The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  * * *

  A dinner with Liveright, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound would have involved heavy drinking, if the men kept to their usual habits. Eliot was at the time mainly a gin man, though his taste would change. Liveright was so distinguished a drinker that back in his New York office, “Authors in the waiting room were often outnumbered by bootleggers,” as his employee Bennett Cerf, later the cofounder of Random House, remembered it. Pound, too, became even more voluble and opinionated “after he had begun to get into his cups, which was fairly soon,” one poet remembered of a Paris dinner that year. And Joyce’s wit and charm were founded on “the agreeable humanity of which he possessed such great stores,” liberally mixed with “his unaffected love of alcohol, and all good things to eat and drink.”

  The previous summer Joyce’s patron Harriet Weaver, anxious that Joyce finish Ulysses at last, had been worried about his progress and his health after hearing reports from Wyndham Lewis and Robert McAlmon, a younger American writer of substantial means and promising but modest talent. Joyce replied to her letter of concern with a long letter of his own and told her, “A nice collection could be made of legends about me.… I suppose I now have the reputation of being an incurable dipsomaniac,” adding that, among other rumors he had heard, he had supposedly enriched himself in wartime Switzerland “by espionage work for one or both combatants,” or was “a cocaine victim,” or “I could write no more, had broken down and was dying in New York.”

  Joyce was still relatively anonymous a month before the publication of Ulysses by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Co. Soon enough he would claim he had to avoid the restaurants “he was in the habit of frequenting because people crowded to look at him.” For all the likely conviviality at the dinner, it would not have been a dinner of equals, at least to Joyce’s mind. He “made no pretense of being indulgent towards other writers” and once asked Robert McAlmon whether he thought “Eliot or Pound has any real importance?” But Joyce’s egotism was wavering, and McAlmon’s response to the rhetorical question was to sidestep it. “Now, Joyce, is that a question for you to ask, who can doubt anything, even yourself?”

  Liveright, not surprisingly, was enamored with Joyce, and was probably intoxicated as much by the conversation of his companions as by the liquor. The evidence of what Joyce thought of Eliot is equivocal at best. He commented, later, after reading The Waste Land, “I had never realized that Eliot was a poet,” but at least until that revelation saw Eliot, whatever his or Pound’s “real importance,” as a useful publicist, a persuadable critic, a journalist who, cultivated with proper assiduousness, could write about him. Joyce sent him advance copies of episodes of Ulysses in the spring of 1921, ingratiating himself and perhaps sensing Eliot’s resistance to his own arrogance, which Eliot thought a “burdensome” trait mitigated only partially by what Eliot decided was a calculated courtesy. “Oh yes. He is polite, he is polite enough,” Eliot complained to Wyndham Lewis. “But he is exceedingly arrogant. Underneath. That is why he is so polite. I should be better pleased if he were less polite.”

  * * *

  Liveright was a “pearl” among “U.S. publicators,” in Pound’s eyes, but he was a pornographer and a Jew given to “impertinence” and worse, according to the New York lawyer John Quinn, a patron of Eliot’s and Pound’s (and Joyce’s, though increasingly unhappy with him). Liveright was a “firebrand” at the very least, which is the title of a biography of Liveright by Tom Dardis. On that inebriated evening he did his best to sign up all three writers. This was his way—to mix cocktails with contracts, as Sherwood Anderson, whom Liveright successfully wooed, recalled of an evening in New Orleans in which the two met in a speakeasy, and over absinthes Liveright offered Anderson $500 a month for five years, an advance-cum-salary, if he would switch to Liveright from Viking.

  Pound reported to Quinn that Liveright had “offered to bring out Ulysses in the U.S. and hand over 1000 bones to J. J.” But Joyce was not receptive, to Pound’s angry astonishment. “Why the hell he didn’t nail it AT once I don’t know. The terms were O. K. 1000 dollars for first edition … However, Joyce is off my hands, free, white, 21, etc.”

  Joyce demurred because it was not the first time Liveright said he wanted to publish the book, as Quinn well knew, having negotiated with Liveright about it in the spring of 1921, after Ben Huebsch, the publisher of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners, had decided he could go ahead with Ulysses only if Joyce cut the book, which as it stood was unpublishable.

