I am sitting in my dark part-time study, having just come in out of the sun where I was reading Virginia Woolf’s diary. I am reading a few pages of A Writer’s Diary (extracts from her diary published by Leonard Woolf a decade or so after her death) each day before I begin work (each Sunday/Monday that is!). It was tempting to stay out there and keep reading, but my point for the day is really writing, which I can do most effectively sitting in front of the computer. Besides, I wanted to record something she wrote in May 1920:
It is worth mentioning, for future reference that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I’m a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I don’t enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult. (Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1954, p. 25.)
Leonard Woolf comments in the preface that one must keep in mind at all times that this is only “a very small portion” of her diary, and does not constitute the entirety of her thoughts. Otherwise “the book will give a very distorted view of her life and her character” (p.ix). I mention this, because as I am reading there is a part of me wishing to have what she seems to have – so much time to focus on writing. I know she didn't have children, but indeed the entries in this diary are often weeks apart – indicating, presumably, weeks when her diary consisted only of non-writing related observations. And even within this extract she remarks that her time for writing has not been hers at all (evidence by the fact that she has hardly done reading outside her review books). Of course, my reading is also inevitably coloured by knowledge of her suicide two decades later. It’s hard to be jealous of that!
Last week I had an email from a (single, childless) old
school friend who is currently in
But actually, she’s not. I love my husband and my children
and even my house, despite the mortgage. When I first bought a house I was 22*,
and more than one person commented that I was the last person they expected to ‘settle
down’. I wasn’t settling down, I replied, I was merely committing to live in
the one place for a year or so, after which I could rent it out and head back
overseas if I felt like it. Up to that point I had cultivated a footloose image
- which I believed in myself and which fit beautifully with my star sign. I was
carefree and adaptable, ready to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice.
(According to this site,
for instance, Sagittarian likes include travelling and freedom, while dislikes
include being tied down, being constrained, being bothered with details). Then
I met Chris, whose star sign makes him out to be a homebody (“It is a
fundamentally conservative and home-loving nature, appreciating the nest like
quality of a secure base” ).
You’d think we’d be at odds (if you believe in that sort of thing). But actually, as much as the idea of being able to
take off to
Sure, I have a constant conflict between my role as a mother and my role as a writer, but is there any other option? The fact is, I’m living the life I want. Except for the lack of a rich sponsor of course.
____
*The housing market had just crashed and it was basically cheaper to buy than to rent, once you get past the start-up expenses which I borrowed from my mother, and paid back in dribs and drabs over the next several years. The house I bought then would now be worth over three times what I paid for it.
