Authors: Louis Menand
American Studies (8 page)
Pound knew his man. Eliot responded enthusiastically, and asked for more Benda. A month later, he told Scofield Thayer, editor
of the American literary magazine the
Dial,
that “Benda’s book is ripping,”
26
and recommended that the
Dial
serialize the whole thing. (It did.) In 1922, when Eliot was starting up the
Criterion
, he eagerly solicited something from Benda. Benda eventually gave him a short essay, which Eliot ran in 1923 with a note calling
Belphegor
“one of the most remarkable essays in criticism of our time.”
27
He later reviewed (unfavorably) the book for which Benda is now famous,
La Trahison des clercs
(1927), and took the opportunity to describe
Belphegor
as “an almost final statement of the attitude of contemporary society to art and the artist.”
28
When Eliot went to work at Faber and Faber, he published an English translation of
Belphegor,
with an introduction by his old teacher Irving Babbitt. And in 1926, he announced in the
Criterion
the existence of a “classical” tendency, which the magazine would henceforth endeavor to represent, and recommended six books as exemplary: Babbitt’s
Democracy and Leadership,
Georges Sorel’s
Réflexions sur la violence,
Jacques Maritain’s
Réflexions sur l‘intelligence
, Hulme’s
Speculations
, Maurras’s
L’Avenir de l’intelligence,
and
Belphegor
. With the exception of Benda and the equivocal exception of Babbitt, every one of these writers had at one time or another been associated with the Action Française.
of the American literary magazine the
Dial,
that “Benda’s book is ripping,”
26
and recommended that the
Dial
serialize the whole thing. (It did.) In 1922, when Eliot was starting up the
Criterion
, he eagerly solicited something from Benda. Benda eventually gave him a short essay, which Eliot ran in 1923 with a note calling
Belphegor
“one of the most remarkable essays in criticism of our time.”
27
He later reviewed (unfavorably) the book for which Benda is now famous,
La Trahison des clercs
(1927), and took the opportunity to describe
Belphegor
as “an almost final statement of the attitude of contemporary society to art and the artist.”
28
When Eliot went to work at Faber and Faber, he published an English translation of
Belphegor,
with an introduction by his old teacher Irving Babbitt. And in 1926, he announced in the
Criterion
the existence of a “classical” tendency, which the magazine would henceforth endeavor to represent, and recommended six books as exemplary: Babbitt’s
Democracy and Leadership,
Georges Sorel’s
Réflexions sur la violence,
Jacques Maritain’s
Réflexions sur l‘intelligence
, Hulme’s
Speculations
, Maurras’s
L’Avenir de l’intelligence,
and
Belphegor
. With the exception of Benda and the equivocal exception of Babbitt, every one of these writers had at one time or another been associated with the Action Française.
The following year, Eliot underwent his conversion to Anglicanism—a secret first unveiled, for most of his readers, in the famous preface to the essay collection
For Lancelot Andrewes
(1928), where he explains that his “general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”
29
The unusual trio (as several commentators have noted) is almost certainly an echo of a 1913 article on Maurras in the
Nouvelle revue française,
entitled
“L’Esthétique des trois traditions,”
in which Maurras’s views are described as
“classique, catholique, monarchique.”
30
(The formula was current among admirers of the Action Française before the
NRF
article: Hulme used a version of it in 1912 in “A Tory Philosophy,” which begins: “It is my aim to explain … why I believe in original sin, why I can’t stand romanticism, and why I am a certain kind of Tory.)”
31
The allusion is fitting because, as Eliot told Paul Elmer More privately, Maurras had been a principal
reason for his conversion.
32
Eliot made public acknowledgment of the influence as well, though the wording was elliptical: responding, in 1928, to the charge that Maurras’s influence “is to pervert his disciples and students away from Christianity,” Eliot testified that “upon me he has had exactly the opposite effect.”
33
For Lancelot Andrewes
(1928), where he explains that his “general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”
29
The unusual trio (as several commentators have noted) is almost certainly an echo of a 1913 article on Maurras in the
Nouvelle revue française,
entitled
“L’Esthétique des trois traditions,”
in which Maurras’s views are described as
“classique, catholique, monarchique.”
30
(The formula was current among admirers of the Action Française before the
NRF
article: Hulme used a version of it in 1912 in “A Tory Philosophy,” which begins: “It is my aim to explain … why I believe in original sin, why I can’t stand romanticism, and why I am a certain kind of Tory.)”
31
The allusion is fitting because, as Eliot told Paul Elmer More privately, Maurras had been a principal
reason for his conversion.
