Volume 3 of the online letters begins with an apology. Eliot writes to Natalie A. Duddington on 5 January 1926:
‘[I] am writing immediately to explain to you the position with regard to your translation of Bunin’s ‘A Night at Sea’ which I accepted for the Criterion […] During the whole of the summer, negotiations were proceeding for the transfer of the publication of the Criterion from Mr Cobden-Sanderson to Messrs Faber & Gwyer Limited.’
This letter, in which he asks her to ‘forgive the inconvenience’, seems to catch him mid-flight. His words are penned in a moment now considered formative to his professional and personal life. First established in 1922, the Criterion is widely accepted to be the writer’s first serious foray into intellectual leadership, and born – at least in part – from between the folds of contemporaneous periodicals. Marianne Moore’s The Dial and John Middleton Murry’s The Adelphi were just two of many vigorous entrants to contemporary English culture: they kindled Eliot’s own editorial spark. In a period where his output as editor quickly exceeded his output as poet, the Criterion thrived. It remained in its original format until January 1926, when the institutional backing of Faber & Gwyer led to a rebrand. The New Criterion lived up to its title in both form and content: a fresh editorial manifesto penned by Eliot headed up a formidable 220 pages of literature and criticism from emerging writers across Europe.
And yet, amongst Eliot’s discussion of his new professional venture comes an offhand, but marked, admission: ‘these negotiations were further protracted by my own illness’. The personal again intrudes on the professional in a letter to W. Worster dated 19 January. Here, his brief gesture to a ‘holiday enforced by [his] doctor’ swerves to a wry questioning of how the recipient ‘propose[s] to treat the subject of Norwegian literature during the last hundred and ten years’. This volume is defined by the constant overlap of business and personal matters, the gathering of a rich literary repertoire at odds with the profound undoing of Eliot’s marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood Eliot. Just as his letters reveal the writer’s intense commitment to the structure of the Criterion, they also indicate how his attempts to separate his life – and writings – into distinct categories are quickly overcome. A chronological reading of his correspondence reveals a gradual weaving together of the domestic with the professional, the critical with the poetic and the guarded with the deeply personal.
Defining a new Criterion
A large proportion of these letters capture Eliot drawing out The New Criterion’s place amongst other publications. On 9 May 1926, he asks his assistant Pearl Fassett to send him the Times Literary Supplement every week. Looking further afield, he writes to Eric Swenne on 15 February 1926: ‘may I ask you to inform me so that I may have The New Criterion sent regularly to Stockholm, and may I ask that Ord Och Bild be sent direct to Mr Flint, for review’. Swenne was London Editor of Svenska Dagbladet, a Swedish-language morning newspaper established in 1884. Eliot’s decision to send him a copy of The New Criterion appears a deliberate move to expand the journal’s critical influence across the continent. Now named Ord&Bild, Ord Och Bild was – and still is – one of Sweden’s most prestigious cultural magazines. Its dedication to literary output, artistic expression, and cultural discourse establishes it as a Scandinavian parallel to The New Criterion.
The question of where in European letters Eliot’s own periodical stood was as much a question of opposition as alliance. Replying to his friend and frequent contributor S. S. Koteliansky in a letter on 8 June 1926, Eliot notes, ‘it is part of an editor’s job to vary the material as much as possible within the prescribed limits’. This pursuit of editorial variety meant he was forced to decline numerous submissions – including the very letters by Dostoevsky that prompted this explanation to Koteliansky. Although Eliot’s reasons for rejection of material are frequently vague in this volume – such as simply telling Alec Brown on 23 June 1926, ‘I am so sorry to find that I cannot use any of these poems’ – he is more forthcoming regarding Dostoevsky. Here, he explains he must avoid the writer ‘for some time to come’, as a recent issue had already featured him heavily.
