2023 International TS Eliot Summer School programme released, December 2022
The programme has now been released for the 2023 International TS Eliot Summer School, which will run from 8th to 16th July in Bloomsbury, London.
Seminars will be run by Eliot numinaries including Anthony Cuda, Director of the Summer School, and David Chinitz, with subjects including Spatial Eliot; Eliot and the Environment; and New World Eliot.
Lecturers include Lyndall Gordon (on Eliot’s Ties to the Woolfs), Julia Daniel and John Morgenstern – and the inaugural lecture will be given by the classicist and poet Ruth Padel.
Full details of the programme are here with links to details of all of the lecturers, locations and fees.
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Eliot, HG Wells and Four Quartets, December 2022
In an essay written for The University Bookman, to demonstrate the value of The Complete Prose, Professor Ben Lockerd suggests a connection between TS Eliot’s view of HG Wells, and a passage in The Dry Salvages.
Lockerd begins with the best-selling Outline of History by HG Wells, in which, he explains,”Wells presents evolution as the driving force, not just of biological development but of cultural development. In his concluding chapter he predicts a time coming soon when hunger, disease, war, and all other ills will be eliminated by the triumph of rationalism and science over religion.”
Eliot, he shows, was critical of Wells’s “understanding of history”, which “requires a degree of culture, civilization and maturity which Mr. Wells does not possess.”
Lockerd demonstrates how he can now easily trace Eliot’s several comments on HG Wells’s views on history and evolution via the Complete Prose. And in 1932, he finds Eliot writing that Wells’s “doctrine of progress cannot make the future seem to us more real than the present. . . . But the doctrine of progress, while it can do little to make the future more real to us, has a very strong influence towards making the past less real to us.”
Does Eliot’s view of Wells’s “popular” but “superficial” thinking, Lockerd asks, lie behind the passage in The Dry Salvages in which:
“It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.”
The essay, The Circumnavigation of Eliot, can be read here.
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Hale letters to go online in January, December 2022
The TS Eliot Foundation has announced that the 1,131 letters from TS Eliot to Emily Hale will be available to read on www.tseliot.com from Friday 27th January. They have been edited by John Haffenden.
In 2020, after the letters had been unsealed, it emerged that publishing them in print would have required two volumes, each at an academic pricepoint, with potentially six months separating the volumes. Instead it was decided to make all of them available together, as they are at Princeton Library, with online publication affording a complete narrative, accessible to anyone interested in Eliot.
This digital release will also make the Emily Hale letters distinct from the continuing series of printed volumes of The Letters of TS Eliot, also edited by John Haffenden.
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The Yale Review celebrates the centenary of The Waste Land, December 2022
In another US centenary celebration, The Yale Review has published a collection of essays marking The Waste Land at 100.
In a new essay, Eliot Among the Ruins, Langdon Hammer considers that “The Waste Land remains prophetic, but what did it foretell?”.
And there are six essays from their archives, from writers Louis Menand, Helen Vendler, Amy Clampitt, Richard Wilbur and James Merrill, together with Anthony Hecht’s 1989 essay on the first eighteen lines of the poem, detailing the fascinating history of Marie Larisch and Archduke Rodolph.
The essays can be read here via The Yale Review.
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US essays mark the centenary of The Waste Land’s publication in book form, December 2022
Three essays by writers in the US examine TS Eliot and The Waste Land in perspectives relating to the centenary of the poem’s first publication in book form, by New York’s Boni & Liveright.
In A Century of Serious Difficulty, Johanna Winant considers the poem alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
“These books are deliberately, self-consciously challenging, in content and in form,” she writes. “They are also hard, beautiful, powerful, and brilliant.” Winant argues for the values of both seriousness and difficulty, and puts them into both personal and academic contexts. The essay is here in the Boston Review.
Rebecca Bratten Weiss writes about Reading The Waste Land as it turns 100, from the position of an academic who “had begun to question the implicit assumption that keeping alive the old traditions of Western thought could save humanity from our own fundamental stupidity and indecency.”
She believes that “we can read The Waste Land today in awe and admiration without buying the idea that only the preservation of Western tradition will save us. We can look instead for the story it tells about the tremendous human appetite for making order out of disorder as we search for our rightful place in our cosmos despite chaos.” Her essay is here in The Christian Century.
And Jed Rasula asks Why (Most) Critics Hated The Waste Land When It Was Published. “Reviews were often pitched at nonspecialist general interest readers,” he explains, “coasting along on a soft carpet of unexamined assumptions about the arts, culture at large, civil discourse, and acceptable behavior.” He quotes many of those first reviews, observing that “To come to Eliot’s poem with a few platitudes about decency, intelligibility, and ease of access to poetic chestnuts was to be brutally confronted with something not only unknown but perilously close to the unknowable.” His essay is here on Literary Hub.
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An Ash Wednesday signed by both Eliots, December 2022
A copy of the first, limited edition of Ash Wednesday, signed by Eliot, and also bearing a gift inscription from Vivienne Eliot, has come to market.
Published in March 1930, there were 600 numbered copies of this edition, signed by TS Eliot; this is number 77. The first editions of Ash Wednesday bore the dedication ‘To My Wife’, which was later omitted.
This copy is particularly interesting as it is inscribed by Vivienne, to a Mildred Gannon, on October 27th 1931. Her chosen spelling and nomenclature is clearly ‘Vivienne Haigh Eliot’.
The reserve price for the book is £1,500 and with other pictures to be seen it is for auction on eBay here.
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Lyndall Gordon on the friendship of Woolf and Eliot, November 2022
In an excerpt from her new book, The Hyacinth Girl, published on the US website Literary Hub, Lyndall Gordon writes about How Virginia Woolf Shunned—and Then Embraced—T.S. Eliot.
The excerpt traces the growth of the writers’ growing friendship, from rocky beginnings, via social misunderstandings, and through the publication of his early collection Poems by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press.
Virginia Woolf’s regard for Eliot grew; “she marked ‘the driving power’ in him” But, Gordon writes, “Eliot tended to faint praise of her writing.”
And in a letter to Emily Hale, Eliot said that “I do not in my heart admire her work quite as much as I am sure she likes it (naturally) to be admired.”
The excerpt can be read here on Literary Hub
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The Waste Land as “a sound-world for deranged times”, November 2022
In the Church Times, Christopher Southgate considers The Waste Land as “first and foremost a sound-world”.
He refers in particular to his experiences of hearing both Jeremy Irons’s recording of the poem, and Simon Callow’s “stunning” performance of it at the 2022 TS Eliot Festival at Little Gidding.
“It is almost musical theatre,” writes Southgate (a member of the TS Eliot Society Committee), “and that is a dimension of the work which it is hard to inhabit reading the poem on the page.”
He goes on to consider The Waste Land as a pandemic poem, and as a poem of loss, and finally explores the peace and “spiritual imperatives” with which the poem concludes. The article can be read here.
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John Haffenden to deliver Annual TS Eliot Lecture 2022, November 2022
The Annual TS Eliot Lecture 2022 is to be given in London at 5.30pm on 17th November by Professor John Haffenden. Its title is Vivien Eliot – Woman and Writer.
John Haffenden is the “indefatigable, exemplary editor” (Evening Standard) of The Letters of TS Eliot, now in its ninth volume. This has given him a unique perspective on Eliot’s life and work. He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. In a TLS review of the most recent volume of the Letters, John Haffenden was praised for his “expert hands” and “a manner both companionable and erudite”.
We are delighted that the Lecture is to be delivered for the first time in London – in the Bloomsbury where Eliot worked for most of his life – and we are grateful to the English Department of University College, London for hosting it in the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre at UCL.
The Lecture will be introduced by Professor Mark Ford, Head of the English Department at UCL, who has himself written and spoken widely on TS Eliot.
Admission is free, but the audience is limited and registration is required, via tseliotlecture.eventbrite.co.uk
Members of the TS Eliot Society are entitled to Reserved Seating for the Lecture; enter your Members Password as a promo code when registering.
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Paul Muldoon on TS Eliot, November 2022
The poet Paul Muldoon has spoken to the Irish Examiner about TS Eliot and his poetry.
“TS Eliot was the poet who got me excited and made me think that writing poetry would be a fine thing,” he says, in The Culture That Made Me.
“For many people, he’s too much. It takes a bit of an effort to read him. It’s not to say he’s not clear, but there are moments when he needs a bit of work. The Waste Landbeing a case in point.” Muldoon wrote an introduction for a 2013 Liveright US reprint of their first edition of the poem; here, he describes The Waste Landas “such an outlandish way of doing business – with all these allusions and quotations from other texts.”
He also talks about The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, which he says is “about the essential uncertainty that is a feature of teenagedom. It continues to be one of my favourite poems.”
The full interview with Paul Muldoon in the Irish Examiner, including observations on Paul McCartney, Sweeney Todd, Leonard Cohen and others, is here.
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Limited luxury centenary edition of The Waste Land in US and Canada, November 2022
A special centenary edition of The Waste Land has been published by the Folio Society – but for copyright reasons it is only available in the US and Canada.
“Limited to just 350 numbered copies this spectacular edition, of arguably the most important poem of the 20th century, features exclusive artwork by Tom Phillips – elected to the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts in 1989 and one of Britain’s finest contemporary artists. Half-bound in vellum blocked in 22-carat gold and printed letterpress, each copy has been signed by the artist.” Copies cost $1,500.
Full details of this extraordinary edition are here – you may need to change your location (in the top right of their site) to US in order to view.
The artist Tom Phillips sadly died on 28th November, shortly after the announcement of this publication.
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A double take on The Waste Land, October 2022
The latest issue of The Observer contains not one but two articles about The Waste Land.
In a Comment article, Kenan Malik writes that TS Eliot’s Waste Land was a barren place. But at least a spirit of optimism still prevailed.
“In Eliot’s day,” he believes, “pessimism about the human condition was confronted by optimism about future prospects. The breakdown of the old order disturbed many, but many others were inspired by the turmoil…Social and moral dislocation also helped foster dazzling advancement in many areas of art, literature and music…and, of course, Eliot himself, seized on the moment to refigure artistic expression.
“Today, that old strain of optimism has largely ebbed away and belief in the possibilities of social transformation eroded. Where a century ago it was the fear of working-class movements and of social revolution that fuelled the reaching back to tradition, today it is the absence of such movements and of such possibilities that shapes much of political discourse.”
