University of Virginia Library

Eliotiana
by
ARTHUR SHERBO

Despite the admirable work by Donald Gallup in his T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (1969) and by Beatrice Ricks and Mildred Martin in their compilations of secondary writings on Eliot,[1] a number of items by and about Eliot can be added to their accounts.

Several pieces by Eliot that are absent from Gallup appeared in The Cambridge Review (hereafter CR), a "Journal of University life and thought" founded in 1879. The first, which has also been reprinted[2], is his review of H. F. Stewart's The Secret of Pascal in CR for November 19, 1941 (63: 124). In 1931 Eliot had published "The Pensées of Pascal" as an introduction to an edition of Pascal's work, and students of Eliot may wish to compare that essay with the review. To my mind, the insights of the review are more important than those of the earlier piece.

A second item from CR (51: 492) is an unnoted Italian translation, by Raffaello Piccoli, of "Ash-Wednesday I" that appeared in the 1929-30 volume.

Piccoli himself was a poet, critic, and Dante scholar. He translated three plays by Shakespeare (Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Othello), other ones by Robert Greene, George Peele, and Christopher Marlowe, and the poetry of Shelley; in the 1920s he contributed some "Letters from Italy" to The Dial.

Although the letter with the caption "Austrian Book Committee" that appeared in the Correspondence section of CR on April 26, 1947 (68: 400) was not written by Eliot, his name is one of sixteen appended to it. As I find nothing about this in Peter Ackroyd's biography of Eliot (1984) nor elsewhere in the literature on Eliot, it merits extensive quotation. I quote from the first of two long paragraphs, noting that the second bears the information that the signatories, whose names are listed, are trying "to organize a collection of the more important books and periodicals bearing on the humanities and the social sciences published in this country since 1938, and to arrange their transport to the Austrian National Library in Vienna."

In 1931, Eliot added his voice to a discussion about Jacques Maritain in The Dublin Review. Montgomery Belgion had reviewed Maritain's Art et Scolastique and its English translation by J. F. Scanlan in the October 1930 issue (187, no. 375: 201-215). His unflattering comments prompted a reply from Maritain in the January 1931 issue (188, no. 376: 134- 135), with a rejoinder in turn from Belgion (pp. 135-136). Though the exchange merits the attention especially of students of scholastic philosophy and art, it is of interest as well for Eliot's role. In Maritain's letter to the editor, he had written,

Eliot contributed a polite demurrer to those lines. His letter appeared in the next issue (April; p. 313) under the heading "Classicism and Romanticism." He stated that he wrote "primarily from the flattery of being mentioned so charmingly by Mr. Maritain, who should know very well my very high opinion of him; but secondarily to cast doubt on two of his sentences." Maritain had admitted that "devant certains défenseurs des éternels principes classiques je trouve au romantisme des charmes enivrants," to which Eliot objected that Maritain was not contrasting "classical theory with romantic theory, nor classical works with romantic works, but certain critics (I suppose) with certain poets." He agreed with Maritain "that the `dispute' between classicism and romanticism is périmée; but then it always was." And he went on to suggest that the two terms do not mean "quite the same thing for any two people, or for any two decades," and they even shift meanings in other ways.

One other piece by Eliot has also been overlooked. The first issue of The London Magazine (February 1954) printed a letter on the death of Dylan Thomas signed by Eliot, Peggy Ashcroft, Kenneth Clarke, Walter de la Mare, Graham Greene, Augustus John, Louis MacNeice, Edwin Muir, Goronwy Rees, Edith Sitwell, Osbert Sitwell, Vernon Watkins, and Evelyn Williams. It reads in part, "The death of Dylan Thomas at the age of thirty-nine is an immeasurable loss to English letters. In memory of his poetic genius a fund has been started for the establishment of a Trust to assist his widow in the support and education of his three young children." The letter provides details about the administration of the Trust and concludes, "We earnestly hope that the response to this appeal [for contributions] will be both immediate and sustained." Although Eliot had written "A Message" (known) congratulating the editor on the appearance of the London Magazine (1.1: 15-16), his signature, the first, on the letter has been overlooked, and I have found no mention of the letter or the appeal in the biographies of Thomas.

