After Tea: Adapting Virginia Woolfs A Writers Diary for Stage Performance
Carol Samson

In a recent New Yorker article, essayist Louis Menard explores the reasons we read and write diaries:
Its not that we imagine that we would be happier if we kept a diary: we imagine that we would be betterthat diarizing is a natural, healthy thing, a sign of vigor and purpose, a statement about life that we care, and that non-diarizing or, worse, failed diarizing, is a confession of moral inertia, an acknowledgement, even, of the ultimate pointlessness of ones being in the world. . .

Menard, in a light touch, offers three Freudian motives to explain our diary-keeping. The ego theory suggests that maintaining a diary demands a level of vanity and self-importance that is simply too great for most people to sustain for long periods of time. It obliges you to believe that the stuff that happened to you is worth writing down because it happened to you. This is why so many diaries are abandoned by circa January 10th: keeping this up, you quickly realize, means something worse than being insufferable to others; it means being insufferable to your self. Menards id theory argues that people use diaries to record wishes and desires that they need to keep secret, and to list failures and disappointments that they cannot admit publicly have given them pain. Diary-keeping, on this account, [he writes] is just neurotic, since the last thing most people want to do with their unconsummated longings and petty humiliations is to inscribe them permanently in a book. And his final theory of the superego explains that diaries are written for the eyes of other people as exercises of self-justification. Menard states that if we speak frankly about our own missteps and short comings, it is only to gain this readers trust. We write to appease the father.

Perhaps, though, Menards argument is most convincing when he examines why readers enjoy reading diaries and makes the claim that we want to know a person in the books, we want to see an interesting character, to have a more intimate sense of her. He claims, though, that we see a more intimate character when we read about people like Virginia Woolf in someone elses diary, when we see Virginia described from the outside by another person. Menard would have us believe that introspection is not as reliable as observation: Inside, he writes,everyone sounds, more or less eloquently, like the same broken record of anxiety and resentment. Its the outside, the way people look and the things they say, that makes them distinct. We read Woolfs diaries so that we can see other people through Woolfs eyes.

Menard understands that Woolf wrote continually, that she kept the instrument in tune, but my paper today will give nod and, yet, take issue with Mr. Menards narrowing of the diary as interpretative space. I hope to explain how, in adapting Woolfs A Writers Diary for stage production, the diary genre became its own reward, not merely on the level of Woolfs ability to supply character portrait and scene study, but more deeply as an enactment of the forming of images, be they of Thomas Hardys dog Wessex or of a French woman embroidering a cloth. The point is that, in Woolf, even flat description is philosophical introspection. Woolf measured out her moments after tea, as she said many times, trying to find a reality beyond the physical world, attempting to construct a bridge across the abyss, to hold her mind together in language. She could, I suppose, claim all of Menards Freudian motives, including appeasing the father; but in my work with the diary, I found that in writing a diary she was doing the scales, alleviating the anger, and understanding her own art. While the diary partakes of rambling and disjunctions, Woolfs hand is a steady recreation of her relationship to art. She is writing meta-writing, framing reasons to continue to inscribe psyche in pen and ink. Woolf, then, turns Menards theory upside down. With Woolf, regardless of the prompt, there is no observation without introspection, no introspection without expanding circles of more introspection. For Woolf, the world of time and substance is not as real as the world that exists behind them, and her diary is her ontological and epistemological hub. For Woolf, everything must be dissolved into mind and, then, mind must make more images because the manufacture of image is restored health. In making my adaptation of her diaries, I had to distill that argument and to set it on stage, in relief, much like Jenny, on the beach in Woolfs The Waves, places a flower on the waters.

