston’s Jordan Hall and at Smith College in Northampton, where Hale would teach two decades later. The Boston Globe reported in advance that Hale had previously played the part, and afterwards said she was “exceptionally good.” The production featured an innovative set, designed by a Smith elocution professor to insure “a quick, smooth-running performance, without the tedious waits for elaborate scene shifting that usually mark a Shakespearean production.”[xiv]Hale followed that up a week later by taking a small part in Davies’s Cousin Kate with the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club, a play whose cast was described as including “several well-known amateurs.”[xv]
Two months later, Eliot left for England after an awkward parting; Hale later recalled being surprised and embarrassed when Eliot told her “how very much he cared for me.” In one of the memoirs she wrote to accompany Eliot’s letters, Hale noted that his subsequent marriage was a complete surprise to her because Eliot “had corresponded quite regularly with me, sent flowers for special occasions, etc., I meanwhile trying to decide whether I could learn to care for him had he returned to the ‘States.’”[xvi]
One of those “special occasions” occurred in late 1914, when Eliot sent Conrad Aiken a money order for four dollars, asking him to deliver a bouquet of Killarney roses and a note to Hale when she performed in the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club’s performance of Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh at Brattle Hall. It is unclear how Eliot mangled the details, but Hale was actually performing the comedy with another company, The Amateurs, in Brookline and Andover, Massachusetts. Aiken still managed to get the flowers delivered.[xvii]
The Amateurs was a company of socially prominent, experienced actors from Boston and Brookline, co-founded by “Mrs. Frederick Briggs,” who played the lead in Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh. As Ada Langley, Briggs had performed on Broadway when she was single, but, frustrated with the minor roles she was given, she had returned home to Boston and gotten married.[xviii] The Andover paper reported that the troupe had “developed one of the leading companies of its kind in the country, and the acting of its several players is rated high in the estimation of all those who have seen them perform.”[xix] Membership was eventually limited to forty active members, and Hale was among those who were invited to join.[xx]
On May 12–13, 1915, Hale played opposite a future professional, Osgood Perkins, in another Amateurs’ production, H. V. Esmond’s farce Eliza Comes to Stay. Hale later wrote on the program she retained: “Osgood became one of America’s best actors and this was his first big part. He died suddenly—too young to go at the height of his career.”[xxi](After his Broadway debut in 1924, Perkins performed in more than twenty plays in New York before moving on to Hollywood as a character actor. He died of a heart attack at forty-five after an opening-night performance at Washington’s National Theatre, leaving behind a small child, future Psycho star Anthony Perkins.)[xxii]
Another cast member, the Englishman Clifford Pember, enjoyed a successful career as a set designer in both the British and American theater and later in Hollywood. His “futurist scenery” for Eliza was notable enough that the short review in the Boston Globe’s society pages felt compelled to comment on it, declaring that it was “one of the hits of the evening.” The set for the parlor farce was fashioned in black and white, with only one bright element, flowers in pink and then red, added in the subsequent acts. The review praised the quality of the production, even as it observed that “courtesy forbids press criticism of an amateur cast,” a point that needs to be acknowledged when evaluating Hale’s positive newspaper reviews from that era.[xxiii] The Globe made note of the sets in some later shows in which Hale performed, writing that the company’s 1919 production of J. M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows provided The Amateurs with “ample opportunity for the picturesque stage settings for which they are famous.”[xxiv]
It was just over a month after Hale’s performance in Eliza that Eliot married Vivien Haigh-Wood. It is not known how Hale learned that news or how she reacted, other than the “surprise” she recalled in her short memoir.[i] She may have heard about Eliot’s marriage from Eleanor Hinkley after Eliot made a brief visit home to his family later that summer.
