Art but no artists

René Maria Rilke, one of the most intense of German-language poets and considered by some to be a founder of modernist poetry, was born 150 years ago today. During a two year period - when he was in love with the married Russian-born Lou Andreas-Salomé and then meeting his future wife Clara Westhoff - he kept a series of diaries. The editors of the English edition of these diaries claim they span a crucial period in the artistic growth of the young poet.

Rilke was born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, on 4 December 1875. His father worked as a railway official having retired from the military, and his mother was considered socially ambitious. René’s childhood was not especially happy, and he was sent to military academy for five years until 1891. He left on account of ill health, only to find his parents had separated. He was tutored for university entrance, and then began studying philosophy at Charles-Ferdinand University. But, by this time, he had already published a first volume of poetry, Leben und Lieder, and was intent on a literary career. Disenchanted with his academic studies, he left, travelling to Munich to study art. There he mixed with artistic types, managed to get some of his plays produced, and published more poetry.

In 1897, Rilke fell in love with the much-travelled Lou Andreas-Salomé, a married woman many years his senior. She appears to have had a major influence over the still-young Rilke, persuading him to change his first name to Rainer, and introducing him to the ideas of psychoanalysis (she had studied with Freud). After a brief stay in Florence, he twice travelled to Russia with Salomé in 1899 and 1900, meeting Leo Tolstoy in 1898, and Leonid Pasternak (the painter and father of Boris Pasternak) and Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet, in 1899. The following year, Rilke stayed at the artists’ colony at Worpswede, where he met Clara Westhoff. They married early in 1900, and had one daughter, Ruth, in late 1901.

In 1902, Rilke travelled to Paris, where he would stay for much of the rest of the decade. Clara left Ruth with her parents and joined him there. He became fascinated by Rodin, writing and lecturing on the sculptor, and even acting as his secretary for a period, and later by Cezanne. Apart from two or three more collections of poetry, he also completed his only novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. In the early 1910s he visited Ronda in Spain and Duino/Trieste in Italy, but the outbreak of WWI found him in Germany and unable to return to Paris. He managed to avoid active service, with the help of influential friends, by being assigned to the War Records Office.

AIn Switzerland he completed the Duino Elegies and, in a burst of 1922 inspiration, wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia late in 1926, highly respected in literary and artistic spheres but barely known by the general public. The Poetry Foundation provides this modern assessment: ‘Widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets, Rainer Maria Rilke was unique in his efforts to expand the realm of poetry through new uses of syntax and imagery and in the philosophy that his poems explored.’ While Encyclopaedia Britannica (1979 edition) calls him ‘a major Austro-German poet regarded as one of the founders and giants of modern literature.’ Further information can be found at Wikipedia, the Academy of American Poets, The Atlantic, or Picture Poems. For samples of Rilke’s poems see All Poetry.

Between April 1898 and December 1900, Rilke kept three diaries. The first of these, while in Florence, was probably written for or inspired by Salomé, since it is known that her own mental regimen included keeping a diary, and she is said to have asked Rilke to bring her back a diary. Biographers suggest the second diary, kept after his return to Schmargendorf, might also have been written with her in mind. The third diary was written during his sojourn at Worpswede. (However, it is worth noting that despite the diary names, Rilke visited Worpswede during the time of the Schmargendorf diary, and stayed at Schmargendorf during the time of the Worpswede diary.) They were first edited and published in German in 1942 by Ruth and her husband Carl Sieber.

A first English edition, translated and annotated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler, was published by W. W. Norton & Co in 1997 - Rainer Maria Rilke - Diaries of a Young Poet. In their introduction, Snow and Winkler explain: ‘Rilke’s diaries do maintain a certain chronological flow, albeit one with breaks and longer interruptions, but they are not directly the immediate account of a specific time; it is not their intent to record the minutiae of day-to-day life. For this reason they have not become identified by their chronology. Rather, they are usually titled after three places where Rilke lived and, at least for a time, felt at home: Florence (and the Tuscan countryside), the village of Schmargendorf just outside Berlin, and Worpswede, an artists’ colony in the moors near Bremen.’

The editors claim that the diary period spans a crucial period in Rilke’s artistic growth: ‘At the beginning of this phase the young poet had perfected, if not yet exhausted the rhetorical techniques and mannerisms of his early, impressionistic style. His verse was still prone to the gossamer and was given more to a flirtation than a sustained artistic engagement with the exquisite and the delicate. [. . . He] had come to realise only too well that he needed to constrain his busy games of make-believe and learn how to control his ingenious lyricism. This made it necessary, most of all, to free himself from the rapturous self-indulgence that could spin mellifluous lines and intricate rhymes with prolific ease. He had to submit himself to the kind of self-discipline that comes with the ascetic solitude of regular, arduous work. Rilke’s three early diaries reflect this search for a language that might capture the specificity of things natural and crafted and at the same time convey their intrinsic spirituality. They chronicle, in other words, the emergence of the “sachliche Sagen,” the objective and visually precise language that will come to characterise his “poetry of things.” ’

Although diary entries - many dated but not all - do predominate in Diaries of a Young Poet, there is also a good deal of poetry as well as some letters. The book can be previewed online at Google Books. Here, though, is one extract from each diary.

17 May 1898 [Florence diary]
‘No human being can raise so much beauty out of himself that it will cover him over completely. A part of himself will always gaze out from behind it. But in the peak times of art a few have erected before themselves, in addition to their own beauty, so much noble heritage, that the work no longer needs them. The curiosity and custom of the public will seek and of course find their personality; but that misses the point. In such times there is an art, but there are no artists.

There is an ever-recurring cycle of three generations. One finds the god, the second arches the narrow temple over him and in doing so fetters him, while the third slides into poverty and takes stone after stone from the sanctuary in order to build meagre and makeshift huts. And then comes one which must seek god again; and to such a generation these belonged: Dante and Botticelli and Fra Bartolommeo.

The element of reconciliation and loveliness that one treasures in the works of Raphael is a triumph that only seldom occurs; it signifies a high point of art, but not a high point of the artist.

Pre-Raphaelites: simply a caprice. Tired of smooth beauty, one seeks the effortful - not so? How facile a proposition! Tired of art, one seeks the artist, and in each work looks for the deed that elevated the man, the triumph over something within him, and the longing for himself.

In notes jotted down day after day vis-à-vis the paintings of the quattrocento, I could have offered nothing more than the tourists’ handbooks do. For they have formulated with unsurpassable cogency the measure of abstract beauty that inheres in the things. So much so that in fleeting consideration one employs quite unconsciously those infamous half-scientific terms that, once sharp and pregnant, have through so many mindless uses become dull and vacuous.

A handbook on Italy, if it wanted to teach pleasure, would have in it but one single word and one single piece of advice. Look! Whoever has a certain culture in him must make do with this guidance. He will not acquire pearls of knowledge and it will scarcely occur to him to ask whether this work is from the late period of an artist or whether in that work “the broad manner of the master” holds sway. But he will recognize an abundance of will and power that came from longing and from apprehension, and this revelation will make him better, greater, more thankful.’

11 September 1900 [Schmargendorf diary]
‘A fine evening at the Overbecks’. The blond painter was with me for the length of the twilight; I showed her some Russian books, the pictures of Nadson and Garshin, Droshin’s portraits, and other mementos. In the evening she sat next to me, and there was much conversation between us. The table was nicely set; small chamomiles slanted to one side framed the simple white runner, which was accented by blue-and-red-embroidered signatures of guests who had preceded us. Dr. Hauptmann and I added our names to this roll. Hauptmann was in rare form, made many cutting remarks regarding the temper of our time, always in the most charmingly ingenuous way. [. . .]

Clara Westhoff had come on her bicycle, But she walked almost the whole way back to Westerwede, since while we were talking I had passed by my gate and continued on at her side. It was about two hours past midnight. The skies were gray, quiet, and the landscape could be seen, completely without color, stretching far in the distance . . . The birch trees stood like candles beside long trails. The only thing white was a white cat, which would appear from behind the bushes in silent leaps, then vanish in the mistless meadows. It was a melancholy cat that staged a solitary dance. In the garden everything green was a shade darker. Almost black, the full bushes leaned against the white railing of the forecourt. Around the urns there was depth and air.’

14 December 1900 [Worpswede diary]
‘Sometimes I remember in exact detail things and epochs that never existed. I see every gesture of people who never lived a life and feel the swaying cadence of their never-spoken works. And a never-smiled smiling shines. Those who were never born die. And those who never died lie with their hands folded, repeated in beautiful stone, on long level sarcophagi in the halflight of churches no one built. Bells that never rang, that are still uncast metal and undiscovered ore in mountains, ring. Will ring: for what never existed is what is on its way, on its way over to us, something in the future, new. And perhaps I’m remembering distant futures when what never existed rises up in me and speaks.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 4 December 2015.