I prepared my stage adaptation of Virginia Woolfs A Writers Diary for the 18th International Virginia Woolf conference in June at the University of Denver. The diaries were first edited by her husband Leonard Woolf in 1953. Since then a five-volume publication of the diaries has expanded and opened the text. For my purposes, though, I allowed Leonard his vision, the primary cut. I read the last years of his edited version and compared it to the complete version, and I found that Leonard in his thoughtfulness kept an eye on her poetry and her honesty, on the moments of despair and on the images that carried psychological weight. He has, as Virginia Woolf said of E.M. Forrester, the eye of an artist, not just the eye of a clever reader. He allows her her own crabbings and her own experiments in modernist prose poems. He allows for meta-consciousness moments wherein he is a character and a goodly one at that. In his introduction to his edition of the diary, a 350 page version taken from the 26 handwritten volumes, Leonard Woolf states his editorial purpose simply:

This book throws light upon Virginia Woolfs intentions, objects, and methods as a writer. It gives an unusual     psychological picture of artistic production from within. Its value and interest naturally depend to a great extent upon the value and interest of the product of Virginia Woolfs art. . . .She was, I think, a serious artist and all her books are serious works of art. The diaries at least show the extraordinary energy, persistence, and concentration with which she devoted herself to the art of writing and the undeviating conscientiousness with which she wrote and rewrote and again rewrote her books. (ix)

Leonard was her ideal reader. He was Woolfs first reader always.

As a road into the making of a play out of a diary, I appropriated Woolfs own sense of situating a diary in aesthetic terms. In the diary of April 1919, where the play begins, she wrote:

I should like this diary to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back , after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.

In this passage she also explains her method of reading the diaries:

The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old volumes is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever, since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

Herein Woolf sets my course: I had to make the clutter of the odds and ends coalesce mysteriously into a tranquil mould with the aloofness of a work of art. It was, of course, the word mysteriously attached to the idea of coalescence that concerned me. And, yet, I found the genre of the diary form allowed for an interesting collage texture. It called for a post-modern exploration of disjunctions, meditations, fragments and notes and play. It allowed for the sublime to co-exist with the ordinary: Leonard gathering apples, cows feeding, set against Woolfs thoughts on what it must feel like to be killed by a bomb -- all in the same few sentences. In editing the diary, I wanted to kept the flavor of the chronology of her careful system of noting the day and date. I wanted the diary juxtapositions of matters ordered by Time to maintain their immediate quality, to keep the simple authenticities of a mind a work. I wanted a sensation of flux and of oddities wherein serious matters sit side-by-side with the mundane: Woolfs deep pain over criticism of her work by Wyndham Lewis and her note that she will buy a blouse to get over it; her comments on Henry James prose style embedded with a note that, just as she was writing, Leonard was bitten by a flee. The diary is, as Woolf says, where she notices things. Leonard Woolf chose to call it A Writers Diary and gave much attention to her thoughts on her individual works and on editing and on the voice of a writer talking her self. In my adaptation, I think we see her with many eyes in the selected cuttings. We view her as what she calls a fanlike membrane of her species, as a woman of culture, a feminist, a barren wife, a sister, a portrait painter, and a philosopher of metaphysical spaces.

Almost immediately as I began my editing, Woolf showed me what she wanted. In January 1919, the young Virginia, about to turn 37, considers her own being as it will exist at age 50:

If Virginia Woolf at age of 50, when she sits down to build her memoirs out of these books, is unable to make a phrase as it should be made, I can only remind her of the existence of the fireplace, where she has my leave to burn these pages to so many black films with red eyes in them. But how I envy her the task I am preparing for her! Already my 37th birthday next Saturday is robbed of some of its terrors by the thought. Partly for the benefit of this elderly lady (no subterfuge will then be possible: 50 is elderly. . .though I anticipate her protest and agree that it is not old), partly to give the year a solid foundation I intend to spend the evening in making out an account of my friendships. . .with some account of my friends characters. . .and a forecast of future works. The lady of 50 will be able to say how near the truth I come.

In this passage Woolf offered me a significant form, a design for the production. I understood that I must have two Virginias on stage: the young, energetic, competitive writer, age 37, about to make her claim and the older, famous, war-weary Virginia, age 58, about to take her own life. In a theatre space, the two Virginias would have conversation. Ones hope would confront the others fatalism. The waves of the manic self would co-exist with the depressive. One self could present questions the other could mediate or answer. And ironically, the young woman, caught in the beauties of the world, could remind the older woman to look her last on all things lovely.

I read the diary twice, marking the workable sections in green, finding new moments and re-considering old choices as I went along. I then typed out all of the viable segments, allowing, amidst the lyrical rhythms, occasional bits of flatness, the necessary diary tone: Car mended. Leonard changed the oil. Won at bowls.

