Death in my heart

‘There is nothing but death in my heart. It is as though I have been pumped with lead. There is nothing to look forward to at all, at all . . . even financially, I’ve had it this time. I owe my rent, the car tax, the car insurance, I’ve had my pay and it is gone. I have 10 pfgs in the house and no petrol in the car. There is nothing to look forward to at all. I am also going through an acute sense of self-pity again and deadening loneliness.’ This is Waguih Ghali, a self-exiled Egyptian writer, whose deep depression, intensely described in his diaries, led eventually to suicide. A first volume of these diaries has just been published by The American University in Cairo Press.

Ghali was born in 1929 or 1930 (the actual date seems unknown) in Alexandria, Egypt, part of a Coptic family, but his father died when he was young, and his mother remarried. As he grew older, he was considered something a wild youth, careless with money and property. From 1944 to 1947, he was sent to Victoria College, a private institution run like a British public school. Friction with his stepfather, led him to spend more time at the college’s Cairo campus, where he stayed with relatives, particularly his maternal aunt, Ketty. After studying medicine at Cairo University for a while, he transferred to the Sorbonne, Paris, but dropped out, leaving Paris in 1953.

Ghali struggled with symptoms of manic depression throughout his life, and he never found a place to settle for long or work that fulfilled him. He became a sponger, a libertine, too fond of alcohol and casual sex, like others in the sixties, but he was also charming and principled. An antipathy towards the Egyptian government left him reluctant to return to his home country. He lived in London and Sweden in the second half of the 1950s, during which time he wrote several personal essays published in The Guardian, and then moved to Rheydt, West Germany, where he remained from 1960 to 1966. It was in Germany that he finished and published his only novel - Beer in the Snooker Club (André Deutsch, 1964) - which achieved some literary success.

While editing the book for André Deutsch, Diana Athill, one of its editors, became involved with Ghali. Concerned about his welfare in 1966, she arranged for him to move to London and live in her flat. It was not an easy friendship, stormy and full of conflict. One major argument flared up, for example, when Athill happened to read what Ghali had written about her in his diary. In 1967, following the Arab-Israeli war, he visited Israel for six weeks, acting as a free-lance journalist. He filed two articles for the London Times and a piece for the BBC, but, by then, the Egyptian authorities had denied renewal of his passport.

In late 1968, while still living in Athill’s flat, Ghali committed suicide. Some time later, in the mid-1980s, Athill published a memoir about her relationship with Ghali - After a Funeral. Until recently, this was the main source of information on the Egyptian writer. Wikipedia has a brief briography, and there is a more nuanced analysis of Ghali and his novel available in The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English by Nouri Gana which can be previewed at Googlebooks.

However, now more biographical information has become available with the publication, by The American University in Cairo Press, of a first volume of Ghali’s diaries - a second volume is to follow in the summer. The diaries cover, and shed much light on, the last four years of Ghali’s life as well as, through reminiscences, aspects of his youth. The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Writer in the Swinging Sixties 1964-1966 has been meticulously edited by May Hawas of the University of Alexandria. Although Athill had, apparently, inadvertently allowed the original diaries to be lost or destroyed, she had also given permission, much earlier to a researcher, Deborah Starr (now an associate professor at Cornell University) to photocopy the diaries, and it is these photocopies that Hawas has worked on for the new publication.

‘The diaries are an interesting read for their own sake,’ says Hawas in her introduction. ‘In the context of the success of Ghali’s novel and the diversity of its audience, as well as the pathos of the writer’s own life, the diaries also represent for Ghali’s fans a much-awaited second work.’ She goes on to look at how Ghali’s diaries (the published volume and the forthcoming one) reflect the Swinging Sixties (as in her subtitle), and how they illuminate the parasitic nature of his relationship with Athill.

Particularly interesting, however, is her brief analysis of the role that keeping a diary played in Ghali’s life. Hamas notes that in his final diary entry - yet to be published, in the second volume - he explains how and why he is going to commit suicide. She says: ‘Although Ghali starts the diary by explaining that he writes to save himself from going mad, it is in these last sections in particular where he elaborates on the role that the diary has played in his life: how writing it has relieved his feelings, but how it has also displaced effort which otherwise might have been channeled into writing a novel. In his suicide note, Ghali stresses his desire to have his diaries published, spelling out the degree to which his creative energy has been directed toward the diary, even if it was not the novelistic work he had really wanted to produce. In some way, the diaries replace the novel as another creative genre, like the short story or novel or poem, simply another way, in his words, that a writer could “create something.” ’

In the first volume of diaries, Hawas also includes a compilation of correspondence between Starr and Athill between 1999 and 2014. In one exchange, Hawas asks Athill, ‘Did Ghali leave you any instructions about what to do with his personal papers after he died?’ Athill replies, ‘Waguih left the bundle in my bedroom with a note saying I should do with it what I saw fit.’ What she saw fit, however, did not apparently include publishing the diaries. Athill is still alive, living in a retirement home, and, all being well, will celebrate her 100th birthday this coming December.

Here are several extracts from The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Writer in the Swinging Sixties 1964-1966. (Ellipses between brackets - [. . .] - indicate where Hawas has cut material; if not between brackets the ellipses are a standardised version of Ghali’s own and variable trailing dots.)

4 June 1964
‘Am at the office. Lovely sunny day. Woke up in an excellent mood. Sang in the car going to work. Perhaps even relieved that that Liselotte thing is finished with. Had a nice walk in the sun to the bank. Bought Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe - in English, unfortunately. But something to read in lieu of depression and thinking. “Thoughts are a disease of the flesh,” said Thomas Hardy.

Will go swimming at noon. Let me live today for today and damn everything else. I’ve got enough to eat, haven’t I? A flat? A car. What do I want? A woman? I’ll go get one from a dancing hall this weekend. Fuck her and throw her. It is the only language they understand. They love that. They’ll love you for it. Leave my bloody anaemic sentimentality and sickliness - Let me be fresh, for Christ’s sake. Am in a good mood today.’

3 December 1964
‘In bed at night. This will be pompous and horrid but nevertheless: been reading An Area of Darkness (Naipaul). He will, hélas, never be a great writer (not popular, either, complimentary nowadays). Too engrossed with himself, his feelings, his thoughts which should only be a concern to himself and not expect others to feel. The ‘cab’ in Alexandria, whether imaginary or not, is too insignificant to build a philosophy upon, a theory and work. “He was a child, an innocent, a maker; someone for whom the world had never held either glory or pathos; someone for whom there had been no place.” This (page 43) could have emanated from a review (a cheap one, probably) of a work or man, but not a description of a man’s life in a work (Ramon in this case). No, no, ‘l’effort préalablement conçu’ as it were.’

26 September 1965
‘There is nothing but death in my heart. It is as though I have been pumped with lead. There is nothing to look forward to at all, at all . . . even financially, I’ve had it this time. I owe my rent, the car tax, the car insurance, I’ve had my pay and it is gone. I have 10 pfgs in the house and no petrol in the car. There is nothing to look forward to at all. I am also going through an acute sense of self-pity again and deadening loneliness. Hélas, I want to die again. Happiness is denied me, and if, at times and out of cowardliness, I believe in God, I see him only as a cruel sadist. What, if he exists, is he doing to me? Why did he give me my brain and way of thinking and my emotions, and then stifle them all the time, torment me all the time? I have nothing to look forward to and I am dead internally. I don’t want to live anymore. I have suffered too much, suffered too much in spite of at times having tried to accept it, and make my life bearable with small things . . . the other car, the radio in it, the trips to Holland, and an aloofness from life . . . But I get knocked all the time, terribly knocked, and at the moment I can’t support it anymore. The thought of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is unbearable. I walk about in my flat, all in disorder since yesterday . . . vestiges of Brigitta. I walk up and down, sit down, smoke, every minute is a torture as I wait for it to pass, only to bring another more dreadful minute. I have reached the bottom again . . . self-pity, horror at the future, loneliness, and utter despair:

[. . .] Sat., [. . .] 2.30 or so, Brigitta came. I was only expecting her at seven. She wanted to go for a swim. She went for her trunks, and I shaved quickly and picked her up at Marienplatz. I could feel she wasn’t in love with me. The pool was closed, but we scrambled in and had a swim. It was a warm lovely day. The man came and told us we were not allowed in, so [we] went away and came to my place. I was a bit nervous, and although I took her in my arms now and then and kissed her, there wasn’t the real response I know. We both had a shower at my place and I found her very beautiful. [. . .] We sat and talked and then she said, “I really didn’t want to come today.” “I felt that perhaps you didn’t and even that you might not [. . .],” I said. We had drank a bit, and one was frank. It was about 7.30.
“I don’t want to have an affair with you . . . I don’t love you,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. And then I asked, “The affair is ended today?”
“Yes,” [. . .] she said.
It meant I wasn’t going to possess her. Death struck me at once. Lead, tons of it, was poured into me. The idea of food, of eating [. . .], gave me nausea.

