Leonard Woolf: A Biography - Softcover

Glendinning, Victoria

4.11

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9781582434117: Leonard Woolf: A Biography

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582434115 ISBN 13: 9781582434117

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2008

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This meticulously researched and compassionately rendered portrait of Leonard Woolf, the dark star” of Bloomsbury, is the first to capture his troubled relationship with his wife, his own intellect, and the tumultuous world of artists and eccentrics around him. A man of extremes, Woolf was by turns ferocious and tender, violent and repressed, opinionated and nonjudgmental, always an outsider of sorts within the exceptionally intimate, fractious, and sometimes vicious society of brilliant but troubled friends and lovers. In telling Woolf's story, Victoria Glendinning traces the development of the Bloomsbury circle, bringing to life the group's literary and personal discussions. She also provides an unprecedented account of Woolf's marriage to the legendary Virginia, revealing his undying creative and emotional support for her amid her numerous breakdowns. Leonard Woolf is a perceptive and lively biography of a man whose far-reaching influence is long overdue the full appreciation Glendinning provides.

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About the Author:

Victoria Glendinning is the award-winning author of Trollope and Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, which both won the Whitbread biography award, as well as Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Rebecca West, and Jonathan Swift. She has also written three novels: Flight, The Grown-Ups, and Electricity. She was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1989 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Somerset, England.

In the Beginning

Having a child is problematic, wrote Leonard Woolf when in his eighties, and childless. It concerns the "new human being" as much as its parents, since this new human being is born without having given its consent. One should think twice, "from the point of view of the hypothetical child." He himself was born, without his consent, on 25 November 1880. There he is, Leonard Sidney Woolf, in the Census returns for 1881, a five-month-old baby.

Everyone, holding a baby, has to wonder what life holds in store for him. No one could have foreseen what would happen to this one. He grew up to become a core member of a group of intimate and talented friends who continue to inspire interest and analysis a century later. In his early twenties, as a colonial servant, he administered ten thousand square miles of village and jungle. He became an anti-imperialist, a Marxist "of a sort" and a socialist, and was an �minence grise of the early Labour Party in Britain as it became a party of government. His adult life spanned the two world wars; his writings informed the charter of the League of Nations and, as polemical journalist, as editor and author, his lifelong mission was to prevent the barbarism and insanity of future war through international cooperation and collective security.

His anguished intelligence saw all too clearly both the failure of this great project, and what he saw as the failure of the Left in Britain. He had his own demons to fight in public and in private life, being a man of extremes and contradictions: ferocious and tender, violent and self-restrained, opinionated and nonjudgmental. Belief in reason pulled him one way, irrational passion another. He was disconcerting, inner-directed, attractive, always an outsider. The constants in his character were honesty, persistence and energy. He played all games, competitively. He was a dedicated gardener. He had an affinity with animals. Nonstop work -- at his writing, at his political activities, in the garden -- came naturally to him.

He liked women, and women liked him. ("I have always been greatly attracted to the undiluted female mind, as well as to the female body.") With his wife, he founded the Hogarth Press. He had no idea when he married Virginia Stephen how her mental instability would determine and distort his own trajectory, nor that she would become one of the most famous English authors of the twentieth century. He knew how to love, and she was the love of his life. After her suicide came change and a new attachment. In his last decade, five volumes of autobiography won him respect and recognition. He left not only distinguished books on international relations, but also satirical squibs, a great mass of literary and political journalism, a play, poetry, short stories, and two novels.

Eclipsed in the literary canon, and in the public imagination, by the illustriousness of Virginia Woolf -- his family name, when standing alone, commonly signifying her, not him -- he is a dark star. "You cannot escape Fate," he wrote at the end of his life, "and Fate, I have always felt, is not in the future, but in the past."

The five-month-old Leonard, dark-haired and blue-eyed, had an elder sister, Bella Sidney, aged four; and a brother, Arnold Herbert Sidney, always called Herbert, aged nearly two. Bella, Herbert and Leonard were joined in the nursery at 101 Lexham Gardens, Kensington, by Harold Sidney, Edgar Sidney, Clara Henriette, Flora, Cecil Nathan Sidney and Philip Sidney. The nine little Woolfs were born within twelve years, the youngest arriving in 1889. There had been yet one more baby, who died in infancy.

Even a rapid overview of Leonard's forebears recalls the remorselessly genealogical chapters of the Book of Genesis.

Leonard's mother, Marie de Jongh, was married at seventeen to Albert Zacharias Goldst�cker, a City merchant. Marie's brother Benjamin de Jongh, a stock-jobber (a stock exchange member who buys and sells shares on his own account), married Clara Woolf. When Marie Goldst�cker was widowed, aged twenty-two, an executor of her late husband's will was a brother of her sister-in-law Clara: Sidney Woolf, a recently qualified young barrister. He was Leonard's future father.

