The pandemic had run its course, and the world war was over when a bunch of writers, artists and philosophers ushered in modernism, especially in western literature. In 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room spearheaded the modernist movement, although that label came later.
The authors didn’t sit down one day and decide, “Let’s create modernism”. According to one recent biographer, they were merely overcoming writer’s block. But no matter, even if the innovators didn’t agree among themselves.
Woolf’s reaction to Ulysses was that she was “puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
But the poet Ezra Pound wrote to a friend saying, “The Christian Era has ended. You are now in the year 1 p.s.U (post-scriptum Ulysses)” That was the endorsement 1922 needed – from the Pope of the written word himself.
Eliot was recovering from a nervous breakdown the previous year, Woolf had been down with the flu while Joyce had been broke and was sustained by the likes of Sylvia Beach who first published his book.
By introducing the many-voiced, multiple-perspective narrative which built on personal trauma to express universal truths, the writers of the period were shaking literature free of the earlier ‘single camera’ view of society and experimenting with both form and content. The lack of plot and character added to the mystique. Perhaps the 20th century really began in 1922.
There were other works too in that magical year. Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha appeared as did the first English translation of Proust’s Rembrances of Things Past. There was the philosopher Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico Philosophicus and psychologist Carl Jung’s Psychological Types.
Rilke’s Duino Elegies, with its haunting first line: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?” was written that year. Picasso and the early Surrealists were evolving a new vocabulary in art. Picasso spoke for the innovators when he said, “modern art is a sum of destructions.”
No biography of 1922 is complete without reference to the formation of the BBC and the first successful treatment of diabetes with insulin, the birth of the Soviet Union, and the discoveries both of the tomb of Tutankhamen and Mohenjo-daro. The opulent, celebratory Jazz Age was overcompensation for the past.
Despite its traumatic past and disturbing future (the Great Crash, World War II), it must have been a good year to be alive.
We will be celebrating the centenary of many of these events in the new year. It will be interesting to see (not that too many of us are likely to), what we will be celebrating in 2122, a hundred years from now. And what books written this year will survive a century.
History can accommodate many ‘modern’ ages. Will 2022 be the start of one? In literature or art, economics or medicine? Or are we, for the moment at least, ‘all done’, to borrow a phrase from my little niece who turns two in the new year?
(Suresh Menon’s recent book is Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read: Reading, Writing and Arrhythmia)
