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WORK TITLE: The World Broke in Two
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
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STATE: NY
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https://us.macmillan.com/author/billgoldstein/ * https://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/537085202/the-world-broke-in-two-four-writers-one-transformational-year
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:City University of New York, Ph.D., 2010.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, and curator. New York Times Online, founding editor of books website; contributor to the “Weekend Today in New York” television program, NBC; Hunter College, New York, NY, curator of public programs at Roosevelt House.
AWARDS:Fellowships from organizations, including Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Bill Goldstein has worked for the New York Times Online, has appeared on the “Weekend Today in New York” television program, and has curated programs for Hunter College’s Roosevelt House. He attended the City University of New York, from which he obtained a Ph.D.
In 2017, Goldstein released The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature. The volume references a quote made by Willa Cather, the author, in an essay she wrote. In an interview with Publishers Weekly writer, Calvin Reid, Goldstein explained: “Cather wrote that in 1936, and was thinking of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in February 1922 and of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in October. To her, and to many others, those works seemed to herald a new modernist era.” In his book, Goldstein profiles Woolf, Eliot, Lawrence, and Forster, focusing on their struggles to release their master works. He draws on their personal correspondence to analyze their respective mental states during the year of 1922.
Writing on the Spectator website, Richard Davenport-Hines remarked: “Goldstein is an enthusiast for literature with the right measure of self-belief. He crackles with excitement about the making of books and the creating of literary reputations. … His purpose is to convey the tensions, fumbling, frustration, arousal and joyous climax of creativity. But the foreplay is so fidgety and inconclusive that the reader is left panting for a cup of cocoa.” Davenport-Hines described The World Broke in Two as an “over-researched, unreflective and lustreless book.” Other assessments of the volume were more favorable. Charles Finch, contributor to USA Today, commented: “The World Broke in Two has serious flaws, particularly its dull, endless accounts of Eliot’s financial wrangling and Lawrence’s lack of connection to Goldstein’s central narrative. But it’s one of those imperfect books with something perfect on nearly every page, a line, a story, a joke.” Booklist critic, Donna Seaman, described the book as “an extensively researched, extraordinarily fine-grained and lucid literary history rich in biographical discoveries.”
Writing in BookPage, Robert Weibezahl suggested: “Goldstein’s research into these (somewhat) intertwined lives is impressively rich and nuanced, and his evenhanded passion for each of his subjects plays out in an elegant narrative. … The World Broke in Two beautifully captures a seismic moment of cultural rupture.” “The intimate peek into the lives, rivalries, and heartbreaks of these celebrated writers sustains an entertaining story,” asserted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked: “Goldstein writes assuredly and well of the work of his chosen four exemplars.” The same reviewer called the volume “an engaging, lightly worn literary study.” Glen Weldon, contributor to the National Public Radio website, suggested: “In letting these four writers speak in their own words—their own witty, gossipy, often waspish words—Goldstein neatly avoids a dutiful chronicling of anything so weighty and abstruse as The Rise of Modernism. Cannily, he sacrifices historical sweep and gravitas for something much more grounded and intimate. In his hands, these literary lions prove surprisingly—and bracingly—catty.” Writing on the New York Times website, Eric Bennett commented: “The enduring interest of 1922 lies in the brilliance, madness, beauty, comedy and devastation with which writers that year fused the fragments of the ages to a noisily vapid postwar present. Eliot and Woolf certainly, but Forster too transmuted private paralysis into astonishing monuments to collective catastrophe.” Bennett continued: “Readers who, from sources other than Goldstein, know these monuments—haunting and inscrutable, vital and deathly, visceral and recondite, funny and weird—will surely cherish the immediacy that The World Broke in Two brings to the biographies of their creators. The homage Goldstein pays them may be shallow but it is entirely full of life.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2017, Donna Seaman, review of The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature, p. 15.
BookPage, August, 2017. Robert Weibezahl, “Well Read: A Modern Quartet,” review of The World Broke in Two, p. 4.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2017, review of The World Broke in Two.
Publishers Weekly, May 22, 2017, review of The World Broke in Two, p. 88; July 17, 2017, Calvin Reid, author interview, p. 210.
USA Today, August 22, 2017, Charles Finch, “Why 1922 Rocked the Literary World,” review of The World Broke in Two, p. 3D.
ONLINE
Jewish Book Council Website, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (February 4, 2018), author profile.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (December 21, 2017), John Mullan, review of The World Broke in Two.
Macmillan Website, https://us.macmillan.com/ (February 4, 2018), author profile.
National Public Radio Online, https://www.npr.org/ (July 25, 2017), Glen Weldon, review of The World Broke in Two.
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (January 28, 2018), Judith Reveal, review of The World Broke in Two.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (August 9, 2017), Eric Bennett, review of The World Broke in Two.
Spectator Online, https://www.spectator.co.uk/ (September 23, 2017), Richard Davenport-Hines, review of The World Broke in Two.
BILL GOLDSTEIN
Bill Goldstein
Bill Hayes
Bill Goldstein, the founding editor of the books site of The New York Times on the Web, reviews books and interviews authors for NBC's "Weekend Today in New York." He is also curator of public programs at Roosevelt House, the public policy institute of New York's Hunter College. He received a PH.D in English from City University of New York Graduate Center in 2010, and is the recipient of writing fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross and elsewhere. Bill is the author of The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year that
Bill Goldstein
Current JBC Network Author
Bill Goldstein, the founding editor of nytimes.com/books, reviews books and interviews authors for NBC's "Weekend Today in New York." He received a PH.D in English from City University of New York Graduate Center in 2010, and is the recipient of writing fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross and elsewhere for his work on The World Broke in Two.
QUOTED: "Cather wrote that in 1936, and was thinking of the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses in February 1922 and of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in October. To her, and to many others, those works seemed to herald a new modernist era."
The year that created modernism: PW talks with Bill Goldstein
Calvin Reid
Publishers Weekly. 264.29 (July 17, 2017): p210.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
In The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and the Year that Changed Literature (Holt, Aug.), Goldstein closely examines four literary lives.
