Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

24 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
Toulmin’s 1989 invocation of Montaigne, if not his more methodical writing style in
Cosmopolis, would certainly have resonated with a writer like Virginia Woolf, for whom
Montaigne was a major cultural touchstone, though she never lived to see the decade of
the 1960s that proved so infl uential for the English philosopher. Toulmin himself was
born in London in the year Woolf published Jacob’s Room. 6 Technically, with luck and
good health, she might have witnessed with wonder at least the initial years of that notorious
decade of cultural and intellectual upheaval, born as she was in 1882. And it’s hard not
to wonder what she might have said about it (indeed, countless Woolf scholars have been
doing that for years). But it is easy to forget that her husband Leonard—two years her
senior—actually did manage to survive well into the 60s, and to keep writing to boot.
Not unlike Toulmin, Leonard—who was also Cambridge-educated—was something
of a social philosopher who saw fi t to invoke Montaigne later in life in an attempt, it
seems, to heal the wounds of history. Nearly thirty years after his wife’s suicide Leonard
opens the fi nal installment of his fi ve-part autobiography in a chapter titled “Virginia’s
Death” with a discussion that leads to the French inventor of the essay form. In fact,
Leonard had even chosen to title that 1969 volume with a paraphrase from the Essais that
he and his wife had both used in various manifestations to describe one of Montaigne’s
most important lessons for them: Th e Journey Not the Arrival Matters.
We might wonder what would prompt Leonard to use a Montaignian message to
name and to begin the end of his autobiography in 1969. Perhaps, nearing ninety, he
identifi ed even more closely with the Frenchman in his library, in retreat from the world.
Indeed, the 67-year-old Toulmin might have felt this way as well when he penned Cosmopolis,
or again in 2001 when he, at 79, reiterated his campaigning on behalf of Montaigne
as philosopher in Return to Reason (of course, we must remember that given the
shorter life spans common in the sixteenth century, Montaigne considered himself elderly
and deserving of peaceful “retirement” by his late forties). But Leonard might also have
been thinking of the reverence he shared with his late wife for this Renaissance writer,
whose home they had visited in 1931, right before Europe began the second phase of its
rapid decline. Toulmin himself even waxes (Virginia) Woolfi an—as best he can—when
he recounts a visit to the great essayist’s tower later in life in the penultimate chapter of
Return to Reason.
Another compelling explanation for Montaigne’s presence in this opening chapter
of this closing book has to do with the Frenchman’s position for the atheist Leonard as
a sort of secular savior fi gure, indeed, a prophet who, if duly heeded, might have saved
Europe and perhaps even Virginia from the demise Leonard describes so despairingly in
these opening pages.
Leonard’s begins his chapter titled “Virginia’s Death” from a decidedly un-Montaignian
impersonal and historical distance by dating the outbreak of the “second of the great world
wars” and giving a rough psychological map of England at the time (9-10). Virginia is fi rst
mentioned more than fi ve pages into his narrative when Leonard tells how her brother
Adrian, horrifi ed by the prospect of the new confl ict, had off ered poison to his sister and her
husband so that they might commit suicide if brutal war should come again (15).
Leonard speaks rather drearily and again impersonally of the profound eff ect the
years 1933-45 had upon the communal psychology of his world, “the world,” he writes
shifting unsubtly into the fi rst person “in which I have had to spend my life” (17, emphasis