Last updated: July 2, 2024 [IV VW Diary, 2 February 1932]
Volume Three concluded with Virginia Woolf’s final entry for 1930 – written at Monks House and while still unwell on 3o December. In the new year, 1931, she continues writing her diary in that book which she had started the previous September – that is, Diary XX. And so begins Volume Four covering the years 1931 through to 1935.
diary xx (Cont.): 2 January 1931-1 January 1932
Friday 2 January 1931: “This is the turn of the tide” [p.3] are the first words in this new year from Virginia Woolf. Ostensibly she is commenting on the welcome change in weather, but are the ‘tides’ of her literary preoccupations also being implied? Sure enough, after claiming the freedom of not allowing herself to be constrained by ‘resolutions’ she names a few: to be kind to herself, keep to herself, eschew moneymaking for the sake of and, yes, “To make a good job of The Waves.” [p.3]
Tavistock Square
On Wednesday 7 January the Woolfs returned to London. Virginia bemoans the cold and miserable weather – and influenza – that confined her indoors during their stay at Rodmell. Granted she did move along with The Waves. And an essay on Edmund Gosse was beginning to take form (pub. in The Fortnightly Review on 1 June and posthumously in 1946 in the collection The Moment and Other Essays).
During January, amongst other things: Clive goes to Zurich to have a deteriorating eye condition attended to; John Lehmann – a young poet and close friend of Julian Bell – enters the Woolf sphere (as a trainee manager of sorts at Hogarth); VW contemplates (to be precise: conceived while having a bath on 20 January) a sequel to a “Room of Ones Own” (that was to go through a series of titles – here, “Open Door” was being favoured – from whence the editor traces the conception of The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938) [p.6]) and this related to a speech she delivers to the National Society of Women’s Service – of which Pippa Strachey is secretary – on 21 January (this link by the way taken from an interesting newly come across website and here is an interesting encyclopedic entry on Pippa and Ray Strachey’s involvement in the women’s rights movement.) I note that the footnote [p.6] references The Pargiters (1977) the collection of essays edited by Mitchell A. Leaska that were the basis to The Years and includes the above said speech. (Available to read at the Internet Archive.)
Saturday, 7 February:
[…] I must record, heaven be praised, the end of The Waves. I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago […]
Vol. 4 [p.10]
To be more precise:
‘And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’
The waves broke on the shore.
The Waves, Virginia Woolf, 1931.
That final stand alone sentence must have been an afterthought, and is surely an apt conclusion to Woolf’s most modernist of novels. In her 7 February entry she refers back to the ideas that she first articulated in her diary entry of 30 September 1926, and is confident (she is actually madly pleased with herself!) that, inspired by that ‘fin’ she wondered about then – seen (or imagined) far in the distance at Rodmell where the marshes met the sky, she had found just the right image(s) and the appropriate expressionistic and fragmentary style to convey the turbulence of life. So, after more then five years, finally, la fin!
I have written about Janet Case before in this ‘my journal of a diary reading’, if I may call it that, and elsewhere, so I will only note here Woolf’s comments on 14 February after a visit:
Janet Case yesterday, shrivelled, narrowed, dimmed, aged & very poverty struck […] cheap shoes & dirty old velvet hat […clinging] to youth […] reads Tome Eliot &c: has her wits about her: but oh dear, the pathos when our teachers become our learners […she has had] a far harder life than I knew – illness, poverty, & all the narrowness of living […] A curious clutching anxious sense such old age gives one […]
Vol. 4 [p.11]
Sounds unkind, or perhaps just plain honest; whichever, it also highlights Woolf’s impatience with all the deprivations and indignities that is the ageing process, and her abiding fear of she herself becoming just another old woman – her brilliance dimmed, her achievements forgotten. It pleases me that when Miss Case dies a half a dozen years later, Woolf finds more generous words in her eulogy (see my link above) and there is only the sort of love that comes from a long friendship in this little letter written only a month before hand.
