A Writer's Diary (42 page)

Wednesday, September 6th

Our first air raid warning at 8:30 this morning. A warbling that gradually insinuates itself as I lay in bed. So dressed and walked on the terrace with L. Sky clear. All cottages shut. Breakfast. All clear. During the interval a raid on Southwark. No news. The Hepworths came on Monday. Rather like a sea voyage. Forced conversation. Boredom. All meaning has run out of everything. Scarcely worth reading papers. The B.B.C. gives any news the day before. Emptiness. Inefficiency, I may as well record these things. My plan is to force my brain to work on Roger. But Lord this is the worst of all my life's ex periences. It means feeling only bodily feelings: one gets cold and torpid. Endless interruptions. We have done the curtains We have carried coals etc. into the cottage for the 8 Battersea women and children. The expectant mothers are all quarrelling. Some went back yesterday. We took the car to be hooded, met Nessa, were driven to tea at Charleston. Yes, it's an empty meaningless world now. Am I a coward? Physically I expect I am. Going to London tomorrow I expect frightens me. At a pinch enough adrenalin is secreted to keep one calm. But my brain stops. I took up my watch this morning and then put it down. Lost. That kind of thing annoys me. No doubt one can
conquer this. But my mind seems to curl up and become undecided. To cure this one had better read a solid book like Tawney. An exercise of the muscles. The Hepworths are travelling books in Brighton. Shall I walk? Yes. It's the gnats and flies that settle on non-combatants. This war has begun in cold blood. One merely feels that the killing machine has to be set in action.

So far, the
Athenia
has been sunk. It seems entirely meaningless—a perfunctory slaughter. Like taking a jar in one hand, a hammer in the other. Why must this be smashed? Nobody knows. This feeling is different from any before. And all the blood has been let out of common life. No movies or theatres allowed. No letters, except strays from America.
Reviewing
rejected by Atlantic. No friends write or ring up. Yes, a long sea voyage, with strangers making conversation, and lots of small bothers and arrangements, seems the closest I can get. Of course all creative power is cut off. Perfect summer weather.

It's like an invalid who can look up and take a cup of tea. Suddenly one can take to the pen with relief. Result of a walk in the heat, clearing the fug and setting the blood working. This book will serve to accumulate notes, the first of such quickenings. And for the hundredth time I repeat—any idea is more real than any amount of war misery. And what one's made for. And the only contribution one can make—this little pitter patter of ideas is my whiff of shot in the cause of freedom. So I tell myself. Thus bolstering up a figment—a phantom: recovering that sense of something pressing from outside which consolidates the mist, the non-existent.

I conceived the idea, walking in the sunbaked marsh where I saw one clouded yellow, of making an article out of these 15 odd diaries. This will be an easy slope of work: not the steep grind of Roger. But shall I ever have a few hours to read in? I must. Tonight the Raid has diminished from a raid on Southwark; on Portsmouth; on Scarborough, to an attempt on the East Coast without damage. Tomorrow we go up.

Monday, September 11th

I have just read 3 or 4 characters of Theophrastus, stumbling from Greek to English, and may as well make a note of it. Trying to anchor my mind on Greek. Rather successful. As usual, how Greek sticks, darts, eels in and out! No Latin would have noted that a boor remembers his loans in the middle of the night. The Greek has his eye on the object. But it's a long distance one has to roll away to get at Theophrastus and Plato. But worth the effort.

Thursday, September 28th

No, I'm not sure of the date. And Vita is lunching here. I'm going to stop
R.
at 12, then read something real. I'm not going to let my brain addle. Little sharp notes. For somehow my brain is not very vigorous at the end of a book though I could dash off fiction or an article merrily enough. Why not relieve it then? Wasn't it my conscientious grind at
The Years
that killed it. So I whizz off to Stevenson—Jekyll and Hyde—not much to my liking. Very fine clear September weather. Windy but lovely light. And I can't form letters.

