Inside the ice hole

Tomaž Humar, an extraordinary mountaineer from Slovenia, died earlier this month while climbing Langtang Lirung in the Himalayas. Although he left behind no published diaries, PlanetMountain.com has a few of his diary extracts. Here is a typical one: ‘I spend the entire day inside the ice hole to acclimatize more - I do not want to take any risk of edema. The wind is really strong reaching speeds greater than 100 km/h.’

Humar was born in Ljubljana, then part of Yugoslavia, in 1969, and started to climb seriously as a teenager, under the country’s then strict training regime. He was conscripted into the army, and sent to soldier in Kosovo, an experience he hated. He married Sergeja Jersin in 1991, and they had two children before separating. In the mid-1990s, he began a series of climbs in the Himalayas that would earn him a huge following in Slovenia as well as respect from the international climbing community. In 1999, for example, he made a now-famous solo ascent of the south wall of Dhaulagiri, considered one of the deadliest routes in the Himalayas.

However, Humar’s methods were considered hotheaded and even dangerous by some. During a solo attempt to climb Nanga Parbat in 2005, he misjudged the conditions and became trapped by avalanches and melting snow at an altitude of nearly 6,000 meters. After six days in a snow cave - much of it followed on the internet thanks to his webcam equipment - he was rescued by an heroic Pakistani army helicopter crew.

All in all, Humar completed over 1,500 ascents, Wikipedia says, and won a number of mountaineering and other awards, including the Piolet d’Or in 1996 for a climb on Ama Dablam in eastern Nepal. The Guardian, The Independant, and UK Climbing all have obituaries.

But thanks to PlanetMountain.com for nine days of Humar’s diary while climbing the South Face of Annapurna in October 2007. Here are the first five of those days.

24 October 2007
‘I start out with my friend Jagat Limbu. We cross the glacier and weave our way through mixed rock and ice pillars under the main wall at 5800m. We stage our first bivy on a small ice platform at 5800 meters.’

25 October 2007
‘We remain in our bivy at 5800 meters all day due to strong winds and stomach problems. Moreover, I did not feel acclimatized. I had only climbed Tharpu Chuli (5690 m) as a warm-up peak and did not sleep higher than 5300 meters. These are insufficient altitudes to adequately acclimate for an 8000 meter peak.’

26 October 2007
‘I start climbing at 6am - no helmet, no rope, no harness - just bivy gear, some food and gas. I leave everything else with Jagat who would face the descent alone in case I did not come back. At 3pm, I start digging a hole in the ice at 7200 meters. This is my second bivy.’

27 October 2007
‘I spend the entire day inside the ice hole to acclimatize more - I do not want to take any risk of edema. The wind is really strong reaching speeds greater than 100 km/h.’

28 October 2007
The alarm goes off at 6am. I have not slept. I have just been waiting and waiting for a good moment to leave. The sky is clear. The wind is strong . . . and cold . . . I climb very light carrying just 2 liters of juice which freeze within the first hour. After two hours, I make it to the East Ridge at 7500 meters where Loretan and Joss passed in 1984. Despite very strong winds, I continue towards the East Summit. By 10am, I have crossed most of the East ridge and the summit feels close at hand. With each passing hour, the wind grows stronger. As I climb higher, ice and snow falls increase in intensity and frequency and the risk of avalanche becomes more extreme. I am standing on the East Summit at 8047 meters before 3pm. I trust God, I pray, I feel safe! Even if the weather is good I would never dare to continue to the main summit at 8091 m as God gave me the possibility to reach it already once in 1995. It was my first 8000 m, this is the only answer I have to why I chose Annapurna, it’s 20 years since alpinism became ‘my way of life’. I immediately begin my descent. The shadow of the snow cornice is growing long. I call Jagat to tell him that I am on my way back. He is really happy to hear from me. The last contact we had was at 10:00am and since then he has been praying for me. As night closes in, I reach the beginning of the East Ridge. I am very tired and it has been a long time since I have been able to eat or drink. It is completely dark and I cannot see any of my tracks. I am lost, but in my soul I know that God is with me. My headlamp is not working due to low temperatures and I have to wait in the cold and dark for the moon to rise before continuing. I reach my bivy at 7200 meters at 8:25pm. I am totally exhausted. I send this sms: ‘Blessed, in bivac. New route up to 7500m +, then my the longest journey to myself. Annapurna east 8000m + and back after 14 hours in earth time. Everything was o.k., but if is this wind 60 km/h then i drive my car slowly.’ I enter meditation and I prepare a cup of tea as I wait for dawn to come.’

Diary briefs

The diaries of Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s mistress, to be published - Corriere Della Sera; The Daily Mail, AFP

The Koda diaries: an Indian scandal in the making - DNA

There is no bread

The handwritten diaries of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones have just been put on display at the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge. It is thought these diaries might represent the only independent Western verification of Stalin’s Ukrainian famine-genocide, known as the Holodomor, in the early 1930s. And Jones himself is now considered a hero in Ukraine for having brought the tragedy to the attention of those in the West. A large amount of material about Jones, including the diaries, is freely available online thanks to a lively website run by Gareth’s niece, Dr Margaret Siriol Colley, and his great nephew, Nigel Linsan Colley.
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Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones was born in Barry, Wales, in 1905. His mother had been tutor to some of the grandchildren of John Hughes, a Welsh industrialist who had founded the town of Yuzovka, modern day Donetsk, in Ukraine, and it was this connection that inspired Jones’ interest in the country. He studied French at Aberystwyth University and then added German and Russian while at Trinity College. In 1930, he began work as a foreign affairs advisor to former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

In 1931, a group of American companies invited Jones to research a book on the Soviet Union, and that summer he toured there with H J Heinz II (of food company fame). Heinz then published a diary of the trip - Experiences in Russia 1931. Wikipedia’s biography of Jones suggests (but without reference) that this diary ‘probably contains the first usage of the word ‘starve’ in relation to the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture’. The diary is narrated by Heinz, but has a preface by Jones. Here is one day’s entry, taken from the Gareth Jones website.

‘Twenty-fifth Day
We were supposed to sail down the Volga yesterday and found today that we could not have done so - yesterday’s boat had not sailed yet. We got on our steamer - a side-wheeler. It was supposed to sail at 11:00am. It did - across the river, and it was nine hours later when we finally left Nijni. It was cold and rainy and there was no place to sit except on our bunks.

Jones struck up a conversation with a mechanic on the boat. ‘I am a Party man,’ the stranger said. ‘There are only four of us on board and only six candidates, and we have a crew of forty-six. On some boats, there is only one Communist. Why? Because the boatmen are mostly of peasant origin and believe in things like private property. The peasants do not like the collective farms because they do not understand. A lot think they are something foreign and not truly Russian. They are superstitious, too.’

It was difficult to get food all day, but finally by the use of some more cigarettes we got the lone waiter interested. The food was not good, although it was very expensive.

The boat was crowded in the third and fourth-class sections. Peasants with huge bundles, dirty clothes, and many babies lay around on every square inch of floor space. There must have been a thousand of them. Smell!

A doctor’s wife on the boat said to Jones: ‘Exiles? The peasants have been sent away in thousands to starve. They were exiled just because they worked hard all their lives. It’s terrible how they have treated them; they have not given them anything; no bread cards even. They sent a lot to Tashkent, where I was, and just left them on the square. The exiles did not know what to do and many starved to death.’

Although there were a fine comfortable lounge and a dining room forward, we could not get the steward to unlock them. He kept insisting that it was against orders to have them open before the boat left port. We finally wore him down with arguing and cigarettes.

So to bed, with rather grim prospects for this trip!’
In 1932, Jones returned to work for Lloyd George even helping him write some memoirs. In early 1933, he went to Germany to cover the Nazis accession to power and was in Leipzig when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor, and flew with him to Frankfurt for a speech there. In March, he travelled to Russia and Ukraine, and on his return to Berlin issued a press release which was published by some newspapers and has since became famous. It started: ‘I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread. We are dying.’ ’

Jones’ claim was denied by many in the West and by the Russian authorities who, in 1934, banned him from returning to the country. He continued to travel, though, this time in the East, but was captured by bandits in Japanese-occupied Inner Mongolia, and was murdered, some believe by Soviet agents, in August 1935 just a few days before his 30th birthday. It was only with the fall of Communism, more than half a century later, that many Ukrainians became aware of the truth of the famine, that an estimated four million people had died because of Stalin’s decision to impose farm collectivisation and then to seal the Ukrainian border to punish peasants for supposedly ‘hoarding grain’.

