On a writer and a hare - Emily Kopley in TLS:

‘Woolf’s diary is another monument nearly destroyed by the war. In 1953 Leonard issued a selection from the retrieved volumes (and others that had not been in the Woolfs’ London house) as A Writer’s Diary; but clearly they demanded to be edited and published in full.
Major Popham was the woman for the job. As Anne Olivier Bell, married to Quentin Bell, she first read the diaries out of personal interest and to establish facts for her husband’s biography of his aunt Virginia. Her involvement became a prodigious labour. With the help of Andrew McNeillie she transcribed and annotated thirty notebooks containing, by her count, 2,317 handwritten pages. These diaries, which Woolf kept from 1915 to the end of her life, and which have been held by the New York Public Library since Leonard’s death in 1969, were published in five volumes between 1977 and 1984. Woolf’s earlier diaries were edited by Mitchell A. Leaska and published in 1990 as A Passionate Apprentice. Excellent scholarly studies of all the diaries include Elizabeth Podnieks’s chapter in Daily Modernism (2000) and Barbara Lounsberry’s monograph trilogy (2014, 2016, 2018).’

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‘Adam Phillips reads the diary as an effort to “outwit one’s egotism”. Olivia Laing praises the diary’s genre-engulfing form as an indication of what Woolf sought to create in fiction. Margo Jefferson makes a case for the diary of the early 1930s as a record of “the states between the pinnacle and the chasm”. And Siri Hustvedt considers why and for whom the diary was kept.’

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‘In August 1937, after the death of her nephew Julian: “A curiously physical sense; as if one had been living in another body, which is removed, & all that living is ended. As usual, the remedy is to enter other lives”.
All of Woolf’s writing strives, like these passages, to close the gap – between reality and language, between spots of time, and between one person and another. Among her prime means was figurative language. Her habit of describing a thing by imagining it as another thing is so pronounced and successful that one is baffled when she lets it go.’

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‘Here is the complete entry in the Asheham diary on September 8, 1918: “Very windy. Bunny [i.e. David Garnett] looked at honey. Bees at work, but unable to get it without moving slates. B. went. Got mushrooms”. In the main diary, on the same date, the entry lasts for three pages. We get lavish flights instead of tight clauses: I remember lying on the side of a hollow, waiting for L. to come & mushroom, & seeing a red hare loping up the side & thinking suddenly “This is Earth life”. I seemed to see how earthy it all was, & I myself an evolved kind of hare; as if a moon-visitor saw me.
This is splendid, and the splendour comes from figures: Woolf as a superior hare, Woolf with selenite perception.’

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‘In the same entry, on her father’s birthday in 1928, she writes: “So the days pass, & I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotised, as a child by a silver globe, by life … I should like to take the globe in my hands & feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy. & so hold it, day after day”. The Granta diaries are rectangular prisms; smooth, with an overhang cover; and about 900 grams each. They can be held day after day.’

Read the article here

‘The remedy is to enter other lives.’ The author as a werewolf. Or as an evolved kind of hare.

The combination must be magnificent.