by Peter Dally
Virginia’s gender was not in doubt. She felt herself to be an attractive woman. She might play with the idea of androgyny but she could not imagine being ‘more than half a man’, as Katherine Mansfield did,4 nor did she desire to put on male dress. On the other hand she was sexually attracted to women. She could appreciate male beauty and enjoy a chance touch, but any hint of sexual interest brought down the shutters.
Her first real crush in adolescence had been on the older Madge Vaughan – echoed in Clarissa Dalloway’s memories of Sally Seton – and that had been followed by her need for a maternal protector and a sensual relationship.
Vanessa’s marriage made Virginia examine her sexuality. No man attracted her physically, apart perhaps from Clive, although she liked male company and preferred the male mind. Several men between 1908 and 1911 were interested in marrying her, but the only one acceptable as a husband had been Lytton Strachey, a confirmed homosexual, suitable because he was ‘the perfect female friend’.5
Men lacked the gentleness and sensitivity of women, in Virginia’s opinion. A man always wanted power, however gentle and understanding he might be on the surface, and a husband would try to dominate his wife. Sexual intercourse lay at the centre of the marital struggle, and must end in a wife being subjugated and humiliated. The prospect terrified Virginia. If she could not be in control, sex was unacceptable. It was not the physical act of penetration, but the psychological effect of being overcome and defenceless that was so horrifying. Perhaps the fear originated in her half-brother Gerald’s fumbling explorations in childhood, but the cause surely lay much deeper; perhaps partly genetic, partly the confusing relationships in early childhood.
Virginia wanted to be married. She hated the idea of living alone. She wanted a marriage that was ‘a tremendous living thing … not dead and easy’.6 She wanted an equal partnership, a companionable husband, strong and understanding enough to be mother and father to her, who loved her yet did not make sexual demands, who watched over her and yet allowed her freedom. The choice of husband was limited.
Chapter Eight
Leonard Woolf and Courtship
Leonard Woolf was born on 15 November 1880 into a liberal Jewish family, the third of nine children and the second of six boys. His father had come from a background of East End tailors to become a successful barrister. His mother was a de Jong, Dutch Jews who had established themselves in London in the middle of the last century.
Leonard was always dismissive of his mother, claiming without justification, ‘she loved me … less than any of the eight others’,1 and he believed he was his father’s favourite son, possessing his father’s mental gifts and marked out to succeed. These lifelong beliefs, together with his provocative and hurtful behaviour to his mother, suggest, at the least, unresolved childhood conflicts, which may have contributed to his melancholic and solitary nature.
His father’s sudden death, when Leonard was 11, plunged the family overnight from wealth into relative penury and a change of lifestyle. His mother Marie Woolf, acting decisively, moved away from their prosperous home in South Kensington to a smaller suburban one in Putney, and decided to spend her available capital on educating her sons. She calculated that, provide some won scholarships, the money would just last out until the eldest were in a position to support the family.
Leonard possessed a huge capacity for work and a determination to succeed. At school he swept the board academically. He won a scholarship to St Paul’s and, from there an Exhibition to Trinity College at Cambridge University. He was by nature an intellectual, but he was also an all-round sportsman; as a result, instead of the bullying usually meted out to swots, he gained a measure of popularity. Nor did he encounter any personal anti-Semitism, a remarkable escape given the widespread prejudice of the period and a tribute to his charm and the ‘carapace’ he erected. Yet his popularity at school was not accompanied by any close friendships and he brought no school acquaintances home. He was proud of being a Jew and very conscious of belonging to that race, but from his teens he seems to have felt ashamed of the habits and settings of his home. From early on he looked upon himself as an outsider, and even in the body of his family he felt himself to be different, a critical yet uneasy observer, never fitting in, always criticising his mother’s ‘dream world of rosy sentimentality’, upsetting her and disturbing himself in the process.
