I love it in the shed

‘I love it in the shed . . . I tiptoed my way in, past a couple of big sash windows from a skip and a fine semicircular stained-glass window, and eased along to the far end. A legless Windsor smoker’s bow chair: a lovely thing but in need of a set of legs. Another project for my nineties.’ This is Roger Deakin, author and environmentalist who died 20 years ago today, writing in a notebook he kept during the last years of his life. 

Deakin was born in Watford in 1943 in Watford, Hertfordshire, the only child of railway clerk Cyril Deakin and his wife Doris. His father died when he was 17. Deakin was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School and then at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read English. After graduating, he worked as a teacher and then in advertising, while also making films and radio programmes. In 1968 he bought Walnut Tree Farm at Mellis in Suffolk, a timber-framed farmhouse surrounded by meadows and a moat, which he restored and where he lived for the rest of his life.

Deakin became closely involved in environmental campaigning and was one of the founders, in 1983, of Common Ground, an organisation concerned with local landscape, culture and environmental distinctiveness. He continued to work in advertising, broadcasting and documentary production, making programmes for the BBC and other organisations. His first book, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, appeared in 1999, following a journey inspired by John Cheever’s short story The Swimmer. Deakin travelled around Britain swimming in rivers, lakes, canals, lidos, the sea and other stretches of open water.

After Waterlog, Deakin began travelling and researching a book about trees and wood, visiting places including France, Greece, Australia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as well as many parts of Britain. He completed Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees shortly before his death. Diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2006, he died at Walnut Tree Farm on 19 August that year, aged 63. Wikipedia, The Outdoor Swimming Society, The Guardian, and University of East Anglia. 

During the last six years of his life, Deakin also kept a detailed record of his daily life, work, thoughts and memories. He filled 45 lined exercise books in his distinctive handwriting, numbering and paginating each one and putting a table of contents on its cover. The entries included observations of the countryside around Walnut Tree Farm, accounts of everyday activities and encounters, memories, travel notes and material gathered for his books and radio programmes.

After his death, extracts from the notebooks were edited by his partner Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker and published by Hamish Hamilton in 2008 as Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (which can be sampled at Googlebooks).. Rather than reproducing the notebooks chronologically, the editors selected entries from different years and arranged them month by month to create a single composite year. Abbreviations were expanded, but otherwise the published extracts retained Deakin’s words. The following three entries are taken from that volume (though none can be dated to a particular year).

9 January

‘A wild, windy night and a bright, clear windy day. I walk out along Cowpasture Lane and up the hill to the pollard hornbeam, definitely a trasmocho tree with its unusually wide bolling. On the way I stand leaning on the little wooden bridge over the stream at the ford, watching the running water. Then a long trudge into the wind to reach the badger sett, still very active and well trodden, with claw marks in the mud everywhere. The wood is creaking, and a sound like a squeaky hinge sings out where two birches are rubbing against each other. From the mud hill-fort of the badger sett, beaten paths radiate into the wood and out across a plank bridge into the weedy set-aside field beyond the wood. In the long shadows of the late white sun it is easy to make them out and to follow one over the field to a ditch crossing and all the way to a gap in the wire fence of the railway embankment, where the badgers scratch themselves against the wire and leave little clumps of their shaving-brush hair on the grass. I walk to the lane in the shadow and shelter of the tall embankment and scuttle home, glad of the shelter of the lane’s hedges.’

15 February

Saturday morning I wake up in London and walk over to the Festival Hall after a hearty bacon and mushroom breakfast. Over Waterloo Bridge, and see a long queue of people eddying and dropping down the narrow well of stairs to the Embankment below like water going down a bath plug.

Amazing forest of placards on pine sticks provided by the Mirror. I found myself marching behind banners I couldn’t read held by a bunch of women, with one reading, as I later discovered after being photographed by the press, ‘Cunt-lovers Against the War’.

There were quite a few dogs on leads, ‘Dogs of War’, as one placard called them, and several poodles, including one led by a priest in full cassock with a banner behind it that read ‘Poodle, Bite your Master’s Leg’.

There were also several beautifully made huge swans, which flapped their diaphanous wings and seemed to fly above the crowd, a striking image in the park. Mike [Hodges] and I spoke up for the daffodils in Hyde Park that were getting trodden down and crushed, and a man climbed up into a plane tree in St James’s Park to watch the march.

There were placards like ‘Pagan Queers for Peace’ and ‘Cold? Wrap Yourself Up in a Woolly Liberal’. Richard discovered long-lost friends like the Berkhamsted CND and the Woodcraft Folk.

Mike, Sarah Martin and Carol [Law] escaped from the park, meeting Caroline Soper and Hanif Kureishi on the way, picked up a free bottle or two of Mecca Cola, and squeezed through a narrow iron gateway with thousands of others to reach Marble Arch and the warmth of a café, then adjourned later to Cigala for a dinner of Caldeirada and rabbit paella, washed down with several bottles of an excellent Ribera del Duero wine called Martin Berdugo. Sarah Martin says she knows of a cork oak forest, where black pigs graze in the woods in the west of Andalusia near Murcia; and the hotel is owned by some people called Chesterton.

Drove home at 1 a.m., arriving at Mellis at 3 a.m., e-mails to Australia (big 500,000 march in Sydney), bed at 4 a.m.’

18 February

‘I had to fiddle about putting the car on the battery charger, then went up the field to rummage about in one of my sheds looking for an architrave. I love it in the shed. Half the tin roof has rusted through and caved in, but, instead of mending it, which would have meant cutting down some brambles to get round the back, I simply moved all the wooden architraves and mouldings into another part of the shed away from the drips.

The whole floor of the shed is under attack from the rabbits whose warren it is, so all the contents are constantly subsiding into the earth. It is a shed with subsidence.

I tiptoed my way in, past a couple of big sash windows from a skip and a fine semicircular stained-glass window, and eased along to the far end. A legless Windsor smoker’s bow chair: a lovely thing but in need of a set of legs. Another project for my nineties.

Removing several sections of stove pipe, I came across the canvas bed that would have been used to convey the grain and chaff to the threshing drum. I moved this and uncovered the pile of architraves and mouldings. All beautiful but all too short, and not a single one matching. I never knew it was possible to plane wood in so many different ways.

None of the pieces was right. A man called David Bill at Shepperton Studios had given them to me years ago, leftovers from commercial sets. Mock-dado rails. Spoof Edwardiana. And now here they were, a palace for spiders, a dust museum, a nuisance for the rabbits. In the end I drove to Diss and bought a new architrave from Jewson’s.’

The concept of decadence

‘[In] literary articles in journals edited by marxists the concept of decadence is appearing more and more frequently of late. i discover that decadence includes me. this is naturally of great interest to me. a marxist actually needs the concept of decline. it serves to identify the decline of the ruling class in the political and economic spheres.’ This is from the diary of Bertolt Brecht, one of Germany’s most important 20th century playwrights who died 60 years ago today.

Eugen Berthold Brecht was born in 1898 in Augsburg, Bavaria, into a mixed Catholic/Protestant family. He was educated at Königliches Realgymnasium, and then avoided the army by enrolling as a medical student at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, where he also studied theatre. He never finished training as a doctor but did do some military service as a medical orderly. During the war, though, he had begun to write newspaper articles, under the name Bert Brecht, and he wrote his first play, Baal, in 1918, but it was not produced until 1923. He became increasingly involved in the theatre and cabaret world, being much influenced by the Munich comedian Karl Valentin. Brecht’s first produced play - Drums in the Night - was premiered in 1922 to rave reviews.

In 1917, Brecht had begun an affair with Paula Banholzer, who had a child, Frank, by him. In 1922, he married the actress Marianne Zoff, and they had a daughter, Hanne, though that relationship soon broke down, and, in 1924, he had a son, Stefan, with Helene Weigel. Five years later, he married Weigel, and they had a second child, Barbara, who would eventually inherit the copyright to all of Brecht’s literary works.

