LITMIR.BIZ

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My only interest as a writer lies, I begin to see, in some queer individuality; not in strength, or passion, or anything startling, but then I say to myself, is not ‘some queer individuality’ precisely the quality I respect? Peacock for example: Borrow; Donne; Douglas, in Alone, has a touch of it Who else comes to mind immediately? Fitzgerald’s Letters. People with this gift go on sounding long after the melodious vigorous music is banal. In proof of this, I read that a small boy, given a book by Marie Corelli for a Sunday school prize, at once killed himself; and the coroner remarked that one of her books was not what he himself would call ‘at all a nice book’. So perhaps the Mighty Atom is dwindling away and Night and Day arising; though The Voyage Out seems at the moment most in esteem. That encourages me. After 7 years next April the Dial speaks of its superb artistry. If they say the same of N. and D. in 7 years I shall be content; but I must wait 14 for anyone to take Monday or Tuesday to heart. I want to read Byron’s Letters, but I must go on with La Princesse de Clèves. This masterpiece has long been on my conscience. Me to talk of fiction and not to have read this classic! But reading classics is generally hard going. Especially classics like this one, which are classics because of their perfect taste, shapeliness, composure, artistry. Not a hair of its head is dishevelled. I think the beauty very great, but hard to appreciate. All the characters are noble. The movement is stately. The machinery a little cumbrous. Stories have to be told. Letters dropped. It is the action of the human heart and not of muscle or fate that we watch. But stories of noble human hearts have their movements unapproachable in other circumstances. There is a queer understated profundity in the relations between Madame de Clèves and her mother, for example. If I were reviewing it, I think I should take for my text beauty in character. Thank God though I am not reviewing it. Within the last few minutes I have skimmed the reviews in the New Statesman; between coffee and cigarette I read the Nation; now the best brains in England (metaphorically speaking) sweated themselves for I don’t know how many hours to give me this brief condescending sort of amusement. When I read reviews I crush the column together to get at one or two sentences; is it a good book or a bad? And then I discount those two sentences according to what I know of the book and of the reviewer. But when I write a review I write every sentence as if it were going to be tried before three Chief Justices. I can’t believe that I am crushed together and discounted. Reviews seem to me more and more frivolous. Criticism on the other hand absorbs me more and more. But after 6 weeks influenza my mind throws up no matutinal fountains. My note book lies by my bed unopened. At first I could hardly read for the swarm of ideas that rose involuntarily. I had to write them out at once. And this is great fun. A little air, seeing the buses go by, lounging by the river, will, please God, send the sparks flying again. I am suspended between life and death in an unfamiliar way. Where is my paper knife? I must cut Lord Byron.

      Friday, June 23rd.

      Jacob, as I say, is being typed by Miss Green, and crosses the Atlantic on July 14th. Then will begin my season of doubts and ups and downs. I am guarding myself in this way.I am going to be well on with a story for Eliot, lives for Squire, and Reading; so that I can vary the side of the pillow as fortune inclines. If they say this is all a clever experiment, I shall produce Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street as the finished product. If they say your fiction is impossible, I shall say what about Miss Ormerod, a fantasy. If they say ‘You can’t make us care a damn for any of your figures’, I shall say read my criticism then. Now what will they say about Jacob? Mad, I suppose: a disconnected rhapsody; I don’t know. I will confide my view to this book on re-reading. On re-reading novels is the title of a very laborious, yet rather gifted article, for the Supt.

      Wednesday, July 26th.

      On Sunday L. read through Jacob’s Room. He thinks it my best work. But his first remark was that it was amazingly well written. We argued about it. He calls it a work of genius; he thinks it unlike any other novel; he says that the people are ghosts; he says it is very strange: I have no philosophy of life he says; my people are puppets, moved hither and thither by fate. He doesn’t agree that fate works in this way. Thinks I should use my ‘method’ on one or two characters next time; and he found it very interesting and beautiful, and without lapse (save perhaps the party) and quite intelligible. Pocky has so disturbed my mind that I cannot write this as formally as it deserves, for I was anxious and excited. But I am on the whole pleased. Neither of us knows what the public will think. There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.

      Wednesday, August 16th.

      I should be reading Ulysses, and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first 2 or 3 chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this on a par with War and?eace\ An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200.

      For my own part I am laboriously dredging my mind for Mrs Dalloway and bringing up light buckets. I don’t like the feeling. I’m writing too quickly. I must press it together. I wrote 4 thousand words of Reading in record time, 10 days; but then it was merely a quick sketch of Pastons, supplied by books. Now I break off, according to my quick change theory, to write Mrs D. (who ushers in a host of others, I begin to perceive). Then I do Chaucer; and finish the first chapter early in September. By that time, I have my Greek beginning perhaps, in my head; and so the future is all pegged out; and when Jacob is rejected in America and ignored in England, I shall be philosophically driving my plough fields away. They are cutting the corn all over the country, which supplies that metaphor, and perhaps excuses it. But I need no excuses, since I am not writing for the Lit. Sup. Shall I ever write for them again?

      Tuesday, August 22nd.

      “The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life—yes, that’s why I disliked so much the irruption of Sydney—one must become externalized; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one’s character, living in the brain. Sydney comes and I’m Virginia; when I write I’m merely a sensibility. Sometimes I like being Virginia, but only when I’m scattered and various and gregarious. Now, so long as we are here, I’d like to be only a sensibility. By the way, Thackeray is good reading, very vivacious, with ‘touches’ as they call them over the way at the Shanks’, of astonishing insight.

      Monday, August 28th.

      I am beginning Greek again, and must really make out some plan: today 28th: Mrs Dalloway finished on Saturday 2nd Sept: Sunday 3rd to Friday 8th; start Chaucer. Chaucer—that chapter, I mean, should be finished by Sept. 22nd. And then? Shall I write the next chapter of Mrs D.—if she is to have a next chapter; and shall it be The Prime Minister? which will last till the week after we get back—say October 12th. Then I must be ready to start my Greek chapter. So I have from today, 28th, till 12th—which is just over 6 weeks—but I must allow for some interruptions. Now what have I to read? Some Homer: one Greek play: some Plato: Zimmern: Sheppard, as textbook: Bentley’s Life: if done thoroughly, this will be enough. But which Greek play? and how much Homer, and what Plato? Then there’s the Anthology. All to end upon the Odyssey because of the Elizabethans. And I must read a little Ibsen to compare with Euripides—Racine with Sophocles—perhaps Marlowe with Aeschylus. Sounds very learned; but really might amuse me; and if it doesn’t, no need to go on.

      Wednesday, September 6th.

      My proofs come every other day and I could depress myself adequately if I went into that. The thing now reads thin and pointless; the words scarcely dint the paper; and I expect

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