Kentucky and Tennessee both gone

‘This morning there comes a dispatch from Chattanooga stating that the enemy had taken Fort Donelson. Generals Pillow, Floyd, Buckner with their commands are prisoners, and that Nashville is in their power: Kentucky and Tennessee both gone, 12,000 of our men are prisoners.’ This is from a diary kept by the crippled and housebound teenager, LeRoy Wiley Gresham, during the American Civil War. Not published until 2018, the publisher compares it to Anne Frank’s famous WW2 diary.

Gresham was born in  1847, in Macon, Georgia, to John Jones Gresham - an attorney, judge, twice mayor of Macon, textile company president, plantation owner of some 100 enslaved people - and his wife Mary Baxter Gresham. Aged eight, a chimney collapse crushed his left leg, causing lifelong impairment. Despite physical limitations, he was precociously intelligent: a voracious reader of Shakespeare, Dickens, Latin and Greek classics; an adept chess player; and a talented mathematician and poet.

Though Gresham never fully returned to health, he remained under continuous care, receiving various Victorian remedies including morphine, opiates, plasters, belladonna, and mercury - all to little effect. Over the years, Gresham’s condition worsened: by 15 he described himself as ‘weaker and more helpless than I ever was,’ later contracting both pulmonary and spinal tuberculosis (Pott’s disease). He died on 18 June  1865, at the age just 17 (only weeks after the Civil War’s ended). Further information is available at Wikipedia.

Gresham is remembered today because of a near daily diary he kept from June 1860 to June 1865. It remained largely unknown until featured in the Library of Congress’s 2012-2013 exhibition, The Civil War in America, and in Harper’s Magazine and in The Washington Post. Subsequently, in 2018, historian Janet E. Croon edited and annotated the diary, releasing it as The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865 (Savas Beatie). This edition includes extensive footnotes, family charts, a medical foreword, and appendices highlighting his final years. Much of the book can be sampled at Googlebooks, and images of the original pages are available at the Library of Congress website. Reviews can be read here and here.

The publisher says: [The diary] captures the spirit and the character of a young privileged white teenager witnessing the demise of his world even as his own body slowly failed him. Just as Anne Frank has come down to us as the adolescent voice of World War II, LeRoy Gresham will now be remembered as the young voice of the Civil War South.’

9 November 1861

‘Warm and very windy. Lockett and Bates came and spent the morning with me. No more from Port Royal. Mother is terribly scared. There has been a great battle at Columbus, Kentucky. Our side was commanded by Gen. Pillow. The Yankees by McLernand and Bradford. 8,000 men. Our ammunition gave out and we charged with the bayonet and routed them. They threw away all encumberments. The paper says “it is a bloody battle and brilliant victory.” A great many women and children came up from Savannah this morning. Aunt Sarah among them; Cousin Eliza comes up tonight. Gov. Brown’s message is out today. I have a bad pain in my back and took a Dover’s Powder. Bob Lockett hit Allen on the head with a rock today. We had a great deal of fun last night. Mary Campbell stayed to tea. We had a “white horse” to our delight and the terror of Allen, who cried like a baby. I played chess with Uncle LeRoy who beat me because of the above frolic. He left for the plantation this morning. Father bought Thomas a pair of boots.’

20 December 1861

‘Cloudy and warm. Great news! Minister Adams has demanded his passports. War with England is thought to be inevitable! Mr. Faulkner is in Norfolk. The 3rd regiment has been moved back to Norfolk. The Yankees have certainly got their hands full. A fight is hourly expected in Kentucky! Father bought Thomas an elegant new knife! Cotton is 42 cents a pound in New York! Father was advanced 15 cents a pound! Thomas has got a very bad cold. I got a letter from Wilson yesterday, giving a description of his journey to Athens. The wagon came up bringing Betty, her baby, and a boy ‘Bil.’ Uncle LeRoy came this evening at nine o’clock.’

21 December 1861

‘Warm, clear, delightful. I went round on Bond’s Hill to see the funeral procession of Mr. Bloom. It was in Mr. Johnston’s house. Colonel J. E. Jones commanded the military. Sam does not get along well at all. He has not gone one curb down. They were too large. The news about Minister Adams is contradicted.’

22 December 1861

‘Cold, damp. Rained in the night pretty hard. I took a Dover’s Powder on account of my leg. There is an account of a small fight on the Potomac. Our side was repulsed with 30 killed and as many wounded. No more from Mason and Slidell. The coals popped so tremendously we moved into Mother’s room. Dr. Fitzgerald came to see Betty yesterday and put a plaster on her and gave her some medicine.’

1 January 1862

‘The New Year comes in with a clear cool day. All the folks went to the Supper last night and Thomas stayed home with me. Mr. Emmett Johnson is to be buried here today. Mother has gone down now to help give the supper out to the poor. Tracy came up to see us yesterday. Played a game of chess: Tom beat me. Thomas wrote to Uncle Richard today. Mrs. Vardell, Mrs. Ralston’s sister, died very suddenly here yesterday.’

2 January 1862

‘Warm and cloudy. Took a game of chess: Tom beat me. ‘Ginco Piano’ opening. Maty, Wills, and Olivia Bates spent the morning here. It is rumored that they are firing on Fort Pickens. The fort commenced first. There are also reports of fighting between Savannah and Charleston. Finished The War of Roses. The weather today is as warm as in spring. Uncle Richard has got back to Portsmouth again and Uncle John is opposite.’

17 February 1862

‘Cold, damp, raw. Had very considerable sore throat through the night and this morning. We were fighting all day at Fort Donelson and had whipped them, taking 1,000 prisoners and were driving them back with cold steel, &c. This morning there comes a dispatch from Chattanooga stating that the enemy had taken Fort Donelson. Generals Pillow, Floyd, Buckner with their commands are prisoners, and that Nashville is in their power: Kentucky and Tennessee both gone, 12,000 of our men are prisoners. All the government stores in Nashville lost, and amid all this, Savannah is in imminent danger. So is Weldon, the key to all the railroads that run to Virginia. It’s perfectly awful! T wrote a letter to Mother today. It is reported that the enemy had shelled Bowling Green and, on account of some movement of the enemy, General Johnston had evacuated it. It commenced raining this eve at 3 and rained hard until now, 9 o’clock. Father and Uncle LeRoy took a game of chess: odds queen. Father mated Uncle LeRoy and I played 7 games of backgammon: I 4, he 3. Thomas and Uncle LeRoy played 7 games of draughts: Thomas beat 3 games.’

18 February 1862

‘Cloudy, damp, and rainy. Rained the whole night and until nine AM. Thomas is writing to Mother. Some people don’t believe that news about Fort Donelson. There has been a dispatch saying that Nashville has not surrendered and do not know about Donelson. Commenced to rain at ten AM, and has rained very hard until 9 PM. A rainy day truly. We received a short letter from Mother. She got along very well and was met in Sparta by the family. My sore throat is entirely well.’

By golly, what a day!

‘By golly, what a day! It is seldom that days which one has anticipated in imagination for weeks or months ever measure up to one’s expectations, but this one has gone far beyond.’ This is Joseph Clark Grew - a career American diplomat who died 80 years ago today - starting a long diary entry about the day he took up a posting as ambassador to Japan. He served for nearly a decade in Tokyo, up to and including Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, after which he was interned for some months. Once back in the US, he published his diaries under the title Ten Years in Japan.   

Grew was born in 1880, in Boston, Massachusetts, into a prominent New England family with deep roots in American history. He was raised in an environment that valued public service and international awareness, and he received his early education at the private Groton School in Massachusetts, a training ground for many future American leaders. He went on to attend Harvard University, graduating in 1902 with a degree in history.

Grew joined the US Foreign Service in 1904 and quickly proved his competence in various international postings. Early assignments included Cairo, Mexico City, and Berlin, where he gained experience in complex diplomatic environments. His career advanced steadily, and he was posted to major European capitals, including a significant tenure in Vienna. Grew served as secretary of the American delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, an important early career milestone. In 1927, he was appointed Ambassador to Switzerland, and later, to Turkey. 

Grew married Alice Perry, the daughter of a US Navy admiral, in 1905, and they would have four children. Alice often accompanied Grew on his foreign postings and played a supportive role in his career, hosting social functions, for example, that were essential to diplomatic work.

