52 TAVISTOCK SQUARE. Tuesday, May 30th
Yes, but of all things coming home from a holiday is undoubtedly the most damned. Never was there such aimlessness, such depression. Can't read, write or think. There's no climax here. Comfort yes: but the coffee's not so good as I expected. And my brain is extinct—literally hasn't the power to lift a pen. What one must do is to set it—my machine I mean—in the rails and give it a push. Lord—how I pushed yesterday to make it start running along Goldsmith again. There's that half finished article. Lord Salisbury said something about dished up speeches being like the cold remains of last night's supper. I see white grease on the pages of my article. Today it's a little warmer—tepid meat: a slab of cold mutton. It's coldish, dullish here. Yes, but I hear the clock tick and suspect, though I must not look, that the wheels are just beginning to turn on the rails. We go to Monks House for Whitsun, which is Monday—the suburban, the diminished Monks House, No, I can't look at The Pargiters. It's an empty snail shell. And I'm empty with a cold slab of a brain. Never mind. 1 shall dive head foremost into The Pargiters. And now I shall make my mind run along Italian—what's his name—Goldoni. A few verbs I think. It occurs to me that this state, my depressed state, is the state in which most people usually are.
Wednesday, May 31st
I think I have now got to the point where I can write for four months straight ahead at The Pargiters. Oh the relief—the physical relief! I feel as if I could hardly any longer keep back—that my brain is being tortured by always butting against a blank wall—I mean Flush, Goldsmith, motoring through Italy. Now, tomorrow, I mean to run it off. And suppose only nonsense comes? The thing is to be venturous, bold, to take every possible fence. One might introduce plays, poems, letters, dialogues: must get the round, not only the flat. Not the theory only. And conversation: argument. How to do that will be one of the problems. I mean intellectual argument in the form of art: I mean how give ordinary waking Arnold Bennett life the form of art? These are rich hard problems for my four months ahead. And I don't know my own gifts at the moment. I'm disoriented completely after four weeks' holiday—no three—but tomorrow we go to Rodmell again. And I must fill up the chinks with reading—and don't want to settle down to books—Well, now I have to go up to Murray about my dress: and there's Ethel round the corner; but no letters; disorganisation from Whitsun again. I thought, driving through Richmond last night, something very profound about the synthesis of my being: how only writing composes it: how nothing makes a whole unless I am writing: now I have forgotten what seemed so profound. The rhododendron like coloured glass mounds at Kew. Oh the agitation, oh the discomfort of this mood.
And I am at once called out to draw lots in our Derby sweepstake. No favourite this year, they say.
Very well: the old Pargiters are beginning to run off: and I say oh to be done. I mean, writing is effort: writing is despair: and yet of course t'other day in the grilling heat at Rodmell I admit that the perspective—this I think was something like my profound thought at Richmond—shifts into focus: yes: the proportion is right: though I at the top suffer strain; suffer, as this morning, grim despair and shall O Lord when it comes to re-writing suffer an intensity of anguish ineffable (the word only means one can't express it); holding the thing;—all the things—the innumerable things—together.
Monday, July 10th
Bella * arrived and knocked her head upon the window of the car. She cut her nose and was dazed. And then I was in "one of my states"—how violent, how acute—and walked in Regents Park in black misery and had to summon my cohorts in the old way to see me through, which they have done more or less. A note made to testify to my own ups and downs: many of which go unrecorded though they are less violent I think than they used to be. But how familiar it was—stamping along the road, with gloom and pain constricting my heart: and the desire for death, in the old way, all for two I daresay careless words.
Thursday, July 20th
I am again in full flood with The Pargiters after a week of very scanty pages. The trouble is to get the meat pressed in: I mean to keep the rhythm and convey the meaning. It tends more and more, I think—at any rate the E.M. scenes—to drama. I think the next lap ought to be objective, realistic, in the manner of Jane Austen: carrying the story on all the time.
