The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  The night before he went to dinner with Sassoon at the Reform Club, Morgan wrote for the first time in five years in a commonplace book he had begun during the war, in Alexandria, the year he had met Mohammed. In it, he had transcribed unidentified passages of poetry and prose into what became a little anthology of writings he divided into three parts, one on war itself; another on “external life: beauty, fun, inevitable death, old age”; and the last one dealing with “hopes, fears, desires.” Looking through the old notebook, he added a note at the front that he dated “Weybridge / 20-3-22.” He had turned to the quotations with the hope that the writers whose words had once been meaningful to him would, he wrote, give “direction to my thoughts.”

  The passages about war were irrelevant now. But the excerpts he had culled on death and old age, fears and desires, had become less abstract with time. Writing in the book during the war, he had described a universal anxiety of the human mind, the desire to be “otherwise than it is.” (“I have transcribed to fill up my own emptiness,” he was to write once about his lifelong habit.) He had once thought he was condemned to a life of unfulfilled longing. He had then met Mohammed. Now, unfulfilled longing, for romantic love and for the will to create, left him sure that at least one way to be otherwise would simply be to be elsewhere than he was at home with Lily. He went to London the next day, a small respite, and saw Sassoon that night.

  * * *

  Writing in the notebook, hoping to give direction to his thoughts, he was as bad off in Weybridge at the end of March as he had been in India. But on the last leg of his long sail home from Egypt, he had found a glimmer of inspiration. His boat had stopped in Marseilles at the end of February. There he bought a copy of Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann.

  “I plunged into Proust on the boat,” he wrote to Masood a week after he arrived home. “He certainly is very good though 5 parts, each consisting of two volumes, make one pause.” (In this, Morgan unknowingly echoed the private reaction of Ezra Pound, initially a champion of Proust, later a harsh, almost demented critic, who upon first reading him, in the summer of 1920, had written to Scofield Thayer, “it’s great stuff … The book will be 50 000000000000000 [sic] pages long.… Some stretches are indubitably boring = but he is a gt. writer. I have been slow to discover it = perhaps = perhaps not.”)

  Proust’s Swann hit him with great force aboard the SS Delta as it moved north through the Atlantic toward home. He wrote in his diary on March 1, on board ship, that he was particularly surprised by “how cleverly Proust uses his memories to illustrate his state of mind.” Forster was awestruck. “His work impresses me by its weight and length, and sometimes touches me by its truth to my feelings. Would that I had the knack of unrolling such an embroidered ribbon. Yet even then I should not be content. The little sip of pure creation that I have been granted has spoilt me.”

  In Virginia’s letter to Forster just before her fortieth birthday, she had written about Proust: “Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience, but I’m shivering on the brink, & waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down—down & down & perhaps never come up again.”

  “Everyone” was presumably at least Clive and Roger, from whom she had first heard of Proust during the war. She had feared being “spoilt” in just the way Forster thought he had been. Even their metaphor of Proust as a kind of watery depth was the same—she wrote of being submerged; he had plunged.

  Two days later, as the ship neared England, Morgan wrote in his diary as if his own submersion in Proust had at least in a small way already transformed him. Perhaps he had not been spoiled. Perhaps he could find some new freedom after all. “Plymouth Sound: filled with memories of my quaint and not very nice relatives: seen from a new altitude.”

  * * *

  À la recherche was no mere novel. The writer André Gide, in a remark that especially moved Proust, compared reading the sequential volumes as they appeared to “entering an enchanted forest; a forest in which you are lost from the first page, but happily lost; soon, you have forgotten where you came in, or how far it is to the next clearing.” One might be lost in a forest, as Gide was, or be filled with memories and therefore see things from a new altitude, as had happened to Forster. Proust disoriented you, and that was the liberating point.

  The shock of Swann for Morgan in particular would have been evident in only the first dozen pages of Proust’s embroidered ribbon. As the novel begins, the narrator conjures himself as a traveler waking in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar hotel room, trying to bring order to his sense of time and space. Realizing he is far from home, he tries to regain a fixity of mind by recalling other bedrooms, particularly his childhood bedroom. Soon enough, all the details of that long-ago sanctuary arise in his mind, together with memories of his mother, his grandmother, and, even more consequentially, his great-aunt Léonie, who serves him the cup of tea and the famous madeleine, the scent of which gives rise to his memories and the rest of the book.

  It was as if the solitary traveler and the triumvirate of women had been selected for their resemblance to Morgan’s own isolation on the Delta and to the dominating trio of his own life: his mother, his aunt Laura, and his great-aunt Marianne Thornton, whose nickname, Aunt Monie, was even a rhyming cousin to the elderly great-aunt who dominates Proust’s narrator’s recollections of the town of Combray.

  From Léonie came the cup of tea that gave rise to À la recherche. From Monie had come a legacy to Morgan of £8,000 that made possible Morgan’s books and his relative freedom.

