Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One

by Kevin Jackson

Ezra Pound referred to 1922 as Year One of a new era. It was the year that began with the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and ended with the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: respectively, the most influential English-language novel and poem of the century. To this day, these two works remain the titanic figures of modern literature—some would say, of modernity itself. And it was the indefatigable Pound who played a significant part in the launch of both writers’ careers.
In Constellation of Genius, Kevin Jackson puts the accomplishments of Joyce and Eliot in the context of the world in which their works first appeared. We see the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the end of Dada, and the death of Proust. Meanwhile, Hollywood transformed the nature of fame, making Charlie Chaplin the most recognizable man on the planet. Hitchcock directed his first feature, Kandinsky and Klee joined the Bauhaus, and Louis Armstrong took the train from New Orleans to Chicago, heralding the start of modern jazz.
Gloriously entertaining, erudite, and idiosyncratic, this is a biography of a year, a journey through the diaries of the anthropologists, actors, artists, dancers, designers, filmmakers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians, and scientists whose lives and works collided over twelve months, creating a frenzy of innovation that split the world in two.

Some of the people discussed are: Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel, Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud, E. M. Forster, George Gershwin, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, Carl Jung, James Joyce, Sergei Prokofiev, Luis Buñuel, Bertolt Brecht, Wyndham Lewis, Fritz Lang, D. H. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, Katherine Mansfield, Aleister Crowley, Bronisław Malinowski, Eugene O’Neill, George Orwell, Nikola Tesla, Alfred Hitchcock, Pablo Picasso, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Bertrand Russell, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Walt Disney, Lois Armstrong, Franz Kafka, Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, W. B. Yeats, Benito Mussolini, Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, Le Corbusier, John Maynard Keynes, F. W. Murnau, Sergei Diaghilev, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wassily Kandinsky, André Breton, Rudyard Kipling, Ronald Firbank, Marcel Duchamp, Dashiell Hammett, Georges Bataille, Aldous Huxley, Andrei Bely, Henri Matisse, Marcel Proust, Ludwig Wittgenstein

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Art, Books About Books, Biography, Cultural, Science

544 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2011

About the author

There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.

Kevin Jackson's childhood ambition was to be a vampire but instead he became the last living polymath. His colossal expertise ranged from Seneca to Sugababes, with a special interest in the occult, Ruskin, take-away food, Dante's Inferno and the moose. He was the author of numerous books on numerous subjects, including Fast: Feasting on the Streets of London (Portobello 2006), and reviewed regularly for the Sunday Times.
From: http://portobellobooks.com/3014/Kevin...

Kevin Jackson was an English writer, broadcaster and filmmaker.

He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After teaching in the English Department of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, he joined the BBC, first as a producer in radio and then as a director of short documentaries for television. In 1987 he was recruited to the Arts pages of The Independent. He was a freelance writer from the early 1990s and was a regular contributor to BBC radio discussion programmes.

Jackson often collaborated on projects in various media: with, among others, the film-maker Kevin Macdonald, with the cartoonist Hunt Emerson, with the musician and composer Colin Minchin (with whom he wrote lyrics for the rock opera Bite); and with the songwriter Peter Blegvad.

Jackson appears, under his own name, as a semi-fictional character in Iain Sinclair's account of a pedestrian journey around the M25, London Orbital.

Adapted from Wikipedia

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exhausting and entertaining précis of the cultural, political, and scientific explosions that took place in 1922. Focusing on the twin peaks of modernism—The Waste Land and Ulysses—Jackson’s brilliant book captures the foreboding and excitement of that monumental time when timeless art was oozing from copious orifices, and the Ungreat Dictators were in the process of wiping out half the universe. His summaries are learned and well-informed—all topics are uncaptured with the essence of pith, making this the perfect confection for those between novels needing a little booster for their forthcoming explorations in the realm of print.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book about a year, this one focused on writers -- primarily Joyce, Eliot, and Pound -- with side trips into art, politics, psychiatry, film, music, and other fields. Having recently read Florian Illies' book on 1913, comparisons are inevitable and I generally preferred Illies' writing and the more integrated structure of his history. 1922 is more a series of factoids and sometimes-digressive footnotes somewhat arbitrarily assembled around the central story of three remarkable writers in a year that was momentous for two of them (Joyce and Eliot -- Pound appears more as a supportive voice). Another difference is the inclusion here of a long section detailing the future lives and works of the people who appear in the year's narrative, not unwelcome but perhaps not as effective as the silence at the end of 1913 that the reader is left to fill on his own. Overall though, a fine slice of artistic history that sets familiar works in a powerful context and leaves me wanting to re-read Ulysses.

