Time Present The Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society number 82 SPRING 2014 CONTENTS A Life’s Devotion: The Collection of The Eliot Society Call for Papers 3 Late Mrs. T. S. Eliot, Christie’s Auction Public Sightings 8 House, London. Announcements 11 Reviewed by Inga Fraser Assistant Curator, Modern British Art, Tate Britain Eliot News and Society Notes 12 Valerie Eliot, the second wife of T. S. Eliot, passed away on November Abstracts 13 9, 2012. Just over a year later, on November 20, 2013, her collection of fine Eliot Centennials 15 and decorative art and furniture was auctioned at Christie’s to benefit Old Possum’s Practical Trust, the charitable organization that she established in Eliot Society Election 16 1990 to support the arts. The sale was staged at Christie’s headquarters on King Street, fewer than five hundred feet away from the London Library, the Reviews newest wing of which was built with generous funding from Old Possum’s Trust. The London Library’s current president, Sir Tom Stoppard, attended A Life’s Devotion: The Collection of The the preview of the collection, which days later sold for more than seven Late Mrs. T. S. Eliot — reviewed by Inga Fraser 1 million pounds. Such sales receive an inevitable boost as a consequence of the celebrity of the The Waste Land, by Anthony Burgess collector, and one tries to learn about the collector from the objects he owned. — reviewed by J. T. Welsch 2 Although Mrs. Eliot acquired many of these artworks after her husband’s death, we inevitably hope to divine something of the poet and his poetry. At the Still Point of the Turning World, For instance, in the introduction to the sale’s catalog, Christie’s Associate by Ralf Yusuf Gawlick — reviewed by Director Gemma Sudlow refers to the contrast among the works—watercolors Guy and Nancy Hargrove 4 by J. M. W. Turner and William Callow seen against works by Wyndham Lewis T. S. Eliot in Context, by Jason and David Bomberg— Harding — reviewed by Margaret as reflective of Greaves 5 the “contrast and comparison” that Literature, Modernism, and Dance, by Eliot sought in his Susan Jones — reviewed by Jennie writing. “Observing Scholick 6 the many works as they jostled for Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot, by position on the walls Thomas Boll — reviewed by Whitney Williams 9 of the Kensington flat they shared,” T. S. Eliot: A Short Biography, by John Sudlow elaborates, Worthen — reviewed by George “one sensed an Haynes 10 understanding of how Eliot observed Visit us on the Web at http://www.luc.edu/eliot Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, The Wrestlers (linocut, c. 1914) Christie’s Images Ltd. 2014 Published by the T. S. Eliot Society, a tax-exempt, non-profit 501(c)(3) literary organization 5007 Waterman Blvd., St. Louis, Missouri 63108 REVIEWS the relationship of artists to one another across time.” Spanning five centuries and an eclectic array Performance of Anthony of international styles and media, Valerie Eliot’s Burgess’s The Waste Land. art collection placed sixteenth-century portraits in dialogue with eighteenth-century landscapes and International Anthony Burgess with a modest but diverse assembly of works by impressionists from Manet to Signac, modernists Foundation, Manchester, UK. from Picasso to Kandinsky, and postmodernists February 28, 2014. from John Piper to Stanley Spencer. The impressive scope of Mrs. Eliot’s collection, Sudlow concludes, Reviewed by J. T. Welsch demonstrates that as a collector she clearly shared her York St John University late husband’s “historical sense.” Valerie Eliot’s particular interest as a collector Not long before his death, Anthony Burgess wrote, was portraiture, specifically portrait miniatures, and “I wish people would think of me as a musician who some two hundred of these were included in the sale. writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music According to Jo Langston of Christie’s, Mrs. Eliot’s on the side” (Economist, 1991). He has not gotten that collection of portrait miniatures, amassed over a wish, of course, although a growing scholarly interest in twenty-year period, charted the development of the Burgess’s astounding range of creative pursuits, spurred genre from its inception in the sixteenth century to its on in part by the generous archive at the International demise in the twentieth. Poet Craig Raine affirms in Anthony Burgess Foundation, is helping to situate his the sale catalog that these “miniatures were at the heart extensive musical corpus alongside his novel writing, of [Mrs. Eliot’s] serious collecting.” “Valerie Eliot’s translations, journalism, and many screenplays. At long collection of miniatures,” he recalls, “hung on the last, the European premiere of Burgess’s setting of The right chimney-breast above the mantelpiece. It was as Waste Land for flute, oboe, piano, cello, soprano, and if some lavishly decorated veteran, some extraordinary narration—composed but only performed once to a hero, weighty