Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  A saying of Leonard’s comes into my head in this season of complete inanity and boredom. ‘Things have gone wrong somehow.’ It was the night C. killed herself. We were walking along that silent blue street with the scaffolding. I saw all the violence and unreason crossing in the air: ourselves small; a tumult outside: something terrifying: unreason - shall I make a book out of this? It would be a way of bringing order and speed again into my world.

  Thursday, May 26th.

  And now today suddenly the weight on my head is lifted and I can think, reason, keep to one thing and concentrate. Perhaps this is the beginning of another spurt. Perhaps I owe it to my conversation with L. last night. I tried to analyse my depression: how my brain is jaded with the conflict within of two types of thought, the critical, the creative; how I am harassed by the strife and jar and uncertainty without. This morning the inside of my head feels cool and smooth instead of strained and turbulent.

  Tuesday, June 28th.

  Just ‘finished de Quincey’. Thus am I trying to keep pace with the days and deliver the second C.R. done on the last of June, which I see with dismay is Thursday. I spent last summer thus toiling over The Waves. This is less severe by a long chalk (what’s the origin of that? cricket pitch? billiards?) Anyhow it blazes; swoons; the heat. Royal, imperial, are the words I fumble with in the Square. So hot yesterday - so hot, when Prince Mirsky came with his fluent Russian lady: I mean she was full of temperament; had the free gestures of the Slav: but Mirsky was trap mouthed: opened and bit his remark to pieces: has yellow misplaced teeth: wrinkles his forehead; despair, suffering, very marked on his face. Has been in England, in boarding houses, for 12 years; now returns to Russia ‘forever’. I thought as I watched his eye brighten and fade - soon there’ll be a bullet through your head. That’s one of the results of war: this trapped cabin’d man. But that didn’t lubricate our tea.

  Wednesday, June 29th.

  Whenever I suck my pen, my lip is covered with ink. And I have no ink with which to fill my pot; and it is 10 minutes past 12; and I have just finished Hardy; and I promise myself that the C.R. will be finally done by Wednesday next. And today is Sunday. Last night at 10 the Zeppelin came past with a string of light hanging from its navel. This consoled me for not having gone to the last night of the ballet. Now I have cleaned my table, which John inherits while I’m away. And I should now attack Ch. Rossetti. But Lord, how tired one gets of one’s own writing.

  Today is Wednesday and the C.R. I confess is not yet quite done. But then - well I had to re-write the last article, which I had thought so good, entirely. Not for many years shall I collect another bunch of articles.

  Monday, July 11th.

  I will take a new pen and a new page to record the fact which is now a fact that I have slipped a green rubber band round The Common Reader, second series, and there it lies, at 10 minutes to one, ready to take upstairs. There is no sense of glory; only of drudgery done. And yet I daresay it’s a nice enough book to read - I doubt that I shall write another like it all the same. I must find a quicker cut into books than this. But heaven be praised, not now. Now I’m taking a holiday. That is to say, what shall I write tomorrow? I can sit down and think.

  Wednesday, July 13th.

  I have been sleeping over a promising novel. That’s the way to write. I’m ruminating, as usual, how to improve my lot; and shall begin by walking, alone, in Regent’s Park this afternoon. What I mean is why do a single thing one doesn’t want to do - for instance buy a hat or read a book. Old Joseph Wright and old Lizzie Wright are people I respect. Indeed I do hope the second volume will come this morning. He was a maker of dialect dictionaries: he was a workhouse boy - his mother went charing. And he married Miss Lea a clergyman’s daughter. And I’ve just read their love letters with respect And he said: ‘Always please yourself - then one person’s happy at any rate.’ And she said make details part of a whole - get proportions right - contemplating marriage with Joe. Odd how rare it is to meet people who say things that we ourselves could have said. Their attitude to life much our own. Joe a very thick sturdy man - ‘I am unique in certain respects,’ he said. ‘We must leave some record of Joe and Lizzie to posterity.’ Had his old working mother to Oxford. She thought All Souls would make a good Co-op. Had a fist and struck boys. His notion of learning. What is it? I sometimes would like to be “ learned myself. About sounds and dialects. Still what use is it? S I mean, if you have that mind why not make something beautiful? Yes, but then the triumph of learning is that it leaves something done solidly forever. Everybody knows now about dialect, I owing to his dictionary. He is a coarse, sturdy variety of Sidney Webb and Walter Leaf - stockish, hairy; more humorous and forcible than either. Could work all night, wash and work all next day. Miss Weisse, Tovey’s lady, brought them together - made Lizzie give up arranging the flowers in the rectory and go to Oxford. She a woman of character. Wouldn’t accept Joe’s offer of a job because he made her feel like a bear at the end of a chain. But she married him. They were lost in the woods by Virginia Water in 1896: and sat on a seat and had an hour of great suffering, after which she accepted him - they got on a baker’s cart and were taken back to Miss Weisse. An absorbing story. Joe knew all about servants. Joe taught himself to read at 14: taught mill boys in a bedroom for 2d a week: a surly but very sensitive man, apparently. Now this is a testimony to Joe and Lizzie that I’ve been thinking how I should have liked to see them - would now like to write to her. A fine face with bright big eyes. Yes, but what happens in volume two?

