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Summary
Summary
A Lambda Literary Awards Finalist
Named one of the best books of 2017 by NPR's Book Concierge
A revelatory narrative of the intersecting lives and works of revered authors Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence during 1922, the birth year of modernism
The World Broke in Two tells the fascinating story of the intellectual and personal journeys four legendary writers, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, make over the course of one pivotal year. As 1922 begins, all four are literally at a loss for words, confronting an uncertain creative future despite success in the past. The literary ground is shifting, as Ulysses is published in February and Proust's In Search of Lost Time begins to be published in England in the autumn. Yet, dismal as their prospects seemed in January, by the end of the year Woolf has started Mrs. Dalloway , Forster has, for the first time in nearly a decade, returned to work on the novel that will become A Passage to India , Lawrence has written Kangaroo , his unjustly neglected and most autobiographical novel, and Eliot has finished--and published to acclaim--"The Waste Land."
As Willa Cather put it, "The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts," and what these writers were struggling with that year was in fact the invention of modernism. Based on original research, Bill Goldstein's The World Broke in Two captures both the literary breakthroughs and the intense personal dramas of these beloved writers as they strive for greatness.
Author Notes
Bill Goldstein , the founding editor of the books site of The New York Times on the Web, reviews books and interviews authors for NBC's "Weekend Today in New York." He is also curator of public programs at Roosevelt House, the public policy institute of New York's Hunter College. He received a PH.D in English from City University of New York Graduate Center in 2010, and is the recipient of writing fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross and elsewhere.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Goldstein, founding editor of the New York Times books website, offers an extensively annotated account of how four major authors invented modernism in 1922. Already a literary landmark for the publication of Joyce's Ulysses and the first appearance of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu in English, 1922 is staked out by Goldstein as a "crucial year of change and outstanding creative renaissance" for his principals. Lawrence's Women in Love survived an obscenity lawsuit, Forster revived his career with A Passage to India, Eliot published The Waste Land to wide acclaim, and Woolf invented Mrs. Dalloway's inner world. For context, Goldstein dwells at length, and with frequent repetition, on his writers' challenges, disappointments, and jealousies. Lawrence whirls like a dervish over countries and continents, happy nowhere; Forster broods with loneliness and grief; Eliot waffles over his great poem in between rest cures; and Woolf battles illness and her own inclination toward elegant spite. Goldstein's plentiful digressions threaten to disjoint an already fragile narrative thread. Nonetheless, the intimate peek into the lives, rivalries, and heartbreaks of these celebrated writers sustains an entertaining story about how great literature is made, and will please scholars and hardcore fans alike. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Four radical writers battled illness, depression, domestic stress, heartbreak, and artistic paralysis as the year 1922 delivered two literary explosions: James Joyce's Ulysses and the first English translation of the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. These novels would serve as goads and polestars for T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. In an extensively researched, extraordinarily fine-grained and lucid literary history rich in biographical discoveries, Goldstein traces the synergy among this quartet and reveals both their anguish and esprit de corps. He extracts wisdom, wit, cattiness, and sympathy from diaries and letters as he charts the fitful creation of The Waste Land, A Passage to India, Kangaroo, and Mrs. Dalloway concurrent with Eliot's breakdowns and rest cures, Forster's unrequited love for men, Lawrence's fractious sojourn in Taos with Mabel Dodge Sterne, and Woolf's defiance of doctor's orders. Here, too, are publishing skirmishes and censorship cases. Goldstein's ardently detailed, many-faceted story of a pivotal literary year illuminates all that these tormented visionaries had to overcome to make the modern happen. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean. (Penguin, $18.) MacLean sketches out the six-decade push to protect the wealthy elite from the will of the majority. The architect of this plan was James McGill Buchanan, a political economist who, starting in the mid-1900s, devoted his career to paving the way for a right-wing social movement. BLACK MAD WHEEL, by Josh Malerman. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) A rock 'n' roll band, the Danes, is approached by a top military official to help identify a mysterious, but potent, noise: The sound seems able to neutralize any kind of weapon, and even make people disappear. As the story goes to the African desert and beyond, the novel "takes flight in some head-splitting metaphysical directions," Terrence Rafferty wrote here. THE WORLD BROKE IN TWO: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature, by Bill Goldstein. (Picador, $18.) The year 1922 was pivotal for these modernists. Goldstein makes good use of their correspondence and published material to outline each writer's development and creative blocks, and how their work fit into a broader postwar movement. MOVING KINGS, by Joshua Cohen. (Random House, $17.) David King is a heavyweight in the moving industry in New York, the patriotic, Republican and wealthy owner of a well-known storage company. In a moment of nostalgia, he invites his distant cousin Yoav, fresh from service in Israel's military, to work for him, carrying out the business's ugly side - evicting delinquent tenants and seizing their possessions. The novel and its tensions promise some thematic heft, touching on race, occupation, gentrification and who deserves the right to a home. THE LONG HAUL: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road, by Finn Murphy. (Norton, $16.95.) Murphy has logged hundreds of thousands of miles and decades on the road, but may be an unlikely representative: He falls asleep reading Jane Austen in motels and nurtures a crush on Terry Gross, "probably because I've spent more time with her than anyone else in my life." SUNBURN, by Laura Lippman. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $16.99.) In a sleepy Delaware town, two newcomers - a waitress running from her past and a short-order cook - fall in love, though the two are not what they claim to be. Set in 1995, this novel has an undertow of 1940s noir, but with more heart than you might expect. As our reviewer, Harriet Lane, wrote: "You see the huge red sun sinking into the cornfields; you feel the dew underfoot."
