On company time: American modernism in the big magazines

At the onset of the modern news magazine, then, we find modernism as news. More than this, we find the positive evaluations of modernism from other periodicals reframed as news about the unhealthy state of literary culture. The reviewer, John C. Farrar, was a Yale friend of Henry Luce and Britton Hadden, and he had a personal stake in the success or failure of Eliot’s formal innovations. Though he is now remembered more for his outsized influence on American literary production as a publisher, in 1923 Farrar was an up-and-coming poet in his own right. Yale published his first two books of verse, Forgotten Shrines (1919) and Songs for My Parents (1921), and Forgotten Shrines won the second annual Yale Younger Poets Prize. Placing Farrar’s Yale prize alongside Eliot’s Dial prize can help explain the animus behind Farrar’s Time review, as both poets and their prizes fight for space in “the economy of prestige”³ as representatives in the struggle between the academic poetry of university presses and the more aggressively experimental work taking place in little magazines. Forgotten Shrines displays a formal regularity and pastoral vision of poetry that provides a perfect antipode to Eliot’s poem. The book is broken into three sections—“Portraits,” “Miscellaneous,” and “Stanzas”—and is full of tightly crafted, rhyming stanzaic portraits of rural simplicity such as “A Hill-Side Farmer,” “A Hill-Woman,” “A Coal-Miner,” and “A Barge-Wife,” among others. Farrar’s poetry, then, devotes itself in subject and theme to folk life, despite its origins and almost exclusive circulation in the highest echelons of the Ivy Tower. He is just as well read and schooled as Eliot, but Farrar’s poetry takes the pastoral as its primary touchstone, along with a strict adherence to regular meter and rhyme. Forgotten Shrines slightly loosens the formal and thematic reins in the “Miscellaneous” section, though the closing lines of “To an Intellectualist” make it clear that the poet’s (relative) stylistic laxity here should not be taken as an endorsement of modern techniques such as vers libre, let alone the citational style that Eliot will employ in The Waste Land:

Despite Farrar’s paeans to poor folks, “To an Intellectualist” seems to be splitting hairs between two strands of roundly unpopular poetry, the academic and avant-garde, both of which circulated in relatively small if overlapping circles in 1923.⁵ In the poem, the clear vision and “dusty thoughts” of the stodgy intellectual stand against the mist-dimmed eyes of the romantic poet, who sees God by shutting down his mind and simply experiencing the world. It’s safe to say that, for Farrar, the undertones of the Grail myth in The Waste Land did not make up for all the footnotes that Eliot later added into his own version of poetic structure. With this context in mind, we might frame Farrar’s denouncement of intellectualist, rather than intuitive, poetry as registering a fear that purposefully difficult poets like Eliot might become, if not accepted, then at least trendy.

As it turns out, he had good reason: Eliot’s sense of the poetic had an outsize influence on those that came after him, and Farrar is remembered now almost exclusively for his second career, hinted at in his affiliation with Time, as an administrator rather than as an example of in-the-flesh talent. In the 1920s he wrote for and edited the New York–based literary magazine The Bookman, contributed film reviews to Ladies Home Journal, and edited the “Books” page of Time until 1927. After working several years as an editor at the publishing firm Doubleday, he founded his own in 1929, Farrar and Rinehart. Several permutations later it would become Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which in the 1950s, lo and behold, published several of Eliot’s books of criticism. Farrar also founded the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in 1926, the self-proclaimed oldest writers’ conference in the United States, where he employed Robert Frost, Willa Cather, and Louis Untermeyer, along with FSG authors such as Stephen Vincent Benet and Hervey Allen, to lead summer workshops for a budding generation of novelists and poets. These fledgling authors and poets undoubtedly benefitted from Farrar’s deft career as a literary patron, but it is fair to assume they knew The Waste Land much better than Forgotten Shrines.

Eliot, of course, worked his own day jobs during this period. First in the foreign transactions department of Lloyd’s Bank, where according to Aldous Huxley he was “the most bank-clerky of all bank clerks,”6 and where he stayed—at his desk in a sub-basement, clocking in from 9:15 to 5:30, with two weeks of vacation every year—even after writing The Waste Land. Like Farrar, Eliot then went into publishing, working his way up to a director at Faber and Gwyer / Faber and Faber. Despite their similar career arcs, Farrar’s devotion to and promotion of traditional poetic and cultural forms looks rather different from Eliot’s appeal to “tradition” as found in his early essays. This difference justifies Farrar’s dismissal of The Waste Land, but it is harder to square with the style of the magazine from which he began his ascent as a teacher and tastemaker.

Farrar’s review in Time’s very first “Books” section mocks Eliot’s experiments in compression as well as those periodicals that have bought into his reworking of poetic voice and form. Yet the parallels between Eliot’s approach to poetic compression and Time’s own stylistic innovations suggest that there might be institutional, as well as personal, stakes for the magazine when it frames modernist experimentation as being antireader. That’s because Time was pieced together out of other reading material and, like The Waste Land, marked a new experiment in approaching an old form. Time quite consciously upended the style of news writing and the organization of editorial work, developing a narrative voice commonly referred to as Time style, which attempted to counteract the pressing overabundance of printed information available in the early decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps most obviously, Farrar’s review positions Time as both an aggregator and arbiter of literary taste. This fits neatly into its self-appointed task of reading and evaluating all the printed material available, then compressing it each week into stylishly worded, easily digestible recaps for “the busy reader.” In this way Time flattens literary culture into another kind of news: Eliot and his “new kind of literature” are one of many pieces of information that Time reads and summarizes so that the magazine’s readers need not waste their time.

