The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (11 page)

Two events occurred in 1902 which brought Leonard peace of mind. He was elected to the Apostles, and he came to know the philosopher G. E. Moore.

The Apostles were members of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, better known as ‘The Society'. A secret society which had existed since 1820, it met behind locked doors on Saturday evenings, when essays were read and moral questions argued. Discussions were inspired by the ‘spirit of the pursuit of truth', and members were expected to speak freely and with absolute candour. To be invited to become an Apostle meant you were not only regarded as highly intelligent and intellectual, but fit company for an élite. At one time or another the Society included some of the best Cambridge minds. Fitzjames Stephen had been an active Apostle but his younger brother Leslie, to his chagrin, was never invited because of his prickly manner. Nor was Thoby Stephen, although Lytton Strachey considered proposing him for membership and later regretted not having done so.

Leonard and Lytton Strachey were elected in 1902. An Apostle remained one until he ‘took wings' and resigned, and the Society included men of all ages and repute. Leonard, for instance, continued assiduously to attend Apostle dinners after his marriage, provoking Virginia to refer banteringly to them as ‘the feast of the brother Apostles'.

In 1902 the Society included Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. Russell remarked, ‘It was owing to the existence of the Society that I got to know the people best worth knowing,'
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a view both Leonard and Lytton would have echoed. It was now they became friends with G. E. Moore. They sat at his feet, accompanied him on his walking holidays in the vacations, and absorbed his philosophy. His
Principia Ethica
became their Bible. His influence on Leonard was immense. Moore removed the ‘obscuring accumulation of scales, cobwebs and curtains' from his eyes and revealed, so it seemed, ‘the nature of truth and reality, of good and evil character and conduct', replacing what Leonard termed ‘the cant of Jehova and Christ' with ‘the fresh air and pure light of common sense'.
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Alas, the idyllic life did not encourage Leonard to work. He had been expected to obtain first class honours in his final examination, and he too anticipated a good enough pass to obtain a Fellowship but, in the event, his results were indifferent and a Fellowship became out of the question. He decided to spend a fifth year at Cambridge reading for the Civil Service Examination, but his feet were not yet firmly on the ground; his mind was still with the Apostles, and he failed to do the necessary cramming. The outcome was that he came 65th in the pass list, too low for an interesting post in the Home Civil Service. The shock of failure hit him hard and left him bemused. He toyed with the idea of teaching and even resurrected the childhood dream of becoming a barrister like his father, but he was finally brought down to earth with a crash by his elder brother Herbert – the ‘head' of the family, who had left school at 16 to work on the Stock Exchange and help out his mother – who told him sharply that he was now expected to contribute to the family finances. He decided to take an appointment in the Colonial Service and, applying for Ceylon, to his surprise and initial dismay, was accepted. In October 1904 he sailed from Tilbury Dock and landed in Colombo on 16 December.

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Cadet Woolf was posted to Jaffna in the Northern Province of Ceylon. The contrast between Cambridge and the parochial society of sahibs and memsahibs he now encountered was huge. At first he felt lost without his friends and the convivial Cambridge lifestyle, and clung on to his closest friend Lytton Strachey, writing him long letters about his new life, his despair and the physical and mental hardships of a colonial civil servant. In return he demanded every piece of Cambridge news and gossip. To his family, however, he wrote in an entirely different vein, and Leonard's letters home are chatty and full of interesting and amusing anecdotes of his life.

In his new surroundings, Leonard initially experienced a sense of
déjà vu,
as of returning to life at school. To be seen to be an intellectual was to put oneself outside the pale, and he had to hide his introspective and natural inclinations and assume the outward trappings of a ‘jolly good fellow'. He played a good game of tennis, which he enjoyed, was a competent bridge player, and he made himself take part in the evening ritual of whisky and soda and ‘British conversation'. Leonard possessed considerable charm when he exerted himself, particularly for women, and as he was young and presentable he was quickly accepted socially. He encountered no anti-Semitism. Arrogant, conceited and quick-tempered as he was, he kept his temper well under control and his often uncomplimentary opinion of his colleagues to himself.

