Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  L. takes Orlando more seriously than I had expected. Thinks it in some ways better than the Lighthouse: about more interesting things, and with more attachment to life and larger. The truth is I expect I began it as a joke and went on with it seriously. Hence it lacks some unity. He says it is very original. Anyhow I’m glad to be quit this time of writing ‘a novel’; and hope never to be accused of it again. Now I want to write some very closely reasoned criticism; book on fiction; an essay of some sort (but not Tolstoy for The Times). Dr Burney’s Evening Tarty I think for Desmond. And then? I feel anxious to keep the hatch down; not to let too many projects come in. Something abstract poetic next time - I don’t know. I rather like the idea of these Biographies of living people. Ottoline suggests herself, but no. And I must tear up all that manuscript and write a great many notes and adventure out into the world.

  June weather. Still, bright, fresh. Owing to the Lighthouse (car) I don’t feel so shut in London as usual, and can imagine the evening on some moor now, or in France without the envy I used to have, in London on a fine evening. Also London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets. I walked Pinker to Grays Inn Gardens this afternoon and saw - Red Lion Square: Morris’s house; thought of them on winters evenings in the 50s; thought we are just as interesting; saw the Great Ormond Street where a dead girl was found yesterday; saw and heard the Salvation Army making Christianity gay for the people; a great deal of nudging and joking on the part of very unattractive young men and women; making it lively, I suppose; and yet, to be truthful, when I watch them I never laugh or criticize but only feel how strange and interesting this is; wonder what they mean by ‘Come to the Lord.’ I daresay exhibitionism accounts for some of it; the applause of the gallery; this lures boys to sing hymns; and kindle shop boys to announce in a loud voice that they are saved. It is what writing for the Evening Standard is for - and - I was going to say myself; but so far I have not done it Wednesday, June 20th.

  So sick of Orlando I can write nothing. I have corrected the proofs in a week; and cannot spin another phrase. I detest my own volubility. Why be always spouting words? Also I have almost lost the power of reading. Correcting proofs 5, 6 or 7 hours a day, writing in this and that meticulously, I have bruised my reading faculty severely. Take up Proust after dinner and put him down. This is the worst time of all. It makes me suicidal. Nothing seems left to do. All seems insipid and worthless. Now I will watch and see how I resurrect. I think I shall read something - say life of Goethe.

  Wednesday, August 9th.

  ... I write thus partly in order to slip the burden of writing narrative, as for instance, we came here a fortnight ago. And we lunched at Charleston and Vita came and we were offered the field and we went to see the farm at Limekiln. Yet no doubt I shall be more interested, come 10 years, in facts; and shall want, as I do when I read, to be told details, details, so that I may look up from the page and arrange them too, into one of those makings up which seem so much truer done thus, from heaps of non-assorted facts, than now I can make them, when it is almost immediately under my eyes. It was a fine day last Monday, I rather think; and we drove through Ripe; and there was a girl and her feller at the gate in a narrow lane; and we had to interrupt them to turn the motor. I thought how the things they had been saying were dammed like a river, by our interruption; and they stood there half amused yet impatient, telling us to go to the left, but the road was up. They were glad when we went; yet gave us a flash of interest. Who are these people in their motor car: where are they going? and then this sunk beneath the mind and they forgot us completely. We went on. And then we reached the farm. The oasts had umbrella spokes poking out at the top; all was so ruined and faded. The Tudor farmhouse was almost blind; very small eye-browed windows; old Stuart farmers must have peered out over the flat land, very dirty, ill kempt, like people in slums. But they had dignity; at least thick walls; fireplaces; and solidity; whereas now the house is lived in by one old weedy pink faced man, who flung himself in his armchair - go where you like - go anywhere, he said, loose jointed, somehow decayed, like the hop oasts; and damp like the mildewed carpets, and sordid, like the beds with the pots sticking out under them. The walls were sticky; the furniture mid-Victorian; little light came through. It was all dying, decaying; and he had been there 50 years and it will drop to pieces, since there is not enough beauty or strength to make anyone repair it.