  After Quinn could not come to terms with Huebsch, who wanted what Quinn called a Ulysses “slightly draped,” he then offered Liveright Ulysses with a warning that he should not publish the book unless he wanted to face “the certainty of prosecution and conviction.” At first Liveright agreed to publish it. But then he backed down, Quinn reported to Joyce. “He said he did not want to be convicted and so he dropped the matter. And that ends Liveright.” Following these disappointments, Sylvia Beach proposed publishing the book herself, and as soon as possible, before the end of 1921. But there had been delays on Joyce’s part, and more than two months after he had finished writing, the memorable date that was a new epoch to Pound, he was still rewriting and making further corrections on page proofs that he would continue with until the very end of January.

  Quinn, replying to Pound’s news of Liveright’s offer, was as angry and as astonished as Pound had been. But he was enraged by Liveright’s “Jew impertinence.” He had flourished a lucrative contract as if it were a kind of dessert? And had no doubt drunkenly proposed to publish Ulysses after having not had the nerve to do so before? It would not come to anything, Quinn predicted. And it didn’t.

  Liveright made a similar kind of offer to Eliot after talking about the poem at dinner. Liveright expressed interest in publishing it. But following the dinner Liveright became worried that the poem Pound and Eliot described would be too short for a book on its own. Could Eliot add any poems to make the book longer? he wrote to Pound from London the next week. And he was concerned about Knopf’s option on Eliot’s next book—Knopf had published a book of Eliot’s poems, in 1920, and another of his criticism, in 1921. Liveright would consider the poem if Knopf were out of the picture. Eliot and Pound continued to edit the loose pages of the manuscript.

  * * *

  The winter of 1922 was far milder in Paris than in London, and Pound’s two-room studio near the Luxembourg Gardens became an oasis where Eliot and Pound could work together, the third stop on Eliot’s recovery from his breakdown. The Pounds lived in a flat up a hill from the Seine, where the air was good, and the studio quiet, protected from the street by a buffer of two gardens. There were little shops nearby with “meat, cake, breads, etc. just at hand, so life is very convenient … much more like Kensington” than he had expected, Pound wrote to his grandmother. But the similarities with London went only so far. Daily life was not only far cheaper. In Paris, working on the poem, Tom seemed to Pound “so mountany gay.” The London Tom had not been, and would not be, nearly so happy.

  For Pound, Eliot had appeared as a second coming of himself, a poet whose advances and innovations the visionary Pound had himself predicted, or even summoned, into being, in his “Prolegomena,” published in 1912.

  As to Twentieth century poetry, and the poetry which I expect to see written during the next decade or so, it will, I think, move against poppy-cock, it will be harder and saner, it will be what Mr Hewlett calls “nearer the bone”. It will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth.… I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.

  Pound and Eliot met two years later, in September 1914, and when Eliot gave his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Pound, it seemed to the master that he had found the protégé who justified his prophecy and the poetry he had foreseen. “The
Love Song…” was “a portrait of failure, or of a character which fails,” and with it Eliot had made such a stark recoil from sentimental uplift that it stood as an uncompromising rebuke to the “false art” of others, who might have contrived to end the poem “on a note of triumph.” Pound hailed Eliot as “the last intelligent man I’ve found … worth watching,” and “Prufrock” as the best poem “I have yet had or seen from an American,” not excepting himself. But Eliot’s faith in the poem, or in himself, was not as extravagant as Pound’s. He wanted to join Pound’s “move against poppy-cock,” but the “devil of it” for Eliot, even as early as 1914, was his certainty that he had written “nothing good” since he had completed “Prufrock.” The anxiety that he might not write another poem equal to it—and had not yet—was what had led him, seven years later, to Margate and then to Lausanne.

