Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Diary. Вирджиния Вулф

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СКАЧАТЬ The Times will be kindly, a little cautious, Mrs Woolf, they will say, must beware of virtuosity. She must beware of obscurity. Her great natural gifts etc … She is at her best in the simple lyric, or in Kew Gardens. An Unwritten Novel is hardly a success. And as for A Society, though spirited, it is too one-sided. Still Mrs Woolf can always be read with pleasure. Then, in the Westminster, Pall Mall and other serious evening papers I shall be treated very shortly with sarcasm. The general line will be that I am becoming too much in love with the sound of my own voice; not much in what I write; indecently affected; a disagreeable woman. The truth is, I expect, that I shan’t get very much attention anywhere. Yet, I become rather well known.

      Friday, April 8th. 10 minutes to 11 a.m.

      And I ought to be writing Jacob’s Room; and I can’t, and instead I shall write down the reason why I can’t—this diary being a kindly blankfaced old confidante. Well, you see, I’m a failure as a writer. I’m out of fashion: old: shan’t do any better: have no headpiece: the spring is everywhere: my book out (prematurely) and nipped, a damp firework. Now the solid grain of fact is that Ralph sent my book out to The Times for review without date of publication in it. Thus a short notice is scrambled through to be in ‘on Monday at latest’, put in an obscure place, rather scrappy, complimentary enough, but quite unintelligent. I mean by that they don’t see that I’m after something interesting. So that makes me suspect that I’m not. And thus I can’t get on with Jacob. Oh and Lytton’s book is out and takes up three columns; praise I suppose. I do not trouble to sketch this in order; or how my temper sank and sank till for half an hour I was as depressed as I ever am. I mean I thought of never writing any more—save reviews. To rub this in we had a festival party at 41: to congratulate Lytton; which was all as it should be, but then he never mentioned my book, which I suppose he has read; and for the first time I have not his praise to count on. Now if I’d been saluted by the Lit. Sup. as a mystery—a riddle, I shouldn’t mind; for Lytton wouldn’t like that sort of thing, but if I’m as plain as day, and negligible?

      Well, this question of praise and fame must be faced. (I forgot to say that Doran has refused the book in America.) How much difference does popularity make? (I’m putting clearly, I may add, after a pause in which Lottie has brought in the milk and the sun has ceased to eclipse itself, that I’m writing a good deal of nonsense.) One wants, as Roger said very truly yesterday, to be kept up to the mark; that people should be interested and watch one’s work. What depresses me is the thought that I have ceased to interest people—at the very moment when, by the help of the press, I thought I was becoming more myself. One does not want an established reputation, such as I think I was getting, as one of our leading female novelists. I have still, of course, to gather in all the private criticism, which is the real test. When I have weighed this I shall be able to say whether I am ‘interesting’ or obsolete. Anyhow, I feel quite alert enough to stop, if I’m obsolete. I shan’t become a machine, unless a machine for grinding articles. As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view. I wonder, though, whether this feeling that I write for half a dozen instead of 1500 will pervert this?—make me eccentric—no, I think not. But, as I said, one must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling. I think the only prescription for me is to have a thousand interests—if one is damaged, to be able instantly to let my energy flow into Russian, or Greek, or the press, or the garden, or people, or some activity disconnected with my own writing.

      Sunday, April 9th.

      I must note the symptoms of the disease, so as to know it next I time. The first day one’s miserable; the second happy. There I was an Affable Hawk on me in the New Statesman which at any rate made me feel important (and it’s that that one wants) and Simpkin Marshall rang up for a second fifty copies. So they must be selling. Now I have to stand all the twitching and teasing of private criticism which I shan’t enjoy. There’ll be Roger tomorrow. What a bore it all is!—and then one begins to wish one had put in other stories and left out the Haunted House, which may be sentimental.

      Tuesday, April 12th.

      I must hurriedly note more symptoms of the disease, so that I can turn back here and medicine myself next time. Well; I’d worn through the acute stage and come to the philosophic semi-depressed, indifferent, spent the afternoon taking parcels round the shops, going to Scotland Yard for my purse, when L. met me at tea and dropped into my ear the astonishing news that Lytton thinks the String Quartet ‘marvellous’. This came through Ralph, who doesn’t exaggerate, to whom Lytton need not lie; and did for a moment flood every nerve with pleasure, so much so that I forgot to buy my coffee and walked over Hungerford Bridge twanging and vibrating. A lovely blue evening too, the river sky colour. And then there was Roger who thinks I’m on the track of real discoveries and certainly not a fake. And we’ve broken the record of sales, so far. And I’m not nearly so pleased as I was depressed; and yet in a state of security; fate cannot touch me; the reviewers may snap; and the sales decrease. What I had feared was that I was dismissed as negligible.

      Friday, April 29th.

      I ought to say something of Lytton. I have seen him oftener these last days than for a whole year perhaps. We have talked about his book and my book. This particular conversation took place in Verreys: gilt feathers: mirrors: blue walls and Lytton and I taking our tea and brioche in a corner. We must have sat well over an hour.

      ‘And I woke last night and wondered where to place you,’ I said. ‘There’s St Simon and La Bruyère.’

      ‘Oh God,’ he groaned.

      ‘And Macaulay,’ I added.

      ‘Yes, Macaulay,’ he said. ‘A little better than Macaulay.’

      But not his man, I insisted. ‘More civilization of course. And then you’ve only written short books.’

      ‘I’m going to do George IV next,’ he said.

      ‘Well, but your place,’ I insisted.

      ‘And yours?’ he asked.

      ‘I’m the “ablest of living women novelists”,’ I said. ‘So the British Weekly says.’

      ‘You influence me,’ he said.

      And he said he could always recognize my writing though I wrote so many different styles.

      ‘Which is the result of hard work,’ I insisted. And then we discussed histories; Gibbon; a kind of Henry James, I volunteered.

      ‘Oh dear no—not in the least,’ he said.

      ‘He has a point of view and sticks to it,’ I said. ‘And so do you. I wobble.’ But what is Gibbon?

      ‘Oh he’s there all right,’ Lytton said. ‘Forster says he’s an Imp.

      But he hadn’t many views. He believed in “virtue” perhaps.”A beautiful word,’ I said.

      ‘But just read how the hordes of barbarians devastated the City. It’s marvellous. True, he was queer about the early Christians—didn’t see anything in them at all. But read him. I’m going to next October. And I’m going to Florence, and I shall be very lonely in the evenings.’

      ‘The French have influenced you more than the English, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Yes. I have their definiteness. I’m formed.”I compared you with Carlyle the other day,’ I said. ‘I read the Reminiscences. Well, they’re the chatter of an old toothless gravedigger compared with you; only then he has phrases.’

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