Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  These are very sensible sayings I think. And it’s all forgotten and over.

  What is uppermost now is the question of writing R.’s life. Helen came. Says both she and M. wish it. So I wait. What do I feel about it? If I could be free, then here’s the chance of trying biography; a splendid, difficult chance - better than trying to find a subject - that is, if I am free.

  Wednesday, November 14th.

  And am now, 10.30 on Thursday morning, November 15th, about to tackle re-reading and re-writing The Pargiters: an awful moment.

  12.45. Well, that horrid plunge has been made and I’ve started re-writing the Ps. Lord, Lord! Ten pages a day for 90 days. Three months. The thing is to contract: each scene to be a scene: much dramatized: contrasted: each to be carefully dominated by one interest: some generalized. At any rate this releases the usual flood and proves that only creating can bring about proportion: now, damnably disagreeable, as I see it will be - compacting the vast mass - I am using my faculties again, and all the flies and fleas are forgotten.

  A note: despair at the badness of the book: can’t think how I ever could write such stuff - and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down - and Lord knows the truth.

  Wednesday, November 21st.

  Margery Fry to tea on Sunday. A long debate about the book on Roger: not very conclusive. She says she wants a study by me, reinforced with chapters on other aspects. I say, Well, but those books are unreadable. Oh of course I want you to be quite free, she says. I should have to say something about his life, I say. The family - Now there of course I’m afraid I should have to ask you to be careful, she says. The upshot of all of which is that she’s to write to the N.S. asking for letters; that I’m to go through them; that we’re then to discuss - so it will drag on these many months, I suppose. And I plan working at Ps: and getting in reading time with Roger’s papers, so that by October next I could write, if that’s the decision. But what?

  Monday, December 3rd.

  Isn’t it odd? Some days I can’t read Dante at all after revising The Ps.: other days I find it very sublime and helpful. Raises one out of the chatter of words. But today (doing the scene at the Lodge) I’m too excited. I think it a good book today. I’m in the thick again. But I will stop at the end of the funeral scene and calm my brain. That is I will write the play for Christmas: Freshwater a farce - for a joke. And rig up my Contemporary Criticism article; and look around. David Cecil on fiction: a good book for readers, not for writers - all so elementary; but some good points made, from the outside. I’ve done though with that sort of criticism. And he’s often wrong: gets W. H. wrong, I think; wants to have a profound theory. We - Bloomsbury - are dead; so says Joad. I snap my fingers at him. Lytton and I the two distractions. Poor Francis lies in a hotel bedroom in Russell Square this rainy morning. I went in and sat with him. Quite himself with a lump on his forehead. And is aware of it all. May die under another operation, or slowly stiffen into complete paralysis. His brain may go. All this he knows; and there it was between us, as we joked. He came to the verge of it once or twice. But I can’t feel any more at the moment - not after Roger. I cannot go through that again. That’s my feeling. I kissed him. ‘This is the first time - this chaste kiss,’ he said. So I kissed him again. But I must not cry, I thought, and so went.

  Tuesday, December 18th.

  Talk with Francis yesterday. He is dying: but makes no bones about it. Only his expression is quite different. Has no hope. The man says he asks every hour how long will this go on, and hopes for the end. He was exactly as usual; no wandering, no incoherence. A credit to Athens. The soul deserves to be immortal, as L. said. We walked back, glad to be alive, numb somehow. I can’t use my imagination on that theme. What would it be like to lie there, expecting death? and how odd and strange a death. I write hurriedly, going to Angelica’s concert this fine soft day.

  Sunday, December 30th.

  Since I forgot to bring my writing book, I must fill up here, on loose sheets. End the year: with these cursed dogs barking: and I am sitting in my new house; and it is, of all hours, 3.10; and it is raining; and the cow has the sciatica; and we are taking her into Lewes to catch a train to London; after which we have tea at Charleston, act the play and dine there. It has been the wettest Christmas, I should say, drawing a bow at a venture, on record. Only yesterday did I manage my phantom farm walk; but pray God, with Christmas over, the rain will stop falling. Miss Emery’s dogs barking.

  It was stupid to come without a book, seeing that I end every morning with a head full of ideas about The Pargiters. It is very interesting to write out. I am re-writing considerably. My idea is to contract the scenes; very intense, less so; then drama; then narrative. Keeping a kind of swing and rhythm through them all. Anyhow it admits of great variety - this book. I think it shall be called Ordinary People. I finished, more or less, Maggie and Sarah, the first scene, in the bedroom: with what excitement I wrote it! And now hardly a line of the original is left. Yes, but the spirit is caught I think. I write perhaps 60 pages before I catch that. And coming back I see it hopping like a yellow canary on its perch. I want to make both S. and M. bold characters, using character dialogue. Then we go on to Martin’s visit to Eleanor: then the long day that ends with the King’s death. I have sweated off 80 or 90 pages, mostly due to a fault in paging though.

  End of the year: and Francis transacting his death at that nursing home in Collingham Place. The expression on his face is what I see: as if he were facing a peculiar lonely sorrow. One’s own death - think of lying there alone, looking at it, at 45 or so: with a great desire to live. ‘And so the New Statesman’s going to be the best paper that ever was, is it?’ ‘He’s dead though,’ (of Brimley Johnson) spoken with a kind of bitterness. None of these words are exactly right.

  And here we are, chafed by the cow’s lame leg and the dogs; yet as usual very happy I think: ever so full of ideas. L. finishing his Quack Quack of a morning: the Zet1 crawling from one chair to the other - picking at his head.

  And Roger dead. And am I to write about him? And the stirring of the embers - I mean the wish to make up as much of a fire as possible. So to get ready for the wet drive. Dogs still barking.

  1935.

  Tuesday, January 1st.

  The play (Freshwater) rather tosh; but I’m not going to bother about making a good impression as a playwright. And I have a lovely old year’s walk yesterday round the rat farm valley, by a new way and met Mr Freeth, and talked about road making; and then into Lewes to take the car to Martin’s and then home and read St Paul and the papers. I must buy the Old Testament. I am reading the Acts of the Apostles. At last I am illuminating that dark spot in my reading. What happened in Rome? And there are seven volumes of Renan. Lytton calls him ‘mellifluous’. Yeats and Aldous agreed, the other day, that their great aim in writing is to avoid the ‘literary’. Aldous said how extraordinary the ‘literary’ fetish had been among the Victorians. Yeats said that he wanted only to use the words that real people say. That his change had come through writing plays. And I said, rashly, that all the same his meaning was very difficult. And what is ‘the literary’. That’s rather an interesting question. Might go into that, if I ever write my critical book. But now I want to write On being despised. My mind will go on plumping up ideas for that. And I must finish Ordinary People: and then there’s Roger and writing despised. Begin Roger in October 1935. Is that possible? Publish O.P. in October; and work at these two during 1936. Lord knows! But I must press a good) deal of work in - remembering 53 - 54 - 55 are on me. And how excited I get over my ideas! And there’s people to see.

  Friday, January 11th.

  This spring will be on us all of a clap. Very windy; today; a dumb misted walk two days ago to Piddinghoe. Now the men are threshing. Nessa and Angelica and Eve yesterday. We talk a great deal about the play. An amusing incident. And I shall
hire a donkey’s head to take my call in - by way of saying This is a donkey’s work. I make out that I shall reduce The Caravan (so called suddenly) to 150,000: and shall finish re-typing in May. I wonder. It is compressed I think. And sometimes my brain threatens to split with all the meaning I think I could press into it. The discovery of this book, it dawns upon me, is the combination of the external and the internal. I am using both, freely. And my eye has gathered in a good many externals in its time.

  Saturday, January 19th.

  The play came off last night, with the result that I am dry-brained this morning and can only use this book as a pillow. It was said, inevitably, to be a great success; and I enjoyed - let me see what? Bunny’s praise; Oliver’s; but not much Christabel’s or the standing about pumping up vivacities with David, Cory, Elizabeth Bowen: yet on the whole it is good to have an unbuttoned laughing evening once in a way. Roger’s ghost knocked at the door - his portrait of Charlie Sanger was delivered in the thick of the rehearsal. And how Francis would have enjoyed this, Leonard said. These are our ghosts now. But they would applaud the attempt. So to sleep: and now, God bless my soul, as Tennyson would say, I must rinse and freshen my mind and make it work soberly on something hard. There’s my Dante; and Renan. And the horrid winter lap begins; the pale unbecoming days, like an ageing woman seen at 11 o’clock. However, L. and I shall go for a walk this afternoon; and that seems to me an enormous balance at the Bank! solid happiness.

  I have an idea for a ‘play’. Summer’s night. Someone on a seat. And voices speaking from the flowers.

  Wednesday, January 23rd.

  Yes, I ought to have explained why I wrote the Sickert. I always think of things too late. I am reading The Faery Queen - with delight. I shall write about it. I took Angelica shopping. ‘Do you mind if I read The Heir of Redcliffe?’ she said at tea, amusing me. What a curious sense the clothes sense is! Buying her coat, mine, hearing the women talk, as of race horses, about new skirts. And I am fluttered because I must lunch with Clive tomorrow in my new coat. And I can’t think out what I mean about conception: the idea behind F.Q. How to express a kind of natural transition from state to state. And the air of natural beauty. It is better to read the originals. Well, Clive’s lunch will jump me out of this. And now that the play is over, we must begin to see people here: and go to Hamlet and plan our spring journey. I am taking a fortnight off fiction. My mind became knotted. I think of making Theresa sing: and so lyricize the argument. Get as far from T (so called after my Sarah and Elvira provisionally). But oh heavens the duck squashy - this is from the pressed duck Jack once gave us: all juice; one squab of juice. I am reading Point Counter-. point. Not a good novel. All raw, uncooked, protesting. A descendant, oddly enough, of Mrs H. Ward: interest in ideas; makes people into ideas. A man from America returns my letters and says he is glad to see me as I am.

  Friday, February 1st.

  And again this morning, Friday, I’m too tired to go on with Ps. Why? Talking too much I daresay. I thought, though, I wanted ‘society’: and saw Helen, Mary, Gillett. Ann tonight. I think The Ps. however a promising work. Only nerve vigour wanted. A day off today.

  Wednesday, February 20th.

  Sarah is the real difficulty: I can’t get her into the main stream, yet she is essential. A very difficult problem; this transition business. And the burden of something that I won’t call propaganda. I have a horror of the Aldous novel: that must be avoided. But ideas are sticky things: won’t coalesce: hold up the creative, subconscious faculty; that’s it I suppose. I’ve written the chophouse scene I don’t know how many times.

  Tuesday, February 26th.

  A very fine skyblue day, my windows completely filled with blue for a wonder. Mr Riley has just mended them. And I have been writing and writing and re-writing the scene by the Round Pond. What I want to do is to reduce it all so that each sentence, though perfectly natural dialogue, has a great pressure of meaning behind it. And the most careful harmony and contrast of scene - the boats colliding etc. - has also to be arranged. Hence the extreme difficulty. But I hope perhaps tomorrow to have done, and then the dinner party and Kitty in the country should go quicker. At least I find the upper air scenes much simpler; and I think it’s right to keep them so. But Lord what a lot of work still to do! It won’t be done before August. And here I am plagued by the sudden wish to write an anti-Fascist pamphlet.

  Wednesday, February 27th.

  And I’ve just written it all over again. But it must do this time, I say to myself. Yet I know that I must put the screw on and write some pages again. It’s too jerky: too — . It’s obvious that one person sees one thing and another another; and that one has to draw them together. Who was it who said through the unconscious one comes to the conscious, and then again to the unconscious?

  I now feel a strong desire to stop reading F.Q.: to read Cicero’s letters, and the Chateaubriand Memoirs. As far as I can see, this is the natural swing of the pendulum. To particularize after the generalization of romantic poetry.

  Monday, March 11th.

  How I should like, I thought some time on the drive up this afternoon, to write a sentence again! How delightful to feel it form and curve under my fingers! Since October 16th I have not written one new sentence, but only copied and typed. A typed sentence somehow differs; for one thing it is formed out of what is already there: it does not spring fresh from the mind. But this copying must go on, I see, till August. I am only now in the first war scene: with luck I shall get to E. in Oxford Street before we go in May: and spend June and July on the grand orchestral finale. Then in August I shall write again.

  Saturday, March 16th.

  I have had three severe swingeings lately: Wyndham Lewis; Mirsky; and now Swinnerton. Bloomsbury is ridiculed; and I am dismissed with it. I didn’t read W. L.: and Swinnerton only affected me as a robin affects a rhinoceros - except in the depths of the night. How resilient I am; and how fatalistic now; and how little I mind and how much; and how good my novel is; and how tired I am this morning; and how I like praise; and how full of ideas I am; and Tom and Stephen came to tea, and Ray and William dine; and I forgot to describe my interesting talk with Nessa about my criticizing her children; and I left out - I forget what. My head is numb today and I can scarcely read Osbert on Brighton, let alone Dante.

  In last week’s Time and Tide St John Ervine called Lytton ‘that servile minded man... that Pandar’ or words to that effect. I’m thinking whether, if I write about Roger, I shall include a note, a sarcastic note, on the Bloomsbury baiters. No, I suppose not. Write them down - that’s the only way.

  Monday, March 18th.

  The only thing worth doing in this book is to stick it out: stick to the idea and don’t lower it an inch, in deference to anyone. What’s so odd is the way the whole thing dissolves in company and then comes back with a rush; and Swinnerton’s sneers and Mirsky’s - making me feel that I’m hated and despised and ridiculed - well, this is the only answer: to stick to my ideas. And I wish I need never read about myself or think about myself, anyhow till it’s done, but look firmly at my object and think only of expressing it. Oh what a grind it is embodying all these ideas and having perpetually to expose my mind, opened and intensified as it is by the heat of creation, to the blasts of the outer world. If I didn’t feel so much, how easy it would be to go on.

  Having just written a letter about Bloomsbury I cannot control my mind enough to go on with The Ps. I woke in the night and thought of it. But whether to send it or not, I don’t know. But now I must think of something else. Julian and Helen last night.

  L. advised me not to send the letter and after two seconds I see he is right. It is better, he says, to be able to say we don’t answer. But we suggest a comic guide to Bloomsbury by Morgan and he nibbles.

  Thursday, March 21st.

  Too jaded again to tackle that very difficult much too crowded raid chapter. In fact I am on the verge of the usual headache - for one thing yesterday was such a scramble.


  I have resolved to leave that blasted chapter here and do nothing at Rodmell. Yet, as I see, I cannot read; my mind is all tight like a ball of string. A most unpleasant variety of headache; but I think soon over. Only a little change needed. Not a real bad headache. Why make this note? Because reading is beyond me and writing is like humming a song. But what a worthless song! And it is the spring.