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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.

Munich by Robert Harris (2017)

Both men fell silent, watching him, and Legat had a peculiar sense of – what was it, he wondered afterwards? – not of déjà vu exactly, but of inevitability: that he had always known Munich was not done with him; that however far he might travel from that place and time he was forever caught in its gravitational pull and would be dragged back towards it eventually. (Munich, page 188)

This is another Robert Harris historical thriller, set during the four nailbiting days of the Munich Crisis of September 1938.

In the Acknowledgements section at the end of the book Harris discloses that the crisis had been an obsession with him even before he collaborated on a BBC documentary about it, to mark the 50th anniversary, in 1988, and he hasn’t stopped being obsessed by it. The acknowledgements go on to list no fewer than 54 volumes of history, diaries and memoirs which were consulted in the writing of this book.

And this depth of research certainly shines out from every page right from the start. Even before the text proper begins, the book has an architect’s plan of the Führerbau in Munich where the climactic scenes of the book take place, because it was here that the four key European leaders – Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Britain, Daladier, Premier of France, Mussolini, the Duce of Italy and Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany – met to resolve the crisis and here that the various backstairs shenanigans of Harris’s thriller take place.

The Munich Crisis

Hitler came to power in 1933 with promises to end reparations to the Allies (France, Britain, America) for Germany’s responsibility for World War One, and to repeal or turn back the provisions of the Versailles Treaty which had stripped Germany of some of her territory and people.

True to his word, Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland (until then a neutral zone) in March 1936. Two years later in March 1938, he sent German troops to annex Austria, thus creating a Greater Germany.

Next on the list were the ethnic Germans who lived in a strip of territory along the periphery of Czechoslovakia, a ‘new’ country which had only been created by Versailles in 1918. Hitler created a mounting sense of crisis through the summer of 1938 by making evermore feverish claims to the land, and then arranging incidents which ‘proved’ that the Czechs were attacking and victimising the ethnic Germans, blaming the Czechs for their aggression and bullying.

Now France had made formal legal obligations to guarantee Czechoslovakia’s safety, and Britain had pledged to come to France’s aid if she was attacked, so everyone in Europe could see how an assault in Czechoslovakia might lead France to mobilise, Britain to mobilise to defend here, the Poles and Russians to pile in, and it would be exactly how the Great War started – with a series of toppling dominoes plunging the continent into Armageddon.

Determined to avoid this outcome at any cost, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew twice to Germany to meet Hitler, on the 15th and 22nd of September. On the second occasion he conceded that Hitler could have the Sudetenland with the full agreement of Britain and France – but Hitler moved the goalposts, now demanding the full dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the redivision of its territory among Germany and Hungary and Poland (who also shared borders with Czechoslovakia and had mobilised their armies to seize what territory they could.)

On 26 September Hitler made a speech to a vast crowd at the Sportspalast in Berlin setting Czechoslovakia the deadline of 2pm on 28 September to cede the Sudetenland to Germany or face war. In secret, Hitler and the Wehrmacht had a fully-worked-out plan of invasion and expected to carry it out.

However, in a fast-moving sequence of events, Chamberlain sent a message via diplomatic channels to the Fascist leader of Italy, Mussolini, asking him to enter the negotiations and use his moderating influence on the Führer. Mussolini agreed, and sent a message to Hitler saying he was totally on his side but suggesting a 24 hour delay in the deadline in order to further study the problem.

Thus it came about that a conference was arranged in Munich, to be hosted by Hitler and attended by Mussolini, Chamberlain and the increasingly sidelined French premiere, Daladier.

And thus Chamberlain and his staff flew for a third time to Germany, this time to Munich, destination the Führerbau building, and here it was that over a series of closed-door meetings the four leaders and their staffs thrashed out an agreement.

It was signed by the four leaders the next day at 1.30pm. As one of Harris’s characters makes clear, the final agreement, although ostensibly submitted by the Italians, was in fact a German creation which they had given the Italians to present. The main terms were that the German army was to peacefully complete the occupation of the Sudetenland by 10 October, and an international commission would decide the future of other disputed areas.

One of the most famous aspects of the summit meeting was that the Czech leaders were physically there, but were prevented by Hitler’s orders from attending any of the actual negotiations. They were simply forced by France and Britain to accept all the terms and hand over their border area to Germany. Since this was where all their fortifications were built it left the rest of the country defenceless and, sure enough, the German army invaded and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia just six months later, in March 1939.

Map of Czechoslovakia showing the Sudeten territory given to Germany in September 1938 in dark brown

All of Europe had held its breath in case the incident sparked the outbreak of another European war. Chamberlain is quoted in the book, in private and then in a famous speech to the House of Commons, saying how unbelievable it is that they all seemed to be galloping towards the apocalyptic disaster so many of them could still remember (the Great War). It was this attitude – avoiding war at all costs – that underpinned Chamberlain’s strategy. And so when he flew to Munich, and even more when he emerged with a face-saving treaty, scores of millions of people all across Europe greeted the avoidance of war with enormous relief, and Chamberlain was feted as a hero.

Of course, in hindsight, we can see that nothing was going to stop Hitler and his maniacal dreams of European domination, and Chamberlain’s policy of ‘appeasement’ grew to have an entirely negative connotation of weakness and cowardice, a policy failure which only ended up encouraging the dictator. And there were plenty of politicians and intellectuals at the time who thought Hitler needed to be stood up to, instead of cravenly given in to, and that Chamberlain had made a great mistake.

That said, there are other historians who point out that neither Britain nor France were militarily prepared for war in September 1938 and that the deal, whatever its precise morality, and despite the unforgiveable abandoning of the Czechs, did give both France but particularly Britain a crucial further year in which to re-arm and, in particular, build up an air force, the air force which went on to win the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940. It was only by a sliver that we won the Battle of Britain, thus maintaining the island of Britain as a launchpad for what eventually came the D-Day invasions.

If war had broken out in 1938, Britain might have lost and been invaded (doubtful but possible), America would never have entered the war, and Europe might have become an impenetrable Nazi fortress. Chamberlain certainly didn’t achieve the ‘peace in our time’ which he so hoped for; but maybe he did secure a vital breathing space for democracy. Historians will discuss these and other possible variations for generations…

The thriller

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the real-life, historical diplomacy, it is these hectic days leading up to 30 September, which Harris describes in minute and fascinating detail, and from both sides.

Because the book is made up of alternating chapters, following the parallel experiences of two well-placed if junior civil service figures, one on the Nazi side, one in Chamberlain’s staff.

In London we follow the working routine and then increasingly hectic preparations for flying to the conference of Hugh Legat, Oxford-educated Third Secretary in Chamberlain’s staff, very much the bottom of an elaborate hierarchy of civil servants. Through his eyes we see the bureaucracy of Number Ten Downing Street in action, as Legat interacts with his civil service bosses and Chamberlain himself (and his wife), fetching and carrying papers, writing up notes to meetings and so on.

In all these passages you can sense the intense research Harris has put in to document with meticulous accurately the layout of the buildings, the furnishing of each room, who attended which meeting, what they looked like, their personal quirks and nicknames, what was said, etc, in immense detail.

