Synopses & Reviews
A spirited chronicle of 1922, “Year One” of modernism, that turns on the influence of Eliot and Joyce
Ezra Pound referred to 1922 as Year One of a new era. It was the year that began with the publication of James Joyces Ulysses and ended with the publication of T. S. Eliots 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 ONeill, 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
Review
“Constellation of Genius . . . is that most counterintuitive of things, an insanely readable book about modernism. Indeed, I think it no disservice to Jackson to say that this is the primer [modernism] has been looking for: a way into its symbolic labyrinth.” —Will Self, The Guardian
“A lively guide to modernisms heyday . . . Deft, elegant and illuminating.” —Literary Review
“[A] marvelous diary of a single year . . . You will be struck by some startling moment of import in a life of genius or an epoch-making event.” —Sunday Herald
Synopsis
Ezra Pound referred to 1922 as Year One of a new era. It was the year that began with the publication of James Joyces Ulysses and ended with the publication of T. S. Eliots The Waste Land, two works that were arguably “the sun and moon” of modernist literature, some would say of modernity itself.
In Constellation of Genius, Kevin Jackson puts the titanic achievements of Joyce and Eliot in the context of the world in which their works first appeared. As Jackson writes in his introduction, “On all sides, and in every field, there was a frenzy of innovation.” It is in 1922 that Hitchcock directs his first feature; Kandinsky and Klee join the Bauhaus; the first AM radio station is launched; Walt Disney releases his first animated shorts; and Louis Armstrong takes a train from New Orleans to Chicago, heralding the age of modern jazz. On other fronts,
Einstein wins the Nobel Prize in Physics, insulin is introduced to treat diabetes, and the tomb of Tutankhamun is discovered. As Jackson writes, the sky was “blazing with a ‘constellation of genius of a kind that had never been known before, and has never since been rivaled.”
Constellation of Genius traces an unforgettable journey through the diaries of the actors, anthropologists, artists, dancers, designers, filmmakers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians, and scientists whose lives and works—over the course of twelve months—brought a seismic shift in the way we think, splitting the cultural world in two. Was this a matter of inevitability or of coincidence? That is for the reader of this romp, this hugely entertaining chronicle, to decide.
About the Author
Kevin Jackson has written and edited more than twenty books, including The Book of Hours, Invisible Forms: A Guide to Literary Curiosities, and The Worlds of John Ruskin. He has written for The New Yorker, Granta, The Sunday Times (London), The Guardian, and Vogue, among other publications. He lives in Cambridge, England.