In 1919, Brecht became associated with the Independent Social Democratic Party, and become friends with the writer Lion Feuchtwanger. By 1924, they had collaborated on an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II - the first of many classic texts Brecht would adapt. The same year, he went to work at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin - then one of the world’s leading theatres. He produced many well-received plays, not least The Threepenny Opera, adapted from The Beggar’s Opera with the composer Kurt Weill. Around this time, Brecht also published his first book of poems. In the early 1920s, Brecht started using the first name Bertolt, to rhyme with that of his collaborator, the playwright Arnolt Bronnen.

Brecht had long been a student of Marxism, but, by the mid-1920s this interest was leading him to write political dramas such as Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogony, also with Weill. After Hitler came to power, Brecht fled Germany in 1933, first to Scandinavia, settling on the Danish island of Funen, then, in 1941, to California, writing poems and plays (such as Galileo and Mother Courage and Her Children) all the while. After the war, in 1947, he was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but left the following day to return to Europe.

After staying in Switzerland to begin with, Brecht settled in East Berlin, where he launched the celebrated Berliner Ensemble, but he wrote few plays in his last years, focusing more on directing and teaching young directors and playwrights. In 1955, he received the Stalin Peace Prize, and, the following year, he died on 14 August. Further information is available from Wikipedia or Encyclopædia Britannica.

Brecht seems to have kept a diary in childhood, although only one journal - the so-called Diary 10 written in 1913 (but which refers to earlier diaries) - appears to have survived (for more on this see Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life by Stephen Parker at Googlebooks). He kept a diary in his early 20s: Bertolt Brecht Diaries 1920-1922, edited by Herta Ramthun, translated and annotated by John Willett, published by Eyre Methuen, 1979. And again he kept a diary from 1938 until the end of his life (though he recorded little in his last years): Bertolt Brecht Journals 1934-1956, translated by Hugh Rorrison, edited by John Willett, and published by Methuen, in 1993. A review in New Statesman and Society of the latter, quoted by the publisher, described the book as ‘a marvellous, motley collage of political ideas, domestic detail, artistic debate, poems, photographs and cuttings from newspapers and magazines’. Here are several extracts.

24 July 1938
‘there are concepts which are difficult to defend because they spread such boredom whenever they arise, like DÉCADENCE. there is naturally such a thing as the literature of the decline of a class, in it the class loses its serene certainty, its calm self-confidence, it conceals its difficulties, it gets bogged down in detail, it becomes parasitically culinary, etc. but the very works which identify its decline as a decline can scarcely be classed as decadent. but that is how the declining class views them, on the other hand the FEAST OF TRIMALCHIO exhibits all sorts of signs of formal decadence. and if ELECTIVE AFFINITIES is not decadent, WERTHER is.’

15 August 1938
‘FEAR AND MISERY OF THE THIRD REICH has NOW gone to press. lukács has already welcomed the spy as if i were a sinner returned to the bosom of the salvation army. here at last is something taken straight from life! he overlooks the montage of 27 scenes, and the fact that it is actually only a table of gests, the gest of keeping your mouth shut, the gest of looking about you, the gest of sudden fear etc. the pattern of gests in a dictatorship. now epic theatre can show that both ‘intérieurs’ and almost naturalistic elements are within its range, that they do not make the crucial difference. the actor will be well advised to study the STREET SCENE before playing one of the short scenes. the aforesaid gests are not to be performed in such a way that the audience wants to stop the scene, empathy is to be sedulously controlled, otherwise the whole thing is a dead loss. the montage, a process that has been so thoroughly condemned, arose here out of letters from dudow who needed something for his little proletarian theatre-group in paris. so the proletarian theatre in exile is keeping the theatre alive. while in moscow maxim vallentin, the one-time director of a berlin agitprop group, has gone over to bourgeois theatre and announced that in art an appeal has to be made to the emotions, which can only mean reason has to be switched off.’

18 August 1938
‘by offering only formal criteria for realism LUKÁCS, whose significance is that he writes from moscow, is in the final estimate handing readers who are avid to learn on a plate to those famous contemporary bourgeois novelists on whom he has bestowed great, if slightly embarrassed compliments, because they display the said formal features (even if they are not so ‘happy’, ‘pure’ and ‘creative’ as the old masters of the great early period). they become his realists (he allays any suspicion by contrasting them with a form of ‘decadence’, to which DOS passos and presumably i too belong), whose descriptions exclude the class struggle (‘do not not take sufficiently into account’, ‘do not yet fully encompass’), so that the reader himself then has to unravel the complicated reflections which the ‘decadents’ incorporate in their books, the very reflections which establish that the events depicted derive from the class struggle. they all display LUKÁCS’S hallmarks, HEINRICH MANN presents such a ‘tangle’ of different human fates in his HENRI QUATRE that nobody can find his way around in it, and doesn’t his brother THOMAS unfold the ‘whole life of the biblical joseph’ in all its ultimate fullness! in HAMSUN we have ‘very involved, very indirect relationships’ by the dozen, the class struggle is less in evidence in all three, but naturally we can add that for ourselves, for ‘in the last resort’ everything is class struggle, such obtuseness is monumental.’

10 September 1938
‘in literary articles in journals edited by marxists the concept of decadence is appearing more and more frequently of late. i discover that decadence includes me. this is naturally of great interest to me. a marxist actually needs the concept of decline. it serves to identify the decline of the ruling class in the political and economic spheres. it would be stupid for him to refuse to recognise decline in the artistic sphere. eg literature cannot exclude the great shackling of productive capacity by the capitalist means of production. i am restricting myself in the first instance to my own production. my first book of poems, the DEVOTIONS FOR THE HOME, is undoubtedly branded with the decadence of the bourgeois class. under its wealth of feeling lies a confusion of feeling. under its originality of expression lie aspects of collapse. under the richness of its subject matter there is an element of aimlessness,. the powerful language is slack. etc etc. seen in this light the subsequent SVENDBORG POEMS represent both a withdrawal and an advance. from the bourgeois point of view there has been a staggering impoverishment. isn’t it all a great deal more one-sided, less ‘organic’, cooler, ‘more self-conscious’ (in a bad sense)? let’s hope my comrades-in-arms will not let that go by default, they will say the SVENDBORG POEMS are less decadent than DEVOTIONS FOR THE HOME. however i think it is important that they should realise what the advance, such as it is, has cost. capitalism has forced us to take up arms. it has laid waste our surroundings. i no longer go off ‘to commune with nature in the woods’, but accompanied by two policemen. there is still richness, a rich choice of battlefields. there is originality, originality of problems. no question about it: literature is not blooming. but we have to beware of thinking in terms of outdated images. this notion of bloom is too one-sided. you can’t harness ideas of value, definitions of power and greatness, to an idyllic conception of organic flowering; it would be ridiculous. withdrawal and advance are not separated according to dates in the calendar. they are threads which run through individuals and works.’

7 October 1938
‘the fall of Czechoslovakia is remarkable for the way it happened. eg people continue to speak about that country as if it were still the same, and for that reason some of its actions are surprising. people have understood that it has to hand over something to germany, but now it is handing over more, in fact everything as far as everybody is concerned. including the jews and refugees. people forget that this defeat has brought different class forces to the helm, so the state has become a different person in law, one can no longer speak of czechoslovakia. and how did this come about? ‘england’ could not enter into a war which its russian ally would have won. the russian ally could not enter into a war which the russian generals would have won. france could not enter into a war which the popular front would have won. and none of them, naturally, could lose a war.’

23 November 1938
‘finished LIFE OF GALILEO. it took three weeks. the only difficulties arose with the last scene. just as in the case of ST JOAN, i needed a neat stroke at the end to ensure that the audience had the necessary detachment. even somebody empathising without thinking must now feel the a-effect when he empathises with galileo. with rigidly epic presentation an acceptable empathy occurs.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 14 August 2016.

All sorts of absurdities

‘About 10 at night young George Dixon, clerk to our Union came to my house & gave me some particulars of a séance (Spiritual) he had attended on Tuesday night in Glover Street, & how he found out the “medium”, a late Liverpool sailor named Eades to be an imposter. This Spiritual business, in the shape of Spiritualism is over-riding common sense, & delivering people into all sorts of absurdities.’ This is from the diaries of Anthony Hewitson, a provincial journalist born 190 years ago today. His diaries - which are free to read online - are considered a rare first hand resource for studying journalism in mid-victorian Britain.

