The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

Spring had not simply brought an end to winter. It was a new season of its own. Mohammed’s death, he began to think, might not mark an end but a beginning, and a release. It was a reminder of what he had realized when he listened to the Beethoven quartets: there was life—and art—after tragedy. He might use his “memories and expressions to illustrate his state of mind,” as he had been impressed, onboard the SS Delta, that Proust had done. Then he had not thought it would be possible for him. But Ackerley, in “Ghosts,” had done it, too.

  At the end of the week, he wrote in his diary, “Determined my life should contain one success I have concealed from myself and others M’s frequent coldness towards me.” Mohammed’s “occasional” warmth might only have been politeness, gratitude, or pity, he wrote.

  “Moh. worse again: the end? The prospect of his death gives me no pain.”

  * * *

  Leonard had not only advised Morgan to go back to his unfinished pages and to give up journalism. He also advised him to be “out & about again.” Morgan’s reliance on Leonard was, Virginia thought, one of his most endearing characteristics. Because Leonard had been proved right about the Indian fragment, Morgan once again did as Leonard urged, accepting invitations widely and realizing he could not afford to let others continue to wonder, as the Cambridge man or T. E. Lawrence had, whether he was dead.

  Virginia wrote in April to Ottoline Morrell to arrange a long-delayed visit for herself and Leonard to Garsington. She proposed they come on May 27. Ottoline, in turn, invited Forster to join them. T. S. Eliot was also to be a guest that weekend, she told Morgan. If he were not free, would he come the following weekend, when Wyndham Lewis was then to be her guest?

  “The month of May was gorgeous & hot—& we had crowds of people here—Every Sunday they flocked over from Oxford,” Ottoline wrote in her diary of a month of weekend parties that included the young men from the university whom she invited to meet the visiting writers and artists.

  Morgan replied that he would be visiting Lytton Strachey, Ottoline’s cousin, on her Eliot and Woolf weekend. “My future is as an uncharted sea, except where it is crossed by Lytton’s system of soundings,” he wrote in a letter full of chivalrous humor.

  Morgan knew he was out of practice among the smart set—he had not been to Garsington since 1920—and, as if to prove his bonhomie, wrote Ottoline in the manner of “one who, despite considerable delay … is reading Proust,” his letter full of long sentences and proliferating subordinate clauses in playful homage to the author he had begun to read so recently.

  “Why do we do such things? Just to catch a glimpse of life—it don’t matter much what,” Virginia wrote to her sister Vanessa in April, explaining why, after a winter of influenza, she and Leonard had accepted H. G. Wells’s invitation to spend five days at Easter with him “playing Badminton and discussing fiction.” This was just like Morgan at Garsington, willing himself, at Leonard’s urging, into a glimpse of life.

  But the settled fabric of the two weekends quickly became frayed, to Morgan’s delight. His weekend with Lytton included the Woolves, surprise guests who were to have been his companions at Garsington with Eliot, a visit Virginia had canceled by claiming, with some truth, the recurrence of her influenza. Virginia suggested a late June or early July visit to Garsington instead and, begging Ottoline’s indulgence—“But please don’t say you will have nothing more to do with me—annoying as these habits are”—she and Leonard went to Strachey’s.

  Forster wrote his mother of the near unraveling of the charade: a wire from Ottoline summoned Lytton and Morgan to the all-day garden party then, as always, in progress. They did not dare refuse, so they went, but without the Woolves, “whom we had to leave behind and conceal.”

  They arrived to find a scene as exotic as anything Morgan had described in his long letters about the doings of the court of Dewas: the whole company had been bathing in the pond, and at the center was “Lady O in bright yellow satin and a picture hat” alternating her “cries of joy and farewell” amid the bustle.