Hale appears to have taken a break that fall before stepping into her next major role, playing Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac at Boston’s Copley Theatre. Edward Vroom, a professional actor recognized for performing Shakespearean roles, had been working to build an amateur company, filled and financially supported by prominent members of Back Bay society. In 1915, he had mounted Cyrano with Briggs as the female lead. In February 1916, it was Hale’s turn. Vroom, the Boston Globereported, “hopes to make a revival of more classical drama in this city and a development of the local histrionic ability.” In the production, the paper said, Vroom “was well supported throughout, especially by Miss Emily Hale.”[ii] The cast included more than sixty persons, and more than one hundred prominent Bostonians were listed on the sponsoring committee, including Hale’s father and the philanthropist Mary Lee Ware, with whom Hale would later live.[iii]
Two months later, Hale rejoined some of her castmates from the Cambridge club to perform Barrie’s Alice Sit-by-the-Fire to benefit the Friends of Poland. The Globe’s society pages reported that theater parties were being organized to see the show because “the cast is a notable one” and “the principal actors are those who made the performance of The Mollusc so great a success.”[iv] Before the end of the year, Hale reprised the role of Roxane for another benefit at Jordan Hall.[v]
Years later, as Eliot and Hale began to correspond regularly, Hale wrote Eliot about an upcoming production of the Cambridge club. He responded, “But what that letter gave me particularly was a glimmering of the part that acting has played in your development, and has helped, I am sure, to make you so exceptional a person—though dozens of others could act the same parts, and act them pretty well, and yet get nothing out of it permanent” (March 2, 1931). Hale may have also referred to the time she performed with Vroom because Eliot urged her to share more about her past roles, “Roxane especially.” He then coyly wrote, “I should be willing to be Cyrano, if it was that Roxane, but perhaps it wasn’t.” (Perhaps he also identified with the play’s two male characters who had trouble expressing their feelings to the woman they loved.)
Eliot then observed, “Acting must have freed you (anyway something has) from many of the restrictions which Boston birth and breeding imposes upon one.” Later that year, as he considered how they would respond when they saw each other again in the company of other people, he observed, “as you say, we both know how to play parts.” Hale’s skill at “playing parts” undoubtedly helped the two of them keep their relationship secret from most of their friends—and the rest of the world—over the following decades.
Theatrical companies and casts served as families for Hale, a woman with no siblings or close cousins, who lost her father in her late twenties, and her mother, for all intents and purposes, by Mrs. Hale’s institutionalization when Emily was five. Eliot saw Hale perform again with the Dorset Players in Vermont in 1946, but she achieved her greatest theatrical successes, both as an actress and a director, when they were apart. While Eliot sometimes talked about writing a role for Hale, there is no evidence that either of them suggested she should perform in one of his plays, or one produced by his theatrical colleagues. Still, she seemed to reawaken Eliot’s interest in the theater, and as the years went on, it was a subject they continued to discuss, whether together or apart.
In early 1916, Hale went to Simmons College to “assist the girls in the formation of a Dramatic Club.”[vi] It was the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death and Drama League chapters around the country, including Boston’s, were working with the federal government to encourage schools and colleges to mark the occasion. Hale may have gotten connected to Simmons through Lucia Briggs, an English professor who was the daughter of the president of Radcliffe. (Briggs had been an officer in that college’s drama club, the Idlers, but was no relation to Ada Langley Briggs.) In June, as part of the Simmons’ commencement, Hale directed the senior class in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, incorporating dancers directed by the college’s physical education teacher. Then in December, Hale and Briggs served as “coaches” for performances of two one-act plays by the newly organized Simmons College Dramatic Association. They chose plays written by two founders of Ireland’s Abbey Theatre, The Land of Heart’s Desire by W. B. Yeats and Spreading the News by Lady Augusta Gregory; thus Hale was exploring the work of other great modernists even before she and Eliot reconnected.[vii]
Hale still continued to perform with amateur companies around Boston. On Valentine’s Day weekend in 1918, she played The Queen in The Amateurs’ production of The Queen’s Enemies by Lord Dusany. A few weeks later, she played Silvia in The Footlight Club’s production of Jacinto Benavente’s masterpiece comedy The Bonds of Interest.[viii] (The Spanish playwright would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature four years later.) Over the years, Hale performed several times with the club, which was founded in 1877 and now lays claim to being the oldest amateur company in the United States.[ix]
But on March 27, Hale’s life was upended when her father, the Rev. Edward Hale, died after a short illness.[x] Hale was then living at home, and her father’s death meant she had to find a job and a new place to live. In May, Simmons offered her a post as assistant matron of the dormitories, and she took up residence there at the start of the 1918–19 school year, just as the influenza epidemic was breaking out in Boston.
