Do what thou wilt

‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law [. . .] I am aflame with the brandy of the thought that I am the sublimest Mystic in all history, that I am the Word of an Aeon, that I am the Beast, the Man, Six Hundred Sixty and Six, the self-crowned God whom men shall worship and blaspheme for centuries.’ This is none other than the infamous and charismatic Aleister Crowley - born 150 years ago today - writing in a magical diary he kept while at the Abbey of Thelema, in Sicily, a commune he set up for his own sexual magic rituals. I have a personal link with Crowley - recorded in my own diaries - in that, when young, I wrote a play about him, and this involved an interview with one of Crowley’s cronies, Gerald Yorke, and researching his library of Crowley papers at the Warburg Institute.

Aleister Crowley was born on 12 October 1875 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, into a religious family, his parents being Plymouth Brethren. His father died when he was 11, and he was cared for by an uncle, said to have been publicly philanthropic but surreptitiously cruel. Crowley attended a school in Streatham for a while (see also London Cross, my online book of a walk across London), as well as Malvern College and Tonbridge School briefly, before entering Trinity College, Cambridge. There he spent his time pursuing non-academic interests - mountaineering, for example, playing chess, and writing and publishing poetry - which, with money inherited from his father’s brewing business, he could afford to do.

While climbing in Switzerland, and expounding his increasingly spiritual ideas to fellow climbers, Crowley made contacts which led him to a magical society in London called the Golden Dawn, and its leader Samuel Liddell Mathers, a learned occultist. Crowley learned much about ceremonial magic from Liddell, but also from another of the society’s members, Allan Bennet, who he invited to live with him in his London flat.

In 1899, Crowley purchased a property on the south-east side of Loch Ness, renaming it Boleskine House, where he set up his own magical operations and rituals. Crowley travelled to Mexico, to go climbing, and to Ceylon, Burma and India to study Buddhist practices. In 1904, he married Rose Edith Kelly, the sister of his artist friend Gerald Festus Kelly. While honeymooning in Cairo, Crowley claimed to have been contacted by a supernatural entity named Aiwass, who provided him with a scared text he called The Book of the Law. Over the next few years, and using the text, he helped set up a new magical order, called the A∴A∴; and he became the leader of the British section of a German order Ordo Templi Orientis. He was a prolific writer, producing poetry, articles, and short stories, as well as spiritually-based texts. Rose had three children by Crowley, but he divorced her in 1909, on the grounds of his own adultery. Crowley was never other than extremely promiscuous, and later in life regularly changed partners, calling each new lover his scarlet woman.

During the First World War, Crowley decamped to the United States, where he earned money by writing and giving astronomical readings. Apart from continuing his sex-based spiritual investigations, he also took up painting and campaigned for Germany (though later he claimed he was working as a British spy). Back in Europe, in 1920, he established the Abbey of Thelema, a spiritual community in Cefalù, Sicily, where he lived with his acolytes and their children, developing his rituals and magical practices, many of them involving sex. By this time, his addiction to drugs, heroin and cocaine, had come to dominate his daily life. Still, new followers continued to arrive - some famous like the film star Jane Wolfe - and all of them were initiated into the Abbey’s bizarre practices. There was little concern at the Abbey for health and safety, with one baby (born to Crowley and his consort Leah Hirsig) and a young man dying there. (Another woman at the abbey also gave Crowley a child at this time, Astarte, who was alive until 2014 - the longest lived of Crowley’s known children.)

In time, the British media got to hear about Crowley, and stories on his depraved practices appeared in newspapers and magazines. He was dubbed the wickedest man in the world and such like. Although he denied many accusations, he was too poor to sue. It didn’t help his reputation when he published a novel called Diary of a Drug Fiend. News of activities at the Abbey finally filtered through to Italy’s Fascist government. Crowley was given a deportation notice, and the commune soon closed without him. He and Hirsig moved to Tunisia, where Crowley began writing his so-called autohagiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, parts of which were first published in 1929. Around the same time, he published one of his most significant works, Magick in Theory and Practice, and he became friends with Gerald Yorke, who began organising his finances.

Having moved around from Tunis, to Paris and London a lot, he moved to Berlin for a while in 1930, returning to London a year or two later. There, he launched several court cases against those he felt had libelled him, and won some of them. Nevertheless, Crowley was declared bankrupt in 1935; and, with few contributions arriving from his magical society links any longer, he was chronically short of money. He published Equinox of the Gods, containing a facsimile of The Book of the Law, which sold well. During the Second World War, he removed to Torquay until he tired of it and returned to London, only settling in Hastings in 1944. There he took a young Kenneth Grant as his secretary, and also appointed John Symonds as his literary executor. Crowley died in 1947, and his funeral was held at Brighton Crematorium - a dozen people attended.

There is much information about Crowley scattered across the internet, at Wikipedia, at the Harry Ransom Center (which holds a large Crowley archive), Vigilant Citizen, Controverscial.Com, Open Culture (with video documentary), and Thelamapedia.

Crowley left behind a large number of writings: a score of poetry books, many magical texts or Libri (teachings, methodologies, practices, or Thelemic scripture), short stories, and autobiographical works. A bibliography can be found at Wikipedia and at The Hermetic Library. Among his autobiographical writings are a number of diaries, which are all archived at the Yorke Collection in the Warburg Institute, London. Not all the archived diaries, however, are original manuscripts, but typescripts made from the originals (now lost) under the guidance of Crowley’s friend Gerald Yorke (who later bequeathed all the material to the Warburg).

Crowley’s diaries were not, for the most part, written with the aim of publication. However, in his lifetime, he did publish portions, for their magical significance, in The Equinox - the official organ of his organisation, A ∴ A ∴. - many editions of this can be read online. The Hermetic Library has a list of Crowley’s diaries, though not all the works on the list can be considered diaries in any but the loosest of senses. Crowley’s one novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend, is thought to be autobiographical, however the text bears little relation to an actual diary. Otherwise, Crowley’s various diaries have made their way into publication in different forms.

The most significant of Crowley’s diaries that have emerged in published form can be found in The Magical Record of the Beast 666, subtitled The Diaries of Aleister Crowley 1914-1920 edited with ‘copious annotations’ by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (Duckworth, 1972). In fact, this includes two separate diaries: Rex de Arte Regia kept by Crowley in New York from 1914-1918 to record his sexual operations and his efforts to perfect sexual magic; and The Magical Record of the Beast, a more general diary Crowley kept in 1920 mostly at Cefalù. At the time of writing, a pdf of the book can be read online here.)

The Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley, edited by Stephen Skinner (Neville Spearman, 1979) covers the year 1923, in Tunisia, after his expulsion from Italy. (An American version can be previewed at Amazon or Googlebooks, and a review can be read Obsidian Magazine). Otherwise, there is a text called The Amalantrah Working, a kind of diary from the first half of 1918, describing, indeed quoting, a series of hash/opium-induced visions and trance-communications received by the oddly-named Roddie Minor, who was at that time acting as Crowley’s scarlet woman. At some stage during the proceedings, Crowley underwent a form of experience involving a large-headed entity now known to occultists as Lam. The name derives from the Tibetan word for ‘way’ or ‘path’, and later Crowley was to draw a portrait of him/it that has become famous. Finally, a further diary, a fragment really, concerns a visit Crowley made to Lisbon in 1930 and his meeting with the writer Fernanda Pessoa. The text can be read within a paper by Marco Pasi’s available at Internet Archive. The paper, incidentally, provides an excellent overview of Crowley’s diary legacy.

From Rex de Arte Regia
16 January 1915
‘Weather like a fine day in May. Light of gas stove. Margaret Pitcher. A young pretty-stupid wide-mouthed flat-faced slim-bodied harlotry. Fair hair. Fine fat juicy Yoni. Object: Money. I invoked Ic-zod-heh-ca at the same time, thinking thus to propitiate the gnomes [earth elementals who preside over hidden treasure]. And I offer him a portion of the Sacrament. The ceremony was not good, as the girl was even more concentrated than I on the object of the Operation. But the Elixir [semen] was copious, well-formed, and of very pleasing quality. It was a fairly orgiastic rite, considering all.’