Saturday, August 12th
So naturally after Mrs. Nef I was so tired—I shivered and shook. I went to bed for 2 days and slept I daresay 7 hours, visiting the silent realms again. It strikes me—what are these sudden fits of complete exhaustion? I come in here to write: can't even finish a sentence; and am pulled under; now is this some odd effort; the subconscious pulling me down into her? I've been reading Faber on Newman; compared his account of a nervous breakdown; the refusal of some part of the mechanism; is that what happens to me? Not quite. Because I'm not evading anything. I long to write The Pargiters. No. I think the effort to live in two spheres: the novel; and life; is a strain. Nefs almost break me because they strain me so far from the other world; I only want walking and perfectly spontaneous childish life with L. and the accustomed when I'm writing at full tilt: to have to behave with circumspection and decision to strangers wrenches me into another region; hence the collapse.
Wednesday, August 16th
And owing to Sir Alan Cobham's flying and Angelica and Julian and fetching the boat I had another headache and bed and didn't see Ethel, but heard her voice and have 6 pages on the subject this morning, and didn't see the Wolves and am out here again * rubbing at The Pargiters and thinking Oh Lord how am I ever going to pull all that into shape. What a tremendous struggle it'll bel Never mind. I want to discuss Form, having been reading Turgenev. (But how my hand trembles after one of these headaches—can't lay hands on words or pens exactly—the habit has been broken.)
Form, then, is the sense that one thing follows another rightly. This is partly logic. T. wrote and re-wrote. To clear the truth of the unessential. But Dostoievsky would say that everything matters. But one can't read D. again. Now Shakespeare was constrained in form by the stage. (T. says one must find a new form for the old subject: but here, I suppose, uses the word differently.) The essential thing in a scene is to be preserved. How do you know what this is? How do we know if the D. form is better or worse than the T.? It seems less permanent. T.'s idea that the writer states the essential and lets the reader do the rest. D. to supply the reader with every possible help and suggestion. T. reduces the possibilities. The difficulty about criticism is that it is so superficial. The writer has gone so much deeper. T. kept a diary for Bozarov: wrote everything from his point of view. We have only 250 short pages. Our criticism is only a birds eye view of the pinnacle of an iceberg. The rest under water. One might begin it in this way. The article might be more broken, less composed than usual.
Thursday, August 24th
A week ago, on Friday to be precise, having got my mind again, I dipped into The Pargiters and determined to sweat it bare of flesh before going on, accumulating more scenes. I am re-arranging too, all the first part, so as to bring it together. The death happens in the first chapter now. I think I shall reduce the size by half; it is however a little bare and jerky at present. Moreover it is rather a rush and a strain. I have just killed Mrs. P.: and can't shoot ahead to Oxford. For the truth is these little scenes embroil one, just as in life; and one can't switch off to a different mood all in a second. It seems to me that the realness of the beginning is complete. I have a good excuse for poetry in the second part, if I can take it. Rather an interesting experiment—if I could see the same thing from two different views. And now I have spent the morning reading the Confession of Arsène Houssaye left here yesterday by Clive. What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.
Saturday, September 2nd
Suddenly in the night I thought of Here and Now
as a title for the Pargiters. I think it better. It shows what I'm after and does not compete with the Herries Saga, the Forsyte Saga and so on. I have now done the first part; I mean compressed it, shall, I think, compress Eleanor's day, and then what? The rest does not admit of much compression. I think I have reduced it to 80,000 words perhaps: but it seems to me there must be another 40, to come. 80 plus 40 equals 120,000. If so it will be the longest of my little brood—longer than Night and Day I imagine.
Tuesday, September 26th
Why not, one of these days, write a fantasy on the theme of Crabbe?—a biographical fantasy—an experiment in biography. I had so much of the most profound interest to write here—a dialogue of the soul with the soul—and I have let it all slip—why? Because of feeding the goldfish, of looking at the new pond, of playing bowls. Nothing remains now. I forget what it was about. Happiness. The perfect day, which was yesterday. And so on. Now I began the morning by telephoning corrections of Twelfth Night, to the N.S.: put in a comma, take out semi-colon; and so on. Then I come out here, having seen the carp, and write Turgenev.
