The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  Eliot was as jovial as possible in describing the requirement to those who were to visit him, but Ottoline Morrell apprehended the horror of the city and had a vision of it that matched Eliot’s in the poem he had completed, but which she had not yet read. She and Eliot agreed to have lunch one day in 1922, but she was late and missed him. She went directly to the restaurant, Simpsons, hoping to find him there. She wrote in her diary that she had “hunted round like a ghost—it was like Hell to me—Seeing the men standing at the bars—and upstairs sitting in that impossible atmosphere of heat & whiskey & decomposed humanity … no wonder Tom’s view of life is mournful.” Eventually she went back to Lloyds, where she waited at the bottom of the stairs for half an hour. It was as dispiriting outdoors as it had been inside the restaurant. She watched the passersby and despaired that she saw in none of them “any beauty of soul.… But perhaps one may be too careless,” she feared. The horror was outside, but also within. “I have become desperately unloving—so easily disgusted.”

  It was the same for Tom. He saw the decomposed humanity around him stripped to their unlovely souls, himself among those whom life, not death, had undone. Negotiations for his poem reached an impasse. He fell into a deeper depression, perhaps made worse than last year’s by the recognition that the rest at Margate, and the treatment in Lausanne, and the completion of the poem, had not had the lasting effect he’d hoped. Not if his biggest and best work were not published.

  Very soon, Ottoline conceived that she must help get Tom out of the bank. It was a commission she undertook on her own because she saw Tom and Vivien continuing to suffer much the same psychological and spiritual predicaments she herself did. Not long after meeting them, she had written in her diary that she had enjoyed herself “enormously” at a dinner that revealed there might be as much darkness as light in the camaraderie. Vivien had seemed to her “so spontaneous & affectionate,” and yet the bond lay elsewhere. “We are all lonely wanderers—in a very barren land,” Ottoline had written in 1919, when Tom’s long poem was barely formed, their friendship, for her, based in a shared feeling of desolation that Eliot’s poem, with its eventual title an echo of her diary, would express.

  Ottoline would soon get Virginia Woolf to help her in what became the “Eliot Fellowship Fund.” But Ottoline was not the first to have the idea that Eliot must be rescued from Lloyds. Ezra Pound had a plan, too. He called his “Bel Esprit.”

  * * *

  Two days after Eliot married in June 1915, Pound had sent to Henry Eliot a “sort of apologia for the literary life in general” he had written at Tom’s request, affirming his belief in Tom’s preeminence, even though only “Prufrock” had so far been published. Pound stressed to Henry Eliot the importance of Tom’s remaining in London to pursue a literary career rather than return to academia in America, as his family wished. Building his life in England was the only way for Eliot to go “the whole hog or he had better take to selling soap and gents furnishings.” Despite the timing of the letter, Pound made no mention of Tom’s marriage, and only in the postscript did he come to the real point, which was financial. “As to the exact sum, or the amount a man actually needs to begin on, I should think that if a fellow had five hundred dollars for the first year and two hundred and fifty for the second he ought to be able to make the rest of his keep and get decently started.”

  Seven years later, in the winter of 1922, Pound was once again canvassing for a way for Eliot to make his keep. Tom had long since started on his career, and he had not done it decently, at least by Pound’s reckoning, having gone to work at Lloyds within eighteen months of Pound’s letter to Henry. Eliot must now free himself, or be freed, from what Pound took to be nothing less than indentured servitude. If, in consequence, Eliot could not earn a living, then one must be provided for him. For Pound, the long poem proved his point, that, as he had written to Quinn in 1920, “No use blinking the fact that it is a crime against literature to let him waste eight hours vitality per diem in that bank.” He had told Thayer as much, three months off from the bank and Eliot had gotten the poem done, Pound had written it. To Eliot, however, it proved the exact opposite point. Working at Lloyds had not prevented him from the poetic accomplishment Pound so long ago had predicted of him.

  As John Quinn was to write to Pound in the summer, “Eliot is worth saving.”

  But neither Quinn—nor Eliot—thought Pound had found the right way to do it.

