A fat little rascal

‘One week from today my diary will become ten years old. It’s getting to be a fat little rascal and perhaps may be the only literature of any value I’ll leave when I die. [. . .] The good diaries, the ones that are truthful and readable and revealing - these should be published. The ordinary lives of ordinary folks. Personal history, en masse, becomes national history.’ This is Edward Robb Ellis, one of the most prolific diarists in American history, who died 20 years ago today. He worked as a reporter for many years, and published a few books, but he is remembered today mostly for the extraordinary diary, published a few years before his death, with the rather grand title of A Diary of the Century.

Ellis was born in Kewanee, Illinois, in 1911. He studied journalism at the University of Missouri graduating in 1934, and subsequently was employed at the New Orleans Associated Press office. He moved to Oklahoma, where he worked for the Oklahoma City Times. In 1937, he married the professional violinist, Leatha Sparlin, and they had one daughter, before divorcing after the war. He served in the United States Navy between 1943 and 1945, editing a hospital newspaper, The Bedside Examiner; and then, after being posted to Okinawa, he ran another newspaper for sailors.

After a short spell at the Daily News in Chicago, Ellis moved, in 1947, to live and work in New York City. There he met and married Ruth Kraus. He worked for the World Telegram for 15 years, and thereafter he wrote several books - including a history of the city - and many articles. Ruth died suddenly in 1965, leaving him bereft. Since the age of 16, he had kept a detailed daily diary, and it was the diary that now kept him going, and indeed became a central focus of his somewhat eccentric life - largely confined to a book-filled rundown Manhattan apartment. With publication of extracts from his 22 million word diary, he accrued some fame, and, having interviewed many names in his life, he himself became the subject of interviews. Prior to 1994, he was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the world’s longest diary. He died on 7 September 1998. There is not a great deal of detailed biographical information available online, but a little can be found at Wikipedia, The New York Times, and Salon.

A Diary of the Century: Tales from America’s Greatest Diarist was published by Kodansha International in 1995. In a short introduction, another New York journalist, Pete Hamill, compares Ellis’s diaries, in the first instance, to that of Thomas Mann (see Mann on Mann). Then, he compares them to those of Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong (Wall Street palpitating), concluding thus: ‘They, too, were decent men and New Yorkers, trying to make sense of the dailiness of their lives. Much of what we know about their time - about the way human beings actually lived - we know from them. There are human beings not yet born who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis. That is his accomplishment. That is his triumph.’ Some extracts from the diary can be read online at Philip Turner’s The Great Gray Bridge or The National Diary Archive. Here are several other extracts.

27 December 1927
(This was the first entry I ever wrote in my diary, misspelling and all.) Well Christmas is past and everyone happy. I got a wristwatch, billfold, DeMolay pin, and the usual hetregeneous collection of sox, ties and handkerchiefs. Went to the students’ dance at the Kewanee Club last night. Took Barbara. Not so hot. Had fun there, though. Am reading a book about the World War. Had trouble with Tom Pierce about ushering at the theater. All right now. I’m paid 25 cents afternoons and 50 cents evenings.’

21 April 1928
‘This is a great day, a great day! Today marks the beginning of a second composition book of my diary. As yet no living person has gazed upon the pages of my diary although several persons have asked for that privilege. At first I put down only the things I wouldn’t be ashamed of, but as time went on I began to record all, or nearly all, of my thoughts, actions and desires, be they good or bad.’

22 February 1932
‘My 21st birthday. What a momentous day! Now, if ever, I am going to have to foster some semblance of manhood and play the part of an intellectual adult. There is one thing of which I am exceedingly conscious on this day, and that is my own ignorance. I can claim but a scant share of all the knowledge the world holds. I am woefully lacking any real insight into all those things worth knowing. I am so damned incompetent! However, there is one quality I possess - energy! If I can retain even a part of this youthful zest and joy in living, then perhaps I can conquer the world. Oh, hell, I’m so Goddam pretentious. Twenty-one, indeed! I’m more like a two-year-old. I wonder whether I’m a neurotic. I’m always highstrung and often nervous. In fact, I’m horribly high-strung and at times become irascible toward Melody Snow when she has done nothing to provoke me. Am I abnormal or normal? Am I over-sexed?’

3 December 1936
‘I’m still having trouble adjusting to the city room of the Oklahoma City Times. When I worked for the New Orleans Item the office was a happy Bedlam, while this office seems like Sunday School. Today the managing editor sent me a note requesting that I make sure my desk is neat before I leave. Nuts! A newspaper office should be the last refuge of non-conformists! “Scoop” Thompson even declares there should be a Constitutional amendment stating that it is the duty of every reporter to get drunk every Saturday night - at least.’

20 December 1937
‘One week from today my diary will become ten years old. It’s getting to be a fat little rascal and perhaps may be the only literature of any value I’ll leave when I die. The other day it occurred to me that it might be a good idea for someone to get an advance from a publishing house and then travel around the country in search of men and women who keep diaries. The good diaries, the ones that are truthful and readable and revealing - these should be published. The ordinary lives of ordinary folks. Personal history, en masse, becomes national history.

If I remember correctly, Voltaire called footnotes in a book the sound of slippers sneaking up the back staircase - something like this. Anyway, this is the kind of history found in diaries - the slippers-under-the-bed, the Mrs. Grundy-just-told-me, the sure-crossed-up-that-guy-yesterday, the hope-that-I’ll-get-it-tomorrow, the but-you-said-you-loved-me, the wail-of-a-lonely-frail, as the song says. The marginalia of civilization.’

23 February 1961
‘In the office today Ed Wallace and I discussed Allen Ginsberg, who worked as a copyboy here at the World-Telegram in 1953. Having just read Ginberg’s poem called Howl, solemn-faced Wallace said; “Ginsberg might become immortal  - if Robert Frost beat him to death with a wet squirrel.”

26 April 1989
‘His Royal Ignorance, George Bush, hopes the Supreme Court will outlaw abortion. The man is all eloquence. In other contexts he speaks of “this vision thing” and “the contra thing.” I wish I could tax bad syntax.’

21 September 1989
‘Donald Trump, the flashy real estate man, is supposed to be worth $1.6 billion. The People's Almanac says that if a person spent $1,000 a day, every day since the birth of Christ, even by this date the billion dollars would not have been exhausted.’

23 September 1989
‘Irving Berlin died in his sleep yesterday at the age of 101 in his town house on Beekman Place. I have a special place in my heart for him because a quarter-century ago I spent an afternoon with him and liked him a lot. The New York Times story about him began on the front page and then broke inside to one full page.’

17 April 1993
‘I dipped into some of my earlier diaries and am astounded by the fact that I have forgotten so many things, some of them important. For example, using photographs, I caricatured Ike and Mamie Eisenhower, Ruthie showed them to her boss, a close friend of the President, her boss took them to the White House, where Ike liked my caricature of him, thought the one of Mamie also was funny, but decided not to show it to her lest it hurt her feelings. How could I forget this?’

The Diary Junction

Guilty of murder

‘I was at my post by 8 a.m. Two men have died, one after a trepanning operation, the other when he was being carried to the operating-table. It has been an unhappy day for me, because I have been through a very trying experience. Perhaps, by writing down all the facts clearly, my mind may be eased of some of its guilt. ‘Guilt’ is a strong word to use, but I was told during the afternoon by Ivan Ivanovich, our head dispenser, that I could consider myself “guilty of murder”.’ This is from the ‘compelling’ diary of Florence Farmborough, a young British nurse who worked for the Russian Red Cross during the First World War, and who died 40 years ago today.

Farmborough was born in 1887 in Buckinghamshire, the fourth child of a family of six, and named after Florence Nightingale, a friend of the family. In 1908, she went to Kiev as a child’s companion and teacher. And then, two years later, she moved to Moscow to take another position as English tutor to the daughters of a heart surgeon. During the First World War, she trained as a nurse at a hospital established by Princess Golitsin in Moscow. In early 1915, she joined a Russian mobile medical unit as a surgical nurse. Her unit was usually very close to the action on the Eastern Front, and often confronted daily with hundreds of wounded.

After returning to Britain in 1918, Farmborough was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In 1926, she moved to Valencia, Spain, where she lectured in English, and then to Salamanca. She was a supporter of General Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and made radio propaganda broadcasts to English speaking-countries. Her book, Life and People of Spain, was published in 1938. She later returned to England and worked for the Women’s Voluntary Service during the Battle of Britain, becoming particularly involved in the rehabilitation of Spanish-speaking Gibraltarians.

