Sill in his thirties, Anthony Julius has an uneven fame in today’s England: He is both the high-flying lawyer representing the Princess of Wales, in her impending divorce from Prince Charles, and the unadvertised author of a book, T.S. Eliot, AntiSemitism and Literary Form, which threatened enough of a storm to be greeted, in London literary circles, with conspicuous reticence.
Although published by the Cambridge University Press, it has not been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement or in most of the major British newspapers. Since Dr. Julius his book is a revised, successful Ph.D. thesis — took two years out from his (as an anti-Semite, or a Jewish mother, might say) lucrative legal career in order to train for and acquire the intellectual muscle, and warrant, to get into the ring with Eliot, he can be excused for expecting at least a chorus of welcome obloquy after a Rocky-like rise from north-London obscurity to challenge the champion of High Culture.
By contrast, as Princess Diana’s legal counsel, Julius has become a gossip- column celebrity, the minutiae of whose offce politics merit newsprinted attention. We have been treated to headlined promises that his usual secretary at the firm of Mishcon, De Reya was miffed when he imported a different (more discreet?) typist to deal with palatial business, and it has been exclusively disclosed that some of his colleagues are detecting symptoms of hubristic vanity in his bearing. Like Eliot’s Princess Volupine, Diana both lends kudos to her escort and excites envy in those whose arm, or advice, she disdains to take.
Perhaps the muted reception of Julius’s book on Eliot proves only that enough is more than enough. After the play and film of Tom and Viv, with all their reheated simplifications, have we not had a surfeit of cattishness at the expense of the young(ish) Tom’s fiat-footed fogeydom? It may be true that he could neither satisfy his first wife — his long-lived second, Valerie, makes do with Keeper of the Flame self- satisfaction — nor obtain a pardon from a rabbinical court for his views on the Jewish question, but need we go on and on about his questionable shortcomings? He has achieved the usual English transition from vieillard terrible to cuddly cult-figure. His old publishing house, Faber and Faber, grows gorgeously rich not so much on his poetic reprints, however frequent, as on the royalties from Cats (based on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, his volume of children’s poetry). It is somewhat sweet that the prim author who referred so scathingly, and undoubtedly anti-Semitically, to “money in furs” should have been purringly immortalized by tuneful pussies. Does what is left of God sometimes take the form of a Cheshire cat, of whom there is nothing to be seen but an ironic smile?
If there have been murmurs of dismay at Julius’s re-opening of the dated charges of anti-Semitism against Old Tom, critics have preferred to be sighingly sympathetic to the emotional — albeit anachronistic — reaction of a young, post- Holocaust Jew to the poet who declared, in the 1920 poem Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, that “the rats are underneath the piles/the jew is underneath the lot.” However, did not Thophile Gautier once say “Tout passe?” Is it not time everything did?
No: Anthony Julius has a new slant on the evidence.
For as long as anyone can remember, the standard response to Jews — and others, if any — who sought to evict Eliot from the sainted niche in which his merits, no less than his Anglophile assimilatory agility, installed him has been to deplore his persecutors” underdeveloped organs of appreciation. Sensitive critics like Christopher Ricks (assuming there is anyone like Christopher Ricks) have displayed, in detailed detail, with what straight- faced skittishness Eliot played the controversial polymath. By donning grotesque masks of unreason, of despair, and of mythological personae, was he not simply “doing the police,” as he used to say, in a variety of cunningly subversive voices?
This routine defense insists that, like any other dramatist or dramatizer, Eliot cannot legitimately be identified with those whom he impersonates or whose platitudes he gilds, or makes glitter, with such scintillating derision. Julius treats these suave disclaimers with merciless courtesy; he does British justice to Eliot’s professorial apologists by listening respectfully to them and believing no more than every other word they say. In this unusual fashion, he proves himself at times a greater, and always a more honest, admirer of Eliot than those who habitually plaster him with saintliness. The unintimidated Julius may attack the poet’s antiSemitism, but its nuanced malice does not prevent him from saluting its generative place in Old Possum’s feline arsenal.
