The World Broke in Two

Home > Other > The World Broke in Two > Page 43
The World Broke in Two Page 43

by Bill Goldstein


  “Septimus Smith was utterly different”: Ibid., 319.

  “All the enmities”: Ibid., 322.

  “Mrs Dalloway saw people looking up”: Ibid., 323.

  news of a War Office report on shell shock: Ted Bogacz, “War Neurosis and Cultural Change in England, 1914–22: The Work of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock,’” Journal of Contemporary History 24, no. 2 (April 1989): 227–56.

  “The Anatomy of Fear”: Times, August 10, 1922, 5.

  “a document of so great interest”: Lord Southborough, G. C. B., “Shell-Shock,” Times, September 2, 1922, 13.

  “I was impressed by … He is happy”: VW Diary 2, 204.

  “I am in excellent form”: EMF to SRM, 27-9-22, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/360/1.

  “I always intended this”: Ibid.

  “When I began the book”: Ibid.

  “very charming … very very minute domestic details”: VW Letters 2, 573.

  Morgan wrote to her about the book: EMF Letters 2, 32.

  “the action through the mind of one of the characters”: Ibid., 26.

  “illusion of life may vanish”: Ibid.

  “In the cave it is either a man”: EMF to GLD, 26-6-24, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/158.

  In Forster’s 1913–14 draft: Oliver Stallybrass, editor of The Manuscripts of A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), argues that in his 1913–14 draft, Forster “got further into the caves episode than appears” in the finished novel, and that he even wrote more of the incident than is evident in the surviving drafts. Stallybrass writes, “My grounds for this belief are, first, the inherent probability that the complexities of this central episode were what brought him to a halt, and, second, the fact that much of the … material for this episode … [is] written comparatively neatly, and with very few changes made” in the course of the writing. Stallybrass surmises that Forster destroyed untidy earlier drafts when he resumed work in 1922. See Stallybrass introduction, xiii–xiv, and for Adela’s changing names, xvi.

  “looked up in his face”: Ibid., 226.

  Forster wrote some notes to himself: This is on page B8v of the Passage to India holograph with author revisions, in EMF Collection, HRC, Box 2, Folder 3.

  “got hold of her other hand … wrenched a hand free”: Forster, The Manuscripts of A Passage to India, 243.

  “She could not push hard”: Ibid.

  17: “What More Is Necessary to a Great Poem?”

  “all that I could have desired”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 763.

  “You could not have used words”: Ibid.

  “Perhaps not even you”: Ibid., 765.

  “his wretchedly unhealthy wife”: Ibid.

  Tom again left London for the seaside: Ibid., 777.

  “visit, travel, or stop at hotels”: Ibid., 762.

  “the Supt.… not that it will be the most intelligent”: VW Diary 2, 208.

  “that rare thing among English periodicals”: Times Literary Supplement, October 26, 1922, Issue 1084, 688.

  the Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury: TSE Letters 1 2009, 789–90n1.

  “how calamitous these statements”: Ibid., 791.

  “as I have suspected for some time”: Ibid., 790. The editors of Eliot’s Letters indicate that Eliot suspected Aldington himself was the source, but in his November 18 letter to Aldington he does not say this explicitly and does not name Aldington to Pound in a letter he wrote on the same day. To Aldington, Eliot wrote, “You should realize as well as I what has made possible the appearance of such a libel and you ought to know as well as I from what source it is like to have emanated. Do not mention this to a single person until I have seen my solicitor and written you again. I pledge you to secrecy.” He wrote almost exactly the same thing to Pound, though to Pound he wrote of “sources,” rather than of one source. Two days later, Eliot wrote to “my dear Richard” in a perfectly friendly tone about Criterion editorial matters and closed, “I am seeing my solicitor and have nothing more to add at present except that this libel business is still a secret and confidential” (TSE Letters 1 2009, 791). It would seem that a more likely source of the “malicious attack from some concealed enemy in London,” as Eliot put it (ibid.), was Wyndham Lewis, in whom Eliot had immediately regretted confiding about his doctor’s advice to take the three months’ leave from Lloyds in September 1921.

