A Writer's Diary Read online

  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.

  1925

  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."

  I am waiting to see what form of itself Cassis will finally cast up in my mind. There are the rocks. We used to go out after breakfast and sit on the rocks, with the sun on us. L. used to sit without a hat, writing on his knee. One morning he found a sea urchin—they are red with spikes which quiver slightly. Then we would go and walk in the afternoon, right up over the hill, into the woods, where one day we heard the motor cars and discovered the road to La Ciotat just beneath. It was stony, steep and very hot. We heard a great chattering birdlike noise once and I bethought me of the frogs. The ragged red tulips were out in the fields; all the fields were little angular shelves cut out of the hill and ruled and ribbed with vines; and all ted, and rosy and purple here and there with the spray of some fruit tree in bud. Here and there was an angular white or yellow or blue washed house, with all its shutters tightly closed, and flat paths round it, and once rows of stocks; an incomparable cleanness and definiteness everywhere. At La Ciotat great orange ships rose up out of the blue water of the little bay. All these bays are very circular and fringed with the pale coloured plaster houses, very tall, shuttered, patched and peeled, now with a pot and tufts of green on them, now with clothes, drying; now an old old woman looking. On the hill, which is stony as a desert, the nets were drying; and then in the streets children and girls gossiped and meandered all in pale bright shawls and cotton frocks, while the men picked up the earth of the main square to make a paved court of it. The Hotel Cendrillon is a white house with red tiled floors, capable of housing perhaps 8 people. And then the whole hotel atmosphere provided me with many ideas: oh so cold, indifferent, superficially polite, and exhibiting such odd relationships; as if human nature were now reduced to a kind of code, which it has devised to meet these emergencies, where people who do not know each other meet and claim their rights as members of the same tribe. As a matter of fact, we got into touch all round; but our depths were not invaded. But L. and I were too too happy, as they say; if it were now to die etc. Nobody shall say of me that I have not known perfect happiness, but few could put their finger on the moment, or say what made it. Even I myself, stirring occasionally in the pool of content, could only say But this is all I want; could not think of anything better; and had only my half superstitious feeling at the Gods who must when they have created happiness, grudge it. Not if you get it in unexpected ways, though.

  Sunday, April 19th

  It is now after dinner, our first summertime night, and the mood for writing has left me, only just brushed me and left me. I have not achieved my sacred half hour yet. But think—in time to come I would rather read something here than reflect that I did polish off Mr. Ring Lardner successfully. I'm out to make £300 this summer by writing and build a bath and hot water range at Rodmell. But hush, hush—my books tremble on the verge of coming out and my future is uncertain. As for forecasts—it's just on the cards Mrs. Dalloway is a success (Harcourt thinks it "wonderful") and sells 2,000. I don't expect it. I expect a slow silent increase of fame, such as has come about, rather miraculously, since J.'s R. was published. My value mounting steadily as a journalist, though scarcely a copy sold. And I am not very nervous—rather; and I want as usual to dig deep down into my new stories without having a looking glass flashed in my eyes—Todd, to wit; Colefax to wit et cetera.

  Monday, April 20th

  One thing, in considering my state of mind now, seems to me beyond dispute; that I have, at last, bored down into my oil well, and can't scribble fast enough to bring it all to the surface. I have now at least 6 stories welling up in me, and feel, at last, that I can coin all my thoughts into words. Not but what an infinite number of problems remain; but I have never felt this rush and urgency before. I believe I can write much more quickly; if writing it is—this dash at the paper of a phrase, and then the typing and retyping—trying it over; the actual writing being now like the sweep of a brush; I fill it up afterwards. Now suppose I might become one of the interesting—I will not say great—but interesting novelists? Oddly, for all my vanity, I have not until now had much faith in my novels, or thought them my own expression.

  Monday, April 27th

  The Common Reader was out on Thursday: this is Monday and so far I have not heard a word about it, private or public; it is as if one tossed a stone into a pond and the waters closed without a ripple. And I am perfectly content, and care less than I have ever cared, and make this note just to remind me next time of the sublime progress of my books. I have been sitting to Vogue, the Becks that is, in their mews, which Mr. Woolner built as his studio, and perhaps it was there he thought of my mother, whom he wished to marry, I think. But my present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: and I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness etc. The fashion world at the Becks—Mrs. Garland was there superintending a display—is certainly one; where people secrete an envelope which connects them and protects them from others, like myself, who am outside the envelope, foreign bodies. These states are very difficult (obviously I grope for words) but I'm always coming back to it. The party consciousness, for example: Sybil's consciousness. You must not break it. It is something real. You must keep it up—conspire together. Still I cannot get at what I mean. Then I meant to dash off Graves before I forget him.

  Second selves is what I mean.

  Friday, May 1st

  This is a note for future reference, as they say. The Common Reader came out 8 days ago and s
o far not a single review has appeared, and nobody has written to me or spoken to me about it, or in any way acknowledged the fact of its existence; save Maynard, Lydia, and Duncan. Clive is conspicuously dumb; Mortimer has flu and can't review it; Nancy saw him reading it, but reported no opinion; all signs which point to a dull chill depressing reception; and complete failure. I have just come through the hoping fearing stage and now see my disappointment floating like an old bottle in my wake and am off on fresh adventures. Only if the same thing happens to Dalloway one need not be surprised. But I must write to Gwen.