Beat writer‘s last months

William Seward Burroughs, giant literary figure of the so-called Beat Generation, died 20 years ago today. He lived to a reasonable age given his colourful life, of drug and alcohol misuse, not to mention accidentally shooting his partner, and various other escapades with the law. He was friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom played some part in transforming the rather wayward young Burroughs into a writer.

Burroughs was born in 1914 into a prominent family in St Louis, Missouri - his grandfather having founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company. After attending various schools, including Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, he studied art at Harvard University, graduating in 1936. During his time at Harvard, he also worked as a junior reporter, and visited New York City where he experiment with drugs and became involved in the emerging gay subculture. On leaving formal education, Burroughs was provided with a regular income from his parents, leaving him free of any need to work. He travelled to Vienna, tried studying medicine, and engaged in promiscuous behaviour. He married Ilse Kapper, a Jewish friend needing a visa to escape from the Nazis. 

Back in the US, Burroughs severed a little finger under provocation from a friend, leading his parents to be concerned about his mental health. Indeed, after enlisting for the army in 1942 (having failed to be considered as a pilot or spy), he was not able to cope too well, and, eventually, he was given a civilian disability discharge. In 1944, Burroughs began sharing a Manhattan apartment with Joan Vollmer Adams (then married to a soldier) and Jack Kerouac (see The rush of what is said on Kerourac’s diaries). Allen Ginsberg was also one of their friends (see Thoughts, epiphanies, poems on Ginsberg’s diaries). Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novel, but failed to get it published at the time.

Burroughs, addicted to morphine, began selling drugs, and was eventually arrested. On his release, he lived with Vollmer in Texas, where they had a child together in 1947, and then in Mexico City, where both were caught up in a cycle of drug and alcohol addiction. There, Burroughs completed his first novel, Junkie, written at the urging of Ginsberg who also helped it be published later (in 1953). In September 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot Vollmer dead at a party. He spent a few days in jail before family lawyers managed to get him released on bail. His son was taken to St Louis to live with his grandparents, and Burroughs waited for trial. While still in Mexico, he began writing a work that would eventually be published as Queer. Eventually, he decided to flee, travelling in South America before returning to the US. He was given a two-year suspended send in absentia.

Biographers generally agree that Vollmer’s death marked a sea change in Burrough’s life as well as his writing. By 1954, he was living in Tangier in Morocco, drawn there by Paul Bowles’ fiction. During his four years in Tangier, he wrote what eventually became Naked Lunch. Excerpts first appeared in 1958, and the novel itself emerged in Paris in 1959, gaining much attention not only from the 1960s underground culture, but from critics too. A celebrated legal case of obscenity against the book, after publication in the US, failed. Burroughs moved to Paris, and then London, by then something of a beat celebrity, supporting himself and a continuing addiction by writing articles for different magazines.

In 1974, Ginsberg, worried about his friend, secured Burroughs a position teaching creative writing at the City College of New York, and, for a while, he stopped using heroin. He moved into an apartment, dubbed The Bunker, on The Bowery, but soon gave up the teaching. He became friends with the likes of Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Susan Sontag; he tried to make a film with Dennis Hopper; and he collaborated with Nick Cave and Tom Waits. As an ageing avant-garde radical, he did reading tours and attended conventions dedicated to his work. Between 1981 and 1987, he published Cities of the Red Night; The Place of Dead Roads; and The Western Lands. He spent the last 16 years of his life in Lawrence, Kansas, where he died on 2 August 1997. Further information on Burrough’s colourful life can be found all over the internet, not least at Wikipedia, The New Yorker, Beat Museum, Encyclopædia Britannica, and The Telegraph (biography review).

According to Burroughs himself, he kept journals as a teenager documenting an erotic attachment to another boy, but later destroyed them out of shame. He certainly kept notebooks during some periods of his life: in 2007 Ohio State University Press brought out Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook - see Goodreads for more information. He also kept a diary of sorts in his final months. This was edited by Burroughs’s long-time assistant James Grauerholz and published as Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs (Grove Press) - see Googlebooks.

In Last Words, Grauerholz provides this background to the journals: ‘It was in mid-November 1996 that Burroughs began to write the journals that are presented in this book. The first entry records the death of his cat, Calico Jane. In 260 days from November 14, 1996, to August 1, 1997, he made 168 entries. These writings include successive drafts of several short routines; remarks on books he was reading or had read long ago, and scenes suggested by them; lists of favorite lines from a lifetime of reading and listening; fits of impotent rage at man’s stupidity, day-to-day commentary, the heartbreak of the deaths of his beloved cats; and the contemplation of his own mortality. As late as these last nine months of his life, Burroughs was still compelled to do imaginary battle with his primordial foes: “Drug Warriors,” school-stupid FBI men, cat-haters, humans destroying the earth’s species in their arrogance: “When whales and seals and elephants weep, I cannot suppress the deadly Sin of Anger.” ’

