A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts From the Diary of Virginia Woolf

  No I have worked myself too dry this time. There is not one idea left in the orange. But we go today and I shall sun, with only a few books. No, I will not write; I will not see people. A little nip from Gissing in the T.L.S. which I must answer. But indeed I can't find words—use the wrong ones—that's my state: the familiar state after these three months writing—what fun that book is to me!

  Tuesday, April 25th

  That's all over—our ten days: and I wrote daily, almost, at Goldsmith—don't much see the point of my Goldsmiths and so on—and read Goldsmith, and so on. Yes: I should now be correcting Flush proofs—I doubt that little book to some extent: but I'm in a doubting mood: the scrambled mood of transience, for on Friday 5th we go to Siena; so I can't settle and make up my story, in which lies permanence. And as usual I want to seethe myself in something new—to break the mould of habit entirely and get that escape which Italy and the sun and the lounging and the indifference of all that to all this brings about. I rise, like a bubble out of a bottle....

  But The Pargiters. I think this will be a terrific affair. I must be bold and adventurous. I want to give the whole of the present society—nothing less: facts as well as the vision. And to combine them both. I mean, The Waves going on simultaneously with Night and Day. Is this possible? At present I have assembled 50,000 words of "real" life: now in the next 50 I must somehow comment; Lord knows how—while keeping the march of events. The figure of Elvira is the difficulty. She may become too dominant. She is to be seen only in relation to other things. This should give I think a great edge to both of the realities—this contrast. At present I think the run of events is too fluid and too free. It reads thin: but lively. How am I to get the depth without becoming static? But I like these problems, and anyhow there's a wind and a vigour in this naturalness. It should aim at immense breadth and immense intensity. It should include satire, comedy, poetry, narrative; and what form is to hold them all together? Should I bring in a play, letters, poems? I think I begin to grasp the whole. And it's to end with the press of daily normal life continuing. And there are to be millions of ideas but no preaching—history, politics, feminism, art, literature—in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire, hate and so on.

  Friday, April 28th

  A mere note. We got out of the car last night and began walking down to the Serpentine. A summer evening. Chestnuts in their crinolines, bearing tapers; grey green water and so on. Suddenly L. bore off; and there was Shaw, dwindled shanks, white beard; striding along. We talked by a railing for 15 minutes. He stood with his arms folded, very upright, leaning back: teeth gold tipped. Just come from the dentist and "lured" out for a walk by the weather. Very friendly. That is his art, to make one think he likes one. A great spurt of ideas. "You forget that an aeroplane is like a car—it bumps—We went over the great wall—saw a little dim object in the distance. Of course the tropics are the place. The people are the original human beings. We are smudged copies. I caught the Chinese looking at us with horror—that we should be human beingsl Of course the tour cost thousands: yet to see us you'd think we hadn't the price of the fare to Hampton Court. Lots of old spinsters had saved up for years to come. Oh but my publicity I It's terrifying. An hour's bombardment at every port. I made the mistake of accepting * invitation. I found myself on a platform with the whole university round me. They began shouting We want Bernard Shaw. So I told them that every man at 21 must be a revolutionary. After that of course the police imprisoned them by dozens. I want to write an article for the Herald pointing out what Dickens said years ago about the folly of Parliament. Oh I could only stand the voyage by writing. I've written 3 or 4 books. I like to give the public full weight. Books should be sold by the pound. What a nice little dog. But aren't I keeping you and making you cold?" (touching my arm). Two men stopped along the path to look. Off he strode again on his dwindled legs. I said Shaw likes us. L. thinks he likes nobody. What will they say of Shaw in 50 years? He is 76 he said: too old for the tropics.

  Last night—to relieve myself for a moment from correcting that silly book Flush—oh what a waste of time—I will record Bruno Walter. He is a swarthy, fattish man; not at all smart. Not at all the "great conductor." He is a little Slav, a little Semitic. He is very nearly mad: that is, he can't get "the poison" as he called it of Hitler out of him. "You must not think of the Jews," he kept on saying. "You must think of this awful reign of intolerance. You must think of the whole state of the world. It is terrible—terrible. That this meanness, that this pettiness, should be possible! Our Germany, which I loved, with our tradition, our culture. We are now a disgrace." Then he told us how you can't talk above a whisper. There are spies everywhere. He had to sit in the window of his hotel in Leipzig a whole day, telephoning. All the time soldiers were marching. They never stop marching. And on the wireless, between the turns, they play military music. Horrible, horrible! He hopes for the monarchy as the only hope. He will never go back there. His orchestra had been in existence for 150 years: but it is the spirit of the whole, that is awful. We must band together. We must refuse to meet any German. We must say that they are uncivilised. We will not trade with them or play with them. We must make them feel themselves outcasts—not by fighting them; by ignoring them. Then he swept off to music. He has the intensity—genius?—which makes him live everything he feels. Described conducting: must know every player.

