18

Justice and Mercy

T he founding in 1961 of the University of Sussex at Falmer, near Brighton (and five miles from Rodmell), had a big impact on Leonard Woolf’s life. He, Trekkie and Ian became especially friendly with Asa Briggs, Sussex’s first professor of history, and his wife Susan.¹ Peter Calvocoressi, Leonard’s colleague at the Hogarth Press and Chatto, came to Sussex as part-time Reader in International Relations in 1965; an academic couple who also became close friends in the early 1960s were the American writer and academic William (Bill) Humphrey and his wife, from Yale.²

Leonard gave 160 volumes on social studies and international politics to the University of Sussex Library in 1963, plus a not quite complete run of Political Quarterly. He asked Asa and Susan Briggs what he should do with his stacks of old copies of The Times, dating back to World War I. Chuck them out, they said. He gave them his collection of 78 rpm gramophone records, the ones he had listened to with Virginia. In his effort to clear the clutter, he sent his collection of scorecards from the Hove cricket ground, dating from 1893, to the county club.

In June 1964, at the first degree ceremony of the University of Sussex, Leonard received an honorary degree, wearing the yellow gown of an Honorary Doctor of Letters. Professor Briggs gave the encomium: “There is a serenity in his spirit which seems to those who know him like a gift of grace. He has meant much to his friends, and they have meant much to him. Never flattered by authority and never seeking to flatter it, acutely aware of the irony of character and of circumstances, not wishing to escape but to understand, he has made Rodmell, where he lives, a place of peace. In his beautiful garden, time is suspended. Words like ‘old’ and ‘new’ become clumsy and irrelevant.”

 

The third volume of his autobiography, Beginning Again, appeared in the spring of 1964, covering the beginnings of his involvement in socialism, his marriage to Virginia Stephen and her breakdown during the Great War. This volume consolidated his project, and reviewers took the opportunity of reconsidering the two earlier volumes, positioning his work as a sustained achievement and an expanding whole. John Sparrow, the warden of All Souls, wrote to him: “I can hear the very sound of your voice in your prose—a good test, I think, of absolute non-affectation and unpretendingness…All the account of Virginia’s troubles and of your devotion to her is deeply disturbing and touching.” For Sparrow as for many people, “it was all much worse and began much earlier than I had known. How right you were to put it all down.”³

Leonard wrote about the nightmare times with care and simplicity, and no appeal to the reader’s sympathy on his own account. He did not include anything about his collapses of health and spirits, nor about the constrictions which Virginia’s frailty placed on his career. But many people wrote in the same vein as Gerald Brenan, struck by the realization that “we owe Virginia’s books to you almost as much as to herself, for I doubt if she would have been able to write them if she had been married to anyone else.”⁴

His evocations of his wife’s physical presence, her behavior and the impression she made on others were as clear-eyed and graphic as his pen portraits of his Cambridge friends. Virginia was beautiful and distinguished; yet always “to the crowd in the street there was something in her appearance which struck them as strange and laughable.” Duncan Grant, recognizing the truth of this, found the descriptions of her walking down the street, with people looking and laughing, “most moving and extraordinarily alive.”⁵ Elsewhere in the volume Leonard wrote that one of her “delusions,” when she crossed the border between sanity and insanity, was that “people laughed at her.” The logic of this suggests that her insanity (like all insanity) involved not only delusion but the stripping away of delusion. Among the many letters he received was one from Jim Bartholomew,⁶ who ended with a rushed sentence about the way Mr. Woolf—for they remained on formal terms—had cared for Mrs. Woolf. “I think it was marvellous I don’t know how you did it but it was a great thing to have done.”

Hamill and Barker bought the typescripts of Beginning Again. There was no manuscript. Leonard wrote as he spoke, straight on to the typewriter, and changed very little in the second and final version.

 

Beginning Again won the seventh W. H. Smith Prize in 1965. The judges, all known to Leonard, were Margaret Lane, Karl Miller and Rupert Hart-Davis. Monks House garden was invaded by the British and foreign press. “I had my photograph taken a dozen or more times yesterday,” he wrote to Trekkie (in France with Ian), “with and without the dogs and puppy.” The dogs were Trekkie’s collie Bessie, and his own Coco; the puppy was Monk, son of Coco. He was interviewed for radio, television and the newspapers. John Betjeman presented the check for £1,000 at a reception at the Savoy. Leonard did not alert his family. “Until we saw you on Television we did not know anything about it,”⁷ complained Edgar.

Leonard said in his acceptance speech that only that August he had been handed an envelope containing a first prize of one shilling for his autumn onions. While he could not hope ever again to be handed an envelope containing a check for £1,000 for an autumn autobiography, he did expect to get another prize for his onions, perhaps a second prize of two shillings.⁸ The photograph of the event shows him speaking with a straight face, and everyone around him laughing heartily. He received a cheery postcard signed by Stephen Spender, Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, lunching together in Princeton having just seen The Sunday Times with the announcement of the prize, and his photograph.

In this heady time, he made a ridiculous misjudgment. He fell for the proposition of a Major Carr of Weston-super-Mare and his “Statistical Unit Racing Investments,” which guaranteed a “100% chance of steady weekly tax-free profits.” Major Carr also had a scheme of guaranteed wins in the football pools—“without fail,” or your money back. Leonard sent in his money for both schemes, and that was the last he heard from Major Carr, who cannot have received any more eloquent letters of protest from his victims than those from Leonard Woolf.

