The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  Vita asked Leonard for the manuscript of Virginia’s 1931 novel The Waves. Leonard wanted to keep that for himself and instead sent her the manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, coincidentally the novel Woolf had begun just before meeting her.

  * * *

  Tom Eliot was, as Wyndham Lewis saw, an indecisive Prufrock “to the life,” particularly as it related to Bel Esprit and to the Eliot fund that Ottoline Morrell and Virginia Woolf had also started. Woolf coordinated their separate efforts through Richard Aldington and sent “poor Tom” £50 at the end of 1922. She worried that Eliot would refuse it. Instead, he deposited it and the $2,000 he received from the Dial in a special account he set up “as a Trust,” for himself and for Vivien. Solicitations for the fund continued for more than another two years. Tom left Lloyds Bank in the summer of 1925, when Geoffrey Faber, setting up a new publishing house, took over the publishing of the Criterion and appointed Eliot to the board of his new company. Faber and Gwyer, named for his partners Maurice Gwyer and his wife, Lady Alsina Gwyer, was renamed Faber and Faber in 1929. Eliot worked at the company until his death in 1965, at the age of seventy-six.

  Eliot had been grateful to Edmund Wilson for his generous praise of The Waste Land. He would, perhaps, have not been surprised by what Wilson had written privately to his friend John Peale Bishop about the poem, in September 1922, or by Mary Hutchinson’s confidence to Virginia and Leonard Woolf that summer that the poem was “Tom’s autobiography—a melancholy one.” He thought so, too, and wrote to his mother before the poem was published that “he had put so much of his own life into it.” His letter to her does not survive, but a May 1923 letter that Charlotte Eliot wrote to her brother-in-law, also named Tom, does. He had written Charlotte that he did not understand the poem, and in reply, she confessed that she, too, had been puzzled when she first read it. But Tom had written her to explain that it described, at least in part, the loss of “an ideal world” in which he had lived: “Certainly up to the time of his marriage and residence in England,” Charlotte wrote her brother-in-law. “Since then he has had pretty hard times.” She told him about Tom’s financial difficulties and of his three months’ leave from Lloyds Bank and his treatment in Lausanne. Vivien’s continuing illnesses, and his own, were once again, that spring, almost more than he could bear. “Under these circumstances you can easily imagine some of his ideals are shattered.”

  * * *

  Ezra Pound wrote to H. L. Mencken in March 1922 that the “Christian Era” had ended at midnight on October 29, 1921, the night that James Joyce finished Ulysses. The magnitude of Joyce’s achievement was incalculable, but it was as important to Pound that the year “1 p.s.U”—post scriptum Ulysses—had then begun. Seeing The Waste Land in print confirmed for Eliot a similar truth. The poem was “a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style,” he wrote in November 1922. The decisive end to one thing must be the start to something else. He was convinced of this all his life, and in Little Gidding, published in 1941, he put it another way:

  For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

  And next year’s words await another voice.

  It was the question Virginia Woolf had asked Roger Fry—and herself—while reading Proust in 1922: “Well—what remains to be written after that?”

  NOTES

  The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

  Introduction

  “How these writers live in their works”: Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 2, 1920–1924 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978), 163. Future references will be to VW Diary 2.

  “It is after all”: T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, rev. ed., vol. 1, 1898–1922 (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 628. Future references will be to TSE Letters 1 2009.

  “apparently the favourite breeding ground”: Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman, vol. 2, 1912–1922 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 504. Future references will be to VW Letters 2.

  “frosty morning”: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006), 41.

  “‘One must preserve…”: Ibid., 43.

  “Poppy Day”: “Lord Haig’s New Scheme for Ex-Service Men,” Times, October 6, 1921, 7.

  “November 11 shall be a real Remembrance Day,” Ibid.

  Eight million sold: “The Poppies of Flanders,” Times, November 12, 1921, 6.

