The World Broke in Two

May 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.

May 15, 2017
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.

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August 1, 2017
Four radical writers battled illness, depression, domestic stress, heartbreak, and artistic paralysis as the year 1922 delivered two literary explosions: James Joyce's Ulysses and the first English translation of the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. These novels would serve as goads and polestars for T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. In an extensively researched, extraordinarily fine-grained and lucid literary history rich in biographical discoveries, Goldstein traces the synergy among this quartet and reveals both their anguish and esprit de corps. He extracts wisdom, wit, cattiness, and sympathy from diaries and letters as he charts the fitful creation of The Waste Land, A Passage to India, Kangaroo, and Mrs. Dalloway concurrent with Eliot's breakdowns and rest cures, Forster's unrequited love for men, Lawrence's fractious sojourn in Taos with Mabel Dodge Sterne, and Woolf's defiance of doctor's orders. Here, too, are publishing skirmishes and censorship cases. 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. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2017

What's in a year? If it's 1922, a lot. James Joyce's Ulysses was published, Marcel Proust's magnum opus began appearing in English, and Woolf, Eliot, Lawrence, and Forster all made significant breakthroughs that signaled the birth of modernism.

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June 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

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.