“You must be hungry,” I said. “Start making the salad. I shall cook the steak. [. . .] I can’t eat, sweetheart,” I said. “I can’t now because I am a bit dead inside.” She said she understood. At once I switched on my charm. I wasn’t going to moan, to be a bore. I treated her as [a] Queen and called her queen. I laughed, set the table for her . . . put a candle [. . .] on the table. Joked. Served her like a waiter, and as she was eating, I went out in the garden, sat on the steps, and smoked a cigarette, one full of misery and utter despair. She came out and called me in. I went in, laughed, watched her eat (she was tucking it in, alright). Drank a few schnapps with her, then cleared the table while she made coffee. I lay on the sofa and we talked for a while. I had plucked a rose from the garden and she found it beautiful. I told her that anyway I was mad . . . that there was a sort of madness in me. We held hands and then I pulled her and she came in my arms as I lay on the sofa. I told her two short stories of Dostoevsky and one of Gogol’s. Gogol’s story of the poet and the bird which struck her heart in the rose’s thorn [sic] to bloom a rose for the beloved, and the poet throwing the rose away, and Dostoevsky’s story of the clerk who died because he couldn’t believe in his happiness. I had my hands beneath her pullover and tried to undo her soutien.

“No - no, Waguih,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked softly. “It is the last time anyway,” and I undid it and pulled her pullover off and again she tore at my things and pulled them off my head and we caressed passionately and then she took her things off. I told her more stories and we kissed and caressed. Then I took her to bed, and made wonderful love to her. I kissed her breasts and her armpits, and she kissed my chest and neck, and after the first time, we lay relaxed and happy and she murmured she would love to spend a whole night in my arms, then I kissed her body and her breasts and made love to her for many an hour, but suddenly I hated this rubber contraption and tore it away and told her I hated it, and she said, “yes”. . . and I came in her. And it is just the critical time. She worried about it, and I am worried too. I gave her an aspirin to take, pretending it’s another kind of pill . . . just to stop her worrying. What will worrying do?

We kissed and I drove her near home. She will not come again. “For a while,” I told her. “I must get over you.” “Of course,” she said. When I let her out of the car, I gave her the rose which I had tucked in the car . . . and a very small folded paper. “I dropped a tear for you and collected it to give you.” Stupid romantic, but she was touched. I walked with her for a while, and in the corner, kissed her. “Goodbye . . . and God bless you,” I said . . . and it is finished.

I am glad and grateful we made love. It would have been terrible otherwise. Glad I haven’t parted humiliated . . . But it is finished. Ended. A pretty little affair, except that no affair is ‘little’ to me, and I am demolished today. Utterly dead. Writing this has helped a bit . . . What can I look forward to?’

27 September 1965
‘Thanks God [sic] for this Diary again, because, being the way I am I must pour out my heart somewhere or other. But I don’t feel as bad as yesterday this morning. Certainly harder and not as soft and as repulsive as yesterday. [. . . ] What is good with this girl, is that I know it is finished, know I shall not see her anymore, so that eliminates a whole lot of ramifications of pain. And strangely, I don’t really love her this morning anymore, in the sense that it is not love, but something I possessed and have lost. I shall try very very hard not to think of her at all. What frightens me most of all, is the period between 5.30 and 8.30 at home. When I return from work, I dread being alone in my flat and suddenly hate the flat itself and everything in it. I do not know what I shall do about money. The whole picture is terribly hopeless.’

18 October 1965
‘I am beginning to hate this Diary somehow - it has become a ‘person,’ who goes on and on putting up with my complaints and groans . . . and whenever I look at it, see it, it is only a reminder of the utter misery that I am. How the weekend dragged - and dragged. Again utterly dead and empty inside. Sunday swimming and racquets again, then a few beers with Kurt and Zander in the evening. Zander’s mother had invited me to lunch, where I learnt from Zander that Brigitta was with Bubbi on Saturday evening.

As I said, I am just absolutely and utterly empty inside. Thoughts of suicide, the whole hog. Damn.

Evening
I think I shall not write this Diary for some time. It depresses me to look at it.’

22 October 1965
‘As I said, the Diary does depress me. Have worked well the last three days on the novel. It is my salvation. I am slowly entering my cocoon, and when I am in it, I am alright. I’ve discovered an isolated pub, which is becoming my local. One or two beers now and then, all alone, dreading any of my acquaintances finding the pub [. . .] But the novel [unfinished at the time of his death] is my salvation.’

16 December 1965
‘I have not been to work since - and I certainly can’t face going. I have handed in my notice for the 15th of January and will play sick as long as possible . . . et après?. . . après ça la deluge, as we know well from experience. But deluge or not, I can’t really worsen very much. I seem to have improved slightly during the last week [. . .].

Here is my day: I go to bed about 2 a.m., having drunk myself to sleepiness. In the morning I force myself to go on sleeping as long as possible. I am usually up at about two in the afternoon. Wash, have two coffees and many cigarettes, then I drive to town for another coffee. I walk about a bit [. . .] and return home. I try and write, but it is nearly impossible. I do write, though, a few pages of a play I am writing together with Kurt Flocken - the same Kurt Flocken of Liselotte days. When I say ‘with’ him I mean I write it in English, then when he comes he takes it down in German (usually my German) . . . For someone who pretends to have literary leanings, he is hopeless. Anyway, my dictating to him is not unpleasant, and it forces me to write a few pages a day because I know he will be coming. After that we go to a pub and drink till 1 or 2 a.m . . . and a new day starts. I ward off the depression with those pills, but have decided to go without them, and without the booze for a few days. [. . .]

Diana Athill’s letters have been short and not too affectionate lately. How well I understand that and sympathise with what I take to be the inevitable revulsion I must now unconsciously cause in her. Those horrible moaning and weeping letters I have inflicted on her for so long. She would have been a monster if she didn’t finally react with some sort of disgust. And then, of course, this lunatic, selfish and absolutely egoistical proposal of mine for her to let me live in her flat for six months or so AT HER OWN COST!! Obviously I was looney to propose such a thing . . . yet. Bless her, she at once wrote to the Home Office to try and get me permission to live in London for six months . . .

Brenda Laring, who strangely turned very affectionate and friendly lately, and concerned about me, hasn’t replied to me last letter . . . a detailed description of my state of despair and fear . . .

But I remember the state I was in as I wrote to Diana suggesting she bring me to England . . . literally begging for her mercy. I remember how I was, how I feared for my sanity . . . how I could foresee that what I was going through is just simply, medically let us say, physiologically . . . unbearable.

As I said, except for this sudden attack this afternoon . . . and coupled with a sudden yearning for Brigitta, I seem to have been steadily improving. And my finances? I have been regularly winning lately. In fact if I add all I have won the last two months, it must add to about DM 200 [. . .]

I have calmed down since that attack (I played patience while it seized me) . . . I am sitting cosily, even the radio on (something I couldn’t bear to listen to until lately). Sometimes I get very hungry and eat a lot, but usually I am on an empty stomach. About my finances, le déluge will start at about the beginning of February I suppose . . .

I have discarded the novel because it started with unrequited love, and it reminds me of B. I have also read Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum and again saw what literature can be . . . what insipid caca’s [sic] most of us write. [. . . ]

My mother has sent me two very affectionate letters . . . No word from Ketty or Samir. I think they would like to be left alone.

There was something I wanted to mention. During the last two years, I have suffered terribly from matters of the heart, and anyone reading this Diary, and reading the affair with Liselotte, and then Brigitta, would laugh . . . This, to me, is one of the cruellest things I am experiencing, the fact that, in essential, it is a laughable matter. What is this ‘love’ I am talking about? Liselotte . . . Brenda . . . Iricka . . . Brigitta . . . all in the space of one year or so? I can see it too, and how cruel and terribly bitter that what is laughable distresses so intolerably. And with those last wise words, will end today’s reportage.’

Oh how weak is man

Some 210 years ago today was born Wilford Woodruff. As a very young man he was drawn to the new religious teachings of one Joseph Smith, and was soon being sent out as a missionary by the Latter-day Saints. He rose rapidly in the church, eventually becoming its fourth leader. Though he had many wives himself, he is remembered for guiding the church towards outlawing polygamy, and thus easing its acceptance by the Union. Also, his lifelong diary is much admired as being a unique resource concerning the church’s early history.

Woodruff was born on 1 March 1807, one of nine children, in Farmington, Connecticut. His father was a miller, but his mother died when he was very young; he was brought up by a step-mother. He worked for his father as a young man, but in 1832 moved to Richland, Oswego Co., New York, where he was recruited by elders of the Latter-day Saints church, baptised and ordained as a teacher in 1834. He moved to the church’s centre, in Kirtland, Ohio. There he met the founder, Joseph Smith, and he was soon ordained a priest. Over the next few years, he was sent on various missions, and rose quickly through the church’s hierarchy, being called to the First Quorum of the Seventy in 1837, to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1838, and, the following year, to the Apostleship. He married his first wife, Phoebe Carter, in 1837; in the next 40 years, he would marry eight more times. His wives are said to have born him 34 children.

In the late 1830s, Woodruff led a party of church of members to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they settled, and where Woodruff became a member of the city council, as well as chaplain for the Nauvoo Legion, a local militia. During the 1840s, Woodruff made two successful missions to Britain; and in 1847 he was a member of the first pioneer company of Latter-day Saints to arrive in Utah’s Great Basin. He became a successful farmer with extensive livestock herds, as well as orchards. He served for 14 years as head of the Deseret Agricultural and Manufacturing Society, and in 1855 became president of the Utah Territorial Horticultural Society. He was also very involved in the early 1860s (but unsuccessful) bid by Utah to join the Union. In 1856, he was appointed as the Latter-day Saints church’s historian, a role he then held for over 30 years.

In 1877, Woodruff became president of St. George’s, the Latter-Day Saints’ first temple in Utah, and was instrumental in developing its ceremonial procedures. When John Taylor (who had succeeded Brigham Young as leader of the church) died in 1887, Woodruff assumed the leadership (being ordained president in 1889). However, at the time, he was still in hiding from federal agents wanting to arrest him for polygamy; and the church itself was facing increasing political, legal and financial pressure because of its stance on plural marriages. In 1890, Woodruff issued a Manifesto that officially terminated the practice of polygamy, an act which then eased the way for Utah to be accepted in the Union in 1896. Woodruff died in 1898. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopedia of Mormonism or the Latter-day Saints Church History website.

