Kenneth Asher. "T.S. Eliot and Ideology". Cambridge University Press, 1995

Paul Morrison. "The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Paul de Man". Oxford University Press, 1996

The prose of "Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley," the Harvard dissertation in philosophy that T.S. Eliot wrote between 1915 and 1916, is taut, nervy, alive. The prose of the preface that Eliot wrote in 1964 for the dissertation's publication is not. Ponderously solemn about such items as "a photostatic copy of the text (the original typescript being, of course, the property of the University)" (10), this is the late Eliot style that Wyndham Lewis characterized as "Westminster Abbey" (Kenner 444). It is as if Eliot's reactionary politics had worked a long-term change in his means of expression. As a young man, Eliot changed the English language forever. But from his middle age onward, something in Eliot's own language resisted that change; tried to ignore it, tried to stay Victorian, tried to live its life as if The Waste Land had never been written.

It was the retrograde latter language that spoke to Leslie Fiedler over the signature "T.S. Eliot." Anthony Julius quotes the anecdote from Fiedler's 1991 memoir Fiedler on the Roof:

I wrote to [Eliot], asking him about the obsessive hostility betrayed in [his anti-Semitic poetry]. I was expecting, I think, a recantation, an apology at least, since at the moment at which I opened our correspondence the full horror of the Holocaust had been revealed. He began in his response by trying -- rather unconvincingly, it seemed to me -- to assure me that he was, of course, opposed to the Nazis' "Final Solution," that, indeed, he considered anti-Semitism a "heresy"; but he then went on to write, in a cliché almost as offensive as spelling the name of my people without a capital letter, that some of his best friends were Jews. And he concluded by unctuously expressing the hope that I was a faithful attendant of a synagogue in Missoula, Montana, which is to say, not, at least, "free-thinking." (Julius 205; bracketed words Julius's)

A sad story, a story that deserves its Henry James: the tale of a subtle thinker who cannot perceive that a part of his mind has been simplified down to banality. But what is sadder still is this: to the young Leslie Fiedler, T.S. Eliot was an author.

"Speeches and books," Michel Foucault reminds us, "were assigned real authors, other than mythical or important religious figures, only when the author became subject to punishment" (124). As the author of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot tried to escape punishment (he called it "personality") by positing that the author is per se a mythical figure: an extension away from the individual and into language itself, a human being who is most individually characteristic when he submerges himself deepest in the lightless sea of anonymous verbality. Eliot's oeuvre itself -- a tiny volume of verse held up to the light of history by a huge, hidden substructure of ephemeral journalism -- is constructed according to that paradigm, and that is why it hurt Leslie Fiedler. In their banality, Eliot's words struck at Fiedler from what Eliot called "tradition": the anonymous history of meaning itself.

Like tradition, that anonymity sustained consciousness unawares. Eliot's publishers, Faber & Faber and Harcourt, Brace, had no objection to spelling Eliot's word "jew" from the lower case until the Collected Poems of 1963, and the ladies and gentlemen of the University of Virginia aren't on record as having protested when Eliot explained to them, a few weeks after Hitler came to power, that in a well ordered society "Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." Since then, however, having been impinged upon by dreadful events that we now know they may have helped to bring about, these realities have entered consciousness and become facts. And the new facts have imposed a new regime. Under their control, "Gerontion" and the Virginia lectures that became After Strange Gods now have to be read as translations of Eliot's language into the speech of their own prehistory. If we take Eliot's poetry seriously, we hear his voice now in the speech of Joyce's Mr. Deasy and Faulkner's Jason Compson, of Henry Adams and Thomas Carlyle and Voltaire and Shakespeare and Chaucer. Furthermore, to the extent that we now think in Eliot's words, that literary record is not just the evidence but the criminal's tool. "The existing order is complete before the new work arrives," says Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"; "for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered." We may not think of this dictum as fraught with any historical irony. After all, Eliot did not invent the novelty-word "jew" or its connotations. But in the twentieth century the word came to be read under an aspect perhaps less literary than the language of the Jew joke or the Bible, closer to the exciting wordlessness of a puddle of blood. That narrowing of focus, that approximation to a single meaning, is a change with which T.S. Eliot has had something to do. Since Eliot's time, and to a crucial extent because of Eliot, the word "jew" has taken on specialized meaning and become what Eliot would have called a fact.

