Some diaries written by Sean Lester, one of Ireland’s most distinguished statesmen and the last Secretary General of the League of Nations, have just been donated to Dublin City University. They cover a period when he was working for the League of Nations, and his first years as its Secretary General. They will only be open to the public in five years time. However, other diaries of his, covering the same period, are held by the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) Library, and much of the text is available online.
Wikipedia gives a short biography of Lester, as does the UNOG Library website. Born in County Antrim, in 1888, he was an Ulster Protestant, but, already as a youth, turned to Irish Nationalism and joined the Gaelic League, and then the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He worked as a journalist for a number of northern papers, before moving to Dublin, where he rose to become news editor of Freeman’s Journal. After the War of Independence (ended 1921), Lester took a job in the Irish Free State government as Director of Publicity, and then, in 1923, moved to the Department of External Affairs.
In 1929, Lester was made Ireland’s permanent representative at the League of Nations in Geneva, but later was seconded to the organisation and became its High Commissoner for Danzig (a Free City, at the time, under the auspices of the League, and the scene of growing tensions between Germany and Poland) from 1933 to 1937. He was then appointed Deputy Secretary General, and, in 1940, to the top job, as Secretary General. Subsequently, he oversaw the League’s winding down and the transfer of its functions to the United Nations. On returning to Ireland, he declined to seek any permanent office; and died in 1959.
Earlier this month, Dublin City University Library announced that it had received a donation of ‘a collection’ of Lester’s diaries, covering the period 1935 to 1941. In a short statement, the university said it is ‘extremely grateful to Sean Lester’s daughters Ann and Patricia, and the Kilroy and Gageby families for this remarkable gift’, and that the documents will become publicly available after a period of five years - i.e. in 2013.
However, lots of Lester’s diary writing is already freely available on the internet, thanks to the UNOG Library, which already holds a collection of Lester material. At the heart of this collection, the Library says, is Lester’s diary written between 1935 and 1946, when he served with the League. His notes, the Library says, were inspired by ‘minor and major events, the working of the League of Nations, personalities he met, political developments, some family matters, and fishing’. A large part of the journal (1935-1941) was hand-written in note-books, the rest was typed on loose-leafs by Lester himself or his secretary, with date and place and often annotated ‘private’, or ‘secret’, or ‘confidential’.
After Lester’s death in 1959, these notes were mislaid and presumed to be lost. However, the Library explains, in 1980 an important part of his journal was found covering much of 1935-1941. It was then thought that this was all that had survived. They were, therefore, copied and bound together with some less interesting papers. Subsequently three more batches of papers turned up including the rest of his journal for 1934-1946, and all his other papers from 1929 to 1959. But even this material, the Library further explains, which was bound into a second volume, is by no means complete, even for the 1935-1941 period. Some time later, a further box of papers, covering most of Lester’s life, was found, including ‘private diary entries, general S. Lester’s notes, correspondence, press, etc.’ In fact, some of the most important papers for 1935-1941 were among them and are not therefore in the two volumes, the Library says (for instance, as regards ‘the 1936 crisis’).
The two bound volumes (as described above) were donated to the UNOG Library in 1981 by ‘Sean Lester’s daughters: Dorothy Mary Gageby, Patricia Kilroy and Ann Gorski’. And the text of these diaries, at least from 1935 to 1941, is available on the Library’s website. Here are two short extracts from nearly 70 years ago.
14 November 1938
Mother died on November 7th, just over 86 years of age. I had been with her a week before, but had returned to Geneva. She was the sweetest, the most unselfish, and most Christian soul, I have known. Her kindness and charity, unswerving faith, devotion, and love made her shine like a lamp in darkness.
16 November 1938
Following the assassination of a Secretary at the German Embassy in Paris by a frenzied Polish-Jewish youth of 17, whose parents had been maltreated, the Nazis launched a pogrom, burning synagogues and destroying houses and shops and imprisoning thousands of poor wretches. Then a fine of 1,000,000,000 marks as a levy on what is left of Jewish property, compulsory restoration of property destroyed, prior to turning it over to Aryans, expulsion from all retail trades, etc, etc. The world has been aghast - horrified once more by the monster. And one looks to see Chamberlain’s difficulties in a policy of appeasement still further increased.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Tragedy in Antarctica
Sir Douglas Mawson, an Australian geologist and explorer, died 50 years ago today. But he might have expired nearly 50 years earlier - as did colleagues - during a first Australasian expedition to Antarctica. His diaries were not published until the 1980s, but they were used by Mawson himself in writing a classic account of the expedition The Home of the Blizzard, which is freely available online.
Mawson was born in Bradford, England, but his family moved to Australia when he was only two. He studied geology at the University of Sydney, and lectured in petrology. Aged 26, he joined a team headed by British explorer Ernest Shackleton which was the first to climb to the top of Mount Erebus, Antarctica’s active volcano, and the first to reach the magnetic South Pole.
Then, starting in late 1911, Mawson led the first Australasian expedition to Antarctica. Having wintered at a place they named Cape Denison, the party split up into different groups. Mawson and two companions - Lieutenant Bellgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz - set off in November 1912 for an exploratory trek eastward. On 14 December, Ninnis, his sledge and all of the dogs fell through a snow bridge into the crevasse below. Paul Ward’s Cool Antarctica site takes up the story.
‘Mawson and Mertz rushed to the edge of the crevasse, and stared down into a deep, gaping hole. About 150 feet below on a ridge was a dog, whining, its back seemingly broken. Beneath this was only the dark open void of the crevasse. Mertz and Mawson called into the depths for over three hours. They gathered all the rope they had but still could not even reach as far as the dog. As well as the loss of their companion Ninnis, they had also lost the sledge, the six fittest dogs, most of the indispensable supplies, the tent, and most of the food and spare clothing. The remaining sledge had only 10 days of rations for the two men and nothing for the six dogs, they were 315 miles from the main base at Cape Denison.’
On the way back to base, Mertz also died (later it was diagnosed that both Mertz and Mawson had been suffering the effects of vitamin A poisoning after eating the livers of the husky dogs). Mawson did make it back to Cape Denison, in February, but he had just missed the ship - the Aurora - that had come to collect him. However, a party of six had stayed behind to look for the missing men. They tried to recall the Aurora by radio but the sea had iced up, and so all seven of them were confined to stay put until the Aurora could return the following December (1913).
While recuperating, Mawson wrote an account of the ill-fated expedition - The Home of the Blizzard - which was first published in London in 1915. A year earlier, Mawson had been knighted, and become a professor at Adelaide University. In 1929 and 1931, he headed two more voyages to the Antarctic, concentrating on oceanography and marine biology. He died on 14 October 1958
Mawson wrote various other books about Antarctica, but it wasn’t until the 1980s, I think, that his diaries were published - Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries - by Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Copies of the book are available, but they’re not cheap, starting at £50 - see Abebooks.
However, Mawson used extracts from his diaries in writing The Home of the Blizzard. The full text is available from Cool Antarctica or Project Gutenberg. More information about Mawson is available from Wikipedia, or The Diary Junction, or Australian National Dictionary of Biography.
But here is Mawson describing the day of Mertz’s death, interweaving diary entries with his commentary. The text can be found in Chapter 13 of The Home of the Blizzard - Toil and Tribulation.
‘During the evening of the 6th I made the following note in my diary: ‘A long and wearisome night. If only I could get on; but I must stop with Xavier. He does not appear to be improving and both our chances are going now.’
‘January 7 - Up at 8 A.M., it having been arranged last night that we would go on to-day at all costs, sledge-sailing, with Xavier in his bag on the sledge.’
It was a sad blow to me to find that Mertz was in a weak state and required helping in and out of his bag. He needed rest for a few hours at least before he could think of travelling.
‘I have to turn in again to kill time and also to keep warm, for I feel the cold very much now.’
‘At 10 A.M. I get up to dress Xavier and prepare food, but find him in a kind of fit.’
Coming round a few minutes later, he exchanged a few words and did not seem to realize that anything had happened.
‘Obviously we can’t go on to-day. It is a good day though the light is bad, the sun just gleaming through the clouds. This is terrible; I don't mind for myself but for others. I pray to God to help us. I cook some thick cocoa for Xavier and give him beef-tea; he is better after noon, but very low - I have to lift him up to drink.’
During the afternoon he had several more fits, then became delirious and talked incoherently until midnight, when he appeared to fall off into a peaceful slumber. So I toggled up the sleeping-bag and retired worn out into my own. After a couple of hours, having felt no movement from my companion, I stretched out an arm and found that he was stiff.
My comrade had been accepted into ‘the peace that passeth all understanding’. It was my fervent hope that he had been received where sterling qualities and a high mind reap their due reward. In his life we loved him; he was a man of character, generous and of noble parts.
For hours I lay in the bag, rolling over in my mind all that lay behind and the chance of the future. I seemed to stand alone on the wide shores of the world--and what a short step to enter the unknown future!’
Mawson was born in Bradford, England, but his family moved to Australia when he was only two. He studied geology at the University of Sydney, and lectured in petrology. Aged 26, he joined a team headed by British explorer Ernest Shackleton which was the first to climb to the top of Mount Erebus, Antarctica’s active volcano, and the first to reach the magnetic South Pole.
Then, starting in late 1911, Mawson led the first Australasian expedition to Antarctica. Having wintered at a place they named Cape Denison, the party split up into different groups. Mawson and two companions - Lieutenant Bellgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz - set off in November 1912 for an exploratory trek eastward. On 14 December, Ninnis, his sledge and all of the dogs fell through a snow bridge into the crevasse below. Paul Ward’s Cool Antarctica site takes up the story.
‘Mawson and Mertz rushed to the edge of the crevasse, and stared down into a deep, gaping hole. About 150 feet below on a ridge was a dog, whining, its back seemingly broken. Beneath this was only the dark open void of the crevasse. Mertz and Mawson called into the depths for over three hours. They gathered all the rope they had but still could not even reach as far as the dog. As well as the loss of their companion Ninnis, they had also lost the sledge, the six fittest dogs, most of the indispensable supplies, the tent, and most of the food and spare clothing. The remaining sledge had only 10 days of rations for the two men and nothing for the six dogs, they were 315 miles from the main base at Cape Denison.’
On the way back to base, Mertz also died (later it was diagnosed that both Mertz and Mawson had been suffering the effects of vitamin A poisoning after eating the livers of the husky dogs). Mawson did make it back to Cape Denison, in February, but he had just missed the ship - the Aurora - that had come to collect him. However, a party of six had stayed behind to look for the missing men. They tried to recall the Aurora by radio but the sea had iced up, and so all seven of them were confined to stay put until the Aurora could return the following December (1913).
While recuperating, Mawson wrote an account of the ill-fated expedition - The Home of the Blizzard - which was first published in London in 1915. A year earlier, Mawson had been knighted, and become a professor at Adelaide University. In 1929 and 1931, he headed two more voyages to the Antarctic, concentrating on oceanography and marine biology. He died on 14 October 1958
Mawson wrote various other books about Antarctica, but it wasn’t until the 1980s, I think, that his diaries were published - Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries - by Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Copies of the book are available, but they’re not cheap, starting at £50 - see Abebooks.
However, Mawson used extracts from his diaries in writing The Home of the Blizzard. The full text is available from Cool Antarctica or Project Gutenberg. More information about Mawson is available from Wikipedia, or The Diary Junction, or Australian National Dictionary of Biography.
But here is Mawson describing the day of Mertz’s death, interweaving diary entries with his commentary. The text can be found in Chapter 13 of The Home of the Blizzard - Toil and Tribulation.
‘During the evening of the 6th I made the following note in my diary: ‘A long and wearisome night. If only I could get on; but I must stop with Xavier. He does not appear to be improving and both our chances are going now.’
‘January 7 - Up at 8 A.M., it having been arranged last night that we would go on to-day at all costs, sledge-sailing, with Xavier in his bag on the sledge.’
It was a sad blow to me to find that Mertz was in a weak state and required helping in and out of his bag. He needed rest for a few hours at least before he could think of travelling.
‘I have to turn in again to kill time and also to keep warm, for I feel the cold very much now.’
‘At 10 A.M. I get up to dress Xavier and prepare food, but find him in a kind of fit.’
Coming round a few minutes later, he exchanged a few words and did not seem to realize that anything had happened.
‘Obviously we can’t go on to-day. It is a good day though the light is bad, the sun just gleaming through the clouds. This is terrible; I don't mind for myself but for others. I pray to God to help us. I cook some thick cocoa for Xavier and give him beef-tea; he is better after noon, but very low - I have to lift him up to drink.’
During the afternoon he had several more fits, then became delirious and talked incoherently until midnight, when he appeared to fall off into a peaceful slumber. So I toggled up the sleeping-bag and retired worn out into my own. After a couple of hours, having felt no movement from my companion, I stretched out an arm and found that he was stiff.
My comrade had been accepted into ‘the peace that passeth all understanding’. It was my fervent hope that he had been received where sterling qualities and a high mind reap their due reward. In his life we loved him; he was a man of character, generous and of noble parts.
For hours I lay in the bag, rolling over in my mind all that lay behind and the chance of the future. I seemed to stand alone on the wide shores of the world--and what a short step to enter the unknown future!’
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Love in Pyrghos
I am in Greece, on holiday, until the 14th. By coincidence, exactly 30 years ago this week, I was also in Greece on holiday. I’d gone to visit a friend, Marielle, who had moved to a place named Pyrghos (at least that’s how I spelled it) with friends to build and live in a large communal house. So, for a change, I thought I’d simply reproduce a few paragraphs from my own diary (more of it is available on the Pikle website).
7-14 October 1978
‘The only flies I feel are flies, and the mosquitoes are the only mosquitoes, and a firefly is too hot to hold, too red to stare at, too proud to ignore. My body moves slowly, treading along pathways that maze around the village, along pathways that become doorways, houseway entrances, entrance halls; crumbling steps lead to crumbling arches lead to crumbling walls and rooves. My foot will (I know it will) disturb the grasshopper on the path that will spread its wings and reveal to a crimson fright, a crimson flight. My eyes will dart with it (I know they will, I feel them ready) to the stone or bush the other side of where I walk.
After a night of long white love, the acute essence of morning is a kaleidoscope of pure colours and sounds. Sea and sky blue, mountains with mysterious greens. Houses old and cold stone. Birds - the twitter tunes. The sun slowly rises and melts my perception or my imagination that might have come in the night. I am a receptacle for the slight sensations that will pass. The horn of the bus, for instance, becomes a sound for to fill the oceans and the lands as far as I can see. The swaying of a tree or the wind itself diverts at least three senses from the sea-wizards that dance in my head. My forehead furrows to capture, to catch a thought, my eyelids would prefer to fall and to let each lash be caressed by the grandeur of the weathers. My love is a momentary dance of tortoises, or is.
Nudity on the rocks, more than nudity, a bareness to the waves and their impressive depths, their heights and depths, the tunnels of rocks that frighten and leave you gasping with a little sense of magnificence.
Robert Crisp is blunter and more like a child this noon-time. He was a foreign correspondent, writer, journalist. He wears shorts and a bright yellow t-shirt; a napkin is tied around his neck. He sits, placed at a table for one, in front of a television; his head bent back, eyes enthralled. His hands play with a knife, fork, chips, a glass and a bottle of retsina. Here is age and freedom and the wrinkles that were moulded, hardened and set by fear. Any trembles he shows now are in the shake of the folds in his skin, not in his voice or eyes. He is fascinated by Marielle’s group, curious. He tempts the members of the group a little with his stories, or the promise of white beard wisdom.
It is four on Monday afternoon. I know it is Monday because two days ago it was Saturday, Friedl told me, and I know it is four in the afternoon because the clock in this cafe says so (even though the post office isn’t supposed to open until five, but it seems to be open now).
