Authors: Shelly Fisher Fishkin
Silences (34 page)
—André Gide
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SILENCES, PP
. 11–13
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SILENCES, P
. 12
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Viking edition, 1965. This is expressed in its own way on the last pages of George Orwell’s
The Road to Wigan Pier.
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SILENCES, PP
. 13–14
SUBTERRANEAN FORCES—AND THE WORK OF CREATION IN CIRCUMSTANCES ENABLING FULL FUNCTION
The writing of
The Waves
(1926–1931) partial selections from Virginia Woolf’s
A Writer’s Diary
1927 June
. . . I read—any trash . . . Slowly ideas began trickling in . . . the Moths,
*
which I think I will write very quickly. . . . the play-poem idea; the idea of some continuous stream, not solely
of human thought, but of the ship, the night etc. all flowing together: intersected by the arrival of the bright moths. A man and a woman are to be sitting at table talking. Or shall they remain silent? It is to be a love story; she is finally to let the last great moth in. . . . But it needs ripening. I do a little work on it in the evening when the gramophone is playing late Beethoven sonatas.
1928 November
As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
The Moths
still haunts me, coming, as they always do, unbidden, between tea and dinner, while L. plays the gramophone. I shape a page or two; and make myself stop. . . .
1929 December
. . . Blundering on at
The Waves.
I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream. Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading; and pencil them into some sense. Still I am not satisfied. . . . I press to my centre. I don’t care if it all is scratched
out . . . and then, if nothing comes of it—anyhow I have examined the possibilities. But I wish I enjoyed it more. I don’t have it in my head all day like the
Lighthouse
and
Orlando.
1930 January
“And now I can think of nothing else.” Thanks to my pertinacity and industry, I can now hardly stop making up
The Waves
. . . after 6 months’ hacking.
1930 January
. . . I
cannot yet write naturally in my new room, because the table is not the right height and I must stoop to warm my hands. Everything must be absolutely what I am used to. . . . I am stuck fast in that book—I mean glued to it, like a fly on gummed paper. Sometimes I am out of touch; but go on; then again I feel that I have at last, by violent measures—like breaking through gorse—set my hands on something
central. . . . But how to pull it together, how to comport it—press it into one—I do not know . . .
1930 February
. . . If I could stay in bed another fortnight (but there is no chance of that) I believe I should see the whole of
The Waves
. . . . [in] these illnesses . . . something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis.
I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain. . . . Then suddenly something springs.
. . . Ideas rush in me; often though this is before I can control my mind or pen. . . . My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.
1930 March
Yes, but this book is a very queer business. I had a day of intoxication when I said, “Children are
nothing to this”: . . . felt the pressure of the form—the splendour, the greatness—as perhaps I have never felt them. But I shan’t race it off in intoxication. I keep
pegging away; and find it the most complex and difficult of all my books. . . . I have not yet mastered the speaking voice . . . and I propose to go on pegging it down, arduously, and then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like
poetry. . . . At any rate, I have taken my fence.
1930 April
. . . I have never written a book so full of holes and patches; that will need re-building, yes, not only re-modelling.
1930 May
. . . I begin to see what I had in my mind; and want to begin cutting out masses of irrelevance and clearing, sharpening and making the good phrases shine. One wave after another.
1931 February
Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised, the end of
The Waves.
I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad) I was almost afraid, remembering
the voices that used to fly ahead. Anyhow, it is done; and I have been sitting these 15 minutes in a state of glory, and calm, and some tears. . . . How physical the sense of triumph and relief is! Whether good or bad, it’s done; and, as I certainly felt at the end, not merely finished, but rounded off, completed, the thing stated—how hastily, how fragmentarily, I know; but I mean that I have
netted that fin in the waste of water which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell when I was coming to an end of
To the Lighthouse.
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Subterranean Forces▴
It is the great quantity of what is not done that lies with all its weight on what wants to come out of the soil.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
“The quiet, patient, generous mornings (yielding to
‘the surging chaos of the unexpressed’) will bring it,” James wrote in his
Notebooks.
If there had been “other claims, other responsibilities so that writing could not be first”; if he (or Woolf) had had only occasional mornings or none; if Conrad had not been able to “sit down religiously every morning . . . for eight hours” with his “crises of despair”—would they have created a body of work?
If Pierre (Melville) had gone out to a job that 8:00 to 4:30 instead of into his desolate and shivering room, how long would his unfinished book have revolved in his head?
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Later,
The Waves.
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September 30, 1926.
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SILENCES, PP
. 13–14