“The Waste Land still speaks to us,” he concludes, “though in a different register to that conjured up by Eliot; its contemporary meaning needs unpacking as carefully as the allusions in the poem.” The full article is here.
And in their New Review, Jude Rogers considers TS Eliot’s women: the unsung female voices of The Waste Land. Her article traces the influences of Eliot’s mother, of Emily Hale and Vivienne Eliot, but also mentions instrumental women in Eliot’s life such as Lady Rothermere, Hope Mirlees and Virginia Woolf.
“I find much of Eliot’s misogyny unbearable,” Rogers writes, “but many other scenes featuring women continue to speak to me with a vivid, sad authenticity. Voices such as Emily’s, Marie’s and Vivien’s seem to have stayed with him and by articulating their experiences, he set them in motion, to fly free.” The full article is here.
The article acts as a preview of her documentary, Hold On Tight: The Women of The Waste Land, for which Rogers “interviewed female critics and biographers and younger academicsexploring Eliot’s important relationships”. The programme is to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 3rd November at 11:30, and subsequently available here.
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Autumn issue of Exchanges, October 2022
The Autumn issue of our Society quarterly, Exchanges, is now available for download.
Its contributions from members include reviews of the three significant new Eliot-related books – on Emily Hale, Mary Trevelyan, and on the ‘biography’ of The Waste Land . There’s an article on the papers of Great Tom author TS Matthews, and an Anglican priest writes about reading Eliot with a dying parishioner.
You can download this new issue here.
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Margaret Drabble on Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan, October 2022
The novelist, biographer and critic Margaret Drabble has written on two of the women in Eliot’s life, Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan, using as a starting point the new books The Hyacinth Girlby Lyndall Gordon, and Mary & Mr Eliot, by Erica Wagner and Mary Trevelyan.
“The relationship of Mary and Tom takes one into the world of Barbara Pym,” writes Dame Margaret, “a world of saints’ days and church wardens and evensong, a world of London fogs and air raids and endless card games.”
Whereas “the longer and more intense relationship of Eliot and Emily Hale has more tragic dimensions. In some aspects it recalls the preoccupations of Henry James in The Aspern Papers and his short story ‘The Altar of the Dead’: sealed boxes, posthumous revelations, treacheries, the beloved as muse, the duties of the guardian of the flame.”
“The brutality of his rejection of both Hale and Trevelyan (who gamely referred to herself as ‘jilted’) is startling,” she writes.
“One could say that Emily Hale has had the last laugh,” Drabble concludes, “but she was too good a woman to laugh at the ironies of fate.”
The full article, The women who made TS Eliot, can be read in The New Statesman.
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The Waste Land – a discussion in print, October 2022
In honour of the 100th anniversary of the publication of “The Waste Land,” Literary Hub invited four writers and academics – Robert Crawford, Jahan Ramazani, Beci Carver and David Barnes – to consider the importance, context, artistry, and legacy of the poem.
The result is a fascinating exchange in print, drawing upon their own lives and works as well as Eliot’s; from their first personal encounters with the poem, through Eliot’s own life and writing style, to the poem’s impact on subsequent literature and on contemporary writers, and its relevance to present day economic, racial and environmental issues.
Robert Crawford, an emeritus professor at the University of St Andrews, is known for his two-volume biography of Eliot; Jahan Ramazaniis Professor of English at the University of Virginia; Beci Carveris a lecturer at the University of Exeter; and David Barnes lectures in English Literature at Trinity College, Oxford
Literary Hub is “an organizing principle in the service of literary culture, a single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of contemporary literary life”. The article can be read at The Most Important Poem of the 20th Century: On T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” at 100
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‘Biography’ of The Waste Land published, October 2022
The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis has been published by Faber & Faber.
“Matthew Hollis reconstructs the creation of the poem,” say the publishers, “and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life.” This large volume (524 pages, including notes, index and the text of the poem’s First Edition) explores the genesis of The Waste Land by “presenting a mosaic of historical fragments.”
Matthew Hollis brings to the work his own experiences as an award-winning poet and biographer, and poetry editor at Faber & Faber. (He presents a short (1:33) video introduction to the poem here)
Reviews of the book are updated below as they appear.
The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, by Matthew Hollis, Faber & Faber, £25
The Observer, Tim Adams: “[Hollis] sifts and rakes over the dead ground of the poet’s broken relationship with his American parents, his disastrous infertile marriage, and the no man’s land of London decimated by Spanish flu after the great war. His quest is for all the seeds of intellectual and emotional pressure that shaped the poem.”
Prospect, Jeremy Noel-Tod: “Little of this will be new to anyone who has browsed the small library of criticism already written about The Waste Land, and some of it will be very familiar. But what Hollis knows about more than most is how poems get into print… In the more satisfyingly focused second half, [this insider expertise] finds its natural relevance, as Hollis dramatises the process of actually writing the poem.”
The Times, Susie Goldsbrough: “With elegance, wit and surprising warmth, given that this is ostensibly A Biography of a Poem, not a person, he tells the story of The Waste Land’s difficult birth.’
Financial Times, Jason Harding: “He overstates the degree to which Eliot learned from Pound’s poetry (Pound acknowledged Eliot had “modernized himself”) but provides a masterly account from surviving manuscripts — photographed in colour in a Faber centenary edition — of Pound’s revisions”
New Statesman, Ellen Peirson-Hagger: “Like the 434-line poem, this book immerses the reader in the political, social and cultural themes of the day – but what came before is important too. Hollis, a biographer of the poet Edward Thomas, weaves a rich body of research into a fast-paced narrative.”
TLS, Helen Vendler: “Hollis’s step-by-step life story of the poem (with references back to Eliot’s youth and forward to his death in 1965) is thronged by the many characters who inhabited Eliot’s world, chiefly Pound.”
The Guardian, Alex Clark: “Hollis is expert at blending biographical detail with literary criticism…It’s a testament to his own talent at dissecting his subject matter and infusing it with imaginative empathy that the reader comes away from his “biography” ready to look at The Waste Land with fresh eyes.” [NB This review was published in December 2022]
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AN Wilson on TS Eliot’s ‘great movement of mind’, October 2022
In a substantial essay in The Lamp, the writer AN Wilson uses The Complete Prose of TS Eliot as the basis for a contemporary consideration of Eliot’s social and religious views.
“These abundant pages,” he writes, “reflect a forty-year struggle to defend a worldview made up of conservative Christianity in public and personal life, and in literature: Eliot’s eclectic combo of symbolism, modernism, and classicism. Modernism in literature that is, but not in religion. At the time they were written, these letters, reviews, and lectures all take it for granted that the struggle had at least a hope of victory.
“Does the worldview he adopted and promulgated seem sustainable,” Wilson asks, “in our very different world, which has seen other truths, perhaps truths which eliminate the possibility of being a Catholic Christian in Eliot’s intolerant manner, with its dismissal as ‘heresy’ of viewpoints inimical to his own, with its undoubted racialism and elitism?”
The Lamp is a bi-monthly lay-edited journal of Catholic letters, and AN Wilson’s essay can be read here.
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Lyndall Gordon’s new book on TS Eliot’s hidden muse is published, October 2022
The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse, the new book by Eliot biographer and scholar Lyndall Gordon, has been published by Virago.
The book is the first in-depth, book-length study of the relationship between Eliot and Emily Hale, drawing extensively upon the letters which the poet wrote to her.
Gordon explores the ways in which Eliot’s emotional and also spiritual identity were intertwined with this relationship; she traces the lives of both Eliot and Hale, and the impact which they had upon each other; and she links incidents in their relationship directly to references, passages, poems and plays in Eliot’s oeuvre. In doing so, she reveals personal references in the works which have not been previously recognised.
“She was the secret sharer of the hot moments of inception,” Gordon writes. “To read Eliot’s letters to Emily during the thirties and early forties is to enter poems in the making.”
In addition, there is extensive consideration of Eliot’s behaviour with his first wife, Vivienne; and the book also covers Eliot’s relationships with the other women in his life, including his close friend Mary Trevelyan, and his second wife Valerie. But it is the letters to Emily Hale which provide the core of this revelatory book and, in Gordon’s words, “grant a new lens” upon Eliot.
Links to reviews will be added below as they appear.
UPDATE: In an article in The Times, previewing the BBC2 documentary Into The Waste Land (scroll down for details), Lyndall Gordon talks about Emily Hale and her work on the letters.
The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse, by Lyndall Gordon, Virago, £25. ISBN: 978-0-349-01211-7
Sunday Times, Kathryn Hughes: “In her exquisitely nuanced book Lyndall Gordon suggests persuasively that, at some level, Eliot did want his affair with Hale… to be known. (…) What effect was he after? Gordon suggests that, deep down, Eliot wanted to stun posterity by showing that, far from being the high priest of impersonality, he was as self-confessional as poets are popularly supposed to be.”
The Spectator, Tom Williams: “With these kind of details, it is hard to maintain the fig leaf of Eliot’s impersonality. Clearly his poems drew more deeply from his life than he cared to admit.”
The Telegraph, Frances Wilson: “Gordon sifts through the remaining documents with her customary care and delicacy, paraphrasing more often than quoting, tracing Hale’s influence throughout the poetry, aware that her interpretations of character are based on one side of a correspondence.”
New Statesman, Margaret Drabble: “It is a tale of betrayal on a grand scale, and it is very well told. The surviving correspondence from Eliot to Hale proves, as Eliot and his wife Valerie correctly feared it might, a bombshell for his reputation, not as a poet, but as someone who presumably aspired to be a good man, but who was obsessed by a sense of ancestral guilt. He had Hale’s side of the years-long correspondence destroyed, and Gordon’s account of the fate of these two caches is as exciting as a detective story. She catches the drama of the sealed boxes brilliantly.”
New York Times, Katie Roiphe: “One of the most refreshing things about The Hyacinth Girl is that Gordon neither lionizes nor takes down Eliot. Rather, a deep respect for and curiosity about his writing, combined with a supple psychological portrait, animates her analysis. She resists judging him in a facile or dismissive way, while not hesitating to illuminate the unsavory and disturbing behavior he sometimes displayed (including, for example, referring to a little Jewish girl fleeing the Nazis as “it”). In narrating his romantic attachments, she captures his manipulations, his selfishness, what she calls his ‘cruelty,’ without abandoning her mission to understand him and his writing.”
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Mary Trevelyan’s memoir of TS Eliot is published, October 2022
Under the co-authorship of Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner, Faber & Faber have published Mary & Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story
For almost twenty years, Eliot maintained a relationship with Mary Trevelyan; they attended church, went on day trips and frequently talked and ate together. “I had to spend all these years loving him and being hurt often,” she wrote.
