What poems people are

‘I felt more powerfully than ever today what poems people are; not the part of them that speaks, but the mysterious, intricate network of thoughts and feelings which remain unexpressed.’ This is from an early diary of Ruth Crawford Seeger, American composer and folk music specialist, who died 70 years ago today. Her diaries, though not published, have underpinned at least two biographies.

Crawford was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, the second child of a Methodist minister. The family moved several times during her childhood, settling in 1912, in Jacksonville, Florida. Her father died of TB, and her mother then opened a boarding house to help make ends meet. Having shown promise in poetry and music from an early age, she started, in 1913, taking piano lessons with Bertha Foster (founder of the local School of Musical Art). Further studies followed with Madame Valborg Collett. After leaving high school in 1918, she began to pursue a career as a concert pianist, sometimes performing at musical events. She also began teaching at Foster’s school and began composing for her pupils. In 1921, she moved to Chicago, and enrolled at the American Conservatory of Music.

In Chicago, Crawford studied piano with Heniot Levy and composition/theory with Adolf Weidig; she also wrote several early works. After receiving her degree in 1924, she enrolled in the master’s degree programme. That year, she took up private piano lessons with Djane Lavoie-Herz, a teacher who introduced her to the ideas of theosophy, the music of Alexander Scriabin, and to a wider world of artists and thinkers. She moved to New York where she studied composition, and where she worked as a piano teacher for the children of poet Carl Sandburg. Through Sandburg, she became interested in American folksongs, contributing arrangements to his 1927 book The American Songbag. In 1929 she began study with Charles Seeger. The two married in 1932 with Ruth assuming responsibility for Charles’ children by a previous marriage, including Pete, soon to become America’s best known folksinger (see They mix it up almost as I do). With Charles, she had two children, Peggy and Mike, both of whom also became renowned folksingers and teachers.

In 1936, the Seegers moved to Washington, D.C. to collect folk songs for the Library of Congress. Ruth acted as transcriber for the book Our Singing Country and, with Charles Seeger, Folk Song USA, both authored by John and Alan Lomax. Subsequently, she published her own pioneering collection, American Folk Songs for Children, in 1948. This and other Crawford Seeger books of the kind came to be regarded as key texts in primary music education. Having composed little since 1934, she returned to serious composition with the Suite for Wind Quintet in 1952. By the time it was complete, she learned she had cancer. She died on 18 November 1953 aged only 52. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Peggy Seeger’s website, The New York Times, Encyclopaedia Britannica, or the Los Angeles Public Library.

Seeger kept a diary from the age of 13 though only portions are extant. Those from her late teens cover daily activities, some philosophical musings and self-analysis. Later entries (1927-1929) ruminate on her first serious love affair, her decision nonetheless to pursue a career in New York, and the beginning of her long friendship with Marion Bauer. Her diaries have not been published as far as I can tell, but at least two biographies mention them often. Ruth Crawford Seeger: memoirs, memories, music by Matilda Gaume (Scarecrow Press, 1986) is freely available at Internet Archive (log-in required). This provides a number of direct quotes from the diaries, and, where not clear in the narrative, their dates are given in the extensive notes at the back of the book. Here are several examples.

6 January 1918
‘What is the soul? When it leaves the body we do not see it. And where is God? Everywhere? But what is he? Why can’t I know all these things? Because thou shouldst then know as much as God. Yes, true. But how -how I want to know it all.’ 

28 October 1927
‘I felt more powerfully than ever today what poems people are; not the part of them that speaks, but the mysterious, intricate network of thoughts and feelings which remain unexpressed.’

16 August 1929
‘Marion Bauer - she has freed me - I am writing again. She asks me to lunch on Tuesday; after lunch she plays some of her preludes . . . One thing I learned from this beautiful afternoon with Marion Bauer was that I had been forgetting that craftsmanship was also art. I have not been composing and have felt tense, partly because I relied on inspiration only. I was not willing to work things out; I felt that inspiration, emotion within, but when it started to come out, my attitude was so negative that the poor thought crept back into darkness from fear. Discipline. We talked on discipline a few nights ago - necessary - ear-training - hearing away from the piano. Lie on your couch and hear and study Bach chorales. Make yourself hear; also improvise, not wildly, but making your self hear the next chord. Courage, Marion Bauer tells me - work. You have a great talent. You must go ahead. I do not mean that you must not marry, but you must not drop your work.’

17 February 1930
‘Only God and my creditors know how poor I am. I wish my creditors were like God. He takes his pay too, but he does it gradually, and you don't realize it until the peanut bag is empty. Then he blows into it and claps it between his two hands, and throws away a bag that isn’t any good any more because it has a hole in it. All the time he is putting peanuts into new bags, and taking them out of old bags, and there is a regular stock exchange of peanuts. But he isn’t the kind of creditor who sends you a bill.’

More recently, Judith Tick in her biography, Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music, (Oxford University Press, 1997), also available to borrow at Internet Archive, does not include so many complete quotes, but she does weave short excerpts into her narrative, for example, as follows:

Page 22
‘Ruth Crawford found her way to composition through the routine of playing through music for her small pupils. A few notations in her diary outline the steps. On December 18, 1918, Ruth “looked over more music [for teaching] and improvised some.” January 3, 1919: “Have made up another piano piece - the 2nd one,” she wrote, adding, “Love to do it!” She showed her compositions to a Mr. Pierce, who perceived talent and decided to teach her some theory. He gave her what she later belittled as “four dry lessons from Chadwicks harmony book”; but on January 17, she wrote in her diary that she was “crazy about harmony.” Two piano pieces, Whirligig and The Elf Dance, date from this period. The Elf Dance was pronounced “real cunning” by Mrs. Doe, a teacher at the School of Musical Art, and a “cute thing” by Madame Collett.’

Page 57
‘Sandburg, moreover, stood on the shoulders of writers whom she perhaps loved even more: Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Crawford opened her 1927 diary with a quotation from Walden Pond, underlining Thoreau’s admonition to “probe the universe in a myriad points.” She alluded to Whitman frequently. One diary entry recounts a telling incident at Djane Herz’s studio: “I pick up Leaves of Grass and find a good many of the first verses of Song of Myself underlined. I feel at home.” Whitman’s cosmic metaphysics inspired her. “His constant reiteration of the oneness of himself with all other creatures - a sense of bigness” was an article of faith in her aesthetic theology.’

Page 60
Despite her success, 1926 was a difficult year. One diary entry refers to 1926 as a “nightmare,” with a darker reference to one “bitter, irritable day” in which “more sensitive morbid people become suicides. My wretchedness comes from the returning to my eyes of last year’s pulling, wracking strain, which makes practice and composing hard.” Little else is known about this crisis of nerves and health, or about an operation that Ruth had in the fall of 1925 to alleviate these symptoms. They abated but did not disappear entirely, and could trigger what Crawford described as spells of “depression.” ’

Page 90
‘Clara Crawford slipped into a coma a few days before her death on August 14. In the last diary entry Ruth’s own sense of loss finally tempered her journalistic fever, as she began to grieve. “I find myself often thinking of something I want to tell or ask Mother. Can it be that I shall never be able to talk to her again? It seems incredible. How little I realized how close she was to me, and what a child I still was, and how very much her interest and love and thoughts for my music were woven into my life! I feel stifled to think she will never again be there to hear and sympathize; I look forward through the years, and feel tragically alone. I begin to wonder how I can live. And to think that I had been feeling during the past year or two a desire to live alone, never dreaming how painfully soon Fate would answer my misplaced and erroneous desire. . .  How pitifully small was my realization of my love and need for Mother. . . I sit here by her bedside and though she breathes and I feel comfort just in holding her hand on my knee, yet my heart aches and I feel like one in prison, for I can tell her nothing, and if I could, she could not answer.” ’

Baekeland makes Bakalite

‘I consider this days very successful work which has put me on the knot of several new and interesting products which may have a wide application as plastics and varnishes. Have applied for a patent for a substance which I shall call Bakalite.’ This is Leo Baekeland, born 160 years ago today and sometimes referred to as ‘The Father of the Plastics Industry’, writing in his diary on the very day he named the first synthetic plastic - a substance which would soon be known as Bakelite and take over the world. 

Baekeland, the son of a cobbler, was born in Ghent, Belgium, on 14 November 1863. He studied at Ghent Municipal Technical School and the University of Ghent, receiving a doctorate in chemistry aged only 21. He taught in Bruges and then back at the university until 1889. He married Céline Swarts that same year, and they would have two children. Together they emigrated to the US. There he worked for a photographic firm before launching his own company to manufacture Velox - his own invention, a photographic paper that could be developed under artificial light (indeed it was the first commercially successful photographic paper). In 1899, he and his partner, Leonard Jacobi, sold their Velox venture (Nepera Chemical Company) to the inventor George Eastman for $1m. With some of the money he purchased a house in Yonkers, New York, where heset up his own research lab.

