A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  Virtually all the great war poets were upper, ‘officer’, class. But one of the very greatest had a quite different background. Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) was Jewish and from the working class. His family had recently emigrated from Russia, fleeing the Tsar's pogroms. Isaac was brought up in London's East End, then something of a Jewish ghetto. He left school at fourteen to become an apprentice engraver. From childhood on, he displayed unusual artistic and literary talent, though he was chronically ill with lung problems. He was physically tiny. Despite these handicaps – and clearly unfit – he volunteered for the military and went ‘up the line to death’ (as soldiers said) in 1915. He was killed in hand-to-hand combat in April 1918.

  Rosenberg's best known poem, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, is what is called an aubade – a ‘dawn poem’. Hailing the newly broken day is traditionally a joyous act, but not for a soldier in France in 1917. By military regulation soldiers ‘stand to’ at dawn, because this is the time of day most favoured for attacks:

  The darkness crumbles away.

  It is the same old druid Time as ever,

  Only a live thing leaps my hand,

  A queer sardonic rat,

  As I pull the parapet's poppy

  To stick behind my ear.

  Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

  Your cosmopolitan sympathies,

  Now you have touched this English hand

  You will do the same to a German

  Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

  To cross the sleeping green between.

  The rats, of course, had a ‘lovely war’ – feasting on the corpses of both armies.

  The four poems we have looked at in this chapter are unquestionably great verse. We are lucky to have them. But were they worth three lives?

  CHAPTER 28

  The Year that Changed Everything

  1922 AND THE MODERNISTS

  Of all wonderful years in literature, 1922 qualifies as the most wonderful. It produced a bumper crop of books. But the reason for the year's wonderfulness is not the quantity or variety of what was produced but the fact that what was published in that year (and the years on either side) changed the reading public's sense of what literature could be. The ‘climate’, as the poet W.H. Auden later put it, was altered. A new and dominant ‘style’ came into play – ‘modernism’.

  Historically one can trace modernism's roots back to the 1890s and the ‘end of century’ (fin de siècle) decade covered in Chapter 21. Writers in that period, worldwide, seemed to have all bought into a kind of creative nonconformity, a breaking of ranks. Think of writers like Henrik Ibsen, Walt Whitman, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Writers, to put it at its simplest, came to see that their principal obligation was to literature itself – even if, like Wilde, it meant ending up in prison or, like Thomas Hardy, having their latest work burned by a bishop. Authority never had an easy time with modernism. It wasn't listening. It was, as we say, doing its own thing.

  If it began in the 1890s and swelled in the Edwardian (pre-war) period, it was in 1922 that this new literary wave crested. One can identify a number of forces and factors that were instrumental. The traumatic effect of the First World War had broken, forever, old ways of looking at the world. Nothing in 1918 seemed the same as it had in 1914. The war could be seen as a gigantic smash-up which left the field barren, but clear for new things to come along. It was what in Latin is called a tabula rasa: a blank slate.

  What, then, were the works that can be said to have spearheaded the innovations of this great year, 1922? James Joyce's novel Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, both published that year, are the first that come to mind. One could also add to these Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (the author's most virtuosic exercise in the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, more of which in Chapter 29). Woolf's novel was published in 1925, but conceived and set in 1922. Wilfred Owen's wartime poems, published posthumously in 1920, and W.B. Yeats's work, rewarded with the Nobel Prize in 1923, were accompaniments to the great year's achievements. By general agreement the greatest Irish poet, Yeats developed strikingly during his long career, from a rhapsodiser about the so-called ‘Celtic Twilight’ (Ireland's mythic past) to a modernist poet engaged with the present – not least the post-1916 civil disorder which was tearing his country apart. Some of his greatest work can be found in the collection Later Poems, published in 1922.

  Before looking at a couple of the masterpieces given to the reading world in and around 1922, let's consider some general characteristics. Exhaustion and its perverse energies has been mentioned. All the literary works start from a kind of baseline zero. Mrs Dalloway, for example, is set against two great holocausts. One is the First World War, from which the shell-shocked hero of the novel, Septimus Smith, never recovers and whose mental torments (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as we would call it now) drive him to a horrible suicide, throwing himself from a high window onto spiked railings. Septimus is a post-war war casualty. The other holocaust was the influenza pandemic known as ‘Spanish flu’ which swept through the world in 1918–21, killing more people than the war itself. Woolf's heroine, Mrs Dalloway, is herself in recovery from the infection, which she has barely survived.

  Another general characteristic of modernism is that its sources spring from outside the literary mainstream, rather than from within it. The Waste Land and Ulysses were introduced in parts to the public in ‘little magazines’, with tiny ‘coterie’ readerships. As we saw in Chapter 25, Joyce's work, in its complete form, was first published in Paris. No publisher in the two major English-speaking markets would touch it for decades – in Joyce's home country, Ireland, for half a century.

