Vaessa Bell - paintings - beautiful exhibition at Dulwich

I had to change my judgement of Vanessa Bell ans I had thought her a painter of ugly blobs in unfortunate colours, and an amateurish try hard. But I really loved many of the pictures in this exhibition and now I am full of respect for Mrs Bell for going on and on with her work and experimenting with, for example, Picasso's style or Matisse's style and continuing to plough her own furrow. I can see now that she did deserve the respect her sister gave her (I sort of feel that VW thought VB the true-er artist of the two.)

Gerald Brenan - South from Grenada

This is an extraordinary book which tells about the culture of southern Spain in the early 19th century, just after World War 1. The writer goes to live in Spain because it is cheap and he wants to be a writer. I think, after the horror of the war (he went through the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele) , he feels that the world owes him a living, and is quite frank about writing hopefully to various uncles and asking them for money. Sometimes he gets money, not always.

Carrington painted him

Carrington painted him more than once. This should be in the NPG.

He plays host to Lytton Strachey and Carrington, and he narrates their visit amusingly - he was in love with Carrington for a very long time. Later Virginia and Leonard Woolf also pay a visit and are very struck with this part of Spain - which has a character like something from the Middle Ages. The Spanish are great at keeping their festivals and culture alive today but they are nothing like they were, simply because the belief in the efficacy of the rites has been lost. Here is an account of a village Easter.

The Easter ceremonies had a peculiar vividness. From the morning of Palm Sunday a silence fell on the village and lasted till the end of the week. During this time no one shouted or sang, and the sound of the pestle and mortar, that gay prelude to every Andalusian meal, ceased to be heard. Then on the night of Holy Thursday the figure of the Crucified Christ was borne in slow procession with torches and candles as far as the stone Calvary that stands among the olive trees a little below the village. At every halt a low, sad copla was sung. On the following evening there was a yet more lugubrious procession, when his dead body was carried in silence in a glass coffin to the same place and then brought back to the church to be interred....

The fast was now ended, but the final scene of the drama had yet to be played. At daybreak on Easter Sunday the young men got the church key from the sacristan, took out the figure of the Risen Christ, and carried it to the square at the lower end of the village, He was represented as a young man in a green dress and, as if to associate him with Adonis and Osiris and all the man-gods who had died in order that the corn might spring again and the sap rise yet once more in the stems, he was crowned with leaves; a bunch of flowers was placed in his right hand and a sheaf of barley in his left. He was set up on a platform in the humble square with its low unplastered houses, and the villagers - especially the poorer families - collected round with cries of Viva, viva el Senor

.

I have chosen a picture of Easter in a Colombian village because
the pictures I can find of Easter in Spain are so stagey, grand and impressive
and show people dressed up like the Ku Klux Klan, which Brenan
never mentioned.

.... at nine o'clock when the Virgin was carried out in her green, star-spangled dress they fell into line behind her and formed a procession. This was the dramatic moment of the Easter ceremonies, which even the simplest of the shepherd boys understood, for the Virgin had found the grave open and missed her son, and was sallying out to seek for him. ... As soon as the figure of the Virgin arrived in front of that of the Christ, she curtsied to him three times: the priest stepped forward to sprinkle him with holy water and incense him, and she was brought up tottering to the edge of the platform on which he stood. Then, when she was only a couple of feet away, his arms, which moved on strings, were raised in a jerky movement to touch her shoulders. This was the signal for the silence to break.

This is from the introduction (by Chris Stewart) to the Penguin Modern Classic edition:

"And it is precisely in this amateur and eclectic approach, embellished with meticulously crafted discourses on subjects as diverse as toxicology and Sufism, Mediterranean agriculture and prehistoric archaeology, that the pleasure of South from Granada lies."

"There are those who would criticise the book for a certain lack of organisation, and it is true that there is an element of rambling to it, but for me rambling is in the very nature of a discursive book; it is redeemed though, and its sometimes tangled threads given cohesion, by the illuminating and all-pervading presence of it author. This is achieved by the wit and warmth as well as the penetrating intelligence he brings to bear on any subject he approaches, and its couching in what seems like effortlessly graceful prose, although in fact he spared no pains in honing and polishing his writing - two and a half years in the case of this book."

"He read French, German and Spanish, as well as Latin and Greek, and during the writing of The Literature of the Spanish People read no fewer than two hundred and fifty books in two and a half years... He was as happy, or perhaps happier, striding high in the mountains with shepherds as he was in earnest discussion with the luminaries of Bloomsbury. He was also a brilliant and generous conversationalist."

(I don't think I have ever met a brilliant and generous conversationalist.)

The extract below is translated by Google and copied from a webpage on Gerald Brenan Spanish course here- this is the kind of English I correct. Sometimes the misuse of words is quite funny. My Spanish students actually write better English than this so it is easy to tell when they try to cheat by using Google translate.

The April 23 was chosen by UNESCO as World Book Day, since it coincides with the death of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. On this day we remember Gerald Brenan, specialist writer on issues of Spain.

