As someone who's groped his way through the bramble patch of artistic anti-Semitism, I had a natural sympathy with Paul Dean in his review of Craig Raine's new biography of T.S. Eliot. Admirably, if also a touch self-consciously, Dean refrains from the inevitable "issue" for as long as possible. That Eliot disliked the Jews is so hackneyed a notion as to induce no shock or scandalous reply at this stage.
I have left until last the matter of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, not wanting it to swamp the review. Raine opposes the case first made extensively by Anthony Julius in T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996) and since taken up by Ricks, George Steiner, James Fenton, and others. In brief, Raine contends that Eliot’s detractors have distorted his comments in After Strange Gods (but his suppression of the book is surely a material fact), have failed to see that the alleged anti-Semitic lines come in poems which are dramatic monologues (and hence are not authorial utterances), and have discounted Eliot’s explicit denials of malice and some later statements supporting Jews. Raine admits that clinching evidence for his defense is lacking, though without mentioning that this is partly because the Eliot estate is dragging its feet over publishing the relevant volumes of the poet’s correspondence. He wants to enter a “plea of mitigation.” The element of special pleading here arouses unease. My hunch, for what it’s worth, is that Eliot, when newly arrived in England, absorbed the casual anti-Semitism fashionable in the social circle to which he aspired to belong, and that when he realized the truth about the Holocaust (whenever that was) he felt, for whatever reason, unable either to repudiate his earlier views or to state his new ones plainly. It was too late to alter his poems, which had too long been in the public domain, but he put conciliatory statements into circulation as opportunity allowed. It seems very difficult to maintain that he had simply never been anti-Semitic at all.
Evelyn Waugh, too, tried to make up for a lifetime of bigotry in his Sword of Honor trilogy by giving half-cocked tributes to God's chosen people, of whom World War II, at battle's end, was seen to have been a necessary rescue operation. But Dean is surely right: Eliot actively scorned the Jews as innate subversives who were irreconcilable with his medieval Christian utopia.
The poetry comes away cleaner than the criticism in this respect. People who take objection to "Gerontion," for example, quote,
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.
— forgetting that the speaker here is an "old man," which Eliot himself decidedly was not in 1922 when these lines were put down. Only a philistine automatically assumes the opinions of a fictive character are those of its author, even if, as Eliot went to great trouble to show later on, he thought much worse of the Jews than his poetic creations did. "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" — try harder, please. Aim also for originality: Shakespeare had the first and final word on tracing the sinking rot of Venice to the bearded bondsman. Or compare the Jewish figures in Eliot's poetry to "Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant / Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants" in "The Waste Land." No one ever reads this description as anti-Greek sentiment.
"Free-thinking" is the key modifier of "Jews" in Eliot's shabby polemic After Strange Gods. All you need to know about the poet's anti-Semitism is that it was ineluctable from his suspicion of political radicalism, and in this way rather resembles the paranoia that gripped Stalin in the years before his death. Eliot much admired the Kremlin mountaineeer, not just as a wartime ally but as a liquidator of intellectuals and "rootless cosmopolitans." (Churchill, though he certainly made up for it, felt the same way about Stalin because he killed more Communists than Hitler ever could.)
Eliot was the one who got Faber and Faber to reject Orwell's Animal Farm for fear that its obvious anti-Communism might offend Uncle Joe. Orwell got the last laugh, however. In 1984, he has O'Brien tell Winston Smith that his future is the ultimate waste land, by his activities with Julia in the underground he'll be reduced to "splinters of bone and handfuls of dust."
There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
I would also add to any further discussion of Eliot's feelings toward the Jews how the famed New York intellectuals, coalescent around Partisan Review in the 30's and 40's, were completely enthralled by the haunting, apocalyptic symbols of modernism. Irving Howe said that part of Eliot's appeal was his biography: a shabby-genteel banker from St. Louis ups and moves to the world capital of London and redefines himself as — though I normally shudder to use this term, I think it's actually the best one in this instance — the voice of his generation. That was the boot-strapper tale par excellence, consonant with the poor but precocious immigrant's dream to "make it" in America.
The history of socialism is filled with these intriguing concatenations between leftist politics and reactionary art. Cultural conservatives are excellent at identifying the angst and anxieties of an age, and in the service of painting or literature, they rise to the level of diagnosticians. The revolutionaries who tilt against them hope to administer the cure. Trotsky (pay attention here, Dan Freeman) famously wrote of the Futurist poet Mayakovsky that he was greatest as a poet precisely where he was worst as a Bolshevik. He was still trapped in a pre-Revolutionary bourgeois aesthetic, but this was eminently useful in cultivating and refining the post-Revolutionary one.
Such sophisticated sensibility — which, had it been successful, might have done something worthwhile with socialist realism — carried to the tenements of the East Bronx, and later to the book-lined railroad apartments of the Upper West Side, where, as Bellow once satirized Eliot (in Yiddish, no less), "the women [came and went], talking of Marx."
So you might say that Eliot's anti-Semitism was ironic and paradoxical; he had the profoundest impact on the very Jews that had him twitching in his tweeds.