32
Eliot made public acknowledgment of the influence as well, though the wording was elliptical: responding, in 1928, to the charge that Maurras’s influence “is to pervert his disciples and students away from Christianity,” Eliot testified that “upon me he has had exactly the opposite effect.”
33
But the influence was of a peculiar kind, for Maurras was not himself a believer. Eliot felt called upon to defend him in 1928, in fact, because two years earlier the pope had condemned the Action Française and placed many of Maurras’s works (including
L’Avenir de l’intelligence
) on the Index of forbidden writings. Maurras’s promotion of Catholicism was inspired entirely by his enthusiasm for the prospect of greater order and authority he thought it afforded. Eliot, of course, was a genuine believer. But having been persuaded into his faith by the arguments of a man for whom religion was an instrument not of personal salvation but of national cohesion, he proceeded to treat Christianity as the basis for social, economic, educational, and political reform. Thus the bizarre spectacle of Eliot’s religious writings, in which twentieth-century Anglicanism, a faith not exactly noted for its proselytizing or millenarian spirit, becomes the foundation for a theocratic political vision.
L’Avenir de l’intelligence
) on the Index of forbidden writings. Maurras’s promotion of Catholicism was inspired entirely by his enthusiasm for the prospect of greater order and authority he thought it afforded. Eliot, of course, was a genuine believer. But having been persuaded into his faith by the arguments of a man for whom religion was an instrument not of personal salvation but of national cohesion, he proceeded to treat Christianity as the basis for social, economic, educational, and political reform. Thus the bizarre spectacle of Eliot’s religious writings, in which twentieth-century Anglicanism, a faith not exactly noted for its proselytizing or millenarian spirit, becomes the foundation for a theocratic political vision.
The Jews therefore figured, in Eliot’s sociology, as the vestigial remainder of a phase that Christendom had left behind. What is almost as startling as the direct reference to the undesirability of Jews in
After Strange Gods
(1934) is the general indifference displayed in
The Idea of a Christian Society
(1939) and
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
(1948) to the problem of what to do with
any
group not assimilable to a homogeneous Christian order. Eliot does not seem, in those writings, antipathetic to the Jews, only indifferent. Their fate (short of conversion) simply did not matter to him. “The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality,” he wrote in 1931. “The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.”
34
Non-Christians can feel glad at least for the recommendation of patience.
After Strange Gods
(1934) is the general indifference displayed in
The Idea of a Christian Society
(1939) and
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
(1948) to the problem of what to do with
any
group not assimilable to a homogeneous Christian order. Eliot does not seem, in those writings, antipathetic to the Jews, only indifferent. Their fate (short of conversion) simply did not matter to him. “The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality,” he wrote in 1931. “The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.”
34
Non-Christians can feel glad at least for the recommendation of patience.
The great mistake in trying to make sense of Eliot is the assumption that he had a very consistent idea of what he was doing. The mistake is easy to fall into because of the sense of authority Eliot’s writing has always conveyed. It was an extremely precocious authority: by the time he was thirty-two, he had written three of the most influential essays in twentieth-century criticism in English—“Hamlet and His Problems,” “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and “The Metaphysical Poets.” But a knack for sagaciousness is readily exploited, and Eliot sometimes used his capacity for sounding official as a mask for a temperament that was genuinely ad hoc. He was always announcing projects, movements, doctrines, tendencies; but as soon as anyone tried to climb up on the platform with him, he pushed him off. I. A. Richards, Herbert Read, and even Babbitt were subjected to public chastisement by Eliot for what they must have assumed were views Eliot would approve of. That the posthumous
Speculations
of T. E. Hulme was a hopelessly muddled collection hardly bothered Eliot—when the book appeared, he hailed Hulme as “the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own”
35
—because the muddle so closely matched his own. He was, as a poet, Bergsonian and anti-Bergsonian, romantic and antiromantic, for his entire career. “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” is a reaction against symbolism; it is also, in its willful image-piling and narrative indeterminacy, a poem unimaginable without symbolism.
Speculations
of T. E. Hulme was a hopelessly muddled collection hardly bothered Eliot—when the book appeared, he hailed Hulme as “the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own”
35
—because the muddle so closely matched his own. He was, as a poet, Bergsonian and anti-Bergsonian, romantic and antiromantic, for his entire career. “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” is a reaction against symbolism; it is also, in its willful image-piling and narrative indeterminacy, a poem unimaginable without symbolism.
Eliot’s was, remarkably, a mind of bits and pieces. His sources are easily traced, but what matters in his writing always comes from something untraceable. The influence of various aesthetic theories on his poetry can all be mapped and measured, and in the end they fail to account for what he actually wrote. There is nothing in imagism or Bergson or Pater that prepares one for “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table” or for “April is the cruellest month.”
