diary xx: 8 September 1930-30 December 1930
On Monday 8th September, still at Rodmell and two weeks after her collapse, Virginia starts a new book. Despite her illness, she considers this the best summer ever at Monk’s House; the weather remains good, Vita is visiting the next day and on Wednesday they are going to Sissinghurst. She is not reading Priestly but is the young poet, Stephen Spender – he, after all, cares for her opinion.
The Woolfs returned to London on 4th October and Virginia’s entry of 11 October begins: “The fifty coffins have just trundled by, in lorries, spread rather skimpily with Union Jacks …& stuck about with red and yellow wreaths” [p. 322] A sight that doesn’t illicit terribly much sympathy from her nor, as she goes on to say, does she see the necessity for exaggerated national mourning. What she speaks of (from the footnote p. 322) is the coming to grief of the experimental flight of the R101 airship over France on Sunday 5th October in which 48 were killed, effectively ending the development of airships in the UK. October is filled with nervous energy with nowhere to go, an unsatisfactory cook that must go, a draft (written on the pages of this diary) of “I am Christina Rossetti” and always Ethel. It is not until the end of the month that Virginia gets back to the ‘grind’ of The Waves and, then (out of the blue?), she divulges the Woolfs’ intention of winding down Hogarth Press so that it publishes only (primarily) their own work.
NPG Ax143162© National Portrait Gallery, London
Saturday 8 November 1930: One at least more famous than she! On the previous evening she dined at Ottoline’s in the company of William Butler Yeats and Walter de la Mare. They talked about poetry (who could have thunk it!) and poets (Tom Eliot & Pound) but also dreams and Tagore and pictures and psychology and metaphor … An interesting encounter. Yeats she finds to be “very cordial, very generous…in command of all his systems, philosophies, poetics & humanities” [p.331], and which gives Virginia the opportunity to compare him with ‘poor Tom’ who had come to tea the day before – with Vivienne. If she thinks Yeats more famous than she, Vivienne surely then madder. This entry ends with “second thoughts [& that] Yeats & de la Mare talk too much about dreams to be quite satisfactory” [p.332].
Tuesday 2 December: Woolf writes of a tortuous dinner party at Ethel Sands on the previous evening attended by Arnold Bennett. Inserted is a note on his death the next year …“Soon after this AB went to France, drank a glass of water, & died of typhoid” (Bennett died in London on 27 March 1931 for the reason given by VW). On 12 December VW sees herself on ‘the final lap’ of The Waves. Through December there is the tragic death of a sporting idol (J.W.H.T. Douglas), a new editor (Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman and Nation), an uprising in Spain.
The Woolfs go to Rodmell on 23 December and by 27 December Virginia is confined to bed with influenza – but reading, for example, Defoe’s A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain and a memoir by E.F. Benson (perhaps a continuation of the interest sparked by Edith Sands – see 3 March above). On 29 December VW is still in bed and still reading – The Journal of a Somerset Rector – and thinking a lot about the said rector of whom she will later base her essay “The Rev. John Skinner” (included in The Common Reader, Second Series, 1935). A comparison between the later essay and this diary entry that is almost exclusively about Rev. Skinner would be interesting. We probably here have Woolf’s working notes.
The last entry for 1930 (and this third volume, but not Diary XX which is continued in the next year) is on Tuesday 30 December. Fittingly, given that it has been paramount on her mind since its inception as “The Moths”, Virginia “talks to herself” about The Waves. She is looking for more unity, more rhythm, more mood, more flow (‘torrent’, she says!), more ‘heat & currency’. Thinking about this has her physical temperature rising (99° she says!). And in the real world: she went to Lewes, the Keyneses came to tea. And for the writer, Virginia Woolf, the year finds it end …
[…] astride my saddle the whole world falls into shape; it is this writing that gives me my proportions.
Vol. III (p.343)
Last updated: January 10, 2023 [III VW Diary, 30th December 1930 p.343]