4
Taking Wings
L eonard finished his 20,000-word essay on Byron—his draft all crossings-out and insertions. During Christmas vacation 1902, he was “in the bottom most gulf, but I really think we are now completely sunk and frozen into an eternal depression. We don’t even seem to have enough warmth now to get up and spark a rage, for this time the term just faded out from melancholism into vanishings.”1
They were hooked on competitive depression, and a lot of what Leonard called “Let’s all be unhappy together.” “Sunk” was their word for feeling low. “Degraded,” and the associated “sordid,” was one degree worse, connected with excesses of drink or lust. (Though sex at this time was solitary or in the head.) They vaunted their modernity, but their melancholy—despairing inertia, heightened sensibility, disgust with the everyday, self-absorption—was essentially Romantic, shading palely into fin-de-
siècle decadence.
There was a perverse stimulation in exposing to one another the anatomy of their melancholy. It was a semi-literary pose in which they got stuck, and Leonard criticized, from an aesthetic point of view, its dynamic: “I don’t think you know,” he wrote to Lytton, “that there is never a crescendo when we write to one another. There are bursts of course from you of flame”—and, somewhat incoherently, “I remember some even fireworks—but as a rule it is a little black—don’t you think?—a little too much for crescendo of having nothing to keep up…well now I have nothing to keep up, I can go on growling or drivelling as I please.”2 His Byron essay had not won the prize.
A paper he read to the Society, on 9 May 1903, took as its text Plato’s vision of the cave where men sit as chained prisoners, thinking the shadows cast on the wall to be reality, when they are only phenomena. “Outside blazed the clear sun and the wide world of Reality.” Only the enlightened, in the cave, realize that they are seeing shadows, and only the very few who struggle up out of the cave into the light glimpse what reality is. “Reality” and the “real world,” in this scenario, mean the exact opposite of what “reality” and the “real world” mean for most people. In apostolic language, it was not only the shadows but the prisoners, the unenlightened ones, who were mere “phenomena.”
Leonard was, by temperament, interested in the world as it was, as well as in states of mind. The discussion after his paper ended with a vote on “George or George or Both?” One George was George Moore, in the sun outside the cave, on the heights. He knows the cave-dwellers but does not join in their struggles and competition. The other George was George Macaulay Trevelyan, down in the cave, and so concerned with setting things right among the cavemen that he has no time to think of the light up above.
Leonard’s question was: “Can we combine the two Georges in our lives?” He thought they could. Practical politics should not be absolutely divorced from philosophy. Should the George who is on the heights go down again into the cave? Unhesitatingly, Leonard said “Yes.” While philosophers remain outside the cave, “their philosophy will never reach politicians or people.” He was challenging the group’s aspiration just to “be,” disengaged from any interest in or knowledge of, as he said, “the Education Bill” or “the Rating of Ground Values.”
Leonard already saw it as an imperative, as he always would, for intellectuals to take part in what Morgan Forster in Howards End was to call “the world of telegrams and anger” and in public life. He described in Sowing how important the Dreyfus Case3 had been to “us,” seeming to mean his Cambridge friends, but more likely his family. The case, with its revelation of virulent and institutionalized anti-Semitism in France and potentially in England, was given enormous coverage in the Jewish Chronicle. “Over the body and fate of one obscure, Jewish captain in the French army a kind of cosmic conflict went on year after year between the establishment of Church, Army, and State on the one side and the small band of intellectuals who fought for truth, reason, and justice on the other. Eventually the whole of Europe, almost the whole world, seemed to be watching breathlessly, ranged upon one side or the other.”4
The Dreyfus case jump-started in twentieth-century European politics the role of the public intellectual, and the philosophical stance of (in the French sense) engagement, which became central in the 1930s, and with which Leonard Woolf was to align himself. He equated Dreyfus’s public vilification with the trial of Socrates and with Christ before Pilate. In old age, he felt that Dreyfus’s vindication had given Europe its great opportunity to line up definitively on the side of truth, reason and justice. Instead, there were “two world wars and millions of Dreyfuses murdered by Russian communists and German Nazis.”
