Watery blowy weather; and this time next week we shall be in the middle of France.
Tuesday, April 17th
Home again, as foretold, last night, and to settle the dust in my mind, write here. We have been across France and back—every inch of that fertile field traversed by the admirable Singer. And now towns and spires and scenes begin to rise in my mind as the rest sinks. I see Chartres in particular, the snail, with its head straight, marching across the flat country, the most distinguished of churches. The rose window is like a jewel on black velvet. The outside is very intricate yet simple; elongated; somehow preserved from the fantastic and ornate. Grey weather dashed all over this; and I remember coming in at night in the wet often and hearing the rain in hotels. Often I was bobbing up and down on my two glasses of vin du pays. It was rather a rush and a cram—as these jumbled notes testify. Once we were high up on a mountain in a snow storm; and rather afraid of a long tunnel. Twenty miles often cut us off from civilisation. One wet afternoon we punctured in a mountain village and I went in and sat with the family—a nice scrupulous polite woman, a girl who was pretty, shy, had a friend called Daisy at Earlsfield. They caught trout and wild boars. Then on we went to Florae, where I found a book—Girardin's memoirs in the old bookcase that had been sold with the house. Always some good food and hot bottles at night. Oh and my prize—£40 from the French. And Julian. And one or two hot days and the Pont du Garde in the sun; and Les Beaux (this is where Dante got his idea of Hell, Duncan said) and mounting all the time steadily was my desire for words, till I envisaged a sheet of paper and pen and ink as something of miraculous desirability—could even relish the scratch as if it were a divine kind of relief to me. And there was St. Remy and the ruins in the sun. I forget now how it all went—how thing fitted to thing; but the eminences now emerge and I noticed how, talking to Raymond at the Nation this afternoon, we had already pitched on the high points. Before that, crossing the graveyard * in the bitter windy rain, we saw Hope † and a dark cultivated woman. But on they went past us, with the waver of an eye. Next moment I heard "Virginia" and turned and there was Hope coming back—"Jane ‡ died yesterday," she murmured, half asleep, talking distraught, "out of herself." We kissed by Cromwell's daughter's grave, where Shelley used to walk, for Jane's death. She lay dead outside the graveyard in that back room where we saw her lately raised on her pillows, like a very old person whom life has tossed up and left; exalted, satisfied, exhausted. Hope the colour of dirty brown paper. Then to the office, then home to work here; and now to work and work, as hard as I can.
Saturday, April 21st
And I find myself again in the old driving whirlwind of writing against time. Have I ever written with it? But I vow I won't spend longer at Orlando, which is a freak; it shall come out in September, though the perfect artist would revoke and rewrite and polish—infinitely. But hours remain over to be filled with reading something or other—I'm not sure what. What sort of summer do I desire? Now that I have £16 to spend before July 1st (on our new system) I feel freer; can afford a dress and a hat and so may go about, a little, if I want. And yet the only exciting life is the imaginary one. Once I get the wheels spinning in my head, I don't want money much, or dress, or even a cupboard, a bed at Rodmell or a sofa.
Tuesday, April 24th
A lovely soaring summer day this; winter sent howling home to his arctic. I was reading Othello last night and was impressed by the volley and volume and tumble of his words; too many I should say, were I reviewing for The Times. He put them in when tension was slack. In the great scenes, everything fits like a glove. The mind tumbles and splashes among words when it is not being urged on; I mean, the mind of a very great master of words who is writing with one hand. He abounds. The lesser writers stint. As usual, impressed by Shakespeare. But my mind is very bare to words—English words—at the moment; they hit me, hard, I watch them bounce and spring. I've read only French for 4 weeks. An idea comes to me for an article on French; what we know of it.
Friday, May 4th
And now there's the Femina prize to record before I go off this brilliant summer day to tea with Miss Jenkins in Doughty Street. I am going dutifully, not to snub the female young. But I shall be overpowering I doubt not. But it is a wonderful day.
