Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Thursday, August 2nd.

  I’m worried too with my last chapters. Is it all too shrill and voluble? And then the immense length, and the perpetual ebbs and flows of invention. So divinely happy one day; so jaded the next.

  Monday, August 7th.

  A rather wet Bank Holiday. Tea with Keynes. Maynard had had teeth out but was very fertile. For instance: Yes, I’ve been 3 weeks in America. An impossible climate. In fact it has collected all the faults of all the climates. This carries out my theory about climate. Nobody could produce a great work in America. One sweats all day and the dirt sticks to one’s face. The nights are as hot as the days. Nobody sleeps. Everyone is kept on the go all day long by the climate. I used to dictate articles straight off. I felt perfectly well until I left. ‘So to German politics.’ They’re doing something very queer with their money.

  ‘ I can’t make out what. It may be the Jews are taking away their capital. Let me see, if 2,000 Jews were each to take away £2,000 - Anyhow, they can’t pay their Lancashire bill. Always the Germans have bought cotton from Egypt, had it spun in Lancashire; it’s a small bill, only half a million, but they can’t pay. Yet they’re buying copper all the time. What’s it for? Armaments no doubt. That’s one of the classic examples of international trade. 20,000 people out of work. But of course there’s something behind it. What is the cause of the financial crisis? They’re doing something foolish. No Treasury control of the soldiers.

  (But I am thinking all the time of what is to end Here and Now. I want a chorus, a general statement, a song for four voices. How am I to get it? I am now almost within sight of the end, racing along: becoming more and more dramatic. And how to make the transition from the colloquial to the lyrical, from the particular to the general?)

  Friday, August 17th.

  Yes, I think owing to the sudden rush of two wakeful nights, making up early mornings rather, I think I see the end of Here and Now (or Music or Dawn or whatever I shall call it): it’s to end with Elvira going out of the house and saying What did I make this knot in my handkerchief for? and all the coppers rolling about

  It’s to be all in speeches - no play. I have now made a sketch of what everyone is to say; and it ends with a supper party in the downstairs room. I think the back is broken. It will run to something like 850 of my rough pages I imagine: which is at 200, 170,000 and I shall sweat it down to 130,000.

  Tuesday, August 21st.

  The lesson of Here and Now is that one can use all kinds of ‘forms’ in one book. Therefore the next might be poem, reality, comedy, play; narrative, psychology all in one. Very short. This needs thinking over also, a play about the Parnells, or a biography of Mrs P.

  Thursday, August 30th.

  If I can’t even write here, owing to making up the last scenes, how can I possibly read Dante? Impossible. After three days’ grind, getting back, I am I think floated again. Robson comes to tea today; and the Wolves tomorrow; and... another lapse making up Elvira’s speech... ‘D’you know what I’ve been clasping in my hand all the evening? Coppers.’

  Well anyhow, I’ve enough in stock to last out this chapter; I daresay another two or three weeks. Yesterday I found a new walk, and a new farm, in the fold between Asheham and Tarring Neville. Very lovely, all alone, with the down rising behind. Then I walked back by a rough broad overflowing grey river. The porpoise came up and gulped. It rained. All ugliness was dissolved. An incredibly 18th Century landscape, happily making me think less of Wilmington.

  A tremendous hailstorm after tea; like white ice; broken up: lanced, lashing; like the earth being whipped. This happened several times; black clouds while we played Brahms. No letters at all this summer. But there will be many next year, I predict. And I don’t mind; the day, yesterday to be exact, being so triumphant: writing; the walk; reading, Leeson, a Saint Simon, Henry James’s preface to P. of a Lady - very clever, but one or two things I recognize; then Gide’s Journal, again full of startling recollection - things I could have said myself.

  Sunday, September 2nd.

  I don’t think I have ever been more excited over a book than I am writing the end of - shall it be Dawn? Or is that too emphatic, sentimental. I wrote like a - forget the word - yesterday; my cheeks burn; my hands tremble. I am doing the scene where Peggy listens to their talking and bursts out. It was this outburst that excited me so. Too much perhaps. I can’t make the transition to E.’s speech easily.

  Wednesday, September 12th.

  Roger died on Sunday. Tomorrow we go up, following some instinct, to the funeral. I feel dazed; very wooden. Women cry, L. says: but I don’t know why I cry - mostly with Nessa. And I’m too stupid to write anything. My head all stiff. I think the poverty of life now is what comes to me; and this blackish veil over everything. Hot weather; a wind blowing. The substance gone out of everything. I don’t think this is exaggerated.

