The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  The Dial, despite the international range of its contents and the distinguished roster of its contributors, was an American magazine, its headquarters in a brownstone on West Thirteenth Street, in Greenwich Village, in Manhattan, and with only a modest English circulation. The Criterion, by contrast, was to be a successor to earlier now defunct English journals—Arts & Letters, the Egoist, where Eliot himself had worked as an assistant editor—and focused narrowly, Eliot explained to a potential contributor to his magazine, on introducing “an elite readership of English letters to the most important representatives of foreign thought … to channel towards London the deepest foreign currents.”

  Eliot might see in the Dial an apt (and possibly lucrative) place for his long poem, but he also saw weaknesses and room for competition in the very variety of its contents, designed to appeal to an intelligent but not necessarily elite set of American readers. Thayer’s plan had been that the Dial would expand English circulation after the magazine was firmly established, and he hoped, until late 1921, to come to an agreement with Lady Rothermere to make efficient distribution possible. When it became clear that instead of collaborating, Lady Rothermere would fund her own magazine, and that Eliot would edit it, Thayer offered congratulations to Tom but was doubtful that “the multiplication of magazines” would help either of them. “It was to avoid just such a thing that I had been to so much bother in re the Rothermere bunch,” Thayer wrote to Vivien, who was at that point writing Tom’s correspondence for him. “The more artistic journals you publish the more money is wasted upon printers and paper dealers and the less is left for the artists themselves.”

  A magazine to compete with his own, and a decisive bit of business quite contradicting Eliot’s seeming incapacitation—it is no wonder that Thayer, who’d contended with Eliot’s missed deadlines and claims of illness, was distrustful of Eliot when he was offered The Waste Land but not allowed to read it. And it was not surprising that when the negotiations became protracted, he was less interested in making allowances for a troubled poet than he might have been a year before. It was now clear that by publishing The Waste Land, the Dial would be showcasing the work, and boosting the reputation, of an unrepentantly demanding poet at its own expense: Eliot would have to capitalize on his own name to draw in some from the roster of international contributors that the Dial was already publishing or pursuing in order to make the Criterion work. There were only so many international writers of commanding-enough stature to go around, and quite apart from the duplication of production costs that Thayer suggested left less for the artists themselves, in fact the opposite might be true: more places to publish meant that the artists themselves might demand, and get, higher prices. In other words, transatlantic competition might mean a greater need to accede to the kind of demands Eliot had just made.

  The Dial was hardly a paying concern, running a deficit for 1922 of $65,000, which required a monthly subsidy from Thayer and Watson of $2,700 each, as Pound made clear in outlining the math for his father in 1921. “Dial costs 46 cents to print,” he wrote, “why the hell shdnt. Thayer charge 50 for it. He makes the public a present of several $1000 each month.”

  Eliot planned to print five hundred copies of the first issue and had asked Cobden-Sanderson for estimates, including circulars for potential subscribers as well as other related material, before he left for Margate. Eliot promised they would begin “the business afresh” upon his return, and he and Cobden-Sanderson had dinner with Lady Rothermere on February 2 at her home. “Lady Rothermere dines at 8,” Eliot informed him the day before, reminding him of her address. “I shall wear a dinner jacket myself.” Cobden-Sanderson submitted revised estimates, as well as paper and type samples, “a good small format and paper, neat but no extravagance and not arty,” Eliot told Pound. There would be no illustrations, which “do more harm than good,” Eliot added, perhaps not just because of their cost but as a reproval of Thayer’s pretensions in the Dial, full as it was of Chagall and Brancusi. Lady Rothermere and Eliot agreed to pay contributors the rate of £10 for five thousand words—a not particularly generous amount given Eliot’s demands of Thayer—with the guarantee, as Eliot wrote to Pound, “that the selection of contributions is entirely in my hands.”

  As it became clear that a first issue would not appear until autumn, Eliot solicited work and suggestions from editors and writers across Europe, in order to be “certain of the right contributors for the first four numbers,” among whom he wanted the Woolves, as he had proposed to them in March. Before Tom left for Lugano, and despite his having been “handicapped by a good deal of illness and worry,” he had copied out, by hand, a list of six hundred names and addresses the Hogarth Press had provided—time he might better have spent preparing a typescript of The Waste Land for a prospective publisher. He promised Cobden-Sanderson that in due course he would have this typed “so that your staff can read it.”