Eliot appears equally opposed in these letters to piratical periodicals, run by unscrupulous editors. Pearl Fassett writes to John Middleton Murry on his behalf on 23 December 1926:
‘Mr Eliot has seen an announcement of a contribution by yourself to a periodical called Beau which is published by The Two Worlds Publishing Company in New York. As this company is publishing parts of Ulysses without Mr Joyce’s permission, and as it has announced for another of its periodicals (The Two Worlds Monthly) that it proposes to reprint something of Mr Eliot’s without having asked his permission, he would be very interested to know whether you can give him any information about these people.’
Murry confirmed Eliot’s suspicions: the editors of Beau were ‘simply swindlers’. The exchange underscores how the Criterion also served as the moral anchor of Eliot’s critical vision. This moralistic vision resurfaces in a letter to Herbert E. Palmer, in which Eliot commissions an exposé on the ‘plagiarisms of modern poets’. While nominally intended to condemn specific writers, this commission ultimately served to protect his peers’ work and, by extension, safeguard his journal’s prestige.
Eliot was also a tireless talent scout: alongside regular commissions for Herbert Palmer, he frequently reached out to influential figures like Conrad Aiken, Charles Whibley, Wyndham Lewis, and John Hayward. His central presence in the literary scenes of the era – including the Bloomsbury Group – gave him the perfect vantage point to shape the periodical. However, his uncompromising care for literary quality – and the joy he took in minutiae – could make him cutting, even toward those he admired. On 8 July 1926, he complains to J. M. Robertson that his essay ‘does not seem to set the Thames on fire’. Two days later, he bluntly informs D. N. Dalglish that her piece is ‘insufficiently interesting’.
As well as rejection, in these letters we find Eliot sending authors elsewhere if their work did not fit The New Criterion. Writing to the literary agency Christy & Moore on July 31 1926, he notes that while their submitted story has ‘a good deal of interest and merit’, it would find a more suitable home in ‘several other periodicals’. On a number of occasions he points D. Fraser-Harris to other publications due to potential ‘disagreement[s]’ (10 May 1927) and, at another point, due to ‘a great deal of accepted material on hand’ that would make publication impossible (8 November 1927). Rather than discouraging contributors, he frequently redirects them. Sometimes it seems convenient. At other times Eliot seems to be sincerely acting as agent for those unable to find home for their work.
Printing Matters
Elsewhere in this volume, Eliot is interrupted by the practical mundanities of printing. On 28 October 1927, he inquires whether H. J. C. Grierson might be open to ‘cut [his] “Milton” until the time for publication is nearer’ as he does not know ‘whether [the issue] shall be cramped for space or not’. A concern for the page’s visual parameters – perhaps due to the expense of extra printing space – here appears to supersede the contents of the review itself, negative space treated as a commodity in Eliot’s perfectly curated periodical. Indeed, space in The New Criterion was precious at a typographical level. It had a simple appearance, with the beige octavo chosen to resemble the popular French monthly, La Nouvelle Revue Française. It deliberately contained no images so as to not disrupt the flow of the contents, with ads only featured sparingly in later issues. Explaining the squeezing and pinching of works, Eliot’s desire to maintain his chosen aesthetic (or perhaps economic) flow is one of the persistent, if not fastidious, lines in this volume.
However, aside from the obvious visual appeal of a well-formatted periodical, Eliot’s concern for the physical page may be a more cerebral one. We may trace this back to ‘The Idea of a Literary Review’, which was published in the first issue of The New Criterion. In it, Eliot says:
‘A review should be an organ of documentation […] its contents should exhibit heterogeneity which the intelligent reader can resolve into order.’
According to this metaphor, The New Criterion becomes something curiously human, its physical pages a body to be enlivened by the perfect, ‘heterogenous’ sequence of work. These letters offer a rare glimpse into Eliot’s vision of curation as a somatic experience – a chance to build an oeuvre, or body, that reaches a kind of aesthetic and intellectual holism. When read through this lens, the writer’s letter to Mona Wilson on 6 September 1927, may take on a curiously visceral undertone:
‘All I can say is that your essay is 32 pages in typescript and that our most convenient length is not more than 25. If you yourself find any way of shortening it, I shall be glad; if not, I must make the best of it and if necessary divide it into two parts. But when I have to divide anything into two parts, it is usually delayed considerably; and I believe that even in a monthly any contribution is rather diminished in effect by being serialised. But I leave the matter entirely to you. If you think you can reduce it, I shall be grateful; if not, I shall publish it as I can.’
