One hundred years ago, in 1922, the world changed. Not the real world, of course — that had happened a few years before, with the war — but the literary world, which is always a few ticks behind (Roddy Doyle, at a recent event, when heckled by an audience member asking when he was going to get to the point, replied, “I’m a novelist, so it might take me a few months.”)
In the opening years of the twentieth century, as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring caused a sensation in their respective spheres, Edwardian English literature remained solidly post-Victorian, dominated by chunky realists like Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy.
But during and after the war, a new type of literature gained prominence — modernism — in response to the belief among writers that their times were uniquely turbulent and complex, a belief that through mechanised war and its losses, and technological advancement and its gains, humanity itself had changed and needed new ways to tell its story — urgently.
And after the rumble, the explosion: the year of 1922 was indelibly marked by the publication of two great, still-standing, monuments to modernism: James Joyce’s novel Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. These two, bookending the year, are the great grandaddies of the show, but other titles, as we shall see, were just as important.
So the