Gerald Brenan (1894) was the eldest son of a British soldier who was destined to continue the family tradition by desire of his father, when he began to have use of reason, he discovered he did not like the games in which he had to show his strength but he preferred the quiet of reading a book. Brenan studied up to 18 years in England to enter the military academy. At this age, he realized that he was being prepared for a profession that was not attractive way of life as to what he rebelled and fled with a friend. The First World War forced him to fight and was decorated. He got a pension with the help of his family, allowed him to find a place in Spain (Yegen) where he could devote himself to what he liked: study of literature, botany, philosophy, arts in general, etc .. since did not go to college like most of his friends (Circle Bloomsbory). his passion was poetry, but he knew he could not make a living as a poet. His father demanded to live a useful profession. For this reason, he decided to write novels and married an American novelist Gamel Woolsey; she corrected and typed his works. They had no children, Brenan adopted a daughter who was the result of a love affair with a young Spanish. Brenan realized that the dwelling place was idyllic but was held incommunicado to continue his career. They moved to a place of great beauty, strategically located. Churriana (Málaga), next to the airport and relatively close to Gibraltar This is where your dream comes true. Brenan is on site and at the right time when exploding Spanish civil war. England was very interested in this confrontation, he would report through their stories about what happened and later wrote a book about the causes of the Spanish war. Brenan that had gone unnoticed, began to be heard and recognized internationally, especially in Spain where his book "The Spanish Labyrinth" was banned, becoming a symbol of freedom for dissidents dictator Franco.Tras this book, wrote others about Spain:  "the History of Spanish Literature" and "the Face of Spain", the result of a trip in 1950. the war had given him the epithet of specialist Spain writer but he was forced to leave his house with a lovely garden in Churriana, where he left the service staff (cook, gardener). on his return to Malaga (1953), he returned to his beloved Brenan lifestyle in which he wrote for the morning and walking in the evenings; he enjoyed the climate, diet and people. He wore an intense social life, made ​​contact with writers like Hemingway or Caro Baroja, etc. Here wrote one of his most famous stories "South of Granada" A Life of one's Own (autobiography) and The Lighthouse Always Says Yes they came to light in 1962 and in 1966. in 1968, killed his wife and collaborator, though he was shocked, he joined his fate to a young woman (Linda Nicholson-Price) that helped to continue its vital objective: writing. They felt they had to start in a new place within the province so they decided to sell the house and fire service. At this stage he published Personal Memory, John of the Cross, The Best Moments: Poems; Thoughts in a Dry Season. Aphorisms In 1987, died at 92 years old. His body was donated to the Faculty of Medicine, some nerve cells were taken for the study of longevity. In 2001 he was cremated and buried in the English Cemetery in Malaga with his wife.

Happy Boxing Day!

Boxing Day may be much nicer than Christmas Day as you don't need to eat so much food, and you can go out and do the things you like doing. There are fewer family games and quizzes. And yesterday we went for a short bedraggled walk in the rain, rather muddy and I had forgotten to take waterproof boots with me, but today looks gusty and bracing.

I got a great number of books for Christmas which is lovely. I received from F: Weeds, by R Mabey, which I will read with recourse to the internet because it doesn't have illustrations of all the weeds. I have Plants from Roots to Riches by K Willis and C Fry: which does have illustrations and (some of them I saw quite recently in a programme about the history of gardens with Monty Don which was very informative) and this book I can't wait to get to grips with. But first I must read The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (1922) for the book group. I thought this would be awfully drippy because I saw a film of it recently in which the women were all equally gorgeous in their long, floppy dresses and the whole mood was very slushy. But the book is a better experience as it is quite slyly acerbic and as frank as it can be about sex without actually mentioning sex and women's attitudes to it. I think Elizabeth von Arnim is quite an amazing person. I am not surprised she had an affair with H.G. Wells; although he was appalling to his wives (bad point) he could cope with women who wanted to be open, honest and experimental with sex, which shows the courage of his convictions about feminism.

 The next Book Club book is called Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. A man called Tom suggested this as I said I would like to read a serious book. Tom is one of two men at the book club and he seems extremely well-read and well-informed.

The book that's driving me mad at the moment is Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name. I have read it all out of order because I kept skipping ahead because it's so long and wordy, but I must read it  again properly to make sure I haven't missed anything so I can't really say I have finished it, but I sort of hate it because the protagonist is making such dangerous decisions and one feels menaced. I have part three of this series to read as well. Italian torture!

I have also had an interesting understanding about Virginia Woolf. I read all her pieces of memoir writing in a book called Moments of Being, and I loved her style and her calm air of understanding what went on about her, then the tragedies, and how she felt about them, her judgements and her love for those she lost. I read it all twice. And in tandem with this, I read Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, which I am nowhere near the end of. It gives you quite a shock to realised that Mrs W. was an unreliable narrator, because she left out the fact that she herself was often very ill physically, in pain and unable to eat, and that during periods of her life she was insane, psychotic or otherwise mentally ill - was violent to Leonard, who had huge strength of character in taking her on (quite the reverse of his tiny physicality). Mrs W doesn't mention what a pain in the neck she had been to Vanessa during their adolescence, and to her sister Stella who had charge of her during her first madness, and how people said: "It's very bad for Stella to have Ginny with her all the time." I imagine she had a doleful intensity that could make anyone feel depressed. From the standpoint of her own memoir, Virginia is a rock of sense! I imagine when she read this out to the Memoir club*, Vanessa was sitting in a corner either laughing quietly to herself or shaking her head and rolling her eyes, sketching or designing something all the while: Vanessa went to listen but always kept her hands busy. Vanessa was a remarkable person in herself, and Virginia could have done nothing, I think, if Vanessa had not been so staunchly determined to be an artist and to be a Bohemian, because Virginia was too weak to do all that without her.

We gave the daughter a pair of Clarks stout leather boots for Xmas, (although she was faintly tempted by Doc Martens), also party clothes and ridiculous shoes (for nightclubs), a jumper, a purse, a scarf - oh, many things, it was fun to get her so many things!

