Bir Yazarın Günlüğü

by Virginia Woolf, Seda Erol Le Morellec (Translator)

Hayat arkadaşı Leonard Woolf’un derlediği Bir Yazarın Günlüğü, dünya edebiyatının akışına yön veren bir dehanın zihnine yolculuk yapma ve mahrem düşünceleri arasında gizlice dolaşma olanağı sunuyor. Eşsiz bir titizlikle derlenen günlük Woolf ile yeni tanışacak okurlara yol arkadaşı olacak, çünkü her bir eserin tohumlarının nasıl ekildiğine, yazmanın ne denli yoğun, acı verici fakat bir o kadar da keyifli bir süreç olduğuna ışık tutuyor. Kitap, bilinç akışı yönteminin öncüsünün hayranları için ise sayısız sürprizle birlikte yeni katmanlar sunuyor: Nihai halini alan kitapların alternatif akışları hatta isimleri, Woolf’un Dostoyevski ile kavgası, Shakespeare hayranlığı, iktisatçı Keynes ile sırdaşlığı, gerçek dostları, öfkeleri, kaygıları, sıradan olan her şeye duyduğu tiksinme hissi... Ve tüm karanlığıyla savaş. Edebiyat ve eleştiri yazmak arasında sıklıkla tercih yapmak zorunda kalan Woolf’un ne denli sıkı bir okur olduğunu da günlük sayesinde öğreniyoruz.
Bir Yazarın Günlüğü ile Woolf’u yakından tanıyacak, satır aralarında ömürlük bir dost bulacaksınız.
“Dün, yani ayın 18’i, pazar günü, bir kükreme duyduk. Tam üstümüze geldiler. Uçağa baktım, kükreyen bir köpekbalığına bakan ufak bir balık gibi. Işıkları yansıyordu, üç tanelerdi sanırım. Zeytin yeşili. Sonra pat pat pat pat! Almanlar mıydı? Tekrardan pat pat pat, Kingston’ın üzerine doğru.”

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Classics, Biography, Memoir, Diary, Biography Memoir

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Reviews

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nu spun o noutate, Virginia Woolf a fost o cititoare pasionată și un critic foarte lucid. Timp de mai multe zile, am transcris însemnările ei despre cărțile pe care le citea. Tabloul este, desigur, incomplet. Pentru a reconstitui întregul lecturilor, modul cum reacționa la ele, se cuvine să-i citim eseurile. Virginia Woolf despre:

a) Homer. Sofocle

luni, 29 octombrie 1934: Citesc „Antigona. Cît de puternic încă este farmecul acesta; emoția pe care ți-o produce [limba] greacă se deosebește de oricare alta. Voi citi Plotinus, Herodot și cred că și Homer” (p.266).

b) Shakespeare, Shelley, Coleridge

A. 15 august 1924, vineri: „Cînd aveam 20 de ani nu puteam să-l citesc pe Shakespeare de plăcere pentru nimic în lume. Acum, plimbîndu-mă, mă bucur la gîndul că voi citi două acte din Regele Ioan astă seară și că apoi voi citi Richard al II-lea. Ceea ce mă atrage acum este poezia, poemele lungi” (p.81).

B. 22 iunie 1940, sîmbătă: „Îmi zic că dacă este ultima mea etapă, n-ar trebui oare să citesc Shakespeare? Dar nu pot... Aceasta mă gîndeam ieri este poate ultima mea plimbare. Lanul de grîu era smălțuit cu maci roșii. Seara îl citesc pe Shelley. Ce delicați, puri, muzicali și integri îmi apar el și Coleridge... Ne scurgem către marginea unei prăpăstii” (pp.392-393).

c) Cervantes

5 august [1920], joi: „Vreau să încerc să spun ce cred despre Don Quijote, pe care-l citesc după cină. Mai întîi cred că pe vremea aceea se scriau povestiri pentru a-i distra pe oamenii stînd în jurul focului... Ți-i închipui șezînd roată, femeile torcînd, bărbații pierduți în gînduri și istorisindu-li-se o poveste veselă, fantastică și încîntătoare ca unor copii mari. Mi se pare că spre aceasta țintește Don Quijote, și anume să ne amuze cu orice preț... Cervantes nu este conștient de sensul profund al operei și nu îl vede pe Don Quijote așa cum îl vedem noi. Într-adevăr, aceasta este dificultatea de care mă izbesc: tristețea, satira, în ce măsură ne aparțin ele nouă, fără să fi fost intenționate [de autor]? Sau poate că aceste personaje nemuritoare au capacitatea de a se schimba în funcție de generații?... Scena marșului sclavilor de pe galeră este un exemplu a ceea ce vreau să spun. Oare Cervantes a simțit întreaga frumusețe și tristețe a acestui pasaj cum o simt eu însămi?” (p.38).

d) F.M. Dostoievski

26 septembrie 1922, joi: „Dostoievski reprezintă pierzania literaturii engleze” (p.65).

e) Marcel Proust

8 aprilie 1925, marți: „Bineînțeles, [Doamna Dalloway] nici nu se poate compara cu Proust, în a cărui lectură sînt cufundată în momentul de față. Ceea ce mă izbește la Proust este împletirea unei sensibilități foarte ascuțite cu o înverșunată tenacitate. Proust scrutează nuanțele unui fluture pînă la ultima particulă. E viguros ca struna unei viori... Presupun că mă va influența și, totodată, mă va înfuria la fiecare frază pe care o voi scrie” (p.89).

f) D.H. Lawrence

2 octombie 1932, duminică: „Îl citesc pe D. H. Lawrence cu obișnuita senzație de frustrare și cu sentimentul că el și cu mine avem multe lucruri în comun; aceeași insistență de a fi noi înșine, așa încît cînd îl citesc nu pot să evadez. Sînt tulburată. Ceea ce aș dori este să mă eliberez de o altă lume, Proust mă ajută să fac acest lucru, Lawrence este irespirabil, claustrat” (p.218).

g) James Joyce

A. 10 august 1922, miercuri: „Ar trebui să citesc Ulysses și să pun la cale un proces în favoarea sau împotriva romanului. Pînă acum am citit 200 de pagini, nici măcar o treime. Primele două sau trei capitole, pînă la sfîrșitul scenei din cimitir, m-au amuzat, m-au stimulat, m-au captivat, m-au interesat. Apoi am rămas nedumerită, plictisită, iritată, decepționată de un student grețos, care își stoarce coșurile... După părerea mea este o carte incultă și grosolană, cartea unui autodidact și știm cu toții cît de dezarmanți sînt aceștia, cît de egoiști, insistenți, rudimentari șocanți și, în ultimă instanță, dezgustători” (p.61).

B. 6 septembrie 1922, miercuri: „Am terminat de citit Ulysses și îl consider un eșec. Cred că nu este lipsit de geniu, dar geniu de o calitate inferioară. Cartea este difuză și grețoasă; pretențioasă și vulgară nu numai în sensul obișnuit, ci și în sens literar. Vreau să spun că un scriitor de înaltă clasă respectă prea mult scrisul ca să trișeze, să șocheze sau să execute acrobații. Aceasta îmi amintește tot timpul de un băiețaș nepriceput de școală primară, plin de inteligență și de daruri, dar atît de conștient de sine și de egoist încît își pierde capul, devine extravagant, afectat, zgomotos, stîngaci - încît îi face pe oamenii cumsecade să-l compătimească, iar pe cei severi îi înfurie. Sper ca aceasta să-i treacă cu vîrsta, dar întrucît Joyce are 40 de ani, e un lucru care pare foarte puțin probabil. N-am citit cartea foarte atent și am citit-o doar o singură dată: e foarte confuză, așa încît fără îndoială că sînt nedreaptă și că meritele ei mi-au scăpat...” (pp.63-64).

***

În dimineața zilei de vineri, 28 martie 1941, Virginia Woolf părăsește casa și se întreaptă spre rîul Ouse. Își umple buzunarele hainei de blană cu pietre și intră în apă. Lăsase în urmă două scrisori de despărțire. Una pentru Leonard Woolf, cealaltă pentru sora ei, Vanessa Bell. În scrisoarea pentru Leonard, notase: „I feel certain I am going mad again”. Cu trei săptămîni înainte, scrisese în jurnal:

8 martie [1941], duminică: „Rețin fraza lui Henry James: 'Observă neîncetat!' Să observ apropierea bătrîneții. Să observ lăcomia. Să observ propria mea deprimare. În acest mod totul poate deveni util... Țin să petrec acest timp cu folos. Voi cădea, dar voi ține steagul sus...” (p.426).

[Dolors · Rating 5 out of 5]

These diary entries brim over with life, with hunger, with a passion that cannot be contained, with the conflicted need to absorb it all; the lonely walks in the Sussex countryside, the visual and sonorous chaos of life in the city, of incessant travel, mental and otherwise, the unstoppable flow of time, the transience of things, the galloping rhythm of emotions, sensations and the simultaneity of memory, past and present in one’s conscience, the tedium of discussions and routine, the truth about daily life without embellishment.

Virginia sat at her desk and wanted to condense it all into poetry and leave out whatever that was superfluous. She never rested. She pushed herself to the limit, squeezed out her mind and existed fully only when she was writing. Writing as a means of being. She became inebriated by the exuberance of words and was carried away by the enthusiasm of getting closer to the voice that would finally give a physical shape to her dispersed, hyperactive senses. Working soothed and provided purpose to an otherwise futile reality, it gave her a reason to be.
But when the last page was done, revised, rewritten and typed out, almost manically, the vertigo of impending emptiness oppressed her, and incessant self-doubt erased all sense of wholeness or achievement.
The vain, arrogant, scathing writer became a vulnerable woman, conflicted about her own expectations and with an almost obsessive need for validation.

