Art but no artists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robertson Davies as diarist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comarnescu and Eugene O’Neil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If these pages survive me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live ten times happier

Jonathan Swift, that great Anglo-Irish satirist, man of pamphlets, died 280 years ago. His name is best remembered for Gulliver’s Travels, which has remained a classic of English literature for three centuries. However, a series of letters he wrote, in journal form, to his lifelong friend Esther Johnson, is also still very much in print - as Journal to Stella - and oft analysed, for what it says about Swift, himself, and London in the last years of Queen Anne’s reign.

Swift was born of Anglo-Irish parents in Dublin in 1667, several months after the death of his father. His mother returned to England, leaving Jonathan with an uncle. He was educated at Kilkenny Grammar, one of the best schools in Ireland at the time, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he became friends with William Congreve. When political troubles in Ireland forced him to leave for England in 1688, his mother helped him get a position as secretary to Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat (soon to move and settle at Moor Park, Farnham). Swift remained at Moor Park for the best part of ten years, although he did return to Ireland, for two sojourns, become ordained as a priest in the Church of Ireland. Temple trusted Swift with important commissions, and introduced him to King William III. He also tutored Esther Johnson (or Stella), the daughter of Temple’s sister, worked on Temple’s memoirs, and developed his own poetical and satirical writings.

Temple died in 1699, and Swift failed to find a new position, so he returned to Dublin where he obtained a living and became prebend of Dunlavin in St Patrick’s Cathedral. He persuaded Esther Johnson, 20 by this time, and Rebecca Dingley, another friend from Temple’s household, to leave England and live with him in Dunlavin. As chaplain to Lord Berkeley, he spent much of his time in Dublin and travelled to London frequently over the next ten years. Swift’s first political pamphlet, published anonymously, was titled A Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome. A Tale of a Tub followed, again anonymously, although Swift was increasingly known to be the author. His works were very popular, yet severely frowned on by the church - even though he, himself, was, in fact, more loyal to church than politics.

Despite his Whig background and sensibilities, from about 1710, he became a key writer for the new Tory government under Robert Harley, attracted by Harley’s commitment to be more supportive of the Church of Ireland. Harley, indeed, had already recruited another important writer of the day, Daniel Defoe, to the Tory cause. Swift took over as editor of the Tory journal, The Examiner, and he wrote a significant pamphlet for the Tories - The Conduct of the Allies - that helped win a vote for peace with France in Parliament. His reward was not a position within the English church - Queen Anne and others had been too scandalised by A Tale of the Tub - but the deanery of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.

Swift’s elevated position with the Tories did not last long. The death of Queen Anne and the accession of George I in 1714 led the Whigs back into power, and saw Tory leaders tried for treason for conducting secret negotiations with France. Swift withdrew to Dublin and his deanery, somewhat spurned by the Anglo-Irish Whig community. He turned his pen and satire to Irish affairs, much to the government’s frustration, with works such as Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720) and Drapier’s Letters (1724). During these years, he also wrote his most famous and lasting work, Gulliver’s Travels, or, more accurately, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, By Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships. He took the manuscript of this with him to London in 1726, and stayed with friends, including Alexander Pope, who helped him publish it anonymously. It was hugely popular, and went through several reprints, and by the following year had been translated into French, German and Dutch.

Swift returned to London one last time, in 1727, staying with Pope, but when he heard Esther Johnson was dying, he raced back to Ireland. She died the following January. More dark satire followed from his pen, notably, in 1729, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick. In the latter years of his life, Swift’s health failed in several ways, physically and mentally. He died on 19 October 1745, and was laid to rest next to Esther, according to his wishes, in St Patrick’s. Further biographical information can be found at Wikipedia, the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Luminarium or reviews of Jonathan Swift: His life and His World by Leo Damrosch (at The Guardian, The New York Times).

There is no evidence that Swift kept a diary of any significance. Although The National Archives records that the Forster Collection at the V&A Museum holds ‘diary, literary MSS, personal accounts, corresp and copies of letters’, there is no reference at all in biographies to any diary kept by Swift. However, one of his most memorable and long-lasting works has been called a ‘journal’, at least since the 19th century - The Journal to Stella. And this work is included in William Matthews’ definitive British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of British Diaries Written Between 1442 and 1942. Indeed, Matthews says it is ‘the best reflection of social life in time of Queen Anne’. The Journal to Stella contains a series of letters written by Swift to Esther (and occasionally her companion, Dingley) between 1710 and 1713. Most biographers agree that Swift had some kind of lifelong relationship with Esther, while some argue they may have been secretly married.

Most of these letters were first published in the 18th century (1768), in a set of Swift’s collected works edited by his relation, Deane Swift. However, it was not until the end of the 19th century, I think, that they were collated together by Frederick Ryland into a single volume (the second in a series of Swift’s Prose Works) and given the title The Journal to Stella. Around a third of the letters remain extant, and are held by the British Library, but the majority have been lost, and so for them Deane Swift’s collected works remains the best source. Many further editions of The Journal to Stella have been published. Most recently, Cambridge University Press has brought out ‘the first critical edition for 50 years’, which, it says, ‘sheds new light on Swift, his relationships and the historical period’. Older editions can be read freely online at Internet Archive.

Here are several extracts from The Journal to Stella as edited by Aitken. (MD is short for ‘My Dears’ and is used by Swift rather fluidly to stand for both Stella and Mrs. Dingley, but also for Stella alone.)

