Muddled in minutiae

‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his quarterly review of literature, the Criterion, which had its first issue in October 1922. Eliot wanted an eminent French author as a contributor: ‘the only name worth getting is Proust’, he told Ezra Pound. As the founding editor of the New York Times books website, Goldstein is attuned to cultural fashions, publicity drives and the politicking of literary factions. And so he makes a painfully reductive explanation of Eliot’s remark: ‘The importance of Proust was publitical above all.’

1922 was the publication year of P.G. Wodehouse’s The Clicking of Cuthbert and of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophus. It was the foundation year of the Laugh-a-Gram cartoon film company (proprietor, Walt Disney). But there was nothing ‘publitical’ about Wodehouse or Wittgenstein, and so Goldstein turns his focus on Eliot (who finished and published The Waste Land), D.H.