11 August 1924 – 17 August 1924

Into all these calculations, broke the death of Conrad, followed by a wire from the Lit. Sup. earnestly asking me kindly to do a leader on him, which flattered and loyal, but grudgingly, I did; and it’s out; and that number of the Lit. Sup. corrupted for me (for I can’t, and never shall be able to, read my own writings. Moreover, now little Walkley’s on the war path again I expect a bite next Wednesday). Yet I have never never worked so hard. For, having to do a leader in five days, I made hay after tea—and couldn’t distinguish tea hay from morning hay either. So doesn’t this give me two extra hours for critical works anyhow (as Logan calls them)? So I’m trying it—my fiction before lunch and then essays after tea. For I see that Mrs. Dalloway is going to stretch beyond October. In my forecasts I always forget some most important intervening scenes: I think I can go straight at the grand party and so end; forgetting Septimus, which is a very intense and ticklish business, and jumping Peter Walsh eating his dinner, which may be some obstacle too. But I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms; and the walks in the fields are corridors; and now today I’m lying thinking. By the way, why is poetry wholly an elderly taste? When I was 20, in spite of Thoby who used to be so pressing and exacting, I could not for the life of me read Shakespeare for pleasure; now it lights me as I walk to think I have two acts of King John tonight, and shall next read Richard II. It is poetry that I want now— long poems. Indeed I’m thinking of reading the Seasons. I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing; have no time to waste any more on prose. Yet this must be the very opposite to what people say. When I was 20 I liked eighteenth century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimeé. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott’s life and letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, and Shelley. Now it’s poetry I want, so I repent like a tipsy sailor in front of a public house. . . . I don’t often trouble now to describe cornfields and groups of harvesting women in loose blues and reds, and little staring yellow frocked girls. But that’s not my eyes’ fault: coming back the other evening from Charleston, again all my nerves stood upright, flushed, electrified (what’s the word?) with the sheer beauty—beauty astounding and superabounding. So that one almost resents it, not being capable of catching it all and holding it all at the moment. One’s progress through life is made immensely interesting by trying to grasp all these developments as one passes. I feel as if I were putting out my fingers tentatively on (here is Leonard, who has ordered me a trap in which to drive Dadie* to Tilton† tomorrow) either side as I grope down a tunnel, rough with odds and ends. And I don’t describe encounters with herds of Alderneys any more—though this would have been necessary some years ago —how they barked and belled like stags round Grizzle; and how I waved my stick and stood at bay; and thought of Homer as they came flourishing and trampling towards me; some mimic battle. Grizzle grew more and more insolent and excited and skirmished about yapping. Ajax? That Greek, for all my ignorance, has worked its way into me.