My guiding darkness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here are several extracts from the published diaries.

23 March 1941

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

19 May 1941

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

1 June 1941

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

23 July 1941

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

26 July 1941

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

14 September 1941

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

5 December 1941

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

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

The champion of reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catch some of my life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day of brain fever

‘Today was a day of brain fever. I have decided to write a full length drama on Kalidas, before starting on the novel. Shall set about it tomorrow. Should complete it by the 21st.’ This is from the diary of Mohan Rakesh, a pioneer of modern Hindi literature, born a century ago today. Once written and produced, the work about Kalidas would soon become recognized as the first modern Hindi play.

Rakesh was born as Madan Mohan Guglani on 8 January 1925 in Amritsar (Punjab Province of British India). His father was a lawyer who died when he was 16. He studied for an MA in English and Hindi at Punjab University in Lahore, and earned the title of Shatri in Sanskrit. His professional journey included stints as a postman, teacher, and editor (of the literary journal Sarika) before he dedicated himself fully to writing in 1957.

As a writer, Rakesh excelled in multiple genres, particularly novels and plays. He is credited with writing the first modern Hindi play, Ashadh Ka Ek Din (1958) - about Kalidas, a classical Sanskrit author some claim is ancient India’s greatest poet and playwright. Indeed, Rakesh is also considered to have been one of the pioneers of the Nai Kahani (‘New Story’) Hindi literary movement. His writing often focused on the urban middle class, exploring their struggles and aspirations in post-independence India. His works are said to be characterised by their realistic portrayal of characters and their dilemmas, reflecting the changing social dynamics of the time.

Rakesh married three times: a first marriage in 1950 was arranged and ended in divorce in 1957; a second marriage, to Sudha in 1960, was also short-lived; and in 1963, he married 21 year-old Anita Aulakh. Throughout his career, Rakesh received several accolades, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1968. He died in 1972, aged only 47. However, his legacy continues to influence Hindi literature and theatre, with his plays still being performed and acclaimed worldwide. For further information see Wikipedia. 

Rakesh kept a diary for some years. Extracts from this were edited by Sudha and published posthumously as Mohan Rakesh Ki Diary (Rajpal & Sons, 1977). A more modern edition can be sampled online at Googlebooks. Although the bulk of the book is written in Hindi, there are a few passages in English. (Moreover, it is possible, these days, to produce a serviceable English translation by dragging and dropping images of the Hindi text into Google Translate.

22 January 1958

‘I do not know how I feel. Probably I am happy, very happy. M... came this morning, when I was working at my typewriter. She remained here for an hour or so. I said everything to her that I wanted to. She gave me her promise to marry me. I do not know how I feel about it. I feel terribly excited. The day had a real feel of spring in it. The grass looked more green than ever. I felt as if I were the master of the world. Love certainly is a positive sentiment, in spite of all the master of the cynicism of my friends. I love the young girl and it gave me intense pleasure to know that she has this same feeling for me. I am happy, for I took a few glasses of beer just now to enjoy my happiness. Oh! How nice and blissful I feel! I feel as if we are already married!’

9 February 1958

‘A week of hectic life in Delhi. Sharat’s marriage was the main event of the week. Met so many persons. Talked so many things. Returned very tired. Slept till eleven in the morning.

Today was a day of brain fever. I have decided to write a full length drama on Kalidas, before starting on the novel. Shall set about it tomorrow. Should complete it by the 21st.’

13 February 1958

‘Plans are ready for shifting to Delhi. 1st of March is the latest by when I should leave Jullundur. Staying here already seems like living in the past. But I had developed more attachments in this city than in any other city before. I shall carry with me many pleasant and unpleasant memories. And I shall never come back to live here.

I do not yet know what is going to be my major occupation for earning a livelihood in the days to come, writing does not provide a living. It may be anything, but I shall at no cost come back to have a job in this city. I shall try to write out the play on Kalidas during the days that I am here.’

16 February 1958


‘I felt suffocated - extremely so, living at Jullundur. I do not know why I am so sensitive to certain situations. Till yesterday, I was not sure if I shall travel to Delhi. Even till later this morning I did not know. Only felt a certain pain, a piercing agony right within my heart. I could not write. I could not read. I even could not imagine things. I felt as if my heart and brain were being eaten up by worms. I feel so terribly depressed. Now that I am sitting in a train, in the compartment next to the engine, the engine is whistling continuously, doing about 50 miles an hour, I feel if the oppressive burden is being slowly lifted. I like this terrible speed, this maddening push. I hope to feel light and happy in an hour's time.

I shall try to settle down in Delhi. I shall live there. I might probably die there. I am so tired of these shiftings, and yet I cannot help them. My whole system has been poisoned by the bitterness of circumstances. How long I have suffered and how much! Could I ever be relieved of this pain, this sorrow?

The train is going very fast. But I also feel lonely and desolate. How can I help it? As the train steams off from Ambala Cantt, the depression is over. 

New Delhi

A feeling like that of having slept well. A vague sensation of pleasant excitement. Wind is chilly. I feel that it is spring.

I like this mode of living. I like this life. Everything around seems to be pulsating with activity.

I cannot believe that I, myself, have been through all that suffering. I want to believe that it was not reality but a nightmare - a hallucination.’

Dipped into Bacon’s essays

Thomas Green, a man of leisure and a self-professed lover of literature, died two centuries ago today. He kept a diary for much of his life, but one focused almost exclusively on his thoughts and opinions about books he was reading. According to this diary, he was often to be found ‘dipping into’ some great work of non-fiction or other, such as Bacon’s essays.

Green was born at Monmouth in 1769. His grandfather was a wealthy Suffolk soap-boiler who had made a fortune during the reign of Queen Anne, and his father was a man of letters, a pamphleteer, and a champion of the Church of England. Green was partly educated privately, and partly at the free grammar school in Ispwich; he was admitted to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. However, illness prevented him from taking up his university studies. Instead, he was called to the bar, and travelled the Norfolk Circuit. He married Catherine Hartcup, and they had one son.

Aged 25, Green inherited the family estate, leaving him free to live a life of leisure and reading literature. He resided in Ipswich, visiting the Continent and different parts of England from time to time. Occasionally, he wrote and published political pamphlets, and he provided contributions to The Gentleman’s Magazine. He died on 6 January 1825. Further biographical information is available from an 1834 edition of The Gentleman’s Magazine, Dictionary of National Biography 1895-1900, or Edmund Gosse’s Gossip in a Library.