Friday, October 6th

Well I have succeeded in despite of distractions to belong to other nations in copying out again the whole of
Roger.
Needless to say, it's still to be revised, compacted, vitalised. And can I ever do it? The distractions are so incessant. I compose articles on Lewis Carroll and read a great variety of books—Flaubert's life, R.'s lectures, out at last, a life of Erasmus and Jacques Blanche. We are asked to lunch with Mrs. Webb, who so often talks of us. And my hand seems as tremulous as an aspen. I have composed myself by tidying my room. Can't quite see my way now as to the next step in composition. Tom this weekend. I meant to record a Third Class Railway Carriage conversation. The talk of business men. Their male detached lives. All politics. Deliberate, well set up, contemptuous and indifferent of the feminine. For example: one man hands the
Evening Standard,
points to a woman's photograph. "Women? Let her go home and bowl her hoop," said the man in blue serge with one smashed eye. "She's a drag on him," another fragment. The son is going to lectures every night. Odd to look into this cool man's world: so weather tight: insurance clerks all on top of their work; sealed up; self-sufficient; admirable; caustic; laconic; objective; and completely provided for. Yet thin, sensitive: yet schoolboys; yet men who earn their livings. In the early train they said, "Can't think how people have time to go to war. It must be that the blokes haven't got jobs." "I prefer a fool's paradise to a real hell." "War's lunacy. Mr. Hitler and his set are gangsters. Like Al Capone." Not a chink through which one can see art, or books. They play crosswords when insurance shop fails.

Saturday, October 7th

It's odd how those first days of complete nullity when war broke out have given place to such a pressure of ideas and work that I feel the old throb and spin in my head more of a drain than ever. The result partly of taking up journalism. A good move, I daresay; for it compacts; and forces me to organise. I'm masterfully pulling together those diffuse chapters of
R.
because I know I must stop and do an article. Ideas for articles obsess me. Why not try the one for
The Times?
No sooner said than I'm ravaged by ideas. Have to hold the
Roger
fort—for I will have the whole book typed and in Nessa's hands by Christmas—by force.

Thursday, November 9th

How glad I am to escape to my free page. But I think I'm nearing the end of my trouble with
Roger.
Doing once more, the last pages: and I think I like it better than before. I think the idea of breaking up the last chapter into sections was a good one. If only I can bring that end off. The worst of journalism is that it distracts, like a shower on the top of the sea.

Reviewing
^*
came out last week; and was not let slip into obscurity as I expected.
Lit. Sup.
had a tart and peevish leader; the old tone of voice I know so well—rasped and injured. Then Y. Y. polite but aghast in the
N.S.
And then my answer—why an answer should always make me dance like a monkey at the Zoo, gibbering it over as I walk, and then re-writing, I don't know. It wasted a day. I suppose it's all pure waste: yet if one's
an outsider, be an outsider. Only don't for God's sake attitudinise and take up the striking, the becoming attitude.

Thursday, November 30th

Very jaded and tired and depressed and cross, and so take the liberty of expressing my feelings here.
R.
a failure—and what a grind ... no more of that. I'm brain fagged and must resist the desire to tear up and cross out—must fill my mind with air and light; and walk and blanket it in fog. Rubber boots help. I can flounder over the marsh. No, I will write a little memoir.

Saturday, December 2nd

Tiredness and dejection give way if one day off is taken instantly. I went in and did my cushion. In the evening my pain in my head calmed. Ideas came back. This is a hint to be remembered. Always turn the pillow. Then I become a swarm of ideas. Only I must hive them till
R.
is done. It was annoying to get on to the surface and be so stung with my pamphlet. No more controversy for a year, I vow. Ideas: about writers' duty. No, I'll shelve that. Began reading Freud last night; to enlarge the circumference: to give my brain a wider scope: to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age. Always take on new things. Break the rhythm etc. Use this page, now and then, for notes. Only they escape after the morning's grind.

Saturday, December 16th

The litter in this room is so appalling that it takes me five minutes to find my pen.
R.
all unsewn in bits. And I must take 50 pages, should be 100, up on Monday. Can't get the marriage chapter right. Proportion all wrong. Alteration, quotation, makes it worse. But it's true I don't fuss quite so much as over a novel. I learned a lesson in re-writing
The Years
which I shall never forget. Always I say to myself Remember the horror of that. Yesterday I was, I suppose, cheerful. Two letters from admirers of
Three Guineas:
both genuine: one a soldier in the trenches; the other a distracted middle class woman.

