The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  9: “Do Not Forget Your Ever Friend”

  “Have this moment burnt”: Forster, Journals and Diaries, 2:66.

  “the indecent writings … of others”: Ibid.

  “the happiest day I have passed”: Ibid.

  “How can a great artist like you”: Ibid.

  “gloomily before my Indian novel”: Ibid.

  “holocaust … sexy stories”: E. M. Forster, The Life to Come, and Other Stories (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973 [1972]), xiv. Oliver Stallybrass wrote an introduction to this posthumous collection of Forster’s short fiction. “Holocaust” is his word. He ascribes the second phrase to Forster, though without a citation.

  “sacrificial burning … in order that”: EMF Letters 2, 129.

  “I will try to connect it”: EMF to Christopher Isherwood, 10-2-44, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/271/2.

  “Ghosts”: London Mercury 5, no. 30 (April 1922): 568–73.

  “all in the opening lines”: EMF Letters 2, 24.

  “dear Morgan / I am sending you”: EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/11.

  “my constant thinking of him”: Forster wrote this note to himself in the margin of his transcription of el Adl’s “Words Spoken,” in EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/11/10/2/A. Because his second use of the words “at all events” fell directly underneath the same words on the line above, Forster used ditto marks to indicate them.

  “Yes, it is easier to write to strangers”: T. E. Lawrence, Correspondence with E. M. Forster and F. L. Lucas, ed. Jeremy and Nicole Wilson (Fordingbridge, UK: Castle Hill Press, 2010), 16. The letter is dated February 22, 1924.

  confessional but oblique: Even two years on Forster was hesitant about too much confession. “Joe Ackerly [sic] has been my confidant,” he wrote in his diary in October 1924, referring to an aborted sexual affair with a married man. “It may cause him to despise me” (Forster, Journals and Diaries, 2:75).

  “I have been reading Proust”: EMF Letters 2, 24.

  “not really first-rate … everyone seems to suspect … astutely malicious.… The usual subject?”: Siegfried Sassoon Diaries, 1920–1922, 129.

  “as I returned home”: Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2003), 45.

  “Delivered by us”: Ibid., 44.

  “Delivrées pas nous”: E. M. Forster Collection, HRC, Box 3, Folder 3.

  “with our mouths open to the sun”: Forster, Journals and Diaries, 2:67.

  “Have made careful & uninspired additions”: Ibid.

  “happy … a silly word … at all events”: EMF Letters 2, 25–26.

  “I want him to tell me”: Forster, Journal and Diaries, 2:67.

  “Determined my life should contain”: Ibid.

  “Moh. worse again”: Ibid.

  “out & about again”: VW Diary 2, 178.

  his most endearing characteristics: Ibid., 33.

  Virginia wrote in April to Ottoline Morrell: VW Letters 2, 524.

  “The month of May was gorgeous & hot”: OM Journal, Lady Ottoline Morrell Papers, British Library, Add. MS 88886/04/012, transcript, 145.

  “My future is as an uncharted sea”: EMF to OM, 5-12-22, Ottoline Morrell Collection, HRC, Box 6, File 9.

  “Why do we do such things?”: VW Letters 2, 520.

  “playing Badminton and discussing fiction”: Ibid., 519.

  “But please don’t say”: Ibid., 526.

  “whom we had to leave behind and conceal”: EMF Letters 2, 27.

  “Lady O in bright yellow satin”: Ibid.

  “once seen, could not be forgotten”: William Plomer, At Home (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958), 46.

  “one admired the colours”: Quentin Bell, “Ottoline Morrell,” in Bloomsbury Recalled (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 161.

  “not very stimulating” weekend … “Ott. was dreadfully dégringolée”: Strachey, The Letters of Lytton Strachey, 521–22. The letter is dated September 19, 1922.

  “It’s such an age”: VW Letters 2, 518.

  Lewis “isn’t nice … Why ask such?”: EMF Letters 2, 27.

  “I liked him but thought … managed to inform”: Forster, Journals and Diaries, 2:59.

  “Suspicious and hostile glares”: EMF Letters 2, 29.

  “a succès fou”: EMF to Gerald Brenan, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/67.

