T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 30, 1996 by Hugh Kenner

AMAZING, the fuss an undistinguished book has caused. Its author, Anthony Julius, is a British lawyer with a British PhD in English. Cambridge University Press emitted it in 1995, to slim notices. It slept for some months. Then, BANG! and . . . Well, let a Sunday Independent writer sum up the "hot debate":

Oxford University's professor of poetry, James Fenton, has proclaimed Eliot a "scoundrel" to a packed lecture theater. Craig Raine, the poet, has written an ardent defense of Eliot in the Financial Times. Tom Paulin, a fellow poet and lecturer at the neighboring Oxford college to Raine's, has taken Julius's side, as have the Jewish poet Dannie Abse, the novelist Will Self, and Christopher Ricks, one of Eliot's most esteemed biographers.

And that summary omits a piece by novelist/screenwriter Frederic Raphael in The Weekly Standard, where we're told a fact without pertinence, that Mr. Julius (whom Raphael calls "a young, post-Holocaust Jew") is "Princess Diana's legal counsel," complete with a typist who was miffed when he "imported a different (more discreet?) typist to deal with palatial business." On the way aloft, in short; and trailing clouds of thesis doth he come.

His strategy is both simple and legalistic: Take charge from your first court appearance. That means taking charge of what the disputed words mean. "Anti-Semitic"? But listen to this, from the very first paragraph of the Introduction:

Eliot . . . wounded his Jewish readers, if not the Jews of his acquaintance, to whom, apparently, he was "not disagreeable." Though worth noting, this is not a distinction that yields a defense to the charge of anti-Semitism. If the work, or some notable part of it, is anti-Semitic, it is the work of an anti-Semite.

Now read that again. "If the work, or some notable part of it, is anti-Semitic . . ." That takes being "anti-Semitic" as self-evident. So, if I think it's anti-Semitic, then its author is an anti-Semite. And if I think Mr. Julius is a charlatan, then a charlatan is what he is. (Do I think that? No, I think he's awfully interested in winning a case. Doctoral supervisors can be almost as pliant as jurors.)

Having seized control of the definition of terms, your strategy is to keep crowding. By late in the second paragraph we're reading this:

There is a difference between reading a text that challenges the worth of one's ideas, and one that challenges the worth of one's person. Eliot's anti-Semitic work constitutes this latter, more radical, challenge to the Jewish reader. How else could he meet these lines from "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar"?

The rats are underneath the piles.

The jew is underneath the lot.

Money in furs.

Well, one could meet those lines by asking whence they proceed. Surely Bleistein is Burbank's image of the Jew, as Yankee Burbank, thumbing his Baedeker, is worldly Bleistein's image of the tourist? Yes, that is discussable, and in detail modifiable. But even in being discussed it bears out a point. Readers of poetry need not assume that every declarative sentence comes, zap, from the heart of the author. Yet that is an assumption the Julius book makes from page 1 onward.

And for decades no one seems to have been worried by the passages that worry Dr. Julius for a whole book. In 1956 Grover Smith Jr., in his magisterial T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, thought the question of whether this poem was anti-Semitic "obviously not a pressing one." (It sufficed to say, he added, that the poem was "in execrable taste.") Ah, forty golden years ago! The Holocaust was seeping into exegetical consciousness. Former commentators hadn't felt prodded to adduce the execrable.

But since then something more has happened: a paradigm shift that alters more than our sense of anti-Semitism: that alters our sense of how a poem works, and that explains why, as Eliot criticism settled down into a long-ago orthodoxy, "anti-Semitism" didn't routinely rear its head. I'm indebted to Dr. Julius's fourth chapter for an instance. He's citing Maud Ellmann; but before I quote let me set up a context.

The Waste Land (1922) opens:

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain. We stopped in the colonnade, And went on, in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Whereas Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1390) begins,

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; . . .

And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen all the nyght with open ye . . .

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . .

It once seemed evident that Eliot's lines weighed a twentieth-century yearning against one of five centuries earlier. Fit readers, it was understood, had Chaucer's lines somewhere in mind, and could gauge twentieth-century impatience with the long wet English spring by Chaucer's assumption that spring is a time of awakening. Also, against a slow communal pilgrimage to Canterbury, punctuated by tales, we have one eager American making off for Munich, where he meets a woman who remembers how it was to have been an Austro-Hungarian Archduke's sister. (Eliot was drawing on a memory; he had met that woman, a Countess Marie.) So, once, about a lifetime ago, The Waste Land measured one age's rituals against another, the text on the page echoing against a far earlier text that sounds in the fit reader's memory. But now listen to Dr. Julius, 1995, on "the impulse to deface in Eliot's work." (His citations are from Maud Ellmann's 1987 The Poetics of Impersonality.)