 

The impulse to honor Leonard Woolf gathered momentum. In November 1965 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, wrote a “Dear Leonard” letter in the spring of 1966 asking him to allow his name to go forward as a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the next Birthday Honours list. Leonard declined the honor, but said how often he had thought of writing to Harold to say “how much I admire what you have done for the party and the brilliant result in the last election.”⁹ He was more abrasive privately: “Harold Wilson, whom I don’t like, has done better than expected.”¹⁰

There was a special Apostles dinner given for him on 25 November 1966, his eighty-sixth birthday, in the private dining room at Kettner’s in Romilly Street. The idea was Dadie Rylands’s, with Victor Rothschild as chief organizer. Most of Leonard’s apostolic contemporaries, and some who were younger than he, were too frail to attend. The aged King’s contingent, including Jack (now Sir John) Sheppard and Morgan Forster, sent regrets and love. Leonard and Morgan remained close, at long distance. Leonard wrote an affectionate, handwritten (unusual, for him) letter to Morgan for his ninetieth birthday in the New Year of 1969, and Morgan replied with equal affection. They had both done well, he wrote, and could depart in peace.

Leonard was not ready to depart. Andreas Mayor wrote to tell Trekkie how impressive he had been at the Apostles dinner: “He went through the evening without the slightest sign of strain or fatigue…He looked magnificent in his purple tweeds in the midst of all the smooth dark suits—that rugged profile which might be a piece of heather-covered granite or the outline of Mr. Juktas in Crete which is meant to look like the head of Zeus.” He had spoken “with perfect ease and a relaxed and humorous command of what he wanted to say” about how the “phenomenal” was not after all so very different from the “real” (meaning, in apostolic code, that the pleasures and rewards of ordinary life were not inferior to those experienced “on the heights”), and about the happiness which begins at seventy and grows steadily greater. Much of that happiness, his friends surmised, was owed to Trekkie.

 

Leonard’s success subtly changed the dynamic of the triad of himself, Trekkie and Ian. Leonard was no longer an essentially gray eminence, whose best claim to fame was that he was the widower of a genius. Ian wrote a formal letter to Leonard—typed on Chatto & Windus stationery, and signed in his absence—about a seemingly private matter. He had paid £95 for a coat for Trekkie’s birthday. “I gather from T that you’ve very kindly agreed to share this present with me, so perhaps you’d like to let me have a check for £47.10 at your convenience.”¹¹

A month later, Leonard and Trekkie flew into New York—Trekkie, perhaps, wearing the new coat. At last, Leonard saw America. They stayed at the Barbizon-Plaza and went to the Frick, the Metropolitan Museum, to Leonard’s publishers Harcourt Brace and to the New York Public Library to meet the director of the Berg Collection, Lola Szladits; Leonard inscribed for her the Berg’s typescript of Beginning Again. They flew south to Charleston to look at gardens. In Washington, D.C., they stayed at the Mayflower Hotel and saw what Leonard in his diary called “the Melon pictures.”¹²

They were the guests of Bill and Dorothy Humphrey in Boston, and went on to Canada to stay with John Graham, professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, who was working on the manuscript of The Waves. His wife Angela loved and revered Leonard, and kept his photograph on her desk: “I used to write to you when I felt particularly isolated and confused,” she confessed. “These weren’t letters for mailing—just letters for healing—a neurotic mechanism perhaps but it helped…I’ve told you before, I feel this freedom to burden you with thoughts and feelings that matter to me. I think you would have made a good psychoanalyst as well as a publisher of it.”¹³

Leonard enjoyed North America, he said, but he would not want to live there. Leonard’s diary, 11 May 1966: “Back to Monks, had lunch, drove Trekkie back to Juggs,” and to Ian. The altered balance between Ian and Leonard was exemplified by Laurens Van der Post’s invitation to him and Trekkie to hear Benjamin Britten’s The Prodigal Son at Aldeburgh, and stay the weekend. “We wish we could ask old Ian as well, but unfortunately our cottage is not big enough.” Ian once referred, to Nora David,¹⁴ to “Trekkie’s extraordinary relationship,”¹⁵ but went no further.

Asa Briggs thought that Trekkie arguably had “undue influence” on Leonard,”¹⁶ in that she could cajole him into doing anything she wanted. But she had to “manage” both sides of her life. As they all grew older—she herself was only two years younger than the twentieth century—her dual devotion and responsibilities were borne with characteristic cheerfulness but not without strain. She was always there when Leonard needed her. Nora David was once with Trekkie when she heard that Leonard was unwell, and “I never saw anyone get into a car quicker.”¹⁷

 

Kitty Muggeridge, wife of the journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge and niece of Beatrice Webb, came to see Leonard in July 1966. She was writing, with Ruth Adam, the biography of her aunt, and Leonard told her about the long-ago idea that he should write about the Webbs. When he read the typescript, Leonard (while making a few corrections) wrote to Kitty: “I have just finished reading your book with tears in my eyes…Beatrice comes completely to life in it.”¹⁸

Kitty paved the way for her husband. In early September 1966, Leonard was interviewed over three days at Monks House by Malcolm Muggeridge for BBC TV. It was meant to be a single half-hour program, but the material was so good that it was decided to spread it between two. On film, Leonard gave Muggeridge tea in the garden: “I’ll try and pour it out without spilling it, because I have a trembling hand since birth.” His old, cultivated, Cambridge voice did not falter. The teacups rattled perilously on their saucers.

After the program Leonard received many sad or angry letters about his adamantine stance against religion. “I have no belief,” he had said on film. “In fact I have a strong disbelief.” His wife Virginia had gone forever. He himself would be snuffed out. In reply to all the letters, he restated for the hundredth time that because religious belief made you feel better, that did not make it true. Occasionally he lost his cool: “What astonishes me about you religious people is your extraordinary arrogance, rudeness and uncharitableness.” Trekkie did a drawing of Leonard standing on the Downs, his hands in his pockets, looking at a tall angel, complete with wings, halo and a lily. The caption is: “I DON’T BELIEVE A WORD OF IT.”

