Peter Washington
THE TIMES OF MR WOOLF
Leonard Woolf
By Victoria Glendinning (Simon & Schuster 530pp £25)

Social scientists have recently identified a distinctive type of modern male they call the Great Woman’s Partner or GWP, pronounced Gawp. Gawps are on the increase. Although they occurred in the past – Mark Antony, Abelard and Prince Albert spring to mind – their numbers are now multiplying fast as women become more prominent in public life. Perhaps surprisingly, given our reputation for chauvinism, Britain has produced more than its fair share of Gawps, the most celebrated twentieth-century examples being Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Denis Thatcher. Not far behind them in celebrity comes Leonard Woolf.

The crucial thing for a successful Gawp is that he should be well matched with his spouse. If you believe Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf satisfied this requirement. Of the other successful Gawps living with the strain of intense public scrutiny, Denis was (and Philip is) the firm-jawed husband of a strong and stable woman whose absorbing public career provided an outlet for her fearsome energies. Besieged by depression and what amounted to bouts of madness, Virginia Woolf, by contrast, had no public role. Instead she focused her enormous intelligence on her own mental life. Though her writing was, of course, a public activity of sorts, it was primarily an extension of that life, a startling dissection of the emotional and psychological struggles which put pressure on all her relationships. This only added to the strain on Leonard who coped with it magnificently.

Although he toyed with the idea of marriage to a straightforward English girl, Leonard seems to have been attracted to neurotic women. Life with Virginia was not easy (she was not slow to point out what an honour she was bestowing by accepting him), but it was certainly stimulating and their union was happy, if sexually unfulfilled. With complementary temperaments, they were well suited. They were also careful to avoid disputes over their respective literary territories. Despite attempts at fiction and drama, Leonard wisely admitted his wife’s supremacy as a novelist while she admired his executive capacities and depended heavily on his emotional support. Unlike many Englishmen – perhaps because he was Jewish – Leonard loved everything about women: their minds and their hearts as well as their bodies. As his sister shrewdly predicted when she warned him against marrying a stupid woman, enjoyment of ‘the female mind’ would be a vital element in his relationship with Virginia.

Glendinning’s book is meant to be about Leonard, not about Virginia Woolf’s husband, but this is a difficult stance to maintain. Would we remember him if it were not for her? The last hundred pages of this book, which deal with his life after her death, suggest not: however interesting for those involved, the events described make dull reading. No one would deny that Woolf was a distinguished and interesting man in his own right – and in many ways I prefer his books to Virginia's – but was he any more distinguished and interesting than many whose adequate literary memorial is a half-page obituary in the broadsheets?

That said, Victoria Glendinning has plenty of material to hand. Leonard lived to a ripe old age and kept himself busy. He belonged to the English middle classes in a period when they had self-confidence, self-control, unlimited energy and an Imperial role. Some ran the Empire, others criticised it. Leonard did both. He was by turns colonial administrator, writer, publisher, political organiser. Always left of centre by sympathy and intellectual conviction, experience in the colonies strengthened his views. The most interesting part of the biography, perhaps because it is the least well-known, concerns his time as an official in Ceylon. The milieu is familiar from Maugham and Orwell, and Victoria Glendinning brings it to life: cool bungalows in the hills, shacks crawling with insects in the hot season, both filled with stunted, inarticulate Englishmen whose frustration was matched only by their amazing powers of endurance. Here was existence in the raw, far removed from the Kensington houses where Woolf grew up. Intimate contact with the workings of Empire cleared his mind of cant. It also gave him a huge advantage over his Bloomsbury friends in that he had knocked about a bit and seen life: he was not precious.

The contrast with home could hardly have been greater. In Ceylon privilege meant hardship, responsibility and dreariness. In England it meant not only comfort but the most exquisite social and intellectual intercourse on offer, not least in marriage to a woman who was already acknowledged as a dominant personality in her formidably talented circle. Here again there is more than enough material for the biographer. Leonard’s friends might sometimes have been frustrated but they were the opposite of inarticulate. Laborare est orare say the Benedictines. For the Bloomsburys, to work was to write. The amount of paper they covered is daunting – not only novels but letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, plays, poems, pamphlets, theses: you name it, they wrote it. At the wedding reception for Leonard and Virginia, Clive Bell took time out to compose a letter explaining that he loved both of them. Very Bloomsbury. Though an unassuming man in many respects, Leonard happily produced no fewer than five volumes of autobiography, which one might consider to be four and a half more than strictly necessary. Unfair perhaps, as they make pleasant and instructive reading – but they do suggest that in his own way Leonard was no less self-absorbed than his wife and her friends.

Glendinning has a problem, in that most of her material is already well known – too well known, some would say. She sensibly turns this problem into an opportunity by presenting familiar characters and events from a new angle. By virtue of his marriage, Leonard Woolf was a central figure in Bloomsbury, yet he was also on the sidelines. Glendinning suggests that his Jewishness made him an outsider in the snobbish Stephen clan, though this can hardly have mattered much in a clique which consisted of self-proclaimed outsiders. More to the point, perhaps, Leonard was not ‘creative’ in the narrow sense that word has taken on (in part due to Bloomsbury influence). Like Keynes, he was primarily a man of affairs. Both were good writers but their medium was expository prose, whereas the Bloomsbury keynote was poetic, even musical. The group’s tone was intimate, private, feminine, its natural home the studio-boudoir rather than the office, its characteristic station the escritoire. Where the norm was set by Virginia and Vanessa, Leonard was bound to be some distance from the centre, however close his marriage.

I am not a fan of routine biographies which tread evenly through the years, least of all when they concern Bloomsbury, but this life of Leonard Woolf is a sound example of the genre. Victoria Glendinning always writes concisely and her densely peopled narrative is pointed and easy to follow. She has an eye for detail. Those who want to know more about English upper-middle-class life in the first half of the last century will enjoy her book, even if they no longer care much for what Saxon said to Thoby about Vanessa’s description of Duncan’s relationship with Clive. My own favourite character is Leonard’s dog, Charles, whom he took to Ceylon. Arriving by boat in Colombo, Charles immediately peed on a stranger’s clean white sarong, then vomited in the Palm Court of the Grand Oriental Hotel. As a comment on foreign travel, this can hardly be bettered. And he didn’t write a word.