一篇为爱略特反犹辩护的经典评论

王敖

CLASSIC REVIEW
After Strange Gods

   
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[We\'re celebrating the 115th anniversary of T.S. Eliot\'s birth by revisiting James Wood\'s eloquent defense of the poet against charges of anti-Semitism, first published in TNR in 1996 and also available in his book The Broken Estate. That summer saw the publication of Anthony Julius\'s controversial T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, which argued that Eliot used anti-Semitic tropes to "empower" his poetry. "In addition to making us reexamine Eliot and his work, Mr. Julius has forced us to rethink some of our most fundamental, received ideas about art, ideas that for years protected Eliot from the sort of scrutiny found in these pages," Michiko Kakutani wrote in an admiring review for The New York Times. Wood reexamines the statements by Eliot that Julius found anti-Semitic, and discovers that in many cases Julius omitted or misconstrued crucial phrases. "Julius is brave and occasionally right," Wood writes. "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 an hysteric." --Ruth Franklin, Associate Literary Editor]



T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form
by Anthony Julius
(Cambridge University Press, 308 pp., $49.95)



I.

T.S. Eliot was an anti-Semite. Anthony Julius\'s program is to assert the centrality of Eliot\'s anti-Semitism in his thought. Anti-Semitism, Julius 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 poems. 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 an 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, and lacked influence." Julius passes over the considerable 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 titled After Strange Gods, readers have been vividly aware of Eliot\'s tendencies. Stephen Spender attacked Eliot\'s anti-Semitism in 1935, and Lionel Trilling alluded to it 1943, followed, over the next decade, by critical discussions in The Saturday Review of Literature, Partisan Review and the Times Literary Supplement. In the last twenty years, hardly a year has gone by in which a book or essay has not appeared that has mentioned, and often censured, Eliot\'s anti-Semitism and its historical and cultural roots. The critics have included Hyam Maccoby, Roger Kojecky, Russell Kirk, William Empson, George Steiner, Christopher Ricks, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Asher and Cynthia Ozick.

Julius announces that he is an admirer of Eliot\'s poetry, and that it 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 hard-working chefs, to prepare the feast of prejudice.

But things are a little undercooked. Thus Eliot\'s racism, for Julius, is as much a matter of silence as noise. His lectures to the University of Virginia, since they claim 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." In his essay "American Literature and the American Language" (1953), he called the Mississippi "the universal river of human life," and his noticing of the dead Negroes catches the river\'s grim universal reach--the river of life and the river of death. But Julius is scandalized that Eliot allows the dead Negroes to be "noted without emotion... Without censure the lines invoke the heritage of a commercial (cargo) slave culture. This racism of prose and poetry i.e. After Strange Gods and "The Dry Salvages" amounts to the adoption of the Confederate cause." It is true that Eliot praised the conservative Agrarians of the early \'30s; but Eliot, the frail bloom of Boston Unitarianism, one of whose cherished books was his abolitionist grandfather\'s history of a black slave, could hardly be further from the surly Confederates. This is not merely a stubborn misreading of Eliot\'s lines (where "cargo" binds together humans and animals, and suggests how the river reduces those humans), but the kind of misreading that suggests the ticking of an ideological metronome. "Without censure": Julius expects Eliot\'s poetry to make literary reparation for the slave trade. It is not allowed simply to describe.

Throughout his book, Julius is in such a rage that he whales his evidence into compliance. Consider this comment by Eliot on the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg, a celebrated British poet who died in the First World War, and whom Eliot called, in 1953, "the most remarkable of the British poets killed in that war": "The poetry of Isaac Rosenberg ... does not only owe its distinction to its being Hebraic: but because it is Hebraic it is a contribution to English literature. For a Jewish poet to be able to write like a Jew, in western Europe and in a western European language, is almost a miracle." Eliot\'s meaning is clear. Rosenberg was a distinguished English poet, but his particular addition to English literature was that he retained a Jewishness that was not assimilated; and this retention, within the pressure that the English poetic tradition exerts to surrender one\'s literary Jewishness, was almost miraculous.