The constant search for meaning made her restless, abstracted and prone to introspection. She devoured books compulsively, classics and contemporary literature, and had no trouble scoffing the likes of Joyce, Hardy or Bernard Shaw, but she wasn’t harsher with any other author than she was with herself. She kept track of her book sales, she was easily humiliated by negative reviews and dreaded the reactions of her close friends in the Bloomsbury group.
The vulnerability shown in these diaries bespeaks of a woman aware of her writing prowess but also mindful of her limitations, something one might not expect to see in the diaries of her male contemporaries.

As years pass and the entries get closer to the onset of WWII, the collapse of Woolf’s world seems to match her increasing mental frailty. The constant fear of imminent bombings during the Blitz overpowers her creativity. Her writing becomes rushed and it loses the quality of a safe haven. Woolf’s hunger to seize meaning through writing wanes and a lulling indifference takes hold of her former urgency.
Where to draw the line between the woman and the writer? Between imposed circumstance and deliberate choice? Maybe one wouldn’t exist without the other.
Some might think Leonard Woolf’s selection of diary entries show a fragmented account of Virginia’s intimate thoughts, but for this reader, they are more than a censured portrait of an artist. They present a fair testimony to the great joys and uncertainties of being a writer, of surrendering to an unknown vision and committing one’s life to seize it without compromising the fleeting quality of its beauty.

[Fionnuala]

scritch scratch scritch scratch dash
scritch scratch scritch scratch semi-colon
scritch scratch scritch scratch inkblot
the trusty nib flounders a moment
then wades through the puddle of ink
and on to the end of the line
to the end of the page
to the end of that year’s diary
and though it flounders sometimes along the way
the trusty nib keeps on scratching through the diaries
until half-way though the last volume
it flounders finally

_______________________________
Now for The Longer Review - and apologies in advance.

Reading a diary is like being in a room with someone who thinks they are alone. And even though they think they are alone, and feel quite safe talking to themselves aloud, we see them glance in the mirror from time to time to see how they look when they are speaking. It can’t matter how they look but they check all the same, just in case. How much ‘just in case’ is present in Virginia Woolf’s diary, the kindly blank-faced confidante she turned to in good times and in bad?

In March, 1926, aged forty-four, she wrote: But what is to become of all these diaries, I asked myself yesterday. If I died, what would Leo make of them? He would be disinclined to burn then; he could not publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think; and then burn the body. I daresay there is a little book in them; if the scraps and scratching were straightened out a little...This is dictated by a slight melancholia, which comes upon me sometimes now and makes me think I am old. Yet, as far as I know, as a writer I am only now writing out my mind.

She was right on all counts. She lived to be fifty-nine and wrote five more novels, some of her most famous essays, many short stories, the second series of The Common Reader, a biography of the artist Roger Fry, plus fifteen more years worth of diary entries. And Leonard Woolf did edit her diaries after her death in 1941, selecting the sections on writing, and some on reading, which he then published as A Writer's Diary full of little gems like this: You see, I’m thinking furiously about Reading and Writing

A Writer's Diary starts in 1918 when Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day was about to be published, and it covers the most important years of her writing life. I for one am very grateful to Leonard Woolf for both the editing and the publishing. It is very exciting to get to read about the writing process as it is happening, and about the writer’s reaction to the reception of their work as it is published.

As a reader, I’m rarely drawn to the biographical details of a writer’s life except where they are so closely linked to the writing that an understanding of one requires an understanding of the other. In the case of Virginia Woolf, it seems to me that biographical details are simply not relevant to an appreciation of her writing. She may have used life experiences as material for her books but the reader doesn’t need to know which episodes are fact and which are fiction; the writing carries the day almost entirely on its own. It is interesting that we don’t often seek to know the intimate lives of artists the way we sometimes do with writers; we accept an artist’s work as it is, simply placing it in its epoch and appreciating its technique and its merits in relation to its contemporaries. The parallel with the artist is particularly relevant in Woolf’s case; the main agenda in her novels is her art. The novels make political points certainly, but it is done without stridency; it never gets in the way of the style of the writing or the shape she is architecting. Even when she makes political points in her non-fiction, her phrasing is always perfect and her voice remains serene; she examines the field as a scientist or an anthropologist might, and sets out her conclusions. In both her fiction and her non-fiction, there is this firm focus on the writing style. I think she would have abhorred any search for intimate details about the personal life behind that writing style.

So what does Virginia Woolf say about the process of writing if writing it is—this dash at the paper of a phrase, this sweep of a brush? In 1923, when she is working on the first draft of Mrs. Dalloway, she writes: But now what do I feel about my writing? One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoievsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do?…But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true reality?…Answer these questions as I may…there remains this excitement: to get to the bones, now that I’m writing fiction again I feel my force glow straight from me at its fullest. After a dose of criticism I feel that I’m writing sideways, using only an angle of my mind.

The other angles of her mind were constantly focused upon the current novel she was working on, or upon the germ of an idea for the next one. Why not invent a new kind of play; as for instance: Woman thinks…He does. Organ plays. She writes. They say: She sings. Night speaks. As we read through the diaries, we watch such seeds grow and change: that particular seed grew into Orlando. Soon afterwards, she began mentioning another theme: ‘moths’. She spoke of those moths again and again, spoke of them hovering at the back of her brain, and finally I realised that she was shaping the playpoem that would become The Waves. More of her diary entries concern The Waves than any of her other books, except perhaps To the Lighthouse. I find it significant that of the entire ten, those are the two I appreciated the most.

And so, there was always a story in the making, even before she had finished the previous one, and the diaries were where she coaxed these seeds of stories into the light. As we can see from the quotes, Woolf wrote the diaries in a kind of shorthand, quite unlike the way she writes in her novels and essays: It strikes me that here I practice writing; do my scales; yes and work at certain effects. I daresay I practiced Jacob here; and Mrs D. and shall invent my next book here; for here I write merely in spirit—great fun it is too, and Old V. of 1940 will see something in it too. She will be a woman who can see, old V., everything—more than I can, I think. She registers her thoughts on the spot, her nib following the swerves of her thinking, sensitive to every shift of mood, and very often the mood mentioned is one of exhilaration, of the ‘high' she experienced from creating phrases. The notion of immense satisfaction, rapture, electric shocks gained from writing is repeated over and over again and most often in relation to the periods when she was engaged on fiction: Great content—almost always enjoying what I am at, but with constant change of mood. I don’t think I’m ever bored. Sometimes a little stale; but I have a power of recovery.

She needed every power of recovery that she could muster when it came to the reception of her novels. After Night and Day came out to unenthusiastic reviews in 1919, she wrote: I ought to be writing Jacob’s Room; and I can’t…I’m a failure as a writer. I’m out of fashion: old: shan’t do any better….my book..a damp firework. Later, while still working on Jacob's Room, she noted: Elliot (T. S.) coming on the heel of a long stretch of writing (two months without a break) made me listless; cast shade upon me; and the mind when engaged upon fiction wants all its boldness and self-confidence. He said nothing (about Jacob's Room)— but I reflected how what I’m doing was probably being better done by Mr Joyce.

By 1939, even though she had some huge successes behind her, and had had books written about her, she was still easily cast down by criticism and brooded about her writing reputation having been damaged by Windham Lewis and Gertrude Stein, and about how she was seen by some critics to be out of date..unlikely to write anything good again…second-rate and likely to be discarded altogether. I think that's my public reputation at the moment. It is based largely on C. Connolly's cocktail criticism: a sheaf of feathers in the wind.

About reading contemporary reviewers such as Cyril Connolly, she writes: When I read reviews [of other people's books] I crush the column together to get at one or two sentences; is it a good book or a bad? And then I discount those two sentences according to what I know of the book and of the reviewer. But when I write a review I write every sentence as if it were going to be tried by three Chief Justices. I can’t believe that I am crushed together and discounted. Reviews seem to me more and more frivolous…The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

Whatever about being read, reading itself was a tremendous pleasure. She mentions reading certain authors again and again; Dante and Proust were two such. She not only reread her favourites over and over, she liked to read them alongside other books, and the more books she had going at once, the better she liked it. In one of her letters, she said: I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time. Due to her association with The Times Literary Supplement as an occasional reviewer, she claims to have learned eventually to read with a pen and notebook, seriously.

There are frivolous moments as well as serious ones in her diary life; a line from an old song is tossed out several times like a repeated theme in a piece of music; it reveals a different Virginia from the one we usually see: And what do I care for a goose-feather bed. The line is from the well-known ballad about the Lady who leaves her Lord and her comfortable house and goes off to share a life on the road with the RaggleTaggle Gypsy-O. Interpret that how we like, it is clear that Virginia liked her comforts and was pleased to have made enough money from her writing to eventually afford certain luxuries. I enjoy epicurean ways of society; sipping and then shutting my eyes to taste. I enjoy almost everything.

Coexistent with the epicurean was a restless spirit constantly questioning itself, sometimes finding only blackness. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay one’s hands on and say ‘This is it’? My depression is a harassed feeling. I'm looking: but that's not it—that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?

