A Response to Ronald Schuchard

Stripped down to its essentials, my T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1995) comprises two propositions: (1) Eliot wrote anti-Semitic poetry and prose, which makes him an anti-Semite; (2) Eliot's anti-Semitic poetry is innovative and imaginative, and therefore cannot be dismissed as an inconsequential blemish in his oeuvre. Few reviewers were interested in the second proposition; those who acknowledged it tended to dismiss it as perverse. The book was read merely as an attack on Eliot, which was welcome to some, objectionable to others. There is immense resistance to the simple truth that Eliot wrote anti-Semitic poems. I do not think that the book has done very much to weaken this resistance.

That it persists is evident from the following remarks of the literary scholar and critic, Barbara Everett:

A part of the literary history of the 20th century was Eliot's gigantic public status and authority, and the steady collapse of that status and authority. The collapse has for several decades now been written down in terms of a discovered or imputed misogyny and anti-semitism. The assailing of Eliot's reputation is a difficult and vexed matter; a poet professionally and substantially involved with the society of his time is likely (however deplorably) to manifest signs of that society's undoubted misogyny and anti-semitism. But these arguments seem to me rationalisations for changes of cultural climate and mere fashion. Eliot remains the superb (if highly individual) poet he always was. ¹

That is to say: Eliot is out of fashion. Followers of fashion, unable to escape today's critical wisdom, justify their disregard for him by reference to anti-Semitism or misogyny. Any argument against his work will do; they have Eliot's reputation in their sights. There are those who appreciate and understand Eliot, and there are those who do not. This latter class misjudge him, and do not understand their own motives when doing so.

This is slack reasoning, conducted at that low level at which the object is not so much to refute an argument as to identify a discreditable motive. Everett begins sceptically with "discovered or imputed anti-Semitism"; she concludes with a reluctant acknowledgment of "signs" of misogyny and anti-Semitism. What may be inferred from this slippage? The following, I think. An absence of thought about anti-Semitism; a discomfort with any reasoning about a poet's responsibility for what he writes, or about the propositional content of poetry, or how the language of poetry may engage with the discourse of anti-Semitism; and last, a desire to evade the challenge of readings that attend to anti-Semitism or misogyny. These readings are "mere rationalisations." The implication? They not call for an answer, just a diagnosis.

The evasiveness of the piece, this reluctance to be forthright about Eliot's anti-Semitism, seems to me to be typical of the state of Eliot apologetics at the moment. But occasionally, as if in reaction to such equivocations as Everett's, an Eliot partisan will insist, with hectic defiance, that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the complaints of anti-Semitism, and that, indeed, Eliot was if anything a friend to the Jews. Such is Ronald Schuchard's argument in his lecture "Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar: American intellectuals, Anti-Semitism, and the Idea of Culture." Eliot, Schuchard asserts, was a "philo-Semite" (21). He makes this case by:

(a) a misuse of biographical material, to the effect that Eliot:

(i) had some Jewish friends and correspondents: Horace Kallen, Sidney Schiff, Violet Schiff, John Rodker, Jacob Isaacs, Leonard Woolf, Victor Gollancz, Groucho Marx. Anti-Semites, Schuchard implies, do not have Jewish friends. He quotes Isaacs to the effect that he "saw no signs of anti-semitism" (22, n. 20).

(ii) took steps to assist German Jews persecuted by the Nazi regime: Karl Mannheim, Adolph Löwe, John Amon—and there may be others. He proved himself to be a friend to Jews...