The Devilish God

David Wheatley

• Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot by Denis Donoghue
  Yale, 326 pp, £17.95, January 2001, ISBN 0 300 08329 7
• Adam’s Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature by Denis Donoghue
  Notre Dame, 178 pp, £21.50, May 2001, ISBN 0 268 02009 4

Few presences were more imposing in postwar poetry than that of T.S. Eliot, but from his eminence as the Pope of Russell Square, Eliot has now shrunk to something more like a holy ghost. Pound’s right-wing unpleasantness, because so deranged, seems somehow more forgivable, to the huddled ranks of Poundians at least. Critics unimpressed by the psychodrama of Eliot’s Christianity, such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, much prefer Yeats and Stevens. And as a glance at any anthology of 20th-century British poetry will show, the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From the maudlin Tom and Viv to Peter Ackroyd’s unauthorised Life and Carole Seymour-Jones’s Painted Shadow, the collateral damage, too, has been heavy. Even now, much about Eliot remains opaque: 13 years after the first volume of his letters appeared, we can only speculate as to what continues to hold up publication of the second. Partisans of Anthony Julius’s 1995 study, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, will have reached their own conclusions. The anti-semitic charge was squatting awkwardly on Eliot’s reputation long before Julius’s book, but old habits of deference died hard, even among his detractors. In ‘T.S. Eliot at 101’, Cynthia Ozick remembers swallowing ‘without protest’ the nasty bits of Eliot’s poems as an undergraduate and the long, slow disenchantment that followed, but manages to end on a note of wistful nostalgia for the ‘Age of Eliot’: ‘What we will probably go on missing for ever is that golden cape of our youth, the power and prestige of high art.’ To Tom Paulin by contrast, post-Julius, Eliot is practically the devil incarnate, portrayed in Paulin’s poem ‘The Yellow Spot’ gloating with Montgomery Belgion over the transportation of Jews and (could there be a connection here?) playing his favourite game of trying to find a rhyme for ‘Ritz’ (‘no not Biarritz’). ‘Resign resign resign,’ screams the last line of Eliot’s ‘Difficulties of a Statesman’. With the catcalls from the terraces grown so strident, how much longer can Chairman Tom cling on?