*A Bloomsbury thing: Lytton, Morgan, Maynard, Leonard, Duncan, Clive, Virginia and Vanessa, maybe some others.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol II 1920-24

This diary is that of a very fulfilled woman. She is still at work on the printing press in the afternoons, but has time to read and write - fewer reviews and better paid - and write her novels. She is happily preparing and writing "the Hours" which became "Mrs Dalloway" during this period. Katherine Mansfield dies, and although VW knew that she was always jealous of her, she misses her.  she finds that most of her group have turned out to be successful, and she feels she wants to reward herself by leaving Hogarth House in Richmond and returning to London, which she and Leonard eventually do. They find themselves a Bloomsbury house with a basement in which they can install the press, and take the flat on the second floor. They have started to employ a succession of helpers at the printing press, and one, Ralph Partridge, marries Carrington and is unfaithful to her ("the village Don Juan") making the whole circle very unstable for a while, for Lytton loves Ralph and Carrington loves Lytton. then there are two further printing press employees in this volume alone.

Crossword Clue: (from The Week): Virginia's partner into endless marijuana? That's serious.
It's a classic clue. Virginia's partner is Vita and endless marijuana is gras. Together = gravitas. But could you get it if you didn't know VW had a love affair with a person called Vita?

Anyway, in this book Vita comes on the scene and at first VW is not impressed. "We had a surprise visit from the Nicolsons. She is a pronounced Sapphist, & may, thinks Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I am. Nature might have sharpened her faculties. [whose?] Snob as I am, I trace her passions 500 years back, & they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine."

At one point I'm sure she says that Vita has a perfect body, but can't find that bit now. Ah yes. "All these ancestors and centuries, & silver & gold, have bred a perfect body. She is stag like, or race horse like, save for the face, which pouts, & has no very sharp brain."

Not very impressed then. But Vita pursues L & V determinedly! "Vita was here for Sunday, [Rodmell] gliding down the village in her large new blue Austin car, which she manages consummately. She was dressed in ringed yellow jersey, & a large hat, & had dressing case all full of silver and night gowns wrapped in tissue. ... But I like her being honourable, & she is it; a perfect lady, with all the dash & courage of the aristocracy, & less of its childishness than I expected. ...

"Vita,...is like an over ripe grape in features [no, me neither], moustached, pouting, will be a little heavy; meanswhile, she strides on fine legs, in a well cut skirt, & though embarrassing at breakfast, [oh do tell how!] has a manly good sense & simplicity about her which both L & I find satisfactory. Oh yes, I like her; could tack her on to my equipage for all time, & suppose if life allowed, this might be a friendship of a sort."

Vita was "embarrassing at breakfast".
I chose this pic in which she is not wearing a hat,
 so we we may judge whether  or not she looks like
 an over-ripe grape. (And Molesworth 2 have a face like a squished tomato)

The real hero of this volume is Leonard. The artistic types are always asking his advice about money and practical matters. He takes Virginia to Spain for an adventurous holiday. He writes his own, serious books about Africa and India and he is the editor of a magazine called the Nation. He lectures working men and others about aspects of socialism and is always politically active and committed. He is the foundation of Virginia's happiness. Now she is getting taken up with titled people and the rich, seems to love it all, and what happened to socialism, Virginia?

Leonard seems to have been short and small,
 very narrow-chested, with a disproportionately large head.

Oxford vs Cambridge

I have never really thought about what distinguishes one from the other - they are both very fine universities. But Virginia Woolf is quite sure that Cambridge "men" (as they generally were in her day) were better, more purely intellectual - poor scholars. She describes "An Oxford young man, inclines to smartness, dress and culture. His soul is uneasy in Cambridge company. He squirms a little visibly."

New Term

I am taking it easy this term and teaching very little. My evening class last night was a bit of a trial as I now have Level 1s instead of Level 2s and some of them have never learned grammar before; have no idea that there are the present simple and present continuous and have always muddled along with some approximation of the two. I feel sad that I have to break the news that they have so much to learn. Those who have come from Entry 3 of course, at least know the names of some of the tenses, and know what a noun is; what a verb is and what an adjective is. I wrote definitions of these on the board last night. I had not planned to but I realised that this was needed. Actually, I am not a bad teacher, but have to hurry around the class too much .

I miss my old class!

Last night I couldn't sleep - probably woken by hunger and the acorns falling on the roof - I was very hungry as I didn't eat properly in the evening - but I want to lose weight anyway. So I went to F's room and read a lot more of Virginia Woolf's diary Vol 2 - same old cheap edition; the cover has fallen off but I can use it as a bookmark. I am enjoying all the Bloomsbury gossip. She has started to report conversations for the sheer fun of it; it's lovely to read. She is very funny sometimes. She gets very down in the dumps about certain things - feels such intense rivalry with Katherine Mansfield - they all think J.M. Murry is a terrible man but they think he's bound for glory, which galls them, The Woolfs heard that their view at Rodmell was about to be destroyed by a new house being built right next to their garden, you can almost feel Virginia's angst and anger - that didn't happen, (thank God, because it's so lovely now), and Leonard and V. bought the land themselves and extended their garden, so they finally could relax about that. VW has started to be comfortable around Tom Eliot "Eliot's visit passed off successfully, & yet I am disappointed to find that I am no longer afraid of him." - He is rather proud of some poems he wants the Hogarth to print - called "The Waste Land". Then she is still up against her servants Lottie and Nelly. "Refer back to some other scene of the kind if you wish to know how many hours have been wasted; how many reflections upon the lower classes formulated; & how often L[eonard] has approached me before I order dinner with a pained, solicitous appearance, begging me on no account to say this or that, strongly advising me at all costs to make something else plain."

I went to the dentist this morning and now I have another gold tooth - hope it will be comfortable like the others. I have a most expensive mouth.  It has been a terribly expensive month, and this comes on top of Australia, which cost I don't like to say how much. We had to spend a lot on F - buy stethoscope, memberships, warm coat, food, towels, all sorts of things. Then my dentistry. The dentist, Catherine, says I huff and sigh in the chair and she is quite sarcastic about it, finds it irritating although I don't know I'm doing it; I don't feel like a bad patient.

