Of war and of sowing

The diaries of Harold Nicolson, one of the most interesting and readable of 20th century diarists, are being republished today in their original three volumes by Faber Finds. Following on from Chamberlain’s ‘birthday’ article yesterday, I’ve chosen one extract from Nicolson’s diary dating to almost exactly 60 years ago about the then prime minister, and another just a few days later which shows Nicolson as happy (well not quite on this occasion) in his garden at Sissinghurst as he was in Parliament.

Wikipedia and The Diary Junction have short online biographies with basic details of Nicolson’s life, but there are also several published biographies, starting with Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (1973), James Lees-Milne’s two-volume Harold Nicolson: A Biography (early 1980s), and Norman Rose’s Harold Nicolson (2005).

Nicolson was Born in Tehran (Persia at the time) in 1886 and worked in the British diplomatic service before becoming an MP in 1935. He married the writer Victoria Sackville-West in 1913, and together they created the famous garden at Sissinghurst, Kent. While not an especially remarkable politician in his own right, Nicolson’s skills lay in his talents as an observer, and as a journalist and writer. He wrote many biographical books, but is probably best remembered for his diaries. He is also well remembered for the relationship with his wife, which was both very close yet also open, in the sense that each partner allowed the other to have affairs, including with same-sex lovers.

Harold’s son Nigel Nicolson edited and published three volumes of the diaries (and letters) in the last years of his father’s life (Harold died in 1968). Since then there have been many reprints and reissues. Most recently, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (now part of Orion, but originally founded by Nigel Nicolson and George Weidenfeld in the 1940s) published, in 2004, a one volume edition - The Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907-1963. This was, like the earlier versions, edited by Nigel but included a different set of entries.

Today (19 March) though, the original three volume set is being reissued by Faber Finds: Harold Nicolson - Diaries and Letters Vol. 1 (1930-1939); Harold Nicolson - Diaries and Letters Vol. 2 (1939-1945); Harold Nicolson - Diaries and Letters Vol. 3 (1945–-1962).

In advertising the reissued books, Faber Finds quotes a number of past reviews. Sir Kenneth Clark, for example, said the diaries provide ‘not only a brilliant picture of English society in the 1930s, but a touching self-portrait of a highly intelligent and civilized man driven by conscience and curiosity to enter politics’. The late Cyril Connolly said, ‘One is hardly able to put it down for meals . . . It is very artfully edited for, besides the diary proper, there are many letters to Sir Harold’s wife, Vita Sackville-West, and not a few from her to him. But this remains solidly and brilliantly Sir Harold’s own book.’ And Michael Foot: ‘One stops to marvel at the achievement. Honesty, decency, modesty magnanimity are stamped on every page, as evident as the wit. These are not the normal virtues of successful diarists or would-be politicians, but Harold Nicolson possesses them all.’

Here are two short extracts (taken from The Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907-1963), both from 60 years ago. I’ve picked the first one because it’s about Chamberlain, the subject of yesterday’s article, and the second because it’s only a few days later but gives a charming (if somewhat maudlin) and characteristic impression of Nicolson at Sissinghurst.

31 March 1939
‘Down to the House. The PM says he will make a statement shortly before three. The general feeling is that he will announce that if Poland and Rumania are attacked we shall go to war. There is some uneasiness about in the corridors. People fear lest Chamberlain may not stay put. Chamberlain arrives looking gaunt and ill. The skin above his high cheek bones is parchment yellow. He drops wearily into his place. . . He begins by saying that we believe in negotiation and do not trust in rumours. He then gets to the centre of his statement, namely that if Poland is attacked we shall declare war. That is greeted with cheers from every side. He reads his statement very slowly with a bent grey head. It is most impressive.’

9 April 1939
‘In the afternoon Viti and I plant annuals. We sow them in the cottage garden and then in the border and then in the orchard. We rake the soil smooth. And, as we rake we are both thinking, ‘What will have happened to the world when these seeds germinate?’ It is warm and still. We should have been so happy were it not for the thought which aches at our hearts as if some very dear person was dying in the upstairs room. We discuss whether we might be defeated if war comes. And if defeated, surely surrender [suicide] in advance would be better? We ourselves don’t think of money or privilege or pleasure. We are thinking only of that vast wastage of suffering which must surely come. All because of the insane ambitions of one fanatic, and of the vicious theory which he has imposed on his people.’

Chamberlain’s diary letters

It’s Neville Chamberlain’s birthday, or would have been if he were alive to have reached twice three score years and ten. A Conservative politician best known for his short term as prime minister and a policy of appeasement in the run up to the Second World War, he also served as Minister of Health and Chancellor of the Exchequer between the wars. During this inter-war period, he wrote weekly letters to his sister, and these have been published in four (expensive) volumes, described by the editor as ‘diary letters’. Diary letters?

The British Government website provides a brief biography of Neville Chamberlain. He was born 140 years ago today (18 March) into a political family: his father, Joseph, would become a mayor of Birmingham and a cabinet minister, and his half-brother Austen would hold various high posts in government including Chancellor of the Exchequer. After being schooled at Rugby and Mason College, Birmingham, Neville went to the Bahamas to manage the large family estate growing sisal (for making rope). On returning to Britain, he became a prominent manufacturer in Birmingham, and then, in 1915, was elected Lord Mayor.

In 1918, aged 49, Chamberlain was returned to Parliament as a Conservative MP. Although offered a post in government, he refused to serve under Lloyd George, and remained a back-bencher until 1922 when he was appointed Postmaster General. For most of the 1920s and 1930s, he went back and forth between the positions of Minister of Health and Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1937, he succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister. Conflict in Europe, though, was not far off.

In 1938, Chamberlain went to meet Hitler, the German chancellor, in Munich. He came back with an agreement that Britain and Germany would never again go to war. ‘I believe,’ he declared, ‘it is peace for our time.’ However, the success of his appeasement policy was shortlived, since Hitler was soon to march into Prague. The subsequent invasion of Poland led Chamberlain to declare war on 3 September 1939. Thereafter, he proved unable to counter mounting criticism of his leadership, and thus resigned in May 1940. Later the same year he died of bowel cancer. Find out more from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, or the BBC.

It was not until just 60 years later, though, that a first volume of The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters was published, by Ashgate Publishing. This first one was subtitled The Making of a Politician, 1915-20. A second volume followed the same year subtitled The Reform Years, 1921-27; a third volume in 2002 subtitled The Heir Apparent, 1928-33; and the fourth and last in 2005 subtitled The Downing Street Years, 1934-40. Each one was edited by Robert Self; and the full set is available from Routledge.

Ashgate says: ‘As a primary source of historical evidence and insight, it is difficult to overstate the value and importance of Neville Chamberlain’s diary letters to his sisters [Ida and Hilda]. They represent the most complete and illuminating ‘insider’ record of British politics between the wars yet to be published. . . Beyond the fascination of the historical record of people and events, these letters are extremely valuable for the remarkable light they throw upon the personality and character of the private man lurking behind the austerely forbidding public persona.’

But what of this idea of ‘diary letters’? Interestingly, there is, online, a full explanation by Robert Self, the editor, of why he chose to use the term rather than simply calling Chamberlain’s letters ‘letters’.

The second volume of the set was reviewed in 2002 by David J. Dutton for the Institute of Historical Research, and this review is available online. Although very positive about the book, Dutton did express reservations about the title, which he said was ‘somewhat misleading to the extent that Chamberlain, unlike his half-brother, did keep an extensive, if not continuous, diary, and the primary purpose of his letters to Ida and Hilda was not to record events for posterity but to keep them informed, to share his concerns with two women of considerable intelligence and good sense, and to use his sisters as a sounding board for his own thoughts and plans.’ Dutton does admit, though, that the letters form ‘an almost continuous record and Chamberlain did, on occasion, clearly use them as a substitute for entries in his diary’.

Also on the Institute’s website is Self’s response to the review. ‘It is difficult to quibble about either the general tone or the specific content of David Dutton’s extremely generous review’, he says, nevertheless, ‘there is one point raised in Dr Dutton’s review which does merit clarification’, and this concerns the claim that the use of the title ‘Diary Letters’ is ‘somewhat misleading’.

