DIARY XI: 3 january 1922-2 January 1923
HOGARTH HOUSE, RICHMOND
Tuesday 3 January 1922: An early entry in the New Year upon the Woolves return from Rodmell. The wild winter weather is described with glee, and of Leonard’s heroic gardening under all and every condition. Virginia fumes still at Richmond’s editing, and vows not to write any more reviews. Just how long that particular resolution will last one may well ask! This night she will begin to read the Pastons (see 15 November 1921 above).
Weeks of January and into February fall away through illness – influenza or something more, is not clear. Barely does Woolf give time to bemoan the passing of months since she has last seen Desmond, before extending the thought to a contemplation of how many (months) there may be in a life – and all this as she approaches her 40th birthday [p.157]. A milestone of sorts that I can’t see touched upon again – presumably not celebrated but instead passed in the bed to which she is confined (ordered?) And again on February 14 she reports: “[the doctor] pronounced that my eccentric pulse had passed the limits of reason & was in fact insane [s0] laid in bed again…“[pp.160-161]. Whereby it is reasonable to suspect the dramatic pronouncement being more that of Virginia herself rather than of said doctor!
And, on the same day, she goes on to list what she is presently reading – and those of us with a tendency to more (a lot more!) than one lekture at any given time will be solaced – and I shall just mention “La Princesse de Clèves”. Firstly, whilst I have recently read the last of Hilary Mantel’s Th. Cromwell trilogy and so the name Clevès still reverberates, as in Anne who saved her neck – literally as well as figuratively – and who through no fault of her own contributed to Cromwell’s downfall (and also because I did for some time live around about the Berg bit in Julich-Cleves-Berg), and secondly because on 18 February 1922 Woolf expands, and quite vividly, upon her interest in Madame de La Fayette’s book:
…I must get on with La Princesse de Clèves. This masterpiece has long been on my conscience. Me to talk of fiction & not to have read this classic! But reading classics is generally hard going. Especially classics like this one, which are classics because of their perfect taste, shapeliness, composure, artistry. Not a hair of its head is dishevelled. I think the beauty very great, but hard to appreciate. All the characters are noble. The movement is stately. The machinery a little cumbrous. Stories have to be told. Letters dropped. It is the action of the human heart & not of muscle or fate that we watch. But stories of noble human hearts have their moments unapproachable in other circumstances. There is a quiet understated profundity in the relations between Madame de Clèves & her mother for example. If I were reviewing it, I think I should take for my text beauty in character. Thank God though I am not reviewing it.
Vol. 2 [p.169]
Woolf then goes on to voice her displeasure at the frivolous nature of reviewing, as opposed to, what she calls, criticism – an interesting topic in and of itself. Not up for review then, so I do wonder why this book should have become an important read for her. Surely suggested by something or someone. I would be interested in finding out whether it comes up again in her diary or in correspondence. And was she reading it in French or translation? (There are enough versions around on the internet, and these links are to wikisource.org – audio in French is available here. An unusual reading project – for a rainy day, another lockdown- to be sure!)
During March, “doctor’s orders” alternate with visits – Eliot, Forster (back from India), Clive and more, wondering over Lottie’s on-again, off-again operation, theater. An editorial note explains that there was a Memoir Club meeting on 4th April, and the Woolfs went to Monks House on 7th April, not returning to Richmond until 27th April, when they visit Lottie in hospital.
Woolf makes one entry on the day of her return; she is cold and bemoans the weather – “worse spring on record…days of bitter wind, blinding rain, gusts, snowstorms, storms every day…” and the difficulties at Rodmell without Nelly and Lottie (she doesn’t mention having just visited Lottie!) They seem to have met Lydia Lopokova at Gordon Square (with or without Keynes) en route back to Richmond, and an amusing description of a visit a few days earlier with Lord and Lady Robert Cecil. Again, an editorial interruption: VW is again ill and is bed-ridden during early May, and on 26th May has three teeth extracted (no, I for one am not counting!), but goes to Tidmarsh (Lytton) the next day anyway. On 31st May the Woolf’s go to Rodmell for Whitsun, and return to Richmond on 10th June 1922.
“Disgraceful!…” she says. Three times she says it on Sunday 11 June; summing up how she feels at not writing for so long, and that this now written is just an excuse not to return to Jacob, and an attempt to temper the expected depression at returning from the idylls of Rodmell – its (now!) perfect weather and the recuperative wonders of the countryside.