  Exile and a sense of not belonging anywhere played its part. A large quantity of what we see as groundbreaking modernist literature was published by what the American writer Gertrude Stein (herself a notable modernist) called the ‘lost generation’ – writers without roots in any ‘home’ market. But modernism is something other than an ‘international’ literary movement. It is, more properly, what we could call ‘supranational’ – above and beyond any national origin. T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) was born, brought up and educated (at Harvard) as American as the Stars and Stripes itself. The manuscripts of The Waste Land reveal that early unpublished sections of the poem were set in Boston (near Harvard). Eliot was, in 1922, resident in Britain (he would later become a British citizen) although important parts of the poem were composed in Switzerland where he was recovering from a nervous breakdown. Is it a poem by an American, a Briton, or an American in Britain?

  Ulysses is a similarly ‘rootless’ work. James Joyce (1882–1941) had left Dublin, where the novel is set, in 1912, never to return. His departure was an artistic decision. Great literature, he believed, should be published ‘in silence, exile, and cunning’. What the novel implies is that its author could only write about Dublin if, in a sense, he was outside Dublin. Why? Joyce explained it with an image in another work. Ireland, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man affirms, is the ‘old sow that eats her farrow [piglets]’ – the mother that both nourishes and destroys you.

  D.H. Lawrence's great work, Women in Love, had been published the year before, in 1921. Both it, and the novel that he published in 1922, Aaron's Rod, assert the need to ‘get up and leave’. The great tree of life (‘Ygraddisil’) was, Lawrence believed, dead in England. He himself left the ‘waste land’ in which he had been born, the child of a miner, to find what he was looking for in life elsewhere. He was, he said, a ‘savage pilgrim’.

  Now let's consider the two 1922 masterpieces after which, truly, literature would never be the same again. The Waste Land, as its title proclaims, starts in a barren place, at a bleak time (the ‘cruellest month’, Eliot calls it). The task the poem sets itself is explained in an essay Eliot published a few months earlier, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. In it Eliot lays out the problem: how to mend a broken culture. It wasn't a case of simply sticking the
leaves back on the tree. Some new ‘modern’ living form had to be found, using the materials – damaged and fragmented as they now were – bequeathed by the past (‘tradition’). How Eliot's poem goes about the task of ‘putting it all together again’ is illustrated in the section called ‘The Burial of the Dead’, which regards London Bridge, in winter, on a foggy, cold morning. ‘Unreal City’, says the observer, adding: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’ What is described is an everyday scene: commuters streaming from the railway terminus across the Thames to their offices in the City (the financial hub of the world), to make the great machine of global capitalism work. They are, most of them, ‘clerks’, in the bowler hat, brolly and briefcase garb of their profession. A dark tide on a dark morning. But the exclamation ‘Unreal City’ is, as the well-read reader was intended to notice, an echo of Baudelaire's poem, ‘Seven Old Men’, in Les Fleurs du mal:

  Unreal City, city full of dreams,

  Where ghosts in broad daylight cling to passers by!

  The workers in Eliot's poem are the ‘living dead’. The theme is intensified by the last line: ‘… death had undone so many’. It is a direct quote from Dante's amazed response to the crowds of dead people he saw on his visit to Hell, in his poem Inferno: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’, says Dante, looking at the massed ranks of the damned. Eliot regarded Dante as one of the giants of literature (Shakespeare was the other). Dante, uniquely, raised literature to the status of philosophy, and his La Divina Commedia (the Divine Comedy) is one of the masterpieces of world literature. But Eliot is not merely dropping big names to show off his reading; he is weaving a new fabric out of old threads with this kind of allusion, which runs all the way through The Waste Land. The poem is Eliot's (the individual talent), but its materials are great literature (tradition).

  Ulysses, as Joyce's title signals, connects with Homeric epic: the very starting point of Western literature. But on the face of it, the alignment seems all wrong. The novel is about (insofar as one can ever use that over-simplifying word ‘about’) one day (16 June 1904) in the life of a Jewish clerk in Dublin – another black-suited desk-slave, like those streaming over London Bridge. Leopold Bloom is married to a woman, Molly, whom he loves, but who he knows is flagrantly unfaithful to him. Not much happens in the day, which is much like every other day – no Troy is sacked, no Helen is abducted, no great battles are fought. But at every point Ulysses breaks new ground in literature. On one level (the level largely responsible for the book's long banning in Ireland) it breaks with the old ‘decent’ inhibitions of fiction – Bloom, for instance, is described on the lavatory. There is the occasional use of four-letter words and vivid descriptions of erotic fantasies. The last section of Ulysses, ‘Penelope’ (named after the undyingly faithful wife in the Odyssey), records what is going on in Molly's mind as she slips into sleep. There is, for many pages, no punctuation – it's a kind of stream of subconsciousness. Our minds, Joyce's novel insists, are where we really live, and at every stage the novel explores new ways of making sense of the strange conditions in which all human beings, however ordinary, find themselves.

  Like Eliot, Joyce makes heavy demands on the reader. You need to be well read, or have a well-annotated text, to catch the intricate allusions in The Waste Land or thread your way through the linguistic and stylistic trickeries of Ulysses. But no literature is more worth the effort.