But Time’s appraisal of literary modernism as the new thing implicitly suggests that Time stands behind, and hence becomes, the old thing, the thing that the reader already knows and enjoys. This despite the fact that it was the magazine’s first issue and despite the possibility that in 1923 this “new kind of literature” was not all that new anymore. If we are to believe Ezra Pound (admittedly a big if), what we now call modernism had peaked in 1914; Eliot only “added certain complexities.”7 On the facing page of Farrar’s review of The Waste Land, Time makes this very claim about visual art. It quotes Clive Bell, “English critic and pontiff of modernism,” who argues that cubism “has served its purpose…and is in danger of becoming itself a mere convention.”⁸ In its early days, Time repeatedly used “modernism” and “modernist” in reference to modern visual art—here, modernism is synonymous with cubism—but rarely to fiction or poetry. A 1930 article, “Sterile Modernism,” assumes the “multitudes of laymen” are familiar “at least by name with Matisse, Picasso, Zuloaga, Augustus John, Rockwell Kent,” but makes no mention of Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, or Gertrude Stein, all authors who, by the end of the 1920s, had come to represent Anglophone literary modernism in both academic and publishing circles. In fact, for Time “modernism” most frequently designated religious unorthodoxy. In 1923 the magazine contrasted religious fundamentalists with “Liberals or Modernists, who believe they are more fundamental than the Fundamentalists.” In fact, its only use of modernism to describe literature before 1937 occurs in a one-paragraph review of a translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Poet Assassinated, which refers to Apollinaire as an “idol of the professional modernists in literature.”⁹

It is only after the fact, in the 1940s, that Time finds a stable vocabulary for describing the “new kind of literature,” but it is not alone in this. This is the same period in which American literary critics and poet-scholars such as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren helped consolidate and define a subset of 1920s art as “modernism” rather than as an array of loosely connected avant-gardes.10 Though Eliot’s poetry in the 1910s and 1920s occupies a separate sphere from academic poetry, from the late 1930s on modernism becomes inextricably linked with the college English classroom. New Critics like Brooks and Warren would perfect the methodology of close reading by emphasizing the irony, ambiguity, and autotelic coherence of poems like The Waste Land, rather than its fragmentation. In fact, according to some critics from the period, modernism is synonymous with higher education. “If…we are on the hunt for the modern element in modern literature,” wrote Lionel Trilling, “we might want to find it in the susceptibility of modern literature to being made into an academic subject.” Though he believed strongly that modern literature should be taught precisely because of its ability to say something about the student’s contemporary moment, he also found it necessary to present it in “as literary a way as possible”: as “a structure of words, in a formal way, with due attention paid to the literal difficulty which marked so many of the works.”¹¹ When Eliot, Joyce, and Proust made their way onto Trilling’s literature syllabus at Columbia, even he became something of a formalist.

Modernism’s firm canonization in the midcentury university is only half the story, though, as it also gained increasing prominence as an issue of national identity in mass media. Serge Guilbaut has approached modernism’s salience during the Cold War in terms of visual art, arguing that the postwar realignment of European political power brought with it a chance for American art dealers and critics to assert themselves. Guilbaut traces, through American journals such as the Partisan Review as well as popular magazines, how the political and aesthetic “rebellion of the artists…gradually changed its significance until ultimately it came to represent the values of the majority,” drifting from the “ideology of the avant-garde” to the “dominant ideology” of “the vital center.” In the face of McCarthyism, the hermeneutic difficulty of abstract expressionism and color-field painting (in contrast to Soviet realism) could be watered down to signify “individualism and the willingness to take risks” and “freedom of expression,” so that “expressionism stood for the difference between a free society and a totalitarian state.” Guilbaut shows just how easily this slide from cutting edge to comfortable middle can be when artistic intentionality is severed from interpretation.¹²

The entrance of modernism into the university signals the end of competition between “academicism and avant-gardism.” At roughly the same moment, though, cultural critics attempting to explain the difference between serious art like The Waste Land and its commercial opposite establish a different binary: that of avant-garde and kitsch, to paraphrase Clement Greenberg’s influential 1939 essay. Though kitsch as of late has experienced a second life in scholarship on twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry,13 Dwight Macdonald’s correlate term “masscult” has proven the more durable category for American critics contrasting the serious artistic achievements of the twentieth century with the vast amount of dreck that “is imposed from above,” “fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen,” whose audience consists of “passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying.”¹⁴ However bad masscult may be, though, the more insidious problem for Macdonald is “midcult”; unlike masscult, which makes no pretension of High Culture—“It is not just unsuccessful art. It is non-art. It is even anti-art,” writes Macdonald—midcult cannibalizes the look and feel of 1920s artistic experimentation but hollows out the interpretive difficulty. By way of example, Macdonald contrasts the “disciplined, businesslike understatement” in Ernest Hemingway’s early story, “The Undefeated,” with “the drone of the pastiche parable” in The Old Man and the Sea, first published in Life in 1952. The latter reeks of the midcult for Macdonald because of its “constant editorializing”; that is, it includes an interpretation of the story and its characters within the story itself, thereby removing any readerly participation. The concluding line of Old Man’s opening paragraph—“The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat”—with its predigested interpretation of the sail’s faded glory, epitomizes the tendency. Turning to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Macdonald asserts that the narrator’s editorializing about the Old Man and Editor Webb’s invocations to the audience are methods of “constructing a social myth, a picture of a golden age that is a paradigm for today,” where “the past is veiled by the nostalgic feelings of the present, while the present is softened by being conveyed in terms of a safely remote past.”¹⁵

Macdonald’s assessment of the midcult, or middlebrow, toggles between considering it as a structure of social relations and prestige—it confers High Culture on the middle class—and an aesthetic category. That duality continues to guide scholarship on the middlebrow even as critics, seeking to understand how different texts and authors settle into the sediment of literary culture, have been more accepting of the genre than Macdonald.16 Macdonald’s disdain for all commercially minded art has aged rather poorly, but his discussion of the midcult is worth parsing further here for several reasons. First, the essay in which he develops the term was commissioned (but eventually rejected) by the Saturday Evening Post as part of its “Adventures of the Mind” series, which also published essays by Clement Greenberg and Randall Jarrell, among other prominent intellectuals. The essay’s origin registers how popular magazines and other mass-media outlets were just as interested in “brow theory” as those ostensible outsiders who criticized it. In addition, Macdonald’s concept of the middlebrow depends on some pure modernism unsullied by mass culture or its print media. “The special threat of Midcult,” he writes, “is that it exploits the discoveries of the avant-garde,” and his heroes from the 1920s who used to be above the commercial fray are the ones sponging off their former achievements. The high-water marks of the middlebrow are “the products of lapsed avant-gardists who know how to use the modern idiom in the service of the banal.” The late-career novels and poems produced by Hemingway or Archibald MacLeish (another example, for Macdonald, of modernism gone to seed) come with built-in cachet because, no matter how insufferably preinterpreted they are now, “their authors were all expatriates in the ‘twenties.’ ” Yet it is important for Macdonald that this is not a story of selling out for these authors; they seem to lack any knowledge or control over their downward slide into middlebrow cultural consumption. In fact, the category depends on it: “That they are not conscious of any shifting of gears, that they still think of themselves as avant-gardists is just what makes their later works so attractive in a Midcult sense.”¹⁷ Macdonald’s retroactive separation of modernism from mass culture, his own long career in commercial magazines, and the origin of “Masscult and Midcult” in the same can make his delineation of the middlebrow look more like a new symptom of modernism’s life inside mass culture rather than an analysis of it. Which, in some ways, makes Macdonald much like the authors he discusses: rather than decrying careerism or vulgar commercialism, he describes the unconscious seepage of modernist authors and their trademarked formal experimentations out of the coterie and into wider circulation. In short, midcult is what happens when modernism stops being able to control itself.