It is at this point that the reviewer might be tempted to end this review by presuming tritely that Virginia Woolf never did find ‘it’. But no, this reviewer thinks she had ‘it’ in front of her all the time, and that she knew it: Nothing makes a whole except when I am writing.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virginia Woolf

On 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

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have a lot of support in your writing, perhaps you don’t need this shot in the arm. But for those of us scribbling in the dark, without guidance, the book feels essential. Read it alongside Woolf’s Flush, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Waves, The Years etc. I have never read anything comparable. The reader travels with Woolf through each draft, through all the joy and despair of writing her books. It’s surprising how much she struggled. Genius or not, she had her doubts like anyone. Though I was disappointed to see how drunk she became with praise in the form of good reviews. She writes of “glory.” The approval of the critics meant a lot to her. Edited by her husband Leonard Woolf, this book is a compilation of entries specifically about writing pulled from her more extensive general diary. I’m grateful for his effort. I would not otherwise have found this information, buried as it was in that oceanic tome.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My copy of A Writer's Diary—I tried to post a photo, but Goodreads just couldn't deal with whatever it was I had to offer—has a forest of little tags poking out from the side. All the passages I've marked.

As a writer, I move between despair and joy on a daily basis. A good day of writing leaves me scoured clean and refilled with peace;

There is some ebb and flow of the tide of life which accounts for it; though what produces either ebb or flow I'm not sure.

but the stress of rejection and of praise is such an invasion of the external world into my inner equilibrium.

...the worst of writing is that one depends so much upon praise. One should aim, seriously, as disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there.

The only way to right the imbalance is to shut out the world and offer myself up to the page. To sit and write until my limbs are stiff, my eyes ache, my brain empties out.

The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

Then, to take a walk, letting the words sift from my head down to my toes. When I return home, I have room for the words of others.

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature.

A Writer's Diary show the decades of a writer's life unfolding in real time: the highs and near-shame of success; the deep, quiet pleasures of the life of the mind; the fear and resignation of failure, which is usually far more a product of the writer's imagination than of the external world.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way. Never be unseated by the shying of that undependable brute, life, hag-ridden as she is by my own queer, difficult, nervous system.

What would Woolf make of the cult of personality she has become?

Now I suppose I might become one of the interesting–I will not say great–but interesting novelists?

What would we have made of her work, what more could she have offered us, if mental illness had not had the final say, if she could have found her way to a different final chapter?

A thousand things to be written had I time; had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

I remarked to another writer what an inspiration this book is to me, what comfort I have found in Woolf's own struggles and doubts. She reminded me how things ended for Woolf. That she took her own life. How strange a response. She missed the point entirely. Instead of being haunted by Woolf's end, I think of Mary Oliver's poem, "The Summer Day" Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Oliver asks.

Here is how Woolf would have answered:

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—the moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves.

Virginia Woolf passed like a cloud on the waves. But her words have become moments upon which we all stand, strengthened, made taller by the foundation of her genius. And we look up at those clouds, mouthing, Thank you.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.

This is a single-volume edited selection of Woolf's diaries made by Leonard Woolf and, thus, a mere fraction of the six volumes of diaries she left. While advertised as a 'writer's diary' - and it does trace her work on her books, essays and articles - it also includes travel, stays in the countryside and, after 1938, the build up and early years of WW2. The selection ends on 8 March 1941 with Woolf thinking about making dinner from haddock and sausage meat... just twenty days before she took her own life on 28 March that year.

But the overall impression is of an intense and vivid mind and intellect: this selection, perhaps purposely, is light on Woolf's illnesses and breakdowns though there are, towards the end, moments when her relief to be back to herself are palpable. Woolf's voice is strong: not necessarily in an opinionated way and one of the most warming qualities is her self-questioning over her writing and what she wanted to do with her books. Tracing the evolution of the novels makes this a must-read, especially as Woolf is her own best critic.

I've frequently had debates with friends who have criticised Woolf for her 'pompous' and 'self-regarding' writing - something that I largely contest. On the contrary, what we see here is a woman who was, to some extent, shunned by the literary establishment - she didn't even get noticed by The Times until publication of The Waves, and makes fun of the constant 'gentlemanly, kindly, timid' reviews of her books in the TLS.

It's perhaps towards the close of the extracts when Britain is at war that we see Woolf revealed in her most personal shades: her pamphlet against fascism (Three Guineas), her vivid pen portraits of London during the Blitz, even the undramatic way that she recounts how Leonard has petrol stashed away in the garage for the two of them to commit suicide together if the Nazis successfully invaded England (he was Jewish and she was, allegedly, on a Nazi hit-list).

What is excluded from this curated selection is the witty, social Woolf: she was unrepentently gossipy and her full diaries are a fascinating primary source for other women who were part of, or on the fringes of, the Bloomsbury Group such as Elizabeth Bowen and Viv Eliot. There are brief mentions of visits from Vita Sackville-West but from reading this alone it would be hard to get a sense of how important this relationship was to Woolf, even with Vita admitted as a model for Orlando. Nevertheless, as a taster of Woolf's diaries with a decisive slant towards her literary work, this is absorbing reading.

[Khush · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Writer's Diary, unlike Woolf's fiction–beautiful though, is an easy book to read. One can see what she has lived through from 1918 to 1941. The book is aptly titled; it is primarily about words, mind, books, artists, writing, and how these myriad things at once possess and liberate a sensitive soul like hers.'

There are a few things, among many other, that particularly make me stop and reflect to know her better. What one immediately recognizes in her work, even when her work is not really understood or only partly read, is the brilliance of mind that is at work. In her diaries entries, we glimpse that mind. She comes across as someone who is wholly immersed in words, drawn to them immensely. Life seems to have no meaning if one cannot give shape it through words– to express her 'becoming.' Such an extraordinary ambition could be liberating and rewarding, but it could also whip the person indulging it– this constant struggle to better life, to live it fully by capturing its 'ever-eluding, ever-mobile' essence. In one of her entries, for instance, a rather casually selected example, she thinks of 'wording' a floating cloud in these words; “The clouds– if I could describe them I would; one yesterday had flowing hair on, like the very fine white hair of an old man. At this moment they are white in a leaden; ...,”

I find some entries particular poignant in which she mentions what comes between her and the 'word-world' she seeks to tame. The phases when she could not write due to ill–health, and times when non-creative processes usurp her time which she only wishes to spend writing and thinking things. I guess as she was aging she became more and more restless with thoughts of 'body' and 'time,' Such a fecund mind, rippling with ideas and books in it, is tied to very real limitations. In one of her entries, she writes about a dying person, but her way of seeing gives a peep into her own fears of what lays ahead– what it all comes to in the end. She observes,“ he is sinking into old age, very shabby, loose-limbed, wearing black woollen mittens. His life is receding like a tide slowly; or one figures him as a dying candle, whose wick will soon sink into warm grease and be extinct.”

These entries also show how vulnerable writers generally are. Throughout the book, she claims that criticism of her work does not matter, that she does not care much, but we also see that she cares and gets affected by bad reviews. However, I trust her when she says she does not care as much as its reverse. She also mentions that writing is what one lives for. It is through writing that one drives a supreme pleasure. In many diaries, we see how concern she is often about the sales of her book (1200 copies, 2000 copies). Now reading this in 2018, these are also aspects that make her identifiable and endearing with ordinary mortals, that she is not only someone who wrote 'Mrs. Dalloway.' it is a pleasure to see the little girl, even momentarily, in her who is so powerfully overshadowed by the formidable adult writer in her.

I am also quite moved by how she responded to Joyce's Ulysses- to her this book seemed 'thin, diffuse, pretentious, brackish, even underbred in the literary sense, pointless. To her, it all felt as if a young boy is scratching his pimples on page after page. Clearly, she was quite stunned by Joyce's achievement but found it hard to acknowledge it. Even toward her last entries, she remains occupied with his work and finally accepts his genius which I assume she has noticed, to her bewilderment, when she first lays her eyes on 'Ulysses.' It was all very clear to her even then.

While reading her thoughts I was a bit surprised that she hardly wrote about her relationships about, love, gender, and sexuality. I wondered if the book is a compilation of only her selective diary entries– pertaining to the writer's struggles and ruminations on her art. But finally, I did see gender and sexuality, casually but powerfully, being mentioned in small paragraphs. I saw someone who wrote 'A Room of One's Own' making astute observations on men's behavior and how men occupy space. As for sexuality, there is again a brief but telling claim that friendships between women are more superior, private and comforting than between man and woman. All this, of course, sated my gratuitous curiosity.

Even before I started reading her book, I knew a few things about her life, the most unfortunate being the manner of her suicide. For this reason, probably, I noticed that throughout this book images and metaphors of water appear in all sort of ways. One also feels that there is nothing more important to her than 'words.' (Maybe certain heights or territories come with their own challenges and fears– it might be lonely 'there'. What shall I write now? Whom shall I read now?)

At a certain point in her life either the words were not there anymore or they had gone unruly– wholly unmanageable. The only comforting thing, then left, was to walk into a river.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A full review to come.

It has arrived. However most of the, Likes, below referred to a quote of Woolf's in an update status I entered. Then using the magic of my technical skills I lost. Sad. A period of web mourning, yet it appeared again in the review below.





What we have here is a reviewer who has been kidnapped. I’m sure it will be in tomorrow’s papers. But how to get out to write… the review? Is there anything here to use to be resourceful?

Only words.

More words.

They mount threatening to crush me as they form before me into ideas, a life. Am I… inside of a diary? How strange.

But do I want to escape? These words and ideas around me, covering me, are brilliant. They are honest. Touching them, their touching me, they glitter with the glowed wand of creative light. It is escape that would be containment. This is where to be.

She writes:

“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.”

A fine thought to keep in mind when opening this diary but beware your fate may be similar to mine. There is no caution sign. Follow me. There is much to be said.

