A Writer's Diary (41 page)

Monday, December 19th

I will spend the last morning—for tomorrow will be an odious scramble—in summing up the year True, there are 10 days or so to run: but the liberty of this book allows these—I was going to say liberties, but my meticulous conscience bids me look for another word. That raises some questions: but I leave them; questions about my concern with the art of writing. On
the whole the art becomes absorbing—more? no, I think it's been absorbing ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St. Ives while the grown ups dined. The last dinner of the year was to Tom.

This year I have worked at
Three Guineas:
and begun, about April 1st,
Roger:
whom I have brought to the year 1919. I have also written Walpole; Lappin Lapinova; and
The Art of Biography.
The reception of
Three Guineas
has been interesting, unexpected—only I'm not sure what I expected. 8,000 sold. Not one of my friends has mentioned it. My wide circle has widened—but I'm altogether in the dark as to the true merits of the book. Is it...? No, I won't even formulate qualities; for, it's true, no one has yet summed it up. Much less unanimity than about
Room of One's Own.
A suspended judgment upon that work then seems fittest. I've written too 120 pages of
Pointz
Hall.
I think of making it a 220 page book. A medley. I rush to it for relief after a long pressure of Fry facts. But I think I see a whole somewhere—it was simply seized, one day, about April, as a dangling thread: no notion what page came next. And then they came. To be written for pleasure.

Friday, January 5th

So I take a new nib, after bringing
Roger
to the verge of Josette with the old one, and spend my last five minutes, this very fine January morning, in writing the first page of the New Year. Last five minutes before lunch—how inaugurate this important volume in that time, with this brain? A brain still running in the rut of the last sentence. Which last sentence will be rewritten a dozen times, too. So the dominant theme is work:
Roger:
the others the usual Rodmell themes. That is, I've let the frost go too far away. We came down 14 or 15 days ago and found all pipes frozen. There was snow for five days—bitter cold: wind. We staggered for one hour through the blizzard. Chains were on our wheels. We ground over to Charleston and Tilton on Christmas day. Then, two days later, woke to find green grass everywhere. The long spikes of ice that hung down the kitchen window had drops on their noses. They melted. The pipes thawed. Now it's a June morning with an east wind. And time's up. But the book's begun anyhow. And perhaps I shall get a clearer head and say 10 minutes tomorrow.

Monday, January 8th

Now that I have brought my brain to the state of an old washerwoman's flannel over
Roger
—Lord the Josette chapter—and it's all too detailed, too tied down—I must expand, first on this irresponsible page and then, for four days I swear, before we go back on Sunday, in fiction. Though I've ground out most wish to write, even fiction. Rodmell is a grind on the brain: in winter especially. I write three solid hours: walk two: then we read, with intervals for cooking dinner, music, news, till 11:30. I've thus read ever so many packets of R.'s letters; and some Sèvignè Chaucer—and some nonsense books.

Thursday, January 18th

It is undoubtedly a great freshener to have my story taken by Harpers. I heard this morning. A beautiful story, enchanted to have it. 600 dollars made then. But the encouragement, I must note, by way of supplying my theories that one should do without encouragement, is a warmer, a reviver. I can't deny it. I was, perhaps partly on that account, in full flood this morning with
P.H.
I think I have got at a more direct method of summarising relations; and then the poems (in meter) ran off the prose lyric vein, which, as I agree with Roger, I overdo. That was, by the way, the best criticism I've had for a long time: that I poetise my inanimate scenes, stress my personality; don't let the meaning emerge from the matière.

Tuesday, February 28th

It is unfortunate for truth's sake that I never write here except when jangled with talk. I only record the dumps and the dismals and them very barely. A holiday from
Roger.
And one day's happiness with
P.H.
Then too many parcels; books coming out; and a head numb at the back. As usual, when I'm prone, all the gnats settle. The usual ones. I needn't specify. I have to "speak" to polytechnics; and engagements multiply. Innumerable refugees to add to the tangle. There—I've recorded them when I said I wouldn't.