  It’ll come back I suppose. Indeed I feel a great wish, now and then, to live more all over the place, to see people, to create, only for the time one can’t make the effort. And I can’t write to Helen, but I must now shut this and try.

  Maupassant, on writers (true I think). ‘En lui aucun sentiment simple n’existe plus. Tout ce qu’il voit, ses joies, ses plaisirs, ses souffrances, ses désespoirs, deviennent instantanément des sujets d’observation. Il analyse malgré tout, malgré lui, sans fin, les coeurs, les visages, les gestes, les intonations.’

  Remember turning aside at mother’s bed, when she had died, and Stella took us in, to laugh, secretly, at the nurse crying. She’s pretending, I said, aged 13, and was afraid I was not feeling enough. So now. The writer’s temperament.

  ‘Ne jamais souffrir, penser, aimer, sentir, Sur l’eau 116 comme tout le monde, bonnement, franchement, simplement, sans s’analyser soi-même après chaque joie et après chaque sanglot.’

  Saturday, September 15th.

  I was glad we went to the service on Thursday. It was a very hot summer’s day. And all very simple and dignified. Music. Not a word spoken. We sat there, before the open doors that lead into the garden. Flowers and strollers which Roger would have liked. He lay under an old red brocade with two branches of very bright many coloured flowers. It is a strong instinct to be with one’s friends. I thought of him too, at intervals. Dignified and honest and large - ‘large sweet soul’ - something ripe and musical about him - and then the fun and the fact that he had lived with such variety and generosity and curiosity. I thought of this.

  Tuesday, September 18th.

  I like writing this morning because it takes off the strain on the lips. A cold dull day after all this blaze. Now we have Graham, and Mrs W., but then, perhaps, peace: and an end to the book? O if that could be! But I feel 10 miles distant - far away - detached, very jaded now.

  I had a notion that I could describe the tremendous feeling at R.’s funeral: but of course I can’t. I mean the universal feeling; how we all fought with our brains, loves and so on; and must be vanquished. Then the vanquisher, this outer force became so clear; the indifferent, and we so small, fine, delicate. A fear then came to me, of death. Of course I shall lie there too before that gate and slide in; and it frightened me. But why? I mean, I felt the vainness of this perpetual fight, with our brains and loving each other against the other thing; if Roger could die.

  But then, next day, today, which is Thursday, one week later, the other thing begins to work - the exalted sense of being above time and death which comes from being again in a writing mood. And this is not an illusion, so far as I can tell. Certainly I have a strong sense that Roger would be all on one’s side in this excitement, and that whatever the invisible force does, we thus get outside it. A nice letter from Helen. And today we go to Worthing —

  Sunday, September 30th.

  The last words of the nameless book were written 10 minutes ago, quite calmly too. 900 pages: L. says 200,000 words. Lord God what an amount of re-writing that means! But also, how heavenly to have brought the pen to a stop at the last Une, even if m
ost of the lines have now to be rubbed out. Anyhow the design is there. And it has taken a little less than 2 years: some months less indeed, as Flush intervened; therefore it has been written at a greater gallop than any of my books. The representational part accounts for the fluency. And I should say - but do I always say this? - with greater excitement: not, I think, of the same kind quite. For I have been more general, less personal. No ‘beautiful writing’; much easier dialogue; but a great strain, because so many more faculties had to keep going at once, though none so pressed upon. No tears and exaltation at the end; but peace and breadth, I hope. Anyhow, if I die tomorrow, the line is there. And I am fresh; and shall re-write the end tomorrow. I don’t think I’m fresh enough, though, to go on ‘making up’. That was the strain - the invention: and I suspect that the last 20 pages have slightly flagged. Too many odds and ends to sweep up. But I have no idea of the whole

  Tuesday, October 2nd.

  Yes, but my head will never let me glory sweepingly; always a tumble. Yesterday morning the old rays of light set in; and then the sharp, the very sharp pain over my eyes; so that I sat and lay about till tea; had no walk, had not a single idea of triumph or relief. L. bought me a little travelling ink pot, by way of congratulation. I wish I could think of a name. Sons and Daughters’! Probably used already. There’s a mass to be done to the last chapter, which I shall, I hope, d.v., as they say in some circles, I suppose, still, begin tomorrow; while the putty is still soft.

