Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  X destroyed our Saturday walk: he is now mouldy and to me depressing. He is perfectly reasonable and charming. Nothing surprises, nothing shocks him. He has been through it all, one feels. He has come out rolled, smoothed, rather sodden, rather creased and jumbled, like a man who has sat up all night in a third class railway carriage. His fingers are stained yellow with cigarettes. One tooth in the lower jaw is missing. His hair is dank. His eyes more than ever dubious. He has a hole in his blue sock. Yet he is resolute and determined - that’s what I find so depressing. He seems to be sure that it is his view that is the right one: ours vagaries, deviations. And if his view is the right one, God knows there is nothing to live for: not a greasy biscuit. And the egotism of men surprises and shocks me even now. Is there a woman of my acquaintance who could sit in my armchair from 3 to 6.30 without the semblance of a suspicion that I may be busy, or tired, or bored; and so sitting could talk, grumbling and grudging, of her difficulties, worries; then eat chocolates, then read a book, and go at last, apparently self-complacent and wrapped in a kind of blubber of misty self-salutation? Not the girls at Newnham or Girton. They are far too spry; far too disciplined. None of that self confidence is their lot.

  Wednesday, November 28th.

  Father’s birthday. He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one has known: but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely 1928 ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, l832 no books; - inconceivable.

  I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. (I believe this to be true - that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act.) He comes back now more as a contemporary. I must read him some day. I wonder if I can feel again, I hear his voice, I know this by heart?

  So the days pass and I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life; and whether this is living. It’s very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so hold it, day after day. I will read Proust I think. I will go backwards and forwards.

  As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. The Moths still haunts me, coming, as they always do, unbidden, between tea and dinner, while L. plays the gramophone. I shape a page or two; and make myself stop. Indeed I am up against some difficulties. Fame to begin with. Orlando has done very well. Now I could go on writing like that - the tug and suck are at me to do it. People say this was so spontaneous, so natural. And I would like to keep those qualities if I could without losing the others. But those qualities Were largely the result of ignoring the others. They came of writing exteriorly; and if I dig, must I not lose them? And what is my own position towards the inner and the outer? I think a kind of ease and dash are good; - yes: I think even externality is good; some combination of them ought to be possible. The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry - by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novelists? that they select nothing? The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in: yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in The Moths. It must include nonsense, fact, sordidity: but made transparent. I think I must read Ibsen and Shakespeare and Racine. And I will write something about them; for that is the best spur, my mind being what it is; then I read with fury and exactness; otherwise I skip and skip; I am a lazy reader. But no: I am surprised and a little disquieted by the remorseless severity of my mind: that it never stops reading and writing; makes me write on Geraldine Jewsbury, on Hardy, on Women - is too professional, too little any longer a dreamy amateur.

  Tuesday, December 18th.

  L. has just been in to consult about a 3rd edition of Orlando. This has been ordered; we have sold over 6,000 copies; and sales are still amazingly brisk - 150 today for instance; most days between 50 and 60; always to my surprise. Will they stop or go on? Anyhow my room is secure. For the first time since I married, 1912-1928 - 16 years, I have been spending money. The spending muscle does not work naturally yet. I feel guilty; put off buying, when I know that I should buy; and yet have an agreeable luxurious sense of coins in my pocket beyond my weekly 13/- which was always running out, or being encroached upon.

  1929.

  Friday, January 4th.

  Now is life very solid or shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world - this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light? I am impressed by the transitoriness of human life to such an extent that I am often saying a farewell - after dining with Roger for instance; or reckoning how many more times I shall see Nessa.

  Thursday, March 28th.

  It is a disgrace indeed; no diary has been left so late in the year. The truth was that we went to Berlin on 16th January, and then I was in bed for three weeks afterwards and then could not write, perhaps for another three, and have spent my energy since in one of my excited outbursts of composition - writing what I made up in bed, a final version of Women and Fiction.

  And as usual I am bored by narrative. I want only to say how I met Nessa in Tottenham Court Road this afternoon, both of us sunk fathoms deep in that wash of reflection in which we both swim about. She will be gone on Wednesday for 4 months. It is queer how instead of drawing apart, life draws us together. But I was thinking a thousand things as I carried my teapot, gramophone records and stockings under my arm. It is one of those days that I called ‘potent’ when we lived in Richmond.

  Perhaps I ought not to go on repeating what I have always said about the spring. One ought perhaps to be forever finding new things to say, since life draws on. One ought to invent a fine narrative style. Certainly there are many new ideas always forming in my head. For one, that I am going to enter a nunnery these next months; and let myself down into my mind; Bloomsbury being done with. I am going to face certain things.

  It is going to be a time of adventure and attack, rather lonely and painful I think. But solitude will be good for a new book. Of course, I shall make friends. I shall be external outwardly. I shall buy some good clothes and go out into new houses. All the time I shall attack this angular shape in my mind. I think The Moths (if that is what I shall call it) will be very sharply cornered. I am not satisfied though with the frame. There is this sudden fertility which may be mere fluency. In old days books were so many sentences absolutely struck with an axe out of crystal: and now my mind is so impatient, so quick, in some ways so desperate.