Apart from being the leader that formally ended polygamy within the church, Woodruff is also remembered and admired for his diary. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism says it is ‘a meticulous multivolume work covering nearly the entire history of the Church in the nineteenth century’, and that it ‘contains the only record of many events and speeches of Church leaders’. A biography of Woodruff by Matthias F. Cowley called Wilford Woodruff - History of His Life and Labors as recorded in his daily journals was published by Deseret News in 1909. But despite the title, the narrative is based on the diaries rather than quoting from them. However, in 1982, a selection of extracts from Woodruff’s 15 journals was published by Kraut’s Pioneer Press. This is freely available at Internet Archive.

Here is part of the publisher’s preface: ‘Wilford Woodruff kept one of the most important journals in the early Church. Recorded within its pages are some of the greatest moments in the Church’s history, much of which might otherwise have gone unrecorded. He was personally acquainted with the Prophet Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and John Taylor, and kept a faithful record of many of their private meetings and counsel. Here for the first time in print are selected out the choicest gems of doctrine and history as they were recorded by this great man.’ And here are several extracts.

19 February 1837
‘I repaired to the house of the Lord and stood in the midst of the congregation of the Saints, where I beheld President Joseph Smith Jr. arise in the stand and for several hours addressed the Saints in the power of God. Joseph had been absent from Kirtland on business for the Church, though not half as long as Moses was in the mount. Many were stirred up in their hearts and some were against him as the Israelites were against Moses, but when he arose in the power of God in their midst, as Moses did anciently, they were put to silence for the complainers saw that he stood in the power of a Prophet. O how weak is man.’

15 May 1842
‘True information has just reached us that the noted Governor Boggs of Missouri who by his orders expelled ten thousand Latter-day Saints, has just been assassinated in his own house and fallen in his own blood. Three balls were shot through his head, two through his brains and one through his mouth, tongue and throat. Thus this ungodly wretch has fallen in the midst of his iniquity and the vengeance of God has overtaken him at last, and he has met his just deserts though by an unknown hand. This information is proclaimed through all the papers and by dispatched messengers and hand bills through the land. Thus Boggs hath died as a fool dieth and gone to his place to receive the reward of his works.’

30 June 1843
‘Excerpts from the synopsis of the remarks of Joseph Smith following his close escape from officials of Missouri; the excerpts indicate the bellicose expressions uttered publicly on this occasion: “. . . If our enemies are determined to oppress us and deprive us of our rights and privileges as they have done and if the authorities that be on the earth will not assist us in our rights, nor give us that protection which the laws and Constitution of the United States and of this State guarantee unto us, then we will claim them from higher power from heaven and from God Almighty and the Constitution, etc. I swear I will not deal so mildly with them again, for the time has come when forbearance is no longer a virtue, and if you are again taken unlawfully, you are at liberty to give loose to blood and thunder, but act with Almighty power.”
“. . . Will not the State of Missouri stay her hand in her unhallowed persecutions against the Saints; if not, I restrain you not any longer; I say in the name of Jesus Christ, I this day turn the key that opens the heavens to restrain you no longer from this time forth. I will lead you to battle, if you are not afraid to die and feel disposed to spill your blood in your own defense you will not offend me. Be not the aggressor; bear until they strike on the one cheek, offer the other and they will be sure to strike that, then defend yourselves and God shall bear you off. Will any part of Illinois say we shall not have our rights, treat them as strangers and not friends and let them go to Hell. Say some, we will mob you and be damned, if I under the necessity of giving up our charted rights, privileges and freedom which our fathers fought, bled and died for, and which the Constitution of the United States and this state guarantee unto us, I will do it at the point of the bayonet and sword.”
“. . . Furthermore if Missouri continues her warfare and continues to issue her writs against me and this people unlawfully and unjustly, as they have done and our rights are trampled upon and they take away my rights, I swear with uplifted hands to heaven I will spill my blood in its defense. They shall not take away our rights and if they don’t stop leading me by the nose, I will lead them by the nose; and if they don’t let me alone, I will turn up the world. I will make war. When we shake our own bushes, we want to catch our own fruit.” ’

17 September 1843
‘In Maine, I walked part of the way home with Father. I talked of taking Rhoda Foss home with me. Father said it would be well if I was a mind to it. I am quite at a stand, don’t know what Phebe will say about it. I returned to Sister Foss and spent the night. I conversed with her during the evening and blessed her. She is strong in faith and desires to go to Nauvoo and intends soon to come and make a visit and stay as long as she pleases. Shosh is not very well contented down east; had rather come to the west. There is quite a western fever in a number of our friends in Maine.’

30 August 1846
‘President Young then addressed the meeting and said that it was an Eternal Principle that before God would chose a man to rule any part of his kingdom, he must first learn to be ruled, and that the Lord was preparing a people for that purpose and fifty years would not pass away before many who are now present will each rule over many more than what I do this day.’

16 May 1851
‘At Summit Creek, met with the citizens to agree upon electing officers. President Young said that he cared nothing about the feeling of the nation who had driven us out. We should not follow in the path of political foolery. We should have one candidate and but one as delegate to Congress. We can speak our feelings freely, but when we vote, let it be for the candidate of our choice. Should we have two candidates and they have about equal votes, the United States would know we had apostatized from our faith and union, or we were trying to deceive them. We would stand better in their eyes to take our own independent course and get united. If we have but one track, the Saints will walk on it. If we have two tracks, there will be a plenty of devils to run on them. If we begin right, we shall go right. If we begin wrong, we shall keep wrong. The United States are afraid of our union and so is the world. In speaking of the Indians, he said these Indians were the descendants of the Old Gadianton robbers who infested these mountains for more than a thousand years.’

19 October 1856
‘President Young said I have got a letter from Elder Hyde. He officiated as clerk in Drummonds Court and wrote things there day after day against God, our religion and the people for a few dimes. He ought to be cut off from the Quorum of the Twelve and the Church. He is no more fit to stand at the head of the Quorum of the Twelve than a dog. His soul is entirely occupied with a few dimes and it is much more in his eyes than God, Heaven, and Eternal Life. He is a stink in my nostrils.’

7 February 1879
‘For the first time in my life I have had to flee away from the enemies for the gospel’s sake or from any other cause. They are now trying to arrest me on polygamy. And as I had to leave St. George at 7 o’clock, I got into a wagon from the temple with David H. Cannon and drove all night.’

16 December 1879
‘I dreamed at night that President Taylor was sealing all in the Church, plural marriages to them that wished it. We met in the Council of the 12. I thought the glory of God rested upon us and we did all our work openly and the government had no power over us and we rejoiced together.’

See also Father of Mormon history and Mobocracy is rife, the former concerning the diaries of Leonard J Arrington, and the latter about those of Brigham Young.

Gabrielle, Celestine or Evangeline?

‘I know not what name to give it, not my new baby, but my new poem. Shall it be ‘Gabrielle,’ or ‘Celestine,’ or Evangeline’?’ This is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, once the country’s most popular poet, mulling over, in his diary, what name to give a work that would become one of his most famous. Longfellow, born 210 years ago today, kept a diary for most of his life, and though the entries are often brief, they are also very lyrical. By way of a postscript, I found the prologue to Evangeline in my own diaries, way back in 1975, and a reference to it 20 years later when I was visiting Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor.

Longfellow was born on 27 February 1807 in Portland, Maine, the second of eight children. His mother’s father had been a general in the American War of Independence and a Member of Congress, and his father was a lawyer. He went to private school where, among other subjects, he learned Latin, and published his first poem aged 13. At 15, he entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. There he met Nathaniel Hawthorne who would become a lifelong friend. While at Bowdoin, Longfellow published as many as 40 poems. Thereafter, he travelled to Europe and spent three years on a grand tour.

On returning to Maine in 1829, Longfellow took took up an offer from Bowdoin to teach languages and act as the college’s librarian. In 1831, he married Mary Potter, a childhood friend, but, during a second sojourn in Europe - at the behest of Harvard College - she had a miscarriage and died soon after. He returned to the US, and took up the professorship of modern languages at Harvard, renting rooms in Cambridge, at the Craigie House (once George Washington’s HQ during the Siege of Boston). He began publishing books of poetry, Voices of the Night (1939) and Ballads and Other Poems (1941). Soon after the former, he also published Hyperion, a prose romance inspired by his trips abroad and his hitherto unsuccessful courtship of Fanny Appleton (whom he had first met in Switzerland).

In 1843, after a seven year courtship, Longfellow and Appleton finally married, and Fanny’s father bought them Craigie House as a wedding present. They lived there for the rest of their lives, having six children. In 1847, Longfellow published his famous poem Evangeline, which helped increase his literary income. In 1854, he retired from Harvard to concentrate on writing, and five years later Harvard awarded him an honorary doctorate of laws. In the summer of 1861, a tragic fire led to Fanny’s death. In trying to save his wife, Longfellow burned his face, and subsequently wore a beard to cover the scarring. Biographers say he never fully recovered from his wife’s death. He spent several years translating Dante’s Divine Comedy; a weekly meeting with friends came to be known as the Dante Club.

