The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  When Lawrence finished the chapter, he, and the novel, returned to the present and to the story of Frieda and himself in Australia, and to the story of Kangaroo, who is killed in a street fight between his vigilante forces and the union men. Lawrence, less a visionary than he sometimes fancied himself, could not prophesy the future of fascism, and it seems he did not know how the novel should end. Halfway through it he called it a “funny sort of novel where nothing happens and such a lot of things should happen.” He understood that figures like Mussolini, who had risen to political prominence as Lawrence was preparing to leave Italy, would gain, or seize, power; he made the danger of their seductive rhetoric clear in the clarity with which he depicted Somers’s overwhelming but seemingly unwilled physical attraction to Kangaroo that leads to at least a temporary political acquiescence, too. But Lawrence stopped short of imagining, at least in Kangaroo, what the ramifications of such an attraction would be, for Somers, or for the masses. Kangaroo’s death was a convenient plot twist, and convenient for Lawrence’s projected schedule. Lawrence wanted to send off the manuscript of his novel so that it might reach the United States before he did. It, like he and Frieda, had a boat to catch. He wrote the rest of the book in little more than two weeks after he resumed work and was able to mail it to the United States at the end of the week that had begun with Seltzer’s promise to put up a big fight.

  Kangaroo, the novel, has as unceremonious an end as Kangaroo himself. Lawrence came to the end of a notebook, and he has Somers and his wife leave Australia, just as he and Frieda were about to do. Their boat sets sail. And the novel is over. Lawrence’s experiment in form had been a complete success. He had written a novel in six weeks. Its first sentences described Richard and Harriet’s arrival, and its last sentences their departure. In America he revised the ending of the novel, or rather added to it by adding an account of his and Frieda’s last three weeks in Australia. This made it neater. Mountsier advised that “The Nightmare” should be cut. It was a digression. It had nothing to do with the story.

  Lawrence considered it. But when he had revised the novel and sent it off, he was adamant. “The Nightmare” must remain. The key to the whole book, and to what he had hoped to achieve in writing it, had been to recall Frieda’s and his experience as it had really been. “Have kept in the War piece,” he wrote Mountsier, “it must be so. The book is now as I want it.”

  It had not seemed to him when he went to Ceylon, or to Perth, or to Sydney or Thirroul, that he was coming closer to unlocking a past that he had so completely—but so uneasily—kept at bay. Lawrence, like Proust and like Forster, had discovered during his months at Wyewurk how to make use of his memories and impressions. Somers’s fears were Lawrence’s, and waking from his nightmare by writing about it, Lawrence decided, along with his counterpart, “The judgments of society were not valid to him.… In his soul he was cut off, and from his own isolated soul he would judge.”

  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. Somers, walking in Sydney on a Saturday night, thinks the city streets will be an escape, except that “by bad luck,” the crowds of people terrify him as in a way he hasn’t felt in years, and the past returns to him as he walks. Mrs. Dalloway, setting out on her errand, is walking in London and thinks, “The war is over,” but her thought was, of course, proof that the war wasn’t over. It is still in Clarissa’s mind, as it was in the shopgirl’s, still a way of measuring everyday experience, including the quality of gloves. The sound of Big Ben with its eleven chimes was a reminder of the war; the noise from the street an unnerving sound that could no longer simply be an automobile backfiring. Any kind of explosive report might never be just a noise in the street again.

  The war had affected not only the men who died. Neither Somers nor Clarissa could be distracted from what Eliot’s narrator, amid the crowds flowing over London Bridge, also knew: that “death had undone so many.” Memories that had been buried persisted. This was the “modern twist” of the Proustian “adventure” that Forster identified: art could render the internal in ways that had never been tried before. “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” Kangaroo, and The Waste Land all depicted the glaring contradiction of 1922: the war was over but had not ended.