Perhaps Grew’s most consequential role was as US Ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1941. He witnessed firsthand the rising tensions between the US and Japan and attempted to avert the drift toward war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he was interned in Japan for several months before being repatriated. He then served as Under Secretary of State and played a key role in shaping post-war U.S. policy toward Japan.

Grew retired in 1945 and spent his later years writing and reflecting on his diplomatic service. He died on 25 May 1965, just two days before his 85th birthday, leaving behind a legacy as one of America’s most experienced and thoughtful diplomats. Further information is available from Wikipedia and The New York Times.

Grew kept detailed diaries for much of his working life. In 1944, after returning from Tokyo, Hammond, Hammond & Co published a first volume of his diary entries: Ten Years in Japan - a contemporary record drawn from the Diaries and Private and Official Papers of Joseph C. Grew. This can be read freely online at Internet Archive. Subsequently, in 1952, Houghton, Mifflin published Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904-1945. This comprehensive two volume selection of Grew’s diary entries, as edited by Walter Johnson, can also be read online. The following entry, detailing his first day as American ambassador to Japan, is taken from Ten Years in Japan.

6 June 1932

‘Tokyo. By golly, what a day! It is seldom that days which one has anticipated in imagination for weeks or months ever measure up to one’s expectations, but this one has gone far beyond. I was up at the absurd hour of 4:45 a.m., hating to miss a trick. Thick fog and only the shadowy form of other ships to be seen. We had skirted along the coast of Japan last evening and had anchored in the roads of Yokohama sometime during the night after the foghorn had wailed drearily for an hour or more. Then, at 5:30, pandemonium: the stewards banging with full force at every cabin door and shouting in raucous voices for us to get up and meet the quarantine officer, and five minutes later repeating the performance. Those stewards certainly know how to carry out their orders with the utmost thoroughness, but I wonder if others don’t get the same results without making you want to punch them on the nose for the way they do it.

Anyway, we did meet the quarantine officer at 6 a.m., although it was quite unnecessary for Alice and our daughter Elsie (who had slept for only two hours) to have dressed so early, as a special Japanese officer had been deputed to look after us and he went through our passports with Parsons without seeing us at all. Another Japanese officer examined our police dog, Kim, and issued a special health certificate, while still a third man took charge of our baggage. It was all done with quiet efficiency and the least possible bother.

Then, even before we docked at 7, the reception began. Yesterday there had been a flight of welcoming radiograms. This morning one deputation after another came on board and to our cabins. These visitors included half a dozen Japanese newspaper correspondents and photographers, and finally the good Edwin Neville, Counsellor of the Embassy, and his wife. We posed for photographs and were asked questions by the press; naturally I refused to say a word about politics, but my answers to their innocent questions were later adroitly manipulated into a quoted interview, the Japan Times bearing headlines, MR. GREW GIVES AN INTERVIEW, which began out of a clear sky: ‘I have written a book called Sport and Travel in the Far East but I know hardly anything about the present Japan. I hope to get down to serious study when I’m settled in my new post. Mrs. Grew’s mother, who was a daughter of Commodore Perry . . .’ etc., etc. Some mother-in-law!

Well, we took leave of Captain Ahlin of the President Coolidge and motored to Tokyo in a drizzling rain, but the ugliness of the route was lost on me as Neville and I, who drove together, had too many interesting things to talk about. Then the Embassy. Big bushes, smooth green lawns, flowers, fountains, tessellated pools, and the buildings themselves, four of them, white with black ironwork trimmings, already framed in luxuriant trees - a real oasis in the more or less ugly surroundings of the new-grown city. The residence is on the crest of a hill looking down on the chancery and the dormitories, to which one descends on little stepping-stones through a thick grove of leafy woods. As for the interior of the residence, when we had explored it with the Nevilles, examined the furniture and curtains and the thick luxurious carpets in the big salon and the little salon and the still littler salon, the smoking-room with its wonderful wainscoting, its many bookshelves and abundant deep cupboards (where at least I shall have space enough to file and store, separate and catalogue, to my heart’s content), the loggia, the banquet hall, the private dining-room, the cloakroom, and the seven bedrooms and the four bathrooms, the ironing-room, sewing-room, and storerooms - while Elsie emitted little shrieks of delight and Kim wagged his entire acceptance of the new situation - I asked Alice how many cons she found, and she answered: ‘Not a single con; they’re all pros.’

We all went to the chancery, passing the swimming pool on the way. I met all the staff and then received the principal American correspondents: Babb, of the Associated Press; Byas, of the New York Times; Vaughn, of the United Press; Fleisher, of the Japan Advertiser. We chatted, and I spoke of my hope for the closest cooperation which would be of mutual benefit and urged them to drop in often. Colonel McIlroy and Captain Johnson, the Military and Naval Attachés, told Neville that their regulations required them to call on me in full uniform, but I sent back word I hoped they would forget their regulations, as we could have a much pleasanter and more satisfactory chat if they would cut out the gold lace, which would undoubtedly leave me tongue-tied.

Maya Lindsley Poole and Parsons came to lunch. I didn’t know Maya until she introduced herself at table. It was amusing to remember that when she was pointed out to me at the Copley Hall dance in January, 1904, as the girl who had just returned from Japan, and later when I asked to be introduced to ‘the girl who had just returned from Japan,’ I was led up to Alice instead.

At 3, Neville came to take me to the Diet to call on Viscount Saito, who could not leave the session to receive me at the Gaimusho, or Foreign Office. He is old - over seventy, I believe - and looks old and tired. Conversation was halting, and he seemed to have too much on his mind to concentrate, but he is decidedly distinguished; he was formerly an admiral in the Navy and Governor-General of Korea, and has now stepped into the breach as Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs to tide over, with his personal prestige, and probably temporarily, a difficult cabinet situation. I stayed a very short time, knowing that he was busy in the session and that we could talk only platitudes; left with him notes asking for audiences with the Emperor and Empress, copies of my letters of credence and the letters of recall of Cameron Forbes, my predecessor, and a copy of my proposed speech to the Emperor. As Neville liked it, we sent it in. Afterwards I called on Baron de Bassompierre, the Belgian Ambassador and Dean of the Diplomatic Corps - very pleasant.

Then, at 5, Alice had the entire staff with wives and daughters to tea - sixty-five people. What a staff! And what a situation that enabled us to give a reception, with buffet, for sixty-five people on the very day of our arrival! Cam Forbes’ Japanese servants are all on the job and functioning like clockwork; I suppose we shall keep them all.

Bingham and Parsons came to dinner. The latter is to stay with us until he can get his apartment in one of the dormitories into shape. I have written up the day while the initial impressions are still fresh, and now, thank heaven, I shall hit the hay at 10:30 and hit it hard.’

I was rather incredulous

‘He explained his call to my astonishment that Beadle, Tatum, and I were to be the co-recipients of the Nobel prize in medicine this year. I was rather incredulous: he insisted the AP was quoting the rumors and he was quite sure it would be announced Thursday.’ This is part of Joshua Lederberg’s diary entry on the day he heard he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. Lederberg, who was born a century ago today, was an American scientist who pioneered work in bacterial genetics but who also advanced the influence of science and scientists in public policy development.

Lederberg was born 23 May 1925 in Montclair, New Jersey, the oldest of three sons. His father, a rabbi, and mother had emigrated from Palestine the year before. The family moved to Manhattan when Lederberg was still an infant. He attended Stuyvesant High School, which specialised in science and technology, and went on to Columbia University, where he studied zoology. There he came under the influence of biochemist Francis J. Ryan, who nurtured his passion to ‘bring the power of chemical analysis to the secrets of life’. In 1943, he enrolled in the Navy’s V-12 training program, which combined an accelerated premedical and medical curriculum, and was able to work at the clinical pathology laboratory at St. Albans Naval Hospital, gaining first-hand experience with parasites.

Lederberg returned to Columbia, finished his degree, and began training as a medical student, also continuing research under Ryan. He was soon much inspired by Oswald Avery’s DNA discoveries, and took a leave of absence to work with Edward L. Tatum, at Yale, an expert in bacteriology and the genetics of micro-organisms. At Yale, he made significant discoveries, including a new understanding of how bacteria evolve and acquire new properties, such as antibiotic resistance.

