more than any other—Jean Verdenal—who had been the friend of his youth
in Paris and was killed in action in the Dardanelles. Eliot’s impulsive mar-
riage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, a month later—perhaps on the rebound from
the sorrow of Verdenal’s death—had revealed itself as a nightmare, even as
Bertrand Russell, once Eliot’s mentor, was having an affair with Vivien right
under Eliot’s nose and partly with his collusion.^21 And then, having failed
to get a military commission or to reconcile with his parents, who had dis-
approved strongly of his marriage, he received the news of his father’s sudden
death. Clearly, the poet’s personal troubles—his almost visceral revulsion
from both Vivien and Russell as well as his alienation from the Bloomsbury
of the Stephens sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, and the Garsington circle of
Lady Ottoline Morrell—demanded an outlet in his writing.
Ironically, none of the above had even the slightest amount of Jewish or
foreign blood; they were, on the contrary, of pure English stock, and Lord
Russell was a member of the high English aristocracy. In this context the
venom directed against the Jew “spawned in some estaminet in Antwerp,”
like the venom displayed vis-à-vis women, especially in The Waste Land,
must be understood as a psychic displacement: all of Eliot’s hatred and re-
sentment for Russell and Vivien, like his guilt feelings toward his parents,
were displaced onto nightmare ¤gures with labels like “the Jew,” or, later in
the poem, “Mr. Silvero / With caressing hands” and “De Bailhache, Fresca,
[and] Mrs. Cammel.” Reluctant to write openly about evils he could not
quite put his ¤nger on, he invented an elaborate objective correlative based
on stereotypes of Jewish or “Oriental” or female behavior. The closest Eliot
came to “direct treatment of the thing” was in The Waste Land, where the
twenty-eight-line passage in “The Game of Chess” that begins with line 111—
“ ‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. / ‘Speak to me. Why
do you never speak. Speak’ ”—and culminates in the “Shakespeherian Rag,”
with its assertion that “ ‘I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street / With
my hair down, so’ ”—has been shown to be closely modeled on Vivien’s own
speech habits; indeed, it was she who added the devastating line “What you
get married for if you don’t want children?” found in the pub sequence.^22 In
“Gerontion,” however, the hostility is de®ected onto “acceptable” targets like
the Jews.
But isn’t this precisely what anti-Semitism is? Isn’t it inherently ressen-
timent or displacement of hostility and self-hatred onto a scapegoat? Of
course, if we add the proviso that the self-disgust and suffering displayed in
Eliot’s “objective correlative” is what makes “Gerontion” such a powerful
and, quite literally, memorable poem. We see the speaker threatened by a
“Jew” who, far from being a successful grasping landlord, squeezing money
30 Chapter 2