File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_2000/phillitcrit.0008, message 101


From: Patsloane-AT-aol.com
Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 05:06:45 EDT
Subject: Re: PLC: Howard on Mein Kampf


In a message dated 8/11/00 9:35:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
dlangsto-AT-mcla.mass.edu writes:

>  
>  On Thu, 10 Aug 2000 Patsloane-AT-aol.com wrote:
>  
>  > Actually not. [Eliot] died in 1965. The first book on the subject
>  > (Harrison)  came out in 1968. 
>  
>  Only Howard knows for sure, but I would be real surprised if he were born
>  before 1968.  But I seem to recall earlier complaints about Eliot's
>  antisemitism. Perhaps I am thinking of the letter you cite concerning
>  Pound's Bollingen award, but I suspect the more likely site is discussions
>  concerning the role of the non-Christians if Eliot's ideas about a
>  Christian society were ever brought to fruition.  (Edmund Wilson sticks in
>  my head too, on this point, but I found nothing germane in looking briefly
>  into the chapter on Eliot in _Axel's Castle_... but I'll keep looking.)

David, 

In 1971, the draft of TWL was published, and had been thought lost. With it 
was a previously unpublished poem called "Dirge," in which Bleistein has 
drowned. This occasioned a tremendous amount of screaming and yelling, and 
renewed interest in "Burbank," which previously had never had as much 
attention as, say, "Prufrock" or TWL. I'm not wedded to the idea that this 
was a major turning point in the criticism, but you might want to watch the 
tenor of what comes after 1965-71 compared to what comes before. 

It's been ages since I've read Axel's Castle, and right now I'm in the 
country with no books. But my general recollection of the early lit is that 
most commentators seemed shocked, embarrassed, and didn't seem to know what 
to say. Typical response to taboo subjects...more or less a paralysis.  
Grover Smith (1956) said that "Burbank" was "in execrable taste," but many 
commentators just didn't say a word about "Burbank" when assessing the early 
poems. Correct me if I'm wrong about Axel's Castle, but I think Wilson might 
have been one of those who just didn't mention the poem.  Don't forget that 
the Dadaists made a career out of shocking the bougeoisie, and I'm inclined 
to agree with Harold Rosenberg that Eliot is a bit of a Dadaist.

I see religion as the expression of a very strong metaphysical urge, and 
without that urge I think we'd be less human. So I don't have any problem 
relating to religious people, and very often I like and admire them. They 
tend to be more sensitive, loving, and imaginative than, say, the 
doctrinnaire atheist, and I regard these qualities as worthwhile. I also very 
much like imaginary portrayals of ideal worlds, whether they're utopian 
societies to be built on earth or little heavens that lie in a dimension 
other than the phenomenological world. It's a fact that these little dream 
worlds are usually mono-sectarian, with an important exception I'll get too 
below. Here, I'd like to deal with your issue of "exclusionary practices" on 
several levels. I agree we can't have people running around screeching, "my 
religion is better than your religion," because that just leads to madness.

Let's say we're examining a Muslim panel painting of Paradise, and all of the 
blessed in the painting are Muslims--no Jews, Christians, Hindus, or 
aetheists, no Americans from Kansas or Wyoming...   According to HH, all of 
us "excluded" ones (or at least, he says, all "excluded" Jews) ought to feel 
hurt, devastated, wronged, and he can't understand why this wouldn't upset 
me. 

Well, it wouldn't upset me because it's only a picture, and I don't have any 
reason to perceive it as a threat. If the NYC Council wanted to pass an 
ordinance that forbade Jews to live in Brooklyn, then I'd be concerned and 
upset.  But that somebody would imagine a scene that didn't have me right in 
the middle of it? Maybe this would make some people feel insecure, but it 
doesn't happen to make me feel insecure. I don't personally feel  aggrieved 
that when MLK said, "I have a dream," he didn't immediately add, "and I want 
to make clear it includes Jews." I don't have to be the honored guest at 
everyone's party all the time, and it doesn't happened to bother me if there 
are parties to which I'm not invited.