More than 70 years after Jones’ death, in 2006, a plaque was unveiled in his memory in the Old College at Aberystwyth University. The Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK, Ihor Kharchenko, was present and described Jones as an ‘unsung hero of Ukraine’. And two years later, Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge (who had also reported on the Ukraine famine) were posthumously awarded the Ukrainian Order of Freedom.

And today - 13 November 2009 - the Wren Library, of Trinity College, Cambridge, is opening an exhibition which includes Jones’ diaries alongside some other rare items connected to past students at Trinity College (such as Isaac Newton, AA Milne, and Ludwig Wittgenstein). The story has been widely reported in the British press today - see The Guardian.

However, it is the Gareth Jones website (put together by his relations, Dr Margaret Colley and Nigel Colley) which has the most information on the diaries (and much else about Jones’ life). It says that perhaps they represent ‘the only independent verification of arguably Stalin’s greatest atrocity’. The website provides a book-length power point presentation entitled The Gareth Jones Diaries with legible images of some of his diaries and transcriptions of those images. Here is an (undated) extract from the diaries, as transcribed by Dr Margaret Colley (with some words added by Colley, and some Russian words left out by me).

‘In the Ukraine. A little later. I crossed the border from Great Russia into the Ukraine. Everywhere I talked to peasants who walked past - they all had the same story; ‘There is no bread - we haven’t had bread for over 2 months – a lot are dying.’ The first village had no more potatoes left and the store of [beetroot] was running out. They all said ‘the cattle is dying. [Nothing to feed.] We used to feed the world now we are hungry. How can we sow when we have few horses left? How will we be able to work in the fields when we are weak from want of food? Then I caught up [with] a bearded peasant who was walking along. His feet were covered with sacking. We started talking. He spoke in Ukrainian Russian. I gave him [a] lump of bread and of cheese.

‘You could not buy that anywhere for 20 roubles. There just is no food.’ We walked along and talked; ‘Before the war this was all gold. We had horses and cows and pigs and chickens. Now we are ruined. [We are] [the living dead]. You see that field. It was all gold, but now look at the weeds. The weeds were peeping up over the snow.’

‘Before the war we could have boots and meat and butter. We were the richest country in the world for grain. We fed the world. Now they have taken all away from us. Now people steal much more. Four days ago, they stole my horse. Hooligans came. There that’s where I saw the track of the horse.’

‘A horse is better than a tractor. A tractor goes and stops, but a horse goes all the time. A tractor cannot give manure, but a horse can. How can the spring sowing be good? There is little seed and the people are too weak. We are all weak and hungry.’

‘The winter sowing was bad, and the winter ploughing [was] also bad.’ He took me along to his cottage. His daughter and three little children. Two of the smaller children were swollen. ‘If you had come before the Revolution we would have given you chicken and eggs and milk and fine bread. Now we have no bread in the house. They are killing us.’

‘People are dying of hunger.’ There was in the hut, a spindle and the daughter showed me how to make thread. The peasant showed me his shirt, which was home-made and some fine sacking which had been home-made. ‘But the Bolsheviks are crushing that. They won’t take it. They want the factory to make everything.’ The peasant then ate some very thin soup with a scrap of potato. No bread in house. The white bread [of Gareth’s] they thought was wonderful.’

More diary briefs

Good extracts from three WWII diaries:
Robert Uhrig, aircraft engineer (Dayton Daily News);
Tom Holcomb’s life on a destroyer (The Charleston Gazette);
Anton Novak, a Canadian prisoner of war (National Post).

And a Cornish soldier’s experience of the WWI trenches - BBC

Diary briefs

The first poppy? - found in Len Smith’s newly-published war diary - The Independent

Bruce Springsteen ‘to publish diaries’ - Digitalspy

Diaries of kids who gave up technology for 30 days - The Daily Mirror

Lieutenant Mark Evison’s journal about the harsh realities of fighting in Afghanistan - The Daily Telegraph

The fall of the Wall

The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago today - on 9 November 1989 - at least metaphorically, if not physically. A day later, Gorbachev’s Foreign Policy Assistant Anatoly Chernyaev wrote in his diary: ‘This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over’. Two days later, Andreas Ramos would drive to Berlin from Aarhus, Denmark, and write about the playing of alpine horns and ‘flags and flags and flags’. But it would be ten more days before I myself mentioned the historic event in my own diary, and then I wrote about ‘the rush of events in Berlin’ being ‘fabulous’.

The Berlin Wall - thanks to Wikipedia for this and the next two paragraphs - was a concrete barrier erected by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that completely encircled the city of West Berlin, separating it from East Germany, including East Berlin. The Wall included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area that contained anti-vehicle trenches and other defenses. The separate and much longer inner German Border demarcated the border between East and West Germany. Both borders came to symbolise the Iron Curtain between Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc.

Prior to the Wall’s erection, three and a half million East Germans had avoided Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions and escaped into West Germany, many over the border between East and West Berlin. During its existence from 1961 to 1989, the Wall stopped almost all such emigration and separated the GDR from West Berlin for more than a quarter of a century. After its erection, around 5,000 people attempted to escape over the wall, with estimates of the resulting death toll varying between around 100 and 200.

During a revolutionary wave sweeping across the Eastern Bloc, which included several weeks of civil unrest, the East German government announced on 9 November 1989 - 20 years ago today - that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Crowds of East Germans climbed onto and crossed the wall, joined by West Germans on the other side in a celebratory atmosphere. Over the next few weeks, parts of the wall were chipped away by a jubilant public and by souvenir hunters; industrial equipment was later used to remove almost all of the rest. The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for German reunification, which was formally concluded on 3 October 1990.

To mark the anniversary - for 9 November 1989 is considered the day the wall fell even though technically it remained guarded for some time - here are three very different texts.

The first is a diary entry made by Anatoly Chernyaev, Mikhail Gorbachev’s Foreign Policy Assistant, on 10 November. This is available at the WBUR website. This extraordinary diary entry, the website says, from inside the Kremlin, the day after the Wall fell, documents in the form of a ‘snapshot’ reaction the revolutionary mood of one of the closest and most loyal of Gorbachev’s assistants. Chernyaev realized that this event meant ‘the end of Yalta’ and of ‘the Stalinist legacy’ in Europe, and in a striking statement, he welcomed this change, saying the key was Gorbachev’s decision not to stand in the way.

10 November 1989
‘The Berlin Wall has collapsed. This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over. . . Today we received messages about the ‘retirement’ of Deng Xiaopeng and [Bulgarian leader Todor] Zhivkov. Only our ‘best friends’ Castro, Ceaucescu, [and] Kim Il Sung are still around - people who hate our guts. But the main thing is the GDR, the Berlin Wall. For it has to do not only with ‘socialism’, but with the shift in the world balance of forces. This is the end of Yalta . . . the Stalinist legacy and ‘the defeat of Hitlerite Germany’. That is what Gorbachev has done. And he has indeed turned out to be a great leader. He has sensed the pace of history and helped history to find a natural channel.’

I would have liked to reproduce here a bonafide diary account about being in Berlin for the fall of the Wall, but I cannot find one on the internet - although there are lots of accounts by people writing retrospectively about the day(s). Here, though, is one paragraph from an account by Andreas Ramos which reads much like a diary, written at the time or very soon after. On hearing the news about the Wall, he and some friends drove from Aarhus in Denmark to Berlin, and this is what Ramos wrote.

11-12 December 1989
‘Everything was out of control. Police on horses watched. There was nothing they could do. The crowd had swollen. People were blowing long alpine horns which made a huge noise. There were fireworks, kites, flags and flags and flags, dogs, children. The wall was finally breaking. The cranes lifted slabs aside. East and West German police had traded caps. To get a better view, hundreds of people were climbing onto a shop on the West German side. We scampered up a nine foot wall. People helped each other; some lifted, others pulled. All along the building, people poured up the wall. At the Berlin Wall itself, which is 3 meters high, people had climbed up and were sitting astride. The final slab was moved away. A stream of East Germans began to pour through. People applauded and slapped their backs.’

And, finally, here is what I wrote - a long way from the action in London - about 10 days after the event, not that there’s anything special about this diary entry, other than it’s mine and it’s about the fall of the Wall.