Sidney Woolf was living then with two recent widows, his mother and his elder sister Sophia. When Sophia remarried, her new husband was another of Marie's brothers, Anselm de Jongh. In 1875, the following year, Marie Goldst�cker and Sidney Woolf were married; she was still in her twenties, and he five years older.

Thus the Woolfs and the de Jonghs were intricately connected. Leonard saw a lot of his maternal grandparents. They too lived in Kensington, at 7 Addison Gardens, and the little Woolfs were taken over to tea once a week. Leonard thought that his de Jongh grandparents "lived in the cleanest house and they were the cleanest people I have ever seen anywhere."

Grandfather Nathan de Jongh, a diamond merchant, lived until 1897, when he was knocked down by a horse-drawn omnibus. Leonard was then well into his teens; and his Grandmother de Jongh survived until 1902, when he was at Cambridge. The de Jonghs seemed to Leonard to be "rather soft" people. Grandfather de Jongh was tall, gentle, quiet, with a long white beard. In the house he wore a brightly colored smoking-cap, and was never seen without a cigar and a book. Outside he wore the same kind of clothes as "all the other gentlemen in Addison Gardens," but he nevertheless looked to Leonard as if he had stepped out of a typical picture of "caftaned, bearded Jews in a ghetto, straight-backed, dignified, sad, resigned, expecting and getting over two millennia nothing but misery . . ."

Leonard remembered his de Jongh grandmother sitting in a high-backed ebony chair in her lace-curtained front window and always knitting, extremely fast. She wore a black lace cap over her white hair, "and beneath it was the round, pink face of an incredibly old Dutch doll." She brought the cap with her in a special basket when she came to visit at Lexham Gardens, for putting on after she removed her hat.

Leonard, describing these grandparents in what was to become Sowing, had originally written that the cap she wore was of white lace. His elder sister Bella, correcting his draft, insisted it was black. By publishing his autobiography, Leonard laid down and preempted the family myths. His brothers and sisters regularly and irritably corrected the record. Children born into the same family remember different things, and the same things differently.

Leonard thought Grandmother de Jongh never read a book or "suffered from an abstract idea" in her life, but he attributed to her special qualities. There are some people, he wrote, "usually dogs or old women -- extremely simple and unintellectual, who instinctively know how to deal with life and with persons, and who display an extraordinary and admirable resistance to the cruelties of man, the malevolence of Providence, and the miseries of existence."

Grandfather Nathan and Grandmother Henriette de Jongh came to London from Amsterdam in the 1860s. Henriette's maiden name was Van Coeverden ("not Katz. Her sister married a Katz," wrote Bella, testily amending Leonard's draft). They had ten children. The eldest daughter, Flora, married Arnold Abrahamson, who lived in Denmark; Leonard had a slew of Scandinavian cousins.

The publication of Leonard's first volume of autobiography in 1960 elicited a small flood of memories and additional information. A Dutchman wrote about the origin of the name Van Coeverden: Coevordon (spelled sic) is a small town in the east of the Netherlands, "where there lived for centuries a good kind of Jews, small itinerant traders and small shopkeepers. But of course most of them are gassed now."

Before they moved to Addison Gardens, the de Jongh grandparents lived at Woburn Lodge, a Regency dwelling like a small country house, off Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury. The house survived until the days when Leonard himself lived in the square. The de Jonghs, in London, must always have been comfortably off.

The Woolfs came up the hard way. Leonard's father, Sidney, was the second youngest of the ten children of Benjamin Woolf and his wife Isabella (n�e Phillips), both born in London in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Leonard's sister Bella understood that the family had started out in Spitalfields in London's East End, a tight little district of streets, alleys and courts, where the majority of London's poor Jews lodged, earning their livings in small workshops and warehouses, and marrying one another's cousins and in-laws. Nearby is the oldest surviving synagogue in London, Bevis Marks, established in 1701 by the Sephardic community who had come from Spain and Portugal in Cromwell's time and still tended to see themselves as the elite.

It is impossible to establish family trees for families like Leonard's, long-established in Britain, though there are many Woolfs, spelled sic, on record. Official registration of Jewish births, marriages and deaths only started in 1837. Some retained Hebrew names, and some were born and died with no public record of their existence. It is estimated that there were around 10,000 Jews in Britain in the 1760s, mostly in London, with a steady influx of those fleeing the persecutions in Europe. By the time Leonard's Woolf grandparents were born, the community had increased threefold. The Jews themselves were alarmed by the impact of the increase. The authorities of the Great Synagogue stopped giving relief to Jewish immigrants who had left their countries "without good cause," and the British government offered free repatriation.

No one in Leonard's generation knew where the Woolfs came to England from, or when, though it was probably during this late eighteenth-century influx from Europe. These newly arrived Ashkenazim (from Germany, Holland and Poland) mostly worked in the informal economy of th...

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