On the German side, we meet Paul von Hartmann, a junior official in the Foreign Ministry, as he, too, goes about various bureaucratic tasks, again gradually giving us insider knowledge of every personage in the German government, with pen portraits of senior civil servants, military figures as well as glimpses of the Führer himself.

Why these two protagonists? Because Harris places them at the heart of the thriller plot he has woven into the real historical events. We now know that during the Munich Crisis a group of senior figures in the Nazi regime and army met to discuss overthrowing Hitler, if the crisis blew up into full-scale war. Hartmann is one of these conspirators and so, through his eyes, we witness one of their meetings and are party to various panic-stricken phone calls among them as the crisis escalates.

None of the conspirators were western liberals. They hated reparations just as much as Hitler, they wanted to unravel the Versailles treaty, they wanted a strong Greater Germany and they were in favour of annexing the Sudetenland. They just disagreed with Hitler’s approach. They thought his brinkmanship would plunge Germany into a war it wasn’t yet militarily ready to win. And so, if the talks failed and war was declared, they were prepared to overthrow the Nazi regime and assassinate Hitler.

To this end they steal secret documents which show that Hitler had planned not only the Sudeten Crisis, and the full-blown invasion of all Czechoslovakia, but has a deeper plan to invade eastwards in order to expand Germany’s Lebensraum. This ‘incriminating’ document is a memo of a meeting Hitler held with his chiefs of staff back in November 1937. It conclusively shows that the Sudetenland is not the end, but only the start of Hitler’s territorial ambitions.

The documents are handed to Hartmann by his lover in the Ministry, Frau Winter, who is part of the plot and stole it from a Ministry safe. At a meeting of the conspirators Hartmann realises he must pass this document on to the British delegation at the conference, and his fellow conspirators agree.

Thriller tropes

It’s at this point that you enter what could be called ‘thrillerland’ i.e a whole series of familiar thriller plotlines and tropes.

First tension is raised as Hartmann takes a train out to a Berlin suburb for the meeting of conspirators, convinced he is being followed or watched.
Later he makes a copy of a top secret Nazi document and then bumps into people who, he thinks, are watching him too closely, asking too many questions. Do they suspect?

It is, after all, Nazi Germany, which comes with a ready-made atmosphere of guilt and paranoia.

Hartmann then has to wangle his way into the delegation travelling with Hitler by train from Berlin to Munich for the conference. He manages to do this but at the price of raising the suspicions of his superior, an SS Sturmbahnfūhrer, Sauer, a senior figure in the delegation who from that point onwards keeps a very close watch on Hartmann. When Hartmann takes advantage of a short stop he phones his office in Berlin to make sure that Legat is on the British delegation. His paranoia forces him to find hiding places for both the document and the pistol he has brought with him, leading to heart-thumping moments when he returns to check his hiding places and see if they’re still there.

Why is Hartmann so concerned that Legat be on the British delegation. Because they had been friends once, when Hartmann was on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where Legat was a student. Now he hopes to use Legat as a conduit to the British Prime Minister.

To this end, back in London and a few days earlier, Hartmann had used contacts in England to anonymously drop off less important but still secret Nazi documents at Legat’s flat in Westminster. Legat hears something coming through his letterbox but by the time he’s gone into the hall, the car with the deliverymen is long gone.

When Legat hands these documents into the authorities, he is called to the office of Foreign Office mandarin Sir Alexander Cadogan where he is introduced to a secret service colonel, Menzies. Menzies questions him and Legat reveals his friendship with Hartmann from their carefree Oxford days back at Balliol College in 1932. They had been very close friends and Legat had gone over to Munich that summer to go on a walking holiday with Hartmann in the mountains.

Menzies judges that Hartmann is obviously a member of the German ‘opposition’ (which British security have heard rumours about) and may wish to communicate with Legat in Munich. Therefore he gets Legat’s immediate superior, Cecil Syers (Chamberlain’s Private Secretary) bumped off the British delegation – much to his anger – and Legat replaces him. But with a mission – to be professional and discreet and do nothing to undermine this vital diplomatic mission – but to be alert to an approach from his old friend and to report back on its contents and intentions. Without wishing to, he has in effect been recruited as a spy.

Legat’s presence enables Harris to give the reader a first-hand account of the Chamberlain entire trip, from packing bags at Number 10, the taxi to Heston airport, the flight, the landing, the official greeting, taxis to the hotel, and then on to the Führerbau for the official reception and then meetings with Il Duce and Der Führer.

The descriptions of all these scenes reek of decades of in-depth research. Which kind of plane, the layout inside it, the sound of take-off, what refreshments were served – all of it is utterly believable but also smells a bit of the study, of the careful poring over dry old memoirs and diaries to recreate every aspect of the scene.

Those 54 books listed in the acknowledgments underpin the detailed descriptions of who was wearing what at the diplomatic reception party which precedes the actual talks, who Mussolini was talking to, what Goering was wearing, even down to the expression on Hitler’s face as he first walks down the grand staircase into the assembled diplomats.

All of it reeks of authenticity and former journalist who has done his research to a T, and all of it makes the book a fascinating account of events – right down to the way that Legat literally stumbles upon the Czech delegation (Foreign Office official Masarik and Czech Minister to Berlin Mastny) being kept in virtual house arrest by SS guards directly under Hitler’s orders – a fact he passes on to his own superiors who filter it up to the PM.

So all these descriptions make it feel like you are there. But as to the thriller plot… for once a Harris thriller failed to really catch light for me. It contains umpteen thriller tropes and moments – we share Hartmann’s stress and anxiety as he hides the incriminating document from the SS man who suspects him – and then tries to give this man the slip once everyone is at the Führerbau, the anonymous men who drop the document through Legat’s letterbox and make off in a car in the dark.

Similarly, from the moment Legat is given his spying mission by Colonel Menzies he certainly feels stiff and self-conscious. A big stumbling block comes when his superiors (not knowing about the mission Menzies has given him) instruct him to stay at the British delegations’s hotel and keep the phone line open to London to report developments, thus stymying his intention of going to the Führerbau and searching for Hartmann. Another uptick in the sense of tension.

But in the end Legat evades this order on a pretext, gets to the big Nazi building, almost immediately sees Hartmann, follows him down backstairs to the basement, out into the car park and then through local streets to a busy Bierkeller and out into the garden where they can talk in secret and that talk… is strangely inconsequential. As in, it doesn’t reveal any really big or new facts.

The crux of their conversation is this: Hartmann and his people want war to break out, so that they can recruit as many high-level German officials as possible to their plan to mount a coup and overthrow the irresponsible warmonger Hitler. This is why Hartmann hands Legat the Nazi memo dating from November 1937 which clearly states that Czechoslovakia is only the beginning of Hitler’s plans. It must be given to Chamberlain in order to make him realise that Hitler is a mad warmonger, and the final invasion of Czechoslovakia and much more will happen regardless of agreement in Munich. Chamberlain must see the memo in order to stiffen his resolve to stand up to Hitler, even if it prompts a crisis, even if it prompts war. Good. That is what the conspirators want. Or, as Hartmann puts it:

‘If Chamberlain refuses tonight to continue to negotiate under duress, then Hitler will invade Czechoslovakia tomorrow. And the moment he issues that order, everything will change, and we in the opposition, in the Army and elsewhere, will take care of Hitler.’

