When she was thirty-six, Virginia Woolf imagined an older version of herself reading her diaries. “If Virginia Woolf at the age of fifty, when she sits down to build her memoirs out of these books, is unable to make a phrase as it should be made, I can only condole with her and remind her of the existence of the fireplace, where she has my leave to burn these pages to so many black films with red eyes in them. But how I envy her the task I am preparing for her. There is none I should like better.”
A Writer’s Diary was compiled by Leonard Woolf from twenty-six volumes. Reading it ninety-one years after that entry, the posterity she imagined has arrived, and it includes anyone willing to sit with these pages.
What compels most is Woolf as reader. “I finished Ulysses and think it is a mis-fire,” she writes. “Genius it has, I think; but of inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense.” That “underbred” is telling. A closed-room view of literature, sometimes suffocating.
But at times unexpectedly funny. “Brafani,” she notes, “three people watching the door open and shut. Commenting on visitors like fates — summing up, placing. A woman with a hard aquiline face, red lips, birdlike, perfectly self-satisfied. French pendulous men, a rather poor sister. Now they sit nibbling at human nature. We are rescued by the excellence of our luggage.”
The diaries make me want to read the full five volumes. They also make me want to reread her novels, hearing this voice behind them.
>High praise indeed. But justified. I was back in them this morning. I must admit to feeling a bit manipulated when I read here of LW's belief that her diary constructs were occasionally the craft rather than the woman. And I do not know why that personal insight is so required by me here. She was so slippery.
>Frances – I think VW, perhaps due to the literary circles she came from and inhabited, constantly had an eye on how posterity would view her. She attempted, where possible, to forge that future opinion while still living.
>Anthony,I can't help but wonder if most of us who keep a diary don't have an eye on posterity, at least the posterity of who we will be if we ever go back and read them again. I know that when I write in my journal, it is rarely of major events of the day, but it is of the little things that make up the day and give a sense of the mind at the time so that when I read it in the future, I'll have some idea of who I was and where I was. But VW's diaries are in every sense of the word extraordinary, as the writer herself was. Thanks for posting this.shalom,Steven
>StevenYes, of course. You are quite right. Woolf's concern was that she got into the habit of only recording one particular kind of mood-irritation or misery, say-and not writing her diary when she felt the opposite, thereby altering how posterity would view her.Anthony