Uproar in Parliament

‘Uproar in Parliament and a great demonstration in favour of the blockade. I have quite a rough passage - a most unaccustomed experience in these days - at Question Time.’ This is from the diary of Hugh Dalton, a Labour politician and economist born 130 years ago today, who served in Winston Churchill’s war cabinet. He kept a diary first during his WWI service, and used it to publish a book about his experiences on the Italian front. In later years, he published three volumes of autobiography each one underpinned by his diaries; and, after his death, the diary texts were edited for publication by Ben Pimlott.

Dalton was born in Neath, Wales, on 16 August 1887, to John Neale Dalton, a clergyman, and his wife Catherine Evan-Thomas. They had married the previous year, and the diarist A. C. Benson - see A C Benson’s inner life - had been John Dalton’s best man. John Dalton was later a chaplain and tutor in Queen Victoria’s royal household. Hugh Dalton was educated at Eton, King’s College, Cambridge, where he was president of the university’s Fabian Society, and the London School of Economics. He was called to the bar in 1914, and married Ruth Fox the same year. Their only child died aged but four in 1922.

During WWI, Dalton joined the Army Service Corps, but later transferred to the Royal Artillery, serving as a lieutenant on the French and Italian fronts. After the war, he returned to teach first at LSE then at the University of London, succeeding to Reader in Economics from 1925 to 1935. Earlier, though, in 1924, he had entered Parliament as member for Peckham (after having failed to be elected in three previous elections). In 1925, his wife, Ruth, was elected a member of the London County Council. She served briefly in Parliament, as MP for Bishop Auckland in County Durham, following a by-election, but then stood down - as planned - after only 90 days in favour of her husband at the 1929 general election (Dalton himself was not available to stand at the time of the by-election).

Dalton rose in the Labour ranks, becoming under-secretary at the Foreign Office in Ramsay MacDonald’s second government from 1929-1931, but then lost his seat in 1931, to be re-elected in 1935. The same year, he published an influential assessment of future options for the Labour Party - Practical Socialism for Britain. He was appointed spokesman on foreign affairs, and helped move the Labour Party away from pacifism towards a policy of armed deterrence. He strongly opposed Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.

During Churchill’s coalition government, Dalton served as Minister of Economic Warfare from 1940, establishing the Special Operations Executive, and from 1942 as President of the Board of Trade (the future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell acting as his principal private secretary). When Labour was unexpectedly returned to power in 1945, Dalton wished to become Foreign Secretary, but Prime Minister Clement Atlee made him Chancellor of the Exchequer. On mishandling the sterling crisis of 1947, Dalton resigned, but was later reinstated into the cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. In 1950-1951, he was minister of town and country planning. He was created Baron Dalton of Forest and Frith in 1960; and he died in 1962.

Ben Pimlott gives this assessment of Dalton in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required): ‘Hugh Dalton’s legacy was diffuse and controversial. Though he had devoted friends, he made many enemies, often in his own party. [. . .]  His influence on British political history and Labour Party ideas bears comparison with that of any other Labour politician who did not become prime minister. As an intellectual he was important in developing Fabian thought, and in helping to give it a hard economic edge. As a politician he was both a powerful and determined advocate and a back-room expert, who was personally responsible for many of the key Labour Party documents of the 1930s and war period, setting the scene for the post-war Attlee government. As chancellor of the exchequer his policies helped to facilitate an ambitious domestic reform programme, in the most adverse conditions. Meanwhile, he talent-spotted and nurtured several generations of young political aspirants. The grouping later known as the Gaitskellites emerged from the circle of his younger friends. In addition to Hugh Gaitskell himself, Anthony Crosland, Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey, George Brown, and James Callaghan were among those who learned from him and benefited from his practical help. [. . .] More than many political leaders, he was consistent in his thinking. More than most, he took a close, professional interest both in political ideas and in the details of the policies he supported. A member of the second generation of Labour leaders, he played an important part in giving his party the intellectual confidence not only to make it electable, but also to make it effective.’ Further information can also be found at Wikipedia.

Dalton began keeping a diary during his WWI army days, and continued doing so for much of his life. On returning from the war, Methuen published With British Guns in Italy: A tribute to the Italian achievement. Dalton says in his preface: ‘This little book of mine is only an account, more or less in the form of a Diary, of what one British soldier saw and felt, who served for eighteen months on the Italian Front as a Subaltern officer in a Siege Battery. But it was my luck to see a good deal during that time. Mine had been the first British Battery to come into action and open fire on the Italian Front. And, as my story will show, it was either the first or among the first on most other important occasions, except in the Caporetto retreat, and then it was the last. I have camouflaged the names of all persons mentioned throughout the book, except those of Cabinet Ministers, Generals and a few other notabilities.’ Although Dalton refers to it as a diary, it is no such thing, since it reads as a continuous narrative and there are no dated entries. The full text is available at Internet Archive.

