WILLIAM PHILLIPS
179
sensibility of our cultural attitudes today. Ozick says that deconstruction,
feminism, and egalitarianism, among other new movements, have swept
away the premises of Eliot's poetry and criticism, and that his reactionary
politics and his anti-Semitism are particularly unwelcome today. It is
Ginsberg's
Howl,
Ozick says, not Eliot's
Wasteland,
that speaks to us today.
Of course she is mostly right. But this seems to be true of the more
popular strains in our culture.
It
is true of a large part, but not all, of the
academy. Yet it does not include many ofour leading poets and non-academic
critics, who still think of Eliot not necessarily as a contemporary guru but as
an important figure in the tradition of criticism and poetry. In my opinion,
Eliot was not only a great poet but also one of the great English critics, in the
tradition of Dryden, johnson, Arnold, and Coleridge. And most ofour serious
poets and critics implicitly acknowledge their debt to his influence, though they
may
be
moving in other directions.
Ozick's summarizing of Eliot's political and cultural conservatism, and his
genteel though ugly anti-Semitism, is adroit, as is her account of his shabby
treatment of his first wife and the other two women who expected to marry
him,
though clearly Eliot was himself psychologically crippled and anguished
by his disabilities. But the more important question is whether his unwhole–
some beliefs and behavior can be said to reduce the quality of his poetry and
criticism. Where they enter directly into the fiber of his work, as do Pound's
beliefs, a case could be made that they do affect its quality. But if they are to
be seen as affecting all of Eliot's work, then we have to reexamine the entire
literature of the West. Many of the writers whose work we value - for
example, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Dickens, Voltaire - had the most
unacceptable and often repellent beliefs. Indeed, this question of belief was
argued quite well by Eliot himself in his essay on Dante, and more
theoretically by both Coleridge and
I. A.
Richards, in their discussions of the
suspension of belief and disbelief in the reading of otherwise commanding
works. Both of them maintained that a writer's work transcends his beliefs. If
we were to raise the question of belief with regard to Ozick's own work (I
happen to agree with her stand on Israel and on other moral and political
issues), how would one who does not share her opinions read her?
A minor point: I think Ozick misconstrues Eliot's idea of the objective
correlative.
It
is not, as she seems to indicate, a way of evading or concealing
one's experience; it is rather meant as the literary equivalent, particularly in
poetry,
of that experience. Eliot's
assu~ption
is that experience is not literally
transplanted to a piece of writing. The concept of the objective correlative
could be questioned as a literary principle, but I do not think it is simply what
Eliot meant when he spoke about the escape from personality.
What it all comes to, it seems to me, is that if we exclude from the
great tradition writers who have held beliefs we do not share, then we must
abandon entirely the idea of a tradition. I have written elsewhere that the
