Talks Toward a Definition of Morality: T.S. Eliot and the Consecration of Broadcasting

In pointing out this generational divide between Wells, on the one hand, and himself and his contemporaries, on the other, Eliot is also in part reiterating the most commonplace of modernist claims about the early twentieth-century literary break from the Victorian and Edwardian past. His essay reads in places like a close redaction of Virginia Woolf’s parricidal commentary on the Edwardian triumvirate of Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” Eliot’s ultimate purpose, however, is not merely to restate this fundamental modernist conviction; rather, it is to show how altered social and literary conditions in the first half of the twentieth century had diminished writers’ capacity to effect any immediate social change while yet permitting them, even into the second World War years, to “keep alive aspirations which can remain valid throughout the longest and darkest period of universal calamity and degradation” (322). Wells, as Eliot suggests, had not only wanted to produce “immediate social change;” he had also hoped to “transform . . . the whole world at

once” (322). The moderns’ aims were, according to Eliot, much more modest than those of Wells. Eliot and his contemporaries were “more disposed to see our hope in modest and local beginnings” (322); they were, therefore, much less able or inclined to believe that their literary activities would lead to any wide or longlasting social change. One of the most interesting aspects of Eliot’s remarks on Wells is his focus on Wells’s relation to popular culture. Given Eliot’s own involvement in popular culture, one shared by many if not all of his modernist contemporaries, it is ironic that he overlooks the extent of this involvement in order to reaffirm, in his claim about the ostensible modesty and “locality” of modernism’s social agendas, a decisive fissure between Wells’s generation and his own. Couching his analysis in the language of genealogy, Eliot’s purpose is to define and clarify the nature of modernism’s social investments and agendas. If no modernist writer had achieved a Wellsian eminence by following a similar trajectory from popular entertainer to social prophet, this was not exactly because of a lack of opportunity, but rather, because of a markedly different conception of the purpose of art and of the writer’s relation to his or her audience. By the time Eliot published his essay on Wells in the New English Weekly, at a time of broad public discussion about Wells’s “Rights of Man,” the BBC had been on air for nearly twenty years and Eliot himself, along with his prophetic elder, had been active in broadcasting for more than half of them, as had many of Eliot’s contemporaries and friends. The irony in Eliot’s formulation is this-–that, notwithstanding the reputation he had begun to earn as a popular broadcaster (if not, like Wells, as a Master of the Microphone), Eliot presents himself as a modernist of the highest type who, like Wyndham Lewis, for example, had never “been listened to by more than a minority public” (320); Eliot therefore appeared to be destined to “see our hope in” a much more circumscribed sphere of influence than had been readily available to the originator of the scientific romance. Eliot’s seeming reluctance to accept that his own reputation depended in part on his participation in a medium whose purpose was to address the largest possible audience in history, suggests the ambivalence with which he regarded radio’s relation to at least his brand of modernism and to his brand of moral theory as well. In his recent book T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003), the most meticulous, nuanced, and receptive examination to date of “Eliot’s actual relations with popular culture” (4), David Chinitz convincingly shows the “deeply ambivalent” but “culturally elastic” character of Eliot’s engagements with a wide range of early and mid-twentieth-century mass and popular culture arenas (5-6). Writing more broadly about the “resurgence of academic interest in modernism” (8), Chinitz presents it as a cultural movement that, in relation to “the modern popular” (5), was much more complex than has been permitted by the orthodox assumption of modernism’s adversarial cultural élitism. Invoking the specter of Andreas Huyssen’s notion of the modern cultural Great Divide, Chinitz explains that since roughly the mid-1990s this critical situation has begun to change in important ways:

As especially interesting examples of these new approaches to Eliot, Chinitz points to the work of such critics as Lawrence Rainey, Leonard Diepeveen, Colleen Lamos, Wayne Koestenbaum, Cassandra Laity, Nancy K. Gish, and others, on such issues as Eliot’s strategies of self-promotion, and from perspectives informed by gender, race, and queer theory (8). Of especial interest here, with respect to Eliot’s involvement with the BBC, is Chinitz’s recognition that “there were aspects even of ‘mass-produced’ culture that Eliot not only welcomed but actively supported (the medium of radio, for example)” (8)––as well as the enthusiasm with which Chinitz notes that “the extent of Eliot’s involvement with radio has . . . just been documented” (17). As Chinitz explains, such documentation represents a critical marker of the “accelerating” pace of scholarly work on Eliot’s involvement in and relation to various aspects and arenas of popular culture (17). As the only critic who has offered a vigorous commentary on Eliot’s interest and participation in radio, Michael Coyle, whose influence Chinitz warmly acknowledges, has documented Eliot’s involvement with radio in detail. He does so in an annotated checklist of the approximately 80 broadcasts (both prose talks and poetry readings) that Eliot delivered between 1929 and 1963 (Coyle, “Checklist”). But also, and more substantially, Coyle has begun to assess the centrality of Eliot’s broadcasting activities to his development as a cultural theorist and his emergence by the mid-1940s as “Britain’s pre-eminent cultural sage” (“T.S. Eliot on the Air” 148). In “‘This rather elusory broadcast technique’: T.S. Eliot and the Genre of the Radio Talk” (1998), for example, Coyle begins by noting the “unique opportunity” that Eliot’s broadcast talks offer to critics interested in “the relation of modernism to mass culture” (32). He also observes that “Eliot’s commitment to the BBC proved one of the most sustained and principled engagements in modern literary history, inseparable from his interest in radio itself,” and asserts that the nature of this engagement was expressive of a “modernist dream: Eliot’s attempt to modernize the discourse of culture” (33). Coyle’s primary focus in the first part of “‘This rather elusory broadcast technique’” is on Eliot’s recognition of the opportunity that radio offered speakers to connect in a new way with their audience, and on Eliot’s efforts, along with those of BBC Talks directors like Hilda Matheson, to craft an informal, conversational mode of broadcast address; this mode of address was “generically” different from the “formal lecture” and was designed, through the persuasiveness of intimacy, to bring into being “a new kind of public” (34-5). In the second half of this essay, Coyle extends his analysis of Eliot’s concern with the formal techniques of broadcasting into a discussion of broadcasting’s broader institutional and historical contexts during the 1940s. Within these contexts, Coyle writes,