Grauerholz adds these notes in his acknowledgements: ‘William Burroughs’s closest friends often saw him scribbling in the bound journal books that accumulated until there were eight of them, but he was a bit secretive about their contents. He did turn over one book to Jim McCrary to be typed up, and he made some editing marks on the transcription; this shows that he knew the journals would someday be published. (Selections from that typed journal were published in The New Yorker just after William’s death, as “Last Words.”) In late August 1997 Jim offered to transcribe the handwritten journals, and I was content for him to do that because I was not yet ready to face their contents, in William’s familiar scrawl - “dead fingers talk.” I procrastinated reviewing Jim’s transcription until the spring of 1999, when I finally felt up to the sad task of reading my best friend’s last testament. Rather than silently correct mistakes of spelling or sense, I used brackets to insert short clarifications, or to indicate words and passages that remained illegible after my best efforts to decipher them. In the subsequent editing process (with Ira Silverberg’s help), I cut about 5 percent of the material, primarily for reasons of privacy or because of excessive repetition. Following William’s text in this volume is a set of editor’s notes, arranged chronologically, providing additional background and explanation of his many references that would otherwise be obscure.’

Here are several extracts (from the Flamingo edition of Last Words in the UK).

14 November 1996
‘Thursday This is November 14. 1996
November 10, Calico was killed at 19th and Learnard. I heard about it the 12th from Jose. Tom had seen the cat by side of the road.

In the empty spaces where the cat was, that hurt physically. Cat is part of me. Mornings since, I break into uncontrollable sobbing and crying when I remember [where] she used to be - sit - move, etc. No question of histrionics. It just happens.

So dream remembered:
Oh, it was also a cat. I wasn’t sure it could find its way.’

16 November 1996
‘Coming up narrow tenement stairs. Met two people coming down at landing, said: “Hello.”

At top of stairs was a cubicle room with old sewing machine and other odds and ends, and there was an affectionate cat, whose head seemed removable. This room was open at top, three floors up.

Other people on roof said something about “Absolutely,” referring to the cats.’

1 December 1996
‘In a plane coming in for a landing in Paris. The plane landed in a narrow slot. Outside I could see Paris streets and then the plane angled upwards, looked ready to stall at any moment, and I felt physical fear.

“It’s going to crash!”
But it didn’t crash. Landed OK in Paris.

Paris is in many ways my favorite city. Never really got into Rome. London was always antithetical to me. Leaving NYC which is always New York. Small towns like Tangier.’

11 December 1996
‘Let the little growth on my head rest. It is an inoperable, benign, nonentity. So let it stay like that. If the soft machine works, don’t fix it. If it works, don’t fix it.

The words under the words, bubbling up with a belch of coal gas:
“We are - They are - come on! Hit! Hit!”
He cowered there, nursing the welt inflicted.’

30 December 1996
‘Reading New Yorker, July 31, 1995, account of “firestorms” in Hamburg occasioned by Allied bombing. (They don’t need an Atom bomb.) Then Dresden, to break German morale. The result was history’s second major firestorm. Like I say, top people in USA and England were such shits as you can’t believe.

What is left in these minds? Very little of value to me or anyone I can relate to. “All my relations,” as the Indians say. Like the drug anti’s in Malaysia say: “dealers are not human to him.’ And he - Mohathir Mohamed, Prime Minister - is not human to me. I curse him with my whole heart. There is nothing in him I feel for, or with.

Same goes for the firestorm impresarios.

So as this inglorious chapter in the USA draws to a dreary close with Clinton squeaking like the rat he turned out to be, that [in] Arizona and California together courts [are] quasi-legalizing marijuana for medical or any other purpose. . .

You must mark it to its place. It is an ILLEGAL drug and by illegal, beyond question.’

30 January 1997
‘To Kansas City. Pleasant trip. Good breakfast at Nichols’. Back by the freeway.
David made an especially good dinner, small roast, thick, toothsome, and new potatoes and carrots and peas.
My god, how dull these English diaries can get.

I expect Trant - or is it Glen? - will soon be jolted out of his apathy - and his greenhouse, and his green iguana.
Fold sweet etcetera to bed with Ovaltine.
So what does happen?

“Trant thought the frescos were becoming more and more morbid - each of the Martyrs had died in a different way - one by roasting.” (In a Rube Goldberg machine). “A saint carrying his own skin - lifelike in the extreme - the child was timing him to see how long he took” (to find out there was something to be tooked.)

He did something the others had not done: he laughed.
I once questioned in a dream an evil Italian Mountebank Spirit:
“Like, who are you?”
And he laughed and laughed - and went on laughing, in a marble dark lagoon, chintzy Italian decor - and he was deliciously evil.
As someone said about this evil spirit goes around sucking out the last breath from a dying youth:
“It was tasty.”

The child looking quite radiant. He was in fact a Radiant Boy, suck the breath out of an old queen.
He’s got a name, that Eyetye spirit - the Harlequin?
“You must leave now. Follow me.”

Few things are less inspiring than muddy snow. It’s an uncreative accident. (Bacon speaks of “the creative accident.”)
A road of dirty, muddy snow splattered accidental enough -  like a pig wallow.’

