Public Eliot Sightings; Eliot at the Center for Advanced Study, 1948

A couple of public TSE sightings:

All Will Be Well: A Memoir (Knopf 2006), by John McGahern, Irish novelist. A phrase from "Little Gidding," the fourth of Four Quartets, TSE's last great poem.

Disturbing the Universe (Pan Books, 1976), by Freeman Dyson. Cited in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Vintage 2006). A adapted phrase from an early poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Bird and Sherwin retell an amusing anecdote: In 1948, thanks to a newly established "Director's Fund," Oppie invited TSE, among other humanists, to the Center for Advanced Studies at Princeton -- TSE accepting for fall term 1948. TSE was "snubbed" by the center's mathematicians, and anyway kept to himself, spending more time at the university than at the center. "Oppenheimer was disappointed. 'I invited Eliot here,' he told Freeman Dyson, 'in the hope that he would produce another masterpiece, and all he did here was to work on The Cocktail Party, the worst thing he ever wrote.'" (Bird and Sherwin 377)