Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Wednesday, October 23rd.

  As it is true - I write only for an hour, then rush back feeling I cannot keep my brain on that spin any more - then typewrite, and am done by 12. He wrote yesterday, 3 Dec. and said he very much liked it. I will here sum up my impressions before publishing A Room of One’s Own. It is a little ominous that Morgan won’t review it. It makes me suspect that there is a shrill feminine tone in it which my intimate friends will dislike. I forecast, then, that I shall get no criticism, except of the evasive jocular kind, from Lytton, Roger and Morgan; that the press will be kind and talk of its charm and sprightliness; also I shall be attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a Sapphist;

  Sybil will ask me to luncheon; I shall get a good many letters from young women. I am afraid it will not be taken seriously. Mrs Woolf is so accomplished a writer that all she says makes easy reading... this very feminine logic... a book to be put in the hands of girls. I doubt that I mind very much. The Moths; but I think it is to be waves, is trudging along; and I have that to refer to, if I am damped by the other. It is a trifle, I shall say; so it is; but I wrote it with ardour and conviction.

  We dined last night with the Webbs and I had Eddy and Dotty to tea. As for these mature dinner parties one has some friendly easy talk with one man - Hugh Macmillan - about the Buchans and his own career; the Webbs are friendly but can’t be influenced about Kenya; we sit in two lodging house rooms (the dining room had a brass bedstead behind a screen) eat hunks of red beef; and are offered whisky. It is the same enlightened, impersonal, perfectly aware of itself atmosphere. ‘My little boy shall have his toys’ - but don’t let that go any further - ‘that’s what my wife says about my being in the Cabinet.’ No they have no illusions. And I compared them with L. and myself, and felt, (I daresay for this reason) the pathos, the symbolical quality of the childless couple; standing for something, united.

  Saturday, November 2nd.

  Oh but I have done quite well so far with Room of One’s Own; and it sells, I think; and I get unexpected letters. But I am more concerned with my Waves. I’ve just typed out my morning’s work; and can’t feel altogether sure. There is something there (as I felt about Mrs Dalloway) but I can’t get at it, squarely; nothing like the speed and certainty of the Lighthouse: Orlando mere child’s play. Is there some falsity of method, somewhere? Something tricky? - so that the interesting things aren’t firmly based? I am in an odd state; feel a cleavage; here’s my interesting thing; and there’s no quite solid table on which to put it. It might come in a flash, on re-reading - some solvent. I am convinced that I am right to seek for a station whence I can set my people against time and the sea - but Lord, the difficulty of digging oneself in there, with conviction. Yesterday I had conviction; it has gone today.

  Saturday, November 30th.

  I fill in this page, nefariously; at the end of a morning’s work. I have begun the second part of Waves - I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel that I am only accumulating notes for a book - whether I shall ever face the labour of writing it, God knows. From some higher station I may be able to pull it together - at Rodmell, in my new room. Reading the Lighthouse does not make it easier to write...

  Sunday, December 8th.

  I read and read and finished I daresay 3 foot thick of MS. read carefully too, much of it on the border, and so needing thought. Now, with this load despatched, I am free to begin reading Elizabethans - the little unknown writers, whom I, so ignorant am I, have never heard of, Puttenham, Webb, Harvey. This thought fills me with joy - no overstatement. To begin reading with a pen in my hand, discovering, pouncing, thinking of phrases, when the ground is new, remains one of my great excitements. Oh but L. will sort apples and the little noise upsets me; I can’t think what I was going to say.

  So I stopped writing, by which no great harm was done, and made out a list of Elizabethan poets. And I have, with great happiness, refused to write Rhoda Broughton, Ouida for de la Mare. That vein, popular as it is, witness Jane and Geraldine, is soon worked out in me. I want to write criticism. Yes, and one might make out an obscure figure or two. It was Elizabethan prose writers I loved first and most wildly, stirred by Hakluyt, which father lugged home for me - I think of it with some sentiment - father tramping over the Library with his little girl sitting at H.P.G. in mind. He must have been 65; I 15 or 16 then; and why I don’t know but I became enraptured, though not exactly interested, but the sight of the large yellow page entranced me. I used to read it and dream of those obscure adventurers and no doubt practised their style in my copybook. I was then writing a long picturesque essay upon the Christian religion, I think; called Religio Laici, I believe, proving that man has need of a God; but the God was described in process of change; and I also wrote a history of Women; and a history of my own family - all very longwinded and Elizabethan in style.

