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T. S. Eliot has probably been given as much media attention in the past five years as he was given in his entire lifetime. But fame, as we all know, is not necessarily a good thing. For admirers of Eliot, the most recent wave has been decidedly bittersweet. His prestige is still apparent, most prominently in his selection by Time magazine as "the poet of the century." But a dark cloud has settled firmly over his reputation. Though Eliot has no apparent skeleton in his closet—such as the pro-Nazi articles which the late "Father of Deconstructionism," Paul de Man, wrote as a young Belgian journalist during World War II—he does have a motley pile of bones, which several recent critics have attempted to reconstruct into various forms.
Unlike de Man, Eliot has long been a thorn in the side of the liberal intellectual establishment. That Eliot was a conservative in almost every aspect of life he himself admitted in the famous preface to his 1928 book of essays For Lancelot Andrewes: "Meanwhile, I have made bold to unite these occasional essays merely as an indication of what may be expected, and to refute any accusation of playing 'possum. The general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion." Such an agenda, dismissed by many of Eliot's contemporaries as merely anachronistic, is taken by our own contemporaries as utterly damning.
Among the most provocative and widely discussed indictments of Eliot is Anthony Julius's book T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. In an irony that Eliot perhaps would have appreciated, it was a trick of pop culture that brought Julius's dissertation work, published by Cambridge in 1995, into prominence. In his day-job, Julius was the attorney who represented Princess Diana in her divorce suit with Prince Charles. If the massive settlement he effected for Diana is any indication, he is a good lawyer (and perhaps the wealthiest literature Ph.D. in the world!). If the case he has constructed regarding Eliot is any indication, the lawyer's craft does not always translate well into that of the literary critic.
What one first intuits from Julius's tone is that the conversation regarding Eliot is already closed. Not only does he posit anti-Semitism as a strong theme in Eliot's work; he further sees this bias as the trope that dominates all of Eliot's thought. Now, it is undeniable that several of Eliot's early poems (all dating from around 1920) have anti-Semitic references, most notably "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar"; an excised portion of The Waste Land entitled "Dirge"; and the opening of "Gerontion," where "the Jew squats on the window sill."
Equally undeniable, and more troubling, is the fact that, well after his 1927 baptism into the Anglican Church, Eliot remarked in a lecture at the University of Virginia in the spring of 1933 (in ill-timed correlation with Hitler's assumption of dictatorial powers in Germany), that "reasons of race and religion make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable" in a Christian culture. The poetic glosses seem to be the product of the ill-conceived period bias that often beset Eliot as a young poet. The lecture remark, reprinted in the volume After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, seems a painful theoretical expression of the logical ends of Eliot's nascent cultural theory.
But from such problematic moments it is a long stretch indeed to Julius's portrait of Eliot as an obsessive anti-Semite—and to the astonishing "judgments" of Eliot that were pronounced in passing, almost casually, in reviews of Julius's book. So, for example, Frederic Raphael in The Weekly Standard: "What we shall never know, luckily for us and, I suspect, for his reputation, is what posture Eliot would have struck in a London as providentially subject to the Nazis as occupied France was."
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