22 August 1916
‘Object: To become the greatest of all the Magi. Operation of long-since-unheard-of vehemence. Elixir of miraculous strength and sweetness. Mental concentration, Samadhic in intensity.’

12 October 1917
‘Object: ‘Io Pan!’ Operation: Orgie from 8.15 circa, continuous work, aided by C[ocaine] and B[randy]. Wonderful. Elixir admirable in all ways.’

From The Magical Record of the Beast
19 May 1920
‘I have been thinking over the question of the routine of the Abbey, both as to daily life and as to disciples. I want a minimum of things which disturb, and at the same time enough to breed Order. Daily Life: 1. Alostrael to proclaim the Law on waking. 2. Adoration of Ra. 3. Grace before breakfast at 7.00 a.m. 4. ditto dinner, noon. 5. Adoration of Ra. 6 and 7, ditto supper at 6.00 p.m. 8. Ritual work.

For newcomers: First week, 1, three days’ hospitality. 2. One day’s silence. 3, Three days’ instruction. 4. The Magical Oath, followed by four weeks’ silence and work. Sixth week, 5, one day’s instruction. 6. Six days’ Vision. Seventh and ninth weeks, 7. three weeks’ silence and work. Tenth week, 8, one week’s instruction and repose. Eleventh and thirteenth weeks, 9, as 7. This makes one Quarter. At the end, the survivor revises the whole period, and takes new counsel and Oath accordingly; but no routine can be appointed for this further period; all will depend on what seems advisable.

Saw Diana renewed tonight, the loveliest slim maiden, rich pale gold in a sea of blue shaded into pink, green, orange, and violet with clouds of ever delicate tone of purple and grey, in every form from solid banks to films of mist.

Her disappearance in the Hell below Amenti, where I suspect her of conduction with Tum, has been the signal for me to renew activity. Made a volcano panel. I wrote The Moralist.’

26 May 1920
‘3.40 a.m. It has been a trying night. I wrote two poems. Leah screamed terribly for over an hour until, twenty minutes ago, I felt it inhuman not to stop it, and so, in the impossibility of getting the doctor’s permission, I gave her about ⅛ grain of heroin under the tongue. She is now calm. I thought heroin better than my only alternative, ether, as he has been giving her laudanum, and ether is irritating to the system, and so contra-indicated in anything like enteritis (P.S. It acted splendidly, with no bad reaction.)

3.45 a.m. I notice that Language itself testifies to the soundness of my ontological theories; for the adjective of Naught is Naughty! Wrote two more poems.

11.00 p.m. Leah is still very ill; and this doctor rather trimmer. I think, without much confidence in himself. A tiring day, though I slept off some arrears.’

18 June 1920 [a few sentences from a much longer entry]
‘10:30 p.m. I accuse myself of not keeping my Diary properly. There ought to be a discoverable relation between my health, my worldly affairs, and the tone of my thoughts. For even Absolute Ego in eruption makes the relation between its modes of illusion a ‘true’, or harmonious one; for all moods are alike to It, despair a theme of pastime equally with exaltation. [. . .]

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law

10:36 p.m. I beginning a new MS book. My Magical Diary has been very voluminous in these last weeks; I seem to find that it is the sole mode of my initiated expression. I don’t write regular essays on a definite subject, or issue regularly planned instructions. This is presumably normal to my tense and exalted state, to the violent Motion proper to the resolution of all symbols. [. . .]

I am drunk with the pride-absinthe that I am great, the greatest man of my century, its best poet, its mightiest mage, its subtlest philosopher, nor any the less for that classed among the very few well eminent mountain-climbing, in chess-play, and in love.

I am aflame with the brandy of the thought that I am the sublimest Mystic in all history, that I am the Word of an Aeon, that I am the Beast, the Man, Six Hundred Sixty and Six, the self-crowned God whom men shall worship and blaspheme for centuries that are yet wound on Time’s spool, yea, I am insane as if with hashish in my Egomania and Folly of Greatness, that is yet Fact steel-hard, gold-glittering, silver-pure; I want to be yet more than this. [. . .]’


Aleister Crowley and me

In the late 1970s - when I was but a young man - I came across Aleister Crowley’s writings, and found his life so interesting and theatrical that I thought to write a play about his time at the Abbey of Thelema. I had access to some of Crowley’s books at the Warburg Institute, London, and I interviewed Gerald Yorke an elderly man who had been a close associate of Crowley’s. I did not know, until talking to Yorke, that a play about Crowley had already been written by Snoo Wilson. That play - The Beast - had been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company but seemed to have faded from view soon after it was staged. With very few theatres/companies willing to consider unsolicited plays, the market for my play was limited to say the least. The most receptive theatre at the time, the most welcoming for new playwrights, was The Bush, in London, where Jenny Topper was the director. But I had no luck there, or anywhere else.

Two years later, in early 1982, I found myself at The Bush to see a revival of Wilson’s play, retitled The Number of the Beast. It was hard to believe there was no link between The Bush having seen/read my Aleister Crowley play in mid-1979, and its commissioning of Wilson to revise his play on the very same subject. On entering the theatre, I was bemused to find the set looking rather like the one I had proposed for my play - i.e. the Abbey of Thelema. Indeed, I soon discovered that the play had been rewritten so that most of the action actually took place at the Abbey - just as in my own play. Coincidence? It seems unlikely. Any how, here are several extracts from my own diary (all available online) about my researching/writing the play, and about seeing Snoo Wilson’s revised version.

29 January 1979
‘Gerald Yorke enthralled me for hours. He told me tales to make the blood curdle. We took tea in the drawing room: marmalade sandwiches, biscuits and tea, no sugar. The man of means took trouble with his words but his laugh rocked me off balance. He seemed pleased that I wasn’t just another occult freak, but dismayed that I wasn’t a Thelemite. He said he had intended once to walk across to China, but found marriage better for his feet. My Aleister Crowley play project moves one step forward. Will, I ever start to write. Yorke told me that Snoo Wilson has already written a play on Crowley, a farce. I had to explain that I’d never written a play before, but that it was simply a challenge I’d set myself.’

22 February 1979
‘Pushing myself to get two or three pages of Crowley’s life written each day. The clickety clack of the typewriter seems to be the secondary thing that I do between the cleaning and the cooking and the talking or the playing. The translation of my imagination into scenes on paper is the most difficult - creating characters, working with them, showing them up through conversations. Then there is the swamp of stage directions that are the length of a novel in themselves. In capital letters stand out bold. And now, with a new ribbon in the clickety-clack machine, their blackness is overwhelming. How can I will myself to work eight-ten hours a day when the ideas run out. I have to search all the books for the next scene or spark of talk. I resort to a cigarette or cup of coffee or leave the house. Today, for example, I went to the Warburg and spent two hours submerged in Crowley in Therion, in The Beast 666, in the Great Hand of Boleskine. I handled some manuscripts typed by Leah Hirsig - ‘Record of the Abbey of Thelema’. She describes in detail the incidents relating to Betty May’s expulsion from the Abbey. It’s perfect. There was also a folder with letters written to and from AC, some about blackmail, money and debts. I touched with care AC’s magical (or drug) record for a period of two weeks at Fontainebleu in March 1922. In intricate detail, he recorded the times and amounts of cocaine and heroin he took. He also recorded conversations with himself, justifying the next dose, and how he felt he should be able to use drugs forever without becoming addicted, but nevertheless intended to wean himself off them. He noted, for example, how he would excuse an extra does of heroin because it soothed his asthma. He does continue to fascinate me, and I would like to get access to more of his papers.’

