Virginia WoolfOn January 1, 1953, Leonard Woolf completed his Preface to A Writer's Diary, a compilation of extracts from the 26 volumes of diaries that Virginia Woolf wrote from 1915 until 1941, with the last entry written just four days before her death. This book was published before the five-volume set of Woolf's diaries that is still in print today. Leonard Woolf makes it clear that, especially since so many of the people whom Woolf wrote about were still alive at the point, it was important for him to avoid publishing the more personal diary entries. Instead, Leonard Woolf selected excerpts that focused especially on Virginia Woolf's writing about writing, fiction as well as criticism. There's something very powerful about reading through Woolf's characterizations of her writing process in one volume, covering decades of her development as a novelist and a critic. As such, this volume is an ideal book to read if you are fascinated by Woolf's creative process, if you are a writer looking for inspiration, or if you are interested in Woolf's diaries, but want a taste of her writing before you make the commitment to read the more complete published editions of her diaries (which I plan to read through this summer). There are some strong themes and topics that emerge from A Writer's Diary. One is Woolf's strong commitment to writing and revising, even in the face of poor health. She describes the highs and lows she experienced at every stage of the writing process, from her initial conceptualization of a new novel or essay (often while she was completing another project), to her struggles to pinpoint her vision for her novels and to realize it in prose, to her commitment to re-writing and revising, always looking to condense her writing, to cut away any extraneous words or passages, to realize the heart of her vision for each novel or essay or biography. Woolf struggled to find a rhythm to her writing and reading that would sustain her through the very difficult periods when she had just completed a long work, and when she was waiting to learn what its reception would be among friends and critics alike. She describes having at least two writing projects going at one time, along with some very ambitious reading projects, sometimes tied to her critical essays, and sometimes part of her development as a writer, to learn from others.As I mentioned above, Woolf writes at length about her unease over the critical reception of her own books. Over time, and with more accolades behind her, this becomes a slightly less difficult struggle, but she never completely shook off her concern over how others, friends, family, critics, and the reading public, thought of her work and of her place in literature. How best to handle reviews of her work? To what extent should she write for external approval? How could she judge how good her writings were when her own assessments of them could shift by the hour? All of the topics I mention above would be fascinating enough, but for me the true joy comes in reading Woolf's beautiful prose. I couldn't resist posting something like 15 excerpts in updates when I was reading this book, and that was a result of my being selective. Here are some of my favorite passages: Woolf writes about her approach to writing a diary: "What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through."Woolf's aspirations for her writing: "Anyhow, nature obligingly supplies me with the illusion that I am about to write something good; something rich and deep and fluent, and hard as nails, while bright as diamonds."Woolf's description of the relationship she seeks between her writing and the substance of life: "So the days pass and I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotised, as a child by a silver globe, by life; and whether this is living. It's very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so hold it, day after day. I will read Proust I think. I will go backwards and forwards."The dual nature of life--solid and fleeting: "Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world—this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light? I am impressed by the transitoriness of human life to such an extent that I am often saying a farewell—after dining with Roger for instance; or reckoning how many more times I shall see Nessa."The importance of revision: "At Rodmell I read through The Common Reader; & this is very important—I must learn to write more succinctly. Especially in the general idea essays like the last, "How it strikes a Contemporary," I am horrified by my own looseness. This is partly that I don't think things out first; partly that I stretch my style to take in crumbs of meaning. But the result is a wobble & diffusity and breathlessness which I detest."Reading and discovery: "Now, with this load despatched, I am free to begin reading Elizabethans—the little unknown writers, whom I, so ignorant am I, have never heard of, Pullenham, Webb, Harvey."This thought fills me with joy—no overstatement. To begin reading with a pen in my