The book draws upon Mary Trevelyan’s previously suppressed memoir, The Pope of Russell Square, presented here with interspersed commentary and exposition by Erica Wagner.
Links to reviews will be added below as they appear.
Mary & Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story, by Erica Wagner and Mary Trevelyan, Faber & Faber, £20
Sunday Times, Kathryn Hughes: “Erica Wagner shows herself to be a forensically astute reader of the memoir and letters that Trevelyan left behind and deposited in the Bodleian.”
The Spectator, Tom Williams: “[Trevelyan] and Eliot attended communion together, ate dinner with one another on a regular basis and exchanged frequent letters. Her perspective on the poet is narrow, and Wagner’s commentary is often necessary, adding important information and context that Mary couldn’t be aware of.”
The Telegraph, Frances Wilson: “In strong, sensible sentences [Trevelyan] catches Eliot’s shyness, pomposity and puzzling psychology: “He is a man in prison,” she notes, “largely of his own making.” She records his bons mots, his explosions of temper, the stiff note in which he tells her that his secretary (recently dismissed as “creepy”) is now his wife.”
Prospect, Jeremy Noel-Tod: “It was not an equal relationship. ‘Tom’ emerges as a charming but childish old man: a fastidious bachelor (Vivien died in 1947) who likes nothing better than a few days in bed for a minor ailment, and who knows Trevelyan will take pity on what she calls his ‘distraught refugee’ face. He wants a mother, but she wants a lover”
The Times, Susie Goldsbrough: “We see Trevelyan fall deeply in love while the great poet enjoys her bacon (not, sadly, a euphemism) and evades or ignores her quiet declarations. In January 1957 she came home to a note saying that he had run off with his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, who was 38 years his junior. Trevelyan was devastated.”
New Statesman, Margaret Drabble: “Wagner points out that Trevelyan’s diary entries are designed to emphasise the intimacy between her and Eliot, which made the news of his announcement that he had secretly married Valerie all the more shocking… Wagner comments that Eliot seemed startled that Trevelyan had taken the marriage amiss, and concludes that it is clear ‘that throughout their friendship his focus was always on himself, and on his own needs and requirements’. Indeed so.”
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Ralph Fiennes’ Four Quartets for BBC broadcast, October 2022
The acclaimed stage performance of Four Quartets by Ralph Fiennes is to be broadcast in a screen version on BBC Four at 8pm on Sunday 16th October.
The screen version has been directed by the actor’s sister, Sophie Fiennes. “Critical to the film’s cinematic conception,” she says, “is the compelling world of Four Quartets, vividly conjured through Ralph’s incisive performance and stage direction. Shot entirely on 16 mm, as a film of a performance of a poem, the film embraces these three creative forms simultaneously.
“It is a mesmerising journey into the imagination, bound by experience, memory and time.”
UPDATE: The screen version has been previewed in the FT: “This feature…is more of a modification than a further adaptation. Although the performance is now supplemented by occasional cutaway landscape sequences — which provide superfluous visualisations of Eliot’s already transporting natural descriptions — it still mostly plays out on a sombre, economically designed set. But the lens and the screen bring a new, even more intimate perspective to the same production.”
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Call for Journal submissions, October 2022
Submissions are now being invited for the Journal of the
TS Eliot Society (UK) 2023.
The Society’s annual academic Journal is published each summer, and welcomes scholarly essays by leading as well as early career academics, on subjects related to TS Eliot’s works and life. Essays are peer-reviewed and are normally 6-8000 words in length, plus references; deadline is January 2023.
If you would like to contribute to the 2023 issue, please see the Journal page of the website for full details, and forward a 300 word abstract or any enquiries to Journal@tseliotsociety.uk
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An Age of Prudence – Mark Ford on TS Eliot in New York Review of Books, September 2022
In the New York Review of Books, Professor Mark Ford of UCL writes about the information now emerging about Eliot’s life and work, ranging from Robert Crawford’s recent biography, Eliot After The Waste Land. to the colour facsimile manuscripts of The Waste Land.
This latter “gala volume”, he writes, “seems aimed at the Eliot aficionado ready to pore over every scrap surviving in the archive and eager to discover new angles on a poem more exhaustively interpreted than any in the language—or rather languages, for it is the most polyglot of poems.”
Ford makes the point that “The ‘deathbed’ edition of his Collected Poems, published in 1963, runs to a mere 234 pages, from which there now radiates a staggering amount of ancillary material. There seems, indeed, no end to our fascination with all that pertains to the creation of the best of these poems, from the baths that he took during his stay in Margate while working on The Waste Land to the original of the pool ‘filled with water out of sunlight’ hymned in Burnt Norton, to which I once made a pilgrimage.”
He explores revelations from the Emily Hale letters, from Eliot’s “career as a tyro literary journalist” in the Complete Prose, and from Crawford’s biography, which“sensitively weaves together poetry, letters, and criticism to present Eliot in all his complexity—one is tempted to say in all his perversity.”
With so much material emerging, Ford feels that “Where significance slides into trivia is not always easy to determine. Is it important that there was a furniture company in St. Louis run by one Harry Prufrock, or that Hale performed in a play in 1917 with an amateur thespian named W. Graydon Stetson?” In the end, he concludes, Eliot’s “own planted corpses undoubtedly keep sprouting, keep blooming.”
The essay is published in the New York Review of Books, October 20, 2022 – it can be read in full here by subscribers, or free upon registration.
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Country Life on The Waste Land, September 2022
Perhaps surprisingly to some, Country Life magazine has published an article marking the centenary of The Waste Land, “the poem of broken modern civilisation that seems more apt than ever”.
The article is not mentioned on the cover of the new September 28th issue, which highlights dog training, scarecrows and the new shooting season. But under a section title of “Home/The Finer Things/Art & Antiques”, Julie Harding asks why “Eliot’s great poem The Waste Land, with its devastating vision of a broken modern civilisation, still resonates so strongly today.”
The article quotes Dr Fran Brearton and Professor Jason Harding in an overview of the poem’s techniques, and concludes that “if [Eliot’s] magnum opus is not solidly rooted in any cityscape or landscape particularly, it is as firmly fixed in the 21st-century psyche as it was in the 20th and is likely to be equally entrenched for centuries to come.”
You can read the article here.
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BBC2 to broadcast ‘Into ‘The Waste Land’ documentary, September 2022
A documentary to be shown on BBC2 promises to “uncover the hidden personal story behind Eliot’s creation of his enduring poem”.
The film, first shown at the Sheffield DocFest (see our Events page, June 2022) focusses on the revelations in Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale which, the producers say, “have finally unveiled Eliot’s hidden heart, and the personal breakdown behind the creation of his most famous work.
“Moving through all five sections of the poem, the documentary explores many different facets of The Waste Land, from Eliot’s state of mind during each phase, to the different places where it was composed. Featuring contributions from actor and director Fiona Shaw and composer Max Richter; poets Hannah Sullivan and Daljit Nagra; Eliot’s biographer Lyndall Gordon, Vivien’s biographer Ann Pasternak Slater and Faber Poetry Editor Matthew Hollis.
“Simon Russell Beale performs specially recorded readings of the poem, in conjunction with Eliot’s own hypnotic reading of his work.”
Director Susanna White spoke previously about making the documentary. “I think it made me realize [Eliot] was far more emotional and sensitive than I’d ever understood,” she said, of the Eliot she found in The Waste Land. “To me, it’s like a man trying to process his life.”
What had previously seemed to her like impenetrable allusions and references in the poem seem now like “incidents from his life – him trying to make sense of what life is, and how to give your life meaning. Him just trying to make sense of things.”
UPDATE: The documentary is previewed in an article in The Times.
UPDATE: Susanna White is interviewed at length about making the film for Directors UK
Into ‘The Waste Land’, a 79-minute documentary, will be broadcast on BBC2 at 9pm on Thursday 13th October.The full BBC programme information and press release is here and the programme will be available after broadcast here.
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The Waste Land and the Rollo books – and Eliot’s personal inscription, September 2022
There are two particularly interesting aspects to an article in the New Yorker magazine, in which Anthony Lane considers The Shock and Aftershocks of The Waste Land.
First is an exploration of the Rollo children’s books of the 1830s, which Eliot read as a child, “popular tales of moral instruction, playful and severe…The Rollo books are a portal into the imaginative world of the poet, before he became a poet; I believe them to be a part of that becoming.”
In particular, Lane quotes passages from a book in which Rollo hopes that rain will not spoil a prospective blueberrying trip. “Did not you know,” his father chastises him, “that the ground was very dry, and that, unless we have rain soon, the crops will suffer very much?”
“Here is Eliot in waiting,” writes Lane, “The self-laceration, the guilty submission to chastisement, and, above all, the belief in aridity as the natural—even preferable—state of affairs. Dryness is what Rollo wants.”
And Lane concludes the article with words that Eliot inscribed in a First Edition ofThe Waste Land which he bought and gifted to Valerie in 1958, and which Lane says have never previously been seen in public:
This book belongs to Valerie, and so does Thomas Stearns Eliot, her husband. He could not give her this book, for he had no copy to give her. She had wanted the book for many years. She had possessed the author for over a year, when the book came. She had made his land blossom and birds to sing there.
The article can be read here in the New Yorker, October 3 2022 issue.
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Lyndall Gordon on the women in The Waste Land, September 2022
On Woman’s Hour, on BBC Radio 4, Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon talked about the women of The Waste Land.
Presenter Emma Barnett, who admitted to not having read the poem, introduced the item from the position that The Waste Land ’s women were “mostly having a terrible time it seems?” Lyndall explained that the women “represent the face of a fallen world, of a degraded society”.
Drawing on her research for her forthcoming book on Emily Hale, The Hyacinth Girl, Gordon stressed instead “a remembered love which has given the speaker of The Waste Land the most elevated feelings, that almost push beyond love of the object into a kind of flashing glimpse of light.” She recommended reading the poem for “the non-Waste Land moments” of transcendence, of which Emily Hale was “the medium, the conduit”.
The twelve-minute item can be heard here and begins at 46:41.
In conclusion, Emma Barnett says that the documentary TS Eliot – Into The Waste Land (see Events, June 2022) will be broadcast on BBC2 on 20thOctober.
