Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  In fact he nearly did, although he does not mention it.

  “He does not mention it.” There was in Leonard Woolf an extraordinary silence, a containment allied to something like concealment, and at the same time open to a methodical candor. This is no paradox; candor is often the mode of the obtuse person. It is of course perilous to think of Leonard Woolf as obtuse: he was both activist and intellectual, worldly and introspective; his intelligence, traveling widely and serenely over politics and literature, was reined in by a seriousness that makes him the most responsible and conscientious figure among all the Bloomsburyites. His seriousness was profound. It was what turned a hand press “small enough to stand on a kitchen table” into the Hogarth Press, an important and innovative publishing house. It was what turned Leonard Woolf himself from a highly able agent of colonialism—at the age of twenty-four he was an official of the British ruling apparatus in Ceylon—into a convinced anti-imperialist and a fervent socialist. And it was what turned the Jew into an Englishman.

  Not that Leonard Woolf is altogether without ambivalence on this question; indeed, the word “ambivalence” is his own. Soon after his marriage to Virginia Stephen, he was taken round on a tour of Stephen relations—among them Virginia’s half-brother, Sir George Duckworth, in his large house in Dalingridge Place, and “Aunt Anny,” who was Lady Ritchie, Thackeray’s daughter, in St. George’s Square. He suffered in these encounters from an “ambivalence in my attitude to the society which I found in Dalingridge Place and St. George’s Square. I disliked its respectability and assumptions while envying and fearing its assurance and manners.” And: “I was an outsider to this class, because, although I and my father before me belonged to the professional middle class, we had only recently struggled up into it from the stratum of Jewish shopkeepers. We had no roots in it.” This looks like candor—“we had no roots”—but it is also remarkably insensible. Aware of his not belonging, he gives no evidence anywhere that the people he moved among were also aware of it. It is true that his own group of self-consciously agnostic Cambridge intellectuals apparently never mentioned it to his face. Thoby Stephen in a letter to Leonard in Ceylon is quick enough to speak of himself, mockingly, as a nonbelieving Christian—“it’s no good being dainty with Christians and chapel’s obviously rot”—but no one seems ever to have teased Leonard about his being an agnostic Jew. In the atmosphere of that society, perhaps, teasing would have too dangerously resembled baiting; levity about being a Christian was clearly not interchangeable with levity about being a Jew. Fair enough: it never is. But Virginia, replying to a letter in which Leonard implores her to love him, is oddly analytical: “. . . of course, I feel angry sometimes at the strength of your desire. Possibly, your being a Jew comes in also at this point. You seem so foreign.” Was he, like all those dark lubricious peoples whose origins are remote from the moderating North, too obscurely other? She corrects herself at once, with a kind of apology: “And then I am fearfully unstable. I pass from hot to cold in an instant, without any reason; except that I believe sheer physical effort and exhaustion influence me.” The correction—the retraction—is weak, and fades off; what remains is the blow: “You seem so foreign.”

  We do not know Leonard’s response to this. Possibly he made none. It would have been in keeping had he made none. Foreignness disconcerted him—like Virginia he was at moments disturbed by it and backed away—and if his own origins were almost never mentioned to his face, his face was nevertheless there, and so, in those striking old photographs, were the faces of his grandparents. Leonard Woolf is bemused in his autobiography by his paternal grandfather, “a large, stern, black-haired, and black-whiskered, rabbinical Jew in a frock coat.” Again he speaks of this “look of stern rabbinical orthodoxy,” and rather prefers the “round, pink face of an incredibly old Dutch doll,” which was the face of his Dutch-born maternal grandmother—about whom he speculates that it was “possible that she had a good deal of non-Jewish blood in her ancestry. Some of her children and grandchildren were fair-haired and facially very unlike the ‘typical’ Jew.” Her husband, however, was a different case: “No one could have mistaken him for anything but a Jew. Although he wore coats and trousers, hats and umbrellas, just like those of all the other gentlemen in Addison Gardens, he looked to me as if he might have stepped straight out of one of those old pictures of caftaned, bearded Jews in a ghetto. . . .” Such Jews, he notes, were equipped with “a fragment of spiritual steel, a particle of passive and unconquerable resistance,” but otherwise the character, and certainly the history, of the Jews do not draw him. “My father’s father was a Jew,” he writes, exempting himself by two generations. “I have always felt in my bones and brain and heart English and, more narrowly, a Londoner, but with a nostalgic love of the city and civilization of ancient Athens.” He recognizes that his “genes and chromosomes” are something else; he is a “descendant” of “the world’s official fugitives and scapegoats.”