In Eliot's sense of the word, Julius's T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form is all fact. It conceives of the question, "Was T.S. Eliot an antisemite?" as factual, and it sets out to demonstrate that the answer "Yes" and Eliot's denials are both aspects of a fact. Julius, who is one of England's best-known lawyers (he represented Princess Diana in her divorce), reads Eliot's language, denials and all, as the fact's modus operandi. The written record will show, for instance, that Eliot wrote, "The poetry of Isaac Rosenberg . . . because it is Hebraic . . . is a contribution to English literature. For a Jewish poet to be able to write like a Jew, in western Europe and in a western European language, is almost a miracle" (Julius 101-02). The formulation seems obscure, but it becomes transparent when we read it as a part of the discourse of antisemitism. Julius does that tessera-style, by inserting Eliot's words, as if they were as interchangeable as standard facts, into the context of Richard Wagner's dictum "The Jew speaks the language of the country in which he has lived from generation to generation, but he always speaks it as a foreigner." That exercise in the archaeology of a word completes Eliot's allusion. More: it demonstrates that Eliot, the paradigmatic modernist author, becomes lisible when his words are read retrospectively, as if there were no discontinuity between them and the ways of meaning they ostensibly break with.

So by establishing its antisemitic etymology, Julius demonstrates that the logic of meaning in words requires the language construction we call "Eliot" to coexist in a continuum of meanings with the pre-Eliotic. "The grounding of [Eliot's] thought in polite opinion of the '80s and '90s is always worth noting," says Warner Berthoff (10n.), and he isn't talking about the 1980s or '90s. But if it is easy for us now to conceive of Eliot in a nineteenth-century context, that may be because we can now think of the nineteenth century as over: a delimited subject with a beginning and an end, two boundaries within which no living language is spoken. Julius writes in the spirit of that century, as a positivist full of cheery confidence that the words of Richard Wagner are still fully comprehensible in their own terms, and perhaps that is his book's only major failure. T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form has a limited but real value: it calls critical attention to Eliot's antisemitism and places it in a verbal context. Any Jewish reader must welcome that call, regretting only that it comes 76 years late. Unfortunately, the way we think in words has changed in those 76 years.

Julius reads in the oldest way of all, for example, when he insists on his right to take his reading personally. The assumption behind any such way of reading is that there is a stable reader unambiguously named "I," and Julius takes on that identity without a second thought. This "I," moreover, is a public persona: the custodian of the language of the Jewish interpretive community, past and present. "'Burbank' so resonates with anti-Semitic scorn," says Julius at the outset (2), "that if my hypothetical Jewish reader persisted with the poem he would, I suggest, feel compelled to answer back in a spirit of remonstrative exegesis. He would read the poem adversarially. I am that reader." I, reader of Julius's reading, want to cheer Julius on. But his words "I" and "reader" cannot now mean what they meant in 1922. In the years between then and now, some powerful personalities have intervened in the historiography of the ego and its languages. One such person was Hitler; another was Eliot. We can still be hurt by Eliot's words, but we cannot speak our pain in any tongue intelligible to the past. Eliot has seen to that. If we are to speak at all of Eliot and the Jews, we will have to speak Eliot's language, just as Paul Celan had to write in German.

Another part of the difficulty of speaking of Eliot is the human problem of originality. Eliot was much more complicated than most men; over and over again in Lyndall Gordon's biography, people who shared Eliot's confidences for years testify that there came a moment when they realized they didn't know him at all. The corroborating evidence of the Letters suggests that it would take a Dostoevsky, or maybe even a Shakespeare, to do biographical justice to the scope and strangeness of Eliot's mind. But the inadequacy of the existing efforts may be able at least to tell us something about Eliot's language.