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The Waste Land “a case study of great art by flawed artists”, September 2022
In the Culture section of The Economist, AD Miller argues that “The Waste Land is a case study in thinking about great art by reprehensible artists” – and that “How readers respond to it is a matter of prejudice—their own, but also, now more than ever, the poet’s.”
He believes that “The real meaning of The Waste Land is how it makes you feel. This way of responding to art tends to come naturally for music or paintings. When the medium is words, some readers find it harder to trust in their emotions. Perhaps that reflects a failure in the words; perhaps it is a limitation in the readers. So much for their prejudice.”
He goes on to consider the prejudices of Pound and Eliot. “Anti-Semitism does not feature in the published poem; but that does not mean readers should blithely ignore the poet’s failings,” he writes. “Nor, though, are those a clinching reason to forswear reading it altogether.
“The challenge is to acknowledge, and reconcile, the masterpiece and the monstrous views” – and, he ends, “accept that people, like poems, can be made up of jagged fragments that form a complex whole.”
Read the full article in The Economist.
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Help from Uncle Possum, September 2022
An essay in the TLS explores the support which Eliot provided to Omar Pound, Ezra’s young son, through unpublished letters which Eliot wrote to the boy’s housemaster.
The essay is written by Chris Jones, an English teacher at Charterhouse school, in whose archives the letters are held. Omar Pound was sent to Charterhouse in 1940 where, despite having no contact with his father, the boy was “shunned” by other pupils because of his father’s Fascist broadcasts from Italy.
Charterhouse holds eight letters from Eliot to Omar’s housemaster, unpublished to date. In the first, dated 1942, Eliot gives his impressions of the boy. “He reminded me of his father,” he writes, “whose nervousness also takes the form of a kind of defensive aggressiveness.”
“I have never been more puzzled by a boy,” he continues, “but then I was previously puzzled by his parents.”
When, because of his activities, Ezra’s finances were frozen by the Custodian of Enemy Property, Eliot stepped in to offer support in terms of pocket money and holiday expenses; if “some aid in this way would help toward his happiness and toward alleviating any sense of inferiority I should be glad to do something indirectly and anonymously.” Eliot also refers to his concern regarding “the unsettled question of [Omar’s] confirmation”.
The relationship continued; Omar Pound’s own archive contains another two decades’ worth of correspondence addressed to “Uncle Possum”.
The full essay is published (£) in the TLS.
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Proof Copy of Old Possum’s, September 2022
A rare Proof Copy of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is being sold by a dealer in the US.
Produced for proofreading checks prior to the published unillustrated First Edition, the book is bound in Faber & Faber’s original yellow wraps, printed in black. There is a typed title label on its spine over an old handwritten title.
There are more images and details at Burnside Rare Books, who are offering the book for $15,000.
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Four Quartets and wartime England, September 2022
Available to hear once again on BBC Sounds is The Poetry of History – T.S. Eliot and the Blitz. First broadcast in 2006, the 30min programme considers Four Quartets and the war, with contributions from historian Jose Harris and Eliot scholar Ian Smith, presented by Jonathan Bate.
In the first half of the programme they visit Shamley Green, the village where Eliot stayed and wrote during much of the War in the Mirrlees family home. “I think what he admired about a village like this,” says Ian Smith, “was not so much its picturesque quality as its exemplary socio-political structure.” They consider villages then organised around great houses and the Church, and the English countryside as depicted in Four Quartets; also aspects of the 1944 Education Act which are a reflection of doctrines which Eliot had been espousing.
On the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral they discuss the importance of the Atlantic during the Blitz, with an interesting juxtaposition of the voices of Eliot and Churchill, and Jose Harris talks about the value of poetry such as Eliot’s as a historical source. “A quite banal journalist may capture an important historical moment,” she observes, “and why one should take note of banal journalists, which we do all the time, but not of a great poet, I am at a loss to understand.”
The programme can be heard on BBC Sounds until 3rd October here.
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The Emily Hale letters in Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’, September 2022
In a lengthy review in the London Review of Books of Robert Crawford’s Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’, Helen Thaventhiran focusses on the presence of Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale in his biography.
“Crawford’s biography,” she writes in Things Ill-Done and Undone, “restores Eliot’s devotion to view while keeping its object shadowy. His concern is with tracing the way Eliot’s ‘conception’ of Hale joined with, disturbed, formed and deformed his self-conception in the years between 1927 and the termination of their correspondence after Eliot’s second marriage thirty years later.”
Helen Thaventhiran is an Associate Professor in Literature at Robinson College, Cambridge. “Without capitulating to the sensationalism of the romance plot,” she writes, “Crawford demonstrates that the letters refresh our sense of Eliot because they show him negotiating the ways in which his private life and public work converged.”
She highlights “the value of the letters as a resonance chamber for Eliot’s published writings”, and praises Crawford’s “wise decision to allow Eliot’s self-justifications to occupy significant space in the book, and to be self-convicting”.
The review in the London Review of Books is here.
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Departing from Gate 5 – The Waste Land, August 2022
An entertaining short article suggests that the best place to read The Waste Land is… in an airport. For, “Like the interwoven ‘textuality’ of the airport, Eliot’s The Waste Land is a pastiche of discourses.”
Jason M Baxter describes the announcements, music, news broadcasts and snatches of conversation which surrounded him in an airport. “Gossip, artistic inspiration, packaged talking points on world affairs, changing landscapes, altering weather patterns: My brain was a fluid movement of fragmented texts and landscapes,” he writes. “It was the perfect context for reading Eliot.”
He describes an airport as “the placeless instrument by which millions of people, who don’t know one another, don’t want to know one another, nevertheless profitably use one another for a few hours to further advance their authenticity, somewhere else. At the same time, more than any other place in the world, our ordinary human actions—eating, talking, walking, waiting—are so completely confined to an arbitrary grid of order, it’s like a physical incarnation of despair.”
“There is a point of hope, though. The fragmented, polytextual style of The Waste Land, while developed as a despairing critique of modernity, became for Eliot a language of potency—broken things, by their brokenness, suggest the hope of restoration, and in turn can mend each other: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’
You can read the whole article on First Things here.
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TS Eliot as Edgelord, August 2022
In an essay on Poetry London, Vidyan Ravinthiran reapproaches The Waste Land in terms foregrounded by the internet. “Do I hear Batman’s Joker,” he asks, “or one of those terminally online males obsessed with him: a would-be-spectacular, self-promotingly ominous provocateur?” He suggests that, rather than any kind of prophet, this makes Eliot, “to draw on today’s internet parlance, an edgelord.
“The edgelord provokes with opinions of algorithm-exploiting vehemence. He harbinges, hyperbolises. His ‘atavistic righteous indignation’ – to borrow Stephen Spender’s phrase for Eliot’s viciously reductive ‘thumbnail sketches’ of ‘cosmopolitans’ – operates as a cover for his spleen. His avatars include the troll, the Twitter mob-lord, the keyboard warrior.
“What’s remarkable (depressing) is the sheer undiluted confidence with which white male grievance habitually redescribes its frustration as a form of universal truth. The claim of the edgelord, encountered on Twitter or in many poetry volumes, is everywhere the same: my anger, elaborated into a theory, explains everything. There is nothing for anyone else to say.”
The child of Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants, Vidyan Ravinthiran grew up in a mixed area of Leeds, studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and is now an Associate Professor of English Literature at Harvard. His The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Herewas shortlisted for the Forward and the TS Eliot Prizes. “This isn’t about burning The Waste Land,” he concludes. “It’s about learning to see that beautiful and moving work as a multiple, contingent, self-conflicted, humanconstruction. It isn’t prophecy, it’s a poem.”
Read the essay on Poetry London here.
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TS Eliot – The Waste Land Tour, August 2022
A weekly guided walk takes participants around the key sites in the City of London mentioned in The Waste Land– and Society Members are offered a concessionary price.
TS Eliot – The Waste Land Tour takes place every Wednesday at 11.30am, starting from Blackfriars Underground Station. “Up Queen Victoria Street to where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours, down King William Street to St Magnus the Martyr. And of course London Bridge and ‘a public bar in Lower Thames Street’.”
The walk is guided by Rick Jones, a Blue Badge Guide (and pianist and freelance writer) who for most of his working life was a journalist. As such he was for ten years chief music critic for the Evening Standard and he remains Secretary of the Critics Circle.
Full details, reviews and reservations for the walk are here. Payment of £15 is taken on the day – and Members are entitled to the concessionary rate of just £10; quote the Members password when paying.
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T.S. Eliot Memorial Service footage, August 2022
Vintage footage has been uploaded of the memorial service for TS Eliot, held at Westminster Abbey on 4th February 1965.
Taken from the AP Archive, the brief (1:39) footage captures, in silent b/w, the arrival and departure of some of the congregation. These include Valerie Eliot (left), and a (magnificently top-hatted) Sir Alec Guinness, who read from Eliot’s work during the ceremony.
The footage can be viewed here
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Trevor Nunn: “People thought staging T.S. Eliot was ridiculous”, July 2022
The legendary theatre director Trevor Nunn has spoken about the staging of Cats, for which he was responsible – and the film, for which he was not.
Sir Trevor, who ran both the RSC and the National Theatre, studied under Leavis at Cambridge – but part of his his success, writes Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph (£), has been to bridge the gap between “serious” fare and popular entertainment. A prime example was Cats. “There were only snorts of derision when I told people I was doing a show based on TS Eliot’s poems – they thought it was ridiculous,” Nunn recalls.
“We did a huge amount of improvisational work around the characters – so there were all these storylines between them, it’s very subtextual,” he says.
But when Nunn offered to help with the movie Cats he never heard back. “It became clear that a different approach was going to be taken, and it was terribly upsetting to realise that the whole thing had been misunderstood – that the starting-point [putting a premium on CGI] was catastrophic.”
He has refused to even see the film.
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Lyndall Gordon on The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse, July 2022
Details have now been released of Lyndall Gordon’s forthcoming book, The Hyacinth Girl, which draws upon the letters from Eliot to Emily Hale.
The publisher, Virago, says that “Lyndall Gordon reveals a hidden Eliot. Emily Hale now becomes the first and [most] consistently important woman of [Eliot’s] life — and his art.
“Emily Hale was at the centre of a love drama he conceived and the inspiration for the lines he wrote to last beyond their time.
“Gordon also offers new insight into the other spirited women who shaped him: Vivienne, the flamboyant wife with whom he shared a private wasteland; Mary Trevelyan, his companion in prayer; and Valerie Fletcher, the young disciple to whom he proposed when his relationship with Emily foundered. Eliot kept his women apart as each ignited his transformations as poet, expatriate, convert, and, finally, in his latter years, a man `made for love.’”
