484
PARTISAN REVIEW
the thick smoke of her lair, the pernicious fever present in the heavy air
added to the effect of the incantations which she chanted from the depth
of her throat. She agitated luen's hearts." And there are other passages of a
similar kind by Maupassant, Baudelaire and Pound. In citing the anti–
Semitism of others, Julius means to show not only the possible sources of
Eliot's anti-Semitism, but also its existence as "a component of our cul–
ture." The effect of the piling on of these statements of other writers is,
oddly enough, to contradict what Julius characterizes as "the charged econ–
omy of Eliot's anti-Semitism." Julius's associating Eliot with the
statements of others creates the impression of the body of Eliot's work as
fatally diseased. Julius here behaves not as a literary critic who respects the
compression of Eliot's poetic line, but as a lawyer standing before a jury,
having to prove not only the existence of the crime, but also its enormity.
The case against Eliot gains its force by the affinity Eliot's lines have with
the even more monstrous assertions by others.
Julius uses the same technique in illustrating the stereotypic association
of the Jew wi th uncleanliness. He refers briefly to the excremental Jew in
"Sweeney" without the confirmation of quotation, but all the truly vile
instances are drawn from other writers: KJpling, Wyndham Lewis, Louis
Farrakhan and the vilest of all, Drumont, who writes "Now that [the Jews]
are our masters, they vomit on us all excrement swallowed by Ezekiel." Julius
wants to dissipate any sentiment of marginal or harmless anti-Semitism in
Eliot's work, the kind encountered, for instance, in polite upper class circles.
The issue is not whether Eliot harbored anti-Semitic feelings but what
a cri tic (in this case Antony Julius) makes of it. Julius himself al1l1ounces at
the begil1l1ing of his book that there are degrees of anti-Semitism. "Anti–
Semites are not all the same. Some break bones, others wound Jewish
sensibilities. Eliot falls into the second category." The effect of Julius's
indictment of Eliot, however, is to dissolve the distinction, because he
wants a verdict of guilty and like any good lawyer he will make th e case
for his side of the argument as fully and as forcefully as possible.
But legal prosecution or defense should not be a model for a literary
criticism. Criticism should allow a work to make its claim on the reader,
before it passes judgment, respecting its complexity without being com–
mitted to a particular outcome. Disinterestedness was Arnold's word for it,
a word of judiciousness rather than prosecution or defense. In Eliot's case,
it should begin with the acknowledgment of the presence of anti–
Semitism without offering excuses for it. There is ample evidence for it
("Burbank with a Badaeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," "A Cooking Egg,"
"Sweeney Among the Nightingales," "Gerontion" and the prose work
After Strange Gods).
It is indefensible to justifY the anti-Semitic sentiments
by the remark (made by Orwell) "who didn't say such things at the time."