Monday, October 2nd
It's October now; and we have to go to Hastings Conference tomorrow and Wednesday, to Vita, then back to London. I opened this in order to make one of my self-admonishments previous to publishing a book. Flush will be out on Thursday and I shall be very much depressed, I think, by the kind of praise. They'll say it's "charming," delicate, ladylike. And it will be popular. Well now I must let this slip over me without paying it any attention. I must concentrate on The Pargiters —or Here and Now. I must not let myself believe that I'm simply a ladylike prattler: for one thing it's not true. But they'll all say so. And I shall very much dislike the popular success of Flush. No, I must say to myself, this is a mere wisp, a veil of water; and so create, hardly, fiercely, as I feel now more able to do than ever before.
Sunday, October 29th
No, my head is too tired to go on with Bobby and Elvira—they're to meet at St. Paul's—this morning. I wish I could get it full and calm and unconscious. This last is difficult, owing to Flush, owing to the perpetual little spatter of comment that keeps me awake. Yesterday the Granta said I was now defunct. Orlando, Waves, Flush represent the death of a potentially great writer. This is only a rain drop, I mean the snub some little pimpled undergraduate likes to administer, just as he would put a frog in one's bed: but then there's all the letters and the requests for pictures—so many that, foolishly perhaps, I wrote a sarcastic letter to the N.S.—thus procuring more rain drops. This metaphor shows how tremendously important unconsciousness is when one writes. But let me remember that fashion in literature is an inevitable thing; also that one must grow and change; also that I have, at last, laid hands upon my philosophy of anonymity. My letter to the N.S. is the crude public statement of a part of it. How odd last winter's revelation was! freedom; which now I find makes it quite easy for me to refuse Sibyl's invitations, to take life much more strongly and steadily. I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded. And though this as usual is only a pot shot, there is a great deal of substance in it. October has been a bad month; but might have been much worse without my philosophy.
Thursday, December 7th
I was walking through Leicester Square—how far from China—just now when I read "Death of Noted Novelist" on the posters. And I thought of Hugh Walpole. But it is Stella Benson. Then why write anything, immediately? I did not know her; but have a sense of those fine patient eyes: the weak voice; the cough; the sense of oppression. She sat on the terrace with me at Rodmell. And now, so quickly, it is gone, what might have been a friendship. Trusty and patient and very sincere—I think of her; trying to cut through, in one of those difficult evenings, to some deeper layer—certainly we could have reached it, given the chance. I'm glad I stopped her at the door as she got into her little car and asked her to call me Virginia—to write to me. And she said: "There's nothing I should like better." But it's like the quenching of something—her death out there in China; and I sitting here and writing about her and so fugitive and yet so true; and no more to come. How mournful the afternoon seems, with the newspaper carts(?) dashing up Kingsway, "Death of Noted Novelist" on the placard. A very fine steady mind: much suffering; suppressed;—there seems to be some sort of reproach to me in her death, as in K. M.'s. I go on; and they cease. Why? Why not my name on the posters? And I have a feeling of the protest each might make: gone with their work unfinished—each so suddenly. Stella was 41. "I am going to send you my book" and so on. A dreary island she lived on, talking to colonels. A curious feeling, when a writer like'S. B. dies, that one's response is diminished: Here and Now won't be lit up by her: it's life lessened. My effusion—what I send out—less porous and radiant—as if the thinking stuff were a web that were fertilised only by other people's (her that is) thinking it too: now lacks life.
Sunday, December 17th
I finished part 4 of Here and Now yesterday and therefore indulge in a contemplative morning. To freshen my memory of the war, I read some old diaries.
