Scofield Thayer

Poet and publisher Scofield Thayer was born in Massachusetts in 1889. His father was the owner of several mills. His uncle Ernest Thayer was a poet, best known for “Casey at the Bat.” During his schooling at Milton Academy, Harvard University, and Oxford University, Thayer made acquaintances with the likes of T.S. Eliot as well as E.E. Cummings— who stayed in a Harvard dormitory named after the Thayer family.

Thayer met his wife, Elaine Eliot Orr, in the fall of 1912; the two married in 1916. A year into the marriage, they were living separately, with Thayer eventually pushing for an open relationship. Confiding in the couple's friend Cummings, who wrote his poem “Epithalamion” for their wedding day, Elaine claimed her husband had become detached and uninterested in their relationship. She and Cummings began an affair, which Thayer supported. When Elaine bore a child, Nancy, presumably fathered by Cummings, Thayer took the girl in as his own, providing for her past the couple's divorce in 1921.

In 1919, during Elaine's pregnancy, Scofield and his friend James Sibley Watson Jr. bought the storied magazine The Dial, for which they both worked. The Dial, in its first iteration, was founded in 1840 by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, serving as the chief publication of the transcendentalist movement before being shut down four years later. It was revived in the 1880s as a politics and literary criticism magazine before being sold to Thayer and Watson, who set out to make The Dial a radical outlet for Modernist literature.

Thayer served as editor in chief of The Dial from 1920 to 1926. Watson valued experimentation more than Thayer did, but Thayer’s relative conservatism kept it from being shut down by United States obscenity laws. Thayer also kept the magazine afloat financially—The Dial lost $100,000 in the first year alone. During that year, the magazine published many influential Modernist writers, such as Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Kenneth Burke, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, E.E. Cummings, Kahlil Gibran, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Bertrand Russel, and W.B. Yeats. Thayer regularly contributed his own poetry as well.

In 1922, The Dial published T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Thayer thought the poem was “disappointing”—although he had similar sentiments for works such as Ulysses, about which he wrote, “never before since the world began has a man of such talent written so dull a book.” 

Despite spending vast amounts of time and money heralding the vanguards of modern literature, Thayer held volatile opinions about much of what the magazine published and despised almost everything to do with modern life itself. He eventually became paranoid, suspicious that the staff was out to get him and fearful that his rival Albert Barnes, a competing art collector, would divulge damaging personal information. In 1924, Barnes wrote a letter threatening to expose Thayer as a “pervert” and to “illustrate the story with photographs.” Around this time, Thayer’s personal writings started to show a deep hatred of his ex-wife and his mother.

In 1921, after his divorce, Thayer moved to Vienna and started weekly psychoanalysis sessions with Sigmund Freud. Thayer claimed his struggles moved Freud “to tears.” His mental health took a severe decline in 1924. After resigning from The Dial in 1926, Thayer continued to float the magazine financially until closing it in 1929 at the insistence of his mother. The magazine had fallen out of favor, even with the writers it had promoted heavily. William Carlos Williams, winner of The Dial Award in 1926, complained to Ezra Pound that The Dial was “a dead letter among the publisher crowd.” A year after his mother's death in 1936, Thayer was declared insane.

For the rest of his life, he traveled with servants and nurses between houses in Martha's Vineyard, Boston, Florida, and Bermuda. Thayer spent most of his time in white robes, writing. He outlived all the heirs named in his will, passing away in 1982 at the age of 93. He was buried in Worcester, Massachusetts, his birthplace. The local newspaper was the only publication that reported his death.