I am too high, too infatuated to realise the glory of this all. My stomach still flutters when I think of Marielle walking around the corner and the smile of a thousand nights missed in our separate flights, our different travels.
Morning in Pyrghos, sun shines low under the mass of grey clouds that appear so low. Contrasting against the white stone walls of the streets. Wind is expectant in gusts. A rainstorm is probable.
I awake slowly from a night of howls by sipping coffee. Above me rises a cobbled street; below, another runs to the church, and to the side another to the plaza. From the latter, a small woman comes, dressed in a black blouse, black skirt, black slippers and carrying a bundle of firewood on her back; it is twice as large as she. Away up the central alley a younger woman carries a similar bundle, but of hay this time. The wind threatens, the vines tremble, leaves form small whirlpools on the concrete.'
7-14 October 1978
‘The only flies I feel are flies, and the mosquitoes are the only mosquitoes, and a firefly is too hot to hold, too red to stare at, too proud to ignore. My body moves slowly, treading along pathways that maze around the village, along pathways that become doorways, houseway entrances, entrance halls; crumbling steps lead to crumbling arches lead to crumbling walls and rooves. My foot will (I know it will) disturb the grasshopper on the path that will spread its wings and reveal to a crimson fright, a crimson flight. My eyes will dart with it (I know they will, I feel them ready) to the stone or bush the other side of where I walk.
After a night of long white love, the acute essence of morning is a kaleidoscope of pure colours and sounds. Sea and sky blue, mountains with mysterious greens. Houses old and cold stone. Birds - the twitter tunes. The sun slowly rises and melts my perception or my imagination that might have come in the night. I am a receptacle for the slight sensations that will pass. The horn of the bus, for instance, becomes a sound for to fill the oceans and the lands as far as I can see. The swaying of a tree or the wind itself diverts at least three senses from the sea-wizards that dance in my head. My forehead furrows to capture, to catch a thought, my eyelids would prefer to fall and to let each lash be caressed by the grandeur of the weathers. My love is a momentary dance of tortoises, or is.
Nudity on the rocks, more than nudity, a bareness to the waves and their impressive depths, their heights and depths, the tunnels of rocks that frighten and leave you gasping with a little sense of magnificence.
Robert Crisp is blunter and more like a child this noon-time. He was a foreign correspondent, writer, journalist. He wears shorts and a bright yellow t-shirt; a napkin is tied around his neck. He sits, placed at a table for one, in front of a television; his head bent back, eyes enthralled. His hands play with a knife, fork, chips, a glass and a bottle of retsina. Here is age and freedom and the wrinkles that were moulded, hardened and set by fear. Any trembles he shows now are in the shake of the folds in his skin, not in his voice or eyes. He is fascinated by Marielle’s group, curious. He tempts the members of the group a little with his stories, or the promise of white beard wisdom.
It is four on Monday afternoon. I know it is Monday because two days ago it was Saturday, Friedl told me, and I know it is four in the afternoon because the clock in this cafe says so (even though the post office isn’t supposed to open until five, but it seems to be open now).
I am too high, too infatuated to realise the glory of this all. My stomach still flutters when I think of Marielle walking around the corner and the smile of a thousand nights missed in our separate flights, our different travels.
Morning in Pyrghos, sun shines low under the mass of grey clouds that appear so low. Contrasting against the white stone walls of the streets. Wind is expectant in gusts. A rainstorm is probable.
I awake slowly from a night of howls by sipping coffee. Above me rises a cobbled street; below, another runs to the church, and to the side another to the plaza. From the latter, a small woman comes, dressed in a black blouse, black skirt, black slippers and carrying a bundle of firewood on her back; it is twice as large as she. Away up the central alley a younger woman carries a similar bundle, but of hay this time. The wind threatens, the vines tremble, leaves form small whirlpools on the concrete.'
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Of briars, thorns and an angel
Exactly a quarter of a millennium ago, on 7 October 1758, a Sussex shopkeeper named Thomas Turner turned to his diary to moan and groan at some length about his wife, and about domestic disquietude, and a marriage that had turned to ‘briers and thorns’. Three years later his wife was dead, and he was writing in his diary, ‘Let them whoever lost an angel, pity me.’
Thomas Turner was born in Kent in 1728, but when still a child his father took over a shop in Framfield, Sussex. Little is known of Turner’s education, but it seems he soon followed in his father’s footsteps by running a general store in East Hoathly. He married his first wife, Margaret ‘Peggy’ Slater, in 1753, but she died before reaching the age of thirty (their only child having also died, in infancy). Turner went on to marry again, and have several children, three of whom survived into adulthood.
For eleven years, starting soon after his first marriage and ending soon after the second, Turner kept a daily diary, often very trivial, but also sometimes very revealing, filling 116 memorandum books, of which 111 are extant and held by Yale University Library. Angst, guilt, depression and too much drinking are all recurring themes in the diary, as is the failure of his marriage to live up to expectations. Charles Dickens quoted from Turner’s diary in All the Year Round; and Arthur Ponsonby (author of English Diaries) says the diary ‘is an amazing production, containing, as it does, the most outspoken confessions combined with almost ridiculous penitence and pretentious moralising’.
Wikipedia and Vulpes Libris have a little information about Turner, and The Diary Junction has some links to online texts of the diary. Here is Turner, writing exactly 250 years ago, bemoaning his life, wife and marriage, with colourful reference to his ‘tumultuous breast’ and the ‘purple current in his veins’!
7 October 1758
‘Oh, how happy must that man be whose more than happy lot it is to whom an agreeable company for life doth fall, - one in whom he sees and enjoys all that this world can give; to whom he can open the inmost recesses of his soul, and receive mutual and pleasing comfort to sooth those anxious and tumultuous thoughts that must arise in the breast of any man in trade! On the contrary, - and I can speak from woful experience - how miserable must they be, where there is nothing else but matrimonial discord and domestic disquietude! How does these thoughts wrack my tumultuous breast, and chill the purple current in my veins! Oh, how are these delusive hopes and prospects of happiness before marriage turned into briers and thorns! But, as happiness is debarred me in this affair, I sincerely wish it to all those that shall ever tye the Gordian knot. Oh woman, ungrateful woman! - thou that wast the last and most compleatest of the creation, and designed by Almighty GOD for a comfort and companion to mankind, to smooth and make even the rough and uneven paths of life, art often, oh too, too often, the very bane and destroyer of our felicity! Thou not only takest away our happy ness, but givest us, in lieu thereof, trouble and vexation of spirit.’
But life with Peggy can’t have been all bad. Two years earlier, Turner had written this.
15 October 1756
‘This is the day on which I was married, and it is now three years since. Doubtless many have been the disputes which have happened between my wife and myself during the time, and many have been the afflictions which it has pleased GOD to lay upon us, and which we have justly deserved by the many anemosityes and desentions which have been continually fermented between us and our friends, from allmost the very day of our marriage; but I may now say with the holy Psalmist, ‘It is good for us that we have been afflicted;’ for, thanks be to GOD, we now begin to live happy; and I am thoroughly persuaded, if I know my own mind, that if I was single again, and at liberty to make another choice, I should do the same - I mean, make her my wife who is so now.’
And here is Turner writing on the day his wife died.
23 June 1761
‘About five o’clock in the afternoon, it pleased Almighty GOD to take from me my beloved wife, who, poor creature, has laboured under a severe tho’ lingering illness for these thirty-eight weeks, which she bore with the greatest resignation to the Divine will. In her I have lost a sincere friend, a virtuous wife, a prudent good economist in her family, and a very valuable companion. . . I have lost an invaluable blessing, a wife who, had it pleased GOD to have given her health, would have been of more real excellence to me than the greatest fortune this world can give. I may justly say, with the incomparable Mr Young, ‘Let them whoever lost an angel, pity me.’
Thomas Turner was born in Kent in 1728, but when still a child his father took over a shop in Framfield, Sussex. Little is known of Turner’s education, but it seems he soon followed in his father’s footsteps by running a general store in East Hoathly. He married his first wife, Margaret ‘Peggy’ Slater, in 1753, but she died before reaching the age of thirty (their only child having also died, in infancy). Turner went on to marry again, and have several children, three of whom survived into adulthood.
For eleven years, starting soon after his first marriage and ending soon after the second, Turner kept a daily diary, often very trivial, but also sometimes very revealing, filling 116 memorandum books, of which 111 are extant and held by Yale University Library. Angst, guilt, depression and too much drinking are all recurring themes in the diary, as is the failure of his marriage to live up to expectations. Charles Dickens quoted from Turner’s diary in All the Year Round; and Arthur Ponsonby (author of English Diaries) says the diary ‘is an amazing production, containing, as it does, the most outspoken confessions combined with almost ridiculous penitence and pretentious moralising’.
Wikipedia and Vulpes Libris have a little information about Turner, and The Diary Junction has some links to online texts of the diary. Here is Turner, writing exactly 250 years ago, bemoaning his life, wife and marriage, with colourful reference to his ‘tumultuous breast’ and the ‘purple current in his veins’!
7 October 1758
‘Oh, how happy must that man be whose more than happy lot it is to whom an agreeable company for life doth fall, - one in whom he sees and enjoys all that this world can give; to whom he can open the inmost recesses of his soul, and receive mutual and pleasing comfort to sooth those anxious and tumultuous thoughts that must arise in the breast of any man in trade! On the contrary, - and I can speak from woful experience - how miserable must they be, where there is nothing else but matrimonial discord and domestic disquietude! How does these thoughts wrack my tumultuous breast, and chill the purple current in my veins! Oh, how are these delusive hopes and prospects of happiness before marriage turned into briers and thorns! But, as happiness is debarred me in this affair, I sincerely wish it to all those that shall ever tye the Gordian knot. Oh woman, ungrateful woman! - thou that wast the last and most compleatest of the creation, and designed by Almighty GOD for a comfort and companion to mankind, to smooth and make even the rough and uneven paths of life, art often, oh too, too often, the very bane and destroyer of our felicity! Thou not only takest away our happy ness, but givest us, in lieu thereof, trouble and vexation of spirit.’
But life with Peggy can’t have been all bad. Two years earlier, Turner had written this.
15 October 1756
‘This is the day on which I was married, and it is now three years since. Doubtless many have been the disputes which have happened between my wife and myself during the time, and many have been the afflictions which it has pleased GOD to lay upon us, and which we have justly deserved by the many anemosityes and desentions which have been continually fermented between us and our friends, from allmost the very day of our marriage; but I may now say with the holy Psalmist, ‘It is good for us that we have been afflicted;’ for, thanks be to GOD, we now begin to live happy; and I am thoroughly persuaded, if I know my own mind, that if I was single again, and at liberty to make another choice, I should do the same - I mean, make her my wife who is so now.’
And here is Turner writing on the day his wife died.
23 June 1761
‘About five o’clock in the afternoon, it pleased Almighty GOD to take from me my beloved wife, who, poor creature, has laboured under a severe tho’ lingering illness for these thirty-eight weeks, which she bore with the greatest resignation to the Divine will. In her I have lost a sincere friend, a virtuous wife, a prudent good economist in her family, and a very valuable companion. . . I have lost an invaluable blessing, a wife who, had it pleased GOD to have given her health, would have been of more real excellence to me than the greatest fortune this world can give. I may justly say, with the incomparable Mr Young, ‘Let them whoever lost an angel, pity me.’
Scandal and Chips
Henry Chips Channon died 50 years ago today. Although American-born, he became a British MP, but is mostly remembered today for his diaries, which have been dubbed ‘wonderfully indiscreet’ for their revelations about high society between the wars. Wallis Simpson, for example, was a friend, and he was privy to her secret affair with the future king. But there may be more scandalous revelations to come, if and when the original diaries are fully published or made available to the public.
The Diary Junction gives a short biographical summary for Channon. Born in Chicago, he was educated both in the US and France. He served with the American Red Cross during the First World War, and after the war returned to Europe, to study at Christ College, Oxford. He was given the nick-name Chips because he shared a house with a friend called Fish. After Oxford, Channon, who had inherited wealth, spent his time travelling and socialising. During the 1926 General Strike he became a Special Constable and promoted The British Gazette , an anti-strike newspaper.
In 1933, Channon married Honor Guinness, the eldest daughter of the second Earl of Iveagh, a previous Conservative MP, who helped his son-in-law become a Conservative MP. Channon and Honor had one child, Paul, born in 1935 (see diary extract below), but the marriage did not survive. Channon was having homosexual affairs, and Honor eventually ran off with a Czech airman. In Parliament, Channon was a supporter of Franco during the Spanish Civil War and, later, an advocate of appeasement. Neville Chamberlain appointed him parliamentary private secretary to Rab Butler, and he remained a junior minister throughout the Second World War.
Channon kept a diary all his life - said to amount to 30 volumes with over three million words - and it is for this that he is most remembered. He moved in the very highest social circles, being friends with the Duke of Kent, younger brother of King George VI, and privy to the secret affair between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. Irene and Alan Taylor said, in The Assasin’s Cloak, that Channon is ‘wonderfully indiscreet’. And Channon himself wrote: ‘What is more dull than a discreet diary?’ A carefully edited version of the diaries - Chips:The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon - did not appear until nearly 10 years after his death in 1967. A few extracts can be found on the Spartacus Education website, and a few pages can be viewed on Amazon’s website.
According to the will of Paul Channon, who died in 2007, full publication of the diaries is to be delayed until 2018. However, The Independent on Sunday ran a story, by Andy McSmith, in April 2007 suggesting that Chips’ grandson, Henry Channon, is considering bringing the date forward. McSmith wrote: ‘Until we have seen the full version, we cannot know what has been hidden - whether it is merely titbits about the sex lives of long forgotten socialites, or something as juicy as a royal scandal. One of the great conundrums that the diaries may answer is the nature of the friendship between Chips Channon and the Duke of Kent, younger brother of King George VI. We know that, coincidentally, they had sons born on the same day in 1935, who grew up together, but what went on between the fathers, in the privacy of a royal bedroom, is still a matter of speculation.’
And here, in one apt extract (from Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon) dated 7 October - the same day as his death 50 years ago - can be found mention of Wallis Simpson, the Duke of Kent, and his only son (born, like the Duke of Kent’s two days later, on 9 October).
7 October 1935
‘Diana Cooper rang early; she had been to the Fort last evening to dine with the Prince of Wales, who was, she said, ‘pretty and engaging’. Mrs Simpson was glittering, and dripped in new jewels and clothes.
I went to Claridges to have tea with the Nicholas’ of Greece who are here for the royal confinement. The Duchess of Kent was there in brown dress and much bejewelled, and rather large but not so large as Honor. Her curls were faultlessly done at the back. She was sweetness itself, but she has not become in the least bit English. We had many pregnancy jokes, and she asked tenderly for Honor, and said it would be ‘so amusing’ if her baby was born first, or on the same day as ours. This unlikely coincidence now seems possible. Hers is due on 16 October, and ours was on 24 September. I adore this family, and loved them when they were down on their luck; now their star is rising, especially since the Kent wedding (these damned, inefficient and all too numerous servants never fill my ink-stand). At one point the Grand-Duchess sent her daughter into the next room to fetch her spectacles and the Duchess went meekly. She has been well brought-up in an old-fashioned affectionate way.
I feel confident that my son will be born before morning.’
The Diary Junction gives a short biographical summary for Channon. Born in Chicago, he was educated both in the US and France. He served with the American Red Cross during the First World War, and after the war returned to Europe, to study at Christ College, Oxford. He was given the nick-name Chips because he shared a house with a friend called Fish. After Oxford, Channon, who had inherited wealth, spent his time travelling and socialising. During the 1926 General Strike he became a Special Constable and promoted The British Gazette , an anti-strike newspaper.
