All posts tagged Pericles

Leonard Woolf: A Life by Victoria Glendinning (2006)

Leonard and Virginia were agreed that his chief fault was cowardice, and hers was snobbery.
(page 151)

‘If it were not for the divine goodness of L. how many times I should be thinking of death.’
(Virginia Woolf diary 28 May 1931, quoted p.291)

Having read most of Virginia Woolf’s adult work, why read a biography of her husband, Leonard, and not her?

1) Because I’d had enough of Virginia: the essays finished me off, my cup overflowed with Woolf style, snobbery and delirium. 2) I’d learned most of the important facts about her life from the short biographies and notes in each of her novels, and the essays. 3) These notes sometimes referred to books by Leonard, notably a book he wrote called Quack! Quack! mocking the 1930s dictators, Mussolini and Hitler, which intrigued me. He wrote two novels, over 15 books of political science, was a committed socialist, literary editor, publisher, and wrote six volumes of autobiography. Does anyone ever read these? No.

So 4) Leonard is the underdog. The critical industry around Woolf is now mountainous – as Glendinning puts it, ‘There is a small mountain of books and articles on the life and work of Virginia Woolf’ (p.502) – and will only increase year by year. She is a patron saint of feminist writing, as iconic as fellow feminist saints Frida Kahlo and Sylvia Plath. There are lots of biographies of her, hundreds of books and tens of thousands of critical essays about her writing. But what about the mystery man who loved and supported her throughout the years of her great achievements, who tried to manage her recurring bouts of mental illness, who co-founded and ran their famous Hogarth Press? Let’s find out.

Jewish

Woolf was Jewish. He came from a large and extensive Jewish family. I enjoyed Glendinning’s handy summary of the history of the Jews in England, their slow liberation from various legal and customary restrictions during the nineteenth century, and then the transformation in the size of the Jewish population and in attitudes towards them triggered by the mass immigration of Jews from Russia in the 1880s and ’90s.

This more than quadrupled the size of the Jewish community in England and, because so many of them were very poor, from peasant communities, and often settled in the slummiest parts of the East End, it was this mass influx which gave rise to the casual antisemitism you find (distressingly) in so many Edwardian and Georgian writers (Saki and D.H. Lawrence spring to mind. The fact that Virginia includes antisemitic comments in some of her novels, and was regularly casually antisemitic in her letters and diaries – ‘I do not like the Jewish voice, I do not like the Jewish laugh,’ (p.189) – requires a separate explanation).

Father

Woolf was born in London in 1880, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sidney Woolf (known as Sidney Woolf), a barrister and Queen’s Counsel, and his wife Marie, maiden name de Jongh). Both parents were Jewish, and from extended families. This is why Glendinning needed four pages to depict the full, extended family trees of both parents. At various points, family members are quoted jokingly referring to it as ‘the Woolf pack’. From time to time grown-up Leonard, feeling sorry for himself, referred to himself as ‘a lone Woolf’.

The family lived at 101 Lexham Gardens off the Earl’s Court Road. The household was:

an example of a typical, well-to-do Victorian way of life, underpinned by an unquestioned social hierarchy and set of values. (p.13)

As a young man Leonard was conscious of ‘the snugness and smugness, snobbery, its complacent exploitation of economic, sexual and racial classes’ (quoted p.15).

We are told all kinds of things about Sidney Woolf but the single most important fact is that he died in his prime, in 1892, aged 47 (p.23). He had earned a lot as a lawyer and that income ended overnight. Now relatively impoverished his widow, Marie, was fortunate enough to have a legacy to live off. She hung on at Lexham Gardens for two years then moved the family to a smaller house further out of town – 9 Colinette Road, off the Upper Richmond Road in Putney.

School

After prep school, Leonard was sent to the prestigious St Paul’s School in west London. Lots of anecdotes, prizes and whatnot, but the important thing is that it was as a slight, shy, Jewish teenager that he developed what he called his ‘carapace’, the protective shell he was to deploy for the rest of his life.

Trinity College, Cambridge

In 1899 he won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. Glendinning vividly paints how he encountered a small group of fellow undergraduates who became soul mates, including the flamboyant Lytton Strachey and the hulking great Thoby Stephen, nicknamed The Goth, son of the biographer Sir Lesley Stephen and brother of the sisters, Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, the second of which Leonard was, of course to marry. But Strachey was the man. Before he’d arrived at Cambridge Strachey was a fully-formed individual with outrageous views and a particular way of speaking which influenced all his friends. Leonard became closer to Lytton Strachey than anyone else in the world, calling him ‘the most charming and witty of human beings since Voltaire’ (p.189).

I tend to think of E.M. Forster as being an old man, but he was actually a year younger than Leonard and they got to know each other at Cambridge.

Leonard was elected to the elite discussion society called The Cambridge Apostles and it is fascinating to learn the rules of this elite club and the kind of topics they discussed. When I was a sixth-former I read A.J. Ayer, learned about Logical Positivism, and went on to read Wittgenstein, all of which convinced me that talk of Beauty and Love and Truth and God is enjoyable, entertaining but ultimately meaningless.

More precisely, they may have a psychological importance and impact on the people who discuss, write and read about such topics, but they don’t really relate to anything in the real world. They derive from a misunderstanding of language. Because we talk about a good meal, a good person and a good day, it’s easy to be deluded into thinking there must be something they have in common. Plato started the ball rolling by writing dialogues in which Socrates and his followers endless debate the True Nature of The Good. Two and a half thousand years later, clever undergraduates at Cambridge were doing just the same.

I follow Wittgenstein in believing there can be no answer to these kinds of questions because they are non-questions based on a misapplication of language. Viewed from a correct understanding of language i.e. that language consists of a vast number of language games – then any given use of language may or may not be appropriate to the vast number of language games people continually play, invent and evolve and self-important Oxbridge discussions of these great big concepts simply take their place among myriads of other linguistic interactions.

Anyway, all this was to come. For the time being these clever young men thought Truth and Beauty were excellent subjects to write long papers about and present at gatherings of like-minded chaps who all considered themselves part of a literally self-selecting intellectual elite, the Apostles. Members of the Apostles included Leonard, Strachey, E. M. Forster and a year or so later, John Maynard Keynes. Thoby Stephen (his future wife’s brother) was friendly with the Apostles, though not a member himself. What comes over from Glendinning’s comprehensive accounts of these meetings and discussions is how absolutely irrelevant everything they discussed is to us today. Here are the dates of Leonard and significant contemporaries:

E.M. Forster b. 1879
Lytton Strachey b.1880
Thoby Stephen b.1880
Leonard Woolf b. 1880
Clive Bell b.1881
John Maynard Keynes b.1883

G.E. Moore

All of them were deeply in thrall to the moral philosopher George Edward (G. E.) Moore (1873 to 1958), himself an older member of the Apostles. They were still undergraduates when Moore published his influential book, Principia Ethica, in 1903, which was concerned with that age-old problem, What is the good? Moore decides that ‘the good’ is ultimately unknowable, so that:

By far the most valuable thing, which we can know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.’ (p.63)

1. The pleasures of human intercourse and 2. the enjoyment of beautiful objects. Friends, lovers and art. Or, as Wikipedia summarises it:

that the summum bonum lies in achieving a high quality of humanity, in experiencing delectable states of mind, and in intensifying experience by contemplating great works of art,

Moore’s conclusions led his book to be treated as a kind of Bible by the network of friends which came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, validating their belief that human relationships are what count most: Love and Beauty. Sounds like Keats, doesn’t it, from almost a century earlier? Glendinning quotes John Maynard Keynes’s extravagant response to Moore’s theory: ‘It seemed the opening of a new heaven on a new earth’ (p.64).

The thing to understand is that the younger generation experienced this as a tremendous liberation from the oppressive burden of Victorian beliefs in duty and honour and nation and empire and queen and country and all the rest of it. For believers like Leonard the book stripped away centuries of oppressive religious beliefs, shedding the calm light of common sense on the agonising questions of how to live and what to believe.

‘Isn’t that the supreme, the only thing – to be loved.’ (Strachey, quote p.98)

But there were plenty of critics who mocked these earnest young believers. Glendinning quotes Beatrice Webb’s shrewish view that the book had little or no value and simply gave the young generation who worshipped it ‘a metaphysical justification for doing what you like’ (p.65).

Glendinning herself criticises the Principia because:

Its unquestioning definition of The Beautiful was heavily Victorian and becoming out of date as the new aesthetics of the 20th century kicked in
Moore’s idea of the good life was very passive and quiescent i.e. simply ignored the active life of politicians, engineers, administrators, people who did things. It was a privileged academic’s conclusion that the best possible way of life was… to be a privileged academic.
No sex please, we’re British: Moore’s ‘asexual mind-set seemed to preclude the “intrinsic value” of any “state of consciousness” elicited by anything more urgent than affection’ (p.63). In other words, Moore’s was a very pallid, underpowered, sexless view of human emotions.