Farmborough later spent four years as a government censor in Jamaica, checking correspondence to and from South America. Back in England, she settled at Sompting near Worthing, Sussex, and gave Russian lessons at her home to pupils from the local high school. Later she moved to Newton Abbot. She made a return visit to Russia in 1962, and visited the Holy Land in 1966. In the mid-1970s, she was the subject of a BBC documentary. She was awarded Honorary Life Membership of the British Red Cross. She died on 18 August 1978. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, Lives of the First World War, Working Nurse, Imperial War Museum, and Encyclopedia.com

While working as a nurse with the Russian army Farnborough also acted as a war correspondent for the BBC and The Times, carrying a glass-plate camera, tripod and darkroom essentials from camp to camp; her many photographs are now held by the Imperial War Museum, and are considered of historical importance. She also kept a diary, often written on scraps of paper. However, it was not until the 1970s, when she was already an old woman, that she decided to edit the diary, subsequently published by Constable as Nurse at the Russian Front - A Diary 1914-18. Since then, it has become a source book for those studying the Great War, the realities of war, and women’s roles in war - see here for example. Reviewers at Good Reads rate the book as compelling, heartbreaking, fascinating. Here are several extracts. (I have listed them by their date in the Western calendar, but have also included, in brackets, the date as given in the book, Russian style, i.e. 13 days behind behind the Western calendar.) 

3 June (21 May) 1916
‘I was told that in Hut 131 a sick woman needed attention. At length I found her, a young mother, sick with typhoid, and her baby. We Sisters are doing our level best to instil into the village-folk the urgent need to boil all their drinking-water - an idea which seems unable to take root in the peasant mind. The same old argument is raised: his parents never drank boiled water, why should he? But we persist. They listen attentively, but their minds are quite impervious to the meaning of ‘pollution’ and ‘contamination’.

Before retiring for the night, it was whispered around that a great battle was expected within the next twenty-four hours, but we sceptically went off to sleep, having heard it so often before.’

27 June (14 June) 1916
‘I was told that well over 200 men had passed through our Unit today; I was also told something that almost took my breath away: that some 3,000 men are to come to us during the next few days to be fed, as the Zemski Soyuz has arranged that enormous supplies of food should be stored in the town under our unit’s supervision. This will entail a vast amount of extra work for our Letuchka; luckily, however, the regiments concerned have agreed to send us extra help.

I sat in the operating-room, awaiting further newcomers. I think that I must have slept, for when I opened my eyes, my watch was pointing to midnight, and all around was very quiet. At 6 a.m. more wounded arrived. One of them had a most unusual wound; a bullet had entered his body at the shoulder-blade, gone down his right side and lodged in his thigh. After an early breakfast, we resumed our work. I extracted a bullet from the upper left arm of a young soldier; it was not a difficult extraction, for the tail-end of the bullet was visible, but even after the wound was cleansed and bandaged, he continued to weep and moan: “Sestritsa, bolit! bolit! [Little Sister, it hurts!].” I was washing the face of another young soldier, a face covered with grime, dust and dried blood. “Sestritsa,” my patient said, with an attempt at a smile. “Leave it dirty! I shall not go visiting any more.” At first I thought that he was joking and some light-hearted repartee was on the tip of my tongue; then I saw the ugly gash on his head and I understood what he meant.

One of the stomach patients had deteriorated greatly in the last few hours. The craving for water was on him; it was all that a Brother and I could do to prevent him from throwing himself off his straw mattress. In his delirium he cried out that he and his comrades were drinking from a great river, and that he was drinking, drinking, always drinking.

In the tent which housed the sick, the patients were less restless. One soldier refused to drink because the water given to him had been boiled; he vowed that boiled water always gave him colic. A young Tatar assured me that if only I would allow him to sit up and smoke, in two days’ time he would be up and about again; but as things were, he said that it was Plokhoye delo! Ochen plokhoye delo! [Bad business! Very bad business!].’

30 July (17 July) 1916
‘About 70 wounded came during the night while I was on duty. I have heard that the 103rd Regiment has managed to cross the River Koronez and occupy Dubenko, half of which town had been in its possession for several days past. The 102nd Regiment has gone into reserve for three days after three and a half months in the trenches.

Our next attack is timed for 4 p.m. The guns have been blazing away. Mamasha and I slipped away for a few minutes, climbed a small hill and crouched on its summit among waving corn and wild flowers. From our vantage point, we could see the Front spread before us. Shells were falling, throwing up blackish clouds of earth about our trenches; farther away, our shells were engaged in similar action near the enemy’s defensive ramparts. Shrapnel was exploding in mid-air, leaving puffs of slowly dissolving smoke behind, and scattering bullets and metal particles to right and left. We picked a few flowers and returned to our quarters.

Dusk had scarcely descended when cartload after cartload of wounded made their appearance. Difficulty arose regarding transport; the highways round Barish were under fire and our ambulance-vans in urgent request alongside the Fighting Lines. We placed the men on the straw-strewn earth in the empty sheds, told them to rest awhile and, at the earliest opportunity, they should be driven to the Base. A young Tatar, heavily wounded, was carried to the operating-table. He could speak no Russian and vainly tried to whisper something to us which we could not understand. One of our Tatar drivers was sent for; he stooped low over the prostrate form, but no answer came to his eager questioning. “He’s gone!” said a voice. The weather-beaten face of the older tribesman stiffened with emotion as he walked away. An infantry officer whose thigh-wound had been dressed and bandaged, declared that he could walk without difficulty; he was most anxious to help and assured us that he had taken a first aid course before joining the Army. He was allowed to tend the more lightly wounded and this he did with considerable skill, but insisted on wearing rubber gloves which, he said, gave him greater confidence and grip.’

26 August (13 August) 1916
I was at my post by 8 a.m. Two men have died, one after a trepanning operation, the other when he was being carried to the operating-table. It has been an unhappy day for me, because I have been through a very trying experience. Perhaps, by writing down all the facts clearly, my mind may be eased of some of its guilt. ‘Guilt’ is a strong word to use, but I was told during the afternoon by Ivan Ivanovich, our head dispenser, that I could consider myself “guilty of murder”. It seems strange to write these words, but the whole scene was strange. I was watching over three men who had recently been operated on, but were gradually losing their hold on life. Our surgeons had seen them in the morning, had said that there was nothing more that one could do for them, only “tend them to the end”. One of the three was the stomach case, operated on during the previous night. He had regained consciousness, but found it difficult to speak; he could articulate only one word: Vo da [water]. I would shake my head; tell him gently that he must not drink; when he would be stronger, water would be given to him. I could see that he was dying, but his cries for water were insistent; he was beseeching, imploring; his thirst must have been agonising. Near one of the other men, a mug of water was standing. He had seen it and, raising an arm, pointed towards it. His eyes challenged mine; they were dying eyes, but fiercely alight with the greatness of his thirst. I reasoned with myself: if I give no water, he will die tormented by his great thirst; if I give him water, he will die, but his torment will be lessened. In my weakness and compassion, I reached for the mug; his burning eyes were watching me; they held suspense and gratitude. I put the mug to his lips, but he seized my arm and tilted the mug upwards. The water splashed into his open mouth, sprayed his face and pillow, but he was swallowing it in noisy gulps. When I could free my arm from his grasp, the mug was empty.

I was deeply distressed and knew that I was trembling. I wiped his face dry and he opened his eyes and looked at me; in them, I saw a great thankfulness, an immense relief. But, before I could replace the mug, a strange, gurgling sound came from him, and, out of his mouth, there poured a stream of thick, greenish fluid; it spread over the stretcher-bed and flowed on to the floor. His eyes were closed and . . . he had stopped breathing. I ran to the door; in the yard stood a Brother and Ivan Ivanovich. “Come quickly,” I begged them. They followed me in, but there was nothing that one could do, for he was dead. Ivan Ivanovich seemed to take in the whole picture at a glance. “Have you given him water to drink?” he asked. “Yes,” I nodded. “His thirst was terrible.” “Then you have killed him,” he said, and added: “Quite simply, you have killed him.” “He was dying,” I gasped. “So you thought you would put the finishing touch!” Shrugging his shoulders, he left the room. The Brother called an orderly and together they washed the dead man and carried him to the mortuary-shed.

I remained in the room until one of them returned. I felt cold and lifeless; as though some violent thing had struck me unawares. Only Mamasha was in our room; she was the last person whom I wished to see; she was so practical and undemonstrative, but I felt that I had to tell somebody. She listened patiently. Then she said: “You are very silly to let these things prey on your mind. You were certainly wrong in disobeying orders, but this kind of thing is happening every day in our abnormal world at the Front. As to Ivan Ivanovich, I have always said that the man is a knave or a fool, or both. In the circumstances, and knowing that death was near, I am sure that, had I been in your place, I should have done exactly the same thing.’’ “Mamasha,” I sobbed. And then for the first time in our long acquaintance, Mamasha took me into her arms and I could feel the throbbing of her motherly heart, comforting and consoling. It didn’t hurt half so much after that. I knew that all my life I should have the grievous memory of hastening a soldier’s death through my disobedience; but, at the same time, there would be another less grievous memory: that of a pair of dying eyes looking at me with infinite gratitude. Throughout the evening, the wounded were being brought to us. We buried our many dead as dusk fell, with prayers, music and the silent homage of soldiers who were stationed in the vicinity.’

21 June (8 June) 1917
‘Enemy aeroplanes had been over about 4 a.m. and awakened us; discontented murmurings came from most beds. We took turns in washing, with as little water as possible. Once or twice we had tried to persuade Rupertsov, our tent-boy, to scrounge another bucketful for us. He would screw his face up and shake his head. Smirnov’s tent was next door to the water-cart and woe betide the person who tried to steal more than his share, for Smirnov knew each one’s quota to a spoonful. Our water-cart had to go to Bojikov to be filled, so we had been warned not to be extravagant.’