Your book opens with a quote from Willa Cather--"The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts"--that serves as its title and theme. What does she mean?
Cather wrote that in 1936, and was thinking of the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses in February 1922 and of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in October. To her, and to many others, those works seemed to herald a new modernist era in which the form of storytelling Cather herself prized was no longer of signal importance. She meant it as a melancholy remark about an irrevocable change. But I think it was also a sly, literary comment about how we misread and misunderstand history.
What made you believe a book on these iconic and much-examined authors would be fruitful? I realized as I began researching the book that there was a big story in these writers' daily lives, and that by looking at what turned out to be one particularly important year, I could focus on the kind of details about their lives and what they were working on that definitive biographies often don't have the space to include. I thought I could reveal the interconnections among them in a new way by focusing on this narrow period.
What did you discover about these authors that we didn't know before?
Each of them was at a creative low point as 1922 began. That January, all four of my main subjects were in deep despair. Each was in search of what to do next, and was wondering what he or she could do that was new. As the year progressed, each of my main subjects worked very tentatively and without much hope on what would be their greatest books. Virginia Woolf turned 40 in January, and it was an unhappy milestone. In the spring, she wrote the short story that "branched," as she put it, into Mrs. Dalloway. Forster had not published a novel in more than a decade by 1922. That spring he began to make his first substantial progress on what would become A Passage to India. They didn't know that the books would get written.
What is it about these legendary authors that continues to hold our attention?
It is just thrilling to read the sentences they wrote, and to see how they made phrases and sentences into gorgeous wholes. The mystery of how they did it can never really be solved, and I think that is partly why we are drawn both to reading The Waste Land oi Mrs. Dalloway or Lawrence's Women in Love and to reading about the authors who wrote these and other such miraculous things.
QUOTED: "The World Broke in Two has serious flaws, particularly its dull, endless accounts of Eliot's financial wrangling and Lawrence's lack of connection to Goldstein's central narrative. But it's one of those imperfect books with something perfect on nearly every page, a line, a story, a joke."
Why 1922 rocked the literary world
Charles Finch
USA Today. (Aug. 22, 2017): Lifestyle: p03D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
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Byline: Charles Finch, Special for USA TODAY
For a moment Clarissa Dalloway feels annoyed at how slowly a shop girl is fetching her change. It's 1922. Then she checks herself: "Thousands of young men had died that things might go on," she thinks. So that she might buy gloves. Mrs. Dalloway's creator, Virginia Woolf, noted the same phenomenon privately: "Peace is rapidly dissolving into the light of common day," she wrote in her diary.
The subject of The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature (Henry Holt, 351 pp., ***1/2 out of four), Bill Goldstein's fascinating, superbly researched group biography of Woolf and three other English novelists, is this painful conundrum. Regular life had resumed in England, but the terrible consequences of a terrible war were only beginning to emerge -- first, as such things so often do, in art.
The book's conceit is that 1922 was itself the watershed year in the evolution of modernism. That's doubtful. Only one of Goldstein's four authors, T.S. Eliot, produced a work of outsized importance during its 12 months, The Waste Land. D.H. Lawrence -- out of place here, as he was most of his life -- was wandering New Mexico and writing a properly forgotten novel called Kangaroo. Woolf was sick for much of the year. E.M. Forster, who rounds out the group, published nothing, though he did, after a long break, resume work on A Passage to India.
Still, Goldstein is persuasive in his argument that 1922 was a "crucial year of change and outstanding creative renaissance" for each. All began it in a state of self-doubt -- perhaps the biggest surprise is that Eliot, who has always seemed so phlegmatic in retrospect, sitting behind his desk at the bank, was in the midst of a genuine breakdown -- and ended it in full creative stride. All were startled into new ambition by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, which had been serialized between 1918 and 1920.
Still, the strength of The World Broke in Two lies not in its overarching vision but in its beautiful mosaic work. Goldstein pieces together thousands of quotations and long-neglected anecdotes, describing in rich detail Forster's dying first love, Woolf's endless acuity, Lawrence's tormented mind, Eliot's rigid depression.
This is the deep end -- but if you know these writers intimately already, the book is a joy, tracing their lost decisions, their fleeting moods, their random acquaintances.
The World Broke in Two has serious flaws, particularly its dull, endless accounts of Eliot's financial wrangling and Lawrence's lack of connection to Goldstein's central narrative. But it's one of those imperfect books with something perfect on nearly every page, a line, a story, a joke.
And doesn't that match the lesson of modernism, of Eliot and Woolf? War shattered every life, and thereafter it was only fragments that could show the whole.
CAPTION(S):
photo Bill Hayes
QUOTED: "an extensively researched, extraordinarily fine-grained and lucid literary history rich in biographical discoveries."
The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T.
S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and
the Year That Changed Literature
Donna Seaman
Booklist.
113.22 (Aug. 1, 2017): p15.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That
Changed Literature. By Bill Goldstein. Aug. 2017.368p. illus. Holt, $30 (9780805094022). 823.
Four radical writers battled illness, depression, domestic stress, heartbreak, and artistic paralysis as the year
1922 delivered two literary explosions: James Joyce's Ulysses and the first English translation of the first
volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. These novels would serve as goads and polestars for T. S. Eliot,
E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. In an extensively researched, extraordinarily finegrained
and lucid literary history rich in biographical discoveries, Goldstein traces the synergy among this
quartet and reveals both their anguish and esprit de corps. He extracts wisdom, wit, cattiness, and sympathy
from diaries and letters as he charts the fitful creation of "The Waste Land," A Passage to India, Kangaroo,
and Mrs. Dalloway concurrent with Eliot's breakdowns and rest cures, Forsters unrequited love for men,
Lawrence's fractious sojourn in Taos with Mabel Dodge Sterne, and Woolf's defiance of doctor's orders.
Here, too, are publishing skirmishes and censorship cases. Goldstein's ardently detailed, many-faceted story
of a pivotal literary year illuminates all that these tormented visionaries had to overcome to "make the
modern happen." --Donna Seaman
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and
the Year That Changed Literature." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 15. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501718703/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1c02c950.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501718703
QUOTED: "Goldstein's research into these (somewhat) intertwined lives is impressively rich and nuanced, and his evenhanded passion for each of his subjects plays out in an elegant narrative. ... The World Broke in Two beautifully captures a seismic moment of cultural rupture."