Went to the happiest shop I know - Waitrose in Hersham. Everybody smiles and is happy and chatty. The staff seem to spend all day gossiping but they do run a good shop. They just can't do enough to help you.

Then went to the garden centre for something to cover the seedlings. I bought a sort of kit - a bit like K'nex for putting bamboo canes together, and a big net. Better go and do it now.

Reading for the book club

I have been enjoying my sojourn with Virginia Woolf. I liked "To the Lighthouse" although I got on better with the first part than the second. Then I tried "Jacob's Room" which I could see was not as successful as the other, greater novels, because it was earlier and she was feeling her way with her impressionistic technique, which meant that some of the time it was hard to understand what on earth was going on. Jacob was there as a blocky smudge, as his impressions of others and their impressions of him.

Then I went to the book club book: "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan, and its ideas of what matters enough to record, and what is the truth, are so entirely different that it knocks one's head sideways. But here there's a boldness and confidence about what matters that's dizzying and the writer has no truck with gentleness. It's as though the bright colours and reality of hard Australian trees and extreme climate has trained him to write in a hard, bright way.

Yet there are surprising similarities about what matters, Flanagan writes about death and VW was no stranger to death; before she was eighteen her mother, sister, brother and father had died; it seemed that they were always at deathbeds, and grief and bereftness comes into the three books I have read - that intrusive, unnecessary bloody death in "Mrs Dalloway" for example.. VW felt the importance of returning to reading the classics, like Flanagan's protagonist.  Flanagan is struggling with the truth just as much as Virginia Woolf, he is also asking what is true, for example, about heroism.

Sometimes in my life, what is given as truth and what I understand as truth are very different, and I think, I must record that, I must write this discrepancy down -  and I don't support the idea that there is no truth. I look sideways and I say nothing, but I know what is true. But I may be seen as a different character whose version of the truth is distorted.

It's a mast year again, and all the oak trees are productive together - acorns fall on my roof from time to time and I like to hear that clunk and roll. 

And Finally, The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol 1

It has completely fallen apart.

On the back of the book it says "the pleasures afforded by this book are too prodigal to itemize" - well, I had a go. If you want my advice, buy the hardback, as you may read it twice many years apart and this is what happens to a cheap paperback.

Virginia Woolf's servant thing

Poor V really needs her servants but on the other hand she can't stand them. So from time to time the whole servant questions pops up in her diary and gives her a great deal of stress because it is not in VW's nature to make her own cups of tea - or anything. The two in question are called Lottie and Nelly.

September 1918 : By rights Lottie should have a whole chapter to herself at this point; but to live through those things is unpleasant enough without reviving them here. At this moment owing to what she overheard L. say to me before breakfast [oh do tell what Leonard said!], I am uncertain whether we have 2 servants or not, & to tell the truth, completely indifferent, such is the relief of being without them for a fortnight. Considering their unimportance [She is so arrogant about them! this is the real problem: they are important to her but she can't bear that fact] they must be compared to flies in the eye for the discomfort they produce in spite of being so small. [I hope that piece of spite made her feel better.] But let us change the subject.

Sunday 28th September 1919 The Strike
Cut off as we are from all human intercourse [they were at Rodmell] I cannot even be sure of the date. It is said that the entire railways of England are on strike; the miners, & perhaps the transport workers, are with them. This happened yesterday morning, or rather late the night before; & though we got our papers through late in the evening, we are without posts. The signalman gave us some information yesterday & believes himself to be striking against a reduction of 14/- a week in his wages. His strike pay comes to 16/- a week.

Tuesday 30th Sept
The papers are just in, shrunk to single sheets, & untrustworthy in their extreme - Daily Mail and Herald; truthful in the middle perhaps, Daily News. So far nothing but persistent hostility on both sides; no overtures.

Weds 1 October
The strike remains, so far as we can judge, the same. On the other hand, rumours of the strike change from hour to hour. A post came this morning. The post man is reported to say that all trains are running as usual. The signal man appears. situation unchanged, much depressed.

We went down to the signal man with books & offers of help.

Tues 7th October
[Hogarth House] The 'docile herds' whom I describe on Peace Day are not so deluded after all. they have held the country up for eleven days I think. We did a little to support them too, & kept one man on strike who would have gone back without our pound. [Probs the signalman.] There's a private strike to record too. [Judging by the next bit, she meant the servants went on strike.] I should like to write philosophically & analyse what is no doubt a sign of the times. ... Dear old Nelly came in shyly like a schoolgirl & asked to apologise last night; & I see us settled for life, with Hogarth, Monk's House, & two domestics.

[I can't help but feel that Nelly just wanted to take the piss at this point - she was probably thinking that if the Woolfs supported the strikers she and Lottie would go on strike and see if they supported that. I mean, it is funny!!! And poor VW just can't see it at all.]

Friday 28 November
It was the dinner parties that led Nelly to give notice last Monday. She did it in a tentative boastful way, as if to show off to someone behind the scenes which makes me think she would be glad now to change her mind. She would at this moment if I asked her. But on the whole I'm not going to ask her. ... we both [V and Leonard] incline to try a new system of dailies, which never ceases to attract us & what with Rodmell & a lower income... No one could be nicer than Nelly, for long stretches; at this moment she gives Angelica her bath, & is perfectly friendly & considerate to me...But the fault is more in the system of keeping two young women chained in a kitchen to laze & work & suck their life from two in the drawing room than in her character or in mine.