Having signed a non-compete clause with Eastman, prohibiting him from photography research, Baekeland journeyed to Germany for a refresher course in electrochemistry. On returning to New York he was in demand as a consultant becoming involved in various successful ventures. But, in 1905, he began searching for a synthetic substitute for shellac (a natural secretion from a bug which had many uses), a search which led him to the discovery of Bakelite, a thermosetting plastic (produced from formaldehyde and phenol at high temperature and pressure). It was the first plastic invented that retained its shape after being heated, and it also held excellent electrical insulation properties. A process patent was awarded in 1909.

In time, his invention led Baekeland - dubbed The Father of the Plastics Industry - to receiving many honours. He served as president of the American Chemical Society in 1924. At the time of his death, in 1944, Bakelite was being used in over 15,000 different products, and world production was totalling around 175,000 tons. By then, too, Baekeland held more than 100 patents. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the National Academy of Sciences, 

Baekeland kept detailed diaries all his life, 62 of them, from 1907 to 1934, are held by Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Archives. Before they were given to the Smithsonian, Céline Karraker, a granddaughter of Baekeland, read the diaries taking meticulous notes and intending to write a biography of her grandfather. They were also read by Carl Kaufmann, husband of Céline Karraker’s step sister, Ruth Wyman, who used the diaries to flesh out his master’s thesis, published as Grand Duke, Wizard and Bohemian: A Biographical Profile of Leo H. Baekeland.

More recently, however, the diaries have been digitalised and transcribed by Smithsonian Digital Volunteers, and are freely available online. A pdf of volume 1, for example, can be found here, with this intro: ‘The diary entries discuss his experiments during the time period in which he filed process patents for Bakelite. This diary [. . .] details Leo H. Baekeland’s daily activities. He writes often of his visits and discussions, as well as the subjects of correspondence he has written and received. Furthermore, Baekeland’s diary sheds light on the use and distance of travel by automobile in the early twentieth century. In the notes, Baekeland explains increasing time spent in the laboratory at the end of 1907 into 1908. The diary spans the spring months through the winter.’ Here are a few extracts, including the first mention of Bakalite. (Baekeland continued to use the term ’Bakalite’ in his diary for some time but he first started also using the term ‘Bakelite’ in November 1907.)

18-21 June 1907
‘Spent all days in my laboratory and found many interesting things. An exceedingly active period which allowed me to learn many mysterious reactions with which Thurlow has been struggling unsuccessfully since over a year. See laboratory notes marks CLS and BKL.

I consider this days very successful work which has put me on the knot of several new and interesting products which may have a wide application as plastics and varnishes. Have applied for a patent for a substance which I shall call Bakalite. Have found also a very practical solution for improving Novolak and make it practical as a varnish. All this work has been carried out while Thurlow was in Detroit showing to Berry Brothers how to deodorize Novolak. I am sure he will be surprised to hear about all what I have accomplished in so short a time.’

3 April 1907
‘I spent the morning at Westchester Hat Co. Yonkers and made an experiment so as to determine whether I could felt asbestos fibre in one of the hat machines so as to produce a cheaper diaphragm than the asbestos cloth diaphragm we are using now at Niagara Falls. The experiment was thoroughly satisfactory. In a very few seconds the whole operation was finished. I used asbestos fibre No.1 of the Johns Mandeville Asbestos Co. I intend to have the experiment repeated directly on flat cathode plates in such a way that they are placed above an opening on a flat table with suction below and a distributer of fibre above. It occurs to me that in order to utilize shorter fibre, we might stretch cheesecloth either free or over the cathode plate and thus produce an initial support for the asbestos fibre. Wetting and pressing the surface favors felting. I shall try wetting with gummy solutions or perhaps silicate of soda. We might also apply the iron paint we are using now at Niagara Falls so as to bind everything together. It occurs to me that in order to counteract the difference in hydrostatic pressure at the diaphragm in the cells we might make the lower part of the diaphragm thicker than the upper part. I have given instructions to Mr. Rowland and Marsh to carry out some further experiments on the subject. Afterwards I intend to apply for a patent.

In the afternoon went to the office of D. & F. Co. and wrote some letters.’

13 July 1907
‘A very active day which I spent in my laboratory on further research work on Bakalite. Thurlow worked on acetone formaldehyde and acetone - phenol products. See laboratory notes’

14 July 1907
‘Sunday. Started very early in my laboratory. Obtained  the first large sample of Bakalite in a bottle. The subject looks very encouraging. I believe I have an excellent thing. and it would be a great disappointment if my patent application had been preceeded by an earlier invention of somebody else.’

15 July 1907
‘Got a telegram from Townsend that Bakalite patent has been filed at Patent Office last Saturday.’

16 July 1907
‘Hard at work in laboratory.’

17 July 1907
‘Another busy day in laboratory further research work in relation to Bakalite.’

18 July 1907
‘Another hot sultry day. But I do not mind it and thoroughly appreciate the luxury of being allowed to stay home in shirt sleeves and without a collar. How about these Slave millionaires in wall street who have to go to their money making pursuit notwithstanding the sweltering heat. All day spent in laboratory - Bakalite’

25 October 1907
‘Went to N.Y. with Mr. Oppenheimer in his Limousine. Met Prof Ira Woolson at Columbia and asked him to test Bakalized Wood for me. He seemed much interested in my subject when I showed him Bakalite and told him the wood was impregnated with it. He gave me some black gum to try the process on it.

Spent remainder of morning in Prof. Tuckers laboratory testing conductivity of Graphite-Bakalite. He too seemed much interested when I showed him my samples.

Went to Wall Street where I was astonished to see mounted police men and rather dense crowds. Run on the Trust Co of America in front of office of Development & Funding Co. Good metered patient crowd line extending overlay the block until beyond custom house. Probably mostly small depositors judging from looks and appearance. Great uneasiness everywhere on account of financial condition.

Received two first copies of my book which has appeared yesterday. Consulted with Marsh & Lansing three hours, (chge 1/2 day)

Hook, Marsh & myself went to Delmonicos for lunch. Wilcox secretary of Public Utilities commission came to our table. General talk everywhere. The unsatisfactory financial condition. Asked my payment of my last bill to Hooker but he asked that I should wait and be satisfied with half of it.

Evening went to Toch’s where took supper he told me all his cash was tied up at Knickerbocker Trust Co which had suspended payments. He was rather more depressed than he ever appeared to me. Lewis fetched me at Chemists club with motor car . Took Bogurt and Toch home and we arrived here about midnight.’

23 November 1907
‘Spent all day writing letters wrote one to Quigley of Armstrong Cork Co telling him how cork Bakelite could be made in a continuous process by feeding continuously hot granulated cork with Bakelite then compressing and let the hot mass harden by itself.

All afternoon was utilized for laboratory and making a condensed report on the result of my wood impregnation tests.

Evening Mandel & wife came to eat mussels. After supper Branchi & wife joined. Showed Mandel in my lab alone my products and told him how Bakalite was made.’

Self-exposing massacre

‘For a fortnight JH and I have been trimming the fat from this volume, fat being the truth that endangers. The book still seems bloated, for I’m as fond of my fat as an analysand is of his fears: with each slice I scream. Yet here’s a hundred deleted wounds to others and to myself, lascivious narratives, family daguerreotypes, puerile anecdotes and dirty linen.’ This is the penultimate entry in Ned Rorem’s third volume of published diaries. Although a Pulitzer-prize winning American composer particularly feted for his art songs, Rorem is more widely known, perhaps, for his uncompromising and witty diaries. He died last November, and today he would have been 100!

Rorem was born on 23 October 1923 in Richmond, Indiana, but moved to Chicago when still a child. He studied music at Northwestern University, Curtis Institute, Juilliard School and Berkshire Music Center. In 1948 his song, The Lordly Hudson, was voted the best published song of that year by the Music Library Association. The following year, he moved to France, and lived and worked there until the late 1950s, including a two year sojourn in Morocco. Back in the US, from 1957, he was much in demand for various music commissions.

Rorem has composed three symphonies, four piano concertos, hundreds of songs, and many other types of music. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for Air Music. According to Boosey & Hawkes, his music publisher, ‘Rorem is justly renowned for his art songs; his catalog includes more than 500 works in the medium. Evidence of Things Not Seen, his evening-length song cycle for four singers and piano, represents his magnum opus in the genre.’ Rorem's most recent opera, Our Town, completed with librettist J. D. McClatchy, is a setting of the acclaimed Thornton Wilder play of the same name, and was premiered in 2006. Rorem has an impoverished biography, which is little more than a long list of his compositions. More biographical information is available from Wikipedia, and at Boosey & Hawkes and Rorem’s own website.

Alongside his composing, Rorem has written extensively about music and about his own life, in autobiographies and diaries. Although he has been quoted as saying he is a composer who also writes, not a writer who composes, it can be argued that his diaries - in which he is frank about his own (homo)sexuality and his relationships with, among others, Leonard Bernstein, Noël Coward, Samuel Barber - have earned him more celebrity status than his music. There is an excellent article, available online in the spring 1999 edition of The Paris Review, by McClatchy in which he interviews Rorem about his diaries.