  “licensing hours”: “London Licensing Hours,” Times, October 3, 1921, 7; and “Licensing Meeting To-Day,” Times, October, 1921, 7.

  prewar “liberties”: “New Drink Hours To-Day,” Times, September 1, 1921, 10.

  1: Virginia Woolf Nears Forty

  “Oh but the cold was too great at Rodmell”: Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 4, 1931–1935 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1982), 4. Future references will be to VW Diary 4.

  Even “a few staggering sentences”: Ibid.

  “Oh its [sic] so lovely on the downs now”: Virginia Woolf, The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 5, 1932–1935 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1982), 141. Future references will be to VW Letters 5.

  “parsimony … odd leaves at the end of Poor Jacob”: VW Diary 2, 155.

  “quite truthfully, the Hogarth Press”: Ibid., 144.

  Paradise Road basement for a print shop: VW Letters 2, 487.

  “I shall think of another novel, I daresay”: VW Diary 2, 142.

  “Will my fingers stand so much scribbling?”: Ibid.

  “I was shivering over the fire”: Ibid., 156.

  “Winter is upon us; fog, frost, every horror”: VW Letters 2, 492.

  “We go to bed under”: VW Diary 2, 143.

  “a north east wind sweeping”: Leonard Woolf, The Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. Frederic Spotts (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 537. Future references will be to LW Letters.

  “one creeps about the house”: VW Letters 2, 492.

  loping her own “delicate” way “a little unevenly”: Diana Gardner, Rodmell Papers: Reminiscences … by a Sussex Neighbor, Bloomsbury Heritage Series #52 (London: Cecil Woolf, 2008), 18.

  “I keep thinking of different ways to manage my scenes”: Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 1, 1915–1919 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 214. Future references will be to VW Diary 1.

  “Tomorrow my reading begins!”: VW Diary 2, 156.

  “Work morn Walk w V aftn”: Leonard Woolf’s pocket diaries are arranged chronologically in Leonard Woolf Papers, SxMs-13/2/R/A, University of Sussex Monk’s House Papers, including SxMs-13/2/R/A/5 (1913); SxMs-13/2/R/A/7 (1915); SxMs-13/2/R/A/14 (1921); and SxMs-13/2/R/A/15 (1922).

  “We should have felt it to be”: Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 156.

  “Its [sic] foul”: VW to Elizabeth Bowen, May 20, 1934, Elizabeth Bowen Collection, HRC, Box 12, Folder 4.

  “V came down for tea” and “Vanessa came dinner”: Leonard Woolf pocket diary, 1922, SxMs-13/2/R/A/15 (1922).

  “settled & unadventurous”: VW Diary 2, 159.

  “less normal”: Ibid.

  “binding”: Ibid.

  “I have seen all the cleverest people”: VW Diary 2, 159.

  “only sixpence a year”: Ibid.

  “Dearest Dolphin”: VW Letters 2, 504.

  “donkey that I am”: VW Diary 2, 159.

  “the sacred morning hours … Phrase tossing”: Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 3, 1925–1930 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1980), 206. Future references will be to
VW Diary 3.

  “the habit of writing thus for my own eye”: VW Diary 1, 266.

  “consists of how many months?”: VW Diary 2, 158.

  “The machinery for seeing friends”: Ibid., 157.

  Talland House “untidy and overrun”: Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 32.

  “I feel time racing like a film at the Cinema.”: VW Diary 2, 158.

  the Times reported: Times, January 5, 1922.

  “Winter sickness”: Times, December 3, 1921, 7.

  “V went concert[.] Could not sleep.”: Leonard Woolf Papers, University of Sussex, SxMs-13/2/R/A/14.

  “plagues”: VW Letters 2, 478.

  “days spent in wearisome headache”: VW Diary 2, 125.

  “What a gap!”: VW Diary 2, 125.

  “Oh what a damned bore!”: VW Letters 2, 494.

  “scribbling away”: Ibid.

  Among the particular symptoms: “New Influenza Outbreak,” Times, January 9, 1922, 10.