Cambridge determined the direction of Leonard’s life. There he discovered an exciting new world of the intellect and the company of like-minded friends. For the first time in his life he felt himself to be one of a group, accepted and on the inside. They included the men who went up to Cambridge in 1899 with him: Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Virginia’s brother Thoby Stephen, Saxon Sydney Turner; as well as Maynard Keynes – who began at King’s College three years later – and a number of dons.
Leonard and his friends tirelessly debated and railed against what they saw as hypocritical Victorian standards and beliefs. They were all atheists in search of honesty and truth, ‘arrogant, supercilious, cynical, sarcastic’. Leonard, Strachey and Saxon Sydney Turner would walk at night through the cloisters to listen to the nightingales and return, arm-in-arm, chanting Swinburne, prior to meeting in one or other’s rooms to debate weighty moral issues.
It was a joyful time and academic work took second place. Leonard worked but ceased to ‘swot’, no longer driven to achieve the top-ranking place. He suddenly grew up and rejected many of the values and standards of his family, replacing them with those of his Cambridge friends. He abandoned Judaism in his last year at school – as all the Woolf children did in time, to their mother’s disappointment – and during his first undergraduate year proclaimed himself an atheist, utterly opposed to any organised religion.
Quite suddenly, in his second year, Leonard was devastated by a profound sense of emptiness; his life seemed pointless and he began questioning his existence. He could ‘find no place for and no explanation of my life or my mind in this fantastic universe’… ‘Doubt came upon me black as Hell.’2 Faced with an existential crisis, he became depressed and, for the only time in his life, self-pitying.
Leonard was an usually self-contained man, but throughout his life he needed an example and a cause to centre himself on. Prior to Cambridge he had his idealised father, who ‘worked so hard and so continually’, and ‘whose code of personal conduct [was] terrific’.3 Leonard had worked flat out at his prep school and St Paul’s to succeed and win an Exhibition because it was what his father would have done and, like him, he was ‘something of a Puritan’. When he abandoned Judaism he was also discarding an idealised part of his father, and signalling the need for a new ideal, a belief or philosophy from someone he could revere and who might give him a clear sense of direction. His friends stimulated and delighted him, and gave him a newfound sense of intimacy, almost of family, helping to bring Leonard’s familiar world to an end. But none was able to help him in his mental struggle or even to understand the problem. He turned to his elder sister Bella, but her advice to ‘follow the light and do the right’ was unilluminating to someone already groping in the dark.4
Two events occurred in 1902 which brought Leonard peace of mind. He was elected to the Apostles, and he came to know the philosopher G. E. Moore.
The Apostles were members of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, better known as ‘The Society’. A secret society which had existed since 1820, it met behind locked doors on Saturday evenings, when essays were read and moral questions argued. Discussions were inspired by the ‘spirit of the pursuit of truth’, and members were expected to speak freely and with absolute candour. To be invited to become an Apostle meant you were not only regarded as highly intelligent and intellectual, but fit company for an élite. At one time or another the Society included some of the best Cambridge minds. Fitzjames Stephen had been an active Apostle but his younger brother Leslie, to his chagrin, was never invited because of his prickly manner. Nor was Thoby Stephen, although Lytton Strachey considered pro
posing him for membership and later regretted not having done so.
Leonard and Lytton Strachey were elected in 1902. An Apostle remained one until he ‘took wings’ and resigned, and the Society included men of all ages and repute. Leonard, for instance, continued assiduously to attend Apostle dinners after his marriage, provoking Virginia to refer banteringly to them as ‘the feast of the brother Apostles’.