Lederberg then began mapping the E. coli chromosome, to show the exact locations of its genes. With Tatum’s support, he submitted research on genetic recombination in bacteria as his doctoral thesis, receiving a PhD degree from Yale in 1947. A year earlier he married a fellow scientist, Esther M. Zimmer. Instead of returning to finish a medical degree, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin. There, he was soon making breakthroughs, discovering, with Norton Zinder, how genetic material could be transferred from one strain of the bacterium Salmonella typhimurium to another using viral material. In 1954, he was promoted to Professor.

Two years later, the Society of Illinois Bacteriologists simultaneously awarded Joshua Lederberg and Esther Lederberg the Pasteur Medal, for ’their outstanding contributions to the fields of microbiology and genetics’. And in 1958, Lederberg, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum. Lederberg’s prize was cited ‘for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of the genetic material of bacteria’; and his colleagues were cited for ‘their discovery that genes act by regulating definite chemical events’.

Just days before receiving news of the Nobel Prize, Lederberg accepted an offer to become the first chairman of the newly-established Department of Genetics at Stanford University’s School of Medicine where he continued to lead research in bacterial genetics. But his interests also widened, relating genetics to the wider context of human health and biology, winning a place for biologists within the burgeoning US space programme. Beyond biological research, he became involved in expanding the role of computers in scientific research, bringing science into matters of public policy, and advising government on such issues. From 1966 to 1971, he wrote a weekly column - Science and Man - for the Washington Post.

In 1966, Lederberg divorced his wife, with whom he had had no children; two years later he married psychiatrist Marguerite Stein Kirsch. They had one daughter. Lederberg became University Professor Emeritus at Rockefeller University in 1990. There, he resumed his own research, continued to advise government and to lecture widely about science issues as they relate to public policies, such as those concerned with bioterrorism and infectious diseases. He died in 2008, Further information is available online from Wikipedia, Nasa, DNA from the beginning, a New York Times obituary, or the National Library of Medicine’s Profiles in science website.

The National Library of Medicine holds an archive of Lederberg’s papers, some of which it has made freely available online. Among these files are images of, and extracts from, Lederberg’s diaries (which range from 1948 to 1963).

20 January 1945
‘I had the evening all to myself, and particularly the excruciating pleasure of reading Avery ’43 on the deoxyribose nucleic acid responsible for type transformation in Pneumococcus. Terrific and unlimited in its implications. Viruses are gene-type compounds, but they cannot grow on synthetic or even dead media, and their capacity for production is limited to reproduction. The TF of Pneumococcus has every characteristic of a mutation. The obvious questions still to be considered are the fraction of serum that is involved in the reaction system; the induction of mutation in the TF by use of x-ray and more controllable methods; the problems of its antigenic specificity and relations to the specific polysaccharide whose manufacture it regulates or initiates. Also the possibility of activity of TF in vitro or in killed systems must be investigated, although the presence of phosphatases and desoxyribonucleases present a difficult problem. I can see real cause for excitement in this stuff though.’

Lederberg wrote a note on the transcript of the following diary entry as follows: ‘I was not keeping a diary at those days but this particular event led me to make notes on it just at the time.’

26 October 1958
‘[. . .] I was to work at the lab until about 12:30, then pick up Phyllis and Margaret for lunch and then see Phyllis off to her plane: --> Columbus->Denver->SFO->Sydney. At 11:30 + or - there was a call from a Mr. Lindquist of the “Tijding...” newspaper in Stockholm - the New York correspondent. He explained his call to my astonishment that Beadle, Tatum, and I were to be the co-recipients of the Nobel prize in medicine this year. I was rather incredulous: he insisted the AP was quoting the rumors and he was quite sure it would be announced Thursday. It’s no surprise, of course, that Beadle should be honored this way and it is a perceptive courtesy for Tatum but I am still quite astonished (as I was for the NAS last year) to be added on. I just had the impression that this kind of dignification in biology should go to the venerables and veterans and it is a bit of a shock to be classed that way. Of course in physics quite young men, e.g. Willis Lamb have been marked this way too. But I’m worried enough at keeping up a lab career that this kind of stigma has some dreadful connotations: I guess I just don’t believe in memorializing the live and kicking. On the whole I’m a little afraid the fuss and bother more than outweigh the egotistic satisfactions, the cash and the prestige factors that might help in getting my lab going. Perhaps I’m exaggerating the fuss; I was glad enough to be off the cover of Time, however! Anyhow I should have guessed sooner: several clues make some more sense now! - George Klein’s enigmatic correspondence (saying earlier he’d see me this year, then denying he was coming to the U.S.); Leo Goldberg’s request for a photograph; a telephone interview yesterday or Friday by Dag Nystadter reporter; George’s request for a bibliography last spring ( I suppose it did occur to me that George did have something of the sort in his mind then, but hardly this year.) Anyhow the trouble is it is by no means certain and there must be some possibility it is a mistake; I am rather nervously awaiting the AP bulletin to be picked up locally as I’m sure I’ll have no peace after that! I do feel as much as ever that the nonsense ought to be abolished but I don’t have the courage to meet it head on and I’m afraid it would raise even more fuss and perhaps affront Ed and Beadle in a rather nasty way. The best I can do is to be as inconspicuous about it as possible and make some reference to the obsolescence of personal distinction in scientific life.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 23 May 2015.

My heart was beating

‘My heart was beating like some young student’s before the big exam. Was I going to be able to step out onto this land that I have been striving to reach for four years with so many sacrifices and struggles? And if so, shall I be able to do any useful work?’ This is from the diaries of Oscar Jászi, the much-admired Hungarian historian and politician known for his advocacy of liberal democracy and social reform. He was born 150 years ago today, and at the time of this diary entry was arriving for the first time in the United States, where he would soon join Oberlin College as a history professor.

Jászi was born on 2 March 1875 in Nagykároly (now Carei, Romania) to his physician father and his second wife. Unhappy with their Jewish origins, his father converted the family to Calvinism in 1881. Oscar studied political science at the University of Budapest, and although he had a low-paid and long-term job in the ministry of agriculture, he developed his interest in politics by studying the country’s agricultural policies. In 1900, he launched with friends the journal Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), and, under a pseudonym, published combative articles about the countries social structures. A year later, Jászi and friends founded the Sociological Society, promoting liberal and democratic ideas. His research and writing focused on political sociology, nationalism, and the need for democratic governance.

During World War I, Jászi became increasingly involved in politics and was instrumental in the short-lived Hungarian Democratic Republic of 1918, serving as Minister for Nationalities in Mihály Károlyi’s government. He attempted to negotiate autonomy for Hungary’s ethnic minorities to prevent the disintegration of the country but was unsuccessful. Following the collapse of the republic and the rise of the communist regime under Béla Kun, followed by the right-wing counterrevolution, Jászi was forced into exile in 1919. First he went to Vienna where he worked to keep Hungarian democracy alive, and from whence he travelled extensively to meet with other emigres.

Jászi settled in the US in 1925, and was appointed a professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, continuing his academic work on nationalism and Eastern European politics. He remained a strong critic of authoritarianism in Hungary and the broader region, advocating for democratic federalism. He wrote several influential books, including Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Hungary and The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. He died in 1957. Further information is available at Wikipedia and in the major biography A Twentieth Century Prophet: Oscar Jászi 1875-1957 by György Litván (CEU Press, 2006 - available to preview at Googlebooks). 

Jászi left behind half a life time of diaries - written from 1919 until his death - in 39 notebooks, now held by Columbia University Libraries. Litván discusses these diaries in his preface: ‘From the very first sentence [. . .] it is clear that he had been keeping a diary before then, and that this was broken off during the turbulent days of the 1918 revolution and was obviously lost or destroyed during the Second World War, along with so many other documents. The Hungarian-language segments of the diary, from between 1919 and 1923, was published in 2001 by the Institute of Political History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The remaining, predominantly English-language segments are as yet unpublished, and use has been made of them only in connection with a few details (e.g. the recital given by Bela Bartok at Oberlin College or Jaszi’s 1947 trip to Hungary). With its detailed daily record of the weather, his own mood, his reading matter, meetings, lectures, correspondence, the articles or other pieces of writing that had been completed, college and domestic business, there can be little doubt that Jászi did not intend his diary to be published. Of course it proved to be of incalculable assistance in putting together this biography - particularly in the case of events, episodes or periods for which no other source exists or is known. (Among these, for instance, are the negotiations or conversations that he conducted with Masaryk, Benes, Maniu and other politicians, the internal disputes with fellow exiles in Vienna and America, and various other, far from exclusively political matters.) Still, the very amplitude of the diary material imposed a heavy responsibility on the author when it came to deciding which items of information might be omitted and which could not.’

