The Degradation of the Modern World
ELIOT, T.S. After Strange Gods. London: Faber and Faber. 1934.
8vo. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to spine, in the dust-jacket priced 3s. 6d. net to the front flap; pp. 68; spine tips rubbed, cloth a little faded to upper and lower edges, small white mark to upper edge of rear panel, rear panel of wrapper detached (discreetly repaired), significant loss to spine, corners, upper edges, various nicks, closed tears and creasing; a very good copy, in a fragmentary but bright wrapper; signed and dated by Eliot (22 May 1947)to title-page.
A scarce signed first printing of Eliot’s troubled and troubling 1933 Page-Barbour Lectures, a volume withdrawn by the author after a single reprint the same year.
After Strange Gods collects the series of three Page-Barbour Lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933. The jacket text (most likely written by Eliot himself) states that the lectures develop, ‘after fifteen years’ interval, the implications of his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. If that essay, printed in Eliot’s first volume of literary essays, The Sacred Wood (1920), offers a theory of literary tradition and innovation (familiar to generations of English Literature undergraduates to this day), the Virginia lectures ‘were not undertaken as exercises in literary criticism [and] not designed to set forth, even in the most summary form, my opinions of the work of contemporary writers’. Instead, ‘they are concerned with certain ideas in illustration of which I have drawn upon the work of some of the few modern writers whose work I know.’ Nonetheless, in seeking to illustrate his thesis that, as the jacket concisely has it, ‘the weakness of modern literature, indicative of the weakness of the modern world in general, is a religious weakness; […] that all our social problems, including those of literature and criticism, begin and end in the religious problem’, he looks closely at the writings of Hardy, Kipling, Lawrence, and others, in relation to ideas of orthodoxy, and ‘its opposite, heterodoxy, for which I shall also use the term heresy’. For Eliot, Hardy, an atheist (though the word is not used), represents ‘an interesting example of a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs […]’, while Lawrence ‘is for my purposes, an almost perfect example of the heretic.’
The book was withdrawn by Eliot after just one reprint, in the same year as the first printing, and never reissued. This was primarily owing to a passage on pp. 19-21 advocating ‘unity of religious background’ which is hard not to read as squarely antisemitic (though many have tried). In his short book on Eliot, Stephen Spender (who doesn’t) notes that the period of the lectures ‘was a time of extreme tension for [Eliot], when he was making up his mind to separate from his [first] wife’, and that ‘the unhappiness shows in the lectures.’ He also records Eliot’s assertion ‘that when he wrote After Strange Gods he was in a state of unhappiness which distorted his judgement.’
Owing to Eliot’s complex relationship with the book, and the relatively few copies in circulation, signed or inscribed copies have always been scarce.
Gallup A25a. See Spender, T. S. Eliot (1975); Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988).
SKU: 2124307