  So the summer is ended. Until 9th of September, when Nessa came across the terrace - how I hear that cry He’s dead - a very vigorous, happy summer. Oh the joy of walking! I’ve never felt it so strong in me. Cowper Powys, oddly enough, expresses the same thing: the trance like, swimming, flying through the air; the current of sensations and ideas; and the slow, but fresh change of down, of road, of colour; all this churned up into a fine thin sheet of perfect calm happiness. It’s true I often painted the brightest pictures on the sheet and often talked aloud. Lord how many pages of Sons and Daughters - perhaps Daughters and Sons would give a rhythm more unlike Sons and Lovers, or Wives and Daughters - I made up, chattering them in my excitement on the top of the down, in the fold. Too many buildings, alas; and gossip to the effect that Christie and the Ringmer Building Co. are buying Botten’s Farm to build on. Sunday I was worried, walking to Lewes, by the cars and the villas. But again, I’ve discovered the ghostly farm walk; and the Piddinghoe walk; and such variety and loveliness - the river lead and silver; the ship - Servic of London - going down: the bridge opened. Mushrooms and the garden at night: the moon, like a dying dolphin’s eye; or red orange, the harvest moon; or polished like a steel knife; or lambent; sometimes rushing across the sky; sometimes hanging among the branches. Now in October the thick wet mist has come, thickening and blotting. On Sunday we had Bunny and Julian.

  Thursday, October 4th.

  A violent rain storm on the pond. The pond is covered with little white thorns; springing up and down: the pond is bristling with leaping white thorns, like the thorns on a small porcupine; bristles; then black waves; cross it; black shudders; and the little water thorns are white; a helter skelter rain and the elms tossing it up and down; the pond overflowing on one side; lily leaves tugging; the red flower swimming about; one leaf flapping; then completely smooth for a moment; then prickled; thorns like glass; but leaping up and down incessantly; a rapid smirch of shadow. Now light from the sun; green and red; shiny; the pond a sage green; the grass brilliant green; red berries on the hedge; the cows very white; purple over Asheham.

  Thursday, October 11th.

  A brief note. In today’s Lit. Sup., they advertise Men Without Art, by Wyndham Lewis: chapters on Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf... Now I know by reason and instinct that this is an attack; that I am publicly demolished; nothing is left of me in Oxford and Cambridge and places where the young read Wyndham Lewis. My instinct is not to read it. And for that reason: Well, I open Keats and find: ‘Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain beyond what Blackwood or Quarterly could possibly inflict... This is a mere matter of the moment - I think I shall be among the English poets after my death. Even as a matter of present interest the attempt to crush me in the Quarterly has only brought me more into notice.’

  Well: do I think I shall be among the English novelists after my death? I hardly ever think about it. Why then do I shrink from reading W. L.? Why am I sensitive? I think vanity: I dislike the thought of being laughed at: of the glow of satisfaction that A., B. and C. will get from hearing V. W. demolished: also it will strengthen further attacks: perhaps I feel uncertain of my own gifts: but then, I know more about them than W. L.: and anyhow I intend to go on writing. What I shall do is craftily to gather the nature of the indictment from talk and reviews; and, in a year perhaps, when my book is out, I shall read it. Already I am feeling the calm that always comes to me with abuse: my back is against the wall: I am writing for the sake of writing, etc.; and then there is the queer disreputable pleasure in being abused - in being a figure, in being a martyr, and so on.

  Sunday, October 14th.

  The trouble is I have used every ounce of my creative writing mind in The Targiters. No headache (save what Elly calls typical migraine - she came to see L. about his strain yesterday). I cannot put spurs in my flanks. It’s true I’ve planned the romantic chapter of notes: but I can’t set to. This morning I’ve taken the arrow of W. L. to my heart: he makes tremendous and delightful fun of B. and B: calls me a peeper, not a looker; a fundamental prude; but one of the four or five living (so it seems) who is an artist. That’s what I gather the flagellation amounts to: (Oh I’m underrated, Edith Sitwell says). Well: this gnat has settled and stung: and I think (12.30) the pain is over. Yes. I think it’s now rippling away. Only I can’t write. When will my brain revive? In 10 days I think. And it can read admirably: I began The Seasons last night... Well: I was going to say, I’m glad that I need not and cannot write, because the danger of being attacked is that it makes one answer back - a perfectly fatal thing to do. I mean, fatal to arrange The P-s so as to meet his criticisms. And I think my revelation two years ago stands me in sublime stead: to adventure and discover and allow no rigid poses: to be supple and naked to the truth. If there is truth in W. L., well, face it: I’ve no doubt I’m prudish and peeping. Well then live more boldly, but for God’s sake don’t try to bend my writing one way or the other. Not that one can. And there is the odd pleasure too of being abused and the feeling of being dismissed into obscurity is also pleasant and salutary.