There is no reflection of concern with the Dreyfus case, or any public issue, in the apostolic debates. It was not that they were incurious. They read widely and all the time. Leonard, the list-maker, calculated that in 1902 he read 121 books (unconnected with his degree course). A key novel for him was Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, a satire on the complacency, hypocrisy and cruelty of respectable parents, on the falseness of conventional religion, of public school education, and of maternal solicitude, which was “solicitude for the most part lest the offspring should come to have wishes and feelings of his own.” Hot off the press in 1903, it was the perfect novel of adolescent revolt. Leonard read Ibsen, Thomas Hardy—and Joseph Conrad, whose protagonists, with their high ideals, their secrets, their fears about failure and faint-heartedness, found a responsive reader in Leonard Woolf.
They read the later novels of Henry James as they came out, and became infatuated by James’s manner, talking and writing in the convoluted, allusive Jamesian way and seeing Cambridge through a Jamesian lens. At Trinity, Leonard wrote down verbatim conversations which seemed to him significant or amusing, and thought, when he came across them years later, that the tones and rhythms of Henry James had indeed infiltrated their talk and his manner of reporting it. These conversations do not bear reproducing (though Leonard did so in Sowing.) One was between the mathematician G. H. Hardy and another member of the troubled Gaye family, Russell K. Gaye, about their ailing cat.5
Another conversation which he recorded verbatim took place in May 1903, in the sitting room he shared with Saxon. (Neither Thoby nor Saxon, sitting by the fire, said anything at all throughout.) Lytton burst in and paced about, flapping his gown, half-speechless. “It’s reached the ultimate,” he finally said…. He’s going—and that of course will be the ultimate—to give me the names.” Lytton had just come from applying “the method” to some unfortunate fellow undergraduate.
“The method” was invented by Leonard and Lytton, and in Leonard’s words, from Sowing, “it was a kind of third-degree psychological investigation applied to the souls of one’s friends. Though it was a long time before we had any knowledge of Freud, it was a kind of compulsory psychoanalysis.” It took the form of relentless, probing questioning. The theory was “that by imparting to all concerned the deeper psychological truths, personal relationships would be much improved.” They derived their technique “partly from Socrates, partly from Henry James, partly from G. E. Moore, and partly from ourselves.”
Lytton, on the occasion recorded, had gone too far and Leonard told him so. “But the questions, I said. How could you ask them? Well, you are cruel. I call it sheer brutality.” But Lytton was exalted. “This has certainly been the most wonderful of all.”
Leonard and Lytton had already applied the method to Saxon, concerned and irritated by the way he had withdrawn from life “to protect himself from its impact and from the impact of persons, emotions, and things by spinning around himself an elaborate and ingenuous series of cocoons.” One evening after dinner in Hall they began their investigation, “and continued it uninterruptedly until five in the morning.” When at last the victim staggered off to bed, “we had successfully uncovered the soul of Saxon, but had disastrously confirmed him in the determination to stifle it in an infinite series of veils.”6
Yet he remained their close friend. Maybe the awful intimacy of the experience bound him to them, or he got some gratification from being the focus of their undivided attention. Leonard seems to have seen no connection between Saxon’s “cocoons” and his own “carapace.” The excitingly risky emergence from his carapace at Cambridge made him eager to pry off other people’s.
Shortly after Saxon’s ordeal, Leonard wrote to him (at the beginning of Easter vacation 1903) as “My dear Anne”—a nickname that he and Lytton used between themselves, but rarely to Saxon directly. “Are you coming to the Lizard?” If so, he must write at once to Yen How. (That was their private name for G. E. Moore, soon abbreviated to the Yen.7) Leonard added a sour postscript: “We decided yesterday that the only place for you is the Kensington Palace. A suite there where you could wander from one dreary room to the other leaving trails of filth-packets in your wake.” He never wrote to Saxon again as “Anne,” nor in this vein. Perhaps Saxon, for once, snarled.