For example, when Gordon reflects on Eliot's ruthless abandonment of Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan, two women who loved and served him, she does what biographers do and posits an explanation in terms of overriding motive. She gives the motive a name, too: "his passion for immortality" ("Women" 20). "Immortality" obviously works at a higher level of abstraction than "Emily" or "Mary," and for reading the Eliot of the Quartets and the late plays it is something like a mot juste. But just as obviously it is a word whose meaning has been reduced by Darwin and Freud and Hitler to a lost potential: an ideal of comprehensibility (like Herbert's definition of prayer -- "something understood") which we can no longer even hope to translate. Eliot's poetry both reflects that reduction in lisibilité and helps to bring it about. That is why it remains historically important. But that too is why we now have to read it in other words.

So the most profitable use of Kenneth Asher's T.S. Eliot and Ideology may be topographical. When we read Eliot we place ourselves in a continuum of changing significances that stretches backward from us to the writers whom Eliot brought into their present meaning by creating them his predecessors; when we read Asher we are enabled to trace the course of that change. In his review of Asher and Julius, for instance, Louis Menand doesn't need Asher's help when he speculates about the historiographic value of Eliot's reverence for the French literary thug Charles Maurras, a professional antisemite and Nazi collaborator. "[I]f the story of Eliot and the anti-Semites had been as well known as the story of Eliot and the symbolistes," says Menand (36), "if people had heard as much about Eliot and Charles Maurras as they heard about Eliot and Jules Laforgue, Eliot's reputation in the decades following the Second World War, when his influence in the literary world was most powerful, [might] have been very different." For a judgment like that we don't need to reread any of Eliot's poetry. But the poetry remains the source of Eliot's influence, however the influence might have eventuated, and the chief merit of T.S. Eliot and Ideology is that it shows us how to read the poetry as a phenomenon affected by its sympathetic proximity to such uglinesses as Maurras.

The binary title of a chapter called "Orthodoxy and Heresy," for instance, brings Asher to a comparison between two descriptions of winter: the first of the "Preludes" ("The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passageways") and the third stanza of "A Song for Simeon" ("Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation / Grant us thy peace"). Asher begins by noting that in the later poem "The specific rounds of human degeneracy are now deemed insignificant in comparison with larger universal patterns, and to capture these Eliot uses a much more abstract diction." But Asher doesn't stop with that literary observation; he goes on to ground it in the data of history, this way.

The heavily Latinate vocabulary of the second passage appeals to Eliot for another reason, its connection with the Christian Middle Ages. Having once claimed, in a youthful effort to rally the English to Maurras's cause, that England was a Latin country, he now seems determined to make it one by introjecting a language that can act as a conduit for medieval modes of thought. . . . It is perhaps not altogether unfair to see the forced nature of [the] line ["Now at this birth season of decease"] as emblematic of the enormous pressure Eliot had to exert throughout his life to contrive the conditions, the tradition, by which he might live. (76-77)

That, of course, has been the general condition of art in this century, and it has been natural for historians to classify the results in political terms. Under the heading "Art and Society: Protest and Propaganda," for example, a coffee-table history of art published during the Reagan years juxtaposes pairs of images to generate a standard Cold War Liberal idea about Socialist and National Socialist conceptions of reality (Selz 329, illustrations 869-72). Here we see Lenin, leaning commandingly forward as he addresses the masses in Vladimir Serov's Lenin's Arrival in Petrograd, 1917; here, immediately below, we see Hitler, leaning commandingly forward as he addresses the beer hall conspirators in Hermann Otto Hoyer's In the Beginning Was the Word. Here, with pistol and saber and heroic countenance, is N.I. Strunnikov's Partisan A.G. Lunev; below, in Elk Eber's The Last Hand Grenade, is a beefcake Great War infantryman with stick bomb and rifle and heroic countenance. The German is wearing a helmet and the Russian is wearing a fur hat, that's the only way you can tell which is which, and if the retrograde politics of the modernist revolution have disturbed you, the conclusion that this juxtaposition makes available is comforting. You can look at these paintings and realize, with a sigh of relief, that they are not even technically competent. If the creators of this junk were typical of the artists who lay down and raised their skirts before the men of Auschwitz and the Gulag, then Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, Gottfried Benn and John Crowe Ransom, William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot were not among their number.