  But a “descendant” is not the same as a member. A descendant shares an origin, but not necessarily a destiny. Writing in his eighties, Leonard Woolf recollects that as a schoolboy he was elected to an exclusive debating society under the thumb of G. K. Chesterton and his brother, and “in view of the subsequent violent anti-Semitism of the Chestertons” he finds this “amusing”; he reports that he was “surprised and flattered.” Sixty-three years afterward he is still flattered. His description of the public school that flattered him shows it to be a detestable place, hostile to both intellect and feeling: “I got on quite well with the boys in my form or with whom I played cricket, football, and fives, but it would have been unsafe, practically impossible, to let them know what I really thought or felt about anything which seemed to me important.” Would have been unsafe. It was a risk he did not take—unlike Morgan Forster, who, in the same situation in a similar school, allowed himself to be recognized as an intellectual and consequently to suffer as a schoolboy pariah. Leonard Woolf did not intend to take on the role of pariah, then or later. Perhaps it was cowardice; or perhaps it was the opposite, that “fragment of spiritual steel” he had inherited from the ghetto; or perhaps it was his sense of himself as exempt from the ghetto.

  Certainly he always thought of himself as wholly an Englishman. In the spring of 1935 he and Virginia drove to Rome. “I was astonished then (I am astonished still),” Quentin Bell comments, “that Leonard chose to travel by way of Germany.” They were on German soil three days; near Bonn they encountered a Nazi demonstration but were unharmed, and entered Italy safely. What prompted Leonard Woolf to go into Germany in the very hour Jews were being abused there? Did he expect Nazi street hoodlums to distinguish between an English Jewish face and a German Jewish face? He carried with him—it was not needed and in the event of street hoodlumism would anyhow have been useless—a protective letter from an official of the German embassy in London. More than that, he carried—in his “bones and brain and heart”—the designation of Englishman. It was a test, not of the inherited fragment of spiritual steel, but of the strength of his exemption from that heritage. If Quentin Bell is twice astonished, it may be because he calculated the risk more closely than Leonard; or else he is not quite so persuaded of the Englishness of Leonard Woolf as is Leonard Woolf.

  And, superficially at least, it is difficult to be persuaded of it. One is drawn to Leonard’s face much as he was drawn to his grandfather’s face, and the conclusion is the same. What Leonard’s eyes saw was what the eyes of the educated English classes saw. What Leonard felt on viewing his grandfather’s face must have been precisely what Clive Bell and Thoby Stephen would have felt. There is an arresting snapshot—still another of those that make up the pictorial history of Bloomsbury—of Leonard Woolf and Adrian Stephen. They are both young men in their prime; the date is 1914. They are standing side by side before the high narrow Gothic-style windows of Asham House, the Sussex villa Leonard and Virginia Woolf owned for some years. They are dressed identically (vests, coats, ties) and positioned
identically—feet apart, hands in pockets, shut lips gripping pipe or cigarette holder. Their shoes are lost in the weedy grass, and the sunlight masks their faces in identical skull-shadows. Both faces are serene, holding back amusement, indulgent of the photographer. And still it is not a picture of two cultivated Englishmen, or not only that. Adrian is incredibly tall and Vikinglike, with a forehead as broad and flat as a chimney tile; he looks like some blueblood American banker not long out of Princeton; his hair grows straight up like thick pale straw. Leonard’s forehead is an attenuated wafer under a tender black forelock, his nose is nervous and frail, he seems younger and more vulnerable than his years (he was then thirty-four) and as recognizably intellectual as—well, how does one put the contrast? Following Leonard, one ought to dare to put it with the clarity of a certain cultural bluntness: he looks like a student at the yeshiva. Leonard has the unmistakable face of a Jew. Like his grandfather—and, again like him, despite his costume—Leonard Woolf might have stepped out of one of those pictures of caftaned Jews in the ghetto.