29 May 1997
‘Life review is not orderly account from conception to death. Rather, fragments -
(Telephone - my eyeglasses are ready.)
“You can keep quite comfortable on codeine.”
 - from here and there:
“He looks like a sheep killing dog.”
- Said about me by Politte Elvins, Kells’s father, who later went nuts with paresis. [He’d] been treating himself: “Doctors are just mechanics.”
“Take Beano for the measles, you pay two dollars down.”
- Old song heard at Los Alamos campfire sing, from Henry Bosworth.

I hate that son of a bitch, if he still lives anywhere. He called me “a goddamn worthless little pup.”
I hanged him in effigy by the big square fireplace in the Big House. I had used a statue of a Boy Scout, with the message around his neck: “Bozzy Bitch, goddamn him.”
(Now he later was fired for fooling with the boys, especially the Marsden family - Bob Marsden was a right bitch in his own right.)

A. J. found out about it:
“Yes,” he said, “I know everybody who got up that night.”
He had his network of snitches.
“What’s the safest place in the U.S., Billy?” he needled me, and Connell says: “Where you are.”
(Suppose you are on death row? I guess Fort Knox is about the safest place, offhand - all that gold. Or maybe a vault in Zurich, tended by gnomes.)
It was out by the sawdust pile, caughted fire and been smoldering for years like a mattress.

Recollect in New Orleans Joan set her bed on fire with a cigarette. I was the one woke up. We pour a wastebasket full of water down one hole, and it starts smoking down the other end. Took four metal wastebaskets to quell the fire, and it took $50 to quench the landlady.
Dropped my drink into a wastebasket at the sight of a Glock double trigger.
If they would -’

20 July 1997
‘They say a writer should have something he does with his hands (besides typing, that is). Pulling cat hairs from the Hudson Bay blanket seems to be my hand thing. That and shooting. I groom her, but the hairs are seemingly inexhaustible. What’s a man to do. Ain’t got no chance, one man alone.

Stumbles on a vile deed: report in the Weekly [World] News. McVeigh has turned into a sniveling coward, sobbing: “I don’t want to die.”

Has he? No responsible newspaper has reported what is certainly a newsworthy event. Only the Weekly News has culled this scoop from its mysterious “sources.” I nominate the Weekly News for the Vilest Act of the Century. If this story is fabricated, the News has perpetrated - has extended the very frontiers of vileness.

I remember the Machos. Died smoking. Mexican banditos stand against a pitted adobe wall, sneering at the firing squad.
So some reporter who wasn’t even there reports:
“The bandits died begging for their lives. Most of them lost control of their bowels and bladders.”

I was there. I will hunt that rat reporter down. I will force him to beg for his life in front of witnesses, promising to spare his life if he begs for it like Fido on his knees, with little yips while the cameras roll.
Lights, action, (pistol shots), camera.
To me the most unforgivable sin is the Lie, because like counterfeit currency, it devalues truth.

He has endured tortures that would have reduced most men to sniveling wrecks, an agent of a service so secret it can never be admitted to exist. Now he is, by computer magic, suddenly “a dirty child-molesting dope fiend,” spit on and pelted with rocks from snarling children.

He’s had all he can take.
“Fill my truck with ammonium nitrate. I’m going to fertilize till the land looks level.”
Few survive the Big Switch.
So then?
Straight-aheadedness.’

Tupper the tinkerer

Earl Silas Tupper, an American tinkerer, businessman and inventor, best known for Tupperware, was born 110 years ago today. For a few years when a young man he kept a daily diary, extracts of which can be found in The Tinkerer’s Story by Kathleen Franz. The diary shows him energetic, full of ambition to be an inventor, to make money, and, above all, to own a car!

Tupper was born on 28 July 1907 on a farm in Berlin, New Hampshire. His father looked after the family farm and greenhouse, while his mother took in laundry and ran a boarding house. As a boy, Earl learned he could sell more of his father’s produce by going door-to-door than he could in the market. After finishing at high school, he continued working for his parents, who now owned a nursery in Shirley, Massachusetts, until he was 19. He found employment on the railways and as a mail clerk before studying tree surgery. He started up his own tree and landscaping business - Tupper Tree Doctors Company - and began inventing items such as a women’s corset, a special hairpin dubbed Sure-stay, and a portable tie rack. In 1931, he married Marie Whitcomb and they would have five children.

During the Depression, Tupper’s business went bankrupt, but having met Bernard Doyle he went to work for his plastic company in Leominster, Massachusetts, part of the larger company, DuPont. A year later, he left and started The Earl S. Tupper Company, designing and developing plastic industrial products. During the war years, he mostly worked under contract for DuPont, producing moulded parts for the navy. It was from DuPont that he acquired a black, hard, polyethylene slag, a waste product of the oil process, and eventually found a way of refining it into a translucent, flexible, lightweight, non-toxic plastic which he called Poly-T. After the war, he turned his attention to the consumer market, making items such as plastic tumblers and cigarette cases; his Tupper Seal invention allowed an air- and water-tight lid. But selling plastic products - even in his Fifth Avenue shop - remained an uphill task.

