A Writer's Diary (21 page)

Sunday, January 26th

I am 48: we have been at Rodmell—a wet, windy day again; but on my birthday we walked among the downs, like the folded wings of grey birds; and saw first one fox, very long with his brush stretched; then a second; which had been barking, for the sun was hot over us; it leapt lightly over a fence and entered the furze—a very rare sight. How many foxes are there in England? At night I read Lord Chaplin's life. I cannot yet write naturally in my new room, because the table is not the right height and I must stoop to warm my hands. Everything must be absolutely what I am used to.

I forgot to say that when we made up our 6 months accounts, we found I had made about £3,020 last year—the salary of a civil servant: a surprise to me, who was content with £200 for so many years. But I shall drop very heavily I think.
The Waves
won't sell more than 2,000 copies. I am stuck fast in that book—I mean, glued to it, like a fly on gummed paper. Sometimes I am out of touch; but go on; then again feel that I have at last, by violent measures—like breaking through gorse—set my hands on something central. Perhaps I can now say something quite straight out; and at length; and need not be always casting a line to make my book the right shape. But how to pull it together, how to comport it—press it into one—I do not know; nor can I guess the end—it might be a gigantic conversation. The interludes are very difficult, yet I think essential; so as to bridge and also to give a background—the sea; insensitive nature—I don't know. But I think, when I feel this sudden directness, that it must be right: anyhow no other form of fiction suggests itself except as a repetition at the moment.

It has sold about 6,500 today, Oct. 30th, 1931—after 3 weeks. But will stop now, I suppose.

Sunday, February 16th

To lie on the sofa for a week. I am sitting up today in the usual state of unequal animation. Below normal, with spasmodic desire to write, then to doze. It is a fine cold day and if my energy and sense of duty persist, I shall drive up to Hampstead. But I doubt that I can write to any purpose. A cloud swims in my head. One is too conscious of the body and jolted out of the rut of life to get back to fiction. Once or twice I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head, which comes when I am ill so often—last year for example at this time I lay in bed constructing
A Room of One's Own
(which sold 10,000 two days ago). If I could stay in bed another fortnight (but there is no chance of that) I believe I should see the whole of
The Waves.
Or of course I might go off on something different. As it is I half incline to insist upon a dash to Cassis; but perhaps this needs more determination than I possess; and we shall dwindle on here. Pinker is walking about the room looking for the bright patch—a sign of spring. I believe these illnesses are in my case—how shall I express it?—partly mystical. Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain—as last year; only discomfort this. Then suddenly something springs. Two nights ago Vita was here; and when she went I began to feel the quality of the evening—how it was spring coming: a silver light;
mixing with the early lamps; the cabs all rushing through the streets; I had a tremendous sense of life beginning; mixed with that emotion which is the essence of my feeling, but escapes description (I keep on making up the Hampton Court scene in
The Waves—
Lord how I wonder if I shall pull this book off! It is a litter of fragments so far). Well, as I was saying, between these long pauses, for I am swimming in the head and write rather to stabilise myself than to make a correct statement—I felt the spring beginning; and Vita's life so full and flush; and all the doors opening; and this is I believe the moth shaking its wings in me. I then begin to make up my story whatever it is; ideas rush in me; often though this is before I can control my mind or pen. It is no use trying to write at this stage. And I doubt if I can fill this white monster. I would like to lie down and sleep, but feel ashamed. Leonard brushed off his influenza in one day and went about his business feeling ill. Here am I still loafing, undressed, with Elly
^*
coming tomorrow. But as I was saying, my mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way. I am reading Byron: Maurois: which sends me to
Childe Harold:
makes me speculate. How odd a mixture: the weakest sentimental Mrs. Hemans combined with trenchant bare vigour. How did they combine? And sometimes the descriptions in
C.H.
are "beautiful"; like a great poet. There are the three elements in Byron:

1. The romantic dark haired lady singing drawing room melodies to the guitar.

"Tambourgi! Tambourgi! thy 'larum afar
Gives hope to the valiant and promise of war;"

"Oh! who is more brave than a dark Suliote,
In his snowy camese and his shaggy capote"

—something manufactured; a pose; silliness.

2. Then there is the vigorous rhetorical, like his prose, and good as prose.

"Hereditary Bondsmen! know ye not

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?

Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!"

3. Then what rings to me truer, and is almost poetry.

"Dear Nature is the kindest mother still!

Though always changing, in her aspect mild;

From her bare bosom let me take my fill,

Her never-weaned, though not her favoured child.

To me by day or night she ever smiled,
Though I have marked her when none other hath,
And sought her more and more and loved her best in wrath."

4. And then there is of course the pure satiric, as in the description of a London Sunday; and

5. Finally (but this makes more than three) the inevitable half assumed half genuine tragic note, which comes as a refrain, about death and the loss of friends.

All thou could have of mine, stern Death! thou hast;

The parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend:

Ne'er yet for me thine arrows flew so fast,

And grief with grief continuing still to blend,

Hath snatched the little joy that life had yet to lend.

These I think make him up; and make much that is spurious, vapid, yet very changeable, and then rich and with greater range than the other poets, could he have got the whole into order. A novelist, he might have been. It is odd however to read in his letters his prose and apparently genuine feeling about Athens: and to compare it with the convention he adopted in verse. (There is some sneer about the Acropolis.) But then the sneer may have been a pose too. The truth may be that if you are charged at such high voltage you can't fit any of the ordinary human feelings; must pose; must rhapsodise; don't fit in. He wrote in the Fun Album that his age was 100. And this is true, measuring life by feeling.