Robertson Davies as diarist

‘Bouts of sinus, headache, nausea, and cold sweats have left me unwell for the day. Brenda and I lay on sofas and read. Went for short walk. What a hateful winter! Every winter has its low point and I hope this it: is it age or bodily rot that brings this appalling tedium vitae?’ This is from the diaries of Robertson Davies, who died 30 years ago today. He was one of Canada’s most important literary figures and its leading man of letters in the mid-20th century. The diaries, which were embargoed for 20 years after his death, provide a wealth of detail about his daily life, but they do not provide evidence for the publisher’s claim that Davies must be considered ‘one of the great diarists’.

Davies was born in Thamesville, Ontario, in 1913, third son to William Davies, a Welsh-born Canadian publisher and politician. He was schooled at Upper Canada College and then went to Queen’s University, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a BLit in 1938. He wished to make a career in the British theatre world, and joined the staff of the Old Vic, led at that time by Tyrone Guthrie, and worked alongside the likes of Ralph Richardson and Vivien Leigh. 

In 1940, Davies married the Australian-born Brenda Mathews, whom he had met at Oxford, but who had also worked at the Old Vic. Shortly after war broke out, Davies was advised to return to Canada. Because of poor eyesight, though, he was unfit for military service. He worked as a literary journalist in Toronto until, in 1942, his father pressed him to take over one of his company’s newspapers, the daily Peterborough Examiner.

Davies, despite his full-time job, and Brenda continued to be involved in the theatre world, with Davies writing (and directing) several plays during the 1940s. He also collected his humorous essays for publication under the pseudonym, Samuel Marchbanks. Frustrated by an inability to get his plays noticed outside of Canada, Davies began writing novels in the 1950s, alongside more plays, publishing what came to be known as the Salterton Trilogy (Tempest-Tost in 1951, Leaven of Malice in 1954, and A Mixture of Frailties in 1958). A major turning point for Davies came in the early 1960s, when he began teaching at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and two years later was appointed Master of the new Massey College.

In all Davies’ endeavours, Brenda was a constant companion - stage managing her husband for six decades, according to an obituary in The Globe and Mail. Together, they had three daughters, one of whom, Jennifer (Surridge), would become her father’s literary executor. And Brenda helped organise many of the Master’s functions at Massey College during Davies’ near-20 years tenure - despite being excluded, as were all women, for the early years. In the 1970s, Davies again found form with the novel, publishing Fifth Business in 1970, The Manticore in 1972 and World of Wonders in 1975 - collectively known as The Deptford Trilogy.

Davies retired from academic life in the early 1980s, but continued to write novels, some of his best. What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), which became the middle book of The Cornish Trilogy, was short-listed for the Booker Prize for fiction. He published two books in the 1990s, but failed to finish the third of what would have been The Toronto Trilogy. He died in 1995. There are no dedicated Robertson Davies websites that I can find, and thus surprisingly little detailed information about him on the web, other than at The Canadian Encyclopaedia or Wikipedia (and in a few obituaries - The New York Times or The Independent, for example). The Paris Review has the text of an audience interview with Davies from 1986.

Although a great fan of Robertson Davies, having read most of his novels over the years, I never knew he was a diarist. Indeed, it seems, he dictated that, after his death, the plethora of his diary material - many different volumes and around three million words - should not be published for at least two decades. When those 20 years had passed, McClelland & Stewart published A Celtic Temperament: Robertson Davies as Diarist, as prepared and edited by Jennifer Surridge and Ramsay Derry. From his teens and throughout his life, Davies kept a variety of diaries: a personal daily diary, a ‘big’ diary for more considered entries, a theatre-going diary, travel diaries on trips, and, occasionally, other diaries for a specific topic, such as one kept during production of his play Love and Libel, and another about Massey College. Surridge and Derry say of their book that it covers ‘a particularly busy time in his immensely productive career’ when he was already known as Canada’s leading man of letters.

The editors have eschewed the idea of identifying the exact provenance of each diary entry ‘in order to maintain an easily readable ongoing narrative’ - though I, personally, would have liked to know which entries came from which diary. However, and very interestingly, there is a project, well under way, to create digital editions of all the diaries. The Davies Diaries project, as it is known, is under the guidance of James Neufeld, Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Trent University, and is being funded by Editing Modernism in Canada and Library and Archives Canada. Ambitiously, the project expects to allow readers to browse and search not only digitised images of all diary pages, but verbatim transcripts, corrected transcripts, and annotated texts. That said, I can find little evidence of much progress in recent years.

Surridge and Derry conclude their introduction to A Celtic Temperament by claiming: ‘[T]he diaries are more than social history, as we hope this introductory selection shows. In their variety, intimacy, and honesty, they present an extraordinary rich portrait of the man and his times and an entertaining account of a life as it is being lived.’ All of which I can agree with. However, I don’t buy the publisher’s claim that this first book of Davies’ diaries establishes him ‘as one of the great diarists’. Far from it. Much, if not most, of the diaries are filled with, if not banal then, straightforward records of his daily activities. These records are, as a whole, hugely important, because Davies is one of the greatest of Canadian authors, but in the detail they are fairly dull. Davies was a decent, hard-working, family man - privileged and successful - and the detail of his daily life reflects these realities. A review in Canada’s The Globe and Mail calls the diaries ‘delightful’ but complains that there is ‘no dirt, little gossip’ and that, though fun and whimsical, they reveal little more than ‘the banalities of a privileged life in letters’.

Here are a few short extracts from A Celtic Temperament - and many thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.

9 February 1961
‘Bill Broughall lunched with me at the University Club. He tells me Vincent Massey says “a gentleman never takes soup with luncheon at his club” because Lord Curzon said it. I fear I shall run into many things a gentleman does not do, and which are unknown to me; but I am writer, and therefore a bit of a bounder.’

25 February 1961
‘Nothing in the Globe and Mail about my appointment because I write for the Star: what small behaviour! Write a Star column in the morning and a critique of Saint Joan. In the afternoon, loaf and read Jung; Rosamund comes for the weekend, very lively; in the evening go through Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto” with her and read Rabelais.’

27 February 1961
‘Now that the news is out, and the world has received it with exemplary calm, and my Proposals are out of my hands, I feel a deep depression, a regression of the libido, what might be called the Hump. What have I let myself in for? What am I, a mere magpie of leaning and certainly no scholar, doing with a learned appointment in that collection of medieval schoolmen and learned but vulgar thrusters, the University of Toronto? My one desire is to crawl into a hole and work on the novel which has been in my mind since before A Mixture of Frailties.’

20 August 1961
‘Lay late reading Final Curtain by Ngaio Marsh. Dye my beard too dark - must look into this. Loafed all day never stirring from the place and found this very refreshing: my condition of mind asks for inactivity; worked on my speech. I am indeed changing: trying to purge my writing of ornament and mere eccentricity and my thinking of bile, emotionalism, and vulgarity. Oh! that I may make some progress in these things!

13 November 1961
‘Worked on Saturday Night piece “Pleasures of Love.” In the evening looked over old MSS of novels and plays and reread diary of Love and Libel a year since: still painful, and it might have succeeded; useless to repine.’

25 February 1962
‘Bouts of sinus, headache, nausea, and cold sweats have left me unwell for the day. Brenda and I lay on sofas and read. Went for short walk. What a hateful winter! Every winter has its low point and I hope this it: is it age or bodily rot that brings this appalling tedium vitae?’

19 December 1962
‘Minor bothers: car goes crook; parcels get mislaid, etc. Rosamund is out of school at 12. Give a good lecture at 2. We call on the Edinboroughs and have mince pies and rum punch. In the evening to Kind Hearts and Coronets, my favourite film.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 15 November 2015.

The father of neurology

‘The floor is made of tile mosaics as are the walls - no seat - only a hole which seems narrow to me at ground level. One has to be agile - but the Arabs certainly are in this respect. They do everything squatting. It is perfect, a paradise for the sense of sight and smell.’ This is Jean-Martin Charcot, born two centuries ago today, the great physician of France’s early Belle Epoque, the so-called ‘father of neurology’ and/or the ‘Napoleon of the neuroses’, writing about a Moroccan toilet in his one and only significant diary.

Charcot was born in Paris on 29 November 1825 into a modest artisan family. He seems to have been a gifted school child, mastering several languages, and was selected by his father as the one child to receive a higher education and enter medical school. He received his M.D. from the University of Paris in 1853 with a dissertation on arthritis. In 1860, he was named associate professor in medicine, and two years later, he was appointed head of a hospital service at Salpêtrière, a complex in the 13th arrondissement near the Seine. Aged 39, he married Augustine-Victoire Durvis, a young widow, with whom he had two children.

Charcot began to publish many books and articles on infectious illnesses, geriatrics, diseases of the internal organs. And, in 1872, he was elected to the Paris Medical Faculty as professor of pathological anatomy. During the 1870s, he turned increasingly to the new discipline of neurology, becoming one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject, publishing on a wide range of neurological conditions, MS, Parkinson’s disease, Tourette’s, aphasia etc. He was the first to describe several conditions, including multiple sclerosis and the disintegration of ligaments and joint surfaces (Charcot’s disease, or Charcot’s joint) caused by locomotor ataxia and related diseases or injuries. In particular, he was known for his work on hysteria, and he developed the practice of using hypnosis as a means to study his patients, often using the technique in public demonstrations.