23 June 1922: Woolf reports on Eliot coming to dine the previous Sunday and reading his poem: “…great beauty & force of phrase; symmetry: & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not sure. […] One was left, however, with some strong emotion. The Waste Land, it is called.” [p.178] VW could not have known that they were that evening audience to the reading of a poem still considered, a hundred years on, one of the most important to be written in the 20th century. That same week there was also a Memoir Club meeting at which Mary Hutchinson confides that she is of the opinion Tom’s poem (that she too has heard) is autobiographical, and further we hear that “Mary purred in my ear” and “Mary kissed me on the stairs” – to which Woolf seemingly had little objection! Reading between the lines, one could note a change in their relationship – the early mistrust has been gradually replaced by a growing familiarity, even intimacy.[p.178] Also, on 15 June, an Apostles’ dinner had led to Morgan (Forster) staying the night and stimulating book talk had ensued. Typically, Virginia is growing more and more anxious as the publication of Jacob’s Room approaches and diverts herself with the ongoing Reading project, the stories “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (the very title says enough!) and “Miss Ormerod”, which would be published in The (New York) Dial in July 1923 and December 1924 respectively (both facsimiles available at the Hathi Trust), and the essay “On Re-reading Novels” in the TLS on 20 July 1922 (and which I wrote about at the end of this blog entry).[footnote p.179]
An all round remarkably inspired week, I would say! For Virginia Woolf, I dare say, just another week in the life of.
Many interesting observations in the next weeks of July – gossip and irritations surrounding the inhabitants of Gordon Square [p. 183] and Tidmarsh [p.185] – and the new month of August brings the resolution “to work methodically” [p.187] and an awareness of the Woolf’s growing celebrity. Amongst other things this characterised by having heard (from Clive B. a footnote suggests) that a certain
Mrs Nicholson thinks me the best woman writer – & I have almost got used to Mrs Nicholsons’s having heard of me. But it gives me some pleasure.
Vol. 2 3 August 1922 [p.187]
Mrs. Nicholson is of course the Hon Victoria (Vita) Nicholson, nee Sackville-West. Should we read Virginia Woolf’s life as a book, a legendary chapter is about to begin.
To be noted here by me, that this again is an example of one of these extraordinary moments that one reads from a place of privilege; knowing to where it is that a passing thought, a comment, an acquaintanceship – in the moment a triviality – will lead, and in the knowledge that Virginia Woolf, as she wrote, does not.
Joyce’s Ulysses remains a struggle for Woolf, and on Wednesday 16 August, says that she
should be reading Ulysses, & fabricating my case for & against. I have read 200 pages so far – not a third; & have been amused, stimulated, charmed […] by the first [chapters] then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples […] An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating […]
Vol. 2 [pp. 188-189]
These scribbled words have found their way into some infamy for providing a definition of an “illiterate, underbred book”. One is tempted to beckon the writer and reader, Mrs. Woolf, from her resting place to explain! Woolf recalls Eliot’s opinion, and tut tuts at his temerity to compare Ulysses with the work of Tolstoy, and whilst insisting on maintaining an open mind and her integrity as a critic, it is clear she is irritated and perplexed by this strange, difficult book. But she returns quickly to her own work – thoughts on Mrs. Dalloway and “Reading” – Pastons, Chaucer, “Greek”. (This will all come together in The Common Reader as the first essay “The Pastons and Chaucer” (see 15 November 1921) and the second, entitled “On Not Knowing Greek”.)
On 22 August Virginia is distracted by a visit from Sydney Waterlow and “writing off the fidgets” – her attacks of the fidgets I have learnt to be an alarm signal as to her state of mind, and sure enough the next day she has a headache. But before this I like her description of “rocking” herself into writing:
“First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature […] One must get out of life […] become externalised; very, very concentrated […] Sydney comes and I’m Virginia; when I write I’m merely a sensibility.
Vol.2 [pp. 191-193]
6 September 1922: Lots of “chatter” with Nessa and Duncan and Maynard, etc. Jacob’s Room proofs flutter in and demand attention. And, “I finished Ulysses …” she said,
& think it a mis-fire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer […] respects writing too much to be tricky […] absurd to compare him with Tolstoy
Vol. 2 [pp 199-200]
A harsh opinion one would have to say, even “genius” is a relative state, and one notes again this “underbred” expression – perhaps common amongst her class, but still grating to the contemporary ear – and it seems clear Eliot’s effusive praise still grates (and will remain a heated topic of discussion in the future).