Choice of career and the Civil Service exam

Woolf was awarded his BA in 1902 but stayed on at Cambridge for another year to study for the Civil Service examinations which he took in the summer of 1904. He got a low pass, 69th in the list, and was offered a job as an imperial administrator in Ceylon. First he went the round saying goodbye to his uni friends and this included dinner at the Stephens new house. Sir Leslie Stephen had recently died (February 1904) and his children had moved out of the gloomy family house in Hyde Park Gate to a roomier lighter one in Bloomsbury. Visiting his friend Thoby (the Goth), meant meeting the two beautiful sisters, Vanessa and Virginia. Glendinning points out that the latter was still recovering from the nervous breakdown triggered by her father’s death, one of what was to become a string of breakdowns and mental health problems. During this breakdown she had made the first of several suicide attempts (p.129).

Ceylon

Woolf was in Ceylon for 7 long years, 1904 to 1911. Glendinning makes the point that he met hundreds of native Sinhalese and Tamils but never became friendly with one of them. He liked Ceylon, some of the scenery was breath-taking. He wrote that the jungle:

‘is a cruel and dangerous place, and, being a cowardly person, I was always afraid of it. Yet I could not keep away from it.’ (quoted p.109)

, but he became an increasingly conflicted imperialist. As he was slowly, systematically promoted, he found himself adjudicating law cases and arguments and realised the only thing to do was be as strict and impartial as possible. At the same time he came to hate the impact many imperial laws and restrictions had on the natives.

Glendinning gives a vivid and fascinating account of all this, based on the twin sources of the official diary he kept of his duties, along with the many letters he exchanged with his friends back in England, Thoby, a friend called Saxon but above all Lytton Strachey.

He lost his virginity to a Singhalese woman and seems to have had occasional sexual encounters, but didn’t keep a native mistress as many other young male imperial administrators did.

The conversation of whores is more amusing than the conversation of bores.

The correspondence with Lytton back in England, in Cambridge, is extraordinarily candid about sex. Lytton deploys what he himself calls ‘the dialect of their intimacy’ (p.146). Lytton was a promiscuous homosexual who needed to be falling in love with new young men all the time. Glendinning quotes liberally from his letters which depict not just his sex life, but the sex lives of those in their set or circle, including Duncan Grant, Clive Bell and Keynes. For example, where he explains that he is having an affair with Duncan Grant, who is also sleeping with Keynes. Lytton and the others delighted in using the word ‘copulate’, in a self-mocking tone.

‘I copulated with him [Duncan] again this afternoon, and at the present moment he is in Cambridge copulating with Keynes.’ (p.115)

As always, it’s the promiscuity of gay men which staggers me, compared with the, as far as I can tell, complete chastity of their female contemporaries, specifically Virginia and Vanessa.

A note that Leonard’s sister, Bella, came out to Ceylon in 1907. She married a colonial administrator, Robert Heath Lock, Assistant Director of the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, near Kandy in 1910. She wrote children’s books and the first tourist guide to Ceylon. She was one of many voices advising Leonard to get married. She merits a Wikipedia page of her own.

Bella Sidney Woolf

The Longest Journey

While Leonard was in Ceylon, his friend E.M. Forster published an autobiographical novel, The Longest Journey which describes the coming-to-maturity of young Frederick ‘Rickie’ Elliott, including lengthy descriptions of his time as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Critics think the character of Stewart Ansell, the clever student which Rickie’s and their circle look up to, is at least partly based on Woolf. Certainly the flashy pseudo-philosophical conversations at Cambridge which the novel opens with, are based on The Apostles. Woolf and Strachey both hated it.

Back from Ceylon

After seven years service Leonard was given an extended leave to return to England. Glendinning quotes many of the colleagues and managers in the Colonial Service who advised him to get married. it’s interesting to read the opinions of quite a few contemporaries all advising that marriage is the best thing or only thing which a young man can do to acquire focus and purpose in his life. ‘Marriage was the only way forward’ (p.120).

We know from their letters and diaries that it was Lytton who first proposed to Virginia, in a panic that she might accept (p.114). You have to have followed the text quite closely to understand why this flamboyant queer would even consider such a mad move in the first place. She sensibly turned him down.

Virginia’s character As the focus of the story turns towards Virginia Stephen, Glendinning gives a useful profile and description of her (pages 128 to 130). The bit that stood out for me was the notion that her mother was aloof and distant, so that the girl Virginia hardly ever had time with her alone.

In adolescence and beyond, she became emotionally attached to older women. (p.128)

Aha, I thought – this sheds light on the warmth and fondness for mother figures and older women which you find in her fiction – Betty Flanders, Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, Lucy Swithin.

Virginia’s physicians We learn about the wonderfully named Dr Savage, the physician treating her mental illness, and that he had treated her father for depression, and one of her cousins, who ended up committing suicide. Also, we learn that her sister, Vanessa, was also prey to anxiety and depression. She had her own ‘nerve doctor’, Dr Maurice Craig of 87 Harley Street. So was it genetic?

Brunswick Square The Stephens children moved again, to 38 Brunswick Square, and invited several friends to move in and take rooms. Among these was Leonard who moved in on 20 November 1911. Their wooing was slow and painful.

The Aspasia Papers Constant company led Leonard to fell deeper and deeper in love with the beautiful, mercurial, charismatic Virginia, who he came to nickname Aspasia. This was the name of the wife of Pericles (495 to 429 BC), leader of Athens during its so-called Golden Age. He wrote descriptions of her and these expanded to become sketches of the entire social circle or set, all under pen-names, eventually called the Aspasia Papers. The whole gang he joking referred to as The Olympians.

Leonard proposes to Virginia On 10 January 1912 he proposed to her. This upset her so much she took to her bed. But over the following weeks he maintained his suit and the great day came on Wednesday 29 May when she acknowledged the loved him. They told the gang who reacted in different ways. Rupert Brooke claimed it was Leonard’s sexual know-how that got her. He described her eyes lighting up when Leonard described having sex with prostitutes in Ceylon. Put simply, he was the only man she knew who wasn’t gay and had had sex. With a woman!

He was 31, she was 30, both getting on a bit.

Quits the Colonial Service The Colonial Office required him to end his leave and return to Ceylon by May at the latest but Leonard realised he couldn’t go back, and after some surprising shows of flexibility by Whitehall, he eventually resigned his position. Now what was he going to do? He was writing a novel and had written some short stories, but hadn’t made any money from them.

Wedding They were married on Saturday 10 August 1912 at St Pancras Registry Office, a very small low-key affair. As Glendinning puts it:

Leonard and Virginia were agreed that his chief fault was cowardice, and hers was snobbery.
(p.151)

And both faults lay behind his failure to invite his mother to the wedding. Not being invited to the most important day of a son for whom she had made such sacrifices as a single mother deeply hurt her.

Sex

Glendinning (like all their friends) moves onto the subject of sex. Virginia seems to have got to the ripe old age of 30 without every experiencing sexual feelings. This is what you’d deduce from her novels and essays which have a kind of hallucinatory sexlessness. So she didn’t have a clue and he wasn’t savvy enough to be a teacher. He’d only slept with a few Singhalese prostitutes and prostitutes are 1) experienced and 2) compliant. Apparently when Leonard went to make his move, Virginia became increasingly anxious and over-excited in the way which preceded her breakdowns so he had to desist. Permanently.

Glendinning cites a letter exchange of 1933 with Ethel Smyth the feminist composer, where they talk about a news story that young women are having operations to break their hymens ahead of getting married, and joke about going to have the operation themselves. Woolf was 51 and apparently serious. Glendinning concludes from this and plenty of other evidence that Leonard and Virginia never had penetrative sex, so the marriage was never consummated in the normal way. Within a year they took to sleeping in separate rooms and never again slept together.

Events

Breakdown and suicide attempt After the marriage Virginia’s anxiety, nerves and depression grew worse. She became extremely anxious about the likely reception of her first novel, ‘The Voyage Out’. They went to the country hotel to celebrate the first anniversary of their honeymoon but it was a disaster. Virginia had high anxieties about food and refused to eat. Back in Brunswick Square, unattended for a few hours, she took an overdose of veronal (100 grains of veronal) sleeping pills. Prompt action by Keynes’s brother, Geoffrey who was staying in the house, and a stomach pump, saved her life but this necessitated a round of carers, nurses, consultations with the three physicians now treating her.

The Village in the Jungle In the middle of all this Leonard’s first novel, The Village in the Jungle, was published to good reviews. It’s set in Ceylon but not among the white ex-pat and colonial community, instead it entirely habits the minds of poor Singhalese villagers. And it’s written in what, for the times, was very plain factual English, what Glendinning calls ‘spare and unmannered’. Woolf’s old boss, Sir Hugh Clifford, wrote that:

‘Your book is the best study of Oriental peasant life that has ever been written, or that I have ever read.’ (p.168)

It’s available online and I’ve read and reviewed it for this blog.

The Village in the Jungle by Leonard Woolf

Virginia Woolf was five feet ten inches tall. She had a ‘cut glass accent’ (p.299).

The Women’s Co-operative Guild The misery with Virginia lasted for months. Throughout this period Leonard became involved with the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, led by its young and energetic president, Margaret Llewelyn Davies. He went to meetings and the annual conference and write articles to promote their work.

He was by this stage writing lots of articles and reviews for a variety of journals, including the New Statesman.