9 October 1711
‘I was forced to lie down at twelve to-day, and mend my night’s sleep: I slept till after two, and then sent for a bit of mutton and pot of ale from the next cook’s shop, and had no stomach. I went out at four, and called to see Biddy Floyd, which I had not done these three months: she is something marked, but has recovered her complexion quite, and looks very well. Then I sat the evening with Mrs. Vanhomrigh, and drank coffee, and ate an egg. I likewise took a new lodging to-day, not liking a ground-floor, nor the ill smell, and other circumstances. I lodge, or shall lodge, by Leicester Fields, and pay ten shillings a week; that won’t hold out long, faith. I shall lie here but one night more. It rained terribly till one o’clock to-day. I lie, for I shall lie here two nights, till Thursday, and then remove. Did I tell you that my friend Mrs. Barton has a brother drowned, that went on the expedition with Jack Hill? He was a lieutenant-colonel, and a coxcomb; and she keeps her chamber in form, and the servants say she receives no messages. - Answer MD’s letter, Presto, d’ye hear? No, says Presto, I won’t yet, I’m busy; you’re a saucy rogue. Who talks?’

12 October 1711
‘Mrs. Vanhomrigh has changed her lodging as well as I. She found she had got with a bawd, and removed. I dined with her to-day; for though she boards, her landlady does not dine with her. I am grown a mighty lover of herrings; but they are much smaller here than with you. In the afternoon I visited an old major-general, and ate six oysters; then sat an hour with Mrs. Colledge, the joiner’s daughter that was hanged; it was the joiner was hanged, and not his daughter; with Thompson’s wife, a magistrate. There was the famous Mrs. Floyd of Chester, who, I think, is the handsomest woman (except MD) that ever I saw. She told me that twenty people had sent her the verses upon Biddy, as meant to her: and, indeed, in point of handsomeness, she deserves them much better. I will not go to Windsor to-morrow, and so I told the Secretary to-day. I hate the thoughts of Saturday and Sunday suppers with Lord Treasurer. Jack Hill is come home from his unfortunate expedition, and is, I think, now at Windsor: I have not yet seen him. He is privately blamed by his own friends for want of conduct. He called a council of war, and therein it was determined to come back. But they say a general should not do that, because the officers will always give their opinion for returning, since the blame will not lie upon them, but the general. I pity him heartily. Bernage received his commission to-day.’

14 October 1711
‘I was going to dine with Dr. Cockburn, but Sir Andrew Fountaine met me, and carried me to Mrs. Van’s, where I drank the last bottle of Raymond’s wine, admirable good, better than any I get among the Ministry. I must pick up time to answer this letter of MD’s; I’ll do it in a day or two for certain. - I am glad I am not at Windsor, for it is very cold, and I won’t have a fire till November. I am contriving how to stop up my grate with bricks. Patrick was drunk last night; but did not come to me, else I should have given him t’other cuff. I sat this evening with Mrs. Barton; it is the first day of her seeing company; but I made her merry enough, and we were three hours disputing upon Whig and Tory. She grieved for her brother only for form, and he was a sad dog. Is Stella well enough to go to church, pray? no numbings left? no darkness in your eyes? do you walk and exercise? Your exercise is ombre. - People are coming up to town: the Queen will be at Hampton Court in a week. Lady Betty Germaine, I hear, is come; and Lord Pembroke is coming: his wife is as big with child as she can tumble.’

15 October 1711
‘I sat at home till four this afternoon to-day writing, and ate a roll and butter; then visited Will Congreve an hour or two, and supped with Lord Treasurer, who came from Windsor to-day, and brought Prior with him. The Queen has thanked Prior for his good service in France, and promised to make him a Commissioner of the Customs. Several of that Commission are to be out; among the rest, my friend Sir Matthew Dudley. I can do nothing for him, he is so hated by the Ministry. Lord Treasurer kept me till twelve, so I need not tell you it is now late.’

16 October 1711
‘I dined to-day with Mr. Secretary at Dr. Coatesworth’s, where he now lodges till his house be got ready in Golden Square. One Boyer, a French dog, has abused me in a pamphlet, and I have got him up in a messenger’s hands: the Secretary promises me to swinge him. Lord Treasurer told me last night that he had the honour to be abused with me in a pamphlet. I must make that rogue an example, for warning to others. I was to see Jack Hill this morning, who made that unfortunate expedition; and there is still more misfortune; for that ship, which was admiral of his fleet, is blown up in the Thames, by an accident and carelessness of some rogue, who was going, as they think, to steal some gunpowder: five hundred men are lost. We don’t yet know the particulars. I am got home by seven, and am going to be busy, and you are going to play and supper; you live ten times happier than I; but I should live ten times happier than you if I were with MD.’

22 October 1711
‘I dined in the City to-day with Dr. Freind, at one of my printers: I inquired for Leigh, but could not find him: I have forgot what sort of apron you want. I must rout among your letters, a needle in a bottle of hay. I gave Sterne directions, but where to find him Lord knows. I have bespoken the spectacles; got a set of Examiners, and five pamphlets, which I have either written or contributed to, except the best, which is the vindication of the Duke of Marlborough, and is entirely of the author of the Atalantis. I have settled Dingley’s affair with Tooke, who has undertaken it, and understands it. I have bespoken a Miscellany: what would you have me do more? It cost me a shilling coming home; it rains terribly, and did so in the morning. Lord Treasurer has had an ill day, in much pain. He writes and does business in his chamber now he is ill: the man is bewitched: he desires to see me, and I’ll maul him, but he will not value it a rush. I am half weary of them all. I often burst out into these thoughts, and will certainly steal away as soon as I decently can. I have many friends, and many enemies; and the last are more constant in their nature. I have no shuddering at all to think of retiring to my old circumstances, if you can be easy; but I will always live in Ireland as I did the last time; I will not hunt for dinners there, nor converse with more than a very few.’