  JUAN LES PINS. Tuesday, May 9th

  Yes, I thought, I will make a note of that face—the face of the woman stitching a very thin, lustrous green silk at a table in the restaurant where we lunched at Vienne. She was like fate—a consummate mistress of all the arts of self-preservation: hair rolled and lustrous; eyes so nonchalant; nothing could startle her; there she sat stitching her green silk with people going and coming all the time; she not looking, yet knowing, fearing nothing; expecting nothing—a perfectly equipped middle class Frenchwoman.

  At Carpentras last night there was the little servant girl with honest eyes, hair brushed in a flop and one rather black tooth. I felt that life would crush her out inevitably. Perhaps 18, not more; yet on the wheel, without hope; poor, not weak but mastered—yet not enough mastered but to desire furiously travel, for a moment, a car. Ah but I am not rich, she said to me—which her cheap little stockings and shoes showed anyhow. Oh how I envy you, able to travel. You like Carpentras? But the wind blows ever so hard. You'll come again? That's the bell ringing. Never mind. Come over here and look at this. No, I've never seen anything like it. Ah yes, she always likes the English. ("She" was the other maid, with hair like some cactus in erection.) Yes I always like the English she said. The odd little honest face, with the black tooth, will stay on at Carpentras I suppose: will marry? will become one of those stout black women who sit in the door knitting? No: I foretell for her some tragedy: because she had enough mind to envy us the Lanchester.

  PISA. Friday, May 12th

  Yes, Shelley chose better than Max Beerbohm. He chose a harbour; a bay; and his home, with a balcony, in which Mary stood, looks out across the sea. Sloping sailed boats were coming in this morning—a windy little town, of high pink and yellow southern homes, not much changed I suppose: very full of the breaking of waves, very much open to the sea; and the rather desolate house standing with the sea just in front. Shelley, I suppose, bathed, walked, sat on the beach there; and Mary and Mrs. Williams had their coffee on the balcony. I daresay the clothes and the people were much the same. At any rate, a very good great man's house in its way. What is the word for full of the sea? Can't think tonight, sky high in a bedroom at the Nettano in Pisa, much occupied by French tourists. The Arno swimming past with the usual coffee coloured foam. Walked in the cloisters: this is true Italy, with the old dusty smell; people swarming in the streets; under the—what is the word for—I think the word for a street that has pillars is Arcade. Shelley's house waiting by the sea, and Shelley not coming, and Mary and Mrs. Williams watching from the balcony and then Trelawney coming from Pisa
and burning the body on the shore—that's in my mind. All the colours here are white bluish marble against a very light saturated sky. The tower leaning prodigiously. Clerical beggar at the door in a mock fantastic leather hat. The clergy walking. It was in these cloisters—Campo Santo—that L. and I walked 21 years ago and met the Palgraves and I tried to hide behind the pillars. And now we come in our car; and the Palgraves—are they dead, or very old? Now at any rate we have left the black country: the bald necked vulture country with its sprinkling of redroofed villas. This is the Italy one used to visit in a railway train with Violet Dickinson—taking the hotel bus.

