Applause for Pearce

Edward Pearce of Thormanby, North Yorkshire has a letter in the London Review of Books, that bastion of left-wing progressive thought (excuse the lack of exactitude),
deploring an attempt to clear TS Eliot of antisemitism.

Here it is:-

Denis Donoghue handles the desperate writhings of Craig Raine over the primitive anti-semitism of T.S. Eliot with gentle dubiety (LRB, 25 January). Neither Raine nor Eliot deserves it. Dramatic monologues which carry the unchallenged malevolence of ‘Burbank/Bleistein’ and ‘Gerontion’ are no less malevolently anti-semitic for being dramatic monologues.

‘The jew is underneath the lot’ (*) is beyond exculpation, pure Julius Streicher. Sir Ferdinand Klein, clipper of the lion’s rump, entertained by Princess Volupine, is clearly a Jew, hatefully about to enjoy a Christian woman. In part, this is the voice of the Old South, from whose borders Eliot derived. It speaks even more clearly of the anti-Dreyfusards, specifically of the intellectualised poison which flourished in France in the 1890s and had a long, vicious after-life. Will Raine please come to terms with the defiantly acknowledged influence on Eliot of Charles Maurras. The founder of Action Française is the source for all the organic community rubbish with which Eliot embarrassed his admirers. In 1945, Maurras, in his seventies, was saved from a firing squad for collaboration with the Nazis. His organic society was to be free from métèques, unorganic outsiders; it was his way of saying: ‘Keep France white.’ The famous passage in ‘After Strange Gods’ – not too many free-thinking Jews and all that – is carbon-copy Maurras.

It is very odd, at a time when any critic of the crimes committed by the Israeli government risks being called ‘anti-semitic’, to find Craig Raine blind to the words on the page and the hatred behind them. There is a larger case to be made about other twists in Eliot’s hyper-refined head: the fear of sex, the scorn for women, the loathing for persons of inferior station, the typist and apeneck Sweeney. Yet here, on the Jewish issue, Raine, like a literary first footman, is to be found polishing the family silver and denying the dirty secrets.

(*) See Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar

But this or such was Bleistein's way:
A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese.

A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time

Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs. The boatman smiles,

Princess Volupine extends
A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand
To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,
She entertains Sir Ferdinand

Klein. Who clipped the lion's wings
And flea'd his rump and pared his claws?
Thought Burbank, meditating on
Time's ruins, and the seven laws.