T. S. Eliot and the Real World

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. By Anthony Julius. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 308. $49.95.

Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917. By T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1997. Pp. 428. $30.

"The Jew is underneath the lot," wrote T. S. Eliot in perhaps his most extendedly anti-Semitic poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar." The remark has a double meaning: Jews are both lower than other forms of life in the poem (or in Eliot's poetry generally) and are at the bottom of an economic and cultural conspiracy there. Not an aberration, the poem takes its place among several others in Eliot's canon: "Gerontion," with its lower-case "jew" perched upon the windowsill; "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," with its image of the animalistic "Rachel née Rabinovitch," and "A Cooking Egg" with its satiric portrait of the Jewish industrialist Sir Alfred Mond, all like "Gerontion" first published together in 1920 in Ara Vos Prec in England and in Poems in the United States. To them may be added a deleted poem ("Dirge") from the pre-Pound version of The Waste Land with its repulsive rendering of Bleistein's drowned body, "Sweeney Agonistes" with its Jewish philistines Krumpacker and Klipstein, and a variety of supporting passages from the prose, particularly the obsessive anxiety about identifying Jews in the letters and the notorious remark about a large number of free-thinking Jews being socially undesirable in After Strange Gods (1934). The poems are not many, but then Eliot did not publish very many poems: his entire poetic output occupies fewer lines than Keats's Endymion alone, and Keats died before his twenty-sixth birthday. Possibly no major poet in English published so little poetry as Eliot, and the anti-Semitic poems loom larger in such a scant output than they might in a larger one. Examination of them not as incidental lapses but rather as constitutive components of Eliot's art and thought forms the burden of Anthony Julius's perceptive and overdue study, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form.

Julius follows a double strategy of first forcing us to confront squarely passages that we may want to duck, and then contextualizing those passages not within the familiar discourses of high literature but with the more sinister ones of common anti-Semitism. In "Gerontion," for example, the problematic lines are these six:

 
Eliot insisted on keeping the lower-case for "jew" until 1963; it was part of his original conception of the poem, already present in the notebook draft. The lower-case signals a disrespectful attitude amply supported by the potpourri of anti-Semitic cliches that follow. As Julius demonstrates, anti-Semitic discourse regularly featured Jews as subhuman ("squats" and particularly "spawned"), as both slumlords ("the owner") and slum denizens, and associated them with "decay," disease ("blistered," a symptom of smallpox), with foreign influence (Antwerp, Brussels), with rootless cosmopolitanism, and with human waste ("merds"). Delmore Schwartz, the American Jewish poet and critic, and admirer of Eliot, once told his friends to call him "squatter Schwartz" in pained memory of this passage.

A similar complex of attitudes underlies the lines about Rachel in "Sweeney Among the Nightingales":

The phrasing again displays Eliot's characteristic anxieties, associating women, Jews, and animals with each other. He was particularly anxious about pure or impure origins, as his letters repeatedly witness and as the sneering "née Rabinovitch" here attests. The lines about Rachel recapitulate a series of anti-Semitic European discourses: the predatory Jewish woman, like Salome or Judith; the Jewish whore (for Maupassant, the Beautiful Jewess was an obligatory brothel type); the Jew as animal ("paws"); and the Jew who disguises his or her name and hence origin. "The Jews, you know, they're all camouflaged, disguised, chameleon-like, they change names like they cross frontiers . . . anything at all that throws people off, that sounds deceptive," wrote Céline in a passage cited by Julia Kristeva.

