Richard Aldington (1892–1962): poet, critic, translator, biographer, novelist. A friend of Ezra Pound, he was one of the founders of the Imagist movement; a contributor to Des Imagistes (1914); assistant editor of The Egoist. In 1913 he married the American poet H.D., though they were estranged and in due course separated (albeit they did not divorce until 1938). In 1914 he volunteered for WW1, but his enlistment was deferred for medical reasons: he went on active service in June 1916 and was sent to France in December. (TSE replaced him as Literary Editor of The Egoist.) During the war, he rose from the ranks to be an acting captain in the Royal Sussex Regiment. He drew on his experiences in the poems of Images of War (1919) and the novel Death of a Hero (1929). After WW1, he became friends with TSE, working as his assistant on The Criterion and introducing him to Bruce Richmond, editor of the TLS (for which TSE wrote some of his finest essays). From 1919 Aldington himself was a regular reviewer of French literature for the TLS. In 1928 he went to live in France, where, except for a period in the USA (1935–47), he spent the rest of his life. He is best known for his early Imagist poetry and translations (see for example his edition of Selections from Rémy de Gourmont, 1928), for his WW1 novel Death of a Hero (1929), and for the controversial Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry (1955), which is widely held to have damaged his own reputation. In 1931, he published Stepping Heavenward, a lampoon of TSE – who is portrayed as 'Blessed Jeremy Cibber': 'Father Cibber, O.S.B.' – and Vivien ('Adele Palaeologue'). This ended their friendship. His estrangement from Eliot was further publicised in an essay written in the 1930s but published only in 1954, Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot: A Lecture, which takes both poets to task for their putatively plagiaristic poetry. He published further biographies, including a controversial study of his friend D. H. Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius, But … (1950); Complete Poems (1948); and Life for Life's Sake (memoirs, 1941). See also Richard Aldington: An Intimate Portrait, ed. by Alister Kershaw and Frédéric-Jacques Temple (1965), which includes a brief tribute by Eliot (with a comment on the 'cruel' Stepping Heavenward); 'Richard Aldington's Letters to Herbert Read', ed. by David S. Thatcher, The Malahat Review 15 (July 1970), 5–44; Charles Doyle, Richard Aldington: A Biography (1989); Richard Aldington: An Autobiography in Letters, ed. Norman T. Gates (1992); and Richard Aldington & H. D.: Their lives in letters 1918–61, ed. Caroline Zilboorg (2003).
W. H. Auden (1907–73), prolific poet, playwright, librettist, translator, essayist and editor. He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk, and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he co-edited Oxford Poetry (1926, 1927), and where his friend Stephen Spender hand-set about 30 copies of his first book, a pamphlet entitled Poems (1928). After going down from Oxford with a third-class degree in English in 1928, he visited Belgium and then lived for a year in Berlin. He worked as a tutor in London, 1929–30; then as a schoolmaster at Larchfield Academy, Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, 1930–2; followed by the Downs School, Colwall, Herefordshire, 1932–5. Although Eliot turned down his initial submission of a book of poems in 1927, he would presently accept 'Paid on Both Sides: A Charade' for The Criterion; and Eliot went on for the rest of his life to publish all of Auden's books at Faber & Faber: Poems (featuring 'Paid on Both Sides' and thirty short poems, 1930); The Orators (1932); Look, Stranger! (1937); Spain (1936); Another Time (1940); New Year Letter (1941; published in the USA as The Double Man); The Age of Anxiety (1947); For the Time Being (1945); The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1948); Nones (1952); The Shield of Achilles (1955); Homage to Clio (1960); and About the House (1966). Eliot was happy too to publish Auden's play The Dance of Death (1933), which was to be performed by the Group Theatre in London in 1934 and 1935; and three further plays written with Christopher Isherwood: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), which would be performed by the Group Theatre in 1936; The Ascent of F6 (1936); and On the Frontier (1937). In 1935–6 Auden went to work for the General Post Office film unit, writing commentaries for two celebrated documentary films, Coal Face and Night Mail. He collaborated with Louis MacNeice on Letters from Iceland (1937); and with Isherwood again on Journey to a War (1939). His first libretto was Paul Bunyan (performed with music by Benjamin Britten, 1941); and in 1947 he began collaborating with Igor Stravinsky on The Rake's Progress (performed in Venice, 1951); and he later co-wrote two librettos for Hans Werner Henze. Other works include The Oxford Book of Light Verse (1938); The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1951); The Dyer's Hand (1963); and Secondary Worlds (1968). See further Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (1981); Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (1995); and Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999).
Montgomery ('Monty') Belgion (1892–1973), author, was born in Paris of British parents and grew up with a deep feeling for the language and culture of France. In 1915–16 he was editor-in-charge of the European edition of the New York Herald; and for the remainder of WW1 he joined up as a private in the Honourable Artillery Company, 1916–18, and was commissioned in the Dorsetshire Regiment. Between the wars he worked briefly for the Paris review This Quarter and then for newspapers including the Daily Mail, Westminster Gazette and Daily Mirror, and for a while he was an editor for Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York. In WW2 he became a captain in the Royal Engineers, and he spent two years in prison camps in Germany. In 1929 Faber & Faber brought out (on TSE's recommendation) his first book, Our Present Philosophy of Life. Later writings include Reading for Profit (1945) and booklets on H. G. Wells and David Hume.
Julian Benda (1867–1956): journalist, political-social philosopher, and critic. Born into a Jewish family in Paris, he studied history at the Sorbonne, and was recognised as a noted essayist and 'intellectuel', writing for a variety of periodicals including Revue Blanche, Nouvelle Revue Française, Mercure de France, Divan and Le Figaro. A passionate upholder of the Graeco-Roman ideal of rational order and disinterestedness – Eliot said Benda's 'brand of classicism is just as romantic as anyone else's' – his works include Dialogues à Byzance (1900), complete with pro-Dreyfus pieces; Le Bergsonisme: ou, Une Philosophie de la mobilité (1912); Belphégor: Essai sur l'esthétique de la présente société française (1918); and Le Trahison des clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals, 1927) – trans. by Richard Aldington in 1928. See further Ray Nichols, Treason, Tradition, and the Intellectual: Julian Benda and Political Discourse (1978).
Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), author and journalist (and son of a weaver and tailor who eventually qualified and practised as a solicitor), grew up among 'the five towns' of the Potteries and began work at the age of 16 in a solicitor's office; but he swiftly made a name for himself as journalist and prolific author. His best-selling novels include A Man from the North (1898), Anna of the Five Towns (1902), Whom God hath Joined (1906), and The Old Wives' Tale (1908) – the first book in the Clayhanger trilogy. His plays, including The Great Adventure (1913), were just as successful, with naturalistic and effective dialogue; and it was in his capacity as a capable dramatist that TSE consulted him in the early 1920s – ironically when Eliot was attempting to write a determinedly (and ultimately uncompleted) experimental play, Sweeney Agonistes. It says much for Bennett that he took TSE seriously and gave him advice that was valued – though Bennett was not keen on The Criterion. See The Journals of Arnold Bennett, ed. by N. Flowers (3 vols, 1932–5); and Margaret Drabble, Arnold Bennett: A Biography (1974).
Marguerite Caetani, née Chapin (1880–1963) – born in New London, Connecticut, she was half-sister to Mrs Katherine Biddle, and a cousin of TSE – was married in 1911 to the composer Roffredo Caetani, 17th Duke of Sermoneta and Prince di Bassiano (a godson of Liszt), whose ancestors included two Popes (one of whom had the distinction of being put in Hell by Dante). A patron of the arts, she founded in Paris the review Commerce – the title being taken from a line in St-John Perse's Anabase ('ce pur commerce de mon âme') – which ran from 1924 to 1932 (see Sophie Levie, La rivista Commerce e il ruolo di Marguerite Caetani nella letteratura europea 1924–1932 [Rome: Fondazione Camillo Caetani, 1985]); and then, in Rome, Botteghe oscure, 1949–60, a biannual review featuring poetry and fiction from many nations – England, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, USA – with contributions published in their original languages. Contributors included André Malraux, Albert Camus, Paul Valéry, Ignazio Silone, Robert Graves, Archibald MacLeish, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore.
Richard Cobden-Sanderson (1884–1964), printer and publisher, was the son of the bookbinder and printer, T. J. Cobden Sanderson (1840– 1922), who was Bertrand Russell's godfather; grandson of the politician and economist Richard Cobden (1804–65). He launched his publishing business in 1919 and was publisher of The Criterion from its first number in Oct. 1922 until it was taken over by Faber & Gwyer in 1925. He also published three books with introductions by TSE: Le Serpent by Paul Valéry (1924), Charlotte Eliot's Savanarola (1926), and Harold Monro's Collected Poems (1933). In addition, his firm produced books by Edmund Blunden and David Gascoyne, editions of Shelley, and volumes illustrated by Rex Whistler. He became a dependable friend as well as a colleague of TSE's. His wife was Gwladys (Sally) Cobden-Sanderson.
R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), philosopher and historian; Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford; later Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, Magdalen College. On 8 Mar. 1938 Collingwood would send TSE a copy of The Principles of Art (1938) – which declared: 'In literature, those who chiefly matter have made the choice, and made it rightly. The credit for this belongs in the main to one great poet, who has set the example by taking as his theme in a long series of poems a subject that interests every one, the decay of our civilisation' – with the personal comment: 'in a sense the book is dedicated to you; the concluding pages are all about The Waste Land, regarded … as a demonstration of what poetry has got to be if my aesthetic theory is to be true! I hope you will be able to forgive me for treating you as a corpus vile, and will understand that it is the highest compliment a poor devil of a philosopher has it in his power to pay you.' (TSE wrote to Thomas Stauffer, 17 Aug. 1944: 'Aesthetics was never my strong suit. In fact, it is one department of philosophy which I always shied away from, even in the days when I thought I was going to be a philosopher, and that is a long time ago. I think that instinct told me that the less I thought about general aesthetic theory the better for me. (Incidentally, do you know Collingwood's book In Praise of Art? [The Principles of Art] To a plain literary practitioner like myself, who, as F. H. Bradley said of himself, has no capacity for the abstruse, Collingwood seems very good).') Collingwood's other works include Speculum Mentis, or, The Map of Knowledge (1924), Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (1925), and The Idea of History (1945). See Fred Inglis, History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood (2009).
John Cournos (1881–1966) – Johann Gregorievich Korshune – naturalised American writer of Russian birth (his Jewish parents fled Russia when he was 10), worked as a journalist on the Philadelphia Record and was first noted in England as an Imagist poet; he became better known as novelist, essayist and translator. After living in England in the 1910s and 1920s, he emigrated to the USA. An unhappy love affair in 1922–3 with Dorothy L. Sayers was fictionalised by her in Strong Poison (1930), and by him in The Devil is an English Gentleman (1932). His other publications include London Under the Bolsheviks (1919), In Exile (1923), Miranda Masters (a roman à clef about the imbroglio between himself, the poet H.D., and Richard Aldington, 1926), and Autobiography (1935).
Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956), German scholar of philology and Romance literature. Scion of a family of scholars, he studied philology and philosophy at Strasbourg, Berlin, and Heidelberg, and taught in turn at Marburg, Heidelberg, and Bonn. Author of Die Französische Kultur (1931; The Civilization of France, trans. Olive Wyon, 1932); his most substantial work was Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (1948; trans. by Willard R. Trask as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1953), a study of Medieval Latin literature and its fructifying influence upon the literatures of modern Europe. In a letter to Max Rychner (24 Oct. 1955) Eliot saluted Curtius on his seventieth birthday by saying that even though he had met him perhaps no more than twice in 35 years, he yet counted him 'among my old friends', and owed him 'a great debt': 'I have … my own personal debt of gratitude to acknowledge to Curtius, for translating, and introducing, The Waste Land. Curtius was also, I think, the first critic in Germany to recognise the importance of James Joyce. And when it is a question of other writers than myself, and especially when we consider his essays on French contemporaries, and his Balzac, and his Proust, I am at liberty to praise Curtius as a critic … [O]nly a critic of scholarship, discrimination and intellect could perform the services that Curtius has performed. For his critical studies are contributions to the study of the authors criticised, which must be reckoned with by those authors' compatriots. We cannot determine the true status and significance of the significant writers in our own language, without the aid of foreign critics with a European point of view. For it is only such critics who can tell us, whether an author is of European importance. And of such critics in our own time, Curtius is one of the most illustrious.' Eliot praised too 'that masterly work, Europäische Litteratur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, on which he had been at work during the years when freedom of speech and freedom of travel were suspended. It bears testimony to his integrity and indomitable spirit … Curtius deserves, in his life and in his work, the gratitude and admiration of his fellow writers of every European nation' (Eliot's letter is printed in full in 'Brief über Ernst Robert Curtius', in Freundesgabe für Ernst Robert Curtis zum 14. April 1956 [Bern, 1956], 25–7.) See too Peter Godman, 'T. S. Eliot and E. R. Curtius: A European dialogue', Liber: A European Review of Books, 1: 1 (Oct. 1989), 5, 7; and J. H. Copley, '"The Politics of Friendship": T. S. Eliot in Germany Through E. R. Curtius's Looking Glass', in The International Reception of T. S. Eliot, ed. Elisabeth Däumer and Shyamal Bagchee (2007), 243–67.
Martin D'Arcy (1888–1976), Jesuit priest and theologian, entered the Novitiate in 1906, took a first in Literae humaniores at Pope's Hall – the Jesuit private hall of Oxford University – and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1921. After teaching at Stonyhurst College, in 1925 he undertook doctoral research, first at the Gregorian University in Rome, then at the Jesuit House at Farm Street, London. In 1927 he returned to Campion Hall (successor to Pope's Hall), where he lectured and tutored in philosophy at the university. He was Rector and Master of Campion Hall, 1933–45; and Provincial of the British Province of the Jesuits in London, 1945–50. Charismatic and highly influential as a lecturer, and as an apologist for Roman Catholicism (his prominent converts included Evelyn Waugh), he also wrote studies including The Nature of Belief (1931) and The Mind and Heart of Love (1945). Louis MacNeice, in The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography (1965), wrote of Fr D'Arcy: 'he alone among Oxford dons seemed to me to have the glamour that medieval students looked for in their masters. Intellect incarnate in a beautiful head, wavy grey hair and delicate features; a hawk's eyes.' Lesley Higgins notes: 'Five of his books were reviewed in The Criterion, some by Eliot himself; his twenty-two reviews and articles in the latter certainly qualify him as part of what Eliot termed the journal's "definite … [and] comprehensive constellation of contributors".' See further H. J. A. Sire, Father Martin D'Arcy: Philosopher of Christian Love (1997); Richard Harp, 'A conjuror at the Xmas party', TLS, 11 Dec. 2009, 13–15.
Bonamy Dobrée (1891–1974), scholar, editor and critic, was to be Professor of English Literature at Leeds University, 1936–55. After service in the army during WW1 (he was twice mentioned in despatches and attained the rank of major), he read English at Christ's College, Cambridge, and taught in London and as a professor of English at the Egyptian University, Cairo, 1925–9. His works include Restoration Comedy (1924), Essays in Biography (1925), Restoration Tragedy, 1660–1720 (1929), Alexander Pope (1951), and critical editions and anthologies. From 1921 to 1925 Dobrée and his wife Valentine resided at Larrau, a village in the Pyrenees, where he worked as an independent scholar. He was one of TSE's most constant correspondents. On 8 Sept. 1938, TSE would write to George Every SSM on the subject of the projected 'Moot': 'I think [Dobrée] would be worth having … He has his nose to the grindstone of the provincial university machine … but he is not without perception of the futilities of contemporary education. His mental formation is Liberal, but he has the rare advantage of being a man of breeding, so that his instincts with regard, for instance, to society, the community and the land, are likely to be right. He is also a person of strong, and I imagine hereditary, public spirit.' On 23 Feb. 1963, TSE urged his merits as future editor of Kipling's stories: 'He is far and away the best authority on Kipling … I have often discussed Kipling with him, and know that we see eye to eye about the stories. As for Dobrée's general literary achievements, they are very high indeed: his published work is not only very scholarly, but of the highest critical standing, and he writes well … If this job is ever done – and I should like to see it done during my lifetime – Dobrée is the man to do it.' See also Jason Harding, The 'Criterion': Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (2002).
Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot (1843–1929), the poet's mother, was born on 22 October in Baltimore, Maryland, the second child and second daughter of Thomas Stearns (1811–96) and Charlotte Blood Stearns (1818–93). She went first to private schools in Boston and Sandwich, followed by three years at the State Normal School, Framingham, Mass., from which she graduated in 1862. After teaching for a while at private schools in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she spent two years with a Quaker family in Coatesville, Pa. She then taught at Antioch College, Ohio, 1865–7; at her Framingham School; and at St Louis Normal School. It was while she was at the last post that she met Henry Ware Eliot, entrepreneur, whom she married on 27 October 1868. She was Secretary of the Mission Free School of the Church of the Messiah for many years. As her youngest son was growing up, she became more thoroughly involved in social work through the Humanity Club of St Louis, whose members were disturbed by knowing that young offenders awaiting trial were being held for long periods with adults. In 1899, a committee of two was appointed, with Mrs Eliot as chairman, to bring about reform. It was in large part due to her campaigning and persistence over several years that the Probation Law 1901 was approved; and in 1903, by mandate of the Juvenile Court Law, a juvenile court was established with its own probation officer and a separate place of detention. As a girl, Charlotte had nursed literary ambitions, and throughout her life wrote poems, some of which (such as 'Easter Songs' and 'Poems on the Apostles') were printed in the Christian Register. In 1904 she published William Greenleaf Eliot: Minister, Educator, Philanthropist, a memoir of her beloved father-in-law (TSE's grandfather); and it came as a great joy to her when TSE arranged for the publication of her Savanarola: A Dramatic Poem, with an introduction by himself (London, 1926). When she was shown the issue of Smith Academy Record containing TSE's 'A Lyric' (1905), she said (as TSE would remember) 'that she thought it better than anything in verse she had ever written'. TSE reflected further on that fine declaration: 'I knew what her verse meant to her. We did not discuss the matter further.' Inspired by a keen ethic of public service, she was a member of both the Wednesday Club of St Louis and the Missouri Society of the Colonial Dames of America, serving successively as Secretary, Vice-President, and President. She chaired a committee to award a Washington University scholarship that required the beneficiary to do a certain amount of patriotic work; and in 1917–18 she did further service as chair of the War Work committee of the Colonial Dames. After the death of her husband in January 1919, she moved home to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Henry Ware Eliot, Jr (1879–1947), TSE's elder brother, went to school at Smith Academy, and then passed two years at Washington University, St Louis, before progressing to Harvard. At Harvard, he displayed a gift for light verse in Harvard Celebrities (Cambridge, Mass., 1901), illustrated with 'Caricatures and Decorative Drawings' by two fellow undergraduates. After graduating, he spent a year at Law School, but subsequently followed a career in printing, publishing and advertising. He attained a partnership in Husband & Thomas (later the Buchen Company), a Chicago advertising agency, from 1917 to 1929, during which time he gave financial assistance to TSE and regularly advised him on investments. He accompanied their mother on her visit to London in the summer of 1921, his first trip away from the USA. In February 1926, he married Theresa Anne Garrett (1884–1981), and later the same year the couple went on holiday to Italy along with TSE and Vivien. He was one of TSE's most regular and trusted correspondents. It was not until late in life that he found his true calling, as a Research Fellow in Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard: see his posthumous publication Excavations in Mesopotamia and Western Iran, Sites of 4000 to 500 B.C. (Harvard University: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1950). In 1932 he published a detective novel, The Rumble Murders, under the pseudonym Mason Deal. He was instrumental in building up the T. S. Eliot collection at Eliot House (Houghton Library). Of slighter build than his brother – who remarked upon his 'Fred Astaire figure' – Henry suffered from deafness owing to scarlet fever as a child, and this may have contributed to his diffidence. Unselfishly devoted to TSE, whose growing up he movingly recorded with his camera, Henry took him to his first Broadway musical, The Merry Widow, which remained a favourite. It was with his brother in mind that TSE wrote: 'The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing' ('Preludes' IV).
Vivien Eliot, née Haigh-Wood (1888–1947). Born in Bury, Lancashire, on 28 May 1888, 'Vivy' was brought up in Hampstead from the age of 3. After meeting TSE in company with Scofield Thayer in Oxford early in 1915, she and TSE hastened to be married just a few weeks later, on 26 June 1915. (TSE, who was lodging at 35 Greek Street, Soho, London, was recorded in the marriage certificate as 'of no occupation'.) The marriage was not a happy one for either of them. She developed close friendships with Mary Hutchinson, Ottoline Morrell, and others in TSE's circle. Despite chronic personal and medical difficulties, they remained together until 1933, when TSE resolved to separate from her during his visit to America. She was never to be reconciled to the separation, became increasingly ill, and in 1938 was confined to a psychiatric hospital, where she died (of 'syncope' and 'cardiovascular degeneration') on 22 January 1947. She is the dedicatee of Ash-Wednesday (1930). She published sketches in The Criterion (under various pseudonyms with the initials 'F. M.'), and collaborated on The Criterion and other works. See Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot (2001).
Geoffrey Faber (1889–1961), publisher and poet, was educated at Malvern College and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a first in Literae humaniores (1912). He was called to the bar by the Inner Temple (1921), though he was never to practise law. In 1919 he was elected a prize fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, which he went on to serve in the capacity of estates bursar, 1923–51. Before WW1 – in which he served with the London Regiment (Post Office Rifles), seeing action in France and Belgium – he spent 18 months as assistant to Humphrey Milford, publisher of Oxford University Press. After the war he spent three years working for Strong & Co. Ltd., brewers (there was a family connection), before going in for publishing on a full-time basis by joining forces with his All Souls colleague Maurice Gwyer and his wife, Lady Alsina Gwyer, who were trying to run a specialised imprint called the Scientific Press that Lady Gwyer had inherited from her father, Sir Henry Burdett: its weekly journal, the Nursing Mirror, was their most successful output. Following protractedly difficult negotiations, in 1925 Faber became chair of their restructured general publishing house which was provisionally styled Faber & Gwyer. After being introduced by Charles Whibley to T. S. Eliot, Faber was so impressed by the personality and aptitude of the 37-year-old American that he chose both to take on the running of The Criterion and to appoint Eliot to the board of his company (Eliot's Poems 1909–1925 was one of the first books to be put out by the new imprint, and its first best-seller), which was relocated from Southampton Row to 24 Russell Square. By 1929 both the Gwyers and the Nursing Mirror were disposed of to advantage, and the firm took final shape as Faber & Faber, with Richard de la Mare and two additional Americans, Frank Morley and Morley Kennerley, joining the board. Faber chaired the Publishers' Association, 1939–41 – campaigning successfully for the repeal of a wartime tax on books – and helping to set up the National Book League. He was knighted in 1954, and gave up the chairmanship of Faber & Faber in 1960. His publications as poet included The Buried Stream (1941) and Twelve Years (posthumously published, 1962),, and his works of non-fiction were Oxford Apostles (1933) and Jowett (1957), as well as an edition of the works of John Gay (1926). In 1920 he married Enid Richards, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. He died at his home in 1961.
John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950), American poet and critic, scion of a wealthy Southern family, dropped out of Harvard in 1907 (his father's death having secured him temporarily independent means) and lived for many years in Europe, principally in London; a friend of Ezra Pound, he became one of the mainstays of Imagism and published much original poetry. In later years he returned to his native Arkansas and espoused Agrarian values. His Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. Fletcher wrote of TSE in Life Is My Song: The Autobiography of John Gould Fletcher (1937): 'As an editor, I found him to be practically ideal, willing for opinions to be mooted that ran contrary to his own avowed toryism, so long as those opinions were not merely emotional prejudices, but were backed up by something resembling intellectual judgment' (308). See also Fletcher, Life for Life's Sake (1941); Selected Letters of John Gould Fletcher, ed. Leighton Rudolph, Lucas Carpenter, Ethel C. Simpson (1996) – 'One of my difficulties with Eliot, whom I knew fairly well for nearly 15 years, was his intellectual snobbery' – Lucas Carpenter, John Gould Fletcher and Southern Modernism (1990); and Ben F. Johnson III, Fierce Solitude: A Life of John Gould Fletcher (1994).
