Leonard
Woolf was born in
London in 1880. After an educated at St.
Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge,
he worked for the Ceylon Civil Service. On his return to England he
married Virginia Stephen and in 1913 his
first novel, The Village and the Jungle
was published. This was followed by the Wise
Virgins (1914).
An opponent of Britain's involvement in the
First World War, Woolf was spared becoming a
conscientious objector by being rejected
by the military as unfit for duty. Woolf joined the Fabian
Society in 1916 and the following year founded the Hogarth Press.
Over the next few years Leonard and Virginia
Woolf became the centre of what became known as the Bloomsbury
Group.
Woolf was literary editor of The Nation
(1923-30) and wrote several books including Socialism
and Co-operation (1921), After
the Deluge (1931), and Principia
Politica (1953). He also published several volumes of autobiography:
Sowing (1960), Growing
(1961), Beginning Again (1964),
Downhill all the Way (1966) and
The Journey Not the Arrival Matters
(1969). Leonard Woolf died in 1969.
(1) Leonard Woolf, The Journey
Not the Arrival Matters (1969)
The psychology of September
1939 was terribly different from that of August 1914. People of my
generation knew now exactly what war is - its positive horrors of
death and destruction, wounds and pain and bereavement and brutality,
but also its negative emphasis and desolation of personal and cosmic
boredom, the feeling that one is endlessly waiting in a dirty, grey
railway station waiting-room, with nothing to do but but wait endlessly
for the next catastrophe. We knew the war and civilization in the
modern world are incompatible at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Europe of 1933 was infinitely more barbarous and degraded than
that of 1914 and 1919. In Russia for more than a decade there had
ruled with absolute power a government, a political power, and a dictator
who, on the basis of superhuman doctrinal imbecility, had murdered
millions of their fellow Russians because they were peasants who were
not so poor as the poorest peasants; the communists, being communists,
were continually torturing and murdering their fellow communists on
such grounds as they were either right deviationists or left diviationists.
In Italy there was established a government and dictator who, with
a political doctrine purporting to be the exact opposite of Russian
communism, produced, much less efficiently, exactly the same results
of savage stupidity. In Germany the same phenomena had appeared as
in Russia and Italy, but the barbarism of Hitler and the Nazis showed
itself, in the years from 1933 to 1939 to be much nastier, more menacing,
more insane than even the barbarism of Stalin and the communists.
(2)
Leonard Woolf was living in Rodmell in Sussex at the start of the
Second World War.
The
strange first air raid of the war - it was, of course, a false alarm,
came to Rodmell on a lovely autumnal or late summer day. It came,
I think, just after or before breakfast and I walked out onto the
lawn which looks over the water-meadows to Lewes and the downs. It
came, I think, just after or before breakfast and I walked out onto
the lawn which looks over the water-meadows to Lewes and the downs.
It was absolutely still; soft, bright sunshine with wisps of mists
still lying on the water-meadows. There are few more beautiful places
in England than the valley of the Sussex Ouse between Lewes and Newhaven.
It was curious that this Ouse valley should be so visually connected
in my mind with peacefulness and beauty while I listen to the first
air-raid sirens of the 1939 war, for, during the next six years, as
soon as the phony war ended and the real war began, it was over the
peaceful water-meadows and above our heads over Rodmell village that
again and again I watched that many strange phases of the war in the
air being fought.
The real air war began for us in August 1940. On Sunday, August 18,
Virginia and I had just sat down to eat our lunch when there was a
tremendous roar and we were just in time to see two planes fly a few
feet above the church spire, over the garden, and over the roof, and
looking up as they passed above the window we saw the swastika on
them. They fired and hit a cottage in the village and fired another
shot into a house in Northease. Through between 1940 and 1945 I must
have seen hundreds of German planes and many of them dropping bombs
of fighting British planes, except in this incident I never saw or
had real evidence of a German plane firing bullets at people or buildings
on the ground.
When the Battle of Britain and the bombing of London in earnest began,
one watched daily in Rodmell the sinister preliminaries to destruction.