Elsewhere in the biography, Litván gives a few verbatim extracts from the diaries buried in his text, as in this extract here [italics are for clarity only). 

‘The diary preserved every aspect of the almost month-long voyage [to the US] in exhaustive detail. Jászi already decided on the first day that his companions were of no interest, most of the travelers being Jewish emigrants from the Ukraine, though he did also hear some words of Hungarian. The food was moderate. As the ship put out to sea, “after all the anxieties, I was seized by a blithe contentment - as if I had been freed from five years imprisonment.” He repeats that several more times during the voyage, but various anxieties also resurface. On August 6th they docked a Varna, on the 8th there was “a marvelous passage through the Bosporus,” on the 9th they were held up at Istanbul, but by the 11th they had arrived at Piraeus, the harbor for Athens, where the ship was moored for several days, so that Jászi, despite the heat, walked round the Acropolis, as he had not previously visited Greece (nor was he to do so again). By the 14th they had reached Patras, from where the next day, with many new passengers on board, they made their way, without putting into harbor again, down the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Messina, past Sardinia and then the Algerian coast, through the Strait of Gibraltar to the Atlantic Ocean.

They were on the approaches to the port of New York, according to the diary, on August 30th: “My heart was beating like some young student’s before the big exam. Was I going to be able to step out onto this land that I have been striving to reach for four years with so many sacrifices and struggles? And if so, shall I be able to do any useful work?”

He passed the immigration controls on Ellis Island without incident. Even while still on the boat Jászi had received a letter from banker and industrialist Robert Caldwell in which the latter informed him that he would be at his service if there was anything he needed. They finally docked on September 1st: “And when the ship passed in front of the Statue of Liberty to enter the city fired by feverish activity, I was so overcome by emotion that I burst into tears on the ship’s bridge.” ’

Malcolm X uninterrupted

Malcolm X, one of the US’s most influential black activists, was assassinated 60 years ago today. He was not yet 40. Having come from a deprived background, turned criminal and spent years in prison, he educated himself sufficiently to become a Muslim minister and human rights activist. Indeed, in the year or two before his death, he had become a figure of international importance. For a few months in 1964, while visiting countries in Africa and the Middle East, he kept a detailed diary. This was edited by one of his daughters, Ilyasah Shabazz, and the journalist Herb Boyd, before being published by Third World Press. On publication, Boyd praised the diary for being ‘Malcolm, uninterrupted, without any kind of editorial interference’.

Malcolm Little was born in 1925 in  Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth of seven children. His father was an outspoken Baptist lay speaker who brought his children up to be self-reliant and proud of their race. White racist threats and attacks blighted family life, leading his father to relocate a couple of times. In 1929, their home was burnt down; a year or two later his father died (his mother, Louise, believing he had been murdered). Later, when Louise was committed to hospital, the children were separated and sent to foster homes.

Until his early 20s, Little held a variety of jobs while living with his half-sister in Boston. He moved to Harlem, New York City, in 1943, and became involved with various criminal activities. After committing several robberies back in Boston, and being arrested, he was jailed at Charlestown State Prison in 1946. While inside, he became a voracious reader; and, thanks to his siblings, turned to a newly-formed religious movement, Nation of Islam, that worked to improve the lot of African Americans, and, ultimately, the return of the African diaspora to Africa. He soon was communicating regularly, by letter, with the movement’s leader, Elijah Muhammad. In 1950, he began signing his name Malcolm X (the X, he explained, signified the true African family name that he could never know).

Malcolm X’s rise through Nation of Islam came swiftly after his parole in 1952. He was first made assistant minister of the Temple Number One in Detroit, but then established Boston’s Temple Number 11, and expanded Temple Number 12 in Philadelphia, before being selected to lead Temple Number 7 in Harlem. He continued to launch new temples, and was a powerful presence and recruiter for the organisation. In 1955, he met Better Sanders; they married in 1958, and they had six children.

Malcolm X first became a significant public figure in 1957, when he took control of a crowd of people protesting at police brutality against a National of Islam member, Johnson Hinton. By this time, also, Malcolm X had become a person of interest to both the FBI and the New York City police. The media began reporting on his activities, and, in 1960, several African nations invited him to official functions linked to a meeting of United Nations General Assembly. In particular, Fidel Castro, Cuba’s leader, held one-to-one talks with Malcolm X and invited him to visit Cuba.

After a period of tension with Muhammad, Malcolm X broke from Nation of Islam in 1964. He founded Muslim Mosque, Inc, and Organization of Afro-American Unity. He gave his famous ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ speech, and he converted to Sunni Islam. That same year he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and he met the Saudi Arabian leader, Prince Faisal. While increasingly he was becoming an international figure (with extensive visits in Africa, as well as to France and the UK), tensions at home with the Nation of Islam led to death threats, and, eventually, his murder. He was assassinated on 21 February 1965 in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom where he was preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Three Nation of Islam members were convicted of the murder. Subsequently, various conspiracies were alleged, not least that an FBI infiltrator might have exacerbated tensions between Malcolm X and Muhammad. Also, one of the organisation’s Boston ministers later admitted that he might have helped stoke up the atmosphere which ultimately led to the murder.

Wikipedia’s biography has this to say about Malcolm X’s legacy: ‘[He] has been described as one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history. He is credited with raising the self-esteem of black Americans and reconnecting them with their African heritage. He is largely responsible for the spread of Islam in the black community in the United States. Many African Americans, especially those who lived in cities in the Northern and Western United States, felt that Malcolm X articulated their complaints concerning inequality better than the mainstream civil rights movement did. [. . .] In the late 1960s, increasingly radical black activists based their movements largely on Malcolm X and his teachings. The Black Power movement, the Black Arts Movement, and the widespread adoption of the slogan “Black is beautiful” can all trace their roots to Malcolm X.’ Further information can also be found at the official Malcolm X website.

In 1964, during two trips to Africa and the Middle East, Malcolm X kept a detailed diary. This did not emerge into the public domain until some years later (when found with other archival material). It was edited by Herb Boyd, a journalist and associate of Malcolm X’s, and one of Malcolm’s daughters, Ilyasah Shabazz, and published as The Diary of Malcolm X by Third World Press. However, in 2013, with publication due in November, a corporation representing Malcolm X’s wife and his heirs (other than the daughter Ilyasah, obviously) claimed the book was being published without the family’s permission, and went to court to stop Third World Press. The poet and black activist, Haki R. Madhubuti, who owns the Press, claimed he had a valid legal contract, and that any delay would put the company in financial jeopardy. See Publishers Weekly or The Guardian for more on this. There is also a Wikipedia entry for the diary itself.

The foreword and introduction of the book can be read freely online at Amazon. Here are a few paragraphs taken from the introduction.

‘From the middle of April to the end of May and later from July to November of 1964, Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) kept an extensive meticulous diary of his journeys to Africa and the Middle East, including his pilgrimage to Mecca.

While his diary has been discussed and occasionally cited [. . .], it exists mainly in the archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, where it is available for scholars and researchers.

The diary came to the Schomburg several years ago after a circuitous route from Florida where it was among Malcolm’s possessions in a storage bin, and then from San Francisco where an auction house was preparing to put the lot up for bids. Fortunately, the family, through its attorney, was able to rescue the valuable memorabilia, and to house a good portion of it at the Schomburg.

Malcolm was a keen collector of keepsakes, documents, books, newspapers, films, and, of course, the record of his life. Volumes I and II of his diary total more than 200 pages in microfilm.’ [See San Francisco Bay View for more on the Malcolm X materials.]

On publication of the diary, Herb Boyd said: ‘The diary humanizes [Malcolm X] in a way that some of these other scholars set out to do . . . This is Malcolm, uninterrupted, without any kind of editorial interference. . . The diary is certainly the most critical thing that he left behind that has not been examined.’ And, Madhubuti said: ‘It’s one of the most important books that we’ve published.’

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director, The Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University, was more expansive: ‘The publication of The Diary of Malcolm X is a great historical event in African American intellectual history. Reading these entries has the effect of overhearing a profound thinker’s most private and uncensored thoughts about everything from his split with Elijah Muhammad to the cost of 16mm film in Accra. I found this a riveting and deeply moving experience, one that only made me even sadder at the senselessness of his assassination. Every student of Malcolm X, and the history of black political leadership, should read this compelling book.’

