Gide was unusually interested in English literature: William Blake, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens. But he also knew the Bloomsbury set – Gide had studied English at Cambridge, the Bloomsbury outpost, in 1918. He met Clive Bell in Paris in 1919, stayed with Lady Ottoline Morrell in Garsington in 1920, carried on a lengthy correspondence with Roger Fry (both shared a love of Nicolas Poussin), and later served on an antifascist committee of intellectuals with Virginia Woolf.
As she was preparing her novel Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf was only too well aware that what she was trying to do was also being attempted by other authors. In her diary for 26 September 1920, she wrote, ‘I reflected how what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr Joyce.’59 T. S. Eliot, she knew, was in touch with James Joyce, for he kept her informed of what the Irishman was doing.
Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 into an extremely literary family (her father was founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and his first wife was a daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray). Although she was denied the education given to her brothers, she still had the run of the family’s considerable library and grew up much better read than most of her female contemporaries. She always wanted to be a writer and began with articles for the Times Literary Supplement (which had begun as a separate publication from its parent, the London Times, in 1902). But she didn’t publish her first novel, The Voyage Out, until 1915, when she was thirty-three.60
It was with Jacob’s Room that the sequence of experimental novels for which Woolf is most remembered was begun. The book tells the story of a young man, Jacob, and its central theme, as it follows his development through Cambridge, artistic and literary London, and a journey to Greece, is the description of a generation and class that led Britain into war.61 It is a big idea; however, once again it is the form of the book which sets it apart. In her diary for early 1920 she had written, ‘I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time; no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist.’62 Jacob’s Room is an urban novel, dealing with the anonymity and fleeting experiences of city streets, the ‘vast atomised masses scurrying across London’s bridges’, staring faces glimpsed through the windows of tea shops, either bored or bearing the marks of ‘the desperate passions of small lives, never to be known.’63 Like Ulysses and like Proust’s work, the book consists of a stream of consciousness – erratic at times – viewed through interior monologues, moving backward and forward in time, sliding from one character to another without warning, changing viewpoint and attitude as fast and as fleetingly as any encounter in any major urban centre you care to name.64 Nothing is settled in Jacob’s Room. There isn’t much plot in the conventional sense (Jacob’s early promise is never fulfilled, characters remain unformed, people come and go; the author is as interested in marginal figures, like a flower seller on the street, as in those who are, in theory, more central to the action), and there is no conventional narrative. Characters are simply cut off, as in an impressionist painting. ‘It is no use trying to sum people up,’ says one of the figures, who could have stepped out of Gide, One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.’65 Woolf is describing, and making us feel, what life is like in vast cosmopolitan cities of the modern world. This fragmentation, this dissolution of the familiar categories – psychological as well as physical – is just as much the result of World War I, she is saying, as the military/political/economic changes that have been wrought, and is arguably more fundamental.
The effect of Sigmund Freud’s psychological ideas on André Breton (1896–1966) was very direct. During World War I he stood duty as an hospital orderly at the Saint-Dizier psychiatric centre, treating victims of shell shock. And it was in Saint-Dizier that Breton first encountered the (psycho) analysis of dreams, in which – as he later put it – he did the ‘groundwork’ for surrealism. In particular, he remembered one patient who lived entirely in his own world. This man had been in the trenches but had become convinced he was invulnerable. He thought the whole world was ‘a sham,’ played by actors who used dummy bullets and stage props. So convinced was he of this vision that he would show himself during the fighting and gesture excitedly at the explosions. The miraculous inability of the enemy to kill him only reinforced his belief.66
It was the ‘parallel world’ created by this man that had such an effect on Breton. For him the patient’s madness was in fact a rational response to a world that had gone mad, a view that was enormously influential for several decades in the middle of the century. Dreams, another parallel world, a route to the unconscious as Freud said, became for Breton the route to art. For him, art and the unconscious could form ‘a new alliance,’ realised through dreams, chance, coincidence, jokes – all the things Freud was investigating. This new reality Breton called sur-reality, a word he borrowed from Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1917 Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and Léonide Massine had collaborated on a ballet, Parade, which the French poet had described as ‘une espèce de surréalisme.’67