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Well read: A modern quartet
Robert Weibezahl
BookPage.
(Aug. 2017): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
1922 is widely regarded as the year that literary modernism came of age. Bookended by the publication of
Ulysses and "The Waste Land," it was dubbed "the year 1 p.s.U" (year one, post scriptum Ulysses) by Ezra
Pound, and Willa Cather would later reflect that "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts." Cather's
phrase provides the title for Bill Goldstein's accomplished, captivating look at that seminal year through the
lens of the interconnecting lives of four literary icons. The World Broke in Two (Holt, $30, 368 pages,
ISBN 9780805094022) explores how those 12 months would prove decisive in the lives and careers of
Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, each of whom would begin to approach the
world anew and produce or conceive a book that has become an essential part of the modernist canon.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Goldstein sets a somber stage: England less than four years after the end of the devastating First World War
was, in Forster's words, "a sad person who has folded her hands and stands waiting." Each of these writers--
well acquainted with one another in the small village that was London's literary community--combated his
or her own malaise. As the year began, Woolf was stricken by influenza, an illness which, coupled with the
lukewarm reception of her last novel, hampered the progress of her writing. Eliot, mired in his tedious job
as a banker and struggling to keep his marriage to his emotionally unstable wife intact, suffered a
breakdown (and influenza, too) and for a time sought psychiatric care in Switzerland. Persona non grata in
his native land of England, Lawrence had been living in Italy since 1919, but was itching to move on to new
frontiers. Forster, the eldest of the quartet, who had not published a novel since Howards End in 1910, had
gone to India as personal secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas and returned home to England that winter,
melancholy and bereft.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
As 1922 unfolded, great literature was born. Eliot completed "The Waste Land" and contentiously sought a
proper home--and adequate payment--for what he knew was his masterpiece. Peripatetic Lawrence took a
rather circuitous route to New Mexico by way of Australia, the source for his novel, Kangaroo, which
Goldstein deems a neglected work. Ignited in part by reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which first
began appearing in English translation in that fateful year as well, Woolf started writing her luminous,
ruminative Mrs. Dalloway. And Forster shed his Edwardian mantle to begin work on A Passage to India, a
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work he had abandoned years before and returned to after his second trip to the subcontinent and the recent
tragedy of his rekindled passion for an Egyptian man, the love of his life.
Goldstein's research into these (somewhat) intertwined lives is impressively rich and nuanced, and his
evenhanded passion for each of his subjects plays out in an elegant narrative. In our own fractured,
impatient age, the poignant and arresting stories of these four genius writers evoke nostalgia for a time
when precision and introspection were the guiding principles of literature. The World Broke in Two
beautifully captures a seismic moment of cultural rupture that, despite its shock and awe, left something
new and exciting in its path.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Weibezahl, Robert. "Well read: A modern quartet." BookPage, Aug. 2017, p. 4. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499345368/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2a028631.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499345368
QUOTED: "The intimate peek into the lives, rivalries, and heartbreaks of these celebrated writers sustains an entertaining story."
1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf,
T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and
the Year That Changed Literature
Publishers Weekly.
264.21 (May 22, 2017): p88.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and the Year That
Changed Literature
Bill Goldstein. Holt, $30 (368p) ISBN 978-0805-0-9402-2
Goldstein, founding editor of the New York Times books website, offers an extensively annotated account
of how four major authors invented modernism in 1922. Already a literary landmark for the publication of
Joyce's Ulysses and the first appearance of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu in English, 1922 is
staked out by Goldstein as a "crucial year of change and outstanding creative renaissance" for his principals.
Lawrence's Women in Love survived an obscenity lawsuit, Forster revived his career with A Passage to
India, Eliot published The Waste Land to wide acclaim, and Woolf invented Mrs. Dalloway's inner world.
For context, Goldstein dwells at length, and with frequent repetition, on his writers' challenges,
disappointments, and jealousies. Lawrence whirls like a dervish over countries and continents, happy
nowhere; Forster broods with loneliness and grief; Eliot waffles over his great poem in between rest cures;
and Woolf battles illness and her own inclination toward elegant spite. Goldstein's plentiful digressions
threaten to disjoint an already fragile narrative thread. Nonetheless, the intimate peek into the lives,
rivalries, and heartbreaks of these celebrated writers sustains an entertaining story about how great literature
is made, and will please scholars and hardcore fans alike. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency.
(July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and the Year That
Changed Literature." Publishers Weekly, 22 May 2017, p. 88. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494099106/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=149f8e4b.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494099106
QUOTED: "Goldstein writes assuredly and well of the work of his chosen four exemplars."
"an engaging, lightly worn literary study."
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Goldstein, Bill: THE WORLD BROKE IN
TWO
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Goldstein, Bill THE WORLD BROKE IN TWO Henry Holt (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 8, 15 ISBN: 978-0-
8050-9402-2
A group biography of four writers who are held as standard-bearers for a new movement in 20th-century
literature.Historical periods rarely break into neat divisions, but Goldstein, the founding editor of the New
York Times book website and current critic for NBC's Weekend Today in New York, makes a solid case for
1922 as the climacteric in which the modern era began--modern, that is to say, in the sense of literary and
artistic modernism. His four cases in point--Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence--
produced significant, even definitive work that year. Perhaps most significantly, Eliot published The Waste
Land, forever altering the poetic landscape by showing that nightmare and saga could be brought to bear on
the neurasthenic postwar present. Not that Eliot was the nicest of guys, and perhaps a certain meanness of
spirit defines modernism as much as any literary trope. As Goldstein writes, "Eliot often dealt in very
narrow, very selective truth. Many of those who knew Eliot well...did not trust him." Though 1922 was also
the year in which the much-admired Marcel Proust died, Woolf took her cues from James Joyce and took as
a challenge the need to "confront and pin down on paper the texture and vitality of a new landscape of the
mind." Interestingly, Goldstein traces her evolution as having been sparked by a kind of imagined writer's
block that led her to yield to what she called the "common sense of readers, uncorrupted with literary
prejudice," and began to produce inventive, experimental books in a challenge that she trusted those readers
to accept. Goldstein writes assuredly and well of the work of his chosen four exemplars; though Lawrence
is barely read these days, the others still hold up, and he brings fresh eyes to all of them. An engaging,
lightly worn literary study, of a piece with Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era (1971) in divining the origins of
the modern.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Goldstein, Bill: THE WORLD BROKE IN TWO." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934329/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d8fad5e4.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934329
QUOTED: "In letting these four writers speak in their own words—their own witty, gossipy, often waspish words—Goldstein neatly avoids a dutiful chronicling of anything so weighty and abstruse as The Rise of Modernism. Cannily, he sacrifices historical sweep and gravitas for something much more grounded and intimate. In his hands, these literary lions prove surprisingly—and bracingly—catty."
