Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Thursday, August 24th.

  A week ago, on Friday to be precise, having got my mind again, I dipped into The Pargiters and determined to sweat it bare of flesh before going on, accumulating more scenes. I am re-arranging too, all the first part, so as to bring it together. The death happens in the first chapter now. I think I shall reduce the size by half; it is however a little bare and jerky at present. Moreover it is rather a rush and a strain. I have just killed Mrs P.: and can’t shoot ahead to Oxford. For the truth is these little scenes embroil one, just as in life; and one can’t switch off to a different mood all in a second. It seems to me that the realness of the beginning is complete. I have a good excuse for poetry in the second part, if I can take it. Rather an interesting experiment - if I could see the same thing from two different views. And now I have spent the morning reading the Confession of Arsène Houssaye left here yesterday by Clive. What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me!

  I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.

  Saturday, September 2nd.

  Suddenly in the night I thought of Here and Now as a title for the Pargiters. I think it better. It shows what I’m after and does not compete with the Herries Saga, the Forsyte Saga and so on. I have now done the first part; I mean compressed it, shall, I think, compress Eleanor’s day, and then what? The rest does not admit of much compression. I think I have reduced it to 80,000 words perhaps: but it seems to me there must be another 40, to come. 80 plus 40 equals 120,000. If so it will be the longest of my little brood - longer than Night and Day I imagine.

  Tuesday, September 26th.

  Why not, one of these days, write a fantasy on the theme of Crabbe? - a biographical fantasy - an experiment in biography.

  I had so much of the most profound interest to write here - a dialogue of the soul with the soul - and I have let it all slip - why? Because of feeding the goldfish, of looking at the new pond, of playing bowls. Nothing remains now. I forget what it was about. Happiness. The perfect day, which was yesterday. And so on. Now I began the morning by telephoning corrections of Twelfth Night, to the N.S.: put in a comma, take out semi-colon; and so on. Then I come out here, having seen the carp, and write Turgenev.

  Monday, October 2nd.

  It’s October now; and we have to go to Hastings Conference tomorrow and Wednesday, to Vita, then back to London. I opened this in order to make one of my self-admonishments previous to publishing a book. Flush will be out on Thursday and I shall be very much depressed, I think, by the kind of praise. They’ll say it’s ‘charming’, delicate, ladylike. And it will be popular. Well now I must let this slip over me without paying it any attention. I must concentrate on The Pargiters - or Here and Now. I must not let myself believe that I’m simply a ladylike prattler: for one thing it’s not true. But they’ll all say so. And I shall very much dislike the popular success of Flush. No, I must say to myself, this is a mere wisp, a veil of water; and so create, hardly, fiercely, as I feel now more able to do than ever before.

  Sunday, October 29th.

  No, my head is too tired to go on with Bobby and Elvira - they’re to meet at St Paul’s - this morning. I wish I could get it full and calm and unconscious. This last is difficult, owing to Flush, owing to the perpetual little spatter of comment that keeps me awake. Yesterday the Granta said I was now defunct. Orlando, Waves, Flush represent the death of a potentially great writer. This is only a rain drop, I mean the snub some little pimpled undergraduate likes to administer, just as he would put a frog in one’s bed: but then there’s all the letters and the requests for pictures - so many that, foolishly perhaps, I wrote a sarcastic letter to the NS. - thus procuring more rain drops. This metaphor shows how tremendously important unconsciousness is when one writes. But let me remember that fashion in literature is an inevitable thing; also that one must grow and change; also that I have, at last, laid hands upon my philosophy of anonymity. My letter to the N.S. is the crude public statement of a part of it. How odd last winter’s revelation was! freedom; which now I find makes it quite easy for me to refuse Sibyl’s invitations, to take life much more strongly and steadily. I will not be ‘famous’, ‘great’. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded. And though this as usual is only a pot shot, there is a great deal of substance in it. October has been a bad month; but might have been much worse without my philosophy.

  Thursday, December 7th.

  I was walking through Leicester Square - how far from China - just now when I read ‘Death of Noted Novelist’ on the posters. And I thought of Hugh Walpole. But it is Stella Benson. Then why write anything, immediately? I did not know her; but have a sense of those fine patient eyes: the weak voice; the cough; the sense of oppression. She sat on the terrace with me at Rodmell. And now, so quickly, it is gone, what might have been a friendship. Trusty and patient and very sincere - I think of her; trying to cut through, in one of those difficult evenings, to some deeper layer - certainly we could have reached it, given the chance. I’m glad I stopped her at the door as she got into her little car and asked her to call me Virginia - to write to me. And she said: ‘There’s nothing I should like better.’ But it’s like the quenching of something - her death out there in China; and I sitting here and writing about her and so fugitive and yet so true; and no more to come. How mournful the afternoon seems, with the newspaper carts(?) dashing up Kingsway, ‘Death of Noted Novelist’ on the placard. A very fine steady mind: much suffering; suppressed; - there seems to be some sort of reproach to me in her death, as in K. M.’s. I go on; and they cease. Why? Why not my name on the posters? And I have a feeling of the protest each might make: gone with their work unfinished - each so suddenly. Stella was 41. ‘I am going to send you my book’ and so on. A dreary island she lived on, talking to colonels. A curious feeling, when a writer like S. B. dies, that one’s response is diminished: Here and Now won’t be lit up by her: it’s life lessened. My effusion - what I send out - less porous and radiant - as if the thinking stuff were a web that were fertilized only by other people’s (her that is) thinking it too: now lacks life.