  Aunt Monie, the sister of Forster’s paternal grandfather, was known as a woman with a “formidable tongue” who often quarreled with her brothers and sisters, to whom she never hesitated to say why and how they’d arranged their lives ineffectively. The “haze of elderly ladies” Forster had recalled from his childhood included his grandmother Louisa and a farther-flung set of aunts, great-aunts—among them Monie—and cousins in a family expanded by second or previous marriages and resulting rings of half-and step-relations. “There have always been aunts in my family,” Morgan was to announce to the Memoir Club, the group of Bloomsbury friends who met to share frank, often intimate, essays read aloud and then discussed. In the spring of 1922, this memoir vignette was the first thing he wrote in England after his plunge into Proust. The sentence might easily have replaced “For a long time, I went to bed early” as the first sentence of Proust’s long novel, or been recovered from an early draft of it.

  These elderly women were not just spectral presences of Morgan’s childhood. Many of them were as long-lived as Lily would prove to be, and they were part of his life still. He had written voluminous letters to his aunt Laura from India, and shortly after his return to England he would take a vacation to visit other aunts on the Isle of Wight. In Howards End, Forster’s protagonist Margaret Schlegel said, “I suppose that ours is a female house, and one must accept it.” She did not mean that their house was simply “full of women.” It was that their house was “irrevocably feminine, even in father’s time.” As Weybridge had been, and was.

  It added to Morgan’s susceptibility to Proust that he was returning from Mohammed’s deathbed. It was not only that the French novelist conjured the past from sensory impressions taking place in the present. Morgan discerned immediately in Proust what Edmund Wilson described as one of Proust’s “favorite formulas … that of an abject and agonizing love on the part of a superior for an inferior person, or at least on the part of a gentle person for a person who behaves toward him with cruelty.” In Swann, this is the complication of Charles Swann’s love for Odette de Crécy. The truth of this to Forster’s own romantic predicament was bracingly clear. Morgan had perhaps not thought Mohammed intentionally cruel, but as his distance from Egypt increased, and he saw Mohammed from a new altitude, he could not be sure just what Mohammed’s feelings had ever been. As Proust revealed, to know the intentions of another was impossib
le in any case. This was a realization that might lead either to freedom or to greater depths of suffering; or, as Forster discovered in Proust’s novel—and in his own life that spring—to alternating doubts and fits of sentimental attachment and desire, a paralyzing blend that was another sensation entirely.

  But reading Proust on board ship did not only kindle in Morgan thoughts of what lay behind him. The more devastating echo of his own life was of what certainly lay ahead. The opening pages of Swann are memorable for being devoted to the narrator’s recollection of the night, many summers before, when he waited in agony for his mother’s good night kiss. Eventually she bestows it, and the narrator’s mind is put at ease. Morgan would soon be arriving back at home to live with a mother whose good night kiss, or morning greeting, or daily conversation he did not anticipate with pleasure.

  * * *

  Writing about Proust years later, Morgan described him as “introspective and morbid and unhappy and limited.” This also described Morgan at the time he first read Proust. But Morgan saw that Proust the artist had transcended the limitations of his nature. This was the sip of pure creation he had tasted. Proust had vitality—“he couldn’t have written a million words if he hadn’t.”

  Morgan at one time had vitality, too. Inanition had come upon him later. The inspiration of Proust seemed to be that he remained “imaginative about tomorrow” in a way that Forster had for a very long time not felt himself capable of being. To Forster it seemed as if the unspooling of the embroidered ribbon came naturally to Proust. By contrast, his own powers of observation had been willed, and he no longer seemed to have that will. As Morgan saw it, Proust’s characters reflected this elemental vitality that Proust himself uniquely must have had. Like their creator, he thought from the evidence of Proust’s million words, they kept an eye open—even when dragged down by disease, and even if sometimes it might only be “half an eye”—on a “sort of adventure” of life that Proust had bravely explored and that Forster found thrilling and redemptive. The adventure, though, was not a swashbuckling one. The modern twist of Proust was that it was interior and encompassed nothing less, Morgan saw, than the entire “adventure of the disillusioned post-war world, when the whole man moves forward to encounter he does not know what: certainly not any good.”

  Morgan first read Proust with the dead weight of the unfinished pages of his India novel in his luggage and amid the trailing sadness of his last weeks with Mohammed. He tried to move forward. He had no faith that he would encounter anything good.

  * * *

  Returning to England more than three years after the Armistice, Morgan saw that a spirit was missing. Something had been killed in the war, but this may have only been Forster extrapolating from his sense of personal and artistic defeat. To a friend in Egypt, Morgan described England in the spring of 1922 as “a sad person who has folded her hands and stands waiting,” much as Lily had waited for him for almost a year. The “smallness quietness and greyness” of the countryside depressed him, almost as if Lily, with her continuing complaints about her worsening rheumatism, a reminder of her age—and his—were all he could see. He saw friends, too, from a “new altitude” and with decidedly less sentimentality, drawing what he called a “hardish line” between those who mattered to him and those who didn’t, he wrote to Masood. Florence Barger bored him when she visited Weybridge. She was long-winded and self-satisfied, he thought. Another friend’s “feeble but authentic light” shined for two unsatisfying days and left Morgan feeling that his friends’ minds were surprisingly undistinguished and that too much contact might lead him into the trap of an “inferior accommodating outlook.” Those in whom he could confide, including Leonard and Virginia and Sassoon, were so shocked at his low ebb that their reaction only intensified his sadness.