  * * *

  Thomas Seltzer’s “big fight” against John Sumner and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was made easier by a decision of the New York State Court of Appeals in another obscenity case, coincidentally announced on the very day that Seltzer’s lawyer was interviewed about his plans by the Times. This case had its roots in the society’s November 1917 arrest of a bookseller, Raymond D. Halsey, for selling a copy of the nineteenth-century French novel Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier. Halsey had been arrested, as Seltzer and Mary Marks were, for violating Section 1141 of the penal code, for having sold a book that was, according to the statute, “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting.” Halsey was tried and acquitted in the Court of Special Sessions, and in turn sued the society for malicious prosecution. He won, in a jury trial. The society appealed, and the jury’s decision was affirmed. The society appealed again to the court of appeals, and on July 12, 1922, after almost five years of litigation, the court found in Halsey’s favor. He was also awarded $2,500 plus accrued interest. Most important, the court’s 5–2 decision established for the first time in New York that in determining “whether a book is obscene or indecent within Penal Law, § 1141, it must be considered broadly as a whole, and not judged from paragraphs alone which are vulgar and indecent.”

  * * *

  Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin had been published in 1835 and was immediately acclaimed in France and abroad. It was also equally notorious and had long been the object of censors’ ire in the United States and elsewhere. The court of appeals cited the book’s many admirers and noted that even though it had its critics, “No review of French literature of the last 100 years fails to comment upon it.” The court pointed to the author’s “felicitous style” and cited the book’s many “passages of purity and beauty.” It also quoted Henry James’s remark that “in certain lights the book is almost ludicrously innocent.” The court acknowledged that the book contained many paragraphs, “however, which, taken by themselves, are undoubtedly vulgar and indecent.”

  The “however” was key, for the essential point of the majority opinion was it did not matter that, printed separately, the apparently objectionable paragraphs might, “as a matter of law, come within the prohibition of the statute.” That might also be true, the court added, of a similar selection of excerpts from “Aristophanes, Chaucer or Boccaccio, or even from the Bible.”

  Opponents of censorship, including Quinn in his defense of the Little Review, had made this argument about selective and misleading passages many times. But no court had agreed. The judgment established as a legal precedent what Ezra Pound had told Joyce in October 1920, when the Little Review issue with the “Nausikaa” episode of his novel was seized by Sumner: “The excuse for parts of Ulysses is the WHOLE of Ulysses.”

  * * *

  The timing was fortuitous, uncanny. On the previous day, Sumner had testified in the West Side Police Court about Seltzer’s three books. The headline in the New-York Tribune bordered on the satiric. “Blushed Through 254 Pages of ‘Young Girl’s Diary,’ He Says,” ran over the subhead, “‘Women in Love’ and ‘Casanova’s Homecoming’ Also Shocking Vice Crusader Sumner Tells Court While Bookseller Asserts They Are Educational.” The Tribune reporter took particular enjoyment in recording details that undermined the censorial assiduousness of the so-called crusader, highlighting the fact that Schnitzler’s Casanova and the anonymous Diary had been available for eight months, and the l
imited edition of Women in Love for nearly two years. Surely they could not be so damaging if they’d been poisoning minds for that long without any discernible impact.

  “Salacious matter,” Sumner said “crisply,” as he closed the copy of A Young Girl’s Diary that he had been holding in court. He had been “profoundly shocked when he got to reading” it, the Tribune reported of Sumner’s testimony. (The newspaper’s headline came from its reporter’s account of Sumner’s testimony: “He began to blush at page 17 and his cheeks reddened with increasing fervor all the way from there to page 254.”) Goldstein’s defense of A Young Girl’s Diary was limited that day. It was, as its cover proclaimed, “intended only” for parents, educators, those in the legal and medical professions, and “students of psychology.” “Anybody, of course, may be a student of psychology,” the Tribune noted. The warning on the cover was as much a way to advertise a “bad book” as Sumner’s own activities often were and did not forestall a trial, which was set for the end of July.

