On Sunday 3 May, Virginia has the macabre thought about what this diary of hers is worth anyway: Not much she warrants; to be burnt and the remnants dispersed at the bottom of the garden at Monks just as she and Leonard intend to be at life’s end. Her reading of Lawrence whilst in France seems to have inspired her to follow a course of ‘writing for writings sake’ [p.25]. And ‘…Because of a R. of ones Own’ she is confident in the quality of her critical writings – she says [p.25]. Throughout the following weeks VW is mostly concerned with bringing The Waves together and fit for publication, and the new organization of her work allows for a ‘happy life’ – she says [p.25]. In her 19 May entry she praises Lytton’s new book, Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (here at the Internet Archive) – a compressed style much more in keeping with his talents (as opposed to, say, Elizabeth and Essex). And comments cryptically and not so positively on Desmond MacCarthy’s book Portraits which he would like Hogarth to publish.
Shortly after, Woolf experiences the onset of a bout of serious mental illness. On Thursday 28 May she describes the preceding days, firstly in London and then Rodmell in startling (and alarming) words:
[…] a headache – flashes of light raying round my eyes, & sharp pain; the pain cut into me by Ethel’s voice […] then to Rodmell [and the same…] the light round my eyes [but the pain was less] If it were not for the divine goodness of L. how many times I should be thinking of death; always knocked over over as I am; but now the recoveries are full of infinite relief […]
Vol. 4 [p.27]
I can’t help but think forward a decade and those infamous final words of gratitude addressed to Leonard that she left behind, nor resist reading into Virginia’s words here a rehearsal of sorts – or one of many – for the inevitable.
VW is reading Lawrence; firstly Sons and Lovers and then his last work The Man Who Died; doing so, she says, in the interest of tracing his decline. And she is still mulling over her sequel to “A Room” which she is now referring to as “A Knock” (see January 1931 entry above). On 30 May Desmond informs that he will be publishing with Putnam instead of Hogarth (see 19 May above) with the rather curious excuse that he has come to the conclusion that this will be his “life work”, so to speak, and it follows a rather more “durable publisher” was required. (Perhaps VW did not feign enthusiasm well enough – well, who would have thunk it!)
June 1931 is characterized by dreams (Mansfield – still!) and spats (Ethel – again!), exhibitions (Duncan) and opera. Leonard finishes the first volume of his ‘study of the psychology of man as a social animal’ – After the Deluge (1931) – and is to give a series of broadcasts [footnote p. 30]. On 29 June Virginia divulges an idea for a book: a ‘fantastic’ voyage around the world; inspired by an evening with William Arnold Foster during which Leonard said that should they go to America (intimating such was planned) that they should not leave it at that but go on a grand world tour, to which Foster added that VW could then write “an Orlando of your tour” [p.32]. [Now that a truly ‘fantastic’ notion! What a tragedy that neither the tour nor VW’s literary writing of it ever eventuated. Alone the America bit! How I have always wondered what she would have made of that neck of the woods. Alas.]
And in July, Virginia’s simmering impatience with Ethel boils over with a fierce exchange of correspondence (see again Volume IV of her letters, nos. 2393 and 2396) only to be tempered by Ethel’s sweeping visit – with fanfare, flowers, and what not – as described in her 7 July entry. After a weekend sojourn at Rodmell, the Woolfs decamp there on 30 July for their summer respite; but not before Leonard has declared The Waves her best yet – “a masterpiece” [p.36].
Monks House Rodmell
Rodmell. August 1931. “… august words” Virginia says in her first entry during their summer retreat. Indeed. Her humor and mood appear as changeable as the weather, but still she basks in the countryside and the (relative) solitude. She meets Rosamund Lehmann whom she likes, but a visit with Mrs. Woolf torments her no end and leads to a quarrel with Leonard! There is the first diary mention of “Flush”; an exercise in light relief after the stringency applied to The Waves. She mentions it, but fails to grasp the significance of Harold Nicholson joining up with Oswald Mosley. Later, Woolf reflects upon the feverish political situation – domestically and internationally (on 24 August the Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour government fell in the face of a worsening global economic and financial crisis and was replaced by a National Government with MacDonald as Prime Minister) – and seems to instinctively recognize an impending gloom, dark clouds on the horizon. Telling is this remark:
Are we then living through a crisis; & am I fiddling? & will future ages, as they say, behold our predicament (financial) with horror? Sometimes I feel the world desperate; then walk among the downs. […] And all round the hills lay, low in cloud.
