Fragments of Virginia Woolf
(/of Anne Olivier Bell*).

(ix):
“I must beg those who find such explanations superfluous to ignore the footnotes.”
“her choice and use of words often appears almost miraculous”

The miraculous apparition of a writer’s words (the moment, some months after I have written something, a moment when, usually, I am not writing or am not in a good practice, and I look at the thing and think to myself, how did I ever do that? and I will never do that again) in contrast to the editorial necessity of explanation, situation, conjunction, and expansion. How did I do that (how did she do that)? Forgetting how the words sometimes do just come.

The diary in its edited and published form shows the dailyness of Woolf’s habit of writing, but it also shows the labor of the editor. This letter from this person, from this family, living here, referring to this talk given here, probably on these topics (based on an archived program/notes).

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This book, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1: 1915-19, unifies two things I am fascinated by, as a writer and as a reader: the accumulation of daily or regular observations and notations, and the post-hoc annotation of extant work. I also love to read books where someone (usually more perceptive than I am) has written interesting things in the margins. (What a disappointment when the notes fall flat, or are simply pedestrian! I am always looking for a gateway into someone’s more interior life through these annotations.)

It’s not unusual for me to go back through my own notebooks (I have thirteen at the moment, a record I began keeping regularly in 2009) and write responses or detail how something came out—or to note that ideas for essays/other prose have become X or Y in development. I try to use another color ink and to date these annotations. Even with a relatively small amount of data, I can find myself going back through a notebook and wondering when I wrote something that is clearly not part of the first layer of notes.

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I am interested in a fiction that plays on the edges of a claim to truth. Which isn’t necessarily to say realism. Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Making a forgery of the world via detailed observation thereof. Playing with the expectation that data means something absolute, or that the voice vested with authority is telling the truth. Fiction like that—like Woolf’s diary—feels like a room in which lots is happening at once. It’s confusing and it requires some stillness from me as a reader. I find it slow going and I often read with my notebook open by me (to write down what I learn about structure or just interesting passages).

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Reading someone’s diary, sure there is the thrill of snooping, knowing more than I am authorized to know (although of course I am ‘authorized’ to know all this—unburnt, selected, edited, published, distributed as it is). But more than that the diary gives me an example of a place (often a feminine space, a domestic space or a wilderness in the midst of the domestic) where inclusion, even ‘frivolity’ or ‘exorbitance’ can be the rule.

The diary mode’s inclusiveness contradicts greeting-card sentimentality and the saccharine quotations extracted from (or mistakenly attributed to) great writers . Woolf is sometimes horrid in her diary: petty, unkind, cruel (remarking on a “long line of imbeciles” she crossed paths with, her only remark besides physical description is “It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed” [13]). If you want to find out more, the diary says, you’re not necessarily going to like what you find. Caveat lector.

As a writer, discovering this diary (and things like it—Susan Sontag’s diaries, Proust’s letters, Kafka’s letters, and Kimiko Hahn’s book The Narrow Road to the Interior) has given me much: the daily in my work, the specifically feminine daily, the throw-away daily. Confirmation that attention to the daily, ground-level stuff can yield interesting and rich patterning. Like a splotch of red makes a blue field more blue, the difficult things in Woolf’s diary make the whole deeper and more interesting.

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At the same time as the diary offers some claim to ‘authenticity’, I am interested in the possibility of forgery, fakery, play. I know the writer knows that any of her work might one day be public. She writes, regardless. We’re the ones who call it ‘real’ or ‘true’ or ‘sincere’.

Forging a passport, I cross into the new world my prose makes.

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(xxiii):
“The long tedium of a life devoted to courtesy, the constant polite endeavour to soothe the vanity, repair the composure, and ensure the comfort of guests—usually male guests, who arrogantly took such endeavours for granted”.

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Woolf’s dailiness: maybe it has its own tediums (for this reader the diary is not perpetually stimulating), but they are the tediums she chose.

“After this both L & I settle down to our scribbling” (4)
“We worked as usual: as usual it rained” (7)

(A regular noting of weather conditions, the social activities of people in her circle, parties/speeches/etc. attended. In the diary, Woolf has a fascination with curtains.)

Recording the daily, though, eventually offers things like “When L. pulled the curtains this morning, practically no light came in; there was a kind of greyish confusion outside—soft swirling incessant snow. This has gone on all day almost, sometimes changing to rain” (25).

At these moments, my years in England interact with Woolf’s words. I have been in that grey. I forgot I could write about it: I forgot how to stand aside from it. I forgot how rich and strange my own dailiness was. (The value of my notebooks is the distance I have from them by the time I can bear to reread them. Then the daily of a few years ago feels both valuable—as material and mnemonic—and unimportant; I feel no real bond to whatever was ‘true’ then.)

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* Bell edited the diaries; my edition is Penuin’s 1983 paperback version.