Guardian Review
The story of 1922, an extraordinary year in literature as told through the lives of four key writers, unsettles our notions of modernism The annus mirabilis of literary modernism, 1922, saw the publication of James Joyce s Ulysses and TS Eliot s The Waste Land. Virginia Woolf completed Jacobs Room and began work in earnest on Mrs Dalloway. The first English translation of the opening volume of Prousts À la Recherche du Temps Perdu was published (Proust died later the same year). Bill Goldsteins book tells the story of 1922. It takes its title from a rueful comment made by Willa Cather in the mid-1930s about the effect on literary taste and value of two momentous publications in that year. Writing like her own suddenly seemed backward. Goldstein calls it a literary apocalypse. His is not the first book to try to tell the story of this year, and is narrower in its focus than others that have gone before it. It deals only with literature and is unapologetically biographical. Goldstein concentrates on four writers: Eliot, Woolf, EM Forster and DH Lawrence. All four begin the year variously thwarted or despondent, dissatisfied with their achievements and uncertain about the next direction. The experience they share in Goldsteins account is not ebullient experimental achievement but the grim struggle to overcome writers block. Each of them felt literally at a loss for words. Goldsteins choice of authors unsettles our notion of a unified movement that we now call modernism. Forster may have been attached to the modish Bloomsbury group, but in his novels he was no formal radical. What is more, in 1922 his fiction seemed all behind him, locked into a bygone Edwardian age. He had not written a novel since Howards End, published in 1910. Lawrence, in contrast, certainly was a radical, but apparently for his subject matter rather than any formal experimentation. Angrily self-isolating, he declined to be part of any movement. Chapter by chapter, Goldstein moves between the lives of these four authors, chronicling, in his early chapters, mostly their different experiences of nervous breakdowns, chronic illness, intense loneliness, isolation, and depression. Illness is the theme. An influenza epidemic engulfs Britain, killing thousands. Everyone in this book duly gets flu and is struck down by it for weeks on end. Even Lawrence in Sicily gets it, deciding his illness will prompt a struggle for rebirth through the blood and psyche Let no one try to filch from me even my influenza. Being ill-looking is evidently Eliots thing. Woolf and Osbert Sitwell gossip about the green powder he applies to his face, apparently intended to give himself a look of strain. Eliot takes three months leave from his job at Lloyds Bank in order to recover from a nervous breakdown. He writes that a celebrated London specialist told him he had greatly overdrawn my nervous energy. (He and Woolf seem ever ready to succumb to any kind of medical quackery.) First, Eliot and his wife Vivien go to Margate, where they stay at the Albermarle hotel and Tom drafts parts of The Waste Land in a wooden shelter on the seafront. On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing Then there is Lausanne, where at the urging of fellow depressive Ottoline Morrell, he signs up with a Swiss medical sage, Roger Vittoz, who teaches mental control to his patients, holding their heads in his hands so he can read their brain waves. It may be baloney, but Tom writes the fifth section of The Waste Land. Eliot, Woolf and Forster keep coming across each other (Lawrence has to make do with his correspondence with Forster). One weekend in September, there they are together at the Woolfs country retreat, Monks House in Sussex, discussing Ulysses. Eliot is convinced it is as important as Tolstoy, while Forster (as ever) hesitates, and Woolf is both fascinated and dismissive. Goldstein gives plenty of space to her subsequently embarrassing comments (An illiterate, underbred book, feeble, wordy, uneducated stuff, and so on), but also notices how Joyces magnum opus worries at her. Its evident influence on Mrs Dalloway goes undescribed. While these literary pioneers consort in England, Lawrence, after roaming with his wife Frieda through Europe in search of what he called naked liberty, has ended up in Taormina, on the eastern coast of Sicily. Women in Love had been published in 1921 to poor reviews and sales, and he is itchy for a better place of creative exile. We follow him to Sri Lanka (too humid) and then Australia, where he is stranded in a small town miles from Sydney. Lawrence raids his latest experiences for Kangaroo, in many ways his most autobiographical novel, and moves on to Taos, New Mexico, accepting an invitation from Mabel Dodge Sterne, a wealthy American admirer of his work. Soon he is fuming to find himself patronised and thinking that he must move somewhere else. From the desert he writes to his American publisher to ask for a copy of Ulysses. I read it is the last thing in novels: Id best look at it. Look at it is evidently what he does: he receives a copy on loan and returns it rapidly, having read only bits. More pleasing to him is the new trade edition of Women in Love that comes in the same package. Thanks to its unsuccessful prosecution by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, it is selling tremendously well and soon the Lawrences can escape Sternes largesse and rent their own ranch at the foot of the mountains. Meanwhile Forster, in his early 40s, is living with his mother Lily in Weybridge, Surrey, glum and unproductive. He has at least managed to lose his virginity a few years earlier while working for the Red Cross in Alexandria, but a year in India has been a waste and disappointment. Returning via Egypt, he has found his former lover, Mohammed el-Adl, dying of tuberculosis. On his return in spring 1922 he burns a pile of what he called my indecent writings in the belief that this might free him to write a novel at last. And perhaps it works: almost unnoticed by his peers, in the latter part of 1922 he manages to write much of a new novel, A Passage to India (published in 1924). It is the dithering, mournful, self-doubting Forster who emerges most vividly from a book that is sustained by its authors undisguised curiosity about the quirks and susceptibilities of his chosen writers. Working from their letters and diaries, Goldstein does not hesitate to suggest he can know their private feelings. As a sign of his familiarity with them, he always refers to Tom, Morgan and Virginia; Lawrence alone, a more distant and difficult character, goes by his surname. This confidence brings one great benefit. The literary achievements of this extraordinary year, which we think we know so well, become hard-won and surprising, rather than inevitable. Indeed, as we follow Eliots endless prevarications over getting The Waste Land published, and his squabbles with prospective publishers over tiny amounts of money, we half expect the great work never to appear. Literary history may know what these authors were doing, but in this account they hardly seem to have known themselves. - John Mullan.