  The voluminous and favorable press coverage “more than pleads the case for us,” Seltzer wrote his wife, but the Halsey case had come as a greater relief, “as precedents are so much, perhaps everything, in lawsuits, this is splendid.” The July heat, which he’d hoped to escape in Canada, was another pressure. “Today is the worst day we have had yet,” he wrote Adele one evening a week before the trial. “Last night I could not sleep.” But rain, beginning at about five p.m., seemed to portend, as the Halsey decision had, that the “hot spell is broken.”

  * * *

  Because it would test the new parameters of the Halsey case, and because Jonah Goldstein would call witnesses, the Seltzer trial quickly became, as Publishers Weekly noted, “one of the most widely discussed cases in book censorship that has ever been before the courts.” Magistrate George Simpson heard testimony on Monday, July 31. The next day, the Tribune ran a summary of the day’s proceedings under a sequence of cheeky headlines, “Fizz Taken Out of Seltzer’s Books at Hearings on Vice Charges / Doctors, Professors, Editors, Mothers and Even ‘Sunday School Review’ Cited to Convince Judge That ‘A Young Girl’s Diary’ Hasn’t Any ‘Kick.’” Sumner testified that he had read both the Diary and Casanova’s Homecoming in their entirety but that, even in the month since he seized Women in Love, he had “perused only passages” of the novel, inadvertently underscoring the weakness of his case in the wake of the Halsey decision, before which that might have been enough to sway a sympathetic judge. The main focus of the experts’ testimony was the Diary, but they were also asked their opinions of Women in Love and Casanova’s Homecoming. An attorney, Miles M. Dawson, of West Ninety-Fifth Street, was called as “an authority on realistic literature of all classes” and had worked as a translator, though his true authority may have been political, as a well-known colleague of Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican former governor of New York and Supreme Court justice then serving as President Harding’s secretary of state. The Diary was “harmless,” Dawson testified, also praising “David Lawrence” as a “great English stylist.”

  Gilbert Seldes, the Dial managing editor, testified that the Dial had published pieces by Lawrence and Schnitzler, giving weight to Goldstein’s contention that both were literary writers who must be judged by a different standard. Speaking also to the issue of whether it was necessary, as Sumner and his allies had long claimed, to ban a book because of “its putative effect on immature readers,” Seldes gave it as his expert opinion that Women in Love “would not interest a child and be no more exciting to an adult than a railroad timetable.”

  * * *

  The “hot spell” Seltzer had complained of in July had been broken. On September 12, Magistrate Simpson found against Sumner and dismissed the complaints against Seltzer and Miss Marks of Womrath’s. Simpson had read the three books with “sedulous care,” he announced and, praising each of them as a “distinct contribution to the literature of the present day,” found that in Women in Love, “the author attempts to discover the motivating power of life.” Quite apart from the quality of the three books, however, “Mere extracts separated from their context do not constitute criteria by which books might be judged obscene,” Simpson wrote in his opinion, the recent court of appeals ruling in Halsey obviously the controlling precedent.

  Seltzer said of the decision, “Technically it was a case of the people vs. Thomas Seltzer. In reality it was a case of the people vs. Mr. Sumner.” Simpson had, at least in part, framed his decision that way, offering a more general defense of literature itself—“Books will not be banned by law merely because they do not serve a useful purpose or teach any moral lesson”—and adding to his finding for Seltzer a warning to Sumner. “It has been said with some justice that the policy of pouncing upon books too frank for contemporary taste, without regard to the motive or purpose for which they were written or to the use to which they are to be put is objectionable and should be curbed.”

  For his part, Sumner was philosophical, saying, “You can’t win every case.”

  The evening papers ran lengthy stories on Sumner’s second defeat in quick succession, and the next morning the New York Times announced, “Book Censorship Beaten in Court.” Seltzer wrote Adele, “Everybody is happy about it. It was really a popular cause in the true sense.”

  Simpson also instructed Sumner to return the hundreds of books he’d confiscated. Soon orders were “rushing in for the three ‘obscene’ books,” Adele wrote a friend. “Can you understand that we’ve been busy?”

