A Writer Talking to Herself

...From the snug harbor of an accomodating marriage and a catered domestic life, she peers critically at other, more precarious moorings, sniffing her aristocratic nose at a bewildering variety of transgressions...

...Yes," she admits, "one wants to be found doing the ordinary things when one's friends call...

...Now we have Virginia talking to herself (with a sly ear cocked on posterity) in this first of a projected five-volume diary...

...It is a highly self-conscious attitude toward art, and there is, indeed, much of the performer about Virginia, something too shiny and presented...

...Underneath all the whimsicality, the cultivated eccentricity, lies a half-embarrassed longing for the prosaic, for "the stuff of life...

...In a sudden onset of modest joy, she records: "Rain again today...

...There is more than a tinge of cruelty here...

...Like all egotists, she tends to be easily threatened, to regard other creative achievements as potential impingements on her own, and is therefore disinclined to be generous about them...

...Specks of humanity flit like so many dust motes across her gaze...

...It breathes print, inhaling other authors' words and exhaling its own...

...Can anyone recall her characters, even the famous Mrs...

...It is difficult to offer, though, so regularly mean-spirited is she in her assessments of other people's demons...

...My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child—wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry...

...Her appeal is undeniable...

...Still, the volume closes on a happy note...

...The book is interesting—though not the "masterpiece" her nephew, Quentin Bell, assures us it is in his Introduction—mostly because it points to an intrinsic elu-siveness of character, the same elu-siveness we had come to accept in the public prose...

...After going shopping in a narrow, thronged street she writes, somewhat wistfully: "The stir & color & cheapness pleased me to the depths of my heart...

...Fragile physical and emotional health dictated that she restrain her energies...

...the diary breaks on February 15...

...And later: "I do not like the Jewish voice...

...Art is contesting, staving off life...

...Such obdurate artistic will is expensive...

...There are only two figures in these abundantly-peopled pages who engage Virginia's consistent affection and loyalty: her husband, Leonard, the ministering angel behind the scenes, and her beloved sister, "Nessa...

...to grasp, & hot exaggerate, & [to] put sheets of glass between him & his matter...

...As Leonard Woolf knew when he excerpted and titled it years ago, this is "a writer's diary...

...Tuesday was written down," she notes, as if Tuesday exists only when it is "written down...

...What we remember is larger and more vague—gestures, a shift of mood, sensation in the abstract...

...I think Jewesses are somehow discontented," she writes after Leonard's mother and sister come to dinner...

...The poor little mahogany colored wretch [bears a] likeness to a caged monkey, suave on the surface, inscrutable beyond," is her description of Perera, the Ceylonese advocate who comes to consult with Leonard...

...I should see beautiful people, & get a sensation of being on the highest crest of the biggest wave—right in the centre & swim of things...

...Virginia intrigues because she is a unique combination of preciousness and muscle: One never knows whether she will curtsy or kick...

...Her sole nonliterary activities are long walks around the garden at Hogarth House, Richmond, and at a countryside retreat—first Asheham House, Sussex, then Monks House, Rodmell...

...Virginia seems to consider Leonard's family—all Jews, in fact—an aberrant species of human animal, more curious than kin...

...All this is interlaced with domestic worries and quaint, housewifely details: "One of the queer things about the suburbs is that the vilest little red villas are always let, & that not one of them has an open window or an uncurtained window...

...When she does party, she is dutifully home by 10 p.m...

...She is nevertheless startlingly sociable, a caricature of the proverbial charwoman, craving the delights of gay company and bright rooms: "I know that with the first chink of light in the hall & chatter of voices I should become intoxicated, & determine that life held nothing comparable to a party...

...When it reopens after a prolonged interval of madness, in August of 1917, the Woolfs have bought a printing press...

...It is December 1919, World War I is over and there are iced buns in the bakeries again...

...He is so discreet, so sensitive, so low in tone and immaculate in taste," she muses about the classical scholar Gilbert Murray, "that you hardly understand how he has the boldness to beget children...

...Ultimately, though, the stuff of life does not count...

...And yet one feels that such professed affability is compensation for a certain essential aloofness of heart...

...Virginia's second novel, Night and Day, has been published to a favorable reception, and she is reviewing regularly for the Times Literary Supplement...

...Reviewed by Daphne Merkin Contributor, "Commentary," "Midstream " The prize catch in what Elizabeth Hardwick has described as the Bloomsbury pond is the gleaming, slippery Virginia Woolf...