Green kept a diary for most of his adult life, and he is mostly remembered because of a quirky book, based on this diary, that he published in 1810: Extracts from The Diary of a Lover of Literature (this is freely available at Internet Archive). It records his thoughts and lengthy opinions on the books he was reading, most of which were worthy, non-fiction classics. Although his selection of diary extracts in this book are confined to a five year period (1796-1800), his friend John Mitford published further extracts in The Gentleman’s Magazine between 1834 and 1843 (here and here for example).

Here are several extracts from Green’s book, starting with much of his elaborately self-effacing and wittily apologetic preface.

PREFACE
‘At length, after much hesitation, and in an evil hour perhaps, I am induced to submit to the indulgence of the Public, the idlest Work, probably, that ever was composed; but, I could wish to hope, not absolutely the most unentertaining or unprofitable.

For the errors and defects naturally incident to a composition successively exhibiting the impressions of the moment in the language which the moment prompted, and which must derive any interest it may possess from the ease and freedom with which these impressions are communicated, it would be fruitless and absurd to attempt an apology. [. . .] For faults of every other description; and for more than a due proportion of these, I feel that I am strictly accountable ; and present myself before the Audience whose attention I have presumed to engage with my babble, under an appalling sense of the responsibility which my rashness has incurred.

To the objector, who should fiercely demand, why I obtruded on the Public at all, matter confessedly so crude and so peccant, I have really little to allege which is quite satisfactory to my own mind, or which I could reasonably hope, therefore, would prove so to his: but to an offended spirit of a gentler nature, I might perhaps be allowed to intimate, that, whatever my faults may be, I have not attempted to decoy unwary Readers by an imposing Title, nor to tax their curiosity with the costly splendours of fashionable typography. It has been my earnest wish, at least, to obviate disappointment, by accommodating, as much as possible, my appearance to my pretensions. These are simple, and of easy statement. To furnish occupation, in a vacant hour, to minds imbued with a relish for literary pursuits, by suggesting topics for reflection and incentives to research, partly from an exhibition of whatever struck me as most interesting in the thoughts of others, during a miscellaneous course of reading, and partly, too, from a free and unreserved communication of the thoughts they gave rise to in my own mind - this is all that I venture to propose to the Reader as my aim in the publication of the following Extracts. [. . .]

With respect to my success in this adventure, if I am not generally very sanguine, there are certain moments - under the encouraging influence of a balmy air, bright sky, and vigorous digestion - in which I am not altogether without hope. When I advert, it is true, to the numerous faults that deform the following pages, all crowding in hideous succession before me - when I reflect on the various improvements of which the whole would be susceptible, even under my own mature revisal - above all, when I compute what brighter talents and ampler attainments might have achieved in a similar career - my heart, oppressed with the load of my infirmities, sinks in despondency within me: but when I consider, on the other hand, the wretched trash with which the Public is sometimes apparently content to be amused, my spirits, in a slight degree, revive; I cannot disguise, from myself, that I am at least entitled to equal indulgence with some of these candidates for public favour; and in the momentary elation of this ignoble triumph, am tempted to anticipate a reception, which however moderate and subdued for an illusion of the fancy, may perhaps prove ridiculously flattering compared with the actual doom that awaits me. [. . .]

The following Sheets are, of course, only a sample, though a pretty large one, of a more considerable Work: but the Purchaser of the present Volume (I hasten to add) need not be alarmed. I cannot flatter myself that the materials for a future selection, are eminently better than those from which I have thus far drawn; and with the present Extracts I am so little satisfied, on a review of them in print, that unless they should experience the most unequivocal symptoms of public favour, they are the last that will appear. An idle experiment, however unsuccessful, may be good-naturedly excused; but to persist in a piece of folly of this kind, after a fair warning that it is such, would betray an unpardonable disregard of what is due, on the occasion, both to public feeling and my own character.’

29 September 1796
‘Read the 9th Chapter of Roscoe’s Lorenzo de Medici; in which the rise (or renovation) and progress of the arts of painting, statuary, engraving, and sculpture upon gems, with the merits of the respective artists in each department, are happily delineated. The account of Michael Angelo - his giant powers - and the concussion with which his advent shook the world of genius and taste - is even sublime. Roscoe is not always exact in the choice of his expressions: for instance, he uses “instigate” in a good sense; which, where we have another appropriate term, is unpardonable: “compromise”, which properly means, the adjustment of differences by reciprocal concession, he employs, by what authority I know not, to express, the putting to hazard by implication. A catalogue of synonymes, executed with philological skill and philosophical discrimination, would be a valuable accession to English Literature.

Read, after a long interval, with much delight, the first two Books of Caesar’s Commentaries. The States of Gaul are represented as far more advanced in government and manners, than I should have expected him to find them; and it would puzzle the Directory of France, at this moment, to frame a manifesto, so neatly conceived, and so forcibly yet chastely expressed, as the reply of Ariovistus, a barbaric chief from the wilds off Germany, to the embassy of Caesar. It is interesting to trace the route of this great commander (and the similitude of names will sometimes fix it with precision) on a modern map. Nothing can exceed the ease, perspicuity, and spirit, with which this incomparable narrative is conducted.

Dipped into Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Boswell, from his open, communicative, good-humoured vanity, which leads him to display events and feelings that other men, of more judgment, though slighter pretensions, would have studiously concealed, has depressed himself below his just level in public estimation. His information is extensive; his talents far from despicable; and he seems so exactly adapted, even by his very foibles, that we might almost suppose him purposely created, to be the Chronicler of Johnson. A pleasing and instructive packet-companion might be formed, by a judicious selection from his copious repertory of Johnson’s talk.’

5 October 1796
‘Pursued Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Johnson’s coarse censure of Lord Chesterfield, “that he taught the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master”, is as unjust as it is harsh. Indeed I have always thought the noble author of Letters to his Son, hardly dealt with by the Public; though to public opinion I have the highest deference. How stands the case? Having bred up his son to a youth of learning and virtue, and consigned him to a tutor well adapted to cultivate these qualities, he naturally wishes to render him an accomplished gentleman; and, for this purpose, undertakes, in person, a task for which none surely was so well qualified as himself. I follow the order he assigns, and that which his Letters testify he pursued. Well! but he insists eternally on such frivolous points - the graces - the graces! Because they were wanting, and the only thing wanting. Other qualities were attained, or presumed to be attained: to correct those slovenly, shy, reserved, and uncouth habits in the son, which as he advanced in life grew more conspicuous; and threatened to thwart all the parent’s fondest prospects in his child, was felt, and justly felt, by the father, to have become an imperious and urgent duty; and he accordingly labours at it with parental assiduity, an assiduity, which none but a father would have bestowed upon the subject. Had his Lordship published these Letters; as a regular System of Education, the common objection to their contents would have, had unanswerable force: viewing them however in their true light, as written privately and confidentially by a parent to his child - inculcating, as he naturally would, with the greatest earnestness, not what was the most important, but most requisite - it must surely be confessed, there never was a popular exception more unfounded. But he - I admit it: he touches upon certain topics, which, a sentiment of delicacy suggests, between a father and son had better been forborne: yet those who might hesitate to give the advice, if they are conversant with the world, and advert to circumstances, will not be disposed to think the advice itself injudicious.’

