The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  Proust, as aware as Eliot of the international importance of his imprimatur, was generally unswayed by the blandishments of editors, journalists, writers, and other favor seekers, eager as they were to flatter him. Eventually, at the end of a long letter to Schiff on July 18, Proust wrote, “I’m too tired to go on. I still haven’t written to M. Eliot.”

  He never would. Proust died on November 18, 1922, and had been certain, all summer, that he was close to death. But Proust’s talk of his imminent death was such a fixture of his conversation that no one took him seriously. In 1919, his friend Paul Morand had written in “Ode to Marcel Proust”:

  I say:

  You’re looking very well.

  You reply:

  Dear friend, I nearly died three times today.

  Proust would not be published in the Criterion until July 1924, when an excerpt, “The Death of Albertine,” appeared. It is unlikely that Eliot ever read much more of Proust than the excerpt he published. The writer William Empson later recalled Eliot’s telling a group of students at Cambridge, “I have not read Proust,” only to hear him, the following week, offer a “very weighty, and rather long, tribute” to Scott Moncrieff’s translation, which he said was “at no point inferior to the original.”

  Eliot’s lack of interest in reading Proust was perhaps conditioned by Pound’s opinion. He had early on been impressed but by 1921 had become bored, referring in the Dial to the French publication of Le côté de Guermantes and Sodome et Gomorrhe as the “new lump of Proust,” with “nearly two hundred pages of close type” Proust devoted to describing a dinner party given by the Duchesse de Guermantes. “The pages of Proust’s beautiful boredom roll on, readable, very readable,” Pound wrote, “and for once at least the precise nuance of the idiocy of top-crusts is recorded.” This was his public comment. Privately, he was appalled by the opening scene of Sodome, an extended sex scene between two older men. “The little lickspittle wasn’t satirising, he really thought his pimps, buggers and opulent idiots were important, instead of the last mould on the dying cheese.”

  * * *

  Quinn finally received Eliot’s typescript on Friday, July 28. He telephoned Liveright that day to tell him that the typescript had arrived and that he would send it to him on Monday, July 31, after one of the stenographers in his office was able to make a “careful copy” of it. Eliot would send the notes to Liveright directly at some point after the contract was signed. Liveright asked his opinion of the poem. Quinn told him he had not read it—that his plan was to “read it over Sunday.”

  Early on Saturday morning, John Quinn called his secretary Jeanne Robert Foster and asked her to come to his apartment at 58 Central Park West. She went up immediately, she was to recall. Here, in an eleven-room apartment on the building’s top floor that he’d leased in 1919 for $3,200 a year, Quinn kept his massive collections of books and manuscripts, about eighteen thousand items, including multiple copies of many books—he had bought thirty-five copies of Eliot’s first book of poems, many as gifts, but also as an investment—as well as the complete manuscript of Ulysses and almost all the manuscripts of Joseph Conrad’s major works. And that didn’t include his collection of paintings and sculpture. Despite how large the apartment was, on the building’s top floor, it was not large enough “to show adequately, or even to store adequately, his immense accumulation” of books and art, which, insured for $350,000, nevertheless stood in piles in several rooms that “resembled not a gallery but storerooms of a museum.”

  When Foster, who was also Quinn’s lover, arrived at the ninth-floor apartment, Quinn asked her to “read something to him that he had received from Elliot” (Foster misspells Eliot’s name in virtually all of her surviving papers). He handed her the copy of The Waste Land he had just received from London.

  One of Mrs. Foster’s “unromantic duties” in Quinn’s office was to “read over his law briefs to him before he appeared in court,” Quinn’s biographer wrote. Quinn had what might be called a phonographic memory. Foster would read the brief twice, after which Quinn was able to remember it almost verbatim. Now Foster did with the poem what she did at the office. “I read it twice that morning,” she recalled, a task that would have taken about an hour. Foster was a poet herself; she, too, had a contract with Liveright for a book of poems, and her reading is likely to have been extremely good.

