Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Thursday, April 13th.

  Two days of influenza after that, mild but sucking one’s head as usual, so I’m out here this morning only to drone my way through a few Roger letters. I finished my first 40 pages - childhood etc. - well under the week; but then they were largely autobiography; Now politics impend. Chamberlain’s statement in the House today. War I suppose not tomorrow, but nearer.

  I read about 100 pages of Dickens yesterday, and see something vague about the drama and fiction; how the emphasis, the caricature of these innumerable scenes, forever forming character, descend from the stage. Literature - that is the shading, suggesting, as of Henry James, hardly used. All bold and coloured. Rather monotonous; yet so abundant, so creative: yes, but not highly creative: not suggestive. Everything laid on the table. Nothing to engender in solitude. That’s why it’s so rapid and attractive. Nothing to make one put the book down and think. But these are influenza musings; and I’m so muddled I shall take Sir Edward into the house and extract him over the fire.

  Saturday, April 15th.

  I’ve done rather well at Roger considering: I don’t think I shall take two weeks over each chapter. And it’s rather amusing - dealing drastically with this year’s drudgery. I think I see how it shapes: and my compiling method was a good one. Perhaps it’s too like a novel. I don’t bother. No letters; no news; and my head too staked for reading. L. galloping through his book. I should like a holiday - a few days in France - or a run through the Cotswolds. But considering how many things I have that I like - What’s odd - (I’m always beginning like this) is the severance that war seems to bring: everything becomes meaningless: can’t plan: then there comes too the community feeling: all England thinking the same thing - this horror of war - at the same moment. Never felt it so strong before. Then the lull and one lapses again into private separation.

  But I must order macaroni from London.

  Wednesday, April 2 6th.

  I’ve done a quarter - 100 pages of Roger which I shall have by tomorrow. As there are 400 pages, and one hundred takes three weeks (oh but I was interrupted) - it will take nine weeks to finish. Yes, I ought to have finished it by the end of July. Only we may go away. Say August. And have it all typed in September... Well - then it will be out this time next year. And I shall be free in August - What a grind it is; and I suppose of little interest except to six or seven people. And I shall be abused.

  Thursday, June 29th.

  The grind of doing Roger and P I P makes my head spin and I let it reel itself off for 10 minutes here. I wonder why; and if I shall ever read this again. Perhaps if I go on with my memoirs, also a relief from R„ I shall make use of it. A dismal day yesterday; shoe hunting in Fortnums. A sale, but only of the unsaleable. And the atmosphere, British upper classes; all tight and red nailed; myself a figure of fun - whips my skin: I fidget: but recoup myself walking in the rain through the Parks. Come home and try to concentrate on Pascal. I can’t. Still it’s the only way of tuning up, and I get a calm, if not understanding. These pin points of theology need a grasp beyond me. Still I see Lytton’s point - my dear old serpent. What a dream life is to be sure - that he should be dead, and I reading him: and trying to make out that we indented ourselves in the world; whereas I sometimes feel it’s been an illusion - gone so fast; lived so quickly; and nothing to show for it, save these little books. But that makes me dig my feet in and squeeze the moment. So after dinner I walked to the Clinic with L.; waited outside with Sally tugging; watched the evening sight: oh and the purple grey clouds above Regent’s Park with the violent and yellow sky signs made me leap with pleasure.

  Monday, August 7th.

  I am now going to make the rash and bold experiment of breaking off, from condensing Vision and Design; to write here for 10 minutes instead of revising, as I ought, my morning’s grind.

  Oh yes, I thought of several things to write about. Not exactly diary. Reflections. That’s the fashionable dodge. Peter Lucas and Gide both at it. Neither can settle to creative art. (I think, sans Roger, I could.) It’s the comment - the daily interjection - that comes handy in times like these. I too feel it. But what was I thinking? I have been thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us. That’s clear in an MS I’m reading.

  If I say this, So-and-so will think me sentimental. If that... will think me bourgeois. All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors. Hence their self-consciousness, their restlessness. It would be worth while trying to discover what they are at the moment. Did Wordsworth have them?

  I doubt it. I read ‘Ruth’ before breakfast. Its stillness, its unconsciousness, its lack of distraction, its concentration and the resulting ‘beauty’ struck me. As if the mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

  That’s an idea for an article.

  The figurative expression is that all the surroundings of the mind have come much closer. A child crying in the field brings poverty: my comfort; to mind. Ought I to go to the village sports? ‘Ought’ thus breaks into my contemplation.

  Oh and I thought, as I was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, and the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: but why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; and to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, and not as unconscious, at least in its approaches, as birth is. I must now return to my grind, I think rather refreshed.

  Wednesday, August 9th.

  My grind has left me dazed and depressed. How on earth to bring off this chapter? God knows.

  Thursday, August 24th.

  Perhaps it is more interesting to describe ‘the crisis’ than R.’s love affairs. Yes we are in the very thick of it. Are we at war? At one I’m going to listen in. It’s very different, emotionally, from last September. In London yesterday there was indifference almost. No crowd in the train - we went by train. No stir in the streets. One of the removers called up. It’s fate, as the foreman said. What can you do against fate? Complete chaos at 37.1 Anna met in graveyard. No war, of course now, she said. John said® ‘Well I don’t know what to think.’ But as a dress rehearsal it’s complete. Museums shut. Searchlight on Rodmell Hill. Chamberlain says danger imminent. The Russian pact a disagreeable and unforeseen surprise. Rather like a herd of sheep we are. No enthusiasm. Patient bewilderment. I suspect some desire ‘to get on with it’. Order double supplies and some coal. Aunt Violet in refuge at Charleston. Unreal. Whiffs of despair. Difficult to work. Offer of £200 from Chambers for a story. Haze over the marsh. Aeroplanes. One touch on the switch and we shall be at war. Danzig not yet taken. Clerks cheerful. I add one little straw to another, waiting to go in, palsied with writing. There’s no cause now to fight for, said Ann. Communists baffled. Railway strike off. Lord Halifax broadcasts in his country gentleman voice. Louie says will clothes be dear? Underneath of course wells of pessimism. Young men torn to bits: mothers like Nessa two years ago. But again, some swerve to the right may come at any moment. The common feeling covers the private, then recedes. Discomfort and distraction. And all mixed with the mess at 37.

  Wednesday, September 6th.

  Our first air raid warning at 8.30 this morning. A warbling that gradually insinuates itself as I lay in bed. So dressed and walked on the terrace with L. Sky clear. All cottages shut. Breakfast. All clear. During the interval a raid on Southwark. No news. The Hepworths came on Monday. Rather like a sea voyage. Forced conversation. Boredom. All meaning has run out of everything. Scarcely worth reading papers. The B.B.C. gives any news the day before. Emptiness. Inefficiency. I may as well record these things. My plan is to force my brain to work on Roger. But Lord this is the worst of all my life’s experiences. It means feeling only bodily feelings: one gets cold and torpid. Endless interruptions. We have done the curtains. We have carried coals etc. into the cottage for the 8 Battersea women and children. The expecta
nt mothers are all quarrelling. Some went back yesterday. We took the car to be hooded, met Nessa, were driven to tea at Charleston. Yes, it’s an empty meaningless world now. Am I a coward? Physically I expect I am. Going to London tomorrow I expect frightens me. At a pinch enough adrenalin is secreted to keep one calm. But my brain stops. I took up my watch this morning and then put it down. Lost. That kind of thing annoys me. No doubt one can conquer this. But my mind seems to curl up and become undecided. To cure this one had better read a solid book like Tawney. An exercise of the muscles. The Hepworths are travelling books in Brighton. Shall I walk? Yes. It’s the gnats and flies that settle on non-combatants. This war has begun in cold blood. One merely feels that the killing machine has to be set in action.

  So far, the Athenia has been sunk. It seems entirely meaningless - a perfunctory slaughter. Like taking a jar in one hand, a hammer in the other. Why must this be smashed? Nobody knows. This feeling is different from any before. And all the blood has been let out of common life. No movies or theatres allowed. No letters, except strays from America. Reviewing rejected by Atlantic. No friends write or ring up. Yes, a long sea voyage, with strangers making conversation, and lots of small bothers and arrangements, seems the closest I can get. Of course all creative power is cut off. Perfect summer weather.