Over the next three years, Hale played an active role in the life of the college. In the summer of 1920, she studied at the Leland Powers Summer School of the Spoken Word in Boston, founded by Powers to train speakers who traveled the Chautauqua circuit in the early twentieth century. When Hale returned to Simmons that fall, she added “special instructor in voice training” to her titles and began offering a course in “voice culture.” In outlining her goals, she said the course would seek to “correct incorrect speech, or tonal placement”; encourage students to recognize that a good voice was “a practical business asset” for both teachers and office workers; and “interest the student further in the better literature of the day, and of the past, by helping her to interpret it understandingly.”[xi]
As a director at Simmons and performer in the Boston area, Hale relied on British comedic chestnuts, while also producing a wide range of classical and contemporary works. In December 1919, she directed the Simmons club in a performance of George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell’s one-act play Suppressed Desires, a comedy the Provincetown Players had premiered four years before with the playwrights in the leading roles. In December 1920, she was part of The Amateurs’ production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. And with the Cambridge club in April 1921, she played the “id” side of the two female characters in Alice Gerstenberg’s one-act play Overtones, a feminist take on Freud’s theories.[xii]
March 4, 1921 marked the fifth anniversary of the Simmons club Hale had helped to start, and, for the occasion, it decided to mount “by far [its] biggest production”: Barrie’s Alice Sit-by-the Fire. Hale was about to turn thirty, and this time she took on the role of Alice, the middle-aged mother, rather than her daughter. “Miss Hale did not play Alice,” the Simmons College Review reported, “she was Alice from the first to the last scene.” And as the play’s director, it added, Hale “took five ‘raw, unbleached school-girls’ and turned them into actresses.”[xiii]
At the end of the 1920–1921 school year came what was arguably the strongest testament to Hale’s skill as a drama teacher. Lucia Briggs had been hired as the new president of Milwaukee-Downer College, a well-regarded women’s school, and she was determined to bring Hale along as a faculty member. Briggs was a somewhat risky choice for the college’s trustees. She was only thirty-four and had limited administrative experience. Ellen Clara Sabin was the outgoing president of the college, retiring in 1921 after thirty years. As the two women began corresponding before Briggs took over, Sabin advised her that the college would need to find a new person to teach “vocal expression.” Sabin asserted, “I hope very much that the person will be a college graduate because it is very important that everyone on the staff possess college ideals and it is seldom that one who has not gone through college has the point of view that makes her most useful in a college.”[xiv] A week later, on May 7, Sabin underscored that point, telling Briggs that many people who teach vocal expression “are not acceptable in a college.”[xv]
Briggs was generally deferential to the older woman, but she was already floating the idea of hiring Hale:
How should you feel about a person who had no degree, provided that she were unusual in other ways? I know of one such person who might possibly be interested in the position. Some years ago, she began coaching the dramatics at Simmons, and she proved so successful not only as a coach but also as a fine influence among the girls that she was appointed in charge of one of the dormitories. She is very much a lady, has had wide social experience, is very delightful and very level-headed. This year she has had voluntary conferences with the seniors, to help them correct faults in the use of their voices; and if she is at Simmons next year, she will probably have a good deal more work of the same sort (though prescribed) with the freshmen. In quality, she is exceptional.[xvi]
Sabin was still wary, arguing that the college already had enough faculty members who lacked degrees, including those who taught art and music. But she conceded that “the kind of superiority that you ascribe to this teacher may overbalance all.” Sabin also thought Hale might be a good candidate to fill an opening for a dorm matron, even as she expressed concern over whether Hale would be willing to stay in Milwaukee for more than a year. Hale’s age and church would also be considerations.[xvii]
Two weeks later, Briggs continued to make the case for hiring her colleague.
