The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  “sort of apologia”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 107.

  “the whole hog”: Ibid., 110.

  “As to the exact sum”: Ibid., 112.

  “No use blinking the fact”: TWL Facsimile, xviii.

  “Eliot is worth saving”: John Quinn to Ezra Pound, July 12, 1922, John Quinn papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Letterbook vol. 25, 965.

  Bel Esprit: Ezra Pound, “Credit and the Fine Arts: A Practical Application,” New Age, March 30, 1922, 284–85.

  “I had not intended … complete liberty”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 650.

  “These things should be done privately … For Gawd’s sake”: John Quinn to Ezra Pound, April 28, 1922, John Quinn papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Microfilm ZL-355, Reel 31.

  6: “Without a Novel & With No Power to Write One”

  “part of my trouble”: EMF to FB, 15-10-19, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/38/1, vols. 34/1-2.

  “A nice state of affairs”: EMF to SRM, 10-3-22, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/360/1.

  “I felt no enthusiasm”: VW Diary 2, 172.

  “That was obvious”: Ibid.

  “I suppose I value”: VW Diary 1, 308.

  “told us as much … inanition … To come back … having lost your Rajah”: VW Diary 2, 171.

  “devilish, shrewd, psychological pounces”: Vita Sackville-West to Harold Nicolson, November 20, 1926, quoted in Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1973]), 212.

  “sparrows that fly about”: VW Diary 2, 171.

  “Ransack the language”: Virginia Woolf, Orlando, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 45.

  “The middle age of buggers”: VW Diary 2, 171.

  “Off he went”: Ibid., 172.

  “It was such a happiness”: EMF to SRM, 10-3-22, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/360/1.

  “so ridiculously inane”: DHL Letters 2, 293.

  Sassoon wrote in diary: Siegfried Sassoon Diaries, 1920–1922, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 126.

  “I think we shall meet”: Forster, Alexandria, 345.

  The scrawl of el Adl’s signature: The letter is in EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/11.

  commonplace book he had begun during the war: EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF 16/13/A.

  “I have transcribed”: Forster, Journals and Diaries, 2:75.

  “I plunged into Proust”: EMF to SRM, 10-3-22, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/360/1.

  “it’s great stuff”: Sutton, Pound, Thayer, Watson, and the Dial, 74.

  “how cleverly Proust”: Forster, Journals and Diaries, 2:65.

  “Everyone is reading Proust”: VW Letters 2, 499. The editors transcribe Woolf on Proust, “I’m shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again.” I have used the more idiosyncratic punctuation of the letter, in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, m.b. (Woolf).

  “Plymouth Sound”: Ibid.

  “entering an enchanted forest”: Marcel Proust, Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, ed. Philip Kolb, trans. Ralph Manheim, vol. 4, 1918–1922 (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 215n5.

  “There have always been aunts”: E. M. Forster, “Uncle Willie,” written for the Memoir Club and provisionally dated to the period just after Forster’s return from India in 1922. Published as Appendix B in Forster, Longest Journey, 354.

  “I suppose that ours is a female house”: E. M. Forster, Howards End, ed. David Lodge (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 37.

  Proust’s “favorite formulas”: Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Vintage Books, 1961 [1952]), 385.

  “introspective and morbid … a million words … adventure”: E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 202–3.

  “a sad person”: EMF to GHL, 27-4-22, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/333.

  “hardish line”: EMF to SRM, 15-4-22, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/360/1.

  Florence Barger … bored him, “feeble … inferior”: Forster, Journals and Diaries, 2:66.

  “had totally disappeared from every one’s view”: EMF to Alice Clara Foster, undated, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/ACF I, 1922–24.

  “and it was the real thing”: T. E. Lawrence Correspondence with E. M. Forster and F. L. Lucas, ed. Jeremy and Nicole Wilson (Fordingbridge, UK: Castle Hill Press, 2010), 179. Forster recounted this incident in his contribution to T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, ed. A. W. Lawrence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 282–86.

  “I want to talk over”: EMF to Leonard Woolf, March 25, 1922, Henry W. and Albert Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Berg Collection, m.b. (Woolf).

