Solomon Eagle: re-reading Defoe in the time of Coronavirus

In which I resolve to spend this period of enforced isolation writing letters by hand, re-reading Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and re-starting my blog.

You’d think that self-isolation and social distancing offer plenty of opportunities for reading and writing. And so, of course, they do. I have made a list of the friends and others to whom I owe long-overdue letters, and have even made a start at writing them, by hand and using a fountain pen. The last study day I conducted before such events were proscribed was on Seamus Heaney; my audience of students (people, like me, at risk from Covid-19 by virtue of our age) especially enjoyed his poem The Conway Stewart with its loving description of the ‘Three gold bands in the clip-on screw-top’ and the ‘spatulate, thin / Pump-action lever’ in the pen’s ‘mottled barrel’. The poem recalls how Heaney’s parents bought him a fountain pen to take to boarding school, the pen with which he would write his first letter home –

     my longhand

‘Dear’

To them, next day.

No poet I have ever come across has written more movingly about the life of a bewildered child at boarding school.

I have made a list of the books I want to read or reread, starting with Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). It isn’t a journal at all: he himself was only six when the Great Plague devastated the population of London:

1665 - No-one left alive

1666 - London burnt to fiddlesticks

(as I learned in my first term at my own boarding school). Defoe’s first-person narrator claims to have reconstructed his ‘journal’ from notes he made at the time in his ‘memorandums’, together with extracts from oral accounts, public documents, official records and other sources, but really it is as much a work of fiction – an event ‘witnessed’ by a man who never existed – as Peter Ackroyd’s 1985 novel of the Plague and its aftermath, Hawksmoor. Still, Defoe’s account resonates strongly: it is all about self-isolating, social distancing – people walking down the centre of the Whitechapel Road to avoid getting too close to those standing on the pavements – and the difficulties of shopping:

People used all possible precaution. When any one bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it off the butcher’s hand, but took it off the hooks themselves. On the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up any odd sum, that they might take no change. (p.88)

The strange ways in which Londoners started to behave during the Plague, and Defoe’s comments about them: the book is worth reading for these alone. The Guardian Review used to run a quirky weekly column, Ten of the Best….’ and Solomon Eagle topped the list of ‘Ten of the Best Religious Zealots in Literature’, even though he gets only a glancing mention by Defoe:

I suppose the world has heard of the famous Solomon Eagle, an enthusiast. He, though not affected at all but in his head, went about denouncing of judgement upon the city in a frightful manner, sometimes quite naked, and with a pan of burning charcoal on his head. What he said, or pretended, indeed I could not learn. (p.116)

By one of those odd coincidences that gladden the heart, I discovered on the very day I read about him in Defoe, that ‘Solomon Eagle’ was the pen name adopted by the poet and literary editor JC Squire, when he was book reviewer for The New Statesman before and during the First World War. In his heyday, Squire was possibly the most influential bookman in London: among his greatest claims to fame, he founded and edited the new London Mercury from 1919 to 1934. Although he fell spectacularly out of favour with writers such as TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and out of fashion altogether by the 1940s, he was a formidable, fascinating figure who is today all but forgotten. So it’s good to report that the writer John Smart, a specialist on London literary life (his biography of John Hayward is a key work on the subject) is completing a biography of Squire. A reassessment of this contradictory and complicated man is certainly overdue.

What I most want to do during these weeks of enforced inactivity is not only to read more and to write more letters, however. I want to return to writing this blog, which I began in August 2011 and which stuttered to a halt after 113 posts in 2018. The stutter developed not because I had grown tired of blogging, but because I was focusing more and more on writing about stained glass; eventually the effort of researching and completing two books* on that subject absorbed all my energy. After the second one was published early last year, I tried a few times to start again but struggled to produce even a stutter. Meanwhile, writing and speaking about stained glass have continued to take up much of my time.

