A Writer's Diary (33 page)

Thursday, May 9th

Sitting in the sun outside the German Customs. A car with the swastika on the back window has just passed through the barrier into Germany.
L.
is in the Customs.
I
am nibbling at
Aaron's Rod.
Ought
I
to go in and see what is happening?
A
fine dry windy morning. The Dutch Customs took 10 seconds. This has taken 10 minutes already. The windows are barred. Here they came out and the grim man laughed at Mitzi.
^*
But
L.
said that when a peasant came in and stood with his hat on, the man said this office is like a church and made him move it. Heil Hitler said the little thin boy opening his bag, perhaps with an apple in it, at the barrier. We become obsequious—delighted that is when the officer smiles at Mitzi—the first stoop in our back.

That a work of art means that one part gets strength from another part.

B
RENNER.
Monday, May 13th

Odd to see the countries change into each other. Beds now made of layers on top. No sheets. Houses building. Austrian,
dignified. Winter lasts at Innsbruck till July. No spring. Italy fronts me on a blue bar. The Czecho-Slovaks are in front going to the Customs house.

P
ERUGIA

Came through Florence today. Saw the green and white cathedral and the yellow Arno dribbling into shallows. A thunderstorm. Irises purple against the clouds. So to Arezzo. A most superb church with dropped hull.

Lake Trasimen: stood in a field of red purple clover: plovers egg lake; grey olives, exquisite, subtle; sea cold, shell green. So on, regretting that we did not stay to Perugia. Brafani where we stayed in 1908. Now all the same. The same ardent sunburnt women. But lace and so on for sale. Better to have stayed at Trasimen. I went into an Albergo yesterday to buy rolls and found a sculptured fireplace, all patriarchal—servants and masters. Cauldron on the fire. Probably not much change since sixteenth century: the people preserve liquids. Men and women scything. A nightingale singing where we sat. Little frogs jumping into the stream.

Brafani: three people watching the door open and shut. Commenting on visitors like fates—summing up, placing. A woman with a hard lined aquiline face—red lips—bird like—perfectly self-satisfied. French pendulous men, a rather poor sister. Now they sit nibbling at human nature. We are rescued by the excellence of our luggage.

Rome: tea. Tea in café. Ladies in bright coats and white hats. Music. Look out and see people like movies. Abyssinia. Children lugging. Café haunters. Ices. Old man who haunts the Greco.

Sunday café: N. and A. drawing. Very cold. Rome a mitigated but perceptible Sunday. Fierce large jowled old ladies.
Q.
talking about Monaco. Talleyrand. Some very poor black wispy women. The effect of dowdiness produced by wispy hair. The Prime Minister's letter offering to recommend me for the Companion of Honour. No.

Tuesday, May 21st

Oddities of the human brain: woke early and again considered dashing off my book on Professions, to which I had
not given a single thought these 7 or 8 days. Why? This vacillates with my novel—how are they both to come out simultaneously. But it is a sign that I must get pen to paper again. Yet at the moment I am going rag marketing with N. and A., who don't come.

Sunday, May 26th

I'm writing at six on a Sunday evening, with a band playing and stopping and children shouting in a too luxurious hotel where the waiters bring one the menu and I mix my French scandalously with odd scraps of painfully acquired Italian. Still I can rattle off Gli Indifferenti lying on my bed for pleasure. Oh the loveliness of the land still here and there—for instance that first morning's drive out of Rome—the sea and the lip of the unviolated land: and the umbrella pines, after Civita Vecchia: then of course all the intense boredom of Genoa and the Riviera, with its geraniums and its bougainvillea and its sense of shoving you between hill and sea and keeping you there in a bright luxury light without room to turn, so steep the vulture neck hills come down. But we slept at Lerici the first night which does the bay, the brimming sea and the green sailing ship and the island and the sparkling fading red and yellow night lamps to perfection. But that kind of perfection no longer makes me feel for my pen. It's too easy. But driving today I was thinking of Roger—Brignolles—Corges—my word, the olives and the rust red earth and the flat green and the trees. But now the band has begun again and we must go down to dine sumptuously off local trout. Off tomorrow and home on Friday. But though I'm impatient for my brain to eat again, I can dally out these last days better than sometimes. Why? Why? I go on asking myself. And feel I could soon polish off those final scenes: a possible amplification of the first paragraph occurred to me. But I don't want to grind at "writing" too hard. To open my net wide. It occurs to me, as we drive, how I'm disliked, how I'm laughed at; and I'm rather proud of my intention to take the fence gallantly. But writing again!

