19
Aftermath
L eonard Woolf left £157,732 gross. Monks House, together with 1 and 2 Stile Cottages, was valued at £24,000.
When Ian and Trekkie read his will, “Ian spotted that instead of the £500 each to Philip’s daughters and son, the clerk had typed £5000, and so the Will had been engrossed.”1 As the unaltered—or meant to be unaltered—parts had not been read out to Leonard by his solicitor, the error had gone unnoticed. The Parsonses asked Cecil and Marie, who attended the cremation, to go with them straight away to the offices of Adams and Remer, Leonard’s solicitors in Lewes, to hear the will read and have the mistake explained.
Quite understandably, Cecil and his sisters decided to take legal action to establish the validity of the will as it stood. They added a plea of “undue influence” on the part of Trekkie, the residuary legatee. According to Trekkie, she asked the solicitor “if we couldn’t just pay the £5000 to each and be done with it, but he said I couldn’t do that properly as executor because I knew that wasn’t what Leonard had intended.”2 She could, however, to avoid unpleasantness, have made up the shortfall between £500 and £5000 from her own inheritance from Leonard, as a personal gift, by a Deed of Variation.
“Leonard Woolf’s Will Disputed,” announced The Times. 3 The dispute ran on for two years amid backbiting, bitterness and suspicion—of a Queen’s Counsel being influenced in a London club, of malicious delaying tactics, even (on the part of those who had not seen the will) of the error being the other way around, i.e., that the clerk had typed £500 instead of an intended £5000. Probate could not be granted. Hamill and Barker could not collect Virginia Woolf’s diaries from the Westminster Bank. No legacies could be paid out, which was hardest on Louie Mayer; the money Leonard left her was for buying her own house.
The action taken in the High Court was “Parsons v. Hardman and Others (Sturgeon and others cited).” Philippa was Mrs. Hardman, the eldest of the siblings; Sturgeon was Leonard’s sister Flora’s married name. She must have come forward in their support. The day before the case was heard, they withdrew their plea of “undue influence.”
The solution was ingenious. In the High Court on 23 July 1971, the judge pronounced for “the force and validity” of the will, “save and except that sub clause 4 of clause 3 be omitted therefrom.” This was the sub clause in which the three disputed legacies were specified. In the will as proved, there is a blank space on the page between sub clauses 3 and 5 of clause 3. The dispute had been settled out of court, with Trekkie paying each of the three in excess of £500 but not so much as £5,000. Trekkie sold 24 Victoria Square for £8,000, paying Cecil compensation for vacating his flat, where as a sitting tenant he claimed a right to remain.
Monks House, its garden and land and the two cottages were also part of Leonard’s legacy to Trekkie, who hoped “that it might be kept as it was, with its contents, as Leonard and Virginia’s house.” She arranged in 1972 to donate Leonard’s archive—known as the Monks House Papers—to Sussex University, in return for the University buying the whole property at the probate value of £24,000. “The arrangement did not turn out happily.”4 The University sold off just the two cottages for £22,000. Some of the contents of Monks House disappeared or went on to bonfires when it was being cleared out. The plan was to let the house furnished to visiting academics and writers. Saul Bellow came, found it uncomfortable and spooky, and did not stay long. The garden lay neglected. Finally the National Trust took over Monks House, with an endowment from the University, and after renovation and alterations it became the literary shrine that it is today.
A second unpleasantness concerned, inevitably, old letters.5 In October 1972 the Berg in New York bought, through the reputable dealer Anthony Rota in London, a huge collection of letters, all in the same transaction. The seller was the daughter-in-law of George Pritchard, of the firm of solicitors Dolland and Pritchard. The collection included 425 letters from Leslie Stephen to his wife, eighty-four from Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, thirty-one from Vanessa to Virginia, and the remainder from well-known writers to Leslie Stephen, to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and a passionate love letter from Leonard to Virginia. There were also twenty-seven letters between Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, letters from Walter Lamb and Sydney Waterlow to Virginia, and from Moore, Forster and Keynes to Leonard. None was dated later than 1921.
Quentin and Olivier Bell read in the Times Literary Supplement about the Berg Collection’s great acquisition. How in the world had the Pritchards come by this extraordinary cache? They communicated their concern to Trekkie. She, as Leonard’s executor, explored further.
Lola Szladits, director of the Berg, had very properly inquired as to the provenance. The story was that George Pritchard died in July 1970, predeceased by his wife. Their son Patrick died soon afterwards. Mary Pritchard, Patrick’s widow, provided for Dr. Szladits a signed affidavit stating that the collection had been given to her father-in-law George Pritchard by Leonard Woolf. From the early 1960s until his death, George Pritchard kept the letters at his home in Caterham, in the unlabeled deed box in which he received them. No one had ever looked properly at the letters, which were not well-ordered, until after Patrick Pritchard’s death, though he knew about them, and had planned to “write a book.”
To the Bells and the Parsonses, such a gift from Leonard to George Pritchard was so unlikely as to be unbelievable. Ian Parsons took the matter up, working through the solicitor Michael Rubinstein, briefing him as to the improbability of letters between Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes ever having been in Leonard’s possession at all. (Lytton did send on to Leonard in Ceylon letters from Keynes, among others, though these would not have been Leonard’s to give away.) It was, surely, much more likely that the deed box had simply been left with George Pritchard in safe custody.
