A Writer's Diary (10 page)

Friday, August 15th

Into all these calculations, broke the death of Conrad, followed by a wire from the
Lit. Sup.
earnestly asking me kindly to do a leader on him, which flattered and loyal, but grudgingly, I did; and it's out; and that number of the
Lit. Sup.
corrupted for me (for I can't, and never shall be able to, read my own writings. Moreover, now little Walkley's on the war path again I expect a bite next Wednesday). Yet I have never never worked so hard. For, having to do a leader in five days, I made hay after tea—and couldn't distinguish tea hay from morning hay either. So doesn't this give me two extra hours for critical works anyhow (as Logan calls them)? So I'm trying it—my fiction before lunch and then essays after tea. For I see that
Mrs. Dalloway
is going to stretch beyond October. In my forecasts I always forget some most important intervening scenes: I think I can go straight at the grand party and so end; forgetting Septimus, which is a very intense and ticklish business, and jumping Peter Walsh eating his dinner, which may be some obstacle too. But I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms; and the walks in the fields are corridors; and now today I'm lying thinking. By the way, why is poetry wholly an elderly taste? When I was 20, in spite of Thoby who used to be so pressing and exacting, I could not for the life of me read Shakespeare for pleasure; now it lights me as I walk to think I have two acts of
King John
tonight, and shall next read
Richard II.
It is poetry that I want now—long poems. Indeed I'm thinking of reading the Seasons. I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing; have no time to waste any more on prose. Yet this must be the very opposite to what people say. When I was 20 I liked eighteenth century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimee. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott's life and letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, and Shelley. Now it's poetry I want, so I repent like a tipsy sailor in front of a public house.... I don't often trouble now to describe cornfields and groups of harvesting women in loose blues and reds, and little staring yellow frocked girls. But that's not my eyes' fault: coming back the other evening from Charleston, again all my nerves stood upright, flushed, electrified (what's the word?) with the sheer beauty—beauty astounding and superabounding. So that one almost resents it, not being capable of catching it all and holding it all at the moment. One's progress through life is made immensely interesting by trying to grasp all these developments as one passes. I feel as if I were putting out my fingers tentatively on (here is Leonard, who has ordered me a trap in which to drive Dadie
^*
to Tilton
^†
tomorrow) either side as I grope down a tunnel, rough with odds and ends. And I don't describe encounters with herds of Alderneys any more—though this would have been necessary some years ago—how they barked and belled like stags round Grizzle; and how I waved my stick and stood at bay; and thought of Homer as they came flourishing and trampling towards me; some mimic battle. Grizzle grew more and more insolent and excited and skirmished about yapping. Ajax? That Greek, for all my ignorance, has worked its way into me.

Sunday, September 7th

It is a disgrace that I write nothing, or if I write, write sloppily, using nothing but present participles. I find them very useful in my last lap of
Mrs. D.
There I am now—at last at the party, which is to begin in the kitchen, and climb slowly upstairs. It is to be a most complicated, spirited, solid piece, knitting together everything and ending on three notes, at different stages of the staircase, each saying something to sum up Clarissa. Who shall say these things? Peter, Richard, and Sally Seton perhaps: but I don't want to tie myself down to that yet. Now I do think this might be the best of my endings and come off, perhaps. But I have still to read the first chapters, and confess to dreading the madness rather; and being clever. However, I'm sure I've now got to work with my pick at my seam, if only because my metaphors come free, as they do here. Suppose one can keep the quality of a sketch in a finished and composed work? That is my endeavour. Anyhow, none can help and none can hinder me any more. I've been in for a shower of compliments too from
The Times,
Richmond rather touching me by saying that he gives way to my novel with all the will in the world. I should like him to read my fiction, and always suppose he doesn't.

There I was swimming in the highest ether known to me and thinking I'd finish by Thursday; Lottie suggests to Karin we'd like to have Ann; Karin interprets my polite refusal to her own advantage and comes down herself on Saturday, blowing everything to smithereens. More and more am I solitary; the pain of these upheavals is incalculable; and I can't explain it either.... Here I am with my wrecked week—for how serene and lovely like a Lapland night was our last week together—feeling that I ought to go in and be a good aunt—which I'm not by nature; ought to ask Daisy what she wants; and by rights I fill these moments full of Mrs. Dalloway's party for tomorrow's writing. The only solution is to stay on alone over Thursday and try my luck. A bad night (K.'s doing again) may partly account. But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness. This brew can't sort with nondescript people. These wails must now have ending, partly because I cannot see, and my hand shakes, having carried my bag from Lewes, where I sat on the Castle top, where an old man was brushing leaves, and told me how to cure lumbago; you tie a skein of silk round you; the silk costs threepence. I saw British canoes, and the oldest plough in Sussex 1750 found at Rodmell, and a suit of armour said to have been worn at Seringapatam. All this I should like to write about, I think. And of course children are wonderful and charming creatures. I've had Ann in talking about the white seal and wanting me to read to her. And how Karin manages to be so aloof I can't think. There's a quality in their minds to me very adorable; to be alone with them, and see them day to day would be an extraordinary experience. They have what no grown up has—that directness—chatter, chatter, chatter, on Ann goes, in a kind of world of her own, with its seals and dogs; happy because she's going to have cocoa tonight, and go blackberrying tomorrow. The walls of her mind all hung round with such bright vivid things, and she doesn't see what we see.

