Leonard WoolfRecensioni

Playing tennis with starched whites with the other English administrators and then chatting over G and Ts in the tropical warm of the evening in an old Dutch fort on the north-east coast of Sri Lanka in the first decade of the twentieth century... Getting to know the Sinhalese of the Kandy region through hearing their complaints, intrigues, and travails in their own language as a defacto judge... As I read through this memoir I felt like I was sitting around the fire with Woolf in his last years (back in the sixties I think) and hearing stories from an educated, unconventional and honest English chap about a life lived in the twilight of the British Empire in Ceylon. And getting to know the Sri Lanka I've visited myself a few times better through hearing about the life and culture of people prior to much modernisation that took place over the twentieth century. Worth the price of admission for me.

IB-6

A 1930s analysis of the European political situation. I came to this with the smug assumption that a white, male, privately educated, intellectual would naturally have a blinkered view of "civilization " and "barbarism", and his initial discussion of Pericles and Athenian democracy seemed to validate that. However, when he opened out the analysis to Stalin, Hitler and Chuchill, I was quite drawn in by the slow crafting of his arguments around power and economics. A worthwhile read. His knowledge of African peoples and cultures is however abysmal.

"All that I was taking with me from the old life and for a contribution to the new, and to prepare me for the task of helping to rule the British Empire. was 90 large, beautifully printed volumes of Voltaire and a wire-haired terrier." I am becoming a fan. Just started this volume and it's a small emotional roller-coaster to be honest.

Enjoyable book with the battle of going with society or doing your own thing. It is pretty progressive for the time it was written and paints and picture of suburbia in much the same way as it exists now. Looking back a hundred years life, and life's problems and choices remain prety much the same.

Interesting, but a bit depressing.

Leonard Woolf's forgotten Sri Lankan novel, BBC News 24 may 2014
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27518833

Set in colonial Ceylon, this novel is vivid and readable. While the author clearly illustrates a particular culture and time, that of a rural family in the "dry" forest area, where life is particularly hard and short, the psychological and social effects of poverty have universal qualities. While the colonial administration system is clearly one of the villains of the book, the gentle innocence of the main characters clearly would be a disadvantage under any system, at least as the world is portrayed in this novel. Dark and haunting, with compelling plot and fascinating characters, this book deserves to be more widely read.

Dear me but this is a depressing book. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong for the main characters. Written from the point of view of impoverished, uneducated jungle dwellers in Sri Lanka by the ex-colonial civil servant Leonard Woolf. It is more interesting as an imaginative exercise in writing than a tale of the jungle. A privileged colonial governor trying to put himself in the mind of the governed. Who knows if he succeeded but he certainly does portray the misery and boredom of peasant life.

"Always evil is coming into this house from the jungle", August 31, 2014

This review is from: The Village in the Jungle (Paperback)
An engrossing tale, inspired by the author's time as assistant governor in the east of Sri Lanka. Set in a small village, it concerns the taciturn loner, Silindu, and his motherless twin daughters. Silindu is an outsider in his village, and prefers to spend his time away hunting in the jungle. But life is hard and desperately poor, and he finds himself at odds with the village headman, who has the power to make his life difficult...
Love, hatred, greed, plotting, religion, superstition all come into this tale; and over it all the British administration, whose taxes and permits make life that bit harder for the peasants.
Having recently visited this area of Sri Lanka, I really felt Woolf's writing brought the area to life ;
'The jungle surged forward over and blotted out the village up to the very walls of her hut...Its breath was hot and heavy...it closed with its shrubs and bushes and trees, with the impenetrable disorder of its thorns and its creepers, over the rice-fields and the tanks.'

In a short story, 'Pearls and Swine' which appears in my (Eland) edition, Woolf expresses some of his opinions on the shortcomings of colonial rule.½

The Wise Virgins by Leonard Woolf

I'm not normally a reader of introductions, as I believe that the test of a work is its ability to stand on its own without explanation, but for some reason I did read this one, which has some quite interesting background information. It seems likely that at least some of the novel's original readers would have recognized Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the characters of Harry Davis and Camilla Lawrence. Certainly their friends and family did. The Wise Virgins was first published in October 1914, and Leonard said 'the war killed it dead'. It was not republished until 1979. Lyndall Gordon's introduction to this Persephone edition comments that on its first publication the reviewers had little idea what Woolf was on about, but on its second it was read too closely as a roman a clef.

