Virginia and Leonard Woolf Remember Their War Dead

Virginia Woolf’s life, and her writing, were deeply, indelibly marked by World War I. Her postwar fiction returned again and again to the challenge of memorializing both personal and collective loss. But before Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse, before the war was even over, she and her husband Leonard worked side by side to produce a physical memorial to Leonard’s youngest brother Cecil, killed in 1917 at the battle of Cambrai just after he turned 30.

It was a tiny collection of Cecil’s poetry, printed and bound by the Woolfs on the printing press they had purchased that year and set up in the dining room of their home in Richmond, Hogarth House, which lent its name for their publishing company, the Hogarth Press. Only a handful of copies of the book exist in print and it is rarely remembered among the output of Virginia Woolf or the Hogarth Press, but its creation, laborious and physical, was a powerful act of commemoration.

Working the press, as Hermione Lee writes in her 1996 biography of Virginia, required “manual dexterity, patience, vigilance, and concentration.” It was an activity Leonard had encouraged his wife to take up as a form of therapy. The setting and printing of Cecil’s poetry was an absorbing and extended physical act of remembrance occupying both the Woolfs for several weeks in the final year of the war.

The Woolfs were still new at printing. In a letter to T.S. Eliot written around this time, 19 October 1918, Leonard referred to their plans to print Eliot’s Poems with a cautious caveat: ‘‘I should add that we are amateurs at printing but we could, if you liked, let you see our last production.” Leonard’s phrasing—“our last production”—shows that he saw publication as a joint effort, and the result of intensive labor. He was most likely referring to Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude, which the Hogarth Press put out in May 1918, before Eliot’s Poems a year later. But between these modernist literary landmarks the Woolfs had put together a memorial volume that belonged to a much older tradition that became popular during the Victorian era.

Among middle and upper class families whose sons had been highly educated, and for one reason or another had died young, it was common to publish commemorative collections of poetry, often accompanied by selections of letters, brief biographies, and photographs. These volumes would circulate among friends and family, or might be donated to a school or university library, although some were published and distributed more widely. During and after World War I, that intensely literary war, these books spiked in popularity. The most famous example, published in 1918 (after much sanitizing and wrangling with his mother), was the combined memorial biography and collected poems of Rupert Brooke, the handsome soldier-poet and childhood friend of Virginia’s, who had died in 1915. Although it is tiny and modest in comparison, the Woolfs’ production of Cecil’s poetry was part of the same tradition.

The memorial volume is 19 pages long, about four inches by five inches, bound in tan leather with marbled endpapers and gold embossed lettering giving the title, the author’s name (“C.N.S. Woolf”) and the name of the Hogarth Press. Inside, the frontispiece repeats the simple title, but the addition of names and biographical details in block capitals evoke a headstone:

POEMS

BY

C.N. SIDNEY WOOLF

LATE 20th HUSSARS (SPEC. RES.)

FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

HOGARTH PRESS, RICHMOND

1918

Identified by both his amateur military status (special reserve) and his intellectual standing as a fellow of Trinity College, Woolf is incorporated into the contemporary mythology of the upper-class soldier-poet, although the poems themselves are largely collected from the pre-war years. Instead of giving the date of birth or death, as a headstone might, the memorial laborers of the Hogarth Press overwrite life with publication.

Inside, these details are fleshed out in the briefest of character sketches, written by Leonard and Cecil’s brother Phillip Sidney Woolf (“P.S.W”) to whom one of the poems is in turn dedicated. The brothers were exceptionally close. They were the two youngest of the nine Woolf children, all born within twelve years of one another (Leonard was the third eldest, seven years older than Cecil.) Before the war they were collaborating on a translation of Stendhal’s De L’Amour. They enlisted together in the same regiment and were hit by the same shell at the battle of Cambrai, the battle in which tanks were deployed for the first time. Philip was seriously injured, and according to Hermione Lee, never fully recovered either physically or emotionally from the shock and the loss of his brother. The introduction closes with lines from a Horatian ode to Virgil, animae dimidium meae, meaning “Half my soul” or “Half my life.”