  Meanwhile, on Thursday, Quinn had dictated a new Liveright contract based on Eliot’s contract with Knopf. Liveright accepted the more limited terms without comment and signed the contract on Saturday, July 29, the same day Foster read the poem to Quinn. Liveright sent it back to Quinn’s office on Monday, following which Quinn sent the typescript to Liveright. (This was the same day that Gilbert Seldes testified in the Seltzer case.) It had been almost seven months since Liveright had first offered to publish the poem. He had still not read it, but at least the contract had been signed. Liveright asked Quinn the title of the book. He didn’t know either, Quinn said, though he soon remembered that it was “tucked away” in the postscript of a seven-page letter that Pound had recently written him. He inserted the name of the poem into the contract: The Waste Land.

  By Monday Quinn had read “the poems,” apparently thinking the five parts were five poems, “last night between 11:50 and 12:30,” he told Eliot, which would mean Sunday evening, July 30, into the early morning of July 31. (Quinn’s remark to Eliot that he had “read” the poems may also suggest the level of his intimacy with Foster and of his reliance on her; Foster’s reading it to him was his reading it, just as he might have told a client he had read whatever legal briefs were germane to his case.)

  The first two people outside Eliot’s immediate circle of intimates to read the poem were unusually attuned to its discontent. Jeanne Foster had been seriously ill in early summer, and Quinn thought that she, like Eliot the previous autumn, was “close to a nervous breakdown as well.” Quinn himself had been “working too hard to quit, and too hard to continue.”

  They were Tom and Vivien on the other side of the Atlantic, and the poem made a deep impression on Quinn. “Waste Land is one of the best things you have done,” he wrote to Eliot, worried that, for all its excellence, “Liveright may be a little disappointed in it.” It was, after all, a poem “for the elect or the remnant or the select few or the superior guys, or any word you choose, for the small number of readers it is certain to have.”

  Quinn was also worried about the length of the poem: “the book is a little thin,” he thought, perhaps one of the reasons he had given Eliot such a precise accounting of the hour he had spent with it. He thought it might make for unflattering comparisons with the range of Eliot’s first book of poems. Even though he foresaw only a small audience for it, Quinn thought it would be worth adding four or five more poems, even if by doing so the book were to be delayed another month.

  “I give you my impression.… You won’t mind my suggestion.”

  * * *

  On June 3, Liveright had cabled Eliot, “Cable deferred rate our expense title of fall book and very brief description for catalogue.” On the same day he sent Eliot the contract, by mail, that precipitated Eliot’s cable to Quinn asking him to intercede. Eliot provided neither the title nor the copy as requested. Two months later, Quinn retrieved the title from Pound’s letter. But Boni & Liveright’s catalog of “Good Books” for autumn 1922, printed even with autumn nearly under way, did not reflect Quinn’s instruction. Eliot’s poem was announced to booksellers and the press as The Wasteland. Perhaps when Eliot sent the notes for the poem to Liveright, he also sent him a description. Eliot was good at this kind of work. He wrote the prospectus for the Criterion that summer, and later in his career as an editor at Faber and Faber, he made an art of the copy he wrote for the books he published. Whether Eliot wrote the copy, or Liveright did, the “Good Books” catalog read:

  Many poets who became prominent during the contemporary American poetic renascence have sunk quietly into forgetfulness. T. S. Eliot is a name
which has acquired a leading significance in the same period. The qualities of Mr. Eliot’s verse are enduring. They represent in many ways the keenest inquiry into our lives which American poetry can boast since Ezra Pound entered the lyric lists. Subtle, ironic, and molded to the peculiar form of Mr. Eliot’s mind, this poet’s work, highly individualistic, has run to caricature of genuine realities, set off by flashes of rhythm and color. He knows how to draw people—not always within the knowledge of a poet—and he deals largely with the people he sees around him.

  The Wasteland is the longest poem T. S. Eliot has written and the first poetry that he has written in the last three years. Mr. Eliot writes from London that this volume represents a new phase in his development, being the ripe fruit of his experimentation in all of his previous work.

