On Monday 13 September 1927 VW says of To the Lighthouse: “The blessed thing is coming to an end …” [p.109], but all has not gone well with her reviewing – too much procrastination, spending the money before it was earned – “my greed is immense” [p.109] but who can begrudge her Persian carpets, etc., before Leonard’s cut becomes due! That she didn’t end up writing on Willa Cather is a loss to us all. (And, more generally, the Americans! Edith Wharton: perhaps I recall something, somewhere …? But, for instance, on William Faulkner who I am reading at the moment I could sorely do with her insight! I try valiantly to find any trace of her having read him during the 1930s but as yet cannot. Surely, she can not have not read Faulkner?) Then on Wednesday 15 September, she returns to the note form with which she had begun to experiment with. Under “A State of Mind” she documents her changing moods, of being tossed (like a wave) into depression. (One must think of The Waves, to be published five years later, as an almost poetic rendering of this shifting state of mind.)
There are only two more entries in September. On 28 September VW explores what she identifies as her depressed state, but (so far) without illness. The last weeks of Summer have been less than satisfactory; visitors have not turned up or, when Vita in fact did, that lead to an argument with Leonard that lead to further more general irritations; she has fallen behind in her reading; she is idle and bored. Much gloom and much introspection. She ponders existence and that in the end one is alone. She resolves to “be much more considerate of L.’s feelings” [p.112] Then, on 30 September, she must expound on what she refers to as “the mystical side of this solitude” [p.113] and searches for an adequate description for this state of being with which she has been overcome and comes up with “a fin passing far out” [p.113], and ponders the impulse for another book, and how an idea can develop. A margin note referring to Oct. 1929 really does seem to suggest (as I mooted above) that here lay the roots to The Waves. As I recall, “fin”; for that of a porpoise, as the tip of waves before they break, is used descriptively numerous times in that novel.
The editor notes that the Woolfs returned to London on 4 October, and that VW makes no entries until the end of the month (nor did Leonard in his records for that matter).
London
On 30 October Virginia appears to be pleased to be back in London and seeing people again, but at the same time is still musing on the possibility of a book coming out of ideas, and driven by the voice of a woman in solitude. There is a weekend in Cambridge, dining with Maynard Keynes and LW delivering a paper at the Heretics’ Club; theater going with Vita and attending her lecture at the Royal Society of Literature presided over by Edmund Gosse. The two women comfortable in their found intimacy.
A further editorial note tells us that no new diary entries were made through much of November; Virginia’s days were full with To the Lighthouse, visiting with Vita from 6-8 November, and innumerable social gatherings. The Woolfs attended H.G. Wells’ dinner party on 4 November where they met the Shaws and Arnold Bennett. The latter said in his journal: “Both gloomy, these two … But I liked both of them in spite of their naughty treatment of me in the press.”
Tuesday 23 November, trashes on Sibyl Colefax (as she has done before). Wonders at “death” as an “experience”. Reflects upon her relationship with Vita: “…a spirited, creditable affair…all gain, I think; rather a bore for Leonard, but not enough to worry him. The truth is one has room for a good many relationships.”[p.117] An open, generous and very modern way of living a life. Virginia is “re-doing six pages of Lighthouse daily” and she thinks it to be her best and does not know what is to follow it. But, then she returns to her most recent musings, to quote:
[…I am] haunted by some semi mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; & time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the the past. One incident – say the fall of a flower – might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist – nor time either[…]
Vol. 3 [p.118]
Here, I feel encouraged to divert to my own personal (and literary) reflection upon The Waves and the extended metaphor within its title that binds the shifting narrative, and coming out of a coincidental and concurrent “flicking through” of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! – a famously complex novel, in which it is even more difficult (than in Woolf’s novel) to keep tack of the multitude of voices. At one point during Quentin Compson’s epic telling of the Supten saga (as he knows it) to his college room-mate, Shreve, he pauses to wonder at how generations somehow inhabit the same space – he is thinking here firstly about he and his father, but then families and people begin to merge, and he submerges himself in this extraordinary, also water-inspired, inner-dialogue: “Maybe we are both Father. Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let his second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm thinking Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us” [pp. 261-262 in my Vintage 2015 edition]. I wondered previously (see 13 September 1926) whether Woolf had read Faulkner, and I wonder now whether Faulkner read Woolf! Two writers separated by more than a wide expanse of ocean – by gender, by socialization – they seem to me to have traveled along the same wave length [sic!] And, a little research on my part (Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism Chapter 7 p.115 at Google Books offers some hints that require following up on) suggests Faulkner read Henri-Louis Bergson, and it is probable Woolf was also at least acquainted with his ideas.
There was one final entry for the year on Saturday 11 December. On 22 December, the Woolfs went to Zennor in Cornwall and spent Christmas with Ka and Will Arnold-Foster, returning to London on 28 December. The Woolfs were at Rodmell from 4-8 January, and on 17 January Virginia went with Vita for a couple of nights stay at Knole, Vita’s father’s home. VW continues to write in Diary XV, as she explains…
[1927]
Friday 14 January 1927:
[…] I have no new book, & so must record here (& it was here I recorded the beginning of The Lighthouse) the end. […I have] finished the final drudgery [the cleaning up of “To the Lighthouse”] […] complete for Leonard to read […] What I feel is that it is a hard muscular book […] it has not run out and gone flabby […]
Vol. 3 [p.123]
Sunday 23 January 1927: Leonard calls Virginia’s book a masterpiece; she revisits the not too enthralling and cut-short Christmas in Cornwall; mulls over an invitation to New York from the Herald & Tribune – concedes it to be tempting, but financially questionable (well, we know she was never to cross the Atlantic – what a shame!); Vanessa is off to France to a Duncan presumable stricken by typhoid (by the time she go there, he was on the mend).
And Vita? To be dined with on the next day, before she leaves for Persia on 28th January. Virginia writes of the stay at Knole the previous week; on the “decayed, dignified, smoothed, effete; respectable I think in his modest way” 3rd. Baron (it’s complicated!); on her tour of the buildings and grounds – quite obviously loved by Vita but not necessarily to her taste. What “remained” from her visit (and this is interesting!):
…Vita stalking in her Turkish dress, attended by small boys […] wafting them on like some tall sailing ship – a sort of covey of noble English life: dogs walloping, children crowding, all very free & stately […]How do you see that? I asked Vita. She said she saw it as something that had gone on for hundreds of years. They had brought wood in from the Park to replenish the great fires like this for centuries: & her ancestresses had walked so on the snow with their great dogs bounding by them. All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb & forgotten; but a crowd of people stood behind not dead at all; not remarkable; fair faced, long limbed, affable; & so we reach the days of Elizabeth quite easily. After tea, after looking for letters of Dryden’s to show me, she tumbled out a love letter of Ld Dorset’s (17th century) with a lock of his soft gold tinted hair which I held in my hand a moment. One has a sense of links fished up …which are usually submerged [but there is] no particular awe or any great sense of difference or distinction…
Vol. 3 [p.125]
She, then, concludes them to be “not a brilliant race”, and on coming home to the company of Marjorie Strachey, Tom Eliot, Nessa & Roger, noted that their little social set may seem constricted and there was “no talk of the clergy or the country; but how lovely & agile compared with the [text ends]” [p.125] Her entry abruptly ends, but presumably she meant to say: the Sackville-Wests.
I think it clear that the ideas behind what will become “Orlando” have begun to cohere in her literary imagination.