—something manufactured; a pose; silliness.
2. Then there is the vigorous rhetorical, like his prose, and good as prose.
"Hereditary Bondsmen! know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?
Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!"
3. Then what rings to me truer, and is almost poetry.
"Dear Nature is the kindest mother still!
Though always changing, in her aspect mild;
From her bare bosom let me take my fill,
Her never-weaned, though not her favoured child.
To me by day or night she ever smiled,
Though I have marked her when none other hath,
And sought her more and more and loved her best in wrath."
4. And then there is of course the pure satiric, as in the description of a London Sunday; and
5. Finally (but this makes more than three) the inevitable half assumed half genuine tragic note, which comes as a refrain, about death and the loss of friends.
All thou could have of mine, stern Death! thou hast;
The parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend:
Ne'er yet for me thine arrows flew so fast,
And grief with grief continuing still to blend,
Hath snatched the little joy that life had yet to lend.
These I think make him up; and make much that is spurious, vapid, yet very changeable, and then rich and with greater range than the other poets, could he have got the whole into order. A novelist, he might have been. It is odd however to read in his letters his prose and apparently genuine feeling about Athens: and to compare it with the convention he adopted in verse. (There is some sneer about the Acropolis.) But then the sneer may have been a pose too. The truth may be that if you are charged at such high voltage you can't fit any of the ordinary human feelings; must pose; must rhapsodise; don't fit in. He wrote in the Fun Album that his age was 100. And this is true, measuring life by feeling.
Monday, February 17th
And this temperature is up: but it has now gone down; and now
Thursday, February 20th
I must canter my wits if I can. Perhaps some character sketches.
Monday, March 17th
The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say. As this morning I could say what Rhoda said. This proves that the book itself is alive: because it has not crushed the thing I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration.
Friday, March 28th
Yes, but this book is a very queer business. I had a day of intoxication when I said "Children are nothing to this": when I sat surveying the whole book complete and quarrelled with L. (about Ethel Smyth) and walked it off, felt the pressure of the form—the splendour, the greatness—as perhaps I have never felt them. But I shan't race it off in intoxication. I keep pegging away; and find it the most complex and difficult of all my books. How to end, save by a tremendous discussion, in which every life shall have its voice—a mosaic—I do not know. The difficulty is that it is all at high pressure. I have not yet mastered the speaking voice. Yet I think something is there; and I propose to go on pegging it down, arduously, and then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like poetry. It will bear expansion. It is compressed I think. It is—whatever I make of it—a large and potential theme—which Orlando was not perhaps. At any rate, I have taken my fence.
Wednesday, April 9th
What I now think (about The Waves) is that I can give in a very few strokes the essentials of a person's character. It should be done boldly; almost as caricature. I have yesterday entered what may be the last lap. Like every piece of the book it goes by fits and starts. I never get away with it; but am tugged back. I hope this makes for solidity; and must look to my sentences. The abandonment of Orlando and Lighthouse is much checked by the extreme difficulty of the form—as it was in Jacob's Room. I think this is the furthest development so far; but of course it may miss fire somewhere. I think I have kept stoically to the original conception. What I fear is that the re-writing will have to be so drastic that I may entirely muddle it somehow. It is bound to be very imperfect. But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky.
Sunday, April 13th
I read Shakespeare directly I have finished writing. When my mind is agape and red-hot. Then it is astonishing. I never yet knew how amazing his stretch and speed and word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace and outrace my own, seeming to start equal and then I see him draw ahead and do things I could not in my wildest tumult and utmost press of mind imagine. Even the less known plays are written at a speed that is quicker than anybody else's quickest; and the words drop so fast one can't pick them up. Look at this. "Upon a gather'd lily almost wither'd." (That is a pure accident. I happen to light on it.) Evidently the pliancy of his mind was so complete that he could furbish out any train of thought; and, relaxing, let fall a shower of such unregarded flowers. Why then should anyone else attempt to write? This is not "writing" at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Wednesday, April 23rd
This is a very important morning in the history of The Waves, because I think I have turned the corner and see the last lap straight ahead. I think I have got Bernard into the final stride. He will go straight on now, and then stand at the door: and then there will be a last picture of the waves. We are at Rodmell and I daresay I shall stay on a day or two (if I dare) so as not to break the current and finish it. O Lord and then a rest; and then an article; and then back again to this hideous shaping and moulding. There may be some joys in it all the same.
Tuesday, April 29th
And I have just finished, with this very nib-ful of ink, the last sentence of The Waves. I think I should record this for my own information. Yes, it was the greatest stretch of mind I ever knew; certainly the last pages; I don't think they flop as much as usual. And I think I have kept starkly and ascetically to the plan. So much I will say in self-congratulation. But I have never written a book so full of holes and patches; that will need re-building, yes, not only re-modelling. I suspect the structure is wrong. Never mind. I might have done something easy and fluent; and this is a reach after that vision I had, the unhappy summer—or three weeks—at Rodmell, after finishing the Lighthouse. (And that reminds me—I must hastily provide my mind with something else, or it will again become pecking and wretched—something imaginative, if possible, and light; for I shall tire of Hazlitt and criticism after the first divine relief; and I feel pleasantly aware of various adumbra-tions in the back of my head; a life of Duncan; no, something about canvases glowing in a studio; but that can wait.)
