Leonard Woolf: A Biography (Hardcover)

Anyone who has had the pleasure of reading Leonard Woolf’s five-volume autobiography, published during the decade before his death in 1969, cannot fail to be impressed by his literary ability and intrigued by his personality. In addition, it offers a unique panorama of English intellectual, literary, and social life beginning in the heyday of Victorian imperialism and ending in the dissolution of empire. A first biography of Woolf is long overdue, especially given that there have been frequent biographies of his wife, Virginia, and of many far less significant figures in the Bloomsbury group. Victoria Glendinning’s enjoyable, copiously researched book is therefore thoroughly welcome.
To take just one vivid example from the middle of Woolf’s autobiography, quoted by Glendinning: in 1935 Woolf, who was heavily involved in advising the Labour Party on foreign policy, decided to drive through Germany to see Nazism for himself. This was a courageous journey, since he was Jewish and had been advised against going by the Foreign Office. He and Virginia found themselves trapped on the way to Bonn, driving with the sun-roof down, and making painfully slow progress along a road lined with stormtroopers and singing children waving Nazi flags and banners with anti-Jewish slogans, who had turned out for a visit by Hermann Goering. Fortunately for the Woolfs, the crowds were delighted by Leonard’s pet marmoset Mitz, perched on his shoulder, at which they shrieked “Heil Hitler!” and saluted. “Everywhere in Germany, Mitz was their passport,” writes Glendinning, “but there was menace in the air and notices outside villages informing them that Jews were not welcome.” Not until the Woolfs drove into France, noted Leonard, did he encounter people who asked him about Mitz “in an adult, intelligent way.”
The incident conveys something of what Glendinning calls the “constants in his character… honesty, persistence and energy.” It would have been much more comfortable and convenient to stay in England and comment on European affairs from afar. But although a part of Woolf was content to be accepted by his politically complacent, inward-looking contemporaries, such as Lytton Strachey-and indeed his wife-another part was forever conscious of being a social outsider with one foot in the wider world. Not only was he a Jew among Gentiles, he came from a large family with little money or position in society, following the disastrous early death of his barrister father. (Virginia even repeatedly called Leonard a “penniless Jew” in letters to her friends before the marriage.) Moreover, his first job after Cambridge had been a seven-year stint as a colonial civil servant in Ceylon, cut off from almost all intellectual and artistic contact with England other than through books and letters.
Ceylon had a profound effect on Woolf, which he describes in the second volume of his autobiography, Growing. Ceylon turned him from an imperialist into an anti-imperialist; it gave him the material for his first novel, A Village in the Jungle, which remains unique in colonial fiction for its accurate and powerful evocation of eastern life by a westerner; and it developed in him his lifelong fascination for administration and politics.
All this Glendinning describes in two chapters devoted to Ceylon. But she lacks Woolf’s empathy for the island, like his Cambridge contemporaries, none of whom visited him in Ceylon. This is clear from a number of spelling errors of places and people in Ceylon (for example ‘Polonnuwa’ instead of Polonnaruwa, the ancient Sinhalese capital), although it is most obvious in her failure to quote sufficiently from Growing. She notes the brilliance of its descriptions of the chaotic pearl fishery Woolf supervised, the grisly hangings he oversaw as an official, and his expeditions into the jungle, which fuelled his novel. But instead of allowing these to speak, the Ceylon chapters prefer Bloomsbury-style gossip about the absurdities of colonial life among the Europeans. And when Woolf falls ill with typhoid in Jaffna, the episode is dispatched in one short paragraph, whereas in Growing Woolf writes at length about how close to death he came. More space is given to the death, from typhoid, in London in the same year, of Thoby Stephen, Virginia’s beloved brother; this reminds us that the biographer’s instinctive focus is on England, not Ceylon.
This is entirely appropriate in the rest of the book, which feelingly captures the most important relationship in Woolf’s life-his 30-year marriage to Virginia-with finesse and wisdom. Glendinning is on home turf here, following her biography of Virginia’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and she deploys her encyclopaedic knowledge to telling advantage. Surely now no sane commentator, however biased towards Virginia, can ever again maintain that Leonard manipulated her for his own dark ends. After Virginia’s suicide, the couple’s friends, T. S. Eliot for example, were almost unanimous in praising his decades of selflessness. Glendinning shows that their judgement was fundamentally sound. Without Leonard, there would most probably have been very few novels by Virginia, because she would have succeeded in ending her life much earlier.
Many other parts of the book are done well, notably the sections on the Hogarth Press the Woolfs founded, Woolf’s life during the Second World War, his love of his garden at Monk’s House, and the thoughtful exercise of his duties as a literary executor as his late wife’s reputation grew. But on the way one cannot avoid wondering whether Woolf, as presented by Glendinning, really deserves such a long biography. If we leave aside his nurturing of Virginia and her talent (and go without mention his support of his friend E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India), what did he achieve that will endure? Perhaps only his first novel and his autobiography will continue to be read-none of his political writings (unlike Orwell’s). His own final verdict on his political work was that the state of the world in 1969 “would be exactly the same if I had played ping-pong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda” for an estimated one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand hours. This was a characteristically honest assessment, and its truth remains unaffected by Leonard Woolf: A Life.
Christopher Ondaatje (Books in Canada)

Starred Review. Although Leonard Woolf (1880– 1969) was a seminal figure in the Bloomsbury set, he is known today primarily as the devoted caregiver of his wife, Virginia. That his life and career encompassed significant contributions to the literary, political and cultural events of his times will be evident to readers of this exemplary biography, the first to do justice to a complex man empowered by his intellect and the friends he made at Cambridge but professionally hobbled by British anti-Semitism and his decision to put aside his aspirations in deference to his wife's crushing needs and his belief in her genius. Glendinning, noted biographer of Vita Sackville-West, Trollope and others, brings her brilliant critical eye to an appraisal of Woolf's difficult personal life, which began with his father's premature death and the family's fall from middle-class comfort. Because the Woolves (as they were known) had a rich intellectual partnership, Leonard endured their celibate marriage and Virginia's lesbian affairs. Only after Virginia's death did he enjoy a sexually fulfilling relationship, with a married woman, which Glendinning documents through previously unreferenced material. This lucid biography is enhanced by Glendinning's humane and perceptive insight into Woolf's conflicted personality as well as by her assessment of his signal role in the literary flowering and political issues of the early 20th century. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Nov. 11)
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