The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  So there could be no reason to return to Hogarth House before October, one annual rite being that the servants would “have to go on their holidays.” But then the last week of September would arrive and Leonard would awaken one morning and feel “the summer dying out of the year, and the chill of autumn in fact immediately descended … a regular grey, damp Rodmell autumn with the clouds right at the foot of the downs and the smell of dead leaves burning.” Then they could go back to London.

  After the war, what Leonard called “civilization” had begun to penetrate into Sussex. There was even a bus that made it easier to travel between Rodmell and Charleston, the grander, if even more unorthodox, house nearby, where Vanessa and Clive Bell lived with their children.

  “Nothing could exceed the monotony of life at Charleston except the pleasantness of that monotony,” Clive wrote to Mary Hutchinson. “One comes down to breakfast as much before ten as possible, hopes for letters, kills a wasp, smokes a pipe, contemplates nature, writes till lunch, reads The Times, goes for a walk, drinks tea, reads Proust, shaves, writes to Polly”—Clive’s nickname for Mary herself—“… dines, lights a fire, smokes a cheroot, reads the Grenville memoirs, smokes a pipe, reads Proust, goes to bed. Sometimes it rains.”

  At Monk’s the monotony, by contrast, consisted of days parceled up into routine activities of work, just as it was in Richmond.

  * * *

  On Sunday, July 23, Leonard read through Jacob’s Room. The novel had had to be postponed, but Leonard’s reaction went very far to redeem the loss of a season and to alleviate Virginia’s fear that delaying it would render it only “sterile acrobatics”: “He thinks it my best work. But his first remark was that it was amazingly well written.” He told Virginia it was a work of genius, “unlike any other novel.” They disagreed about whether her people “were puppets,” as he thought, and she did not. But he found it “very interesting, & beautiful” and almost completely “without lapse.… I am on the whole pleased.” He thought she ought to consider using her “method”—her focus on the internal—more narrowly next time, burrowing in “on one or two characters” rather than on the larger chorus of Jacob’s Room. She had already been doing this, in “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” and Leonard’s advice, so attuned to the experiment she had under way in the story she was continuing to revise, gave her encouragement to go on thinking about the ways in which that story might be developed further. His identification of her “method” in Jacob’s Room was a ratification of her own burgeoning conviction that what she had begun to do with Clarissa Dalloway was a further advance on the novel that preceded it. She had made a kind of formal breakthrough that she must now recognize, and lay possession to, as hers.

  * * *

  She could savor the last days of July in London. They had dinner with Vanessa, Duncan, Tom, and Hope Mirlees, another poet they published, and Jacob’s Room was at last on its way to Donald Brace, her publisher in New York. She noticed, too, “On the whole, L. & I are becoming celebrities,” she wrote in her diary, knowing that Leonard would deny it, but convinced that she was right, her observation “drawn from other sources.” Clive had likely been one, or perhaps even the only one, of these, because it was from him that she presumably heard the opinion of an acquaintance of his who was longing to be introduced to Virginia: “Mrs Nicolson thinks me the best woman writer—& I have almost got used to Mrs Nicolson’s having heard of me. But it gives me some pleasure.” Mrs. Harold Nicolson was Vita Sackville-West.

  Then, on Monday, July 31, the day of the Seltzer trial and Seldes’s testimony in New York, they had a farewell dinner at Commercio, their regular spot on Frith Street, celebrating with Roger Fry and Clive, who, just back from Paris, was a last-minute addition, having run into Virginia in the street unexpectedly. Taking advantage of the prewar liberties that the recently extended licensing hours allowed, they savored “our usual talk,” as Virginia put it in her diary, Clive’s “bits of gossip” about adulterous entanglements among Rodmell villagers and, via his mistress Mary, the “literary and fashionable intelligence.” Tom had been invited, but was too busy, and spent his evening “dictating to his typist,” Clive reported to Mary. Tom did join them afterward, at Clive’s flat in Gordon Square, arriving “very neat from the type-writers,” Clive told her. Tom solicited a contribution for the Criterion from Fry, who had been showing his paintings to the group, and though Tom had heard from John Quinn by cable on Saturday that his contract with Liveright had been signed, he was apparently completely silent on the subject of his poem. Neither Clive, writing to Mary, nor Virginia, in a colorful account of their evening in her diary, mentions what both would likely have recorded as the major news it was.