11 October 1796
‘Read Hawkesworth’s Life of Swift; of whose character and conduct but an imperfect idea is given by the narrative of Johnson. Hawkesworth is much more communicative and interesting; and the minuteness and simplicity with which he details the few, but deplorable, incidents of the four last years of Swift’s life, are highly affecting. The circumstance of his struggling to express himself, after a silence broken but once for more than a year; and, finding all his efforts ineffectual, heaving a deep sigh, quite cleaves the heart.’

12 September 1798
‘Dipped into Bacon’s Essays; so pregnant with just, original, and striking observations on every topic which is touched, that I cannot select what pleases me most. For reach of thought, variety and extent of view, sheer solid and powerful sense, and admirable sagacity, what works of man can be placed in competition with these wonderful effusions.’

6 May 1800
‘Read Gildon’s Essay, prefixed to Shakespear’s Poems; in which he largely discusses Dramatic Poetry. Poetry, he considers as an art; and he is a grand stickler for the rules of this art, which he regards, rather as the original suggestions of right reason, instructing us how to please, than the mere conclusions of experience from what has pleased: a preposterous piece of folly, nearly akin to that which attempts to solve the phaenomena of nature from the chimaeras of the fancy, instead of collecting the materials for this solution from a patient investigation of the laws by which nature is really governed in all her operations; but as a practical piece of folly, leading to consequences still more absurd. According to Gildon, all excellence flows from the observance of the rules of composition, and all deformity from their violation: to such a taste, Shakespear’s Dramas must have a most untoward aspect; yet his “wood-notes wild” occasionally extort, even from this sturdy champion of the summum jus in critical jurisprudence, an approving nod, with - “this is very well”. At the close of his Remarks on Shakespear’s Plays, he observes, that “verisimilitude in the Drama, is more essential than truth, because fact itself is sometimes so barely possible that it is almost incredible”. Hurd has caught this idea: and it is not the only instance in which I fancy I have detected him poaching on this antient and neglected manor.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 6 January 2015.

The worst is yet to come

‘We stand at the turn of the year more hopeless and depressed than ever during these unfortunate four and a half years of the World War. In the past, we still saw the possibility of a favorable conclusion to the serious crisis for humanity; today, this glimmer of light is only tiny, barely perceptible. The war is only over in theory; it rages on in an even more terrible form than before. Let us not deceive ourselves; the worst is yet to come.’ This is from the published diaries of Alfred Hermann Fried, an Austrian pacifist born 160 years ago. He is remembered for cofounding the German peace movement, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and championing the use of Esperanto.

Fried was born in Vienna into a Hungarian-Jewish family on 11 November 1864. He left school aged 15 and started to work in a bookshop. In 1883 he moved to Berlin, where he opened a printing press. It was there that Fried became a steadfast pacifist and befriended Bertha von Suttner. Together, in 1892, they launched the magazine, Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!) - which from 1899 became Die Friedenswarte (The Peacekeeper). He co-founded the German peace society, and became known for advocating ‘fundamental pacifism,’ peace as the ultimate solution. He wrote and published countless articles in his magazines calling for peace and harmony among nations.

The Hague Peace Conference of 1899 was a turning point in the development of Fried’s philosophy of pacifism. Thereafter, in his appeals to the German intellectual community, he placed more reliance on economic cooperation and political organisation among nations as bases for peace, and less upon limitation of armaments and schemes for international justice. ‘War is not in itself a condition so much as the symptom of a condition, that of international anarchy’, he said. ‘If we wish to substitute for war the settlement of disputes by justice, we must first substitute for the condition of international anarchy a condition of international order.’

Fried was a prominent member of the Esperanto movement, and in 1903 published an Esperanto textbook. In 1909, he collaborated with Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine of the Central Office of International Associations in the preparation of the Annuaire de la Vie Internationale. In 1911 he received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Tobias Asser. At the outbreak of World War I, he moved to neutral Switzerland, and worked continuously for an end to the conflict. After the war, he returned to Austria to continue writing and advocating international peace. He died in 1921. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Nobel Prize website, and the Jewish Virtual Library.

During the war, Fried kept a diary, one which he later published in four volumes as Mein Kriegs-Tagebuch (My War Journal). The diary is available online at Internet Archive and, thanks to a ZIMD digitisation project, at this dedicated website. A short introduction at the latter states: ‘Bernhard Tuider [from the Austrian National Library], who wrote one of the few well-founded works about [Fried’s] war diaries, was fascinated by their power. 1,600 pages about the World War from a man who, as a journalist at the NZZ in neutral Switzerland, worked through up to 50 international newspapers every day. The war diaries are unique in their quality and can be counted as part of the heritage of the world culture of peace.’ However, as far as I can tell, the diary appears only to be available in the origial German.

In the diary, Fried documents his activities and those of colleagues in the peace movement; expresses dissatisfaction with the peace settlement; and details his journalistic campaign against the Versailles Treaty. As a whole, the diary served as a platform for Fried to argue that the war proved the validity of his pacifistic analysis of world politics. A more detailed look at Fried’s diary can be found in an article by Tuider. Moreover, a list of the original diaries is available at the online archive of California.

The following two extracts have been sourced from the digitised files and then translated by Google.

31 December 1915
‘The hopes for peace that were kindled by the article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung prove to be vain. The proposals are rejected by friend and foe alike. People’s minds are too clouded to be able to see that this is not about the terms of peace at all, but only the beginning of discussions. The tools of reason should only be put into use. That is the main thing.

On the other hand: England, England so proud of its freedoms, is introducing general conscription. This is a step backwards in culture for all, which we owe to this war. And a bad prospect. If England is only now beginning to prepare for a continental war, how long will it last?

