The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1, 1915-19 part 1, post 1

Last night I had to get up and check the dictionary

because, during the evening class, I had written ~"defence" on the board and I was suddenly sure it was the wrong spelling! Shouldn't it be "defense"? But the latter, it turns out, is the US spelling, which I occasionally mention but I don't teach.

that is typical of a night after teaching. I go to sleep but I wake up with random teaching-related thoughts and then I have a mental review of the lesson.

In the night I continued reading a book I bought when I was at University "The Diary of Virginia Woolf 1915-9". Although I read it all those years ago I can't really remember it so it's a terrific surprise. Mrs W is living in Richmond with her husband Leonard, and walks to the butcher and the grocer when she needs to, and they walk to Twickenham or to Kingston most days, which must have been the thing in those days as all the Bloomsbury group walked every day.

She likes going to London for the Library and to the 1917 Club, which seems to have been founded as a place for Bloomsburies to meet their young followers. The original Bloomsburies are already minor legends! even though VW has written only one novel at this time. She is making her living (and so is LW) by writing reviews in the TLS and other notable publications. They buy a manual printing press and begin by publishing Katherine Mansfield stories. Meanwhile, Nessa is seeing out the war at Charleston because Duncan and Bunny are conchies and so have to work as farm labourers. Leonard is simply in poor health and after attending many army medical boards, it is established that he does not have to fight. Maynard is working for the government and I am not sure how Lytton avoids the war, but like the others he takes a house in the country (with Carrington). and there are loads more people in the book because VW has an incredible social circle. To start with, she is related to a vast array of people, some rather grand and titled, and some ordinary folk, and then a great number of literary grandees are somehow blood relatives, and then all her friendships seem to be long-lasting and involve more and more people. Yet often she and Leonard sit by the fire and read in the evenings, or play cards, and that's what she likes as much as anything. People make social visits without warning and she has to give them (whoever it is) lunch or tea or dinner, and it must be very difficult because as the war goes on food is in very short supply, and so is coal.

VW doesn't cook anything - she has a couple of servants called Nelly and Lottie to do the cleaning and the cooking, but because of the air raids she and Leonard frequently spend the nights in the kitchen with the servants, chatting away for hours and hours to keep their spirits up. VW doesn't really like the servants but can't manage without them. That's an aspect of her life that is really strange. When she and L go down to the house they rent in the country, Asheham, they have to take the servants too, in the train, and it's weirdly like taking your pets with you. Supposedly she is a revolutionary who wants everyone to have the same: £300 a year is the figure mentioned; so where are the servants going to come from in that scheme of things?

She is incredibly nasty about the lower classes and how limited their thinking is; and even though her husband works hard for the cause of Ceylonese luminaries, and she has them round for tea and so forth, she refers to them as "darkies". Then she also tells that Katherine Mansfield smells like a civet cat and it's really unpleasant to be in the same room as her! There are many of these astonishing bits and that's why it's so entertaining.

The war starts distantly from London but by the end there are bombing raids by planes whenever the moon is out, and London suffers, but most of all, can't sleep at night.

Her brother-in-law (Cecil) was killed in the war and she writes nothing at all about how L feels about this, or anything about how she feels, but she and L are now planning to print a small book of Cecil's poems, so I think they do have feelings which she chooses not to share.

Marriage is a bag which can be stretched in many ways without breaking

One thing that was very admirable about the Bloomsbury group was their determination to cast aside Victorian hypocrisy and be open about their relationships, rather than covert. Perhaps the bravest was Vanessa Bell. She loved Duncan Grant, who was homosexual, so she left her husband and went to live with him and managed to have a child with him; over the years making space for the more passionate relationships he had with a succession of men. She wanted to love honestly and passionately and knew there was no room for a locked-in, watertight commitment. It wasn't an easy or self-indulgent way of life because sharing is hard and demanding, but love survived even though lovers came and went.

I know a woman who was in a very long-standing relationship with a married man and had his child, and he visited and provided for the child. Now there was a wife, and she knew about this, but the marriage survived.  I knew another woman who made the same choice, to have a child with a man she loved, although he stayed with his wife and visited his number 2 family only occasionally. If you read any family story there is very often some instance of illegitimate children and the father having two families. Very interesting. So the advice columns tell you what a healthy relationship in a healthy marriage is, but there are plenty that survive infidelity and, really, polygamy, without collapsing, and in a way, isn't that worth celebrating too?

Women sometimes have 2 partners at once, although this is more hidden, to save the feelings of one of the men. 

One film that made an impression on me is called Pleasantville, with Toby Maguire. It’s a film about an American telly programme where the citizens of 1950s Pleasantville live idealised lives in black and white. Everything is perfect in Pleasantville, orderly and neighbourly, but grey. But when passion comes along the citizens change into pink-coloured people. The mother of the perfect TV family is deeply ashamed that she has turned coloured because of her secret passion for the artistic man who owns the town Diner . Her son (Toby Maguire) helps her to cover her face in grey make up until she looks “normal” again. But the Diner man shows her a painting that makes her cry, and because of the tears he sees that her face is pink under the make-up, and she turns her face away in shame. But he says “That’s beautiful” and he helps her to take all the make up off again. He celebrates her by painting her in lovely bright pinks and blues and making love, and of course he turns coloured himself.

Many aspects of life change in Pleasantville; there is violence because the people are afraid of the fact that people can change. And the message of the film seems to be that life is not nice or tidy and it’s certainly not perfect, but it is dangerous and difficult and beautiful, and we have to deal with that.

In the film the 'mum' character leaves her dull husband because she loves the other man. But the husband  is heart-broken, because he loves her very much in his own way, and she too loves him in a way. So the three of them sit down together and try to work something out. Maybe they can find a way to share the perfect wife. After all, laws and traditions only work as far as they work. Sometimes we need to find a more imaginative solution, and what is really interesting is that people seem to have done so, perhaps always, in their underhand, ad hoc way, although I really know back as far as Edwardian England, and what went on then was truly revolutionary.

post script: Vanessa Bell did not tell her daughter that her father was Duncan Grant, allowing her to believe that she was Clive Bell's child until she was 18, which was, of course, a mistake. Honesty has to go all the way, and must start with the children.