  T. S. Eliot is a man to be reckoned with, now, and hereafter, among the few unique talents of the times.

  The Wasteland will be one of the most beautifully printed and bound books that has ever borne our imprint.

  To be published October 1st … $2.00

  * * *

  Everything seemed to be settled. Quinn prepared to go on an upstate vacation for the month of August. In Liveright’s office a ledger for the book was created. The contract was for The Waste Land, but in the Boni & Liveright accounting department the title was entered as “Wasteland.” The first end-of-month entry, on July 31, is an overhead cost for inclusion in the fall catalog, $37.

  But the poem would not be published by Liveright on October 1, as his catalog announced. There were to be more delays. It would not appear until December.

  Chapter 13

  “I LIKE BEING WITH MY DEAD”

  Morgan had heard nothing from Egypt for quite some time, but in mid-June he was still writing letters to Mohammed once a week—“on the chance,” he told Florence Barger, happier to confide in her by letter than to spend too much time in her presence. He also wrote to Masood, with whom he could similarly share the continuing intensity of his feelings, and whose disapproval he did not fear. On the chance. The letters helped him to believe Mohammed was still alive, he wrote to Florence. “It will be painful stopping, for then I shall realise for ever that he is not there.”

  The boom had helped him forward—but he was still caught in the vise of his grief.

  * * *

  On the same day in late June that Morgan wrote to Masood about the “boom” of the Malet review in the Times, he received two letters from Egypt, one from Mohammed’s wife and the other from his brother-in-law, reporting what he had anticipated all spring: Mohammed was dead. The news, now that it had come, was unsurprising, an anticlimax, and Morgan realized that the “nearest approach to a shock” he’d had in the final months of their relationship had been when his boat had docked at Port Said and Mohammed was not there to greet him. The rest had been inevitable. The letters gave a confusing account of Mohammed’s estate—he had owned three houses and had left £60—and this apparent financial security again raised the question of whether Mohammed had taken advantage of him, though Morgan’s worry on this point was at least in part dispelled by a vision he had of Mohammed’s ghost “as one needing forgiveness” appearing from behind a curtain, “conceived of as taller than normal.” This relieved Morgan enough that he concluded, “The affair has treated me very gently.” Mohammed’s lingering death, which had tried Morgan’s patience was now, retrospectively, more clearly a time in which the letters they exchanged had been full of expressions of love. Morgan noted the date of Mohammed’s last letter—May 8—in his diary and realized that Mohammed must have died “almost directly” afterward.

  Poppy kicked that summer by traveling—not quite running away from home as he had done in going to India, but it was neater and simpler to be away from Lily than to confront her too boldly about his need for freedom. Forster spent a month on the Isle of Wight, visiting his aunts the Miss Prestons at Brighstone, where he walked the downs. From Brighstone, he went to Dorchester, where in mid-July he visited Thomas Hardy and his wife for what he was disappointed to find was a rather dull afternoon tea, “nice food and straggling talk,” he wrote to Lily. Hardy took him to see the graves of his pets, their names on headstones overgrown with ivy. The elderly author was pleasant and friendly, but as the visit wore on, Forster decided it was too much of a “dolorous muddle,” with Hardy enumerating the death of each one, many of whom had been run over by trains. Snowbell, Pella, Kitkin, “she was cut clean in two, clean in two,” Hardy told Forster, his sentence trailing off into silence. When Forster finally asked, “How is it that so many of your cats have been run over, Mr Hardy? Is the railway near?” Hardy replied, no, it was not near. And then, he added, there were the many who had simply gone missing. “I could scarcely keep grave,” Morgan told Lily, the caricature of Hardy’s own novels and poems too great.

  Even away from home, he was thinking about his novel. Before he left on his trip, he had been worried about the “fundamental defect” his resumption of work had revealed: that he was emphasizing atmosphere too much, rather than characterization. One advantage of his visits through the summer, then, was that, in recording conversations, he was reminded of how people talked. He returned home in midsummer, and in August, after a brief stay, resumed his travels—to Belfast to visit Forrest Reid, and then to Edinburgh.

