The Criterion

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June 1, 2004 by Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

Byline: Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

In early 1920s London, a number of small literary journals failed, including The Egoist, edited by T.S. Eliot. The poet envisioned filling the vacuum with a new scholarly periodical that would challenge the establishment's romantic conventions. He had many affiliations with the Bloomsbury Group, but while they were carousing in the countryside, he was toiling away as a bank clerk in the city contemplating a more conservative vision of modernism.

In 1921, Eliot contacted the writer Thomas Sturge Moore about his idea for a quarterly that "should be simple and severe in appearance, without illustrations...[that] should unite the best critical opinion in England, together with the work of the best critics who I can find from other countries.... I shall make its aim the maintenance of critical standards and the concentration of intelligent critical opinion..." Appropriately, Eliot's wife, Vivien, who would edit many pieces, named the journal The Criterion.

Soon Sydney Schiff, a wealthy patron of the arts and a novelist, introduced Eliot to Lady Lillian Rothermere, the estranged wife of a newspaper magnet and a fan of the poet's work. She offered moderate financing for three years for a journal with a circulation of up to 1,000 that would serve "the caviar" of literary criticism, according to Jason Harding, author of The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain.

Still working at Lloyds Bank in the Colonial and Foreign Department to support his poetry, Eliot concealed his role as editor to avoid losing his day job, even though it was an open secret in the London literary world. But that fall a nervous breakdown bought him a three-month leave from the bank - during which he wrote his opus "The Waste Land," and began scouting for writers for The Criterion.

On October 16, 1922, publisher Cobden and Sanderson printed 600 copies of the magazine's debut issue. It had a demure beige cover with red lettering. It carried no advertisements and featured "The Waste Land," and an eclectic mix of essays by the writers Sturge Moore and George Saintsbury. It also carried a translation, edited by Virginia Woolf, of Doestoevsky's plan for a new novel. Lady Rothermere dubbed the issue "dull," and writers complained that the rates were too low.

But the journal did challenge contemporary aesthetics and cultural assumptions. "He and his wife Vivien regarded the launch as a 'gun powder' plot to dynamite the British literary establishment," says Peter Sacks, who teaches a course on Eliot at Harvard. For one thing, The Criterion was politically conservative, even reactionary, which was highly unusual for a small, avant-garde literary journal, says Hilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion. "Eliot hoped to refute the idea that modernist literature represents some kind of break from the traditions of European literature." Eliot explained the thinking behind The Criterion in a famous essay "Tradition and Individual Talent," which asserts that avant-garde art and traditional art are and ought to be inseparable.

Eliot's journal gathered an impressive roster of contributors including Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke and E.M Forster. But after the first year, the poet was plagued by financial worries and emotional stress, and Vivien fell ill. Eliot wrote a despairing letter to his friend John Quinn, a New York lawyer and patron of the arts, lamenting the burden and expense of the magazine: "I have not got a penny out of it. In order to carry on The Criterion I have had to neglect not only the writing I ought to be doing but my private affairs of every description...I am worn out. I cannot go on."

In 1926, Elliot resigned from Lloyds and joined Faber and Gwyer publishing, which took over The Criterion after Lady Rothermere withdrew her financing because she felt that the journal was too controversial. The magazine reached a circulation of 600 and continued publishing until 1939. It ultimately folded because of its small size, the onset of World War II and Eliot's personal stress. "The dream of holding a Pan-European civilization together was disintegrating," says Sacks. Eliot's last words in The Criterion express its ultimate legacy: "The Criterion has brought me associations, friendships and acquaintanceships of inestimable value; I like also to think it may have served contributors, by initiating friendships and acquaintances between those who might not otherwise have met or known each other's work."