In the late 1940s, Tupper joined forces with two distributors of his products - Brownie Wise (in Florida ) and Thomas Damigella (in Massachusetts) - who began to shift high volumes. The three met in 1951 and developed a new sales model called the Tupperware Home Party Plan with exclusive rights for selling Tupperware products (which were withdrawn from sale in shops). The plan was modelled on a home party plan pioneered by Stanley Home Products, but expanded and refined by Wise. Damigella and his wife became the first such distributors of Tupperware; and Wise was named vice president of Tupperware Home Parties in 1951. In 1958, Tupper fell out with Wise, who was dismissed, and then sold his company to Rexall Drug Company for $16m, divorced his wife, gave up U.S. citizenship (to avoid tax) and bought himself an island in Central America. He died in Costa Rica in 1983. Further biographical information is available at The Tupperware Collection, The New York Times obituary, Daily Maverick, Encyclopedia.com or Wikipedia.

Between 1933 and 1937, Tupper kept a daily diary of his activities. As far as I know these have never been published. However, they are used (and quoted from) extensively by Kathleen Franz in her book Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). This is available to preview at Googlebooks. The opening paragraphs in Chapter 4 - A Tinkerer’s Story (i.e. about Tupper) - are worth quoting in full. (The illustration below also comes from Franz’s book.)

‘Earl Silas Tupper represents one grass-roots inventor who embraced the prolific advice literature on the importance of individual inventors and the profitability of patents during the Great Depression. Tupper, creator of the famous plastic containers that bear his name, was an avid tinkerer who began his inventive career by patenting and promoting an automobile accessory. In the 1930s, a young Earl Tupper tinkered with the design of numerous consumer novelties ranging from hairpins and permanently creased dress pants to a streamlined sled. While many of these were fleeting ideas, he promoted some quite vigorously. Tupper kept detailed diaries and notes of his daily activities between 1933 and 1937, and these documents reveal the intense efforts of one consumer-turned-amateur inventor to heed popular advice on invention, to emulate an older generation of independent inventors, and to successfully market his automotive improvements for profit.

Even as the design of the automobile became more complete in the 1930s and university-trained engineers and designers took greater control of technological innovations in the car, Tupper proved that tinkerers still saw the automobile as a fertile field for improvement. Tupper focused his efforts on patenting and marketing a collapsible top for rumble seats, which he dubbed the Clipper Rumble-Top. The rumble-seat top embodied Tupper’s hopes for gaining fame and fortune from invention. His writings reflect the widely held belief in the democratic nature of invention. Like many inventors, he hoped his patents would provide the capital on which to build personal financial security.

For Tupper, invention provided the key to individual success. Although Tupper wrote about the humanitarian benefits of invention, the bulk of his diary entries reflected his more immediate worries about money and his goal of improving his own material circumstances through patenting and selling his ideas. Popular advice encouraged tinkerers like Tupper to model themselves on inventor-heroes of previous generations and to use their own experience to redesign existing machines. A devoted student of popular magazine stories about invention, Tupper embodied what historian Brooke Hindle has called the process of emulation, an empirical approach to invention in the nineteenth century that relied on “fingertip knowledge,” creativity, and a desire to “equal and surpass the work of other [inventors].” Advice experts and committed grass-roots inventors like Tupper continued the process of emulation into the twentieth century, sustaining the efforts of those who invented outside a growing system of corporate research and development laboratories.

Earl Tupper’s coming of age in New England fit the genre of inventor biographies circulating in the popular literature of the early twentieth century. Born on a New Hampshire farm to a family of modest means, Tupper “developed a love of invention” and “showed an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit” by the age of ten. Tupper worked at odd jobs and, through study and persistence, achieved success by inventing a simple plastic container. This simplified story, however, obscures the haphazard and difficult path Tupper followed prior to his success. Tupper had a complex relationship to automobility and to invention. His diaries speak not only to the economic hardships faced by many Americans during the Great Depression but also the hopes and difficulties of patent management for grass-roots inventors. Tupper’s experiences serve as a bridge between nineteenth-century ideas of invention as democratic and accessible and a modern corporate structure that placed invention and innovation in the hands of trained scientists and engineers who worked for large corporations.’

And here are several brief excerpts from Tupper’s diary, all of which I have extracted from Franz’s narrative (each one, therefore, is very likely to have been taken from a longer entry in the diary itself).

2 January 1933
‘Lately I have developed a ravenous appetite for knowledge, [. . .] Why couldn’t I have realized my real future desires while in school?’

7 January 1933
‘If I can get a little money ahead, I’ll show the world some real inventions. [. . .] I let my imagination play to-day . . . on what I would buy if I had only . . . $10,000 to spend. (Boy! - it was tough getting back to the depression).’

12 January 1933
‘I’ll be a super being if I successfully complete it [a programme of study].’

20 January 1933
‘I am ever impressed by the vast amount of interesting - fascinating - and elevating knowledge to be had by the ambitious in this world. It is impossible to live long enough to acquire it all.’

10 February 1933
‘It certainly is amazing what a rotten grafting game our politicians can get away with - even when the facts are broadcast to the people. If this old depression could continue for five more years,  think it would much to awaken the masses to activity towards wiping out corruption.’