'The World Broke In Two': Four Writers, One Transformational Year
July 25, 20172:00 PM ET
GLEN WELDON
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The World Broke in Two
The World Broke in Two
Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature
by Bill Goldstein
Hardcover, 352 pages |
purchase
The title of literary historian Bill Goldstein's book refers to a familiar quote from writer Willa Cather. In a 1936 essay, sensing that the literary landscape had shifted under her feet and that her own work was passing out of fashion, she lamented,"The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts."
She was referring to the appearance, in that year, of three towering works of modernism: James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and the English publication of the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
The ingenious conceit of Goldstein's book is to follow, using excerpts from both their correspondence and their diaries, the intertwined personal and literary lives of four writers — Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and Eliot himself — as the three seismic shocks of those publications ripple through their lives, and their work. To do so, he narrows the focus and imposes strict parameters. Very strict, as it turns out: Apart from some contextualizing commentary, The World Broke in Two rigorously limits itself to the span of days from January 1st to December 31st, 1922.
If any of the above suggests a dry accounting of facts, or an academic's penchant for grappling with insular abstractions at 30,000 feet, know this: In letting these four writers speak in their own words — their own witty, gossipy, often waspish words — Goldstein neatly avoids a dutiful chronicling of anything so weighty and abstruse as The Rise of Modernism. Cannily, he sacrifices historical sweep and gravitas for something much more grounded and intimate. In his hands, these literary lions prove surprisingly — and bracingly — catty.
Again and again, he highlights the disconnect between their public praise of another's work and their private dismissal of it. Woolf, for example, would eventually praise Ulysses, albeit begrudgingly, in The Common Reader ("... there can be no question but that it is of the utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably important.") In her diary, however, as she first struggled through the work in 1922, her opinion was considerably less politic, even more insufferably snobbish — and, not coincidentally, a lot more fun ("An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.").
Virginia Woolf, At Intersection Of Science And Art
KRULWICH WONDERS...
Virginia Woolf, At Intersection Of Science And Art
All four of the writers Goldstein profiles entered the year 1922 rocked back on their heels and in a state for recovery: Woolf from a debilitating bout of influenza, Eliot from a nervous breakdown, Forster reeling from grief over an unrequited infatuation, and Lawrence from both stinging reviews and a restlessness that would send him roaming the world seeking a contentment he was perennially ill-equipped to experience, much less enjoy.
The book comes alive in the ceaseless churn of these intersecting egos, as they turn their withering writerly gazes upon one another — and, less eagerly, upon themselves. Their professional and personal jealousy, spite, anxiety and outrage — the familiar hallmarks of the writer's personality — become a kind of humanizing background noise, drawing us in and allowing us to see them more fully. Woolf emerges as a patrician gossip, Forster as a broken-winged romantic, Eliot as "almost unbearably formal and pretentious" and Lawrence ... well. Here, Goldstein shows an eagerness to step in and throw some elbows himself, primly noting that "There was very little about Lawrence that wasn't irritating to someone."
Capturing this on-the-ground feel of these writers' literary lives is only one of the book's aims, of course. The other — enumerating how the year transformed their work — proves the heavier lift, and Goldstein finds more success with some writers than others. As Woolf, for example, works on the story that would become Mrs. Dalloway, Goldstein assiduously lays out the many ways that her reading of Proust and Joyce enriches and enlivens her approach, without inserting any pat, overdetermined "Eureka!" moment. He walks us through Forster's inwardness and grief, and allows us to see his delighted relief as he starts to grapple with the book that would become A Passage to India. Protracted dithering over the agreement to publish The Waste Land takes up a great deal of the book's Eliot content, and proves about as fascinating as any account of contract disputes tends to be — but to be fair, that tiresome back-and-forth took up a great deal of Eliot's year, as well.
On Eliot's 125th, His 'Waste Land' Hasn't Lost Its Glamour
POETRY
On Eliot's 125th, His 'Waste Land' Hasn't Lost Its Glamour
The chapters on those three writers — Woolf, Forster and Eliot — prove the most successful, as their lives were most indelibly intertwined. All three lived in London, socialized to some degree, and — crucially — the projects they were working on in 1922 have since become pillars of the Western literary canon. The chapters on Lawrence have a more difficult task, both because he spent the year travelling abroad, and because the book he worked on — the autobiographical novel Kangaroo, written and set in Australia — is now largely overlooked. Goldstein makes a good case that the book was important to Lawrence's experience, but the Lawrence chapters of The World Broke in Two never quite manage to integrate or advance the book's thesis.
But again, Goldstein avails himself of excerpts — in this case, from the correspondence of Lawrence's long-suffering wife, Freida — to vividly portray what having to actually live with such an impulsive, narcissistic man who so performatively fancied himself an iconoclast was like, day to day. "Lawrence is wear and tear," she wrote to friend. You'll come away from The World Broke in Two convinced that she had the guy's number.
The World Broke in Two by Bill Goldstein review – modernism’s annus mirabilis
The story of 1922, an extraordinary year in literature as told through the lives of four key writers, unsettles our notions of modernism
John Mullan
Thu 21 Dec 2017 02.31 EST Last modified on Fri 22 Dec 2017 19.11 EST
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TS Eliot with Virginia Woolf and Vivien Eliot, 1932.