19 November 1989
‘There appears to be no stopping the unfolding of extraordinary events on the other side of the iron curtain. Poland and Hungary are already being embraced by the West, having overhauled their political systems in the space of a very short period; they are being garlanded with loans and aid and pretty speeches from capitalist world leaders. Now East Germany has joined the throng. Almost overnight the leader fell, the government fell, and the Berlin Wall was, metaphorically speaking, knocked down.

The rush of events in Berlin were so fabulous, that almost every serious mainline radio and TV news programme decamped to that divided city. Freeing the border and allowing unfettered movement from East to West and back again, allowed literally millions of people to explore what they had only ever seen on television, allowed them to visit relatives and friends. Every interview on the subject included questions about the re-unification of Germany, even though the possibility must be many years down the road.

More than Poland and more than Hungary, East Germany’s status is that most likely to affect the emotions of those in the West. The terrible war left not only a divided nation but a divided city as a loud vivid actual symbol of the resulting Cold War. The possibility of greater integration between East and West again exists most seriously through the border of the Germanys: they speak the same language; until just a few decades ago shared the same culture; they are the same people.’

Postscript
The BBC has posted a video of Douglas Hurd, the UK Foreign Secretary in November 1989, reading from his diary.

Trotsky’s indispensability

‘England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.’ Ah, who else but Trotsky could have written that. It’s his birthday today, or would be if he were alive and could have lived to 130. He’s famous for his Marxist theorising, revolutionary ways, and literary ability, but not for being a diarist. Nevertheless, he did very occasionally put pen to journal, especially if cooped up somewhere. Only one diary, though, has ever been published in English, and that’s been out of print for over 30 years.

Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on 7 November 1879 into a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of Russia. As a teenager, he became involved with Marxism and underground activities which led to him being arrested in 1898. He spent two years in prison, where he married fellow Marxist Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, before being tried and sent to jail in Siberia (where his two children were born). He escaped in 1902, and went to London, joining other Russian emigres, including Lenin, and became a key writer for Iskra, the official organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The following year, he married Natalia Sedova.

In 1903, the Social Democrats split. While Lenin assumed leadership of the Bolshevik (minority) faction, Trotsky became a member of the Menshevik (majority) faction and developed his theory of ‘permanent revolution’. He returned to Russia during the 1905 revolution, but was arrested and sent to Siberia again. While imprisoned he wrote one of his major theoretical works - Results and Prospects. Again he escaped, and thereafter pursued his revolutionary activities while travelling in Europe and the US.

After the outbreak of revolution in Petrograd in February 1917, he made his way back to Russia. Despite the previous disagreements with Lenin, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and played a decisive role in the communist revolution. His first post in the new government was as foreign commissar, where he found himself negotiating peace terms with Germany. He was then made war commissar and in this capacity, built up the Red Army which prevailed against the White Russian forces in the civil war. When Lenin fell ill and died, Trotsky was outmanoeuvred by Stalin who, in 1927, threw him out of the party. By 1936, he had settled in Mexico but an assassin called Ramon Mercader, acting on Stalin’s orders, murdered him with an ice pick. Further information is readily available at Wikipedia, The British Library, and Spartacus Educational.

Trotsky never had much time for diary writing, except when he was cooped up somewhere, and this was the case in 1935, when the French government had decided to expel him, but no other country was willing to grant an entry visa. He was kept under police surveillance, without a secretary or regular mail, and not even allowed to visit Paris. Eventually he moved to Norway, where he had more freedom and less time for the diary. But, for that period in 1935, he noted down, more or less daily, various observations about politics, his companion Natalia, the fate of his family in the USSR, and so on. The notebook was found more than a decade after his death among the archives at Harvard University. It was translated by Elena Zarudnaya and published, in 1958, by the university press as Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, 1935.

The dust jacket flap says: ‘This diary of the exiled Trotsky is a powerfully evocative fragment of history and human personality. Of all the great figures of the Russian revolution Leon Trotsky touches our senses as the one who lived, and felt and died as other men. Understandably, we feel curiosity about and some sympathy for the man who was driven out as he had driven others, who wandered the world in danger forseeing assassination, and who was struck down by his enemies in his last sanctuary so close to us. This extremely personal record was written in France and Norway, it gives the day-to-day reflections of a fallen leader, of one who had wielded power and was now in an exceptional position to observe it in the hands of others. Finally, and until now unknown, there is his Testament, written in Mexico in February 1940 near the close of his life. Knowing that death was near, from illness if not from Stalin’s agents, he envisaged the form it might take, restated his defiance of Stalin and his imperishable confidence in the triumph of the People, and once more affirmed his love for Natasha, his second wife. At the end there is the discontinued and unexplained sentence, ‘In case we both die . . .’ ’

Here are a couple of snippets from the diary (found on quotation websites):

5 April 1935
‘Life is not an easy matter. . . You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.’

‘The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves. ‘

11 April 1935
‘England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.’

8 May 1935
‘Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.’

More substantial quotes can be found in two reviews of the book, first published by Fourth International in winter 1959, one by Michael Foot and the other by Pierre Frank.

Michael Foot is much impressed with the diary. He says: ‘Trotsky himself, of course, is the foremost example of his own aphorism. He is, probably in all history, the greatest man of action who was also a very great literary genius. Everything he wrote bears the individual stamp of the man; it has a pulse and urgency which is absent from the writings of those political writers, even the most perceptive, who were only spectators. This applies to the latest Trotsky ‘discovery’, the fragments of a diary he wrote during his exile in France and Norway in 1935, even though he obviously found the diary form awkward and distasteful.’

Foot quotes Trotsky writing about a trip to Lourdes: ‘What crudeness, insolence, nastiness! A shop for miracles, a business office for trafficking in Grace. The Grotto itself makes a miserable impression. That, of course, is a psychological calculation of the clerics; not to frighten the little people away by the grandeur of their commercial enterprise; little people are afraid of shop windows that are too resplendent. At the same time they are the most faithful and profitable customers. But best of all is the papal blessing broadcast to Lourdes by - radio. The paltry miracles of the Gospels side by side with the radio-telephone! And what could be more absurd and disgusting than the union of proud technology with the sorcery of the Roman chief druid. Indeed the thinking of mankind is bogged down in its own excrement.’

And Foot finds Trotsky’s portrait of his wife Natalia (Natasha) very touching: ‘Here, in the diary, he has painted an incomparable picture of his wife, Natasha. The hunt of Trotsky’s children and his friends by Stalin is surely one of the most appalling stories of sustained barbaric revenge of which history has any record. The full brunt of the horror fell on the heart of the dignified and dauntless Natasha. Quotation would mar this immortal tribute of a man to his wife. Read it for yourself.’

Finally, Pierre Frank, in his review, which is longer and much wordier, gives a more substantial quotation, which he introduces thus: ‘Many other passages give food for thought, whether it be his regret at not having had more time to devote to philosophy, or that dream in which he was talking with Lenin. But of this diary, which was not written for publication and which was forgotten by Trotsky among his papers, it is not possible to fail to reproduce this passage, where a Marxist treats of the role of personality in history, this personality being himself, with impressive objectivity.’

Here, then, is Trotsky analysing his own indispensability sometime in 1935:

‘Rakovsky was virtually my last contact with the old revolutionary generation. After his capitulation there is nobody left. Even though my correspondence with Rakovsky stopped, for reasons of censorship, at the time of my deportation, nevertheless the image of Rakovsky has remained a symbolic link with my old comrades-in-arms. Now nobody remains. For a long time now I have not been able to satisfy my need to exchange ideas and discuss problems with someone else. I am reduced to carrying on a dialogue with the newspapers, or rather through the newspapers with facts and opinions.

And still I think that the work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life - more important than 1917, more important than the period of the Civil War or any other.

For the sake of clarity I would put it this way. Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place - on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring - of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to overcome the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders. The struggle with ‘Trotskyism’ (i.e. with the proletarian revolution) would have commenced in May 1917, and the outcome would have been in question. But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin the October Revolution would have been victorious anyway. The same could by and large be said of the Civil War, although in its first period, especially at the time of the fall of Simbirsk and Kazan, Lenin wavered and was beset by doubts. But this was undoubtedly a passing mood which he probably never even admitted to anyone but me.

