Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 2 (2019), p. 325

To those who know little of the organic movement’s early history, linking T. S. Eliot with the philosophy of organicism may seem rather far-fetched. After all, Eliot was a banker and publisher whose poetry memorably described the ‘unreal city’ where he lived and worked, with its lonely typists and its swarms of commuters. But this is only part of the picture. The poet and novelist Richard Aldington recalled country walks with Eliot which revealed his responsiveness to natural beauty. Eliot’s sensitivity to the English landscape is apparent at times in his Four Quartets, and he was baptized into the Anglican communion not in a metropolitan church, but at Finstock in the Cotswolds.

Jeremy Diaper’s argument in T. S. Eliot and organicism goes way beyond such circumstantial considerations, though, presenting a wealth of evidence to show that Eliot attached great importance to farming and to a thriving rural culture and economy. He saw them as vital to the health of the nation, both physical and spiritual, and through his work as an editor and publisher played a key role in promoting the organic cause during the 1930s and ’40s. In demonstrating this, Diaper incidentally lends weight to the thesis of my book The origins of the Organic Movement: that the movement emerged from a context in which Christian social thought and the idea of a God-given natural order were prominent features.

Diaper begins by tracing the roots of Eliot’s agricultural awareness to a period well before his active involvement with organicism. As early as 1915, Eliot praised America’s schools of agriculture as ‘better and honester places than its universities’, because they did work which could be taken ‘seriously’ (p. 1). There follows a close analysis of how Eliot used agricultural and fertility symbolism in The Waste Land. Diaper shows that Eliot ‘was absorbed by the idea of the desert and the fertility of the soil in a poetic sense’ (p. 13), before becoming concerned about soil exhaustion in a literal sense and about the social importance of farming. He rightly emphasizes the link in Eliot’s thought between restoration of the soil and cultivation of a religious sensibility, and notes The Waste Land’s references to the unhealthy lives of city-dwellers, with their diet of tinned foodstuffs.

By the early 1930s agrarian issues were a recurrent theme of Eliot’s social criticism, and the majority of Diaper’s book analyses his contribution to three journals which fostered organicism: The Criterion, The New English Weekly (NEW) and The Christian News-Letter. In an article for the Review in 1998 (AgHR 46 part 2), I identified the NEW as ‘A Forum for Organic Husbandry’. Eliot served on its editorial board, and Diaper’s chapter on that journal reveals that the Four Quartets (three of which first appeared in the NEW) can be interpreted ‘in relation to the agricultural topics that were raised with conspicuous regularity in the journal’ (p. 96). Diaper’s study of The Criterion, which Eliot edited throughout its 17-year run, has led him to regard it as a ‘platform for agricultural perspectives’. The Criterion featured reviews of many books on agriculture, and contributors included leading organicists such as Montague Fordham, Rolf Gardiner, Philip Mairet and H. J. Massingham.

Diaper’s chapter on The Christian News-Letter argues that Eliot’s involvement with this publication – as a member of the editorial committee and occasional guest-editor – is ‘integral to a complete understanding of his agricultural thinking’ (p. 99). The chapter contrasts Eliot’s vision of a Christian society based on a series of rural communities with the farming projects of Rolf Gardiner (Dorset), Ronald Duncan (North Devon) and John Middleton Murry (on the Suffolk/Norfolk border). Through this contrast, Diaper ‘indicate[s] the limits of Eliot’s agrarianism’ (p. 100). It was tempered by mistrust of the paganism with which Gardiner, in particular, flirted; and by the belief that agricultural communities were not ends in themselves, but could be the means of reviving an Anglo-Catholic spirituality in the post-war world.

Diaper also examines Eliot’s role as a director of Faber and Faber, the company which published so many of the early organic movement’s canonical texts. He provides evidence that Eliot’s contribution to this policy was at least as significant as that of Faber’s agriculture editor Richard de la Mare.

I have two problems with Jeremy Diaper’s book. First, he evades the contentious issue of Eliot’s ‘alleged’ (p. 175) anti-semitism, on the grounds that it has been discussed at length elsewhere. As to whether Eliot was implicated in the organic movement’s radical-Right tendencies, Diaper notes his considerable affinity with the outlook of Gerard Wallop (Viscount Lymington, later the Earl of Portsmouth), but says this was only in relation to Wallop’s ideas on agriculture and rural life. In my article on Wallop (‘Organic Society: Agriculture and radical politics in the career of Gerard Wallop, 9th Earl of Portsmouth (1898–1984)’, AgHR 53 part 1), with which Diaper does not engage, I contend that his political outlook was closely intertwined with his views on these matters. Wallop was one of the early organic movement’s most dedicated anti-semites, and the extent of Eliot’s sympathy with his ideas requires more analysis than Diaper offers in his somewhat disingenuous dismissal of the subject.

Secondly, and more importantly for readers of this journal, the book lacks any real sense of the agricultural context, other than offering a handful of brief references to issues such as mechanization and the neglect of arable land. Readers are left unaware that an agricultural revolution was taking place. The organic movement was in part a reaction against the proposals of influential figures like C. S. Orwin and Sir Daniel Hall, who urged increased specialization and use of chemical fertilizers, and identified efficiency with output per worker rather than output per acre. While Eliot dreamed of a nation based on religious communities which practised organic husbandry, Fisons, ICI and the agricultural machinery industry were driving government policy towards the 1947 Agriculture Act and the subsequent reign of agri-business.

Nevertheless, despite this lacuna, Jeremy Diaper’s monograph offers a convincing case for T. S. Eliot’s major role in propagating the organicist philosophy.