Eliot both developed his mature understanding of “the enduring value of ‘culture’ even in a time of extreme international duress and violence” and advanced his conviction of the social value of Culture at a time when, through the formation of the Third Programme in 1946, the BBC was struggling to balance its foundational cultural and moral ideals against the increasing pressure of market forces which threatened to “move . . . it out of the way of routine attention: a devil’s bargain characteristic of fifties liberalism and its promotion of ‘culture’” (37, 39). In his more recent essay “T.S. Eliot on the Air: ‘Culture’ and the Challenges of Mass Communication” (2001), Coyle continues his project of illuminating the nature of the tension between mass culture and high culture in Eliot’s thinking. He does so partly by reading Eliot’s efforts to marry the two during the 1940s and 1950s in relation to the Frankfurt School’s, and particularly Theodor Adorno’s, strident postwar critique of the “culture industry.” The broad lineaments of Adorno’s suspicion of electronic mass communications’ leveling and homogenizing tendencies (similar to though much more pessimistic than those expressed in the mid-1920s by Bertolt Brecht) are familiar enough to need no summary here, beyond mentioning Adorno’s “fundamental argument,” as Coyle puts it, “that mass communication in itself runs counter to the humane power of culture” (145). With respect to Eliot’s involvement not only with radio in general, however, but also with the BBC in particular, and specifically from an ethical perspective, Coyle’s argument is interesting for its triangulation of Adornian cultural critique, Eliotic negotiations of the emergent mass communications medium, and the Reithian desire that, in the absence of an organically coherent English culture, radio be used to foster national unity as a public service in the national interest. Although Coyle himself does not trace the ethical contours of Eliot’s involvement in early radio broadcasting, he makes such an analysis possible; these contours begin to be faintly discernible in Coyle’s discovery of a Reithian impulse behind Eliot’s almost 35-year career as a broadcaster. Because of Eliot’s contributions to the development of the informal mode of broadcast address in cultural talks-–a mode designed to encourage social and moral unity, although it also permitted ethically unconventional uses by broadcasters like Forster, MacCarthy, Wells, and Virginia Woolf-–and because of his advocacy of the Third Programme with its serious cultural talks, Coyle explains, Eliot also shared with Reith, in marked contrast to Adorno (and, closer to home, the Leavises and their followers), a fundamental belief in “the humane potential of mass media” (146). Eliot’s involvement with the BBC represents, in short, a sustained effort “to appropriate the very voice of mass culture to speak against its most characteristic impulses” (146); Eliot “hop[ed] that the mass media could exert a unifying force on the nation” during the late 1920s and over the course of the 1930s, the period that Tyrus Miller has provocatively termed “late modernism,” and which was characterized in good part by the “intensive development of the mass media” and the emergence of “a world of technological culture” (Coyle, “T.S. Eliot on the Air” 153; Miller 24). In both of his essays, Coyle’s analysis of Eliot’s broadcasting activities is a formal and a structural one; that is to say, he examines Eliot’s

“attempt to find a new form wherein ‘culture’ might meet the new and ‘more difficult’ problem of modernity” (153). As a result, Coyle offers a great deal of insight both into the nature of Eliot’s persistent and thoughtful engagement with one of the major forms of early twentieth-century mass culture, and into British modernism as a cultural movement permeated and in part constituted by radio as the quintessentially new electronic mass telecommunications medium. From Coyle’s perspective, the most significant aspect of Eliot’s career as a broadcaster-– what makes it “historically distinctive” (153)––lies not in the specific content of his broadcast talks but, rather, in the success with which he crafted a mode of address consonant with the listening expectations and demands of a mass audience in order to promote a Reithian cultural agenda. Coyle’s argument is both innovative and convincing; it is an important effort to clarify the nature of Eliot’s involvement with radio specifically and with mass culture in general. However, in order to understand more precisely the ethical character of Eliot’s involvement with radio broadcasting during the period before he achieved renown as “Britain’s pre-eminent cultural sage”––that is to say, from 1929, when, like Wells, he delivered his first broadcast, to the mid-1930s, the years during which he was developing the cultural ideas and ideals contained in After Strange Gods (1934), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), and, finally, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948)––it is no less important to look at the content of Eliot’s broadcasts than it is to foreground the formal means by which he expressed a cultural cum moral agenda that in many ways very closely resembles Reith’s own. In contrast to those of many other modernist writers who participated in broadcasting during the Reithian era and into the second World War years-–and certainly in contrast to the other writers examined in this book-–Eliot’s cultural and moral ideas were more nearly consonant with those of the Reithian BBC. One might expect, therefore, to find The Listener, with its generally Reithian agenda, celebrating Eliot’s moral and cultural vision in its pages. It is accordingly rather ironic that, despite his growing reputation as a cultural arbiter in an Arnoldian mold over the course of the 1930s, Eliot received much less attention in The Listener’s pages than did many of his less Arnoldian or Reithian contemporaries. He received much less attention, for example, than the iconoclastic Wells, who had initially resisted the blandishments of Talks producers because of what he perceived as the excessive censoriousness of BBC administration. It is also, however, a measure of The Listener’s semiautonomy and of the extent to which the fledgling BBC relied on celebrity speakers to bolster its reputation, as well as an indicator of the degree to which BBC Talks producers preserved a certain moral flexibility regarding broadcast content during Reith’s tenure, that, over the course of his first fifteen years as a broadcaster, and even after he had become recognized as a cultural sage, Eliot, unlike Wells, was never the subject of a Listener commentary on culture and, in fact, received no mention in Listener editorials at all. In 1929, shortly after he began broadcasting, Eliot was upstaged by the controversial but wildly popular Wells in the pages of The Listener: in the 17 July issue, whose editorial celebrated Wells’s first broadcast as “an important event in

