December 2024

G. Kim Blank, Department of English, University of Victoria

Beginning in 1927 and running until 1931, and under the direction of Richard de la Mare (1901-86), Faber & Gwyer/Faber & Faber of London publish thirty-eight pamphlet cards known as “The Ariel Poems.” A second release of eight poems—designated by Faber & Faber as the "New Series"—is produced in 1954.

Faber’s catalogue advertises its line of “little booklets” of unpublished poems as “suitably decorated in colours and dressed in the gayest wrappers. It has been designed to take the place of Christmas cards and other similar tokens that one sends for remembrance sake at certain seasons of the year.” The series is, at least initially, commercially successful; this is assured by commissioning a wide selection original art for the cards, including work by brothers Paul and John Nash, Barnett Freedman, Eric Ravilious, poet-artist David Jones, and Eric Gill.

Printed by the Curwen Press, Plaistow (east London), and published 9 October 1929 in a run of 3,000 copies, T. S. Eliot’s Animula is No. 23 in the sequence of Ariel Christmas-card poems; it sells for 1 shilling, as indicated on the accompanying envelope. [1] Two weeks later, 400 large-paper copies—numbered and signed by Eliot—are published, though these larger cards were intended mainly as gifts for friends and valued patrons within the Eliot-Faber circle. Eliot is forty-one years old.

Both versions of Animula—the smaller trade card and the larger-paper edition—have two wood-engravings (one in colour) by sculptor, illustrator, and wood-engraver Gertrude Hermes (1901-1983). Eliot will, in November 1931, say that he didn’t really like the larger wood engraving (of a naked male juggling figure), and that he "tried to make a change" but was "not at all happy" with it. More generally, Eliot declares he would prefer “not an illustration but a design” to accompany poetry, given that “the illustrator will merely impose his own particular interpretation of the poem upon the reader”; Eliot also adds that he thinks “the market for those Christmas card poems is pretty well exhausted.” [2]

Eliot contributes a poem in the Ariel series for each of the six years it runs. His other poems are The Journey of the Magi (1927, no. 8 in the Ariel series), A Song for Simeon (1928, no. 16), Marina (1930, no. 29), Triumphal March (1931, no. 35), and The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (1954, when the series is shortly revived in a larger format with eight poems by prominent poets). In Eliot’s collected edition of his poems (the first being Poems 1909-1925), Eliot uses the series name to nominate his grouping as the “Ariel Poems.” Eliot will later say in a New York Times Book Review (29 November 1953) that his “promise” to contribute to the Ariel series in fact “released the stream” for him to once more write poetry.

Other writers who contribute to the Ariel series include Thomas Hardy (1927, no. 1); Walter de la Mare (1927-1931, nos. 4, 11, 20, 31, 33); G. K. Chesterton (1927, 1929-1930; nos. 5, 21, 25); Siegfried Sassoon (1927-1928, 1930-1931, nos. 7, 14, 27, 34 ); W. B. Yeats (1929, no. 18); Edith Sitwell (1928, 1931; nos. 15, 36); “AE” (1929, no. 19); and D. H. Lawrence (1930, no. 28); the "New Series" 1954 pamphlet-cards include poems by W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender. The full lineup of Ariel poets is more or less a who’s-who of poets writing in English over the first half of the twentieth century.

At the time of composing Animula, American-born Eliot works for Faber & Faber (though there is only one “Faber”—Geoffrey), having been taken on with an initial five-year contract as a director/editor in the autumn of 1925, when the publisher is Faber & Gwyer (Eliot first meets Geoffrey in December 1924). His general position is as literary advisor. Eliot did have pressures in his selection of writers: Geoffrey Faber naturally wanted to turn a profit. This isn’t a given, since Faber & Faber’s declared publishing inclinations are belle-lettristic.

In joining the publisher, Eliot leaves a position at Lloyds Bank in London, where, for eight years, and advancing quickly, he ends up in the Colonial & Foreign Department. His work ethic and polyglottal skills set him ahead. In the last phase of his employment at Lloyds, he heads its Intelligence Department; he eventually oversees a staff of seven. Despite the nagging of many friends to invest his full energies in literature, it is not easy for Eliot, at age thirty-seven, to leave the security—and the challenges—of working for Lloyds, where he deals with the complexities of international, real-world banking policy at an interesting historical moment of both financial growth and post-war debts, and where, in fact, he develops some lasting friendships.