 

In January 1966 Quentin Bell committed himself to writing the biography of Virginia Woolf. The starting point was obviously her diaries. Leonard posted off his manila envelopes containing the chopped-up sections of his carbon copies. He told Quentin that, with the extracts published in A Writer’s Diary, he now had the lot. It was not so easy. The truncated pages sometimes had the dated portion cut off, and bits were missing. Fortunately, Quentin’s wife Olivier was a highly trained researcher, having been employed in her youth by eminent scholars to “get things right.”¹⁹ She reconstituted the diaries, using Leonard’s master copy when in difficulties.

The work was made easier in early 1967 when Quentin was appointed Professor of History and Theory of Art at the University of Sussex, and he and his family came to live at Cobbe’s Place, within a couple of miles of, and roughly equidistant from, Charleston and Monks House. Leonard rooted out for them bundles and boxes of letters, including the copies of those he had sold. He was helpful but not controlling, exerting no pressures. Quentin sent Leonard a “Report on Preliminary Research” after one year: the main task had been to put the 300,000 words of the diary into “usable form.” He and Olivier were preparing a biographical index and notes as they went along. They were also sorting the Charleston papers, and were planning to interview people who knew Virginia. Olivier constructed a system of card indexes and a chronology.

In late December 1966, Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson brought to Monks House a Ph.D. student from Cornell, doing her thesis on Virginia Woolf.²⁰ Nigel asked Leonard if he was ready to have the Vita/Virginia letters published. Leonard prevaricated, writing three days later: “The fact is, I find it extremely difficult to force myself to read old letters…Whenever one really knows the facts, one finds that what is accepted by contemporaries or posterity as the truth about them is so distorted or out of focus that it is not worth worrying about.”²¹ The correspondence must await publication until after his death, when the copyright, and the decision, would be Quentin’s and Angelica’s.

Over and above Leonard’s general distaste for old letters, reading the private correspondence of a dead spouse is perturbing. Leonard knew about Vita and Virginia. But he had not, at the time, known everything, or grasped the gamey tone of their intimacy. What he did know was Virginia’s tendency to hyperbole and playfulness, and he could read “his” Virginia in the letters to Vita. Yet reading them may have forced him into thinking in a new way about the sexual nullity of his marriage. In his bleak anthology published in 1967²² he quoted Gorky: “Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his most tormenting tragedy, has been, is, and will be—the tragedy of the bedroom.” At one of his last appearances at an editorial meeting of the New Statesman, when the idea of an issue on homosexuality was under discussion, he suddenly and surprisingly said: “My wife was a lesbian.”

He was not ready to have this revealed to the world while he lived. He did not, in his graphic accounts of friends in his autobiography, mention their homosexuality, not even apropos of Lytton. When reproached for this in Encounter by Goronwy Rees, he replied on the letters page that since he was not a homosexual himself it was irrelevant to his relation to them; and that at the time of writing it was “still unusual to reveal facts which might be painful to living people unless it was absolutely vital to mention them.”²³

Leonard did not change his mind-set. Before James Strachey died he gave to Lucy Norton her brother Harry Norton’s letters to himself and Lytton. Leonard advised her against publishing them. “My main reason is that they are so much about intimate psychological small beer that except for the interest in buggery I cannot imagine their being of interest to or even understandable by the general reader.” He found them hard to read himself, even though he knew everyone involved intimately. They were all dominated by the “semi-real, semi-unreal personal drama which at that time largely owing to Lytton was imposed upon Cambridge personal relations.”²⁴

With the decriminalization in Britain of homosexual acts between consenting adults in private in 1967, the closet was unlocked. In that year, the first volume of Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey appeared, taking the story up to 1910. It had been subjected to scrutiny from James Strachey before he unexpectedly died; thus some of the credit, or in some eyes the discredit, of the book’s unprecedented sexual candor²⁵ was due to James. Though Leonard praised in his review Michael Holroyd’s “conscientious industry,” he did not like the book very much.²⁶ He found it too long for its material, he told Edgar, and out of focus and distorted in the way that he described in his letter to Nigel Nicolson. Out of sympathy with the extravagantly camp culture of their youth, he thought that Holroyd treated Lytton’s love dramas too seriously.

Leonard was more positive two years later about Holroyd’s second volume, praising its thoroughness, accuracy and documentation. “He does succeed in bringing Lytton to life,” he wrote in his review.²⁷ In all its many pages, he told Holroyd, he only noticed “two very minor inaccuracies.”²⁸ A week later he wrote again saying that “turning out some papers” he had found “some letters from Lytton to me and also some of his poems in his own handwriting. I have had them typed out and I think it may interest you to see the typescript.”²⁹

This chance find was entirely typical. Leonard’s papers were chaotic. He never seems to have listed what he had in Monks House or in 24 Victoria Square in the way of old letters and papers, nor what he sold and to whom and when. He employed a variety of secretarial help for copy-typing, the typists often taking the material home, and he did not record what left his hands. In 1968 he sent some typing work to Nora David’s daughter Teresa Davies, newly married and living in Wales, including a notebook of Virginia’s early writings, dating from 1909. After his death the notebook was forgotten—not to be rediscovered, in a drawer, until 2002.³⁰

One significance of Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey was that it cut though the inhibitions and anxieties which had been preoccupying the remains of the Bloomsbury circle as they exchanged, copied, mulled over, sold or secreted their yellowing packets of correspondence. The biography of Lytton made Bloomsbury sensational. It was a “hinge” publication, opening the way for the burgeoning Bloomsbury industry as, over the decades, the nuances of their social and sexual relationships, as well as their letters and minor writings, were published, glossed and interpreted, and quality-controlled by trusts and executors, for the benefit of a world readership variously indifferent, bored, disgusted, intrigued, entranced and insatiable.