In France, the Socialist Congress has passed a resolution in favor of continuing the war until a permanent legal peace is achieved. The resolution was adopted by an enormous majority of 2,736 votes to 76.

These are two events that do not mean peace, but war. The continuation of the war and increased bitterness, increased destruction. Hundreds of thousands of young men are to be sacrificed again. That is the meaning of these two events that conclude the war year of 1915.

Last year I raised the question here whether the terrible war would end on New Year’s Eve this year. ‘For those who can measure the magnitude of the shocks that these five months of war have already brought about, it may seem questionable whether New Year’s Eve 1915 will already descend upon a Europe liberated from war.’ - Questionable. And yet I concluded hopefully with a ‘perhaps.’ It is a solemn seriousness that, after the end of this bloody year, provides the answer to the questioning view of the previous year. And today one dares not look into the future of the new year with the same doubt. Everything that must come is terrible. The slaughter has lasted too long; Europe has been destroyed for too long. Our generation can no longer hope for peace. I conclude my notes for 1915 with a curse on the year that has passed away, on the year that has been stolen from us, with a curse on the insane arrangers of this war.’

31 December 1918
‘A year ago we stood before Brest-Litovsk. Today we stand before Versailles. Is it going to be the same? Is the Entente victors going to repeat the fraud of the German military, who then spoke of a peace without territorial cessions and compensation and then emphasized their ‘power position’ and forced the most shameful peace of conquest? Pichon recently spoke in the French Chamber of the annexation of the Saar region as compensation for the injustice committed against France in 1815. Will they ultimately want to restore the integrity of Troy? The failure of the English elections has strengthened Lloyd George’s power politics. All pacifists and politicians of reconciliation have been defeated. These are elections like the Hottentot elections in Germany in 1912. The new state of the Czechoslovaks was in no way different from Wilhelmine Germany in its early days. The areas of the German-Austrians and Magyars are still being occupied and Czechized. In ultra-German Reichenberg, where the town’s police wore spiked helmets in the Prussian style, the Czech language is being introduced as an official language. The Italians want to hold on to the German territories in Tyrol and are constantly coming into conflict with the South Slavs on the Adriatic. The peace that is about to be concluded and which was originally under the sign of the Wilson program threatens to become a new affirmation of the power principle. There is therefore a danger that it will not be peace again, only a period of truce, interspersed with seeds of conflict that will soon flourish under the expected regime of violence. Is it possible that after this terrible object lesson we are threatened with something like this, that the madness that we thought we had overcome has survived? It is clear that if this is to happen, the efforts of those who want to radically overcome the current situation, who believe that new life can only blossom from the total destruction of this society, will gain strength. The German militarists, in their delusion, were the pioneers and firing guard of Bolshevism. Should the military and the militarily minded politicians of the Entente blindly follow in the footsteps of their Prussian predecessors? - The victory of the principle of force in Versailles would mean the victory of the world revolution in its most radical form. Indeed, it would even leave no other hope that the unbearable pressure of the militarism that will still be maintained after this war will be removed. The people who have the decision to shape the coming peace agreement take on a great responsibility. It depends on them whether the institution of war is eliminated by a rational decision or whether its elimination is achieved through decades of terrible bloodbath in the civil war.

We stand at the turn of the year more hopeless and depressed than ever during these unfortunate four and a half years of the World War. In the past, we still saw the possibility of a favorable conclusion to the serious crisis for humanity; today, this glimmer of light is only tiny, barely perceptible. The war is only over in theory; it rages on in an even more terrible form than before. Let us not deceive ourselves; the worst is yet to come.’

Reality is unbearable

‘Reality is unbearable, because it is not fully experienced; it is not fully visible. It reaches us in fractions of events, snatches of accounts, echoes of gunfire - horrifying and impenetrable - in the clouds of dust, in fires, which as history says “reduced everything to ashes” although nobody really understands these words.’ This is Zofia Nałkowska, an influential Polish author born 140 years ago today, writing in her diary during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her diaries, which are said to have ‘stood the test of time to a greater extent than her novels’ were published in six volumes, but only in Polish.

Nałkowska was born on 10 November 1884 into a family of intellectuals in Warsaw. She went to a boarding school before entering the ‘Flying University’, a secret educational establishment aimed at teaching Polish scholarship (rather than the ruling Russian ideology). Aged 14, she made her debut as a poet in Przegląd Tygodniowy; thereafter publishing poems in other Warsaw magazines. In her 20s, having abandoned poetry, she began to contribute short fiction and articles to Echa Kieleckie, a weekly magazine  established thanks to the revival of political life in Poland.

In 1904, Nałkowska married the writer and publisher Leon Rygier, though they separated in 1909. Later, in 1922, she would marry Jan Jur-Gorzechowski, a soldier in the Polish Army, but this marriage, too broke down, in 1929. Her first literary literary success came in 1923 with Romans Teresy Hennert (The Romance of Teresa Hennert), and a slew of popular novels followed. For a while, she worked for the Polish government, in the Foreign Propaganda Bureau, but after returning to Warsaw in 1926 (having lived in Wołomin, Kielce) she ran a literary salon and travelled through Europe. In 1933 she joined the Przedmieście literary group. In 1935, she went to live with her mother, and during the German occupation, she ran a tobacco shop with her sister Hanna.

For years she was the vice-president of the Polish PEN Club; she was active in the Main Board of the Association of Polish Writers; and she was a member of the Legislative Sejm. In 1949 she was a delegate to the Congress of Defenders of Peace in Paris. In November 1949 she became a member of the National Committee for the Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s Birth. Granica - which would become her most famous work of the interwar period - earned her the State Literary Award in 1935. She died in 1954. Further information is available from Wikipedia and Culture.pl.

Nałkowska wrote a diary for nearly 60 years beginning with her early youth and continuing through to her death. These journal entries were collected into six volumes and published in Polish by Czytelnik. According to Culture.pl, her diaries show ‘she had a talent for observation and introspection as well as intellectual flourish and emotional depth.’ Moreover, ‘[the diaries] have stood the test of time to a greater extent than her novels’. The following extracts - translated into English - were sourced at Culture.pl, which also has more substantial information about the diaries.

1900
‘It is hard to believe to what extent happiness depends on money. . . Shortage surrounds me (. . .) There is something tasteless about poverty. It is such a sorrowful condition that one constantly wants to shake it off as if it was a sticky spider web. (. . .) I am writing at a table made of door laid on an old wooden washbasin and covered with a shabby time-worn bedspread. I [am] writing by light of a candle burning out in a candlestick greened with age. I can smell a wonderful bouquet of flowers placed in a preserve jar. Browned basket with Hanka’s stones, a very old dressing case from my aunt, a chewed penholder.’