4 March 1933
‘This noon we heard . .. President Roosevelt sworn into office. . . Mr. Roosevelt said a lot of nice things if he can and will see them through. I hope this old depression either grows much worse, or leaves us entirely - and very soon. Boy! I feel more stranded than Robinson Coruso [sic] even could have felt. . . It’s certain things can get no worse for me - financially.’

5 May 1933
‘That rumble top certainly looks like somebody’s Million Dollars.’

18 June 1933
‘I am too strapped for money and have notebooks full of sketches and a house of models of inventions awaiting completion and business. [ . . .] If I had a car, I could take care of myself.’

25 June 1933
‘No matter how poets and song writers play up pagan existence and Midevial [sic] civilizations, I’ll still take modern civilization . . . and ultra modern civilization - the more advanced the better I’m for it.”

23 July 1933
‘Gosh this standing around with nothing to do, is driving me crazy. I’m going to start making tops if nothing else.’

10 August 1933
‘Those birds don’t mind saying mean things to a poor little inventor. Just the same, I still believe that I can make money and selling those tops.’

10 September 1933
‘I have just $19 left to my name, no car, and apparently nothing else. With those business assets, I must take care of a fine little wife and a darling child. [. . .] I could always live, but to carry on and keep life for them worth living is a problem - it has been for a year.’

9 December 1933
‘How I crave a new auto now!’

7 February 1934
‘Mr. Sheedy doesn’t want to spend any more money until he sees what we can do toward merchandising the top. I believe that the patent should be granted, then we would have something to sell. As it is we have nothing. [. . .] And since Mr. Sheedy is paying the bill, I can’t say much.’

8 March 1934
‘I hope they sell like hot-cakes.’

22 March 1934
‘I’ve been planning sales campaigns, moving, buying a car, and everything else.’

22 January 1937
‘I can do this designing better than anyone else.’

Signalling with Marconi

‘Signalling with Marconi and Parallel-Wire systems to Lavernock Point.’ This is George Kemp’s inauspicious diary entry for 13 December 1897, the day the Italian radio pioneer, Guglielmo Marconi, made telecommunications history. Marconi, who died 80 years ago today, certainly kept notebooks and diaries himself, though they are brief and coded and considered largely inscrutable by biographers. Of more use to biographers, especially those wishing to trace the evolution of Marconi’s technical innovations, are the diaries kept by Kemp, his first assistant and lifelong friend.

Marconi was born in 1874 into a wealthy Bologna family, and, although mostly brought up in Italy, he spent several years living with his Irish/Scottish mother in Bedford, England. As a boy he took a keen interest in physical and electrical science, studying the work of physicists Maxwell and Hertz. Another physicist who was also a neighbour, Augusto Righi, let Marconi attend lectures at the university of Bologna. In 1895, he began experiments at his father’s country estate at Pontecchio, and succeeded in sending wireless signals over a distance of one and a half miles. The following year, he took his apparatus to England where he was introduced to William Preece, engineer-in-chief of the Post Office, and was granted the world’s first patent for a system of wireless telegraphy.

Marconi demonstrated his system successfully in London, on Salisbury Plain and, most significantly, across the Bristol Channel (on 13 May 1897); and later, in July, he formed The Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company Limited. That same year, he gave a demonstration to the Italian Government at Spezia where wireless signals were sent over a distance of twelve miles; and, in 1899, he established wireless communication between France and England across the English Channel. He soon erected permanent wireless stations in several places on the south coast. In 1900, he took out his famous patent No. 7777 for ‘tuned or syntonic telegraphy’ and, on an historic day, 12 December 1901, determined to prove that wireless waves were not affected by the curvature of the Earth, he used his system for transmitting the first wireless signals across the Atlantic between Poldhu, Cornwall, and St. John’s, Newfoundland, a distance of over 2,000 miles. A year later, a transmission from a Marconi station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada, became the world’s first radio message to cross the Atlantic in the other direction. In 1905, Marconi married Beatrice O’Brien in 1905, and they had three children.

Marconi expanded his company rapidly, developing inventions, and building high-powered stations on both sides of the Atlantic to communicate with ships. In 1904, he established a service of transmitting news to subscribing vessels at sea, and a few years later he launched the first transatlantic commercial service between Glace Bay and Clifden, Ireland. In 1905, he patented his horizontal directional aerial and, in 1912, a ‘timed spark’ system for generating continuous waves. Marconi’s company played a significant role in saving lives after the sinking of the Titanic, a development which brought Marconi himself some fame. He was awarded the Nobel Prize, shared with Professor Karl Braun, in 1909. In 1913, the Marconis moved back to Italy.

In 1914, Marconi was commissioned in the Italian Army as a Lieutenant, and placed in charge of Italy’s military radio service. He was later promoted to Captain, and in 1916 transferred to the Navy in the rank of Commander. He was a member of the Italian government mission to the United States in 1917, and in 1919 was appointed Italian plenipotentiary delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. He was awarded the Italian Military Medal in 1919 in recognition of his war service. Marconi continued to experiment, extending  knowledge and uses of shorter and shorter radio waves. In 1924, his company obtained a contract from the British post office to establish shortwave communication with the countries of the British Commonwealth. In 1927, having had his first marriage annulled, he married Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali and they had one child.