This - the early years of the Belle Epoque - was a heyday for the medical profession in France, as a group  progressive physician-scientists - among whom Charcot was the most famous - sought to modernise medicine more in line with scientific understanding. Apart from his medical discoveries, he also pioneered the art and science of medical photography. Charcot’s second-to-none reputation as a teacher attracted students from all over the world, not least, in 1885, Sigmund Freud.

Meanwhile, in their grand home on the boulevard Saint-Germain, the Charcots would give lavish parties, attracting the cream of Parisian society, politicians, artists, writers and, of course, other physicians. In 1882, Charcot was named Chair for the diseases of the nervous system, the first such professorial post in the world. Financing followed his fame, with the government resourcing a new neuropathological institute at Salpêtrière. Charcot died, relatively young, in 1893. Further information is available at Wikipedia, National Center for Biotechnology Information, Science Museum, and inside Medical Muses: Hysteria in 19th-Century Paris by Asti Hustvedt (some pages of which about Charcot are viewable at Googlebooks).

Charcot was not a diarist, though he did occasionally keep note-books when on holiday or travelling. One such note-book so stood out from the rest for Toby Gelfland (Department of History, University of Ottawa) that he decided to translate, edit and publish it - as Charcot in Morocco (University of Ottawa Press, 2012). In July 1887, Charcot went south to Spain for his annual summer holiday, but, on this occasion, concluded the voyage with a week in Morocco, and while there kept a detailed personal diary, amounting to 14,000 words, 95 manuscript pages, and various sketches, maps and watercolours.

The journal is a unique document, says Gelfand, because of its sheer length and detail but also because of ‘the intimate, relaxed, colorful, at times frankly exuberant quality of a first-person narrative written primarily for oneself, even if it were later to be shared with family and friends’. Furthermore: ‘The journal offers rare access to an otherwise elusive figure who said little of a spontaneous nature in public. [. . .] Historians, following most contemporary accounts, tend to portray Charcot as an authoritarian and rather austere medical leader, a “grand patron” who was at once intimidating and shy, if not secretive. The Moroccan journals reveals a less pretentious figure possessed of a rough and ready sense of humor, someone who did not always take himself or others so seriously.’

10 August 1887
‘Soon we reach the 1st Moroccan doorway, a square house, which sits atop a high hill. Two Moors of the Emperor who are to accompany us emerge; one carries a gun, the other a bag. These 2 do not join in with our group. Sometimes they approach, then at other times they disappear - only to reappear a little afterwards at a turn in the way . . . they are definitely strange; as well they have a rather unhealthy look about them with their caped robes that seem to be soaked with sweat.

We have been walking perhaps 2 hours when suddenly the plain widens out. In the middle we see a castle in ruins covered with ivy - not far off, some stones are piled up in a way that marks off an oval shape of earth. It is a tomb. There are many others. On a few of the tombs, red rags hang from sticks planted in the ground, rags now faded which must have formerly had a beautiful red color. They mark the tomb of a chieftain, more or less canonized and elevated to the level of a saint. It was here that the battle against the Moroccans took place which led to the march on Tetuan. More than 20 years ago, all that. The name Prim returns to mind. We walk on and keep on walking. From time to time I look at my watch. We’re going to get to the Moor’s place soon, no doubt! By this time hunger and thirst have set in. But where is this the devil of a house of the Moor? We don’t see it. Here are a few trees and rocks. We have lost sight of the sea. Anxiously, we walk on for nearly an hour; devil of a house gone astray. We begin to berate the Moors of the Emperor who led us down this wrong path. At last, there it is, a hut scarcely above the ground, hidden among the underbrush and tall cactus. [. . .]

I get up and rejoin the group drinking water, who are sharing a watermelon. On the mound where they are sitting, there is no more space. One of the Moors of the King noticed; he goes up to my son and, tapping him gently on the shoulder, says to him, in Spanish, “Your father is not seated.” My son gets up and I sit down in his place. An example of Arab manners that is in sum very edifying and which demonstrates that, even if we are among the people of Barbary, we are not with barbarians.’

11 August 1887
‘Soon we arrive at one of our “wealthy Moors”. [. . .] The young ladies go into the women’s quarters. Employing a searching gaze, we look into everything open to us. I think they were expecting us; most certainly, they were waiting for us. However a flurry of emotion, doubtless feigned, a pretended surprise, took place when we entered. A lady of mature years, who appeared beautiful to me, quickly fled, but not before showing us her face. That left 4 or 5 negresses, who shamelessly stayed where they were. Moreover, they were very beautiful, their arms and legs nude, their bodies lightly clothed in a clear fabric. They certainly do not belong to the religion whose acolytes cover up. As always, the first floor with balcony is just about the same as the lower floor. But it seems we cannot visit since the private living quarters are there. I look everywhere for a certain spot which interests me from a hygienic perspective. Instinct guides me. Here water flows on the ground - one certainly cannot go in without clogs. The floor is made of tile mosaics as are the walls - no seat - only a hole which seems narrow to me at ground level. One has to be agile - but the Arabs certainly are in this respect. They do everything squatting. It is perfect, a paradise for the sense of sight and smell.’

12 August 1887
‘It is agreed that I will give a few medical consultations; they implored me to do so. A few people have been referred by the consul, or by M. Alvans, the military envoy, who never tires of being helpful.

Here come the patients, 5 or 6 of them, all Jews. They file into the patio. I sketch one who presents a beautiful case of Parkinson’s. Nothing very interesting from the point of view of diagnosis. But all are nervous cases. Yesterday, on the square, they showed me a Jew who remained mute, so they say, during his entire childhood but who eventually began to speak. Was he a case of hysteria?

The consultation is over. I must see the town some more so as to take with me an indelible visual impression. Along the way, on one of the most densely inhabited streets, we hear in the distance a sort of chanting, mixed and monotonous at the same time: the voices of men. They appear in a cortege of about a hundred persons; they are walking quickly, they seem to be in a hurry. “The dead go quickly.” In fact it is a burial. The deceased is carried on a kind of cot, nude in a white shroud which hides him completely, the head too. It seems to me that no one stirs nor extends greetings. We don’t either: that is not the custom here. We let the cortege pass, we will meet it again momentarily, in the cemetery.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 29 November 2015.

We hope for better times

‘Our Co for the first time have the sad duty to perform of burying one of their number. Jane is also quite sick of a Diareah but we hope not dangerous. [. . .] many are complaining & the dust is the greatest hardship to endure we have found on our whole journey. But we hope for better times.’ This is the heartfelt diary writing of Polly Lavinia Crandall Coon - born two centuries ago today - travelling with others on the long and arduous trail across the North American continent, from Wisconsin to Oregon, in search of a better life.

Polly Lavinia was born on 24 November 1825 in Alfred, Allegheny, New York, the eldest child of Paul and Sally Crandall. In 1838, the family moved west to Lima, Rock County, Wisconsin where they settled. Paul became one of the members of the Wisconsin constitutional convention in 1847, and was dubbed a ‘Father of Wisconsin’. But, in 1952, they set off, west again, overland in wagons to Oregon, with most of their several children, including Polly and her daughter. Polly’s husband, Thomas, and her brother had already made the journey a year or two earlier.

Once settled in the new land, Thomas died, in early 1854, and two months later Polly gave birth to their second child. Soon after, Polly had her claim of land surveyed. She sold it off in lots to form a new town, called Silverton - on the banks of Silver Creek. She taught at a school in Silverton, and also in Salem and other nearby communities. In 1855, she married Stephen Price, a carpenter and millwright, who built them a new home. They had one son, before moving, in 1856, to Salem; and much later they lived in Hood River, on the south bank of the Columbia River. Both Stephen and Polly died in 1898. Not much is known of Polly, though a little more information can be found at the Liberal University of Oregon website.

A daily diary kept by Polly on her journey was published by A. H. Clark, in 1983, within Covered Wagon Women - Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1852: The Oregon Trail, as edited and compiled by Kenneth L. Holmes and David C. Duniway. This was the fifth volume of an eleven-volume series: Covered Wagon Women - Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1890. Some pages of Polly’s diary - Journal of a Journey Over the Rocky Mountains - can be read at Googlebooks. Here are a few extracts (they are as originally published except for a few full stops).

29 March 1852
‘Started from the town of Lima Rock Co. Wis. on our long contemplated journey to seek a home on the Pacific coast, in the territory of Oregon. Passed through Janesville to the town of Plymouth where we struck our camp for the first time, & found that we had truly left all comfort behind at least as far as the weather is concerned. But all are in health & spirits seeming determined to manufacture as much comfort as possible from what material we have.’