  “protracted and immense strain”: Ibid., 798.

  “The circulation of untrue stories”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 794.

  “for my life or for Vivien’s life”: Ibid., 789.

  “I want to talk about publicity”: Gilbert Seldes to Beatrice Kaufman, October 5, 1922, Dial/Scofield Thayer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSS 34, Series I, Box 6, Folder 211.

  “I sometimes feel as if”: Wilson, The Twenties, 109.

  a cheap railroad apartment: Ibid., 29.

  “bowled over”: Lewis M. Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 3.

  “It will give you a thrill … nothing more or less than”: Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972, 94.

  “Never have the sufferings”: Ibid.

  reviewed the poem on November 5: T. S. Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 34.

  Wilson often complained that Rascoe: Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972, 79 and 97.

  “drew blood”: Joost, Scofield Thayer and The Dial, 105.

  “quite beyond words”: Scofield Thayer to Gilbert Seldes, November 28, 1922, Dial/Scofield Thayer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL 34, Series IV, Box 41, Folder 1157.

  “paragraph by paragraph”: Gilbert Seldes to Scofield Thayer, November 5, 1921, Dial/Scofield Thayer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL 34, Series IV, Box 40, Folder 1129.

  “in our opinion”: Gilbert Seldes to Scofield Thayer, December 14, 1922, Dial/Scofield Thayer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL 34, Series IV, Box 41, Folder 1158.

  “as to the literary contents too”: Joost, Scofield Thayer and The Dial, 111.

  by another thousand, to 7,440: Ibid., 41.

  the Dial soon touted to potential advertisers: Amanda Sigler, “Expanding Woolf’s Gift Economy: Consumer Activity Meets Artistic Production in The Dial,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 322–23.

  “generally considered the outstanding poem”: New-York Tribune, December 24, 1922, 17.

  “probably the most discussed”: New-York Tribune, January 21, 1923, SM26.

  ran under the headline “Between Ourselves”: New York Times Book Review, December 10, 1922, 57.

  “Dearest darling Wing”: TSE Letters 2, 8–9.

  “I think you have understood”: Ibid., 11.

  “imitator … extremely ill-focused”: Ibid., 11n3.

  “vast indebtedness … there are unquestionably respects”: Ibid., 11.

  “I always envied James Joyce”: TSE to Ezra Pound, December 28, 1959, Ezra Pound Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSS 43, Box 15, Folder 673.

  the copy he gave to Pound in January 1923: Ezra Pound’s copy of The Waste Land is at HRC. Eliot adapted this inscription for the dedication in later editions of The Waste Land: For Ezra Pound / il miglior fabbro.

  Epilogue

  “Good bye Mohammed. I meant to review the year”: Pickering 2, 73.

  “mark the fact”: Ibid.

  All of the entries: Forster’s diary, also known as his “Locked Journal,” is in EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/12/8, vol. 4/4.

  “I have this moment”: EMF to Leonard Woolf, undated, Leonard Woolf Papers, University of Sussex, SxMs 18II.

  “He is moved, as I am”: VW Diary 2, 289.

  “was to be Forster’s end”: Gardner, E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, 211.

  “admirable self-restraint”: Ibid., 214.

  �
��A little while ago”: Ibid., 204.

  seventeen thousand copies … fifty-four thousand: Forster, The Manuscripts of A Passage to India, Stallybrass introduction, 19.

  “A few years ago”: Ibid.

  His income for the year: Harry T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart: The Story of D. H. Lawrence (London: Penguin Books, 1960), 386.

  “Birkendele”: Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, 189.

  “very quiet, pretty, peaceful”: DHL Letters 4, 473.

  “hateful here … It’s all the dead hand”: Ibid., 552.

  “sad as ever … To me you are”: Ibid., 584.

