The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  In working on the Indian novel before the war, Forster had written himself into a cul-de-sac with the central “incident” in the book. His early draft of the book included largely the same cast of characters as appear in the published novel, and the first scenes are also largely alike, focusing on a small group of characters, some English, including administrators of the Civil Station at Chandrapore, and some Indians. These include Ronny Heaslop; the woman, Adela (at various times called Edith or Janet), who comes from England to decide whether she should marry him; Ronny’s mother, Mrs. Moore; Cyril Fielding, an English teacher; and the Indian doctor Aziz. Adela wants to see “the real India,” and Aziz impulsively suggests they visit the Marabar Caves. The question of the novel is the question of what happens there. Adela claims that Aziz has assaulted her. He is arrested. There is a trial. And at its climax Adela withdraws her charge. She decides that he has not assaulted her, she perhaps imagined it. But then what did happen in the caves? Forster himself did not know, he claimed, even to Goldie, who wrote him immediately after reading the book, in June 1924, to ask why Forster did not say. He was sure Forster must have a good reason and was, for himself, more curious about the reason than about the incident.

  “In the cave it is either a man, or the supernatural, or an illusion,” Forster replied. “And even if I know! My writing mind therefore is a blur here—i.e., I will it to remain a blur, and to be uncertain, as I am of many facts in daily life.” If it were to remain a blur for him, he must ignore his own drafts, where before the war he had made the sexual attraction between Aziz and Adela much more explicit than he made it in the published novel. And here had been his problem, and where he had stopped writing. He could get inside the cave, but he could not get himself out again.

  In Forster’s 1913–14 draft, Adela (still Janet) “looked up in his face” and thought, “How handsome he was, and no doubt his wife was beautiful, for people usually get what they already possess.” In the caves, they “drift into one another’s arms—then apart.” (Here Forster wrote some notes to himself: “Discovers she loves him … Marriage impossible. She—theoretically—immoral: he practically, but believes it is impossible with an Englishwoman.”) In the draft, Aziz “got hold of her other hand and forced her against the wall, he got both of her hands in one of his, and then felt at her breasts.” In the novel, Adela swings wildly—perhaps at air. In the draft, she “wrenched a hand free” and pushes at Aziz’s mouth: “She could not push hard, but it was enough to hurt him.” She runs out of the cave in both the draft and the novel. But only in the draft is it clear what she is running from. In both the draft and the novel, Forster ends the chapter when Adela finds help.

  That is also where he stopped writing, and where he resumed in 1922.

  Forster’s way forward from Proust and from Jacob’s Room might not be to “pretend” to be in any character’s head as easily as he would be in any other. For him the development was to be less inside a character’s head than as the novelist he had the right to be. Virginia had cut away the Blue Books of the interior and exterior life of the various characters. He, too, would cut away and perhaps in the blur find the “general liberation” he had seen Virginia make for herself. He had begun his letter to Mohammed in search of this, and now, as autumn turned to winter, he continued writing in search of a general liberation as the artist he was once again beginning to feel himself to be.

  Chapter 17

  “WHAT MORE IS NECESSARY TO A GREAT POEM?”

  On October 13, 1921, Vivien had written to Scofield Thayer of Tom’s serious breakdown, that he must stop all work and would be going away for three months. One year later, the earliest copies of the first issue of the Criterion began to appear in London, and with them The Waste Land. Tom received his own six copies on Monday, October 16, and wrote to Cobden-Sanderson, his printer, that the magazine lived up to his expectations: “all that I could have desired; it is a model.” The first words of praise of The Waste Land arrived that same day, from Sydney Schiff. The letter is lost, but Tom replied that afternoon, “You could not have used words which would have given me more pleasure or so have persuaded me that the poem may possibly communicate something of what it intends.” Tom shared Schiff’s letter with Vivien, who wrote her own much longer reply to Schiff’s “real and true appreciation” of the poem. “Perhaps not even you can imagine with what emotions I saw The Waste Land go out into the world,” she wrote. “It was a terrible thing, somehow, when the time came at last for it to be published.”

