Word: woolfe
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...Woolf writes of the death of sweet reason that afflicted the Western world during and between the two world wars. The title of this book refers to the Gadarene swine in the Bible, who were possessed of evil spirits and, according to St. Luke, "ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked." The swine, as Woolf sees it, were the Tories and ultranationalists who brought on the first World War, and the fascists and Communists whose fanaticism and civic savagery made a shambles of the peace...
...Woolf's confident equation of his own "erosion"-he is now 86-with the decline of the West has an endearing arrogance. Yet there is much to excuse his consciousness of belonging to an elite. It is this consciousness, in fact, that raises his book from being merely an insider's memoir of the liberal British intelligentsia-although on this level alone it is very highly readable. It is still amusing to hear, in Woolf's tone of melancholy malice, how "Tom" Eliot confessed that he had "behaved like a priggish, pompous little ass" on a weekend...
Detachment. As a publisher, Woolf doggedly stuck to his belief that he could print only the best work and still make money. It was not easy. He and his wife were poor until Virginia's novels began to sell, as well as the works of other distinguished authors on his list: Eliot, Auden and Freud (24 volumes in English). It was an exemplary publishing career, but on the personal level Woolf is a singularly jejune autobiographer. The record of a suicide is always painful, but a curious detachment in Woolf's character leads him to describe the series...
Dispassionately, he records that social and intellectual snobbery was her worst defect, and he notes with a stranger's eye "a streak of incongruous archness in her humor which is almost ladylike and very disconcerting." Woolf mentions friendships, but the reader feels no warmth. He writes most affectionately of a marmoset named Mitz (the gift of a Rothschild), which rode on his shoulder on a tour of Hitler's Germany. The monkey stole the show and distracted the Brownshirts from Woolf's culpable Jewishness...
...tireless public career as Labor candidate for Parliament, as assiduous sitter on committees, is the record of one defeat after another. Nobody would listen-even when, as adviser to the Labor Party on foreign affairs, he tried in 1938 to muster the party to support rearmament against Hitler. Nobody, Woolf complains, read his three-volume treatise on politics...