24 June 1979
‘Colin read my Crowley play. Jenny Topper at the Bush read it, and now there is nothing left of it. A dead play. No one wants it. The characters are unshaped, there is no theatrical development etc etc yawn yawn. Colin thinks I should go on writing stories. Ha ha, did you hear the one about the man called Frederic [my estranged father] who wanted to be a writer.’

20 February 1982
‘ ‘The Beast’ by Snoo Wilson was initially commissioned by the RSC almost a decade ago. In its original form it was nothing more than a farce but now it’s been extensively rewritten so that the bulk of the play takes place at the Abbey of Thelema. On entering the Bush theatre I was agreeable surprised to see a set much as the one I had imagined for my own play about Aleister Crowley. All the action takes place outside the rundown barn-temple. The acting was first class, although the writing and direction left little room for the characters to be truly difficult or even unlikeable. John Stride playing Crowley refused to shave his head but would have given a better and truer performance if had.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 12 October 2015.

As beautiful as her legend

‘The evening sunlight fading to make the colours hum more and more melodiously was a pleasure to us all. Greta did not seem to notice the magical effects, of which she in pink with pink and white striped trousers became a part and in this light she became as beautiful as her legend.’ This is Cecil Beaton writing in his diary about Greta Garbo, his ex-lover who was about to turn 60. Beaton, once obsessed by Garbo had wanted to marry her. They remained friends for decades, at least until Beaton published his diaries revealing the intimacies of their relationship. Today marks 120 years since Garbo’s birth.

Greta Lovisa Gustafsson was born in Stockholm on 18 September 1905 into a working class family. She left school at 13, and looked after her ill father. He died in 1920. Thereafter, she worked briefly in a barber’s shop, before taking a job in the PUB department store. Before long, she was modelling hats, and had secured more lucrative employment as a fashion model. In late 1920, she appeared in her first film commercial for the store, advertising women’s clothing. She made further advertising films, but, in 1922, the director Erik Arthur Petschler gave her a part in his short comedy, Peter the Tramp. From 1922 to 1924, she studied at the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s acting school in Stockholm; and it was during this period that she changed her name to Garbo.

The prominent Swedish director Mauritz Stiller recruited Garbo in 1924, and nurtured her for his films; but she then caught the eye of MGM’s Louis B. Mayer who asked her - still only 20 and unable to speak English - to come to the US. Once there, she and Stiller heard no word from Mayer, but eventually MGM’s head of production Irving Thalberg gave Garbo a screen test, and she was cast in Torrent. Stiller was hired to direct the next film for Garbo, The Temptress, but was soon fired. Garbo received rave reviews and went on to make eight more silent movies, turning her into a Hollywood star. John Gilbert, with whom she had an affair, was her co-star in several of these films, and is said to have taught her how to behave like a star, how to socialise at parties, and how to deal with studio bosses.

Despite concerns about her Swedish accent, she proved as much of a success when, from the early 1930s, MGM started making sound movies. Her first talkie, Anna Christie, was the highest grossing film of the year, and led to her first Oscar nomination. By 1933, she had negotiated a new contract with MGM, earning her $300,000 per film. Garbo continued to work, starring in films such as The Painted Veil, Anna Karenina, Camille and her first comedy, Ninotchka. With the success of Ninotchka, MGM chose another comedy, Two-Faced Woman, to be directed by George Cukor (who had directed Camille). This was not a critical success, and the negative reviews deeply affected Garbo. Although not intending to retire, in fact, she never made another film. Many a project was offered her in the 1940s, and she accepted some, but every one of them fell through.

Garbo never married or had children, though she had various affairs with men and women. Among these were the conductor Leopold Stokowski, the author Erich Maria Remarque, the photographer Cecil Beaton, and the poet Mercedes de Acosta. Her relationships with the latter two, in particular, have given rise to books: Greta & Cecil by Diana Souhami and Loving Garbo: The Story of Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton and Mercedes de Acosta by Hugo Vickers (both published by Jonathan Cape, 1994).

From the early days of her career, Garbo avoided society, preferring to spend her time alone or with friends. She never signed autographs or answered fan mail, and rarely gave interviews. In 1951, she became a naturalised US citizen, and in 1953 bought an apartment in Manhattan where she lived for the rest of her life. She became increasingly withdrawn in time - though she would occasionally take holidays with friends - and was known for walking the city, dressed casually and wearing large sunglasses.

According to the 1979 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica ‘Garbo had, in the opinion of her directors and most critics, a perfect instinct for doing the right thing before the camera. Her talent, her great beauty, and her indifference to public opinion made her career unique in the history of the cinema.’ She died in 1990. Further information is available from Wikipedia, the ‘Official Garbo website’, the fan site Garbo Forever, or the online Encyclopædia Britannica.

There is no evidence I can find of Garbo ever having kept a diary. However, she was the subject of other people’s journals, and, in particular, the memoir published by de Acosta (Here Lies the Heart) and the diaries published by Beaton. She considered herself betrayed by both ex-lovers for making public such intimate details. Beaton, himself, appeared fully conscious of the hurt he might cause to Garbo by publishing his diaries - though it wasn’t until he was long dead that some of his diaries were published in an expurgated form - see Nerves before a sitting. She also features in diaries kept by Remarque, but these have yet to be published and only short quotes about Garbo have appeared (in Great Garbo: A life apart, by Karen Swenson, for example).

Beaton’s diaries - especially those from the 1940s published as The Happy Years - are full of Beaton’s obsession with Garbo. A New York Times review says: ‘The core material for Loving Garbo was drawn from Beaton’s diaries and letters, in which he recorded his impressions of Garbo in minute detail, along with every seismic tremor of their relationship. Although Beaton’s encomiums to Garbo’s cheekbones and extra-thick eyelashes betray a rhapsodic giddiness, his writing never loses its undertone of shrewdness and common sense. And much as he may adore Garbo, he repeatedly evokes her as an object to be coveted for its social and economic value.’

Here are a few extracts about Garbo in Beaton’s diaries taken from published sources - the first two from Loving Garbo, the second two from Beaton in the Sixties, and the last from The Unexpurgated Beaton.

3 November 1947
‘I was completely surprised at what was happening & it took me some time to recover my bafflement. Within a few minutes of our reunion, after these long & void periods, of months of depression & doubt, we were suddenly together in unexplained, unexpected and inevitable intimacy. It is only on such occasions that one realises how fantastic life can be. I was hardly able to bridge the gulf so quickly & unexpectedly. I had to throw my mind back to the times at Reddish House when in my wildest dreams I had invented scenes that were now taking place.’

October 1956
‘She is like a man in many ways. She telephoned to say, I thought we might try a little experiment this evening at 6.30. But she spoke in French and it was difficult to understand at first what she meant. But soon I discovered, although I pretended not to. She was embarrassed and a certain pudeur on my part made me resent her frankness and straightforwardness - something that I should have respected.’

July 1965
‘I arrived at Vougliameni, the appointed bay where the yachts were harboured. Greta was the first I saw, sitting with her back to the quay, she had tied her haired back into a small pigtail with a rubber band. The effect was pleasing, neat and Chinese but the hair has become grey. The surprised profile turned to reveal a big smile. It was almost the same, and yet no, the two intervening years since we’ve last met have created havoc. I was appalled how destroyed her skin has become, covered with wrinkles, double chin, but worse the upper lip has jagged lower and the skin has perished into little lines, and there is a furriness that is disastrous. But no sign of defeat on Greta’s part. She was up to her old tricks. ‘My, my, my! Why can it be Beattie? Me Beat!’ [. . .]

In the apricot-colored light of the evening she still looks absolutely marvellous and she could be cleverly photographed to appear as beautiful as ever in films. But it is not just her beauty that is dazzling, it is the air of mysteriousness and other intangible qualities that make her so appealing, particularly when talking with sympathy and wonder to children or reacting herself to some situation with all the wonder and surprise of childhood itself.’