Here is Rorem responding to McClatchy’s question about when he first kept a diary: ‘I did keep a diary in 1936, age twelve, for three months when our family went to Europe. Except for frequent references to Debussy and Griffes, it focuses breathlessly on American movies seen in Oslo or tourists we met on boats. No shred of lust, much less of intellect or guile. Admittedly, words are never put on paper, be it War and Peace or a laundry list, without thought of other eyes reading them, even though those eyes might just be one’s own at another time. But I didn’t think of myself as an author. Ten years later I began a literary diary and kept it up until I went to France in 1949. It’s filled with drunkenness, sex, and the talk of my betters, all to the tune of André Gide.’

The first of Rorem’s diaries was published in 1966 - The Paris Diary - covering his years abroad from 1951 to 1955. ‘Its pithy, elegant entries’ McClatchy says, ‘were filled with tricks turned and names dropped (Cocteau, Poulenc, Balthus, Dali, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Man Ray, and James Baldwin, along with the rich and titled, the louche and witty).’

The following year, Rorem published The New York Diary, which took the story up to 1961 and ‘deepened his self-portrait as an untortured artist and dashing narcissist’. There have been several more volumes - The Final Diary in 1974, The Nantucket Diary in 1987, and Lies in 2002, for example - up to the most recent, published in 2006, Facing the Night in which he finds himself alone after the death of Jim Holmes, his companion of 32 years. Many or all of these books can be sampled or previewed at Googlebooks and Amazon.

Here, though, are some extracts from The Final Diary 1961-1972 published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1974.

16 April 1961
‘Sitting in one denuded room whose center contains a mountain of packing cases to be removed tomorrow by Robert Phelps. Without paying last month’s rent I fly Friday for London, meanwhile have already left, can only sit, wondering, for five days more.

Wondering about those three things (and there are only three) we all desire: success in love, success in society, success in work. Any two of these may be achieved and possessed simultaneously, but not all three - there isn’t time. If you think you have the three, beware! You’re teetering on the abyss. You can’t have a lover and friends and career. And even just career and love are, in the long run, mutually exclusive.’

9 June 1961
‘Three days ago at dawn I smashed my right thumb flat as a bedbug in Virgil’s bathroom door, was sped to a fourth-rate doctor in Les Halles who administered five stitches as I (blushing delirium) whispered “tu me plais”, and he replied with an antitetanus shot which, for the next twelve hours, left me hanging by a thread. (Like other chosen fools, my allergy to anything concerning horses is prodigious: to ride a horse, to smell horsemeat cooking, even to read about Swift’s Houyhnhnms, I swell like a bomb.) A week in bed, shivering, finger paralyzed. Then with a few sips of Chablis and a taste of saucisson (which, they say, is ground donkey fat) the tetanus symptoms recur worse than before. Bulges everywhere. The antiserum contagion twists even the forehead into knots of wet iron. Return to bed, every joint aching for days, pills, pills, body a gray grub, spirit a clod, thumb sticking out like a sore thumb as I ruminate on how I bring on these dramas because “life isn’t enough.” ’

7 August 1961
‘So here I am in Africa again, after ten years. And like two Augusts ago on finally returning to Chicago (where I found the initials NR childishly imbedded in the hard cement of adulthood before our former house) I am disturbed. For the past thirteen weeks I’ve sought love on three continents, and found love elusive, because you can’t go back, although nothing has changed but you, etc.

Nothing affects me. Yesterday, Guy’s friend, young Docteur Michel Blanquit, for my general education took me to the Salé morgue and there displayed the svelte naked body of a dead Berber girl who had hanged herself in the woods. Nothing. Yet this was only my second corpse, the first being that “man who jumped off the Seranac” whom all we fourth-graders ran to see and were traumatized for weeks.

Yesterday in Fez I sniffed once more the cedar, mint and heavy olives, hear and taste the terrible exoticism, feel nostalgia less strong than it should be, because I’m not involved (or don’t let myself be), and grow jealous and lonely.

Who knows if America might not after all be the country where my realest problems, for better or worse, will eventually be solved? You can go home again.’

29 September 1961
‘If I weren’t a musician I’d have more time for music. Far more informed than I is the Music Lover, the amateur; nor is his information necessarily more superficial. At a time when it counted - before the age of twenty - I did learn the piano catalogue of Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Debussy, Ravel, and a bit less of Liszt and Schumann. But most of these weren’t mastered. To hear them no longer tempts me. Seldom at a concert don’t I feel I should be home writing my own music.’

7 February 1962
‘For seventeen years I’ve been intermittently keeping these diaries. What will I ultimately do with them. The earliest ones are doubtless more - well - engrossing for their reportage, but the rest are mere self-exposing massacre when au fond I am (as Maggy says) a hardworking mensch. (Hardworking? At least this journal is not concerned with my work. And today I say that work means balance without pleasure; my collaboration with Kessler and our opera for next season I anticipate with only boredom - yet what masterpieces have not sprung from even less!). The other night at one of the biweekly domestic evenings chez moi I read the “Cocteau Visit” extract to Morris and Virgil, and everyone was impressed and said: print it! But where? Oh, the energy I had for the observative journalizing in those early fifties!. But as I wrote then, we spend most of our lives repeating ourselves so now I save time by notating telegram-style. Well, if tomorrow I died, I suppose there’d remain a sizable and varied catalogue. (Am I advancing? Yes, but the scenery’s stationary.) And die perhaps I will, though, astrologically it should have happened to our whole world three days ago, February 4.’

23 December 1972 [Last but one entry]
‘The Final Diary is merely a title, like Journal of the Plague Year or The Great American Novel. Which does not mean it’s fiction. (Fiction freezes my pen. The discipline of invention - that which is not fact, as I comprehend fact - eludes me.) For a fortnight JH [Jim Holmes] and I have been trimming the fat from this volume, fat being the truth that endangers. The book still seems bloated, for I’m as fond of my fat as an analysand is of his fears: with each slice I scream. Yet here’s a hundred deleted wounds to others and to myself, lascivious narratives, family daguerreotypes, puerile anecdotes and dirty linen. Precisely because they are “interesting” they will remain posthumous. Well, one must, at least in appearance, grow up sometime. For only children are punished. Thus only children are frightened. Alas, only children are worthwhile.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 23 October 2013.

A nice little slot

‘I think some critics are uncomfortable with me because they have never been able to put me into a nice little slot. They haven’t been able to place me. But I’ve long since ceased to lose sleep over that. They’ve got their jobs to do, and I’ve got mine.’ This is from the diaries of the great British film director John Schlesinger who died 20 years ago today. The diaries - taped and written - have never been published but Schlesinger’s biographer, William J. Mann, refers to them repeatedly in his biography Edge of Midnight.

Schlesinger was born in 1926, in Hampstead, London, to wealthy Jewish parents - his father was a distinguished physician. He was educated at St Edmund’s School (Hindhead) and Uppingham School before enlisting in the British Army serving, during WW2, with the Royal Engineers. He became involved in making films on the front line, and he also entertained fellow troops with magic tricks. Subsequently, while at Balliol College, Oxford, he continued to make films and perform, not least with the Oxford University Dramatic Society.

In the early 1950s, Schlesinger appeared in various supporting roles for British films and television productions, but his directorial debut came in 1956 with a short documentary Sunday in the Park about London’s Hyde Park. Another followed, in 1958, about Benjamin Britten and the Aldeburgh Festival. He provided assistant directorial services on dozens of episodes for the TV series The Four Just Men, as well as a few for Danger Man. The early 1960s saw his career take off with several releases - Terminus, A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, Darling and Far from the Madding Crowd - winning awards. In 1969, his film Midnight Cowboy won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. Through the 1970s and 1980s, he continued making successful films (and some not so successful), in Hollywood and Britain, as well as directing drama for television, and also sometimes in the London theatres.

Schlesinger’s final films were the intense drama Eye for an Eye (1996), about a revenge-driven mother, and The Next Best Thing (2000) starring Madonna and Rupert Everett. Schlesinger had come out as gay during the making of Midnight Cowboy, and he had a long term relationship with Michael Childers. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1970 Birthday Honours for services to film. He died on 25 July 2003. Encyclopaedia Britannica has this brief assessment: ‘Although the films of his later career were less uniformly brilliant than those early films with which he made his reputation, Schlesinger left an enviable body of work.’ Further information is also available from Wikipedia and IMDB.

Schlesinger left behind a large volume of diary material, much of it tape-recorded rather than written. William J. Mann uses this material extensively in his biography - Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger (Hutchinson, 2004). ‘I sorted through the tapes,’ he says in the biography, ‘they were intended for his own use, for writing his own memoir; he hadn’t expected anyone other than himself to hear them. Not for every film did John keep a detailed diary. There were gaps, but also some wonderful surprises: a rambling, intimate account of a holiday in South Africa with Michael; an on-the-set recording of rehearsals for The Believers; a tape left running after a radio interview had “officially” concluded. Not all of his diaries were tape-recorded: of his earlier work, he left mostly written records, often squeezed into the columns in his daily planners, a practice repeated again on his last film. Helpful and insightful as such written records were, however, they could not compare to the power of hearing his voice.’

