Leonard Woolf

biographical notes, letters, memoirs, autobiography

biographical notes, letters, memoirs, autobiography

Leonard Woolf Autobiography – Vol I

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

politics, life, and literature – 1880 to 1969

Leonard Woolf is probably best known as the husband of Virginia Woolf, but in fact he had a remarkable life and set of achievements quite apart from his wife. He was a political activist and one of the founders of the League of Nations (which became the United Nations); he was a novelist and a journalist; and throughout the whole of his adult life he was a professional publisher, in charge of the very successful Hogarth Press, which he founded and ran successfully for fifty years.

The first volume of his autobiography deals with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.

You also get full details of all the property leases and house buyings of this group as it established its regular system of one place in town and another in the countryside. Some of his more inspired passages are his tirades against mysticism, religious belief, and any surrender to irrationalism. He has a seductively convincing underpinning to his philosophic position that Nothing matters, which he interprets in a non-passive manner – no doubt his own brand of G.E.Moore’s ethics, which he absorbed at Cambridge along with the rest of the Apostles.

Occasionally he’s quite humorous, and he is certainly a humane, rational, and honest man; yet he seems slightly naive in claiming that money is not really important – a claim contradicted by his obsessive habit of listing every penny he spent and earned throughout his fife. But these are minor human inconsistencies.

The next part (a whole volume in its original publication) deals with a part of his life of which most literary enthusiasts know nothing – his work as a colonial administrator in Ceylon. These pages include scenes you would not normally associate with this pillar of Bloomsbury: supervising floggings and executions; eliminating outbreaks of rinderpest; trekking through jungles; and issuing certificates for celebrity big game hunters.

He comes across as a thoroughly decent, intelligent, hard-working man, with a particularly sharp eye for the underdog and a love of animals which makes him an animal liberationist before his time. His experiences in Ceylon made him increasingly anti-imperialist, so he quit the service in 1911 and married Virginia Woolf instead.

He lived an astonishingly rich and varied life post 1912 (covered in Volume II) engagement with the co-operative movement, a gradual shift to the Left in political terms, and friendships with all the leading literary and political figures of the day – H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and T.S.Eliot. There are also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Freud (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald. He also provides an impassioned account of the political dark years of the 1930s.

Politically, he was a left-wing realist. He served on endless committees, fighting for causes in which he believed. Yet he realised that the people amongst whom he worked, and the mechanisms they pursued, were deadly boring. Unlike many fellow travellers of the inter-war years, he was also well aware that the communists (in Soviet terms) killed more people than they helped or saved.

He’s very revealing on the mechanics of running a small independent publishing company, and he presents the profits and balance sheets of the Hogarth Press with the very conscious aim of revealing what most other writers talk about but never confess – how much they make from their writing.

As an autobiography, it’s long overdue for a reissue, but in the meantime, the two volume Oxford Paperbacks edition offers the full text with good indexes. Leonard Woolf went up in my estimation as a result of reading this memoir, and I am looking forward now to both his collected leters, and in particular to the letters he exchanged on almost a daily basis with his ‘lover’ Trekkie Parsons.

See volume two of this autobiography

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Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: 1880-1911 v. 1, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980, pp.320, ISBN: 0192812890

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Leonard Woolf Autobiography – Vol II

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

politics, life, and literature 1911-1969

The first volume of his autobiography dealt with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.

This second volume covers his astonishingly rich and varied life post 1912 – engagement with the co-operative movement, a gradual shift to the Left in political terms, and friendships with all the leading literary and political figures of the day – H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and T.S.Eliot. There are also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Freud (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald. He also provides an impassioned account of the political dark years of the 1930s.

In the last part of his memoir, written when he was eighty-five, it has to be said that he rambles quite a lot, and goes over ground he has already covered earlier. But this does help to reinforce the tremendous variety in his life. He felt that all his political efforts amounted to nothing, and that the Hogarth Press had been successful because it had been kept small scale and independent. He’s probably a bit too hard on himself politically, and anybody with a CV half as long could hold their head up high.

However, this is not a memoir full of gossip or personal revelation. You would never know from this that his wife fell in love with another woman, or that he had a largely sexless relationship with her. Nor would you ever guess that for the last thirty years of his life he shared the wife of his business associate on a weekend-weekday basis.

