Dear Reader—
This project got away from me a bit this month; I fell out of keeping up with each entry as Woolf writes them, and nearly wrote nothing at all! But I came back to it and wrote a sort of summary accounting of Woolf’s entries from the month of May 1920, which follows here. I wrote this entry in two parts, and I’m leaving them in with their separate timestamps.
It’s the very end of May for me in this here-and-now, but I’m guessing it’ll probably be June when you read this. (Or later because the Internet is forever! Who knows!) I’m so distracted this week, or in general lately. This whole spring has felt like a weird time to be alive (is it ever not a weird time to be alive? This question is only half rhetorical), but this week feels like the wildest yet. I feel inspired by the protests and scared about the police response, and sad about the ongoing racism and violence and brutality that caused all this. This post by Hayley Nahman on her Substack platform articulated a lot that resonates with me, and links to a lot of important sources—most of which I haven’t yet read; I’m planning to read some of those soon and feeling galvanized to work on educating myself more in general.
In the meanwhile, here’s me thinking about Woolf’s words! For the summer, at least, I think I’m going back to trying to write about each diary entry 100 years later to the date—I could use the structure, and having to produce something on a particular day is a nice escape clause from thinking too hard about what to say.
Saturday, May 23, 2020 — 7:41 PM
Reader—
It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? My time and the diaries’ timeline have fallen out of step, which was maybe to be expected. Which makes it trickier to start this entry, since it feels overdue, which paradoxically makes me not want to write it at all—oh well! I think the project of writing about each diary entry on the exact date it was written, while poetic, was maybe a bit ambitious to actually keep up with. But also I want to keep to it, in some form, and I want to hold onto the idea of measuring in some very limited way the span of a century. So the new format, as I’m envisioning it right now, is one entry/email a month, covering all of Woolf’s entries from that month in 1920 (and so on…)—but we’ll see what happens! Or in this case I’ll decide what happens which is a funny thing about making things.
Today I am all maybes. But the day isn’t: in fact, as I write this right now, the light has gone slanty and golden. It’s summer, all at once, if not yet technically, but the past week’s mostly been rainy and cold. I finished all my work for school (finals are my excuse for having delayed writing here so long) and felt very free for about a minute before realizing I missed the stress already, way-too-quickly. I’ll have to get better at imposing my own structures on the days—which I’m very aware is a good problem to have.
But (turning the page, turning the century) back to Woolf: on May 5th, 1920, she was also making excuses for not writing: she and Leonard spent a long weekend at Rodmell (Monks House, country house), “which accounts,” she writes, “as I say, making my apology to this book, in which so few pages seem to have been written.” She describes a dinner there, at her brother’s house—the friends that came over, what she’s been working on. Leonard’s been offered a job writing for The Nation(not the same as the current one, see link), but it doesn’t look quite certain whether he’ll take it, which begins the next entry (May 8) too. It’s funny to read about all these past-tense practicalities. There’s another dinner, described as “A chattering random vivacious evening”, and Woolf ends the day’s entry: “Yesterday I had tea with Saxon at the Club; &, remembering old lonely evenings of my own, when the married couple seemed so secure & lamplit, asked him back to dinner. I wonder though whether his loneliness ever frightens him as mine used to frighten me. I daresay office work is a great preservative.”
I love this little description, “secure & lamplit”—it makes me think of walking though a city neighborhood, or anywhere really, and how warm the windows of houses look sometimes—the little glimpses into someone else’s interior. And I find something very sweet in this detail, in Woolf’s wondering whether her friend’s loneliness is or isn’t similar to one she’s felt before.
Woolf was also writing, always—in this particular May it was Jacob’s Room, and she begins Tuesday May 11th’s entry by telling a bit about that—and I think this paragraph is a delight so I’ll reproduce it for you in full:
“It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly on beginning a new book quiets down after a time, & one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, & the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I’m a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I dont enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult.”