with honours, were standing to small crowd in 1978—underscores the broader potential attention.” Also featured in the sale were two portraits of cross-medial interpretation. of the poet himself, including a watercolor made in 1940 by R. H. Wilenski, author of such works as The “...from the Debussy-esque Modern Movement in Art (Faber & Gwyer, 1927). The piano for the opening of “A Game later portrait, by the American artist Bernard Fuchs, of Chess” to the barroom rolls was made posthumously and used to illustrate an behind the pub scene...” edition of Collected Poems 1909–1962. Having worked The many musical allusions and citations in Eliot’s primarily as a magazine illustrator, Fuchs highlights poem continue to have their due critical attention. in workmanlike fashion Eliot’s most characteristic The challenge, as with any interdisciplinarity, is in features and apparel in this charcoal drawing—the considering these extraliterary aspects on their own furrowed brow, the spectacles, the blue suit. However, terms. As Burgess wrote, quite rightly, “Most musicians neither of these portraits reveals as much of Eliot’s know about literature, but few litterateurs know about character as Wyndham Lewis’s portrait from 1938, music.” Like his “Blooms of Dublin” and other musical- pictured in the catalog over the mantelpiece in the literary experiments, Burgess’s The Waste Land dwells Eliots’ Kensington flat but not included in the sale. In on the real difference between technical forms, and Lewis’s iconic portrait, the artist’s polished modernity therefore the real difference between such multimedia suits the poet’s incisive editorial gaze, more so than activations of a text and the handling of textual references the style of portraits produced by Wilenski or Fuchs. to Wagner or to the pop songs in the poem as mere However, that these lesser portraits sold for well over matters of cultural history or a flattened intertextuality. their guide prices is no small testament to the great Unlike written annotations, Burgess’s score is able to popular interest in Eliot as a figure of enormous reproduce—in real time—explicit citations, such as the influence in twentieth-century literary history and soprano entering for the lines from Tristan und Isolde, beyond. continued on p. 4 Time Present 2 Spring 2014 ELIOT SOCIETY CALL FOR PAPERS Eliot’s past-minded verse to recent debates about the The 35th Annual Meeting of the roles that history, context, and novelty play in literary T. S. Eliot Society scholarship more generally. T. Austin Graham is an assistant professor of English St. Louis, September 19–21, 2014 at Columbia University, where he teaches American literature. He is the author of The Great American The Society invites proposals for papers to be Songbooks: Musical Texts, Modernism, and the Value of presented at the annual meeting in St. Louis. Clearly Popular Culture (Oxford: 2013). His current project is a organized proposals of about 300 words, on any topic study of American historical fiction and the American reasonably related to Eliot, along with biographical historical profession in the twentieth century. sketches, should be emailed by June 13, 2014, to the To enroll in the seminar, email the Vice President at President, Michael Coyle ([email protected]). [email protected]. This year’s seminar is open to Papers given by graduate students and scholars the first 15 registrants; registration will close July 15. receiving their doctoral degrees no more than two years Seminarians will submit 4–5 page position papers by before the date of the meeting will be considered for email, no later than September 1st. the Fathman Young Scholar Award. Those eligible for the award should mention this fact in their submission. The Fathman Award, which includes a monetary prize, Memorial Lecturer: will be announced at the final session of the meeting. Sarah Cole Eliot Society members who would like to chair a panel are invited to inform the President of their interest, either with or independently of a paper proposal. Sarah Cole is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her most recent book, Peer Seminar: At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England Eliot at the Limits of History and and Ireland (Oxford, 2012), investigates the strange proximity of modernist aesthetics and violence in Historicism the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, Cole reads The Waste Land in the context Eliot’s work has always raised historical questions: of the First World War to examine the polarizing whether in the temporal vortex of The Waste Land, the relationship between “enchanted” and “disenchanted” medieval pageantry of Murder in the Cathedral, or the violence. Her Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First timeless suspension of the Four Quartets, the reader is World War (Cambridge, 2003) explores the literary and invited again and again to meditate upon the past’s cultural history of masculine intimacy in the twentieth presence.