T.S. Eliot's day job at Lloyd's Bank

http://therumpus.net/2012/01/a-peaceful-but-very-interesting-pursuit/

by gruseom • 14 years ago

64 15 14 years ago

pg• 14 years ago

Someone should write a book just about the day jobs (and sources of income generally) of famous people. It's hard to imagine an aspect of history that's more overlooked.

gruseom3• 14 years ago

Apparently when Wallace Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize, one of his colleagues at the insurance firm said "What – Wally a poet?"

http://www.kevinstevens.net/writings/wallacestevens.htm

chmelynski• 14 years ago

My favorite example of this is Kafka, who worked for an insurance company. Who else but someone working in a large, bureaucratic organization could have written the kind of stuff he wrote? And his work contains some of the best reflections on the nature of modern life, the fact that we're just in this huge machine and understand at most 0.00000001% of it.

cobralibre3• 14 years ago

Jorge Luis Borges, a critic of the Peróns, was once promoted from his position at a municipal library in Buenos Aires to something like "Chief Poultry Inspector". He never filled the post.

rdouble• 14 years ago

Nobel prizewinner J.M. Coetzee's "Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II" has an interesting look at his life as a computer programmer in London in the 1960s.

Non Nobel-winner Michel Houellbecq's book "Whatever" is a dark but somewhat hilarious story obviously based on his former day job as a computer programmer.

alextp• 14 years ago

Jorge Luis Borges in a book of memoirs told that when he worked in the library in Buenos Aires as a clerk one day one of his colleagues barged into his office to show him an encyclopedia (or list of famous people, or something like that) that showed another argentinian named Jorge Luis Borges, a famous writer at that, who was born on the very day that Borges was born! (of course, it was an article about himself)

beastman82• 14 years ago

This article butchered the very first line:

Even after he published, Prufrock and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot continued to work his day job at a bank.

gruseom3• 14 years ago

They've since fixed it. There's also this solecism: "nobody wants to think about the poet [...] pouring over actuarial tables". Though it's true I don't want to think of my favorite poets destroying perfectly good actuarial tables by pouring over them.

rtperson• 14 years ago

> we know Wallace Stevens sold insurance

No he did not. He was a corporate vice president of two large insurance companies. The man was no Ned Ryerson.

The writer of this article needs to call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one.

gwern• 14 years ago

Did he start as a vice president?

cobralibre3• 14 years ago

He started as a lawyer to an insurance company. To say that he "sold insurance" is a bit of poetic license.

pinchyfingers• 14 years ago

And bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

jpdoctor• 14 years ago

Without PacBell, Scott Adams would never have given proper birth the Dilbert or The PHB. He said that he kept that job long after the success of the comic book just for the source material. He was particularly amused when somebody from a comic (who was being made fun of) would ask him to autograph their particular strip.

OK, different league. But same sentiment.

cobralibre3• 14 years ago

I would perhaps not infer too much about Tom Eliot's feelings towards his day job from a few letters to a worried mother an ocean away and a polite resignation letter. Even Eliot's letter to Ezra Pound, which expresses quite a different view of his work at the bank ("Of course I want to leave the Bank..."), must be read with some suspicion because of Pound's, shall we say, strong opinions about banking and finance.

I would be surprised, actually, if no dissertations have in fact been written on this topic. The Pound connection alone makes that unlikely.

gruseom3• 14 years ago

Any dissertations presumably would lack this material, because Eliot's letters are only just being published. That's what's behind the OP and a good many recent posts about the renascent Eliot.

It's astonishing that Eliot's letters are only being published now (and then only a small, early fraction of them). The reason appears to be that his second wife, who was much younger than he, is still alive and exercising tight control of his legacy.

Pound's mentorship of Eliot is well known, of course. What Pound doesn't mention in the letter where he praises The Waste Land as the poem of the century is that he himself had edited it practically to the point of co-authorship.

T.S. Eliot's day job at Lloyd's Bank

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