  Sunday, May 12th.

  Here, having just finished what I call the final revision of Women and Fiction so that L. can read it after tea, I stop; surfeited. And the pump, which I was so sanguine as to think ceased, begins again. About Women and Fiction I am not sure - a brilliant essay? - I daresay: it has much work in it, many opinions boiled down into a kind of jelly, which I have stained red as far as I can. But I am eager to be off - to write without any boundary coming slick in one’s eyes: here my public has been too close; facts; getting them malleable, easily yielding to each other.

  Tuesday, May 28th.

  Now about this bo
ok, The Moths. How am I to begin it? And what is it to be? I feel no great impulse; no fever; only a great pressure of difficulty. Why write it then? Why write at all? Every morning I write a little sketch, to amuse myself. I am not saying, I might say, that these sketches have any relevance. I am not trying to tell a story. Yet perhaps it might be done in that way. A mind thinking. They might be islands of light - islands in the stream that I am trying to convey; life itself going on. The current of the moths flying strongly this way. A lamp and a flower pot in the centre. The flower can always be changing. But there must be more unity between each scene than I can find at present. Autobiography it might be called. How am I to make one lap, or act, between the coming of the moths, more intense than another; if there are only scenes? One must get the sense that this is the beginning; this the middle; that the climax - when she opens the window and the moth comes in. I shall have the two different currents - the moths flying along; the flower upright in the centre; a perpetual crumbling and renewing of the plant. In its leaves she might see things happen. But who is she? I am very anxious that she should have no name. I don’t want a Lavinia or a Penelope: I want ‘she’. But that becomes arty, Liberty greenery yallery somehow: symbolic in loose robes. Of course I can make her think backwards and forwards; I can tell stories. But that’s not it. Also I shall do away with exact place and time. Anything may be out of the window - a ship - a desert - London.

  Sunday, June 23rd.

  It was very hot that day, driving to Worthing to see Leonard’s mother, my throat hurt me. Next morning I had a headache - so we stayed on at Rodmell till today. At Rodmell I read through The Common Reader; and this is very important - I must learn to write more succinctly. Especially in the general idea essays like the last, ‘How it strikes a Contemporary,’ I am horrified by my own looseness. This is partly that I don’t think things out first; partly that I stretch my style to take in crumbs of meaning. But the result is a wobble and diffusity and breathlessness which I detest. One must correct A Room of One’s Own very carefully before printing. And so I pitched into my great lake of melancholy. Lord how deep it is! What a born melancholic I am! The only way I keep afloat is by working. A note for the summer - I must take more work than I can possibly get done. - No, I don’t know what it comes from. Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth. That is the only mitigation; a kind of nobility. Solemnity. I shall make myself face the fact that there is nothing - nothing for any of us. Work, reading, writing are all disguises; and relations with people. Yes, even having children would be useless.

  However, I now begin to see The Moths rather too clearly, or at least strenuously, for my comfort. I think it will begin like this: dawn; the shells on a beach; I don’t know - voices of cock and nightingale; and then all the children at a long table - lessons. The beginning. Well, all sorts of characters are to be there. Then the person who is at the table can call out any one of them at any moment; and build up by that person the mood, tell a story; for instance about dogs or nurses; or some adventure of a child’s kind; all to be very Arabian Nights; and so on: this shall be childhood; but it must not be my childhood; and boats on the pond; the sense of children; unreality; things oddly proportioned. Then another person or figure must be selected. The unreal world must be round all this - the phantom waves. The Moth must come in; the beautiful single moth. Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises. She might have a book - one book to read in - another to write in - old letters. Early morning light - but this need not be insisted on; because there must be great freedom from ‘reality’. Yet everything must have relevance.

  Well all this is of course the ‘real’ life; and nothingness only comes in the absence of this. I have proved this quite certainly in the past half hour. Everything becomes green and vivified in me when I begin to think of The Moths. Also, I think, one is much better able to enter into others’

  Monday, August 19th.

  I suppose dinner interrupted. And I opened this book in another train of mind to record the blessed fact that for good or bad I have just set the last correction to Women and Fiction, or A Room of One’s Own. I shall never read it again I suppose. Good or bad? Has an uneasy life in it I think: you feel the creature arching its back and galloping on, though as usual much is watery and flimsy and pitched in too high a voice.

  Monday September 10th.