See volume one of this autobiography

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Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: 1911-1969 v. 2, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980, pp.536, ISBN: 0192812904

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Leonard Woolf biography

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

lifeline, literature, publishing, politics

Leonard Sidney Woolf was born in London in 1880, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sydney and Marie (de Jongh) Woolf. When his father died in 1892, Woolf was sent to board at the Arlington House School, a preparatory school near Brighton. From 1894 to 1899 he studied on a scholarship as a day student at St. Paul’s, a London public school noted for its classical studies. In 1899 he won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge.

At Cambridge, Woolf became part of a youthful group of intellectuals who were elected to an elite group called ‘The Apostles’. The members of this group included Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Thoby Stephen, John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, who were students, and Bertrand Russell, who was a Fellow. These people eventually formed the core of the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1902 Woolf earned his B.A. degree but stayed on at Cambridge for a fifth year to study for the civil service examination. He left Trinity College in October 1904 to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. His professional progress was rapid. In August 1908 he was appointed an assistant government agent in the Southern Province, assigned to administer the District of Hambantota.

As part of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf met Virginia Stephen, Thoby’s sister, and twice proposed marriage to her. He was twice refused. Woolf returned to England in May 1911 for a year’s leave, expecting to return to Ceylon later. In July, however, he proposed to Virginia yet again, and this time she accepted him.

Partly because he chose to marry Virginia and partly because of a growing distaste for colonialism, Woolf resigned from the Ceylon Civil Service early in 1912 (as George Orwell was to do over a decade later). It was at this time that the Bloomsbury Group began to gain momentum as an intellectual and artistic force, and Leonard Woolf was at the centre of it.

In 1913 Woolf published his first novel, The Village and the Jungle, based on his experiences in the colonial service. This was followed by The Wise Virgins in 1914.

Like most other members of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf was a pacifist and an opponent of Britain’s involvement in the First World War. However, he was spared becoming a conscientious objector, because he was rejected by the military as unfit for duty.

With the outbreak of the war, Woolf turned his attention to politics and sociology. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and became a regular contributor to New Statesman. In 1916 he wrote International Government which outlined future possibilities for a international agency to enforce peace in the world. The book was incorporated by the British government in its proposals for a League of Nations at Geneva. Woolf was later active in the League of Nations Society and the League of Nations Union.

During the war years Woolf spent a lot of his time caring for his wife Virginia, who was then suffering extreme manic-depression. To provide her with a relaxing hobby they bought a small hand printing press in 1917 and set up the Hogarth Press – named after their home in Richmond. Their first project was a pamphlet containing a story by each of them, printed and bound by themselves.

Other small books followed, written by their friends including T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and E.M. Forster. Many of the book jackets were designed by Virginia’s sister, the designer and painter Vanessa Bell. Within ten years, the Hogarth Press was a full-scale publishing house and included on its list such seminal works as Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Freud’s Collected Papers, which were translated into English by Julian Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother. Leonard Woolf remained the main director of the publishing house from its beginning in 1917 until his death in 1969.

After the war, Leonard Woolf occupied himself more and more with political work. He became editor in 1919 of International Review, and edited the international section of Contemporary Review from 1920 through 1922. He was literary editor of Nation Athenaeum from 1923 to 1930 and joint editor of Political Quarterly from 1931-1959. Woolf also served during the period between the wars as secretary of the Labour Party’s advisory committees on international and colonial questions.

Leonard looked after his wife Virginia through all her periods of depression, right up to the point of her suicide in 1941. They remain a couple who typify the Bloomsbury Group through their personal lives and their prodigious creative output. What is less well known about Leonard Woolf however, is that the latter part of his life was no less radical at a personal level. Love Letters reveals the whole story of this extraordinary episode.

During the Second World War he began an affair with a painter and book illustrator Trekkie Parsons, who was married to a publisher – at that time on active military service. Leonard was 61, Trekkie 39. He wanted her to get a divorce and marry him, but instead she persuaded him to move into the house next door to her in London and she spent the weekends with him at Monk’s House in Rodmell.

When her husband came back from the war, their lives not surprisingly became more complex. She spent the weekends with her husband and the week with Leonard. She took holidays with the two men separately, and acted as hostess for them both. This arrangement worked smoothly for the next twenty-five years.

