The World Broke in Two

Bill Goldstein

Bloomsbury, £25

Review by Nick Major

IN academe, 1922 has long been accepted as high modernism’s annus mirabilis. Bill Goldstein, in the subtitle to this enlightening if misconceived book, calls it The Year That Changed Literature. Insert an indefinite article for that definite one and he might be on to something. In all seriousness, his claim comes from an essay by Willa Cather, who identified 1922 as when “the form of storytelling she prized, and had excelled at, was no longer of signal importance.” As all modernist sympathisers know, the reigning style of the time was summed up by Ezra Pound’s proclamation “make it new”.

It was Pound, that practised noise-maker, who contributed most to the appraisal of that year as ‘the’ year. Although, as Goldstein points out, Pound thought the night of October 29-30 1921 was when the real sea change occurred. That was when James Joyce finished Ulysses. Pound would, on January 3, 1922, orchestrate the famous Paris dinner with Joyce, TS Eliot and the US publisher Horace Liveright (whose name should have been Liverwrong; he was an indefatigable boozer). The next month Ulysses was published by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Co; Eliot’s The Waste Land was published in October.

For all this, Goldstein’s book is not about modernism per se, which doesn’t do much for his premise, but means we are not weighed down with known arguments about the subject. His main achievement is in his careful use of the private correspondence and diaries of four writers to navigate his way through the period. He follows, with quotidian delicacy, Eliot, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, and DH Lawrence. Goldstein’s reason for choosing these authors (why not Joyce or Pound, for instance?) is that they were “writers in deep despair, privately confronting an uncertain creative future…none of these pillars of 20th century literature could foresee the work just ahead that was to transform them as writers.”

There are many synchronicities across the main coterie and their associates. Most people are desperately ill. Virginia Woolf spends three months in bed with successive bouts of influenza; Eliot is recovering from a fiscal and personal breakdown (Elizabeth Bowen described his first marriage as “‘two highly nervous people shut up in grinding proximity’”) and Forster is both love sick (his Egyptian lover, Mohammed Adl, was coughing his way out of existence) and particularly wordless; the prevailing joke of the time was that Howards End (1910) was Forster’s End.

As for DH Lawrence, he was mad and poor from cradle to grave, so 1922 was nothing new. His inclusion here is an anomaly. Yes, he wrote his novel Kangaroo in a desperate burst of energy during a trip to Australia, but it is a minor work. His two earlier novels, Women in Love and The Rainbow, and their delving free indirect style did more to advance forms of storytelling. What Lawrence did have in common with the time was that he and Joyce were both enraging the censors. In July 1922 John Sumner’s the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice raided publisher Thomas Seltzer’s offices and confiscated copies of Women in Love.

It is Joyce’s Ulysses that highlights the intellectual differences between the three other writers. When Eliot visited Woolf on the last weekend in September he told her Joyce’s novel would “‘be a landmark, because it destroyed the whole of the 19th century…it showed up the futility of all English styles.’” Woolf disagreed. She recognised its greatness, but maintained that it was written by a “pretentious and egotistic ‘self-taught working man’”. She and Forster instead turned to Marcel Proust, who galvanised and informed them to finally put some words on the page. The two writers corresponded about the first volume of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, and Woolf started trying out for herself “what Forster noted as Proust’s breakthrough: to use memory and experience to illustrate a character’s state of mind.” Proust, of course, died in November 1922.

Goldstein has done tremendous and valid work here to find the small but crucial changes in these writers’ lives that resulted in their various attempts to capture consciousness on the page. By the end of 1922, Woolf was at work on her defining novel, Mrs Dalloway, and Forster was underway on his final one, A Passage to India; Eliot was vainly happy that the literati were in a state of high excitement about The Waste Land and his new journal, Criterion. But DH Lawrence, who was far away from all this, galloping around America, had the best year of the lot. Why? All the publicity surrounding the obscenity trial against Women in Love meant sales were on the up.