... having been breathed out

A number of people had disliked Lytton Strachey—Harold Nicholson for instance. I went to see him in his rooms at the Albany one evening. He was sitting in a chair when I entered, open-eyed and apparently examining me critically. He said nothing. I stood before him shuffling my feet, shifting my weight from one side to another, murmuring something about the uncontroversial weather. He continued to glare. Suddenly a sort of convulsion ran through him, and he blinked. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been asleep,’ he said. 'Would you like a drink?’ I said that I would. But the question was apparently to satisfy his curiosity rather than my thirst. We began to talk. Lytton, he told me, resembled a bearded and bitchy old woman, rude rather than witty in society, injecting with his unnaturally treble voice jets of stinging poison into otherwise convivial gatherings. After about a quarter of an hour he looked across at his own large empty glass, which stood on a table between us, and and asked: 'Another drink?’ Hesitantly I agreed. But once again he made no move, and since I could see no sign of a drink in the room, we went on talking. Ten minutes later his gaze again fell on the glass, this time with incredulity. 'Do you want another drink?’ His tone was so sharp I felt it prudent to refuse.

Next day I told this story to Duncan Grant. Without a word, he leapt up and poured me a strong gin and tonic. It was half past ten in the morning.

Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is dispatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

I thought to myself, as Lytton was talking, Now I will remember this & write it down in my diary tomorrow. And as I thought that, everything melted to mist. People don’t say things, except in biographies. True, Lytton was smooth & mild & melancholy beyond his wont; but with intimates, when talk is interesting, one sentence melts into another; heads & tails merge; there is never a complete beast.

Ah! There are so many difficulties! So many difficulties! I want to write a novel about a Lord Chancellor and his naughty son, but I can’t for the life of me think of anything like the shadow of a plot, and then—the British public! Oh dear, let’s all go off to the Faroe Islands, and forget the existence of Robin Mayor and Mrs Humphrey Ward, and drink rum punch of an evening, and live happily ever after! It’s really monstrous that we shouldn’t be able to. Vanessa would cook for us. Why not?

At Cambridge, the most memorable event of the summer [1909] term was staged by Geoffrey [Keynes], now in his final year at Pembroke. He and two friends had invited the novelist Henry James to visit Cambridge, Henry James accepting, so Maynard [Keynes] informed Duncan [Grant], ‘in an enormous letter even more complicated than a novel…’ On Sunday 13 June 1909 Maynard gave a breakfast party for Henry James at King’s. It was not a success. He had invited, among others, Harry Norton, who responded to each remark with manic laughter. Henry James was not amused. Desmond MacCarthy found him sitting disconsolately over 'a cold poached egg bleeding to death’ surrounded by a respectful circle of silent undergraduates. However, the visit did produce a classic James remark. Told that the youth with fair hair who sometimes smiled was called Rupert Brooke, who also wrote poetry which was no good, Henry James replied, 'Well, I must say I am relieved, for with that appearance if he had also talent it would be too unfair.’

• Every single person in pre-WWI England wanted to bone Rupert Brooke.
• Horrible breakfast parties read about at second hand are almost as amusing as horrible dinner parties read about at second hand.
• The image of Henry James sitting disconsolately over a cold poached egg, surrounded by silent undergraduates while one lone man laughs manically, will be a balm to call upon in my darker moments.
• If that doesn’t cheer me up, imagining the complexity of James’s acceptance letter should do the trick.

Many people accept the idea that each of us has a certain resolute innerness—a kernel of selfhood that we can’t share with others. (Levin, at the end of “Anna Karenina,” calls it his “holy of holies,” and says that, no matter how close he grows to the people around him, there will always be “the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife.”) What interested Woolf was the way that we become aware of that innerness. We come to know it best, she thought, when we’re forced, at moments of exposure, to shield it against the outside world.

There can be something enjoyable, even revelatory about that feeling of self-protection, which is why we seek out circumstances in which we can feel more acutely the contrast between the outside world and our inner selves. Woolf was fascinated by city life—by the feeling of solitude-on-display that the sidewalk encourages, and by the way that “street haunting,” as she called it, allows you to lose and then find yourself in the rhythm of urban novelty and familiarity. She was drawn to the figure of the hostess: the woman-to-be-looked-at, standing at the top of the stairs, friendly to everyone, who grows only more mysterious with her visibility. (One of the pleasures of throwing a party, Woolf showed, is that it allows you to surprise yourself: surrounded by your friends, the center of attention, you feel your separateness from the social world you have convened.) She showed how parents, friends, lovers, and spouses can become more unknowable over time, not less—there is a core to their personhood that never gives itself up. Even as they put their lives on display, she thought, artists thrive when they maintain a final redoubt of privacy—a wellspring that remains unpolluted by the world outside. “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter,” Clarissa thinks, at the end of “Mrs. Dalloway.” Of course, it’s the chatter—the party—that helps her know that she has something to lose in the first place.

…she was very far from saying, even in the privacy of her own mind, “I am in love with you,” and that sentence might very well never have framed itself.

… I beg for more illusions.
I can assure you, if you’ll make me up, I’ll make you …

Dear Mrs Woolf
(That appears to be the suitable formula.) I regret that you have been in bed, though not with me—(a less suitable formula.)

The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience. That bowl on the mantelpiece, for instance, was bought at Mantua on a windy day. We were leaving the shop when the sinister old woman plucked at our skirts and said she would find herself starving one of these days, but, “Take it!” she cried, and thrust the blue and white china bowl into our hands as if she never wanted to be reminded of her quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how badly we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little hotel where, in the middle of the night, the innkeeper quarrelled so violently with his wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look, and saw the vines laced about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment was stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that slipped by imperceptibly. There, too, was the melancholy Englishman, who rose among the coffee cups and the little iron tables and revealed the secrets of his soul — as travellers do. All this — Italy, the windy morning, the vines laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his soul — rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece. And there, as our eyes fall to the floor, is that brown stain on the carpet. Mr. Lloyd George made that. “The man’s a devil!” said Mr. Cummings, putting the kettle down with which he was about to fill the teapot so that it burnt a brown ring on the carpet.