When Trekkie and Leonard were not together they talked through the post. Trekkie sealed up their correspondence, and it was only opened after her death. Linked by excerpts from her diary, the letters shine with details of daily life: of gardens and glow-worms, books and plays; of Leonard’s publishing and politics; of Trekkie’s struggle to balance her professional and personal life. This remarkable exchange of letters tells the story of two contrasting personalities, their love for one another and their unusual and creative domestic arrangement.

Among Woolf’s most important writings are After the Deluge (1931-51), a multi-volume modern political and social history, and his five-volume autobiography, Sowing (1960), Growing (1961), Beginning Again (1964), Downhill All The Way (1967) and The Journey Not The Arrival Matters (1969). He died August 14, 1969.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Love Letters: Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Parsons

May 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury’s secret love affair

Everybody knows that Leonard Woolf nursed his wife Virginia Woolf through periods of mental and physical illness, right up to the point of her suicide in 1941. What is not so well known is that he did this at the same time as being a full time journalist and author, a Labour Party activist responsible for the development of the League of Nations, and a successful commercial publisher in charge of the Hogarth Press. Even less well known is the fact that within twelve months of his wife’s death he began a relationship with a woman which was to last for the rest of his life.

Not that there was anything wrong with his forming a new relationship – but the woman happened to be married to someone else. She was Trekkie Parsons, an artist and book illustrator, and her second husband Ian Parsons eventually became Leonard Woolf’s business partner. The actual content of the letters is fairly inconsequential: arrangements for meeting; reflections on botanical matters; lots of endearments; the desire (on his part) for more contact; and occasional comments on their contemporaries. They had lots of shared interests – pet animals, horticulture, and even printing. He was after all an independent publisher, and she studied and practised all sorts of printing techniques.

Leonard is clearly the more enamoured: as a widower, living alone, he yearns for more time with her. But she warns against their relationship becoming passionate – using a form of words which would give anyone pause for thought: ‘I want you to love me you see – but not as an epidemic disease all covered in spots & then quite cured’.

When her husband was posted to France she went to live with Woolf at Monks House in Lewes (sleeping in Virginia Woolf’s old bed) – though it also has to be said that when Ian Parsons was demobbed in 1945 all three of them moved into the same house in London.

In fact for the near thirty years that their relationship existed, she split herself between the two men. She supported her husband in his business ventures and enjoyed their busy social life together. They were said to be a ‘well-oiled unit’. But she spent a large part of the working week with Leonard, and even went on holidays with him.

There is no evidence in the letters that her husband was at all worried about what was going on, but when Parsons started an affair of his own with his business partner Nora Smallwood, Trekkie was not impervious to jealousy.

The most amazing thing is that there is hardly a word in what they write to each other over a span of almost three decades about the oddity, ambiguity, or any tensions in their relationship. Even the footnotes remain silent on that score.

The question which anyone with an ounce of curiosity or a spoonful of blood in their veins will want to know is – was the relationship physically intimate? And the amazing thing is that there is not a jot of evidence either way so far as I could see – which makes it all the more curious.

The editing of the letters is quite scholarly. Whenever someone new is mentioned, an explanation of who they are is offered in a footnote. But there is little analysis or interpretation of events.

Leonard claimed that Trekkie was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He made her his executrix and principal legatee. And when his will was contested by members of his own family, these letters were adduced in court as evidence of merely a ‘literary and social friendship’. Moreover, Trekkie herself claimed (at the age of ninety) that the relationship had not been sexual.

If that is true, Leonard Woolf spent almost six decades devoted to two women, Virginia and Trekkie, with whom he had sexless relationships. It is no good going to his excellent Autobiography to discover more, because he is just as reserved about his private life there. One can only read and stand back, amazed at yet another facet of Bloomsbury life.

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Judith Adamson (editor), Love Letters: Leonard Woolf & Trekkie Parsons 1941-1968, London: Pimlico, 2002, pp.312, ISBN: 0712664734

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The Hogarth Press

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Hogarth Press 1917—1941

The Hogarth Press was established by Leonard Woolf in 1917 as a therapeutic hobby for his wife Virginia Woolf who was recovering from one of her frequent bouts of ill-health. It was named after Hogarth House in Richmond, London, where they were living at the time. Its first manifestation was a small hand press which they installed on the dining table in their home. They also bought two boxes of type, which was used to hand-set the texts they produced. Working from a sixteen page instructional handbook, they taught themselves how to set the type and print a decent page. What started as an amateur diversion became one of the pillars of European modernism.