I believe her to be an unusual person. I have consulted with my father, with Dean Park of Simmons College, and with Professor Robert Malcolm Gay, the head of our English department, all of whom have advised me to engage her. . . . She is twenty-nine years old. She has studied at the Leland Powers School, and is planning further professional study this summer. She has also studied singing, and she acts delightfully.
Briggs said that Hale was declining a new offer to work with the Simmons freshmen “because she is particularly interested in the possibility of developing the work at Milwaukee-Downer College in the future.” Briggs went on:
Professor Gay, whose standard is high and who is not given to over-statement, says that she is a remarkable teacher. . . . Professor Gay wants very much to have her stay at Simmons but does not wish to block a larger opportunity. He tells me that he “has been looking for ten years unsuccessfully before finding such a person.”[xviii]
In the end, Sabin told Briggs it was her decision to make. Briggs offered Hale the job as speech instructor, along with the post of matron of the college’s smallest dorm.
Over the summer, Hale took more professional classes, studying at the Cornish School of the Theatre in Seattle while visiting her aunt and uncle there. Seven years after it was founded by Nellie Cornish, the school had just opened a brand-new building with a three-hundred-seat theater and rehearsal rooms; it was then the largest school of music west of the Mississippi. In a preface to Cornish’s autobiography when it was published in 1964, a friend wrote:
[Cornish] had never had the time nor the money for voice training and often expressed regret that she could not speak as beautifully as her close friend, Ellen Van Volkenburg, the actress and director who, with her husband, Maurice Browne, started the Little Theatre movement in America, and founded the Cornish drama department. The Brownes also brought their exceptional theatrical knowledge to the Cornish summer school, giving the Pacific Northwest its first opportunity to see the great dramatic classics of all times, ranging from the ancient Greek masterpieces to Shaw’s The Philanderer and Claudel’s Tidings Brought to Mary—the latter in its first American performance, held over the New York Theatre Guild’s unsuccessful attempts to prove prior rights to the production.[xix]
Under the tutelage of Van Volkenburg and Browne, Cornish wrote, students “also had the opportunity of learning the handling and preparation of sets and lighting equipment.”[xx] Hale later cited the actors by name in her credentials, and continued to study and correspond with Van Volkenburg.[xxi]
Once Hale arrived in Milwaukee, she dove into her work. By November, the Drama Club performed three one-act plays, and in the spring, it mounted Fanny and the Servant Problem, the full-length comedy in which Eliot had starred. The yearbook reported that the play was “a distinctively new venture” because the club “as a rule, confines its efforts to plays of a more serious vein.” The club, it concluded, “under the guidance of the new adviser, Miss Hale, has made very real progress during the past year.”[xxii]
In her second semester in Milwaukee, Hale performed with another faculty member in a short play for the annual meeting of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, then did a reading of Alfred Noyes’s poem “The Highwayman” at a meeting of the Milwaukee-Downer Alumnae Club.[i]Nineteen twenty-two marked the tercentenary of Molière’s birth, and in March Hale donned a white wig to play the role of the Marchioness Dorimène in the French club’s performance of the playwright’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.[ii]
In November 1922, just as The Waste Land was published in New York, Hale got the biggest theatrical opportunity of her life when she was cast as the lead in the Wisconsin Players’ production of Miss Lulu Bett at the 1,300-seat Pabst Theater. The play was the first written by a woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and local newspapers heralded the production as a homecoming for its playwright, Wisconsin native Zona Gale. Gale was close friends with Laura Sherry, co-founder of the Players, and was in the audience on Hale’s opening night. A newspaper story touting the production in advance said the cast included “the foremost dramatic talent of the state.” “Miss Emily Hale, head of the dramatic department of Milwaukee-Downer College, will play the title role.” Gale spent several days in Milwaukee supervising final rehearsals. Afterward, she said the production “more than gratifies my wish as to the way in which I would wish my play presented.”[iii]
