Another fascinating obituary in the Telegraph: that of the Jewish poet, Emanuel Litvinoff. Two things interested me in it: at first, the remark, “Emanuel was a bookish child in a bookless household and, like his [nine] brothers and sisters, treated the local library as his second home.” So did I, like countless others, though unlike Litvinoff I didn’t grow up in two rooms and there were books around the house. Memo to the Coalition: please don’t close the public libraries. Cut or cap the salaries of overweening local government officials instead.
The second point concerns Litvinoff’s celebrated attack on T S Eliot. The obit states: “Litvinoff admired Eliot and was inclined to forgive him for his fashionable pre-war anti-Semitism, but was horrified that he was prepared to celebrate such sentiments after the Holocaust.” In 1952 he wrote a poem, “To TS Eliot”, attacking him for his views and recited it at the Institute of Contemporary Arts where, by an unfortunate coincidence, Eliot himself happened to be present. There was a furore among Eliot’s friends, such as Stephen Spender and Sir Herbert Read, though the poet himself was heard to mutter: “It’s a good poem.”
There is no getting round Eliot’s anti-Semitism which I feel went deeper than a merely “fashionable” pre-war stance. His 1933 lectures at the University of Virginia, later published as After Strange Gods, contain the notorious sentence: “The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”
After the war Eliot prudently withdrew this book from circulation and never re-published it. So why did he not withdraw the equally damning poem “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” from his Selected Poems, published in 1948 and which Litvinoff rightly took exception to? It was still included in my own copy of his Collected Poems 1909-1962, published in 1963 and which I read that same year. Was it an oversight or did the magnitude of the Holocaust not impinge on Eliot’s consciousness?
As Anthony Julius’s book on Eliot’s anti-Semitism suggests, a very great poet can also be a flawed human being.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.