Mann uses the written and taped diaries many times in the biography, but mostly by weaving very extracts phrases into his narrative rather than by providing whole and dated extracts. Nevertheless, here are few passages from Mann’s book (which can be digitally borrowed from Internet Archive) which include such excerpts from Schelsinger’s diaries.

***

‘He would learn, despite his kneejerk pessimism, to distance himself from criticism and rejection, for they would become the ever-present background chorus to his career. “I’ve often been dismissed,” he told his diary. “I think some critics are uncomfortable with me because they have never been able to put me into a nice little slot. They haven’t been able to place me. But I’ve long since ceased to lose sleep over that. They’ve got their jobs to do, and I’ve got mine.” ’ 

***

‘Gloria Swanson visited the set, courtesy of the Paramount publicity machine. “I think she didn’t really know what it was all about, what was going on around her, but she was very charming,” John recorded in his diary. “I never realized how small she was, nor that the beauty mark that has been so much her trademark was in fact a rather ugly, raised black mole, quite hideous on close inspection. I’m amazed a film star of such magnitude would have clung to it for so long, that it never registered what it really was.” ’

***

‘Camaraderie, in fact, extended from the grips and the technicians right up to the top. John liked his second American crew much better than his first: “This is not at all the Hollywood experience that I had somehow expected,” he recorded in his diary. I had expected bullshit. I had expected union problems. I had expected a kind of blaséness and I’ve found none of that. I suppose it’s the executives and the agents that sometimes turn me off the place, but I must say, working with these people has been an eye-opener.” ’

***

‘Watching Alan Bridges’ film The Hireling, with a script by Wolf Mankowitz, he also felt “homesick.” Musing to his diary, John wrote: “I felt once again a sense of terrible loss about the British cinema because when we do it well, we do it well. Much better, I think, than the average film made here.” ’ 

***

‘ “I have a very strong feeling that whatever the outcome of this picture [Yanks],” John recorded in his |diary, whether it’s commercially successful or not, I’m making the right move at this moment of my career.” Certainly, he was now enjoying being back in England, defying the odds in mounting a major film there - even if none of the money was British. “There is sheer pleasure in having won all our financial battles in getting the thing off the ground after an extremely depressing summer, when I really felt that it would never see the light of day.” ’

***

‘ “Vanessa [Redgrave] is without question one of the best actresses I’ve ever worked with,” John told his diary. “She is the consummate actress, able to take direction, really a wonderful musical instrument, so to speak, for a director to play.” ’

What is the answer? Money!

Very many happy returns to Joan Collins, 90 years old today. A famous British actress best remembered for her role in Dynasty, she is now considered one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Apart from her long career in films and television she has also authored at least eight autobiographical books, one of which is a selection of entries from her ‘unapologetic’ diaries. Here she is in her early 60s, ruminating. ‘What do I really want to do? I would like to just live a happy life, and I don’t think that doing an American sitcom is going to make me that happy. What is the answer? Money! And with my kids and lifestyle, I need plenty of it.’

Collins was born in London on 23 May 1933 to a theatrical agent and a former dancer. She and her two younger siblings (sister Jackie would become a famous author) were thus much exposed through childhood to the entertainment industry. Aged 15, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but also took modeling jobs to supplement her allowance. In 1952, she earned a first film credit, playing a teenage delinquent in Judgement Deferred. She then signed a five-year contract with J. Arthur Rank. Through the first half of the 1950s, she appeared in many films, being given increasingly better roles. In 1954, she was chosen by US director Howard Hawks to star as the scheming Princess Nellifer in Land of the Pharaohs. This led to a seven year contract with 20th Century Fox. She made her Hollywood film debut in the lavish drama The Virgin Queen, given equal billing with the likes of Bette Davis and Richard Todd.

Having been passed over to play the title role in Cleopatra, with the part going to Elizabeth Taylor, she became disillusioned with 20th Century Fox, and returned to London. Various films in the UK, Italy and again in the US followed. By the late 1960s, she was making guest appearances in many (now famous) television serials, and subsequently in TV movies. The 1970s saw her lead in many more films (appearing with Robert Mitchum in The Big Sleep, for example, and in a film version of her sister Jackie’s racy novel The Stud). In 1981, she joined Dynasty a struggling American soap opera, taking the role of Alexis Colby, the beautiful and vengeful ex-wife of an oil tycoon. Dynasty ran through the 1980s becoming the US’s number one TV show. Collins was nominated six times for a Golden Globe Award, winning it the once, in 1983. In the early 1990s, she starred in a stage revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives as well as in a set of Coward’s plays for the BBC.

Into the 21st century, Collins continued acting regularly for screens big and small and onstage, but she also appeared frequently on chat and celebrity shows. In 2006 she toured the UK with a solo stage act, An Evening with Joan Collins, subsequently taking it to the US. She published a good number of books, some autobiographical, some on beauty, and some fiction. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2015. She has been married five times, has three children and several grandchildren. Further information is available from Wikipedia, IMDB and Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

One of Collins’s autobiographical books is a collection of diary entries entitled My Unapologetic Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021). She ends a short autobiographical prologue as follows: ‘And now I’m spilling the beans! Well, nearly all of them. I’ve always been a diarist, starting at age twelve with a tiny five-year diary of the kind you’d find at Smythson’s, and writing sporadically over the years. What you will read in the following pages was written when “I felt like it” between 1989 and 2006.

I dictated most of these entries in real time, into a mini tape recorder, every night when I came home. There is no rhyme or reason why there are gaps of years between entries. I do know that interesting events happened in those gaps, but I guess I wasn’t in the mood, or I couldn’t find my tape recorder, or maybe the tapes ended in the same place as Richard Nixon’s lost eighteen minutes. . .

Anyway, here they are, with NO apologies to anyone mentioned in them. Enjoy!’

24 October 1996
‘Meet Sacha and Erin at The Ivy. Supposed to be joined by Gary Pudney, but he doesn’t call or show. That’s Hollywood folks. At the next table is Jennifer Aniston, the current crème de la crème heartthrob of Friends on TV. I’ve never seen such slender arms. Also at the next table is an unrecognisable Cheryl Tiegs. Why do women over forty think they can go around wearing no make-up. I looked at Erin and say, “No woman over thirty should ever go out without make-up - you’re a girl after my own heart.” Jeffrey joins us and we discuss Sacha’s upcoming Vanity Fair layout, and his exhibition which he is planning on 1 February. We swap Polaroids from our various shoots yesterday. His is absolutely fabulous from Vanity Fair and for the first time in a photograph I can see the incredible combination of Tony and me in his face.

Dine with Jeffrey, Debbie Miller and Chris Barrett, my agents, and Mark Paresio, a new literary agent at Metropolitan. Drai’s restaurant is buzzing. Thursday night must be the night to be here. Joanie Schnitzer is sitting with Boaz. Plus the usual suspects. We have a fun dinner in which yet another television idea is pitched to me by Mark. This one I really like more than anything else. It’s a one-hour drama called ‘Georgetown’, set in Washington with all its political plottings and plannings. I would play a Pamela Harriman type. It sounds fabulous. I would make a good Pamela Harriman, although I don’t think that I possess her Machiavellian way and manipulative spirit. The usual paparazzi are outside. I am wearing my new simple look. Since Hollywood has embraced this in a big way, you leave the pearls and the glitz and the diamonds and the big hair at home. This is a bit difficult for me as I rather like it. I notice Joanie Schnitzer hasn’t left hers at home.’

30 November 1996
‘Went with Jeffrey and Erin to see 101 Dalmatians at the Academy. God, what a piece of shit! Without too many sour grapes or bitterness, I thought Glenn Close was perfectly awful as Cruella de Vil. I really wanted to play this role, and would have done anything, well almost, to get it. She plays it totally without humour and without any kind of vulnerability. All in all, it was the yawn of the year, and I’ll be amazed if it makes anybody over the age of nine want to go and see it. [ . . .]

Peter was very positive about me. He said how beautiful I was etc. etc., how great I looked, blah-blah. And he did make some very interesting suggestions: a) he thought I should change my hair, as my short, dark hair is so much associated with Alexis. He suggested going sort of a deep red, as producers would then see me in a different light.

“That’s probably why they don’t want to develop something for you, because you look the same as you did in Dynasty.”

“Maybe it’s a good idea. I’m fed up with the way I look, anyway,” I said.

Then, b), he said he thought I should go on the Howard Stem Show. I’ve always wanted to do that. I think he’s rather brilliant. I thought I’d say as my opening line, “I’ve always wanted to know whether your dick is as small as you always brag about.” Peter seems to think that getting a younger, hipper audience is the answer. Answer? I really don’t know what the question is. Do I really want to get down and dirty, trading scatological jokes with Howard Stern? What do I really want to do? I would like to just live a happy life, and I don’t think that doing an American sitcom is going to make me that happy. What is the answer? Money! And with my kids and lifestyle, I need plenty of it.’