  Saturday, August 12th.

  Shall I now continue this soliloquy, or shall I imagine an audience, which will make me describe? This sentence is due to the book on fiction which I am now writing - once more, O once more. It is a hand to mouth book. I scribble down whatever I can think of about Romance, Dickens etc. must hastily gorge on Jane Austen tonight and dish up something tomorrow.

  All this criticism however may well be dislodged by the desire to write a story. The Moths hovers somewhere at the back of my brain. But Clive yesterday at Charleston said that there were no class distinctions. We had tea from bright blue cups under the pink light of the giant hollyhock. We were all a little drugged with the country; a little bucolic I thought. It was lovely enough - made me envious of its country peace; the trees all standing securely - why did my eye catch the trees? The look of things has a great power over me. Even now, I have to watch the rooks beating up against the wind, which is high, and still I say to myself instinctively ‘What’s the phrase for that?’ and try to make more and more vivid the roughness of the air current and the tremor of the rook’s wing slicing as if the air were full of ridges and ripples and roughness. They rise and sink, up and down, as if the exercise rubbed and braced them like swimmers in rough water. But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.

  Friday, August 31st.

  This is the last day of August and like almost all of them of extraordinary beauty. Each day is fine enough and hot enough for sitting out; but also full of wandering clouds; and that fading and rising of the light which so enraptures me in the downs; which I am always comparing to the light beneath an alabaster bowl. The corn is now stood about in rows of three four or five solid shaped yellow cakes - rich, it seems, with eggs and spice; good to eat. Sometimes I see the cattle galloping ‘like mad’ as Dostoievsky would say, in the brooks. The clouds - if I could describe them I would; one yesterday had flowing hair on it, like the very fine white hair of an old man. At this moment they are white in a leaden sky; but the sun behind the house, is making the grass green. I walked to the racecourse today and saw a weasel.

  Monday, September 10th.

  ... I was amused to find that when Rebecca West says ‘men are snobs’ she gets an instant rise out of Desmond: so I retorted on him with the condescending phrase used about women novelists’ ‘limitations’ in Life and Letters. But there was no acrimony in this. We talked with fertility; never working a seam dry. Do you suppose then that we are now coming like the homing rooks back to the tops of our trees? and that all this cawing is the beginning of settling in for the night? I seem to notice in several of my friends some endearing and affecting cordiality; and a pleasure in intimacy; as if the sun were sinking. Often that image comes to me with some sense of my physical state being colder now, the sun just off one; the old disc of one’s being growing cooler - but it is only just beginning; and one will turn cold and silver like the moon. This has been a very animated summer; a summer lived almost too much in public. Often down here I have entered into a sanctuary; a nunnery; had a religious retreat; of great agony once; and always some terror; so afraid one is of loneliness; of seeing to the bottom of the vessel. That is one of the experiences I have had here in some Augusts; and got then to a consciousness of what I call ‘reality’: a thing I see before me: something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist. Reality I
call it. And I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing to me: that which I seek. But who knows - once one takes a pen and writes? How difficult not to go making ‘reality’ this and that, whereas it is one thing. Now perhaps this is my gift: this perhaps is what distinguishes me from other people: I think it may be rare to have so acute a sense of something like that - but again, who knows? I would like to express it too.

  Saturday, September 22nd This has been the finest, and not only finest, but loveliest, summer in the world. Still, though it blows, how clear and bright it is; and the clouds are opalescent; the long barns on my horizon mouse-coloured; the stacks pale gold. Owning the field has given a different orient to my feelings about Rodmell. I begin to dig myself in and take part in it. And I shall build another storey to the house if I make money. But the news of Orlando is black. We may sell a third that we sold of the Lighthouse before’ publication - not a shop will buy save in sixes and twelves. They say this is inevitable. No one wants biography. But it is a novel, says Miss Ritchie.

