The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood

Author:James Wood
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780804151900
Publisher: Random House LLC
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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T. S. Eliot's

Christian Anti-Semitism

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1

T. S. Eliot was an anti-Semite. Anthony Julius's program, in his book I S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, is to assert the centrality of Eliots anti-Semitism in his thought. Anti-Semitism, he says, was Eliot's inspiration, his muse,- he was that rare anti-Semite, one who was "able to place his anti-Semitism at the service of his art",- he "trained himself to be an anti-Semite." To conjure this centrality, Julius argues that anti-Semitism occurs at the heart of some of Eliot's greatest poetry. Julius is brave and occasionally right. His anger has the glow of righteousness. But it is the color of simplicity. His book is tendentious, misleading, and unremittingly hostile. He has written an unstable book about an unstable subject,- reading it is like watching a maniac trying to calm a hysteric.

First, there must be a conspiracy, and some long corridors. Julius contends that Eliot's anti-Semitism has been scandalously ignored or apologized for. "Almost from the start, dissenting voices were rarely heard. . . ." But Julius passes over the amount of influential criticism there has been of Eliot's anti-Semitism. Since the publication of Eliot's three anti-Semitic poems in 1920, and certainly since the publication of Eliot's University of Virginia lectures in 1934, in a volume entitled After Strange Gods, readers have been aware of Eliot's tendencies. Stephen Spender attacked Eliot's anti-Semitism in 1935, and Lionel Trilling hinted at it in 1943, followed, over the next decade, by The Saturday Review of Literature, Partisan Review, and the TLS. In the last twenty years, hardly a year has passed in which a book or essay has not appeared that has mentioned, and often censured, Eliot's anti-Semitism (these critics include Graham Martin, Roger Kojecky, Russell Kirk, William Empson, George Steiner, Christopher Ricks, Leslie Fiedler, Cynthia Ozick).

Julius announces that he is an admirer of Eliot's poetry, and that it is his admiration that draws him to this delicate subject. But his book is violently critical. Being praised by Julius is a brisk affair. The closest the book gets to the free pastures of praise is this: "It is in the Four Quartets, and not in his prose criticism, that Eliot's conservatism finds its most considered, cogent expression." Julius's business is to paint Eliot as racist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic. The idea seems to be that the three demons are separate but pull together, like hardworking chefs, to prepare the feast of prejudice. But things are a little undercooked. For instance, Eliot's racism, for Julius, is as much a matter of silence as noise. His lectures to the University of Virginia, since they presuppose the racial uniformity of Virginia, "overlook the entire Black population of the South." Julius then reaches for two famous lines from "The Dry Salvages," the third poem of Four Quartets:

Time the destroyer is time the preserver,

Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops

Eliot grew up in St. Louis, and as an old man recalled seeing the Mississippi in flood, when it flows at "such speed that no man or beast can survive it.

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