A Writer's Diary (22 page)

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.

R
ODMELL.
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.

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.

Tuesday, January 20th

I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book
^*
—a sequel to
A Room of One's Own
—about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps—Lord how exciting! This sprang out of my paper to be read on Wednesday to Pippa's society. Now for
The Waves.
Thank God—but I'm very much excited.

(This is 
Here and Now,
I think. May '34.)

Friday, January 23rd

Too much excited, alas, to get on with
The Waves.
One goes on making up "The Open Door," or whatever it is to be called. The didactive demonstrative style conflicts with the dramatic: I find it hard to get back inside Bernard again.

Monday, January 26th

Heaven be praised, I can truthfully say on this first day of being 49 that I have shaken off the obsession of
Opening the Door,
and have returned to
Waves:
and have this instant seen the entire book whole, and now I can finish it—say in under 3 weeks. That takes me to February 16th; then I propose, after doing Gosse, or an article perhaps, to dash off the rough sketch of
Open Door,
to be finished by April 1st. (Easter is April 3rd.) We shall then, I hope, have an Italian journey; return say May 1st and finish
Waves,
so that the MS. can go to be printed in June and appear in September. These are possible dates anyhow. Yesterday at Rodmell we saw a magpie and heard the first spring birds: sharp egotistical, like man. A hot sun; walked over Caburn; home by Horley and saw three men dash from a blue car and race without hats across a field. We saw a silver and blue aeroplane in the middle of a field, apparently unhurt, among trees and cows. This morning the paper says three men were killed—the aeroplane dashing to the earth. But we went on, reminding me of that epitaph in the Greek anthology: when I sank, the other ships sailed on.

Monday, February 2nd

I think I am about to finish
The Waves.
I think I might finish it on Saturday.

This is merely an author's note: never have I screwed my brain so tight over a book. The proof is that I am almost incapable of other reading or writing. I can only flop wide once the morning is over. Oh Lord the relief when this week is over and I have at any rate the feeling that I have wound up and done with that long labour: ended that vision. I think I have just done what I meant; of course I have altered the scheme considerably; but my feeling is that I have insisted upon saying, by hook or by crook, certain things I meant to say. I imagine that the hookedness may be so great that it will be a failure from a reader's point of view. Well, never mind: it is a brave attempt. I think, something struggled for. Oh and then the delight of skirmishing free again—the delight of being idle and not much minding what happens; and then I shall be able to read again, with all my mind—a thing I haven't done these four months I daresay. This will have taken me 18 months to write: and we can't publish it till the autumn I suppose.

Wednesday, February 4th

A day ruined, for us both. L. has to go every morning at 10:15 to the Courts, where his jury is still called, but respited always till 10:15 the next day; and this morning, which should have dealt a formidable blow at
The Waves—
B. is within two days I think of saying O Death—was ruined by Elly, who was to have come at 9:30 sharp but did not come till 11. And it is now 12:30 and we sat talking about the period and professional women, after the usual rites with the stethoscope, seeking vainly the cause of my temperature. If we like to spend 7 guineas we might catch a bug—but we don't like. And so I am to eat Bemax and—the usual routine.

How strange and wilful these last exacerbations of
The Waves
are! I was to have finished it at Christmas.

Today Ethel
^*
comes. On Monday I went to hear her rehearse. A vast Portland Place house with the cold wedding cake Adams plaster: shabby red carpets; flat surfaces washed with dull greens. The rehearsal was in a long room with a bow window looking on, in fact in, to other houses—iron staircases, chimneys, roofs—a barren brick outlook. There was a roaring fire in the Adams grate. Lady L. a now shapeless sausage, and Mrs. Hunter,
^*
a swathed satin sausage, sat side by side on a sofa. Ethel stood at the piano in the window, in her battered felt, in her jersey and short skirt conducting with a pencil. There was a drop at the end of her nose. Miss Suddaby was singing the Soul, and I observed that she went through precisely the same attitudes of ecstasy and inspiration in the room as in a hall: there were two young or youngish men. Ethel's
pince nez
rode nearer and nearer the tip of her nose. She sang now and then; and once, taking the bass, made a cat squalling sound—but everything she does with such forthrightness, directness, that there is nothing ridiculous. She loses self-consciousness completely. She seems all vitalised; all energised. She knocks her hat from side to side. Strides rhythmically down the room to signify to Elizabeth that this is the Greek melody; strides back. Now the furniture moving begins, she said, referring to some supernatural gambols connected with the prisoner's escape, or defiance or death. I suspect the music is too literary—too stressed—too didactic for my taste. But I am always impressed by the fact that it is music—I mean that she has spun these coherent chords, harmonies, melodies out of her so practical vigorous student mind. What if she should be a great composer? This fantastic idea is to her the merest commonplace: it is the fabric of her being. As she conducts, she hears music like Beethoven's. As she strides and turns and wheels about to us perched mute on chairs she thinks this is about the most important event now taking place in London. And perhaps it is. Well—I watched the curiously sensitive, perceptive Jewish face of old Lady L. trembling like a butterfly's antennae to the sound. How sensitive to music old Jewesses are—how pliable, how supple. Mrs. Hunter sat like a wax figure, composed, upholstered, transfixed, with her gold chain purse.