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Exchanges 1 the T.S Exchanges 1 The T.S. Eliot Society (UK) Quarterly Volume 9 Issue 7 Summer 2015 In This Issue: EDITORIAL COMMENT Editorial Comment This year's Festival focuses on Eliot and biography. Lyndall Gordon and Robert Crawford, Letter to Editor the foremost biographers of Eliot will both be speaking at the Eliot Festival on 18th July at Page 1 Little Gidding. Ron Schuchard will keep us up to date on the massive publishing venture from Faber and Faber and John Hopkins University Press, which will eventually gather all T.S. Eliot and Eliot's writing into one edition. This year is a one-day event and will close with Graham Cheese Fawcett, president of the Eliot Society reading Little Gidding. It promises to be a wonderful Page 2 occasion and not, unlike the past, clashing with Wimbledon. …continued Paul Keers, the Society's Webmaster, has contributed an article on Eliot and cheese; Argot Page 3 includes a satirical piece written by Eliot and Vivienne. This fascinating and unexpected passage comes from the 2nd volume of the complete Eliot prose edited by Ron Schuchard. To Gummo Marx This is an ebook and available on line. Page 4 Thanks as always to Kathy Radley and Paul Keers who have established a membership of over 100 people and keep them informed by means of the website. From the Diaries of Virginia Woolf Alan Bennett Letters to the Editor: Pages 5 Dear Editor, Argot The Spring 2015 issue of EXCHANGES has been intellectually and emotionally uplifting Pages 6 and I'm sure that if Our Poet were alive he'd have approved without any Prufrockian ifs and perhaps and buts. …continued Page7 Professor Brooker's lecture T.S. Eliot and the Ecstasy of Assent is an example of the highest, finest and most elevated forms of literary criticism. We must thank Graham Pechey for his accurate reportage. I look forward to the two volumes by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, which are due out in October. In Memoriam David Liston's Old Possum's Hat Trick....in The Waste Land unravels many mysteries and personality identities that men of genius have to grapple with and contend with. How many Membership hats must a man wear? Our man was pinstriped and sported a City bowler hat. And yet he information loved London's music halls and the Cockney dialect and accent. But he never, so far as I Page 8 know, wore a cloth cap. In Memory of Henry James (from The Egoist 1918) recalls with forceful clarity TSE's mastery of criticism. Let us all pay homage to Park Honan. - Reginald Massey 2 TS Eliot and cheese “The poets have been mysteriously silent” wrote GK Chesterton, “on the subject of cheese.” The one poet of whom this could not be said is TS Eliot. Indeed, Eliot exhibited a surprising volubility on the subject of cheese, and English cheeses in particular. Stilton, Double Gloucester, Cheddar and Cheshire all feature in his life and letters. Just look at Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, where one particular cheese features: ‘The term culture…includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes…Wensleydale cheese…’ And his attitude towards cheese clearly influenced significant decisions in his life. Eliot declined an invitation from the critic IA Richards to visit Peking with him in 1929, on the grounds that he did “not care to visit any country which has no native cheese.” Hugh Kenner, in his book The Pound Era, recalls a lunch with Eliot at the Garrick Club. (A link to the full extract is on the Miscellany page of our website.) Kenner declined dessert for himself, and suggested cheese: ‘To which [Eliot responded], “Very well. I fancy . a fine Stilton.” And as the waiter left for the Stilton, Eliot imparted the day’s most momentous confidence: “Never commit yourself to a cheese without having first . examined it.” Sage advice indeed from the great man. And when the waiter returned with the cheese, Eliot proceeded to deploy his critical faculties to the full. ‘The Stilton stood encumbered with a swaddling band, girded about with a cincture, scooped out on top like a crater of the moon. It was placed in front of the Critic. (“Analysis and comparison,” he had written some 40 years earlier, “Analysis and comparison, methodically, with sensitiveness, intelligence, curiosity, intensity of passion and infinite knowledge: all these are necessary to the great critic.”) ‘With the side of his knife blade he commenced tapping the circumference of the cheese, rotating it, his head cocked in a listening posture. It is not possible to swear that he was listening. He then tapped the inner walls of the crater. He then dug about with the point of his knife amid the fragments contained by the crater. He then said, “Rather past its prime. I am afraid I cannot recommend it.” ‘He was not always so. That was one of his Garrick personae. An acquaintance reports that at dinner in Eliot’s home “an ordinary Cheddar” was “served without ceremony.”’ So perhaps it was only an ordinary Cheddar to which Valerie Eliot referred, when explaining that their relationship was a quiet one; she once said that “We used to stay at home, and drink Drambuie and eat cheese [my emphasis] and play Scrabble.” 3 But it was Stilton, which inspired one of Eliot’s most impassioned communications. In 1935, Eliot wrote to The Times and offered his support for Sir John Squire’s “manly and spirited defense of Stilton cheese”. He was less enthusiastic, however, about Squire’s idea of a public monument to its inventor: Eliot is of the opinion that “a “Stiltonian monument” is not appropriate. What is needed, Eliot writes, “if cheese is to be brought back to its own in England”, is “the formation of a Society for the Preservation of Ancient Cheeses.” ‘There is a great deal of work which such a society, and its members individually, could do. For instance, one of its first efforts should be to come to terms, by every possible persuasion, with the potteries which supply those dishes with three compartments, one for little biscuits, one for pats of butter, and one for little cubes of gorgonzola, so called. The production of these dishes could be stopped by a powerful organization of cheese-eaters. Also troops of members should visit all the hotels and inns in Gloucestershire, demanding Double Gloster [sic]. (On two occasions I have had to add the explanation: “it is a kind of cheese.”)’ Eliot goes on to claim superiority for “the noble Old Cheshire when in prime condition” over “even the finest Stilton”; but the letter ends by saying that “this is no time for disputes between the eaters of English cheese,” because “the situation is too precarious”. Did Eliot take his position on cheese as part of his adopted English character? He certainly used cheese as a means of criticizing the tastes of his fatherland. In a letter to The New Statesman and Nation in 1935, he responded to a review by David Garnett of A Little Book of Cheese, a book by Osbert Burdett intended “to aid the reader in the choice of cheese”: ‘Sir – Mr. David Garnett is in error in supposing that there is no tolerable American cheese. There is a delicious Port Salut type made by Trappist monks in Ontario. But Trappist monks, like their cheese, are the product of “a settled civilisation of long standing,” and I fear that there is little demand for either. Americans seem to prefer a negative cream cheese, which they can eat with salad: and American salads are barbaric. (…) I for one would be glad to buy a Double Cottenham, if he could put me in the way of it.’ (And who would not? Double Cottenham, a cheese similar to Stilton, was last made a hundred and fifty years ago; cheese making in the village of Cottenham ceased after the cattle plague in 1866.) It was clearly English cheese, as opposed to varieties from abroad, which was Eliot’s passion; and, indeed, perhaps his most poetic quote was inspired by the cheese he placed within his definition of culture. Wensleydale is now a Protected Geographical Indication, like Champagne, meaning that the cheese so described must come from that particular area. And within the government’s DEFRA documentation for the product, specifying its unique characteristics, TS Eliot is quoted, in perhaps his most poetic utterance on cheese. “Ah, Wensleydale,” he declared in The Observer. “The Mozart of cheese.” Paul Keers 4 TO GUMMO MARX June 1964 Dear Gummo: Last night Eden and I had dinner with my celebrated pen pal, T S Eliot. It was a memorable evening. The poet met us at the door with Mrs Eliot, a good-looking middle-aged blonde whose eyes seemed to fill up with adoration every time she looked at her husband. He, by the way, is tall, lean and rather stooped over; but whether this is from age, illness or both I don’t know. At any rate, your correspondent arrives at the Eliots’ fully prepared for a literary evening. During the week I had read ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ twice; ‘The Waste Land’ three times. And just in case of a conversational bottleneck, I brushed up on ‘King Lear.’ Well sir, as cocktails were served, there was a momentary lull – the kind that is more or less inevitable when strangers meet for the first time. So, apropos of practically nothing (and ‘not with a bang, but a whimper’) I tossed in a quotation from ‘The Waste Land.’ That.
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