  It’s like an invalid who can look up and take a cup of tea. Suddenly one can take to the pen with relief. Result of a walk in the heat, clearing the fug and setting the blood working. This book will serve to accumulate notes, the first of such quickenings. And for the hundredth time I repeat - any idea is more real than any amount of war misery. And what one’s made for. And the only contribution one can make - this little pitter patter of ideas is my whiff of shot in the cause of freedom. So I tell myself. Thus bolstering up a figment - a phantom: recovering that sense of something pressing from outside which consolidates the mist, the non-existent.

  I conceived the idea, walking in the sunbaked marsh where I saw one clouded yellow, of making an article out of these is odd diaries. This will be an easy slope of work: not the steep grind of Roger. But shall I ever have a few hours to read in? I must. Tonight the Raid has diminished from a raid on Southwark; on Portsmouth; on Scarborough, to an attempt on the East Coast without damage. Tomorrow we go up.

  Monday, September nth.

  I have just read 3 or 4 characters of Theophrastus, stumbling from Greek to English, and may as well make a note of it. Trying to anchor my mind on Greek. Rather successful. As usual, how Greek sticks, darts, eels in and out! No Latin would have noted that a boor remembers his loans in the middle of the night. The Greek has his eye on the object. But it’s a long distance one has to roll away to get at Theophrastus and Plato. But worth the effort.

  Thursday, September 28th.

  No, I’m not sure of the date. And Vita is lunching here. I’m going to stop R. at 12, then read something real. I’m not going to let my brain addle. Little sharp notes. For somehow my brain is not very vigorous at the end of a book though I could dash off fiction or an article merrily enough. Why not relieve it then? Wasn’t it my conscientious grind at The Years that killed it. So I whizz off to Stevenson - Jekyll and Hyde - not much to my liking. Very fine clear September weather. Windy but lovely light. And I can’t form letters.

  Friday, October 6th.

  Well I have succeeded in despite of distractions to belong to other nations in copying out again the whole of Roger. Needless to say, it’s still to be revised, compacted, vitalized. And can I ever do it? The distractions are so incessant. I compose articles on Lewis Carroll and read a great variety of books - Flaubert’s life, R.’s lectures, out at last, a life of Erasmus and Jacques Blanche. We are asked to lunch with Mrs Webb, who so often talks of us. And my hand seems as tremulous as an aspen. I have composed myself by tidying my room. Can’t quite see my way now as to the next step in composition. Tom this weekend. I meant to record a Third Class Railway Carriage conversation. The talk of business men. Their male detached lives. All politics. Deliberate, well set up, contemptuous and indifferent of the feminine. For example: one man hands the Evening Standard, points to a woman’s photograph. ‘Women? Let her go home and bowl her hoop,’ said the man in blue serge with one smashed eye. ‘She’s a drag on him,’ another fragment. The son is going to lectures every night. Odd to look into this cool man’s world: so weather tight: insurance clerks all on top of their work; sealed up; self-sufficient; admirable; caustic; laconic; objective; and completely provided for. Yet thin, sensitive: yet schoolboys; yet men who earn their livings. In the early train they said, ‘Can’t think how people have time to go to war. It must be that the blokes haven’t got jobs.’ ‘I prefer a fool’s paradise to a real hell.’ ‘War’s lunacy. Mr Hitler and his set are gangsters. Like A1 Capone.’ Not a chink through which one can see art, or books. They play crosswords when insurance shop fails.

  Saturday, October 7th.

  If s odd how those first days of complete nullity when war broke out have given place to such a pressure of ideas and work that I feel the old throb and spin in my head more of a drain than ever. The result partly of taking up journalism. A good move, I daresay; for it compacts; and forces me to organize. I’m masterfully pulling together those diffuse chapters of R. because I know I must stop and do an article. Ideas for articles obsess me. Why not try the one for The Times No sooner said than I’m ravaged by ideas. Have to hold the Roger fort - for I will have the whole book typed and in Nessa’s hands by Christmas - by force.

