Novel Readings

I have not stopped reading through Woolf’s diaries. I finished Volume 3 some time ago and have begin Volume 4. I have not stopped finding memorable or thought-provoking or delightful moments in them: Volume 3 is festooned with post-it flags, and Volume 4 is on a similar track.

And yet.

I have not been posting about it as much because the truth is, in between the post-it flags are often long stretches I’m not very interested in.

There, I admitted it! But I do feel sheepish about it, which is perhaps foolish. Why, after all, would I have expected to be fascinated by every page of someone’s actual diary? Nobody’s life, not even the life of a genius, is 100% fascinating; even Woolf, a genius, cannot make (and to be fair is not even trying to make) every moment fascinating.

She does a lot of socializing. People come over, she goes to their place, they hang out, they chat, they dine out, they gossip. I can’t always be bothered to read all the notes telling me who everybody is. Sometimes I even have to remind myself who “Roger” is. A lot of her reporting on this stuff is just not very interesting to me. I start to skim during accounts of conversations that seem like even in real time they were a bit tedious for her. She frets quite a bit about servants; by and large these are not her best moments.

She keeps at the diary as writing practice, as a routine, as a record, sometimes as a chore. It was never meant to be her masterpiece, or her legacy.

The best parts of Volume 3, for me, were her comments on the composition of The Waves. At the beginning of Volume 4, she is just finishing it: “Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised,” she writes on February 7 1931, “the end of The Waves”:

I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the lasdt ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice . . . Anyhow it is done . . . How physical the sense of triumph & relief is! Whether good or bad, its done; & as I certainly felt at the end, not merely finished, but rounded off, completed, the thing stated–how hastily, how fragmentarily I know; but I mean that I have netted that fin in the waste of waters which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell when I was coming to an end of To the Lighthouse.

It is vicariously thrilling to share in that sense of “triumph & relief,” and humbling to imagine the mind and the craft and the courage it took to realize that vision in words and in such daring form. In November, when the novel has been published, the exhilaration continues:

Oh yes, between 50 & 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody, at last, the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning–if The Waves is my first work in my own style!

If only it were all like that!

It can’t be, of course, and if it were it would be exhausting, unsustainable for her as well as for us. It’s true that there’s always the option of reading only her ‘Writer’s Diary,’ as “curated” by Leonard. But that would mean no chance of discovering the other delights and oddities and poignancies of the day to day records, which are not (and of course they are not) all dull. I loved reading about her “astonishing hat”! And many of my post-it flags bring me back to moments of personal reflection, some of them vivid and moving in the moment and more so, painfully so, knowing what we know, what she did not yet know, about the story of her life:

The thing is now [she writes in May 1930] to live with energy & mastery, desperately. To despatch each day high handedly. To make much shorter work of the day than one used. To feel each like a wave slapping up against one. So not to dawdle & dwindle, contemplating this & that. To do what ever comes along with decision; going to the Hawthornden prize giving rapidly & lightheartedly; to buy a coat; to Long Barn; to Angelica’s School; thrusting through the mornings work (Hazlitt now) then adventuring. And when one has cleared a way, then to go directly to a shop & buy a desk, a book case. No more regrets & indecisions. That is the right way to deal with life now that I am 48: & to make it more & more important and vivid as one grows old.

That seems like the right way to deal with life now that I am 58 as well.

So I will press on, allowing her to be boring sometimes and trying not to feel that my boredom is a sign of my own inadequacy! In Volume 4 she has begun work on what becomes first The Pargiters, then Three Guineas and The Years. One of my first post-its: “I’m quivering & itching to write my–whats it to be called?–‘Men are like that?'”