August 1965
‘The evening sunlight fading to make the colours hum more and more melodiously was a pleasure to us all. Greta did not seem to notice the magical effects, of which she in pink with pink and white striped trousers became a part and in this light she became as beautiful as her legend. But it is a legend that does no longer exist in reality. If she had been a real character she would have left the legend, developed a new life, new interests and knowledge. As it is, after thirty years she has not changed except outwardly, and even the manner and personality has dated. Poor old Marlene Dietrich, with her dye and facelift and new career as a singer, with all her nonsense, is a live and vital person, cooking for her grandchildren and being on the go. That is much preferable to this other non-giving, non-living phantom of the past.’

13 April 1973 [source: The Unexpurgated Beaton - The Cecil Beaton Diaries as they were written]
‘The day was not without its setbacks. Whether or not it was out of malice a commentator, after a radio interview, gave me a review of my book by - of all people - Auberon Waugh, the son of my old arch enemy. He seems to have inherited the spleen of his father. A devastating attack aimed to reduce me to a shred. It hurt. Then a horrid little woman journalist, referring to it, said, ‘You’re supposed to be a marvellous person, but they say your book is awful’ and she handed me Waugh’s review. [. . .] I do feel terribly guilty about exposing Garbo to public glare. Even though those things happened thirty years ago, my conscience has been pricking me terribly. Yet I know that if I had the option of not publishing it, I would still go ahead - and suffer. I only trust Greta can rise above it in the way she did about Mercedes’s book.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 18 September 2015.

Missing Tom and Kate

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the tragic death of the British mountain climber, Alison Hargreaves. Having scaled Everest without the aid of sherpas or bottled oxygen, she was intent on completing similar climbs of the second and third highest mountains, K2 and Kangchenjunga, but she died on the descent from the K2 summit. Her diaries, as used by David Rose and Ed Douglas in their biography, Regions of the Heart, reveal a woman constantly torn between love of her two children and her obsession not only to climb, but to make her mark as a mountain climber.

Hargreaves was born in 1962, and grew up in Belper, Derbyshire, the middle child of three. Her family were often out walking on the English hills, and aged nine she had raced ahead of them to be the first to the summit of Britain’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis. She was introduced to rock climbing aged 13, preferring to climb than to study for Oxford as her parents had done. Aged 16, while working in a climbing shop, she met amateur climber Jim Ballard, nearly twice her age. She left home two years later to live with him. The couple ran an outdoor equipment shop, while Hargreaves trained and climbed in her spare time. By her mid-20s, she had climbed in the Himalayas, but in 1988 - the year she married Jim - she was back in the Alps, notably climbing the north face of the Eiger while six months pregnant with Tom. Her second child, Kate, was born two years later.

By 1993, Alison and Jim were in so much debt they had to leave their house. They relocated to live in Switzerland, in an old Land Rover, so that Hargreaves could continue to climb. That year she became the first person ever to scale the six north faces of the Alps alone and in one season. This brought her media and sponsorship attention. She wrote a book about the feat - A Hard Day’s Summer - but it was poorly received, and money problems continued.

Hargreaves decided that her next project - for personal and financial reasons - should be Everest. She bailed on a first attempt in 1994 fearing frostbite, but a second attempt in May 1995 succeeded, making her the first woman to reach the summit alone and without supplementary oxygen (the first man was Reinhold Messner - see Death on Nanga Parbat). She quickly made further plans to conquer the second two highest mountains in the world (K2 and Kangchenjunga). After a brief trip back to see her family in the UK, she returned to the Himalayas in June to join an American team with a permit to climb K2. For weeks, stormy weather kept the team at base camp. By August, remnants of the team had joined up with members of other teams from Canada and New Zealand. Peter Hillary, son of Edmund who along with Tenzing Norgay completed the first successful ascent of Mount Everest (see On top of Mount Everest), was also there with a Spanish team.

On 13 August, Hillary decided to turn back and go down, forecasting a change in weather conditions. However, Hargreaves and Spaniard Javier Olivar saw fine weather and made for the summit, reaching it at 6.45pm, making Hargreaves the first woman to conquer both Everest and K2 without supplemental oxygen or support. Four other climbers reached the summit behind them; but, then, all six died in a violent storm on the way down. A seventh climber that had turned back below the summit died later from the effects of exposure. The next day two other Spanish climbers, lower down, saw debris equipment, and a body in the distance, and concluded it was Hargreaves who had been blown off the mountain in the storm.

Hillary, in an interview with The Independent, noted that a bizarre chemistry had developed among the several expeditions on the mountain ‘that meant they were going for the summit no matter what’. Of Alison, in particular, he said: ‘[She] was a brilliant climber but she had tremendous commercial pressures on her and she became obsessed. When you spoke to her it was clear that climbing came first and everything else was secondary.’

Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopedia.com, a Guardian interview with Jim Ballard, the BBC, or The Independent’s obituary. Alison and Jim’s son, Tom, later became the first person to climb solo all six major north faces of the Alps in one winter - see The Telegraph, for example.

Hargreaves left behind a large volume of diary material which, apparently, was fought over by her husband on one side and her parents on the other. In any case, two journalist/climbers, David Rose and Ed Douglas were given access to them for their sympathetic biography Regions of the Heart - The Triumph and Tragedy of Alison Hargreaves (Michael Joseph, 1999).

The authors say: ‘Alison’s diaries provide a record of her life which is well in excess of a million words. For the period 1973-92, the quotations from them found here were copied by us from the originals, which were left at Meerbrook Lea when the house was repossessed in 1993 and rescued by her parents. Later diary entries were published in her own A Hard Day’s Summer (Hodder & Stoughton, 1994) and Jim Ballard’s One and two Halves to K2 (BBC Books, 1996).’

Unfortunately, their book quotes very few actual diary entries, and rarely do they come referenced with a date. The following diary-focused extracts in Regions of the Heart can all be found in the last chapter, Nemesis.

‘ ‘I’ve been missing Tom and Kate today,’ she wrote in her diary as early as 3 July, ‘probably because I have had time to think about them. I’ve half felt like not wanting really to stay and finish this “job off” - but I don’t know if or when I’ll get another chance, so I might regret it.’ ’

‘Cooney remembers her returning in tears on 11 July from one of the agonizingly short telephone calls she made on the satellite phone to her children. ‘I spoke for two and a half minutes,’ she wrote miserably in her diary.’ ’

‘ ‘I am feeling pressure back home,’ she wrote in her diary on 5 August at the height of her crisis. ‘Why I failed, what went wrong. Personally it doesn’t matter but I worry about how everyone else will see it.’ Except, of course, that how others saw her was very important indeed to her self-esteem, and for Alison failure was bitterly personal.’

‘On 5 August, with the porters ready to start carrying her equipment down the glacier next day, she wrote of how she missed the children. She’d now spent more than a hundred days of 1995 away from Tom and Kate. Yet there was still a desire for the mountain, too. ‘It eats away at me - wanting the children and wanting K2,’ she wrote. ‘I feel like I’m pulled in two. Maybe they’d be happier if Mum was around but maybe summiting K2 would help make a better future for them. Long term, having me back safe and sound is surely more important.’ ’ [It’s not clear from the authors’ text whether this last is an actual diary entry or not.]

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 13 August 2015.

Ampère falling in love

André-Marie Ampère, dubbed the father of electrodynamics, was born 250 years ago today. A child of the enlightenment and Rousseau’s education principles, he became a great scientist without formal training. He left behind one youthful diary, a naive and charming account of his love and courtship of the woman who became his wife, but then died just four years later.