Wednesday, June 5th

Back here
^*
again, and the grim wooden feeling that has made me think myself dead since we came back is softening slightly. It's beginning this cursed dry hand empty chapter again in part. Every time I say it will be the devil! but I never believe it. And then the usual depressions come. And I wish for death. But I am now seeing that the last 200 pages will assert themselves and force me to write a play more or less: all broken up: and I stop to begin making up; also, after the queer interlude, at once life—that is the telephone beginning—starts. So that one is forcibly chafed. (I meant to make a note about the dramatic shape which forces itself upon me.)

Monday, June 10th. Whit Monday

At Monks House. Working very hard. I think I shall rush these scenes off. Yet I cannot write this morning (Tuesday). How can I say, naturally, I have inherited the Rose and the Star!

Thursday, June 13th

In some ways, it's rather like writing
The Waves
—these last scenes. I bring my brain to a state of congestion, have to stop; go upstairs, run into towsled Mrs. Brewster, come back; find a little flow of words. It's the extreme condensation; the contrasts; the keeping it all together. Does this mean that it's good? I feel I have a round of great pillar to set up and can only drag and sweat. It's something like that. It's getting barer and more intense. And then what a relief when I have the upper air scenes—like the one with Eleanor! only they have to be condensed too. It's the proper placing that strains me.

Tuesday, July 16th

A curious sense of complete failure. Margery hasn't written to me about my speech:
^†
according to Janie, Pamela thought the whole thing a failure. And it was for this that I ruined my last pages! I can't write this morning, can't get into the swing.
Innumerable worries, about getting people to dine and so on, afflict me. My head is all jangled. And I have to get that d——d speech printed, or refuse to. The director has written. Never again, oh never again!

I think though that I can get the last pages right, if I can only dream myself back into them. Yes, but how dream, when I have to see Susie and Ethel, to see Miss Belsher's house, to ring up and write notes and order this and that? Well, be still and ruminate; it's only 16th: there's a fortnight before August. And I'm sure that there is a remarkable shape somewhere concealed there. It's not mere verbiage, I think. If necessary I could put it away. But I think no: merely go on and perhaps write a very rapid short sketch, in ink—that's a good plan. Go back and get the central idea, and then rocket into it. And be very controlled and keep a hand on myself too. And perhaps read a little Shakespeare. Yes, one of the last plays: I think I will do that, so as to loosen my muscles. But oh this anxiety, and the perpetual knocking of the cup out of my hand.

Wednesday, July 17th

Just now I finished my first wild retyping and find the book comes to 740 pages: that is 148,000 words; but I think I can shorten: all the last part is still rudimentary and wants shaping; but I'm too tired in the head to do it seriously this moment. I think all the same I can reduce it; and then—? Dear me. I see why I fled, after
The Waves,
to
Flush.
One wants simply to sit on a bank and throw stones. I want also to read with a free mind. And to let the wrinkles smooth themselves out. Susie Buchan, Ethel, then Julian—so I talked from 4:30 till 1
A.M.
with only two hours for dinner and silence.

I think I see that the last chapter should be formed round N.'s speech: it. must be much more formal; and I think I see how I can bring in interludes—I mean spaces of silence, and poetry and contrast.

Friday, July 19th

No. I go on getting preliminary headaches. It is no good trying to do the last spurt, which should be much like a breeze in the heavy elms, these last days here: yes, a wind blowing in
the trees that are thick with green leaves. For there must be movement as well as some weight, something for the breeze to lift.

Friday, August 16th

I cannot make a single note here, because I am so terrifically pressed re-writing—yes, typing out again at the rate, if possible, of 100 pages a week, this impossible eternal book. I work without looking up till one; which it now is, and therefore I must go in, leaving a whole heap of things unsaid; so many people, so many scenes, and beauty, and a fox and sudden ideas.