Here is one extract from the published diary.

17 April 1964

[Saudi Arabia]

‘El Jumah prayers: crowded, all colors, bowing in unison - not conscious of color (race) around whites for 1 st time in my life. The whites don’t seem white - Islam actually removed differences - Persian (white) followed me around, offering the hospitality of eating with his family - pilgrims from Nigeria & Ghana, very vocal & confident. Sudanese quiet confidence. No one seems to believe that a Muslim could come from America (a convert?).

2 bros from Eritrea (Ethiop) now living in Riyadh, schooled in Cairo. Ethiopia has 18 million people, 10 million are Muslims. I just finished chicken & potatoes with my hands in airport restaurant (2 Jordanian refugees met later at Mina post office).

The masses are Muslims, but the gov [governor] is Christian. The time of Hajj makes all true Muslims very pious. Some came in groups, ranks, ate in circles & in ranks, from each others plate, ate & slept as one.

I haven’t seen any U.S. newspapers since leaving the States Monday—all colors here, none force [themselves] on others, yet none feel neglected or ignored, and still “birds of the same color stay primarily together.”

Out of the thick darkness comes sudden light. My, how fortune can change. I felt blue, and after saying my sunset (Maghreb) prayers I laid down - the Persians were friendly, insisting that I share fruit & tea with them. I felt alone, lonely - then it dawned on me I should call Dr. Omar Azzam: after showing the officials my letter from Dr. [Mahmoud Youssef] Sharwarbi, they finally got Dr. Azzam on the phone. He came over immediately, got me released thru the airport (and passport) officials, and took me to his home, where I met his father (Azzam Pasha) his uncle (chemist), book on the chemical science that proves the myths of Islam & secretary of the Arab League - Never have I met a more educated, intellectual than Azzam Pasha [illegible], his vast reservoir of knowledge and its variety, seemed unlimited - racial lineage & descendants of M [Prophet Muhammad] family, both black & white (color complexions) differences in Muslim world, only to the extent it has been influenced by West. He gave me his room at the Jeddah Palace while he stayed with his son. Such hospitality. Never so honored.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 21 February 2015.

My guiding darkness

‘Perversion interests me most and is really my guiding darkness . . . I love to write of cruel deeds.’ This is Patricia Highsmith, who died 30 years ago today, confiding in a youthful diary about a preoccupation that would come to dominate her writing, and, indeed, inspire her to produce some of the most popular psychological crime stories of the 20th century. She did keep diaries and notebooks throughout her life, and although these were available to biographers in the past, they were not actually published until 2021.

 
Mary Patricia Plangman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, the child of artists who divorced before she was born. Her mother soon married Stanley Highsmith, and the family moved to New York. She studied English composition at Barnard College, and found work at a comic publishers. Turning freelance allowed her to earn more money and to write her own short stories. She lived for a while in Mexico.

Highsmith published her first novel - Strangers on a Train - in 1950, to modest success. The famous film maker, Alfred Hitchcock, adapted the story in 1951, and the movie’s success rubbed off on Highsmith. Her second novel, The Price of Salt, a lesbian romance published under a pseudonym, Claire Morgan, came out in 1952. The Talented Mr. Ripley, probably her most famous novel nowadays, emerged soon after, in 1955. Many other psychological thrillers followed, but it was not until 1970 that she returned to Ripley, eventually completing five novels (the Ripliad) about her compelling anti-hero.

Highsmith never settled down for long with a partner, male or female, though she had many affairs. Her private life was constantly troubled, she moved around a lot, living in various parts of Europe. She drank and smoked to excess, and the older she got the more she preferred the company of cats (and snails, apparently!), while colleagues found her misanthropic and even cruel. For the last 14 years of her life she lived in Switzerland. She died there on 4 February 1995. Her archives are stored at Swiss Literary Archives in Bern - see also Swiss Info.

Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, or from two biographies, available to preview through Googlebooks: Beautiful Shadow: a Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson (Bloomsbury, 2003) and The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar (St Martin’s Press, 2009). See also reviews of the former at The Guardian, The New York Times; a review of the latter by Jeannette Winterson also at The New York Times, and an article by Schenkar at The Paris Review.

One of many extraordinary things about Patricia Highsmith was an obsession with documenting her own life. Having decided not to destroy her diaries, she left behind some 8,000 handwritten pages, in 37 work notebooks or cahiers (1938-1992), and 18 personal diaries (1940-1984). These diaries were mined thoroughly by the biographers, Wilson and Schenkar, but it was not until 2021 that Liveright published Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995 as meticulously edited by her longtime editor Anna von Planta. 

The publisher says of the book: ‘In these pages, we see Highsmith reflecting on good and evil, loneliness and intimacy, sexuality and sacrifice, love and murder. We see her tumultuous romantic relationships play out alongside her acquaintances with other writers including Jane Bowles, Aaron Copland, John Gielgud, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Arthur Koestler, and W. H. Auden. And in her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, we see the famously secretive Highsmith revealing the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. Written in her inimitable and dazzling prose and offering all the pleasures of Highsmith’s novels, these are one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to be published in generations - and yield, at last an unparalleled, unfiltered, unforgettable picture of this enigmatic, iconic, trailblazing author's true self.’ Some pages can be previewed at Amazon, and a review can be read here.

Wilson’s biography - which is generally rated more highly than Schenkar’s - refers to Highsmith’s diaries constantly, and always provides the exact source (i.e. whether from a cahier or a private journal, and with the exact date). However, he rarely provides any complete or long quotations from the diaries, choosing instead to incorporate phrases within his own text.

Here is part of Wilson’s introduction: ‘Her work explores the motif of the double or splintered self. The changeable nature of identity fascinated her both philosophically and personally. “I had a strong feeling tonight . . . that I was many faceted like a ball of glass, or like the eye of a fly.” ’ [14 February 1942] [. . .]

Her private notebooks can be seen to represent, if not an authentic self, at least an identity that is somehow more substantial than the one she chose to show to the outside world. In addition to keeping incredibly detailed diaries, she recorded her creative ideas, observations and experiences in what she called her “cahiers” or working journals. [ . . .]

Many writers’ diaries are works of self-mythology, often more fantastical than their own fiction, but after checking Highsmith’s documents with other archival sources and information gleaned from my interviews, it is clear that her private journals were written without artifice. Her voice was tormented, self-critical but, significantly, brutally honest. She kept a diary, she said, because she was interested in analysing the motivation of her behaviour. “I cannot do this without dropping dried peas behind me to help me retrace my course, to point a straight line in the darkness.” [21 September 1949] Throughout her life she toyed with the idea of burning these most personal of journals, and although she was given the opportunity to incinerate any incriminating material before her death, she only chose to destroy a few letters from one of her younger lovers.’

Here are three extracts from Highsmith’s diaries taken from Wilson’s biography.

27 August 1942
‘Perversion interests me most and is really my guiding darkness . . . I love to write of cruel deeds. Murder fascinates me . . . Physical cruelty appeals to me mostly. It is visual & dramatic. Mental cruelty is a torture, even for me, to think of. I have known too much of it myself.’

25 October 1942
‘I believe people should be allowed to go the whole hog with their perversions, abnormalities, unhappinesses, [. . .] Mad people are the only active people, they have built the world.’

18 November 1942
‘The Lesbian, the classic Lesbian, never seeks her equal in life. She is . . . the soi-disant male, who does not expect his match in his mate, who would rather use her as the base-on-the-earth which he can never be.’

And here are several extracts from the published diaries.

23 March 1941

‘I met an insufferable young woman from school on my way to Billie’s. She was going to Temple Emanu-El for a meeting of young gays. What a thing to do on Sunday! My good angel tells me that would be better - but my God! I’ll take the devil! Billie very sweet - kisses, etc. She tells me that she likes me a lot. That she wants me. I feel very attracted to her. But I told her I was in love with Helen at school. Billie was very sad - I didn’t allow her to touch me - anyways, we decided not to see each other for a month. She gave me a little gold chain for my wrist. I won’t wear it - and I - I gave her nothing but one cent.’

19 May 1941

‘Work! Work! I’m not even reading the papers. A ship sank. 190 Americans. Hitler, perhaps. Everyone is talking about Germany’s victory. We’ve just entered the war. + I read Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure - etc. It’s exciting to study like this: all day! Other men’s thoughts.’