Hewitson was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, on 13 August 1836, and was brought up largely in Ingleton by his grandparents. In 1850, aged 14, he moved to Lancaster to begin a seven-year apprenticeship as a compositor on the Lancaster Gazette. He taught himself shorthand and, while still an apprentice, began reporting for the Gazette and sending material to other newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian. After completing his apprenticeship he worked briefly on newspapers in Kendal and Wolverhampton before moving to Preston. In September 1858 he married Margaret Wilson, the daughter of a Lancaster tailor and draper, with whom he was to have a large family.

Hewitson worked successively for several Preston newspapers, including the Preston Chronicle, the Preston Herald and the Preston Guardian, becoming chief reporter on the latter. He also supplemented his income with freelance reporting for newspapers outside the town. Dismissed by the Guardian in 1867, apparently because its proprietor believed he intended to establish a rival news agency, he returned to the Chronicle. In March 1868, aged 31, he bought the paper for £580 and became its proprietor and editor. He developed the Chronicle into a successful business and ran it for 22 years, selling it in 1890. He subsequently launched a newspaper in Lancaster and in 1896 acquired the Wakefield Herald, which was managed by his son Ethelbert.

Alongside journalism, Hewitson was a prolific writer on Preston and its history. His books included Our Churches and Chapels (1869), Preston Town Council (1870), Our Country Churches and Chapels (1872), and his substantial History of Preston (1883), to which he appended a detailed chronology of the town from 705 to 1883. He also edited historical diaries, including that of Thomas Tyldesley, and in later life continued writing historical and antiquarian articles. Semi-retired after selling the Chronicle, he lived at various times in Preston, Morecambe and Yorkshire, while retaining interests in newspapers and property. He died in 1912, aged 75. Further information is available online at Open Book Publishers.

Hewitson began keeping diaries as a young man, with the surviving sequence extending from the 1860s almost to his death. Seventeen manuscript diaries are known, now held by Lancashire Archives, although there are substantial gaps. The fullest surviving run begins in 1865, when Hewitson was working as chief reporter on the Preston Guardian. He usually wrote at the end of the day, recording his reporting assignments, newspaper work, business dealings, reading, journeys and social encounters alongside domestic events and his reactions to the people and events around him. The diaries were also working records: Hewitson returned to them for information which could be reused in his journalism and historical writing. The result is an unusually detailed record not only of one Victorian family but of the everyday mechanics of provincial journalism - meetings and court cases, news gathering, gossip, freelance work, printing, editing and the commercial running of a newspaper. Diaries by nineteenth-century provincial journalists are extremely rare; Hobbs describes Hewitson’s as ‘the only known diaries of a 19th-century provincial journalist’.

The diaries have been transcribed and edited by journalism historian Andrew Hobbs, with work also undertaken by Hewitson’s descendant Margaret Dickinson, Pauline Wainwright and the Friends of Lancashire Archives. The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1: 1865-1887, edited by Hobbs, was published by Open Book Publishers in 2022 and made freely available online. It contains the surviving diaries for 1865-1868, 1872-1875, 1881, 1884-1885 and 1887, together with autobiographical material and extensive annotation. A second volume, covering the surviving diaries from 1891 to 1912, is in preparation. Transcriptions of much of this later material have meanwhile been made available online by Hobbs through his Hewitson Diaries website. The diaries provide a particularly rich source for the history of Victorian journalism, while also documenting family life, politics, religion, entertainment and the changing social and commercial life of Preston.

6 January 1873 

‘Heard this morning - first day of “Great Saturday Horse Fair” - that my friend Jas. Kenyon had rambled off somewhere in “the blues”. Went with a friend to police station & set on two detectives to search. Found out in evening, that Kenyon had rambled home into Claughton. At night I & wife went to a carding party at house of a person called R. Lancaster in Eastcliff rd. Had supper there, & stayed till 1 in morning.’

22 May 1873 

‘Working in shop nearly all day except a little in morning when I had a dip into John Stuart Mill’s work on Utilitarianism. About 10 at night young George Dixon, clerk to our Union came to my house & gave me some particulars of a séance (Spiritual) he had attended on Tuesday night in Glover St[ree]t, & how he found out the “medium”, a late L[iver]pool sailor named Eades to be an imposter. This Spiritual business, in the shape of Spiritualism is over-riding common sense, & delivering people into all sorts of absurdities. To-day young Woods tobacconist went into shop I left in Fishergate. My charge for fixtures is 5/- per week.’

3 February 1874

‘Preston election to-day. Voting began at 8 in morning & closed at 4 in af[ternoo]n. All mills closed from dinner time. Much crowding in Fishergate; but all orderly. The candidates were Mr E Hermon & Mr J Holker (the two previous Conservative members) & Mr Mottershead, who came down from London as a “Working Man’s candidate”. The result of the election was the return of Hermon & Holker. Mottershead polled more votes than was expected. At night after doing some telegraphing, I had something to drink with some Conservatives.’

20 February 1874

‘Violent railway collision this morning between Euxton & Coppull. Scotch limited mail, through a fog, ran into a standing coal train. Much damage & destruction; & driver & stoker of mail af[terwar]ds died through the injuries they received. I went to scene of accident at noon & got some particulars for our own & other papers. Telegraphed it to The Times. Disraeli’s new administration announced at 12.30 to-night.’

1 April 1874 

‘A tolerably easy day; & April joke making confined to children.’

13 August 1874

‘My 38th birthday. I thank God that I have lived thus far & have amid all changes & struggles enjoyed & felt His wisdom & goodness. May my next 38 years & odd be similarly - nay more fully - imbued with & blessed by His excellence. Working all day & home to White Horse at night.’

18 April 1875

‘To Morecambe with Florence my daughter this morning. Walked from Hest Bank to Morecambe along sands side. Beautiful walk - tide in, sea birds flying about. Spent a good part of day on pier where my father in law has a refreshment room.’

30 January 1884

‘My daughter Florence returned to daughter day from America in the SS “City of Chicago” - same boat she & I went out in. I went to L[iver]pool to meet her - sailed down Mersey in a tender as far as New Brighton. Daughter had a very rough voyage & was sick again. To Preston - home - both of us early.’

Tuesday 25 March 1884

‘To St Anne’s-on-Sea to day in order to get materials for an article on the place. Mr T Fair, who will pay me for the article, wants it for one of the Manchester evening papers. I called at his house and had lunch. Then I went with him in his carriage to St Anne’s round which I rode, & then he left me to my own wanderings & musings. Quiet but pleasant. Home at about 7 in evening.’

22 January 1885

‘Same. At night I & my wife went to Gaiety Theatre to see “the claimant” - the alleged Sir Roger Tichborne, who has recently been released on ticket of leave, after ab[ou]t 10 y[ea]rs imp[risonmen]t for perjury. Prior to his trial he paid a visit to Preston, & at a public gathering - anyhow audience - in the Corn Xchange - I put two or three questions to him. He answered them cunningly but badly. The chief questions were - Did he know anybody except himself who had forgotten t[he] name of his mother and the very alphabet o[f] a language he once was well acquainted with. He looked considerably thinner & was going quite grey in whiskers on Thursday night.’

5 February 1885

‘Unwell. Had a Turkish bath in af[ternoo]n - heat during part of time being 225 degrees. Working till 10.5 at night - on leaving the bath. News published of the fall of Khartoum this morning. Great shock to English.’

Night music struck down

‘I feel as if a lovely delicate child, tender and humorous, had been knocked down by a truck and lay dying.’ This is the US playwright Clifford Odets, born 120 years ago today, commenting in his diary on the opening night reviews of his play Night Music. Though regarded as a key figure in the development of American theatre for his socially-relevant dramas, neither his name nor his plays are remembered as well as those of Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller - perhaps because he gave in to pressure from McCarthy to name names, or perhaps, some writers suggest, his ’narrative of decline’.

