Beginning Again: An autobiography of the years 1911-1918.

137 Pages·1964·7.06 MB·English

by  Leonard Woolf

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BEGINNING AGAIN /1/'),'i:
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY .
OF THE YEARS
'9" to 1918
i
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
History and Politics
INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENT
EMPIRE AND COMMERCE IN AFRICA
CO-OPERATION AND THE FUTURE OF INDUSTRY
SOCIALISM AND CO-OPERATION
FEAR AND POLITICS
IMPERIALISM AND CIVILIZATION
AFTER THE DELUGE VOL. I
AFTER THE DELUGE VOL. II
QUACK, QUACK!
PRINCIPIA POLITICA
BARBARIANS AT THE GATE
THE WAR FOR PEACE
Criticism
HUNTING THE HIGHBROW
ESSAYS ON·. LITERATURE, HISTORY AND POLITICS
Fiction
THE VILLAGE IN THE JUNGLE
STORIES OF THE EAST
THE WISE VIRGINS
Drama
THE HOTEL
Autobiography
SOWING' AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE YEARS ,sso TO '904
GROWING, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE YEARS
1904 TO I9II
BEGINNING AGAIN' AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE YEARS
I9II TO I9I8
DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY' AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
THE YEARS 1919 TO 1939
THE JOURNEY NOT THE ARRIVAL MATTERS, AN
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE YEARS '939 TO '969
A CALENDAR OF CONSOLATION, A COMFORTING
THOUGHT FOR EVERYDAY OF THE YEAR
BEGINNING
AGAIN
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF THE YEARS 1911-1918
By
LEONARD WOOLF
The author and Virginia I 9 I 2
1972
THE HOGARTH PRESS
LONDON
Published by
The Hogarth Press Ltd
42 William IV Street
London WCz To Trekkie
*
Clarke, Irwin & Co. Ltd
Toronto
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
m any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recordmg or otherwise, without the
prior permission of The Hogarth Press.
First published I964
Second impression I964
Third impression I96 5
Fourth impression I968
Ftfth impression I972
BIB
<< =-u'~"-""
I< !1 o 4 5 j 3
ISBN 0 7012 0250 5
© M. T. Parsons rg64
Printed Ill Great Britain by
Redwood Press Limited, Trowbridge, Wiltshire
Sein Blick ist "om f?oriibergehen der Stiibe
so mud geworden, dasz er nichts mehr hiilt.
lhm ist, als ob es tausend Stiibe giibe
und hinter tausend Stiiben keine Welt.
His gaze from going through the bars has
grown so weary that it can take in nothing
more. For him it is as though there were a
thousand bars and behind the thousand .bars
no world.
RILKE: Der Panther
CONTENTS
Foreword I3
PART ONE
London and Marriage, I 9 I I and I 9 I Z I 5
PART TWO
The Years I9I3 and I9I4 84
PART THREE
The I9I4 War
Index
I' '
,I,
11,,
II!' ILLUSTRATIONS
1111 I The author and Virginia, I 9 I 2 Frontispiece
2 The Stephen family on the Facing page 92
brink of the workhouse:
Leslie Stephen, Lady Albutt, Mrs.
Stephen, Gerald Duckworth, Sir C.
Albutt, Vanessa, Virginia, Adrian
3 George Duckworth, Stella Duckworth, 93
J.
and W. Hills
Roger Fry in Greece 96
4
5 The author and Virginia at Asham 97
House, I9I4
G. E. Moore at Asham House, I9I4
Asham House, I 9 I 4
6 The author and G. E. Moore at Asham II2
House, I9I4
The author and Adrian Stephen at 113
7
Asham House, I9I4
8 The author and G. Lowes Dickinson at I44
Asham House, I9I4
Strachey and Yeats in the garden at Gower I45
9
Street, I 93 I:
Sunday afternoon at Garsington, I 92 I,
David Cecil, L. P. Hartley, Virginia, and
Anthony Asquith
'By courtesy of Mrs. Igor Pinogrado.lf'
IO T. S. Eliot I6o
The road to Telscombe: I6I
II
Spring, Summer
Autumn, Winter
FOREWORD
writing this third volume of my autobiography I have
IN
often been haunted by the lines from Rilke' s superb poem
'Der Panther' which I have had printed at the beginning of
this book. This volume is the record of my life during the
first great war and all through the war one felt that one was
behind bars, and now recalling those years it seems to me
that one was looking at the world and one's own life through
bars. But then another thought, a terrible doubt, came to me.
There are other bars, permanent bars of the cage of one's
life, through which one has always and will always gaze at
the world. The bars of one's birth and family and ancestors,
of one's school and college, of one's own secret and sinuous
psychology. Has not my mind, my soul, if I have a soul, for
the last 8 2 years been pacing up and down like the panther,
backwards and forwards, behind these bars and gazing
through them until, so weary, I have seen, not the world or
life, but only the bars-a thousand bars and behind the
thousand bars no world?
I have to thank the Public Trustee and The Society of
Authors for allowing me to quote Bernard Shaw's letter.
Part One
LONDON AND MARRIAGE,
1911 AND 1912
0 N Wednesday, May 24, 19 r r, I left Ceylon on leave
after my six and a half years there as a civil servant. My
leave was for one year. I sailed in the Staffordshire with my
sister Bella, who had married R. H. Lock, the Assistant
Director of the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens. Seventeen
days later, on Saturday, June ro, we arrived in Marseille. It
was a dull and rather dreary voyage. I like all voyages out,
