Eliot's Dangerous Art

“Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar: American Intellectuals, Anti-Semitism, and the Idea of Culture” by Ronald Schuchard, with responses by David Bromwich and others, in Modernism/Modernity (Jan. 2003), The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2715 N. Charles St., Baltimore, Md., 21218–4363.

Was T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) an anti-Semite? The modernist poet and critic, author of “The Waste Land” (1922) and other seminal works, has been attacked for employing seemingly anti-Semitic language, especially in a group of poems written during the period immediately following World War I. Consider these lines from “Burbank with a Baedeker” (1920): “The rats are underneath the piles./ The jew is underneath the lot.” The debate over Eliot has recently heated up again, and some academics now even refuse to teach his work in their courses.

Schuchard, an English professor at Emory University, argues that the poet’s own complex views regarding religion help to explain the controversial passages. A recently uncovered 33-year correspondence with Amer­ican intellectual and Zionist Horace Kallen reinforces the view that Eliot was no bigot. In the “sustained and cordial dialogue between Eliot the conservative, believing Christian and Kallen the liberal, freethinking Jew,” Kallen often asked Eliot to intercede on behalf of certain European Jews who were fleeing Nazi persecution. In every case the poet responded vigorously, using his influence to secure a position for economist Adolph Löwe at the New School for Social Research in New York City, for instance, and also befriending sociologist Karl Mann­heim and introducing him to other academics in London. Eliot counted many Jews among his friends, including such luminaries as Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo, and, unlikely as it seems, the comedian Groucho Marx. Eliot’s detractors point to his friendships with known anti-Semites—Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, among others.

Schuchard says that during the time that Eliot was writing the troubling poems he was also preparing to join the Church of England, converting from the Unitarianism of his youth, which he detested because of its humanistic separation from traditional Christianity. In fact, says Schuchard, Eliot admired the Hebrew faith for its grounding in ancient tradition. Deeply affected by the horrors of the Great War and immersed in the difficult creative process that would lead to “The Waste Land,” with its vision of the disintegration of Western culture and society, Eliot frequently employed Jewish characters in his poems, according to Schuchard, as a metaphorical device, to represent the decay of tradition. That was effective, but it made for dangerous art, and Eliot’s critics recoil at some of the imagery he used. In “Gerontion” (1920), for instance, a Jew “squats on the window sill,” his skin “patched and peeled” by a loathsome disease.

Equally damning, in the critics’ view, is a published remark from 1933, when Eliot declared that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” Schuchard counters that, to the archconservative Eliot, freethinking intellectuals of any stripe were anathema. Eliot later retracted the word race. (He also claimed ignorance of the persecutions that were already under way in Nazi Germany, and Schuchard, relying on several recent studies of newspaper accounts of the time, says that is completely plausible.)

The invited commentators mostly remain unconvinced by Schuchard’s arguments. The milder voices, such as University of Rochester English professor James Longenbach, allow that “Eliot’s poems are powerful because their language invites us to call him a bigot.” But Anthony Julius, author of T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995), says that “critics who excuse Eliot’s anti-Semitism, or worse, pretend that it does not exist, merely carry on his own work of contempt toward Jews.” The Modern­ism/Modernity debate concludes on a wistful note, with Schuchard’s hope that future discoveries on the scale of the Eliot-Kallen correspondence might shed new light on Eliot’s personal views. Until then, the truth about his beliefs may remain as elusive as the meaning of some of his poetry.