Odets was born in Philadelphia to Jewish immigrant parents on 18 July 1906, the oldest of three children. Later the family moved to the Bronx, New York, where he went to high school, but dropped out to study acting. Having relocated to Greenwich Village, he worked in a number of jobs (such as radio elocutionist and camp drama counsellor) and performed with various theatre groups before landing a first casting on Broadway in 1928. He worked with the Theatre Guild for a bit, and was then selected, in 1931, to join the newly formed Group Theatre. Famously, this based its performances on the kind of method acting devised by Stanislavski and recently introduced into the US. Elia Kazan, who would go on to become a much feted director on Broadway and in Hollywood, was another member.

Employed only as a rarely used understudy, Odets began to use his time to write plays, but continued to take part in the Group Theatre’s training and rehearsal schedules. His plays, inspired by and suffused with Group Theatre’s techniques, were left wing and socially hard-hitting. However, at first they were not good enough for the group’s leader, and it was not until early in 1935 that one was produced - Waiting for Lefty. The opening night was a huge success. Within weeks, the group was opening with Awake and Sing!, a play Odets had been working on for some time, and which Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1979 edition) says ‘foreshadowed’ Arthur Miller and ‘related Odets with Tennessee Wiilliams’. Further plays followed, including Rocket to the Moon (1938) which led to Odets being featured on the cover of Time, and the highly successful Golden Boy. However, Night Music, which opened in 1940 with Elia Kazan in the lead, was a flop; and it was a disaster for Group Theatre, presaging the company’s end.

By the mid-1930s, Odets had relocated to Hollywood (though he would continue to travel to New York regularly) to work as a screen writer, often declining to be credited, and as a director (None but the Lonely Heart, 1944). There he met and married the German-born actress Luise Rainer (who by then had won best actress awards in 1936 and 1937), though the marriage would last but three years. He married another actress, Bette Grayson in 1943, and they had two children before divorcing in 1951. Odets was investigated by Joseph McCarthy in 1953, and is suspected of having named names; certainly he continued to work in Hollywood, but lost friends.

Though there have been several major biographies of Odets, his name is clearly not as well remembered as that of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller. On the centenary of the writer’s birth, in 2006, The New Yorker concluded: ‘It’s possible that Odets’s narrative of decline is what has kept him from claiming the privileged place in the theatrical discussion that he deserves. Odets’ plays showed a way for the next generation of playwrights to combine linear movement with psychological complexity and depth. He brought a new demotic music to stage speech. His subject was always the struggle of the heartbroken American soul under capitalism. “I will reveal America to itself by revealing myself to myself,” Odets wrote. His plays and his life, full of unique lament and liveliness, eloquently fulfill his prophecy.’ Further biographical information is also available at Wikipedia, New York Public Library, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Penniless Press.

Odets kept a diary regularly thought his life. His papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts include a series of diaries and journals spanning 1926-1963, with entries from a number of separate years rather than one continuous diary. The archive lists journals from 1926, 1932, 1940, 1953, 1955, 1958 and other periods right up to the year of his death. However, only one diary - from 1940 - has been published: The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journals of Clifford Odets (Grove, 1988). Kirkus Reviews has a short review; and Library Journal says this: ‘His journal shows a gigantic ego lavishing severe judgment on friend and enemy alike, and an overactive libido seeking the perfect woman (he had access to a breathtaking array of them). Although Odets was hard on everyone, he judged himself most severely. This journal records the dark journey of a life and time out of joint yet seeking their proper form. Interspersed are glimpses of major figures in modern American theater and film.’

The only diary quotes from the book I can find online are thanks to The Sheila Variations (‘not a film’) blog - both extracts below concern Odets’s play The Night Music.

22 February 1940
‘This is the time for opening the play. Harold gave the cast a brief line run-through, but I stayed at home, sleeping, resting, lounging it out against my slowly constricting nerves. Restless, finally, I jumped into the roadster and rode out to Sunnyside to take Bill and Lee to dinner. I chattered away, quite calm, really, to that peculiar point of indifference which comes from having done all that one can do in a situation. We rode into New York and had dinner across the street from the theatre, at Sardi’s. A lot of the people who are going across the show were eating dinner there - it was like running the gauntlet. Stella Adler was there with a party, smoke-eyed and neurotic - usually when you are dying she is more dramatic about the event than you are! Finally I pushed my way through a lot of well-wishing people and went over to the theatre. The cast was in fine shape, quietly making up in their own rooms; no noise, no excitement backstage, things routine and orderly.

The audience was no better or worse than the usual opening night crowd. If anything they were an edge more respectful. Harold I had met outside the theatre for a moment - he was white and tired and was going to see a musical comedy, true to his habit of never attending an opening. I, on the other hand, get a kind of perverse spiteful pleasure from attending an opening. I saw none of the critics but shook hands with several friends.

The performance of the play was tip-top - the cast had never been better. The play suffered from what had always been wrong with it because of a certain lack in the direction - a lack of clear outlining of situations, a lack of building up scenes, a certain missing in places of dramatic intensity. But none of these things was enough to do vital harm to a beautiful show, smooth, powerful and yet tender, fresh, moving, and touching, with real quality in all the parts. But I could see during the first act that the audience was taking it more seriously than it deserved; and I knew that the old thing was here again - the critics had come expecting King Lear, not a small delicate play. It all made me very tired, but at the end I thought to myself that it didn’t matter, for the show was more or less what I intended; it was lovely and fresh, no matter what the critics said. And I knew, too, that if another and unknown writer’s name had been on the script, there would have been critical raves the next day.

People surged backstage after the curtain - they all seemed to have had a good time. There were the usual foolish remarks from many of them - “Enjoyable, but I don’t know why,” etc., etc. Also, a good deal of insincere gushing from a lot of people who would like nothing better than to stick a knife in your ribs. God knows why!

I invited some people down to the house for a drink. Along came the Eislers, Kozlenkos, Bette, Julie [John] Garfield, Boris Aronson, old Harry Carey and his wife, Morris and Phoebe later, Harold, Aaron Copland and Victor [Kraft[, Bobby Lewis and his Mexican woman, etc. etc. We drank champagne, Scotch when the wine ran out, smoked, filthied up the house, listened to some music. Then they went and I dropped into bed, dog-tired, unhappy, drunk, knowing what the reviews would be like in the morning. In and out I slept, in and out of a fever - all of modern twentieth-century life in one day and a night.’

23 February 1940
‘The biggest shock I have experienced since the auto crash in Mexico a year ago was the reviews of the play today. Perhaps it was the serious lack of sleep which kept me so calm and quiet. I wanted to send the Times man a wire telling him I thought his notice stupid and insulting, but I gave up that idea after a while. Equally distressing to me was the attitude at the office, an ugly passivity. They are quite inured there to the humdrum commercial aspect of doing a play this way - close if the notices are bad.

My feelings were and are very simple. I feel as if a lovely delicate child, tender and humorous, had been knocked down by a truck and lay dying. For this show has all the freshness of a child. It was Boris A. who called the turn. He said, “This show is very moving to me, a real artwork, but I don’t think they will get its quality - it is not commercial.”

In the morning I cashed fifteen thousand dollars worth of the baby bonds I hold. I thought to spend it on advertising, to keep the show open, etc., but by the time I finished at the office in the afternoon it was easy to see the foolishness of that; the show costs almost ten thousand a week to run.

So, friend, this is the American theatre, before, now, and in the future. This is where you live and this is what it is - this is the nature of the beast. Here is how the work and delight and pain of many months ends up in one single night. This is murder, to be exact, the murder of loveliness, of talent, of aspiration, of sincerity, the brutal imperception and indifference to one of the few projects which promise to keep the theatre alive. And it is murder in the first degree - with forethought (perhaps not malice, perhaps!), not second or third degree. Something will have to be done about these “critics”, these lean dry men who know little or nothing about the theatre despite their praise of the actors and production. How can it happen that this small handful of men can do such murderous mischief in a few hours? How can it be that we must all depend on them for our progress and growth, they who maybe drank a cocktail too much, quarreled with a wife, had indigestion or a painful toe before they came to see the play - they who are not critics, who are insensitive, who understand only the most literal realism, they who should be dealing in children’s ABC blocks? How can the audience be reached directly, without the middleman intervention of these fools?