Kirkus Review
A group biography of four writers who are held as standard-bearers for a new movement in 20th-century literature.Historical periods rarely break into neat divisions, but Goldstein, the founding editor of the New York Times book website and current critic for NBC's Weekend Today in New York, makes a solid case for 1922 as the climacteric in which the modern era beganmodern, that is to say, in the sense of literary and artistic modernism. His four cases in pointVirginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrenceproduced significant, even definitive work that year. Perhaps most significantly, Eliot published The Waste Land, forever altering the poetic landscape by showing that nightmare and saga could be brought to bear on the neurasthenic postwar present. Not that Eliot was the nicest of guys, and perhaps a certain meanness of spirit defines modernism as much as any literary trope. As Goldstein writes, "Eliot often dealt in very narrow, very selective truth. Many of those who knew Eliot welldid not trust him." Though 1922 was also the year in which the much-admired Marcel Proust died, Woolf took her cues from James Joyce and took as a challenge the need to "confront and pin down on paper the texture and vitality of a new landscape of the mind." Interestingly, Goldstein traces her evolution as having been sparked by a kind of imagined writer's block that led her to yield to what she called the "common sense of readers, uncorrupted with literary prejudice," and began to produce inventive, experimental books in a challenge that she trusted those readers to accept. Goldstein writes assuredly and well of the work of his chosen four exemplars; though Lawrence is barely read these days, the others still hold up, and he brings fresh eyes to all of them. An engaging, lightly worn literary study, of a piece with Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era (1971) in divining the origins of the modern. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This scholarly study examines the lives of four major English writers in 1922 when, Willa Cather suggested, the literary world "broke in two" with the dawn of modernism, beginning with the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Goldstein (founding editor, New York Times book website) maintains that these writers were interested in creating "the language of the future," but each began the year with an impediment to moving forward. Virginia Woolf suffered from recurring influenza, T.S. Eliot was recovering from a nervous breakdown, E.M. Forster was lonely, and D.H. -Lawrence was -continually moving from place to place in search of utopia. Goldstein traces his subjects' activities during the year to show how they reached breakthroughs that got their careers back on track, including the publication of Eliot's landmark poem, The Waste Land. Hovering over the four were the shades of not only Ulysses but also Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and the lasting effects of World War I, which left England a different country from what it had been previously. VERDICT Recommended for all readers interested in the development of early 20th-century English literature.-Denise J. Stankovics, Vernon, CT © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. 1 |
1 Virginia Woolf Nears Forty | p. 11 |
2 Eliot in January | p. 30 |
3 Edward Morgan Forster | p. 56 |
4 "Somewhere Away by Myself" | p. 77 |
5 "The Greatest Waste Now Going On in Letters" | p. 94 |
6 "Without a Novel & With No Power to Write One" | p. 113 |
7 "The Usual Fabulous Zest" | p. 123 |
8 "English in the Teeth of All the World" | p. 141 |
9 "Do Not Forget Your Ever Friend" | p. 159 |
10 "Eliot Dined Last Sunday & Read His Poem" | p. 173 |
11 Women in Love in Court | p. 187 |
12 The Waste Land in New York | p. 207 |
13 "I Like Being with My Dead" | p. 221 |
14 A September Weekend with the Woolves | p. 231 |
15 David and Frieda Arrive in Taos | p. 249 |
16 "Mrs Dalloway Has Branched into a Book" | p. 265 |
17 "What More Is Necessary to a Great Poem?" | p. 278 |
Epilogue | p. 287 |
Notes | p. 295 |
Bibliographic Note | p. 333 |
Acknowledgments | p. 335 |
Index | p. 341 |