27 October (14 October) 1917
‘I was still dressing when the father returned. Outside in the street a little group of mourners stood; two were carrying an empty coffin; another was holding a discoloured banner. There was no priest. They took the boy’s body, which we had wrapped in a sheet, and laid it in the coffin. The father came hastily toward me, bowed low and kissed my hand. I do not know whether he saw the tears in my eyes. As they moved away, they began to sing a dirge-like chant.

In the evening, we were told that all the Red Cross Otryads of the Zemski Soyuz would be disbanded, with three exceptions: the 1st, 5th and 10th. So we, the 10th, would, thank God, remain!’

The 1st Earl of Egmont

John Perceval, 1st Earl of Egmont, died 270 years ago today. He is remembered today for being instrumental in the early development of Georgia, North America, which was given a charter by, and named after, George II, and because of his grandson, Spencer Perceval, who became a UK prime minister (and is the only one ever to have been murdered - see An agony of tears). However, he is also remembered for his diary which provides historically important information on the development of Georgia as well as on the details of élite society in early Georgian London.

John Perceval was born in 1683 in County Cork, Ireland, part of an aristocratic family. His father, third baronet, died when he was two, and John succeeded to the title as fifth baronet in 1691 (after the death of his older brother). He was educated at Westminster School, London, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, but left before taking a degree. In 1704, he inherited large estates in Ireland, and the same year was first elected to the Irish House of Commons, and served on the Irish Privy Council. He married Catherine Parker, the daughter of Sir Philip Parker, in 1710. They had seven children, only three of whom survived into adulthood. Their oldest, also John, became the 2nd Earl of Egmont, and was a confidant of George III; and their grandson, Spencer Perceval, served as prime minister from 1809 until his assassination in 1812.

Perceval, determined to acquire English status (as well as Irish), assiduously cultivated the support of influential persons in the highest social and political circles, becoming closely acquainted with the Prince of Wales, later George II, Queen Caroline, and Sir Robert Walpole among others. He finally entered the British Parliament as Member for Harwich in 1727. The following year he joined the committee investigating prison conditions, and became a close associate of the committee’s chairman James Oglethorpe. In 1730, with Oglethorpe and others, he formed the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America. Two years later, King George II granted the colony a charter, naming Perceval president of the Georgia Trustees. A year later, Perceval was created Earl of Egmont in the Peerage of Ireland. In 1734, Egmont stood down from his Harwich seat (in favour of his son, who failed to secure it), and concentrated on his work, with Oglethorpe, to establish the colony of Georgia. He died on 1 May 1748. Further information online can be found at Wikipedia or the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ONDB - log-in required).

Egmont was a committed diarist. It seems he started keeping a journal in his teenage years, however only diaries from the last two decades of his life appear to be extant (with the exception of a travel diary from 1701, and a few weeks from 1728-1729). These were first published in 1920-1923 by the Historical Manuscripts Commission as Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont (in three volumes, all freely available at Internet Archive: 1730-1733, 1734-1738, 1739-1747, this latter volume also includes a few pages of diary from 1728-1729 and a 170-page index for all three volumes). The diaries are considered an important primary source of information about Parliamentary debates in the 1730s, and about the history of the development of the Georgia colony.

According to the introduction by R. A. Roberts ‘[Egmont’s] diary is a punctilious work founded on personal knowledge, laboriously entered up with details of events, speeches, conversations, reflections, and the like, both public and private and personal.’ Roberts gives further details: ‘The entries were made either day by day or, possibly, on the days when he “stayed at home,” or during the evenings which he “spent in his study” - in any case quite near to the events chronicled, when impressions were fresh in his mind. There are periods in the year which are lightly passed over or omitted altogether, chiefly those of the summer holiday months spent at his country house at Charlton, or on visits to Bath. But when residing in town, as was his habit for the greater part of the year, and especially during the sessions of Parliament, his diligence and assiduity as a diarist are most remarkable.’

The ONDB has this assessment: ‘Egmont kept a personal diary for many years, and this, together with his accounts of the Georgia trustees’ proceedings, provides a mine of information not only about his own life but also about many different facets of élite society in early Georgian London. Egmont’s diaries, and the unreliable Genealogical History of the House of Yvery, published under his supervision in 1742, lend credence to the contemporary view of him as a pompous and conceited person. However, his diaries also reveal that he had a deep and abiding love of the arts and enjoyed a generally happy relationship with his wife.’

In 1989, University of Missouri Press published The English Travels of Sir John Percival and William Byrd II: the Percival diary of 1701 as edited by Mark R. Wenger. Here, though, are several extracts from the volumes published in 1920-1923.

7 April 1734
‘This morning I went to chapel, then to the Prince of Orange’s levee, who asked me several questions about Ireland. Then I went to the Prince of Wales’ Court, who asked me if my son was sure at Harwich. I replied, Yes, if no tricks were played me. He said it would be hard indeed that so good a friend to the Government as I am should have tricks played me. I dined with my Lord Tyrconnel in company of the Earl of Shaftesbury, Captain Coram, Dr. Rundle, Mr. Vernon, and Mr. Martin, our secretary.

I was called from thence by Cousin Ned Southwell to go to Wotton the Painter’s, to see some noble large hunting pieces made by him for the Earl of Sunderland to be set up at Althorp. He is the best painter of horses in England.

I passed some time at the coffee house, and then returned home. My son returned from Malden, where he and Mr. Cross took up their freedom. One Malden of the place, an apothecary, told my son that his brother-in-law, Alderman Rudland of Harwich, would to his knowledge vote for my son. This morning Mr. Horace Walpole went to Harwich in order to embark for Holland.’

25 December 1735
‘Christmas Day, communicated at the King’s Chapel. Dr. Couraye dined with me. Went in the evening again to chapel, and from thence to the coffee house, where Mr. John Banks, late member for Corfe Castle in Dorsetshire, told several of the company who were sitting together that Justice Robe, now living at Clerkenwell, cured his butler of an inveterate rheumatism by a powder he called his magnetic powder. The man had been long so ill that he had lost the use of his hand, when Robe, who was an acquaintance of Mr. Banks’ father, ordered him to be laid in bed, after he had saved about three pints or two quarts of his urine made in quantities after a considerable retention. This urine the justice set on the fire and put into it some of his powder, stirring it round with a stick that had several notches in it (which Mr. Banks thought was to show there was some mystery in the thing). The whole family stood by the bed, as did some friends called in to watch if the Justice gave the man anything inwardly, but he never approached him, continuing at the fire and stirring the urine and saying at times, “Now in three minutes you shall see your butler begin to sweat; now in five minutes he shall sweat stronger; now in three minutes he shall sweat plentifully”: all which they observed to be true. At length, having finished his operation, he bid the man remain an hour in bed and cool gradually, and then to get up and dress himself by the fire, and stay an hour in the room, after which he might go out about his master’s business. The man followed his directions, and from that day to this never ailed anything, being perfectly cured. Mr. Banks asked him if he was dry all the time he sweated, or found any particular affection. He replied, No, only that he lay as one in a trance quite listless of using his limbs. He also expressed his apprehension to the Justice that if he took his servant into the country where he was going the rheumatism might return, and what should he do in that case? The Justice replied he need but write him word of it, for he would bottle up the urine, and it would serve to recover him a second time though at a hundred miles distance. This is a plain instance of sympathetic cure, though very extraordinary, but nobody doubted Mr. Banks’ veracity, and besides Governor Peachy, who was present, declared he knew another instance of Justice Robe’s making a like cure the same way.’

14 October 1736
‘Returned to Charlton to dinner. A few days ago Lady Catherine Shirley died in 24 hours by the sting of a wasp, on which being advised to clap on a halfpenny to assuage and draw out the venom, the sting which remained within the flesh mortified the part and killed her.

Also a few days ago, the Queen returning from London to Kensington, the mob got round her coach and cried, “No gin, no King”; upon which she put forth her head and told them that if they had patience till the next Session they should have again both their gin and their King.’

2 November 1739
‘Mr. Verelts brought me letters from Mr. Oglethorp to the Trustees, dated from Frederica 4 July and from Savannah 16 the same month. I also had a letter from Mr. Oglethorp dated from Frederica 5 July.

Mr. Verelts told me Mr. Ausperger speaks very advantageously of the colony, to which he intends to return after he has settled some affairs in Switzerland his native country. He said he eat some grapes at Savannah in July as fine as can be seen, which will make the best Vidonia wine. He brought over twelve pound of extraordinary good silk, and there had been more of it, but that a multitude of worms died by putting them into the place where our sick people were kept.’

10 November 1739
‘This day Dr. Bearcroft, preacher at the Charterhouse and King’s Chaplain, formerly my son’s tutor, married my daughter to Sir John Rawdon, and gave me a certificate thereof signed on the back of the licence. They were married in my chapel at Charlton.’

