American Studies (7 page)
Authors: Louis Menand
The intellectual story begins in 1909, the year that Eliot, starting work toward his master’s degree at Harvard, registered for a course taught by Irving Babbitt on “Literary Criticism in France.” Babbitt
was the author of
Literature and the American College
(1908), an attack on what he called “humanitarianism” and a defense of what he called “humanism.” Casting his argument in terms so apparently indistinguishable was possibly not the cleverest idea Babbitt ever had; what he meant by humanitarianism was, on the one hand, a brute scientism he associated with Bacon and, on the other, a fuzzy sentimentalism he associated with Rousseau—in other words, naturalism and emotivism. What he meant by humanism was, essentially, classicism—reason and restraint. He thought colleges were promoting the former when they should be instilling the latter.
was the author of
Literature and the American College
(1908), an attack on what he called “humanitarianism” and a defense of what he called “humanism.” Casting his argument in terms so apparently indistinguishable was possibly not the cleverest idea Babbitt ever had; what he meant by humanitarianism was, on the one hand, a brute scientism he associated with Bacon and, on the other, a fuzzy sentimentalism he associated with Rousseau—in other words, naturalism and emotivism. What he meant by humanism was, essentially, classicism—reason and restraint. He thought colleges were promoting the former when they should be instilling the latter.
Babbitt had recently returned from a sabbatical year in Paris (1907—08), where he had read and was greatly influenced by a book called
Le Romantisme français
(1907), by Pierre Lasserre.
Le Romantisme français
is an attack on French cultural decadence, which Lasserre blamed on nineteenth-century romanticism and the cult of the individual, and, in particular, on Rousseau; and it is a recommendation for a return to the spirit of classicism. Much of the book had first appeared in the
Revue de l’action française,
of which Lasserre was the editor; for the attack on romanticism, conceived in those terms, was one aspect of the “counterrevolutionary” program of the leader of the Action Française, Charles Maurras.
Le Romantisme français
(1907), by Pierre Lasserre.
Le Romantisme français
is an attack on French cultural decadence, which Lasserre blamed on nineteenth-century romanticism and the cult of the individual, and, in particular, on Rousseau; and it is a recommendation for a return to the spirit of classicism. Much of the book had first appeared in the
Revue de l’action française,
of which Lasserre was the editor; for the attack on romanticism, conceived in those terms, was one aspect of the “counterrevolutionary” program of the leader of the Action Française, Charles Maurras.
Maurras was one of the great enemies of the Third Republic, and the Action Française was his lifelong political party. He had made his name as a journalist by defending Hubert Henry, the colonel who had forged the documents used to convict Alfred Dreyfus. The Action Française arose out of the anti-Dreyfusard movement; Babbitt had, in fact, attended some lectures sponsored by the group on an earlier visit to Paris in the late 1890s. Anti-Semitism was therefore central to its program. Maurras later cited Edouard Drumont’s rabidly anti-Semitic
La France juive
(1886) (a best-seller) as the intellectual landmark of his youth. He believed, as he argued in
Trois idées politiques
(1898) and on innumerable occasions thereafter, that the Jews were responsible for the poison of individualism; he blamed the Jews, in fact, for Protestantism. And he called, in the name of a return to order, for monarchism, Catholicism, and extreme economic and cultural nationalism. Babbitt admired Lasserre’s critique of romanticism—he would eventually produce
his own tome on the subject,
Rousseau and Romanticism
(1919)—although he regretted the extremism of the political movement the book was associated with. He helped to persuade Eliot to take his year abroad, and he encouraged him, when he got to Paris, to get a copy of Maurras’s own attack on French cultural decadence,
L’Avenir de l’intelligence
(1905). Eliot took the advice. He bought the book in 1911, and it became one of the touchstones of his thought.
La France juive
(1886) (a best-seller) as the intellectual landmark of his youth. He believed, as he argued in
Trois idées politiques
(1898) and on innumerable occasions thereafter, that the Jews were responsible for the poison of individualism; he blamed the Jews, in fact, for Protestantism. And he called, in the name of a return to order, for monarchism, Catholicism, and extreme economic and cultural nationalism. Babbitt admired Lasserre’s critique of romanticism—he would eventually produce
his own tome on the subject,
Rousseau and Romanticism
(1919)—although he regretted the extremism of the political movement the book was associated with. He helped to persuade Eliot to take his year abroad, and he encouraged him, when he got to Paris, to get a copy of Maurras’s own attack on French cultural decadence,
L’Avenir de l’intelligence
(1905). Eliot took the advice. He bought the book in 1911, and it became one of the touchstones of his thought.