Leonard was in Lytton’s thrall during 1903, lending himself to his friend’s merciless disdains, his infatuations, and to their joint and separate application of “the method.” “You are magnificent, supreme,” he wrote in a typically incoherent letter from Lexham. “You say ‘we’ brought it off, but it is surely you alone—you are on such heights in such flames this time, that I am, perhaps not dizzy, but certainly wonderfully dazzled…For it would be I thought darkness, a real ‘heart of darkness,’ pitch if not sulphur. What you say of him completely astounds me…That he grasped and was equal to it, lifts him mountains high—though I do doubt whether to the heights you at first thought—but after all your ‘discovery’ and you are the important thing, I agree.”8
This may be about Maynard Keynes. Lytton replied with equal obliquity and extravagance. It should be borne in mind, when impatient with this youthful silliness, that Lytton’s flaunting of his homosexual proclivities, and his triumphalism when he forced another to confess to the same, were in a context of risk. It was only eight years since Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment.
During May Week in the summer term of 1903, Thoby Stephen’s two sisters—Vanessa, who was a year older than he, and Virginia, his younger by two years—came to visit him in his Trinity rooms, where Leonard met them for the first time. In their white dresses and large hats, with parasols in their hands, “their beauty literally took one’s breath away.” It was an awkward occasion. The Goth was not socially adept. His sisters, for all their “astonishing beauty,” were shy and demure. Leonard, more than half a century on, in Sowing, fancied he recalled a look in their eyes “which belied the demureness, a look of great intelligence, hypercritical, sarcastic, satirical.”
Leonard, even then, was an object of interest to the girls. Virginia, in romantic and facetious retrospect, in a Memoir Club contribution of 1921 or 1922, recalled how Thoby used to tell his sisters about his Cambridge friends “as if they were characters in Shakespeare.” One was “a man who trembled perpetually all over. He was a Jew.” When Virginia asked why he trembled, Thoby somehow suggested that “it was part of his nature—he was so violent, so savage; he so despised the whole human race.” Most people came to terms with life, but “Woolf did not and Thoby thought it sublime.” Thoby told her about a dream Woolf had about throttling a man, and that when he woke up he had pulled his own thumb out of joint. “I was of course inspired with the deepest interest in that violent trembling misanthropic Jew.”9
Leonard told Lytton after the end of term that he had been in “a vague hell” ever since he came home, ‘and I only wanted something like this to make it definite.” For he had done worse in Part II of the Classical Tripos than he had in Part I. He was placed in the Second Class. (So, in their Tripos examinations, were the Goth and Lytton. Saxon had a First.) Now that he had officially left Trinity, Leonard’s exhibition money of £75 a year, augmented by £120 from a scholarship won during his first year, came to an end.
He was virtually penniless apart from what his mother or his elder brother Herbert could spare him. “I suppose in the end if you never get what you want, you even begin to care when you don’t get what you didn’t care whether you got or not…I want to get out into the open, not to be penned in this swamp of trivialities, having to think twice about spending a penny on an evening paper because one bought a shilling book hardly desired. Curse.” He envied Lytton his “infinity of desire”: “You have your crises and you feel them, your loves and your hates and your passions…I often envy you that, for I am, I feel it, so often a mere spectator with my hands in my pockets. You can’t love by desiring an extremely vague desire of a very vague moon.”10
What next for the trinity of Trinity? Lytton was trying for a fellowship. Leonard and Saxon decided to sit for the Higher Civil Service Open Competition. There were twelve examination papers, including some on subjects which Leonard had to get up from scratch, such as Political Economy and Economic History.11 Most candidates spent the year at specialist cramming establishments. Leonard and Saxon went back to Cambridge in autumn 1903 to study on their own.