At the beginning of February, Virginia had attended a rehearsal of Ethel Smyth’s new opera, The Prison, and found a lot to say; nearing caricature in her description of Smyth’s physical presence and performative attributes but less forthcoming with her appreciation of the music [pp.9-10]. Then on 9 March she writes about the London premiere of the opera (on 24 February at the Queen’s Hall) and the party given afterwards – both to all intents and purposes being a disaster – and continues to seethe in the weeks to follow – venting her annoyance and impatience. It is worth quoting here:
Monday 9 March: […]Ethel’s remorseless fangs: her irresistible vanity, & some pang too for her child’s craving for a party – how tawdry how paltry: her facing out the failure of The Prison; her desperate good cheer; her one bouquet; her old battered wigged head. How mixed my feelings […] how exhausted & windswept & disillusioned I was – with my ears ringing, & no warmth depth comfort slippers & ease anywhere: but all effort & strain: & the sense of the futility of it all.
Monday 16 March: […] Ethel – that valiant truculent old moss-trooper of a woman. She is so gritty to be brother with. And I respect her capacity for ignoring me. […she says] she assumed from my voice – exhausted, cold & gruff – that ‘all was over’. Her strength of feeling is her power over one. This drives her […] Her Press has been catcalling […] Never mind. She has other schemes on foot at once. A curious problem – what she minds, what she thinks, about her music. She descends to explanation […] that seem deplorably low down.
Vol. 4 [pp. 12-14]
Mentioned in the footnote [p.13] is a letter to Ethel from this time. And it is useful to compare VW’s private thoughts above with those letters during the corresponding time (Ethel’s version, so to speak, would of course give a fuller picture of the kerfuffle!) – from the curt typewritten note of 9 March through April, and from what seemed to be almost a break in their friendship to a return to the playful banter Virginia accorded only her intimates. My reading (of diary and letters) suggests VW attended her friend’s opera only reluctantly, the party even more so – after witnessing a rehearsal and as a matter of taste, she was uncertain of its merit; the brouhaha afterwards was absolutely not her thing and she seems to have expected Ethel to have known as much. But what really seems to have irritated, was Ethel’s lack of composure in the face of negative criticism and instead allowing herself to be drawn into petty posturing. This was the critic, Virginia Woolf, with a bee in her bonnet defending the ‘art’ of criticism – not a higher art to be sure but one that she experienced from both sides. (Some more on Ethel Smyth in my blog post here.)
Saturday 28th March: Arnold Bennett, last seen by Woolf in December 1930, died of typhoid fever the previous day and, irrespective of their differences, she hits a kinder note amidst the not so – a veritable word potpourri reserved only for the deserved:
… leaves me sadder than I would have supposed. A lovable genuine man ….well meaning; ponderous; kindly; coarse … Glutted with success: wounded in his feelings; avid; thick lipped: prosaic intolerably; rather dignified … deluded by splendour & success; but naïve; an old bore; an egotist … a shop keepers view of literature … I remember his determination to write 1000 words daily … some sorrow that now he will never [again…methodically cover] his regulation number of pages in his workmanlike beautiful but dull hand […] he abused me; & I yet rather wished him to go on abusing me; & me abusing him. An element in life […] taken away. This is what one minds.
Vol. 4 [pp. 15-16]
One could presume: Virginia Woolf is not left cold by this sudden loss of one of her prime antagonists. And, one could say: Bennett – unwittingly – played an important part in impelling an inner-life, previously only hinted upon, to reveal itself; breaking out (of the confines of realism) and daring to write itself – herself – anew. I also refer to VW’s Edmund Gosse essay previously mentioned (see 7 January 1931 entry above); the opening paragraph of which has Bennett compared favourably with Gosse (also in footnote [p.16]). Another example in which Woolf’s diary musings often, sooner or later, find their way into her work. Here, very soon indeed.
The editorial note and footnote [p.16] explains the next days. On Saturday 28 March the Woolfs drove to Liphook in Hampshire and stayed the night with Sidney & Beatrice Webb. Returning to London, they visited the House of Commons on Monday 30 March from which follows VW’s essay “This is the House of Commons”, one of the six so-called “London scenes” written for Good Housekeeping (here in its entirety at the Internet Archive). The next day they attended the memorial service for Arnold Bennett. They went to Rodmell for Easter on 2 April and returned to London on 9 April.