And I think to myself as I walk down Southampton
Row, "And I have given you a new book."
P.M.
Thursday, May 1st
And I have completely ruined my morning. Yes that is literally true. They sent a book from The Times, as if advised by Heaven of my liberty; and feeling my liberty wild upon me, I rushed to the cable and told Van Doren I would write on Scott. And now having read Scott, or the editor whom Hugh provides, I won't and can't; and have got into a fret trying to read it, and writing to Richmond to say I can't: have wasted the brilliant first of May which makes my skylight blue and gold; have only a rubbish heap in my head; can't read and can't write and can't think. The truth is, of course, I want to be back at The Waves. Yes that is the truth. Unlike all my other books in every way, it is unlike them in this, that I begin to re-write it, or conceive it again with ardour, directly I have done. I begin to see what I had in my mind; and want to begin cutting out masses of irrelevance and clearing, sharpening and making the good phrases shine. One wave after another. No room. And so on. But then we are going touring Devon and Cornwall on Sunday, which means a week off; and then I shall perha
ps make my critical brain do a month's work for exercise. What could it be set to? Or a story?—no, not another story now...
Wednesday, August 20th
The Waves is I think resolving itself (I am at page 100) into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in and out, in the rhythm of the waves. Can they be read consecutively? I know nothing about that. I think this is the greatest opportunity I have yet been able to give myself; therefore I suppose the most complete failure. Yet I respect myself for writing this book—yes—even though it exhibits my congenital faults.
Monday, September 8th
I will signalise my return to life—that is writing—by beginning a new book, and it happens to be Thoby's birthday, I remark. He would have been, I think, 50 today. After coming out here I had the usual—oh how usual—headache; and lay, like a fibre of tired muscle on my bed in the sitting room, till yesterday. Now up again and on again; with one new picture in my mind; my defiance of death in the garden.
But the sentence with which this book was to open ran "Nobody has ever worked so hard as I do"—exclaimed in driving a paper fastener through the 14 pages of my Hazlitt just now. Time was when I dashed off these things all in the day's work. Now, partly because I must do them for America and make arrangements far ahead, I spend I daresay a ridiculous amount of time, more of trouble, on them. I began reading Hazlitt in January I think. And I am not sure that I have speared that little eel in the middle—that marrow—which is one's object in criticism. A very difficult business no doubt to find it, in all these essays; so many; so short; and on all subjects. Never mind; it shall go today; and my appetite for criticism is, oddly, whettened. I have some gift that way, were it not for the grind and the screw and the torture.
Tuesday, December 2nd
No, I cannot write that very difficult passage in The Waves this morning (how their lives hang lit up against the Palace) all because of Arnold Bennett and Ethel's * party. I can hardly get one word after another. There I was for 2 hours so it seemed, alone with B., in Ethel's little back room. And this meeting I am convinced was engineered by B. to "get on good terms with Mrs. Woolf"—when Heaven knows I don't care a rap if I'm on terms with B. or not. B. I say, because he can't say B. He ceases; shuts his eyes; leans back; one waits. "Begin," he at last articulates quietly, without any fluster. But the method lengthens out intolerably a rather uninspired discourse. It's fun. I like the old creature. I do my best, as a writer, to detect signs of genius in his smoky brown eye: I see certain sensuality, power, I suppose; but O as he cackled out "What a blundering fool I am—what a baby—compared with Desmond MacCarthy—how clumsy—how could I attack professors?" This innocence is engaging; but would be more so if I felt him, as he infers, a "creative artist." He said that George Moore in The Mummer's Wife had shown him The Five Towns: taught him what to see there: has a profound admiration for G. M.; but despises him for boasting of his sexual triumphs. "He told me that a young girl had come to see him. And he asked her, as she sat on the sofa, to undress. And he said she took off all her clothes and let him look at her.... Now that I don't believe ... But he is a prodigious writer—he lives for words. Now he's ill. Now he's an awful bore—he tells the same stories over and over. And soon people will say of me 'He's dead.'" I rashly said: "Of your books?" "No, of me," he replied, attaching, I suppose, a longer life than I do to his books.
Soon after this A.B. went to France, drank a glass of water and died of typhoid. (March 30th. His funeral today.)
"It's the only life," he said (this incessant scribbling, one word after another, one thousand words daily). "I don't want anything else. I think of nothing but writing. Some people are bored." "You have all the clothes you want, I suppose," I said. "And bath. And beds. And a yacht." "Oh yes, my clothes couldn't be better cut."
And at last I drew Lord David * in. And we taunted the old creature with thinking us refined. He said the gates of Hatfield were shut—"shut away from life." "But open on Thursdays," said Lord D. "I don't want to go on Thursdays," said B. "And you drop your aitches on purpose," I said, "thinking that you possess more 'life' than we do." "I sometimes tease," said B., "but I don't think I possess more life than you do. Now I must go home. I have to write one thousand words tomorrow morning." And this left only the scrag end of the evening; and this left me in a state where I can hardly drive my pen across the page.