  Back in London, he resumed work on the review, prepared to devote the next three months “of entire concentration on this one object,” he told Ottoline Morrell, apparently forgetting The Waste Land for the moment. “I shall not go out anywhere and must not contemplate any weekends,” he wrote her, begging off from an invitation with less than sterling honesty. The next week he spent a “perfect” evening with Mary Hutchinson, who introduced him to Léonide Massine, the Russian dancer and choreographer; sat for a portrait by Wyndham Lewis; and went to another dinner and a dance, at which “Vivien starved,” he told Mary, while he “enjoyed myself, and got off with the Aga Khan.” Busy with correspondence for the Criterion, as he claimed when he departed from the Woolves after reading his poem, and still unable to “drop my attempts to make money by writing” whatever assignments he was offered, he had to hire a shorthand typist to come in two evenings a week. He began dictating letters to her, further confounding any explanation of why, by the end of July, he had still been unable to have one or several copies of The Waste Land prepared for Liveright or for the editors of the Dial.

  * * *

  Eliot and Thayer had not written to each other since before Eliot saw Pound in Verona. Eliot had, in April, refused “to dispose of the poem to The Dial” at the price Thayer had offered. There things stood into the late summer, the unfortunate aftermath of Eliot’s “endocrine boil over,” as Pound had called it, and a matter of pride more than business or literary differences, as Pound knew. “My present impression of the case is ‘Oh, you two bostonians [sic],’” he wrote Thayer from Italy in May, expressing friendship—Amicitia—from his hideaway in the World of Spirits, and seeming to throw up his hands for the moment in favor of pursuing his own work. He closed his note to Thayer, “Ora Pro Nobis”—pray for us.

  Eliot sent his London Letter for the July issue to Gilbert Seldes, the Dial managing editor, before leaving for Lugano, and then had no further communication with either Seldes or Thayer until July 24, when he sent another London Letter to Seldes in time for the September issue. He did not mention his poem, and because Quinn had been negotiating in earnest with Liveright about the book, it is possible he had decided that publishing it in a periodical was not necessary, or at this point would not be lucrative enough to jeopardize whatever sales might materialize from Liveright’s edition. Thayer, who knew Seldes admired Eliot’s work and would himself be eager to publish a poem of Eliot’s at last, had in the meantime warned his managing editor—whose judgment he distrusted and whom he had been trying, without luck, to replace—“to correspond with Eliot only in the meagerest and barest form observing courtesy,” presumably to forestall any discussion of the poem, but also, conveniently, preventing any second-guessing of Thayer’s behavior in the matter.

  With Thayer in Vienna and Watson, his partner, having left for Europe himself, “Young Seldes,” as John Quinn called him, was concerned that the editorial reserves of the Dial were running very low. Even as managing editor, he had no authority to accept material on his own, a situation Thayer would not alter because of his dissatisfaction (from
a literary point of view, unjustified) with Seldes. In fact, Seldes wrote widely, and perceptively, for the Dial as well as other publications and was a responsible enough literary expert to be asked by Thomas Seltzer’s lawyer to testify on behalf of his client and to attest to the artistic merits of D. H. Lawrence.

  The September issue had to be done—and the article well was running even more dangerously dry than it had in August. “When are you coming home? The milk is getting sour on the doorstep,” Seldes wrote to Watson. He had, he added, “enough material, I think,” for September, but the October issue was looking thin, apart from a serial by Sherwood Anderson already scheduled to begin that month. But the Anderson serial was only so long, and Seldes warned Watson, “there is not a poem nor a filler nor a loose line cut in hand.” Given that “nothing of astounding brilliance” had arrived, it was now a question of finding “a few things acceptable” in order to get the October issue out at all. “Seriously, we will be in rather a mess … very soon,” he added. Seldes wanted to publish a play by Yeats, The Player Queen. It was good, worth publishing, and long enough to fill forty to fifty pages.

