Is it always my fault?

Denis Donoghue

T.S. Eliot by Craig Raine
Oxford, 202 pp, £12.99, January 2007, ISBN 978 0 19 530993 5

In 1929, in his essay on Dante, T.S. Eliot wrote:

But the question of what Dante ‘believed’ is always relevant. It would not matter, if the world were divided between those persons who are capable of taking poetry simply for what it is and those who cannot take it at all; if so, there would be no need to talk about this question to the former and no use in talking about it to the latter. But most of us are somewhat impure and apt to confuse issues: hence the justification of writing books about books, in the hope of straightening things out.

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Vol. 29 No. 2 · 25 January 2007 » Denis Donoghue » Is it always my fault? (print version)
Pages 24-25 | 2538 words

Letters

From Edward Pearce

Denis Donoghue handles the desperate writhings of Craig Raine over the primitive anti-semitism of T.S. Eliot with gentle dubiety (LRB, 25 January). Neither Raine nor Eliot deserves it. Dramatic monologues which carry the unchallenged malevolence of ‘Burbank/Bleistein’ and ‘Gerontion’ are no less malevolently anti-semitic for being dramatic monologues.

‘The jew is underneath the lot’ is beyond exculpation, pure Julius Streicher. Sir Ferdinand Klein, clipper of the lion’s rump, entertained by Princess Volupine, is clearly a Jew, hatefully about to enjoy a Christian woman. In part, this is the voice of the Old South, from whose borders Eliot derived. It speaks even more clearly of the anti-Dreyfusards, specifically of the intellectualised poison which flourished in France in the 1890s and had a long, vicious after-life. Will Raine please come to terms with the defiantly acknowledged influence on Eliot of Charles Maurras. The founder of Action Française is the source for all the organic community rubbish with which Eliot embarrassed his admirers. In 1945, Maurras, in his seventies, was saved from a firing squad for collaboration with the Nazis. His organic society was to be free from métèques, unorganic outsiders; it was his way of saying: ‘Keep France white.’ The famous passage in ‘After Strange Gods’ – not too many free-thinking Jews and all that – is carbon-copy Maurras.

It is very odd, at a time when any critic of the crimes committed by the Israeli government risks being called ‘anti-semitic’, to find Craig Raine blind to the words on the page and the hatred behind them. There is a larger case to be made about other twists in Eliot’s hyper-refined head: the fear of sex, the scorn for women, the loathing for persons of inferior station, the typist and apeneck Sweeney. Yet here, on the Jewish issue, Raine, like a literary first footman, is to be found polishing the family silver and denying the dirty secrets.

Edward Pearce
Thormanby, North Yorkshire