Thursday, May 9th
Sitting in the sun outside the German Customs. A car with the swastika on the back window has just passed through the barrier into Germany. L. is in the Customs. I am nibbling at Aaron's Rod. Ought I to go in and see what is happening? A fine dry windy morning. The Dutch Customs took 10 seconds. This has taken 10 minutes already. The windows are barred. Here they came out and the grim man laughed at Mitzi.* But L. said that when a peasant came in and stood with his hat on, the man said this office is like a church and made him move it. Heil Hitler said the little thin boy opening his bag, perhaps with an apple in it, at the barrier. We become obsequious—delighted that is when the officer smiles at Mitzi—the first stoop in our back.
That a work of art means that one part gets strength from another part.
BRENNER. Monday, May 13th
Odd to see the countries change into each other. Beds now made of layers on top. No sheets. Houses building. Austrian, dignified. Winter lasts at Innsbruck till July. No spring. Italy fronts me on a blue bar. The Czecho-Slovaks are in front going to the Customs house.
PERUGIA
Came through Florence today. Saw the green and white cathedral and the yellow Arno dribbling into shallows. A thunderstorm. Irises purple against the clouds. So to Arezzo. A most superb church with dropped hull.
Lake Trasimen: stood in a field of red purple clover: plovers egg lake; grey olives, exquisite, subtle; sea cold, shell green. So on, regretting that we did not stay to Perugia. Brafani where we stayed in 1908. Now all the same. The same ardent sunburnt women. But lace and so on for sale. Better to have stayed at Trasimen. I went into an Albergo yesterday to buy rolls and found a sculptured fireplace, all patriarchal—servants and masters. Cauldron on the fire. Probably not much change since sixteenth century: the people preserve liquids. Men and women scything. A nightingale singing where we sat. Little frogs jumping into the stream.
Brafani: three people watching the door open and shut. Commenting on visitors like fates—summing up, placing. A woman with a hard lined aquiline face—red lips—bird like—perfectly self-satisfied. French pendulous men, a rather poor sister. Now they sit nibbling at human nature. We are rescued by the excellence of our luggage.
Rome: tea. Tea in café. Ladies in bright coats and white hats. Music. Look out and see people like movies. Abyssinia. Children lugging. Café haunters. Ices. Old man who haunts the Greco.
Sunday café: N. and A. drawing. Very cold. Rome a mitigated but perceptible Sunday. Fierce large jowled old ladies. Q. talking about Monaco. Talleyrand. Some very poor black wispy women. The effect of dowdiness produced by wispy hair. The Prime Minister's letter offering to recommend me for the Companion of Honour. No.
Tuesday, May 21st
Oddities of the human brain: woke early and again considered dashing off my book on Professions, to which I had not given a single thought these 7 or 8 days. Why? This vacillates with my novel—how are they both to come out simultaneously. But it is a sign that I must get pen to paper again. Yet at the moment I am going rag marketing with N. and A., who don't come.
Sunday, May 26th
I'm writing at six on a Sunday evening, with a band playing and stopping and children shouting in a too luxurious hotel where the waiters bring one the menu and I mix my French scandalously with odd scraps of painfully acquired Italian. Still I can rattle off Gli Indifferenti lying on my bed for pleasure. Oh the loveliness of the land still here and there—for instance that first morning's drive out of Rome—the sea and the lip of the unviolated land: and the umbrella pines, after Civita Vecchia: then of course all the intense boredom of Genoa and the Riviera, with its geraniums and its bougainvillea and its sense of shoving you between hill and sea and keeping you there in a bright luxury light without room to turn, so steep the vulture neck hills come down. But we slept at Lerici the first night which does the bay, the brimming sea and the green sailing ship and the island and the sparkling fading red and yellow night lamps to perfection. But that kind of perfection no longer makes me feel for my pen. It's too easy. But driving today I was thinking of Roger—Brignolles—Corges—my word, the olives and the rust red earth and the flat green and the trees. But now the band has begun again and we must go down to dine sumptuously off local trout. Off tomorrow and home on Friday. But though I'm impatient for my brain to eat again, I can dally out these last days better than sometimes. Why? Why? I go on asking myself. And feel I could soon polish off those final scenes: a possible amplification of the first paragraph occurred to me. But I don't want to grind at "writing" too hard. To open my net wide. It occurs to me, as we drive, how I'm disliked, how I'm laughed at; and I'm rather proud of my intention to take the fence gallantly. But writing again!
