Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  1940.

  Saturday, January 6th.

  An obituary: Humbert Wolfe. Once I shared a packet of choc, creams with him, at Eileen Powers. An admirer sent them. This was a fitting tribute. A theatrical looking glib man. Told me he was often asked if I were his wife. Volunteered that he was happily married, though his wife lived - Geneva? I forget. Remember thinking, Why protest? What’s worrying you? Oh it was the night Arnold Bennett attacked me in the Evening Standard. Orlando? I was going to meet him at Sybil’s next day. There was a queer histrionic look in him, perhaps strain in him. Very self assured, outwardly. Inwardly lacerated by the taunt that he wrote too easily and deified satire; that’s my salvage from an autobiography of him - one of many, as if he were dissatisfied and must always draw and re-draw his own picture. I suppose the origin of many of the new middle aged autos. So the inspirer of these vague winter night memories - he who sends for the last time a faint film across my tired head - lies with those blackberry eyes shut in that sulphurous cavernous face. (If I were writing I should have to remove either lies or eyes. Is this right? Yes, I think for me; nor need it spoil the run: only one must always practise every style: it’s the only way to keep on the boil: I mean the only way to avoid crust is to set a faggot of words in a blaze. That phrase flags. Well, let it. These pages only cost a fraction of a farthing, so that my exchequer isn’t imperilled.) Mill I should be reading. Or Little Dorrit, but both are gone stale, like a cheese that’s been cut and left. The first slice is always the best.

  Friday, January 26th.

  These moments of despair - I mean glacial suspense - a painted fly in a glass case - have given way as they so often do to ecstasy. Is it that I have thrown off those two dead pigeons - my story, my Gas at Abbotsford (printed today) - and so ideas rush in. I began one night, absolutely submerged, throttled, held in a vice with my nose rubbed against Roger - no way out - all hard as iron - to read Julian. And off winged my mind along those wild uplands. A hint for the future. Always relieve pressure by a flight. Always violently turn the pillow: hack an outlet. Often a trifle does. A review offered of Marie Corelli by the Listener. These are travellers notes which I offer myself should I again be lost. I think the last chapter must be sweated from 20,000 to 10,000. This is an attempt at the first words:

  ‘Transformation is the title that Roger Fry gave to his last book of essays. And it seems natural enough, looking back at the last ten years of his life, to choose it by way of title for them too.

  ‘They were years not of repose and stagnation, but of perpetual experiment and experience. His position as a critic became established. “At the time of his death,” writes Howard Hannay, “Roger Fry’s position in the English art world was unique, and the only parallel to it is that of Ruskin at the height of his reputation.”

  ‘But that position was the result of the freedom and the vigour with which he carried on his intellectual life; and with which he extended and enlarged his views. Nor was he less adventurous in the other life. And these two transformations resulted in something permanent. As Sir K. Clark says, “Although he was remarkably consistent in the main outlines of his beliefs, his mind was invincibly experimental and ready for any adventure, however far it might lead him beyond the boundaries of academic tradition.”

  ‘Physically, the strain was very great. His health had suffered from the long years at the Omega.’

  No, I cannot reel it off at all. How queer the change is from private writing to public writing. And how exhausting. My little fund of gossip and comment is dried up. What was I going to say? Oh that the lyric mood of the winter - its intense spiritual exaltation - is over. The thaw has set in; and rain and wind; and the marsh is soggy and patched with white, and two very small lambs were staggering in the east wind. One dead ewe was being carted off; and shirking the horror I crept back by the hanger. Nor have I spent a virtuous evening, hacking at these phrases. I’m enjoying Burke though, and shall tune up on the French Revolution.

  Friday, February 2nd.

  Only the fire sets me dreaming - of all the things I mean to write. The break in our lives from London to country is a far more complete one than any change of house. Yes, but I haven’t got the hang of it altogether. The immense space suddenly becomes vacant: then illuminated. And London, in nips, is cramped and creased. Odd how often I think with what is love I suppose of the City: of the walk to the Tower: that is my England: I mean, if a bomb destroyed one of those little alleys with the brass bound curtains and the river smell and the old woman reading, I should feel - well, what the patriots feel.

  Friday, February 9th.