8 April 1852
‘All are well & in excellent spirits. We traveled yesterday 16 miles and camped on a vast prairie in Lafayette Co where nothing but land & sky were to be seen save one little log house. But to make up the absence of other interesting matter we found a wedding party assembled in the aforesaid “log house”. The “old Man” came up and gave us all an invite to attend the dance in the evening. We all went down but none of us joined in the exercises but Ray & Stallman. They reported to have had a very fine time and staid till morning the others returned at 9 o’clock. We have tonight a beautiful camping ground near the line between G[r]ant and Lafayette pleasant weather but still wet under foot.’

9 April 1852
‘Rained all day consequently we have laid by - improving the time in doing some baking. At night the ground being very wet we were obliged to take shelter in the house.’

10 April 1852
‘Reached the Mississippi at Eagle Ferry 2 miles above Dubuque found a number of teams in wait to go over.’

11 April 1852
‘After being delayed all day in getting all crossed over we at length reach Dubuque. We made a few purchases & excited not a little curiosity nor a few remarks from the good people of the city by our “Bloomer Dresses.” Left this town about 3 o’clock passing out some 2 miles through the deepest mud & worst roads I ever saw. Camped in a field & got about half enough poor hay for which the Man charges 30 cts per yoke. I record this as a demonstration of the depth of the heartlessness to which the human heart is capable of arriving.’

12 April 1852
‘Our brother Ray left us this morning - It was with deep regret and tearful eyes we left him to plod on alone towards his home. We feel sad that we leave him behind but hope another year will bring him to Oregon. This after noon it is quite pleasant except the chilling winds which sweep furiously across the endless praries of the state of Iowa. All well and judging from the talking and laughing we hear from the adjoining tent all are in good spirits. The roads continue very bad otherwise we get along very finely.’

11 May 1852
‘Traveled near about 16 miles & camped again on a large Prarie near a beautiful spring which we consider a great treat. After getting our tents pitched & supper nearly in readiness a heavy thunder shower struck us & we were nearly drenched but succeeded in keeping our beds tolerable dry.’

28 May 1852
‘We have all felt much distressed today at witnessing a scene truly heartrending. About noon we came by a Camp where yesterday all were well & today one man was buried - another dying & still another sick. The disease was Diareah which which they had not medicine to check & the result from death. The man that was buried left a young wife to either return through a savage country or go on alone and heartbroken. Many of our Company are complaining but none very sick.’

13 August 1852
‘Dr Weber grew worse after stoping, medicine had no effect & about 1 o’clock at night he died. Our Co for the first time have the sad duty to perform of burying one of their number. Jane is also quite sick of a Diareah but we hope not dangerous. Samuel does not not improve much. The weather is so very hot & dusty that very many are complaining & the dust is the greatest hardship to endure we have found on our whole journey. But we hope for better times.’

17 August 1852
‘Our Co commenced crossing - having stretched a rope across the river & coupled two wagon boxes together, towed over the cattle first & then carried our wagons, luggage & people. We got over quite early with the sick ones in order to make them as comfortable as possible.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 24 November 2015.

Comarnescu and Eugene O’Neil

Petru Comarnescu, one of the most original Romanian critics and cultural historians of the twentieth century, was born 120 years ago today. His journals, written over many years, chart his inner life with painful candour; however, they also contain one of the richest first-hand records of a transatlantic literary friendship - with the American playwright Eugene O’Neill.

Comarnescu was born in Iași on 23 November 1905. He studied philosophy at the University of Bucharest and completed his doctorate abroad, steeped in the ideals of Hellenistic balance and the American pragmatist idea of life as continual experience. He married Gina Comarnescu in the mid-1930s, though the marriage disintegrated painfully. 

A long research stay in the United States in the 1930s laid the foundations for his career as Romania’s foremost interpreter of American culture; on his return he joined the editorial and academic world centred on the Royal Foundations. War and the arrival of Communism disrupted his work. Many of his projects were blocked, staged productions suppressed and correspondence delayed or cut. Yet he persisted, publishing studies, teaching, translating and defending a broad humanistic view of art until his death in Bucharest in 1970. A little further biographical information is available at Wikipedia.

Comarnescu kept diaries for much his life, from 1923 to 1968. A three-volume set of these journals - titled Pagini de jurnal - was published in Romania by Editura Noul Orfeu in 2003. There is also a separate publication titled Jurnal, 1931‑1937 (1994) published by Institutul European. A review in Romanian of this can be found here. However, generally, there is a paucity of information online and in English about Comarnescu and his diaries. My only source, thus, is a 10-page paper by Adriana Carolina Bulz in HyperCultura (Vol. 1 No. 1/2015)- the journal put out by Hyperion University’s Department of Letters and Foreign Languages. Bulz’s paper is entitled: Eugene O’Neill’s Romanian Memory Revisited through Petru Comarnescu’s Diary and Correspondence. (To find this online google search: Eugene O’Neill’s Romanian Memory.)

The journals show, says Bulz, a mind continually drawn to the classical idea that goodness and beauty are inseparable, and to a belief in destiny that was not passive but combative. In a revealing entry he notes that ‘my existence is determined by an irrational play of contrary forces,’ yet insists that because fate is unknowable ‘we must fight, as the ancient heroes fought.’ These tensions animate his most creative years and frame the long passages where he reflects on the artists who sustained him. The diaries are also the key to understanding why he recognised something of himself in Eugene O’Neill’s tragic vision. Early entries describe his desire to ‘pour all the feelings, problems and contradictions’ of recent years into writing - a formulation that echoes O’Neill’s own practice of turning personal conflict into drama. 

The correspondence reproduced in the article shows how deeply O’Neill valued him. In May 1938 O’Neill praises Comarnescu’s article in Revue Hebdomadaire as ‘much superior to other criticism of my work,’ gives him permission to publish his translation of Strange Interlude and even declines copyright payment, asking only for a copy of the book. In November that year he appoints him his legal representative in Romania, grants him full rights to translate Mourning Becomes Electra – ‘the best thing I have done,’ he writes - and expresses confidence that it would have ‘the greatest success’ on the Romanian stage. Later letters reveal O’Neill’s delight at the Bucharest production of Mourning Becomes Electra, his gratitude to the theatre company, and his continuing trust in Comarnescu as ‘sole representative and translator.’ 

Against these letters, the diaries provide essential context. Translating Strange Interlude during the collapse of his marriage, he describes working ‘in these terrible times for me, so as not to go mad,’ finding in O’Neill’s characters ‘so many situations similar to those I was going through.’ When Communist cultural authorities began blocking productions and banning plays on ideological grounds - at one point invoking O’Neill’s Catholicism as justification - the diaries record his despair: ‘tragedy itself was no longer in fashion… destiny considered a bourgeois diversion.’ Yet even at his lowest, he sets his own anguished reflections beside O’Neill’s tragic characters, writing that between Hamlet, Hickey and himself ‘it would have been better never to be born,’ a formulation remarkably close to Edmund’s lament in Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play Comarnescu had never read at the time. 

In his final letter to the O’Neills in 1947, Comarnescu describes sending new volumes of translations, outlines the structure of his major study on the revival of tragedy and confesses, without false modesty, that he feels ‘nearer to [O’Neill’s] philosophy and art than any of his critics.’ The diaries confirm that this was not arrogance but a conviction built from years of immersion, affinity and hard scholarship.

The gay diaries of Mr Lucas

‘Today I was tried before a brigadier and four other officers - a very shattering ordeal, in the latter part of which I felt sick and ill. The prosecution was fair; the judge advocate was fair, and his summing up favourable; my defending officer, though he bungled his job, was at least moderately convincing. Yet the court (swayed, I believe, by the brigadier) found me guilty (which I had expected) and sentenced me to be cashiered and to serve six months’ imprisonment - which I had not expected.’ These words were written exactly seventy-five years ago today by Russell Lucas, a British officer whose private diaries have survived as one of the clearest, most candid records of mid-century gay life. It is thanks to the journalist Hugo Greenhalgh that the diaries have been edited and published.

Lucas was born in the interwar years and spent most of his working life in Whitehall, moving through clerical and administrative posts typical of the postwar civil service. He lived largely alone, with a small and cautious circle of friends, and confronted the long period during which homosexual acts remained criminalised in England. He began keeping a diary in 1949 and continued for decades, chronicling nights in London pubs and clubs, friendships and infatuations, encounters with the law, the rhythms of office life, and the gradual liberalisation of attitudes from the 1950s onwards. He died in relative obscurity, leaving behind a bundle of notebooks that remained with his family until they were passed to Greenhalgh, who edited them for publication as The Diaries of Mr Lucas - Life in 1960s Gay London. Some pages can be previewed at Googlebooks.

Greenhalgh, who grew up in London and studied Modern Languages at Exeter College, Oxford, first came to prominence after leading the campaign that forced the university to recognise same-sex partnerships on equal terms with heterosexual ones. He later built a career in financial and business journalism, including long periods at the Hugo before shifting towards cultural reporting and LGBTQ history. 