Eliot picked up things he encountered and turned them to uses no one had quite imagined. The famous definition of the “objective correlative” in the essay on
Hamlet
—“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked”
36
—is lifted straight out of a review by Pound’s great friend Ford Madox Ford, in which Ford wrote: “poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader.”
37
But critics spent decades pondering Eliot’s essay, and no one remembers Ford’s. And having introduced the term to literary criticism, Eliot never used it again.
Hamlet
—“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked”
36
—is lifted straight out of a review by Pound’s great friend Ford Madox Ford, in which Ford wrote: “poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader.”
37
But critics spent decades pondering Eliot’s essay, and no one remembers Ford’s. And having introduced the term to literary criticism, Eliot never used it again.
This creates difficulties when critics try to nail Eliot down to one set of influences or ideas. Kenneth Asher’s
T. S. Eliot and Ideology
(1995), for example, made a significant contribution to our understanding of the importance Maurras had for Eliot, but it got hung up by looking for signposts where there are only many, many signs. “From beginning to end,” Asher proposed, “Eliot’s work, including both the poetry and the prose, was shaped by a political vision inherited from French reactionary thinkers, especially from Charles Maurras.”
38
No doubt it was, and in ways Asher did a lot to illuminate; but Eliot’s work was shaped by a dozen other influences as well, some consistent and some inconsistent with Maurrasian philosophy. Richard Wollheim once suggested that Eliot “was progressively led to substitute in his mind, on the one hand, ideas of less content for ideas of more content, and, on the other hand, poorer or softer ideas for better and stronger ideas.”
39
T. S. Eliot and Ideology
(1995), for example, made a significant contribution to our understanding of the importance Maurras had for Eliot, but it got hung up by looking for signposts where there are only many, many signs. “From beginning to end,” Asher proposed, “Eliot’s work, including both the poetry and the prose, was shaped by a political vision inherited from French reactionary thinkers, especially from Charles Maurras.”
38
No doubt it was, and in ways Asher did a lot to illuminate; but Eliot’s work was shaped by a dozen other influences as well, some consistent and some inconsistent with Maurrasian philosophy. Richard Wollheim once suggested that Eliot “was progressively led to substitute in his mind, on the one hand, ideas of less content for ideas of more content, and, on the other hand, poorer or softer ideas for better and stronger ideas.”
39
Two things are distressing about the political and sociological writings Eliot produced in the 1930S. One is the deeply antimodern animus, the high-minded intolerance, that informs them. The other is the comfort they seem so blithely to give to people and doctrines whose potential for evil must have been perfectly manifest. Some of these cases involve the fate of the European Jews. Julius went over many of them carefully and critically, noting, for example, that
Hitler had already come to power when Eliot made his remarks about the undesirability of “free-thinking Jews,” and had been in power for a year when those remarks were finally published. That Eliot was indifferent to the threat posed by Nazism to German Jews is chillingly suggested by an unsigned book notice which appeared in the
Criterion
in 1936. The book was
The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany
; it carries an introduction by the Bishop of Durham. Julius, following several other scholars, including Ricks, believed the writing is Eliot’s own. It is not; the review was by Montgomery Belgion, a writer Eliot often published on French subjects. The style, though, is plainly imitative of the style of the master. This is the review Eliot ran:
Hitler had already come to power when Eliot made his remarks about the undesirability of “free-thinking Jews,” and had been in power for a year when those remarks were finally published. That Eliot was indifferent to the threat posed by Nazism to German Jews is chillingly suggested by an unsigned book notice which appeared in the
Criterion
in 1936. The book was
The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany
; it carries an introduction by the Bishop of Durham. Julius, following several other scholars, including Ricks, believed the writing is Eliot’s own. It is not; the review was by Montgomery Belgion, a writer Eliot often published on French subjects. The style, though, is plainly imitative of the style of the master. This is the review Eliot ran:
There should be someone to point out that this book, although enjoying a cathedratic blessing, is an attempt to arouse moral indignation by means of sensationalism. Needless to say, it does not touch on how we might alleviate the situation of those whose misfortunes it describes, still less on why they, among all the unfortunates of the world, have a first claim on our compassion and help. Certainly no English man or woman would wish to be a German Jew in Germany today; but not only is our title to the moral dictatorship of the world open to question, there is not the least prospect of our being able to exercise it. More particularly, it is noticeable that the jacket of the book speaks of the “extermination” of the Jews in Germany, whereas the title-page refers only to their “persecution”; and as the title-page is to the jacket, so are the contents to the title-page, especially in the chapter devoted to the ill-treatment of Jews in German concentration camps.