Chamberlain mustn’t sign a peace. If he signs a peace treaty then Hitler will be immensely popular inside Germany as the man who created a Greater Germany without firing a shot: all the waverers Hartmann and the conspirators hope to recruit will fall in line behind him. Hitler will become unstoppable. But, Legat points out, this is all hugely speculative:

Legat folded his arms and shook his head. ‘It is at this point that I’m afraid you lose me. You want my country to go to war to prevent three million Germans joining Germany, on the off chance that you and your friends can then get rid of Hitler?’ (p.297-98)

Which Hartmann has to concede, does sum up his position. And when it is stated like that, not only Hartmann and Legat realise how unlikely the position is… but so does the reader. This could never happen, the reader thinks, with the added dampener that the reader of course knows that it did not happen. At the heart of the book is a little cloak and dagger adventure among a handful of men, boiling down to these two old friends, which doesn’t amount to a hill of beans and doesn’t change anything.

So the old ‘friends’ have met, exchanged the document, and Hartmann has laid his proposition on the line. What happens in the final hundred pages?

Chamberlain refuses the Nazi memo

Both men return to their delegations and tasks which are described with documentary accuracy. But overnight Hartmann sees no sign of change in the British position and he suddenly decides to abandon diplomacy and care for his cover. He shoulders his way into the British delegation, confronts Legat and forces him to take him to Chamberlain’s room.

There Hartmann begs five minutes of Chamberlain’s time and presents him with the 1937 Nazi war plan. Chamberlain reads it and his reaction is interesting, in a way the most interesting part of the book. Chamberlain says it is entirely inappropriate for Hartmann to have pushed in like this; it breaks the chain of command on both sides, and it undermines the present negotiations; because Chamberlain is interested in the present, not what Hitler may or may not have said 6 months, or a year or five years ago. From the point of view of the professional negotiator, all that matters is what your opposite number says in the room, now. What he says and signs up to now supersedes all previous declarations. I thought that was an interesting insight into negotiating tactics as a whole.

Chamberlain reads the stolen memo but rejects it and its contents and asks Hartmann to leave, and then instructs Legat to burn it. It has no bearing on the present.

This is a very interesting scene in terms of being an education in how actual diplomacy and negotiation works, but it militates the entire basis of the thriller. the Big Secret is out. The Key Document has been shown to the Prime Minister. The Secret men and women risked their lives for, cloak and dagger letter drops in London took place for, which Legat was subbed onto the British Legation for and Hartmann played sweaty cat and mouse with his SS boss for – has finally been delivered and… nothing happens. Chamberlain says: I am ignoring it. Burn it.

Oh. OK. Hard not to feel the tension Harris has built up with all the backstairs meetings and SS searches suddenly leak away like the air from a punctured balloon.

Leyna

Throughout the narrative Legat has dropped occasional hints about a woman named Leyna, who made up the third element in his friendship with Hartmann. Only now, towards the end of the book, do we find out more.

A few hours after they’ve both been turfed out of Chamberlain’s office, Legat is fast asleep in his room at the hotel being used by the British, when there’s a knock and it’s Hartmann who tells him to get dressed. Hartmann takes him outside to car he’s (conveniently) borrowed and then drives Legat out of Munich into the countryside, to a village called Dachau and stops outside the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp there.

To my surprise, Legat is not impressed, and says officials in Britain know all about these camps, Stalin has as many if not more but they have to deal with him, too. Hartmann points out that within weeks, if the Nazis annex the Sudetenland, some Sudeten Germans, now free – communists and Jews and homosexuals – will be behind the wire being worked to death at Dachau. Yes, replies Legat, but then how many would survive the aerial bombing and street fighting which will occur if Chamberlain refuses a settlement and prompts war, which will end up with Czechoslovakia still being occupied and victims still being carted off by the SS.

This is an interesting debate but it has now lost the element of being a thriller. For me this felt like a purely cerebral, intellectual debate about what was at stake at Munich.

Anyway, it turns out this isn’t what Hartmann wanted to show him. Some Dachau guards notice the pair bickering in the car and turn the floodlights on them, so our guys beat a hasty retreat and Hartmann then drives Legat on for a further hour until they arrive at a remote mansion in the country with, Legat notices, the windows barred, no notices on the noticeboard in the cold hallway which smells of antiseptic.

Now we learn two things. Harris gives us a flashback to that summer of 1932, when, after walking in the woods, the three friends drove back into Munich and Leyna insisted on going to the apartment block where Hitler lived, surrounded by Nazi bodyguards.

As the would-be Führer (he was famous but had still not been made German Chancellor) leaves the building Leyna shouts loudly ‘NIECE-FUCKER’ at him. This was based on the rumours that Hitler had had an affair with his niece, Geli Raubel, who he forced to live with him in this apartment block and kept a maniacal watch over. In his absence, on 18 September 1931, Gaubl apparently shot herself dead with Hitler’s pistol. Was he having an affair with her? Was she pregnant with his child? Did she kill herself, or was it a put-up job by party apparatchiks who realised her existence threatened the Führer’s career. Whatever the truth (and historians argue about it to this day) there were enough lurid rumours around to allow Leyna to shout this insult at the future Führer as he emerged from his apartment, and to anger his SA guards, some of whom turn from protecting their boss and give chase to Leyna, Hartmann and Legat. The SA guards chase after our threesome who split up in a warren of alleyways.

Legat finds his way back to Hartmann and Leyna’s apartment. In the melee outside the apartment, someone had punched him in the eye and now it is swollen closed. Layna leans over Legat to apply a poultice, and he pulls her head down and kisses her. They make love. It wasn’t crystal clear to me earlier but now the text makes clear that Leyna was Hartmann’s girlfriend. So she has ‘betrayed’ him, and so has his best friend. Thus there is an emotional and sexual ‘betrayal’ at the heart of this plot which is about numerous betrayals, or betrayal on many levels: Hartmann betraying his Führer; Chamberlain betraying the Czechs, and now friend betraying friend. And so on.

This, frankly, felt a lot too ‘pat’ and convenient to me. Formulaic. It had the thumping inevitability of a cheap made-for-TV movie (which is how the book might well end up, since it has none of the really big action scenes required by a modern movie).

Now, in another development which seemed to me equally clichéd, it turns out that Leyna has ended up here in this mournful, isolated care home for the mentally defective. We now learn that: a) Hartmann found out about Leyna’s ‘betrayal’ and they split up b) she got more heavily into communist politics and married a communist who was subsequently killed in the Spanish Civil War, but c) she continued being an organiser of an underground communist newspaper till she was arrested by the Gestapo and badly beaten. Hartmann points out that Leyna was of Jewish heritage (which I don’t think anybody had mentioned earlier). With the result that the SS beat her unconscious, before or after carving a star of David into her back, and then threw her out of a third floor window. She survived in body, but was permanently brain damaged. Hartmann found out, and used his contacts to get her a place here in this out-of-the-way hospice.

