A Writer's Diary (39 page)

Tuesday, May 31st

A letter from Pippa. She is enthusiastic. So this is the last load off my mind—which weighed it rather heavy, for I felt if I had written all that, if it was not to her liking I should have
to brace myself pretty severely in my own private esteem. But she says it's the very thing for which they have panted: and the poison is now drawn. Now I can face the music, or donkeys bray or geeses cackle of the Reviews so indifferently that (truthfully) I find myself forgetting that they'll all be out this weekend. Never have I faced review day so composedly. Also I don't much mind my Cambridge friends either. Maynard may have a gibe; but what care I?

R
ODMELL.
Friday, June 3rd

This is the coming out day of
Three Guineas.
And the
Lit. Sup.
has two columns and a leader; and the
Referee
a great black bar Woman declares sex war, or some such caption. And it makes so much less difference than any other cackle on coming out day that I've written quietly at
Poyntz Hall:
haven't even troubled to read R. Lynd, nor look at the Ref. nor read through
The Times
article. It's true I have a sense of quiet and relief. But no wish to read reviews, or hear opinions.

I wonder why this is? Because it's a fact I want to communicate rather than a poem? I daresay something of the kind. Mercifully we have 50 miles of felt between ourselves and the din. It is sunny, warm, dry and like a June day but will rain later. Oh it pleased me that the
Lit. Sup.
says I'm the most brilliant pamphleteer in England. Also that this book may mark an epoch if taken seriously. Also that the
Listener
says I am scrupulously fair, and puritanically deny myself flights. But that's about all.

Anyhow that's the end of six years floundering, striving, much agony, some ecstasy: lumping the
Years
and
Three Guineas
together as one book—as indeed they are. And now I can be off again, as indeed I long to be. Oh to be private, alone, submerged.

Sunday, June 5th

This is the mildest childbirth I have ever had. Compare it with
The Years!
I wake knowing the yap will begin and never bother my head. Yesterday I had
Time and Tide
, and various London obscurities: today
Observer:
Selincourt. A terrible indictment.
Sunday Times, New Statesman
and
Spectator,
reserved for next week presumably. So the temperature remains steady. I foretell a great many letters on Tuesday night: some anonymous and abusive. But I have already gained my point: I'm taken seriously, not dismissed as a charming prattler as I feared.
The Times
yesterday had a paragraph headed "Mrs. Woolf's call to women" a serious challenge that must be answered by all thinkers—or something like that: prefacing the
Lit. Sup.
advt: unknown before I think; and must be some serious intention behind it.

B
ALDOCK.
Thursday, June 16th

Stop to light a pipe on the Icknield Way, a scrubby street of yellow villas. Now St. James Deeping. After Croyland, a magnificent moulded Church. Now very hot: flat; an old gent, fishing. Spread out and exposed. River above road level. On now to Gainsborough. Lunch at Peterborough: factory chimneys. Railway gate opened; off again. Gainsborough. A red Venetian palace rising among bungalows: in a square of unkempt grass. Long windows, leaning walls. A maze of little lanes. A strange forgotten town. Sunday at Housesteads. Thorn trees: sheep. The wall and white headed boys in front. Miles and miles of lavender campagna. One thread coloured frail road crossing the vast uncultivated lonely land. Today all cloud and blue and wind. The wall is a wave with a sharp crest, as of a wave drawn up to break. Then flat. Bogs under the crest. Waiting now for the rain to stop, for it blew and rained that day on the wall. Now a few miles from Corbridge waiting in the middle of the moor. Very black. Larks singing. Lunch deferred. A party of ninety lunching at the Inn at Piercebridge. A sense of local life eighteenth century inn diners to celebrate some sport. So on to a Manse in a garden: a very solid private house that takes in residents. Hot ham and fruit, but real cream, looking over an ugly range. The country early today was fen Wash country; Then the Pennines. These are shrouded in a heat mist. Larks singing. L. now looking for water for Sally
^*
(but this should precede the wall). Sunday. Sitting by the road under the Roman
wall while L. cleans sparking plugs. And I have been reading translations of Greek verse and thinking idly. When one reads the mind is like an aeroplane propeller invisibly quick and unconscious—a state seldom achieved. Not a bad Oxford introduction, trying to be in touch, up to date: scholarly but Oxford. Cows moving to the top of the hill by some simultaneous sympathy. One draws the others. Wind rocks the car. Too windy to climb up and look at the lake. Reason why the hills are still Roman—the landscape immortal ... what they saw I see. The wind, the June wind, the water, and snow. Sheep bedded in the long turf like pearls. No shade, no shelter. Romans looking over the border. Now nothing comes.