In 1902 the Society included Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. Russell remarked, ‘It was owing to the existence of the Society that I got to know the people best worth knowing,’5 a view both Leonard and Lytton would have echoed. It was now they became friends with G. E. Moore. They sat at his feet, accompanied him on his walking holidays in the vacations, and absorbed his philosophy. His Principia Ethica became their Bible. His influence on Leonard was immense. Moore removed the ‘obscuring accumulation of scales, cobwebs and curtains’ from his eyes and revealed, so it seemed, ‘the nature of truth and reality, of good and evil character and conduct’, replacing what Leonard termed ‘the cant of Jehova and Christ’ with ‘the fresh air and pure light of common sense’.6
Alas, the idyllic life did not encourage Leonard to work. He had been expected to obtain first class honours in his final examination, and he too anticipated a good enough pass to obtain a Fellowship but, in the event, his results were indifferent and a Fellowship became out of the question. He decided to spend a fifth year at Cambridge reading for the Civil Service Examination, but his feet were not yet firmly on the ground; his mind was still with the Apostles, and he failed to do the necessary cramming. The outcome was that he came 65th in the pass list, too low for an interesting post in the Home Civil Service. The shock of failure hit him hard and left him bemused. He toyed with the idea of teaching and even resurrected the childhood dream of becoming a barrister like his father, but he was finally brought down to earth with a crash by his elder brother Herbert – the ‘head’ of the family, who had left school at 16 to work on the Stock Exchange and help out his mother – who told him sharply that he was now expected to contribute to the family finances. He decided to take an appointment in the Colonial Service and, applying for Ceylon, to his surprise and initial dismay, was accepted. In October 1904 he sailed from Tilbury Dock and landed in Colombo on 16 December.
* * *
Cadet Woolf was posted to Jaffna in the Northern Province of Ceylon. The contrast between Cambridge and the parochial society of sahibs and memsahibs he now encountered was huge. At first he felt lost without his friends and the convivial Cambridge lifestyle, and clung on to his closest friend Lytton Strachey, writing him long letters about his new life, his despair and the physical and mental hardships of a colonial civil servant. In return he demanded every piece of Cambridge news and gossip. To his family, however, he wrote in an entirely different vein, and Leonard’s letters home are chatty and full of interesting and amusing anecdotes of his life.
In his new surroundings, Leonard initially experienced a sense of déjà vu, as of returning to life at school. To be seen to be an intellectual was to put oneself outside the pale, and he had to hide his introspective and natural inclinations and assume the outward trappings of a ‘jolly good fellow’. He played a good game of tennis, which he enjoyed, was a competent bridge player, and he made himself take part in the evening ritual of whisky and soda and ‘British conversation’. Leonard possessed considerable charm when he exerted himself, particularly for women, and as he was young and presentable he was quickly accepted socially. He encountered no anti-Semitism. Arrogant, conceited and quick-tempered as he was, he kept his temper well under control and his often uncomplimentary opinion of his colleagues to himself.
As at school, work became his raison d’être; his old drive to succeed, which had been lost in the Apostolic heavens of Cambridge, returned in full force. He coerced the authorities at Jaffna to give him greater responsibility, and within a short time he had proved so efficient and reliable that his boss, the government agent, a man Leonard liked but considered lazy and indecisive, came to look on him as indispensable. When the government agent was promoted to Kandy he insisted on Leonard being transferred with him, which was very much to Leonard’s benefit. Leonard continued to do most of his boss’s work, working a ten- or eleven-hour day, seven days a week, with such conspicuous success that in the summer of 1907 he was promoted to Office Assistant to the Government Agent.
Leonard’s outstanding abilities and energy attracted the attention of the Acting Governor of Ceylon, Sir Hugh Clifford, who enjoyed the climate and entertainment of Kandy and spent a good deal of time there. Clifford took to Leonard and used him on a number of important occasions. He was so impressed with his competence that he had him promoted to Assistant Government Agent to the Hambantota District in the Southern Province. It was exceptionally rapid promotion, after only four years’ service, and it made Leonard by far the youngest A.G.A. in the country. The promotion, predictably, generated resentment among some of his colleagues. The Government Agent of the Southern Province, Leonard’s immediate superior, for whom Leonard had little respect, considered him a ‘jumped-up’ favourite, and was openly antagonistic.