In 1933, Channon married Honor Guinness, the eldest daughter of the second Earl of Iveagh, a previous Conservative MP, who helped his son-in-law become a Conservative MP. Channon and Honor had one child, Paul, born in 1935 (see diary extract below), but the marriage did not survive. Channon was having homosexual affairs, and Honor eventually ran off with a Czech airman. In Parliament, Channon was a supporter of Franco during the Spanish Civil War and, later, an advocate of appeasement. Neville Chamberlain appointed him parliamentary private secretary to Rab Butler, and he remained a junior minister throughout the Second World War.
Channon kept a diary all his life - said to amount to 30 volumes with over three million words - and it is for this that he is most remembered. He moved in the very highest social circles, being friends with the Duke of Kent, younger brother of King George VI, and privy to the secret affair between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. Irene and Alan Taylor said, in The Assasin’s Cloak, that Channon is ‘wonderfully indiscreet’. And Channon himself wrote: ‘What is more dull than a discreet diary?’ A carefully edited version of the diaries - Chips:The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon - did not appear until nearly 10 years after his death in 1967. A few extracts can be found on the Spartacus Education website, and a few pages can be viewed on Amazon’s website.
According to the will of Paul Channon, who died in 2007, full publication of the diaries is to be delayed until 2018. However, The Independent on Sunday ran a story, by Andy McSmith, in April 2007 suggesting that Chips’ grandson, Henry Channon, is considering bringing the date forward. McSmith wrote: ‘Until we have seen the full version, we cannot know what has been hidden - whether it is merely titbits about the sex lives of long forgotten socialites, or something as juicy as a royal scandal. One of the great conundrums that the diaries may answer is the nature of the friendship between Chips Channon and the Duke of Kent, younger brother of King George VI. We know that, coincidentally, they had sons born on the same day in 1935, who grew up together, but what went on between the fathers, in the privacy of a royal bedroom, is still a matter of speculation.’
And here, in one apt extract (from Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon) dated 7 October - the same day as his death 50 years ago - can be found mention of Wallis Simpson, the Duke of Kent, and his only son (born, like the Duke of Kent’s two days later, on 9 October).
7 October 1935
‘Diana Cooper rang early; she had been to the Fort last evening to dine with the Prince of Wales, who was, she said, ‘pretty and engaging’. Mrs Simpson was glittering, and dripped in new jewels and clothes.
I went to Claridges to have tea with the Nicholas’ of Greece who are here for the royal confinement. The Duchess of Kent was there in brown dress and much bejewelled, and rather large but not so large as Honor. Her curls were faultlessly done at the back. She was sweetness itself, but she has not become in the least bit English. We had many pregnancy jokes, and she asked tenderly for Honor, and said it would be ‘so amusing’ if her baby was born first, or on the same day as ours. This unlikely coincidence now seems possible. Hers is due on 16 October, and ours was on 24 September. I adore this family, and loved them when they were down on their luck; now their star is rising, especially since the Kent wedding (these damned, inefficient and all too numerous servants never fill my ink-stand). At one point the Grand-Duchess sent her daughter into the next room to fetch her spectacles and the Duchess went meekly. She has been well brought-up in an old-fashioned affectionate way.
I feel confident that my son will be born before morning.’
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
John Blow’s bad singing
John Blow, an English organist and composer, died three hundred years ago today. He taught Henry Purcell, was one of James II’s musicians, and is thought to have composed the first true English opera. There is no evidence that he kept a diary, and so I only mention him here because Pepys referred to him once - rather unflatteringly.
Blow was baptised in February 1649 (his birth date isn’t known), and was probably educated at the Magnus Song School in Nottinghamshire. In 1660, he joined the choir at Chapel Royal, under Captain Henry Cooke. By the end of the decade, he had been appointed organist at Westminister Abbey, and had become one of the king’s musicians. He was succeeded as organist at Westminster Abbey in 1680 by one his students, Henry Purcell, who had also sung under Cooke at the Chapel Royal, but was reappointed to the post when Purcell died in 1695.
Although hardly remembered today, Blow enjoyed much success during his life. He held various important music-related positions, such as choirmaster at St Paul’s Cathedral, official composer for the Chapel Royal, and Composer in Ordinary to James II. He also composed much ceremonial music, both religious and secular. Although some credit Henry Cooke with the first English opera - The Siege of Rhodes - performed in 1656, my 15th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica says John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, written between 1680 and 1685 ‘is regarded as the first true English opera’. The New Grove (definitive encyclopaedia for music) also ‘names it as the earliest surviving English opera’.
Blow died on 1 October 1708, three hundred years ago, and was buried in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey. The Twickenham Museum has some information about the musician, presumably because he owned a house in nearby Hampton during the latter part of his life. And it is thanks to the museum’s website that I know Pepys heard a young Blow sing, unfortunately his voice had already broken.
Here is part of Pepys diary for 21 August 1667 (taken from www.pepys.info)
‘Thence by coach, took up my wife, and home and out to Mile End, and there drank, and so home, and after some little reading in my chamber, to supper and to bed. This day I sent my cozen Roger a tierce of claret, which I give him. This morning come two of Captain Cooke's boys, whose voices are broke, and are gone from the Chapel, but have extraordinary skill; and they and my boy, with his broken voice, did sing three parts; their names were Blaew and Loggings; but, notwithstanding their skill, yet to hear them sing with their broken voices, which they could not command to keep in tune, would make a man mad - so bad it was.’
Blow was baptised in February 1649 (his birth date isn’t known), and was probably educated at the Magnus Song School in Nottinghamshire. In 1660, he joined the choir at Chapel Royal, under Captain Henry Cooke. By the end of the decade, he had been appointed organist at Westminister Abbey, and had become one of the king’s musicians. He was succeeded as organist at Westminster Abbey in 1680 by one his students, Henry Purcell, who had also sung under Cooke at the Chapel Royal, but was reappointed to the post when Purcell died in 1695.
Although hardly remembered today, Blow enjoyed much success during his life. He held various important music-related positions, such as choirmaster at St Paul’s Cathedral, official composer for the Chapel Royal, and Composer in Ordinary to James II. He also composed much ceremonial music, both religious and secular. Although some credit Henry Cooke with the first English opera - The Siege of Rhodes - performed in 1656, my 15th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica says John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, written between 1680 and 1685 ‘is regarded as the first true English opera’. The New Grove (definitive encyclopaedia for music) also ‘names it as the earliest surviving English opera’.
Blow died on 1 October 1708, three hundred years ago, and was buried in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey. The Twickenham Museum has some information about the musician, presumably because he owned a house in nearby Hampton during the latter part of his life. And it is thanks to the museum’s website that I know Pepys heard a young Blow sing, unfortunately his voice had already broken.
Here is part of Pepys diary for 21 August 1667 (taken from www.pepys.info)
‘Thence by coach, took up my wife, and home and out to Mile End, and there drank, and so home, and after some little reading in my chamber, to supper and to bed. This day I sent my cozen Roger a tierce of claret, which I give him. This morning come two of Captain Cooke's boys, whose voices are broke, and are gone from the Chapel, but have extraordinary skill; and they and my boy, with his broken voice, did sing three parts; their names were Blaew and Loggings; but, notwithstanding their skill, yet to hear them sing with their broken voices, which they could not command to keep in tune, would make a man mad - so bad it was.’
Stevenson’s visit to Tuvalu
Today is Independence Day in Tuvalu. It’s also the 25th anniversary of the country’s independence from Britain. Formerly known as the Ellice Islands, Tuvalu consists of four reef islands and five atolls, and is located in the Pacific Ocean midway between Australia and Hawaii. It is one of the smallest countries, land-wise and population-wise, in the world. In 1890, not long after the country first came under British jurisdiction, Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous Scottish writer, visited the place with his wife, who kept a diary.
The ancestors of Tuvaluan people are believed to have arrived on the islands 2,000-3,000 years ago, probably from Tonga and Samoa. According to Wikipedia, eight of the country’s nine islands were inhabited, hence the name Tuvalu, which means ‘eight standing together’ in Tuvaluan. Under the leadership of chiefs, known as ‘Aliki’, traditional society continued for hundreds of years before undergoing significant changes with the arrival of European traders in the 1820s.
In the early 1860s, Peruvian slave raiders (‘blackbirders’), stole over 400 people from the Tuvaluan islands, but, later in the decade, missionaries started arriving. The British took control in the 1870s, and then administered them as a protectorate from 1892 to 1916, and as part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony from 1916 to 1974. The Ellice islanders then voted for separate British dependency status as Tuvalu, separating from the Gilbert Islands, and in 1978, took on full independence within the Commonwealth.
Tuvalu has a population of less than 10,000 about half of whom live in the capital Funafuti (which is itself made up of 33 islets); and a gross land area of only 26 sqkm (although Funafuti alone encircles a lagoon with an area 275 sqkm). According to Wikipedia again, it is the third least populated independent country in the world (with only Vatican City and Nauru having fewer inhabitants), and the fourth smallest in terms of land area (with only Vatican City, Monaco and Nauru smaller). Subsistence farming and fishing remain the primary economic activity, but the country’s main form of income is foreign aid. Being only 5 m above sealevel, it is one of the countries most endangered by the threat of rising sea levels from climate change.
In May 1890, Robert Louis Stevenson (author of such famous novels as Treasure Island and Kidnapped) visited Funafuti. Since 1887, when his father died, he and his family had been travelling around the Pacific, with extended stays in the Hawaiian islands, Tahiti and the Gilbert Islands. Their visit to Funafuti came a few weeks after leaving Sydney, on their third and final voyage around the South Seas, this one on a ship called Janet Nicol. Later the same year, Stevenson settled in Upolu, one of the Samoan islands, and stayed there till his death in 1894.
Stevenson was no mean diarist, and several of his diaries were publishing successes - Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, for example, and The Silverado Squatters. More about Stevenson, and links to etexts of these diaries can be found at The Diary Junction. But his wife, Fanny, also kept a diary, and it is thanks to her that we have a record of their visit to Funafuti - in The Cruise of the Janet Nichol in the South Seas. Parts of the book are available at Googlebooks, but Jane Resture, on her Tuvalu website, reproduces the text of Fanny’s entry regarding the visit to Funafuti, as well as adding a map and some old photos.
The Stevensons arrived at Funafuti on 27 May 1890 and left the next day. Here is part of Fanny’s diary for 27 May.
‘We expect to make Funafuti, the first of the Ellices by daybreak. At nine o'clock, there were no signs of the island. ‘Bad steering,’ growled the Captain. ‘We’ve run past it and now we have to turn around and run back.’ At about 2 we anchored in the lagoon. Two traders came aboard. One was a half-caste from some other island with elephantiasis, very bad, in both legs. The other trader (Restieaux) was described as not thin but very pallid; his face, hands, legs, and feet were without sunburn, smooth, and of a curious transparent mixture like wax. It seemed an over-exertion to raise his large heavy eyes when he spoke to us.
I asked him if he liked the island. ‘Not at all,’ he answered and went on to describe the people; he said he could not keep chickens, ducks or pigs; no one could, for their neighbours, jealous that another should have what they had not, would stone the creatures to death. The same with the planting of fruit trees; the soil was good, and there were a few breadfruits and bananas, but any attempt to grow more is frustrated. The young trees are torn up and even the old ones are occasionally broken and nearly destroyed. . .
. . . After awhile, Louis and I stroll across the island, becoming more and more amazed by what we saw. Everything that one naturally expects to find on a low island is here reversed. To begin with, the fact of the poisonous fish are outside the reef is contrary to what one has reason to expect. The soil is very rich for a low island, with ferns and many shrubs and flowering plants growing. We saw a little taro and quite a large patch, considering, of bananas. There was much marsh and green stagnant pools, and the air was heavy with a hothouse smell. The island seemed unusually wide, but when we pushed through the bushes and trees to find ourselves not on the sea beach, as we had expected, but on the margin of a large lagoon emptied of its waters almost entirely by the low tide.
I found Louis bending over a piece of the outer reef that he had broken off. From the face of both fractures innumerable worms were hanging like a sort of dreadful, thick fringe. The worm looked exactly like slender earth worms more or less bleached, though some were quite earth worm colours.’
The ancestors of Tuvaluan people are believed to have arrived on the islands 2,000-3,000 years ago, probably from Tonga and Samoa. According to Wikipedia, eight of the country’s nine islands were inhabited, hence the name Tuvalu, which means ‘eight standing together’ in Tuvaluan. Under the leadership of chiefs, known as ‘Aliki’, traditional society continued for hundreds of years before undergoing significant changes with the arrival of European traders in the 1820s.
In the early 1860s, Peruvian slave raiders (‘blackbirders’), stole over 400 people from the Tuvaluan islands, but, later in the decade, missionaries started arriving. The British took control in the 1870s, and then administered them as a protectorate from 1892 to 1916, and as part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony from 1916 to 1974. The Ellice islanders then voted for separate British dependency status as Tuvalu, separating from the Gilbert Islands, and in 1978, took on full independence within the Commonwealth.
Tuvalu has a population of less than 10,000 about half of whom live in the capital Funafuti (which is itself made up of 33 islets); and a gross land area of only 26 sqkm (although Funafuti alone encircles a lagoon with an area 275 sqkm). According to Wikipedia again, it is the third least populated independent country in the world (with only Vatican City and Nauru having fewer inhabitants), and the fourth smallest in terms of land area (with only Vatican City, Monaco and Nauru smaller). Subsistence farming and fishing remain the primary economic activity, but the country’s main form of income is foreign aid. Being only 5 m above sealevel, it is one of the countries most endangered by the threat of rising sea levels from climate change.
In May 1890, Robert Louis Stevenson (author of such famous novels as Treasure Island and Kidnapped) visited Funafuti. Since 1887, when his father died, he and his family had been travelling around the Pacific, with extended stays in the Hawaiian islands, Tahiti and the Gilbert Islands. Their visit to Funafuti came a few weeks after leaving Sydney, on their third and final voyage around the South Seas, this one on a ship called Janet Nicol. Later the same year, Stevenson settled in Upolu, one of the Samoan islands, and stayed there till his death in 1894.
Stevenson was no mean diarist, and several of his diaries were publishing successes - Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, for example, and The Silverado Squatters. More about Stevenson, and links to etexts of these diaries can be found at The Diary Junction. But his wife, Fanny, also kept a diary, and it is thanks to her that we have a record of their visit to Funafuti - in The Cruise of the Janet Nichol in the South Seas. Parts of the book are available at Googlebooks, but Jane Resture, on her Tuvalu website, reproduces the text of Fanny’s entry regarding the visit to Funafuti, as well as adding a map and some old photos.
The Stevensons arrived at Funafuti on 27 May 1890 and left the next day. Here is part of Fanny’s diary for 27 May.
‘We expect to make Funafuti, the first of the Ellices by daybreak. At nine o'clock, there were no signs of the island. ‘Bad steering,’ growled the Captain. ‘We’ve run past it and now we have to turn around and run back.’ At about 2 we anchored in the lagoon. Two traders came aboard. One was a half-caste from some other island with elephantiasis, very bad, in both legs. The other trader (Restieaux) was described as not thin but very pallid; his face, hands, legs, and feet were without sunburn, smooth, and of a curious transparent mixture like wax. It seemed an over-exertion to raise his large heavy eyes when he spoke to us.
I asked him if he liked the island. ‘Not at all,’ he answered and went on to describe the people; he said he could not keep chickens, ducks or pigs; no one could, for their neighbours, jealous that another should have what they had not, would stone the creatures to death. The same with the planting of fruit trees; the soil was good, and there were a few breadfruits and bananas, but any attempt to grow more is frustrated. The young trees are torn up and even the old ones are occasionally broken and nearly destroyed. . .