L’Avenir de l’intelligence
has four parts, only two of which are likely to have interested Eliot: the first, which is an analysis of modern French history as a struggle between “Blood and Gold … the Usurer and the Prince, Finance and the Sword”;
12
and the third, which is an attack on
“Le Romantisme féminin.”
A crucial element in both discussions is the claim that the corrupting influences—the obsession with money, in the first case, and feminine solipsism, in the second—were not French. They were the products of what Maurras called the
“métèques”—
foreigners who adopt French ways. He habitually referred to Rousseau (and to the concepts of liberty, fraternity, and equality themselves) as “Swiss”; he described Madame de Staël as “a Swiss of Prussian origin.”
13
There is no explicit attack on the Jews in
L’Avenir de l’intelligence,
but any reader of Drumont, who had argued that Jews had taken over France by controlling its finances, would have had no trouble identifying the alien representatives of finance and usury as Maurras described them.
has four parts, only two of which are likely to have interested Eliot: the first, which is an analysis of modern French history as a struggle between “Blood and Gold … the Usurer and the Prince, Finance and the Sword”;
12
and the third, which is an attack on
“Le Romantisme féminin.”
A crucial element in both discussions is the claim that the corrupting influences—the obsession with money, in the first case, and feminine solipsism, in the second—were not French. They were the products of what Maurras called the
“métèques”—
foreigners who adopt French ways. He habitually referred to Rousseau (and to the concepts of liberty, fraternity, and equality themselves) as “Swiss”; he described Madame de Staël as “a Swiss of Prussian origin.”
13
There is no explicit attack on the Jews in
L’Avenir de l’intelligence,
but any reader of Drumont, who had argued that Jews had taken over France by controlling its finances, would have had no trouble identifying the alien representatives of finance and usury as Maurras described them.
Maurras’s argument in
“Le Romantisme féminin”
is that the romantic imagination is inherently feminine. It spawns self-absorption, perversity, emotional anarchy—a general attitude of, as he put it, “
je souffre, donc je suis
.”
14
To say that French culture was blighted by romanticism was to say that it had been feminized. Two years later, Lasserre, in Le
Romantisme français,
included a chapter on “
Le Sacerdoce de la femme
,” which recommends Maurras’s
“Le Romantisme féminin”
as the best treatment of the subject. “Romanticism,” Lasserre explained, “when one considers its impact on ideas, sentiments, manners, literature, or art, manifests everywhere the instincts and the travail of the self-indulgent woman.”
15
“Le Romantisme féminin”
is that the romantic imagination is inherently feminine. It spawns self-absorption, perversity, emotional anarchy—a general attitude of, as he put it, “
je souffre, donc je suis
.”
14
To say that French culture was blighted by romanticism was to say that it had been feminized. Two years later, Lasserre, in Le
Romantisme français,
included a chapter on “
Le Sacerdoce de la femme
,” which recommends Maurras’s
“Le Romantisme féminin”
as the best treatment of the subject. “Romanticism,” Lasserre explained, “when one considers its impact on ideas, sentiments, manners, literature, or art, manifests everywhere the instincts and the travail of the self-indulgent woman.”
15
Eliot finished “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” shortly after he read
L’Avenir de l’intelligence
. Ricks, in
T. S. Eliot and Prejudice,
has a great deal of fun with the many critics, from John Crowe Ransom to Helen Gardner, who have simply assumed that the women in the lines “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” must be prating silliness. “The absurdity of discussing his giant art, in high-pitched feminine voices, drifting through a drawing room, adds merely extra irony to the underlying sense of the lines,”
16
as Helen Gardner once put it. It’s true, as Ricks points out, that the poem says not a word about the intellectual quality, or, for that matter, about the pitch, of the talking these women are engaged in. But it is a little hard, after reading what Eliot had been reading with admiration just before turning his attention to this poem, not to believe that Dame Helen spoke truer than she knew, and that the intention of the lines is to depict a condition of cultural debilitation, and precisely for the reason that the talkers are identified as women and not men. Historical scholarship must be good for something.