  There was something Cheshire Cat about Tom that night, though. He was “sardonic, guarded, precise, & slightly malevolent, as usual,” Virginia wrote.

  * * *

  The next morning, Clive and the Woolves took the train to Lewes together, the journey, with servants and voluminous luggage and packages, “organized with uncommon skill: we chattered all the way down—I hardly know about what,” Clive told Mary, surprised to learn that his cook, Mrs. Harland, was a “most engaging companion” who seemed to know “all the theatrical profession and to have seen all the plays—they send her tickets … and rather respects me because she thinks I am in with the theatrical world and lead a loose life.”

  Packed to go to Sussex was a deceptively simple way of putting it, Virginia once joked, given that it meant also packing up the Hogarth Press. “We travel with a selection of our books placed in hampers,” and the cumbersome array was in addition to their dog. (Their summer convoy one year also included “a tortoise, bought for 2/-yesterday in the High Street.”) Virginia left Leonard to preside over the decampment and the wrangling of humans, beasts, and luggage, “with considerable mastery—poor devil,” she wrote. “I make him pay for his unfortunate mistake in being born a Jew by discharging the whole business of life. This induces in me a sense of the transitoriness of existence, and the unreality of matter, which is highly congenial and comfortable.”

  * * *

  As if to test her after her winter illnesses, this summer the Sussex weather upset her daily routines. August was full of “rain, wind, & dark London looking skies,” only a scattering of good days, and the paths often too muddy to walk along. This meant an “almost constant stream across the floor” of the Monk’s House kitchen so extreme it might have been “one of the main tributaries” of the nearby Ouse.

  But the disruption did not prove fatal for Virginia, as variations so often had been and were to be. Now it seemed Virginia had almost effortlessly persevered. The “gift of summer,” which had for too long been “promised & then withheld,” had now, she saw, brought a garden blooming as never before—apples and pears, and green peas that arrived in time to eat before they returned to Richmond.

  And the summer’s gift to her was a new freedom of mind she was unused to experiencing: “There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.” With Jacob’s Room finished, she thought again about her reading essay and also made expansive plans about the fiction she might be able to write in autumn. And even though she dreaded the reviews of Jacob’s Room and admitted, “I can’t write while I’m being read,” what others were to say then seemed less essential than her own confidence at Monk’s House now. “At last, I like reading my own writing. It seems to me to fit closer than it did before.”

  * * *

  Their most sociable summer might, like the weather, have had its own cost.

  “Visitors leave one in tatters,” she wrote on the sixth of September, but they kept inviting them, because, she added on the other side of a semicolon, they also left her “with a relish for words.” Lytton Strachey was coming for several days in mid-September, for the second part of a visit that began at Charleston with Vanessa and Clive Bell. When Clive asked whethe
r the order of the visits might be reversed, he discovered it couldn’t be done: “Woolf & Virginia had arranged everything as neatly as a Chinese puzzle.” Yet it had all come together despite the fact that, Virginia wrote a friend, “neither of us wishes for visitors. Of course they threaten us from all sides—Partridges, M[olly], Hamilton, Americans, Lytton, Morgan, Tom, Sangers—no: leave me, leave me, is all I say: to work my brain.”

  Morgan and Tom had missed their weekend together at Garsington in the spring and would be visiting together the third weekend of September. They would be the final guests of the season.

  * * *

  Tom arrived on Saturday, after his morning’s work at Lloyds. A letter from John Quinn, written on September 7 and received just before he was to visit Monk’s, outlined the final arrangements for publication of The Waste Land, first in the November issue of the Dial and then afterward as a book, by Liveright.