In 1930, by which time Marconi had joined the Italian Fascist party, Benito Mussolini appointed him president of the Royal Academy of Italy, which made Marconi a member of the Fascist Grand Council. He received many honorary doctorates and other international honours and awards, including Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order in England, and the hereditary title of Marchese in Italy. He died on 20 July 1937, and was given a state funeral. The following day, all BBC transmitters and wireless Post Office transmitters in the British Isles observed two minutes of silence in his honour. Further information is readily available online, not least at Wikipedia, Nobel Prize, Electronics Notes, and Encyclopædia Britannica.

Marconi was an inveterate keeper of notebooks which rarely, it seems, had the character of a private diary. Such notebooks from his teens (and other archival materials) were discovered in the 1990s at Villa Farnesina (which had been the home of the Royal Academy under Marconi’s presidency). Some information on these early notebooks (and photographs) can be found at the Guglielmo Marconi Committee’s website. Although the text is in Italian, Google Translate provides a reasonable text in English. 

Otherwise, there is information in English about Marconi’s adult notebooks/diaries in various biographies. Marc Raboy, in his much-respected and very recent work Marconi: The Man who Networked the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), summarises: ‘Every life has its store of secrets and mysteries, which is perhaps why people get so exercised at the thought of some government agency having access to their phone records or hard drives. Marconi’s diaries hold clues to questions unasked and unanswerable, often hinting at relations and interests that then vanish without a trace. There is a backstory to Marconi’s elusive life that we can only begin to glimpse. He loved recounting and reinventing it, but he also took great care to keep parts of it shrouded in obscurity. He would record meetings and make notes to himself in small leather-bound diaries, but he often used a series of indecipherable codes meaningful only to himself; a word, a name, a single letter, a number or an X. The diaries are inscrutable, strewn with references to people who turn up nowhere else in any of the accounts of his life. One of these ephemeral figures was Betty - whose full name was Marion Elizabeth Jessie Marconi Clover. Marconi would occasionally make a note regarding his children - Degna, Giulio, Gioia. . . and, once in the same breath, Betty Clover. On the surface, what could be more reasonable than taking one’s fourteen-year-old goddaughter to Cartier, London’s finest jewellery dealer (as he recorded doing on January 24,1925), or so it would appear.’

Raboy includes more than a dozen mentions of Marconi’s notebooks/diaries in his index, but, as far as I can tell, he only quotes from the diaries once - and in this context: ‘Marconi also carried around a small pocket diary in those days that he used occasionally for recording experimental notations. The notations are often stripped of any context and not necessarily placed on the pages bearing the dates when they were made. But under December 12, 1901, partly obscured by other notations that he may have made earlier or later, he has written: “Sigs at 12.30 1.1 OX and 2.20,” and on December 13, 1901: “Sigs at 1.38.” These entries are the only ones in ink; the others are in pencil. In later years, Marconi frequently referred to these notations, as well as Kemp’s diary, as evidence of the time and date the signals were received. What is perhaps most unusual is that neither Kemp’s nor Marconi’s diary indicate they felt that anything extraordinary had taken place. The entries are matter-of-fact and unadorned. In later years, they both embellished the story, turning it into drama.’

Kemp - George S. Kemp - was Marconi’s right-hand man for many years. Marconi always considered Kemp his first collaborator and a valued friend; indeed emp was still employed by the Marconi company when he died on January 2, 1933, at the age of seventy-five. Marconi was one of the witnesses to his will. From 1887 to 1932, he kept a diary recording his work with Marconi. The diary is a considered a precious resource for understanding Marconi’s research in the early days, and is referred to and quoted from often in Raboy’s biography.

Similarly, Gerald Garratt has much to say about Kemp in his work (available at Googlebooks) The Early History of Radio: From Faraday to Marconi (Issue 20 of History and Management of Technology Series - Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1994): ‘A name that does not appear in any of the contemporary accounts is that of G. S. Kemp, to whom we are chiefly indebted for the day-to-day account of the Lavernock trials. Kemp had joined the Royal Navy at the age of fifteen and, when he was discharged in 1895 at the age of thirty-eight, he joined the staff of the Post Office as an assistant in the Engineer-in-Chief’s Laboratory. In that capacity, he had been instructed to assist Marconi in the earlier experiments on Salisbury Plain. With the decision to hold the more extensive trials in the Bristol Channel, Kemp was made responsible for transporting and setting up the apparatus at Lavernock and Flat Holme. Following his life-long habit, Kemp recorded brief details of his daily activities in a pocket diary. It is to this diary - and particularly to the expanded and edited versions that Kemp prepared for the Marconi Company in about 1930 - that we are indebted for the details which follow.’

Garratt’s text then continues (I have italicised the entries from Kemp’s diary for clarity):

‘In Kemp’s words, the historic experiments started early:

6 May 1897
‘Left at 8.30 a.m. for Paddington with apparatus for experiments at Cardiff. Arrived at 2.17 p.m. and stowed apparatus in store. Proceeded to Lavernock to see mast and found that a long cable had been fixed, stretching out beyond low-water mark, for the earth connection. Fixed a wire atop the 107 ft pole, 16 strands of aluminium wire. Then returned to Cardiff to make arrangements for transporting apparatus to Flat Holme Island.’