12 November 1739
‘This day I gave the wedding dinner.’

The Diary Junction

Wedekind’s erotic life

‘[Katya]’s wearing a brand new silk dress from the Louvre that’s too short for her and hence fastened up with a hundred pins. The opening is even sewn askew. I demolish the entire contraption and dump her into bed. In spite of the good supper with champagne, I can’t manage more than a couple of tributes: her confounded practice of refusing to take off her underclothes may be to blame for that.’ This is from the diaries of Frank Wedekind, a German playwright, a libertarian and forerunner of the Expressionism movement, who died a century ago today. Not well known in the English-speaking world, a few of his plays have been translated and published recently, and his Diary of an Erotic Life was published in 1990.

Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Wedekind was born in 1864 in Hannover to a Swiss actress mother and a German father twice her age. He grew up in his father’s Swiss castle, one of six children. He started work at 19, having dropped out of university, first as a journalist, then as a press agent, and then as a private secretary travelling extensively in France and England. By the mid-1890s, he had become an actor of sorts, giving public readings, in Switzerland, of Ibsen plays. A year or two later, he became political editor of Simplicissimus, a German satirical magazine. There followed a period in which he joined a touring company, producing and acting plays (also often Ibsen) through northern Germany, before he took on a similar role for the state theatre company in Munich at the Schauspielhaus.

By the 1890s, Wedekind, settled in Munich, was also writing his own material. First came Frühlings Erwachen in 1891 with such strong sexual content it was banned in Germany. (A hundred or so years later it was successful adapted into a Broadway rock musical, Spring Awakening.) The so-called Lulu plays would become his best known works: Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1904). Most of his plays continued to challenge the prevailing bourgeois attitudes, particularly towards sex, sometimes causing scandal. Indeed, at one point earlier in his life he had served a short term in prison as a result of a lèse-majesté prosecution against Simplicissimus (Kaiser Wilhelm II had objected to an article by Wedekind). Apart from plays, Wedekind also composed (and performed) many Brettl-Lieder (cabaret songs).

Wedekind’s private life, associating with bohemian artists and political activists, was notoriously as libertarian as his writing. He enjoyed numerous relationships, and often visited prostitutes. He had an affair with the Austrian writer, Frida Uhl, who bore him a child in 1897 (she was already mother to one child by the playwright Auguste Strindberg). And he had another illegitimate child with his housemaid Hildegard Zellner. But, in 1906, he married an Austrian actress Tilly Newes, half his age, with whom he had two children. Their relationship was reportedly faithful though tempestuous. Wedekind died relatively young, from post-surgery complications, on 9 March 1918. Although much forgotten in the English-speaking world during the 20th century, he is back in print, perhaps because of the success of Spring Awakening. See Bloomsbury Publishing for translated plays currently available. For further biographical information see Wikipedia, Encyclopedia.com, Spartacus, and Samuel A. Eliot’s introduction to his translation of four Wedekind’s plays - Tragedies of Sex (freely available at Internet Archive).

Eliot gives this assessment of Wedekind’s influence: ‘Though he died in March, 1918, he had incorporated in many a play before then both the sensational content and the free, direct, spasmodic form which German literature, especially German drama, was to show in the post-War turmoil and distress. Georg Kaiser and the other Expressionists so prized to-day can make no secret of their debt to him, and the wild rush they represent and play to - to contemplate man’s lowest impulses, the roots of will and feeling, the instincts, not the ideals that actuate confused and drifting peoples, and having studied them in crude, disordered life to set them down in baldest, swiftest speech, in rank but penetrating truth - this rush that is observed in all the Continental countries but most among the Germans did there alone possess a guide and prophet in the dead author, analyzer, wry and bitter thinker, Wedekind.’

Wedekind kept a diary at different times in his life, and surviving manuscripts were put together and edited by Gerhard Hay, and published in German for the first time in 1986. This work was translated into English by W. E. Quill and published by Basil Blackwell Ltd in 1990 as Diary of an Erotic Life. For the most part, Quill says in his preface, the original German publication includes ‘practically everything that survives in the way of Wedekind’s diaries and personal notebooks’. Some of these texts, he explains, had been published but many had not, and were only released by Wedekind’s daughter Frau Kadidja Wedekind-Biel in 1986. ‘The surviving diaries - whether in print or in manuscript - are discontinuous and at times fragmentary, but they do have a kind of fortuitous continuity as a series of mirrors reflecting the phases of the author’s development from the juvenile erotic skirmishes and fantasies of Lenzburg, through his years in Berlin and Munich, where he seems to have hovered diffidently on the brink of sexual adventure, to his time in Paris, where he celebrated his sexual coming of age.’

More from Quill’s preface: ‘Wedekind’s Diaries may perhaps best be left to speak for themselves: they are a plain record of a life largely devoted to social intercourse. It is indeed remarkable how unliterary they are as compared with the diaries of most professional writers. Wedekind very rarely writes about his current literary preoccupations in any detail. As he himself points out, the diaries had a kind of clinical function as a record of his responses to everyday experiences. They were intended to be a self-portrait, and this they certainly are to an almost embarrassing degree, portraying their author, piles, gumboils, false teeth and all. Given the emotive nature of many of the incidents described, they are remarkably dispassionate and objective. [. . .] Apart from recording Wedekind’s emotional and intellectual responses, the diaries seem to have served another purpose: the careful recording of social environment and behaviour, particularly evident in the graphic descriptions of cafe society in Munich, Berlin and Paris.’

I have not been able to track down any samples or extracts of Diary of an Erotic Life online, and the starting price for second hand copies is quite high, in the region of £50 - see Abebooks. One review - with quotes - can be found at The New York Times (the reviewer believes ‘the diary is full of detailedly, intimately, multifariously welcoming passages, far better than anything in Henry Miller or Frank Harris’). Here, though, are a few extracts from the 1990 print edition.

17 February 1887
‘I go to see Wilhelmine between two and three. Her sister is at home. When she goes off to her Women’s Guild at last, we are both glad to watch from the window as she departs. There are folk you prefer to see from behind rather than from in front, who cause you pain when you see them from the front, and pleasure when you see them from the back. I explain to Wilhelmine that this is the basis of Greek love. She cannot understand how a mind like mine which aspired towards the ultimate extreme could even reflect on such a serious matter. Then we talk about top-hats. If I ever want to cool her ardour, then I need only come to her wearing a top-hat. We would get married in an artist’s slouch hat, and divorced in a top-hat. As we part she begs me, if I have the smallest spark of feeling for her, to write her a poem by tomorrow. We intended to go to Aarau, and I should read it to her in the railway carriage. Gretchen comes for her piano lesson. Wilhelmine pushes me into the next room without a word and strangles me, so that I turn red and blue, then she returns with the maternal composure of a Madonna to the music-room, while I slink out of the house on tiptoe.

After supper I hunt through all my poems but can’t find anything suitable. I lie down full-length on the divan, but don’t manage to concentrate my thoughts on her. I fall asleep.’

3 May 1892
‘Sign my power of attorney at the Swiss Consulate, where Dr Stumm stamps me as a Swiss. Write to Mama. Dine with Katja and Weinhöppel, and discuss the Ballet Roquanedin at the Eden Theatre with him. Until two in the Pont Neuf, where we drink Baron Habermann’s health in Americain. Then I take the pair of them to an all-night cafe in the Halles, where Katja gets totally drunk. She refuses to take my arm, and I leave her to Weinhoppel, who trots out triumphantly with her into the Rue Montmartre. I keep out of sight and follow them about a hundred paces to the rear. Weinhoppel at last asks a passer-by, who directs him in the opposite direction. So they contrive to make their way over the Pont Neuf, which is just beginning to emerge in the first light of dawn, and get into the Boulevard St Germain, where they once more lose the track. They set out towards the Bastille. On the Boulevard St Michel they ask their way again and turn back the way they came. As they pass me, Katja asks me for her key. At the Eglise St Germain-des-Prés they lose their bearings once more and wait for me. I cross to the opposite pavement, they pursue me. I take refuge in a urinal and make them wait ages for me. Katja leans against a tree and starts crying. Finally they start walking round and round the urinal, come to the conclusion that I’m no longer inside, and set off again in search of the Rue Bonaparte. After wandering round for ages they return to my urinal, where I stick my umbrella out under the screen. They’ve finally found the right way. I once again follow them at a distance of a hundred yards, until Katja disappears in the entrance to the Hotel St Georges. Weinhoppel then comes up to my room. I go to bed about six.’

22 May 1892
‘I wait for Katja in a cafe. We take a cab to St Cloud, sit down in front of the restaurant, and drink until it’s time to go back. We dine together at Marguerite’s and then drive back to my room at one o’clock, where I invite her to get into bed. She’s wearing a brand new silk dress from the Louvre that’s too short for her and hence fastened up with a hundred pins. The opening is even sewn askew. I demolish the entire contraption and dump her into bed. In spite of the good supper with champagne, I can’t manage more than a couple of tributes: her confounded practice of refusing to take off her underclothes may be to blame for that. I don’t care in the least for her caresses. Her lips are flabby and she slobbers all over my face. I keep on pouring cognac into her, and the powerful aroma comes back at me. Elle me veut tailler une . . . , mais elle me mord les testicles que je crie par douleur. At the same time she keeps on making such clumsy attempts to address me in the familiar form that I simply can’t bring myself to reply in the same terms. Between four and five, in broad daylight, I take her home, and go to bed about seven.’