Julius’s book is mold-breaking without being merely an act of debunking. Its diffident impact is only underlined by the affectations of deja vu with which academics on both sides of the Atlantic have chosen, pretty well, to ignore it. Make no mistake: What is extremely rare, if not unique, is Julius’s assertion that Eliot’s dismissive disdain was not a dramatic device or even an illadvised lapse on the great man’s part, but an integral and seminal aspect of his imagination. He saw the Jews as a blot, not a menace; their physical stuntedness was the objective correlative of their spiritual atrophy. They were a practical joke he liked to crack, like a bad egg.
Julius rejects the fudgy dogma (so often propounded by John Carey, Christopher Ricks, and all that galore) that, since great poetry cannot be anti-Semitic and since Eliot certainly is a great poet, he cannot, logically, be hostile to Jews. Julius comes to the embarrassingly plausible conclusion that poems such as Sweeney Among the Nightingalesare both great literature and anti-Semitic. Despite what Witt- genstein (or Jean-Paul Sartre) said to the contrary, aesthetics and ethics have no necessary equivalence or symmetry; there can, after all, be “good” reactionary literature. (Come to think of it, what would literature be without its prejudices, of which grammar is the abstract guardian? Mere naturalism!) With meticulously footnoted defiance, Julius breaches and honors the fastidious conventions of academic custom. His only naivetis in supposing, if he does, that such candid duplicity can secure him the admiration more properly reserved, in literary critical circles, for hypocrisy.
It has always been held to be a sign of naivet — an intellectual sin far graver than malice or vindictiveness-to attribute ideological content to poetry. Prose may incidentally embrace metaphors, but poetry is metaphor and hence sui generis: True or false assertions about the world can never properly be extracted from it. Julius cries “humbug” to this recension of the old claim to “benefit of clergy,” and rightly. Yet like Eliot, he is at once subversive and respectful of tradition; en bon anglais, he is prudent enough to shout without raising his voice. His attack on literary evaluation is determined to be a contribution to it. Parody is the sincerest, and most painstaking, form of criticism.
I once said of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in reviewing a heavy volume of essays in which he took as much space to discuss the (negligible) role of the vice president of the United States as Thucydides did to describe the defeat of the Athenian armada in the great harbor of Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War, that there were “few dark corners on which he fails to shed fresh dust.” If there is a trace of urgent dustiness in Julius, he differs from the smug junior Schlesinger (can anyone still take the toadying biographer of Robert Kennedy seriously?) in being genuinely enlightening. He is particularly forceful in exposing the supercilious stratagems with which Eng. lit. pundits have sought, systematically, to obscure or excuse the vulgar animus of protected specimens in the modern canon.
Although Ezra Pound’s anti- Semitism is so manifest (and programmatically murderous) that only the most refined minds are scrupulous enough to deny its centrality in his work, one of Julius’s problems is that for a Jew to harp on malice towards Jews can still be taken as evidence of undue sensitivity. Discreet Shylockian sufferance is much to be preferred to being a crybaby. I was once on a panel at Stratford, faced by rows of culture-tripping Japanese, after a production of The Merchant of Venice in which Shylock, played by Ian McDiarmid, wore a yellow hat, spoke with a stereotypical Jewy lisp, and played for self-inflicted laughs. In the discussion, McDiarmid denied angrily that he would ever have anything do with anything that endorsed anti-Semitism. To which, in my crowd-displeasing way, ! asked whether this did not amount to resignation from Western European culture.
It is, I dare say, in response to such loutish cosmopolitan sarcasm that the critic Denis Donoghue impatiently advises Jews to have a sense of humor as willing to let bygones be bygones as that of his folk, the Irish. (None of them, we may deduce, has ever complained about such antique grievances as the behavior of Oliver Cromwell. And what Irishman would today remind the English of how little they did to alleviate the potato famine or draw attention to the cynicism with which London divided and still rules part of the Ireland it colonized?)
Before the war the English/Polish professor Sir Lewis Namier declined to write a history of his own people on the grounds that the Jews did not properly have a history, only a “martyrology. According to Julius’s reading, Eliot’s A Song for Simeon (1928) testifies to even the most honorable Jew’s marginal role by Simeon’s greeting the arrival of Jesus merely as a resigned, soon-to-be-dispossessed witness (witness is, of course, the root meaning of ” martyr”). St. Paul’s “New Covenant” relegated the Chosen People to the exemplary position of rejected wanderers (Blaise Pascal took the same view of them in the 17th century); they have been forced to pay the long price of their refusal to believe in Christ ever since.