  The father-figure behind the great modernist triumph of 1922 was Ezra Pound – ‘Il miglior fabbro’ (the greater artist), as Eliot calls him in the dedication to The Waste Land. It was Pound who broke down Eliot's first drafts of the poem, creating its daringly new and disjointed shapes. It was Pound, in his role as modernist mentor, who dragged W.B. Yeats out of the nostalgic ‘Celtic Twilight’ of his early and middle period and made him confront the present state of Ireland with a new, hard style and poems like ‘Easter, 1916’, reflecting on the bloody Irish uprising and the brutal British repression.

  Pound's own poetry found its inspiration in exotic places. He was fascinated by oriental literature and language in which the pictorial and the textual were merged into a single unit. Was it possible to ‘crystallise’ words into images as the Chinese pictogram did? He succeeded better than anyone in the effort. One of his poems, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, began as an extended description of the Paris underground. He boiled it down to something as short, brilliant and pictographic as a fourteen-syllable Japanese haiku. You could get it inside a Christmas cracker.

  It was not merely modernism on offer to the reader in 1922. At its strongest, the movement was a powerful expression of minority taste in an overwhelming mass culture that was wholly indifferent or violently hostile to what writers like Eliot, Pound, Woolf and Yeats were doing. But time has a way of sifting out the good from the bad. Who now remembers Robert Bridges, the poet laureate in 1922 (he would hold the post from 1913 to 1930)? There were a thousand purchasers of his volume-length 1929 poem, The Testament of Beauty, for every one reader of The Waste Land, when it was published almost simultaneously in little magazines in Britain and America. Bridges' poem is in the waste-paper basket of literature. The Waste Land survives and will be on posterity's bookshelf for as long as poetry is read. The year 2022 will be a great anniversary.

  CHAPTER 29

  A Literature of her Own

  WOOLF

  ‘On or about December 1910’, Virginia Woolf famously (and not entirely seriously) said, ‘human character changed’. It was then that ‘Victorianism’ finally came to a close and the new era, modernism, began. The actual moment Woolf specified was when a controversial Post-Impressionist art exhibition opened in London. Woolf was very definitely ‘post-Victorian’ – an uneasy successor to an age whose values and prejudices were obstinately outliving their historical period.

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) wrote from within a famous milieu (roughly, a group of like-minded intellectuals) known as the Bloomsbury Group. She was a central member of the group and forcefully articulated many of its leading ideas. She was intellectually powerful and very much her own woman. But without the support of that milieu she would never have been the writer she was. For one thing, the ‘Bloomsberries’ (as outsiders have belittlingly called them) had, for their time, advanced views on the ‘woman question’. Women in Britain would not get the vote until eight years after 1910, the date ‘human character changed’. (In the USA it was slightly earlier.) Even then, insultingly, only women over thirty were allowed to vote, being considered too emotionally unstable to handle the responsibility until that age. For the record, Virginia Woolf was twenty-eight years old in 1910. Not yet ready to put her ‘X’ on the ballot paper – or so the man's world thought.

  We cannot seriously discuss Woolf without bringing into the picture two other elements. One, already mentioned, is the Bloomsbury Group in the 1920s. The other is the great reformation in critical thinking about literature which came about with the emergence of the ‘Women's Movement’ in the mid-1960s, which took her up as a figurehead writer. It did wonders for her sales. During her lifetime, Woolf's works sold only in the hundreds. Had she not owned the firm that printed them (the Hogarth Press), she might well have had difficulty getting even those hundreds published. Her work is now everywhere available in hundreds of thousands of copies and everywhere, in the English-speaking world, studied.

  It goes well beyond sales figures. Feminist criticism has been especially instrumental in altering the way we now read and value Woolf's works. She herself wrote what became one of the founding texts of literary feminism, A Room of One's Own (1929). In this treatise she argues that women need their own space, and money, in order to create literature. They can't reasonably do it on the kitchen table, after they've cooked the evening meal for the man of the house and the children have been safely put to bed. (This is how the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, known as ‘Mrs Gaskell’, wrote her fiction. No one nowadays, incidentally, calls our author ‘Mrs Woolf’.) A Room of One's Own i
s infused with flaming anger, and a determination that the sheer unfairness of the inequalities which have unbalanced literature for thousands of years must be put right. The woman's voice must no longer be silenced. This is how Woolf puts it:

  When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.

  The phrase ‘mute and inglorious Jane Austen’ alludes to Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. Wandering and pondering, looking at the gravestones, Gray thinks how many of those buried there had poetic talents equivalent to his, but did not have the social advantages and privileges to bring those undeveloped gifts to fruition. Yes, says Woolf, but writers like Thomas Gray could get through. If she had been ‘Thomasina Gray’, unless she were abnormally lucky she too would have been ‘mute and inglorious’.

  The Bloomsbury Group included among its most notable members the novelist E.M. Forster (Chapter 26), the art critic Roger Fry, the poet Rupert Brooke (Chapter 27), and the most influential and radically new-thinking economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes. Few milieux have had more ‘ideas’ circulating among them.