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. Lawrence (who wrote a novel set in Australia, while living in a small town in New South Wales), E.M. Forster (who overcame writer’s block and began his last novel), and Virginia Woolf (who wrote a short story, ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, which she expanded into a wonderful novel). As Kangaroo was published in 1923, A Passage to India in 1924 and Mrs Dalloway in 1925, the reality behind Goldstein’s chronological arrangement seems weak.

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Goldstein is an enthusiast for literature with the right measure of self-belief. He crackles with excitement about the making of books and the creating of literary reputations. His admiration for his four chief protagonists gives a nice temper to his own book: there is no one whom he wants to show up or do down. Einstein and Patrick Hennessy, scientist and historian, both took as their motto: ‘Never lose a holy curiosity.’