[Rob Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an art movement. It arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to leave traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete.

Ezra Pound declared 1922 to be year one of a new age. The previous age had ended when Joyce wrote the final words of Ulysses in October of the preceding year. This is a breezy book which provides an entertaining overview of the subject.

I also listened to the BBC Radio 4 program: 1922: The Birth of Now. Matthew Sweet investigates objects and events from 1922, the crucial year for modernism, that have an impact today. And a couple of episodes of The Rest is History:
* Ep 136: 2022 marks 100 years since one of the most important years in modern history. In part 1 Tom and Dominic discuss all things 1922: Bolshevism, fascism, and the significance of The Waste Land and Ulysses.
* Ep 137:: In part 2 of this centennial episode, Tom and Dominic cover the triggering of the Irish Civil War, the birth of the BBC, and Howard Carter's 'Tutmania'.

[Kirti Upreti · Rating 3 out of 5]

A couple of months ago I came across a 2009 interview of Eduardo Galeano where he discusses his then latest book ‘Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone’.

At one point the host asks Galeano: “Was there ever a ‘golden age’?”

An almost septuagenarian Galeano, mildly amused, replies: “No..no..never. Of course, never! We are all half garbage and half marble - all of us.”

—————————————————————

In the history of the western world, the early twentieth century is often regarded as the golden age of illumination. The glory and glamour of the time is so lustrous that even catastrophes like world wars and economic depressions couldn’t make it fade. It was the age of modernism – when Picasso, Matisse and Duchamp questioned the traditions and Einstein revived mystery just when Physics was almost declared to be complete. The period witnessed the fall of the tsars and rise of the Lenins, Stalins, Mussolinis and Hitlers of the world. Ulysses was published and James Joyce carried forward the movement started by Gustave Flaubert at the turn of the century. Virginia Woolf gained prominence in an age when women had just begun to exercise the right to vote.

But history, more often than not, highlights only that to which it confers the title of 'remarkable' and ignores to bring forth the mundane side of its protagonists. That’s why some books are meant to be read in order to just balance the two sides of every historical opera – the serious and the casual, the divine and the human, the significant and the insignificant, the marble and the garbage.

[AC · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very rapid pastiche of (mostly) literary gossip. Some interesting anecdotes, but not a terribly weighty or important book.

[Rafael Eaton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected a bit more of a narrative than a monthly, geographically-based play-by-play of the year. It was fun though.

[Alex Sarll]

