Leonard Woolf: Coming to London

At the end of his memoir, “Leonard Woolf: Coming to London,” Woolf wrote, “I do not propose to say anything about either, because, as Montaigne said so many years ago, it is not the goal, not the destination, not the arrival which is interesting, but the journey.” As was mentioned in class, this saying seems somewhat cliché to us now. But I think Woolf was being very intentional when he situated this quote at the end of his essay. Throughout the essay he reveals to the reader several experiences in his life that contributed to his eventual inclusion in the Bloomsbury group. Here are the steps that Leonard Woolf indicates as a part of his journey:
1. A chance encounter in a Putney barbershop
2. St. Paul’s
3. Trinity College
4. The Strachey’s
5. The Sitwell’s dinner parties
6. The embarrassing dinner party
All of these experiences contributed to Woolf’s passion and respect for literature. Reading about these experiences makes it clear to me that Leonard Woolf really does belong in the literary world of England. For instance, most young boys would not consider a chance encounter with a well-known author something of any great importance. But Woolf remembered the exact details of the scene even years later. The fact that he felt a deep connection with literature even at St. Paul’s is also significant. At this point in his life, Woolf considered his passion something that needed to be hidden, yet he could not extinguish it. When he got to Trinity College he discovered that he fit in with fellow students that enjoyed intellectual pursuits. Up to this point it seems clear that Leonard Woolf has great potential to become one of the great members of British literary society.
But the final two stepping stones indicate why Woolf did not consider himself to be a part of true literary society. With the Sitwells, which was a series of small scale dinners, Woolf said that he felt inferior to the other members—that he felt like a small time amateur. In Woolf’s mind one must be a respected, established writer to be considered a member of a ‘literary world’. The later dinner party that Woolf described is a social disaster for himself and Virginia. They do not fit in with the sophisticated, religious people that make up the British literary elite. Since he does not fit this particular mold, Woolf considers himself to be a permanent outsider in the literary world of England. Today we do not have such a limited view of what it means to be an important member of ‘literary London.’ In fact the reason we remember Leonard Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury group is because they set out to be different. They had their own ideas and based literary merit not on age and prestige, but on the originality of ideas. I think that Leonard Woolf would be pleasantly surprised to learn of the respect that admirers have for him today.