I broke the diary into four parts, worked each section separately based on the rhythms of her life: the apprenticeship, the fame, the ripening, the depression. I looked for the visual moments, the dialogues, the introspection into her character and into her friends. I noticed that Woolf often refers to the comfortable moments after tea when she could write; and, noting that we would be having tea at the conference, I titled the piece After Tea. I worked each of the four sections again and again, finding the dramatic arc before compiling them, keeping Time, so to speak by working the journal dates into the dialogue thereby requiring the actors to read the date as part of the line, again allowing diary genre its due. The two actors, I decided, would carry diary books and read parts from them. At first I imagined many volumes on stage, the actresses drawing up book after book; but I was forced to conclude that simplicity must rule, that the retrieval of too many books meant cumbersome stage movement. I knew that, in the end, I wanted a language piece, a fluent run of poetry. I wanted the audience, especially those new to Woolf, to enjoy her moments of frothing into sparklets, to understand her physical pain, and in the end to see that writing itself was good health to her. I worked every day for three months. At the end of last summer, I had a readable version of 49 pages.

In preparation for a first reading I had the actresses listen to Woolfs voice from a BBC program done in 1939. We agreed that she sounded like Queen Elizabeth, but that we would not do an imitation, just a slight English accent. At the first reading, I explained the wave-like rush in the adaptation, the rhythm of youth, the build, the decline, the epiphany, the break. I told them how the piece works to explain ageing and obsolescence, societal issues of gender, experiences of warfare and illness. I wanted them to see, though, that the significant form of the piece, the underlying design, if you will, was a segmenting of the debate about capturing reality in words and exploring phantom realities, about concepts of death as a passing into mist, about her own theories that she insubstantizes. Clearly, Woolf feels that reality itself is cheap, but that the reality within and beyond the thing in itself with all of its sensory possibilities and its hauntings is intriguing. Perception of the thing it itself, followed by the act of recording, the act of writing things down, stabilizes Virginia Woolf. The essence of the play, then, is really how, given the world with its pressures and deaths, given what she called her squirrel cage mind, Woolf creates a dialogue with self where two voices try help each other. The creative part will restore the health of it all, creating and re-visioning images. This young part is conscious of the nursing role, but sometimes this self, too, must be reined in and held in abeyance as she comes to wish to lie down in the snow and stay there. The critical self keeps measuring, falling into slumps, finding herself unable to exist, despising the people who judge her, gnawing at old bones, yet determining that the only recourse to inner peace is looking at things, dahlias instead of war rubble, mist instead of solid mass.

For the set, then, I wanted a simple image: two chairs, a tea table, a carpet. The script, as I adapted it, dictated two geographical spaces: London Bloomsbury and rural Rodmell, I wanted an Arts and Crafts chair for London and a tall, wicker-backed chair for Rodmell. I studied the pictures from Monks House, noting the lamps and the oddments. I looked at catalogues of Virginia Woolfs sisters farmhouse at Lewes, considering the screens and the teapots. The philosophy of the play may call for things insubstantial, but the set had to suggest Woolfs world, her taste. I found the chairs. I found teapots that matched the aesthetics. I found demi-lune tables to hold their tea-cups, half tables that could be placed together to form one table, an echo of my vision of the younger and older Virginia co-existent, having tea.

Cutting some of the parts of the text that I thought I could not do without was difficult; but in the fifth draft, the sweating it down as Woolf would say, I began to see the poetry take over from the academic diatribes or the random moments I had to eliminate -- the moment, for example, when, having had to miss the ballet, she turns the flight of zeppelin in the sky into a ballet dancer and feels better. The script, as I edited it, relies not so much on plot as on repetition of image, on themes that reoccur, on seeing old women, pale and ill and obsolete, and women, beautiful -- a French woman in a green dress, and on women friends like Mary Sheepshanks and Ethel Smyth. Woolf takes the fences, as she says, recording issues of mortality, the death of friends, the mental struggle to make the later works, Flush and The Years work. She feels the stings of being despised by the young male writers of the 1930s, senses the loss of reputation, but she continues to talk herself into observing and writing. With the coming of World War II, the threat to Leonard Woolf who was Jewish, the destruction of London, the nightly flights of German air-raids over the house at Rodmell, we see a breaking:

Wednesday, January 15, 1941 (She would take her life in March 1941.) London: I wandered in the desolate ruins of my old squares, gashed, dismantled, the old red bricks all white powder . .Sunday, January 26: Rodmell. The solitude is great. The house is damp. The house is untidy. I begin to dislike introspection: Sunday, February 16:. . .No country to look at. No butter, no jam. Old couples hoarding marmalade and grape nuts on their tables.