That September G. E. Moore’s book Principia Ethica was published. The Apostles were bowled over, and obliquely flattered. For this was Moore’s own voice enshrined in print by the Cambridge University Press, Moore’s method of cross-examination, and Moore’s hard-won conclusions, just as they had heard them taking shape at Society meetings and late at night in college rooms. The long, agonized and agonizing silences, while Moore questioned a question, were mercifully elided, in print. The resulting impression was of striking, common-sense clarity.
The book is an investigation of the idea of “the Good.” Moore’s originality in this unoriginal quest12 lay in his concept of “good in itself”—unanalyzable, indefinable, an “intrinsic value.” His chapter “The Ideal” excited his disciples inordinately. Finding “the best state of things conceivable” to be inaccessible, Moore concluded that “By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.”
He stressed that the emotional response should be “appropriate”: if a high degree of emotion is directed toward “an object that is positively ugly,” the state of consciousness may be “positively bad.” His unquestioning assumption of consensus on what was beautiful or ugly was old-fashioned even in 1903, when the avant-garde was already turning away from conventional ideas of beauty and finding value in new forms. His stress on contemplative enjoyment ignored the pleasure and value of active involvement in life, and his asexual mind-set seemed to preclude the “intrinsic value” of any “state of consciousness” elicited by anything more urgent than affection.
Nevertheless, the Apostles—in particular Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes—pounced on this chapter in delight, disregarding the strictures on the unworthiness of “states of the body.” It seemed, said Maynard later in a Memoir Club paper,13 “the opening of a new heaven on a new earth.” The intrinsic value given to “the pleasure of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects,” which to them included beautiful people, exactly met their requirements.
The chapter “Ethics in Relation to Conduct” was less intoxicating to them. “What ought we to do?” Moore’s answer was, whatever is likely to bring about the best result for the world. A general observance of society’s rules would surely be “good as a means” of preserving civilized society; and the preservation of civilized society “is necessary for the existence of anything which may be held to be good in itself.”
To the modern mind, the phrase “civilized society” is in need of being unpacked according to Moore’s own method. (“What exactly do you mean by…?”) It did not seem necessary to Moore in Cambridge in 1903; nor to Leonard, for whom the ideal civilization of Periclean Athens was brought closer by everything Moore held to be “good in itself.”
Moore did concede that the neglect of an established rule, in individual cases, may sometimes produce a better total result. But rule breaking by individuals would tend to legitimize general rule breaking, which would be “disadvantageous.” Thus Moore came down heavily in favor of social conformity as a guide to practical ethics. That was no great problem to his apostolic readers, whose privileged way of life would suffer if the general population took it upon itself to upset the status quo.
In his summing-up, Moore allowed for more leeway for the individual to comply or not, specifically in the matter of chastity and family values. Here Lytton and Maynard Keynes saw another green light. “We were not afraid of anything,” as Keynes said in his Memoir Club paper. “We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules…We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom.”
Principia Ethica seemed to give permission for the complex web of sexual connections for which this group of friends became notorious. Beatrice Webb, in a letter of 1911, let rip about “the pernicious set…which makes a sort of ideal of anarchic ways on sexual questions,” setting a bad example to “our young Fabians.” And as for Principia Ethica, “a book they all talk about as ‘The Truth’! I can never see anything in it, except a metaphysical justification for doing what you like and what other people disapprove of!”14
Leonard Woolf read Principia Ethica in his own way and as a whole. In Sowing he rejected entirely Maynard Keynes’s “absurdly wrong judgments” about the nature of the influence of Moore and his book. It was just not true that they all became “rational immoralists.” One might have expected Leonard to respond positively to Keynes’s complaint that Moore left out or denied so much of human experience—the possibility of physical love as a “good,” the life of action, “the pattern of life as a whole.” But Leonard focused on the “tremendous influence” of the way that Moore “suddenly removed from our eyes an obscuring accumulation of scales, cobwebs, and curtains, revealing…the nature of truth and reality, of good and evil and character and conduct, substituting for the religious and philosophical nightmares, delusions, hallucinations, in which Jehovah, Christ, and St. Paul, Plato, Kant and Hegel had entangled us, the fresh air and pure light of plain common-sense.” Moore answered their questions with a voice more “divine,” wrote Leonard, than the voice of “Jehovah from Mount Sinai or Jesus with his sermon from the Mount.”