But recent architectural history has made the sigh of relief a little harder to heave. Yes, the Nazis demanded that the statues on the grounds of the Berlin Olympics be "free of all ambiguity" (Taylor 166), thereby demonstrating a heroic ignorance of modernist theory. On the other hand, when the Nazis needed to construct a modernist building, they went ahead and constructed a modernist building. As the career of Philip Johnson and the illustrations in Robert R. Taylor's The Word in Stone demonstrate, belief in the ideology of National Socialism was not at all incompatible with the creation of beauty under modernist norms. In fact, there is an important sense in which fascism is modernism.

Consider, for instance, the cover of the guidebook designed by Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi in 1932 for their strikingly modernist Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (Schnapp 30, illustration 5). Here at the left is a granite bas relief of Mussolini, all scowl and lips and chin. Below his image, in bold sans-serif uppercase, is the title MOSTRA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE FASCISTA. Then the perspective recedes and we read, filling with curving wave after wave the void into which the image stares, one more word, a word whose incantation has brought itself into being: DU-CE DU-CE DU-CE DU-CE DU-CE DU-CE DU-CE DU-CE DU-CE DU-CE DU-CE DU-CE DU-CE. You are holding the book now, and fascism has come back to life in your hand and fixed its incarnating word and idea in physical form. The word has successfully become its own mostra. But has it taken a unique, a uniquely evil, form? No; it comes to us wearing the international fashion of Art Deco. Lower the volume and translate the language and you could be in a first class salon on board the Normandie. From his balcony, while his devotees chanted Duce! below, Benito Mussolini proposed to change Italy by military conquest, but the far more profound matter of a change in mentality he accomplished by joining an international triumph already in progress. That triumph was modernism.

This was one of the things the young Paul de Man understood. The antisemitic essay he wrote in 1941 for a Nazi-controlled newspaper, "Les Juifs dans la littérature actuelle" (de Man 45) was statistically an aberration. In all the rest of his oeuvre, before and after, there is nothing else like it, and Jacques Derrida was well within his critical rights when he begged us to consider that that silence may be a context within which we may say we don't yet understand. But de Man's Wartime Journalism is full of references to Mussolini and the modernity he was imposing on Italy, and these provide a context whose language we need to realize that we already know. As Reed Way Dasenbrock says, "The young Paul de Man was not torn between fascism and a commitment to modern art; he identified them. And just as important, this was not an idiosyncratic notion on his part. He was in a coherent intellectual tradition . . ." (238).

By considering that tradition as an aesthetic object, Paul Morrison enables himself to read it dynamically, as a unified but complex system. As he says in the introduction to The Poetics of Fascism, "My governing concern is the interaction among modernism, fascism, and post-structuralism; my specific focus is the politics and poetics of the proper name" (4). At work, that elegant conception "the politics and poetics of the proper name" proceeds by bridging the gaps between categories. That, in turn, allows Morrison to realize Eliot's antisemitism (for instance) by reading it in the essentially modernist way: as a verbal construction. Ideological content then becomes part of a continuum extending from the poet's individual expression all the way back to the etymologies of his collective history.

"The obstinate puzzle," says George Steiner, "is that Eliot's uglier touches [of antisemitism] tend to occur at the heart of very good poetry (which is not the case with Pound)" (qtd. Julius 113). In his practical application of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Morrison attempts to solve Steiner's puzzle by searching Eliot's prosody for the lost trace of Whitman's American language. The Poetics of Fascism is full of such interesting and productive moves, but Morrison's language is not always able to withstand the force of Eliot's. "Rises to the occasion," for instance, is a cliché.