Although Cecil was a Cambridge scholar, Philip was at pains to present him as something more down-to-earth: “He loved Learning and Art well, but men and horses better. Himself a brilliant scholar, he held Brilliancy in small esteem; he valued deeds above words, and prized honesty before all things.” By opposing “Learning and Art” to “men and horses,” the dedication plays on the competition between high-flown rhetoric and ordinary speech that was central to the long, slow process of working out how to remember the war dead. The temptation to elevate the dead man’s qualities, making him an abstract hero, vies with the urge to represent him as an honest, ordinary, human man. Cecil is said to be “brilliant” yet to reject “Brilliancy,” with its implication of superficial shine.

Emphasizing Cecil’s humanity, his deeds over his words, is also a way of acknowledging that the poems in the collection to follow are not great works of art. They are presented instead as documents of potential, a testament to a cruelly shortened life. Philip suggests that had Cecil lived, the poems would have been “revised and repolished” and made worthy of publication “under both our names.” But without Cecil, there can be no collaboration: the unfinished poems have to stand alone, to stand in for the missing poet.

Throughout the collection, Cecil shows the kind of fascination with burial, remembrance, and heroic death that was typical of classically educated boys of his class who grew up in bourgeois comfort in a world that seemed to be securely at peace. “Sonnet,” from 1909, opens “I think of one, dead in a lonely place,” and goes on to imagine a purely abstract “high heroic quest,” and the loss of a “dear, lov’d face.” It is a bloodless elegy, turning after the octave to a vague religious consolation, in which “unseen powers / Built him a grave; God scatter’d precious flowers.” The lost love is not a person but a pretext for a poetic game. Yet in the poem “To P.S.W” and dated May 21, 1909, Cecil puts a human face on loss, expressing his love for his brother by imagining his death.

My heart to-night is on a moonlit sea,
Heaving its breast in a quite dreamless sleep;
My heart has ridden on the thun’dring deep;
To-night I moor it to a thought of thee.

Written when Cecil was twenty-two, five years before the outbreak of the war that would require heartfelt formal elegies to young, healthy brothers, the poem was probably more exercise than emotional expression—the poem is modeled on Tennyson’s In Memoriam, perhaps the most famous Victorian poetic articulation of intense (quasi) brotherly love. But shadowed by Cecil’s death and Philip’s dedication, it also speaks to the unusually close intertwining of the brother’s lives and fates.

Even in the poems written after 1914, there is no evidence that the experience of war changed the nature of Cecil’s poetic understanding of death and loss. The 15 poems are a product of their time and place and the poet’s upbringing, demonstrating an intimate knowledge of the classics, and an interest in confining forms—it is poetry as exercise, as craftsmanship. The sonnet “100 Years After,” is a heavy-handed parody of Wordsworth’s “On Westminster Bridge,” opening with the line “Earth hath not anything to show more vile” and railing against London fog and gloom. Few tropes are more reliable in the English poetic tradition than this contrast between the decadent bustle of the city and the purity and tranquility of the rural space.

But Cecil was not purely a traditionalist. He was also influenced by the Georgian poets, a group including Rupert Brooke, D.H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, and Siegfried Sassoon, who were both wildly popular and deliberately shocking, at least for a brief period just before the war. “At the Zoo,” for instance, describes a brotherly relationship between the speaker and an ape that hints at the possibility of an accidental interspecies coupling. There’s also a striking interest in Cecil’s poems in perverse, overly intimate familial relationships. “The Masquerade” imagines the unmasking of couples at the end of a ball, to reveal incestuous pairings of siblings and mothers and sons, and concludes with the lines: “O! witless players in the masquerade, / Keep on your masques until the whole thing’s played.” The Georgian fascination with sex, social realism, and the wit of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers was, however, quickly overtaken by the far more violent literary upheavals that the war generated.

The Woolfs’ publication of Cecil’s poetry as a private memorial is only a footnote in the rich literary life of Virginia, Leonard, and the Hogarth Press. But it is nonetheless fascinating to consider how its production might have influenced the way that the couple experienced and understood grief and loss. Was it a comfort to assemble these youthful poems, and try to shape with them the story of a life? Or did the slimness of the volume only drive home how much talent was wasted for what was, at the time, a still-ongoing war? When Woolf reviewed the memorial volume of Rupert Brooke’s poetry (which privately she called a “disgraceful sloppy sentimental rhapsody”) she insisted on resisting the false comfort of heroic narratives, the pretense that violently truncated lives could be seen as whole. The same might be said of Cecil, born the same year as Brooke and killed just two years after him: “One turns from the thought of him not with a sense of completeness and finality, but rather to wonder and to question still: what would he have been, what would he have done?”