Leonard spoke for himself. The green light for him was for spiritual and intellectual freedom, and an end to his search for a transcendent metaphysic or religion.
Staying in Cambridge for this fifth year, he worked for five hours a day, played golf with Keynes and the Yen (who played with passion, and missed the ball a lot), and attended the Society’s meetings on Saturday evenings. He gave a paper to the Society on 31 October 1903, “Othello or Lord Byron,” voted on as “Is Sentimentality a Confusion of Symbolic Parts with Wholes?” Lytton (constantly in Cambridge on weekends) voted against, with the additional note: “No, a confusion of privy parts with holes.” Leonard’s paper was a diatribe against sentimentality, with special reference to a play he had seen, Little Mary by J. M. Barrie, with a female “phenomenon” who had been moved to tears and took offense when Leonard said the play was “thoroughly bad.”
Leonard’s Mooreian point here was the “inappropriateness” of expending high emotion on unworthy objects. His private fear was that he might never, in the world as it was, find a worthy object—a cause, or a person—to meet his desires and expectations. As he said in another paper, in February 1904, “The best things and the best people—and we must include among these our best selves—only exist in our imaginations.” Moore was in a similar predicament. He told Leonard privately, on an Easter reading party in Devon that April, that if he could only find “a female stimulus” who would lift him out of his wretchedness he would marry, “but he has given up hope, I think, of finding her.”
On 4 May 1904, Leonard spoke to the Society on “Embryos or Abortions?”—a meditation on the apostolic temperament, in which he made a vehement distinction between reality and realism. “Merely to give faithful descriptions of things as they are in the world is of no value.” He quoted Emma’s deathbed scene in Madame Bovary as a wonderful shift “from realism to reality”; whereas “to go as Zola does into a Paris slum and give a bare description of all the filth that he can see with his eyes, has about as much value as a photograph of a slum would have.”
Leonard, in this paper, envisaged a modern form of fiction which would demonstrate this distinction between realism and reality—the apostolic reality, a matter of perspective, universal truth, and the perception of links and connections between disparate happenings. (His future wife’s fictional aims and methods may owe something to his vision.) Writing, and how to write about writing, was his preoccupation. In an earlier paper,15 “What is Style?” he said that there was almost no worthwhile literary criticism “because of the vagueness of meaning attached to the critical words which the critic uses.” If criticism were ever to have any value it must become “scientific,” and substitute for “its present vague and meaningless vocabulary a definite technology”—another idea half a century before its time.
Leonard was no longer in thrall to Lytton, who wrote him an extravagant letter from the British Museum reading room while working on his fellowship dissertation: “If I say that you are the only person I can talk to, will you not be absurd in any of the million ways anyone else will be absurd in? I presume you are noble, I presume you will not imagine too little, or be horrified at too much, that you will understand.” Lytton felt like “a quavering tongue of fire, a mad ghost searching for a hand of flesh”—and so on.16 He was, as in so many of his letters, practicing arpeggios, with a basso continuo designed to check out whether Leonard was still prepared to play the game—which was to play, safely, with fire.
Leonard couldn’t do this anymore. “I wonder if I really understand,” he replied. “At any rate, what I feel is—I must tell you the whole truth—a little sad. Do you understand that? You never, I think, understood how a year ago I should have felt far otherwise—and a year is such a long time. I feel sad not for the present, but perhaps for the future, certainly for this absurd combination of the present and past, this silly malignity of fate. Do you understand?”