As at school, work became his
raison d'être;
his old drive to succeed, which had been lost in the Apostolic heavens of Cambridge, returned in full force. He coerced the authorities at Jaffna to give him greater responsibility, and within a short time he had proved so efficient and reliable that his boss, the government agent, a man Leonard liked but considered lazy and indecisive, came to look on him as indispensable. When the government agent was promoted to Kandy he insisted on Leonard being transferred with him, which was very much to Leonard's benefit. Leonard continued to do most of his boss's work, working a ten- or eleven-hour day, seven days a week, with such conspicuous success that in the summer of 1907 he was promoted to Office Assistant to the Government Agent.

Leonard's outstanding abilities and energy attracted the attention of the Acting Governor of Ceylon, Sir Hugh Clifford, who enjoyed the climate and entertainment of Kandy and spent a good deal of time there. Clifford took to Leonard and used him on a number of important occasions. He was so impressed with his competence that he had him promoted to Assistant Government Agent to the Hambantota District in the Southern Province. It was exceptionally rapid promotion, after only four years' service, and it made Leonard by far the youngest A.G.A. in the country. The promotion, predictably, generated resentment among some of his colleagues. The Government Agent of the Southern Province, Leonard's immediate superior, for whom Leonard had little respect, considered him a ‘jumped-up' favourite, and was openly antagonistic.

In Hambantota, Leonard was solely responsible for the administration of an area of over one hundred thousand people. He was all things to all men: policeman, magistrate, judge, vet, adjudicator, customs officer, taxman, planner and keeper of the peace. The work was immensely hard and often dangerous; comforts were primitive; malaria, along with a range of other tropical diseases and parasites, was endemic. Leonard had to rely entirely on his own resources. He rarely saw another European. There were no railways and few made-up roads. He rode everywhere, and when on circuit his diet frequently depended on what he shot.

He fell in love with the country and became fascinated by the Sinhalese and their way of life. He set about improving their lives; opening schools, developing irrigation schemes, combating poverty and disease. He learnt Sinhalese and Tamil, and it became his passion to understand the people and the structure of their lives and relationships in the villages. He became so involved that he rarely recalled the pleasures of Cambridge, and his letters to Lytton Strachey dwindled to a mere trickle. His empathy with the villagers was remarkable strong, as the reader of Leonard's novel
The Village in the Jungle
will recognise.

Leonard's life in Hambantota was given over to work. Every day, from the time he got up to the moment he went to bed, was concerned with some problem. He exalted his work to a mania, and became obsessed with the need for efficiency, of finding the quickest, most methodical and economical way of tackling a task. He was determined to make his district the most efficient in the island. His pride in completing a census of the district and wiring the result to the authorities in Colombo before anyone else gave him immense satisfaction. He changed the way the goverment salt industry was organised, battled against rinderpest which was ravaging the district, and gained the reputation for being a fair-dealing if hard police magistrate. When he left Hambantota after three years to return home on leave, he had achieved much, and was held in high esteem by the administration in Colombo.

Success was only achieved at a cost to himself and the villagers. His drive for efficiency often became an end in itself. He allowed his impatience and arrogance to triumph over his humanitarian side; efficiency became the be-all and end-all of action. He was prone to trample over traditional native ways when they appeared inefficient and cumbersome and to replace them by Western methods. He played the ‘strong man' and often aroused resentment and dislike. More than one person complained to the Governor and asked for his dismissal. Years later, looking back on that time, Leonard admitted he had been ‘too ruthless – both to them and myself'.
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Leonard was never ambitious in the conventional sense of seeking high position, wealth and honours. He despised such aims. His drive came from wanting to be as perfect as possible in his work, and to be recognised as ‘best'. He believed, long before Hambantota, that he was more able than most of the Europeans he encountered, and towards the end of his service he was liable to show it, making little effort to hide his contempt. On at least one occasion he was rebuked by the Governor for writing rude comments on orders received from his G.A., and instructed to show ‘more restraint and discretion'.
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Three years of near-isolation from European life inevitably increased Leonard's introspective nature and his intolerance for fools. During that time he was a large fish in a small pond, and his word was virtually law among the natives. He loved them as children and came to understand them, much as he did his pets, and he expected the same obedience. He was beginning to assume the mantle of the all-wise dictator, but even before he left Ceylon he had begun to recognise this and question his role.