The next day Leonard brings to Virginia’s attention “a very intelligent review” from across the Atlantic which impresses, and at least encourages her to look again. (Here is a – rather difficult to read, but worth the effort – facsimile of the review by Gilbert Seldes in The Nation on 30 August 1922.)
Saturday 8 October is tainted by news of Kitty Maxse’s death on 4 October after falling (“mysteriously”) from the banisters at her home. Whilst they had not spoken since 1908, one knows that Kitty (née Lushington) and her sisters were amongst the Stephen sisters earliest friends, and regulars at Hyde Park Gate, for not only had the Lushington girls’ father, Vernon, been a contemporary and friend of Sir Leslie Stephen but also acquainted with their mother through her Duckworth marriage, and so after his wife’s death it fell upon Julia Stephen to fill a maternal role. A role that Kitty tried to return in kind after the death Stella. Some would have it, and there is indeed some evidence to the effect, that Kitty Maxse was the inspiration for Clarissa Dalloway . (This TLS essay supports this theory and offers some other interesting Lushington/Stephen insights; my blog entry is here.) I do know from Woolf’s letters that the friendship with both Virginia and Vanessa became strained during the early years of Bloomsbury when the young Stephen siblings broke with familial and societal norms; a lifestyle not approved of by the very socially aware and conservative Kitty, and as early as 1907 while thinking about writing a novel she called Melymbrosia (that would be published in 1915 as The Voyage Out, and in which the Clarissa Dalloway character would make her first appearance), she is begging Vanessa for another name for the character she has tentatively called Cynthia, presumably to become Rachel, and wonders whether Lettice (to be Clarissa) is just a little too like Kitty.
Through October reviews for Jacob’s Room are mixed, but the reactions of her friends are enthusiastic – though she finds Lytton’s perhaps too much so. [pp.207-210]. At Logan Pearsell Smith’s in early November VW meets Percy Lubbock for the first time in twelve years, and remembers the last time to have be on the occasion of Lytton’s quickly withdrawn marriage proposal! What she doesn’t mention is whether Lubbock responds to, or counters, her “Re-reading” essay in the TLS (see 15 June 1922).
Disputes and irritations continue with Partridge – both personally (the Tidmarsh menagerie) and professionally (wanting to sell out to first Constables and then Heinemanns) – culminating with the final parting of the ways. On Friday 15 December Woolf doesn’t hold back on what she thinks of Ralph’s behaviour and character. Also, the previous evening she dined at Clive’s and met “the lovely gifted aristocratic Sackville West” – underwhelmed one could say;
Not much to my severer taste – florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist. She writeds 15 pages a day – has finished another book – publishes with Heinemanns – knows everyone – But could I ever know her? I am to dine there on Tuesday.
Vol. 2 [pp. 216-217]
Again, we know where this meeting is to lead, so it is fair to say the year ended with a bang!
From the editors’ note, Virginia did indeed dine with Vita Sackville-West on Tuesday 19 December 1922. The Woolfs spent Christmas at Monk’s House but there is no record of the stay, and they returned to London on 1 January 1923 whereupon she visited Vanessa and family at Gordon Square.
VW wrote an entry on Tuesday 2 January 1923 (mis-dated by her as 3 January) in the 1922 diary, DIARY XI. And a rather sad entry it is – “I am in one of my moods today…” -and she asks herself why and admits it is this desire for a life like Nessa’s – children, family life. Virginia remembers saying to herself years before: “…never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having…it often comes back to me. Never pretend that children, for instance, can be replaced by other things…one must […] like things for themselves.” She struggles to find the right words for this loss and discontent that she feels, she worries that she is becoming more and more self-indulgent. She doesn’t want to cause Leonard displeasure, but his controlling nature (even should it be in the interest of her well-being) irritates. “Middle Age then.” she says; she fears that are slinking into elderly years where time is of utmost importance. Time has become regimented, their work and pleasures dominated by the clock. She returns to Vanessa – for her, everything is done so freely – she can just take off and travel without the commitments that she and Leonard have; work, houses, servants. The entry ends thus:
I will leave it here, unfinished, a note of interrogation – signifying some mood that recurs, but is not often expressed. One’s life is made up, superficially, of such moods; but they cross a solid substance, which too I am not going to hack my way into now.
So this is the end of 1922
Vol. 2 [p.222]