  RODMELL

  Friday, August 5th.

  Yesterday L. came into my room at breakfast and said ‘Goldie1 is dead.’ I never knew him well but had the common feeling that I have with those trusty Cambridge fellows: and was pleased, of course, by what he wrote of The Waves: and so came nearer. I get the strangest feeling now of our all being in the midst of some vast operation: of the splendour of this undertaking - life: of being capable of dying: an immensity surrounds me. No - I can’t get it - shall let it brood itself into ‘a novel’ no doubt. (It’s thus I get the conception from which the book condenses.) At night L. and I talked of death again, the second time this year: how we may be like worms crushed by a motor car: what does the worm know of the car - how it is made? There may be a reason: if so not one we, as human beings, can grasp. Goldie had some mystic belief.

  And now we have been to Lewes races and seen the fat lady in black with parts of her person spilling over the shooting seat on which her bulk is so insecurely poised: seen the riff raff of sporting society all lined up in their cars with the dickies bulging with picnic basket»: heard the bark of backers: seen for a second the pounding straining horses with red faced jockeys lashing them pound by. What a noise they made - what a sense of muscle hard and stretched - and beyond the downs this windy sunny day looked wild and remote; and I could rethink them into uncultivated land again.

  Wednesday, August 17th.

  Now I think I have corrected the C.R. till I can correct no longer. And I have a few minutes’ holiday before I need take the proofs in to L. Shall I then describe how I fainted again? That is the galloping hooves got wild in my head last Thursday night as I sat on the terrace with L. How cool it is after the heat! I said. We were watching the downs draw back into fine darkness after they had burnt like solid emerald all day. Now that was being softly finely veiled. And the white owl was crossing to fetch mice from the marsh. Then my heart leapt: and stopped: and leapt again: and I tasted that queer bitterness at the back of my throat; and the pulse leapt into my head and beat and beat, more savagely, more quickly. I am going to faint, I said, and slipped off my chair and lay on the grass. Oh no, I was not unconscious. I was alive: but possessed with this struggling team in my head: galloping, pounding. I thought something will burst in my brain if this goes on. Slowly it muffled itself. I pulled myself up and staggered, with what infinite difficulty and alarm, now truly fainting and seeing the garden painfully lengthened and distorted, back, back, back - ho
w long it seemed - could I drag myself? - to the house: and gained my room and fell on my bed. Then pain, as of childbirth; and then that too slowly faded; and I lay presiding, like a flickering light, like a most solicitous mother, over the shattered splintered fragments of my body. A very acute and unpleasant experience.

  Saturday, August 20th.

  A curious day in London yesterday. I said to myself standing at L.’s window. Look at the present moment because it’s not been so hot for 21 years. There was a hot wind, as if one passed over a kitchen, going from the studio to the Press. Outside girls and young men lying in white on the square grass. So hot we couldn’t sit in the dining room. L. fetched and carried and hardly let me walk upstairs carrying my own body. Coming back we had the car shut and the windscreen open - thus sat in a hot rough gale which, as we came to the lanes and woods, became deliciously cold and green. The coolest place is the front seat of a car going at 40 or 50 miles with the windscreen open. Today, at 12.30, a wind rose: clouds descended; now at 3.45 it’s almost a normal warm summer day. For 10 days this heat has lasted. After my faint my head soon throbs; or so I think. I think a little of dying suddenly and reflect. Well then go about eating and drinking and laughing and feeding the fish. Odd - the silliness one attributes to death - the desire one has to belittle it and be found, as Montaigne said, laughing with girls and good fellows. And L. is staking out the dewpond and I am going in to be photographed. Three more books appearing on Mrs Woolf: which reminds me to make a note, sometime, on my work.

