A Hundred Visions and Revisions: A Professor’s
Journey to Uncover the Works of T.S. Eliot
By Rebekah Fitzsimmons
“Dear Professor Schuchard,
I remember that in 1975 you wrote me a thoughtful letter after
reading my husband’s Clark Lectures, and I have always been
interested in what you have had to say about his work over the
years. ... I am now writing to ask if you would like to edit the
Clark and Turnball Lectures. I do not know what your present commitments
are, apart from the Yeats letters, but if you are willing and
able to undertake this task, I should like it done as soon as
conveniently possible. Yours very sincerely, Valerie Eliot”
In 1987, Emory Professor Ronald Schuchard received this letter
from the widow of Nobel Prize Laureate T.S. Eliot. Over the next
six years, Schuchard worked on the Clark Lectures that Eliot delivered
at Trinity College in Cambridge and on the Turnbull Lectures Eliot
gave at Johns Hopkins University. In 1993, Schuchard published
The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, a collection of these
previously unpublished lectures.
Schuchard, Goodrich C. White Professor of English at Emory, boasts
a long and distinguished career as a professor and researcher.
In addition to The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry,
he is co-editor with John Kelly of The Collected Letters of
W.B. Yeats, Vols. 3-5. Schuchard regularly rubs
elbows with contemporary writers like Seamus Heaney and Salman
Rushdie and was instrumental to the foundation of Emory’s
Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, which will host
Umberto Eco in 2008 as its 20th-anniversary speaker.
In 2005, Mrs. Eliot asked Schuchard to work on a project again
involving her husband’s literary legacy: a complete collection
of Eliot’s prose to be published by Faber and Faber and
by Johns Hopkins University Press. “I would see [Mrs. Eliot]
yearly from 1987 when I was working on all of this material,”
said Schuchard. “We became friends and gradually the trust
and the friendship led to this project, which is the highlight
of my academic career.”
Throughout his life Eliot remained a prolific writer, but many
of his essays and addresses remain unpublished. “[Eliot]
collected about 88 essays in several volumes, but we have over
700 prose items that are uncollected,” Schuchard explained.
This project is significant not only for its size and scope, but
also because the Eliot estate has maintained restricted access
to this content since the poet’s death.
The collection, which Schuchard estimates will fill eight volumes
of approximately 1,000 pages each, will be divided into chronological
sections that reflect periods in Eliot’s professional life.
The first part, the major section of each volume, will contain
the works that Eliot witnessed in print during his lifetime. The
second section of each volume will contain unpublished works of
great scholarly interest and value. “These volumes will
offer many important essays and addresses that scholars and students
will be very grateful to have,” said Schuchard.
In 2006, Schuchard was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship,which is
designed to support from six to 12 months of study on a particular
project. Schuchard spent the majority of his Guggenheim year engaged
in a literary scavenger hunt, traveling to repositories of Eliot’s
papers, including
Harvard’s Houghton Library, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book
& Manuscript Library, the University of London, the University
of Cambridge, King’s College London, and the University
of Oxford, among others. Schuchard also spent a large amount of
time at Eliot’s publishing house Faber and Faber and at
the flat of Mrs. Eliot, going though her husband’s personal
correspondence and files.
This year-long search resulted in the discovery of many works
by Eliot that no one knew existed. Schuchard admitted that he
had not anticipated finding so much new material. “I thought
I would find mostly contextual material for all the essays that
are in the bibliography,” he said, holding a well-worn copy
of Eliot’s official bibliography published in 1969. “You
can see all the hundreds of items that are here, 681 prose items
in the bibliography alone. We will add 200 to that,” he
continued.
Schuchard describes an instance in which he discovered a 1938
letter from a headmaster, thanking Eliot for the wonderful address
that he had given. Schuchard searched online for the school in
Cornwall and sent a copy of the letter to the present headmaster,
inquiring “Would there be any record of T.S. Eliot coming
to your school in 1938 and talking?” About a week later,
the headmaster sent him a copy of the school’s magazine
that had published Eliot’s lecture, never published anywhere
else. “Instances like that – that happen through serendipity
– by sending off a letter and with no expectation of anything,
just trying it, an essay was recovered,” he said.
Now the work of organizing, editing, and annotating each piece
will begin. While Schuchard recognizes that there may still be
undiscovered pieces, he takes comfort in the knowledge that the
paper version of the collection will not be the final word on
the subject. “When the print edition has been out, it will
be available online and it will be searchable,” Schuchard
said. “The hunt for new pieces is still going on and will
go on as other individuals find new things in nooks and crannies.”
A digital database of all of the pieces, created by the Woodruff
Library’s Beck Center at Emory, will be made available to
Schuchard’s co-editors immediately. He explains that a project
of this size would have been difficult to complete before the
advent of the digital age. “This project would have taken
20 years to complete 20 years ago. Now the project can probably
be done in five.”
For Schuchard, this year of research was full of joy and surprises.
“I discovered aspects of his biography of which I had no
notion. The sheer range of his generosity – he would give
addresses to benefit church groups, a society called Cecil Houses
to benefit destitute women in London, societies for the blind,
and to raise money for turning books into Braille. He did all
that! He was in the world and of the world and very much in demand.”
Like Eliot, Schuchard’s generosity extends well beyond the
academic. Over the past five years, Schuchard has worked to set
up an educational memorial to George Brumley, an Emory pediatrician
who perished with his entire family in a plane crash in Kenya.
Schuchard has brought Emory administrators, staff, and students
to Kenya to assist in refurbishing a school by donating recycled
lab equipment, textbooks, and extra copies of encyclopedias. The
IT department staff has assisted by installing surplus Emory computers,
making the Meru school one of the few schools outside of Nairobi
with Internet access. “For everyone who has been [to Kenya]
it has been a life changing experience,” said Schuchard.
“You can’t change Africa or the whole nation [of Kenya],
but you can take an area and make a big difference.”
Rebekah Fitzsimmons is a 2006 Emory College graduate and currently
serves as the conferences coordinator for the Office of International
Affairs.
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