The ‘ism’ that ruined the West

In 1974, as editor of the Connoisseur magazine, I ran an ‘1874’ issue to mark the centenary of Winston Churchill’s birth, to which John Betjeman, Asa Briggs and Lady Spencer-Churchill all contributed. So I know the virtues of selecting a single year and ‘sinking a shaft into history’.

Effective use has often been made of this genre. Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger wrote the bestseller The Year 1000. James Shapiro chronicled a year in Shakespeare’s life, 1599. Thomas Pakenham wrote on 1798: The Year of Liberty (the story of the Irish rebellion). In her nineties, Rebecca West produced a volume on the year 1900, which she had the advantage of remembering as a young Victorian. Philip Metcalfe covered 1933, concentrating on Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, a member of Hitler’s circle. The jolly jingoist Arthur Bryant devoted separate tomes to 1940, 1942, 1943 and 1944. And one day I feel sure there will be a book entitled 2000: The Great Millennium Cock-Up. (I might write it myself.)

Kevin Jackson’s book is of this kind. Taking the year 1922, he shows us what various well-known people were up to on almost any given day. He has clearly read widely and not scamped his research; and the portrait of 1922 which emerges is pretty much what we might expect of the post-Great War period. There’s a lot of frenetic vivacity: fizz, bubble and letting off steam.

But Jackson is not content just to let the year speak for itself. The engine under all the fancy coachwork is modernism — for which he makes grotesquely extravagant claims. On the jacket of his book, the word ‘GENIUS’ stands out in capital letters of Stonehenge proportions. It was the year in which James Joyce’s Ulysses was published (on his 40th birthday),and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land also appeared.

In his introduction, Jackson suggests that 1922 ‘was blazing with a “constellation of genius” of a kind that had never been known before, and has never since been rivalled’.