The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  But whatever offense Thayer took in Seldes’s insubordination about giving Eliot’s poem the “place of honor” ought to have been subsumed by his pleasure in the success of the publicity campaign Seldes engineered. What Thayer had lost of face he was making up in circulation. The November and December issues of the Dial, the former with the poem and the latter with the announcement of the prize, sold better than any in the magazine’s history, almost 50 percent more at newsstands than an average issue, reaching over 4,500 in November, and even more for December, over 6,200 copies. Subscriptions also rose at the end of 1922, to more than 6,300 at year’s end, and by another thousand, to 7,440, by February 1923, much of it, if not all, directly accountable to the expectations created by publishing The Waste Land rather than Edith Wharton.

  As the Dial soon touted to potential advertisers, it had a “rapidly increasing circulation” among “wealthy, cultured, intelligent people,” and its “typographical perfection” would be an ideal showcase for prestigious brands. By February 1923, Colgate and Company, Steinway and Sons, American Express, and the Underwood Typewriter Company had all come aboard.

  * * *

  Liveright’s edition sold as well as the Dial, and his first edition of one thousand copies sold quickly enough that he ordered another printing. On Christmas Eve, a Sunday, a large photograph of Eliot appeared on the front page of the New-York Tribune’s Book News and Reviews section, alongside Burton Rascoe’s In Retrospect on the literary year. The caption mentioned the Dial Prize of $2,000 and said of The Waste Land, it is “generally considered the outstanding poem of the year.”

  Liveright advertised The Waste Land in the Tribune as “probably the most discussed poem that has been written since Byron’s Don Juan.” He quoted Clive Bell, “the distinguished English writer,” who had published an article in the New Republic calling Eliot “the most considerable poet writing in English,” though Liveright, of course, did not know that Bell’s private proclamations, particularly to Mary Hutchinson, were often more unkind.

  Liveright also took a Christmas advertisement in the New York Times Book Review that ran under the headline “Between Ourselves” and included chatty squibs about a dozen of his autumn books. About The Waste Land he wrote: “The Dial’s annual award of $2000.00 has been given this year to T. S. Eliot, the American poet now living in England. The contract for The Waste Land, Mr Eliot’s longest and most significant poem, which we have just published, was signed in Paris on New Year’s Eve and was witnessed by Ezra Pound and James Joyce. A good time was had by one and all—even by the publisher.”

  The story read well, but there was not a word of truth in it.

  * * *

  The end of 1922 arrived for Eliot in January 1923, when copies of Liveright’s edition reached him in London. He sent one to Vivien, away in Eastbourne, and she wrote her “Dearest darling Wing,” on January 11, “I think Waste Land book very nice.” The same day Tom wrote to Edmund Wilson, thanking him for his “more than generous appreciation” of the poem in the Dial. “I think you have understood it remarkably well, perhaps a little over-understood it! I mean read more into it than it contains here and there. I am very sensible of its fundamental weaknesses, and whatever I do next will be, at least, very different; I feel that it [is] merely a kind of consummation of my past work, not the initiation of something new, and it will take me all my courage and persistence, and perhaps a long time, to do something better. But ‘something’ must be better. The Waste Land does not leave me well satisfied.”

  Wilson had been generous in his appreciation of The Waste Land, but he wrote harshly of Ezra Pound, whom he called an “imitator” of Eliot and whose “extremely ill-focused” recent Cantos presented, in contrast to The Waste Land, “a bewildering mosaic with no central emotion to provide a key.” In his letter, Tom reminded Wilson of his “vast indebtedness” to Pound. He told Wilson without false modesty that it was plain to him that “there are unquestionably respects in which he is far more a master than I am.” For Tom was not always the schoolmaster that he seemed to play when he was with Virginia Woolf. As he wrote later to Pound, “I always envied James Joyce his apparent conviction of the importance of his own work. I have never felt so convinced as he appeared to be. Often very doubtful.”

  Perhaps it was in writing to Wilson he got the idea for the inscription in the copy he gave to Pound in January 1923: “For E. P./Miglior Fabbro,” the better craftsman.

