Wednesday, October 5th
I write in the sordid doss house atmosphere of approaching departure. Pinker is asleep in one chair; Leonard is signing cheques at the little deal table under the glare of the lamp. The fire is covered with ashes, since we have been burning it all day and Mrs. B. never cleans. Envelopes lie in the grate. I am writing with a pen which is feeble and wispy; and it is a sharp fine evening with a sunset, I daresay.
We went to Amberley yesterday and think of buying a house there. For it is an astonishing forgotten lovely place, between water meadows and downs. So impulsive we both are, in spite of our years.
But we are not as old as Mrs. Gray, who came to thank us for our apples. She won't send to buy, as it looks like begging, since we never take money. Her face is cut into by wrinkles; they make weals across her. She is 86 and can never remember such a summer. In her youth it was so hot in April often that they couldn't bear a sheet on them. Her youth must have been almost the same time as my father's. She is 9 years younger, I make out; born in 1841. And what did she see of Victorian England I wonder.
I can make up situations, but I cannot make up plots. That is: if I pass a lame girl I can, without knowing I do it, instantly make up a scene: (now I can't think of one). This is the germ of such fictitious gift as I have. And by the way I get letter after letter about my books and they scarcely please me.
If my pen allowed, I should now try to make out a work table, having done my last article for the Tribune, and now being free again. And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another. I think, for a treat, I shall let myself dash this in for a week, while...
Saturday, October 22nd
This is a book, I think I have said before, which I write after tea. And my brain was full of ideas, but I have spent them on Mr. Ashcroft and Miss Findlater, fervent admirers.
"I shall let myself dash this in for a week"—I have done nothing, nothing, nothing else for a fortnight; and am launched somewhat furtively but with all the more passion upon Orlando: a Biography. It is to be a small book and written by Christmas. I thought I could combine it with Fiction, but once the mind gets hot it can't stop: I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me; from which I have kept myself since last February, or earlier. Talk of planning a book, or waiting for an idea! Then one came in a rush; I said to pacify myself, being bored and stale with criticism and faced with that intolerable dull Fiction, "You shall write a page of a story for a treat; you shall stop sharp at 11:30 and then go on with the Romantics." I had very little idea what the story was to be about. But the relief of turning my mind that way was such that I felt happier than for months; as if put in the sun, or laid on a cushion; and after two days entirely gave up my time chart and abandoned myself to the pure delight of this farce; which I enjoy as much as I've ever enjoyed anything; and have written myself into half a headache and had to come to a halt, like a tired horse, and take a little sleeping draught last night; which made our breakfast fiery. I did not finish my egg. I am writing Orlando half in a mock style very clear and plain, so that people will understand every word. But the balance between truth and fantasy must be careful. It is based on Vita, Violet Trefusis, Lord Lascelles, Knole, etc.
Sunday, November 20th
I will now snatch a moment from what Morgan calls "life" to enter a hurried note. My notes have been few; life a cascade, a glissade, a torrent; all together. I think on the whole this is our happiest autumn. So much work; and success now; and life on easy terms; heaven knows what. My morning rushes, pell mell, from 10 to 1. I write so quick I can't get it typed before lunch. This I suppose is the main backbone of my autumn— Orlando. Never do I feel this, except for a morning or two, writing criticism. Today I began the third chapter. Do I learn anything? Too much of a joke perhaps for that; yet I like these plain sentences; and the externality of it for a change. It is too thin of course; splashed over the canvas; but I shall cover the ground by January 7th (I say) and then re-write.
Wednesday, November 30th
A hurried note about the lunch party, L. dining at the Cranium. An art of light talk; about people. Bogey Harris; Maurice Baring. B. H. "knows" everyone: that is no one. Freddy Fossle? Oh yes I know him; knows Lady so-and-so. Knows everyone: can't admit to not knowing. A polished, burnished diner out—Roman Catholic. In the middle M. Baring says: "But Lady B. died this morning." Sibyl says: "Say that again." "But R. M. was lunching with her yesterday," says Bogey. "Well it's in the papers she's dead," says M. B. Sibyl says: "But she was quite young. Lord Ivor asked me to meet the young man his daughter's to marry." "I know Lord Ivor," says, or would say, Bogey. "Well it's odd," says Sibyl, giving up the attempt to wrestle with the death of the young at a lunch party. So on to wigs: "Lady Charlie used to have hers curled by a sailor on deck before she got up," says Bogey. "Oh, I've known her all my life. Went yachting with them. Lady ... eyebrows fell into the soup. Sir John Cook was so fat they had to hike him up. Once he got out of bed in the middle of the night and fell on the floor, where he lay 5 hours—couldn't move. B. M. sent me a pear by the waiter with a long letter." Talk of houses and periods. All very smooth and surface talk; depends on knowing people; not on saying anything interesting. Bogey's cheeks are polished daily.