This is a collection of her entries culled from the twenty six volumes from the years 1915-1941, the year of her death, by her husband Leonard Woolf. This raises a number of issues; Virginia Woolf was clear from the beginning that no one else would be privy to this diary but herself and years ahead her elder self, therefore no reason to be anything but honest and objective. Can any one of us human critters, even the great VW, be totally free of the subconscious sway, the way we would like to see ourselves and the minute etching and scraping of events past to fit into our frame of the budding image. Then there is her husband and his unspoken agenda, possibly-probably-not known to him for the selections and their cumulative effect in presenting his picture of his deceased wife. She committed suicide. She walked out into the sea. I imagine his thoughts, memories, were quite complicated.

This is important information which I unfortunately did not include in my update status. Fortunately GR Friend Proustitute pointed this out before I rambled my merry way possibly leading others to believe this was the entire diary when only a portion. Much grateful for being rescued before walking before walking into a wall.

I believe despite its fractioned existence, the distortions, omissions, amplifications, this is a work that stands on its own. A separate collection forming a narrative around her relationship to her own work, the process she developed or was encumbered upon her through natural organic entreaties, the people she associated with including writers, painters, her conflicting relationship with the outside world as seen through the eyes of her artistic realm, scenes of that outside world and its landscapes described in the beauty of words painted, the limitations of a mental instability and physical maladies, and what she read-an influential part of her daily existence. If taken for what it is these diary excerpts form a narrative work impelling the reader within the mind of a significant writer.

Each entry, even about her commonplace day is about writing, containing her gifts with her pen, and always at work seeing her world. Every page so far contains inspiration for reading, writing. The only mar is when she feels the obligation to receive and pay visits. Otherwise her world would consist of the scenes gathering in her mind and the need and pleasure of penning them on paper.

More complicated than that. She conjures with death. Flits about hiding amongst its shadows.There is another kind of death. Does she fear looking inside to find nothing? This the reason for the continous visiting and being visited? Her fear of being alone? Yet she fills blank pages with an outpouring of her world, the world of imagination. This does not appear to be some psychological defense of projection. The world of imagination is the real world. Her real-true self resides there. Looking inside may prove fruitless but writing across the white pages, then typing what she has written, is the act of discovering and expressing the Self. She exists within the printed words, the empty spaces, accumulating into a bound manuscript. The arc of her sweated battle.

Writing is to keep living. Through form she can put the novel together as a substitute for putting her wayfaring emotions together, to put her strident inner life in order.Her writings contain her inner self which resists the tug and pull from the other side. Once the rope snaps she gushes forth. A manic romp of creativity, then sensitivity to its echoed return.


In the end this is a book of navigating the inner and outer. Is it navigation or a battle? She believes herself tied to the city life of visits and being visited upon. Her writing, no matter how well guarded is inextricably twined into the reception from friends, family, publishers. She relies on husband Leonard. Yet she is only truly herself in the solitude of writing, reading. The outer world means little until it means a lot. The world she chooses is the world of her imagination. Even out in the world beyond the borders of herself she pulls the objects, the people, into her readerly scope describing and depicting as though writing or the collecting of material within her net to be used at a later time.

The classic battle that so many of us here on GR discuss; the outside world is where life takes place and books exist to augment the experience versus the life of imagination. This is where books are the essence of living a life of meaning and that the world is there to only fulfill the necessities, having no more drama than the brushing of one’s teeth. Yes, tooth brushing is something needed to be done but conversations about it might run thin and dry. This is a choice we all make with our varying formulae to produce a unique customized balance. VW makes her battle quite clear from moment to moment and day to day, in her lyrical prose. Since writing for no one other than her older future self it appears that she thinks and therefore writes in a natural swirl of metaphor, simile, analogy. Her style may be an un-style. The flow of liquid words may be the unfolding of her mind in its continuity. Armed, this is what she goes into battle with fierce beneath the lyric path of her words.

[Miss Ravi · Rating 5 out of 5]

در آخرین جمله‌ی کتاب، ویرجینیا می‌خواهد شام بپزد. ماهی هداک و سوسیس. بیست روز پیش از خودکشی‌اش. در حالی که برای روزها و ماه‌های آینده‌اش برنامه ریخته. گاهی انرژی دارد و گاهی بی‌حوصله است. درست است که خودکشی با بعضی‌ها هست؟
بی آن‌که پای ویژگی مشترکی وسط باشد، ویرجینیا وولف من را یاد ویوین مایر می‌انداخت. شاید برای آن‌که هر دو درون‌نگری خاصی داشته‌اند و شاید هم بی‌دلیل. ویرجینیا در سراسر یاددا‌شت‌هایش دارد با کتاب‌هایش دست‌وپنجه نرم می‌کند. اول اشتیاق نوشتن‌شان را دارد و بعد انگار با آن‌ها می‌جنگد، جنگی برای شکل دادن به جملات و رام کردن کلمات. و بعد دوره کوتاهی استراحت و دوباره کتاب دیگری. در آخرین جمله از کتاب، پیش از آن‌که ویرجینیا شام بپزد، من از تمام شدن کتاب، غمگینم.

[Helle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was glorious. I’ve underlined great things on nearly every page. If this is what Virginia Woolf could produce when sitting in bed and simply writing an expansive version of a ‘dear diary’, it tells us something about her genius (she calls it a dialogue of the soul with the soul). It is the best I’ve read by Woolf so far. It is more immediate, more intimate, more relatable than what I’ve read by her before. It is packed with thoughts and feelings and metaphors and meaning.

I’m slowly wading my way through Virginia Woolf’s body of work and, by extension, through the intricacies of her brain and her sensibilities. It is not an uncomplicated liaison; when I read her fiction, I occasionally glance around during the reading process, appreciating bits here, doubting other pieces there; marvelling at her imagery and insight, yet sometimes feeling frustrated at her refusal to throw me just a tiny bit of plot, just a small shard of a realistic character trait, a little something that induces me to invest in her stories. One reviewer, she admits, describes her style as ‘so fluent and fluid that it runs through the mind like water’ – which is the closest I can come to a description of how her prose feels to me.

But when I read her non-fiction, well, I’m both in awe and a little bit in love. In this book, we are granted insight into, especially, her craft and her creative powers but also into her life, her friends and her demons, her gradual rise to fame, her own ambivalent attitude toward it, and into her final days.

She airs opinions that are sometimes unnuanced or that I humbly disagree with, e.g. that literature is not a matter of ‘development’ but of prose and poetry. I deeply appreciate a deliberate take on form, but I also prefer deliberate content and development – of story, of people; otherwise it remains poetry to me. She does admit to learning that she could do scenes but not plots. No surprise there. In this book no plot is needed. At times her sentences are shockingly profound, at other times simply gorgeous. The list of examples of the latter is endless, but here are a few to savour:

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections (…)

(…) the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in.

But to be well and use strength to get more out of life is, surely, the greatest fun in the world.

I am laboriously dredging my mind for Mrs. Dalloway and bringing up light buckets.

Joy’s life in the doing – I murder, as usual, a quotation; I mean it’s the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

I’m the hare, a long way ahead of the hounds my critics.

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me.

I was a little taken aback by her blatant disparagement of other authors (Mansfield, Joyce, James, the list goes on), but she is also critical of her own ability from time to time. And as she never criticized Forster, I didn’t care so much. In fact, she mentions him with a certain fondness every time his name crops up (‘Morgan’), and as Forster was one of my first loves in English literature, I cannot help but appreciate that tendency of hers. Her best sentence about Forster may be the following:

Morgan has the artist’s mind; he says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason.

On that note, she writes that intelligent criticism is to be encouraged. Yes, I thought. That ought to be a quote on the goodreads site. Perhaps it already is. Then it deserves to be read.

There are other authors whom she expresses something like love for. I savoured and wallowed in those parts. Shakespeare takes centre stage, but there’s also a wonderful scene where she and Leonard visit Thomas Hardy. A valuable aspect of the book, indeed, is when we hear about her own reading habits, her views on contemporary literature, her comparison of Turgenev and Dostoevsky etc.

Interestingly, as her books were published by Hogarth House, the Woolfs’ own publishing house, her books never fell under the critical gaze of an editor. We hear of how she typed them up, how Leonard only read the books after she was completely done with them and how they themselves had x number of copies printed depending on how many were ordered.

As we progress into the second half of the book, Virginia Woolf is visited more and more by her incertitude, her ups and downs, her despair, while simultaneously being more and more in the public eye. It saddened me deeply when she muses on what exacerbated her depressions:

I think the effort to live in two spheres: the novel; and life; is a strain. (…) to have to behave with circumspection and decision to strangers wrenches me into another region; hence the collapse.

I wonder if the beginning of World War II also underlined to her some of life’s enormous sadness or if it was a complete coincidence that she committed suicide in the second year of the war. The war is like a desperate illness, she wrote. The Woolfs’ home in London was bombed to smithereens, and so she spent the last days of her life in the country, at Monk’s House, where they could still hear the bombers and where, she wrote, we live without a future.

For readers who are interested in the writer Virginia Woolf, this is an absolute must-read. It was one of those books which made me impatient to read on and discover more and yet also stop and savour her words and her thoughts and not rush through it because there is only one first time for every book.

[Zoe Artemis Spencer Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."