I think now to write very inexpensive plays in the future, few actors, one set; perhaps hire a cheap theatre and play there. Good or bad, these “critics” must never be quoted, they must not opportunistically be used. A way must be found to beat them if people like myself are to stay in the theatre with any health and love. Only bitterness results this way, with no will or impulse for fresh work. The values must be sorted out and I must see my way clearly ahead, for I mean to work in the American theatre for many years to come.

I have such a strong feeling - a lovely child was murdered yesterday. Its life will drag on for another week or ten days, but the child is already stilled. A few friends will remember, that’s all.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 18 July 2016.

A librarian’s business

Humfrey Wanley, an English librarian, palaeographer and scholar of Old English, died 300 years ago today. He was employed by manuscript collectors and was the first keeper of the Harleian Library. He left behind a rather unusual diary: although little more than a banal record of a librarian’s day-by-day business in the early 18th century, it is considered an important record for the history of book collecting.

Wanley was born in Coventry in 1672, the youngest son of the clergyman and author Nathaniel Wanley. Apprenticed to a Coventry draper while still in his teens, he developed an extraordinary fascination with medieval manuscripts, teaching himself to read and copy ancient hands in every spare moment. His talent attracted the attention of William Lloyd, whose patronage enabled him to enter Oxford in 1695. Although he never took a degree, his remarkable expertise in palaeography quickly earned him a place as an assistant in the Bodleian Library; there he began work that established him as the foremost Anglo-Saxon manuscript scholar of his generation.

During the following decade Wanley became indispensable to the study and cataloguing of England’s medieval manuscripts. He travelled widely in search of Anglo-Saxon books, compiled the pioneering catalogue of Old English manuscripts published in 1705, and gained the confidence of the great manuscript collector Robert Harley. From 1708 he served as keeper of the Harleian Library, helping to build one of Britain’s greatest manuscript collections, now preserved in the British Library. His meticulous cataloguing and formidable knowledge of early English texts made him one of the founders of modern manuscript scholarship.

Wanley married Anna Bourchier, the widowed Bernard Martin Berenclow, at St Swithin, London Stone, in 1705. Their three children all died in infancy, and Anna herself died in 1722. He later married Ann Lloyd. Frequently troubled by poor health, Wanley nevertheless continued working almost until the end of his life. He died of dropsy in London on 6 July 1726 and was buried in St Marylebone Parish Church. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, Kemble College, The British Academy or an article in The Scribe Unbound.

Wanley’s diary covers the final eleven years of his life, from March 1715 until June 1726. Kept primarily as a working journal, it records his daily dealings with booksellers, collectors, scholars and aristocratic patrons, especially the Harleys, alongside visits to auctions, coffee houses and libraries. Rather than offering introspective reflections, it provides an unusually detailed picture of the London book trade, the formation of great manuscript collections and the practical business of scholarship in the early eighteenth century. It has become an indispensable source for historians of books, libraries and antiquarian learning.

Although long known to scholars in manuscript, the diary was not published until 1966, when the Bibliographical Society issued The Diary of Humfrey Wanley, 1715-1726 in two volumes, edited by C. E. Wright and Ruth C. Wright. The full text can be read online at Internet Archive. Here are several extracts - including a part of the introduction - that give a flavour of the full published work.

Introduction: ‘Humfrey Wanley’s Diary or Journal, here printed for the first time in its entirety, was kept by him while Library-Keeper in the service of Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, and Edward, his son, the 2nd Earl, and runs from 2 March 1714/15 to 23 June 1726, with, however, a considerable gap (except for one entry under 18 July 1716) between 22 August 1715 and 11 January 1719/20, when the Diary was resumed by my Lord Harley’s Order. It records the visits of, or to, booksellers and dealers, and negotiations with them; lists of manuscripts and printed books offered for sale, purchased, or received by gift; conversations with various people about library business; the visits of scholars and others to the Library, either as students there or as sightseers, and so on. It is in fact a record of the day-by-day business of a working librarian and is in no sense, therefore, a diary such as Pepys’s or Evelyn’s: apart from occasional references to his health, Wanley’s allusions to personal affairs are few, for instance, a reference to the sudden death of his wife (on 3 January 1721/22) - ‘my late grievous Calamity’ under the entry 15 January 1721/22 - and to the death of his landlady (under 10 November 1724), but a simple direct style, happy choice of descriptive word and phrase, skill in recounting an incident (such as the oft-quoted Warburton-Genoa Arms ‘frolick’ under 13 July 1720), a sarcastic, caustic tongue and occasional use of ‘asides’ (as when he says that Mr. Hugh Thomas ‘came to Study, as he think’s’ combined with the interest of the subject matter (at any rate to all those whose ways lie in the paths of librarianship) make it absorbing reading. The entry under 11 January 1719/20 suggests that when the Diary was begun in 1715 it was done so by Edward Harley’s instructions and that it was, in a certain sense, intended to be an official record of his work as custodian of the Library. It is preserved in two quarto-size volumes in the Lansdowne Collection.’

10 June 1715

‘My noble Lord Oxford was pleased to bring in an Original Letter of the Elector Palatin to Qu. Anne: and an Extract from a letter of the late Emperor of Morocco to her Majestie, in Arabic; with an English Version.’

14 June 1715

‘My Noble Lord Oxford was pleased to send in an Original Letter of Louise Princess of Holstein to Queen Anne.’

15 June 1715

‘My Noble Lord Oxford was pleased to send in an Original [letter] of Victor Amedeo the present King of Sicily, to himself.’

4 May 1720.

‘I went to Stafford-house, upon information that there are two very fine MSS which will be sold at the Sale of the late Earl of Stafford’s things, which Commence’s to morrow. I found the one to be a sort of Breviary, the other to be a kind of Diurnal, both very finely Illuminated.

A Letter was Sent to Mr Tanner, desiring him to attend my Lord this day by two of the clock. (in Order to receive my Lord’s Commissions for Buying at the Sale abovementioned).

Mr Sanderson sent me a Letter, with the Price he putt’s upon his Things; which price I think too dear, because very many of them His Lordship doth not want, or intend’s to buy: many other’s he hath already; and the remainder not considerable enough to induce him to part with so much as Mr Sanderson ask’s.

I went to Mr Warner the Goldsmith, desiring him to execute my Lords Commission for buying the MSS. abovementioned, and some other things at Stafford-house, which he readily undertook. I also bought of him the old Gyllyngham-Silver-Spoon for my Lord.’

28 June 1721

A Letter sent to Mr Noel, about a time when he is to wait upon my Lord.

Mr Charles Davis brought a MS. mostly Hebrew, written by a Christian, and partly Latin; being upon the Subject of Conjuration. I rejected it now; as I remember I did before about 7 or 8 years ago.

Mr Bogdani came, & took away the old Leaves he left with me.

Mr Cart came, enquiring about Mr Morley & A Bp. Sancrofts Papers.

Mr Bacon came, & told me that he had lately seen in a Booksellers Hands, one part of a Septi-partite Indenture between King Henry VII, and others, dated 16 July, anno regni 19, which is to be sold. But that the Seal & Bosses are taken off. I desired him to buy it for my Lord as cheap as he can; & he promised to do so.’

The giddy Wanda Gág

Wanda Gág, an American artist and author best known for her Millions of Cats children’s book (apparently, the oldest US picture book still in print), died 80 years ago today. She kept an interesting and intimate diary all her life, but only a selection from her youthful diaries have ever been published.

Gág was born in 1893 in rural Minnesota, the first of her parents’ seven children. Her father, an artist, had come from Bohemia, as had her mother’s parents. She wrote, later in life, that she grew up in an atmosphere of Old World customs and legends, and that her mother and she as well as all her siblings often drew and wrote stories. After the death of her father, in 1908, the family suffered financially, and Wanda struggled - against those advising she should work - to maintain her education. However, The Minneapolis Journal published some of her illustrated stories in their Junior Journal, which helped.

After graduating in 1912, Gág taught for a few months, but then continued her studies, attending The Minneapolis School of Art from 1914 to 1917, after which, with a scholarship, she moved to the Art Students League of New York, where she took lessons in composition, etching and advertising illustration. Around the same time, she completed a first illustrated boon on commission - A Child’s Book of Folk-Lore - and by the end of the decade was earning a living as a commercial illustrator.