Full details and pre-ordering are now available via the Virago Bookshop.
The Hyacinth Girl, Virago, 432pp, is scheduled for publication on 6thOctober, ISBN-13: 9780349012117, £25
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Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys on The Waste Land, July 2022
Interviewed for This Cultural Life on BBC Radio 4, Neil 
Tennant of Pet Shop Boys mentions the influence of Eliot’s The Waste Land on his band’s hit, West End Girls.
“I always loved the poem The Waste Land by TS Eliot,” he says. “I don’t really understand it to this day, but I love all the voices…you know, when it’s ‘Good night ladies, good night’, the women talking in the pub, women talking on the bus. I love the idea of having a collage of voices, and so in writing West End Girls I was also thinking of writing a collage of different voices, so it’s not just one voice all the way through.”
The interview is on BBC Sounds here, and this section begins with an extract from The Waste Land at 36:24.
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Summer issue of Exchanges, July 2022
The Summer issue of our Society quarterly, Exchanges, is now available for download.
Its contributions from members include a reflection on Little Gidding and consolation; reports from this year’s Annual TS Eliot Festival at Little Gidding; a review of Matthew Geary’s book TS Eliot and the Mother; and an article on teaching The Waste Land to A Level students.
You can download this new issue here.
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BBC celebrate centenary with He Do The Waste Land in Different Voices and more, June 2022
The BBC has announced several programmes on radio and TV which will celebrate the centenary of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.
On 10th July, on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds, He Do The Waste Land In Different Voices “will see the poem performed for the first time as if an audio drama, the text unchanged from the original, but with a focus on the collection of voices within it.”
An ensemble cast for the performance “bring the characters from the poem to life”:
Marie & Madame Sosostris: Maggie Steed
The Seer: Adrian Edmondson
The Hyacinth Girl: Esme Scarborough
The Poet: Paul Ready
The Woman in the Pub: Tilly Vosburgh
The Actor: David Haig
Tiresias: David Calder
The Typist: Matilda Tucker
“Carefully created to evoke a sense of fractured time, with haunting whispers of catastrophes to come, the sound remains faithful to the themes of anxiety, loss and anger found within the text as well as the uncertainty of the modern age we currently live in.” Produced by Caroline Raphael, the performance also features the work of award-winning sound designer David Thomas. Permission was granted from the Eliot Estate to mark the centenary with this new adaptation.
The programme will be preceded by a feature about the poem, for which Paul Keers (Chair of the TS Eliot Society) has interviewed leading Eliot scholars Lyndall Gordon, Mark Ford, Seamus Perry, Stephen Connor, and Nancy Fulford, archivist for the T S Eliot Estate. “Taking listeners into the Eliot archive, the feature will contextualise the text and provide insight into Eliot’s own inspirations as well as the story behind The Waste Land.”
He Do The Waste Land in Different Voices is available on BBC Sounds until 9th August.
Update: An article in The Sunday Times explores the story behind the making of both the feature and the dramatic production.
And a discussion with excerpts on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row previewed both the feature (“really interesting to cast light and different shades on the audio play that follows”) and the audio drama itself (“I loved the way they really played with sound and texture”). The item can be heard here beginning at 21:41.
Later this year, on BBC Two and iPlayer, a new documentary, T.S. Eliot: Into ‘The Waste Land’, directed by Susanna White, will “uncover the hidden personal story behind Eliot’s creation of his celebrated poem… Moving through all five sections of the poem, the documentary explores many different facets of The Waste Land, from Eliot’s state of mind during each phase, to the different places where it was composed.”
And on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds in November in Hold On Tight: The Women Of The Waste Land, arts writer and broadcaster Jude Rogers “immerses herself in the worlds and the voices of the women inside and outside T.S. Eliot’s extraordinary poem.” Initial details of these later broadcasts are here and further information will follow nearer the broadcasts.
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Alice Oswald’s “distracted walkabout with TS Eliot and others”, June 2022
The latest lecture by Alice Oswald as Oxford Professor of Poetry can now be heard online.
Titled The Life and Death of Poetry, her Trinity term lecture was subtitled A distracted walkabout with T.S Eliot and others. “This is not a lecture about The Waste Land,” she begins. “It is an assembly of voices invoked by and including The Waste Land to let me read it more refreshingly.”
Nevertheless, the poem is at the heart of her lecture, and particularly the discarded original opening. She find that there are “two Waste Lands – the sermonising one, which guides a reader from a death to an attempted resurrection; and the carnival one, published in facsimile, with Old Tom leading the procession.” It is the latter which is echoed in her “walkabout”.
Oswald explains that moving from rural Devon to urban Bristol has changed her relationship with the poem, and her “walkabout” in the city encounters other writers from graffiti artists and a street poet to Linton Kwesi Johnson. “It is not just that the city has altered the poem,” she says, “but by the time I’ve rushed out to walk the streets with my hair down, so, the poem has altered the city.”
The lecture can be heard here.
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TS Eliot books in Bonhams auction, June 2022
A typescript proof copy of Four Quartets, stapled in blue printed Faber wrappers (right, click to enlarge) is just one of the items related to TS Eliot which are included in an auction of Fine Books & Manuscripts at Bonhams, Knightsbridge on 22nd June.
There is also a copy of Triumphal March inscribed “for [French writer, journalist and literary critic]Ramon Fernandez from his friend T.S. Eliot”; and a US First Edition of For Lancelot Andrewes inscribed to his cousin, “Eleanor Hinkley from T.S. Eliot affectionately/ 30.iv.29/ (I am not responsible for the Stars, or the wrapper)”, the latter a complaint about the US book’s design.
There is a First Edition of his Collected Poems 1909-1935, inscribed three days before its publication to his friends “to G. & Polly Tandy/ Compts. of Possum 31.iii.36″ (mentioned in Letters Vol 8). And there is a copy of Poems 1909-1925, the Faber & Gwyer First Edition of 1926, in its rarely-surviving dustjacket (left, click to enlarge)
Images of all the items can be seen in the online Bonhams catalogue, lots 174-178.
Update: The typescript proof copy of Four Quartets sold for £1,657.50 including premium; the inscribed Triumphal March for £1,020; the inscribed For Lancelot Andrewes for £2,040; the inscribed Collected Poems 1909-1935 for £2,295; and the Poems 1909-1925 for £892.50.
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Eliot After The Waste Land published, June 2022
The second and concluding volume of Robert Crawford’s biography of TS Eliot, Eliot After The Waste Land, has been published.
“In this compelling and meticulous portrait of the twentieth century’s most important poet,” reads the flyleaf, “Robert Crawford completes the story he began in Young Eliot. Drawing on extensive new sources and letters, this is the first full-scale biography to make use of Eliot’s most significant surviving correspondence, including the archive of letters…detailing his decades-long love affair with Emily Hale.
“This long-awaited second volume… tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life.
Eliot After The Waste Land, 609pp (124pp of acknowledgements, footnotes & index), Jonathan Cape, £25
See our Events page for events connected to publication; links to reviews are updated below as they appear:
Erica Wagner, New Statesman – How TS Eliot found happiness
“Crawford’s magisterial account sometimes feels overcrowded with details of this lecture given, or that essay published in a certain journal. Yet such comprehensiveness is, and will be, invaluable to scholars. And it means that the tender, elegiac final notes of this book are all the more striking. The portrait of the poet’s final years is one of joy – joy despite his own ill-health and the loss of many old friends to death’s reaping scythe. With his last breath Tom Eliot spoke his beloved wife’s name.”
John Carey, The Sunday Times (£) – “Sex, betrayal and three women who loved him”
“To many readers TS Eliot seems an austere and remote figure, hidden behind unintelligible poetry and intimidatingly erudite prose. So it is a pleasant surprise to find that in this whopping second (and final) volume of Robert Crawford’s biography, although due attention is paid to Eliot’s writing (and to his rampant racism and antisemitism), Eliot’s love life, or lack of it, is a big concern…
“Perhaps Eliot demonstrates what Jonathan Bate notes in Radical Wordsworth. Being starved of sex brings out a poet’s greatest work. Sexual satisfaction is calamitous.”
Sean O’Brien, The Telegraph (£) – This new biography makes TS Eliot’s life seem unthinkably grim.
“Full of voices, friendships and conflicts, Crawford’s book is rich and dense as Christmas cake…Nobody, least of all Eliot, seems to have had any fun: for him the revulsion seems to have been the payoff…As Crawford reads him, Eliot was in many ways an unappetising figure.”
Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman – This account of the second half of TS Eliot’s life is suitably complex.
“Crawford is the first biographer to have access to Eliot’s correspondence with Emily Hale, which was sealed for 50 years, and there is therefore a tranche of new detail, speculation and inference possible. But Crawford wisely states ‘my aim is not to neaten his life, or reduce it to one expository template, but to let it emerge in its sometimes complex, contradictory messiness’. Messiness is a very apposite word.”
Philip Hensher, The Spectator – Is TS Eliot’s great aura fading?
“This book is a thorough, solid sequel to Crawford’s much-praised Young Eliot. It benefits from the opening up of new material, the publication of letters and a proper edition of both the prose and the full body of poetry… This biography is going to play a large part in any future assessment of Eliot, and has an overall solid authority. What will happen to that reputation?”
James Marriott, The Times (£) – Inside TS Eliot’s weird and miserable world
“In this dismayingly thorough second volume of his biography of the poet… Robert Crawford digs through the drifts, heaping shovelfuls of speeches and honorary degrees on to the helpless reader. It is our privilege to witness the author of The Waste Land engaging in such scintillating activities as ‘speaking at a . . . celebration in Chichester after his return from a short Spanish holiday’ and ‘unveiling a plaque to Yeats’.
“‘Celebrating Eliot’s honorary degree from the University of Rome, [Eliot and his wife] stayed for over two weeks, relishing the food.’ Well, good for him. Although less good for me since I had to read about it. To my distress, Eliot was awarded 13 honorary degrees.”
Jason Harding, FT: “Crawford was undaunted by the task of digesting a huge amount of recently published material in his attempt to offer a fresh portrait of Eliot after a century of intensive, sometimes intrusive, scrutiny.”