Private Affairs
Just as this volume of letters reveals Eliot’s meticulous approach to his periodical’s structure, it also highlights his efforts to impose order on his discussions of public and private affairs. Correspondence from Pearl Fassett on 1 September 1926 details the intense strain his wife Vivienne was under at the time:
‘I feel rather thankful that V. is where she can be really well nursed. Please give her my best love, all my sympathy and every wish for a quick recovery. I will send her a card tonight.’
By this point in the marriage, Vivienne had reached a state of mental and physical breakdown. While both husband and wife had previously suffered from these afflictions, a particularly bad episode led to her placement under suicide watch at the Sanatorium de la Malmaison, where Eliot joined her. In a 3 September letter to Fassett, he describes the institution as a ‘nursing home in France’, and touchingly requests she check if West’s ‘still have a grey dressing gown of V.’s’ to replace the one that is ‘worn out’. This vulnerable exchange is perhaps why Eliot then makes an attempt to strictly separate his professional and personal matters when re-contacting Fassett on 8 October. He writes:
‘In future, I propose to keep Criterion & F. & G. matters strictly apart from private matters in writing to you, & shall address you as ‘Miss Fassett’: these letters can be filed for reference; and I should be glad if you wd do the same, & keep yr. carbons.’
Eliot’s definition of order here appears not to be a unified whole, but instead a meticulous separation into distinct compartments. Yet, despite these efforts, this volume reveals moments where this systematic separation of the professional and personal fails. This breakdown is seen most notably in Eliot’s 8 April 1927 letter to former Criterion publisher Richard Cobden-Sanderson:
‘I must apologise for not answering your kind invitation to the Boat Race, which once again I could not attend. But my father in law had just died, and I was immersed in the business of a kind that you know.’
The curious intermingling of personal feeling and professional correspondence is also evident in his letter to Jack Isaacs on 15 April of that year, where he expresses: ‘I am rather hurt at not hearing from you about Stich, and not getting his pamphlet; but from my previous experience, I suppose I might put this down to your general undependability.’ Here, his joke bites with a certain irritation.
New Spring Coat
The volume’s portrayal of Eliot’s personal and professional life as a frayed, disordered patchwork finds a darkly comical and visceral parallel in his correspondence with Mary Culpin on 3 June 1927.
Culpin: ‘Was your dog ill last week? He evidently bit a large piece out of my new spring coat. I suppose it’s too late now to recover the fragments.’
Eliot: ‘The dog had a nervous crisis last week but I am glad to say he is now quite recovered so that if it was he who ate the piece out of your coat you may be sure that it did him no harm.’
There is a certain poignancy with which Eliot’s correspondences move from professional obligations to personal intimacies that is worth sitting with. Rather than simply indicating disarray, this resistance to compartmentalisation creates overlaps that are at once chaotic and profoundly necessary. This dissonance appears in a letter to Orlo Williams on 8 March 1926, where he details a week of ‘leisure’, only to add: ‘P.S. Would you care to criticise a few critics together in a review in the June Criterion? I have on hand Authors Dead and Living by F. L. Lucas and Dramatis Personae by Arthur Symons.’ Eliot is here unable to resist turning to matters of his publication, framing the blending of his personal and professional life as strangely indulgent – playful, even. Work and life dance around each other on the page. Far from signalling anguish, these discordances become mutually informing – and even mutually sustaining – for a writer and critic fully absorbed in literary society.
In Eliot’s world, no single facet of life could exist in isolation. He could not (or perhaps simply would not) divide his personal existence from his professional one. Volume 3 weaves his roles as scout, agent and friend into one inextricable whole – if not a conventional one, then a deeply human one.