Frank Stuart ('F. S.') Flint (1885–1960), English poet and translator, and civil servant, grew up in terrible poverty – 'gutter-born and gutter-bred', he would say – and left school at 13. But he set about to educate himself in European languages and literature (he had a deep appreciation of the French Symbolists and of Rimbaud), as well as in history and philosophy. In 1908 he started writing articles and reviews for the New Age, then for the Egoist and for Poetry (ed. Harriet Monroe). Quickly gaining in reputation and authority (especially on French literature – his influential piece on 'Contemporary French Poetry' appeared in Harold Monro's Poetry Review in 1912) – he soon became associated with T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and Hilda Doolittle; and he contributed poems to the English Review (ed. Ford Madox Hueffer) and to Pound's anthology Des Imagistes (1914). In 1920 he published Otherworld Cadences (The Poetry Bookshop); and with TSE and Aldous Huxley he was one of the contributors to Three Critical Essays on Modern English Poetry, in Chapbook II: 9 (March 1920). Between 1909 and 1920 he published three volumes of poetry, though his work as essayist, reviewer, and translator was the more appreciated: he became a regular translator and reviewer for The Criterion from the 1920s – and a member of the inner circle gathered round TSE – even while continuing to work in the statistics division of the Ministry of Labour (where he was Chief of the Overseas Section) until retiring in 1951. See also The Fourth Imagist: Selected Poems of F. S. Flint, ed. Michael Copp (2007).
E. M. Forster (1879–1970), novelist and essayist, was educated at King's College, Cambridge, where he gained a second in the classics tripos (and where he was elected to the exclusive Conversazione Society, the inner circle of the Apostles). Though intimately associated with the Bloomsbury group in London, where his circle of friends and acquaintances came to include Edward Marsh, Edward Garnett, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, he derived much from visits to Italy, Greece, Egypt, and India – where he worked for a while as private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas: that experience brought about one of his most acclaimed novels, A Passage to India (1924), which sold around one million copies during his lifetime. His other celebrated novels include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and the posthumous Maurice (1971, written 1910–13), a work that addressed his homosexuality. He gave the Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1927 – in succession to TSE – which were published as Aspects of the Novel (1927). He turned down a knighthood, but in 1953 he was appointed a Companion of Honour; and he received the OM in 1969. See also Forster, 'Mr Eliot and His Difficulties', Life and Letters, 2: 13 (June 1929), 417–25; P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster (2 vols, 1977, 1978); Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, ed. by Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (2 vols, 1983–5); and Nicola Beauman, Morgan: A Biography of E. M. Forster (1993).
H. J. C. Grierson (1866–1960): Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, University of Edinburgh, 1915–35; knighted in 1936; celebrated for his edition of The Poems of John Donne (2 vols, 1912) and Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921) – which TSE reviewed in the TLS, 21 Oct. 1921. Cairns Craig, in 'The Last Romantics: How the Scholarship of Herbert Grierson Influenced Modernist Poetry' (TLS, 15 Jan. 2010, 14–15), argues that 'The Waste Land is saturated with echoes of Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems. When Eliot sent a copy of his Collected Poems to Grierson, it was inscribed "to whom all English men of letters are indebted".' (Letty Grierson remembers a slightly different wording, 'to whom all poets of today are indebted': noted in the Grierson catalogue issued by James Fergusson Books & Manuscripts 2010.) TSE contributed to Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (1938).
Maurice Haigh-Wood (1896–1980): TSE's brother-in-law. He was six years younger than his sister Vivien, and after attending Ovingdean prep school and Malvern School, trained at Sandhurst Military Academy, before receiving his commission on 11 May 1915 as a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion, the Manchester Regiment. He served in the infantry for the war, and on regular visits home gave TSE his closest contact with the nightmare of life and death in the trenches. After the war, he found it difficult to get himself established, but became a stockbroker, and he remained friendly with, and respectful towards, TSE even after his separation from Vivien in 1933. In 1930 he married a 25-year-old American dancer, Ahmé Hoagland, and they had two children.
John Hayward (1905–65), editor, critic, and anthologist, read modern languages at King's College, Cambridge. Despite the early onset of muscular dystrophy, he became a prolific and eminent critic and editor, bringing out in quick succession editions of the works of Rochester, Saint-Évremond, Jonathan Swift, Robert Herrick and Samuel Johnson. Other publications included Complete Poems and Selected Prose of John Donne (1929), Donne (1950), T. S. Eliot: Selected Prose (1953), The Penguin Book of English Verse (1958), and The Oxford Book of Nineteenth Century English Verse (1964). Celebrated as the learned and acerbic editor of The Book Collector, he was made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1952, a CBE in 1953. Writers including Graham Greene and Stevie Smith valued his editorial counsel; and Paul Valéry invited him to translate his comedy Mon Faust. Hayward advised TSE on various essays, poems, and plays including The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk, and most helpfully of all on Four Quartets. See also Helen Gardner, The Composition of "Four Quartets" (1978).
When it was proposed during WW2 by Robert Nichols that Hayward might be nominated for the Oxford Chair of Poetry, TSE wrote on 27 July 1944: 'I would certainly back up any testimony for John to the best of my command of the resources of the language; but I am wondering whether, at this stage, it would not be best for you to have a talk to John and sound him. I believe that such a suggestion would come as a surprise to him; he might need winning over to it; or he might have positive objections and difficulties beyond any of which you or I are aware … I suppose John's best official credentials are his "Nonesuch" editions of Donne and Swift, and the work he has been engaged upon, off and on, for some years, on Dryden, for the Oxford Press. I don't think he has done much formal lecturing; but I believe he has sometimes addressed undergraduate societies, as well as talked regularly to Mrs Whatshername's young ladies, during these last years in Cambridge. I think he stands well as an editor of texts, and therefore as an English scholar … [M]y own preference had fallen upon Dobrée, among the possibles, as John had not occurred to my mind …'
Mary Hutchinson, née Barnes (1889–1977), a half-cousin of Lytton Strachey, married St John ('Jack') Hutchinson in 1910. A prominent Bloomsbury hostess, she was for several years the acknowledged mistress of the art critic, Clive Bell, and became a close, supportive friend of TSE and VHE. TSE published one of her stories ('War') in The Egoist, and she later brought out a book of sketches, Fugitive Pieces (1927), under the imprint of the Hogarth Press. She wrote a short unpublished memoir of TSE (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin). See David Bradshaw, '"Those Extraordinary Parakeets": Clive Bell and Mary Hutchinson', The Charleston Magazine, in two parts: 16 (Autumn/Winter 1997), 5–12; 17 (Spring/Summer 1998), 5–11.
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963): novelist, poet and essayist, whose early novels Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923) were successful satires of post-war English culture. While teaching at Eton, Aldous told his brother Julian in December 1916 that he 'ought to read' Eliot's 'things', which are 'all the more remarkable when one knows the man, ordinarily just an Europeanized American, overwhelmingly cultured, talking about French literature in the most uninspired fashion imaginable'. For his part, Eliot thought Huxley's early poems fell too much under the spell of Laforgue (and of his own poetry), but Huxley went on to become, not only a popular novelist, but, as the author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, an influential intellectual figure. See Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual (2002); Aldous Huxley, Selected Letters, ed. James Sexton (2007).
Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), painter, novelist, philosopher, critic, was one of the major modernist writers. A friend of Ezra Pound, Lewis was the leading artist associated with Vorticism, and editor of BLAST, the movement's journal (1914–15), in which TSE's 'Preludes' and 'Rhapsody on a Windy night' appeared (July 1915). Lewis served as a bombardier and war-artist on the Western Front, 1916–18, and wrote memorable accounts of the period in his memoir Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), including brilliant portraits of TSE, Pound, and Joyce, and war-time and modernist London. TSE reviewed Lewis's first novel Tarr (1918) in The Egoist 5: 8 (Sept. 1918), describing him as 'the most fascinating personality of our time', in whose work 'we recognize the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave-man' (106). In turn, Lewis considered Eliot 'the most interesting man in London society' (7 Nov. 1918). TSE, who thought Lewis's work 'so imaginative and visually concrete' (letter to Philip Lane, 4 Dec. 1934), published pieces by him in the Criterion and, even though Lewis was notoriously cantankerous, kept up a lifetime's friendship with him. Lewis did a number of drawings of TSE, one of which hung in his flat – reproduced in vol. 2 of Letters – and his best-known portrait of him (rejected by the Royal Academy) is now in Durban. On Lewis's death, TSE wrote 'The Importance of Wyndham Lewis' in The Sunday Times (10 Mar. 1957), and a memoir in Hudson Review X: 2 (Summer 1957): 'He was … a highly strung, nervous man, who was conscious of his own abilities, and sensitive to slight or neglect … He was independent, outspoken, and difficult. Temperament and circumstances combined to make him a great satirist … I remember Lewis, at the time when I first knew him, and for some years thereafter, as incomparably witty and amusing in company …' TSE wrote too, for the magazine Spectrum: 'Wyndham Lewis was in my opinion one of the few men of letters of my generation whom I should call, without qualification, men of genius. It is for other painters and draughtsmen to praise his genius as a painter and draughtsman. I would only like to repeat what I have said several times before, that Lewis was the most prominent and versatile prose-writer of my time. I would also like to pay a special tribute to the work he did after he became blind. In Self-Condemned he seems to have written a novel greater than Tarr or The Revenge for Love; in Monstre Gai a sequel to The Childermass more remarkable than The Childermass itself. It is a great artist and one of the most intelligent men of my age who is dead' (letter to Hugh Kenner, 27 Mar 1957). See The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (1963); Paul O'Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (2000).
Thomas McGreevy (1893–1967) – the family name was 'McGreevy', but by the 1930s he would assume the more Irish spelling 'MacGreevy' – Kerry-born poet, literary and art critic, and arts administrator, worked for the Irish Land Commission before serving in WW1 as a second lieutenant in the British Royal Field Artillery: he fought at Ypres and the Somme, and was twice wounded. After reading History and Political Science at Trinity College, Dublin, he moved in 1925 to London, where he met TSE and started to write for the Criterion, TLS (with an introduction from TSE), and Nation & Athenaeum. His poem 'Dysert' appeared in NC 4 (Jan. 1926) under the pseudonym 'L. St. Senan' (the title was later changed to 'Homage to Jack Yeats'). In 1927 he took up teaching English at the École Normale Supérieur in Paris, where he became friends with Beckett and Joyce (to whom he had been introduced in 1924) and with Richard Aldington. (His promotional essay on Joyce's incipient Finnegans Wake – 'The Catholic Element in Work in Progress' – appeared in Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress in 1929.) In addition, he journeyed through Italy with W. B. Yeats. Back in London in 1933, he lectured at the National Gallery and wrote for The Studio. Ultimately he was appointed Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, 1950–63. He was made Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, 1948; Cavaliere Ufficiale al merito della Repubblica Italiana, 1955; and Officier de la Légion d'Honneur, 1962. In 1929 he published a translation of Paul Valéry's Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci); and in 1931, two short monographs, T. S. Eliot: A Study and Richard Aldington: An Englishman; and his Poems would appear in 1934. His publications on art include Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and an Interpretation (1945) and Nicolas Poussin (1960). See also The Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy: An Annotated Edition, ed. Susan Schreibman (Dublin, 1991).