1902
‘In as much as I lead a literary life, I write a real-life diary. There is no ‘fiction’ here. Whilst writing, I am always in a hurry to squeeze in as much as possible not to miss anything. I do not care about the form; I cram facts one after another leaving ponderings and effects aside. What I achieve in this way is a certain directness, certain freshness of life, which I highly appreciate.’

1913
‘I went to a fancy-dress party and two other balls and, in a sense, I bought myself out of melancholy. For a long time now I have known that it is a hygienic thing to immerse into a bathtub of foolishness and primitiveness. Yet, it is difficult for me then to close my eyelids completely. Through my eyelashes I can still see my distance from this cheerfulness, distance or even dysfunction.’

1914
‘I enjoy living. I am certain that if I wasn’t ill, I could say that I am happy. To observe the world from a hammock, balcony or various points in a forest. To think, think, think - beginning with early morning when I am so deathly exhausted and sleepy as if night did not exist at all, to the evening when looking in the mirror I can see that I am not young any more. The latter one is surly sad but not that important - as my curiosity about the world has remained unchanged; it’s an insatiable, burning curiosity.’

1915
‘My acquaintanceships have turned significantly licentious. Every single day there are visitors, groups of visitors I should say. However, I have always enjoyed looking at people - and even more so since I derive less pleasure from looking at myself.’

1 April 1942
‘It seems to me that I experience the irreversible and irretrievable passage of time stronger than others. Perhaps, the reason for it is my poor memory, who knows, if it hasn’t already started to weaken. The passage of my emotions and the passage of people who keep leaving and passing away, who leave nothing behind: this is the sole drive behind my writing. As always, I am not concerned with historical events, fate of entire nations, facts passing in the back motion - this is not what tempts me as others will deal with it in a much better way - but with the life as I have seen and experienced myself, that is totally doomed to failure. Not only am I someone in a boat drifting against the tide but as shores pass by, I am leaving myself behind. But the water itself, the essence of life motion, continues to pass out of my memory. Drifting, I keep leaving myself on those shores and at the same time I am sailing around myself. And I fail to achieve the goal of keeping records. I will never succeed, never be on time, never embrace, never accomplish, never remember everything. Pooh, it’s gone, it has evaporated, it’s lost for good. It sounds ridiculous that the most important of all my ‘worries’ is that everything will perish and be wasted, and I am the one to blame.’

28 April 1943
‘Reality is unbearable, because it is not fully experienced; it is not fully visible. It reaches us in fractions of events, snatches of accounts, echoes of gunfire - horrifying and impenetrable - in the clouds of dust, in fires, which as history says “reduced everything to ashes” although nobody really understands these words. This reality, both distant and happening next door, is bearable. What you cannot bear are your thoughts.’

29 April 1943
‘Solemn marches of the resigned, jumps into the flames, leaps into the dark. (. . .) I have lived next to it, I can live! But finally I feel bad, finally I have been changing into someone else. How can I be forced to it, to be inside it, to accept it while staying alive! It is not only a torture but also a disgrace. It is a terrible shame, not only compassion. One feels guilty for making any efforts to survive, not to go insane, or somehow retain yourself in this terror.’

14 December 1943
‘It has still continued, it has repeated over and over again - similar days go by: raids and then executions in the city streets. Or there - this I know. I think that I will be myself at that time, that I will never stop being myself. I think of it as if it was a discovery. When I walk where I don’t want to, when I am forced to leave my makeshift bed, my books and my letter files behind, and to do what seems so difficult when one is still surrounded by them - till the very last moment, however, I will be left with myself, who will be with me. And in this sense, I will remain myself. Because what is really important in the final moments are the morale and the peace that I am so certain of, as well as a total restraint of despair – because there will be no fear. Fear will be turned around; frozen; fear will be exactly that: resilience and strength. I can achieve it all if I am still myself. - That’s what I believe and that’s how I settle my own matters. Yet, it does not settle the matters of the others: those young ones whose lives are unfulfilled.

1 September 1946
‘I look like the old woman that I am. And realizing that old age is a shame, a disability; that an old age disqualifies; and keeping up appearances, a hairdo, a face “made-up” in spite of anything, neat clothes make it worse, make it the more visible. That’s it.’

Professor of poetry

Francis Turner Palgrave, a close friend of Alfred Tennyson and a connoisseur of English poetry, was born two centuries ago today. He worked most of his life as a civil servant in the education service but in his 60s was elected Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry. Soon after Palgrave’s death, his daughter, Gwenllian, published a book about her father’s life in which she quotes extensively from diaries he kept intermittently for over 50 years.

Palgrave was born on 28 September 1824 in Great Yarmouth, the eldest son of Sir Francis Palgrave, an historian, and his wife Elizabeth Turner, daughter of a banker. He grew up in Yarmouth and also in Hampstead, London, but was largely educated at home, in an atmosphere of ‘high artistic culture’, ‘fervid anglo-catholicism’ and ‘strenuous thought’, until the age of 14, when his father could afford to sent him to Charterhouse public school as a day boy.

After travelling on the Continent, Palgrave won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford; but, in 1846, he interrupted his studies for a year or so to serve as assistant private secretary to William Gladstone. From 1847 to 1862, he was fellow of Exeter College. In 1849, he took up a civil service post in the education department, which led him, from 1850 to 1855, to be vice-principal at Kneller Hall, a government training college for elementary teachers at Twickenham. There, he met Alfred Tennyson. When the training college was abandoned, Palgrave returned to Whitehall in 1855, becoming examiner in the education department, and eventually assistant secretary.

Palgrave married Cecil Grenville Milnes in 1862, and they had one son and four daughters. Apart from Tennyson and Gladstone, Palgrave was friends with other notables of the time, including Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold. He wrote and published poetry, in volumes such as Visons of England. However, his principal claim to fame was to publish the Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), a comprehensive and carefully chosen (in consultation with Tennyson) anthology of the best poetry in the language. This tome is considered to have helped popularise the poetry of William Wordsworth, and to have had a significant influence on poetic taste for several generations.

In 1884, Palgrave resigned his civil service position, and, the following year, was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. By then, his life was mostly divided between London and Lyme Regis where he had bought a holiday home in 1872, with almost annual visits to Italy. He died in London in 1897. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, Dictionary of National Biography (source of the quotes above) or The Twickenham Museum website.