  Vivien’s faith in Tom had been vindicated but she was also perhaps anxious at the poem’s revelation of herself and their marriage. The poem might, as Mary Hutchinson had said, be Tom’s melancholy autobiography, but it was, in that case, Vivien’s history, too. Schiff had “exactly described” her own response to the poem, Vivien wrote, adding, as if to acknowledge by confession what he already knew, “it has become a part of me (or I of it) this last year.” Schiff’s additional compliments about the Criterion she took, along with the poem, as a testament to Tom’s triumph over circumstances she had in part imposed, his work fitted into evenings compromised not only by exhaustion after days at the bank, but by his being forced, she wrote self-deprecatingly, to fill hot water bottles and prepare invalid food for “his wretchedly unhealthy wife.”

  A week later, Tom again left London for the seaside, exhausted as he had been a year before, but in happier circumstances—and with different prospects awaiting him upon his return from what was to be about ten days away, the remainder of his annual leave from Lloyds. Everything about this year’s trip was as markedly different as he could make it. He went to Worthing, this time, on the southern coast, hours in the other direction from Margate, and he went alone, the regimen and limited diet imposed upon Vivien too strict for her to “visit, travel, or stop at hotels,” as he wrote to one friend, offering an excuse for refusing a weekend invitation but, perhaps unintentionally, also an indication of what he was relieved to be escaping from. He gave his address only to their partner Cobden-Sanderson, in case of emergency. He was back in London on November 1.

  Reviews of the Criterion were favorable, including an auspicious notice in the Times Literary Supplement, which was the most important. Worrying about the review of Jacob’s Room that would appear in “the Supt.,” Virginia wrote in her diary that it was the only one she was anxious about—“not that it will be the most intelligent, but it will be the most read & I can’t bear people to see me downed in public.” Eliot was not downed. The Criterion was “that rare thing among English periodicals, a purely literary review … of a quality not inferior to that of any review published here or abroad,” and the Times said of The Waste Land that it seemed to be “a complete expression of this poet’s vision of modern life. We have here range, depth and beautiful expression. What more is necessary to a great poem?… Life is neither hellish nor heavenly; it has a purgatorial quality. And since it is purgatory, deliverance is possible.”

  The downing of Eliot came from an unlikely source, the Books and Bookmen column of the Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury, which on November 16, 1922, reported that The Waste Land, “a long poem by Mr. T. S. Eliot” published in the first issue of a quarterly review called the Criterion, was “attracting considerable attention.” The article did not say anything more of the poem but described the Bel Esprit fund in detail, mixing sensation and error and noting that though friends of Mr. Eliot “endeavoured strenuously to keep the affair a secret … it has come to light (by way of America).” This was strange, given that Pound had published his manifesto in an English periodical eight months before. According to the newspaper report, “Until quite recently Mr. Eliot was earning his livelihood in a London bank,” which was of course false; he was very much still employed there. The newspaper then recounted an “amusing tale” presumably from its American source: that well before Bel Esprit, a sum of £800 was presented to Mr. Eliot by “admirers to persuade him to give himself up for literature.” On that occasion, he had
“accepted the gift calmly and replied, ‘Thank you all very much; I shall make good use of the money, but I like the bank!’” This fabricated event had supposedly occurred two years before, but the poet had “held out” in the bank until the past spring, according to the newspaper, “when he suffered a severe nervous breakdown which necessitated a three months’ leave of absence.” It was then that Bel Esprit “was hatched in secret and carried through, the poet’s wishes not being consulted.” This last phrase was a direct quote from Pound’s article in the New Age.