Leonard’s income was increased by the success of his autobiographies; Virginia’s royalties added up to five times more than his own earnings, not ten times as before. He continued to manage her rights and permissions, and was quick to defend her position, writing in riposte to a dismissive reference from Sir Denis Brogan of Peterhouse, Cambridge, that “like so many highbrow writers” he assumed that “her reputation has been a casualty of the last war and that people no longer read her.” Leonard pointed out that sales of To the Lighthouse alone in 1967 were 56,653.³¹ He was not avid to publish everything she left. “I don’t mind scraping out the last scrapings of the barrel, but I think one should call a halt before the scrapings are from the barrel itself,”³² he wrote, deciding that a manuscript of Virginia’s, “The Dunciad,” should not be published; it could, however, be sold. In 1967 he sold more letters to Hamill and Barker, and the galleys of The Years.

Hamill and Barker were becoming more picky, there being now something of a glut on the market. What the two women really wanted were the crown jewels—the originals of Virginia’s diaries, which they had paid for back in 1958—in spite of the arrangement that they must remain locked up in the bank in Leonard’s lifetime. They had not reckoned on his living so long. “Might this be the year for the picking up of the diaries?” they wrote in May 1967; and tried again in 1968. No.

His fourth volume of autobiography, Downhill All the Way, came out in 1967. It is the least compelling of the five, even though it covers the anxious period between the two world wars, with important passages about Virginia, and some good anecdotes and “characters”; also lists of Hogarth publications, accounts of his journalism, of his and his wife’s earnings and of his political activities. It was written at a time when, because of success and private happiness, he was more taken up with the outside world. It brought him a tribute from William Robson, touched by Leonard’s references to their collaboration on PQ: “I still look back on our joint editorial partnership as the halcyon period when there was complete understanding, shared judgements, and remarkable efficiency.”³³

 

The marriage of Peggy Ashcroft and Jeremy Hutchinson came apart in the mid-1960s, after twenty-five years. Jeremy Hutchinson wrote to Leonard: “Last night Peggy told me she had talked to you, and I was so glad. She loves you so much, and has such comfort from your friendship that in the difficult and sad months ahead I know your understanding will be perhaps her greatest support.” So it was. She had always written him well-mannered, affectionate letters. In her distress over the breakup she wrote frequently to “dearest” or “darling” Leonard. He reminded her how fond he was of her, across the barrier of their twenty-seven years’ age difference: “Yes I do know,” she replied, “and I’m sure you know how fond I am of you. But perhaps you don’t know how good you have been for me as well as to me.” She was grateful for “the feeling of love and friendship that you give me.” He was “a source of comfort and strength…I shall go on saying—and believing—‘everything passes,’ all pain is resolved in the end, and if one learnt not to feel possessive one would never feel dispossessed.” She loved waking up at Monks House, and sitting in the garden or in the upstairs sitting room talking to him, “and I never cease to marvel how lucky I am to have LW as a friend.”

The divorce was in 1966, and the same year Jeremy Hutchinson married June Osborn. He came with her to Monks House that spring. Leonard was not a man to take sides. In 1967 he brought out with the Hogarth Press an anthology, a Calendar of Consolation: A Comforting Thought for Every Day in the Year. Even the title was parodic. Innocent book-buyers were in for a shock. It is Leonard’s most characteristically satirical production, and deserves to be famous. It is a calendar of disturbing thoughts, and cannot have brought comfort to Peggy Ashcroft though it may have made her laugh. The consolation offered in the ruthlessly black aphorisms and paragraphs he selected is for those for whom optimism and uplift are no consolation. Angela Graham, discomfited, was “in wonder at how a man with such bleak views of life can be so alive.”³⁴

Leonard’s circle widened during the 1960s, not only with such people as Nora and Dick David, but with Deirdre and Anthony Bland, who came to live at Iford. Deirdre and her husband Anthony, who taught at Sussex University, opened the Southover Gallery in Lewes, where Trekkie showed her pictures. Deirdre was the sister of Rupert Hart-Davis, who had been briefly married to Peggy Ashcroft in their youth. Ruth Simon, about to become Hart-Davis’s third wife, wrote to Leonard: “It is curious how at ease I feel with you, and have always felt.”³⁵ Leonard’s social-emotional life was intense. Visitors proposed themselves constantly and brought along their weekend guests. As he wrote to Trekkie, away as she was rather often now, “The volume of pleasure which one suffers is enormous and unending.”³⁶

A real pleasure in 1968 was that in the spring Horticultural Show he won six firsts, one second and one third prize—much to the delight of his new gardener, Vout Van der Keift. In the summer show they swept the board: seven first prizes, all for vegetables. The orchard was still Leonard’s special care, and an ancient apple tree which had been in the garden fifty years before, when he and Virginia bought Monks House, was finally identified as “Mr. Prothero.” In 1968 and spring 1969, Leonard ordered extravagantly large amounts of herbaceous plants for propagation: he and Vout were inaugurating a commercial operation, “Monks House Plants.”

 

Leonard was, as Angela Graham said, “so alive.” Angelica Garnett, to whom he sporadically sent checks, said that “I think the reason you remain so young is that you are the most honest person I know—if I ever wanted to confess my sins it is to you that I should apply. Somehow the fogs and veils that one finds impeding one’s communication with most people fall to the ground with you.”³⁷ He never seemed like an old person, thought Quentin’s daughter Virginia (Bell) Nicholson—until one looked at his veined and wrinkled hands. He treated children as people whose opinions he valued, and gave thoughtful answers to their questions. He lived in the present and in the future. There was no old man’s reminiscing. He was hospitable not only to his friends’ children, but to their friends too. Shelton Fernando’s son Tyrone, studying in London, brought six fellow students at once down to Monks House.