For Julius, however, this is an anti-Semitic "libel" that allows "Jews an aesthetic sense, and thus a measure of creativity, but deriving only from Jewish tradition." He follows Eliot\'s quote with this paragraph:


Eliot\'s eccentric praise of the Jewish poet is consistent with his larger deprecations. "That a Jew can do this!" registers the surprise of the anti- Semite. What is it to write like a Jew? Richard Wagner explains: "The Jew speaks the language of the country in which he has lived from generation to generation, but he always speaks it as a foreigner." A Jew cannot compose German music; when he purports to do so, he deceives. The Jewish composer could only compose music as a Jew by drawing on the "ceremonial music" of the synagogue service, a " nonsensical gurgling, yodelling and cackling." These "rhythms ... dominate his musical imagination"; they are irresistible. So while the talented Jewish composer is disqualified by his race from composing German music, he is disqualified by his talent from composing Jewish music. Rosenberg was luckier. He was able, by "almost a miracle," to write in English "like a Jew." The difference between Eliot\'s anti- Semitism and Wagner\'s is defined, on this point, by the possibility of this " miracle."

This is characteristic of Julius\'s method. A passage of Eliot\'s is dropped into a stream of vicious anti-Semitic crudity, in the hope that the waters will mix. Almost every page of this book, which lavishly flows with examples of the anti-Semitism of people other than Eliot, attempts this guilt by immersion. But Julius makes Eliot mean the opposite of what he is saying. Wagner claims that the Jew tries to speak as a native but always reveals himself as a foreigner. For this reason he is incapable of great work. But Eliot praises Rosenberg for precisely the opposite quality. Rosenberg has retained a foreignness which Eliot considers a contribution and a miracle of self-preservation.

If anything, Eliot implies that the Jew will always speak as a native, and that the struggle will be to speak as a foreigner. And Eliot is careful to suggest that Rosenberg\'s foreignness is not his only quality: "does not only owe its distinction to its being Hebraic." Julius reads the passage as if the phrase "like a Jew" were simply not in the text, as if the passage read: "For a Jewish poet to be able to write in western Europe and in a western European language, is almost a miracle." This may be Wagner\'s belief, but it is palpably the opposite of Eliot\'s. Eliot is not praising Rosenberg for being able to write at all. The difference between Eliot\'s anti-Semitism and Wagner\'s anti-Semitism is not defined by the word "miracle"; it is defined by Eliot\'s not being, in this instance, anti-Semitic. At worst, Eliot\'s comment suggests a heightened awareness of Jewishness.

A critic who is inattentive to language in this way will not seem trustworthy, and Julius\'s book contains many bullied readings. Some of them are flicked off. In a brief discussion of Pound\'s anti-Semitism in the Cantos, Julius suggests that where Pound was incontinent, Eliot was economical. " Take Jewish Vienna: while The Waste Land renders it unreal\' ... the Cantos brood obsessively on it." In a book one of whose themes is the silencing of Jews and the literary triumphing over them, we are supposed to attend here to Eliot\'s calm silencing of Jewish Vienna in The Waste Land. He renders Jewish Vienna "unreal," and hence unreal also the Jewish lives it contains.

Alas, for Julius, nowhere in The Waste Land is Vienna marked as Jewish. The city\'s name appears only once, as one of a list of cities that may stand for the fragmentation, or perhaps the disordered superabundance, of civilization: "Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/Vienna London/Unreal." Nor, of course, does Vienna\'s unreality, even if it were anywhere identified as Jewish, have anything to do with silencing. Earlier in the poem, London is called "unreal" in the famous, bleak, tolling passage in which the poet sees commuters walking across London Bridge:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge,
so many,
I had not thought death had undone
so many.

The slow, lovely cortege of these lines makes hidden reference to Baudelaire and Dante: Baudelaire\'s vision is of a city of phantoms, Dante\'s is of the living dead, those who know neither good nor evil. Eliot\'s London is unreal not because its people are silenced or dismissed, but because they are phantoms moving through a city of dreams. It is not that Eliot\'s modern city-dwellers have been oppressed, or thieved of reality, by the poet; Eliot\'s point is that their lives do not have enough reality.

Eliot was not Wagner. He combined two strands of anti-Semitism: the fashionable contempts of his age and an unfashionable belief that whatever was outside the Christian Church was heretical and, literally, deadly. "If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes," he wrote in 1939, in The Idea of a Christian Society. "If you will not have God ... you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin." Eliot\'s ecclesiastical petrification is wary of competing religions and hostile to all secularism. His critical prose, usually dementedly patient, is stirred to animus whenever those anti- religionists, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley or Bertrand Russell, stray into his cloisters. ("These two depressing life-forcers" was his estimation of Russell and Huxley.) Jews, and especially "free-thinking Jews," take their place in this procession of unfortunates.

