Things you learn by reading books

Three things. One, two, three.

1. All these people are driven by ambition: X is publishing, Y is publishing, why am I not publishing?
   
2. The high profile of The Wasteland has always puzzled me. And now I know: it became famous because it was well launched. American publishers have decided to give it a prize sight unseen, as a bribe to get the publishing rights (and work around their fixed fee policy). Influential critics who praised it in public, simultaneously confessed in private that they didn’t actually like it. No one much liked it, really, but Ezra Pound pushed it because he wanted to help T. S. Eliot quit his banking job. The Emperor really is naked.
   
3. All these people go through very severe influenza in 1922 — four years after the peak of the epidemic.

And then a quote from D. H. Lawrence:

More and more I feel that meditation and the inner life are not my aim, but some  sort of action and strenuousness and pain and frustration and struggling through. Men have to fight a way for the new incarnation. And the fight and the  sorrow and the loss of blood, and even the influenzas and the headache are part  of the fight and the fulfillment. Let nobody try to filch from me even my  influenza.—I’ve got influenza at the moment. 

Bill Goldstein, The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year that Changed Literature