Such discourses converge most prominently in Eliot's poem "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," whose very title reflects the common anti-Semitic charge of Jewish obliviousness to culture and beauty—no guidebook for Bleistein, only a cigar to suggest immediate gratification and commercial success (both Walter Besant and Wyndham Lewis noted the importance of the cigar to anti-Semitism's portrait of the Jew). Indeed, even Bleistein's name, with its literal meaning of "lead-stone" instead of the more expected "Goldstein" or "gold-stone" supports the caricature: that name, along with Silverstein, Loanstein, Diamondstein, and Sparklestein, routinely appeared in American business jokes of the period. Certainly, the upper crust Burbank of the first three stanzas fares badly. But the portrait of Bleistein in the poem is even worse:

The portrait begins with the image of Bleistein as apelike, shambling along with palms turned out, in the manner also used to depict Irishmen and Blacks at the turn of the century. "Chicago Semite Viennese" suggests again the charge of rootless cosmopolitanism, the eye staring from the slime suggests the association of Jews with swamps and lower life forms like leeches, its incomprehension of Canaletto an alleged incomprehension of the aesthetic, "On the Rialto" a phrase used by Shakespeare's problematic Shylock, the rat a common anti-Semitic association (Rothschild "belongs to the rodent order; he looks like a rat, a colossal Leviathan of a rat" wrote one Jew-baiter), and the association of Jews with the fur industry and their involvement in the clothes trade. The Jew is "underneath the lot" in the sense of being lower than any, and also in the sense of being at the bottom of a vast international conspiracy. This nasty poem concludes with a gibe at the fictional "Sir Ferdinand / Klein," whose name is apparently intended to call forth a response of both decline and humor at its mixing of gentile and Jewish names. The particular names resonate, too: Klein shares his forename with Ferdinand of Aragon, who expelled the Jews from Spain, and his own name means "small," a standard anti-Semitic epithet ("And when the little sheenies die, / Their souls will go to hell" ran a song popular in the Ivy League of Eliot's student days). Similar associations plague the representation of Bleistein's corpse in the suppressed "Dirge" or the quatrain on Sir Alfred Mond in "A Cooking Egg."

What was Eliot thinking of? What thinking? What? First, he seems to be thinking not of actual Jews in the real world, but of fictive ones in the warped discourses of anti-Semitic Europe and its pale offspring in America. His views on Jews' appearance, aesthetic capacity, morals, poverty, or money relate not to actual individuals (he once actually claimed that some of his best friends were Jews) but to stereotypes. Second, in making Jews into Others he linked them to women and to Blacks, though he did so in different ways. Race and gender are important here. As Julius notes, "In late nineteenth-century Europe, misogyny and anti-Semitism were frequent partners." Depictions of the two often ran together, with women sharing both emotional and sinister qualities with Jews, and Jewish males representing a feminized and subjugated Other familiar to us nowadays as a stock feature of colonialist discourse. It arose first within the continent, with Jews serving for centuries as inevitable Other to Christianity and Europe. As Freud would later observe, the turn-of-the-century Viennese critic Otto Weininger "treated Jews and women with equal hostility, and overwhelmed them with the same insults." The conflation placed Jewish women at the absolute bottom of the scale, of course, and Eliot's poetry would include not only Rachel née Rabinovitch but also Lady Kleinwurm and Lady Katzegg amid its contemptuous references.

If Eliot associated Jews and women, he did not equate them. Julius perceptively points out that "Eliot's difficulties with Jews and women are not to be collapsed into a generalised hostility towards an undifferentiated 'Other.'" Rather, women seem to have stimulated a fear in Eliot, related to a sense of potential subordination to them, whereas Jews provoked more a sense of contempt deriving from feelings of superiority. The scornful dismissal of "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo"is a defensive gesture in a poem dramatizing male panic about women, who elsewhere in it are apt to pin the speaker wriggling to the wall, bring his head in on a platter, or lead to his underwater drowning. No wonder that Eliot returns over and over to representations of men murdering women: "Jews don't rattle the poet; women do," writes Julius. Jews emerge as contemptible but seldom threatening, and in that way play a different role in Eliot's literary anti-Semitism than they do in, say, Pound's. Even less threatening are Blacks, who appear chiefly as the Sambo-like and sexually charged caricatures of the unpublished King Bolo poems, the "cargo of dead negroes" of the late sequence Four Quartets, and as a blank absence in the southern population evoked in the Virginia lectures After Strange Gods. In different ways, the figures of Jews, women, and Blacks seem to embody projections of different portions of Eliot's own psyche and in that way to suggest a suppressed identification. The British critic Karl Miller has perceptively speculated in a passage quoted by Julius that "Eliot was his own Jew, that the Jew could serve him both as a type of the distressed human being and as a figure for some distressing part of his own nature—wandering, free-thinking, heretical, frightful."