Exempted from war service When the war came the army was at first fuelled with volunteers. The Military Service Act of 1916 widened the age of conscription to all men aged between 16 and 41. Leonard was 35 but underweight and anxious, with a permanent tremor in his hands. In the next three years he underwent three medical examinations but each time presented a letter from his doctor exempting him, predicting that if he were conscripted he would have a physical and mental breakdown within months.

The Fabian Society As well as the Women’s Co-Operative, Leonard had been collared by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, leading lights of the Fabian Society, who were always recruiting likely young chaps for their cause. Sympathetic to gradualist socialism based on facts and figures, Leonard was commissioned to research and write various reports. Thus in 1916 was published the result of extensive researches, his International Government. The book’s central proposal was for an international agency to enforce world peace, and he went on to join a number of the organisations lobbying for a League of Nations to be set up, becoming friendly with the genial H.G. Wells in the process.

Labour Party Leonard joined the Labour Party and helped research and write policy papers. Women’s Co-Operative, League of Nations charities, Fabians and Labour, he wrote research papers, pamphlets and books for all of them. His next book was the thoroughly researched Empire and Commerce in Africa.

1917 Club As a left-winger Leonard welcomed the Russian Revolution. As promptly as December 1917 he helped set up the 1917 Club in Soho as a discussion forum.

The Hogarth Press In 1917 the couple bought an old printing press for £19 and set it up on the dining room table of Hogarth House in Richmond and taught themselves how to use it, to print pages and stitch them together into books. Their first publication was Two Stories, one by Leonard, one by Virginia. Hers was The Mark On The Wall, a free-associating flight of fancy. It was her first published story. His old friend Lytton Strachey immediately saw it was a work of genius. But as Virginia’s confidence grew, Leonard’s shrank. He had published two novels but began to lose faith. He was happier writing factual books.

Mark Gertler, Lady Morrell, Katherine Mansfield They make friends with Mark Gertler, self-obsessed Jewish painter and lover of Dora Carrington. At Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morell, they meet the New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield and her husband, the editor John Middleton Murray. They agreed to published Mansfield’s 68-page story The Prelude on their press

Leonard produced another book, Co-operation and the Future of Industry and agreed to edit a journal called International Review. The publishing sensation of 1918 was his old friend, Lytton Strachey’s debunking work of biography, Eminent Victorians.

In the war one of Leonard’s brothers, Cecil, was killed and one, Philip, badly wounded.

Recap When the war ended Glendinning summarises that Woolf had established himself as a documentary journalist and political propagandist, an experienced public speaker and author of distinguished books, as well as a seasoned book reviewer, and publisher in his own right. He was a behind-the-scenes figure in the growing Labour Party and was offered a seat to contest as an MP but, after some hesitation, turned it down.

James Joyce In April 1918 Harriet Weaver, patron of The Egoist magazine, approached them with the unfinished manuscript of James Joyce’s Ulysses but they had to turn it down. Far too big for their expertise, it was rejected on the grounds of obscenity by the two commercial printers they approached. Obscenity was Virginia’s central objection to Joyce, see her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923). She couldn’t get past her snobbish aversion to his references to peeing, pooing and the male anatomy. (The book’s central character, Leopold Bloom, has a bath and idly watches his willy floating in the water.) In her own fictions, almost all references to the body, let alone sex (God forbid) are rigorously excluded, which helps to give them their strange, bloodless, ethereal character.

Woolf’s problematic reaction to Joyce (admiration, envy, rivalry, disgust at his physicality) are explored in two excellent essays by James Heffernan:

T.S. Eliot Conversation with Weaver turned to her other protegé, T.S. Eliot, who they invited to tea to discuss whether he had anything to publish. As a result they published seven of his poems in a small edition of 140 in November 1919. Initially stiff and inhibited, Eliot became friends with Virginia who referred to him, unpretentiously, as Tom. He, like Leonard, was to become carer to a mad wife. He was six years younger than Virginia (born 1888 to Virginia’s 1882). (Later Glendinning wryly notes that ‘Eliot continued to consult Leonard as an expert on mad wives,’ p.265. Ten years later they could have both helped Scott Fitzgerald with Zelda.)

Monk House In 1919 they were meant to go down to Cornwall to join the ménage which had been set up by D.H. Lawrence, his wife Frieda, Middleton Murray and Mansfield – but never did. They had been used to a place in the country named Asheham House but it was sold by the owner. They looked around and settled on Monks House in the village of Rodmell in Sussex. They paid £580 plus £120 for the freehold. This is now a National Trust property. When they moved in it had no running water, electricity or toilet facilities. These two highbrows put up with conditions which would nowadays as unfit for human habitation. Leonard became addicted to working in the garden and had to be dragged away to take Virginia for constitutional walks.

Back in London they bought a bigger press and began to consider the Hogarth Press as a commercial venture. They published Virginia’s story, Kew Gardens. It was 1919 the year of the Paris Peace Conference and Leonard nearly went. They printed Leonard’s Three Tales from the East with a cover by Dora Carrington, to very positive reviews.

Friends’ success Lytton had become a famous name with his Eminent Victorians and Keynes became famous for writing a scathing indictment of the peace terms imposed on Germany in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (December 1919). But although much of Leonard’s research for International Government was used by the British government or other organisations at the Conference, he got little recognition.

Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (1920) a scathing indictment of British imperial policy in Africa. He was writing for the New Statesman and wrote leading articles on foreign affairs for the Nation. He was secretary to the Labour Party Committee on International and Imperial Questions. He was in the loop.

The Memoir Club Molly McCarthy set up the Memoir Club to bring together old pals from Cambridge to read works in progress. A propos of this you realise that Leonard, the man, was the objective authoritative and grounded one; Virginia, the woman, was flighty, solipsistic, experimental (p.237).

Gorki and the Russians In 1919 Maxim Gorky sent a friend of theirs, Kotelianski, a manuscript of his life of Trotsky, which he brought to the Woolfs. Thus began a series of careful translations of contemporary Russian literature by the Hogarth Press.

Teeth out In June 1921 Virginia had another nervous collapse. It is mind-boggling to read that some experts thought that having your teeth extracted was a cure from mental illness. On this occasion she had three pulled out. By the end of her life she’d had all her teeth pulled out by these experts.

Jacob’s Room In November 1921 she finished writing Jacob’s Room but with the end of any book came a rush of doubt, anxiety and sometimes collapse. She had come to rely on Leonard entirely, and he had evolved to know his place was by her side and supporting. At the time of the peace conference he had been asked to travel abroad, the Webbs asked him to visit Bolshevik Russia and report back, but he turned all offers down in order to remain by Virginia’s side. This makes him a hero, doesn’t it?

Passage To India Leonard played a key role in helping Morgan Foster complete his most important novel, A Passage To India, when Forster had severe doubts and thought of abandoning it (p.242). Passage was published in 1926 and made Forster famous and financially secure. Leonard was the grey eminence behind it.

Stands for Parliament Leonard stood as a Labour candidate for Liverpool in the 1922 General Election but, thanks to his lacklustre speeches about international affairs and against imperialism, came bottom of the poll. It was a relief.

Literary editor

‘I expect you have heard that, having failed as a) a civil servant b) a novelist c) an editor d) a publicist, I have now sunk to the last rung… literary journalism. I am now Literary Editor of The Nation and Athenaeum.’ (letter to Lytton Strachey, 4 May 1923)

The salary, £500 a year, gave the couple some financial stability and coincided with the start of ‘the most prolific and successful period of Virginia’s writing life’ (p.248). She had published Jacob’s Room and started the long process of writing Mrs Dalloway and was, in addition, writing important essays and reviews.

Leonard’s literary positions Wikipedia gives a handy list of Leonard’s editorial positions:

1919 – editor of the International Review
1920 to 1922 edited the international section of the Contemporary Review from 1920 to 1922
1923 to 1930 – literary editor of The Nation and Athenaeum (generally referred to simply as The Nation)
1931 to 1959 – joint founder and editor of The Political Quarterly from 1931 to 1959

The Waste Land It’s a bit mind-boggling to learn that the Hogarth Press published The Waste Land and the type was set in the household larder. ‘Tom’ was pleased with the typescript and layout. In the same year he established a literary magazine of his own, the Criterion and he and Leonard now were friendly and conspiring literary editors, swapping reviewers and ideas. Tom became a regular visitor to their house, mostly alone, in fact maybe a bit too often as his marriage with the mentally unstable Vivian sank into misery.

Glendinning very entertainingly punctuates the key events of Leonard’s life with a roundup of what all the other Bloomsburies were doing, which is mainly having hetero or bisexual affairs with each other. A little grenade was thrown into the mix when Keynes announced he was not only in love with, but going to marry a dancer from the Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova (p.249).

52 Tavistock Square Virginia felt out of it in Richmond and wanted to socialise more. So they sold Hogarth House (for £1,350) and rented 52 Tavistock Square for £140 a year.

Vita Sackville-West At this time Virginia met and became friends with socialite and author Vita Sackville-West. She was married to diplomat Harold Nicholson but they led separate lives, he with a string of boyfriends, she having affairs with women and, eventually, with Virginia. They became ‘tentative’ lovers for about three years. But sex was alien to Virginia’s nature and Vita was a passionate collector of conquests.