The Woolfs have proved endlessly interesting as individuals and as central players in the drama of Bloomsbury. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to their achievement as publishers. But with ten years research behind his endeavour, John Willis brings the remarkable story of their success as publishers to life. You might expect a book of this kind to be not much more than a long descriptive catalogue of publications, but in fact he generates interesting thumbnail sketches of Hogarth’s authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus

He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press, as well as the minute details of its finances which Leonard Woolf left behind as a legacy of his administrative skills and background.

The press is best known for its fiction, but it also ventured into poetry – supported by a £200 a year subsidy from Dorothy Wellesley. But despite attracting many of the brightest young talents of the inter-war years, none of these publications broke even. The whole enterprise was kept afloat by its best-selling stars, who just happened to be the one-time lovers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West.

Leonard Woolf is rightly famous for his shrewd commercial judgements and his fanatical bookkeeping, yet the press also took on an amazing range of authors – from an unknown sixteen year old girl (Joan Adeney Easdale) to the ‘working class’ John Hampson (Saturday Night at the Greyhound) and arch modernists such as Gertrude Stein and Rainer Maria Rilke (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge).

What’s not so well known is that the Hogarth Press published a great deal on politics – from polemical essays on current affairs to substantial works of political and economic philosophy, particularly anti-imperialism and the promotion of internationalism, which was of particular interest to Leonard Woolf. A measure of his astuteness as a businessman was his publication of Mussolini’s article ‘The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism’ in 1933.

The Maurice Dobbs and the Sidney Webbs of this era published books and pamphlets arguing that Soviet communism offered a positive alternative to the nationalism and imperialism of the European powers which had led to the horrors of the First World War.

Their fundamental error, now more easily observed with the benefit of hindsight, is that they took all the data for their analysis directly from the Soviet regime itself, which we now know was based on lies, falsehoods, corruption, and deceit. They were bamboozled, and didn’t check their facts. Few escaped the God that Failed embarrassment – but Leonard Woolf was one of them, and he deserves to be more highly regarded because of it.

It’s interesting to note that many of the same issues which are being debated at the end of the first century of the twenty-first century were alive eighty years ago – educational reforms, anti-Imperialism, international finance, unemployment, and capitalism in crisis.

Willis’s account also features the strained and often difficult relationships which were created when Leonard Woolf took on assistants and partners in the firm – the best known of whom was John Lehmann, who had two periods of tenure. The partnership approach foundered because Leonard insisted on sticking to his independent commercial practises, and in the end he was proved right.

He was also right in his judgement that the English-speaking world was ready for psycho-analysis and the works of Freud. He took the bold step of publishing translations (some by friends, James and Alix Strachey) of the International Psycho-Analytic Library, as well as Freud’s Collected Papers.

This is a fascinating work which embraces literature, poetry, politics, feminism, international affairs, the mechanics of publishing, and a general account of cultural history in UK of the inter-war years – sometimes referred to as ‘the long weekend’.

There are three ideal audiences for this book: fans of Bloomsbury who want to know about one of its most productive enterprises; bibliophiles who are interested in a company which produced fine objects which were culturally significant but still made money; and cultural historians who might wish to ponder the significance of an enterprise which started out as a table-top hobby and became a major national cultural force.

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J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41, London: University of Virginia Press, 1992, pp.451, ISBN: 0813913616

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The Letters of Leonard Woolf

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

politics, life, and literature – 1900 to 1969

Leonard Woolf was one of the longest living (1880-1976) and the most distinguished members of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a writer, a publisher, a political activist, a proto environmentalist and animal lover, a loyal friend, cantankerous employer, and a devoted husband. What’s not so well known about him is that in fact he had two ‘wives’ – the second technically married to somebody else – who happened to be his business partner. The Letters of Leonard Woolf is a definitive selection from his voluminous correspondence, which begins at Cambridge, with letters to his lifelong friend Lytton Strachey, and fellow apostles G.E.Moore and Saxon Sydney-Turner.

