The T.S. Eliot Debate

"A Flapping of Scolds" by Vince Passaro, in Harper’s Magazine (Jan. 1997), 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012.

In T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995), Anthony Julius stirred controversy on both sides of the Atlantic by arguing that Eliot’s well-known anti-Semitism blighted the poet’s literary achievement. Nonsense! says Passaro, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

Eliot (1888–1965) "unquestionably" was an anti-Semite, Passaro says, but Julius renders the great poet "utterly vile" on the basis of just "one full poem, five passages in Eliot’s poetry (some of which were not published in his lifetime), and a few scattered prose remarks." It is not mere political correctness that leads Julius to jump from these trangressions to an indictment of Eliot’s entire corpus, Passaro says. It is literature itself, with its insistence on "making something significant and even beautiful out of ugliness, dissonance, fever, hatred, anger, failure, and pain" that today’s undereducated literary intellectuals find unacceptable. They nod perfunctorily toward Eliot’s greatness but do not grasp the meaning of the word.

Eliot’s accusers fail to see, Passaro writes, that his "constant effort [was] to take the stuff of the neurotic, damaged, modern personality, and the stuff of everyday irritation, anger, fear, loathing, and contempt—the self, in all its horrors—and try to move it toward some divine plateau... where the burdens of personality fall away and the truth, painful and retributive though it may be, makes itself known." This "narrative movement toward God" can be traced back even to Eliot’s early poetry, predating his 1927 conversion to Anglo-Catholicism.

Thus, in the case of "Gerontion" (1920), which contains some notoriously anti-Semitic lines ("And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,/ Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp."), Julius misses their secondary meanings and the very meaning of the poem itself, Passaro contends. "Gerontion" is about an old man waiting to die, and the house in which he lives "serves as the central metaphor of the poem: the house is his life and contains history itself.... The image of the Jew is unpleasant and disturbing, but that he is the owner of the metaphorical house containing history itself suggests something else about him. That he is squatting on the windowsill is scatological, but it also suggests an animal about to leap—Christ the tiger, who, later in the poem, ‘devours’ us." Though the common meaning of estaminet is "cafe" or "bistro," another meaning—one that would have been well known in Antwerp, since it comes from the Walloon dialect spoken in Belgium—is "manger." In a later line ("The word within a word, unable to speak a word") in the poem, Eliot borrows the language of the Elizabethan bishop Lancelot Andrewes and "doubles the image of Christ in the manger."

Julius saw none of that, Passaro says. "A universe in which a horrifying, hostile, contemptuous image of a ‘jew’ can also be made to suggest God, in his most tender moment of Incarnation as well as in his terrifying justice, is a universe in which Anthony Julius and many other critics steeped in comfortable assumptions would prefer not to live. Literature is not the game for them."