482
PARTISAN REVIEW
and pogroms. Others have insisted that the anti-Semitism is peripheral to
Eliot's main achievement, or, in the poems at least, not the expression of
the poet's sentiments, but rather of dramatis personae. In
T
S.
Eliot and
Prejudice
Christopher Ricks (who takes the issue of anti-Semitism in Eliot
seriously) argues that the lines "And the jew squats on the window sill, the
owner, / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, / Blistered in Brussels,
patched and peeled in London." belong to the narrator of "Gerontion,"
not the poet, while acknowledging that the lines, "The rats are underneath
the piles. / The jew is under the lot. / Money in Furs" in "Burbank with
a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" are Eliot's responsibility. The narrator
of "Gerontion" admits
to
"thoughts of a dry season." Does the apparent
self-condemnation of the narrator exculpate the poet? It could be argued
that Eliot identified himself with the mind of the narrator without self–
congratulation. But it could also be argued that self-condemnation or
self-irony may provide a license to express deeply felt sentiments. (When
Stephen Dedalus in
A Portrait of the Artist as a
YOUIl<1?
Man
speaks of
"open[ing] the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and
patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri," he may mean to disarm the
reader with the charm of self-irony, but he does not escape the charge of
coldness.) In "Burbank" anti-Semi tism egregiously pervades the poem
and, we may assume, reflects the sentiments of the poet. We may also con–
clude that a poet who writes "Burbank" in his own voice can identifY
himself with the narrator of "Gerontion."
Julius's dis tinctive contribution is his insistence on the centrali
ty
of
anti-Semitism to Eliot's achievement. He resists every attempt to bracket
and discount it as irrelevant to the power of the work. George Steiner
speaks of "uglier touches [that] tend to occur at the heart of very good poet–
ry." For Julius the lines are not touches, but infections. "'Burbank .. .' is
certainly infected throughout, the jew conceived as 'protozoic slime.''' The
persuaded reader should come away from the book believing that anti–
Semitism is Eliot's muse.
Is the evidence of the poetry sufficient to sustain Julius's claim? A
lawyer by profession, Julius employs a prosecutorial strategy. For instance,
he focuses on a line that disparages the Jew, "Rachel nee R.abinovich, /
tears at the grapes with murderous paws;" in "Sweeney Among the
Nightingales" and accumulates around it all the associated anti-Semi tic
passages by other writers that he can summon up: Bram Dijkstra
(Idols of
Perversity)
in which "Rachel is a predatory Jewish woman (or 'Jewess:
which evokes 'tigress')," Edouard-Adolphe Drumont for whom the actress
Rachel is "a little Bohemian tigress, a lascivious Jewess" and Charles
Maurras, of the notorious
Action Franfaise,
who wrote of a Semitic witch
who "did harm by evil magic, withdrew her spells and cast them again ...