  RODMELL - Boxing Bay I find it almost incredibly soothing - a fortnight alone - almost impossible to let oneself have it. Relentlessly we have crushed visitors. We will be alone this once, we say; and really, it seems possible. Then Annie is to me very sympathetic. My bread bakes well. All is rather rapt, simple, quick, effective - except for my blundering on at The Waves. I write two pages of arrant nonsense; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream. Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading; and pencil them into some sense. Still I am not satisfied. I think there is something lacking. I sacrifice nothing to seemliness. I press to my centre. I don’t care if it all is scratched out. And there is something there. I incline now to try violent shots - at London - at talk - shouldering my way ruthlessly - and then, if nothing comes of it - anyhow I have examined the possibilities. But I wish I enjoyed it more. I don’t have it in my head all day like the Lighthouse and Orlando.

  1930.

  Sunday, January 12th.

  Sunday it is. And I have just exclaimed: ‘And now I can think of nothing else.’ Thanks to my pertinacity and industry, I can now hardly stop making up The Waves. The sense of this came acutely about a week ago on beginning to write the Phantom Party: now I feel that I can rush on, after 6 months’ hacking, and finish: but without the least certainty how it’s to achieve any form. Much will have to be discarded: what is essential is to write fast and not break the mood - no holiday, no interval if possible, till it is done. Then rest. Then re-write.

  Sunday, January 26th.

  I am 48: we have been at Rodmell - a wet, windy day again; but on my birthday we walked among the downs, like the folded wings of grey birds: and saw first one fox, very long with his brush stretched; then a second; which had been barking, for the sun was hot over us; it leapt lightly over a fence and entered the furze - a very rare sight. How many foxes are there in England? At night I read Lord Chaplin’s life. I cannot yet write naturally in my new room, because the table is not the right height and I must stoop to warm my hands. Everything must be absolutely what I am used to.

  I forgot to say that when we made up our 6 months accounts, we found I had made about £3,020 last year - the salary of a civil servant: a surprise to me, who was content with £200 for so many years. But I shall drop very heavily I think. It has sold about 6,500 today, Oct. 30th, 1931 - after 3 weeks. But will stop now, I suppose.

  The Waves won’t sell more than 2,000 copies. I am stuck fast in that book - I mean, glued to it, like a fly on gummed paper. Sometimes I am out of touch; but go on; then again feel that I have at last, by violent measures - like breaking through gorse - set my hands on something central. Perhaps I can now say something quite straight out; and at length; and need not be always casting a line to make my book the right shape. But how to pull it together, how to comport it - press it into one - I do not know; nor can I guess the end - it might be a gigantic conversation. The interludes are very difficult, yet I think essential; so as to bridge and also to give a background - the sea; insensitive nature - I don’t know. But I think, when I feel this sudden directness, that it must be right: anyhow no other form of fictio
n suggests itself except as a repetition at the moment.

  Sunday, February 16th.

  To lie on the sofa for a week. I am sitting up today in the usual state of unequal animation. Below normal, with spasmodic desire to write, then to doze. It is a fine cold day and if my energy and sense of duty persist, I shall drive up to Hampstead. But I doubt that I can write to any purpose. A cloud swims in my head. One is too conscious of the body and jolted out of the rut of life to get back to fiction. Once or twice I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head, which comes when I am ill so often - last year for example at this time I lay in bed constructing A Room of One’s Own (which sold 10,000 two days ago).If I could stay in bed another fortnight (but there is no chance of that) I believe I should see the whole of The Waves. Or of course I might go off on something different. As it is I half incline to insist upon a dash to Cassis; but perhaps this needs more determination than I possess; and we shall dwindle on here. Pinker is walking about the room looking for the bright patch - a sign of spring. I believe these illnesses are in my case - how shall I express it? - partly mystical. Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain - as last year; only discomfort this. Then suddenly something springs. Two nights ago Vita was here; and when she went I began to feel the quality of the evening - how it was spring coming: a silver light; mixing with the early lamps; the cabs all rushing through the streets; I had a tremendous sense of life beginning; mixed with that emotion which is the essence of my feeling, but escapes description (I keep on making up the Hampton Court scene in The Waves - Lord how I wonder if I shall pull this book off! It is a litter of fragments so far). Well, as I was saying, between these long pauses, for I am swimming in the head and write rather to stabilize myself than to make a correct statement - I felt the spring beginning; and Vita’s life so full and flush; and all the doors opening; and this is I believe the moth shaking its wings in me. I then begin to make up my story whatever it is; ideas rush in me; often though this is before I can control my mind or pen. It is no use trying to write at this stage. And I doubt if I can fill this white monster. I would like to lie down and sleep, but feel ashamed. Leonard brushed off his influenza in one day and went about his business feeling ill. Here am I still loafing, undressed, with Elly coming tomorrow. But as I was saying, my mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way. I am reading Byron: Maurois: which sends me to Childe Harold; makes me speculate. How odd a mixture: the weakest sentimental Mrs Hemans combined with trenchant bare vigour. How did they combine? And sometimes the descriptions in C.H. are ‘beautiful’; like a great poet. There are the three elements in Byron:

  1. The romantic dark haired lady singing drawing room melodies to the guitar.

  ‘Tambourgi! Tambourgi! thy ‘larum afar Gives hope to the valiant and promise of war;’

  ‘Oh! who is more brave than a dark Suliote, In his snowy camese and his shaggy capote’

  - something manufactured; a pose; silliness.