The story opens "Man is not naturally a gregarious animal, though he has become so under the compulsion of circumstances and civilization." It develops the argument that although people would naturally have lived in solitary caves circumstances have forced them to live in ever tighter groups, with builders building rows of houses for whole classes of people rather than individual houses for individual families, but behind each door "each is still a monogamous and solitary animal, mysteriously himself in his thoughts and his feelings, jealous for the woman who has come to him, despite the clergyman and the gold ring, as she came to him in the cave, to be possessed by him and to possess him and to bear him children in the large brass bed". London intellectuals go out to the suburbs and exclaim 'Oh. these red-brick villas! All exactly the same, just like the people who live in them!" But, argues the book, they are "the same only in the thin crust which civilization has formed over the fires of their primeval feelings. They wear the same straw hats and muslin dresses in the summer, and in winter bowler hats and dark dresses; they think the same things and in the same way, because the ways of this strange world in which they find themselves wandering are so difficult to understand, and they humbly and gratefully take what is given to them. That is why they go into the builder's stuccoed villas; for them the stucco and the red brick and the wooden gables and the delicate pink of the almond blossom that brings spring for a brief week to every third house, stand for comfort and cosiness. They have been told these things and therefore they believe them; in that, it is true, they are all the same. But in themselves, in the feelings that no-one has taught them, under the painted plaster crust of straw hats and opinions, they burn each of them with a fiery individuality."

On first reading, I whizzed through this section, which goes on for about three pages, thinking 'yes, yes, get on with it', but on going back over the book in preparation for this review, I realize that this is where Woolf set out his stall.

In one of these rows of comfortable stuccoed red-brick houses, in the fictional London suburb of Richstead (a conflation of Hampstead and Richmond), lives the Garland family. The story begins in their garden one hot sunny June afternoon. Mrs Garland is a widow with four virgin daughters. Although "not strictly a virgin" she is "a widow of so many years' standing that she might almost have been said to have reached a second virginity". The Garland's garden shows no trace of masculine presence, there are two laburnum trees 'like maidens' and white arum lilies 'standing like virgins' bloom in island beds together with perfectly tended roses. Three of the daughters are sitting in the garden. Ethel, at thirty-seven, is the oldest, and is doing needlework. Gwen, the youngest, is reading a novel, as is her older sister, May. Gwen is experiencing vague discontent, which has come on her increasingly of late, but which she knows is wrong, and would not dream of mentioning. Gwen asks Ethel if she is ever annoyed by novels, their cleverness, the people in them who have everything, and whether she often thinks of herself as just like the heroine. After a pause Ethel says she used to, but doesn't think she does anymore. Gwen says she does, and supposes that everybody does, although it's absurd to do so because they're not like the people in books, who are so superior. She demonstrates the absurdity by asking Ethel to imagine one of their friends as the heroine of the novel, going off to Cornwall for a week with an artist, having conversations like the people in the book. Ethel replies 'But, Gwen, dear, it's a book. I don't think I want things to happen to me like that." Gwen asks "But, Ethel, don't you ever wish something had - would happen, I mean?"

Ethel moves the conversation on to the new family who have moved in down the street. Mrs Garland has called on them and returns to her daughters with the news that the family is called Davis, the father is a solicitor, they used to live in Bayswater and keep a carriage, and they have a daughter Hetty about the same age as Gwen, and a son who is an artist. There is some disappointment that the Davis family is probably Jewish, but that does not entirely quell the girls' excitement at the thought of meeting the son, and dresses are selected for the following evening.

Harry Davis, who is accepted to be a portrait of Leonard Woolf, though described by his sister as having Leonard's worst characteristics multiplied to the -th degree, is a curious creature. He enormously resents the move to Richstead and feels nothing but contempt for its inhabitants.

One of the most curious aspects of this novel one hundred years on is the emotional state of the characters given their ages. Gwen is twenty-four and Harry seems to be the same, yet they both seem like teenagers in that uncomfortable limbo between child and adult. Harry is given to making absurd or outrageous statements, guaranteed conversation killers. His parents apologize for him, or say he has an odd sense of humour. In fact he is uncomfortable in company and frequently plows relentlessly on with a clearly unsatisfactory subject rather than risk the trauma of finding another. Alone in his room after first meeting the Garlands he twists with anger in his chair; they haven't liked him, he hadn't got on with them, he never could get on with people; the Garlands were dull and stupid, but Gwen had been interested in him, none of them could understand him. Amongst all this angst is the other teenage classic - sex. Quite daringly for the period Woolf writes of Harry as he agonizes about the Garlands "To understand Harry Davis and his place in the universe - it would be necessary to have some account of the thoughts which now came to him. Convention and the keepers of the public conscience make this account impossible in the English language. The reader must fill up according to his or her ability eight to ten minutes introspection."