27 December 1996
‘Did a little shopping at a men’s shop, then came home to the dreadfully sad news on my answering machine that Jean-Claude Tramont had died. Sue Mengers had left the message and she sounded dreadful. I was terribly, terribly upset. It was only seventeen weeks ago that he was in the South of France, frolicking in the pool, playing poker, full of life and jokes. We just adored him, so it’s a terrible blow. Went in the pouring rain with Jeffrey to a party at Ian and Doris La Frenais’s place. A lot of reasonably interesting people there, like Kiefer Sutherland, Helmut Newton and his wife June, Dani Janssen, Wendy Stark and John Morrissey. The food was good and it was great seeing Ian, who’s always fun and cheered me up.’

29 January 1997
‘A meeting at Aaron Spellings palatial offices where Jonathan Levin - all smiles and, as they say in My Fair Lady, ‘oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way around the floor’ - made nice to me. Also there were the writers Diane Messina and Jim Stanley, along with Steven Tann (Vice President of Programming) and Jim Conway (Executive Vice President of Spelling Television). Sat there trying to be intelligent about a role that I really know nothing about. They’ve decided to call her Christina. I’ve suggested Zelda or Valentina, but they wanted something more ‘royal’. The actress who was to play my daughter is now no longer on board and they still haven’t cast her, although they are supposed to start shooting in three weeks. How Hollywood.’

The bluff to Old Snuffy

‘In the afternoon Lt. Wheeler and I came to a rapid where we deemed it advisable to wait for the Picture [a boat]. I climbed the bluff to Old Snuffy [one of the brown dolomite tongues in the Bright Angel Shale]. Near the water line are rocks with scolithus, loosely aggregated sandstone, Potsdam sandstone? It must be 75 feet thick on the granite.’ This is from the diary of Grove Karl Gilbert, one of the founders of geomorphology, written during an early expedition under the command of the pioneering explorer and cartographer, George M. Wheeler.

Gilbert was born in Rochester, New York, on 6 May 1843. He was home schooled for much of his childhood, and, though not always healthy, was an attentive student. He graduated from the University of Rochester, and tried teaching but soon resigned his first job. In 1863, he took an apprenticeship at Ward Natural Science Establishment, at Cosmos Hall on the Rochester campus, which manufactured and distributed scientific equipment for schools. He avoided the Civil War, most likely because of poor health. In 1869 he took part in the second Ohio State Geological Survey as a volunteer assistant; and, in 1871, he joined the Wheeler Survey, one of the four great surveys of the American West. In 1874, he married Fanny Loretta Porter; and in 1875, he was transferred to the John Wesley Powell survey, which took him to Utah. In 1877, he published his first important monograph, The Geology of the Henry Mountains. 

Following the creation of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879, Gilbert was appointed Senior Geologist. In 1884 he was placed in charge of the Appalachian division of geology, and in 1889, upon the creation of the division of geologic correlation, he was placed at its head. In 1890, he published his History of the Niagara River, but in 1892 he relinquished his position as chief geologist. Although wrongly attributing the origins of a crater in Arizona to volcanic activity, he correctly concluded that the craters on the moon were caused by meteorites and not volcanoes. He joined the Harriman Alaska Expedition in 1899. Two weeks after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, he took a series of photographs documenting the damage along the San Andreas fault. 

Gilbert, much honoured in his lifetime, won the Wollaston Medal from the Geological Society of London in 1900. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1902. He was awarded the Charles P. Daly Medal by the American Geographical Society in 1910. And, he is the only geologist to ever be elected twice as President of the Geological Society of America. ‘Gilbert,’ Wikipedia says, ‘is considered one of the giants of the sub-discipline of geomorphology, having contributed to the understanding of landscape evolution, erosion, river incision and sedimentation. He died in 1918. Further information is also available Encyclopaedia Britannica, and EOS.

Although Gilbert was a lifelong diarist, the many diaries he left behind have been described as ‘colourless’. Here is an extract from William M. Davis’s memoir on Gilbert - as found online at the National Academy of Sciences: ‘During Gilbert’s apprenticeship at Cosmos Hall he formed the habit of keeping a concise diary, and this habit was pursued all through his life. Brief entries were made in small pocket-books concerning the persons he met and the places he visited; and 51 of these consecutive annual records have been preserved, beginning in 1868 and continuing to 1918; the last entry was made only a few days before his death. It is a great privilege to look over the personal records of such a man, not in the way of peering curiosity but in a reverent spirit, with the memory of the man constantly present, and with much of the sadness that one feels when standing alone and in silence by the grave of a trusted friend. A sincere interest is aroused by every item that teaches something of his habit of thought, something of his inner nature, something of the powerful and beautiful personality that so greatly aided the progress of geology in America and that endeared itself so warmly to all his associates.

Unhappily, entries in the diaries are for the most part colorless records of fact, with very few expressions of opinion or of feeling. There are occasional blank periods, and these are prolonged when the diary was replaced by field notebooks during many seasons of work in the West. Annual summaries of travel and other leading topics are found in many of the later books. Mention is frequently made of stops on journeys westward or eastward at Rochester to see parents or elder brother; or at Jackson, Mich., to see a sister; but there is nothing written to indicate the warm affection that united the diminishing family. Instead of drifting apart in later years by reason of separated residence, the survivors seemed to grow closer and closer together. Brief extracts from the diaries will be found on later pages, where they occasionally serve to fix the dates of journeys and or to clear up matters that would otherwise remain obscure.’

That said, one of his diaries has been transcribed, by George Simmons, and is available online at Colorado Plateau River Guides (CPRG) website. CPRG says that when presented with this manuscript by Simmons ‘we almost fell dead’. This is a very significant piece of literature,’ it continues, ‘that has, to our knowledge, never been published. The trip occurred in the fall of 1871, before John Wesley Powell’s second expedition through the Grand Canyon. This is one of three factors which led to the decision by Powell to abandon the rest of his expedition at Kanab Creek in 1872. Lt. George M. Wheeler was in charge of the expedition in which Grove K. Gilbert was the geologist. This is the third expedition to reach Diamond Creek.’ 

Here are several extracts.

26 September 1871
‘The gravel that underlies Fortification Rock and Table Mountain, is newer than Black Canon lavas and older than the basalt of those peaks. The river bluffs above are of more recent gravels. Think the lower (red) bed of Table Mountain is lava - the yellow above gravel. The same beds north of the river bear the same relation to the basalt that forms the Table Mountain there.

At Fortification Rock were pictured the Butte itself the sculptured gravel opposite and some sand-worn rocks. We left the spot at about 1 P.M. and to Vegas Wash - 2 or 3 miles - had to tow up a steep hill made by the debris from the wash. The slack water above this dam gave us easy work nearly to Callville, a distance of ten miles(?). All the way the banks show gravel bluffs of coarse and fine material, half consolidated so as to give rough semi-castellated forms.’

6 October 1871
‘I propose to call our boat (No. 3) the Trilobite. We

managed to get off from Camp Crossing at about 10 A.M., just in time to miss the swimming of the mules. Mr. Marvine accompanies us so far as to get a glimpse of the mouth of the Canon and then returns. We camp outside the Canon and Hecox and I start to climb the wall. Hecox sickens (morally) at the first third of the climb, and returns. I do not reach the top until after sunset though I started at about 1 P.M. It is the hardest climb I ever undertook.’

8 October 1871
‘This morning we got ready early and I walked back to

meet Lt. Wheeler who with O’Sullivan had camped a mile below. With him I revisited the springs on the north shore and we named them.

A large one of the crater style with flowers we called Tufa Spring and Tufa Springs would be a good name for the group. Another larger one with a fantastic canopy of tufa is Grotto Spring.

A third is Baptismal Fountain.

A fourth (now dry) and hanging against a larger one is the Holy Water Fountain.

A dripping spring where tufa a foot from the water projects far over it. Starting our boat along we find yet other springs on both shores. Many of them voluminous. At one are some scrubby trees a foot or two in diameter but with the habit of the water willow. The leaf is small and unequally cordate [sketch omitted] the leaves on sprouts being rounder than those on old stems.

Verdure is to be seen at many points on the bank and referable to springs. It is confined however to the sandstone doubtless because the limestone is not so pervious [barometric readings omitted].

In the afternoon Lt. Wheeler and I came to a rapid where we deemed it advisable to wait for the Picture.

I climbed the bluff to Old Snuffy [one of the brown dolomite tongues in the Bright Angel Shale]. Near the water line are rocks with scolithus, loosely aggregated sandstone, Potsdam sandstone? It must be 75 feet thick on the granite [sketch and description of geologic section omitted].’

