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NONFICTION: The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, edited by Elliott Mossman ∙ The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell Going to the Dance, Arlene Croce Love, Eleanor, Joseph P. Lash Midnights, Alec Wilkinson The Red Smith Reader, edited by Dave Anderson
Tuesday. Another day, another book by Virginia Woolf. Dead for 41 years, yet her output still rolling off the presses almost faster than one can read it. Leave aside the novels, biographies and critical collections in her own lifetime. What about the nearly 4,000 letters in six volumes that finished coming out in 1980? The countless essays and fugitive pieces being sorted and shuffled in various miscellanies? And now these reams of diaries, to be concluded in a fifth volume. What energy! What fluency! After writing final words of The Common Reader, Second Series, she jotted in a diary...
Thursday. Tried to convince myself that all this darting observation and febrile sensitivity of Woolf's is getting boring. Lost the argument by opening to a page at random. She says of Henry James' prose: "His pounce & grip & swing always spring fresh upon me." Ditto with her. The literary portraits alone are worth the price: Huxley, Rebecca West, old Shaw and Yeats, T.S. Eliot ("hard, spry, a glorified boy scout in shorts & yellow shirt. . . settling in with some severity to being a great...
Sunday. Death a growing preoccupation. Hitler's murderous rise in Germany The passing of close friends like Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry ("intolerable: the impoverishment"). Woolf in her 50s now, her best work behind her, battling the recurrent flashing rays of light and sharp pains in her head, the attacks of near madness that (we know) augur her suicide. "And then all this incandescence led to the galloping horses in my heart the night before last," she writes after an overexertion. "I lay in bed reasoning that I could not come smash. Death I defy...
Tuesday. Meant merely to dip into the book and ended up devouring it. But now it really is time for a break. That is to say, what Virginia Woolf shall I read tomorrow? -By Christopher Porterfield