Self explains that, in part, the adoption of the term ‘diary letters’ represented ‘a logical extension of my earlier edited volume of letters from Austen Chamberlain to the same sisters which he commenced in February 1917 after enquiring whether he ‘could write something like a diary letter’ to them’. He also notes that the practice of writing regular ‘diary letters’ did not start in the Chamberlain family with the generation that included Austen, Neville and their sisters, but earlier. Moreover, he adds, Neville Chamberlain explicitly noted in a letter on New Year’s Day 1921 that the correspondence with his sisters had ‘the advantage of making a sort of diary’.

Self goes on to examine what he considers a more fundamental point raised by David Dutton, namely ‘the relative significance and historical value of the diary letters to Hilda and Ida when compared with the five relatively slim volumes of political journals which cover a similar period’. Despite a similarity in the period covered, he says, the content and even the phrasing of the political journals ‘invariably lack the depth, the detail and (crucially) the almost unfailing weekly consistency of the record contained in the diary letters to his sisters, which so painstakingly reconstructed all of the events, activities and experiences of the preceding week’.

More generally, Self argues that the letters have specific diary qualities. Here is the final paragraph of his response.

‘Yet beyond the far greater continuity, depth and length of the record contained in the diary letters, their outstanding value and importance is derived from the very nature of the epistolary act and the closeness of the relationship with his sisters which underpinned his devotion to it. Thus, whatever the similarity in terms of information content, the solitary act of keeping a diary did not necessarily encourage the same uninhibited expression of emotion and inner feelings that so often emerges in an intense and revealing manner in the diary letters to his sisters. Only here do we really see more than a glimpse of the complete inner man so fastidiously concealed from the world beyond his immediate family. Indeed, as Austen noted in 1931, even within the family it was well known ‘how tongue-tied in matters of sentiment’ his half-brother was. Yet the intense natural confidence and reassuring intimacy of Neville Chamberlain’s bond with his sisters encouraged this supremely reticent man to indulge a well developed propensity for ‘epistolary garrulity’ (as he called it in August 1921), which permitted him to reveal as much about his innermost thoughts, hopes, fears and ambitions as he was ever capable of exposing to anyone - perhaps even to his adoring wife. Ultimately, the unique value of the diary letters is derived from precisely this additional, intensely personal insight into that hidden, warmer and more human side of the truly enigmatic personality which lurked behind a public persona that all too often appeared to be cold, abrasive and supremely unlovable.’

Lennon and Linda McCartney

It’s forty years ago today that Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman, and it was, by all accounts, a happy and successful marriage that only ended when Linda died. However, rumours, partly said to be based on the diaries of John Lennon, suggest that he and Linda had sex on one occasion.

Paul McCartney, one of the famous Beatles group, married Linda Eastman, an American photographer, at a civil ceremony in London on 12 March 1969. Paul adopted Linda’s daughter from her first marriage, Heather, and the couple had three more children. Most observers say the marriage was happy and successful. Paul himself claimed that he and Linda spent less than a week apart during their entire marriage. Linda died in 1998.

However, a contributor (calling himself 18th candidate) to Everything2 (which says it is ‘a collection of user-submitted writings about, well, pretty much everything’) suggests Linda might have been unfaithful to Paul on one occasion.

18th Candidate writes: ‘It’s been said that the Beatle to whom Linda was initially attracted was John Lennon, but John showed no interest in her and Linda subsequently set her sights on Paul. According to John’s diaries, however, years later in the 1970s, when Linda was married to Paul and John was married to Yoko Ono, Linda and John reportedly had a brief affair. According to the story, after an argument with Yoko, John went to Paul’s home where he found Linda alone. She had also had an argument with Paul and he had stormed out. After a bottle of wine and some marijuana, the diaries claim that John and Linda ended up in bed for a short encounter. Whether or not that story is true is actually largely speculation, but it’s the only report that Linda was ever unfaithful to Paul during their marriage.’

The source claimed for this unlikely scenario is ‘John’s diaries’, but information on these is hard to come by, on the internet at least. There is, though, some hard information about the involved story of the diaries in an article by Brian Murphy called Let Me Take You Down - In a Cyn Sandwich, The Profoundly Paradoxical Mind of John Lennon (Cyn being short for Cynthia, Lennon’s first wife). This is freely available on the Oakland University Journal website.

Certainly, Lennon kept some diaries in the last years of his life which, immediately after his death, were stolen by Fred Seaman, Lennon’s assistant in New York. He was convicted of this theft in 1983, and sentenced to five years’ probation. The diaries, which were returned to Yoko Ono (though, obviously, they may have been photocopied), have never been published nor made public. Seaman did, though, author The Last Days of John Lennon: A Personal Memoir published by Birch Lane Press in 1991.

However, there have been two books which specifically claim to be based on Lennon’s diaries. One is Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon written by Robert Rosen and published by Fusion Press in 2000. Rosen, in his introduction to the book (available on john-lennon.com) explains how he came to use Lennon’s diaries as ‘a road map to the truth’.

‘Twenty-four hours after John Lennon was murdered on December 8, 1980, his personal assistant Fred Seaman, a close friend of mine came to my apartment. He was visibly shaken, his eyes blood shot, tears streaming down his face. There was work to be done he said. The previous summer, during an extended stay in Bermuda, John had told him should anything happen to him, it was Seaman’s job to write the true story of his final years. It would not be the official tale of a happy, eccentric household raising Sean and baking bread while Yoko ran the family business. Instead it would be the story of a tormented superstar, a prisoner of his fame locked in his bedroom, raving about Jesus Christ while a retinue of servants tended to his every need. Still it was not until Wednesday October 21, (1981) that I began the process of transcribing Lennon’s diaries. It was exhausting work that continued unabated until the end of November. No matter how much I transcribed there was always more; the task seemed endless. . .’

‘. . . Then on January 4, 1982 Ono fired Seaman. He assured me the project would continue; he’d given John Lennon his word that he’d tell his true story. Yoko, he said would not object. On February 9, 1982 I flew to Jamaica. When I returned to New York on February 27, my apartment had been ransacked. Everything I’d been working on - the diaries, the photocopies of the diaries, the transcripts, the manuscripts, the tapes, the photos - had all been taken. There was no sign of forced entry. It was Seaman. He had the keys. It was only then that I realized that virtually everything Seaman had told me about why we were doing the project was a lie. I sank into a state of near paralysis but managed to file a complaint with the police. Lennon’s diaries haunted me. I’d wake up in the morning and details would come flooding back. I began taking notes on everything I could remember. By mid-April I’d put together a manuscript that included the information from the diaries and everything that had happened since the day Lennon was murdered. Nowhere Man is a work of both investigative journalism and imagination. I have used the memory of Lennon’s diaries as a road map to the truth.’

In fact, the book’s index offers less than a handful of references to the diaries, and those references lead to little of substance in the book itself.

The other book - Lennon in America: 1971-1980 - was written by Geoffrey Giuliano and published by Cooper Square Press in 2000. This even has the subtitle: Based on the Lost Lennon Diaries. Wikipedia’s article on Giuliano gives detail. The author claimed he was given transcripts of Lennon’s journal by the singer Harry Nilsson, who died in 1994. The claim, however, was made after Nilsson’s death, and several people close to Nilsson do not believe he ever had such transcripts. Moreover, Steven Gutstein, a lawyer who read the diaries in connection with the legal case against Fred Seaman, remarked that Giulano’s book was ‘a Mad magazine version of the diaries’. Gutstein described his own memory of the diaries as being ‘a lot of philosophical musings combined with mundane details of everyday life’.

But, presumably, this book must be the source of 18th Candidate’s rumour-mongering. Giuliano says (or imagines) that Linda was alone nursing a headache in the aftermath of a heated argument with Paul. John and Yoko were going through a rough patch, and John regularly went over to Paul’s house in St John’s wood (incidentally only two doors down from where I myself lived for a short while in the 70s). On this occasion, Paul was out and Linda was making a bed, so Paul helped. In the course of spreading the sheets, Giuliano says, their hands touched briefly. Linda paid the contact no mind, but as Lennon reached to tuck in the top sheet (the detail is banally brilliant!), Lennon caught her arm and kissed her. Giuliano’s words: ‘A gentle, awkward embrace evolved into caresses and a quick interlude of sexual intimacy.’ Linda deeply regretted the indiscretion, Giuliano suggests, and never told a soul, while Lennon found it amusing.