  The poem would be published within weeks, running in the Dial issue scheduled to appear about October 20. Eliot would be paid the $10 a page that Thayer had offered in January, but as Watson had proposed, Eliot would also get the Dial Prize, and its $2,000 cash award, for his “services to the cause of literature.” Liveright would publish the book in December, paying Eliot $150 upon publication, and the Dial would buy 350 copies of his $2 edition, at a 40 percent discount, to “push mightily” as promotional copies for subscribers. The arrangement basically ensured that Liveright would not lose money on the book and that the Dial would not, either, since, as Seldes noted, even it were to be a total loss they would have paid only about $350. The notes that Eliot had written were to appear only in Liveright’s edition, which Seldes regretted because, as he reported to Dial co-owner Watson, they were “exceedingly interesting and add much to the poem … but don’t become interested in them because we simply cannot have them.”

  Once Quinn and Liveright had signed the book contract at the end of July, Eliot no longer cared very much whether the Dial would publish The Waste Land, still angry at Thayer despite what he thought had been Watson’s charming manner, even though “it’s my loss, I suppose,” he wrote to Pound on August 30.

  But it would also be the Dial’s loss—of prestige but also of copy to fill the magazine—and Seldes, worried about it, as he had been all summer, took matters into his own hands at the end of August and proposed privately to Liveright the arrangement that Quinn formalized. “It was a close shave,” Quinn wrote Eliot, reporting on a meeting with Liveright and Seldes in his office. “There was a good deal of chinning” about terms, and “Seldes made Liveright promise in nine different forms that he would keep The Dial’s intention to award you the $2,000 prize confidential.” But Liveright, with his penchant for publicity, knew the importance of the award and the value to him of keeping it secret. By the terms of the agreement, he would not be able to publish it on October 1, as his autumn catalog had indicated—but with 350 sold before he even needed to print the book, the delay was a lucrative one.

  When Liveright published the book in December, to take advantage of the Dial’s publicity, he put the news of the Dial Prize on the front cover, so that it was nearly as prominent as the title and author. He also followed Seldes’s suggestion to number copies of the first edition to give the book “bibliographical value.” He printed one thousand copies. And he lowered the price to $1.50.

  * * *

  Just before leaving for Sussex, Eliot wrote to Quinn in gratitude, “quite overwhelmed by your letter, by all that you have done for me, by the results that have been effected, and by your endless kindness. In fact, the greatest pleasure of all that it has given me is the thought that there should be anybody in the world who would take such an immense amount of pains on my behalf.”

  But he was as silent in September as he had been sardonic and guarded at Gordon Square on the evening of July 31. Whether out of discretion or modesty, Tom seems to have said nothing about the imminent publication of his poem during his weekend at the Woolves’, even though they discussed the fellowship fund in detail. Virginia wrote two long diary entries about the weekend. She analyzed Tom as she usually did and described their conversation about the fund, but made no mention of The Waste Land.

  * * *

  Morgan arrived on Friday, allowing an evening’s visit before Tom arrived for the weekend, too. Forster, by contrast with the formal Eliot, dressed shabbily, traveling lightly with a frayed rucksack for luggage. (He had been teased about his clothes for years, and during the war el Adl had “gently” complained to him, “You know, Forster, though I am poorer than you I would never be seen in such a coat” as the tattered one Forster wore. “I am not blaming you—no, I praise—but I would never be seen, and your hat has a hole and your boot has a hole and your socks have a hole.”)

  As overnight guests Forster and Eliot were an unlikely pairing—never to be repeated—particularly in a house of such close quarters and with so little privacy. Morgan did all he could to keep to himself, writing an article in his room upstairs, busy, largely out of sight, until Tom had left after tea on Sunday. Then the three old friends “snuggled in & Morgan became very familiar; anecdotic; simple, gossiping about friends & humming his little tunes,” Virginia wrote in her diary.

