Illustrating Eliot: Edward McKnight Kauffer and the Ariel Poems

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ion, and flattening the planes of perception emerged from his poster designs of the 1910s–20s prior to his success in the London publishing world from the mid1920s. From 1915, the British transport administrator Frank Pick commissioned a series of posters by Kauffer depicting London boroughs and various English countryside landscapes, as well as advertisements for winter sales reached by underground train. Kauffer’s Winter Sales posters feature abstracted shapes in bold colors to represent commuters in coats with stippled effects and diagonal stripes to represent snow and rain. He assimilated different styles and schools of graphic art into his poster designs and later illustrations, and his range of underground posters united the conventions QUIN / edward mcknight kauffer and the ariel poems 61 of Japanese color prints, Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster designs, and Vorticist painting (Haworth-Booth, Kauffer, 27–28). The Winter Sales posters were particularly admired by Fry for the experimental design and abstract forms, which Fry believed the public were more receptive to on their daily commute: “It is surprising, what alacrity and intelligence people can show in front of a poster which if it had been a picture in a gallery would have been roundly declared unintelligible. The judicious frame of mind evidently slows the wits very perceptibly.” According to Fry, the silhouetted, simplified, and abstracted forms of shoppers braving the weather were readily identified as such on the underground hoardings. Outside the galleries of high art, or indeed beneath them in Kauffer’s subterranean gallery, the public was more receptive to abstract art and experimentation. The ubiquity of poster adverts might allow the modern artist to smuggle in a new style and cultivate new modes of appreciating art. For Kauffer, this abstract simplicity was a fundamental property and requirement of modern poster design. In The Art of the Poster (1924), he stressed that the compositional arrangement of a poster was necessarily different from “pure painting” because of the demands of advertising. The poster must convey a set of facts to the spectator with a perceptible immediacy that also “remain[s] impressed upon his memory.” Kauffer’s reputation as the preeminent “poster-king” has been duly cemented by recent critical and curatorial attention (Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 212). However, his prolific illustration work and book cover designs have received less attention. Elements of Kauffer’s poster design aesthetic, his insistence on symbols and compositional arrangements that were simple but memorable, proved complementary to his burgeoning work as an illustrator. From the 1920s–30s, he worked for some of the most prominent publishers in London, including Francis Meynell at Nonesuch Press, Victor Gollancz, Harold Curwen, Richard de la Mare at Faber and Gwyer, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Hogarth Press. Similarly, by the mid-1920s, Eliot was a well-established cultural figure in Bloomsbury through the success of The Waste Land in 1922, and from 1924–25, parts I to IV of The Hollow Men appeared as discrete poems in various combinations in Commerce, the Criterion, the Dial, and Harold Monro’s Chapbook Miscelllany. Kauffer’s first minor illustration of an Eliot poem was a commissioned cul-de-lampe, or typographic ornament, in Monro’s Chapbook magazine for “Doris’s Dream Songs,” which would become parts II and III of The Hollow Men. Eliot insisted on a tailpiece illustration to the poem because he wanted two pages to himself. He informed Monro that “as I particularly should not be willing to appear on the same page with anyone else, I will immediately produce another 1⁄2 page of verse if you have any difficulty with the cul-de-lampe.” To fill the bottom half of the page, Kauffer executed a small black-and-white vignette that alluded to the “cactus land” and “stone images” of the poem. In this tailpiece, we can see key features of Kauffer’s illustrative aesthetic: the use of abstraction and simplification, the interplay of light and shade, and crucially, a discerning eye for textual detail in Eliot’s difficult modernist verse. As Lorraine Janzen Kooistra has noted, an aesthetics of graphic minimalism took hold at many publishers and little magazines of the high modernist period in Britain. On the one hand, a formalist emphasis on the words alone informed the presentation M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 62 of verse on the page, free from the contamination of elaborate textual ornaments or worse yet commercial advertisements. On the other hand, avant-garde illustrators of the period sought more ingenious and subtle means of incorporating graphic work into the text that drew nuanced interpretations of the relationship between text and image. Faith Binckes has noted that the status of illustration was elevated in the 1910s–20s as the art of the line