L’Avenir de l’intelligence
. Ricks, in
T. S. Eliot and Prejudice,
has a great deal of fun with the many critics, from John Crowe Ransom to Helen Gardner, who have simply assumed that the women in the lines “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” must be prating silliness. “The absurdity of discussing his giant art, in high-pitched feminine voices, drifting through a drawing room, adds merely extra irony to the underlying sense of the lines,”
16
as Helen Gardner once put it. It’s true, as Ricks points out, that the poem says not a word about the intellectual quality, or, for that matter, about the pitch, of the talking these women are engaged in. But it is a little hard, after reading what Eliot had been reading with admiration just before turning his attention to this poem, not to believe that Dame Helen spoke truer than she knew, and that the intention of the lines is to depict a condition of cultural debilitation, and precisely for the reason that the talkers are identified as women and not men. Historical scholarship must be good for something.
Eliot’s personal meeting with Maurras, in 1910 or 1911, was probably arranged by Jean Verdenal, who is reported to have had a literary and political interest in the Action Française.
17
Reactionary politics were common among young male Parisians at the time, and Maurras had a gang of followers, who were known as
les camelots du roi,
“the hawkers of the king,” since they sold the movement’s newspaper,
L’Action française,
on the sidewalks. They also engaged in harassment of the movement’s enemies—which is to say, liberals and Jews, whom they chased through the streets and sometimes beat. In April 1911, for example, during Eliot’s stay, the Comédie Française put on a play, called
Après moi,
by Henri Bernstein. Bernstein, who was Jewish, was an established playwright who had, in his youth, deserted briefly during his military service, an episode apparently largely forgotten by 1911. But on opening night, the
camelots
plastered the theater with stickers denouncing “
Le Juif Déserteur”;
they drowned out every performance with catcalls and disturbances. After two weeks, and a discreet official request, the play was withdrawn. The incident attracted considerable attention, and Maurras, to accompany the protests, published daily attacks on Jews on the front page of
L’Action française.
18
17
Reactionary politics were common among young male Parisians at the time, and Maurras had a gang of followers, who were known as
les camelots du roi,
“the hawkers of the king,” since they sold the movement’s newspaper,
L’Action française,
on the sidewalks. They also engaged in harassment of the movement’s enemies—which is to say, liberals and Jews, whom they chased through the streets and sometimes beat. In April 1911, for example, during Eliot’s stay, the Comédie Française put on a play, called
Après moi,
by Henri Bernstein. Bernstein, who was Jewish, was an established playwright who had, in his youth, deserted briefly during his military service, an episode apparently largely forgotten by 1911. But on opening night, the
camelots
plastered the theater with stickers denouncing “
Le Juif Déserteur”;
they drowned out every performance with catcalls and disturbances. After two weeks, and a discreet official request, the play was withdrawn. The incident attracted considerable attention, and Maurras, to accompany the protests, published daily attacks on Jews on the front page of
L’Action française.
18
In March, the paper had published an article by Lasserre (who had become its literary critic in 1908) on
“La Philosophie de Bergson.”
The article identified Bergson with romanticism, condemned his philosophy for its emphasis on individuality, sensation, and the irrational, and attacked him for being a Jew. (Maurras would later protest Bergson’s election to the Académie Française because Bergson was Jewish; he protested on the same grounds after hearing that Albert Einstein might come to the College de France after fleeing Germany in 1933.) Whether Eliot read Lasserre’s essay is not known; but T. E. Hulme read it—he had already taken an interest in Maurras and the politics of the Action Française—and it marked the beginning of a complete transformation in his theory of art.
“La Philosophie de Bergson.”
The article identified Bergson with romanticism, condemned his philosophy for its emphasis on individuality, sensation, and the irrational, and attacked him for being a Jew. (Maurras would later protest Bergson’s election to the Académie Française because Bergson was Jewish; he protested on the same grounds after hearing that Albert Einstein might come to the College de France after fleeing Germany in 1933.) Whether Eliot read Lasserre’s essay is not known; but T. E. Hulme read it—he had already taken an interest in Maurras and the politics of the Action Française—and it marked the beginning of a complete transformation in his theory of art.
