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 Narrated by Bill Goldstein

Overview

This program is read by the author.

A revelatory narrative of the intersecting lives and works of revered authors Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence during 1922, the birth year of modernism


The World Broke in Two tells the fascinating story of the intellectual and personal journeys four legendary writers, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, make over the course of one pivotal year. As 1922 begins, all four are literally at a loss for words, confronting an uncertain creative future despite success in the past. The literary ground is shifting, as Ulysses is published in February and Proust's In Search of Lost Time begins to be published in England in the autumn. Yet, dismal as their prospects seemed in January, by the end of the year Woolf has started Mrs. Dalloway, Forster has, for the first time in nearly a decade, returned to work on the novel that will become A Passage to India, Lawrence has written Kangaroo, his unjustly neglected and most autobiographical novel, and Eliot has finished-and published to acclaim-“The Waste Land."

As Willa Cather put it, “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” and what these writers were struggling with that year was in fact the invention of modernism. Based on original research, Bill Goldstein's The World Broke in Two captures both the literary breakthroughs and the intense personal dramas of these beloved writers as they strive for greatness.

Editorial Reviews

SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

The year 1922 was a momentous one in modernist literature: It saw the publication of Joyce’s ULYSSES, Eliot’s WASTE LAND, and the first English translation of Proust. Those are intimidating works, but Bill Goldstein makes them approachable to listeners. As book editor for the NEW YORK TIMES, Goldstein is also a veteran of television and podcasts, so his tone is never academic. In any case, the focus is not the literary works themselves but rather the personal lives of four major figures from this period. There are intimate moments here. By leaning heavily on the journals and correspondence of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster, the audiobook combines journalism and criticism with a dollop of gossip. D.B. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

The New York Times Book Review - Eric Bennett

…the enduring interest of 1922 lies in the brilliance, madness, beauty, comedy and devastation with which writers that year fused the fragments of the ages to a noisily vapid postwar present. Eliot and Woolf certainly, but Forster too transmuted private paralysis into astonishing monuments to collective catastrophe. Readers who, from sources other than Goldstein, know these monuments—haunting and inscrutable, vital and deathly, visceral and recondite, funny and weird—will surely cherish the immediacy that The World Broke in Two brings to the biographies of their creators.

Publishers Weekly

05/22/2017
Goldstein, founding editor of the New York Times books website, offers an extensively annotated account of how four major authors invented modernism in 1922. Already a literary landmark for the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses and the first appearance of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in English, 1922 is staked out by Goldstein as a “crucial year of change and outstanding creative renaissance” for his principals. Lawrence’s Women in Love survived an obscenity lawsuit, Forster revived his career with A Passage to India, Eliot published The Waste Land to wide acclaim, and Woolf invented Mrs. Dalloway’s inner world. For context, Goldstein dwells at length, and with frequent repetition, on his writers’ challenges, disappointments, and jealousies. Lawrence whirls like a dervish over countries and continents, happy nowhere; Forster broods with loneliness and grief; Eliot waffles over his great poem in between rest cures; and Woolf battles illness and her own inclination toward elegant spite. Goldstein’s plentiful digressions threaten to disjoint an already fragile narrative thread. Nonetheless, the intimate peek into the lives, rivalries, and heartbreaks of these celebrated writers sustains an entertaining story about how great literature is made, and will please scholars and hardcore fans alike. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (July)

From the Publisher

“Fresh . . . significant . . . comprehensive and exuberant . . . entirely full of life.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Bill Goldstein beautifully explains why 1922 was a watershed period for English literature . . . A very important work to understand English literature, especially Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster.” —The Washington Book Review

“Fascinating, superbly researched . . . a beautiful mosaic . . . The book is a joy.” —USA Today

“A fascinating and engrossing tale . . . This is Goldstein’s own personal triumph: he creates an original, moving and at times wryly amusing account of four literary demi-gods during the course of these few months that shaped a new direction in English literature, incorporating a wealth of detail which builds, layer upon layer, until the picture is satisfyingly complete.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Gossipy, accessible and fascinating.” —People

“An indispensable guide to four legendary writers who were largely responsible for the creation of modern literature . . . [Goldstein] presents these illuminating portraits with some masterly craftsmanship of his own . . . At the end, The World Broke in Two is invaluable.” —The National Book Review

“An extensively researched, extraordinarily fine-grained and lucid literary history rich in biographical discoveries…Goldstein’s ardently detailed, many-faceted story of a pivotal literary year illuminates all that these tormented visionaries had to overcome to ‘make the modern happen.’” —Booklist