  For some reason hope has revived. Now what served as bait? A letter from Joe Ackerly approving my Corelli? Not much. Tom dining with us? No. I think it was largely reading Stephen’s autobiography: though it gave me a pang of envy, by its youth and its vigour, and some good novelist’s touches - I could pick holes though. But it’s odd - reading that and South Riding both mint new, gives me a fillip after all the evenings I grind at Burke and Mill. A good thing to read one’s contemporaries, even rapid twinkling slice of life novels like poor W. H.’s. And then, I’ve polished off, to the last gaiter button, the three d — d chapters for London on Monday; and got my teeth I think firm into the last Transformations: and though of course I shall get the black shivers when I re-read, let alone submit to Nessa and Margery, I can’t help thinking I’ve caught a good deal of that iridescent man in my oh so laborious butterfly net. I daresay I’ve written every page - certainly the last - 10 or 15 times over. And I don’t think I’ve killed: I think I’ve brisked. Hence an evening glow. Yet the wind cuts like a scythe; the dining room carpet is turning to mould; and John Buchan has fallen on his head and is, apparently, dying. Monty Shearman is also dead;, and Campbell. L.’s absurd nice old parson friend - his bachelor Buffy friend. Now the wind rises: something rattles, and thank God I’m not on the North Sea, nor taking off to raid Heligoland. Now I’m going to read Freud. Yes, Stephen gave me three hours of continuous illusion - and if one can get that still, there’s a world - what’s the quotation? - there’s a world outside? No. From Coriolanus?

  Sunday, February 11th.

  By way of postponing the writing of cheques - the war, by the way, has tied up my purse strings again, as in the old days of 11/- a week pocket money - I write here: and note that the authentic glow of finishing a book is on me. Does this mean it’s good; or only that I have delivered my mind successfully? Anyhow, after shivering yesterday, today I made a stride, and shall I think finish this week at 37. It’s tight and conscientious anyhow. So, walking this mildish day, up to Telscombe I invented pages and pages of my lecture: which is to be full and fertile. The idea struck me that the Leaning Tower school is the school of auto-analysis after the suppression of the 19th century. Quote Stevenson. This explains Stephen’s autobiography: Louis MacNeice etc. Also I get the idea of cerebration: poetry that is not unconscious, but stirred by surface irritation, to which the alien matter of politics, that can’t be fused, contributes. Hence the lack of suggestive power. Is the best poetry that which is most suggestive - is it made of the fusion of many different ideas, so that it says more than is explicable? Well, that’s the line; and it leads to Public Libraries: and the supersession of aristocratic culture by common readers: also to the end of class literature: the beginning of character literature: new words from new blood; and the comparison with the Elizabethans. I think there’s something in the psycho-analysis idea: that the Leaning Tower writer couldn’t describe society: had therefore to describe himself, as the product, or victim: a necessary step towards freeing the next generation of repressions. A new conception of the writer needed: and they have demolished the romance of ‘genius’ of the great man, by diminishing themselves. They haven’t explored, like H. James, the individual: they haven’t deepened; they’ve cut the outline sharper. And so on. L. saw a grey heraldic bird: I only saw my thoughts.

  Sunday, February 18th.

  This diary might be divided
into London diary and country. I think there is a division. Just back from the London chapter. Bitter cold. This shortened my walk, which I meant to be through crowded streets. Then the dark - no lighted windows, depressed me. Standing in Whitehall, I said to my horses ‘Home, John’ and drove back in the grey dawn light, the cheerless spectral light of fading evening in houses - so much more cheerless than the country evening - to Holborn, and so to the bright cave, which I liked better, having shifted the chairs. How silent it is there - and London silent: a great dumb ox lying couchant.

  Monday, February 19th.

  I may as well make a note I say to myself: thinking sometimes who’s going to read all this scribble? I think one day I may brew a tiny ingot out of it - in my memoirs. Lytton is hinted as my next task by the way. And Three Guineas a dead failure in the U.SA.; but enough.

  Wednesday, March 20th.

