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conveyed,
especially
if
the entries are incomplete and omissions not indi–
cated? We know only that she had a headache nearly all the time,
enough to prevent most people from functioning at all, not to speak of
writing some twenty or more books. Mrs. Woolfs headache was such
a continual complaint and so important for the progress of her creative
work that we want to know more about what she thought of it, if there
was any more-and we don't even know
that.
In order to balance such
distortions-they can never be righted-we must keep in mind that mass
of other material which the editor considered irrelevant to a
writer's
diary and remember too how many of Virginia Woolf's thoughts were
reserved to those two hours in the morning when she did her creative
work. Above all, we must remember what it may be like to keep a
diary, to see ourselves in this. How else can we understand some of
the more cryptic passages or appreciate the sameness of most entries?
Year follows year, but the feelings continue very much as before; yet
this was not true of the novels: one would not expect, reading the 1926
entries, that part of
To the Lighthouse
might scan almost like Pindar,
or that the very different
Between the Acts
might run together with the
later entries. Then we may be startled by passages we cannot assess at
all, like this:
Friday, October 30th [1936]
I do not wish for the moment to write out the story of the months
since I made the last mark here. [June 23rd] I do not wish, for reasons
I cannot now develop, to analyse that extraordinary summer.
It
will be
more helpful and healthy for me to write scenes; to take up my pen
and describe actual events; good practice too for my stumbling and
doubting pen. Can I still "write"? That is the question, you see. And
now I will try to prove
if
the gift is dead, or dormant.
There is something bleakly horrifying about this, unlike the strained and
exacerbated feeling of the other entries, the other kind of despair or
rage. She had been working on
The Years
which-we learn later–
was nothing less than a major ordeal; it is there we should find the
meaning of that summer of 1936, there, and in
Between the Acts
when
Miss La Trobe strains to convey a vision. But also it is at such points
that we are reminded: this is the diary of a woman who committed
suicide.
Some readers have apparently been shocked by her sensitivity to
criticism as she reveals it in worry over reviews and her need for
praise; and some writers have been surprised that
this
should seem
shocking. Of course, Mrs. Woolf expressed something of what all
writers must feel about reviews, about acceptance or rejection, praise,
or criticism: pictures must be looked at, actors must be heard, writers