Thus I cannot speak of the ‘indispensability’ of my work, even about the period from 1917 to 1921. But now my work is ‘indispensable’ in the full sense of the word. There is no arrogance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these Internationals is at all equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in dealing with it. Then is no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third International. And I am in complete agreement with Lenin (or rather Turgenev) that the worst vice is to be more than 55 years old! I need at least about five more years of uninterrupted work to ensure the succession.’

Devoted to great art

‘So much in my past that I hate to evoke. Short of violence, I have been capable of every sin, every misdemeanour, every crime. With horror I think what I should have become if I lived the life of an ill-paid professor, or struggling writer, how rebellious, if I had not lived a life devoted to great art . . .’ So wrote Bernard Berenson in his very last diary entry. He was one of the 20th century’s most important historians, and he died 50 years ago today.

Berenson was born Bernhard Valvrojenski in 1865 into a Jewish family in Lithuania. Ten years later the family emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts - and became the Berensons. Bernard attended Boston University College of Liberal Arts and then Harvard University. He moved to Oxford, UK, where he met many influential people in the art world, and where he first got involved with Mary, then married to a barrister called Frank Costelloe (with whom she had two children). In time, she divorced and married Berenson, and became an art historian in her own right (see the Dictionary of Art Historians for more biographical information). Also, she had some of her diary writing published in A Self-Portrait from her Letters & Diaries, edited by Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels, published by W W Norton in 1983.

In Oxford, Berenson not only developed his reputation as an art historian but began associations with various art dealers. His first book, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, became one in a series of four studies on Italian schools mostly published in the 1890s. So famous were these books, that English historians sometimes referred to them as the four gospels. In 1900, Berenson bought a house - Villa I Tatti - in the Tuscan hills of Settignano, outside Florence, which he and Mary transformed into a centre for renaissance studies. During the First World War, he worked as a translator and negotiator in Italy, thanks to a reccommenation by his friend, the author and art writer Edith Wharton.

Between the wars, some of Berenson’s earlier writings were collected and published as The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, a book which was considered a definitive authority on the subject for much of the 20th century. For 30 years or so, he enjoyed a close relationship with Joseph Duveen, the period’s most influential art dealer. Through a secretive deal, Berenson was paid 25% of whatever price Duveen achieved for the paintings, often from the wealthiest of collectors in the US who had been attracted by Berenson’s accreditations.

During the Second World War, Berenson found himself a virtual prisoner in I Tatti, despised as an American by the Mussolini government, but also fearful that his Jewish heritage would make him a target. Mary died in 1945, by which time Berenson had become intimately involved with Nicky Mariano, his long-term assistant. Berenson himself died, aged 94, half a century ago today on 6 October 2009.

The Dictionary of Art Historians gives the best online biography of Berenson. Here is one paragraph from that biography: ‘As an historian dedicated to the object (as opposed to documentary art history, iconography, social art history, etc.), he centered the emerging discipline. Berenson’s approach focused on determining the authenticity of art works rather than constructing histories in which art was created. His thrust proved particularly useful to art dealers and collectors, with whom Berenson has been criticized for having too close a relationship. Berenson’s major books are essentially lists of authenticated paintings by Berenson with introductory essays. He never altered the text in the numerous editions of his books, confident his analysis was comprehensive, despite embarrassments such as his low assessment of Sassetta. Instead, subsequent editions featured his corrections and supplements to his lists of attributions. Haughty and extremely class-conscious, perhaps because of his modest upbringings and American heritage in a European-dominated field, Berenson cultivated feuds; his personal correspondence shows that he viewed contemporary art historians as either ‘friend’ or ‘enemies’.

There are three collections of Berenson’s diary material. The first to be published, by Simon and Schuster in 1952, was Rumor and Reflection: The Wartime Diary of the Most Celebrated Humanist and Art Historian of Our Times. Next came The Passionate Sightseer: From the Diaries 1947-1956, also published by Simon and Schuster, in 1960; and then Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries 1947-1958, published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1963. There’s very little information about any of these books available on the internet - I can’t, for example, find a single review.

However, there are several quotes in Ernest Samuels’ two volume biography: Bernard Berenson, The Making of a Connoisseur (1979) and Bernard Berenson, The Making of a Legend (1987) both published by Harvard University Press. Parts of both books are available to view on Googlebooks. The promotional material for the second says this: ‘Controversy swirls around Bernard Berenson today as it did in his middle years, before and between two world wars. Who was this man, this supreme connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting? How did he support his elegant estate near Florence, his Villa I Tatti? What exactly were his relations with the art dealer Joseph Duveen? What part did his wife, Mary, play in his scholarly work and professional career? The answers are to be found in the day-to-day record of his life as he lived it - as reported at first hand in his and Mary’s letters and diaries and reflected in the countless personal and business letters they received. His is one of the most fully documented lives of this century. Ernest Samuels, having spent twenty years studying the thousands of letters and other manuscripts, presents his story in absorbing detail.’

Here is Samuels writing in The Making of a Legend about Berenson’s attraction to women in old age, with various quotations from the diaries:

‘The diary of his old age showed no slackening of his devotion to women. . . Time and again Berenson returned to the tantalizing subject. It was the charm of women that they remained ‘adolescent-minded through all ages.’ At 83, he remarked, ‘Give me an aspiring and admiring woman to crank me up for talk.’ What sentient male - of any age - would not feel the force of his admission at 85, ‘My mind when vacuous dwells a good deal on women and always with a faint erotic tinge’? He still dreamt of ‘fair women’ as the ‘wolf dreams of the lamb.’ It was only ‘in the very last few years,’ he wrote at 88, that he had ‘gradually become more and more aware of how sex dominates us . . . no matter how tucked away . . . Do we ever meet a [woman] for the first time without asking ourselves whether we would want to go to bed with her?’ . . . As a nonagenarian, Berenson recorded, ‘I still would like to caress all the young women who attract me.’

And here are a couple more quotes from Berenson’s diaries, as reproduced in The Making of a Legend, including Berenson final entry.

1919
‘[Spain was] the only place in the world to study French art. Your thirteenth century stonecutters had all the grace of Watteau; all your churches are restored, but down there they’re pure.’

1945
‘I am a convert not to Zionism but to the necessity of finding a place for the Jew, not only safe from the heritage of Hitler but from his own gnawing frustration and inferiority complex.

February 1958
‘I end as a myth whose saga I can hardly recognise.’

April 1958
‘So much in my past that I hate to evoke. Short of violence, I have been capable of every sin, every misdemeanour, every crime. With horror I think what I should have become if I lived the life of an ill-paid professor, or struggling writer, how rebellious, if I had not lived a life devoted to great art and the aristocratically pyramidal structure of society that it serves, or worse still if I had remained in the all but proletarian condition I lived as a Jewish immigrant lad in Boston. So I remain skeptical about my personality. It really seems to have reached its present integration in the last twenty years, with the wide and far vision I now enjoy, with tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, expecting little and trying to be grateful for that, the serenity for which I am now admired But I keep hearing the Furies, and never forget them.’

Britten’s firecracker crits

A new collection of Benjamin Britten’s diaries are being published today by Faber and Faber. They portray, according to the publisher, an ‘intimate self-portrait of a young boy’s journey to adulthood, and the growth of his creative genius’. More colourfully, The Guardian writes of the diaries that they reveal a young man ‘exposed to a glamorous world of metropolitan homosexuality’. But the real firecrackers in the diaries - if there are any, for today is the 5th of November - seem to come from Britten’s youthful opinions of other composers.

Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk. When only 11 he began studying with the composer Frank Bridge, and then, aged 16, entered the Royal College of Music, London. During the 1930s, he worked for the GPO Film Unit. One of his compositions for the GPO - the famous Night Mail - brought him into contact with W H Auden who wrote the words. In 1937, Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge brought him international acclaim. The same year, he met the singer, Peter Pears, with whom, subsequently, he lived for the rest of his life.

With the onset of war, Britten followed Auden to the US where they composed the operetta Paul Bunyan. In 1942, he returned to the UK, and, together with Pears, toured the country giving recitals. In 1945, Britten completed Peter Grimes, a major opera set in the fishing village of Aldeburgh, Suffolk. It was a huge success, and other operas - such as The Rape of Lucretia and Billy Budd - followed.