  Yes, another attack, in fact two other attacks: one Sunday week - 101 with Angelica there to put me to bed; t’other last Friday, 102 after lunch. So to bed up here in L.’s room, and Dr Tooth, who keeps me in bed (where I sit up with L. reading proofs) till tomorrow. That’s the boring history. What they call recurring with slight bronchitis. Yes. One Sunday (the 101 Sunday) L. gave me a very severe lecture on the first half. We walked in the meadows. It was like being pecked by a very hard strong beak. The more he pecked the deeper, as always happens. At last he was almost angry that I’d chosen ‘what seems to me the wrong method. It’s merely analysis, not history. Austere repression. In fact dull to the outsider. All those dead quotations.’ His theme was that you can’t treat a life like that; must be seen from the writer’s angle, unless the liver is himself a seer, which R. wasn’t. It was a curious example of L. at his most rational and impersonal: rather impressive: yet so definite, so emphatic, that I felt convinced: I mean of failure; save for one odd gleam, that he was himself on the wrong tack, and persisting for some deep reason - dissympathy with R.? lack of interest in personality? Lord knows. I note this plaited strand in my mind; and even while we walked and the beak struck deeper, deeper, had this completely detached interest in L.’s character. Then Nessa came; disagreed; Margery’s letter ‘Very alive and interesting’; then L. read the second half; thought it ended on the doorstep at Bernard Street: then N.’s note ‘I’m crying can’t thank you’ - then N. and D. to tea up here; forbid me to alter anything; then Margery’s final letter ‘It’s him... unbounded admiration’. There I pause. Well, I think I re-write certain passages, have even in bed sketched them, but how in time for this spring? That I shelve till tomorrow. Great relief all the same.

  Thursday, March 1st.

  Here is the Good Friday festival beginning. How one can sense that in a garden, with flowers and birds only, I can’t say. Now for me begins the twilight hour, the emerging hour, of disagreeable compromise. Up to lunch. In the sitting room for tea. You know the dreary, messy, uncomfortable paper strewn, picking at this and that, frame of mind. And with R. hanging over me. Walk out as soon as possible and keep on reading Hervey’s memoirs. And so come to the top slowly. I’m thinking of some articles. Sidney Smith. Madame de Staël. Virgil. Tolstoy, or perhaps Gogol. Now I’ll get L. to find a life of Smith in the Lewes Library. A good idea. I’ll ring up Nessa about sending Helen that chapter, and establish an engagement. I read Tolstoy at breakfast - Goldenweiser that I translated with Kot in 1923 and have almost forgotten. Always the same reality - like touching an exposed electric wire. Even so imperfectly conveyed - his rugged short cut mind - to me the most, not sympathetic, but inspiring, rousing: genius in the raw. Thus more disturbing, more ‘shocking’, more of a thunderclap, even on art, even on literature, than any other writer. I remember that was my feeling about War and Peace, read in bed at Twickenham. Old Savage picked it up, ‘Splendid stuff!’ and Jean tried to admire what was a revelation to me. It’s directness, its reality. Yet he’s against photographic realism. Sally is lame and has to go to the vet. Sun coming out. One bird pierces like a needle. All crocuses and squills out. No leaves or buds on trees. I’m quoted, about Russian, in Lit. Sup. leader, oddly enough.

  Friday, March 29th.

  What shall I think of that’s liberating and freshening? I’m in the mood when I open my window at night and look at the stars. Unfortunately it’s 12.15 on a grey dull day, the aeroplanes are active, Botten2 is to be buried at 3; and I’m brain creased after Margery, after John and after Q. But it’s the little antlike nibblings of M. that infect me - ants run in my brain - emendations, tributes, feelings, dates - and all the detail that seems to the non-writer so easy - (‘just to add this about Joan’ etc) and to me is torture. Thumbing those old pages - and copying into the carbon. Lord, lord! And influenza damped. Well I recur, what shall I think of? The river. Say the Thames at London Bridge: and buying a notebook; and then walking along the Strand and letting each face give me a buffet; and each shop; and perhaps a Penguin. For we’re up in London on Monday. Then I think I’ll read an Elizabethan - like swinging from bough to bough. Then back here I’ll saunter... oh yes and we’ll travel our books round the Coast - and have tea in a shop and look at antiques; and there’ll be a lovely farmhouse - or a new lane - and flowers; and bowls with L., and reading very calmly for C.R.s. but no pressure; and May coming and asparagus and butterflies. Perhaps I’ll garden a little; oh and print; and change my bedroom furniture. Is it age, or what, that makes life here alone, no London, no visitors, seem a long trance of pleasure... I’m inducing a state of peace and sensation feeling - not idea feeling. The truth is we’ve not seen spring in the country since I was ill at Asheham - 1914 - and that had its holiness in spite of the depression. I think I’ll also dream a poet-prose book; perhaps make a cake now and then. Now, now - never any more future skirmishing or past regretting. Relish the Monday and the Tuesday, and don’t take on the guilt of selfishness feeling: for in God’s name I’ve done my share, with pen and talk, for the human race. I mean young writers can stand on their own feet. Yes, I deserve a spring - I owe nobody nothing. Not a letter I need write (there are the poems in MS all waiting) nor need I have week-enders. For others can do that as well as I can, this spring. Now being drowned by the flow of running water, I will read Whymper till lunch time.