So where did this rumour come from? Giuliano claims that George Speerin, a former Lennon aide, revealed the story in 1983; and that he himself (Giuliano) had seen a handwritten note by Lennon ‘which was probably intended for inclusion in his diaries’ which ‘referred’ to the same incident.

Giuliano admits in the introduction that his book does not contain any quotes from Lennon’s diaries. He says they were often incomplete thoughts and snippets - the exact meaning of which was dificult to discern. Instead, he says, he used the diaries as ‘collaborating source material’. The book’s index does have 20 or more references to Lennon’s diaries for where Giuliano has used them as source material. Here are two, one about the McCartneys and one about sex.

- ‘John ended up at dinner listening to the McCartney’s endless bragging about how wonderfully they were doing. In his [Lennon’s] diaries, he termed them obnoxious, smug and even downright stupid.’

‘So important were these pleasurable [sexual] episodes to the former Beatle than he kept a daily record of them all - in handwritten and taped diaries he assiduously maintained to the end of his life.’

Steller on Bering Island

The German naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, was born three centuries ago today. He took part in a famous Russian expedition, led by Vitus Bering, that landed in Alaska in 1741, and was shipwrecked on Bering Island. Steller kept a journal of the voyage which, a modern publisher says, ‘fully and dramatically’ describes the European discovery of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands.

Steller was born in Windsheim, near Nuremberg, on 10 March 1709 exactly 300 years ago. He studied at the University of Wittenberg, then moved to work at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. He was appointed as naturalist on an expedition commanded by Bering to chart the Siberian coast of the Arctic Ocean and search for an eastern passage to North America. The expedition sailed to the Kamchatka Peninsula in September 1740, and Steller spent the winter there, helping to organize a local school.

The following summer he sailed with Bering to North America, landing in Alaska at Kayak Island in July 1741. During the return journey, the boat was shipwrecked on an island off Kamchatka - later called Bering Island - where half the crew and Bering himself died. Stellar, however, survived; he also wrote descriptions of the fauna of the island, and several animals are now named after him (see Wikipedia for a list). The surviving crew built a new vessel in the spring, and managed to return to Kamchatka (Avacha Bay), where Steller remained for another two years. He died in 1746 on his way back to St Petersburg.

A manuscript journal kept by Steller found its way to the Academy in St Petersburg, where eventually it was reorganised and partly rewritten by the professor of natural history, another German, Peter Simon Pallas. He published a first instalment in 1781, based on the journal’s appendix about the physical geography of Bering Island. The substance of the journal was published as a second instalment in 1793. A few years later, in 1803, a first summarised version appeared in English as one part of a larger work - the fourth edition of William Coxe’s Account of the Russian Discoveries Between Asia and America.

Much more recently, though, in 1988, Stanford University Press published Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742, as translated by Margritt Engle and O. W. Frost, and with a long and informative introduction by Frost. Most of the introduction can be freely viewed at Googlebooks. The publisher says: ‘The European discovery of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands is fully and dramatically recorded in this journal - a gripping narrative of human conflict, of nature as adversary, of terror and pain and death, and of final deliverance.’

The Avacha Bay Co website says this of the book: ‘Although more than 250 years have passed since Steller wrote his private journal, the text, translated from the original German, is lively, easily readable, and displays a compassion and insight which seems uncanny for the era. His observations are an invaluable resource for understanding what this region was like prior to European discovery and what it felt like to be a participant in one of the world's great expeditions of discovery.’

The introduction to Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742 can be read online at Googlebooks; and also at Googlebooks some extracts from the diary itself can be found in The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts (Island Press). Steller wrote, for example, about the suffering of his colleagues on Bering Island: ‘One screamed because he was cold, another from hunger and thirst, as the mouths of many were in such a wretched state from scurvy, that they could not eat anything on account of the great pain because the gums were swollen up like a sponge, brown-black and grown high over the teeth and covering them.’ And, of Bering, who died on 8 December 1740, he wrote that he died, ‘more from hunger, cold, thirst, vermin and grief than from a disease’.

Rotten eggs in Peking

‘Though among foreign correspondents in China good ones are certainly not wholly lacking, in the final analysis most of them are stupid and are rotten eggs.’ This was the Communists’ explanation for banning foreign journalists in the weeks after taking power, as recorded by Derk Bodde, an eminent American historian born 100 years ago today, in his Peking diary almost exactly 60 years ago. But, Bodde himself also comments: ‘It is difficult to see the justification for a step which, in its sweeping inclusiveness, transcends anything attempted even in Soviet Russia.’

Derk Bodde was born on 9 March 1909, a century ago today, in Brant Rock about 50km southeast of Boston, Massachusetts. As a boy he lived for several years in China, where his father taught physics. He studied at Harvard, and then spent several more years in China on a fellowship, before completing a doctorate at Leiden University in the Netherlands. From 1938, he began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania becoming emeritus Professor of Chinese Studies, and he continued to teach there until retiring in 1975, apart from sabbaticals and a period of war service.

According to an obituary in The New York Times, Bodde, became known as an expert on the Qin dynasty of the late third century BC, as the translator of Fung Yu-lan’s History of Chinese Philosophy, as an analyst of Chinese law of the 18th and early 19th centuries, and as a shrewd observer of Chinese politics of the late 1940s. Inspired by Galia Speshneff, his Russian-born wife who he met in China, he also wrote an analysis of how Chinese culture had influenced Tolstoy - Tolstoy and China - which was described as ‘solid and important’. He died only a few years ago, in 2003. More details of his life can be found on a University of Massachusetts website - Warring States Project.

The New York Times called Bodde ‘a shrewd observer of Chinese politics of the late 1940s’ on the basis of his Peking Diary, a book written thanks to a Fulbright scholarship. After the war, in 1948, Bodde went once again to China as the very first recipient of a scholarship programme set up by Senator J. William Fulbright. According to Wikipedia, the Fulbright Program is now one of the most prestigious awards programmes worldwide, operating in 144 countries and with 51 commissions - ‘more Fulbright alumni have won Nobel Prizes than those of any other academic program, including two in 2002’.

Bodde describes (in Peking Diary) how he got offered the scholarship: ‘One morning in March 1948 the telephone rang in my home in Philadelphia. It was a call from Washington. ‘Would you be prepared to go to China as a Fulbright Fellow?’ the voice asked. ‘We would like an immediate decision, if possible, so that we can make a press release today to say that the Fulbright Program has been started.’ I swallowed my surprise, remembering from wartime experience in Washington that when things happen there, they usually do so explosively. ‘I’ll be tremendously happy to go,’ I replied. ‘Please tell me the details.’ ’

Bodde, with his wife and son Theodore, travelled to, what was then still called, Peking in August 1948. The year he then spent in the Chinese capital happened to coincide with the fall of the Nationalist government and the arrival of the Communists. Throughout this tumultous period in the country’s history, Bodde kept a detailed diary, and this was published in 1950 by Henry Schuman as Peking Diary: A Year of Revolution. It is considered the first full-length account of the Chinese revolution by a neutral observer. The full text is freely available at Internet Archive.

In the introduction, Bodde says the diary ‘is offered in the hope that it may have some historical value as a fragmentary record of a crucial year in Chinese history, seen from the city which became the focus of events during this year’. ‘So far as I know,’ he adds, ‘no other foreigner kept a similar record while I was in Peking, the more so as the news activities of all foreign correspondents were halted by the Communists less than a month after their arrival.’

And here is an extract from the diary (with several paragraphs omitted), dated almost exactly 60 years ago.

4 March 1949
‘It is now thirty-two days since the People’s Army marched into Peking. Following the spate of meetings, parades, and congratulatory messages of the first two weeks, changes of a more concrete nature are beginning to make themselves felt. The honeymoon seems over.