1 June 1941

‘A ghostly day - no ordinary people on the streets because everyone’s out of the city. I wonder what Va.’s doing? + I learned a lot - Don’t want to write stories about stupid, useless people. There are so many things crying out to be described. + Graham here 10:00. We talked quietly. The situations and circumstances at the camps are unbelievable/A sentry shot two men obeying his orders! We listened to records. He was wearing my slippers. They look nice on his feet. I’m happy.’

23 July 1941

‘Spent this night with Buffie as I knew I would. Arrived about five - she gave me a gorgeous pair of cufflinks - gold with a brown stone. Rather large. Then we picked up Irving D. & Billy Somebody & went to Spivy’s anniversary party. Then home. I’m not in love. Can’t even say I wish I were. Buffie is so damned “bandbox,” as Constable so aptly put it.’

26 July 1941

‘Caught the bus at 10:50 last evening. Graham along to see me off. Hot tiresome trip. I feel blue. Thinking constantly of Rosalind & not at all of Buffie. I am an ungrateful fickle little bastard. It’s so much fun to ride along, letting one’s mind build things like an Erector Set, and being quite alone as the miles go past, enjoying cigarettes & coffee, and thinking of possible stories, and of Rosalind, and of the busy, active, amusing, and wild life before me - not only next semester, when I shall work like hell, but for all time. I have a great destiny before me - a world of pleasures and accomplishments, beauty and love.’

14 September 1941

‘Things are coming to a crisis, Stanley says. Mother is nervous, again talks of removing me from school. I shall be lost. All the jobs I want require a B.A. She is jealous of my friends. Constantly making comparisons between herself & them and jealous too of my courtesy to Jeva & Marjorie when they come over. And could I possibly be in love with my own mother? Perhaps in some incredible way I am. And it is the recalcitrance in all of us that shows in my ingratitude for my mother’s over-zealous effort to please me, and to do things for me. It is the old story of things being too simple - and of our refusal to throw our love to the easiest and most deserving and most logical object.’

5 December 1941

‘Friday: Gloomy day. Short school. Went to Lola’s at 6:00. Gillespie, [Toni] Hughes, Buffie (whom I scarcely spoke to), Jimmie Stern & many Frenchmen. Also Melcarth. Thence to Barnard. Mary S. (also there) said Helen was the cutest thing she’d seen in years. That my taste was in my mouth. I didn’t know what she meant. Helen has all the warmth - and she wore her gray suit tight because she knows I love it - and we could not keep our eyes or our hands off each other all evening and it was all very beautiful. She loves me - she said so - in the cold air outdoors. And she means it. Why should I lie? I miss her so when I’m away an hour I can’t see straight. The first time I’ve been in love - the terrific physical appeal plus my love of her - God what a perilous combination!’

This article is a revised version of one first published on 204 February 2015.

The champion of reason

‘I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.’ This is Ayn Rand, a Russian-American writer and philosopher, born 120 years ago today. Her few novels were extremely popular in their day, and she developed a philosophical system, Objectivism, which also drew many admirers. She kept notebooks for much of her life, jotting thoughts about her novels and philosophy, and these were edited and published in the 1990s as Journals of Ayn Rand.

Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum was born on 2 February 1905 in St Petersburg into a wealthy Jewish family. The October Revolution and Bolshevik rule led to the family’s property being confiscated, and to them fleeing as far as the Crimean Peninsula. After graduating from high school there, Alisa returned, with her family, to Petrograd, where she was one of the first women to enrol in the state university, majoring in history. Subsequently, she studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. Around this time, she adopted the surname Rand, and took her first name as Ayn.

In 1926, Rand went to visit relatives in the US, staying a few months in Chicago, before heading for Hollywood. There she did odd jobs, worked as a junior scriptwriter, and met a young actor Fank O’Connor who she married just before her visa ran out. She became an American citizen in 1931; several attempts to bring her family members to the US, though, failed.

In the early 1930s, Rand sold a screenplay to Universal Studios, and had a play produced on Broadway (later turned into a film by Paramount). Her first, partly autobiographical, novel - We the Living - was published in 1936. Although not a success at the time, later, when her other novels sold so well, Rand issued a revised edition which went on to sell over three million copies.

By the 1940s, Rand had become politically active; and she volunteered for the presidential campaign of Republican Wendell Wilkie. She took on speaking appointments, and came into contact with other free market-leaning intellectuals. Her first major success as a writer came with The Fountainhead, published in 1943, a novel of romance and philosophy. Warner Bros hired her to write a screenplay for a film version (which came out in 1949). Subsequently, she was hired by Hal Wallis (who had produced Casablanca for Warner) as a screenwriter and script-doctor for his own, new production company. One of her projects was to write a screenplay about the development of the atomic bomb - although the film never got made. Meanwhile, her political activities led her to become associated with other anti-Communist writers.

In 1951, Rand moved to New York where she established a group of admirers, including Nathan Blumenthal (later Nathaniel Branden) and his wife Barbara, and Barbara’s cousin Leonard Peikoff. By 1954, she and Nathaniel were having an affair with the full knowledge of their spouses. Atlas Shrugged, considered Rand’s most important work, was published in 1957, and became an international bestseller. More than any other of her novels, Atlas Shrugged was rich in her developing ideas on philosophy, a system she called Objectivism.

Thereafter, Rand eschewed fiction in favour of promoting her philosophical ideas, by writing books, giving lectures, and often taking controversial stances on political issues (wholeheartedly rejecting religion, for example, and supporting the right to abortion). In 1958, Branden established the Nathaniel Branden Lectures (later Institute) to promote Rand’s philosophy. This expanded considerably, until it was offering courses in 80 cities; but, in 1968, Rand denounced Branden and publicly broke off with him and the Institute.

After an operation for lung cancer in 1974, Rand’s work activities declined. Her husband died in 1979, and she passed away in 1982, leaving her estate to Peikoff. Further biographical information can be found at the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Encyclopaedia Britannica, or Wikipedia. Wikipedia also has an extensive article on Rand’s Objectivism

Soon after Rand’s death, Peikoff released extracts from her notebooks for publication in two magazines The Objectivist Forum and The Intellectual Activist. Then, in 1997, Dutton released Journals of Ayn Rand, edited by David Harriman with Peikoff’s approval. The book has its own Wikipedia entry, which states: ‘Some reviewers considered it an interesting source of information for readers with an interest in Rand, but several scholars criticized Harriman’s editing as being too heavy-handed and insufficiently acknowledged in the published text.’

In a foreword, Peikoff explains: ‘Ayn Rand’s Journals - my name for her notes to herself through the decade - is the bulk of her still unpublished work, arranged chronologically. [. . .] The Journals contain most of AR’s notes for her three main novels - along with some early material, some notes made between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and some notes from her final decades.’

He continues: ‘If the primary value of the Journals to us is the evidence it furnishes of AR’s growth, a second value is the evidence that her growth was a product of thinking - in the art of which the Journals may serve as a textbook. The subtitle of this book really ought to be: How to Answer Your Own Questions.’

In his preface, Harriman says: ‘In a note to herself at the age of twenty-three, AR wrote: “From now on - no thought whatever about yourself, only about your work. You are only a writing engine. Don’t stop, until you really and honestly know that you cannot go on.” Throughout her long career, she remained true to this pledge - she was a “writing engine”. With the publication of her journals, we can now see the “writing behind the writing” and appreciate fully the prodigious effort that went into her published work. AR’s notes, typically handwritten, were spread among numerous boxes of papers she left behind at her death in 1982. My editing of this material has consisted of selection, organization, line editing, and insertion of explanatory comments. Selection. This book presents AR’s working journals - i.e. the notes in which she developed her literary and philosophical ideas. Notes of a personal nature will be included in a forthcoming authorized biography.’

Many if not most of the entries in Journals of Ayn Rand (which can be previewed online at Googlebooks) are not dated, and those that are tend to be more associated with her philosophical musings (as opposed to those about her novels). Here are a few samples (the last concerns her work for Hal Wallis on the atomic bomb screenplay).

9 April 1934
‘The human race has only two unlimited capacities: for suffering and for lying. I want to fight religion as the root of all human lying and the only excuse for suffering.