  The last signed copies of the $15 edition of Women in Love sold out before the end of September. “We haven’t a copy left,” Seltzer wrote to Mountsier the next week, outlining his plans for a three-thousand-copy trade edition at $2.50 to be published quickly. Seltzer also announced he would sue Sumner for $30,000 in damages, $10,000 for each book seized, for false arrest and injury to his business, while Miss Marks, who had also been exonerated when Simpson dismissed Sumner’s charges, sued for $10,000. This might serve Seltzer’s sense of justice, but it also brought a new round of stories that served as ideal publicity for the forthcoming trade edition, which was published on October 18 and quickly sold out. A second printing was available the first week of November, and a third printing quickly followed. Sales reached upwards of fifteen thousand copies by the end of the year.

  The next June, Lawrence received an accounting from Seltzer of his sales for 1922. Aaron’s Rod had done well enough at Brentano’s, perhaps, but it was a brief, local success at best, and sales of it, Sea and Sardinia, Fantasia of the Unconscious, and volumes of his stories, including England, My England, seemingly well timed in November, and his poems and plays had been far more modest. “I should still be poor sans Women in Love, shouldn’t I?” Lawrence wrote in reply, more sorry for Seltzer, whom he tried to cheer up, than he was for himself. “Pazienza!” he counseled, worried, despite the commercial breakthrough, that his publisher would be “getting a bit tired of me if the sales are so small.”

  At the end of 1921, as he had argued with Mabel Dodge about the necessity of paying her rent, he had written her, “I hope I needn’t all my life be so scrubby poor as we have been: those damned books may sell better.” At least one had. Women in Love had found a belated success, and so would others of his books, he was sure. As for his “rather depressing sales,” he wrote his agent, “All we can do is grin and bear it, for the present. I shall still have my day.”

  * * *

  Mabel Dodge sent Lawrence a newspaper cutting about the case, and it was awaiting him when he and Frieda arrived in San Francisco on September 4.

  “Pfui!” he wrote Seltzer in New York the next day. “I thought I should have had a word from you—but there is nothing.… I shall be glad to hear from you & to know what is happening. Apparently I have arrived in the land of the free at a crucial moment.”

  Lawrence would finally see Seltzer’s correspondence about the events of July when he arrived in “New Mexico, U. S. A.” on September 11. The next day, Simps
on dismissed the charges against Seltzer and, in doing so, exonerated Lawrence, too. He and his books were welcome in America. What quickly became clear, in Taos, was that Lawrence did not particularly welcome being in America.

  Chapter 12

  THE WASTE LAND IN NEW YORK

  Wyndham Lewis had been wrong. Eliot had not lied to him when he said Lady Rothermere’s review was going forward, though it is likely that Lewis hadn’t shared his suspicion only with Mrs. Schiff—and equally likely that he was not the only one wondering why the “Hypothetical Review” seemed to become more and more so as time went on. By the end of June, “the current rumours of its having been abandoned” were so widely discussed that Eliot wrote to Richard Cobden-Sanderson, the printer he and Lady Rothermere selected as their partner, to say it was imperative a notice announcing otherwise must be distributed as soon as possible. The unwelcome expense of it would be worth the effect it would have “upon certain groups in London.”

  In fact, the magazine had a name now, the Criterion, which was Vivien’s idea (“simply because I liked the sound of the word”; Lady Rothermere and Tom also liked it, if only because it was “apparently harmless” and so many other possibilities had been discarded). The rocks ahead that Vivien had feared the previous year, when Lady Rothermere agreed in principle to finance the quarterly, had materialized in their lives, but not because of the magazine. In fact, though progress had been delayed by Eliot’s poor health and two absences from London, its development had otherwise been relatively smooth.

  More surprising was the great degree to which Tom had staked his future position on the Criterion rather than The Waste Land.

  * * *

  Eliot envisioned a journal that would balance longer essays of up to five thousand words on contemporary subjects—in the first issue, an essay by the French critic Valery Larbaud on the importance of Joyce’s Ulysses—against “more historical work,” for example, an article on the Tristan and Isolde myth by an English writer T. Sturge Moore.