Who was Phlebas the Phoenician?
Short answer: Eliot made him up. He’s not a person. Which is to say, this is not a name recorded anywhere else.
Back in 1956 Herbert Musurillo [‘A Note on the Waste Land (Part IV)’, Classical Philology, 51:3 (1956), 174–175] pointed to ‘epitaphs in the Palatine Anthology (7. 263ff) dedicated to drowned sailors and the like’, some of which, he suggested, have the flavour of this section of The Waste Land. None of these epigrams are addressed to anybody called Phlebas, but Musurillo notes ‘that the names Phlĕbon and Phlĕbippos are found in antiquity — formed on the Greek word φλεψ-’. He concedes there is no historical Phlebas recorded anywhere, but thinks ‘the formation by adding the suffix -as is regular enough’. (He goes on: ‘the choice of the word “Phoenician” is more difficult: it is not clear whether the reference is actually to the Phoenician sailors of old … or, possibly, to the fabulous bird called the “phoenix,” whose habits of life became a symbol of man’s immortality’. But here it’s clear Musurillo goes astray, as I note below).
Anyway: Φλεψας Phlĕpsas would, as a name, mean something like ‘vein-y’. Hmm. This seems a long way from what the poem actually gives us.
Part of the reason this doesn’t ring true to me is because I can’t bring myself to call the character ‘Phlebbas the Phoenician’. The name has always, in my ear, had a long ‘e’: Φληβας, ‘Phlēbas’. Don’t you agree?
What else can we say about this made-up name? In the ancient world the coastal realm of Phoenicia was known for its sailors, which is fitting in a section of the poem called ‘Death by Water’. But Phoenicia is also, in Eliot’s imaginary, a way of talking about Semites, rather than Greeks — about, that is, Jews (hence: ‘Gentile or Jew/O you who turn the wheel and look to windward’). So: not warrior seaman, or explorers, but mercantile sailors, money-making Semites, focused on the profit and loss (until, that is, such time as they enter the whirlpool that awaits all of us).
This brings us to the contentious topic of T S Eliot and anti-Semitism. Here is Anthony Julius:
Drowning is a theme in Eliot’s poetry; in The Waste Land it provides a title, ‘Death by Water’. The death is that of Phlebas the Phoenician, who is present in each of the poem’s five sections. In the first, Madame Sosostris produces ‘the drowned Phoenician sailor’ from her ‘wicked pack of cards’. The first and second sections allude to him with the line ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’. In the third, as in the first, Phlebas is invoked by reference to places: Phoenician Carthage, and Mylae, where a naval battle of the first Punic War was fought. Then: ‘Death by Water’. [Anthony Julius, T.S. Eliot, Anti-semitism, and Literary Form (CUP 1995), 141]
Julius makes the point that Carthage was ‘a Semitic city’, and quotes H G Wells’s History of the World: ‘unlike the “little Semitic people, the Hebrews” the Phoenicians were “sea Semites”, vigorous and inventive.’ The contest between Carthage and Rome, Wells argued, ‘was the inaugural instance of a struggle between Semite and Aryan that is trans-historical and “continues to this day”, a “rivalry” that “merge[d] itself later on in the conflict between Gentile and Jew”.’ Julius notes how common and long-established view this view was. ‘Michelet, for example, regarded the Punic Wars as a “struggle … to settle which of the two races, the Indo- Germanic or the Semitic, was to rule the world”; “I am ever as deeply aware of the gulf between pure German and pure Jewish blood as a Teuton would be aware of the gulf between him and a Phoenician”, remarked a German anti-Semite. [Julius, 142]
When I wrote my biography of Wells, there was no getting around this question. Here is a bit of that concerning Joyce’s choice of a Jew as protagonist of Ulysses, Wells’s influential work of socialist non-fiction New Worlds For Old (1908) and Eliot and Pound co-creating the Waste Land. I start by quoting Bryan Cheyette:
The Phoenicians, as Joyce learnt from Bérard, were a mercantile Hebrew-speaking people who were commonly perceived as ancient equivalents of the contemporary Jewish bourgeoisie. Such ‘parallels between contemporaneity and antiquity’, as Eliot argued in his review of Ulysses began to be exploited as early as Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo (1850) … Wells’s New Worlds for Old (1908) and The Outline of History (1920) both make a popularly held parallel between the historic semitic Phoenicians and the contemporary British-Jewish plutocracy. [Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge Univ. Press 1993), 259]