During the last 15 years or so of his life, Longfellow’s fame continued to grow, and he was awarded many honours, and met many other famous figures. He supported the abolitionist cause and hoped for a reconciliation between the northern and southern states after the American Civil War. He published several more books; and he travelled to Europe, receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge, and meeting Queen Victoria in 1868. He died in 1882. For further information see Wikipedia, Maine Historical Society, Poets.org, Poetry Foundation, or a Houghton Library’s online exhibition.

Longfellow kept a diary throughout his life, rarely making long entries. Despite their brevity, they often exhibit his poetical and lyrical view (physically and metaphorically) of the world around him. The journal entries were first edited and compiled by his brother Samuel within a two volume biography - Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: with extracts from his journals and correspondence (1886, Ticknor and Co, Boston).

An extended version of the Life (dominated by the journals) was also included by Samuel Longfellow in The Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: with bibliographical and critical notes and his life, with extracts from his journals and correspondence (14 volumes, 1886-1891, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston). The journals in particular can be found in vol 12 (also labelled volume I of the Life) covering the years 1807-1842; vol 13 (volume II of the Life) covering the years 1843-1861; and vol 14 (volume III of the Life) covering the years 1862-1882. Here are several extracts from each of the three volumes.

17 October 1838
‘Face swollen with tooth-ache; look like King Henry VIII. A working day in college. Have I been wise to give up three whole days [in the week] to college classes? I think I have; for thus I make my presence felt here, and have no idle time to mope and grieve.’

18 October 1838
‘Wrote a chapter in Hyperion. Thus slowly goes on the work. Well or ill, I must work right on, and wait for no happier moments. This is a glorious autumn day. The coat of arms of the dying year hangs on the forest wall,as the coat of arras on the walls of a nobleman’s house in England, when he dies.’

7 December 1845
‘I know not what name to give it, not my new baby, but my new poem. Shall it be ‘Gabrielle,’ or ‘Celestine,’ or Evangeline’?’

20 May 1846
‘Tried to work at Evangeline. Unsuccessful. Gave it up and read Legard’s letters, which give one a favorable idea of his abilities and aims. In the afternoon drove to town. Dined at Prescott’s at five [the eminent historian William H. Prescott, author of The History of the Conquest of Peru among others]. He received us in his library, where I found Rev. Mr. Young, Rev. Mr. Ellis, and West the painter, looking at the two rival Mexican editions of the Conquest of Mexico. Near by, Theophilus Parsons and Alexander Everett talking together. Felton, Sumner, and Hillard came in later. We discussed the French liquid ll, whether it should be heard or sunk into a y. Then marched down to dinner. Many matters discussed at table; among others the Puritans; then the Fathers of the Revolution.’

6 July 1846
‘Examination in Modem Languages. The Spanish classes did very well; the Italian not so well; the German best of all, as is usually the case. A warm, weary day, made more weary by a long Faculty-meeting in the evening. So ends the college year with me, and vacation begins. Dear vacation, when alone I feel that I am free! I have a longing for Berkshire or the sea-side. Both Nahant and Stockbridge beckon; and Niagara thunders its warning and invitation. And now let me see if I cannot bring my mind into more poetic mood by the sweet influences of sun and air and open fields.’

9 July 1846
‘Idly busy days; days which leave no record in verse; no advance made in my long-neglected yet dearly loved Evangeline. The cares of the world choke the good seed. But these stones must be cleared away.’

17 November 1846
‘I said as I dressed myself this morning, “To-day at least I will work on Evangeline.” But no sooner had I breakfasted than there came a note from ___ to be answered forthwith; then ___, to talk about a doctor; then Mr. Bates, to put up a fireplace; then this journal, to be written for a week. And now it is past eleven o’clock, and the sun shines so brightly upon my desk and papers that I can write no more.’

15 May 1855
‘I am plagued to death with letters from all sorts of people, of course about their own affairs. No hesitation, no reserve, no consideration or delicacy. What people!’

17 May 1855
‘A beautiful morning. Went and sat an hour with Lowell in his upper chamber among the treetops. He sails for Havre the first of June.’

20 May 1855
‘Sumner just returned from New York, where he has been lecturing on Slavery to huge audiences in theatres. A great success, and a great sign of the state of the public mind.’

31 January 1859
‘Prescott’s funeral at the Chauncey-Place Church, at three in the afternoon. It was very impressive and touched me very much. I remember the last time I spoke with Prescott. It was only a few days ago. I met him in Washington Street, just at the foot of Winter Street He was merry, and laughing as usual. At the close of the conversation he said, “I am going to shave off my whiskers; they are growing gray.” “Gray hair is becoming,” I said. “Becoming,” said he; “what do we care about becoming, who must so soon he going?” “Then why take the trouble to shave them off?” “That’s true,” he replied with a pleasant laugh, and crossed over to Summer Street. So my last remembrance of him is a sunny smile at the comer of the street!’

8 August 1877
‘A lovely summer day; I wanted to be in many places at once.’

27 February 1879
‘My seventy-second birthday. A present from the children of Cambridge of a beautiful armchair, made from the wood of the Village Blacksmith’s chestnut-tree.’

 13 June 1880
‘Yesterday I had a visit from two schools; some sixty girls and boys, in all. It seems to give them so much pleasure, that it gives me pleasure.’

By way of a postscript, I, myself, as a young man was much enamoured of Longfellow’s Evangeline, and copied the prologue into my diary in 1975, and learned it off by heart. Here are the first few lines.

‘This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.’

And then, 20 years later, I remembered the poem when visiting Wistman’s Wood, an ancient patch of oak woodland on Dartmoor, and wrote this in my diary.

25 October 1996
‘[Wistman’s] wood was beautiful. The oaks were indeed small old and decrepit and covered in moss and lichens some of which was hanging down and reminded me of the Longfellow poem Evangeline. The clinging mist and rain added to the atmosphere making it seem, if anything, that much more of an ancient place. We clambered around the moss-covered boulders through which the trees had been growing for so many years and inspected the different trees, admiring the patterns of the gnarled and partly dead branches and the various flora they supported, not least good strong ferns growing among the lichen and moss.’

The Andy Warhol Diaries

Today marks 30 years since the death of the American pop artist Andy Warhol. A huge celebrity in his own lifetime, his fame seems to have continued unabated, several of his paintings having sold in the 21st century for around the $100m mark. Not a prolific writer, Warhol did produce a few best-selling books, although most of them were in collaboration with his friend Pat Hackett. Indeed, The Andy Warhol Diaries is a compilation of the typed-up daily conversations she had with Warhol over a ten year period.

Andrew Warhola was born Pittsburgh in 1928, the youngest child of working class immigrants from a village in the Carpathian Mountains(in what is now part of the Slovak Republic). He was sickly youth, which left him with hypochondriac tendencies. On leaving school, he studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. On finishing, in 1949, he moved to New York City, changed his name to Warhol, and worked as a commercial artist for magazines as well as at designing advertising and window displays. He gained some attention for his whimsical ink drawings of shoe advertisements, and he was one of the first to adopt the silk screen print-making process for artworks.

By the late 1950s, he was exhibiting in New York galleries, but 1962 saw his first solo exhibition of pop art at the Stable Gallery. It included some now very famous works, the Marilyn Diptych, 100 Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles, and 100 Dollar Bills. The same year saw Warhol open a New York studio, referred to as the Silver Factory, and later simple as The Factory, employing various assistants, and it also saw his first exhibition on the West Coast, in Los Angeles. Around this time, Warhol began experimenting with film, and, in 1963, he produced Sleep, an ‘anti-film’ with over five hours footage of his close friend, John Giorno, sleeping. Hundreds of art films were to follow over the next ten years. In 1967, he produced his first commercial book, Andy Warhol’s Index, and a couple of years later, with John Wilcock, he launched the magazine Interview.

When a radical feminist and hanger-on, Valerie Solanas, tried to murder Warhol in 1968, it marked the end of a period which had seen The Factory harbour an unconventional, alternative scene. Thereafter, Warhol himself sought more upmarket society - often finding himself in the company of other celebrities. His work in the 1970s shifted towards earning high fees for society portraits, leading some critics to argue he was prostituting his talent, and that his art was in decline. However, in 1973, Warhol did also produce his famous Mao series as a comment on President Richard Nixon’s visit to China. In 1979, Warhol was involved with the founding of the New York Academy of Art. In the 1980s, he returned to painting and collaborated with younger artists earning him renewed critical attention. He died on 22 February 1987 after suffering post-surgery complications - see a New York Times story on the health problems that led up to his death.

The Art Story website sums up Warhol’s legacy as follows: ‘[He] was one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century, creating some of the most recognizable images ever produced. Challenging the idealist visions and personal emotions conveyed by abstraction, Warhol embraced popular culture and commercial processes to produce work that appealed to the general public. He was one of the founding fathers of the Pop art movement, expanding the ideas of Duchamp by challenging the very definition of art. His artistic risks and constant experimentation with subjects and media made him a pioneer in almost all forms of visual art. His unconventional sense of style and his celebrity entourage helped him reach the mega-star status to which he aspired.’ More detailed information is also readily available from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Wikipedia, The Carpathian Connection, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books.

Warhol was not a diarist, but, from 1976 until the year of his death, he chatted, usually every weekday morning over the telephone, to his friend Pat Hackett who would then ‘sit at the typewriter and get it all down on paper’. Prior to 1976, Hackett had kept a ‘sketchy Factory log’ listing business visitors, key events, expenses and so on, often by talking to different individuals, and she was also collaborating with Warhol on his memoir: Popism - The Warhol Sixties. However, when Hackett wanted to quit The Factory, Warhol asked if she would continue to keep the log.

