PARTISAN REVIEW
4b3
ards of his chosen environment." Eliot, he writes, abandoned
In
the
1930s
the pro-Fascist inclination which in 1928 had induced him to in–
dulge in fulsome adulation of the British Union of Fascists, only
regretting "that a nationalist organization should have to go abroad
for its name and symbol." The publication he edited since 1922,
The Criterion,
had much to say about the problem of reconciling
the "aristocracy of culture" with the "demagogy of science," a topic
which had already troubled Eliot's spiritual predecessor W. B.
Yeats. Similarly, "the governors of the people" must be encouraged
to sustain "the conviction of their right to govern." Who "the
governors" were was never clearly spelled out, but they appear to
have been envisioned as a hereditary caste. On the subject of Marx–
ism,
The Criterion's
readers were informed that since Marx was a
Jew, and since Jews had become "more and more openly the ex–
ploiters of the Western world today," Marx's revolutionary doctrine
merely represented "the desire of the inferior to revenge themselves
on the superior (as Nietzsche points out, characteristic of the
Judaic psychology)." Against this background it is hardly sur–
prising that throughout the 1930s
The Criterion
maintained a policy
of complete silence about Hitler and what was going on in Ger–
many.
This is strong stuff, especially in a book designed for a wide audience,
but Lichtheim reserves his most withering words for Martin Heidegger,
with whose irrationalist philosophy he comes briefly to grips, though
mainly in passing, in a number of his essays. "Heidegger," Lichtheim
curtly notes, "was by no means the only German philosopher who
jumped down the sewers in 1933, but the enthusiasm he evinced at the
sight of Hitler's cloaca had few parallels." All this has been said before,
though not often, not enough, and not with such damaging felicity.
I am not disposed to gloss over the potential perils of such a com–
bative stance. It is in the best tradition of polemical writing, and it
provides that pleasant little thrill that watching a bullfight gives thc
aficionado. But aggression can kill appreciation. Eliot (to single out one
of Lichtheim's targets ) was after all more than a murky reactionary;
he rescued poetry from the mire of sentimentality, swollen rhetoric,
and false pathos, and, in the best sense of that word, helped to revo–
lutionize modern literature. Liehtheim, of course, knew all this perfectly
well. He explicitly disclaimed any party line and, as his essays on Simone
Wei
I
and Graham Greene show, he could muster considerable sympathy
for writers whose view of life differed markedly from his own. Nor was
he disposed to discount Eliot's grim diagnosis of our time as a waste–
land; he simply did not want anyone to enjoy the misery, or to con–
tribute to its intensification. H e confessed that he was not at home in
