Friday 24 November, 2006

The writing life

Bernice wrote a post on the new Leonard Woolf biography by Victoria Glendinning and today Arts& Letters Daily linked to a review in the New York Sun.I read both with interest, and, indeed, the review a few weeks ago in the Guardian. In fact the Guardian ran a second review as well.

I began work on my third novel, currently entitled This Devastating Fever before I knew about the Glendinning biography, though I found out about it pretty quickly because her name was in various guest books around Sri Lanka when I went there last year. We were both following in Leonard's path though clearly her research was coming to an end, and mine was just beginning . Like all writers I thought I had stumbled over a wonderful and secret life (as his life, relative to other Bloomsbury figures, is). Ahh the hubris of the writer and all that. Of course it is actually wonderful for me to have such a wwll researched volume of his life now sitting on my bookshelf (and a very handsome volume it is too).

'This Devastating Fever' is to be a novel about the first four years of Leonard Woolf's relationship with Virginia Woolf (1911-1915) after Leonard's return from seven years in Ceylon. While these years were monumental for Leonard and Virginia personally, they were also globally, as the first World War began and Europe began to change irrevocably.

Leonard Woolf lived in Ceylon from the end of 1904 to mid-1911. While there he lived first in Jaffna, as a Superintendent at a Pearl Fishery in Marichchukaddi, was Acting assistant Government Agent in Mannar, an Office Assistant in Kandy and, for two-and-a-half years of his stay, the Assistant Government Agent of Hambantota. This final posting was Leonard's most senior, and also his most solitary. When Leonard Woolf returned from Ceylon he began to write the novel inspired by his experiences in Hambantota, The Village in the Jungle. Leonard began his second novel, The Wise Virgins in August 1912, during his honeymoon with Virginia and, inevitably, it encapsulates some of his distress about the sexual problems that had been verbally articulated before the wedding, but at this point became real. The Wise Virgins is a strange, novel, one which, among other things charts Leonard's feelings about being Jewish, feelings which were complicated by his own loss of faith, a loss that was not Leonard's alone. As Dadaist, Hugo Ball, put it bluntly of those years, 'God is dead.' But God or no, anti-semitism remained. The hero of The Wise Virgins, Harry, says on the subject, 'You can glide out of the room and I can't . . . I admire your women with their white skins and fair hair, but I despise them.' (Wise Virgins: 51-2) The misogyny of Leonard's alter ego, Harry, needs to be considered alongside Virginia's anti-semitic views.

There has been much criticism of Leonard, but he is also the man that is credited for keeping Virginia alive, and relatively sane for more than thirty years. I am in sympathy with David Malouf when he says, 'a writer certainly can't afford to have strong opinions in the writing. I think opinion is pretty much the death of thinking. And it's certainly the death of trying to understand how other people think and feel.'

Glendinning's biography was fascinating to me though, given my own interests I could have done with more on his time in Ceylon, and less on his political life in the Thirties. But that's just me. I did think that in her attempts to present Leonard as a good man (which I also consider him to be) she brushed over some of his considerable faults. She was also dismissive of aspects of Virginia's personality (such as the impact of abuse on the formation of her sense of her sexual self) in a way I found problematic. Hermoine Lee, Virginia's biographer, is the only writer I've read so far that neither dismisses this aspect of Virginia's life or makes it an explanation for everything about her.

As I've intimated, though, the research is terrifically impressive and thorough, and she's an enaging writer - sometimes much better than just engaging. Take this: 'Edgar was the brother Leonard liked least. His letters to Leonard in adult life were likes lumps of masonary hurled from an adjacent building.' Which is an entirely perfect and accurate description. She also has a good eye for the moments which indicate the masssive social change Leonard, in his 88 years, lived through and included is a letter from a spurned young woman (Virginia fans took to falling in love with Leonard after Virginia's death) which includes the phrase 'well when you stood me up three times running, well buddy, that was too much'. In which the slide from the Victorian to the life post WW2 is effortlessly and amusingly evoked.

Those who know me might be asking why all this talk of a third book when no second has been published. Well, it's not published, but it is only a thorough edit/redraft from being finished. So, hopefully Dharma is a Girl's Best Friend will be out by this time next year. This Devastating Fever is several years away.

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