Year that changed English literature: 1922!

The World Broke in Two: the Year That Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein, 2017 wanted to cover the intellectual achieve­ments and personal dramas in the life of famous British writers, Virginia Woolf, T.S Eliot, E.M Forster and D.H Lawrence, throughout 1922. These 4 writers were not unknown at that stage but the literature world was chang­­ing. This was the year straight after James Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (published in English 1922) shocked the public. Goldstein included Proust because he’d had a vast impact on Woolf and EM Forster!

The World Broke in Two: the Year That Changed Literature
by Bill Goldstein

The History Reader

1922 was the birth year of modernism! It was a great year in which Woolf started one of her very popular novel Mrs Dalloway and Forster started one of his great successes, A Passage to India. Lawrence wrote Kangaroo, his Australian novel, and Eliot wrote his well respected The Waste Land.

Yet I started Goldstein's book with concerns. If 1922 ushered in a new English modernist lit­erature, would that down­play the value of my beloved late Victorian and Edwardian Liter­ature? What if Goldstein analysed and over-glorified The Rise of Modernism? As NPR explained well, Goldstein neatly avoided a dutiful chronicling of anything so weighty. He cleverly sacrificed historical depth for more intimacy.

It certainly was a year of new and exciting literature, but would we describe it as the invention of literary modernism? Bill Goldstein called them literary geniuses with interconn­ecting lives. Forster and Eliot lived in London and socialised with each other. And the Woolfs lived in London until 1919. The Joyces lived most of the 1920s in Continental Europe.

These writers might had ev­oked a nostalgia for a time when prec­is­ion and introspection were the guiding principles of liter­at­ure. No shock there, but there were great ex­cerpts from their own letters and their own diaries. So often their words were witty, gossipy and often critical. And not just their own diaries. Read the letters of poor Frieda Lawrence who struggled to live with her self-absorbed husband.

The problem was 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, economic catastrophes were created by the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, Gandhi was arrested in Bombay for sedition and gaoled, and Joseph Stalin became Gen­eral Secretary of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee.

We need to know the inspirations, self-doubts, financial strug­gles, love affairs, mental illness and personal rivalries between 4 important writers. But what I needed more was important historical context eg please ack­­now­ledge that the terrible influenza epidemic that swept Brit­ain just before 1922 had a very real and personal impact on our writers.

T.S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Vivienne Eliot

Facebook

My longest blog posts are 1000 words, so I cannot say I know anything about the creative process for people writing com­plete books. Thus it was very interesting to read how Woolf, Eliot, Law­r­ence and Forster approached the writing process in very diff­erent ways. Goldstein closely described the process for each of these writers. Virginia Woolf 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 to boost their creativity.

The sharing of ideas while reading and discussing each other’s work was also important, with individuals or in writer groups. EM Forster 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 broken from grief over the death of his lover in Egypt. And the reigning theme of the book, according to The New York Times was writer’s block, treated as an anthropological constant. I'm fortunate; academics may not even know what writer’s block means.

Hogarth Press, the publishing house founded in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, succeeded. Still, Virginia & Leonard would not publish Joyce’s Ulysses. Large volumes were difficult for such a small press and worse still, they probably thought the book would be banned, leading to Hogarth Press being shut down. Neither DH Lawrence nor Virginia could read Ulysses!

Joyce with his loyal publisher Sylvia Beach,

12 rue de l’Odéon Paris, 1922

Los Angeles Public Library

 
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 New Mexico, from 1917 on. Copying Gertrude Stein’s cultural salon in Paris, Lawrence expected to socialise with influential artists and poets. Later that year Lawrence and wife went on a very successful tour of Australia for 3 months in 1922, then his novel Kangaroo was published.

Eliot and Forster were regulars at Virginia & Leon­ard Woolf’s home, but it was more personal than it was glitterati. And sometimes it was too personal; Gol­dstein let the 4 writers use their own witty, gos­s­ipy & cranky words. Woolf emerged as a patrician gossip, Forster a tragic romantic, Eliot formal and pretentious and Lawrence an irritant.

Were the main participants in this literary revolution highly conscious of being part of a shared enterprise? Prof John Mullan said yes; this was their historical moment. The alliances and rivalries between individual writers gave literary modernism a unique self-consciousness. A web of influences, friendships and sometimes collaborations was necessary to their literary innovations.

A Passage to India

by E.M Forster

Open Library