So that was 2022; a year of which the absolute best that could be said is that we were allowed to see other people for the whole of it, something which until quite recently you wouldn't even have thought needed mentioning. Not that there were all that many places to see them, with naive predictions of a new roaring twenties smacking into the reality of Britain's pubs and clubs closing at a faster rate than during lockdown. Or that many people could afford to go to the ones which survived, what with the cost of living crisis. Which, while it had its roots in the pandemic, was then compounded by the rebirth of European land wars, and then our own idiot rulers, including arguably the worst budget in British history. And even aside from that, sometimes the plague would still keep you home, or the tempests, or the hottest days and nights Britain has ever seen (or rather, ever seen so far, given the world continues to be on fire and those with the power to do anything about it can barely feign giving the merest fraction of a fuck). Elsewhere: tides of sewage, the Comixology 'update', endless bloody sport, Roe vs Wade overturned, tempest, drought, Ladbaby again, strikes upon strikes, the Hardy Oak falling, Elon and Kanye competing for the title of world's most divorced man. A year where we lost Meat Loaf, Cathal Coughlan, Fletch, Sidney Poitier, Patricia McKillip, Neal Adams, George Perez, Alan Grant, Fred Ward, David Warner, Robbie Coltrane, Bernard Cribbins, Angela Lansbury, Loretta Lynn, Olivia Newton John and Lamont Dozier within 24 hours, Raymond Briggs the day after, Jean-Luc Godard, Julee Cruise, Ronnie Spector, Gorbachev, Barry Cryer, Paulie Walnuts, Coolio, Hilary Mantel, Alexei Panshin, Carmen Callil, Jerry Lee Lewis, Mimi from Low and Kevin O'Neill within 24 hours, Leslie Phillips the day after that, Greg Bear, Wilko Johnson, Christine McVie, Kirstie Alley, Chris Boucher and Victor Lewis-Smith *and* Angelo Badalamenti within 24 hours, Terry Hall, Mike Hodges, Maxi Jazz, Stephen Greif, Ronan Vibert, John Bird, Vivienne Westwood. With only one long overdue Nazi in the credit column to set against those debits. And this just the ones I actually felt, of course, there were plenty more I could abstractly recognise as losses too, and I suspect even then the list is incomplete. Not to mention the Queen who reigned over most of the century dividing this year from 1922. 1922, as you've probably already gathered from all the anniversary programming and articles, being a key year for the Good Twenties bringing so much into the world, here anatomised by one of the many fine things the Bad Twenties have already taken out of it. And yes, in a sense it's frustrating that Jackson should get so near to the centenary of his subject, only to have missed it – but at least that way he avoided the dismal comparison. In 1922, you could barely turn around for new possibilities bubbling out of the arts. In 2022, films and shows get completed then junked unseen as tax write-offs when the suits belatedly realise that peak TV has peaked - not that it stops everyone and his dog from continuing to launch their own increasingly threadbare streaming services. This was a year when the best 'new' book was incomplete and by a man who's been dead 16 years, and the best 'new' album was by someone who arguably took it a bit far by bailing out before even hitting the 21st century. Even the best gig I saw was a comeback by a band from two decades earlier, who turned out to be dead even if they didn't know it at the time. The obvious retort would be to suggest that brilliant new stuff is happening in bits of the underground far too hip for me to know about them, but one of the things Constellation Of Genius reminds you of is that while not all of the big names here were already big names in 1922, nor were they uniformly obscure. The Waste Land and Ulysses may now be thought of as difficult, and they were then too (though of course, at the time many more people were happily to declare the emperor naked, not having the weight of a century of canonical status arrayed against them), but they were not obscure publications in the other sense. Oh, and before anyone tries trotting out the 'modern culture is hooked on sequels and reboots' line, bear in mind that Ulysses was both – and what's The Waste Land if not the yoking together of multiple pre-existing properties in an Eliot Poetic Universe?

But just as those two pillars of 1922 culture found suggestive similarities as well as massive dissimilarities between their own age and a classical past, so there are moments here which seem hauntingly familiar. Ulysses being attacked as "literary Bolshevism" could almost be 'cultural Marxism' via one of those news sites that feeds things through a digital thesaurus. Russia is being shitty, of course; Lenin, broken, realising the extent to which the revolution isn't what he hoped for, though obviously not regretful enough about that to stop him being corrupt and murderous in his exacerbating a famine and lying about it. Flat-out denying reality, too, with the Party denouncing Einstein's theories as reactionary. By year's end, infirm and effectively imprisoned as Stalin gives bloody birth to the USSR. Italy's plumped for fascism. 100,000 are lost to a typhoon in what's now Shantou, the same again when Turkish troops set Smyrna ablaze. There's the unfortunate moment when an artist turns out to have dreadful beliefs – who would have guessed Bunuel was violently homophobic? And a few big cultural deaths too, not least Proust's; the next day Cocteau, viewing the body, described the 20 volumes of manuscript for In Search Of Lost Time as "still alive, like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers". You will note, though, that it's only the downsides which seem to correspond; where 1922 opens Tutankhamun's tomb and finds wonderful things (though Jackson is enlightening on how much that story has been massaged – and also on how the Egyptian craze often thought to have begun with the discovery was in fact already underway, though certainly kicked up a gear), 2022 only gets the curse.