Before the war, Britten had bought a house at Snape, near Aldeburgh, and, in 1948, Britten, Piers and Eric Crozier launched the first Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. Twenty years later, the Snape Maltings was converted to a concert hall to host the annual festival. In 1955, Britten went on a world tour, and in 1961 he conducted the first performance of his War Requiem, commissioned for the opening of Coventry Cathedral which had been damaged in the war. Britten was much feted during his life, and received many honours, including being appointed a member of the Order of Merit in 1965. See MusicWeb International, the Britten-Pears Foundation, or Wikipedia for more information.

Extracts from Britten’s diaries (and letters) were edited by Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed and first published in the early 1990s by Faber and Faber in two volumes: Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten (one volume covering the years 1923-1939 and the other 1939-1945). And both were republished together as paperbacks in 1998 - see Faber’s website (here and here) for more details. A third companion volume, covering the years 1946-1951 and containing only letters, was published in 2004.

Today, Faber is publishing a new collection of Britten’s diaries: Journeying Boy - The Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten, 1928-1938, selected and edited by John Evans. Britten kept a daily journal for a decade, the publisher says, and ‘this intimate self-portrait of a young boy’s journey to adulthood, and the growth of his creative genius, offers us a fuller understanding of the man and the artist Britten was to become, and of the age in which he lived’.

From his arrival as a boarder at Gresham’s School and his private lessons in London with Frank Bridge, the publisher adds, to his student days at the Royal College of Music and subsequent apprenticeship in London with the GPO Film Unit, the Group Theatre and at the BBC, the book traces the progress of ‘this journeying boy through the turbulent 1930s’. Collaborations with Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice and Grierson helped define Britten as an artist, while international acclaim at home and abroad soon followed. But these were difficult times, Faber adds, not least for Britten, ‘who lost both parents within three years, and began to feel an outsider: a young man struggling with his homosexuality and with being a pacifist at a time of imminent war.’

Evan’s introduction to the first section of the book, concerning Britten’s life in Lowestoft and at Gresham’s, can be read on the Amazon website.

A review in The Guardian, by Charlotte Higgins, says the diaries reveal ‘a lonely but driven schoolboy; a young man exposed to a glamorous world of metropolitan homosexuality; and an artist of stupendous talent, with uncompromising opinions of fellow musicians.’ Some of the most entertaining material in the diaries, Higgins says, stems from Britten’s unguarded opinions of other musicians: Adrian Boult is by turns ‘slow, dull & ignorant’ and ‘suetlike’; Sir Henry Wood is ‘an absolute vandal’; Brahms First Symphony is ‘ugly and pretentious’; of Edward Elgar, he writes ‘How I wish I could like this music’; and he says of Vaughan Williams that he ‘repulses me’.

Here are a couple more snippets from the diary, filtered out of The Guardian’s review:

(Of Isherwood)
‘He is an awful dear & I am terribly tempted to make him into a father confessor.’

(Of Lennox Berkeley who, according to the editor John Evans, was besotted with Britten)
‘He is a dear & I am very, very fond of him; nevertheless, it is a comfort that we can arrange sexual matters at least to my satisfaction.’

(Of a brothel in Paris)
‘ . . . about 20 nude females, fat, hairy, unprepossessing; smelling of vile cheap scent, & walking round the room in couples to a gramophone. It is revolting.’

A diary not for burning

‘I will tell you what kind of a diary you will never wish to burn. Get a good sized, substantially bound blank-book and record in it simply facts of your every-day life . . .’ Such was the advice given by Jacob Abbott - a 19th century teacher and writer who died 130 years ago this day - to his pupils and other teachers. George F Root, a colleague of Abbott’s who had previously burnt all his diaries, followed this advice, and kept his new diary for 25 years, only to have it be burnt any way - in the great Chicago fire of 1871.

Abbott was born at Hallowell, Maine, in 1803, and graduated from Bowdoin College in 1820. Thereafter, he studied at Andover Theological Seminary, and was a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Amherst College. He founded the Mount Vernon School for Young Ladies in Boston in 1829 and the Eliot Congregational Church at Roxbury, Massachusetts, in the mid 1830s. With his brothers, in the 1840s, he set up Abbott’s Institute; and was also a principle at the Mount Vernon School for Boys, in New York City.

Abbott was also a prolific author, writing fiction, history, science and religious books. According to Wikipedia, his Rollo Books - such as Rollo at Work and Rollo at Play - are the best known of his writings. Original copies of some of these books, over a century old, can be bought on Abebooks for under a tenner. He died on 31 October 1879, 130 years ago today.

Although Abbott himself does not appear to have left behind any journals, there is an intriguing account of how he advised the young ladies at his school, and other teachers, to keep a diary. This account is found in The Story of a Musical Life: An Autobiography by George F Root published by The John Church Co, Cincinnati, in 1891. It is freely available at Internet Archive, but original copies can also be bought from Abebooks for a little over £30.

Here is that account (preceded by some description of Abbott’s school and the teaching methods - as found on Deidre Johnson’s website which has lots of information about fiction series aimed at 19th century girls).

‘Abbott’s school for young ladies at that time was in one of the fine houses in the white marble row in Lafayette Place, New York, spacious and convenient beyond anything I had before seen. I found the work delightful. Our methods were new, as Mr Abbott had said they would be, and no one having made class teaching and singing tedious and unpopular in the school it was not difficult to arouse and keep up an interest in the lessons. We had frequent visitors - parents and friends of the young ladies, and other persons interested in seeing the new work, and later on in hearing the pleasant part-singing. This singing in parts came along astonishingly soon, for three-quarters of an hour every school day with those bright, interested girls was very different from the two half hours a week that I had been accustomed to in the Public Schools of Boston. . .

. . . I ought to say something more here of that remarkable family with whom it was my good fortune to be connected during my ten years in New York. The published works of Jacob Abbott and of John S C Abbott are known. In the legal profession the works of Benjamin Vaughan Abbott and of Austin Abbott are, I am told, regarded as standards, and in the theological and editorial world Lyman Abbott is one of the most eminent men of the present time. These three last mentioned are sons of Jacob Abbott, and were boys at the time of which I write. That, however, which is not ‘known and read of all’ is the home and school-life of these admirable men. In their homes and in their school-rooms, with each other and with all who were connected with them, either as pupils or teachers, their intercourse was characterized by a sincerity and a gentle friendliness so steady and so constant that breaking over it into roughness of any kind or into disobedience seemed impossible. I saw no outbreak or case of ‘discipline’ in all the years that I was with them. That their excellent methods and great skill and attainments as teachers had something to do with the result will of course be understood. . .

As larger buildings were needed the school was moved, first to Houston street, then to Bleecker, both near Broadway. I can not remember just when the brothers decided to have two schools, and now I miss my diary again. In fact, as I go on, I miss it more and more. That book, by the way, and the circumstances that caused it, are worth speaking of.

Early in my New York life Mr Jacob said to me one day:
‘Did you ever keep a diary?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘I have begun a half dozen at least.’
‘You haven’t any of them now?’
‘No.’
‘You burned each one after writing a few weeks or a few months in it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it because you had been so sentimental that you gradually grew tired of what you had written, and at last ashamed to have any one see it?’
I laughed and said it was exactly so.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that is a very common experience. I will tell you what kind of a diary you will never wish to burn. Get a good sized, substantially bound blank-book and record in it simply facts of your every-day life; first, every event of your past life, with its date, that you think you would like to remember years hence, then begin where you are now and do the same thing every day. Speak of pupils, letters, people you see, concerts, classes, journeys - in short, every occurrence of any prominence that is connected with your work or home. Do not give an opinion or admit a word of sentiment in regard to any of the records you make, but let them be stated in the briefest and most concise manner possible. They may look dry to you now, but years hence they will be full of associations of the successful and pleasant life you are now living, and instead of growing tiresome as you read them, they will become more and more interesting and valuable.’