A number of early secondary materials about Eliot likewise have not yet been recorded. Neither Ricks nor Martin includes G. Martin Turnell's review of Ash-Wednesday (CR, 52 [1930-31]: 14), though Martin does list two other pieces by him (items 476 and 611) from that periodical. James M. Reeves, playwright, poet, editor, and drama critic, wrote on Eliot's essay "Hamlet and His Problems" from The Sacred Wood in 52: 111 (Martin lists a different CR item 1170 by Reeves). Hugh Ross-Williamson, playwright, novelist, and biographer, is represented by seven items in CR in Martin, but not the piece on 52 (1930-31): 318, which antedates those others. This short essay, "T. S. Eliot and His Conception of Poetry," also appeared in The Bookman of London (79 [March 1931]: 347-350), with two portraits of Eliot. (Ricks lists The Bookman but not CR.) A year later Ross-Williamson's The Poetry of T. S. Eliot (1932) expressed "my gratitude to Mr. Eliot for his kindness in supplying certain facts of which I have made use in this book, and for the stimulus of his conversation." The essay should be compared with the pertinent parts of the book. W. G. Archer's "McKnight Kauffer and T. S. Eliot" (52: 369-370) particularly deserves resurrection, as it deals with the "American artist and commercial designer who illustrated many of Eliot's `Ariel' poems" and became one of his oldest friends.[3] Add to these A. C. Bouquet on After Strange Gods (55 [1933-34]: 348) and John Casey's review of Eliot's book on F. H. Bradley (85 [1963-64]: 198-199), and one has a considerable area of neglect. Casey, incidentally, dismisses the book on Bradley as "a competent, devout, and not highly original account of Bradley's epistemology; it no doubt thoroughly deserved a Ph.D. But has it any interest beyond this?" A. C. Bouquet was a writer on Christianity and other religions. He suggested that Eliot was on "firmer ground" as a literary critic than as an apologist for Catholicism, and he found that there was no "note of penitent humility" in him. J. M. Todd's review of Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society appeared in the 1939-40 volume (61: 161-162) under the heading "Rome without Reason." I quote what I take to be the two most important sentences:

The review by Casey of Eliot's doctoral thesis on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley was one of a relatively small number of reviews of Eliot's writings or of productions of his plays. Others that have been overlooked are John Hayward's review of The Family Reunion at the A.D.C. Theatre (64 [1942-43]: 179) and that of Joan Bennett of the same production (64: 215). The review by Hayward, Eliot's friend, of the A.D.C.'s production of The Family Reunion ends with a paragraph of literary criticism.

Joan Bennett wrote that "Mr. Eliot portrays the aristocratic family group and the individuals who form it with a fine sense of comedy. His verse medium sharpens the irony by contrasting the formal pattern of the metre with the vacuous or inane content of the speeches." She does not, however, neglect the theological aspects of the play.

In this volume also appeared D. J. Gordon's groundbreaking essay, "T. S. Eliot's Use of Dante in `Little Gidding'" (64 [1942-43]: 196, 198-199). Earlier studies of Dante's influence on Eliot were by Mario Praz in 1937 and Muriel Bradbrook in 1942; neither focused on Little Gidding. Gordon's essay is too long to quote, but it belongs squarely in any future anthology of criticism of Eliot. I might add that Gordon quotes a number of lines from The Divine Comedy and from Little Gidding to show how Eliot used Dante, particularly the last canto of the one and the last lines of the other.

One other CR review of an Eliot play that should be mentioned is Hugh Southern's response to the Arts Theatre production of The Confidential Clerk (77 [1955-56]: 74). Southern, a drama critic, did not like the play: "The whole of The Confidential Clerk is written at such low pressure, with such spurious insight into human personality, and with so little love of individual idiosyncrasy that it fails to come to life. It is a funny play and an ingenious play. The only thing wrong with it is that it was written by Mr Eliot."

F. R. Leavis reviewed East Coker (62 [1940-41]: 268, 270) and stressed that "the author of Ash-Wednesday and its successors was, in the days of his critical influence, the distinguished advocate of impersonality" but that "these poems are intimately personal documents." The personal "note becomes at one point directly autobiographical," quoting "So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years" and the seven and a half following lines (p. 268). The review appeared in the February 21, 1941, number of CR and is listed in the bibliography appended to R. P. Bilan's The Literary Criticism of F. R. Leavis (1979), but not in Martin. Soon thereafter, in the summer 1942 number of Scrutiny (pp. 68-71), Leavis reviewed Dry Salvages and touched upon the same theme in a few remarks on East Coker, saying that "it is personal, running even to autobiography (it is the most directly personal poem of Eliot's we have)" (p. 67). The remarks on East Coker are repeated verbatim in Leavis's Education and the University (1948, pp. 98-99) with an added footnote: "Mr. Eliot, I think, would object to this way of putting it, but I don't know how to indicate the distinctive quality of the poem without using the adjective [`personal']" (p. 98). Leavis's criticism of East Coker stems, therefore, from his review of the poem in the CR, where it