At some point one wants to leave Eliot's constructions of the Jews and appeal finally to the lives of real Jews, beyond language, even if to do so means offering only linguistic constructions of those lives. For Eliot's poetry and prose belong to an especially charged time in Jewish history, spanning as they do first the wave of massive Eastern European immigration to America in the wake of anti-Semitic pogroms, then the Holocaust, and finally the foundation of the state of Israel, none of which figure in Eliot's work. On the contrary, that work proceeds as though current historical events never happened to actual Jews, an absence that leads to repeated misfirings. The most spectacular is this notorious passage in Eliot's sketch of his ideal society in After Strange Gods, written shortly after the Nazis' assumption of power:

Such thinking had disastrous historical consequences, first in the closing off of Jewish immigration to America in the legislative acts of 1921 and 1924, and ultimately in the Holocaust itself. Obviously, Eliot is not responsible for the Holocaust and presumably was appalled by it. But as the French theorist Tzvetan Todorov has observed in his book On Human Diversity, discourses are also events, and they make both acts and the acceptance of acts possible. Julius's continual contextualization of Eliot in terms of the rhetoric of traditional and modern anti-Semitism reveals the pervasiveness of such language in Eliot. Even in After Strange Gods, for example, Eliot follows the traditional association of Jews with freethinkers, and he adds a particularly American twist by associating them with New York as well. He tells his Virginia audience, "You are farther away from New York; you have been less industrialized and less invaded by foreign races." Equally culpably, Eliot minimized accounts of the Holocaust even when they began to appear, rejecting empiricism and historical evidence for the rhetorical discourses that continued to hold his allegiance. The best example here is the negative review of The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany which Eliot published in his magazine The Criterion in 1936. Although a recent letter from Valerie Eliot in TLS claims that the review is not by Eliot but by Montgomery Belgion, Eliot still commissioned and published it, and its positions accord closely enough with his own for such respected scholars as C. K. Stead, Christopher Ricks, and Ronald Bush to have associated it with him. The review concedes minor persecutions suffered by German Jews but denies any major catastrophe: "this book . . . is an attempt to arouse moral indignation by means of sensationalism." In fact, the carefully-researched book was the first widely circulated report in English to claim that Jews were being murdered at Dachau. The review shows a marked indifference to Jewish pain and takes its place in a long line of Holocaust denial stretching from the 1930s to the present day.

Such instances raise the issue of the intended audience for Eliot's poetry, and for the identity of the magisterial "we" of his prose. Who, we may ask, is the implied reader of poems like "Gerontion" or of "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar"? Not, evidently, a Jewish one. The poems' rhetorical depiction of Jews excludes actual Jews from among their readers; instead, the poems appeal to a self-consciously non-Jewish group whom the anti-Semitic overtones may please or offend, but who may number themselves among those addressed. As Julius observes, such passages imagine Jews as their targets, not as their readers. So, too, with the "we" of the prose or of Four Quartets. Eliot's rhetoric achieves its sense of inclusion through its sense of exclusion. In that respect, it differs diametrically from the position of a modernist like Joyce, whom Eliot praised in After Strange Gods for his orthodoxy but who accepted the heterogeneity that Eliot rejected. In the "Cyclops" chapter of Ulysses, for example, the Jewish protagonist Bloom meets the narrow-minded nationalist Citizen in a pub. The citizen shares the same anti-Semitic rhetoric (Jews as bugs) and views (Jews as "foreign") that pervade Eliot's work. "What is your nation, if I may ask?"he climactically inquires of Bloom. "Ireland," says Bloom with magnificent humanity and simplicity. "I was born here. Ireland." It sounds a note sadly missing in Eliot's work, missing because Eliot projects in order to repudiate, whereas Joyce introjects in order to identify. Eliot's Jews belong to abstract rhetoric, Joyce's Jew to reality.