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Terry Eagleton on TS Eliot’s “conservative modernism”, June 2022
“For most moderately enlightened readers today, Eliot’s social views range from the objectionable to the obnoxious.” In the June issue of Commonweal magazine, Terry Eagleton, “distinguished visiting professor of English literature, University of Lancaster”, considers The Pope of Russell Square – TS Eliot’s conservative modernism.
His essay explores Eliot’s ideal social order, and his position as “a radical of the right”. “A belief in social order need not be authoritarian,” writes Eagleton, “it may rather be an alternative to the anarchy of the marketplace. It may also be preferable to a liberal civilization in which everyone may believe more or less what they want—but only because convictions don’t matter much in any case, and because the idea of human solidarity has withered at the root.”
Eagleton considers the roles of history, poetic impersonality and classicism in Eliot’s poetry, and the way in which “For Eliot to be loyal to one criterion of a classic, then, is to flout certain others: order, balance, harmony, nobility, and the like. It means producing a poetry marked by spiritual disorder, sordid imagery, broken rhythms, banal snatches of speech and barren inner landscapes.”
“The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,” Eagleton concludes, “bear witness to ‘a progressive refinement in the perception of the variations of feeling, and a progressive elaboration of the means of expressing these variations’ (The Sacred Wood). That this stretch of time is also the matrix of much of what Eliot detests—materialism, democracy, individualism, secularization—is an instance of the cunning of history, which takes with one hand what it gives with the other.”
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The Waste Land after One Hundred Years, June 2022
A newly published collection of eight essays reflects on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. The Waste Land after One Hundred Years is edited by Steven Matthews, Professor of Modernist Studies and Director of the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading.
“At this centenary moment,” say the publishers, “the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem’s legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India.
“Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem’s immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence.”
Published by Boydell and Brewer, the 210pp collection is £19.99 in Ebook or £30.00 in hardback, and full details are here. Our Events page also carries details of the launch event, open to all, which includes two seminar panels and a reading of the poem, both in Oxford and online.
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The Love Song of TS Eliot, May 2022
An article in The Observer previews both the release of the Emily Hale letters, and the publication of Eliot After The Waste Land, the second volume of Robert Crawford’s biography of TS Eliot. Crawford is the first biographer to be given permission to reproduce passages from the Hale letters, ahead of their planned publication online.
Crawford believes that, through these letters, Eliot revealed what he saw as his true self. He told The Observer that “[Eliot] sees himself as an emotional person. He’s very aware that people see him as a rather cold intellectual.
“That’s the way that people often regarded TS Eliot – and still regard him. People who perhaps don’t get his poetry feel there’s a crossword puzzle aspect to it.
“But if you read it aloud, you realise that there’s tremendous emotional disturbance underneath a lot of Eliot’s poetry. Sometimes people wonder where that came from. I think it came from this sense of longing, bound up with his feelings for Emily Hale.”
A surprisingly similar article, focussing primarily on the Hale letters, is published in The Times (£)
For more details of Robert Crawford’s book, scroll down to March of this year.
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TS Eliot and Groucho Marx, revisited, May 2022
An article in Jstor Daily explores once again the surprising relationship between TS Eliot and Groucho Marx
“Their encounter has the feel of a tragic Modernist fable about the impossibility of communication; two radically different men—one an iconoclast, the other an elitist—both geniuses in their respective domains, forever blown about on the winds of their own insecurity and anger.”
While adding little to the story of their letters and meeting – see our Resources/Miscellany/Recollections for that – the article delves into the characteristics of Jewish humour in the period of Modernist literature, and suggests that Eliot and Marx “needed each other; Eliot to rehabilitate his pre-war image, Marx to receive the benediction of the literati he so coveted.”
“Separated by class, by upbringing, by nation, by ethnicity, by religion, Eliot and Marx’s distance may seem marked, but all of us are separated from one another regardless. Facing such the predicament of our myriad alienations, Modernist poetry responds with a plaintive whine, while Jewish comedy is perfectly content to laugh.”
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This year’s Journal is published, May 2022
The 2022 edition of The Journal of the TS Eliot Society has just been published.
Edited by Dr Scott Freer, the 2022 edition contains essays and reviews on subjects ranging from the gift of the Emily Hale letters to an examination of Eliot and Evelyn Waugh.
Full contents are listed on our Journal page, together with ordering details. The Journal is free to members of the Society, £8 + p&p to others.
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How Siegfried Sassoon pictured ‘Pastor T Stearns Eliot’, May 2022
A sale of artworks by Siegfried Sassoon includes an extraordinary Christmas card, on which he has pictured TS Eliot as a priest.
In a full length portrait, Eliot is drawn in pencil, wearing a full-length cassock and a blue stole, lettered “TSE”.
The inside of the card reads “Wishing you a prim Xmas and a priggish New Year”, and “From Pastor T Stearns Eliot, Modernist Tabernacle, Boston, Mass:”, with a pasted on example of Eliot’s signature.
In later life, the auctoneers say, Siegfried Sassoon felt embittered towards the new generation of modernist poets such as Pound and Eliot. In one letter he wrote, “I now live almost entirely detached from the literary scene and the younger generation and am liable to assume that none of them regard me as having any significance in the Eliot/Auden age”.
Full details of the sale with further images are here.
UPDATE: This item sold for £900.
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The Waste Land First Edition signed by T.S. Eliot, May 2022
An extremely rare First Edition of The Waste Land signed by TS Eliot has come on to the market.
“Signed or inscribed copies of either the first American or first English edition of Eliot’s `magnum opus’ are rare,” writes the bookseller Peter Grogan. “The last signed copy at auction was over half-a-century ago (although there have been two inscribed copies since then).
“The signature here appears to have been done (presumably for a collector) in the late 1940s or early ’50s.”
Signed by Eliot to the title-page beneath his printed name, which he has crossed through, the book itself is described as “a very good copy in supplied first-state dustwrapper with significant conservation”. Although it is being sold from London, the book is priced at US$57,500 and full details are here.
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Full colour Centenary Edition published of The Waste Land Facsimile & Transcript, April 2022
Featuring full colour photography for the first time, Faber have today published a Centenary Edition of The Waste Land Facsimile & Transcript of the poem’s original drafts.
The new edition replaces the monochrome images in the 1971 and subsequent editions with full colour images, revealing for the first time the variations in paper stock, typewriting and carbon copies, and pencil and ink handwriting.
A short article by Matthew Hollis explains the background to the new edition, and also details the material included for the first time: images of several verso notes, which were only footnoted previously; three bills for Eliot’s stay at The Albermarle Hotel in Margate; and the label with which Eliot mailed his original drafts in a package to John Quinn in New York.
The Centenary Edition is published by Faber, 161pp paperback, £25.
A full review of the Centenary Edition, with comparative images, is in the Spring issue of our Society quarterly, Exchanges – see item below for details of its free download.
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Spring issue of Exchanges, marking the centenary of The Waste Land, April 2022
The Spring issue of our Society quarterly, Exchanges, is now available for download.
Marking the centenary of The Waste Land, its contributions from members include reminiscences of first encounters with the poem; images from the First Edition’s dustjacket and promotional material; a look back at initial critical responses to The Waste Land; and the first review with images of the new full-colour Facsimile & Transcript Centenary Edition.
You can download this new issue here.
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TS Eliot in Margate, April 2022
“It’s 1921, and in Margate the sunniest October on record is fading into a cool November. On a bench in a shelter down by the beach, a tired-looking man of 33 is trying very hard to do nothing. This does not come easily to him. He is, by temperament, a worker and a worrier, but he is under instructions from his doctor to do nothing. His employer, Lloyd’s bank, has given him three month’s paid leave for that very purpose.
“So he does nothing, or almost nothing. He sketches passers-by. He practices scales on a mandolin. And he writes the lines at the heart of what will become the most influential poem of the next hundred years”
In The Telegraph (£), Tristram Fane Saunders takes a trip to Margate, and tries “to walk where Eliot walked, see the places he saw”, in order to connect physical aspects of the town in which Eliot wrote part of The Waste Land to lines from the poem and manuscript. He quotes Lyndall Gordon and Matthew Hollis on the poem, together with Carl Barat, frontman of the rock band The Libertines, who runs a hotel in the town.
“On Margate Sands,” he writes, “Eliot connected nothing with nothing to make something, something that we will read as long as there are readers.”
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The Sacred Wood, inscribed by TS Eliot to his niece, April 2022
A copy of The Sacred Wood inscribed by Eliot to his niece, Theodora Eliot Smith, has come up for sale through Blackwell’s Rare Books.
This Second Edition of the book, for which Eliot added his preface, is inscribed “For Theodora Eliot Smith, from T. S. Eliot, 25.vii/28”
Blackwell’s explain that Theodora “was the daughter of Eliot’s sister Charlotte, who had died prematurely a couple of years before – at the end of a summer during which Theodora had visited the Eliots in Paris, where Vivien had been staying at the Sanatorium de la Malmaison. The young Theodora had made a very favourable impression on the beleaguered Eliot, not least for the affection she displayed towards Vivien.”
Details of the book are here
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TS Eliot and Bob Dylan – a previously unpublished link, April 2022
An unpublished poem by Bob Dylan has provided an important early link between the two Nobel Laureates, Dylan and TS Eliot.
The poem appears in sixteen pages of handwritten, Beat-style poetry, written by Dylan some time in 1959 or 1960, while at the University of Minnesota. Writing under his newly-adopted name of Bob Dylan, and with a cover page calling them “Poems Without Titles”, the pages have just come up for auction.
Of particular interest are lines describing a romantic date: “I thought she was hip when we sat and drank coffee and I flipped when she recited all of Prufrock by heart.”
It provides evidence that Eliot was in Dylan’s consciousness from his teenage onwards. He would later go on to refer in Desolation Row to “Ezra Pound and TS Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower”, and to recite the opening lines of The Waste Land during his radio show Theme Time Radio Hour.
The full story of Dylan’s Poems Without Titles has been posted by Hot Press, and the individual poems are for auction at RR Auctions with an estimate in excess of $20,000 per poem.
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TS Eliot’s modernism “between high and low culture”, April 1922
A Guardian opinion piece balances the centenary of The Waste Land with Eliot’s feelings about the death of the music hall artiste Marie Lloyd, and the way in which his work and his references span both high and low culture.
“What the poet found in the most popular music hall artiste of his time,” says the paper, “shines a light on a misunderstood genius and the time he lived in.”
The Guardian claims that “A century on, Eliot can seem an effete, politically unattractive character, who has held the academy in thrall with his wilful obscurity.”