The format here is that of a timeline, which has made for a handy (if, as you may have gathered, seldom a cheering) read throughout the year, and to some extent saves worrying about structure, but is not necessarily the easiest thing to imbue with spark and personality. Still, that's a challenge, not an impossibility, and much like Lance Parkin, Jackson is up to the job of making it sing. Even with all his wide-ranging knowledge, he didn't have something for every day – and given the associations, it's ironic that April is the sparsest month, at one stage skipping 10th-16th-20th. Sometimes there's only a little to say: the entry for 11 July is, in its entirety, "The Hollywood Bowl opened." Other days, though, get pages and pages; 21 July gives us plenty on both Edith Wharton's postwar windfalls, and the powerful bond between Robert Graves and TE Lawrence. Sometimes these longer entries (which, yes, frequently include matter from subsequent days, but otherwise the telling of Modernism might itself become a little too disjointedly Modernist) point up key themes or works; elsewhere, they're just yarns Jackson knows are worth sharing, like the story of Cocteau and Radiguet's messy was-it-a-relationship, here hinged on Radiguet pissing off with Brancusi in an increasingly quixotic search for the best bouillabaisse in Paris; he eventually staggers back ten days later, having got as far as Corsica. Wittgenstein teaching at a primary school is an image with which to conjure; Andre Breton taking his mysteriously resurrected armadillo on a depressing brothel trip feels like it belongs in a really niche comedy sketch show. See also Einstein and Bohr learning they'd won the Nobel on the same day, which sounds like the set-up for a joke about uncertainty, even if it was just that Einstein's was the delayed 1921 prize (and set against the laugh there the wince upon learning of Einstein's huge popularity in Japan, given their appointment a few years later with the applied results of the new physics).

And yes, Einstein does make plenty of appearances here, and we do get Louis Armstrong changing the face of jazz too; it's not just the Eliot and Joyce show with occasional stirrings in Bloomsbury. Hell, it's not even just a high culture affair; we also get Lovecraft, the debuts of Richmal Crompton and Enid Blyton, the introduction of the Oldest Member in The Clicking Of Cuthbert, a Wodehouse even I've not read (because, obviously, golf), and the launch of Reader's Digest. I was particularly entertained by the crossovers, such as Kipling's meeting with Lorca, or Biggles' creator WE Johns being the recruiting officer when TE Lawrence joined the RAF under an assumed name. Elsewhere, it's a crossing of generational streams: Forster struggling not to crack up while Hardy shows him around the deeply Hardyesque graveyard of his dead cats, their ends never peaceful. But it must be admitted that compared to Matthew Sweet's recent radio series about the decade, the emphasis here is distinctly Western. It's remarkable the change even a decade has made in our assessments: Sweet had an episode on Lu Xun's Story Of Ah Q, a Chinese modernist keystone subsequently tainted by Mao's love for the book, but which is wholly absent here. And while Jackson can hardly ignore the fascism of Pound in particular, or the stirrings in Italy and Germany, there's nothing like the same constant hum of the fascism within Modernism, simply because in those innocent days ten years ago, it didn't have to be such a preoccupation. Then again, I felt Sweet never integrated his material as much as he might, and while Jackson spends a smaller proportion of his time on them, he feels more alert to the nuances, like the different ways in which Italian and German fascism balanced their contrasting Modernist/Futurist and backwards-looking tendencies – although of course that leads into the general question of the way so many supposed Year Zero movements contain a huge dose of retro.

Oh, and one other way in which this book did feel ever so slightly dated: the reference in a footnote to Parade's End as great but neglected, something Stoppard and Cumberbatch have done much to change in the interim. Even for the dead white guys, the canon ain't quite set yet.

