A Writer's Diary (7 page)

Wednesday, February 15th

Of my reading I will now try to make some note. First Peacock:
Nightmare Abbey,
and
Crotchet Castle.
Both are so much better than I remember. Doubtless, Peacock is a taste acquired in maturity. When I was young, reading him in a railway carriage in Greece, sitting opposite Thoby,
^*
I remember, who pleased me immensely by approving my remark that Meredith had got his women from Peacock, and that they were very charming women, then, I say, I rather had to prod my enthusiasm. Thoby liked it straight off. I wanted mystery, romance, psychology, I suppose. And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely. And I enjoy satire more. I like the scepticism of his mind more. I enjoy intellectuality. Moreover, fantasticality does a good deal better than sham psychology. One touch of red in the cheek is all he gives, but I can do the rest. And then they're so short; and I read them in little yellowish perfectly appropriate first editions.

The masterly Scott has me by the hair once more.
Old Mortality.
I'm in the middle; and have to put up with some dull sermons; but I doubt that he can be dull, because everything is so much in keeping—even his odd monochromatic landscape painting, done in smooth washes of sepia and burnt sienna. Edith and Henry too might be typical figures by an old master, put in exactly in the right place. And Cuddie and Mause are as usual marching straight away for all time, as lusty as life. But I daresay the lighting and the story telling business prevent him from going quite ahead with his fun as in the
Antiquary.

Thursday, February 16th

To
continue—certainly the later chapters are bare and grey, ground out too palpably; authorities, I daresay, interfering with the original flow. And Morton is a prig; and Edith a stick; and Evandale a brick; and the preacher's dulness I could take for granted. Still—still—I want to know what the next chapter brings, and these gallant old fellows can be excused practically anything.

How far can our historical portrait painters be trusted, seeing the difficulty I have in putting down the face of Violet Dickinson, whom I saw, for two hours, yesterday afternoon? One hears her talking in a swinging random way to Lottie in the hall, as she comes in. "Where's my marmalade? How's Mrs. Woolf? Better eh? Where is she?" meanwhile putting down coat and umbrella and not listening to a word. Then she seemed to me as she came in gigantically tall; tailor made; with a pearl dolphin with red tongue swinging from a black ribbon; rather stouter; with her white face, prominent blue eyes; nose with a chip off the end; and small beautifully aristocratic hands. Very well; but her talk? Since nature herself could give no account of it—since nature has wilfully left out some screw, what chance is there for me? Such nonsense putting old Rib-blesdale and Horner on Boards—Ly. R. was an Astor—refused to let a penny of hers be invested. Your friend Miss Schreiner has gone to Bankok. Don't you remember all her boots and shoes in Eaton Square? To tell the truth I remembered neither Schreiner, her boots, or Eaton Square. Then Herman Norman is back and says things are in an awful mess at Teheran.

"He's my cousin," I said.

"How's that?" Off we went on to Normans. Leonard and Ralph were having tea meanwhile and sometimes intercepted a whiff of grapeshot. Now all this, properly strung together, would make a very amusing sketch in the style of Jane Austen. But old Jane, if she had been in the mood, would have given all the other things—no, I don't think she would; for Jane was not given to general reflections; one can't put in the shadows that appear curving round her, and giving her a sort of beauty. She quiets down—though believing the old doctrine that talk must be incessant—and becomes humane, generous; shows that humorous sympathy which brings everything into her scope—naturally; with a touch of salt and reality; she has the range of a good novelist, bathing things in their own atmosphere too, only all so fragmentary and jerky. She told me she had no wish to live. "I'm very happy," she said. "Oh yes, very happy—But why should I want to go on living? What is there to live for?" "Your friends?" "My friends are all dead." "Ozzie?" "Oh, he'd do just as well without me. I should like to tidy things up and disappear." "But you believe in immortality?" "No. I don't know that I do. Dust, ashes, I say." She laughed of course; and yet, as I say, has somehow the all round imaginative view which makes one believe her. Certainty I like—is love the word for these strange deep ancient affections, which began in youth and have got mixed up with so many important things? I kept looking at her large pleasant blue eyes, so candid and generous and hearty and going back to Fritham and Hyde Park Gate. But this doesn't make a picture, all the same. I feel her somehow to be the sketch for a woman of genius. All the fluid gifts have gone in; but not the bony ones.