Greenhalgh’s editorial work on the Lucas diaries involved reconstructing missing sequences, deciphering coded passages and cross-referencing names, dates and incidents against public records. The result is a vivid portrait of a man navigating a society that permitted him little honesty, and of a gay world stretching from pre-decriminalisation shadows to the beginnings of modern visibility (see The Guardian or The New Humanist for reviews).

What follows are several extracts from Lucas’s diaries (as edited by Greenhalgh) focusing on the events of autumn 1950, when Lucas - having rejoined the army after his National Service - was stationed in Düsseldorf and arrested by the German police after an encounter in a public lavatory. His account of the arrest, the days in custody, the return to barracks and the court martial that ended his military career must be counted among the most sustained personal descriptions of such a case.

18 October 1950

‘At 6 p.m. I was a useful and respected staff officer taking a walk; at 7 p.m. I was under arrest for an alleged indecent assault offence with a young German who reported me. After interrogation by Finnerson [of the Special Investigations Branch of the military police] until after midnight, I was removed to the 1st Norfolk barracks to spend the remainder of the night in a dismal guardroom under escort of a 2nd lieutenant Sanderson - an agreeable, bespectacled subaltern who no doubt found the situation as disagreeable as I did. So my career as an officer comes to an end, sordidly.

Our hapless lieutenant was released the following morning from ‘close arrest at 11 a.m.’, to my relief and, I should fancy, that of poor second lieutenant Sanderson. Lunch at the Rhine Centre was followed by the journey to Bad Oeynhausen, during which I sat with my thoughts, except for a few words with an elderly civilian in my carriage. How I envied him.’

20 October 1950

‘I must say, Major Miller has been wonderfully kind. As I waited for Lt. Col. Alexander this morning, he remarked that ‘no man knows what another man has to bear’, spoke a few consoling words about the comforts of our religion, and shook my hand. The colonel, too, though he said little, was most kind in his manner. Until my re-arrest and court martial, I am carrying on with my normal duties. My colleagues believe I have been recalled for a Court of Inquiry on the traffic accident in which I have recently been involved. What they will say when they learn the truth, I prefer not to think. Meanwhile, work goes on . . .’

21 October 1950

‘On Wednesday evening last, at seven, I was in the hands of the Düsseldorf police, accused of an indecent assault on a young German in a lavatory on the Kleverplatz. In point of fact, the young fellow was one that, coming back and forth to this lavatory several times, had persuaded me he was comme ça. When I perceived him masturbating, I was sure of it, and approached him, whereon he departed and presently two Kriminalpolizei men in plain clothes arrive, arrest me and, after much talk at the police station, hand me over to the military police. [. . .]

Yet in the face of the German’s positive testimony and the absence of any reason why he should lie, no court martial can but find me guilty. I expect three years’ gaol at most, nine months at least; thereafter, God knows. I must be dismissed from the civil service as well as discharged with ignominy from the military.’

His sense of injustice is tempered, perhaps amusingly for us today, by the fact that not only did he not actually do what he was accused of, but his chances of proving that were virtually nil.’

18 November 1950

‘On Monday, after thirty-three days of waiting, is my trial by General Court Martial for gross indecency. I have no doubt of the outcome - I shall be convicted and dismissed from the service, and my career ruined, all because of a moment’s imprudence. The young German who for some sinister motive of his own reported me to the police after acting in the most suggestive manner, and masturbating in front of me, has done more than he expected - though I appreciate my dangerous situation and realize that in no long time I shall, for the first time in my life, have no occupation and no source of income, I cannot yet feel more than a general apprehension. Terror and dismay will no doubt come later; at present regret that this catastrophe should come so soon and that the occasion of my fall should be so mean and sordid are my chief emotions, mixed with anger and contempt for my denouncer and gratitude to my soldier friends for their sympathetic letters. Had I been arrested for sodomy with, say, Gunner McAdam, I’d have been better pleased - the affair would have been on a nobler and more romantic plane.’

20 November 1950

‘Today I was tried before a Brigadier and four other officers (one major and three captains) - a very shattering ordeal, in the latter part of which I felt sick and ill. The prosecution was fair; the judge advocate was fair, and his summing up favourable; my defending officer, though he bungled his job, was at least moderately convincing. Yet the court (swayed, I believe, by the Brigadier) found me guilty (which I had expected) and sentenced me to be cashiered and to serve six months’ imprisonment - which I had not expected. Lieutenant ‘Porky’ Gale, RWK, tried before me, has the same sentence for nine charges of selling stores: and he, I, and our two escorts will occupy the mess until our sentences are confirmed and we are removed to gaol. God be compassionate to all poor souls in prison or awaiting imprisonment.’

Sense and senselessness

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Zygmunt Bauman. He published prolifically across the spectrum of sociology and social theory, and is considered one of the world’s most influential sociologists. Not known as a diarist, he did publish a work provocatively called, This is Not a Diary, with entries dated as if it were a diary - each one being a mini-essay on whatever sociology-related subject happened to come to mind that day. The first dated entry is titled, On the sense and senselessness of diary-keeping. Another - On the friends you have and the friends you think you have - is about the evolutionary anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, under whom I, personally, studied many years ago.

Bauman was born to Jewish parents in Poznań, Poland, on 19 November 1925. When the Nazis invaded, in 1939, his family fled to the Soviet Union where he enlisted in the Polish division of the Red Army, working as a political education instructor. He was involved in the battles of Kolberg and Berlin, and in May 1945 was awarded the Military Cross of Valour. In the early post-war years, he served as a political officer in the Internal Security Corps (KBW) formed to combat Ukrainian and Polish insurgents, and as an informer for military intelligence. In parallel, he studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw. In 1948, he married Janina Lewinson, and they had three daughters.

Having risen to the rank of major, Bauman was dishonourably discharged from the KBW, in 1953, when his father - a Zionist - sought permission to emigrate to Israel, even though he, himself, held anti-Zionist views. The following year he became a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. A visit to the London School of Economics led to his first major book, in 1959, on the British socialist movement, some years later translated into English. Other books followed, notably the popular Socjologia na co dzień in 1964, later forming the basis for his English-language text-book Thinking Sociologically in 1990.

By the late 1960s, an orchestrated anti-semitic campaign was leading many Poles of Jewish descent, not least the intellectuals, to emigrate. At the same time, Bauman’s politics had fallen out of line with that of the communist government; so, in 1968, he gave up his Polish citizenship in order to be allowed to leave the country. He went first to Tel Aviv University, but, by 1972, he had taken up a chair in sociology at Leeds University. He retired in 1990, but since then has published over 40 books, on subjects such as globalisation, modernity and postmodernism, consumerism and morality. His wife, Janina, who also wrote a few books on her wartime memories, died in 2009. The following year, the University of Leeds launched The Bauman Institute in Bauman’s honour. Bauman himself died in 2017. There is further biographical information at Wikipedia, University of Leeds, The Guardian, The Culture Society, and The American Task Force on Palestine. The photo was found at Culture.pl.

There is no obvious evidence that Bauman kept a diary through his long life - although he might have done. However, in 2010 and 2011 he took it into his head to keep a kind of journal, with dated entries, but with all the entries more like mini-essays on current issues of interest or concern to him. Some of these were clearly inspired by things he had read, in the news or elsewhere, and so the dates do have some occasional relevance. The collection of mini-essays were published by Polity Press in 2012, and somewhere along the publishing road acquired the playful title: This is Not a Diary. A few pages can be read at Amazon.

Each dated entry starts with its own title, such as On the quandries of believing, On hurting flies and killing people, On glocalisation coming of age, On immoral axes and moral axemen, etc. Each entry is too long to quote in full, and, unfortunately, given the essay structure, any cutting back reduces, in every sense, Bauman’s little essays. Nevertheless, here are extracts from two sections. I’ve chosen the opening entry, partly because it is the first, and partly because it is, ostensibly, about diary keeping (though more about writing in general). I’ve chosen the second because it’s about a Robin Dunbar theory, and Robin was my tutor, some decades ago (when I was preparing an MSc biological anthropology thesis - on paternal care in primates; see my own diaries - November 1989).

3 September 2010
‘On the sense and senselessness of diary-keeping. I confess: as I am starting to write (it is 5 a.m.), I haven’t the slightest idea what, if anything, will follow, how long it will go on and how long I’ll need, feel the urge and wish to keep it going. And the intention, let alone the purpose, is anything but clear. The question ‘what for’ can hardly be answered. At the moment when I sat down at the computer, there was no new burning issue waiting to be chewed over and digested, no new book to be written or old stuff to be revised, recycled or updated, no new interviewer’s curiosity to be satiated, no new lecture to be sketched out in writing before being spoken - no request, commission or deadline . . . In short, there was neither a frame nailed together waiting to be filled, nor a plateful of podgy work in search of a mould and a form.

I guess the question ‘because of what’ is more in order in this case than the question ‘what for’. Causes to write are abundant, a crowd of volunteers line up to be noted, picked and chosen. The decision to start writing is, so to speak, ‘overdetermined’.