7 May 1897
‘I packed Mr Marconi’s transmitter into a small tug at 6.30 a.m. together with the transmitting and receiving apparatus belonging to Mr Preece’s Parallel- Wire system and transported all to Flat Holme Island. Fixed a wire of 18 strands to top of 110 ft pole and prepared Mr Marconi’s transmitter in a small hut close to mast. Slept at a small house owned by the person in charge of the Cremation House.’

For the next few days, Kemp was busy on the little island, fitting up and testing Marconi’s transmitter and Preece’s parallel-wire system. He had trouble with the insulation of the zinc drum at the top of the mast and with the insulation of the stays. Sparks on the parallel-wire system also caused difficulties whenever he used the Marconi transmitter, but these were only ‘teething troubles’ and by the Wednesday of the following week he was able to record that, ‘The signals transmitted across to Lavernock by Mr Marconi’s transmitter and the Parallel-Wire system were good.’ Insulation, however, was still proving troublesome and his next comment was, ‘As I did not like the insulation of the drum, I sent some of these signals on the aerial which was connected to insulated stays’ - a reminder of the very high voltages encountered in the aerial circuits of the early spark transmitters.

Mention was made above of the two versions of Kemp’s diary: the original contemporary pocket diary (parts of which the owner, Kemp’s son, Leslie, kindly permitted me to photograph some years ago) and the expanded version which Kemp had typed and edited for the Marconi Company in about 1930. The latter version contains an amount of detail to which no reference is made in the original, and while no actual contradictions have been noted, it is difficult to avoid wondering how an old man (he was over seventy at the time) writing more than thirty years after the events could have remembered many of the trivial details he mentions. In the original diary, the events of the time from Monday 10 to Friday 14 May are bracketed together with the single comment, ‘Signalling with Marconi and Parallel-Wire systems to Lavernock Point’, but in the 1930 version the daily events are recorded with considerable detail, for example:

13 May 1897
‘The great day for Flat Holme signals. 1 started at 7 a.m. and fitted a new copper earth wire in lieu of the iron earth. I sent and received good signals on both systems between 12 and 1.45 p.m. The first half hour of V’s were on a paper strip on the inker, the second, ‘so be it, let it be so’, and the third, ‘it is cold here and the wind is up’. This message was posted to the Kaiser by Professor Slaby.

In the afternoon Mr Marconi came over and tried some adjustments; Mr Taylor came with him and did a little transmitting but, as T sent the best sentences between 12 and 2 p.m. I returned to those adjustments and sent them the following:
How are you?   repeated
It is hot   repeated
Marconi   repeated
Go to bed   repeated
Go to Hull   repeated
So be it   repeated
Tea here is good   repeated

Nine similar sentences follow. The tests were resumed the following morning. A motor-driven commutator and a Vrill break were tried, but with no marked improvement on the previous day’s results.’

15 May 1897
‘I dismantled the Marconi transmitting apparatus on Flat Holme, leaving it at Penarth, and then arranged for a steamer to Brean Down on Monday.’

Here is the first mention in any of the records of an attempt to transmit right across the Bristol Channel from Lavernock to Brean Down on the Somerset coast. It leaves the impression that it was a sudden, ‘on the spot’ decision, inspired in all probability by the success of the Lavernock-Flat Holme experiments. Preparations continued over the weekend, with Kemp assembling the Marconi transmitter on the top of the cliff at Lavernock. Monday, however, brought bad weather, and Kemp noted that it was too rough for the receiver party to land at Brean Down. Kemp himself remained at Lavernock to operate the transmitter. Just how the receiver party eventually reached Brean Down is not evident from the surviving records. There is no record either of the names of those in the receiver party, or of exactly what they received, but in his contemporary diary Kemp noted on Tuesday, 18 May: ‘Good signals to Brean Down using kite and 300 ft (91.4m) of 4-strand wire’.

In the language of the day, the phrase ‘good signals’ was far from being synonymous with ‘good messages’. In the 1930 version of his diary, Kemp seems to qualify his original comment by saying ‘The engineers reported that they had received signals at Brean Down’. Whether or not the signals were exactly ‘Q5’ (fully readable), it is evident from Gavey’s report that the Post Office officials were impressed with the inherent possibilities of the system. Signals, of sorts, had got across, although it was clear that, in Gavey’s words, ‘There was . . . still much to be desired in order to convert crude appliances into good working devices’. [. . .]

This historic series of experiments across the Bristol Channel came to a close, as Kemp noted the following in his diary:

29 May 1897
‘Packed up and returned to Paddington by the 10.37 p.m. train from Cardiff, arriving at Paddington at 3.30 a.m. on Sunday morning. We stowed all the apparatus in the cloak room.’ ’

Estonian writer’s secret drawer

Karl Ristikivi, one of the most important Estonian writers of historical novels, died 40 years ago today. He kept a diary for a decade or so, and this was published in 2009 to some local acclaim - one reviewer said his diary resembled a secret drawer. However, Ristikivi remains unknown in Britain, and none of his work, and certainly not his diary, has been translated for publication in English.