In the mid-1960s he was father confessor to a young relative of Trekkie’s who was having a breakdown. He had sustained her since childhood, she wrote, and now, “You have undoubtedly saved my life.” He gave her his usual mantra, “Nothing matters.” His own experience of depression colored his advice: “You get yourself into a state in which you imagine things which have no basis in reality…One begins for some reason to worry about something and, if one allows oneself to go on doing that, one gradually imagines all kinds of things. It is a kind of self-indulgence and one gets into a perpetual daydream. It is essential to stop this process and face the real world—which is never so bad as all that.”³⁸

No welcoming flurry greeted visitors at Monks House. Leonard opened the door and, gravely and silently, let them in. It could be unnerving. The young architect Georgie Wolton, taken to tea with him (and Peggy Ashcroft) by Deirdre Bland, saw his conversational style in structural terms: most people start “on the inside,” with enquiries about the guests’ journey, where they are from, what they do; and, when such questions are exhausted, move on to general topics. Leonard started straight away “on the outside”—the political situation, for example—and worked inward, by degrees, to the personal.³⁹ He disconcerted young Bernard Crick, about to be taken on at PQ and making a pilgrimage to Monks House, by asking him, on the threshold, with no preliminaries, who he considered to be the greatest poet in English of the twentieth century.

Dr. Elizabeth Wiskemann, a history don at the University of Sussex, told him about some “young creatures” in their first year who were “much excited about ‘Bloomsbury.’”⁴⁰ Could they come and see him? They were Clare Cherrington and her two friends Julia Flint and Kay (Catherine) Jones, who invited him to be honorary president of the Sussex University Fabian Group. He enjoyed their bright company, and they shared their academic and personal difficulties with him, as also with Trekkie. But he was perhaps not wise in writing a check for £900 to help Julia and Kay to buy a cottage. He was also visited by an eighteen-year-old from Streatham who wrote to him out of the blue after seeing him on television. “In talking to you,” she wrote after her first visit, “I did not feel this terrible gap between the generations.” Leonard did not put a foot wrong. She might visit again if she wished, he told her; but the suggestion must come from her. She came again, and again.

As for the student protests of 1968, which affected Sussex as they did most other universities, “The revolt of the young does not disturb me. I think they have been doing the same since Cain killed Abel…We thought in my youth that we were just as much in revolt as people do now but we were against violence and, of course, we had not the same amount of publicity in those times.”⁴¹ What he did not agree with was the involvement of the academic staff: “Every reasonable person who has read history must agree that rebellion is in certain circumstances justifiable, but for professors and lecturers hysterically to encourage the young to use violence against the laws and the public seems to me very dangerous. Violence practically always begets violence.”⁴²

Leonard’s role as counselor to younger people was of two-way benefit: he felt privileged to be admitted into their confidence. He met Virginia Browne-Wilkinson in 1959, when she submitted a novel to the Hogarth Press, which he turned down in his uniquely encouraging way. They remained in touch and, in charge of books for the BBC’s “Woman’s Hour,” she came to interview him about his autobiography—or rather, she felt, he interviewed her, seeming to prolong the visit: “I’d like to ask you to come to lunch but I hate to be an incubus to…people under fifty.” And almost at once, on a postcard: “How about next Monday.”⁴³

Virginia Browne-Wilkinson’s lunches at Monks House became regular, and she sometimes stayed the night. Trekkie was never there on Mondays, and Jill Balcon, the actor wife of Cecil Day-Lewis, advised Virginia always to “go on a Monday,” without putting into words why. Virginia had the idea of having a bronze bust of Leonard in the garden, to balance Stephen Tomlin’s head of his wife. With his agreement, she commissioned a sculptor friend to do it. He sat for twenty-five-year-old Charlotte Hewer over four weekends in June 1968. Charlotte worked in the orchard, kneeling in the daisies, with Leonard sitting in a basket-chair reading. They did not talk much. She found him a good sitter, and as a person, “incredibly young” in spite of his old face. As an interviewer for the Guardian put it, “In old age his voice is dry, his gnarled face like an animated statue coming to life when he smiles.”⁴⁴

Though Charlotte Hewer already had a track record as a sculptor, she was earning her living as a gardener at Hillier’s Nurseries,⁴⁵ so noticed and remembered what was blooming in his conservatory that summer: white and yellow datura, gloriosas, jasminum polyanthemum, gloxinias, Scarborough lilies—and cacti in the greenhouses. The head was in cold-cast bronze, and Leonard was delighted with it. (A fiberglass cast went to the National Portrait Gallery in the early 1970s.)

Louie was diagnosed with cancer. She had an operation and made a slow recovery. (Anneliese West, for whom the Parsonses had built a cottage at the far end of their land at Juggs Corner, took over the heavy work at Monks House.) With both Trekkie and Louie away, Virginia B-W spent time with Leonard at Monks House. Lunch was tinned lambs’ tongues with salad from the garden, and on Sundays he roasted a shoulder of lamb, needing no help. They worked—he on the last volume of his autobiography, she on a novel in progress—and listened to music in the evenings. If he called her anything, it was “Dearest.” Only once when, with his back to her, pouring drinks for several people, he said: “Virginia? What would you like?” did she feel the frisson of the coincidence of names. It was not uncomfortable.

 

On 16 February 1969 Kingsley Martin, aged seventy-two, died in Cairo, from a stroke followed by a heart attack. Leonard received the news during a weekend that Virginia B-W was staying at Monks House. They went to Jim Bartholomew’s cottage to see the report of Kingsley’s death on television. (Leonard never acquired a television set.)

