Escaping the chill of the Paris winter, a stooped thirty-three-year-old poet named Thomas Stearns Eliot entered a quiet restaurant and peered around the room for his dining companions: the Irish novelist James Joyce, the modernist impresario Ezra Pound, and an American publisher named Horace Liveright, who was hoping to establish his publishing house, Boni and Liveright, as the principal purveyors of modernism. Eliot, an American who had acquired an English accent while working as a banker in London for the past few years, had just arrived in Paris after spending two months in Switzerland recuperating from a nervous breakdown.
Indeed, T.S. Eliot had been suffering against his era for at least a year, lamenting to a friend that “the whole of contemporary politics etc. oppresses me with a continuous physical horror like the feeling of growing madness in one’s own brain. It is rather a horror to be sane in the midst of this; it is too dreadful, too huge. It goes too far for rage.”
Channeling these feelings of disillusionment, Eliot had just finished writing his longest and best poem to date, “The Waste Land,” and he was confident that its publication would contribute toward the swelling zeitgeist of the modernist movement. Ezra Pound, who helped Eliot revise the poem into its final form, promoted “The Waste Land” as the pinnacle of modernist poetry, promising that it was “as good in its way as Ulysses.” By the end of that Paris dinner, Liveright offered Eliot an advance of $150 on 15% royalties for the right to publish the first edition of “The Waste Land” in the fall.
With the first edition of Joyce’s Ulysses also forthcoming, 1922 promised to be a watershed year for the modernist movement.
But Eliot’s agreement with Boni and Liveright didn’t stop him from also shopping “The Waste Land” to Scofield Thayer, the new co-editor/co-owner of The Dial literary magazine. Note: these negotiations were taking place without either publisher reading the text itself. The poem was being sold on vibes alone.
Thayer was eager for The Dial magazine to publish the poem, sight unseen, but he was unwilling to haggle over the price; by policy, The Dial paid all contributors, whether famous or entirely unknown, $10 per page of poetry. Thayer was only willing to increase his offer to $150, about a month’s pay of Eliot’s salary as a banker. However, Eliot wrote to Pound that Thayer’s dealing had been ungracious, “as if he were doing me a great favour.” The negotiations then broke down over a garbled telegram: rather than asking for £50, Eliot’s telegram read “CANNOT ACCEPT UNDER !8!56 POUNDS.” In response, Thayer pointed out that he and James Watson Jr., his co-editor/co-owner, were “running The Dial with a very large annual deficit: we have had to make personal sacrifices to keep it going. It would not be possible for us to pay higher rates than we already pay to our contributors and to continue in existence.” Indeed, Thayer and his co-owner Watson were both paying around $4,000 out of pocket each month to cover the magazine’s deficits and to keep The Dial spinning. Together, Thayer and Watson were patronizing modernism at the equivalent cost of nearly $2 million annually in today’s money. We might excuse Thayer for a measure of indignation at being pressured to spend more on Eliot’s poem.
Thayer’s business partner, Watson, though, was dismayed that The Dial might miss out on publishing one of modernism’s major works and rekindled the negotiations a few months later. In August, Watson requested that Eliot send him a copy of the poem. Eliot did so, and when Watson finally read The Waste Land, he found it “disappointing.”
Nonetheless, Watson offered to publish the poem on exceptionally good terms: not only would he pay $150 for the poem, but Eliot would also receive The Dial’s annual prize of $2,000 (roughly equivalent to $37,500 in today’s money) in recognition of Eliot’s “service to letters.” This offer was too good for Eliot to pass up, but it was complicated by his contract with Boni and Liveright, which he had signed only three weeks earlier.
Eliot maneuvered beguilingly between these two entangling publication agreements. He suggested to Watson that Liveright “would delay publication as a book until the new year” and then played the other side, claiming that The Dial had “suggested getting Liveright to postpone the date of publication as a book, but I have written to them to say that it seemed to me too late to be proper to make a change now.” Eliot struck a wheedling tone, writing “unfortunately,” “I see nothing but to hope,” and “it’s my loss, I suppose” before finally suggesting “if Watson wants to try to fix it up with Liveright I suppose he can, that’s his affair.”
But Eliot got his way in the end. Watson met with Liveright in New York and agreed to terms, including The Dial‘s commitment to purchase 350 of the 1000 copies of the Boni and Liveright book edition of The Waste Land, which would be delayed a month after the poem’s appearance in The Dial. And here’s the kicker: Eliot also negotiated an agreement that he could publish “The Waste Land” before anyone else in volume 1, number 1 of The Criterion, the literary magazine Eliot himself was preparing to launch.
Ultimately, “The Waste Land” appeared in three separate publications within the span of three months: first in The Criterion on October 16, then in The Dial on October 20, and finally in the Boni and Liveright independent volume on December 1. These interactions took advantage of an emerging network of modernist institutions.
The first edition(s) of “The Waste Land” also benefitted from modern marketing and advertising practices. The Dial magazine, with a monthly circulation of 9,000, pursued a wide marketing campaign for the poem, arranging for it to be displayed prominently in newsstands and bookstalls in all major cities and transit hubs. Similarly, Liveright doubled his normal advertising budget for the launch of the book, and it’s first run of 1,000 copies sold out within two months.
Boni and Liveright’s marketing and packaging of the book leveraged the positive critical reception from the poem’s previous publications in The Criterion and The Dial earlier that fall.
On the book’s dust jacket cover, Liveright highlighted Eliot’s winning of The Dial’s 1922 award, and the inside flap quoted critics’ positive reviews, one of which called it “the finest poem of this generation.”
In these ways, Eliot’s poem achieved a popularity that made its publication a cultural event. “The Waste Land” quickly became shorthand for literary modernism’s brand of intelligent disillusionment, its creative repurposing of a broken civilization’s obscure fragments.
Ironically enough, The Waste Land became the most fertile ground for planting modernism’s seeds.
Sources and Further Reading:
Ackroyd, P. (1984). T.S. Eliot: A Life. Simon and Schuster.
Eliot, T.S. (2011). The Letters of T.S. Eliot Vol. 1: 1898-1922 (V. Eliot and H. Haughton, Ed.).Yale.
Kirk, R. (1971). Eliot and his Age: T.S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. Sherwood Sugden & Company.
Pound, E., Thayer, S., Watson, J. (1994). Pound, Thayer, Watson, and The Dial: A Story in Letters (W. Sutton, Ed.). University of Florida.
Rainey, L. (1991). “The Price of Modernism: Publishing The Waste Land” in R. Bush (Ed.) T.S. Eliot: The Modernist in History (91-133). Cambridge.