by Ray Strachey, late 1920s or early 1930s
Saturday 11 April 1931: Looking forward to a sojourn in France, Virginia is busy not only finishing off her articles for Good Housekeeping and the Gosse piece for the Fortnightly Review but also two pieces for the TLS – ‘Lockhart’s Criticism’ (later published post-posthumously in The Moment and Other Essays) and ‘“Aurora Leigh”’ later published in The Common Reader Second Series). She has learnt to ‘dash’ and not to ‘finick’ she says but the correcting ‘nauseates’ still. She sees Pernel Strachey and Peter Lucas. About the former we know much – family, principal Newnham College etc. – so I just add the Wiki image (r) because it is of a painting by her sister-in-law and it seems to be from around about this time, and it is sort of nice to have some help in imagining the person sitting opposite sharing tea perhaps and conversation all those years ago. And the latter turns out to be a much more interesting personage than VW perhaps gave him credit for – his ‘pertinacity’ (as ascribed to him by VW) mostly appeared well placed. Lucas was one of the few of her acquaintances that saw unequivocally – and very early – fascism for what it was, loudly decried the policies of appeasement, in wartime did his bit at Bletchley and published widely; helping classical poetry to be accessible to ‘the everyman’ through translation. And, his later comments – in 1958 – on ‘Bloomsbury’ are certainly worth quoting:
The society of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey was far from being in the ordinary sense a happy family. They were intensely and rudely critical of each other. They were the sort of people who would read letters addressed to others. They tormented each other with endless love affairs. In real crises they could be generous, but in ordinary affairs of life they were anything but kind … Dickinson and Forster were not really Bloomsbury. They were soft-hearted and kind. Bloomsbury was certainly not that.[56]
Stone, Wilfred, ‘Some Bloomsbury Interviews and Memories’, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol.43, No.2 (Summer, 1997), p. 190; Lucas’ words as reported in Wilfred Stone’s notes (from Wikipedia)
Harsh perhaps, but it seems to confirm a lot of what we know (from here and elsewhere).
On 16th April the Woolfs departed for France, returning on 30th April. VW writes that, despite (or because of) 19 years marriage, that union is such that it more than overcame the wretched weather. Here, she pastes into her diary her notes of their travels, bemoaning their haphazardness; headed as she presumably did and summarized by me – including an abbreviated (only x amount of locations appear to be supported) Google map.
Diary of Tour
to La Rochelle,
Brantome &c.
April 16th 1931
Before the crossing, on 16th April 1931 the Woolf’s dined at the Bridge Hotel (of some historic significance) in Newhaven and an ever alert Virginia wondered at the other guests, imagining their stories and the potential for her stories no doubt: a what she presumed to be a lesbian pair, newly weds, an elderly married couple. From 17th through the weekend, they drive the country roads to Saumur via Alençon in the cold and wet – the food is not always great, the wine mostly is and the bath water cold to not so. They visit the Abbey of Fontevrault and see dead Plantagenets and Virginia sees (sort of) Edith Sitwell ([…] was a granddaughter of Henry Somerset, 7th Duke of Beaufort through whom she was descended from the Plantagenets in the female line.[2]Wikipedia):
…Went to Fontevrault. Saw beautiful bare old convent church. […] The tombs of Plantagenets: like Edith Sitwell: straight, narrow side by side […]
Vol. 4 (p.190
Monday 20th April en route to La Rochelle – rain and two punctures and VW reads Sons and Lovers. The next day they drive to Marennes – “lovely country” drives, LW partakes of oysters – and the precise itinerary over the next days is unclear (editor’s note on p.17 says a more exact version is given in LW’s diary). Footnote (p.21) says they visited the Château de Montaigne on Thursday 23 April (a woman came and showed them around – oh, for those days before mass tourism!). And to Bergerac and to Périgueux according to her notes from Saturday 25 April in which she begins by saying they are in Angoulême, and then later that they spend the night at Brantôme – “cheap, clean, elementary Inn” [p. 21] VW says but happily there are letters awaiting her! They take walks in the region and love the country side “O to live here, we said.” [p.22]; better than Cassis, read as: better than Vanessa’s place.
Sunday 26 April to Poitiers and the Woolfs, satisfied, are homeward bound. The next day they continued via Chinon (exploring the castle) to Le Mans – bad weather, bad roads and the food in her opinion compares not favorably with the White Hart Lewes! Again, Virginia’s notes are neither clear nor extensive. But they stay a night at Dreux, visit Nonancourt and Tillières-sur-Avre, and spend their last day in Caudebec.
[End of inserted pages]