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.

Alien Reaches: The City and the River

Suttree 

by Cormac McCarthy

"A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging his slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse."
- T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land


The city is Knoxville, the river is the Tennessee, and the story is about Cornelius Suttree. Suttree is a fisherman who lives on and off the river. We meet him as he lays prone "With his jaw cradled in the crook of his arm" as he "watched idly surface phenomena, gouts of sewage faintly working, gray clots of nameless waste and yellow condoms roiling slowly out of the murk like some giant form of fluke or tapeworm."(p 7) This is the milieu of Suttree and he does not stray from it very far throughout his picaresque journey chronicled in Cormac McCarthy's fine novel. His city is made of a "Curious marble architecture, stele and obelisk and cross and little rainworn stones where names grow dim with years."(p 3) His world is "a world within the world . In these alien reaches these maugre sinks and interstitial wastes that the righteous see from carriage and car another life dreams."(p 4)

As the novel opens Suttree, who comes from a prominent family, has abandoned his wife and infant son and has chosen to live on a houseboat near McAnally Flats, among the drifters and derelicts of the town. He keeps himself alive by fishing in the filth of the Tennessee River, but his existence is apparently meaningless, given over to destructive drinking, fighting, and carousing. As the narrator explains in the introduction to the story,
“We are come to a world within the world. In these alien reaches, these maugre sinks and interstitial wastes that the righteous see from carriage and car another life dreams. Ill-shapen or black or deranged, fugitive of all order, strangers in everyland.”(p 4)
Suttree has been accepted as part of this other world. He shares bottles, stories, and jail cells with the “ruder forms” that inhabit the region. They recognize that Suttree is different, has had opportunities denied them, but they never question his decision to live among them. To them, he is simply “old Sut.”

The reader follows him through apparently random experiences. The book is thus constructed in episodic fashion and depends on the cumulative effect of these episodes to develop its structure and identify its theme. Some characters come and go, touching Suttree only for the moment. Others, however, form a constant in his life, forcing him to come out of his self-imposed isolation and renew, in however meager a fashion, his connections with humanity. The themes hold the book together as they recur from time to time.  Most prominent among these is McCarthy's ability to use his Faulknerian prose to capture the essence of death. The book opens with a horrifying realistic scene of a suicide in the river - "as Suttree passed he noticed with a feeling he could not name that the dead man's watch was still running."(p 10) This reminder that 'life goes on' will be brought home again as Suttree passes through the "alien reaches" that he inhabits. In a later scene as he visits a cemetery he sees an old vault that nature as begun to dismantle. "Inside there is nothing. No bones, no dust. How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it."(p 153)

Although the book is large and its contents rich and varied, several episodes do stand out as significant events in the sweep of Suttree’s life. While in prison for having taken part, unintentionally, in a robbery, Suttree meets Gene Harrogate, a foolish country boy who later follows Suttree back to Knoxville to become part of the marginal world of the outcasts. Although Suttree tries to avoid being involved with Harrogate, he often finds himself drawn into the boy’s irrational schemes, and on occasion has to rescue the boy. A couple of these scenes provide a broad sort of humor that I have not encountered in McCarthy's other novels. Other characters also place demands on Suttree’s humanity despite his best attempts to deny them, and he forms special relationships with a number of the doomed inhabitants of the region. Among them are Ab Jones, a giant black man who fights constantly with the police; an old ragpicker, whose wisdom and stoicism Suttree admires; the Indian named Michael, who offers Suttree a quiet and dignified friendship; and the pathetic catamite Leonard, who involves Suttree in a grotesque scheme to dispose of the decaying body of Leonard’s long-dead father. The longest episode in the book tells the story of a man named Reese and his bizarre family of shellfishermen who entice Suttree, despite his better judgment, away from Knoxville to the French Broad River with the promise of pearls and adventure. 

