Literary Criticism:The career of TS Eliot still presents a strange paradox. Some regard him as almost a saint, who has written the best religious poetry since Hopkins. But even that is sometimes held against him, as when his friend Virginia Woolf, declared: "He seems to me to be petrifying into a priest - poor old Tom." And Elias Canetti, another Nobel laureate, describes him as "the driest figure of the century" who exudes a "stink of enfeeblement".
Meanwhile the second volume of his letters is delayed, perhaps because of the emotional entanglements involving his first wife, who died in a mental hospital, as well as epistolary relationships with at least two other ladies. And then there was his bachelor life with the disabled critic John Hayward. And finally his second marriage to his devoted secretary, "who brought great happiness to a great poet", as Craig Raine writes in his dedication.
A public figure who practises concealment attracts all the more interest, as many politicians know. So we have had a play and a film about Eliot's first marriage, and even a biography of his first wife. And while there is no authorised biography of the poet, there have been several unauthorised. Craig Raine's study is an interim report from this fraught arena. He embraces these "supple confusions" by adopting Arnold's theory of The Buried Lifethat fuels creative work: "Alas! Is even love too weak,/ To unlock the heart and let it speak".
A chapter on the drama acknowledges that Eliot's language is inert, a mistaken attempt to write in a West End idiom. Yet I remember a production of his first playlet, Samson Agonistes, which fairly throbbed with energy, "Aeschylus on sax" remarks Craig Raine wittily. And Murder in the Cathedral is a fine pageant.
And as Fiona Shaw has demonstrated, The Waste Landis highly dramatic, echoing its original title, He Do the Police in Different Voices. The first totally modern poem, Craig Raine compares it to the pulsating rhythms of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, which I was lucky enough to have seen, choreographed by Maurice Bejart. Raine does not tackle, however, the question of The Waste Land'spresent relevance, when the world seems more likely to end with a series of bangs rather than a whimper. The spiritual aridity diagnosed in the poem has been supplanted by various forms of religious fanaticism, Christian fundamentalism mirroring Islamic jihad.
Raine dwells on the Indian influence in The Waste Land, which of course reappears in The Four Quartets. But it is more Hinduism than Buddhism and may go back to a boyhood reading of another Arnold, Sir Edwin Arnold's version of the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna. Lines like "No man shall 'scape from act/ By shunning action; nay, and none shall come/ By mere renouncements into perfectedness" seem to foreshadow some of Eliot's meditations.
The chapter that has provoked most interest is the appendix on Eliot and anti-Semitism.
This is a charged subject, especially as there is a new form of anti-Semitism. Or rather a renewal of an old form, a recoiling from the Zionist ideal that led to the creation of Israel and that has revived ancient tensions between Arab and Jew. Whereas the anti-Semitism that seems to leak into Eliot's early poetry and criticism is European and Christian. Indeed various forms of anti-Semitism have always been part of our European culture. My Tyrone neighbour, speaking of a prosperous farmer, says, "He's as rich as a Jew", unaware that over European centuries Jews were forbidden to own land. And my beloved Mr Blemings, an ex-serviceman turned postman, presented me, when I was only a small boy, with a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There I learnt that the Jews were to blame for everything, but then when I went to my Catholic college, I was told it was the Freemasons!
NO DOUBT THERE is a taint of anti-Semitism in Eliot's early poetry - it was rife at the time, and runs riot in the Cantosof his great friend, Ezra Pound. The Cantosare disfigured by it, but they are fairly mild compared to Pound's wartime broadcasts, which are snarling outbursts of pathological hate against the "kike" and the "yid". Jewish himself, Craig Raine tries to deal with recent attacks on Eliot, being notably successful against lawyer Anthony Julius's TS Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form(1996), but less so against crisp, stylish Christopher Ricks's TS Eliot and Prejudice(1986), perhaps because Ricks's precise and feline mind evades capture. But these are contributions to an ongoing argument, which still lacks all the evidence, such as Eliot's later letters.
One of the most commonly cited examples of anti-Semitism is in After Strange Gods(1934), strange lectures in which Eliot also lambasts DH Lawrence, while declaring that "reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable". It has been argued that he was in poor form, having just separated from his increasingly unstable wife, but in any case these lectures have not been reprinted, whereas Gerontion lumbers on. "My house is a decayed house,/ And the jew squats on the window-sill, the owner,/ Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp . . .".
If the older Eliot had truly regretted his anti-Semitism, he could have expunged lines such as these, which seem to add little to the poem but have consistently caused offence. Raine tries his best to defend, deploying great rhetorical skills, invoking terms like "zeugma", "chiasmus", but one perhaps wishes that Eliot had simply come to understand how much hurt such lines might cause.
TO LIGHTEN MATTERS, why not accuse poor Tom of being anti-Irish as well? As a young poet, I considered calling on Eliot, but had heard that he could be testy. Raine quotes him on Frost, a testy fellow himself: "his verse . . . is uninteresting, and what is uninteresting is unreadable". I had also heard that he had become English enough to be dismissive of us, commenting in a letter that "McCarthy is of course an Irishman, that is to say he belongs to a race which I cannot understand".
And his portrait of Apeneck Sweeney does not resemble the God in the Tree of myself and Seamus Heaney. Though he came to like Yeats, with his spooks and his "Dublin gossip", and he adored Joyce, whose Jewish Bloom, ironically, influenced his thinking on nationality, "the same people living in the same place". And a further irony, he was also friends with Groucho Marx: perhaps I should have called on him! This is a thoughtful book on a thorny subject.
John Montague's most recent volume of poetry is Drunken Sailor (2004), published by Gallery Press
TS Eliot By Craig Raine Oxford University Press, 202pp. £12.99