  Sunday, December 17th.

  I finished part 4 of Here and Now yesterday and therefore in-indulge in a contemplative morning. To freshen my memory of the war, I read some old diaries.

  1934.

  Tuesday, January 16th.

  I have let all this time - three weeks at Monk’s - slip because I was there so divinely happy and pressed with ideas - another full flood of Targiters or Here and Now (odd that Goldie’s letter mentions that - The Waves is also here and now - I had forgotten). So I never wrote a word of farewell to the year; not a word describing the Keynes and the Jones; nothing about the walks I had ever so far into the downs; or the reading - Marvell of an evening, and the usual trash.

  Sunday, February 18th.

  And I began Here and Now again this morning, Sunday, at the point where I left off all but three weeks ago for my headache. Here I note that from two to three weeks is the right space. It has not gone cold, as after six weeks: I still carry it in my mind, and can see how to revise. It has gone - the talk during the Raid - running all over the place, because I was tired; now I must press together: get into the mood and start again. I want to raise up the magic world all round me and live strongly and quietly there for six weeks. The difficulty is the usual one - how to adjust the two worlds. It is no good getting violently excited: one must combine.

  Tuesday, April 17th.

  So jaded am I after last night that I cannot add a word to my Sickert or make out a sketch of the last chapters of Here and Now. A high price to pay for a hurried dinner at the Hutches: racing to Macbeth; talking to Dodo Macnaghten; then to Sir Fred Pollock on the stage of Sadlers Wells. An idea about Shakespeare.


  That the play demands coming to the surface - hence insists upon a reality which the novel need not have, but perhaps should have contact with the surface, coming to the top. This is working out my theory of the different levels in writing and how to combine them: for I begin to think the combination necessary. This particular relation with the surface is imposed on the dramatist of necessity: how far did it influence Shakespeare? Idea that one could work out a theory of fiction etc. on these lines; how many levels attempted, whether kept to or not.

  Wednesday, May 8th.

  This, the 9th May, was our last day and fine. So we saw Warwickshire - but I’ve been reading the Monologue and note how oddly another style infects - at its best: thick green, thick leaves, stubby yellow stone houses and a fine sprinkling of Elizabethan cottages. All this led very harmoniously to Stratford on Avon; and all crabbers be damned - it is a fine, unselfconscious town, mixed, with 18th Century and the rest all standing cheek by jowl. All the flowers were out in Shakespeare’s garden. That was where his study windows looked out when he wrote The Tempest,’ said the man. And perhaps it was true. Anyhow it was a great big house, looking straight at the large windows and the grey stone of the school chapel, and when the clock struck, that was the sound Shakespeare heard. I cannot without more labour than my roadrunning mind can compass describe the queer impression of sunny impersonality. Yes, everything seemed to say, this was Shakespeare’s, had he sat and walked; but you won’t find me, not exactly in the flesh. He is serenely absent - present; both at once; radiating round one; yes; in the flowers, in the old hall, in the garden; but never to be pinned down. And we went to the church and there was the florid foolish bust, but what I had not reckoned for was the worn simple slab, turned the wrong way. Kind Friend for Jesus’ sake forbear - again he seemed to be all air and sun smiling serenely; and yet down there one foot from me lay the little bones that had spread over the world this vast illumination. Yes, and then we walked round the church and all is simple and a little worn; the river slipping past the stone wall, with a red breadth from some flowering tree, and the edge of the turf unspoilt, soft and green and muddy and two casual nonchalant swans. The church and the school and the house are all roomy spacious places, resonant, sunny today, and in and out yes, an impressive place; still living, and then the little bones lying there, which have created: to think of writing The Tempest looking out on that garden: what a rage and storm of thought to have gone over any mind; no doubt the solidity of the place was comfortable. No doubt he saw the cellars with serenity. And a few scented American girls and a good deal of parrot prattle from old gramophone discs at the birthplace, one taking up the story from the other. But isn’t it odd, the caretaker at New Place agreed, that only one genuine signature of Shakespeare’s is known; and all the rest, books, furniture, pictures etc. has completely vanished? Now I think Shakespeare was very happy in this, that there was no impediment of fame, but his genius flowed out of him and is still there, in Stratford. They were acting As You Like It I think in the theatre.

  Duffers the biographers not to make more hum and melody out of New Place. I could, so I think. For the man told us that after the great grand-daughter’s death there was a sale, and why shouldn’t some of his things, he said, be lost, put away and come to light? Also, Queen H. Maria, Charles I’s queen, stayed there at New Place with the grand-daughter(?) which shows how substantial it must have been. That he told us, and I had never heard. And he said Gaskell, the clergyman, had the original house, which stretched across the garden almost to the chapel, pulled down because people bothered him, asking to see Shakespeare’s house. And there (between the window and the wall) was the room he died in. A mullberry reputes to be the scion of the tree that grew outside Shakespeare’s window. Great cushions of blue, yellow, white flowers in the garden, which is open, so that the living go on walking and sitting there.