“[An] accomplished, captivating look at that seminal year through the lens of the interconnecting lives of four literary icons…Impressively rich and nuanced…[Goldstein’s] evenhanded passion for each of his subjects plays out in an elegant narrative. In our own fractured, impatient age, the poignant and arresting stories of these four genius writers evoke nostalgia for a time when precision and introspection were the guiding principles of literature. The World Broke in Two beautifully captures a seismic moment of cultural rupture that, despite its shock and awe, left something new and exciting in its path.” —BookPage

“The ingenious conceit of Goldstein’s book is to follow, using excerpts from both their correspondence and their diaries, the intertwined personal and literary lives of four writers—Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and Eliot himself—as the three seismic shocks of those publications ripple through their lives, and their work…In letting these four writers speak in their own words—their own witty, gossipy, often waspish words—Goldstein neatly avoids a dutiful chronicling of anything so weighty and abstruse as The Rise of Modernism. Cannily, he sacrifices historical sweep and gravitas for something much more grounded and intimate. In his hands, these literary lions prove surprisingly—and bracingly—catty.” —NPR

"Engaging and very well researched....Goldstein’s insightful and graceful prose reveals four authors during troubled moments of their careers, and he is fortunate in having a trove of writings from which to draw....This year-in-the-life chronicle gives us a remarkable look at the gestation of literature." —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Candy for those who have a taste for literary history…Goldstein splits his focus between the writers’ work and their intertwined lives, offering drama, cultural insight and a good dose of pure fun.” —The Forward

“An extensively annotated account of how four major authors invented modernism in 1922…The intimate peek into the lives, rivalries, and heartbreaks of these celebrated writers sustains an entertaining story about how great literature is made, and will please scholars and hardcore fans alike.” —Publishers Weekly

“What a masterpiece this book is! So captivating, so original, so full of energy, insights and analysis! Bill Goldstein's brilliant work will be read with great pleasure not only by those who think they already know his famous subjects, but by all readers who love history and biography.” —Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals and The Bully Pulpit

“The World Broke in Two is more fun to read than it has any right to be. Its subject – the overlapping neuroses, illnesses, and inspirations of four 20th Century greats – would seem familiar territory. But Bill Goldstein is such a companionable writer and his narrative is so full of telling detail that we encounter each of these writers anew. The result is a book that anyone interested in the vicissitudes of the writing life– then or now – will read with hunger. Like all good accounts of writing, it draws us back to the books themselves.” —Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone

“The World Broke in Two is a gem of collective – and interwoven – biography. Like the great modernists of fiction, Bill Goldstein pays keen imaginative attention to simultaneity; he surveys the literary landscape, and these four great peaks upon it, as if he were the pilot flying that famous airplane over Mrs.Dalloway. The reader is made to see the writers – paused, burgeoning, and on the brink – in strong relationship to one another. The result is a view and vision we've not had before.” —Thomas Mallon, author of Yours Ever: People and Their Letters

“The year 1922 was indeed “a grrrreat littttterary period,” as Ezra Pound wrote to T. S. Eliot, and as Bill Goldstein demonstrates in this stunningly written, riveting day-by-day account of how four of the world's most beloved writers created their greatest works. He provides new insight into the relationships among writers we thought we knew. How heartening this book will be to readers and to writers – it was to me – to realize that even Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence experienced self-doubts, envy, and all kinds of other challenges, and that they simply had to plow through them and get their work done. The World Broke in Two brilliantly illuminates the adventure that is the creative process.” —Sherill Tippins, author of February House and Inside the Dream Palace:The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel

“Bill Goldstein, a wizard of words, has gifted us with a magical brew. Profoundly researched and filled with stunning connections, The World Broke in Two is brilliant, compelling, incisive. It transforms our understanding of modern literature, and the creative relationships of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H.Lawrence, and E.M. Forster. Everyone interested in history, literature, life will enjoy and benefit from this dazzling work.” —Blanche Wiesen Cook, author, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volumes I, II, and III.