I believe - and I want to gather all the facts to illustrate this - that the worst curse on mankind is the ability to consider ideals as something quite abstract and detached from one’s everyday life. The ability to live and think quite differently, thus eliminating thinking from your actual life. This applied not to deliberate and conscious hypocrites, but to those more dangerous and hopeless ones who, alone with themselves and to themselves, tolerate a complete break between their convictions and their lives, and still believe that they have convictions. To them, either their ideals or their lives are worthless - and usually both.

I hold religion mainly responsible for this. I want to prove that religion breaks a character before it’s formed, in childhood, by teaching a child lies before he knows what a lie is, by breaking him of the habit of thinking before he has begun to think, by making him a hypocrite before he knows any other possible attitude to life. [. . .]

Why are men so afraid of pure, logical reasoning? Why do they have a profound, ferocious hatred of it? Are instincts and emotions necessarily beyond the control of plain thinking? Or were they trained to be? Why is a complete harmony between mind and emotions impossible? Isn’t it merely a matter of strict mental honesty? And who stands at the very bottom denying such honesty? Isn’t it the church?

I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.’

6 November 1944
‘The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you’re doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?

It’s a coldly intellectual process. If your emotions do not proceed from your intellect, you will not be able to apply it, even if you know all the rules. The mental ability of a writer determines the literary level of his output. If you grasp only home problems well, you’ll only be a writer of good homey stories. (But what about Tolstoy?)’

25 January 1946
‘Interview with Mrs Oppenheimer: Test was referred to as “Trinity”. Test was on a Monday - the next Saturday Mrs. Oppenheimer gave a party - evening dress. Mood was one of relief. After Hiroshima they did not feel like celebrating. The Oppenheimers were the first family to move to Los Alamos. [The town] had about 30 people then - a big dormitory for scientists in one of the schoolrooms. The Oppenheimers lived in one of the masters’ houses of the old school. Community life was much friendlier and more harmonious than in other cities - higher mental level. Dr Oppenheimer took job only on condition that his essential workers would know the secret. A great part of their work was spent in meetings and conferences. At first, scientists were afraid of possible German atomic research, but later learned there was none. Scientists worked in order to save lives and end the war. Was it in order to beat the Germans to the discovery? “Good God, no!” ’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 2 February 2015.

Catch some of my life

James Gordon Farrell, who might have reached ninety today had he not died young in a storm accident, would have become one of the really great novelists writing in the English language today - according to a claim by Salman Rushdie widely quoted on internet sites. The editor of a collection of Farrell’s letters and ‘diary fragments’, published a few years ago by Cork University Press, argues that her book reveals Farrell’s ‘lost autobiographical voice.’ In a first entry, Farrell writes of using the diary to ‘catch some of my life’, and in another he catches a moment of inspiration, one that will lead to his best book.

Farrell was born in Liverpool on 25 January 1935 into an Anglo-Irish family. Although his family moved to County Dublin after the war, he was enrolled at Rossall boarding school in Lancashire from the age of 12, spending holidays in Ireland. After Rossall, he taught in Dublin, and also worked at a radar station in the Canadian Arctic. He entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1956, but contracted polio which left him partially crippled. On leaving Oxford with a low class degree, he went to live and teach in France, the setting for his first novel A Man from Elsewhere.

Thereafter, Farrell led a peripatetic life, variously in Paris, Morocco, Dublin and London. In 1966, he won a Harkness Fellowship to visit the US, and although this did not lead him, as he hoped, to study at Yale Drama School, it did provide him with the stimulus to write Troubles (about Ireland’s struggle for independence), the book that would bring him literary fame. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and with the proceeds he went to India, the setting for his next novel on colonial power, The Siege of Krishnapur. This won the UK’s Booker Prize in 1973. A third, thematically similar, novel followed - The Singapore Grip.

In 1979, Farrell decided to move from London (where he had been based since around 1970) to the southwest of Ireland. A few months later, he was found dead, after being swept from rocks in a storm while fishing. He never married, though he had affairs, and a wide circle of literary friends. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, which quotes Salmon Rushdie as saying, in 2008, that had Farrell not died so young,‘he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language.’ There are various other articles online about Farrell, some reporting on how Troubles won, in 2010, the Lost Booker Prize for 1970 - at The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and BBC. (‘Lost’ because books published in that year missed out on being considered thanks to a rule change.) A chapter on Farrell in Writing Liverpool: Essays and Interviews can be read at Googlebooks.

Farrell does not appear to have been a committed diarist, but, in 2009, Cork University Press published J. G. Farrell in his Own Words - Selected Letters and Diaries, as edited by Lavinia Greacen. Most of the book is taken up with letters, and Graecen, herself, refers to the rest as ‘diary fragments’. A review can be found online at Estudios Irlandeses.

Although the name J. G. Farrell tends to come with an austerely confident ring to it, Greacen says the ‘lost autobiographical voice’ in this book reveals him to be warm and sometimes full of self doubt. In a very short foreword, John Banville explains that he met Farrell once, a few days before he won the Booker Prize for The Siege of Krishnapur. He notes, however, that Farrell himself thought Troubles was a better book.

Here are two extracts from J. G. Farrell in his Own Words - Selected Letters and Diaries. I’ve chosen the first because it explains Farrell’s motivations for starting a diary; and the second for it records a pivotal moment in the genesis of Troubles. However, I have also chosen the second because of a link with my own life: the very same Surf Hotel on Block Island, mentioned by Farrell, was where I was taken having been expelled from my father’s island house - I never saw or spoke to him again (see my diaries).

22 December 1966
‘This is addressed to an absent third party . . . in all respects like me, but not me. Alright then, the idea of this diary is to help me to get control of my talent for writing. I hope that it will help me in the following ways:
1) That I shall bring myself face to face with things that I normally discard through sheer mental laziness.
2) That I shall be able to remember things people say that make an impression on me as well as things I read.
3) Get in the habit of discussing problems with myself.
4) Catch some of my life before I forget it. I’m appalled to think how little I can remember of my first trip to America, even though it was only ten years ago. However, avoid being garrulous or it will become a chore. Avoid self-pity and sentimentality. Avoid haranguing myself uselessly like this.

On Monday I had lunch with Mike Roemer. He was busy and somewhat harassed; I noticed for the first time how he tends to talk too loud, as if afraid that he won’t be able to assert himself if he doesn’t. He had been to see Polanski’s Cul de Sac and hadn’t liked it. I was unable to understand his reasons for not liking it. He said he thought it was badly written; that it hadn’t gone far enough if it was supposed to be black humour etc. Well, perhaps I do partly see what he means. For all that, he couldn’t convince me (he didn’t try) that it was a bad film. I still find parts of it sublime: the kitchen scene at the beginning and the visit of friends [. . .] Roemer told me had once dined with E. M. Forster and been very impressed with his modesty and simplicity. F. had only wanted to talk about films. In the course of lunch R. repeated his theory that writers use up their experience when young, then go through a middle period of hard work before they can learn to invent their own material. In return I talked to him of intuitive writers, citing Edna O’Brien as one who had gone off the rails once she had begun to think about it. [. . .] I don’t think either of us were particularly convinced by this. Nothing, anyway, will convince R. that writing is not a field in which one only succeeds by hard and ruthless work. With deep misgivings I gave him a copy of The Lung.

Reading Virginia Woolf’s diary in the train to N. Caroline to spend Christmas with Bob. Odd and curious flashes of contempt for the lower classes appear every now and then that seem sadly out of date (these are the only things that seem unusual for a person like V. W. by today’s standards).’

11 May 1967
‘Over a month since my last entry - an interval in which things went downhill at a fairly brisk pace, with the roaches multiplying in my room at the Belvedere faster than I could control them . . . In this time I took out Anita Gross a couple of times. She’s attractive, sure. But there’s something slightly wrong somewhere [. . .]

A week ago I came to Block Island to stay at the Surf Hotel under the aegis of Mr and Mrs Sears. He is a fat, genial chap and she is somewhat severe with elegantly rolled white hair that makes her look like an immigrant from Versailles. [. . .] At first I found myself eating with an English couple called Porter: she is a psychiatrist, he described himself as a ‘poet’ but I didn’t question him about this and he didn’t volunteer any further information. [. . .]

I’ve covered most of the island on foot in the past week and feel much healthier for it. The weather has been a mixture of terrible storms and sunny, windy days. Last weekend the ferry was unable to make the return trip because of a storm. Now the rain has returned I think I shall return to NY tomorrow.