This chapter tracks that loss of control by way of T. S. Eliot’s circulation in big magazines, particularly those published by Time Inc. It builds off the groundwork I laid on Time Inc. in chapter 3, particularly how the company imagined the corporate impersonality of its own narrative voice as an antidote to the glut of print media in the 1920s. In a number of ways, they contrast their own experiments during the 1920s to those of Eliot and other modernists as a version of market differentiation. But at the same time that Time becomes unprecedentedly popular in the late 1920s—as do Fortune and Life in the 1930s—modernism succeeds in a different cultural context, primarily the university, which affixes to it a unique readership and niche in periodical culture, one that Time Inc. does not see itself in competition with. This doesn’t mean that modernist writers disappeared from the big magazines; to the contrary, the 1940s and 1950s witnessed an explosion of articles about Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Stein, and other American writers from the 1920s. What does disappear, though, is the disapproval. Especially in Time, Eliot and modernism transform into ambassadors of American popular culture for Time Inc.’s increasingly international postwar audience. Eliot becomes a symbol of the political and epistemological uncertainties of postwar American cultural expansion as Time Inc. repatriates a version of Eliot’s poetry, especially The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” that is not formally opaque and sociopolitically cosmopolitan but instead transparent and realistic—even democratic.

When one is relatively unknown to the general public, as Eliot was in the run-up to the first three publications of The Waste Land in 1922 and 1923, controlling one’s public image may be laborious, but it is a reasonably well-defined endeavor. However, after the initial spark of infamy inaugurated by the Dial prize, it becomes an increasingly attenuated project for Eliot to manage the narratives that circulate about his poetry. Instead of attempting to parse out Eliot’s own feelings about mass culture or how magazines affected the production of his literary work, I want to give a genealogy of T. S. Eliot as a mass-cultural artifact; to see how and why the tenor of coverage changes over the interwar and immediate postwar periods; and, finally, to theorize how the popular reading of Eliot presents an alternative version of midcentury modernism, one in which the middlebrow has not diluted modernism so much as modernism has become more concentrated in popular American culture. This change in methodological perspective—from a tight historical focus on scenes of writing in the 1910s and 1920s to an overview of the massification of terms associated with Eliot, and by extension with literary modernism, in big magazines—allows a circulatory reading of Eliot rather than one attuned to literary production. From this perspective, I see a gradual reclamation of Eliot as an American writer and thinker as well as a recasting of the competition between modernist and journalistic practices of the 1920s as paired cultural endeavors in the 1950s. When the big magazines write about Eliot from the 1920s through the 1950s, they also implicitly write about themselves. Though big magazines, most notably Time and Life, first position their own cultural nationalism against a cosmopolitan Eliot, after World War II they repatriate him as a symbol of American internationalism. The modernist trope of exilic alienation morphs into Time Inc.’s Cold War image of America Everywhere.

In other words, this chapter provides a parallel story to modernism’s institutionalization in the university and uncovers a different interpretation of modernist ambiguity, one that existed alongside the interpretation proposed by the New Critics. Tweaking Macdonald’s idea of the middlebrow, what follows will theorize an emerging postwar mass modernism, where the tropes of modernist exile and alienation become part of U.S. postwar culture. Rather than emphasize how modernism becomes mainstream, then, we’ll see how the mainstream becomes modernist. As Macdonald is fully aware, such a situation depends on a general openness to the shock of the avant-garde; unlike the academicism of the 1920s, “which was intransigently opposed to the avant-garde,” a new class of cultural consumer “graduated to an appreciation” of it.18 Especially in the United States, and especially with T. S. Eliot, this constituted modernism’s “victory over reigning taste and at the same time an accommodation with the established literary order.”¹⁹

Linking Eliot’s poetry to midcentury nationalism rubs against a history of reading Anglo-American modernism in terms of cosmopolitanism, which goes back at least to Delmore Schwartz’s “T. S. Eliot as the International Hero” (1945) and plays an integral role in the transatlantic turn in modernist studies. Rebecca Walkowitz’s “critical cosmopolitanism” is exemplary here, as it builds bridges between high-modernist and contemporary writers—Conrad to Ishiguro, Woolf to Sebald, Joyce to Rushdie—by way of their engagement with the aesthetics and politics of cosmopolitanism, and in doing so it generates compelling reassessments of modernist aesthetic and political stances while also recalibrating the timeframes by which one defines modernism.20 Yet it is hard not to see this otherwise powerful reassessment of contemporary writers in light of modernism as, in Jon Wiener’s words, forgetting the Cold War, when cosmopolitanism was something of a dirty word among politicians and intellectuals alike.²¹ More specifically, this critical stance toward cosmopolitanism makes it hard to see the strange ways that modernism surfaces in the discourse of midcentury American nationalism. For instance, Eliot appears on the cover of Time in 1950—then the most widely circulated newsmagazine in the world—with an accompanying article about Eliot’s boundless popularity. When Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, an award that is the height of international acclaim, Time wrote: “The Twentieth Century needed a poet (at least) to explain it to itself, and a good place for a Twentieth Century poet to be born was St. Louis, Missouri.”²² Even though Eliot had not lived in St. Louis for over forty years—or the United States for over thirty—his intractable “Americanness” remained essential to the interpretation of his contemporary relevance in Time and other outlets of mass print culture. The repatriation of Eliot-as-modernism and the exportation of America as world culture were in fact deeply intertwined. These magazines latched on to both Eliot’s Midwestern origins and his transnational popularity to present him as a figure of American culture writ large.