  Ottoline, “once seen, could not be forgotten.” She was best appreciated as an abstract painting, Quentin Bell, Virginia’s nephew and biographer, remembered, “one admired the colours, the matière, the disposition of forms, one was amazed by the brilliance and the audacity of the composition, it was all stupendous, gorgeous, a little overwhelming and highly dramatic.” Lytton spent a “not very stimulating” weekend with her in 1922 and was less awestruck, indulging himself to Virginia with a picture of a grotesque. “Ott. was dreadfully dégringolée”—“tumbled,” an apt word for how far she had fallen in his estimation: “her bladder has now gone the way of her wits—a melancholy dribble; and then, as she sits after dinner in the lamplight, her cheek-pouches drooping with peppermints, a cigarette between her false teeth, and vast spectacles on her painted nose, the effect produced is extremely agitating. I found I want to howl like an Irish wolf—but perhaps the result produced in you was different.” Virginia, almost equally harsh in private, could also be sycophantic, or at least fawning when required, as she was when she had written to Ottoline that spring, “It’s such an age since I was at Garsington, and it never seems to me a house on the ground like other houses, but a caravan, a floating palace.”

  When Morgan and Ottoline talked about his own impending weekend, it turned out that she would have preferred him to visit with Tom Eliot. She was surer than ever that Wyndham Lewis “isn’t nice,” she told Morgan. “Why ask such?” Morgan wondered to Lily. (Lewis, and for that matter Lytton and Virginia, was no less “nice” than Ottoline herself could be, often unprovoked. At one of her garden parties Morgan met a poet. “I liked him but thought him a bit crazy and a bit of an ass, also conceited,” he wrote in his diary. But Lady Ottoline did not like him, he added, and, in the course of her remarks, “managed to inform” Forster and the others that the poet had syphilis. Delighted as Forster was with the gossip, he was anxious that he would be the subject of it when out of earshot.)

  The next weekend, Morgan arrived at Garsington in time for dinner on Saturday. “Suspicious and hostile glares” exchanged between Morgan and the other guests quickly gave way to fun, and, in particular, to a surprising ease with Lewis, who Morgan discovered was “a curious mixture of insolence and nervousness.” Lewis even drew him away for a private walk, which disappointed Ottoline, who had counted on them “to be figuring separately,” as ornaments among different groups of the guests.

  Morgan thought the visit “a succès fou.” He had weathered his first weekend back in England playing “Morgan Forster” and not as a guest among close friends like Lytton or the Woolves. But Lewis, however confidential and ingratiating he appeared, was in the end as unkind as Ottoline had feared he would be. He recalled in his autobiography that at Garsington he had once met Forster, “the ‘Bloomsbury novelist,’” attaching the moniker as if it were a known insult, which in Lewis’s lexicon it was. Forster was a “quiet little chap,” so anodyne and minor that no one could be jealous of him, which was the key to why, Lewis wrote, Forster “hit it off with the ‘Bloomsburies,’ and was appointed male number opposite to Virginia Woolfe [sic],” whose name Lewis willfully misspelled more than once in his book. Forster and “Woolfe” were both equally sexless and sterile, merely “roosters of the ‘post-war’” who quickly “crowed themselves hoarse or to a standstill,” with Forster’s long silence particularly advantageous in a paradoxical way because “the less you write, in a ticklish position of that sort, the better.”

  * * *

  A few days after Morgan returned from Garsington, everything changed.

  It all began unexpectedly enough—with a mildly unfavorable review in the Times of Da Silva’s Widow, and Other Stories, the latest collection of vaguely supernatural stories by Lucas Malet, an elderly writer whose popularity had peaked many years before. The review itself, published on Tuesday, June 6, promised little. It was fairly short, not prominently featured, and the headline, “Pale Souls,” not calculated to
draw readers, seemed rather to be apologizing to them. Which perhaps it was. The first sentence of the review—“Hardly one of these short stories does not carry a reminder, by its subject, of some other author”—urged people away not only from Malet’s book but seemingly from the review itself. The second sentence, however, invoking Henry James as the superior author most often echoed, ended with a different comparison, that Malet “once or twice” was instead more like “the Mr. E. M. Forster of The Celestial Omnibus.” The similarity was “peculiarly unfortunate” because, in provoking comparison with Forster, Malet’s work would only leave the reader “wondering what Mr. Forster would have made” of the material.