  A very good summer, this, for all my shying and jibbing, my tremors this morning. Beautifully quiet, airy, powerful. I believe I want this more humane existence for my next - to spread carelessly among one’s friends - to feel the width and amusement of human life: not to strain to make a pattern just yet: to be made supple, and to let the juice of usual things, talk, character, seep through me, quietly, involuntarily, before I say Stop and take out my pen. Yes, my thighs now begin to run smooth: no longer is every nerve upright. Yesterday we took plums to old Mrs Grey. She is shrunk and sits on a hard chair in the corner. The door open. She twitches and trembles. Has the wild expressionless stare of the old. L. liked her despair: ‘I crawls up to bed hoping for the day; and I crawls down hoping for the night. I’m an ignorant old woman - can’t write or read. But I prays to God every night to take me - oh to go to my rest. Nobody can say what pains I suffer. Feel my shoulder,’ and she began shuffling with a safety pin. I felt it. ‘Hard as iron; full of water, and my legs too.’ She pulled down her stocking. ‘The dropsy. I’m ninety-two; and all my brothers and sisters are dead; my daughter’s dead; my husband is dead...’ She repeated her misery, her list of ills, over and over; could see nothing else; could only begin all over again; and kissed my hand, thanking us for our pound. This is what we make of our lives - no reading or writing - keep her alive with doctors when she wishes to die. Human ingenuity in torture is very great.

  LONDON

  Sunday, October 2nd.

  Yes, I will allow myself a new nib. Odd how coming back here upsets my writing mood. Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged so, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. Therefore all this flitter flutter of weekly newspapers interests me not at all. These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated. So I shan’t run about, just yet, buying clothes, seeing people. We are off to Leicester tomorrow, to the Labour Party Conference. Then back to the fever of publishing. My C.R. doesn’t cause me a single tremor. Nor Holtby’s book. I’m interested in watching what goes on for the moment without wishing to take part - a good frame of mind when one’s conscious of power. Then I am backed now by the downs: the country: how happy L. and I are at Rodmell: what a free life that is - sweeping 30 or 40 miles; coming in when and how we like; sleeping in the empty house; dealing triumphantly with interruptions; and diving daily into that divine loveliness - always some walk; and the gulls on the purple plough; or going over to Tarring Neville - these are the flights I most love now - in the wide, the indifferent air. No being jerked, teased, tugged. And people come easily, flowering into intimacy in my room. But this is the past, or future. I am also reading D. H. L[awrence]with the usual sense of frustration: and that he and I have too much in common - the same pressure to be ourselves: so that I don’t escape when I read him: am suspended: what I want is to be made free of another world. This Proust does. To me Lawrence is airless, confined: I don’t want this, I go on saying. And the repetition of one idea. I don’t want that either. I don’t want ‘a philosophy’ in the least: I don’t believe in other people’s reading of riddles. What I enjoy (in the Letters) is the sudden visualization: the great ghost springing over the wave (of the spray in Cornwall) but I get no satisfaction from his explanations of what he sees. And then it’s harrowing: this panting effort after something: and ‘I have £6.10 left’ and then Government hoofing him out, like a toad: and banning his book: the brutality of civilized society to this panting agonized man: and how futile it was. All this makes a sort of gasping in his letters. And none of it seems essential. So he pants and jerks. Then too I don’t like strumming with two fingers - and the arrogance. After all, English has one million words: why confine yourself to 6? and praise yourself for so doing. But it’s the preaching that rasps me. Like a person delivering judgement when only half the facts are there: and clinging to the rails and beating the cushion. Come out and see what’s up here - I want to say. I mean if s so barren: so easy: giving advice on a system. The moral is, if you want to help, never systematize - not till you’re 70: and have been supple and sympathetic and creative and tried out all your nerves and scopes. He died though at 45. And why does Aldous say he was an ‘artist’? Art is being rid of all preaching: things in themselves: the sentence in itself beautiful: multitudinous seas; daffodils that come before the swallow dares: whereas Lawrence would only say what proved something. I haven’t read him of course. But in the Letters he can’t listen beyond a point; must give advice; get you into the system too. Hence his attraction for those who want to be fitted: which I don’t; indeed I think it a blasphemy this fitting of Carswells into a Lawrence system. So much more reverent to leave them alone: nothing else to reverence except the Carswellism of Cars well. Hence his schoolboy tweaking and smacking of anyone offered to him: Lytton, Bertie, Squire - all are suburban, unclean.