Labour As well as working full time as literary editor of the Nation, he continued to be secretary to Labour’s Advisory Committee on International and Imperial Questions. He drafted the foreign policy section of Labour’s 1929 manifesto. Throughout the 1920s he campaigned for India and Ceylon to be given independence. If they had, he later wrote, the murder and mayhem of the independence struggle and the catastrophe of partition would never have happened.

Freud The Hogarth Press embarked on publishing the complete works of Freud being translated by James and Alix Strachey. This project carried on into the 1960s, long after Leonard had parted company with Hogarth, and they’re the edition I own, as republished by Penguin. Despite this, Leonard grew more anti-analysis as he grew older. I’ve reviewed quite a few of Freud’s works:

Freud reviews

Vita It became a love affair in December 1925. They took trouble to conceal the full depth of it from Leonard.

Car In August 1927 he bought a car. He drove Virginia all round the country. They drove to the south of France. He wrote that nothing changed his life as much as owning a car.

Mrs Dalloway was published by the Hogarth Press on 14 May 1925. The Common Reader, a volume of 21 short literary essays, was published the same year, and the following year was the first one in which Virginia’s income exceeded Leonard’s. In 1927 her masterpiece To The Lighthouse was published. In 1928 she earned £1,540 to his £394.

Nicknames Virginia never called him Len, she called him Leo. From the start of the marriage they had numerous nicknames for each other but the enduring ones were the Mongoose and the Mandrill. Before she married, Virginia’s nickname in the Stephen household was ‘the Goat’.

They went to Berlin to visit Harold Nicholson, it was a long draining visit with many late nights, and on her return she had a relapse and was in bed for three weeks. Glendinning quotes her as saying she really wanted ‘the maternal protection which… is what I have always wished from everyone’. Suddenly, reading that, I saw how Woolf was a child, endlessly seeking reassurance. And it made me see her novels as essentially childlike, a sexless, jobless, workless, child’s-eye view of life.

Orlando: A Biography was published on 11 October 1928 and sold well, securing their finances. A year later, in October 1929, A Room of One’s Own was also successful.

Richard Kennedy, 24, was the latest young graduate taken on to help out at the Hogarth Press. He describes how Leonard was:

the magician who keeps us all going by his strength of will… and Mrs W is a beautiful, magical doll, very precious but sometimes rather uncontrollable.’

He describes how, when she was lifting off into one of her manic spells, Leonard would gently tap her on the shoulder and she would stop talking, and quietly follow him, go to her bedroom where he talked quietly, read to her and calmed her down. Leonard had to warn new people what they could not say to Virginia to avoid a problem/getting her over-excited. I hadn’t realised she was this on the edge, all the time.

Ethel Smyth During 1930 Virginia gets to know the deaf, feminist composer Ethel Smyth and they become regular, and sometimes bawdy, correspondents. Smyth was 72, Virginia 48. Here’s Smyth’s most famous work, The March of The Women. Very worthy, but heavily Victorian and boring.

New Fabian research Bureau Leonard is appointed to its executive committee in 1931.

Kingsley Martin, an earnest young nonconformist, is appointed editor of the New Statesman which he would remain for 30 years. Leonard became joint editor of the Political Quarterly which he remained for the next 27 years.

The Hogarth Press published 31 books or pamphlets in 1930, 34 in 1931.

John Lehmann just down from Trinity Cambridge, was hired to work on the Press. He lasted two years. While here he published New Signatures, the selection which introduced the poets of the Auden generation. He introduced the Woolfs to Christopher Isherwood. They published Laurens van der Post’s first book. The more I read about the Hogarth press, the more impressive it becomes.

Glendinning cites eye witness accounts from Lehmann, Barbara Bagenal and Harold Nicholson of how Virginia needed Leonard to calm her when she got over-excited or had a fugue, a loss of awareness of where she was or what she was doing (p.294).

There are plenty of eye witnesses testifying to how happy Leonard and Virginia were at Monks House, how relaxed with each other and a civilised routine. Visitors heard Virginia endlessly talking to herself, in the bath, as she pottered round the big garden, and along country lanes, so that the locals came to think of her as bonkers. The servant Louie Everest came to recognise when Virginia was having one of her bad headaches because she pottered round the garden, bumping into trees.

1932

21 January: Lytton Strachey died of cancer. Leonard wrote a sensitive obituary. He had been Leonard’s best friend in their youth. His death confirmed Leonard was middle aged.

11 March, Lytton’s partner, the painter Dora Carrington, shot herself.

Mains water is brought to Monks House and they get a telephone, Lewes 832. Virginia buys new beds from Heals.

1 October Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists. Marches, rallies and violence in the East End. The Woolfs were connected to all this because up till this point Virginia’s lover, Vita Sackville West’s husband, Harold Nicholson, had been secretary to Mosley. Now he quit.

Conversely, T.S. Eliot‘s mentally unstable wife, Vivian, joined the Fascists. Eliot separated from her and never saw her but she stalked him and made public scenes. Virginia sympathised and ‘Tom’ became a good friend and regular visitor to their London or Sussex house.

1933

1933: Victor Gollancz asked Leonard to edit An Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War. This is the same subject as prompted Virginia’s great book, Three Guineas. In April Mosley held a rally for 10,000 followers at the Albert Hall. Leonard and the Fabians thought he might be in power in five years’ time.

1934

July: they visited the fabulously wealthy Victor Rothschild and promised to look after his pet marmoset while he went abroad. It was called Mitzy and became so attached to Leonard’s kindness that she never went back. She perched on Leonard’s shoulder or head and the back of his jacked was routinely strewn with her poo.

5 to 10 September: Leonard listens to the Nazi Nurenberg rally, relayed on the radio. He was inspired to write his satire on the totalitarian regimes, Quack Quack!

9 September: art critic and populariser of the French post-impressionist painters, Roger Fry, died. Vanessa had had a fiercely sexual affair with him (13 years older than her) and was inconsolable. Slowly the idea crystallised that Virginia should write his biography. This was to turn into a chore and produce a not very good book.

1935

May: Driving to Italy Leonard decided to take a detour through Nazi Germany. Glendinning points out that in his autobiographies he doesn’t mention the antisemitism of the 1930s, doesn’t mention Mosley or the British Union of fascists. She thinks this is because he didn’t want to put down in black and white even the possibility of his country’s rejection of himself, as a Jew. The British Foreign Office advised Jews not to visit Hitler’s Germany. Brief description of their journey through Nazi Germany, soldiers everywhere, public notices against Jews, mobs of children giving the Nazi salute. They had taken Mitzy the marmoset with them who made people laugh and defused tensions.

June: published his attack on the Fascist governments, Quack Quack!

September: Nazi Nuremberg Race Laws Jews legally different from their non-Jewish neighbours introducing all kinds of legal discrimination.

September: Leonard and Virginia attended the Labour Party Conference where Ernest Bevin argued that Britain had to rearm to face the Fascist powers, annihilating pacifist speaker in the process.

2 October: Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. Sanctions were useless as didn’t include Germany or the USA. Leonard wrote bleakly about the failure of the League of Nations. He had spent 20 years arguing that the only way to keep peace was international co-operation. Now he was forced to abandon that position and agree with Bevin that Britain needed to re-arm and make itself strong.

1 November: UK General Election in which Labour were thrashed and the new coalition government of Conservatives along with small breakaway factions of the Labour and Liberal parties, was headed by Conservative Stanley Baldwin.

Tom Eliot brought Emily Hale, a former love and confidante, to meet Leonard and Virginia, who left a record of their tea, finding Leonard more sympathetic, warm and tired.

1936

20 January: King George V died, succeeded by his son, Edward VIII.

6 March: Hitler’s troops reoccupied the Rhineland in breach of the Versailles Treaty. The atmosphere of growing antisemitism in Britain. British Union of Fascists symbols drawn on the walls.

Trying to finalise The Years and separate out the polemical book which was to become Three Guineas brought Virginia closer to breakdown than she’d been since 1913. She lost half a stone and for over three months was unable to work, an unusual hiatus. Only in the last 3 months of the year could she resume work on what was to be her longest novel.

July: Spanish Civil War broke out with the army’s coup against the republican, anti-clerical socialist government. Leonard concluded the international system had collapsed and a European war was inevitable.

Sunday 4 October: the Battle of Cable Street as anti-fascists attacked a march by the British Union of Fascists through the East End.

5 to 31 October: the Jarrow march.

19 December: after a prolonged constitutional crisis, Edward VIII abdicates because of the Establishment’s refusal to let him marry the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson.

1937

Leonard was ill for an extended period of time. Glendinning thinks it expressed his anguish about the international situation and dread for the plight of the Jews. He tried various consultants who thought it was diabetes or prostate trouble i.e. didn’t have a clue.

April: the bombing of Guernica.

24 June: Leonard and Virginia were among many artists and performers onstage at the Albert Hall for a concert to raise money for Basque orphans.

20 July: the terrible news that Virginia’s nephew (Vanessa’s son) Julian Bell had been killed after volunteering to drive an ambulance in Spain.