Earlier that weekend, he walked with Virginia to the river, and showed her where he had found the walking stick of the other Virginia, his wife. The younger Virginia asked him if he had ever wanted to marry anyone else. “No, no one else, ever,” he replied. “This weekend was an extraordinary sort of duet,” Virginia wrote when she got home. “Gloom, yes, but great pleasure going on steadily at the same time. Also it was very pleasant being there when you finished your book”⁴⁶—the fifth and final volume of his autobiography, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters.

Leonard agreed reluctantly to write about Kingsley for PQ. ⁴⁷ His partner Dorothy Woodman wrote to him: “He loved you, even when he disagreed most violently with you, and in the past few years at Hilltop, you gave him background and support and the happiness of sharing a real love for the garden and the Downs.”⁴⁸ They were both cat-lovers—Kingsley wrote a note full of feeling to Leonard when Troy, “the best cat I ever had,” died—and they were at one over campaigns for the preservation of the Sussex countryside. But locked into intimacy with him over decades of argument and exasperation, Leonard was as ambivalent about Kingsley Martin in death as in life. He did not go to the Memorial Meeting. With wry satisfaction, he said to Virginia B-W: “I once made Kingsley cry—at breakfast.”

 

He wrote even his last volume of autobiography fast, with little revision. All five were quite short; if bound together, they would hardly make a tome. In writing them he was, as Lytton would have put it, most utterly dans son assiette. He was released. He wrote in other books and in his journalism about ideas, issues and events. Where he had used his own experience, it was to make sociological points. He rarely talked much about himself, for that matter, though Stephen Spender wrote that to be with him “was to experience the very rare excitement of total communication.”⁴⁹ In a solicited puff for another’s autobiography, he wrote: “When a man writes his autobiography, he ought to give a clear spiritual X-ray of his character, and this is hardly ever done.” Leonard provided such an X-ray, although he did not suggest how much suffering he had endured; and his many omissions and elisions, invisible on the X-ray, were integral to his character.

Critics often complained about the digressions in his books, and the autobiographies were no exception. His train of thought always took the scenic route. He moved back and forth in time, following associations and connections to their conclusions before returning to the matter at hand. Anyone trying to make a chronology of his life by using the autobiographies would have a nervous breakdown. Aware that some readers found his manner too discursive, he justified his method in this last volume: “Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation…If one is to record one’s life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.”

The Journey Not the Arrival Matters was in essence an overview volume, apart from the grave, spare section on Virginia’s last illness and suicide. The one jarring note in the book was his harping on the points of difference between himself and John Lehmann at the Hogarth Press “in tedious and ungenerous detail,” as Julian Jebb put it in his review.⁵⁰ Leonard was nettled by John Lehmann’s own account in his second volume of autobiography, I Am My Brother. Both of them, as he wrote, were prickly characters. Because of the forward-looking digressions in earlier volumes, there was some repetition of material. But he broke new ground with breathtaking honesty when assessing the value of his life’s work: “I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing.”

The state of the world in 1969, he wrote, “would be exactly the same if I had played pingpong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda.” In his long life, he must have “ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work.” He acknowledged the “peripheral influence” of International Government on the establishment of the League of Nations, and of the two Advisory Committees on the political novices of the Labour Party. But no Labour government fully supported the League, or carried through the recommendations of the Advisory Committees, even when they were adopted as official policy.⁵¹ Injustice, cruelty, intolerance, tyranny “fill me with a passion of disgust and horror,” and he had worked for fifty-seven years to combat them. But when he thought of “the insanity of Hitler,” the cruelty and stupidity of Soviet and Chinese communism, America’s “stupid, unjustified, bloody and useless war” in Vietnam, the unending war between Arabs and Israelis, the brutality of apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia, “the ebb and flow of chaos and bloodshed and bleak authoritarianism in the new African states…I feel acute pain, compounded, I think, of disappointment and horror and discomfort and disgust.”

But he could never, he wrote, have disengaged himself from the real world and just cultivated his garden (though he did that as well). Somewhere in him was “a spark of fire or heat which may at any moment burst into flame and compel me violently to follow some path…contrary to the calculations of reason and possibility.” The “shadow of the shadow of a dream”—the dream of defeating cruelty and barbarism—was, he wrote, a good enough carrot to keep a human donkey going.

Yet his arguments in his books against war between states and peoples were always couched as appeals to reason. Similarly paradoxical was his affinity with the wildness of animals, with social deviance, with “madness,” all of them at odds with the “civilization” he sought to preserve or create. This is not so strange. Leonard’s sanity was deep enough, as his wife’s was not, to contain his insanity, most of the time, with inspired leaks and some messy spillages. The prerogative of “late style,” as Edward Said wrote, is to render opposites without resolving the contradictions: “What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity.”⁵²

In this last volume Leonard addressed his Jewishness, as the culture that made him what he was. “I have always been conscious of being a Jew,” he wrote to the novelist and critic Dan Jacobson in 1968, “but in the way in which, I imagine, a Catholic is conscious of being a Catholic in England…I have always been conscious of being primarily British and have lived among people who without question accepted me as such.” He had of course come up against “the common or garden anti-Semitism, from the Mosley type to the ‘some of my best friends have been Jews.’ But it has not touched me personally and only very peripherally.”⁵³ Yet there in perpetuity sits the Jew in the tea shop at Kew in his own story “The Three Jews”: “They do not like us, you know.” For the first time, in The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, Leonard acknowledged how much in his own character derived from his being a Jew. He had “the inveterate, the immemorial fatalism of the Jew,” who learned “the lessons of centuries of pogroms and ghettoes down to the gas chambers and Hitler. Thus we have learned that we cannot escape Fate…” Here again he is paradoxical. He had written a few pages back, apropos of his political passion, that he could never “completely resign myself to fate.” His interior dissonances were not different in kind from everyone’s, but they were demonically intense.