The caesura between B.C. and A.D. was indeed fatal for Jewish fortunes. At their peak, in the early Roman empire, Jews constituted 10 percent of the population of the known world; their diabolization by the Fathers of the Church (St. John Chrysostom, the “goldenmouthed,” led the way) reveals the fabricated cohesion of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition. In fact, the rupture between Jews and Christians was as dire for the former as it was promotional to the latter. The Judeo/Christian tradition is a long story of one-sided malevolence; to justify their malice, Christians discovered regular “evidence” of what the usual suspects were up to. Ritual murder, poisoned wells, and lamentable standards of personal hygiene were the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual gracelessness. (Muslims, on the other hand, were ridiculed for excessive washing; good Christians, inspired perhaps by St. Francis’s charitable attitude to infestation, did not have to indulge in bathing more than once a year.)
In his many studies of the relation between violence and religion, RenGirard has pointed out that “the scapegoat mechanism,” which stigmatizes the outcast (and preferably weak) Other, is a standard recipe when a society feels in danger of fracture or disintegration; victimizers have to see themselves as victims. One of the curious and unforeseen consequences of expelling or killing scapegoats is that they later become objects of superstitious veneration. Supernatural and magic powers are attributed to the bloody nuisance whose maltreatment has enabled society to recover its poise. Jesus remarked that the stone that the builder rejected became the head of the corner. The Jew becomes an unexpected instance of the same process; time and again, he is dismissed from Christian society, only subsequently to be credited (though not by Mr. Eliot) with the mythical, tentacular omnipotence which sponsors rekindling the fuse of violence. Not wholly by chance was the religious scholar Mircea Eliade both the academic apostle of the theory of eternal return and a committed Fascist.
David Pryce-Jones, the present-day historian of anti-Semitism, once told me that on the eve of his execution, Julius Streicher, the Nazi “Jew-baiter,” informed his jailers that he now realized that he had been completely wrong about the Jews. On being told that it was a little late for repentance, Streicher explained that he had not exaggerated the worldly power of the Jews, but rather underestimated it: Since they were clearly invincible, he now wanted to be on their side. If they had survived the Holocaust, they were a club worth joining.
In more refined calculations, however, the sorry survival of the Jews is coincidental with, and a validation of, the history of Christianity. Hence the humbug of the postwar Eliot’s “refutation” of charges of anti-Semitism by asserting that, since he was a Christian, he could not possibly be anti- Semitic. Even if it was technically a “sin” to hate Jews (or anyone else), such sinfulness was scarcely a practical impossibility; sins have, after all, been known to be committed. Be that as it may, Eliot became quite tetchy, after 1945, when “libeled” by uncouth contributors to the Times Literary Supplement; he demanded “evidence” or retraction, quite as if he had never printed the propositional, prosaic remarks in Afer Strange Gods calling for a very limited number of “free-thinking Jews” in any putative Christian society. His ideal state would require the exclusion of Jews who tried to pass for common citizens (Maurras too was particularly venomous about those who changed their names). Father Coughlin and Ole Ez and the Great Tom were brothers under the skin. The Rev. Farrakhan is but the latest witless recruit to their fraternity.
In his 1970 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lecture, George Steiner mimicked the arriviste’s cautious nerve when he alluded to Eliot’s mutedly regretful references to the recent Holocaust in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (still awaiting Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version). Steiner has claimed that his polemic wariness contributed to the frustration he encountered when seeking preferment in Oxford or Cambridge. In the printed lectures, entitled In Bluebeard’s Castle, probably his best and certainly his most cogently argued work, Steiner delicately broke academic step by dealing openly with Eliot’s reluctant retreat from the quasiFascist ideology with which he had certainly flirted in the entre deux guerres. At that time, Eliot all but got into bed, in a spiritual sense, with Charles Maurras, whose Action Franfaise movement was avowedly based on anti-Semitism. In 1940, Maurras notoriously remarked that France’s defeat was “a divine surprise,” and in 1945 he observed unrepentantly that his condemnation by a French court was “the revenge of Dreyfus.” 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.