While here I have made yet another ‘fresh start’ on my book - partly inspired by the charred remains of the Ocean View Hotel which stands, or stood, on a cliff overlooking the old harbour where the ferry comes in. It burned down a year or so ago. “A place with a thousand rooms,” Mr Porter (the poet) said. “200 to 300” said his wife. This morning I went up to look at the remains while the sun was still shining. Old bedsprings twisted with heat; puddles of molten glass; washbowls that had fallen through to the foundations; a flight of stone steps leading up to thin air; twisted pipes; lots of nails lying everywhere and a few charred beams. I think the way the glass had collected like candlegreas under the windows impressed me most. When you picked it up it was inclined to flake away into smaller pieces in your hand. I must remember to ask someone how many storeys it had. Anyway this gave me an idea, which seems to me a good one, for the dwelling place of the family.’ [Ocean View Hotel did, in fact, provide the catalyst for the Majestic Hotel in Troubles, and give him the structure for the novel.]

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 25 January 2015.

A glow of enthusiasm

‘The air is distinctly fragrant with balsam and resin and mint - every breath of it a gift we may well thank God for. Who could ever guess that so rough a wilderness should yet be so full of good things. [. . .] God himself seems to be always doing his best here, working like a man in a glow of enthusiasm.’ This is from the diaries of the Scottish-born American John Muir, an early and influential voice in the development of US national parks who died 110 years ago today. 

Muir was born in 1838 in Dunbar, Scotland. Until the age of eleven he attended local schools but, in 1849, his family emigrated to the US, settling first at Fountain Lake and then moving to Hickory Hill Farm near Portage, Wisconsin. Muir’s father worked his family hard but whenever they had time he and his younger brother would explore the rich Wisconsin countryside. Muir developed a love of the natural world, but he also became an inventor, a carver and clock maker. In 1860 he traveled the short distance south to Madison, to the state fair, where he won admiration and prizes, and enrolled in the university. Although doing well, after three years he left to travel the northern US and Canada, odd-jobbing his way through the as yet unspoiled land. An industrial accident in 1867 nearly cost him an eye; thereafter, it is said, he resolved to dedicate his life to exploring and preserving nature. 

Muir traveled extensively, walking from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico and eventually settling in California in 1868. He became particularly enchanted with Yosemite Valley, describing it as ‘the grandest of all special temples of Nature’. Over the next six years, he explored and studied the Sierra Nevada mountains, developing groundbreaking theories about glacial formation. His environmental advocacy proved transformative as he was instrumental in establishing several national parks, including Yosemite (1890), Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Petrified Forest, and Grand Canyon. In 1892, he co-founded the Sierra Club, serving as its first president, to promote conservation and environmental protection.

Muir’s writings and activism significantly influenced public perception of wilderness areas and inspired conservation efforts. He was particularly close to President Theodore Roosevelt, accompanying him on a pivotal trip to Yosemite that helped secure federal protection for the park. He was also a prolific writer, publishing 300 articles and 10 major books about his travels and environmental philosophy. Some of his notable works include The Mountains of California and Our National Parks. 

Muir married Louie Wanda Strentzel in 1880 and he managed a family fruit ranch in Martinez, California, while continuing his conservation work. He died on 24 December 1914. Encyclopaedia Britannica has this assessment of the man: ‘His conviction that wilderness areas should be federally protected as national parks has given generations of US citizens and tourists an opportunity to appreciate America’s landscapes as they exist in the absence of human industrial influence. Muir’s writings continue to serve as sources of inspiration for naturalists and conservationists in the US and worldwide.’ 

Further information is also available from Wikipedia and The Sierra Club.

Muir kept extensive diaries throughout his life - some 78 journals and 25 notebooks. Nearly every page of these can be viewed at the University of the Pacific’s Scholarly Commons website. The diaries served as a basic resource for his books and many articles though they do not seem to have been published directly. Nevertheless a couple of his early books are presented in diary form: My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) and A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) both published by Houghton Mifflin Company. 

The following extracts are taken from my First Summer in the Sierra.

19 June 1869 

‘Pure sunshine all day. How beautiful a rock is made by leaf shadows! Those of the live oak are particularly clear and distinct, and beyond all art in grace and delicacy, now still as if painted on stone, now gliding softly as if afraid of noise, now dancing, waltzing in swift, merry swirls, or jumping on and off sunny rocks in quick dashes like wave embroidery on seashore cliffs. How true and substantial is this shadow beauty, and with what sublime extravagance is beauty thus multiplied! The big orange lilies are now arrayed in all their glory of leaf and flower. Noble plants, in perfect health, Nature’s darlings.’

20 June 1869

‘Some of the silly sheep got caught fast in a tangle of chaparral this morning, like flies in a spider’s web, and had to be helped out. Carlo found them and tried to drive them from the trap by the easiest way. How far above sheep are intelligent dogs! No friend and helper can be more affectionate and constant than Carlo. The noble St. Bernard is an honor to his race.

The air is distinctly fragrant with balsam and resin and mint - every breath of it a gift we may well thank God for. Who could ever guess that so rough a wilderness should yet be so full of good things. One seems to be in a majestic domed pavilion in which a grand play is being acted with scenery and music and incense, - all the furniture and action so interesting we are in no danger of being called on to endure one dull moment. God himself seems to be always doing his best here, working like a man in a glow of enthusiasm.’

22 June 1869

‘Unusually cloudy. Besides the periodical shower-bearing cumuli there is a thin, diffused, fog-like cloud overhead. About .75 in all.’

23 June 1869 

‘Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.’

23 July 1869

‘Another midday cloudland, displaying power and beauty that one never wearies in beholding but hopelessly unsketchable and untellable. What can poor mortals say about clouds? While a description of their huge glowing domes and ridges, shadowy gulfs and cañons, and feather-edged ravines is being tried, they vanish, leading no visible ruins. Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significant as the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both alike are built up and die, and in God’s calendar difference of duration is nothing. We can only dream about them in wondering, worshiping admiration, happier than we dare tell even to friends who see farthest in sympathy, glad to know that not a crystal or vapor particle of them hard or soft, is lost; that they sink and vanish only to rise again and again in higher and higher beauty. As to our work, duty, influence, etc. concerning which so much fussy pother is made, it will not fail of its due effect, though like lichen on a stone, we keep silent.’

2 August 1869

‘Clouds and showers, about the same as yesterday. Sketching all day on the North Dome until four or five o’clock in the afternoon, when, as I was busily employed thinking only of the glorious Yosemite landscape, trying to draw every tree and every line and feature of the rocks, I was suddenly, and without warning, possessed with the notion that my friend, Professor J. D. Butler, of the State University of Wisconsin, was below me in the valley, and I jumped up full of the idea of meeting him, with almost as much startling excitement as if he had suddenly touched me to make me look up. Leaving my work without the slightest deliberation, I ran down the western slope of the Dome and along the brink of the valley wall, looking for a way to the bottom, until I came to a side cañon, which, judging by its apparently continuous growth of trees and bushes, I thought might afford a practical way into the valley, and immediately began to make the descent, late as it was, as if drawn irresistibly. But after a little, common sense stopped me and explained that it would be long after dark ere I could possibly reach the hotel, that the visitors would be asleep, that nobody would know me, that I had no money in my pockets, and moreover was without a coat. I therefore compelled myself to stop, and finally succeeded in reasoning myself out of the notion of seeking my friend in the dark, whose presence I only felt in a strange, telepathic way. I succeeded in dragging myself back through the woods to camp, never for a moment wavering, however, in my determination to go down to him next morning. This I think is the most unexplainable notion that ever struck me. Had some one whispered in my ear while I sat on the Dome, where I had spent so many days, that Professor Butler was in the valley, I could not have been more surprised and startled. When I was leaving the university, he said, “Now, John, I want to hold you in sight and watch your career. Promise to write me at least once a year.” I received a letter from him in July, at our first camp in the Hollow, written in May, in which he said that he might possibly visit California some time this summer and therefore hoped to meet me. But inasmuch he named no meeting-place, and gave no directions as to the course he would probably follow, and as I should be in the wilderness all summer, I had not the slightest hope of seeing him, and all thought of the matter had vanished from my mind until this afternoon, when he seemed to be wafted bodily almost against my face. Well, to-morrow I shall see; for, reasonable or unreasonable, I feel I must go.’