A Writer's Diary (27 page)

S
IENA.
Saturday, May 13th

Today we saw the most beautiful of views and the melancholy man. The view was like a line of poetry that makes itself; the shaped hill, all flushed with reds and greens; the elongated lines, cultivated every inch; old, wild, perfectly said, once and for all: and I walked up to a group and said What is that village? It called itself 
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; and the woman with the blue eyes said, "Won't you come to my house and drink?" She was famished for talk. Four or five of them buzzed round us and I made a Ciceronian speech about the beauty of the country. But I have no money to travel with, she said, wringing her hands. We would not go to her house—a cottage on the side of the hill: and shook hands: hers were dusty: she wanted to keep them from me; but we all shook hands and I wished we had gone to her house, in the loveliest of all landscapes. Then, lunching by the river, among the ants, we met the melancholy man. He had five or six little fish in his hands, which he had caught in his hands. We said it was very beautiful country; and he said no, he preferred the town. He had been to Florence: no, he did not like the country. He wanted to travel, but had no money: worked at some village: no, he did not like the country, he repeated, with his gentle cultivated voice: no theatres, no pictures, only perfect beauty. I gave him 2 cigarettes; at first he refused, then offered us his six or seven little fish. But we could not cook them at Siena, we said. No, he agreed, and so we parted.

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.

Sunday, May 14th

Yes, I am reading—skipping—the
Sacred Fount,
about the most inappropriate of all books for this din—sitting by the open window, looking across heads and heads and heads—all Siena parading in grey and pink and the cars hooting. How finely run along those involuted threads? I don't—that's the answer. I let 'em break. I only mark that the sign of a masterly writer is his power to break his mould callously. None of H. J.'s timid imitators have the vigour, once they've spun their sentence, to smash it. He has some native juice—figure: has driven his spoon deep into some stew of his own—some swarming mixture. That—his vitality—his vernacular—his pounce and grip and swing always spring fresh upon me, if at the same time I ask how could anyone, outside an orchis in a greenhouse, fabricate such an orchid's dream. Oh these Edwardian ladies with pale hair, these tailored "my dear men"! Yet compared to that vulgar old brute Creevey—L. is here bitten by a flea—H. J. is muscular, lean. No doubt the society of the Regent—the smell of brandy and bones, the painted velvet Lawrence women—the general laxity and lushness and vulgarity are here at their superlative. Of course the Shelleys, the Wordsworths, the Coleridges existed on the other side of the hedge. But when it comes gushing out of Creevey's page, it's for all the world like—something between Buckingham Palace, Brighton and the Queen's own italic style—so uncurbed, so weak: and how can one hope for a cure for a single person? There's all the dreary Lords and Ladies ogling and overeating; and plush and gilt;
and the Princess and the Prince—I think dissolution and obesity taking hold of the eighteenth century and swelling it into a puff ball efflorescence, 1860 is considerably more to the point.

Monday, May 15th

This should be all description—I mean of the little pointed green hills; and the white oxen and the poplars and the cypresses and the sculptured shaped infinitely musical, flushed green land from here to Abbazia
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—that is where we went today; and couldn't find it and asked one after another of the charming tired peasants, but none had been 4 miles beyond their range, until we came to the stonebreaker and he knew. He could not stop work to come with us, because the inspector was coming tomorrow. And he was alone, alone, all day with no one to talk to. So was the aged Maria at the Abbazia. And she mumbled and slipped her words, as she showed us into the huge bare stone building; mumbled and mumbled, about the English—how beautiful they were. Are you a Contessa? she asked me. But she didn't like Italian country either. They seem stinted, dried up; like grasshoppers and with the manners of impoverished gentle people; sad, wise, tolerant, humorous. There was the man with the mule. He let the mule gallop away down the road. We are welcome, because we might talk; they draw round and discuss us after we're gone. Crowds of gentle kindly boys and girls always come about us and wave and touch their hats. And nobody looks at the view—except us—at the Euganean, bone white, this evening; then there's a ruddy red farm or two; and light islands swimming here and there in the sea of shadow—for it was very showery—then there are the black stripes of cypresses round the farm; like fur edges; and the poplars and the streams and the nightingales singing and sudden gusts of orange blossom; and white alabaster oxen with swinging chins—great flaps of white leather hanging under their noses—and infinite emptiness, loneliness, silence: never a new house, or a village; but only the vineyards and the olive trees, where they have always been. The hills
go pale blue, washed very sharp and soft on the sky; hill after hill.