However, the paper highlights Eliot’s grief at the death of Marie Lloyd. It quotes from his letter of 1922: “No other comedian succeeded so well in giving expression to the life of [her] audience, in raising it to a kind of art.”
And the paper concludes: “The same could be said of Eliot himself. He lived through two world wars and has left monuments to both. But it’s often his less grandiose interventions that resonate.”
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The Waste Land “couldn’t be more relevant to now”, April 2022
An article in The Guardian previews the forthcoming fragments festival celebrating the centenary of The Waste Land, and incorporates views of the poem from some of those involved in the event.
Jeanette Winterson, who will speak on the opening night, says of the poem that “It’s a slow point in the turning world. It encourages you to take your hand off the panic button and breathe a bit deeper. There’s a real meditative quality to it, if you spend the time.”
While the British-Indian pianist Rekesh Chauhan, who will perform one of the weekend’s closing events, says that “The Waste Land is dark, but there’s also a lot about regeneration, renewal, spring. I really hope that will come out.”
Co-curator Séan Doran says: “A hundred years on, here we are again: Covid, world war, the sense of the fragility of life, even climate change. The poem couldn’t be more relevant to now.”
London’s Evening Standard has published a short guide to the festival, highlighting some of the performances taking place, and CityAM have an overview of the event.
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Collecting the centenary, April 2022
“Collectors often come to me in search of a first edition of The Waste Land, and I have to ask a troublesome question: ‘which one?'”
Sammy Jay is a specialist in literature at Peter Harrington, the largest antiquarian book dealer in Europe. In “Mixing Memory and Desire”: Collecting the centenary in poetry, an article in Poetry London, he discusses all of the ‘first appearances’ of The Waste Land, in the magazines The Criterion and The Dial as well as in its First Edition books. He explains the appearance of a cache of pristine US First Editions, and discusses the UK First Edition, “in some ways the most interesting”, published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press.
“Perhaps the most intriguing of these to have passed through my hands,” he relates, “was one owned by the violinist Olga Rudge, not least because the copy ended up in the library of her lover – Ezra Pound.”
There are several Eliot First Editions available to Members Only on our Bookshelf page – but sadly not of The Waste Land. Peter Harrington currently have for sale a copy of the First Edition of The Criterion, containing the first appearance of the poem, for £7,500.
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Fragments festival preview featuring Jeanette Winterson, April 2022
On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on April 1st, at 8:43 am, there was a preview of the fragments festival celebrating the centenary of The Waste Land.
During the item, author Jeanette Winterson spoke about her own relationship with Eliot’s work. As a teenager, Winterson’s books were burnt by her mother, and she associated the remnants with Eliot’s use of “fragments” in the poem.
To open the fragments festival, Jeanette Winterson will deliver a “secular sermon”, Looking into the Heart of Light, at Southwark Cathedral on Thursday 7th April at 7pm. Tickets (£10 and £12.50) can be booked here.
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Robert Crawford completes biography of TS Eliot, March 2022
The second and concluding volume of Robert Crawford’s acclaimed biography of TS Eliot is scheduled for publication on 2nd June.
Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’ will draw on extensive new sources and letters, including the archive of letters to Emily Hale, to complete the story which Crawford began with Young Eliot (2015).
“This long-awaited second volume tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life,” say the publishers, Jonathan Cape.
“From his time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land, through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford reveals the public and personal experiences that helped generate some of Eliot’s masterpieces. He explores the poet’s religious conversion, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, and his great work Four Quartets.
“Robert Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as a husband, lover and widower, as a banker, editor, playwright and publisher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.”
The 480-page volume will have a cover price of £25.
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Novel “imagines a happier ending” for Vivienne Eliot, March 2022
Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight is a just-published novel from Australian author Steven Carroll, which “imagines a happier ending for the mercurial and complicated Vivienne Haigh-Wood,”
The book completes the author’s “Eliot Quartet”, which began with his 2007 novel The Lost Life, which centres on the relationship between Eliot and Emily Hale, over one month in 1934. A World of Other People sees Eliot volunteering as an aircraft spotter during the Blitz in 1941; and in A New England Affair, it is 1965, Eliot is dead and Emily Hale, now 72 years old, confronts her position as the poet’s muse.
““Right from the start,” Carroll told The Observer, “I decided that Eliot would not be a character, but a presence. It was too daunting to go into the mind of TS Eliot. Instead you have a portrait of him from all different people, incorporating all sorts of facets of Eliot – something that one portrayal in one novel couldn’t do. The Eliot you meet in The Lost Life is quite different from the Eliot in Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight.”
Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight follows Eliot’s first wife Vivienne, after she was committed to an asylum. Carroll imagines a different life for her, in which Vivienne escapes the asylum and goes into hiding. The publishers, Harper Collins Australia, describe it as “A delicate dance between what was and what might have been, between fact and fiction…, a daringly revisionary story of Vivienne… imagining a wholly different and entirely satisfying ending to her story.”
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TS Eliot in translation – conference deadline extended, March 2022
The deadline to submit papers to the international conference on Eliot in translation has been extended to April 30th.
The conference is to be held in October 2022 by LARCA, the Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones, at the University of Paris.
The LARCA “invites TS Eliot scholars, and specialists of Modernism more generally, to share and discuss their (re)assessment of the reception of TS Eliot’s works and ideas in the various languages of Europe. We are especially, but not exclusively, interested in probing the role of translation in reception and canonization processes, that is, in the formation and reshaping of literary canons and their effect on the circulation of literary theory. Conversely, examining translation processes and their effects on literary reception may shed new light on reading, criticizing and teaching Eliot.”
The call for papers and full details of the conference are here.
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The ‘devoted patience’ of TS.Eliot, wartime correspondent, March 2022
In the TLS , Seamus Perry reviews Volume 9 of The Letters of TS Eliot 1939-1941 (scroll down to August 2021 for publication details), a volume which, he writes, “covers three especially important years in [Eliot’s] life.”
Perry summarises the key events of the period for Eliot, but focusses on his work at Faber, where Eliot was “‘attending to the affairs of other writers’, as he puts it rather sourly at one point.” Perry identifies the ways in which Eliot addresses his authors, highlighting comments from the “deft” to the “droll”, and observes how “[Eliot’s] voice, at once arch and kindly, could sharpen into something more judgemental”.
His review particularly praises the “expert hands” of John Haffenden as editor: “Haffenden is the perfect host: the letters sit on a bedrock of editorial notes, identifying people and texts, quoting generously from other correspondences, Eliot’s own and others’, and adducing all sorts of other material in a manner both companionable and erudite.”
Perry also commends Faber’s publication of the nine volumes of this “magnificent edition” to date; “It is right and good that Faber should be producing it.”
Finally, he notes the US publication of The Gloucester Notebook, the “enterprising and extremely handsome” facsimile of Inventions of the March Hare, (scroll down to December 2021 for publication details), which, he writes, “gives us something of the charisma of the handwritten page”.
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Portrait of TS Eliot’s mother, March 2022
A portrait of a young Charlotte Eliot, teacher and poet, and mother of TS.Eliot, has been put up for sale by New York bookseller James Cummins.
The photograph is said to be circa 1870, and is in a glazed but damaged frame. It is enclosed in an envelope that reads “Given me by Theresa Eliot (Mrs. Henry Ware Eliot, Jr.)”
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f r a g m e n t s : The Waste Land 2022 – A Celebration, February 2022
UPDATE – The website for this festival is now live and contains full updated details and booking links – see our Events page for details:
A six day festival from 7th to 12th April will celebrate the centenary of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land with multiple diverse performances in some of the City of London’s most intimate churches.
The f r a g m e n t s festival will allow audiences to “walk where Eliot walked in the City of London, seeing the churches and streets that map The Waste Land.”
Details are yet to be confirmed – the f r a g m e n t s website states that tickets will go on sale 1st March – and will be posted on our Events page when released. However, some events believed to be included are:
• Gavin Bryars Ensemble performing his Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, in St. Katherine Cree Church
• VOCES8 vocal ensemble, in St. Anne and St. Agnes Church
• Maria Youseff, Qunan player, in St. Ethalburga Church
• The Secret Ensemble, performing Sufi and Mystical music from Anatolia, in St. Margaret Lothbury Church
• The Waste Land, a Sound Installation by Pierre-Yves Macé in St. Mary-Le-Bow Church
• UNREAL CITY: Vienna – DJ Sotusura & Guest in St. Clement Eastcheap
• The Waste Land – A Filmed Reading with 5 actors in All Hallows at the Tower Crypt
UPDATE – Some further details have now emerged:
“f r a g m e n t s has been devised to combine a plurality of different voices, different spiritual cultures, popular culture as well as high art. Just as Eliot brought a diversity of styles, influences and tastes into his writing so the curators have done the same to reflect the defining elements of The Waste Land.”
The Festival will open with:
• Jeanette Winterson, giving a secular sermon at Southwark Cathedral
• Liam Ó’Maonlaí (of the Hothouse Flowers) performing songs at St Mary Woolnoth
The Festival will then roll out over five three-hour long sessions between Friday evening 8th April and Sunday afternoon 10th April. Each of the sessions will feature unique performances from a range of performers alongside installations that will happen throughout the weekend. (See above for some anticipated events.)
In addition, Philip Glass’ iconic film Koyaanisqatsi will be screened on a loop alongside live readings of influential poems from the last 100 years, selected by previous winners of the T S Eliot Prize, and performed by Tamsin Greig, Imogen Stubbs and Toby Jones.
“Creating an individual ‘shuffle festival’, audiences are invited to design their own route through the events, which will include music, film, poetry and installation. Moving from church to church, all of which are situated within one square mile of each other, they will experience the different performances in ‘fragments’ reflecting the structure of the poem itself. Audiences will select one of the 5 Celebrations and move between the events programmed in that time slot.”
Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight!, the tribute to Marie Lloyd, Eliot’s favourite music hall performer, previously announced with booking details on our Events page, October 2021, has been added as a conclusion to the Festival on 11th and 12th April.
Full details of the whole festival will be posted on our Events page when released.
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Simon Callow to give centenary reading of The Waste Land, February 2022
The acclaimed actor, writer and director Simon Callow is to give a centenary reading of The Waste Land, at the TS Eliot Festival at Little Gidding on 10th July. He will also continue the tradition of giving a reading of Little Gidding at Little Gidding.
