Why didn’t he commit suicide?

Frank Kermode

T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews by Jewel Spears Brooker
Cambridge, 644 pp, £80.00, May 2004, ISBN 0 521 38277 7

Here, in six hundred double-column pages, we have what the editor describes as ‘the most comprehensive collection of contemporary reviews of T.S. Eliot’s work as it appeared’. There are other such collections, but this one will be enough for most people. The editor is American, and she is contributing to a series which gives the same treatment to Emerson, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Faulkner, Melville and so on. Eliot’s presence on this list amounts to a claim that Eliot is an American author, a decision qualified by a willingness to be fair to the disappointed British: ‘since Eliot’s work was published first in London, this collection includes British and Irish reviews.’ Nevertheless, ‘spelling and punctuation have been changed to American style throughout.’ So much tedious editorial labour has been devoted to exhibit this anglicised and europhile poet as an American national treasure.

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Vol. 26 No. 21 · 4 November 2004 » Frank Kermode » Why didn’t he commit suicide? (print version)
Pages 30-32 | 3319 words

Letters

From Jack Adrian

Frank Kermode, I'm sure, wasn't surprised at Sir John Squire's 'vulgarity' when it came to judging The Waste Land (LRB, 4 November). Squire was pretty good on the Georgians (Masefield, Drinkwater, W.H. Davies, Walter de la Mare and so on) and lyric poetry in general, but was never a man to tackle Modernism with any sympathy. Although his London Mercury was, in the 1920s, one of the most influential arts periodicals, its approach was firmly from the right of centre, and its reputation was mainly as a cheerful demolisher of sacred cows as well as a trasher of those younger writers who Squire himself thought were highfalutin and getting above themselves. He didn't mind whom he used as demolishers or trashers, either. In 1925 he commissioned the comic novelist and spook-story writer E.F. Benson to launch a 20,000-word literary missile at the then much-revered Robert Louis Stevenson ('a sedulous ape' with a 'childish and inconsiderate vanity'), and in 1928 a shorter but still pretty fierce attack on Virginia Woolf and Michael Arlen ('precious … hollow … dreary'). Squire and the London Mercury were immortalised in A.G. Macdonell's comic masterpiece England, Their England (1933) as Mr Hodge and the London Weekly. It should also be remembered that Mr Hodge was devoted above all else to cricket, pugilism and great foaming jacks of ale. Hardly The Waste Land.

Jack Adrian
Cradley, Worcestershire

From Jack Adrian

I was sorry to lose Geoffrey Faber from my list of lyric poets (Letters, 18 November). Still, not to worry. I’ve been blue-pencilled by madmen, seriously deranged obsessionists and fiends in human shape before now. When I was writing pulp fiction for a living back in the 1980s, my then agent got me a gig with Jove Books in New York banging out a couple of books for a series about a bunch of kill-crazy mercenaries, aimed at paperback carousels in truckers’ greasy-spoons in the Rust Belt. ‘Lots of sex,’ he said, ‘lots of violence.’ I duly delivered the goods. Meanwhile, unfortunately, the particular editor I was dealing with had moved on and a new one, who clearly considered himself the reincarnation of Maxwell Perkins, had taken over, rewriting the book and taking out all the sex, all the violence, and all the cuss-words. Doubtless it was a finer, nobler book, but it wouldn’t have sold beans in Poughkeepsie. The first I knew of all this was when the proofs turned up, followed shortly thereafter by an apoplectic transatlantic phone call from a third editor who had just read the same proofs and was wondering why Jove were paying top dollar for a book that wouldn’t bring a blush to a maiden’s brow. (What he actually said was ‘for a buncha garbage written by Caspar-fuckin’-Milquetoast!’)

Jack Adrian
Cradley, Worcestershire