. . . After awhile, Louis and I stroll across the island, becoming more and more amazed by what we saw. Everything that one naturally expects to find on a low island is here reversed. To begin with, the fact of the poisonous fish are outside the reef is contrary to what one has reason to expect. The soil is very rich for a low island, with ferns and many shrubs and flowering plants growing. We saw a little taro and quite a large patch, considering, of bananas. There was much marsh and green stagnant pools, and the air was heavy with a hothouse smell. The island seemed unusually wide, but when we pushed through the bushes and trees to find ourselves not on the sea beach, as we had expected, but on the margin of a large lagoon emptied of its waters almost entirely by the low tide.
I found Louis bending over a piece of the outer reef that he had broken off. From the face of both fractures innumerable worms were hanging like a sort of dreadful, thick fringe. The worm looked exactly like slender earth worms more or less bleached, though some were quite earth worm colours.’
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Civilisation no longer exists
Abel J Herzberg, a Dutch lawyer in Amsterdam, was arrested by the Nazis in 1943 and, by January 1944, was incarcerated in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He survived there 15 months before release, and for the latter half of that time, he kept a detailed diary, which has been described as ‘unusually probing, sensitive, and eloquent’. This diary - Between Two Streams - A Diary from Bergen-Belsen - is being republished today in paperback form.
I B Tauris, a London-based publisher specialising in the Middle East and the Islamic World, first published Between Two Streams - A Diary from Bergen-Belsen, an English translation of Herzberg’s diary, in 1997. However, it was originally published in a Dutch journal nearly 50 years earlier in 1950; but parts are also included in Bergen-Belsen from 1943 to 1945, a book translated into English in the 1980s - see Abebooks.
Although Herzberg was sent to Bergen-Belsen in January 1944, his diary doesn’t begin until 14 August; and it finishes on 10 April 1945. According to I B Taurus, the diary chronicles ‘the horrific reality of daily existence in the camp’, and Herzberg only survived (rather than being gassed) in the camp because he was one of a small number of ‘privileged’ Jews who were held for possible use in exchanges with Allied-held German civilians. A website on Bergen-Belsen gives more details. It says that Herzberg was on a list of 272 Jews selected in April 1944 to go to Palestine, but that at the last minute, 50 names were crossed off the list and he was sent back to the camp.
Herzberg went on, after the war, to write many books on a wide variety of subjects, receiving numerous honours and prizes, including the Dutch prize for literature in 1974. After he died, in 1989, a translater called Jack Santcross produced an English edition of the diary, which was then published in hardback by I B Taurus in 1997. Santcross himself was a small part of Herzberg’s story, in that as a boy of only nine, he was transported on the same trains that took Herzberg both to and away from Bergen-Belsen!
The 1997 hardback publication of Between Two Streams was favourably reviewed. Kirkus, quoted by Amazon.com, said this: ‘An unusually probing, sensitive, and eloquent diary of incarceration at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. . . As a result of their unique status, these ‘special’ prisoners escaped the fate of others, who were worked to death or immediately killed. But life was not much easier: Seventy percent of the prisoners in Herzberg's section perished form malnutrition, disease, or torture. It is because Herzberg lived to see so much, and because of his passion for justice and his basic decency, that this book towers over many more gruesome death-camp memoirs.’
Eric Sterling wrote a longer review for H-Net calling the diary ‘very powerful and illuminating’. He says Herzberg’s work possesses ‘a sense of immediacy’ that other diaries don’t, because ‘[he] writes about actions as they happen!’. Stein also notes that Herzberg, realising that the quality of his diary would suffer if he revised it after his liberation, refrained from making any alterations, ‘the reader, therefore, learns what goes on in the mind of a concentration camp prisoner as he endures his manifold hardships and as he witnesses atrocities inflicted upon other inmates’.
The Diary Junction has a biographical summary for Herzberg. It also has links to some extracts from his diary - here are a couple.
14 August 1944
‘Hut 13 is being punished. During roll-call, they had not stood orderly and still. Once again roll-call had lasted one and a half hours because someone miscounted in hut 28. Apparently hut 13 had got tired. Now they must stand in the cold, because it is chilly today . . .’
‘. . . Here civilisation no longer exists and consequently no sophistication either. As for eating, all I have to say is: there is hunger one side of our body, namely the inside, and fodder on the outside. Now the problem is: how to make the fodder reach the stomach. That is all. You have a fodder dish which is brown. It is a little impractical for a snout, else it could easily be used for pigs. You have a spoon, why? Because if you slurped from the your fodder dish you might make a mess, and that would be a pity.’
15 August 1944
‘The prisoners have erected the tent camp. Our men have carried straw. And last night and this morning a transport of women and children moved into these ten to twelve tents. Who are they? All this takes place right next to our camp section. We can see them. And nonetheless nobody knows anything - we are isolated from one another that strictly. All sorts of rumours are circulating, and most of them boil down to: fugitives from Poland and East Prussia. So we know at least one thing for certain: it is a sign of dissolution. And further: we are not going to get out of here anymore. We have to wait for the chaos. Will we one day have to swap places with these women and be housed in the tents? Those who love indulging in gloomy prophecies believe that. But it strengthens our power of resistance.’
I B Tauris, a London-based publisher specialising in the Middle East and the Islamic World, first published Between Two Streams - A Diary from Bergen-Belsen, an English translation of Herzberg’s diary, in 1997. However, it was originally published in a Dutch journal nearly 50 years earlier in 1950; but parts are also included in Bergen-Belsen from 1943 to 1945, a book translated into English in the 1980s - see Abebooks.
Although Herzberg was sent to Bergen-Belsen in January 1944, his diary doesn’t begin until 14 August; and it finishes on 10 April 1945. According to I B Taurus, the diary chronicles ‘the horrific reality of daily existence in the camp’, and Herzberg only survived (rather than being gassed) in the camp because he was one of a small number of ‘privileged’ Jews who were held for possible use in exchanges with Allied-held German civilians. A website on Bergen-Belsen gives more details. It says that Herzberg was on a list of 272 Jews selected in April 1944 to go to Palestine, but that at the last minute, 50 names were crossed off the list and he was sent back to the camp.
Herzberg went on, after the war, to write many books on a wide variety of subjects, receiving numerous honours and prizes, including the Dutch prize for literature in 1974. After he died, in 1989, a translater called Jack Santcross produced an English edition of the diary, which was then published in hardback by I B Taurus in 1997. Santcross himself was a small part of Herzberg’s story, in that as a boy of only nine, he was transported on the same trains that took Herzberg both to and away from Bergen-Belsen!
The 1997 hardback publication of Between Two Streams was favourably reviewed. Kirkus, quoted by Amazon.com, said this: ‘An unusually probing, sensitive, and eloquent diary of incarceration at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. . . As a result of their unique status, these ‘special’ prisoners escaped the fate of others, who were worked to death or immediately killed. But life was not much easier: Seventy percent of the prisoners in Herzberg's section perished form malnutrition, disease, or torture. It is because Herzberg lived to see so much, and because of his passion for justice and his basic decency, that this book towers over many more gruesome death-camp memoirs.’
Eric Sterling wrote a longer review for H-Net calling the diary ‘very powerful and illuminating’. He says Herzberg’s work possesses ‘a sense of immediacy’ that other diaries don’t, because ‘[he] writes about actions as they happen!’. Stein also notes that Herzberg, realising that the quality of his diary would suffer if he revised it after his liberation, refrained from making any alterations, ‘the reader, therefore, learns what goes on in the mind of a concentration camp prisoner as he endures his manifold hardships and as he witnesses atrocities inflicted upon other inmates’.
The Diary Junction has a biographical summary for Herzberg. It also has links to some extracts from his diary - here are a couple.
14 August 1944
‘Hut 13 is being punished. During roll-call, they had not stood orderly and still. Once again roll-call had lasted one and a half hours because someone miscounted in hut 28. Apparently hut 13 had got tired. Now they must stand in the cold, because it is chilly today . . .’
‘. . . Here civilisation no longer exists and consequently no sophistication either. As for eating, all I have to say is: there is hunger one side of our body, namely the inside, and fodder on the outside. Now the problem is: how to make the fodder reach the stomach. That is all. You have a fodder dish which is brown. It is a little impractical for a snout, else it could easily be used for pigs. You have a spoon, why? Because if you slurped from the your fodder dish you might make a mess, and that would be a pity.’
15 August 1944
‘The prisoners have erected the tent camp. Our men have carried straw. And last night and this morning a transport of women and children moved into these ten to twelve tents. Who are they? All this takes place right next to our camp section. We can see them. And nonetheless nobody knows anything - we are isolated from one another that strictly. All sorts of rumours are circulating, and most of them boil down to: fugitives from Poland and East Prussia. So we know at least one thing for certain: it is a sign of dissolution. And further: we are not going to get out of here anymore. We have to wait for the chaos. Will we one day have to swap places with these women and be housed in the tents? Those who love indulging in gloomy prophecies believe that. But it strengthens our power of resistance.’
Monday, September 29, 2008
Nelson’s diary, and left hand
It’s Horatio Nelson’s birthday. One of Britain’s greatest heroes was born 250 years ago today on 29 September 1758. He is not famed for his diary-keeping, although there is a published diary, dating from the very last weeks of his life, the original of which is said to have had an odour ‘faintly suggestive of spicy exhalations from tar and hemp and timber’. A typed version is freely available online; but, more interesting is the diary of Elizabeth Fremantle who was at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife - where Nelson lost his right arm.
Horatio Nelson, born exactly a quarter of a millennium ago, was famous for his role in the Napoleonic Wars, most notably at the Battle of Trafalgar, a decisive British victory, during which he lost his life - on 21 October 1805. By 16, he had already travelled the world with the Royal Navy; and by 21, he was one of its youngest captains. He was famed for inspiring loyalty in his crew and for his innovative strategies in battle at sea - he fought in more than 120 engagements. For more biographical information about Nelson on the internet, try Wikipedia, or the BBC, or the Royal Navy.
Nelson did keep diaries, it seems, but - with one exception - they have never been published as such. The exception is the diary he kept in the very last weeks of his life. This was published in 1917 as Nelson’s Last Diary. It covers only a few weeks, from 13 September to 21 October in 1805, but also contains an introduction and notes by Gilbert Hudson. It’s freely available, in various versions, at the Internet Archive. While the diary itself is not that interesting (unless you’re a naval historian), Hudson’s description of it is very appealing.
‘It measures about seven inches by four-and-a-half, and contains twenty leaves now numbered as forty pages all of them except the first, and the last five, being written on both sides entirely by Nelson’s own left hand, interleaved with blotting-paper, and bound in limp leather covers of a deep red shade. Nothing but a slight crinkling of these covers remains to show that the book lay during many years rolled up with the Will and other papers, without distinction of place or treatment. The fact that they have been protected, like thousands of other interesting records, from the deleterious handling of idle curiosity, speaks well for those official regulations which the general public is always ready enough to condemn as arbitrary and unreasonable.
Had the Diary been lodged in scrupulous custody at an earlier date, it might have retained its original number of leaves, whereof two, unfortunately, have long been missing. But the mutilation is not visible except on careful scrutiny, and the book now appears only a little more soiled and worn than when it lay in Nelson’s escritoire, unhurt amid the perilous tumult of Trafalgar.
The time-mellowed pages have a peculiar odour of a much more agreeable pungency than the usual mustiness of ancient records, and more than faintly suggestive of spicy exhalations from tar and hemp and timber. Whether this arises indeed from some old permeation of nautical atmosphere and circumstance, or merely from certain fragrant qualities of the paper and binding, or by chance from any process of fumigation or embalmment, or from what other cause so ever, it deserves at least brief mention if only for the sake of sentiment.’
The diary itself contains only brief entries, here is one which I’ve chosen simply because it’s from the same date as today - 29 September (1805): ‘Fine weather. Gave out the necessary orders for the Fleet. Sent Euryalus to watch the Enemy with the Hydra off Cadiz.’ There’s a small photograph of the diary in a BBC News article dating from 2005 and the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.
Otherwise, one has to google hard on the web to find evidence of Nelson’s diaries. For example, the National Archives has a long listing for Nelson, but does not include reference to any diaries. However, Robert Southey, in his biography - The Life of Nelson (available to view at Googlebooks website) - does refer to Nelson’s diaries. Southey’s extracts, it seems, came from an 1809 biography by Clarke and McArthur. However, there are extracts, of what Nelson called his ‘private diary’, in the various volumes of The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson (downloadable from Internet Archive).
Here is Southey using Nelson’s diary. It is June 1805, just a few months before Trafalgar: ‘Nelson’s diary at this time denotes his great anxiety and his perpetual and all-observing vigilance. ‘June 21. Midnight, nearly calm, saw three planks, which I think came from the French fleet. Very miserable, which is very foolish.’ On the 17th of July he came in sight of Cape St. Vincent, and steered for Gibraltar. ‘June 18th,’ his diary says, ’Cape Spartel in sight, but no French fleet, nor any information about them. How sorrowful this makes me! but I cannot help myself.’ The next day he anchored at Gibraltar; and on the 20th, says, ‘I went on shore for the first time since June 16, 1803; and from having my foot out of the VICTORY two years, wanting ten days.’ ’
But others around Nelson were keeping diaries, and one of the most intriguing and interesting is that by Elizabeth Fremantle. She was one of five Wynne sisters, three of whom kept journals, These were edited by a descendant and published in several volumes in the 1930s - as The Wynne Diaries - by a Fremantle descendant. Subsequently, they were further edited into a single volume. The Diary Junction has some information and links.
Of interest, though, is that Elizabeth (or Betsey) Wynne married one of Nelson’s captains, Thomas Fremantle (later a vice-admiral), and was onboard with him during various sea battles, not least the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797, where Nelson lost his arm. The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has a painting by Richard Westall of the moment, accompanied by a good summary of events:
‘Nelson was ordered to take possession of the town and harbour of Santa Cruz in Tenerife, where Spanish treasure ships were reported to be lying. He immediately set sail with three ships of the line, three frigates, and a cutter and was joined by a fourth frigate and a bomb vessel en route. After several failed attempts Nelson decided upon a direct assault on Santa Cruz by night, aiming for the central castle of San Cristobal where the Spanish general staff were based. Nelson commanded the attack, leading one of six divisions of boats . . . However, the initial boat-landings went wrong when many of them were swept off course and the element of surprise was lost. During his attempt to land Nelson was about to disembark when he was hit just above the right elbow by a musket or similar ball fired as grapeshot, which shattered the bone and joint. The arm was amputated aboard the Theseus that night. The attack ground to a halt, the British force landed at the harbour negotiating a truce with the Spanish Governor under which they returned to their ships. The Spanish also offered hospital facilities for the wounded and to sell the squadron provisions.’
Although a bit short of punctuation at times, extracts from Elizabeth Fremantle’s diary (a 1982 edition of The Wyne Diaries) give a marvellous on-the-spot account of what it was like to be there - even if the author is understandably more concerned about her husband’s wounds than Nelson’s arm! They also suggest Betsey may have received one of the first notes Nelson wrote with his left hand.
Thursday 25 July
‘The troops landed at two oclock this morning. There was much firing in the Town, but from the ships it seemed as if the English had made themselves masters of it, Great was our mistake, this proved to be a shocking, unfortunate night Fremantle returned at 4 this morning wounded in the arm, he was shot through the right arm the moment he had landed, came off in the first boat, and stayed on board the Zealous till day light, where he wound was dressed. Thank God as the ball only went through the flesh he will not lose an arm he managed it so well that I was not frightened, but I was not a little distressed and miserably when I heard what it was, and indeed he was in great pain and suffered cruelly all day but it was fortunate that he did get wounded at first, God knows if ever I should have seen again had he stayed on short. It was dreadful, poor Captain Bowen killed on the spot, The Admiral was wounded as he was getting out of the Boat and most unfortunately lost his arm. The fox Cutter was lost and poor old Gibson drowned Captain Thompson is likewise wounded. All the rest remained on shore very few people returned to the ships in the morning. As they threatened to burn the Town they had their own terms and were sent off . . .