17 July 1892
‘I get up at nine o’clock and have just got dressed when there’s a knock. I draw the curtains in front of the alcove and ask Herr Weintraub to come in. He asks for 45 francs for copying the manuscript and spends an hour telling me how badly off he is. We read Hebrew together, and I serve him a schnaps. After he’s gone, I get back into bed with Rachel. We get up about four and go to lunch. She would simply love to go bathing with me in Chernetre, but I’m too lazy. We part after coffee.’

27 July 1892
‘Fetch Rachel from the Café d’Harcourt. She gets completely undressed in my room, apart from her vest, a diaphanous pink petticoat and her black stockings. In this outfit, with her hair let down and holding her black fan, she wallows around on my sofa between my guitar, my various fat lexicons and a couple of shapeless hessian cushions. She takes up one delicious pose after another, at the same time sucking down to the last drop a lemon which happened to be lying on the table. The lemon inspires her - and me as well - with lascivious ideas. After we’ve got into bed she sucks me off, which I can’t stand for long, as I find it drives me to utter distraction. The next morning she tells me she had dreamt about her mother all night. She had desperately wanted to suck her mother’s cunt. At first her mother wouldn’t let her, but then she had consented, and it had been so sweet, so sweet.’

25 January 1894
‘I go to the National Gallery and am furiously annoyed by the glass over all the pictures. After lunch I get on the Underground at Charing Cross and travel to the Tower, look round the museum, the most boring and tasteless I have ever seen, travel under the Thames via London Bridge and come back home through the underworld, dine at seven o’clock and take the omnibus to the London Pavilion. Apart from a couple of authentic English children, I find nothing new and very little that’s congenial. I spend some time in a bar amid a pack of frightful whores, and go to bed at twelve o’clock.’

My entire soul

‘Could I have already during this year explored my entire soul, and is there no longer anything in me that interests me?’ This is from the diary of a precocious 18 year old student who would go on to become not only a leading existential philosopher but one of France’s foremost 20th century intellectuals - Simone de Beauvoir. It is only in the last ten years or so, though, that some of her personal diaries have been published in English, thanks to the University of Illinois Press and The Beauvoir Series.

De Beauvoir was born into a wealthy Parisian family on 9 January 1908. She studied at the Sorbonne where she met Jean-Paul Sartre. Thereafter, she and Sartre were to remain a couple for the rest of their lives, although they lived apart and had various other lovers. During the 1930s and through the Second World War, de Beauvoir taught at several schools, in Marseilles, Rouen and then, in Paris. After the war, with Sartre, she founded the magazine Les Temps Modernes, and she travelled widely, in Europe, the US, North Africa and China. Her first novel, L'Invitée, published in 1943, was based on the story of one of Sartre’s affair.

In 1949, De Beauvoir published what would become a classic of feminist literature and her most famous work: The Second Sex. She became involved with the feminist movement from the late 1960s. Between 1958 and the early 1970s, she published various autobiographical works, and, after Satre died in 1980, she published her memoir of Sartre’s last years, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. She herself died in 1986. Further information is available from Wikipedia, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Paris Review, or The Quarterly Conversation.

In 1947, de Beauvoir spent four months in the US, a sojourn which resulted in her publishing L’Amérique au Jour le Jour in 1948. This was translated into English by Patrick Dudley and published by Gerald Duckworth in 1952 as America Day by Day. Although usually promoted as a diary, with entries for each day, de Beauvoir explains in her preface that, in fact, the text was written retrospectively: ‘In place of a study that it would be presumptuous for me to attempt, I can at least give faithful testimony here of what I saw. Just as a concrete experience embraces both subject and object, so I have not sought to eliminate myself from this account: it would not be a true one did it not take into consideration those peculiar, personal circumstances in which each discovery was made. That is why I have adopted the style of a diary; although retrospective, this journal, reconstructed with the help of some notes, letters and still-fresh memories, is scrupulously exact. I have respected the chronological order of my astonishment, admirations, indignations, hesitations and mistakes. It often happened that my first impressions did not become clear until later on in my journey. But I must point out that no isolated passage expresses a definite opinion; besides which, I often never reached a definite point of view, and it is my indecisions, additions and corrections, taken as a whole, that combine to form my opinion. There was no process of selection involved in the development of this story: it is the story of what happened to me, neither more nor less. This is what I saw and how I saw it; I have not tried to say more.’ A more recent edition of America Day by Day, translated by Carol Cosman (University of California Press, 2000), can be previewed at Googlebooks.

However, more than 20 years after her death, the University of Illinois Press has published - as part of The Beauvoir Series - edited versions of bona fide diaries she kept at different times in her life. In 2006, it published an English translation (by Barbara Klaw) of de Beauvoir’s Cahiers de Jeunesse 1926-1927 as Diary of a Philosophy Student: 1926-1927. Some pages can be previewed online at Googlebooks. And two years later it brought out Wartime Diary (translated by Anne Deing Cordero) covering the period from September 1939 to January 1941. The publisher says of this latter volume: ‘Wartime Diary gives English readers unabridged access to one of the scandalous texts that threaten to overturn traditional views of Beauvoir’s life and work. The account in Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary of her clandestine affair with Jacques Bost and sexual relationships with various young women challenges the conventional picture of Beauvoir as the devoted companion of Jean-Paul Sartre, just as her account of completing her novel She Came to Stay at a time when Sartre’s philosophy in Being and Nothingness was barely begun calls into question the traditional view of Beauvoir’s novel as merely illustrating Sartre’s philosophy. Most important, the Wartime Diary provides an exciting account of Beauvoir’s philosophical transformation from the prewar solipsism of She Came to Stay to the postwar political engagement of The Second Sex.’

The first two of the following extracts are taken from Diary of a Philosophy Student: 1926-1927, and the last two are taken from the 1952 edition of America Day by Day.

9 August 1926
‘Could I have already during this year explored my entire soul, and is there no longer anything in me that interests me? Such indifference, such great disgust, is such lassitude natural or the proof that I am incurably mediocre? It is in solitude that being shows its worth.’

14 September 1926
‘I know now that I would be capable of seeing this work through to the end, but the effort is so useless! I myself am useless! Nothing about me matters to me any longer. Alone in me is this desire more necessary than life. Yesterday, in this barely familiar countryside, that I chose on purpose to avoid the assault of memories from a dead past, I believed myself to be so far from everything, so near and so far from him! Anxiety of knowing that the future will not give me what [I] ask of it. The countryside was really beautiful upon my return, like a thing that one sees for the first time. This morning, memories give me peace, tranquil security . . . and yet I do not even know what my face looks like in the mind of those who think of me. For others, what am I? Can one guess my veritable being behind the words that I have said? One never knows a being, since even if one knows all the elements in him, the unique manner in which the synthesis is formed is perceived only by the being himself, and it is this alone that matters. But one could know an exact symbol for him. How does the symbol for me look? And the place that it occupies? Wait. . .’

26 January 1947
‘In the dead of night and in my deep slumber a voice spoke without words: “Something has happened.” I was asleep and I did not know whether it was joy or catastrophe that had overtaken me. Perhaps I was dead as so often happens in my dreams, perhaps I would wake on the other side of the grave. Opening my eyes I felt frightened. Then I remembered: this was not altogether the world of beyond. This was New York.

This was no mirage. New York was here, it was real.

Suddenly the truth burst on me through the deep blue sky, the soft, damp air. It was even more triumphant than the doubtful enchantments of the night before. It was nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, the streets were deserted, one or two neon signs still glowed. But there was not a person in sight, not a car in the street; nothing to break the rectilinear course of Eighth Avenue. Cubes, prisms, and parallelograms - the streets were concrete abstract designs, their surface looked like the abstract intersection made by two books; building materials had neither density nor texture; space itself had been poured into the moulds. I did not move. I looked. At last I was here, New York belonged to me. I felt again that joy I had known for fifteen years. I was leaving the station, and from the top of the monumental stairway I saw all the roofs of Marseilles spread out below me; I had a year, two years to pass alone in an unknown city; I did not move and I looked down, thinking: it is a strange town. It is my future and it will be my past. Between these houses that have existed for years without me are streets laid out for thousands of people to whom I do not, and never did, belong. But now I am walking, going down Broadway. It’s me all right. I walk in streets that were not built for me, and where my life has not yet left its tracks; here is no perfume of the past. No one knows of my presence; I am still a ghost, and I glide through the city without disturbing anyone. And yet henceforth my life would conform to the layout of the streets and houses; New York would belong to me, and I to it.

I drank an orange juice at a counter and sat down in a shoe-shiner’s booth on one of three armchairs raised on a short flight of steps; little by little I came to life and grew accustomed to the city. The surfaces were now facades, the solids houses. In the roadway dust and old newspapers were drifting on the wind. After Washington Square all mathematics went by the board. Right angles are broken, streets are no longer numbered but named, lines get curved and confused. I was lost as though in some European town. The houses have only three or four floors, and deep colours varying between red, ochre and black; washing hangs out to dry on fire escapes that zig-zag up the buildings. Washing that promises sun, shoe-shine men posted at street corners, terraced roofs - they vaguely recall some southern town, and yet the faded red of the houses reminds one of London fogs. But this district does not resemble anything I know. I feel I shall love it.