In a notorious passage in After Strange Gods, a book that he did not allow to be republished, Eliot defined his Christian society. "The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely to be either fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." This was uttered in 1933. It is indefensible.

It sounds flippant, or worse, to suggest that Eliot did not want to be taken seriously at this moment; but Eliot\'s prose has a tendency toward a mocking chilliness of tone. He is at times puerile, delighting in pulling the wings off the sensitive secular insect. In Notes Towards The Definition of Culture (1948), he suggests that to discuss the preservation of Welsh as a language is "really as much as to ask whether the Welsh, qua Welsh, are of any use?" Does one not feel him here relishing in nudity? Similarly, a footnote in his Norton lectures of 1932-33 calmly proposes that "the Roman and Communist idea of an index of prohibited books seems to me perfectly sound in principle. It is a question (a) of the goodness and universality of the cause, (b) of the intelligence that goes to the application." In " Thoughts After Lambeth" he likes to strike a Kierkegaardian note: "You will never attract the young by making Christianity easy; but a good many can be attracted by finding it difficult; difficult both to the disorderly mind and to the unruly passions."

This language, with its pellets of precision and its frozen demeanor, shocks contemporary readers. More than a century has elapsed since writers pronounced like this. In tone and in thought, however, there is little here that would have seemed unusual to Cardinal Newman. Eliot savors the shock of a word like "intelligence," aware that most readers will find "intelligence," in the matter of censorship and book-burning, trivial or irrelevant. Similarly, he squeezes the word "undesirable" for its full sap of hidden prejudice, while holding the word to its exact volume of verifiable meaning: it is not that a concentration of free-thinking Jews is grotesque or impossible or disgusting, but it is not desirable, not ideal. This language buys its shocking effects through its glacial reticence. Of course, Eliot believed what he was saying in these instances; but he took pleasure, one suspects, at the idea that he might not be believed by others.

Julius, following several critics, argues that Eliot was tellingly attracted, when discussing non-Christian groups, to the excoriation of the Jews. But there is little evidence for this--all we have are the single passage in After Strange Gods that I have quoted and a footnote in Notes about the unfortunate nature of some of the "culture-contact" between Jews and Christians, which was revised thus in 1962: "It seems to be highly desirable that there should be close culture-contact between devout and practising Christians and devout and practising Jews." All this mutuality of devoutness is sickly, of course, and merely adds free-thinking Christians to the free- thinking Jews already excluded. But in truth, Jews are barely noticed in Eliot\'s writing about Christianity, and when they are noticed, they are not awarded the fear and loathing that is reserved for Christian secularists such as Russell and Wells.

Eliot\'s obliviousness to the Jewish plight during the 1930s was a sin, but it was a different kind of sin from the anti-Semitism that Julius alleges. The Idea of a Christian Society, lectures published in 1939, makes no reference to Jews, and we may find this cruel or insensitive; but it does not, as Julius claims, "disparage" Jews, or only by omission. I do not mean to soften the obnoxiousness of Eliot\'s anti-Semitism, only to insist against its centrality in Eliot\'s thought. Christian orthodoxy was his rock; all unorthodoxies issued from enemy territory.

Eliot\'s Christianity, he explained, was not emotional and religious, but intellectual and dogmatic. Reversing St. Paul, he aphorized that in Christianity the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life. Eliot\'s family was of a distinguished Unitarian New England line. Unitarianism, from a dogmatic Christian position, is a religion of air. It is full of spirit and bereft ofletter. It denies both the reality of the Trinity and Jesus\'s claim to be the Son of God. It is optimistic, with a spiny ethical emphasis on charity and goodworks. Eliot\'s grandfather, the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, arrived in St. Louis from Harvard Divinity School and helped to found three schools, a university and a sanitary commission. William Empson speculated that Eliot\'s anti-Semitism was the embodiment of Eliot\'s hatred for his father, a Unitarian businessman.