Ampère was born in Lyon, France, on 20 January 1775. His father was a prosperous businessman who admired the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In line with Rousseau’s education ideas, he left his son to educate himself at the family home - with a well-stocked library - at Poleymieux-au-Mont-d’Or near Lyon. Although his father came to be called into public service by the new revolutionary government, he was guillotined in 1793 as part of the so-called Jacobin purges. Ampère, himself, found regular work as a maths teacher in 1799. This gave him enough income to marry his sweetheart, Julie Carron.

In 1802, Ampère was appointed a professor of physics and chemistry at the École Centrale in Bourg-en-Bresse, which meant leaving Julie, by then a sick woman, and his son in Lyon. In Bourg, he produced his first treatise on mathematical probability - Considerations on the Mathematical Theory of Games, which he sent to the Paris Academy of Sciences. Following the death of Julie, he moved to the capital and began teaching at the new École Polytechnique, where, in 1809, he was appointed professor of mathematics.

As well as holding positions at the École Polytechnique through to 1828, Ampère also taught philosophy and astronomy at the University of Paris for a while, and in 1824 was elected to the chair in experimental physics at the Collège de France. He engaged in all kinds of scientific enquiry, but, from 1820, when hearing of a Danish discovery which showed how a magnetic needle can be deflected by an electric current, he began developing theories to understand the relationship between electricity and magnetism.

It is for his work in understanding electromagnetism that Ampère is best remembered. He developed a physical account of electromagnetic phenomena, empirically demonstrable and mathematically predictive, and in 1827 published his major work, Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience. This work coined the name of a new science, electrodynamics, while Ampère also gave his name, in time, to Ampère’s Law, and the SI unit of electric current, the ampere, often shortened to amp. He died in 1836. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, NNBD, Encyclopaedia Britannica. James R. Hofmann’s biography - André-Marie Ampère: Enlightenment an Electrodynamics - can also be previewed at Googlebooks.

Although Ampère is not known as a diarist, he did leave behind one published diary, a record of his courtship with his future wife. This was first published, in French, in 1869, as Journal et Correspondance de André-Marie Ampère (freely available in French at Internet Archive or Gallica). An 1875 English review of the book can be found in The North American Review (Vol. 121, No. 249, Oct., 1875), viewable online at JSTOR. The reviewer, T. S. Perry, says the volume is ‘idyllic’ and ‘charming’, and though Ampère was ‘far from being a fool, he certainly shows how foolish an intelligent man can be in the privacy of his diary’. And Perry adds: ‘Although Ampère’s letters and diary lack the historical value of Pepys’s they have a far higher interest in the light they throw upon the private life and character of a great and good man.’ High praise indeed.

An English translation was published by R. Bentley & Son, a few years later, in 1873, with the title The Story of his Love: being the journal and early correspondence of of André-Marie Ampère with his family circle during the First Republic, 1793-1804. The full text of the English version can be read online at Googlebooks.

10 April 1796
‘I saw her for the first time.’

10 August 1796
‘I went to her house, and they lent me ‘Le Nouvelle Morali di Soave’.’

3 September 1796
‘M. Coupier had left the day before. I went to return ‘Le Nouvelle’ and they allowed me to select a volume from the library. I took Mme. Deshoulières. I was a few moments alone with her.’

4 September 1796
‘I accompanied the two sisters after mass. I brought away the first volume of Benardin. She told me that she should be alone, as her mother and sister were leaving on Wednesday.’

9 September 1796
‘I went there, and only Elise.’

14 September 1796
‘I returned the second volume of Bernardin, and had some conversation both her and Jenny. I promised to bring some comedies on the following day.’

17 September 1796
‘I took them, and began to open my heart.’

27 January 1797
‘At length she has arrived from Lyons; her mother did not come into the room at once. Apparently for the sake of looking at some vignettes, I knelt by her side; her mother came in and made me sit down by her.’

9 June 1797
‘I was prevented from giving a lesson on account my cough; I went away rather early, taking with Gresset, and the third volume of the Histoire de France. Julie shows me the trick of solitaire, which I had guessed the evening before; I seated myself near Julie, and remained by her till the end.

Incidentally, referring to some airs and songs, I left C’est en vain que la nature on the table. I ate a cherry she had let fall, and kissed a rose which she had smelt; in the walk I twice gave her my hand to get over a stile, her mother made room for me on the seat between herself and Julia; in returning I told her that it was long since I had passed so happy a day, but that it was the contemplation of nature which had charmed me the most; she spoke to me the whole day with much kindness.’

21 May 1803
‘Walk in the garden. Julie very ill.’

9 July 1803
‘Julie very ill in the morning. I begged M. Mollet to take my place at the Lyceum. M. Pelotin continued the same treatment, in spite of the new symptom.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 20 January 2015.

Death on Nanga Parbat

Happy birthday Reinhold Messner, 80 years old today. An Italian mountaineer, dubbed by some as the greatest climber in history, he was the first to make a solo ascent of Mount Everest without additional oxygen, and he was the first to climb all 14 peaks in the world over 8,000 metres. The first of these was Nanga Parbat, in the western Himalayas, in 1970. During that expedition, his brother, Günther, died. Messner has published many books, but none, as far as I know, could be classed as diaries. Nevertheless, a diary, and the evidence therein, has been at the centre of a controversy blighting his fame since the early 2000s, when several colleagues on the Nanga Parbat climb broke a long silence to claim that, contrary to Messner’s account, he had, in fact, been responsible for his brother’s death.

Messner was born in Brixen, in the very north of Italy, on 17 September 1944, and grew up, fluent in Italian and German, in nearby Villnöß. He was part of a large family, with many brothers; and his father was a teacher. From the age of 13, he began climbing with his younger brother Günther, and by their early 20s, it is said, they were already among the best climbers in Europe. Inspired by the Austrian mountaineer, Hermann Buhl (the first man to climb Nanga Parbat), Messner embraced the so-called alpine style of climbing, with light equipment and a minimum of external help.

In 1970, Messner undertook his first major climb, an ascent of Nanga Parbat. Alhough he and Günther succeeded in ascending the unclimbed Rupal face, Günther lost his life on the descent. (Messner himself lost several toes to frostbite, which meant he could not climb on rock as well, so, thereafter, he focused on higher mountains where the climbing was mostly on ice.) At the time, he was attacked by others for having persisted on the climb even though his brother was less experienced, and these accusations led to various disputes and lawsuits. In 1971, he returned to the mountain to look for his brother.

In the next few years, Messner succeeded in climbing two further eight-thousanders, before ascending Everest in 1978 without supplemental oxygen. Two years later, he made a second Everest ascent, this time solo and without oxygen. He continued climbing the eight-thousanders through to 1986 by when he had become the first man to climb all fourteen of them without supplemental oxygen. After that, Messner eschewed climbing high mountains, preferring to undertake more unusual expeditions, such as skiing across the Antartic (1989-1990), and, more recently (2004), walking across the Gobi Desert.

Messner has written over 80 books, many translated into other languages, including English, with titles such as Free Spirit: A Climber’s Life; The Crystal Horizon: Everest - The First Solo Ascent; All Fourteen 8,000ers; My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas’ Deepest Mystery; and The Big Walls: From the North Face of the Eiger to the South Face of Dhaulagiri. He served as an MEP for the Italian Green Party between 1999 and 2004; he helped found the international NGO, Mountain Wilderness; and he now devotes most of his time to the Messner Mountain Museum, which is located at five different sites in Northern Italy.

There is some biographical material about Messner available in English on the internet, at Wikipedia, for example, at Badass of the Week, and at Youtube (interview in English), but there are also plenty of published books about his life, not least Reinhold Messner: My Life at the Limit.

Although Messner has written many books about his climbing life, none, as far as I can tell, contain actual diary material. However, 30 years after his successful but tragic climb on Nanga Parbat, the controversy over his role in Günther’s death resurfaced. In 2002, Messner published The Naked Mountain, a retelling of the 1970 Nanga Parbat expedition. Even before its publication, though, several of the team’s members had publicly announced they disputed many of the details in Messner’s account. Two of his fellow team members (including Max von Kienlin) published their own books, in Germany, claiming that Messner held far more responsibility for his brother’s death than he had admitted. Messner reacted furiously, and the charges and counter-charges were played out in the European press.