The 1920s saw Gág become increasingly successful, involved in various publishing ventures and exhibitions. A one-woman show at the Weyhe Gallery in 1926 led to her being dubbed as ‘one of America’s most promising young graphic artists’. She also published essays on feminism, and illustrated covers for left-leaning magazines (such as The New Masses). To get away from commercial work, she rented a property in the country, calling it Tumble Timbers, where she could work on her fine art. She continued to support her unmarried siblings, some of whom lived with her from time to time, and even did work for her. She had various intimate relationships, though the most enduring was with her business manager, Earle Humphrey, who she married late in life.

Wooed as an illustrator by Ernestine Evans, director of Coward-McCann’s new children’s book division, Gág instead offered her own story with illustrations - Millions of Cats. It proved a winner, attracting awards, remaining in print since, and being judged one of the top 100 children’s stories. Further children’s books followed, but none so successful. She went on to translate and illustrate fairy tales by the Grimm brothers, while her art was recognised repeatedly with inclusion in major exhibitions, not least one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1939. She died of lung cancer on 27 June 1946. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, Minnesota Historical Society, Penn Libraries, or Wanda Gág House.

Gág kept a diary all her life, but while still alive chose only to edit and publish a selection from her youth: Growing Pains: diaries and drawings for the years 1908-1917 (Coward McCann, 1940). This is freely available online at Internet Archive, but has also been reprinted by Minnesota Historical Society Press. ‘Thirty-one notebooks originally compiled this diary,’ she wrote in her introduction ‘they are full of diagrams, self-portraits and other sketches, with many crossed-out words, ink spots - even tear blots. Several of the books are wrinkled and blurred from being stored in a damp cellar, and a few are lost.’ These notebooks, she explained, were carelessly stored in Minnesota for many years, but were eventually sent on to her in New York. ‘I had often wondered how I would feel upon re-reading them and had even speculated about it in my diary at times.’

In concluding her short introduction, Gág wrote about how she came to keep a diary in the first place: ‘At about this time I came across an old half-empty ledger of my father’s. In our household anything which could be drawn or written upon was in great demand; a notebook of any kind was a positive treasure. I pounced on the old ledger and, prompted perhaps by the fragmentary business accounts in my father’s handwriting, I began recording my earnings and expenditures, what drawings I had sent where and when, and other notes pertaining to my new business ventures. I was never able to limit myself to plain figures and facts in keeping accounts; and so reports on the weather, new additions to the baby’s vocabulary, family incidents, even youthful thoughts and yearnings, found their way into my “ledger.” And that, to the best of my memory, is how I came to start this diary.’

The following extracts are taken from Growing Pains. However, the Penn Libraries archive of Gág’s papers holds nine boxes with 59 diaries, dating from 1908 to 1945, as well as a dozen other notebooks - all itemised on the website. As far as I can tell, the only extracts from the later diaries have been published in Wanda Gág: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints by Audur H. Winnan (University of Minnesota Press, 1993). The publisher says this of the book: ‘Using excerpts form Gag's expressive diaries and letters, Winnan fleshes out a portrait of the artist. With extraordinary candor, Gag describes her intimate personal thoughts and experiences, and her friendships and encounters [. . .] Throughout her writings, Gag reflects on her career, the restrictions placed on women, and her sexual desires. This portrayal reveals both the internationally recognized artist who drew inspiration from van Gogh and Cezanne, and the vibrant, erotic woman who admitted to being amazed by her own passions.’

19 November 1913
‘Today I was out in the hall waiting for Sketch Class and two second-year students, Dave Hendrickson and Bob Brown, came along and stopped to look at my sketches. Bob Brown declared that my technique was very good (technique is Greek to me) and he said that I did not work in lines and that was a good thing. They think it’s so funny that I sit up nights and draw, and they think it’s funny too that I sketch myself. I thought all people who aspired to be artists drew as much as I do but it seems they don’t. I thought too that all, or at least a good many, of the art school students would be queer, but they aren’t; and it sometimes makes me wish that I weren’t so different. For I am - there is absolutely no getting around it. And a whole lot of my new acquaintances are in that stage now where they misunderstand me. I will stick to my old theory which is this: That I usually make a fairly good impression (I don’t mean to compliment myself by saying this, but it’s true and it only serves to make it so much harder afterwards) but that after they know me for a while they are disappointed in me. Then, if they have the faith to stick by me thru this second stage, they will find my true nature - at least as much of it as I ever show. Roughly speaking, at first they think I’m jolly, then they think I’m frivolous, and finally they find out that, after all, I am more serious than anything else. Paula has been the only one that I know of who has not come to the second stage after a year of my acquaintance. She stood by me for four years but even she is beginning to doubt me. Larry Morse said that I was “giddy” and altho Paula does not agree there, the remark has served to make her think-to think that perhaps he was not so far wrong. I am frivolous sometimes - giddy too, and silly - I can’t deny it. But often I act that way only to hide my real feelings. Besides (and I told this to Paula) if I were not frivolous once in a while, I am afraid I’d go mad or something like that, because I’d think too much. No one can know what it is to be I.’

20 January 1914
‘This noon at dinner we were discussing Love, Art & Marriage again. Miss Dean declared that she didn’t think there was any real love in the world. She believed in mother love, sister love, brother love and the rest, but not in The Love. I told her I had had that bee in my bonnet once too. She said, “Oh I know why you got over it,” and when I wanted to know why, she said, “Since you met Mr. Edgerley.” I told her I did not love Mr, Edgerley nor any other boy.

I reeled off the old story about taking Love & Art together etc. She thought I ought to sacrifice my art for my love. Theresa declared that I couldn’t take care of my children if I wouldn’t give up art, and I said if I would get married I’d drape my babies up in chiffon and sketch them, and that my husband would have to pose as king or beggar (according to what my latest fit would be like). To this Miss Dean said, “I pity your poor family!” and we ended up with a good all-around laugh.’

20 January 1915
‘Yesterday was an event in my life - I started painting in oils. I am rather timid about handling my brush for I am not at all used to the medium, so my study is abominally smooth and insipid. It looks something like the work of that eternal aunt or sister or cousin of everyone you meet “who does beautiful oil studies and has never taken a lesson in all her life.” But ding, I have a long road to travel in oil painting. It seems that Emma Brock (a former student who did some good illustrations last year) has returned. They say she doesn’t care about eating either.

I am beginning to like Mr. Goetsch and I think in a short time I shall like him very much indeed. Only some fine day we will have a good hot little discussion, I think. You see he thinks himself smart about some things, and I think myself smart about some things, and some day we’ll both think ourselves smart about the same thing. I don’t know how he found out I was an artist’s daughter, but yesterday during sketch class he looked at my crumpled wrapping paper and absolutely impractical method of holding the whole drawing outfit, and said, “Tz! Tz! Tz! And you an artist’s daughter?” I said, “Well, that just proves that I am an artist’s daughter. Artists aren’t practical.” And he laughed and went on.

I made a sketch last night which I consider rather decent but to which no one, up to this time, has taken a fancy to. I like it because it is bold and simple, and I think that I have successfully hidden the fact that it was studied out very carefully in the first place. I mean it looks as if it had been dashed in, only it hasn’t. [. . .] I am taking Color Harmony now and have stacks of make-up work to do.’

NB: The Girlhood Diary of Wanda Gág, 1908–1909: Portrait of a Young Artist published around 2000 by historian Megan O’Hara for Blue Earth Books/Capstone is a short 30-page volume within the ‘Girlhood Diary’ educational series.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 27 June 2016.

Sir Haggard’s diaries

Sir Henry Rider Haggard, the British author of many an adventure story set in colonial Africa, often in sympathy with the native populations, was born 170 years ago today. He may have kept a private diary when younger, but the only diary extracts to have been published - Private Diaries and Diary of an African Journey - date from the last decade of his life. In the latter book, Haggard records an interesting conversation with the wife of South Africa’s first Prime Minister about the country’s future.