This plot development, coming late on in the story, did three things for me:

1. It is a gross and characteristic example of the brutality of the Third Reich i.e. it has the effect of undermining all the diplomats fussing about precedence back in Munich. I think that is its intention, to show you the brutality behind the diplomatic veneer. But it has the unintended consequence, fictionally, imaginatively of making all the rest of the text, with its precise observations of diplomatic procedure, seem pale and irrelevant.

2. Indeed Hartmann picks up this idea, and makes an impassioned speech explaining that this is what he and Legat didn’t realise when they airily debated national Socialism back at Oxford, what their lofty Oxford education didn’t at all prepare them for: for the sheer bestial irrationality of the regime, its violence, which no diplomatic niceties can contain (‘This is what I have learned these past six years, as opposed to what is taught at Oxford: the power of unreason.’ p.374)

3. But I also couldn’t help the feminist in me rising up a bit and thinking – why does this point have to be made over the mute, unspeaking body of a tortured and disfigured woman – for Leyna is brain-damaged and recognises neither Hartmann nor Legat (p.373)?

Why is the central woman in their menage reduced to silence? Is it, in itself, a sort of feminist point, that the entire diplomatic circus, Hitler’s blusterings and Chamberlain’s prissy precisionism and French cowardice, all this describes the world of men, the men who would soon plunge the entire world into a war in which millions more totally innocent women and children would be murdered?

Back in Munich

Hartmann drives Legat back to his hotel in Munich as the last day of the Munich conference, and the novel, dawns.

Legat is shaving when he hears a noise in his bedroom and gets in just in time to see a man exiting by the door into the corridor. This scene reminded me of numerous Tintin books where the hero gives chase to the ‘strange man’ who turns a corner and disappears, leaving our hero to trudge back to his room half-dressed, bumping into a startled member of the delegation on the way.

Back in his room, Legat discovers that he has, of course, been burgled and that the incriminating Nazi memorandum from November 1937, the one which had been stolen and given to Hartmann to show to Chamberlain, who rejected it and told Legat to destroy – well, Legat like a fool hadn’t destroyed it, and he now discovers that whoever was searching his room found it. What an idiot he’s been. He has jeopardised his friend’s life – and all for nothing!

So Legat finishes dressing and goes along to the Prime Minister’s room where he just about persuades Chamberlain to let him (Legat) accompany Chamberlain to his last meeting with Hitler.

Chamberlain has had the bright idea of requesting a one-on-one meeting with Hitler in order to present him with the text of a speech he (Hitler) made a week earlier, in which he had pledged eternal friendship between Germany and Britain. Chamberlain has had his officials convert this speech into a pledge, a declaration, a binding document. He hopes to persuade Hitler to sign it and thus secure ‘peace in our time’.

And now, thanks to Harris’s clever interleaving of historical fact with spy fiction, Legat gets to witness this meeting at first hand, and so do we. We are given the entire scene in which a translator translates into German the couple of paragraphs in which Chamberlain has recast Hitler’s pledge of friendship between Britain and Germany and, to his slight surprise, Hitler signs it.

And now the delegation packs up, catches its taxis to the airport and flies home. It is only as they land that one of the pair of female typists who have accompanied the delegation, to type up the various notes and memos, corners Legat.

As Chamberlain gets out of the plane and holds an impromptu press conference, waving the little piece of paper with Hitler’s signature on it, this secretary tells Legat that she is also a recruit of British Security, tasked with keeping an eye on Legat. And that she had earlier broken into Legat’s bedroom, professionally searched it, found the incriminating memo and removed it; so that the burglar who Legat disturbed, and who ran off down the corridor, did not have the incriminating memo after all. Hartmann is in the clear.

And indeed in the last couple of pages we learn that Hartmann was not arrested by his hyper-suspicious boss, Sauer, and continued to serve the Nazi regime until he was involved in the 20 July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, at which point he was arrested, interrogated and hanged.

Comment

This is a fascinating and deeply researched description of the Munich Crisis which opened my eyes about the details of the actual negotiations and the issues at stake. But despite early promise, the thriller element never caught fire for me. If you come to the book with the mindset that the whole future of Europe is at stake, then maybe you can make every one of the small tense incidents (secret documents, secret meetings) have a vast world-shattering importance.

But I came to it knowing what came afterwards (i.e. the entire conspiracy fails and so is completely inconsequential) which continually poured cold water on attempts to get me excited. Even if both the protagonists had been arrested, tortured and bumped off, it wouldn’t ultimately have made any difference, not if you bear in mind what was about to follow i.e. the deaths of tens of millions of people.

For a thriller to work you have to believe the fate of the protagonists is of total, nailbiting importance. But nice enough though these two young chaps seemed to be, the book failed to make me care very much about them.

‘Shit’ and ‘fuck’

Part of this was because the characters just seemed too modern to me. They seemed contemporary, not creatures from what is steadily becoming a remote past. Legat and Hartmann and many of the other characters completely lacked, for me, the old trappings, the genuinely old and remote mindset of that period – not only its embedded sexism and racism, but the entire imperial and class assumptions of their time and class. When you read fiction written at that time (late 1930s) you are continually pulled up sort by all kinds of period assumptions, about race and sex and class, not to mention that actual vocabulary and phraseology and turns of speech. The ruling class really did say ‘Top hole’, and ‘I say’, and ‘old chap’, and was drenched in expectations of privilege and deference.

None of this really came over in Harris’s book. Instead the characters came over as entirely up-to-date modern thriller protagonists. They think logically and clearly, with no emotion, like computers, uninfluenced by ideology or the beliefs of their era. Hartmann says he is a German nationalist, but nowhere in his conversations with Legat, or in his thoughts which we are privy to throughout the book, does any of that come across. He is a good German nationalist and yet his attitude to the Nazis’ anti-Semitism could come from a Guardian editorial.

There is little sense that these people belonged to a different time, with its own, now long-lost values and assumptions.

A small but symptomatic indication of this was Harris’s use of the words shit and fuck. His characters think ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ in a way you would never find in, say Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh writing in 1938. Hartmann sees roadsweepers and thinks not that they are shovelling up horse droppings, but cleaning horse ‘shit’.

When Hartmann is lying in the bed of his mistress, Frau Winter, he notes the photo of her husband on her cabinet and wonder if she fantasises, when they make love, that she is ‘still fucking Captain Winter’.

The half a dozen times Harris uses the word ‘fuck’ completed the process of making his characters sound like post-1960s, brutally explicit, modern-day thriller protagonists. The use of ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’, for me, not only upset the register of the narrative but begged the bigger question of whether he was at all inhabiting the minds of the people of the day – or simply ventriloquising them from an irredeemably 21st century perspective.