In several publications Lawrence Rainey meticulously works out the facts behind what Farrar and Time suspected in 1923; as it turns out, the cards really might have been stacked in Eliot’s favor concerning the Dial prize. In the process of parsing out the complicated backroom dealings of the poem’s American publication, Rainey famously refuses to read the poem, citing his methodology as “the modernist principle of reading” and concluding, “the best reading of a work may, on some occasions, be one that does not read it at all.”²³ There is no evidence that the Dial’s editors read The Waste Land before offering Eliot the prize, and a number of well-placed reviewers and poets presented the poem as a watershed without actually seeing it, let alone studying it. Instead of closely reading The Waste Land, Rainey’s attentive history of the poem’s publication is a close reading of, in his words, “how modernism negotiated its way among the ‘contrived corridors’ of its own production”—to financial stability and canonical status. The moral of Rainey’s narrative is about the puff work associated with The Waste Land; long considered by scholars a well-wrought urn, it has now been recast as “the output of a specific marketing-publicity apparatus.”

Rainey’s investigative work into the “institutions of modernism” has produced an entire subgenre of literary history intent on getting to the bottom of the processes that enshrined modernism as a dominant literary movement.24 Unlike the New Critics, particularly Cleanth Brooks, who assert that modernist poetry wins out over other contemporary modes because of its inherent aesthetic quality—its ambiguity, paradoxicality, autonomy, and structural integrity—scholars of modernism in the late 1980s began to insist that, in the words of Rainey, the afterlife of a particular author or work in the critical tradition is subject to “historical contingencies as varied and intricate as those that also informed the poem’s composition.”²⁵ However, from a somewhat bent angle, Rainey’s story about modernism can look like a slightly expanded version of the New Critics’ autonomous texts. In Rainey’s account, the autonomous aesthetic object, the inside of the poem, is transferred to an insulated coterie of culturemongers on the outside of it. Pound, Eliot, Gilbert Seldes, and the other players in Rainey’s story have free rein over defining and publicizing their literary endeavors, with little input from or care for the other writers, magazines, or publishing houses, such as Farrar’s, that might want to define modern literature in a different way. In this way, the self-enclosed poem of the New Critics transforms into the self-defining literary culture of the New Modernists.

Contemporary reviews of Eliot’s “new kind of literature” share Rainey’s belief that its formal difficulty might hide organizational underhandedness. Time fills its “Books” section with questions about the openness of the literary market and implies that the lack of transparency (in aesthetic and organizational registers) signifies a threat to American nationality. One month after its review of The Waste Land, the magazine echoed a “charge” that “has been repeated” against American literature in towns such as Boston and Chicago: “Is There a ‘Literary Dictatorship’ in New York?” Writers in these cities fear being shut out of literary opportunity by a “semisecret cabal of radical young critics”:

This reaction against a coterie of literary elites certainly does not originate with Time, nor does it end in the 1920s. Similar charges are waged in Harold Stearns’s America and the Young Intellectuals (1921), Brander Matthews’s 1922 New York Times Book Review article about “juvenile highbrows,” and Joel Spingarn’s manifesto from the same year, “The Younger Generation,” which explains that the new class is a “somewhat narrow and unorganized but very articulate group.”27 A more recent version is Thomas Strychacz’s account of the simultaneous professionalization of literature and criticism in the period: specifically, that difficult texts coupled with a new, jargon-filled literary criticism professionalized both literary production and interpretation by keeping out the amateurs. Unlike the article above, which conflates literary experimentation with radical politics, Strychacz exposes the nascent conservatism contained within the will to professionalize. Yet the two early articles in Time give us an alternative perspective: they portray modernism from the outside—a tentative and skeptical picture of the literary coterie from the position of those who can only access the modernist prestige system through the cloudy window of what they feel to be inscrutable texts. Thus, the terms of literary exclusion here are a little counterintuitive. Time, itself only two months old, does not say the older generation refuses to let them in. Instead, they paint a literary market quietly overrun by a minority of young “highbrow[s]” who are cutting out their forebears and “traditional” younger writers.²⁸ And when we think about this as the opinion of an organ that will, over the next two decades, become the face of American mass culture, the implications of the terms of the debate take on national significance. As the references to a “semisecret cabal” and a “literary dictatorship” make clear, this new social formation is profoundly undemocratic—and the denial of meritocratic access to the literary field quickly mutates into a charge of un-Americanism. As the article states, “a sound belief in American institutions” ensures one’s exclusion from the new world order. “Clearness and cleanness” are “coupled” to American nationality, both in literary production and in the social fields that encompass individual works.

My point here is not to show that the free market of ideas has never actually been all that free, nor is it to mock archly the outrage of a new mass-market periodical that has stumbled upon this hypothesis. Instead, the preceding debate shows how the projection of a meritocratic literary market, and the recognition of the shortcomings of that projection, quickly transforms into a discussion of national character—an American “clearness and cleanness” positioned against its offshore opposite. In a move that may seem strange from our vantage point, which has inherited a vision of Eliot as the embodiment of royalism, classicism, and Anglo-Catholicism, the article goes on to say that the “social radicals” that can be found walking the halls of The Dial and Vanity Fair are scheming “to ‘put over’ T. S. Eliot as the greatest modern American poet” on an innocent reading public.29 The threat that the “social radicals” and their metonymic leader represent, then, is not only the rise of difficult texts or even that of a literary cosmopolitanism in competition with a nationalist tradition. Instead, the problem is the redefinition of which poetry counts as both legitimately modern and canonically American as well as of the periodical context in which it circulates.

Though Time Inc. magazines have come to be something like the background noise of American popular culture, in 1923 the company found itself in a rather similar situation to T. S. Eliot and other modern authors: attempting to differentiate itself among a field of more established and reputable competitors. Henry Luce and Britton Hadden, the magazine’s founders, publishers, and editors-in-chief, represent in their pages a “faith in the things money cannot buy,” “respect for old manners,” and “interest in the new”—three tenets that could sit comfortably next to Eliot’s version of the literary “Tradition,” which reads true innovation as consciously speaking to and augmenting the past.³⁰ Time Inc.’s version of experimentation, then, could very well suffer the same critique that they level against Eliot—and in fact it does, again and again. The inverted sentence structures, chatty tone, and aggressive compression of content and words that define Time style were consistently mocked by other publications. Walcott Gibbs’s 1936 New Yorker profile of Henry Luce, which contains his joke about Time style, is not alone in this regard. A longer list would include the 1931 Harvard Advocate, edited by James Agee; a similar issue of the University of Washington’s magazine; a Naval Academy newspaper article; Hotchkiss’s student magazine Index; a 1934 White Company (manufacturer of trucks and buses) promotional pamphlet that included the “Truck of the Year”; a Rochester, New York, newspaper; an Edmonton, Alberta, newspaper; and even Henry Luce’s own mother, who mocked his magazine’s style in a 1926 letter.

