1922, the birth year of literary modernism - Woolf, Eliot, Forster, Lawrence

1922 was the birth year of literary modernism!

TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Vivien Eliot
The Guardian

The World Broke in Two: the Year That Changed Literature  (Deckle Edge, 2017) by Bill Goldstein wanted to cover the intellectual achieve­ments and personal dramas events in the life four now famous British writers, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Edward Morgan Forster and David Herbert Lawrence, throughout 1922. These four writers were not unknown at that stage but every­thing was chang­ing, perhaps unpredictably. This was the year that James Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time hit the public’s attention and shocked them. In fact Proust had a vast impact on Virginia Woolf and EM Forster!

It must have been a productive year in which Woolf started one of my favourite novels Mrs Dalloway and Forster started one of my very favourite novels. A Passage to India. Lawrence wrote Kangaroo, his biographical Australian novel, and Eliot wrote his very well respected The Waste Land.

Yet I faced the Goldstein book with some concern. If 1922 ushered in a new style of English modernist lit­erature, would that down­play the value of my loved Victorian & Edwardian Liter­ature? What if Goldstein analysed and glorified The Rise of Modernism? As NPR explained beautifully Goldstein neatly avoided a dutiful chronicling of anything so weighty. He cleverly sacrificed historical sweep and gravitas for some­thing much more grounded, intimate, and even rude.

It certainly was a year of new and exciting literature, but I am not sure we would describe it as the invention of literary modernism. Bill Goldstein called them literary geniuses, gen­iuses with interconnecting lives. Woolf, Forster and Eliot all lived in London and socialised to some extent with each other. And the Woolfs lived in London, until they moved in 1919 to East Sussex.

These writers should ev­oke in us “nostalgia for a time when precision and introspection were the guiding principles of literature”. One reviewer said the book “captured a seismic moment of cultural rupture that, despite its shock and awe, left something new and exciting in its path” (BookPage).

No, there is neither shock nor awe but there were great ex­cerpts from their own correspondence and their own diaries. So often their words were witty, gossipy and often critical.  And not just their own diaries. Read the correspondence of poor Freida Lawrence who struggled to live with her thought­less, self-absorbed husband.

The problem for me is that 1922 was a huge year in world history. The War To End All Wars had ended in tragedy, young men were dead or wounded, Versailles Peace Treaty created economic catastrophes, Gandhi was arrested in Bombay for sedition and given a long gaol sentence, and Joseph Stalin became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union's Communist Party.

The World Broke in Two 

by Bill Goldstein

It’s in not that I do not want to know the inspirations, self-doubts, financial strug­gles, love affairs, mental illness and personal rivalries between four important individ­uals. What I really needed was important historical context. However I have to ack­nowledge that the terrible influenza epidemic that swept Brit­ain in 1922 had a very real and personal impact on our writers.

My longest blog posts are 1000 words and my lecture notes end at the end of each 75 minute session. So I cannot say I know anything about the creative process for people writing books. Thus it was very interesting to read how Woolf, Eliot, Law­r­ence and Forster approached the writing process in very diff­erent ways. Goldstein described in depth the process for each of these writers. Virginia Woolf, for example, was my type of woman! She allocated two hours every morning as sacred writing time, boosted by walking and journal writing. In fact each of the four writers nominated sacred times and sacred places to clear their minds and boost their creativity.

The sharing of ideas while reading and discussing each other’s work was also important, whether with individuals or in writers’ groups. EM Forster readily admitted that he learned a great deal from reading Virginia Woolf’s writing.

That these clever writers had to overcome incapacitating physical and mental illnesses was an anxiety-provoking part of the book for me. What happens if locking oneself in a study for hours on end damages all writers’ mental health and threatens their marriages? Eliot suffered from both anxiety and depression, and his editor had great problems in getting Eliot to deliver his poems in time for publication. Forster spent the year incoherent from grief over the death of his lover in Egypt.

The reigning theme of the book, according to The New York Times was writer’s block, treated as an anthropological constant. I am fortunate – academics don’t even need to know what writer’s block means 😊

The Hogarth Press publishing house, founded in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, was successful. Yet Virginia and Leonard would not publish James Joyce’s Ulysses. Books of such large volume were difficult for such a small press. Worse still, they probably thought that the book would be banned, shutting the Hogarth Press down. Neither D.H Lawrence nor Virginia could read Ulysses in its entirely.

DH Lawrence was very fortunate that travel did not disrupt his ability to write. Some of Lawrence’s books were banned in the UK, so instead of facing the obscenity laws at home, he saw his time abroad as voluntary exile. I will only mention two trips. In Feb 1922 Lawrence and his wife visited the famous patron of the arts Mable Dodge Luhan in Taos New Mexico, which started in 1917. Copying Gertrude Stein’s cultural salon in Paris, Lawrence would have been expected to socialise with influential artists and poets.

Later that same year Lawrence and his wife went on a very successful tour of Australia for three months in 1922. His novel Kangaroo was published in 1923.

Eliot and Forster were regular visitors at the Woolfs' home, but it was more personal and less glitterati than Taos. Leonard even took the risk of warning Forster about the dangers of writing love stories between gay men

Geniuses yes, but very human. Woolf emerged as a patrician gossip, Forster as a tragic romantic, Eliot as unbearably formal and pretentious, and Lawrence as an irritant (NPR).