Much later in his life, Dalton used (and quoted from) his diaries extensively to write three volumes of autobiography, all published by Frederick Muller: Call Back Yesterday (1887-1931) in 1953, The Fateful Years (1931-1945) in 1957, and High Tide and After (1945-1960) in 1962. In the introduction to the first, he states, ‘I have quoted a good deal from my diaries’ and ‘much that is not direct quotation’ is based on the diaries. All three works are long out of print. More recently - well in 1986 - Jonathan Cape published two volumes of extracts from the diaries as edited by Ben Pimlott: The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton 1940-45 and The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton 1918-40, 1945-60.

In an Editorial Note to the former, Pimlott provides background on the diary: ‘For most of his life, Dalton wrote his diary in longhand, using small notebooks or, later on, loose sheets. Between 1937 and 1947, however - including the whole period covered by this book - his habit was to dictate the diary to a secretary. Hence almost all of the original diary for the Second World War is in typescript. There was only one draft. Dalton would read through what had been typed, and make occasional corrections. What makes the diary for the Coalition years different from earlier and later material - and so requiring separate treatment - is partly its sheer bulk (during his years of wartime ministerial office. Dalton produced almost as much diary as for the rest of his life put together); partly the regularity of wartime entries, with a record for almost every day (the main exceptions are holidays and trips); and partly a difference of arrangement that is a product of size, regularity and the pace of the events described. Instead of occasional reflections, and episodes widely dispersed, there is a continuity of plot and subplot, with far more detail and, very often, a close examination of policy.

Why did he write so much? Dalton engaged in one form of writing or another throughout his career, and during this period of intense activity, the diary became his main literary outlet. It is likely that his first, war book was somewhere in his mind, and that he saw the diary as the basis for some future publication. A sense of history, and of history being made, pervades his record of the war years. On one occasion, Dalton discussed diary-keeping with another compulsive diarist Harold Nicolson, and both agreed that their proudest boast would be that they had served in Mr Churchill’s Government.’

Here are several extracts from the same volume.

25 March 1941
‘Uproar in Parliament and a great demonstration in favour of the blockade. I have quite a rough passage - a most unaccustomed experience in these days - at Question Time. Outcry from all sections of the House. They are shocked at recent press revelations of trade through Marseilles and at navicerting of American food ships. Really, of course, they should shout at the Admiralty, the Foreign Office and the P.M.! I have it put about that only a very simple-minded person would think that I ask the Admiralty not to stop these ships, or that I ask Halifax to persuade Roosevelt to send the food ships! There is some perturbation among my advisers over this demonstration, but on the whole I welcome it and it strengthens my hand for the Cabinet this week.’

29 March 1941
‘On top of the world! First news of naval battle in Eastern Mediterranean. In this phase the war goes fast our way. It may reverse a bit later, but never mind that.’ 

5 July 1941
‘In the small hours of this morning, both of us having returned and done some more work, Gladwyn suggests that I might explore with Eden the possibility of Leeper returning to the Foreign Office and Loxley taking his place at C.H.Q., the whole show being then coordinated under one head, as I had so often told him I wanted. I said this would be rather difficult to handle but I would see how things went. It would be an admirable solution, for almost every reason. . .

To C.H.Q. in time for lunch. I make a row about the Italian Prisoners of War in India and how they are to be approached. I say that I will exercise my own judgment on these drafts and clean them up. It is silly to say that there should be ‘no propaganda’. The practical question is, is it worth while to try to recruit a Free Italian force? Probably Martelli should be the conducting officer.’

6 July 1941
‘Return by way of Chingford, where I speak in P.M.’s constituency. I make a good speech and get off most successfully with the lady Mayor of Chingford and, even more important, Sir James Hawkey, Chairman of the P.M.’s constituency organisation, who hated Neville Chamberlain and the old Tory machine and with whom I exchange various political reminiscences, designed to bring out the undoubted fact that it was the Labour Party which determined the change of Government leading to Churchill becoming P.M., and also that I played some personal role in this.’

13 February 1944
‘Address a public meeting at Battersea. This has been well advertised and is reasonably well attended. But I dislike very much addressing public meetings now. One feels held upon a chain with a row of reporters sitting waiting to pounce upon unguarded phrases. Hinley Atkinson is there and we walk back together, after tea with Douglas and his wife. Atkinson quite understands my feelings. The audience, he says, are always waiting for “those few reckless words” which would warm them up but would make most disastrous headlines. He is a very strong supporter of Maurice Webb for the secretaryship of the Party. I still feel, however, that he can’t get it.’