In 1922, while working for Lloyds, Eliot founds and edits one the premier literary magazines of the era: The Criterion. Eliot has had experience: through his early mentor, Ezra Pound, in 1917 he had worked as Assistant Editor (and contributor/reviewer) for The Egotist, a modernist journal which ends publication in 1919 (most noteworthy, it publishes James Joyce’s A Portrait of a Young Man, parts of Joyce’s Ulysses, and Wyndam Lewis’ Tarr). The first issue of The Criterion in October 1922 (of 600 copies) includes a seminal and darkly uncertain poem by Eliot, sculpted by experimental, modernist technique, layered by allusional complexity, and enmeshed with historical crises and Eliot’s own personal uncertainties: The Waste Land. The poem is subsequently published in the US in The Dial, November 1922; it becomes a seminal Modernist text.

Eliot vets countless submissions while overseeing The Criterion. Eliot shapes the direction of the journal with his critical views: he writes over sixty editorial-commentaries, and he develops a recognizable iconoclastic tone, which he had begun to hone in his 1920 essay collection, The Sacred Wood. Because of Eliot, the journal manages to bridge conservative and traditional literary values with modernist and avant-garde work. He recruits writers like Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Wyndam Lewis, Kathleen Raine, Dylan Thomas, as well sounding a clear internationalist, cosmopolitan agenda in premiering writers like Marcel Proust, Albert Camus, and Herman Hesse. Early on, Eliot records that taking on The Criterion completely exhausts him, and a history of its various funding and nominal incarnations show its ups and downs, along with Eliot’s. The Criterion ceases publication in January 1939, on the brink of World War II; buried within this last issue are Eliot’s “Final Words,” expressing, in his own terms, editorial “staleness” and personal “discontent.”

Making the period of Eliot’s affiliation with Faber even more complex and uneven, in 1925, Eliot’s wife of ten years, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, suffers with serious health issues, both physical and psychological. This is predicted a few years earlier, in 1921, when Eliot himself suffers from some kind of depression-related breakdown before re-entering his life of letters. But as Eliot moves forward in the mid-1920s, his wife’s condition fully distresses and taxes him; he has moments of what seem to him as hopeless fatigue; he expresses being overwhelmed and even paralyzed by work. Medically attending to Vivien—which Eliot prefers over “Vivienne”—becomes a personal and financial burden. Eliot will separate from Vivien in 1933; she dies in 1947, having spent the last decade of her life committed to an asylum, with some suggestion of behind-the-scene promptings by Eliot. Vivien’s anonymous contributions—as “F. M.”—to The Criterion over 1924-1925 are somewhat undervalued, though also complicated by Eliot’s overseeing all of the journal’s published work, including editing the work of “F. M.”; her shared reflections on Eliot’s poetry are minor but not unimportant.

The mid-1920s sees one part of Eliot attracted to right-wing views. In February 1924, he writes to his mother that his political and social opinions are “reactionary and ultra-conservative.” While this might sound extreme, such sentiments are certainly in the air at the moment, and often amongst the intelligentsia. But Eliot’s views are neither entirely sympathetic to communism nor rising Fascist politics, as his review of five books about Fascism (in The Criterion, December 1928) make clear; more than anything, Eliot hoped for a new, engaged form of democracy, though his leanings are tinged, as it were, with some elitist and royalist sentiments tied to older traditions.

Eliot working at Faber & Gwyer, March 1926; photo taken by his brother, Henry; Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am. 2650 (186).