9 October 1712
‘I have left Windsor these ten days, and am deep in pills with asafoetida, and a steel bitter drink; and I find my head much better than it was. I was very much discouraged; for I used to be ill for three or four days together, ready to totter as I walked. I take eight pills a day, and have taken, I believe, a hundred and fifty already. The Queen, Lord Treasurer, Lady Masham, and I, were all ill together, but are now all better; only Lady Masham expects every day to lie in at Kensington. There was never such a lump of lies spread about the town together as now. I doubt not but you will have them in Dublin before this comes to you, and all without the least grounds of truth. I have been mightily put backward in something I am writing by my illness, but hope to fetch it up, so as to be ready when the Parliament meets. Lord Treasurer has had an ugly fit of the rheumatism, but is now near quite well. I was playing at one-and-thirty with him and his family t’other night. He gave us all twelvepence apiece to begin with: it put me in mind of Sir William Temple. I asked both him and Lady Masham seriously whether the Queen were at all inclined to a dropsy, and they positively assured me she was not: so did her physician Arbuthnot, who always attends her. Yet these devils have spread that she has holes in her legs, and runs at her navel, and I know not what. Arbuthnot has sent me from Windsor a pretty Discourse upon Lying, and I have ordered the printer to come for it. It is a proposal for publishing a curious piece, called The Art of Political Lying, in two volumes, etc. And then there is an abstract of the first volume, just like those pamphlets which they call The Works of the Learned. Pray get it when it comes out. The Queen has a little of the gout in one of her hands. I believe she will stay a month still at Windsor. Lord Treasurer showed me the kindest letter from her in the world, by which I picked out one secret, that there will be soon made some Knights of the Garter. You know another is fallen by Lord Godolphin’s death: he will be buried in a day or two at Westminster Abbey. I saw Tom Leigh in town once. The Bishop of Clogher has taken his lodging for the winter; they are all well. I hear there are in town abundance of people from Ireland; half a dozen bishops at least. The poor old Bishop of London, at past fourscore, fell down backward going upstairs, and I think broke or cracked his skull; yet is now recovering. The town is as empty as at midsummer; and if I had not occasion for physic, I would be at Windsor still. Did I tell you of Lord Rivers’s will? He has left legacies to about twenty paltry old whores by name, and not a farthing to any friend, dependent, or relation: he has left from his only child, Lady Barrymore, her mother’s estate, and given the whole to his heir-male, a popish priest, a second cousin, who is now Earl Rivers, and whom he used in his life like a footman. After him it goes to his chief wench and bastard. Lord Treasurer and Lord Chamberlain are executors of this hopeful will. I loved the man, and detest his memory. We hear nothing of peace yet: I believe verily the Dutch are so wilful, because they are told the Queen cannot live.’

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

Burning at the heart

François Mauriac, a French novelist and Nobel Prize winner barely read in the English world, was born 130 years ago today. As an old man emerging from the Second World War, he was a strong supporter of Charles De Gaulle; indeed, Mauriac’s son worked for the president. For some of his life, Mauriac kept diaries, but these - like most of his novels - have not been translated into English. One extract, though, in Robert Speaight’s biography, tells of him struggling to find the balance in his writing so that ‘the young saint, my hero, is burning at the heart of the furnace.’

Mauriac was born on 11 October 1885 in Bordeaux, France. His father died soon after, leaving his mother to raise five children, of which he was the youngest. He studied at the University of Bordeaux and then at the École Nationale des Chartes, Paris, but soon left to pursue a career in literature. He managed to publish his first work, a collection of poems - Les Mains jointes - in 1909. But, it was to novels that he soon turned, publishing L’Enfant chargé de chaînes and La Robe prétexte in 1913-1914. In 1913, he married Jeanne Lafon and, between 1914 and 1924, they had four children. In 1923, Le Baiser au lépreux (The Kiss to the Leper) made him famous in France, and established his literary reputation.

Further novels followed, including Le Noeud de vipères in 1932, a marital drama often considered Mauriac’s masterpiece. The following year, he was elected to the Académie Française. As the decade progressed, he wrote more novels, but also plays. He took a strong stance against totalitarianism, and denounced Fascism in Italy and Spain. During the war he lived in occupied territory, and worked with writers of the Resistance. After the war, he was a great supporter of Charles De Gaulle, who made him Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour. From the mid-1950s, he wrote a popular weekly newspaper column, Bloc-Notes.

Mauriac was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952. Though his fame did not spread far outside France, some consider him the country’s greatest writer after Marcel Proust. He died in 1970. One of his sons, Claude, was a writer and also worked as personal secretary to Charles de Gaulle. And, through a daughter, he was the grandfather of Anne Wiazemsky, actress and novelist who married Jean-Luc Godard. Further biographical information is available in English at Wikipedia (a fuller bio can be found at the French Wikipedia), the Nobel Prize website, Encyclopædia Britannica or Authors’ Calendar. 