  Friday, May 18th.

  I broke off, after sticking my Irish papers into the old book, and felt I suppose a little shiver. Can’t be anything I said to myself after all that holiday; but it was - the flu. So I had to resign all ideas - all flood of Pargiters and the glorious and difficult end of that book: all was blotted by the damp sponge; and now it is precisely a week since I went to bed, and here we are for Whitsun at Monk’s. What’s more amazing is that I write this with a gold Waterman, and have some thoughts of supplanting steel Woolworth. It is a sunny voluptuous day, the birds all rasping on their nests, I suppose, and cawing on the trees and early in the morning giving loud and continued bursts of songs to which I lie listening. I hear L. going about the garden with Percy. All is calm and profoundly comfortable, owing to the absence for ever even in the background of grumbling Nelly and her replacement by the steady silent unselfish Mabel. Yes, we do without a char; we are free, serene, matter of fact, oh what a relief! So if I can pull my head out of the bog, I may go back on Tuesday to the three months Immersion. But I take a day or two more to rest myself. How infinitely modest and disillusioned and without ambition of any sort I became, all because of influenza. Couldn’t believe that anyone would come and see me, let alone that I could ever again string a dozen words. Now self confidence, conceit, the blessed illusion by which we live begin to return; very gently. Smooth serenity is the first stage which I will not interrupt by writing.

  Tuesday, May 22nd.

  At last today, which is Tuesday, after striking the match on the box despairingly, sterilely - oh I was so overcome with rigidity and nothingness - a little flame has come. Perhaps I’m off. This refers to the devilish difficulty of starting Part 7 again after the ‘flu. Elvira and George, or John, talking in her room. I’m still miles outside them, but I think I got into the right tone of voice this morning. I make this note by way of warning. What is important now is to go very slowly; to stop in the middle of the flood; never to press on; to lie back and let the soft subconscious world become populous; not to be urging foam from my lips. There’s no hurry. I’ve enough money to last a year. If this book comes out next June year it’s time enough. The last chapters must be so rich, so resuming, so weaving together that I can only go on by letting my mind brood every morning on the whole book. There’s no longer any need to forge ahead, as the narrative part is over. What I want is to enrich and stabilize. This last chapter must equal in length and importance and volume the first book: and must in fact give the other side, the submerged side of that. I shan’t, I think, re-read; I shall summon it back - the tea party, the death, Oxford and so on, from my memory. And as the whole book depends on bringing this off, I must be very leisurely and patient and nurse my rather creaking head and dandle it with French and so on as cunningly as possible.

  Monday, June 11th.

  That hopeful page reads rather too credulous now, since I went back and again on Friday following shivered, and ached, was stiff as a rod, talking to Elizabeth Bowen: 101: bed: influenza: and so lay all that week, till last Sunday to be accurate: and then went to Rodmell; and there began the chapter again and had a sudden fuse of ideas and then there was the opera, the nightingale singing in the ilex tree, Christabel and Mr Olaf Hambro telling stories about the Queen and Prince: and a very hot concert yesterday, so I cannot, no I cannot, write today. Patience, as Carlyle would say (in Italian). But consider - the whole system is so strained over this end, that one tiny grit, one late night, one too tiring day - takes away all rush, all fusing. And just as I saw it clear before me: the very intricate scenes: all contrasting; building up: so wait till tomorrow.

  Monday, June 18th.

  Very very hot: day altered so as to go out after tea. A drought over the world. In flood with Here and Now, praise be. Yet very wary: only just now I made up the scene with Ray and Maggie: a sign I am fertilizing, for i should be doing French for Janie, who comes at 5.

  Friday, July 27th.

  Ah hah - but now, having despatched that entirely disagreeable day, Worthing and Mr Fears, representing Rodmell Labour Party for an hour after dinner, I’m free to begin the last cha
pter; and by a merciful Providence the well is full, ideas are rising and if I can keep at it widely, freely, powerfully, I shall have two months of complete immersion. Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. I can see the day whole, proportioned - even after a long flutter of the brain such as I’ve had this morning it must be a physical, moral, mental necessity, like setting the engine off. A wild windy hot day - a tearing wind in the garden; all the July apples on the grass. I’m going to indulge in a series of quick sharp contrasts: breaking my moulds as much as ever I like. Trying every kind of experiment. Now of course I can’t write diary or letters or read because I am making up all the time. Perhaps Bob T. was right in his poem when he called me fortunate above all - I mean in having a mind that can express - no, I mean in having mobilized my being - learnt to give it complete outcome - I mean, that I have to some extent forced myself to break every mould and find a fresh form of being, that is of expression, for everything I feel or think. So that when it is working I get the sense of being fully energized - nothing stunted. But this needs constant effort, anxiety and rush. Here in Here and Now I am breaking the mould made by The Waves.