This is the most melancholy event, I can’t help thinking of poor Captain Bowens losing his life just at the end of the war in which he had been so fortunate. At the moment he was continually talking of the happy life he should lead when he returned home. . . .
Fremantle was in great pain all day but I hope he will soon get well.’
Wednesday 26 July
‘Fremantle had a very good night’s rest he has no fever at all, his wound was dressed at twelve oclock and Fleming says it looks very well. It is a wonder how nothing but the flesh was hurt as two musquet balls went through the arm, about 15 of our men are wounded and two dead we are lucky as the other Frigates lost about 20 men a piece and some of the line of battle ships a hundred. The Admiral is coming on very well, he wrote me a line with his left hand.’
Horatio Nelson, born exactly a quarter of a millennium ago, was famous for his role in the Napoleonic Wars, most notably at the Battle of Trafalgar, a decisive British victory, during which he lost his life - on 21 October 1805. By 16, he had already travelled the world with the Royal Navy; and by 21, he was one of its youngest captains. He was famed for inspiring loyalty in his crew and for his innovative strategies in battle at sea - he fought in more than 120 engagements. For more biographical information about Nelson on the internet, try Wikipedia, or the BBC, or the Royal Navy.
Nelson did keep diaries, it seems, but - with one exception - they have never been published as such. The exception is the diary he kept in the very last weeks of his life. This was published in 1917 as Nelson’s Last Diary. It covers only a few weeks, from 13 September to 21 October in 1805, but also contains an introduction and notes by Gilbert Hudson. It’s freely available, in various versions, at the Internet Archive. While the diary itself is not that interesting (unless you’re a naval historian), Hudson’s description of it is very appealing.
‘It measures about seven inches by four-and-a-half, and contains twenty leaves now numbered as forty pages all of them except the first, and the last five, being written on both sides entirely by Nelson’s own left hand, interleaved with blotting-paper, and bound in limp leather covers of a deep red shade. Nothing but a slight crinkling of these covers remains to show that the book lay during many years rolled up with the Will and other papers, without distinction of place or treatment. The fact that they have been protected, like thousands of other interesting records, from the deleterious handling of idle curiosity, speaks well for those official regulations which the general public is always ready enough to condemn as arbitrary and unreasonable.
Had the Diary been lodged in scrupulous custody at an earlier date, it might have retained its original number of leaves, whereof two, unfortunately, have long been missing. But the mutilation is not visible except on careful scrutiny, and the book now appears only a little more soiled and worn than when it lay in Nelson’s escritoire, unhurt amid the perilous tumult of Trafalgar.
The time-mellowed pages have a peculiar odour of a much more agreeable pungency than the usual mustiness of ancient records, and more than faintly suggestive of spicy exhalations from tar and hemp and timber. Whether this arises indeed from some old permeation of nautical atmosphere and circumstance, or merely from certain fragrant qualities of the paper and binding, or by chance from any process of fumigation or embalmment, or from what other cause so ever, it deserves at least brief mention if only for the sake of sentiment.’
The diary itself contains only brief entries, here is one which I’ve chosen simply because it’s from the same date as today - 29 September (1805): ‘Fine weather. Gave out the necessary orders for the Fleet. Sent Euryalus to watch the Enemy with the Hydra off Cadiz.’ There’s a small photograph of the diary in a BBC News article dating from 2005 and the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.
Otherwise, one has to google hard on the web to find evidence of Nelson’s diaries. For example, the National Archives has a long listing for Nelson, but does not include reference to any diaries. However, Robert Southey, in his biography - The Life of Nelson (available to view at Googlebooks website) - does refer to Nelson’s diaries. Southey’s extracts, it seems, came from an 1809 biography by Clarke and McArthur. However, there are extracts, of what Nelson called his ‘private diary’, in the various volumes of The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson (downloadable from Internet Archive).
Here is Southey using Nelson’s diary. It is June 1805, just a few months before Trafalgar: ‘Nelson’s diary at this time denotes his great anxiety and his perpetual and all-observing vigilance. ‘June 21. Midnight, nearly calm, saw three planks, which I think came from the French fleet. Very miserable, which is very foolish.’ On the 17th of July he came in sight of Cape St. Vincent, and steered for Gibraltar. ‘June 18th,’ his diary says, ’Cape Spartel in sight, but no French fleet, nor any information about them. How sorrowful this makes me! but I cannot help myself.’ The next day he anchored at Gibraltar; and on the 20th, says, ‘I went on shore for the first time since June 16, 1803; and from having my foot out of the VICTORY two years, wanting ten days.’ ’
But others around Nelson were keeping diaries, and one of the most intriguing and interesting is that by Elizabeth Fremantle. She was one of five Wynne sisters, three of whom kept journals, These were edited by a descendant and published in several volumes in the 1930s - as The Wynne Diaries - by a Fremantle descendant. Subsequently, they were further edited into a single volume. The Diary Junction has some information and links.
Of interest, though, is that Elizabeth (or Betsey) Wynne married one of Nelson’s captains, Thomas Fremantle (later a vice-admiral), and was onboard with him during various sea battles, not least the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797, where Nelson lost his arm. The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has a painting by Richard Westall of the moment, accompanied by a good summary of events:
‘Nelson was ordered to take possession of the town and harbour of Santa Cruz in Tenerife, where Spanish treasure ships were reported to be lying. He immediately set sail with three ships of the line, three frigates, and a cutter and was joined by a fourth frigate and a bomb vessel en route. After several failed attempts Nelson decided upon a direct assault on Santa Cruz by night, aiming for the central castle of San Cristobal where the Spanish general staff were based. Nelson commanded the attack, leading one of six divisions of boats . . . However, the initial boat-landings went wrong when many of them were swept off course and the element of surprise was lost. During his attempt to land Nelson was about to disembark when he was hit just above the right elbow by a musket or similar ball fired as grapeshot, which shattered the bone and joint. The arm was amputated aboard the Theseus that night. The attack ground to a halt, the British force landed at the harbour negotiating a truce with the Spanish Governor under which they returned to their ships. The Spanish also offered hospital facilities for the wounded and to sell the squadron provisions.’
Although a bit short of punctuation at times, extracts from Elizabeth Fremantle’s diary (a 1982 edition of The Wyne Diaries) give a marvellous on-the-spot account of what it was like to be there - even if the author is understandably more concerned about her husband’s wounds than Nelson’s arm! They also suggest Betsey may have received one of the first notes Nelson wrote with his left hand.
Thursday 25 July
‘The troops landed at two oclock this morning. There was much firing in the Town, but from the ships it seemed as if the English had made themselves masters of it, Great was our mistake, this proved to be a shocking, unfortunate night Fremantle returned at 4 this morning wounded in the arm, he was shot through the right arm the moment he had landed, came off in the first boat, and stayed on board the Zealous till day light, where he wound was dressed. Thank God as the ball only went through the flesh he will not lose an arm he managed it so well that I was not frightened, but I was not a little distressed and miserably when I heard what it was, and indeed he was in great pain and suffered cruelly all day but it was fortunate that he did get wounded at first, God knows if ever I should have seen again had he stayed on short. It was dreadful, poor Captain Bowen killed on the spot, The Admiral was wounded as he was getting out of the Boat and most unfortunately lost his arm. The fox Cutter was lost and poor old Gibson drowned Captain Thompson is likewise wounded. All the rest remained on shore very few people returned to the ships in the morning. As they threatened to burn the Town they had their own terms and were sent off . . .
This is the most melancholy event, I can’t help thinking of poor Captain Bowens losing his life just at the end of the war in which he had been so fortunate. At the moment he was continually talking of the happy life he should lead when he returned home. . . .
Fremantle was in great pain all day but I hope he will soon get well.’
Wednesday 26 July
‘Fremantle had a very good night’s rest he has no fever at all, his wound was dressed at twelve oclock and Fleming says it looks very well. It is a wonder how nothing but the flesh was hurt as two musquet balls went through the arm, about 15 of our men are wounded and two dead we are lucky as the other Frigates lost about 20 men a piece and some of the line of battle ships a hundred. The Admiral is coming on very well, he wrote me a line with his left hand.’
Thursday, September 25, 2008
I thought I was out of the woods
John Churton Collins, a writer and literary critic at the turn of the last century, died 100 years ago in mysterious circumstances. However, the last few pages of his diary - available online thanks to the New York Times archive - point to a near-suicidal depression. In a particularly poignant entry five days before his death, Churton Collins writes: ‘Last night I was so calm and contented when I went to bed I thought I was out of the woods.’
Publication of this article was planned for the 100th anniversary of Churton Collin’s death - which, according to Wikipedia, took place on 25 September 1908. But, while researching the story, it soon became clear that, in fact, he died 10 days earlier on 15 September 1908. So this article is ten days late. I mention it only because the 25 September death date can be found all over the internet, and is a prime example of how the nature of the internet, which is mostly marvellous, can lead to the extensive propagation of mis-information (but I don’t wish to suggest I’m any less guilty of this than the next web-man.)
The 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica gives a short biographical summary for Churton Collins. Born in 1848 in Gloucestershire, he graduated from Oxford in 1872, and embarked on a writing career. Books on Joshua Reynolds, Bolingbroke, Voltaire and Swift followed, as well as many literary reviews. In 1904, he became professor of English literature at Birmingham University. And on 15 September 1908, it says, ‘he was found dead in a ditch near Lowestoft, at which place he had been staying with a doctor for the benefit of his health’. (Wikipedia uses almost the exact same text, but with 25 September instead of 15 September!) The circumstances necessitated the holding of an inquest, and the verdict was ‘accidental death’.
In an article on the death of Churton Collins, dated 22 September 1908, the New York Times (which, very usefully, has scanned and put online so many of its archived articles) said he was ‘esteemed as one of the sanest recent critics of literature’; it described him as ‘an old-fashioned, hard-hitting critic’ and as having sound, if somewhat prejudiced, views but a mind that was ‘well balanced’.
Two days earlier, on 20 September 1908, the New York Times had run a news story about the death, calling it ‘a remarkable pathological case’. It said Churton Collins had suffered for several years from fits of depression, probably caused by overwork, and it quoted extracts from the last pages in his diary (which had been cabled to New York by the paper’s London correspondent). It also noted that he had written a Voltaire quotation (ironic in the circumstances) on the inside cover of the diary: ‘Apres tout c’est un monde passable’.
Here are most of the diary entries published by the New York Times on 20 September 1908.
26 August: I am at Dr Daniel’s, at Oulton Road [Lowestoft], having had for nearly a month one of the worst attacks of depression I ever experienced. It began in London, got worse at Cardiff, and reached its climax at Oxford. The doctor insisted I must leave at once, and it was arranged I should come here, where I have been better, but am still suffering terribly at times. I can trace the cause of the attack to great stress of work and its sudden cessation. This undoubtedly set it up. My agony at times has been intolerable. . .
27 August: Much better; then came a reaction for the worse. I am now in the extreme of misery and depression.
28 August: Complete collapse again - intense depression
29-30 August: Wretched time, with occasional alternations, but nothing lasting. I can sleep well, God be thanked, and then wake up depressed.
31 August: Fearful depression, sensation that I was worn out mentally, fearfully sleepy. What will become of my children if I get worse?
2 September: I am now in a dead, dull suicidal misery.
3 September: Very good news - rest from awful depression. Then came on a terribly acute attack.
4 September: Woke up as usual without depression, but it soon began.
5 September: Miserable depression till about 7, when the cloud lifted and I got peace and began to think contentedly about future work.
6 September: Terrible in the morning; better as day advanced.
7 September: Very mixed day.
10 September: Last night I was so calm and contented when I went to bed I thought I was out of the woods. I felt perfectly well; but, alas, morning came and I had a terrible relapse into utter depression. Better after breakfast. Now, sitting on the porch at 12 o’clock, I feel calm.
No date: I have been through an awful time. My nerves are completely shattered. I have taken a drug this morning to get a good sleep and appease my agony.
The 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica gives a short biographical summary for Churton Collins. Born in 1848 in Gloucestershire, he graduated from Oxford in 1872, and embarked on a writing career. Books on Joshua Reynolds, Bolingbroke, Voltaire and Swift followed, as well as many literary reviews. In 1904, he became professor of English literature at Birmingham University. And on 15 September 1908, it says, ‘he was found dead in a ditch near Lowestoft, at which place he had been staying with a doctor for the benefit of his health’. (Wikipedia uses almost the exact same text, but with 25 September instead of 15 September!) The circumstances necessitated the holding of an inquest, and the verdict was ‘accidental death’.In an article on the death of Churton Collins, dated 22 September 1908, the New York Times (which, very usefully, has scanned and put online so many of its archived articles) said he was ‘esteemed as one of the sanest recent critics of literature’; it described him as ‘an old-fashioned, hard-hitting critic’ and as having sound, if somewhat prejudiced, views but a mind that was ‘well balanced’.
Two days earlier, on 20 September 1908, the New York Times had run a news story about the death, calling it ‘a remarkable pathological case’. It said Churton Collins had suffered for several years from fits of depression, probably caused by overwork, and it quoted extracts from the last pages in his diary (which had been cabled to New York by the paper’s London correspondent). It also noted that he had written a Voltaire quotation (ironic in the circumstances) on the inside cover of the diary: ‘Apres tout c’est un monde passable’.
Here are most of the diary entries published by the New York Times on 20 September 1908.
26 August: I am at Dr Daniel’s, at Oulton Road [Lowestoft], having had for nearly a month one of the worst attacks of depression I ever experienced. It began in London, got worse at Cardiff, and reached its climax at Oxford. The doctor insisted I must leave at once, and it was arranged I should come here, where I have been better, but am still suffering terribly at times. I can trace the cause of the attack to great stress of work and its sudden cessation. This undoubtedly set it up. My agony at times has been intolerable. . .
27 August: Much better; then came a reaction for the worse. I am now in the extreme of misery and depression.
28 August: Complete collapse again - intense depression
29-30 August: Wretched time, with occasional alternations, but nothing lasting. I can sleep well, God be thanked, and then wake up depressed.
31 August: Fearful depression, sensation that I was worn out mentally, fearfully sleepy. What will become of my children if I get worse?
2 September: I am now in a dead, dull suicidal misery.
3 September: Very good news - rest from awful depression. Then came on a terribly acute attack.
4 September: Woke up as usual without depression, but it soon began.
5 September: Miserable depression till about 7, when the cloud lifted and I got peace and began to think contentedly about future work.
6 September: Terrible in the morning; better as day advanced.
7 September: Very mixed day.
10 September: Last night I was so calm and contented when I went to bed I thought I was out of the woods. I felt perfectly well; but, alas, morning came and I had a terrible relapse into utter depression. Better after breakfast. Now, sitting on the porch at 12 o’clock, I feel calm.
No date: I have been through an awful time. My nerves are completely shattered. I have taken a drug this morning to get a good sleep and appease my agony.
Monday, September 22, 2008
A bit of Balkan history
Today is the 100th anniversary of the independent state of Bulgaria (according to the old style Julian calendar) which is as good an excuse as any to mention the controversial Bulgarian - or possibly Macedonian - intellectual, Krste Misirkov, who was much involved in defining an identity of Macedonians. He died in 1926, but an important diary of his was found just two years ago in a Bulgarian antique shop, and has been much in the Balkan news.