In June 1927, Eliot converts to Anglo-Catholicism. He is secretly baptised and then immediately confirmed (confirmation requires baptism). This is as complex and interesting as it might seem odd—maybe more so for a thirty-nine-year-old. It certainly surprises, even shocks, some of his friends who, like Virginia Woolf, worry it might dull his creativity; it didn’t. Eliot’s family religious background, formed as it was around somewhat progressive Unitarian values, did not offer guidance about more decisive beliefs and practices that he seemed to crave. Thus his searching philosophical and unsteady spiritual disposition (with some attraction to mysticism) makes his conversion to rooted, disciplined, and liturgical pursuits much less surprising. Eliot felt that life held a void, and he craved some representation of order; in short, he wanted a belief system, or at least the tenets of one to grasp toward and to practice. Holding the deep, traditional values of the church, with the more absolute pronouncements—about good and evil, atonement and original sin, birth and death—also offered Eliot much to creatively engage. More personally, for Eliot, through the idea of a sacramental life and possibility of fulfilment, came habits he hoped might shape his own discipline—in, for example, in the simple, ceremonial habits of attending mass. And so, Eliot is attracted to how Anglo-Catholicism turns to questions of spiritual salvation in the context of both historical chaos and in his personal discomposure. [3]

Looking ahead, we come to a powerful and somewhat uniquely odd tension in Eliot the poet: he is powerfully attracted to the stability and traditions and trappings of belief, along with the embedded mysteries of disenchantment and indecision; and yet, formally, his verse is startlingly modernist in its form, phrasing, and testing allusions.

Later in 1927, Eliot is naturalized as a British citizen. Workwise, during the year, in prose alone, Eliot averages to write about one piece every week.

In his work at Faber & Faber, Eliot continuously assesses submissions, and his busyness is, here and there, apparent in a few haphazard moments of proofreading and decision-making. As mentioned, he manages to foster, publish, and promote many of the most important writers of the age, such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Wallace Stevens. Interestingly, he turns down the opportunity to publish George Orwell’s Animal Farm: he’s unconvinced that the “fable” of Animal Farm “is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at the present time” (letter to Orwell, 13 July 1944)—to criticize Stalinism, that is.

Eliot will be professionally associated with Faber & Faber for forty years, often acting as a crucial literary advisor; by the end of the 1930s, under Eliot's guidance, Faber & Faber has more or less established the canon of modern English literature, and of poetry in particular.

A year after the death of Vivien in 1948, Eliot, aged sixty, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1957, and quite secretly one very early January morning, Eliot marries Valerie Fletcher. He has known her for eight years, when she is a secretary at Faber & Faber (Eliot proposes via a very polite letter); she has known all about Eliot since her early teens, when she seems to be seriously drawn to him after hearing a recording of his poetry being read—which, coincidently, happens to be the most significant of the Ariel poems, The Journey of the Magi (1927). Valerie is 30 at the time of their marriage; Eliot 68. Toward the end of 1957, Eliot believes he is passed being useful to Faber & Faber—and that, in fact, he feels he is being overpaid (letter to Geoffrey Faber, 26 October 1952).

In 1965, less than eight very happy years with Valerie, and after long history of chain-smoking and suffering from emphysema, Eliot passes away, aged 76. Valerie, as literary executor of Eliot-related material, will become a protective yet crucial editor of Eliot’s poetry and letters; she also makes and then generously distributes the fortune she makes via the worldwide profits of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, a musical based on Eliot’s 1939 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Valerie passes in 2012, aged 86.

Faber & Faber still manages a great deal of Eliot’s work, along with handling the rights of the Estate of T. S. Eliot. It remains an independent publisher that privileges the belle-lettristic tradition. Today Faber & Faber refers to Eliot as its first "Poetry Editor."

Notes

[1] The Curwen Press has a history tied to music printing, letter-press work, type-face design, lithography, graphic reproduction, fine illustrative printing, and French-language work.

[2] Letter to Emily Hale, 24 Nov. 1931; The Eliot-Hale Letters, ed. John Haffenden, The Estate of T. S. Eliot, 2022.

[3] Eliot's formal turn to Anglo-Catholicism after conversion is sounded in Journey of the Magi (1927), Ash-Wednesday (1930), and in the four poems that make up Four Quartets (1936, 1940, 1941, 1942). Here, in these poems, scaffolded with much Christian symbolism, we find an open yet complex engagement with the struggle to have faith replace skepticism, with the integration of time with timelessness, as well as with the meaning of renunciation and penitence.

University of Victoria Copy no. 1 of T. S. Eliot's Animula (autographed and numbered 152):

University of Victoria Copy no. 2 of T. S. Eliot's Animula (autographed and numbered 365):

University of Victoria copy of the T. S. Eliot's Animula Christmas trade card, with the original envelope: