Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Friday, April 30th.

  The last of a wet windy month, excepting the sudden opening of all the doors at Easter and the summer displayed blazing, as it always is, I suppose, only cloud hidden. I have not said anything about Iwerne Minster. Now it would amuse me to see what I remember it by. Cranbourne Chase: the stunted aboriginal forest trees, scattered, not grouped in cultivations; anemones, bluebells, violets, all pale, sprinkled about, without colour, livid, for the sun hardly shone. Then Blackmore Vale; a vast air dome and the fields dropped to the bottom; the sun striking, there, there; a drench of rain falling, like a veil streaming from the sky, there and there; and the downs rising, very strongly scarped (if that is the word) so that they were ridged and ledged; then an inscription in a church ‘sought peace and ensured it’ and the question who wrote these sonorous stylistic epitaphs? - and all the cleanliness of Iwerne village, its happiness and well-being, making me ask, as we tended to sneer, still this is the right method, surely; and then tea and cream - these I remember: the hot baths; my new leather coat; Shaftesbury, so much lower and less commanding than my imagination, and the drive to Bournemouth and the dog and the lady behind the rock, and the view of Swanage, and coming home.

  Yesterday I finished the first part of To the Lighthouse, and today began the second. I cannot make it out - here is the most difficult abstract piece of writing - I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless and featureless with nothing to cling to; well, I rush at it, and at once scatter out two pages. Is it nonsense, is it brilliance? Why am I so flown with words and apparently free to do exactly what I like? When I read a bit it seems spirited too; needs compressing, but not much else. Compare this dashing fluency with Mrs Dalloway (save the end). This is not made up; it is the literal fact.

  Tuesday, May 25th.

  I have finished - sketchily I admit - the second part of To the Lighthouse - and may, then, have it all written over by the end of July. A record. 7 months, if it so turns out.

  Sunday, July 25th

  At first I thought it was Hardy, and it was the parlourmaid, a small thin girl, wearing a proper cap. She came in with silver cake stands and so on. Mrs Hardy talked to us about her dog. How long ought we to stay? Can Mr Hardy walk much etc. I asked, making conversation, as I knew one would have to. She has the large sad lack-lustre eyes of a childless woman; great docility and readiness, as if she had learnt her part; not great alacrity, but resignation, in welcoming more visitors; wears a sprigged voile dress, black shoes and a necklace. We can’t go far now, she said, though we do walk every day, because our dog isn’t able to walk far. He bites, she told us. She became more natural and animated about the dog, who is evidently the real centre of her thoughts - then the maid came in. Then again the door opened, more sprucely, and in trotted a little puffy-cheeked cheerful old man, with an atmosphere cheerful and business-like in addressing us, rather like an old doctor’s or solicitor’s, saying ‘Well now -’ or words like that as he shook hands. He was dressed in rough grey with a striped tie. His nose has a joint in it and the end curves down. A round whitish face, the eyes now faded and rather watery, but the whole aspect cheerful and vigorous. He sat on a three-cornered chair (I am too jaded with all this coming and going to do more than gather facts) at a round table, where there were the cake stands and so on; a chocolate roll; what is called a good tea; but he only drank one cup, sitting on his three-cornered chair. He was extremely affable and aware of his duties. He did not let the talk stop or disdain making talk. He talked of father: said he had seen me, or it might have been my sister, but he thought it was me, in my cradle. He had been to Hyde Park Place - oh, Gate was it. A very quiet street. That was why my father liked it. Odd to think that in all these years he had never been down there again. He went there often. Your father took my novel - Far From the Madding Crowd. We stood shoulder to shoulder against the British public about certain matters dealt with in that novel. You may have heard. Then he said how some other novel had fallen through that was to appeal’ - the parcel had been lost coming from France - not a very likely thing to happen, as your father said - a big parcel of manuscript; and he asked me to send my story. I think he broke all the Cornhill laws - not to see the whole book; so I sent it in chapter by chapter and was never late. Wonderful what youth is! I had it in my head doubtless, but I never thought twice about it. It came out every month. They were nervous, because of Miss Thackeray I think. She said she became paralysed and could not write a word directly she heard the press begin. I daresay it was bad for a novel to appear like that. One begins to think what is good for the magazine, not what is good for the novel.

  “You think what makes a strong curtain,’ put in Mrs Hardy jocularly. She was leaning upon the tea table, not eating - gazing out.

  Then we talked about manuscripts. Mrs Smith had found the MS of F. from the M.C. in a drawer during the war and sold it for the Red Cross. Now he has his MSS back and the printer rubs out all the marks. But he wishes they would leave them as they prove it genuine.

  He puts his head down like some old pouter pigeon. He has a very long head; and quizzical bright eyes, for in talk they grow bright. He said when he was in the Strand 6 years ago he scarcely knew where he was and he used to know it all intimately. He told us that he used to buy second-hand books - nothing valuable - in Wyck Street. Then he wondered why Great James Street should be so narrow and Bedford Row so broad. He had often wondered about that. At this rate, London would soon be unrecognizable. But I shall never go there again. Mrs Hardy tried to persuade him that it was an easy drive - only 6 hours or so. I asked if she liked it, and she said Granville Barker had told her that when she was in the nursing home she had ‘the time of her life’. She knew everyone in Dorchester but she thought there were more interesting people in London. Had I often been to Siegfried’s flat? I said no. Then she asked about him and Morgan, said he was elusive, as if they enjoyed visits from him. I said I heard from Wells that Mr Hardy had been up to London to see an air raid. ‘What things they say!’ he said. ‘It was my wife. There was an air raid one night when we stayed with Barrie. We just heard a little pop in the distance. The searchlights were beautiful. I thought if a bomb now were to fall on this flat how many writers would be lost.’ And he smiled, in his queer way, which is fresh and yet sarcastic a little: anyhow shrewd. Indeed, there was no trace to my thinking of the simple peasant. He seemed perfectly aware of everything; in no doubt or hesitation; having made up his mind; and being delivered of all his work, so that he was in no doubt about that either. He was not interested much in his novels, or in anybody’s novels: took it all easily and naturally. ‘I never took long with them,’ he said. ‘The longest was The Dinnasts (so pronounced). ‘But that was really three books,’ said Mrs Hardy. ‘Yes; and that took me six years; but not working all the time.’ ‘Can you write poetry regularly?’ I asked (being beset with the desire to hear him say something about his books; but the dog kept cropping up. How he bit; how the inspector came out; how he was ill; and they could do nothing for him). ‘Would you mind if I let him in?’ asked Mrs Hardy, and in came Wessex, a very tousled, rough brown and white mongrel; got to guard the house, so naturally he bites people, said Mrs. H. ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Hardy, perfectly natural, and not setting much stock by his poems either it seemed. ‘Did you write poems at the same time as your novels?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wrote a great many poems. I used to send them about, but they were always returned,’ he chuckled. ‘And in those days I believed in editors. Many were lost - all the fair copies were lost. But I found the notes and I wrote them from those. I was always finding them. I found one the other day; but I don’t think I shall find any more.

  ‘Siegfried took rooms near here and said he was going to work very hard, but he left soon.

  ‘E. M. Forster takes a long time to produce anything - 7 years,’ he chuckled. All this made a great impression of the ease with which he did things. ‘I daresay Far from the
Madding Crowd would have been a great deal better if I had written it differently,’ he said. But as if it could not be helped and did not matter.

  He used to go to the Lushingtons in Kensington Square and saw my mother there. ‘She used to come in and out when I was talking to your father.’

  I wanted him to say one word about his writing before we left and could only ask which of his books he would have chosen if, like me, he had had to choose one to read in the train. I had taken the Mayor of Casterbridge. ‘That’s being dramatized,’ put in Mrs Hardy, and then brought Life’s Little Ironies.

  ‘And did it hold your interest?’ he asked. I stammered that I could not stop reading it, which was true, but sounded wrong. Anyhow, he was not going to be drawn and went off about giving a young lady a wedding present. ‘None of my books are fitted to be wedding presents,’ he said. ‘You must give Mrs Woolf one of your books,’ said Mrs Hardy, inevitably. “Yes I will. But I’m afraid only in the little thin paper edition,’ he said. I protested that it would be enough if he wrote his name (then was vaguely uncomfortable).