I add:
Cheyette goes on: ‘the destruction of Carthage, a “semitic” city in Wells’s terms, is implicitly referred to throughout The Waste Land and, according to Empson, is at the heart of Ezra Pound’s understanding of the “unity” of Eliot’s poem. … Pound had written that “London has just escaped, from the First World War, but it is certain to be destroyed in the next one, because it is in the hands of international financiers. The very place of it will be sown with salt, as Carthage was, and forgotten by men”. The “purgation” of Phlebas … is, according to this reading, also implicated in the cleansing of the Carthaginian “Judaic father” whose all-pervading materialism and “semitic” confusion had brought about the downfall of European civilization.’ This is what Wells says:
Which is the better master — the democratic State or a “combine” of millionaires? Which will give the best social atmosphere for one’s children to breathe — a Plutocracy or a Socialism? That is the real question to which the middle-class man should address himself. No doubt to many minds a Plutocracy presents many attractions. … for the masses, they will be fed with a sort of careless vigour and considerable economy from the Chicago stockyards, and by agricultural produce trusts, big breweries, fresh-water companies, and the like; they will be organized industrially and carefully controlled. They will crowd to see the motor-car races, the aeroplane competitions. It will be a world rich in contrasts and not without its gleam of pure adventure. [Wells, New Worlds For Old, 8:1]
In other words — or not other words, but these actual words — who shall be master, the democratic State or a “combine” of Semitic millionaires? Which would you prefer: rule by Socialism, or rule by the Jew? Wells really does present the options as being as zero-sum as that.
The question is: how far this is the logic of The Waste Land, too? ‘Death By Water’, a section of short, lyric intensity, is the fourth of five divisions in the poem, and acts structurally as a hinge-point about which the whole moves — to something renewed, from a land wealthy but barren: the childless couple beneath their lacquered, coffered ceiling playing chess seated in chairs rich enough to be thrones, ‘The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four’ — the immediate contrast with the following monologue, ‘When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said — ’ steps down in terms of social class and affluence, but it carries-through the idea of aridity and waste: the ‘wealth’ of the poor, their fecundity, becomes deathly, pregnancy a curse (‘She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George’), a world of abortifacients (‘them pills she took, to bring it off’) and false teeth replacing the live. The world is dead and has not been reborn, and is not reborn in the poem until the great thunderstorm in the fifth, final section. ‘Death by Water’ stands, then, as a sacrificial death, an offering to the gods of water to renew the barren desert, literal and figurative, with rain, literal and figurative. It might not be crass to bring this down to a racialised intervention, along these lines: the land is dead, spiritually; it must be renewed; and a necessary step on the path to that renewal is: to offer the Jew up as a sacrifice — a holocaust, to use the technical language. When you put it like that, the poem becomes something monstrous, a two-decade-forward prophecy of horror.
But perhaps this is too crude a reading; for though Eliot was in many ways anti-Semitic (and Pound, his collaborator on this poem, was extremely anti-Semitic) this poem has always seemed to me something better, larger, more beautiful and powerful than simple racism. Conceivably this is me allowing my affection for the work, since it has moved and shaped me over many decades, to override the obvious. Still, Anthony Julius, who is otherwise unsparing of Eliot’s various anti-Semitisms, thinks that by editing the poem into a tighter shape from Eliot’s longer original, Pound defuses the prejudice.