He urged Lytton to abandon the British Museum and come for a walk with him in Richmond Park. The harder you worked, “the more you want to copulate, and probably the more you ought to. I simply go about wanting to do nothing else. Only, unlike you or, perhaps like you now, I usually want it, when it is that and nothing else, with women. If it wasn’t for the paraphernalia [condoms] and their extraordinary foulness, I should work all the morning and engage a whore for the afternoon and copulate among the ferns.”17 He was still a virgin.
After the Civil Service examinations were over in August 1904, Leonard was to join Maynard Keynes and Charlie Sanger—an older Apostle, married, and a barrister—on a walking tour in Wales. Lytton begged him to come straight on to meet him in Cambridge afterward, even offering to pay his train fare. Leonard declined. “I have about £7 & that must last me till October at least and I expect I shall spend it all in Wales. I’ve also vowed to stay with [Leopold] Campbell in Surrey, which however won’t cost me anything as I shall bicycle there.” Lytton should write to him at Pwlleli post office, “but be careful [i.e., discreet] as it may get to the dead letter office and be opened.”18 On the way back, he lost his luggage on the train with “all the clothes I ever possessed, except a pair of ‘knickers’ [tweed knee-breeches] and a frayed shirt without a collar.”
A discouraged letter from Lytton which reached Leonard in Wales moved “my pity rather than my anger.” He reassured Lytton that he was “only in a trough,” and that “they were and are extraordinarily right” in their values.19 This elicited another extended verbal flight, designed to recapture Leonard’s heart and mind: “We are—oh!—in more ways than one, like the Athenians of the Periclean age. We are the mysterious priests of a new and amazing civilization. We have abolished religion, we have founded ethics, we have established philosophy, we have sown a strange illumination in every province of thought, we have conquered art, we have liberated love…Your letter was wonderful, and I was particularly impressed by the curious masculinity of it. Why are you a man? We are females, nous autres, but your mind is singularly male.”
Leonard was by no means the only one to whom Lytton wrote in such a way. He was increasingly intimate with Maynard Keynes, and perpetually in a tumult over attractive “embryos.”
Moore’s six-year fellowship ran out; he was leaving Cambridge and going north to live with his closest friend, Fred Ainsworth, who had a lectureship in Greek at Edinburgh University. Lytton and Maynard Keynes were taking over as the leading lights in the Society, and Cambridge remained the center of Lytton’s social and emotional universe, even though he failed to win his fellowship at Trinity. But Cambridge, for Leonard, was over. At a meeting of the Society, in Keynes’s rooms in King’s on 15 October 1904, he became an honorary member and “took wings.”
The results of the Civil Service examinations came out. Saxon Sydney-Turner was forty-fifth out of ninety-nine listed. Leonard Woolf was sixty-ninth.20 He had to break the less than good news to his family. His elder brother Herbert, as head of the household, talked seriously to him about money. Herbert had gone straight from school into the City, to work with a firm of stockbrokers. The family finances were worse than Leonard realized. He was required not only to earn his living but to contribute if possible to the home, so there was no question of trying to become a writer, which was what he wanted. The Bar was out of the question too. It cost money to read for the Bar. He could be a schoolmaster. As he told Lytton, “I have to rush about finding out whether people will allow their sons to be taught by Jews and Atheists.”
But like Saxon, he had an asterisk after his name in the Civil Service list, which meant he would be offered something, though not a plum posting such as the Foreign Office. Saxon was offered the Post Office, turned it down, and accepted a clerkship at the Treasury in the Estate Duty Office. Leonard was offered an “Eastern Cadetship” in the Colonial Service. “I shall probably get Ceylon,” he told Saxon. “I am going to have an operation on the scrotum:21 I shall not be allowed to move for 6 weeks. Amen.”