The manner of these early writings is surprisingly arch, full of classical references and undergraduate Weltschmerz – though no doubt this reflects the turn-of-the-century social mood amongst such a privileged elite. All of this was to change very suddenly when after doing badly in the Civil Service exams, he went to work as a colonial administrator in Sri Lanka – then called Ceylon. There he plunged into the practical affairs of running the Empire – and making a big personal success of it. It’s interesting to note that the florid rhetoric of the earlier letters is replaced by a straightforward reporting of events, and a frank expression of his feelings. His fellow Brits began to seem like something out of a bad novel:

The ‘society’ of the place is absolutely inconceivable; it exists only upon the tennis-court & in the G.A.’s house; the women are all whores or hags or missionaries or all three; & the men are … sunk.The G.A.’s wife has the vulgarity of a tenth rate pantomime actress; her idea of liveliness is to kick up her legs & to scream the dullest of dull schoolboy ‘smut’ across the tennis court or the dinner table,

There are many interesting disclosures as he reveals himself to Lytton Strachey, his only confidant, who was 9,000 miles away. Woolf though that sexual desire was a ‘degradation’ – an attitude which casts light on his two later sex-free relationships. “I am really in love with someone who is in love with me. It is not however pleasant because it is pretty degrading, I suppose, to be in love with practically a schoolgirl”.

He’s also fairly unsparing in his comments on people who were later to become his famous fellow Bloomsburyites – though it has to be remembered that he had known them since they were all undergraduates together. On reading E.M.Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread he thinks ‘It’s …a mere formless meandering. The fact is I don’t think he knows what reality is, & as for experience the poor man does not realise that practically it does not exist’.

I detest Keynes, don’t you? Looking back on him from 4 years I can see he is fundamentally evil if ever anyone was.

When he arrived back in England on leave in 1911, is was with the vague notion of marrying Virginia Stephen, an idea that Lytton Strachey had put into his head. And marry her he did – even though Virginia refused to allow his family to the wedding and made it quite clear that she felt no physical attraction to him.

The letters are presented in separate themes which correspond to successive periods in his life – Cambridge, Ceylon, marriage to Virginia, manager of the Hogarth Press. It also has to be said that this is a rigorously scholarly production. Each section of his life has an essay-length introduction; there’s a family tree, chronological notes; biographical sketches of the principal characters, explanatory footnotes, photographs, and a huge index.

Writing as a publisher, there are some wonderfully humane letters to his actual and would-be authors, explaining the iniquities of the book trade. He was of course sealing with writers of the stature of Freud and T.S.Eliot. There’s also an extended letter to one of his best-selling authors, Vita Sackville-West (his wife’s one-time lover) which should be required reading for anyone who wants to know how the world of selling books works – even today.

He also had his finger on the pulse of the BBC and its patronising attitude to the public in a way that still rings true:

That the BBC should be so reactionary and politically and intellectually dishonest is what one would expect and forgive, knowing the kind of people who always get in control of those kind of machines, but what makes them so contemptible is that, even according to their own servants’ hall standards, they habitually choose the tenth rate in everything, from their music hall programmes and social lickspittlers and royal bumsuckers right down their scale to the singers of Schubert songs, the conductors of their classical concerts and the writers of their reviews.

Politically, he was spot on throughout all the tensions and ambiguities of the inter-war years. Anti-Imperialist, Ant-Fascist, and supportive of the Russian revolution whilst critical of the Stalinism which caused its corruption.

One of the most interesting features of his later life is that he spent more than thirty years of it in love with another man’s wife. She lived with Leonard during the week and went back to her husband at the weekend. The husband even became Leonard’s business partner.

This is somewhat brushed under the carpet by the editor. He chooses fairly anodyne letters to Trekkie Parsons, and you would need information from other sources such as their collected correspondence (Love Letters) to realise how serious the relationship was.

It was serious enough that Leonard made Trekkie his executor and legatee in a will which was disputed by the Woolf family after his death. It was in court that the revelation (or claim) was made that they were never more than good friends.

One wonders, and boggles. But the fact is that Leonard Woolf was a great letter writer – though always seeming to be writing with the public looking over his shoulder. His correspondence should be read alongside the magnificent Autobiography, but even then you need to realise that there’s more to the story of a person’s life than the tale told by its protagonist.

