SCOFIELD THAYER
Editor and patron of The Dial (his deep pockets allowed it to lose
$100,000 in its first year), Scofield Thayer was central to the rise of
modernism, even though he didn’t much like it. In the first issue in
1920, he published e.e. cummings’ “Buffalo Bill’s” (“how do you
like your blue-eyed boy / Mister Death?”) and other poems even
though he didn’t like Cummings’s experiments, and he published
Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which he didn’t like either. He gave James
Joyce a gift of the equivalent of $10,000 and published excerpts
from Ulysses but thought that it was a waste of a good talent. He
was still technically the editor of The Dial in 1925 but was in
absentia. From 1921 to 1923, Thayer had been in Vienna for weekly
sessions with Sigmund Freud, but his condition deteriorated when
he was home in the US, so he returned in 1925. While there, he got
Freud to write a piece for the magazine, but the staff rejected it, and it
was never published. The psychoanalytic treatments were for naught since Thayer
was, in fact, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. He moved in
with his mother and disappeared from the literary scene. He died
in 1982 forgotten, his only obituary in his hometown, Worcester,
Massachusetts, newspaper.