  But the part about Eliot’s nervous breakdown was correct, even if the newspaper was wrong about when it had occurred. Eliot was outraged, feared “how calamitous these statements may be for me,” and wrote to Richard Aldington and to Pound that it had not come as a surprise that such a story would be published “as I have suspected for some time that something of the sort might happen.” Here, months later, was the fruition of what he had feared when putting the prospectus for the Criterion together: the “great many jackals swarming about waiting for my bones” if it were to fail. Then he had worried about the immense loss of prestige he might suffer. He had been blind, in his worry, to the fact that the jackals might swarm more venomously with the gain in prestige he made when the Criterion—and his own poem—proved successful. He did not say to Pound what was also true: if Pound’s Bel Esprit plan had not been published, he might not be in this situation, ready to pursue a libel action against the newspaper.

  He spent the next two weeks meeting with solicitors and getting legal advice. Eventually he wrote a letter to the Post and Mercury that was published on November 30 and settled the matter without a recourse to the “protracted and immense strain” it would have been to take the matter to court. “The circulation of untrue stories of this kind causes me profound astonishment and annoyance and may also do me considerable harm,” he wrote. There had been no collection or presentation; he had not received any money; he had not left the bank. It was slightly less true that the Bel Esprit plan “referred to by your correspondent is not in existence with my consent or approval,” given that Eliot knew about it and had allowed Pound—and Ottoline Morrell and Virginia Woolf, continuing to pursue the separate Eliot Fellowship Fund they had started in the spring—to proceed with fund-raising while also stating conditions for accepting the money to be raised. These included whether the initial guarantees the plans promised would be renewed, “for my life or for Vivien’s life,” he had written to Pound only the day before the Liverpool article appeared. “If the contributors cannot give such guarantees, then they are people who ought not to be in such an enterprise at all.”

  * * *

  The appearance of The Waste Land in New York was a brilliantly orchestrated occasion. A few weeks before the November Dial was to appear, Seldes wrote to Beatrice Kaufman, the wife of the playwright George S. Kaufman, who worked as a publicist for Liveright, to arrange a meeting. “I want to talk about publicity for T. S. Eliot with you very shortly, and I think that these lofty business matters are always settled at lunch, paid for by the office. Let us go to Child’s some morning or afternoon.”

  The first reader of the poem beyond Eliot’s immediate circle seems to have been Edmund Wilson, then an editor at Vanity Fair and a friend of Seldes’s whom he asked to write a review of the poem to appear in the December Dial along with the announcement of the prize.

  Seldes knew that Wilson would be sympathetic to Eliot, and knew, too, that Wilson had a great deal in common with the poet. In the winter of 1922, Wilson had written in his notebook, “I sometimes feel as if all the tires of my mind were deflated and my intellectual wheels were running rackingly and joltingly on their rims,” an echo of Tom’s poem much like Ottoline Morrell’s private vision recorded in her diary. Seven years Eliot’s junior, Wilson was, like him, an impecunious journalist who needed every assignment, and he recognized himself in the poem, just as he had seen his plight in Pound’s Bel Esprit manifesto: he was working at a magazine as an editor rather than writing full-time and living with a roommate in a cheap railroad apartment on Lexington Avenue, above a furrier’s loft, that smelled like wet cats. His enthusiasm for Eliot’s earlier work—and the announcement of Bel Esprit—had prepared him for what he would discover in The Waste Land, and after getting it from Seldes, he began to read it immediately, sitting on the upper deck of a Fifth Avenue bus, so engrossed in it he felt “bowled over,” his own “Unreal City,” its crowds and its noise, all around him as he read.

  Wilson wrote immediately to the poet John Peale Bishop that he was “much excited” about the poem. “It will give you a thrill, I think.” Though he had read the poem two or three times in quick succession, and too cursorily, he told Bishop, he saw that it was Eliot’s masterpiece, and something more—“nothing more or less than a most distressingly moving account of Eliot’s own agonized state of mind during the years which preceded his nervous breakdown.” Wilson knew Eliot’s previous poems, and they had corresponded only in Wilson’s capacity as an editor at Vanity Fair. But he saw in The Waste Land just what Mary Hutchinson had, and just what Eliot had been anxious others would see in it: Tom’s melancholy autobiography, and a little bit of his own.