  Watson saw Pound in Paris at the end of July, and though his enthusiasm to publish Eliot was genuine—and untainted by the long history and personal strain that marked Eliot’s relationship with Thayer—he was also realistic about the magazine’s desperate need for copy. Pound wrote a “coy veiled hint” to Eliot about Watson’s interest, and on July 28 Eliot promised to send a copy of The Waste Land “for confidential use” as soon as he could make one; he’d had only two copies and had sent one to Quinn “to present to Liveright on the completion of the contract,” which Liveright was, at that moment, about to sign. Perhaps because Liveright’s publication of the poem was now certain and because he was no longer dependent on the Dial, Eliot told Pound that he had no objection to letting Watson and Thayer see it.

  “Cher S. T.,” Watson wrote on August 12. “Eliot seems in a conciliatory mood.”

  * * *

  Eliot sent the copy to Pound in Paris, rather than to Thayer in Vienna, which meant that Watson, unusually, read it first. “The poem is not so bad,” he wrote his partner, though he amended the sentence to “better than not so bad” before sending the letter. Not a passionate endorsement, but then, Eliot had been a mainstay of the magazine, and his first poem for the magazine deserved a benefit of the doubt. This would have been the case had the editorial well not run dry. But now, the magazine could not stand on ceremony or afford to remain affronted by Eliot’s earlier demands. A few days later, Watson wrote to Thayer again and forwarded a copy of the poem. It had taken some getting used to, he realized. “I found the poem disappointing on first reading, but after a third shot I think it up to his usual—all the styles are there, somewhat toned down in language (adjectives!) and theatricalized in sentiment.” Watson also told Thayer that Liveright was to publish the poem in book form. He thought, though, that “Gilbert could get around Liveright” and that they could publish the poem in the Dial first, if they acted quickly.

  And, after all these months in which they had not seen the poem, act quickly they must. Seldes’s worries about the upcoming issues had deepened. But the lack of copy was not the only problem the Dial now faced. The question of the lucrative Dial Prize was also on Watson’s mind. The Dial had inaugurated the award in December 1921 and given it to Sherwood Anderson. The announcement of the award, and its munificence—$2,000—had garnered a great deal of publicity at a time when literary awards were rare. (The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was given for the first time only in 1922, to Edwin Arlington Robinson, for his Collected Poems; three earlier prizes awarded by the organization had been sponsored by the Poetry Society of America.) Almost as soon as the Dial’s first award was made, Thayer and Watson looked ahead to the next one and settled on E. E. Cummings as the likely recipient.

  But Watson had come to think that Cummings was “less and less supportable” as the recipient. To Thayer he proposed this idea about Eliot: “Shall I try to persuade him to sell us the poem at our regular rate with the award in view?” The announcement of the second Dial Prize would not be made for months yet, but here was a sleight of hand that would allow them to raise the effective price that Eliot would be paid for his poem. Watson said he favored giving Eliot the prize even without The Waste Land factored in. But because of Bel Esprit, Eliot was widely known to have financial problems and to have had a nervous breakdown. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t be doing something moderately popular in giving him the award.” Watson and Thayer could open their pocketbooks to show that the Dial was above the petty politics of transatlantic literary wars. Thayer relented, though a record of his initial thoughts on Eliot’s poem do not survive. Whether Eliot was in a conciliatory enough mood to accept the offer Watson had persuaded Thayer they must make was another question.

  * * *

  To Eliot, the success of his own magazine had become a question of personal pride—and “at least from the point of view of its contents, if not from that of circulation,” also a matter of survival. The Criterion must not fail, because he must not fail. The open canvassing for Bel Esprit had exposed him to pity and perhaps even ridicule. If the first issue of the magazine were not dazzling, the personal cost would be great. “I am quite aware,” Eliot wrote Aldington, who had become Eliot’s de facto assistant as plans for the magazine proceeded, “how obnoxious I am to perhaps the larger part of the literary world of London and that there will be a great many jackals swarming about waiting for my bones.” The failure of the Criterion would mean not only that he had “gained nothing” but that, more significantly, he would have lost “immensely in prestige and usefulness and shall have to retire to obscurity or Paris like Ezra.”

