The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  “It’s odd how little I mind,” she noticed, reflecting on the negative reviews, surprised at the equanimity that seemed to have come along with her conviction in the summer that at forty she had found out how to say something in her own voice, now affirming in her diary, “At last, I like reading my own writing.… At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain—how to get the greatest amount of pleasure & work out of it.” She was certain she could “go on unconcernedly whatever people say,” as distrustful of Clive’s telling her Jacob’s Room was a masterpiece as she was unmoved by being “sneered at” by some reviewers. At least Jacob’s Room was selling—six hundred fifty of its one thousand copies gone, enough to order a second edition of another thousand.

  One friend, the writer and bookseller Bunny Garnett (from whose shop, Birrell and Garnett, she had bought Ulysses), telephoned her to tell her “it is superb, far my best, has great vitality & importance.” Two days later he wrote to expand upon what he had only been able to begin to share on the phone. The novel gave him more pleasure than anything of hers he’d read, and then he went further—it gave him more pleasure than anything written by anyone of their generation. Garnett concluded with the observation, “You are perfectly free of a heritage that didn’t suit you—the legacy of the realist.”

  Replying to Bunny’s praise—and to his assurance that he was going to fill a window of his shop with it and sell as many copies as he could—she framed the question she had been pursuing in Jacob’s Room and was preparing to explore further in “At Home, or a Party.” “But how far can one convey character without realism? That is my problem—one of them at least,” she wrote. There were no scenes in Jacob’s Room as there were in The Voyage Out or in Night and Day, no conversations or traditional dialogue that gave voices to the characters. She instead sketched them in through their impressions; working to leave no sense of a narrator, or the novelist herself, in whose hands and through whose eyes the reader saw things. Garnett appreciated the rhapsodies, and whether they were disconnected or not, as she had feared, his letter at least assured her there was beauty in what she had achieved. She could not “do” the realism, she told him, and had exhausted her interest in it with Night and Day. Even though she admired writers who could—she was soon to praise Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt—her own aim was to “try to get on a step further in the next one, now that I’ve got rid of some of my old clothes.” She wrote to Bunny on the twentieth, having taken the “step further” a week before, now that “Mrs. Dalloway” had branched into a book. She had thought to move from “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” to “The Prime Minister.” Now she saw that there must also be another character. “Septimus Smith?—is that a good name?” she wondered.

  On October 16 she wrote in her notebook under the heading “a possible revision of this book”:

  Suppose it to be connected in this way:

  Sanity and insanity.

  Mrs. D. seeing the truth. S. S. seeing the insane truth …

  The contrast must be arranged …

  The pace is to be given by the gradual increase of S’s

  insanity. on the one side; by the approach of the party on the other.

  The design is extremely complicated …

  All to take place in one day?

  If, as she told Bunny, she could not “do” the realism, she knew, too, that she could not do modernism as Joyce or Eliot or anyone else were doing it. That had become clear enough to her after finishing Ulysses and talking about it with Tom at Monk’s House. But Bunny made another comparison in his letter. It was not only that her novel was more full of beauty than any piece of modern prose he could remember. He had been looking through the Criterion and had read The Waste Land just the day before.

  I compared him with you—simply because he represents something I suppose. But the difference between you is that you have a sense of beauty; you see beauty in the world about you, you are alive to it all the time. Mr Eliot seems to me entirely to lack it. And lacking a sense of beauty he is profoundly bored. Boredom seems to me the mainspring of his work and of a good many other frightfully clever people’s work. He is a schoolboy at the top of his class, first in every subject and bored by each—and to tickle his palate can only try new combinations of subjects.

  Virginia was flattered but told Bunny, “I expect you’re rather hard on Tom Eliot’s poem.” (She might also have cautioned him he was rather hard on Eliot himself. Like Clive, Bunny had completely elided the distinction between the writer and his work. Of course he had done the same thing with Virginia, to a happier purpose.) Virginia told him she had not read The Waste Land herself. “I only have the sound of it in my ears, when he read it aloud; and have not yet tackled the sense. But I liked the sound.”

  But the sense of her new book, and what connected it together—she had not resolved that yet. She desired to “foresee this book better” than her first three novels in order to “get the utmost out of it” in a way that Joyce and Eliot had not with their latest works. One of the most interesting comments on Jacob’s Room, in fact, was one she was unlikely to have seen but might have agreed with. Her friend Desmond MacCarthy, the literary editor of the New Statesman, told Vanessa that it was the best thing Virginia had ever written but added a caveat: “he said it is like a series of vignettes,” Vanessa relayed to Clive in Paris. “I don’t know that that matters but I gathered he thought it lacked coherence though very brilliant. Each chapter is like the beginning of a very good novel. That is his description. As I have only read the first chapter I can’t say.”

  She could have indeed “screwed Jacob up tighter,” Virginia decided, but she had had to “make my path as I went.” Her path, like her method, was to be her own.

  * * *

  Virginia began writing “The Prime Minister” on October 6, the same day that she wrote out her first notes for “At Home: or The Party” (or “the 10th of June, or whatever I call it”). It was writing the first ten pages that had given her the idea for her possible revision of the scope and structure. Septimus Smith was mentioned only once in the story until then, one of a group of half a dozen friends who gather for lunch every Wednesday at half past one at a restaurant in Leicester Square. Something about him provoked her attention even at this earliest stage: “Septimus Smith was utterly different,” she wrote in her first sentence about him. “He was goat-toothed and laughed very violently.” Virginia shifted her focus to Septimus Smith in the next seven pages of the story, but his background remained mysterious, his link to the other people at lunch not stated. He is twenty-seven, and therefore likely a veteran. He leaves lunch and the thought occurs to him that he will kill the prime minister and then himself. But his mind seems to drift in other directions: “All the enmities and motives of life came across him in a flash.” He lights his cigarette but forgets to smoke it. He drops it to the pavement. He thinks of his wife. His mind wanders. Other characters drift in again. The story ends with what Virginia intended to be the next link in the chain of stories, an airplane flying overhead that, like the sound in the street, fused the two chapters and their characters together. The airplane is writing letters in the sky.

  “Mrs Dalloway saw people looking up,” she wrote. The story ended.

  On November 9 she decided that “The Prime Minister” and “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” were “too jerky & minute” for her purposes, not joined by a “general style.” Now she saw more clearly what her novel would be.

  Suppose the idea of the book is

  the contrast between life and death.

  All inner feelings to be lit up.

  The two minds. Mrs. D. and Septimus.

  She thought through upon whom “S.S.” would be “founded,” and did the same with the other characters. Septimus’s wife would be called “Rezia,” and she thought to draw on Leonard. “She to be founded on L?” she wrote, though there were to be significant differences between her own husband and her fictional wife, who was to be “simple, instinctive, childl
ess.” About Septimus she had a decision to make: “Had been in the war? or founded on me?” She thought she might base his character, and his look, on Ralph Partridge, a young man who was their (largely unsatisfactory) assistant in the Hogarth Press. But if she attained the right “generalised” sense of him that she wanted to achieve—“left vague—as a mad person is”—then he “can be partly R.; partly me.” She had thought of Septimus’s name before she wondered whether he was to be “founded” on herself, but to make him “partly me” may have been her unconscious intention to begin with. His name is Latin for “seventh,” and Virginia was the seventh of her parents’ eight children. Her father, Sir Leslie, had one child from his previous marriage to Harriet Thackeray, and her mother, Julia, had three children by her first husband, Herbert Duckworth. Sir Leslie and Julia were married in 1878 and had four children: Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian Stephen, who was younger than Virginia by one year.

  * * *

  But “S.S.” would not, in 1922, have been shorthand only for Septimus Smith. It had meant something else almost since the beginning of the war, a meaning that received renewed attention only recently. Ten days after Leonard and Virginia arrived at Monk’s, the Times published news of a War Office report on shell shock. The study had been the work of more than two years, undertaken in April 1920, almost eighteen months after the end of the war. The inquiry was under the leadership of Lord Southborough, a response to public outrage at the ill treatment of veterans, and also to resolve whether those who claimed shell shock had in fact been ill. The committee met forty-one times beginning in September 1920, and examined fifty-nine witnesses before ending on June 22, 1922. The Times article, under the headline “The Anatomy of Fear,” urged a wide readership of the two-hundred-page report, calling it “a document of so great interest as to merit the attentive study of every one interested in human nature.… It probes far into the dim processes of the mind which determine character and conduct.” It was as much a challenge to a novelist as it was an invitation to the public.

  The report, and the extensive coverage of it in newspapers over the course of the next month, was another reminder that the war had not ended with the Armistice. The plight of wounded veterans, mentally and physically scarred, was visible all around. The care of wounded veterans was an exorbitant cost to the public. But if these veterans’ mental infirmities had never been established as true wounds of war, then was it worth the public’s money to support them? Or was it indulgence of continued malingering? And why were so few who were treated recovering?

  The committee concluded that the array of mental illness among soldiers in the war was a large one, not usefully termed “shell shock” because the problems were found among soldiers who did not hear, literally hear, shell explosions. The web of mental diseases were, Lord Southborough summarized in a separate article for the Times published the first week of September, also a result of the “wear and tear of a prolonged campaign of trench warfare, with its terrible hardships and anxieties, and of attack and perhaps repulse.” Shell shock itself was a “wholly misleading” term, he wrote. “Shell-shock” was so firmly “established” that it was impossible to erase it from the vernacular, however. “The alliteration and dramatic significance of the term had caught the public imagination, and thenceforward there was no escape from its use.”

  The “condition of mind and body” produced under the battle conditions Southborough enumerated were more properly termed “war neurosis.” And the manifestations of war neurosis would be “practically indistinguishable from the forms of neurosis familiar to every doctor under ordinary conditions of civil life.”

  It was not, then, a choice for Virginia whether she must found “S’s character” on his experience on the battlefield or on her own history. To use the alliteration would suggest one obvious “reason” for Septimus’s insanity—he was another shell-shocked veteran of the war. But his having been in the war was irrelevant. It could not be news to her that there was a continuity of neuroses in peace and in war. This was the deeper psychological truth—sanity vs. insanity—she was pursuing in fusing the stories of Clarissa and Septimus.

  * * *

  Morgan was a frequent overnight guest at Hogarth House in the autumn and winter, visiting at monthly intervals that, incidentally, charted the course of his own progress on his Indian novel.

  Just after Morgan had left Monk’s House in September, Virginia wrote in her diary, “I was impressed by his complete modesty (founded perhaps on considerable self-assurance).” He had rediscovered some of this confidence because of his continuing work. “He is happy in his novel, but does not want to discuss it,” she wrote.

  A few days later he wrote to Masood, his grief over Mohammed abating, at least for the moment, after the letter he had begun in August. He shared no more with his friend than he had with Virginia. “I am in excellent form and have hopes of finishing my Indian novel,” he wrote, urging Masood, too, to keep his secret, because “if people know the news and get talking, I become worried & cannot write.” He was far enough along to ask Masood whether he would accept the dedication. “I always intended this, but warn you that you will find yourself initialling much you will consider inaccurate, pernicious, and banal.”