Frederic Manning (1882–1935): Australian writer who settled in 1903 in England, where he came to know artists and writers including Max Beerbohm, William Rothenstein, Richard Aldington, and Ezra Pound (the latter would compliment him as 'the first licherary ComPanionship in Eng/ of Ez'); author of Scenes and Portraits (1909; 2nd edn, revised and enlarged, 1930). Despite being an asthmatic, he served in the ranks (Shropshire Light Infantry) in WW1, being involved for four months in heavy fighting on the Somme: this experience brought about his greatest achievement, a novel about the Western Front, The Middle Parts of Fortune (privately printed, 1929; standard text, 1977; expurgated as Her Privates We, credited pseudonymously to 'Private 19022', 1930; republished in full, with intro. by William Boyd, 1999) – 'the best book to come out of the First World War', Eliot is said to have said of it. In a letter to Aldington (6 July 1921), Eliot described Manning as 'undoubtedly one of the very best prose writers we have and he wrote of him in a later year: 'I did not know him well myself, though I have met him – I think directly after the first World War – and I have a precious copy which he gave me of Her Privates We and later I went to his funeral in Kensal Green … I remember him as a very careful and meticulous letter writer – one of few people I knew who put the first word of the next page at the bottom of every page of their letter' (letter to L. T. Hergenhan, 26 Oct. 1962). See Verna Coleman, The Last Exquisite: A Portrait of Frederic Manning (1990).
Henri Massis (1886–1970), right-wing Roman Catholic critic: contributor to L'Action Française; co-founder and editor of La Revue Universelle. Closely associated with Charles Maurras, his writings include Jugements (2 vols, 1924), Jacques Rivière (1925), and La Défense de l'Occident (1928). A defender of Mussolini and Salazar, his later works include Chefs: Les Dictateurs et nous (1939) and Maurras et notre temps (2 vols, 1951).
On 1 Nov. 1945 TSE wrote the following testimony: 'I, Thomas Stearns Eliot, British subject, of 24 Russell Square, London, W.C.1., England, doctor honoris causa of the Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Leeds, Bristol, Columbia, Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, a member of the board of directors of the publishing house of Faber & Faber, Ltd., London, testify that I have known Monsieur Henri Massis for over twenty years. The firm of publishers of which I am a director published an English translation of his Défense de l'Occident; and M. Massis was a contributor to a quarterly review, The Criterion, of which I was the editor. I saw M. Massis whenever I visited Paris, and when he visited London. I also received regularly La Revue Universelle of which on the death of Jacques Bainville he became the editor.
'The intellectual bond between myself and M. Massis was the common concern for the civilisation of Western Europe, the apprehension of the Germanic danger, and a similar diagnosis of its nature. Germany owed her highest achievement of culture to her allegiance to western civilisation; the future of Europe depended on whether Germany affirmed this allegiance, or whether she abandoned herself to her primitive instincts, seeking barbaric dominion in cultural isolation. After the rise of Hitler it was evident that Germany had taken the wrong course; that Germany was no longer one of the western peoples and that she had become a menace against which Europe should prepare herself. Such were my views, and such, I am sure, were the views of M. Massis, as his writings show. We were also in accord in attaching great importance to the development of the closest possible relations in every way, between France and England.
'My conversations with M. Massis, as well as his writings, left me with the strongest impression that he was not only a man of clear vision in these matters, but also a patriot of integrity and probity, who would never hesitate to sacrifice his own interests to those of his country. I should always have said that the love of France was one of his most conspicuous characteristics. And I cannot believe that so passionate a nationalist can be suspected seriously of having used his editorship of La Revue Universelle in order to ensure anything but the consolidation of an intellectual resistance to the plans of Germany for the subordination of his country.'
Charles Maurras (1868–1952): French poet, critic, political philosopher and polemical journalist; founding editor and moving spirit of the monarchist paper, L'Action Française (1908–44) – which was ultimately to support Pétain and Vichy during WW2. TSE was to write of Maurras, in a letter to Vernon Watkins dated 10 Apr. 1946: 'He was condemned as a collaborator and is in prison for the rest of his life unless he is later released on compassionate grounds. Maurras was one of those whose collaboration, if it can be called that, was the result of mistaken judgement and certainly not unpatriotic or self-interested motives.' Building on 'three traditions' – classicism, Catholicism, monarchism – Maurras's ideology was to become increasingly, intransigently, right-wing, authoritarian and anti-democratic. In 1925 TSE had planned to write a book about Maurras; and he later wrote 'The Action Française, M. Maurras and Mr. Ward', MC. 7 (March 1928). TSE said he had been 'a reader of the work of M. Maurras for eighteen years', and, far from 'drawing him away from' Christianity – during 1926 Maurras was even condemned by the Pope, with five of his books being placed on the Index – it had had the opposite effect. (Paul Elmer More wrote to Austin Warren on 11 Aug. 1929, of Eliot: 'some time between The Waste Land and For Lancelot Andrewes he underwent a kind of conversion, due largely I believe to the influence of Maurras and the Action Française' – quoted in Arthur Hazard Dakin, Paul Elmer More [Princeton, 1960], 269. However, Eliot would write this comment in the margin of his copy of Dakin's book on More: 'Hardly possible. But Maurras convinced me, as he convinced my friend Massis, of the social importance of the Church. But there is a gap here which Maurras could not bridge.') In a later essay, TSE cited Léon Daudet, Whibley, and Maurras as the 'three best writers of invective of their time' (SE, 499). Eliot would ultimately write of Maurras to William Force Stead, on 19 Mar. 1954: 'I am a disciple of Charles Maurras only in certain respects and with critical selection. I do owe Maurras a good deal, and retain my admiration for him, but I think he had serious errors of political judgment – in fact, he should have confined himself, I think, to the philosophy of politics, and never have engaged in political agitation at all. In that, however, I may be wrong – one never knows what things would have been like, had they been different.' See further James Torrens, SJ, 'Charles Maurras and Eliot's "New Life"', PMLA 89: 2 (Mar. 1974), 312–22.
Jean de Menasce (1902–73), theologian and orientalist (his writings include studies in Judaism, Zionism, and Hasidism), was born in Alexandria into an aristocratic Jewish Egyptian family and educated in Alexandria, at Balliol College, Oxford (where he was contemporary with Graham Greene and took his BA in 1924), and at the Sorbonne (Licence es-Lettres). In Paris, he was associated with the magazines Commerce and L'Esprit, and he translated several of TSE's poems for French publication: his translation of The Waste Land was marked 'revue et approuvée par l'auteur'. He became a Catholic convert in 1926, was ordained in 1935 a Dominican priest – Father Pierre de Menasce – and went on to be Professor of the History of Religion at the University of Fribourg, 1938– 48; Professor and Director of Studies, specialising in Ancient Iranian Religions, at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. Eliot came to consider him 'the only really first-rate French translator I have ever had' (letter to Kathleen Raine, 17 May 1944).
Harold Monro (1879–1932): poet, editor, publisher, and bookseller. In 1913 he founded the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street, London, where poets would meet and give readings and lectures. In 1912 he briefly edited The Poetry Review for the Poetry Society; then his own periodicals, Poetry and Drama, 1913–15, and The Chapbook (originally The Monthly Chapbook), 1919–25. From the Poetry Bookshop, Monro would put out a remarkable mix of publications including the five volumes of Georgian Poetry, ed. by Edward Marsh (1872–1953), between 1912 and 1922 (popular anthologies which sold in the region of 15,000 copies), the English edition of Des Imagistes, and the first volumes by writers including Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, and Robert Graves, along with some of his own collections including Children of Love (1915) and Strange Meetings (1917). TSE was to accept The Winter Solstice for publication by Faber & Gwyer as no. 13 of the Ariel Poems. Though a homosexual, Monro was to marry the sister of a friend, 1903–16; and in 1920 he wed Alida Klemantaski (daughter of a Polish-Jewish trader), with whom he never cohabited but who was ever loving and supportive to him: both of them endeared themselves to Eliot, who would occasionally use the premises of the Poetry Bookshop for meetings of contributors to The Criterion. After Monro's death, TSE wrote a critical note for The Collected Poems of Harold Monro, ed. Alida Monro (1933), xiii–xvi. See further Joy Grant, Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop (1967); and Dominic Hibberd, Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age (2001).
Marianne Moore (1887–1972), American poet and critic, contributed to The Egoist from 1915. Her first book, Poems, was published in London in 1921. She went on to become in 1925 acting editor of The Dial, editor, 1927–9, and an important and influential modern poet. Eliot found her 'an extremely intelligent person, very shy … One of the most observant people I have ever met'. Writing to her on 3 April 1921, he said her verse interested him 'more than that of anyone now writing in America'. And in Eliot's introduction to her Selected Poems (1935), which he brought out from Faber & Faber, he stated that her 'poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time'.
Thomas Sturge Moore (1870–1944), English poet, playwright, critic, and artist – and brother of the philosopher G. E. Moore – was christened Thomas but adopted his mother's maiden name 'Sturge' to avoid confusion with the Irish poet Thomas Moore. A prolific poet, author of 31 plays, and a loyal contributor to the Criterion, he was also a close friend of W. B. Yeats, for whom he designed bookplates and bookbindings. He published his first collection of poems, The Vinedresser and Other Poems, in 1899. See also W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901–1937, ed. Ursula Bridge (1953); Frederick L. Gwynn, Sturge Moore and the Life of Art (1951).
Paul Elmer More (1864–1937), critic, scholar, and prolific writer, had grown up in St Louis, Missouri, and attended Washington University before going on to Harvard; at one time he had taught French to TSE's brother Henry. Initially a humanist, by the 1930s he assumed an Anglo-Catholic position not unlike that of TSE (who appreciated the parallels between their spiritual development). See also 'An Anglican Platonist: the Conversion of Paul Elmer More', TLS, 30 Oct. 1937, 792. At the outset of his career, More taught classics at Harvard and Bryn Mawr; thereafter he became a journalist, serving as literary editor of The Independent (1901– 3) and the New York Evening Post (1903–9), and as editor of The Nation (1909–14), before finally turning to freelance writing and teaching. TSE keenly admired More's many works, in particular Shelburne Essays (11 vols, 1904–21), The Greek Tradition (5 vols, 1924–31), and The Demon of the Absolute (1928); and he went to great trouble in the 1930s in his efforts to secure a publisher for Pages from an Oxford Diary (1937), which More stipulated he would only ever publish in anonymity.
In 1937, TSE wrote in tribute: 'The place of Paul More's writings in my own life has been of such a kind that I find [it] easiest, and perhaps most effective, to treat it in a kind of autobiographical way. What is significant to me … is not simply the conclusions at which he has arrived, but the fact that he arrived there from somewhere else; and not simply that he came from somewhere else, but that he took a particular route … If I find an analogy with my own journey, that is perhaps of interest to no one but myself, except in so far as it explains my retrospective appreciation of the Shelburne Essays; but my appreciation of the whole work cannot be disengaged from the way in which I arrived at it.
'When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, More was editor of the Nation, and to occupy that position in those days was to be a public figure. I sometimes read the Nation and I sometimes read a Shelburne Essay, but I cannot remember that I liked or disliked More's writing … I certainly did not have the background for appreciating the kind of critical intelligence at work in the Shelburne Essays – to say nothing of Ste. Beuve. It was not until my senior year, as a pupil of [Irving] Babbitt's, that More's work was forced on my attention: for one of the obligations of any pupil of Babbitt was to learn a proper respect for "my friend More". But while one was directly exposed to so powerful an influence as Babbitt's, everything that one read was merely a supplement to Babbitt.
'It was not until one or two of the volumes of The Greek Tradition had appeared, that More began to have any importance for me. It was possibly Irving Babbitt himself,
'I had met More only once in earlier years – at a reception given by the Babbitts to which some of Babbitt's pupils had the honor of invitation and that remained only a visual memory. My first meeting with him in London, however, seemed more like the renewal of an old acquaintance than the formation of a new one: More was a St. Louisan, and had known my family; and if he had remained a few years longer, I also he would have learned my
Frank Vigor Morley (1899–1980), son of a distinguished mathematician – his brothers were the writer Christopher, and Felix (who was to become editor of The Washington Post) – was brought up in the USA before travelling as a Rhodes Scholar to New College, Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in mathematics. After working for a while at the Times Literary Supplement, he became London Manager of The Century Company (Publishers) of New York. In 1929 he became a founding director of Faber & Faber, where he would be a close friend of TSE: for some time they shared a top-floor office at Russell Square. On 4 January 1932 Morley wrote of himself to F. Gilchrist Thompson of Jonathan Cape Ltd, which was to publish his book Lamb before Elia (1932): 'As to career it is, alas, not so much chequered as check-mated. I was born at Haverford, Penn., the seat of a Quaker College in which in due course I was entered, but the war intervened and caused a kind of tussle with Quakerism in which I am sorry to say Quakerism was worsted. After a completely undistinguished period with the American Army I returned, supposedly to study mathematics, to a good place called Johns Hopkins University. Actually I played at mathematics but worked at a subject called lacrosse, which seems to be played by women in this country [UK] but which is still a serious blood-letting, Red Indian pursuit in my native black blocks. I was successively a seaman on the Pacific, a member of the United State [words missing,] temporary manufacturer of air-cooled motor cars, and then a Rhodes Scholar at New College, which paved the way for becoming a stoker in SS. Antwerp on the Harwich-Antwerp run across the North Sea. The only item in this which has any bearing on literary criticism is my brief yet glorious career in the [words missing.] After coming to England I always intended to go home but never quite got round to doing so – so here I still am inventing Brothers' Clubs to take the place of legitimate adventures'.
