Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 18:48:30 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Langston <dlangsto-AT-mcla.mass.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Howard on Mein Kampf



On Thu, 10 Aug 2000 Patsloane-AT-aol.com wrote:

> You're on the prowl for authors to scold, T. S. Eliot will do as well as 
> anyone
           ...and...
> No, I can't name paragraphs in ICS or Notes... that are derogatory towards 
> Jews.  I don't even recollect Jews being mentioned in these texts. 

Scolding T.S. Eliot for anti-semitism started long before Howard was born
or "cultural studies" gleamed in the eyes of Stuart Hall.
 
There are some lines or characters in Eliot's poems which occasionally
have been targets of that judgment, but the _locus classicus_ for the
charge of anti-semitism are _The Sacred Wood_ and _After Strange Gods_. I
seem to remember that after the war Eliot distanced himself from the more
rancid things he had to say there about Jews in the '30's.

I remain a little puzzled about why subscribers to this list are either
shocked or defensive over the fact that modernist writers present themes
and situations which we today consider to be racial or ethnic bigotry. 
Such ideas were so widespread as to be almost universal; they were taken
for granted in almost every quadrant of life.  Ellison's _Invisible Man_
depicts the intellectual left as almost crippled by a pervasive racism
masked by the arrogant certainty that history could only be headed in a
single direction.  People who advocated views we might endorse today were
few and far between, and notions of racial hierarchy and distinction were
so common it is more a surprise when we find their absence.  It may be
disappointing to discover writers accepting -- or in the case of Eliot,
Yeats, and Pound advocating -- ideas which aligned them with fascist
political movements of their day....but they did.

At the same time, the modernist embrace of racial or ethnic hierarchy did
not go unnoticed at the time, and there were plenty of people then (and
now) who took Eliot to task for his cultural theories.  However, the most
interesting development from Eliot's defense of culture is not who
criticized him but who defended him and used his ideas.  Eliot temporizes
his defense of core values with by saying "you can't have too much of
this" or "too much of that" -- at least keeping the door open to some
limited measure of diversity.  His defenders and inheritors have been a
good deal more totalizing in their prescriptions for "good culture."  In
their versions, the cultural police would never lack for work.

David Langston



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