WOOLF IN CEYLON
Friedman, Melvin J.
Woolf in Ceylon Growing: an autobiography of the years 1904-1911, by Leonard Woolf. Harcourt, Brace & World. 256 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Melvin J. Friedman In this, the second volume of Leonard...
...He also reprints a rather tedious exchange of letters with the Secretary of State for the Colonies which resulted in Woolf's resignation as a Ceylon civil servant...
...In a short epilogue he describes his return to England and the rediscovery of the Bloomsbury group which seemed to remain unchanged in his absence...
...Growing has all the charm of Sowing—if not its wholesome literary judgments—and continues Leonard Woolf's fascination with people's oddities...
...Reviewed by Melvin J. Friedman In this, the second volume of Leonard Woolf's autobiography, we find "the highly sophisticated product of St...
...Thus Growing has many fewer literary judgments than Sowing and seems generally to lack its sophistication and belletristic manner...
...When he describes poverty he makes his anti-imperialist pronouncements...
...As a form of punishment, it is disgusting and, as I saw it, disgustingly inefficient...
...He therefore depends heavily on an exchange of letters with Lytton Strachey and official diary notations...
...Leonartl Woolf emerges from Growing as sympathetically as one can imagine: anti-imperialist, enlightened colonizer, animal lover, humanist...
...The authentic tone of the man who left a cultivated Cambridge setting behind, armed only with a "pukka English dog" and a 90 volume set of Voltaire, to confront a largely uncivilized Ceylon beset by imperialist problems, carries through convincingly...
...But this second glance at Woolf's memoirs offers us an invaluable Baedecker to Ceylon: as accurate as most guide books ami much more pleasantly presented...
...The author feels dutifully obliged to set a slow pace...
...Unlike Sowing, in which most of the material was familiar to Woolf's reader, the situations and exotic landscapes described here demand a complete reorientation...
...Camus was never more convincing...
...Leonard Woolf is amply aware of his obligation to the reader: "But if one has the temerity to write an autobiography, then one is under an obligation not to conceal...
...The author apologizes for his unreliable memory...
...Almost every landscape he describes or story he tells has some moral lesson for us...
...He comes to hate imperialism because the system is a respector of classes and castes, not of individuals...
...We witness the breakdown of class distinctions on the part of a cultivated civil servant who comes to prefer the uncultivated natives to the Oxford and Cambridge trained representatives of the British Empire...
...As Leonard Woolf moves from one Ceylonese outpost to another and advances in the British foreign service, he lets us examine his mind at each stage of its development...
...When he observes Buddhism in action he somewhat modifies his anti-religious bias: ". . . if one must have a religion, Buddhism seems to me superior to all other religions...
...When he speaks of a series of hangings he ends with an epigrammatic statement against capital punishment: "I give these repulsive details because those who support capital punishment in the Twentieth Century pretend that it is a necessary, humane, civilized form of punishment...
...Woolf leaves us again with a moral lesson: that education and background are not necessarily determinants of character...
...After seven years in Ceylon, Leonard Woolf faces the problem of readjustment...
...The first chapter, "The Voyage Out" (appropriately borrowed from the title of an early Virginia Woolf novel) sets the tone of uncertainty and unfamiliarity which characterizes the book...
...Woolf's method depends on description of setting, anecdote, and moral resolution...
...He leaves Ceylon with the somewhat rhetorical question on his lips: "I wonder if things are really managed in England as they are here...
...We have liberal excerpts from each which fortify the narrative and offer the documentary evidence we frequently require from an autobiography written fifty years after the events described...
...The only point in an autobiography is to give, as far as one can, in the most simple, clear, and truthful way, a picture, first of one's own personality and of the people whom one has known, and secondly of the society and age in which one lived...
...If these are the requisites for good autobiography, Growing must be among the best...
...Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge" on his way to Ceylon to assume his role as civil servant...
Vol. 26 • May 1962 • No. 5