In 1933 when TSE separated from Vivien, Morley arranged convivial temporary accommodation for him near his farmhouse at Pike's Farm, Lingfield, Surrey. In 1939 Morley moved to the USA, where he became Vice-President of Harcourt Brace and Company (and during the war he served on the National War Labor Board in Washington, DC). In 1947 he returned with his family to England to take up the post of Director at Eyre & Spottiswoode. A large, learned, ebullient figure, he earned the sobriquet 'Whale' – though not merely on account of his corpulence: in his youth he had spent time aboard a whaling ship (he was revolted by the slaughter), and subsequently wrote (with J. S. Hodgson) Whaling North and South (1927) – which was reviewed in the Monthly Criterion by his friend Herbert Read. His other publications include Travels in East Anglia (1923), River Thames (1926), Inversive Geometry (1933), My One Contribution to Chess (1947), The Great North Road (1961), The Long Road West: A Journey in History (1971), and Literary Britain (1980); and contributions in verse (along with verses by Eliot, Geoffrey Faber and John Hayward) to Noctes Binanianae (1939).
Morley Kennerley told The Times (25 Oct. 1980) that 'one of his hobbies was to work out complicated problems for his friends, and for those baffled there were amazing practical jokes. Convivial lunches with interesting people were a joy to him … He found jobs for many and squeezed me into Fabers where he generously put up with my sharing a corner of his room for some years. I was present all day during his interviews, dictation, visitors and often lunch. How he put up with all this I do not know. His correspondence with Ezra Pound was quite something, and I think he out-Pounded Pound. As his family say, he was a compulsive letter writer and was rarely without a pencil in his hand or pocket.'
In 1939, when Morley was on the point of returning to the USA, Geoffrey Faber wrote of him to the editor of The Times: 'Morley is a quite outstanding person … [His] first obvious quality is that he is a born "mixer", with an extraordinary range of friends in different walks of life. He is a very good talker, though rather fond – like many Americans – of spinning the yarn out. But he never spins without a purpose. As a negotiator he is in a class by himself. His judgment of men and situations is first rate. He knows the personnel of both the English and American publishing and journalistic worlds. As for his mental equipment, he took a doctorate at Oxford with a mathematical thesis. The story is that nobody in Oxford could understand it, and help had to be got from Cambridge. But he is at least as good a man of letters as he is a mathematician' (Faber Archive).
Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938): daughter of Lieutenant-General Arthur Bentinck and half-sister to the Duke of Portland. In 1902 she married Philip Morrell (1870–1941), Liberal MP for South Oxfordshire 1902–18. A patron of the arts, she entertained a notable literary and artistic circle, first at 44 Bedford Square, then at Garsington Manor, nr. Oxford, where she moved in 1915. She was a lover of Bertrand Russell, who introduced her to TSE, and her many friends included Lytton Strachey, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, the Woolfs, and the Eliots. Her memoirs (ed. by Robert Gathorne-Hardy) appeared as Ottoline (1963) and Ottoline at Garsington (1974). See Miranda Seymour, Life on the Grand Scale: Lady Ottoline Morrell (1992, 1998).
Edwin Muir (1887–1959): Scottish poet, novelist, critic; translator (with his wife Willa) of Franz Kafka. TSE was to write to LW on 22 Aug. 1946: 'I am anxious to do anything I can for Muir because I think highly of his best poetry and I think he has not had enough recognition.' To his cousin Eleanor Hinkley, 25 Dec. 1955: 'I have always found Willa rather oppressive. Edwin is a sweet creature, who never says anything when his wife is present, and only an occasional word when she isn't. An evening alone with him is very fatiguing. But he is a good poet, and I believe, what is even rarer, a literary man of complete integrity. He is not really Scottish, but Orcadian – in other words, pure Scandinavian.' And in an obituary tribute: 'Muir's literary criticism had always seemed to me of the best of our time: after I came to know him, I realised that it owed its excellence not only to his power of intellect and acuteness of sensibility, but to those moral qualities which make us remember him, as you say justly, as "in some ways almost a saintly man". It was more recently that I came to regard his poetry as ranking with the best poetry of our time. As a poet he began late; as a poet he was recognised late; but some of his finest work – perhaps his very finest work – was written when he was already over sixty … For this late development we are reminded of the later poetry of Yeats; and Muir had to struggle with bad health also: but in the one case as in the other (and Muir is by no means unworthy to be mentioned together with Yeats) we recognise a triumph of the human spirit' (The Times, 7 Jan. 1959). Willa Muir privately commented on TSE's plaudits: 'Eliot, in his desire to present Edwin as an orthodox Christian, overdid, I think, the desolations and the saintliness. Edwin's wine could never be contained in any orthodox creed' (letter to Kathleen Raine, 7 Apr. 1960). TSE would later say of Muir: 'He was a reserved, reticent man … Yet his personality made a deep impression upon me, and especially the impression of one very rare and precious quality … unmistakable integrity and of his poems: 'under the pressure of emotional intensity, and possessed by his vision, he found almost unconsciously the right, the inevitable, way of saying what he wanted to say' ('Edwin Muir: 1887–1959: An Appreciation', The Listener, 28 May 1964, 872). Muir's publications include First Poems (Hogarth Press, 1925); Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature (1926), An Autobiography (1954); Selected Poems of Edwin Muir, preface by TSE (1966); Selected Letters of Edwin Muir, ed. P. H. Butter (1974).
John Middleton Murry (1889–1957): English writer, critic, and editor, founded the magazine Rhythm, 1911–13, and worked as a reviewer for the Westminster Gazette, 1912–14, and the Times Literary Supplement, 1914–18, before becoming editor from 1919 to 1921 of the Athenaeum, which he turned into a lively cultural forum – in a letter of 2 July 1919, TSE called it 'the best literary weekly in the Anglo-Saxon world'. Richard Church thought him 'a dark, slippery character, who looked over my shoulder (probably into an invisible mirror) when talking to me, and referred to himself always in the third person … In spite of these characteristics … he was possessed by a strong literary sensibility.' In a 'London Letter' in Dial 72 (May 1921), Eliot considered Murry 'genuinely studious to maintain a serious criticism', but he disagreed with his 'particular tastes, as well as his general statements'. After the demise of the Athenaeum, Murry went on to edit The Adelphi. 1923–48. In 1918, he married Katherine Mansfield. He was friend and biographer of D. H. Lawrence; and as an editor he provided a platform for writers as various as George Santayana, Paul Valéry, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and Eliot. His first notable critical work was Dostoevsky (1916); his most influential study, The Problem of Style (1922). Though as a Romanticist he was an intellectual opponent of the avowedly 'Classicist' Eliot, Murry offered Eliot in 1919 the post of assistant editor on the Athenaeum (which Eliot had to decline); in addition, he recommended him to be Clark lecturer at Cambridge in 1926, and was a steadfast friend to both TSE and his wife Vivien. Eliot wrote in a reference on 9 Sept. 1945 that Murry was 'one of the most distinguished men of letters of this time, and testimony from a contemporary seems superfluous. Several volumes of literary essays of the highest quality are evidence of his eminence as a critic; and even if one took no account of his original contribution, his conduct of The Athenaeum, which he edited from 1919 until its absorption into The Nation, should be enough to entitle him to the gratitude of his contemporaries and juniors. His direction of The Adelphi should also be recognised. Since he has devoted his attention chiefly to social and religious problems, he has written a number of books which no one who is concerned with the same problems, whether in agreement with him or not, can afford to neglect. I am quite sure that no future student of these matters who wishes to understand this age will be able to ignore them, and that no future student of the literary spirit of this age will be able to ignore Mr Murry's criticism.' He wrote to Murry's widow on 29 May 1957: 'The friendship between John and myself was of a singular quality, such that it was rather different from any other of my friendships. We did not often meet. We disagreed throughout many years on one point after another. But on the other hand, a very warm affection existed between us in spite of differences of view and infrequency of meetings. This affection was not merely, on my part, a feeling of gratitude for the opportunities he had given me early in my career during his editorship of The Athenaeum, but was something solid and permanent. He was one of the strangest and most remarkable men I have known, and no less strange and remarkable was the tie of affection between us.' See F. A. Lea, The Life of John Middleton Murry (1959); and David Goldie, A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919–1928 (1998).
F. S. Oliver (1864–1934), businesman and polemicist, was educated at Edinburgh and Trinity College, Cambridge, before joining forces in 1892 with Ernest Debenham in the firm of Debenham and Freebody (drapers, wholesalers, manufacturers), which they caused to flourish and expand (buying up Marshall and Snelgrove and Harvey Nichols); Oliver, who had become a wealthy man, retired as managing director in 1920. A radical Tory, he engaged himself in many public issues. His publications included Alexander Hamilton (1906), Ordeal by Battle (1915), and The Endless Adventure (3 vols, 1930–5).
Kenneth Pickthorn (1892–1975): historian and politician; Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, from 1914; Dean, 1919–29; Tutor, 1927–35; President, 1937–44. From 1950 to 1966 he was to be the Conservative MP for a Midlands constituency; an independent-minded and outspoken parliamentarian, critical of cant, he was made a baronet in 1959, Privy Councillor in 1964. His publications included Some Historical Principles of the Constitution (1925) and Early Tudor Government (2 vols, 1934).
Ezra Pound (1885–1972), American poet and critic, was one of the prime impresarios of the modernist movement in London and Paris, and played a major part in launching Eliot as poet and critic – as well as Joyce, Lewis, and many other modernists. Eliot called on him at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, on 22 Sept. 1914, with an introduction from Conrad Aiken. On 30 Sept. 1914, Pound hailed 'Prufrock' as 'the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American and on 3 October called Eliot 'the last intelligent man I've found – a young American T. S. Eliot … worth watching – mind "not primitive"' (Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 40–1). Pound was instrumental in arranging for 'Prufrock' to be published in Poetry in 1915, and helped to shape The Waste Land (1922), which Eliot dedicated to him as 'il miglior fabbro'. After their first meeting, the poets became friends, and remained in loyal correspondence for the rest of their lives. Having initially dismissed Pound's poetry (to Conrad Aiken, 30 Sept. 1914) as 'well-meaning but touchingly incompetent', Eliot went on to champion his work, writing to Gilbert Seldes (27 Dec. 1922): 'I sincerely consider Ezra Pound the most important living poet in the English language.' He wrote an early critical study, Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (1917), and went on, as editor of The Criterion and publisher at Faber & Faber, to publish most of Pound's work in the UK, including Selected Shorter Poems, The Cantos and Selected Literary Essays. After his move to Italy in the 1920s, Pound became increasingly sceptical about the direction of TSE's convictions and poetry, but they continued to correspond. TSE wrote to James Laughlin, on the occasion of Pound's seventieth birthday: 'I believe that I have in the past made clear enough my personal debt to Ezra Pound during the years 1915–22. I have also expressed in several ways my opinion of his rank as a poet, as a critic, as impresario of other writers, and as pioneer of metric and poetic language. His 70th birthday is not a moment for qualifying one's praise, but merely for recognition of those services to literature for which he will deserve the gratitude of posterity, and for appreciation of those achievements which even his severest critics must acknowledge' (3 Nov. 1955). After Eliot's death, Pound said of him: 'His was the true Dantescan voice – not honoured enough, and deserving more than I ever gave him.' See A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and his Work I: The Young Genius 1885–1920 (2007), Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character (1988), The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907– 1941, ed. D. D. Paige (1950), and Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, Joanna Moody (Oxford, 2011).