To work hard was another lesson “unconsciously inculcated in Jews,” almost as part of their religion. His father had absorbed this tradition and passed it on to him. All his life, he had worked “hard and persistently. I do not claim this as a merit, but state it as a fact. Both Virginia and I looked upon work not so much as a duty as a natural function or even a law of nature.” Thus Virginia became an honorary Jew.

What about “Nothing matters?” He wrote in this last book that, under the eye of eternity, nothing human was of the slightest importance. But in one’s personal life, “certain things are of immense importance: human relations, happiness, truth, beauty or art, justice and mercy.” And even though what he had tried to do politically was “completely futile and ineffective and unimportant, for me personally it was right and important that I should do it.” For Peter Calvocoressi, Leonard Woolf was “the only man I ever met who seemed to me to be right about everything that matters.”⁵⁴ When Virginia Browne-Wilkinson, towards the end, challenged him about “Nothing matters,” he turned to her and said: “Nothing matters, and everything matters.”

 

His health was good throughout the 1960s, apart from minor setbacks. On Monday, 14 April 1969, in disappointing weather, Monks House garden was open to the public. Leonard wrote “Ill,” in his diary that day. Next morning Vout, the gardener, found him in an armchair in the upstairs sitting room unable to speak intelligibly. Vout fetched his wife and Louie, and rang for an ambulance. Louie refused to allow the ambulance men to take Leonard away to the hospital. That was the last great service she did for him. Trekkie, as always on Mondays, was in London. She returned at once. Leonard was still in the armchair. He knew who she was, but could not remember her name, or his wife’s name. Over the next few days his speech returned and his memory improved.

He described to Virginia B-W, when she came to see him, how he had woken in the night, knowing that something had happened to him. “It was lovely to see you looking and sounding so much as usual,” she wrote afterward. “All the same, I’ve been thinking a lot about that unpleasant night you spent on your own.” She was offering, tentatively, to “sleep under your roof on the nights that Trekkie doesn’t. I expect you really like being alone to the extent that you are; but if now or in the future you decide that you need to have someone who could telephone for a doctor and for Trekkie for you if you were took bad, and that you were prepared to put up with a bit more company than you really like”—there was nothing she would like better.⁵⁵ According to Trekkie, who read this letter out to him, Leonard was “alarmed” and “appalled” by the idea of Virginia nursing him. “But I thought that if she would come for a night at weekends I could get home for a night’s rest and see Ian. So we wrote to her and said this.”⁵⁶

Whatever “we” wrote, Leonard himself typed a letter to “Dearest Virginia” (and posted it, unprecedentedly, in a brand-new envelope): “First I must say that whatever may happen your letter gave me intense pleasure and I can think of no one at this moment of time and my life who would have given me such pleasure by such an offer…But I am so fond of you and feel that you look at things so much as I do—if that is possible with almost half a century between us—that I can speak absolutely without any kind of glove, silk or wool, on.” He suggested her staying at Monks House on the weekends for a trial period of two months. “Whatever happens, I know that my feelings for you would not alter in any way.” He was improving, though his typing was “rather slovenly, like my brain.”⁵⁷ His brain was not so slovenly that he did not shrewdly advise her to rent out her weekend home in the Mendips for the two-month trial period.

He was able to walk in the garden. Once he insisted on driving the car back from a shopping trip to Lewes. Trekkie looked after him from Tuesday to Friday and sometimes on the weekend too, with or without Virginia, bringing Ian. (“I hate this house,” Ian said, bumping his head on a beam coming downstairs to supper.)

 

Julian Jebb was setting up a fifty-minute BBC TV “Omnibus” documentary⁵⁸ on Virginia Woolf, and wanted to interview various people—including, of course, Leonard, who was not able to take part. He told Julian Jebb he had jaundice, suggesting an interview with Louie Mayer instead: “She has lived in my cottage and worked for me for thirty-six years. She was devoted to my wife. She is a remarkable character and if she is allowed to get going is a remarkable talker.”⁵⁹ Angelica and Duncan came together to see him, after which Angelica wrote: “Why is the expression of love always so damnably inadequate? If I could have hugged you 5 times as much the other day it wouldn’t have been nearly enough…nothing is any good except the fact that one knows when one loves, and when one is loved.”⁶⁰ Quentin, Olivier and their son Julian came, and Quentin was able to read aloud to Leonard the early chapters of his biography of Virginia; he reached the mid-1920s.⁶¹

On 28 May, Leonard made a note in his diary for the first time since his stroke—“if it was a stroke”⁶²—in weak and spidery handwriting: “Work Virginia lunch.” Letting him know she could not come for one weekend in mid-June, Virginia wrote that she hoped his “gloom” would disperse. “It is certainly the most miserable complaint of all, depression.” Leonard could not read properly anymore. It was not a question of eyesight. He found it hard to make sense of the written word. The only person he wanted to have reading aloud to him was Peggy Ashcroft, who had made for him a recording of the last words of The Waves.

Virginia B-W corrected the proofs of The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, and found for him the title of the Gluck piece which was played at his wife’s cremation. When she was with him, she was unable to say what she felt on reading his account of his wife’s death, so put it in a letter: “One would have thought that it couldn’t be written about, but you have written one of the most moving and restrained descriptions of apprehension and grief that anyone ever has.” He told her that he had to “take his life in his hands to do it.”⁶³

Not much more than a year before, in April 1968, he had reviewed with undimmed sarcastic verve Cynthia Asquith’s “futile and frivolous” Diaries 1915—18 for the Listener. The novelist L. P. Hartley had written the introduction, and took violent exception, writing a letter of protest to which Leonard made a restrained reply. But now Leonard had to acknowledge that he could no longer write, returning Thomas Jones’s Whitehall Diary 1916—1925 to Derwent May, the Listener’s literary editor.