I saw at once how good this advice was, and went right off to Mr Ivison (who was then a member of Mercer Street choir) and had the book made. It was as large as a good-sized ledger, was bound in strong leather, and so arranged that it could be locked. As soon as it was done I asked Mr Jacob to come and see it. He came, and when he had looked and approved I asked him to begin it for me. He did, and this is about what he wrote:

‘Mr George has brought me in here to see his new book. This is his music room. It is octagonal in shape, two corners being cut off for closets and two for doors of entrance. The wood-work is oak. All octagonal table occupies the center, and book-cases with glass doors are on the side between the doors. There is a piano and a lounge here, and several easy chairs in convenient places. Twenty years hence, Mr George, when you read this in some totally different scene let it remind you of your New York music room and ‘Mr Jacob.’ ’

I did as he advised - began with my early life, and found I could recall almost everything of importance before going to Boston, and while there, then started from that time (early in 1845) to make short daily records. This went through my New York life, my first stay in Europe, and my early convention work to 1871, when we were in full tide of successful business in Chicago - more than twenty-five years of brief, close record. The book was but little more than half full, and how true were Mr Jacob’s ideas about the memories and associations it recalled. ‘Closing exercises at Rutgers to-day’ was not merely the record of a musical exercise twenty years before. About that commonplace event were now summer flowers, bright skies and dear friends - and the flowers grew sweeter, the skies brighter, and the friends dearer as the years rolled on. But a memorable day came when my big journal shared the fate of its little predecessors. It was burned! But not by my hand. It went up, with many other mementos of my former life, in the flames of the great Chicago fire.

Somebody may be as much obliged to me as I was to Mr Jacob for this suggestion about the way to keep a diary.’

Nothing but the eyes

Otto Rank, a Viennese psychoanalyst who studied with Freud for many years, died 70 years ago today. He is remembered for theorising that some neuroses stem from the trauma of birth, and for extending psychoanalytic theory to the study of myth, art and creativity. One of his patients was the writer Anaïs Nin, but she was also his lover, and wrote much about him in her extraordinary and intimate diaries.

Rank was born in Vienna in 1884, into a lower/middle-class Jewish family. Aged 21 he met Freud, who persuaded him to study psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna. Before long he had become Freud’s trusted assistant, and was appointed secretary to the emerging Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Rank remained close to Freud for the best part of two decades. Nevertheless, through books such as The Artist and The Incest Theme in Literature, he developed his own theories, extending psychoanalytic theory, in particular to explain the significance of myths and artistic creativity.

Rank served in the First World War and then returned to his studies. In 1924, though, he published The Trauma of Birth in which he maintained that anxiety and neurosis stemmed from a baby’s shock at being separated from his or her mother. Although Freud was initially impressed by this idea, he later rejected it, and the book distanced Rank from him and others in the Vienna Circle.

The same year, he moved to the US, where he developed a reputation for his evolving ideas in psychotherapy (including that of getting patients to re-experience their birth traumas). For the next ten years he travelled often between New York and Paris, teaching and practicing psychotherapy. In 1936 he settled in New York City, where he died 70 years ago today, on 31 October 1939 (five weeks after Freud had died in London). For more detail on Rank’s life see Encyclopaedia Britannica or Wikipedia.

Anaïs Nin, one of the 20th century’s most interesting diarists, was not only a patient of Rank, but his lover too. She was born in France, to musical parents of mixed and partly Cuban heritage. When they separated, her mother then took Anaïs and two brothers to New York City. At 20 she married a banker, Hugh Guiler, who later illustrated some of her books and went on to become a film maker.

They moved to Paris, where Nin began writing fiction and where she fell in with the Villa Seurat group, which included the writers Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. She had many love affairs, often with well known literary figures, but her relationship with Miller was more constant than most. Although Nin wrote many short stories and some novels, it is her diaries that are considered to be her most enduring work. And, in the diaries, there is much about Rank, and her relationship with him. (See The Diary Junction for more on Nin’s diaries, and some links.)

The following extracts which mention Rank have been culled from Incest: From ‘A Journal of Love’ by Anaïs Nin published by Peter Owen in 1993. It is considered the second volume of Nin’s unexpurgated diaries (the first being Henry and June), and even has its own Wikipedia entry.

21 December 1932
‘. . . We three [Nin, Henry Miller and Hugh Guiler] read Rank together - Rank’s book Art and Artist, the book I wanted to write!’

17 January 1933
‘. . . Daydream of renewing the process of psychoanalysis again - with Rank, perhaps, to see if I can complete my half-born confidence.’

19 January 1933
‘. . . We (Nin and Henry Miller) awake after a short rest and I am not tired. I am blazing with energy. I must be a sexual superwoman who, as Rank has written, is stimulated rather than exhausted by sexual life. . .’

11 July 1933
‘. . . I want to go to Rank and get absolution for my passion for my father. . .’

21 July 1933
‘. . . I need Rank; I need a stronger mind than Allendy’s [French psychoanalyst]. I want to talk with Rank. About art, creation, incest. I want to be free of guilt. I want to confront a big mind and thresh out the subject. Plumb it. . .’

7 November 1933
‘. . . I impulsively decided to ring Rank’s doorbell. . . By sheer accident, it was he who opened the door. ‘Yes?’ he said in his harsh Viennese accent, wrapping the incisive, clean French word in a German crunch, as if the words had been chewed like the end of a cigar instead of liberated out of the mouth as the French do. . . He was small, dark skinned, round faced; but actually one saw nothing but the eyes, which were beautiful. Large, dark, fiery. . .’

‘. . . Rank immediately gave me the feeling that he is curious, alive, fond of exploration, experiment, the open road, anarchism, that he swims freely in big free spaces. . .’

20 January 1934
‘. . . Rank has a leaping quality of mind. It is exciting to see how he corners one, how he attacks, and how he enlarges the problems like a creator who is there to add, to invent, to multiply, to expand rather than analyze into nothingness. He does not raze the ground by analysis; he explores and quickens into life, he illumines. . .’

1 June 1934
‘Today He [Rank] was not shy. He dragged me toward the divan and we kissed savagely, drunkenly. He looked almost beside himself, and I could not understand my own abandon. I had not imagined a sensual accord.’

7 July 1934
‘. . . The word love is not enough. We are both ill with our joy; we are truly dying of joy. We are broken, feverish.

All those who tried to make me renounce the impossible, accept the realities of love, its limitations! I possess it. I am possessed by it. For the first time, I am incapable of enjoying Henry, incapable of thinking of anyone but Rank - I’m full of him. I awake thinking of him. His selflessness. We live for each other. We break down obstacles. We love in a way everybody believes impossible. We love impossibly . . .’

14 August 1934
‘I cannot live without seeing him. It is a hunger, an unbearable hunger. I rushed to him today. It is like touching fire. He makes me terribly happy.’

Gurdjieff and his ‘idiots’

Gurdjieff, one of the last century’s most enigmatic and idiosyncratic spiritual leaders, died 60 years ago today, yet his Fourth Way is still followed by small and slightly secretive groups all over the world. Although he was not the greatest of communicators through the written word, several of his students - Ouspensky and Orage, for example - did much to propagate his ideas, while others - Bennett and Nott - kept diaries which provide some interesting insights into life with the great man, not least his fondness for referring to people as idiots, and to a possible encounter with Aleister Crowley.

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol (now Gyumri), Armenia, in the 1860s or 1870s (the exact date is unknown). He grew up in Kars and travelled widely before returning to Russia in 1912 were he began teaching. There he met Peter Ouspensky, who would become his most famous student, and interpreter of his teachings. That same year he married Julia Ostrowska. During the revolution, in 1917, he returned to his family home in Alexandropol, and continued to teach Russian pupils at various locations on the Black Sea coast of southern Russia.

In 1919 Gurdjieff and his closest pupils moved to Tbilisi, then to Istanbul. After travelling around western Europe, lecturing and giving demonstrations of his work, he (and his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man) settled near Paris in 1922 at Chateau du Prieuré. Over the next decade, the Institute attracted many artists and intellectuals from Britain and the US. He remained there until 1933, when he moved to Paris, where he lived and taught for the next 16 years until his death - 60 years ago today on 29 October 1949.

In his teachings, Gurdjieff propounded a system of developing all sides of one’s being (body, emotions and intellect) simultaneously - the Fourth Way - through writing, music and dance movement. Followers of the system call Gurdjieff’s principles and instructions ‘The Work’. His most famous book - Meetings with Remarkable Men - is considered to be pseudo-autobiography, and is one part of a trilogy which also includes the less readable Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, and Life is Real Only Then, When I Am. But it was Ouspensky who made Gurdjieff’s ideas more accessible with books such as In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching.

There is no shortage of websites dedicated to Gurdjieff’s teachings. Wikipedia has a biography and links; or try Gurdjieff Studies for a longer biography (taken from the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism) and a detailed chronology of his life.