To begin with, I’ve failed to learn any other form of life except writing. A day without scribbling feels like a day wasted or criminally aborted, a duty neglected, a calling betrayed.

To go on, the game of words is for me the most heavenly of pleasures. I enjoy that game enormously - and the enjoyment reaches its peak when, after another reshuffle of the cards, the hand I get happens to be poor and I need to strain my brains and struggle hard to make up for the blanks and bypass the traps. Forget the destination; it is being on the move, and jumping over or kicking away the hurdles, that gives life its flavour. [. . .]

What, after all, is the difference between living and reporting life? We can do worse than take a hint from José Saramago, my lately discovered fount of inspiration. On his own quasi-diary he reflects: “I believe that all the words we speak, all the movements and gestures we make . . . can each and every one of them be understood as stray pieces of unintended autobiography, which, however involuntary, perhaps precisely because it is involuntary, is no less sincere or truthful than the most detailed account of life put into writing and onto paper.”

Exactly.’

27 December 2010
‘On the friends you have and the friends you think you have. Professor Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist in Oxford, insists that ‘our minds are not designed [by evolution] to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world’. Dunbar has actually calculated that number; he found that ‘most of us can maintain only around 150 meaningful relationships’. Not unexpectedly, he’s called that limit, imposed by (biological) evolution, the ‘Dunbar number’. This hundred and a half is, we may comment, the number reached through biological evolution by our remote ancestors, and where it stopped, leaving the field to its much nimbler, more agile and dexterous, and above all more resourceful and less patient successor - called ‘cultural evolution’ (that is, triggered, shaped and driven by humans themselves, and deploying the teaching and learning process rather than changing the arrangement of genes). [. . .]

Electronic sustained ‘networks of friendship’ promised to break through recalcitrant, intrepid limitations to sociability set by our genetically transmitted equipment. Well, says Dunbar, they didn’t and will not: the promise can’t but be broken. ‘Yes.’ says Dunbar in his opinion piece for the New York Times of 25 December, ‘you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life.’ Among those thousands of Facebook friends, ‘meaningful relationships’, whether serviced electronically or lived off-line, are confined as before within the impassable limits of the ‘Dunbar number’. [. . .]

Dunbar is right that the electronic substitutes for face-to-face communication have brought the Stone Age inheritance up to date, adapting and adjusting the ways and means of human togetherness to the requirements of our nouvel age. What he seems to neglect, however, is that in the course of that adaptation those ways and means have also been considerably altered, and that as a result ‘meaningful relationships’ have also changed their meaning. And so must the content of the ‘Dunbar number’ concept have done. Unless it is precisely the number, and only the number, that exhausts its content. . .’

NB: As usual in Diary Review articles, trailing dots enclosed by square brackets (i.e. [. . .] ) indicate text I have left out from the source published text. Trailing dots not enclosed by square brackets are as found in the original text.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 19 October 2015.

Men racing in tubs with paddles

‘After luncheon we all adjourned to the Liane where there were some rural sports going on - men racing in tubs with paddles - then walking along a greased pole to catch a flag at the end, of course continually dropping off into the water, and swimming round to their covered boat, to try their luck once more - two only succeeded in performing the great feat.’ This is from the Boulogne holiday diary kept by Frances Louisa Hayman - later Lady Frances Somerville - who died 140 years ago today. Her diaries, now transcribed online, give an unusually rich view of upper-class travel, spa culture and family life in the 1850s.

Frances Louisa Hayman was born in Southampton in 1804, the only daughter of John Hayman, a local gentleman. In 1833 she married the naval officer Kenelm Somerville at St Marylebone, and the couple established their main English home at Newbold Comyn, just outside Leamington Spa, where they raised five daughters and two sons between 1835 and 1844. After Kenelm inherited the title of 17th Lord Somerville in 1842, the family divided their time between Newbold Comyn, the Scottish estate at the Pavilion near Melrose, and a circuit of seaside and spa retreats.

In widowhood, following Kenelm’s death in 1864, Frances maintained that itinerant respectability, leasing East Close House near Hinton Admiral for some twenty years and retaining control over the scattered Somerville properties. She died in London, at Granville Place, Marylebone, on 18 November 1885, aged eighty-one, leaving both land and family papers to her surviving daughters and their heirs.

The surviving diaries - the focus of modern interest in Lady Somerville - are not a continuous life record but a set of carefully written holiday books. They cover, among other episodes, a stay at Boulogne in 1854, a season at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in 1855 and 1858, a northern journey in 1856 to inspect the family’s Scottish estates, and later visits to Weymouth and other resorts. Written in her clear, controlled hand, they mix itineraries, weather notes, topographical description and family logistics with pointed remarks about fellow visitors and relations. For modern readers they chart how a mid-Victorian aristocratic family used spas and seaside towns as a network of meeting-places rather than escapes from society.

Social hierarchy is one of the diaries’ clearest themes. Lady Somerville did not aspire to mix with royalty, but equally avoided those she considered lower in status, reserving her energy for a wide but carefully policed circle of family and friends. At Cowes, Boulogne or Melrose she moves among titled cousins, naval officers, clergy and genteel visitors whose names recur like a private directory. The result is a dense picture of mid-Victorian networks: marriages, promotions, illnesses and deaths are all logged, often with anniversaries noted years later in the margins.

The sea and the water-cure are another preoccupation. Entries from the 1855 Cowes diary describe rough Channel crossings, excursions on the royal yacht, days spent watching waves at ‘Egypt’ on the shore, and a family visit on 10 August 1855 to St Lawrence’s Well near Ventnor, complete with observations of the shrine and its spring. Elsewhere she records promenades to fountains and wells in Boulogne and in other spa towns, providing material that historians of spa culture and hydropathic tourism have used to trace routes, timings and the burgeoning infrastructure of mid-nineteenth-century travel.

The 1856 diary shifts the focus north, following the family to the Pavilion at Melrose and other Scottish properties whose history had been intertwined with Walter Scott’s editing of Memorie of the Somervilles. Here the entries blend sightseeing with estate inspection, reflecting a landowning widow conscious both of romantic heritage and of the practical business of managing far-flung holdings. The same volume mentions the seventeenth-century Somerville manuscripts, which Lady Frances later bequeathed to her daughter Louisa, showing her awareness of written records as heirlooms in their own right.

The modern publishing history of the diaries is straightforward but revealing. They seem to have become detached from other Somerville family papers when the Pavilion at Melrose passed through several hands after the barony lapsed in the 1870s. In the late twentieth century the Spas Research Fellowship acquired the original volumes from the book trade and began a methodical transcription and annotation project. Today the Somerville Diaries are available online through the Fellowship’s dedicated portal, where the text is accompanied by essays on family networks, spa landscapes and individual sites such as Boulogne’s fountains or St Lawrence’s Well. Here are several extracts.

14 July 1854, Boulogne

‘Breakfasted at 9, and then went down to the Pier to see the 21 horses slung up by a crane in boxes, and lowered into the steamer with wonderful ease - A scud of rain came on and alarmed us for our voyage, so we listened to Giovanini singing various bravura songs - The rain cleared off and after taking a quantity of Dr Jephson’s specific lemon juice, we embarked in the Reine Des Belges steamer for Boulogne - there was a fresh breeze and for the first quarter of an hour we all thought it very charming dancing over the green waves - but by degrees Louy, Mary and last Emily were handed down to leeward and endless white basins were called into the service of the unhappy passengers. Kenelm bore it like an Admiral, and so did I till we were about ‘half seas over’ when I succumbed to the fate of the rest but soon recovered, and did not suffer near so much as my neighbours - At about half past 4 we got into the harbour and very thankful we were to find ourselves there. We were detained sometime at the wearisome Custom house to give our names and address, and then found our Commissionaire Mr Pay ready to escort us to our house 8 Rue du pol d’Etain rather a back street, but a good large house which holds us all comfortably plenty of clocks and looking glasses - but rather scanty in the necessaries of life and the offices very deficient. After a substantial tea we walked up the Grande rue and through the Haute VilleClick, and went to bed thoroughly tired with our voyage and its consequences.’

15 August 1854, Boulogne

‘This was a grand jour de fete for the assumption of the Virgin and also the Emperor’s birthday, and luckily it was a very fine day, tho’ there had been rain in the night - Monsieur Brunet came to the boys at 8, and Monsieur Laston at 10 - so at 11 we went to St Nicholas to hear high mass and the Te deum for the Emperor. The Church was crowded to excess, but with great difficulty we got on chairs, and saw the knave lined with soldiers all in grande livree. It was like all the other ceremonies we have attended full of pomp, but very little devotion, people crushing in and out in all directions, and the officers shouting out to their men to lower arms etc. in the middle of the service - I found myself next to an English Catholic who persuaded us to go and hear the English sermon at 12 the last of the ‘retraile’ series which she assured us would be most eloquent. We waited some time while various little bells rang, and the Priest at the altar seemed to be drinking up all the Wine, after which began our English sermon which I thought very unsatisfactory and unconvincing - he tried to persuade us that the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud that attended the Israelites in the Wilderness, were no other than the blessed Virgin herself - quite a new Doctrine to us - he then went on to say that there were proofs in scripture that our sinfulness required the mediation of a third person as with Moses Job the Angels, Saints etc. that our Saviour was always subject to his mother and that therefore she was all powerful in heaven, etc., and that it was our duty to pray for her for her intercession in every case - In short all his arguments were futile, and not to be proved from scripture, and I came away a more decided Protestant than ever! 