  Leonard monitored: Leonard Woolf’s account books are at the University of Sussex, SxMs-13/2/R/A/65.

  “the inexorable Jew”: Clive Bell to Mary Hutchinson, September 15, 1924, Mary Hutchinson Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Box 6, File 6. Future references to the Harry Ransom Center will be abbreviated as HRC. Future references to Clive Bell will be abbreviated as CB, and future references to Mary Hutchinson as MH.

  “an interval in which”: Willa Cather, Not Under Forty (New York: Knopf, 1936), 139.

  “continual nagging”: Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Biography (New York: Free Press, 2006), 250.

  “pronounced my eccentric pulse”: VW Diary 2, 160.

  “best advice”: “The Influenza Epidemic,” Times, January 12, 1922, 11.

  “at a time when many”: Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader: Annotated Edition, ed. Andrew McNeillie (Harcourt, 1986), 70.

  “Nearing the end of the year”: VW Diary 2, 78.

  “K. M. bursts upon the world”: Ibid., 161.

  “in two days [sic] time”: Ibid., 141.

  “it will appear to me sterile acrobatics”: Ibid., 161.

  “We had thought that this world”: Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), 386. Future references will be to Lee.

  the novel was “a lie in the soul”: Ibid., 395.

  “a kind of glittering village”: J. H. Stape, ed., Virginia Woof: Interviews and Recollections (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 20. Future references will be to Stape.

  “the cultured attitude”: Fry to VW, September 4–5, 1921, in S. P. Rosenbaum, ed., The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 37.

  “central heating”: The remark was made by Clemence Dane, quoted in LW Letters, 543.

  “Bloomsburial”: TSE, “The Post-Georgians,” Athenaeum, April 11, 1919, 171.

  “La belle Virginia”: CB to MH, September 11, 1924, Mary Hutchinson Papers, HRC, Box 6, File 6.

  “suddenly felt the quintessence”: Noel Carrington, Carrington: Paintings, Drawings, and Decorations (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1978), 32.

  T. S. Eliot and his wife, Vivien: Eliot’s wife was named Vivienne at birth. She adopted the spelling “Vivien” in her twenties, and during the period covered in this book she signed her letters this way. She later reverted to “Vivienne.” See Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, and the Long-Suppressed Truth About Her Influence on His Genius (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2002), 598.

  “backwards and forwards to each other”: Ibid.

  Bloomsbury standards: TSE to John Hayward, July 7, 1941, The Papers of the Hayward Bequest of T. S. Eliot Material, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge, HB/L/12/1/18. Future references to King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge, will be abbreviated as KCAC.

  “We are at the tea table”: Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 183.

  “speech became the deadliest weapon”: Vanessa Bell, in Stape, 3.

  “her living presence”: Gerald Brenan, in ibid., 45.

  “I see she is very beautiful”: Lady Ottoline Morrell Papers, British Library, Add. MS 88886/4/13, transcript, 51–52, entry for June 19, 1923. Future references to Lady Ottoline Morrell will be abbreviated as OM.

  “O Philosophress of Garsington”: Sassoon to OM, September 3, 1922, Ottoline Morrell Collection, HRC, Box 28, File 4.

  “Yellow Cockatoo”: VW Letters 2, 341.

  “Yellow Bird of Bloomsbury”: Ibid., 348.

  “orchestral concerts”: Gerald Brenan, in Stape, 89.

  “From this distance”: Sassoon to OM, April 6, 1920, OM Papers, HRC, Box 28, File 4.

  “The London intellect”: E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 246.

  “Tenuousness and purity”: LW Letters, 259n3.

  “But the odd thing is”: VW Diary 2, 116.

  “I have made up my mind”: Ibid., 168.

  “I was stricken with the influenza”: VW Letters 2, 498–500.

  “evanescent, piping, elusive”: VW Diary 4, 321.

  “timid, touching, infinitely charming”: VW Diary 3, 193.

  “whimsical & vagulous”: VW Diary 1, 291.