The prize was an affair of dull stupid hours; a function; not alarming; stupefying. Hugh Walpole saying how much he disliked my books; rather, how much he feared for his own. Little Miss Robins, like a redbreast, creeping out. "I remember your mother—the most beautiful Madonna and at the same time the most complete woman of the world. Used to come and see me in my flat" (I see this as a summer visit on a hot day). "She never confided. She would suddenly say something so unexpected, from that Madonna face, one thought it vicious." This I enjoyed; nothing else made much impression. Afterwards there was the horror of having looked ugly in cheap black clothes. I cannot control this complex. I wake at dawn with a start. Also the "fame" is becoming vulgar and a nuisance. It means nothing; yet takes one's time. Americans perpetually. Croly; Gaige; offers.
Thursday, May 31st
The sun is out again; I have half forgotten Orlando already, since L. has read it and it has half passed out of my possession; I think it lacks the sort of hammering I should have given it if I had taken longer; is too freakish and unequal, very brilliant now and then. As for the effect of the whole, that I can't judge. Not, I think, "important" among my works. L. says a satire.
L. takes Orlando more seriously than I had expected. Thinks it in some ways better than the Lighthouse: about more interesting things, and with more attachment to life and larger. The truth is I expect I began it as a joke and went on with it seriously. Hence it lacks some unity. He says it is very original. Anyhow I'm glad to be quit this time of writing "a novel"; and hope never to be accused of it again. Now I want to write some very closely reasoned criticism; book on fiction; an essay of some sort (but not Tolstoy for The Times). Dr. Burney's Evening Party I think for Desmond. And then? I feel anxious to keep the hatch down; not to let too many projects come in. Something abstract poetic next time—I don't know. I rather like the idea of these Biographies of living people. Ottoline suggests herself, but no. And I must tear up all that manuscript and write a great many notes and adventure out into the world.
June weather. Still, bright, fresh. Owing to the Lighthouse (car) I don't feel so shut in London as usual, and can imagine the evening on some moor now, or in France without the envy I used to have, in London on a fine evening. Also London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets. I walked Pinker to Grays Inn Gardens this afternoon and saw—Red Lion Square: Morris's house; thought of them on winter evenings in the 50s; thought we are just as interesting; saw the Great Ormond Street where a dead girl was found yesterday; saw and heard the Salvation Army making Christianity gay for the people; a great deal of nudging and joking on the part of very unattractive young men and women; making it lively, I suppose; and yet, to be truthful, when I watch them I never laugh or criticise but only feel how strange and interesting this is; wonder what they mean by "Come to the Lord." I daresay exhibitionism accounts for some of it; the applause of the gallery; this lures boys to sing hymns; and kindles Shop boys to announce in a loud voice that they are saved. It is what writing for the Evening Standard is for—and—I was going to say myself; but so far I have not done it.
Wednesday, June 20th
So sick of Orlando I can write nothing. I have corrected the proofs in a week; and cannot spin another phrase. I detest my own volubility. Why be always spouting words? Also I have almost lost the power of reading. Correcting proofs 5, 6 or 7 hours a day, writing in this and that meticulously, I have bruised my reading faculty severely. Take up Proust after dinner and put him down. This is the worst time of all. It makes me suicidal. Nothing seems left to do. All seems insipid and worthless. Now I will watch and see how I resurrect. I think I shall read someth
ing—say life of Goethe.