Physically, conditions continue to return to normal. The enormous piles of unsightly refuse which had accumulated in the streets during the siege are gradually being carted away. The reopening of the Palace Museum, and probably of many other parks and museums, is promised within a week. Already the city wall is open as a promenade to those who wish to use it. From its top the evidences of destruction wrought by Peking’s former defenders are clearly apparent: on the wall itself, in the tunnels and piles of brick and earth remaining from hundreds of dugouts and gun emplacements; beyond the wall, in the gray waste of razed buildings which circle the city in a belt several hundred yards wide. Of these, only heaps of rubble now remain, from which boys are gradually carrying away the bricks on their backs. At one or two places a start has been made at rebuilding, but for the most part the scene is one of bleak desolation.

On the production front the papers are filled these days, quite à la Russe, with enthusiastic accounts of how the workers are rehabilitating industry to a point equal to, or even higher than, its presiege level. Improving communications are making it possible for thousands of refugees to return to their homes, helped by free transportation and grain allotments from the government. It was inspiring to revisit the Temple of Confucius a few days ago and compare its present stately calm with the former scene of refugee squalor, misery, and confusion. Almost the last evidences of that unhappy time are the piles of refuse now being carted away in preparation for its formal reopening a few days hence. Voids remain, however, where doors, windows, and furniture used to be all burned as firewood during the siege. [. . .]

Newspapers have suffered a high mortality, at least seven having been closed in Peking, including that to which I had subscribed, the World Daily News. [. . .]

During the past few weeks, however, I have concluded that the integrity of the press depends on more than simply the number of its papers, important though this may be. It does not greatly matter, after all, if a city possesses one, two, or five papers, provided they all print essentially the same news derived from the same source. As a matter of fact, what can be said of the press here in China can also be made to apply, in some respects, to the American press: too many American cities maintain only one paper, too many papers depend for news solely on a single news agency, too many Americans read the same feature columns syndicated throughout the country. The real difference between America and Communist China, however, can be summed up in a sentence: a speech by Mao Tse-tung has a fair chance of being at least partially reported in America; a Truman speech has no chance at all of being printed in Communist China, unless it suits the purpose of the authorities to permit it.

Most disturbing act of thought control is the February 27 order halting all further news activities of Peking’s foreign correspondents. Though only seventeen persons are affected (Australian, Swiss, Swedish, and Dutch, as well as American), the order in effect means the complete cessation of news (other than over the Communist radio) from Communist China to the outside world, since Peking is the only city in North China in which foreign correspondents are stationed. The same order bans the further circulation here of the US Information Service news bulletins, both Chinese and English, thus leaving the short-wave radio (for those who have one) as the only ‘free’ organ of information from the outside world.

It is difficult to see the justification for a step which, in its sweeping inclusiveness, transcends anything attempted even in Soviet Russia. The official explanation is that of ‘conditions during the present state of military activity.’ The Progressive Daily goes a good bit further by beginning its February 28 editorial with the words: ‘Though among foreign correspondents in China good ones are certainly not wholly lacking, in the final analysis most of them are stupid and are rotten eggs.’ As illustration it cites the unfortunate AP and UP dispatches describing the Communist entry of Peking. If these are the real causes for the present step, the Communists could have attained their objectives equally well either by expelling the two correspondents directly involved or by imposing general censorship. Though either step would have undoubtedly aroused criticism abroad, neither could have been as disastrous as the present move, the only practical effect of which is to close the mouths of the new regime’s potential friends abroad, strengthen its enemies, and make more difficult the re-establishment of those diplomatic and commercial ties from which the Chinese Communists themselves stand to benefit. [. . .]’

DiMaggio’s diary - $33 a word

Joe DiMaggio died a decade ago today. He was one of the most famous of American baseball players, and is perhaps best known for his 56-game hitting streak, a record that still stands, or, possibly, for a marriage to Marilyn Monroe that lasted less than a year. There is nothing about Monroe, however, in DiMaggio’s diaries, and not much else interesting either, according to reviewers. Nevertheless, a variety of original pages from the diaries are on sale at $2,000-5,000 each.

There is no shortage of information about DiMaggio on the internet. Wikipedia’s article is a bit full of jargon, Notable Biographies is a much easier read, and the official Joe DiMaggio website has lots of photographs too.

DiMaggio was the eighth of nine children born in 1914 to Italian immigrants, and grew up in San Francisco. He made his professional baseball debut shortly before his 18th birthday, and became a local Minor League celebrity. A serious knee injury slowed down his career down slightly, but in 1936 he made his Major League debut for the New York Yankees, in front of many thousands of Italian fans. He soon earned the nicknames ‘Joltin’ Joe’ for the power of his batting and ‘The Yankee Clipper’ after the transAtlantic ships built for speed.

In the 1939 season, DiMaggio won the League’s Most Valuable Player award, and in 1941 he created the record that still stands - a fifty-six-game hitting streak. (For non-Americans, the term ‘hitting streak’ refers to the consecutive number of official games in which a player gets at least one base hit, and a base hit is when the batter safely reaches first base after hitting the ball into fair territory, without the benefit of an error or a fielder’s choice.). He spent three years in the army returning to professional baseball in 1946 and winning his third Most Valuable Player award in 1947.

With injury problems having affected his play for several seasons, DiMaggio retired in 1952; the Yankees then, in honour of their much-loved player, retired his uniform number (5) so no player could use it again. Thereafter, he worked in television. He was married once before the war, to Dorothy Arnold, and then briefly - for less than a year - to the actress Marilyn Monroe after the war. In 1955, he was he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and in 1969 a poll of sports writers named him the sport’s greatest living player. He died on 8 March 1999, ten years ago today.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Joe DiMaggio kept a diary from 1980 to 1994, although this was at the suggestion of his accountant so that he could have a record of expenses. In 2007, these diaries were acquired by Steiner Sports, which describes itself as ‘the leader in autographed sports memorabilia and sports collectibles’. Immediately, it announced that it would try to auction them for a minimum of $1.5m. The auction received plenty of publicity, and it was widely reported that there were over 2,000 pages in plastic protective sheets contained in 29 thick, black, loose-leaf binders.

According to Onion Sports Network, though, the diaries are not very interesting. They are merely a listing of all the things and people DiMaggio hated: ‘Jukeboxes, dollar stores, Paul Simon, Washington DC, speaking, Garth Brooks, myself, and automobiles. Also sore throats, Yogi Berra, films, Lee Iacocca, coffeemakers, anyone who has ever referred to me as Joltin, sandals, baseball.’

And the UK newspaper The Independent was not very impressed by DiMaggio’s diaries either: ‘His so-called diaries are a random collection of 2,000 pages, offering a clipped daily chronicle of events . . . next to nothing about Marilyn Monroe, and precious little even about the Yankees. Instead you find bland entries about dinners with friends, and endless complaints about the burdens of fame. ‘Swamped with the signing of baseballs - pictures - radio and TV,’ he writes of one July 1989 day in Anaheim, California. ‘Stress too much.’ ’

Although there were many reports of the proposed auction by Steiner Sports, there appear to have been none about the result. Presumably, the company did not find anyone willing to pay $1.5m, and therefore decided to sell - as it said it might - the great baseball’s players jottings one by one. Indeed, individual specified diary pages, some of them with only 150-200 handwritten words, are currently on sale at the Steiner Sports website for $2,000-5,000. Each page, it says, will be shipped in ‘a blue protective hard cover display’, however, it stresses, the purchase includes no rights to copy, reproduce or publish the page.

For example, the diary page 2 March 1992 is on sale for $5,000. Steiner Sports describes the content as follows: ‘DiMaggio had a very late breakfast at the club then met with a couple of friends who wanted to say hello before hitting some balls at the driving range. Met a friend at the range and decided to play nine holes with him. After the nine holes DiMaggio took at [sic] steam and had dinner at the club.’ The website shows a picture of the diary page, so I can calculate that there are no more than 150 words, and that therefore each word is worth at least $33.

According to the company, the diaries detail ‘a myriad of memories’ including: ‘A visit with President Ronald Reagan at the White House at Gorbachev dinner . . .; a meeting with New York City Mayor Ed Koch; missing the final game of the 1986 World Series to receive Ellis Island Medal of Honor; sitting in George Steinbrenner’s box and talking baseball with the Yankees owner; reaction to Commissioner’s press conference on Pete Rose; the pressures of the 56 game hitting streak . . .; watching the Gulf crisis unfold on television; sitting in an airport lounge getting ‘high on diet cokes’.’