  “vaguely rambling butterfly”: Ibid., 295.

  “the peculiar invalid’s acuteness of emotion”: Conrad to Ada Galsworthy, February 9, 1922, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1927), 2:265.

  “naturally abnormal”: VW Diary 2, 161.

  “I have taken it into my head”: Ibid., 167–68.

  lethargy of an alligator: VW Letters 2, 503.

  “furious, speechless, beyond words indignant”: Ibid., 504.

  “going to make him let me out”: Ibid., 504.

  “a little air, seeing the buses”: VW Diary 2, 169.

  “The cat lets this mouse run”: Ibid., 170.

  “an occasional bite … like dead leaves … what a 12 months”: Ibid., 161.

  “exquisitely on a bed”: CB to Vanessa Bell, March 1, 1922, The Charleston Papers, CHA/1/50/4/8, KCAC. Future references to Vanessa Bell abbreviated as VB.

  “the fire dying out”: VW Diary 2, 167.

  “both very much liked your book”: LW Letters, 262.

  “Peace is rapidly dissolving … Instead of feeling”: VW Diary 1, 217.

  “There’s practically no one”: VW Letters 2, 293.

  “interrupted somewhere on this page”: VW Diary 1, 218.

  “We literary people”: VW Letters 2, 297.

  “His sentences take”: Ibid., 295–96.

  “beneath the surface”: 218.

  “To go on with Eliot”: VW Diary 2, 67.

  “What happens with friendships”: Ibid., 100.

  “our damned self conscious susceptibility”: Ibid., 104.

  “on the strength of one visit”: VW Diary 1, 235.

  “I plunge more than he does”: VW Diary 2, 104.

  2: Eliot in January

  “I suppose you wdn’t come for the 24th?”: VW Letters 2, 483.

  “passed off successfully”: VW Diary 2, 140.

  “why it is cheaper to buy steel bars”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 357.

  “Have you ever been”: Ibid., 546.

  “hoard of fragments”: Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 539.

  “the freedom of mind”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 549.

  “prey to habitual worry and dread of the future”: Ibid., 617.

  “lived through material for a score”: Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, 540.

  “engaged in some obscure & intricate task”: Lewis to Violet Schiff, February 6, 1921, British Library, Schiff Papers, Add MS 52919.

  “Eliot can not be depended on”: Ezra Pound, Pound/The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Marg
aret Anderson: The Little Review Correspondence, eds. Thomas L. Scott and Melvin J. Friedman (New York: New Directions, 1988), 64.

  “chief drawback to my present mode of life”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 557.

  “invalid food for his wretchedly unhealthy wife”: Ibid., 765.

  Eliot published: See T. S. Eliot, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926, eds. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber and Faber, 2014), v-vii; https://muse.jhu.edu/book/32768.

  “a moment’s breathing space”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 556.

  “private worries”: Ibid., 583.

  “her migraines and malaises”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 597.

  “another anxiety as well as a joy”: Ibid., 557.

  “These new and yet old relationships”: Ibid., 568.

  “So I shall not rest”: Ibid.

  “emancipated Londoners … charmingly sophisticated”: Ibid., 105.

  “sleek, tall, attractive … sort of Gioconda smile”: Ibid., 104n2.

  “Vivien’s smell peculiarly feline”: Dial/Scofield Thayer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL 34, Series VII, Box 80, Folder 2078.

  “one sees it in the way”: Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 63.

  “the author of Prufrock”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 104n2.

  “a handsome young United States President”: Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 [1937]), 270.

  “be fully conscious of”: TSE to Philip Mairet, October 31, 1956, T. S. Eliot Collection, HRC, Box 5, File 4.

  “Our marriage was hastened”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 117.

  “The only really surprising thing”: Ibid., 113.

  “a maddening feeling”: Craig R. Whitney, “2 More T. S. Eliot Poems Found amid Hundreds of His Letters,” New York Times, November 2, 1991, 13.

  “flirtation or mild affair”: TSE Letters 1 2009, xix.