Tuesday, November 18th.
What I was going to say was that I think writing must be formal. The art must be respected. This struck me reading some of my notes here, for if one lets the mind run loose it becomes egotistic; personal, which I detest. At the same time the irregular fire must be there; and perhaps to loose it one must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that. I am driving my way through the mad chapters of Mrs D. My wonder is whether the book would have been better without them. But this is an afterthought, consequent upon learning how to deal with her. Always I think at the end, I see how the whole ought to have been written.
Saturday, December 13th.
I am now galloping over Mrs Dalloway, retyping it entirely from the start, which is more or less what I did with the V.O.: a good method, I believe, as thus one works with a wet brush over the whole, and joins parts separately composed and gone dry. Really and honestly I think it the most satisfactory of my novels (but have not read it cold-bloodedly yet). The reviewers will say that it is disjointed because of the mad scenes not connecting with the Dalloway scenes. And I suppose there is some superficial glittery writing. But is it ‘unreal’? Is it mere accomplishment? I think not. And as I think I said before, it seems to leave me plunged deep in the richest strata of my mind. I can write and write and write now: the happiest feeling in the world.
Monday, December 21st.
Really it is a disgrace—the number of blank pages in this book. The effect of London on diaries is decidedly bad. This is I fancy the leanest of them all, and I doubt that I can take it to Rodmell, or if I did, whether I could add much. Indeed it has been an eventful year, as I prophesied; and the dreamer of January 3rd has dreamt much of her dream true; here we are in London, with Nelly alone, Dadie gone it is true, but Angus to replace him. What emerges is that changing houses is not so cataclysmic as I thought; after all, one doesn’t change body or brain. Still I am absorbed in ‘my writing’, putting on a spurt to have Mrs D. copied for L. to read at Rodmell; and then in I dart to deliver the final blows to The Common Reader, and then—and then I shall be free. Free at least to write out one or two more stories which have accumulated. I am less and less sure that they are stories, or what they are. Only I do feel fairly sure that I am grazing as near as I can to my own ideas, and getting a tolerable shape for them. I think there is less and less wastage. But I have my ups and downs.
1925.
Wednesday, January 6th.
Rodmell was all gale and flood; these words are exact. The river overflowed. We had 7 days’ rain out of 10. Often I could not face a walk. L. pruned, which needed heroic courage. My heroism was purely literary. I revised Mrs D., the chillest part of the whole business of writing, the most depressing—exacting. The worst part is at the beginning (as usual) where the aeroplane has it all to itself for some pages and it wears thin. L. read it; thinks it my best—but then has he not got to think so? Still I agree. He thinks it has more continuity than J.’s R., but is difficult owing to the lack of connection, visible, between the two themes. Anyhow it is sent off to Clark’s, and proofs will come next week. This is for Harcourt Brace, who has accepted without seeing and raised me to 15 p.c.
Tuesday, April 8th.
I am under the impression of the moment, which is the complex one of coming back home from the South of France to this wide dim peaceful privacy—London (so it seemed last night) which is shot with the accident I saw this morning—a woman crying oh, oh, oh, faintly, pinned against the railings with a motor car on top of her. All day I have heard that voice. I did not go to her help; but then every baker and flower seller did that. A great sense of the brutality and wildness of the world remains with me—there was this woman in brown walking along the pavement—suddenly a red film car turns a somersault, lands on top of her and one hears oh, oh, oh. I was on my way to see Nessa’s new house and met Duncan in the square, but as he had seen nothing he could not in the least feel what I felt, or Nessa either, though she made some effort to connect it with Angelica’s accident last spring. But I assured her it was only a passing brown woman; and so we went over the house composedly enough.
Since I wrote, which is these last months, Jacques Raverat has died; after longing to die; and he sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the happiest days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom. And he will, I suppose, both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own. Jacques died, as I say; and at once the siege of emotions began. I got the news with a party here—Clive, Bee How, Julia Strachey, Dadie. Nevertheless, I do not any longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death. I like to go out of the room talking, with an unfinished casual sentence on my lips. That is the effect it had on me—no leavetakings, no submission, but someone stepping out into the darkness. For her though the nightmare was terrific. All I can do now is to keep natural with her, which is I believe a matter of considerable importance. More and more do I repeat my own version of Montaigne—‘It’s life that matters.’
I am waiting to see what form of itself Cassis will finally cast up in my mind. There are the rocks. We used to go out after breakfast and sit on the rocks, with the sun on us. L. used to sit without a hat, writing on his knee. One morning he found a sea urchin—they are red with spikes which quiver slightly. Then we would go and walk in the afternoon, right up over the hill, into the woods, where one day we heard the motor cars and discovered the road to La Qotat just beneath. It was stony, steep and very hot. We heard a great chattering birdlike noise once and I bethought me of the frogs. The ragged red tulips were out in the fields; all the fields were little angular shelves cut out of the hill and ruled and ribbed with vines; and all red, and rosy and purple here and there with the spray of some fruit tree in bud. Here and there was an angular white or yellow or blue washed house, with all its shutters tightly closed, and flat paths round it, and once rows of stocks; an incomparable cleanness and definiteness everywhere. At La Ciotat great orange ships rose up out of the blue water of the little bay. All these bays are very circular and fringed with the pale coloured plaster houses, very tall, shuttered, patched and peeled, now with a pot and tufts of green on them, now with clothes, drying; now an old old woman looking. On the hill, which is stony as a desert, the nets were drying; and then in the streets children and girls gossiped and meandered all in pale bright shawls and cotton frocks, while the men picked up the earth of the main square to make a paved court of it. The Hotel Cendrillon is a white house with red tiled floors, capable of housing perhaps 8 people. And then the whole hotel atmosphere provided me with many ideas: oh so cold, indifferent, superficially polite, and exhibiting such odd relationships; as if human nature were now reduced to a kind of code, which it has devised to meet these emergencies, where people who do not know each other meet and claim their rights as members of the same tribe. As a matter of fact, we got into touch all round; but our depths were not invaded. But L. and I were too too happy, as they say; if it were now to die etc. Nobody shall say of me that I have not known perfect happiness, but few could put their finger on the moment, or say what made it. Even I myself, stirring occasionally in the pool of content, could only say But this is all I want; could not think of anything better; and had only my half superstitious feeling at the Gods who must when they have created happiness, grudge it. Not if you get it in unexpected ways, though.
Sunday, April 19th.
It is now after dinner, our first summertime night, and the mood