A celebrated Shakespearean actor, Callow has appeared in numerous plays and films, from his role as Mozart in the premiere of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus at the National Theatre, to his BAFTA-nominated role as Gareth in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. He has directed plays and operas, and written a dozen books, including biographies of Welles and Wagner; his biographies of Dickens and Wilde led to a number of events at which he read their works.
Callow read from TS Eliot for Josephine Hart’s Poetry Hour, and in an online preview of an event in 2017, TS Eliot and Decadence, Callow talks about Eliot’s time in Paris, and reads from some of his early poems.
Booking has not yet opened for the 2022 TS Eliot Festival, to be held at Little Gidding on Sunday 10th July, but details will be posted when released. Society members have booking privileges for the Festival.
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The Waste Land at the Charleston Festival, with Benedict Cumberbatch, February 2022
Full details of this event, announced below last month, including booking, are now on our Events page.
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The Waste Land app released for iPhone, February 2022
To mark the centenary of the poem, Faber is releasing the award-winning The Waste Land app for the first time on iPhone as well as iPad.
Celebrated when it was launched for the iPad a decade ago, “This edition carries forward Eliot’s vision and vividly demonstrates how literature can be illuminated by the new digital medium.”
Its features include:
- Comprehensive interactive notes, original manuscript pages, and the ability to move quickly between sections with a new navigation tool
- Complete audio readings of the poem, synchronised to the text, by Eliot himself (readings from two periods in his life) as well as Ted Hughes, Alec Guinness, Viggo Mortensen, and Jeremy Irons with Eileen Atkins
- A specially filmed performance of the entire poem by Fiona Shaw, synchronised to the text
- Over 35 expert video perspectives on the poem including contributions from Seamus Heaney and Jeanette Winterson
The Waste Land app costs £8.99 for iPhone or for iPad – full details are here
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TS Eliot and the Moot, February 2022
A review article in The Glass, the journal of the Christian Literary Studies Group, explores TS Eliot’s membership of the Moot, the discussion group where Eliot was “drawn into debate about ideological and political issues”, and where the thinking “influenced his The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.”
In TS Eliot: A Cleric of Sorts, Roger Kojecky draws upon his own researches to explore the character of the Moot, a select group of influencers, including Eliot, which convened at weekend gatherings from 1938-1947. “There was an academic tone, with theologians, philosophers, sociologists, educationists and jurists taking part, not all of them with an overtly Christian conviction.”
It was mostly through Eliot’s membership of the Moot, writes Kojecky, that he was drawn into debate about ideological and political issues; he presented a paper, ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy’, and the thinking there influenced the writings of other members, as well as his own.
Kojecky reviews a recent book by Jonas Kurlberg, Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism: T.S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim and the Moot (Bloomsbury Academic); he questions in particular Kurlberg’s depiction of the Moot as ‘a Modernist revitalisation movement’, in the light of Eliot’s own views on Modernism.
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Wartime Eliot documents up for sale, February 2022
A group of papers have come up for sale, including a three page carbon copy of Eliot’s article Poetry in Wartime, “Pages two and three with some hand-annotations and corrections, presumably by Eliot.” The typescript is for sale along with signed letters from Eliot to the American writer and publisher Selden Rodman.
Rodman was an acquaintance of Joyce, Pound and Mann, and co-editor of an American magazine, Common Sense. In one of these letters, in response to a request for a contribution, Eliot explains to Rodman that he “had just broadcast to Sweden…and I enclose the text on which this broadcast is based.” (Eliot lectured in Sweden for the British Council in April and May 1942).
“There is of course a lot more to be said,” writes Eliot, “a good deal that one would say to an American public and not Swede, and this may look too [‘infantile’ is xed out here] simple.” However, Poetry in Wartime was published in Common Sense, 11 Oct 1942.
The documents show signs of fire damage; in 1972 a serious fire consumed most of Rodman’s home in Oakland and severely damaged his papers. He died in 2002. The papers are for sale at $2500 from Second Story Books in Washington DC.
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Winter issue of Exchanges, our Society quarterly, February 2022
The Winter issue of our Society quarterly is now available.
Its contributions from members include articles on this year’s TS Eliot Prize for Poetry; on the expensive Mardersteig editions of Eliot’s works; a personal recollection of Journey of the Magi; an argument against accompanying readings of Eliot with music; and a reaction to the discovery that Eliot once tried wearing pince-nez…
You can download this new issue here.
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Eisenstaedt portrait of TS Eliot in London auction, February 2022
An original portrait photograph of TS Eliot, taken by the celebrated American/German photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, is to be auctioned in London on 8th March.
Taken in 1951, for LIFE magazine, this print is from the photographer’s estate; it is signed by Eisenstaedt in black pen in the bottom right-hand corner, and is titled in ink with artist’s inkstamp on the back.
The auction estimate is £700-£1000 plus fees, with a starting bid of £500. Full details are here.
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Archive containing Eliot letters for sale, February 2022
What is being described as “a fine TS Eliot archive”, of letters, Committee agenda and other documents incorporating “twenty-eight total pages of Eliot’s writing”, has been put up for sale by an American dealer.
Eliot’s letters are on both Faber and Criterion letterheads, and seem to concern Eliot’s work in 1935 with the Church Literature Association; several are exchanges with the Chairman of its Book Committee, Revd Prebendary Charles Harris. They discuss potential subjects, finances and publishing arrangements for Association books; Eliot encourages Harris to commission Lord Hugh Cecil to write a book on marriage and divorce, and they consider authors for a book on “practical ethics”.
At one point, Eliot considers potential readership. “I see no point in appealing to what [Committee member Lowther] Clarke calls the average Clubman . If he means the sort of stock-size jaded man-of-the-world it only reminds me of La Rochefoucauld’s maxim, which I can’t quote exactly: Quand nos vices nous quittent, nous croyons que c’est nous qui les avons quittes. [‘When our vices leave us, we flatter ourselves that we leave them’ – Maximes, 1665]
“I don’t believe that such people are likely to want to read this kind of book anyway. As for the more serious quite young men, they are extremely moral in their own way, and unlimited self-indulgence hardly applies. It is only that their morality is apt to be based on the wrong religion.”
Further details and images of the archive, which is for sale at US$26,500, are here.
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Benedict Cumberbatch in performance of The Waste Land, January 2022
Award-winning actor Benedict Cumberbatch will “breathe new life” into TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, in a world exclusive performance alongside the Britten Sinfonia.
The performance will be part of the Charleston Festival, which will run from 19th to 29th May 2022.
Details have not been released, but will be featured on our Events page when the full programme of Festival events is announced in February.
UPDATE: The Sussex Express reports that “The actor is joined by the Britten Sinfonia orchestra for an extraordinary rendition of the poem set to music originally composed by A Clockwork Orange author, Anthony Burgess.”
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TS Eliot in the BBC’s Modernism season, January 2022
A season of programmes on Modernism, broadcast across BBC Radio 4 and Radio 3, will contain reflections on several aspects of TS Eliot’s work and life.
The Criterion, which published The Waste Land (Radio 4, Jan 25th, 13:45), is part of a Radio 4 series, 1922: The Birth of Now. In this episode, Matthew Sweet and guests will discuss the influence and content of the literary magazine which Eliot founded and edited. Details and listen after broadcast here.
The first episode of that series (Radio 4, Jan 24th, 13:45) considers The Shabolovka Tower and the Gherkin. From the top of the Gherkin, in the City of London, Matthew Sweet will look briefly down at the streets and churches T. S. Eliot mapped in The Waste Land. Details and listen after broadcast here.
And in Headwaters (Radio 4, Feb 8th, 11:30), Rebecca Watson explores the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, and includes The Waste Land in her consideration. Details and listen after broadcast here.
Eliot’s work is likely to arise in various discussion programmes scheduled during the season, full details of which are here.
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Beastly Clues: TS Eliot, Torquemada and the Modernist Crossword, January 2022
In an article in The Public Domain Review, Roddy Howland Jackson writes about the invention and subsequent craze for the “Cross-Word Puzzle” in the 1920s – and on TS Eliot’s own crossword enthusiasm.
Jackson records Eliot’s habit of “smuggling The Times crossword into ‘tedious’ editorial meetings under the table”; and his delight at “finding a reference to myself and my works in The Times crossword”.
He also mentions the literary critic who wondered whether The Waste Land was “just a rather pompous cross-word puzzle”.
The article draws upon the page on the Eliot Foundation website on TS Eliot’s Crossword Puzzles; and Jackson highlights one clue which Eliot failed to solve:
- Written by Johnson; edited by Jerome. Unlike bees and ants (6)
The solution is given in Jackson’s article.
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TS Eliot Festival planned for Little Gidding in 2022, January 2022
After a two year pandemic hiatus, the Annual TS Eliot Festival is being scheduled to take place once again, at Little Gidding on Sunday 10th July 2022.
Plans are being made for the Festival to celebrate the centenary of the publication of The Waste Land. Biographer and scholar Lyndall Gordon will discuss Eliot’s women, the subject of her own forthcoming book. The Festival will offer its traditional attractions, including audience readings, book sales, discussions, and the open church of Little Gidding itself. And if film and theatre commitments permit, an acclaimed actor, writer and director is hoping to read both The Waste Land and Little Gidding at Little Gidding.
Further details and booking will be announced when plans are finalised, but put the date in your diary now.
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BBC programmes on TS Eliot featuring readings by Jeremy Irons available again, January 2022
Following a repeat broadcast on BBC Radio 4, three programmes of TS Eliot’s poetry, discussed by guests and read by Jeremy Irons, and originally broadcast on New Year’s Day 2017, have been made available again online for a limited time only on BBC Sounds.
In Prufrock and Other Observations, Martha Kearney talks to novelist Jeanette Winterson about her first experience of reading T.S. Eliot; and Jeremy Irons reads: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; Portrait of a Lady; Preludes; Rhapsody on a Windy Night; Morning at the Window; The ‘Boston Evening Transcript’; Aunt Helen; Cousin Nancy; Mr. Apollinax; Hysteria; Conversation Galante; and La Figlia Che Piange.
In The Waste Land, Kearney and Winterson are joined by Rowan Williams and Jackie Kay to explore the emotional and creative impact of the poem; and Jeremy Irons reads The Waste Land.
And in The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Ariel Poems, actress Fiona Shaw considers the imagery and the seductive music of Eliot’s poems of spiritual struggle; and Jeremy Irons reads: The Hollow Men; Ash Wednesday; Journey of the Magi; A Song for Simeon; Animula; and The Cultivation of Christmas Trees.