Hackett explains: ‘I told him that I didn’t want to have to continue calling everyone at the office every day to find out what had happened the day before - that if I were going to do that I might as well still be working there. So we agreed that from then on, the daily accounts would come from Andy himself. At this point the log became Andy’s own personal narrative. In the fall of 1976 Andy and I established a weekday morning routine of talking to each other on the phone. Ostensibly still for the purpose of getting down on record everything he had done and every place he had gone the day and night before and logging the cash business expenses he had incurred in the process, this account of daily activity came to have the larger function of letting Andy examine life. In a word, it was a diary.’

Two years after his death, in 1989, Warner Books published The Andy Warhol Diaries as edited by Pat Hackett. In her introduction (from which the above quotes also come) Hackett explains that she distilled the original length of the diaries, some 20,000 pages, down into one volume with what ‘I feel is the best material and the most representative of Andy’. It was republished as a Penguin Classic in 2010. A Guardian review of the latter starts: ‘The 90s bestseller that no one admitted having read, Andy Warhol’s diaries have long been the definition of a guilty pleasure, famed for their celebrity anecdotes, their triviality, their lack of engagement with world events. From 1976 to 1987, Andy tells us of parties attended, champagne drunk, cabs taken - and dollars spent. He hangs out with “everybody”: Bianca Jagger (“God, she’s dumb”), Jackie O (“thinks she’s so grand she doesn't even owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big”), Yoko (“We dialed F-U-C-K-Y-O-U and L-O-V-E-Y-O-U to see what happened, we had so much fun”) and “Princess Marina of I guess Greece”.’

More recently, in 2014, it was republished in the US, by Twelve (see Amazon), on the 25th anniversary of the original edition. An article on the Christie’s website about the latest reissue draws on a rare recent interview with Hackett. ‘The diaries,’ she says, ‘were cathartic for Warhol. Towards the end of his life, she asked him, “Have you ever thought about talking to a psychiatrist?” He said, “I don’t need one. I have you.” And Hackett recalls: ‘Everybody was reading [the diaries] like mad largely because we made a calculated decision not [to] publish an index, [. . .] A lot of people at the time were extremely upset. But [Studio 54 co-owner] Steve Rubell did something great. He went on TV and said, “We’re all going crazy because of what Andy said about us in the Diaries but nobody can do anything because it’s all true!” ’ Here are several extracts from the Penguin Classics edition.

19 December 1979
‘The ABC 20/20 camera crew was coming to the office to film. I worked until 7:30. Then at home I glued myself together. Bob called and said he was exhausted but he really wanted to go to the Alice Mason dinner, so he picked me up and we walked to 72nd Street and Lexington. I was next to Norris Church Mailer. I told her we were still interested in doing something with her for Interview but she said she’d put on weight and that she really liked eating better than staying thin for modeling. Then we got a cab to El Morocco, Norris and Norman and Bob and me (cab $5). It was a party for Margaux Hemingway’s engagement. I ran into Jamie Blandford there and had a fight with him, I don’t know why, I just always do, I hope I didn’t (laughs) offend him. And Mimi Trujillo was there. She was married to the son of that dictator and she’s a fashion designer. Victor sees her stuff then tells Halston about it - I mean, she does stuff like Halston, but she does it sort of first.

Millie and Bill Kaiserman were there. I introduced Norris to them, but I think I did it in a strange way, I guess I said, “This is Norris Church, she wants free clothes.” But they should have good-looking people walking around in their clothes for free. There were lots of funny young people, El Morocco’s back on its way again.’

11 February 1980, Zurich
‘Slept late and then Thomas Ammann woke me up to do a portrait. A beautiful wife with a fat husband. I said she didn’t need makeup. She was easy to do because she was a raving beauty. Her husband tells her she’s ugly - Thomas says that’s how Swiss people treat their wives because they never want them to get too secure. We gave them a book and an Interview and we sent out the film. It’s so hard to find anything but SX-70 film here, they’re phasing the other out. We bought English papers which I paid for ($5).

We had lunch downstairs in the restaurant with Loulou de la Falaise Klossowski and her husband Thadée and Thomas. We signed for it. The food was good. The place was so beautiful with a view of the lake and the mountains. We were the only people there and the sun was beating through the window on our backs. It’d been hailing in the morning. The weather has been so strange. Loulou told us that YSL really was such a genius that he just can’t take it, he has to take a million pills and the whole office gets so depressed when he’s depressed except for her. She said she acts happy no matter what. That’s why she gets sick, because she’s always trying to act happy and it’s really a lot of stress on her liver. She hasn’t had a drink in a year and a quarter but she doesn’t think cocaine is bad. I do, though. We talked about her stepfather, John McKendry. She said he had so many boyfriends. His idea of marrying Maxime was fantasizing that her son Alexis was going to live at home with them and that he could have an affair with him. But the son immediately got married and moved to Wales. Then he envisioned Loulou being there bringing home pretty boys every minute that he could fuck. And actually he did steal her boys.

Loulou said John McKendry was actually killing himself slowly because he’d always fantasized how great and romantic and wonderful and literary the aristocracy must be. Then when he met them, and married a countess - her mother - and got to meet Jackie O. and people like that every day through his job at the Met, he realized they were just normal dumb people like everybody else. There was nothing left for him to live for. Of course I think that Maxime just drove him crazy. I couldn’t say that to Loulou, though. Then we took a cab downtown ($10.50).’

19 February 1980
‘I got up before 9:00 to watch the Today Show and try to figure out why Gene Shalit hasn’t used the thing he did on me. He’ll use it after I die, he’ll say, “I spoke with Andy Warhol in 1980 and here is that clip.” I must be a really terrible guest. I mean, I must be too weird for TV because it’s always the same thing - they never know what to do with it. Well, the 20/20 thing that Karen Lerner shot during the Exposures tour is supposed to be on next week. The twenty-eighth.

We had office pizza lunch ($5).

Oh, and this guy from New York called about the first part of Popism that they’re running on the cover. Wouldn’t it be great if the book was a big hit and we didn’t have to work to promote it?

Ron Feldman came down and we looked at the Ten Jews. It’s really such a good idea to do that, they’re going to sell. And all the Germans want portraits. Maybe because we have a good person selling there, Hans Mayer. How come we don’t get many American portraits?

And I forgot to say that when I was walking along University Place a kid stuck his head out of a car window and said, “Aren’t boys cuter in cars?” ’

1 April 1980
‘Up at 10:00, interview with Expresso again. Lucio picked us up and took us to the gallery because we had a press conference with 400 people. Joseph Beuys loves the press now because he’s running for president of Germany under the Free Sky Party and with me he can get more coverage - no, it’s the Green Party, that’s it. Then São Schlumberger arrived and we invited her to lunch at this waterfront place. Then we were picked up for the opening and there were at least 3,000 or 4,000 people there, you couldn’t get in, it was horrible, and finally we slipped away, they were giving us a party at a place called something like City Hall, a drag nightclub. Finally after three hours of waiting, this drag queen with hair on his chest came in and I was talking so she told me to shut up, she did a couple of numbers and then all of a sudden pushed me aside and stormed out and we didn’t understand what had happened, but somebody said she was too emotional because she was singing for me, she gets that way. But it was too boring. Fred got insulted because the TV lights were shining on us too long, and told Lucio off, that it was the most ridiculous evening, and that Lucio had wasted our time because that kind of evening wouldn’t sell pictures, and that he was just using us to get into show business. We didn’t get into bed till about 4:00.’

2 December 1980
‘Richard Weisman called and invited me to the party for the famous Hollywood photographer George Hurrell at Doubles. Got there and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was coming out, and I asked him why he was leaving and he said because he’d stood in front of his photograph and had his picture taken by the press so then it was time to leave.

The big stars there were Lillian Gish, Maureen Stapleton. Tammy Grimes. I met Mr. Hurrell and he’s really strong and straight and Paul Morrissey had said that he was about to pop off any minute, but there he was and he knew all about me and he raved and he was sweet and I asked him if I could take a picture and he said sure.

Maureen O’Sullivan was next to me and she was saying. “Oh, I’ve just been throwing out so many Hurrells and Clarence Bulls, we’ve been moving.” I asked her what it was like to get so close to Johnny Weissmuller’s body and she said it was okay but that she only was interested in intellectuals, my dear. I said, ‘So is Mia really going to marry Woody Allen?’ And she said that she really didn’t know, and then I told her that I was only kidding, that I didn’t care. And I met Teresa Wnght and she looked good.’

24 December 1980
Cabbed up to Jerry and Mick’s apartment for Chnstmas lunch. Jerry’s pregnant sister Cyndy just married Robin Lehman, and so everybody was happy. Jerry’s mother was there. Jerry had an apron on that when you unzippered it a big cock came out, so I was taking funny pictures of that, her cooking a turkey with a cock in her hand.

Earl McGrath was there, and Ahmet Ertegun stopped by for a second. The food was ready at 5:00 but it was supposed to have been ready at 2:00. Everything was great, though, it was the best turkey and everything was fresh, the peas and everything, so I porked it up.

The limo came at 6:30 to take us out to the Guests’. We picked up Barbara Allen who was wearing a green taffeta YSL and then we went to the ‘hem of Harlem’ - that’s what Jerry Zipkin calls his neighborhood - and picked up Jerry and he had Nelson Seabra with him. It was a sit down dinner and the turkey was terrible. It was like canned stuff, and the cranberry sauce was canned and there were eighteen different desserts but none of them were good. I was next to ‘Suzy’ and Bob was next to Liz Smith and Iris Love, and Iris had a kilt on and let me feel if she was wearing underpants. Cornelia looked beautiful.