Leonard was diagnosed with numerous ailments and prescribed loads of medicines none of which worked. He even went to see the inventor of the Alexander technique, Frederick Alexander, but gave it up as too arduous. His ongoing illness prompted love and support from Virginia. Glendinning quotes Virginia’s diary describing them walking round Tavistock Square like a lovestruck couple:

‘love-making – after 25 years can’t bear to be separate…you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.’ (Virginia’s diary 22 October 1937)

21 October: after a long gestation, Virginia’s final and longest novel, The Years was published. It received good reviews and was her most commercially successful novel although Leonard thought it was her worst.

In late 1937 John Lehmann became a partner in the Hogarth press, buying out Virginia’s share for £3,000.

1938

March: Lehmann started full time as co-director of the Hogarth Press. Endless bickering with Leonard. But it was making more money than ever, £6,000 in this tax year.

March: Leonard installs a wireless in 52 Tavistock Square. He himself makes regular radio broadcasts.

12 March: the Anschluss, Nazi Germany marches into Austria and takes it over. At the Labour Party Executive Leonard argues for a coalition with the Conservatives and the introduction of conscription.

April: Lady Ottoline Morrell, hostess of the literary salon at Garsington Manor, died.

June: Three Guineas published. Leonard thought it typified Virginia’s impeccable feminism but their friends didn’t like it. Forster thought it cantankerous, Keynes thought it silly, Vita thought it unpatriotic. I think its structure (like a lot of Woolf’s writing) is eccentrically oblique and sometimes confusing, but the picture she builds up, especially through the extended notes, of the patriarchy which held back British women, is magnificent, radiating scorn and quiet rage.

August: Tom Eliot’s wife Vivian was certified insane and sent to a lunatic asylum where she spent the last 9 years of her life. Eliot never visited her.

September: the Munich Crisis, Neville Chamberlain flies to Munich and along with the French Prime Minister allows Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia with a large German population. Leonard predicted war. Virginia is still very much in love with him. She bakes a loaf of bread and calls out to the garden, where he’s up a ladder ‘where he looked so beautiful my heart stood still with pride that he had ever married me’ (letter to Vanessa Bell, October 1938).

9 November: Kristallnacht when the Nazis unleashed stormtroopers on Jewish homes, business and synagogues across Germany. Hundreds of synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland were damaged, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Leonard has a recurrence of the painful rash which covers his back and other parts. He sees doctors but Glendinning thinks it was psychosomatic, stress, and to do with the persecution of the Jews.

December: Leonard finished the first volume of After the Deluge, an analysis of Enlightenment thought into the early nineteenth century. His aim was to show the psychological and sociological process which bring about wars, and so avoid them. Fat chance. When it was published in September 1939 it sold pitifully.

1939

January: Leonard and Virginia go to tea with Sigmund Freud, recently escaped from Nazi Vienna. The Hogarth press had been publishing his works for 15 years. Leonard was struck by Freud’s aura of greatness. Freud died a few weeks into the war, on 23 September 1939.

15 March: German army annexes the rest of Czechoslovakia and claims the country has ceased to exist. France and Britain bring forward their rearmament programmes. Leonard’s psychosomatic rash returns with a vengeance.

23 June: their friend the artist Mark Gertler gassed himself. He was suffering from financial difficulties, his wife had recently left him, his most recent exhibition had been slammed, he was still depressed by the death of his mother and the suicide of Dora Carrington with whom he’d been madly in love, and was fearful of the imminent world war.

Victor Gollancz commissioned Leonard to write a book in defence of civilisation and tolerance for the Left Book Club for £500. But the final manuscript of Barbarians at the Gate contained criticisms of the Soviet Union which were unacceptable to the communists at the club, leading to a prolonged exchange of angry letters.

2 July: Leonard’s mother died. He was unsentimental.

The Woolfs moved to 37 Mecklenburg Square, taking their thousands of books and the Hogarth printing press.

23 August: Germany and Russia signed their non-aggression pact. 1 September Germany invaded Poland. 3 September Britain was at war with Germany.

November: The Barbarians at the Gate was published and slated by left-wing fellow travellers.

1940

The War for Peace published in which Leonard defended what critics called his utopianism in international relations.

June: France collapsed. Hitler enters Paris. Dunkirk. Leonard was shaken.

September: the Blitz began and was to last until May 1941. The blackout is enforced in Rodmell (the village where they had their country home). Virginia spoke to the local Women’s Institute then became its secretary. Like many others they equipped themselves with means of committing suicide should the Germans invade (p.353).

Correspondents: Virginia was still writing letters about her everyday life to Ethel Smyth who didn’t die until May 1944. Leonard still wrote letters to Margaret Llewelyn Davies of the Women’s Co-operative Guild.

They drove to London but couldn’t get as far as Mecklenburgh Square because of the bombing. A pill box was built in the field beyond their garden. German planes flew overhead every day. The flat in Mecklenburgh had its windows blown out by bombs, but their old place at 52 Tavistock Square was reduced to rubble. The Hogarth press machinery was evacuated to Letchworth. The books from Mecklenburgh were shipped down to Monks House where they packed the corridors.

23 November: Virginia finishes first draft of Between the Acts. She slowly fell into a depression, Her hand started to shake.

1941

25 January: Virginia turned 59 and Leonard began to be worried about her persistent depression. She was revising Between the Acts, always a dangerous time. They socialise, Virginia telling people her new novel is no good, though Leonard praised it.

March: she went for a walk in the fields and fell into the river whose banks had broken and flooded some of their land. Leonard returned from giving a talk to find her staggering back towards the house, wet and upset. Vanessa visits and tries to cheer her up.

Monday 24 1941: he realised she was becoming suicidal. The situation was as bad as her collapse in 1913. He consults a friend, Octavia Wilberforce, about whether to his nurses and force 24 hour supervision on Virginia against her will. But this is what had triggered furious psychotic breakdowns in the past so they decided to try and gentler approach, of Leonard calmly supporting and encouraging her.

Next day was a series of humdrum chores, recorded by Leonard and the house servant, and Virginia said she was going for a walk before lunch. An hour or so later Leonard went up to his sitting room and found two letters there, one for Vanessa one for himself, suicide notes. The letter to him is so full of love it made me cry. She thanked him and said she had had a wonderful life but she could feel her madness coming on, she was hearing voices, she couldn’t read, he would be better off without her.

Obviously he came running downstairs, hailed all the servants, sent one to get the police and help and spent the day till sunset searching the flooded river Ouse. He found Virginia’s walking stick lying on the bank. In subsequent days the river was dragged for the body. Eventually the authorities gave up the search for her body.

Three weeks later he body was discovered floating in the river by some teenagers having a picnic. They called the police. Leonard had to identify it. Coroner’s report etc. Leonard drove on his own to the cremation.

All his friends tried to console him, saying she was better off dead than really mad, but Leonard swore she would have recovered from this attack as from previous ones. He buried her ashes under two elm trees in the garden at Monks House which they had jocularly named after themselves.

Joyce and death Born February 2, 1882, Joyce was precisely eight days younger than Virginia. Two days after his death on January 13, 1941, she noted in her diary that he was ‘about a fortnight younger’ (D 5: 352-53). She outlived him by just a little over ten weeks.

Virginia asked Leonard to destroy all her papers

He disobeyed and in the years to come Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters, autobiographical writings and unpublished works, were to be published and pored over in ever greater detail. The shape of her legacy, and the broader picture of the Bloomsbury Group, would have been very different if he’d obeyed her wishes.

Was he right to ignore her explicit, direct request, as Max Brod disobeyed Kafka’s request to burn his papers?

The shocked response of friends and family, other writers, journalists, and the wider world, are described and done with by about page 380 of this 500-page book. Leonard Woolf still had 28 years to live (died 14 August 1969). A man who was born the year Gladstone replaced Disraeli as Prime Minister (1880) lived to see men land on the moon. The twentieth century, century of marvels but also cataclysmic disasters.

After Virginia

What’s interesting is the power of the biography completely evaporates with Virginia’s death. I hadn’t realised how much Leonard’s story had come to be entwined with hers, and his existence justified by his support of her as she wrote her masterpieces. When it’s back to just him it remains sort of interesting in a journalistic gossipy way but the pressure drops right down.

Twenty-eight more years of living, writing, politicking, editing, publishing and loving – one year less than his marriage to Virginia (1912 to 1941). According to Glendinning ‘Few people are so fortunate in their later life as Leonard Woolf’ and he had many happy years. But for this reader, at any rate, all the life went out of the book when Virginia died.

Trekkie

In the next few years he fell in love with a woman called Trekkie (real name Margaret Tulip) Parsons, a keen but nondescript painter, married to Ian Parsons, an editor at Chatto and Windus, a handsome charming man. Ian sort of permitted a menage a trois to develop though it’s doubtful that Leonard and Trekkie ever had sex, and I hate myself for reading about other people’s sex lives, though this is an unavoidable aspect of modern biography. Ian meanwhile was having an affair with his editorial assistant Norah Smallwood so… so people will be people.

Superficial though it sounds, the relationship with Trekkie lasted for the rest of their lives.

The growth of Bloomsbury

The other theme which emerges is the slow steady growth of the Bloomsbury industry. Post-war interest in Virginia and other figures just kept on growing. The surviving members of the network –published books every year and fed the market throughout the 1950s (p.433). The advent of the swinging 60s, sexual liberation, the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, a greater openness about sex, made the Bloomsburies, with their fluid sexuality and open relationships, seem forebears and founders.