The end of the Great War, recorded by Virginia Woolf

Before I go on to "To the Lighthouse" I want to write about this. This is where Virginia W, in her diary, starts to write for posterity, because she knew she was living in Interesting Times. It's also rather sickening, because the troops were fighting right to the very end, even though the war had been won -   they had to carry on killing and being killed. This should NEVER happen. Surely a ceasefire could have been called?

Sat 12th October
Whatever we have done this week has this extraordinary background of hope; a tremendously enlarged version of the feeling I can remember as a child as Christmas approached. the Northcliffe papers do all they can to insist upon the indispensability and delight of war. They magnify our victories to make our mouths water for more; they shout with joy when the Germans sink the Irish mail; but they do also show some signs of apprehension that Wilson's terms may be accepted. L. has just come in from Staines with a paper which says, with obvious gloom, that the rumour is that Germany agrees to evacuation. She is not, of course, they add, to be allowed to make any sort of terms.

Tuesday 15th October
I did not think I should so soon have to describe a meeting with a cabinet minister ... Herbert Fisher's visit... was very obviously due to old family affection.  ... Was I nervous or proud, or anything but interested & anxious to pick his brains for news? I don't think I felt a moment's agitation. ... he has lost his lean intellectual look; his hollow cheeks are filled; ... the number of deaths in his house caused this perhaps; but I can't help thinking that London life has rid him of his desire to say clever things to undergraduates all the time.

"We've won the war today" he said at once. " I saw Milner this morning, & he says we shall have peace by Christmas. The Germans have made up their minds they can't fight a retreat...Of course we can't accept their present terms. Why, that would leave them still the greatest military power in Europe. they could begin again in ten years time. But it rests with the French. Lloyd George is going to Paris on Monday; but they are holding out for the evacuation of Alsace Lorraine as a guarantee. We shall probably demand the disarmament of certain regiments too. But we've won the war."

There is now a good prospect of a complete defeat of the German army; Foch says "I have not yet had my battle". Despite the extreme vindictiveness of our press and the French press, Herbert believed that we are going to baulk Foch of his battle, partly because the Germans will accept any terms to avoid it. "Lloyd George has told me again and again that he means to be generous to the Germans. "We want a strong Germany" he says. the Kaiser will probably go.... they've been taught to be brutal. But it hasn't paid. Each one of their crimes has turned out badly. ... it cost us £1,000 to kill a German at the battle of the Somme [1916]; now it costs £3,000. "

... in a little room in Downing Street, where, as he said, the wireless messages are racing in from all over the world, ... where you have to settle off hand questions of enormous difficulty and importance - where the fate of armies does more or less hang upon what two or three elderly gentlemen decide. Herbert thinks there are 2 or 3 geniuses in the cabinet (L. George, Balfour, & possibly Winston Churchill - his definition being that they make everything appear different) & a number of mediocrities.

Friday 18th October

... Wilson's second note came out on Tuesday, in which he used the word 'peradventure'; so far the Germans have not answered. But their Retreat goes on, & last night, beautiful, cloudless, still & moonlit, was to my thinking he first of peace, since one went to bed fairly positive that never again in all our lives need we dread the moonlight. [the irony could break your heart.]

24th October
We took tram to Kingston & there heard the paper boys shouting out about the President's message, which we bought & devoured in the train. The main points are that he is keeping negotiations going, though the Times came out with a great headline "No parley" this morning. He discriminates too, between the German people & the Kaiser; he will consider an armistice with the one but only complete surrender with the other.

...avoiding London, because of the influenza - (we are, by the way, in the midst of a plague unmatched since the Black Death, according to the Times, who seem to tremble lest it may seize upon Lord Northcliffe, & thus precipitate us into peace).

Saturday 9th November
Lord Mayor's day among other things, & one of the two last of war, I suppose. It's just possible that Lottie may bring us news that the armistice is signed within an hour. People buy papers at a great rate; but except for an occasional buzz round a newspaper boy & a number of shop girls provided with the Evening News in the train one feels nothing different in the atmosphere.. the general state perhaps is one of dazed surfeit; here we've had one great relief after another; you hear the paper boys calling out that Turkey has surrendered, or Austria given up, ..

but apparently Katherine Murry had heard someone say "we're giving them everything and getting nothing". Since then it is difficult to see how the most bloodthirsty citizens can squeeze anything more out of Germany.

Monday 11 November
Twenty five minutes ago the guns went off, announcing peace. A siren hooted on the river, They are hooting still. A few people ran to look out of windows. ...so far neither bells nor flags, but the wailing of sirens & intermittent guns.

Tuesday 12 November
...we were both conscious of a restlessness which made it seem natural to be going up to London. Disillusionment began after 10 minutes in the train. A fat slovenly woman in black velvet and feathers with the bad teeth of the poor insisted upon shaking hands with two soldiers ... she was half drunk already, & soon produced a large bottle of beer which she made them drink of; & then she kissed them ...but she and her like possessed London, & alone celebrated peace in their sordid way, staggering up the muddy pavements in the rain, decked with flags themselves, & voluble at sight of other people's flags. The Heavens disapproved and did their utmost to extinguish, but only succeeded in making feathers flop & flags languish. Taxicabs were crowded with whole families, grandmothers and babies, showing off; & yet there was no centre, no form for all this wandering emotion to take. The crowds had nowhere to go, nothing to do; they were in the state of children with too long a holiday. ..there seemed to be no mean between tipsy ribaldry & rather sour disapproval. Besides the discomfort tried every one's temper. it took us from 4 to 6 to get home; standing in queues, every one wet, many shops shut...

Friday 15 November
You can go to London without meeting more than two drunk soldiers; only an occasional crowd blocks the street. In a day or two it will be impossible for a private to threaten to knock out the brains of an officer, as I saw done the other day in Shaftesbury Avenue.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf: Monk's House, Rodmell, Sussex

The garden near the house.