Monday, February 17th

And this temperature is up: but it has now gone down; and now

Thursday, February 20th

I must canter my wits if I can. Perhaps some character sketches.

Monday, March 17th

The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say. As this morning I could say what Rhoda said. This proves that the book itself is alive: because it has not crushed the thing I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration.

Friday, March 28th

Yes, but this book is a very queer business. I had a day of intoxication when I said "Children are nothing to this": when I sat surveying the whole book complete and quarrelled with L. (about Ethel Smyth) and walked it off, felt the pressure of the form—the splendour, the greatness—as perhaps I have never felt them. But I shan't race it off in intoxication. I keep pegging away; and find it the most complex and difficult of all my books. How to end, save by a tremendous discussion, in which every life shall have its voice—a mosaic—I do not know. The difficulty is that it is all at high pressure. I have not yet mastered the speaking voice. Yet I think something is there; and I propose to go on pegging it down, arduously, and then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like poetry. It will bear expansion. It is compressed I think. It is—whatever I make of it—a large and potential theme—which
Orlando
was not perhaps. At any rate, I have taken my fence.

Wednesday, April 9th

What I now think (about
The Waves
) is that I can give in a very few strokes the essentials of a person's character. It should be done boldly; almost as caricature. I have yesterday entered what may be the last lap. Like every piece of the book it goes by fits and starts. I never get away with it; but am tugged back. I hope this makes for solidity; and must look to my sentences. The abandonment of
Orlando
and
Lighthouse
is much checked by the extreme difficulty of the form—as it was in
Jacob's Room.
I think this is the furthest development so far; but of course it may miss fire somewhere. I think I have kept stoically to the original conception. What I fear is that the re-writing will have to be so drastic that I may entirely muddle it somehow. It is bound to be very imperfect. But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky.

Sunday, April 13th

I read Shakespeare
directly
I have finished writing. When my mind is agape and red-hot. Then it is astonishing. I never yet knew how amazing his stretch and speed and word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace and outrace my own, seeming to start equal and then I see him draw ahead and do things I could not in my wildest tumult and utmost press of mind imagine. Even the less known plays are written at a speed that is quicker than anybody else's quickest; and the words drop so fast one can't pick them up. Look at this. "Upon a gather'd lily almost wither'd." (That is a pure accident. I happen to light on it.) Evidently the pliancy of his mind was so complete that he could furbish out any train of thought; and, relaxing, let fall a shower of such unregarded flowers. Why then should anyone else attempt to write? This is not "writing" at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Wednesday, April 23rd

This is a very important morning in the history of
The Waves,
because I think I have turned the corner and see the last lap straight ahead. I think I have got Bernard into the final stride. He will go straight on now, and then stand at the door: and then there will be a last picture of the waves. We are at Rodmell and I daresay I shall stay on a day or two (if I dare) so as not to break the current and finish it. O Lord and then a rest; and then an article; and then back again to this hideous shaping and moulding. There may be some joys in it all the same.

Tuesday, April 29th

And I have just finished, with this very nib-ful of ink, the last sentence of
The Waves.
I think I should record this for my own information. Yes, it was the greatest stretch of mind I ever knew; certainly the last pages; I don't think they flop as much as usual. And I think I have kept starkly and ascetically to the plan. So much I will say in self-congratulation. But I have never written a book so full of holes and patches; that will need re-building, yes, not only re-modelling. I suspect the structure is wrong. Never mind. I might have done something easy and fluent; and this is a reach after that vision I had, the unhappy summer—or three weeks—at Rodmell, after finishing the
Lighthouse.
(And that reminds me—I must hastily provide my mind with something else, or it will again become pecking and wretched—something imaginative, if possible, and light; for I shall tire of Hazlitt and criticism after the first divine relief; and I feel pleasantly aware of various adumbra-tions in the back of my head; a life of Duncan; no, something about canvases glowing in a studio; but that can wait.)

And I think to myself as I walk down Southampton
Row, "And I have given you a new book."

P.M.

Thursday, May 1st

And I have completely ruined my morning. Yes that is literally true. They sent a book from
The Times,
as if advised by Heaven of my liberty; and feeling my liberty wild upon me, I rushed to the cable and told Van Doren I would write on Scott. And now having read Scott, or the editor whom Hugh provides, I won't and can't; and have got into a fret trying to read it, and writing to Richmond to say I can't: have wasted the brilliant first of May which makes my skylight blue and gold; have only a rubbish heap in my head; can't read and can't write and can't think. The truth is, of course, I want to be back at
The Waves.
Yes that is the truth. Unlike all my other books in every way, it is unlike them in this, that I begin to re-write it, or conceive it again with ardour, directly I have done. I begin to see what I had in my mind; and want to begin cutting out masses of irrelevance and clearing, sharpening and making the good phrases shine. One wave after another. No room. And so on. But then we are going touring Devon and Cornwall on Sunday, which means a week off; and then I shall perhaps make my critical brain do a month's work for exercise. What could it be set to? Or a story?—no, not another story now...

Wednesday, August 20th

The Waves
is I think resolving itself (I am at page 100) into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in and out, in the rhythm of the waves. Can they be read consecutively? I know nothing about that. I think this is the greatest opportunity I have yet been able to give myself; therefore I suppose the most complete failure. Yet I respect myself for writing this book—yes—even though it exhibits my congenital faults.