Haggard was born into a large family, in Norfolk, England, on 22 June 1856. His father was a barrister and his mother a writer. He was schooled at Ipswich Grammar, and then in London to enter the Foreign Office, but he never sat the necessary exams. Instead, in 1875, his father sent him to South Africa to work for his friend, Sir Henry Bulwer, Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony of Natal. By 1878, he had secured himself a job as registrar of the High Court in the Transvaal. In 1880, he returned to England briefly, and there married Marianna Louisa Margitson with whom he had one son (who died young), and three daughters.

The family left South Africa in 1882, and settled in Ditchingham, Norfolk. Haggard turned to the law and was called to the bar in 1884, but, by then, he was more interested in writing novels. His most famous work, King Solomon’s Mines, was published in 1885, and other stories based in Africa followed, most notably She, which has become, according to Wikipedia, one of the best-selling single-volume books of all time. Also according to Wikipedia, his novels portray many of the stereotypes associated with colonialism, ‘yet they are unusual for the degree of sympathy with which the native populations are portrayed.’

Although Haggard failed to get elected to Parliament in 1895, he became involved with reform in the agricultural sector, sitting on land use commissions, and occasionally travelling to the colonies. Apart from his many fiction works, he wrote several non-fiction books, including Rural England (1902) and an autobiography (The Days of My Life, 1926). He was knighted in 1912 and made a KBE in 1919. He died in 1925. Further biographical information about Haggard can be found at Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Days of My Life is available at Internet Archive or at Project Gutenberg Australia.

From the start of the First World War (until his death), Haggard kept a detailed diary. This was edited by D. S. Higgins and published by Cassel in 1980 as The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard, 1914-1925. According to Kirkus Reviews, the published extracts (only some two per cent of the total diaries) make for ‘a live and affecting document’; however the impression the journal leaves is of ‘a fragile, worn-out relic from a bygone era’. Morton N. Cohen, author of Haggard’s biography for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required) is less generous: ‘[The diary] is, sadly, the account of a sour old man who sees himself betrayed by fate, a disillusioned imperialist with authoritarian, racist leanings, who ranted against the Jews, communists, Bolsheviks, trade unionists, the Irish, and Indian nationalists (the editor of his diaries omits from the published text most of Haggard’s harangues).’

The full work can be digitally borrowed from Internet Archive. Here are two extracts.

22 June 1921

‘By the lake side, Blagdon. Again my birthday. I am now 65! Alas how swiftly the years go by and I sink into old age. Disguise the truth as one will, it remains a melancholy truth that for me middle age has followed youth into the limbo of the past leaving at best but a few short years of life to be travelled before the last eclipse. Every year my friends grow fewer. Of the small number who still write to me upon my birthday my sister Ella was always one. And Ella has gone whither soon all of my generation must follow her.’

30 March 1917

‘I said to Kipling at the Athenaeum today that I trusted that we should not be expected to inhabit that region in the next world which was occupied by Germans. He replied that he was quite convinced that we should find none in any hell that he and I might land in. I think so too; whatever our sins we have not deserved that!

Rudyard Kipling and Martin Conway¹ were lunching together. Afterwards Conway came into the billiard room downstairs and informed me that Rudyard Kipling had been talking with admiration and amazement of the MS. of the story Yva, which I had given to him to read, saying that it was as full of go and imagination as though I had been sixteen instead of sixty.

Later Rudyard turned up and repeated this and more. He said to me that he had read the whole thing at a sitting ‘interlineations and all’, really read it, and that its grip and ‘freshness’ astonished him. He lay upon a sofa with those slippery sheets before him, unable to leave it, and thought it a remarkable work of imagination - really a new thing. I asked him if he had any criticisms to make. He said that he would not venture to offer any - there was the work - in a way outside of criticism - as good as anything I had ever done - or words to that effect. Evidently too, he meant all he said. This from such a man is complimentary, especially as he is not prodigal of compliments, but I am sure that when it appears the public - or rather the critics - will not discover these virtues in the book. It is not their fashion to praise my work. However, I am glad that the tale pleases its first reader so completely. The truth is that he (Kipling) has imagination, vision and can understand, amongst other things that Romance may be the vehicle of much that does not appear to the casual reader.’

Haggard also kept a diary earlier in his life, although how often is not clear. In 1899, Longmans, Green & Co published a farming diary for the year 1898, A Farmer’s Year (freely available at Internet Archive), and, in 1905, it published A Gardener’s Year (Internet Archive). Both books have diary-like entries, though they were written by Haggard as information books with publication in mind. In 2001, C. Hurst, by arrangement with the University of Natal Press, South Africa, published Diary of an African Journey (1914), as edited by Stephen Coan. Some pages of this can be viewed at Googlebooks (the source of the following extracts). Also, it’s worth noting that Haggard mentions - albeit only a couple of times - a diary in his autobiography.

7 March 1914
‘On this day, together with a number of other people, we were invited by the government to what might be termed a ‘joyride’ round Table Mountain. For one of our party, Mrs. Tatlow, it proved nothing of the sort. The motor she was in collided with another. She was thrown or fell out and has been left behind in bed at the Queen’s Hotel (I write this at Oudtshoorn) suffering from something like slight concussion. We lunched in a tent at the famous house of Groot Constantia. This place was granted in 1684 to Van der Stel, who was the next governor to Van Riebeeck. He built the house and began to cultivate the vines from which the well-known wine Constantia was made. Its last owners were the Cloetes who sold it in 1885 with 280 acres of land to the government for the small sum of £5 500. Since that time the state could have done well on their bargain if, as I was informed by the manager, they refused an offer for it of £28 000. Here there are 103 acres under vines and 56 under fruit trees. The house with its large cool rooms all adorned with ancient and appropriate furniture is really beautiful.

At luncheon which was given in a tent I sat next to, and had an interesting conversation with, Mrs. Botha, who expressed herself as very pleased that I agreed with her husband, the Prime Minister [Louis Botha], as to the uselessness of attempting to emigrate poor white folk to South Africa when already there were enough of them. Such people, unskilled and resourceless, she said, would come right up against the competition of the native, and their exclusion, which in some quarters was set down to race feeling, was really in their own interests. The only openings were for farmers with some capital, a scarce class. We discussed the outlook of the white inhabitants of South Africa in the future and both agreed that it seemed very doubtful - chiefly because of this native question. The native could no longer be suppressed, or even oppressed: he must follow his destiny and often he was an able and a competent person. In practice South Africa must face the fact that all it has to rely on, so far as the whites are concerned, is its present population and their progeny. But here came the trouble - the restriction of population (i.e. race suicide) is creeping in, even among the Boers, except quite in the backveld districts where it would reach ere long. One no longer saw the large families of 30 years ago: they grew smaller and smaller. Moreover those who were growing up, for some subtle reason, in enterprise, in virility and femininity in their widest sense, were not the men and women of the stamp of our generation. She had often said as much to her own children. What was to be the end of it? She could not tell but the future was dark and dubious. Perhaps at last South Africa would be the heritage of the black races with an admixture of white blood. The danger of war between whites and Bantu had gone by, but there were other dangers. Thus what I saw on the previous day, white man and black, working side by side was one of them: it meant the approach of equality. Once that was established how could the dwindling white people hold their own against an increasing race, already four or five times as numerous?

She said it was hard work for a man like her husband to be Prime Minister of the Union in these days and hard for his wife also. It was both exhausting and difficult to deal with politics continually and keep his hands quite clean. We both agreed that time and experience were wonderful softeners of strong views. Thus today I should not write another Jess and she would not think about the English as she had thought even a dozen years ago. She told me that although it seemed a strange thing for her to say, the deportation of the captured Boers had been a very good thing for the people. The sight of other lands had opened their minds and made them more progressive; also they had learnt what the British Empire meant. Such is a summary of this enlightening talk made from notes taken that evening, and I think one that is accurate, although compressed. Mrs. Botha struck me as an able woman in a quiet way and I liked her very much.’

10 March 1914
‘Woke up lo find that we were running over bush-clad sourveld with a few ostriches wandering round lonely Boer steadings. While I was dressing the iron lid of the washbasin fell on and crushed the top plate of the false teeth which were recently fitted with so much discomfort. A most annoying incident. Luckily I have the old temporary set with me which the dentist wanted to destroy.

