Holding the Light

Virginia Woolf's Diaries (and Mine)

In June of this year, I jotted down these notes in my journal:

I’m reading Virginia Woolf’s diary, which I flatter myself is not much different from my own. This was a shock, since I had such a hard time getting into her fiction [though I loved Orlando and more recently enjoyed The Years and The Waves, and Night and Day]. But her diaries are fascinating. Reading them is quite a project, because I have to keep my phone handy to look up the people she describes (often so scathingly).

I felt a strong kinship with her when I learned she appreciates jars as much as I do. She wrote on July 23, 1918: “I think it was on Friday that I was given my green glass jar by the chemist—for nothing! It’s a jar I’ve always coveted; since glass is the best of all decorations, holding the light & changing it.” Yes, Virginia. Exactly so.

There aren’t a great many connection points between me and Virginia. Having read her opinion of Katherine Mansfield’s story “Bliss,” for instance, I feel sure she would be appalled by my stories. But like the green jar, we share certain points of intersection when I feel I understand her completely.

Her description of what she wanted her diary to be is a good example:

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly…. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil, composed with the aloofness of a work of art. (4/20/1919)

The image of a deep desk, with a self-sorting mechanism to curate the jumble inside, is precisely what I’d like my journal (and the entire contents of my laptop) to be. I hope all my random jottings-down reflect at least some of the light of my life, and that the light is not overwhelmed entirely by daily minutiae—the appointments, the meals, the errands, the aggravations. Of course, Virginia had those, too.

I write in the sordid doss house atmosphere of approaching departure. Pinker [the spaniel] is asleep in one chair; Leonard [her husband] is signing cheques at the little deal table under the glare of the lamp. The fire is covered with ashes, since we have been burning it all day and Mrs. B. never cleans. Envelopes lie in the grate. I am writing with a pen which is feeble and wispy; and it is a sharp fine evening with a sunset, I daresay. (10/5/1927)

Another passage, written several years later, is even more explicit:

And I feel us, compared to Aldous [Huxley] & Maria, unsuccessful. They’re off today to do mines, factories…. They are going to the Sex Congress at Moscow, have been in India, will go to America, speak French, visit celebrities—while here I live like a weevil in a biscuit. (2/17/1931)

Virginia and Leonard traveled abroad; they worked and socialized with some of the most prominent people of their time—yet she often felt stuck in a comparatively narrow life, constricted by a lack of money for years as she worked to become a well-established, successful author. If there were times when she felt like a weevil in a biscuit, well, there’s no denying the weevil was in an excellent position to observe and record. Virginia stayed busily observant and utterly merciless at cataloging the physical and mental faults and quirks of the people around her. Some of my personal favorites:

Her face might have been cut out of cardboard by blunt scissors. (6/5/1921)

And he got naked & bathed, & made the river look many sizes too small. (8/22/1922)

My own tendency is to avoid physical descriptions and concentrate more on the hilarious things people say. We are fortunate to have our own circle of family and friends who provide good-quality spoken material. Of course my standard for hilarity is quite low.

Ernesto noticed a 12-pack of canned Brisk tea sitting in the woods near [our neighbor] Brenda’s barn. Naturally he asked why it was there. It seems Brenda was given a few cases of expired tea and has been gradually emptying the cans to recycle them. “That’s work!” she said. “Opening all them cans and waiting for the tea to pour out.” (2/18/2023)

Talked to Pam, who’s not feeling at all well this week after eating spicy chicken and attending a crowded funeral where she was crammed into a pew next to a huge woman whose boob was in Pam’s lap and whose enormous haunch rested on Pam’s hip bone. (5/4/2023)

Ernesto began a rant about a story on the news. I asked him to lower his volume and he replied, “Don’t you know that when it rains the frogs come out to sing?” Surely there’s a country song there; the meter is right. (9/17/2020)

Went to dinner at Holli’s, and [my nephew] Clark was supposed to be writing a paper for school. I thought he should write it in verse and demand extra credit. I asked, “But what rhymes with ‘essay’?” and with no pause whatsoever my sister Robin said, “Dessay.” (Undated)

Virginia and I both write somewhat lightly of our health, tending to avoid discussion of any significant complaints. When it comes to minor ailments, we are always ready to share, as Virginia does here:

I had rather catch Leonard’s itch than Lottie’s—that’s my only contribution to lice psychology which still occupies our minds, & wastes our mornings; & poisons our quiet after tea. … By taking thought I can itch at any point on my hundreds of inches of skin. I do it now.  (2/4/1920)

Oh, yes, I can make myself itch at will—usually as I’m trying to fall asleep at night. But worse than the itch of imagined lice is the itch to write something sturdy and true, knowing how hard it is to get the words to fall into place in the right way, in the way that you know in your heart they should fall. Demons of self-doubt and perfectionism haunted Virginia:

10 minutes to 11 a.m. And I ought to be writing Jacob’s Room; —I can’t, & instead I shall write down the reason why I can’t—this diary being a kindly blank faced old confidante. Well, you see, I’m a failure as a writer. I am out of fashion; old; shan’t do any better…. (4/8/1921)

The same demons haunt me, though I have the happy ability to take it all less seriously, being a less serious person than Virginia.

I was up at 3:30 and 4:30 a.m. the last couple of nights to see the Perseids. Watching for meteors on those rare nights when they’re visible here feels exactly like writing to me. Waiting, waiting, for the right, random moment when everything comes together and you earn a thrill of brief illumination. Of course it’s very much like fishing, too. I don’t mind the waiting so much, but I do want to catch something. (8/13/2023)

Virginia deserves the last word. In an entry dated January 24, 1939, she wrote:

These are notes I scribble hastily, while L[eonard] (exacerbated by the itch again) goes to the Cocktail at the BB. … And on the bus coming back from the Flower Show I described my new ‘novel’: & we planned the books we shd. write, if we could live another 30 years.