  Tuesday, October 16th.

  Quite cured today. So the W. L. illness lasted two days. Helped off by old Ethel’s bluff affection and stir yesterday by buying a blouse; by falling fast asleep after dinner.

  Writing away this morning.

  I am so sleepy. Is this age? I can’t shake it off. And so gloomy. That’s the end of the book. I looked up past diaries - a reason for keeping them, and found the same misery after Waves - after Lighthouse I was, I remember, nearer suicide, seriously, than since 1913. It is after all natural. I’ve been galloping now for three months - so excited I made a plunge at my paper - well, cut that all off - after the first divine relief, of course some terrible blankness must spread. There’s nothing left of the people, of the ideas, of the strain, of the whole life in short that has been racing round my brain: not only the brain; it has seized hold of my leisure; think how I used to sit still on the same railway lines - running on my book. Well, so there’s nothing to be done the next two or three or even four weeks but dandle oneself; refuse to face it; refuse to think about it. This time Roger makes it harder than usual. We had tea with Nessa yesterday. Yes, his death is worse than Lytton’s. Why, I wonder? Such a blank wall. Such a silence: such a poverty. How he reverberated!

  Monday, October 29th.

  Reading Antigone. How powerful that spell is stil
l - Greek, an emotion different from any other. I will read Plotinus: Herodotus: Homer I think.

  Thursday, November 1st.

  Ideas that came to me last night dining with Clive; talking to Aldous and the Kenneth Clarks.

  About Roger’s life: that it should be written by different people to illustrate different stages.

  Youth, by Margery Cambridge, by Wedd? Early London life...

  Clive Sickert Bloomsbury, Desmond V. W.

  Later life, Julian Blunt Heard and so on.

  All to be combined say by Desmond and me together. About novels: the different strata of being: the upper, under. This is a familiar idea, partly tried in the Pargiters. But I think of writing it out more closely; and now, particularly, in my critical book: showing how the mind naturally follows that order in thinking: how it is illustrated by literature. I must now do biography and autobiography.

  Friday, November 2nd.

  Two teeth out with a new anaesthetic: hence I write here, not seriously. And this is another pen. And my brain is very slightly frozen, like my gums. Teeth become like old roots that one breaks off. He broke and I scarcely felt. My brain frozen thinks of Aldous and the Clarks: thinks vaguely of biography; thinks am I reviewed anywhere - can’t look - thinks it is a fine cold day.

  I went upstairs to rinse my bleeding gum - the cocaine lasts half an hour; then the nerves begin to feel again - and opened the Spectator and read W. L. on me again. An answer to Spender. ‘I am not malicious. Several people call Mrs W. Felicia Hemans.’ This I suppose is another little scratch of the cat’s claws: to slip that in, by the way - ‘I don’t say it - others do’. And so they are supercilious on the next page about Sickert; and so - Well L. says I should be contemptible to mind. Yes: but I do mind for 10 minutes: I mind being in the light again, just as I was sinking into my populous obscurity. I must take a pull on myself. I don’t think this attack will last more than two days. I think I shall be free from the infection by Monday. But what a bore it all is. And how many sudden shoots into nothingness open before me. But wait one moment. At the worst, should I be a quite negligible writer, I enjoy writing: I think I am an honest observer. Therefore the world will go on providing me with excitement whether I can use it or not. Also, how am I to balance W. L.’s criticism with Yeats - let alone Goldie and Morgan? Would they have felt anything if I had been negligible? And about two in the morning I am possessed of a remarkable sense of (driving eyeless) strength. And I have L. and there are his books; and our life together. And freedom, now, from money paring. And... if only for a time I could completely forget myself, my reviews, my fame, my sink in the scale - which is bound to come now and to last about 8 or 9 years - then I should be what I mostly am: very rapid, excited, amused, intense. Odd, these extravagant ups and downs of reputation; compare the Americans in the Mercury... No, for God’s sake don’t compare: let all praise and blame sink to the bottom or float to the top and let me go my ways indifferent. And care for people. And let fly, in life, on all sides.