  Leonard offered Morgan two pieces of advice: Forster, Journals and Diaries, 2:66.

  7: “The Usual Fabulous Zest”

  “Summer time”: VW Diary 2, 174.

  “27 days of bitter wind”: Ibid., 175.

  “my Reading book”: Ibid., 120.

  “up to the fire … four hundred pages … between tea … perhaps with labour … career”: Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, vol. 3, 1919–1924 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 474. Future references will be to VW Essays 3.

  “lewd”: VW Diary 2, 151.

  “Milton is alive”: VW Essays 3, 477.

  “new book by Mr Keats”: Ibid., 479.

  In the dozens of reviews: The Woolf articles to which I refer are collected in VW Essays 3.

  “But if the sense”: Ibid., 138.

  “the usual fabulous zest”: VW Diary 2, 172.

  “In England at the present moment”: VW Essays 3, 475.

  “a little party”: Ibid., 494.

  “who will marry who”: Ibid.

  “Mrs Dalloway was so-and-so”: Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, ed. Lorna Sage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 38.

  “for a season”: Ibid., 37.

  “a tall slight woman”: Ibid., 39.

  “Well, that’s over”: Ibid., 84.

  “was quite nice”: Ibid., 88.

  “It’s a pity to be intimate”: Ibid., 89.

  “And the Dalloways”: Lytton Strachey, The Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. Paul Levy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 270.

  “such a harlequinade”: VW Diary 2, 17.

  “the more alterations”: VW Letters 2, 401.

  “I have put it in”: Ibid., 404.

  “voluntarily … extremely good”: VW Diary 2, 65.

  “so few of the gifts”: VW Letters 1, 383.

  “my people are puppets”: VW Diary 2, 186.

  “on his mother’s side … Mrs Dalloway confessed”: VW Essays 3, 494.

  “most sincere … she had an Englishwoman’s … fetch her husband”: Ibid., 495.

  “very interesting, & beautiful”: VW Diary 2, 186.

  “Come” … It was time: VW Essays 3, 495.

  “So what does it matter”: VW Diary 2, 170.

  “some queer individuality … I’m to write”: Ibid., 168.

  “almost impenetrably overgrown”: McNeillie note, VW Essays 3, 473.

  “solid, living, flesh-and-blood”: VW Essays 3, 388.

  “ticklish … When one wants … I can never tell … tearing me up … have a fling”: VW Letters 2, 521.

  “little creatures”: VW Diary 2, 161.

  “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street”: A typescript of the story with Woolf’s change of “silk” to “gloves” is in the Berg Collection, m.b. (Woolf) [Mrs. Dalloway Stories], “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” New York Public Library. The story is printed in Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick, 2nd ed. (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 152–59.

  Manchester Guardian: “The Silence in Manchester,” Manchester Guardian, November 12, 1919, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2009/nov/12/remembra
nce-archive-manchester-1919.

  “Gloves have never been quite so reliable”: Woolf, Complete Shorter Fiction, 158–59.

  “one has more pleasure”: VW Diary 2, 45.

  “walked with V” and other LW entries: LW pocket diaries, Leonard Woolf Papers, University of Sussex.

  “Sunshine and Happiness”: “Sunshine and Happiness,” Times, May 9, 1922, 7.

  deaths in England and Wales: “Influenza Epidemic Figures,” Times, June 16, 1922, 7.

  “my heart has gone rather queer”: VW Letters 2, 525.

  “3 I could ill spare”: Ibid., 532.

  “goes on like”: Ibid.

  “She must rejoice”: LW Letters, 199.

  “Somehow, one can’t take Richmond”: VW Diary 1, 29.

  “Omnibuses joined motor cars”: Virginia Woolf, Complete Shorter Fiction, 155.

  “I love walking”: Ibid., 153.

  “a strip of pavement … some way further”: VW Diary 2, 73.

  “unused hour fresh”: Virginia Woolf, Complete Shorter Fiction, 152.

  “seemed a fine fellow … there is nothing”: Ibid.

  “sweating out streams … Proust’s fat volume … to sink myself … Proust so titillates”: VW Letters 2, 525.