If HH is feeling hurt, wronged, and devastated that Eliot's Christian society 
hasn't hung out a warm welcome sign for Marxists and for atheists, I'll wipe 
away HHs tears. But it really irritates me that in this day and age he still 
obstinantly thinks of Jews as weak, sissified, incompetent   victims who 
can't speak for themselves and can't function without his good offices.  I'd 
like to be allowed to decide for myself if I regard T. S. Eliot as a threat, 
and if I want HH to protect me from that threat. 

On "it's only a picture," the argument could be made that pictures "might" 
become reality. But why worry hypotheticals? Why not look at what actually 
_was_ reality? For nearly 100 years, and until the last year of Eliot's life, 
it was perfectly lawful in the United States to exclude Jews from hotels, 
country clubs, golf courses, medical schools, many professional jobs, the 
list is almost endless. All the "better" establishments excluded Jews.  
Immigration into this country was restricted. The big problem in Word War II 
was that Jews trying to escape from Nazi Germany couldn't find other 
countries willing to accept them. Orwell writes about this, and the Holocaust 
Museum in Washington recently had an exhibition about the Saint Louis, a ship 
turned away by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when it tried to land in Miami. In 
short, Jews had so many problems from exclusionary practices that it's almost 
perverse to imagine that T. S. Eliot could have been anywhere near the top of 
the list, even if the worst he's ever been accused of were true.  Don't 
forget that very few people read poetry, and even fewer read Eliot. 

A book I'd like to recommend, on exclusionary practices, is Davis, The 
Guggenheims. As wealthy as they were, they were still excluded from 
"restricted" establishments. But they were kind of fun. When they couldn't 
play golf at "Gentiles Only" country clubs, they built better golf courses of 
their own, ideally as close as they could to the golf courses that excluded 
Jews. During WWI, the Guggenheims owned nearly all the world's copper mines, 
and could virtually dictate the price of copper. Feared as they were, they 
still couldn't stay at the "better" (restricted) hotels, and it's kind of 
bizarre. Sort of like that apocryphal story of the black president of a white 
bank, who doesn't want his customers to realize he's black. So he checks up 
on the bank by posing as the janitor.

I mentioned above that nearly every utopia, and certainly every portrayal of 
heaven is mono-sectarian. It doesn't get me particularly bent out of shape. 
But neither is this an asset, and as you say, it can suggest a kind of 
exclusionary thinking, or at least insensitivity to others.  I know of two 
portrayals of heaven that are "non-sectarian." I don't believe there are any 
others, or at least none that I've seen. Both are in Eliot poems, and it's 
astonishing to me that people don't see it, or that it hasn't been picked up 
in the literature. The one I'll mention here is "A Cooking Egg," in which the 
narrator imagines who he's going to meet in heaven and names half a dozen 
famous persons. Check, please, their religious affiliations. There's one Jew, 
one Protestant, one Greco-Roman "heathen," one Theosophist, and two Catholic 
women.  I'm embarrased to say he didn't include an atheist, which is 
"exclusionary" towards Howard. Apart from this grievous flaw, show me another 
portrayal of heaven in which the inhabitants display as broad a range of 
sectarian beliefs. Kind of fun, and interesting that we read so selectively 
that people could read this poem over and over and over and not notice. 
There's a lovely line he dropped from the draft which to me speaks to the 
question of why one would want a non-sectarian heaven: "I wanted peace, here 
on earth, while I was still young and strong."

I regard the Idea of a Christian Culture as, in part, a reaction to his 
prolonged correspondence with  Horace M. Kallen, a Jew who was one of the 
founders of the New School. Most of the material is in the American Jewish 
Archives in Cinncinnatti. The letters are primarily about Kallen's ideal 
society, not Eliot's. Great correspondence, because in some ways these two 
are so similar. Pie in the sky idealists with grand ideas about how to 
arrange the world. Both of them so impractical that one wouldn't trust either 
one of them to manage even the tiniest township. And then they were also so 
different. Kallen wanted to make a religion out of democracy. He was 
compiling a bible for his new religion, and it began with things like the 
Declaration of Independence.  Eliot must have practically croaked at the idea 
that a religion was something you just invented if you found that you needed 
one.  He's trying to persuade Kallen to stick to Judaism, and Kallen is 
essentially arguing that it's time for something more up to date.  Do read 
this stuff it you weren't aware, say, that Eliot was a great admirer of 
Martin Buber.   If you can read the Eliot-Kallen correspondence without 
laughing, you're a better person than I am. Couple of old guys who feel 
they've reached an age where they ought to set down their ideas on how the 
world ought to be rearranged. Very intense about it, but they just can't 
agree on the details.  

