A Writer's Diary (24 page)

I am working very hard—in my way, to furbish up two long Elizabethan articles to front a new
Common Reader:
then I must go through the whole long list of those articles. I feel too, at the back of my brain, that I can devise a new critical method; something far less stiff and formal than these
Times
articles. But I must keep to the old style in this volume. And how, I wonder, could I do it? There must be some simpler, subtler, closer means of writing about books, as about people, could I hit upon it. (
The Waves
has sold more than 7,000.)

Wednesday, January 13th

Oh but this is, as I always say, making an apology myself to myself, not the first day of the year. It is the thirteenth, and I am in one of those lassitudes and ebbs of life when I cannot heave another word on to the wall. My word, what a heaving
The Waves
was, that I still feel the strain I

Can we count on another 20 years? I shall be fifty on 25th, Monday week that is: and sometimes feel that I have lived 250 years already, and sometimes that I am still the youngest person in the omnibus. (Nessa said that she still always thinks this, as she sits down.) And I want to write another four novels:
Waves,
I mean; and the
Tap on the Door;
and to go through English literature, like a string through cheese, or rather like some industrious insect, eating its way from book to book, from Chaucer to Lawrence. This is a programme, considering my slowness, and how I get slower, thicker, more intolerant of the fling and the rush, to last out my 20 years, if I have them.

Sunday, January 31st

Having just finished, as I say, the final version as I call it, of my
Letter to a Young Poet,
I can take a moment's liberty. From the cynical tone of this sentence I see that my finality is not secure. Writing becomes harder and harder. Things I dashed off I now compress and re-state. And for purposes which I need not go into here, I want to use these pages for dialogue for a time.

Monday, February 8th

Why did I ever say I would produce another volume of
Common Reader?
It will take me week after week, month
after month. However a year spent—save for diversions in Greece and Russia—in reading through English literature will no doubt do good to my fictitious brain. Rest it anyhow. One day, all of a rush, fiction will burst in. These remarks are jotted down at the end of a long morning's work on Donne, which will have to be done again, and is it worth the doing? I wake in the night with the sense of being in an empty hall: Lytton dead and those factories building. What is the point of it—life—when I am not working—suddenly becomes thin, indifferent. Lytton is dead, and nothing definite to mark it. Also they write flimsy articles about him.

Thursday, February 11th

My mind is set running upon
A Knock on the Door
^*
(what's its name?) owing largely to reading
Wells on Woman
—how she must be ancillary and decorative in the world of the future, because she has been tried, in 10 years, and has not proved anything.

Tuesday, February 16th

And I have just "finished"—I use inverted commas ironically—my Donne, a great but I think well intentioned grind. And I'm quivering and itching to write my—what's it to be called?—"Men are like that"?—no, that's too patently feminist. The sequel then, for which I have collected enough powder to blow up St. Pauls. It is to have four pictures. And I must go on with the
Common Reader
—for one thing, by way of proving my credentials.

Tuesday, May 17th

What is the right attitude towards criticism? What ought I to feel and say when Miss B. devotes an article in
Scrutiny
to attacking me? She is young, Cambridge, ardent. And she says I'm a very bad writer. Now I think the thing to do is to note the pith of what is said—that I don't think—then to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more
vigorously oneself. It is perhaps true that my reputation will now decline. I shall be laughed at and pointed at. What should be my attitude—clearly Arnold Bennett and Wells took the criticism of their youngers in the wrong way. The right way is not to resent; not to be longsuffering and Christian and submissive either. Of course, with my odd mixture of extreme rashness and modesty (to analyse roughly) I very soon recover from praise and blame. But I want to find out an attitude. The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme—thinking too much. And now that thorn is out—perhaps too easily.

