The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  Liveright had, in the meantime, sent Eliot a contract—a very bad one, Eliot thought, and far more disadvantageous to the author than the contract John Quinn had negotiated for him with Knopf in 1919. It had been a long time since Eliot had been in touch with Quinn, who, when the Knopf negotiation had been finished, had advised Eliot that he should find a literary agent, which would be easier to do now than when he was unpublished, and unknown, in America. But Eliot had not sought a literary agent, and now he had no other alternative than to contact Quinn, by cable, despite the expense, on Wednesday, June 21.

  DISSATISFIED LIVERIGHTS CONTRACT POEM MAY I ASK YOUR ASSISTANCE APOLOGIES WRITING ELIOT.

  Quinn cabled his reply immediately.

  GLAD TO ASSIST EVERYWAY POSSIBLE YOUR CONTRACT.

  He would be willing to see Liveright in person, if necessary, and awaited further instructions from Eliot by the letter his cable had promised.

  Quinn’s reverence for artists and writers and his generous financial support of many were at odds with his general misanthropy and the anti-Semitic tirades prompted by the slightest imagined offense of Liveright’s or Knopf’s. When in the course of dealing with Eliot’s contract he had difficulty getting either on the phone in the summer of 1922, he complained to Eliot about their congenitally inconstant work habits and told him he had ultimately “treed” both of them: “You may observe this use of the Simian-verb ‘to tree’ with reference to these two publishers.” And if either did not respond with alacrity to some request of his, he took it, as he called one of Liveright’s delays, “a dirty piece of Jew impertinence, calculated impertinence at that, for that is the way that type of Jew bastard thinks that he can impress his personality.… I never forget things like that and I always repay with justice and exactitude.”

  But he was loyal to those for whom he had affection and regard, including Eliot, whose work he thought important. His avuncular embrace of Eliot was strengthened by the fact that Eliot had never asked him for financial assistance, as Joyce had (though Quinn had promised Pound a generous subscription to the Bel Esprit plan). Eliot and Quinn never met in person, but despite their many differences, of age, and income, and temperament, they had in common exhausting lives lived, as Eliot once wrote to Quinn, “with the leisure that you want always a mirage ahead of you, your holidays always disturbed by unforeseen (or foreseen) calamities.” Responding in kind, Quinn was likely to offer advice far afield from the literary or legal. “Now, take off the time and go to your dentist,” he wrote Eliot on one occasion. “That is rather important, much more important than having your hair cut. I know just what it is to be so busy that one cannot go to the dentist or have one’s hair cut. But it is a mistake to allow yourself to be that driven,” advice that was easier for Quinn to offer than to follow.

  In response to Quinn’s reassuring cable, Eliot wrote a letter similar to the other letters of apology and excuse he had become practiced at writing to Thayer and to others that year, begging pardon for his unavoidable inattention to serious matters, regretful as he was that he must ask for extra time or another indulgence because of his wife’s or his own health.

  The Liveright contract was unnecessarily vague, Eliot thought, “and gives all the advantage to the publisher,” with Eliot seeming to sign away to Liveright world rights, translation rights, control of periodical and anthology publication, all of which made it “tantamount to selling him the book outright” for $150 and a 15 percent royalty. It was not a matter of money—this was the arrangement Liveright had proposed in Paris—but Eliot hoped Quinn could negotiate one closer to the terms of the Knopf contract for his previous book, encompassing only American and Canadian book rights and a copyright in Eliot’s own name. Quinn agreed and, in turn, told Eliot that if Liveright would not accept the terms Quinn demanded, it was just as well for Eliot. There were other publishers, and Quinn, in any case, was always eager to slip out of business with a Jew, preferring that writers simply dealt with publishers named Harper or Scribner. Liveright had been interested in publishing the Eliot poems that Knopf had ultimately done in 1920 but had backed off at the last moment. Now Knopf was not to publish Eliot’s new book, and here they were dealing with Liveright again. Must Quinn’s own work always be “to tree” a Jewish publisher on Eliot’s behalf?

  Quinn’s dissatisfaction with Liveright was particularly intense at the moment, since fresh in his mind was Pound’s account of Liveright’s other offer over dinner in Paris, to publish Ulysses. Quinn knew Liveright had not had the courage to do so the previous year, and knew, too, that he would not do it in 1922, despite the offer. Liveright was making good on his Paris offer to Eliot, but with a contractual perfidy that made him no more trustworthy on this than on the Ulysses question. Quinn assured Eliot it would be easy for him to arrange for another publisher to do the book, which might have calmed Eliot if he were not so anxious that The Waste Land be published this year. Quinn’s letter would not have arrived in London until the first week of July at the earliest. Quinn was sure about eventual publication, by another publisher, ideally of non-Semitic origin. Eliot was concerned with publication as soon as possible.

  Still hopeful that the poem would be published in the autumn, Eliot nevertheless gave Quinn power of attorney to do as he liked with the Liveright contract, including to refuse it. In a letter he wrote on Sunday the twenty-fifth, a week after his visit to the Woolves, he told Quinn he would send him a copy of the poem “as quickly as possible … merely for your own interest.” He now planned to add notes, partly a stratagem to bulk up the book, addressing Liveright’s concern in January that the poem might be too short on its own. He also promised Quinn he would send the complete typescript “in the form to be handed to the publisher.” Liveright still had not read the poem.

