Book Review: The World Broke in Two
/The World Broke In Two:
Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster,and the Year That Changed Literatureby Bill GoldsteinHenry Holt, 2017“The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts” - so Willa Cather wrote in 1936, and college undergraduates have been worrying it like a soup-bone ever since. That worrying writ large forms the kernel of Bill Goldstein's new book The World Broke In Two, with its leave-nothing-to-the-imagination subtitle, “Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature,” which centers on some of the key figures in the Western literary world in the year 1922. Goldstein, the founding editor of the New York Times books website, recounts the professional and personal lives of his main characters and a big cast of others in chummy detail (“Hearing of Virginia's latest relapse in May, Tom wrote in sympathy to Leonard ...”), all set against a backdrop of the WWI aftermath that Goldstein contends is psychologically crucial:
One consequence of the unprecedented scale of killing during World War I was a world haunted by the palpable absence the death of so many created: the past made indelibly present by loss that could not be forgotten. The techniques these writers experimented with in 1922 were an attempt to make personal and artistic sense of a dislocation in time and consciousness between the country England had been before the war and what it was now, and between the artists they had been then and the pioneers they were becoming. Looking back at their work before the war and just afterward – and at the work that Joyce and Proust were doing – impelled them to confront and pin down on paper the texture and vitality of a new landscape of the mind.
The year finds Woolf on the cusp of writing the book that would eventually become Mrs. Dalloway and Forster at work on A Passage to India. Eliot was publishing his much-ballyhooed “The Waste Land,” and Lawrence has just written his novel Kangaroo, which Goldstein hilariously characterizes as under-appreciated (any appreciation it's managed to scrap together is more than it deserves and conclusive proof that there's a sucker born every minute). And the book's strongest element is the way it captures the webwork-details of these writers at work day by day, traveling, corresponding, and dealing with all the little mundane events that complicate the business of getting the next book written. Goldstein is unfailingly interesting in bringing these little complications back to life, as when he reminds readers of a weird, happy little twist in Forster's literary fortunes. That June, the Times ran a review that offhandedly mentioned the similarity between the book under review and The Celestial Omnibus, a collection of Forster short stories that had appeared years before and disappeared with hardly a mention. The author responded in high dudgeon, loudly claiming she'd never even heard of Forster – whose publishers immediately responded by offering to send her a copy of The Celestial Omnibus. Goldstein calls it “another proof that it is never a good idea for an author to respond to an unfavorable review”; suddenly the letters column of the Times was filled with hymns of praise to Forster, who found the whole experience emboldening:
The correspondence in the Times made him “so frisky and pleased,” he wrote to Siegfried Sassoon. He was “more composed and able to face people” than he had been for a long time, and this affected the mood with which he wrote his Indian novel. He had been working diligently in the last month, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with his writing but still not convinced that the novel would ever be finished. His track record was not one to give him faith, and he saw a “fundamental defect” in the novel that he worried he might not solve. The characters, he thought, were “not sufficiently interesting,” and he found himself tempted to emphasize atmosphere at the expense of drama.
Golstein is much more entertaining when doing this kind of interweaving of life and work when he's writing about Forster and Lawrence than when Woolf or Eliot is in the spotlight, and that sometimes makes the book feel uneven. But the real weakness here is the artificiality of the premise, that any given year can serve as a literary watershed, so characterizing one that way inevitably raises dozens of rival candidates. And in this particular case, it raises another caution that every generation of literary pundits, apparently, must learn anew: just because Willa Cather writes something doesn't make it so.