Vol. 4 [p.39]
I often recognize that in Woolf: Perhaps not exactly ‘fiddling while Rome burned’, but feelings of inadequacy, lack of formal education; questioning whether what she does, her art, her writing, is of any significance in the face of the Big Issues and a troubled world.
On 19 August VW writes: “My proofs [for the The Waves] … went yesterday; & I shall not see them again.[p.41]
It is not until almost two weeks later, on Tuesday 1 September, that Virginia writes again in her diary and we are told of ‘bed & headache & overpowering sleep’ [p.41]. It is as if the completion of every major work leaves a void that is manifested in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. Or, is it that the intensity Woolf brings to her craft keeps the impending darkness at bay, and without that …?
VW is trying to read Hugh Walpole’s Judith Paris just published and Scott’s Ivanhoe. On the latter, she finds it incredulous that her father should have fallen short of the mark [sic] in his appraisal of Sir Walter Scott. But, then, decides that she at least prefers him to Walpole. In other words, at this moment, impressed with neither it seems. On 3 September she is feeling in better spirits: ‘My brain is soft & warm & fertile again, I feel fresh & free with energy for talk…’ [p.42] She ends the entry with thoughts of her father again; of days long gone at St. Ives when the young Virginia recites to her the great events to be remembered on this day: ‘The battle of Dunbar, the Battle of Worcester & the death of Cromwell’ [p.43].
During the following days of September, 1931, Virginia has been inspired by John Lehmann to write a Letter to a Young Poet (for the brave, at the Morgan Library, is Woolf’s handwritten letter to Lehmann dated 24th Sept. 1931) and an anniversary appraisal of Donne , and again wonders how appropriate and trivial this stuff is that she does as the economy falls off the cliff, the sterling tumults into crisis and the gold standard suspended (this, from J. Maynard Keynes, is probably something like what she was perhaps hearing directly from him and most definitely from Leonard.)
Summer comes to an end. Virginia is fretting about the upcoming publication of The Waves; of those who have received early copies, some get it, others not so. She is not confident of its success, already imagines her diminished reputation, doesn’t expect sales. False modesty, or genuine angst?
52 Tavistock Square
The Woolfs are back in Tavistock Square by the first week of October. To Virginia’s astonishment the reviews of The Waves are laudatory and sales going through the roof (to later subside). All this, to her mind, inexplicable: that ‘this unintelligible book’ is being so well ‘received’, ‘that people can read that difficult grinding stuff!’ [p.47] On 20 October VW is mulling over ‘the Elizabethans’, that will evolve into the first essay titled ‘The Strange Elizabethans” in The Common Reader: Second Series. On or about the 23rd Virginia is ‘disheartened’, firstly, by the very mediocre in every respect review of Leonard’s book in the Lit. Sup., and, then, more so by his despondency and pessimistic attitude (along the lines of: years wasted; librarians in cahoots with the Lit Sup; fate of a work decided by columns afforded in a review), that she compares to an attack of influenza and traits she recognizes in all ‘Woolves’.
VW doesn’t write in her diary again until 16 November. The possibility of a lease in Gordon Square has fallen through, and the Woolfs will be allowed to remain for the time being at Tavistock (all this courtesy of a to and fro regarding property development with the Duke of Bedford Estate) – and they will in fact stay there until 1939. Virginia is negotiating with Vanessa a place for Lottie with Clive. And reading the latter’s book – An Account of French Painting. She quotes with obvious delight the praise given by Forster (in a letter dated 12 November 1931 and now in the Berg) for The Waves, he says: “[…] It’s difficult to express oneself about a work which one feels to be so very important but I’ve the sort excitement over it which comes from believing that one’s encountered a classic.” [p. 52] Forster’s opinion and that of others have led Woolf to feel confirmed in the literary route that she has chosen, and she goes on to say:
[…] I think I shall write out some very singular books […] 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!
Vol. 4 [p.53]
On the other side of the ledger, Woolf suspects others (whom she love) have not read it. To be mentioned is the footnote [p.53] confirming that Lytton in fact had not, and did all and everything not to: ‘It’s perfectly fearful […] I shudder and shiver – and cannot take the plunge. Any book lying about I seize up as an excuse for putting it off.’ Curious. To be explained only by Woolf’s reaction to Elizabeth and Essex and his serious illness.
She is ‘working very hard’, she says; she is focused on a new Common Reader and especially ‘the Elizabethans’, she says (see 20 October above, and the footnote p.53 mentions another essay included in the CR2 ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’); and she is contemplating how to write about old things (books) in a ‘simpler, subtler, closer’ manner. How to make the old new again, one could say, I say.