  Eliot had read the poem aloud to the Woolves. Presumably he did not read it from memory and there was some typed version available. But it now took him three more weeks to do what he’d promised Quinn to do quickly, once again undermining, and perhaps fatally, his hope that his poem would be published soon.

  It had been in nearly finished form since January. It is impossible to explain why Eliot could not find, and did not make, any time in all those months to type a new draft of the poem, possibly even to take advantage of yet another time through Pound’s sieve, or his own, in the realistic anticipation that a publisher would eventually need a clean typescript from which to set the poem, whether for book publication or in a periodical. (In April, Pound had written to a friend in New York inquiring whether Vanity Fair might be interested in the poem, and how much it might pay Eliot, but nothing came of it.) It is even harder to conceive why he did not have a professional typist type one or perhaps more copies, at a likely minimal expense, if he did not have time to do it himself.

  Since he had not typed it, and did not type it, he had more apologies to make, even as he left it to Quinn to negotiate with Liveright. On July 19, Eliot sent Quinn a provisional version for Liveright, regretful that he had not yet been able to “type it out fair, but I did not wish to delay it any longer.” The version Eliot was sending would be enough for Liveright “to get on with,” if the contract was signed, “and I shall rush forward the notes to go at the end.”

  The entire publication of The Waste Land was a litany of apologies. Knowing it was his best work, Eliot urged the publisher’s special care with the typescript—“I only hope the printers are not allowed to bitch the punctuation and the spacing, as that is very important for the sense,” he wrote to Quinn about Liveright—and yet he had not taken the time to retype a fresh copy for Liveright to work from, as he had promised to do a month before. The delays he had created compounded his worry about the text, because with so little time before publication, it was impossible for the typesetting and correcting of proofs to proceed at a normal pace.Time was too tight, and it would take too long for Eliot to receive and return more than one set of corrections across the Atlantic. Nor had he yet written the promised notes, a new endeavor at jus
t the moment he was also becoming most worried about the Criterion.

  Chapter 11

  WOMEN IN LOVE IN COURT

  An attractively printed brochure announced that a 1,250-copy limited edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love would be published by a new firm, Thomas Seltzer, Inc., in November 1920. The brochure, alluding to the scandal of Lawrence’s The Rainbow and promising the same kind of reading experience with its sequel, did as much as possible to entice readers while doing what it could to avoid provoking the censors.

  With Lawrence passion looms large, but great passion is always near to great spirit, and “Women in Love” will eventually baffle the sensation hunters, because Lawrence, although unhesitatingly accepting, even celebrating the flesh, is quick to discover and proclaim the divinest essences.

  The title page of the book listed no publisher (“Privately Printed for Subscribers Only”), and the edition sold steadily but modestly over the next eighteen months. Lawrence’s reputation continued to grow, particularly with the successful publication of The Lost Girl in the United States, by Seltzer, and in Britain, but at $15 the subscription edition of Women in Love was an item for rarefied wallets in any case. And when, on a hot Friday afternoon in early July 1922, John Sumner, of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, paid an unwelcome call at Seltzer’s offices across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, there were plenty of unsold copies of Lawrence’s novel available to be seized.

  Lawrence was in Australia, Eliot in London—but at the beginning of July, New York was the place that mattered most to their futures.

  * * *

  The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873, was approaching its fiftieth anniversary. It had been a pioneering organization, the first of its kind in the United States, a private group that, upon its founding, was given law-enforcement responsibilities. Its founder and guiding spirit, Anthony Comstock, had led the organization, funded by the crusading Comstock’s wealthy patrons, for more than four of those decades. When he died, in 1915, he was succeeded by Sumner, a figure who loomed smaller in the public imagination. Comstock’s legend—his belly and whiskers as grandiose as his “lush” prose fulminating against “Base Villains”—proved enduring enough that Margaret Anderson, whose Little Review excerpts of Ulysses were first suppressed in 1917, recalled in her memoirs that the magazine had been “suppressed by Anthony Comstock,” even though he had been dead for two years by then.

  The continuing prosecution of the Little Review for its Ulysses excerpts and now of Seltzer for Women in Love was the handiwork of Comstock’s successor, a Long Island stockbroker whose hobbies were golf and driving. Sumner, as nettlesome and indefatigable as Comstock, never escaped his shadow, though he was relentless and successful at policing the “many subdivisions of commercialized vice,” including motion pictures, plays, and photographs and artwork for sale. He was also more inventive than Comstock. Sumner proudly recalled in an unpublished memoir that it had been his own innovation to prosecute a fiction magazine—the Little Review—which was something his predecessor had never thought to do.

