1 December 1930 – 7 December 1930

No, I cannot write that very difficult passage in The Waves this morning (how their lives hang lit up against the Palace) all because of Arnold Bennett and Ethel’s* party. I can hardly get one word after another. There I was for 2 hours so it seemed, alone with B., in Ethel’s little back room. And this meeting I am convinced was engineered by B. to “get on good terms with Mrs. Woolf”—when Heaven knows I don’t care a rap if I’m on terms with B. or not. B. I say, because he can’t say B. He ceases; shuts his eyes; leans back; one waits. “Begin,” he at last articulates quietly, without any fluster. But the method lengthens out intolerably a rather uninspired discourse. It’s fun. I like the old creature. I do my best, as a writer, to detect signs of genius in his smoky brown eye: I see certain sensuality, power, I suppose; but O as he cackled out “What a blundering fool I am—what a baby—compared with Desmond MacCarthy—how clumsy—how could I attack professors?” This innocence is engaging; but would be more so if I felt him, as he infers, a “creative artist.” He said that George Moore in The Mummer’s Wife had shown him The Five Towns: taught him what to see there: has a profound admiration for G. M.; but despises him for boasting of his sexual triumphs. “He told me that a young girl had come to see him. And he asked her, as she sat on the sofa, to undress. And he said she took off all her clothes and let him look at her. . . . Now that I don’t believe . . . But he is a prodigious writer— he lives for words. Now he’s ill. Now he’s an awful bore—he tells the same stories over and over. And soon people will say of me ‘He’s dead.’” I rashly said: “Of your books?” “No, of me,” he replied, attaching, I suppose, a longer life than I do to his books. Soon after this A.B. went to France, drank a glass of water and died of typhoid. (March 30th. His funeral today.) “It’s the only life,” he said (this incessant scribbling, one word after another, one thousand words daily). “I don’t want anything else. I think of nothing but writing. Some people are bored.” “You have all the clothes you want, I suppose,” I said. “And bath. And beds. And a yacht.” “Oh yes, my clothes couldn’t be better cut.” And at last I drew Lord David* in. And we taunted the old creature with thinking us refined. He said the gates of Hatfield were shut—“shut away from life.” “But open on Thursdays,” said Lord D. “I don’t want to go on Thursdays,” said B. “And you drop your aitches on purpose,” I said, “thinking that you possess more ‘life’ than we do.” “I sometimes tease,” said B., “but I don’t think I possess more life than you do. Now I must go home. I have to write one thousand words tomorrow morning.” And this left only the scrag end of the evening; and this left me in a state where I can hardly drive my pen across the page. Reflection: It is presumably a bad thing to look through articles, reviews, etc. to find one’s own name. Yet I often do.

One word of slight snub in the Lit. Sup. today makes me determine, first, to alter the whole of The Waves; second, to put my back up against the public—one word of slight snub.