Poets

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965), poet, critic, playwright and editor, was born in St Louis, Missouri, and settled in England in 1914. He edited the Criterion (1922–39) and in 1925 joined the publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, later Faber & Faber, where he became a director. His works include The Waste Land (1922), Ash-Wednesday (1930), Four Quartets (1943) and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Order of Merit in 1948.

Geoffrey Faber (1889–1961), publisher and poet, was educated at Malvern College and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a double first in Classical Moderations (1910) and Literae Humaniores (1912). He was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple (1921), though he was never to practise law. In 1919 he was elected a prize fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, which he went on to serve in the capacity of Estates Bursar, 1923–51. Before WW1 – in which he served with the London Regiment (Post Office Rifles), seeing action in France and Belgium – he spent eighteen months as assistant to Humphrey Milford, publisher of Oxford University Press. After the war he passed three years working for Strong & Co. Ltd, brewers (there was a family connection), before going in for publishing on a full-time basis by joining forces with his All Souls colleague Maurice Gwyer and his wife, Lady Alsina Gwyer, who were trying to run a specialised imprint called the Scientific Press that Lady Gwyer had inherited from her father, Sir Henry Burdett: its weekly journal, the Nursing Mirror, was their most successful production. Following protractedly difficult negotiations, in 1925 Faber became chair of their restructured general publishing house, which was provisionally styled Faber & Gwyer. After being introduced by Charles Whibley to T. S. Eliot, Faber was so impressed by the personality and aptitude of the 37-year-old American that he chose both to take on the running of the Criterion and to appoint Eliot to the board of his company (Eliot’s Poems 1909–1925 was one of the first books to be put out by the new imprint, and the firm’s first best-seller), which was relocated from Southampton Row to 24 Russell Square. By 1929 both the Gwyers and the Nursing Mirror were disposed of to advantage, and the firm took final shape as F&F, with Richard de la Mare and two additional Americans, Frank Morley and Morley Kennerley, joining the board. Faber chaired the Publishers’ Association, 1939–41 – campaigning successfully for the repeal of a wartime tax on books – and helping to set up the National Book League. He was knighted in 1954, and gave up the chairmanship of F&F in 1960. His publications as poet include The Buried Stream (1941), and his works of non-fiction were Oxford Apostles (1933) Jowett (1957), and an edition of the works of John Gay (1926). In 1920 he married Enid Richards, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. See further Toby Faber, Faber & Faber: The Untold Story of a Great Publishing House (2019).

Frank Vigor Morley (1899–1980), son of a distinguished mathematician – his brothers were the writer Christopher, and Felix (editor of the Washington Post) – was brought up in the USA before travelling as a Rhodes Scholar to New College, Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in mathematics. After working for a while at the TLS, he became London Manager of The Century Company (Publishers) of New York. In 1929 he became a founding director of F&F, where he would be a close friend of TSE: for some time they shared a top-floor office at Russell Square. Morley would remark that TSE’s ‘great skill’ as a publisher was that he ‘had an unerring gift for spotting talent, but he would never fight for people. I used to watch, and know him so well that if he quietly suggested publishing the poetry of Marianne Moore, whom nobody knew, I would take up the cudgels and be the loud hailer’ (‘The time when Eliot lit the fuse’, Sunday Times, 8 June 1980). In 1933 when TSE separated from Vivien, Morley arranged convivial temporary accommodation for him at his farmhouse at Pike’s Farm, Lingfield, Surrey. In 1939 Morley moved to the USA, where he became Vice-President of Harcourt, Brace and Company (and during the war he served on the National War Labor Board in Washington, DC). In 1947 he returned with his family to Britain to take up the post of Director at Eyre & Spottiswoode. A large, learned, ebullient man, he earned the sobriquet ‘Whale’ – though not merely on account of corpulence: in his youth he spent time aboard a whaling ship (he was revolted by the slaughter), and subsequently wrote (with J. S. Hodgson) Whaling North and South (1927) – which was reviewed in the Monthly Criterion by his friend Herbert Read. Other writings include Travels in East Anglia (1923), River Thames (1926), Inversive Geometry (1933), My One Contribution to Chess (1947), The Great North Road (1961), The Long Road West: A Journey in History (1971), Literary Britain (1980); and contributions in verse (together with Eliot, Geoffrey Faber and John Hayward) to Noctes Binanianae (privately printed, 1939). Morley Kennerley told The Times (25 Oct. 1980) that

‘one of [Morley’s] hobbies was to work out complicated problems for his friends, and for those baffled there were amazing practical jokes. Convivial lunches with interesting people were a joy to him … He found jobs for many and squeezed me into Fabers where he generously put up with my sharing a corner of his room for some years. I was present all day during his interviews, dictation, visitors and often lunch. How he put up with all this I do not know. His correspondence with Ezra Pound was quite something, and I think he out-Pounded Pound. As his family say, he was a compulsive letter writer and was rarely without a pencil in his hand or pocket.’

On 2 July 1978 Morley wrote to Helen Gardner, of Eliot: ‘I loved him, as I think you know, near to the side of idolatry.’

John Hayward (1905–65), editor, critic, anthologist, read modern languages at King’s College, Cambridge. Despite the early onset of muscular dystrophy, he became a prolific and eminent critic and editor, bringing out in quick succession editions of the works of Rochester, Saint-Évremond, Jonathan Swift, Robert Herrick and Samuel Johnson. Other works included Complete Poems and Selected Prose of John Donne (1929), Donne (1950), T. S. Eliot: Selected Prose (1953), The Penguin Book of English Verse (1958), and The Oxford Book of Nineteenth Century English Verse (1964). Celebrated as the learned, acerbic editor of The Book Collector, he was made a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1952; CBE in 1953. Writers including Graham Greene and Stevie Smith valued his editorial counsel; and Paul Valéry invited him to translate his comedy Mon Faust. Hayward advised TSE on essays, poems, and plays including The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk, and most helpfully of all on Four Quartets. See Helen Gardner, The Composition of ‘Four Quartets’ (1978); John Smart, Tarantula’s Web: John Hayward, T. S. Eliot and Their Circle (2013).