Friday, October 17th

It is disgraceful. I did run upstairs thinking I'd make time to enter that astounding fact—the last words of the last page of
Mrs. Dalloway,
but was interrupted. Anyhow, I did them a week ago yesterday. "For there she was," and I felt glad to be quit of it, for it has been a strain the last weeks, yet fresher in the head; with less I mean of the usual feeling that I've shaved through and just kept my feet on the tight rope. I feel indeed rather more fully relieved of my meaning than usual—whether this will stand when I re-read is doubtful. But in some ways this book is a feat; finished without break from illness, which is an exception; and written really in one year; and finally, written from the end of March to the 8th October without more than a few days' break for writing journalism. So it may differ from the others. Anyhow, I feel that I have exorcised the spell which Murry and others said I had laid myself under after
Jacob's Room.
The only difficulty is to hold myself back from writing others. My cul de sac, as they called it, stretches so far and shows such vistas. I see already the Old Man.

It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes and work at certain effects. I daresay I practised
Jacob
here; and
Mrs. D.
and shall invent my next book here; for here I write merely in the spirit—great fun it is too, and old V. of 1940 will see something in it too. She will be a woman who can see, old V., everything—more than I can, I think. But I'm tired now.

Saturday, November 1st

I must make some notes of work; for now I must buckle to. The question is how to get the two books done. I am going to skate rapidly over
Mrs. D.,
but it will take time. No: I cannot say anything much to the point, for what I must do is to experiment next week; how much revision is needed, and how much time it takes. I am very set on getting my essays out before my novel. Yesterday I had tea in Mary's room and saw the red lighted tugs go past and heard the swish of the river: Mary in black with lotus leaves round her neck. If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure—the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it? Truthfully? As I think, the diary writing has greatly helped my style; loosened the ligatures.

Tuesday, November 18th

What I was going to say was that I think writing must be formal. The art must be respected. This struck me reading some of my notes here, for if one lets the mind run loose it becomes egotistic; personal, which I detest. At the same time the irregular fire must be there; and perhaps to loose it one must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that. I am driving my way through the mad chapters of
Mrs. D.
My wonder is whether the book would have been better without them. But this is an afterthought, consequent upon learning how to deal with her. Always I think at the end, I see how the whole ought to have been written.

Saturday, December 13th

I am now galloping over
Mrs. Dalloway,
re-typing it entirely from the start, which is more or less what I did with the
V.O.:
a good method, I believe, as thus one works with a wet brush over the whole, and joins parts separately composed and gone dry. Really and honestly I think it the most satisfactory of my novels (but have not read it cold-bloodedly yet). The reviewers will say that it is disjointed because of the mad scenes not connecting with the Dalloway scenes. And I suppose there is some superficial glittery writing. But is it "unreal"? Is it mere accomplishment? I think not. And as I think I said before, it seems to leave me plunged deep in the richest strata of my mind. I can write and write and write now: the happiest feeling in the world.

Monday, December 21st

Really it is a disgrace—the number of blank pages in this book. The effect of London on diaries is decidedly bad. This is I fancy the leanest of them all, and I doubt that I can take it to Rodmell, or if I did, whether I could add much. Indeed it has been an eventful year, as I prophesied; and the dreamer of January 3rd has dreamt much of her dream true; here we are in London, with Nelly alone, Dadie gone it is true, but Angus to replace him. What emerges is that changing houses is not so cataclysmic as I thought; after all, one doesn't change body or brain. Still I am absorbed in "my writing," putting on a spurt to have
Mrs. D.
copied for L. to read at Rodmell; and then in I dart to deliver the final blows to
The Common Reader,
and then—and then I shall be free. Free at least to write out one or two more stories which have accumulated. I am less and less sure that they
are
stories, or what they are. Only I do feel fairly sure that I am grazing as near as I can to my own ideas, and getting a tolerable shape for them. I think there is less and less wastage. But I have my ups and downs.

Wednesday, January 6th

Rodmell was all gale and flood; these words are exact. The river overflowed. We had 7 days' rain out of 10. Often I could not face a walk. L. pruned, which needed heroic courage. My heroism was purely literary. I revised
Mrs. D.,
the chillest part of the whole business of writing, the most depressing—exacting. The worst part is at the beginning (as usual) where the aeroplane has it all to itself for some pages and it wears thin. L. read it; thinks it my best—but then has he not
got
to think so? Still I agree. He thinks it has more continuity than
J.'s R.,
but is difficult owing to the lack of connection, visible, between the two themes. Anyhow it is sent off to Clark's, and proofs will come next week. This is for Harcourt Brace, who has accepted without seeing and raised me to 15 p.c.

Tuesday, April 8th

I am under the impression of the moment, which is the complex one of coming back home from the South of France to this wide dim peaceful privacy—London (so it seemed last night) which is shot with the accident I saw this morning—a woman crying oh, oh, oh, faintly, pinned against the railings with a motor car on top of her. All day I have heard that voice. I did not go to her help; but then every baker and flower seller did that. A great sense of the brutality and wildness of the world remains with me—there was this woman in brown walking along the pavement—suddenly a red film car turns a somersault, lands on top of her and one hears this oh, oh, oh. I was on my way to see Nessa's new house and met Duncan in the square, but as he had seen nothing he could not in the least feel what I felt, or Nessa either, though she made some effort to connect it with Angelica's accident last spring. But I assured her it was only a passing brown woman; and so we went over the house composedly enough.

Since I wrote, which is these last months, Jacques Raverat has died; after longing to die; and he sent me a letter about
Mrs. Dalloway
which gave me one of the happiest days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. And he will, I suppose, both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own. Jacques died, as I say; and at once the siege of emotions began. I got the news with a party here—Clive, Bee How, Julia Strachey, Dadie. Nevertheless, I do not any longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death. I like to go out of the room talking, with an unfinished casual sentence on my lips. That is the effect it had on me—no leavetakings, no submission, but someone stepping out into the darkness. For her though the nightmare was terrific. All I can do now is to keep natural with her, which is I believe a matter of considerable importance. More and more do I repeat my own version of Montaigne—"It's life that matters."