  Judge John Ford … began an attack … Seltzer was arrested again: Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, 189.

  “one of the glories”: E. M. Forster, The Creator as Critic and Other Writings by E. M. Forster, ed. Jeffrey M. Heath (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008), 222.

  “neither of them quite satisfactory … improper and scarcely read him”: Ibid.

  “pages and chapters … the whole fabric”: Ibid., 224.

  “the most heart-rending account”: Ibid., 222.

  “the promise of a story”: Raymond Mortimer to Scofield Thayer, February 22, 1923, Dial/Scofield Thayer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL 34, Series IV, Box 36, Folder 998.

  “which she does not want to print here”: Raymond Mortimer to Scofield Thayer, February 26, 1923, ibid.

  “2 chapters of my Garsington novel”: VW Letters 2, 543. Not long after “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” had branched into a novel, in the autumn, Woolf learned of the death of an old friend, Kitty Maxse, whom she had not seen in many years. Maxse had fallen on the stairs, and it seemed that her fall was not an accident and may have been suicide. Woolf drew on Maxse and her death as she wrote her novel, but she did not have Maxse in mind when writing her story. See VW Letters 2, 573.

  “I enclose Mrs. Woolf’s story”: Raymond Mortimer to Scofield Thayer, April 14, 1923, Dial/Scofield Thayer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL 34, Series IV, Box 36, Folder 999.

  “as to the exquisiteness”: Scofield Thayer to Raymond Mortimer, April 19, 1923, ibid.

  Woolf’s handwritten note: Dial/Scofield Thayer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL 34, Series I, Box 8.

  “putting on a spurt”: VW Diary 2, 325.

  “deliver the final blows”: Ibid.

  “so far I have not heard a word”: VW Diary 3, 12.

  “floating like an old bottle … fresh adventures”: Ibid., 15–16.

  “The only judgment”: Ibid., 22.

  “sparing of words … awfully pleased”: Ibid., 24.

  “We are going to build”: VW Letters 3, 187.

  “I wonder if this time”: VW Diary 3, 7.

  “the utmost sensibility … tough as catgut”: Ibid.

  “he will I suppose”: Ibid.

  “to have father’s character done complete”: Ibid., 18.

  “lovely gifted aristocrat … Not much to my severer taste … But could I ever know her”: VW Diary 2, 216–17.

  sent her the manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway: LW Letters, 259–61.

  “poor Tom”: VW Letters 2, 593.

  “as a Trust”: TSE Letters 2 2009, 6.

  Faber and Gwyer: Ibid., 823.

  “he had put so much”: Ibid., 124.

  “an ideal world”: Ibid.

  “Certainly up to the time … Since then he has had”: Ibid.

  “Under these circumstances”: Ibid.

  Ezra Pound wrote to H. L. Mencken: Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 174.

  For last year’s words: Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, 204.

  BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

  In The World Broke in Two I focus as much as possible on what the people I write about were thinking at the time about their lives and works. For that reason most of my source material has been their diaries and letters, and those of the people who knew them. I have tried to put these contemporaneous thoughts and impressions in context and to make clear where what people thought, or wrote privately, was myopic, mistaken, or false. I consulted many authoritative works about Eliot, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf that helped shape my understanding of them and their times. Some of these appear in my source notes because I quoted from them directly. I am grateful to the scholarship and insights of other biographers and critics, and to historians of the period who were equally essential as I worked, and I note some key books here.

  Barham, Peter. Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

  Beauman, Nicola. E. M. Forster: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1993.

  Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005.

  Bynner, Witter. Journey with Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrences. New York: John Day, 1951.

  Byrne, Janet. A Genius for Living: The Life of Frieda Lawrence. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

  Carter, William C. Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

  Crawford, Robert. Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

  Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land, ed. Michael North. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

  Findlay, Jean. Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

  Glendinning, Victoria. Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West. New York: Knopf, 1983.

  Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001 [1984].