Good summaries of the dispute can be found in 2004 articles in The Guardian, a 2005 article in Men’s Journal, a 2006 article in Outside. and another in Vanity Fair. The details are fairly intricate, but in summary are as National Geographic explained at the time: ‘While Messner claims he led his flagging brother down the Diamir Face as a last resort, some teammates charge that he had planned a solo ascent and traverse of the mountain from early on in the expedition. He had even talked openly about it to his teammates (though not, of course, to expedition leader Herrligkoffer). Americans Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein had become instant legends with their traverse of Everest in 1963. To complete a comparable traverse of Nanga Parbat - solo - would make Messner a mountaineering celebrity on a par with his hero Hermann Buhl. Messner’s critics believe he was so focused on that goal that he placed it ahead of caring for his flagging brother.’

The evidence against Messner depends largely on von Kienlin’s diary, which he reproduces at length in a book, the title of which translates from German as The Traverse: Günther Messner’s Death on Nanga Parbat). Messner, though, claims von Kienen faked the diary pages and added them at a later stage. Messner has also made much play of the locations at which gruesome remains of his brother (first a leg bone, then a boot, then a headless corpse) were found to bolster his own account. Here is a good explanation of the role von Kienlin’s diary has played in the controversy, again from a 2004 National Geographic article:

‘Messner says he’s convinced that two crucial pages of von Kienlin’s diary are fake - written in 2002 or 2003 on “old paper” and stitched into the journal as if penned in 1970. Charlie Buffet, one of Europe’s leading mountaineering journalists, asked Messner about the diary during an interview for Le Monde in late January 2004. (Buffet also assisted in reporting this article.) Messner’s response was blistering: “Yesterday, I was on television in Berlin, and I said publicly that this liar has falsified his journal. If that’s not true, he can sue me. And show his journal, so that I can prove he falsified it and he will go to prison.”

The most devastating charge in von Kienlin’s book, however, concerns the conversations he says he had with Messner himself. The diary describes an anguished talk the two friends had, soon after being reunited in Gilgit, in which the distraught Messner says: “I’ve lost Günther! I called for him. I don’t know why he couldn’t hear me. Maybe he was in bad shape. Maybe he didn’t manage [to climb down]. Maybe he even fell. My God, I didn’t want that!”

The diary depicts Messner as having been overcome with doubts and regret, wailing, “Perhaps I should have gone with him, because alone, he wasn’t capable of it. Why did he follow me? Why?" He hides his face in his hands.

Then von Kienlin’s account adds a stunning twist: Since the tortured Messner is almost incapable of talking, von Kienlin writes, “I feel obligated to guide him.” Messner doesn’t know what to say to their leader, Karl Herrligkoffer, so von Kienlin proposes a face-saving fabrication: “You must not tell K that you intended to make the traverse.”

According to von Kienlin, he himself proffered the fiction that Günther was lost in an avalanche low on the Diamir Face - and understood that he must keep an eternal silence about the ruse.

Messner’s response, as recorded in the diary: “R pulls himself together. ‘You’re right.’ He looks at me with clear eyes.” ’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 17 September 2014.

I’d have liked that too

‘Remembered to-day something I’d said to F. last summer as we lay on the bed together: I said “You know, you’re one of the few men I’d like to have had a child by.” After all, it was nearly twenty years since F. and I first went to bed together, so my remark shouldn’t have startled him. But no, perhaps it didn’t startle him - I’m wrong. Only his arm round me tightened a little, “Yes,” he said slowly, “I’d have liked that too.” ’ This is from the recently-published diaries of a largely forgotten New Zealand gay writer, James Courage, who died 60 years ago today

Courage was born in Christchurch in 1903, the eldest of five children. His grandfather had emigrated to New Zealand in the 1860s, and purchased a sheep station, and a grandmother had written several books about early colonial life. Taught at home during his early years, he was enrolled at Dunelm Preparatory School between 1912 and 1915, entering the rather exclusive Christ’s College in 1916. Though he excelled for a while at English, he seems to have had some kind of breakdown while still at school. Encouraged by his family, he travelled to England in 1923, gaining entrance to study at Oxford University, St John’s College. While there, he published poems, music reviews, and several plays in local/university publications. He graduated with a modest English degree in 1927.

Thereafter, Courage lived in London, studying the piano, and working occasionally as a journalist. He travelled in Europe and South America for a while, and lived in a fisherman’s cottage in St Ives. In 1931, he contracted tuberculosis, and was confined to a Norfolk sanatorium until 1933. During this time, though, his first novel One House was published by Victor Gollancz, though with a limited print run. On leaving the sanatorium, Courage returned to New Zealand for an extended period of convalescence, during which he made several contacts, On returning to the UK in 1936, he rented a flat in London and became involved with the Kiwi literary scene, meeting among others, Charles Brasch with whom Courage would maintain a life-long correspondence. Brasch published several of Courage’s poems in Landfall, a New Zealand literary journal he founded, and he edited a posthumous collection of Courage’s short stories.

Classified as medically unfit, Courage became a fire warden during the Second World War, and from 1940 he worked at a bookshop in Hampstead. Although regarded as excellent company, he nonetheless suffered from depression and from 1951 was nearly always under psychiatric treatment. Between 1948 and 1961, he published half a dozen novels, mostly set in New Zealand. One novel - A Way of Love - set in England focuses on a young homosexual’s relationship with an older man. Courage died in Hampstead on 5 October 1963 - see the websites of The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand and Victoria University of Wellington for further biographical information.

The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand has this assessment of Courage: ‘Discreet to a fault, and even self-apologetic by modern standards, the novel [A Way of Love] was banned under the censorship provisions in place prior to the setting up of the Indecent Publications Tribunal in 1964, and was only available to few New Zealanders. In recent times some commentators have viewed it as a milestone in New Zealand writing by gay writers. Published at a time when no other New Zealand writer addressed the themes of sexual orientation and same-sex relationships, except in very indirect ways, Courage’s novel stands out as a brave exception.’

Most recently, Courage has garnered some critical attention for his diaries edited by Chris Brickell and  published in 2021 by the Otago University Press. A review can be read at the New Zealand Newsroom. Here, though, is the opening paragraph of the introduction to James Courage Diaries, followed by several extracts from the diaries themselves. 

‘Courage was a prolific and idiosyncratic diarist. He began making notes about his life in 1920, at the age of 16, and carried on until 1963, the year of his death. His 14 private journals have attracted less attention than his novels, short stories and plays, but they have an immediacy that is not often found in his formal writings. Courage’s ‘spasmodic’ diary entries captured the smallest details of lives and places: the fine grained aspects of his daily routine in Christchurch, and later in England after he moved there in 1922, as well as the impact of global events. He wrote about his travels by ocean liner during the 1930s, the effects of World War II on the inhabitants of inner-city London where he was a fire warden for an apartment building, and his treatment for tuberculosis. The diaries also reveal what it was like to be homosexual in a world that was not always accepting, how Freudian psychotherapy changed Courage’s view of himself and how publishers’ decisions affected his often-tenuous self-esteem.

3 February 1930
‘This man has changed my life. For the first time I am willing to surrender my reserve to another. Even my sense of humour ‘goes under’: and my ‘second man’ (a sneaking hyper-critical fellow) disappears - which is extremely remarkable. Long may it last!’

9 February 1930
‘My twenty-seventh birthday. I turn back a year in the journal to find that last February I wrote as an aspiration: “To be famous and to be loved.” Well, I am loved. Now what about the fame?’