  Eliot had left Vittoz’s care unsure of whether the now larger manuscript of the poem could be made to work, but his two weeks in Paris with Ezra Pound—more continuous time—changed that to certainty that it would. Working through the guts of the poem was exhilarating, all the cutting away of “superfluities,” a “caesarean operation” bringing out the “nearer the bone” poetry that Pound had prophesied in his “Prolegomena.” In 1912 he had projected the poetry he expected would be written in the next decade or so, and now it was, precisely. And Eliot thrived on collaboration. It fit his temperament as an artist and was why, very soon, he began to think of writing plays. It was also why, after 1930, he focused almost exclusively, and very successfully, on verse drama. Eliot wanted to be done with editing the manuscript as soon as possible because he wanted it to be published as soon as possible, as he and Liveright had discussed at dinner, no later than the autumn of 1922. Because Vivien was not accompanying Tom back home to London—she was going to Lyons for a week and then would spend a few more days in Paris—his time alone at home in the evening was to be a further “period of tranquility” of work on the poem he had become confident, after his time with Pound, was his best. Vivien’s absence from home, she recognized, could help the poet in a way that might preserve their marriage in the end.

  * * *

  On January 22, 1922, a week after Tom had returned from Paris, Wyndham Lewis wrote to Ottoline Morrell that he had seen him. “He has written a particularly fine poem.” Tom had evidently begun to circulate it. That week, working at home in the evenings while Vivien was still in France, Tom prepared a new version. He sent it to Pound at about the same time Lewis wrote to Ottoline with his good news about Eliot.

  “MUCH improved,” Pound wrote on January 24. “The thing now runs from April … to shantih without a break,” Pound wrote, referring to the first line of the latest draft, “April is the cruellest month,” and the last, “Shantih shantih shantih,” the Sanskrit word for “the peace which passeth understanding,” though this was “a feeble translation of the content of this word,” Eliot was to write, the repetition of the word perhaps a way of finishing the poem with a tribute to one of Vittoz’s exercises, which was to seize upon a calming word and repeat it three times. “That is nineteen pages,” Pound calculated, “and let us say the longest poem in the English langwidge.… Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies.”

  The “hoard of fragments” had become a poem. Getting it published was now the question. Seeing Pound in Paris during the summer of 1921, John Quinn had warned him that “he had done enough, or almost enough, for others,” and that instead Pound should now “begin to do for himself and play his own game.” But Pound went to work again on Eliot’s behalf.

  Chapter 3

  EDWARD MORGAN FORSTER

  Edward Morgan Forster—Edward for his father and Morgan for a maternal grandmother—was born on New Year’s Day 1879. He was an only child, but not his parents’ first. His mother, Alice Clara Whichelo, had miscarried, shortly after her January 1877 wedding day. Theirs was a family known by nicknames. Edward Morgan, the father, was Eddie, Alice Clara was Lily, and Edward Morgan, the second-born and surviving son, was always and to everyone Morgan. The little group of Forsters was shaped by loss. Eddie died when Morgan was a year old. Lily and Morgan were the only two left, and they lived together, amid a “haze of elderly ladies,” until Lily’s death, at age ninety, in 1945.

  Morgan marked the end of 1921, and the approach of his forty-third birthday the next day, with the ritual he followed all his life, writing in his diary about the year just past and recording his mood as his birthday arrived. This annual rite, adding a few birthday lines, sometimes a lengthy entry, continued into his eighties. In his most autobiographical novel, The Longest Journey, published in 1907, when Forster was twenty-eight, he wrote of his protagonist, and confessed about himself, “The boy grew up in great loneliness,” his childhood spent conducting “solitary conversations, in which one part of him asked and another part answered.” Morgan’s diary, begun not long after the novel was published, arose from that boyish impulse, though even as he undertook it, talking to himself had long since ceased to be the “exciting game” it had been for the boy. Morgan’s inward glance was unforgiving in its self-appraisal, and, perhaps for this reason, intermittent. Unlike Virginia Woolf, he kept the diary lackadaisically, at best, through the rest of the year.