I'm doing a series of three books on Eliot collectively called _Pun and 
Games_, and the first volume, _T. S. Eliot's Bleistein Poems_, just came out. 
I'm saying that five poems ("Burbank" is the first) are a sequence which is a 
take-off on the Commedia. To see this, one has to pay much more attention to 
his literary sources than has been paid to date. One has to actually read the 
stuff, and one can't scrape by with just "a general idea" about what, say, 
Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is about. Also, one has to have a lot of 
tolerance for word play, because he uses it so heavily. 

In a sense, each of the five poems is a double poem. Read it the way you've 
always read it, don't worry too much about all those literary sources he's 
borrowing from, and the poem works fine.  "Burbank" is about a Venetian whore 
(Princess Volupine), a sort of decayed Cleopatra who's  being visited by 
tourists.  A sordid little slice of everyday life. 

Now try it again, paying attention to the literary allusions. In a variation 
on the surprise endings we all know from murder myteries, you'll find all of 
your expectations being upset. The poem is loaded, for example, with 
borrowings from the chapter in Revelation in which the whore of Babylon and 
her fate are described. By implication, then, Volupine is more than just a 
decayed Cleopatra; she may also be a modernized (and somewhat decrepit) whore 
of Babylon. I can't cram a book into a paragraph, and it goes without saying 
that I had to be methodical in tracing each thread. So here I'm just 
summarizing conclusions. The setting may not be Venice, but a little hell 
that somewhat resembles Venice. The poem is an analog for the Inferno, in 
that it explores the nature of damnation. Or (Eliot keeps it ambiguous) both 
pictures co-exist. Behind the hellish little scene of the Princess and the 
tourists is the "mythic" world of Dante's Inferno, the "real" hell.

This post is way too long and I ought to stop, though I haven't answered many 
of your questions. But, briefly, part of one poem.

>  Then there are the lines from "Burbank with Baedeker:  Bleistein with a
>  Cigar."

>     But this or such was Bleistein's way:
>       A saggy bending of the knees
>     And elbows, with the palms turned out,
>       Chicago  Semite Viennese.

There's too much of waving poems around and saying "Look, look! This is 
obviously antisemitic."  You do have a responsiblity to articulate, and I'll 
try to do it for you in this case. What's disturbing you is that you perceive 
the guy as homely or even (Julius) "ugly." Now you refine it and justify your 
issues as to exactly what you regard as "antisemitic." Having a Jewish 
character in a poem who isn't young and handsome? having a Jewish character 
in a poem at all? Having a Jewish character with vaudville overtones (Charlie 
Chaplin's "little tramp" character)?  

Eliot is pretty good at getting readers to inadvertently reveal their own 
prejudices, because this is what satirists do. Don't forget that the lines 
mimic the opening of Browning's "How it Strikes a Contemporary," where a poet 
is being described.  The lit is unanimous on the point that the reference 
must be ironic, that Bleistein couldn't possibly be a poet.  Not clear 
whether he's supposed to be ruled out as a poet because he's a Jew, because 
he's "ugly," or because he's an "ugly Jew." But of course the preconceptions 
being revealed are ridiculous. Who do these people think wrote the Psalms? 
Among the army of anonymous psalmists whose names we don't even know, can we 
be absolutely certain that each looked like a male Barbie-doll and not a 
single one was "ugly"? 
  