However, it is not clear which of the pages for these events have already been sold, nor indeed how many pages in total have been sold since 2007. Nor have I any idea whether pages containing the following extracts have been sold or not.

28 April 1989
‘Up at 5am . . . Book people felt me out with questions pertaining to baseball. Some part of my private life but not too strong on that. Will not reveal anything in a negative way towards Marilyn - only books that have come out on her might have not been truthful.’

30 April 1991 (at Kennedy Airport)
‘. . . was asked for another autograph - just one interruption after another - people must think I have skin like an armored plate. Will get a checkup and find out how I’m holding up.’

And NBC Sports has these undated laments about a public relations frenzy and about travelling: ‘If I thought this would be taking place I would have stopped the hitting streak at 40’; and ‘Plane food should be fed to pigs’.

The Wallenberg curse

The Wall Street Journal has just published a series of articles about Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat working in Budapest who saved thousands of Jews but who went missing in the last months of the Second World War. In particular, the newspaper draws attention to a diary kept by Raoul’s stepfather, Fredrik von Dardel, for over 25 years, most of which is about the search for Raoul.

Raoul Wallenberg’s story is well-known and well documented. Wikipedia has a fully-referenced summary, and there is a long biography on the website of The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. There are also dozens of books about the man, many of them on Googlebooks, such as Wallenberg: Missing Hero by Kati Marton, which claims on the cover that he saved 100,000 Jews.

Wallenberg was born in 1912 into a wealthy Swedish family, three months after his father had died. In 1918, his mother married Fredrik von Dardel, and they had two children, Guy and Nina. In the 1930s, Wallenberg went to study architecture in the US, but then worked for a construction company in South Africa and a bank in Haifa. On returning to Stockholm, he joined the Central European Trading Company, owned by Kálmán Lauer a Hungarian-Jew. From the early 1940s, he began to travel to Hungary as Lauer’s aide, and was soon a part owner of the company and a director.

By the spring of 1944, Allied leaders were considering what to do about the persecution and deportation of Jews in Hungary. One consequence was that the American War Refugee Board sent a representative to Stockholm looking for someone willing and able to go to Budapest to organise a rescue programme. In July that year, Wallenberg travelled to the Hungarian capital as the First Secretary of the Swedish legation, and for the next six months organised safe housing and protective passports for Jews, saving tens of thousands of lives (possibly 100,000 as the Marton book claims, but certainly 20,000). At its peak, the rescue programme involved as many as 350 helpers.

In January 1945, though, the Soviet army entered Budapest, and Wallenberg was arrested under suspicion of being an American spy. He disappeared, almost certainly to a prison in Russia. In 1957, the Soviets announced that Wallenberg had actually died of a heart attack in 1947, but some believed/believe he might have been executed. A Swedish report in 2001 concluded as follows, ‘there is no fully reliable proof of what happened to Raoul Wallenberg’, so the manner and timing of his death remain a mystery. For the rest of their lives Wallenberg’s mother and stepfather fought to find out what had happened to Raoul, often against staunch resistance from the Swedish authorities. In 1979, they both committed suicide, acts which their daughter Nina Lagergren attributed to despair.

Thereafter, Nina and Guy continued their parents’ campaign for the truth, and to foster knowledge about their brother. Both appear to have recently contributed to a series of articles in The Wall Street Journal. The first is entitled The Wallenberg Curse - The Search for the Missing Holocaust Hero Began in 1945. The Unending Quest Tore His Family Apart. Another article explains where the mystery stands today; and a third piece provides an example of the diary kept by von Dardel.

Frederik von Dardel began writing the diary on 24 October 1952, his 34th wedding anniversary, and would maintain it until a year before his death. The diaries were donated to the Swedish National Archives in 1985, but were only made available to the public in 2000. Officials say no one has been very interested in them, at least not until The Wall Street Journal showed up. It claims to have read thousands of family journal entries, letters and documents, and hundreds of interviews - and to have been the first to read most of them.

The paper gives brief extracts from the first and last entries in this diary (translated by Amalia Johnsson). Of the first, on 24 October 1952, it says there are two paragraphs devoted to von Dardel’s wife, and that he then turns ‘to the stepson who had come to call him Papa’: ‘Raoul Wallenberg’s fate has lain like a dark cloud over our existence.’ And with regard to the last entry, 25 years later, on 28 April 1978, it says, von Dardel concluded the diary with two English words: ‘stone wall’.

The Wall Street Journal also gives another, longer extract from the diary, in which von Dardel explains how, in connection with the king’s 70th birthday, Raoul was awarded the medal ‘Illis quorum meruere labores’ (For Those Whose Labors Have Deserved It), partly as a result of efforts by Stockholm-based Austrian author Rudolph Philipp. Here are the last few paragraphs of the story as written in von Dardel’s diary.

12 November 1952
‘. . . it was nevertheless decided that Raoul, in connection with the rain of decorations on the king’s 70th birthday would receive ‘Illis quorum’. Philipp’s action also aimed for this distinction to mark the Foreign Ministry’s understanding that Raoul was still alive.

So it was also understood by all the newspapers save Svenska Dagbladet, which mentioned the news item under the headline Posthumous Distinction for Raoul Wallenberg.

This was irksome, especially as this paper is the lifeblood of our social circle. After I and several others had shaken up the editorial staff, they introduced in the regional edition, and in the following day’s Stockholm edition, a correct statement in a prominent place.’

Woolf on rinderpest and salt

A century ago today, while the Bloomsbury Group of literary friends was beginning to coalesce in London, one of its future members, Leonard Woolf, was more concerned about salt stocks and outbreaks of rinderpest working as a government administrator in Sri Lanka (then still a British colony called Ceylon). Never a diarist like his future wife, he did keep a diary of his duties in Ceylon, and these were published in the early 1960s.

Leonard Sidney Woolf, born in 1882, was the third of ten children. When his father died ten years later, Woolf was sent to board at Arlington House, a preparatory school near Brighton. Thereafter he was educated at St Paul’s and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he joined a group of writers and intellectuals - including Bertrand Russell and E M Forster - who called themselves The Apostles. In 1904, however, he left behind the literary world, and went to work in Ceylon. For the last three years of his time with the Civil Service there, from 1908, he served as the Colonial Administrator for Hambantota, in the very south of island. He returned to London in 1911; and, the next year, married Virginia.

Woolf opposed Britain’s involvement in the First World War, and, having been rejected for military service on health grounds, began to focus his writing increasingly on politics and sociology. The couple settled in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and together set up The Hogarth Press, with Leonard as the main director, a position he retained until his death in 1969. His main work, however, was as a political writer and editor. He also spent much time caring for his wife, through the ups and downs of manic depression. After Virginia’s death, he had a long relationship with Trekkie Parsons, an artist, despite her being married.

More information about Woolf can be found at Wikipedia, of course, and at The Diary Junction. Sussex University holds most of his papers (at The Keep) which has an extensive catalogue online. Also online - at Internet Archive - are many of his books, now out of copyright, including his first novel The Village in the Jungle. Publicity (on Amazon) for a modern print of the novel says: ‘It reads as if Thomas Hardy had been born among the heat, scent, sensuality and pungent mystery of the tropics. Translated into both Tamil and Sinhalese, it is one of the best-loved and best-known stories in Sri Lanka.’ In the 1960s, Mr Saparamadu, of the Ceylon Civil Service, said it was ‘generally acknowledged to be the best work of creative writing in English on Ceylon’.

In January 1960, 50 years after his administrator’s stint in the country, Woolf returned to Ceylon (although independent by this time, it would remain Ceylon until the name Sri Lanka was adopted in 1972), where he was received with ‘much honour’ (again according to Saparamadu). As a result of the visit, and because of Woolf’s literary eminence, the country’s prime minister directed that the official diary written by Woolf half a century earlier, when serving as the Hambantota administrator, should be published by the government. An edition was thus printed by The Ceylon Historical Journal in 1962, and another by The Hogarth Press (the company set up by Woolf but, by then, part of Chatto & Windus) in 1963 - Diaries in Ceylon 1908-1911, Record of a Colonial Administrator

Saparamadu explains, in the book’s introduction, that there is a vast corpus of official diaries written by government agents and administrators from 1808 to 1941, and that the diaries were meant to contain a full record of work done by each writer and a full description of events and and the conditions of their districts. ‘Woolf’s diaries,’ he says, ‘have been selected as a good introductory to them not only because they are typical of the diaries but because of the wide public interest in them and also since they help to throw some light on the experience in the villages of Hambantota which provided the inspiration for Woolf’s celebrated book The Village in the Jungle.’