  His ruler coming down and measuring them. Why all this criticism of other people? Why not some system that includes the good? What a discovery that would be - a system that did not shut out Wednesday, November 2nd.

  He is a rattle headed, bolt eyed young man, raw boned, loose jointed, who thinks himself the greatest poet of all time. I daresay he is - it’s not a subject that interests me enormously at the moment. What does? My own writing of course. I’ve just polished up the L.S. for The Times - a good one, I think, considering the currents that sway round that subject in The Times of all papers. And I have entirely remodelled my ‘Essay’. It’s to be an Essay-Novel called The Pargiters (The Years) - and it’s to take in everything, sex, education, life etc.: and come, with the most powerful and agile leaps, like a chamois, across precipices from 1880 to here and now. That’s the notion anyhow, and I have been in such a haze and dream and intoxication, declaiming phrases, seeing scenes, as I walk up Southampton Row that I can hardly say I have been alive at all, since 10th October.

  Everything is running of its own accord into the stream, as with Orlando. What has happened of course is that after abstaining from the novel of fact all these years - since 1919 - and N. & D. is dead - I find myself infinitely delighting in facts for a change, and in possession of quantities beyond counting: though I feel now and then the tug to vision, but resist it. This is the true line, I a
m sure, after The Waves - The Pargiters - this is what leads naturally on to the next stage - the essay-novel.

  Monday, December 19th.

  Yes, today I have written myself to the verge of total extinction. Praised be I can stop and wallow in coolness and downs and let the wheels of my mind - how I beg them to do this - cool and slow and stop altogether. I shall take up Flush again, to cool myself. By Heaven, I have written 60,320 words since October nth. I think this must be far the quickest going of any of my books: comes far ahead of Orlando or the Lighthouse. But then those 60 thousand will have to be sweated and dried into 30 or 40 thousand - a great grind to come. Never mind. I have secured the outline and fixed a shape for the rest. I feel, for the first time, No I mustn’t take risks crossing the road, till the book is done...

  Yes, I will be free and entire and absolute and mistress of my life by October 1st, 1933. Nobody shall come here on their terms; or haul me off to them on theirs. Oh and I shall write a poet’s book next. This one, however, releases such a torrent of fact as I did not know I had in me. I must have been observing and collecting these 20 years - since Jacob’s Room anyhow. Such a wealth of things seen present themselves that I can’t choose even - hence 60,000 words all about one paragraph. What I must do is to keep control; and not be too sarcastic; and keep the right degree of freedom and reserve. But oh how easy this writing is compared with The Waves! I wonder what the degree of carat-gold is in the two books. Of course this is external: but there’s a good deal of gold - more than I’d thought - in externality. Anyhow, ‘what care I for my goose leather bed? I’m off to join the raggle taggle gipsies oh!’ The gipsies, I say: not Hugh Walpole and Priestley - no. In truth The Targiters is first cousin to Orlando, though the cousin is the flesh: Orlando taught me the trick of it. Now - oh but I must stop for 10 days at least - no 14 - if not 21 days - now I must compose the 1880-1900 chapter, which needs skill. But I like applying skill I own. I am going to polish off my jobs: and tomorrow we go. A very fruitful varied and I think successful autumn - thanks partly to my tired heart: so I could impose terms: - and I have never lived in such a race, such a dream, such a violent impulsion and compulsion - scarcely seeing anything but The Targiters.