  Pound proposed Bel Esprit in an obliquely titled manifesto, “Credit and the Fine Arts: A Practical Application,” published in the New Age on March 30, 1922. The artist at work was a part of an economic system, a political system, Pound wrote, and it was a failure of civilization that writers of the greatest talent were inevitably the writers who would starve. Democracy, he wrote, “has signally failed to provide for its best writers,” who were not surprisingly rewarded in inverse order of merit: “That is to say, the worst work usually brings the greatest financial reward.” The rise of democracy meant there was no “coordinated civilisation” left in Europe, and that aristocratic patronage existed “neither in noun nor in adjective.” The valuable function of the old aristocracy, in Pound’s view, had been to select. By contrast, today, the world was filled with “illiterate motorcar owners … incapable of that function.”

  This was not a new cry. Pound had railed against this reality for a long time, his new broadside in effect a bookend to his “Prolegomena,” written ten years earlier. Then Pound had foreseen a new kind of poetry. He now foresaw a new kind of patron. Civilization must be restarted somehow, and Bel Esprit was a plan simply to “release more energy for invention and design.” The practical way Pound proposed to do it was through modest subscriptions of £10 each, solicited broadly, guaranteeing an income of, say, £100 a year to twenty or thirty artists “who have definitely proved they have something in them, and are capable of its expression,” either for life or perhaps for shorter periods if that were all the support a particular artist might need. The only possible gift to an artist “is leisure in which to work,” Pound wrote, and to provide that is “actually to take part in his creation.” Bel Esprit would make free men of artists and was “definitely and defiantly” not a charity. His plan was not based on pity for the “human recipient” of the funds it would raise. But most of the manifesto was a rhetorical gambit to present what became clear only near the end. Pound was not, for the moment, concerned with twenty or thirty artists or writers, or with finding patrons for all of them. Civilization could be restarted later. He was concerned with only one writer and what might become of him.

  “Rightly or wrongly some of us consider Eliot’s employment in a bank the worst waste in contemporary literature,” Pound wrote. He then referred, almost in passing, to what most people would not have known. “During his recent three-months’ absence due to complete physical breakdown he produced a very important sequence of poems: one of the few things in contemporary literature to which one can ascribe permanent value.”

  There was the crucial word. Value. The value of art and the value of money. Pound was providing for a new exchange of value in a marketplace that had no room for commodity. But, at least for the present, he did have only one human recipient in mind.

  The completion of The Waste Land, not named yet and also still referred to as a “sequence of poems,” was “a fairly clear proof of restriction of output, due to enforced waste of his time and energy in banking.” That Eliot was a banker seemed almost too pointed an indictment of the whole system of capitalist economics and the poverty of the artist. The poet wasted his energy in service of the very machine that denied him his place as an artist. And Pound twice used the word “waste.”

  Only Pound and Vivien, and perhaps a very few others, had read the poem. But among those who either read or heard about Bel Esprit were the critics who would shape the poem’s reception whenever it did appear. Pound had guaranteed that long before they read The Waste Land, they knew of the waste, and of Eliot’s breakdown.
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br />   The wishes of Mr. Eliot, he stated, “have not been consulted.”

  * * *

  That was not true. “I had not intended to say anything to you about the scheme until I had got it working,” Pound wrote Eliot on March 14, enclosing a detailed overview of his plan for ensuring his friend’s “complete liberty.” But Pound’s public disclosure of Eliot’s breakdown, so pointed and yet so casual at the same time, was as near the bone as the poetry Pound had prophesied in his 1912 “Prolegomena.” It certainly was for Eliot. His poem was no closer to publication, but the disarray of his private life was now on public display. Pound had also made a bold claim that gave public notice to the small circles interested in such things that Eliot had an important work forthcoming. But who would publish it and when was anything but settled. In fact, more parties seemed to be balking than to be proceeding.

  Quinn was outraged by Pound’s publication of the scheme. He was worried that it would hurt Eliot’s feelings to be exposed in this way and was inclined to think Pound was at best naive about the practicalities involved and the impact on Eliot’s reputation. “These things should be done privately. There should be no publicity about them,” he wrote. It was also not enough to solicit contributions. “If you really mean business,” and Quinn felt that he did and that Pound did not, there must be written agreements with people, obligating them to specific amounts for a given period of years.

