What the Fran

1922: Year Zero

Willa Cather said "the world broke in two in 1922." Ezra Pound dubbed it "year zero" - starting over. It was the tipping point of Modernism, the true arrival. So what happened in 1922?

Beyond the London-Parisian milieu most of this post takes place in, In a Bamboo Grove by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was published in January 1922. It was adapted as the 1950 film Rashomon and gave its name to the 'Rashomon effect' - the unreliability of eyewitnesses. It wasn't translated into English until 1952.

What kicks off the 1922 Pound was talking about: In February, Sylvia Beach published James Joyce's Ulysses from her bookshop on the rue de l'Odéon. I'm tempted to leave it at that. I will.

Katherine Mansfield's short story The Garden Party was serialised in February, and later in the year published as the collection The Garden Party and Other Stories (available at Project Gutenberg). It was her last published work before she died the next year aged thirty-four. She moved in Bloomsbury Group circles and was friends with Woolf, the Literary Ladies Guide has a nice article about their friendship.

Violet and Sydney Schiff held a party in May at the Hotel Majestic with a guest list including Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, and Clive Bell. It's famous for being the only meeting of Joyce and Proust (who died later in the year) and accounts vary massively - almost all of them are recounted in Francis Booth's Everybody I Can Think of Ever.

TS Eliot effectively self-published his poem The Waste Land in October by starting his own magazine, The Criterion. One time I'm going to do some research into the long and completely acceptable history of 'self-publishing.' The Waste Land can be read, with some nice annotations, at Poetry Foundation.

Also published in October is Virginia Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room. I'm a big fan of the main-character-who's-barely-there vibe. Previously Woolf had published The Voyage Out in 1915 and Night and Day in 1919. So all the really big hitters were yet to come. Jacob's Room is a shift, a signal, a trajectory. While her next, Mrs Dalloway, a clear classic of modernism, wasn't published until 1925 she started writing it about this time in autumn 1922.

In December there's a performance of Antigone written by Jean Cocteau and collaborators Pablo Picasso on the scenery, music by Arthur Honegger, with Coco Chanel doing the costumes. Stacked.

At some undefined point in 1922, Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair is published. It's available at Project Gutenberg. Sinclair was also a critic and famously used the term 'stream of consciousness' about a Dorothy Richardson work, Pilgrimage. And we've not stopped using it since. Pilgrimage came out in several volumes including in 1920, 1921, and 1923 so while not officially 1922 is clearly part of it.

I don't know nearly as much as I should about art but there's a list of 1922 in art. Interestingly, Modern Art Week in Brazil of which there's a nice article with lots of paintings from Brown University.

If I don't know much about art I know even less about music. I do know about the ballet The Rite of Spring but it is not 1922 so getting ruthlessly cut. It was written by Igor Stravinsky for Sergei Diaghilev, who crops up a lot in stories of Modernist Paris.

In 'not modernism but bound to have an impact', also for context, 1922 saw: the film Nosferatu, the Irish Civil War, the founding of the BBC, Mussolini becoming prime minister, the end of the Ottoman empire, Howard Carter digging up Tutankhamun, the debut of Readers Digest. I'd wondered sometimes about why the 1922 Committee (Parliamentary Conservatives) were so called. Turns out it was just the 1922 election intake. Boring.

A bibliography of sorts for this post:

I've got a collection of notes about scenes including what Joyce termed Stratford-on-Odéon. This is going to form something of a series with other years. 1910, of which Virginia Woolf said 'On or about December 1910 human nature changed.' Also 1886, rolled in with more nineteenth-century.

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