  SIENA. Saturday, May 13th

  Today we saw the most beautiful of views and the melancholy man. The view was like a line of poetry that makes itself; the shaped hill, all flushed with reds and greens; the elongated lines, cultivated every inch; old, wild, perfectly said, once and for all: and I walked up to a group and said What is that village? It called itself *; and the woman with the blue eyes said, "Won't you come to my house and drink?" She was famished for talk. Four or five of them buzzed round us and I made a Ciceronian speech about the beauty of the country. But I have no money to travel with, she said, wringing her hands. We would not go to her house—a cottage on the side of the hill: and shook hands: hers were dusty: she wanted to keep them from me; but we all shook hands and I wished we had gone to her house, in the loveliest of all landscapes. Then, lunching by the river, among the ants, we met the melancholy man. He had five or six little fish in his hands, which he had caught in his hands. We said it was very beautiful country; and he said no, he preferred the town. He had been to Florence: no, he did not like the country. He wanted to travel, but had no money: worked at some village: no, he did not like the country, he repeated, with his gentle cultivated voice: no theatres, no pictures, only perfect beauty. I gave him 2 cigarettes; at first he refused, then offered us his six or seven little fish. But we could not cook them at Siena, we said. No, he agreed, and so we parted.

  It is all very well, saying one will write notes, but writing is a very difficult art. That is one has always to select: and I am too sleepy and hence merely run sand through my fingers. Writing is not in the least an easy art. Thinking what to write, it seems easy; but the thought evaporates, runs hither and thither. Here we are in the noise of Siena—the vast tunnelled arched stone town, swarmed over by chattering shrieking children.

  Sunday, May 14th

  Yes, I am reading—skipping—the Sacred Fount, about the most inappropriate of all books for this din—sitting by the open window, looking across heads and heads and heads—all Siena parading in grey and pink and the cars hooting. How finely run along those involuted threads? I don't—that's the answer. I let 'em break. I only mark that the sign of a masterly writer is his power to break his mould callously. None of H. J.'s timid imitators have the vigour, once they've spun their sentence, to smash it. He has some native juice—figure: has driven his spoon deep into some stew of his own—some swarming mixture. That—his vitality—his vernacular—his pounce and grip and swing always spring fresh upon me, if at the same time I ask how could anyone, outside an orchis in a greenhouse, fabricate such an orchid's dream. Oh these Edwardian ladies with pale hair, these tailored "my dear men"! Yet compared to that vulgar old brute Creevey—L. is here bitten by a flea—H. J. is muscular, lean. No doubt the society of the Regent—the smell of brandy and bones, the painted velvet Lawrence women—the general laxity and lushness and vulgarity are here at their superlative. Of course the Shelleys, the Wordsworths, the Coleridges existed on the other side of the hedge. But when it comes gushing out of Creevey's page, it's for all the world like—something between Buckingham Palace, Brighton and the Queen's own italic style—so uncurbed, so weak: and how can one hope for a cure for a single person? There's all the dreary Lords and Ladies ogling and overeating; and plush and gilt; and the Princess and the Prince—I think dissolution and obesity taking hold of the eighteenth century and swelling it into a puff ball efflorescence, 1860 is considerably more to the point.

  Monday, May 15th

  This should be all description—I mean of the little pointed green hills; and the white oxen and the poplars and the cypresses and the sculptured shaped infinitely musical, flushed green land from here to Abbazia *—that is where we went today; and couldn't find it and asked one after another of the charming tired peasants, but none had been 4 miles beyond their range, until we came to the stonebreaker and he knew. He could not stop work to come with us, because the inspector was coming tomorrow. And he was alone, alone, all day with no one to talk to. So was the aged Maria at the Abbazia. And she mumbled and slipped her words, as she showed us into the huge bare stone building; mumbled and mumbled, about the English—how beautiful they were. Are you a Contessa? she asked me. But she didn't like Italian country either. They seem stinted, dried up; like grasshoppers and with the manners of impoverished gentle people; sad, wise, tolerant, humorous. There was the man with the mule. He let the mule gallop away down the road. We are welcome, because we might talk; they draw round and discuss us after we're gone. Crowds of gentle kindly boys and girls always come about us and wave and touch their hats. And nobody looks at the view—except us—at the Euganean, bone white, this evening; then there's a ruddy red farm or two; and light islands swimming here and there in the sea of shadow—for it was very showery—then there are the black stripes of cypresses round the farm; like fur edges; and the poplars and the streams and the nightingales singing and sudden gusts of orange blossom; and white alabaster oxen with swinging chins—great flaps of white leather hanging under their noses—and infinite emptiness, loneliness, silence: never a new house, or a village; but only the vineyards and the olive trees, where they have always been. The hills go pale blue, washed very sharp and soft on the sky; hill after hill.