Could one put a rating on someone's diary? Is it even appropriate to do so? Should one be saying things like 'you have a nice, organized thoughts', 'you keep a very thorough, meticulous and systematical diary', 'clear and very well-written', as though diary/ journal is written for someone else's eyes other than the writer's. Therefore, this rating is reserved for how meaningful the experience of perusing through Virginia Woolf's journal to me.
I have a confession to make. I, with the fiber of my being, worship Virginia Woolf. One of my regret is that I've found her late in my life stages, and from the first time I opened the page to A Room of One's Own, she has always been my hero ever since. Thus, I was daunted to read her personal journal, because as the saying goes, never meet your hero. To my enormous relief, seeing, listening and reading her makes me love her in a similar and different way. She felt like an intimate friend, whose voice and thoughts resonated in me, not as a writer of course, but as a person who inspired and comforted me with her passion, honesty and brilliant courage.

She's an inventor who always strove to create new forms, new styles of writing, of life-telling. She's a visionary who aimed for something greater and deeper, meaningful.
"I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say 'This is it'? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as 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."

Often time, it feels as though she is obsessing over glory or fame, but in fact what she craves for is respect and connection. She might be judgmental and critical on other people, but never more than on herself. She was a very harsh judge on herself, demanded perfection to her works. She's vain but oddly humble, never aim of being great writer, only an interesting one. She wrote but never preached, which was one of the reason I admired her so much. "Art is being rid of all preaching: thing in themselves: the sentence is beautiful: multitudinous seas; daffodils that come before the swallow dares."
The devotion and determination to her books was breathtaking. In her life, she focused to be her own self, refusing to be controlled, hated dominion or imposition of will over others. She would not lose her identity, sticking bravely to her aesthetic, using the sheer defiance of 'I write for myself' as her fighting pose every single time. "I will not be 'famous', 'great'. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded" And she was brilliant enough to find a way to be financially fulfilled but still able to write whatever the hell she wanted, instead of marketing herself to the satisfaction of public. "I am an outsider. I can take my way: experiment with my own imagination in my own way. The pack may howl, but it shall never catch me."

But even still, she wanted to do her own share for humanity. "I want to give the whole world of the present society--nothing less: facts as well as the vision." This contradiction became a continuous struggle, entangled with her war with self-worth, old age, and deaths of her friends, acquaintances, the rake of raw emotions that easily overwhelmed her, and the battles of depression.
From her journal, it could be seen how writing was a core need to her being, it how she came alive, she stated how she couldn't stop, or she would fall into a state of depression. If she didn't has anything to engage her brain: reading or writing, it was as though the inactiveness would force her to stare into the meaningless void of existence. "Wonder how a year or so perhaps is to be endured. Think, yet people do live; can't imagine what goes on behind faces. All is surface hard; myself only an organ that takes blows, one after another; the horror of the hard raddled faces in the flower show yesterday: the inane pointlessness of all this existence; hatred of my own brainlessness and indecision; the old treadmill feeling, of going on an on and on, for no reason."

Virginia Woolf was a gifted thinker, a born writer who was plagued by constant, continuous self-doubt, uncertainty and depression her whole life, but kept galloping courageously, floundering and stumbling in her search for truth and her own personal voice, but always transforming. Reading her writing process, her creative-always-changing journey had moved and touched me in an inexplicably profound level.

"I saw all the violence and unreason crossing in the air: ourselves small; a tumult outside."

[ZaRi · Rating 4 out of 5]

جمعه، 30 آوريل 1926
... ديروز بخش اول به سوي فانوس دريايي را تمام کردم، و امروز بخش دوم را شروع کردم. هيچ نمي‌توانم سر در بياورم. يکي از دشوارترين و مجردترين پاره از اثر درست همين است که با آن روبرويم. بايد به ترسيم يک خانه خالي بپردازم، بي وجود هيچ شخصيتي از هيچ کسي، و گذشت زمان، و همه کور و فاقد هر ويژگي، بي‌وجود هيچ چيزي که بتوان در آن چنگ انداخت؛ خوب، با شتاب مي‌نويسم، و تا چشم به هم بزني دوصفحة تمام سياه کرده‌ام. آيا مزخرفند؟ آيا عاليند؟ چرا اين‌طوري واژه باران مي‌شوم، آنهم ظاهراَ تا اين حد آزاد که هر چه دلم مي‌خواهد دقيقاَ همان بکنم. وقتي يک کمي از آن را مي‌خوانم، به نظرم مي‌رسد انگار خيلي هم زنده و پر تپش از کار درآمده است؛ فقط يک کمي بايد فشرده‌ترش کرد؛ ديگر هيچ چيزي لازم ندارد. اين رواني چشمگير سخن را با وضعي بسنج که در مورد« خانم دالووي» پيش آمد( جز، البته، در اواخر آن) . اين يکي ساختگي نيست؛ واقعيت محض است.

[Amir · Rating 4 out of 5]

هوش بالا وقتی با جزئی‌نگری زنانه ترکیب میشه تبدیل به یه تجربه‌ی جذاب و صد البته ویران‌گر میشه. ویران‌گرتر از هوش مردانه. ظرافت طبع ویرجینیا وولف رو میشه تو لابه‌لای صفحات این کتاب دید. یادداشت‌های وولف آیرونی‌وارانه! از سال 1918 (سال جنگ بزرگ) تا 1941 (میانه‌های جنگ عالم‌گیر دوم) رو شامل میشه
.
همه‌ی جذابیت این کتاب برمی‌گرده به دید زدن حالات روحی یه نویسنده توی یه گستره‌ی زمانی بیست و چند ساله. وولف اوایل کتاب بسیار حساس هست و بی اعتماد به نفس. دونه دونه‌ی نقدهایی که روی کارهاش می نویسند روش تاثیر می‌گذاره. اما رفته رفته وولف خودش رو پیدا می‌کنه. توی همین کتاب هم می‌بینیم که وولف موقع نوشتن خیزاب‌ها (که ظاهرا بهترین کتابش هست) خودش هم از نظر روحی عالی و توی اوج هست و بعد از همین رمان هست که آروم آروم باز هم اعتماد به نفس این بانوی بزرگ تحلیل میره تا جنگ شروع بشه. جنگ روی وولف تاثیر عمیقی می‌گذاره. بوی مرگ رو میشه از صفحه‌های آخر این کتاب شنفت. شاید جنگ اگر کمی زودتر تموم می‌شد ویرجینیا وولف هم بیشتر عمر می‌کرد
و فقط شاید
...

راستی نکته‌ی جالب این یادداشت‌ها این بود که وولف بعد از تموم کردن هر کتاب اون رو میده به لئونارد (شوهرش) تا بخونه و نظر بده. لئونارد تو همه‌ی این سال‌ها همیشه نظرش رو به این‌طور ابراز می‌کرده: بهتر از کار قبلیته. اما در مورد خیزاب‌ها برمی‌گرده و میگه: این یه شاهکاره. و در مورد کتاب بعدی وولف میگه به خوبی کارهای قبلیت هست. ظرافت این مرد ستودنی هست
.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wat had ik tijdens het lezen van deze door Leonard Woolf geselecteerde dagboeknotities van Virginia Woolf graag nog eens gegrasduind door mijn verloren GR-reviews bij haar meesterwerken. Op The Years en Between the Acts na, heb ik ze de voorbije jaren allemaal in het Engels gelezen. Nog meer dan de inspanning die dat soms vergde, was er telkens opnieuw dat gevoel beloond te worden door de onvergelijkbare literaire rijkdom waarin ze je als lezer onderdompelt. Haar eigen, meerstemmige variatie op de stream of consciousness.

In deze dagboeken leerde ik haar eigen(zinnige) stem kennen. En die verveelde geen seconde. Weloverwogen, maar tegelijk heel vrij schrijft ze over wat zich in haar binnenste roert. De selectie die Leonard Woolf maakte is dan wel gericht op notities die de ontstaansgeschiedenis van haar werk illustreren, toch laat de auteur, net als in haar boeken, heel wat meer meevloeien met die literaire onderstroom. Het enige frustrerende eraan vond ik misschien dat er naast de welbekende Britse tijdgenoten, net iets te veel personen in vernoemd, beschreven en geciteerd werden uit Virginia Woolfs kringen die ik niet kon thuisbrengen. Maar dat stond het leesgenot niet in de weg.

De onderstroom van typische schrijversbesognes zoals twijfels, werklust, timing, redactie, revisie, meer twijfels, frustraties, het moeilijk maar dapper omgaan met kritieken, inspiratie, schrappen, nog meer twijfels, gelukzaligheid, trots, opluchting, (on)geduld enz. passeren stuk voor stuk de revue. Bij elke roman wil Virginia zichzelf als het ware opnieuw uitvinden. Streng voor zichzelf en sterk in haar zelfreflectie ontvouwt zich in deze dagboeknotities een leven in functie van het schrijven dat vaak op het scherpst van de snee geleefd wordt, inclusief de mentale en soms ook fysieke balans die Virginia Woolf voor zichzelf moest zien te bewaren. Iets wat niet altijd lukte, ook al vielen er best wel wat momenten van oprecht geluk en tevredenheid op te tekenen.

Dat geluk kon zowel veroorzaakt worden door schrijfplezier, door het los kunnen laten van een roman na de laatste revisie (bij 'The Years', waar ze het langst over deed, heb ik echter vaak gedacht: 'Kap ermee, Virginia!') als door het wandelen in de natuur rond hun buitenhuis in Rodmell of door haar geliefde thuisstad Londen. Met mensen had ze het moeilijker, maar ook daarover schrijft en denkt ze zo genuanceerd, dat er zelden een zwartwit-portret ontstaat. In alles wat ze schrijft zoekt ze naar lagen, details, verbindingen tussen wat er zich aan de oppervlakte roert en wat er daaronder loert. Dat is misschien wel de essentie van Woolfs queeste als kunstenaar: het combineren van zulke dualiteiten.