Although Suttree’s experiences are often horrible and degrading, the book ends with at least the possibility of hope. Nearly dying of typhoid fever, Suttree faces in his lengthy delirium the waste and cowardice of his life. When he recovers his strength and returns to McAnally Flats, he finds most of his companions either dead or absent. In his own houseboat, he discovers the rotting corpse of some unknown figure who has usurped his very home and identity. In death, however, there is new life, and Suttree leaves Knoxville, breaking with his past. His destination is unspecified. As he stands by the side of the road, a mysterious boy offers him a drink of water and smiles. Then a car stops for him without his making the effort to flag it. Both acts are, in one sense, minor, but they are also acts of grace.

This is a mighty epic in a modern sense and I recommend it to all readers who want to challenge their perspective through a visit to the "alien reaches" seldom seen from the comfort of their reading rooms.

Comic Novel with Tragic Moments

A Handful of Dust 
by Evelyn Waugh

"Polly's party was exactly what she wished it to be, an accurate replica of all the best parties she had been to in the last year;  the same band, the same supper, and, above all, the same guests.  Hers was not the ambition to create a sensation, to have the party talked about in the months to come for any unusual feature, to hunt out shy celebrities or introduce exotic strangers.  She wanted a perfectly straight, smart party and she had got it." (p 55)

Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, on several end-of-century Top 100 lists,was published on September 3, 1934. Waugh took the title for his novel from a line in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh returned to the same poem, sending Anthony Blanche out on an Oxford balcony to stutter a few lines from it. Waugh’s biographers have noted a particular connection to Eliot. Early in life, Waugh liked to associate himself with Eliot’s avant-garde style; in his late twenties, Waugh became a Catholic, as Eliot in his late twenties became Anglican; and later in life, both authors grew more conservative and wrote in support of preserving and improving the crumbling class system in Great Britain.
IN this novel we have a comedy that contains tragic events, but still manages to entertain the reader with Waugh's brilliant satire and wit. The protagonist, Tony Last, is an ossified country squire. As one of that system’s most doomed representatives when we first meet him, Last is living in blinkered bliss at Hetton Abbey, a rambling Victorian mansion renovated in tasteless neo-Gothic style. He is blithely unaware of his wife's peccadilloes. When the battle over divorce heats up Tony goes on an expedition to South America with a con man. Whether the trip is made because he is merely fooled by the con man or as a reaction to the divorce proceedings it does not work out quite as he expects. Eventually he falls under the spell of a madman named Todd who has a beloved set of Dickens novels; it is his passion to hear them read aloud, and it is Tony's personal hell to be the one required to do this.
This is Waugh at his satirical best and I can forgive his use of Dickens as torture (which reading him may be to some people anyway). While I had trouble understanding the foibles of most of the characters I understood enough of the story to become mesmerized by his brilliant satire and witty prose.

View all my reviews

Quality of Life

Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates

“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.”   ― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road




How do you describe what you have just experienced when you've just finished reading a perfectly-written book? Richard Yates' masterpiece, Revolutionary Road, is a modern classic in the true sense of the word. He captures life in the fifties and the ennui and longing that lay hidden behind the grey flannel suits and the white aprons. This book works on every level, just one being the way he successfully creates a central couple as protagonists and is able to provide, in a theme and variation style, two other couples whose lives in different ways mirror those of the central couple, the Wheelers - Jack and April. His writing style is effortless and deeply serious - in our book discussion the multiple connections to the poetry of T. S. Eliot were brought out as examples of the depth and complexity of the novel. Yates uses motifs with superb subtlety to provide a continuity that lasts throughout, even surviving the climactic finale.

What amazes me even more is that this was a first novel - it is unusual for the first novel of an author to be his best. I also find interesting that this novel was bested by Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a book that I personally like, for the National Book award in 1962 (Heller's Catch 22 was also a finalist). That suggests the quality of the competition in that year was very high (I wish I could say the same about every year). I found this to be a book that works well on many levels and one that I strongly recommend be read by all.


Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Everyman's Library. 2009 (1961)