  Sunday, March 31st.

  I would like to tell myself a nice little wild improbable story to spread my wings after this cramped ant-like morning - which I will not detail - for details are the death of me. Thank God, this time next week I shall be free - free of entering M.’s corrections and my own into margins. The story? Oh, about the life of a bird, its cheep cheep - its brandishing of a twig by my window - its sensations. Or about Botten becoming one with the mud - the glory fading - the million tinted flowers sent by the doleful mourners. All black like a moving pillar box the woman was - or the man in a black cardboard casing. A story doesn’t come. No, but I may unfurl a metaphor - No. The windows very dove grey and dim blue islanded - a rust red on L. and V. and the marsh green and dark like the floor of the sea. At the back of my head the string is still wound tight. I will unwind it playing bowls. To carry the virtues of the sketch - its random reaches, its happy finds - into the finished work is probably beyond me. Sydney Smith did in talk.

  Saturday, April 6th.

  I spent one afternoon at the L.L., looking up quotes. Another buying silk for vests. And we did not dine with the Hutchinsons to meet Tom and Desmond. And how glad I was of the drowsy evening. And so at 12.45 yesterday handed L. the two MSS and we drove off as happy as Bank Holiday clerks That’s off my shoulders! Good or bad — done. So I felt wings on my shoulders: and brooded quietly till the tyre punctured: we had to jackal in midroad; and I was like a stalk, all crumpled, when we got here. And it’s a keen spring day; infinitely lit and tinted and cold and soft: all the groups of daffodils yellow along the bank; lost my three games, and want nothing but sleep.

  Monday, May 13th.

  I admit to some content, some closing of a chapter and peace that comes with it, from posting my proofs toda
y. I admit - because we’re in the third day of ‘the greatest battle in history’. It began (here) with the 8 o’clock wireless announcing as I lay half asleep the invasion of Holland and Belgium. The third day of the Battle of Waterloo. Apple blossom snowing the garden. A bowl lost in the pond. Churchill exhorting all men to stand together. ‘I have nothing to offer but blood and tears and sweat.’ These vast formless shapes further circulate. They aren’t substances: but they make everything else minute. Duncan saw an air battle over Charleston - a silver pencil and a puff of smoke. Percy has seen the wounded arriving in their boots. So my little moment of peace comes in a yawning hollow. But though L. says he has petrol in the garage for suicide should Hitler win, we go on. It’s the vastness, and the smallness, that makes this possible. So intense are my feelings (about Roger); yet the circumference (the war) seems to make a hoop round them. No, I can’t get the odd incongruity of feeling intensely and at the same time knowing that there’s no importance in that feeling. Or is there, as I sometimes think, more importance than ever?

  Monday, May 20th.

  This idea was meant to be more impressive. It bobbed up I suppose in one of the sentient moments. The war is like a disperate illness. For a day it entirely obsesses: then the feeling faculty gives out; next day one is disembodied, in the air. Then the battery is re-charged and again - what? Well, the bomb terror. Going to London to be bombed. And the catastrophe - if they break through: Channel this morning said to be their objective. Last night Churchill asked us to reflect, when being bombed, that we were at least drawing fire from the soldiers, for once. Desmond and Moore1 are at this moment reading… i.e. talking under the apple trees. A fine windy morning.