Karl Ristikivi was born in 1912 in western Estonia to an unmarried maidservant. He was baptised as a Russian Orthodox, like his mother, with the first name Karp. His childhood was spent on farms where his mother was employed, but in 1927 a rich relative offered to send him to study in Tallinn. He left college in 1932, and took up writing, contributing stories to magazines, and publishing children’s books. This earned him enough money to study (sociology) at the University of Tartu from 1936. He graduated in 1941. Between 1938 and 1942, he published three volumes of his so-called Tallinn Trilogy. In the tumult of the war years, he managed to secure himself a position at the Estonian Bureau in Helsinki, and from there, in 1944, he crossed to neutral Sweden, never to return to his home country.

Domiciled in the Stockholm area, Ristikivi worked for the state health insurance office, writing novels, magazine articles (for the Estonian press) and, occasionally, poems in his spare time. His novels (including three trilogies) were largely set in Europe in different historical time periods. None of these have been translated into English, indeed Ristikivi remains largely untranslated into any language. Further information about his life is not readily available online in English, although Wikipedia does have an entry, and there are articles about him at the Estonian Literary Magazine and Karl Ristikivi Society. There is also an informative thread about him at the World Literature Forum.

In 2009, one of Estonia’s largest publishers, Varrak, brought out a 1,000 page edition of Ristikivi’s diaries: Päevaraamat (1957-1968). The original manuscripts are held at the Baltic Archive, part of the Swedish State Archive in Stockholm. The diaries were edited and annotated by Janika Kronberg, a writer who has been head of the Karl Ristikivi Museum and Director of the Estonian Literary Museum. A review of the book, by Rutt Hinrikus, can be found at the Estonian Literature Centre.

Hinrikus says: ‘As is often true of diaries, Ristikivi’s does not contain the information one would expect, nor does it reveal great secrets. Rather, it corresponds to all the characteristics of the canonical diary: it is monotonous, full of repetitive openings, memory fragments, returns to the same themes. It is unexpectedly circumstantial while also unexpectedly private - a very human document in its moving helplessness. Nevertheless, it is very deliberately written as the diary of a writer, a public figure who belongs to the public sphere. While concealing everything that is deeply personal, information is periodically divulged about conditions surrounding writing, including the writer’s health. The author knows that the diary is a personal document, but he also knows that one day it will be found and read. Otherwise, why would it be composed so thoughtfully? The writer notes the dates and ceremonies that are important to him, and emphasizes the way he recollects the past. He heals past trauma through scriptotherapy, sometimes dramatizing the past in order finally to be freed from it. Daily writing allows him to lighten his heart, and helps him begin writing again. The first-person narrator of Ristikivi’s last work, Rooma päevik (Roman Diary) refers to his diary as a hermit’s monologue. Ristikivi interrupts the fictive monologue of Roman Diary in mid-sentence. Ristikivi’s own writer’s diary, however, resembles a secret drawer. The writer does not hold out the key to the reader, but hands him a secret message directing him to the next hiding place, where yet another secret message awaits him.’

Here are a few entries from Ristikivi’s diary, as translated and found in Hinrikus’s review.

1 August 1957
‘It is a very ordinary day, this day on which I begin my diary. I do not know which attempt this is, nor whether I will get farther with it this time than I did the previous times. But now I have decided to keep it for 10 years. Thus it would replace the newspaper clippings---which I am now finished with—after 10 years of work.

And so, for starters, my coordinates. I am 44 years old and work in the Solna health insurance office/---/This is located diagonally across the street at Rasundavägen 100, and I am sitting under the window.’

12 October 1957
‘I am afraid of people, afraid of illness, afraid of accidents. And unfortunately this is not without reason’

26 November 1959
‘When day dawns and with the coming of the lighter season of the year, these existential fears recede and Ristikivi exerts himself to find a topic that would attract him enough to be able to start writing again. Often the greatest obstacle is not so much the present with its everyday fears and routine, but images from the past that continue to make themselves felt. Just as the writing of history is a dialogue between the present and the past, so also is a diary. Sixteen years ago I left Estonia. I had no real place there, neither do I have one here.’

Diary briefs

Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad - Harvard University Press, The Independent, Mail Online

Journals of L. M. Montgomery - Rock’s Mills Press

Court case over Chiang Kai-shek diaries - Taipei Times

Diaries of flying ace Albert Ball - Leicester Mercury, Daily Mail, Nottingham Post

Diaries of immigrant Japanese businessman - Stanford News

Diary of Jersey Under the Swastika - Youtube, Amazon

Did Soviet spies steal a Canadian PM’s diary? - CTV News

David Sedaris publishes diaries - Little Brown, The Guardian

Langley’s diaries unblocked by court - The Guardian

1,000 Days on the River Kwai - Pen & Sword Books, Amazon

Lost diary of tortured Mexican - New York Historical Society, Times of Israel

Diary clue to lost New Zealand natural wonder - NZ Herald, The Guardian

Child’s diary of abuse by grandmother - Crime Online

Depression diary of suicide student - Oldham Evening Chronicle

Wing commander’s war diary auctioned - Cheffins, Daily Mail