Wednesday, June 5th
Back here * again, and the grim wooden feeling that has made me think myself dead since we came back is softening slightly. It's beginning this cursed dry hand empty chapter again in part. Every time I say it will be the devil! but I never believe it. And then the usual depressions come. And I wish for death. But I am now seeing that the last 200 pages will assert themselves and force me to write a play more or less: all broken up: and I stop to begin making up; also, after the queer interlude, at once life—that is the telephone beginning—starts. So that one is forcibly chafed. (I meant to make a note about the dramatic shape which forces itself upon me.)
Monday, June 10th. Whit Monday
At Monks House. Working very hard. I think I shall rush these scenes off. Yet I cannot write this morning (Tuesday). How can I say, naturally, I have inherited the Rose and the Star!
Thursday, June 13th
In some ways, it's rather like writing The Waves—these last scenes. I bring my brain to a state of congestion, have to stop; go upstairs, run into towsled Mrs. Brewster, come back; find a little flow of words. It's the extreme condensation; the contrasts; the keeping it all together. Does this mean that it's good? I feel I have a round of great pillar to set up and can only drag and sweat. It's something like that. It's getting barer and more intense. And then what a relief when I have the upper air scenes—like the one with Eleanor! only they have to be condensed too. It's the proper placing that strains me.
Tuesday, July 16th
A curious sense of complete failure. Margery hasn't written to me about my speech: † according to Janie, Pamela thought the whole thing a failure. And it was for this that I ruined my last pages! I can't write this morning, can't get into the swing. Innumerable worries, about getting people to dine and so on, afflict me. My head is all jangled. And I have to get that d——d speech printed, or refuse to. The director has written. Never again, oh never again!
I think though that I can get the last pages right, if I can only dream myself back into them. Yes, but how dream, when I have to see Susie and Ethel, to see Miss Belsher's house, to ring up and write notes and order this and that? Well, be still and ruminate; it's only 16th: there's a fortnight before August. And I'm sure that there is a remarkable shape somewhere concealed there. It's not mere verbiage, I think. If necessary I could put it away. But I think no: merely go on and perhaps write a very rapid short sketch, in ink—that's a good plan. Go back and get the central idea, and then rocket into it. And be very controlled and keep a hand on myself too. And perhaps read a little Shakespeare. Yes, one of the last plays: I think I will do that, so as to loosen my muscles. But oh this anxiety, and the perpetual knocking of the cup out of my hand.
Wednesday, July 17th
Just now I finished my first wild retyping and find the book comes to 740 pages: that is 148,000 words; but I think I can shorten: all the last part is still rudimentary and wants shaping; but I'm too tired in the head to do it seriously this moment. I think all the same I can reduce it; and then—? Dear me. I see why I fled, after The Waves, to Flush. One wants simply to sit on a bank and throw stones. I want also to read with a free mind. And to let the wrinkles smooth themselves out. Susie Buchan, Ethel, then Julian—so I talked from 4:30 till 1 A.M. with o
nly two hours for dinner and silence.
I think I see that the last chapter should be formed round N.'s speech: it. must be much more formal; and I think I see how I can bring in interludes—I mean spaces of silence, and poetry and contrast.
Friday, July 19th
No. I go on getting preliminary headaches. It is no good trying to do the last spurt, which should be much like a breeze in the heavy elms, these last days here: yes, a wind blowing in the trees that are thick with green leaves. For there must be movement as well as some weight, something for the breeze to lift.
Friday, August 16th
I cannot make a single note here, because I am so terrifically pressed re-writing—yes, typing out again at the rate, if possible, of 100 pages a week, this impossible eternal book. I work without looking up till one; which it now is, and therefore I must go in, leaving a whole heap of things unsaid; so many people, so many scenes, and beauty, and a fox and sudden ideas.