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Frederic Spotts (ed), The Letters of Leonard Woolf, London: Bloomsbury, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1992, pp.616, ISBN: 0747511535

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Thrown to the Woolfs

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Leonard and Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press

John Lehmann joined the Hogarth Press as a trainee manager in 1931 when it was in the full flush of its first success. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse had just been published, as well as T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land and Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude. This was to be the first of two periods of engagement with the Press, the second of which lasted until 1946. Thrown to the Woolfs his account of publishing and the literary world of the 1930’s is dominated by the figure of Leonard Woolf, whose own account of the Hogarth Press in his Autobiography confirms almost all of what Lehmann says – though they differed over issues of policy.

It’s a rather unglamorous world of working strict office hours in crowded basement rooms, with “a ramshackle lavatory, in which old Hogarth Press galley proofs were provided as toilet paper”. He was delighted to be mixing with some of the major figures of the modernist period, as well as the up-and-coming writers of the day. There are sketches of writers of the period with whom Lehmann dealt: Michael Roberts, William Plomer, and Christopher Isherwood, whom he introduced to the Press as the Great Hope of English Fiction (which people believed at the time).

He does his best to be fair to Leonard Woolf, and his portrait corresponds accurately to that which one gains from other accounts, including Woolf’s own:

Leonard himself was, in general, cool and philosophical about the ups and downs of publishing: his fault was in allowing trifles to upset him unduly. A penny, a halfpenny that couldn’t be accounted for in the petty cash at the end of the day would send him into a frenzy that often approached hysteria… On the other hand, if a major setback occurred – a new impression, say, of a book that was selling fast lost at sea on its way from the printers in Edinburgh – he would display a sage-like calm, and shrug his shoulders.

It’s quite obvious from his account that although he was being employed in commerce as a publisher’s assistant, to write adverts, promote sales, and check proofs, his heart was set on being a ‘poet’ himself. The tensions he felt with Leonard Woolf became more serious, and within two years of securing what he at first thought of as his dream job, he gave in his notice and left under a very dark cloud.

He then gives an account of his wanderings in central Europe, inspired by Rilke’s notion that “In order to write a single verse, one must see many cities” (not having read Emily Dickinson, it would seem). Much of this part of the story revolves around Christopher Isherwood and Lehmann’s efforts in publishing the collection New Writing. But in 1938, having made up with the Woolfs, he bought out Virginia’s share of the Press and rejoined it as manager and full partner.

The theme then becomes ‘How does one run a publishing company during a war?’. The odd thing is that despite paper rationing, despite being bombed out of its premises in Mecklenburgh Square, and despite having to transfer the Press and its business to Letchworth, sales rose, because of general shortages:

Books that in peacetime, when there was an abundance of choice, would have sold only a few copies every month, were snapped up the moment they arrived in the shops.

Priority was given to keeping Virginia Woolf’s works in print even after her death, as well as the works of Sigmund Freud which the Press had started to publish. Other writers whose work appeared around this time were Henry Green, Roy Fuller, and William Sansom.

However, following Viginia’s death in 1941, there remained only two essential decision makers on policy. Without her casting vote, the differences between them grew wider and led to clashes. Lehmann wanted to publish Saul Bellow and Jean Paul Sartre, but Leonard said ‘No’. There were also misunderstandings about income tax returns and the foreign rights to Virginia’s work.

When the final split between them came about, Leonard solved the problem by persuading fellow publisher Ian Parsons of Chatto and Windus to buy out John Lehmann’s share. Parsons was the husband of Trekkie Parsons, who lived with Leonard during the week and with her husband at weekends – so as well as sharing a wife, they became business partners.

John Lehmann eventually went on to found his own publishing company, and the Hogarth Press was absorbed into Chatto and Windus on Leonard’s death in 1969. This is an interesting account of their joint efforts – partisan, but reasonable and humanely argued.

For literary historians it’s an interesting account of English culture and letters in the 1930s and the war years. And it’s also a fascinating glimpse into the world of commercial publishing. Anyone who wants to make judgments about the rights and wrongs in the disputes between the principals should also read Leonard Woolf’s excellent Autobiography.

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John Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978, pp.164, ISBN 0030521912

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