There were festoons of evergreens all the way up the Grande rue and a triumphal Arch of the same near the top. After luncheon we all adjourned to the Liane where there were some rural sports going on - men racing in tubs with paddles - then walking along a greased pole to catch a flag at the end, of course continually dropping off into the water, and swimming round to their covered boat, to try their luck once more - two only succeeded in performing the great feat. The next exhibition was a Duck hunt, quite different to that at CowesClick - a cargo of real Ducks were taken out in a basket and thrown in all directions into the water when about a dozen men and boys plunged in after them, and swam with all their might to catch the poor animals, who flew, dived, and did their utmost to escape their pursuers - but in vain for they were all captured at last, and carried about in triumph poor things. It was anything but a jour de fete for them! 

These diversions lasted till near 4 when the grand procession of the Virgin was to begin - We took some of the children up to Lady Louisa Ramsay’s a capital situation for seeing all down the Grande rue - the rest of us went to Admiral Knox's who has a house 14 Grande Rue - There we found the old Admiral and his Wife and daughter and a Mr Goff who married Lady Adelaide Knox a very pretty pleasing person - After waiting a long time we began to despair of the arrival of the procession, but at last we ascertained that it had gone round by the Tintelleries the Rue Sallequin and was to return up the Grande rue - soon the sound of music proclaimed its approach. First came a great Red Beadle to clear the way and then a long run of Priests, Nuns white black and grey of the Various orders - Sisters of Charity with their schools - then fishwomen most picturesquely dressed in scarlet petticoats white bodices and pretty caps and earrings - then about 50 young girls all in white with Veils and white bouquets and some carrying Lilies in their hands - all supporting by white ribbons a silver image of the Virgin in a boat with a large bunch of Grapes - then another turn of English Catholic girls in white and gold Veils bearing another Virgin then the Bishop and Priests carrying the Host the Crosier and Crucifix born before him, and blessing the people as he went with his goggle eyes looking enough to frighten them all - Upon the whole I must say it was the very prettiest and most picturesque thing I could have imagined and I would not have missed it for worlds! We came home to dinner with Stephen and then rushed down to the pier where the Military band was playing, and a great crowd assembled - after which we walked home with the Ramsays and up to the top of the Grande Rue to see the Illuminations - the Prefet's house and the Eagle and Legion d’Honneur were very brilliant, and the ramparts lighted with torches - returned home quite exhausted with our day’s exertion.’

3 September 1856, Scarborough

‘This is our 23rd wedding day, and I was greeted by congratulations from my two dear girls! Certainly I have much to be thankful for in such uninterrupted happiness - About a quarter past one, we all started in three carriages for Bramham Park. Mr George Fox’s - where there was a fete Champetre, attended by all the County / about 200 people / beautiful gardens, with Terraces and cut high hedges, in the formal style like Versailles on a large scale, and very handsome, but the house was burnt down some years ago, and only the shell remains. It was a very pretty sight, such a number of gaily dressed, pretty people, Harewoods, Nevills, Meynell Ingrams etc. and several pretty children -. After refreshments in a tent, we all adjourned to the Bowling Green where they danced to rather an indifferent Band till half past 6 when we all returned to a late dinner, very tired and rather cross. I met a few people I knew - Mrs Bland, the Boucheretts, Wilkinsons, and was introduced to Lord Harewood, Sir Maxwell Wallace etc. - It was a very pleasant day, tho' not brilliant.’

22 August 1860, Weymouth

‘After a pouring night and misty morning, it cleared about 10 and Humfry came up to make arrangements about Lulworth - It was settled that Emily, Selina, Julia, and I, were to join him and his sisters at 11-30 - which we did, but when we got on board the steamer, we found it was not going to Lulworth, but only to Portland, as the landing at the former is so bad. We therefore made the best of it, and payed our £s to go to Portland - landed there and engaged a Wagonette which took us all up the hill very steep and strong but a beautiful view at the top - The Chiswell beach and a fine sea surf dashing against it.

We then drove on to Pennsylvania, or Bow and Arrow Castle, - a modern house on a precipitous rock overhanging the sea, with a wood down to the water - it is now uninhabited but we went into a handsome circular drawing room, with some beautiful old carved oak furniture in it and ate our sandwiches there - Emily and Julia rushed down among the rocks to get some ferns, and Humfry and Selina to the old ruin which is small, but very picturesque, and will make a beautiful sketch - and is a prefect spot for a picnic! From thence we drove on to the Quarries, got some specimens of petrified wood and water - saw the outside of the Prison and all the Offices of the establishment. We saw some of the Convicts at work. Altogether it was a curious and interesting drive, to say nothing of the amusement afforded by the Hats blowing off etc etc. for the wind was very high but no rain. After much discussion, and finding we were late for the steamer, and should have to wait some time, we agreed to drive on in the carriage to Weymouth - It was tremendously cold and windy coming along Chesil beach - and we dropped Humfry Emily Selina and Julia near Sandsfoot Castle to walk home, while I drove on with the Skipwiths about half past 3 after a very pleasant Excursion - I having engaged them all to dine with us, as they missed their own dinner at home - No letters but one containing a Prawn for Selina - Kenelm and the girls went on the Pier and met the others coming from Sandsfoot.’

If these pages survive me

‘I write because I cannot stop writing; it is the last habit that still feels like freedom. If these pages survive me, let them tell only that I tried to remain honest.’ This is from the diaries of the Russian writer, Olga Fyodorovna Bergholz who died 50 years ago today. Her name, once synonymous with the besieged city of Leningrad, now stands again in the public record thanks to the appearance of her complete diaries, published for the first time in a full scholarly edition. The series, titled Мой дневник (My Diary), reveals in her own words the life of a poet who bore witness to war, repression, and renewal, writing continuously from 1923 until shortly before her death. The publication of these diaries has given new voice to one of Russia’s most emblematic twentieth-century writers, half a century after her death.

Bergholz was born in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) on 16 May 1910, the daughter of a military surgeon of Latvian descent and a Russian mother. She began writing poetry in her teens and studied philology at Leningrad University, where she joined the literary group Smena alongside young writers of the early Soviet generation. In the 1930s she published poems and children’s stories while working as a journalist in Kazakhstan and later in Leningrad. Her life was shadowed by tragedy: her first husband, the poet Boris Kornilov, was executed during the Great Purge in 1938; and she herself was arrested and imprisoned for several months before being released and rehabilitated.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Bergholz remained in Leningrad throughout the blockade. Her calm, steady voice on Leningrad Radio became a lifeline for the starving and bombed city, and her wartime poems, including February Diary and Leningrad Poem, earned her the title ‘voice of the blockade’. After the war she continued to publish poetry, memoirs and essays, and was honoured with the Order of Lenin and other state awards. She died on 13 November 1975 and was buried in the Literatorskie Mostki cemetery, where many of Leningrad’s writers rest. (Limited) further information is available in English at Wikipedia and the (Russian) Presidential Library

Bergholz’s personal diaries remained unseen for decades. Written between 1923 and 1971, they were preserved in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art  and the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House). Only in recent years have these diaries begun to appear in full. The project to publish them as a complete, annotated scholarly edition began in the mid-2010s under the Moscow publisher Kutchkovo Pole. The first volume (1923-1929) appeared in 2016, it was followed by a second in 2017 (1930-1941), and a third in 2020 (1941-1971). Each tome reproduces her handwritten entries and includes editorial commentary, biographical notes, and indices prepared by literary historians.

These diaries are of said to be of extraordinary range and candour. They show Bergholz evolving from an idealistic student of the 1920s into a mature poet and chronicler of war. Early notebooks record her youthful self-doubt, her experiments with language and love of poetry; later entries chart her experiences of imprisonment, bereavement and hunger during the siege; and post-war pages reveal her disillusionment with censorship and her continued belief in moral integrity. Uncensored and often raw, they document her private reflections on faith, loyalty and artistic conscience - a counterpoint to the public optimism demanded of her. Scholars describe them as a literary and historical monument to one woman’s endurance through the century’s darkest decades.

I can find no translated extracts online of Bergholz’s diaries, but ChatGPT has found some original Russian extracts: ‘Four short, genuinely attested diary-style fragments from publicly available Russian sources (museum publications, commemorative features, and press articles) which quote Olga Bergholz’s diary prose. I [i.e. ChatGPT] have translated them faithfully into English, keeping them concise so they can be used safely in a review context. None of these come from the copyrighted pages of Мой дневник itself; all are from excerpts already published in open Russian sources.’