Tuesday. Now in Midlothian. Stopping for petrol. On the way to Stirling. Scotch mist driven across the trees. Normal Scots weather. Great hills. Ugly puritanical houses. The Hydro built 90 years ago. A woman called and said she had seen Mrs. Woolf walking in Melrose on Saturday. Second sight as I was not there. Galashiels a manufacturing town. Hideous. Fragments of talk overheard at the Hydro Melrose. Soft voiced old Scotch ladies sitting in their accredited places by the fire under the window. "I was wondering why you walked about with an umbrella." One who is stitching, "I wonder if I should wash it and begin again. I'm working on a dirty ground." Here I interpose: We stopped at Dryburgh to see Scott grave. It is under the broken palanquin of a ruined chapel. Just enough roof to cover it. And there he lies—Sir Walter Scott, Baronet. In a caddy made of chocolate blancmange with these words cut large and plain on the lid. As Dame Charlotte who is buried beside him is covered with the same chocolate slab it must have been his taste. And there's something fitting in it. For the Abbey is impressive and the river running at the bottom of the field. And all the old Scots ruins standing round him. I picked a white syringa in memory but lost it. An airy place but Scott is much pressed together. The col. by his side and Lockhart his son in law at his feet. Then there's Haig's stuck about with dark red poppies. But the old ladies are discussing Dr. John Brown whose brother was a doctor in Melrose. Soon one's head would ache and one's senses fuddle. One
would eat too many cakes at tea and there's a huge dinner at 7. "I think he's very nice—her husband. She's got a personality of her own. A very nice cir-r-cle. Where do they live? Retired to Perthshire.... I'm three stitches out ... Miss Peace came along to the reading room with her friend and wanted a fire. Couldn't she have rung the bell or something? Out you cornel (unpicking the knitting). There so much opened up now. Two years ago was the Centenary (of Dryburgh?). I went to the meeting. There was a service—most interesting. All the Ministers. Five on the platform. Possibly the Moderator. At any rate it was very nice and it was a beautiful day and the place was very full. The birds joined in the music. Alan Haig's birthday. There was a service at Dryburgh. I like D. I've not been to Jedburgh—awfully pretty." No, I don't think I can write it all out. The old creatures are sitting on a sofa not much older than I am I daresay. Yes, they're about 65. "Edinburgh's nice—I like it. We have to go away before we appreciate it. You have to go away from your birthplace. Then when you go back everything changed. A year does it—two years do it. I should leave it (of the work) and see the effect afterwards. What church d'you go to? Church of Scotland—not to St. Giles. It used to be the Tron. We go to St. Giles. It was St. George's parish—my husband was an elder in St. George's parish Charlotte Square. D'you like Waugh? I like him in a way I don't
hear
him, and it's a common complaint. He gives very hard sermons—you can't take anything away. The choir's beautiful. I can't get a sitting from which you can hear. I feel it infra dig rushing with the crowd. The crowd hasn't reached—I've just got to sit still—I'm having a service—I hear the prayers, the young men the music. It was pretty well where they come in from the Thistle chapel. They passed me bang. I rose and moved along. There are some seats the people never come to, and often the best seats. I like St. Giles, a lovely old place. The old lady whose seat I had told me the church was all renovated. Chambers did it, and when it came to the opening not a seat retained for the Chambers family. Badly arranged. Someone provided seats for them. A stupid thing. Always some higher church alteration. I like the episcopal. If it be episcopal let it
be: if Church of Scotland, let it be Church of Scotland. Dr. Waugh's brother is at Dundee. He would like Roseneath. Someone said that the minister at Roseneath is delicate."