Worse, it is a metaphor. As a metaphor, it is unable to express modernism's catastrophic insight that the world is all metaphor. In its time, that insight gave us Finnegans Wake, and Saussure's linguistics, and the great palimpsest of The Waste Land. But it also gave us Ezra Pound's jaunty conclusion about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, "Certainly they are a forgery, and that is the one proof we have of their authenticity" (Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II, qtd. Morrison 139). When Ferdinand de Saussure discovered that words have meaning only in relation to other words, he both opened a new linguistic territory and introduced it to the serpent. Only after then, perhaps, could it have been felt necessary for Marjorie Perloff to demand of Jacques Derrida, in the wake of the de Man scandal (775), "Is context always and only verbal: the judgment on the word by the word?"

That is finally a religious question, and T.S. Eliot was a religious poet. Early and late in his work, it is the part of silence to judge. Nevertheless, there were times when his words took part in the process. On some of those occasions, Eliot's criterion-word was a thing called jew, not to be confused with "Jew." After a thorough review of the evidence, Louis Menand has concluded that when Eliot spoke the word "Jew" the way Anthony Julius has heard it, he was, often enough, merely negligent. Choosing to associate with obsessive antisemites like Pound, Maurras, and his patron John Quinn, Eliot sometimes chose to talk the way the way they did: a human failing, and in so far comprehensible. Eliot's own antisemitism is comprehensible in the same way. But jew . . .

That that word has been written by one of the great modernist poets is a warrant that it will never be comprehensible. For Julius, this incomprehensibility is a matter of deviation from a standard of meaning -- a standard which (at least in relation to Julius's own perceptions) is itself stably comprehensible. Julius's Eliot is a fact. He can be contemplated as a point of attention which has only one aspect. Asher and Morrison, however, have understood what modernism and its language did to the idea of fact.

So think of the word jew on the page, unrealized but present to emotion, like whatever it was that the Fascists were trying to mean when they cried Duce! On its page jew subsists as if it were a fact, present to Mr. Eliot's attention under only one aspect. Once too, perhaps, it had a meaning off the page as well. But -- thanks in part to Mr. Eliot -- that meaning has now changed. In fact, thanks in part to Mr. Eliot, the word jew is now all but unspeakable. Like some of the sentences that philosophers under the influence of modernism have devised to show that meaning has neither grammar nor truth-value -- "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," or "The present King of France is bald" -- jew now means only to itself. That we have the language to say so at last is Eliot's most terrible achievement.

Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1919. 1965. New York: Cambridge UP, 1981.

Dasenbrock, Reed Way. "Paul de Man: The Modernist as Fascist." Golsan 229-41, 278-82.

de Man, Paul. Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943. Ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988.

Derrida, Jacques. "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War." Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 590-652.

Eliot, T.S. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley. 1964. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

-- . The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 1, 1898-1922. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt, 1988.

Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 113-38.

Golsan, Richard J., ed. Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1992.

Gordon, Lyndall. "Eliot and Women." T.S. Eliot: The Modernist in History. Ed. Ronald Bush. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991. 9-22.

-- . Eliot's New Life. 1988. New York: Noonday, 1989.

Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.

Menand, Louis. "Eliot and the Jews." New York Review of Books 6 June 1996: 34+.

Perloff, Marjorie. "Response to Jacques Derrida." Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 767-76.

Schnapp, Jeffrey T. "Epic Demonstrations: Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution." Golsan 1-37, 244-52.

Selz, Peter. Art in Our Times: A Pictorial History 1890-1980. New York: Abrams, 1981.

Taylor, Robert R. The Word in Stone: The Role of Architecture in the National Socialist Ideology. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.

Jonathan Morse
Department of English
University of Hawaii