Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar: American Intellectuals, Anti-Semitism, and the Idea of Culture

T. S. Eliot arrived in London by mischance in August 1914, forced here by the German declaration of war, just as he had begun his study of German philosophy at the University of Marburg. He would have preferred a landing in Paris, where he had spent an earlier academic year at the Sorbonne; he was being trained in the mind of Europe at Harvard, and his previous travels, especially in Italy, had further shaped his European sensibility. In the growing cultural chaos, however, an uncertain route to England became his one, fortuitous avenue of escape. He took refuge in Merton College and began reading philosophy to fulfill the spirit of his travelling fellowship. At the end of the year, he took the first step of self-imposed exile—his unannounced marriage to Vivien Haigh Wood—and briefly returned alone to the family summer home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to inform his parents that he was abandoning a career in philosophy at Harvard for a literary career in London. After suffering a withering rebuke, he agreed that the precipitous cancellation of his fellowship was one of his "blunders" and duly promised to complete his doctoral dissertation. ¹ Upon his safe and permanent return to London, where Vivien had been left in the care and company of Bertrand Russell, Eliot began to unpack the intellectual baggage that he brought to England from America: a few respected authors (Poe, Hawthorne, Henry James), his masters at Harvard (Josiah Royce and Irving Babbitt), those he needed to set himself up as a practicing poet and literary critic and to exercise an almost intact vision of culture and its relation to humanism and religion. Others have examined the importance of Eliot's American luggage in England, but much has remained lost in the attic. So I want to spend an hour rummaging in Eliot's attic, tracing his definition and defense of culture in relation to some American intellectuals with opposing ideas of culture. In the process, I feel obliged to address the widespread presumption that his writings are anti-Semitic, first by reconstructing the lost contexts of "Burbank with a Baedeker" and "Dirge" and After Strange Gods, and then by bringing out of the attic a fugitive intellectual whose relationship to Eliot may radically reform our perception of Eliot as a critic of Judaeo-Christian culture in Europe.

The first figure that Eliot removed from his steamer trunk was Ralph Waldo Emerson, Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist philosopher, champion of the democratic spirit, and hero of nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Eliot's grandfather, the Unitarian preacher William Greenleaf Eliot, had met Emerson; his mother and members of his extended St. Louis and Boston families revered him; but to Eliot he was the romantic embodiment of everything he wanted to exile himself from in America—religious liberalism, individualism, optimism, sentimentalism. In Eliot's view, the Emersonian-Unitarian philosophy had infected his family and the whole of New England, particularly Boston, and especially Harvard University; it had led to "the Boston doubt," a scepticism, he wrote "which is difficult to explain to those who are not born to it. This scepticism is a product, or a cause, or a concomitant, of Unitarianism; it is not destructive, but it is dissolvent." ² Emerson's Unitarian virus, working on a weakened strain of New England Puritanism, had transformed itself into Transcendentalism, and a young Eliot found the blanched, dissolvent morality abhorrent. "In the Puritan morality that I remember," he wrote, "it was tacitly assumed that if one was thrifty, enterprising, intelligent, practical and prudent in not violating social conventions, one ought to have a happy and 'successful' life. Failure was due to some weakness or perversity peculiar to the individual; but the decent man need have no nightmares." ³

The new London resident and bridegroom was equally concerned that Emerson's philosophy had worked...