  Quinn soon learned that Pound had solicited Liveright’s participation, which was an even worse mistake. “For Gawd’s sake, keep Liveright out of it. He is vulgarity personified. He would advertise it all over the place. I would rather make my guaranty $350 a year, that is, I would rather add $50 to my $300 a year guaranty, than have Liveright in it. I do this out of pride in Eliot’s name.”

  Chapter 6

  “WITHOUT A NOVEL & WITH NO POWER TO WRITE ONE”

  Morgan had dreaded the approach to Plymouth. It might be impossible to hide from Lily the effect of what he had passed through in passing through Egypt. As he had written to Florence Barger of an earlier crisis of Mohammed’s, “part of my trouble must be that no one knows of it: this makes me frightfully irritable—I can scarcely bear to be in the room with anyone.” It was to be worse this time.

  On the last night of the trip that had begun more than six weeks before in Bombay came what was either a final humiliation or a gateway into a new series of calamities. He was robbed of nearly £30. “A nice state of affairs,” he wrote to Masood. Someone had come into his cabin while he was asleep and “pinched it out of my pocket book.… The Purser and his minions were detestable over it, and if one of the passengers had not lent me £2 I couldn’t have got home.” The amount was also equal to almost two months of the stipend he had promised to Mohammed, a sum which, depending on how long Mohammed lived, he might be less able to spare.

  This was the way in which Morgan Forster, famous novelist of the Edwardian age, made his way back to England after a year away.

  * * *

  “I felt no enthusiasm at seeing my native cliffs again,” he told Virginia and Leonard when he came to tea at Hogarth House on March 7, two days after Eliot’s visit. “That was obvious,” Virginia remarked in her diary. It had been almost precisely a year since he had sailed from Tilbury on March 4, 1921. His departure the year before had left her “melancholy. I like him, & like having him about,” and the prospect of his absence had then reminded her, “I suppose I value Morgan’s opinion as much as anybodies [sic].”

  She was not expecting that she would feel melancholy when seeing him again, but the first sight of him was a shocking one, and a dispiriting conversation followed. Virginia and Leonard had visited Lily for dinner the previous October, and she had shared with them Morgan’s deceptively cheerful letters. There had been no hint to Lily of any unhappiness. Now he confided the range of his disappointments—“told us as much as we could get out”—but it was all immediately clear, and words were almost unnecessary between them. He was, they thought, “depressed to the point of inanition,” Virginia wrote in her diary, summarizing later in the week the substance of his unsentimental confidences to her and Leonard that afternoon: “To come back to Weybridge, to come back to an ugly house a mile from the station, an old, fussy exacting mother, to come back having lost your Rajah, without a novel, & with no power to write one—this is dismal, I expect, at the age of 43.”

  Here was one of Virginia’s “devilish, shrewd, psychological pounces” that Vita Sackville-West found unnerving and also acutely revelatory. “Damn the woman, she has put her finger on it,” she wrote after one letter from Virginia. Woolf could see Forster baldly, in stark relief, but she was unsettled. Her last confidence to him, in her letter of January 21, had been that she was herself, at forty, heaving bricks over a wall, without a new, finished novel herself and perhaps, too, without the power to write one. His visit came only one day after she had returned to writing.

  Five days later, she had not quite exorcised the vision of her friend and “best critic” at low ebb. He was “charming, transparent”—he had stories to tell of “the sparrows that fly about the Palace—no one troubles about them”; he was pointed, too, in his analysis of politics and empire. She had recently despaired “what a 12 months it has been for writing!” For him, it had been twelve years. She saw in him, and feared in herself, a dilemma she was to describe in Orlando: “Ransack the language, as he might, words failed him.”

  Amid the talk of sparrows and native states, Virginia noticed something else that afternoon. “The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.” She discerned in him a loneliness that was elemental to him.

