LEONARD WOOLF IN CEYLON – BY ANINDYO ROY (Professor of English, Colby College, Maine, USA)
Source: The Sri Lankan Anchorman
And there he was, this fortunate man, himself, reflected in the plate-glass window of a motor-car manufacturer in Victoria street. All India lay behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera; a district twice as big as Ireland; decisions he had come to alone – (Mrs Dalloway 71-72).
Captured in Peter Walsh’s reflection on this silvery surface of the plate glass is the self-image of a colonial man. Appearing in Virginia Woolf’s famous novel Mrs Dalloway, Peter is modeled after her own husband Leonard Woolf. Most readers in Sri Lanka know Leonard Woolf as the man who authored The Village in the Jungle, a novel unique in its intense dramatization of rural life in colonial Ceylon during the early years of the twentieth century. Leonard Woolf, of course, is more famous among literary circles for being the husband of the great English modernist writer, Virginia Woolf, with whom he set up the Hogarth Press that was responsible for not only publishing many of Virginia Woolf’s experimental fiction but also T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. As an important member of Britain newly founded Labor Party, he also played a key role in the establishment of the League of Nations that was later to evolve into the United Nations.
Woolf was intimate with many of Britain’s Bloomsbury Group, many of whom were writers, artists, art historians, economists and mathematicians. In October 1904, after completing his Cambridge education but failing to qualify for the coveted Indian Civil Services, Leonard Woolf had accepted a cadetship in the Senior Crown Colony of Ceylon. From 1904 to 1911 he was to serve in various capacities as a colonial administrator – in Jaffna in north-west Ceylon where he was temporary replacement for a magistrate and police officer, undertaking emergency measures for famine relief; in Kandy, where, as an Office-Assistant, he was involved in the sale and settlement of Crown land as well as managing labor problems of English tea planters; in Hambantota, a remote district in South-East Ceylon, where at the age of twenty seven, he was promoted to the virtually independent post of Assistant Government agent. In addition to keeping an official diary, as mandated in 1808 by the then Governor, Sir Thomas Maitland, in which he noted in meticulous detail his public duties, Woolf corresponded regularly with his friend Lytton Strachey.
It’s true that Leonard Woolf’s reputation as writer has been overshadowed by that of his more famous wife, Virginia Woolf. Only recently has there been an interest in his fictional writings, including his letters, signified by the publication of a series of scholarly articles, including Christopher Ondaatje’s book, Woolf in Ceylon.
Woolf first started corresponding with Lytton Strachey in January 1905 and continued writing to him until 1909, after which his letters grew progressively infrequent. To the modern reader, these letters bear evidence to a whole range of personal emotions that continued to be generated by the various kinds of duties he undertook as a public administrator of the British Empire, which he articulated with a rare sense of intimacy, anger, provocation, confusion and reticence. Fredrick Spotts has put together and edited a volume of those letters, which now provides a valuable resource for re-assessing Leonard Woolf as modern writer of great power and relevance.
In his letter of 25 November 1908 written to Strachey from Ceylon, Woolf refers back to a “hanging” incident:
I had to go to see four men hanged one morning. They were hanged two by two. I have a strong stomach but at best it is a horrible performance. I go to the cells & read over the warrant of execution & ask them whether they have anything to say. They nearly always say no. Then they are led out clothed in white, with curious white hats on their heads which at the last moment are drawn down to hide their faces. They are led up on to the scaffold & the ropes are placed around their necks. I have (in Kandy) to stand on a sort of verandah where I can actually see the man hanged. The signal has to be given by me. The first two were hanged all right but they gave one of the second too big a drop or something went wrong. The man’s head was practically torn from his body & there was a great jet of blood which went up about 3 or 4 feet high, covering the gallows and priest who stands praying on the steps. (Woolf, Letters 133)
Personal memory, which shapes and animates much of modernist writing, becomes part of Woolf’s own consciousness of his public role that he begins to record in his letter of 25 November 1908: “As I suppose you know I am everything here: policeman, magistrate, judge & publican” (Woolf, Letters 141).
The spectacle of the hanged man reveals the way in which an individual like Woolf had been “accommodated” to the Law put in place by the Empire. There’s a kind of symbolic enactment of law here: in order to function as Law, the “criminal” be turned into an anonymous object – with his face covered by the hat being drawn down over it – and that the agent of Law – Woolf himself – be present as a witness to its action and to give the final “signal.”
Reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s description of the technology of penal semiotics which he elaborates in Discipline and Punish, the scene also gestures towards the modern technology of colonial power which “combines the idea of the social contract with the theory of representation and a principle of utility.” It is assumed that the criminal is being punished for having broken the law, and that his punishment attests to both the terrible power of the State and to his quiet willingness to present his own body for a spectacle that necessitated the witnessing presence of the supervisor.
Although physically placed at a safe distance from where he escapes being drenched by the prisoner’s blood, Woolf is haunted by the memory of that scene.
The kind of trauma registered in that memory appears to have its origin in the “efficient” functioning of the colonial machine that Woolf served. Kafkaesque in its presentation of the workings of this machine, this scene links the machine to the operation of law and justice. This is highlighted by Woolf through a deft narrative turn: linked to the staging of the entire scene — from the criminals being “led out clothed in white,” to ropes being placed around their necks, to the giving of the signal, to the bodies dropping, and to the unexpected streaming of the blood — reveals the “gap” in the order of efficiency.
For Woolf, what had seemed to be a “clean act” turns otherwise: as the blood streams out, spills over and drenches the priest standing nearby, it rips open the veneer of methodological precision with which the law operated. The tearing of the man’s head from his body and the subsequent drenching of the gallows and the priest by his blood forces a form of visibility from which the agent of law himself cannot escape (although he remains untainted by the actual blood).
This, then, is the kind of prose that one often associates with great modernist writing, a prose that weaves together through the power of language the traces of memory, trauma, and history.