  * * *

  That spring Forster also visited Cambridge, and he recounted to his mother a conversation he had at a Sunday lunch. A man he had not seen in many years said that Morgan “had totally disappeared from every one’s view.” Morgan replied he had “never been more famous,” and added that if the man thought otherwise, Morgan “feared it meant he wasn’t moving among important people.” But the man was as adamant as Morgan was defensive: “some one had seen my obituary notice—some one whom he knew quite well,” though it was also someone whose name the man diplomatically forgot when Morgan pressed him for it. A little later, Siegfried Sassoon asked T. E. Lawrence’s permission to share with Forster the private, as yet unpublished, edition of Lawrence’s autobiography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence agreed because he recalled admiring Howards End, “and it was the real thing.” But Lawrence was doubtful: “was not the author long since dead?”

  Morgan was living a posthumous life.

  On Saturday, March 25, he wrote to Leonard, asking to meet. “I want to talk over my situation with you. There is no one whom I would so willingly consult, and I know you will help me if you can.… Would you be in town Friday, and if so could we lunch?”

  Leonard recorded among his activities for Friday, March 31: “Work morn Lunch w Morgan talk his writing.”

  Leonard offered Morgan two pieces of advice: to give up journalism and to read over his “Indian fragment with a view to continuing it.”

  Chapter 7

  “THE USUAL FABULOUS ZEST”

  “Summer time”—the changing of the clocks—began on Sunday, March 26. The evening sky was prolonged, Virginia wrote in her diary, but that did not mean that summer, or even a hint of spring, had arrived. At the end of April she would be able to calculate that, far from enjoying any good weather they had had, “27 days of bitter wind, blinding rain, gusts, snowstorms, storms every day,” as if winter, like her influenza, would never end. More significant than the arrival of “summer time” was that Virginia had been regularly at work in the three weeks since Eliot’s and Forster’s visits.

  Attempting to erase the “12 months” it had been for writing, she returned to an idea she’d had a year before, in the spring of 1921, “my Reading book,” her hopes for which grew out of her dissatisfaction with the limitations of other people’s criticism, and her own. A year ago, writing Jacob’s Room with an eye toward finishing it in the autumn, she had felt “too scatterbrained” to get her thoughts in order to write about reading, too. Now, approaching how to think about the state of reading in contemporary England, she began an essay that soon became a flight of fancy. She started the piece conveniently enough with a weather report, drawing herself “up to the fire (for it was cold in March, 1922),” to read an invented first novel, The Flame of Youth by the fictitious “E. K. Sanders,” that its publisher had sent to the newspapers with intemperate fanfare. The Sanders novel promised to be “the talk of the season” and, padded out as it had been to “four hundred pages of sufficiently large type,” would be easy enough for Virginia to read quickly “between tea & dinner.” The next morning, “perhaps with labour, perhaps without,” she would then write a review to fit precisely into the space the commissioning editor had allotted it. Virginia’s piece, like the novel itself and the publisher’s claims for it, were all part of the usual machinery.

  But the conceit of the essay was now revealed. Virginia was not able to finish the assignment. The novel sparked nothing but rather snuffed out “my career as a reviewer.” This was liberation, a fulfillment of one of her hopes for 1922, which was to do what Leonard was at the very same moment urging Morgan to do—to give up the unnecessary distraction that reviewing had become. It wasn’t only a compromise of her time anymore, she feared. In December 1921, Bruce Richmond, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, had called her on the telephone to discuss her review of a collection of Henry James stories. He had objected to her use of the word “lewd” and told her “surely that is rather a strong expression to apply to anything by Henry James.” Virginia didn’t agree with him but decided she could accept “obscene” instead, though she was firmly resolved that in the new year she would not compromise again. She must not be t
oo eager for editorial approval. The growing success of the Hogarth Press meant that she was earning, as a publisher, enough to forgo some of what she might earn, as a writer, from reviewing. And in writing an essay on not being able to write a review, she found another way of striking out on her own.

  She called the essay “Byron and Mr. Briggs” and in it imagined what a fictitious Mr. Briggs might think of Byron’s letters, which she had been reading in a new edition published that spring. Through Mr. Briggs, born 1795; died 1859, Woolf began to sketch out an idea that was to become an essential part of her thinking: that, as Dr. Johnson had written, the fate of literature depended on “the common sense of readers, uncorrupted with literary prejudice.” As Woolf put it in her new essay, “Milton is alive in the year 1922 & of a certain size & shape only because some thousands of unimportant people are holding his page at this moment before their eyes.” To Mr. Briggs she playfully gave the name “Tom,” the name of the most uncommon reader she knew. But if critics like Tom Eliot (and possibly herself) were irrelevant to literature, as Johnson had suggested more than a century before, was there any way to approach the question of what and who made literature alive this year? What kind of critical voice was necessary? Could that voice be hers?