Reflection: It is presumably a bad thing to look through articles, reviews, etc. to find one's own name. Yet I often do.
Thursday, December 4th
One word of slight snub in the Lit. Sup. today makes me determine, first, to alter the whole of The Waves; second, to put my back up against the public—one word of slight snub.
Friday, December 12th
This, I think, is the last day's breathing space I allow myself before I tackle the last lap of The Waves. I have had a week off—that is to say I have written three little sketches; and dawdled and spent a morning shopping and a morning, this morning, arranging my new table and doing odds and ends—but I think I have got my breath again and must be off for three or perhaps four weeks more. Then, as I think, I shall make one consecutive writing of The Waves etc.—the interludes—so as to work it into one—and then, oh dear, some must be written again; and then, corrections; and then send to Mabel; and then correct the type; and then give to Leonard. Leonard perhaps shall get it some time late in March. Then put away; then print, perhaps in June.
Monday, December 22nd
It occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet that I would merge all the interjected passages into Bernard's final speech and end with the words O solitude: thus making him absorb all those scenes and having no further break. This is also to show that the theme effort, effort, dominates: not the waves: and personality: and defiance: but I am not sure of the effect artistically; because the proportions may need the intervention of the waves finally so as to make a conclusion.
RODMELL. Saturday, December 27th
But what's the use of talking about Bernard's final speech? We came down on Tuesday and next day my cold was the usual influenza and I am in bed with the usual temperature and can't use my wits or, as is visible, form my letters. I daresay two days will see me normal; but then the sponge behind my forehead will be dry and pale—and so my precious fortnight of exaltation and concentration is snatched; and I shall go back to the racket and Nelly without a thing done. I clear myself by thinking that I may evolve some thoughts. Meanwhile it rains; Annie's child is ill; the dogs next door yap and yap; all the colours are rather dim and the pulse of life dulled. I moon torpidly through book after book: Defoe's Tour; Rowan's autobiography; Benson's Memoirs; Jeans: in the familiar way. The parson—Skinner—who shot himself emerges like a bloody sun in a fog: a book worth, perhaps, looking at again in a clearer mood. He shot himself in the beechwoods above his house; he spent a life digging up stones and reducing all places to Camelodunum; quarrelled; bickered; yet loved his sons; yet turned them out of doors—a clear hard picture of one type of human life—the exasperated, unhappy, struggling, intolerably afflicted. Oh and I've read Q. V.'s * letters; and wonder what would happen had Ellen Terry been born Queen. Complete disaster to the Empire? Q. V. entirely unaesthetic; a kind of Prussian competence and belief in herself her only prominences; material; brutal to Gladstone; like a mistress with a dishonest footman. Knew her own mind. But the mind radically commonplace, only its inherited force and cumulative sense of power making it remarkable.
Diary of a Somerset rector.
Tuesday, December 30th
What it wants is presumably unity; but it is I think rather good (I am talking to myself over the fire about The Waves). Suppose I could run all the scenes together more?—by rhythms chiefly. So as to avoid those cuts; so as to make the blood run like a torrent from end to end—I don't want the waste that the breaks give; I want to avoid chapters; that indeed is my achievement, if any, here: a saturated unchopped completeness; changes of scene
, of mind, of person, done without spilling a drop. Now if it could be worked over with heat and currency, that's all it wants. And I am getting my blood up (temp. 99). But all the same I went into Lewes and the Keynes came to tea; and having got astride my saddle the whole world falls into shape; it is this writing that gives me my proportions.
1931
Wednesday, January 7th
My head is not in the first spring of energy: this fortnight has brought me no views of the lapping downs—no fields and hedges—too many firelit houses and lit up pages and pen and ink—curse my influenza. It is very quiet here—not a sound but the hiss of the gas. Oh but the cold was too great at Rodmell. I was frozen like a small sparrow. And I did write a few staggering sentences. Few books have interested me more to write than The Waves. Why even now, at the end, I'm turning up a stone or two: no glibness, no assurance; you see, I could perhaps do B.'s soliloquy in such a way as to break up, dig deep, make prose move—yes I swear—as prose has never moved before; from the chuckle, the babble to the rhapsody. Something new goes into my pot every morning—something that's never been got at before. The high wind can't blow, because I'm chopping and tacking all the time. And I've stored a few ideas for articles: one on Gosse—the critic, as talker: the armchair critic; one on Letters—one on Queens.
Now this is true: The Waves is written at such high pressure that I can't take it up and read it through between tea and dinner; I can only write it for about one hour, from 10 to 11:30. And the typing is almost the hardest part of the work. Heaven help me if all my little 80,000 word books are going in future to cost me two years! But I shall fling off, like a cutter leaning on its side, on some swifter, slighter adventure—another Orlando perhaps.
A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts From the Diary of Virginia Woolf Page 17