  Morgan did not always mix well with other guests, she had found, and, after one uneasy weekend, thought that “Forster would come out better alone,” which, in the end, was true of this weekend, too. On the earlier occasion Morgan had been “easily drowned” by the vivacity of the others, struggling himself with an awkwardness he had described in Howards End: “I don’t believe in suiting my conversation to my company,” one of Forster’s protagonists says. “One can doubtless hit upon some medium of exchange that seems to do well enough, but it’s no more like real conversation than money is like food. There’s no nourishment in it.”

  Morgan was “often melancholy and low-temperature,” particularly when faced with those, like Eliot, with whom he was cordial, but about whom he was decisive and judgmental. “He never effused,” Virginia wrote in her diary, and he could not easily hide it if “he didn’t like you.” The cozy ebullience Virginia was often able to spark in Morgan, Tom’s presence almost instantly stifled. Eliot could not encounter the playful Morgan, and perhaps like Wyndham Lewis at Garsington, he didn’t witness that when enjoying a bit of gossip Morgan’s blue eyes would “sparkle” with pleasure and amusement. This was often the amused prelude to a “sort of suppressed sneeze, which became a surreptitious laugh … a little sneeze of joy.”

  Tom’s mind, Virginia noted that weekend, “is all breadth & bone compared with Morgan’s,” as if seeing them at such close quarters for the first time revealed each anew. Morgan had “something too simple about him—for a writer perhaps, mystic, silly, but with a childs [sic] insight.” Tom, she felt, retained little of the directness that was the foundation of Morgan’s observant, insightful nature. Tom, too guarded at least in her presence, was earnest and pedagogical, playacting at the convivial guest and tending even in casual conversation to the oracular pronouncement, the whole weekend another stage set for him to play a role.

  Alone with Leonard and Virginia, Morgan told them that Tom had asked him to contribute to the Criterion, flattery of the eminent novelist, so recently boosted by the Times, by the younger editor seeking recognizable names for the table of contents of his new magazine.

  But flattery and compliments could “scarcely touch” Morgan, and Morgan, Virginia noted approvingly, was very different from herself, caring “very little I should think what people say.… I dont think he wishes to shine in intellectual society; certainly not in fashionable.… To dominate the talk”—as Eliot did—“would be odious to him.”

  * * *

  Much of the talk was about Ulysses.

  It had now been two years since the September 1920 weekend when Eliot’s praise of Joyce had left Virginia feeling that what she was doing, in her stories, was “probably being better done by Mr Joyce.” And it had been nearly six months sinc
e she had cut the pages of Ulysses, left the book for Leonard actually to read, and then begun to read Proust instead. In the summer it had been the other way around: she had been in the second of her two-volume edition of Swann, when she put it aside to read Ulysses again, resenting that Joyce was one of “these undelivered geniuses” whom one couldn’t neglect, “or silence their groans, but must help them out, at considerable pains to oneself,” she wrote to a friend in June. That certainly proved true. By August she had read two hundred pages—“not a third.” She had decided she was “amused, stimulated, charmed[,] interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters—to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples,” she wrote in her diary, eliding the distinction between the writer and his work. “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.” But was the novel or the working man distressing, egotistic, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating?

  She had written to Clive in frustration and disbelief—she was going to give Tom a piece of her mind about Joyce and Ulysses when he visited. And in seeing no difference between the man and his work, Virginia had a particularly fitting interlocutor in Clive, to whom she had, in 1917, confessed her boredom with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  Clive had met Joyce for the first time in Paris on May 6, 1921, and wrote Mary the next morning about the encounter, memorable for all the wrong reasons.

  Bell and some friends had started the evening at the Deux Magots, and then went to dinner at Michaud. One of Clive’s companions saw a man he knew sitting in an adjoining room with a friend of his own. Bell did not recognize either of the men but was told one of them was “un critique anglais qui devait être americain … un sale type—qui parle tout le temps dans un français de l’anglais de l’opéra-bouffe de ses livres et de leur valeur”—an English critic who must be American—a bad sort—who speaks only about his own books and their value in a French out of an opera bouffe.