  Lewis, however confidential and ingratiating he appeared: Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 239. The index to the book spells Virginia’s surname correctly, but the misspelling in the text is preserved in the reset second edition, prepared by his widow Anne Wyndham Lewis and posthumously published in 1967 by the University of California Press, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps to preserve Lewis’s original intention. On page 3 of the 1937 edition, Lewis writes that it is time to give the war a “fresh inspection” and that “the roosters of the ‘post-war’ have crowed themselves hoarse or to a standstill.… The ‘frozen eagle,’ Mrs. Woolfe, has not flooded the welkin for a moon or two.… It is many years since Mr. Forster opened his mouth” (3–4). He was presumably unaware of Forster’s essay collection, Abinger Harvest, published in 1936; Woolf’s The Years was published in 1937. The remark about “Mrs. Woolfe” is removed from the 1967 edition, perhaps in deference to her suicide, leaving the question of the misspelling even more confounding.

  “Pale Souls”: Times, June 6, 1922, 14.

  she had never even heard: Ibid., June 8, 1922, 14.

  “Having seen ‘Lucas Malet’s’ letter”: Ibid., June 10, 1922, 14.

  “I am well and suddenly famous”: EMF to SRM, 26-6-22, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/360/1.

  “so frisky and pleased”: EMF to Siegfried Sassoon, 12-6-22, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/489/3.

  “fundamental defect … not sufficiently interesting”: EMF to GHL, 6-13-22, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/333.

  “terribly slowly”: Ibid.

  “By looking blandly ahead? By screaming? How? By Living?”: EMF to Siegfried Sassoon, 12-6-22, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/489/3.

  “longs to see her again and has often thought of her”: EMF Letters 2, 29.

  “and still more the prohibitions … He wants to ask Mummy … Ever love as ever”: EMF Letters 2, 30.

  “Poppy kicks”: EMF Letters 2, 30n1.

  10: “Eliot Dined Last Sunday & Read His Poem”

  “We know what constant illness is”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 667.

  There is nothing in any of Tom’s or Vivien’s: Eliot seems never to have referred to Vittoz after leaving Lausanne; and even when his own mental state and Vivien’s declined precipitously in 1924 and 1925, he seems never to have thought of returning to Vittoz for treatment. The only evidence of continued contact between them is in December 1923. Eliot sent Vittoz a copy of the Hogarth Press edition of The Waste Land as a Christmas present and inscribed it to the doctor with “eternal gratitude.” Vittoz died in April 1925. “The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot, Presented by Senior Rare Book Specialist Adam Douglas,” video, Peter Harrington Rare Books, http://www.peterharrington.co.uk/video/waste-land-t-s-eliot/; and Simon Reichley, “T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, with Inscription to the Author’s Therapist, Goes on Sale,” Melville House, February 9, 2016, http://www.mhpbooks.com/t-s-eliots-the-waste-land-with-inscription-to-the-authors-therapist-goes-on-sale/.

  “run down, so that at present”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 669.

  “He was in a state of collapse”: Ibid., 701.

  “for a needed change of air … only one step … I get no benefit”: Ibid., 670.

  “T. S. Eliot is very ill”: Ibid., 669n1.

  “4tnight’s holiday”: Ibid., 673.

  “never felt quite so lazy and languid”: Ibid., 675.

  “boating, bathing, eating, sleeping”: Ibid., 686.

  “smothered in roses and wisteria”: Ibid., 675.

  two days with Ezra Pound in Verona: Ibid., 676, 687.

  “I have been on the job”: Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 172.

  “I shall be dead to the world”: Ezra Pound to John Quinn,
April 12, 1922, in Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 208.

  “I am dead”: Ezra Pound to Jeanne Foster, April 12, 1922, in Londraville and Londraville, Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford, 200.

  “had it put about”: A. D. Moody, “Bel Esprit and the Malatesta Cantos: A Post–Waste Land Conjunction of Pound and Eliot,” in Ezra Pound and Europe, ed. Richard Taylor and Claus Melchior (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1993), 80.

  “I shall rise again at a suitable time”: Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 498.

  “Malatesta Cantos” … “Thomas amics” … “the footlights”: Moody, “Bel Esprit and the Malatesta Cantos,” 81.