In this light, the authors of Time had to worry not just about how to interpret Eliot and his new literary movement but that they might be mistaken for a similar group of hoaxers. Time’s “organization” becomes a way to tie into the professional-managerial class’s desire for specialized knowledge as well as mark itself as the torchbearer for a national American culture—“Curt, Clear, Complete,” to quote another Time self-description that diametrically opposes the magazine’s representation of the “secret cabal” of youthful literati. Just when the new magazine Time enters the print ecology hoping to contribute something to American prose, the new kind of literature represented by Eliot’s The Waste Land starts winning American literary awards and making a name for its own type of experimentation. The magazine marks modernism as simultaneously foreign and meaningless so as to distinguish its own formal experimentation as the rightful descendent of American letters.

As it becomes the self-styled voice of the nation, Time deports Eliot and modernism across the Atlantic. How the magazine does this becomes clearer with the section of Eliot’s poem that Time reprints in its 1923 review and how it chooses to do so. It excerpts the last eight lines of The Waste Land with no attempt to contextualize how they relate to the rest of the poem. If one wants to make Eliot’s poetry appear as unintelligible as possible, this final section certainly does the job. Five languages, only three lines in English (one a nursery rhyme, one typographically marked as antique); references to London Bridge and “Le Prince d’Aquitaine”; no discernible meter, rhythm, narrative, or any other organizational logic to provide an interpretive scaffolding. Unlike the poem’s opening line “April is the cruelest month,” or one of the scenes from “A Game of Chess,” or even the typist’s tryst with the young man carbuncular, this section is completely dependent on the preceding 425 lines for even the most basic of interpretations. The polylingual section is made even more difficult by the specific typographical appearance of this reproduction. The quoted lines are pushed tightly together, almost bleeding into one another. Also, the font size is noticeably smaller than the rest of the article, making it more difficult to read. The American and British periodical publications in The Dial and Criterion and the book publication by Boni & Liveright present the lines (mostly) intact, center the text with wide margins, and provide plenty of kerning space between lines, which gives the poem a visual integrity. As Jerome McGann has argued, small-press magazines and vanity book publishers treated the materiality of the page and presentation of the poem as artistic practices that were equal to the content of the words.31 Time’s reprint of these lines, then, shows the darker side of how the space of the page can inflect interpretation. By refusing Eliot even the logic of his line breaks, Time takes away the excerpt’s basic formal logic. When the magazine quotes and reproduces these lines as representative of Eliot and claims Eliot as representative of “a new kind of literature abroad in the land,” it marks both the individual and the artistic movement as examples of a foreign decadence antithetical to a definition of American literature based on “clearness and cleanness.” All of these non-English languages crashing against one another becomes indistinguishable from the string of syllables in James Joyce’s Ulysses, which Time describes as composed of “some half million assorted words—many such as are not ordinarily heard in reputable circles—shaken…up in a colossal hat, [and] laid…end to end.”³² Only now it isn’t benignly meaningless: cosmopolitan cross-cultural sampling becomes a politically suspect formal mode.

Though the terms change a little, one can trace this reading of an un-American Eliot in Time through the 1939 article “From Tom to T. S.,” which takes great pains to mock both Eliot’s collegiate affectations and his bourgeois banality. After establishing the bright field of Harvard graduates from which Eliot arose, the magazine writes that his contemporaries in college mockingly “say he was English in everything but accent and citizenship…and dressed with the studied carelessness of a future dandy.”33 They cast Eliot as an outlier at Harvard, but not for the usual reasons given in his biographies. His alienation often is attributed to his two-pronged identification with St. Louis and Boston, a simultaneous homesickness for the Mississippi River and northeastern pines—or, in other words, a feeling of permanent exile produced by his identification with two versions of American regionalism.³⁴ Instead, Time characterizes Eliot as an outlier at Harvard because of his European pretensions rather than his Midwestern upbringing. During a visit to Boston, he “seemed to enjoy flaunting his English ways: ‘I tend,’ said he, ‘to fall asleep in club armchairs, but I believe my brain works as well as ever, whatever that is, after I have had my tea.’ ” Here we find a unique career arc: the dandy turned avant-garde poet turned stodgy bourgeoisie, a character Eliot ironized in his early poetry. On the cusp of World War II, Eliot appeared thoroughly decoupled from the current state or future of an American literature: he “winces at Americanisms” and “admit[s] he had little knowledge of U.S. Poetry or interest in it.”³⁵

So far this story lines up chronologically with how and when Eliot and modernism are usually positioned: 1922 as the annus mirabilis and the 1920s as the height of their cultural importance. However, when one looks quantitatively at Eliot’s appearance in Time, the historical location of his dominance looks a little different.³⁶ From 1923 to 1960, Eliot is mentioned in 420 articles, but between its first issue in 1923 and 1929, Time only mentions him five times, all but ignoring (or forgetting) the colossal threat that Eliot and his ilk posed in the first issue. In fact, Eliot’s peak does not occur until after World War II, when between 1950 and 1954 he is mentioned more than one hundred times. In 1950, he appeared in the magazine at least once every two weeks (see figure 4.1).