“This is a brilliant book about the birth of modernism, one which taught me something on every page. I never knew what a life-changing influence Proust had on Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster – or how everyone struggled with money, especially T. S. Eliot. This beautifully written book reveals how artistic innovation occurs in the real world of gossip, love affairs, poverty and class differences. You will feel – and be! – much smarter after you read it.” —Edmund White, author of Proust

“[Bill Goldstein] makes a solid case for 1922 as the climacteric in which the modern era began—modern, that is to say, in the sense of literary and artistic modernism…[he] writes assuredly and well of the work of his chosen four exemplars…he brings fresh eyes to all of them…engaging.” —Kirkus Reviews

Library Journal

06/15/2017
This scholarly study examines the lives of four major English writers in 1922 when, Willa Cather suggested, the literary world "broke in two" with the dawn of modernism, beginning with the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Goldstein (founding editor, New York Times book website) maintains that these writers were interested in creating "the language of the future," but each began the year with an impediment to moving forward. Virginia Woolf suffered from recurring influenza, T.S. Eliot was recovering from a nervous breakdown, E.M. Forster was lonely, and D.H. Lawrence was continually moving from place to place in search of utopia. Goldstein traces his subjects' activities during the year to show how they reached breakthroughs that got their careers back on track, including the publication of Eliot's landmark poem, The Waste Land. Hovering over the four were the shades of not only Ulysses but also Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and the lasting effects of World War I, which left England a different country from what it had been previously. VERDICT Recommended for all readers interested in the development of early 20th-century English literature.—Denise J. Stankovics, Vernon, CT

SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

The year 1922 was a momentous one in modernist literature: It saw the publication of Joyce’s ULYSSES, Eliot’s WASTE LAND, and the first English translation of Proust. Those are intimidating works, but Bill Goldstein makes them approachable to listeners. As book editor for the NEW YORK TIMES, Goldstein is also a veteran of television and podcasts, so his tone is never academic. In any case, the focus is not the literary works themselves but rather the personal lives of four major figures from this period. There are intimate moments here. By leaning heavily on the journals and correspondence of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster, the audiobook combines journalism and criticism with a dollop of gossip. D.B. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2017-05-01
A group biography of four writers who are held as standard-bearers for a new movement in 20th-century literature.Historical periods rarely break into neat divisions, but Goldstein, the founding editor of the New York Times book website and current critic for NBC's Weekend Today in New York, makes a solid case for 1922 as the climacteric in which the modern era began—modern, that is to say, in the sense of literary and artistic modernism. His four cases in point—Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence—produced significant, even definitive work that year. Perhaps most significantly, Eliot published The Waste Land, forever altering the poetic landscape by showing that nightmare and saga could be brought to bear on the neurasthenic postwar present. Not that Eliot was the nicest of guys, and perhaps a certain meanness of spirit defines modernism as much as any literary trope. As Goldstein writes, "Eliot often dealt in very narrow, very selective truth. Many of those who knew Eliot well…did not trust him." Though 1922 was also the year in which the much-admired Marcel Proust died, Woolf took her cues from James Joyce and took as a challenge the need to "confront and pin down on paper the texture and vitality of a new landscape of the mind." Interestingly, Goldstein traces her evolution as having been sparked by a kind of imagined writer's block that led her to yield to what she called the "common sense of readers, uncorrupted with literary prejudice," and began to produce inventive, experimental books in a challenge that she trusted those readers to accept. Goldstein writes assuredly and well of the work of his chosen four exemplars; though Lawrence is barely read these days, the others still hold up, and he brings fresh eyes to all of them. An engaging, lightly worn literary study, of a piece with Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era (1971) in divining the origins of the modern.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169139723
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	08/15/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

VIRGINIA WOOLF NEARS FORTY

Even when Virginia Woolf was feeling well, winter took a toll.

"Oh but the cold was too great at Rodmell. I was frozen like a small sparrow," she wrote one January. At a happy time, the perennial cold might be no bar to writing with pleasure, whether in London or at Monk's House, in Rodmell, their country home in Sussex. Even "a few staggering sentences" were enough satisfaction for a morning's work, the frigid weather almost enlivening her mood, especially when the recompense was the icy beauty of Monk's House at Christmas time or New Year's.

"Oh its [sic] so lovely on the downs now ... I lie on the ground and look; and then the bells tinkle, and then the horses plough; and then, forgetting all the days to come and days past and this day and tomorrow, — well, you know the mood."

New Year's Eve, December 31, 1921, a Saturday, had been spent at Monk's House, but eager to be back at work early in the new year, Virginia and her husband, Leonard, returned by a Monday afternoon train to Hogarth House, 40 Paradise Road, in Richmond upon Thames, a suburb southwest of London.