24 February 1944
‘Lunch with Mrs Phillimore and two Frenchmen. One, recently arrived from France, says that ‘the resistance’ is not divided into political parties but is more prepared, probably, than we in England for large changes after the war, both in the direction of European ‘federation’ - in loose form, e.g. unification of currency, transport services, etc. - and internally in Socialist direction, especially through public ownership of heavy industry. He thinks Germany should be admitted from the start to any new international organisation, but with very low status, this only being raised to that of other members gradually and in accord with German good behaviour. He thinks countries on the Atlantic seaboard will be much more stable and closely bound to England than anything to the east. He is not hopeful about south-east Europe.

Afterwards I go back with Attlee, who says that he and others today protested to the P.M. about last night’s pandemonium in Cabinet and the impossible position in which our officials were now placed. P.M. said he thought we were really all agreed on three things: (1) no return to the gold standard, (2) no abolition, or even reduction, of Imperial Preference, except in return for sufficient tariff concessions by Americans, and (3) no increase in the price of food by taxation. He inveighed again, with great emphasis, on this third point. Anderson said that these three points would suit him and the P.M. said he would issue a short Minute.’

6 June 1944
‘The Invasion of France began today at first light. It is very hard to think or speak of anything else. But I have, very unwillingly, to give my mind to preparing my speech for the House of Commons tomorrow on Location of Industry, which is being raised on the Board of Trade vote. I spend all day on this. As usual, the trouble is that one has, not too little material, but much too much.’

23 June 1944
‘Awakened at 2 a.m. by flying bombs and one comes fairly close when I am in my bath at 9 a.m.!

Lunch at Soviet Embassy, with Sir Thomas Barlow, in celebration of his services in providing clothing for the Soviet civilians. Gusev still very slow and tongue-tied, but it is not true to say that he won’t speak English.

Leave for West Leaze with Bob Fraser. Train is very crowded and the morale of some of the passengers is not high. It is sensible that any one not now working in London should, if they conveniently can, get out and stay out.’

4 July 1944
‘Answering P.Q.s. I get the House entirely on my side and dissolved in laughter by saying in reply to a Supplementary, that ‘I understand that a “physiotherapist” is what we used, in old-days, to call a masseuse.’ Then follows a discussion whether there is not some equally good simple English word for both. I invite suggestions and there are cries of ‘rubbers’.’

29 October 1944
‘Today we hold one of our ‘Secret Meetings’ of the National Executive and the Labour War Cabinet Ministers at Howard’s Hotel. As usual most are quite sensible. Our Declaration that we shall fight the next election as an independent Party has had soothing effects everywhere. Bevin coming in, as usual, very late, says that he can hardly believe his ears. He thought ministers were all supposed to be chained to the Coalition ‘and captives of the Tories’, but here today everyone is saying we must not hurry the election or the break-up of the Government and everyone, except Shinwell, says that we ought to get the Social Insurance Bill through before the Parliament ends. And this, indeed, is the general mood. I say I also want to get a Location of Industry Bill through. Unless we get Social Insurance through, the Tories will use it as bait for the electors; if we do get it through we can say that, but for us, nothing nearly so good would have been put forward; and in any case it is right to get it through, regardless of party politics.’

I like Mussolini, very much

According to Amazon, Enigma Books, a US imprint, is today publishing a reprint of Diary 1937-1943: The complete unabridged diaries of Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1936-1943, first published in 2002 by Phoenix. However, it is worth noting that there is no mention of this new edition on the publisher’s website. Nevertheless, it is as good an opportunity as any to celebrate - if that’s the right word - Ciano’s fascinating diaries. According to Malcolm Muggeridge they are ‘the most interesting [documents]’ to have come out of the Second World War, and the ones which ‘will probably prove in the end the most useful to historians’.

Galeazzo Ciano was born in Livorno in 1903. His father, an admiral, was later decorated in the First World War. Ciano moved to Rome, where, when only 18, he took part in the march which led to the Fascist overthrow of the Republic. He studied law, tried journalism and then settled on a career in diplomacy. In 1930, he married Benito Mussolini’s daughter Edda (they had three children), and thereafter rose to become a member of the Fascist Supreme Council. He was a secretary of state for press and propaganda, and then served in the Italian air force during the invasion of Ethiopia, before becoming minister of foreign affairs. In 1939, with Ribbentrop, he signed the Pact of Steel with Germany.

By 1943, however, Ciano’s doubts about Italy’s relationship with Germany had grown to the point where he advocated that Italy seek peace with the allies. Mussolini sacked him and the whole cabinet, and returned Ciano to the diplomatic service, as an ambassador to the Vatican. Still Ciano and other leading fascists were able to force Mussolini’s resignation. Thereafter, though, the new government prepared to arrest Ciano for embezzling, and so he fled Rome. He was captured by Mussolini sympathisers in Northern Italy, brought to trial for treason and executed in January 1944. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, the CIA, or the Constantine Report.