P
IACENZA.
Friday, May 19th

It's a queer thing that I write a date. Perhaps in this disoriented life one thinks, if I can say what day it is, then ... Three dots to signify I don't know what I mean. But we have been driving all day from Lerici over the Apennines and it is now cold, cloistral, highly uncomfortable, in a vast galleried Italian inn, so ill provided with chairs that now at this present moment we are squatted, L. in a hard chair by his bed, I on the bed, in order to take advantage of the single light which burns between us. L. is writing directions to the Press. I am about to read Goldoni.

Lerici is hot and blue and we had a room with a balcony. There were Misses and Mothers—misses who had lost all chance of life long ago, and could with a gentle frown, a frown of mild sadness, confront a whole meal—arranged for the English—in entire silence, dressed as if for cold Sunday supper in Wimbledon. Then there's the retired Anglo-Indian, who takes shall we say Miss Toutchet for a walk, a breezy red faced man, very fond of evensong at the Abbey. She goes to the Temple; where "my brother" has rooms. Et cetera. Et cetera. Of the Apennines I have nothing to say—save that up on the top they're like the inside of a green umbrella: spine after spine: and clouds caught on the point of the stick. And so down to Parma; hot, stony, noisy; with shops that don't keep maps; and so on along a racing road, to Piacenza, at which we find ourselves now at 6 minutes to 9
P.M.
This of course is the rub of travelling—this is the price paid for the sweep and the freedom—the dusting of our shoes and careering off tomorrow—and eating our lunch on a green plot beside a deep cold stream. It will be all over this day week—comfort—discomfort; and the zest and rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of travelling.

Sunday, May 21st

To write to keep off sleep—that is the exalted mission of
tonight—tonight sitting at the open window of a second-rate inn in Draguignan—with plane trees outside, the usual single noted bird, the usual loudspeaker. Everybody in France motors on Sunday; then sleeps it off at night. The hotel keepers are gorged and scarcely stop playing cards. But Grasse was too plethoric—we came on here late. We leave here early. I dip into Creevey; L. into
Golden Bough.
We long for bed. This is the tax for travelling—these sleepy uncomfortable hotel nights—sitting on hard chairs under the lamp. But the seduction works as we start—to Aix tomorrow—so home. And "home" becomes a magnet, for I can't stop making up the P's: can't live without that intoxicant—though this is the loveliest and most distracting alternative. But I'm full of holiday and want work—ungrateful that I am!—and yet I want the hills near Fabbria too and the hills near Siena—but no other hills—not these black and green violent monotonous southern hills. We saw poor Lawrence's Phoenix picked out in coloured pebbles at Vence today among all the fretted lace tombs.

