T.S. Eliot rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm for Faber & Faber

Stefan Collini has reviewed the latest volume of T.S. Eliot's letters for the London Review of Books. It covers the years 1942-4, and the most striking thing about the review is the revelation of how little time Eliot spent writing poetry and how much he devoted to his duties for the publishers Faber & Faber.

One advantage that firm had over other publishers was that it was based in Russel Square rather than the traditional book-trade quarter of Pasternoster Row, which stood in the shadow of St Paul's and was heavily bombed in the London Blitz.

Collini also writes about Eliot's most famous business decision: his rejection of George Orwell's Animal Farm:

In July 1944 Eliot wrote what became one of the more celebrated rejection letters in literary history, turning down Orwell’s Animal Farm. This letter has been extensively cited by Orwell scholars, but the annotation in the present edition, based on the Faber archive, adds some fascinating detail to the story. 

Eliot’s letter has always seemed a little unsteady in tone: he declares that he cannot "see any reason of prudence or caution to prevent anybody from publishing this book – if he believed in what it stands for", but concludes that he and the nameless fellow director who he claimed had also read the manuscript "have no conviction (and I’m sure none of the other directors would have) that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time". 

Almost twenty years later, struggling to recall the episode accurately, the ageing Eliot did concede that rejecting the book "was a great mistake on our part". Later still, Fredric Warburg, chairman of Secker and Warburg, the eventual publishers of Animal Farm, claimed that Geoffrey Faber had once shown him Eliot’s report on the script, but at that point (after the deaths of both Eliot and Faber) no such report could be found in the files. Faber himself had been out of London at the time of Orwell’s submission and had not read it, so it seems to have been rejected principally on the basis of Eliot’s judgment. 

The rejection letter suggests that the book's "positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing", but other unresolved questions aside, there is a certain piquancy in seeing Eliot, by this point well known for his conservative political views, appearing unwilling to publish a critique of Soviet communism at a time when the USSR was Britain’s essential wartime ally. 

With hindsight, we can also see that had Faber and Faber accepted the book, which was an almost unmatched commercial success, it would have transformed the financial position of the firm to which Eliot was so devoted. 

Collini, incidentally, quotes some of Eliot's verdicts on his contemporaries – Orwell is "a very queer bird".

John Carey and The Intellectuals and the Masses

The death of John Carey, the critic and former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, has been reported today. I discovered him through his 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939, which skewered the snobbish and anti-democratic attitudes that pervaded modernist literature and Fabian politics.

Here is Ian Hamilton reviewing Carey's book in the London Review of Books the year it came out:

The book is not meant to be straight literary criticism. It is about attitudes, not artworks. And on the matter of attitudes, Carey’s testiness can be joyously unreined. He has no patience with high-flown talk about predicaments and alienation. He is first of all an educator. His sympathies are with readers rather than with writers and he believes that, with the advent of mass literacy, a great educational opportunity was missed. 

Instead of sneering at Leonard Bast’s pretensions, Forster should have been teaching him at night school. But that could never have happened because, however the intellectuals chose to dress up their disdain, it was actually class-based – it had its roots in a fear and loathing of the mass, a revulsion which in some cases turned into super man delusions or fantasies of mass-extermination.

Carey's views are, I think, less controversial now than they were when The Intellectuals and the Masses was published, yet the idea that modernist writers must be, or at least ought to be, on the side of social progress was held for many decades.

Here's my own personal Thirties poet W.T. Nettlefold expressing a generation's sense of betrayal when T.S. Eliot's Conservative politics and adherence to the Church of England became known:

HOW NICE for a man to be clever,
So famous, so true
So sound an investment how EVER
So nice to be YOU.

To peer into basements, up alleys,
A nose for the search.
To challenge with pertinent sallies,
And then JOIN the Church.

I had a very good teacher for A level English Literature, but I have shaken off his taste for the modernists over the years, now preferring Dickens and Auden to his gods Lawrence and Eliot. And I suspect we can all see now what Edward Mendelson's wrote in his introduction to W. H. Auden: Selected Poems in 1979:

Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event. 

In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernists predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular. 

All of this Auden rejected.

I commend The Intellectuals and the Masses to anyone with an interest in the literature and politics of the early 20th century.

Finding our more about Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley

"It's time to find out more about Frieda Harris," I wrote the other day of the woman who was the wife of one Liberal MP (Sir Percy Harris) and great grandmother of another (Matthew Taylor), an who helped fund the notorious Aleister Crowley.

A good place to starts is an article by Brianna Di Monda about Frieda and her partnership with Crowley published in Lapham's Quarterly.

She writes of Frieda's early life:

Growing up in a wealthy, middle-class family, Lady Frieda Harris was taught only the arts—drawing, music, dancing—and conversational French. Though women were benefiting from expanded opportunities in the late nineteenth century, Harris’ education prepared her only for a good marriage. It also likely readied her for a life of being a voracious autodidact. 