Tuesday was to be her first day of work, and Virginia, as if to prepare, wrote a long entry in her diary, which for the sake of "parsimony" she wrote in the "odd leaves at the end of poor Jacob," in the notebook she was using for her third novel, Jacob's Room. She was looking forward to being busy again — writing, reading, printing.

Her apology to herself for not writing in her diary as often as she liked was "quite truthfully, the Hogarth Press," she wrote after a gap of ten days. The press would mark its fifth anniversary in 1922, and a number of its recent books had sold surprisingly well for Christmas, including an edition of Roger Fry's woodcuts that had been reprinted twice, and which she had hand-stitched herself in December. In October, they had bought a larger secondhand printing press for £70 and decided to use their Paradise Road basement for a print shop. More important, in November she had finished the draft of Jacob's Room. She had already begun revising it so that they would be able to publish it in the spring — the first full-length work of hers that Hogarth would issue.

Virginia also had a book of essays, about reading, in mind. Once those were under way, in January, "I shall think of another novel, I daresay." Looking ahead to her work in 1922, she had wondered, "Will my fingers stand so much scribbling?"

But almost as soon as she and Leonard were back at Hogarth House, Virginia came down with influenza. On the night of the fifth, "I was shivering over the fire & had to tumble into bed." Sentences, staggering or otherwise, were not forthcoming.

Winter had settled unseasonably over London as early as November — "Winter is upon us; fog, frost, every horror," Virginia wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell — and remained extremely bad. "We go to bed under red blankets, quilts, fur coats," she had written, worried all through the autumn and into the winter that she would become sick with influenza. She had escaped, until the new year. This was to be one of those long Januaries that Leonard found dispiriting, particularly at Monk's House: "a north east wind sweeping on to the croft ... and a grim grey sky hanging not more than two feet above the elms and rain, sleet or snow banging on the windows." Sunset was at only shortly after three in the afternoon, so it was unsurprising that "one creeps about the house longing only for bed. Even without a cold, one's nose drips perpetually." Whatever the weather Virginia would have worked in the mornings, and even in January, whether in the country or in town, she would have walked in the afternoon — if influenza didn't mean she wasn't allowed out.

To walk was, to Virginia, also to write, for she worked out sentences in her head as she walked, settling them in her mind in order to write them down the next day. In London's winter cold, or in Sussex's summer splendor, Virginia walked after tea at four p.m., loping her own "delicate" way "a little unevenly, one foot turning very slightly inwards," through the countryside or city and going through the sentences she'd composed that morning, writing and rewriting in her head to seal that day's work and — observing people, hearing their talk — to anticipate her next day's adventure. "I keep thinking of different ways to manage my scenes; conceiving endless possibilities; seeing life, as I walk about the streets, an immense opaque block of material to be conveyed by me into its equivalent in language," she had written while working on her second novel, Night and Day, published in 1919. She had not — and would never — change.

Virginia had come to London resolved to start work on the essays on reading she was thinking through. "Tomorrow my reading begins!" she had written in her diary. But her reading did not begin the next day.

Leonard Woolf's pocket appointment diary recorded the sudden change in Virginia's health: "Work morn Walk w V aftn V. unwell even Went disp. Saw Fergusson," meaning he had done his own writing in the morning and took a walk with Virginia in the afternoon, and then in the evening she was ill. Leonard went to the dispensary, and they saw Dr. D. J. Fergusson, the local doctor, whose office was a short walk from Paradise Road.

Leonard's pocket diaries are filled with abbreviations, written quickly to save time, to jog his memory about daily and weekly events, and even, perhaps, as parsimonious as he was, to save money on ink. His entries recorded their daily routines, his careful inscription of the same activities day after day — work and printing usually in the afternoon — itself a routine, the main variations across the year consisting only of the names of visitors for tea or dinner, or an overnight stay. Leonard and Virginia made no distinction between weekdays and weekends, at Hogarth House or Monk's. "We should have felt it to be not merely wrong but unpleasant not to work every morning for seven days a week and for about eleven months a year," Leonard later recalled.

* * *

"Its [sic] foul," Virginia wrote of influenza, "it leaves one like a watch that doesn't tick." And unable to scribble. Her days were instead spent bedridden, largely without visitors, one of the usual compensations for her morning's work, and she was conscious only of waste. Not writing her reading essay — not revising Jacob — these were losses enough. But every day of January that passed meant that the twenty-fifth, and her fortieth birthday, were one day closer.

