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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing," Leonard Woolf wrote in the last of the five volumes of his autobiography. "I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work." He was respected for his articles and parliamentary briefs, but his books on political history, in particular the long-labored-over volumes of "After the Deluge," dropped into obscurity. His wife, in her diary, sometimes wondered whether he gave in too thoroughly to his sense of failure. "Oh but I have been made miserable--damped & disheartened--this is no exaggeration--because the Lit Sup. only gave half a column of belittlement to After the Deluge," Virginia Woolf recorded in October of 1931. "L. says--& honestly believes--that this puts an end to the book. . . . He says his ten years work are wasted, & that he sees no use in going on."
"After the Deluge" was meant to be a major work of "scientific history" that would have the stature of the books Leonard Woolf's friends had written. By 1931, Lytton Strachey had published "Eminent Victorians" and "Queen Victoria," John Maynard Keynes "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," Roger Fry "Vision and Design," Edward Morgan Forster "Howards End" and (with Leonard Woolf's years of careful encouragement) "A Passage to India," and Virginia Woolf, for whom her husband was bulwark and first reader, seven novels, including "To the Lighthouse" and, in 1931, "The Waves," which was reviewed that same "damped & disheartened" day. Her diary entry concludes, "And when I say this morning incautiously, 'I'm reviewed in the M[anchester] Guardian' L. says 'Is it a long review?' And I say, feeling like a mother to a hurt & miserable little boy, Yes. Lord what human beings are!"
Both Woolfs were in the perpetual business of writing, editing, publishing, and reviewing books. At the Hogarth Press, which for many years occupied the larder in their basement, they printed not only "After the Deluge" and "The Waves" but T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Katherine Mansfield's "Prelude"; they helped translate works of Gorky and Dostoyevsky, and became Sigmund Freud's publishers in England. Leonard Woolf was also the literary editor of The Nation and, for twenty-seven years, co-editor of The Political Quarterly, and he counted among his contributors H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Isaiah Berlin, and Rebecca West. Never was a man more occluded by masterpieces. There is thus a mystery and a peculiar satisfaction surrounding the fact that Woolf, at nearly eighty, began to publish an autobiography that was immediately hailed by reviewers, won an important literary prize, and, in the almost half century since the first volume appeared, has seldom been out of print.
"Sufficient for the morning is the pleasure thereof," Woolf said in the last volume, "and one of the most unfailing pleasures is to sit down in the morning and write." Discovering the writing life of Leonard Woolf has always been a project for the assiduous; even the forthright autobiography takes refuge behind that shell of privacy which he referred to as his "carapace." In 1989, Frederic Spotts edited an admirable and substantial selection of Woolf's correspondence, and there has been a quickening of interest in recent years: Woolf's first novel, "The Village in the Jungle," was reissued in 2005; three long out-of-print stories have just been published by the Hesperus Press, under the title "A Tale Told by Moonlight"; and now Victoria Glendinning's "Leonard Woolf" (Free Press; $30), the first full-length biography, brings us a thoroughly researched and elucidating account. Through the ages of Woolf's life--the childhood among impoverished middle-class Jews (the family fortunes diminished when Woolf was eleven and his barrister father died); an adolescence reading classics at St. Paul's on scholarship; intellectual emergence at Cambridge; seven difficult and transformative years in Ceylon as a colonial administrator; and nearly six decades of editing, marriage, war, and labor politics--one sees the flickering aspirations of Leonard Woolf the writer, which, though often invisible to others, remained, to him, a central fact of his existence.
He was an austere man, with a strong temper and a thin face, whose clothes fit him loosely; reserved, even shy, in many social situations, he would...
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