Palgrave kept a journal for much of his life, and although this has not been published separately, Palgrave’s daughter, Gwenllian, included many extracts in her biography: Francis Turner Palgrave - His Journals and Memories of his Life. This was published by Longmans, Green and Co. in 1899. It is freely available at Internet Archive. According to Gwenllian, her father started keeping a journal, intermittently, as early as 1834, in the form of letters to his mother. His last journal entry was in 1890. Here are a few extracts from Palgrave’s diary, as culled from Gwenllian’s biography,

31 March 1849 [Palgrave’s first meeting with Tennyson]
‘In the evening to Mr. Brookfield’s. Found there Lingen, A. Tennyson; afterwards Thackeray and H. Hallam came. Walked towards Hampstead with A. Tennyson. Conversed on Universities, the ‘Princess,’ his plans, &c.; he very open and friendly: a noble, solid mind, bearing the look of one who had suffered greatly: - strength and sensitiveness blended.’

2 April 1849
‘In the afternoon to A. Tennyson’s in the Hampstead Road. Long conversation with him; he read me songs to be inserted in the ‘Princess,’ and poems on A. Hallam, some exquisite.’

July 1870
‘On the 14th of July we welcomed another little boy. After eight or nine days this little darling began to pine, and my dear Cis wishing to have him baptised, he received the names Arthur Frederick, the second after Freddy Cavendish, who promised to be godfather. The baby looked at us with deep violet eyes, as if asking to live. I could not realise fear, though his dear mother had begun to realise she must resign her treasure. But in the afternoon of the 31st, as this sweet patient little Arthur lay on Cecil’s lap, every hope was clearly over. . . . We buried him in the quiet country ground at Barnes, where Cecil’s Aunt Sidney lies.’

23 November 1870
‘The war still, but with more than one difference. In so great and complex an action and where so much human feeling is mixed, a cause cannot remain true to itself: initial right and justice are insufficient to leaven the vast mass of after events. It seems clear that the French will die as a nation, sooner than make a surrender of defeat.’

29 May 1871
‘All to Stokesay Castle, a singularly perfect specimen of domestic residence temp. Edward I. The site of this small ancient relic, lovely amid green wooded hills and mountainesque horizon - indebted much to the haze of an exquisite summer day. Thence to Ludlow: the castle here of all dates, is as fine as that uncomfortable thing, a ruin, ever can be.’

21 July 1871
‘Came to Lyme. In the evenings I am reading to Cis the ‘Bride of Lammermoor’: this seems to me to stand above all other novels, like a play by Shakespeare above all other plays. Indeed, in astonishing truthfulness and variety in creation of character, in power and pathos, I cannot see how this, at least, is inferior to Shakespeare . . . We have spent four agreeable days at the Palace at Exeter: I had one long walk with the Bishop, and a really good discussion on Darwin and cognate topics. He was at his best on such points: large and wise and liberal . . . After that a brief visit to Whitestaunton, a charming house of early Elizabethan date; we much regretted the brevity of our visit, having greatly liked our hosts.’

20 October 1871
‘We came to Lyme, and Cis and I went carefully over our little intended purchase, Little Park. It is a pretty little old place, with its many little rooms and pretty garden and lovely views. May it be a true haunt of peace to us and our dear ones! . . . Returned home to a warm welcome from our dear, dear lively little ones.’

4 July 1874
‘We went to Chichester, taking little Cecy and Frank. A year has much shaken the good old Dean, but when pretty well there was all his old charm and life. He is about the best type of a former age that I know, or, rather, he has the best of the last age joined with our modern movement.’

23 July 1879
‘Cis and I took the two eldest children to ‘Hamlet.’ I had not seen any serious acting for years, and went expecting to find my greatest pleasure in the dear children’s; but I returned very deeply impressed with the frequent admirable renderings of Irving as ‘Hamlet’ and Miss Terry as ‘Ophelia.’ . . . Above all, the amazing difficulty of the art impressed me; as with painting, I doubt how far the spectator can pretend to point out the way in which parts might be improved, though he may lawfully feel not satisfied. What was good also, both in these and in the other actors, is to me so much clearly gained. Also if ‘Hamlet’ acted unequally, how unequally, a vrai dire, is ‘Hamlet’ written!’

17 July 1883
‘We took the children to ‘The Merchant of Venice’ for the second time. Irving’s Shylock seemed to me a fine and true rendering of Shakespeare’s intention - viz. the mediaeval Jew a little raised in dignity and humanity. The Terry Portia was generally admirable. This play gains, certainly, immensely by representation . . , the sort of tradition which gives Shylock the protagonist, if not the hero part, is amply justified. . . I certainly think that those who cannot see that Irving gave a very powerful, and Miss Terry a very beautiful, interpretation, and that the piece as a whole was a thoroughly ‘adequate’ representation of what Shakespeare meant, must never expect to be satisfied by human art.’

7 April 1885 [Naples]
‘The Pompeian frescoes and mosaics are much beyond what I expected in quality of Art: the invention is so copious, the handling so absolutely assured, that I fully felt the sad lesson how Art (despite a few reactions) has had one long downward career for two thousand years.’

2 October 1886 [Dorchester]
‘Walked with Frank through twilight to Winterbourne Came: a pretty little thatched house among trees. I was allowed to go up to the great aged poet in the bedroom which - at eighty-four and with now failing bodily strength - he is not likely to quit. Mr. [William] Barnes had invited me when Frank visited him last Christmas, and truly glad was I, and honoured did I feel, to accomplish it. A very finely cut face, expressive blue eyes, a long white beard, hands fine like a girl’s - all was the absolute ideal of a true poet. Few in our time equal him in variety and novelty of motive: in quantity of true sweet inspiration and musical verse. None have surpassed him in exquisite wholeness and unity of execution. He was dressed in red with white fur of some sort, and a darker red cap: Titian or Tintoret had no nobler, no more high born looking sitter among the doges of Venice. His welcome was equally cordial and simple; and, despite his bodily weakness, the soul, bright and energetic, seemed equally ready for death or for life. He talked of his visit to Tennyson; of his own work, saying he had taken Homer, and him only, as his model in aiming at choosing the one proper epithet when describing: also his love for the old pure English. I shall remember this most interesting half-hour all my life, and my dear Frank, I trust, will remember it many years beyond me.’