  2. Then there is the vigorous rhetorical, like his prose, and good as prose.

  ‘Hereditary Bondsmen! know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

  By their right arms the conquest must be wrought? Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!’

  3. Then what rings to me truer, and is almost poetry.

  ‘Dear Nature is the kindest mother still!

  Though always changing, in her aspect mild;

  From her bare bosom let me take my fill,

  Her never-weaned, though not her favoured child.

  To me by day or night she ever smiled,

  Though I have marked her when none other hath.

  And sought her more and more and loved her best in wrath.’

  4. And then there is of course the pure satiric, as in the description of a London Sunday; and 5. Finally (but this makes more than three) the inevitable half assumed half genuine tragic note, which comes as a refrain, about death and the loss of friends.

  All thou could have of mine, stern Death! thou hast;

  The parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend:

  Ne’er yet for me thine arrows flew so fast,

  And grief with grief continuing still to blend,

  Hath snatched the little joy that life had yet to lend.

  These I think make him up; and make much that is spurious, vapid, yet very changeable, and then rich and with greater range than the other poets, could he have got the whole into order. A novelist, he might have been. It is odd however to read in his letters his prose and apparently genuine feeling about Athens and to compare it with the convention he adopted in verse. (There is some sneer about the Acropolis.) But then the sneer may have been a pose too. The truth may be that if you. are charged at such high voltage you can’t fit any of the ordinary human feelings; must pose; must rhapsodize; don’t fit in. He wrote in the Fun Album that his age was 100. And this is true, measuring life by feeling.

  Monday, February 17th.

  And this temperature is up: but it has now gone down; and now Thursday, February loth.

  I must canter my wits if I can. Perhaps some character sketches. Monday, March 17th.

  The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say. As this morning I could say what Rhoda said. This proves that the book itself is alive: because it has not crushed the thing I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration.

  Friday, March 28th.

  Yes, but this book is a very queer business. I had a day of intoxication when I said ‘Children are nothing to this’: when I sat surveying the whole book complete and quarrelled with L. (about Ethel Smyth) and walked it off, felt the pressure of the form - the splendour, the greatness - as, perhaps I have never felt them. But I shan’t race it off in intoxication. I keep pegging away; and find it the most complex and difficult of all my books. How to end, save by a tremendous discussion, in which every life shall have its voice - a mosaic I do not know.

  The difficulty is that it is all at high pressure. I have not yet mastered the speaking voice. Yet I think something is there; and I propose to go on pegging it down, arduously, and then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like poetry. It will bear expansion. It is compressed I think. It is - whatever I make of it - a large and potential theme - which Orlando was not perhaps. At any rate, I have taken my fence.

  Wednesday, April 9th.

  What I now think (about The Waves) is that I can give in a very few strokes the essentials of a person’s character. It should be done boldly, almost as caricature. I have yesterday entered what may be the last lap. Like every piece of the book it goes by fits and starts. I never get away with it; but am tugged back. I hope this makes for solidity; and must look to my sentences. The abandonment of Orlando and Lighthouse is much checked by the extreme difficulty of the form - as it was in Jacob’s Room. I think this is the furthest development so far; but of course it may miss fire somewhere. I think I have kept stoically to the original conception. What I fear is that the rewriting will have to be so drastic that I may entirely muddle it somehow. It is bound to be very imperfect. But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky.

  Sunday, April 13th.

  I read Shakespeare directly I have finished writing. When my mind is agape and red-hot. Then it is astonishing. I never yet knew how amazing his stretch and speed and word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace and outrace my own, seeming to start equal and then I see him draw ahead and do things I could not in my wildest tumult and utmost press of mind imagine. Even the less known plays are written at a speed that is quicker than anybody else’s quickest; and the words drop so fast one can’t pick them up. Look at this. ‘Upon a gather’d lily almost wither’d.’ (That is a pure accident. I happen to light on it.) Evidently the pliancy of his mind was so complete that he could furb
ish out any train of thought; and, relaxing, let fall a shower of such unregarded flowers. Why then should anyone else attempt to write? This is not ‘writing’ at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

  Wednesday, April 23rd.

  This is a very important morning in the history of The Waves, because I think I have turned the corner and see the last lap straight ahead. I think I have got Bernard into the final stride. He will go straight on now, and then stand at the door: and then there will be a last picture of the waves. We are at Rodmell and I daresay I shall stay on a day or two (if I dare) so as not to break the current and finish it. O Lord and then a rest; and then an article; and then back again to this hideous shaping and moulding. There may be some joys in it all the same.