Hale’s opening-night performance was reviewed by both of Milwaukee’s daily newspapers. The Sentinel wrote: “Miss Emily Hale, with her dry wit and her downtrodden air which aroused sympathy and at the same time left an impression of deep and intense feeling, stood out decidedly in the feature role. Handling a difficult part with unusual ease, it was neither overdone nor treated in a casual manner.”[iv] But the afternoonJournal was more critical, choosing to zero in on Hale’s voice, one of her theatrical assets. “Miss Emily Hale, who played Miss Lulu, the kitchen drudge in her sister’s household, seemed to forget, at times, that she was the uneducated Lulu and gave her lines in a voice too cultured to belong to so drab a housekeeper.”[v]In her personal papers, Hale retained several congratulatory notes about her performance, but not this program nor the newspaper clippings; the Journal’s critique was a rarity among her newspaper reviews.
Gale forged a relationship with Hale that weekend and seemed happy with her performance. In the summer of 1924, Hale conscientiously wrote Gale to inquire about paying the playwright a royalty when she performed one of her plays for the Women’s Guild of her uncle’s Seattle church. Gale addressed her reply to “Miss Lulu Bett,” and said she could not imagine charging Hale a fee. “I do not know anyone,” she wrote, “who has a better right to use a play of mine.”[vi]
Miss Lulu Bett apparently was the last time Hale performed with the Wisconsin Players. The demands of their teacher’s rehearsals were probably the major reason Milwaukee-Downer’s Drama Club did not put on a play that term. Hale may have recognized she was trying to do too much or been advised by Briggs that she needed to focus on her job, particularly if her academic credentials might be questioned. After that point, Hale focused instead on teaching and building up the Drama Club, as well as directing or supporting the wide range of plays that other campus groups performed.
Milwaukee-Downer shut down over the summer months, and it appears that Hale and Eliot reconnected during a trip she made to England in the summer of 1923. In June, the student newspaper reported: “Miss Hale will travel in England, and will spend a week in France, and a few days in Holland as well.”[vii] Hale later reported that the meeting occurred the previous year, but that appears to be one of several dates she got wrong in the memoir she wrote thirty-four years later.[viii] Eliot recalled a momentous meeting in Eccleston Square, and in September 1923 he sent Hale an inscribed copy of Ara Vos Prec and arranged for her to begin receiving copies of The Criterion.[ix]
During these years, Hale directed productions both large and small, some of them classics and some of them the kind of lighter comedies that Eliot sometimes held in contempt. The latter would have been easier for a small, inexperienced, all-female cast to pull off, and during her years in Milwaukee, Hale returned to many of the plays she knew, including Alice Sit-By-the-Fire, Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh, and Eliza Comes to Stay. The student paper reported that Eliza had never been performed in that part of the country before. Hale directed productions of Barrie’s Rosalind and Dear Brutus and George Kauffman’s Dulcy, among others, but she also organized productions of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. On another, more informal occasion, Hale directed the city students’ group in Eleanor Hinkley’s A Flitch of Bacon, a one-act play the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club had also once produced. Hale further supported and performed in the elaborate annual Christmas productions directed by Emily Brown, an older English professor who later visited Hale in England when she gathered ideas and props for her celebrated cycle of holiday plays.
[i] Kodak, April 1922, June 1922, Milwaukee-Downer College, Milwaukee-Downer College Archives, Lawrence University.