  The observation may be obvious and boring but it is not insignificant, if only because it is derived from Leonard himself; it is his own lesson. What can be learned from it is not merely that he was himself conscious of all that curious contrast, but that his fellows could not have been indifferent to it. In a 1968 review of the penultimate volume of Leonard Woolf’s memoirs, Dan Jacobson wonders, “Did his being a Jew never affect . . . his career or social life in the several years he spent as a colonial officer in Ceylon, his only companions during that time being other colonial civil servants—not in general the most enlightened, tolerant, or tactful of British social groups? Did it not arise in the political work he carried out later in England, especially during the rise of Nazism?” On all these matters Leonard is mute; he does not mention it. Not so Virginia. “He’s a penniless Jew,” she wrote in a letter to a friend announcing her marriage, and we know that if she had married a poor man of her own set she would not have called him a penniless Englishman. She called Leonard a Jew not to identify or explain him, but because, quite simply, that is how she saw him; it was herself she was explaining. And if she wrote light-heartedly, making a joke of marriage without inheritance, it was also a joke in general about unaccoutered Jews—from her point of view, Leonard had neither inheritance nor heritage. He was—like the Hogarth Press later on—self-created.

  Of course, in thinking about Leonard Woolf, one is plainly not interested in the question of the acculturated Jew (“. . . nearly all Jews are both proud and ashamed of being Jews,” Leonard writes—a model of the type); it is not on the mark. What is to the point is the attitude of the class Leonard aspired to join. “Virginia for her part,” Quentin Bell notes—and it is unnecessary to remind oneself that he is her nephew—

  had to meet the Woolf family. It was a daunting experience. Leonard himself was sufficiently Jewish to seem to her disquietingly foreign; but in him the trait was qualified. He had become so very much a citizen of her world. . . . But Leonard’s widowed mother, a matriarchal figure living with her large family in Colinette Road, Putney, seemed very alien to Virginia. No place could have been less like home than her future mother-in-law’s house.

  And how did the Woolfs regard her? Did they perceive that she thought their furniture hideous? Did she seem to them a haughty goy thinking herself too good for the family of their brilliant son? I am afraid that they probably did.

  [Here follows an account of Virginia’s response—aloof and truculent—upon learning the character of the dietary laws, which Mrs. Woolf observed.]

  Virginia was ready to allow that Mrs. Woolf had some very good qualities, but her heart must have sunk as she considered what large opportunities she would have for discovering them.

  “Work and love and Jews in Putney take it out of me,” she wrote, and it was certainly true.

  This aspect of Virginia Stephen’s marriage to Leonard Woolf is usually passed over in silence. I have rehearsed it here at such length not to emphasize it for its own sake—there is nothing novel about upper-class English distaste for Jews—but to make a point about Leonard. He is commonly depicted as, in public, a saintly socialist, and, in private, a saintly husband. He was probably both; but he also knew, like any percipient young man in love with a certain segment of society, how to seize vantage ground. As a schoolboy he was no doubt sincerely exhilarated by the playing field, but he hid his intellectual exhilarations to make it look as if the playing field were all there was to esteem; it was a way, after all, of buying esteem for himself. And though he was afterward no doubt sincerely in love with Virginia Stephen (surely a woman less intelligent would not have satisfied him), it would be a mistake to suppose that Virginia herself—even given her brilliance, her splendid head on its splendid neck, the radiance of her first appearance in Thoby’s rooms in Cambridge wearing a white dress and round hat and carrying a parasol, astonishing him, Leonard says, as when “in a picture gallery you suddenly come face to face with a great Rembrandt or Velasquez”—it would be ingenuous, not to say credulous, to think that Virginia alone was all there was to adore. Whether Leonard Woolf fell in love with a young woman of beauty and intellect, or more narrowly with a Stephen of beauty and intellect, will always be a formidable, and a necessary, question.

  It is a question that, it seems to me, touches acutely on Leonard Woolf in his profoundly dedicated role as nurse. He was dedicated partly because he was earnestly efficient at everything, and also because he loved his wife, and also because he was a realist who could reconcile himself to any unlooked-for disaster. He came to the situation of Virginia’s health determinedly and unquestioningly, much as, years later, when the German bombings had begun, he joined up with the Local Defence Volunteers: it was what had to be done. But in the case of Virginia more than merely courage was at issue; his “background” had equipped him well to be Virginia Stephen’s nurse. When things were going badly he could take on the burden of all those small code-jottings in his diary—“V.n.w.,” “b.n.,” “V.sl.h.”—and all the crises “Virginia not well,” “bad night,” “Virginia slight headache” horrendously implied, for the simple reason that it was worth it to him. It was worth it because she was a genius; it was worth it because she was a Stephen.