1934
Tuesday, January 16th
I have let all this time—three weeks at Monks—slip because I was there so divinely happy and pressed with ideas—another full flood of Pargiters or Here and Now (odd that Goldie's letter mentions that— The Waves is also here and now—I had forgotten). So I never wrote a word of farewell to the year; not a word describing the Keynes and the Jones; nothing about the walks I had ever so far into the downs; or the reading—Marveil of an evening, and the usual trash.
Sunday, February 18th
And I began Here and Now again this morning, Sunday, at the point where I left off all but three weeks ago for my headache. Here I note that from two to three weeks is the right space. It has not gone cold, as after six weeks: I still carry it in my mind, and can see how to revise. It has gone—the talk during the Raid—running all over the place, because I was tired; now I must press together; get into the mood and start again. I want to raise up the magic world all round me and live strongly and quietly there for six weeks. The difficulty is the usual one—how to adjust the two worlds. It is no good getting violently excited: one must combine.
Tuesday, April 17th
So jaded am I after last night that I cannot add a word to my Sickert or make out a sketch of the last chapters of Here and Now. A high price to pay for a hurried dinner at the Hutches: racing to Macbeth; talking to Dodo Macnaghten; then to Sir Fred Pollock on the stage of Sadlers Wells. An idea about Shakespeare.
That the play demands coming to the surface—hence insists upon a reality which the novel need not have, but perhaps should have contact with the surface, coming to the top. This is working out my theory of the different levels in writing and how to combine them: for I begin to think the combination necessary. This particular relation with the surface is imposed on the dramatist of necessity: how far did it influence Shakespeare? Idea that one could work out a theory of fiction etc. on these lines; how many levels attempted, whether kept to or not.
Wednesday, May 9th
This, the 9th May, was our last day and fine. So we saw Warwickshire—but I've been reading the Monologue and note how oddly another style infects—at its best: thick green, thick leaves, stubby yellow stone houses and a fine sprinkling of Elizabethan cottages. All this led very harmoniously to Stratford on Avon; and all crabbers be damned—it is a fine, unselfconscious town, mixed, with eighteenth century and the rest all standing cheek by jowl. All the flowers were out in Shakespeare's garden. "That was where his study windows looked out when he wrote The Tempest," said the man. And perhaps it was true. Anyhow it was a great big house, looking straight at the large windows and the grey stone of the school chapel, and when the clock struck, that was the sound Shakespeare heard. I cannot without more labour than my roadrunning mind can compass descr
ibe the queer impression of sunny impersonality. Yes, everything seemed to say, this was Shakespeare's, had he sat and walked; but you won't find me, not exactly in the flesh. He is serenely absent—present; both at once; radiating round one; yes; in the flowers, in the old hall, in the garden; but never to be pinned down. And we went to the church and there was the florrid foolish bust, but what I had not reckoned for was the worn simple slab, turned the wrong way, Kind Friend for Jesus' sake forbear—again he seemed to be all air and sun smiling serenely; and yet down there one foot from me lay the little bones that had spread over the world this vast illumination. Yes, and then we walked round the church and all is simple and a little worn; the river slipping past the stone wall, with a red breadth from some flowering tree, and the edge of the turf unspoilt, soft and green and muddy and two casual nonchalant swans. The church and the school and the house are all roomy spacious places, resonant, sunny today, and in and out *—yes, an im- pressive place; still living, and then the little bones lying there, which have created: to think of writing The Tempest looking out on that garden: what a rage and storm of thought to have gone over any mind; no doubt the solidity of the place was comfortable. No doubt he saw the cellars with serenity. And a few scented American girls and a good deal of parrot prattle from old gramophone discs at the birthplace, one taking up the story from the other. But isn't it odd, the caretaker at New Place agreed, that only one genuine signature of Shakespeare's is known; and all the rest, books, furniture, pictures etc. has completely vanished? Now I think Shakespeare was very happy in this, that there was no impediment of fame, but his genius flowed out of him and is still there, in Stratford. They were acting As You Like It I think in the theatre.