40
40
Eliot did not write this. He did, however, assign, edit, and publish it. For he seems to have thought it a brilliant strategy to use the spread of fascism in Europe as a stick to beat the British liberals with. So, for example, in his “Commentary” in the
Criterion
for October 1938—after Mussolini’s Ethiopian war, after the
Anchluss,
after Munich—we find Eliot attacking “the heirs of liberalism, who find an emotional outlet in denouncing the iniquity of something
called ‘fascism.’” “The irresponsible ‘anti-fascist,“‘he complains, “is a danger in several ways. His activities … distract attention from the true evils of his own society. What some of these are may be learned by reading Viscount Lymington’s
Famine in England”
41
—which he goes on, at some length, though in vague terms, to praise.
Criterion
for October 1938—after Mussolini’s Ethiopian war, after the
Anchluss,
after Munich—we find Eliot attacking “the heirs of liberalism, who find an emotional outlet in denouncing the iniquity of something
called ‘fascism.’” “The irresponsible ‘anti-fascist,“‘he complains, “is a danger in several ways. His activities … distract attention from the true evils of his own society. What some of these are may be learned by reading Viscount Lymington’s
Famine in England”
41
—which he goes on, at some length, though in vague terms, to praise.
Now, Viscount Lymington, later the Earl of Portsmouth, was a man named Gerard Wallop. He was a friend of Eliot’s; they had met some years earlier at a private dinner in the House of Commons.
Famine in England
is a warning against war with Germany, a war the British are being driven to, Wallop advises, by Communist propaganda and by those who would benefit from the chaos war would bring. What England needs instead, he argues, is a renewal of its agricultural and its human stock: “It is blood and soil which rule at last.”
42
It seems that the real danger is within:
Famine in England
is a warning against war with Germany, a war the British are being driven to, Wallop advises, by Communist propaganda and by those who would benefit from the chaos war would bring. What England needs instead, he argues, is a renewal of its agricultural and its human stock: “It is blood and soil which rule at last.”
42
It seems that the real danger is within:
Foreign invasion of England has not happened in war time. It has happened in the last hundred years. Anyone who has been able to notice with his own eyes the foreign invasion of London should read Colonel Lane’s
The Alien Menace
to see the extent to which it has been carried on … . These immigrants have invaded the slums and the high places as well. It should not be forgotten that those aliens who now appear to have a stake in this country have a stake also in many others. But most of them, who are obscure, have a definite stake in revolution and no instinct for or interest in English life and tradition. One by one they have “muscled in” on the Englishman’s livelihood till they are everywhere in key positions. With them has come corruption and disrespect for the ancient decencies.
43
The Alien Menace
to see the extent to which it has been carried on … . These immigrants have invaded the slums and the high places as well. It should not be forgotten that those aliens who now appear to have a stake in this country have a stake also in many others. But most of them, who are obscure, have a definite stake in revolution and no instinct for or interest in English life and tradition. One by one they have “muscled in” on the Englishman’s livelihood till they are everywhere in key positions. With them has come corruption and disrespect for the ancient decencies.
43
Arthur Lane’s
The Alien Menace
is a work of classic paranoid anti-Semitism, in the tradition of Nesta Webster, a writer Lane repeatedly cites. Two sentences are adequate to give the flavor of his book: “It is unsound and inconsistent of our Government to spend large sums of money in emigrating our best people instead of expelling and repatriating the scourings of the earth, whose natural climate and country is the East. Why not settle this evil horde
in Palestine and the Euphrates Valley.”
44
Following the publication of
Famine in England
, Wallop was invited to Berlin. He went for a week in 1939, meeting with Hitler (he had also had an audience with him earlier in the decade) and “being,” as he put it in his autobiography, “wined and dined, seeing youth work camps, bride schools, and a very great many of the good things Hitler was doing.”
45
The Alien Menace
is a work of classic paranoid anti-Semitism, in the tradition of Nesta Webster, a writer Lane repeatedly cites. Two sentences are adequate to give the flavor of his book: “It is unsound and inconsistent of our Government to spend large sums of money in emigrating our best people instead of expelling and repatriating the scourings of the earth, whose natural climate and country is the East. Why not settle this evil horde
in Palestine and the Euphrates Valley.”
44
Following the publication of
Famine in England
, Wallop was invited to Berlin. He went for a week in 1939, meeting with Hitler (he had also had an audience with him earlier in the decade) and “being,” as he put it in his autobiography, “wined and dined, seeing youth work camps, bride schools, and a very great many of the good things Hitler was doing.”