  “Never have the sufferings of a sensitive man in the modern city chained to some work he hates and crucified on the vulgarity of his surroundings been so vividly set forth,” Wilson wrote to Bishop. “It is certainly a cry de profundis if ever there was one—almost the cry of a man on the verge of insanity.” In fact Eliot’s breakdown prefigured Wilson’s own stay in a sanitarium later in the 1920s. The review Wilson published in the December Dial was laudatory but contained no reference to Eliot’s own agonized state.

  The book columnist for the New-York Tribune, Burton Rascoe, reviewed the poem on November 5, after it appeared in the Dial. Rascoe was a friend of Wilson’s and also of Gilbert Seldes. Wilson often complained that Rascoe relied too much on his opinions for his columns (he also complained that Rascoe frequently misquoted him). Rascoe called The Waste Land “perhaps the finest poem of this generation,” and echoed Wilson’s private comments for public consumption: “it gives voice to the universal despair or resignation arising from the spiritual and economic consequences of the war, the cross purposes of modern civilization … and the breakdown of all great directive purposes which give joy and zest to the business of living.” Four of the most influential of the reviews that appeared—Wilson’s in the Dial and Rascoe’s in the Tribune; and two more, by Seldes himself, in the Nation, and Conrad Aiken’s in the New Republic—were all by men who knew of Eliot’s private drama. None mentioned it, and Eliot’s despair became, in the reviews, a universal one.

  * * *

  Eliot, in January, could hardly have anticipated the success that November and December would bring. Liveright’s fear that The Waste Land was too short to make a book on its own would soon prove unfounded, and Quinn, too, had been wrong in cautioning Eliot in July that The Waste Land might have only a very small, select audience. One of the few people who was not pleased was Scofield Thayer. When the November issue of the Dial appeared, a week or so after the Criterion, The Waste Land had been given the “place of honor,” appearing first, a decision Seldes and Watson made without telling Thayer, who when he saw the issue in Vienna was very angry. In fact, the worst review of The Waste Land was Thayer’s.

  Thayer wrote to Seldes from Vienna with his detailed postmortem and, as usual, included some praise as well as criticism that “drew blood.” The November issue was a disappointment to him, and nothing was more disappointing than The Waste Land. He thought it “quite beyond words” that Yeats’s The Player Queen had been placed “anywhere other than at the beginning of the number,” and he complained about Yeats’s loss of eminence and that the play had been set in type that was far too small. Thayer’s letters went on for pages, noting every typographical error, and he sent so many in succession about each issue, repeating points made earlier, that Seldes could defend himself adequately only by res
ponding “paragraph by paragraph,” apologizing on one occasion “if in answering two, i.e., letters, I seem to retrace my steps.”

  Seldes justified the placement of The Waste Land by saying that the Dial frequently published Yeats and had never published a poem by Eliot before. He had also given Eliot pride of place to set the tone for the following issue, in which the Dial Prize would be announced. Almost incidentally he added of the poem, “in our opinion it was a very fine piece of work,” leaving it diplomatically unclear to whom his royal we referred.

  Thayer had not warmed to the poem as Watson had on rereading it. He did not see himself reflected in the “cry de profundis,” as Wilson had or, if he did, he disliked the poem even more. Publicly he wrote in extravagant praise of it in the required editor’s note announcing the $2,000 prize in the December issue. But writing privately to Alyse Gregory, another Dial editor whom he hoped to persuade to take Seldes’s place as managing editor, he described his vision of what they should be doing, and what he hoped she would agree with him they must do: “as to the literary contents too I feel forced to refrain in the future from publishing such matter as the silly cantos of Ezra Pound and as the very disappointing ‘Waste Land’ and I should like to secure for The Dial the work of such recognised American authors as Edith Wharton.”