Leonard Woolf Looks Backward
Friedman, Melvin J.
Leonard Woolf Looks Backward Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904, by Leonard Woolf. Harcourt, Brace. 224 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Melvin J. Friedman Using a title which reminds one...
...He seems more keenly devoted to his preparatory school and university years...
...He casts interesting light on the Dreyfus trial by likening it to the "trial and death of Socrates and the scene in the prison at Athens...
...Childhood for him was a stormier period, which ended in religious rejection and financial difficulty following his father's death...
...Despite his frequent apologies for lapses of memory Woolf manages to recall large segments of his past and to present them almost as if they were currently happening...
...Woolf moves freely back and forth in time and explains childhood experiences often in terms of things which happened later...
...His fond references to Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Desmond MacCarthy seem clearly to refer to a later period...
...His apologies for Swinburne are an attempt to make us understand what the Cambridge undergraduate of the turn of the century appreciated in a poet who was both "silly and sentimental...
...The period of fin de siecle rejection and rebellion which he went through at Cambridge from 1899 to 1904 offers his fondest recollections...
...Woolf delighted in the "infinitely sensitive antennae" displayed in the later novels of Henry James and in the intricately constructed sentences which abound in his fiction and conversation...
...Reviewed by Melvin J. Friedman Using a title which reminds one of a Henry Green novel, Leonard Woolf offers us in Sowing the beginnings of a life devoted to the arts...
...Sowing is filled with delightful turns of phrase and witty anecdotes...
...The friendship with Lytton Strachey, Thoby Stephen (Virginia Woolf's brother), and Saxon Sydney-Turner was of the type Montaigne speaks of: the selfless sharing of all experiences...
...But on the whole he is cheerful when he remembers childhood experiences and multiplies anecdotes from young manhood...
...Leonard Woolf has outlived most of the Trinity College Cambridge-Blooms-bury group...
...Sowing is the work of a man approaching his eightieth birthday who looks back fondly on his youth...
...Woolf is given throughout this volume to a religious skepticism which causes him in the end to reject most modern forms of organized religion...
...His wide reading in the classics has offered him a solution which he ironically expresses early in Sowing: "The only tolerable Gods were those of the Greeks because no sensible man had to take them seriously...
...We reluctantly take leave of Leonard Woolf at the point when he has completed his work at Cambridge and is about to depart for Ceylon in the unfamiliar role of civil servant...
...He refused, he tells us, at the age of fourteen to attend his synagogue and unwaveringly held to this position for the remainder of his life...
...Woolf is not content with the image of the Wordsworthian "child among his new-born blisses...
...This gives the narrative a certain fluidity and perhaps even timelessness...
...He manages, on another occasion, a classic juxtaposition which should amuse most of his readers: "The church or suicide, it will be observed, were to us in the 1890's what the Communist Party became to a later generation...
...Woolf was disturbed by the accusations of immorality and indecency directed at Hardy after the publication of Tess of the D'Urbervilles...
...Woolf does not play Tiresias...
...We can be fairly certain that Woolf intends several more volumes of memoirs before he has finished...
...He wrinkles his brow slightly at the reception Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover might have encountered had they been published in 1891...
...He attended Cambridge during the years when Victorian literature was beginning to give way to less traditional forms...
...He sets out for unknown parts clutching his complete Voltaire which probably offered a model for his religious cynicism and caustic wit running through Sowing...
...He does not restrict himself to the time scheme of 1880-1904...
...If he leaves us with a message in this first volume, perhaps it is, "My experience is that almost everyone, if you really get to know him, is a 'curious character...
...His observations on literature are considerably more optimistic...
...He has earned in his own right a slight but distinguished reputation as editor, publisher, and author—a reputation certain to be enhanced by this volume of memoirs of his early years...
...Most of these judgments interest us because they manage to bring into focus the literary impressions of another generation when viewed at a remove of sixty years by one of its members...
...Leonard Woolf has always refused the unpalatable role of "neglected" husband of Virginia Woolf and has never hidden behind her literary accomplishments...
...The admiration for G. E. Moore, especially, and for the other Cambridge philosophers of those years was part of the apprenticeship every undergraduate serves...
...He quotes two letters from G. E. Moore which date from 1905 and 1908...
...he treats certain of his recalled moments with solemnity and forces a kind of elegiac tone...
...But in the background is always the sober appraiser who has immersed himself in the classics and can interpret most modern problems in terms of what he knows about the ancients...
...he admits to many blunders in taste and discretion...
Vol. 24 • December 1960 • No. 12
