Bookplanet: Princess Di's lawyer also a leading T.S. Eliot scholar

A priceless precedent
Literary criticism owes a great debt to Anthony Julius, the divorce lawyer famous for representing Princess Diana and now Heather Mills-McCartney. John Sutherland explains why (from the good old Guardian)

Macca v Macca will be, Max Clifford assures us, a red-top blood fest. In the same league as the Rooney metatarsal or "Cocaine Kate".

Among the garbage scavengers, but standing well apart from them, will be a literary critic. Unusually for his kind, he will be earning a reported £500 per hour. Nice work if you can get it.

Anthony Julius, as every profile of him recalls, was the lawyer who gave Princess Di her post-divorce wings and erected a protective fence of Mishcon de Reya libel writs round Robert Maxwell while the old rogue lived (and could pay for them).

Julius is also the TS Eliot scholar who has made more waves than any other in his field, in the last 20 years.

For Julius, literary criticism is not a sideline - a cultivated hobby, like other lawyers' opera-going or bird-watching. He does literary criticism as he does law: to win. His victories, and his methods, bear examination. They are very instructive.

I first came across AJ (to use a convenient Sopranoism) in the early 1990s, when I came back to the UK from America. He had just completed a PhD on Eliot and anti-semitism (more specifically Eliot's own anti-semitism) under the novelist and academic, Dan Jacobson.

It was, Jacobson believed, a necessary and distinguished piece of research. Not a man to praise extravagantly, he encouraged Julius to submit the thesis for publication. The work needed to be put into circulation.

That was as might be. Publishers thought differently. The manuscript was everywhere turned down. One top-rated press ventured the judgment that Julius's work was "crude" - a term which, quite reasonably, infuriated Jacobson. Whatever else it may be, Julius's writing is anything but crude.

The suspicion was that publishers were frightened of the Eliot estate, and of his vigilant publisher, Faber, and too frightened to admit they were frightened. There was the salutary example of Peter Ackroyd, whose biography of Eliot (still the standard "life") had been refused permission to quote the author's poetry or prose. Another American commentator on Eliot of my acquaintance had been obliged to submit his work for inspection before permission to quote (expensively charged for) was given. There were dragons at the Eliot gate.

Neither Jacobson nor Julius were easily frightened or faced down. The supervisor organised what was, effectively, a write-in. I, as head of the department, was asked to read the thesis and - if I was inclined - submit an open letter of support. I duly read, was impressed with the force and lucidity of Julius's work, and wrote my letter. Whether it did any good, I don't know. Julius was very nice about it.

Finally the manuscript was accepted for publication, pretty well as it stood, by Cambridge University Press (CUP). Courageously (and backed by the professional clout of an author who was, although still in his mid-30s, one of the most powerful lawyers in the country) they determined to quote as much Eliot as was necessary for the book's argument, using the "Fair dealing" provision.

Fair use permits bona fide lit-crit people to use short quotations, free of charge, for the purpose of literary explication. It's a vague privilege and, where it is likely to provoke objection, publishers traditionally play safe. As did Ackroyd's publishers, with their quoteless biography.

TS Eliot, Anti-Semitism, And Literary Form was duly published, with plentiful supporting quotation, in 1995. The book met with a resounding silence until Tom Paulin - never one to observe resounding silences - hailed it in the London Review of Books while, at the same time, excoriating the "gutlessness" (Orwell's word) of the British publishing and critical establishments. After which, it is fair to say, all hell broke loose.

Whether or not Eliot was, as Julius asserts, an anti-semite must be left to critics and posterity to determine. What is more significant (for his fellow lit-crit practitioners) is AJ's modus operandi. It can be demonstrated with one example, the epigraph. Epigraphs, situated as they are in solitary splendour on the opening page, have an honoured place in any literary-critical monograph. They sum the book up. Julius's epigraph may be quoted in full:

"In Cape Town [Eliot] was entertained by Mr Justice Millin and his wife, Sarah Gertrude Millin, the novelist and biographer whose books were published by Eliot's firm ... That night before going to bed Mrs Millin was brushing up her acquaintance with Eliot's verse ... when her eye fell on "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar", and particularly these lines:

'The rats are underneath the piles. The Jew is underneath the lot.'

Mrs Millin was a Jew. She went and rapped on Eliot's door, asked whether he acknowledged these lines (he did) and then asked him to leave her house next morning."

It's devastating. And it never happened. Moreover, when he chose the story of Mrs Millin righteously kicking Eliot into the street as his epigraph, Julius knew that it was - let's choose a tactful word - apocryphal.

Moreover he knew that Mrs Millin, on her part, was a racist of more virulence than anything that could be directed against the author of "Burbank with a Baedeker", the difference being that her bigotry was directed against South Africa's "mixed breeds" as she called them.

One knows that Julius doubts the truth of his epigraph, because he admits it, in a very woolly and inconspicuous way, buried deep in his endnotes: where, of course, few readers will ever come across it. Mrs Millin's heroic denunciation is, none the less, referred to more than once in the main body of the book.

She is, of course, a witness for the prosecution. What Julius is doing is getting his "case" before the jury. The reader, that is. It is the responsibility of the defence critics, not him, to poke holes in whatever evidence he presents. This is, as I say, lit-crit conducted according to the rules not of the ivory tower, but the court room, where adversaries fight their corners not to establish the truth (that is the jury's responsibility) but to win.

There are other examples (particularly in changes made between editions of Julius's monograph) of the same adversarial tendency. Once one understands where he's coming from it is, I think, refreshingly tough stuff. Not for Julius the ho-hum of "on this hand, and on the other hand". For him, there is only one hand, and it is clenched, and in your face. You don't like it? Fight back.

I don't know what Julius thought about the rights and wrongs of Princess Diana, in her action, or what he thinks about the justice of Heather Mills-McCartney's claims on Sir Paul's wealth (whatever they may be: Max Clifford suggests £100m). I do know that he believes, passionately, in the case he makes against T S Eliot. Whether we go along with him is up to us, after reviewing the evidence and arguments he puts before us.

My personal view is that, whatever verdict posterity brings in about Eliot, literary criticism owes a huge debt of thanks to Julius (and to CUP) for establishing the right of commentators and biographers to use the fair use provision in their work. AJ has established a precedent which is invaluable. Although, having said that, I'm not sure I would go up to £500 an hour for it. Literary criticism, alas, cannot afford Anthony Julius, much as it may want him back.