The landscape changes. The word landscape is appropriate to this city abandoned by men and invaded by the sky - the sky that soars above the skyscrapers, plunges down into the long straight streets, and is too vast for the city to annex it. Everywhere the sky overflows; a mountain sky. I walk between high cliffs in the depths of a canyon where the sun never strikes; there is the tang of salt in the air. The history of man is not inscribed on these buildings whose equilibrium is so nicely calculated: they are nearer to prehistoric caverns than the houses of Paris or Rome. In Paris, in Rome, history has percolated to the very roots of the soil. Beneath the underground railways, the drains and heating plants, the rock is virgin, not touched by man. Between this rock and the open sky, Wall Street and Broadway, deep in the shadows of their gigantic buildings, belong to nature. The little russet church, with its cemetery filled with flat tombstones, is as unexpected and as moving in the middle of Broadway as some Calvary on the wild seashore.

The sun was so beautiful, the waters of the Hudson so green, that I got on the boat which takes the provincials from the Middle West to the Statue of Liberty. But I did not get off at the little island which looks like a small fort. I only wished to see the Battery as I had so often seen it at the cinema. I saw it. From a distance its campaniles seem fragile. They rest so exactly on their vertical slopes that the slightest tremor would make them collapse like card houses. As the boat approaches, their foundations appear firmer. But their steepness still fascinates. What fun to bombard them!

Hundreds of restaurants, but on Sunday all are closed. The one I eventually found was crowded; I ate hastily, pressed by the waitress. . . ’

17 May 1947
‘This the last day I would spend in Chicago. This morning I went to see the museum again, and the splendid lake on which white sails sparkled. A young mulatto had fallen fast asleep in the sun-drenched grass with straw hat over his eye. A grey-blue mist was thinning gradually over the massive buildings of the Loop, so that they no longer seemed to weight the earth. But the blackness was not banished: beside the harbour where the brightly-varnished boats lay still and slumbered, at the edge of satin waters, there were enormous heaps of dust and coal; warehouses streaked with railways and with trucks loaded with black blocks. I crossed an avenue where shining automobiles were moving swiftly, and went towards the canals. I found myself in a subterranean world; it was roofed by a road and very much darker there than underneath the El. It was lit with lamps, and there was a proper street with shops and bars on sidewalks where neon signs shone at midday; I saw in my mind’s eye the brilliance of the sun and the blue waters, and this subterranean city strongly reminded me of the film Metropolis. The street brought me back to the Loop, in which, alas! I wandered for the last time.

I should miss Chicago. I did not see it at all in the same way as I saw New York, so that I could not compare them. Instead of getting to know a lot of people and many places, I preferred to profit by the friends I had, which gave me a deeper appreciation of at least one of its aspects. My experience was very limited. I did not return to the “smart” districts, of which I had caught a glimpse the first time I passed through; I did not set foot in any of the chic nightclubs, nor did I have any contact with the University, which is most interesting, I was told. But because I had taken up a definite approach I came to be quite intimate with the city, in a way that I had been unable to achieve in New York. At all events it would only be a memory to-morrow. And in three days’ time the whole of America would be but a memory. Slowly my phantom had taken on bodily shape; I had seen the blood flow through its veins, and I was happy when its heart began to beat like a human heart. But now it was becoming disembodied with alarming speed.’

The Diary Junction

I have depassed myself

‘I’m already demode, depasse. I have depassed myself into a void,’ wrote R.D. Laing in his diary in the early 1970s. Born 90 years ago today, R. D. Laing was, for a time, one of the most famous psychiatrists in the world, but he eventually ran foul of the medical establishment, and his own life was dogged in family discord (he had 10 children by four women) and depression. Although an inveterate keeper of notebooks, only a few diary excerpts have been published - in a biography written by his son A. C. Laing.

Laing, an only child, was born in Glasgow on 7 October 1927. He did well at school and his parents enrolled him in Hutcheson’s Boys Grammar school. By the age of 15 he was already familiar with the writing of many European philosophers. He moved onto Glasgow University to study medicine, graduating in 1951. He was conscripted into the British Army, serving in its Netley psychiatric unit, before taking up a post at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, where he became the youngest consultant in the country. There he met, and came under the influence of, the neurosurgeon Joe Schorstein and the psychiatrist David Henderson. He married Anne Hearne in 1952, and they had five children, before divorcing. He married Jutta Werner in 1974, and they had three children. Out of wedlock, he also fathered two children with two other women.

From 1956 until 1967, Laing work in London, at the Tavistock Institute, a centre for psychotherapy, latterly as the principal investigator for the schizophrenia and family research unit. During this time, he published the first of many influential books, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, in which he offered new and controversial ideas on the understanding and treatment of schizophrenia. In 1965, Laing, with others, set up the Philadelphia Association which launched a radical experiment at Kingsley Hall, London, to house and treat those seriously affected by schizophrenia without restraint or drug therapies. During its five year life, Kingsley Hall became notorious as a place where people could regress into infantile and uninhibited behaviour before, supposedly, resurfacing with a new and authentic sanity. Laing, himself, was experimenting with LSD, and is said to have taken it with Sean Connery in 1964 (before it was illegal). At this time, he was among the most famous therapists in the world.

In 1971, Laing and his family travelled to Sri Lanka to find out more about meditation from Buddhists, and to India where he learnt Sanskrit and met the guru Govinda Lama. Further books followed, The Politics of the Family (1971), The Facts of Life (1976), and The Voice of Experience (1982). In 1985, he published his autobiography, Wisdom, Madness and Folly, but, by this time, a tendency to alcoholism and depression was leading him into trouble with the medical establishment, and he gave up practising medicine. He died in 1989. Further information is available from the R. D. Laing Institute, an issue of Janus Head, Allan Beverage’s article in BJPsych Bulletin, the BBC, Wikipedia, or Adrian C. Laing’s article in The Guardian.

According to his son and biographer Adrian C. Laing, R. D. Laing was ‘an avid keeper of diaries, drafts of his books both published and unpublished, notes, scribbles, loose thoughts, recollections of dreams, jottings, correspondence, tape-recordings, transcripts of tape-recordings and press cuttings.’ As far as I can tell, none of the notebooks or diaries have been published in their own right. However, in the biography of his father - R. D. Laing: A Life (Peter Owen, 1994) - A. C. Laing does refer occasionally to the diaries, and quotes from them a few times. The following extracts (which include excerpts from his father’s diary) are taken from the 1997 paperback edition by HarperCollins.

***

‘The last entry in Ronnie’s diary that is in any way remotely concemed with ‘politics’ was made on 23 March 1970 under the heading ‘My Relation to Politics’. Here he admitted, to himself at least, that the political movement ‘is far more vast than I can comprehend and apart from its existence there is very little I can say about it’.

***

‘On 7 October 1967 Ronnie celebrated his fortieth birthday and wrote a rough entry in his diary marking “the transition from Icarus to Daedalus from Oedipus to Laius from enfant terrible to grand old man or everyman’s favourite uncle from disciple to Guru from Isaac to Abraham. From simply son to father to one of the elders who has failed. . . From Jesus to Joseph. From one of yesterdays [sic] young men of tomorrow to one of tomorrow’s old men of yesterday”.’

***

A few days after Ronnie s forty-fourth birthday on 7 October 1971, he recorded in a diary a visit to a wise man by the name of Mufti Jal al-Ud-din. The note Ronnie made of that encounter indicated what they discussed. Ronnie numbered the topics: “1. What is man’s chief end in life?; 2. What is the correct way to live?; 3. What is the method to rid oneself of the corruptions that defile the heart and weaken wisdom?” In answer to these questions, the wise man replied: “if you wish to help your fellow man there is no better way to do so than to give up the world, renounce everything and take up the robe and bowl”. This did not seem to provide Ronnie with a satisfactory answer. He wrote in his diary: “It would be a blessing were I to find the right man for me. Maybe there is not such a man, maybe I cannot recognize him.” ’

***
‘When Ronnie and his second family returned from India on 20 April 1972, much had taken place since their departure for Sri Lanka in March of the previous year. Ronnie had deliberately kept out of touch with events not just in London but the West as a whole. He had been reading a great deal but his interests were confined solely to books on Eastern theology and philosophy. He had a lot of catching up to do. Moreover, shortly after his return to London he experienced a serious collapse in his own self-confidence, prompting the following entry in his diary in May 1972: “I’ve got to keep my nerve - or lose it - everything is completely uncertain. I’ve lost my motivations and beliefs - there is nothing I want to do and I don’t want to do nothing. It’s really like starting a new life and I would be just as glad not to. I’m already demode, depasse [sic]. I have depassed myself into a void.” ’

***

‘One of most important events in Ronnie’s life in 1979 was the permanent replacement of his secretary by a woman from New Zealand - Marguerite Romayne-Kendon - for it was with Marguerite that Ronnie would spend the last few years of his life. The following year Ronnie saw many friends and other people he felt attached to pass away. He wrote in his diary on 3 August, “Sartre died two/three months ago, then Roland Barthes, yesterday Hugh Crawford. Peter Sellers and Ken Tynan.” The next month he added the name of Franco Basaglia. Before the year was out there were others to mention: David Mercer, Jesse Watkins (the sculptor who was the subject of ‘A Ten-Day Voyage’ in The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise), Steve McQueen, John Lennon. Of 1980 Ronnie wrote, “death has had a good harvest this year”.