The annus mirabilis of literary modernism, 1922, saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. Virginia Woolf completed Jacob’s Room and began work in earnest on Mrs Dalloway. The first English translation of the opening volume of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu was published (Proust died later the same year). Bill Goldstein’s book “tells the story of 1922”. It takes its title from a rueful comment made by Willa Cather in the mid-1930s about the effect on literary taste and value of two momentous publications in that year. Writing like her own suddenly seemed “backward”. Goldstein calls it a “literary apocalypse”.
His is not the first book to try to tell the story of this year, and is narrower in its focus than others that have gone before it. It deals only with literature and is unapologetically biographical. Goldstein concentrates on four writers: Eliot, Woolf, EM Forster and DH Lawrence. All four begin the year variously thwarted or despondent, dissatisfied with their achievements and uncertain about the next direction. The experience they share in Goldstein’s account is not ebullient experimental achievement but the grim struggle to overcome writer’s block. “Each of them felt literally at a loss for words.”
Virginia Woolf
Fascinated yet dismissive … Virginia Woolf. Composite: AP/Getty Images
Goldstein’s choice of authors unsettles our notion of a unified movement that we now call “modernism”. Forster may have been attached to the modish Bloomsbury group, but in his novels he was no formal radical. What is more, in 1922 his fiction seemed all behind him, locked into a bygone Edwardian age. He had not written a novel since Howards End, published in 1910. Lawrence, in contrast, certainly was a radical, but apparently for his subject matter rather than any formal experimentation. Angrily self-isolating, he declined to be part of any movement.
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Chapter by chapter, Goldstein moves between the lives of these four authors, chronicling, in his early chapters, mostly their different experiences of “nervous breakdowns, chronic illness, intense loneliness, isolation, and depression”. Illness is the theme. An influenza epidemic engulfs Britain, killing thousands. Everyone in this book duly gets flu and is struck down by it for weeks on end. Even Lawrence in Sicily gets it, deciding his illness will prompt a struggle for rebirth “through the blood and psyche … Let no one try to filch from me even my influenza”. Being ill-looking is evidently Eliot’s thing. Woolf and Osbert Sitwell gossip about “the green powder” he applies to his face, apparently intended to give himself a “look of strain”.
Eliot takes three months’ leave from his job at Lloyds Bank in order to recover from a “nervous breakdown”. He writes that a celebrated London specialist told him he had “greatly overdrawn my nervous energy”. (He and Woolf seem ever ready to succumb to any kind of medical quackery.) First, Eliot and his wife Vivien go to Margate, where they stay at the Albermarle hotel and Tom drafts parts of The Waste Land in a wooden shelter on the seafront. “On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing …” Then there is Lausanne, where at the urging of fellow depressive Ottoline Morrell, he signs up with a Swiss medical sage, Roger Vittoz, who teaches “mental control” to his patients, holding their heads in his hands so he can read their brain waves. It may be baloney, but Tom writes the fifth section of The Waste Land.
DH Lawrence, English novelist and poet 1885-1930.
In search of naked liberty … DH Lawrence. Photograph: Alamy
Eliot, Woolf and Forster keep coming across each other (Lawrence has to make do with his correspondence with Forster). One weekend in September, there they are together at the Woolfs’ country retreat, Monk’s House in Sussex, discussing Ulysses. Eliot is convinced it is as important as Tolstoy, while Forster (as ever) hesitates, and Woolf is both fascinated and dismissive. Goldstein gives plenty of space to her subsequently embarrassing comments (“An illiterate, underbred book”, “feeble, wordy, uneducated stuff”, and so on), but also notices how Joyce’s magnum opus worries at her. Its evident influence on Mrs Dalloway goes undescribed.
While these literary pioneers consort in England, Lawrence, after roaming with his wife Frieda through Europe in search of what he called “naked liberty”, has ended up in Taormina, on the eastern coast of Sicily. Women in Love had been published in 1921 to poor reviews and sales, and he is itchy for a better place of creative exile. We follow him to Sri Lanka (too humid) and then Australia, where he is stranded in a small town miles from Sydney. Lawrence raids his latest experiences for Kangaroo, in many ways his most autobiographical novel, and moves on to Taos, New Mexico, accepting an invitation from Mabel Dodge Sterne, a wealthy American admirer of his work. Soon he is fuming to find himself patronised and thinking that he must move somewhere else.
From the desert he writes to his American publisher to ask for a copy of Ulysses. “I read it is the last thing in novels: I’d best look at it.” “Look at it” is evidently what he does: he receives a copy on loan and returns it rapidly, having read “only bits”. More pleasing to him is the new trade edition of Women in Love that comes in the same package. Thanks to its unsuccessful prosecution by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, it is selling tremendously well and soon the Lawrences can escape Sterne’s largesse and rent their own ranch at the foot of the mountains.
EM Forster
Mournful, self-doubting … EM Forster. Photograph: Edward Gooch/Getty Images
Meanwhile Forster, in his early 40s, is living with his mother Lily in Weybridge, Surrey, glum and unproductive. He has at least managed to lose his virginity a few years earlier while working for the Red Cross in Alexandria, but a year in India has been a waste and disappointment. Returning via Egypt, he has found his former lover, Mohammed el-Adl, dying of tuberculosis. On his return in spring 1922 he burns a pile of what he called “my indecent writings” in the belief that this might free him to write a novel at last. And perhaps it works: almost unnoticed by his peers, in the latter part of 1922 he manages to write much of a new novel, A Passage to India (published in 1924).
It is the dithering, mournful, self-doubting Forster who emerges most vividly from a book that is sustained by its author’s undisguised curiosity about the quirks and susceptibilities of his chosen writers. Working from their letters and diaries, Goldstein does not hesitate to suggest he can know their private feelings. As a sign of his familiarity with them, he always refers to “Tom”, “Morgan” and “Virginia”; Lawrence alone, a more distant and difficult character, goes by his surname. This confidence brings one great benefit. The literary achievements of this extraordinary year, which we think we know so well, become hard-won and surprising, rather than inevitable. Indeed, as we follow Eliot’s endless prevarications over getting The Waste Land published, and his squabbles with prospective publishers over tiny amounts of money, we half expect the great work never to appear. Literary history may know what these authors were doing, but in this account they hardly seem to have known themselves.