>  I take it that, in the same vein as other analysts of the decadence and
>  depravity of the 1920's, Eliot is using the figure of "the jew" as a
>  marker for the decline of civilization and value.  The degradation of the
>  modern world can be measured by the degree to which Jews have become its
>  owners, interlopers eager for empty markers of status ("Sir Ferdinand
>  Klein"), subhuman tourists in the shrines of High Art, insomniac seducers
>  of a failed aristocratic leadership which has lost its potency and lustre,
>  and unwholesomely gleeful over the postwar crackup.

I don't see where you're getting any of this from the poems. But it reveals a 
lot about your own preconceptions.  I'll just take one item. Plenty of Jews 
have been given titles in England. It's not a novelty. It's not "weird." If 
the first thing a Jew with a title suggests to you is that the guy must be an 
interloper eager for empty markers of status, then you might want to do some 
soul-searching about why you'd think in that way. Certainly there are people 
who sneer at Jews with titles. But I don't think this is the crowd you want 
to align yourself with. So I hope you can get past the assumption that 
there's something automatically suspect about a Jew with a title. 

You, of course, would like to tell me that what you wrote down were not your 
own thoughts. You were just clairvoyantly reporting "what Eliot thinks." 
Pretty shaky ground in this case. At one point there was talk in England of 
appointing a sort of czar to oversee Brtitish industry. Eliot did an 
editorial for the Criterion recommending the industrialist Sir Alfred Mond. 
Eliot doesn't seem to have any problem with the guy being Jewish and having a 
title. Just a somewhat admiring  discussion of Mond's qualifications, and why 
Eliot thinks he'd be the best person for the job. My provisional conclusion: 
Eliot doesn't get bent out of shape about a Jew with a title, but, for 
whatever reason, you do.  

>  
>  Now if these are the poems you are calling Eliot's "Jewish poems" in lieu
>  of calling them his "antisemitic poems," then we have, perhaps, identified
>  a point of profound disagreement.

I like to do things one step at a time, and I don't like to be prejudicial. 
They're Jewish poems because they mention Jews or include Jewish characters. 
If they're antisemitic, this has to be shown, not assumed. And I want a 
showing that meets some reasonable standards. Not just a bunch of people 
repeating "it's obvious it's obvious." I don't actually  have as much 
clairvoyance as other people. I have no idea what he "really" thought about 
Jews. I just know that they supposed "evidence" from Ara Vos Prec just 
doesn't hold up. 

>  
>  There are also some other lines in the "Fragment of a Prologue" (Collected
>  Poems 78-79) which features a banal conversation in which two American
>  businessmen who are also war veterans, Krumpacker and Klipstein, confess
>  to feeling alien to London because it is too glittering and decadent. They
>  are permanent outsiders who must depend upon "real live Britishers" to
>  show them around: 
>      Klipstein:         You said it Krum.
>        London's a slick place, London's a swell place,
>        London's a fine place to come on a visit --
>      Krumpacker:  Specially when you got a real live Britisher
>        A guy like Sam to show you around.
>        Sam of course is at _home_ in London,
>        And he's promised to show us around.  [Eliot's emphasis.]
>  
>  The tawdry phrases, "slick" and "swell," and the resistance to taking up
>  residence in London makes these guys into permanent tourists without homes
>  -- and without the things homes stand for in Eliot: permanence, abiding
>  loyalty, religious awe, moral value, etc.  One wonders if Eliot has
>  grafted the stock figure of the Wandering Jew onto the avaricious,
>  shallow, American war veteran. 
>  
>  Now to conclude the Eliot was anti-semitic on that fragment of a play
>  alone is a bit far-fetched, but I would not call those lines part of a
>  "Jewish poem" either.

No, it's not a Jewish poem, because there isn't one damn thing in it to 
suggest that either of these two are Jewish at all, or that there's anyone in 
the poem who's Jewish. The names are German. Krumpacker seems to be an actual 
German name. Klipstein I suspect is invented, and means "rock-stone."  
Lyndall Gordon thought Klipstein was Jewish, and the association is downright 
embarrassing. Given nothing whatsoever in the poem to suggest that any of the 
characters are Jewish, I'd guess that "Klip" suggested cheating to Gordon, 
and she associated cheating with Jews. My first thought was that this woman 
is despicable, but I'm trying to be charitable. I pray regularly that God 
will give her the insight to understand that Jews don't necessarily cheat, 
and people who cheat are not necessarily Jews.