Wednesday, May 25th

Now I have "finished"
David Copperfield,
and I say to myself can't I escape to some pleasanter atmosphere? Can't I expand and embalm and become a sentient living creature? Lord how I suffer! What a terrific capacity I possess for feeling with intensity—now, since we came back, I'm screwed up into a ball; can't get into step; can't make things dance; feel awfully detached; see youth; feel old; no, that's not quite it: wonder how a year or so perhaps is to be endured. Think, yet people do live; can't imagine what goes on behind faces. All is surface hard; myself only an organ that takes blows, one after another; the horror of the hard raddled faces in the flower show yesterday: the inane pointlessness of all this existence: hatred of my own brainlessness and indecision; the old treadmill feeling, of going on and on and on, for no reason: Lytton's death; Carrington's; a longing to speak to him; all that cut away, gone: ...women: my book on professions: shall I write another novel; contempt for my lack of intellectual power; reading Wells without understanding;... society; buying clothes; Rodmell spoilt; all England spoilt: terror at night of things generally wrong in the universe; buying clothes; how I hate Bond Street and spending money on clothes: worst of all is this dejected barrenness. And my eyes hurt: and my hand trembles.

A saying of Leonard's comes into my head in this season of
complete inanity and boredom. "Things have gone wrong somehow." It was the night C. killed herself. We were walking along that silent blue street with the scaffolding. I saw all the violence and unreason crossing in the air: ourselves small; a tumult outside: something terrifying: unreason—shall I make a book out of this? It would be a way of bringing order and speed again into my world.

Thursday, May 26th

And now today suddenly the weight on my head is lifted and I can think, reason, keep to one thing and concentrate. Perhaps this is the beginning of another spurt. Perhaps I owe it to my conversation with L. last night. I tried to analyse my depression: how my brain is jaded with the conflict within of two types of thought, the critical, the creative; how I am harassed by the strife and jar and uncertainty without. This morning the inside of my head feels cool and smooth instead of strained and turbulent.

Tuesday, June 28th

Just "finished de Quincey." Thus am I trying to keep pace with the days and deliver the second
C.R.
done on the last of June, which I see with dismay is Thursday. I spent last summer thus toiling over
The Waves.
This is less severe by a long chalk (what's the origin of that? cricket pitch? Billiards?). Anyhow it blazes; swoons; the heat. Royal, imperial, are the words I fumble with in the Square. So hot yesterday—so hot, when Prince Mirsky came with his fluent Russian lady: I mean she was full of temperament; had the free gestures of the Slav: but Mirsky was trap mouthed: opened and bit his remark to pieces: has yellow misplaced teeth: wrinkles his forehead; despair, suffering, very marked on his face. Has been in England, in boarding houses, for 12 years; now returns to Russia "forever." I thought as I watched his eye brighten and fade—soon there'll be a bullet through your head. That's one of the results of war: this trapped cabin'd man. But that didn't lubricate our tea.

Wednesday, June 29th

Whenever I suck my pen, my lip is covered with ink. And I have no ink with which to fill my pot; and it is 10 minutes past 12; and I have just finished Hardy; and I promise myself that the
C.R.
will be finally done by Wednesday next. And today is Sunday. Last night at 10 the Zeppelin came past with a string of light hanging from its navel. This consoled me for not having gone to the last night of the ballet. Now I have cleaned my table, which John inherits while I'm away. And I should now attack Ch. Rossetti. But Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.

Today is Wednesday and the
C.R.
I confess is not yet quite done. But then—well I had to re-write the last article, which I had thought so good, entirely. Not for many years shall I collect another bunch of articles.

Monday, July 11th

I will take a new pen and a new page to record the fact which is now a fact that I have slipped a green rubber band round
The Common Reader,
second series, and there it lies, at 10 minutes to one, ready to take upstairs. There is no sense of glory; only of drudgery done. And yet I daresay it's a nice enough book to read—I doubt that I shall write another like it all the same. I must find a quicker cut into books than this. But heaven be praised, not now. Now I'm taking a holiday. That is to say, what shall I write tomorrow? I can sit down and think.