16 October 1871
Hecox and I were out of camp last night on account of boat accident, and the camp missed us for we had food and beds, and our boat crew went without either. They had however some bread in the morning when we came up and some of them made up all deficiencies by a good hearty grumble lasting through the day. Tonight Lt. Wheeler puts us on short allowance of flour - four pounds a day for seven men (the full ration is 7 lbs. 12 oz.). Our bacon is gone, and beans and rice are scant, but coffee is in plenty and will outlast every other item. Our flour will hold out at this rate six days and those must bring us to the Diamond River or back to the crossing, the former if possible. I make out from lves map and Newberry’s section that we are not to expect any great change in the character of the canon at Diamond River, but merely a retirement of the Red Wall from the immediate cliff. It is now far enough back to be out of sight except through canon vistas.

The granite cliff continues to show much schistose rock gneiss, chlorite slate, etc.

Basalt veins (as I can only suppose them to be for I have no time to examine them) have appeared along the cliff at many (3 or 4) points today though we have come but 1 1/2 miles.

Our work of today was the completion of the passage of Double Rapid. On the upper half Salmon and Hecox broke loose in a boat and brought up in an eddy between the two falls and on the wrong side. Indians had to swim the river and climb around to them (a work of 2 hours) to row them over when they succeeded in getting them up. Once above the rapid we found deep slow running water (with slight interruption) for 1 1/2 miles when we encamped and drew our daily ration or half ration. Drew the Picture up for repairs.

The force of the current in high water is here so great that no small gravel remains on the surface of the bottom - only large boulders. These give the rapids quite different character as regards navigation. Standing ground is generally convenient for men on the tow line. Sunken rocks are likewise abundant and the water is much tossed. The towing force does not have to wade, but pulls hand-over-hand. The steersman and bowman have to be on the alert.

Astronomical Obseravations tonight: Camp 28.’ 

Hammer out a little idea

Today marks the 180th anniversary of the birth of Henry James, one of the US’s finest writers, and a major figure in 19th century literary realism. He was not a diarist as such, but jotted regularly in diary-like notebooks, developing ideas for stories he was hoping to write. As such, the notebooks, held by the Houghton Library at Harvard, are considered an important resource not only for understanding Henry James but for insights into the creative process.

James was born in New York City on 15 April 1843 into a wealthy family which travelled often to Europe where he was taught by tutors. His father was a Swedenborgian theologian, and his brother became a philosopher. Although briefly enrolled at Harvard Law School, James soon decided to be a writer, publishing short stories and contributing to magazines such as Nation and Atlantic Monthly. He continued to journey to Europe, where he met Ruskin, Darwin and Rossetti as well as literary figures including Turgenev and Flaubert.

In 1876, James settled permanently in London, and devoted himself to literature and travel. In his early novels - including Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady - as well as in some of his later work, James contrasts the sophisticated, traditional Europeans with innocent brash Americans. After unsuccessfully trying to become a playwright he wrote some of his greatest novels, such as The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw and The Ambassadors.

Later in his life, James lived in Rye, on the Sussex coast. He became a British citizen in 1915 and received the Order of Merit from King George V in 1916. He died the same year. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, or the Poetry Foundation. James’s sister, Alice, is remembered largely because of a diary she kept which was published posthumously - see The Diary Review: Geyser of emotions, and The Diary Junction.

Henry James did not so much keep a diary as notebooks, and there are 16 volumes (1878 to 1916) held by the Houghton Library, Harvard University. According to the Library, James used the diaries largely to work out plots, problems of narration and point of view, as well to record addresses, appointments, and days, good and bad. The diaries were edited by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock and published by Oxford University Press in 1947 as The Notebooks of Henry James. The full text can be read online at Internet Archive. A more comprehensive (and less annotated) edition, put together by Leon Edel and Lyall Powers, came out in 1987 as The Complete Notebooks of Henry James (also Oxford University Press).

Generally speaking, James’s biographers have found the diaries of his sister, Alice, and his secretary, Theodora Bosanquet more useful than his own notebooks - see for example Henry James, a Life by Leon Edel, and Henry James at Work by Theodora Bosanquet. Here, though, are a couple of extracts.

8 May 1892 [about what would become Owen Wingrave]
‘Can’t I hammer out a little the idea - for a short tale - of the young soldier? - the young fellow who, though predestined, by every tradition of his race, to the profession of arms, has an insurmountable hatred of it - of the bloody side of it, the suffering, the ugliness, the cruelty; so that he determines to reject it for himself - to break with it and cast it off, and this in the face of every sort of coercion of opinion (on the part of others), of such pressure not to let the family honour, etc. (always gloriously connected with the army), break down, that there is a kind of degradation, an exposure to ridicule, and ignominy in his apostasy. The idea should be that he fights, after all, exposes himself to possibilities of danger and death for his own view - acts the soldier, is the soldier, and of indefeasible soldierly race - proves to have been so - even in this very effort of abjuration. The thing is to invent the particular heroic situation in which he may have found himself - show just how he has been a hero even while throwing away his arms. It is a question of a little subject for the Graphic - so I mustn’t make it ‘psychological’ - they understand that no more than a donkey understands a violin. The particular form of opposition, of coercion, that he has to face, and the way his ‘heroism’ is constatée. It must, for prettiness’s sake, be constatée in the eyes of some woman, some girl, whom he loves but who has taken the line of despising him for his renunciation - some fille de soldat, who is very montée about the whole thing, very hard on him, etc. But what the subject wants is to be distanced, relegated into some picturesque little past when the army occupied more place in life - poetized by some slightly romantic setting. Even if one could introduce a supernatural element in it - make it, I mean, a little ghost-story; place it, the scene, in some old country-house, in England at the beginning of the present century - the time of the Napoleonic wars. - It seems to me one might make some haunting business that would give it a colour without being ridiculous, and get in that way the sort of pressure to which the young man is subjected. I see it - it comes to me a little, He must die, of course, be slain, as it were on his own battle-field, the night spent in the haunted room in which the ghost of some grim grandfather - some bloody warrior of the race - or some father slain in the Peninsular or at Waterloo - is supposed to make himself visible.’

12 January 1895 [about what would become The Turn of the Screw]
‘Note here the ghost-story told me at Addington (evening of Thursday 10th), by the Archbishop of Canterbury: a mere vague, undetailed faint sketch of it – being all he had been told (very badly and imperfectly) by a lady who had no art of relation, and no clearness: the story of the young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country-house, through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children; the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon, whom they invite and solicit, from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence, etc. – so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves by responding, by getting into their power. So long as the children are kept from them, they are not lost: but they try and try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. It is a question of the children ‘coming over to where they are’. It is all obscure and imperfect, the picture, the story, but there is a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect to it. The story to be told – tolerably obviously – by an outside spectator, observer.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 15 April 2013.

Set up the box

‘Decided to spend the day photographing. Saddled pony and started for the mountain taking camera and plate changing box with a dozen plates and during the forenoon made eight exposures, all on rock subjects.’ This is the famous early American photographer, William Henry Jackson, born 180 years ago today, writing in his diary on a formative mission to photograph the Union Pacific railway line in 1869.

Jackson was born in Keeseville, New York, on 4 April 1843, the first of seven children. His mother was a talented painter, and influenced William Henry who was something of an artistic prodigy. As young as 15, he started working as a retoucher in photography studios. In 1862 he joined the Union Army though saw little if any action in the American Civil War, since his unit was usually on garrison duty. He returned to Vermont in 1863, and to working in a studio. In 1866, after a broken engagement, he went West, working as a bullwhacker for a freighting outfit. He sketched landmarks and lifestyles along the Oregon Trail. On returning from the west in 1868, he opened his own photographic studio in Omaha, Nebraska, and, while travelling in the surrounding area, took many of his now-famous photographs of American Indians.

In 1869, Jackson won a commission from the Union Pacific to document the scenery along the various railroad routes for promotional purposes, and this led to him being invited to join a geologic survey to explore the Yellowstone region. He was then the official photographer of the US Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories, and became one of the most important national explorers. His photographs are credited with helping convince Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park, the first such park in the US. In 1879, he opened a studio in Denver, Colorado, and established a large inventory of national and international views. Commissions for railroads followed in the early 1890s, and in the mid-1890s he took many photographs for the World’s Transportation Commission.

Thereafter, Jackson became a partner in the Detroit Photographic Company which acquired exclusive rights to use a form of photography processing called Photochrom, allowing the company to mass market postcards and other materials - many taken by Jackson - in colour. The company went out of business after the war, and Jackson moved to Washington, D.C. in 1924, where he produced murals of the Old West for the new US Department of the Interior building, and wrote two autobiographies. He is also credited with being a technical advisor for the filming of Gone with the Wind. He died in 1942, aged 99. Further information is readily available on the internet, at Wikipedia, for example, National Park Service, and the University of Chicago Library.