Friday, February 17th

I've just had my dose of phenacetin—that is to say a mildly unfavourable review of
Monday or Tuesday
reported by Leonard from the
Dial,
the more depressing as I had vaguely hoped for approval in that august quarter. It seems as if I succeed nowhere. Yet, I'm glad to find, I have acquired a little philosophy. It amounts to a sense of freedom. I write what I like writing and there's an end on it. Moreover, heaven knows I get consideration enough.

Saturday, February 18th

Once more my mind is distracted from the thought of death. There was something about fame I had it in mind to say yesterday. Oh, I think it was that I have made up my mind that I'm not going to be popular, and so genuinely that I look upon disregard or abuse as part of my bargain. I'm to write what I like; and they're to say what they like. My only interest as a writer lies, I begin to see, in some queer individuality; not in strength, or passion, or anything startling, but then I say to myself, is not "some queer individuality" precisely the quality I respect? Peacock for example: Barrow; Donne; Douglas, in
A lone,
has a touch of it. Who else comes to mind immediately? Fitzgerald's Letters. People with this gift go on sounding long after the melodious vigorous music is banal. In proof of this, I read that a small boy, given a book by Marie Corelli for a Sunday school prize, at once killed himself; and the coroner remarked that one of her books was not what he himself would call "at all a nice book." So perhaps the
Mighty Atom
is dwindling away and
Night and Day
arising; though
The Voyage Out
seems at the moment most in esteem. That encourages me. After 7 years next April the
Dial
speaks of its superb artistry. If they say the same of
N. and D.
in 7 years I shall be content; but I must wait 14 for anyone to take
Monday or Tuesday
to heart. I want to read Byron's Letters, but I must go on with
La Princesse de Clèves.
This masterpiece has long been on my conscience. Me to talk of fiction and not to have read this classic! But reading classics is generally hard going. Especially classics like this one, which are classics because of their perfect taste, shapeliness, composure, artistry. Not a hair of its head is dishevelled. I think the beauty very great, but hard to appreciate. All the characters are noble. The movement is stately. The machinery a little cumbrous. Stories have to be told. Letters dropped. It is the action of the human heart and not of muscle or fate that we watch. But stories of noble human hearts have their movements unapproachable in other circumstances. There is a queer understated profundity in the relations between Madame de Clèves and her mother, for example. If I were reviewing it, I think I should take for my text beauty in character. Thank God though I am not reviewing it. Within the last few minutes I have skimmed the reviews in the
New Statesman;
between coffee and cigarette I read the
Nation;
now the best brains in England (metaphorically speaking) sweated themselves for I don't know how many hours to give me this brief condescending sort of amusement. When I read reviews I crush the column together to get at one or two sentences; is it a good book or a bad? And then I discount those two sentences according to what I know of the book and of the reviewer. But when I write a review I write every sentence as if it were going to be tried before three Chief Justices. I can't believe that I am crushed together and discounted. Reviews seem to me more and more frivolous. Criticism on the other hand absorbs me more and more. But after 6 weeks influenza my mind throws up no matutinal fountains. My note book lies by my bed unopened. At first I could hardly read for the swarm of ideas that rose involuntarily. I had to write them out at once. And this is great fun. A little air, seeing the buses go by, lounging by the river, will, please God, send the sparks flying again. I am suspended between life and death in an unfamiliar way. Where is my paper knife? I must cut Lord Byron.