Hulme was killed in the war, in 1917, and his writings have come down to us in the form of a collection called
Speculations
, edited in 1924 by Herbert Read, at the time Eliot’s assistant at the
Criterion.
For years critics tried to treat the pieces in
Speculations
as though they were somehow intellectually consistent, until Michael Levenson pointed out, in
A Genealogy of Modernism
(1984), that about half the pieces—those written before 1912—are Bergsonian and the other half—those written after 1912—are anti-Bergsonian. Hulme completely changed his mind in 1912, going from a late-romantic subjectivism largely derived from Bergson to a profoundly antihumanist objectivism largely derived from the German aesthetician Wilhelm Worringer. Lasserre’s article, Levenson suggests, was probably the reason.
19
So that by the time Eliot met him, Pound, influenced partly by this turn of Hulme’s and partly by the self-promotional success of the Italian futurists, had dropped imagism for a “harder” aesthetic theory, something he called (in collaboration with Wyndham Lewis) “vorticism.” Pound had become suspicious of the emotionalism and subjectivism implicit in the sort of impressionistic free verse he had once encouraged; when Eliot showed up at his door, his views were in the process of a severe hardening.
Speculations
, edited in 1924 by Herbert Read, at the time Eliot’s assistant at the
Criterion.
For years critics tried to treat the pieces in
Speculations
as though they were somehow intellectually consistent, until Michael Levenson pointed out, in
A Genealogy of Modernism
(1984), that about half the pieces—those written before 1912—are Bergsonian and the other half—those written after 1912—are anti-Bergsonian. Hulme completely changed his mind in 1912, going from a late-romantic subjectivism largely derived from Bergson to a profoundly antihumanist objectivism largely derived from the German aesthetician Wilhelm Worringer. Lasserre’s article, Levenson suggests, was probably the reason.
19
So that by the time Eliot met him, Pound, influenced partly by this turn of Hulme’s and partly by the self-promotional success of the Italian futurists, had dropped imagism for a “harder” aesthetic theory, something he called (in collaboration with Wyndham Lewis) “vorticism.” Pound had become suspicious of the emotionalism and subjectivism implicit in the sort of impressionistic free verse he had once encouraged; when Eliot showed up at his door, his views were in the process of a severe hardening.
Two years after that meeting, in the fall of 1916, Eliot, having decided to remain in England and needing money, taught a course in the Oxford University Extension program on “Modern French Literature.” His syllabus was essentially an outline of French antiromanticism:
the reading list included
L’Avenir de l’intelligence, Le Romantisme français,
and Babbitt’s
Masters of Modern French Criticism
(1912), which contains Babbitt’s own attack on Bergson.
20
The following year marked the beginning of Eliot’s closest collaboration with Pound, which was inaugurated by a joint decision to react against what Pound called the “emotional slither” and subjectivism of free verse and imagism. This was the decision that produced the anti-Semitic poems of
Ara Vos Prec
, with their strict metrical patterning and their “impersonal” voice.
the reading list included
L’Avenir de l’intelligence, Le Romantisme français,
and Babbitt’s
Masters of Modern French Criticism
(1912), which contains Babbitt’s own attack on Bergson.
20
The following year marked the beginning of Eliot’s closest collaboration with Pound, which was inaugurated by a joint decision to react against what Pound called the “emotional slither” and subjectivism of free verse and imagism. This was the decision that produced the anti-Semitic poems of
Ara Vos Prec
, with their strict metrical patterning and their “impersonal” voice.