  “No ‘method’ is justified”: Ezra Pound, Paris Letter, Dial, March 1922, 403.

  “I see it is necessary”: VW Letters 2, 519.

  “if it goes on raining”: Ibid., 521.

  “Now Mr Joyce”: Ibid., 522.

  “unutterable boredom … I can’t see what he’s after”: VW Letters 2, 167.

  “The life of a man”: VW Diary 2, 68.

  “claims to be a writer … concealed vanity”: Ibid., 67.

  “I should have gone under”: Ibid.

  “is probably being better done by Mr Joyce”: Ibid., 69.

  “Then I began to wonder”: Ibid.

  “in the opinion of”: Ibid., 115n22.

  “women can’t paint, women can’t write”: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Mark Hussey (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005), 51.

  “First there’s a dog”: VW Letters 2, 234.

  “interesting as an experiment”: Ibid.

  “These five years”: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 61.

  8: “English in the Teeth of All the World”

  would never be able to work there: Keith Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 121.

  “for a bit, thank God”: DHL Letters 4, 157.

  “the people are so”: Ibid., 103.

  Their steward came at seven a.m.: Ibid., 205.

  “yelling crowd … handsome Turks … hateful Christians … one can easily throw”: Ibid., 211.

  “lost Paradise”: Ibid.

  “on thorns, can’t settle”: Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works, 120.

  Ceylon: Composite 2, 117.

  repulsed by the thought of America: DHL Letters 4, 207.

  large bungalow: Composite 2, 118.

  “curled up”: Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works, 121.

  “affected consciousness”: Composite 2, 118.

  “good-looking”: Ibid., 121.

  “whose flow of blood”: Ibid., 118.

  “colourful” … monkeys … elephants: Ibid.

  “need never tread … strange, pulsating”: Ibid., 127.

  “sad and forlorn … the butt … being a prince … periphery … most living clue … vital spark”: Ibid., 121.

  “English in the teeth of all the world”: Ibid., 131.

  “Heaven knows why … I think Frieda”: Ibid.

  “bush all around” … A land to lose oneself: DHL Letters 4, 266.

  “raw hole”: Composite 2, 131.

  gave no hint: Ibid., 473–74n31.

  “unhewn”: Ibid., 136.

  Lawrence of Arabia: Ibid.

  “Why had he come?”: D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1994]), 13.

  “but—but—BUT”: Composite 2, 135.

  “an outsider … off the map”: D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 117–18.

  “to be one step removed”: Lawrence, Kangaroo, 256.

  “Sydney town”: DHL Letters 4, 249.

  Meat “is so cheap”: Ibid., 256.

  “you get huge joints”: Ibid., 266.

  the 1921 census: Joseph Davis, D. H. Lawrence at Thirroul (Sydney, Australia: W. Collins, 1989), 38.

  “Thirroul’s Gay Arena”: Ibid., 250n74.

  “under the brooding”: Ibid., 24.

  “the men here are mostly”: Ibid., 44.

  “I feel awfully foreign”: DHL Letters 4, 253.

  “very discontented”: Composite 2, 142.

  Australian gentry: Ibid.

  “indescribably weary and dreary … so many forlorn”: Lawrence, Kangaroo, 26.

  The to-let advertisements: Davis, Lawrence at Thirroul, 27, 32.

  The “holiday cottage”: Ibid., 18.

  “only we are on the brink”: DHL Letters 4, 263.

  “morose-looking fellow”: Davis, Lawrence at Thirroul, 38.

  “ignored the normal give-and-take”: Robert Darroch, “The Town That Doesn’t Want to Be Famous,” Australian Magazine, Christmas 1976, 31–33.

  preternaturally curious: Davis, Lawrence at Thirroul, 38.

  “It doesn’t pay”: Ibid.

  the estate agent: Composite 2, 144.

  muse: DHL Letters 4, 243.

  “Idle Here” … “Wyewurk” … “Wyewurrie”: Davis, Lawrence at Thirroul, 18.

  “‘Why work’”: Ibid., 19.

  “very seaey water”: DHL Letters 4, 271.