hand, discovering, pouncing, thinking of phrases, when the ground is new, remains one of my great excitements."The efforts to pin down ideas when writing: "It is all very well, saying one will write notes, but writing is a very difficult art. That is one has always to select: and I am too sleepy and hence merely run sand through my fingers. Writing is not in the least an easy art. Thinking what to write, it seems easy; but the thought evaporates, runs hither and thither. Here we are in the noise of Siena—the vast tunnelled arched stone town, swarmed over by chattering shrieking children."Her thoughts of what she wants to achieve and develop in The Waves (referred to here by its early title The Moths): "Orlando has done very well. Now I could go on writing like that—the tug and suck are at me to do it. People say this was so spontaneous, so natural. And I would like to keep those qualities if I could without losing the others. But those qualities were largely the result of ignoring the others. They came of writing exteriorly; and if I dig, must I not lose them? And what is my own position towards the inner and the outer? I think a kind of ease and dash are good;—yes: I think even externality is good; some combination of them ought to be possible. The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry—by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novelists? that they select nothing? The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in: yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in The Moths. It must include nonsense, fact, sordidity: but made transparent." And one last inspirational quote, which captures the magic, the beauty, the sadness, and the wonder of this volume: "Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is "it." It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell Square with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. Who am I, what am I, and so on: these questions are always floating about in me: and then I bump against some exact fact—a letter, a person, and come to them again with a great sense of freshness. And so it goes on. But on this showing, which is true, I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this "it"; and then feel quite at rest." Virginia Woolf
“Strano come la forza creativa rimette subito in sesto l’universo intero.”Bisogna armarsi di passione e di pazienza per entrare nell’Io inespresso della Woolf, e salire sulle impalcature di quelle sue lente – e pur sempre operose – costruzioni letterarie. Leggere il suo diario è dare uno sguardo attento dapprima alla planimetria e poi al vero e proprio progetto, portato avanti con impegno e minuziosità, nell’esercizio della scrittura, nell’esercizio del vivere. È partecipare direttamente alla formazione delle fondamenta fatte di cemento armato: di carta e inchiostro, di tantissime letture classiche, moderne e contemporanee. È vedere sollevarsi pilastri d’operosi pensieri, squadrati e stabili, sul proprio lavoro di scrittrice e di critica letteraria. È ripararsi dietro mura spesse di mattoni, dentro la sua solitudine, protetta dai più cari amici e da Leonard, suo marito, il suo primo lettore, il suo più grande estimatore e supervisore di questo grande progetto diventato poi, un classico, una serie di classici. È guardare fuori dalle finestre la storia scorrere, la natura esplodere e la vita morire. È abbellire gli interni di uno stile perfezionato attraverso prove, revisioni, stroncature, tagli su tagli: essenziale. È ammirare infine una struttura costruita per resistere ai venti più forti della critica letteraria, ai terremoti più forti della vita, alla morte stessa.“Non si scherza con le parole – non si può – quando si vuole che durino «in eterno».”Era questa la Woolf, una donna forte che confidava nelle sue capacità ma che anche teneva molto a ciò che gli altri pensavano di lei. Si aspettava forti critiche, e puntuali arrivavano dopo ogni sua pubblicazione, e queste le servivano per rafforzarsi nelle sue intenzioni. Arrivavano pure molti complimenti e vendite inaspettate, e quest’altre contribuivano a farla sorridere di felicità e a crearsi dei risparmi che spendeva in libri, quaderni, viaggi, penne e calamai. Soffriva il vuoto dell’inoperosità, che arrivava sempre dopo le ultime frasi dei suoi libri, e aveva paura della morte, soprattutto quando sottraeva alla vita persone che riscopriva care. Lottava contro il fascismo e per la parità dei sessi, e per sua sfortuna visse gli ultimi suoi anni col pensiero costante di una guerra “inutile”: di altre morti.Questa era la Woolf dedita a leggere e scrivere, vivere e morire.
What do You think about A Writer's Diary (2003)?
I think I lied. The update status space wouldn't hold the length of this quote that really touched me. I don't know any other method and am too stubborn to just walk away from it. So, many pages later I will come back and write an actual review.“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit yet not slovenly, so elastic that it embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.”