This is a terrific place for stalkers of VW! It's very tucked away and hard to find. When the Woolfs bought it they had already bought somewhere else, but this property was to be auctioned and VW fell in love with the garden. When they bought it they had to sell the other house they had bought. The house was very small and ramshackle, and the kitchen was always prone to flooding - it's two steps down from ground level. All the floors are tiled with terracotta slabs and the walls are very thin; like a hut, and to go there when there was no heating can't have been enjoyable. The Woolfs added hot water and a toilet to the facilities. I can't imagine their servants can have been exactly thrilled with the kitchen.

The Woolfs did well here - Virginia found it a good place to write, and loved the view and the walks and Leonard took over the garden, and as their income improved, he employed a full-time gardener.

The green walls give the house a freshwater feel - and there are many artistic presents from Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell

Like other notable authors, such as Roald Dahl, Virginia wrote in a wooden “writing lodge” tucked into the orchard garden, where she was surrounded by views conducive to creative thought, in an undisturbed sanctuary. She kept a diary and there are very few entries which do not mention the garden. While Virginia was not a passionate horticulturist, her husband, Leonard, became one.

The story of the garden at Monk’s House, which was the garden of her writing life, is fascinating. It was started in 1919 and its creation illustrates the satisfaction, love and challenges that a garden provides as well as the friction occasionally generated. “The garden was sometimes 'the third person in the marriage’,” according to biographer Victoria Glendinning. Virginia would have to tear Leonard away and she would make him book “walk” time.

For Leonard, who started off as an amateur but became an expert, developing and tending the garden was totally absorbing. He would graft his own fruit trees, tend to and add to his massive collection of cacti and train his sweet peas in the way his sister-in-law, Vanessa Bell, did at Charleston, 10 miles down the road. He grew copious fruit and vegetables with the help of Percy Bartholomew, his gardener, keeping immaculate records (including detailed costings) and selling the surplus at the Women’s Institute market. When Virginia and Leonard were in London, a hamper of produce was sent up each week. Leonard was keen to learn and founded the Rodmell Horticultural Society in 1941.

The garden is lush and has delicious smells - a mini lilac tree, mint and rosemary. ~wildflowers grow among the planting. The orchard has long grasses with buttercups and bee hives, which Leonard started. There is a smooth bowls lawn facing a view of a chalk escarpment. It is lovely on a dull day, so on a sunny day it must be a veritable paradise.

it didn't occur to me to wonder why we decided to go. We had to meet A's dad somewhere - this was roughly midway - and I thought it would be interesting, to me, anyway. Here Virginia enjoyed her creative work and also had fun entertaining her many friends. Virginia and Leonard's ashes were scattered in the garden and it seems like the happy ending to a story. The National Trust can't over-prettify it because it was already very pretty. It feels like something from my grandparents' time - that time which is just out of reach, out of memory - and that's the time I find most fascinating, and I also think it was one of the best times for England, when talented people led relatively simple lives and did not strive to be extraordinarily rich.

Virginia Woolf's diary, part 1, 2nd post

Virginia Woolf didn't "do" introspection and whether this is right or wrong I don't know. Perhaps she feared that looking inward would damage her confidence. She preferred merely to record events and describe them with her own bias, which again, she didn't analyse. She used her diary in the following ways:

1. to loosen up her writing style - for example, to practice making unusual similes. She wrote it as quickly as possible "before tea". Could be any time - before tea! But she was involved in writing novels and reviews at the same time, so this writing, a record her life, allowed far more freedom.

5th Jan 1915 After lunch we took the air in the Old Deer Park, & marked by a line of straw how high the  river had been; & how a great tree had fallen across the towing path, crushing the railing beneath it. Three bodies were seen yesterday swiftly coursing downstream at Teddington.

26th Jan 1915 I wrote, as usual, over the fire, with an occasional interruption by Lizzy [an inept maid] who is like a rough coated young carthorse, with muddy hooves.

 e.g. 8 Sept 1918  Yesterday poor Bunny came for the night, bringing 8 combs of honey, for which he charges 2/6 each. .. Poor old Bunny! He is as if caked with earth, stiff as a clod; you can almost see the docks and nettles sprouting from his mind; his sentences creak with rust. He can now only lay hands on the simplest words.

 2. to keep her hold on reality because she has had a history of  psychosis; here she writes soon after a bout of illness only about the simplest facts.

e.g. 7 Aug 1917 Queer misty day. Sun not strong enough to come through. Went to Brighton after lunch. German prisoners working in the field by Dod's Hill laughing with the soldier, and woman passing. Went to Pier; tea at Booth's horrible men at our table; staged at Lewes on way back. Bicycled back from Glynde. 

3. to record her life's events with her own personal slant and interpretation

e.g.  Last Friday (14th June 1918) we went to a League of Nations meeting. The jingoes were defeated by the cranks. It was a splendid sight to see. The chief jingo was H.G. Wells, a slab of a man formidable for his mass, but otherwise the pattern of a professional cricketer. He has the cockney accent in words like "day". He was opposed by Oliver, Mrs Swanwick and Adrian. There were also present such gnomes as always creep out on such occasions - old women in coats & skirts with voluminous red ties, & little buttons and badges attached to them - crippled, stammering men, & old patriarchs with beards, & labour men, & ourselves.

e.g. 10 Jul 1918 Rain for the first time for weeks today & a funeral next door; dead of influenza. 

e.g. 12 Jul 1918 Great storms have been beating over England the last 3 days, the result of the Bishop's importunity, God being, as usual, spiteful in his concessions, & now threatening to ruin the harvest. 