Daarnaast werpt dit boek ook een rijk geschakeerd tijdsbeeld op van het interbellum zoals dat in Britse kunstenaarskringen geleefd en beleefd werd. De dagboeken lopen van 1918 tot 1941. Naar het eind toe, van zodra de naam Hitler valt, lees je hoe na jaren van nieuwe vooruitzichten en mogelijkheden de dreiging van een nieuwe oorlog zich aandient en hoe die op Brits grondgebied, met o.a. de luchtaanvallen op Londen, ook Virginia Woolfs leven binnenvalt en wellicht mede verantwoordelijk is voor haar suïcide.

Ik veronderstel dat je haar complete verzameling dagboeknotities moet lezen om ook haar mentale evolutie beter te kunnen duiden en de zelfmoord op late leeftijd beter te begrijpen. Daar zal ik me ooit nog wel eens aan wagen, in het Engels dan wellicht, want dit las verbazingwekkend vlot weg. Ook haar vroege, kortere romans en verhalen wil ik nu verder ontdekken. Want voor mij is Virginia Woolf zonder enig voorbehoud een van de allergrootsten uit de literatuur. Haar romans klinken zo uniek en zijn zo prachtig gecomponeerd (ja, als muziek) dat ik er een leven lang naar terug zal grijpen. Deze dagboeken hebben dat verlangen alleen maar aangezwengeld. 4,5*

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

'A very good summer, this, for all my shying and jibbing, my tremors this morning. Beautifully quiet, airy, powerful. I believe I want this more humane existence for my next—to spread carelessly among one's friends—to feel the width and amusement of human life: not to strain to make a pattern just yet: to be made supple, and to let the juice of usual things, talk, character, seep through me, quietly, involuntarily, before I say Stop and take out my pen.'

[Fabia Consorti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Che mente straordinaria, non trovo altre parole!

[Tatjana Bordukalo Nikšić · Rating 5 out of 5]

Divna introspektivna proza za koju bi, ipak, bilo dobro poznavati osnovne podatke iz autoričine biografije, kao i imati barem neki uvid u njezin bogati opus. Ova knjiga ne čita se na brzinu i s lakoćom, treba određeno vrijeme da se uživimo u tekst, ali on nudi cijelo prostranstvo tema, sadržaja i stilova iz kojeg će svatko moći iščitati nešto drugo. Ovom prilikom, kod prvog čitanja (a nekako slutim da ću se ovoj knjizi još vraćati), najviše su mi u oči upadali njezini strahovi prilikom iščekivanja kritike svakog novoobjavljenog djela - i to je nešto s čime se svaki umjetnik mora boriti, a bori se najčešće u tišini, sam za sebe.
Izvrstan prijevod Ande Bukvić Pažin (uz pripadajuću prevoditeljsku bilješku) i sjajan pogovor Nataše Govedić.

[Sidharth Vardhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?”

I normally avoid diaries that weren't published directly by author but this woman is too cool not to be in hell. The book suffers typical limitations of diary - written in certain moods, without desire of being understood always present (sometimes Woolf just throws a word stream instead of sentences) and not much focused on being eloquent. Woolf was full of ideas what forms literature could take and this book is full of such ideas. Another way a person interested in mind of a writer or art of writing might gain insights is how she has to go through spells of depression, writer's block, insecurities about her writings etc. Than there are all writers impressed her (to impress someone like her should be a real milestone). There are a number of beautiful passages I collected - more than I ever expect to from reading someone's personal diary.

[Roya · Rating 2 out of 5]

هیچ شکی در این نیست که ویرجینیا وولف یکی از بزرگترین و "تواناترین" نویسنده‌هاست و نقشی که توی ادبیات داشته بی‌نظیر و جسورانه‌ست.
ویرجینیا وولف نویسنده‌ایه که همیشه برای زندگی سراسر پر از رنجش غصه می‌خورم و به نظرم لیاقت داشتن زندگی خیلی بهتر و شادی داشت :(((
ویرجینیا بیشتر از هر چیزی توی زندگیش، به نوشتن و سبک نگارشی‌ش اهمیت می‌داده و برای اینکه تداوم داشته باشه، هر روز به عنوان تمرین توی دفترش یادداشت می‌کرده.
یادداشت‌هاش مجموعی از اتفاقات روزمره، گفتگوها، کارهایی که باید انجام بده، نشانه‌های افسردگی و بیماری‌ش، نظرش درباره نقدهایی که از کتاب‌هاش میشده، مختصری از نظرات و نقدهایی که برای کتاب‌های دیگران می‌نوشته، برنامه‌ش برای نوشتن کتاب‌های جدید و نظرش راجع به سبک کتاب جدیدش و.... است. یعنی صرفا می‌خواسته بنویسه.
من با هدف آشنایی بیشتر با وولف، سراغ کتاب رفتم ولی در طول خوندنش حس بدی داشتم چون خوندنش مثل سرک کشیدن توی دفتر خاطرات دیگران می‌مونه.
با اینکه وولف نویسنده‌ی خیلی خوبیه ولی قرار نیست از خوندن این یادداشت‌ها شگفت‌زده بشین و نباید دنبال چیز خاصی باشین. صرفا یک سری روزانه‌نویسی و به قلم آوردن افکار روزمره‌ست که به نظرم همسرش نباید منتشرشون می‌کرد چون کار درستی نیست.
پس اصلا ناراحت نباشین که چاپ کتاب تموم شده و نمی‌تونین بخونینش. چیزی از دست ندادین.

[Ben Winch]

Woolf. I can’t say as I get her yet, but I’m trying, in fits and starts. A Writer’s Diary has sat by my bed for a good few months now, at times (during the sections on To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Years) leaping into the foreground of my thoughts, but mostly providing a fallback when I wanted to snatch a quick paragraph or two of something that wouldn’t get its hooks in me. And no, at no point did it really get those hooks in, whether through discussion of craft (which I would have loved, but there was little, it seemed, of any deep detail) or lyricism (it was there but I was as inclined to skip as savour it, finding it at times laboured and at times mundane, and never as potent (need this be said?) as in the fiction) or everyday life (this I quickly tired of; I keep a journal too, have done for half my life, and it may be some things are common to all journals; at any rate much here was familiar and slightly crushing – the grind, the frustration, the grey bafflement by routine). That said, there were parts that took some kind of hold of me, Woolf’s struggle over The Years being maybe most compelling: a nerve-shredding cyclical lurching from confidence to dismay and back again and a cautionary tale for those of us prone to obsessive redrafting. Good to see some glimpse of her process, of her perfectionism. Good to witness her doubts, to know she lived them and still finished and moved on. Good to share in any revelations concerning her work. (Even those constant plans and timelines, composed in vain, were reassuring.)

As to my experience of her fiction, it’s been half enjoyable. Mrs Dalloway, years ago, seemed fussy and banal and I left it half-finished. Orlando I put down after a chapter though without malice. To the Lighthouse I read last year to its end; though the reading was a chore at times, images stuck with me (or one image, from multiple angles: the view across the bay, the lighthouse as if shining on one consciousness after another). Also “Time Passes”, I thought, was great. But overall the fussiness, to me, persisted – a skilful engraving but too static, mechanical, or at any rate not quite alive (but no, in retrospect it’s alive; at the time it seemed choked almost, gasping for breath, the grip of Woolf’s style too tight, rigid, close-clutched; though now I wonder if that very rigidity fuelled explosive movement when – as happened at key points, “Time Passes” being one of them – it softened). And most recently The Waves, which I’ve put on hold after 50 pages and may have to start again when I feel like diving in, but which the diary intimates I may like best, for Woolf’s having bent her mind and will to it with such force, in the full flush of confidence, before the torture of The Years, with a sense of both its unique limitations and its power. Whether I’ll ever get over the fussiness I tend to doubt, but that (I hope) I’ll learn to filter it while heeding the full-flowing wellspring beneath is what keeps me going, slowly, at a rate perhaps analogous to Woolf’s own writing habits, which, judging by her diary, were never quite as fast as she kept hoping.

[piperitapitta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Camera con vista.

[correva l'anno 2008]
Cosa dire di nuovo oltre tutto quello che abbiamo già detto nel gruppo di lettura?
In questo diario c'è tutta Virginia Woolf, nonostante i tagli effettuati dal marito Leonard rispetto alla vita privata, quella più intima e quella pubblica. C'è la Virginia Woolf scrittrice, sempre in cerca di approvazione e recensioni ai suoi scritti (ma anche orgogliosamente disinteressata alle critiche e ai giudizi negativi), c'è la Virginia Woolf critica letteraria, spietata, attenta, spigolosa, studiosa e meticolosa e infine c'è la Virginia Woolf donna, fragile e insicura e allo stesso tempo determinata, acuta osservatrice, sensibile e sempre in bilico tra felicità e depressione. Tutte queste Virginia, imprescindibili l'una dall'altra, sono un tutto indivisibile attraverso le quali seguire, tra gli alti e i bassi del suo genio e della sua umanità, la genesi delle sue opere, tra mille emozioni, dolori, attese e ripensamenti, dei suoi articoli letterari, delle sue biografie e quel lento e inesorabile declino che la porterà a togliersi la vita.
Il diario si ferma quattro giorni prima della sua morte e dopo averla seguita nell'arco di ventiquattro anni, dal 1918 al 1941, si resta senza fiato, annichiliti, con la sensazione, ma anche con la speranza, di poterla ritrovare in altre pagine a scrivere della guerra in corso, della primavera a Monk's House, dell'acquisto di nuove tende per la casa di città o delle copie vendute del suo ultimo romanzo, con una tazza di tè in mano o a passeggio per le campagne inglesi.