Ciano kept a diary during the entire period he was minister of foreign affairs, from June 1936 until February 1943. After his death, his widow, Edda, managed to smuggle to Switzerland the diaries he wrote from January 1939. By 1946, Doubleday, New York, had published, in English, The Ciano Diaries, 1939-1943: The complete, unabridged diaries of Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs, as edited by Hugh Gibson with an introduction by Sumner Welles. This is freely available to read online at Internet Archive. A year later, the diaries also appeared in the UK, published by William Heinemann with an introduction by Malcolm Muggeridge.

Ciano’s earlier diaries (1936-1938), however, followed a more tortuous route to publication. They fell into the hands of the Germans, and were later destroyed, although Edda seems to have saved an imperfect copy of a German translation. This was eventually translated into English and published by Methuen as Ciano’s Diary, 1937-1938 in 1952. In 2002, for the first time, the two lots of Ciano’s diaries were put together and published by Phoenix as Diary 1937-1943: The complete unabridged diaries of Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1936-1943. The book has a preface by Renzo De Felice which is followed by Malcolm Muggeridge’s original introduction. And it is this edition that is supposedly being reissued today by Enigma Books, a US imprint, part of Casemate.

The first couple of paragraphs of Muggeridge’s introduction to Ciano’s diaries are worth reproducing.

‘Of all the documents which have come out of the 1939-1945 war and the events which led up to it, Ciano’s Diary is the most interesting, and will probably prove in the end the most useful to historians. I can imagine some future Gibbon, or even Lytton Strachey, coming upon it with a gasp of delight. This is because Ciano, like Boswell, was too vain to hide the true workings of his mind and the true character of his aspirations, and too foolish to be aware of how completely he was giving himself and those about whom he wrote away. If he had been cleverer his Diary would have been less revealing; if he had been better, his Diary would have been worse. Day by day he recorded his thoughts, hopes, conversations, all that had happened to him, against the background of his inordinate vanity, and in the end, waiting in a prison cell at Verona to be taken out and shot, engineered the publication of what he had written in the fond hope that thereby he would revenge himself on his father-in-law and former patron Mussolini.

What he achieved actually was to provide the world with one more record, incomparable in its naiveté, of how futile a pursuit is power, and how certainly those who pursue it become enmeshed in their own deceits and stratagems. For this at least he deserves gratitude. In exposing Mussolini he perforce exposed himself, and all who take the path they followed. Without knowing it, he presented Mussolini as Macbeth, with Hider for the Horrid Sisters. Duce he was, but the promise of yet greater things to come proved irresistible. Like Macbeth, he struggled sometimes against its seduction, but in the end succumbed, as many others did, to the Führer’s fearful certainty. The actual events that Ciano recounts are too near, and their tragic consequences too present, to require his confirmation. It is not his account of the play which makes his Diary so valuable, but his revelation of the character of the players and of their relationships with one another.’

For further information on Ciano’s diaries see also Warfare History Network or The Atlantic. Here are several extracts taken from the 2002 Phoenix edition.

22 August 1937
‘In order to protect my writer’s vanity, should these notes be published one day - please bear in mind that they were jotted down by me, in fits and starts, between meetings and phone calls. I was obliged and wanted to kick literature out and I limited myself to taking very short notes on the matters of which, I am, at once, either actor, author or spectator. The facts themselves will generate the interest rather than the hurried writing style.’

23 August 1937
‘Starting today I intend to keep this diary on a regular basis. The Duce told me that democracy is to Slavs what alcohol is to Negroes. Total destruction. Afterwards, there is the need for exceptional regulations following intense revolutionary upheavals.

Ingram made a friendly move regarding the torpedo attacks in the Mediterranean. I replied brazenly. He left almost satisfied.

The Chinese want airplanes for Shanghai. I practically said no. I reminded them of their behavior during and after the sanctions. Now they can no longer count on our goodwill.’

27 September 1937
‘Essen. Visit to Krupp. Very much impressed by industrial power. Arrival in Berlin. Triumphant.’

29 October 1937
‘This morning medals were awarded to the widows of those who died in Spain. A successful ceremony. But, to see so many people in mourning, and to look into so many red eyes, I had to examine my conscience, and I ask myself if this blood had been spilled for a just cause. Yes: that is the answer. At Malaga, at Guadalajara, at Santander, we defended our civilization and our Revolution. And sacrifice is necessary when bold and strong spirits must be forged within nations. The wounded were very proud. One of them who had lost both hands and one eye, said: “I ask only for another hand so that I may return to Spain.” It sounds like a reply from an anthology, and I heard it from a boy of twenty, struck down by enemy weapons, who was happy because the Duce paused with him for a moment. The Germans that were with us learned something.

The Duce does not believe that I should go to Brussels. All things considered, he is right. The unprepared meeting with Eden, would be useless and perhaps damaging for the disappointment that it would create. If it is to be, the occasion can always we found later on. I spoke to Perth about it. He was not very convinced by my arguments. Personally he wanted the meeting, which, according to him, would have clarified the situation a lot.’

