Read The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 Online
Authors: T. S. Eliot
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (145 page)
Gilbert Seldes
(1893–1970), journalist, editor and critic, graduated from Harvard in 1914 and was a war correspondent before becoming for a while editor of the
Dial
, 1920–3. His works include the influential study
The 7 Lively Arts
(1924) – on popular arts, embracing the comic strip and popular songs as well as cinema and vaudeville – and
The Stammering Century
(1928). In later years he was prolific as an essayist; he also wrote for the Broadway theatre, and became the first director of TV programmes for CBS News, and the founding Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. See Michael G. Kammen,
The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States
(1996).
Alfred Dwight (‘Shef’) Sheffield
(1871–1961), husband of TSE’s eldest sister Ada, taught English at University School, Cleveland, Ohio, and was an English instructor, and later a Professor, of Group Work at Wellesley College. His publications include
Lectures on the Harvard Classics: Confucianism
(1909), and
Grammar and Thinking: a study of the working
conceptions in syntax
(1912). He later joined the editorial staff of
Webster’s International Dictionary
.
Scofield Thayer
(1890–1982): American poet and publisher; pioneering editor of the
Dial
. Thayer came from a wealthy Massachusetts family, which enabled him to travel and act as a patron of the arts. He was a friend of TSE from Milton Academy, where he was his junior by a year. Like TSE, he went on to Harvard and Oxford, where from 1914 he spent two years studying philosophy at Magdalen College: it was at his rooms there that TSE met Vivien Haigh-Wood in 1915. From 1919 to 1925 he was editor of the
Dial
, having joined forces with Dr James Sibley Watson (who became president of the magazine) to save it from closure. Re-launched as a monthly in January 1920, the
Dial
became the most enterprising and innovative cultural and arts magazine in the USA. It published TSE’s ‘London Letters’ and
The Waste Land
as well as important essays by him such as ‘
Ulysses
, Order and Myth’; Yeats, Pound, cummings, Joyce and others of the most important Anglophone modernists; and influential European writers including Mann, Hofmannsthal and Valéry. A meeting with Lady Rothermere prompted her to finance the
Criterion
, with Eliot as editor. In 1921, Thayer settled in Vienna, where, while continuing remotely to edit the Dial, he underwent analysis with Sigmund Freud. He suffered a series of mental breakdowns, resigning from the magazine in June 1926. Certified in 1930, he spent the remainder of his life in care. Watson kept going with the
Dial
, and Marianne Moore took over as editor until its final issue in 1929. Moore judged Thayer to be ‘very quiet friendly polished and amusing’, and ‘in his discernment and interplay of metaphor … very brilliant’ (
Selected Letters of Marianne Moore
, ed. Bonnie Costello [1998]). See also Nicholas Joost,
Scofield Thayer and ‘The Dial’
(1964).
Jean Jules Verdenal
(1890–1915), the son of a French doctor, was born on 11May 1890 at Pau in the French Pyrenees. He became a medical student in Paris, where he and Eliot met as fellow lodgers at Mme Causabon’s
pension
, 151 bis rue St Jacques. During the academic year 1910–11 they became close friends, sharing many literary and cultural interests. Although they continued to correspond after Eliot’s return to America in the autumn of 1911, they were never to meet again. Renouncing his deferment from military service, on 18 March 1913 Verdenal joined the 18th Infantry Regiment and served on the Western Front from 2 August 1914 to February 1915, being appointed an assistant medical officer in November 1914. He was killed in the Dardanelles on 2 May 1915. Eliot
dedicated to Verdenal ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, with an epigraph from Dante opening ‘
Or puoi la quantitate / comprender dell’amor ch’a te me scalda’
(‘Now can you understand / the measure of love which warms me towards you’). In an autobiographical note in Criterion 13 (April 1934), Eliot evoked ‘the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Garden in the later afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (as far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli’. See George Watson, ‘Quest of a Frenchman’,
Sewanee Review
(Summer 1976).
Dr Roger Vittoz
(1863–1925): Swiss psychiatrist recommended to TSE by Ottoline Morrell. He published one book,
Traitement des psychonévroses par la rééducation du controle cérébral
(Paris, 1911), of which there was an English translation by H. B. Brooke,
Treatment of Neurasthenia by Means of Brain Control
(2nd edn., 1913). Morrell, who was treated for neurasthenia, wrote of him: ‘He taught his patients a system of mental control and concentration, and a kind of organisation of mind, which had a great effect on steadying and developing me … The man himself impressed me by his extraordinary poise and goodness. Part of the treatment was the formation of the habit of eliminating unnecessary thoughts and worries from one’s mind, and to do this one had to practise eliminating letters from words, or one number from a set of numbers’ (
Ottoline: The Early Memoirs
, 237). Other patients of Vittoz included William James, Joseph Conrad and Julian Huxley. See R. Dupond,
La Cure des Psychonevroses par la Méthode de Dr. Vittoz
(Paris, 1934); H. Lefebvre
, Un ‘Sauveur’: Le Docteur Vittoz
(Paris, 1951); and Adam Piette, ‘Eliot’s Breakdown and Dr. Vittoz’,
ELN
33: 1 (Sept. 1995), 35–8.
Harriet Shaw Weaver
(1876–1961): English editor and publisher, and political activist, whom Virginia Woolf described as ‘modest judicious & decorous’ (
Diary
, 13 April 1918). In 1912, Weaver began by giving financial support to the
Freewoman
, a radical periodical founded and edited by Dora Marsden, which was renamed in 1913 (at the suggestion of Ezra Pound)
The Egoist.
Weaver became editor in 1914, turning it into a ‘little magazine’ with a big influence in the history of literary modernism. Following in the footsteps of Richard Aldington and H. D., TSE became assistant editor in 1917 (having been nominated by Pound) and remained so until it closed in 1919. When Joyce could not secure a publisher for
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, Weaver in 1917 converted the
Egoist
into a press to publish it. She went on to publish TSE’s first book,
Prufrock and Other Observations
(1917), Pound’s
Dialogues of Fontenelle
and
Quia Pauper Amavi
, Wyndham Lewis’s novel
Tarr
, and Marianne Moore’s
Poems
, and other notable books. (She played a major role as Joyce’s patron and confidante, and went on to be his literary executor and to help to put together
The Letters of James Joyce
.) TSE wrote in tribute in 1962: ‘Miss Harriet Shaw Weaver … was so modest and self-effacing a woman that her generous patronage of men of letters was hardly known beyond the circle of those who benefited by it … Miss Weaver’s support, once given, remained steadfast. Her great disappointment was her failure to persuade any printer in this country to take the risk of printing
Ulysses
; her subsequent generosity to James Joyce, and her solicitude for his welfare and that of his family, knew no bounds … [Working for her at the
Egoist
] was all great fun, my first experience of editorship. In 1932 I dedicated my
Selected Essays
to this good, kind, unassuming, courageous and lovable woman, to whom I owe so much. What other publisher in 1917 (the Hogarth Press was not yet in existence) would, I wonder, have taken
Prufrock
?’ See also Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson,
Dear Miss Weaver: Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1876–1961
(1970).
James Haughton Woods
(1864–1935): Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, 1913-34, and chairman of the department, 1914–16. He introduced courses in Indian philosophy to the University, and his
Yoga System of Patanjali
(1914) was the first American scholarly study of Indian philosophy. Eliot studied Greek Philosophy with him in 1911–12, and ‘Philosophical Sanskrit’ in 1912–13. After Eliot submitted his thesis, Woods told him he wanted to create a ‘berth’ for him in the Philosophy Department at Harvard. Eliot recorded later that ‘a year in the mazes of Patanjali’s metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods left me in a state of enlightened mystification’ (ASG, 40). Eliot’s lecture notes on Woods’s lectures in 1911–12 are in the Eliot Collection, Houghton Library.
Leonard Woolf
(1880–1969): writer and publisher, and husband of Virginia Woolf, whom he married in 1912. A friend of Lytton Strachey and J.M. Keynes at Cambridge, he played a central part in the Bloomsbury Group. He wrote a number of novels, including
The Village and the Jungle
(1913), as well as political studies, including
Socialism and Co-operation
(1919) and
Imperialism and Civilization
(1928). As editor, with Virginia Woolf, of the Hogarth Press, he was responsible for publishing TSE’s
Poems
(1919) and
The Waste Land
(1922). In 1923 he became literary editor of the
Nation & Athenaeum
(after TSE had turned it down),
commissioning numerous reviews from him, and remained a friend. See
An Autobiography
(2 vols, 1980);
Letters of Leonard Woolf
, ed. Frederic Spotts (1990); and Victoria Glendinning,
Leonard Woolf: A Life
(2006).
Virginia Woolf
(1882–1941), English novelist, essayist and critic, was the author of
Jacob’s Room
(1922),
Mrs Dalloway
(1925), and
To the Lighthouse
(1927), among many experimental and influential novels, as well as of
A Room of One’s Own
(1928), a classic of modern feminist criticism, and
The Common Reader
and other collections of essays. Daughter of the biographer and editor Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), she married Leonard Woolf in 1912, published her first novel
The Voyage Out
in 1915, and founded the Hogarth Press with her husband in 1917. The Hogarth Press published TSE’s
Poems
(1919),
The Waste Land
(1923), and
Homage to John Dryden
(1923). For his part, TSE published in the
Criterion
Woolf’s essays and talks including ‘Kew Gardens’, ‘Character in Fiction’, and ‘On Being Ill’. In addition to being his publisher, Woolf became a friend and correspondent; and her diaries and letters give a detailed first-hand portrait of him. See Hermione Lee,
Virginia Woolf
(1996).
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