This second volume of Virginia Woolf’s diary begins in 1920. The war years are over but the ‘peace’ came at a high human and economic cost for all, and it is a ‘peace’ that Woolf does not quite believe in. Personally and professionally though her star is in the ascendancy – her second novel, Night & Day, was published towards the end of 1919 and will soon to be also in America along with The Voyage Out, reviews are commissioned aplenty, Leonard is secure in his work and the Hogarth Press evolving into a joint venture of impressive stature. Irritations with brilliant friends and equally brilliant rivals, often one in the same, are no more than that – even when she suggests they are! In October 1919 the Woolfs had bought Monks House in Rodmell; instinctively recognizing its potential to become their home -for ever and ever – and working hard at making it just that. The Woolf social and professional life, then, continues in its familiar cycle: between Richmond and Sussex, and London always in-between.
Christmas festivities were forsaken in December 1919 as first Leonard, and then Virginia, became ill (with influenza), therefore delaying their planned retreat to Monks House until 29th December. The first diary entry for the year, on 7th January 1920, was in fact written in her 1919 book and later pasted in the new book – Diary IX – my reflections on which follow. On 8th January the Woolfs returned to Richmond.
DIARY IX : 7 January 1920 – 2 January 1921
MONKS HOUSE, RODMELL.
Wednesday 7 January: Written on their last evening at Monk’s House, Virginia Woolf shares a little of the domestic life in their new abode – meals being ordered in; hearty, simple fare cooked by by a Mrs. Dedman (as they are yet to install a cooker in the kitchen), and there is a village girl, Elsie, who comes in daily to clean. And a beautiful description is given of their garden and the surrounding landscape – down and meadow – its flora and fine feathered inhabitants.
HOGARTH HOUSE, RICHMOND.
Saturday 10 January, and back in Richmond, Virginia writes her first entry for the new year, and she has apparently dived immediately back into the familiar lifestyle; there is some servant-baiting, going into London is again the norm – to dine, to shop, to visit: the 17 Club or see Vanessa in Regent Street. On Wednesday 14 January she records an exchange at the Club with Marjorie “Gumbo” Strachey (Lytton’s youngest sister) so:
My intimacy with Gumbo came on the flood tide of her appreciation of N. & D. … [her expressed] sentiments warm one to people. Apart from them…I have warmed to her these past years…[referring to MS’s novel] whether I too, deal thus openly in autobiography & call it fiction?
Vol. 2 p.7
This is enlightening in two respects. Firstly, how susceptible Woolf is to words of flattery, even craves them, and secondly, the consideration of Strachey’s novel prods her to consider the relationship between autobiography and fiction in her own work, and ponder just how far one can go in this respect. The background of Strachey’s doomed affair with Josiah Wedgwood is picturesquely detailed on 17 January 1915 (Vol 1. pp.20-22). Refer to this blog post for an interesting additive to the Jos. Wedgwood story.
It is Monday 26 January, and the day after her 38th birthday, and Woolf records proudly that her ideas for a new form of fiction have begun to take form. (If I may so formulate.) The literary significance is obvious; at least in her diary she had previously not so explicitly stated her intent of charting a new course in her writing. Though it was clear in the short time since the publication of Night & Day that she was had become aware of its shortcomings; that it was not quite the “modern” novel she would have liked to have written. I can do nothing but quote and paraphrase the passage in question, which I see as an excellent insight into Woolf’s creative process and development; coming at the end of what she considers her apprenticeship and at the beginning of a new phase in her writing.
…happier today than [I was] yesterday having […] arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel. Suppose one thing should open out of another – as in An Unwritten Novel – only not for 10 pages but 200 or so – doesn’t that give the looseness & lightness I want: doesnt that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything? [And] the human heart…? [The approach] will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything a bright as fire in the mist. […]Whether I’m sufficiently mistress of things – thats the doubt; but conceive mark on the wall, K[ew].G[ardens] & unwritten novel taking hands and dancing in unity. […] My hope is that I’ve learnt my business sufficiently now to provide all sorts of entertainments. […] I must still grope & experiment but this afternoon I had a gleam of light […]
Volume 2 [pp.13-14]
The footnotes to these pages provide information on the three short stories VW refers to, the first two of which I have mentioned in passing. The Mark on the Wall was published in Hogarth’s first publication (Two Stories) in 1917 and Kew Gardens in 1919. An Unwritten Novel was published in the London Mercury in July, 1920. All were reprinted by Hogarth in the collection Monday or Tuesday (1921).