  But it is called biography on the title page, they say. It will have to go to the Biography shelf. I doubt therefore that we shall do more than cover expenses - a high price to pay for the fun of calling it a biography. And I was so sure it was going to be the one popular book! Also it should be 10/6 or 12/6, not 9/-. Lord, lord! Thus I must write some articles this winter, if we are to have nest eggs at the Bank. Down here I have flung myself tooth and nail on my fiction book, and should have finished the first draft but for Dorothy Osborne whom I’m dashing off. It will need entire re-writing but the grind is done - the rushing through book after book and now what shall I read? These novels have hung about me so long. Mercy it is to be quit of them; and shall I read English poetry, French memoirs - shall I read now for a book to be called ‘The Lives of the Obscure’? And when, I wonder, shall I begin The Moths? Not until I am pressed into it by those insects themselves. Nor have I any notion what it is to be like - a completely new attempt I think. So I always think.

  Saturday, October 27th.

  A scandal, a scandal, to let so much time slip and I leaning on the Bridge watching it go. Only leaning has not been my pose; running up and down, irritably, excitedly, restlessly. And the stream viciously eddying. Why do I write these metaphors? Because I have written nothing for an age. Orlando has been published. I went to Burgundy with Vita. It flashed by. How disconnected this is! My ambition is from this very moment, 8 minutes to 6, on Saturday evening, to attain complete concentration again. When I have written here, I am going to open Fanny Burney’s diaries and work solidly at that article which poor Miss McKay cables about. I am going to read, to think. I gave up reading and thinking on 26th September when I went to France. I came back and we plunged into London and publishing. I am a little sick of Orlando. I think I am a little indifferent now what anyone thinks. Joy’s life in the doing - I murder, as usual, a quotation; I mean it’s the writing, not the being read, that excites me. And as I can’t write while I’m being read, I am always a little hollow hearted; whipped up; but not so happy as in solitude. The reception, as they say, surpassed expectation. Sales beyond our record for the first week. I was floating rather lazily on praise, when Squire barked in the Observer, but even as I sat reading him on the Backs last Sunday in the showering red leaves and their illumination, I felt the rock of self esteem untouched in me. ‘This doesn’t really hurt,’ I said to myself; even now; and sure enough, before evening I was calm, untouched. And now there’s Hugh in the Morning Post to spread the butter again, and Rebecca West - such a trumpet call of praise - that’s her way - that I feel a little sheepish and silly. And now no more of that I hope.

  Thank God, my long toil at the women’s lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women - that’s my impression. Intelligent, eager, poor; and destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals. I blandly told them to drink wine and have a room of their own. Why should all the splendour, all the luxury of life be lavished on the Julians and the Francises, and none on the Phares and the Thomases? There’s Julian not much relishing it, perhaps. I fancy sometimes the world changes. I think I see reason spreading. But I should have liked a closer and thicker knowledge of life. I should have liked to deal with real things sometimes. I get a sense of tingling and vitality from an evening’s talk like that; one’s angularities and obscurities are smoothed and lit. How little one counts, I think: how little anyone counts; how fast and furious and masterly life is; and how all these thousands are swimming for dear life. I felt elderly and mature. And nobody respected me. They were very eager, egotistical, or rather not much impressed by age and repute. Very little reverence or that sort of thing about. The corridors of Girton are like vaults in some horrid high church cathedral - on and on they go, cold and shiny, with a light burning. High Gothic rooms: acres of bright brown wood; here and there a photograph.

  Wednesday, November 7th.