Saturday, March 11th

Yesterday, that is Friday 10th, I set the last word to the first sketch of
Roger.
And now I have to begin—well not even to begin, but to revise and revise. A terrible grind to come: and innumerable doubts, of myself as biographer: of the possibility of doing it at all: all the same I've carried through to the end; and may allow myself one moment's mild gratification. There are the facts more or less extracted. And I've no time to go into all the innumerable horrors. There may be a flick of life in it—or is it all dust and ashes?

Tuesday, April 11th

I am reading Dickens; by way of a refresher. How he lives: not writes: both a virtue and a fault. Like seeing something
emerge; without containing mind. Yet the accuracy and even sometimes the penetration—into Miss Squeers and Miss Price and the farmer for example—remarkable. I can't dip my critical mind, even if I try to. Then I'm reading'Sévigné, professionally, for that quick amalgamation of books that I intend. In future, I'm to write quick, intense, short books, and never be tied down. This is the way to keep off the settling down and refrigeration of old age. And to float all preconceived theories. For more and more I doubt if enough is known to sketch even probable lines, all too emphatic and conventional. Maurice, the last of the LI. Davies brothers, is dead; and Margaret lives—lives too carefully of life, I used to feel Why drag on, always measuring and testing one's little bit of strength and setting it easy tasks so as to accumulate years? Also I'm reading Roche-foucauld. That's the real point of my little brown book—that it makes me read—with a pen—following the scent; and read the good books: not the slither of MSS and the stridency of the young chawking—the word expresses callow bills agape and chattering—for sympathy. Chaucer I take at need. So if I had any time—but perhaps next week will be more solitudinous—I should, if it weren't for the war—glide my way up and up into that exciting layer so rarely lived in: where my mind works so quick it seems asleep; like the aeroplane propellers. But I must retype the last Clifton passage; and so be quit for tomorrow and clear the decks for Cambridge. Rather good, I expect it is: condensed and moulded.

Thursday, April 13th

Two days of influenza after that, mild but sucking one's head as usual, so I'm out here this morning only to drone my way through a few Roger letters. I finished my first 40 pages—childhood etc.—well under the week; but then they were largely autobiography; Now politics impend. Chamberlain's statement in the House today. War I suppose not tomorrow, but nearer.

I read about 100 pages of Dickens yesterday, and see something vague about the drama and fiction; how the emphasis, the caricature of these innumerable scenes, forever forming character, descend from the stage. Literature—that is the shading, suggesting, as of Henry James, hardly used. All bold and
coloured. Rather monotonous; yet so abundant, so creative: yes, but not
highly
creative: not suggestive. Everything laid on the table. Nothing to engender in solitude. That's why it's so rapid and attractive. Nothing to make one put the book down and think. But these are influenza musings; and I'm so muddled I shall take Sir Edward into the house and extract him over the fire.

Saturday, April 15th

I've done rather well at
Roger
considering: I don't think I shall take two weeks over each chapter. And it's rather amusing—dealing drastically with this year's drudgery. I think I see how it shapes: and my compiling method was a good one. Perhaps it's too like a novel. I don't bother. No letters; no news; and my head too staked for reading. L. galloping through his book. I should like a holiday—a few days in France—or a run through the Cotswolds. But considering how many things I have that I like—What's odd—(I'm always beginning like this) is the severance that war seems to bring: everything becomes meaningless: can't plan: then there comes too the community feeling: all England thinking the same thing—this horror of war—at the same moment. Never felt it so strong before. Then the lull and one lapses again into private separation.

But I must order macaroni from London.

Wednesday, April 26th

I've done a quarter—100 pages of
Roger
which I shall have by tomorrow. As there are 400 pages, and one hundred takes three weeks (oh but I was interrupted)—it will take nine weeks to finish. Yes, I ought to have finished it by the end of July. Only we may go away. Say August. And have it all typed in September ... Well—then it will be out this time next year. And I shall be free in August—What a grind it is; and I suppose of little interest except to six or seven people. And I shall be abused.