A chief question provoked by T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form is why it has taken so long for the issue of literary anti-Semitism to arise in the first place. To be sure, Julius is not the first to raise the question, which many scholars—including the present reviewer over twenty years ago—have commented on. But perhaps the confluence of the present moment and of Julius's fifteen minutes of fame as the lawyer for Princess Di have given it a contemporary currency. At least two factors prohibited Jewish critics from raising it effectively earlier in the century, first the exclusion of Jews from academic departments of literature and then the marginalization of religion in the academic recuperations of the last twenty years. The precarious footing of Jews in literature departments—many of which admitted Jews to the faculty only after World War II—made them unlikely to challenge the poet who then dominated the modern canon, particularly since an alleged inability of Jews to teach Christian writers was a chief prop of their exclusion. Eliot's displacement coincided with the rise of race, class, and gender as privileged categories of analysis, one that did little for exclusions based on religion, and with the academic left's hostility toward Israel, which implicitly discouraged sympathy with the plight of actual Jews. It has taken until the mid-1990s for studies like Bryan Cheyette's Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature andSociety, Michael Ragussis's Figures ofConversion: "The Jewish Question"andEnglishNational Identity, James Shapiro's Shakespeare and the Jews, or Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb's anthology The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction ofIdentity to appear and to receive widespread attention. Such books grapple with varying degrees of success to combine the rhetorical with the real. And yet, as Michael Bernstein has pointed out, such a liberatory project "if it wants to avoid recapitulating the very typologies and projections it seeks to raise into critical awareness, needs to maintain some link between the actual histories of the subjects being (mis)represented and the conventions, whether hostile or sympathetic, through which their textual objectification takes place." Or, more succinctly: hermeneutics without history is dangerous, as Eliot's work makes painfully clear.

 
If Julius's book expands our notion of Eliot in one way by confronting tough new critical questions, Christopher Ricks's edition of Eliot's previously unpublished poetry notebook, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, does so in another by presenting a welter of new materials. It includes the chief surviving manuscripts of nearly all of Eliot's poetry up to The Waste Land: over three dozen previously unpublished poems still in the notebook; that portion of the scatological King Bolo work excised from the notebook and now at Yale; and drafts of many of the published poems from Eliot's first two volumes of verse, often with annotations and suggestions by Ezra Pound. Eliot himself originally gave the notebook the ironic and distancing title Inventions of the March Hare but cancelled that and substituted the more neutral Complete Poems of T. S. Eliot, presumably at the time that he sold the notebook to his Irish-American patron John Quinn for $140. Currently in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the notebook undercuts Eliot's self-fashioning as an austere poet of slender output periodically released in minor or major masterpieces. Instead, it reveals a far messier, fallible, and more prolific poet caught in contingencies of both biography and history. Unfortunately, the editorial presentation works to preserve the older image of Eliot and thus to negate everything that makes the new material so interesting.

Some of the new material would have extended Julius's argument about anti-Semitism, though without major change. The lower-case "jew" of "Gerontion" appeared even in manuscript, for example, and the original title of the later quatrain poem was simply "Blei stein with a Cigar," with no titular reference to Burbank. One of the Bolo verses refers to a doctor as "a bastard jew named Benny," again with lower case. Eliot refers more frequently to Blacks, first as Negroes in some of the lyrics and then more pervasively in the grotesque bawdy of the Bolo work, where the racist elements accompany eruption of a sexual carnival repressed elsewhere in Eliot. Women are if anything even more prominent in the notebook than elsewhere, and the original subtitle of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was originally "Prufrock among the Women." I focus here not on the large body of derivative, Laforguean verse nor on previously published notebook poems like "The Love Song of St. Sebastian," but rather on three bodies of work most likely to interest readers: the unpublished section of "Prufrock," the corrections suggested by Pound, and the King Bolo burlesques.