Wednesday, August 21st
Up in London yesterday. And I saw this about myself in a book at The Times—the most patient and conscientious of artists—which I think is true, considering how I slave at every word of that book. My head is like a like a—pudding is it—something that mildly throbs and can't breed a word at the end of the morning. I begin fresh enough. And I sent off the first 20 pages or so to Mabel yesterday.
Margery Fry comes on Friday with her hands full of papers, she says. Another book. Have I the indomitable courage to start on another? Think of the writing and re-writing. Also there will be joys and ecstasies though. Again very hot. I am going to re-paint this room. Went to Carpenters yesterday and chose chintzes. Is this worth writing? Perhaps.
Thursday, September 5th
I've had to give up writing The Years—that's what it's to be called—this morning. Absolutely floored. Can't pump up a word. Yet I can see, just, that something's there; so I shall wait, a day or two, and let the well fill. It has to be damned deep this time. 740 pages in it. I think, psychologically, this is the oddest of my adventures. Half my brain dries completely; but I've only to turn over and there's the other half, I think, ready, quite happily to write a little article. Oh if only anyone knew anything about the brain. And, even today, when I'm desperate, almost in tears looking at the chapter, unable to add to it, I feel I've only got to fumble and find the end of the ball of string—some start off place, someone to look at * perhaps—no, I don't know—and my head would fill and the tiredness go. But I've been waking and worrying.
Friday, September 6th
I am going to wrap my brain in green dock leaves for a few days: 5, if I can hold out; till the children, L.'s nieces, have gone. If I can—for I think a scene is forming. Why not make an easier transition: Maggie looking at the Serpentine say; and so avoid that abrupt spring? Isn't it odd that this was the scene I had almost a fit to prevent myself writing? This will be the most exciting thing I ever wrote, I kept saying. And now it's the stumbling block. I wonder why? Too personal, is that it? Out of key? But I won't think.
Saturday, September 7th
A heavenly quiet morning reading Alfieri by the open window and not smoking. I believe one could get back to the old rapture of reading if one did not write. The difficulty is, writing makes one's brain so hot it can't settle to read; and then when the heat goes, I'm so tired in the head I can only skirmish. But I've stopped two days now The Years: and feel the power to settle calmly and firmly on books coming back at once. John Bailey's life, come today, makes me doubt though. What? Everything. Sounds like a mouse squeaking under a mattress. But I've only just glanced and got the smell of Lit. dinner, Lit. Sup., lit this that and the other—and one remark to the effect that Virginia Woolf of all people has been given Cowper by Desmond and likes it! I, who read Cowper when I was 15—d——d nonsense.
Thursday, September 12th
Mornings which are neither quiet nor heavenly, but mixed of hell and ecstasy: never have I had such a hot balloon in my head as re-writing The Years: because it's so long; and the pressure is so terrific. But I will use all my art to keep my head sane. I will stop writing at 11:30 and read Italian or Dryden and so dandle myself along. To Ethel * at Miss Hudson's yesterday. As I sat in the complete English gentleman's home, I wondered how anybody could tolerate that equipage; and thought how a house should be portable like a snail shell. In future perhaps people will flirt out houses like little fans; and go on. There'll be no settled life within walls. There were endless clean, well repaired rooms. A maid in a cap. Cakes on pagoda trays. A terrible array of glossy brown furniture and books—red sham leather. Many nice old rooms, but the manor house has been embellished and made of course self consciously elaborate. A ballroom; a library—empty. And Miss Hudson all brushed up with her Pekinese, a competent ex-mayor of Eastbourne, with waved grey hair; and all so neat and stout; and the silver frames askew; and the air of order, respectability, commonplace. "I'm going to call on the vicar's wife." Ethel immensely red and stout: churning out, poor old woman, the usual indefatigable egotism about deafness and her Mass. She must have a scene every six months. No. But of course, to go deaf, to be 76—well, back to Charleston with Eve and Angelica.
Friday, September 13th
What a combination for the superstitious! Driving off to visit Margaret and Lilian at Dorking: and I have got into a mild flood I think with The Years. The difficulty is always at the beginning of chapters or sections where a whole new mood has to be caught, plumb in the centre. Richmond accepts my Marryat and thanks me for his poor little knighthood!