I have suggested elsewhere that there is something no less providential, in an amiable but not wholly dissimilar sense, in the creation of the European Community. The vanished Jews of Europe provide an unspoken but fundamental reason for the kind of “fresh beginning” that will consign them to honorable oblivion. By “fundamental” I mean that the blood of Europe’s Jews has provided the basic cement linking their active and passive persecutors in a pact of righteous silence. Why else was the recent suggestion by President Clinton that dispossessed European Jews should be allowed to sue, independently or as members of a “community,” for the return of their stolen property greeted as another example of clod-hopping Yankee crassness? Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s prophylactic payment of “compensation” to the nascent state of Israel was both a confession of guilt and a well-timed act of early redemption (buying back) of Germany’s good name: Mea culpa and raison d’etat went together economically.
The place of the Jews today, even in the demonology of their enemies, has changed beyond foreseeable regression since the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel. There are those, of whom George Steiner is the most rampantly outspoken, who wonder whether Hitler was not, in some sense, the unacknowledged sponsor, even the necessary cause, of the Jewish state and whether the Jews are not fated to disappear, as “the people of the book,” as much because of Zionism as because of the Holocaust. Having acquired a land, Steiner laments, they are no longer rooted in the text, in the intellect, in what D.H. Lawrence called “disinterested speculation.” Anti- Semitism certainly did not die with Hitler, but his murderous example rendered it obscene as a philosophy or, except to crackpots and headline- hoggers, as an explanation of “the way we live now” (to cite the title of Trollope’s novelistic contribution to the anti-Semitic canon). Winston Churchill once told one of Hitler’s legmen to advise his master that anti- Semitism was a “good starter but a bad stayer,” and so it seems, bloodily, to have proved.
In the light of 20th-century experience, it should be strange that, of all our strange gods, the anti-Semitic figures in the literary pantheon have retained their centrality. Myths of Jewish cunning and clannish manipulation could hardly survive the Holocaust any better than the benign God Whom, supposedly, Jew and Christian had in common. Not the least intriguing of recent discoveries — published in France — is that of a suppressed papal encyclical, commissioned by Plus XI in 1938, in which a Jesuit and a Dominican, among others, argued for an unequivocal condemnation of anti- Semitism and racism. Pius XI died before he could sign the imprimatur and Pius XII had it shelved. This palpable cowardice has not been held against him by those who maintain that he “saved” many thousands of Jews by his tacit tact. Eliot’s obsequious postwar decorum was of a piece with Pius XII’s concern more with Christian continuity than with Christian witness.
What mattered in 1945 was the preservation of appearances; a complete rejection of what had led up to the Shoah would have been tantamount to a repudiation of the whole language of Western thought. It was literally unthinkable. The preservation of Eliot, as the head of the corner, was the academy’s compact with prudent oblivion.
Am I saying that he was not a great poet? Must I? I prefer to remember what a French academician wrote not long ago: As a young lycgen, he was an impotent witness of the arrest of the Jewish members of his class. He became an influential critic and made a considerable career in literature, but he was, he confessed, never able to think that writing was quite as supremely important as cultural pundits would have us believe. Somerset Maugham remarked long ago, when someone accused a (fictional) character of being a lousy poet because he behaved despicably, that he was, on the contrary, a great poet; he was a lousy man — Mr. Eliot, intimidating impostor, probing poseur and genius, was of the same galere.
The comedy of his intrusive centrality is that the man from St. Louis was himself, in Maurras’s terms, a meteque — a camouflaged foreigner in an England where anti-Semitism was, and perhaps is, often a casual social prejudice but never a plausible political program. England’s refusal to be scandalized by Anthony Julius’s book is not itself a scandal. The Jews have had a happy history in Britain, despite fiurries of malice and, sometimes, of murder. Benjamin Disraeli (a convert, though proud of his Jewish blood) is the only Victorian figure who is still instantly recognized by his nickname, Dizzy. And the most famous English Jews, despite the malpractice of those like Robert Maxwell, are remembered for their benefactions and their genius rather than for their misdeeds.
English tolerance may be almost indistinguishable from indifference, but is London wholly misguided in being more interested in Anthony Julius as Princess Di’s worthy liegeman than in Dr. Julius, the shedder of indignant dust?
Frederic Raphael is a novelist and screen-writer whose work includes Lindmann, Darling, Two for the Road, The Glittering Prizes, and the forthcoming Stanley Kubrick film Both Eyes Shut.
