Offlist, Piet Wesselman and Franc Gavin have suggested that I troll the
used book stores, and Seamus Cooney has suggested that if the Paige
_Selected Letters_ is indeed out of print it should be possible for me to
get the whole thing duplicated by a commercial copy service. Thanks to you
all, and I'll write Norton instantly to see about getting permission to
copy. For the purposes of ordering a whole class's worth of books,
Professor Cooney's suggestion is probably the one to start with.
 
As to Burt Hatlen's question: yes, Norton is the distributor of New
Directions books, not (as I wrongly said) the successor to New Directions.
The relationship between the two companies is made clear by the following
note, just received from the Norton rep for my campus.
 
 
>Professor Morse
>
>A new edition is in the works but it will not be ready for awhile because
>the editor is not well.  There is no plan to reprint the current edition.
>This is the word from  New Directions.  There are no copies in the Norton
>warehouse.  Sorry for the bad news.
>
>Todd Wheeler
><[log in to unmask]>
 
 
And speaking of gloom: I agree with Jonathan Gill that Valerie Eliot's
edition of TSE's letters through 1921 is wonderful -- if not for the
primary material, then at least for the footnotes. But that volume was
published eleven years ago, and -- after I don't know how many promises
from Faber & Faber in the interim -- it now seems probable that Mrs. Eliot
just isn't going to release volume 2. I should think we'd see even more of
the "low" Eliot there, at least if the editor were allowed to print the
antisemitic letters to John Quinn which Louis Menand has discussed in
paraphrase. But I guess we'll have to wait a few more generations for those.
 
On the other hand, sursum corda, and consider this heartening anecdote.
 
Anthology editor after anthology editor has protested against the
exorbitant costs of reprinting Eliot. The extreme case, I suppose, would be
Rothenberg & Joris's _Poems for the Millennium_, vol. 1, whose table of
contents will point you to something called "[The Waste Land]." Look up
that bracketed phrase on the indicated page and all you'll find is a note
telling you to read the poem in some other book. But that gesture of
defiance and despair dates from 1995. Two years later Eliot's copyright
expired, and now you can buy _The Waste Land_ for $1 in a Dover Thrift
Edition. That groaning sound you hear is the author of _Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture_ turning over in his grave.
 
Jonathan Morse