These numbers come from one magazine, and they could be the statistical idiosyncrasy of looking at a single title. However, in many ways Time is the magazine of midcentury American culture. During the 1920s and 1930s, Henry Luce had amassed the largest, most profitable print empire in the world while many of the little magazines that helped circulate modernist print culture folded under the financial pressures of the Great Depression.37 By the 1940s, Time and the other Time Inc. publications, especially Life, unquestionably stood on top of the American print marketplace. Luce’s photo-magazine Life was unprecedentedly popular: by the end of its first year in 1937, circulation reached 1.5 million per week—more than triple the first-year circulation of any magazine in American history. In 1942 it was over 4 million, and in 1952 over 5.5 million. A 1938 study concluded that the actual readership of Life exceeded 17 million if one counted the “pass-along” readers not represented in raw sales figures.³⁸

Eliot’s place in literary culture had changed just as drastically as that of Time Inc. He founded his own English literary magazine, became a British citizen in 1927, came out as an Anglo-Catholic cultural conservative, quit Lloyd’s Bank and became an editor at Faber & Faber, won the Nobel Prize, and wrote several popular and financially successful plays. That is, he migrated from the leading edge to the comfortable middle of the world of letters, both on the literature syllabus and on the pages of big magazines. While it shouldn’t be a surprise that Eliot was popular in the 1950s, the substance of that popularity is quite strange. That’s because Time and Life, beginning with a 1948 article about Eliot winning the Nobel Prize, also frame this popularity as an American repatriation. In 1954, T. S. Matthews wrote in Life that “In England he seems synthetically American; in America he seems synthetically British.” Matthews praises Eliot’s postwar work for being “as smooth as a gumdrop,” claiming that it “can be taken in with the same lack of effort.” Though Eliot addresses serious topics and themes like “the mystery of reality, and loneliness, and love, and paying the piper…none of these themes intrudes itself in any painful or even provocative way.”39 However, Time’s coverage of the 1948 Nobel Prize makes similar claims about Eliot’s prewar poetry, specifically The Waste Land, which has “the immediacy of a headline” and “the memorableness of a song that is easy to hum.” That is, rather than the hallmark of difficulty, The Waste Land now might be mistaken by readers as too clear. However, Time saves the poem from oversimplicity: “the 20th Century had no difficulty in recognizing itself” in The Waste Land, but it insists that it is “not mere poetic journalism.”⁴⁰

The most compact and forceful reinterpretation occurs in March 1950, when Eliot appears on the cover of Time.41 Over the caption “No middle way out of the waste land?” his face looks back at the reader, superimposed over a surrealist landscape of mountains, canyons, and flowing streams (see figure 4.2). Two disembodied arms, one on either side of him, raise a golden cross and a Manhattan glass—a reference to his play The Cocktail Party (1949), which had recently premiered on Broadway. Yet the imagery and headlines all allude to The Waste Land, linking his reputation in 1950 with the notoriety of his earlier poetry. The reddish-purple landscape seems to reference the nymphless dry stone and red rock of The Waste Land, but softened with undulating riverbanks and pastel hills. “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of that stony rubbish?” the poem asks, which gets transformed into the hand-trees that stand to the side of Eliot’s face.⁴² All three (the head and two hands) grow directly out of an otherwise barren landscape; the hands sprout roots, and Eliot’s shirt and tie blend seamlessly into the river in the foreground. Knowing Eliot’s fondness for Grail myths, it’s hard not also to see that cocktail glass and its golden elixir as a chalice, which provides an answer to the poem’s question regarding which roots and branches can survive in such an unforgiving climate. The naturalized Christian iconography suggests that Eliot’s theological project is the middle way out the waste land and that The Waste Land is the way into Eliot’s contemporary American appeal.

The accompanying article erases the cosmopolitan Eliot of the 1920s. It seeks to expand Eliot’s influence beyond the “few Americans” who know him only as “an expatriate, an obscurely highbrow poet who wrote an unreadable poem called The Waste Land.”43 It recounts how “The American Master” taught his English students to play baseball; emphasizes the “human Mr. Eliot who loves Bourbon and the Bible, both of which he used to keep on his night table (in austerity England he settles for pink gin)”; and quotes Conrad Aiken reminiscing about “tall, dapper Tom Eliot” in his Harvard days, who takes up boxing and “proudly sports a shiner” (23). Baseball, bourbon, the Bible, bloodsport: the article attaches a list of homespun “American” characteristics to someone who voluntarily expatriated thirty years prior. And that, it would seem, is the point: Eliot, as an ambassador of national culture, exports America via his chosen exile and his cultural work, be it the poem or the classroom—or the poem in the classroom.

Time also reinterprets Eliot’s poetry as an outgrowth of his native pragmatism. Instead of an avant-garde hoax, The Waste Land now evidences the clarity and representativeness of Eliot’s social policy. It resembles a “kaleidoscopic mirror held up to the age—a patched mirror which at first seems to reflect only a heap of broken images, but which, to a longer view, blends them into a single bizarre picture, at once as strange and as familiar as one’s own face (or one’s own city)” (24).⁴⁴ The age itself was indecipherable until Eliot integrated it into a unified “tableau of aimlessess” (rather than aimlessness itself) full of “sharp, unsentimental lyricism” that “touched a hidden spring in the century’s frightened, shut soul” (24). The article assumes the same permeability between literary and social form as Time did in 1923, but now the poem-as-mirror clearly sheds light on complexity rather than muddying a transparent literary market. The poem can now also be read as nationalist despite never actually mentioning the United States.⁴⁵ The contemporary barrenness in The Waste Land, according to the author, describes a specifically continental problem:

Eliot’s work not only holds a mirror up to his readers but to Time Inc.’s two most successful magazines as well. In this repatriated version of Eliot’s poetry, the differences between modernist difficulty and the clarity of Time style disappear. The reviewer praises Eliot’s “complex thoughts in catchy (if complex) rhythms” and claims that readers “like Eliot for being clever, and at the same time clear,” all of which sounds remarkably like the characteristics to which Time aspires and diametrically opposed to the unclean and unclear social radicals that typified modernism in the 1920s. Eliot turns out to be engaged in the same project as Time: they both describe the contemporary scene in more accurate and efficient language. Modernist poetry no longer withholds meanings or forces the audience to read difficult texts; instead, it is exactly like Time, aggregating disparate types of knowledge into a uniform, accessible literary voice.

Whereas in the 1920s Time Inc. asserted its Americanism by deporting Eliot and his “new kind of literature,” its postwar reclamation of Americans abroad suggests a new mission statement: the expansion of American cultural products into other national markets. Henry Luce’s “The American Century,” published in Life in February 1941, lays out the plan. “We Americans are unhappy,” it begins. “We are not happy about America. We are not happy about ourselves in relation to America. We are nervous—or gloomy—or apathetic. As we look out at the rest of the world we are confused; we don’t know what to do.”⁴⁷ Luce claims that Americans suffer something like national ennui because they haven’t fully acknowledged “their nation became in the 20th Century the most powerful and the most vital nation in the world.” Unlike the British, who “are calm in their spirit not because they have nothing to worry about but because they are fighting for their lives,” Americans “do not have to face any attack tomorrow or the next day…so now all our failures and mistakes hover like birds of ill omen over the White House, over the Capitol dome and over this printed page” (61). The “ill omen” hanging over the page will only recede when the reader realizes that “we are in a war to defend and even to promote, encourage and incite so-called democratic principles throughout the world” (62).