Sun Dance as cosmic drama

‘If the word “art” is appropriate here, one could say that the Sun Dance is a powerful work of art; at all events, one can understand why the Red Indians never felt the need to create a great epic or the like. The manner in which they saw and experienced Nature excluded precisely every kind of fine art.’ This is Frithjof Schuon, a Swiss-born philosopher, metaphysician, poet and painter born 110 years ago today, writing in a diary he kept while living for a short while with the Sioux Indians in the United States. His diary and paintings of the Sioux were published together under the title The Feathered Sun.

Schuon was born in Basel, Switzerland, on 18 June 1907. When his father, a German musician, died, his mother took him and his brother to be near her family in Mulhouse, France, where he became a French citizen. Already as a boy he was interested in metaphysical ideas, and particularly the works of René Guénon, a French philosopher and Orientalist with whom he started a long-term correspondence. Schuon also took much pleasure in drawing and painting. After serving in the French army for 18 months, he moved to Paris where he worked as a textile designer and began to study Arabic. In 1832, he travelled to Algeria, where he met Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, a Sufi mystic, and was initiated into his order. Further trips to North Africa followed, including one to Egypt where he met Guénon.

Schuon again served in the French army during the Second World War, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was granted asylum by the Swiss and took on Swiss nationality. In 1948, he produced one of his most important written works, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, which spells out the metaphysical foundations of his religio perennis (perennial religion) ideas. The following year he married Catherine Feer, the daughter of a Swiss diplomat. Having developed friendly contacts with North American Indians who were visiting Paris in the 1950s, Schuon and his wife went together twice to visit the Plains Indians. During the first visit, the Schuons were officially adopted into the Red Cloud family of the Lakota tribe, a branch of the Sioux nation. Some years later, they were similarly adopted by the Crow medicine man and Sun Dance chief, Thomas Yellowtail.

Schuon continued to write articles and books, as well as to paint. Increasingly, he became known as a spiritual teacher, receiving many visits from religious scholars, and travelling himself widely in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. In 1980, Schuon and his wife emigrated to the US, settling in Bloomington, Indiana. There he continued to write books - such as From the Divine to the Human, To Have a Center, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism - all published by the Bloomington-based World Wisdom. He also continued to write poetry, and to give spiritual direction to a community of disciples who had came from all over the world. He died in 1998. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, Frithjof Schuon, or World Wisdom. More about Schuon and his philosophy can also be found in Harry Oldmeadow’s Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy (World Wisdom Books, 2010), available online at Googlebooks.

There is no evidence that Schuon was a diarist, however he did keep diary-like entries during his 1959 and 1963 visits to the Plains Indians (Sheridan, Wyoming and Yellowstone Park). These were published alongside a series of his paintings in The Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art and Philosophy (World Wisdom Books, 1990). According to Oldmeadow, over the years, and without any intention on Schuon’s part, the feathered sun became a symbol for his spiritual message. None of the entries in the published book are dated but they do read as though they were written on a near daily basis. Here are several extracts concerning Schuon’s 1959 trip.

‘We went to a place shaded by trees where there were many Indians singing, drumming and dancing, men and women all in full costume. We met Red Shirt, whose acquaintance we had made in Brussels; he introduced us to a grandson of Red Cloud - the younger one - who then took us both by the hand and led us into the circle of dancers; there he made a short speech in Lakota to introduce us to the Sioux. Then all sang a greeting song and my wife had to join in the dance with them; after this Red Cloud’s grandson (Charles) took us to his elder brother, to whom we presented my painting of the White Buffalo Cow Woman; the old man studied it carefully and after a while remarked that at that time the Pipe was still made from the bone of a deer, there were not yet any Pipes made of wood and stone.’

***

‘The whole morning I sat beside Chief Red Cloud, (James) the eldest grandson of the great chief. He recounted to me, with many slow gestures, something of the history of his tribe and explained how all the vast land around used to belong to the Lakota, how everything had been taken from them, and how Big Foot’s band had been “rubbed out” at Wounded Knee. When I was alone with him, I communicated to him the essential of what I have to say to the Indians; he nodded in ready agreement, then for a long time we remained silent. At length I said to him - for he intends soon to go to Washington - that one must insist that the Lakotas be given work on their own land, and not somewhere far away. Again we were silent for a long time. All at once he asked for a piece of paper and wrote a few words in Lakota on it; he then told me that he wished to adopt me as his brother and call me Wambali Ohitika (Brave Eagle) and my wife Onpahi Ske Win (Antelope Teeth Woman); antelope teeth, which are very precious for the Indians, correspond to our pearls.

I had to think of Black Elk Speaks, as Chief Red Cloud sat beside me on a grassy rise, with his gray braids and his wide-brimmed black felt hat adorned with beadwork and feathers - as with gestures of the hands he conjured up the old days, and pointing towards the dance ground before us, said: “At that time, there were soldiers everywhere here.”

When we were taken to see Chief Red Cloud for the first time, he more than once cast a searching, penetrating glance at me. Then suddenly he seemed to conceive a great confidence in me; this I could see quite plainly. Once he put on his wonderful leather shirt, adorned with long fringes and embroidered here and in red, and held a fan of eagle feathers in his hand; in his hair he wore a long feather, like his famous grandfather.

Before night came, we had a long talk with One Feather and his wife. Tradition was dying out everywhere, he said, but there were men who sought to keep it alive. Before the coming of the white man, the Indians had the religion of the Pipe, and this had been brought to them just as the Ten Commandments had been brought to the whites. But with his religion the white man had also introduced the devil. One devil was alcohol, another was money. Christ had been crucified, but the Indians crucified themselves on the cottonwood tree; the cross of Christ had been of oak, whereas the Sun Dance Tree was, precisely, the cottonwood; a cross section through any branch of this tree always showed a golden star.

When One Feather speaks of spiritual things, he becomes a completely different man; he then speaks slowly and softly, becomes solemn, and emphasizes his words with impressive gestures. His tremendous angular and sharply chiseled face, with the triangular eyes, then becomes altogether spiritual.’

***

‘Second day of the Sun Dance. We are also fasting. In the early morning, before sunrise, we are already in the sacred Lodge. Coming down the road in the half-light of dawn, one can hear from afar the drumming and the powerful singing.

After the greeting of the sun, the fire is allowed to die out; the dancers crouch around the embers, wrapped in their blankets and with heads bowed; they sing four songs, and after each song they blow their eagle-bone whistles four times; four is the sacred number of the Indians, deriving from the Four Directions of space, or the four quarters of the universe. These songs are altogether peaceful, rather like laments, and are sung with a restrained voice.

Today, the second day, the Sun Dance reached its dramatic climax. This second day is the most important one, it is like the heart of the sacred event. Most of the dancers had painted themselves, which gave some of them a ghostly appearance. Their torsos were yellow, and most of them had their faces daubed with white and red spots; a few of the men had encircled their eyes with red, to make it easier to look into the sun; Yellowtail had black zigzag lines on his upper arms. The semicircle where the dancers were was now turned into a closed corridor, roofed over with little fir trees; the white cloth that shut off the corridor from the drummers and the spectators could be raised like a curtain, so that the stakes became visible. It was between these stakes that the painted dancers now stood; then the powerful drumming started up again and the dancers moved forwards and backwards, incessantly blowing their eagle-bone whistles. We sat on the rush-covered ground beside the drummers in a crowd of Indians, both men and women; during the dancing every woman received a spray of willow shoots and waved it up and down, or from side to side, in time with the drumming. At this point sick people came and stood beside the Tree in the center; the medicine man - a Ute - did various things in order to transmit to them the healing blessing of the Tree; he held handfuls of leaves over their heads and stroked them with them, blew upon the sick people, worked on them with a fan of eagle feathers, and did other things of the kind.

The Sun Dance is a cosmic drama, indeed it is a cosmos in itself. It is without beginning and without end: it is the temporal fraction of a timeless and supernatural reality; it is as if it had fallen into time; in it everything becomes timeless, outward happening stands still. The rhythm of the drum is rhythm as such; all is rhythm and center, equilibrium and presence.

If the word “art” is appropriate here, one could say that the Sun Dance is a powerful work of art; at all events, one can understand why the Red Indians never felt the need to create a great epic or the like. The manner in which they saw and experienced Nature excluded precisely every kind of fine art.

In some of the Indians the Sun Dance seems to have become crystallized; it gives them a definitive stamp - it has in a way become congealed in them, or rather, they in it. Or again, it continues to vibrate in them, its rhythm is their life.’

