'A Man of the World Among Ascetics'

 T.S. Eliot died sixty years today. It’s a date marked on my internal calendar. My junior-high school had a bookstore housed in a closet of a room off the cafeteria. I must have read about Eliot’s death in the newspaper and a few days later bought a paperback copy of his Selected Poems from one of the racks in the little shop. I set to memorizing parts of “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men,” and still retain them. The pages are brown but here's my beat-up, yellow-covered Harcourt, Brace & World edition:

Some of the passages fueling charges of anti-Semitism against Eliot can be found in my old paperback, including “Gerontion.” These obscenities have never entirely stopped bothering me and other readers. That so learned, devout and sophisticated a man can indulge in such crudity makes no sense, except if we recall that humans seldom make much sense. None of us is immune to vile thoughts and opinions. Today, my understanding resembles Joseph Epstein’s:

 

“But might it be allowed that one can write or say anti-Semitic things without being an anti-Semite? Eliot is guilty of the former, but does not, I think, stand guilty of the latter. There is no record of anything on his part resembling anti-Semitic actions. He had good friends who were Jews. Not that this excuses him, but everything anti-Semitic he wrote was composed before the Holocaust. He obviously wasn’t Jew-crazy, like his difficult friend Ezra Pound, who could blame the Jews for bad weather.”

 

Pound can never be forgiven. It helps that most of his poetry is unreadable, whereas I seldom go more than a few months without reading something by Eliot, usually Four Quartets. I’ve unsystematically browsed in the eight volumes of The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot since they were published in 2021. Epstein quotes from one of the essays, “The Pensées of Pascal,” originally published as the introduction to the Everyman Library edition in 1931. Few writers so winningly combine brilliance and accessibility. Eliot writes:

 

“Pascal is a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of the world; he had the knowledge of worldliness and the passion of asceticism, and in him the two are fused into an individual whole. The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.”

 

One senses an unusual degree of self-identification in Eliot:

 

“His despair, his disillusion, are, however, no illustration of personal weakness; they are perfectly objective, because they are essential moments in the progress of the intellectual soul; and for the type of Pascal they are the analogue of the drought, the dark night, which is an essential stage in the progress of the Christian mystic. A similar despair, when it is arrived at by a diseased character or an impure soul, may issue in the most disastrous consequences though with the most superb manifestations; and thus we get Gulliver’s Travels; but in Pascal we find no such distortion; his despair is in itself more terrible than Swift’s, because our heart tells us that it corresponds exactly to the facts and cannot be dismissed as mental disease; but it was also a despair which was a necessary prelude to, and element in, the joy of faith.”