23 October 1933 – 29 October 1933

No, my head is too tired to go on with Bobby and Elvira—they’re to meet at St. Paul’s—this morning. I wish I could get it full and calm and unconscious. This last is difficult, owing to Flush, owing to the perpetual little spatter of comment that keeps me awake. Yesterday the Granta said I was now defunct. Orlando, Waves, Flush represent the death of a potentially great writer. This is only a rain drop, I mean the snub some little pimpled undergraduate likes to administer, just as he would put a frog in one’s bed: but then there’s all the letters and the requests for pictures—so many that, foolishly perhaps, I wrote a sarcastic letter to the N.S.—thus procuring more rain drops. This metaphor shows how tremendously important unconsciousness is when one writes. But let me remember that fashion in literature is an inevitable thing; also that one must grow and change; also that I have, at last, laid hands upon my philosophy of anonymity. My letter to the N.S. is the crude public statement of a part of it. How odd last winter’s revelation was! freedom; which now I find makes it quite easy for me to refuse Sibyl’s invitations, to take life much more strongly and steadily. I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded. And though this as usual is only a pot shot, there is a great deal of substance in it. October has been a bad month; but might have been much worse without my philosophy.