Mario Praz (1896–1982): scholar and critic of English life and literature; author of La Carne, la Morte e Il Diavolo nella Letteratura Romantica (1930; The Romantic Agony (1933). Educated in Bologna, Rome and Florence, he came to England in 1923 to study for the title of libero docente. He was Senior Lecturer in Italian, Liverpool University, 1924– 32; Professor of Italian Studies, Victoria University of Manchester, 1932– 4; and Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Rome, 1934–66. His many other publications include Il giardino dei sensi (1975). In 1952 he was conferred by Queen Elizabeth II with the title of Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE). In 'An Italian Critic on Donne and Crashaw' (TLS, 17 Dec. 1925, 878), TSE hailed Praz's study Secentismo e Marinismo in Inghilterra: John Donne – Richard Crashaw (1925) as 'indispensable for any student of this period and these authors'. Later, in 'A Tribute to Mario Praz', he noted: 'His knowledge of the poetry of that period in four languages – English, Italian, Spanish and Latin – was encyclopaedic, and, fortified by his own judgment and good taste, makes that book essential reading for any student of the English "metaphysical poets"' (Friendship's Garland: Essays presented to Mario Praz on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Vittorio Gabrieli [1966].)
Alec (later Sir Alec) Randall (1892–1977), diplomat and writer, entered the Foreign Office in 1920. In the early 1920s he was Second Secretary to the Holy See. He ended his career as Ambassador to Denmark (where he was awarded the Grand Cross, Order of Dannebrog), 1947–52. He wrote on German literature for the Criterion and TLS. Later works include Vatican Assignment (1956) and The Pope, the Jews and the Nazis (1963).
Herbert Read (1893–1968): English poet and literary critic, and one of the most influential art critics of the century. Son of a tenant farmer, Read spent his first years in rural Yorkshire; at sixteen, he went to work as a bank clerk, then studied law and economics at Leeds University; later still, he joined the Civil Service, working first in the Ministry of Labour and then at the Treasury. During his years of service in WW1, he rose to be a captain in the Yorkshire regiment the Green Howards (his war poems were published in Naked Warriors, 1919); and when on leave to receive the Military Cross in 1917, he arranged to dine with TSE at the Monico Restaurant in Piccadilly Circus. This launched a lifelong friendship which he was to recall in 'T.S.E. – A Memoir', in T. S. Eliot: The Man and his Work, ed. Allen Tate (1966). Within the year, he had also become acquainted with the Sitwells, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington, and Ford Madox Ford. He co-founded the journal Art & Letters, 1917–20, and wrote essays too for A. R. Orage, editor of the New Age. In 1922 he was appointed a curator in the department of ceramics and glass at the Victoria and Albert Museum; and in later years he was to work for the publishers Routledge & Kegan Paul, and as editor of the Burlington Magazine, 1933–9. By 1923 he was writing for The Criterion: he was to be one of Eliot's regular leading contributors and a reliable ally and adviser. In 1924 he edited T. E. Hulme's posthumous Speculations. His later works include Art Now (1933); the introduction to the catalogue of the International Surrealist Exhibition held at the New Burlington Galleries, London, 1936; Art and Society (1937); Education through Art (1943); and A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959). In 1947 he founded (with Roland Penrose) the Institute of Contemporary Art; and in 1953 he was knighted for services to literature. Eliot, he was to recall (perhaps only half in jest), was 'rather like a gloomy priest presiding over my affections and spontaneity'. According to Stephen Spender in 1966, Eliot said 'of the anarchism of his friend Herbert Read, whom he loved and esteemed very highly: "Sometimes when I read Herbert's inflammatory pamphlets I have the impression that I am reading the pronouncements of an old-fashioned nineteenth-century liberal"' ('Remembering Eliot', The Thirties and After [1978], 251). Joseph Chiari recalled TSE saying of Read: 'Ah, there is old Herbie, again; he can't resist anything new!' See Herbert Read, Annals of Innocence and Experience (1940); James King, The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read (1990); and Herbert Read reassessed, ed. D. Goodway (1998). Jason Harding (The 'Criterion': see citation under Dobrée) calculates that Read wrote 68 book reviews, 4 articles, and 5 poems for the Criterion.
I. A. Richards (1893–1979): theorist of literature, education, and communication studies. At Cambridge University he studied History but switched to moral sciences, graduating from Magdalene College, where in 1922 he was appointed College Lecturer in English and Moral Sciences. A vigorous, spell-binding lecturer, he was to the fore in the advancement of the English Tripos. His early writings – The Foundations of Aesthetics (with C. K. Ogden and James Wood, 1922), The Meaning of Meaning (also with Ogden, 1923), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Science and Poetry (1926), Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929) – are foundational texts in modern English literary studies. After teaching at National Tsing Hua University in Peking, 1929–30, he repaired for the remainder of his career to Harvard University, where he was made a university professor in 1944. His other works include Basic Rules of Reason (1933), Basic in Teaching: East and West (1935), Mencius on the Mind (1932), Coleridge on Imagination (1934), The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), Interpretation in Teaching (1938), Speculative Instruments (1955), and translations from Plato and Homer. He was appointed Companion of Honour in 1963, and awarded the Emerson-Thoreau medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1970. Out of the teaching term, he enjoyed with his wife Dorothy (1894–1986) an adventurous life of travel and mountain-climbing. See Selected Letters of I. A. Richards, CH, ed. John Constable (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); John Constable, 'I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, and the Poetry of Belief', Essays in Criticism (July 1990), 222–43; I. A. Richards and his Critics, ed. John Constable (vol. 10 of I. A. Richards: Selected Works 1919–1938 (2001); John Paul Russo, I. A. Richards: His Life and Work (1989).
Bruce Richmond (1871–1964), literary editor, was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, and called to the Bar in 1897. However, he never practised as a barrister; instead, George Buckle, editor of The Times, appointed him an assistant editor in 1899, and in 1902 he assumed the editorship of the fledgling Times Literary Supplement, which he commanded for 35 years. During this period, the TLS established itself as the premier academic and critical periodical in Britain. He was knighted in 1935. TSE, who was introduced to Richmond by Richard Aldington in 1919, enthused to his mother that year that writing the leading article for the TLS was the highest honour 'in the critical world of literature'. In a tribute, he recalled Richmond as possessing 'a bird-like alertness of eye, body and mind … It was from Bruce Richmond that I learnt editorial standards … I learnt from him that it is the business of an editor to know his contributors personally, to keep in touch with them and to make suggestions to them. I tried [at The Criterion] to form a nucleus of writers (some of them, indeed, recruited from The Times Literary Supplement, and introduced to me by Richmond) on whom I could depend, differing from each other in many things, but not in love of literature and seriousness of purpose. And I learnt from Richmond that I must read every word of what was to appear in print … It is a final tribute to Richmond's genius as an editor that some of his troupe of regular contributors (I am thinking of myself as well as of others) produced some of their most distinguished critical essays as leaders for the Literary Supplement … Good literary criticism requires good editors as well as good critics. And Bruce Richmond was a great editor' ('Bruce Lyttelton Richmond', TLS, 13 Jan. 1961, 17).
J. M. Robertson (1856–1933), author, journalist, politician, began his career as a clerk; then worked on newspapers including the Edinburgh Evening News and National Reformer. He was Liberal MP for Tyneside, 1908–18. Though self-taught, he was a prolific writer, publishing over 100 books and pamphlets including The Problem of Hamlet (1919), Hamlet Once More (1923), Mr Shaw and the Maid (1926) – a study of St Joan which TSE reviewed in The Criterion (Apr. 1926) – and The Problems of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1927), which TSE reviewed in The Nation (12 Feb. 1927). A fervent disintegrationist, Robertson sought to isolate the pure Shakespeare. TSE wrote to Duff Cooper on 30 Nov. 1949, in response to his book Sergeant Shakespeare: 'I must let you know that I am no longer under the influence of Robertson, and no longer quite agree with what I said about Hamlet.' See also Leo Storm, 'J. M. Robertson and T. S. Eliot: A Note on the Genesis of Modern Critical Theory', Journal of Modern Literature 5: 2 (Apr. 1976), 315–21; Martin Page, Britain's Unknown Genius: The Life-Work of J. M. Robertson (1984); J. M. Robertson, 1856–1933: Liberal, Rationalist and Scholar, ed. G. A. Wells (1985); Odin Dekkers, J. M. Robertson: Rationalist and Literary Critic (1998).
Edouard Roditi (1910–92): American-Jewish poet, critic, biographer, translator, and essayist. With a background that was partly Spanish-Portuguese and partly Greek, he attended schools in England, and went up (for a single year, 1927–8) to Balliol College, Oxford. Precocious as both poet and translator, by the age of 12 he had translated into Latin and Greek a good deal of the poetry of Byron; and at 14 he put Gerard Manley Hopkins into French. His adult works included Prison Within Prison: Three Elegies on Jewish Themes (1941); the prose poems of New and Old Testaments (1983); collections of essays including The Disorderly Poet (1975) and a treatise, De L'Homosexualité (1962); as well as translations into English, German and French. The Times obituary remarked (18 May 1992): 'In 1926 he was sent to a Swiss clinic, where he set himself the task of translating the French poet Saint-John Perse's Anabase into English. A little later he discovered that T. S. Eliot was engaged in the same project, and so sent him his version, from which, he claimed, Eliot took up more than a few interpretations. But Eliot also made encouraging comments about some of the boy's original verse.'
On 11 Nov. 1936 TSE wrote on Roditi's behalf to the Undersecretary of State: 'I am glad to offer myself as a sponsor for Mr Edward Roditi in his application to be allowed to reside in this country. I have known Mr Roditi for some years as a poet and man of letters, and neither in my personal acquaintance nor in his literary work – he has been a contributor to The Criterion – have I regarded him as a foreigner in any way. He writes English as his native tongue, and his poetry has distinction and beauty. I believe his abilities, experience and education to be such that I should consider it for the good of English letters that he should be allowed to reside here. And so far as I know him personally, my opinion of him supports my opinion of his literary work' (UCLA).
Roditi later wrote to The Jewish Quarterly, no. 142 (38: 2, Summer 1991), 72: 'I was barely eighteen when I first met Eliot in 1928 because I too had undertaken a translation of Saint-John Perse's Anabase without knowing that its French author had already granted Eliot the right to translate and publish it in English.
'Eliot then proved to be very cordial and almost paternal in his typically reserved manner. After discussing our different interpretations of some of the more cryptic passages in Anabase, Eliot invited me to submit to him some of my own poems. From some of these he was soon able to conclude that I was of Jewish origin and attempting somehow to discover my Jewish identity in a few of my poems. Very kindly, he suggested corrections to these somewhat immature poems and encouraged me to continue submitting my poetry to him for guidance. After a while, he even suggested publishing in The Criterion one of my most overtly Jewish poems – in fact one of the sections of my long elegy entitled "The Complaint of Jehuda Abravanel"; but this particular section of my poem had already been accepted for publication either in The Spectator or The Jewish Review. I then submitted a group of shorter poems and Eliot published three of these in The Criterion.
'I continued to see Eliot fairly regularly in London between 1928 and 1937 and can testify to the fact that he expressed to me on several occasions after 1933 his horror of the anti-Semitic outrages which were already occurring in Nazi Germany. My personal impression is that, after writing The Waste Land, Eliot had become a much more devout Christian, before writing the so-called "Ariel Poems" and Ash Wednesday. As a Christian he no longer felt or expressed the kind of somewhat immature and snobbish anti-Semitism that can be detected in the earlier poems and letters …'
See also Roditi, 'T. S. Eliot: Persoenlichkeit und Werk', Der Monat 3 (1948), 86–9; 'Corresponding with Eliot', London Magazine 28: 5/6 (Aug./Sept. 1988), 33–44. Roditi wrote two articles about St-John Perse, in Contemporary Poetry, 6: 3 (1944) and La République libre, 26 Jan. 1951.