by Philip Edward Morrell, vintage snapshot print, 1930
NPG Ax143170
Saturday 31 January: And, given (as noted above) it is in the London Mercury that An Unwritten Novel is first published, Woolf’s entry on this day is particularly interesting as it includes a vivid rendition of the Squires coming to dinner on the previous Tuesday. The Squires being John Collings Squire, editor of the aforesaid from 1919-1934 and his wife Eileen. VW makes much of Squire’s attempt to win her over to his publication in favour of Middleton Murry’s Athenaeum, and uses the opportunity for a (delightfully!) brutal portrait of Mrs. Squire: ” …spread more widely…settled into kind of whitish sediment…a sort of indecency to me in her passive gloating contentment …like some natural function, performing automatically – a jelly fish – without volition, yet with terrifying potentiality…” [p.15] The Wiki entry paints an equally unfavourable picture of Mr. Squire whose shifting political persuasions (read: to the right, Mosley)seems to have approximately tracked that of the Nicolsons (the latter’s flirt though was shortlived).
There is enough of the same; of dinners and lunches with Morrells, Eliots, Webbs and the like – often written after the fact and colorfully – but especially to be noted is the March 6 entry; recording as it does a dinner at the MacCarthys and the first Memoir Club meeting. Virginia did not read anything of her own on that evening, but appears to have enjoyed reading a lot into the readings of others – contributions from Vanessa and Duncan for instance. Two weeks later on March 18 she was to make her debut, leaving her in retrospect aghast at her candor; admonishing herself for saying out loud such “…egotistic sentimental trash!” and “laying bare her soul!” [p.26], at the same time hinting that it had been wildly enjoyed by those present. The editor’s footnote [p.27] informs that no records were kept of the Memoir Club meetings, to which I can only say: Damn!
On April 10 the Woolfs return from an Easter sojourn at Rodmell – the quiet and the delights of nature appear to have trumped the inconveniences of a house still in a state of disrepair. And stating this to be “the first time I’ve written [this]” [p.28] VW confides her intention to begin Jacob’s Room the next week.
This, in fact, doesn’t come to be, instead, into the month of May, Virginia grumbles at all the tedious reviewing she has to do; a long, long weekend is spent at Rodmell again; Leonard is collaborating with Kot. on a Maxim Gorky translation, and it is from Kot that she learns that Katherine Mansfield is back in London. Her reaction: the typical mixture where KM is concerned of anticipation and consternation. Woolf finds writing difficult during these days; wanting but unable to concentrate her attentions on Jacob’s Room, amongst other things she busies herself setting a Forster story – The Story of the Siren – for Hogarth. The May 11 entry ends with the aforementioned ‘consternation’ – “No mention of K’s wishing to see me.” [p.36] On Tuesday, May 18 she bemoans the lack of success of the Hogarth publication of Hope Mirrlee’s Paris, a poem (which I wrote about and linked to in this blog entry and which seems to have had a literary life beyond its time, and certainly not one predicted by Woolf at the time of publication) and Stories from the Old Testament by Logan Pearsall Smith. By the end of May, correspondence had been exchanged with the elusive Mansfield, including VW’s (sincere she says [p.42]) praise of her story “The Man without Temperament” (Arts & Letters, Spring 1920, then reprinted in Bliss and Other Stories), and I note that in the previous entry on 24th May a visit by Leonard’s Swedish cousin leads Woolf to ponder “…lack of temperament in the enlightened races” [p42] Now, “temperament” is just a word, but so responsive is Woolf to her environment and those that inhabit it, and so important is KM to her intellectual stimulation, that I think it is an interesting observation. Two days later (on 28th May) they met and Virginia writes of the vibrant conversation between like-minded (in VW’s opinion anyway and in terms of their literary passions), and notes too that some of Mansfield’s effusiveness (in respect to Night & Day) didn’t exactly correspond to what she wrote in her Athenaeum review.
Entries are sparse during June and July; there are “field days” as she calls them into London, meeting Clive or Vanessa, dining with the Murrys or Roger, and hosting the Memoir Club on 16th June. I could mention also the 17th June Apostles annual dinner, that VW did not attend, but resulted in the subsequent visit by G.E. Moore who had a profound effect upon Leonard et.al. at Cambridge.[pp47-49].
Mentioned on 23rd June is a tea with the aged (so insinuated, though she is in fact not yet 60!) and ill (which she was, but would live for many years to come!) Janet Case, and which gives me an opportunity to mention another extraordinary woman of her time; one who befriended the young Woolf, encouraging her intellectual curiosities and enthusiasm for the classics, especially all things Greek, that, though academically speaking lackadaisically pursued, were to be an abiding influence upon her. (See this blog entry.)