11 March 1930
‘I love this man unreservedly. I cannot imagine life without him.’

20 October 1931
‘Afternoon sadness. A roaring north-easterly wind tears the leaves from the trees. Bitterly cold. I sit with blue hands. Towers and scuds of white and grey cloud, with beams between. Rooks singing wildly.’

9 February 1932
‘My twenty-ninth birthday. Sobering reflection that I have spent so much of the last nine years in the company of fools, vagabonds, sex-maniacs and literary people generally. Well, if I have caught T. B. I’ve at least escaped syphilis. My great regret is that I have not written, as yet, the really good book I want to, though ‘The PY’ has excellent moments. To-day I wrote the passage about my grandmother and Mr Sherwood.’

10 July 1932
‘Pain and depression. My chest hurts: I feel stifled when I cough. A good deal of sputum. Heaven help me.’

13 July 1932
‘Appalling depression - really rock-bottom - everything in the world went black. This culminated in the evening when I burst into tears when Mrs M. came to see me, and wept for an hour and a half. I really think she saved me from suicide. I haven’t been so upset since Dec 27th, 1930, on the way to S. America. Completely and absolutely de profundis.’

16 July 1932
‘Feeling much stronger: despondency vanished. Mrs M. read One House in proof, and liked it - or rather, admired it. She envies me my “easy, flexible English”. I told her it was the result of damned hard work: and so it was.’

 13 May 1937
‘I have bought this journal and make my first entry in it in Brighton (Sussex). Am staying at the Old Ship Hotel, having temporarily - and for a very good reason - shut up the flat in Hampstead. I have been here a fortnight tomorrow, staying alone. Solitude by no means as depressing as I had feared, though I miss having somebody to talk to in the evenings. That, 1 suppose, is the penalty of living out of London - at least for a soi-disant intellectual. However, for the moment it can’t be helped; and at least I’ve taken to writing letters again, a habit of which the telephone in London had almost robbed me. If I had enough gumption I’d go out and live for a bit somewhere completely away from towns - somewhere in the Weald of Sussex, for instance. But I haven’t the gumption, so that’s that. I even say to myself, cynically, that there’s nothing to do in the country except farm and/ or fornicate. However that may be, I don’t feel at the moment that I want to do either. So, at Brighton I stay (where, if the opportunity arises, I can at least fornicate urbanly and in good company - to judge by the mien of most of the couples who populate the hotels). My waiter at the hotel here said yesterday (Coronation Day): “It ought to have been Teddy (Windsor) they crowned. Then he could have had Mrs Simpson to-night and told England to go to hell!” Evidently Brighton’s philosophy is on the pagan side. It must be something to do with that amazing Royal Pavilion of George IV’s and Mrs Fitzherbert’s.’

13 February 1943
‘I shall remember this day all my life for the sad news it brought me. When I reached home at 5.30 in the evening I found an envelope from the Returned Letter Office containing two of my letters (written in Dec. last) to my much- and long-loved Christopher. On each of my envelopes was pasted a typed notice telling me that the addressee had died on active service. For about an hour I hardly felt the shock. I even played the piano and read. Then when Mrs Timmons (who remembered Chris) arrived to cook my dinner I told her the news. Directly she said “Oh, how terrible”, the tears rushed into my eyes and I wept. Later in the evening I rang up Joan V. who knew Chris well. She told me that he died of wounds “due to shell or bomb blast” on Dec. 11th last (two months ago) somewhere in the Mediterranean. The announcement had been in the papers but I had not seen it. Chris was 27. Before going to bed I wrote to his mother, though I found this difficult.’

25 July 1953
‘One should be able to write of one’s sexual predilections as naturally as one’s taste in food.

Remembered to-day something I’d said to F. last summer as we lay on the bed together: I said “You know, you’re one of the few men I’d like to have had a child by.” After all, it was nearly twenty years since F. and I first went to bed together, so my remark shouldn’t have startled him. But no, perhaps it didn’t startle him - I’m wrong. Only his arm round me tightened a little, “Yes,” he said slowly, “I’d have liked that too.” ’

Only you, my diary

‘Only you, my diary, know that it is here I show my fears, weaknesses, my complaints, my disillusions. I feel I cannot be weak outside because others depend on me. I rest my head here and weep. Henry asked me to help him with his work. Gonzalo asks me to join political revolutions. I live in a period of dissolution and disentegration. Even art today is not considered a vocation, a profession, a religion, but a neurosis, a disease, an “escape”. I titled this diary “drifting”. I thought I too would dissolve for a little while, but ultimately I become whole again.’

This is Anaїs Nin writing in August 1936. The same year she would begin to edit her earlier diaries with a view to publishing them. However, it would be another three decades before a first volume reached print, and when it did, Karl Shapiro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, would write: ‘For a generation the literary world on both sides of the Atlantic has lived with the rumour of an extraordinary diary. Earlier readers of the manuscript dicussed it with breathtaking superlatives as a work that would take its place with the great revelations of literature. A significant section of this diary is at last in print and it appears that the great claims made for it are justified.’

Today - the 120th anniversary of her birth - seems a good day to remember Nin, one of the great literary diarists.

Anaїs Nin was born in France on 21 February 1903. Her parents, of mixed and partly Cuban heritage, were both music professionals. When they separated, their mother took Anaїs and her two brothers to New York City. At 20, she married a banker, Hugh Guiler, who later illustrated some of her books and went on to become a film maker. The couple moved to Paris in 1924, where Nin began writing fiction and where she fell in with the Villa Seurat group, which included the writers Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell (‘Larry’ in the diary). She had many love affairs, often with well known literary figures, but her relationship with Miller was more constant than most.

In 1932, Nin’s D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study was published with a limited print run. Also, in the mid-1930s, she began therapy with Otto Rank, a one-time pupil of Sigmund Freud. Despite Rank being 20 years older, she had an affair with him lasting several years (for more see The Diary Review article Nothing but the eyes). Thereafter, Nin published several novellas and collections of short stories, such as House of Incest (1936), Winter of Artifice (1939) and Under a Glass Bell (1944). Also in the 1940s, she began to write short erotic stories, though these were not published until the 1970s (Delta of Venus and Little Birds).

In 1939, Nin and Guiler relocated to New York. In 1946, Nin met the actor Rupert Pole, 16 years her junior; and in 1955 she married him in Arizona. The couple went to live in California, though Pole was unaware that Nin was already married; and Guiler, to whom Nin returned to in New York often, remained ignorant of the marriage to Pole. Nin, eventually, had her marriage to Pole annulled because of the legal complications of both husbands claiming her as a dependent on their tax returns. Nin continued to live with Pole, though, until her death in 1977, and Pole became her literary executor.

Throughout her life, starting aged 14, Nin was a committed, almost obsessed, diary writer. According to Wikipedia’s entry on The Diary of Anaïs Nin, the diary became ‘her best friend and confidante’. And, ‘despite the attempts of her mother, therapists Rene Allendy and Otto Rank, and writer Henry Miller, to break [her] of her dependence on the diary, she would continue to keep a diary up until her death in 1977’.

Already in the early 1930s, encouraged by her friends, especially Lawrence Durrell (see, also, A book out of these scraps), Nin began editing her diaries with a view to publication. However, it was not until 1966 that a first volume (covering the years 1931-1934) appeared, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Over the next decade or so, six more volumes in the same series would be published, each one edited by Nin herself; and these would later be referred to as the ‘expurgated’ version of Nin’s diary. (In the UK, they were published by Peter Owen and titled The Journals of Anaïs Nin.)

After her death, several volumes of Nin’s earlier diaries, i.e. from 1914 to 1931, were published, and then after Guiler’s death, in 1985, Pole commissioned unexpurgated versions of the journals. There have been several of these: Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer The Moon, all subtitled From a Journal of Love.

Further information on Nin is readily available across the web, at Wikipedia, The Official Anaïs Nin Blog, and Sky Blue Press. Excerpts from her diaries are also readily available, at Googlebooks for example, and on the fan sites.