26 November 1885
‘Ince telegraphed that, I was elected Professor of Poetry by a majority of sixty. The pleasure this gave at home, and the many kind letters called forth from friends, have been the really agreeable elements in this success. It will be difficult to satisfy expectations - to face the illustrious images of ancestors in the Chair. But I am glad of a chance to be a little useful before the night cometh, if I may be so allowed.’

3 February 1887
‘A very pleasant visit to Browning. He was very affectionate and open, and told much of his earlier days. I was sorry to hear that he had lately been clearing his papers, and had burnt letters which, while his parents lived, he had written to them by way of minute daily journal from Russia, Italy, and England.’

10 February 1887
‘My dear eldest girl was married to James Duncan. Amongst the many friends who came to the house were Browning and Matt Arnold, who were among those signing the marriage register. . .’

27 February 1890
‘With dearest Cis to Oxford. Saw Jowett and Lyttelton Gell, and were received by the Rector of Exeter with his usual friendliness.’

‘My father’s journal,’ Gwenllian writes, ‘now breaks off with a pathetic abruptness; the last entry (February 27, 1890) being exactly a month before my mother’s death. From that time he altogether discontinued keeping a Journal. It is impossible to write of the effect which so near and sacred a sorrow had upon him. Such was the depth and the intensity of his feeling and reverence towards her, that even in her lifetime he only spoke of her - or of her opinions and judgment - with a kind of bated breath, as though she were too far above him to be mentioned in an ordinary way. During the remaining years of his life, few days passed without his recalling to his children some memory of her unselfishness, her humility, or her beautiful simplicity. For the first few months after her death this sorrow absolutely crushed him, and his friends, seeing him, feared that he would never recover any interest or happiness in life. But his own perfect selflessness - for with him it was always something more than unselfishness - enabled him to gather up the threads of life again for the sake of his children with a courage and loving tenderness which were inexpressibly touching. Many observed that his devotion to his children, strong and intense as it had always been, grew as these years passed, not only deeper, but also in many senses like that of a mother’s. He never conceived a plan, nor undertook anything, even for his own comfort or pleasure, without first thinking whether it would be for their happiness.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 28 September 2024.

Autobiographical items

Dannie Abse, the Welsh doctor, poet and occasional diarist, died ten years ago today, just two days before I got married (though I’d known my new wife, Hat, for seven years, and we have two children together). I never met Abse, but there are one or two rather amazing links between him, Hat and I. He was best mates with my father, Frederic, in the 1950s, before Frederic abandoned me and my mother to emigrate to the US. Decades later, long before I met Hat, Abse was friends with her father, Giles Gordon. Indeed, both our fathers, (Hat’s and mine) are mentioned in Abse’s first published book of ‘journals’ - journals, for him, being a collection of ‘autobiographical items’. In later life, Abse lived in the same road as my mother, and they would walk their dogs in Childs Hill Park, and nod ‘hello’, in some faint acknowledgement of their social connection half a century earlier.

Abse was born in Cardiff, youngest of four children in a Jewish family. His father part-owned and ran cinemas. He studied medicine, briefly at the University of Wales, and then, in London, at Westminster Hospital and King’s College, becoming a specialist chest physician. During the latter part of the war he volunteered with other medical students to help, but was not sent abroad. He published his first book of poetry in the late 1940s, and in 1951, he was called up for National Service. That same year, he married Joan Mercer, a librarian at the time for the Financial Times, and an art historian. They moved to live in Hodford Road, Golder’s Green, north London, and had three children.

By this time, Abse was part of the London poetry scene, giving poetry readings, and being likened to his fellow Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, though he soon brushed off the latter’s overwrought style. A second collection of poems followed, and then his first autobiographical novel Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve (1954) brought him some early literary success. Many other poems, readings, books followed, as he managed to live life as a celebrated poet at the same time as pursuing a medical career.

In 2005, Joan was killed in a car accident, and Abse himself suffered injuries. He continued to write, and, in 2012, he accepted a CBE for services to poetry and literature, saying, at the time, that many people more left-wing than he had taken the award. He died on 28 September 2014. Wikipedia has a short biography, but there are also several detailed obituaries online, at The Telegraph, for example, The Guardian, the BBC. There are several older articles by Gerald Isaaman, ex editor of the Ham and High, for Camden New Journal.

My mother, Barbara, who died in 2007, also lived on Hodford Road, and would often see Abse in Childs Hill Park as they walked their dogs. I don’t think they ever talked, but they would nod a greeting as they passed, in some vague way acknowledging that they had known each other in the 1950s. Indeed, according to my father, Frederic Goldsmith, Dannie was one of his best friends in those days. They were both part of a group of musicians, artists, writers, German refugees (Frederic had arrived in London as a child in the 30s, his family escaping from Hitler’s Nazi Germany) that would meet in The Cosmo, on Finchley Road. Also part of that group was Peter the Girl, who was a friend of my parents; Uncle Bondy, who took us on holiday to his primitive villa in Bandol, France, at least once; and Peter Vansittart who married my aunt, Johnnie.

Around the time Abse was getting married, Frederic met my mother, and I was born the following year. The marriage between my parents didn’t last long - in contrast to Abse’s which lasted a lifetime and very happily so, according to all reports. Frederic, the cad, ran off to the US, not to return for 20 years. And when he did return to London, he thought it would be funny, in an ‘old times’ sort of way, to show up at Abse’s house in the middle of the night. But Abse didn’t find it funny, and, effectively, rejected his old friend. Peter the Girl, out of loyalty to Frederic, never forgave Abse for that - indeed she called me the day after he died to remind me of the story. Ironically, I was out of the country when Frederic made that visit to London - ironic because every year through my childhood he had written to me saying he would come visit soon!

Fast forwarding, to the year 2007, Frederic long since dead, and my mother just gone too, I met and fell in love with Harriet Gordon (often known as Hat). Her parents, too, had died in recent years: Giles Gordon, literary agent, and Margaret Gordon, children’s book illustrator. It turned out that her father had been Dannie Abse’s agent, and friend, for many years. Hat and I moved in together, and have two children now. Along the way, we wrote to Abse, thinking he might be intrigued by the coincidence. He wrote back, saying that is one ‘helluva coincidence’, or rather ‘a heaven of a coincidence.’

I feel justified in contributing a piece on Abse here, to The Diary Review, because he published several books which were either compilations of diary extracts and/or were given the title ‘journals’. In fact, in his first collection of ‘journal’ pieces - Journals from the Ant-Heap (1986) - Abse mentions both my father and Hat’s father, but in very different contexts. The so-called journal entries, though, had been written to order, on Gerald Isaaman’s suggestion for a column in the Ham and High (see below), and are only dated by month. Similar kinds of later autobiographical notes were put together with Journals from the Ant-Heap in a single volume called Intermittent Journals.

