Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Diary. Вирджиния Вулф
I think—saying that one can’t make characters in this way; flattering enough. Of course, I had a letter from Morgan in the opposite sense—the letter I’ve liked best of all. We have sold 650, I think; and have ordered a second edition. My sensations? as usual—mixed. I shall never write a book that is an entire success. This time the reviews are against me and the private people enthusiastic. Either I am a great writer or a nincompoop. ‘An elderly sensualist,’ the Daily News calls me. Tall Mall passes me over as negligible. I expect to be neglected and sneered at. And what will be the fate of our second thousand then? So far of course the success is much more than we expected. I think I am better pleased so far than I have ever been. Morgan, Lytton, Bunny, Violet, Logan, Philip, have all written enthusiastically. But I want to be quit of all this. It hangs about me like Mary Butts’ scent. I don’t want to be totting up compliments, and comparing reviews. I want to think out Mrs Dalloway. I want to foresee this book better than the others and get the utmost out of it. I expect I could have screwed Jacob up tighter, if I had foreseen; but I had to make my path as I went.
1923.
Monday, June 4th.
I’m over peevish in private, partly in order to assert myself. I am a great deal interested suddenly in my book. I want to bring in the despicableness of people like Ott. I want to give the slipperiness of the soul. I have been too tolerant often. The truth is people scarcely care for each other. They have this insane instinct for life. But they never become attached to anything outside themselves. Puff said he loved his family and had nothing whatever to knock over. He disliked cold indecency. So did Lord David. This must be a phrase in their set. Puff said—I don’t quite know what. I walked round the vegetable garden with him, passing Lytton flirting on a green seat; and round the field with Sackville West, who said he was better, and was writing a better novel, and round the lake with Menasseh (?) an Egyptian Jew, who said he liked his family and they were mad and talked like books; and he said that they quoted my writings (the Oxford youth) and wanted me to go and speak; and then there was Mrs Asquith. I was impressed. She is stone white; with the brown veiled eyes of an aged falcon; and in them more depth and scrutiny than I expected; a character, with her friendliness and ease and decision. Oh if we could have had Shelley’s poems; and not Shelley the man! she said. Shelley was quite intolerable, she pronounced; she is a rigid frigid puritan; and in spite of spending thousands on dress. She rides life, if you like; and has picked up a thing or two, which I should like to plunder and never shall. She led Lytton off and plucked his arm, and hurried—and thought ‘people’ pursued her; yet was very affable with ‘people’ when she had to be, and sat on the window sill talking to a black shabby embroideress, to whom Ott. is being kind. That’s one of her horrors—she’s always being kind in order to say to herself at night, then Ottoline invites the poor little embroideress to her party and so to round off her own picture of herself. To sneer like this has a physical discomfort in it. She told me I looked wonderfully well, which I disliked. Why? I wonder. Because I had had a headache perhaps, partly. But to be well and use strength to get more out of life is, surely, the greatest fun in the world. What I dislike is feeling that I’m always taking care, or being taken care of. Never mind—work, work. Lytton says we have still 20 years before us. Mrs Asquith said she loved Scott.
Wednesday, June 13th.
There was Lady Colefax in her hat with the green ribbons. Did I say that I lunched with her last week? That was Derby Day and it rained, and all the light was brown and cold and she went on talking, talking, in consecutive sentences like the shavings that come from planes, artificial, but unbroken. It was not a successful party, Clive and Lytton and me. For Clive’s back; and he dined here with Leo Myers the other night; and then I went to Golders Green and sat with Mary Sheepshanks in her garden and beat up the waters of talk, as I do so courageously, so that life mayn’t be wasted. The fresh breeze went brushing all the” thick hedges which divide the gardens. Somehow, extraordinary emotions possessed me. I forget now what. Often now I have to control my excitement—as if I were pushing through a screen; or as if something beat fiercely close to me. What this portends I don’t know. It is a general sense of the poetry of existence that overcomes me. Often it is connected with the sea and St Ives. Going to 46 continues to excite. The sight of two coffins in the Underground luggage office I daresay constricts all my feelings. I have the sense of the flight of time; and this shores up my emotions.
Tuesday, June 19th.
I took up this book with a kind of idea that I might say something about my writing—which was prompted by glancing at what K.M. said about her writing in The Dove’s Nest. But I only glanced. She said a good deal about feeling things deeply: also about being pure, which I won’t criticize, though of course I very well could. But now what do I feel about my writing?—this book, that is, The Hours, if that’s its name? One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoievsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No, I think not. In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense. But here I may be posing. I heard from Ka this morning that she doesn’t like In the Orchard. At once I feel refreshed. I become anonymous, a person who writes for the love of it. She takes away the motive of praise, and lets me feel that without any praise I should be content to go on. This is what Duncan said of his painting the other night. I feel as if I slipped off all my ball dresses and stood naked—which as I remember was a very pleasant thing to do. But to go on. Am I writing The Hours from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it. It’s a question though of these characters. People, like Arnold Bennett, say I can’t create, or didn’t in Jacob’s Room, characters that survive. My answer is—but I leave that to the Nation: it’s only the old argument that character is dissipated into shreds now; the old post-Dostoievsky argument. I daresay it’s true, however, that I haven’t that ‘reality’ gift. I insubstantize, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality—its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself? Answer these questions as I may, in the uncomplimentary sense, and still there remains this excitement. To get to the bones, now I’m writing fiction again I feel my force glow straight from me at its fullest. After a dose of criticism I feel that I’m writing sideways, using only an angle of my mind. This is justification; for free use of the faculties means happiness. I’m better company, more of a human being. Nevertheless, I think it most important in this book to go for the central things. Even though they don’t submit, as they should, however, to’ beautification in language. No, I don’t nail my crest to the Murrys, who work in my flesh after the manner of the jigger insect. It’s annoying, indeed degrading, to have these bitternesses. Still, think of the 18th Century. But then they were overt, not covert, as now.
I foresee, to return to The Hours, that this is going to be the devil of a struggle. The design is so queer and so masterful. I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design is certainly original and interests me hugely. I should like to write away and away at it, very quick and fierce. Needless to say, I can’t. In three weeks from today, I shall be dried up.
Friday, August 17th.
The question I want to debate here is the question of my essays: and how to make them into a book. The brilliant idea has just come to me of embedding them in Otway conversation. The main advantage would be that I could then comment and add what I had had to leave out, or failed to get in, e.g. the one on George Eliot certainly needs an epilogue. Also to have a setting for each would ‘make a book’; and the collection of articles is in my view an inartistic method. But then this might be too artistic; it might run away with me; it will take time. Nevertheless I should very much enjoy it. I should graze nearer my own individuality. I should mitigate the pomposity and sweep in all sorts of trifles. I think I should feel more at my ease. So I think a trial should be made. The first thing to do is to get ready a certain number of essays. There could be an introductory chapter. A family which reads the papers. The thing to do would be to envelop each essay