Certainly, Eliot\'s Christianity--he was received into the Church of England in 1927--was the dark to Unitarianism\'s light. (Responding to a correspondent critical of his words about free-thinking Jews, Eliot replied that Judaism without belief and observation descends into "a mild and colourless form of Unitarianism.") Eliot plunged into the magma of religious proposition even as Unitarianism fled from it. He worked upwards from the bottom through a chain of black excruciations. As a consequence of Original Sin, man is essentially bad. Man\'s religious existence will thus be the worship of correction: " thought, study, mortification, sacrifice," as he once described it. Tending toward disorder, he must covet discipline. Politically, this will mean order, and the order provided by institutions. For the Christian, that institution is the Church. Where there is no Christianity, there is heresy, disorder, anarchy--"the anarchy of feeling," as he put it in his essay on Arnold and Pater. The Anglican thinkers whom Eliot admired, such as Richard Hooker (1554- 1600) and Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), insisted on the oneness of the Church of England and the nation.

This may be cheerless, conservative, or reprehensible to many ears. But it is a vision of completeness, and what is outside it must seem incomplete. Eliot\'s anti-Semitism needs to be seen in this light. This was the mind that could write, about religious revivalism in the 1930s, that "religion can hardly revive, because it cannot decay." "It cannot decay": Eliot\'s faith is a hard faith, and we may wonder at the usefulness of a critic of Eliot who can write, as Julius writes, that "as late as Notes he was still insisting upon the determinative importance of Christianity," as if religion were like hypochondria, to be abandoned once secular medicines have brought release. Of course Eliot was "still insisting" on this importance: he could insist on nothing else, because he could see no other. He spoke of "the incredibility of every alternative to Christianity that offers itself," and he used the word with customary formality: he could not believe in an alternative.

Some of Eliot\'s anti-Semitism, then, is dogmatic Christianity\'s anti-Semitism--not the anti-Semitism of the Church (the riots, the superstitions, the discriminatory laws, the complicity with the Holocaust), but the anti- Semitism of Christ himself. It should not be controversial to say that Christianity must be structurally at odds with Judaism, and Judaism at odds with Christianity, for Christ claimed to be both a fulfillment and a supercession of the Old Testament: "Before Abraham was, I am." Jesus used Judaism to triumph over itself, which is the point of Jesus\'s disobedience of the laws of the Sabbath, a disobedience he justifies, when challenged by the Pharisees, by quoting David. For this illegality leads to a miracle: inside a synagogue, on the Sabbath, he cures a man with a withered arm, asking, "Is it lawful, on the sabbath days, to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?"

Julius, of course, rages against the anti-Semitism of St. John, Marcion, Tertullian and the early Church, and decides that "the desire to sever Christianity from its Jewish origins is a project of many anti-Semites." What this has to do with Eliot is never made clear, since Julius himself quotes Eliot stressing the connection of Judaism and Christianity. Eliot censured Simone Weil, whom he admired, for rejecting Israel. By "denying the divine mission of Israel," wrote Eliot, she also rejected "the foundation of the Christian Church." Now, it is characteristic not so much of Eliot as of his Christianity that Israel is seen as the provider of Christianity. This will offend those who care about such things; but this is not Eliot\'s anti- Semitism, it is Christianity\'s super-Semitism. Julius is blind to this theology of supercession and, typically, storms in hysterical squalls: "Here we are meant to infer that it was Israel\'s mission to found the Church; having done so, it should have dissolved itself" is his comment on Eliot\'s sentences. He offers no evidence for the second half of his allegation.

St. Luke gives one of the Christian Church\'s most cherished stories of Israel\'s "divine mission" in the second chapter of his gospel. It is known in the Christian liturgy as the Nunc Dimittis, and it is sung or spoken every day at the evening service called Evensong. Simeon, writes Luke, an old and devout man, "waiting for the consolation of Israel," is visited by the Holy Spirit, who reveals to him that he shall not die before seeing the Christ child. Taken to the temple where the infant Jesus is being circumcised, Simeon thanks God, saying: "Lord now lettest now thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people...." The old man is ready to die, happy in the glory of Messianic completion.