—Stephen P
I suppose your diary is the one place it's ok to be self obsessed, but I find Woolf's ego and narcissism off putting. Most writers have ego's of course, but I get the feeling Woolf writes more to stroke her ego than she does for story. I find her and Joyce to be overrated. I don't think inaccessible, scholarly writing is what makes good literature. Story does. It's fiction for crying out loud! I am impressed most when writers are not trying to impress! Of course Woolf is deeply insecure and critical of herself. Very critical of others too. Often times I think envy drives some of her criticism. I find her to be pretentious. Is she scholarly? Yes. Of course. But who cares? So are a lot of people, but it doesn't mean they are good story tellers. Woolf is not the person I would seek out at a party to hear a good tale. Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Edna Ferber all all superior writers. Their work is accessible, and is all for the love of story. William Strunks theory is best. Pull the reader from the quicksand! That is your job as a writer above all else!
—Heather Mize
I have to wonder at my timing on this one. Here I am, picking up one of the most perfect books for spurring the self on to writing during the merry month of NaNoWriMo, only to finish in the midst the most recent surge of action in the great Gramazon debacle; a debacle wholly embittered by the concept of self-published authors. Now, I'd like to go the traditional rout of publishing myself, but still. It gives both this review and my dream of writing for a living an air of antagonism, watch your step/mince your words or be misunderstood severely.Or that could be me thinking too much.But see here, though, that's what this whole work is all about. Thinking about writing, and when the person doing the thinking is Woolf, well. One hesitates to define one's principles about the 'too much thinking' business, for on one side lies her suicide and on the other, her body of work. And if you've ever had the privileged pleasure to experience her work, you know what I'm talking about.What I'm actually attempting to talk about, here, in this review, is harder to say. The comfort I feel in comparing myself to Woolf is eerily seductive and not nearly as obsequiously awestruck as I would like it to be. I mean, Woolf! Bloomsbury group! Only one of the greatest prose artists to grace this poor world of ours, a life led during the interwar period filled with famous names, famous intrigues, and famous writing. Eurocentric and even more despairingly Anglocentric, to be fair, and her easy disparagement of others and her half-handed hypocrisy on women's rights set my teeth on edge, but my god. This old English lady who drowned herself fifty years before I was born understands me, down to the marrow of my meaning of life. I thought, driving through Richmond last night, something very profound about the synthesis of my being: how only writing composes it: how nothing makes a whole unless I am writing: now I have forgotten what seemed so profound.To reiterate the perfection above, writing is both everything and nothing, depending on whether I'm paying more attention to my self or the grander scheme of things. A fervor delving into the very core of existence's delight, or a waste that asks the ultimate question of why I'm still bothering with everything in general. Once upon a time, if given the chance of control or perhaps even some means of getting rid of the nihilistic face of the coin completely, I would have taken it. These days, I'm not so sure.This compilation of cut-outs from a 27 year run of personal record is chock-full of that feeling, that sense of one's heartbeat relying on the pace and pound of words both writing and already written, a heartbeat that is sensitive in all the ways both right and wrong. It is not practical. It is not objective. It is everything to do with how a question of how I write put by a unwitting bystander is going to set me off on a complete and utter rhapsodizing on the power of literature in every facet of life. It is both unbearably personal and the manifesto of my character that I would proclaim to all, if I got the chance to. For, as you all know, literature means publishing, and publishing means business, and it is a very rare case indeed where those as devoted as Woolf to their craft avoid having their soul sucked out by the reality of writing for a living. Advertising, academia, pick your grindstone and hang on for dear life and the slow weathering down of passion in the face of life.Did I mention that this book is not practical? Good. This isn't a creative fictioning self-help book, for all its sociocultural periphery. This is a lifeline.Woolf was lucky to have a living situation such as hers. I am lucky for her being lucky enough to create such a body of work of not only reading and writing, but commentary on said reading and writing, especially writing. Especially how intimately and horrifically her mental state was tied to it, in as much a way as anything one lives for becomes. Which makes the state less of a tragedy and more of a best of all possible worlds, except not, except. Maybe? Or one could stick with 'that's life'. That is a much more honest answer, one that if you're lucky spools out enough years for the ink to spread out and flow.I'd say more, but really, what else is there to say but: writers, read this. Readers, read this. As for me? You see, I'm thinking furiously about Reading and Writing. I have no time to describe my plans.Toodles.
—Aubrey