These poems—“Sweeney among the Nightingales,” “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” and the rest—are not dramatic monologues, because they are programmatically antagonistic to the very idea of self-expression as a literary value. They were written in deliberate reaction against “romantic individualism” and all its evils. Given the association of individualism, sensation, and “emotional slither” with women and Jews in the French criticism Eliot had been reading and teaching since 1910, it is not surprising to find the poems populated by figures like Rachel and Bleistein, Princess Volupine and Sir Ferdinand Klein, and the shadowy
étrangers
of “Gerontion”: Mr. Silvero of the “caressing hands”; Hakagawa, “bowing among the Titians”; Fraulein von Kulp. For these are the
“métèques”—
in Eliot’s mind, the representatives of the very dissolution for which the ostentatious formal regularity of the poems in which they appear is the symbolic antidote. They are literally what the poems are trying to “contain.” When Eliot undertook this exercise in “classical” poetic form, the alleged lubricity of Jews and women must have come to him as his natural subject matter.
étrangers
of “Gerontion”: Mr. Silvero of the “caressing hands”; Hakagawa, “bowing among the Titians”; Fraulein von Kulp. For these are the
“métèques”—
in Eliot’s mind, the representatives of the very dissolution for which the ostentatious formal regularity of the poems in which they appear is the symbolic antidote. They are literally what the poems are trying to “contain.” When Eliot undertook this exercise in “classical” poetic form, the alleged lubricity of Jews and women must have come to him as his natural subject matter.
A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time
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.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
In 1920, Pound, on a visit to Paris, picked up a book by Julien Benda called
Belphegor
. He admired it, and mailed a copy to Eliot in London. Pound must have recognized the book immediately as the equivalent in prose of the poems Eliot had just published in
Ara Vos Prec.
For
Belphegor
(1918) is an attack on cultural decadence in the familiar Maurrasian and Lasserrean mode. “Contemporary French Society demands that all works of art shall arouse emotion and sensation,”
21
it complained; and it recited the familiar list of Rousseauian toxins: emotionalism, self-indulgence, and the craving for newness and originality.
Belphegor
. He admired it, and mailed a copy to Eliot in London. Pound must have recognized the book immediately as the equivalent in prose of the poems Eliot had just published in
Ara Vos Prec.
For
Belphegor
(1918) is an attack on cultural decadence in the familiar Maurrasian and Lasserrean mode. “Contemporary French Society demands that all works of art shall arouse emotion and sensation,”
21
it complained; and it recited the familiar list of Rousseauian toxins: emotionalism, self-indulgence, and the craving for newness and originality.
Benda suggested several candidates as possible sources of cultural debility, among them the Jews. There are, he explained, two types: “the severe, moralistic Jew, and the Jew who is always greedy for sensation—speaking symbolically, the Hebrew and the Carthaginian, Jehovah and Belphegor [one of the biblical names for Baal], Spinoza and Bergson.”
22
But the Jewish influence, he says, does not explain enough; for although French society has proved susceptible to the corrupting effect of the second type of Jew, it must have been corrupted already, or it would not have been susceptible. It is the classic anti-Semitic form of anti-anti-Semitism: the influence of the Jews has been exaggerated.
22
But the Jewish influence, he says, does not explain enough; for although French society has proved susceptible to the corrupting effect of the second type of Jew, it must have been corrupted already, or it would not have been susceptible. It is the classic anti-Semitic form of anti-anti-Semitism: the influence of the Jews has been exaggerated.
Benda therefore goes on to consider several anterior causes, including “the entrance into French society of people of a different class, whose minds are in a state of nature (parvenus of trade, industry and finance, etc.).”
23
But the crucial reason for the debasement of French culture, he says, “lies in the fact
that it is entirely created by women
”:
24
“All the literary attributes exalted by contemporary aesthetics are those with which women are most highly endowed, and which form a kind of monopoly of their sex; absence of general ideas, cult of the concrete and circumstantial, swift and entirely intuitive perception, receptiveness to sentiment alone, interest centered on the self … . Men … try to imitate the literature of their rivals. Alas! … There is a degree of unintellectuality and shamelessness to which they will never attain.”
25
23
But the crucial reason for the debasement of French culture, he says, “lies in the fact
that it is entirely created by women
”:
24
“All the literary attributes exalted by contemporary aesthetics are those with which women are most highly endowed, and which form a kind of monopoly of their sex; absence of general ideas, cult of the concrete and circumstantial, swift and entirely intuitive perception, receptiveness to sentiment alone, interest centered on the self … . Men … try to imitate the literature of their rivals. Alas! … There is a degree of unintellectuality and shamelessness to which they will never attain.”
25
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