Very few of Mauriac’s novels appear to have been translated into English, so it is no surprise to find that there are no diaries published in English either. However, it seems, he did keep a diary. In 1948, he published Journal d’un homme de trente ans: (extraits); and, from 1950 on, I believe, the French publisher Gallimard, began publishing his complete works. One volume, published in 1952, contains a series of his journals - see the British Library holding. But the only diary extracts I can find that have been translated into English are in Robert Speaight’s biography - François Mauriac: A study of the writer and the man (Chatto & Windus, 1976) - as per the following:

9 June 1916
‘Paris. Temptations. Passions go on velvet feet in the jungle. Huge beasts. Perfume of sensuality.’

18 July 1916
‘Must free our body of desire.’

28 January 1917
‘My son Claude to keep me pure.’

2 March 1917
‘Paris is disgusting.  “Great Ladies”, pederasts, lesbians, everyone is procuring for somebody else.’

1918
‘The war is ending on a picture postcard where we see the French re-entering Metz and Strasbourg . . . Frightening absence of God in the triumphal cries of Clemenceau.’

Undated
‘Perhaps it is always enough that a creature we love should live beside us, not perhaps that we should love them less, but that we should no longer realise that we love them.’

1934
‘Still, after many years, to have so much to say to one another, from the most trivial to the most serious, without any desire to astonish or to be admired - what a wonderful thing that is!. No more need of lies; man and wife have become so transparent to each other that lying can no longer be of any use. This is the only love that cherishes immobility, that feeds on the habitual and daily round.’

29 July 1953
‘At my age, the conflict between the Christian and the novelist has moved on to another plane. It’s much less a question of the Jansenist scruples that used to trouble me in describing the passions than a kind of disenchantment with everything to do with art in general, and with my own art in particular. A feeling that art is literally an idol, that it has its martyrs and its prophets, and that for many people it is a substitute for God. And not art alone, but the word - the word that has not been made flesh. [. . . Having resumed work on a new novel, L’Agneau, he is determined not to put it aside] ‘until I have found the balance that I’m looking for, and the young saint, my hero, is burning at the heart of the furnace.’

Undated
[Whatever the motives of General de Gaulle’s withdrawal from power in February 1946, Speaight says, Mauriac could only look back on a great dream that was dead:] ‘All the Resistance tightly gathered round its leader; the C.N.R. as the nucleus of the new Assembly; prompt punishment for traitors and assassins by regular court martial, whose impartiality was beyond suspicion - a punishment followed, after a few months, and in despite of all the complaints, by a total amnesty for those whom the legality of Vichy . . . had led astray; the prisons reserved for crime, and adolescents rescued from their corruption; and finally reforms, at once bold and proportionate to the needs of a country which has been drained of its blood, and is covered with graves and ruins.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 11 October 2015.

The Symbolist, Zinaida Gippius

Today marks the 80th anniversary of Zinaida Gippius’s death. A leading Russian Symbolist poet and polemical critic, she chronicled revolution and exile with an unsparing, self-interrogating voice; her diaries are among the sharpest first-person records of Petrograd in 1917-1918, when the Russian capital (renamed from St Petersburg during the war) was convulsed first by the overthrow of the tsar in February and then by the Bolshevik seizure of power in October.

Gippius (also written as Hippius) was born in Belyov in 1869, the eldest of four sisters who only received a sporadic education as their father, a respected lawyer and a senior officer in the Russian Senate, moved residence often. She came of age in the Petersburg literary world of the 1890s. She married the writer-critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky in 1889, and together they became central to the city’s Symbolist circles - embracing mysticism, aesthetic experimentation, and the idea of art as a path to spiritual renewal. They launched the Religious-Philosophical Meetings, which tried to bring the intelligentsia and the Church into dialogue. Her most important works (beyond the diaries - see below) include several volumes of poetry that placed her at the centre of Russian Symbolism, the short story collections New People and The Devil’s Doll, the novel The Roman-Tsarevich. 

Gippius also cultivated a deliberately androgynous, confrontational persona and, under the male pseudonym ‘Anton Krainy’, wrote some of the era’s most incisive criticism. The 1905 Revolution radicalised Gippius’s politics while deepening her spiritual preoccupations. She welcomed the February 1917 revolution which overthrew the tsar and installed the Provisional Government, but judged October a cultural catastrophe, a judgment that drove the couple into emigration in 1919 - first to Poland, then France and Italy - where she kept writing poetry, prose, memoir. She died in Paris on 9 September 1945, four years after Merezhkovsky. Further information is available from Wikipedia; Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Library of Congress. 

Gippius began making diary entries in the 1890s, though only fragments from those years remain. The first substantial run of entries dates from the early 1900s. From then on she maintained diaries more or less steadily, though they became especially intense and historically important during the Revolutionary years, 1917-1918, when she wrote almost daily in Petrograd. After emigrating in 1919 she continued the habit in exile, sometimes combining poems and diary notes in the same volumes.

Her first major diary publication was Stikhi: dnevnik 1911-1921 (Berlin, 1922), a hybrid volume pairing late poems with diary entries; her best-known diary book, Sinyaya kniga. Peterburgskiy dnevnik 1914-1918 (The Blue Book), appeared in Belgrade in 1929. An English selection, Between Paris and St Petersburg: Selected Diaries of Zinaida Hippius, edited and translated by Temira Pachmuss, was issued by University of Illinois Press in 1975. This can be freely borrowed online at Internet Archive.

‘Hippius’s diaries are works of art,’ Pachmuss says in her preface. ‘Her skill as an artist is inevitably reflected in her diaries, even though they were not written for subsequent publication. They reveal aspects of her personality which are not expressed in her poetry or published prose works. They further illuminate her views on literature, religion, politics, freedom, ethics, love, marriage, life, death, God, the Holy Trinity - in fact, the entire evolution of her Weltanschauung may be reconstructed from her diaries. In them she defined her attitude toward other people, her concept of creative work, her criteria for imaginative literary criticism, and above all, her credo as a poet. Hippius’s diaries, written in her minute and graceful script, are a valuable, highly artistic personal confession. Their intrinsic value is justification for their publication in English in the present volume.

