Sherry Chandler

I have come to the late 1930s in Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf. Woolf was very active in Labour politics and perhaps you could even say he was instrumental in the establishment of the League of Nations. In the last half of the thirties, all that began to unravel as Hitler and Mussolini began their wars of expansion and their pogrom against the Jews. Woolf had “excoriated” the Treaty of Versailles as founded on “military guarantees, vindictive punishment, subjection and economic discrimination.” As he might have predicted, the War to End War turned out to be the cause of even greater violence: the Spanish Civil War—in which Virginia’s nephew Julian Bell was killed (he went as a ambulance driver)—Guernica, kristolnacht.

As they listen to Hitler rant on the wireless and see photographs of Jews being dragged out of their homes while ordinary German citizens look on and laugh, Leonard becomes more and more ill with a skin rash for which doctors can find no cause or cure and Virginia lapses in and out of “madness.” There is a harrowing description of a driving tour Leonard and Virginia took through Germany in May of 1935. They went even though the British government was asking British Jews to stay away because Leonard wanted to see for himself. They wound up on a road that turned out to have been secured for Goering to drive from Cologne to Bonn.

All along the route, the road was lined with Nazi storm troopers and singing children waving Nazi flags and banners with anti-Jew slogans. …They were driving with the sunroof down, and [Leonard's pet marmoset] Mitz perching on Leonard’s shoulder. When the crowds saw her they shrieked with delight all alone the route, shouting “Heil Hitler” and giving the Nazi salute—to Mitz and by extension her owners. Mitz saved the day, but it was not pleasant.

Understatement?

Heartbreaking reading, at any rate, the moreso when viewed through the lens of the last couple of decades. Frightening to think how easily neighbor can be made to hate neighbor — in Bosnia and now in Darfur and in Iraq. Depressing to think that the United States was the catalyst for such hatred.

Interspersed, little personal details such as this:

That August of 1938, T. S. Eliot’s wife Vivien was certified insane and committed to a mental hospital; “and Eliot never visited her in the asylum, where she remained for the rest of her life.” (quote from Lyndell Gordon, Eliot’s New Life)

Toward the end of Richard Taylor’s novel Sue Mundy when our guerilla has been taken and condemned to hang by a military tribunal that has inescapable parallels in the present, a tribunal set up to bring about a politically expedient execution, he remembers advice his father gave him:

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Leonard Woolf understood what Sue Mundy learned to his regret, that sometimes our own pain can be temporarily assuaged by inflicting pain on others, animal or human. It is a vicious cycle, one that Woolf fought against his whole life, personally and politically. I fear we’ll never learn to be kind.