  Thursday, November 9th.

  How glad I am to escape to my free page. But I think I’m nearing the end of my trouble with Roger. Doing once more, the last pages: and I think I like it better than before. I think the idea of breaking up the last chapter into sections was a good one. If only I can bring that end off. The worst of journalism is that it distracts, like a shower on the top of the sea.

  Reviewing1 came out last week; and was not let slip into obscurity as I expected. Lit. Sup. had a tart and peevish leader; the old tone of voice I know so well - rasped and injured. Then Y. Y. polite but aghast in the NS. And then my answer - why an answer should always make me dance like a monkey at the Zoo, gibbering it over as I walk, and then re-writing, I don’t know. It wasted a day. I suppose it’s all pure waste: yet if one’s an outsider, be an outsider. Only don’t for God’s sake attitudinize and take up the striking, the becoming attitude.

  Thursday, November 30th.

  Very jaded and tired and depressed and cross, and so take the liberty of expressing my feelings here. R. a failure - and what a grind... no more of that. I’m brain fagged and must resist the desire to tear up and cross out - must fill my mind with air and light; and walk and blanket it in fog. Rubber boots help. I can flounder over the marsh. No, I will write a little memoir.

  Saturday, December 2nd.

  Tiredness and dejection give way if one day off is taken instantly. I went in and did my cushion. In the evening my pain in my head calmed. Ideas came back. This is a hint to be remembered. Always turn the pillow. Then I become a swarm of ideas. Only I must hive them till R. is done. It was annoying to get on to the surface and be so stung with my pamphlet. No more controversy for a year, I vow. Ideas: about writers’ duty. No, I’ll shelve that. Began reading Freud last night; to enlarge the circumference: to give my brain a wider scope: to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age. Always take on new things. Break the rhythm etc. Use this page now and then, for notes. Only they escape after the morning’s grind.

  Saturday, December 16th.

  The litter in this room is so appalling that it takes me five minutes to find my pen. R. all unsewn in bits. And I must take 50 pages, should be 100, up on Monday. Can’t get the marriage chapter right. Proportion all wrong. Alteration, quotation, makes it worse. But it’s true I don’t fuss quite so much as over a novel. I learned a lesson in re-writing The Years which I shall never forget. Always I say to myself Remember the horror of that. Yesterday I was, I suppose,
cheerful. Two letters from admirers of Three Guineas: both genuine: one a soldier in the trenches; the other a distracted middle class woman.

  Monday, December 18th.

  Once more, as so often, I hunt for my dear old red-covered book, with what an instinct I’m not quite sure. For what the point of making these notes is I don’t know; save that it becomes a necessity to uncramp, and some of it may interest me later. But what? For I never reach the depths; I’m too surface blown. And always scribble before going in - look quickly at my watch. Yes, 10 minutes left - what can I say. Nothing that needs thought; which is provoking; for I often think. And think the very thought I could write here. About being an outsider. About my defiance of professional decency. Another allusion of a tart kind to Mrs W., and her desire to kill reviewers in the Lit. Sup. yesterday. Frank Swinnerton is the good boy and I’m the bad little girl. And this is trivial, compared with what? Oh the Graf Spee is going to steam out of Monte Video today into the jaws of death. And journalists and rich people are hiring aeroplanes from which to see the sight. This seems to me to bring war into a new angle; and our psychology. No time to work out. Anyhow the eyes of the whole world (B.B.C.) are on the game; and several people will lie dead tonight, or in agony. And we shall have it served up for us as we sit over our logs this bitter winter night. And the British Captain has been given a K.C.B. and Horizon is out; and Louie has had her teeth out; and we ate too much hare pie last night; and I read Freud on Groups; and I’ve been titivating Roger: and this is the last page; and the year draws to an end; and we’ve asked Plomer for Christmas; and - now time’s up as usual. I’m reading Ricketts diary - all about the war - the last war; and the Herbert diaries and... yes, Dadie’s Shakespeare, and notes overflow into my two books.