Without a doubt the book is a fascinating account of the nitty-gritty of the Munich meeting, of the nuts and bolts of key events and main players – but it failed for me a) as a thriller, because the Big Secret which is meant to underpin a thriller in fact is revealed a hundred pages before the end and turns out not to matter at all – and b) as a fictional attempt to enter the minds and mindsets of these long-dead people.

All the people felt like they were just waiting to be turned into the characters of another film adaptation, an adaptation in which all the good guys will have impeccably #metoo and politically correct attitudes about everything, who will be fighting for decency as we define it in 2019 – instead of being the much more difficult and potentially unlikeable characters you’d expect to meet from that period.

Munich is an effectively written account of the events, with a clever but ultimately disappointing thriller plot slipped in – but not a very good fictional guide or insight into the lost values and psychology of that remote and ever-more-distant era.

Robert Harris reviews

Robert Harris reviews

1848: Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport (2008)

1848 became known as ‘the year of revolutions’ and ‘the springtime of nations’ because there was political turmoil, fighting and unrest right across Europe, resulting in ministries and monarchies being toppled and new nation states proclaimed.

Causes

The underlying causes were agricultural, economic and demographic.

1. Agricultural failure

From 1845 onwards grain harvests across Europe were poor, and this was exacerbated when the fallback crop, potatoes, were hit by a destructive blight or fungal infection which turned them to mush in the soil. The result of the potato blight in Ireland is estimated to have been one and a half million deaths, but right across Europe peasants and small farmers starved, often to death. Hence the grim nickname for the decade as a whole, ‘the Hungry Forties’.

2. Economic downturn

This all coincided with an economic downturn resulting from industrial overproduction, particularly in the textile industry. Textile workers and artisans were thrown out of work in all Europe’s industrialised areas – the north of England, the industrial regions of Belgium, Paris and south-east France, the Rhineland of Germany, around Vienna and in western Bohemia.

3. Population boom

Hunger and unemployment impacted a population which had undergone a significant increase since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Countryside and cities alike had seen a population explosion.

The surplus of population was across all classes: it’s easy to see how an excess of many mouths to feed in a countryside hit by bad harvests, or in towns hit by economic depression, would result in misery and unrest. A bit more subtle was the impact of rising population on the middle classes: there just weren’t enough nice professional jobs to go round. Everyone wanted to be a doctor or lawyer or to secure a comfortable sinecure in the labyrinthine bureaucracies of the autocracies – but there just weren’t enough vacant positions. And so this created a surplus of disaffected, well-educated, middle-class young men who found roles to play in the new liberal and radical political movements.

If the surplus poor provided the cannon fodder in the streets, the surplus professional men provided the disaffected theoreticians and politicians of liberal reform and nationalism.

Inadequate response

As usual, the politicians in charge across Europe didn’t fully understand the scale of the poverty and distress they were dealing with and chose the time-honoured method of trying to repress all and any expressions of protest by main force.

Rapport’s book describes massacres in cities all across Europe as the garrisons were called out and soldiers shot on marching protesters in capital cities from Paris to Prague. This had an inevitable radicalising effect on the protesting masses who set up barricades and called on more of their fellow workers-urban poor to join them, and so on in a vicious circle.

However, these three underlying problems (population, hunger, slump) and the repressive response by all the authorities to almost any kind of protest, did not lead to one unified political movement of reform in each country. Instead the most important fact to grasp is that the opposition was split into different camps which, at the moments of severe crisis formed uneasy coalitions, but as events developed, tended to fall apart and even come to oppose each other.

There were at least three quite distinct strands of political opposition in 1848.

1. Liberalism

Of the big five states in 1840s Europe – Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia – only France and Britain had anything remotely like a ‘democracy’, and even in these countries the number of people allowed to vote was pitifully small – 170,000 of the richest men in France, representing just 0.5% of the population, compared to the 800,000 who were enfranchised by the 1832 Reform Act in Britain (allowing about one in five adult British men the vote).

Despite the small electorates, both Britain and France at least had well-established traditions of ‘civil society’, meaning newspapers, magazines, universities, debating clubs and societies, the theatre, opera and a variety of other spaces where views could be aired and debated.

This was drastically untrue of the three other big powers – Prussia, Austria and Russia had no parliaments and no democracies. They were reactionary autocracies, ruled by hereditary rulers who chose ministers merely to advise them and to carry out their wishes, these moustachioed old reactionaries being Czar Nicholas I of Russia, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and Frederick William IV of Prussia.

Therefore, while liberals in Britain merely wanted to expand the franchise a bit, and even the radicals were only calling for complete manhood suffrage (encapsulated in ‘the Great Charter’ which gave the movement of ‘Chartism’ its name and whose collection and presentation to Parliament amounted to the main political event of the year in Britain) and whereas in France liberals wanted to see expansion of the suffrage and the removal of repressive elements of the regime (censorship) – in the three autocracies, liberals were fighting to create even a basic public space for discussion, and a basic level of democracy, in highly censored and repressive societies.

In other words, the situation and potential for reform in these two types of nation were profoundly different.

But to summarise, what marked out liberals across the continent is that they wanted constitutional and legal change, effected through what the Italians called the lotta legale, a legal battle (p.43).

2. Nationalism

Sometimes overlapping with liberal demands, but basically different in ambition, were the continent’s nationalists. Italy and Germany are the obvious examples: both were geographical areas within which the population mostly spoke the same language, but they were, in 1848, divided into complex patchworks of individual states.

In 1806 Napoleon had abolished the 1,000 year-old Holy Roman Empire, creating a host of new statelets, kingdoms, duchies and so on. Some thirty-nine of these were formed into the German Confederation. The German states were a peculiar mix of sovereign empires, kingdoms, electorates, grand duchies, duchies, principalities and free cities. The German Confederation was dominated by the largest two states, Prussia in the North and the Austrian Empire in the south.

Italy was arguably even more divided, with the two northern states of Lombardy and Piedmont under Austrian rule, the central Papal States under control of the Pope, while the south (the kingdom of Sicily and Naples) was ruled by a bourbon king, with other petty monarchies ruling states like Tuscany and Savoy.

1848 was a big year for the famous Italian nationalists, Garibaldi and Mazzini, who attempted to stir up their countrymen to throw off foreign rule and establish a unified Italian state. It is an indication of how dire Italy’s fragmentation was, that the nationalists initially looked to a new and apparently more liberal pope to help them – Pope Pius IX – the papacy usually being seen as the seat of reaction and anti-nationalism (although the story of 1848 in Italy is partly the story of how Pope Pius ended up rejecting the liberal revolution and calling for foreign powers to invade and overthrow the liberal government which had been set up in Rome.)

So 1848 was a big year for nationalists in Italy and the German states who hoped to unite all their separate states into one unified nation. Far less familiar to me were the nationalist struggles further east:

the struggle of Polish nationalists to assert their nationhood – after 1815 Poland had been partitioned into three, with the parts ruled by Prussia, Russia and Austria
as well as a host of more obscure nationalist struggles east of Vienna – for example:
- the struggle of Magyar nationalists – the Hungarians – to throw off the yoke of German-speaking Vienna
- the Czechs also, attempted to throw off Austrian rule
- or the struggle of Ukrainian nationalists to throw off the domination of their land by rich Polish landowners

Many of these movements adopted a title with the word ‘young’ in it, hence Young Italy, Young Germany, Young Hungary, Young Ireland, and so on.