Although the text of "Prufrock" in the notebook contains numerous minor variations from the published text, the greatest interest undoubtedly lies in publication here of the deleted thirty-eight line section "Prufrock's Pervigilium." Pervigilium means "eve," and the title alludes to an erotic Latin poem "Pervigilium Veneris" much admired by Walter Pater and other aesthetes. It contains occasional lines and phrases preserved in the published version (like those about the ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas) but consists mainly of new material passing through the speaker's head on a nighttime ramble through lower sections of the city. Some of these clearly show the affinity of Eliot's speakers for psychological projection:

Those "evil houses" clearly contain a sexual ("ribald") charge and they may like Gerontion's even be owned by Jews. They allow the speaker to project onto them his own self-condemnation, here imagined as finger-pointing, as well as Prufrock's characteristic fear of being laughed at. Other deleted lines ("I have heard my Madness chatter before day") undermine Prufrock's stability and sanity more blatantly than the published version. They are also far weaker poetry: Eliot, like Pound, had a good sense of what to delete.

Pound's comments and revisions especially on the quatrain poems included in Eliot's Ara Vos Prec and Poems (both 1920) carry special interest. Though less obtrusive and spectacular than his improvement of The Waste Land, the revisions here show the same concern with craft and structure. For example, in "Gerontion" Pound strengthened the final passage by changing the passive "driven by the horn" to the more active "running on the Horn." At times the obsession with technique can betray broader lapses, as when Pound makes multiple suggestions on the technique of the opening stanzas of "Bleistein" and then scrawls in the margin just before the anti-Semitic passages start "O. K. from here anyhow." Elsewhere Pound changed the blunt "castrate" to the more oblique "enervate" as an epithet for Origen in "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" and made extensive improvements in "Whispers of Immortality." Unfortunately, Ricks's editorial decision to consign Pound's interventions to notes in small type diminishes their prominence and makes it hard to track them at all. The strategy that Valerie Eliot chose for her earlier The Waste Land: A Facsimile andTranscript of having type transcriptions face facsimiles of the manuscripts would have been preferable here, too.

The scatological material will undoubtedly evoke considerable interest. It includes "The Triumph of Bullshit" with its refrain of "For Christ's sake stick it up your ass"; "Ballade pour la grosse Lulu" with its sendups of Lyman Abbot, Booker T. Washington, John Rockefeller, and Eliot's distant cousin the Harvard President Charles W. Eliot; and a group of verses presenting the bawdy European explorer Columbo and his equally bawdy African rival King Bolo with schoolboy glee:

Ricks prissily worries about the inclusion of this material, fretting in the preface that it may elicit "either the wrong kind or the wrong amount of attention," and does what he can to set up a quarantine by exiling it to an Appendix. (Comically, he adds to the confusion by printing lines beginning "There was a jolly tinker" as Eliot's own creation, whereas in fact they are a transcription by Eliot of the scatological Scots ballad "The Ball of Kirriemuir" printed as long ago as 1719.) The material fascinates, less on account of its various prejudices—racism, sexism, anti-Semitism—than of its humanization of Eliot by giving voice to a riotously sensual side denied such direct expression in his published verse. No one aware of "The Triumph of Bullshit" will confuse Eliot with his High Anglican persona in quite the same way.

