304
PARTISAN REVIEW
force of Eliot's sounds-past Eliot's beliefs
to
appreciation of the poetry
as poetry. It succeeds, at least in part. Even so, Donoghue feels he can–
not help but take up the vexed questions of Eliot's anti-Semitism and his
Ch ristian ity.
Donoghue, clearly at home with the literary and intellectual terrain
of most of the book, seems uncomfortable, or at least less engaging, in
his role as apologist for Eliot. He assumes this role self-consciously
against the grain of contemporary opinion, which Donoghue sees as
wrong-headed and intolerant. Donoghue thinks Eliot is not anti-Semitic
and has been badly misread. And he believes Eliot's effort
to
imagine a
Christian society is reasonable and serious, and has been dismissed for
shallow reasons.
For me, these are the weakest parts of this otherwise very fine book.
Most of the time, Donoghue proceeds by applying the common sense of
a learned and formidable intelligence
to
the poetry, and
to
the ideas
within and around the poetry. He draws on an exceptionally wide set of
references and does not lapse into pedantry. Hence he frequently settles
for "Something along these lines is enough ... "; and he does not shy
away from saying,
"I
wish 1 knew more securely what Eliot means by
.... " We welcome these apparently lax confessions because they are
said by a widely read, even-handed, and distinguished reader. But in a
few places the admirably relaxed Donoghue, on whom learning rests
easily and who can sensibly take us through famously dense intellectual
thickets, suddenly vanishes, and we find ourselves reading some other
Donoghue, this one extremely picky and abruptly rigid.
This other Donoghue, for example, wants us
to
think that transfer–
ring "The rats are underneath the piles.lThe Jew is underneath the
10t.lMoney in furs." from Eliot to Burbank would adequately rebut the
charge of anti-Semitism. Or that the passage about "free-thinking Jews"
in
After Strange Gods
should be understood as just a special case of the
category "free thinkers." Donoghue's ear is usually acute, but this is not
so when he says "] appreciate the fact that, since the Holocaust, Jews
must be treated with particular tenderness." My point is that Eliot's ref–
erences to Jews are offensive not because of some overt race-hatred on
Eliot's part but because of both his tone and his blind use of Jews as
examples of reprehensible behaviors or beliefs. 1 don 't think this can be
easily explained away. But neither can we damn everything Eliot ever
wrote on this account alone, as if it were the very core of Eliot's writing.
Eliot's ideas a bout a Ch ristian society, however, bea r much more cen–
trally on the poetry, especially his later poetry. According
to
Donoghue,
Eliot objects to free-thinking Jews within a Christian society because any
