Eliot’s anti-Semitism
Sir: I yield to none in my love of T.S. Eliot’s work, and have even managed to defend to myself the iffy passages about Jews in his poetry. But the letters that Craig Raine quotes in his review (Books, 14 November) are so blatantly, even honestly, anti-Semitic that they leave no room for doubt; except, it seems, at Faber & Faber. Mr Raine’s attempts to argue the anti-Semitism away present a hilarious and painful spectacle. For example, Eliot writes that Jews are inclined to Bolshevism — a classic Nazi belief. Mr Raine asserts, desperately, that this is a tribute to Jewish iconoclasm. It isn’t; it’s racism. The question is, why does Mr Raine go through such contortions to protect his hero when the evidence is so plain? Eliot was a great man with a rotten prejudice. We may not like it, but we have to admit it, as he does, or risk its shadow falling on us.
Thomas Adès
London WC1
Judgments of hindsight
Sir: I was interested to read Pavel Stroilov’s article (‘Reaching through the Iron Curtain’, 7 November) about Labour party contacts with the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. There is, of course, another side to that coin. No doubt sitting quietly in an archive or an attic in Pretoria is a diary by one of Anatoly Chernyaev’s counterparts in South African intelligence, recording their contacts with members of the Conservative party over the same period. Without stretching this notoriously elastic term too far, it is clear that a number of prominent Conservatives, some of them conspicuously close to the Tory party leadership, acted as ‘agents of influence’ for the South African government. If they did not receive wads of used notes from their contacts, many of them benefited financially from business links with South Africa.
This is not to indulge in crude, party-political point-scoring.
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