In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Modernism/modernity 10.1 (2003) 57-70



[Access article in PDF]

My Reply:
Eliot and the Foregone Conclusions

Ronald Schuchard


When my Eliot's Dark Angel (Oxford, 1999) was reviewed in Modernism/Modernity(September 2001), I was criticized for not addressing Eliot's alleged anti-Semitism and for leaving my opposition to the motives, methods, and conclusions of Anthony Julius's book couched in an endnote, where I stated that, when restricted materials eventually become available, a full scholarly investigation would require "a book length study rather than a chapter . . . and a larger context than Julius and previous critics have provided." 1 The reviewer found this an injudicious way of avoiding a hotly-contested point and felt that I seemed

to be implicating not just the vituperative Eliot-haters, but an entire lineup of scholars—many of them more respectable than Julius, and who have been quite sympathetic to Eliot's oeuvre as a whole—who have been justifiably troubled by the anti-Semitic imagery found there. I'm skeptical that buried in some archive there exists a trump card that will decisively recuperate those poems that represent, in however problematized, ironic, or distanced a fashion, the Jew as unassimilable, greedy, disgusting, dangerous, conniving. 2

In the otherwise generous review, I was dismayed only by that series of adjectives with which the reviewer confirmed the widespread view of the way Eliot portrays the Jew in his poems. Thus, when I wrote "Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar," I determined to respond to this criticism by (1) reconstructing the lost biographical and historical context of the 1918-19 poems and the 1933 lectures that became After Strange Gods, [End Page 57] and by (2) bringing the recently discovered Kallen correspondence to bear on the issue, providing a sample of the archival material that is just beginning to surface. I made a deliberate decision not to cite Ricks or Julius or any of the scores of critics who have brought anti-Semitic charges against Eliot, for I wanted to bring to the table a considerable amount of new material in a non-argumentative essay, knowing full well that my academic audience was familiar with the conflict, if not all the combatants. I did realize, however, that its publication would provoke responses and opinions that would resist my arguments and interpretations. So on the occasion of its publication with invited responses, I am grateful for this opportunity to enter into dialogue with this group of scholars, whom I thank for their time and attention, even in disagreement. I begin my reply with respect and in the spirit of "sporting fellowship" (19) in which Eliot and Kallen conducted their cultural arguments.

Whatever the value of my interpretations and conclusions in the essay, the surfacing of Eliot's correspondence with Kallen is of major import, bringing a seismic shift of ground to what is dryly termed "the discourse of anti-Semitism" and my primary disappointment is that my respondents, in defending and reiterating their previous positions and attitudes, pay little service to its likely impact on Eliot and modernist studies. The correspondence is pushed to the side of argument by a general insistence on Eliot's alleged anti-Semitism and a refusal to accept evidence that religion and not race is the issue in Eliot's writing. Thus, the placement of this neglected material into debate requires an historical context for some of our readers.

For over fifty years, since scholars such as Lionel Trilling and Stanley Edgar Hyman began to break the silence about the seemingly anti-Semitic stance of Eliot's early poems and later prose, there has been precious little material added to the increasingly aggressive dialogue—a letter here, an anecdote there, a memoir, and so on—the evidence repeatedly rehashed like a Prufrockian "argument of insidious intent." George Bornstein and Ronald Bush brought the theme into the 70s and 80s, but Christopher Ricks was the first to synthesize the record of complaints and examine the nature of Eliot's prejudice and anti-Semitism in a probing book-length study, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988...

pdf

Share