The Death of Sweet Reason

DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY by Leonard Woolf. 259 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.95.

In a famous verse, Yeats diagnosed his age as a time when the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity. In this spirit, Leonard Woolf, British Lib-Lab intellectual, publisher, politician and husband of Novelist Virginia, has written the fourth installment of his autobiography. Its value as a document of an age and a class grows with each volume.

Woolf writes of the death of sweet reason that afflicted the Western world during and between the two world wars. The title of this book refers to the Gadarene swine in the Bible, who were possessed of evil spirits and, according to St. Luke, "ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked." The swine, as Woolf sees it, were the Tories and ultranationalists who brought on the first World War, and the fascists and Communists whose fanaticism and civic savagery made a shambles of the peace.

Woolf's confident equation of his own "erosion"--he is now 86--with the decline of the West has an endearing arrogance. Yet there is much to excuse his consciousness of belonging to an elite. It is this consciousness, in fact, that raises his book from being merely an insider's memoir of the liberal British intelligentsia--although on this level alone it is very highly readable. It is still amusing to hear, in Woolf's tone of melancholy malice, how "Tom" Eliot confessed that he had "behaved like a priggish, pompous little ass" on a weekend. And it is still poignant to learn that Sigmund Freud, ravaged by terminal cancer of the mouth and giving the appearance of "a half-extinct volcano," presented Virginia Woolf with a flower.

Detachment. As a publisher, Woolf doggedly stuck to his belief that he could print only the best work and still make money. It was not easy. He and his wife were poor until Virginia's novels began to sell, as well as the works of other distinguished authors on his list: Eliot, Auden and Freud (24 volumes in English). It was an exemplary publishing career, but on the personal level Woolf is a singularly jejune autobiographer. The record of a suicide is always painful, but a curious detachment in Woolf's character leads him to describe the series of crippling psychotic episodes that led Virginia Woolf in 1941 to drown herself as if he were her doctor, not her husband.

Dispassionately, he records that social and intellectual snobbery was her worst defect, and he notes with a stranger's eye "a streak of incongruous archness in her humor which is almost ladylike and very disconcerting." Woolf mentions friendships, but the reader feels no warmth. He writes most affectionately of a marmoset named Mitz (the gift of a Rothschild), which rode on his shoulder on a tour of Hitler's Germany. The monkey stole the show and distracted the Brownshirts from Woolf's culpable Jewishness.

Defeats. His tireless public career as Labor candidate for Parliament, as assiduous sitter on committees, is the record of one defeat after another. Nobody would listen--even when, as adviser to the Labor Party on foreign affairs, he tried in 1938 to muster the party to support rearmament against Hitler. Nobody, Woolf complains, read his three-volume treatise on politics.

He never seems to have understood the status of the intellectual in British public life. The Establishment has always maintained a sort of marsupial arrangement with members of the intelligentsia. From his well-padded pouch, the infant marsupial may complain about the accommodation and the direction the parent in power may be taking, but that is about all.

At Cambridge, Woolf was one of the "Apostles"--a tiny, self-perpetuating club that once included Bertrand Russell. Later he was a charter member of the group known to the public as "Bloomsbury" and to itself as "the Memoir Club." They read their own memoirs to each other. It lasted for 36 years but of its members, only John Maynard Keynes seems to have had any great influence on the course of events. It was "the worst, full of passionate intensity," who, as Woolf sees it, overwhelmed the rational world of the Apostles and Bloomsbury. "Catholics, Communists, Rosicrucians and Adventists"--Woolf herds all passionate believers into one nasty pen. He never seems to have asked himself whether it is rational to expect men to behave rationally. Must it be true that a believer is a barbarian? Surely the question is not the act of belief, but what is believed in.

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