After she left school, her interest in mysticism—incited, perhaps, by her mother reading her light texts about Buddhism at a young age and her father’s membership in the United Grand Lodge of England (England’s governing Masonic lodge for the majority of Freemasons)—carried her far beyond her traditional schooling. She read widely about alternative belief systems and became involved in theosophy and, briefly, Christian Science.

Above all, Harris committed herself to painting, which she also used as a springboard for further spiritual involvement. As an artist, Harris exhibited her work in prominent London galleries. There are rumors that she was a co-mason, a form of Freemasonry that admits female members, for whom she painted surreal Masonic trestle boards, the graphic teaching devices of Freemasonry. Her 1926 illustrated book Winchelsea: A Legend—which chronicles Dionysus’ imagined adventures in East Sussex—also reflects her interest in classical mythology and mysticism.

And then of her marriage to Sir Percy:

When Frieda married Sir Percy Harris in 1913, her husband encouraged her continued artistic pursuits. “My wife is an artist and a good one,” he wrote in the postscript of his 1948 memoir, Forty Years In and Out of Parliament. “She takes her art seriously, in fact works at her painting seven days a week and generally twelve hours out of the twenty-four. When, however, critics discover she is my wife she is immediately written down as an amateur and accordingly disparaged.” 

Frieda in turn supported Percy’s ambitions in Parliament: she joined his election campaigns, entertained their guests, ran his household, and involved herself in politics as a militant suffragist while he advocated for progressive legislative reforms. Their marriage was built on friendship and mutual admiration, but their relationship barely survived the years Frieda threw herself into painting an improved tarot deck.

That tarot deck was painted for Crowley, whom she first met in 1936 - by then he looked nothing like the satyr in my earlier post. He proved a demanding client - you can read all about their collaboration in Di Monda's article.

Despite that:

The two remained devoted to each other until the end of Crowley’s life in 1947, and Harris was named a co-executor of his will. She hosted a wake in his honor at her home in London.

And we know that she helped fund Crowley's living expenses for a time, which is what occasioned my earlier post.

Di Monda says that by the time Crowley died, Frieda and Sir Percy maintained separate London residences, though they still socialised and took holidays together.

And finally:

After Percy’s death in 1952, Frieda moved to a houseboat in Srinagar, in Kashmir “in search of a God,” making a modest income from writing and artistic projects, such as ballet designs. In a 1958 letter to a friend, she wrote that she still longed for Crowley, “who was so damned clever and without limitations.” She died four years later.

As you would expect with someone who dealt with esoteric subjects, Frieda's art fetches high prizes - I rather covet her book on Winchelsea. But you can buy a pack of her Tarot cards for a reasonable price.

Armed with them, a headscarf and golden earrings, I shall set myself up as fortuneteller and tour the local village fetes:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

Two per cent of GCSE students study literature by female authors

I saw a tweet by Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, in support of the End Sexism in Schools campaign. It said that, "shockingly", only two per cent of GCSE students study literature by female authors.

It is a shocking statistic, and it made me think back to my own schooldays. Sure enough, I didn't study a single woman writer for O level or A level English literature.

Since you ask, here are the books I studied:

O level

• The Merchant of Venice
• An anthology of 20th-century British poets
• Lord of the Flies

You had to study Lord of the Flies for O level in those days - I think there was a law. And there wasn't a single woman poet in that anthology: the poets I liked most in it were Edward Thomas and Edwin Muir. There was no Auden, who is now my favourite British poet of this era, and I don't think there was anyone later than the early Betjeman.

A level

• Hamlet
  
• The Tempest
• Dr Faustus
• Wordsworth's Prelude (Book 1)
• John Donne
• T.S. Eliot (Selected Poems)
• The Rainbow
• The Grapes of Wrath

I think we studied more texts than we needed to because use we had a good teacher and we were a bright class, but there was still no room for a woman writer.

When it came to my MA in Victorian Studies, male writers were in the majority, but we did at least study Felix Holt by George Eliot and Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell.

And it's interesting that, when I was preparing to start the MA course, I read the two Victorian novels I was most ashamed of not having read: Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights.

So all power to End Sexism in Schools. Not because the male writers I studied were bad, though Lord of the Flies was surely overrated in those days, but because one point of studying good literature is to widen your imagination and your sympathies. And you are less likely to do that if you study only writers of one sex.

You can download the full report from the campaign's website.

The Joy of Six 1222

"What they got was a journalist with access to the upper reaches of the Government, with a determination to get on air and tell everyone the whispers that she had heard from ministers, advisors and officials – before Sky or ITN. What the BBC needed was someone who could take a step back, away from the scrum, and tell audiences when they were being lied to." Laura Kuenssberg has been a catastrophic failure as the BBC's political editor, argues Patrick Howse.