There are several published diaries which reveal something of Gurdjieff’s life and teachings. In 1978, Routledge & Kegan Paul published C. Stanley Nott’s Teachings of Gurdjieff: a pupil’s journal - an account of some years with G I Gurdjieff and A R Orage in New York and at Fontainebleau Avon. (Orage being another student of Gurdjieff and interpreter of his teachings.)

Nott was a young English First World War veteran and literary intellectual living in New York. Having been spiritually restless and having travelled all over the East and West looking for answers, he eventually found them with Gurdjieff. The book was republished by Arkana (Penguin) in the early 1990s, and reviewed in New Dawn 88. The review (available here) concluded: ‘This work is a valuable one in several ways. It is an objective account by one of Gurdjieff’s earliest young followers, who kept detailed journals and diaries. It follows his personal growth through the work and the method. It is also an insight into Gurdjieff himself, his family, senior pupils and his method. Nothing is whitewashed here.’

There is one extract from Nott’s book which is widely reproduced on the internet (here, for example). It concerns a meeting between Gurdjieff and another big personality from the 20th century who turned himself into a self-styled mystic - Aleister Crowley. This is Nott’s account.

‘One day in Paris I met an acquaintance from New York who spoke about the possibilities of publishing modern literature. As I showed some interest, he offered to introduce me to a friend of his who was thinking of going into publishing, and we arranged to meet the following day at the Select in Montparnasse. His friend arrived; it was Aleister Crowley. Drinks were ordered, for which of course I paid, and we began to talk. Crowley had magnetism, and the kind of charm which many charlatans have; he also had a dead weight that was somewhat impressive. His attitude was fatherly and benign, and a few years earlier I might have fallen for it. Now I saw and sensed that I could have nothing to do with him. He talked in general terms about publishing, and then drifted into his black-magic jargon.

‘To make a success of anything,’ he said, ‘including publishing, you must have a certain combination. Here you have a Master, here a Bear, there the Dragon - a triangle which will bring results . . . ’ and so on and so on. When he fell silent I said, ‘Yes, but one must have money. Am I right in supposing that you have the necessary capital?’. ‘I?’ he asked, ‘No not a franc.’ ‘Neither have I.’ I said.

Knowing that I was at the Prieuré he asked me if I would get him an invitation there. But I did not wish to be responsible for introducing such a man. However, to my surprise, he appeared there a few days later and was given tea in the salon. The children were there, and he said to one of the boys something about his son who he was teaching to be a devil. Gurdjieff got up and spoke to the boy, who thereupon took no further notice of Crowley. There was some talk between Crowley and Gurdjieff, who kept a sharp watch on him all the time. I got the strong impression of two magicians, the white and the black - the one strong, powerful, full of light; the other also powerful but heavy, dull and ignorant. Though ‘black’ was too strong a word for Crowley; he never understood the meaning of real black magic, yet hundreds of people came under his ‘spell’. He was clever. But as Gurdjieff says: ‘He is stupid who is clever.’ ’

The veracity of this account, though, has been questioned - see the Lashtal discussion board - partly because of an entry in Crowley’s diaries, or magical diaries as he preferred to call them. The entry in question, though, is quoted in a much more readable book, a biography of Crowley by John Symonds - The Great Beast.

‘Gurdjieff, their prophet, seems a tip-top man. Heard more sense and insight than I’ve done for years. Pindar dines at 7.30. Oracle for my visit was ‘There are few men: there are enough’. Later, a really wonderful evening with Pindar. Gurdjieff clearly a very advanced adept. My chief quarrels are over sex (I doubt whether Pindar understands G’s true position) and their punishments, e.g. depriving the offender of a meal or making him stand half an hour with his arms out. Childish and morally valueless’.

Then there is Diary of Madame Egout Pour Sweet by Rina Hands which was published by Two Rivers Press in 1991. (Two Rivers Press is part of the Two Rivers Farm Gurdjieff group in Oregon, US, and should not be confused with a small literary UK publisher of the same name.) Hands was a pupil of J G Bennett, also ex British army but subsequently an intelligence officer as well, who studied under Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and became a spiritual guide in his own right (see the Bennett website). She was given the honorary title of ‘égout’ (French for ‘sewer’ or ‘drain’) by Gurdjieff during evening meals with him in Paris, during the last few months of his life in 1948-1949. Rina wrote this diary primarily for herself, the publisher says, ‘for she was certain even then of the importance of those days’.

Here is one extract from the journal (thanks to the Gurdjieff Legacy website): ‘And so we sit with the author at the lunches and dinners, hear Mr Gurdjieff recounting his English, Scottish and Irish jokes and, of course, toasting to the idiots, the toasts usually not getting beyond nine or ten idiots. (Mr Gurdjieff says he is Idiot No 17.) Recounted are Gurdjieff’s insights into the various idiots. For example, there are three kinds of Compassionate Idiot. The first sees a man in need of help and immediately helps him, even giving him his own shirt. The second does exactly the same, but only because his fianceé’s father is observing. The third kind, says Gurdjieff, ‘So-so-so, sometimes he gives and sometimes not, depending on many things, perhaps even the weather.’ ’

And here is another: ‘People are beginning to bring their children. They sit at the table with us and participate like everyone else, often being able to choose their idiots. There is a little English girl here at the moment, Lord Pentland’s daughter, Mary Sinclair. Today she sat at lunch beside her mother and just in front of Mr Gurdjieff. The meal was a long one and she was bored. She had been eating an orange and began to tear up the peel and scatter it on the table. Suddenly Mr Gurdjieff spoke to her. ‘You know something,’ he said, ‘in life it is never possible to do everything.’ The child looked puzzled, as well she might. We all wondered what was coming. ‘You see,’ he went on, ‘on my table you cannot make this mess. Perhaps at home Mother permits. Then if you want to do this thing, you must stay at home. But if you stay at home, you will not be able to come here and see me. So you see, you can never do everything. Now put all orange back on plate and remember what I tell - never can we do everything in life.’ She did as she was told with a very good grace. . . At the end of dinner, Mr Gurdjieff asked her, ‘Who do you respect the most?’ She did not understand and her mother said, ‘Who do you think is the most important person here?’ Without a moment’s hesitation, she replied, ‘My Daddy’. I thought I detected a faint look of consternation on her mother’s face, but she need not have had any qualms. Mr Gurdjieff beamed at the child and said, ‘I am not offended. God is not offended either.’ He went on to explain that who loves his parents, loves God. If people love their parents all the time that their parents are alive, then, when their parents die, there is a space left in them for him to fill.’

From the same period comes Idiots in Paris: Diaries of J G Bennett and Elizabeth Bennett, published by - as it happens - Bennett Books, set up in 1987 to publicise Bennett’s writings and teachings. The book is made up mostly of diary entries by Elizabeth (Bennett’s wife). In her introduction, she explains that the book is ‘designed to help those readers who are not familiar with the activities and environment of Gurdjieff and his followers.’ Twice daily the group would go through a series of rituals, including the ‘toast of the idiots’. The exact repetition of these rituals, Elizabeth says, ‘left one free to attend to the shifting responsibilities of the inner world’; and ‘every moment in Gurdjieff’s presence was a chance to learn, if one was sufficiently awake to take the chance.’

Here are a couple of extracts (taken from Gurdjieff International Review):

‘We would go to lunch at midday. There was always a reading aloud of some part of Gurdjieff’s own writings, or occasionally from P D Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous [referred to throughout the diaries as Fragments, Ouspensky’s original choice of a title]. The reading would last for one or two hours and then we would go to the dining room for lunch.’

‘In the evening he listened with great enjoyment to the reading of Fragments, leaning forward with his elbow on his knee and his cigarette-holder in his hand, his eyes snapping, shaking with laughter at the references to himself.’

‘In the evening he was enjoying the reading from Fragments so much - Chapter XII, about the right use of sex energy - that we did not start dinner until ten to twelve.’

Prussia and Japan’s Diet

Itō Hirobumi, a 19th century Japanese statesmen who played a crucial role in building modern Japan, and became its first prime minister, was assassinated a century ago today. I cannot find any substantial information about him as a diarist, but the Library of the National Diet has an excellent website, partly in English, with images of a travel diary kept by Itō when visiting Prussia during a trip which would influence the very formation of the Diet.