On Thursday the twelfth, a week after she first became ill, it was a major step that "V came down for tea," Leonard noted in his diary. A few days later, on Sunday, the fifteenth, "Vanessa came dinner," Leonard wrote. Vanessa was just back from a three-month painting trip in France and would soon be gone again. The hurried meetings before she went away again were painful for both sisters. Virginia feared that Vanessa's travels, and her children, left her, by contrast, seeming "settled & unadventurous," in her own eyes, and in Vanessa's. Virginia, childless, felt constitutionally "less normal" than her sister. Vanessa, in turn, pursuing her art in France, felt that Virginia and Leonard had something "binding" in their marriage as they approached their tenth anniversary that she, despite her three children, and her husband, Clive, and her lover, Duncan Grant, lacked in her own life. In London her work and Duncan's went for virtually nothing, she thought, whereas in France it could be at the center of their lives — just as in London, writing and books were at the center of Virginia and Leonard's and their circle of friends.

In London Vanessa felt invisible — in the shadows in Bloomsbury and in the larger world of the arts. "I have seen all the cleverest people," she complained to Virginia, "and not one has asked me about the South of France. Nobody mentioned painting." She had even hung two of her own and Duncan's latest paintings in Maynard Keynes's apartment, and he never noticed them, Vanessa said. Virginia tried to feel sympathy, but the way in which Vanessa seized independence —"only sixpence a year — lovers — Paris — life — love — art — excitement — God! I must be off!" left her "rather depressed," Virginia wrote in a letter to her "Dearest Dolphin," after another of Vanessa's visits, that her own life seemed to her a "dull respectable absurd" one in Vanessa's judgmental eyes. "This leaves me in tears."

Her sense of difference from Vanessa unsettled her, "donkey that I am ... susceptible to the faintest chord of dissonance twelve fields away," she wrote in her diary after one visit. It was transitory and would pass, she knew — except that this time, ill as she was, and unable to write, her own life "did not very vigorously rush in," the usual recompense, her work, forbidden her by her doctor, who proscribed writing as too much of a strain. This meant it was impossible for her to write for her two hours every morning, "the sacred morning hours," she called them. "Phrase tossing can only be done then." When she was well, the afternoon was set aside for printing; then she would write letters and in her diary, usually for a half hour after tea. Her diary served the same purpose as her walks, and she kept to both as regularly as possible, believing, as she put it in 1919, "the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink."

* * *

Life, she wondered, "consists of how many months? That's what I begin to say to myself, as I near my 40th birthday," she wrote in January, the day almost ominously without light: illness and the weather had turned her inward upon her "exacting brain," isolated in her solitude rather than liberated from social obligations. "The machinery for seeing friends is too primitive: one should be able to see them by telephone — ring up, & be in the same room," she wished, for even when she was well, too many visitors often left her "in tatters," a state in which "my mind vibrates uncomfortably," and she might feel consumed by the failures of the encounters: "One's talked nonsense; one's ashamed; they've been uncomfortable; the contact of one with the other was difficult."

Yet she didn't like to be away from people too long, either. Too much isolation seemed a proof of illness and frailty and brought uncomfortable vibrations of a different kind. An "endless rain of visitors" brought frustrations but also reminded her of childhood, and of summer vacations in St. Ives, Cornwall, where family life "was rather shabby and casual" and Talland House "untidy and overrun with people," her nephew Quentin Bell would write.

Turning forty was to be an unhappy milestone for Virginia Woolf. "I feel time racing like a film at the Cinema. I try to stop it. I prod it with my pen. I try to pin it down."

* * *

Virginia's influenza was an inconvenience to her ambition, but it was not only that. The morning she became ill, the Times reported that there had been 151 deaths from influenza in London that week, nearly triple the number — 54 — in the preceding week. This was the start of what would soon be recognized as an epidemic. The Times had reported on a steep rise in "Winter sickness" as early as November, with the medical correspondent warning that "persons with weak hearts or chests must ... avoid rapid changes of temperature, which severely tax the circulation and which lower bodily resistance to infection," among other nostrums.

Virginia had been worried she would become ill because she had very good reason to: she was among those warned to take particular care. She had been so eager to begin work early in 1922 because she had lost so much time to serious illness in 1921.