The members wrote autobiographies and memoirs, and a steadily growing tribe of academics wrote books about them. Glendinning describes some of the early Virginia scholars who began to approach Leonard asking for help, advice, an interview, and whatever papers he could spare.

Glendinning records Leonard’s growing involvement with not just American scholars but professional buyers of manuscripts such as Hamill and Barker, to whom he sold off packets and parcels of letters, manuscripts and diaries, through the 1950s and ’60s, for lucrative sums (pages 427, 450).

The schism between academics and public intellectuals

This move to biography was encouraged by the growing schism between general, freelance public intellectuals such as Leonard, and the growing number of professional academics housed in the growing number of postwar universities. When Virginia and Leonard started writing all intellectuals were on about the same level, with some being experts at universities, but many freelance writers knowing quite as much across a broad range of subjects. The tone of discourse across public writers and academics was comparable. In the new era of academic specialisation, academics developed technical terms and jargon, assumed specialist knowledge, which increasingly cut them off from generalists let alone the man in the street.

Leonard fell victim to this specialisation with his book on international politics, After the Deluge, published in 1955. He intended it to form the third part of a trilogy (the previous books published in 1931 and 1939) which he allowed himself to be persuaded to give the grandiose title Principia Politica. This begged comparisons with the masterworks of Newton (Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica), Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica or GE Moore’s Principia Ethica, but it was nothing of the kind, as reviewers were quick to point out. Compared to the new ranks of professional academics, Leonard appeared discursive, repetitive, anecdotal and amateurish (p.444).

The spread of universities and growth of a class of specialist academics was epitomised by the opening, in 1961, of the University of Sussex, just outside Brighton and only 5 miles from Leonard’s rural retreat in the village of Rodmer (p.465).

For the public intellectual locked out of the growing ivory tower of academia, there remained publishing (he continued to be a director of the Hogarth Press), ‘the higher journalism’ (he continued to edit the Political Quarterly, and biography and memoirs. So this feeds back into the growth of Bloomsbury books – none of the survivors (Vanessa, Duncan, Quentin and so on) were really expert, scholarly expert-level on anything except… themselves.

Leonard himself epitomised the trend. Having had his masterwork of political commentary rubbished he retreated to the safer territory of his own life, and commenced his own autobiography which ended up taking no fewer than six volumes:

Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904 (1960)
Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904 to 1911 (1961)
Diaries in Ceylon 1908 to 1911, and Stories from the East: Records of a Colonial Administrator (1963)
Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (1964)
Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (1967)
The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939 to 1969 (1969)

I’d never heard of these but they won him prizes. Beginning Again won the W.H. Smith book prize and the handy sum of £1,000.

Michael Holroyd’s two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey published in 1967-8 proved to be a turning point. Its openness about Strachey’s homosexuality, his numerous affairs, his thousands of camp letters, shed a completely new light on the Bloomsburies, rendering much that had been written up to that point obsolete, but confirming their reputation as sexual pioneeers (p.475).

Pointless

In the last volume of his autobiography Leonard candidly, devastatingly, adjudged that a lifetime of political activism, sitting on innumerable committees, spending years researching and writing position papers and polemical books (calling for international co-operation for peace) achieved more or less nothing.

‘I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing.’ (quoted p.484)

Thoughts

Authoritative, thorough, empathetic, insightful, fascinating and often very funny, nonetheless Glendinning’s definitive biography becomes increasingly focused on the mental illness of poor Virginia, relentlessly building up to Virginia’s suicide which is so terrible, so upsetting, so devastating, that I could barely read on and stopped trying to review it after that point.

Credit

‘Leonard Woolf: A Life’ by Victoria Glendinning was first published by Simon and Schuster in 2006. Page references are to the 2007 Pocket Books paperback edition.

Luxury and power: Persia to Greece @ the British Museum

This is an exhibition with a thesis. The layout and design, the structure, the choice of topics addressed and even the selection of individual artefacts, have all been made to support the central argument. What is this thesis? It’s another one of those ‘undermining received opinion’ exhibitions, so common nowadays.

In this case the received opinion goes like this: in the fifth century BC, from roughly 500 to 450 BC, the federation of Greek city states, led by Athens, fought off repeated attempts to invade and conquer them mounted by the huge Persian (proper scholarly name, Achaemenid) Empire, under its kings, Darius the Great (ruled 522 to 486 BC) and Xerxes the Great (ruled 486 to 465 BC).

You can see from this map how the Achaemenid Empire, at its height around 500 BC, covered a large swathe of south-central Asia and how vexing it was for its rulers that it swept through the Middle East, all of Turkey and up into the Balkans only to be blocked by the obstinate city states of Greece (at the far left of the map).

The Achaemenid Empire at its Greatest Extent, about 500 BC. Created by Mossmaps, accessed from Wikipedia

Contemporary Greeks, notably the historian Herodotus, but many other politicians and playwrights whose works have survived, portrayed the conflict as a desperate struggle against the odds of free, democratic states battling oriental tyranny.

In particular – and the focus of this exhibition – is the way that Greek leaders, politicians, writers and historians, but also artists, sculptors and craftsmen, routinely associated the Persians with luxury, with excessive wealth, which they went on to associate with moral failings such as decadence, greed, corruption, effeminacy, and so on.

The legendary King Midas (originally an actual ruler of Phrygia in central Anatolia) and how he was curse to turn everything he touched into gold, became associated with the Persians, a symbol of the punishment incurred by unlimited greed.

Recreation of an Achaemenid court robe, made with expensive dyes, rich embroidery and gold applique, designed to be draped and belted across the middle. Designed by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University (2022)

According to Greek writers all this Oriental extravagance and decadence starkly contrasted with their own pure, restrained and high-minded art and culture, which was summed up in the inscription above the famous oracle at Delphi: ‘Nothing in excess‘.

East versus West

This stark dichotomy or binary view of civilisations, of a fundamental opposition the West and the Eastern Mediterranean, was to have a strong influence on the Roman Empire, whose leaders and writers also associated themselves with lofty principle and morality, and their opponents in the East – the successors to the Persians, the Parthian Empire – in identical terms. We are brave, they are warlike. We are high-minded and principled, they are lawless and treacherous. We live lives of dignity and restraint, they wallow on luxury and sensuality. All tropes which would again be revived when, in the late Middle Ages, the Ottoman Turks conquered Anatolia (modern Turkey) and then pushed on into Thrace, eventually conquering Greece itself in the 1700s.

These tropes lived on into 18th and 19h century scholarly works, of history, art and anthropology, as what the American critic Edward Said called ‘Orientalism’ i.e. associating the empires, states and peoples of the East with luxury, corruption, decadence, sexual profligacy and so on.

Arguably, this great founding binary between noble democratic West and tyrannical barbarous East underwent another enormous revival in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, in aftermath of which loads of American leaders and opinion-makers revived all these old tropes, painting the Middle East as a land of wild-eyed religious fanatics, with the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington going as far as claiming the terrorist attacks had revived an age-old, unchangeable and inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’.

The only thing problem with this long and hallowed tradition is that, right back where it started, with the polar opposition between Greeks and the Persians… it’s wrong. And this exhibition at the British Museum sets out to show why.

Undoing the stereotype

It does so by presenting two counter-claims:

Persian luxury wasn’t what the Greeks claimed it to be
the Greeks were far from being as spartan and luxury-free as they claimed, but themselves valued luxury goods and incorporated many aspects of Persian craftsmanship and style into their own artefacts

To put it another way, for over two thousand years scholars and writers in the West have tended to take the Greeks’ at their own valuation of themselves, not least because our own power structures (of Christendom versus the Turks, of the European powers when they created their empires, of the modern 21st century American empire) found the Greeks’ binary tropes useful to confirm the superiority of the moral West. But the actual objects from these two supposedly distinct cultures tell a different story. They reveal a far more complex and messy picture of cultural interaction, interpenetration, influence and involvement than the official documents.

Thus, with disarming simplicity, the exhibition reflect this binary worldview, starting with two rooms: the first one displays a range of objects from different parts of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, some to explain the history and structure of the empire, some to demonstrate how luxury objects were used to express and support political and cultural power.

Room two focuses on the other half of the dyad, classical Athens of the 5th century BC, again with some objects used to explain the history and cultural highpoints of the period (of which the construction of the Parthenon between 447 and 438 BC is the most notable item), before going on to display cases which indicate how the Athenians incorporated, remodelled and adapted influences from the East through a variety of handicrafts and objects.

Hellenistic

And then, to prove its point that there was always more complex interplay between cultures right across the region, the third and final room looks in detail at the culture which arose after the conquest of Alexander the Great.

Alexander turned the tables on the Persians for, after conquering all of Greece, he swiftly took Anatolia, conquered Egypt and then pushed on into modern Iraq and Iran and into Afghanistan. It was here that his dazzling ten-year career of ceaseless conquests came to an end with his untimely death in Babylon in 323 BC.

On his death Alexander’s short-lived empire quickly collapsed into individual kingdoms ruled by his various generals and there’s a display of coins with heads of those who managed to emerge as new rulers including the Antigonids (who emerged to rule Macedonia), the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids in Persia. Nonetheless the Greek culture, literacy, models of poetry and writing, models of sculpture and architecture, lived on after him across the whole region.