Wednesday, July 13th

I have been sleeping over a promising novel. That's the way to write. I'm ruminating, as usual, how to improve my lot; and shall begin by walking, alone, in Regent's Park this afternoon. What I mean is why do a single thing one doesn't want to do—for instance buy a hat or read a book. Old Joseph Wright and old Lizzie Wright are people I respect. Indeed I do hope the second volume will come this morning. He was a maker of dialect dictionaries: he was a workhouse boy—his mother went charring. And he married Miss Lea a clergyman's daughter. And I've just read their love letters with respect.
And he said: "Always please yourself—then one person's happy at any rate." And she said make details part of a whole—get proportions right—contemplating marriage with Joe. Odd how rare it is to meet people who say things that we ourselves could have said. Their attitude to life much our own. Joe a very thick sturdy man—"I am unique in certain respects," he said. "We must leave some record of Joe and Lizzie to posterity." Had his old working mother to Oxford. She thought All Souls would make a good Co-op. Had a fist and struck boys. His notion of learning. What is it? I sometimes would like to be learned myself. About sounds and dialects. Still what use is it? I mean, if you have that mind why not make something
beautiful?
Yes, but then the triumph of learning is that it leaves something done solidly forever. Everybody knows now about dialect, owing to his dictionary. He is a coarse, sturdy variety of Sidney Webb and Walter Leaf—stockish, hairy; more humorous and forcible than either. Could work all night, wash and work all next day. Miss Weisse, Tovey's lady, brought them together—made Lizzie give up arranging the flowers in the rectory and go to Oxford. She a woman of character. Wouldn't accept Joe's offer of a job because he made her feel like a bear at the end of a chain. But she married him. They were lost in the woods by Virginia Water in 1896: and sat on a seat and had an hour of great suffering, after which she accepted him—they got on a baker's cart and were taken back to Miss Weisse. An absorbing story. Joe knew all about servants. Joe taught himself to read at 14: taught mill boys in a bedroom for 2d a week: a surly but very sensitive man, apparently. Now this is a testimony to Joe and Lizzie that I've been thinking how I should have liked to see them—would now like to write to her. A fine face with bright big eyes. Yes, but what happens in volume two?

R
ODMELL.
Friday, August 5th

Yesterday L. came into my room at breakfast and said, "Goldie
^*
is dead." I never knew him well but had the common feeling that I have with those trusty Cambridge fellows: and was pleased, of course, by what he wrote of
The Waves:
and so came nearer. I get the strangest feeling now of our all being in the midst of some vast operation: of the splendour of this undertaking—life: of being capable of dying: an immensity surrounds me. No—I can't get it—shall let it brood itself into "a novel" no doubt. (It's thus I get the conception from which the book condenses.) At night L. and I talked of death again, the second time this year: how we may be like worms crushed by a motor car: what does the worm know of the car—how it is made? There may be a reason: if so not one we, as human beings, can grasp. Goldie had some mystic belief.

And now we have been to Lewes races and seen the fat lady in black with parts of her person spilling over the shooting seat on which her bulk is so insecurely poised: seen the riff raff of sporting society all lined up in their cars with the dickies bulging with picnic baskets: heard the bark of backers: seen for a second the pounding straining horses with red faced jockeys lashing them pound by. What a noise they made—what a sense of muscle hard and stretched—and beyond the downs this windy sunny day looked wild and remote; and I could rethink them into uncultivated land again.

Wednesday, August 17th

Now I think I have corrected the
C.R.
till I can correct no longer. And I have a few minutes' holiday before I need take the proofs in to L. Shall I then describe how I fainted again? That is the galloping hooves got wild in my head last Thursday night as I sat on the terrace with L. How cool it is after the heat! I said. We were watching the downs draw back into fine darkness after they had burnt like solid emerald all day. Now that was being softly finely veiled. And the white owl was crossing to fetch mice from the marsh. Then my heart leapt: and stopped: and leapt again: and I tasted that queer bitterness at the back of my throat; and the pulse leapt into my head and beat and beat, more savagely, more quickly. I am going to faint, I said, and slipped off my chair and lay on the grass. Oh no, I was not unconscious. I was alive: but possessed with this struggling team in my head: galloping, pounding. I thought something will burst in my brain if this goes on. Slowly it muffled itself. I pulled myself up and staggered, with what infinite difficulty and alarm, now truly fainting and seeing the garden painfully lengthened and distorted, back, back, back—how long it seemed—could I drag myself?—to the house: and gained my room and fell on my bed. Then pain, as of childbirth; and then that too slowly faded; and I lay presiding, like a flickering light, like a most solicitous mother, over the shattered splintered fragments of my body. A very acute and unpleasant experience.