Tuesday, December 20th
This is almost the shortest day and perhaps the coldest night of the year. We are in the black heart of a terrific frost. I notice that look of black atoms in a clear air, which for some reason I can never describe to my liking. The pavement was white with great powdery flakes the other night, walking back with Roger and Helen; this was from Nessa's last Sunday—last, I fear, for many a month. But I have as usual "no time": let me count the things I should be doing this deep winter's night with Leonard at his last lecture and Pinker asleep in her chair. I should be reading Bagenal's story; Julian's play; Lord Chesterfield's letters; and writing to Hubert (about a cheque from the Nation). There is an irrational scale of values in my mind which puts these duties higher than mere scribbling.
This flashed to my mind at Nessa's children's party last night. The little creatures acting moved my infinitely sentimental throat. Angelica so mature and composed; all grey and silver; such an epitome of all womanliness; and such an unopened bud of sense and sensibility; wearing a grey wig and a sea coloured dress. And yet oddly enough I scarcely want children of my own now. This insatiable desire to write something before I die, this ravaging sense of the shortness and feverishness of life, make me cling, like a man on a rock, to my one anchor. I don't like the physicalness of having children of one's own. This occurred to me at Rodmell; but I never wrote it down. I can dramatise myself a parent, it is true. And perhaps I have killed the feeling instinctively; or perhaps nature does.
I am still writing the third chapter of Orlando. I have had of course to give up the fancy of finishing by February and printing this spring. It is drawing out longer than I meant. I have just been thinking over the scene when O. meets a girl (Nell )in the Park and goes with her to a neat room in Gerrard Street. There she will disclose herself. They will talk. This will lead to a diversion or two about women's love. This will bring in O.'s night life; and her clients (that's the word). Then she will see Dr. Johnson and perhaps write (I want somehow to quote it) To all you Ladies. So I shall get some effect of years passing; and then there will be a description of the lights of the eighteenth century burning; and the clouds of the nineteenth century rising. Then on to the nineteenth. But I have not considered this. I want to write it all over hastily and so keep unity of tone, which in this book is very important. It has to be half laughing, half serious; with great splashes of exaggeration. Perhaps I shall pluck up courage to ask The Times for a rise. But could I write for my Annual I would never write for another paper. How extraordinarily unwilled by me but potent in its own right, by the way
, Orlando was! as if it shoved everything aside to come into existence. Yet I see looking back just now to March that it is almost exactly in spirit, though not in actual facts, the book I planned then as an escapade; the spirit to be satiric, the structure wild. Precisely.
Yes, I repeat, a very happy, a singularly happy autumn.
Thursday, December 22nd
I just open this for a moment, being dull of the head, to enter a severe reprimand of myself to myself. The value of society is that it snubs one. I am meretricious, mediocre, a humbug; am getting into the habit of flashy talk. Tinsel it seemed last night at the Keynes. I was out of humour and so could see the transparency of my own sayings. Dadie said a true thing too; when V. lets her style get on top of her, one thinks only of that; when she uses clichés, one thinks what she means. But, he says, I have no logical power and live and write in an opium dream. And the dream is too often about myself.
Now with middle age drawing on and age ahead it is important to be severe on such faults. So easily might I become a harebrained egotistic woman, exacting compliments, arrogant, narrow, withered. Nessa's children (I always measure myself against her and find her much the largest, most humane of the two of us), think of her now with an admiration that has no envy in it; with some trace of the old childish feeling that we were in league together against the world; and how proud I am of her triumphant winning of all our battles; as she takes her way so nonchalantly, modestly, almost anonymously, past the goal, with her children round her; and only a little added tenderness (a moving thing in her) which shows me that she too feels wonder, surprise, at having passed so many terrors and sorrows safe....
The dream is too often about myself. To correct this; and to forget one's own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practise anonymity. Silence in company; or the quietest statement, not the showiest; is also "medicated" as the doctors say. It was an empty party, rather, last night. Very nice here, though.