While Luce’s essay often, and rightly, is read as an argument against Roosevelt’s perceived political and military isolationism (and an argument, paradoxically, for full-on militarization as an antidote to the fear of world war), it ends by stating that the binary between isolation and interventionism is a false one. Global exchange thoroughly colors all aspects of one’s daily life, and a general ignorance of this fact, ultimately, underlies American dissatisfaction. Luce’s real goal, as the essay closes, entails transforming the basic experience and scale of global connectedness into a specifically American enterprise. “We can make a truly American internationalism something as natural to us in our time as the airplane or the radio,” writes Luce (64). For him to imagine the proliferation of American influence in terms “as natural to us” as transportation and communication technologies underscores the strangeness of such a statement. Airplanes and radios connect different people in different places, but Luce’s vision of an American Century is the world as a singularity, something Marshall McLuhan describes as the periodical press’s presentation of the “the world as one city”—preferably New York.48

A cultural version of American internationalism already exists, Luce explains, and he advocates for the political sphere to take advantage of this foothold:

The soft power of American culture “blindly” seeped over foreign borders, and, Luce surmises, American cultural hegemony is as inevitable as the nation’s entry in the war. Exporting a unified American culture becomes the seedbed for what Luce describes as “so-called democratic principles” and the free-market capitalism that will allow his magazine to thrive elsewhere. All it needs is a powerful image and a unified message: “a vision of the 20th Century to which we can and will devote ourselves,” one that encapsulates “from Maine to California the blood of purposes and enterprise and high resolve” (65). The best way forward, as he alludes above, is to target the “human” element. Elsewhere he writes, “No idea exists outside a human skull—and no human skull exists without hair and a face and a voice—in fact the flesh and blood attributes of a human personality.”49 And again: “People just aren’t interesting in the mass. It’s only individuals who are exciting.”⁵⁰ The most effective way to affix ideas to skulls, as the cover of almost every issue of Time and the photographs of every issue in Life show, is to focus on a single person who can stand in for everyone else. This fixation on representative individuals leads him to refute internal difference within the United States. Regionalism and provincialism are things of the past: “America is already the intellectual, scientific, and artistic capital of the world. Americans—Midwestern Americans—are today the least provincial people in the world” (65). And for the majority of the 1940s and 1950s, Time Inc. will attach its American internationalism to the “hair and face and voice” of T. S. Eliot, whose literary path from Midwestern provincialism to international renown provides the ideal model for Luce’s postwar enterprise.

Eliot’s 1948 Nobel lecture provides a clue as to why, of all possible professions, a poet should serve as the figurehead of American internationalism. In it he extols the transnational and utopian possibilities of poetry; one need only look at the Nobel Prize itself, its “function” and “peculiar symbol,” to witness the “supra-national value of poetry.” It is “the most local of the arts” because it depends on a common language, but this limitation provides a useful filter. Different nations, cultures, and languages interact through the “small minority” who can “acquire an understanding of each other which, however partial, is still essential.” When poets and their work circulate among other traditions, they become part of a much longer and geographically wider collaborative project. A poet writes in “the voices of all the poets of other languages who have influenced him…and at the same time he himself is speaking to younger poets in other languages, and these poets will convey something of his vision of life and something of the spirit of his people.”⁵¹ Pascale Casanova calls this global literary field the “world republic of letters,” in which innovation moves from the periphery and semiperiphery to the cultural centers. Eliot’s Nobel speech, equally attuned to uneven development, envisions cultural cross-pollination as the height of a positively positioned cosmopolitanism. However, it’s only a small step for Luce to turn this statement about poetry’s cross-cultural influence into another form of American internationalism. In a less utopian tenor, a poet’s transmission of “something of the spirit of his people” into the minds of other types of people is another way of saying that the American Century will be won with hearts and minds.

Like Luce’s American internationalism, Eliot’s rise also gets framed as unintentional. Anders Osterling’s presentation speech claims that Eliot differs from his predecessors in that he accumulates prestige against his will: “His career is remarkable in that, from an extremely exclusive and consciously isolated position, he has gradually come to exercise a very far-reaching influence. At the outset he appeared to address himself to but a small circle of initiates, but this circle slowly widened, without his appearing to will it himself.” Osterling offers a somewhat different take on the intentionlessness of modernism, one attuned to the author’s inability to restrict an expanding readership rather than to literary form. In fact, it resembles Luce’s understanding of cultural circulation more than an account of literary style, and as such it is attuned to the way an author’s reputation travels outside of his control. Much like how Luce will refashion Eliot in the 1950s, Osterling’s speech emphasizes the interpretive value of reading the poet as straddling American and continental culture. He was “born an American,” but “his years of study as a young man at the Sorbonne, at Marburg, and at Oxford, clearly revealed to him that at bottom he felt akin to the historical milieu of the Old World.”52 Like Henry James before him, Eliot is the modern American abroad, the perfect vessel through which to perceive the changing of the cultural guard from “Old” European to “New” American.⁵³

In a Time piece from 1960, T. H. White contends Eliot has become one of the “poets unfashionable.” “He is out—due for the chop. Eliot is no longer cool. He’s square.”54 The rough exterior of Eliot’s modernist aesthetic has been smoothed away so that he becomes predictable and approachable. And to be called “square” by an author of young-adult fiction in the pages of Time (the blurb that follows this Eliot article carefully dissects the impact of Bob Hope’s rheumatoid arthritis on his comedic persona) must be a truly difficult pill to swallow for one of those formerly outrageous “Men of 1914.” At this moment, Eliot becomes shorthand for a wide variety of experiences; for example, his poetry introduced Time’s coverage of the 1963 Bay of Pigs incident, which begins, “April is the cruelest month breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land” and concludes that Kennedy “could subscribe to the notion of April’s cruelty.”⁵⁵ Or Eliot’s poetry can describe the American disposition in general, as it did in Life’s 1948 “Report of the Roundtable,” in which a handful of prominent intellectuals—Erich Fromm, Stuart Chase, Sidney Hook, Beatrice Gould (the editor of Ladies Home Journal), and Henry Luce, among others—came together to discuss “the pursuit of happiness” and young Americans’ self-image. As it turned out, young people imagined themselves as descendants of T. S. Eliot. The report cites the case of a Yale student “who described himself as one of T. S. Eliot’s ‘hollow men’ because he did not believe in anything and consequently could find nothing to say.”⁵⁶ Hugh Kenner begins his book on Eliot with a similar claim about the poet’s saturation in midcentury culture: “We may assume that everyone by this time knows who T. S. Eliot is, that it is no longer necessary to testify to his lucidity.” “He commands vast influence,” according to Kenner, “partly through moral consistency, partly through inscrutability, partly because, in an academic context, his prose is so quotable.”⁵⁷ Moral consistency and inscrutability, maybe. But he’s certainly quotable when someone wants to summarize the anxieties of postwar American life, and not just in the academy.