  The Celestial Omnibus had collected six stories of Forster’s written in a fantastical vein very different from his novels. Forster struggled, even after the success of Howards End, to find a publisher willing to issue them; his own regular publisher, Edward Arnold, declined. Eventually Sidgwick and Jackson published the book in 1911, hoping that by doing so it might have a chance at Forster’s next novel. But there had been no next novel or next book. Despite some good reviews, The Celestial Omnibus had not been a commercial success, stories, then as now, generally less lucrative than novels. But the reviewer’s mention of it in the Times brought an unexpected second life that played out in the letters columns of the newspaper over the next ten days.

  Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of Mary St. Leger Kingsley, born in 1852, the author of many novels and stories, the first published in 1882, the last in 1930, a year before her death. Malet, the daughter of Charles Kingsley, author most famously of Westward Ho!, and a writer who in her heyday had become a friend of James’s and earned favorable comparisons to George Eliot and to Rudyard Kipling, was insulted by the review and by what she took to be the suggestion that her own stories were plagiarized.

  Indignant at that charge—which had not been made or implied—Malet wrote to the newspaper that she was unaware of The Celestial Omnibus and of Forster’s work; in fact she had never even heard of Mr. E. M. Forster. Her letter was published on Thursday. Frank Sidgwick, of Sidgwick and Jackson, was in his turn equally indignant at Malet’s profession of ignorance of Forster. Sidgwick wrote to the Times as a publisher whose literary sensitivity had been offended, but in reality he was seizing a promotional opportunity. The Celestial Omnibus was eleven years old, and Sidgwick had not had confidence in it even as he went ahead with it, agreeing to use only six of the ten stories Forster wanted in the book and adding illustrations and decorated endpapers that were silly and trivialized the work, Forster thought. Sidgwick had reprinted the stories in a cheap edition in 1920 that was still available, and now he ran to the publicity barricades.

  His letter was published on Saturday. “Having seen ‘Lucas Malet’s’ letter in The Times of to-day, we have at once sent her a copy of The Celestial Omnibus, and we should be glad if you will announce that we will readily send a free copy of that book to any British novelist who, in our judgment, is as distinguished a writer as ‘Lucas Malet,’ if that novelist will make a similar public confession in your columns that he or she has never heard of Mr. E. M. Forster or read any of his books.”

  Confessions of admiration came quickly from readers, some of them novelists, who, almost every day for the next week, offered encomiums to Forster, praising one or the other of his books. (One of the letters was signed “C. K. S. M.,” the initials of the man soon to publish his translation of Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann.) The correspondence appeared under the recurring headline “Mr. E. M. Forster’s Books.” Many wrote that they wondered what Mr. Forster had been doing for the last decade. He had been silent but was not forgotten.

  Lucas Malet’s injudicious comment on Forster was another proof that it is never a good idea for an author to respond to an unfavorable review. The aggrieved victim never gets the last word and only draws more attention to the review that caused unhappiness in the first place. In this case, the ill-informed Malet also drew renewed attention to Forster. A newly, if warily, confident Morgan shared the exciting news with Masood, who was in Japan.

  “I am well and suddenly famous. A most mysterious transition. Letters every day about me in the Times, ¾ column article upon me, imploring letters from publishers, missives from unknown admirers—all for no reason. I have done nothing. A trivial accident started in the Times. I am pleased and for one of my temperament the experience is good. You can’t know—or perhaps you alone do know—the torture my diffidence often caused me, and a boom like this helps me forward.”

  The correspondence in the Times made him “so frisky and pleased,” he wrote to Siegfried Sassoon. He was “more composed and able to face people” than he had been for a long time, and this affected the mood with which he wrote his Indian novel. He had been working diligently in the last month, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with his writing but simply pushing ahead. His additions were not bad, he thought, but he was still not convinced that the novel would ever be finished. His track record was not one to give him faith, and he saw a “fundamental defect” in the novel that he worried he might not solve. The characters, he thought, were “not sufficiently interesting,” and he found himself tempted to emphasize atmosphere at the expense of drama.

