Volume Two: 1920-1924

Rodmell…

… so heads VW her entry on Monday 2 August, and then rises (like her well baked cake) the domestic, playful voice from within that often characterizes her inner dialogue when she is away from all the hectic and demands of London (or more precisely Richmond):

Bank Holiday. I’m [in] the middle of baking a cake, & fly to this page for refuge, to fill in moments of baking & putting in my bread. Poor wretched book! Thats the way I treat you! – Thats the drudge you are! Still, take comfort from the thought that I brought you all the way from London, to save scribbling on half sheets which get lost…

Vol 2 [p.53]

All that is lost upon Life’s Way…for just one moment, the curious mind wonders at what may have gone astray…then pauses and considers all that is there and whether one has a right to say: “more!”

& Sussex is her home as the summer days pass, visitors and local funerals, reviews that she have trouble getting written, a Jacob’s Room that barely stutters. An end August visit to London [pp61-62] and a goodbye to Katherine – her last? Does she wonder this or do I? On 31st August they secure the future of the press through a partnership with Ralph Partridge. Strachey comes and goes and Eliot comes to stay on 18th September and annoys and interests her in equal measure. A last day at Rodmell on Friday 1st October, and VW reflects on how the weeks have flown, how “enchanting” they leave their summer abode, how she feels a headache looming and concedes “It was this, not Eliot I suppose, that broke off Jacob.” [p70]. She speculates on her work and that of Leonard, on finances, on the possibilities of travel, and pens a charming au revoir to a summer in the countryside:

One of the charms of Rodmell is the human life: […] the same thing at the same hour: when the old vicar performs erratically on the bells, after churching the women, everybody hears him, & knows what he’s up to. Everyone [is in] their garden; lamps are lit, but people like the last daylight, which was brown purple last night, heavy with all this rain. What I mean is that we are a community.

Vol. 2 [p71]

Had Virginia Woolf finally found her home? Of course we know she had.

And, back in Richmond …

the diary is not returned to until Monday 18th October – VW does not elaborate on the circumstances that accorded her silence, and does not mention the headache or Jacob, one can only say that a breakdown in her health often coincided with a change of place. She does though bemoan that plans for travel must be forsaken because Leonard is to contribute to a Contemporary Review supplement after all (and for a lesser fee!), and they quarrel. She goes on to report that “the usual people” are seen en masse – Nessa, Duncan, Clive, Stracheys, etc. – interesting is Koteliansky and his Tchekhov project for Hogarth Press that was to be published the next year as The Note-Books of Anton Tchekhov Together with Reminiscences of Tchekhov by Maxim Gorky, trans. by Koteliansky and Leonard. [pp.71-72]

A week later, on Monday 25th October, Woolf seems overcome by a melancholic mood swing, or is it more than that? She grants that by writing down how she feels, her gloomy state diminishes, but quickly admits that she doesn’t do so enough and offers her reasoning for this (that even she must know has nought to do with “vanity”), which is so telling that I repeat it here.

I want to appear a success even to myself. Yet I don’t get to the bottom of it. Its having no children, living away from friends, failing to write well, spending too much on food, growing old – I think too much of why’s and wherefores: too much of myself. I don’t like time to flap around me. Out here no one comes in to waste time pleasantly. If they do, I’m cross. The labour of going to London is too great Nessa’s children grow up, & I can’t have them in to tea or go to the Zoo. […] Yet I’m persuaded that these are trivial things: its life itself, I think sometimes, for us in our generation so tragic – no newspaper placard without its shriek of agony from some one. […] Unhappiness is everywhere; just beyond the door; or stupidity which is worse. […] To write Jacob’s Room again will revive my fibres […] but I don’t like what I write now. And with it all how happy I am – if it weren’t for my feeling that its a strip of pavement over an abyss.

Vol. 2 [pp72-73]

Wednesday 10 November: “I have walked some way further along the strip of pavementwithout falling in.” So sees Woolf then the precariousness of each step she takes. She intimates she makes herself busy – because she must. On Tuesday 23 November: She sees too many people – because she must. She has a routine – printing, scheduling, days off – because she must. Woolf is formulating her own strategy for survival. And “…so my strip of pavement (I bag that phrase for Jacob) widens.”

A hasty scan does not confirm that she uses that phrase in Jacob’s Room, but the voice accompanying Jacob and the pretty, brainless Florinda on an evening’s walk (Chapter 6) ponders:

Stop a man; ask him the way; he’ll tell it you; but one’s afraid to ask him the way. What does one fear?—the human eye. At once the pavementnarrows, the chasm deepens. There! They’ve melted into it—both man and woman.

Virginia Woolf. Jacob’s Room (Kindle Locations 965-967).

It seems to me an interpretation is very often a matter of perspective – here, in more ways than one. The “human eye” reference may alert one to what is being suggested. Perhaps Virginia spent some time looking over Vanessa’s shoulder as she practiced drawing as a girl, though she herself may well have come across the idea of a “vanishing point” in a most basic drawing class. Imagine, then, a man and woman disappearing into the far, their path sinking into nothingness, their persons melting into each other. Not exactly the same as the perilous path VW had to maneuver through life, but certainly a powerful metaphor for: out of sight is not necessarily out of mind, and just how far there is to fall.

Sunday 5 December: “The Memoir Club was fearfully brilliant – I mean I was…” so begins the entry! The footnote on the same page [p77] states the referenced meeting had been held on 17 November at the MacCarthy’s, and that Woolf’s contribution had probably been “22 Hyde Park Gate”. From Hermione Lee’s biography (Chapter 8: Abuses) we are told (Lee seems to have mistakenly dated these papers at 1921-22 because a page later she in fact refers to this 1920 diary entry) that it was on this evening that VW famously suggests the incestuous overtures of George Duckworth.

…These are provided in the two papers she writes for the Memoir Club in 1921 and 1922. In the first of these, ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’, she describes George coming into her room in the dark at night, after their outings: “Don’t be frightened”, George whispered. “And don’t turn on the light, oh beloved. Beloved – ” and he flung himself on my bed, and took me in his arms.’ The old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia, she adds in her peroration, never knew that George Duckworth was ‘lover’ as well as ‘father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls’…

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf . Random House. Kindle Edition.

As Lee notes, I too am struck by the difference in her attitude and approach at this Memoir Club evening as compared to that at the first meetings at the beginning of the year. The obvious discomfort she felt at exposing too much of herself has seemingly been replaced by an almost no holds barred attitude – perhaps tickled by the applause. One can wonder whether she had by accident or design come up with a strategy of combining the factual with fictive elements, such that the essence is true; and that then is what “memoir” really is – not bland facts but the essence of a moment. Certainly, conspicuous is her thrill at the reception her work was granted by the Club, and minds one to be alert to what happens next. Chapter 8 of Lee’s book is a must read in this very murky, never totally resolved, matter.

As 1920 draws to an end, there are visits with the old and true, Lytton and the Cases, but also new acquaintances like Molly Hamilton, everyone seems to have a book out (except me, she may well be thinking!) of which she says she has not read any (though I thought she did read Mansfield’s “Bliss”) – worth mentioning (especially as I can link to them) is Roger Fry’s Vision and Design and Eliot’s essay collection The Sacred Wood. [pp78-82]

On Wednesday 22 December 1920 the Woolfs went to Rodmell for Christmas, returning on Sunday 2 January 1921. On that date VW writes one final entry to conclude Diary IX, and in which she enjoys herself immensely at the the expense of a Mrs Hawkesford, the wife of the Rector of Rodmell. A parody of village clerical life to be filed away for future reference perhaps.[pp85-86]