Still, if even a book quite this capacious can't be everything, it does a bloody good job of at least catching its central foment, with glimpses at what else was afoot. The scenes in which it feels most fully itself are those covering events like the great dinner party of May 18th, where Proust and Joyce both turned up late, but did meet...and while accounts of the details vary, all agree they completely failed to hit it off until, like a couple of grans, they got on to their health complaints. Although Picasso and Stravinsky were also present, they don't seem to have joined in, which is at once a great loss, and yet maybe for the best. Speaking of Joyce's health, how remarkable that when he consulted two ophthalmologists, they should have been called Dr Henry and Dr James – particularly when both forecast a worsening fog on his vision, which recalls so well the experience of reading their joint namesake.

Like one of those films where the end credits are overlaid with captions telling us what the characters did next, the book closes with 50 pages of aftermath; inevitably, many we've seen in 1922 will go on to make terrible political choices (special mention to Shaw for being uncomfortably keen on both Stalin and Hitler!), be displaced by the terrible choices of others, or simply fall to classics like cancer and booze. Nevertheless, I expect any similar account of the survivors of 2022 will make for a yet more grisly read, assuming there's anyone left in 2122 with the capability to write it.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writing a review to clarify that this is more of a 2.5 star book for me.

This book is a day-by-day chronicle of prominent thinkers, artists, and public figures of 1922, but that's really about it. Kevin Jackson claims that 1922 represents the birth of Modernism, because the year begins with publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and ends with T.S. Eliot's publishing The Waste Land. Ezra Pound advocated for re-starting the official calendar with the publication of Ulysses, and dated his letters as such for a time.

However, instead of defining modernism to his readers or theorizing about the impact that various artists, thinkers and public figures had on advancing modernism, he simply starts on January 1st and finishes on December 31, and uses journals, letters, and other primary sources to describe just what Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Katherine Mansfield, Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein & the like were doing on that day and what they were all saying about each other. While I found this collection of ephemera occasionally interesting, I think this book lacked a defined point of view and would have preferred more context or perhaps a more thematic construction to the author's contention that 1922 was the official dawn of the Modern Age.

I could read cultural histories of the 1920s for the rest of my life and never tire of it; I can't say this book wasn't at times interesting and readable - it was. I was engaged with many of the storylines and threads presented in the book, no matter how haphazard and difficult to follow they were, due to the straight chronological form of the book. Living almost 100 years after the events presented, I was continually reminded of the ephemeral nature of fame, and how works of art considered influential or respected during the time are all but forgotten and unread now.

However, for a book about Proust, Freud, and Breton, is is light as a feather. It is saying something when, after reading this book, I cannot describe Modernism as a movement as defined by the author. I think that this book is like a Very Intellectual Person's Bathroom Reader, rather than a cogent argument about a profound turning point in the culture of the world.

[Sammy · Rating 3 out of 5]

See other reviews. A worthy topic, but this is a smart marketing opportunity rather than a book with any kind of argument. Well researched, no doubt, and nevertheless fascinating for people like myself obsessed with the birth of Modernism. But, anyone with a university library card and a Wikipedia account could make this happen, so I'm willing only to recommend it as a bargain sale for dipping into, rather than as a contribution to literature on the era.

[Mangoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a unique jewel of a book. It is a diary of the year 1922 (which incidentally is one century away just a few days from the time of this writing), elected as year 1 of modernism. Organized per months and gravitating around three main representatives (Joyce and his "Ulysses", Eliot and his "The waste land", and Pound with his "Cantos"), the book reveals with constant precision of details (and very rich footnotes, to the point one wonders how the author has gotten all that curious, even pedantic information about daily routines and singular accidents in the lives of such memorable people) and sustained elegance and ingenious acumen of linguistic sharpness the tangled web of events, characters, inventions, actions, publications, travels, acquaintances, friendships, marriages, separations, digressions, adventures, crises, successes and failures that dotted that full year. The attention is largely on the artistic memorabilia, and thereby eminently literary, though fair space is conceded also to cinema, theater, music, painting, ballet, architecture and other creative outlets that were anyway at least partly tinged with reflections of ideas that came to constitute modernism. History also laces the pages, as this year hangs in between the two world wars and the echo of the first is not gone while the anticipation of the second is not close yet. All of this massive bundle of development is presented within a monolithic sub specie aethernitatis view, where triumphs and agonies are equally tampered and normalized, and within a slick elegant rigid volume perfectly formatted (coherent font, a few typos though), amply referenced, and concluding with a short biographical sketch of the main characters following them until their death. Among the scientists, Einstein is the star, among the philosophers is Wittgenstein (who also here overshadows Russel). The author keeps a polite, sharp, curious, and critical eye in picking up a stunning amount of notes and trivia, letters and confessions, registering dates, elucidating antecedents and previews, debunking a few myths and reinstalling justice where edulcorated by posterior views, and not shying away from expressing his own judgment where legit (Pound catches the attention here). A rather unique accomplishment, that one would wish to see redacted for any relevant year of our times.

[Chrystyna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Constellation of Genius - 1922: Modernism and all that Jazz by Kevin Jackson - OK

Last year I read an anthology of diary entries as a kind of 'readalong' and thought I'd try it again this year. I found this at Scotland Street Little Free Library and as I know very little of the 'jazz age' and 1922 I thought this might fit the bill. It did. Kind of.

It is billed as a 'gloriously entertaining journey through the diaries of the actors, anthropologists, artists, dancers, designers, film-makers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians and scientists whose lives and works collided over twelve months, creating a frenzy of innovation and the beginning of a new era."

That's not quite how I saw it. It was interesting to get a peek into their lives and the era, but there seemed to be an awful lot of time dedicated to Ulysses and The Wasteland and what various folk felt about it. I did discover that I had no idea who most of the protagonists were and in looking up more detail about them I did learn a few things. I think I found the most interesting bit was the last 60 pages: The Aftermath, where the author rounded up all the people included and said what became of them after 1922.

An interesting enough read, but if I'd sat down to read it cover to cover (rather than date by date) I'd have given up long before page 50.

[Mauricio Montenegro · Rating 3 out of 5]

La premisa es original y sugerente: un libro dedicado a un año singular, el año en que se publicaron el Ulysses de Joyce y The waste land de Eliot, entre decenas o cientos de otros acontecimientos culturales, académicos, científicos y políticos. Tiene la estructura de un calendario, que va recuperando mes a mes entradas de diarios, notas de periódicos, correspondencias. Ya en el detalle, no logra mantener el interés: los datos más interesantes se mezclan con los más prosaicos, la miscelanea inglesa de intrigas aristocráticas gana un protagonismo inmerecido. Una vez se ha desvanecido la primera impresión de casualidad histórica, no hay nada en el fondo para recibirnos. Lo mejor son las últimas cuarenta páginas, que abandonan el formato de calendario y tratan de narrar las secuelas de la historia de cada protagonista.

[Bianca · Rating 2 out of 5]

So disappointed by this book. 2 Stars simply because I couldn’t stand the execution. The short notes of the “day by day” blows of 1922 just didn’t work. It limited the writing style meaning there was excessive footnoting on most pages which broke the flow. It was difficult to follow the narrative because of this as well, meaning someone may have been mentioned briefly at the start and then not again until near the end. It was obviously well researched and there was a lot that happened in 1922 to warrant this book, but the execution just didn’t work.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intermittently interesting. I was apparently reading this when I decided to move and packed it in a box, where it lay forgotten for a couple of years until I unpacked and picked it up where I left off (page 141). It's the sort of book you can do that with and not miss much. Must say I was rather annoyed at the many lengthy footnotes in teeny tiny print.

[Paul Mcloughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An always entertaining, often enlightening, and sometimes even thrilling overview of 1922, aka the Year Zero of Modernism. It left me wanting to explore further - I've already bought "The Waste Land" and it may even be time to give "Ulysess" a shot.