  Then there was de la Mare. His last book of stories seemed to them such a pity. Hardy had liked some of his poems very much. People said he must be a sinister man to write such stories. But he is a very nice man - a very nice man indeed. He said to a friend who begged him not to give up poetry, ‘I’m afraid poetry is giving up me.’ The truth is he is a very kind man and sees anyone who wants to see him. He has 16 people for the day sometimes. ‘Do you think one can’t write poetry if one sees people?’ I asked. ‘One might be able to - I don’t see why not. It’s a question of physical strength,’ said Hardy. But clearly he preferred solitude himself. Always however he said something sensible and sincere, and thus made the obvious business of compliment-giving rather unpleasant. He seemed to be free of it all; very active minded; liking to describe people; not to talk in an abstract way; for example Col. Lawrence, bicycling with a broken arm ‘held like that’ from Lincoln to Hardy, listened at the door to hear if there was anyone there. ‘I hope he won’t commit suicide,’ said Mrs Hardy pensively, still leaning over the tea cups, gazing despondently. ‘He often says things like it, though he has never said quite that perhaps. But he has blue lines round his eyes. He calls himself Shaw in the army. No one is to know where he is. But it got into the papers.’ ‘He promised me not to go into the air,’ said Hardy. ‘My husband doesn’t like anything to do with the air,’ said Mrs Hardy.

  Now we began to look at the grandfather clock in the corner. We said we must go - tried to confess we were only down for the day. I forgot to say that he offered L. whisky and water, which struck me that he was competent as a host and in every way. So we got up and signed Mrs Hardy’s visitors books; and Hardy took my Life’s Little Ironies off and trotted back with it signed; and Woolf spelt Wolff, which I daresay had given him some anxiety. Then Wessex came in again. I asked if Hardy could stroke him. So he bent down and stroked him, like the master of the house. Wessex went on wheezing away.

  There was not a trace anywhere of deference to editors, or respect for rank or extreme simplicity. What impressed me was his freedom, ease and vitality. He seemed very ‘Great Victorian’ doing the whole thing with a sweep of his hand I (they are ordinary smallish, curled up hands) and setting no great stock by literature; but immensely interested in facts; » incidents; and somehow, one could imagine, naturally swept off into imagining and creating without a thought of its being difficult or remarkable; becoming obsessed; and living in imagination”. Mrs Hardy thrust his old grey hat into his hand and he trotted us out on to the road. ‘Where is that?’ I asked him, pointing to a clump of trees on the down opposite, for his house is outside the town, with open country (rolling, massive downs, crowned with little tree coronets before and behind) and he said, with interest, ‘That is Weymouth. We see the lights at night - not the lights themselves, but the reflection of them.’ And so we left and he trotted in again.

  Also I asked him if I might see the picture of Tess which Morgan had described, an old picture: whereupon he led me to an awful engraving of Tess coming into a room from a picture by Herkomer. ‘That was rather my idea of her,’ he said. But I said I had been told he had an old picture. That’s fiction,’ he said. ‘I used to see people now and then with a look of her.’

  Also Mrs Hardy said to me ‘Do you know Aldous Huxley?’ I said I did. They had been reading his book, which she thought ‘very clever’. But Hardy could not remember it: said his wife had to read to him - his eyes were now so bad. They’ve changed everything now,’ he said. ‘We used to think there was a beginning and a middle and an end. We believed in the Aristotelian theory. Now one of those stories came to an end with a woman going out of the room.’ He chuckled. But he no longer reads novels. The whole thing - literature, novels etc., all seemed to him an amusement, far away too, scarcely to be taken seriously. Yet he had sympathy and pity for those still engaged in it. But what his secret interests and activities are - to what occupation he trotted off when we left him - I do not know. Small boys write to him from New Zealand and have to be answered. They bring out a ‘Hardy number’ of a Japanese paper, which he produced. Talked too about Blunden. I think Mrs Hardy keeps him posted in the doings of the younger poets.

