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Leonard Woolj and "The Village in the Jungle"

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Leonard Woolj and To Glide Silently Out of Ones Own Text- Leonard Woolj and "The Village in the Jungle" JUDITH SCHERER HERZ IN 1998. SHYAM Selvadurai, born in Columbo, Sri Lanka, but living in Canada for the previous fourteen years, published his second novel, Cinnamon Gardens. It is set in Columbo in 1927, the year of the Donoughmore Constitutional Commission, the cautious and incomplete response of the presumptive father/ mother country to the pressures for home rule in the island colony. The novel focuses on the encounter, years after they had been peremptorily parted in London, between the main character, Balendran, and his former lover, Richard, a British barrister, now come to Columbo as fact finder for the Commis• sion. More than offering a simple framework or backdrop, the debate over the status of the colony is played out in Selvadurai's novel as a familial and generational conflict in a narrative of challenge to paternal rule. The claims of history, tradition, class, and gender underwrite the shifting relations of fathers/ sons, mothers/daughters as both persons and polity look for ways to assert and reclaim an identity. If the main character has been made to lead a false life by his father, repressing, or mostly repressing, his homosexuality at his father's bidding, he is able at the novel's end to confront his father and to take back his life and yet still be in the family where he too is a father and a hus• band as well as a son. After their first meeting, Richard reflects: The memory of his earlier encounter with the Mudaliyar [Balen• dran's father] was one Richard never dwelt on, the excess of it, the humiliation. Yet seeing the Mudaliyar today had brought it all back. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 32:4, October 2001 70 JUDITH SCHERER HERZ When he returned to the room, Alii [Richard's present, much younger lover] was seated on the bed, his legs out in front of him, reading Leonard Woolf's The Village in the Jungle. He looked up when Richard entered, but seeing the stiff look on Richard's face, he thought he was still in a bad temper and quickly returned to his book. (140) I evoke this moment chiefly for its starring text, Leonard Woolf's The Village in the Jungle. Why this book? What does its presence accomplish? It certainly fits the scene. That Alii, the young Mr. Alliston, should be reading the novel in 1927 is an accurate de• tail. Published in 1913, the first edition went through several reprintings in Britain with a second edition in 1925. If not a new book, it was now new again and by a known and respected public figure, especially one whose polemical and journalistic writing against imperialism would have been known to those involved with the Donoughmore Commission. This tourist might well pack it in his bags, even though the world it revealed would find little echo in his experience. For Selvadurai, moreover, seventy years later it is still a significant text, a way of specifying a time and a place and of writing himself into that time and place Indeed a striking fact about the literary history of this novel is its continued presence in the cultural repertoire of Sri Lankan writers both at home and the world over even while it remains largely absent from consideration by modernist and postcolo• nial critics.1 Michael Ondaatje in his 1982 memoir, Running in the Family, uses a quotation as a section epigraph and then remarks some pages later, "Apart from Knox [a British sailor held captive by a Kandyan king in the seventeenth century and whose account, An Historical Relation, was used by Defoe in Rob• inson Crusoe] and later Leonard Woolf in his novel, .A Village in the Jungle, very few foreigners truly knew where they were" (83). His brother Christopher Ondaatje's 1993 memoir, The Man- Eater of Punanai, even more pervasively uses Woolf's novel as well as his autobiographical writing. In Sri Lanka the novel has rarely been out of print either in English, or in Sinhalese and Tamil translations. But in the Western academy there has been mainly silence. Thus the question: how might one write Leonard Woolf back into literary history, especially his writing, both fiction and non- fiction, about the East? What kinds of claims can one make LEONARD WOOLF "THE VILLAGE IN THE JUNGLE" 71 about these texts — The Village in the Jungle (the chief concern of this essay), the three published stories, the second volume of his autobiography, Growing, his Official Diaries from the time he was AGA in the Hambantota district, Eastern Province of then Ceylon — especially claims that are not limited to what they re• veal about Virginia Woolf