  “You are so bad-tempered”: Lawrence, Kangaroo, 26. I have drawn some details of the Lawrences’ lives in Australia from this autobiographical novel. As Lawrence’s biographer David Ellis notes, “In almost all respects that matter, Harriet and Richard Somers ‘are’ Frieda and Lawrence.” See David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43.

  “boomingly crashingly noisy”: DHL Letters 4, 271.

  “Fritzies, most likely”: Lawrence, Kangaroo, 8.

  “pure Teutonic consciousness”: Ibid., 238.

  “I feel I have packed”: Frieda Lawrence to Anna Jenkins, Papers associated with D. H. Lawrence collected by W. Forster, University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, For L 1/3/4/1.

  “housewifes”: DHL Letters 4, 266.

  “all ourselves”: Ibid.

  “frightened by the voices within”: Margaret Barbalet, Steel Beach (Ringwood, Australia: Penguin Books Australia, 1988), 13. The part of Barbalet’s novel about the Lawrences in Australia is based on her research.

  “the last of my serious English novels”: DHL Letters 4, 92.

  “strange stimulus … living company … Especially fir-trees”: Ibid., 25.

  “almost motionless”: Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, p. 324.

  “little travel book”: Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works, 109.

  “my interim”: DHL Letters 4, 25.

  “The novels and poems”: D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 65.

  “appear to have passed their prime”: John Middleton Murry, quoted in Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph in Exile, 1912–1922, 684.

  quickly, often in a month or less: DHL Letters 4, 28.

  “pitched”: Ibid., 258.

  “It was winter, the end of May … that air of owning”: Lawrence, Kangaroo, 7.

  “One was … Her companion”: Ibid.

  “suddenly writing again”: DHL Letters 4, 255.

  “when the sun is very warm”: Ibid., 256.

  “the days slipped by like dreams”: Frieda Lawrenc
e, “Not I, But the Wind…” (Santa Fe, NM: Rydal Press, 1934), 119.

  “keeps on at the rate … rum sort”: DHL Letters 4, 257.

  “a weird thing”: Ibid., 265.

  “weird unawakened country”: Ibid., 266.

  “has written his head off”: Frieda Lawrence to Anna Jenkins, Papers associated with D. H. Lawrence collected by W. Forster, University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, For L 1/3/4/1.

  “the Lord alone”: DHL Letters 4, 267.

  “Richard’s hand was almost drawn”: Lawrence, Kangaroo, 136.

  At least thirty-five hundred words a day: Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 39.

  “Mr Dionysos and Mr Hermes”: Lawrence, Kangaroo, 173.

  “a determined little devil”: Ibid.

  “done more than half”: DHL Letters 4, 267.

  “now slightly stuck”: Ibid., 268.

  “I do hope”: Ibid.

  “depressing accounts of sales”: Ibid., 276.

  “The trouble was”: Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 345. About the period between October 1926 and March 1927, Ellis writes, “Lawrence was reconciled to being neither popular nor rich and prepared to regulate his expenses accordingly.” Ellis quotes DHL’s response to a November 1926 letter from the Seltzers “asking if he would consider publishing with them again. In his reply Lawrence said that he could promise nothing and added, ‘Adele says I am to come back with a best seller under my arm. When I have written “Sheik II” or “Blondes Prefer Gentlemen”, I’ll come. Why does anybody look to me for a best seller? I’m the wrong bird.’”

  “thought-adventurer, driven to earth”: Lawrence, Kangaroo, 212. Robert Darroch, in his book D. H. Lawrence in Australia (Melbourne, Australia: Macmillan Australia, 1981), argued that the political parts of Kangaroo are not invented. Bruce Steele rebutted Darroch’s claims in his introduction to the Cambridge University Press edition of Kangaroo, xiv–xviii. Darroch has continued his research into the issue, and it is presented, along with other information about Lawrence’s time in Australia, on the website of the D. H. Lawrence Society of Australia:http://www.dhlawrencesocietyaustralia.com.au/.

  “Seven weeks today”: DHL Letters 4, 267.

  “Have you ever stood”: “D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work,” Papers associated with D. H. Lawrence collected by W. Forster, University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, For L 4/1/1/1.

  “D. H. Lawrence Completes His Love-Cycle”: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 6, 1922, 3.