Leventhal Fred - Leonard Woolf: Bloomsbury Socialist

The authors of this biographical study have shared an interest in Leonard Woolf for many years. They first met when Fred Leventhal was an undergraduate and Peter Stansky a graduate student, and they lived in the same Harvard House. They both received Ph.D. degrees in modern British history, having done so with the same splendid mentor, David Owen, and they have remained close friends ever since, even though they have lived miles apart on the opposite coasts of the United States since 1968. Over the years they have both approached Leonard Woolf from different perspectives. Fred has written studies of various political figures on the British left as well as several articles about Woolf, while Peter has been interested in Leonard as a member of the Bloomsbury Group. They were both privileged to have brief encounters with Woolf himself. It might be of interest to mention them here.

Peter met him in the summer of 1962. He and William Abrahams were just beginning a study of Woolfs nephew, Julian Bell, for their book Journey to the Frontier and went to see him in his tiny cold office, a cubicle off a passage at Chatto & Windus, the publishing house with which the Hogarth Press had become affiliated. He himself, with his white hair and skin, conveyed a sense of colorlessness increased by the fact that the room was skylighted, and all was bathed with a certain arctic light on a cold June day in London. His attitude towards Julian, his wifes beloved nephew, who had been killed in the Spanish Civil War, was characteristic. Clearly he cared for him, but was not about to abandon his critical sense. His view of Julians virtues and defects, although premised on the affection due to a nephew, was truthful and hard-headed. For the very reason that individuals were so important, the perception of them was not to be clouded by any false sentimentality. In effect, his conversation was like his autobiography: it gave the appearance of being discursive, but as it went on, each touch added up to a picture of Julian as he remembered him. The comments were put in what seemed to be an erratic way, much as a painter might daub on his color, but it was the best way for him to create a portrait. Having begun by saying he had little to say, he ended by saying a good deal. We were never to meet again, but we corresponded. His letters were succinct and to the point, and always sent in used envelopes, in what one imagined to be a sign of Gladstonian parsimony but may actually have come from the habit of saving paper during the Second World War. In these exchanges he revealed a keen editorial sense along with the shrewdness of a man of business. We had wanted to use extensive quotations from Virginia Woolfs then unpublished memoir of Julian; he allowed us to use only about half of what we had originally asked for. He was right, editorially, for he forced us to rely on our own words, and not on anothers, to gain the effect we wanted. Also, by limiting the amount of hitherto unpublished material by his wife to appear in print, he was, as he pointed out, protecting the economic value of her words. After Journey to the Frontier was published in 1966, he sent a warm, but brief note of praise, and listed a few, as is inevitable, errors. He also paid us the supreme compliment of praising the book in his autobiography, writing that he would not write much about Julian in it as we had provided a good account of his life. Our meeting was brief but supremely valuable, and I was lucky to have had the experience.

Fred met Woolf in August 1968 at the start of research for a biography of Henry Noel Brailsford, the journalist and writer on international relations, with whom Leonard had close ties in the world of weekly journalism and on the Labour Party Advisory Committees on International and Imperial Questions. He replaced Brailsford on the staff of the Nation in 1922 and worked with him on the New Statesman during Kingsley Martins editorship. Their attitudes were generally similar, although Woolfs antipathy to Soviet Russia emerged earlier than Brailsfords. Both were staunch advocates of Indian independence. An authors query for information on my part elicited an invitation to visit Leonard at Monks House on a summer afternoon. He cordially welcomed my wife and me, provided tea, and later accompanied us on a walk to the banks of the Ouse, where Virginia had drowned herself. He was forthcoming with recollections of Brailsford but failed to locate any correspondence. During our brief visit, Leonard, then nearly 88, seemed to go up and down the stairs with alacrity, looking in vain through some of his files. He promised to continue searching after our departure and corresponded only a few months before his death expressing regret that nothing further had been found. In July 1990, during a brief foray into Leonards papers and those of Kingsley Martin in the University of Sussex collections, I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Trekkie Parsons, who was helpful in illuminating Leonards political ideas and moral values, as well as providing the photograph that accompanied my essay on Leonard in the volume