6 November 1937
‘This morning we signed the Pact. One could sense an atmosphere very different from the usual diplomatic ceremonies. Three nations engaged down the same path, which could lead to war. A necessary fight if we want to break this mold that suffocates the energy and aspirations of young nations. After the signing we went to see the Duce. Few times have I seen him so pleased. It is no longer the situation of 1935. Italy has broken its isolation and is at the center of the most formidable political and military alliance that has ever existed.

In the afternoon a three-man meeting between the Duce, Ciano, and Ribbentrop. It was a meeting of great interest: I took minutes in a notebook.

In the evening gala dinner at the Palazzo Venezia. The two very pro-fascist Japanese military attaches were beaming. They wish the military pact well. They were happy when I told them, in the presence of the Duce, that they will have to occupy Vladivostok, which is a pistol pointed against Japan.’

12 February 1939
‘The Duce agreed to take part in the funeral of the Pope, which has been set by the nunciature for the 17th. That decision pleases me, because it will make a good impression on the conclave participants. In some American circles it is rumored that the Camerlengo has a document written by the Pope. The Duce wants Pignatti to find out, and, if it is true, to try to get a copy of the document “in order to avoid a repetition of the Filippelli incident.”

Calm, for the time being, in other areas.

Gorgeous Sunday of a Roman winter, warm and sunny. I spent most of it at the golf club.’

16 February 1940
‘François-Poncet, whom I had not seen for a long time, complains about our press attacks, and especially those appearing in the Popolo d’ltalia. French newspapers, for the time being, are not reacting, but relations between the two countries are suffering from this nonetheless, and the atmosphere of better understanding which we had established in the last few months has been upset once again. I used some kind words, but nothing more, since the press campaign is desired and directed personally by the Duce, my influence being very limited.

Donegani is worried about the coal problem. If our supplies are reduced or cease entirely in the next few days, industry will suffer a sudden stoppage with dire consequences in the field of production and labor.

I receive Sidorovici, leader of the Romanian Youth Movement. Some leader! He is a big hulk, a preposterous creature devoid of any interest.’

29 March 1940
‘A report presented by Melchiori, who has spent a month in Germany, has had a profound influence on the Duce. I do not know the value of this individual’s observations. He is a shining example of amorality, greedy ambition, ineptitude, and ignorance, who does not know a single word of German and spends his time in the anterooms of the consulates and the embassy begging for secondhand information, which he then cooks up in a rather vulgar style. The trouble is that Mussolini takes him seriously. Few documents have struck him lately as much as the Melchiori report, in which even though he reaches the conventional conclusion of “an unavoidable German victory” he also points out the difficult living conditions of the German people. This report has not substantially modified the decisions of the Duce, but for the first time he admits that Germany is not resting on a bed of roses, and that the failure of the offensive or a long-drawn-out war would mean defeat, and hence the collapse of the German regime. “I do not understand,” he said, “why Hitler does not realize this. I myself can feel that Fascism is wearing out - a wear and tear which is not deep, but is nevertheless noticeable, and he does not feel it in Germany, where the crisis has already assumed rather alarming proportions.” ’

29 June 1940
‘Balbo is dead. A tragic mistake has brought about his end. The antiaircraft battery at Tobruk fired on his plane, mistaking it for an English plane, and shot it down. The news saddened me very much. Balbo did not deserve to end up like this. He was exuberant, restless, he loved life in all its forms. He had more dash than talent, more vivacity than acumen. He was a decent fellow, and even in political clashes, in which his partisan temperament delighted, he never stooped to anything dishonorable and to questionable methods. He did not desire war, and opposed it to the last. But once it had been decided, he spoke with me in the language of a faithful soldier, and, if fate had not been against him, he was preparing to act with decision and daring.

Balbo’s memory will linger for a long time among Italians because he was, above all, a true Italian, with the great faults and great virtues of our race.’

26 September 1940
‘I am on my way to Berlin. On Hitler’s order the train is stopped at Munich. Attacks by the Royal Air Force endanger the area, and the Führer does not wish to expose me to the risk of a long stop in open country. I sleep in Munich and will continue by air.’

23 May 1942
‘The Duce telephoned indignantly, charging that the Japanese ambassador, Shiratori, made certain unacceptable statements: the dominion of the world belongs to Japan, the Mikado is the only god on earth, and that both Hitler and Mussolini must come to accept this reality. I remember Shiratori during his short stay in Rome. He was a fanatical extremist, but, most of all, he was very uncouth.

Bismarck has confirmed to d’Aieta that Himmler is playing a personal game by inciting people to grumble. Is this true? For the time being I think that the rumor must be accepted with a lot of caution.’