The ease with which Eliot’s name takes on meanings in Time and Life rubs against the grain of the gravitas in his work and professional carriage. The 1950 Time cover story gestures toward this incongruity by, of all things, quoting Eliot’s early poetry. It reprints the most famous of Eliot’s “Five-Finger Exercises,” which begins:

The levity of this quotation starkly contrasts those enjambed lines from The Waste Land that Time reprinted in 1923, but this selection also suggests that the site of Eliot’s obscurity has shifted. The “exercise” of the poem finds Eliot ironizing his own public image, the interpretive leap from Eliot as author of “Prufrock” to Eliot as Prufrock that both enables and limits the poet’s reputation. The Time author explains that there are “many different Mr Eliots—the shy and the friendly, the sad and the serene.” Readers know him as “an expatriate, obscurely highbrow poet who wrote an unreadable poem called The Waste Land and fathered a catch-phrase about the world ending not with a bang but a whimper.” Now, “thanks to a Broadway hit called The Cocktail Party (Time, Jan. 30), his name at last was beginning to be more frequently encountered.” And in his new popularity, “Mr. Eliot” is only the most recognizable of his many poetic personae.58 Notice, though, that “his name” comes up and not his poems or his work. Eliot the person has replaced his poems as the uninterpretable artifact. Kenner formulates this point in slightly different terms, defining Eliot’s poetic masks—Prufrock in particular—as “a name plus a Voice” or a “pseudo-person”; he writes that Eliot “can give, for readers and interviewers alike, consummate imitations of the Archdeacon, the Publisher, the Clubman, the Man of Letters in Europe, the Aged Eagle, the Wag, and the Public-Spirited Citizen…. The only role he refuses to play is the Poet.”⁵⁹ Yet for all the self-fashioning that Kenner lays out, Eliot’s “Five-Finger Exercise” reinforces the caricature of Eliot-as-Prufrock rather than deflates it; it finds Eliot playing up his caricatured persona. The playful Edward Lear style extends the quotation-based composition model that helped create the image of Eliot as a bookish and bloodless killjoy that Farrar lambasted in the first place. Rather than composing poetry that footnotes other poets, he quotes his own public image, “Mr. Eliot,” who originates at the intersection of Eliot’s poetry and his extrapoetic circulation in the printed words of others.

As his biographer Peter Ackroyd summarizes, around this time Eliot “wonder[ed] if his fame meant that his writing had only a contemporary appeal…he complained that people now thought of him as a celebrity rather than a poet.” In a 1948 New York Times interview, Eliot responded to his untethered cultural circulation in the impersonal mood: “one seems to have become a myth, a fabulous creature that doesn’t exist.” Perhaps Eliot’s concern over fading into myth refers to the strange inconsistencies that occur when the words he wrote in the 1920s outlive their original context and override his later work. Or, even worse, that he “had ceased to be a poet and had become an institution.”⁶⁰

When Eliot voices his concern over becoming an institution, or of fading into myth, perhaps he refers to the interpretive slippage and strange inconsistencies that can occur when words and symbols outlive the intentionality of their original context. He suggests as much in a 1956 lecture, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” delivered in front of 14,000 people at the University of Minnesota. It was part of the Gideon D. Seymour Memorial Lecture Series, established to honor a famous Minneapolis journalist by convening once a year to discuss the overlap between journalism and an adjacent discipline. For Eliot, that discipline is literary criticism; two years later Archibald MacLeish will talk about poetry. Ironically, the minority culture that T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and others hoped to create through their work was unprecedentedly large in the postwar period: Allen Tate described Eliot’s crowd as “surely the largest audience ever assembled to hear a discourse on literary criticism.”61 Though Eliot had never been more popular, he opens his talk by lamenting that the last thirty-five years of his work had been reduced to “a few notorious phrases which have had a truly embarrassing success in the world” (7). Even worse, when he tries to recapture the harried tone of an early essay, “The Function of Criticism,” Eliot says he “found it impossible to recall to mind the background of my outburst” (3). He was “rather bewildered, wondering what all the fuss was about,” because he could “not recall a single book or essay, or the name of a single critic” that inspired the essay, which text or name at the time he apparently found so offensive (3). Part of this calculated befuddlement could very well be an enactment of his earlier piece’s success. That is, he cannot remember the names of those functionless critics because he and his followers thoroughly scoured them from the literary field. His own method of reading and writing about literature bludgeoned all contenders into nonexistence; now they neither exist in his mind nor in the archive. While this is at least partially true, this literary cleansing seems also to have taken his own pre-“Function” memory along with it. In fact, he has a hard time remembering anything he wrote or thought. In the space of a single paragraph he says, “I turned to see what I had said,” “I must have thought well of this essay ten years later,” “I was merely rather bewildered,” “I found it impossible to recall,” “it would seem that I must have had in mind,” “but I cannot recall.” He summarizes his self-contextualization by giving up: “I did not, on rereading, find it at all helpful” (3). There’s an irony in this obliqueness: even if the audience is familiar with work that made Eliot someone worth listening to, he is unfamiliar with himself. Moreover, Eliot’s “embarrassing success” is embarrassing only in so far as it reenacts the very cultural forgetting that he rails against: for half a century he championed an artist’s familiarity with Tradition, and when he becomes a tradition he finds himself decoupled from his own history. Eliot is quotable because of his circulation in magazines like Time and Life, but he fears, perhaps correctly, that no one actually reads or understands him anymore.