The Year that Launched Modernism

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

"In 1922, Eliot, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf each discovered a private literary way to recapture and to bridge the lost time that the (Great) war represented."



Willa Cather stated in 1936 that "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts," and since then, college freshmen have been fretting about it like a soup-bone. 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," Bill Goldstein's book, The World Broke In Two, which focuses on some of the major figures in the Western literary world in the year 1922, has that unsettling idea at its core. 

The professional and personal lives of Goldstein's key characters and a large cast of others are described with insightful detail ("Hearing of Virginia's latest relapse in May, Tom wrote in sympathy to Leonard"), the founding editor of the New York Times Books website. The year 1922 was indeed "a great literary period," as Ezra Pound wrote to T. S. Eliot. The book was meaningful to me personally as a reminder of the enjoyment I have had reading the books discussed, especially with the added biographical background of E. M. Forster and the others. The book is a tribute to the birth of modernism in literature.

Things Happen in England and Italy

Where Angels Fear to Tread 

by E.M. Forster

"Miss Abbott, don’t worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them … I never expect anything to happen now, and so I am never disappointed … I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it’ […]

She said solemnly, ‘I wish something would happen to you, my dear friend; I wish something would happen to you."   - E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster's first novel tackles issues of national identity and the potential for interpersonal connection despite societal inequalities that would preoccupy Forster throughout his career. The action is split between England and Italy. Where Angels Fear to Tread culminates in a "song of madness and death" similar to the sad opera Lucia di Lammermoor, which turns raucously amusing in one of the novel's most memorable sequences, yet at times veers into farce.

The novel is gruesome, accomplished, and darkly humorous. The best intentions fail and well-known ideas of virtue and vice fall to pieces in it. This kind of tragedy is distinctively Jamesian, and Philip's tale unmistakably invokes The Ambassadors' storyline. Similar to Strether in James' novel, Philip goes to the continent in order to save a fellow countryman from disgrace (first Lilia, then her son), only to fall in love with the place, find himself in the unlikely position of defending it, and have additional "ambassadors" (Harriet and Caroline Abbott) sent in order to save his mission. John Marcher, the main character of Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle," and, in a way, the model for Strether, have similarities with Philip in his disengagement from life and inability to make snap decisions. However, Philip's tragedy is more difficult to accept because of his conviction that nothing can save him, which is actually the reverse of Strether's.

The action of this novel somewhat presages aspects of Forster's third novel, A Room With A View. As first novels go, this one is one of the best with a literary touch that Forster would continue to develop in his more famous later novels.

Never the Twain shall Meet

A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster

“She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity.”  ― E.M. Forster, A Passage To India

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet"" wrote Rudyard Kipling in his 1889-first published poem, "The Ballad of East and West". This 1924 novel of E. M. Forster clearly illustrates this belief.

This book, in an edition from the Folio Society, sat on my bookshelf unread for too many years.  Even after I had read and enjoyed both A Room With a View and Howard's End I resisted the urge to read what many consider to be Forster's masterpiece.  However, almost two years ago when I was engaged in reading another great novel about India, Vikram Seth's massive A Suitable Boy, I decided to read A Passage to India.  I found that it is a novel about the effect on a group of people of divisive differences between the East and the West. The central incident upon which the plot hangs is an expedition to the Caves of Marabar organized for a group of British visitors to India by a young Muslim doctor, Aziz. He is a passionate admirer of the British. Among the visitors is a young and earnest woman, Adela Quested, who is determined to explore and understand the 'real India' and in so doing overcome the impediments created by the snobbishness and intolerance of her countrymen. An incident in the caves results in her accusing Aziz of assaulting her. The resolution of this incident provides for the main drama in the novel. Forster's prose is impeccable and the other characters are all excellently delineated, especially the powerful and equivocal figure of Mrs. Moore who, though seemingly an ordinary old lady, seems to possess remarkably intuitive insights into the sources of conflict in India. This, along side Howard's End, is among my favorite novels of E. M. Forster.

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. Folio Society, 1996 (1924).