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the poetry , one more version of an aristocratic Christian myth which has tried
to maintain the mold of a world order ever since it became a political force .
Pound had the advantage of being without any formal religious ties . His
nativism had a great deal in common with the mind and imagination of a
Henry Ford, and it is not by accident that he shared so many of Ford 's
prejudices. Richard Hofstadter had this kind of mentality in mind when he
pointed to the " curiously persistent linkage between anti-Semitism and
money and credit obsessions" in the United States . But in " Mr. Eliot ," the
political positions were framed by a need for Christian tradition . And if this
led to the nonsense of
After Strange Gods
and
The Idea ofa Christian Society,
it is also what kept Eliot from ever going beyond what Chace calls a " flirtation
with fascism." Where Pound's politics evolve within his poetics , Eliot's
remain the cry of a man haunted by the vicissitudes of his existence, as if
lurking in the bushes of his fantasies were hosts of those' 'free thinkingJews"
whom he feared . Ultimately , he was unable to accept what he logically should
have accepted. His intelligence stood in the way . He " abjured both power
and consciousness and , in so doing, negated not only fascism , but all contem–
porary ideology ." Ironically , his inability to go all the way became his chief
political sin .
Mr. Chace has written a book that merits greater attention than it has yet
received , one of the best studies of writers and politics that I know of. Deter–
mined from the outset to face the fact that Pound and Eliot were in large
measure molded by their political fears and beliefs , he manages to avoid
moralizing at their expense. The story he traces for us reinforces an old if
uncomfortable idea : no matter how much one may want it to be different ,
ideology constricts writers . No political system is the writer 's friend , although
a political position can be among his needs . Mr. Chace patiently analyzes the
political positions these two writers took . Like some writers who moved towards
Marxism, they felt contempt for people, both as a Whitmanesque en masse
and as individuals . But where the Marxist writer needs to consider himself in
the vanguard of history , the reactionary desires to freeze history , to remove the
democratic uncertainty- along with the democratic mob-from his midst. If
Mr. Chace is correct in believing that the' 'plateau of structured belief' which
Pound and Eliot reached is what contemporary liberals" desire , but cannot
attain ," one can still wonder whether the much-abused liberal cannot argue
that his doubt , his inability to reconcile , is the only courageous judgement
that can be made- both of those who, like Pound and Eliot , make that
reconciliation at the expense of democratic reality and those who , like the
liberal himself, cannot reconcile at all.
Leonard Kriegel