  Leonard is having a picnic at Charleston and I am here - ‘tired’. But why am I tired? Well I am never alone. This is the beginning of my complaint. I am not physically tired so much as psychologically. I have strained and wrung at journalism and proof correction; and underneath has been forming my Moth book. Yes, but it forms very slowly; and what I want is not to write it, but to think it for two or three weeks say - to get into the same current of thought and let that submerge everything. Writing perhaps a few phrases here at my window in the morning. (And they’ve gone to some lovely place - Hurstmonceux perhaps, in this strange misty evening; - and yet when the time came to go, all I wanted was to walk off into the hills by myself. I am now feeling a little lonely and deserted and defrauded, inevitably.) And every time I get into my current of thought I am jerked out of it. We have the Keynes; then Vita came; then Angelica and Eve; then we went to Worthing, then my head begins throbbing - so here I am, not writing - that does not matter, but not thinking, feeling or seeing - and seizing an afternoon alone as a treasure - Leonard appeared at the glass door at this moment; and they didn’t go to Hurstmonceux or anywhere; and Sprott was there and a miner, so I missed nothing - one’s first egotistical pleasure.

  Really these premonitions of a book - states of soul in creating - are very queer and little apprehended...

  And then I am 47: yes; and my infirmities will of course increase. To begin with my eyes. Last year, I think, I could read without spectacles; would pick up a paper and read it in a tube; gradually I found I needed spectacles in bed; and now I can’t read a line (unless held at a very odd angle) without them. My new spectacles are much stronger than the old and when I take them off I am blinded for a moment. What other infirmities? I can hear, I think, perfectly: I think I could walk as well as ever. But then will there not be the change of life? And may that not be a difficult and even dangerous time? Obviously one can get over it by facing it with common sense - that it is a natural process; that one can lie out here and read; that one’s faculties will be the same afterwards; that one has nothing to worry about in one sense - I’ve written some interesting books, can make money, can afford a holiday - Oh no; one has nothing to bother about; and these curious intervals in life - I’ve had many - are the most fruitful artistically - one becomes fertilized - think of my madness at Hogarth - and all the little illnesses - that before I wrote the lighthouse for instance. Six weeks in bed now would make a masterpiece of Moths. But that won’t be the name. Moths, I suddenly remember, don’t fly by day. And there can’t be a lighted candle. Altogether, the shape of the book wants considering - and with time I could do it. Here I broke off.

  Wednesday, September 25th.

  Yesterday morning I made another start on The Moths, but that won’t be its title; and several problems cry out at once to be solved. Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? One wants some device which is not a trick.

  Friday, October 11th.

  And I snatch at the idea of writing here in order not to write Waves or Moths or whatever it is to be called. One thinks one has learnt to write quickly with gusto or pleasure: because of the concentration. I am not reeling it off; but sticking it down. Also, never, in my life, did I attack such a vague yet elaborate design; whenever I make a mark I have to think of its relation to a dozen others. And though I could go on ahead easily enough, I am always stopping to consider the whole effect. In particular is there some radical fault in my scheme? I am not quite satisfied with this method of picking out things in the room and being reminded by th
em of other things. Yet I can’t at the moment divine anything which keeps so close to the original design and admits of movement. Hence, perhaps, these October days are to me a little strained and surrounded with silence. What I mean by this last word I don’t quite know, since I have never stopped ‘seeing’ people - Nessa and Roger, the Jeffers, Charles Buxton, and should have seen Lord David.-’and am to see the Eliots - oh and there was Vita too. No, it’s not physical silence; it’s some inner loneliness - interesting to analyse if one could. To give an example - I was walking up Bedford Place is it - the straight street with all the boarding houses this afternoon - and I said to myself spontaneously, something like this. How I suffer. And no one knows how I suffer, walking up this street, engaged with my anguish, as I was after Thoby died - alone; fighting something alone. But then I had the devil to fight, and now nothing. And when I come indoors it is all so silent - I am not carrying a great rush. of wheels in my head - yet I am writing - oh and we are very successful - and there is - what I most love - change ahead. Yes, that last evening at Rodmell when Leonard came down against his will to fetch me, the Keynes came over. And Maynard is giving up the Nation, and so is Hubert and so no doubt shall we. And it is autumn; and the lights are going up; and Nessa is in Fitzroy Street - in a great misty room with flaring gas and unsorted plates and glasses on the floor - and the Press is booming - and this celebrity business is quite chronic - and I am richer than I have ever been - and bought a pair of earrings today - and for all this, there is vacancy and silence somewhere in the machine. On the whole, I do not much mind; because what I like is to flash and dash from side to side, goaded on by what I call reality. If I never felt these extraordinarily pervasive strains - of unrest or rest or happiness or discomfort - I should float down into acquiescence. Here is something to fight; and when I wake early I say to myself Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling, I would; the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world; the sense that comes to me of being bound on an adventure; of being strangely free now, with money and so on, to do anything. I go to take theatre tickets (The Matriarch) and see a list of cheap excursions hanging there, and at once think that I will go to Stratford on Avon Mop Fair tomorrow - why not? - or to Ireland or to Edinburgh for a weekend. I daresay I shan’t. But anything is possible. And this curious steed, life, is genuine. Does any of this convey what I want to say? But I have not really laid hands on the emptiness after all. It’s odd, now I come to think of it -