  PIACENZA. Friday, May 19th

  It's a queer thing that I write a date. Perhaps in this disoriented life one thinks, if I can say what day it is, then ... Three dots to signify I don't know what I mean. But we have been driving all day from Lerici over the Apennines and it is now cold, cloistral, highly uncomfortable, in a vast galleried Italian inn, so ill provided with chairs that now at this present moment we are squatted, L. in a hard chair by his bed, I on the bed, in order to take advantage of the single light which burns between us. L. is writing directions to the Press. I am about to read Goldoni.

  Lerici is hot and blue and we had a room with a balcony. There were Misses and Mothers—misses who had lost all chance of life long ago, and could with a gentle frown, a frown of mild sadness, confront a whole meal—arranged for the English—in entire silence, dressed as if for cold Sunday supper in Wimbledon. Then there's the retired Anglo-Indian, who takes shall we say Miss Toutchet for a walk, a breezy red faced man, very fond of evensong at the Abbey. She goes to the Temple; where "my brother" has rooms. Et cetera. Et cetera. Of the Apennines I have nothing to say—save that up on the top they're like the inside of a green umbrella: spine after spine: and clouds caught on the point of the stick. And so down to Parma; hot, stony, noisy; with shops that don't keep maps; and so on along a racing road, to Piacenza, at which we find ourselves now at 6 minutes to 9 P.M. This of course is the rub of travelling—this is the price paid for the sweep and the freedom—the dusting of our shoes and careering off tomorrow—and eating our lunch on a green plot beside a deep cold stream. It will be all over this day week—comfort—discomfort; and the zest and rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of travelling.

  Sunday, May 21st

  To write to keep off sleep—that is the exalted mission of tonight—tonight sitting at the open window of a second-rate inn in Draguignan—with plane trees outside, the usual single noted bird, the usual loudspeaker. Everybody in France motors on Sunday; then sleeps it off at night. The hotel keepers are gorged and scarcely stop playing cards. But Grasse was too plethoric—we came on here late. We leave here early. I dip into Cr
eevey; L. into Golden Bough. We long for bed. This is the tax for travelling—these sleepy uncomfortable hotel nights—sitting on hard chairs under the lamp. But the seduction works as we start—to Aix tomorrow—so home. And "home" becomes a magnet, for I can't stop making up the P's: can't live without that intoxicant—though this is the loveliest and most distracting alternative. But I'm full of holiday and want work—ungrateful that I am!—and yet I want the hills near Fabbria too and the hills near Siena—but no other hills—not these black and green violent monotonous southern hills. We saw poor Lawrence's Phoenix picked out in coloured pebbles at Vence today among all the fretted lace tombs.

  Tuesday, May 23rd

  I have just said to myself if it were possible to write, those white sheets would be the very thing, not too large or too small. But I do not wish to write, except as an irritant. This is the position. I sit on L.'s bed; he in the only armchair. People tap up and down on the pavement. This is Vienne. It is roasting hot—hotter and hotter it gets—and we are driving through France; and it's Tuesday and we cross on Friday and this strange interval of travel, of sweeping away from habitation and habits will be over. On and on we go—through Aix, through Avignon, on and on, under arches of leaves, over bare sandy roads, under grey black hills with castles, beside vines: and I'm thinking of the Pargiters: and L. is driving; and when we come to poplars we get out and lunch by the river; and then on; and take a cup of tea by the river: fetch our letters, learn that Lady Cynthia Mosley is dead: picture the scene; wonder at death; and drowse and doze in the heat, and decide to sleep here—hotel de la Poste; and read another letter and learn that the Book Society will probably take Flush and speculate what we shall do if we have £1,000 or £2,000 to spend. And what would these little burghers of Vienne, who are drinking coffee, do with that sum, I ask? The girl is a typist; the young men clerks. For some reason they start discussing hotels at Lyons, I think; and they haven't a penny piece between them; and all the men go into the urinal, one sees their legs; and the Morocco soldiers go in their great cloaks; and the children play ball and people stand lounging and everything becomes highly pictorial, composed, legs in particular—the odd angles they make: and the people dining in the hotel; and the queer air it all has, since we shall leave early tomorrow, of something designing Vienne on my mind, significantly. Now the draw of home, and freedom and no packing tells on us—oh to sit in an arm chair; and read and not have to ask for Eau Mineral, with which to brush our teeth!