Then I had to get back to Halston’s in town and it had suddenly dropped from forty degrees to minus fifteen. Halston gave me a green beaded dress to hang in my closet. It’s like a $5,000 dress. It’s his art. But it’s not really my favorite green although it’s a nice green. I would rather have had a red one.

I felt another cold coming on and I wanted to go home to bed, but since the house was empty I didn’t. I gave Halston a chocolate box of art candy that I made, not too great, and a Diamond painting, and I gave Victor a Shoe one. I got home about 1:30 and opened my packages. Reinhold gave me a little TV set, a 2” x 2” Sony Trinitron.’

6 February 1983
‘Went to church. Worked some more on drawings. Went to bed early. The phone didn’t ring all day.’

11 February 1983
‘The snow hadn’t started at the beginning of the day and I just didn’t believe it would, the weather reports are always wrong. But by 12:30 it’d started (cabs $5, $3, phone$.50).

Interview was having a screening of The Lords of Discipline at Paramount and I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to get around so I hired a limousine. And then I went into Interview and invited some of the kids to ride up with me, and then Fred screamed at me that 1 had destroyed the office protocol. I keep forgetting that at Interview they have all these levels of who gets invited to what with who, based on how important your title is. Like a regular office. And I didn’t invite Robert Hayes to ride up with me because he was with his sister and his boyfriend Cisco, and Cisco has AIDS so I didn’t want to be that close to him.

People in the streets were laughing and throwing snow.

The movie was great, I enjoyed it so much, it’s so decadent. There are no girls in it, and all these boys fighting. Mitchell Lichtenstein looks great, just like his father, Roy, twenty years ago, and I do think David Keith is going to be the new John Wayne.’

17 February 1987 [the last entry]
‘In the morning I was preparing myself for my appearance in the fashion show Benjamin coordinated at the Tunnel. They’d sent the clothes over and I look like Liberace in them. Should I just go all the way and be the new Liberace? Snakeskin and rabbit fur. Julian Schnabel (laughs) would be so impressed with these clothes he would start wearing them

Oh, and Brigid is at the English fat farm and she’s going to be fired when she gets back. I’ll give her a pink slip. l’ll give her dogs pink slips - Fame and Fortune will be fired!

Vincent was going to tape the fashion show and he called to say a car would pick me up at the office at 2:00. Ken came and we went downtown (cab $6). Worked hard at the office.

Then went over to the Tunnel and they gave us the best dressing room, but still it was absolutely freezing. I had all my makeup with me. Miles Davis was there and he has such delicate fingers. They’re the same length as mine but half the width. I’d gone with Jean Michel last year to see his show at the Beacon, and I’d met him in the sixties at that store on Christopher Street, Hernando’s, where we used to go get leather pants. I reminded him that I’d met him there and he said he remembered. Miles is a clotheshorse. And we made a deal that we’d trade ten minutes of him playing music for me, for me doing his portrait. He gave me his address and a drawing - he draws while he gets his hair done. His hairdresser does the hair weaving, the extensions.

They did a $5,000 custom outfit for Miles with gold musical notes on it and everything, and they didn’t do a thing for me, they were so mean. They could’ve made me a gold palette or something. So 1 looked like the poor stepchild, and in the end they even (laughs) told me I walked too slow.

And the clothes in the show really stank. Alligator, fur, and lace. And I really worked my ass off. The Japanese crew was more interested in me than in Miles. They were doing the show again at 10:00 but I didn’t have to do the second one, I was only in the one that was for the press. And then afterwards Vincent had a taxi come.

When I got home I called Fred and explained that I was just too exhausted to go to the Fendi dinner, so when he called them to say I wouldn’t be coming with him and that he’d bring a girl instead, they said don’t bother, that they didn’t want him without me.

Got into bed and Wilfredo called and then Sam called and then I fell asleep. But I woke up at 6:30 and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I took some Valium and a Seconal and two aspirin, and I was sleeping so heavily that I didn’t wake up when PH called at nine o’clock. And when I didn’t answer she got scared because that had never happened before, so she called on the other line and Aurora answered in the kitchen, and PH made her come up to my bedroom to shake me but I wish she’d just let me sleep.’

The Diary Junction

Hertz and his radio waves

‘Before lunch I went to an optician to find out the price of a battery and an electromagnet; but he said he did not stock the inferior sort and those he had were too expensive for me. Therefore I went to Prof. Boettger after luncheon to ask him whether I might be allowed to use the instruments of the Physical Society. He told me to write to the president, which I did that evening. I have not yet received an answer. Perhaps I shall not get one, or only a refusal; then I shall wait till I am home for Christmas.’ This is from the diaries of the German physicist, Heinrich Hertz, then only 18 years old, but demonstrating a precocious enthusiasm for his subject. Hertz, born 160 years ago today, was the first to demonstrate the existence of radio waves and that they could be broadcast and received, but he died tragically young in his mid-30s.

Hertz was born on 22 February 1857 in Hamburg, the oldest of five children of a weatlhy and prominent family. He showed an early aptitude for maths and science, and started to study civil engineering. However, after time in Frankfurt and then Dresden, he left to do military service in Berlin. Subsequently, he continued to study in Munich though concentrating more on a physics research career. In 1878, he returned to Berlin, to work under Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann Helmholtz, where he received his doctorate in 1880. After, as Helmholtz’s assistant he focused on properties of mechanical hardness and stress, and produced a number of important research papers.

In 1883, Hertz moved to the University of Kiel as a lecturer, and directed his research more towards electromagnetism. In 1885, he accepted a full professorship at Karlsruhe’s Technische Hochschule. In the following year, he married Elizabeth, daughter of a colleague, and they had two daughters. By the end of the decade, Hertz’s research had overturned the existing paradigms for understanding electrical and magnetic phenomena: he demonstrated that electromagnetic effects take place in time, not instantaneously, and discovered the existence of radio waves, and that they behave like light. By doing so, he validated pre-existing theories put forward by the British scientist James Clerk Maxwell.

Hertz’s work on electromagnetic waves was first published in 1888 and elevated him to be counted among the leading physicists of the day. It also led to him moving, in 1889, to the University of Bonn where he continued research on the discharge of electricity in rarefied gases. His scientific papers were translated into English and published in three volumes, two of them posthumously - Electric Waves (1893), Miscellaneous Papers (1896) and Principles of Mechanics (1899). In 1892, he was diagnosed with an infection and underwent several operations, but he died in 1894 aged only 36. The unit of frequency - cycle per second –-was named the ‘hertz’ in his honour. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Engineering and Technology History, Magnet Academy, and MacTutor.

A first edition of Hertz’s memoirs, letters and diaries was arranged by his daughter Johanna Hertz and published in 1927. A second bilingual edition, revised and extended, was published in 1977 at the behest of Hertz’s youngest daughter, Dr. Mathilde Hertz - Heinrich Hertz: Memoirs, Letters, Diaries. This was translated by Dr Hertz herself, Lisa Brinner and Charles Susskind and published by Physik Verlag in the Federal Republic of Germany and by San Francisco Press in the US. A review can be read at the website of the University of Chicago Press Journals (Isis 70, no. 2 - June 1979). Although, as a younger man, Hertz wrote some longer entries in his diaries, later in life the entries were mostly very short and factual (see photo). Here are several extracts.

3 January 1867
‘I have a new satchel and a new pen case that I have already used at school, Mama hopes I shall bring home only good reports in the new satchel. I hope so too, but I do not believe it. Yet I will try hard.’

24 October 1875
‘The weather was so bad I could not go out. I read, mostly Wüllner’s Physics, and since I had previously known little about hydrostatics, I found it very interesting.’

8 November 1875
‘Before lunch I went to an optician to find out the price of a battery and an electromagnet; but he said he did not stock the inferior sort and those he had were too expensive for me. Therefore I went to Prof. Boettger after luncheon to ask him whether I might be allowed to use the instruments of the Physical Society. He told me to write to the president, which I did that evening. I have not yet received an answer. Perhaps I shall not get one, or only a refusal; then I shall wait till I am home for Christmas. There was a very interesting lecture by Prof. Boettger this evening. He talked about sulfur and phosphorus.’

11 December 1875
‘In the meantime the business with the Physics Club has been brought to conclusion, and I feel ashamed of my own rashness. For after receiving a letter on November 29, I went to the Senckenberg library and found Dingler’s Journal there; I leafed through it and soon found all sorts of articles about telegraphy, in fact I came to wonder whether my idea might not have been executed long ago. Therefore I did not go to Dr. Mappoldt right away, as I had intended, but decided first to return to the library on Tuesday. There I realized that it would be folly to set up experiments on something of which I knew as little as I did, and in the end I had to admit it was just as well that there had been some doubts about the propriety of my working in the laboratory, and I therefore withdrew my request. But from then on I went to the library almost every day, and I found a book listed there: Zetzsche, Development of Automatic Telegraphy. I ordered it and on receiving it yesterday I discovered that my idea was the fundamental concept of the entire field of automatic telegraphy; of course no part of it was executed as I had imagined, and the system that came closest to mine, that of Chauvassaigne et Lambrigot, was already obsolete. However, it seemed to me that even they did not formulate the idea that everybody could write his telegram at home on a paper strip supplied by the post office, which ought to have tremendous advantages. After leafing quickly through the periodicals in the reading room, I concentrated on The Development of the Chemical Industry from the Reports on the Vienna World Fair. At home I mostly read Tyndall, Heat as a Form of Motion. At the office I am occupied with copying the plans for the new stock exchange building in reproducing ink. Yesterday I had a new idea which I will perhaps test at home, at Christmastime; namely, to construct large-size lenses by introducing a liquid between two (if possible circular) glass plates of great elasticity and subjecting it to pressure, which will cause the glass plates to bulge out, and the central part of the bulge will probably come close to satisfying the conditions of a lens of large focal distance, at least close enough to collect a quantity of rays even if a clear image is not obtained. The question is only whether the glass is sufficiently elastic to withstand such deformation. To be sure, such a lens would lead to further difficulties in use.’