The treatment of the Bolo poems exemplifies the extent to which the form of this edition is at odds with its content. Much of the interest of Inventions of the March Hare lies in its revelation of Eliot's work as biographically and historically contingent. In contrast, Ricks's presentation negates the notebook as actual historical object, treating the text of the poems as purely linguistic events transferable to other contexts without loss. He thus neglects what Walter Benjamin called the "aura" in his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." There Benjamin wrote:

This edition of Inventions of the March Hare eliminates the sense of notebook as physical object, not only by neglect of it as a material entity but also by neglect of Eliot's careful ordering of its contents. Instead, Ricks substitutes a new order that offers first transcripts of only the poems that Eliot left unpublished (with an exception made for "Prufrock" on account of its new section), then two hundred pages of notes, then the rest of the notebook divided into three Appendixes—one presenting poems excised from the notebook, the second poems from the notebook included in Prufrockand Other Observations, and the third poems on loose leaves in the notebook published in Ara Vos Prec and Poems. Such a procedure marginalizes the Bolo material by consigning it to an appendix sandwiched between hundreds of pages of notes and other appendixes. It also makes it very hard for the reader to reconstruct the original ordering of the notebook, or to read the poems in the sequence that Eliot constructed for them there. And the inclusion of only two facsimiles means that the reader cannot imagine the original notebook as a physical object at all.

The notes pose a particular problem. Ricks's standard of annotation is that "This edition is based on the conviction that . . . the important thing is evidence of where the poems came from, and of where they went to in Eliot's other work." This principle leads to a bizarre practice, in which two hundred pages of notes interpret "where the poems came from" as solely other works of literature. They read as though Ricks dumped into them a card catalogue of every similar passage he could find by a previous writer, yet cautiously preferred the bare designation "compare" to any more definite claim. The result is to exclude the very biographic and historical contingencies that make the notebook so interesting. Treatment of the title page itself exemplifies the problem. It includes a variant of the famous dedication to the Prufrock volume, here beginning "For Jean Verdenal 1889-1915, Mort Aux Dardanelles" and continuing with the lines of Statius to Virgil in Dante's Purgatorio XI that may be translated as: "Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing." Ricks's seven pages of notes trace the history of the dedication and epigraph from Dante through Eliot's published work before entering a comically bloated discussion of literary antecedents for the phrase "Inventions of the March Hare." The reader learns nothing of the historical Jean Verdenal, Eliot's dear friend killed in World War One, nor of Eliot's deep attraction to him, which some have termed homoerotic. Nor does the reader learn that Verdenal died on the catastrophic Anglo-French expedition to the Dardanelles during the War, or that a War was going on at all. Pertinent historical events like the Great War, the immigration acts barring Jews and others, or any other events in the real world make no appearance in these pages. The copious notes suggest that literature arises solely out of other literature rather than out of confluence of literature with historical and biographic contingencies. Not surprisingly, Ricks does not mention that one of the loose leaves included in the notebook is a printed one headed "Ministry of Food" and containing the new "Rationing Order, 1918," a leaf that does much to suggest the historical context so important to "where the poems came from."

The notes thus join an editorial strategy which works against the very elements that make the contents of the notebook so interesting. They deny the very contingencies that the notebook exposes, just as the editorial strategy denies the aura of the notebook itself. Reading the notebook in Ricks's annotated transcription quarantines its contents in a purely literary realm with only incidental relation to the world of history. That is just the charge mistakenly levelled against modernist writers by their current opponents, and just the charge that Julius's book so ably refutes in the area of anti-Semitism. Ricks's edition belongs to an older editorial practice allied to an older critical approach, the one that we now call "New Critical." Newer forms of editorial practice, with their attention to the physical form as well as linguistic codes of literary works, and their foregrounding of historical contingency over transhistorical idealization, would have suited publication of the notebook better. It may be, as Eliot remarked in Burnt Norton, that human kind cannot bear very much reality. But we need to bear more of it than this conservative edition of Inventions of the March Hare offers—we need the kind raised by Julius's innovative study. Paradoxically, so does Eliot's reputation if future generations are to find his work interesting.