165. TIME: See note 141.
167. ANTISEMITISM, one of Eliot’s more notorious flaws, rears its ugly head rears here, as the Lil story first alludes to the outspoken Lilith from Jewish folk literature then concludes with a vulgar pork meal. Gammon (line 166) is smoked ham; as used here, it also suggests a slang term for sexual intercourse.
The absence in this poem of any further antisemitic recurrence is thanks in part to Ezra Pound’s editing (see F&T*). A preliminary draft had contained a reference to a Jewish slur from one of Eliot’s earlier poems, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar (1920), in which Eliot had written:
“The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs.”
Eliot had inserted Bleistein into The Waste Land with yet another reference to Ariel’s song (see note 26):
“Full fathom five your Bleistein lies
Under the flatfish and the squids,”
but Pound prevailed in having these lines deleted.
Pound also succeeded in having Eliot remove the whole of the poem Gerontion (1920) (see F&T*, which included a reference to a stereotypically Jewish landlord:
“My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.”
Eliot’s anti-semitism has relatively limited exposure within his poems, with these Bleistein and Gerontion infractions being the primary instances, but for more prominent examples see his social commentary in After Strange Gods (1934), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes Toward a Definition of Culture (1948), in which, collectively, he spoke out against a more pluralistic, secular society. Most directly, in After Strange Gods, he commented that a society with “too many free-thinking Jews” was undesirable. However, Eliot refused to have this essay republished beyond its limited first printing and conceded that it reflected a “disturbed” state of mind. See Michiko Kakutani, Critic's Notebook; Examining T. S. Eliot And Anti-Semitism: How Bad Was It? (New York Times, August 22, 1989). For a more unforgiving look, see Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1996).
_________________________________________
* see note 0.1
