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OLD POSSUM WAS JUST PLAYING possum. Not since the opening of the musical "Cats," based on his children's verse "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," had the great poet been an object of wide public interest. Now he's become more controversial than at any time since his death in 1965. A new book, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, by Anthony Julius (308 pages. Cambridge. $49.95), makes the case that Eliot was an unregenerate anti-Semite, and that antiSemitism is a key element in his writing. The book attracted little attention when it came out in Britain last fall. Then it was noticed that its author is none other than the lawyer handling Princess Diana's divorce. Now poets are arguing and gossip mavens are dishing.
Julius, 39, a Ph.D. in literature as well as a lawyer, turns out to be a relentless prosecutor, a deep-digging scholar and a powerful literary critic. He's head of litigation at the firm of Mishcon de Reya, a hotshot lecturer who riffs on "Kant, Eliot and Tarantino," a member of the Labour Party, and he's Jewish. This last fact caused the novelist Will Self, writing in The Observer, to speculate that the media lust for Julius "chimes with an unconscious ... conception of the Jew in the English collective psyche ... The idea that a Jew should be in close contact with our Aryan princess, the woman who is held to be most inaccessible and therefore most desirable, produces a frisson that makes those column inches expand and expand."
What would Eliot, a self-proclaimed "classicist. . .royalist . . .and Anglo-Catholic," say about that Jungian analysis of the princess and the mouthpiece? The fascinating thing is that although Julius mounts the most convincing case yet to prove Eliot's aversion to Jews, his admiration for the poetry is unwavering. "Anti-Semitism," he writes, "which is mired in ugliness and loathing, does not make poetry impossible. Indeed. . .it can be a poet's inspiration. It can be a muse." At the same time, "we should also be bothered by Eliot's anti-Semitism." Julius thus disagrees both with those critics who deny that Eliot is an anti-Semite and with those who hold that because he is anti-Semitic, the poetry is bad. Being both adversary and advocate may seem like an untenable paradox. And in a post-Holocaust world it's not easy to get past Eliot's "seem and contempt," as Julius says, for Jews.
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One way out has been to see the controversial passages as coming not from Eliot but from characters in the poems. This is the position taken by Craig Raine, himself a noted poet, in a long review in the Financial Times. In the famous (or notorious) "Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar," Eliot etches Bleistein in acid: "But this or such was Bleistein's way: / A saggy bending of the knees / And elbows, with the palms turned out, / Chicago Semite Viennese ... The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot." This is anti-Semitic, admits Raine, but it's not Eliot speaking, it's Burbank, the character who provides the poem's point of view. Thus the poem isn't anti-Semitic, it's about anti-Semitism. To which one might reply, no Cigar. Raine sees the more famous/notorious passage in "Gerontion" (excerpt) not as Eliot's vision of the squalid, squatting Jew but as that of the old man of the title. To which one might reply, that's squat.
No, it seems clear that it's Eliot we hear in these poems, along with others like "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" ("Rachel nee Rabinovitch / Tears at the grapes with murderous paws") and "Dirge," which Eliot deleted from "The Waste Land" ("Fullfathom five your Bleistein lies. . . / Graves' Disease in a dead jew's eyes! / . . .See the lips unfold unfold / From the teeth, gold in gold"). This last image is a bizarre harbinger of the death camps 20 years later, with their harvest of gold teeth.
Julius distinguishes between the anti-Semitism in Eliot's poetry and prose: "The poetry challenges, while the prose merely offends." In his 1934 book "After Strange Gods," Eliot writes of his ideal society: "Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." Although Eliot never reprinted this book, Julius finds that he never made any significant repudiation of such sentiments. In September 1943 at a London poetry recital, Eliot chose to read "Gerontion." At this point the existence of the Nazi gas chambers was known, Julius points out, and "three months before Eliot read his lines about 'the jew' squatting on a window sill ... the press had reported the final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto." How could a great poet exhibit such insensitivity?
Julius's crushingly convincing book stops short of answering this question. But it's clear that Eliot, the Anglo-Catholic convert, was a tormented soul with an overwhelming sense of sin. He had found the way, the way the Jews had spurned. They were the Others in his personal drama of redemption. He needed his Bleisteins, his Rachels. They were the damned against whom he could measure his salvation.
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