There’s so much to note here— I love this glimpse into Woolf’s process, the sense of the book’s emerging from real time. I love especially her dream of writing nothing she doesn’t enjoy writing, but I feel this paradox that the paradox lands in: does the difficulty of writing make that project impossible? Can one learn to enjoy the difficulty, or is “enjoy” even the right verb? At a poetry reading I went to in the alternate universe of a few months ago when one could go and hear a person read poetry in a room with other people, Jericho Brown talked about realizing he had what he called “an attraction to difficulty”, which he suggested is a good thing to have if you’re a poet. (I liked this phrase and this suggestion.)
I always find Woolf’s writing about her own writing most quotable, and maybe most interesting—it’s what endures—but I think what I enjoy reading most in the diaries is the practicalities, the little lists, the simple recounting of things that happened or are happening in the strange illusory present-tense that I’m hanging out in with Woolf by virtue of reading these entries—as here: “L. is up in London seeing his constituents… He has a meeting (I think) won’t be home till late. I spent the afternoon typing & setting up Morgan’s (J’s note: Forster!) story. Went out to buy a bun, called on Miss Milan about the chair covers, & when I’ve done this, I shall read Berkeley… Though it was summer till 3.30, it is now brushed with blackness, & I must shut the window & put on my jersey. Nessa comes back on Friday…I like coming back to Richmond after Gordon Sqre. I like continuing our private life, unseen by anyone.”
There’s a funny paradox in this ‘private life’, too—because the entire enterprise of reading someone’s diaries is hinged on the idea of some kind of access to their private life, which is of course incomplete and very mediated. But there is some kind of access—there’s so much of Woolf’s life recorded here! It’s impressive and a bit overwhelming. I do go on thinking about what the point is of writing this at all or of reading the diaries (like, what’s my abstract say? But also who cares about that? Maybe I do?), and I guess at this stage I’m really not sure.
Sunday, May 31, 2020 — 8:37 PM
Reader—
“How nice, I often think, normal people are!” Woolf wrote that on May 15th, a century ago plus two weeks. Who are these ‘normal people’? (Yes, I watched the Hulu series of Sally Rooney’s Normal People and you should too, but only if you’ve read the book already.) A proposition: normal people are always someone else. (Maybe I only think that because I’m not them.)
A diary of a diary, a diary squared: I find this hard to write today. I’m tired, or just out of practice. It seems dubious, the worthiness of this project I’ve dreamed up for myself. But I want to stick to it, see it through in some form, if only because I think I’m bad at following through on things—it’s one of my weaknesses.
May 18th: “Gordon Square begins again & like a snake renews its skin outworn—that’s the nearest I can come to a quotation.” She’s near-quoting Shelley (a footnote lets me know), who we might as well quote too:
The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn.
—Shelley, Hellas, I, 1060
I’m fascinated for a moment by these lines, their refraction through Woolf’s rephrasing: a fossil reading. This makes me think of something else I’ve thought of a lot while reading through these diaries, which is that often when one reads a volume of someone’s diaries, you’re also reading so much work that some other person did to put the diaries together into that volume—because of course what you’re reading isn’t quite the diary itself. Someone typed these, someone looked up that quotation, someone wrote the footnotes identifying who many of the people Woolf wrote about were. A life so archived! In this case most of that work was done by Anne Olivier Bell (a fascinating figure in her own life), who was married to Woolf’s nephew.
“The war has put its skeleton fingers into even our pockets,” Woolf writes on May 20— interesting. She writes about work and the goings-on of her acquaintances; she tracks the weather. We’ll fast-forward—though I’m skipping over quite a bit—to May 31, a century ago today. Most of this entry talks about Woolf meeting Katherine Mansfield, which I might come back to later, but I want to leave you with the beginning of it:
“Back from Monk’s an hour ago, after the first week end—the most perfect, I was going to say, but how can I tell what week ends we mayn’t spend there? The first pure joy of the garden I mean. Wind enough outside; within sunny & sheltered; & weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness.”
An auspicious beginning to summer, this queer enthusiasm—expect more, here, before too long.
—J