Now, though, seems the moment to try again, always remembering Beaumarchais’ admonition: ‘La difficulté de réussir ne fait qu’ajouter à la nécessité d’entreprendre’  (The difficulty of succeeding only adds to the necessity of undertaking). As before, I shall aim to range across books, writers and readers, with occasional digressions onto people and places, even stained glass perhaps. Already I think I know one book I shall be writing about soon: Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, just published and very well reviewed. I have only started to read it; but I’ve also skimmed through the bibliography at the back. To my astonishment, Imagism and After: a Study of the Poetry of Richard Aldington, is listed there – my MA thesis, deposited in Durham University Library in 1975 where, I had always assumed, it had lain unread and gathering dust ever since. Evidently not, but you’ll have to wait until I have read and written about this book centred on Mecklenburgh Square, on the edge of Bloomsbury, to learn why not.

Adrian Barlow

27 March 2020

* Kempe: the Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe (2018)

   Espying Heaven: the Stained Glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Artists (2019)

Illustrations: 

(i) 'Solomon Eagle’ drawing by EM Ward (1848); Wellcome Institute, reproduced under Creative Commons licence. 

(ii) The London Mercury: cover. This journal was cherished as much for the quality of its typography and illustrations as for its content.

The Second Mrs T.S. Eliot

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s play, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, is about a young woman ‘with a past’ whose marriage to a much older widower has complicated and ultimately disastrous consequences. By contrast, Valerie Fletcher, who became the second Mrs T.S. Eliot, was a woman with no past at all. Her life only ever had one focus: Eliot himself. Although she was thirty-eight years younger, her marriage to him was (as far as she at least was
 concerned) blissfully uncomplicated, and its consequences for Eliot’s posthumous reputation have been the opposite of disastrous – though not everyone, I know, agrees.

A friend recently handed me a photograph (c.1943) showing a squad of lacrosse players from Queen Anne’s School, Caversham. Did I recognize the girl on the right at the end of the back row? my friend asked. The girl was Valerie Fletcher. ‘She was never much of a looker, was she?’ added my friend. Actually, some people thought she was a looker: when Groucho Marx met her, in 1961, he described her as ‘a good-looking, middle-aged blonde whose eyes seemed to light up with adoration every time she looked at her husband’.

In many ways, Valerie Fletcher’s marriage to T.S. Eliot in January 1957 was even more extraordinary than Marilyn Monroe’s to Arthur Miller the previous year. At least Monroe and Miller had met, plausibly enough, in Hollywood; by contrast, the story of the lacrosse-playing teenager and the Nobel Prizewinning poet defied all probability.

Eliot died in 1965; Valerie outlived him by forty seven years. The Guardian obituary of her maintained that as a schoolgirl she had told her headmistress her ambition was to become Eliot’s secretary; the Queen Anne’s Society News (2012-2013), took the story a step further and reported that while still at school, Valerie had confidently announced she would marry him. The most specific account, however, comes in Tarantula, John Smart’s biography of Eliot’s close friend, John Hayward. Eliot had shared a London flat with Hayward for eleven years, up until the day before he married Valerie – to the astonishment of everyone except Valerie herself:

Valerie Fletcher had been listening intently in an English lesson to a gramophone record of John Gielgud reading ‘Journey of the Magi’. She was bowled over. At the end of the lesson she went up to her teacher, Miss Bartholomew, and asked, ‘Who wrote that poem?’ Miss Bartholomew told her that it was T.S. Eliot. ‘I shall marry that man,” her pupil said immediately. After a moment’s pause, she mused, ‘But how shall I meet him?’ Without thinking anything of it, Miss Bartholomew replied, ‘You could become his secretary, I suppose.’

It would be quite unfair to conclude that Valerie was a manipulative young gold-digger setting out to entice a foolish, fond old man. Lyndall Gordon in T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life – to my mind, by far the best study of Eliot’s life and poetry – says simply that ‘Eliot came to recognize in his secretary the absolute dedication of an ideal heir’. In an interview quoted by Gordon, Valerie herself explained the life-defining impact of hearing ‘Journey of the Magi’:

It just hit me. The whole feeling of Tom in it – and the impression I formed then – was borne out right throughout marriage and everything. After that I tried to find out everything I could about him. It was something very sympathetic.

