332
PARTISAN REVIEW
allow very little transition between them and the diary. It was the
difference between being "Virginia" and being "a sensibility": "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
[in
the country] I'd like to be only a sensibility." In itself this is
not so striking, but we note the terms of the distinction and that the
diary addressed "old Virginia" or,
in
the early days, "Virginia of 1940":
the sensibility neither wrote it nor, I think, read it.
"Virginia" had many friends and was, as some of them recall, the
pivot of that remarkable Bloomsbury circle, a society of rare distinction
like nothing most people have ever known. She went abroad, she walked
in London and in the country, went to parties, and wrote in the diary
daily or every few days. London was then small enough so that she could
seem to be close to the center of its intellectual and literary life, and
the Hogarth Press, which she and Leonard Woolf founded, gave that
closeness an explicit form. She read widely, as the distinguished "com–
mon reader" that she was, and observed herself, her contemporaries, and
her elders (note a Hardy visit, arguments with T. S. Eliot over
Ulysses,
conversations with Lytton Strachey, tea with Katherine Mansfield and
J.
M. Murry, encounters with E. M. Forster at the London Library,
deputizing for Eliot at Lady Ottoline Morrell's funeral); and much
of it went into the diary in the form of brief comments or interesting
vignettes. Mrs. Woolf's thoughts about literature spring up everywhere,
fascinating, but only fragmentary here: her considered opinions are in
the essays.
If
"Roger" and "Clive" are mentioned frequently, there is
very little on what either of them wrote or the painting that interested
them. "Tom" and "Morgan" are quoted on
Ulysses
or on
her
work;
in
the diary she doesn't discuss what
they
did, except that when "Des–
mond" praises "East Coker" she feels jealous, or when "Morgan" fin–
ishes
A Passage to India
his feeling of failure resembles her own. Natur–
ally, in this diary- and like most diarists-Virginia Woolf takes the
center of the stage, and the Bloomsbury friends may seem reduced to
a claque ; but she knew her own vanity even while she observed and
practiced her own voice, as writers must.
Nor did the degrees of self-consciousness escape her. Mrs. Woolf
herself said that one gets into the habit of recording, in a diary, only
certain kinds of feelings, only the depressions or difficulties, or the self–
abasement. Transitions may not be noted, and all the life outside the
diary leaves only the sediment of a posturing self. Consider her head–
aches, for example. When she notes or describes them, we get some
sense of this writer's daily life; but how accurate is the picture so