Wednesday, August 9th
...I write thus partly in order to slip the burden of writing narrative, as for instance, we came here * a fortnight ago. And we lunched at Charleston and Vita came and we were offered the field and we went to see the farm at Limekiln. Yet no doubt I shall be more interested, come 10 years, in facts; and shall want, as I do when I read, to be told details, details, so that I may look up from the page and arrange them too, into one of those makings up which seem so much truer done thus, from heaps of non-assorted facts, than now I can make them, when it is almost immediately under my eyes. It was a fine day last Monday, I rather think; and we drove through Ripe; and there was a girl and her feller at the gate in a narrow lane; and we had to interrupt them to turn the motor. I thought how the things they had been saying were dammed like a river, by our interruption; and they stood there half amused yet impatient, telling us to go to the left, but the road was up. They were glad when we went; yet gave us a flash of interest. Who are these people in their motor car: where are they going? and then this sunk beneath the mind and they forgot us completely. We went on. And then we reached the farm. The oasts had umbrella spokes poking out at the top; all was so ruined and faded. The Tudor farmhouse was almost blind; very small eyebrowed windows; old Stuart farmers must have peered out over the flat land, very dirty, ill kempt, like people in slums. But they had dignity; at least thick walls; fireplaces; and solidity; whereas now the house is lived in by one old weedy pink faced man, who flung himself in his armchair—go where you like—go anywhere, he said, loose jointed, somehow decayed, like the hop oasts; and damp like the mildewed carpets, and sordid, like the beds with the pots sticking out under them. The walls were sticky; the furniture mid-Victorian; little light came through. It was all dying, decaying; and he had been there 50 years and it will drop to pieces, since there is not enough beauty or strength to make anyone repair it.
Saturday, August 12th
Shall I now continue this soliloquy, or shall I imagine an audience, which will make me describe? This sentence is due to the book on fiction which I am now writing—once more, O once more. It is a hand to mouth book. I scribble down whatever I can think of about Romance, Dickens etc. must hastily gorge on Jane Austen tonight and dish up something tomorrow. All this criticism however may well be dislodged by the desire to write a story. The Moths * hovers somewhere at the back of my brain. But Clive yesterday at Charleston said that there were no class distinctions. We had tea from bright blue cups under the pink light of the giant hollyhock. We were all a little drugged with the country; a little bucolic I thought. It was lovely enough—made me envious of its country peace; the trees all standing securely—why did my eye catch the trees? The look of things has a great power over me. Even now, I have to watch the rooks beating up against the wind, which is high, and still I say to myself instinctively "What's the phrase for that?" and try to make more and more vivid the roughness of the air current and the tremor of the rook's wing slicing as if the air were full of ridges and ripples and roughnesses. They rise and sink, up and down, as if the exercise rubbed and braced them like swimmers in rough water. But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.
Friday, August 31st
This is the last day of August and like almost all of them of extraordinary beauty. Each day is fine enough and hot enough for sitting out; but also full of wandering clouds; and that fading and rising of the light which so enraptures me in the downs; which I am always comparing to the light beneath an alabaster bowl. The corn is now stood about in rows of three, four or five solid shaped yellow cakes—rich, it seems, with eggs and spice; good to eat. Sometimes I see the cattle galloping "like mad" as Dostoievsky would say, in the brooks. The clouds—if I could describe them I would; one yesterday had flowing hair on it, like the very fine white hair of an old man. At this moment they are white in a leaden sky; but the sun behind the house is making the grass green. I walked to the racecourse today and saw a weasel.
Monday, September 10th
...I was amused to find that when Rebecca West says "men are snobs" she gets an instant rise out of Desmond: so I retorted on him with the condescending phrase used about women novelists' "limitations" in Life and Letters. But there was no acrimony in this. We talked with fertility; never working a seam dry. Do you suppose then that we are now coming like the homing rooks back to the tops of our trees? and that all this cawing is the beginning of settling in for the night? I seem to notice in several of my friends some endearing and affecting cordiality; and a pleasure in intimacy; as if the sun were sinking. Often that image comes to me with some sense of my physical state being colder now, the sun just off one; the old disc of one's being growing cooler—but it is only just beginning; and one will turn cold and silver like the moon. This has been a very animated summer; a summer lived almost too much in public. Often down here I have entered into a sanctuary; a nunnery; had a religious retreat; of great agony once; and always some terror; so afraid one is of loneliness; of seeing to the bottom of the vessel. That is one of the experiences I have had here in some Augusts; and got then to a consciousness of what I call "reality": a thing I see before me: something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing to me: that which I seek. But who knows—once one takes a pen and writes? How difficult not to go making "reality" this and that, whereas it is one thing. Now perhaps this is my gift: this perhaps is what distinguishes me from other people: I think it may be rare to have so acute a sense of something like that—but again, who knows? I would like to express it too.
