PRINCE Charles divorces Princess Diana and, as a result, the reputation of the great poet T.S. Eliot hits the skids on both sides of the Atlantic.
Eliot, who died in 1965, enters the picture because Princess Diana's lawyer, Mr Anthony Julius, is also the author of an until recently obscure book on the poet called Eliot, Anti Semitism and Literary Form. Cambridge University Press published a few thousand copies in Britain last year and thought that would be the end of it a new commentary available to scholars on an old issue that has haunted Eliot's reputation whether he was an anti Semite.
And for a time it was. But the publishers forgot the power of the British press to zero in on any nugget pertaining, no matter how indirectly, to the Prince and Princess of Wales. When Fleet Street got wind of who the author was the poet who liked to call himself by the avuncular title of Old Possum began making news again.
"Not since the opening of the musical Cats, based on Eliot's children's verse Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, had the great poet been an object of wide public interest. Now he's become more controversial than at any time since his death", Newsweek said.
The reason is Mr Julius's thesis that lines in Eliot's poetry such as Rachel nee Rabinovitch tears at the grapes with murderous paws were not only meant as anti Semitic comments but animated and inspired his verse.
"No Jew reading the following is likely to doubt its anti Semitism And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner/Spawned in some estamine of Antwerp/Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London", writes Mr Julius.
That Eliot wrote anti Semitic lines in his poetry and in his prose has long been accepted by critics. But they have argued for years over whether he meant them as anti Semitism or as ironic comment. Others argue that Eliot was an anti Semite in youth but deeply repented after the war.