A Response to Ronald Schuchard

The name Anthony Julius is nowhere mentioned in Ronald Schuchard's richly informative essay, but clearly the author of T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995, second edition forthcoming) was on Schuchard's mind as he assembled his brief in defense of the poet against the charge of anti-Semitism—a charge not original with Julius, of course, but made most forcefully by him. In countering the Julius line, Schuchard mounts two arguments. The first, on pages 7-11, carefully contextualizes the "offensive" poems of the late 1910s—e.g.,"Burbank with a Baedeker," "Sweeney among the Nightingales," and "Gerontion"—so as to show that the "dominant motive" of these poems was not to "exercise a little gratuitous anti-Semitism" (7) but to dramatize the sense of despair and failure of Eliot's war years—a phantasmagoria in which the poet's own consciousness is at one with that of his characters. The second argument (11-21) concerns, not Eliot the youthful poet, but Eliot the Public Man and Social-Cultural Presence of the post-conversion years, especially on his now frequent visits to the United States.

Here, I shall not take up Schuchard's first argument since I have myself recently countered Julius along somewhat similar lines. In my T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture (September 2002), I suggest that the notorious passage in "Gerontion" ("the jew squats on the window sill, the owner. . ."), obviously anti-Semitic as it appears when taken out of context, must be understood within the frame of the entire poem, which expresses, in the most moving and terrifying terms possible, the crisis ("After such knowledge, what forgiveness?") Eliot underwent in the years following the death of his beloved Jean Verdenal, mort aux Dardanelles in 1915, his miserable marriage to Vivien, coupled with his knowledge of and complicity in her sordid affair with Bertrand Russell, and the sudden death in 1919 of his father, with whom he had not had a chance to reconcile and who was never to know that his son was to become a distinguished poet. ¹ Schuchard establishes a careful factual context for "Burbank with a Baedeker," and although I disagree with some of his particulars—I think, for example, that Eliot's alleged concern for post-war Vienna was hardly, as Schuchard thinks (6), a case of empathy for the displaced Eastern Jews pouring into that city but, on the contrary, a concern that the great imperial capital would be mongrelized and its vibrant culture destroyed—I am sympathetic to the argument for context that Schuchard makes.

But the second half of the essay is more troubling. Here, the focus is on Eliot's relationship with the Jewish social philosopher, Zionist, and New School of Social Research professor Horace N. Kallen, an intellectual whom Eliot first met at Harvard in 1906, and whose (hitherto unknown) correspondence with the poet has now surfaced at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio. This cache of letters—they extend from 1927 to 1960 and, as Schuchard points out, more and earlier letters may well surface since the two men had been close friends at Harvard from 1906 to 1911—does indeed, in Schuchard's words "restore a missing chapter of American cultural history" (13). The question is what that missing chapter tells us.

From 1927 on, when his "friendly correspondence" with Eliot resumed, Kallen was evidently making "repeated efforts to bring [the poet] to the [New School] to lecture and read, an arrangement that finally materialized in the spring of 1933 when Eliot was Norton Professor at Harvard" (14). Kallen was a fervent admirer of the Great Poet and was hence honored to entertain him. At the dinner party he hosted for Eliot at a New York restaurant, one of the guests was the Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. Eliot was apparently much impressed with Cardozo, writing to his producer Henry Sherek that the Justice was "singularly distinguished amongst all the guests," and that...