  EPILOGUE

  Forster continued through 1923 to work on his novel. Late in the year, he gave it the title A Passage to India, taken from a poem by Walt Whitman. On the last day of 1923, on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday, he wrote again in his diary about Mohammed. “Good bye Mohammed. I meant to review the year, but my eyes have gone fut. I can only say ‘Good bye—I saw you and kissed you last year.’” Three weeks later, on January 21, 1924, he recorded a different farewell: he had finished A Passage to India that day. Forster dedicated the novel to Masood, “and to the seventeen years of our friendship,” but writing in his diary, he paid private tribute to another friend by using Mohammed’s pencil to “mark the fact” that the novel was done. All of the entries in the hundreds of pages of his diary, from 1909 to 1967, are written in various inks. Except that one.

  Morgan also wrote to Leonard Woolf, at whose urging, almost two years before, he had looked at his Indian fragment “with a view to continuing it.” He paid tribute, now, to the Woolves, and was as touchingly dependent on Leonard’s advice as ever.

  “I have this moment written the last words of my novel and who but Virginia and yourself should be told about it first?” There would be revisions, and “of course there’s the typing.… Do you know a typist—cheap?… It would save time if I could give out say 20,000 words.”

  Virginia wrote in her diary after reading Morgan’s letter, “He is moved, as I am always on these occasions.”

  * * *

  A Passage to India was published by Edward Arnold on June 4, 1924, and in the United States by Harcourt Brace in August. By then it had been fourteen years since the publication of Howards End. One reviewer admitted to his worry that Howards End “was to be Forster’s end.” Another, praising the “admirable self-restraint” by which Forster “limited his output,” regretted the gap meant that the public was now not familiar enough with his style to appreciate that “no modern writer is so distinctive in all his work.” The book received nearly unanimous praise, including a not completely unbiased review by Leonard Woolf in the Nation and Athenaeum: “A little while ago I wrote in these columns that the book of this publishing season to which I looked forward most eagerly was Mr. E. M. Forster’s new novel, A Passage to India. And now it has appeared and I have read it and—Well, there are few things more exciting than to look forward to the publication of a new book, by a living writer, to read it, and to find one’s hopes realized.” The book quickly became the biggest success of Forster’s career, and by the end of 1924 had sold seventeen thousand copies in England and more than fifty-four thousand in the United States. Forster had an idea about why A Passage to India was his first novel to sell at all well in America. “A few years ago I wrote a book which dealt in part with the difficulties of the English in India,” he wrote in a 1926 essay. “Feeling that they would have had no difficulties in India themselves, the Americans read the book freely. The more they read it the better it made them feel, and a cheque to the author was the result.”

  A Passage to India was Forster’s last novel, though he published many works of nonfiction before his death in 1970 at ninety-one.

  * * *

  By the end of 1922, Lawrence was no longer so “scrubby poor” as he had been. His income for the year was $5,439.67, and he owed the U. S. government $70 in taxes. But his Christmas idyll at Del Monte Ranch did not last long, and he was not able to “pitch” a novel in Taos as he had done in Australia. He went to Mexico in 1923 and traveled across America that year, to Texas, New Orleans, Washington, DC, and then on to New
York City, Buffalo, and Los Angeles. He and Frieda spent part of July and August 1923 at a cottage in New Jersey that Thomas and Adele Seltzer rented for the two couples, and which the publisher renamed “Birkendele,” in honor of the character Rupert Birkin in Women in Love. It was here, in the hills above Morris Plains, that Lawrence corrected the proofs of Kangaroo and other books, a collection of poems, and the translations of Giovanni Verga he had begun on his ocean voyage to Ceylon, which Seltzer planned to publish in the autumn. The house was as inaccessible and isolated as Del Monte Ranch, and as Wyewurk, in Thirroul, and Fontana Vecchia, in Taormina, had also been: “very quiet, pretty, peaceful, quite alone.… A horse and buggy: 4 miles from station.” Seltzer and his wife commuted to New York and returned in the evenings, an arrangement that worked well enough, perhaps because it was not intended to last. Frieda returned to England without Lawrence in early August 1923, and he sailed shortly afterward. He planned to visit his sisters in the Midlands just after Christmas. But it was “hateful here” in England, he wrote to Mabel, who had married Tony that year. “It’s all the dead hand of the past, over here, infinitely heavy.” He postponed his visit and stayed in Nottinghamshire only a few days to mark the new year. The rest of the winter he and Frieda spent traveling in Europe, before returning to Taos in the spring.