Saturday, September 22nd
This has been the finest, and not only finest, but loveliest, summer in the world. Still, though it blows, how clear and bright it is; and the clouds are opalescent; the long barns on my horizon mouse-coloured; the stacks pale gold. Owning the field has given a different orient to my feelings about Rodmell. I begin to dig myself in and take part in it. And I shall build another storey to the house if I make money. But the news of Orlando is black. We may sell a third that we sold of the Lighthouse before publication—not a shop will buy save in sixes and twelves. They say this is inevitable. No one wants biography. But it is a novel, says Miss Ritchie.*
But it is called biography on the title page, they say. It will have to go to the Biography shelf. I doubt therefore that we shall do more than cover expenses—a high price to pay for the fun of calling it a biography. And I was so sure it was going to be the one popular book! Also it should be 10/6 or 12/6, not 9/-. Lord! lord! Thus I must write some articles this winter, if we are to have nest eggs at the Bank. Down here I have flung myself tooth and nail on my fiction book, and should have finished the first draft but for Dorothy Osborne whom I'm dashing off. It will need entire re-writing but the grind is done—the rushing through book after book and now what shall I read? These novels have hung about me so long. Mercy it is to be quit of them; and shall I read English poetry, French memoirs—shall I read now for a book to be called "The Lives of the Obscure"? And when, I wonder, shall I begin The Moths? Not until I am pressed into it by those insects themselves. Nor have I any notion what it is to be like—a completely new attempt I think. So I always think.
Saturday, October 27th
A scandal, a scandal, to let so much time slip and I leaning on the Bridge watching it go. Only leaning has not been my pose; running up and down, irritably, excitedly, restlessly. And the stream viciously eddying. Why do I write these metaphors? Because I have written nothing for an age. Orlando has been published. I went to Burgundy with Vita. It flashed by. How disconnected this is! My ambition is from this very moment, 8 minutes to 6, on Saturday evening, to attain complete concentration again. When I have written here, I am going to open Fanny Burney's diaries and work solidly at that articl
e which poor Miss McKay cables about. I am going to read, to think. I gave up reading and thinking on 26th September when I went to France. I came back and we plunged into London and publishing. I am a little sick of Orlando. I think I am a little indifferent now what anyone thinks. Joy's life in the doing—I murder, as usual, a quotation; I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. And as I can't write while I'm being read, I am always a little hollow hearted; whipped up; but not so happy as in solitude. The reception, as they say, surpassed expectation. Sales beyond our record for the first week. I was floating rather lazily on praise, when Squire barked in the Observer, but even as I sat reading him on the Backs last Sunday in the showering red leaves and their illumination, I felt the rock of self esteem untouched in me. "This doesn't really hurt," I said to myself; even now; and sure enough, before evening I was calm, untouched. And now there's Hugh in the Morning Post to spread the butter again, and Rebecca West—such a trumpet call of praise—that's her way—that I feel a little sheepish and silly. And now no more of that I hope.
Thank God, my long toil at the women's lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women—that's my impression. Intelligent, eager, poor; and destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals. I blandly told them to drink wine and have a room of their own. Why should all the splendour, all the luxury of life be lavished on the Julians and the Francises, and none on the Phares and the Thomases? There's Julian not much relishing it, perhaps. I fancy sometimes the world changes. I think I see reason spreading. But I should have liked a closer and thicker knowledge of life. I should have liked to deal with real things sometimes. I get such a sense of tingling and vitality from an evening's talk like that; one's angularities and obscurities are smoothed and lit. How little one counts, I think: how little anyone counts; how fast and furious and masterly life is; and how all these thousands are swimming for dear life. I felt elderly and mature. And nobody respected me. They were very eager, egotistical, or rather not much impressed by age and repute. Very little reverence or that sort of thing about. The corridors of Girton are like vaults in some horrid high church cathedral—on and on they go, cold and shiny, with a light burning. High Gothic rooms: acres of bright brown wood; here and there a photograph.