In Hambantota, Leonard was solely responsible for the administration of an area of over one hundred thousand people. He was all things to all men: policeman, magistrate, judge, vet, adjudicator, customs officer, taxman, planner and keeper of the peace. The work was immensely hard and often dangerous; comforts were primitive; malaria, along with a range of other tropical diseases and parasites, was endemic. Leonard had to rely entirely on his own resources. He rarely saw another European. There were no railways and few made-up roads. He rode everywhere, and when on circuit his diet frequently depended on what he shot.
He fell in love with the country and became fascinated by the Sinhalese and their way of life. He set about improving their lives; opening schools, developing irrigation schemes, combating poverty and disease. He learnt Sinhalese and Tamil, and it became his passion to understand the people and the structure of their lives and relationships in the villages. He became so involved that he rarely recalled the pleasures of Cambridge, and his letters to Lytton Strachey dwindled to a mere trickle. His empathy with the villagers was remarkable strong, as the reader of Leonard’s novel The Village in the Jungle will recognise.
Leonard’s life in Hambantota was given over to work. Every day, from the time he got up to the moment he went to bed, was concerned with some problem. He exalted his work to a mania, and became obsessed with the need for efficiency, of finding the quickest, most methodical and economical way of tackling a task. He was determined to make his district the most efficient in the island. His pride in completing a census of the district and wiring the result to the authorities in Colombo before anyone else gave him immense satisfaction. He changed the way the goverment salt industry was organised, battled against rinderpest which was ravaging the district, and gained the reputation for being a fair-dealing if hard police magistrate. When he left Hambantota after three years to return home on leave, he had achieved much, and was held in high esteem by the administration in Colombo.
Success was only achieved at a cost to himself and the villagers. His drive for efficiency often became an end in itself. He allowed his impatience and arrogance to triumph over his humanitarian side; efficiency became the be-all and end-all of action. He was prone to trample over traditional native ways when they appeared inefficient and cumbersome and to replace them by Western methods. He played the ‘strong man’ and often aroused resentment and dislike. More than one person complained to the Governor and asked for his dismissal. Years later, looking back on that time, Leonard admitted he had been ‘too ruthless – both to them and myself’.7
Leonard was never ambitious in the conventional sense of seeking high position, wealth and honours. He despised such aims. His drive came from wanting to be as perfect as possible in his work, and to be recognised as ‘best’. He believed, long before Hambantota, that he was more able than most of the Europe
ans he encountered, and towards the end of his service he was liable to show it, making little effort to hide his contempt. On at least one occasion he was rebuked by the Governor for writing rude comments on orders received from his G.A., and instructed to show ‘more restraint and discretion’.8
Three years of near-isolation from European life inevitably increased Leonard’s introspective nature and his intolerance for fools. During that time he was a large fish in a small pond, and his word was virtually law among the natives. He loved them as children and came to understand them, much as he did his pets, and he expected the same obedience. He was beginning to assume the mantle of the all-wise dictator, but even before he left Ceylon he had begun to recognise this and question his role.
How could he justify governing another race? What right had an Imperial power to impose its standards on another culture? British rule kept the peace in Ceylon and brought progress to its ‘less civilised’ peoples, yet was it morally right? Did he want to continue to rule over these people as proconsul? As a highly successful civil servant it was likely that when he returned to Ceylon after his leave he would be promoted to Central Government in Colombo and, in time, progress to Colonial Secretary or even Governor. The thought depressed him. He would have to mix, put on his carapace, suppress his arrogance, and adopt a ‘good fellow’ approach to life. He would be expected to join in the social life of Colombo; tennis and bridge, billiards at the Club, the interminable gossip and ‘filth’. The prospect was unappealing. Yet he was reluctant to abandon the achievements of seven years and start afresh.
Leonard left Colombo on a year’s leave on 24 May 1911 with a divided mind and a sense of uncertainty.