Sunday 9 September

An almost motionless day; no blue sky; almost like a winter day, save for the heat. Very quiet. Over to picnic at Firle in the afternoon. Nessa & 5 children came after we had done; sat outside the trees. Walked home over the downs. Red sky over the sea. Woods almost as thin as winter, but very little colour in them.

Woolf’s diaries start up again in August, 1917, after the long recovery from her breakdown in February 1915. “For long time,” the editor notes, “there was no question of her writing at all, and then she was rationed, as it was thought to excite her.” (Readers of “The Yellow Wallpaper” are familiar with this theory—and with its debilitating effects.) This edition includes, as an Appendix, the “Asheham Diary,” briefer daily records covering some of the same period as her ‘real’ diary, where the entries also begin as quite brief, almost perfunctory logs of mostly mundane things: the weather, walks, mushrooming, taking letters to the post. Yet it’s still Woolf writing, with her observer’s eye:

We meant to have a picnic at Firle, but rain started, as we were ready, & so we went to post at Beddingham instead. Left my macintosh in the hedge, so it came down hard, & we were very wet. [I love that “so” there, as if—as we all probably feel sometimes—she had jinxed the weather by going without her raincoat.] It rained hard & steadily the whole evening & was raining violently when we went to bed. This is the first bad day we have had; even so, the morning was fine. The high wind of the last few days has broken leaves off, although only a few of the trees have begun to turn. Swallows flying in great numbers very low & swift in the field. The wind has brought down some walnuts, but they are unripe; the wasps eat holes in the plums, so we shall have to pick them. My watch stopped.

And so it goes until they move back to Richmond in October. At that point, the length and especially the energy of the entries picks up again, along with the Woolfs’ social life. On October 14 she reports “much argument . . . old arguments,” which the footnote explains “concerned VW’s thirst for social life and LW’s anxiety lest she should over-strain or excite herself.” What if the very thing that sustains you also exacts a price?

At first I was thinking that not much was really happening in this section, but then it struck me that of course there is a war on, as we are reminded by several passing references to German prisoners working on the nearby farms: “To picnic near Firle,” she reports on August 11, for example, “with Bells &c. Passed German prisoners, cutting wheat with hooks.” Also during this period Leonard is called up to military service, and their efforts to have him excused on medical grounds are repeatedly mentioned. Once they are back at Richmond, they are constantly on edge about air raids: on December 6, she is “wakened by L. to a most instant sense of guns: as if one’s faculties jumped up fully dressed.” They retreat to the kitchen passage then go back to bed when the danger seems passed, only to be once again roused by “guns apparently at Kew.” The raid, the papers tell her the next day, “was the work of 25 Gothas, attacking in 5 squadrons, and 2 were brought down.”

In the midst of this, the Woolfs are setting up their press and beginning to print. It is amusing to follow their frustrations with the apprentice they take on to “help” them with this work. “Our apprentice weighs rather heavily upon us,” Woolf notes, wondering if the discomfort she induces is because of her youth, or “something highly polished so as to reflect without depth about her.” She is “nice, considerate,” but not good at her job:

Today has been spent by L. in the futile misery of trying to print from one of her pages which wont lock up. As the other page had to be entirely taken down & re-set, her work amounts to nil; less than nil, considering L.’s time wasted.

The Woolfs also acquire and then lose a dog, Tinker, who goes missing the same day Leonard gets his papers stating he is “permanently and totally disabled,” so their relief at his security is “rather dashed by the loss of the spaniel whom we had come to like.”

The intermingling of different kinds of events and preoccupations—war and picnics, air raids and printing presses, soldiers and servants, book reviews and mushrooming—is one of the most interesting features of the diaries so far. In itself it is not, of course, surprising or unusual: we all live that way, after all, in the midst of events much larger than ourselves that affect us both directly and indirectly; whatever else is going on, we still somehow mostly keep up whatever counts for us as ordinary life. Sometimes we rise to the occasion, meeting history as best we can on our own terms, and other times we recede into pettiness. It’s reassuring to see that this is true for geniuses too. “I must again register my complaint that people wont write to me,” Woolf mopes on November 13; ‘I dont write to them, but how can one?” Fair! Especially if “one” is so busily writing one’s diaries. 🙂

I recently treated myself to the complete Granta editions of Woolf’s diaries. I wanted to mark the finalization of my divorce last month, and this felt right, somehow—more a reflection of the life I am trying to build now, in this room of my own, than, say, jewelry would be. I thought, too, that reading through them would make a good summer project for me, especially if I made writing about reading them a bit of a project as well. I say “a bit of” because I don’t have big ambitions for it. I don’t necessarily want to tie myself to a schedule or make promises, if only to myself, that I then don’t keep but feel bad about! But I do think it will be motivating to have the intention to post updates of some sort. We’ll see what unfolds.

 This morning I started on Volume 1, which covers 1915-19. I read the foreword by Virginia Nicholson; the editor’s preface, by Anne Olivier Bell; the introduction by Quentin Bell; and then, finally, the first section of diary entries, from January 1915. They end abruptly because, as the editor’s note explains, Woolf “plunged into madness” in February; the diary does not pick up again until 1917. It seems inevitable that one key effect across the whole of the diaries will be this kind of dramatic irony: after all, it is impossible not to know, now, how her life ended. At the same time, and I think this is not as obvious as it maybe sounds, it seems important that she did not know this. When someone ends their own life it is hard not to see that as the most significant and meaningful thing, not just about them as people, but about the life they lived up to that decision. I’ve always been very moved by the conclusion of Winifred Holtby’s memoir of Woolf, which was published in 1932—Holtby did not know, and would never know (as she died in 1936), about Woolf’s suicide. “For all her lightness of touch, her moth-wing humour, her capricious irrelevance,” Holtby says,

she writes as one who has looked upon the worst that life can do to man and woman, upon every sensation of loss, bewilderment and humiliation; and yet the corroding acid of disgust has not defiled her. She is in love with life. It is this quality which lifts her beyond the despairs and fashions of her age, which gives to her vision of reality a radiance, a wonder, unshared by any other living writer. . . . It is this which places her work, meagre though its amount may hitherto have been, slight in texture and limited in scope, beside the work of the great masters.

“She is in love with life”: it would be too simple to say that this is exactly what the diary communicates so far, but it is certainly very full of living. A central preoccupation at this point is the search for new London lodgings that ends with the Woolfs leasing Hogarth House, where they also then launched the Hogarth Press. During this period The Voyage Out is moving towards publication, but she mentions it explicitly only once that I noticed; the editor suggests that nonetheless it was very much on her mind and that the stress of its impending release contributed to the collapse of her mental health.

Something that is immediately notable to me is how populated Woolf’s world is. I am torn so far between checking each footnote explaining who somebody is and just taking the cast of characters for granted, as she obviously does. It is interesting to know, but distracting to keep finding out, because Woolf mentions so many different people. My mother, whose interest in Woolf long predates my own,* explained once that part of what drew her to the diaries, in addition of course to Woolf’s voice—about which more in a minute—was being plunged into that community. I already see her point: everybody just seems so interesting, so busy with art and politics and love affairs. There is so much bustle, and while much of it (like the house-hunting) is quotidian and familiar, there is also something extraordinary about the way Woolf and her circle of friends wanted to be in the world, as intellectuals and creators and radicals—which is not to idealize them, or her, or to deny the privilege and snobbery that occasionally show through.

There are two related but separate things, I suppose, that make these diaries worth reading. One is Woolf—who she was as she wrote them and who she became. The other is the diaries themselves—what they are like to read, what they offer us as (if you’ll forgive the word) texts. Lots of people have kept diaries that are primarily of documentary interest; Woolf’s diaries, on their merits, are also of literary interest, or so I think it is generally agreed. It seems odd to say “they are great examples of the form” when that form is something so personal. The goal of keeping a diary is not generally to publish it, after all, and there can hardly be a model for how to write about and for oneself. But  Woolf is a good writer no matter the form or purpose of her writing, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the kind of good writer Woolf is suits the darting, episodic, idiosyncratic form of a diary. Already the entries are shot through with evidence of her brilliance, from vivid bits of description (“the afternoons now have an elongated pallid look, as if it were neither winter nor spring”) to moments of acid social commentary:

We went to a concert at the Queen’s Hall, in the afternoon. Considering that my ears have been pure of music for some weeks, I think patriotism is a base emotion. By this I mean … that they played a national Anthem & a Hymn, & all I could feel was the utter absence of emotion in myself & everyone else. If the British spoke openly about W.C.’s, & copulation, then they might be stirred by universal emotions. As it is, an appeal to feel together is hopelessly muddled by intervening greatcoats & fur coats. I begin to loathe my kind, principally from looking at their faces in the tube. Really, raw red beef & silver herrings give me more pleasure to look upon.

My favorite bit in this first instalment was this thoughtful observation:

Shall I say “nothing happened today” as we used to do in our diaries, when they were beginning to die? It wouldn’t be true. The day is rather like a leafless tree: there are all sorts of colours in it, if you look closely. But the outline is bare enough.

Looking closely, seeing all the colours in an ordinary day: that sounds like an artist’s job to me, a painter’s but also a novelist’s, and it is something anyone can practice by writing in their diary, though the results are unlikely to be as scintillating as hers.

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*Just as my father’s love of Trollope and the other Victorians predates mine—I am so fortunate, as I often now reflect, both in my parents themselves (much love to you both, if you are reading!) and in their literary influences on me. Their bookshelves were always both inspirational and aspirational to me when I was growing up, and important as it was that they read to us, I think it was even more important that we always saw them reading all kinds of books.