The following extracts about diary writing itself are taken from The Journals of Anaïs Nin - Volume Two, i.e. the second published edition of the expurgated diaries.

August 1936
‘Conflict with diary-writing. While I write in the diary I cannot write a book. I try to flow in a dual manner, to keep recording and to invent at the same time, to transform. The two activities are antithetical. If I were a real diarist, like Pepys or Amiel, I would be satisfied to record, but I am not, I want to fill in, transform, project, expand, deepen, I want this ultimate flowering that comes of creation. As I read the diary I was aware of all that I have left unsaid which can only be said with creative work, by lingering, expanding, developing. [. . .]

After I wrote here the other day on art versus diary, I felt the danger of putting art into the diary. It might kill its greatest quality, its naturalness. I must split up and do something apart - it is a need. No consciousness of perfection must enter the diary. Good-bye completeness. My plan of writing up a Day and a Night until I reach perfection.’

Fall 1937
‘Larry began to look over the volumes I took out of the tin box. But I began to feel uneasy, agitated, and we talked first. His first remark was: “Why, that is as terrifying as Nijinsky.” We had all been reading Nijinsky’s diary. Larry went away with an armful of volumes after saying: “You are a strange person, sitting there, surrounded by your black notebooks.”

I feel right about the diary. I will not stop. It is a necessity. But why does Henry attack it? He says I give good justifications for it each time but that he does not believe them.

Nijinsky, writing just before all connections broke with human beings. . .

Larry with his keen eyes, saying: “I have only smelled the diary writing, just read a page here and there. You have done it, the real female writing. It is a tragic work. You restore tragedy which the world has lost. Go on. Don’t stop. I’m sick of hearing about art. What you have done nobody has done. It is amazing. It is new.” ’  (See The Diary Review for more on Nijinsky’s diary.)

November 1937
‘Because of Henry’s description of the whalelike diary, Larry calls me “the Whale”. And signs himself: “your ever-admiring limpet.” [. . .]

Have gone to work on abridged edition of the diary. [. . .]

Henry has been collecting subscriptions to publish the first volume of the diary, and the first one he received was from André Maurois, who added that, however, he did not want all of the fifty-four volumes, his house was too full of books. In between these visits I arranged all the diaries I want to edit in one box so I can plunge into them easily.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 21 February 2013.

Incredibly fantastic

Lili Elbe, a Danish painter and famously a transgender woman, was born 140 years ago today. She wrote an autobiographical memoir - Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex - which was first published in English in 1933 and included substantial extracts from her diaries. Norman Haire, a medical practitioner and sexologist, who provided an introduction to the book, starts by noting that this story ‘must seem incredibly fantastic’.

Einar Wegener was born in Vejle, Denmark, on 28 December 1882, the son of a spice merchant. Little seems to be known about his early life, but he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. There, he met Gerda Gottlieb. They married in 1905, and both worked as illustrators, Einar producing landscape paintings while Gottlieb illustrated for books and fashion magazines. Einar won the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at the Vejle Art Museum in Denmark, among other places. In time, Gottlieb became famous for her paintings of beautiful women with haunting eyes and chic clothes. The story goes that Wegener first started dressing in women’s clothes to stand in for Gottlieb’s models.

The couple travelled in France and Italy, before settling in Paris, where Wegener felt freer to entertain at home or appear in public dressed as a woman. Over time, the female side of his personality became increasingly important, leading him to research his behaviour, and to consult doctors. In 1930, physicians found that he had more female than male hormones (and therefore may have had what is now known as Klinefelter syndrome). That same year, he began to undergo a series of experimental surgical procedures, to remove his testicles and penis and to transplant ovaries and a uterus into his body. In October 1930, a Danish court annulled his marriage, and he was able to have his sex and name legally changed, to Lili Ilse Elvenes. The pseudonym Lili Elbe first came from a Danish newspaper article. She died in 1931, not long after the fifth procedure. Further information can be found at Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Not long after Elbe’s death, in 1932, the story of his/her transition was published in Danish, and it was soon translated into German and English. The English version (translated from the German by  H. J. Stenning) was published in 1933 by Jarrolds as Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex with the subtitle The true story of the miraculous transformation of the Danish painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). The book is freely available at Internet Archive. An introduction is provided by Norman Haire who was a medical practitioner and sexologist. He writes: ‘To the reader unfamiliar with the unhappy byways of sexual pathology, the story told in this book must seem incredibly fantastic. [. . .]

The story of this strange case has been written by Niels Hoyer, partly from his own knowledge, partly from material dictated by Lili herself, partly from Lili's diaries, and partly from letters written by Lili and other persons concerned. The biographer states that the surgeon who performed the operation has passed his account of the case as correct.’

In fact, Niels Hoyer was a pseudonym for a friend of Elbe’s, but the text was written by Elbe herself. Throughout, and very confusingly, he/she uses various names for her male and female sides, as well as pseudonyms for everyone else. Much discussion of these names, and of the work in general and many other issues connected with it can be found in a scholarly edition of the work published in 2020 by Bloomsbury (edited by Pamela L. Caughie and Sabine Meyer). There is also a companion website where the texts can be read online - Lili Elbe Digital Archive.

In her original text, Elbe quotes from her diaries extensively and from those kept by Gottlieb. However, she never tells us much about her diaries, her diary-writing habit, nor does she date most of the quoted entries. However she does tell us a bit about Gerda’s diary: ‘During these days Grete began to keep a diary. Every evening she recorded therein her observations, and the experiences which crowded thickly upon her in the company of the new Lili, in simple, almost fumbling sentences, seeking the way of her friend - this difficult, wonderful way upon which Lili had scarcely ventured to take the first step. Here is a leaf from the diary that she started: “Lili bears everything with incredible patience. True, she whimpers every morning, and even yet believe. . .  Or is it that she will not yet show that she believes?” ’

Here is one example of how Elbe used her own diary in writing Man into Woman (NB: Evidently in the narrative, she refers to herself in the third person, with Andreas being her male side and Lili her female side.)

‘Only one thing troubled her rather more than she liked. In contrast to Grete’s and Andreas’ women friends, who had long since accepted Lili as one of themselves, with few exceptions, all the male friends of Andreas avoided Lili. Grete, who had expected help and sympathy for Lili from them most of all, and in this belief had revealed Lili’s existence to them, was very distressed over this failure on the part of Andreas’ friends, all the more so as just at that time the whole secret of Andreas and Lili was divulged in Copenhagen through the indiscretion of a Parisian woman friend and eventually published in unreserved fashion by an organ of the Press. Lili learned of this by accident. All her gaiety vanished again. For many days she would not stir out of her attic. She paid no heed to anything, and could not understand why none of Andreas' friends found their way to her. A little entry in her diary tells of this:

“How is it possible that all Andreas’ friends here have left me in the lurch? That they all avoid me as if I were a pariah? What have I done to them? Andreas was always ready to help them. He was always a reliable friend. And now one of them says that just because he esteemed Andreas so highly he could never recognize Lili. Lili would always stand between him and Andreas. He would shudder at offering her his hand. This sentiment is nothing but an eruption of overweening masculinity. And another excuses himself with other subterfuges. One could not be seen walking with Lili in the streets without compromising himself. Copenhagen was too small to show oneself publicly with such a pitiful creature, unmolested and unsuspected.” ’

And here is another example.

‘Lili now realized that the crisis through which she had passed, especially when she was first in Denmark, and from the effects of which she was still suffering, was a natural consequence of the implantation which had been carried out upon her. She perceived how her whole cerebral function had received a new direction.

She confided all this to her diary:

“In the first months after my operation it was necessary above all else to recuperate. When this had happened to some extent, the physical change in me began. My breasts formed, my hips changed and became softer and rounder. And at the same time other forces began to stir in my brain and to choke whatever remnants of Andreas still remained there. A new emotional life was arising within me.” ’