The Republic of Bulgaria forms part of the Balkans in south-eastern Europe, bordering five other countries: Romania, Serbia, Greece, Turkey and the Republic of Macedonia. But the idea of Bulgaria goes back a long way. There was a Bulgarian empire that started in the 7th century and survived over three hundred years; and a second empire that lasted from the 12th century to the 14th. The next five hundred years Bulgarians lived under the rule of the Ottoman empire. In the 1870s, though, Russia went to war against Turkey, and this led to Bulgaria becoming a principality in 1878. Thirty years later, on 22 September 1908 (old style calendar - see Wikipedia for an explanation), it declared itself an independent nation.
But the Balkan area was then (and became so again much later in the 20th century after the collapse of Yugoslavia) a cauldron of peoples vying for identity and nationality, and Bulgaria’s independence was just one element in the region’s complex picture. Another element was the neighbouring region of Macedonia, which can trace its history much further back than Bulgaria, and which was also grumbling about Ottoman rule and wanting some autonomy. It didn’t achieve any. After the First World War, it became part of Serbia, and then, after the Second World War, part of Yugoslavia.
Nearly 100 years later, there is once again a country called Macedonia, but so strong are the feelings about the Macedonian identity that a dispute with Greece over the use of the name ‘Macedonia’ has meant that, pending a solution to the dispute, this new republic is still referred to in international negotiations as FYROM, or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
Very much alive at the time of Bulgaria’s independence and Macedonia’s grumblings was Krste Misirkov, an intellectual, writer and philologist. He was born in 1874 in Pella, now in the Greek region of Macedonia, and died in Sofia in 1926. His 1903 book On The Macedonian Matters - which, among things, set down principals for a Macedonian literary language - was considered a kind of rallying cry by Macedonian intellectuals struggling for independence. A full text in English is available at Wikisource.
Largely because of this book, some Macedonian historians have dubbed Misirkov as the father of the contemporary Macedonian nation. Also on the basis of this book, they’ve claimed he was Macedonian, rather than Bulgarian, an assertion that has been difficult to reject definitively since he himself made conflicting claims about his nationality. Macedonian News still calls him ‘the founder of the Macedonian national history, literary language and orthography’.
Astonishingly, a 380 page diary written by Misirkov in Russian and dating from 1913 was found recently - 80 years after his death - in a Bulgarian antique shop. The diary, which has been authenticated by both Bulgarian and Macedonian experts, sheds new light on Misirkov and his beliefs. In particular, it shows that he thought of himself as a ‘Macedonian Bulgarian’.
An article on Macedoniablogs (in English, but with delightful spelling!) gives an interesting analysis of Macedonian history at the time, with reference to Misirkov. It also quotes a review of the newly-found diary by Prof Dr Vlado Popovski, cited in Vreme newspaper: ‘[Misirkov] presents Bulgaria as martyr, who has undertaken the biggest burden from the war with the Turkish empire, it is a country that sacrificially heads to the realisation of its national ideal for the unification of the Bulgarian lands, in which apart from Thrace, Misirkov includes also Macedonia. In the context, he presents a range of statements with which he justifies the Bulgarian interests in Macedonia and calls the Macedonians Macedonian Bulgarians. Accusing Russia of unfaithfulness and coarse nationalism . . . Misirkov recommends to it [i.e. Russia] at least to call for autonomy of Macedonia as a transition solution to unification with Bulgaria.’
In other words, the simple truth seems to be that Misirkov supported the idea of a Macedonian identity in order to work towards an autonomous region, but only so that it would then be easier for it to unify with Bulgaria.
According to Sofia News Agency Novinite earlier this year, the State Archive of the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria’s State Archives Agency will soon be publishing the diary in both languages (translated from the original Russian).
The Republic of Bulgaria forms part of the Balkans in south-eastern Europe, bordering five other countries: Romania, Serbia, Greece, Turkey and the Republic of Macedonia. But the idea of Bulgaria goes back a long way. There was a Bulgarian empire that started in the 7th century and survived over three hundred years; and a second empire that lasted from the 12th century to the 14th. The next five hundred years Bulgarians lived under the rule of the Ottoman empire. In the 1870s, though, Russia went to war against Turkey, and this led to Bulgaria becoming a principality in 1878. Thirty years later, on 22 September 1908 (old style calendar - see Wikipedia for an explanation), it declared itself an independent nation.
But the Balkan area was then (and became so again much later in the 20th century after the collapse of Yugoslavia) a cauldron of peoples vying for identity and nationality, and Bulgaria’s independence was just one element in the region’s complex picture. Another element was the neighbouring region of Macedonia, which can trace its history much further back than Bulgaria, and which was also grumbling about Ottoman rule and wanting some autonomy. It didn’t achieve any. After the First World War, it became part of Serbia, and then, after the Second World War, part of Yugoslavia.
Nearly 100 years later, there is once again a country called Macedonia, but so strong are the feelings about the Macedonian identity that a dispute with Greece over the use of the name ‘Macedonia’ has meant that, pending a solution to the dispute, this new republic is still referred to in international negotiations as FYROM, or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
Very much alive at the time of Bulgaria’s independence and Macedonia’s grumblings was Krste Misirkov, an intellectual, writer and philologist. He was born in 1874 in Pella, now in the Greek region of Macedonia, and died in Sofia in 1926. His 1903 book On The Macedonian Matters - which, among things, set down principals for a Macedonian literary language - was considered a kind of rallying cry by Macedonian intellectuals struggling for independence. A full text in English is available at Wikisource.
Largely because of this book, some Macedonian historians have dubbed Misirkov as the father of the contemporary Macedonian nation. Also on the basis of this book, they’ve claimed he was Macedonian, rather than Bulgarian, an assertion that has been difficult to reject definitively since he himself made conflicting claims about his nationality. Macedonian News still calls him ‘the founder of the Macedonian national history, literary language and orthography’.
Astonishingly, a 380 page diary written by Misirkov in Russian and dating from 1913 was found recently - 80 years after his death - in a Bulgarian antique shop. The diary, which has been authenticated by both Bulgarian and Macedonian experts, sheds new light on Misirkov and his beliefs. In particular, it shows that he thought of himself as a ‘Macedonian Bulgarian’.
An article on Macedoniablogs (in English, but with delightful spelling!) gives an interesting analysis of Macedonian history at the time, with reference to Misirkov. It also quotes a review of the newly-found diary by Prof Dr Vlado Popovski, cited in Vreme newspaper: ‘[Misirkov] presents Bulgaria as martyr, who has undertaken the biggest burden from the war with the Turkish empire, it is a country that sacrificially heads to the realisation of its national ideal for the unification of the Bulgarian lands, in which apart from Thrace, Misirkov includes also Macedonia. In the context, he presents a range of statements with which he justifies the Bulgarian interests in Macedonia and calls the Macedonians Macedonian Bulgarians. Accusing Russia of unfaithfulness and coarse nationalism . . . Misirkov recommends to it [i.e. Russia] at least to call for autonomy of Macedonia as a transition solution to unification with Bulgaria.’
In other words, the simple truth seems to be that Misirkov supported the idea of a Macedonian identity in order to work towards an autonomous region, but only so that it would then be easier for it to unify with Bulgaria.
According to Sofia News Agency Novinite earlier this year, the State Archive of the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria’s State Archives Agency will soon be publishing the diary in both languages (translated from the original Russian).
Friday, September 19, 2008
Waltari’s Dark Angel
Mika Waltari, one of Finland’s most widely known and translated writers, was born a hundred years ago today. He became best known for his historical novels, but he was a prolific and adaptable writer, turning his pen to many different forms. He is not, however, known as a diarist. Nevertheless, it seems that he did once keep a travel diary, and that it provides an interesting insight into how he did research for his historical fiction. Of particular interest is the way he tracked down the 15th century diary of Nicolo Barbaro, which tells of the fall of Constantinople, and how he then used it as a source for one of his best known novels, The Dark Angel, written in diary form.
Waltari was born on 19 September 1908 into a religious family, but lost his father at the age of 5. He studied philosophy and literature at university, and became a prominent figure in the Finnish literary movement known as Tulenkantajat (the Flame-bearers), which sought to open up Finnish literature to the rest of Europe. His first novel, Suuri Illusioni (Grand Illusion), published in 1928, depicted, according to WSOY (Finland’s leading publisher), the lost generation following the first world war - ‘à la Fitzgerald’. It proved an early success.
Both Wikipedia and Books from Finland provide biographical summaries. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Waltari worked hectically as a journalist and reviewer, and travelled widely in Europe. He also continued writing books, in many different genres, poetry, horror, crime and even scripting popular cartoons, and authoring a guidebook for aspiring writers. During the war years, he wrote propaganda for the government, and soon after published his first historical novel, The Egyptian, which became an international bestseller. He wrote seven more historical novels, placed in different ancient cultures, among which The Dark Angel, set during the fall of Constantinople in 1453, is considered one of his best.
By happy coincidental chance (for this blog), Waltari - not a diary-keeper by habit - did once keep a diary, a travel diary, published in 1948, when he was researching The Dark Angel. The Finnish author Panu Rajala, who is currently working on a biography of Waltari, says this travel diary is the ‘best introduction to Waltari’s working methods’ - something the National Library of Finland asked him to write about for their 2008 bulletin.
The last two paragraphs are worth reproducing verbatim for Rajala, in using the author’s own diary, explains how the famous diary written by Niccolo Barbaro inspires Waltari to use the diary form for his next novel.
‘On this trip to Venice or the next, Waltari ascends the steps to the National Library of St. Mark along the Piazzetta opposite the old Doge’s Palace. He has read a printed version of the diary written by Niccolo Barbaro, a participant in the battle, describing the Siege of Constantinople, but now he wants to see the original manuscript in its original decorative leather binding. He reads the 67-page diary, hand-written in the calligraphic script of its time, in which a young Venetian patriot describes the tragic phases of the siege. An unknown commentator’s marginal annotations in red ink provide Waltari with his most cogent insights. This is just what Waltari has maintained - of greater importance to the author are often the footnotes and minor details, not always the broad strokes. When Niccolo Barbaro accuses the Genovians of embezzlement, written on the page is ‘Angelo Zacaria, Greek embezzler for the Turks’.
Johannes Angelos is born and begins to grow as the novel’s main character. Simultaneously the form of the future novel - a diary - is found. Waltari is already in a rush to his destination, Istanbul.’
There is not much biographical information about Barbaro himself on the internet, but The Diary Junction gives a little, and also provides links to online texts of his diary. A near full version can be found here.
At the end of his description of the last day of the siege, Barbaro writes: ‘The fighting lasted from dawn until noon, and while the massacre went on in the city, everyone was killed; but after that time they were all taken prisoner. Our Bailo, Jeruolemo Minoto, had his head cut off by order of the Sultan; and this was the end of the capture of Constantinople, which took place in the year one thousand four hundred and fifty-three, on the twenty-ninth of May, which was a Tuesday.’
Waltari was born on 19 September 1908 into a religious family, but lost his father at the age of 5. He studied philosophy and literature at university, and became a prominent figure in the Finnish literary movement known as Tulenkantajat (the Flame-bearers), which sought to open up Finnish literature to the rest of Europe. His first novel, Suuri Illusioni (Grand Illusion), published in 1928, depicted, according to WSOY (Finland’s leading publisher), the lost generation following the first world war - ‘à la Fitzgerald’. It proved an early success.
Both Wikipedia and Books from Finland provide biographical summaries. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Waltari worked hectically as a journalist and reviewer, and travelled widely in Europe. He also continued writing books, in many different genres, poetry, horror, crime and even scripting popular cartoons, and authoring a guidebook for aspiring writers. During the war years, he wrote propaganda for the government, and soon after published his first historical novel, The Egyptian, which became an international bestseller. He wrote seven more historical novels, placed in different ancient cultures, among which The Dark Angel, set during the fall of Constantinople in 1453, is considered one of his best.
By happy coincidental chance (for this blog), Waltari - not a diary-keeper by habit - did once keep a diary, a travel diary, published in 1948, when he was researching The Dark Angel. The Finnish author Panu Rajala, who is currently working on a biography of Waltari, says this travel diary is the ‘best introduction to Waltari’s working methods’ - something the National Library of Finland asked him to write about for their 2008 bulletin.
The last two paragraphs are worth reproducing verbatim for Rajala, in using the author’s own diary, explains how the famous diary written by Niccolo Barbaro inspires Waltari to use the diary form for his next novel.
‘On this trip to Venice or the next, Waltari ascends the steps to the National Library of St. Mark along the Piazzetta opposite the old Doge’s Palace. He has read a printed version of the diary written by Niccolo Barbaro, a participant in the battle, describing the Siege of Constantinople, but now he wants to see the original manuscript in its original decorative leather binding. He reads the 67-page diary, hand-written in the calligraphic script of its time, in which a young Venetian patriot describes the tragic phases of the siege. An unknown commentator’s marginal annotations in red ink provide Waltari with his most cogent insights. This is just what Waltari has maintained - of greater importance to the author are often the footnotes and minor details, not always the broad strokes. When Niccolo Barbaro accuses the Genovians of embezzlement, written on the page is ‘Angelo Zacaria, Greek embezzler for the Turks’.
Johannes Angelos is born and begins to grow as the novel’s main character. Simultaneously the form of the future novel - a diary - is found. Waltari is already in a rush to his destination, Istanbul.’
There is not much biographical information about Barbaro himself on the internet, but The Diary Junction gives a little, and also provides links to online texts of his diary. A near full version can be found here.
At the end of his description of the last day of the siege, Barbaro writes: ‘The fighting lasted from dawn until noon, and while the massacre went on in the city, everyone was killed; but after that time they were all taken prisoner. Our Bailo, Jeruolemo Minoto, had his head cut off by order of the Sultan; and this was the end of the capture of Constantinople, which took place in the year one thousand four hundred and fifty-three, on the twenty-ninth of May, which was a Tuesday.’
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Donoughue’s Downing Street play
A second volume of Bernard Donoughue’s Downing Street diaries is published today. As an adviser to Harold Wilson and then James Callaghan, Donoughue was well placed to record the decline and final collapse of ‘old’ Labour and the emergence of Margaret Thatcher and her campaign to dismantle trade union power and public sector dominance. Peter Hennessy, a professor of contemporary history, says the book is best seen as a play - ‘a drama tingeing into tragedy and often laced with farce’.
Jonathan Cape, part of Random House, has just published Downing Street Diary Volume Two: With James Callaghan in No 10, by Bernard (and Baron) Donoughue. The first volume, published in 2005, starts in 1974, when he was invited by Harold Wilson first to help fight the General Election, and then to found and run the policy unit (the ‘kitchen cabinet’) at No 10. This second volume covers the three years, 1976-1979, when Donoughue was Senior Policy Advisor to James Callaghan.
Donoughue was educated at grammar school, and then at Lincoln and Nuffield Colleges, Oxford. He worked for The Economist and the Political and Economic Planning Institute before joining the staff of the London School for Economics in 1963. From 1974 to 1979, he worked at Number 10, and then went back to journalism for a few years. From the early 1980s, though, he was involved in the private sector, employed in the banking and investment sector, apart from a short spell in the late 1990s when he served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. His professional activities have also included positions with an orchestra and a racecourse.
Random House says, of the first volume, that Donoughue’s diary, kept every day, provides ‘an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Harold Wilson, struggling to hold the Labour Party together, drinking heavily, increasingly paranoid about ‘plots’ and the press, and apparently in thrall to Marcia Williams’. In this new second volume, Donoughue records the prime minister and government becoming paralysed as the ‘Winter of Discontent’ begins to bite and politics takes to the streets. ‘As Labour drifted to inevitable defeat in the 1979 election,’ Random House says, ‘we see Callaghan fighting honourably’ and ‘from the smoke of battle there emerges a striking new leader: Margaret Thatcher.’ The diaries describe vividly, it adds, ‘both the decline and final collapse of ‘old’ Labour and how Mrs Thatcher took the opportunity to launch her crusade to dismantle trade union power and much of the British public sector’.