That same evening Gwen goes to bed dejected and discontented, unable to decide if Harry was nice. Had he liked her? Had he despised them all? He thought her stupid and dull; was she stupid and dull? There was something unpleasant and cynical about him, but he thought in a way unlike anyone she knew.

Harry has his eye on a girl in his art class, Camilla Lawrence. She seems romantic and mysterious to him, and he needs something romantic in his life. He thinks of her purity of face and her virgin remoteness.

Here are two different approaches to virginity. While the Garlands are virgin not only by their lack of sexual experience but also by their innocence and their life without any masculine influence, a simple, domestic, virginity, Camilla is virgin in an almost holy way, by her distance and unattainability.

Camilla's set are well heeled intellectuals who sit about in large leather armchairs talking about the arts. Camilla seems to have divided reviewers; for me she never really came off the page. She has an older sister, Katharine, who is much more interesting. She is used to some extent as a foil for Camilla; Katherine is more engaged with the world, more perceptive and wise than Camilla. She is also physically attractive, soft and alluring. Harry despairingly asks himself why, if he is to be in love with anyone, couldn't he be in love with her.

While dreaming of Camilla Harry entertains himself by widening Gwen's literary horizons. He starts her off with Dostoevky's Idiot and moves her to "The Master Builder". While he thinks of her enough to provide the books, he sees her too seldom for her to discuss the books with him, nor does it occur to him that she might wish to do so. The unpleasant prudish vicar engaged to Gwen's sister May attempts to keep Gwen away from Harry, and finally tells him that the books he has been lending her are 'not quite the thing' for a young girl to read, as without the experience of life to enable them to see clearly their minds will be unsettled.

Ultimately, in a return to the theme of her opening discussion with Ethel, Gwen does take the books as a model for life, specifically identifying herself with Hilda in The Master Builder. Harry's contempt for suburban life has fueled the discontent which she already felt, and the books have shown her other ways to live.

Harry indulgently applauds Gwen when she tells him that she is going to model herself on Hilda, however when she prepares to throw aside her present life he is appalled. While she quotes back at him his own words he finds himself absurdly thinking of a line from Hedda Gabler "People don't do those sorts of things", but after all he's said it's impossible for him to tell her so. Speaking to Camilla later he says "It was all an absurd mistake. I talked to Gwen as you - we all talk... she believed, as we don't"

Harry's relationship with truth is complicated, as it is for most people. He is a great advocate of truth telling, as, it seems, are the members of Camilla's circle. Katharine tells him that Camilla's boundaries between truth and fantasy are soft, and that she cannot be told the truth about herself, which of course what needs to be done to save Harry.

Sometimes Harry seems to say things he doesn't believe just for shock value or to fill gaps in conversation. Sometimes he seems to say them just to be conventional. Sometimes he says them to avoid saying what he means. Sometimes it is almost as though he is two people, the thinking one and the one that is spouting whatever he is saying. In one particularly good passage he lies because he's expected to:-

"He looked straight into her eyes. It seemed to him that he was watching coldly what was going on within. He could have laughed bitterly at himself, at her, at the whole world. It seemed to him that he saw her soul, her miserable, weak, frightened soul, forcing itself to believe his lying words. It knew they were lies, it knew they were lies. It was turning in there, squirming down there. It believed, it had shut its eyes. She flushed. It believed - she believed. He could have taken her by the throat and shaken her.'

One of the subjects Harry brings up most frequently is his Jewishness. Given his general anger and lack of social ease I found it hard to decide what he was doing in his outbursts on the subject. His comments are harsh, yet he says he is proud of being a Jew. Sometimes it seems he is using his Jewishness simultaneously as a device to distance himself and an excuse for that distance. He will never be like the others, he is the Wandering Jew, he admires but despises Gentile women for their paleness and bloodlessness. He says that Jews want money, knowledge, intelligence, and taste, in order to get power to do things and influence people, which is in itself a form of creativity. On some occasions his outbursts seem intended to offend by their very unpleasantness the person to whom he is speaking. But he also ascribes to his Jewishness his energy, his desire to do rather than just be.