Sunday, March 8th: (Twenty days before her death) I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. . .Suppose I bought a ticket at the Museum; biked in daily and read history. Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that its seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

I pondered the line about haddock and sausage meat. At first, I thought that it would serve me well as an ending. I thought: "Here is the objective correlative for my piece, that is, to name is to gain hold of the thing, to record is to control." But, again, mysteriously Woolf showed me otherwise. She had, I discovered, trained me well. I considered the endings of her novels. I knew that the artist must redeem the last moment, in art if not in life. I remembered To the Lighthouse and Lily Briscoes triumphant gesture in finishing her painting in one purple stroke. I considered Peter Walshs feelings of terror and ecstasy at the end of Mrs. Dalloway, his lines: What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was. I re-read Bernards verbal assault on Death in The Waves. I thought of the young protagonist of Woolfs early novel, The Voyage Out, who -- in her dying -- chooses to return to a world of images, and of the short story Kew Gardens where in the final moments Woolf moves the visual camera eye through space, lifting us off the ground into a higher life of color and form, into forms within forms like Chinese boxes. Woolf showed me, mysteriously if you will, that I must do what she says she does; I must see beyond the real. I must insubstantise. Perhaps, in the end, this was her personal gift as I worked with her diary. She didnt tell me, as Ezra Pound would, to Make it Strange. She seemed to say, Make it Metaphysical, read the soul in concrete matter, look hard to find the eternal in the garden, in the steeple, in the game of bowls, in the purple color in the sky over Asheham, in the thing itself.

I found the ending for my adaptation early on in my editing when I read her entry for October 4, 1934. I read it seeing it in the light of her final diary entries, in March of 1941, wherein she reminds herself to mark Henry Jamess dictum: observe perpetually, and wherein she adds to his thought: Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable.

I read the October 1934 entry, remembering that she spoke often about the fact that the look of things had a great power over her, that she watched the rooks beat in the wind and searched for a phrase for that, that she wanted to get down into her pen what was vivid to her eyes. It seemed appropriate, then, to end the play in this single diary moment as Woolf uses rapid brushstrokes of images to record her view over the river toward one house she loved, the large white house at Asheham. I hoped that the audience would understand the way this passage was, in its lyrical impressionism, a statement of the wave-like rhythms of her psychology and of the restorative nature of the process of language-making, of the way one gains control of haddock and sausage by writing them down. I divided the speech into the short bits, into a moulded collage of single images that the actresses will speak, alternating turns, two voices creating one picture, the speech thus becoming a final chorus containing the light and the dark and the metaphysical:

Thursday, October 4th, 1934: A violent rain storm on the pond. The pond is covered with little white thorns; springing up and down; the pond is bristling with leaping white thorns like the thorns on a small porcupine; bristles; then black waves; cross it; black shudders; and the little water thorns are white: a helter skelter rain and the elms tossing it up and down; the pond overflowing on one side; lily leaves tugging; the red flower swimming about; one leaf flapping; then completely smooth for a moment; then prickled; thorns like glass; but leaping up and down incessantly; a rapid smirch of shadow. Now light from the sun; green and red; shiny; the pond a sage green; the grass brilliant green; red berries on the hedges; the cows very white; purple over Asheham.

So, now, I end with a note for your diaries: The play, After Tea: An Adaptation of Virginia Woolfs A Writers Diary, debuted to a full house at the 18th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference on Friday, June 20, in the Hamilton Theatre at the University of Denver. And, write this down: Tea and Scones were served at 6 p.m.

The play, After Tea, began at 7. As Woolf might say, It is true that one gains a certain hold on [scones and tea] by writing them down.

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