  * * *

  He made progress on the novel, but as he wrote to Siegfried Sassoon, the fact that he was not “dissatisfied with what I do” was not the same as having “the faintest conviction that it will be finished.” He was still not sure that he could simply become a novelist again, and in the piece he wrote for the Memoir Club not long after his return from India, he tried to work the problem out. If he could find the conviction, he had told one friend, then everything would be all right—he could continue with the novel. But he did not have that faith, and for the Memoir Club he wrote of a moment in his past when that faith had been given to him from outside himself. He recalled the inspiration it had been for him, when still an undergraduate, he went to say good-bye to his tutor and to talk about his prospects. The man, Nathaniel Wedd—well known to those in the club, many of whom had met Forster at Cambridge—had “brought not only help but happiness” by telling Morgan, “Of course I could write—not that anyone would read me, but that didn’t signify.”

  Wedd had praised Forster highly and had told him, he remembered, that “I had a special and unusual apparatus, something which philosophy and scholarship and athletics all despised, still I had it and they hadn’t.” Morgan’s problem then, in 1901, was Morgan’s problem now, though he did not make (and did not need to make) the connection explicit as he read the essay aloud to his friends. He recalled that as an undergraduate he had begun a novel, but that once under way, “the manuscript broke off.… The apparatus was working, not inaccurately, but feebly, and dreamily because I wasn’t sure it was there.” The tutor’s benediction had given him some measure of confidence, he explained, enough that, in due course, while traveling abroad—a long trip of ten months—he wrote “The Story of a Panic,” which became his first published story. Speaking before the Memoir Club two decades later, he was, as the members knew, back from another long trip abroad he had taken in search, at least in part, of himself as a writer.

  Describing the long-ago scene in the tutor’s rooms at King’s, Morgan obliquely elided his post-undergraduate past and the present. Recalling his farewell to the tutor, he said of the encounter, “And now he helps me again, for he tells me that I might write, could write, might be a writer.” From the memory he might draw faith for today. But it would not be easy to do. He had changed from the early days of his career, Morgan told his friends as he went on. He spoke of his second novel, The Longest Journey, published in 1907, which had been the last book of his that had “come upon me without my knowledge.” The others had come with greater effort of mind and will, he said. He did not speak that night about the novel he was at present writing, but in calling the talk “My Books and I” he di
d not shy away from the question it would raise in the others’ minds: Would there be another book? The doubt for Morgan was the doubt Eliot had shared from Lausanne. Morgan did not know whether the novel he was writing would work, and sometimes he had to give himself over to nothing more or less than “the motion of my pen,” he told the Memoir Club, for the simple reason that all of a writer’s faculties, “including that very valuable faculty, faking—do conspire together thus.” In India, he had not been able to assimilate or arrange. Perhaps now that he was back in England—his preoccupation with Mohammed, tiresome even to himself—he could continue to fake it with his careful and uninspired additions.

  Virginia and Leonard were at least two members of the Memoir Club who knew that he was making his perhaps uninspired additions and hoping for the best. Not long after the meeting, Morgan wrote to Ludolf about his progress and asked him to say nothing of the novel to any of their mutual acquaintances in Egypt: “secresy [sic] conveniences me.”

  * * *

  Home in early August, Morgan was overwhelmed by ghosts, or by one ghost—Mohammed’s. The liberation he expected Mohammed’s death to bring had come to him only fitfully. After his travels he settled in at Weybridge to find that he was more akin to the narrator of Ackerley’s poem in the Mercury than he had been when he first read it in the spring. It had now been six weeks since he received confirmation of Mohammed’s death. But this had not put Mohammed behind him at all, and “most nights” were alive with visions and dreams of Mohammed, just as the poem had foretold. He himself had indeed been delivrées pas. Delivered not.