the history of broadcasting” (84), Eliot’s talk on “The Tudor Biographers”––the first installment of his six-part series on Tudor writers-–was printed in the “Books and Authors” section, while Wells’s talk appeared on the front page of the issue. Of course, world peace is an obviously more significant topic than Tudor biographers, and one would not expect a broadcast on the latter to take precedence over one on the former. Nevertheless, the relative lack of attention shown Eliot during the first years of his broadcasting career is at first glance perhaps surprising; after all, this career began several years after The Waste Land brought him international literary fame. However, this fame was limited in scope and in the late 1920s and early 1930s Eliot was known among the larger public, if at all, precisely as a poet and literary critic, and perhaps as an editor. Even as late as 1937, as the legendary BBC producer D.G. Bridson, who served the BBC from 1935 to 1969, recalls in his autobiography, Prospero and Ariel: The Rise and Fall of Radio: A Personal Recollection (1971), Eliot was relatively unknown to the listening public. Bridson writes of his experience mounting, with Eliot’s blessing, a production of The Waste Land in 1937 which “made quite remarkable radio, but I have to confess that Eliot did not share my own enthusiasm for the result,” in part because he was “dismayed” by and “failed to appreciate” the performance of the actor Robert Farquharson as Tiresias (65-7). In a passage that provides some insight into the cultural conservatism of the BBC in the 1930s, into the manner in which broadcast productions of modern literature helped to facilitate its acceptance beyond the cultural coteries on which it first made its impact, and, most intriguingly, into radio’s ability to unite a wide range of social classes around shared cultural interests, Bridson writes of Eliot’s reputation at this time and of the reception of the 1937 broadcast performance of The Waste Land:

Notwithstanding this no doubt pleasant surprise, Eliot, like many other writers during the BBC’s first decade or so on air, appears to have been quite circumspect about a communications medium that even in the 1930s had, in Bridson’s words, “still to be opened up and developed” (37). In 1931, Bridson explains, Eliot would refuse BBC producer Archie Harding’s invitations to employ “radio as a medium for serious writing. Unfortunately for radio,” Bridson laments, Harding was unsuccessful (33). But if Eliot was initially hesitant to explore the novel formal possibilities that the new medium offered to poets, dramatists, and other writers-– possibilities embraced shortly thereafter by writers like Dylan Thomas and Samuel Beckett, and in the early 1930s by Ezra Pound-–he nevertheless embraced radio as

a means of sharing his literary-critical opinions and his views on questions of broader social import with an audience far larger than any to which he had previously had or desired access. During the 1910s, as Michael Kaufmann has shown in his examination of the differences between Eliot and Virginia Woolf regarding the size and demographic of their desired audiences early in their careers, Woolf’s radically democratic views on common readers’ role in literary creation and valuation contrasted sharply to Eliot’s much more restrictive sense of audience. Kaufmann recognizes that during the 1910s Eliot “was on the outside of the London literary circles, trying to break in as a foreigner and as yet unknown critic” and therefore he “would have to take his opportunities as he could get them” (138). Woolf, on the other hand, partly by virtue of her inherited social position as a member of Britain’s intellectual aristocracy, had begun to establish herself within those circles, as a literary critic if not yet as a writer of fiction or a feminist theorist. By the time Eliot began reviewing for English periodicals in 1916, Woolf, six years his senior, had already been publishing in The Times Literary Supplement for a decade. But although Eliot’s audience at this time was, compared to Woolf’s, relatively small, this was not, Kaufmann argues, simply because of “an absence of opportunity. . . . Eliot was obviously interested in having a wider influence and more readers.” Rather, it was because Eliot “trusted only a certain kind of reader” (138-9), and because he wanted to be recognized primarily by “‘a small and select’ audience of like-minded individuals” (141). By the end of the 1920s, Eliot was addressing-–though, one suspects, not exactly “trusting”––the largest and least select audience available. Andrew Crisell explains the phenomenally rapid growth in broadcasting’s popularity over the course of the 1920s. “In 1923,” he writes:

D.L. LeMahieu also notes the size of the BBC’s listenership in terms of percentage of the British population. “By 1935,” he writes, “98 percent of the population had some access to wireless programmes” (273-4). The audiences for Eliot’s own broadcasts-–or for the other modernists’ talks, with the possible exception of the internationally famous Wells’s-–probably never approached even the middle of the scale drawn by Crisell, and it is possible that he overstates the case regarding the minimum number of listeners to any given program. Nevertheless, even with due allowance for overestimation, these statistics suggest that, quite literally overnight, once Eliot decided to enter the broadcasting booth, his audience expanded from a very small coterie of “a few intelligent people” to one of a magnitude that was, at