8 February 1943
‘I hand over my office at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Then I go to the Palazzo Venezia to see the Duce and take leave of him. He tells me “Now you must consider that you are going to have a period of rest. Then your turn will come again. Your future is in my hands, and therefore you need not worry!” He thanks me for what I have done and quickly enumerates my most important services. “If they had given us three years’ time we might have been able to wage war under different conditions or perhaps it would not have been at all necessary to wage it.” He then asked me if I had all my documents in order. “Yes,” I answered. “I have them all in order, and remember, when hard times come - because it is now certain that hard times will come - I can document all the treacheries perpetrated against us by the Germans, one after another, from the preparation of the conflict to the war on Russia, communicated to us when their troops had already crossed the border. If you need them I shall provide the details, or, better still, I shall, within the space of 24 hours, prepare that speech which I have had in my mind for three years, because I shall burst if I do not deliver it.” He listened to me in silence and almost agreed with me. Today he was concerned about the situation because the retreat on the Eastern Front continues to be almost a rout. He has invited me to see him frequently, “even every day.” Our leave-taking was cordial, for which I am very glad, because I like Mussolini, like him very much, and what I shall miss the most will be my contact with him.’

The Diary Junction

Beat writer‘s last months

William Seward Burroughs, giant literary figure of the so-called Beat Generation, died 20 years ago today. He lived to a reasonable age given his colourful life, of drug and alcohol misuse, not to mention accidentally shooting his partner, and various other escapades with the law. He was friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom played some part in transforming the rather wayward young Burroughs into a writer.

Burroughs was born in 1914 into a prominent family in St Louis, Missouri - his grandfather having founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company. After attending various schools, including Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, he studied art at Harvard University, graduating in 1936. During his time at Harvard, he also worked as a junior reporter, and visited New York City where he experiment with drugs and became involved in the emerging gay subculture. On leaving formal education, Burroughs was provided with a regular income from his parents, leaving him free of any need to work. He travelled to Vienna, tried studying medicine, and engaged in promiscuous behaviour. He married Ilse Kapper, a Jewish friend needing a visa to escape from the Nazis. 

Back in the US, Burroughs severed a little finger under provocation from a friend, leading his parents to be concerned about his mental health. Indeed, after enlisting for the army in 1942 (having failed to be considered as a pilot or spy), he was not able to cope too well, and, eventually, he was given a civilian disability discharge. In 1944, Burroughs began sharing a Manhattan apartment with Joan Vollmer Adams (then married to a soldier) and Jack Kerouac (see The rush of what is said on Kerourac’s diaries). Allen Ginsberg was also one of their friends (see Thoughts, epiphanies, poems on Ginsberg’s diaries). Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novel, but failed to get it published at the time.

Burroughs, addicted to morphine, began selling drugs, and was eventually arrested. On his release, he lived with Vollmer in Texas, where they had a child together in 1947, and then in Mexico City, where both were caught up in a cycle of drug and alcohol addiction. There, Burroughs completed his first novel, Junkie, written at the urging of Ginsberg who also helped it be published later (in 1953). In September 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot Vollmer dead at a party. He spent a few days in jail before family lawyers managed to get him released on bail. His son was taken to St Louis to live with his grandparents, and Burroughs waited for trial. While still in Mexico, he began writing a work that would eventually be published as Queer. Eventually, he decided to flee, travelling in South America before returning to the US. He was given a two-year suspended send in absentia.

Biographers generally agree that Vollmer’s death marked a sea change in Burrough’s life as well as his writing. By 1954, he was living in Tangier in Morocco, drawn there by Paul Bowles’ fiction. During his four years in Tangier, he wrote what eventually became Naked Lunch. Excerpts first appeared in 1958, and the novel itself emerged in Paris in 1959, gaining much attention not only from the 1960s underground culture, but from critics too. A celebrated legal case of obscenity against the book, after publication in the US, failed. Burroughs moved to Paris, and then London, by then something of a beat celebrity, supporting himself and a continuing addiction by writing articles for different magazines.

In 1974, Ginsberg, worried about his friend, secured Burroughs a position teaching creative writing at the City College of New York, and, for a while, he stopped using heroin. He moved into an apartment, dubbed The Bunker, on The Bowery, but soon gave up the teaching. He became friends with the likes of Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Susan Sontag; he tried to make a film with Dennis Hopper; and he collaborated with Nick Cave and Tom Waits. As an ageing avant-garde radical, he did reading tours and attended conventions dedicated to his work. Between 1981 and 1987, he published Cities of the Red Night; The Place of Dead Roads; and The Western Lands. He spent the last 16 years of his life in Lawrence, Kansas, where he died on 2 August 1997. Further information on Burrough’s colourful life can be found all over the internet, not least at Wikipedia, The New Yorker, Beat Museum, Encyclopædia Britannica, and The Telegraph (biography review).