Map of Europe in 1848. Note the size of the Austrian Empire but also the deep penetration into Europe of the Ottoman Empire

Map of Europe in 1848. Note the size of the Austrian Empire in blue, but also the deep penetration into Europe of the Ottoman Empire (Source: Age of the Sage)

Rapport shows how nationalists in almost all the countries of Europe wanted their lands and peoples to be unified under new, autochthonous rulers.

N.B. It is important to emphasise the limits of the 1848 revolutions and violence. There were no revolutions in Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden-Norway, in Spain or Portugal or in Russia. The Springtime of Nations most affected France, Germany, Italy and the Austrian Empire.

3. Socialism

After liberalism and nationalism, the third great issue was the ‘social question’. While the rich and the upper-middle class seemed to be reaping the benefits from the early phases of the industrial revolution – from the spread of factory techniques for manufacturing textiles, the construction of a network of railways which helped transport raw materials and finished goods and so on – a huge number of rural peasants, small traders, and the urban working class were living in barely imaginable squalor and starving.

The paradox of starvation in the midst of plenty had prompted a variety of theoretical and economic analyses as well as utopian visions of how to reform society to ensure no-one would starve. These had become more prominent during the 1830s. It was in 1832 that the word ‘socialism’ was first coined as an umbrella term for radical proposals to overhaul society to ensure fairness and to abolish the shocking poverty and squalor which so many bourgeois writers noted as they travelled across the continent.

So ‘socialist’ ways of thinking had had decades to evolve and gain traction. Rapport makes the interesting point that by 1848 Europe had its first generation of professional revolutionaries.

The great French Revolution of 1789 had propelled men of often middling ability and provincial origin into high profile positions which they were completely unprepared for. By contrast, 1848 was a golden opportunity for men who had devoted their lives to revolutionary writing and agitating, such as Louis-August Blanqui and Armand Barbès.

(As Gareth Stedman Jones makes clear in his marvellous biography of Karl Marx, Marx himself was notorious to the authorities as a professional subversive, and his newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung became the bestselling radical journal in Germany, but he had little impact on the actual course of events.)

The various flavours of socialists were united in not just wanting to tinker with constitutions, not wanting to add a few hundred thousand more middle-class men to the franchise (as the liberals wanted) – nor were they distracted by complex negotiations among the rulers of all the petty states of Italy or Germany (like the nationalists were).

Instead the socialists were united in a desire to effect a comprehensive and sweeping reform of all elements of society and the economy in order to create a classless utopia. For example, by nationalising all land and factories, by abolishing all titles and ranks and – at their most extreme – abolishing private property itself, in order to create a society of complete equality.

A crisis of modernisation

Rapport sums up thus: The revolution and collapse of the conservative order in 1848 was a crisis of modernization, in that European economies and societies were changing fast, in size and economic and social requirements, but doing so in states and political cultures which had failed to keep pace and which, given the reactionary mindsets of their rulers and aristocracy, were dead set against any kind of reform or change. Something had to give.

1848

Rapport tells the story of the tumultuous events which swept the continent with great enthusiasm and clarity. He gives us pen portraits of key reformer such as the nationalists Mazzini and Garibaldi and the socialist Blanqui, and of arch conservatives like Klemens Metternich, Chancellor of Austria, the young Bismarck of Prussia, and the sneering Guizot, unpopular premiere of France.

This is a great cast to start with but quite quickly the reader is overwhelmed with hundreds more names of radicals, republicans, liberals, reactionaries, conservatives and monarchists, ordinary workers and emperors – Rapport clearly and effectively presenting a cast of hundreds of named individuals who played parts large and small during this tumultuous year.

The first and decisive event of the year was the overthrow of King Louis Philippe in France and his replacement by a hastily cobbled-together Second Republic, in February 1848. This was a genuine revolution, and in what many took to be Europe’s most important nation, so news of it spread like wildfire across the continent, emboldening radicals in Italy, Austria, Prussia and further east.

Rapport describes events with a keen eye for telling details and the key, often accidental incidents, which could transform angry hunger marchers into an revolutionary mob. For example, the outraged citizen of Milan who knocked a cigar out of the mouth of a preening Austrian officer, sparking a street fight which escalated into a ‘tobacco riot’, prompting the city’s Austrian governor to call out the troops who then proceeded to fire on the mob, killing six and wounding fifty Italian ‘patriot and martyrs’. That is how revolutions start.

There is a vast amount to tell, as Rapport describes not only the turmoil on the streets, but the complex constitutional and political manoeuvrings of regimes from Denmark in the north to Sicily in the south, from Ireland in the west to Hungary, Ukraine and Poland in the east. I didn’t know so much happened in this one year. I didn’t know, for example, that in the Berlin revolution, in March, one day of epic street fighting between liberal reformers, backed by the population against the king’s army, resulted in 800 dead!

Fierce streetfighting around Alexanderplatz in Berlin on the night of 18-19 March 1848

Fierce fighting at the Alexanderplatz barricade in Berlin on the night of 18-19 March 1848

It was eye-opening to be told in such detail about the scale of the violence across the continent.

I knew that the ‘June Days’ in Paris, when General Cavaignac was tasked with using the army to regain control of all the parts of the city where revolutionary barricades had been set up, resulted in vast bloodshed, with some 10,000 killed or injured. But I didn’t know that when Austrian Imperial troops retook Vienna from the liberal-radical National Guard in the last week of October 1848, the use of cannon in urban streets contributed to the death toll of 2,000 (p.287).

There were not only soldiers-versus-workers battles, but plenty of more traditional fighting between actual armies, such as the battle between the forces of the king of Piedmont and Austrian forces in north Italy leading to the decisive Austrian victory at Custozza on 25 July 1848.

But it was the scale of the urban fighting which surprised and shocked me.

In another example, for a few months from April 1848 the island of Sicily declared its independence from the bourbon king of Naples who had previously ruled it. However, the king sent an army by ship which landed at Messina, subjecting the city to a sustained bombardment and then street by street fighting, which eventually left over two thirds of the city in smouldering ruins (p.260).

The social, political but also ethnic tensions between native Czech republicans and their overlord Austrian masters, erupted into six days of violent street fighting in Prague, June 12-17, during which Austrian General Windischgrätz first of all cleared the barricades before withdrawing his troops to the city walls and pounding Prague with a sustained artillery bombardment. Inevitably, scores of innocent lives were lost in the wreckage and destruction (p.235).

So much fighting, So much destruction. So many deaths.

New ideas

Well, new to me:

1. The problem of nationalism

The new ideology of nationalism turned out to contain an insoluble paradox at its core: large ethnically homogenous populations were encouraged to agitate for their own nation, but what about the minorities who lived within their borders? Could they be allowed their national freedom without undermining the geographical and cultural ‘integrity’ of the larger entity?