Aware that his mind was failing, he asked Virginia B-W twice to help him to end his life: he was, when it came to the crunch, a Woolf. She told the GP, Dr. Rutherford, who would not connive. Leonard asked Virginia to take power of attorney on his behalf. Wisely, she referred this to Trekkie, who took it on. Virginia, who could type, answered Leonard’s business letters—and, distressingly, earned Leonard’s and Trekkie’s rage by “tidying” the letters and papers in his writing room, which no one ever, ever touched. Even Louie was aghast.

He was well enough to write, or dictate, a letter to the New Statesman about Labour and imperialism which appeared in the issue of 13 June 1969. But in the last ten days of that month he was fretting about the £900 he had lent Julia and Kay for their cottage. Nothing further had been heard from them. Trekkie tried to sort it out, and the two young women wrote Leonard a desperately penitent letter.

In the same week he had a letter from Suzanne Henig, with whom he had corresponded generously: “Since there is so much I want to ask you about as I finish my book [about Virginia Woolf ], would it be possible for you to schedule our meeting for a little longer than the twenty minutes you gave me three years ago?”⁶⁴ Trekkie replied to this, as she did to Hugh Gibb of Dyak Films, who wanted a meeting about the film rights of To the Lighthouse, and to someone wanting a “chat” about plans for a film of Orlando. On 28 June the garden was scheduled to be open to the public. This was canceled. The last mark Leonard made in his diary—and it was just a mark—was on the last day of June.

 

Leonard had said one morning when Trekkie brought him his breakfast: “We must talk about things you do not like.” She brought to his bed the black tin box in which was his will. “It was then that I learned that he had made me his executor and residuary legate[e].” There was a will of 1949 and a will of 1959, almost the same except that in 1959 he made her sole executor and “increased certain legacies.” They discussed his leaving more to Louie, to Angelica and to Quentin. “He had left his brother Philip’s two daughters and his son (Philippa, Marie and Cecil) £500 each and that was to remain unaltered.” He had also left his niece Clare £500, which they decided should be increased.⁶⁵ He feared he did not have time for a whole new will to be drafted. Colonel Adams, his solicitor, suggested altering the existing will in the office, and bringing it over to Monks House for him to sign. Trekkie sat with Leonard while the solicitor read out to Leonard only those parts in which there were changes, and he signed.

The downstairs sitting room, once the best room in the house, had long been storage for logs and apples, like an indoor garden shed. But weak as he was, he could get upstairs to the little sitting room almost to the end. He only wanted to see Trekkie, the beloved of more than twenty-five years, and Peggy and Virginia B-W. Visitors were not encouraged to go to his room. Deirdre Bland, a Roman Catholic convert, managed to slip upstairs. She said, “Leonard, when you wake up, you’re going to have a wonderful surprise!” The apparently comatose man raised up his arm and said “No, no, no, no!”⁶⁶

He recalled, toward the end of his final volume, his father saying at Sunday lunch that as regards the rules of life, a man need only follow the advice of the prophet Micah: “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” Although, as Leonard wrote, he had never been much concerned with God or with walking humbly with him, he believed profoundly in the two other rules. “Justice and mercy—they seem to me the foundation of all civilised life and society, if you include under mercy toleration. This is, of course, the Semitic vision…” Learning, later, that the Greeks had added the vision of liberty and beauty, and putting the words of Micah together with the speech of Pericles in Thucydides, he found his own vision. The combination, both ethical and aesthetic, “gives to my feeling about what I call civilisation both its intensity and also a kind of austerity.” For all his faults and fears, Leonard Woolf had an integrity of which “intensity and also a kind of austerity” were the foundation.

He wrote in his last volume about death, recalling once more the puppy struggling in the bucket of water, and the dead Arab lying on the sand at the Pearl Fishery in Ceylon. “I watched Alice dying of cancer in Victoria Square…Only a day before he died, I went to see Clive Bell, dying of cancer, no longer able to talk, but, in the room where time had stopped, his eyes watching for death, but still eager to hear from me the trivialities of the living; I saw Virginia’s body in the Newhaven mortuary.”

What he felt each time, irrespective of his personal involvement, was “the primeval sense of time stopping, the universe hesitating, waiting, in fear, regret, pity, for the annihilation or snuffing out of a life, of a living being.”

 

In the house where time had stopped, the night nurse woke Trekkie at 4:15 a.m. on Thursday, 14 August 1969, to tell her that Leonard had died. Later, Peggy Ashcroft rang Virginia: “He’s left us.”

 

Leonard Woolf’s body was cremated the next day, the only time when both Juliette Robson and Peggy Ashcroft could be available in the immediate future. At the Downs Crematorium in Brighton, where Leonard had witnessed alone the cremation of his wife, those who loved him heard Juliette play a Bach cello partita, and Peggy read Milton’s Lycidas, which he knew by heart. Afterward everyone went back to the garden at Monks House.

Some days later, Quentin Bell wrote to Trekkie: “I have never been quite sure whether you realised how grateful Vanessa was to you for taking Leonard out of that appalling misery and into a long and lovely autumn…I think you ought to know it.”⁶⁷ Trekkie was grateful for the assurance. She buried Leonard’s ashes under the surviving elm—which later, like its companion, blew down in a gale. Leonard’s dog Coco was a casualty. She did not settle in at Juggs Corner, and was put down.