  “combative allusion”: Ibid., 79.

  “T. S. E.” after “you” on one draft: Ibid., 80n7.

  “I object strongly … With your permission”: TSE Letters 2, 141.

  “perfection is such”: VW Diary 2, 176.

  “slip easily”: Ibid.

  “working too hard; talking too much”: Ibid., 177.

  “premonitory shivers”: Ibid.

  “my season of doubts & ups & downs”: Ibid., 178.

  “clever experiment … vary the side of the pillow”: Ibid.

  “very calm, serene”: Ibid.

  “If I ever finish a novel”: EMF to Edward Arnold, 16-6-22, EMF Papers, KCAC, EMF/18/169/2.

  “in very much better health”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 686.

  “Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem”: VW Diary 2, 178.

  “He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it”: Ibid.

  “The Waste Land, it is called”: Ibid. Virginia’s reaction to the poem echoed Eliot’s thoughts on Donne, whose gift, Eliot had written, was to make a poem from “the apparent irrelevance and unrelatedness of things” and to convey in a very personal way “his genuine whole of tangled feelings.” Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), 13.

  “one is writing, so to speak”: T. S. Eliot, “Poetry and Drama,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 138.

  “The question of communication”: Ibid.

  “is right to you”: Ibid.

  “glands … perfectly new and violent … very strong internal”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 679.

  “Tom’s autobiography—a melancholy one”: VW Diary 2, 178.

  “Yes, Mary kissed me on the stairs”: Ibid.

  “When you were a tiny boy”: Ada Eliot Sheffield to TSE, April 13, 1943, in TSE Letters 1 2009, xxxvii.

  “to the accompaniment of a small drum”: TSE to R. Ellsworth Larsson, May 22, 1928, in T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, vol. 4, 1928–1929 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 171. Future references will be to TSE Letters 4. Adam Mars-Jones cites this as an “outright mockery” of a younger poet and a conscious myth-making: “Of course, it’s possible that he really did so, but wouldn’t it have become part of the myth if he had? More likely that he gave in for once to irresistible impulse and took the piss out of a no-hoper.” Adam Mars-Jones, review of TSE Letters 4, Guardian, January 10, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/10/letters-ts-eliot-1928-1929-review.

  “that curious monotonous sing-song”: Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975 [1967]), 109.

  When John Quinn questioned Eliot: TSE Letters 1 2009, 557.

  “desperate attempt to break through … slowly, precisely and flatly”: Miranda Seymour, Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 257. The quotes are Seymour’s summary of Morrell’s journal entries.

  “slightly booming monotone, without emphasis”: Brigit Patmore, My Friends When Young: The Memoirs of Brigit Patmore, ed. Derek Patmore (London: Heinemann, 1968), 84.

  bow drawn gently over a ’cello string”: Draft of “T. S. Eliot: Some early memories,” Brigit Patmore Collection, HRC, Box 3, File 6.

  DISSATISFIED LIVERIGHTS CONTRACT POEM MAY I ASK YOUR ASSISTANCE APOLOGIES WRITING ELIOT: TSE Letters 1 2009, 680.

  GLAD TO ASSIST EVERYWAY POSSIBLE: Ibid.

  “You may observe this use of the Simian-verb ‘to tree’ with reference to these two publishers”: John Quinn to TSE, July 28, 1922, John Quinn papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Quinn Microfilm, ZL-355, Reel 10.

  “a dirty piece of Jew impertinence”: John Quinn to TSE, June 30, 1919, John Quinn papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Quinn Microfilm, ZL-355, Reel 10.

  “with the leisure that you want”: John Quinn to TSE, May 9, 1921, John Quinn papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Quinn Microfilm, ZL-355, Reel 10.

  “Now, take off the time and go to your dentist”: John Quinn to TSE, March 27, 1923, John Quinn papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Letterbook vol. 26, 757.

  The Liveright contract was unnecessarily vague: TSE Letters 1 2009, 681.

  “and gives all the advantage … tantamount to selling”: Ibid.

  Quinn assured Eliot: Ibid., 680n1.