Wind rages: trees leafless: bannocks and a blue pound note the only changes. Glencoe. Menaching. Leaf green hills, islands floating. A moving string of cars; no inhabitants, only tourists ... Ben Nevis with stripes of snow. The sea. Little boats: feeling of Greece and Cornwall. Yellow flags and great foxgloves: no farms, villages or cottages: a dead land over-run with insects. An old man who could not get up from his chair. Two other ladies, her legs overflowing her shoes. All dress for dinner, and sit in the drawing room. This was the good inn at Crianlarich. Lake with hanging stalactites green trees in the middle. Bowl of the hills. Hills with velvet leaf green. The Bannington of Eaton Place. She had found winter green for her father-in-law, a botanist. Sky light at 11. Bad review of
Three Guineas
by G. M. Young. Pain lasted ten minutes: over then. Loch Ness swallowed Mrs. Hambro. She was wearing pearls.

And then, sick of copying, I tore the rest of it up—a lesson, next journey, not to make endless pencil notes that need copying. Some too I regret. Some Boswell experiments in inns. Also the woman whose grandmother worked for the Wordsworths and remembered him as an old man in a cloak with a red lining muttering poetry. Sometimes he would pat the children on the head but never spoke to them. On the other hand, H. Coleridge was always drinking at the pub with the men.

Thursday, July 7th

Oh the appalling grind of getting back to
Roger,
after these violent oscillations,
Three Guineas
and
P.H.
How can I concentrate upon minute facts in letters? This morning I have forced myself back to Failand in 1888. But Jumbo
^*
last night threw cold water on the whole idea of biography of those who have no lives. Roger had, she says, no life that can be written. I daresay this is true. And here am I sweating over minute facts. It's all too minute and tied down—documented. Is it to
be done on this scale? Is he interesting to other people in that light? I think I will go on doggedly till I meet him myself—1909—and then attempt something more fictitious. But must plod on through all these letters till then. I think contrast the two all the time. My view: his—and other people's. And then his books.

Saturday, August 7th

Rather enjoy doing
P.H.
That's something, for it won't please anyone, if anyone should ever read it. Ann Watkins, by the way, says the
Atlantic
readers haven't read enough of Walpole to understand my article. Refused.

Wednesday, August 17th

No I won't go on doing
Roger
—abstracting with blood and sweat from the old Articles—right up to lunch. I will steal 25 minutes. In fact I've been getting absorbed in
Roger.
Didn't I say I wouldn't? Didn't L. say there's no hurry? Except that I'm 56; and think that Gibbon then allowed himself 12 years, and died instantly. Still why always chafe and urge and strain at the leash? What I want is a season of calm weather. Contemplation. I get this sometimes about 3
A.M.
when I always wake, open my window and look at the sky over the apple trees. A tearing wind last night. Every sort of scenic effect—a prodigious toppling and clearing and massing, after the sunset that was so amazing L. made me come and look out of the bathroom window—a flurry of red clouds; hard; a water colour mass of purple and black, soft as a water ice; then hard slices of intense green stone; blue stone and a ripple of crimson light. No: that won't convey it: and then there were the trees in the garden; and the reflected light: our hot pokers burning on the edge of the steep. So, at supper, we discussed our generation: and the prospects of war. Hitler has his million men now under arms. Is it only summer manoeuvres or—? Harold broadcasting in his man of the world manner hints it may be war. That is the complete ruin not only of civilisation in Europe, but of our last lap. Quentin conscripted etc. One ceases to think about it—that's all. Goes on discussing the new room, new chair, new
books. What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do? And I would like to write
P.H.:
and other things.

Sunday, August 28th

The character of this summer is extreme drought. Brooks dry. Not a mushroom yet. Sunday is the devil's own day at M.H.: dogs, children, bells ... there they go for evensong. I can't settle anywhere. Beaten after three hard fights at bowls. Bowls is our mania. Reading rather scamped. I'm strung into a ball with
Roger:
got him, very stiffly, to the verge of America. I shall take a dive into fiction: then compose the chapter that leads to the change. But is it readable—and Lord to think of the further compressing and leavening. Ding dong bell ... ding dong—why did we settle in a village? And how deliberately we are digging ourselves in! And at any moment the guns may go off and explode us. L. is very black. Hitler has his hounds only very lightly held. A single step—in Czechoslovakia—like the Austrian Archduke in 1914—and again it's 1914. Ding dong ding dong. People all strolling up and down the fields. A grey close evening.