Thus the Hungarian nationalists had barely broken with their Austrian rulers before they found themselves having to deal with minority populations like Romanians, Serbs, Croats and others who lived within the borders the Hungarians claimed for their new state. Should they be granted their own independence? No. The Hungarians not only rejected these pleas for independence, but went to war with their minorities to quell them. And in doing so, split and distracted their armies, arguably contributing to their eventual defeat by Austria.

Meanwhile, Polish nationalists were dead set on asserting Polish independence, but in Galicia quickly found themselves the subject of attacks from the Ruthenian minority, long subjugated by Polish landowners, and who claimed allegiance to a state which they wanted to call Ukraine. Like the Hungarians, the Poles were having none of it.

Thus nationalism spawned mini-nationalisms, sub-nationalisms, and ethnic and cultural conflicts which began to look more like civil wars than struggles for ‘independence’.

As a result, two broad trends emerged:

1. The chauvinism of big nations

Nationalists from the larger nations developed an angry rhetoric castigating these troublesome little minorities as culturally less advanced. Rapport quotes German nationalists who criticised the Slavic minorities for their alleged racial and cultural inferiority – a rhetoric which was to have a long career in Germany, leading eventually to the Nazis and their Hunger Plan to starve and enslave the Slavic peoples.

2. Austro-Slavism

In response to the breakaway aspirations of Hungary, the Hapsburg (Austrian) monarchy developed a strategy of Austro-Slavism. This was to appeal directly to the many minorities within the empire, and within Hungarian territory in particular, and guarantee them more protection within the multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire than they would receive in one of the new, ethnically pure, nationalist states. ‘Stay within our multicultural empire and you will be better off than under repressive monoglot Hungarian rule.’

Thus when representatives of the Slovaks asked the new Hungarian Parliament (which had been created in March 1848 as a concession from Vienna) to allow the teaching of the Slovak language and the flying of the Slovak flag in Slovak regions within the new Hungary, the Hungarians vehemently refused. They accused the nationalists of ‘Pan-Slavic nationalism’ and of wanting to undermine the integrity of the new Magyar (i.e. Hungarian) state. Not surprisingly when, later in the year, open war broke out between Austria and Hungary, many Slovak nationalists sided with Austria, having made the simple calculation that they were likely to have more religious, racial and linguistic freedom under the Austrian Empire than under the repressively nationalistic Hungarians.

3. The threshold principle of nationalism

The threshold principle is an attempt to solve the Nationalism Paradox. It states that a people only ‘deserves’ or ‘qualifies’ to have a state of its own if it has the size and strength to maintain and protect it. Surprisingly, Friederich Engels, the extreme radical and patron of Karl Marx, espoused the threshold principle when it came to the smaller nationalities in and around Germany. Being German himself he, naturally enough, thought that Germany ought to be unified into a nation. But the Czechs, Slovaks and other ‘lesser’ peoples who lived within the borders of this new Germany, Engels thought they didn’t deserve to be nations because they didn’t come up to ‘German’ standards of culture and political maturity. (Explained on page 181).

This was just one of the problems, paradoxes and contradictions which the supposedly simple notion of ‘nationalism’ contained within itself and which made it so difficult to apply on the ground.

Nonetheless, 1848 marks the moment when nationalism clearly emerges as a major force in European history – and at the same time reveals the contradictions, and the dark undercurrents latent within it, which have dominated European politics right down to this day.

4. Grossdeutsch or Kleindeutsch?

Uniting the 39 states of Germany sounds like a straightforward enough ambition, but at its core was a Big Dilemma: should the new state include or exclude Austria? The problem was that while the Austrian component of the Austrian Empire spoke German and considered themselves culturally linked to the rest of Germany, the Hapsburg monarchy which ruled Austria had also inherited a patchwork of territories all across Europe (not least all of Hungary with its minorities, and the northern states of Italy): should those obviously non-Germanic part of the Austrian empire be incorporated into Germany? Or would Austria have to abandon its empire in order to be incorporated into the new Germany?

Exponents of a Grossdeutsch (Big Germany) option thought it ridiculous to exclude Austria with its millions of German-speakers; of course Austria should be included. But that would mean tearing the Austro-Hungarian empire in half because obviously you couldn’t include millions of Hungarians, Romanians and so on inside a ‘German’ state (the Kleindeutsch, or Little Germany, position).

Or could you? This latter thought gave rise to a third position, the Mitteleuropäisch solution, under which all of the German states would be incorporated into a super-Austria, to create a German-speaking empire which would stretch from the Baltic in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, a bulwark against Latins in the west and south, and the Slavic peoples to the east and south-east, promoting German culture, language and way of life across the continent, by force if necessary. (pp.298-300)

Comical and hypothetical though this may all sound, it would prove to be at the centre of world history for the next century. It was the ‘German Problem’ which lay behind the seismic Franco-Prussian War, the catastrophic First World War, and the global disaster of the Second World War.

The European Economic Community, established by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, at bottom was an attempt to settle the ‘German Problem’ i.e. to tie the German and French economies so intricately together that there could never again be war between the two of them.

Some people think the ‘German Problem’ was only really settled with the reunification of the two Germanies in 1990, but others think it still lives on in the disparity between the rich industrial West and the mostly agricultural and impoverished East.

And the question of German identity, of who is or isn’t Germany, has been revived by Angel Merkel’s over-enthusiastic acceptance of a million refugees in 2017, which has led to the widespread popularity of far right political parties in Germany for the first time since the Second World War.

All of which tends to suggest that the virus of nationalism, unleashed in 1848, can never really be cured.

Results

It takes four hundred pages dense with fact and anecdote to convey the confused turmoil of the year 1848, but Rapport had already spelled out the overall results in the opening pages.

Although all the protesters hated the reactionary regimes, they couldn’t agree what to replace them with. More specifically, the liberals and socialists who initially found themselves on the same barricades calling for the overthrow of this or that ‘tyrant’ – once the overthrow had been achieved or, more usually, a liberal constitution conceded by this or that petty monarch – at this point these temporarily allied forces realised that they held almost diametrically opposed intentions.

The liberals wanted to hold onto all their property and rights and merely to gain a little more power, a little more say for themselves in the way things were run; whereas the socialists wanted to sweep the bourgeois liberals out of the way, along with the monarchy, the aristocracy, the church and all the other tools of oppression.

It was this fundamentally divided nature of the forces of ‘change’ which meant that, as events worked their course, the forces of Reaction found it possible to divide and reconquer their opponents. Almost everywhere, when push came to shove, middle-class liberals ended up throwing in their lot with the chastened autocracies, thus tipping the balance of power against the genuine revolutionaries.

The high hopes of 1848 almost everywhere gave way to the resurgence of the autocracies and the restoration of reactionary regimes or the imposition of old repression in new clothes. Nowhere more ironically than in France where the overthrown monarchy of Louis Philippe gave way to the deeply divided Second Republic which staggered on for three chaotic years before being put out of its misery when the canny Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte – who had gotten himself elected president right at the end of 1848 – carried out the coup which brought him to power as a new Emperor, Napoleon III, in 1851.

