2 October 1939 – 8 October 1939

Well I have succeeded in despite of distractions to belong to other nations in copying out again the whole of Roger. Needless to say, it’s still to be revised, compacted, vitalised. And can I ever do it? The distractions are so incessant. I compose articles on Lewis Carroll and read a great variety of books—Flaubert’s life, R.’s lectures, out at last, a life of Erasmus and Jacques Blanche. We are asked to lunch with Mrs. Webb, who so often talks of us. And my hand seems as tremulous as an aspen. I have composed myself by tidying my room. Can’t quite see my way now as to the next step in composition. Tom this weekend. I meant to record a Third Class Railway Carriage conversation. The talk of business men. Their male detached lives. All politics. Deliberate, well set up, contemptuous and indifferent of the feminine. For example: one man hands the Evening Standard, points to a woman’s photograph. “Women? Let her go home and bowl her hoop,” said the man in blue serge with one smashed eye. “She’s a drag on him,” another fragment. The son is going to lectures every night. Odd to look into this cool man’s world: so weather tight: insurance clerks all on top of their work; sealed up; self-sufficient; admirable; caustic; laconic; objective; and completely provided for. Yet thin, sensitive: yet schoolboys; yet men who earn their livings. In the early train they said, “Can’t think how people have time to go to war. It must be that the blokes haven’t got jobs.” “I prefer a fool’s paradise to a real hell.” “War’s lunacy. Mr. Hitler and his set are gangsters. Like Al Capone.” Not a chink through which one can see art, or books. They play crosswords when insurance shop fails.

It’s odd how those first days of complete nullity when war broke out have given place to such a pressure of ideas and work that I feel the old throb and spin in my head more of a drain than ever. The result partly of taking up journalism. A good move, I daresay; for it compacts; and forces me to organise. I’m masterfully pulling together those diffuse chapters of R. because I know I must stop and do an article. Ideas for articles obsess me. Why not try the one for The Times? No sooner said than I’m ravaged by ideas. Have to hold the Roger fort— for I will have the whole book typed and in Nessa’s hands by Christmas—by force.