Woolf was writing at a time when anti-Semitism was fairly standard in many, if not most, circles, and indeed many of the other characters in the novel express suspicion or dislike of Jews. At times even the narrative sections of the book read harshly. Mrs Davis is described as having been a handsome woman, but someone who would look better under a palm tree swathed in scarves singing the Song of Miriam. Reviewers at the time of original publication were also confused, some wondering at the author's harsh view of his own people, with others wondering why he would boast of being a Jew.

Despite Harry's contempt for them, the novel has a certain sympathy for suburban women, for it is hinted that to some degree they have all at some stage gone through a period of unrest but with no outlet have subdued their ambitions and desires in committees and cookery lessons. One of the Garland sisters, an eighteen year old boy in a woman's body, escapes by spending her life on the golf course. Harry declares himself pro-suffrage and Woolf maintained that all sensible men should adopt feminism as a policy or belief.

I could read this novel several times and get more from it each time. It would be an interesting pair to Night And Day.

At first I thought Leonard Woolf was just riding the coat tails of his wife, Virginia, when it came to his writing a book - well low and behold - I found it to be a magnificent piece of work. It opens your eyes to how ignorance can affect people and society as a whole. I highly recommend reading this book if you are Woolf fans and even if you're not.

4769. Sowing An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904, by Leonard Woolf (read 20 Oct 2010) This volume covers the years from Woolf's birth to the time in 1904 when he left for Ceylon. In the early part of the book he expiates on how opposed he is to religion and belief, which I thought overdone and did not really care about. He muchly deprecates his time at St. Paul's and tells of his years at Cambridge, which is of interest even though it mainly tells of his friends and fellow intellectuals. I found this interesting reading, but whether I will read the other two volumes of his autobiography I do not know.

An interesting but flawed novel, largely autobiographical, centered in a yound disillusioned Jewish man at the beginning of the 20th century and his differing life and romantic choices: the bohemian, intelligent, independent Camilla and the suburban, unsatisfied but conventional Gwen. Its main problem is a certain unevenness of tone and purpose: however, the book is excellent in the satirical examination of suburban life and the examination of the power relationships and self-delusions of courtship and romance.

This relatively short (340 page) volume is incredibly deceptive. I feel inadequate writing a review on it after only one reading (and reading this back I have far from done his aims, intentions and achievements justice), but what struck me most was a huge amount of it might well have been written today. It is as relevant, incisive, clear and informative as the day it was written.

Writing in the mid-late 1920s (the book was published in 1931 and took 10 years to complete; it was the first of 3 volumes) Woolf sets himself to study communal psychology. He believes it is more effective as a historian to focus on whole communities/cultures rather than totally focusing on events and higher profile individuals (although he does also write about some of those things).

One of the key changes historically is that prior to the mid 18th century there was almost no focus or even understanding of the concept of the individual. Everyone perceived everyone else, as well as themselves, as part of a group of some kind. However, the study and acknowledgement of the individual was a considerable driving force in how political and social changes were to occur.

Ultimately what Woolf is doing is showing us the path that led us to the first and second world wars, and to the aim in some countries of striving for democracy. What is very potent in his findings is that in the 1920s, and I think still today, what we call ‘democracy’ is not true democracy. He believes that we have got stuck in a kind of neo-authoritarianism which is informed by what he calls the ‘dead hand’ ie the lessons and conservativisms of the past, not least nationalism, patriotism and also to some degree imperialism and empire. I believe that we haven’t advanced that position by very much in many respects.

Some of what Woolf seems to infer is that as long as there is a kind of ‘privileged’ class leading the masses (this may not necessarily only be a wealthy ‘privilege’, but generally includes that), and the only responsibility (or equity) that the ordinary man in the street bears is to put the X on his voting paper, we will not have any kind of true democracy, as those privileged classes will always be wanting to protect their own patch before anyone else’s. And this rolls down. Many of us have managed to nudge ourselves a little further up that slippery pole, and we don’t want to slide back down, so rather than striving for a more authentic democracy in any serious way, we want to protect the small gains we have made. So in some senses we collude with the leaders in authority.

