Read Online A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Virginia Woolf
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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 1 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
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 1 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
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