Because some Greeks called their homeland Hellas and its inhabitants Hellenes, scholars have for hundreds of years referred to the period from 323 until the Romans conquered Egypt in 31 BC, as the Hellenistic period, and art historians refer to the style which developed across it as the Hellenistic style.

The curators include a room on post-Alexander Hellenistic culture in this exhibition because they want us to arrive at it with fresh eyes: instead of the Hellenistic style representing a new synthesis of opposing traditions – which art historians have traditionally seen it as – this exhibition argues that Hellenism was more like the logical continuation of complex cross-cultural contacts and currents which had been swirling across the region for centuries before, despite the insistence to the contrary of Greek propagandists, who scholars for too long have taken too literally.

Room 1. The Achaemenid Empire

So room one attempts to show that the so-called ‘luxury’ of the Persians wasn’t indicative of moral failings, as Greek propagandists liked to claim, but was an intrinsic aspect of their statecraft. In other words, artefacts and objects, ceremonies and rituals which involved or highlighted wealth were important tools in keeping together such a huge and heterogeneous empire. When the Achaemenids conquered a territory, they went out of their way to appease populations. They often left native rulers in place (such as King Arbinas of Lycia for whom the Nereid Monument was built which is viewable elsewhere in the museum) or replaced them with regional administrators called satraps.

The new Persian rulers let their subject peoples continue to practice their religions – but they insisted on the pomp and pageantry which established them firmly as the ultimate rulers, distributing largesse and gifts to confirm the hierarchy of client king or satrap, and emperor. Satraps in turn collected taxes and tributes, and then granted largesse on a local level.

Thus the Persian administrative system court used objects of exquisite luxury not only as markers of authority but as intrinsic means to the administration of the empire. In doing so, a distinctive Persian style developed that was copied by different social classes throughout the empire and spread far beyond, into Greece itself and up into the Balkans. To quote one curator, the ‘Persians wielded “luxury” as a political tool across a vast and complex empire.

The Greek interpretation of Persian ‘luxury’ was a misreading: the Greeks interpreted it through a moralising prism and failed to understand that ostentatious displays of luxury were central to the Persian Empire’s administrative methodology.

Power was demonstrated not just by luxury objects but ceremonies and activities such as holding public audiences, banquets for subject kings and courtiers, and hunting expeditions. The court moved seasonally between the capital Persepolis, Babylon, Susa and Ecbatana, to hold court, administer justice, and confirm his power around his huge multicultural empire. The king travelled with a vast camp including a royal tent equivalent to a palace throne.

According to the Greek writer Xenophon, the Persian emperor would reward client kings and courtiers with gits such as a horse with a gold bit, a necklace of gold, a gold bracelet, a gold scimitar, a Persian coat, and so on.

The room starts with historical background to the Greco-Persian wars: with Cyrus the Great (died in 530 BC), founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and then Darius I (550 to 486 BC) who launched the first invasion of Greece (492 to 492). This failed, he began preparation for another one, but died before it could start and handed on preparations to his son, Xerxes.

Xerxes (486 to 465 BC) led the second attempted invasion of Greece, invading via a bridge he had constructed across the Hellespont (480 BC), and mounting a military campaign marked by the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Although he at one point captured Athens and burned the buildings on the Acropolis (480), Xerxes was defeated at Plataea and, facing revolts in various provinces back in the empire, was forced to retreat from Greece. The defeat of his huge campaign spelled the beginning of the decline of the Achaemenian Empire.

Room 1 displays

Having given a brisk overview of the historical background, the exhibition moves on to cases devoted to various aspects of the central topic, ‘luxury’.

One of the most numerous types of object are so-called rhytons. These are drinking vessels but, the exhibition tells us, were part of a surprisingly ornate ritual. You’re a very senior Persian official and, at a banquet, you hold the rhyton in one hand while a slave fills it with wine. When it reaches a certain level you tip it with one hand and a stream of wine gushes forth from a small hole at the bottom, often concealed amid an elaborate design, and the thing is, you had to direct this stream of wine towards a shallow bowl you’re holding in your other hand. You don’t drink from the rhyton, you drink from the bowl. The rhyton is a luxury object designed to showcase your power and prestige, as is the entire ritual.

Sound unlikely? Well, there’s a carved stone relief showing precisely this action being carried out at a banquet and there’s several cases full of beautifully worked examples of these wine pourers, crafted into all kinds of animal motifs.

Detail of the Nereid Monument showing Arbinas, king of Lycia, at a banquet using a rhyton and drinking bowl. In multicultural fashion, he sports a Persian beard but is wearing a Greek gown © The Trustees of the British Museum

Other aspects of Persian ‘luxury’ include bottles created to contain rare and precious spices and oils and objects such as the exquisite gold armlet (above), details of peacocks and parasols, jewellery and make-up. The king wore fur-lined coats, a golden torc around his throat, all markers of supreme power.

Persian rulers used chariots for hunting but also as symbols of power and dominance. The most common animals in Persian imagery are the mightiest animal then known, the lion, and the mythical creature, the griffin, both of which are depicted across all media from the Persian Empire.

Gateway 1. The Persian wars

You pass from room 1 to room 2 through a kind of gateway, angular upright and lintel painted jet black to distinguish it from the dazzling white of the rest of the show. In each of these there is an animated map and a couple of artefacts reflecting war. The first one is a 30-second animation showing the path of the two Persian invasions into mainland Greece: the first one from 492 to 490, ending in defeat at the Battle of Marathon; the second one, from 480 to 479, which featured the battle of Thermopylae, the naval battle of Salamis (480) and the Persians’ definitive defeat at Plataea. To set the tone the animation is accompanied by a classic Greek helmet and a figurine of a warrior.

Room 2. Ancient Athens

Again, the room starts with the basic history, describing the development of the Greek city states, especially Athens, which rose to have an empire of its own, complete with an enormous population of slaves and a flock of smaller cities who paid her handsome tributes, as well as wealth from the silver mines discovered in 483.

There’s a bust of Pericles the great statesman (495 to 429 BC), whose noble speeches are recorded by the historian Thucydides, and who oversaw the development of Athenian democracy and the building of a new, astonishingly beautiful and mathematically precise temple to Athena Parthenos atop the Acropolis. This temple, the Parthenon, was not only a temple but a treasury, a storehouse, packed with treasures of all kinds.

The exhibition backs this up with an illustration of the original Parthenon, brightly painted and decorated, and photos of the modern reconstruction of the enormous statue of Athena Parthenos (‘the virgin’) which was the focal point of the Parthenon and which was a gaudy, brightly painted figure, 12 metres tall, made of ivory, wood and gold.

Reconstruction of the statue of Athena Parthenos at the reconstruction of the entire Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. Luxury permitted when it enhanced the prestige of the city.

There’s an inventory of some of the treasure the temple once contained, carved in stone (including the throne of King Xerxes, captured at the Battle of Salamis); and part of a relief from the Elgin Marbles showing women processing towards the temple carrying luxury plates and objects, possibly captured from the Persian army, to devote to the goddess.

This section explains how the Athenians struggled to reconcile their self image as noble, egalitarian democrats with their growing wealth. One solution was to decide ‘luxury’ was permissible so long as it wasn’t attached to individuals but was used to honour that state.

It also explains the socio-political reasons for this aversion to luxury. Democracy was a response to civil conflict. Competitive displays of wealth among Athens’s richest families had led to tensions and violence at the end of the 6th century. When the statesman Kleisthenes introduced his reforms in 508 they were designed to defuse these tensions by enforcing greater equality between citizens. The laws he introduced distributed political responsibility among all adult male citizens in a system they came to call the rule of the people, demos-kratos.

Thus the animadversions of so many writers against personal displays of ‘luxury’ wasn’t based on morality alone, but on a very real fear that they would revive the social conflicts of the late 6th century which had threatened to plunge the city into civil war. Banning private displays of wealth was a political necessity.

Room 2 displays

Take peacocks. Peacocks were a very Persian marker of luxury and caste. They arrived in Athens sometime during the 5th century BC. Expensive to keep and with no practical purpose, they were classic markers of wealth and luxury, which meant their owners had to be careful not to raise democratic hackles. One aristocrat publicly displayed his peacocks once a month: luxury was acceptable so long as it was presented as benefiting the community.

As to Athenian views of the Persians, there’s a hilarious display case showing how the Greeks portrayed them on the many, many vases they made, decorated with line drawings of characters and animals. On earlier pots Persian characters are depicted as wearing trousers and jackets, very barbaric from a Greek perspective, but dignified and noble warriors.

After the triumphs of the Persian war, the depiction of Persians became more mocking and derisive, notably in the image of a defeated Persian sitting side-saddle (effeminate) on a donkey (not a warlike horse) facing backwards.

Green pot showing a Persian warrior seated side-saddle, facing backwards on a donkey (about 470 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Or take the Persian habit of having slaves carry a parasol to protect you from the fierce Middle Eastern sun. In Greek depictions, this was turned into parasols for delicate ladies, associating the Persians with effeminacy. In part this was because women played no part in Athenian politics and so were, in a sense, free to toy with decadent habits. Another one the exhibition points out, is the use of make-up and eyeliner, something Persian men wore but would be unthinkable in a fine, upstanding male Greek citizen.