William Rothenstein (1872–1945), Bradford-born son of Jewish immigrants, painter and administrator, was Principal of the Royal College of Art from 1919; knighted in 1931. See Twelve Portraits (F&F, 1928), Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein (2 vols, 1931–2); Since Fifty: Men and Memories, 1922–1938 (1939); and Robert Speaight, William Rothenstein: The Portrait of an Artist in His Time (1962).
A. L. Rowse (1903–97), Cornish historian, was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and elected a Prize Fellow of All Souls in 1925. He was a lecturer at Merton College, 1927–30, and taught also at the London School of Economics. His numerous books include Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge (1937), The England of Elizabeth (1950), William Shakespeare: A Biography (1963), Shakespeare the Man (1973), Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age (1974), All Souls in My Time (1993), and volumes of poetry gathered up in A Life (1981). Though he failed in 1952 to be elected Warden of All Souls, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1958 and made a Companion of Honour in 1997. See Richard Ollard, A Man of Contradictions: A Life of A. L. Rowse (1999), and The Diaries of A. L. Rowse (ed. Ollard, 2003). TSE was to write to Geoffrey Curtis on 1 May 1944: 'Rowse is an old friend of mine, and a very touching person: the suppressed Catholic and the rather less suppressed Tory (with a real respect for Good Families), the miner's son and the All Souls Fellow, the minor poet and the would-be politician, the proletarian myth and the will-to-power, are always at odds in a scholarly retiring mind and a frail body. He is also very patronising, and one likes it.'
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970): one of the most influential twentieth-century British philosophers; co-author (with Alfred North Whitehead) of Principia Mathematica (1910–13), and author of innumerable other books including the popular Problems of Philosophy (1912), Mysticism and Logic (1918) – which was reviewed by TSE in 'Style and Thought' (Nation 22, 23 March 1918) – and History of Western Philosophy (1945). In 1914, Russell gave the Lowell lectures on 'Our Knowledge of the External World' at Harvard, where he encountered Eliot. On 27 March 1914, Russell described Eliot as 'very well dressed and polished, with manners of the finest Etonian type'. He later characterised him as 'proficient in Plato, intimate with French literature from Villon to Vildrach, and capable of exquisiteness of appreciation, but lacking in the crude insistent passion that one must have in order to achieve anything'. After their accidental meeting in 1914, Russell played an important role in introducing TSE to English intellectual life, as well as getting him launched as a reviewer for International Journal of Ethics and The Monist. However, it has been alleged that, not long after TSE's marriage, Russell may have had a brief affair with his wife Vivien – though in later years Russell would deny any such thing; on 28 May 1968 he wrote to Robert Sencourt: 'I never had any intimate sexual relations with Vivienne. The difficulty between Eliot and Vivienne sprang chiefly from her taking of drugs and the consequent hallucinations.' The three friends had shared lodgings for a period in 1916 at Russell's flat in London. Russell was a Conscientious Objector and vocal opponent of WW1, which led to a brief prison sentence in Wandsworth. In later years, TSE saw little of his one-time professor and friend, and he attacked Russell's philosophical and ethical views, in his 'Commentary' in the Criterion (April 1924), and elsewhere. Russell provides a partial account of his relationship with the Eliots in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell II: 1914–1944 (1968). See also Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1996).
Alexis St Leger Leger (1887–1975) – pen name St-John Perse – poet and diplomat. Scion of a Bourgignon family, he passed his early years on an island near Guadeloupe in the West Indies, but the family returned to France in 1899. After studying law at the University of Bordeaux, he joined the Foreign Office as an attaché and worked for six years as Secretary at the French Legation in Peking: his poem Anabase is inspired in part by aspects of his life and observations in China, which included a journey to Outer Mongolia. In 1921, at a conference in Washington, DC, he was recruited by Aristide Briand, Prime Minister of France, as his chef de cabinet; and after Briand's death in 1932 he retained high office, serving as Sécretaire Générale of the Foreign Office, 1933–40. Dishonoured by the Vichy regime (he was a Grand Officier of the Legion of Honour), he spent the years of WW2 in the USA (serving for a time as a 'consultant' to the Library of Congress); and he went back to France only in 1957 (he had formally closed his diplomatic career in 1950, with the title of Ambassadeur de France). His publications include Éloges (published with help from André Gide, 1911), Anabase (1924; trans. TSE as Anabasis, 1930), Exil (1942), Pluies (1943), Vents (1946), Amers (1957), and Oiseaux (1962). In 1924 he had published in Commerce a translation of the opening section of 'The Hollow Men'. He was made Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1960.
In a copy of Anabase (Paris: Librairie Gallimard/Éditions de La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1925: limited edition copy no. 160), St-John Perse wrote: 'A T. S. Eliot / dont j'aime et j'admire l'oeuvre / fraternellement / St. J. Perse.' (TSE Library)
In 1960 TSE was to recommend St-John Perse for the Nobel Prize. When requested on 10 Mar. 1960 by Uno Willers, secretary of the Svenska Akadamiens Nobelkommitté, to 'write down a more detailed motivation for your suggestion', TSE responded on 23 Mar. 1960: 'My interest in the work of St-John Perse began many years ago when I translated his Anabase into English. This task gave me an intimacy with his style and idiom which I could not have acquired in any other way. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me still, that he had done something highly original – and in a language, the French language, in which such originality is not easily attained. He had invented a form which was different from "free verse" as practised in France to-day, and different from the "prose-poem" in which some French writers, anxious to escape the limitations of the conventional metrics of their language, take refuge.
'He is the only French poet among my contemporaries, with the solitary exception of Supervielle, whose work has continued to interest me. With some of my contemporaries writing in other languages I feel a certain affinity – with Montale, for example, and with Seferis so far as I can judge from translations – with Perse, I have felt rather an influence which is visible in some of my poems written after I had translated Anabase.' He added: 'My remarks are, of course, to be taken as confidential, as I am always careful never to express in public my opinions of the relative value of the works of poets who are my contemporaries or my juniors.'
See also Richard Abel, 'The Influence of St.-John Perse on T. S. Eliot', Contemporary Literature, XIV: 2 (Spring 1973), 213–39.
Gilbert Seldes (1893–1970), journalist, critic, and editor, was a war correspondent before becoming editor of The Dial, 1920–3. His works include The Seven Lively Arts (1924) – an influential study of popular arts embracing the comic strip and popular songs as well as cinema and vaudeville – and The Stammering Century (1928). He wrote a number of 'New York Chronicles' for the Criterion. In later years he was a prolific essayist; he also wrote for the Broadway theatre, and became the first director of TV programmes for CBS News, and founding Dean of the Annenburg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. See Michael Kammen, The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (1996).
Robert Esmonde Gordon George – Robert Sencourt (1890–1969) – critic, historian and biographer. Born in New Zealand, he was educated in Tamaki and at St John's College, Oxford. By 1929 – perhaps to avoid confusion with Professor George Gordon (President of Magdalen College, Oxford) – he was to take the name of Robert Sencourt. He taught in India and Portugal before serving as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of English Literature, University of Egypt, 1933–6. The Times obituarist noted that he was 'born an Anglican [but] was converted to Roman Catholicism which alone could inspire him with the spiritual dimension of the life of grace … [He] was the most fervent and devout of religious men, with the same personal mysticism which makes his life of St John of the Cross a joy to read. Never fearing to speak his mind in religious matters, even when (as often) his view ran counter to the church's, he was intolerant of any form of ecclestiastical cant or humbug.' His books include The Genius of the Vatican (1935), Carmelite and Poet: St John of the Cross (1943), St Paul: Envoy of Grace (1948), biographies of George Meredith, the Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III, King Alfonso, and Edward VIII, and T. S. Eliot: A Memoir, ed. Donald Adamson (1971). On 17 July 1936 TSE was to write to the Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in support of Sencourt's application for the Chair of English at Bucharest: 'I should think Sencourt would do admirably for it. He is a New Zealander, and has lived abroad a great deal, largely in Italy and France, and has what would be called a cosmopolitan mind. He gets on well with foreigners – he had three years as Professor of English in Cairo, and is very tolerant of inferior races, and gets on well with them. He is an R.C. convert. He knows everybody or nearly everybody. George Gordon will probably speak for his work as an undergraduate at Oxford (some years ago). He is very much more than competent in English literature (you will learn his official qualifications from other sources), is I believe a firstrate horseman, and of physical courage to the point of recklessness. He is regarded as an odd creature, and a snob: but I know that his kindness and generosity are boundless. I will also say what one could not very well say in a formal testimonial, that I think he is absolutely good enough, and not too good, for such a position. It wouldn't be a question of blocks being chopped (rather badly) with a razor; he is just the right sharpness and weight; he wouldn't despise the job and he would do it thoroughly; and he would do his best to like and to understand his pupils. I think the Roumanians would be lucky to get him.' Similarly, two years later, when Sencourt applied to be Professor of English at Raffles College, Singapore, TSE urged the Universities Bureau on 11 Feb. 1938: 'I am eager to add my recommendation, as I am sure that no more suitable incumbent could be found: Mr. Sencourt is qualified for such a position to an unusual degree, both by his academic and literary attainments, by his experience of teaching, and in particular by his experience in teaching Orientals. He has furthermore all the social and personal qualifications – such as patience, tactfulness, and a cosmopolitan experience which gives him a sympathy with foreign minds.'
Sencourt wrote to TSE in Oct. 1930, after staying for a few days with him and VHE: 'I could hardly imagine a spirit more congenial and refreshing than yours … I know I can count on you both to give me more of what means so much to me.'
Edith Sitwell (1887–1964): poet, biographer, anthologist and novelist; editor of Wheels 1916–21. Her collection, The Mother and Other Poems (1915), was followed by Clown's Houses (1918) and The Wooden Pegasus (1920). In 1923, her performance at the Aeolian Hall in London of her cycle of poems, Façade (1922), with music by William Walton, placed her briefly at the centre of modernistic experimentation. Other writings include Gold Coast Customs (1929), Collected Poems (1930), Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946), The Queens and the Hive (1962), and Taken Care Of (memoirs, 1965). She was appointed a DBE in 1954. See John Lehmann, A Nest of Tigers: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell in their Times (1968); and John Pearson, Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (1978). TSE published one of her poems in The Criterion.
James Smith (1904–72), critic and educator, won a double first in English and Modern Languages (French and German) from Trinity College, Cambridge. According to a profile in Granta (which he edited, 1925–6), he revived the Cam Literary Club, 'and even presided over it for a year, in order to introduce Cambridge to T. S. Eliot' (cited in John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins [2005], 603). He was Vice-President of the Club (the President being Professor Sir Arthur Quiller Couch). Empson was to recall having his weekly supervisions with I. A. Richards and then treacherously 'listening to the James Smith group, who favoured T. S. Eliot and Original Sin' (195). Smith was to become an occasional contributor to The Criterion and to Scrutiny: he wrote on Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity and on metaphysical poetry; and his other essays included studies of Croce, Wordsworth, Marlowe, Chapman, Webster, and Shakespeare (collected in the posthumous Shakespearean and Other Essays, 1974). In the 1930s he taught at King Edward VII School in Sheffield before becoming an HMI. During WW2 he was Director of the British Institute at Caracas; and after the war he became Professor of English at Fribourg. F. R. Leavis petitioned TSE on 19 Nov 1946 to support Smith's application: 'He is, in my opinion, an incomparably wellequipped man, but, by a series of accidents, he didn't start a university career when he ought to have done, & so has never held a university post before. He is not long back from Venezuela, where he spent five years establishing a British Institute – which (I have reason to know) he did magnificently … He is a man for whom I would do anything that lay in my power. It has always seemed to me a scandal that such preeminent qualifications shouldn't be used in a university. And I'm worried about him generally: it's absurd that he should have to go on living by hackwork. I've found his assistance in Downing-teaching very valuable, both before the war, & since he has been back, but there's no post for him. I can't imagine a better representative of English culture abroad. He's a classic & a philosopher, & can talk with authority about almost any aspect of England in French & German that to my ear are perfect. And he's a charming man, of complete integrity. (He's a Catholic, so would fit in at Freiburg, which is Dominican, I'm told.)' TSE replied to Leavis on 21 Nov. 1946, 'I have hardly been in touch with [Smith] for a number of years but I have enough confidence in him from my knowledge in the past to be very glad to give him this support', and he enclosed a testimonial: 'I have known Mr. Smith ever since he was an undergraduate at Cambridge where I formed a high opinion of his abilities. A little later I was a referee in connection with a dissertation which he submitted and was to report very favourably thereon. I regard Mr. Smith as a man of quite first rate abilities, and of exceptionally wide knowledge and interests.'
