Notes on Anti-Semitism
Jan. 8th, 2012 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloBut (following on from yesterday's post)...
...Cecil Beaton was an anti-semite. Or, at least, there was an incident. I don't know enough about his life and personality to know whether- when he smuggled a anti-semitic insult into a Vogue cartoon- he was just echoing the fashionable trash-talk of his age or drawing on something deeper. A lot of the art of the first half of the 20th century is infected by anti-semitism.
Allen Ginsberg visited Ezra Pound in old age and recorded Pound's apology for his big mistake- his embrace of "that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-semitism". Ginsberg offered and Pound accepted forgiveness. By the time he wrote about it Ginsberg was the only living witness to this transaction- and we may question how much of it- if any of it- ever really happened. Perhaps it was a parable. We may also ask on whose authority Ginsberg was licensed to offer and give a blessing (as Rodger Kamenetz does in the poem published here.)
Pound was a virulent anti-semite but largely managed to keep his anti-semitism out of his poetry. T.S. Eliot, less virulent, wrote anti-semitic poems that have entered the canon. The appearance of anti-semitism in what is unquestionably good and thoughtful art is profoundly troubling. Anthony Julius wrote a book about it. He summarises its arguments in this article. Anti-semitism cannot be argued away or excused- especially when it perpetuates itself in art- it can only be engaged with. He writes
...Cecil Beaton was an anti-semite. Or, at least, there was an incident. I don't know enough about his life and personality to know whether- when he smuggled a anti-semitic insult into a Vogue cartoon- he was just echoing the fashionable trash-talk of his age or drawing on something deeper. A lot of the art of the first half of the 20th century is infected by anti-semitism.
Allen Ginsberg visited Ezra Pound in old age and recorded Pound's apology for his big mistake- his embrace of "that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-semitism". Ginsberg offered and Pound accepted forgiveness. By the time he wrote about it Ginsberg was the only living witness to this transaction- and we may question how much of it- if any of it- ever really happened. Perhaps it was a parable. We may also ask on whose authority Ginsberg was licensed to offer and give a blessing (as Rodger Kamenetz does in the poem published here.)
Pound was a virulent anti-semite but largely managed to keep his anti-semitism out of his poetry. T.S. Eliot, less virulent, wrote anti-semitic poems that have entered the canon. The appearance of anti-semitism in what is unquestionably good and thoughtful art is profoundly troubling. Anthony Julius wrote a book about it. He summarises its arguments in this article. Anti-semitism cannot be argued away or excused- especially when it perpetuates itself in art- it can only be engaged with. He writes
To describe a person as anti-semitic is not to imply that he endorses the crimes of the Nazis, still less is it to imply that he would be capable of committing them himself. It is to imply, however, that he is careless about the consequences of anti-semitic positions held by others, and that he lacks the imagination to grasp where Jew hatred may lead. Anti-semitism encompasses both drawing-room condescensions and forest shootings. The drawing room anti-semite is not a murderer, but he is an anti-semite.
Conclusion? There is no conclusion. We're nowhere near wrapping this one up....
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Dorogaya Whitehall.
Date: 2012-01-08 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 05:24 pm (UTC)I was going to link you to a November New York Review of Books review of Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child (2011) because of the reviewer's footnote about the dismaying "old British literary habit" he finds Hollinghurst recapitulating by naming those characters who serve as markers of foreign wealth and/or crass modern decline things like "Sharon Feingold" and "Jerry Goldblatt," and in the process I found a December letter to the editors and just this week a response from the author: so, no. The debate doesn't even stop with Eliot and Beaton.
(For what it's worth, I'm with Daniel Mendelsohn. His original point is clear and brief, faulting what he sees as a correctable susceptibility to literary conventions as opposed to a Pound-like pathology; his responses in both cases are detailed, nuanced, and generous with the assumptions of others, although he indicates it annoys him that interpretation of his footnote has come to dominate discussion of Hollinghurst's book. Both Galen Strawson and Hollinghurst go for an ad hominem suspicion of Mendelsohn's motives and ability as a critic that does not leave me convinced of their abilities to have the discussion without digging themselves in deeper at the least.)
Re: Dorogaya Whitehall.
Date: 2012-01-08 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 07:21 pm (UTC)I agree with you. I don't think Strawson and Hollinghurst would have been quite so prickly if Mendelsohn hadn't touched then on the raw.
For the record it would never have occurred to me to read Jacobs as a Welsh name.