the very least, uncommon before the advent of radio (Eliot, qtd. in Kaufmann 139). Because Eliot was devoted to the rigorously discriminatory establishment of an Arnoldian “right reason” in literary culture specifically and in British culture generally, it is reasonable to speculate that, in addition to the vast audience that the BBC offered him, he was attracted to public service broadcasting as “a model of correct use of the new medium” (“Farewell to Savoy Hill” 632), and that he appreciated the opportunity to participate in a new technocultural medium that, in contrast to the American model of commercial broadcasting, did not require the sacrifice of “cherished cultural traditions” (LeMahieu 189). Reflecting on Eliot’s fascination with the technocultural fact of mass transportation-–or more precisely, his interest in the ways that the advent of the subway both altered individuals’ perception of spatio-temporal normalcy and produced a new type of social fact, the flowing crowds of The Waste Land-–Hugh Kenner writes, “One thing that seems to have impressed him was the capability of such systems for engendering crowds, such crowds as humankind had not routinely experienced before” (27). Eliot seems also to have been impressed by radio’s capability for engendering and simultaneously shaping a new mass audience. By entering into the broadcasting booth in the late 1920s, he gave tacit assent to an opinion expressed in his friend Geoffrey Tandy’s inaugural installment of The Criterion’s “Broadcasting Chronicle” commentary in October 1934. “It is the business,” Tandy, a noted broadcaster writes, “of everybody who wishes to influence public opinion to make as much use as he can of the broadcasting weapon.” Tandy also contrasts the medium of radio broadcasting-–or, more particularly, the specific cultural formation of public service broadcasting-–to that of the commercialized popular press; he does this in order to celebrate the former for what he considers to be its ideological catholicity and to chide the latter for its “practice of manipulation of all subject matter to support the policy of the proprietors.” Notwithstanding the Reith administration’s “intensely cautious middle-class respectability,” Tandy continues, “there is more opportunity” at the BBC “for those who wish to tell the truth as they see it, than under any probable alternative” (106). Eliot’s willingness to air his cultural, political, religious, and ethical views at the BBC demonstrates his fundamental agreement with Tandy’s belief in the necessity for intellectuals to employ radio as a means of influencing public opinion. It is also evidence of the increasing perception among traditional intellectuals during broadcasting’s first decade of the central role that radio was playing in the formation of public attitudes on issues of greater and more immediate social urgency than those related to, say, seventeenth-century English literature; this was, however, the subject of Eliot’s first 15 radio broadcasts. Eliot’s broadcasting career started in mid-1929, when in June and July he offered six talks on, as he puts it in among the very first words he spoke on air, “some of the great prose writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” His purpose was, he continues, “to give a kind of cross section of English prose . . . mostly in the later years of Queen Elizabeth” and “to illustrate the very great richness and variety of that prose” (“Tudor Translators” 833). Covering a wide generic range, these talks, delivered weekly between 11 June and 16 July, and all

published in The Listener, bore the following titles, respectively: “The Tudor Translators,” “The Elizabethan Grub Street,” “The Genesis of Philosophic Prose: Bacon and Hooker,” “The Prose of the Preacher: The Sermons of Donne,” “Elizabethan Travellers’ Tales,” and finally, “The Tudor Biographers.” Approximately one year later, in March and April 1930, Eliot offered his second series of talks, on seventeenth-century poetry and poets: “Thinking in Verse: A Survey of Early Seventeenth-Century Poetry,” “Rhyme and Reason: The Poetry of John Donne,” “The Devotional Poets of the Seventeenth Century: Donne, Herbert, Crashaw,” “Mystic and Politician as Poet: Vaughan, Traherne, Marvell, Milton,” “The Minor Metaphysicals: From Cowley to Dryden,” and “John Dryden.” Delivered on 11 April 1930, the final broadcast in Eliot’s second series of talks also anticipates the subject of his third series, which comprised three further broadcasts on Dryden in April 1931: “The Poet Who Gave the English Speech,” “Dryden the Dramatist,” and “Dryden the Critic, Defender of Sanity” (the Dryden talks were published in 1932 as John Dryden: The Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic). Scores of talks followed over the next 35 years, with Eliot averaging more than two broadcasts annually until 1963 (Coyle, “T.S. Eliot on the Air” 14). Whatever value these earliest talks may contain either intrinsically or with respect to Eliot’s career as a literary critic, his involvement with the BBC as a broadcaster cannot be summed up through a mere litany of titles. To borrow Eliot’s own formulation from another context, his career in radio, like the past of which he writes in The Dry Salvages, “has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence” (Collected Poems 194). Eliot was sensitive to broader social and cultural issues; his interest in connections between them grew in the 1930s; and Eliot’s entrance into broadcasting roughly coincided with the moment in his career when, as Peter Ackroyd writes, “not only did he assert the public role and ‘social usefulness’ of the writer in an almost nineteenth-century manner, but he also announced that the principles he derived from his religious belief were more enduring than literary or critical ones” (239). Given this combination of factors, it is unsurprising that Eliot should have discovered in radio an agreeable conduit for the articulation of his developing ideas on the relations among culture, politics, religion, and ethics. In his essay “Religion and Literature” (1937), Eliot would pronounce that “Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint” (Selected Prose 97). With respect to the trajectory of Eliot’s early career as a broadcaster, the prescription contained in that pronouncement may be applied mutatis mutandis to his decision to offer, as his fourth series of radio talks, one year following those on Dryden, four contributions to a 1932 BBC series titled “The Modern Dilemma.” These four talks-–respectively, “Christianity and Communism,” “Religion and Science: A Phantom Dilemma,” “The Search for Moral Sanction,” and “Building up the Christian World”––represent the core of Eliot’s broadcast contribution to ethical discourse in the BBC’s Reithian era, and might be described as a moral tetralogy. Another talk, “The Church’s Message to the World,” which Eliot delivered in early 1937, recapitulates several of the themes contained in these earlier broadcasts; like the “Modern Dilemma” broadcasts, it was published

immediately following the broadcast event in The Listener; later, in 1939, Eliot included it as the Appendix to The Idea of a Christian Society. In these talks, Eliot explicitly adopts the voice of what Edward Said, in his own BBC Reith Lectures, delivered in 1993, has called the “amateur” intellectual and repudiates in a manner common to much of his social criticism the authoritative tone of his earlier literarycritical broadcasts in order to address a general audience familiarly on a topic of wide concern-–“a subject,” Eliot says, “which comprehends everything under the sun” (“Christianity” 382). More specifically, Eliot sees himself as writing at a historical moment marked and marred by an increase in the social fragmentation that had begun with the “downfall of monarchies” in the late eighteenth century and then developed through the Darwinian and industrial nineteenth century. In the introductory paragraphs of his first talk in this series, the terms of Eliot’s contextualizing remarks recall such Victorian critiques of “machinery” as those of Dickens, Engels, and perhaps especially, Carlyle. Eliot’s own moment, he thinks, is one in which “we seem at times to be labouring to perfect small parts . . . of a vast machine which works very badly in performing some function which is unknown to us, if it have any function at all” (382). Eliot adopts the persona of the amateur to question the “tyranny of the expert”––“The present,” he says, “is . . . very conspicuously an age of the amateur”––and because it is only through this adoption that he feels able to raise a fundamental ethical question. “We feel,” he says:

The ethical question toward which Eliot gestures here is a rearticulation of the fundamental Platonic one: How to live life well? Eliot asks his audience to consider how to live a worthwhile or “justifiable” life as individual members of a larger social and, indeed, cosmic whole, at a historical moment when “vast machinery” of various types was threatening further and increasingly rapid social, religious, and moral fragmentation. A few months before Eliot delivered his “Modern Dilemma” talks in early 1932, between late September and late December 1931 Harold Nicolson had broadcast his nine-part series on “The New Spirit in Modern Literature” under the general rubric, “The Changing World.” In his attempt to define the mental attitude characteristic of “the modern spirit” or “the spirit of the age,” Nicolson posits a basic distinction between writers such as J.M. Barrie, John Galsworthy, and Hugh Walpole, whose great popularity might have seemed to warrant them a place among the age’s representative spirits, and those such as Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Eliot, whose work was then relatively unknown but who, from his perspective,

had most integrally explored the complexities of the early twentieth century’s “changing world.” In his first talk in the series, “The Approach to the Intellectuals,” Nicolson-–described rather wittily by a Listener editor as “an interpreter between the modernist writers who never explain themselves, and the public which often finds them impossible to understand” (545)––explains his decision to ignore the more popular writers in favor of those “who are trying to express new formulae;” these “pioneer writers,” he continues, “are not concerned with conventional values,” and their aesthetic experiments represent “a perfectly natural reaction against the inheritance of the past. The nineteenth century wasted so much energy in finding methods of expression which would save them from calling a spade a spade that the twentieth century have adopted the spade as a mascot of liberation” (546). In addition to explaining his understanding of the modern zeitgeist and briefly discussing his chosen writers, Nicolson also offers a prediction regarding the sources to which future literary historians will look to discover the modern spirit. “The spirit of the age,” he writes:

From the dual perspective of radio historiography and modernist studies, it is interesting to note the irony that it is precisely to “the columns of the popular press” that one may turn today to discover some of the ways that many of Nicolson’s “more active minds” were negotiating the cultural, social, religious, and moral complexities of the early twentieth century. By early 1932, less than three years after it was founded, The Listener was itself a mass-market publication, and the Radio Times, having commenced publication in 1923, had achieved a readership in the millions. A more nuanced understanding of the modernists “as interpreters of the saddened complexities of the post-War period” requires, then, that we examine not only the canonical works by these writers but also those which, intended for rapid consumption by the mass audience engendered by radio, often found their way into print in the pages of the popular press. In his ninth and last talk in the “New Spirit” series, “The Modernist Point of View,” Nicolson perhaps alludes to The Waste Land in his discussion of modernism as a multifaceted and often desperate response to the Great War. Nicolson, himself a practitioner of a distinctively modernist, or postStracheyesque, method of biographical writing in Some People and other works, here speaks in an Eliotic idiom. In the years immediately following the War, Nicolson writes, “We were left in a world of crumbled ideas. We analysed the ruin” (1108). He goes on to explain the “essential value” of modernist writing: it is

“passionately sincere;” it strives to legitimize previously unacceptable content; it “provides unrealized beauty;” and it “wage[s] war upon the second-hand.” He speaks also of some of the ways that “the disillusion of the War generation” resulted in the introduction of new elements into English writing. Foremost among these is the element of contrast. This element, Nicolson writes:

Although Joyce is the writer who, for Nicolson, most forcefully expresses the modern “contrast between the desired and the attainable, between the unreal and the unreal . . . between literature and life,” it is Eliot, surveyor of the unreal city, who ultimately epitomizes-–in Eliot’s own words-–a new type of specifically poetic “dissociation of sensibility” and who, in response both to the first World War and to the “variety and complexity” of modern civilization, achieves the most “various and complex results” (“The Metaphysical Poets” 64-5). But if modernist writing had been impacted by the first World War in this way, it is equally true that it was also a natural response to recent developments in mass culture. As himself a regular broadcaster, a practitioner of a recognizably modernist mode of life writing, and a close friend or associate to many modernist writers and artists, Nicolson was well positioned to comment on the nuances of those relations. There is, Nicolson explains, “a historical justification for the alleged selfishness of the modern school” (684). Thus, in the third broadcast in his series on modern literature, “Are Modern Writers Selfish?” he asserts that, in addition to their embrace of the rather schizophrenic attitude of contrast following the Great War, another characteristic the modernists shared was a selfishness that appeared inevitable because of altered conditions in the production, dissemination, and consumption of written and visual culture. This selfishness also reflected a fragmentation of social and cultural life. “The modern audience,” he writes:

Together with the BBC’s early guardians, many supporters of public service broadcasting during the 1920s and 1930s attempted to allay the fear of booksellers and indeed of print publishers of all kinds that broadcasting would cause the demise of or a sharp decline in reading. John Reith himself was well aware of this fear, which he addressed in Broadcast over Britain; he called it “one of the most pregnant facts in the whole problem of the influence of broadcasting” (132), and admitted that “It would be unfortunate indeed if broadcasting were to have a prejudicial effect on reading. . . . Properly handled, it ought to have exactly the opposite effect” (131). Nicolson likely goes too far in attributing a direct causal link between, say, increased cinema attendance and an ostensible growth in the reading public. Nevertheless, like Reith he was sanguine about the potential positive impact of radio listening on British reading habits. However, unlike the firmly Arnoldian Reith, who believed that broadcasting would nurture these habits by introducing listeners to “the things which are worth while” or “[t]he literature which endures”––thus leading them independently to read more books, channeling their potential intellectual energy into a current wherein to discover their higher selves (Broadcast 133)––Nicolson sees radio as a sort of anarchic force that was indirectly causing the disintegration of a common culture or at least exacerbating its increasing depersonalization and atomization. Writers like Desmond MacCarthy, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and their Bloomsbury Group colleagues generally welcomed this change; for them, the breaking up of the reading public into uncommon groups of widely diversified aesthetic preferences represented a positive movement toward an increased democratization of taste and of ethical judgment. For H.G. Wells, radio was a medium that, in the right hands, might disrupt traditional national allegiances and lead to greater global unity. For T.S. Eliot, however, such rupturing was part and parcel of the general social and moral heterodoxy of modern life, a mere “labouring to perfect small parts” of a vast and unknowable social “machine” in the absence of a shared set of common values. His decision, therefore, to speak on “The Modern Dilemma” from the perspective of an “amateur” intellectual unimpeded by the “tyranny of the expert”––much, Eliot notes, as Bertrand Russell had done in his own talks on the same subject just a few months earlier-–suggests his Reithian desire to use radio as a means of restoring a common culture. Printed in The Listener on 16 March 1932, “Christianity and Communism” appears in typographic counterpoint to a poem by Stephen Spender that itself offers an interesting ideological counterpoint to the moral content of Eliot’s broadcast. The first page of the printed text of Eliot’s talk literally surrounds Spender’s “After They Have Tired,” a lyric poem that, operating across a wide discursive range, combines economic imagery with rich allegorical and Biblical allusion and imagery of the working classes to herald a communist revolution that will occur through the explosive imaginative regeneration of the proletarian will. In the last stanza of his poem, apostrophically addressed to his “comrades,” Spender implores his readers:

Spender’s views are in clear contrast to those of Eliot, who explains in his talk that “all our problems”––that is to say, all of the most pressing problems of the modern European world-–“turn out ultimately to be a religious problem. Its most pressing form, probably, is the economic problem; but economic questions depend finally upon moral questions, as morals depend upon religion” (“Christianity” 382). Both poets agree that the most urgent expression of the modern problematic, “probably, is the economic problem;” yet the manner in which Eliot introduces religion into the equation is what most sharply distinguishes his views on the modern dilemma from those of Spender, who ultimately rejoices in the “failure of cathedrals.” Eliot, for his part, desires “the organization of the world in a Christian way” as the better alternative between Christianity and Communism; whereas the latter “religion” offers the alluring prospect of “efficiency,” Christianity, as Eliot sees it, is the only religion, and therefore the only model of social organization, that offers “more liberty than we have now, more freedom of choice, more opportunity for all to obtain the real goods of life” (“Christianity” 383, italics in text). In her recent essay “To Murder and Create: Ethics and Aesthetics in Levinas, Pound, and Eliot” (2003), Jewel Spears Brooker argues that by the late 1940s, and specifically in his 1948 United States Library of Congress talk “From Poe to Valéry,” Eliot “complete[d] a process begun years before-–a withdrawal of commitment to self-reflexivity in language. In my view, it was the war and particularly the Holocaust that underscored for him the folly of such a commitment” (62). Brooker locates the beginnings of Eliot’s vacillation between “allegiance to the aesthetic,” on the one hand, and his suspicion of the insufficiency of the aesthetic as a means of “salvag[ing] the ruins of life,” on the other, as early as 1922, when in the conclusion of The Waste Land Eliot’s “cascade of fragments” suggests art’s inability adequately to redeem life, to shore against its ruins (66-7). Brooker points out two other “crises” that caused Eliot to “question the sufficiency of art” (66). The first of these centers on his religious conversion in the mid-1920s, which led him to “reject . . . the idea that art can be a substitute for religion” (67). The second, Brooker writes, was forced by World War II. Invoking Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of the “other” in her argument that Eliot’s developing ethical sensibility resembles that of Levinas in two key ways-–a shared concern not only with the idea of otherness but also with the religious and ethical concepts of “infinity” and “totality”––Brooker claims that in East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, to take three significant examples from Eliot’s poetry, “The most important moral characteristic of the artist . . . is humility, humility before language, before history, before the other” (68). In other words,

according to Brooker’s argument, by the end of the second World War, and even by the late 1920s, Eliot had moved a great distance from his early concern, expressed most forcibly perhaps in “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923), with “making the modern world possible for art” (Eliot, Selected Prose 178). However important such moments of crisis were to Eliot’s ethical questioning of the redemptive value of art, his “retreat from aestheticism,” as Brooker calls it, was a prolonged and gradual process, one punctuated by these moments of particular urgency. It continued, she writes, “throughout the 1930s, with his Criterion editorials and cultural criticism showing increasing concern for the social and religious dimensions of art” (67). One might point to another moment of crisis in Eliot’s gradual but persistent movement away from aestheticism and toward a more religious understanding of culture. This was the moment when Eliot decided to offer his thoughts on the modern dilemma in the voice of the amateur intellectual to a mass listening public. By so doing, he also challenged the sort of criticism that, as Nicolson explains in his 21 October 1931 broadcast on the modernists’ putative selfishness, had been commonly directed at the purveyors of “the new spirit in literature” for more than a decade. “The most serious criticism,” Nicolson tells his listeners:

With “Christianity and Communism,” and in fact, with his “Modern Dilemma” series of broadcasts as a whole, Eliot may be seen deliberately to have challenged this popular view of himself in several ways: in both the fact of his broadcast (that is to say, in the fact that it was a broadcast) and its intellectual content, he showed himself as a modernist writer who was nevertheless keenly aware of his “fellow citizens” and, moreover, deeply “concerned with the hopes and sufferings of the rest of humanity.” He also showed a willingness and even an eagerness both “to comprehend the experiences of other and more ordinary people [and] to render his own experiences comprehensible to them.” And he began defining himself in these broadcasts as an “inclusive” writer, if of a markedly parochial type. According to Virginia Woolf, Eliot had “died” when he converted to AngloCatholicism in 1928: he “may be called dead to us all,” she told a correspondent, referring to her Bloomsbury friends (qtd. in Ackroyd 161). Woolf is, of course, speaking in jest. But Eliot’s decision to broadcast his views on the modern dilemma over the airwaves four years later as a “fellow citizen” did complete a

resurrection of sorts: his entrance into broadcasting coincided with the strengthening of his religious beliefs and with his going public as a social critic. With respect to Eliot’s ethical views, too, his venture into broadcast social criticism marks a significant moment in his career as a social and religious thinker and as a cultural theorist. Indeed, the very availability of radio-–and more exactly, the availability of a mass communications institution devoted to public service broadcasting in the national social and moral interest-–itself was perhaps partly responsible for the trajectory of this development. Speaking for radio helped Eliot to acquire what Michael Coyle calls “a humane tolerance of mass culture unusual among modernist critics” (“T.S. Eliot on the Air” 143)––a claim that should be modified in light of many other early twentieth-century critics’ use of the new medium-–and also encouraged him to cultivate an informal style that, somewhat paradoxically, achieved “that quality of disembodied vocality sometimes possible when a priest speaks for his flock” (153). This activity also prompted Eliot, owing in part to his perennial and vigorous self-reflexiveness as a social and moral thinker, to consider ethical issues in relation to the existence and intellectual function of the new communications technology and cultural form. With the exception of one long paragraph in his Criterion commentary for April 1938, in which he reflects frowningly on how some unnamed social reformers had been backing radio as a vehicle of “the preservation or the revival of country life”––these “benevolent people,” in Eliot’s opinion, “want to make country life more endurable [by] aiming to make it more suburban,” when in fact “what the wireless can do is to tempt country folk to stay up too late when they ought to go to bed in order to get up early” (482)––Eliot never apparently produced a commentary on radio in the way that, say, Forster did in his 1944 broadcast on Milton’s Areopagitica, that Wells did in his “Man’s Heritage” broadcast, or that even Virginia Woolf did in Three Guineas-–and all of these commentaries and analyses are very brief.1 He did use his reputation for what must be considered good ends in the 1950s and 1960s, when he wrote generously detailed letters to D.G. Bridson asking the latter’s help in securing paid broadcasting work for Eliot’s friends in financial need (Lilly Library, Bridson MSS, T.S. Eliot to D.G. Bridson, 20 October 1955 and 17 April 1956). But with regard to Eliot’s specific contribution to ethical discourse over the airwaves during the 1930s, a briefer but more telling reference to relations between radio and ethics occurs in the second of his “Modern Dilemma” talks, “Religion and Science: A Phantom Dilemma.” In “Christianity and Communism,” his first talk in the series, he had described the contestants in the only “real dilemma”

confronting the modern world-–namely, the “religions” of Christianity and Communism. In “Religion and Science,” Eliot clarifies his characterization of religion as presupposing “an entity to be adored” and one that “requires genuine self-sacrifice” (428-9). He also debunks the notion of a genuine dilemma between religion and science as such; and he examines both the historical impact of science on religious faith-–or more accurately, the relative historical synchronicity (as opposed to causal relation) of scientific development and “progressive spiritual degeneration” (429)––and the mutually sustaining relation between the general modern fascination with mechanical invention, on the one hand, and the decline of Christian belief, on the other. Eliot views the modern world as the inheritor and habitual propagator of a more or less rational skepticism constituted in part by a refusal to acknowledge “the good things that we have given up . . . the belief in holy living and holy dying, in sanctity, chastity, humility, austerity, asceticism, the belief in . . . Christian Tragedy” (429). Because of this conviction, he accuses contemporaneity of a thoughtless acceptance of the great moral value of mechanism, including the machinery of the microphone itself. “I dare say,” he tells his listeners:

Ironically, the success of Eliot’s dogmatic proposal to disavow “scientific discovery” as a moral benefit and return to a considered Christianity as the sole guide to “what is ultimately desirable” would, if successful, entail the elimination of the specific communications medium whose existence he was harnessing to convey his message and with whose custodians he was in fundamental moral agreement (428-9). Eliot’s “Modern Dilemma” broadcasts demonstrate his deep sympathy with the “common sense Christian ethics”––or with the idea that the embrace of Christian ethics was a genuine index of common sense-–whose dissemination, along with that of an Arnoldian notion of culture, John Reith had made the moral cornerstone of his directorial agenda in the first 16 years of British broadcasting. During the months when Eliot was preparing and delivering his “Modern Dilemma” broadcasts, his personal life intersected in a suggestive way both with his views on modern mass technoculture and with his developing moral convictions. In one of his three brief references to Eliot’s involvement with broadcasting, Peter Ackroyd notes quite simply that in his “Modern Dilemma” talks Eliot, “concerned with the place and importance of Christianity in the modern world . . . emphasized the need for ‘holy living and holy dying . . . sanctity, chastity, humility, austerity’” (192). To this, Ackroyd offers a juxtaposition that, with respect to Eliot’s moral agenda in this broadcast series, is interesting not exactly for any explicit connection that it reveals between Eliot’s life at this time and his broadcast aims, but rather, for a connection at which it metonymically