Here are two extracts, taken from exactly 100 years ago today, which give a good indication of Woolf’s preoccupations at the time - cattle and salt!

3 March 1909
‘I was woken at 3am by the Stock Inspector’s messenger. My wrath was appeased by learning that it is not rinderpest. I heard today that all the contractors who are removing salt from Palatupana on Government account at Rs1.70 per ton had left the lewaya [shallow lagoon]. This was a strike to force my hand and make me pay Rs2 per ton. In the evening I got hold of the previous contractor and I was determined that he should take another contract. Eventually with great difficulty and a certain amount of pressure I induced him to enter into a contract to remove 10,000 cwts a month until all the salt on this side of the lewaya is removed. As he will probably pay the carters about Rs1.50 a ton, I feel that I have scored. He undertakes with me to do it at Rs1.80 per ton which is the old rate.’

4 March 1909
‘Another case of rinderpest but again out of the isolated contacts. There are now 4 isolated contacts left. In the evening I went down to the Maha Lewaya and released the 230 bulls there. I have had them in quarantine since February 18th and the Stock Inspector considered it safe to let them to go yesterday but I thought I would keep them an extra day. Great rejoicing among the carters who told me that in future they would obey any order I gave them, so I told them they had better prove what they said by going away and removing salt for two months from Bundala. 32 carts immediately left for Bundala, at least so they said.’

The finding of Tutankhamun

Howard Carter, the archaeologist who is credited with discovering the Egyptian tomb of Tutankhamun, died 70 years ago today. Thanks to the Ashmolean Museum and Griffith Institute, in Oxford, diary entries made by Carter in 1922 when discovering the Tutankhamun tomb are freely available online.

Carter was born in Kensington, London, in 1874, the youngest son of an artist, and while still a teenager began studying inscriptions and paintings in Egypt. For much of the 1890s, he worked as a member of the Egypt Exploration Fund, directed by Édouard Naville, at the Hatshepsut temple of Deir el-Bahri, on the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor. In 1899, he joined the Egyptian Antiquities Service, as chief inspector of antiquities for Upper Egypt, and then for Lower Egypt. In 1905, though, he resigned following a dispute between Egyptian site guards and some French tourists.

In the next few years, George Herbert, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, became interested in Egyptian antiquities and agreed to finance some archaeological work. It was agreed with the Egyptian Antiquities Service that Carter should take charge of the Carnarvon-sponsored excavations. They began at Thebes, and then moved to the Delta region, but in 1914 Lord Carnarvon secured a concession to excavate in the Valley of the Kings.

There were many delays to the excavations due to the First World War; and then, subsequently, in the years after the war, Lord Carnarvon became increasingly frustrated at Carter’s lack of excavation success. However, in October 1922, Carter - literally - struck gold by finding the now-famous tomb of Tutankhamun. In Wikipedia’s article on Carter, the tomb is described as ‘by far the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings’.

After completing the excavations, Howard Carter retired from archaeology and became a collector of antiquities, though he did visit the US in 1924 to give a series of lectures. He also visited Luxor often, and could be found at the Winter Palace Hotel, sitting by himself in willful isolation, says a short biography of Carter at Tracing The Past. He died in Kensington on 2 March 1939, 70 years ago today.

Carter was not a literary diarist, but he did keep an excavation diary, and this is held by the Griffith Institute, which is part of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, which itself is part of Oxford University. The text of the diary is available (on the Ashmolean Museum or Griffith Institute web pages). Here are two entries, one from the day that Carter first discovered the tomb, and the second from the day three weeks later when Lord Carnavon had arrived and the tomb was opened.

Saturday, November 4.
‘First steps of tomb found
At about 10am I discovered beneath almost the first hut attacked the first traces of the entrance of the tomb (Tut.ankh.Amen) This comprised the first step of the N.E. corner (of the sunken-staircase). Quite a short time sufficed to show that it was the beginning of a steep excavation cut in the bed rock, about four metres below the entrance of Ramses VI’s tomb, and a similar depth below the present level of the valley. And, that it was of the nature of a sunken staircase entrance to a tomb of the type of the XVIIIth Dyn., but further than that nothing could be told until the heavy rubbish above was cleared away.’

Sunday, November 26.
‘Open second doorway - about 2pm - Advised Engelbach
After clearing 9 metres of the descending passage, in about the middle of the afternoon, we came upon a second sealed doorway, which was almost the exact replica of the first. It bore similar seal impressions and had similar traces of successive reopenings and reclosings in the plastering. The seal impressions were of Tut.ankh.Amen and of the Royal Necropolis, but not in any way so clear as those on the first doorway. . .

Feverishly we cleared away the remaining last scraps of rubbish on the floor of the passage before the doorway, until we had only the clean sealed doorway before us. In which, after making preliminary notes, we made a tiny breach in the top left hand corner to see what was beyond. Darkness and the iron testing rod told us that there was empty space. Perhaps another descending staircase, in accordance to the ordinary royal Theban tomb plan? Or may be a chamber? Candles were procured - the all important tell-tale for foul gases when opening an ancient subterranean excavation - I widened the breach and by means of the candle looked in, while Ld. C., Lady E, and Callender with the Reises waited in anxious expectation.

It was sometime before one could see, the hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, but as soon as one’s eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another.

There was naturally short suspense for those present who could not see, when Lord Carnarvon said to me ‘Can you see anything’. I replied to him ‘Yes, it is wonderful’. I then with precaution made the hole sufficiently large for both of us to see. With the light of an electric torch as well as an additional candle we looked in. Our sensations and astonishment are difficult to describe as the better light revealed to us the marvellous collection of treasures: two strange ebony-black effigies of a King, gold sandalled, bearing staff and mace, loomed out from the cloak of darkness; gilded couches in strange forms, lion-headed, Hathor-headed, and beast infernal; exquisitely painted, inlaid, and ornamental caskets; flowers; alabaster vases, some beautifully executed of lotus and papyrus device; strange black shrines with a gilded monster snake appearing from within; quite ordinary looking white chests; finely carved chairs; a golden inlaid throne . . .

Our sensations were bewildering and full of strange emotion. We questioned one another as to the meaning of it all. Was it a tomb or merely a cache? A sealed doorway between the two sentinel statues proved there was more beyond, and with the numerous cartouches bearing the name of Tut.ankh.Amen on most of the objects before us, there was little doubt that there behind was the grave of that Pharaoh. . .’

The ghost of a reader

‘The journal writer, like the poet, is haunted by the ghost of a reader; but a ghost is very different from some palpable flesh-and-blood reader whom the writer imagines looking over his shoulder with his expectations, standards and demands.’ So wrote the British poet Stephen Spender, born a century ago today, in trying to explain why he had decided to publish his diaries, even though they were not written with publication in mind. The diaries themselves contain similar self-analysis (about his role as a poet for example) as well as many interesting anecdotes about other literary figures of the 20th century.

Spender was born in London, exactly 100 years ago today, to a mother of German-Jewish descent and to a liberal journalist. He was educated at University College School, Hampstead, and at Oxford where he became acquainted with other poets such as Auden, Isherwood and MacNeice. After Oxford, Spender lived in Hamburg for a while and then Berlin. From the start of the 1930s, he began to publish poetry and literary criticism, much of it flavoured by his left-wing politics. One of his poems, The Pylons, gave rise to the label Pylon Poets.

During the Spanish Civil War, Spender helped write propaganda for the Republican side; during the Second World War he worked for the National Fire Service. In the early 1950s, he published an autobiography giving an account of his relationship with the Communist Party. He went on to be editor of Encounter from 1953 to 1967, and to be involved with Index on Censorship. At times, he also lectured in the US. He was knighted in 1983 (the same year he appears to have stopped writing a diary) and he died in 1995.

More information on Spender can be found at Wikipedia; and The Diary Junction has some diary-related links. The Stephen Spender Memorial Trust, which says it aims to widen knowledge of 20th century English literature with particular focus on Spender’s circle of writers, has a biography, a bibliography and photos.