Seven months before, Leonard had noted an ominous change on June 10, 1921: "V went concert[.] Could not sleep." It had been years since Leonard had recorded Virginia's insomnia — or had the need to monitor her health so minutely. As the weekend and the following week proceeded, the situation worsened: Monday, "V still unwell"; Tuesday, "V not well." On Wednesday and Thursday Leonard's entries collapsed economically to "Ditto." Even his usual shorthand was too much to write out. The last time he had used his diary to track Virginia's failing health in this way had been six and a half years before, in February 1915, and his abbreviations were similar to those he used then, a replay of the familiar and the foreboding. For most of 1915 Woolf had been given sedatives liberally, as she had also been in 1913, when she had been ill for nearly a year and had attempted suicide with an overdose of Veronal, the sleeping medication she was once again using, time folding in upon itself.

The summer of 1921 set a cascade of "plagues" upon her, she wrote to Lytton Strachey. She had endured "days spent in wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back, frets, fidgets, lying awake, sleeping draughts, sedatives, digitalis, going for a little walk, & plunging back into bed again," she wrote in her diary. Only in August was she sleeping well without medication.

"What a gap!" Virginia had exclaimed in her diary on August 8, "two whole months rubbed out — These, this morning, the first words I have written — to call writing — for 60 days." She had lost weight, despite oppressive milk cures that she hated, but by autumn, recovering despite the unpalatable regimen, she was more sanguine. "Oh what a damned bore!" she had written a friend, making light of the severity of a crisis in order to be entertaining. She spent much of the fall "scribbling away" to make up for lost time. She had felt better in the autumn for that reason, closer to finishing Jacob's Room — and because September at Rodmell had brought gorgeous weather and long walks after summer rains. To be bedridden again so soon, after only four months in the autumn and winter, and with her revisions of her novel only partially done, was as dispiriting — and as debilitating — as the second bout of illness itself. The consequences to her work would be too great. She had wanted to publish Jacob's Room in the spring of 1922. Now it would have to be postponed until the autumn. It seemed too long to wait.

* * *

She had been incapacitated for long spells of her life, because of either mental illness or physical illness. To become ill, even not very seriously, was never free of apprehension for Virginia. The gap of summer had meant, as she had written in her diary, "all the horrors of the dark cupboard of illness once more displayed for my diversion." Among the particular symptoms of the epidemic of 1922, the Times reported, was a "tendency to 'feel the heart'— i.e., to palpitation," the breathlessness, nervousness, and muscular pains that were typical leading to a "marked depression" that was generally likely to occur along with heart trouble — and the threat of which exacerbated the disturbances of even minor illness for Virginia. The dark cupboard seemed to be opening again, and far too soon. She had had such a short time in which to catch up, to return to the necessary order of her days.

* * *

Leonard monitored Virginia's habits, and their finances, very carefully, noting their daily, weekly, monthly, and annual expenses, minuscule or large, ever more rigorously as the years went by after their marriage in August 1912. In 1921, he bought socks on July 29 and razors on August 5; a year later, on August 28, 1922, he replenished his supply, six razors for 3 shillings. Virginia bought a comb on January 5, just before falling ill. They bought a mousetrap, at 2 shillings and 6, on May 9. He would note his purchase of a toothbrush and a nail brush in 1923 but seems to have bought neither in 1922, an actuality more likely than that he would have omitted to record the purchase. Observing Leonard at work on the ledgers of the Hogarth Press, Clive Bell, Virginia's brother-in-law, called him "the inexorable Jew."

Virginia was not always happy about Leonard's supervision, which could seem punitive, and Leonard knew that it was not always wise to exert the control over her daily schedule that he wished to, for her own good. He was careful on Virginia's behalf partly because she was not, and because he knew that there was never, as Willa Cather would write about Katherine Mansfield, "an interval in which she did not have to drive herself beyond her strength." But Leonard was also careful because he knew that if he managed Virginia well, then she was at greater liberty to write, and to do her work with greater freedom of mind. He had learned that the "continual nagging which that kind of shepherding always involves" would "do no good & only spoil things" — so he knew he must be as unobtrusive a monitor as he could be, aware at the same time that "it was mad" to be too unmindful, even when nothing appeared to be wrong. Now, as the two months' gap that had hobbled her in 1921 seemed to reappear to mar 1922, his task was more delicate than ever. After one examination that winter, Virginia wrote in her diary that the doctor was worried about her heart. He "pronounced my eccentric pulse had passed the limits of reason & was in fact insane." They spoke in metaphors of mental illness even when trying hardest to avoid the precipice.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The World Broke In Two"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Bill Goldstein.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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