• The World Broke in Two by Bill Goldstein is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for £21.25 (RRP £25) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
QUOTED: "The enduring interest of 1922 lies in the brilliance, madness, beauty, comedy and devastation with which writers that year fused the fragments of the ages to a noisily vapid postwar present. Eliot and Woolf certainly, but Forster too transmuted private paralysis into astonishing monuments to collective catastrophe."
"Readers who, from sources other than Goldstein, know these monuments—haunting and inscrutable, vital and deathly, visceral and recondite, funny and weird—will surely cherish the immediacy that The World Broke in Two brings to the biographies of their creators. The homage Goldstein pays them may be shallow but it is entirely full of life."
1922: The Year That
Transformed English
Literature
By ERIC BENNETT AUG. 9, 2017
THE WORLD BROKE IN TWO
Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and the Year
That Changed Literature
By Bill Goldstein
Illustrated. 351 pp. Henry Holt. $30
World War I wounded or killed almost 40 million people, upended the balance
of power that had prevailed in Europe for a century, heralded a new age of
mechanized warfare and redrew borders around the globe. It also transformed
literature. Since the days of the Black Death, writers in English had fashioned books
from other books. Chaucer plundered Boccaccio to good effect. Shakespeare filched
parts of “Hamlet” from Thomas Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy.” Milton retooled Virgil
for English Protestants. And such theft and fealty persisted well into the era of
internal combustion. Dickens worked lines of Sir Philip Sidney into the 59 chapters
of “Great Expectations.”
The Treaty of Versailles made no provisions against the canon, but it might as
well have. After the war, Virginia Woolf claimed to have “burst out laughing” at the
sound of Tennyson. But such mirth came mingled with despair, and one could
plausibly define literary modernism as the washing of the corpse of tradition, albeit
sardonically. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” performed last rites for Homer’s “Odyssey”
1/28/2018 1922: The Year That Transformed English Literature - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/books/review/bill-goldstein-the-world-broke-in-two.html 2/4
and destroyed the whole of the 19th century, at least according to T. S. Eliot. But it
was also a joke. Eliot’s own writing was just as funereal and just as wry. “These
fragments I have shored against my ruins,” a voice in “The Waste Land” intones, as if
from sanitarium or deathbed. Yet Eliot’s working title — “He Do the Police in
Different Voices” — quoted Dickens at his liveliest and goofiest. In the 1920s, writers
could still root themselves in the past, but only as eulogists or parodists. The best
were both.
In his fresh account of four modernists, Bill Goldstein, a former editor of the
books section of this newspaper’s website and an interviewer for NBC New York,
does not tell this story. Instead “The World Broke in Two” chronicles Morgan
(Forster), David (Lawrence), Tom (Eliot) and Virginia (Woolf) as they wage personal
battle in tremendous earnest against blank sheets of paper to create important new
works from the inner recesses of their genius. Goldstein offers a snapshot history of
their careers in deference to the American now, embracing not only the chatty
familiarity of first names but also, and more significant, the biographical details of
authorship that most 21st-century interest in literature seems to depend upon.
The year is 1922. “Ulysses” appears in February, “The Waste Land” in October.
By then, everybody is reading C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust. The four
writers bid farewell to 1921 in bad shape and greet 1923 in good. Eliot recovers from
a breakdown, wins prize money and publication for “The Waste Land” and starts The
Criterion, the journal that will house his rise to critical pre-eminence. Woolf bucks
the flu, sublimates her class disdain for Joyce, channels Proust, publishes “Jacob’s
Room” and commences work on “Mrs. Dalloway.” Forster loses a secret lover to
tuberculosis, burns his unpublished dirty stories, is delivered from artistic malaise
by a random bump of celebrity and transforms an aborted manuscript into “A
Passage to India.” Lawrence arrives in a United States where obscenity trials have
just legalized his racy fiction, publicized it and earned him money.
In diaries and letters, the four make literature of their daily lives, and Goldstein
is comprehensive and exuberant curating this material. Forster, Woolf writes, is
“evanescent, piping, elusive,” “timid, touching, infinitely charming,” “whimsical &
vagulous,” a “vaguely rambling butterfly.” Eliot has “a big white face,” “a mouth
twisted & shut; not a single line free & easy; all caught, pressed, inhibited.” Proust’s
1/28/2018 1922: The Year That Transformed English Literature - The New York Times
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prose inspires in Woolf an “astonishing vibration and saturation and
intensification,” a pleasure that “becomes physical — like sun and wine and grapes
and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.” Meanwhile, “Ulysses” leaves her
“puzzled, bored, irritated & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching
his pimples.”
There are good anecdotes. A lugubrious Thomas Hardy shows Forster the ivy-clad
gravestones of his pets — Snowbell, Pella, Kitkin — as Forster tries to keep a straight
face. The Swiss physician Roger Vittoz cradles Eliot’s head in his hands in order to
read the sad poet’s brain waves and unkink them. Forster, dithering and mild, has
sex on the beach.
“The World Broke in Two” sedulously traces correspondences between lived
details and the published novels and poems. A child’s voice in “Jacob’s Room,”
disrupting a painter trying to paint, originates in the irritating children outside
Woolf’s own window. The spooky refrain in “The Waste Land,” “Hurry up please its
time,” echoes the shortened wartime hours still in effect for cafes and pubs in
London. Lawrence’s “Kangaroo,” written in a burst in the summer of 1922, is an
almost real-time transcription of his stopover in Australia.