and, to a lesser degree, about Blooms- bury as a social formation, but rather encounter Leonard Woolf as a writer in his own right? How did his experience as colonial administrator from late 1904 to 1911 and his Cambridge nour• ished ambitions to be a writer come into uneasy but fruitful col• lision in texts that in many ways determined the shape of his later polemical writing against empire? How is The Village in the Jungle different from and in some ways more remarkable than even Forster's A Passage to India, for example? Michael Ondaatje's observation — "Apart from Leonard Woolf, very few foreigners truly knew where they were" — provides a suggestive way into this subject, for Woolf certainly knew where he was. Possibly not at the very beginning, a 24-year-old with dog and multiple volumes of Voltaire (70, 90 — the numbers change over the years), with a knowledge of contract bridge, a wonderfully watchful eye, a stern self control, an amazingly methodical and well stocked mind, and a trembling hand, set• ting out, still "an innocent imperialist" in the words of the last volume of his autobiography "rather absent mindedly to help govern the British empire" (J 193). Both the autobiographies and the letters he wrote at the time, especially those to his close friend Lytton Strachey, offer useful access to the fictional texts, especially when read with the caveat that they too are forms of fiction, the letters (mostly those for the first two or three years) the more extravagantly self-dramatizing. The autobiographies and the letters together provide two complementary and to a certain degree contradictory points of reference. Not two months after his arrival, he laments in a letter to Stra• chey, that "well a thousand years ago I walked and talked with Gods" (Letters 74). And such Cambridge speech, as well as Moorean allusions to reality and the phenomenal, continue throughout the correspondence.2 In 1906 he writes how his let• ter is "the last despairing cry of the ghost of a soul you once 72 JUDITH SCHERER HERZ knew in the real world" (116). Of course, more than half a cen• tury later, writing the second volume of his autobiography in some considerable measure out of these letters, but now inhab• iting the persona of judge, ironist, and sage, he observes how when "one is writing to an intimate friend of one's youth, the passions and prejudices of youth which were so important a part of that friendship exaggerate and distort the picture of our re• actions to entirely new circumstances" (G62). (And given Stra- chey's responses, which were rather ungod-like, racist really, one can understand something of the impulse behind this exag• geration). Yet even at the time of their writing he was aware of the degree to which the act of writing was itself the creator of the putative reality it described: "reality is nothing, it is only in writing 8c imagination that things are wonderful or horrible or supreme [the code words of apostolic friendship], in reality they are sometimes just beautiful, nearly always ugly & always vague & always dire"(Letters 146). The letters attempt to maintain, in• deed to create in language, through writing, something which he acknowledged to have vanished almost immediately on his arriving in Ceylon: "the whole of my past life in London and Cambridge seemed suddenly to have vanished, to have faded away into unreality" (G23). An intellectual, a Jew, among the sport and gossip talking civil servants, all play acting, all "a good deal grander than we could have been at home" (G24), Woolf acted his way into the colonial world and there found himself watching both others and himself, "cynically amused, . play• ing a part in an exciting play on a brightly coloured stage" (G22). But if his fellow civil servants elicited his scorn and dis• may, the country itself, its trees and soil, its sand and sun audits inhabitants elicited something very different. It is that differ• ence that Ondaatje was referring to. Woolf knew where he was. It is no doubt the case that the earnest, stern young man that the autobiographies construct was considerably less coherent a being than retrospect allowed. His anti-imperialism arose grad• ually and fitfully as he moved from Jaffna to Kandy and finally and crucially to Hambantota. But what began at once as his past life receded into unreality was a sense of personal solitude that allowed him an empathy with the world he found himself in LEONARD WOOLF "THE VILLAGE IN THE JUNGLE" 73 that was strikingly unsentimental and unpatronizing. "I am glad that I had for some years, in what is called the prime of life, experience of the slow-pulsing life of this most ancient type of civilization. [The word "civilization" is important.
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