Hippius’s diaries have great historical and literary significance not only because they describe the views and attitudes of the poetess herself, but also because they re-create the spiritual atmosphere of St. Petersburg at the beginning of the twentieth century - with its emotional maximalism, metaphysical disposition, and religious aspirations. They further reveal the nature of life in Poland after the October Revolution, and the activities of ‘Russian Paris’ in the third and fourth decades of this century.’

Here is a sample extract from an early diary quoted in Between Paris and St Petersburg.

13 March 1901

‘I would like to know what attracts me to this diary - now? There is no more contes d’amour, no special amorousness . . . About what, then, to write? Yet I want to write precisely here. This means that there is within me some form of amorousness, or something resembling it.

Something resembling… yes, but at the same time something completely different. It is good that it does resemble, and it is also good that it is something different.

In spite of this absolutely shameless, personal pain of the old and human aspect of my soul (I am saying it calmly), there is a great deal of serene strength in me, active strength, and there is a great deal of my good and old amorousness for ‘something different.’ I have much strength now, but I do not wish to conceal from myself that there is a certain danger for me. An almost inevitable danger.

From now on I am destined to pursue the path of ascetism, complete as a closed circle. I know with the combined insight of both my body and my soul that this path is the wrong one for me. A deep knowledge that you are pursuing the wrong path will - without fail, quietly, but certainly - deprive me of my strength. I won’t be able to reach the end of the path; I won’t pour forth the whole volume of my strength. Even now, when I think about the future, it depresses me. At the present time there is so much of this lively strength in me. I will engross myself in the spirit - without fail - and my spirit will evaporate like light vapor. Oh, I do not suffer because of myself! I am not sorry for myself! I am sorry for That to Which I will not serve to the best of my abilities.

I would have selected another path - there isn’t any other, however. It is not even worthwhile talking about - it is immediately obvious that there isn’t any other path.

Sometimes it seems to me that there must be people who resemble me, who are neither satisfied with the existing forms of passion nor with the forms of life; that is, there must be people who want to go forward, who desire God not only in those phenomena which already exist, but also in those which will take place. So I think. But then I laugh. All right, there are such people. So what? Will I feel better from this knowledge? For I definitely won’t meet such a person. But if I do meet him? Then probably it will just be in order ‘to bless him while I descend into my grave.’ For in a few years I will become an old woman (a weak old woman who will be embittered by her past). And I will know that I have not lived righteously. And even if I meet him now, at this moment, will I believe it? And if I do fall in love with him, I will preserve my silence till the very end anyhow - from fear that he is not the ‘right’ one. And he, if he resembles me, will also be silent. No, it won’t be that way. It, this miracle, can take place only in the Third Person, but what He will tell me - I don’t know. I have not heard His voice as yet. But why do I ponder it? Why am I apprehensive? Why do I complain? Everything will be as it should be. This is not my will. It is not my volition that there is such strange, such lively blood in me. For something, for Somebody this blood is necessary. So let Him do with it whatever He wants. And also with that strength of mine which He has granted to me. I will only be sincere. Asceticism [the next page is missing] is stronger than what they think about themselves. Their sin is only their self-belittlement. I see how some people, who are able to save not only themselves but other people as well, perish from this sin. And my white flowers wither, wither away . . .

How can I tell them? How can I help them? Indeed I am not so strong, so long as I am alone.’

Polidori’s first ghost story

‘Began my ghost-story after tea. Twelve o’clock, really began to talk ghostly. L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s Christabel, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle.’ This is from the diaries of John William Polidori, physician and writer, born 230 years ago today. He is best remembered today for his novella The Vampyre, often described as the first modern vampire story in English literature, but his surviving diaries also provide an unusually vivid portrait of a gifted young man caught between literary ambition and family expectation.

Born in London on 7 September 1795 to an Italian émigré scholar and an English mother, Polidori studied medicine at Edinburgh, graduating as a doctor at only nineteen. Restless and ambitious, he sought literary fame as much as medical distinction. In 1816 he entered the service of Lord Byron as his travelling physician and accompanied him to Geneva, where he found himself among an extraordinary circle that included Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley). The gathering at the Villa Diodati in June 1816 has since become legendary, for it was there that the company challenged one another to write ghost stories - an evening that led Mary Shelley to conceive Frankenstein and Polidori to begin what would become The Vampyre.

Dismissed by Byron, Polidori travelled in Italy and then returned to England. His story, The Vampyre, which featured the main character Lord Ruthven, was published in the April 1819 issue of New Monthly Magazine without his permission. Whilst in London he lived on Great Pulteney Street in Soho. Much to both his and Byron’s chagrin, The Vampyre was released as a new work by Byron. Byron’s own vampire story Fragment of a Novel was published in 1819 in an attempt to clear up the confusion, but, for better or worse, The Vampyre continued to be attributed to him. Polidori’s long, Byron-influenced theological poem The Fall of the Angels was published anonymously in 1821; but in August that year Polidoro died. The coroner gave a verdict of death by natural causes, but his family believed he committed suicide with prussic acid. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia and The Millions.

Polidori’s diaries cover his youthful years in Edinburgh, his time with Byron, and the troubled period that followed. They reveal a man both enthralled and embittered by his proximity to greatness. He often complained of Byron’s arrogance and treatment of him as a mere servant, while at the same time recording his own bouts of melancholy, gambling losses, and quarrels with family. His diary for 1816-1817, edited by William Michael Rossetti in 1911, has become a key document for scholars studying the Villa Diodati circle.