  Eliot confided that alternative only partly in jest. It was not “persecution mania” that led him to believe that his own public fate was intertwined with the success or failure of the Criterion, he wrote Aldington. He knew—and could not escape hearing the chatter of others confirming—that many in London’s various literary sets, including friends like Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis, viewed him with disdain or suspicion or pity (or envy), and that there were those on all sides who saw his vaunted hopes for his magazine as only another way in which he assumed an air of personal “superiority.” This word was used in anger by Aldington, when Eliot reacted unfavorably to an essay he’d sent for his approval. In a further burst of unkindness, Aldington had also passed along to Eliot that people were saying he was “getting bitter and hypercritical,” a report surely meant to hurt rather than to have a cautionary effect, and which Tom, who shared the remark with Pound, felt was a betrayal by a man in whom he’d confided so much and whose work he usually praised.

  * * *

  Through the summer Eliot flattered, cultivated, and ingratiated himself with as many eminent writers and editors as he could, for he knew that the table of contents for the first issue and the roster of promised contributors were battle lines drawn against competitors and rivals. Later in the 1920s, Leonard Woolf was involved with the creation of a magazine called Political Quarterly. One of his associates, the journalist Kingsley Martin, wrote Woolf with the disappointing news that John Maynard Keynes was working on a book and would therefore be unable to contribute to the first issue. Keynes’s name, whatever he could have been persuaded to contribute, would have been, Martin wrote Woolf, “uniquely valuable intrinsically and ‘publicitically’—(a good word that).”

  Eliot, like Martin, knew the intrinsic and also the publicitical value of those whom he sought for the Criterion. But if it was clear why the Criterion needed celebrated names, it was certainly not clear why those with celebrated names would need the Criterion. This conundrum was much on Eliot’s mind, particularly as he pursued the imprimatur of one whose prestige was greater than almost anyone’s—Marcel Proust. Eliot’s anxiety to publish him in the Criterion was a precise measure of Proust’s exalted reputation in England by the summer of 1922.

  “I am n
ot anxious to get many French people for the first two numbers, more anxious to get other (foreign) nationalities,” Eliot wrote Pound, “the French business is so usual (in London) that it doesn’t raise a quiver; the only name worth getting is Proust, whom I am fishing for.”

  The importance of Proust was publicitical above all. Eliot, though otherwise deeply immersed in French poetry and criticism, had not read Proust, and there is not even a passing mention of Proust in Eliot’s correspondence until he began to plan the first issues of the Criterion in 1922. His friend Sydney Schiff did know Proust and, a novelist himself who wrote under the name Stephen Hudson, had hoped to translate À la recherche into English. In this, he had been foiled by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, whose translation of the first volume, Swann’s Way, was soon to appear. In June, Eliot asked Schiff to intercede on his behalf for a contribution, or at least the promise of one for a following issue. Eliot was hoping for a double coup, an English translation of an as-yet-unpublished section of Proust’s novel. (In October 1920, the Dial had published an excerpt in translation from Le côté de Guermantes, which had appeared in France, together with an enthusiastic appreciation by Richard Aldington.) Schiff agreed to do so and suggested that Eliot also write to Proust directly.

  On July 4 Eliot told Schiff he had written Proust at his “private address,” as instructed. “I await consequences eagerly.” The pressure was to secure Proust’s name for the first promotional circular, the copy for which was due in mid-July. A week later there had been no response. “I have been waiting every day to hear from Proust, but have heard nothing,” Eliot wrote Schiff. “I am very disappointed.” Still, he hoped that Proust would, he added flatteringly, “yield to your persuasion if to anybody’s.”

  Schiff’s fishing expedition produced little, but Eliot did not know that Schiff was fishing on his own behalf as well as Eliot’s and was hoping to arrange for the serialization of his novel Elinor Culhouse in France. Schiff had asked Proust to intervene with his own publishers, Jacques Rivière, the editor of La Nouvelle Revue française, and Gaston Gallimard, the head of NRF Éditions, the magazine’s book publishing operation. Schiff praised Eliot to Proust as “possibly our best critic and certainly our best poet,” but Proust did not reply to Eliot, writing instead to his publisher Gallimard, on July 7, proposing that he try to arrange with Eliot a more practical solution for publication in the Criterion, an excerpt published in French but not yet translated. But, he cautioned Gallimard, “cette question Eliot” was “all mixed up with” the more delicate issue of Schiff, in whose work Gallimard was not interested.