Rose Schrager, long retired, was contacted. Mr. Woolf, she remembered, often stored books and papers in the Dolland and Pritchard office in Mecklenburgh Square, and Mr. George rarely sent in bills either for storage or for legal work, even though Mr. Woolf constantly asked for them. “A long time ago, Mr. George did mention to me that Mr. Woolf had given him a package [sic] of letters, and when I asked, ‘What for?’, he seemed embarrassed and replied, ‘Mr. Woolf seems to think he owes me something,’ referring to the fact that he rarely made legal charges for work…I doubt if Mr. George had any idea of their possible value.”
Rose Schrager added that if any papers had been handed to Mr. George for safekeeping, “they would have been given to me to put away in one of our huge safes…and I would have made a note of it on the index.”6 Trekkie herself spoke to Rose in early December 1973. Unfortunately, Rose could not remember when Mr. George told her about Mr. Woolf giving him the letters. But she did remember something else: that Mr. Woolf cleared some papers from the basement and stored them “in a little room at the side of Mr. George’s room.”
The partners at Dolland and Pritchard argued that if the papers had been in formal safe custody, George Pritchard would have returned them when Leonard Woolf died. Michael Rubinstein replied that “It really is stretching credibility too far to speculate, in the absence of any known letter of thanks from the recipient,” that Mr. Woolf would have given Mr. Pritchard hundreds of letters “which it would seem neither troubled to look at.”7 But he was getting nowhere. He informed Dolland and Pritchard that Mrs. Parsons did not intend to pursue the matter, “but reserved the right to make public the facts so far as they are known to her.”
No suspicion attached to Mary Pritchard, who was at worst naïve: it was bad practice, and bad manners, not to consult with the family whose letters they were, about the proposed sale. In this she was badly advised.
There is maybe no great mystery. There is ample evidence of Leonard’s groaning distaste for old letters, and he was always hopelessly vague about what was where. It is possible to imagine a scene with George Pritchard reminding him of the deed box—left perhaps in John Lehmann’s former office—and Leonard, busy, preoccupied, telling him just to keep it, having no idea what was in it, in recognition of his generosity in not charging for legal services.
Leonard did not remember even the existence of the box in later years, or he would not have been puzzled, when James Strachey was collecting Lytton’s correspondence, as to the whereabouts of Lytton’s letters to him in Ceylon. The batch of Lytton’s letters in the deed box was the same batch as those of which he sent copies to Michael Holroyd in 1968; Leonard must have taken the trouble, some time before he stowed them away with all the rest in the deed box, to have them typed or photocopied. But is there any connection at all between the Berg cache and the old family letters Leonard gave to Vanessa in 1949, saying they had “recently turned up” in the office of Dolland and Pritchard?8
There have been speculations about sticky fingers. But simple explanations are generally the right ones.
Morgan Forster died in 1970. William Robson and Ian Parsons lived until 1980, and Trekkie Parsons until 1995. The two most disturbed of Leonard’s siblings outlived the rest. Flora, for all her frailty, lived—most of the time in Holloway Sanatorium—until 1975. Edgar, tranquil and cheerful in his extreme old age, died in 1981, aged ninety-six.9
The afterlives of authors, and the careers of those who teach or write about their lives and work, are made possible by the availability of material—which in the case of Bloomsbury was massive. “Bloomsbury books,” biographies and critical studies have proliferated. Virginia Woolf—as artist, modernist, feminist—is an iconic figure, studied in Women’s Departments and English Departments in English-speaking universities and beyond. The decades immediately following Leonard Woolf’s death saw a new and positive wave of feminism. One of its negative aspects was a knee-jerk denigration of the male partners of significant women. Leonard Woolf and the part he played in his wife’s life and death became topics for pseudo-scholarly speculation based on partial knowledge. He has been construed both as the nurturer and protector of genius and as the oppressor or the conniver in the death of genius. There is no reason to adumbrate all the theories about his role in the marriage. They are in the public domain, and some are what he and Lytton Strachey would have described as “very wild.”
There is a sense of something displaced in the more hostile interpretations of Leonard’s role in the marriage; whatever relationship is being described, it is not solely that of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. But as with all neurotic perceptions, there is a smidgeon of truth underlying the distortions, which makes them disturbing to read. A black legend and a golden legend can be constructed around any relationship, as around any individual, and neither can ever be one hundred percent true. All intimate relationships are freighted with ambivalences and projections. The more intimate the relationship, the more this is the case, since the importance and depth of the intimacy means the relationship has to carry a load which in other circumstances would be spread around. A black legend could easily be constructed around Virginia as a wife, based on her corrosive contempt for her husband’s race, his class, his family, his friends and the work that meant so much to him, quite apart from the fact that she would not, or could not, have sex with him. But that too would be a distortion. Theirs was a real marriage. As for Leonard, he could have been happier, “not if [he] had married someone else, but if Virginia had been other than she was.”10
Except in Ceylon, and apart, latterly, from specialist pockets of interest in International Studies Departments, his life, character and career have been hardly considered except in relation to his wife’s. Only the publication of his Letters in 198911 and of his correspondence with Trekkie Parsons in 200112 began to redress the balance. Readers of this book will have made up their own minds about the nature and quality of the whole man.