See maggots squirming

‘It is now as hot and sultry as it was ever my lot to witness. The cloudy weather and recent rains make everything damp and sticky. Wo don’t any of us sweat though, particularly, as we are pretty well dried up. Laying on the ground so much, has made sores on nearly every one here, and in many cases gangrene sets in, and they are very bad off. Have many sores on my body, but am careful to keep away the poison. To-day saw a man with a bullet hole in his head over an inch deep, and you could look down in it and see maggots squirming around at the bottom.’ This is from the astonishingly graphic diary of John L. Ransom, a Union Army soldier who was imprisoned by the Confederates during the Civil War at Andersonville. Although, initially, Ransom self-published the diary, it has long since been considered a primary source of information about the war and thus been reprinted many times, most recently by Dover Publications.

Ransom was born in Conneaut, Ohio, to Zebina and Mary Ransom, in 1843. While still in his teens, he began working as a printer for the Citizen (a predecessor of the Citizen Patriot), a newspaper based in Jackson, Michigan. In 1862, he joined the 9th Michigan Cavalry, part of the Union Army, becoming a quartermaster sergeant with Company A. However, in 1863, he was captured by the Confederates, and confined at Belle Isle, a Confederate prison on a small island in James River, near Richmond, Virginia. Some three months later, he was taken on a week-long train ride, for incarceration at a new prison in Andersonville, Georgia. Conditions there were appalling, with overcrowding, lack of food, bad water, disease; nearly a third of 45,000 prisoners died.

After around six months, during which time his weight had fallen from a little over 11 stone to six and a half stone, Ransom was transferred to the Marine Hospital at Savannah. There, he recovered, and eventually managed to escape, rejoining his unit in December 1864. After the war, he returned to work for the Citizen, which serialised a diary he had kept during his time in prison. He married twice, once to Eliza Finette Holway, who bore him a daughter, Katherine, and then, after Eliza’s death, he married Frances Wendell. He live in Auburn, New York, for a while, and also Chicago, where he died in 1919. There is very little biographical information about Ransom readily available online, but see MLive, Spartacus or a message board at Ancestry.

The diary kept by Ransom while in Anderson prison and then serialised by his newspaper was first published in its own right (privately, by Ransom himself), in 1881, as Andersonville Diary: Escape and List of the Dead (freely available at Internet Archive). Here is Ransom’s own introduction.

‘The book to which these lines form an introduction is a peculiar one in many respects. It is a story, but it is a true story, and written years ago with little idea that it would ever come into this form. The writer has been induced, only recently, by the advice of friends and by his own feeling that such a production would be appreciated, to present what, at the time it was being made up, was merely a means of occupying a mind which had to contemplate, besides, only the horrors of a situation from which death would have been, and was to thousands, a happy relief.

The original diary in which these writings were made from day to day was destroyed by fire some years after the war, but its contents had been printed in a series of letters to the Jackson, (Mich.) Citizen, and to the editor and publisher of that journal thanks are now extended for the privilege of using his files for the preparation of this work. There has been little change in the entries in the diary, before presenting them here. In such cases the words which suggest themselves at the time are best - they cannot be improved upon by substitution at a later day.

This book is essentially different from any other that has been published concerning the “late war” or any of its incidents. Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest. The annexed list of the Andersonville dead is from the rebel official records, is authentic, and will be found valuable in many pension cases and otherwise.’

Since its original publication, Ransom’s diary has become a primary source for US Civil War researchers, and has been reprinted many times, most recently in March 2017 by Dover Publications with the title John Ransom’s Civil War Diary: Notes from Inside Andersonville, the Civil War’s Most Notorious Prison (available to preview at Amazon). The Dover publication is an unabridged copy of Ransom’s original with one exception: it does not contain the 100 odd pages listing (in small print) the tens of thousands of names of those buried at Andersonville. Here are several extracts from the diary.

4 June 1864
‘Have not been dry for many days. Raining continually. Some men took occasion, while out after wood, to overpower the guard and take to the pines. Not yet been brought back. Very small rations of poor molasses, corn bread and bug soup.’

13 June 1864
‘It is now as hot and sultry as it was ever my lot to witness. The cloudy weather and recent rains make everything damp and sticky. Wo don’t any of us sweat though, particularly, as we are pretty well dried up. Laying on the ground so much, has made sores on nearly every one here, and in many cases gangrene sets in, and they are very bad off. Have many sores on my body, but am careful to keep away the poison. To-day saw a man with a bullet hole in his head over an inch deep, and you could look down in it and see maggots squirming around at the bottom. Such things are terrible, but of common occurrence. Andersonville seems to be head-quarters for all the little pests that ever originated - flies by the thousand millions. I have got into one bad scrape, and the one thing now is to get out of it. Can do nothing but take as good care of myself as possible, which I do. Battese works all the time at something. Has scrubbed his hands sore, using sand for soap.’

15 June 1864
‘I am sick; just able to drag around. My teeth are loose, mouth sore, with gums grown down in some places lower than the teeth and bloody, legs swollen up with dropsy, and on the road to the trenches. Where there is so much to write about, I can hardly write anything. It’s the same old story, and must necessarily be repetition. Raiders now do just as they please, kill, plunder and steal in broad daylight, with no one to molest them. Have been trying to organize a police force, but cannot do it. Raiders are the stronger party. Ground covered with maggots. Lice by the fourteen hundred thousand million infest Andersonville. A favorite game among the boys is to play at odd or even, by putting their hand inside some part of their clothing, pull out, what they can conveniently get hold of and say: “Odd or even?” and then count up and see who beats. Think this is an original game here. Never saw it at the North. Some of the men claim to have pet lice, which they have trained. Am gradually growing worse. Nothing but the good care I have taken of myself, has saved me thus far. I hope to last some time yet, and in the mean time, relief may come. My diary about written through. It may end about the same time I do, which would be a fit ending.’

2 July 1864
‘Almost the Glorious Fourth of July. How shall we celebrate? Know of no way except to pound on the bake tin, which I shall do. Have taken to rubbing my limbs, which are gradually becoming more dropsical. Badly swollen. One of my teeth came out a few days ago, and all are loose. Mouth very sore. Battese says: “We get away yet.” Works around and always busy. If any news, he merely listens and don’t say a word. Even he is in poor health, but never mentions it. An acquaintance of his says he owns a good farm in Minnesota. Asked him if he was married - says: “Oh, yes.” Any children? “Oh, yes.” This is as far as we have got his history. Is very different from Indians in general. Some of them here are despisable cowards - worse than the negro. Probably one hundred negroes are here. Not so tough as the whites. Dead line being fixed up by the Rebels. Got down in some places. Bought a piece of soap, first I have seen in many months. Swamp now in frightful condition, from the filth of camp. Vermin and raiders have the best of it. Captain Moseby still leads the villains.’

6 July 1864
‘Boiling hot, camp reeking with filth, and no sanitary privileges; men dying off over a hundred and forty per day. Stockade enlarged, taking in eight or ten more acres, giving us more room and stumps to dig up for wood to cook with. Mike Hoare is in good health; not so Jimmy Devers. Jimmy has now been a prisoner over a year, and poor boy, will probably die soon. Have more mementoes than I can carry, from those who have died, to be given to their friends at home. At least a dozen have given me letters, pictures &c., to take North. Hope I shan’t have to turn them over to some one else.’

9 July 1864
‘Battese brought me some onions, and if they ain’t good, then no matter; also a sweet potato. One-half the men here would get well if they only had something in the vegetable line to eat, or acids. Scurvy is about the most loathsome disease, and when dropsy takes hold with the scurvy, it is terrible. I have both diseases, but keep them in check, and it only grows worse slowly. My legs are swollen, but the cords are not contracted much, and I can still walk very well. Our mess all keep clean, in fact, are obliged to, or else turned adrift. We want none of the dirty sort in our mess. Sanders and Rowe enforce the rules, which is not much work, as all hands are composed of men who prefer to keep clean. I still do a little washing, but more particularly hair cutting, which is easier work. You should see one of my hair cuts. Nobby! Old prisoners have hair a foot long or more, and my business is to cut it off, which I do without regards to anything except to get it off. I should judge that there are one thousand Rebel soldiers guarding us, and perhaps a few more, with the usual number of officers. A guard told me to-day that the Yanks were “gittin licked,” and they didn’t want us exchanged, just as soon we should die here as not. A Yank. asked him if he knew what exchange meant; said he knew what shootin’ meant, and as he began to swing around his old shooting-iron, we retreated in among the crowd. Heard that there were some new men belonging to my regiment in another part of the prison; have just returned from looking after them, and am all tired out. Instead of belonging to the 9th Michigan Cavalry, they belong to the 9th Michigan Infantry. Had a good visit and quite cheered with their accounts of the war news. Some one stole Battese’s wash board, and he is mad; is looking for it - may bust up the business. Think Hub Dakin will give me a board to make another one. Sanders owns the jack-knife of this mess, and he don’t like to lend it either; borrow it to carve on roots for pipes. Actually take solid comfort “building castles in the air,” a thing I have never been addicted to before. Better than getting blue and worrying myself to death. After all, we may get out of this dodrotted hole. Always an end of some sort to such things.’

22 July 1864
‘A petition is gotten up, signed by all Sergeants in the prison, to be sent to Washington, D. C., begging to be released. Captain Wirtz has consented to let three representatives go for that purpose. Rough that it should be necessary for us to beg to be protected by our Government.’