Hooked

By Christopher Porterfield

THE DIARY OF VIRGINIA WOOLF: VOL.1,1931-1935 Edited by Anne Olivier Bell Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 402 pages; $19.95

Some notes found under a vacation hammock:

Tuesday. Another day, another book by Virginia Woolf. Dead for 41 years, yet her output still rolling off the presses almost faster than one can read it. Leave aside the novels, biographies and critical collections in her own lifetime. What about the nearly 4,000 letters in six volumes that finished coming out in 1980? The countless essays and fugitive pieces being sorted and shuffled in various miscellanies? And now these reams of diaries, to be concluded in a fifth volume. What energy! What fluency! After writing final words of The Common Reader, Second Series, she jotted in a diary: "Now I'm taking a holiday. That is to say, what shall I write tomorrow?"

Thursday. Tried to convince myself that all this darting observation and febrile sensitivity of Woolf's is getting boring. Lost the argument by opening to a page at random. She says of Henry James' prose: "His pounce & grip & swing always spring fresh upon me." Ditto with her. The literary portraits alone are worth the price: Huxley, Rebecca West, old Shaw and Yeats, T.S. Eliot ("hard, spry, a glorified boy scout in shorts & yellow shirt. . . settling in with some severity to being a great man").

Friday. A salutary touch of malice gloriously unjust. She describes a visit to Novelist Elizabeth Bowen in Ireland, where other guests included Critic Cyril Connolly and wife: "There we spent one night, unfortunately with baboon Connolly & his gollywog slug wife Jean."

Sunday. Death a growing preoccupation. Hitler's murderous rise in Germany The passing of close friends like Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry ("intolerable: the impoverishment"). Woolf in her 50s now, her best work behind her, battling the recurrent flashing rays of light and sharp pains in her head, the attacks of near madness that (we know) augur her suicide. "And then all this incandescence led to the galloping horses in my heart the night before last," she writes after an overexertion. "I lay in bed reasoning that I could not come smash. Death I defy you, etc. But it was a terrific effort, holding on to the reins."

Monday. She wanted company, stimulation, talk; but needed solitude, serenity, writing. Her letters reach out for the former; the diaries embrace the latter, often during pauses from work or in moments snatched between social engagements. Compared with letters, her diaries also full of shoptalk as she labors on The Years, Three Guineas, her biography of Fry. Not that this is mundane stuff. Here was a woman who could weep over her earlier entries: "The sense of all that floating away for ever down the stream, unknown for ever." Ultimately the diaries had the same spiritual stake for her as the rest of her writing. "If one does not lie back & sum up & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one's gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough."

Tuesday. Meant merely to dip into the book and ended up devouring it. But now it really is time for a break. That is to say, what Virginia Woolf shall I read tomorrow? --By Christopher Porterfield

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.