Constellation of Genius by Kevin Jackson

Author:Kevin Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

NOVEMBER

1 NOVEMBER

CONSTANTINOPLE

The Ottoman Empire was abolished, and the Grand National Assembly took control of Turkey; the legitimacy of the GNA’s rule was internationally recognised some months later at a treaty conference held in Laussane. The last of the Ottoman Sultans, Mehmed VI Valentin, duly abdicated. On 17 November, he went into exile in Italy.

LONDON

In preparation for the imminent launch of the BBC, Parliament introduced a ten-shilling radio licence.

2 NOVEMBER

AUSTRALIA

The Australian airline Qantas began its first passenger services.

LONDON

Eliot arrived back from his brief holiday in Worthing. Vivien wrote an extraordinary letter to Pound, complaining about Lady Rothermere, or, as Vivien called her, ‘the Rothermere woman’: ‘She is unhinged – one of those beastly raving women who are the most dangerous.’ She continued in this vein, referring to the Gurdjieff Institute as if it were a mental hospital:

She is now in that asylum for the insane called La Prieure where she does religious dances naked with Katherine Mansfield. ‘K. M.’, she says in every letter – ‘is the most intelligent woman I have ever met.’ K. M. is pouring poison in her ear (of course) for K. M. hates T[om Eliot] more than anyone.

It sounds nonsensical, even paranoid. Yet on the following day Eliot also wrote to Pound, expressing much the same fears and resentments, if in rather more temperate language.

Lady Rothermere has been getting increasingly offensive ever since the Criterion came out, and especially since she entered her retreat for maniacs. I wish you could see her before she leaves Paris and tell her bluntly that the Criterion is a SUCCESS. I have had nothing but good notices. Nearly all the copies are sold (600 printed). But this woman will shipwreck it.

Pound replied swiftly, counselling Eliot not to carry out his emergency plan of trying to buy the title from Lady Rothermere.

LONDON

Macmillan published two handsome volumes of their collected edition of W. B. Yeats: Later Poems and Plays in Prose and Verse. The artist Charles Ricketts designed the green cloth binding, and produced drawings of a unicorn and a fountain for the endpapers. A few days later, Yeats wrote a grateful letter to Ricketts:

Yesterday my wife brought the books up to my study, and not being able to restrain her excitement I heard her cry out before she reached the door ‘You have perfect books at last.’ Perfect they are – serviceable and perfect. The little design of the unicorn is a masterpiece in that difficult kind …

He went on to report recent acts of violence: a minor bomb that had been thrown in the street outside a recent meeting of the Dublin Arts Club,1 and a much larger one on the far side of Merrion Square a few days earlier which was powerful enough to crack Yeats’s windows.

THRACE

Hemingway travelled to Muradli in eastern Thrace to observe the withdrawal of Greek troops. The territory had now been ceded to the Turks by the Allies, and the Greek forces were given just three days to evacuate. In one sense they were a

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