Emphasizing the personal, Goldstein neglects the allusive, mythological and
abstract dimensions of the works. This shortchanges Forster only a little and
Lawrence hardly at all. But it seriously cheats Eliot and Woolf. Edmund Wilson’s
famous review of “The Waste Land,” which catalogs the source material — Vedic
hymns and Ecclesiastes, Ovid and Augustine, Jessie L. Weston’s “From Ritual to
Romance” and Sir James George Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” and much more —
interests Goldstein far less than Wilson’s take in a private letter. There, he judges
“The Waste Land” “a most distressingly moving account of Eliot’s own agonized state
of mind during the years which preceded his nervous breakdown.” Phlebas the
Phoenician, ageless Tiresias and the vista of Himavant might as well never have
existed. Yet the ancient inheritance was crucial to Eliot, as the national one was to
Woolf. She loved the English canon, hated its implacable maleness and wove that
love and hatred into the warp and weft of her masterpieces. Goldstein cuts a yearsized
piece from this fabric, though it stretches back to the Battle of Hastings.
1/28/2018 1922: The Year That Transformed English Literature - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/books/review/bill-goldstein-the-world-broke-in-two.html 4/4
The reigning theme of “The World Broke in Two” is writer’s block, treated as an
anthropological constant. These modernists, in Goldstein’s hands, often resemble
graduate students at the moment you least want to encounter them. “Lawrence had
been writing during that year, as Virginia Woolf had, but he had not been successful
at writing the fiction that mattered to him,” and “that defined Lawrence to himself,
just as Virginia’s anxiety about her delay in finishing ‘Jacob’s Room’ defined Woolf
to herself. They shared, as Eliot did, the frustrating conundrum Forster had
described but had for too long been unable to escape: always working, never
creating.” Lawrence’s struggle with “Kangaroo,” Woolf’s with “Mrs. Dalloway,”
Forster’s with “A Passage to India” and even Eliot’s with “The Waste Land” could be
that of anyone working on a dissertation.
Yet the enduring interest of 1922 lies in the brilliance, madness, beauty, comedy
and devastation with which writers that year fused the fragments of the ages to a
noisily vapid postwar present. Eliot and Woolf certainly, but Forster too transmuted
private paralysis into astonishing monuments to collective catastrophe. Readers
who, from sources other than Goldstein, know these monuments — haunting and
inscrutable, vital and deathly, visceral and recondite, funny and weird — will surely
cherish the immediacy that “The World Broke in Two” brings to the biographies of
their creators. The homage Goldstein pays them may be shallow but it is entirely full
of life.
Eric Bennett is the author of “Workshops of Empire” and “A Big Enough Lie.”
A version of this review appears in print on August 13, 2017, on Page BR13 of the Sunday Book Review
with the headline: Not a Single Line Free and Easy.
QUOTED: "Goldstein is an enthusiast for literature with the right measure of self-belief. He crackles with excitement about the making of books and the creating of literary reputations. ... His purpose is to convey the tensions, fumbling, frustration, arousal and joyous climax of creativity. But the foreplay is so fidgety and inconclusive that the reader is left panting for a cup of cocoa."
"over-researched, unreflective and lustreless book."
Bill Goldstein says the ‘World Broke in Two’ in 1922 – but it didn’t
His big literary vision of ‘modernism’ is lost in a muddle of minutiae
Richard Davenport-Hines
E.M. Forster (image: Getty)
23 September 2017 9:00 AM
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The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and the Year that Changed Literature
Bill Goldstein
Bloomsbury, pp.336, £25
‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his quarterly review of literature, the Criterion, which had its first issue in October 1922. Eliot wanted an eminent French author as a contributor: ‘the only name worth getting is Proust’, he told Ezra Pound. As the founding editor of the New York Times books website, Goldstein is attuned to cultural fashions, publicity drives and the politicking of literary factions. And so he makes a painfully reductive explanation of Eliot’s remark: ‘The importance of Proust was publitical above all.’
1922 was the publication year of P.G. Wodehouse’s The Clicking of Cuthbert and of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophus. It was the foundation year of the Laugh-a-Gram cartoon film company (proprietor, Walt Disney). But there was nothing ‘publitical’ about Wodehouse or Wittgenstein, and so Goldstein turns his focus on Eliot (who finished and published The Waste Land), D.H. Lawrence (who wrote a novel set in Australia, while living in a small town in New South Wales), E.M. Forster (who overcame writer’s block and began his last novel), and Virginia Woolf (who wrote a short story, ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, which she expanded into a wonderful novel). As Kangaroo was published in 1923, A Passage to India in 1924 and Mrs Dalloway in 1925, the reality behind Goldstein’s chronological arrangement seems weak.
Goldstein is an enthusiast for literature with the right measure of self-belief. He crackles with excitement about the making of books and the creating of literary reputations. His admiration for his four chief protagonists gives a nice temper to his own book: there is no one whom he wants to show up or do down. Einstein and Patrick Hennessy, scientist and historian, both took as their motto: ‘Never lose a holy curiosity.’ But although Goldstein reveres his quartet, his inquisitiveness is neither discriminating nor hallowed. He gives his readers a trudging chronicle, week by week, sometimes even day by day, of his protagonists’ activities and ideas during 1922. His purpose is to convey the tensions, fumbling, frustration, arousal and joyous climax of creativity. But the foreplay is so fidgety and inconclusive that the reader is left panting for a cup of cocoa.
Goldstein is a man for the microscope rather than the telescope. His readers are given such close and tiny details that the big vision is lost. There is nothing interesting in Eliot’s decision to wear black tie at a dinner of Lady Rothermere’s or in the stewed pears offered to Lawrence for breakfast. Inordinate quotation from his subjects’ letters and diaries makes for choppy, disjointed reading and peppers Goldstein’s pages with too many inverted commas. He seems remote in his understanding of Woolf as a woman, and at his most sympathetic in writing of Forster’s doubts and anxiety. Yet Goldstein’s account of Kangaroo will be new and appetising to most readers. If only he had written more about this half-forgotten novel, and less about people’s ailments and squabbles.
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He puts Eliot, Lawrence and Woolf, if not so much Forster, into a mental landscape of postwar trauma. The scale of death from the war of 1914–18 and the subsequent influenza epidemic left its survivors grieving and haunted: memories of the past were encased in everybody’s present thoughts. Goldstein reiterates:
‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, Kangaroo and The Waste Land all declared the glaring contradiction of 1922: the war was over, but had not ended.