Wednesday, October 2nd
Yesterday we went to the L.P. meeting at Brighton and, of course, though I have refused to go again this morning, I am so thrown out of my stride that I can't hitch on to The Years again. Why? The immersion in all that energy and all that striving for something that is quite oblivious of me; making me feel that I am oblivious of it. No, that's not got it. It was very dramatic. Bevin's attack on Lansbury. Tears came to my eyes as L. spoke. And yet he was posing I felt, acting, unconsciously, the battered Christian man. Then Bevin too acted I suppose. He sank his head in his vast shoulders till he looked like a tortoise. Told L. not to go hawking his conscience round. And what is my duty as a human being? The women delegates were very thin voiced and unsubstantial. On Monday one said It is time we gave up washing up. A thin frail protest but genuine. A little reed piping, but what chance against all this weight of roast beef and beer—which she must cook? All very vivid and interesting; but overlapping: too much rhetoric, and what a partial view: altering the structure of society; yes, but when it's altered? Do I trust Bevin to produce a good world, when he has his equal rights? Had he been born a duke ... My sympathies were with Salter who preached nonresistance. He's quite right. That should be our view. But then if society is in its present state? Happily, uneducated and voteless, I am not responsible for the state of society. These are some of the murmurs that go round my head, and distract me from what is, after all, my work. A good thing to have a day of disturbance—two days even—but not three. So I didn't go; and can't really write. However I will make myself when I've done this. Odd the enormous susceptibility of my mind to surface impressions: how I suck them in and let them swirl about. And how far does anybody's single mind or work matter? Ought we all to be engaged in altering the structure of society? Louie * said this morning she had quite enjoyed doing for us, was sorry we were going. That's a piece of work too in its way. And yet I can't deny my love of fashioning sentences. And yet ... L. has gone there and I daresay I'll discuss it with him. He says politics ought to be separate from art. We walked out in the cold over the marsh and discussed this. The fact is too my head easily tires. Yes, too tired to write.
Tuesday, October 15th
Since we came back I have been in such full flush, with Years all the morning, Roger between tea and dinner, a walk, and people, that here's a blank. And I only scamp Roger this evening because I wore a hole in my back yesterday; couldn't write this morning; and must go up
and receive Miss Grueber (to discuss a book on women and fascism—a pure have yer on as Lottie would say) in ten minutes. Yes, it has been 10 days of calm full complete bliss. And I thought how I shall hate it. Not a bit. London is quiet, dry, comfortable. I find my dinner cooked for me. No children screaming. And the sense of forging ahead, easily, strongly (this petered out today) at The Years. Three days I got into wild excitement over The Next War. Did I say the result of the L.P. at Brighton was the breaking of that dam between me and the new book, so that I couldn't resist dashing off a chapter; stopped myself; but have all ready to develop—the form good I think—as soon as I get time? And I plan to do this some time this next spring, while I go on accumulating Roger. This division is by the way perfect and I wonder I never hit on it before—some book or work for a book that's quite the other side of the brain between times. It's the only way of stopping the wheels and making them turn the other way, to my great refreshment and I hope improvement. Alas, now for Grueber.
Wednesday, October 16th
What I have discovered in writing The Years is that you can only get comedy by using the surface layer—for example, the scene on the terrace. The question is can I get at quite different layers by bringing in music and painting together with certain groupings of human beings? This is what I want to try for in the raid scene: to keep going and influencing each other: the picture; the music; and the other direction—the action—I mean character telling a character—while the movement (that is the change of feeling as the raid goes on) continues. Anyhow, in this book I have discovered that there must be contrast; one strata or layer can't be developed intensively, as I did I expect in The Waves, without harm to the others. Thus a kind of form is, I hope, imposing itself, corresponding to the dimensions of the human being; one should be able to feel a wall made out of all the influences; and this should in the last chapter close round them at the party so that you feel that while they go on individually it has completed itself. But I haven't yet got at this. I'm doing Crosby—an upper air scene this morning. The rest of going from one to another seems to me to prove that this is the right sequence for me at any rate. I'm enjoying the sequence, without that strain I had in The Waves.