[Michael]

A day by day description of literary, political, musical, poetic, film and other happenings in the momentous year, 1922. It has opened my eyes to many "geniuses" who supported Mussolini. How easy it is to be seduced by fascism as the right wing in America is doing right now.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would have made a better novel, David Markson style.

[Russ Haeber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth a gander.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a lot going on in this one. I had no idea how interconnected all of modernism really was and is until I read this.

[Honor · Rating 4 out of 5]

While more romantic than academic in tone, this book was an delightful and highly informative read 👍🏻

[Elif Kaynakci · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 and half stars. Fascinating and well researched, nevertheless becomes repetitive towards the end.

[Robert Monk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got this on a whim, and it's just about what I thought it would be: a gossipy little diary about the goings-on of (mostly) the expat set in 1922. It reminds me a bit of the Warhol diaries, in fact. And it's fun enough, showing the doings of characters in the early jazz age. And there were a lot of characters there. The book points out that the year was bookended by *Ulysses* and *The Waste Land*, and Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Salvador Dali, and Mussolini all make appearances. This isn't a critical analysis, and there are no illustrations (which is a shame, given the number of visual artists who get mentioned), but it's readable.

[Bloodorange · Rating 3 out of 5]

Argh. This book was not at all what I expected it to be.

Having enjoyed Bill Bryson’s One Summer, I did not necessarily expect a book written in a “this day in history” format, presenting what happened day after day in Paris, London, Moscow, and anywhere D.H. Lawrence travelled. Instead of organised material, we get, quite literally, a collection of trivia. Did I really need to know that Eliot reportedly used "violet face powder to make himself look more cadaverous"? How about D.H Lawrence's stomach bug? "One of Proust's last memorable nights on the town, which turned very ugly"? At best, these are attractive anecdotes for lightening up one’s classes or lectures– such as the one of Zelda’s rebellious review of The Beautiful and the Damned, in which she playfully – and rightly – accused her husband of plagiarizing her diaries and letters.

The book format has inherent formal problems, such as lengthy footnotes (including a three-page-long one on Louis Armstrong), inclusion of barely relevant information on youthful exploits of Gershwin, Hitchcock, and Dali (who, thrillingly, became a university student in 1922!), and rather tedious summaries of “major players’” lives after 1922. All this, along with the fact that the style of the book, while not simplistic, frequently feels too relaxed, simply screams “lazy writing”.

Why is this a keeper, then? I think I am precisely the target audience for this book, which reads like an extended gossip column on dead people I really care about. While obviously not a quotable academic source (meaning I would be ashamed of using it), the book is useful in preparing classes, and it fulfils the promise of its title in at least one respect: it successfully conveys the idea of a ‘constellation’ – it was fascinating to see how nearly all major writers of the period knew many of the others, exchanged letters, impressions, opinions.

[Disarticulate · Rating 3 out of 5]

An awful lot happened in 1922 in the world of art, literature, politics, film, international relations - the world in general. So much so, that a book such as the 'Constellation of Genius' is needed to track the daily highlights from this wonderful year. Structured as an almanac recounting the major events on a day by day basis, 'Constellation of Genius' really helped me appreciate how remarkable this year was.

1922 saw the publication of the two fundamental landmarks of Modernism - Ulysess and The Wasteland. Ezra Pound recognised the importance of the Wasteland, so much so he christened 1922 as year One of a new era.

Ezra Pound is one of many of the cast of characters who appear in the Constellation of Genius. The cast is immense including everyone from Lenin to Proust from Hitchcock to Wittgenstein from Freud to Kafka. What is best about this book, is seeing how major figures in this year reacted to the cultural and historical events as they happened. Reading about Virgina Woolf’s virulent feelings about Ulyssses and her growing appreciation of Joyce’s genius gives a greater insight into the novel and of Woolf as a writer. There are countless moments such as these when great figures come into contact with one another. It is at these moments I wish I had access to a time machine. What exactly did Proust and Joyce talk about at their only meeting at dinner party in Paris which also included Picasso, Diaghilev, Stravinsky as guests? Did they get round the piano and have a sing-song as Stravinsky palyed a tune, did they share a Ferrero Roche? Who knows but this book goes some way to creating links and filling in some blanks about some great people in an extraordinary year.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book to get caught up in. As its subtitle indicates it is essentially about the beginnings of the Modernist era, given as the year that Joyce's 'Ulysses' was published, but also 1922 was the year that Eliot's 'The Waste Land' appeared. The book is divided into the 12 months as chapters, then the significant events are discussed chronologically, flitting around the world, introducing the major players of the time, whether they be writers, artists, composers, filmmakers or politicians. The world stage seems huge. Joyce, Eliot and Ezra Pound are the standout people of the book, and following the reviews of 'Ulysses' in particular is a fascinating journey.