4. to air her prejudices  

e.g.  4th January 1915. I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh: otherwise I think there is something to be said for Flora Woolf.

e.g. I bought my fish and meat in the High Street - a degrading but rather amusing business. I dislike the sight of women shopping. They take it so seriously.

 e.g.  On the towpath we met and had to pass a long line of imbeciles. ...and then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.

e.g. The odd thing about the Woolf family, to me, is the extreme laxness of it. In my family, the discussions and agitations that went on about the slightest change in one's way of life were endless; but with the W's it doesn't much seem to matter whether they turn farmer, run away with another man's wife, or marry a Polish Jew Tailor's daughter.

 5. to remark the small things that give her friends and acquaintances personality

e.g. 27th Jan 1915 She seems to like everyone equally, as if they were all the same. She told us how she used to go to bed with a basket of socks by her side, so as to start darning first thing in the morning.

e.g. I talked mainly to Ermengard - a rare visitor, but somehow familiar. As L. remarked these country women get a slow bovine manner, rather refreshing to my taste. She breeds prize bulls, plays a double bass in the evening & writes improper stories for children. She seems to have settled into a corner absolutely fitted for her, where she exists pleasantly, having a Quaker faith now to round her off. I got the impression of some large garden flower comfortably shoving its roots about & well planted in the soil - say a Stock, or a holly-hock. 

e.g. Adrian looks immensely long, & his little bow tie somehow gives him a frivolous rather than distinguished air, as if a butterfly had settled on him by mistake. He has some job in an office.

e.g. 23rd Jul 1918  Lytton & Carrington were alone. No servant was visible & most of the waiting seemed to be done by Carrington. She is silent, a little subdued, makes one conscious of her admiring & solicitous youth. If one were concerned for her, one might be anxious about her position - so dependent on L & having so openly burnt the conventional boats.  

6.  and as a store of material to use in stories and novels (can't separate this and the previous very well.)

e.g. 1st Feb 1915 In St James's street there was a terrific explosion; people came running out of clubs; stopped still and gazed about them. But there was no Zeppelin or aeroplane - only, I suppose, a very large burst tyre. But it is really an instinct with me, & most people I suppose, to turn any sudden noise, or dark object int he sky into an explosions, or a German aeroplane. And it always seems utterly impossible that one should be hurt.[used in Mrs Dalloway].

e.g.  28th May 1918 Harry Stephen told his old stories, wrinkled his nose, & alluded several times to his great age. He is 58. An undoubted failure: but that has a freshening effect upon people; they are more irresponsible than the successes; but yet one can't call Harry exactly irresponsible either. He is modest; humorous; all his pride for his father and ancestors. He still takes out an enormous pocket knife, & slowly half opens the blade & shuts it. [VW used this for Peter Walsh in Mrs Dalloway.]

e.g. 1 May 1918 We [Leonard and V] had a  tremendous talk about the Equator. In the middle of a demonstration with two pebbles ... this diverted my attention. A serious reprimand had to be administered.. It was discovered that I took the Equator to be a circular mark, coloured dull red, upon the end of a football. The ignorance and inattention combined displayed in this remark seemed so crass that for about 20 minutes we could not speak. [VW used this too in Mrs Dalloway, see previous entry.]

7. and of course, for enjoyment.

e.g.  28th May 1918  The heat was such that it was intolerable to walk before tea; we sat in the garden, I indolently reading, L. not sitting but gardening. We had the best display of flowers yet seen - wall flowers in profusion, columbines, phlox, & as we went huge scarlet poppies with purple stains inside them. The peonies even about to burst. There was a nest of blackbirds against the wall. Last night at Charleston I lay with my window open listening to a nightingale, which beginning in the distance come very near the garden. Fishes splashed in the pond. May in England is all they say - so teeming, amorous & creative.

Stalking Virginia Woolf

I was rather interested to see Hogarth House, where VW lived in Richmond whilst writing the first volume of this diary, and I was also very interested to find out how long it would take her to walk from Richmond to Kingston. We parked a mile or so out of Kingston - at Teddington Lock on the Ham side, and we walked at a fair pace along the tow-path to Richmond, stopping at Ham House to explore the cellars and shelter from a shower. We went to find Hogarth House, which is in a quietish road not at all far from the shopping streets. The house is rather grand-looking and I think that in the Woolfs' time it was cut in two, and they had only half of it.. There is practically no garden and you can walk down the path at the side (peeking over the wall at the lack of garden) to cut through to the shops. I tried to imagine the town as it was in the first world war: which buildings were there then (most of them) and why VW was so nasty about poor Richmond?! She thought it very vulgar and her favourite thing was the train to London. Then we went to the green (such a gorgeous town) where the Attenboroughs used to live, and then back to the river where we had an excellent beer, and walked back mainly along the tow-path. There must be a shorter way, I think, as it was quite tiring, even though very attractive, and I also wondered what VW wore on her feet. She never complained, in her diary, that her feet hurt; she must have had a great pair of boots but so far (and I am well into 1918) she has been very reticent about her footwear.

the path to Kingston from Richmond

Hogarth House in Richmond

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.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway isn't exactly an easy read.

It is, however, if you give it some effort, really quite intoxicating, because it is strange and fresh. In this novel Mrs Dalloway plans a party, buys some flowers, mends her dress, is visited by an old flame, and has a moment with her husband, who wants to tell her he loves her, doesn't, but he does take her some roses and hold her hand. Then she lies down for a while, and in the evening she plays the gushing, warm hostess at her party, which is a very grand party (and the Prime Minister attends).