1928
Tuesday, January 17th
Yesterday we went to Hardy's funeral. What did I think of? Of Max Beerbohm's letter, just read; or a lecture to the Newn-hamites about women's writing. At intervals some emotion broke in. But I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony. One catches a bishop's frown and twitch; sees his polished shiny nose; suspects the rapt spectacled young priest, gazing at the cross he carries, of being a humbug; catches Robert Lynd's distracted haggard eye; then thinks of the mediocrity of X.; next here is the coffin, an overgrown one; like a stage coffin, covered with a white satin cloth; bearers elderly gentlemen rather red and stiff, holding to the corners; pigeons flying outside, insufficient artificial light; procession to poets corner; dramatic "In sure and certain hope of immortality" perhaps melodramatic. After dinner at Clive's Lytton protested that the great man's novels are the poorest of poor stuff; and can't read them. Lytton sitting or lying inert, with his eyes shut, or exasperated with them open. Lady Strachey slowly fading, but it may take years. Over all this broods for me some uneasy sense of change and mortality and how partings are deaths; and then a sense of my own fame—why should this come over me? and then of its remoteness; and then the pressure of writing two articles on Meredith and furbishing up the Hardy. And Leonard sitting at home reading. And Max's letter; and a sense of the futility of it all.
Saturday, February 11th
I am so cold I can hardly hold the pen. The futility of it all—so I broke off; and have indeed been feeling that rather persistently, or perhaps I should have written here. Hardy and Meredith together sent me torpid to bed with headache. I know the feeling now, when I can't spin a sentence and sit mumbling and turning; and nothing flits by my brain, which is as a blank window. So I shut my studio door and go to bed, stuffing my ears with rubber; and there I lie a day or two. And what leagues I travel in the time! Such "sensations" spread over my spine and head directly I give them the chance; such an exaggerated tiredness; such anguishes and despairs; and heavenly relief and rest; and then misery again. Never was anyone so tossed up and down by the body as I am, I think. But it is over; and put away....
For some reason, I am hacking rather listlessly at the last chapter of Orlando, which was to have been the best. Always, always the last chapter slips out of my hands. One gets bored. One whips oneself up. I still hope for a fresh wind, and don't very much bother, except that I miss the fun, which was so tremendously lively all October, November and December. I have my doubts if it is not empty; and too fantastic to write at such length.
Saturday, February 18th
And I should be revising Lord Chesterfield at this moment, but I'm not. My mind is wool-gathering away about Women and Fiction, which I am to read at Newnham in May. The mind is the most capricious of insects—flitting, fluttering. I had thought to write the quickest most brilliant pages in Orlando yesterday—not a drop came, all, forsooth, for the usual physical reasons, which delivered themselves today. It is the oddest feeling: as if a finger stopped the flow of the ideas in the brain; it is unsealed and the blood rushes all over the place. Again, instead of writing O., I've been racing up and down the whole field of my lecture. And tomorrow, alas, we motor; for I must get back into the book—which has brightened the last few days satisfactorily. Not that my sensations in writing are an infallible guide.
Sunday, March 18th
I have lost my writing board; an excuse for the anæmic state of this book. Indeed I only write now, in between letters, to say that Orlando was finished yesterday as the clock struck one. Anyhow the canvas is covered. There will be three months of close work needed, imperatively, before it can be printed; for I have scrambled and splashed and the canvas shows through in a thousand places. But it is a serene, accomplished feeling, to write, even provisionally, the End, and we go off on Saturday, with my mind appeased.
I have written this book quicker than any; and it is all a joke; and yet gay and quick reading I think; a writer's holiday. I feel more and more sure that I will never write a novel again. Little bits of rhyme come in. So we go motoring across France on Saturday and shall be back on April 17th for the summer. Time flies—oh yes; that summer should be here again; and I still have the faculty of wonder at it. The world swinging round again and bringing its green and blue close to one's eyes.
Thursday, March 22nd
These are the last pages at the end of Orlando and it is twenty-five minutes to one; and I have written everything I have to write and on Saturday we go abroad.
Yes it's done—Orlando—begun on 8th October, as a joke; and now rather too long for my liking. It may fall between stools, be too long for a joke, and too frivolous for a serious book. All this I dismiss from a mind avid only of green fields, the sun, wine; sitting doing nothing. I have been for the last 6 weeks rather a bucket than a fountain; sitting to be shot into by one person after another. A rabbit that passes across a shooting gallery, and one's friends go pop-pop. Heaven be praised, Sibyl today puts us off; which leaves Dadie only and a whole day's solitude, please Heaven, tomorrow. But I intend to control this rabbit-shooting business when I come back. And money making. I hope to settle in and write one nice little discreet article for £25 each month; and so live; without stress; and so read—what I want to read. At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials. But I think I have made moral reflections enough, and should describe people, save that, when seen so colourlessly, by duty not wish, one's mind is a little slack in taking notes.
A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts From the Diary of Virginia Woolf Page 13