22 December 1875
‘This evening I am going to Hamburg for the holidays. Since my last entry I have had a very busy time at the office as the stock exchange roof neared completion, which entailed strenuous calculations, as did the new bridge across the Upper Main in the past few days. On the other hand, I did practically no work at home, because I did not want to start anything big before Christmas. Joyful anticipation of Christmas has been my main feeling. I have made so many plans of what to make on the lathe and in the laboratory while I am at home, that I fear very little of it will come to fruition. Yesterday and today were still full of interest. An unusually interesting lecture was held at the Physics Club, in which Prof. Boettger demonstrated a new piece of apparatus, in which a set of rotating vanes in vacuum is set in motion by light alone (radiometer).’

29 April 1885
‘Set the generator going and wanted to undertake some measurements with it, but the gas motor was not quite up to it.’

21 May 1885
‘Considered a current regulator for the generator.’

27 May 1885
‘Constructed a battery of 230 Planté cells and thought about electrodynamic experiments.’

22 December 1887
‘Experimented. Phase effect in the wire. Radical experiments on the velocity of propagation of the electrical effects.’

Diary briefs

The Civil War Diary of Rev. James Sheeran - The Catholic University of America Press, Googlebooks

Miss Weeton Governess and Traveller - Alan Roby’s website, Lancashire Evening Post

Diary evidence in US stabbing case - Austin American-Statesman, The Sun

The Siege of Leningrad - Harvard University Press, The Spectator

Our Israeli Diary - OneWorld, The Spectator

George W. Pearcy’s POW diaries - Veterans History Project, Washington Post

They Called Her Cate - PRWeb, Union Leader

Lady Bird Johnson’s diaries online - Discover LBJ

WWI diary of gunner Lawrence - Soldier on the Somme, Mashable

Diary of wartime Shanghai - Earnshaw Books, Shanghai Daily

Australian weather history in diaries - The Conversation

The magnificent Sahara

‘Now that the torrid heat of summer has suddenly come again, now that Algiers lies in a glaring daze once more by day, the notion that I am back in Africa is slowly sinking in. Soon I will feel completely at home, especially if my plan to go to Bou Saada comes off. . . Oh, that journey! It will mean a brief return, not to the magnificent Sahara itself, but to a place nearby that has all the palm trees and sunshine one could want!’ This is from the diary of Isabelle Eberhardt, born in Switzerland 140 years ago today, but who only found peace when living in North Africa, wearing men’s clothes, and having converted to Islam.

Eberhardt was born on 17 February 1877 in Geneva, Switzerland, to an odd couple: her father, Alexandre Trophimowsky, was an atheist, anarchist and former Orthodox priest who had been hired as a tutor for the children of the widower General Pavel de Moerder. His aristocratic mother, Nathalie Moerder (née Eberhardt) was Moerder’s wife, some 40 years his junior. Eventually, Nathalie and Trophimowsky, who was also married, left their families, and had two children, one, Augustin, was accepted by de Moerder as his own, but, a few years later, Isabelle was registered as Nathalie’s illegitimate daughter. She grew up well tutored by Trophimowsky, and speaking several languages, including Arabic. Biographers say she disguised herself as a boy from an early age so as to enjoy more freedom, a trait not discouraged by her father.

From around 1895, Eberhardt began publishing short stories, some inspired by the letters from Augustin who had joined the French Foreign Legion and from Eugène Letord, a French officer stationed in the Sahara, who had advertised for a pen pal. Aged but 20, she traveled to North Africa with her mother, where they both converted to Islam. Soon after, her mother died, her father died also, and then a half-brother committed suicide. With family ties severed, Eberhardt called herself Si Mahmoud Saadi, began to wear Arab male attire all the time, and assumed a male personality. Residing in Paris, trying to pursue a writing career, she was offered money to return to the Sahara region and investigate the death of a friend’s husband.

By mid-1900, Eberhardt had settled in the oasis town of El Oued, some 650 miles southeast of Algiers, close to the border with Tunisia, but she made little headway with the investigation. However, she fell in love with an Algerian soldier, Slimène Ehnni, and they were soon living together openly. The French authorities began to suspect Eberhardt of being a spy or an agitator, and Ehnni was posted away, some 300km north. Eberhardt also became involved with a Sufi order, the Qadiriyya, and, in early 1901, at one of its meetings was attacked by a man with a sabre. She suspected her attacker had been hired by the French authorities, who, eventually expelled her from North Africa. In June the same year, she was allowed to return to Algeria briefly to give evidence against her attacker, who, she said, she forgave.

Back in France, Eberhardt lived with her brother Augustin and his wife, worked alongside him as a dock labourer, and continued writing. Ehnni, meanwhile, was reposted, this time to near Marseilles, where he was free to marry Eberhart (earlier, in Algeria, they had been denied permission to marry). In early 1902, Ehnni completed his military service, and the couple returned to Bône, Algeria, to live with Ehnni’s family, at first, and then in Algiers. There Eberhardt worked for the newspaper Al-Akhbar, publishing stories, including serialised chapters of her novel Trimardeur. In mid-1903, she was sent to report on the aftermath of the Battle of El-Moungar, and became friendly with a French officer, for whom she may have engaged in some kind of spying activity. She fell ill with fever, and travelled to Aïn Sefra to recuperate. Ehnni joined her there, and they rented a mud hut. When a flash flood struck, Ehnni escaped, but Eberhardt was killed - only 27 years old. Further information is available at Wikipedia, Pathos, Rejected Princesses, Atlas Obscura or from a biography review at The New York Times.

Eberhardt’s diaries - three cardboard notebooks and a small linen volume - were first translated by Nina de Voogd and published in English by Virago in 1987 as The Passionate Nomad: The Diary of Isabelle Eberhardt. More recently, in 2002, Summersdale has reissued the translation, as edited by Elizabeth Kershaw, under the title The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt. The book’s introduction can be read online here; and for a short review see The Guardian. According to Kershaw, Eberhardt used her diaries ‘for observation and introspection; to record literary ideas; as a ledger and as a portable library of copied material from her favourite writers’. Here are several extracts.

27 May 1900
‘Geneva. Back to this gloomy diary of mine in this evil city in which I have suffered so much. I have hardly been here a week and once again I feel as morbid and oppressed as I used to in the old days. All I want to do is get out for good.

I went to have a look at our poor house, with the sky low and sunless; the place was boarded up, mute and lost amongst the weeds. I saw the road, white as ever, white like a silvery river, straight as an arrow, heading between those tall, velvet trees for the Jura’s great mountaintops.

I saw the two graves in that faithless cemetery, set in a land of exile, so very far away from that sacred place devoted to eternal repose and everlasting silence . . . I feel that I have now become a total stranger in this land, and tonight I feel an unfathomable and indescribable sadness, and increasingly resigned before my fate . . . What dreams, what enchantments and what raptures does the future still hold in store for me? What dubious satisfactions, and what sorrows?

And when will the clock strike the hour of deliverance at long last, the hour of eternal rest?’

8 June 1900
‘Over there in Africa, above the great blue gulf of unforgettable Annaba, the graveyard on the hill is asleep under the blazing sky of a summer day’s sunset. The white marble tombs and those made of glazed and multicoloured tiles must look like bright flowers among the tall, black cypresses, creepers and geraniums the colour of blood or pale flesh, and fig trees from the Barbary Coast. . .

At that same moment, I was sitting in the low grass of another graveyard. As I sat facing the two grey tombs set among the spring weeds, I thought of that other grave, the White Spirit’s resting place . . . And in the midst of all that indestructible nature, my thoughts turned once again to the mystery of the end of people’s lives.

Birds sang their innocent, peaceful song above the untold amount of human dust accumulated there . .

So far, this diary can be summed up as follows: an endless record of the unfathomable sadness there is at the bottom of my life, it consists of increasingly vague allusions, not to people I have met or to facts that I have observed, but to the invariably melancholy effect these facts and people have upon me.

How useless and funereal are these notes of mine, and how despairingly monotonous, without even the slightest hint of lightness or of hope. The only consolation they contain is their increasing Islamic resignation.

At long last I do find that my soul is beginning to show signs of indifference to pedestrian things and people, which means that my strength is on the increase. I find it contemptible and unworthy of myself that for so long I have put so much store by pitiful things and by futile, meaningless encounters. At long last, the realisation that I am utterly incapable of joining any coterie whatsoever, and of feeling at ease with people whose only reason for being together is no mere happenstance but rather the fact that they share their lives.

For the time being at least I know what I want: I would like it if Archivir understood the things I said and wrote to him. I would like him to smile at me as only he can, to hear him tell me in that tone of voice of his, the way he did the day I came so close to baring my soul: “Go Mahmoud, and do great, magnificent deeds . . . Be a hero . . .”