  Vice societies had proliferated across America in the late nineteenth century, to counteract the supposed loosening of moral codes brought on by the evils of urbanization and immigration. Their crusade against immoral literature as an incitement to crime and as a perversion of youth was part of a campaign dedicated to progressive causes, including anti–child labor laws and the elimination of poverty. Even Comstock himself, who had “conspicuously made an ass of himself” on many occasions, was respected by many, including some of his enemies, for having done much good if literature were left out of the accounting. It was a big if.

  For it was true of Comstock, and true of Sumner, that fulminating about the dangers of a book didn’t warn readers away: the attacks made it easier for them to pay attention, giving publicity to novels and nonfiction books that in almost every case would have had a lower public profile, and smaller sales, had they been published without prosecutorial fanfare. A New York Times editorial criticizing Sumner’s efforts ran under the headline “Advertising Bad Books.”

  The society’s targets were publishers and booksellers: Margaret Anderson and her partner in the Little Review, Jane Heap, not Joyce; Thomas Seltzer, not D. H. Lawrence. The author was both victim and innocent bystander, an interested party left out of the equation, except for the cost to his reputation. When The Rainbow had been suppressed in England, in 1915, and Methuen, the publisher, agreed to withdraw all copies, Lawrence wrote to his friend Cynthia Asquith, “This is most irritating. Some interfering person goes to a police magistrate and says, ‘This book is indecent, listen here.’ Then the police magistrate says, ‘By Jove, we’ll stop that.’ Then the thing is suppressed.” An appeal against the damning verdict was available only to the publisher, Lawrence complained—it was “an entitlement useless to the author,” who, no matter how offensive his work was deemed to be, was not the offending party.

  Sumner, “Decency’s local representative,” took the name of his society seriously and lived up to it, though he rejected the word “censorship” as a misrepresentation of his work because “the word was offensive to people in general.” Instead, he thought of himself as a kind of curator, who culled the unsuitable in service of a higher and purer ideal of what literature or art or entertainment—and people—ought to be.

  Of the sensational in books, Sumner wrote, “We are told that this literature merely reflects the life of the time and that this is what the people want. Neither statement is true. Such literature may and probably does reflect the life of a certain minor element of the population and there is a certain type of reader who no doubt demands it. Well, there is a certain part of the public that wants narcotic drugs, but very strict laws prohibit their sale.

  “Does not the demand for salacious literature also come from a newly created class of addicts?”

  Hapless readers were as much victims of predatory miscreants as those lured into gambling dens or lives of iniquity as prostitutes, and in his 1922 annual report, Sumner complained of new dangers then spreading like an infection: an “ebbtide of moral laxity, as a result of the great war, has revealed itself ominously,” and led to a market for, and tolerance of, objectionable material of every kind, from postcards to motion pictures. Sumner’s detailed monthly reports to his board of managers suggest he and his small staff were almost submerged beneath the weight of the moral infirmity around him. Books were only one part of a vast, creeping danger. Calls and letters came in from an army of concerned citizens, or busybodies. Every variety of moral affront was their daily business; the society’s most public acts, and its most publicized, were against books and theater, but more time was spent, on a daily and monthly basis, with “vice” of a private nature. The society reported—to its managers and to the police—on “degenerates” lurking on street corners, in high schools, in subway stations, and even in fine neighborhoods. In the weeks before his July call on Thomas Seltzer, Sumner received a letter signed “McK. Hotchkiss” informing the society of “activities of [a] negro woman, Fanny Woods, using premises 230 Riverside Drive for immoral purposes.” The report was referred to a police inspector for “investigation and action.” Nothing was too small to escape the notice of a nosy neighbor, or Sumner’s enumeration of it to those paying his salary: “Anonymous woman called stating that indecent pictures and writings on the walls appeared in premises 163 West 21st Street and 22 West 21st Street.” The society “investigated and at both places the janitor promised to remove the objectionable matter.” Sumner also wrote to the lessee of 163—a “Mr. Rappaport”—to suggest “that walls be painted a dark color which would discourage those inclined to deface them in this manner.” Quite conveniently for the offended woman and for Sumner, these addresses were around the corner from the society’s own offices on West Twenty-Second Street.

  Even older than the society was the precedent that still for the most part controlled legal decisions r
egarding obscenity. Regina v. Hicklin, decided in 1868, in England, but followed in American courts into the twentieth century, had deemed a publication obscene if “the tendency of the matter … is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influence and into whose hands publication of this sort may fall.” This definition, which in effect meant isolated passages of supposedly questionable purity could condemn an entire work, was used effectively in 1921, when Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were once again on trial for publishing an excerpt of Ulysses (in the July–August 1920 issue). Anderson thought the essential question was “the relation of the artist—the great writer to the public.… I state clearly that the (quite unnecessary!) defense of beauty is the only issue involved.” But the law did not agree with her. Though not required to, the judges in that case allowed the defense attorney, John Quinn, the lawyer who was also Eliot’s patron, to call three experts to the stand to testify to the literary quality of Joyce’s work. This was a defense of beauty; but though their testimony was allowed, it did not affect the result, which was conviction, in February 1921, setting in train the wriggling of Huebsch and Liveright that was to so enrage Quinn, and once again infuriated him a year later when Pound told him of Liveright’s professed interest in publishing Ulysses.