Although best remembered for being a poet, and, to some extent for literary criticism, Spender did produce other kinds of writing, travel books, a couple of plays and a handful of novels. For much of his life, he also wrote journals intermittently, often for specific purposes. These were compiled and edited into a single publication by John Goldsmith - Stephen Spender’s Journals 1939-1983 - and published by Faber and Faber in 1985. Spender, himself, however had some control over which entries were included in the volume, and provides a biographical commentary before each chapter.

In his introduction, Spender explains his journal-writing philosophy: ‘The essential of the journal for me is that I can put down whatever I like without consideration of fulfilling the expectations, or catering for the taste of, an editor or a reader. ‘But after all,’ the reader may protest, ‘here you are, publishing your journals.’ The answer to this objection is, I think, that the journal writer, like the poet, is haunted by the ghost of a reader; but a ghost is very different from some palpable flesh-and-blood reader whom the writer imagines looking over his shoulder with his expectations, standards and demands. The writer of the journal need only set down what is interesting to himself, his own truth, and much of this will conform to no standards of publication that he is aware of at the time. Much of it will, indeed, be unpublishable.’

In the 40 years and more covered by Stephen Spender’s Journals 1939-1983 there is only one entry dated 28 February, i.e. on his birthday. It’s from 1970: ‘I drove to New York and dined with Auden. My sixty-first birthday: his sixty-third was two days ago, 26 February.’ And there follows a poem which starts ‘Dined with Auden. He’d been at Milwaukee . . .’

Here, however, are two other extracts from the book, forty years apart.

20 October 1939
‘It must now be three weeks since my weekend at the Woolfs. They live in a very pleasant house at Rodmell near Lewes . . . I arrived in time for tea. After tea, we went out on to the lawn and played a game of bowls. . . Virginia and I walked about the garden talking about writing, which she said she wanted to discuss with other writers. She was pleased that I kept a journal because she said she found it was the only thing she could do, too. She thought that every day an occasion arises in which one sees things in an entirely new and different way, that these moments of transformation are one’s grasp of reality. This is the experience she tries to catch hold of in her journal.’ (NB: See The Diary Junction for more on Woolf’s diary.)

5 October 1979
‘I wrote a poem about Derwentwater. One of my best, at this moment, I think. Why do I have such resistance to writing poetry? Since when I am writing it I can become very absorbed, happy, fascinated. The resistance comes first from the sense not so much of failure as of non-recognition. I can’t really convince myself my poetry gives pleasure to anyone. I feel apologetic sending it to a friend, humiliated sending it to an editor, as though asking for a favour. Next, writing it is a test in which all one’s best qualities are brought in confrontation with all one’s incapacitiy. Next, poetry is not ‘work’. And there is always ‘work’ elbowing its way in and pushing poetry aside. . .

Being a minor poet is like being minor royalty, and no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that.’

Mullin and leylandii

The diaries of Labour MP Chris Mullin, covering the period of New Labour from 1999 to 2007, are about to be published by Profile Books. However, substantial extracts are being serialised in the Mail on Sunday, and can be read online. While Profile Books says Mullin is ‘irreverent, wry and candid’ in the diaries, the Mail on Sunday extracts - such as those in which Mullin is most concerned about leylandii legislation - make his irreverence seem more puerile than wry.

Wikipedia offers a short biography of Mullin. Born in Chelmsford, Essex, in 1947, he read law at the University of Hull. He first campaigned (unsuccessfully) for a Labour seat when only 22, but then worked as a journalist on the television documentary World in Action, which, among other things, campaigned for the release of the so-called Birmingham Six.

By the start of the 1980s, Mullin was an active member of the Labour Party, veering towards Tony Benn’s style of politics, supporting Benn’s political positions, and editing some of his written material. Mullin himself was elected to Parliament in 1987, and has remained an MP (for Sunderland South) since then. Tony Blair appointed him to the government in 1999, as a junior minister at the DETR, under John Prescott; he has also served in ministerial positions at the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office. Since 2005, though, he has been a backbencher. He is married to a Vietnamese woman, Ngoc, and they have two children.

Last year, Mullin announced that he does not intend to fight another election - which is, presumably, why he’s now happy to make his diaries public. A View From The Foothills, about life in the New Labour government from 1999 to 2007, is due to be published by Profile Books on 2 March. The book is being billed as ‘Alan Clarke meets Yes Minister’, and Profile is quoting Mullin as saying: ‘It is said that failed politicians make the best diarists. In which case I am in with a chance.’

Here is more of the publisher’s blurb: ‘Mullin is irreverent, wry and candid. His keen sense of the ridiculous allows him to give a far clearer insight into the workings of Government than other, more overtly successful and self-important politicians. He offers humorous and incisive takes on all aspects of political life: from the build-up to Iraq, to the scandalous sums of tax-payers’ money spent on ministerial cars he didn’t want to use. His diary is a joy to read: brilliantly-observed, it will entertain and amuse far beyond the political classes.’

In advance of 2 March, extracts from the diaries are being published in the Mail on Sunday, which claims that, until now, the diaries have been ‘kept hidden from everyone but his family’. The book is available from Amazon at half the recommended retail price of £20.

Here’s a small sample of the delights in store. They come from Mullin’s first year in office, when working under John Prescott at the DETR. Personally, I think Mullin’s irreverence and/or wryness falls rather flat in some of this writing, especially when taking his effort to legislate on leylandii so self-importantly!

21 September 1999
‘At John Prescott’s office. JP, grim-faced in shirtsleeves, standing near the window. The reason for this morning’s angst is yet more interference by Downing Street in the business of the Department. Speed limits are the subject of today’s intervention.

His black mood is compounded by the fact that he has come to work this morning wearing unmatching shoes. We are permitted a brief giggle at this. Towards the end of the meeting a minion appears with a plastic bag containing an assortment of shoes.

JP has no concept of how to get the best out of people. His idea of conferring is to lie slumped in an armchair and deliver, at breakneck speed, a series of diatribes. Occasionally, he invites brief contributions from one or other of his Ministers, who are arranged around him on easy chairs. Now and then he solicits information from one of the advisers, who sit behind us on upright chairs.

Our main role is to laugh sycophantically at his jokes. This is how it must be at the court of Boris Yeltsin.’

13 October 1999
‘With Michael Meacher to discuss the dreaded leylandii hedges. After two years of faffing, the Department has produced a leaflet advising on suitable hedging for suburban gardens. ‘Where,’ Michael asks the officials, ‘does it actually say it is not a good idea to plant leylandii?’

‘Ah well, Minister, it doesn’t quite put it as boldly as that. We have to be careful of upsetting the industry.’ Pure Yes, Minister. Later, Brian Hackland - an official from No10 - calls in. Amazingly, The Man has indeed given the matter his attention.’

18 October 1999
‘Another exchange about leylandii with Hackland. ‘The climate in Downing Street is not right,’ he asserted. ‘What climate?’ I say. ‘I bet the Prime Minister hasn’t devoted more than 30 seconds of his time to the matter.’ Reluctantly Hackland disgorged two names, Jonathan Powell and Anji Hunter.

‘Hunter? Where does she fit in?’ ‘The Prime Minister values her political antennae.’

So, our entire effort is paralysed on the whim of the Prime Minister’s Special Assistant. Come back Marcia Falkender.’

Postscript: John Prescott, not to be entirely floored by Mullin’s diary revelation concerning the unmatching shoes, has retaliated (if that’s not too strong a word) with a story about Mullin in his blog, as reported by The Guardian. Prescott writes: ‘I wonder if he [Mullin] mentions in his book about the time when I was called by security to the front of the department’s building to deal with a tramp. I turned up to discover security refusing to let in a man dressed in a thick overcoat, scarf, gloves and a wooly Russian cap that covered his face and ears. I turned round to security and had to tell them: ‘That’s no tramp, that’s my junior minister - Chris Mullin.’

August Derleth Day

Today, 24 February, has just become August Derleth Day in the state of Wisconsin, US, thanks to a proclamation by the state governor, Jim Doyle. The proclamation was made to honour Derleth’s centenary, for he was born exactly 100 years ago. Although a versatile and prolific writer, he is most well remembered for promoting the horror stories of H P Lovecraft. He was also, though, a committed diarist, and published several volumes of diaries.