The Guardian provides some good extracts. Here are several.
Tuesday 14 June 1977: ‘I worked in the office in the morning. Lunch with Robin Butler at his club. Great pleasure to see him again. He told me one little story. While at No 10 there arrived on his desk a large brown envelope addressed personally to H Wilson, and forwarded from Lord North Street. He opened it and it was a current account sheet from the offshore Swiss bank which went broke with an illegal deposit in it for Wilson. Robin just resealed it and passed it on.’
Friday 24 February 1978: ‘My view is that we must establish an image of [Margaret] Thatcher [then the leader of the opposition] as a dangerous woman who will divide our society and create trouble. We are doing this now over immigration. Instead of ducking this issue, as many have advised, I have pressed the PM to take it head-on and attack her for inciting racial hatred - and so causing violence on the streets. We will not win any votes on the immigration issue this way: Thatcher will gain a lot on that in the short run. But I hope that in the long run we can broaden it out to her disadvantage. So we shall show that she is abrasive and divisive on industrial relations, confronting the trade unions. And on Scottish devolution. And on social security casualties - ‘scroungers etc’. And on the unemployed - attacking redundancy payments. . . ’
Friday 4 May 1979: ‘I awoke shortly after eight o'clock, having had less than three hours' sleep. The children buzzed in and out of my bedroom, on their way to school. I could hear excited discussions about what would happen ‘now Daddy has got the sack’. Stephen, aged nine, was clearly delighted, saying that now that I would be at home in the day I could cook his lunch and he ‘would not have to stay to school dinner’, which is one of the main burdens of his always fastidious life.’
Peter Hennessy, now a Professor of Contemporary British History, but who was a contemporary of Donoughue’s and a political journalist in the 1970s, has reviewed the new volume for The Times Literary Supplement. His long article starts as follows: ‘In the bigger picture of UK politics since 1945, Bernard Donoughue’s Downing Street Diary is best seen as a play - a drama tingeing into tragedy and often laced with farce - with the Labour Left and the Conservative Right lurking in the wings, itching to prevail when old Labourism issues its last gasp and collapses into the arms of waiting historians, ready to pronounce the obsequies of the post-war consensus. . . Donoughue’s is a very good play - gripping, filled with personalities and acute observations, punctuated by moments of frustration verging on fury - for the author is quite a hater, especially when crossed.'
Hennessy also uses some extracts from the diaries, including one about himself! He says: ‘First, I must declare an interest. Donoughue outs our clandestine relationship during that era of tightly drawn official secrecy . . . : ‘15th–17 November 1976: Ridiculous that we [special advisers] are always suspected of leaking to the press. In fact I do occasionally talk with three old friends in newspapers without giving anything secret away – one on the Sunday Times (Harold Evans), one on The Times (Peter Hennessy) and one on the Financial Times (Joe Rogaly). Each tells me that most of their frequent leaks of secret information comes from regular civil servants.’ ’
Jonathan Cape, part of Random House, has just published Downing Street Diary Volume Two: With James Callaghan in No 10, by Bernard (and Baron) Donoughue. The first volume, published in 2005, starts in 1974, when he was invited by Harold Wilson first to help fight the General Election, and then to found and run the policy unit (the ‘kitchen cabinet’) at No 10. This second volume covers the three years, 1976-1979, when Donoughue was Senior Policy Advisor to James Callaghan.
Donoughue was educated at grammar school, and then at Lincoln and Nuffield Colleges, Oxford. He worked for The Economist and the Political and Economic Planning Institute before joining the staff of the London School for Economics in 1963. From 1974 to 1979, he worked at Number 10, and then went back to journalism for a few years. From the early 1980s, though, he was involved in the private sector, employed in the banking and investment sector, apart from a short spell in the late 1990s when he served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. His professional activities have also included positions with an orchestra and a racecourse.
Random House says, of the first volume, that Donoughue’s diary, kept every day, provides ‘an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Harold Wilson, struggling to hold the Labour Party together, drinking heavily, increasingly paranoid about ‘plots’ and the press, and apparently in thrall to Marcia Williams’. In this new second volume, Donoughue records the prime minister and government becoming paralysed as the ‘Winter of Discontent’ begins to bite and politics takes to the streets. ‘As Labour drifted to inevitable defeat in the 1979 election,’ Random House says, ‘we see Callaghan fighting honourably’ and ‘from the smoke of battle there emerges a striking new leader: Margaret Thatcher.’ The diaries describe vividly, it adds, ‘both the decline and final collapse of ‘old’ Labour and how Mrs Thatcher took the opportunity to launch her crusade to dismantle trade union power and much of the British public sector’.
The Guardian provides some good extracts. Here are several.
Tuesday 14 June 1977: ‘I worked in the office in the morning. Lunch with Robin Butler at his club. Great pleasure to see him again. He told me one little story. While at No 10 there arrived on his desk a large brown envelope addressed personally to H Wilson, and forwarded from Lord North Street. He opened it and it was a current account sheet from the offshore Swiss bank which went broke with an illegal deposit in it for Wilson. Robin just resealed it and passed it on.’
Friday 24 February 1978: ‘My view is that we must establish an image of [Margaret] Thatcher [then the leader of the opposition] as a dangerous woman who will divide our society and create trouble. We are doing this now over immigration. Instead of ducking this issue, as many have advised, I have pressed the PM to take it head-on and attack her for inciting racial hatred - and so causing violence on the streets. We will not win any votes on the immigration issue this way: Thatcher will gain a lot on that in the short run. But I hope that in the long run we can broaden it out to her disadvantage. So we shall show that she is abrasive and divisive on industrial relations, confronting the trade unions. And on Scottish devolution. And on social security casualties - ‘scroungers etc’. And on the unemployed - attacking redundancy payments. . . ’
Friday 4 May 1979: ‘I awoke shortly after eight o'clock, having had less than three hours' sleep. The children buzzed in and out of my bedroom, on their way to school. I could hear excited discussions about what would happen ‘now Daddy has got the sack’. Stephen, aged nine, was clearly delighted, saying that now that I would be at home in the day I could cook his lunch and he ‘would not have to stay to school dinner’, which is one of the main burdens of his always fastidious life.’
Peter Hennessy, now a Professor of Contemporary British History, but who was a contemporary of Donoughue’s and a political journalist in the 1970s, has reviewed the new volume for The Times Literary Supplement. His long article starts as follows: ‘In the bigger picture of UK politics since 1945, Bernard Donoughue’s Downing Street Diary is best seen as a play - a drama tingeing into tragedy and often laced with farce - with the Labour Left and the Conservative Right lurking in the wings, itching to prevail when old Labourism issues its last gasp and collapses into the arms of waiting historians, ready to pronounce the obsequies of the post-war consensus. . . Donoughue’s is a very good play - gripping, filled with personalities and acute observations, punctuated by moments of frustration verging on fury - for the author is quite a hater, especially when crossed.'
Hennessy also uses some extracts from the diaries, including one about himself! He says: ‘First, I must declare an interest. Donoughue outs our clandestine relationship during that era of tightly drawn official secrecy . . . : ‘15th–17 November 1976: Ridiculous that we [special advisers] are always suspected of leaking to the press. In fact I do occasionally talk with three old friends in newspapers without giving anything secret away – one on the Sunday Times (Harold Evans), one on The Times (Peter Hennessy) and one on the Financial Times (Joe Rogaly). Each tells me that most of their frequent leaks of secret information comes from regular civil servants.’ ’
Monday, September 15, 2008
Base ball and cricket records
A very early - possibly the earliest - reference to baseball has been found in an English diary, written by William Bray, thus supporting the idea that, in fact, the quintessentially American game began in England and not on the other side of the Atlantic. Another English William who wrote a diary, but lived a century later, William Allingham, was, for a number years, the field manager for the Pre-Raphaelite Baseball Club - bizarre, but true in the imaginary world of the Cosmic Baseball Association. And going back a century before Bray, other diaries provide evidence on the history of that quintessentially English game, cricket.
Last week, the Surrey Advertiser Group broke the news that a diary written by William Bray in the 1750s contained possibly the earliest ever reference to the game of baseball. The diary was found last year by local historian, Tricia St John Barry, and authenticated by Julian Pooley, manager of the Surrey History Centre in Woking (where Bray’s later diaries are held). Various media picked up the story, including the BBC which ran an article including the text of the relevant entry which is from Easter Monday 31 March 1755. It reads: ‘Went to Stoke Ch. This morning. After Dinner Went to Miss Jeale’s to play at Base Ball with her, the 3 Miss Whiteheads, Miss Billinghurst, Miss Molly Flutter, Mr. Chandler, Mr. Ford & H. Parsons & Jelly. Drank Tea and stayed till 8.’
The sequence of events that led to the Surrey Advertiser story is worth acknowledging. The body that runs baseball in the US, Major League Baseball (MLB) was researching and filming in England for a documentary called Base Ball Discovered. The BBC ran an item about MLP’s project which St John Barry saw; she then contacted MLB to tell them about her discovery in Bray’s diary. Subsequently, MLB contacted Pooley, an expert on Bray, to verify that the 1754-1755 diary was genuine.
According to Associated Press’s story, the Bray reference is about 50 years earlier than the, hitherto, first known reference to baseball, and it had long been thought that baseball was ‘an American invention, with roots in the British games of rounders and cricket’. Apparently, there are earlier references to baseball, but only in fictional books; and the game is mentioned in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, written in 1798 but not published until late 1817. The first recorded competitive baseball game took place in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1846 between the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York and the New York Nine, and the first professional team was playing by the end of the 1860s.
William Bray was born in Surrey in 1736, but educated at Rugby before being articled to a lawyer in Guildford. Over time, he became solicitor to many county families, but also was steward of Surrey manors, treasurer of charities and an indefatigable antiquary. He worked with Owen Manning in compiling notes for a history of Surrey, but, after Manning’s death, took over the responsibility for writing and publishing The History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey, a definitive work in three volumes. He transcribed and published the diaries of Sir John Evelyn, one of Britain’s most famous diarists. Moreover, Bray kept a diary himself, some texts of which are readily available on the internet - see The Diary Junction for links.
Also, see The Diary Junction for information about another diarist called William - William Allingham. Born in Ireland, he lived about one hundred years later than Bray, through much of the 19th century and was a celebrated poet connected with the Pre-Raphaelite movement of painters, such as Rossetti and Millais. Unlike Bray, very little of Allingham’s diaries can be found on the internet. What can be found is thanks to baseball! When the Pre-Raphaelite Baseball Club joined the Cosmic Baseball Association in 1997 they ‘tapped Allingham to be their field manager’. He then compiled ‘a very decent 180-144 won-loss record’ in the two seasons the team played in the Cosmic Underleague. The Cosmic Baseball Association describes itself as ‘a baseball league of the imagination’, but it is also an online source for Allingham’s diary entries!
What baseball is to Americans, cricket is to the English, but cricket was already considered a major sport - according to Wikipedia - by the end of the 17th century, i.e. at least 50 years before Bray’s first and solitary mention of baseball. Some of the evidence for the origins of cricket also comes from diaries. Henry Teonge, for example, a priest who decided to join the navy as a chaplain, wrote a lively diary, which is available online at Googlebooks.
Here is his diary entry from 6 May 1676 when he was staying in Aleppo (now part of Syria): ‘This morning early (as is the custom all summer long) at least forty of the English, with his worship the consul, rode out of the city about four miles to the Green Plat, a fine valley by a riverside, to recreate themselves where a princely tent was pitched; and we had several pastimes and sports as duck-hunting, fishing, shooting, handball, cricket, scrofilo, etc; and then a noble dinner brought thither, with great plenty of all sorts of wines, punch, and lemonades; and at 6 we return all home in good order, but soundly tired and weary.’
One hundred years later, in the 1770s, John Baker, another Surrey diarist, is writing about cricket in much more detail. Thanks to David Underdown and the Cricinfo website for a colourful article about Baker and his diaries. Here one paragraph from the artice: ‘Besides these virtually professional matches, Baker also watched a good deal of local cricket in Sussex. His disgust at Hambledon’s poor performance at Sevenoaks was typical of him. He was just as unforgiving of shoddy play in local games. ‘Poor doings on both sides’, he grumbled when Horsham played Warnham in 1776. But Horsham had a strong team: in 1773 he watched them return from a victory over East Grinstead, ‘in procession a cheval’. There was a good crowd too for Horsham versus Reigate, including one of the local noblemen, Lord Irwin, who ‘got out of his coach and stood with the crowd’. No doubt Reigate’s ‘Shock’ White was a big draw. A couple of years earlier he had gone in against Hambledon with a bat wider than the wicket, thus leading to a rapid change in the Laws.’
Last week, the Surrey Advertiser Group broke the news that a diary written by William Bray in the 1750s contained possibly the earliest ever reference to the game of baseball. The diary was found last year by local historian, Tricia St John Barry, and authenticated by Julian Pooley, manager of the Surrey History Centre in Woking (where Bray’s later diaries are held). Various media picked up the story, including the BBC which ran an article including the text of the relevant entry which is from Easter Monday 31 March 1755. It reads: ‘Went to Stoke Ch. This morning. After Dinner Went to Miss Jeale’s to play at Base Ball with her, the 3 Miss Whiteheads, Miss Billinghurst, Miss Molly Flutter, Mr. Chandler, Mr. Ford & H. Parsons & Jelly. Drank Tea and stayed till 8.’
The sequence of events that led to the Surrey Advertiser story is worth acknowledging. The body that runs baseball in the US, Major League Baseball (MLB) was researching and filming in England for a documentary called Base Ball Discovered. The BBC ran an item about MLP’s project which St John Barry saw; she then contacted MLB to tell them about her discovery in Bray’s diary. Subsequently, MLB contacted Pooley, an expert on Bray, to verify that the 1754-1755 diary was genuine.
According to Associated Press’s story, the Bray reference is about 50 years earlier than the, hitherto, first known reference to baseball, and it had long been thought that baseball was ‘an American invention, with roots in the British games of rounders and cricket’. Apparently, there are earlier references to baseball, but only in fictional books; and the game is mentioned in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, written in 1798 but not published until late 1817. The first recorded competitive baseball game took place in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1846 between the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York and the New York Nine, and the first professional team was playing by the end of the 1860s.
William Bray was born in Surrey in 1736, but educated at Rugby before being articled to a lawyer in Guildford. Over time, he became solicitor to many county families, but also was steward of Surrey manors, treasurer of charities and an indefatigable antiquary. He worked with Owen Manning in compiling notes for a history of Surrey, but, after Manning’s death, took over the responsibility for writing and publishing The History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey, a definitive work in three volumes. He transcribed and published the diaries of Sir John Evelyn, one of Britain’s most famous diarists. Moreover, Bray kept a diary himself, some texts of which are readily available on the internet - see The Diary Junction for links.
Also, see The Diary Junction for information about another diarist called William - William Allingham. Born in Ireland, he lived about one hundred years later than Bray, through much of the 19th century and was a celebrated poet connected with the Pre-Raphaelite movement of painters, such as Rossetti and Millais. Unlike Bray, very little of Allingham’s diaries can be found on the internet. What can be found is thanks to baseball! When the Pre-Raphaelite Baseball Club joined the Cosmic Baseball Association in 1997 they ‘tapped Allingham to be their field manager’. He then compiled ‘a very decent 180-144 won-loss record’ in the two seasons the team played in the Cosmic Underleague. The Cosmic Baseball Association describes itself as ‘a baseball league of the imagination’, but it is also an online source for Allingham’s diary entries!