Mi chiedo: sarò mai capace di rileggerlo? Verrà mai un tempo in cui reggerò alla lettura di un mio scritto stampato senza arrossire, senza rabbrividire, senza il bisogno di cercare riparo?
(pag. 38)

[(credo proprio che mi piacerà)
gruppo di lettura
inizio 31 ottobre]

[oggi, 9 dicembre 2017]
Forse uno dei miei primi gruppi di lettura (virtuale) su Anobii, sicuramente uno di quelli che ricordo meglio: perché partecipò anche mia sorella Silvia (anche Francesca, ma lei è sempre stata la sorella colta, quella che a dieci anni andava a dormire portandosi a letto la Divina Commedia), solitamente dedita a letture di tutt'altro genere: Stephen King, Ken Follett, Fred Vargas, Massimo Carlotto; ma partecipò lo stesso perché sapeva che mi avrebbe fatta felice, perché questo gruppo che riuniva idealmente gli autori morti suicidi (nato all'indomani della morte di David Foster Wallace), era una mia creatura, una creatura a cui tenevo molto.
Queste furono le sue riflessioni, a diario non finito, che mi colpirono moltissimo allora, ancora di più rileggendole dopo molto tempo.

.......Gruppo di lettura......intanto visto che la mia lettura procede lentamente, riporto i miei primi commenti:
Virginia Woolf, in prima analisi, non risulta propriamente simpatica, appare dotata di un perfezionismo che sembra sconfinare spesso in una sorte di saccenza.
Sicuramente è critica non solo nei confronti degli altri ma anche e soprattutto con se stessa, ma nonostante possa risultare dotata di un carattere forte, avverto in questa continua ricerca di approvazione e di bisogno di confrontarsi con gli altri, un profondo senso di inadeguatezza e di insicurezza.
A volte ho la sensazione che la sua ricerca della forma letteraria perfetta le faccia dimenticare ciò che è l’essenza dell’arte, ossia il comunicare........ qualcosa di non perfettamente scritto ma che comunichi intensamente può essere più arte di un testo tecnicamente perfetto...."Il mio dubbio è fino a che punto racchiuderà il cuore umano. Sono abbastanza padrona dei miei dialoghi per imprigionarcelo dentro?"....o forse è il dilemma di ogni scrittore, la paura di non esser riusciti a tradurre in parole quello che il cuore trasmette.
I segni di un profondo senso di inadeguatezza li avverto ovunque nel suo scrivere, la differenza sta solo nel suo modo di affrontarlo, a volte con forza e voglia di vincerlo a volte con rassegnazione e senso d'oblio...."Perché è così tragica la vita; così simile a una striscia di marciapiede che costeggia un abisso .Guardo giù; ho le vertigini; mi chiedo come farò ad arrivare alla fine....E' una sensazione di impotenza; di non fare nessun effetto...." fare nessun effetto sembra una frase poco profonda che usiamo spesso nel linguaggio parlato....eppure nel suo modo di viverla e di intenderla assume per me quello che è uno dei suoi tormenti, il terrore di non lasciar traccia, la paura che il tempo le "svolazzi intorno battendo le ali" ed allora lo scrivere diventa la sua salvezza ed il suo tormento perché la fa sentire meglio al momento, ma è in fase di rilettura e di autocritica a posteriori, che tutti i suoi dubbi ed incertezze riaffiorano violentemente, il suo bisogno di perfezione e di autoaffermazione le impedisce di trarre una gioia completa dalla sua arte e diventa invece un elemento di ulteriore insicurezza.
........"L'opinione generale sarà che mi sto innamorando del suono della mia voce e non abbastanza di ciò che scrivo; indecorosamente affettata; una donna antipatica",.... trovo inquietante l'essere inclusa in quella che lei definisce "opinione generale" e nonostante confermi la mia prima impressione, ho voglia di andare più a fondo e provare a vedere se è a me che sfugge qualcosa, ma l'analisi attenta di ogni cosa che scrive, il segnare puntualmente qualcosa che avvalori o meno ciò che credo di aver capito, mi fa in un certo senso avvicinare di più al suo modo di lavorare ed essere quindi meno drastica nel giudizio....se io posso leggere utilizzando contemporaneamente passione ed analisi, razionalità ed istinto, perché mai Virgina Woolf non potrebbe usare anch'essa nello scrivere una fusione di cuore e cervello?perché uno dei due dovrebbe necessariamente avere il sopravvento e non convivere in perfetta sinergia?
"Voglio trovarmi lontana dagli spruzzi e nuotare di nuovo in acque tranquille"..... non è un pensiero che esprime un profondo equilibrio tra l'agitato mare interno e la ricerca di un approdo e della calma razionalità?E non è forse di noi tutti questo tormento e questa ricerca?
E' strano, o forse non lo è perché è così che deve essere, ma più la leggi è più la comprendi, ti sembra di entrare anche tu nel suo "meccanismo" mentale, hai come la sensazione di riuscire ad afferrare quel qualcosa ed in un attimo lo hai perso, è come se a tratti riuscissi a passare per "le stanze illuminate del suo cervello" per ritrovarti poco dopo nei suoi corridoi.
Trovo splendidi alcuni passaggi di questi anni, la sua riflessione su Proust "quello che che ha Proust è l'unione dell'estrema sensibilità con l'estrema tenacia. Esamina quelle sfumature di farfalla sino all'ultima venatura. E' resistente come il filo per sutura ed evanescente come la polvere d'oro di una farfalla.", ed è pura poesia ...."A proposito, perché la poesia è per forza un interesse da persone anziane?...Ora è la poesia che voglio, così mi pento come un marinaio sbronzo di fronte a un 'osteria....", ed in questo devo darle torto, credo che la ricerca e la comprensione della "poesia" non sia prerogativa di un'età ma di uno stato d'animo, quando sei in "quell'attimo" la riconosci e te ne nutri.
Trovo splendida anche la capacità di descrizione della Woolf..."A la Ciotat grandi barche arancioni sorgevano dall'acqua blu della piccola baia. Queste baie sono tutte perfettamente circolari e orlate (un termine che trovo delizioso!) dalle casette intonacate a colori pallidi, molto alte, con le persiane chiuse, scorticate e rattoppate, ora con un vaso e qualche ciuffo di verde, ora con panni al sole; ora con una vecchia che guarda. Sulla collina, che è petrosa come un deserto, asciugavano le reti; e poi, nella strada, bambine e ragazze ciarlavano e vagabondavano, tutte con scialli luminosi e teneri abiti di cotone, mentre gli uomini picconavano la terra dalla piazza per farne un cortile selciato".... sembra di trovarsi dentro la scena, di sentire il chiacchiericcio delle ragazze, il rumore del piccone, la brezza del mare mitigata da un sole che non scalda ma ne da l'impressione, sto apprezzando mano a mano che procede la lettura, una notevole capacità descrittiva della Woolf.
E' molto interessante anche l'accenno che fa in riferimento al tema della morte, "E tuttavia non me la sento di inchinarmi al cospetto della morte. Mi piace l'idea di varcare la soglia mentre parlo, con una frase qualunque interrotta sulle labbra....niente commiati, niente sottomissione, solo una persona che fa un passo fuori verso il buio..." se si analizzano con attenzione le parole, è strano ma non trovo nulla della donna insicura e fragile che spesso fa capolino tra le righe, è una donna forte che aderisce pienamente e coscientemente alla versione di Montaigne, "E' la vita che conta".
E' un continuo altalenarsi di concretezza e consapevolezza, con irrequietezza e "zampilli di pensiero che roteano nella sua mente" e se da un lato ha la maturità letteraria di comprendere che la sua verità è quella del piacere profondo di scrivere e non di quello superficiale di essere letti, dall'altro avverti un percorso di sottile ed inarrestabile isolamento della sua persona...."E io non amo il prossimo. Li detesto tutti. Li rasento appena .Lascio che si rompano su di me come pioggia sporca.".... trovo quest'ultima frase agghiacciante e meravigliosa allo stesso tempo, perché ha la capacità di racchiudere in così poche parole, uno stato d'animo in cui spesso ci si può trovare e ci si trova e che da semplice profana non saprei esprimere in modo più profondo e più vero.

«E io non amo il prossimo. Li detesto tutti. Li rasento appena. Lascio che si rompano su di me come pioggia sporca.»

[Eylül Görmüş · Rating 5 out of 5]

Çok güzel kitap. Woolf’un güncelerinden seçilmiş parçalardan oluşan bu kitabı sadece Woolf’la ilişkisini derinleştirmek isteyenlere değil, yazmak üzerine kafa yoran ve yazmayı deneyen herkese tavsiye edeceğim. Bir yazarın günlük rutinleri, kendisiyle kavgaları, eserleriyle gel-gitli ilişkilerine dair çok ilginç iç görüler var içinde. Bir yandan da Woolf’un yavaş yavaş depresyonuna yenik düşüşün izlerini, kendi mutsuzluğuyla mücadele edişini izliyoruz ki bu açıdan da oldukça hüzünlü bir okumaydı. (Woolf’a yönelttiğim “karakterlerini derinleştiremiyor” eleştirisinin ta 100 yıl önce, kendisi hayattayken de yapıldığını da bu kitaptan öğrendim, ilginçti.) Velhasıl çok beğendim, arz ederim.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

this isn't exactly prying. leonard woolf presents a very distilled version of her mind. for the public, for her readers and fans, with a clear focus on anything literary, her criticisms, fears, disappointments, perpetual feelings of failure: all in relation to her writing.

but, as with all her autobiographical works, there is the impending date of doom at the end of March, 1941.

