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Modernism/modernity 10.4 (2003) 772-775



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The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain . Jason Harding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 250. $55.00 (cloth).

There have been a variety of flying visits to the Criterion over the years, in-and-out engagements with Eliot's seventeen-year struggle to create an eighteen-volume record of intellectual life between the wars. Some hefty doctoral dissertations on the periodical await an occasional reader on the shelves of university libraries, but some contemporary critics more readily thumb the pages of the Criterion itself in search of evidence for agenda-driven studies of Eliot's religious, political, and economic biases. In the face of this academic activity, Jason Harding has taken the Criterion out of vacuum-sealed isolation and re-examined it in relation to other literary reviews of the time, showing Eliot and his contributors making their way in a post-war cultural climate in competition with other editors and their writers, all vying for the attention and support of a limited literary public and readership. To Harding, the character of the Criterion "cannot be divorced from the alliances and loyalties, rivalries, animosities, and friendships that mark all social relations as fully human" (7), and in the process of reconstructing these intellectual relationships he has admirably scoured all the accessible archives in Great Britain, America, and Canada, interviewing when possible the surviving participants and witnesses. Harding's laudable aim has been "to provide a thickly textured account of the milieu of British inter-war literary journalism necessary for measured assessment of the history and significance of the Criterion" (21). That assessment comes through a disinterested immersion in magazines and milieus and in a jargon-free narrative that seeks neither to indict nor exonerate the less attractive aspects of Eliot's Tory-Anglican conservatism, but certainly to address what he describes as "slack charges of 'fascism' and 'anti-Semitism'" (6) that have followed upon Eliot's editorial provision for the symposial examination of right-wing causes.

Harding's introductory history of the Criterion from 1922 to 1939 is expanded and enriched in subsequent sections of this tripartite study of the journal's competitors, contributors, and cultural controversies. Following the collapse of the Egoist, which he served as assistant editor, Art and Letters, Coterie, and other little magazines to which he had contributed, Eliot desired to reconstitute literary and editorial standards in a review that would be responsive to the current of ideas following the cultural upheaval of the war. His Jewish friend Sydney Schiff, former proprietor of Art and Letters, introduced him to Vicountess Lilian Rothermere, estranged wife of the newspaper magnate, who wished to finance a little magazine that would have "a social éclat" in literary London and that might satiate her "craving for the clever, brittle conversation of fashionable society drawing-rooms" (12). She expressed her discontent with the contents and controversies until she cut off her subsidy at the end of 1927, when Geoffrey Faber provided a new haven for the review at Faber & Gwyer, the publishing firm that Eliot had joined in September [End Page 772] 1925. Thereafter, Eliot's larger, extra-literary aims gradually became evident: not only to nourish literary excellence and exchange, but to address and shape the pressing concerns of inter-war cultural criticism; not only to preserve an idealized mind of Europe, but to provide a "defence of the Christian West" (136) against the rising tide of secularism and political substitutes for religion, particularly the "Russian religion" of communism.

Harding illuminates Eliot's multiple editorial struggles by examining the intricate rivalries, tensions, and antagonisms of the Criterion with a periodical network that included John Middleton Murry's Adelphi, Edgell Rickword's Calendar of Modern Letters, F. R. Leavis's Scrutiny, Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse, and to a lesser extent Bruce Richmond's TLS, J. C. Squire's London Mercury, Kingsley Martin's New Statesman, A. R. Orage's New English Weekly, and other metropolitan publications. He brings a wealth of unpublished correspondence and unfamiliar archival...

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