The Herbert Read Conference 2004

Speaker: Jason Harding, Feng Chia University, Taiwan
Title: T. S. Eliot’s Anarchist Aide-de-Camp

This paper examines the friendship between Herbert Read and T. S. Eliot. It is intended to demonstrate that although pronounced differences of taste and temperament placed a strain on their professional relationship, these differences did not ultimately rupture an underlying mutual affection and respect.

Read and Eliot began their long acquaintance as collaborators on the avant-garde magazine, Art and Letters, and initially moved in the same modernist London circles. When Eliot launched The Criterion in 1922 he was keen to enlist Read as a regular contributor. In fact, Read became an exceptionally important contributor of essays, poems, reviews and surveys of American periodicals. Read later described himself as Eliot’s ‘aide-de-camp’ in the literary struggles of the interwar period; he acted, in effect, as The Criterion’s unofficial assistant editor.

However, Eliot’s cautious and at times calculating editorial role in the disagreements between Read and I. A. Richards, voiced in reviews for The Criterion, revealed a distaste for Read’s pioneering advocacy of psychoanalytical criticism, and Richards’ linguistic and psychological perspectives on criticism. On his 1933 lecture tour of the United States, Eliot publicly criticized both Read and Richards, whom he believed to be the most influential contemporary English literary critics, in an attempt to dissociate himself from their opinions.

Throughout the 1930s, Read strongly criticized Eliot’s low estimation of Shelley and championed such radical causes as surrealism and political anarchism, leading Geoffrey Grigson to characterize him as The Criterion’s ‘seditious Eye’. Certainly, by the demise of The Criterion in 1939 the aesthetic and political differences between Read and Eliot appeared to be insuperable. Their subsequent correspondence, including Eliot’s disapproving response to Read’s 1955 I.C.A. lecture critical of Wyndham Lewis, never recaptured the intimacy of their early collaboration. When Read came to assess his relationship with Eliot, for an obituary address in 1965, he movingly expressed a ‘deep personal devotion’ towards Eliot. It was an affection that he believed was reciprocated by Eliot, albeit increasingly tempered by reservations about Read’s advanced beliefs. In the last analysis, Read and Eliot could agree to disagree: indeed it was precisely their fruitful exchanges and disagreements that served to nourish the remarkable and enduring legacy of both men.

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