[ii] Emily Hale Papers, Dramatic Appearances, 1915–1960 Folder.
[iii] “May Bring Zona Gale’s Play Here,” Wood County Reporter, Grand Rapids, Wis., October 19, 1922, 4. Similar stories appeared in newspapers in Appleton and Madison.
[iv] “Players Are Seen in ‘Miss Lulu Bett,’” Milwaukee Sentinel, November 11, 1922.
[v] Milwaukee Journal, November 12, 1922.
[vi] Zona Gale to “Miss Lulu Bett” (Emily Hale), August 11, 1924, Zona Gale papers, in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Accession #7763,7763-a to 7763-d, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.
[vii] Kodak, June 1923, Milwaukee-Downer College Archives, Lawrence University; Emily Hale Letters from T. S. Eliot, 1957 Narrative.
[viii] Emily Hale Letters, Narrative Written by Emily Hale, March 1–3, 1965.
[ix] Gordon, Imperfect Life, 205; Letters 2:212.
[i] Emily Hale Letters from T. S. Eliot, Narrative Written by Emily Hale, March 1–3, 1965.
[ii] “A Blustering Cyrano,” Boston Globe, February 3, 1916, 13.
[iii] Emily Hale Papers, Dramatic Appearances, 1915–1960 Folder.
[iv] “Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, March 12, 1916, 66.
[v] “Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, November 12, 1916, 61.
[vi] Emily Hale Papers, undated résumé, Folder 1, Biographical Material, 1936–1990.
[vii] The Microcosm, The Simmons College Annual, 1917, 183, 196. https://archive.org/details/microcosm1917simm. Accessed July 4, 2021.
[viii] Emily Hale Papers, Dramatic Appearances, 1915–1960 Folder.
[ix] Footlight Club history. www.footlight.org/. Accessed July 4, 2021.
[x] “Reverend Edward Hale, Pastor at Chestnut Hill, Dead,” Boston Globe, March 28, 1918, 6.
[xi] “Course in Voice Culture,” Simmons College Review 3, no. 5 (March 1921): 201.
[xii] Microcosm, 1920, 165. https://archive.org/details/microcosm1920simm. Accessed July 4, 2021; “To Present Two Plays at Simmons College,” Boston Globe, December 9, 1919, 3; “Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, December 5, 1920, 51; Emily Hale Papers, Dramatic Appearances, 1915–1960 Folder.
[xiii] Simmons College Review, 203.
[xiv] Ellen C. Sabin to Lucia R. Briggs, April 29, 1921, Milwaukee-Downer College Records, 1840–1964, Milwaukee MSS L; Milwaukee Micro 78; Micro 2095, Series 1: Office of the President, 1851–1964, correspondence, 1921–1948, Box 12, Folders 13–14, Briggs, 1921–1922. More details on the two women and excerpts from this correspondence can be found in “Faithfully Yours, Ellen C. Sabin: Correspondence between Ellen C. Sabin and Lucia R. Briggs from January, 1921, to August, 1921,” edited by Virginia A. Palmer in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Magazine of History 67, no. 1 (1983).
[xv] Sabin to Briggs, May 7, 1921.
[xvi] Briggs to Sabin, May 8, 1921.
[xvii] Sabin to Briggs, May 18, 1921.
[xviii] Briggs to Sabin, June 2, 1921.
[xix] Emily Hale Papers, “Record of Preparatory Work and Teaching of Miss Emily Hale, Assistant-Professor of Spoken English Smith College” (undated) résumé, Folder 1, Biographical Material, 1936–1990; Nancy Wilson Ross, foreword to Nellie C. Cornish, Miss Aunt Nellie: The Autobiography of Nellie C. Cornish, eds. Ellen Van Volkenburg and Edward Nordhoff Beck (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), xii.
[xx] Cornish, Miss Aunt Nellie, 128.
[xxi] Emily Hale Papers, “Record of Preparatory Work.” Hale misspelled the actress’s name as “Ellen Van Volkenburgh Brown”; Ellen Van Volkenburg Browne to “My very dear Miss Hale” (undated), correspondence, 1924–1959 Folder.
[xxii] Cumtux, 1923, Milwaukee-Downer College, Milwaukee-Downer College Archives, Lawrence University.
[i] Emily Hale Letters from T. S. Eliot, December 16, 1935, C0686, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. All subsequent letters from this collection cited by date.
[ii] E. Martin Browne to Emily Hale, November 11, 1966, T. S. Eliot correspondence, MS Am 2244, (1), Houghton Library, Harvard College Library; E. Martin Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). The letter is part of a collection donated by Eleanor Hinkley’s niece, Mrs. Theodore Sturtevant, in 1997.
[iii] Jon Ceander Mitchell, Trans-Atlantic Passages: Philip Hale on the Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1889–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
[iv] T. S. Matthews, Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 140; Robert Crawford, Young Eliot (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015), 189–90; Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: Norton, 1998), 79.
[v] Eliot’s papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library include the program from the December 1, 1913 performance. B MS Am 2560 (folder 103).
[vi] Stunt Show program, Letters1:38; Emily Hale Papers, Smith College Archive, CA-MS-00344, Dramatic Appearances, 1915–1960, Folder 8, Box 840.
[vii] Matthews, Great Tom, 141; Crawford, Young Eliot, 193.
[viii] Gordon, Imperfect Life, 80, 248–49. Gordon cites a letter from Scripps student Laurabel Neville (Hume) that Hale’s “many bookshelves were covered with photographs, some of her appearing in plays in Boston—non-professional productions, she assured us. Evidently her family had not approved of Emily going on the stage at all, but she persisted.”
[ix] Rev. Joseph Bassett, interview by author about Emily Hale and First Church of Chestnut Hill, Peabody, Mass., June 10, 2018.
[x] Hubert Hale Davies, The Mollusc: A New and Original Comedy in Three Acts (London: Heinemann, 1908), 7. https://archive.org/details/TheMollusc/mode/2up. Accessed July 4, 2021.
[xi] Davies, Mollusc, 50, 82. Dr. Rachel Murray of the University of Sheffield explored Eliot’s use of mollusc-like imagery in her paper, “Things That Cling: Marine Attachments in Eliot,” delivered at the 41st Annual Meeting of the International T. S. Eliot Society, October 1–3, 2020.
[xii] Richard W. Hall, “Recollections of the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Historical Society 38 (1959–1960): 57. https://historycambridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Proceedings-Volume-38-1959-1960.pdf. Accessed July 4, 2021.
[xiii] Crawford, Young Eliot, 191.
[xiv] “Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, April 12, 1914, 66; “Present Twelfth Night,” Boston Globe, April 26, 1914, 7.
[xv] “Gives Cousin Kate,” Boston Globe, May 1, 1914, 9.
[xvi] Emily Hale Letters from T. S. Eliot, Narrative Written by Emily Hale, March 1–3, 1965.
[xvii] Letters 1:69–70, 73–74.
[xviii] Patricia J. Fanning, Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 20–21.
[xix] “Mrs. Bumpstead Leigh,” Andover Townsman, December 4, 1914, 5; “Amateurs Score Triumph,” Andover Townsman, December 18, 1914, 5.
[xx] “Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, October 15, 1916, 63. This description comes from a story about the club’s 1916–1917 season, when, the article said, it returned to “an old custom of issuing invitations to desirable members,” which then included Hale.
[xxi] Emily Hale Papers, Dramatic Appearances, 1915–1960 Folder.
[xxii] “Osgood Perkins Is Dead, Show Goes On,” Boston Globe, September 22, 1937, 11.
[xxiii] “Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, May 16, 1915, 60.
[xxiv] “Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, April 27, 1919, 61.