The entries for 20, 22, and 24 January were originally written in the makeshift Diary VI (see Vol. 1 Appendix 2) but were transcribed with additions into the new book for 1919 (Diary VII).
DIARY ViI: 20 January 1919-28 December 1919
Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond.
Monday 20 January 1919: Explaining her bedridden weeks at year’s beginning, we hear of the strict regime Virginia was placed under by Leonard whilst she convalesced, including writing for only an hour every day. I suppose teeth problems a hundred years ago could be the cause of extreme duress, but one may presume other reasons for the decline in her health – the fuss of Vanessa’s new baby, looking after two young boys, dissatisfaction with not getting done that which she planned. And the rational behind this recurring writing ban therapy imposed by Leonard (on whose advice?) is questionable. Woolf tells us that she has reread her diary for the last year, and is only mildly appalled at the quality – “…it does not count as writing” (to which I can only say I would give an awful lot to be able to scribble hastily with such verve!), and then proceeds to imagine the 50 year old VW accumulating her memories from these diaries. This musing suggests to her that she should evaluate and write up her various friendships – the idea being that the older self will be able to verify with all the hindsight of the years what she got right and what not. As with her previous contemplation of “scale of pleasures” (see Friday November 16th 1918), this desire to order her scale of affections is, I believe, even more Homeric in tone.
Then on the 22nd (having returned to bed for a a couple of days), she continues with this task she set for herself; grouping these friends of hers, appearing as they have at different times in her hitherto life, is an intricate matter – some are like concentric circles, others are independent and run parallel; all defined by place or person or both. The group she contemplates first is of longest standing, associated with Thoby, Cambridge and Hyde Park Gate – Lytton, Desmond and Saxon Sydney-Turner.
“Oddly enough …” Woolf says on Friday 24 January about having being moved to contact Lytton on this day. [Hardly odd, I would counter, as you did seem to place him atop the order of your affections, more odd is that you hadn’t been in contact with him for six months or so. What troubled you, Virginia, his complicated household of three, or is it his recent fame?] She then launches in into a monograph that includes a lot of “brilliants” only to be then mitigated as “conventionally [so]…” or “…lacks originality, & substance”, and “… when I think of a Strachey, I think of someone infinitely cautious, elusive & unadventurous” [p.236] The scalpel is sharp even with, perhaps especially with, friends. On Thursday 30 January, word is received from Lytton that he cannot dine with them as was arranged the previous week, with a mercurial excuse that Woolf appears to doubt. This thought she takes into the next days, and Desmond ringing for a chat (31 January) and his sympathetic enquiries of her person she places in direct contrast to Lytton and his involvement with himself and his new found celebrity. Later (Tues. Feb. 4th. indented in margin) Woolf questions her appraisal of Strachey. How fair, or right, could her arguments pertaining to his work be when he was so revered amongst his peers? Was she jealous of his success? She ponders this, then says: “…while I admire, enjoy [agree] up to a point …I’m not interested in what he writes”. She stands firm in her opinion: “…he is a great deal better than his books.” [p.238] A backhanded compliment to be sure!
Tuesday 18 February: VW first turns her attention to Desmond MacCarthy. And a wonderful portrait it is too. By far the nicest of the troop; of that she is clear. As unambitious as he is good natured, his work brilliant but fragmentary. She imagines a worth to be discovered:
I can see myself…going through his desk…shaking out unfinished pages from between…blotting paper, &…old bills….making…a small book…as a proof to the younger generation that Desmond was the most gifted of us all. But why did he never do anything? they will ask.
Vol. 1 [pp241-242]
And of Saxon Sydney-Turner Virginia despairs, as (she says) he says of himself: “one lonely if alone, & bored if in company” (a rather brilliant summing up of oneself I think!), but recognises a fundamental integrity that is dependable and uncomplicated, and can not be cast aside;
You would never find him wanting…callous…insincere…or grudging the last farthing of his possessions.
Vol. 1 [p242]
Having done with, for the moment at least, this trio, Woolf gets back to Mansfield – as she invariably does – only to wonder whether she and Katherine remain friends; having not heard from her since December. One should say, well, it IS only February; but to her the silence rings loud. A friendship “founded on quicksands” she bemoans [p.243]. They will eventually meet again on March 22 whereupon “something dark & catastrophic” is intimated, but VW will “find with Katherine [that what she doesn’t find with others]… a sense of ease & interest … about our precious art.” Am I wrong or is Woolf not aware of the severity of Mansfield’s illness (tuberculosis)? Certainly not, it seems, of the intensive treatment she had undergone in January [footnote p.248]. Perhaps she would have preferred to have been “dropped” by Mansfield; giving her adequate reason for disparagement, rather than, like others also, being kept justifiably at bay because of the dire circumstances or her health.
