18 March 1940 – 24 March 1940

Yes, another attack,* in fact two other attacks: one Sunday week—101 with Angelica there to put me to bed; t’other last Friday, 102 after lunch. So to bed up here in L.’s room, and Dr. Tooth, who keeps me in bed (where I sit up with L. reading proofs) till tomorrow. That’s the boring history. What they call recurring with slight bronchitis. Yes. One Sunday (the 101 Sunday) L. gave me a very severe lecture on the first half. We walked in the meadows. It was like being pecked by a very hard strong beak. The more he pecked the deeper, as always happens. At last he was almost angry that I’d chosen “what seems to me the wrong method. It’s merely analysis, not history. Austere repression. In fact dull to the outsider. All those dead quotations.” His theme was that you can’t treat a life like that; must be seen from the writer’s angle, unless the liver is himself a seer, which R. wasn’t. It was a curious example of L. at his most rational and impersonal: rather impressive: yet so definite, so emphatic, that I felt convinced: I mean of failure; save for one odd gleam, that he was himself on the wrong tack, and persisting for some deep reason—dissympathy with R.? lack of interest in personality? Lord knows. I note this plaited strand in my mind; and even while we walked and the beak struck deeper, deeper, had this completely detached interest in L.’s character. Then Nessa came; disagreed; Margery’s letter “Very alive and interesting”; then L. read the second half; thought it ended on the doorstep at Bernard Street: then N.’s note “I’m crying can’t thank you”—then N. and D. to tea up here; forbid me to alter anything; then Margery’s final letter “It’s him . . . unbounded admiration.” There I pause. Well, I think I re-write certain passages, have even in bed sketched them, but how in time for this spring? That I shelve till tomorrow. Great relief all the same.

Here is the Good Friday festival beginning. How one can sense that in a garden, with flowers and birds only, I can’t say. Now for me begins the twilight hour, the emerging hour, of disagreeable compromise. Up to lunch. In the sitting room for tea. You know the dreary, messy, uncomfortable paper strewn, picking at this and that, frame of mind. And with R. hanging over me. Walk out as soon as possible and keep on reading Hervey’s memoirs. And so come to the top slowly. I’m thinking of some articles. Sidney Smith. Madame de Stael. Virgil. Tolstoy, or perhaps Gogol. Now I’ll get L. to find a life of Smith in the Lewes Library. A good idea. I’ll ring up Nessa about sending Helen that chapter, and establish an engagement. I read Tolstoy at breakfast—Goldenweiser that I translated with Kot in 1923 and have almost forgotten. Always the same reality —like touching an exposed electric wire. Even so imperfectly conveyed—his rugged short cut mind—to me the most, not sympathetic, but inspiring, rousing: genius in the raw. Thus more disturbing, more “shocking,” more of a thunderclap, even on art, even on literature, than any other writer. I remember that was my feeling about War and Peace, read in bed at Twickenham.* Old Savage† picked it up, “Splendid stuff!” and Jean‡ tried to admire what was a revelation to me. Its directness, its reality. Yet he’s against photographic realism. Sally is lame and has to go to the vet. Sun coming out. One bird pierces like a needle. All crocuses and squills out. No leaves or buds on trees. I’m quoted, about Russian, in Lit. Sup. leader, oddly enough.