gets fullest expression. The bibliographies of secondary material on Eliot list Leavis's angry defense of East Coker in TLS (Sept. 21, 1940, p. 483) against a previously published review in TLS (Sept. 14, 1940, p. 472), the latter of which is unaccountably absent from those bibliographies. The anonymous review of East Coker ended on a dismal note: "This is the confusion of a lost heart and a lost art. These are sad times, but we are not without hope that Mr. Eliot will recover both, finding even that hearts are trumps and that Keats was not far out about the one in the rift." Small wonder that he aroused Leavis's ire.

Although Ricks lists at least one item from The Dublin Review, while Martin lists none, two items from that periodical also have been overlooked. W. W. Robson wrote a number of pieces on Eliot and they are duly listed, but his review of The Cocktail Party (with Helen Gardner's The Art of T. S. Eliot) in 214, no. 448 (Second Quarter, 1950): 127-129, is one of the two not cited. As with the other pieces discussed here, I shall only whet the appetite of devout students of Eliot's work, quoting Robson to the effect that the "treatment of the language is tender and relaxed," the play "has a profound subject, and a subtler subject than a bare account of the plot might suggest," and the "artistry of the play is, as we should expect, impeccable." Robson's "tentative criticisms" revolve about the characters of Celia and Reilly whom he is unable "to accept fully." The other neglected piece is Ian Gregor's "The Critic and the Age: Some Observations on the Social Criticism of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot" in 217, no. 462 (Fourth Quarter, 1953): 394-404. Ricks lists Gregor's "Eliot and Matthew Arnold" (note the changed order of precedence) in Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium, edited by Graham Martin (1970; pp. 267-278); Martin does not. Gregor used the first paragraph of The Dublin Review piece as an introduction to what may be considered, at the very least, a refaciamento of the piece in the periodical, if, indeed, it is not a new essay. The two should, of course, be compared.

The first piece devoted to Eliot in The New English Weekly (hereafter NEW) was by Basil Bunting (1900-1983), described by Donald Davie in the Dictionary of National Biography as a poet and translator and as an acquaintance of Pound and Eliot. Bunting's essay on Eliot's poetry, "T. S. Eliot," appeared in the Sept. 8, 1932 issue (1: 499-500) and deserves to be widely known. It is listed in Basil Bunting: A Bibliography of Works and Criticism, ed. Roger Guedalla (1973), p. 95.

Two reviews of Murder in the Cathedral came out almost cheek by jowl in NEW, with James Laughlin's "Mr. Eliot on Holy Ground" appearing on July 11, 1935 (7: 250-251) and F. Bunce's simply-titled "Murder in the Cathedral" two weeks later (7: 299-300). Laughlin's review is listed in Martin (not in Ricks), but Bunce's follow-up essay is not (nor in Ricks). Laughlin's piece is necessarily summarized in but two sentences: "Eliot has attempted a fusion of the classical and medieval dramatic formulas. Informal, intelligent criticism" (p. 72). The essay is reprinted in New Democracy 5, nos. 9-10 (January 1-15, 1935): 159-160, and readers may wish to read the whole there or in NEW. Bunce, who felt that Laughlin confined his review (or essay) only

to some aspects of the play, with insufficient attention to the theme, sought to repair the omission. The only F[rank] Bunce in the British Library Catalogue of Printed Books to 1975 is credited with "Rehearsal for Murder, etc." (1956) and So Young a Body, a novel (1952). These two essays, or reviews, among the earliest criticism, different in nature from Laughlin's, may even be thought of as ground-breaking.

The anonymous review, or notice, of The Dry Salvages in NEW for November 20, 1941 (20, no. 5: 44) is remarkably short, given the prominence of Eliot in the periodical. As it has been overlooked, I shall quote the whole.

Austin Warren wrote an article titled "Some Periodicals of the American Intelligentsia" for the October 5, 1932, NEW (1: 595-597) and came to "Hound and Horn," of which he wrote,

It was from this slight beginning that Warren went on to expand his views on Eliot as critic in articles in 1964 and 1966 and in the culminating chapter in his Connections (1970), reprinted from the article in the 1966 Sewanee Review. In a note in Connections (p. 201) Warren dates the first section of his essay on Eliot "not long after 1939," forgetting that the idea of Eliot's being a poet and critic concurrently was some seven years earlier.