In general, beyond the shadow cast by KM, March [pp. 247-261] is ripe with anecdote and observation, and fun to read – Murry & Leonard & the Athenaeum, Charleston with Vanessa and Duncan and baby; evoking all the chaos and charm of this hybrid family, brilliant dining outs and teas, Hope Mirrlees (is she smitten? I ask), Night & Day, Clive & Gordon Sq. and the reminiscence inspired (VW quotes Vanessa along the lines of ” …in that drawing room as though it were 1907 again, & yet with so complete a re-arrangement of our parts”) [pp.260-261].
Before Easter Woolf is engrossed in essays for the Times Literary Supplement – “Modern Novels” (10 April 1919 and later in The Common Reader (1925) as “Modern Fiction”) and “The Novels of Defoe” (24 April) and, among other things, consternated by Clive’s contention that Eliot doesn’t like her while at the same time having him to dinner. A rare Easter is spent idling in London, entertaining and being entertained, before going to Asheham on 25 April.
Back in London at the beginning of May, the Woolfs quickly resume their routine, including on Tuesday 6 May going to the club after which, instead of going to “Bertie’s lecture” (a Bertrand Russell lecture series titled “The Analysis of the Mind”), she enjoys the entertainment of songsters at Trafalgar Sq. [footnote p.270]. Interesting I think that VW would forgo what one would have thought to be intellectually stimulating stuff for musical variety amongst the folk. Given her skepticism in respect to Freud & co., and irritation towards Adrian & Karin, perhaps she avoided intentionally any discourse venturing too close to matters of the “mind”.
Monday 12 May: Published by the Hogarth Press on this day: The Critic in Judgment by J. Middleton Murry, Poems by T.S. Eliot and Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf, & the footnote tells that the two last were printed and paper-covered entirely by the Woolfs. (Murry’s work is hard to track down in digitised form; the link is to a battered but presumably original cover and handwritten order notes made by LW. The other links are for the cover only of Poems and the entire digitised version of the original Kew Gardens, both on the British Library website.) May proceeds with a veritable bustle of activity in wonderful sunshine, and ends in Asheham, as she tells us on Whit-Monday 9 June, with a quarrel with Vanessa about her woodcut for Kew Gardens and ramblings around about that ended in the purchase of The Round House. On the 10th June they have the news, via James Strachey, that Maynard has resigned from the Treasury in protest against the conditions of the Paris Peace agreement (his prophetic The Economic Consequences of the Peace will be published later that year), which little did they realise would mark the beginnings of a legendary career. [p.280] The 14th June records a striking field-trip to Hampstead (exacerbated upon on 18th June) that has VW first visting with the Murrys, and then with Adrian and Karin (Costelloe), Ray (Costelloe) Strachey and Dorothy (Strachey) Bussy.
Thursday 3rd July: A colorful entry explaining how Monks House came to be acquired. On a meander to the Round House, spied upon by VW an auction sign for the aforesaid, and within days a love affair began that culminated in the purchase for £700. By 12th July she is already imagining the possibilities the future at Monks House will bring, but also noting the signing of the Peace Treaty at Versailles on 28th June and the gradual return to normality to be observed in the shop windows: “…Sugar cakes, currant buns, & mounds of sweets…”. She has a chance meeting with Morgan Forster at Waterloo, whereupon they discuss writing (Picture this: a Woolf & a Forster in the Summer of 1919 discussing amid the bustle of a crowded railway platform the literary form…!) and says how much she likes him, and then to Katherine’s and decides she likes her “more & more”. Did the calmness and kindness and intellectual stimulus of the Forster encounter inspire this warmth? On Saturday 19 July the official Peace celebrations are resolutely not her thing but described through the eyes of the servants: it rains, the procession through Richmond – “… soldiers & tanks & nurses & bands…they said the most splendid sight of their lives…”. A “servants festival” she calls it, and more:
…something got up to pacify & placate ‘the people’…There’s something calculated & politic & insincere about these peace rejoicings…with no beauty, & not much spontaneity…
Vol. 1 [p.292]
Her appreciation of the day was not improved by a 1917 Club dinner in honour of Annie Besant (VW’s opinion put to one side, another one of those extraordinary biographies from the time) that rankled her even more, and beyond Besant alone, generalising about a certain ‘sort’:
It [is] clear that the only honest people are the artists, & that these social reformers & philanthropists get so out of hand, & harbour so many discreditable desires under the disguise of loving their kind, that in the end there’s more to find fault with in them than in us.
Vol. 1 [p.293]
Ouch! & on the next day and the week after Woolf remains observant of the hypocrisy of it all; “…the peace at any rate is over” [p.294]. Her entry of Thursday 24th July, reports Morgan Forster as a dinner guest the evening before, and he perplexes and charms her and will visit them in Asheham if they pay his fare (“he has only £26 in the bank”).
This was the last diary entry until 7th September, and the last in this book until 7th October. After a typically busy Woolf few days, they went to Asheham on 29th July, and the socialising continued there – Mirrlees coming on the 8 August, Pernel Strachey and Forster (they obviously paid his train fare!) from 22-25 August, and a dinner party with Clive & Vanessa, Duncan, Roger Fry, Mary Hutchinson and Maynard on 24th August – and at Charleston. On 14 August the Woolfs attended the sale of contents at Monks House.