A Major Minor Document

Summary

In the mid-1940s, Eliot produced a series of interrelated essays, lectures, and radio broadcasts on the idea of culture. His thinking on this topic would find its ultimate expression in Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), and three of his mid-decade pieces would enter that book as chapters. Culture, broadly speaking, had been among Eliot’s central concerns since the late 1920s, but the particular constellation of issues that come together in Notes—the multiple meanings of “culture” as a term, the roles of classes and elites in the creation and transmission of culture, the interdependency of regional and national cultures, the relation of culture to religion, etc.—is a product of his wartime experiences and of his participation in two discussion groups: the Moot, organized by J. H. Oldham, and the Chandos group, led by Maurice Reckitt.2 Until now, Eliot's 1940s writings on culture have appeared to form a network of independent works with a terminus in Notes but no distinct origin. The discovery that the whole network emerges from one piece of writing dating from the fall of 1941 provided an exhilarating moment in my editorial collaboration with Ronald Schuchard on volume 6 of the Complete Prose. “It's as if we’ve just come upon the source of the Nile,” I said.

Among the fugitive items whose place in the volume was not immediately evident was a two-page typescript that appeared to be an outline of an essay on culture. Eliot enclosed this document with a letter to Mary Trevelyan postmarked November 26, 1941, yet neither this letter nor other surviving correspondence give any clue to its origins or his intentions for it. As I studied the unpublished document, I became convinced that it was in fact a draft outline of the 1943 essay “Notes towards a Definition of Culture,” the earliest piece in Eliot's series on culture.

Eliot's letters of 1941 provide circumstantial evidence for this hypothesis. On June 21, Eliot told Reckitt that Faber & Faber was “decidedly interested” in a proposed collection of essays on the future of Christianity, adding that he himself would like to contribute a chapter, although he would not be able to begin work on it for some time. He had committed his summer to his editorial work on A Choice of Kipling's Verse.