This quote I found particularly ‘live’ to the post-9/11 experience:

‘But those who survived the great war, and can now look back in tranquillity and recall the state of their own minds and that of their fellow-countrymen’s between 1914-1918, know that in war many things done under the impulse of modern patriotism to suppress opinion and to restrict liberty which have nothing to do with the country’s safety, and in fact are a hindrance to the efficient conduct of war. They are done partly because the spirit of modern patriotism is authoritarian and antagonistic to that of democracy, and partly because those in authority see that they can use the patriotic spirit to increase their own power and to suppress opposition.’

[After the Deluge, Vol 1, 1931, Woolf, L, pp297-8]

I’ll enhance this review after re-reading, which may be some while as I still have volumes 2 and 3 to read.½

Until I read Victoria Glendinnings fine biography about Leonard last year, I was totally unaware of what a front runner, in fact possibly THE front runner he was in regards to writing about International Affairs, ultimately becoming well respected writer on these issues as well as an adviser to Government. Again when Woolf is talking 'business' as opposed to his personal life there is a cooler tone.

The Woolf's lived in a very interesting times both creatively, politically, internationally and historically. Leonard is very interesting on giving smaller details (as well as the more important ones) of experiences he had within all these areas. Sometimes little things that give you an incite into the people he is describing.

In this volume he also marries Virginia, and has some inciteful and interesting things to say about their life together and her creative mind, as well as her health and mental problems.

The primary flaw is too many diversions. I enjoy taking diversions or going slightly off the chronology, but in this volume especially Woolf does it to such an degree that when we get back to the chronology he has run out of things to put because he has told the stories earlier, and therefore is left to repetition or referal.½

I got very easily into the first volume of Leonard Woolf's autobiography, I very much enjoy 'campas' books, life in academe. Woolf was surrounded by fine minds, creative and philosophical and is interesting when writing of others as well as himself.

A cooler volume of Leonard Woolf's biography, although interesting in many aspects, I felt more held at a distance. He very much comes across as a young man with an important job, who wants to do well. He is more brittle than in his college years where he is surrounded by his friends. By his own admission he found himself in an imperialist position, something that he hadn't thought about when setting out, and ultimately a state that he finds himself uncomfortable in, on a personal level, as opposed to on the level of how he was able to function.

Something that makes me warm to him is his admission that writing autobiography leaves any writer open to inaccuracies, flawed memories, singular perceptions and misunderstandings. When he feels he was good at something he says so, but he also reminds the reader that others may view things differently. He also admits when he gets things wrong, or is uncertain of specific memories.½

Goodness! Persephone certainly publish some fascinating and hugely readable books! The Wise Virgins - Pesephone no 43 - is beautifully written to start with. Added to that is the tantalising idea that it is said to be, in part at least, autobiographical. The novel concerns young adults, their feelings of restlessness and disappointment in the narrow, restricted world they inhabit. The novel explores, with great honesty, what few choices there were for young people at this time. their lives regulated by convention, they had little option but to marry and settle down to family life. For those intellectuals and artists, who might want more than mere middle class domesticity out of life, the world seemed a dull and pointless place.

Ah, the somewhat less famous husband of Virginia!

I've read volumes 1 and 5 of his autobiography, and loved them. Leonard Woolf was an extremely intelligent man and an excellent writer. His prose has great clarity, and he did a lovely job of recalling his earlier life for these books.

This volume relates life in Britain during WWII, and also covers Virginia's suicide. We forget, sometimes, that Leonard was so accomplished in the shadow of his wife, but here we are reminded through accounts of his literary and political undertakings.

You should read these of you love Virginia. You should read these if the waning days of the British Empire interest you.

In the feudal society of Ceylon "I felt that there was some depth of happiness rather than pleasure, of satisfaction, . . . which the western world is losing or has lost." (p 158)

Judgments such as these in the context of this autobiography seem to me very valuable. Not because they are true, but because they illustrate one individual perspective that can be charted across 80 years of recent history.

The Accidental British Servant: Leonard Woolf in Ceylon
http://www.literarytraveler.com/literary_articles/virginia_woolf_leonard_woolf.a...

Great 3 books about the Woolfs, Leonard and Virginia. Talented, and tragic.

This is the second book Leonard Woolf wrote of his life. He is a graceful author, and a sensitive man. Good look into an aristocratic young britisher and his growing up.