How could he justify governing another race? What right had an Imperial power to impose its standards on another culture? British rule kept the peace in Ceylon and brought progress to its ‘less civilised' peoples, yet was it morally right? Did he want to continue to rule over these people as proconsul? As a highly successful civil servant it was likely that when he returned to Ceylon after his leave he would be promoted to Central Government in Colombo and, in time, progress to Colonial Secretary or even Governor. The thought depressed him. He would have to mix, put on his carapace, suppress his arrogance, and adopt a ‘good fellow' approach to life. He would be expected to join in the social life of Colombo; tennis and bridge, billiards at the Club, the interminable gossip and ‘filth'. The prospect was unappealing. Yet he was reluctant to abandon the achievements of seven years and start afresh.

Leonard left Colombo on a year's leave on 24 May 1911 with a divided mind and a sense of uncertainty.

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He returned to the family home in Putney. Almost nothing had changed in his absence: there was the same surburban atmosphere, thick dark curtains, heavy furniture, the photographs and porcelain knick-knacks, his brothers and sisters joking and disputing, all presided over by his mother radiating ‘rosy sentimentality'. A ‘mixture of reality and unreality, of familiarity and strangeness'. overcame him.
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Sitting at the dinner table that first evening he felt claustrophobic and homesick for Ceylon. In his mind's eye he saw the large open room of his Hambantota bungalow, and heard the waves of the Indian Ocean pounding the shore below. The walls of the Putney dining room closed in on him and, for a moment, he thought to catch the next boat back. He felt unsure of himself, who he was or what he was doing there. He forced himself to concentrate his thoughts. He was home, the responsible Jewish boy, the good son who had proved himself and become a sahib, his mother's pride and joy; but the acclaimed Administrator of Hambantota seemed far off.

Cambridge and the Apostles were soon in the forefront of his thoughts, and three days after the homecoming he went up to Cambridge to stay with Lytton Strachey and renew friendships. Initially, Leonard was apprehensive, fearing he had changed and become a dull being, but Lytton welcomed back the friend who had been ‘absolute Lord of ten million blacks in the middle of the desert', with open arms.
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Leonard had not changed at all, Lytton declared, apart from his ‘long, drawn, weather-beaten face' and habit of speaking ‘very slowly, like one re-risen from the tomb – or rather on the other side of it'.
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He went to a gathering of the Society and immediately found himself back in the familiar stimulating environment he had left behind in 1904; the same friends, almost the same intellectual disputes. Leonard's gloom vanished overnight. He sought out his old acquaintances, including Moore, and was infinitely reassured to find them ‘unchanged and unchanging', holding to the same truths and values.

Leonard decided to forget his doubts about Ceylon and his future and for the first six months of leave give himself up to enjoyment. He spent a week walking on Dartmoor with Lytton and Moore, and three weeks in Scandinavia with his brother Edgar. The remainder of 1911 was a time of ‘unmitigated, pure, often acute, pleasure', such as he ‘had never had before'. Much of this pleasure came from his growing friendship with Virginia, Clive and Vanessa.

Leonard dined with Vanessa and Clive in Gordon Square on 3 July, three weeks after his arrival home, and afterwards Virginia, Duncan Grant and Walter Lamb joined them for coffee and talk. It was, Leonard later decided, ‘the beginning of what came to be called “Bloomsbury”'.

Leonard was captivated by what he found at Gordon Square. When he had last dined there in 1904 with Thoby and his sisters, the atmosphere had been formal and reserved. It was ‘wonderfully different' in 1911, freer, more friendly, less inhibited. Leonard felt immediately accepted, at once on intimate terms with the Bells, taken into a society, unimaginable in Ceylon, where people said exactly what they thought on any topic, be it literature or sex, and women participated as passionately and freely as men. Formality was banished, everyone was on first name terms, and kisses were preferred to handshakes.