Get Ready: TS Eliot Rehabilitation Attempt

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Away from his Nobel prize-winning poetry, TS Eliot has long been castigated for being a cruel husband and an anti-Semite.

Now a new volume of his letters helps to restore the personal reputation of the troubled writer whose early works voiced the disillusionment of a generation after the first world war and whose later verse about Macavity and other felines inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical Cats.

...His next letters, covering the late 1920s, will be out in two years’ time. One key revelation in the next book will be the number of close Jewish friends Eliot had, which might rid the long-held argument that he was anti-Semitic. One friend was Horace Kallen, the American academic, and their correspondence shows that Eliot helped to get European Jewish refugees to America during the second world war. “There is no evidence I’ve seen of any anti-Semitism in any correspondence,” said Haffenden.

Anthony Julius, the lawyer for Diana, Princess of Wales and who has written a book exploring what he believes to be anti-Semitic sentiments in Eliot’s work, is unconvinced. He points to poems such as Gerontion, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar and Sweeney Among the Nightingales.

“The views are there in the poetry,” said Julius. “He took the clichés about Jews and used them creatively in his work. But, yes, it is possible to have Jewish friends, too, as we all live lives of contradictions.”