hints. Ackroyd discusses the final stages in the erosion of Eliot’s first marriage, and notes that “in 1932, the final year of his marriage, he strove to maintain the familiar pattern of life until the end. . . . [H]e gave a series of talks on the radio. They were entitled ‘The Modern Dilemma’” (192). In the third broadcast in the series, “The Search for Moral Sanction,” Eliot observes “in the present state of society . . . an extraordinary muddle of social and moral values” (480). Qualifying the proposal he had made the previous week regarding the need to “dispense with” “scientific discovery” as a means of recuperating a more legitimate and permanent source of moral authority, he argues that “I do not want to see machinery destroyed, but only to repeat that a machine age requires a fresh economic theory, and a fresh economic theory requires a fresh viewpoint in morals, and a fresh viewpoint in morals must get back to the foundations of morals” (480). The general purpose of this talk is to examine the relative merits of psychology and religion with respect to the articulation and establishment of a moral code. Although he is suspicious of psychology’s ability to account for “the more intense, profound and satisfying emotions of religion” (446), Eliot grants-–as is so often the case in his critical writings, without defending his position through close argument-–that “certain psychological theories” have a degree of “moral utility” when they are “fundamentally Christian.” In the final analysis, however, only Christianity is capable of offering moral sanction in the modern world, of resolving the modern dilemma; it is the only intellectual or spiritual system that, as he sees it, can adequately answer the question, “What is machinery for?” (480). Or, to paraphrase Ezra Pound’s formulation from a different context, Christianity is, for Eliot, the best and perhaps the only means of redeeming the age’s accelerated moral grimace. When considering Eliot’s search for a moral framework appropriate to the redemption of modern life from “the obvious menaces of scientific invention” (“Search” 480), it is useful to recall Michael Levenson’s catalogue of some of the early twentieth century’s most acute anxieties. “It is fair,” Levenson writes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Modernism:

In the “Modern Dilemma” broadcasts, Eliot directly or indirectly addresses each of these concerns. He is especially concerned, in the final two talks, with “the fate of the West” as that fate, if it were to be a redemptive one, related to the widespread adoption of an absolute or orthodox moral framework. The thrust of his argument is contained in one sentence from “The Search for Moral Sanction”––“Without the love of God there is no love at all” (446, 480). If, as with the Bloomsbury Group members in general or more recent thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Williams, and Emmanuel Levinas, being ethical entails the feeling and expression of love toward others, or if the ethical begins in

empathic relations with others in the exclusively material or purely immanent sphere of human relations, then it is difficult to characterize Eliot’s position as precisely an ethical one. If being ethical presupposes, or if ethics as such relies on, transcendent sanction, then Eliot’s passion is indeed an ethical one. This latter understanding of ethics has been characterized, notably by Deleuze and Williams, as “morality;” both philosophers worked to clarify the ethics-morality distinction that informs much poststructuralist ethical thinking. As Williams uses the terms, for example, in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), “‘ethical’ is the broad term to stand for what the subject is certainly about, and ‘moral’ and ‘morality’” refer to a “narrower system” (6).2 Williams further explains current connotations of “morality”:

“Morality” and “ethics” are terms that in common usage are generally interchangeable. For Williams, however, to think of “ethical philosophy” as “moral philosophy” is conceptually to privilege a “special system” (7). Williams, sharply attuned to the historical development of the ethical in modern Western culture-–that is, to the historicity of the concept of ethics-–observes that the “narrower system” of morality has come by and large to stand in for the ethical. In short, from Williams’s perspective, this moral standing-in, with its connotation of duty to social convention, involves a reification of dominant social norms and values at the expense of minority values, or the reification of the idea of a transcendent, transhistorical norm to the exclusion of alternative values. Williams’s approach to that development recalls Samuel Hynes’s historical observation that beginning near the end of the nineteenth century in England and culminating in the age of Edward VII, “the forms of values” became the values themselves (5, italics in text). “Conventional standards of behavior,” Hynes continues, “which had developed from the evangelical ethics of a century earlier had become rigid and empty gestures of decorum, important not because they

implied moral rightness, but because they seemed to protect social stability, public morals, religion, and the British Empire against the threat of change” (6). Eliot himself stridently disavows merely conventional understandings of Christianity, explaining that he is “frightened . . . of the ‘Christianity’ that many Englishmen have learned at school; that Christianity which is merely one of the finishing processes of that over-produced commodity, the gentleman” (“Building” 502). His own allegiance lies, he says, with an orthodox, if unconventional, notion of a pure or “real” Christianity (502). Eliot’s deontological understanding that “Without the love of God there is no love at all” and that this love of God is an abslute prerequisite to loving human relations-–statements that subsume the ethical in no uncertain terms to orthodox religious and moral duty-–leads him in his “Christianity and Communism” broadcast also to insist upon the universality of his vision. He announces in this talk his commitment to “the organization of the world in a Christian way” and speaks of “the Christian organization of society” as “an ideal towards the realization of which non-Christians can co-operate” (383). Here, Eliot is speaking specifically of, and to, Christians in England, but his implicit scope is much broader, as he makes clear in the title of the final broadcast in his “Modern Dilemma” series, “Building up the Christian World.” In the body of this talk, Eliot writes with perhaps some disingenuousness that he “cherish[es] the . . . modest hope that every individual” in a rejuvenated Christian world “will be a Christian so far as he is anything” (501). He also reaffirms the conviction, increasingly strong for him in the early 1930s, that the only basis for genuine human relationships is a shared commitment to fundamental Christian principles. “Building up the Christian World” ends with the summary statement: “My whole purpose [in the “Modern Dilemma” series of broadcasts] has been to stimulate the belief that a Christian organization of society is possible, that it is perhaps now more than at any previous time possible; to encourage the search for it and the testing of all offers of reform and revolution by its standards”––and with Eliot’s acceptance of “sin” as intrinsic to human nature and his hope that “we can surely labour towards a social justice in this world which will prepare more souls to share not only here but in the Resurrection” (502).3