Eliot put these words into verse in his poem "A Song For Simeon" (1928). The poem is spoken by Simeon, as "The Journey of the Magi" (1927) is spoken by one of the three wise men. It is a dramatic monologue. It is a frail, somewhat blanched poem; minor, but touching. Simeon prays that "the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,/ Grant Israel\'s consolation/ To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow," and ends in one of those Eliotian dying falls, the words repeated like the repetitions of ritual, so as to become a religious nudging:

I am tired with my own life and the lives of
those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths
of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

Eliot\'s poem is faithful to Luke, save for the addition of some hyacinths and Simeon\'s age. Eliot would not have altered what is a canonical piece of Christian liturgy; he offers his poem as a devout liturgy of its own kind. What mild Christian triumphalism there is in the poem--the Messiah who is Israel\'s consolation--is Luke\'s. And Luke\'s triumphalism has more to do with rejoicing, and with universal absolution, than with glee: "thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people...."

But Julius, for whom the poem is obviously an obstacle (the anti-Semite poet who writes as a Jew), sees it as "another one of Eliot\'s triumphs over Jews." First, the title seems curdlingly significant: "The song is for, not of, Simeon... The poem," he chides, "merits Alasdair MacIntyre\'s wider criticism: t he attempt to speak for Jews , even on behalf of that unfortunate fiction, the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, is always deplorable.\'"

Pass over the recollection that Eliot called one of his books, which contained an essay on the Elizabethan English divine, For Lancelot Andrewes. Pass over the thought that the critic who makes use of Alasdair MacIntyre\'s disparagement of the "so-called Judeo-Christian tradition" later attacks as anti-Semitic "the desire to sever Christianity from its Jewish origins." (Had Eliot called that tradition "so-called," Julius would stamp on him.) Because Julius has more: "Eliot gives the Jew lines that locate him, and by implication all Jews, wholly within the Christian drama. Incapable of denying its truth, but equally incapable of living that truth, Simeon welcomes death because his life is death." He continues: "Simeon does not know how to worship. Eliot allows him to condemn himself." Yet Simeon does not welcome death because his life is death, but because his life has been gloriously completed, messianically irradiated. He is located "wholly within the Christian drama" because, in a sense, he, like Israel, has been Christianized through his witnessing of the Messiah. He has been baptized into futurity. That the Jews were "a chosen people" because they were chosen to be Christians is a familiar New Testament idea (see St. Peter). This is, within the tradition, glorious, and only an unbalanced or unintelligent or tendentious critic would see it as a sinister "triumph over Jews."

  

II.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Why should we trust a critic who seems to have such narrow access to justice? Julius is a lawyer by profession, and his prose style, when not sunk in troughs of research, has a judicial tread: "This is an argument one can respect, though I reject it." But more often he merely insinuates. The New Criticism of the 1950s and its legacy, he writes, still "protects Eliot." Eliot "wrote out of Symbolism for New Criticism"--as if Eliot, in Symbolism\'s dream-kitchen, were chopping poems to order. Or this, on Eliot\'s criticism: "At its best, it enlarged a particular tradition. In the context of his poetic achievement, however, Denis Donoghue\'s remark that its flaws ... or even its merits--are hardly worth talking about\' is just." At its best, Eliot\'s criticism did not enlarge a particular tradition. It founded a new one: his own. But we know what Julius thinks of Eliot\'s"poetic achievement": "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is misogynistic; The Waste Land silences Jewish Vienna; and Four Quartets, when not racist, as in "The Dry Salvages," offers merely the "most cogent, considered expression" of Eliot\'s conservatism, a vision which Julius finds repulsive and tacitly anti-Semitic.

It is in this light that we need to examine Julius\'s claim that Eliot\'s anti- Semitism appears at the heart of his finest poetry. Why should we believe such a claim when Julius can find nothing warm to say about the poetry that is not tainted with anti-Semitism? This untainted poetry, incidentally, includes all the work for which Eliot will be remembered: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; The Waste Land; Four Quartets; "The Journey of the Magi." What, in Julius\'s vision, does "greatness" mean? How can anti-Semitism appear at the heart of a greatness which Julius seems to feel does not exist? It is not credible that Julius, the ferret of all forms of prejudice, would find Eliot\'s non-anti-Semitic poems to be somehow lacking, while finding Eliot\'s anti-Semitic poems (there are three, only) to be great or virtuosic. This would surely be perverse. But this is Julius\'s strategy, and it inevitably raises the suspicion in the reader that Julius is not telling the truth, that he likes none of the poetry, but that he needs to inflate the importance and the quality of Eliot\'s three anti-Semitic poems in order to be able to argue anti-Semitism\'s centrality in Eliot\'s work, and its thorough entanglement with Eliot\'s best poetry.