Willliam Force Stead (1884–1967), poet, critic, diplomat, clergyman, was educated at the University of Virginia and served in WW1 as Vice Consul at the American Foreign Service in Liverpool. After working for a while in Florence, he was appointed in 1927 Chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford, where he became a Fellow. While in England, he befriended literary figures including W. B. Yeats, John Masefield, and Robert Bridges, as well as TSE – whom he was to baptise into the Anglican Church in 1927. In later years, after living through WW2 in Baltimore, he taught at Trinity College, Washington, DC. His published poetry included Moonflowers (1909), The Holy Innocents (1917), Uriel: A Hymn in Praise of Divine Immanence (1933), and an edition of Christopher Smart's Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam (1939) – a work which he discovered.
TSE wrote a testimonial on 4 Dec. 1938 (sent to the Dept. of English, University of Cairo, on 9 Dec.): 'I have known Mr. William Force Stead for over eleven years and count him as a valued friend. He is, first, a poet of established position and an individual inspiration. What is not so well known, except to a small number of the more fastidious readers, is that he is also a prose writer of great distinction: his book [The Shadow of] Mt. Carmel is recognised as a classic of prose style in its kind. And while the bulk of his published writing on English literature is small, those who know his conversation can testify that he is a man of wide reading and a fine critical sense.
'Mr. Stead is, moreover, a man of the world in the best sense, who has lived in several countries and is saturated in European culture. By both natural social gifts and cultivation, accordingly, he has a remarkable ability of sympathy with all sorts and conditions and races of men.
'I would say finally that I know from several sources, that Mr. Stead was most successful as a teacher of young men at Oxford; that he gained both the affection and the respect of his students; and that he exercised upon them a most beneficial influence. He has the scholarship necessary to teach English literature accurately, and the personal qualities necessary to make the subject interesting to his pupils; and I could not recommend anyone for the purpose with more confidence.' (Beinecke)
See 'Mr Stead Presents An Old Friend', Trinity College Alumni Journal 38: 2 (Winter 1965), 59–66; George Mills Harper, 'William Force Stead's Friendship with Yeats and Eliot', The Massachusetts Review 21: 1 (Spring 1980), 9–38.
Allen Tate (1899–1979), poet, critic, and editor, grew up in Kentucky and attended Vanderbilt University (where he was taught by John Crowe Ransom and became associated with the group of writers known as the Fugitives). He taught at various universities before becoming Poetin-Residence at Princeton, 1939–42; Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, 1944–5; and editor of The Sewanee Review, 1944–6; and he was Professor of Humanities at the University of Minnesota (where colleagues included Saul Bellow and John Berryman), 1951–68. Eliot wrote of him in 1959: 'Allen Tate is a good poet and a good literary critic who is distinguished for the sagacity of his social judgment and the consistency with which he has maintained the least popular of political attitudes – that of the sage. He believes in reason rather than enthusiasm, in wisdom rather than system; and he knows that many problems are insoluble and that in politics no solution is final. By avoiding the lethargy of the conservative, the flaccidity of the liberal, and the violence of the zealot, he succeeds in being a representative of the smallest of minorities, that of the intelligent who refuse to be described as "intellectuals". And what he has written, as a critic of society, is of much greater significance because of being said by a man who is also a good poet and a good critic of literature' (The Sewanee Review, 67: 4 [Oct.–Dec. 1959], 576). Tate's publications include Ode to the Confederate Dead (1930), Poems: 1928– 1931 (1932), The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936), Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936), and The Fathers (novel, 1938).
Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876–1961), English editor and publisher, whom Virginia Woolf described as 'modest judicious & decorous' (Diary, 13 April 1918). In 1912, Weaver began by giving financial support to The Freewoman, a radical periodical founded and edited by Dora Marsden, which was renamed in 1913 (at the suggestion of Ezra Pound) The Egoist. Weaver became editor in 1914, turning it into a 'little magazine' with a big influence in the history of literary Modernism. TSE followed in the footsteps of Richard Aldington and H.D. to became assistant editor in 1917 (having been nominated by Pound), and remained so until it closed in 1919. When Joyce could not secure a publisher for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Weaver in 1917 converted The Egoist into a press in order to publish it. She went on to publish TSE's first book, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Pound's Dialogues of Fontenelle and Quia Pauper Amavi, Wyndham Lewis's novel Tarr, and Marianne Moore's Poems, and other notable books. (She played a major role as Joyce's patron and confidante, and went on to be his literary executor and to help to put together The Letters of James Joyce.) TSE wrote in tribute in 1962: 'Miss Harriet Shaw Weaver … was so modest and self-effacing a woman that her generous patronage of men of letters was hardly known beyond the circle of those who benefited by it … Miss Weaver's support, once given, remained steadfast. Her great disappointment was her failure to persuade any printer in this country to take the risk of printing Ulysses; her subsequent generosity to James Joyce, and her solicitude for his welfare and that of his family, knew no bounds … [Working for her at The Egoist] was all great fun, my first experience of editorship. In 1932 I dedicated my Selected Essays to this good, kind, unassuming, courageous and lovable woman, to whom I owe so much. What other publisher in 1917 (the Hogarth Press was not yet in existence) would, I wonder, have taken Prufrock?' See also Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver: Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1876–1961 (1970).
Charles Whibley (1859–1930) took a first in Classics in 1883 from Jesus College, Cambridge, and embarked on a career as journalist, author, and editor, and as a well-connected social figure (his intimates were to include Lord Northcliffe and Lady Cynthia Asquith). After working briefly for the publishers Cassell & Co., he wrote for the Scots Observer and the Pall Mall Gazette (for a while in the 1890s he was Paris correspondent, a posting which enabled him to become acquainted with Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry), for the Daily Mail, and above all for Blackwood's Magazine – where he produced for over 25 years a commentary, 'Musings without Method', comprised of sharp High-Tory substance and style. TSE hailed his column as 'the best sustained piece of literary journalism that I know of in recent times'. Richard Aldington jealously thought Whibley 'a pernicious influence' on Eliot: 'Eliot was already too much influenced by Irving Babbitt's pedantic and carping analysis of Rousseau – indeed to some extent he founded his prose style on Babbitt – and in Whibley he found a British counterpart to his old Harvard professor. Whibley was … a good scholar, but a hopeless crank about politics. He was the very embodiment of the English Tory don, completely out of touch with the realities of his time. "Whig" and "Whiggism" were his terms of contempt and insult to everybody he disliked, and anybody can see how Eliot picked them up. But Whibley took Eliot to Cambridge, where his conversation enchanted the dons and procured him friends and allies, vastly more important and valuable than the Grub Street hacks who had rejected him.' His friend F. S. Oliver wrote (17 April 1930), in some personal reminiscences put down at TSE's request, of 'the apparently impulsive and prejudiced character of C. W. that when he came to deal with the craft of writing he had no favour, or fear, or anger for friends or enemies. I never knew him once to praise goodnaturedly a book because it was written by a very close friend; nor have I ever known him to dispraise a book with real merits, but which happened to be written by someone whose character and opinions he held in detestation. Contrary to the general idea of him he was one of the most tolerant people (as regards literature) that I have ever known … [I]t is this quality of truthful, courageous, penetrating, sympathetic literary criticism which I should put first among all his brilliant capacities … [H]e was I think the best critic who lived in my time.' Whibley's books included William Pitt (1906), Political Portraits (1917, 1923), and Lord John Manners and his Friends (1925). See TSE, Charles Whibley: A Memoir (The English Association Pamphlet no. 80, Dec. 1931).
Orlando (Orlo) Williams (1883–1967): Clerk to the House of Commons, scholar, and critic; contributor to TLS. Chevalier, Légion d'honneur. His publications include The Clerical Organisation of the House of Commons 1661–1850 (1954); Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris (1913); Some Great English Novels: The Art of Fiction (1926).
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972): highly influential literary critic, social commentator and cultural historian; worked in the 1920s as managing editor of Vanity Fair; later as associate editor of The New Republic and as a prolific book reviewer. Major publications include Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931) – which includes a chapter on TSE's work, sources and influence – The Triple Thinkers: Ten Essays on Literature (1938), and The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (1941). TSE was to write to Geoffrey Curtis on 20 Oct. 1943: 'Edmund Wilson is a very good critic except that, like most of his generation in America, he has mixed his literary criticism with too much political ideology of a Trotskyite variety and perhaps he is also too psychological, but I have a great respect for him as a writer and like him as a man.'
Humbert Wolfe (1885–1940) – originally Umberto Wolff (the family became British citizens in 1891, and he changed his name in 1918) – poet, satirist, critic, civil servant. The son of Jewish parents (his father was German, his mother Italian), he was born in Bradford (where his father was a partner in a wool business), and went to the Grammar School there. After graduating from Wadham College, Oxford, he worked at the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Labour, and spent time as UK representative at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva. He found fame with Requiem (1927), and in 1930 was mooted as a successor to Robert Bridges as Poet Laureate. He edited over 40 books of verse and prose, and wrote many reviews. See Philip Bagguley, Harlequin in Whitehall: A Life of Humbert Wolfe, Poet and Civil Servant, 1885–1940 (1997).
Leonard Woolf (1880–1969): writer and publisher; husband of Virginia Woolf, whom he married in 1912. A friend of Lytton Strachey and J. M. Keynes at Cambridge, he played a central part in the Bloomsbury Group. He wrote a number of novels, including The Village and the Jungle (1913), as well as political studies including Socialism and Cooperation (1919) and Imperialism and Civilization (1928). As foundereditor, with Virginia Woolf, of the Hogarth Press, he was responsible for publishing TSE's Poems (1919) and The Waste Land (1922). In 1923 he became literary editor of The Nation & Athenaeum (after TSE had turned it down), commissioning many reviews from him, and he remained a firm friend. See An Autobiography (2 vols, 1980); Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. Frederic Spotts (1990); Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Life (2006).
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), novelist, essayist, and critic, was author of Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927), A Room of One's Own (1928), a classic of modern feminist criticism, and The Common Reader (1925). Daughter of the biographer and editor Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), she married Leonard Woolf in 1912, published her first novel The Voyage Out in 1915, and founded the Hogarth Press with her husband in 1917. The Hogarth Press published TSE's Poems (1919), The Waste Land (1923), and Homage to John Dryden (1923). TSE published in the Criterion Woolf's essays and talks including 'Kew Gardens', 'Character in Fiction', and 'On Being Ill'. Woolf became a friend and correspondent; her diaries and letters give firsthand accounts of him. Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell on 22 July 1936: 'I had a visit, long ago, from Tom Eliot, whom I love, or could have loved, had we both been in the prime and not in the sere; how necessary do you think copulation is to friendship? At what point does "love" become sexual?' (Letters, vol. 6). Eliot wrote in 1941 that Woolf 'was the centre, not merely of an esoteric group, but of the literary life of London. Her position was due to a concurrence of qualities and circumstances which never happened before, and which I do not think will ever happen again. It maintained the dignified and admirable tradition of Victorian upper middle-class culture – a situation in which the artist was neither the servant of the exalted patron, the parasite of the plutocrat, nor the entertainer of the mob – a situation in which the producer and the consumer of art were on an equal footing, and that neither the highest nor the lowest.' To Enid Faber on 27 Apr. 1941: 'she was a personal friend who seemed to me (mutatis considerably mutandis) like a member of my own family; and I miss her dreadfully, but I don't see her exactly as her relatives see her, and my admiration for the ideas of her milieu – now rather old-fashioned – is decidedly qualified.' See further Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996).
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