Here is Abse’s explanation of how he came to publish Journals from the Ant-Heap.

‘Gerald Isaaman, the editor of a local newspaper in London, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, affectionately known as the Ham and High, is a great admirer of George Orwell. In December 1983, recalling Orwell’s once lively column for Tribune entitled ‘As I Please’, he decided that, during 1984, he would like a similar series to grace the pages of the Ham and High.

George Orwell, alas, was not available. So he cast around other writers, shortlisting a number of them, no doubt alphabetically, for soon he telephoned me. I could not mimic Orwell. I could only write my own kind of prose. Gerald did not seem to mind and I agreed to offer him a fortnightly autobiographical column for one year only. He was to call my non-Orwellian ‘As I Please’ ‘ABSE’s 1984’. He proved to be an ideal editor. He only occasionally made suggestions and never changed my copy.

In March 1985 it was suggested to me that I protract my journal so that it could be published in book form. I could continue writing it, of course, as I pleased, and more importantly, when I pleased. I cannot pretend that I have not enjoyed conjugating occasional autobiographical items while I have been based in London or in South Wales. And I hope they will amuse like-minded readers. They are not private diary entries but were written, as all journalism is, as a public secret.’

Abse dedicated Journals from the Ant-Heap ‘To Margaret and Giles Gordon’ (Hat’s parents); and here is one extract from the book, in which Abse reflects on the Cosmo days, and mentions Frederic/Fred, my father - approximately 20 years before Hat and I were to meet.

March-April 1986
‘We decided to dine out to celebrate the arrival of an advance copy of my new book of poems, As the Bloody Horse. We chose to eat at The Cosmo in Swiss Cottage. Joan and I had not visited that Viennese café for years but suddenly, in nostalgic mood, we wanted to make a return journey to 1949. In the post-war years, when I was a medical student, instead of studying in my ‘digs’ in Aberdare Gardens, NW6, [. . .] I often spent an evening gossiping and arguing with other Cosmo habitués.

Because of the refugees who had come to live in small rooms scattered across Swiss Cottage, this area had become a corner of Vienna with a distinct café life. Soon, young British writers, artists, musicians and burglars, joined the refugees and found the party-going, cigarette-smoking laden atmosphere of The Cosmo congenial. Generally Joan - then Joan Mercer - and I sat in the annexe over one cup of coffee all night but there were occasions when the annexe was too full and its occupants overflowed into the large main restaurant where they had laid white linen table-cloths over the tables in order to encourage their clientele to eat something!

It was to the main restaurant that we now repaired. It had hardly changed. There was something old-fashioned about the place, something outmoded, as if the clock had stopped not so much in 1949 but in pre-war Vienna. [. . .] It was odd to gaze around the restaurant and observe not one person known to us. Where were the novelists, youthful once more, Peter Brent, Bernice Rubens, Peter Vansittart? Where the sculptor, Bill Turnbull? Would not Emanuel Litvonoff, Cherry Marshall and Rudi Nassauer come in at any minute? Was Ivor M in jail again? Were Keith Sawbridge, Fred Goldsmith and Old Bondy next door in the annexe arguing the toss? I recalled Jack Ashman, somewhat manic, and Theodore Bikel with his guitar - and the prettier faces of Penny, Noa, Betty, Jacky, Peter the Girl, Nina Shelley. I looked out of the window. Across the road where once had stood the elegant facades of fire-blitzed houses reigned instead W. H. Smith and MacDonalds.

Soon Joan and I were talking about the most remarkable ghost of The Cosmo, Elias Canetti. Canetti, some twenty years older than us, used to insist we called him Canetti, not Elias, since he did not care for his first name.  [. . .] Canetti would sit in The Cosmo regularly, often with pen in hand. When questioned on what he was writing he made it clear that it was a masterpiece. He had been working, he told us, on a book about Crowds and Power for more than a decade. When asked when he would publish it he quite seriously commented that there was plenty of time, that he did not wish to make the mistake Freud had done - contradict himself. ‘I have to be sure,’ he would say passionately. If ever a man believed he would one day receive the Nobel Prize for Literature that man was Elias Canetti. And he was right.’

After Joan’s death, Abse’s output was, understandably, focused on his grief. Apart from poems, he also published a diary - The Presence (Hutchinson, 2007) - he had kept in the year after the tragedy, and this turned out to be more of a bona-fide kind of diary, kept day-by-day, than anything he had published hitherto. The blurb describes it as ‘both a record of present grief and a portrait of a marriage that lasted more than fifty years’. ‘It is an extraordinary document,’ the publisher says, ‘painful but celebratory, funny yet often tragic, bursting with joy as well as sorrow and full of a deep understanding of what it means to be human.’ Here are a few lines from the first extract.

22 September 2005
‘The past survives however much one tries to drive it down and away from one’s consciousness. It rears up provoked by something overheard or a scene, a place, an object, a tune, a scent even. It is inescapable. But I think how I must count my blessings, though it would have been better if Joan not I had been the one who had crawled out of that capsized car. She would have been much more self-sufficient. Count your blessings, son, my mother used to say. A cliché. At times of stress, clichés, family sayings, proverbs, are drawn to the mind like a magnet. I do count my blessings: at night, though I don’t sleep well, I am unable to lie on my right side now that the stress-fractures of the right thoracic cage have healed; the scar on my chin and neck are hardly visible; my left thumb, though oddly angled, is less troublesome and it is no bad thing that I’ve lost a stone in weight. Presumably the latter is due as much to my increased metabolic rate as it is to the lack of Joan’s tempting and nutritious cooking. At least I hope I haven’t developed an over-active thyroid. I take my pulse and note it is raised though not alarmingly so. Do I write all this down as an aide-mémoire for my future self?’

Finally, I turn to my own diaries and find but one significant mention of Abse - yet another synchronous connection.

30 May 1977
‘Who is Dannie Abse? Yesterday evening my mother showed me a book of his poems, an old friend  of Frederic, I was told, before I was born. A poem ‘Epithalamium’ was pointed out - ‘Today I married my white lady in a barley field’. This evening I walk in to Pentameters because I have nothing else to do. Astonishingly, the man himself is reading tonight. I am anxious to meet him.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 28 September 2014.