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| The Need to Complete |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2007
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Originally published
in The Guardian
17 November 2007
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Anyone who has any great interest in poetry
will agree that we need a complete edition of the works of TS
Eliot. Me, I can't wait. The admirable Auden edition, to which
a new volume of the collected prose is just about to be added,
keeps moving forward. Not every reader will need every volume
of it, but every lover of Auden's work will be happy to know
that it is there, and admirably executed, and if one did need
to look something up (some fugitive essay, some unfinished or
abandoned poem) in the fullness of time everything will be available.
With Eliot, the need is far greater: there
is much, much more in the way of uncollected and unavailable
prose: 700 uncollected items, all kinds of ephemeral pieces,
many of them missing from the standard bibliography, which is
itself due for complete revision. The new bibliography is under
way, in the hands of Archie Henderson.
The Complete Poems - two volumes of it - is
also in hand. Christopher Ricks is the editor and publication
is perhaps three years away. In this case, it is not that we
expect another "Waste Land" to turn up. It is a matter
of wanting to see the work whole - great poems, dreadful poems,
trivia, whatever there is. When it comes to a poet like this,
I'm a staunch completist.
Then there is the stalled edition of the Collected
Letters, which began so well with a first volume in 1988, edited
by Valerie Eliot. That first volume is now due for revision
and, together with a second volume, is due out in 2009, with
Hugh Haughton at the helm. Thereafter things are expected to
proceed at a modest pace.
But it is the collected prose that really interests
me: the essays and reviews, the lectures, everything from the
most substantial pieces to the critical ephemera. Seven volumes
are planned, with publication shared between Faber in London
and Johns Hopkins University in the US. Here the editor is Ronald
Schuchard, who has already, along with Ricks, spent years tracking
things down. Once again, 2009 is the year in which we will begin
to be able to see the results.
A foretaste is provided by Schuchard in the
current issue of the magazine Areté. As is well known,
Eliot spent much of his adult life as a publisher at Faber,
in whose archives there are 40 box-files to do with the Criterion,
the magazine Eliot edited, and 120 box-files of correspondence
as a publisher, representing, as Schuchard puts it, "43
years of daily engagement with a world-wide literary clientele".
Like any publisher, Eliot had to produce regular
reports on proposed books, and blurbs for those which he had
accepted. He was clearly a very careful report and blurb-writer,
but he could also explode with adjectives. Here he is at the
opening of the blurb for Robert Graves's The White Goddess:
"This is a prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable
book: the outcome of vast reading and curious researches into
strange territories of folk-lore, legend, religion and magic."
The White Goddess of the title, Eliot tells
us, "is a terrifying and protean deity who has many names;
she is Astarte or Luna; she has her place in every religion
and every demonology. Perhaps she is that "queen of air
and darkness" whom Housman addressed in the most mystifying
of his poems: certainly she is especially necessary and fatal
for poets, whom she inspires and destroys."
This kind of thought (about Housman, about
what it is that inspires and destroys poets) is not casually
expressed, and it will be useful to have all of Eliot's blurbs
and to know for sure that they are his. Eliot, for instance,
composed the original blurb for Ted Hughes's The Hawk in the
Rain. "Everyone engaged in publishing," he wrote,
"knows what a difficult art blurb-writing is; every publisher
who is also an author considers this form of composition more
arduous than any other that he practises. But nobody knows the
utmost difficulty until he has to write blurbs for poetry: especially
when some are to appear in the same catalogue. If you praise
highly, the reviewer may devote a paragraph to ridiculing the
publisher's pretensions; if you try understatement, the reviewer
may remark that even the publisher doesn't seem to think much
of this book: I have had both experiences."
The publisher's reports - relaxed, unbuttoned,
but (on the basis of the samples Schuchard gives) carefully
thought out none the less - give insight into what Eliot thought
about the barren shores of mysticism. "The addiction to
Asiatic mysticism, separated from Asiatic religion, produced
a sort of frigid superiority in a man like Aldous Huxley; and
something which to me is very much more repellent in Gurdjieff
and Ouspensky."
Eliot's suspicions were aroused by any form
of mysticism which had not evolved out of, and was not supported
by, a religion. Here he is in 1934, commenting on a book called
God Among the Germans by Paul F Douglass, who spent a couple
of years in the early 1930s in Berlin: "This is a queer
book. Mr Douglass, an American author, seems to have swallowed
the Nazi religion whole, but he hasn't digested it. Just as
South Sea Islanders have been carried away by epidemics of such
things as chickenpox and measles, so Americans are sometimes
carried away by equally light epidemics of ideas. Mr Douglass
seems to have read a lot of German Thought, and my God what
a lot of it there is. His manner is too much that of the PhD
dissertation for him to come out boldly and say he believes
one thing or another; but the 'trend' is unmistakeable. I have
never advised against a book with more burning conviction than
I advise against this."
The italics are mine. Obviously this report
will be of great interest to those who are interested in the
controversy, which flared up a decade ago, over Eliot and antisemitism.
Douglass was a Methodist and educationalist, as well as an exponent
of "religion in the National Socialist State". After
the war, he became an adviser to the odious president of South
Korea, Syngman Rhee. God Among the Germans was published in
1935, but is something of a rarity today - an embarrassment
to its owners, no doubt, after Pearl Harbor.
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