  As I am not going to milk my brains for a week, I shall here write the first pages of the greatest book in the world. This is what the book would be that was made entirely solely and [ with integrity of one’s thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they became ‘works of art’? Catch them hot and sudden as they rise in the mind - walking up Asheham hill for instance. Of course one cannot; for the process of language is slow and deluding. One must stop to find a word. Then, there is the form of the sentence, soliciting one to fill it.

  Art and thought What I thought was this: if art is based on thought, what is the transmuting process? I was telling myself the story of our visit to the Hardys, and I began to compose it; that is to say to dwell on Mrs Hardy leaning on the table, looking out, apathetically, vaguely, and so would soon bring everything into harmony with that as the dominant theme. But the actual, event was different.

  Next Writing by living people Tuesday. Sank into a chair, could scarcely rise; everything insipid; tasteless, colourless. Enormous desire for rest. Wednesday - only wish to be alone in the open air. Air delicious - avoided speech; could not read. Thought of my own power of writing J with veneration, as of something incredible, belonging to someone else; never again to be enjoyed by me. Mind a blank. Slept in my chair. Thursday. No pleasure in life whatsoever; but felt perhaps more attuned to existence. Character and idiosyncrasy as Virginia Woolf completely sunk out. Humble and modest. Difficulty in thinking what to say. Read automatically, like a cow chewing cud. Slept in chair. Friday: sense of physical tiredness; but slight activity of the brain. Beginning to take notice. Making one or two plans. No power of phrase-making. Difficulty in writing to Lady Colefax. Saturday (today) much clearer and lighter. Thought I could write, but resisted, or found it impossible. A desire to read poetry set in on Friday. This brings back a sense of my own individuality. Read some Dante and Bridges, without troubling to understands but got pleasure from them. Now I begin to wish to write notes, but not yet novel. But today senses quickening. No ‘making up’ power yet: no desire to cast scenes in my book. Curiosity about literature returning; want to read Dante, Havelock Ellis and Berlioz autobiography; also to make a looking glass with shell frame. These processes have sometimes been spread over several weeks.

  Proportions changed That in the evening, or on colourless days, the proportions of the landscape change suddenly. I saw people playing stool-ball in the meadow; they appeared sunk far down on a flat board; and the downs raised high up and mountainous round them. Detail was smoothed out. This was an extremely beautiful effect: the colours of the women’s dresses also showing very bright and pure in the almost untinted surroundings. I knew, also, that the proportions were abnormal - as if I were looking between my legs.


  Second-rate Art i.e. C., by Maurice Baring. Within its limits, it is not second rate, or there is nothing markedly so, at first go off. The limits are the proof of its non-existence. He can only do one thing; himself to wit; charming, clean, modest, sensitive Englishman. Outside that radius and it does not carry far nor illumine much, all is - as it should be - light, sure, proportioned, affecting even; told in so well bred a manner that nothing is exaggerated, all related, proportioned. I could read this for ever, I said. L. said one would soon be sick to death of it.

  Wandervôgeln of the sparrow tribe. Two resolute, sunburnt, dusty girls in jerseys and short skirts, with packs on their backs, city clerks, or secretaries, tramping along the road in the hot sunshine at Ripe. My instinct at once throws up a screen, which condemns them: I think them in every way angular, awkward and self-assertive. But all this is a great mistake. These screens shut me out. Have no screens, for screens are made out of our own integument; and get at the thing itself, which has nothing whatever in common with a screen. The screen-making habit, though, is so universal that probably it preserves our sanity. If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies we might perhaps dissolve utterly; separateness would be impossible. But the screens are in the excess; not the sympathy.

  Returning health.

  This is shown by the power to make images; the suggestive power of every sight and word is enormously increased. Shakespeare must have had this to an extent which makes my normal state the state of a person blind, deaf, dumb, stone-stockish and fish-blooded. And I have it compared with poor Mrs Bartholomew almost to the extent that Shakespeare has it compared with me.