In other words, the better the poetry in which anti-Semitism occurs, the better the anti-Semitism for Julius\'s case. For were Eliot\'s three anti- Semitic poems to be seen as minor, then so would Eliot\'s anti-Semitism. The three poems are: "Gerontion," "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" and "Sweeney Among the Nightingales." They do not offer attractive reading, and Julius is at his best when supplying the dismal tradition of abuse from which Eliot\'s lines spring. In the best of the poems, "Gerontion," an old man, confused, bitter and frantic for the fertility of order, casts about himself and dribbles allusions to Lancelot Andrewes, Henry Adams, Job, St. Matthew\'s gospel, the Elizabethan poets:

My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window sill,
the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled
in London.

These lines cannot be mitigated. True, "Gerontion" is a dramatic monologue, and the old man is perhaps a bitterer anti-Semite than Eliot. (This is the usual argument in favor of Eliot\'s innocence, made most recently by Christopher Ricks.) But what we know of Eliot\'s wider anti-Semitism allows us to read, without unreasonable forcing, these lines as simultaneously lines of dramatic monologue and lines congruent with Eliot\'s own internal monologue. More devastatingly, Eliot originally published the poem with "Jew" in lower case ("jew"), enriching the typography only in 1963, when the Jew suddenly walked tall in his own capital. This emendation is an admission of guilt. It was not Gerontion who changed the typeface, it was Eliot.

Still, these are the only anti-Semitic lines in the poem, and though their foulness forces an arrest on us, we have to be able to free ourselves. " Gerontion" is a poem with an anti-Semitic rash, but the rash is confined to a limb. It is a poem blemished. One cannot say this for "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," which fawns at the Gentile reader, slobbering anti- Semitism. Bleistein, the Jewish-American tourist, ("Chicago Semite Viennese") is ridiculed, and the poem rises to this peak:

The rats are underneath the piles.
The Jew is underneath the lot.

"Sweeney Among The Nightingales" does not crawl with distaste in quite the same way, though it features "Rachel nee Rabinovitch" who "Tears at the grapes with murderous paws."

Julius\'s discussion of the anti-Semitism in these three poems is valuable, though he does not relinquish his habit of mummifying all his details in strips of historical research. One notices, though, that while he states the quality of these poems as poems, his bag of superlatives is hardly full. While hating the anti-Semitism, he is forced to claim that the lines in " Gerontion" "economically render" various anti-Semitic themes. A little later, he refers to these "charged, economical lines." Later still, he compares Pound\'s anti-Semitism unfavorably with "the charged economy of Eliot\'s anti- Semitism." In "Sweeney," he writes, Eliot, "with great virtuosity ... turns that material i.e. anti-Semitic clichés into art. He compresses it into a single, powerfully charged sentence." But this "art" appears to have only two qualities for Julius: it is economical and it is charged (and this latter comes to us by definition anyway: anti-Semitic lines are bound to be "charged" ).

Julius entraps himself. He must argue, on the one hand, that Eliot\'s poetic anti-Semitism is indebted to anti-Semitic clichés (Jews as rats), but he must also argue, on the other hand, that the poetry is not itself clichéd. For if the prejudice allegedly at the heart of Eliot\'s poetry were not original, it would not be great poetry. Inevitably, these two categories, cliche and originality, begin to slide toward each other, and at one point Julius admits that "Gerontion"\'s squatting Jew, "in his inability to find any permanent place of rest, is also Eliot\'s gesture toward that most fatigued of cultural cliches, the Wandering Jew. He gives the cliché a malignant twist in " Gerontion," and a comic twist in "Burbank."

There are readers of Eliot for whom these early poems, written before The Waste Land, are Eliot\'s most complex and daring. The poetry after 1920, for these people, is a trail gone cold. But surely Eliot\'s greatest poetry is the poetry after 1920, which is the poetry with no anti-Semitism in it. Is it impossible for an anti-Semitic poem to be a great poem? No, but it is probably harder for such a poem to be great, and Eliot\'s three poems provide the evidence. If we look at them as poems--one of Eliot\'s constant injunctions in the criticism that Julius deems negligible--we can only compare them unhappily with the poetry of The Waste Land.