Thursday, June 29th

The grind of doing
Roger
and PIP makes my head spin and I let it reel itself off for 10 minutes here. I wonder why;
and if I shall ever read this again. Perhaps if I go on with my memoirs, also a relief from
R.,
I shall make use of it. A dismal day yesterday: shoe hunting in Fortnums. A sale, but only of the unsaleable. And the atmosphere, British upper classes; all tight and red nailed; myself a figure of fun—whips my skin: I fidget: but recoup myself walking in the rain through the Parks. Come home and try to concentrate on Pascal. I can't. Still it's the only way of tuning up, and I get a calm, if not understanding. These pin points of theology need a grasp beyond me. Still I see Lytton's point—my dear old serpent. What a dream life is to be sure—that he should be dead, and I reading him: and trying to make out that we indented ourselves in the world; whereas I sometimes feel it's been an illusion—gone so fast; lived so quickly; and nothing to show for it, save these little books. But that makes me dig my feet in and squeeze the moment. So after dinner I walked to the Clinic with L.; waited outside with Sally tugging; watched the evening sight: oh and the purple grey clouds above Regents Park with the violet and yellow sky signs made me leap with pleasure.

Monday, August 7th

I am now going to make the rash and bold experiment of breaking off, from condensing
Vision and Design;
to write here for 10 minutes instead of revising, as I ought, my morning's grind.

Oh yes, I thought of several things to write about. Not exactly diary. Reflections. That's the fashionable dodge. Peter Lucas and Gide both at it. Neither can settle to creative art. (I think, sans
Roger,
I could.) It's the comment—the daily interjection—that comes handy in times like these. I too feel it. But what was I thinking? I have been thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us. That's clear in an MS I'm reading.

If I say this, So-and-so will think me sentimental. If that ... will think me bourgeois. All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors. Hence their selfconsciousness, their restlessness. It would be worth while trying to discover what they are at the moment. Did Wordsworth have them? I doubt it. I read "Ruth" before breakfast. Its stillness, its unconsciousness, its lack of distraction, its concentration and the resulting "beauty" struck me. As if the mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

That's an idea for an article.

The figurative expression is that all the surroundings of the mind have come much closer. A child crying in the field brings poverty: my comfort; to mind. Ought I to go to the village sports? "Ought" thus breaks into my contemplation.

Oh and I thought, as I was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, and the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: but why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; and to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, and not as unconscious, at least in its approaches, as birth is.

I must now return to my grind, I think rather refreshed.

Wednesday, August 9th

My grind has left me dazed and depressed. How on earth to bring off this chapter? God knows.

Thursday, August 24th

Perhaps it is more interesting to describe "the crisis" than R.'s love affairs. Yes we are in the very thick of it. Are we at war? At one I'm going to listen in. It's very different, emotionally, from last September. In London yesterday there was indifference almost. No crowd in the train—we went by train. No stir in the streets. One of the removers called up. It's fate, as the foreman said. What can you do against fate? Complete chaos at 37.
^*
Ann
^†
met in graveyard. No war, of course now, she said. John said
^‡
"Well I don't know what to think." But as a dress rehearsal it's complete. Museums shut. Searchlight on Rodmell Hill. Chamberlain says danger imminent. The Russian pact a disagreeable and unforeseen surprise. Rather
like a herd of sheep we are. No enthusiasm. Patient bewilderment. I suspect some desire "to get on with it." Order double supplies and some coal. Aunt Violet in refuge at Charleston. Unreal. Whiffs of despair. Difficult to work. Offer of £200 from Chambers for a story. Haze over the marsh. Aeroplanes. One touch on the switch and we shall be at war. Danzig not yet taken. Clerks cheerful. I add one little straw to another, waiting to go in, palsied with writing. There's no cause now to fight for, said Ann. Communists baffled. Railway strike off. Lord Halifax broadcasts in his country gentleman voice. Louie says will clothes be dear? Underneath of course wells of pessimism. Young men torn to bits: mothers like Nessa two years ago. But again, some swerve to the right may come at any moment. The common feeling covers the private, then recedes. Discomfort and distraction. And all mixed with the mess at 37.