...She teems with paradoxes, and it is her luck—her gift—to acknowledge them with such humor and elegance that they cease to frighten and start to captivate...

...I do not like the Jewish laugh...

...Eventually they establish the Hogarth Press, responsible for introducing several important authors, and Virginia divides her time between publishing, bookish teas, reading, and reviewing...

...and to make sure she went to bed early and limited her activity there was the watchful Leonard...

...The diary begins on January 1, 1915, and immediately we are in the thick of opinions on articles in the London Times and on national foibles: "If the British spoke openly about W.C.'s, & copulation, then they might be stirred by universal emotions...

...While E. M. Forster, the diffident mama's boy, was exploring the possibilities of breaking down class barriers in Howard's End (before making a more urgent plea for tolerance in Passage to India), Virginia Woolf was applying the final varnish to a peculiarly English form of snobbism that is civilized, even decorative, yet intransigent...

...I daresay the most important element is work"), and behind the innately conservative temperament lurks a timeless acerbity of mind...

...Never quite staying where one would like to put her, Virginia Woolf has been alternately hailed and condemned as a "feminine" writer...

...Often she comes across as too fine-grained for even the atmosphere of the drawing room, yet there is as much Puritan as blue blood in her...

...People who aspire above their station do not fare much better: "I'm a little doubtful, when I find a cheap ready made young woman out of an office in Oxford Street & lodging at Harrow, enthusiastic about Robinson Crusoe...

...Leonard's book on Africa is due to appear, and his appointment as editor of the prestigious International Review has been reconfirmed...

...We have had the first and second volumes of her letters, but still she wriggled out of our grasp...

...always changing, resisting and yielding against one's forecast...

...The light Virginia Woolf throws upon us is clear and chilly, closer to the moon's than the sun's...

...I haven't an inner life," she declares after hearing that Ottoline Morrell's diary is devoted to precisely that, and in some sense this is perversely true...

...Virginia's first novel, The Voyage Out, was to be published in March...

...Dalloway...

...She doesn't care for "darkies," either...

...everywhere one steps in Bloomsbury, it seems to be littered with the shards of talent and relationships...

...almost alarmed to find how intensely I'm specialized...

...And we, her readers, want to be invited in, like the fascinating, famous friends who knocked at the door of Hogarth House...

...It slides off her novels...

...Of course, there is an adult Virginia, who advises Mark Gertler with astonishing clarity "for arts sake, to keep sane...

...She comments huffishly on "a woman of doubtful character dining alone with a man," and offers this verdict upon hearing H. G. Wells speak at a League of Nations gathering: "He has the cockney accent in words like 'day.' " Tsk, tsk...

...Woolf's speculations habitually begin in generosity and end in coy animosity...

...She is stuck inside the nursery with her books, eyeing the big world from her window: "I'm...

...A discussion with Mark Gertler, the Jewish painter, prompts this stunning generalization: "There is something condensed in all Jews...

...this is true even of Barbara, not the most variable or gifted of her kind...

...I cleaned silver, which is an easy & profitable thing to do...

...we float in an exquisitely-crafted medium...

...As for the rest, especially those who hit her throbbing competitive nerve?Katherine Mansfield and Lytton Strachey, for instance—it is touch and go...

...She is a believer in hard work and plain living ("what, I wonder, constitutes happiness...

...But this diary would merit attention even if it were composed exclusively of cooking recipes, for its author has lodged herself in the firmament of our readerly imagination...

...In To the Lighthouse, Woolfs masterpiece, the disengagement succeeds in imparting a sense of standing outside the confines of time and place...

...Sometimes she reminds us of one of the dowagers "furred like seals & scented like civets" she encounters at Days' bookshop, who enrage her because they "condescend to pull a few novels about on the counter, & then demand languidly whether there is anything amusing...

...they disturb, they irritate, they amuse, and then are flicked off with a stroke of her witty, graceful pen: "Anyhow, nothing is more fascinating than a live person...

...The same impulse governs the diary...

...Virginia is possessed of the writer's fury to pin the struggling specimens of experience to paper, to drape and tuck "this loose, drifting material of life" into a costume pleasing to the eye...

...But the continual concern for her well-being seems to have worked against her, leaving her strangely onesided, an egg-head on top of a little girl's body...

...Having barely coasted clear of her private terrors (she suffers a breakdown—not the first—six weeks after the diary begins), she perhaps deserves understanding...

...It so soon shines again...