  He had a new conception of it, far different from what Masood might have imagined after urging Morgan to look to India for a subject in the early years of their friendship. He warned Masood, “When I began the book, I thought of it as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West,” recalling it at this distance almost as a romance intended to strengthen the bridge of sympathy between the two of them into something deeper than friendship. Returning to the book now, Forster had realized “this conception has had to go, my sense of truth forbids me anything so comfortable.” Perhaps there had been value in having visited India again, even though being there had not helped him forward in the writing. But he had gained a perspective he now thought essential to the new spirit of what he was writing. “I think that most Indians, like most English people, are shits and I’m not interested whether they sympathise with one another or not. Not interested as an artist: of course the journalistic side of me still gets roused over these questions.” Morgan had, in fact, written another article for the Nation to pour out “that part of my soul,” the part that hoped, given new trouble in India and the Middle East, “the whole bloody Empire was over.” Journalism and fiction might not be so mutually exclusive after all; he might not be expending energy on the one at the expense of the other but, like Virginia, he might vary the side of the pillow as his mood, or as necessity, required. He had given the important news incidentally: he was an artist again.

  A month later, at Hogarth House, where he stayed from Friday to Sunday, October 20 to 22, Morgan was once again “very charming,” Virginia wrote to Roger Fry, her letter a long and warmly confidential one even though she was sorry she had no gossip to share. But she did have news about Morgan. She and Morgan had gone for a walk in Richmond Park on Saturday. It was now almost exactly three years since that evening in November 1919 when they had walked together along the Thames after dinner at Hogarth House and Morgan had confided to her that he was “in trouble with a novel of his own … fingering the keys but only producing discords so far.” Now he was finishing the novel, he told her, though Morgan, as in September at Monk’s House, said little or nothing about it before he “snuggled in” again, and they became engrossed in “very very minute domestic details: the cat, the maid, the cousin, and Miss Partridge of Ashstead.” Virginia gave him a copy of Jacob’s Room, and he left.

  Two days later, on the twenty-fourth, once more at home with his mother, the cat, and the maids, Morgan wrote to her about the book, which he had read immediately and had only just finished. It was “an amazing success,” he told her, and his mind was occupied with “wondering what developments, both of style and form, might come out of it.” He had read it, in other words, as a novelist thinking about the use it might be to him. He was confused on tha
t point, so “of course am reading the book again” to see how she had made the “tremendous achievement” of it work, and what he might learn from it. She had kept readers’—and his—interest in Jacob as a character even though he was absent from the book, present in the thoughts others had of him.

  His praise seemed connected to his work on his own novel and some of the problems with which he been struggling. She had been able to “clean cut away” the difficulties that seemed insuperable to him: “all those Blue Books of the interior and exterior life of the various characters—their spiritual development, income, social positions, etc., etc.,” that he had worried in reading Night and Day “were gaining on you,” the sheer amount of information that added detail to the pages of a novel but did not bring life to them. He had worried earlier in the year that this tendency might be gaining on him, too, that he might be stressing atmosphere at the expense of character, adding color without depth. She, in Jacob’s Room, had found a “general liberation” from convention, and also, it seemed, from compromise: “I don’t yet understand how, with your method, you managed it,” but that was why he was already reading the book again.

  For Virginia had found an answer to at least one issue that had frustrated him as he worked, his impatience with the “tiresomeness and conventionalities of fiction-form.” In Jacob’s Room she had made a leap beyond the conventions, and though sparked by Proust, Morgan had not yet been able really to do so. He was working, but it was in the old vein. It was frustrating, he had written to Goldie in the spring, to be limited to viewing “the action through the mind of one of the characters; and say of the others ‘perhaps they thought’, or at all events adopt their view-point for a moment only.” Proust had done it: his first-person narrator became an omniscient third-person narrator to tell the story of Swann and Odette, after which long sequence the “I” returned. This had not broken the texture of Proust’s embroidered ribbon. But Morgan was concerned that in his lesser hands, the “illusion of life may vanish.” It had happened to others, the creator degenerating into the showman, he told Goldie. Reading Jacob’s Room five months later, he saw that Virginia had managed, in her way, to do what Proust had done and what he might want to do: “pretend” to get inside “all the characters.” That she had done this was the greatest achievement of the book, and “the making of the book … it’s full of beauty, indeed is beautiful.”