But there's more to it than this! Is Mrs Dalloway a lesbian, who constantly remembers her darling first love, Sally? (It seems so.) But in her thoughts she often goes to her old flame, Peter Walsh, and her old home, Bourton. And Peter Walsh also goes about London and considers his past and his future.  Is Mrs Dalloway psychologically linked with a mentally disturbed veteran of the Great War? (Yes.) Is Mrs Dalloway a portal to a range of consciousnesses and feelings? - for she feels one thing and the next minute she feels almost the opposite thing, just as people do, so she is not a fixed personality made up of streaks of good or evil, but a different person almost at every second.

On the first page we are told that the doors are to be taken off their hinges: perhaps this is a hint. Things are going to come through the pages of the novel that have not previously come through such portals. We are going to get a first-hand account of what it is like to be psychotic, like poor Septimus, the war veteran, all his strange fears and hallucinations, and also what it is like to look after someone who is psychotic, like Septimus's wife Rezia. We are going to find out how lovely it is to be Mrs Dalloway as she sits and mends her party dress, and how her old flame feels about her - how remarkable she is, how vivid, but with a streak which others call coldness.

From the Wordsworth Classics edition, p 88-9

But - but - why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? ... but what had he said? There were his roses. Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very unjustly, for her parties! That was it! That was it!
Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she knew what it was, she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard [her husband] merely thought it was foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. and both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.
"That's what I do it for," she said, speaking aloud, to life.

An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.
All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . . 

People do think about sex, in the novel, Peter Walsh refers to it as "the other thing" and realises that it wouldn't be good for him with Clarissa. [How do people know this?] Peter Walsh is getting ready for the party and thinking to himself:

... and yet nobody,of course, was more dependent upon others (he buttoned his waistcoat); it had been his undoing. He could not keep out of smoking-rooms, liked colonels, liked golf, liked bridge, and above all women's society, and the fineness of their companionship, and their faithfulness and audacity and greatness in loving, which, though it had its drawbacks, seemed to him (and the dark, adorably pretty face was on top of the envelopes [photo of his girlfriend]) so wholly admirable, so splendid a flower to grow on the crest of human life, and yet he could not come up to the scratch, being always apt to see round things (Clarissa had sapped something in him permanently), and to tire very easily of mute devotion and to want variety in love...

 I think some people think this style with all its semi-colons, rather too much, but it is such a good attempt to explain how it feels to be alive, and have death at one's back. I am sure Septimus did not want to die, but he was mad and the medical men simply made him worse, and this story is where V Woolf expresses her anger with regard to her own experiences of being mad. She was mad, at times, and perhaps like Septimus kept hearing messages and seeing faces; absorbed with things that were not there and completely irrational.

How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton part 2: Character in realist fiction vs modernist fiction

Here is Prof. E. writing about an important change in literature, and he makes the changes seem clear and easily understood. I have edited drastically taking out some of his examples:

One of the achievements of the great European realist novel, ... is to illustrate this weaving of character and context. Characters in this kind of fiction are seen as caught up in a web of complex mutual dependencies. they are formed by social and historical forces greater than themselves, and shaped by processes of which they may be only fitfully conscious. ... As George Eliot puts it, there is no private life that has not been influenced by a wider public one.

 Characters in the realist tradition are generally presented as complex, credible, fully rounded individuals. Many of them seem a lot more real than the people next door. 

The modernists are in search of new modes of characterisation, suitable to a post-Victorian age. ...The typical realist character tends to be reasonably stable and unified, ... As such, it reflects an era when identity was felt on the whole to be less problematic than it is today. People could still see themselves as the agents of their own destinies. they had a fairly acute sense of where they stopped and other people began. their personal and collective history, for all its ups and downs, seems to represent a coherent evolution, one which was more likely to issue in felicity than in catastrophe.  

 Modernism, by contract, pitches the whole concept of identity into crisis.... Once you start to see human consciousness as unfathomably intricate, it is hard to contain it within the well-defined limits of Walter Scott's Rob Roy or Robert Louis Stephenson's Jim Hawkins. Instead, it begins to spill out over the edges, seeping into its surroundings as well as into other selves....Woolf's fiction, where identity is more elusive and indeterminate than it is in Trollope or Thomas Hardy. ...It can involve a traumatic sense of loss and anxiety. Having too little identity can be quite as disabling as having too much.

If the self is bound up with its changing experiences, then it no longer has the unity and consistency of Bunyan's Everyman or Shakespeare's Coriolanus. It is less able to recount a coherent story of itself. Its beliefs and desires do not necessarily hang together to form a seamless whole. Neither do the works in which such characters appear. 

T.S. Eliot is also disdainful of mere consciousness, and largely indifferent to individual personality. what seizes his attention are the myths and traditions which shape the individual self.... and these forces lie far below the individual mind, in a kind of collective unconscious. It is here that we all share in the same timeless myths and spiritual wisdom.

There is another reason why the idea of character as Balzac or Hawthorne knew it no longer seems feasible in modern times. This is because in an age of mass culture and commerce, human beings come to seem increasingly faceless and interchangeable. We can ... not distinguish easily between Vladimir and Estragon. ...Leopold Bloom ... is sharply individualised, yet he is also an anonymous Everyman whose thoughts and feelings could be almost anybody's. His mind is magnificently banal.

So interesting, because one thinks that both views are true at the same time!  Is that possible? I don't know about Bloom because one book I keep meaning to read is James Joyce's Ulysses. will I ever? When there are so many great books to read?

There was something I was going to write about and I forgot what it was before I had time to write it in my blog, and now I feel very cheated, because whatever it was is now lost forever. I do fear I have the dementia that comes from having too much to do in the way of dreary job tasks. But my mother's dementia is worse than it was, because she is confused about her money now, and I am afraid that she will start to give her small pot of money away to an undeserving cause. She will then forget she has done it and wonder what has happened.