Itō Hirobumi was born in the feudal province of Chōshū in 1841. In 1863, in gained the title of samurai, and the same year was sent by the leaders of Chōshū to England to study naval sciences. On his return, he played a minor part in the Meiji (enlightened rule) Restoration, which overthrew the shogunate (or army) and returned power to the emperor in 1868. Subsequently, he undertook government assignments to the US and Europe (a long one in 1871-1873 - see below), before being appointed home affairs minister in 1878.

Itō travelled to Europe again in 1882 to study foreign government systems, and then on his return to Japan he worked to establish a cabinet and civil service, eventually becoming the country’s first prime minister. He supervised the drafting of the first constitution (Meiji Constitution) and persuaded the government to adopt it. It was proclaimed by the emperor in 1889. A year later, the National Diet - the legislative assembly - was established. The constitution and Diet are considered to have been much influenced by the experience of Itō and others during their visits to Europe, and Prussia in particular, in the 1870s and 1880s.

Itō’s pre-eminence continued in the 1890s. He successfully negotiated with the UK for British nationals in Japan to be subject to Japanese law (an agreement which was then emulated with other Western nations). And he led Japan to success in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. He was not so successful domestically, as the infighting between political parties hindered government programmes in the Diet. Nevertheless, he served four terms in all as prime minister.

Following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, when Japan occupied Korea, Itō became Korea’s first Resident General, but he was assasinated on 26 October 1909, exactly 100 years ago today, by a Korean nationalist (an event which then served as a pretext for Japan’s full annexation of Korea in 1910). For more information on Itō’s life see Wikipedia or the Notable Names Database (NNDB).

I can only find one small reference to Itō as a diarist, and this is on the Modern Japan in Archives website hosted by National Diet Library. It says he kept a diary while travelling in the West in 1871-1873 - the so-called Iwakura Mission (named after the mission leader Iwakura Tomomi). The mission lasted approximately two years, making a circuit of the US, Britain, France, Eastern Europe, and Russia. The website displays images from Itō’s diary in March 1873, and says it ‘records his stay in Prussia, with detailed memos about the parliamentary and electoral systems in that country’. Unfortunately, there’s no translation into English.

Musket fire in Vera Cruz

George B McClellan. According to some he is among the most controversial of figures in American military history. And now Louisiana State University Press is publishing what it calls the ‘definitive edition’ of his diary from the Mexican War in the mid-1840s. However, the text of McClellan’s diary, as published in 1917, is freely available online - and very colourful it is too.

McClellan was born in Philadelphia in 1826, the son of a prominent surgeon. He entered the United States Military Academy at a young age, and graduated in 1846. After joining the US Army Corps of Engineers, he was detailed as a military engineer with General Winfield Scott’s expedition in the Mexican War (1846-1848). His experiences there - including the siege at Vera Cruz - proved formative. In the mid-1950s, he was sent to Crimea to report on European methods of warfare, a trip that led him to write a book on calvary tactics, and to design a saddle which became standard equipment in the calvary.

Although McClellan resigned his commission to work on developing the country’s rail network, he soon returned to military life thanks to the civil war - but his was to be a controversial war. After his Union troops had successfully driven Confederate forces from western Virginia in 1861, President Lincoln called on him to restore and command the Army of the Potomac (which had been demoralised by the defeat at First Bull Run). Although he successfully rebuilt the army, his hesitant and indecisive Peninsular campaign led Lincoln to replace him. Although recalled later, he was blamed for failing to destroy the rebel forces at Antietam in 1862, and relieved of his duties again.

in 1864, McClellan, still on active duty as a US Army general, ran for president, but was roundly beaten by Lincoln. He then resigned from the Army, and went back into business as a consulting engineer, but he also served a single term as governor of New Jersey. He died relatively young, in his mid-50s, in 1885. Since then, history has never quite made up its mind about McClellan. Wikipedia says he is ‘usually ranked in the lowest tier of Civil War generals’ but has been universally praised ‘for his organizational abilities and for his very good relations with his troops’.

While still in his formative years and on his first major army assignment, during the Mexico War, McClellan kept a detailed record of his day-to-day activities. Louisiana State University Press is about to publish a ‘definitive edition’ of these diaries (and letters) as edited by Thomas W Cutrer - The Mexican War Diary and Correspondence of George B McClellan. Some pages can be previewed at Amazon.

LSU says McClellan’s ‘colorful diary’ and frequent letters ‘provide a wealth of military details of the campaign, insights into the character of his fellow engineers . . . and accounts of the friction that arose between the professional soldiers and the officers and men of the volunteer regiments that made up Scott’s command’. It calls McClellan ‘a courageous, indefatigable, and superbly intelligent young man’ but suggests the diaries reveal him ‘contemptuous of those he perceived as less talented than he, quick to see conspiracies where none existed, and eager to place upon others the blame for his own shortcomings and to take credit for actions performed by others’.

No need to buy the book, though, since the diaries are freely available - at Internet Archive - in a version edited by William Starr Myers and published by Princeton University Press in 1917. This older version has a near identical title: The Mexican War Diary of George B McClellan. Here are a few extracts from March 1847, when the US Army won control of Vera Cruz.

9 March 1847
‘. . . We were removed from the Orator to the steamer Edith, and after three or four hours spent in transfering the troops to the vessels of war and steamers, we got under weigh and sailed for Sacrificios. At half past one we were in full view of the town [Vera Cruz] and castle, with which we soon were to be very intimately acquainted.

Shortly after anchoring the preparations for landing commenced, and the 1st (Worth’s) Brigade was formed in tow of the Princeton in two long lines of surf boats bayonets fixed and colors flying. At last all was ready, but just before the order was given to cast off a shot whistled over our heads. ‘Here it comes’ thought everybody, ‘now we will catch it.’ When the order was given the boats cast off and forming in three parallel lines pulled for the shore, not a word was said everyone expected to hear and feel their batteries open every instant. Still we pulled on and on until at last when the first boats struck the shore those behind, in the fleet, raised that same cheer which has echoed on all our battlefields we took it up and such cheering I never expect to hear again except on the field of battle.

Without waiting for the boats to strike the men jumped in up to their middles in the water and the battalions formed on their colors in an instant our company was the right of the reserve under [Lieut.-] Colonel Belton. Our company and the 3rd Artillery ascended the sand hills and saw - nothing. We slept in the sand - wet to the middle. In the middle of the night we were awakened by musketry a skirmish between some pickets. The next morning we were sent to unload and reload the ‘red iron boat’ - after which we resumed our position and took our place in the line of investment. Before we commenced the investment, the whole army was drawn up on the beach. We took up our position on a line of sand hills about two miles from the town. The Mexicans amused themselves by firing shot and shells at us all of which (with one exception) fell short.’

22 March 1847
‘. . . The command ‘Fire!’ had scarcely been given when a perfect storm of iron burst upon us every gun and mortar in Vera Cruz and San Juan, that could be brought to bear, hurled its contents around us the air swarmed with them and it seemed a miracle that not one of the hundreds they fired fell into the crowded mass that filled the trenches. The recruits looked rather blue in the gills when the splinters of shells fell around them, but the veterans cracked their jokes and talked about Palo Alto and Monterey. When it was nearly dark I went to the left with Mason and passed on toward the town where we could observe our shells the effect was superb. The enemy’s fire began to slacken toward night, until at last it ceased altogether ours, though, kept steadily on, never ceasing never tiring.’

25 March 1847
‘. . . About 11.30 the discharge of a few rockets by our rocketeers caused a stampede amongst the Mexicans they fired escopettes and muskets from all parts of their walls. Our mortars reopened about 1.30 with the greatest vigor some times there were six shells in the air at the same time. A violent Norther commenced about 1 o clock making the trenches very disagreeable. About three quarters of an hour, or an hour after we reopened we heard a bugle sound in town. At first we thought it a bravado then reveille, then a parley so we stopped firing to await the result. Nothing more was heard, so in about half an hour we reopened with great warmth. At length another chi-wang-a-wang was heard which turned out to be a parley. During the day the terms of surrender of the town of Vera Cruz and castle of San Juan de Ulua were agreed upon, and on 29th of March, 1847 the garrison marched out with drums beating, colors flying and laid down their arms on the plain between the lagoon and the city. . . muskets were stacked and a number of escopettes. . . pieces of artillery were found in the town and . . . in the castle.

After the surrender of Vera Cruz we moved our encampment first to the beach, then to a position on the plain between our batteries and the city. . .’