This is too trite a theme to bear the weight of significance that is piled on it in The World Broke in Two.
The title is one of the best points in Goldstein’s book. ‘The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,’ Willa Cather wrote in 1936 of the year when Joyce published Ulysses and Eliot The Waste Land. The phrase looks catchy on the book cover, but Goldstein is ungrateful to Cather. In the modernist ascendancy of 1922, ‘the form of storytelling she prized, and excelled at, was no longer of signal importance’, he says on the first page of his book. ‘She was the relic of an old literature, the value of which had not been preserved against the new literature that Joyce and Eliot represented.’
This is the New York literary publitician talking like a commodity dealer taking a short-term position. Cather’s novel of 1922, One of Ours, is a lopsided, risk-taking triumph with flaws that increase its fascination: it would be acclaimed for its war writing if she had been a man. Her next novel, A Lost Lady (1923) is a marvel of emotional richness: Madame Bovary set in a small American community called Sweet Water; little known in England, but unforgettable to anyone who has read it. Both novels leave A Passage to India bowled middle-stump. Goldstein’s dismissal of Cather as démodée gives an early warning of what is wrong with his over-researched, unreflective and lustreless book.
The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year that Changed Literature
Image of The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature
Author(s):
Bill Goldstein
Release Date:
August 14, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Henry Holt and Co.
Pages:
368
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Judith Reveal
Although many consider that the modernist period of literature began just prior to the start of the 20th century and continued into the 1960s, and included many familiar names, it is the year 1922 that author Bill Goldstein has chosen to focus on, with attention to Woolf, Eliot, Lawrence, and Forster.
In the first four chapters he describes the introspection each of these four authors’ experiences regarding their writing and personal lives (including their focus on age), and through these experiences how each faces 1922 with some trepidation. In many instances, the time between publications was excessive, and it is clear that there was considerable low self-esteem, or perhaps a lack of self-confidence that each of these authors experienced. As 1921 ended, each faced the incoming year with fear of failure, and yet as the new year began, each sensed a revival of self-confidence through his or her writing.
As with many modernist authors, World War I often impacted how they told a story. Virginia was at work on ‘Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street’ at the time
Lawrence wrote his ‘Nightmare’ chapter. Their approaches reflected their different styles and aims, and also their different experiences of the war itself, but they both wrote from the same awareness of it as a present thing, and even with the same fictional provocation for their characters.”
In these overviews, there are certain threads that intertwine through each person’s life including their health, personal relationships, and writing output. Goldstein takes these threads and weaves an intricate web, drawing them tight to one another.
Of the four authors discussed, Goldstein seems to give shorter shrift to D. H. Lawrence; there seems to be more distance between Lawrence and the other three authors. And yet questions of competence seemed to haunt him as much as they did the others.
The relationships between Woolf, Eliot, and Forster are conveyed through diary entries, newspaper critiques, and anecdotal conversations; and although there seems to be a touch of envy that often arises, on the whole the respect each writer showed for the other is well documented.
In addition to the well-developed discussions of these authors, there are interesting side stories about many of the mentors, editors, and publishers, as well as the aristocrats whose patronage of the artistic community of the time were invaluable to writers.
Goldstein discusses the role between Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in some detail. Eliot struggled with the completion of his substantial poem, “The Waste Land,” experiencing long periods of writer’s block, or perhaps better described as writer’s procrastination. Pound’s belief in Eliot’s skill as a writer is reflected in his ongoing editorial work and encouragement toward the writer in spite of Eliot’s often long delays in producing anything of value.
The personal lives of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence at times read like a crisis novel. Both Woolf and Eliot experienced bouts with the influenza that attacked Britain at the turn of the 20th century; Eliot’s wife, Vivienne, experienced sufficient maladies to suck the air out of his writing, and he faced his own mental health problems through a nervous breakdown.
Forster, fighting his own writing devils, fell in love with a man whose own health problems left Forster bereft. D. H. Lawrence faced extreme criticism as a result of his sexually explicit writings that were banned or not published at all.
In Chapter 11, Goldstein discusses the concept of book censorship, as it existed in America in the early 20th century, with commentary on Lawrence’s “Women in Love.” Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, published in 1835, drew much attention in the twentieth century American courts as a prelude to determining the negative impact of A Young Girl’s Diary, Casanova’s Homecoming, and Women in Love.
Although the courts recognized many passages in Gautier’s book “. . . taken by themselves, are undoubtedly vulgar and indecent,” it further judged “. . . whether a book is obscene or indecent…it must be considered broadly as a whole, and not judged from paragraphs alone which are vulgar and indecent.” This judgment alone gave hope to authors and publishers alike that a precedent may have been set for judging contemporary books under censorship rules.
Goldstein carries the four authors through 1922, bringing their relationships together into a tight pocket of interwoven fibers and yet still focusing on each as an individual and the importance of each author’s work. His reference to their individual works—Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob’s Room, Women in Love, Kangaroo, “The Waste Land” and A Passage to India just to name a few—provide deep insight into not only the writing challenges each author faced as they worked to complete their stories, but the personal journeys they undertook to bring each work to a successful conclusion.
Goldstein’s approach to 1922 and how lives were changed as this year approached is well written and clarifies how these lives were changed as the doors opened for each author, and his or her inability to write in this new year turned 180o.
In his epilogue, Goldstein brings these authors, and the importance of 1922 to each of them, together for a final overview, but the most important culmination is his reference to the impact of 1922 and Modernist Literature:
“Ezra Pound wrote to H. L. Mencken in March 1922 that the ‘Christian Era’ had ended at midnight on October 29, 1921, the night that James Joyce finished Ulysses.”
Although modernist literature is considered to have begun prior to the 20th century, it is clear that Pound believed that 1922 was the catalyst year when change truly brought new life to what was being written and published.
Judith Reveal is an author of mysteries, historical fiction, and nonfiction. She wrote The Four Elements of Fiction: Character, Setting, Situation, and Theme.