  While in Baden-Baden, he read Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon, the book of essays on ancient and modern Egypt that the Hogarth Press published in 1923. Forster had sent it to him, and when Lawrence wrote to thank Forster for the book, he told him it seemed as “sad as ever,” the call of a lost soul to a departed world of glory. After his years of wandering, Lawrence saw a camaraderie with Forster that he had not felt before, though he thought of himself as more eager to turn toward the future than Forster. “To me you are the last Englishman,” Lawrence wrote him. “And I am the one after that.”

  Kangaroo received respectful reviews and some very high praise, in both the United States and England, but as a novel apparently “about” Australia, it had perhaps less appeal than it might have if it had had “so much of the letter S of sex” in it, particularly because Judge Simpson’s exoneration of Seltzer was not a New York court’s final word on Women in Love. In February 1923, Judge John Ford, of the New York State Supreme Court—outraged that Lawrence’s “loathsome” novel had been recommended to his daughter by a clerk at a lending library—began an attack that, coordinated with John Sumner, was as widely covered in the newspapers as the 1922 seizure and trial had been. Seltzer was arrested again, in July 1923, and indicted by a grand jury for publishing “unclean” books, though the grand jury did not find Women in Love objectionable, and Lawrence was once again exonerated. The publication of Kangaroo shortly afterward had Lawrence’s good reputation to capitalize on, but this, unsurprisingly, led to less sensational sales than Women in Love had achieved. Few reviewers appreciated the autobiographical experiment that the novel marked for Lawrence, who wrote in Kangaroo as honestly of himself and his wife as he had written of his family life and youth in Sons and Lovers.

  Lawrence died in March 1930, in France, of tuberculosis. He was forty-four. A few weeks later, Forster gave a talk about Lawrence on the BBC. He ranged widely and generously over the work of a writer he called “one of the glories of our twentieth-century literature.” But at the time of his death, Lawrence had two publics, Forster said, “neither of them quite satisfactory.” The general public thought him “improper and scarcely read him at all.” This was the Lawrence who, book after book, had been in trouble with the law—The Rainbow, Women in Love, and, finally, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, so sensational that Lawrence published it privately, which did not prevent its becoming, long before it could be published legally in the United States and in England, his most famous, and lucrative, book. By contrast, Lawrence’s “special public” read him in too narrow and fanatical a way, Forster thought. But the Lawrence with whom Forster himself felt kinship had been forgotten, and however flawed his work, the “pages and chapters of splendour” that he had written when “the whole fabric of his mind catches fire” ought to be remembered. The “Nightmare” chapter of Kangaroo was one of the splendors and was, Forster said, “the most heart-rending account of non-fighting that has ever been written.” This was Forster’s way of affirming what he, too, had always known. Lawrence was wear and tear, and had always been fighting, in his life and in his art.