The New York Public Library holds a large archive of Jackson’s papers, including many of his diaries. According to the information online: ‘The diaries vary in depth and breadth of coverage, as well as in format. Some are original holograph journals. Others are holograph or typed transcripts made by Jackson from the originals. Some which appear to be transcripts are Jackson’s narrative reconstructions based on the original diaries; others are memoirs based on brief notes. These “diaries” as a whole cover his nine months in the Vermont Regiment, 1862-1863; his first trip West in 1866-67; the opening of his studio in Omaha; his photography along the line of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869; his “photographic campaigns” with the U.S. Geological Survey, 1870-1878; his travels abroad with the World’s Transportation Commission, 1894-1986; and his years in retirement, 1925-1942. There are no diaries covering his years as a commercial photographer in Denver, 1879-1897, and only one diary (1901) and one notebook related to the 27 years he worked for the Detroit Photographic Company (later Detroit Publishing Company).’

The Diaries of William Henry Jackson was published in 1959 by Arthur H. Clark Co. as part of The Far West and the Rockies Historical Series. This is freely available to view online at the Hathi Trust. Photographs of the original pages from the June- September 1869 diary are available to view online at the New York Public Library website, as is a typescript of the same.

24 June 1869
‘The morning was cloudy but we thought promised a fine day so we went to work & set up the box. Worked around the streets from different quarters until about noon when it commenced raining & we stopped. Kept it up at intervals all P.M. Heard that some of the demi-monde wanted some large pictures of their house. Hull & I thought we would go around & see if we couldn’t get a job out of them. Talked it up a while but they seemed indifferent. I called for a bottle of wine soon after they began to take considerable interest in having a picture taken. Had another bottle & then they were hot and heavy for some large pictures to frame & began to count up how many they should want. So we left promising that if the weather permitted we would surely be on hand & make their pictures. Just before six the rain came down in torrents, making rivers in every street. As it slacked up a little we got our instruments out & made three or four negatives of the flood, getting some very good effects. This evening was but a repetition of the last.’

25 June 1869
‘Silvered paper in the morning and attended to printing all day. Not a good day for outside work so we did not make any negatives. Got along very well with printing & even after toning our pictures looked first-rate - but the fixing bathfixed them & we were very much disappointed, some of them turning out poorly. Printed up about 4 or 5 dozen. Shall probably get quite an order from McLelland for them. After supper sat in Sumner’s store listening to tough yarns from John & his brother of fighting scrapes &c. After taking a look in the Gold Room we retired early.’

26 June 1869
‘Morning opened bright. Got things out at once to make negatives. Set the box up in the yard & made a few up town of Rollins House, Ford House &c., &c & them went down to the depot securing half a dozen different views. After dinner went over to Madame Cleveland’s to make the group of the girls with the house. Weather was just hazy enough to soften the light down for an out-door group. Made three exposures - first two not good but the last very good. Occupied the rest of the afternoon varnishing and retouching the negatives made.’

27 June 1869
‘Yesterday I received a letter from & in the evening wrote one to Mollie. This A.M. slept until 7 & then went over to John’s & commenced sivering paper at once. Kept steadily at printing until about 2 P.M. getting off about 12 sheets of paper. The pictures printed well, but in toning came up mealy much to our disgust & to add to our troubles got them overtoned - had toning all done by 4 O’clock & by 5 had 20 of Madame Cleveland’s shebang all mounted. Concluded to wait until to-morrow before we delivered them. After tea took our usual walk to the depot to see the Western train come in. Things begin to look as though we should sell quite a number of pictures & it is time we did for the last two days I have been just about strapped.’

25 September 1869
‘Decided to spend the day photographing, Saddled pony and started for the mountain taking camera and plate changing box with a dozen plates and during the forenoon made eight exposures, all on rock subjects. In passing the plate box from one to another in coming down over the rocks it slipped out of hand and in falling was damaged so that it would not work. This put an end of picture making for the time being and we all went back to camp and spent the afternoon fishing. Just before sunset, however, I repaired the plate holder and exposed the remaining plates on fish subjects.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 4 April 2013.

Sedaris gets the call

‘Roger Donald called from Little, Brown to say that he would like to negotiate a two-book deal. To celebrate, I bought a denim shirt, and thought it amazing how quickly one’s life can change. I never thought I’d want a denim shirt.’ This is from the diaries of the American humorist, David Sedaris, who, exactly 30 years ago today, discovered he would finally be a published author.

Sedaris was born in Johnson City, New York, in 1956 to an IBM engineer of Greek heritage and his Anglo-American wife. He grew up in a suburban area of Raleigh, North Carolina with five siblings. He attended Western Carolina University and Kent State University before dropping out in 1977. After dabbling in visual and performance art, he moved to Chicago in 1983 and graduated from the School of the Art Institute in 1987. While scraping a living from odd jobs (not least dressing up as a Christmas elf) he was invited by a local radio host, Ira Glass, to appear on a weekly programme, The Wild Room. This led on to a regular slot, edit by Glass, with National Public Radio. 

Sedaris moved to New York in 1991, and in 1993, he signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown and Company. Many of his essays began appearing in main stream magazines, such Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Esquire. His first book - Barrel Fever - came out in 1994, and Naked followed in 1997. In 2001 he was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim came out in 2004. His recording of pieces from the book was nominated for a Grammy Award for best spoken-word album; and his Live at Carnegie Hall received a Grammy nomination for best comedy album. Further successful books followed, including a collection of entries from his diaries. His most recent publication was Happy-Go-Lucky in 2022. Since 2019, he has lived in Rackham, West Sussex, England, with his longtime partner, painter and set designer Hugh Hamrick. For further information see Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica or his own website. 

Sedaris has been a committed diarist for most of his life, indeed his very first broadcasts were based on extracts from the diaries. In 2017, Little, Brown published a collection of edited extracts from the diaries: Theft by Finding Diaries: Volume One. The book can be sampled at Googlebooks and the full work can be digitally borrowed online at Internet Archive.

Here is part of Sedaris’s introduction explaining how and why he keeps a diary.

‘Not long after deciding to release a book of diary entries. I came upon a five-pound note. I’d been picking up trash alongside a country road in West Sussex, and there it was between a potato-chip bag and a half-full beer can that had drowned slugs in it. Given the exchange rate, the bill amounted to around $8.15, which, as my mother would have said, “Ain't nothing”. A few days later I met with my friend Pam in London. The subject of windfalls came up. and when I mentioned the money she asked if I’d spent it.

“Well, of course.” I said. 

“In the U.K. if you discover something of value and keep it. that’s theft by finding,’ she told me. “You’re supposed to investigate whether it was lost or stolen, though in this case - five pounds - of course you’re fine.’

Theft by Finding. It was, I thought, the perfect title for this book. When it comes to subject matter, all diarists are different I was never one to write about my feelings, in part because they weren’t that interesting (even to me) but mainly because they were so likely to change Other people’s feelings, though, that was a different story. Got a bone to pick with your stepmother or the manager of the place where you worked until yesterday? Please, let's talk! If nothing else, a diary teaches you what you’re interested in. Perhaps at the beginning you restrict yourself to issues of social injustice or all the unfortunate people trapped beneath the rubble in Turkey or Italy or wherever the last great earthquake hit. You keep the diary you feel you should be keeping, the one that, if discovered by your mother or college roommate, would leave them thinking. If only I was as civic minded/bighearted/philosophical as Edward! 

After a year, you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn’t afford. Unless, of course, social injustice is your thing, in which case - knock yourself out. The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can’t. Won’t people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder. The me that hates my own child, that put my perfectly healthy dog to sleep? The me who thinks, deep down, that maybe The Wire was overrated? 

What I prefer recording at the end - or, more recently, at the start - of my day are remarkable events I have observed (fistfights, accidents, a shopper arriving with a full cart of groceries in the express lane), bits of overheard conversation, and startling things people have told me. These people could be friends but just as easily barbers, strangers on a plane, or cashiers. A number of their stories turned out to be urban legends: the neighbor of a relative whose dead cat was stolen from the trunk of a car, etc. I hope I’ve weeded those out. Then there are the jokes I’ve heard at parties and book signings over the years. They were obviously written by someone - all jokes are - but the authors are hardly ever credited in the retelling. 

Another thing I noticed while going through my forty years of diaries is that many of the dates are wrong. For instance, there might be three October 1, 1982s This was most likely because I didn’t know what day it was. Time tends to melt and run together when you don’t have a job. In that prelaptop era, you had to consult a newspaper or calendar to find out if it was Wednesday the eighth or Thursday the ninth. This involved getting up, so more often than not, I’d just stay put and guess. Quite often I’d even get the month wrong.

It might look like my average diary entry amounts to no more than seven sentences, but in fact I spend an inordinate amount of time writing about my day - around forty-five minutes, usually. If nothing big happened, I'll reflect on a newspaper article or a report I heard on the radio I’m not big on weather writing but have no policy against it. Thus when life gets really dull. I’ll just look out the window and describe the color of the sky. That will lead to something else, most often: a bird being mean to another bird or the noise a plane makes.’

And here are several extracts from the diaries including those in which he writes about his first book deal, some three decades ago.