  The power and allure of the Stephen world lay not in its distance from the Jews of Putney—Bloomsbury was anyhow hardly likely to notice the Jews of Putney, and if Virginia did notice, and was even brought to tea there, it was through the abnormal caprice of a freakish fate—but in its illustriousness. Virginia was an illustrious young woman: had she had no gift of her own, the luster of her father’s situation, and of the great circle of the aristocracy of intellect into which she was born, would have marked her life. It was additionally marked by her double fortune of genius and insanity, and though her primary fortune—the circle into which she was born—attracted, in the most natural way, other members of that circle, the biting and always original quality of her mind put the less vivid of them off. Her madness was not public knowledge, but her intellect could not be hidden. Her tongue had a fearful and cutting brilliance. “I was surprised to find how friendly she made herself appear,” said Walter Lamb, another of Thoby Stephen’s Cambridge friends, amazed on one occasion to have been undevoured. He courted her for a time, pallidly, asking frightened questions: “Do you want to have children and love in the normal way?”—as if he expected nothing usual from Virginia Stephen. “I wish,” she wrote to Lytton Strachey, after reporting Lamb’s visits, “that earth would open her womb and let some new creature out.” The courtship was brief and ended in boredom. Lamb’s offer was one of at least four proposals of marriage from differing sources; Strachey himself had tendered her one. Since he preferred stableboys to women, a fact they both understood very well, it was a strange mistake. Sydney Waterlow, still another Cambridge name, was a suitor; she regarded him as “amiable.” Hilton Young, a childhood friend—cast, says Quentin Bell, from a “smooth and well-proportioned mould”�
��might have been an appropriate match, mixing politics with poetry and gaining a peerage; he was merely “admirable.” Meanwhile, Virginia was thoughtfully flirting with her sister’s husband. At twenty-nine, despite all these attentions, she was depressed at being still unmarried; she was despondent, as she would be for the rest of her life, over her childlessness. Not one of those triflings had turned to infatuation, on either side.

  It was fortunate. There was lacking, in all these very intelligent men, and indeed in their type in general, the kind of sexual seriousness that is usually disparaged as uxoriousness. It was a trait that Leonard invincibly possessed and that Clive Bell despised as “provincial and puritanical, an enemy to all that was charming and amusing in life.” Clive was occupied by a long-standing affair and lived apart from Vanessa, who, at various times, lived with Roger Fry and with Duncan Grant—who was (so closely was this group tied) Lytton Strachey’s cousin, and who may have been (so Quentin Bell allows us to conjecture) the father of Quentin’s sister, Angelica. Vanessa typed and distributed copies of Lytton Strachey’s indecent verse; once at a party she did a topless dance; it was legendary that she had at another party fornicated with Maynard Keynes “coram publico”—the whole room looking on. It may have been in honor of these last two occasions that Virginia Woolf, according to Quentin Bell, pronounced human nature to have been “changed in or about December 1910.”

  It was not a change Leonard Woolf approved of. Four years after this crucial date in human history he published a novel critical of “unnatural cultured persons” given to “wild exaggerated talk” and frivolous behavior; it was clearly an assault on Vanessa and Clive Bell and their circle. The novel, called The Wise Virgins, was about not marrying Virginia. Instead the hero is forced to marry a Putney girl, and lives unhappily ever after—only because, having been infected with Bloomsbury’s licentious notions, he has carelessly gotten her with child. The fictional Leonard loses the heroine who represents Virginia, and is doomed to the drabness of Putney; in the one act he both deplores Bloomsbury and laments his deprivation of it. The real Leonard tried to pick his way between these soul-cracking contradictions. He meant to have the high excitement of Bloomsbury—and certainly “frivolity” contributed to Bloomsbury’s dash and éclat—without the frivolity itself. He meant to be master of the full brilliant breadth of all that worldliness, and at the same time of the more sober and limiting range of his native seriousness.