  “as quickly as possible … merely for your own interest”: Ibid., 682.

  “in the form to be handed to the publisher”: Ibid.

  In April, Pound had written: Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, Collected and Uncollected Poems, 561.

  “type it out fair, but I did not wish to delay”: TSE Letters 1 2009, 707.

  “and I shall rush forward the notes”: Ibid.

  “I only hope the printers”: Ibid.

  11: Women in Love in Court

  “With Lawrence passion looms large”: D. H. Lawrence Collection, HRC, Box 48, File 2.

  New York Society for the Suppression of Vice: Boyer, Purity in Print, 3.

  a private group: Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 133.

  “lush”: Boyer, Purity in Print, 2.

  “suppressed by Anthony Comstock”: Ibid., 3.

  “many subdivisions of commercialized vice”: John S. Sumner, “The Truth About ‘Literary Lynching,’” Dial 71 (July 1921): 65.

  He was also more inventive: “Jurgen and the Censor,” 4, in John Saxton Sumner Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Library-Archives Division, Box 1, File 8.

  “conspicuously made an ass of himself”: Boyer, Purity in Print, 29.

  having done much good: Ibid.

  “Advertising Bad Books”: New York Times, March 15, 1923, 18.

  “This is most irritating”: DHL Letters 2, 431.

  “an entitlement useless to the author”: Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Random House, 1992), 59.

  “Decency’s local representative”: Newspaper clipping, April 1, 1951, publication name not included, John Saxton Sumner Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Library-Archives Division, Box 4.

  “the word was offensive to people in general”: “Forensics,” p. 4, John Saxton Sumner Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Library-Archives Division, Box 1, Folder 7.

  “We are told that this literature … Does not the demand”: “Literature and the Law,” p. 1, John Saxton Sumner Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Library-Archives Division, Box 1, File 8, MS-44. The piece was written in 1931.

  “ebbtide of moral laxity”: The 1922 annual report is in John Saxton Sumner Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Library-Archives Division, Box 2, Folder 8.

  The society reported: Sumner’s monthly reports for 1922 are in ibid.

  Regina v. Hicklin: de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere, 12.

  “the tendency of the matter”: Ibid., 193.

  “the relation of the artist”: Ibid., 11.

  the
result, which was conviction: Ibid., 10–11.

  “business panic … The salesman in the West”: Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, 174.

  The Lost Girl had, however, sold four thousand: Ibid., 207.

  “Lawrence boom … hardly a literary page … spending money freely”: Ibid., 211.

  “benefactors of writers … never very far from insolvency”: Alexandra Lee Levin and Lawrence L. Levin, “The Seltzers & D. H. Lawrence: A Biographical Narrative,” in Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, 175.

  Women in Love sold steadily enough: Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, 207.

  “really unobjectionable”: Ibid.

  His June 1922 advertisement: New-York Tribune, June 11, 1922, D4.

  “offish little”: Alexander Woollcott, in a review of Eugene O’Neill’s The First Man, New York Times, March 16, 1922, 15.

  “Don’t interrupt me … This, they say”: Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, 228.

  Lawrence’s generally weak sales: Neither Mountsier nor Seltzer seemed to think that Lawrence’s sheer productivity—and the publication of so many books of his in so many genres in so short a time—diminished his overall prospects. Seltzer published twenty books of Lawrence’s between 1920 and 1925, including an edition of The Rainbow in 1924. Seventeen appeared between 1920 and 1923 alone. Lawrence, working at the protean rate that was natural to him, appeared to calculate that small advances and perhaps limited royalties on many books would make for a better return than holding back in favor of the potentially lucrative novels that took him longer to complete (Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, 279).

  “no love interest at all so far—don’t intend any—no sex either”: DHL Letters 4, 258.

  “Amy Lowell says you are getting a reputation”: Ibid.

  Late in the afternoon of Friday, July 7: “Seize 772 Books in Vice Crusade Raid,” New York Times, July 12, 1922, 32.

  “pinched by the PO-lice”: The phrase is Ezra Pound’s, from a letter he wrote in October 1920 to James Joyce about Sumner’s seizure of the Little Review for July–August 1920, containing the “Nausikaa” episode of Ulysses, in Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Reid (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 184.