Rapport’s account also makes clear that the violence and turmoil wasn’t limited to 1848 – it continued well into 1849:

in Germany where the newly established ‘national’ parliament was forced to flee to Frankfurt and, when the Prussian king felt strong enough to surround and close it, its suppression sparked a second wave of uprisings, barricades, vicious street fighting and harsh reprisals in cities all across Germany e.g. Dresden where Richard Wagner took part in the insurrection, whose violent suppression left over 250 dead and 400 wounded.
and in Italy where the republics of Rome and Venice were besieged and only conquered after prolonged bombardment and bloodshed. (It is a real quirk of history that the Roman republic was besieged and conquered by French troops, ordered there by ‘President’ Napoleon. Why? Because the French didn’t want the approaching Austrians to take control of Rome and, therefore, of the Papacy. Ancient national and dynastic rivalries everywhere trumped high-minded but weak liberal or republican ideals.)

More than anywhere else it was in Hungary that the struggle for independence escalated into full-scale war (with Austria) which dragged on for several years. By the end, some 50,000 soldiers on both sides had lost their lives. When the Austrians finally reconquered Hungary, they quashed its independent parliament, repealed its declaration of rights, reimposed Austrian law and language and Hungary remained under martial law until 1854.

The Hungarian revolt led to the establishment of an independent parliament in 1849 which seceded from the Austrian Empire. Unfortunately, this was crushed later in the year by a combination of the Austrian army which invaded from the west, allied with Russian forces which invaded from the East. The parliament was overthrown, Hungary’s leaders were arrested, tried and executed, and the country sank into sullen acquiescence in the Austro-Hungarian Empire which lasted until 1918, when it finally achieved independence.

None of the ‘nations’ whose nationalists were lobbying for them to be created ended up coming into existence: both Italy and Germany remained patchwork quilts of petty states, albeit some of them reorganised and with new constitutions. Italy had to wait till 1860, Germany until 1871, to achieve full unification.

Polish nationalism completely failed; Poland didn’t become an independent nation state until 1918.

Same with the Czechs. They only gained nationhood, as Czechoslovakia, in 1918 (only to be invaded by the Nazis 20 years later).

Only in France was the old order decisively overthrown with the abolition of the monarchy. But this, ironically, was only to give rise to a new, more modern form of autocracy, in the shape of Napoleon III’s ’empire’.

It is one among many virtues of Rapport’s book that he explains more clearly than any other account I’ve read the nature of Napoleon’s widespread appeal to the broad French population, and the succession of lucky chances which brought him to the throne. Karl Marx dismissed Napoleon III as an empty puppet who made himself all things to all men, not quite grasping that this is precisely what democracy amounts to – persuading a wide variety of people and constituencies that you are the solution to their problems.

Everywhere else the European Revolution of 1848 failed. It would be decades, in some cases a century or more, before all the ideas proclaimed by liberals came into force, ideas such as freedom of expression and assembly, the abolition of the death penalty (1965 in Britain), of corporal punishment and censorship (Britain’s theatre censorship was only abolished in 1968), the emancipation of minorities and the extension of the franchise to all men and women (in the UK it was only in 1928 that all men and women over the age of 21 were allowed a vote – 80 years after 1848).

Order over anarchy

The political and economic situation had certainly got bad enough for a constellation of forces – and for hundreds of thousands of alienated urban poor – to mobilise and threaten their rulers. But none of the reformers who inherited these situations could command the majority needed to rule effectively or implement their plans before the Counter-Revolution began to fight back.

The failure of the French Second Republic, in particular, made clear a fundamental principle of advanced societies. that the general population prefers an able dictatorship to the uncertainty and chaos of ‘revolution’.

(This is also the great lesson of the wave of anarchy which swept across Europe after the Great War, described in by Robert Gerwarth’s powerful book, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917 to 1923.)

Again and again, in different countries, Rapport repeats the lesson that people prefer order and security, albeit with restricted political rights, to the ‘promise’ of a greater ‘freedom’, which in practice seems to result in anarchy and fighting in the streets.

People prefer Order and Security to Uncertainty and Fear.

When faced with a choice between holding onto their new political liberties or conserving their lives, their property and their communities against ‘anarchy’ or ‘communism’, most people chose to sacrifice their freedom for the sake of security. (p.191)

A simple lesson which professional revolutionaries from Blanqui to our own time seem unable to understand. It is not that people are against equality. If asked most people of course say they are in favour of ‘equality’. It’s that most people, in countries across Europe for the past 170 years, have time and time again shown themselves to be against the anarchy which violent movements claiming to fight for equality so often actually bring in their train.

P.S.

I get a little irritated by readers and commentators who say things like, ‘the issues in the book turn out to be surprisingly modern, issues like freedom of speech, constitutional and legal reform, the identity of nations and their populations’.

Rapport himself does it, commenting that many German states expressed ‘startlingly modern-sounding anxieties’ (p.337) in response to the Frankfurt Parliament’s publication of its Grundrechte or Bill of Basic Rights, in December 1848.

This is looking down the telescope the wrong way. All these themes and issues aren’t ‘surprisingly relevant to today’. What phrases like that really express is that, we are still struggling with the same issues, problems and challenges – economic, social and cultural – which have dogged Europe for over 200 years.

The past isn’t surprisingly ‘relevant’. It is the world we live in that is – despite all the superficial changes of clothes and cars and techno-gadgets – surprisingly unchanged. We are still struggling with the problems our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and their parents and grandparents, failed to solve.

If you’re of the tendency who think that handfuls of people living a hundred or two hundred years ago – early socialists or feminists or freethinkers – were ‘prophets’ and ‘surprisingly relevant’ it’s because this way of thinking tends to suggest that we standing tip-toe on the brink of solving them.

I, on the contrary, take a much more pessimistic view, which is that this or that thinker wasn’t a startlingly far-sighted visionary, simply that they could see and express problems and issues which over the past two hundred years we have completely failed to solve.

When so many better people than us, in more propitious circumstances, have failed, over decades, sometimes centuries, to solve deep structural issues such as protecting the environment, or how to organise states so as to satisfy everyone’s racial and ethnic wishes, or how to establish absolute and complete equality between the sexes – what gives anyone the confidence that we can solve them today?

All the evidence, in front of the faces of anyone who reads deeply and widely in history, is that these are problems intrinsic to the human condition which can never be solved, only ameliorated, or fudged, or tinkered with, in different ways by different generations.

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Leonard Woolf: A Life by Victoria Glendinning (2006)

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Munich by Robert Harris (2017)

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1848: Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport (2008)

Causes

1. Agricultural failure

2. Economic downturn

3. Population boom

Inadequate response

1. Liberalism

2. Nationalism

3. Socialism

A crisis of modernisation

1848

New ideas

1. The problem of nationalism

1. The chauvinism of big nations

2. Austro-Slavism

3. The threshold principle of nationalism

4. Grossdeutsch or Kleindeutsch?

Results

Order over anarchy

P.S.

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