7 June 1987, Chicago
‘I dared myself to lean too hard against one of the living-room windows yesterday, and it broke and cut my elbow up. Later in the afternoon I took the empty frame to the hardware store, where they said it would cost $30 for new glass. That seemed exorbitant to me, so I was walking back home by way of the empty lot when an American Indian woman grabbed on to it, saying she’d been looking for a window frame just like this. “I need it,” she said. “Hand it over.” Her face was strikingly flat, and for a second all I could do was stare at it.

The woman was holding a beer bottle and put it down so she could grab my window frame with both hands. “Turn it loose,” she said, and the several drunk people behind her cheered her on. Then a man who was slightly less drunk told her to let it go. “Leave him alone, Cochise,” he said. “This here’s a working man.”

I haven’t worked in more than three weeks, but it was nice to be mistaken for someone with a job. Today I took the frame down a different street to the L, where I thought I’d try another hardware store. Right near the station a man asked me for money, and when I walked by he shouted, “Watch where you’re going with that thing, asshole! You almost killed that girl. You almost hit her with that window, you fucker.”

I said, “What?”

“You just about hit that baby, you son of a bitch. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget, you little fuck. You can’t get away from me.”

The guy was really beside himself, and I’m lucky I was so close to the ticket window. I worried he’d panhandle enough money to reach the platform before the train arrived, but luckily he didn’t. And what baby? I didn’t see any baby.

Why did I have to break that window, and on a dare, for God’s sake?’

13 February 1989, Chicago
‘Tonight at Barbara’s Bookstore, Tobias Wolff read from his new memoir, This Boy’s Life. All the seats were taken, so I sat on the floor in the front and tried to act normal. I was too shy to say anything when I got my book signed, afraid that if I started talking, everything inside me would just spill out.

He seemed like a kind person and wore a turtleneck, a plaid shirt, a tweed jacket, and jeans with black socks and running shoes. I have to be his biggest fan.’

12 July 1990, Chicago
‘For the third time this week, a man approached me and asked if he could have $1. He pointed to a van and said that it was his. “It broke down and if I don’t get to work, I’m in big trouble.”

Each time it’s a different guy, but it’s always the same van. A scam, obviously, but even if the story was true, who goes to work with no money in his pockets? What if you ran out of gas?

When I taught my night class in the Fine Arts Building, I was often asked for money by a woman who said she’d been robbed and needed to take a commuter train to one of the northern suburbs. Even the first time I saw her I thought, Really? You can’t call a friend or a family member? You’re honestly going to hit up total strangers for your fare? Like the men with the van, she was always well dressed and acting frantic.’

16 October 1991, New York
‘Amy and I walked up 8th Avenue to Intermezzo, where Hugh and his friend Sue were having lunch. “Here you are!” Amy shouted. “Just what do you think you’re doing? You can’t afford to be eating here, not when I’ve got a five-month-old baby waiting in the car. And wine too! You’re drinking wine! I hate being your sponsor, I really do.” Everyone stared and Hugh turned bright red.

Afterward I went to Macy’s, where I filled out umpteen forms, peed into a jar, and had my eyes tested. This year, as a returning elf. I’ll make $9 an hour. Regular Christmas help gets only $6.’

16 January 1993, New York
‘Helen’s forty-two-year-old nephew was a public-school teacher and today he died of AIDS. I said I was sorry to hear it and Helen said, “The bastard. Thought he was Mr. Big because he had an education, but where’s him and his college degree now? In the ground, that’s where. The last time I saw him, I called out, ‘Tommy!’ but he kept on walking. I say, ‘Fuck you, Mr. Smart.’ Yeah, we all know how smart he was now.” ’

24 February 1993, New York
‘This was an amazing New York day. In the morning I met with Geoff Kloske, the editorial assistant from Little, Brown who called a few weeks back to ask if he could read my manuscript. He’s only twenty-three, a kid, and has a grandmother in Jacksonville, North Carolina. We had coffee and afterward he took me to meet his boss, Roger, a big, good-looking chain-smoker who said that he, too, liked my manuscript and hopes to get back to me within a week or two.

Afterward I went to our play rehearsal (for Stump the Host). We open a week from tomorrow.’

8 March 1993, New York
‘The night before the play opened (at La MaMa), William dropped out, saying he wasn’t having much fun. “And if it’s no fun, why bother?”

I spent some time panicking and then decided to take the part myself, seeing as I know the lines. So I performed on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Opening night we had fourteen people in the audience. On Friday, there were forty, and on Saturday we were sold out. Meryl has extended our run, and thankfully Paul Dinello has agreed to take over my part. Hugh and Amy say, “Oh, you know you love being onstage.” But they’re wrong. I don’t. Not like that, anyway.’

9 March 1993, New York
‘Roger Donald called from Little, Brown to say that he would like to negotiate a two-book deal. To celebrate, I bought a denim shirt, and thought it amazing how quickly one’s life can change. I never thought I’d want a denim shirt.’

13 March 1993, New York
‘I met on Thursday afternoon with Don Congdon, the agent Roger Donald recommended. He proposed lunch and took me to Le Madri, an Italian place near his office and the fanciest restaurant I’ve been to in New York. Don is in his late seventies and was very elegantly dressed. A fine suit, a Pucci tie, a topcoat, even a black beret. The maître d’ knew him. “Right this way, Mr. Congdon.”

Our waiter poured olive oil onto a plate and then gave us bread, which I guessed we were supposed to dip into it. I had thinly carved steak arranged into a turban with grilled radicchio and endive. Don had pasta that he didn’t finish.

While eating, I learned that he represents William Styron, Russell Baker, Ellen Gilchrist, and Thomas Berger. He represented Lillian Hellman for a production of The Little Foxes in, I think, Russia, and Frank O’Connor. He told stories about wandering through the Village with J. D. Salinger, whom he called Jerry, and recounted the night the two of them went to hear Billie Holiday. I heard of the time Don was arrested by the vice squad during Prohibition, and then something about Dashiell Hammett. The problem was that it was all about the past. That said, I liked his language, especially his old-fashioned slang.’

30 April 1993, New York
‘Between cleaning jobs, I bought a coffee and sat in Union Square Park to read for a while. The benches there are sectioned off with armrests - this to prevent people from stretching out and sleeping, I imagine. I’d just lit a cigarette when a guy approached - wiry, around my age, wearing soiled white jeans and a Metallica T-shirt. His hair fell to his shoulders, he had a sketchy mustache, and he was carrying a paper bag. Ex-convict, I thought. It was a snap assessment, but I’m sticking by it.

The guy asked for a cigarette, and when I handed him one, he took it without thanking me. Then he pointed to my bag of cleaning supplies, made a sweeping gesture with his hand, and said, “I’m going to sit down there.”

There were plenty of other benches, so I said no.

“Goddamn it,” he said. “I told you to move your fucking shit.”

I got up and left, knowing that if I hadn’t moved my bag, he would have thrown it. If, on the other hand, I had moved it, he would have sat beside me and continued asking for things. All afternoon I thought about it and wished that I knew how to fight.’

8 January 1994, New York
‘Stitches (our play) opened Thursday night to an audience of fifty. La MaMa can squeeze in 120, so this wasn’t so bad. Friday was sold out, as was tonight. The Times came last night; tonight it was Newsday and the Voice. I want to tell them we were just joking. It’s not a real play, it’s what comes from doodling while you’re holding a bong. Whatever they have to say, it’s out of my control now and in the hands of the actors. My job is to play the host and greet people at the door as they enter.’

27 December 1994, New York
‘Christmas afternoon. Dad pulled out his film projector and a half dozen Super 8 movies from the late ’60s and early ’70s. I recall him standing in front of us with the camera back then, but, like the photos he takes of us on the stairs every year, I never knew what became of them. Two friends of Lisa’s had dropped by, and though nothing could be duller than watching someone else’s home movies, none of us cared. The moment we saw Mom, we forgot about our guests. They mumbled something on their way out - “Merry Christmas,” or maybe “Your kitchen is on fire,” whatever.

I never knew my mother had been captured on film moving. The first reel was from St. John in 1972. Mom Dad, Aunt Joyce, and Uncle Dick. We see the island. Boats. More island. More boats, and then there’s Mom, who waves good-bye before ducking into a thatched hut. Then the camera is handed to someone else, and we see Dad pull her out. He is young and handsome - he is always handsome. When he points at the camera. Mom buries her head in his chest. Then he lifts her chin and they kiss.

Watching this, Dad stomped his foot on the floor, the way you might if you just missed the bus and knew that another wasn’t coming for a long while. He rewound the film and replayed it a second time, then a third.

“Again,” we called. “Play it again.” To see them both on an island, so young and happy. I couldn’t believe our luck: to have this on film!’

28 August 2002, Paris
‘Shannon called to tell me I’m at number nine. This makes fifty-two weeks - a year on the Times paperback list. While she was very excited and congratulatory, the news left me slightly embarrassed, the way you feel when you’ve stayed too long at the party and notice your hosts looking at their watches. The hosts, in this case, are all the superior writers whose books haven’t sold more than a few thousand copies. On the bright side, I think I can write something much better than Me Talk Pretty. And if it fails and no one buys it, I can really feel good about myself.’