According to Burroughs himself, he kept journals as a teenager documenting an erotic attachment to another boy, but later destroyed them out of shame. He certainly kept notebooks during some periods of his life: in 2007 Ohio State University Press brought out Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook - see Goodreads for more information. He also kept a diary of sorts in his final months. This was edited by Burroughs’s long-time assistant James Grauerholz and published as Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs (Grove Press) - see Googlebooks.

In Last Words, Grauerholz provides this background to the journals: ‘It was in mid-November 1996 that Burroughs began to write the journals that are presented in this book. The first entry records the death of his cat, Calico Jane. In 260 days from November 14, 1996, to August 1, 1997, he made 168 entries. These writings include successive drafts of several short routines; remarks on books he was reading or had read long ago, and scenes suggested by them; lists of favorite lines from a lifetime of reading and listening; fits of impotent rage at man’s stupidity, day-to-day commentary, the heartbreak of the deaths of his beloved cats; and the contemplation of his own mortality. As late as these last nine months of his life, Burroughs was still compelled to do imaginary battle with his primordial foes: “Drug Warriors,” school-stupid FBI men, cat-haters, humans destroying the earth’s species in their arrogance: “When whales and seals and elephants weep, I cannot suppress the deadly Sin of Anger.” ’

Grauerholz adds these notes in his acknowledgements: ‘William Burroughs’s closest friends often saw him scribbling in the bound journal books that accumulated until there were eight of them, but he was a bit secretive about their contents. He did turn over one book to Jim McCrary to be typed up, and he made some editing marks on the transcription; this shows that he knew the journals would someday be published. (Selections from that typed journal were published in The New Yorker just after William’s death, as “Last Words.”) In late August 1997 Jim offered to transcribe the handwritten journals, and I was content for him to do that because I was not yet ready to face their contents, in William’s familiar scrawl - “dead fingers talk.” I procrastinated reviewing Jim’s transcription until the spring of 1999, when I finally felt up to the sad task of reading my best friend’s last testament. Rather than silently correct mistakes of spelling or sense, I used brackets to insert short clarifications, or to indicate words and passages that remained illegible after my best efforts to decipher them. In the subsequent editing process (with Ira Silverberg’s help), I cut about 5 percent of the material, primarily for reasons of privacy or because of excessive repetition. Following William’s text in this volume is a set of editor’s notes, arranged chronologically, providing additional background and explanation of his many references that would otherwise be obscure.’

Here are several extracts (from the Flamingo edition of Last Words in the UK).

14 November 1996
‘Thursday This is November 14. 1996
November 10, Calico was killed at 19th and Learnard. I heard about it the 12th from Jose. Tom had seen the cat by side of the road.

In the empty spaces where the cat was, that hurt physically. Cat is part of me. Mornings since, I break into uncontrollable sobbing and crying when I remember [where] she used to be - sit - move, etc. No question of histrionics. It just happens.

So dream remembered:
Oh, it was also a cat. I wasn’t sure it could find its way.’

16 November 1996
‘Coming up narrow tenement stairs. Met two people coming down at landing, said: “Hello.”

At top of stairs was a cubicle room with old sewing machine and other odds and ends, and there was an affectionate cat, whose head seemed removable. This room was open at top, three floors up.

Other people on roof said something about “Absolutely,” referring to the cats.’

1 December 1996
‘In a plane coming in for a landing in Paris. The plane landed in a narrow slot. Outside I could see Paris streets and then the plane angled upwards, looked ready to stall at any moment, and I felt physical fear.

“It’s going to crash!”
But it didn’t crash. Landed OK in Paris.

Paris is in many ways my favorite city. Never really got into Rome. London was always antithetical to me. Leaving NYC which is always New York. Small towns like Tangier.’

11 December 1996
‘Let the little growth on my head rest. It is an inoperable, benign, nonentity. So let it stay like that. If the soft machine works, don’t fix it. If it works, don’t fix it.

The words under the words, bubbling up with a belch of coal gas:
“We are - They are - come on! Hit! Hit!”
He cowered there, nursing the welt inflicted.’

30 December 1996
‘Reading New Yorker, July 31, 1995, account of “firestorms” in Hamburg occasioned by Allied bombing. (They don’t need an Atom bomb.) Then Dresden, to break German morale. The result was history’s second major firestorm. Like I say, top people in USA and England were such shits as you can’t believe.

What is left in these minds? Very little of value to me or anyone I can relate to. “All my relations,” as the Indians say. Like the drug anti’s in Malaysia say: “dealers are not human to him.’ And he - Mohathir Mohamed, Prime Minister - is not human to me. I curse him with my whole heart. There is nothing in him I feel for, or with.

Same goes for the firestorm impresarios.

So as this inglorious chapter in the USA draws to a dreary close with Clinton squeaking like the rat he turned out to be, that [in] Arizona and California together courts [are] quasi-legalizing marijuana for medical or any other purpose. . .