1. Early 1920s - youth, aspiration, self-interrogation. (Source: excerpt quoted in a 2015 RG.ru article on Bergholz’s early notebooks). Translation: ‘Today I feel again that strange trembling before the page, as if I am approaching someone who knows me better than I know myself. I pretend the diary is a listener, but in truth it is a mirror. When I write, I see not who I am but who I might become if only I can hold my course. I am still so easily shaken. Yet I trust the written word more than my own resolve.’

2. Late 1930s - arrest, fear, and the moral fracture of the terror. (Source: fragment quoted in Colta.ru’s feature on the diaries project, describing her 1938 entries after imprisonment). Translation: ‘How quickly a person can be unmade. Yesterday I still believed that truth had weight, that it could shield us. Now I see how fragile everything is: a knock at the door, a name on a list, and the world turns upside down. I hold myself together by force, but inside there is a crack that was not there before. I try to write to seal it, but the pen trembles.’

3. February 1942 - the blockade winter (genuine diary prose, not poem). (Source: public Russian exhibition text at the Museum of the Defence of Leningrad quoting her siege diary). Translation: ‘Cold presses on the bones and on the mind. People speak slowly now, as if every word costs something. I walked to the studio this morning past bodies that no one had strength to move. At the microphone I tried to steady my voice, but inside I was repeating only one thing: endure, endure. When I returned home the room was darker than before, and I felt suddenly that even light had grown thin.’

4. Early 1970s - late-life reflection. (Source: fragment quoted in a Pushkin House commemorative article discussing her final notebooks). Translation: ‘Old age brings a strange clarity. I look back and see not the events themselves but the thread that binds them. Everything I resisted, everything I hoped for - all of it has become quieter now, like the sea in the evening. I write because I cannot stop writing; it is the last habit that still feels like freedom. If these pages survive me, let them tell only that I tried to remain honest.’

Found mine field with Bosch notice

‘Started forward at 6 a.m. H plus ½ hour. Heavy fog. Found men coming back and took them along with me. Heavy fire all around from m.g. Found mine field with Bosch notice on it. Got to R.R. cut near Cheppy sent pigeon message. Was fired on heavily and 35 Div came back on the run.’ This is from the First World War diaries of George Smith Patton Jr, born 140 years ago today. He was a natural soldier who would become a US Army General in the Second World War, one admired for his leadership and strategic genius.

Patton was born on 11 November 1885 in San Gabriel, California, into a prosperous family steeped in military tradition. Educated by tutors, he struggled with dyslexia but excelled in physical pursuits and displayed an early fascination with warfare. After attending the Virginia Military Institute for one year, he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1909. The following year he married Beatrice Banning Ayer, daughter of Boston industrialist Frederick Ayer, with whom he had three children.

Patton’s early army career was marked by his talent for horsemanship and discipline. He represented the United States at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics in the modern pentathlon and later became aide-de-camp to General John J. Pershing during the 1916 Mexican Expedition. In the First World War he commanded the newly formed U.S. Tank Corps and led the first American tank attack at Saint-Mihiel. Between the wars he emerged as one of the army’s leading advocates of mechanised warfare, publishing studies on mobility, discipline, and leadership.

During the Second World War, Patton commanded US forces in North Africa, Sicily, and later France and Germany, his Third Army achieving one of the fastest and most decisive advances in modern military history. His leadership during the relief of Bastogne in December 1944 became legendary. Known for his harsh discipline and fiery rhetoric as much as his strategic brilliance, he was both feared and revered by subordinates. He died on 21 December 1945 in Heidelberg, Germany, following an automobile accident. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, or the Warfare History Network.

Patton began keeping diaries as a young officer, developing the habit during his early cavalry years and maintaining it without interruption until the end of his life. His first surviving notebooks date from 1910 and include accounts of his honeymoon travels and early postings in the United States and Mexico. By 1916-1917, during the Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa, his entries had become more detailed and self-analytical, mixing operational notes with personal reflection. From this period onward, Patton viewed diary-keeping as both a professional record and a means of self-discipline, using it to refine his thoughts on leadership, courage, and the psychology of command.

Throughout the First World War and the inter-war years, Patton’s diaries were largely handwritten in small leather notebooks, often accompanied by operational maps, sketches, and lists of orders. His First World War volumes describe his training of the Tank Corps in France, his wounding at Saint-Mihiel, and his meetings with Pershing and other senior officers. 

Between 1919 and 1939 his diary entries turned to professional studies - tactics, mobility, weapons - and his personal frustrations at the slow pace of promotion. When war came again in 1939-1945, his habit of daily recording became an intense discipline. The World War Two diaries are said to be among the most complete of any senior Allied commander, describing every major campaign in North Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany, and offering a rare inside view of command at army level.

After Patton’s death in December 1945, his diaries - over forty notebooks and typescripts - were preserved by his family and later deposited in the Library of Congress as part of the George S. Patton Papers. The complete diaries run from 1910 to 1945. Edited extracts first reached the public through Martin Blumenson’s two-volume The Patton Papers (1972 and 1974), which combined diary entries, correspondence, and official memoranda. These editions shaped much of Patton’s posthumous reputation. Later historians and archivists produced full transcripts of the original notebooks, revealing that Patton often revised his entries, added clarifying notes, and occasionally softened his tone for posterity. Also at the Library of Congress can be found images of many pages from the original diaries. 

The following extracts are all from The Patton Papers (which is freely available to read online at Internet Archive). 

31 July 1917

‘Gen. P, Col Harbord, Col de Chambrun, and I left office at 2:50 in Hotchkiss and Packard to St. Dizier. We passed for miles along scene of battle of the Marne, the road marking almost exactly last French line of battle. Many graves along road. ‘Where hospitals were, large squair inclosures full of crosses. Just north of the road is where Napoleon fought first half of campaign of 1814. Reached St. Dizier at 8 p.m. Pershing and Harbord at hotel, Chambrun and I bilited with private family.’

1 August 1917

‘Left St. Dizier 8:10 a.m., to Vittel and Grand Hotel, where good supper. Inspected American troops and were disappointed. Men did not look smart, officers were lazy, troops lacked equipment and training, were listless.’

2 August 1917

‘Through Neufchateau to Chaumont, lunch at Hotel de France. Left 3 p.m. by way of Troyes, reached Paris 10 p.m.’

4 August 1917

‘Lunch and dinner with K, Beatrice’s sister, and her husband, Keith, who was with the State Department in London.’

7 September 1917

‘Engaged laundress in morning; drilled 160 clerks in evening. “They did not like it much but it is necessary as they look like soldiers and must act like them.” Shallenberger became Provost Marshal, Collins attached to the General Staff, Mars still Pershing’s aide, ‘and I am nothing but hired flunkey. I shall be glad to get back to the line [with troops] again and will try to do so in the spring.’

17 March 1918

‘Had Elsie Janis [the favorite American singer and entertainer of troops in France] and her mother to lunch. She is not pretty but quite amusing though common in her pronunciation. She wore an artificial Lepord skin coat. Met Secretary [of War Newton] Baker and went around with him for a while. Seemed interested and intelligent.’

18 March 1918

‘Got telephone connected and office and mess running. Expect to be shelled at 9:30 now 10:05 and nothing has happened but they [the Germans] are shelling Paris to the west.’

19 September 1918

‘Went to Front line and found trenches not very wide. And ground rather better than I had expected.’

23 September 1918

‘Got all 345 Tanks unloaded by daylight under shell fire but no casualties. Got lot of mail from home. Five letters from B. Rained all day and a lot of shelling over us at Clermont. Cussed out Brett & Compton for carelessness etc.’

24 September 1918

‘Got Corps Plan. Wrote field order & memo. Gen R called. We are in pretty good shape but we are to be shelled or something to night. The Bosch took pictures of us so I guess we shall be shelled or something to night. Wrote B & Mama.’

25 September 1918

‘Inspected battalions at 9 a.m. 345th very dirty, ordered correction. 344th better but could stand improvement. Gen R called. Went to corps to get H-hour and D-day, also passes for gasoline trucks. Went to meeting at 35th Division. One of my trucks full of runners was hit by a shell 6:15 p.m. Near Neuvilly, no movement yet. Had big dinner. Will start soon. Wrote B.’

26 September 1918

‘Started forward at 6 a.m. H plus ½ hour. Heavy fog. Found men coming back and took them along with me. Heavy fire all around from m.g. Found mine field with Bosch notice on it. Got to R.R. cut near Cheppy sent pigeon message. Was fired on heavily and 35 Div came back on the run. Moved back about 200 m. [meters] Heavy m.g. [machine gun] & Art. [Artillery] fire. Lots of Dough Boys hit. [Captain] English & I got tanks forward. 20 men hit. Tried to make inft charge and got shot. Lay in shell hole an hour. Could hear bosch talk. Went to hospital and was operated on by Dr. Elliot of N.Y.’

27 September 1918

‘Woke up to find Capt Semmes on my right. Capt. Gilfillen on my left. Both wounded. Slept a lot. Wrote Beat. Tried to wire but could not.’