  And this shall be written for my own pleasure. But that phrase inhibits me; for if one writes only for one’s own pleasure, I don’t know what it is that happens. I suppose the convention I of writing is destroyed: therefore one does not write at all. I am rather headachy and dimly obscured with sleeping draught. This is the aftermath (what does that mean? - Trench, whom I open idly apparently says nothing) of Orlando. Yes, yes: since I wrote here I have become two inches and a half higher in the public view. I think I may say that I am now among the well known writers. I had tea with Lady Cunard - might have lunched or dined any day. I found her in a little cap telephoning. It was not her atmosphere - this of solitary talk. She is too shrewd to expand and needs society to make her rash and random which is her point. Ridiculous little parrakeet faced woman; but not quite sufficiently ridiculous. I kept wishing for superlatives; could not get the illusion to flap its wings. Flunkeys, yes: but a little drab and friendly. Marble floor, yes: but no glamour; no tune strumming, for me at least. And the two of us sitting there had almost to be conventional and flat - reminds me of Sir Thomas Browne - the greatest book of our times - said a little flatly by a woman of business, to me who don’t believe in that kind of thing unless launched with champagne and garlands. Then in came Lord Donegall, a glib Irish youth, dark, sallow, slick, on the Press. ‘Don’t they treat you like a dog?’ I said. “No, not at all,’ he replied, astonished that a marquis could be treated like a dog by anyone. And then we went up and up to see pictures on stairs, in ballrooms and finally to Lady C.’s bedroom, hung entirely with flower pieces. The bed has its triangular canopy of rose red silk; the windows, looking on the Square, are hung with green brocade. Her poudreuse - like mine only painted and gilt - stood open with gold brushes, looking glasses, and there on her gold slippers were neatly laid gold stockings. All this paraphernalia for one stringy old hop o’ my thumb. She set the two great musical boxes playing and I said did she lie in bed and listen to them? But no. She has nothing fantastic in that way about her. Money is important. She told me rather sordid stories of Lady Sackville never visiting her without fobbing something off on her - now a bust, worth £5, for which she. paid £100: now a brass knocker. ‘And then her talk - I didn’t care for it...’ Somehow I saw into these sordid commonplace talks and could not sprinkle the air with gold dust easily. But no doubt she has her acuity, her sharp peck at life; only how adorable, I thought, as I tip-toed home in my tight shoes, in the fog, in the chill, could one open one of these doors that I still open so venturously, and find a live interesting real person, a Nessa, a Duncan, a Roger. Someone new, whose mind would begin vibrating. Coarse and usual and dull these Cunards and Colefaxes are - for all their astonishing competence in the commerce of life.

  And I cannot think what to write next. I mean the situation is, this Orlando is of course a very quick brilliant book. Yes, but I did not try to explore. And must I always explore? Yes I think so still. Because my reaction is not the usual. Nor can I even after all these years run it off lightly. Orlando taught me how to write a d
irect sentence; taught me continuity and narrative and how to keep the realities at bay. But I purposely avoided of course any other difficulty. I never got down to my depths and made shapes square up, as I did in the Lighthouse.

  Well but Orlando was the outcome of a perfectly definite, indeed overmastering, impulse. I want fun. I want fantasy. I want (and this was serious) to give things their caricature value. And still this mood hangs about me. I want to write a history, say of Newnham or the women’s movement, in the same vein. The vein is deep in me - at least sparkling, urgent. But is it not stimulated by applause? overstimulated? My notion is that there are offices to be discharged by talent for the relief of genius: meaning that one has the play side; the gift when it is mere gift, unapplied gift; and the gift when it is serious, going to business. And one relieves the other.

  Yes, but The Moths? That was to be an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem. And there may be affectation in being too mystical, too abstract; saying Nessa and Roger and Duncan and Ethel Sands admire that; it is the uncompromising side of me; therefore I had better win their approval.

  Again, one reviewer says that I have come to a crisis in the matter of style: it is now so fluent and fluid that it runs through the mind like water.

  That disease began in the Lighthouse. The first part came fluid - how I wrote and wrote!

  Shall I now check and consolidate, more in the Dalloway and Jacob’s Room style?

  I rather think the upshot will be books that relieve other books: a variety of styles and subjects: for after all, that is my temperament, I think, to be very little persuaded of the truth of anything - what I say, what people say - always to follow, blindly, instinctively with a sense of leaping over a precipice - the call of - the call of - now, if I write The Moths I must come to terms with these mystical feelings.