  * * *

  Despite his inanition, Morgan was talkative on a variety of subjects. As afternoon gave way to evening, “Off he went, carrying a very heavy plate, to dine with Aunt Rosalie at Putney.” This was Rosalie Alford, his favorite aunt. Leonard walked with him to the bus for the short trip to Putney, four miles away. The plate was actually a small round tray—one piece in a set of plates and vases that had been a farewell present from Masood. He wrote to Masood upon arriving home: “It was such a happiness seeing all these things in England, indeed my chief happiness, and they all remind me of you.”

  The inanition Virginia had discerned was not new. In February 1915, when Morgan met D. H. Lawrence for the first time, Lawrence had used that same word to describe him: Forster’s life “is so ridiculously inane, the man is dying of inanition.”

  Seven years—and more—dying of inanition. This was a slower death than Mohammed’s, and one without as clear an ending. Two weeks after his visit to the Woolves in Richmond, Forster paid a visit to the poet Siegfried Sassoon at the Reform Club, on Pall Mall.

  “This evening, E. M. Forster came to dine with me,” Sassoon wrote in his diary on Tuesday, March 21. In a bad mood exacerbated by the sight of Forster’s aimlessness, he described the paradoxical feelings of frustration and enthusiasm he inspired.

  Forster, eight years older, was singular, one of the few “people who think for themselves,” a man whose “delicate and sympathetic” mind left Sassoon seeking Forster’s approval all his life. But sitting before him now, Morgan was “a disappointing (and disappointed) creature,” an exhausted artist despite his “extraordinarily interesting and brilliant qualities.” Forster was indisputably a great writer, “one of the very few who signify anything in our wilderness of bestsellers,” and far more important than Sassoon himself was or ever would be. Sassoon could not make sense of it. “Anyhow he causes me to explode.”

  At the Reform Club it became obvious to both of them that, as Sassoon put it, “something deters him from writing the good stuff of which he is surely capable.” But it was not only as a novelist that Forster was diminished. He stated as a fact that his “‘memory and power of observation’ are not as good as they used to be,” but he also complained, vaguely, that he had become “‘dissatisfied with’ his character.” Here before Sassoon was the inanition Lawrence and Woolf
had also described.

  Sassoon’s italicized something suggests that Sassoon, who was also homosexual, understood a truth Forster did not state openly—that if Morgan feared his powers as a novelist had declined, or atrophied completely, he was equally debilitated by Mohammed’s impending death, and perhaps also by the sexual embarrassment of their last visit. “I judge him to be over-sensitive and sexually thwarted. (He once told me he believed in sexual austerity. But he gives an impression of being sexually starved.)” Forster was, or had been, a great artist, but he lacked a “driving force,” it seemed. Sassoon was unnerved. “I wish he would get really angry with the world. Or fall passionately in love with an Idea.”

  But the problem was that for Forster, the idea of love, the ideal Mohammed had represented from afar while he was in India anticipating their reunion, had died even while Mohammed still lingered. He continued to receive letters in which Mohammed declared his love for Morgan, but each was a reminder of the fact that it was not a romantic love and that Mohammed invoked a supposedly higher ideal that for Morgan was incomplete.

  Mohammed had, in fact, written Morgan a letter dated March 10, which, in the normal course of things, he might have seen just before he dined with Sassoon. The letter from Egypt confirmed the inevitable slow demise and contained nothing that Morgan didn’t already expect. The specific details were horrifying but almost irrelevant, and added to Morgan’s guilt at having begun to wish that Mohammed’s death would come quickly, for both their sakes. It had taken several weeks for a letter of Morgan’s from the boat to reach Mohammed, and it had “buoyed” him to see Morgan’s handwriting. “I think we shall meet each other if not in the world it will be in heaven,” Mohammed wrote. “I am sure you are remembering me. I think always of you without exception. I am trying to be good in order to meet again either in Egypt or in England.” He sent “compliments to mother” and closed as he usually did, “My love to you, my love to you.” The scrawl of his signature, “Your ever friend / Moh el Adl,” conveyed its own message of death. But expressions of affection like this, promising a reunion in an afterlife in which Morgan did not believe, only exacerbated Morgan’s loneliness, and his resentment that Mohammed had not, and could not, reciprocate the love and desire he had inspired—and perhaps played upon—in Morgan.