Wednesday, August 21st

Up in London yesterday. And I saw this about myself in a book at
The Times
—the most patient and conscientious of artists—which I think is true, considering how I slave at every word of that book. My head is like a like a—pudding is it—something that mildly throbs and can't breed a word at the end of the morning. I begin fresh enough. And I sent off the first 20 pages or so to Mabel yesterday.

Margery Fry comes on Friday with her hands full of papers, she says. Another book. Have I the indomitable courage to start on another? Think of the writing and re-writing. Also there will be joys and ecstasies though. Again very hot. I am going to re-paint this room. Went to Carpenters yesterday and chose chintzes. Is this worth writing? Perhaps.

Thursday, September 5th

I've had to give up writing
The Years
—that's what it's to be called—this morning. Absolutely floored. Can't pump up a word. Yet I can see, just, that something's there; so I shall wait, a day or two, and let the well fill. It has to be damned deep this time. 740 pages in it. I think, psychologically, this is the oddest of my adventures. Half my brain dries completely; but I've only to turn over and there's the other half, I think, ready, quite happily to write a little article. Oh if only anyone knew anything about the brain. And, even today, when I'm desperate, almost in tears looking at the chapter, unable to add to
it, I feel I've only got to fumble and find the end of the ball of string—some start off place, someone to look at
^*
perhaps—no, I don't know—and my head would fill and the tiredness go. But I've been waking and worrying.

Friday, September 6th

I am going to wrap my brain in green dock leaves for a few days: 5, if I can hold out; till the children, L.'s nieces, have gone. If I can—for I think a scene is forming. Why not make an easier transition: Maggie looking at the Serpentine say; and so avoid that abrupt spring? Isn't it odd that this was the scene I had almost a fit to prevent myself writing? This will be the most exciting thing I ever wrote, I kept saying. And now it's the stumbling block. I wonder why? Too personal, is that it? Out of key? But I won't think.

Saturday, September 7th

A heavenly quiet morning reading Alfieri by the open window and not smoking. I believe one could get back to the old rapture of reading if one did not write. The difficulty is, writing makes one's brain so hot it can't settle to read; and then when the heat goes, I'm so tired in the head I can only skirmish. But I've stopped two days now
The Years:
and feel the power to settle calmly and firmly on books coming back at once. John Bailey's life, come today, makes me doubt though. What? Everything. Sounds like a mouse squeaking under a mattress. But I've only just glanced and got the smell of Lit. dinner,
Lit. Sup.,
lit this that and the other—and one remark to the effect that Virginia Woolf of all people has been given Cowper by Desmond and likes it! I, who read Cowper when I was 15—d——d nonsense.

Thursday, September 12th

Mornings which are neither quiet nor heavenly, but mixed of hell and ecstasy: never have I had such a hot balloon in my head as re-writing
The Years:
because it's so long; and the pressure is so terrific. But I will use all my art to keep my head sane. I will stop writing at 11:30 and read Italian or Dryden and so dandle myself along. To Ethel
^*
at Miss Hudson's yesterday. As I sat in the complete English gentleman's home, I wondered how anybody could tolerate that equipage; and thought how a house should be portable like a snail shell. In future perhaps people will flirt out houses like little fans; and go on. There'll be no settled life within walls. There were endless clean, well repaired rooms. A maid in a cap. Cakes on pagoda trays. A terrible array of glossy brown furniture and books—red sham leather. Many nice old rooms, but the manor house has been embellished and made of course self consciously elaborate. A ballroom; a library—empty. And Miss Hudson all brushed up with her Pekinese, a competent ex-mayor of Eastbourne, with waved grey hair; and all so neat and stout; and the silver frames askew; and the air of order, respectability, commonplace. "I'm going to call on the vicar's wife." Ethel immensely red and stout: churning out, poor old woman, the usual indefatigable egotism about deafness and her Mass. She must have a scene every six months. No. But of course, to go deaf, to be 76—well, back to Charleston with Eve and Angelica.