T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Editor, Rejects George Orwell’s “Trotskyite” Novel Animal Farm (1944)

By Josh Jones

We’ve written recently about that most common occurrence in the life of every artist—the rejection letter. Most rejections are uncomplicated affairs, ostensibly reflecting matters of taste among editors, producers, and curators. In 1944, in his capacity as an editorial director at Faber & Faber, T.S. Eliot wrote a letter to George Orwell rejecting the latter’s satirical allegoryAnimal Farm. The letter is remarkable for its candid admission of the politics involved in the decision.

From the very start of the letter, Eliot betrays a personal familiarity with Orwell, in the informal salutation “Dear Orwell.” The two were in fact acquainted, and Orwell two years earlier had published a penetrating review of the first three of Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Click here to read the rest of this story

When Edward Gorey Illustrated Dracula: Two Masters of the Macabre, Together

  By Maria Popova

“No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.”

As if knowing that the great Edward Gorey illustrated a small stable of little-known and wonderful paperback covers for literary classics weren’t enough of a treat, how thrilling it is to know that he also illustrated the occasional entire volume, from classic fairy tales to H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds to T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. But out of all his literary reimaginings, by far the greatest fit for Gorey’s singular brand of darkly delightful visual magic is Edward Gorey’s Dracula (public library), a special edition of the Bram Stoker classic originally published in 1977 and eventually adapted as a magnificent toy theater of die-cut foldups and foldouts.

 

Click here to read the rest of this story

From Dissections To Depositions, Poets’ Second Jobs

By David Orr

“No man but a blockhead,” Samuel Johnson famously observed, “ever wrote, except for money.” This is tough news for poets, since the writing they do is often less immediately profitable than a second-grader’s math homework (the kid gets a cookie or a hug; the poet gets a rejection letter from The Kenyon Review). Poetry itself is tremendously valuable, of course, but that value is often realized many years after a poem’s composition, and sometimes long after the end of its author’s life.

In the meantime, everyone has to eat. So unless you win the lottery, being a poet means finding a job that can support the writing of poems. Over the past few decades, that job has overwhelmingly involved teaching in university departments of English and/or creative writing. In , for instance, almost all of the 75 contributors have taught poetry in universities or earned an advanced degree in poetry, or (more frequently) both.

But the university job is a relatively recent development in Anglo-American poetry. spent eight years in a bank and decades in publishing. was a lawyer and insurance executive. was a doctor. worked in a university library, and ran the Library of Congress. was, improbably enough, a postal clerk.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Gay Talese on the Social Order of New York’s Cats

By Maria Popova

A rare and wonderful 1961 taxonomy of Gotham’s feline fraternity from the godfather of literary journalism.

Cats, not unlike dogs, seem to have claimed the role of literary muses, from Joyce’s children’s books to T. S. Eliot’s poetry to Hemingway’s heart, by way of various other bookish cameos. In 1961, 29-year-old Gay Talese penned New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey (public library) — an obscure out-of-print gem, in which the beloved icon of literary journalism paints an immersive, vibrant portrait of Gotham’s secret life, from its 8,485 telephone operators to its 5,000 prostitutes to its one chauffeur who has a chauffeur, and the entire bubbling cauldron of humanity in between.

Among the singular subcultures Talese explores is the city’s feline fraternity:

Click here to read the rest of this story

20 Awesome Examples Of Literary Graffiti

  Thank you, graffiti artists, for making our streets a little bit smarter. How many of these literary references do you recognize?

1. Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse Five”

 

Click here to read the rest of this story

He Do the Police in Different Voices

		T. S. Eliot On this day in 1922 T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (originally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices”) was published. Like many friends and acquaintances, Virginia Woolf thought Eliot an odd case, but her diary notes how compelling she found his after-dinner reading of his poem: “He sang it & chanted it & rhymed it. It has great beauty and force of phrase; symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure….”

Click here to read the rest of this story

Eliot, Groucho, Duck Soup

		T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) On this day in 1964, T. S. Eliot wrote to Groucho Marx to confirm that he was sending a car to pick “you and Mrs. Groucho” up for dinner. Their meeting was after years of correspondence, beginning with an Eliot fan letter expressing admiration for Groucho’s films. While not the alcoholic or literary event foreseen, the occasion became high comedy in Groucho’s hands.

Click here to read the rest of this story

He Do the Police in Different Voices

		T. S. Eliot On this day in 1922 T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (originally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices”) was published. Like many friends and acquaintances, Virginia Woolf thought Eliot an odd case, but her diary notes how compelling she found his after-dinner reading of his poem: “He sang it & chanted it & rhymed it. It has great beauty and force of phrase; symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure….” ...read more

T.S. Eliot Devotees Angered by Plans to Develop East Coker

Jim McCue

By PATRICIA COHEN

 

“Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,/Are removed, destroyed, restored…” T.S. Eliot wrote in “East Coker,” a poem in his famed collection “Four Quartets.” Now a proposal do the first — build a development with 3,750 houses and an industrial estate on the edge of East Coker, in Somerset — has triggered protests from Eliot devotees.Jim McCue, who is editing Eliot’s “Poems” for Faber & Faber with Sir Christopher Ricks, was disturbed to learn of construction plans so near to the spot where Eliot’s ashes are buried. “His final masterpiece,” Mr. McCue said by email on Monday, is “deeply informed by his sense of place and of history.”…read more

Eliot and the Woolfs

		Click to buy On this day in 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend that “I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr. Eliots [sic] poem with my own hands — you see how my hand trembles.” Though referring to the typesetting of the first English edition of The Waste Land, Woolf’s trembling reflected her exhaustion from running the Hogarth Press rather than any presage of the moment’s literary importance. …read more