Friday, June 23rd

Jacob,
as I say, is being typed by Miss Green, and crosses the Atlantic on July 14th. Then will begin my season of doubts and ups and downs. I am guarding myself in this way. I am going to be well on with a story for Eliot, lives for Squire, and
Reading;
so that I can vary the side of the pillow as fortune inclines. If they say this is all a clever experiment, I shall produce
Mrs. Dalloway
in Bond Street as the finished product. If they say your fiction is impossible, I shall say what about Miss Ormerod, a fantasy. If they say "You can't make us care a damn for any of your figures," I shall say read my criticism then. Now what
will
they say about
Jacob?
Mad, I suppose: a disconnected rhapsody; I don't know. I will confide my view to this book on re-reading. On re-reading novels is the title of a very laborious, yet rather gifted article, for the
Supt.

Wednesday, July 26th

On Sunday L. read through
Jacob's Room.
He thinks it my best work. But his first remark was that it was amazingly well written. We argued about it. He calls it a work of genius; he thinks it unlike any other novel; he says that the people are ghosts; he says it is very strange: I have no philosophy of life he says; my people are puppets, moved hither and thither by fate. He doesn't agree that fate works in this way. Thinks 1 should use my "method" on one or two characters next time; and he found it very interesting and beautiful, and without lapse (save perhaps the party) and quite intelligible. Pocky has so disturbed my mind that I cannot write this as formally as it deserves, for I was anxious and excited. But I am on the whole pleased. Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.

Wednesday, August 16th

I should be reading
Ulysses,
and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first 2 or 3 chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this on a par with
War and Peace!
An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200.

For my own part I am laboriously dredging my mind for
Mrs. Dalloway
and bringing up light buckets. I don't like the feeling. I'm writing too quickly. I must press it together. I wrote 4 thousand words of
Reading
in record time, 10 days; but then it was merely a quick sketch of Pastons, supplied by books. Now I break off, according to my quick change theory, to write
Mrs. D.
(who ushers in a host of others, I begin to perceive). Then I do Chaucer; and finish the first chapter early in September. By that time, I have my Greek beginning perhaps, in my head; and so the future is all pegged out; and when
Jacob
is rejected in America and ignored in England, I shall be philosophically driving my plough fields away. They are cutting the corn all over the country, which supplies that metaphor, and perhaps excuses it. But I need no excuses, since I am not writing for the
Lit. Sup.
Shall I ever write for them again?

Tuesday, August 22nd

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life—yes, that's why I disliked so much the irruption of Sydney—one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain. Sydney comes and I'm Virginia; when I write I'm merely a sensibility. Sometimes I like being Virginia, but only when I'm scattered and various and gregarious. Now, so long as we are here, I'd like to be only a sensibility. By the way, Thackeray is good reading, very vivacious, with "touches" as they call them over the way at the Shanks', of astonishing insight.

Monday, August 28th

I am beginning Greek again, and must really make out some plan: today 28th:
Mrs. Dalloway
finished on Saturday 2nd Sept.: Sunday 3rd to Friday 8th; start Chaucer. Chaucer—that chapter, I mean, should be finished by Sept. 22 nd. And then? Shall I write the next chapter of
Mrs. D.—
if she is to have a next chapter; and shall it be
The Prime Minister?
which will last till the week after we get back—say October 12 th. Then I must be ready to start my Greek chapter. So I have from today, 28th, till 12 th—which is just over 6 weeks—but I must allow for some interruptions. Now what have I to read? Some Homer: one Greek play: some Plato: Zimmern: Sheppard, as textbook: Bentley's Life: if done thoroughly, this will be enough. But which Greek play? and how much Homer, and what Plato? Then there's the anthology. All to end upon the Odyssey because of the Elizabethans. And I must read a little Ibsen to compare with Euripides—Racine with Sophocles—perhaps Marlowe with Aeschylus. Sounds very learned; but really might amuse me; and if it doesn't, no need to go on.