Only a few lines of ‘Death by Water’ survived Pound’s editing; related poems, principally ‘Dirge’, were scored through. Suppose that Eliot had not accepted these deletions, in particular preserving ‘Dirge’ in his larger work. What then? The effect would have been to lock Phlebas into a relation with Bleistein. Bleistein is an ugly Jew; Phlebas is a handsome Phoenician. Bleistein is ‘expensive rich and strange’; Phlebas is a trader and sailor, and sailors are honoured in the original ‘Death by Water’ as ‘clean and dignified’. Bleistein is outside the human race; in the first draft of ‘ Death by Water’, the poet addresses the dead man as ‘brother’. Yoked together, Bleistein and Phlebas are each unambiguously singular; exclude Bleistein, and Phlebas expands into ambiguity. By deleting ‘Dirge’, ‘Death by Water’ was liberated. Freed from the play of opposites, the lines about a drowned Phoenician resonate more generously in the poem, its themes of city and empire, of trade and war, of the secular and the spiritual, and of quest, so thoroughly implicated in that short fourth section, ‘Death by Water’. Retaining the anti-Semitic ‘Dirge’ would thus have had a cramping effect on The Waste Land. Keeping it out was a vindication of the aesthetic judgment implicit in Eliot’s work that anti-Semitism must be enabling in poetry, and when not, is absolutely to be prohibited. [Anthony Julius, T.S. Eliot, Anti-semitism, and Literary Form (1995), 141]
Still, Phlēbas is not a Jewish name. So what’s going on? Well, here I come to the most speculative, and probably the least convincing, part of my blogpost.
Consider (the name) Phleebǝs — not Phlubbas. I wonder if Eliot is remembering, or half-remembering — whether he is, deliberately or otherwise, pointing us towards — Φίληβος? Unlike Φλεψας, this is a real name, and a famous one, because one of Plato’s most important dialogues is named after him.
The Philebus is one of those dialogues where the titular character (an Athenian Greek) barely appears. He’s there at the beginning, to state his position — a hedonistic one, that values physical and sensual pleasures and thinks such pleasures should be the aim and point of life — and then barely says anything else as Socrates demolishes his claim by way of establishing that there are higher more valuable pleasures that should be our focus.
No one can claim to have thought seriously about the question ‘How ought I to live?’, the guiding question of political philosophy, without having confronted the powerful answer to it supplied by hedonism. In thinking about hedonism today, we may begin from that thinker who was both very important to and early in its history: Plato. Of the dialogs that have come down to us as Plato’s, only the Philebus takes as its direct aim the examination of pleasure’s claim to be the human good. The Philebus culminates in the suggestions that the need for self awareness or self-knowledge may finally be more fundamental to all human beings (and hence to hedonists) than is even the desire for pleasure, and that the experience of at least some pleasures constitutes a great obstacle to precisely the self-knowledge we seek. The Philebus is important today not only because it contains a searching analysis of hedonism but also because it compels us to raise the crucial question of the precise nature of ‘the good’ with which we are justly most concerned — our own or that of others — a question whose centrality to self-knowledge we are in danger of forgetting. [Robert C. Bartlett, ‘Plato’s Critique of Hedonism in the Philebus’, The American Political Science Review 102:1 (2008), 141]
What is, I suppose, appealing about taking this as an intertext for Eliot’s poem is the way it removes us from the specifically Semiticizing (or anti-Semiticizing) context. In the Republic there is a discussion of whether individuals absorb particular qualities
the quality of love of knowledge, which would chiefly be attributed to the region where we dwell [ie Athens] or the love of money [φιλοχρήματος] which as everyone knows is not least likely to be found in Phoenicians and the population of Egypt.” [Plato, Republic 435e]
Love of money is an iteration of the ‘lower’ hedonism which Plato’s Socrates sets out to refute in the Philebus, and for which that title character, that man called ‘Ph’lee-bǝs’, argues. Money, Semites, sailors, Phoenicians, the wreckage of World War One and those bits of it to which we cling. In the Philebus, Socrates describes an erring man clinging to his fallacies as a shipwrecked sailor clinging to wreckage:
SOCRATES: The sciences are a numerous class, and will be found to present great differences. But even admitting that, like the pleasures, they are opposite as well as different, should I be worthy of the name of dialectician if, in order to avoid this difficulty, I were to say (as you are saying of pleasure) that there is no difference between one science and another; — would not the argument founder and disappear like an idle tale, although we might ourselves escape drowning by clinging to a fallacy? [Philebus 14a; Benjamin Jowett’s translation]
Better perhaps to drown, to enter the whirlpool?
Next up: Iain M Banks.