for you sail into the future, the unknown, into a widening
horizon. And so all return journeys are somewhat depress
ing, even if you are on a year's leave and terribly eager to
arrive and be once more home. You are going back to what
you know-the horizon narrows. I feel that somehow my
youth ended on Wednesday, May 24, 191 r-though I was
already 3 r, l was a young man when I left Colombo, but
slightly middle-aged when I reached Marseille.
It was, of course, very strange and exciting to walk up the
Marseille street. What astonished and entranced us most in
our first view of Europe was the shops full of every kind of
chocolate creams; we ate them steadily on the long train
journey to Paris. I remember nothing of the France and
Europe of my journey home except the chocolate creams.
When we got off the boat at Folkestone, my brothers,
Herbert and Edgar, were there to meet us-they had
become strangers to me in six and a half years. And when we
got into a taxi at Charing Cross and drove into Trafalgar
Square, I felt at once, in the rhythm of the streets, that I had
come back to a new world. The world of the four-wheeler
IS
BEGINNING AGAIN LONDON AND MARRIAGE, 1911 AND 1912
and the hansom cab, which I had left in I 904, no longer out of the corner of his eye as a 'not I', a stranger acting a
existed. I felt for the moment like a relic from a slower age, part upon a stage. I always feel, from moment to moment,
for the life into which I was plunging out of Charing Cross that my life and the life around me is immediately and
railway station had a tempo clearly faster and noisier than extraordinarily real, concrete, and yet at the same time there
what I was accustomed to. I faced it with caution and reserve
is something absurdly unreal about it, because, knowing too
and some depression. well what I am really like inside, I cannot avoid continually
We drove out to Putney in a London summer afternoon of
watching myself playing a part upon a stage. This is the
perfect sunshine-I 91 1 was one of those rare. years, an result of observing oneself objectively. It has a curious
unending summer of the snakeless meadow-m. I 9 I I a psychological effect; it helps one, I think, to bear with some
summer which began in early spring and gently dred away equanimity both the ills one has and the ills one knows not of.
only in late autumn. In I 904 when I landed in Colombo .and If you begin to regard yourself objectively, you begin tp
walked round to the Secretariat, to report my arnval, find that what matters so violently to you subjectively hardly
through the sun and sights and sounds and sm~lls. of Asia, I matters at all to the objective you.
felt, as I wrote in Growing, as if my whole past hfe m Lon~on Thus it was that driving out to Putney on Sunday, June
and Cambridge had suddenly vanished, fading away mto
I I, I 9 I I, about 4 p.m. in the Fulham Road I suddenly once
unreality. And yet Colombo and myself walking in its dusty more became aware of a kind of split in my personality, of
streets were not entirely real; then and all through my years the I, the real I, sitting in the taxi talking to my sister Bella
in Ceylon I felt a certain unreality, theatricality, as if out of and my brothers, Herbert and Edgar, and of that other I
the corner of my eye I observed myself acting a part .. ~he who had already begun to play a new part in Scene I, Act I,
curious thing about my return to England was that, dr:vmg of a quite new play. Today, SI years later, in June, I962,
out from Charing Cross to Putney through the mechamzed,
I am still playing my part in that play.
bricked up sunshine of this London summer, I felt alm~st When we reached our destination, the house in Colinette
exactly what I had felt seven years ago in Colombo. My hfe
Road, Putney, the mixture of reality and unreality, of
in Ceylon, in Jaffna, Kandy, and Hambantota, sud~e?ly familiarity and strangeness, was bewildering. This was the
vanished into unreality; but London and myself drrv~ng same house to which my mother with her nine children had
through its ugly streets did not acquire any reassurmg migrated nearly 20 years before, when owing to my father's
reality. Out of the corner of my eye I seemed ~o observe death we became overnight comparatively poor. It was the
myself once more acting a part in the same complicated play house from which, seven years before, I had set out for
in front of a new backcloth and with different actors and a
Ceylon. On the surface very little had changed in the house,
different audience. the garden, and its inhabitants-except age. The furniture in
I was born an introspective intellectual, and the man or
the house, the pear tree in the garden, my mother, my
woman who is by nature addicted to introspection gets into
brothers and sisters, and I myself were all 20 years older.
the habit, after the age of I 5 or I 6, of feeling hi'?self,, often There we all were, the ten of us, all together round the same
intensely, as 'I' and yet at the same time of seemg hrmself
dinner table as we had been seven years ago and 7 years ago.
I
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