Here is the proclamation being read out today by Governor Doyle at Sauk City Park Hall (Sauk City being but a village): ‘. . . Whereas August W Derleth, a Wisconsin author born on February 24, 1909 in Sauk City, brought honor and distinction to himself, his community and his state during a lifetime spent in writing and publishing; and whereas, Derleth was educated in Sauk City beginning a writing career at age thirteen, publishing his first story in 1926; and whereas, he entered the University of Wisconsin where he continued writing, and graduated in 1930, after which he was briefly employed in an editorial position out-of-state; and . . .

Whereas, returning to Sauk City in 1931, Derleth embarked on a writing career leading to a contract with Charles Scribner’s Sons, the publication of the first of his Sac Prairie novels depicting the historical evolution of Sauk City and Prairie du Sac; the awarding of a Guggenhein Fellowship in 1938, and the ultimate publication of over 150 books ranging from history, historical novels, biography, poetry, contemporary novels, juvenilia, supernatural fiction and pastiches, marking him as the most prolific writer in Wisconsin history, and . . .

Whereas, Derleth founded Arkham House [a publishing company] . . . devoted to the works of H P Lovecraft and other writers of the macabre . . . and whereas, in 1941, Derleth was appointed literary editor of the Capital Times of Madison, a position he held until 1960, and whereas, Derleth died in 1971 at age 62, leaving behind two children, April Rose and Walden William and the many lives he touched through his works; and whereas, Derleth took continued pride in his Wisconsin roots as evidenced by his writings, his activities in lecturing on American Regional Literature and his Journals exploring the delights of rural Wisconsin,

Now, therefore, I, Jim Doyle, Governor of Wisconsin, do hereby proclaim February 24, 2009, the hundredth anniversary of August Derleth’s birth, as August Derleth Day.’

The long bibliography on Derleth’s Wikipedia page lists five published journals: Village Year: A Sac Prairie Journal (1941); Village Daybook (1947); Countryman’s Journal (1963); Wisconsin Country: A Sac Prairie Journal (1965); and Return to Walden West (1970). But John Howard, who maintains a website called Walden East with lots of information about Derleth, adds two other books with journal extracts: Walden West (1961) and Walden Pond: Homage to Thoreau (1968)

Howard says of Derleth: ‘His journal is full of variety. Even more so than in [his] novels, there is plenty of acute observation of nature: wildlife, plants, the weather and the changing seasons. And the human inhabitants of the region are put under the microscope and analysed. Comedy and tragedy is played out in equal measure, and recorded.’

An analysis of Derleth’s writing and books can be found on the Arkham House website. It says this of Countryman’s Journal: ‘Much of the entertainment results from his comic pictures of townspeople’s eccentricities, such as their colorful speech, and their dry wit. Conversely, the transience of human existence, evident in the many deaths, contrasts with nature’s survival, which he emphasizes by describing nature’s recurring seasonal changes. Derleth also reveals something about himself. He is both gregarious, which made it possible for him to learn much about others, and mildly abrasive, as shown by his running battle with one of the local priests.’

Here are two (undated) extracts from Derleth’s journal provided by the Walden East website:

‘Miss Ilsa Lahman passed: she who has always had delusions of grandeur. . . walking in her characteristic fashion, as if on eggshells, with the appearance of a slight limp: a hitch, actually. When asked what was wrong with Miss Lahman, Jo Merk replied, ‘She got that walking up and down the stairs in her medieval air castles.’ ’

‘Turning over his words in this place where, conceivably, they had taken shape for him, I was made to think of Sac Prairie, where, I suppose, I engage life in somewhat similar circumstances, allowing for a century’s advance in time. . . There are still solitary places in the woods and the marshes around Sac Prairie where, as Thoreau found it at Walden, only a railroad can be seen to remind one of civilization. . .’

Finally, John Howard also provides, on his Walden East website, an interesting article in which he traces how one small incident that happened on a train was not only recorded by Derleth in his journal, but used in his poetry and fiction as well.

World Chief Guide

Olave Baden-Powell, a key figure in the history of the Girl Guides, was born 120 years ago today. Coincidentally, it is also the birthday of her husband, Robert Baden-Powell, who launched the whole scouting movement a century or so ago. Girl Scouts and Guides celebrate this day each year as World Thinking Day. Olave must have kept some kind of diary since there are a few extracts online. More revealing, though, is a diary entry about (not by) her doing ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’.

Olave St Clair Soames was born on 22 February 1889 - exactly 120 years ago today - and was the youngest daughter of Harold Soames, a brewery owner. In 1912, aged only 23, she married Robert Baden-Powell, then 55, having met him on a liner sailing to New York. During the early years of the First World War, Olave spent a few months in France, but mostly helped her husband with secretarial services and by driving him to meetings. From about 1916, though, she became involved in working for the Girl Guides, becoming Chief Commissioner, then Chief Guide, and then, in 1930, World Chief Guide.

In 1918, Olave and her husband moved to Pax Hill, near Farnham, Hampshire, where they lived for 20 years and brought up three children. In 1939, they went to live in Kenya, where Robert died in 1941. The following year, she returned to live in Hampton Court Palace (since Pax Hill had been taken over by the Canadian military) and stayed there after the war. Thereafter, she continued touring to promote the Scout and Guide organisations. From 1942 until her death in 1977, she is said to have travelled the world five times taken 653 flights.

Today - 22 February - is also World Thinking Day for Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. It was chosen as such over 80 years ago, in 1926, precisely because of the joint birthday of Olave and Robert. This year’s theme is ‘stop the spread of AIDS, malaria and other diseases’; last year it was ‘Think about water’; and the year before it was ‘Discover your potential by taking the lead, growing friendships, and speaking out’.

A guide to archives on the history of Scouting can be found on PAXTU, the International Web Site for the History of Guiding and Scouting, and this lists many diaries left by Robert Baden-Powell. The same site has similar documents for the history of Guiding, but there is no mention of Olave’s diaries. However, there must be some, for the Olave Baden-Powell tribute website quotes a few short extracts. Here are three (exactly as they appear on the website).

1945
‘St. George's Day., Attended Scout and Guide celebrations of freedom in Paris. Toured through Normandy with General Lafont, Chief Scout of France. Continued through Alsace and Lorraine, and on VE Day crossed into Switzerland, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, England, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland.’

1946
‘West Indies, British Guiana, Cuba, Mexico, the Unites Staets, Canada and Newfoundland. Travelled 3,720 miles by sea, 6,355 miles by train, 16,610 miles by air, and 3,565 miles by road. Made 231 speeches to audiences varying in number (from 30 to 20,000, gave 62 press interviews or radio talks. Attended World Conference at Evian, France. Visited Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and Holland.’

1949
‘Visited Holland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Belgium, France and Denmark and many parts of the British Isles; in a five months' tour of Africa travelled over 23,000 miles by air and visited 20 territories.’

And here is another brief entry, apparently from Olave’s diary (found on the Historical Boys’ Clothing website), just after the death of her husband in 1941: ‘He looked so sweet and perfect in death as he was in life - utterly utterly noble and good and dear and wonderful, great and faultless.’

Here, though, is a diary entry that gives a much better picture of Olave. It’s taken from the diary of the late Lorna Collins (quoted in Guiding in Australia - May 1989) and can be found on this Olave Baden-Powell tribute website.

June 1967
‘A rally had been organised for Saturday 25 June at the Perry Lakes Stadium. Girls had come from widespread country areas and there was the concern that as they assembled at the stadium, they would be very wet and very cold. So it was decided to have a warm-up activity in which everyone could join. The Chief - always greeting people: ‘How are you? How are you?’ - could see that the people were being asked to stand and they weren’t, so she got up, and of course, then every one got up and did ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’. When it was through the Chief called ‘again’ and everyone did it again. And so everyone was warm and happy and they sat down and the rally proceeded. Now the next day the Chief was to leave by plane for London. All the goodbyes had been said, all the hands shaken and all the VIPs kissed and she went up the gangway, stood at the top and waved, and of course everyone waved to her. One would think that that would be the end, but there at the doorway to the plane the Chief started ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’ and those back on the ground joined in.’