First the wail of the sirens; then the drone of the German planes
flying in from the sea, usually to the east of Rodmell and Lewes.
On a clear fine day one could see the Germans high up in the sky and
sometimes the British planes going up to meet them north of Lewes.
There was very little fighting in the air immediately over the Ouse
valley for the Germans flew regularly in a corridor more to the east.
(3)
In his autobiography Editor, Kingsley
Martin explained the influence that Leonard Woolf had on the New
Statesman (1968)
Leonard
Woolf had a powerful influence on the policy and character of the
New Statesman. He had been literary editor of the Nation,
to which I had often contributed in the past. I had known him and
Virginia Woolf ever since the First World War, and found him, as I
still do, the most companionable of men. He was already to advise
me and became, I think, something of a Father Figure to me. No one
was ever so ready for argument and, I must add, so obstinate and lovable.
(4)
In January, 1941, Leonard
Woolf,
became concerned about the health of Virginia
Woolf.
He decided to ask the advice of their friend, Dr. Octavia
Wilberforce.
Octavia Wilberforce practised
as a doctor in Montpelier Crescent, Brighton, and lived there with
Elizabeth Robins. Octavia was a remarkable character. Her ancestors
were the famous Wilberforce of the anti-slavery movement; their portraits
hung on her walls and she had inherited their beautiful furniture
and their fine library of eighteenth-century books. Octavia had been
born and bred in a large house in Sussex, a young lady in a typical
country gentleman's house. But though she was always very much an
English lady of the upper middle class, she was never a typical young
lady.
She was already a young lady when she decided that she must become
a doctor. It was a strange, disquieting decision, for in a Sussex
country houses in those days young ladies did not become a doctors;
they played tennis and went to dances in order to marry and breed
more young ladies in still more country houses. Octavia's idea was
not thought to be a good one by her family, and she received no encouragement
there. Another difficulty was that her education as a young lady was
not the kind which made it easy for her to pass the necessary examinations
to qualify as a doctor. But her quiet determination, the oak and triple
brass enabled her to overcome all difficulties. She became a first-class
doctor in Brighton.
She had, to all intents and purposes become Virginia's doctor, and
so the moment I became uneasy about Virginia's psychological health
in the beginning of 1941 I told Octavia and consulted her professionally.
The desperate difficulty which always presented itself when Virginia
began to be threatened with a breakdown - a difficulty which occurs,
I think, again and again in mental illness - was to decided how far
it was safe to go in urging her to take steps - drastic steps - to
ward off the attack. Drastic steps meant going to bed, complete rest,
plenty of food and milk.
On Wednesday, March 26, I became convinced that Virginia's mental
condition was more serious than it had ever been since those terrible
days in August 1913 which led to her complete breakdown and attempt
to kill herself. I suggested to Virginia that she should go and see
Octavia and consult her as a doctor as well as a friend. She had a
long talk with Octavia by herself and then Octavia came into the front
room in Montpelier Crescent and she and I discussed what we should
do.
We felt that it was not safe to do anything more at the moment. And
it was the moment at which the risk had to be taken, for if one did
not force the issue - which would have meant perpetual surveillance
of trained nurses - one would only have made it impossible and intolerable
to her if one attempted the same kind of perpetual surveillance by
one self. The decision was wrong and led to the disaster.
(5)
In his autobiography, The Journey, Leonard
Woolf described the suicide of Virginia Woolf
(1969)
On
Friday, March 28, 1941, I was in the garden and I thought she was
in the house. But when at one o'clock I went in to lunch, she was
not there. When I could not find her anywhere in the house or garden,
I felt sure that she had gone down to the river. I ran across the
fields down to the river and almost immediately found her walking-stick
lying upon the bank. I searched for some time and then went back to
the house and informed the police. It was three weeks before her body
was found when some children saw it floating in the river.
(6)
Virginia
Woolf, letter to Leonard
Woolf
(28th March, 1941)
I
feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through
another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I
begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what
seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible
happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I
don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible
disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling
your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You
see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to
say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely
patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody
knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything
has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on
spoiling your life any longer.
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