Jonn Elledge asks if the Tories are deliberately posting terrible social media: "It's worth noting, though, that the most damning comment I heard from anyone while reporting this piece came from a Tory strategist: 'The conspiracy theory I’ve always liked the most is the one that presumes that behind something inexplicably dumb there must be some grand plan or deep rooted super secret scheme designed in these smokey backrooms of government. It’s terrifically flattering,' they explained. 'My god, I wish it were true. I mean, have you met us? We really are just this shit.'"

Andrew Kersley meets the parents of truant children hit by the single justice procedure: "Imagine receiving a letter through the post, informing you that you’re about to be prosecuted for a crime you did not commit. Your defence and plea of not guilty won’t be considered. Instead, you will be found guilty in a private ruling, with only a single judge present in the room. There’s no prosecution, no defendant, no press, and no witnesses. And after all that, you will be left with a criminal record that could cost you your job."

"In Thinking to Some Purpose, Stebbing took on the task of showing the relevance of logic to ordinary life, and she did so with a sense of urgency, well aware of the gathering storm clouds over Europe." Peter West on the neglected British philosopher Susan Stebbing.

Jessica Kiang celebrates Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, which was released 50 years ago.

"The poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), an undergraduate at Christ Church in the mid 1920s, would bring visitors here to show them what he considered to be the embodiment of 'The Waste Land' described in TS Eliot's poem of the same name, of which he was a great admirer." Local History in South Oxford takes us to St Ebbe's Gasworks.

The Joy of Six 1146

Matthew Pennell expects the Conservatives to look to the US Republicans when devising their strategy for the next general election. The good news is he doesn't think it will work.

"For mandatory reporting to work effectively, a law needs to ensure reporting of reasonable suspicions. But the lack of any criminal penalty for non-reporting undermines both the impetus to do so, and the cover for those who want to report." Richard Scorer fears the recommendations of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse may not be enough to protect children from abuse in religious settings.

"Thirteen months after first making the allegations in front of the committee, Rafiq says: “All that’s changed really is my family have been driven out of the country.” Incredibly, Lord Patel, who was hired to help Yorkshire recover from the scandal, faced so much abuse that it contributed to him leaving the UK, too." Leila Latif on the reaction to the Commission for Equity in Cricket’s report.

John Read reveals that research shows UK patients are not being told about the serious risks and limited benefits of electroconvulsive therapy.

"These books are deliberately, self-consciously challenging, in content and in form. They are also hard, beautiful, powerful, and brilliant. That account of their greatness and difficulty, especially of the way their greatness and difficulty are entwined - they are great because they are difficult, and difficult because they are great - is a story that was itself invented." Johanna Winant reminds us that last year saw the centenary of The Waste Land, Ulysses and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. 

Nicola Chester debates the pros and cons of a rural childhood.

Alan Bennett once delivered chops to T.S. Eliot's mother-in-law

The video of a recent British Film Institute event with Alan Bennett has appeared on YouTube.

So far I've watched just the first few minutes, but it was enough to give me my Trivial Fact of the Day. Play the clip above to hear it.

The importance of Auden to English literature

Today has been W.H. Auden's birthday. He was born in this house on Bootham in York on 21 February 1907.

Edward Mendelson's introduction to W. H. Auden: Selected Poems (1979) captured his importance to English literature:

Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event. 

In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernists predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular. 

All of this Auden rejected.

He was a good Cornish Liberal and a Radical: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and True Tilda

I once imagined that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (rhymes with Gooch), who signed himself Q and edited Horace Rumpole's beloved Oxford Book of English Verse, was an austere and distant figure.

Not a bit of it. When he was knighted by Asquith's government in 1910, it was for literary, educational and political services. He was a good Cornish Liberal and a Radical with it.

In 1899 he chaired a Liskeard meeting against the Boer War. The speakers were David  Lloyd George and the remarkable Emily Hobhouse, sister of L.T. 

As so often at these meetings, there were ugly scenes and Lloyd George had to be smuggled out of the building.

And in the academic world Quiller-Couch defended Liberalism against the Modernist High Toryism of T.S. Eliot.

He also wrote fiction, including at least one book for children, True Tilda.

This is a sort of feminist reworking of Oliver Twist, in which Tilda, a resourceful female Artful Dodger on the side of good, helps a traumatised younger boy find his fortune.

In hospital after an accident in the circus ring, Tilda hears a tale of injustice from a woman dying in the next bed. As soon as she is discharged she springs the boy, Arthur, from the evil Dr Glasson's orphanage and, travelling by canal boat and other means, the two of them evade his pursuit.

Eventually they arrive at Holmness in the Bristol Channel where Arthur finds his fortune. He turns out, inevitably, to be the lost son of an aristocratic family.

True Tilda was adapted by the BBC in the 1990s, an era when I didn't own a television. The other day - and this is my reason for writing all this - a fragment of the series turned up on YouTube.

I'd normally skip to the start of the episode, but the trailers here are of period interest - Chesterfield in an FA Cup semi-final and the great Stephen Lewis.

Later. This video disappeared soon after I posted this, but now it's back.