  But even this doubt represented a significantly new perspective: the defect was in the novel rather than in himself as the novelist, as he had thought for a decade. He was working “terribly slowly,” but if he continued to work, he might make a novel of what he had, just as Leonard had advised would happen.

  Three months before, he had confessed to Sassoon that he thought his powers of observation were failing him. Now he was not so certain. He must get the conviction he could finish the book, he wrote Sassoon more optimistically at the end of June. He was not quite sure what he had to do. “By looking blandly ahead? By screaming? How? By Living?”

  Living, and living as he wished to, might, after all, be the answer. Even when Morgan had been away on his weekend visits, he wrote long letters to Lily in order to reassure her, as he had written from Garsington in May, that he “longs to see her again and has often thought of her.” But now a change between them was necessary, he told Lily. He could no longer bear her criticisms “and still more the prohibitions.” He was roused against her at last, vibrant, even reckless, as he cataloged his complaints. But he could shed his submissiveness only so much, and he charged at her but retreated, too, using an awkward third person: “He wants to ask Mummy to try not to interfere with him so much. If he wants to take his clock to London, let him take it … if he wants to give away his great coat, let him—if he loses his glove, accept the fact.” Each thing was so trivial in itself, it seemed absurd to mention them, “but they all add up into a loss of independence,” he wrote. And he must gain his independence from her, as he had from Mohammed, if he were to finish the novel.

  He closed with conciliatory chatter about how busy he was. He was to see Roger Fry, he had had his watch repaired, he had bought a volume of Hardy’s poems. Morgan signed the letter, “Ever love as ever,” as if signaling that in the end he was resigned that things would go on as before.

  Morgan saved the letter, even as he burned successive rounds of his old correspondence in the decades after Lily’s death. He may or may not have shocked Lily. But he had shocked himself. He wrote on it in the shakier hand of his later years, “Poppy kicks.”

  Chapter 10

  “ELIOT DINED LAST SUNDAY & READ HIS POEM”

  Hearing of Virginia’s latest relapse in May, Tom wrote in sympathy to Leonard and added, “We know what constant illness is, and I think very few people do.” This was as close to a personal confession as Eliot came in any of his letters to the Woolves at this time, a small shedding of the armor Aldous Huxley had described to Ottoline Morrell. Dealing with constant illness was a bond, usually left unspoken, that he and Leonard as husbands understood, and that he and Virginia, and indeed the two couples, also shared. Tom left unsaid, as he had in the autumn, that he, like Virginia, ha
d relapsed, too, the return of his anxiety and depression more insidious in one way than influenza because it was without a foreseeable course. It was as if it were the autumn of 1921 all over again, as if his trip to Margate, and his treatment with Vittoz, had not happened at all; as if even his contentment at having finished his poem had dissipated now that, because of his own recalcitrance and procrastination, he was making the business of getting it published so difficult. To this were added the strains and delays involved in planning the Criterion, another way in which his ambitions for 1922—publishing his long poem, inaugurating his literary magazine, solidifying his position—seemed to slip farther from reach.

  “I do not know whether it will work,” he had written from Lausanne, before he and Pound had edited the nearly thousand-line poem into its final form of half that length. Now, the doubt was whether it would be published, a surprising turn of events. He had seemed so confident when he visited the Woolves at Hogarth House during the first week of March, when Virginia had written in her diary that he seemed to take heart having it safe in his desk. The difficulties with Thayer had already begun. But he had been able to hide any worry he might have begun to have behind his composed shell, and his cadaverous cosmetics. Now, after his high-handed, high-dudgeon demand for more money, the prospects for his poem seemed vastly different.

  The uncertainty of the poem’s future, his multiplying overdue assignments, including as yet unwritten work still owed the Dial, Vivien’s worsening illnesses, even more physically debilitating than his own increasing depression through the spring—it all became too much to manage, the kink in his brain apparently no match for the techniques Vittoz had trained him in for attaining calm and mental control. There is nothing in any of Tom’s or Vivien’s voluminous and often very frank correspondence that spring to explain why the exercises that had so effectively calmed him in the winter were of no use or had been forgotten.