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Hello and welcome to Spectators Book Club podcast. It's a centenary year of 1922, which as every

GCSE student knows is the year that modernism broke.

I'm joined by the writer and critic Mervais Emre and by Richard Davenport Hines,

who wrote among his many books, A Night at the Majestic, an account of a famous dinner party

that took place in Paris in 1922.

Can I stop by asking you both, is this sort of

GCSE version of it that 1920 was like, that was modernism? How true is that? And why do we think

that's the year? I mean, of course, we know there's Ulyf's, we know there's the wasteland at the

end of the year, but how much support is there for that case? That's brutal. In 2022, is the year, but how much support is there for that case? That's brutal. In 1982

is the year when the real hangover from the First World War, the grief and the anger and

the wheel neurosis begins finally to wane. It's the first really post-war year so far as the arts are concerned.

And I think that's the real reason why it's important. Proust dies in it and finishes

his writing the final volume of Warshorest and Tom Perdue, but and Joyce also publishes Ulysses.

But that's, that's, it's a much wider cultural change happens in that, yeah.

I think you can answer that question in two ways, Sam.

One thing you could do is to say that it's 1922 simply

because Ezra Pound went to a great deal of trouble to proclaim that it was 1922 when modernism

broke the world. And to support Pound's claim, you could marshal a great deal of both historical

evidence, as Richard has, but also literary evidence, and say it's not just the publication

of Ulysses and the publication of the wasteland, but it is the rejection of an earlier American literary realism,

as emblematized by someone like Willa Kather, who won the Pulitzer in 1922,

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