After his death, Polidori’s sister Charlotte transcribed the diaries, but censored ‘peccant passages’ and destroyed the original. Based only on the transcription, The Diary of John Polidori was edited by William Michael Rossetti and first published in 1911 by Elkin Mathews (London) - this is freely available online at Internet Archive. Reprints followed in teh 1970s, and a new edition of The Diary of John William Polidori was issued by Cornell University in 2009.

Here is a flavour of Polidori’s diary, though I have omitted the annotations and explanations (about the genesis of The Vampyre for example), which take up many pages in the published editions.

17 June 1816

‘Went into the town; dined out with Lord and Madame etc. here. Went after dinner to a ball at Madame Odier’s; where I was introduced to Princess Something and Countess Potocka, Poles, and had with them a long confab. Attempted to dance, but felt such horrid pain was forced to stop. The ghost-stories are begun by all but me.’

18 June 1816

‘My leg much worse. Shelley and party here. Mrs. S[helley] called me her brother (younger). Began my ghost-story after tea. Twelve o’clock, really began to talk ghostly. L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s Christabel, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face, and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him. He married; and, a friend of his liking his wife, he tried all he could to induce her to love him in turn. He is surrounded by friends who feed upon him, and draw upon him as their banker. Once, having hired a house, a man wanted to make him pay more, and came trying to bully him, and at last challenged him. Shelley refused, and was knocked down; coolly said that would not gain him his object, and was knocked down again. Slaney called.’

19 June 1816

‘Leg worse; began my ghost-story. Mr. S[helley?] etc. forth here. Bonstetten and Rossi called. B[onstetten] told me a story of the religious feuds in Appenzel; a civil war between Catholics and Protestants. Battle arranged; chief and commander calls the other. Calls himself and other friends. One will not persuade of his being wrong. Other accepted, and persuaded them to take the boundary rivulet; and they did. Bed at 3 as usual.’

20 June 1816

‘My leg kept me at home. Shelley etc. here.’

5 September 1816

‘Not written my Journal till now through neglect and dissipation. Had a long explanation with S[helley] and L[ord] B[yron] about my conduct to L[ord] B[yron]; threatened to shoot S[helley] one day on the water. Horses been a subject of quarrel twice, Berger having accused me of laming one.’

17 September 1816

‘Left St. Gingoux at 6. Walked to __. Took bread and wine. Crossed to Chillon. Saw Bonivard’s prison for six years; whence a Frenchman had broken, and, passing through a window, swam to a boat. Instruments of torture, - the pulley. Three soldiers there now: the Roman arms already affixed. Large subterranean passes. Saw in passing the three treed islands. The Rhone enters by two mouths, and keeps its waters distinct for two stones’ throw.

From Chillon I went to Montreaux - breakfasted - leaving Charney on my left. I began to mount towards the Dent de Jamanu. Before beginning to mount Jamanu itself, one has a beautiful view, seeing only part of the lake, bound by Meillerie, Roches, and the Rhone. Higher up the view is more extensive, but not so beautiful - nothing being distinct; the water looking merely as an inlet of sky, but one could see the Jura as far as Genthoud.

I entered a chalet, where they expressed great astonishment at my drinking whey, which they give to their pigs only. Refused at first money.

Descended towards Mont Boyon. What owing to the fatigue and hardly meeting any one, sick with grief. At Mont Boyon dined, and, finding they would not dance, slept immediately after.’

30 September 1816

‘Up at 5. Off at 6 in a large barge, with yesterday’s English party and two carriages, by the Tessino and canal to Milan: at first through a fine hilly country, and rapidly by the Tessino flood. After, slower, and through a flat plain with trees and neat villas and hanging grapes, to Milan. Slept out of the town by the canal.’

2 October 1816

‘Got up at 8. Breakfasted on grapes, bread and butter, wine, and figs. Wrote to Lord Byron. Dressed. Went to Marchese Lapone - not at home; Monsignor Brema - not at home. Walked about looking at booksellers’ shops. Entered the Duomo - invisible almost, so black and dark. They were putting up drapery for Friday, which is the Emperor’s birthday (probably the same as for Napoleon). Returned home, arranged my papers. Took a walk on the Corso; then to the Teatro Rè. The same price for all the places. The piece Il Sogno di Ariosto [Dream of Ariosto], where Fortune, Merit, Orgoglio, with Mrs. Disinganno, were all personified. The dialogue abounded in truths, especially regarding women, which they applauded. The theatre is very small, like the Haymarket. Home to bed.’

Strapped to this journal

‘I’m strapped to this journal. Grunt. Heave. Impression that the ship is going down. The furniture slides, the table legs wobble …’ This is from the diary of Félix Guattari, a French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and activist who died 33 years ago today. Although not a diarist by nature, a collection of diary-like writings from his notebooks were published posthumously.

Guattari was born in 1930 in Villeneuve-les-Sablons, Oise, France, into a modest family background - his father was a metal worker and his mother a secretary. He attended secondary school in Enghien-les-Bains before moving on to Paris, where he became involved in student political circles. In his youth he developed a strong interest in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He trained with Jacques Lacan in the late 1940s and early 1950s, though he soon began to distance himself from Lacanian orthodoxy, pursuing a more experimental and collective approach to therapy.

In 1953, Guattari began working at the experimental La Borde Clinic near Blois, founded and directed by Jean Oury. La Borde became central to both his personal and professional life; he lived and worked there for much of the rest of his career. The clinic’s practice of institutional psychotherapy sought to dismantle rigid hierarchies by involving both patients and staff in the daily running of the institution, fostering collective forms of responsibility and therapeutic community. This practical experience deeply informed Guattari’s theoretical work, as he attempted to interweave psychoanalysis, politics, and philosophy.