It is true that of all the men I have come across, this one, whose beloved picture I have in front of me, is the most bewitching of all, and that his charm is of the most elevated and noble sort: he speaks to the spirit rather than to the senses, he exalts whatever is sublime and stifles the base and lowly. No one has ever had such a truly beneficial effect upon my soul. No one has ever understood and bolstered those blessed manifestations that, since the White Spirit’s death, have slowly but surely begun to take root in my heart: faith, repentance, the desire for moral perfection, the longing for a reputation based on noble merit, a sensuality that makes a mockery of my suffering and abnegation, a thirst for great and magnificent deeds. I judge and love him for what I have seen of him so far.

Time will tell whether I have been perceptive, whether I have seen him as he really is, or whether I have made another mistake. I will not swear to anything, but nothing has so far given me reason for suspicion, even though I have become terribly, incurably wary. If he is but another dissembler and a sham . . . that will be the end of it once and for all, for if what I hold to be pure turns out to have a hidden blemish, if what looks to me like true beauty masks the usual horror, if the light I take to be a beneficial star showing me the way or a beacon in life’s black maze is but a trick meant to lead wayfarers astray - if so, what can I expect after that? Yet, once again, nothing, absolutely nothing has so far suggested there might be anything to such unthinkable conjecture ... if he is the way I think he is, he may well put me through terrible but magnificent paces . . . he may well turn out to be responsible for sending me off to die, but spare me the worst of fates, namely disillusionment.’

1 December 1900
‘El Oued, at the house of Salah ben Taliba. The beginning of this month of December is curiously reminiscent of the same time in that deadly year of 1897. Same weather, same violent wind lashing against my face. In those days, though, I had the vast, grey Mediterranean for a horizon, breaking furiously against the black rocks with a deafening, cataclysmic sound. I was still so young, and even though recently bereaved, I still had a full measure of joie de vivre.

Since then, however, everything has changed, everything; I have aged and matured thanks to this strange destiny of mine.

Yes, everything has changed indeed. Augustin has found his haven at long last, and it does look as if he is meant never to leave it again. After all those ups and downs and twists of fate have settled down at last, however oddly.

I could never be content with the genteel pleasures of city life in Europe. My idea of heading for the desert to satisfy my need for both adventure and peace required courage, but was inspired. I’ve found domestic happiness, and far from diminishing, it seems to grow stronger every day.

Only politics threatens it . . . But alas! Allah alone knows what is hidden in the sky and the earth! and no one can predict the future.

Barely two weeks ago I went to meet my beloved in the night, as far as the area south of Kouïnine. I rode Souf in a darkness so dense it made my head spin.

Lost my way several times. Had strange impressions down in those plains, where the horizon seems to rise in the shape of dunes, and villages look like hedges made of djerid.

I was thinking about the passage in Aziyade about Istanbul graves lit by dim and solitary lights, when I suddenly spotted the gate to the Teksebet cemetery’s dome.

Every afternoon for several days in a row I have been along the road to Debila, either with Khalifa Taher or by myself. One day, as I was on a solitary outing, I had a strange feeling of familiarity [i], of a return to a past that was dead and buried. Going through the shott I stopped my horse beneath the palm trees. I closed my eyes, and listening to the sound of the wind rustling in the foliage, I was off in a dream. I felt as if I were back in the big woods along the Rhone and in the Parc Sarrazin on a mellow summer evening. The illusion was almost perfect. It was not long before a sudden movement of Souf’s brought me back to reality, though. I opened my eyes . . . an endless succession of grey dunes rolled out before me, and above my head the foliage rustled on the tough djerids.

At the foot of the dune behind our house, next to an enclosure containing three low palm trees, stands a small African-looking mosque built of ochre-coloured plaster that looks like mud. It only has a tiny, fortified dome, a koubba, ovoid in shape. Behind it stands a splendid date palm which, seen from our rooftop, seems to grow out of the koubba itself.

Yesterday, I went up there at maghreb time. In the blaze of the setting sun I could see grey silhouettes drenched in scarlet light move by the post office in the distance. While the little dome seemed to be on fire and the muezzin’s slow and languorous voice recited the evening prayer in the direction of every corner in the sky, men came down the dune on my right-hand side in the splendour of that melancholy hour.

Poignant memories of the end of the White Spirit’s life have come to haunt me these last few days.’

9 February 1901
‘Around five o’clock this afternoon, Abdallah ben Mohammed [her attacker] was put in a prison cell. I saw him arrive and studied him while he was being searched by soldiers . . . I had a profound feeling of pity for this man, the blind instrument of a destiny whose meaning he does not understand. And seeing that grey silhouette, standing with his head bowed, flanked by the two blue uniforms, I had perhaps the strangest and deepest impression I have ever experienced of mystery.

Much as I search my heart for hatred towards this man, I cannot find any. Even less contempt. What I do feel for him is curious: it seems to me that I am close to an abyss, in the presence of a mystery whose last word - or rather whose first word - hasn’t yet been spoken, and which would contain the whole meaning of my life. As long as I do not know the key to this enigma - and shall I ever know it! God alone knows - I shall not know who I am, or what is the reason or explanation of my destiny, one of the most incredible there has been. Yet, it seems to me that I am not meant to disappear without having plumbed the depths of this enigma, from its strange beginnings to the present.

“Madness,” sceptics will say, who like easy solutions and have no patience with mystery. They are wrong, because to see the chasms that life conceals and that three-quarters of the population don’t even suspect exist cannot be treated as folly, in the same way that an artist’s descriptions of sunset or of a stormy night would seem ridiculous to a man born blind.

If the strangeness of my life were the result of snobbery of a pose, yes, then people could say, “She brought those events on herself”, but no! No one has ever lived more from day to day and by chance as I have, and it is very much the events themselves, inexorably linked to one another, which have brought me to where I am and absolutely not me who has created them. Perhaps the strange side of my nature can be summed up in a single trait: the need to keep searching, come what may, for new events, and flee inertia and stagnation.’

8 June 1902
‘Life goes on, monotonous as ever, yet there is the hint of some future direction in the midst of all this dreadful emotional turmoil. I am going through another slow period of gestation, which can be quite painful at times. I am beginning to understand the character of the two people, Barrucand and Mme ben Aben, who have helped us here, both of them good people and very tactful. Barrucand, a dilettante in matters of thought and in particular of sensations, and a moral nihilist, is, however, a man who is very positive, and knows how to live. Mme ben Aben is the second woman I have known after my mother who is good to the core, and enamoured with ideals. Yet in real life, how ignorant the two women are! Even I, as someone intimately convinced that I do not know how to live, even I know more than they do.

Augustin is now gone from my life. As far as I am concerned the brother I used to love so much is dead. That shadow of him in Marseilles who is married to ‘Jenny the work-horse’ does not exist for me, and I very rarely think of him.

Now that the torrid heat of summer has suddenly come again, now that Algiers lies in a glaring daze once more by day, the notion that I am back in Africa is slowly sinking in. Soon I will feel completely at home, especially if my plan to go to Bou Saada comes off. . . Oh, that journey! It will mean a brief return, not to the magnificent Sahara itself, but to a place nearby that has all the palm trees and sunshine one could want!’

31 January 1903 [the last entry]
‘Bou Saada. We arrived here from El Hamel yesterday at three in the afternoon.

Every time I see Lella Zeyneb I feel rejuvenated, happy for no tangible reason and reassured. I saw her twice yesterday in the course of the morning. She was very good and very kind to me, and was happy to see me again.

Visited the tomb of Sidi Muhammad Belkassem, small and simple in that large mosque, and which will be very beautiful by the time it is finished. I then went on to pray on the hillside facing the grave of El Hamel’s pilgrim founders.

I did some galloping along the road, together with Si bel Abbes, under the paternal gaze of Si Ahmed Mokrani. Some women from the brothel were on their way back from El Hamel. Painted and bedecked, they were rather pretty, and came to have a cigarette with us. Did fantasias in their honour all along the way. Laughed a lot. . .

The legend of El Hamel’s pilgrims appeals to my imagination. It must be one of Algeria’s most biblical stories . . .

I began this diary over in that hated land of exile, during one of the blackest and most painfully uncertain periods in my life, a time fraught with suffering of every sort. Today it is coming to an end.

Everything is radically different now, myself included.

For a year now I have been on the blessed soil of Africa, which I never want to leave again. In spite of my poverty, I have still been able to travel and explore unknown regions of my adoptive country. My Ouïha is alive and we are relatively happy materially.

This diary, begun a year and a half ago in horrible Marseilles, comes to an end today, while the weather is grey and transparent, soft and almost dream-like here in Bou Saada, another Southern spot I used to yearn for over there!

I am getting used to this tiny room of mine at the Moorish bath; it is so much like me and the way I live. I will be staying here for a few more days before setting off on my journey to Boghar, through areas I have never seen; living in this poorly whitewashed rectangle, a tiny window giving out on the mountains and the street, two mats on the floor, a line on which to hang my laundry, and the small torn mattress I am sitting on as I write. In one corner lie straw baskets; in the opposite one is the fireplace; my papers lie scattered about . . . And that is all. For me that will do.

There is no more than a vague echo in these pages of all that has happened these last eighteen months; I have filled them at random, whenever I have felt the need to articulate. . . For the uninitiated reader, these pages would hardly make much sense. For myself they are a vestige of my earlier cult of the past. The day may come, perhaps, when I will no longer record the odd thought and impression in order to make them last a while. For the moment, I sometimes find great solace in rereading these words about days gone by.

I shall start another diary. What shall I record there, and where shall I be, the day in the distant future when I close it, the way I am closing this one today?

“Allah knows what is hidden and the measure of people’s sincerity!” ’