T. S. Eliot And Anti-Semitism

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1999 by R. F. Fleissner

At this point it might be helpful to resort to some particular instances in his writings which have been a cause for alarm and see just what we can make of them objectively. The most notorious is probably his use of the phrase 'freethinking Jews' in a talk at the University of Virginia, which was printed then in his collection After Strange Gods (but then never reprinted because he admitted that he had composed some things that were not well enough written). One of America's leading Eliot scholars, whose name I hereby reserve the right to withhold in print, has instructed me at a T. S. Eliot Society annual meeting in St. Louis a few years ago that the very title of Eliot's book represents in fact a give-away. In other words, what Eliot meant to suggest was that Jews who were 'free-thinking' represented followers of such liberal prototypes as Freud and Marx (not Abraham). Later he was known for admitting that, in such a respect, it would seem he did not mean to single out merely Jews as being such 'free-think ers.' It is arguable, by some, whether Marx himself was much of a Jew, his heritage notwithstanding. In any case, it might be contended that such an expression as 'free-thinking Jews' when taken by itself does sound bigoted. The immediate context qualifies this appreciably, though the term itself might better now be dropped.

Another example worth some scrutiny is his reference to a 'jew merchant' in a familiar letter to Pound. Again the expression when taken by itself is defamatory. But again context has to be seen for what it is as well. The main point here is that evidently he was playing up to Pound's own proclivities with his phrase, trying to placate him in other words. Such an 'occasion' would not totally excuse the term in question, but at least it gives it an understandably more human touch. Along with this is the fact that such an expression was more or less endemic among his fellow Americans. If that was so, he was probably trying to conform to a colloquialism, one which in one form or another was used and quoted even in poetry. This is notably true, I have found, with the anthologizer Louis Untermeyer, himself Jewish, insofar as he included Southern poetry with the expression jewboy, for one, in his collection Modern American Poetry. Because of my having had some of my graduate school training in the South, I witnesse d the use of the term cited by Untermeyer even in a private conference by one of the most distinguished professors of English at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (a personal friend of Frost's, it so happened, not Eliot's). So the key point again is that if terms like 'jewboy' and 'jew merchant' (even in the uncapitalized form, used by Eliot in his earlier poetic references but later revised) derived from a certain cultural heritage, the heritage itself was basically to blame, not Eliot himself necessarily.

Another example worth momentary treatment at least is the fact that one original section of The Waste Land, which he then later discarded, was entitled 'Dirge' and contained a passing, plausibly offensive reference to the money-making Bleistein. Having examined the original manuscript in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, I can verify that even Pound himself had qualms about this short verse, assigning there the label of 'doubtful' to it. Fortunately Eliot did not have the lyric printed because of possible overtones it had. In a word, he himself recognized the dangers inherent in such a stereotyped association of a Jew (with a German name) and money-making. The basic issue, however, is whether in fact proper conservation of money is not a fundamental human prerogative, hardly one limited to any one ethnic group, though (granted) one may be more talented at it than another. Aware of sinister implications of the name of Bleistein, Eliot widely discarded this jeu d' esprit of his from his most impressive overall assemblage which warranted the modernist label of The Waste Land. Besides, 'Dirge' was simply not well enough written.