"Gerontion," with its blemish, comes close to being one of Eliot\'s finer poems. The other two do not. We feel the pressure of a controlling malignity in these poems, where we feel the pressure of a helpless despair in The Waste Land. In The Waste Land, a desperate irony propels the lines. In "Burbank" and "Sweeney," by contrast, we feel the smaller category of sarcasm as the engine of the verse--in much the same way that Wallace Stevens\'s mildly anti- Semitic poem, "Winter Bells," exchanges his glassy rhetoric for a mean, swinging condescension.

In these poems ("Gerontion" excepted) the odor of light verse is merely smothered. And this is appropriate, for anti-Semitism is not mythic but vernacular: it belongs to, is owned first by, speech. Light verse is its home. In Stevens\'s poem, as in "Sweeney" and "Burbank," there is the tight gallop of light verse. The lines have a kind of rhythmic impudence, knowingly sealed in prejudice. Like Eliot, Stevens writes of "the Jew," that happily undefined definite article. Stevens\'s "Jew" prefers the trappings of Christianity and Gentile life:

How good life is, on the basis of propriety,
To be followed by a platter of capon!
Yet he kept promising himself
To go to Florida one of these days,
And in one of the little arrondissements
Of the sea there,
To give this further thought.

Florida, thanks to the Jews, has its arrondissements, and no doubt its estaminets: it has been slyly Europeanized. This is the level of Stevens\'s poem, and indeed of Eliot\'s anti-Semitic poems--the level of the jibe. And the jibe necessitates its own bright rhythm.

But Eliot\'s great poetic revolution was rhythmic; this is something that neither his poetry nor his criticism allows us to forget. It is the rhythm of a modern neurosis, a mind chopped and failing. But it is simultaneously the deeper music of lamentation, the language sinking its roots down, as Eliot said it should, into the poetic moisture: "Here is no water but only rock/ Rock and no water and the sandy road/ The road winding above among the mountains/ Which are mountains of rock without water." There is a primitivism here, the primitivism of myth.

The inhabitants of The Waste Land are mythical. Bleistein, Burbank, Rachel are made smaller than us, for we are supposed to condescend to them; they issue out of cliché; but in The Waste Land, Madam Sosostris, Phlebas the Phoenician, even the woman in the pub, are enlarged. They include us, for their demise is ours:

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to
windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome
and tall as you.

The Waste Land is founded on the principle of enlargement. Blake, in his biblical epic poem Jerusalem, turned London into a city of impossible dreams, relishing the continuity and discontinuity between the world of biblical hugeness and the ordinariness, now radiant, of London\'s place-names: "is that/ Mild Zion\'s hill\'s most ancient promontory, near mournful/Ever weeping Paddington?" Eliot learned much from Blake, and made London, as Blake did, larger than itself. London was not only London, but Dante\'s Florence, Baudelaire\'s Paris, and the Fisher King\'s sterile wastelands. Through allusion and counterpoint, London was lyricized--turned not only into Eliot\'s poetry, but into all of English poetry:

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline

In The Waste Land, the banal--the young man carbuncular, the commuters crossing London Bridge--are at once condescended to and somehow pitied; for the stored pity of European poetry is brought to watch their ordinariness. And such people are pitied, unlike Bleistein or Rachel, because the poet pities himself, too:

The awful daring of a moment\'s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

Just as Eliot went down into the theological magma for his rock, so we feel here that he has descended, made one of those "rare descents" into despair about which he wrote in his essay on Matthew Arnold. What we bring back from those descents, said Eliot, is not "criticism." No, it is not criticism; and it is not disdain, and it is not condescension. It is the knowledge that far from the public rooms, far from the forms of life ("not to be found in our obituaries"), far from society itself with its cruelties, is a loneliness whose brutality is stronger than our powers, and it enforces on us gentleness, sympathy and control.

Here, at the end of The Waste Land, Eliot suggests a despair which cannot be renovated by the consoling verticalities of hierarchy and tradition. At the end of the poem, the thunder says three words in Sanskrit: "Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata."--Give. Sympathize. Control. Eliot\'s anti-Semitic verse obeys only the last command of that austere triad. We cannot be certain that anti- Semitic poetry can never be great poetry. Our frail contemporary empiricism dares only that, on the evidence, it may not be.

James Wood is a senior editor at TNR.