I think the success of this book lies in the fact that we are used to history books covering longer periods of time, and thus not going into so much detail, and as so much happened of significance, as it will have done in many other years, it is almost like an international diary. It does admittedly focus on the artistic world, but it does not purport to be a political history, although important events are discussed. There are copious footnotes (and in the beautifully produced hardback edition they are printed in a classy mauve print)and a summary at the end of the further lives of the people who have been appearing in the preceding pages. A very enjoyable book for any Twentieth Century fan, or those interested in history of the arts, written with some humour and a keen sense of key events.

[Russell Glasson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has a simple thesis; that Modernism was formed and furnished with its twin leading literary landmarks of Ulysses and The Waste Lands in 1922, and that everything else was framed with reference to an event that took place this year. The year is laid out for us to consume, event by event, letter by gossipy letter, historical details related in chronological order, with a simplicity that allows the world it describes to speak for itself.

Easy and straightforward, Kevin Jackson illustrates his thesis with footnote biographies and cross-references that enable the reader to trace the web of connections between many of the key personalities of the day. The text remains light, avoids most if not all interpretations and references secondary sources only with a bibliographic list at the end, but for anyone interested in the development of literature, cinema, poetry and much else besides, this is illuminating.

[Lizzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jackson has created an immersive day by day account of Western European life in 1922, arranged like an omniscient journal of the year's political and cultural luminaries. Jackson bases his selection of 1922 as the pivotal year in the creation of modernism on the publication of The Waste Land and Ulysses, and the concurrent genius of TS Eliot and James Joyce, and their prophet-cum-booster Ezra Pound. It is a brilliant format, bursting with profound quotations, transcendent moments, tawdry quarrels, and grumpy, gossipy letters. I would have wished for a broader net, as happenings outside of London, Paris, Berlin, and Hollywood are covered shallowly, from the perspective of a newspaper-reading Brit, with a few exceptions (Spanish modernism, a few slight passages on the Harlem Renaissance, ect). That said, I loved the book and desperately want to read sequels for 1923 onward- if only more history could be written in such an immediate, personal style.

[Busyknitter · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh dear. I should have read the blurb. This wasn't a book about modernism, it was a chronological gossip column from 1922, mainly taken from the diaries and letters of the celebrities of the day. I really disliked it.

I'm just not interested in Joyce's arguments with his publisher, Eliot's boring job in the Bank of England and Maynard Keynes's sex life. I also don't need to be reminded what a nasty person Bertrand Russell was.

(Side note; it's never a good sign when the footnotes seem to take up more space than the main text)

[Grady · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm giving up on this book for now. It includes a wealth of information about major and many many minor cultural figures, mostly in Western Europe and America, in the year 1922. But, the vignette structure and large number of characters makes it hard to follow any particular narrative thread. This might be a fun read for someone who already knows a bunch of the personalities and the general cultural history of the year; without that background, I've found this a hard slog with nothing to stick the various episodes in my memory.

[Patti K · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 2013 book is an almanac calendar of the annus mirabilis 1922.
Many important events happened in historical, cultural, and scientific
areas. It is an exciting compilation of the highlights of that year.
The Wasteland and Ulysses were both published; the BBC was founded;
Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler were on the rise much to the world's
chagrin. The first Disney animation was produced and Albert Einstein
was awarded the Nobel in Physics. It is a fascinating excursion through
history.