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PARTISAN REVIEW
it apply to the work, as well as to the life, it begins to look far from or–
dinary. In Baudelaire's verse documentation pours forth, inexhaustibly,
from an inexhaustible fund of darkness: Hugo's "mouth of shadow."
There is nothing wrv here; nothing held back; what comes out is speech
that is plain, sometimes crass, almost shockingly public. The haunting
secret which remains seems to dwell entirely in the generating source,
the
secretaire,
repository of so much true evidence:
Un gros meuble
a
tiroirs encombre de bilans,
De vers, de billets doux, de proces, de romances,
Avec de lourds cheveux routes dans des quittances,
Cache moins de secrets que mon triste cerveau.
What we find in such lines is more than mere analogy. Those drawers
which are the compartments of the brain guard jealously their dubious
treasure. Mr. Turnell, for all his patient effort, has failed to make the
drawer speak.
Francis Golffing
THE STRAINS OF A PRIVATE LIFE
A WRITER'S DIARY: Being Extrocts From the Diory of Virginio Woolf.
Edited by Leona rd Woolf. Horcourt, Brace. $5.00.
"Gide's journal, again full of startling recollection-things I
could have said myself."
So Virginia Woolf in 1934, and so anyone of us, for it is part of
the charm of reading diaries that we find
ourselves
in them. Everything
is sharp and familiar yet different: the shorthand of daily feelings,
groans and wishes, resentments, future plans and new ideas, dreariness,
occasional insight and honesty, the impatient arrogance of wanting to
be considered. In the public image, a writer's pain is as serious as
pleasure, on the grand scale; but in diaries, in notebooks, in letters, we
sense the relaxed formless irritation which is no less a part of a writer's
life, where depression may lead to work as well as violence, and work
may fade into depression-suddenly, without reason, inexplicably, be–
cause the diary has no more achieved form than the pain it records.
It is the only form, other than dreams or conversation, to express the
daily life, quiet or desperate, which is not clearly shaped
in
triumph
or madness; the civilized pain we all bear or try to tum into pearls is
diffuse and ordinary: we act out nothing but a headache. Perhaps for
that reason it is best to skim these extracts from Virginia Woolf's diary;
to dip into them here and there is a delight, although to read from
