Noble eagle
PATRICK ANDERSON
Downhill All the Way Leonard Woolf (The Hogarth Press 35s) Honesty about oneself and one's friends was a prime virtue amongst the Bloomsbury group of writers. In the fourth volume of his memoirs, which covers the period 1919-39, Mr Leonard Woolf continues to be astringently frank. He presents himself as a perfectionist, easily bored, 'an unredeemed and unrepentant intellectual,' 'hot tempered and allergic to fools' in youth, and happier working with subordinates—as in the old days in Ceylon—than with equals or superiors. 'I tend to go my own way and do not worry,' he explains, although, if worry is too nervous and sentimental an activity for a man of his level-headed temperament, exas- peration at human folly and cruelty pervades a book which is prefaced by a quotation from Luke on the subject of the Gadarene swine and is then divided into two parts, the irony of 'Peace in our time, 0 Lord' being followed by 'Downhill to Hitler.' Mr Woolf regards the 'moderate optimism' of the pre- 1914 period as having been very thoroughly extinguished by subsequent events; 'one of the horrors of life since 1920 is its senseless savagery,' he says in one place, and throughout he regrets 'an iron fatalistic achuiescence in insecurity and barbarism.'
Mr Woolf's honesty extends to his own work, which was concerned with trying to knock a little sense into the heads of his contem- poraries. He spent some thirty-three years examining the-reasons why nations go to war, an investigation which led him to invent his own concept of 'communal psychology,' but finally gave up after the publication of the third volume in the series, Principia Politica, in 1953. 'The - three volumes were a failure and I was not prepared to spend another five or ten years and another 200,000 words with the same result.' Nor does he kid himself that his journalistic work for left-wing publications of small circulation amounted to very much =Certainly one would have had to be very artless or very sanguine to think that many people read or anyone minded sixteen pages on international affairs in the Contemporary Re- view.' Although he assembled a splendid group of reviewers when he was literary editor of the Nation, I doubt whether anyone today is familiar with his weekly criticism in its 'World of Books.'
He confesses, too, that his many years of service on advisory councils of the Labour party were generally governed by the thought, Blessed is he who expects nothing, for unex- pectedly he may somewhere, some time achieve something.' Indeed, he mentions several occa- sions when his attempts to influence policy came to grief: a move to strengthen the League of Nations in 1927 was one such—it evoked a complimentary but evasively un- grammatical reply from Ramsay MacDonald —while an equally fruitless effort was made to get Labour to take a stand when Hitler in- vaded Austria in 1938. At other times Mr Woolf was evidently hampered by his own intelligence. This was the case when he stood for the Combined Universities seat in the elec- tion of 1922; he could not really envisage himself queueing up day by day at the division lobbies.
It is, I think, characteristic of him—a highly individual exponent of the private life—that the political issues which come most alive in this fourth volume are concerned with minor cases of social injustice: he rescues a woman bullied by a policeman, he rushes to the defence of an eccentric prosecuted for print- ing indecent Christmas cards. He also fights the Royal Hotel when jazz from its ballroom endangers the peace of the inhabitants of Tavistock Square. His off-beat approach is epitomised in the way he analyses the response of various countries to the pet marmoset he took with him on a continental tour. The Germans and Italians were ecstatic but en- tirely ignorant as to what the 'thing' might be (a rat, perhaps, or a bat) and then in France a soldier observed Mitz in the car and 'talked about her in an adult, intelligent way. . . . The reaction of the man in the street to a marmoset sitting on the steering-wheel of a car teaches one something, I think, about the in- tellectual condition, even the civilisation, of the country to which he belongs. There are a good many things which I do not like in the French tradition, but its scepticism and respect for intelligence seem to me admirable.' This is pure Woolf.
However, apart from such revelations of character, most readers will be less interested in Mr Woolf's political career than in his con- tinuing account of Virginia Woolf and of the Hogarth Press. In the previous volume he revealed himself as a splendid foil for his brilliant, unstable wife: dry, ironic, wryly humorous and employing a prose of great sim- plicity but of little visual content where she was all vivacity, sensitivity and art. We may, in fact, see Mr Woolf as a noble old eagle protecting a bird of paradise, his alert, shrewd but nevertheless limited gaze now darting towards a Maynard Keynes or an Ottoline Morrell, now transfixing a Lytton Strachey or a Vita Sackville-West with a memorable phrase, and then veiled in proprietary affection as he perches beside the shimmering and bewitch- ing tones, the prismatic extravagances, the im- periousness combined with vulnerability, of his extraordinary mate.
In the present volume he is at pains to demonstrate that Virginia was not a highbrow aesthete (the local Labour party met at Monks House), that her concentration and profes- sionalism were absolute (how she loved parties, yes, but how she put them to use!) and that for years she.worked exceedingly hard for very
little money (it was her lesser works and that failure, The Years, which eventually brought in
the cash). Yet here, too, the note of honesty is sounded. 'Her most obvious fault, as a person and as a writer, was a kind of intellec- tual and social snobbery—and she admitted it herself.' There was too much ego in her nature. I must recommend this book for another reason, too. It contains a good deal about money, a subject now considered more shame-
ful than sex, and literary historians will find much of interest in Mr Woolf's tables of accounts. The financial success of the Hogarth Press, whose books were printed on a treadle machine in the larder and bound in the dining- room, is a fascinating story in itself. These two amateurs achieved an efficiency that many thoroughly commercial firms must envy. I only regret that we hear so little about the new writers introduced by the Woolfs, especially the writers of the 'thirties, for Hogarth published New Signatures as well as Christopher Isherwood. The emphasis often falls oddly. Freud was a great friend but makes the briefest of appear- ances: Eliot's 'pomposity and priggishness' are loosened up at Rodmell but his personality remains the merest sketch. These disappoint- ments (and an occasional inaccuracy) are the price we have to pay for the marmoset, the portraits of Strachey and Vita Sackville-West and the lovable oddness of the old bird.
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