‘Throughout marriage and everything’ – for Valerie, marriage was to be eight years of devoted happiness, as it was for the poet too: Lyndall Gordon speaks of  ‘the idyllic nature of his attachment’. Afterwards, ‘everything’ included the nearly fifty years she lived on as his widow and literary executor.

The first most people knew about Valerie in this new role was her publication in 1971 of  

The Waste Land

A FACSIMILE AND TRANSCRIPT

OF THE ORIGINAL DRAFTS

INCLUDING THE ANNOTATIONS

OF EZRA POUND

Edited by Valerie Eliot

The ‘lost’ manuscript of this poem, as originally edited by Ezra Pound and annotated by Eliot, Pound and Eliot’s first wife, Vivien, had only resurfaced in 1968 when the New York Public Library announced it had been discovered among a collection of privately purchased papers. Valerie’s Facsimile and Transcript was itself a ground-breaking work of bibliography: the reader could see on the left-hand pages Eliot’s hand-written or typed sheets and on the right could read the same text now type-set and with all the annotations, erasures and overwritings ingeniously transcribed typographically and colour-coded. It showed that Pound had been far more influential in shaping the most famous Modernist poem of the twentieth century than many people had recently wanted to believe, and that his editorial judgment had saved the poem.  Eliot himself had acknowledged this by dedicating the poem to ‘Il miglior fabbro’. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Valerie’s book helped rehabilitate Pound’s reputation. Put simply, it was (and is) a master class in responsible editing and exegesis: without it, I wonder whether Helen Gardner’s virtuoso work, The Composition of Four Quartets, which refined the approach Valerie had previously taken with The Waste Land, would even have been published.

No longer now the gawky, sporty schoolgirl with a crush, nor the adoring blonde on the arm of an elderly husband, Valerie Eliot had proved she should be taken seriously as a scholar and as Eliot’s literary executor. I have every admiration for what she achieved with The Waste Land – and every sympathy with the way she defended Eliot’s posthumous reputation later.  Others may disagree. But her own best memorial should be her definitive edition of The Waste Land. Let Lyndall Gordon, comparing Valerie’s edition with Helen Gardner’s work on The Composition of Four Quartets, explain why:

Both are lasting works of scholarship […. ] In Mrs Eliot’s introduction and Helen Gardner’s chapters on the growth and sources of the Quartets, facts are selective and direct the reader towards the work. It is to be hoped that scholars of the twenty-first century will follow their lead in discerning the simplicity at the heart of Eliot’s apparent difficulty.

Adrian Barlow

[Illustration: ‘The Scarlet Runners’ – Queen Anne’s School, Caversham, Lacrosse players c.1943 (private collection)

[Notes: Groucho Marx’s description of Valerie is quoted by Lyndall Gordon in T.S. Eliot, an Imperfect Life (1998), p. 517. From the same source comes the extract from Valerie’s 1988 Times interview, p.497-8, as does the description of Eliot’s recognizing in Valerie ‘the absolute dedication of an ideal heir’. The quotation with which I end this post will be found on p.679.

John Smart’s account in Tarantula (p.263) of Valerie’s reaction to hearing ‘Journey of the Magi’ is based on an interview he conducted with Dorothy Bartholomew (1913-2011), the teacher who transformed Valerie’s life simply by putting a record on the gramophone.

For an additional account of Valerie’s marriage to Eliot and her subsequent life as his literary executor, I recommend the Independent obituary (14 November 2012); while for a different perspective on Valerie Eliot, see Karen Christensen, ‘Dear Mrs Eliot’, Guardian 29 January 2005.

I have written previously about Eliot, in T.S. Eliot and the Turning Year. 2015 being the 50^th anniversary of his death, I hope to write about him again, more than once in the remaining six months.