Leonard Woolf: A Biography, and: "My Madness Saved Me," The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Leonard Woolf: A Biography, and: "My Madness Saved Me," The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf Wayne Biddle Victoria Glendinning , Leonard Woolf: A Biography (Free Press, 2006), 498 pp.; Thomas Szasz, "My Madness Saved Me," The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf (Transaction Publishers, 2006), 154 pp. What is the big fat deal about marriage? My latest unscientific survey shows beyond reasonable doubt that everyone in the Western World over forty has been divorced, separated, never hitched in the first place, or is desirous of one of these categories. Below forty there may be some genuine experimentalists in Provincetown or a few real lovebirds among those punims on the Sunday wedding pages of The New York Times. ("Couples posing for pictures should arrange themselves with their eyebrows on exactly the same level and with their heads fairly close together," say the paper's instructions for submitting an announcement, as though there might already be a problem.) But it is safe to conclude that nobody on the planet is one-hundred-percent gung ho about matrimony anymore, besides the Pope, and he has never, etc. [End Page 174] Two literary connubialisms of the last century are wholly to blame for this sorry situation. The saga of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes alone could put any betrothed's plans on hold, though they were at least once young and hot for each other. Virginia Stephen and Leonard Woolf, however, had nothing going from the start. That each of these fun couples continues to fuel an industry of biographical analysis far beyond the edifice of writing produced by each individual suggests that marriage is still engrossing to many readers, in the way that authentic Russian roulette is certain to draw a crowd. Victoria Glendinning bends over backward to create a sympathetic picture of Leonard Woolf and the twenty-nine-year marriage that is the main reason now for remembering him. She works in the shadow of Hermione Lee's 1996 biography of Virginia, which she rather stiffly refers to, just once, as "public domain" when footnoting the source of some crucial letters. The Lee volume contains everything most readers need to know about the entire Bloomsbury universe, so what we get here is a great deal of bubblewrap about Leonard's heritage in the nineteenth century rise of British Jews from itinerant traders and small shopkeepers to middle-class professional respectability; his years at Trinity College with Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, and Thoby Stephen, among others; and his seven-year stint in Ceylon for the Colonial Service (a position he won by placing sixty-ninth out of ninety-nine takers of the Civil Service exam). He had wanted to be a writer or, distant second choice, a solicitor, but his elder brother, who had gone straight from school to a City brokerage, let him know there was no money in the family for either career path. As it turned out, the white man's burden in Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka in 1972) fit just fine on Leonard's shoulders. "They are, I feel, either Gods or animals," was his very first impression of the Sinhalese. As an obscure Crown Colony presided over by second-rate Governors self-installed at the top of the Hindu caste system, Ceylon was run as a lemon out of which the British squeezed every last drop. Leonard gradually climbed the rungs on the Escheresque bureaucratic ladder that arched over every aspect of life, doing all the things expected of him: humiliating Tamils who dared to expectorate on the verandah; screwing his head clerk's niece by the hour; supervising floggings and hangings; reorganizing an ancient salt-collecting society along the coast until it was so efficient that the natives rioted; financing new schools through the monopoly sale of opium; making sure all the local children received Union Jacks to wave on Empire Day; determining that the sacred Dalada Maligawa, the "Temple of the Tooth," enshrined not Buddha's but a big dog's; and entertaining the Colonial Secretary, Sir Hugh Clifford, said to be the inspiration for Noel Coward's song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen," whose many aberrations included greeting visitors while wearing nothing...