What baseball is to Americans, cricket is to the English, but cricket was already considered a major sport - according to Wikipedia - by the end of the 17th century, i.e. at least 50 years before Bray’s first and solitary mention of baseball. Some of the evidence for the origins of cricket also comes from diaries. Henry Teonge, for example, a priest who decided to join the navy as a chaplain, wrote a lively diary, which is available online at Googlebooks.
Here is his diary entry from 6 May 1676 when he was staying in Aleppo (now part of Syria): ‘This morning early (as is the custom all summer long) at least forty of the English, with his worship the consul, rode out of the city about four miles to the Green Plat, a fine valley by a riverside, to recreate themselves where a princely tent was pitched; and we had several pastimes and sports as duck-hunting, fishing, shooting, handball, cricket, scrofilo, etc; and then a noble dinner brought thither, with great plenty of all sorts of wines, punch, and lemonades; and at 6 we return all home in good order, but soundly tired and weary.’
One hundred years later, in the 1770s, John Baker, another Surrey diarist, is writing about cricket in much more detail. Thanks to David Underdown and the Cricinfo website for a colourful article about Baker and his diaries. Here one paragraph from the artice: ‘Besides these virtually professional matches, Baker also watched a good deal of local cricket in Sussex. His disgust at Hambledon’s poor performance at Sevenoaks was typical of him. He was just as unforgiving of shoddy play in local games. ‘Poor doings on both sides’, he grumbled when Horsham played Warnham in 1776. But Horsham had a strong team: in 1773 he watched them return from a victory over East Grinstead, ‘in procession a cheval’. There was a good crowd too for Horsham versus Reigate, including one of the local noblemen, Lord Irwin, who ‘got out of his coach and stood with the crowd’. No doubt Reigate’s ‘Shock’ White was a big draw. A couple of years earlier he had gone in against Hambledon with a bat wider than the wicket, thus leading to a rapid change in the Laws.’
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Beautiful men were dead
The Great Northern War, fought between Sweden and Russia for control of the Baltic Sea, reached a turning point 300 years ago today, when the King of Sweden, Charles XII, stopped marching his troops towards Moscow. A Swedish history blogger - whose name I can only divine as TB - has published an interesting article about the war, one which includes several excruciating extracts from diaries written by those involved.
The Great Northern War was fought largely between Russia and Sweden for supremacy in the Baltic Sea, although various other powers were involved at different times. Denmark-Norway and Saxony-Poland, for example, were both involved with Russia in launching the initial attacks on Sweden in 1700. The conflict ended two decades later, in 1721, with Sweden ceding territories (including Estonia) to Russia.
Wikipedia’s list of events for 11 September includes this: 1708 - ‘Charles XII of Sweden stops his march to conquer Moscow outside Smolensk, marking the turning point in the Great Northern War. The army is defeated nine months later in the Battle of Poltava, and the Swedish empire is no longer a major power.’ Charles XII was a skilled military leader, winning several battles early on in the conflict, but his political abilities were lacking, especially when it came to making peace. Upon the outbreak of the Great Northern War, Voltaire is said to have quoted Charles XII as saying: ‘I have resolved never to start an unjust war but never to end a legitimate one except by defeating my enemies.’
A Swedish blogger - who goes by the initials TB - seems fascinated by the Karolinska Army, so named because it was made up of men, Karoliners, who served under Karl XI and Karl XII (Charles XI and Charles XII). An excellent article of his on the army’s involvement in the Great Northern War includes many verbatim extracts from letters and diaries. But, he warns, he’s copied the letters and diaries ‘down to the exact word and wording . . . so, if it sounds strange, it’s because they talked and wrote differently than we do now.’
In 1706, according to TB, the Swedish army finally got want they wanted, a decisive battle against Saxony-Poland at Fraustadt. He quotes from the diary of dragoon corporal, Joachim Lyth, to explain what happened after the battle was won: ‘His excellence General Rehnskiöld gave order to form a square with dragoons, cavalry, and infantry, in which all the Russians that had been taken prisoner had to stand in. Roughly 500 souls, who soon with no mercy were shot or stabbed to death, they fell over each other like sheeps in slaughter.’ Having defeated Saxony-Poland, TB says, only Russia was left, and so in the autumn of 1707, the Swedish Karoliner main army, 44,500 strong, started marching toward Moscow to end the war.
However, the army never made it to Moscow, TB explains, because of lack of food. When still 400 km away, it turned round, and started to march south towards Ukraine looking for supplies. That winter was exceptionally cold. On 23 December, the army reached the village of Petrovka, and while some found shelter, others were obliged to sleep outside. TB’s article then gives an extract from Erik Larsson’s diary: ‘It was so cold that the oxen at our supply-wagon fell dead to the ground. The birds who tried to fly fell dead from the skies. Yes many will remember this day if he survives.’
And then there’s this about the next day (24 December) from the diary of Cavalry Major, Nils GyllenStierna: ‘The road was filled in the morning with men who had frozen to death, with them lay horses, oxen, and other animals. Supply and sick-wagons stood still because their drivers had died by the cold they were still sitting like they were waiting for orders. Now many beautiful men were dead.’
The Great Northern War was fought largely between Russia and Sweden for supremacy in the Baltic Sea, although various other powers were involved at different times. Denmark-Norway and Saxony-Poland, for example, were both involved with Russia in launching the initial attacks on Sweden in 1700. The conflict ended two decades later, in 1721, with Sweden ceding territories (including Estonia) to Russia.
Wikipedia’s list of events for 11 September includes this: 1708 - ‘Charles XII of Sweden stops his march to conquer Moscow outside Smolensk, marking the turning point in the Great Northern War. The army is defeated nine months later in the Battle of Poltava, and the Swedish empire is no longer a major power.’ Charles XII was a skilled military leader, winning several battles early on in the conflict, but his political abilities were lacking, especially when it came to making peace. Upon the outbreak of the Great Northern War, Voltaire is said to have quoted Charles XII as saying: ‘I have resolved never to start an unjust war but never to end a legitimate one except by defeating my enemies.’
A Swedish blogger - who goes by the initials TB - seems fascinated by the Karolinska Army, so named because it was made up of men, Karoliners, who served under Karl XI and Karl XII (Charles XI and Charles XII). An excellent article of his on the army’s involvement in the Great Northern War includes many verbatim extracts from letters and diaries. But, he warns, he’s copied the letters and diaries ‘down to the exact word and wording . . . so, if it sounds strange, it’s because they talked and wrote differently than we do now.’
In 1706, according to TB, the Swedish army finally got want they wanted, a decisive battle against Saxony-Poland at Fraustadt. He quotes from the diary of dragoon corporal, Joachim Lyth, to explain what happened after the battle was won: ‘His excellence General Rehnskiöld gave order to form a square with dragoons, cavalry, and infantry, in which all the Russians that had been taken prisoner had to stand in. Roughly 500 souls, who soon with no mercy were shot or stabbed to death, they fell over each other like sheeps in slaughter.’ Having defeated Saxony-Poland, TB says, only Russia was left, and so in the autumn of 1707, the Swedish Karoliner main army, 44,500 strong, started marching toward Moscow to end the war.
However, the army never made it to Moscow, TB explains, because of lack of food. When still 400 km away, it turned round, and started to march south towards Ukraine looking for supplies. That winter was exceptionally cold. On 23 December, the army reached the village of Petrovka, and while some found shelter, others were obliged to sleep outside. TB’s article then gives an extract from Erik Larsson’s diary: ‘It was so cold that the oxen at our supply-wagon fell dead to the ground. The birds who tried to fly fell dead from the skies. Yes many will remember this day if he survives.’
And then there’s this about the next day (24 December) from the diary of Cavalry Major, Nils GyllenStierna: ‘The road was filled in the morning with men who had frozen to death, with them lay horses, oxen, and other animals. Supply and sick-wagons stood still because their drivers had died by the cold they were still sitting like they were waiting for orders. Now many beautiful men were dead.’
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
I won’t write any more
Cesare Pavese was born a hundred years ago today, on 9 September 1908. He is considered one of Italy’s most important writers, but he was also one of the saddest. The protagonists in his novels were often loners, managing only superficial relationships, and, in his own life, love always disappointed him. He died while still young, in his 40s, by committing suicide, something he had discussed in his diary for years.
Although Pavese was an important and successful writer, it seems he never found happiness in his private life. There is not a great deal about him on the internet in English, even the Wikipedia article is awkwardly written and brief (relative to his importance - the Italian Wikipedia article is much longer). The Diary Junction provides a short biographical summary.
Pavese was born in the village of Santo Stefano between Turin and the Alps. He studied literature at university, and graduated in 1930 with a thesis on Walt Whitman. Subsequently, he wrote essays on American literature and translated literary texts into Italian. His mother died in 1931, and he went to live with his sister Maria and her family, also in Turin. While the fascists were becoming stronger by the day, Pavese fell in love with Tina Pizzardo, a Communist teacher and activist. In 1935, the police found some incriminating letters (which Tina had received, at Pavese's house, from a collaborator). He was arrested, jailed briefly, and then exiled to Calabria for three years. Tina, meanwhile, left him and married someone else.
On returning to Turin after the war, and finding some of his friends dead, Pavese joined the Communist Party and became more politically active. But it was literature that remained his first love. His novels won several prestigious prizes, and he is well regarded for his poetry. In 1950, Pavese fell in love again, with a young American actress, Constance Dawling, to whom he dedicated his last novel ‘The Moon and the Bonfires’, but she left him too. In August the same year, he killed himself in a hotel room.
A biography in English on an Italian website - www.saporidilanga.com - concludes as follows: ‘Worn, tired, but perfectly lucid, he suicides in a room of the hotel Roma in Turin by swallowing a strong dose of [barbiturates]. It is on 27th August 1950. Only an annotation is left on the first page of his book ‘Dialoghi con Leucò’ [Dialogues with Leucò], which was on the bedside of the room: ‘I forgive all and to you all I ask for me is forgiveness . . .’. He was only 42 years old.’
Pavese’s diaries have been published in English - The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950, for example, and This Business of Living. Time has a good review of the former: ‘It is a haunting book, at once a cry of anguish, a case history, and a series of thoughtful notes on the art of fiction.’ And RL on Babelguides says this about the latter: ‘A diary of such a great writer, a writer with such a fierce connection with life, is an unfathomably rich work that one can enter again and again always finding more. It also shows that a diary can be a very complex work of art, one that uses a very basic narrative logic, the march of time itself. Within that straightforward structure anything can happen as the connections between entries are made only by the mental structure of the diary’s author, and with the passage of time.’
Here are a few extracts from Pavese’s diaries (some showing his preoccupation with the idea of suicide).
5 May 1936
‘Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.’
19 January 1938
‘Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.’
29 September 1938
‘I shall have to stop priding myself on being unable to find pleasure in the things ordinary men enjoy - high days and holidays; the fun of being one in a crowd; family affection and so on. What I am really incapable of is enjoying out-of-the-ordinary pleasures - solitude and a sense of mastery, and if I am not very good at sharing the sentiments of the average man it is because my artless assumption that I was capable of something better has rusted my natural reactions, which used to be perfectly normal. In general we feel rather pleased with ourselves when we do not enjoy common pleasures, believing this means that we are ‘capable of better things’. But incapacity in the one case does not presuppose capacity in the other. A man who is incapable of writing nonsense may be equally incapable of writing something pleasing.
We hate the thing we fear, the thing we know may be true and may have a certain affinity with ourselves, for each man hates himself. The most interesting, the most fertile qualities in every man are those he most hates in himself and in others, for hatred includes every other feeling - love, envy, ignorance, mystery, the urge to know and to possess. It is hate that causes suffering. To overcome hatred is to take a step towards self-knowledge, self-mastery, self-justification, and consequently towards an end of suffering. When we suffer, it is always our own fault.’
30 Oct 1940
‘Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time - is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.’
1 Jan 1950
‘At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it; breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.’
25 March 1950
‘One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love- reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.’
Pavese’s very last diary entry reads: ‘All this is sick. Not words. An act. I won’t write any more.’
Although Pavese was an important and successful writer, it seems he never found happiness in his private life. There is not a great deal about him on the internet in English, even the Wikipedia article is awkwardly written and brief (relative to his importance - the Italian Wikipedia article is much longer). The Diary Junction provides a short biographical summary.
Pavese was born in the village of Santo Stefano between Turin and the Alps. He studied literature at university, and graduated in 1930 with a thesis on Walt Whitman. Subsequently, he wrote essays on American literature and translated literary texts into Italian. His mother died in 1931, and he went to live with his sister Maria and her family, also in Turin. While the fascists were becoming stronger by the day, Pavese fell in love with Tina Pizzardo, a Communist teacher and activist. In 1935, the police found some incriminating letters (which Tina had received, at Pavese's house, from a collaborator). He was arrested, jailed briefly, and then exiled to Calabria for three years. Tina, meanwhile, left him and married someone else.
On returning to Turin after the war, and finding some of his friends dead, Pavese joined the Communist Party and became more politically active. But it was literature that remained his first love. His novels won several prestigious prizes, and he is well regarded for his poetry. In 1950, Pavese fell in love again, with a young American actress, Constance Dawling, to whom he dedicated his last novel ‘The Moon and the Bonfires’, but she left him too. In August the same year, he killed himself in a hotel room.
A biography in English on an Italian website - www.saporidilanga.com - concludes as follows: ‘Worn, tired, but perfectly lucid, he suicides in a room of the hotel Roma in Turin by swallowing a strong dose of [barbiturates]. It is on 27th August 1950. Only an annotation is left on the first page of his book ‘Dialoghi con Leucò’ [Dialogues with Leucò], which was on the bedside of the room: ‘I forgive all and to you all I ask for me is forgiveness . . .’. He was only 42 years old.’
Pavese’s diaries have been published in English - The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950, for example, and This Business of Living. Time has a good review of the former: ‘It is a haunting book, at once a cry of anguish, a case history, and a series of thoughtful notes on the art of fiction.’ And RL on Babelguides says this about the latter: ‘A diary of such a great writer, a writer with such a fierce connection with life, is an unfathomably rich work that one can enter again and again always finding more. It also shows that a diary can be a very complex work of art, one that uses a very basic narrative logic, the march of time itself. Within that straightforward structure anything can happen as the connections between entries are made only by the mental structure of the diary’s author, and with the passage of time.’
Here are a few extracts from Pavese’s diaries (some showing his preoccupation with the idea of suicide).
5 May 1936
‘Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.’
19 January 1938
‘Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.’
29 September 1938
‘I shall have to stop priding myself on being unable to find pleasure in the things ordinary men enjoy - high days and holidays; the fun of being one in a crowd; family affection and so on. What I am really incapable of is enjoying out-of-the-ordinary pleasures - solitude and a sense of mastery, and if I am not very good at sharing the sentiments of the average man it is because my artless assumption that I was capable of something better has rusted my natural reactions, which used to be perfectly normal. In general we feel rather pleased with ourselves when we do not enjoy common pleasures, believing this means that we are ‘capable of better things’. But incapacity in the one case does not presuppose capacity in the other. A man who is incapable of writing nonsense may be equally incapable of writing something pleasing.
We hate the thing we fear, the thing we know may be true and may have a certain affinity with ourselves, for each man hates himself. The most interesting, the most fertile qualities in every man are those he most hates in himself and in others, for hatred includes every other feeling - love, envy, ignorance, mystery, the urge to know and to possess. It is hate that causes suffering. To overcome hatred is to take a step towards self-knowledge, self-mastery, self-justification, and consequently towards an end of suffering. When we suffer, it is always our own fault.’
30 Oct 1940
‘Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time - is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.’
1 Jan 1950
‘At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it; breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.’
25 March 1950
‘One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love- reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.’
Pavese’s very last diary entry reads: ‘All this is sick. Not words. An act. I won’t write any more.’
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