Monday, December 18th

Once more, as so often, I hunt for my dear old red-covered book, with what an instinct I'm not quite sure. For what the point of making these notes is I don't know; save that it becomes a necessity to uncramp, and some of it may interest me later. But what? For I never reach the depths; I'm too surface blown. And always scribble before going in—look quickly at my watch. Yes, 10 minutes left—what can I say. Nothing that needs thought; which is provoking; for I often think. And think the very thought I could write here. About being an outsider. About my defiance of professional decency. Another allusion of a tart kind to Mrs. W., and her desire to kill reviewers in the Lit. Sup. yesterday. Frank Swinnerton is the good boy and I'm the bad little girl. And this is trivial, compared with what? Oh the Graf Spee is going to steam out of Monte Video today into the jaws of death. And journalists and rich people are hiring aeroplanes from which to see the sight. This seems to me to bring war into a new angle; and our psychology. No time to work out. Anyhow the eyes of the whole world (B.B.C.) are on the game; and several people will lie dead tonight, or in agony. And we shall have it served up for us as we sit over our logs this bitter winter night. And the British Captain has been given a K.C.B. and Horizon is out; and Louie has had her teeth out; and we ate too much hare pie last night; and I read Freud on Groups; and I've been titivating Roger: and this is the last page; and the year draws to an end; and we've asked Plomer for Christmas; and—now time's up as usual. I'm reading Ricketts diary—all about the war—the last war; and the Herbert diaries and ... yes, Dadie's Shakespeare, and notes overflow into my two books.

Saturday, January 6th

An obituary: Humbert Wolfe. Once I shared a packet of choc, creams with him, at Eileen Powers. An admirer sent them. This was a fitting tribute. A theatrical looking glib man. Told me he was often asked if I were his wife. Volunteered that he was happily married, though his wife lived—Geneva? I forget. Remember thinking, Why protest? What's worrying you? Oh it was the night Arnold Bennett attacked me in the
Evening Standard.
Orlando? I was going to meet him at Sybil's next day. There was a queer histrionic look in him, perhaps strain in him. Very self assured, outwardly. Inwardly lacerated by the taunt that he wrote too easily and deified satire; that's my salvage from an autobiography of him—one of many, as if he were dissatisfied and must always draw and redraw his own picture. I suppose the origin of many of the new middle aged autos. So the inspirer of these vague winter night memories—he who sends for the last time a faint film across my tired head—lies with those blackberry eyes shut in that sulphurous cavernous face. (If I were writing I should have to remove either lies or eyes. Is this right? Yes, I think for me; nor need it spoil the run: only one must always practise every style: it's the only way to keep on the boil: I mean the only way to avoid crust is to set a faggot of words in a blaze. That phrase flags. Well, let it. These pages only cost a fraction of a farthing, so that my exchequer isn't imperilled.) Mill I should be reading. Or
Little Dorrit,
but both are gone stale, like a cheese that's been cut and left. The first slice is always the best.

Friday, January 26th

These moments of despair—I mean glacial suspense—a painted fly in a glass case—have given way as they so often do
to ecstasy. Is it that I have thrown off those two dead pigeons—my story, my Gas at Abbotsford (printed today)—and so ideas rush in. I began one night, absolutely submerged, throttled, held in a vice with my nose rubbed against
Roger—
no way out—all hard as iron—to read Julian. And off winged my mind along those wild uplands. A hint for the future. Always relieve pressure by a flight. Always violently turn the pillow: hack an outlet. Often a trifle does. A review offered of Marie Corelli by the
Listener.
These are travellers notes which I offer myself should I again be lost. I think the last chapter must be sweated from 20,000 to 10,000. This is an attempt at the first words:

"Transformation is the title that Roger Fry gave to his last book of essays. And it seems natural enough, looking back at the last ten years of his life, to choose it by way of title for them too.

But transformation must express not only change, but achievement.

"They were years not of repose and stagnation, but of perpetual experiment and  experience. His position as a critic became established. 'At the time of his death,' writes Howard Hannay, 'Roger Fry's position in the English art world was unique, and the only parallel to it is that of Ruskin at the height of his reputation.'