You have it a bit more complex. You found elements in the passage that were 
"tawdry" and "avaricious,"  and to you this suggested Jews. Do you do this 
often? Every time you encounter a character that you find unsavory, does it 
cross your mind that the character may or must be a Jew? I think I'm going to 
add you to my prayers, just to be on the safe side. 
  
>  So the fact that he mentions Jews in only one place hardly
>  confines anti-semitism to that single citation,...

Is it antisemitic to mention Jews? Just curious about what the term means to 
you.

>  I assume those are the texts which have prompted the critics you cite to
>  find anti-semitism in Eliot, and since their arguments are doubtlessly
>  stronger and better researched than I can muster on the spur of the
>  moment, I wonder if you would explain why you think their evidence is
>  unconvincing or their arguments are weak.  

The usual critieria --non sequiturs, false premises, misinformation.  Maybe 
circular reasoning is especially important. If you set out to show that Eliot 
is antisemitic, you can't announce that he's antisemitic on page 1. Either 
it's your initial assumption or your conclusion, but not both at once. Don't 
forget that the lit "denouncing Eliot's antisemitism" is polemical, comes in 
large part from people outside the field, and tends to be at a lower level 
than what I'll call Eliot scholarship proper. Julius is an example. He's an 
attorney. Makes no bones about being angry and wanting to vent his anger. In 
my opinion, has too sketchy a grasp of the poems--interested mainly in where 
one  finds the word "Jew." Doesn't know the correspondence, the works of 
criticism, or even biographical material as well as he should, or as well as 
most people do who publish on Eliot. Should never read anything later than 
Browning, and his real complaint about Eliot seems to be "ugliness." From 
time to time, ties this back to his main subject by announcing, without 
explanation, that ugliness is antisemitic. He's now supposed to be working on 
a book "about art," although I thought his comments on art in his Eliot book 
didn't show much background in that area. I could be wrong, but I'm expecting 
a polemic of some sort against modern art. 

Don't mean to be hard on Julius so much as to make the point that "deploring 
Eliot's antisemitism" is sort of a niche in Eliot studies. 

> I, for one, have no difficulty
>  in seeing those lines as decisivelyly anti-semitic, and Eliot's rant in
>  _After Strange Gods_ no less so.  

This man never ranted in his life. As you said, you haven't read ASG for a 
long time, and maybe you should look at it again.

>  Speaking
>  only for myself I find it somewhat difficult to find more than roughly a
>  score of people between 1900 and 1945 who advocate principles I am willing
>  to endorse.  I'm don't think myself unusual in finding that even then I
>  must pick and choose, and sometimes the pickings are fairly sparse. 

I'm very interested in what I'll call the hypocrisy of the politically 
correct. From the Victorian era onward, the great mass of decent people seem 
to be very polite to Jews. Don't know what they said in private, but one 
couldn't fault what they said in public. It did seem odd that if they liked 
Jews as much as they said, they didn't want us in their country clubs. What 
happened in Germany is along the same line. Despite anything Hitler had to 
say about foreign-looking Jews wearing caftans, that wasn't the way things 
were. German Jews were the most assimilated in Europe and seemed to be 
completely accepted. I conclude, on the basis of the Holcaust, that they 
didn't have as many friends as they thought they had. 

You believe that what people say or advocate matters. I don't. I think 
they'll say whatever they think makes them look good. For insight into what 
people really believe, I'd rather watch how they behave.   You may recall all 
those liberal politicians who fought hard to integrate the public schools, 
but sent their own children to private schools. Or our law-and-order mayor in 
New York, who unflinchingly advocates the highest moral principles but cheats 
on his wife behind the scenes.

This post is much too long. you're forgiven if you never get this far. Many 
thanks for the information on Yeats.

pat


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