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174 REVIEWS 1. THE ESSENCE OF BLOOMSBURY Leonard Woolf. The Journey not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography , of. the Years 1939 to T9T9. Lond: The Hogarth P, 1969; NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970. 35 s; $5·95· With Leonard Woolf's death a few months after he finished his autobiography , the last link with original Bloomsbury, except for that provided by E. M. Forster, has been broken. It Is fortunate that Bloomsbury has had its historian in Leonard Woolf. He was at once Involved in Bloomsbury's central concerns but was less Internationally famous, less controversial as an individual and cultural figure , less driven by his sensibility and the creative Imagination than some of its other figures. He was able to see the woods as well as the trees. The result is a recreation of a group of people and of an age in recent Intellectual history marked by both sympathy and detachment. The Journey not the Arrival Matters finishes the design begun In Τ90Ό with Sowing: An Autobiography of. the Years 1880-1904.1 Most obviously, the autobiography Is an Invaluable source book and firsthand account of Bloomsbury, its origins, its major personalities, Its affiliations, it affinities, its sympathies, and its Influence, by a witty and knowledgeable observer and participant. But the book is a personal revelation as well. In this volume the harrowing account of Virginia Woolf«s death is marked by the same poignancy as the descriptions of her illnesses In Beginning Again; It is the more heart-rending by Woolf's dispassionateness, as one senses the surges of pain beneath the quiet narrative. The wry and Ironic tone constitutes for me the distinction of this autobiography , though Woolf has been criticized by some readers for his apparent lack of passion and personal Involvement and for his refusal to be great. Like all long-lived individuals who were much a part of their time, Woolf spanned disparate eras, the London of Oscar Wilde and the London of John Osborne, England at her height of International power and wealth and the diminished and restless England of the 1960«s. Woolf was at the heart of one facet of modernism, which began as a revolt against Victorian cant and smugness in the cloisters of Cambridge in the late nineties and flowered Into the Bloomsbury which dominated the British 1920's and Influenced heavily, whether directly or by the restlessness It incited, the British 1930's. Impetus left Bloomsbury with the deaths of Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry In I932 and 1934, and its demise as an articulate Intellectual force coincided with the suicide of Virginia Woolf in 1941 and with the outbreak of world war shortly before. But the Second War would have wrought Bloomsbury's demise in any case, If for no other 175 reason than the fact that the era of the Independent Income was past. But Bloomsbury had already fulfilled Its original raison d'etre: its contributions to modern culture had already been diffused on an international scale. Its effects lingered In the novelists influenced by Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster (Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Angus Wilson, L. P. Hartley, Iris Murdoch, and more remotely perhaps, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty), In such organs as Encounter and the London Magazine (possibly even such a "liberal" journal as The Partisan Review). In "liberal" critics as different as Lionel Trilling and Cyril Connolly and Edmund Wilson and Irving Howe, In the welfare state Itself with Its assimilation of Fabian socialism (Woolf was a chief proponent) and of Keyneslan economics, In the establishment of the vestiges of an International government in the United Nations (Woolf worked tirelessly for the League of Nations), In the renovation of the art of biography (Strachey was central here, though Virginia Woolf s contribution In the Common Reader essays should not be discounted), In the assimilation of postImpressionist and abstract painting and the recognized Importance of the formal properties of painting and the other arts (Cllve Bell and Roger Fry were the leaders here), and in the emphasis on Individual responsibility and social conscience characterizing present-day liberal and radical politics. Through Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, through John...

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