45
Eliot’s inability to dissociate himself from men whose anti-Semitism was virulent and overt was lifelong. Such a man was Ezra Pound, long before he met Major Douglas or heard of Mussolini. In a series entitled “Patria Mia,” in the British
New Age
in 1912, he praised the ethnic diversity of New York, but found it necessary to add, “The Jew alone can retain his detestable qualities.”
46
Such a man was John Quinn, the New York lawyer who was the patron of Pound, Joyce, and Eliot. Quinn had written to Eliot in 1919 concerning some trouble with the publisher Horace Liveright (who was Jewish), and expressing his satisfaction on hearing news of Polish pogroms and his keen desire to start a pogrom in New York—so that Eliot must have thought it a useful piece of stroking when, writing to Quinn several years later to complain again about Liveright, he commented that he was sick of what he called Jew publishers and asked whether Quinn couldn’t find a decent Christian one.
47
And such a man was Charles Maurras, who shouted “
C’est la revanche de Dreyfus
!” upon his conviction in 1945 by a French court for collaborating with the Nazi occupation. After the trial, the right-wing French newspaper
Aspects de la France et du Monde
published a special issue in homage to Maurras; Eliot contributed an essay in which he described Maurras as “a sort of Virgil who led us to the doors of the temple.”
48
New Age
in 1912, he praised the ethnic diversity of New York, but found it necessary to add, “The Jew alone can retain his detestable qualities.”
46
Such a man was John Quinn, the New York lawyer who was the patron of Pound, Joyce, and Eliot. Quinn had written to Eliot in 1919 concerning some trouble with the publisher Horace Liveright (who was Jewish), and expressing his satisfaction on hearing news of Polish pogroms and his keen desire to start a pogrom in New York—so that Eliot must have thought it a useful piece of stroking when, writing to Quinn several years later to complain again about Liveright, he commented that he was sick of what he called Jew publishers and asked whether Quinn couldn’t find a decent Christian one.
47
And such a man was Charles Maurras, who shouted “
C’est la revanche de Dreyfus
!” upon his conviction in 1945 by a French court for collaborating with the Nazi occupation. After the trial, the right-wing French newspaper
Aspects de la France et du Monde
published a special issue in homage to Maurras; Eliot contributed an essay in which he described Maurras as “a sort of Virgil who led us to the doors of the temple.”
48
As Julius argued, the poems in
Ara Vos Prec
are poetry, and they are anti-Semitic, and the two qualities are inseparable, for the poems have a place within a very specific tradition of anti-Semitic literary thought. Julius’s claim that anti-Semitism casts a shadow on Eliot’s writing after 1922 is right as well. And in the end, even his refusal to concede ground to exculpatory arguments seems just. For indifference is not a defense. There is no evidence that Eliot ever
demonstrated personal hostility to a Jew. His anti-Semitism was certainly not, as some of his defenders claimed over the years, “genteel” (whatever it could mean to be a genteel bigot); but neither was it, except as a spur to writing, acted upon or intended to be acted upon. I don’t think Eliot ever wished any harm to the Jews. But he took support from and gave support to many people who did. He was a traveler in that terrible fellowship.
Ara Vos Prec
are poetry, and they are anti-Semitic, and the two qualities are inseparable, for the poems have a place within a very specific tradition of anti-Semitic literary thought. Julius’s claim that anti-Semitism casts a shadow on Eliot’s writing after 1922 is right as well. And in the end, even his refusal to concede ground to exculpatory arguments seems just. For indifference is not a defense. There is no evidence that Eliot ever
demonstrated personal hostility to a Jew. His anti-Semitism was certainly not, as some of his defenders claimed over the years, “genteel” (whatever it could mean to be a genteel bigot); but neither was it, except as a spur to writing, acted upon or intended to be acted upon. I don’t think Eliot ever wished any harm to the Jews. But he took support from and gave support to many people who did. He was a traveler in that terrible fellowship.
For most of his career Eliot laid claim to a position outside the fray. It was his role, he seemed to feel, to be the one man who could think eschatologically while everyone around him was thinking merely politically and biologically. Asher has a nice phrase for the rhetorical gambit Eliot used when he assumed this stance: “the calling of a truce while he attacks from above.”
49
But I don’t think Eliot’s personal associations with anti-Semitism were unworldly. I think they were all too worldly.
49
But I don’t think Eliot’s personal associations with anti-Semitism were unworldly. I think they were all too worldly.
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