What’s next here?

This blog has morphed from a place to keep field notes about a species of bird in a place I used to live, to miscellaneous public musing and a sort of commonplace book, and then (in my mind and plans) to a multimedia chronology and, perhaps, an autobiography. I’m even considering inviting commentary or guest blogging from anyone involved in any events which might appear here. My alarm about the vast tracts of time for which I have no memories at all drives me to do whatever I can to capture the remaining ones. In that respect, this would be documentary as well as remembering (re-membering).

A few weeks later, I add: When I took up the notion of turning this blog into an autobiographical scrapbook, it seemed like a cool idea to transcribe my original diary and journal entries. After all, they are dated and can speak for themselves, and would make a bio-blog totally authentic. But then I actually pulled them out of the box and started reading them again, and the style, gah! I can’t take it. Makes me want to find a TARDIS and fly back in time and get really violent with back-then me. Clear and plain sentences are one out of ten, and the pretentiousness goes to 11. Maybe it can be translated. Or maybe, I tell myself, do the transcription, but don’t turn the posts on until 2064 or sometime way, way away.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would write the screenplay herself

“I foresee, to return to The Hours, that this is going to be the devil of a struggle. The design is so queer & so masterful. I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design is certainly original, & interests me hugely.” VW, diary, 19 Jun 1923, p. 249.

Since the first time I noted this quotation, I finished reading Mrs. Dalloway. No sooner finished than I knew I’d have to read it again. I found an entire scholarly essay about an episode in the novel of which I had no memory, an that got me going. I’ve also watched the film adaptation, and when you remember that “the design is certainly original” you have to wonder how anyone could produce such a banal treatment of it. But then you have to wonder, too, how one could produce an excellent treatment. Is it mandatory to meet the unconventional with the unconventional? Art with art? And who was the intended audience?

Eminence and Immortality

“How far has our set justified its promise? Lytton maintains that in ourselves we are as remarkable as the Johnson set, though our works may perish — still we’re at the beginning of our works.” VW diary, p. 64

It would be interesting to know if Boswell compared his own set to anything preceding it, or if he distinguished between set and Club. And if by set, Strachey meant The Club, then we have to compare Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell to Reynolds, etc, and immortality certainly falls short. A discussion on immortality was the context for the quotation above in September 1920 (recorded in Virginia Woolf’s diary). Lytton was the believer, and Leonard Woolf the skeptic. “It was an amusing talk,” wrote Virginia, and it apparently included comparisons involving Madame de Sevigné and Macaulay.

 

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw85227/The-Memoir-Club

Quotations from recent reading

“A feeling of depression is on me, as if we were old & near the end of all things.” VW, diary, 2 Aug 1924, p. 307. The rest of the entry makes it clear this was just a mood, but the metaphor captures much of my own mood in the second half of this second decade of the 21st century.

 

“I foresee, to return to The Hours, that this is going to be the devil of a struggle. The design is so queer & so masterful. I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design is certainly original, & interests me hugely.” VW, diary, 19 Jun 1923, p. 249.

“…[Ralph Partridge] behaves like a bull in a garden. And with it he is malicious. He is a male bully, as L[eonard] says. I am reminded of the tantrums of Adrian & Clive. There is something maniacal in masculine vanity.” VW, diary, 28 Jul 1922 (and yet, Ralph was called Ralph because Lytton Strachey re-christened him, and Ralph let him do so, and then named his own son Lytton – a son who married VW’s great-neice. But it’s the last sentence that is the quotation here, only it needs context. Oddly, RP doesn’t have his own wiki, only a link redirecting to the entry for Frances – he literally only exists in the stories about the other BG members).

 

“It is fatal not to write the thing one wants to write at the moment of wanting to write it. Never thwart a natural process.” VW, diary, 2 Oct 1918

In a letter from Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, two very remarkable events are reported: one is Rupert Brooke’s election to the Cambridge Apostles, and the other is the play-reading group that the Stephen siblings and their Cambridge alumni friends have formed:

p. 139 “If only Clive were a little less Clivy, it would be perfect…”

the editor of VW’s early diaries places the first play-reading in December, 1907. Leonard Woolf was in Ceylon at this time.