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beginning to end may be a bore and a disappointment, too much like
life itself.
For, it is a fascinating book, but not because it is so very unusual
as a diary.
From the twenty-six blankbooks that Virginia Woolf filled
between 1915 and 1941, her husband has selected those portions which
relate to her writing life and made it a
writer's diary.
Mr. Woolf realizes
the danger in producing a proper, smooth, "literary" portrait, but we
can respect his intention as well as his understandable reluctance to
publish all the diaries at the present time. Some distortion is inevitable,
although for other writers it might be more serious; even if
these
pas–
sages are deeply felt, they haven't the intensity of a diary written by
someone who writes nothing else. The emotional code, the carelessness,
the remarks like "I can't go into it here" are never indulged by people
for whom the diary is
uniquely
important. Most of these entries are not
"written" with high seriousness; there is little choosing or polishing of
phrases, no exhaustive hunt for the proper word. The reader is not
always peering over this writer's shoulder.
We are ignorant about other notebooks Virginia Woolf may have
kept, but in these extracts there is very little discussion of
the matter
of the books she was writing when she wrote in the diary. She did not
usually project scenes or movement in Jamesian style: "Better to have
Lily say nothing to Tansley, the revelation comes from him while they
ride down to Cornwall (or Skye?) together-----Qr should it be a fight
on the lawn?" Instead, the fight is in Lily Briscoe's mind, there is notll–
ing of it here. Rather, Mrs. Woolf writes about moods, about the progress
or sales of her books, the comments of friends and reviewers, and of
the events of daily life. She writes about the difficulty of writing, about
straining, galloping, aching, trying, failing, rather than about explicit
literary problems or even explicit themes. We see more clearly what
kind of a diary it is when we note that-in these extracts at least–
the
subjects
of Mrs. Woolf's books, in the usual sense, seldom entered
her mind.
1
And if this practice makes sense for fiction, which it surely
does, we may be surprised to find Virginia Woolf following it with her
discursive works as well:
Three Guineas
itself, for example, is far more
open, more
specific,
than any of the few diary comments about it, for
the diary stood in a complex and indirect relation to her actual creative
ideas. The real planning and shaping went on somewhere else and by
another method. And there is also reason to believe that Mrs. Woolf's
creative states ("making up," she calls it) were absolute enough to
1 H er real subjects, however, were unusual: "the sea is to be heard all
through it"
(To the L ighthouse),
is an example.