  * * *

  “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” was published in the July 1923 issue of the Dial, in the same issue as a review of Jacob’s Room by David Garnett that largely repeated the praise he had offered to Woolf in his October letter, though without any of the doubts about The Waste Land that he shared with her. The story was also published without any of the difficulties that Eliot and Thayer had experienced in their negotiations. Raymond Mortimer, a young graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, whom Woolf met through Ottoline Morrell, was working unofficially as a London agent for Thayer after Eliot became editor of the Criterion. He wrote Thayer in February 1923 that he had “the promise of a story from Virginia Woolf,” a story, she had suggested to him, “which she does not want to print here (probably because she has done a portrait of some one in it, at least that is my guess).” This may have been a playful insinuation by Woolf that her protagonist was based on Morrell, to whom Woolf had written in the summer of 1922 that she had finished “2 chapters of my Garsington novel, you’ll be glad to hear.” This perhaps had been more flattery than truth, but Mortimer’s interest was piqued by Woolf’s hint, and he was gratified by the story he received from her a few weeks later. Mortimer sent it to Thayer in Vienna with a note, “I enclose Mrs. Woolf’s story (very badly typed, as she said).… I think it is most exquisite, & hope you will like it. I am coming to think her the best writer we have.”

  Thayer agreed “as to the exquisiteness of Mrs. Woolf’s story” and forwarded it to the New York office to calculate her payment. This came to $60. Woolf’s handwritten note, dated May 21, 1923, acknowledging “The Dials [sic] cheque received today,” is among the Dial Papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library.

  Woolf worked on Mrs. Dalloway for more than two years. She varied the side of her pillow so successfully that, just before Christmas 1924, she was “putting on a spurt” so that the novel could be copied in time for Leonard to read at Monk’s House, and so that she could then “deliver the final blows” to her book on reading. The Hogarth Press published The Common Reader at the end of April 1925, and Mrs. Dalloway three weeks later, on May 14, 1925. At first her reading book was little read—a few days after publication she wrote in her diary, “so far I have not heard a word about it, private or public: it is as if one tossed a stone into a pond, & the waters closed without a ripple.” Though she saw her disappointment about it “floating like an old bottle in my wake,” she was on to “fresh adventures.” She hoped the same thing would not happen to Mrs. Dalloway. It didn’t.

  Woolf was gratified by the nearly universally ecstatic reviews the novel received but wrote in her diary, “The only judgment on Mrs. D. I await with trepidation (but thats [sic] too strong a word) is Morgan’s.” A few days later, he visited. “Well, Morgan admires,” she wrote. “This is a weight off my mind.” Though “sparing of words,” he told her it was better than Jacob’s Room and kissed her hand. As he left he told her he was “awfully pleased, very happy (or words to that effect) about it.”

  Mrs. Dalloway soon began to sell, and, more surprisingly to her, so did The Common Reader, in both England and the United States, where both books were published by Harcourt Brace. If sales kept up, “We are going to build a W. C. and a bathroom at Rodmell,” she wrote a friend.

  Woolf read Proust again as she was finishing Mrs. Dalloway. “I wonder if this time I have achieved something?” she wrote in her diary shortly before her novel was published. “Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now.” Proust was unlike any other writer in his combination of “the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He
searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & and as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom,” the last words she had once used to try to encompass Morgan’s unique characteristics, too. She had already begun to think of her next novel, To the Lighthouse, and, she wrote, “he will I suppose both influence me & make me out of temper with every sentence of my own.” Once again, the question was what remained to be written after Proust. Mrs. Dalloway had been one answer. To the Lighthouse, “to have father’s character done complete in it; & mothers [sic]; & St Ives; & childhood” was perhaps another. The title she gave to the brief but central section of the novel, published in 1927, has an echo of Proust. Woolf called it “Time Passes.”

  * * *

  Virginia Woolf committed suicide on March 28, 1941. She was fifty-nine. She left instructions that Leonard should choose one of her manuscripts as a gift for Vita Sackville-West, whom she had met just before Christmas 1922, at a dinner party Clive arranged. Vita was a “lovely gifted aristocrat,” Virginia wrote in her diary the next day, but “Not much to my severer taste … florid, moustached, parakeet colored, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist.” A decade younger than Virginia, she was also too prolific, wrote too quickly, published too much—five books of poetry and three novels between 1909 and 1922. She “knows everyone—But could I ever know her?” Vita invited Virginia to dinner soon afterward, and it turned out she could. Their deep romantic attachment became a lifelong friendship, the singular significance of which Virginia underscored with the legacy she gave uniquely to Vita.