Fish were another pressure point. Rich Athenians imported from the Persians a taste for rare and exotic fish, something which was publicly disapproved of, as shown here by a vase illustration and a disapproving quote from the playwright Aristophanes. (Compare and contrast with Roman moralists from Cicero onwards singling out ownership of rare fish ponds as one of the first markers of the Roman Republic’s slide into decadence and decay.)

Remember the rhytons which figured largely in the first room? This room has half a dozen examples showing how the Greeks adapted and undermined their grandiloquent originals. For a start they’re generally made from the Greeks’ favourite material, good democratic clay not ostentatious silver. And , as in this example, the bombastic use of an animal’s head (a lion’s) is undermined by the realistic and very Greek narrative depicted on the main body of the vase, above it.

There’s a case explaining that the Persians used images of bulls, lions and griffins in their power objects, but that these characteristically Persian motifs were also incorporated by Athenian designers. The exhibition features examples including beautifully crafted jewellery such as pendants and bracelets, and even a wonderful pair of earrings with tiny deer-heads in the shape of rhytons. What had been exemplary markers of Achaemenid royal court have been transformed into high-end fashion accessories for wealthy Athenians.

Interestingly, Persian motifs and depictions of characters wearing classic Persian dress became slowly more stylised and generalised, over time. A century after peace had been made with Persia (i.e. by 350) Persian motifs had been generalised into images and symbols of the vague East, including griffins, Amazons and other legendary animals and peoples.

Gateway 2. Alexander’s conquests

As with the passage from room 1 to room 2, so the passage from room 2 to room 3 is through a narrow, relatively low archway painted jet black in which is embedded a screen showing an animation, in this case showing the path of Alexander’s astonishing victories across Anatolia, into Egypt and then across Mesopotamia, Persia and Afghanistan.

Map showing extent of Alexander’s conquests in 323 BC. As you can see, it almost completely replicates the extent of the Achaemenid Empire at its height (source: Encyclopedia Britannica)

Room 3. Hellenistic culture

Born in 356 BC Alexander inherited the throne of Macedonia on the death of his father, Philip II, in 336, at the age of 20, and almost immediately set about fighting his rivals in northern and central Greece, wars in which he enjoyed unparalleled success, uniting all of Greece under his rue before pursuing campaigns in Asia Minor, into Egypt and then east into Mesopotamia.

The period from Alexander’s death in 323 down until the overthrow (suicide) of Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt in 31 BC, is generally referred to as the Hellenistic period.

Alexander not only swept aside the Persian empire but the range and cosmopolitan nature of his empire ushered in a new age in which eastern and western styles of luxury were fused, hence the need for a distinct adjective, ‘Hellenistic’ style, a style which originated in Greece but freely incorporated eastern and oriental subject matter and styles.

Alexander has, of course, been traditionally viewed as a great Greek hero. The curators ask the teasing question, was he? Or could he more accurately be described as the last Achaemenid king? Because when he conquered the Persian Empire he inherited a highly organised, centralised administration. He maintained the existing system of provinces and retained some Persian governors. And then he remodelled images of his rule on the Persian style. He held court in the tent of his foe, Darius III and ordered suppliants to kneel before him, in a most ungreek manner.

In the era after Alexander’s conquests, cities across Asia developed as trading hubs for precious materials such as gold, silvery and ivory, housing specialist craftsmen. True to the spirit of Hellenism, they mixed motifs from Greece, Persia and Egypt.

Room 3 displays

Again there are a couple of panels summarising the history before we move on to look in detail at a range of objects. One of the most stunning is a gold wreath from Turkey, similar to those found in elite tombs in the kingdom of Macedonia. The gold oak wreath consists of two branches, bound together at the front by a model of a bee and with two gold cicadas concealed among the leaves. From the tomb of a local aristocrat in western Turkey, it epitomises the spread of ‘luxury’ across the region and the evolution of cosmopolitan styles in the wake of Alexander’s conquests.

Gold wreath: can you spot the two cicadas hidden among the leaves? One is just above the bottom-left leaf; the ‘bee’ is at the top of the thin circle of gold, with 3 triangular wedges at the bottom, looking more like a tiny owl © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a display case about ivory, explaining the culture’s attitude to elephants, the trade in tusks and the ‘luxury’ good made from them. There’s a set of clothes, trousers and a jacket, representing Hellenistic cultural synthesis. It’s actually a recreation of a Persian riding costume. Persians wore a costume which included cap, coat, tunic and trousers. Alexander liked to mix Persian and Macedonian costume. He adopted the tunic, cap and sash but not the trousers which, as a good Greek, he considered barbaric.

Persian riding costume as recreated by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (2022)

The Panagyurishte Treasure

But pride of place in the third room goes to extraordinary Panagyurishte Treasure from Bulgaria (roughly equivalent to ancient Thrace). Accidentally discovered by three brothers in 1949, these treasures are outstanding examples of ancient metalworking and demonstrate the influence of Persian and Greek luxury across the Balkans.

Remember the Persian rhytons from room one, and how we saw them being echoed and rework by the Athenians in room two? Well, of the nine pieces in the Panagyurishte Treasure, no fewer than eight are rhytons, beautifully crafted gleaming gold. The ninth object, the big circular plate, is one of the shallow bowls which you poured wine into from a rhyton and actually drank from. Still can’t really imagine how you’d do this without spilling loads of wine down your front, unless you were exceptionally dexterous.

The Panagyurishte treasures rarely leave Bulgaria, and were last seen in the UK in 1976, so this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see them.

Information cabinets: raw materials and techniques

The exhibition is punctuated by information ‘boxes’, white cubes with text printed on them and a little glass pane showing samples of the material being explained. So there’s a box devoted to frankincense which contains samples of the aromatic gum from frankincense trees which was used in antiquity as medicine and incense. Apparently rulers of Arabia sent to the Achaemenid emperor every year about 26,000 tonnes of frankincense as tribute, which was then distributed to rulers across the empire as a symbol of the emperor’s largesse.

There’s a box about silver and its role in Persian artistry, which contains some actual silver ore, ingots and silver coins.

There’s one about the marble the ancient Greeks used to build the Parthenon and other temples, explaining that the particular type they used (‘Pentelic’ marble from Mount Pentelikon, 10k from Athens) contained traces of oxidised iron which gives the buildings that warm glow around sunset time, with some examples of marble fragments.

There were other similar explanations and samples of alabaster (‘a soft, luminous stone prized for its coloration and distinctive veining’) and ivory (the role of elephants in Persian and Greek culture, and the use of ivory, having a display case to themselves, including a cute ivory carving of a satyr’s head, which once decorated the head-rest of a couch).

Some of these info boxes are complemented by videos, each only about 60 seconds long, which give you insight into methods and techniques. There’s an interesting one about techniques used to manufacture a stunning Persian robe (displayed next to it), another one about how to create black glaze pottery ancient Greek style, one showing how the Greeks used glazes to give ceramic pottery a finish which mimicked Persian metalware. Persian metalware = decadent luxury; Greek pottery = democracy and morality.

But the standout one for me, one of the highlights of the exhibition, was a 60-second video showing how the Tyrian purple dye, famous across the Mediterranean for over for millennia, is actually made. I’ve read about it hundreds of times but never before seen a craftsman take one of the murex sea snails, crack it open with a hammer, dexterously extract its hypobranchial gland from the gloopy body and add this to a load of others kept in a jar, where sunlight and decay make them turn a rich purple colour. Once the coloration process is complete, the jar of glands is laid out in the sun to dry, then ground to a fine powder to create the basis of the purple dye, for over a thousand years associated with royalty and power. Because of its labour-intensive production, pure Tyrian dye was more expensive, pound for pound, than gold.

Conclusions

Does the exhibition succeed in its aim of persuading me that there was less of a binary opposition between Greek abstemiousness and Persian ‘luxury’ than previously thought? To be honest, it’s difficult to say. I imagine that most visitors, like me, are just not qualified enough to judge and are entirely in the hands of the curators. If they say so, I guess it must be so.

What does come over, for me at any rate, was a related but different conclusion, which is to do with the profound disconnect between official discourse (Greek texts) and the evidence of the objects on the ground, of the life of people in the broader culture which, the curators claim, strongly contradicts official Greek propaganda.

It made me wonder if it’s always true, if it’s a rule of human societies, that governments, almost by their nature, have views and official versions which fetishise a nation’s culture and heritage and so on – but that these will always clash with the far more messy and complex realities of life on the ground, of how people actually live, with the language and artefacts and habits and customs of actual populations, which often don’t fit into anybody’s neat categories.

To put it another way: that, throughout history, societies are always more multicultural than their leaders want or imagine them to be.*

Other rooms

The Greeks and Persians are favourite attractions at the museum, and at the end of the exhibition there’s a list of rooms where you can see objects related to the exhibition, being:

Nereid monument (room 17)
Parthenon (room 18)
ancient Athens (room 19)
The world of Alexander (room 22)
ancient Iran (room 52)
Mesopotamia 1500 to 539 BC (room 55)

* This thought has behind it the evidence and analysis presented in Michael Ignatieff’s trilogy of books about nations and nationalism.