  The end of one year, the beginning of another, the burden of his birthday a double reminder of the passage of time. For all the hope Morgan seemed to want to have about the future, it was his temperament to pause and look back rather than forward, to hesitate and ruminate. “Will review the year, eat an orange, read, and go to bed,” he wrote the winter he was thirty. Finishing his novel Maurice, his fantasy of an intimate, fulfilling, and enduring sexual and romantic love between two men, before the First World War, he had dedicated it to a “Happier Year.” His birthday entries repeated his realization, and disillusion, that the happier year was always a long way off. Here was an essential paradox: Morgan perennially looked forward to a happier year but was usually unhappy about his accomplishments in the year just past, and very rarely expressed satisfaction with the present or confidence about his immediate prospects for happiness.

  It was this way on December 31, 1921. Morgan was unsparing in his assessment as usual, and frank. The situation was as dire as any he’d faced. He had written very little, really nothing, in the past year. Maurice apart, he had written only journalism in the past ten years. Now, to his surprise and to the surprise of his friends and family, he was not at home but in India. He had started an Indian novel after a first trip to India in 1911–12. After several years of intermittent work, he deceived himself enough to wonder whether he had faltered because it had already been too long since he’d been immersed in the landscape and among the people. That had been in 1916.

  To make progress on the novel, left unfinished since before the war, had been chief among the reasons he’d come to India, a decade’s bleak lack of achievement looming behind him. But as the months in India passed, he acknowledged to himself that progress had proved impossible. And might always be. He was as downhearted as he’d been a year before, when he had reached what he recorded as a dramatic low. “I may shrink from summarising this sinister year,” he’d written as 1920 ended.

  Now he wrote, “India not yet a success, dare not look at my unfinished novel, can neither assimilate, remember, or arrange.” Morgan had published his previous novel, Howards End, almost a dozen years ago. “Am grinding out my novel into a contrast between money and death,” he wrote in his diary as he was completing it. At the time, a neighbor asked him, “In your novels which takes you longest—the writing or the thinking?” He recorded the question, an example of all the silly things people asked an author about his work, but not his response, if he made one. Howards End was published in the autumn of 1910. It was a great success. Forster published a collection of six stories, The Celestial Omnibus, the next spring. Then, nothing. He wrote Maurice but did not think of publishing it, and circulated it privately among his friends. The passage of more
than a decade suggested the belated answer to his neighbor’s question was both. He thought too much and had written too little.

  Morgan was only three years older than Virginia but seemed almost to be of another generation. (He was of the generation before Eliot, who was nine years younger.) He had early on been a productive and esteemed writer, publishing his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in 1905, when he was twenty-six. Three more novels followed in the next five years. When Howards End appeared in October 1910, it was widely called the year’s best. “There is no doubt about it whatever. Mr. E. M. Forster is one of the great novelists,” wrote the critic for the Daily Telegraph. The acclaim was echoed everywhere, and in the Standard it came was this extravagant fillip: “With this book, Mr. Forster seems to us to have arrived, and if he never writes another line, his niche should be secure.” The book sold extremely well—7,662 copies by the end of 1910—and references to it in Punch delighted Morgan. He wrote in his diary, “Let me not be distracted by the world. It is so difficult.” Though he thought he was “not vain of my overpraised book,” he wished he would be “obscure again.” The superlative in the Standard had soon become more prophecy than praise, and his publisher, Edward Arnold, eventually gave up hoping that there would be another. Forster did, too. “I should satisfy myself as well as my admirers if I produced another novel. I will let you know if ever I do,” he wrote to Arnold at the end of January 1921. A few weeks later, he was gone to India.

  In March 1921, he left England, escaping the burden of his literary silence and the routine of his domestic life with Lily that he treasured and resented in equal measure. During the war, when he had made a previous break and gone off to do war work for the Red Cross in Alexandria in 1915, he had confided to a friend, “One ‘oughtn’t to leave one’s mother when she has no one else’ I know[,] yet the question is complicated when filial piety finds compensation in an arm chair and four meals a day served regularly.” The three months of his wartime stint became three years, in which he’d found the freedom to, among other liberties, lose his virginity, at the age of thirty-seven. He came home in early 1919. His return was the occasion for one of the few outwardly emotional moments between mother and son. Lily was so moved, “she unexpectedly read family prayers which she hadn’t done in my presence since I was a boy.” Morgan was surprised by the show of sentiment and remembered it all his life. Then months and years began to pile up once more, and with them no novel.