Eminent quartet
“What a 12 months it has been for writing! — & I at the prime of life, with little creatures in my head which won’t exist if I don’t let them out!” wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary in early 1922. Depression, anxiety, insomnia and headaches had obliterated a good portion of 1921 for her, and now she was bedridden again, with influenza. She felt herself on the verge of forging a new way of novel writing but despaired of having the health and time to do it.
At the same time, E.M. Forster was sailing back from a long sojourn in India, where he had hoped to find inspiration to finish a novel abandoned years before. Instead, he had found only heartbreak and loss, and upon returning home “he gave up on the possibility of a new novel.”
T.S. Eliot was ending a foreign absence of his own, recuperating in Lausanne, Switzerland, from a nervous breakdown brought on by “financial uncertainty, an unhappy marriage, and a stultifying anxiety.” And D.H. Lawrence, recovering from disastrous reviews and threats of obscenity charges for his latest novel, “Women in Love,” made plans to flee Europe, possibly for New Mexico, where a strange woman had invited him to come live. He hadn’t written a word for six months.
So begins Bill Goldstein’s account of four literary legends, coevals and friends for the most part, supposedly at a critical moment in their careers — and in the course of English literature. And although the unifying conceit of the book does not always hold, “The World Broke in Two” is a fascinating and informative look into the creative lives of this eminent quartet.
If the literary world broke in two in ’22, as Willa Cather claimed in this book’s eponymous epigram, it was ruptured more by James Joyce and Marcel Proust than by Goldstein’s Four. “Ulysses” was published on Feb. 2, Joyce’s 40th birthday. And the fourth volume of Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu” (as well as the first English translation) was published later in the year. Joyce and Proust are the ghosts who linger offstage, haunting our poor protagonists. Ezra Pound even referred to the time frame of this book as “the year 1 p.s.U. [post scriptum Ulysses].”
Eliot tells Woolf the same, that Joyce’s novel “has destroyed the 19th century,” and she feels obliged to order a copy and interrupt her joyful submersion in Proust. “Now I have Mr. Joyce on the table,” she writes. “I look, and sip, and shudder.” She is obsessed by him through much of the year, even as she manages two groundbreaking essays and her first story about a certain Clarissa Dalloway. In the end, she finds “Ulysses” (which she never finished) to be “illiterate, underbred ... the book of a self-taught working man”: an odd assessment of a Trinity College grad from an informally educated autodidact, genius though she was. Despite her judgment, though, Joyce had a profound effect on her work, as Goldstein notes: “One sentence in her diary about Ulysses and the next about Mrs. Dalloway. In the reading of the one she saw something of the writing of the other.”
For Forster, too, 1922 went from literary barrenness to a new beginning. After returning home and getting over the death of his life’s great love, an Egyptian tram conductor he’d been involved with since 1916, he was able to greet the spring’s first warm weather with a diary entry: “Have made careful & uninspired additions to my Indian novel, influenced by Proust.” Even his letters to friends were sporting “long sentences and proliferating subordinate clauses in the manner of the author he had begun to read so recently.” Sometimes persistent pedestrian work, even imitative work, is the only way to get out of a rut, and indeed by the end of the year he was plowing fruitfully away at “A Passage to India.”
In the cases of Eliot and Lawrence, Goldstein’s thesis is less convincing. “The Waste Land” was indeed a seminal work of Modernism, and published in 1922; but Eliot finished writing it in 1921. He spends 1922 procrastinating sending the manuscript to his publisher, and an inordinate amount of space is devoted to the negotiation of his contract and his efforts to launch a new literary magazine, Criterion. His apotheosis has already occurred in January, when Ezra Pound finishes editing “The Waste Land” and writes him, “Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies.”
Eliot comes off as utterly neurotic in his dealings with his publishers, as does Lawrence in general. Lawrence, in fact, reminds one of his future pseudo biographer Geoff Dyer — both are comically unable to be content wherever they happen to be. Lawrence flees Italy for Ceylon, Ceylon for Australia, and Australia for New Mexico, always wishing he were somewhere else. And the novel he manages to wring out of his travels, “Kangaroo,” can hardly be considered a watershed either for him or literature.
Yet even if the “hook” of “The World Broke in Two” isn’t always solid, the book is well researched, intelligent and entertaining. By delving into these writers’ letters and diaries to illuminate the development of their methods and ideas, Goldstein shines a welcome spotlight back onto an age when literary giants walked the earth.