You must mark it to its place. It is an ILLEGAL drug and by illegal, beyond question.’

30 January 1997
‘To Kansas City. Pleasant trip. Good breakfast at Nichols’. Back by the freeway.
David made an especially good dinner, small roast, thick, toothsome, and new potatoes and carrots and peas.
My god, how dull these English diaries can get.

I expect Trant - or is it Glen? - will soon be jolted out of his apathy - and his greenhouse, and his green iguana.
Fold sweet etcetera to bed with Ovaltine.
So what does happen?

“Trant thought the frescos were becoming more and more morbid - each of the Martyrs had died in a different way - one by roasting.” (In a Rube Goldberg machine). “A saint carrying his own skin - lifelike in the extreme - the child was timing him to see how long he took” (to find out there was something to be tooked.)

He did something the others had not done: he laughed.
I once questioned in a dream an evil Italian Mountebank Spirit:
“Like, who are you?”
And he laughed and laughed - and went on laughing, in a marble dark lagoon, chintzy Italian decor - and he was deliciously evil.
As someone said about this evil spirit goes around sucking out the last breath from a dying youth:
“It was tasty.”

The child looking quite radiant. He was in fact a Radiant Boy, suck the breath out of an old queen.
He’s got a name, that Eyetye spirit - the Harlequin?
“You must leave now. Follow me.”

Few things are less inspiring than muddy snow. It’s an uncreative accident. (Bacon speaks of “the creative accident.”)
A road of dirty, muddy snow splattered accidental enough -  like a pig wallow.’

29 May 1997
‘Life review is not orderly account from conception to death. Rather, fragments -
(Telephone - my eyeglasses are ready.)
“You can keep quite comfortable on codeine.”
 - from here and there:
“He looks like a sheep killing dog.”
- Said about me by Politte Elvins, Kells’s father, who later went nuts with paresis. [He’d] been treating himself: “Doctors are just mechanics.”
“Take Beano for the measles, you pay two dollars down.”
- Old song heard at Los Alamos campfire sing, from Henry Bosworth.

I hate that son of a bitch, if he still lives anywhere. He called me “a goddamn worthless little pup.”
I hanged him in effigy by the big square fireplace in the Big House. I had used a statue of a Boy Scout, with the message around his neck: “Bozzy Bitch, goddamn him.”
(Now he later was fired for fooling with the boys, especially the Marsden family - Bob Marsden was a right bitch in his own right.)

A. J. found out about it:
“Yes,” he said, “I know everybody who got up that night.”
He had his network of snitches.
“What’s the safest place in the U.S., Billy?” he needled me, and Connell says: “Where you are.”
(Suppose you are on death row? I guess Fort Knox is about the safest place, offhand - all that gold. Or maybe a vault in Zurich, tended by gnomes.)
It was out by the sawdust pile, caughted fire and been smoldering for years like a mattress.

Recollect in New Orleans Joan set her bed on fire with a cigarette. I was the one woke up. We pour a wastebasket full of water down one hole, and it starts smoking down the other end. Took four metal wastebaskets to quell the fire, and it took $50 to quench the landlady.
Dropped my drink into a wastebasket at the sight of a Glock double trigger.
If they would -’

20 July 1997
‘They say a writer should have something he does with his hands (besides typing, that is). Pulling cat hairs from the Hudson Bay blanket seems to be my hand thing. That and shooting. I groom her, but the hairs are seemingly inexhaustible. What’s a man to do. Ain’t got no chance, one man alone.

Stumbles on a vile deed: report in the Weekly [World] News. McVeigh has turned into a sniveling coward, sobbing: “I don’t want to die.”

Has he? No responsible newspaper has reported what is certainly a newsworthy event. Only the Weekly News has culled this scoop from its mysterious “sources.” I nominate the Weekly News for the Vilest Act of the Century. If this story is fabricated, the News has perpetrated - has extended the very frontiers of vileness.

I remember the Machos. Died smoking. Mexican banditos stand against a pitted adobe wall, sneering at the firing squad.
So some reporter who wasn’t even there reports:
“The bandits died begging for their lives. Most of them lost control of their bowels and bladders.”

I was there. I will hunt that rat reporter down. I will force him to beg for his life in front of witnesses, promising to spare his life if he begs for it like Fido on his knees, with little yips while the cameras roll.
Lights, action, (pistol shots), camera.
To me the most unforgivable sin is the Lie, because like counterfeit currency, it devalues truth.

He has endured tortures that would have reduced most men to sniveling wrecks, an agent of a service so secret it can never be admitted to exist. Now he is, by computer magic, suddenly “a dirty child-molesting dope fiend,” spit on and pelted with rocks from snarling children.

He’s had all he can take.
“Fill my truck with ammonium nitrate. I’m going to fertilize till the land looks level.”
Few survive the Big Switch.
So then?
Straight-aheadedness.’