Beyond his clinical activity, Guattari was heavily involved in left-wing activism. During the 1960s, he participated in far-left groups, supported anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and Vietnam, and was an active presence in the events of May 1968. Around this period, he began his celebrated collaboration with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, then teaching at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes. Their joint publications, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), were later collected under the common title Capitalism and Schizophrenia. These works critiqued both Freudian psychoanalysis and orthodox Marxism, offering instead a radical exploration of desire, subjectivity, and social assemblages. They became central texts in contemporary Continental philosophy and cultural theory.

In addition to these collaborative works, Guattari published influential texts of his own, including Molecular Revolution (1977), Chaosmosis (1992), and the posthumously collected Soft Subversions. These writings continued his exploration of subjectivity, ecology, and collective enunciation.

Guattari married Nadine Charbonnel in 1961, with whom he had three children. Despite his involvement in international intellectual and political movements, he remained grounded at La Borde, where personal, professional, and political worlds often overlapped. He continued to write, teach, and practice therapy until his sudden death from a heart attack at La Borde on 29 August 1992, at the age of sixty-two. Further information is available from Wikipedia.

After his death, several collections of his unpublished writings appeared, notably The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006), which contains diary entries and working notes from 1969 to 1973. They present a more personal and unguarded side of his thought - urgent, confessional, and exploratory - recording his creative struggles during the development of Anti-Oedipus as well as his conflicts with Lacan and his work at La Borde. A few pages can be sampled at Amazon. Back in 2015, The Paris Review published this extract from The Anti-Oedipus Papers, as translated by Stéphane Nadaud.

10 June 1972

‘I’m strapped to this journal. Grunt. Heave. Impression that the ship is going down. The furniture slides, the table legs wobble …

Writing so that I won’t die. Or so that I die otherwise. Sentences breaking up. Panting like for what. [. . .]

You can explain everything away. I explain myself away. But to whom? You know … The question of the other. The other and time. I’m home kind of fucking around. Listening to my own words. Redundancy. Peepee poopoo. Things are so fucking weird! [. . .]

Have to be accountable. Yield to arguments. What I feel like is just fucking around. Publish this diary for example. Say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow. Barter whatever for whoever wants to read it. Now that I’m turning into a salable name I can find an editor for sure [. . .] Work the feed-back; write right into the real. But not just the professional readers’ real, “Quinzaine polemical” style. The close, hostile real. People around. Fuck shit up. The stakes greater than the oeuvre or they don’t attain it [. . .]

Just setting up the terms of this project makes me feel better. My breathing is freed up by one notch. Intensities. A literary-desiring machine. [. . .]

When it works I have a ton to spare, I don’t give a shit, I lose it as fast as it comes, and I get more. Active forgetting! What matters is interceding when it doesn’t work, when it spins off course, and the sentences are fucked up, and the words disintegrate, and the spelling is total mayhem. Strange feeling, when I was small, with some words. Their meaning would disappear all of a sudden. Panic. And I have to make a text out of that mess and it has to hold up: that is my fundamental schizo-analytic project. Reconstruct myself in the artifice of the text. Among other things, escape the multiple incessant dependencies on images incarnating the “that’s how it goes!”

Writing for nobody? Impossible. You fumble, you stop. I don’t even take the trouble of expressing myself so that when I reread myself I can understand whatever it was I was trying to say. Gilles will figure it out, he’ll work it through. [. . .]

I tell myself I can’t take the plunge and leave this shit for publication because that would inconvenience Gilles. But really, though? I just need to cross out the passages he’s directly involved in. I’m hiding behind this argument so that I can let myself go again and just fucking float along. Even though when it comes to writing an article, I start over like twenty-five times!!

And this dance of anxiety …’

My imagination flies

‘I just said - “My imagination flies, like Noah’s dove, from the ark of my mind . . . and finds no place on which to rest the sole of her foot except Coleridge - Wordsworth and Southey.” ’ This is a young Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of English Opium-Eater, born 240 years ago today, confessing to his diary how he yearned to meet the Lake Poets. Later, of course, he would meet them; and some of his most important contributions to literature would be writing about those very poets. Unfortunately, it seems, he only kept that one diary - not published until the 20th century - for a few months in 1803.

Thomas was born in Manchester on 15 August 1785. His father, Quincey, also Thomas, was a successful merchant. In 1796, three years after the death of an elder sister and then his father, his mother moved to Bath and changed the family name to De Quincey. Thomas was enrolled in a series of schools, and proved a precocious student. During 1800-1801, he came into contact with various literary figures, and became keen on the poets Coleridge and Wordsworth. Having been refused permission to enter Oxford early, he absconded from Manchester grammar in 1802. His family, accepting the decision, allowed him one guinea a week, and he set off on a walking tour in North Wales.

De Quincey, however, soon lost his regular guinea by failing to write letters home. He borrowed money, went to London, where he preferred destitution to the prospect of family constraints. He later claimed to have been protected and comforted, innocently, by a young prostitute whom he celebrated in Confessions. Eventually, though, in early 1803, he was found by friends, and returned home. He was sent to stay in Everton, near Liverpool, for several months, and was then allowed to go to Worcester College, Oxford, on a reduced income. On the final day of his exams in 1808, he suffered a loss of nerve, and fled to London. During his student years, he had become acquainted with Coleridge and Wordsworth, and, in 1809, moved to Grasmere, in the Lake District, where he lived in Dove Cottage (once occupied by the Wordsworths - see Daffodils so beautiful). He studied German literature, planned an ambitious philosophical work, and travelled occasionally to London or Edinburgh.