At lunch time we came to a range of mountains called Outniqiua, or some such name, that tower above a little township of about 2 000 inhabitants, called George, which is largely inhabited by retired persons in search of quiet. The situation is fine on a flat plain dominated by tall grassy peaks down which run waterfalls that look like lines of wandering silver. At the beginning of the pass we went through government plantations of gums [eucalypts] of about 10 years of age which are doing splendidly. There are several of these here. Next we passed through some native bush in the kloofs, then came broom, heather and bracken, clothing the broad hill shoulders. From the crest of the pass the view was grand. The flat plain below diversified with plantations surrounding the scattered town of George and in the distance the great sea. All this district might be afforested, the hills with pines and the plains with gums. As the land seems to be worth no more than 10s. an acre it would be an excellent purpose to which to put it. About 4 o’clock we entered the Oudtshoorn valley, a hot and fertile place surrounded by hills, and everywhere saw ostriches feeding on lucerne in their wired camps.

On arrival we were met by the mayor and notables and taken off to see the farm of Mr. John le Roux where, after 34 years or so. I renewed my acquaintance with that ungainly but profitable fowl, the ostrich. By the way, at the station a gentleman whose name I think was Rex came up and asked me if I remembered him - as I did not he produced from his pocket an official order of the Pretoria High Court, written and signed by myself in 1878, appointing him a sworn interpreter. I wonder if he always carries it about with him. I was glad to see that the order was properly drawn and written in a better hand than I can boast nowadays. The signature, however, is identical with that I use at present.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 22 June 2016.

Sand's Journal Intime

George Sand, the famous French writer, cigar smoker and lover of artists, died 140 years ago today. A hard working and prolific author of novels, she also wrote plays and an autobiography. Her commitment to the diary form was, however, intermittent. Nevertheless a collection of her personal writings, under the title Intimate Journal - taken from the French Journal Intime - were published in English in 1929, and have been reprinted several times since then.

Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin was born in 1804, in Paris, and educated at Nohant, her grandmother’s estate, and at a convent in Paris. In 1821, she inherited Nohant, and a year later married Casimir Dudevant. In 1831, though, she left Nohant and her husband and went, with two children, to Paris. The same year she published a first novel, Rose Et Blanche, written in collaboration with Jules Sandeau, from whom she took her early pen-name (Jules Sand), and articles in Le Figaro. Her second novel Indiana, in 1832, written under the pen-name George Sand, brought her near instant fame. It told of a naive woman abused by an older husband and deceived by a selfish seducer.

Thereafter, Sand became a celebrity of sorts, famously dressing in men’s clothes much of the time, and having many love affairs, the most famous of which was with the composer Chopin. Her novels, and there were many, were largely romantic, with the heroes often workmen or peasants, living in the countryside of her childhood near Nohant. They were also often autobiographical, coloured by whoever she was involved with at the time, and overtly romantic with love usually conquering obstacles of class and convention.

Sand’s later years were lived at Nohant, comfortably in a relatively stable relationship with a younger artist, Alexandre Manceau, though he died in 1865, ten years before she herself died on 8 June 1876. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, Notable Biographies and NNDB. There are also a couple of biographical works freely available online: George Sand - Some aspects of her life and writings by Rene Doumic and translated into English by Alys Hallard in 1910 (Internet Archive or Full Books); and George Sand by E. Caro in 1888 (Internet Archive).

Sand was not a committed diarist though she did leave behind some diary writing in the form of letters addressed to lovers and occasional musings on her intimate relations and on her own shortcomings. These were collected together and first published but Williams & Norgate in an English translation in 1929 as The Intimate Journal of George Sand (edited and translated by Marie Jenney Howe). It has been reissued several times since then - see Googlebooks for a 1977 version by Cassandra Editions, or Chicago Press Review for a 2000 edition.

There are also the diaries - not translated into English as far as I know - that were kept by Manceau. Evelyne Bloch-Dano, author of The Last Love of George Sand: A Literary Biography (translated by Allison Charente, Arcade Publishing, 2013) explains: ‘George Sand had kept a periodic journal during key moments of her life, more to organise her thoughts than to keep a precise record of her days. She lived too much in the present to feel the need. Alexandre [Manceau] decided to record his lady’s activities, meetings, readings, works, and promenades every day, until his death. At first the Diaries were written in the first person, as if Sand was dictating them, but they morphed into the third person after a few weeks. Marceau would also make personal notes throughout the entries, creating an entirely separate character. The Diaries were his own work, even if George added her own details from time to time or occasionally took up the pen in his place.’

The following extracts are taken from the original 1929 edition of The Intimate Journal of George Sand.

1 June 1837

‘I awakened feeling dull. Piffoël’s sleep was disturbed by elusive desires that floated in a pale mist of dreams. The weather is neither cheerful nor depressing. It makes me restless. The trees are tossed by gusty, fantastic wind. The sun is hidden. If I put on my dressing-gown I am too hot, if I take it off I am cold. Leaden day in which I shall accomplish nothing worth while. Tired and apathetic brain! I have been drinking tea in the hope that it would carry this mood to a climax and so put an end to it.

No letter from Everard to-day. He is angry again. Happy man, to find anything worth getting angry about!

Before going to bed. From midnight until one o’clock I explained to Duteil the theory of dissatisfaction with life. I was indignant because he tried to make me believe he is happy every day and almost every hour of the day. Isn’t it exasperating to be treated as a fool by people who do not suffer?’

2 June 1837

‘Late at night. Piffoël walked twelve miles to-day. As soon as life becomes bearable we stop analyzing it. A tranquil day is spoiled by being examined. Shall we always be guided by feeling which distorts our ideas and impressions? Excessive emotion is like cross-eyed vision whose errors our reason tries feebly to correct.’

12 June 1837

‘This evening, while Franz was playing fantastic melodies of Schubert, the Princess walked in the shadows that fall across the terrace. She was wearing a dress of indefinite color. Her head and tall, slender body were swathed in a long white veil. As I watched her move back and forth with a light tread which scarcely touched the ground, the circle she described was cut across by rays from my lamp around which all the moths of the garden were dancing a delirious sarabande. The moon behind the lindens threw into high relief black specters of pine trees that stood immobile in the blue-gray air.

Over the flowers and plants a profound calm reigned. At the first harmonies from the divine instrument the breeze languished, then, falling exhausted on the tall grasses, slowly died. A nightingale had drawn near in the shadows of the foliage and, like the excellent musician he is, had caught the measure and tuned his own ecstatic throat in harmony with the music. He sang on, but as though he had become conscious of rivalry his voice became timid and withdrawn.

We were seated on the steps, listening to strains of the Erlkoenig. As the prelude gave place to the heartbreaking refrain, we sank into the mood of surrounding nature and were engulfed in melancholy enjoyment. And we could not take our fascinated gaze from the magic circle traced before our eyes by the mute sibyl in white. When the music, in a series of sad modulations, merged into tender melody, her steps grew slower.

From that time onward her pace kept the rhythm of the andante and the maestoso, and her movements showed such marvelous harmony that it was as if the music flowed from her as from a living lyre. Slowly she crossed the lamp-lit space, her white veil forming delicate, distinct contours on the dark background of the picture, while the rest of her was obliterated as it floated into the mystery of night. After a moment she drew near out of the dusk, as if she meant to alight on the white lilac. But, fugitive as the shadows, she slowly disappeared. She did not seem to withdraw under the dark foliage, it was rather as though darkness laid hold of her and drew her into its depths by thickening the curtain of shadows. At the end of the terrace she was completely lost in the pines, to reappear suddenly in the rays of the lamp like some spontaneous creation of its flame. Again she withdrew and floated, vaporous and pale, against the light. Finally she became visible and seated herself on a pliant branch, which supported her weight as though she had been a phantom. Then, as if bound by some mysterious tie to this pale, beautiful woman, the music stopped.

Rising, she glided by an inscrutable mounting movement toward the top of the steps and disappeared into the shadowy hall. A moment later we saw a veritable châtelaine of the middle ages cross the adjoining hall under the light of the candles. Her blond head shone like an aureole, and her veil, thrown over her shoulders, followed cloudlike the light and rapid motion of her flying figure.

The fingers straying across the piano were silent. The lights went out. The vision receded into the night.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 8 June 2016.