Tuesday, May 23rd

I have just said to myself if it were possible to write, those white sheets would be the very thing, not too large or too small. But I do not wish to write, except as an irritant. This is the position. I sit on L.'s bed; he in the only armchair. People tap up and down on the pavement. This is Vienne. It is roasting hot—hotter and hotter it gets—and we are driving through France; and it's Tuesday and we cross on Friday and this strange interval of travel, of sweeping away from habitation and habits will be over. On and on we go—through Aix, through Avignon, on and on, under arches of leaves, over bare sandy roads, under grey black hills with castles, beside vines: and I'm thinking of the Pargiters: and L. is driving; and when we come to poplars we get out and lunch by the river; and then on; and take a cup of tea by the river: fetch our letters, learn that Lady Cynthia Mosley is dead: picture the scene; wonder at death; and drowse and doze in the heat, and decide to sleep here—hotel de la Poste; and read another letter and learn that the Book Society will probably take
Flush
and speculate what we shall do if we have £1,000 or £2,000 to spend. And what would these little burghers of Vienne, who are drinking coffee, do with that sum, I ask? The girl is a typist; the young men clerks. For some reason they start discussing hotels at Lyons, I think; and they haven't a penny piece between them; and all the men go into the urinal, one sees their legs; and the Morocco soldiers go in their great cloaks; and the children play ball and people stand lounging and everything becomes highly pictorial, composed, legs in particular—the odd angles they make: and the people dining in the hotel; and the queer air it all has, since we shall leave early tomorrow, of something designing Vienne on my mind, significantly. Now the draw of home, and freedom and no packing tells on us—oh to sit in an arm chair; and read and not have to ask for Eau Mineral, with which to brush our teeth!

52 T
AVISTOCK
S
QUARE.
Tuesday, May 30th

Yes, but of all things coming home from a holiday is undoubtedly the most damned. Never was there such aimlessness, such depression. Can't read, write or think. There's no climax here. Comfort yes: but the coffee's not so good as I expected. And my brain is extinct—literally hasn't the power to lift a pen. What one must do is to set it—my machine I mean—in the rails and give it a push. Lord—how I pushed yesterday to make it start running along Goldsmith again. There's that half finished article. Lord Salisbury said something about dished up speeches being like the cold remains of last night's supper. I see white grease on the pages of my article. Today it's a little warmer—tepid meat: a slab of cold mutton. It's coldish, dullish here. Yes, but I hear the clock tick and suspect, though I must not look, that the wheels are just beginning to turn on the rails. We go to Monks House for Whitsun, which is Monday—the suburban, the diminished Monks House, No, I can't look at
The Pargiters.
It's an empty snail shell. And I'm empty with a cold slab of a brain. Never mind. 1 shall dive head foremost into
The Pargiters.
And now I shall make my mind run along Italian—what's his name—Goldoni. A few verbs I think.
It occurs to me that this state, my depressed state, is the state in which most people usually are.

Wednesday, May 31st

I think I have now got to the point where I can write for four months straight ahead at
The Pargiters.
Oh the relief—the physical relief! I feel as if I could hardly any longer keep back—that my brain is being tortured by always butting against a blank wall—I mean
Flush,
Goldsmith, motoring through Italy. Now, tomorrow, I mean to run it off. And suppose only nonsense comes? The thing is to be venturous, bold, to take every possible fence. One might introduce plays, poems, letters, dialogues: must get the round, not only the flat. Not the theory only. And conversation: argument. How to do that will be one of the problems. I mean intellectual argument in the form of art: I mean how give ordinary waking Arnold Bennett life the form of art? These are rich hard problems for my four months ahead. And I don't know my own gifts at the moment. I'm disoriented completely after four weeks' holiday—no three—but tomorrow we go to Rodmell again. And I must fill up the chinks with reading—and don't want to settle down to books—Well, now I have to go up to Murray about my dress: and there's Ethel round the corner; but no letters; disorganisation from Whitsun again. 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. The rhododendron like coloured glass mounds at Kew. Oh the agitation, oh the discomfort of this mood.

And I am at once called out to draw lots in our Derby sweepstake. No favourite this year, they say.

Very well: the old Pargiters are beginning to run off: and I say oh to be done. I mean, writing is effort: writing is despair: and yet of course t'other day in the grilling heat at Rodmell I admit that the perspective—this I think was something like my profound thought at Richmond—shifts into focus: yes: the proportion is right: though I at the top suffer strain; suffer, as
this morning, grim despair and shall O Lord when it comes to re-writing suffer an intensity of anguish ineffable (the word only means one can't express it); holding the thing;—all the things—the innumerable things—together.