De Quincey had first tried opium during a visit to London in 1804, apparently to ease the pain of toothache. By 1813, or so, his irregular use of the drug had become a daily habit. By the following year, he had begun an affair with Margaret, 18 at the time, who bore him a child in 1816. They married the following year, and would go on to have seven more children. However, De Quincey’s meagre income was failing, so he turned to journalism, finding employment as editor for a weekly Tory newspaper, The Westmorland Gazette. He proved poor at meeting deadlines, and, after a little more than a year, he relinquished the post. A position writing for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was even more short-lived.

In the summer of 1821, he took lodgings in London, where he worked on Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, an account of his early life and opium addiction that appeared in the September and October issues of the London Magazine. His Confessions were an immediate success, and attracted nationwide attention. They were published in book form in 1822, and regularly reissued in his own life time, and ever since. Over the next five years, he published upwards of 20 essays for the magazine, but money problems persisted. In 1825, he was evicted from Fox Ghyll, Rydal (which he’d taken on when more money was coming in from the London Magazine), and went to live with Margaret’s parents. By 1830, the family had relocated to Edinburgh, where De Quincey was regularly contributing to Blackwood’s Magazine, but then mostly to Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine - often but a hair’s breadth from debtors’ prison.

From 1840 or so, De Quincey’s life became more stable, as his eldest daughter, Margaret, took charge of her father’s affairs and finances. Over the next decade and more, he published regularly: a series of reminiscences of the Lake Poets in Tait’s is considered one of his most important works. He also went back to Blackwood’s contributing several works including a sequel to Confesssions. From 1850, most of his work was being published by James Hogg in The Instructor. Ticknor and Fields of Boston, US, undertook to publish a collected edition of De Quincey’s works. The 22 volumes were poorly organised and flawed, which prompted Hogg to suggest that De Quincey himself work on a revised edition of his own writings. This task - including a much lengthened Confessions - took up most of the rest of his working life. It was while working on the fourteenth and last volume that he died, in 1859. Further information on De Quincey can be found at Wikipedia, Historic UK, reviews of Morrison’s biography (The English Opium Eater) such as at The Guardian or The Washington Post, or Encyclopaedia Britannica. Confessions of an Opium-Eater is freely available at Internet Archive.

De Quincey kept a diary for a few short months, during his sojourn in Everton, before going to Oxford. It was first edited by Horace A. Eaton, Professor of English at Syracuse University in the US and published by Noel Douglas in 1927 as A Diary of Thomas De Quincey - Here reproduced in replica as well as in print from the original manuscript in the possession of the Reverend C. H. Steel. According to the book’s editor, the diary, 101 pages long, is contained in ‘a shabby little volume in quarto, with torn leaves and untidy scribbled pages, partly filled with a list of books’. Substantial further information about the diary can be found at the National Archives website. Here are a few sample extracts from the 1927 edition.

4 May 1803
‘Read 99 pages of “Accusg Spirit; - walked into the lanes; - met a fellow who counterfeited drunkenness or lunacy or idiocy; - I say counterfeited, because I am well convinced he was some vile outcast of society - a pest and disgrace to humanity. I was just on the point of hittg him a dab on his disgustg face when a gentleman (coming up) alarmed him and saved me trouble.’

5 May 1803
‘Last night I imaged to myself the heroine of the novel dying on an island of a lake, the chamber-windows (opening on a lawn) set wide open - and the sweet blooming roses breathing yr odours on her dying senses.[. . .]

Last night too I image myself looking through a glass. “What do you see?” I see a man in the dim and shadowy perspective and (as it were) in a dream. He passes along in silence, and the hues of sorrow appear on his countenance. Who is he? A man darkly wonderful - above the beings of this world; but whether that shadow of him, which you saw, be ye shadow of a man long since passed away or of one yet hid in futurity, I may not tell you.’

3 June 1803
‘Rise between 11 and 12 - go to W’s; - read out “Henry the Fourth”; (part 1st) which Mrs. E. pronounces “a very pretty play.” Almost immediately after this is finished  . . . dinner is announced; - I go without seeing Mr. W.; walk, by French prison and lane, to windmill on shore; - turn back along shore; cross over to French prison; - go to C’s; - dine there again by myself; - open a volume of the Encyclopaedia; read 2 pages of the life of Frederick the Great of Prussia . . . containing the origin of his acquaintance with Voltaire - his mode of spending the time as described by Voltaire; then read the article “French” (language) in the same volume; - open no other book; - go to W’s; ring and ask if the ladies are really gone, as they talked of doing, to Mossley; - find they are gone in spite of the rain; - walk to Everton; - find postman at door; - decypher a letter; - lend Miss B. 2s 3d to pay the postage of one; - the other (2s 2d) she leaves unpaid, though I offered to lend her the money; - both come from the coast of Africa; - Miss B. seems wild with joy; - has received money I suppose; I drink coffee.’

15 June 1803
‘I just said - “My imagination flies, like Noah’s dove, from the ark of my mind . . . and finds no place on which to rest the sole of her foot except Coleridge - Wordsworth and Southey.” This morning (and indeed many times before) I said - “Bacon’s mind appears to me like a great abyss - on the brink of which the imagination startles and shudders to look down” - Of that gilded fly of Corsica - Bonaparte - I said just now (what I have applied to others too - using it as a general curse) “May he be thirsty to all eternity - and have nothing but cups of damnation to drink.” ’

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