  Lawrence, Frieda. The Memoirs and Correspondence, ed. E. W. Tedlock Jr. New York: Knopf, 1964.

  Nicolson, Nigel. Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1973].

  Parker, Peter. Ackerley: The Life of J. R. Ackerley. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.

  Walkowitz, Judith R. Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

  Virginia Stephen and Leonard Woolf, July 23, 1912, three weeks before their wedding

  Mohammed el Adl

  “Mr. E. M. Forster in his full official robes at an Indian Court,” October 31, 1921

  “Mrs. Eliot”: Vivien Eliot at Garsington, 1921

  T. S. Eliot and his mother, Charlotte, at the Eliots’ Clarence Gate Gardens flat, summer 1921

  T. S. Eliot and his brother, Henry, in Sussex, 1921

  “Tired of Europe”: D. H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence renewed their passports in Italy in September 1921.

  D. H. Lawrence (center) with Frieda Lawrence (right) and Australian friends, on a trip to Lodden Falls, 1922

  At Garsington, from Ottoline Morrell’s Photograph Albums

  Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, 1923

  Vanessa Bell (center) and Ottoline Morrell (right), with Morrell’s daughter, Julian (left)

  E. M. Forster

  From Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Photograph Albums

  Mary Hutchinson and Clive Bell

  E. M. Forster (left) and T. S. Eliot, at Monk’s House, September 1922

  D. H. Lawrence, Santa Fe, 1922, by Witter Bynner

  Mabel Dodge Sterne, in Taos, circa 1920

  Thomas and Adele Seltzer, early in their marriage

  Publishing The Waste Land

  T. S. Eliot. On the reverse of the photograph, Vivien Eliot wrote, “Bosham/August 1922/Tom, looking like the Prince of Wales”

  Scofield Thayer, 1921

  Horace Liveright, 1922

  From left: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, John Quinn, and Ford Madox Ford in Paris, 1923

  “I was having a sitting for a drawing by Lewis and did not get home till nearly eight”: T. S. Eliot, by Wyndham Lewis, June 23, 1922.

  “I must sit for portrait to John o’London’s on Monday”: Virginia Woolf, “drawn from life,” October 16, 1922, by H. L. Warren for John O’London’s Weekly.

  James
Joyce, a portrait by Stuart Davis for the Dial, June 1922

  “D. H. L. / dark mysterious within himself,” by Knud Merrild, 1923

  Marcel Proust, spring 1921

  T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, photographed by Ottoline Morrell, at Garsington, 1924

  “Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book”: Virginia Woolf in 1925, the year her novel Mrs. Dalloway was published.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I could not have written The World Broke in Two without the support, encouragement, and advice of many friends.

  Blake West’s love and absolute faith in me made it possible. I love him with all my heart. I dedicate my book to him.

  I also dedicate it to my mother, Joanne Goldstein. I think it is a coincidence that she was born in 1922. I am very pleased that on pages 274–75 I was able to quote from a letter that Virginia Woolf wrote to Roger Fry on Sunday, October 22, 1922, the day my mother was born.

  I thank my brothers, Lewis, Abbey, and Arnold, and my sisters-in-law Susan, Claire, and Marian, as well as my nieces and nephews, for their continuing interest in my work, and their love.

  My father, Harden Goldstein, died in 1969. I inherited his love of books and reading, and I grew up surrounded by his vast book collection, which made me feel close to him and continues to, now that so many of his books, all faithfully kept by my mother through many years and her move from our house to an apartment, are mine. My father collected the works of his contemporaries—Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Philip Roth, and others. But he also had a copy of Thomas Seltzer’s trade edition of Women in Love, a World War II edition of Eliot’s collected poems, and a later edition of Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon, all of which I treasure. I didn’t realize growing up that we had no Woolf in the house, or none, at least, that I’ve ever found. But a visit to my mother’s apartment is also a visit to my father’s library, and there are books behind the books on all the shelves, and I will keep looking.

 

‹ Prev