17 November: Virginia says it is a ‘foggy morning’. I wonder whether she may also have been talking about her mind. Vita calls; coming on top of VW dreaming weirdly about Vita, being dropped by Vita, Vita running off with someone else, and in the midst of all this breaking her teeth. Their relationship seems to be at an impasse. She also seems convinced that she is being ostracized by some of her friends because of The Waves. [I think we can feel what’s coming…]
An editor’s note reveals that in the next days the Woolfs were socially active, going to a concert and the cinema, and then went to Rodmell the next weekend. But during the following week Virginia’s headaches returned. For the next month she remained in a semi-invalid state: ‘a hermit’s life, without pleasure or excitement’. During this period they learnt just how sick Lytton was, and telephoned each day for news of him. They returned to Rodmell for Christmas on 22 December (where they were to remain until 10 January 1932).
Headed: Friday Xmas morning: ‘Lytton is still alive this morning…’ so begins Virginia’s melancholic missive of a less than celebratory day. Vanessa had imparted sad tidings of her and Clive’s visit to Ham Spray on Christmas Eve. Old age and death are now on her mind more than ever.
Talk [with Leonard] last night about death: its stupidity; what he would feel if I died […] And the feeling of age coming over us: & the hardship of losing friends; & my dislike of the younger generation; & then I reason, how one must understand. And we are happier now.
Vol. 4 [p.55]
As December ends, Virginia is irritated by Desmond’s accusation of ‘[her pushing] her method of dreaming subjectivity to its extreme limits’ [p.56 and footnote]. What does that mean? she appears to be asking – and I do too. She seems again to question Desmond’s depth of – what we would call today – emotional intelligence. The Woolfs lunch with Maynard and Lydia – the first espouses a rational philosophy of dying and death and the latter had three helpings of turkey. The Keyneses relationship with Lytton has frayed over time – Lydia finding the Ham Spray set up and Carrington in particular immoral. To have been a fly on the wall; for the conversation, at least between Maynard and Leonard, must surely have turned to the economic and monetary crises gripping the world. But perhaps at such moments Virginia retreats into private observation and Lydia helps herself to more turkey. But, what one can always tell, I think, is that Virginia likes being around Maynard and Lydia.
The last entry of 1931 is dated Tuesday 29 December. There is reason to believe that Lytton is somewhat better, and Virginia reflects on the roller-coaster ride of the last weeks: ups and downs; the complexities of her emotions about Lytton, something akin to the dark recurring bouts that afflict her own person. And that this time her recovery seems different to previously; she feels little, writes not at all, even though she knows not to do so means ‘[she] shall whizz into extinction like an electric globe fused.’ [p.57]
The pragmatist will have us know that she will finish this book here and begin a new one for 1932, that a pair of publishers are chasing her to reprint, and that ‘L. has sold his 450; & I 9400 – what figures!’ [p.57]
[1932]
Well, not quite! Woolf makes one more entry in Diary XX, written on 1 January 1932 before going up to London for the day on 2 January.
Virginia is ‘pretending’ its still 1932; she is ‘scribbling’, not writing. Her attempts at John Lehmann’s letter (to a Young Poet) were to no avail on the previous day, but with only a few days remaining at Monks she is using this space to help her find a way back to her self.
Waves, in fact has sold 9,650 (Deluge, 440). The Keyneses and Bells came to tea. The latter give the dish on their Christmas eve visit with Lytton and the whole morbid scene at Ham Spray, of numerous Stracheys in various degrees of distress, of Carrington (who it is supposed will commit suicide – oh, god, we know that she does), and Lytton’s stoicism, and somewhere along the way ‘L & I are sobbing’ [p.62] writes Virginia. There is also some talk of Desmond (and his ‘maniacal lies’), of the demise of Action, the weekly Harold Nicholson was editing for Oswald Mosley’s despicable New Party (appearing for the last time on 31 December.) Woolf writes in respect to Clive: We talked about going to bed in front of Angelica.[p.61] Make of that what you will, problematic, with or without the double entendre. A harmless jest I would suggest.
In the last paragraph Virginia zooms into the Sussex countryside, commenting on the horrid site of construction on the the bank opposite Asheham obstructing the view of the downs, and the gossip that more is to come. So, as 1931 ends, the Woolfs cannot escape the ruthless surge of progress – neither in the city (see 16 November above) nor in their beloved rural retreat.