[Emma Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of Virginia Woolf's typical incredible insights, also a really interesting look at the books she was both reading and writing, her process as a writer, and her reaction to the reactions her books received.

[Smiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly as tough and true as its subtitle implies, this paperback has indeed started as my long journey of reading it since 1994, the year I bought its paperback copy (HarperCollins, 1978) in which I browsed off and on once in a while with inadequate motive and left it (at p. 260) on the shelf till I came across this Harcourt edition with larger fonts early this month in the Booklovers Bookshop on Rambutri Lane, next to Khaosan Road, Banglampoo in Bangkok. Delighted to have a more handsome copy with larger-type pages, that is, more reader-friendly than the old one, I eventually resumed reading it once more, feeling grateful to Leonard Woolf, her husband, who in 1953 edited her 26-volume diary and told us on how he worked by means of his three principles in his preface:

. . . I have included also three other kinds of extract. The first consists of a certain number of passages in which she is obviously using the diary as a method of practising or trying out the art of writing. The second consists of a few passages which, though not directly or indirectly concerned with her writings, I have deliberately selected because they give the reader an idea of the direct impact upon her mind of scenes and persons, i.e. of the raw materials of her art. Thirdly, I have included a certain number of passages in which she comments upon the books she was reading. (pp. viii-ix)

Therefore, its readers couldn't help feeling obliged to his strategy and the narrative diary entries effectively extracted in which we can find them enjoyably readable to the extent that reading this A Writer's Diary is like reading Virginia Woolf herself but in a smaller scale. If you would like to try reading her formidable full-scale diary, there has long been a five-volume paperback set entitled The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volumes 1-5: 1918-1941 (Penguin, 1982) edited by Anne Oliver Bell; vaguely, I recalled coming across the set in the Asia Books Branches in Bangkok and only browsed some pages during my college years since I had rarely known her and never read her works.


For instance:
Monday, October 2nd (1933)
It's October now; and we have to go to Hastings Conference to morrow and Wednesday, to Vita, then back to London. I opened this in order to make one of my self-admonishments previous to publishing a book. Flush will be out on Thursday and I shall be very much depressed, I think, by the kind of praise. They'll say it's "charming," delicate, ladylike. And it will be popular. Well now I must let this slip over me without paying it any attention. . . . (p. 205)

Thursday, August 2nd (1934)
I'm worried too with my last chapters. Is it all too shrill and voluble? And then the immense length, and the perpetual ebbs and flows of invention. So divinely happy one day; so jaded the next. (p. 213)

Wednesday, March 27th (1935)
I see I am becoming a regular diariser. The reason is that I cannot make the transition from Pargiters to Dante without some bridge. And this cools my mind. I am rather worried about the raid chapter: afraid if I compress and worry that I shall spoil. Never mind. Forge ahead and see what comes next.
Yesterday we went to the Tower, which is an impressive murderous bloody grey raven haunted military barrack prison dungeon place; like the prison of English splendour; the reformatory at the back of history; where we shot and tortured and imprisoned. . . . (pp. 233-4)
and so on and so forth.

In short, those diary entries in this book should be taken account as something essential to our background especially for some Virginia Woolf newcomers who have never read her or have just been fledgling ones so that they can understand what might cause trouble in her mind, how she coped with literary snags, why she kept writing, etc. as the foundation of her literary legacy to posterity. Interestingly, there have long been numerous versions of her biography; one being on Virginia Woolf in Professor John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists (Profile Books, 2011) in which I came across Professor Hermione Lee's quote, "Virginia Woolf was a sane woman who had an illness." (p. 323) as an optimistically verdict-like revelation.

[کافه ادبیات · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب گزیده ای از یادداشتهای ویرجینیا وولف از سال ۱۹۱۸ الی ۱۹۴۱ هست ،طبق گفته لئونارد(همسر ویرجینیا و ناشر کتاب) در مقدمه کتاب ، ویرجینیا از سال ۱۹۱۵ نوشتن خاطرات روزانه را شروع کرد و ۴ روز قبل از مرگش در سال ۱۹۴۱ حدود ۲۶ جلد از این یادداشت ها به جا گذاشت.
گرچه این کتاب فقط گزیده ای از ۲۶ سال یادداشت های روزانه هست ولی به خوبی نشان دهنده سیر زندگی و نوشتن کتابهایش را نشان می دهد.
نوشته های روزانه او به خوبی نشان می دهد که در اوایل نویسندگی و انتشار کتاب هایش غرور خاصی دارد و رگه هایی از فمینسم هم در اتفاقات و گزارشات روزانه اش دیده می شود.
در خلال این یادداشتها به بیماری خودش که از نوجوانی و پس از مرگ پدرش همراهش بوده اشاراتی دارد،همچنین از تبعیض بین مردان و زنان و نازا بودن خودش.
هر چه به پایان نزدیک تر میشویم حالت سرخوردگی روحی و خستگی اش بیشتر در یادداشتها به چشم می آید.که این سرخوردگی پس از آغاز جنگ جهانی دوم به اوج می رسد.مسلما روحیه ضعیف و ظریفش طاقت ویرانی ها و کشتار روزانه را ندارد.
ترجمه کتاب خوب و روان است به غیر از ص ۱۷۱ که به نظر اشتباه تایپی باشد آنجا که می نویسد:
دوشنبه ۲۶ ژانویه ۱۹۳۱
شکر خدا امروز که ۴۶ ساله شدم..
که با توجه به سال تولد ویرحینیا وولف در ۱۸۸۲ میلادی در آن روز ۴۹ سال شده است.
در پایان هم گزیده ای از یادداشت ها به نقل از کتاب:

«وقتی می نویسم کمتر احساس غم می کنم .پس چرا بیشتر آن را روی کاغذ نمی آورم؟خب،غرور به آدم این اجازه را نمی دهد.می خواهم به نظر موفق جلوه کنم،حتی به نظر خودم .با وجود این تا انتهای آن پیش نمی روم.موضوع بچه نداشتن است،دور زندگی کردن از دوستان،ناتوانی در خوب نوشتن،بسیار برای خوراک هزینه کردن و پیر شدن ا��ت.»
دوشنبه ۲۵ اکتبر۱۹۲۰


«راه بازگشت به نوشتن این است:اول انجام تمرین های سبک و نشاط آور ، دوم خواندن آثار خوب ادبی.این که فکر کنیم ادبیات را می توان از چیزهای خام تولید کرد ، اشتباه است.»
سه شنبه ۲۲ اوت ۱۹۲۲

«اما من کاملاً در خیال زندگی می کنم،به ایده های ناگهانی و جرقه های فکری متکی هستم،که هنگام قدم زدن یا نشستن به سراغم می آیند؛همه چیز در ذهنم چرخ میزند و نمایشی دائمی می آفریند که باید مایه خوشبختی ام باشد.»
یکشنبه ۷ سپتامبر ۱۹۲۴

« در پی ماجرای ضعف کردن،غالبا چیزی در سرم می کوبد،یا چنین به نظر می آید.ناگهان اندکی به یاد مرگ می افتم و به فکر فرو می روم،با خود می گویم خب پس برو،بخور،بنوش،بخند و به ماهی ها غذا بده،این که آدم مرگ را احمقانه می داند چقدر عجیب است.»
شنبه ۲۰ اوت ۱۹۳۲

جمعه ۲۴ دی ۱۴۰۰

[Eva Lavrikova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vypočuté na Vltave ako audio, výborne načítala Taťjana Medvecká.
Veľmi osobné (pochopiteľne), veľmi zvieravé, intenzívne. Pozoruhodný vhľad do tvorby diela VW, ktorej repetitívnosť a zacyklenosť v úzkostiach, nadšeniach, obavách a apatii prezrádza, ako veľmi ťažko asi bolo pre VW žiť a tvoriť - aj to, ako veľmi nemohla inak, až kým už nemohla vôbec.
Počúvať v týchto dňoch, ako záverečné zápisky ústia vo vojne, je navyše vskutku silný zážitok.

[Cemre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeniden işe başlamak ve "yeni normal"e uyum sağlamaktan mıdır bilmiyorum; ama bir "reading slump" tam ortasındayım. Bu nedenle yaklaşık iki haftadır Virginia Woolf ile birlikte yaşıyorum.

Bu kitabı nasıl değerlendiririm bilemiyorum. Bir günlük bu. Okuyucuya sunulmak üzere yazılan bir metin gibi değerlendirmem mümkün değil. O sebeple bir yorum yapmayı düşünmüyorum. Yalnızca severek okuduğum kitaplarının nasıl ortaya çıktığını Woolf'tan okumanın beni çok mutlu ettiğini söyleyebilirim. Aynı şekilde, pek çok yazarı (Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, E.M. Forster gibi) bu günlüklerde okumak oldukça enteresandı. Tabii elbette savaşı da... Bir dünya savaşının ortasında bile bir insanın hayatta kalmak için çalışması, kitaplarım satmıyor diye üzülmesi, beğenilmeyecek diye endişelenmesi ve sonunda yıkılmış evinin önünde durup almak için çalışıp didindiği eşyalarının yerle bir olmasını görmesiyle bir nevi her şeyin anlamsızlığını fark etmesi... Bu anlamda günlüğün son kısımlarının beni bir hayli etkilediğini söyleyebilirim.