Ceylon it was. “I don’t know why one doesn’t commit suicide, except that one is dead and rotten already,” he wrote to Lytton. “I feel that, in a way, you are lost to me already…”22 (For all the differences and difficulties, he was closer to Lytton than to anyone in the world.) He gave a formal farewell dinner for Desmond MacCarthy, Thoby Stephen and Saxon Sydney-Turner. (Saxon had moved into lodgings at 37 Great Ormond Street—two furnished rooms, with identical oleographs of the same rural scene, one on each side of his bed—where he was to molder for decades.) Morgan Forster, the Taupe, came for a farewell lunch at Lexham. The Taupe was already publishing stories in the Independent Review, a Cambridge journal founded by Goldie Lowes Dickinson, and had started writing his first novel.
Leonard found this lowering. As his sister Bella well knew, her “dearest Len” would rather “cast in your lot with Literature with a capital L” than go to Ceylon. But if he felt he could commit himself to the Bar, she would pay the £40 for registration. “I have a serial ordered by Cassell’s23 for which they promise to pay me £60 and well, there’s my offer.” He could not accept. He was running around—so much for not moving for six weeks—buying kit for Ceylon at the Army & Navy Stores, and taking riding lessons. “My bottom is raw from riding,” he told Lytton, and “I am dressed in completely new clothes. My balls are in a suspensory bandage with four straps round my legs and hips, my calves in sock-suspenders, and my belly in a cholera belt.”
Lytton was in one of his emotional crises, “drunk and degraded” as Leonard irritably observed. But he went to Cambridge for a last weekend to act as Lytton’s “love surveyor and expert,” and to hear, with him and Saxon, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the C Minor. He went to Scotland for a couple of days, to say goodbye to his brother Harold, working on a farm near Aberdeen, and to the Yen in Edinburgh.
He also went to dinner with the Stephens, to say goodbye to the Goth. The lovely sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, were there. Their father had died the previous February, and the four young adult children had rented out the gloomy Hyde Park Gate house and took a lease on 46 Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury—at least as big, but light and airy—in order to live differently and as they pleased. Virginia was recovering from a severe mental breakdown. The evening that Leonard went to dinner, she was pale and quiet.
Leonard and Lytton agreed to write to each other once a week, and to keep each other’s letters. Leonard was taking all the letters he already had from Lytton with him to Ceylon, “under lock and key in the old cigar box. Do you think it is dangerous?” They were always worried about their correspondence falling into hostile hands.
But what they both had in mind, already, was posterity. When Leonard came to write about his Cambridge years in Sowing, he was nearly eighty years old. Thoby Stephen was dead. Lytton Strachey was dead. Saxon Sydney-Turner was dead. Clive Bell was dead. Maynard Keynes was dead. G. E. Moore was dead. Their names were and are famous for whatever it is that each of them became famous for. (Saxon is famous for being their friend. His is the name in a hundred indexes.) What Leonard wrote about Cambridge is discursive and impressionistic, and broken up by fast-forwards to what came after; the world he found there determined so much of his future. He wrote more about the Apostles than, in their memoirs, did any of his contemporaries. He wrote little about his inner life and, writing about his friends, he composed extended “characters” of them, in the eighteenth-century manner. The actuality of the young men that they were, with their curiosity and desire, their posing, their cruelties and infatuations, their immature authenticities, their terrible arrogance, is irretrievable. It was irretrievable to Leonard, at eighty. Only in the letters that Leonard and his friends wrote to one another, and preserved, can one get closer.
Desmond MacCarthy gave Leonard a miniature edition of Shakespeare, and a four-volume Milton. Leonard also had the works of Voltaire in seventy volumes. His fox terrier Charles was going too, but since the P & O Line did not carry animals, Charles had to travel separately, on a Bibby Line ship.
On the evening of 19 November 1904, Leonard was on board the S.S. Syria as it started out on its voyage to Colombo, Ceylon.