and reproducible monotone art in little magazines was set in opposition to the elaborate and sometimes gaudy reproductions of paintings as full-color illustrations in Victorian books. In the 1890s, Walter Crane criticized the tradition of photomechanically reproduced paintings as book illustrations prevalent in the late nineteenth century as “simply pictures without frames,” bearing no formal relation to the type and layout of the printed page. Crane preferred linework or woodcut book decorations that shared the same processes of book design and printing as the type and letterpress. The black-and-white graphic austerity of modernist magazines like Rhythm and Blast was celebrated through a critical language of graphic art that emphasized rhythm, pattern, linear simplicity, and abstraction. Like Wadsworth, C. R. W. Nevinson, and William Nicholson, Kauffer’s linear poster art and black-andwhite linework was commended by critics for its tone and rhythm, terms formerly reserved for the art of painting, as we will see was the case in Fry’s discussion of Kauffer’s Burton illustrations. Marianne Moore surmised of Kauffer’s art at large that the “shadows are as arresting as objects” and the reserved “language of blacks and grays is color.” Part I of “Doris’s Dream Songs” printed in Monro’s Chapbook roughly translates into part II of The Hollow Men, recalling “death’s dream kingdom.” On the following page of the Chapbook, part III of the dream song marks a tonal shift with deictic gestures towards a series of desert images: This is the dead land This is cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man’s hand Under the twinkle of a fading star. In the barren scene of Eliot’s poem, towering stones and cacti appear as totems in the “dead land,” receiving supplication and prayers without the promise of redemption. Eliot is returning to a favorite trope from The Waste Land by hollowing out a religious iconography: the twinkling star, the stone idols, and elsewhere in the dream songs, the blackened river. Kauffer’s cul-de-lampe fills the empty space of the second page with images appropriate for the barren landscape. Where sections I and II in the Chapbook publication revolve around fluid and immaterial settings—“death’s dream kingdom,” “death’s other kingdom,” “between life and death”—the arid iconography of the final section provides appropriate material for a tailpiece illustration. That Eliot was prepared to add verses rather than be placed alongside another poet shows his intention for a closing section befitting either a blank space or a similarly barren tailpiece. Of QUIN / edward mcknight kauffer and the ariel poems 63 course, the periodical publication of poems or prose alongside corresponding graphic material is typically lost in their standardized reprinting in collections or anthologies. If the Chapbook printing of “Doris’s Dream Songs” shows this in miniature, Eliot’s subsequent Ariel Poems underscores how indirect deictic and ekphrastic gestures take on a new significance when read alongside Kauffer’s cover and frontispiece illustrations. 1925 was a seminal year for Kauffer. He received a retrospective solo exhibition of his poster designs by the Arts League of Service and moved further into the business of book illustration with a substantial commission from Nonesuch and Curwen presses. The Nonesuch Press illustrated edition of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy was a new departure in several respects. It was Kauffer’s first illustrated book, commissioned by Francis Meynell. The project also afforded Curwen Press the opportunity to experiment with watercolor stenciling for several illustrations in forty specially printed vellum copies of the book, making the Nonesuch edition of Burton’s Anatomy the first large scale pochoir stencil operation in Britain. Kauffer therefore availed himself of Curwen’s stencil work from its inception, experimenting with opaque gouache and lighter stippled effects in stencil to create his varied and textured illustrations. Executing the pochoir technique by hand was immensely time consuming, and Harold Curwen employed a team of stencilers, all women from the Curwen bindery, to complete pochoir illustrations in watercolor or gouache. Paul Nash identified a “new aesthetic value for the ‘stencilled’ book” in the light of Curwen Press publications by Kauffer, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, and others. Nash admired how “the colour for each picture is applied separately by hand” at Plaistow, “not impressed by a mechanical device.” There was also an admirable fidelity to original designs as the Curwen stencilers worked by hand. The stencilers used the same brushes as Kauffer in his originals and incorporated small sponges and toothbrushes to create the stippled and splattered effects (Nash, “The Stencil,” 113). In subsequent years Kauffer refined his craft alongside the Curwen stencilers with commissions for Melville’s Benito Cereno (1926), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1929), Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (193