A small square of ivory

The quintessentially English writer Barbara Pym - whose best novels came out in the 1950s and who has been likened to Jane Austen - died 30 years ago today. The in-vogue author Alexander McCall Smith wrote recently of her enduring appeal and he likened her writing to pictures on a small square of ivory. Her diaries, published posthumously, show tact and wit, according to The New York Times, but are somewhat self-pitying.

Pym was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, in 1913 and studied at Huyton College, and St Hilda’s, Oxford. During the Second World War she worked for the censorship office in Bristol, then served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, in Britain and in Naples. After the war she joined the International African Institute, helping to edit one of its journals, and worked there until the mid-1970s. She never married despite several close relationships with men, including the future Conservative politician Julian Amery.

Pym’s first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, was published in 1950; others followed, such as Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings. In the 1960s, though, her manuscripts were rejected as being out of step with the times; and, in the early 1970s, her health deteriorated significantly. In 1977, after more than 15 years in the literary wilderness, she was named in the Times Literary Supplement as one of the most under-rated novelists of the century. Soon after Quartet in Autumn was published, a book which was then shortlisted for the Booker prize. She died on 11 January 1980. Further information can be found at Wikipedia and the Barbara Pym Society.

In a recent review of Excellent Women (republished by Virago in 2008), the novelist Alexander McCall Smith (see The Guardian) considered Pym’s enduring appeal: ‘Like Jane Austen, Pym painted her pictures on a small square of ivory, and covered much the same territory as did her better-known predecessor: the details of smallish lives led to places that could only be in England. Neither used a megaphone; neither said much about the great issues of their time. In Excellent Women the reader is made aware of the fact that, not long before, there had been a war, but what that war was about is not touched upon. With Jane Austen, the fact that a major war was raging hardly impinges upon the consciousness of the characters. And yet although Pym’s novels are about as far away as possible from engagement with the great political and social issues, they are powerful reminders that one of the great and proper concerns of literature is that motley cluster of small concerns that makes up our day-to-day lives. This is what gives her novels their permanent appeal.’

A few years after Pym’s death, in 1984, Macmillan published A Very Private Eye, subtitled on the title page as The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym (although bizarrely the front cover title is slightly different: A Very Private Eye - An Autobiography in Letters and Diaries). Pym’s own texts were put together and edited by her sister Hilary Pym and her friend and literary executor Hazel Holt. In her preface, Holt says that Pym started keeping a diary in 1931, and that her diary entries were ‘written - and certainly preserved - to be read’. Although she gave up writing a formal diary after the war, Pym continued jotting in notebooks about the events of her life as well as thoughts and ideas.

I can only find one online review of the book - by Anatole Broyard for The New York Times. He defined Pym’s novels as ‘quintessentially English’ and focuses largely on what the diaries tell the reader about Pym’s love life. Broyard says her novels are ‘quintessentially English’ and describe relations between men and women with ‘gentle ironies’. She tended to fall in love with ‘men who did not admire her enough’, he says, and suggests that she goes on about her first love, Henry Stanley Harvey, ‘with a hopeless persistence that she would never have allowed in her novels’.

A Very Private Eye reveals, Broyard says, that Pym ‘always seemed to love more than she was loved’. He continues: ‘When she fell for a man, she would research him exhaustively, even ‘tail’ him through the streets. It is conceivable that she frightened men away by her enthusiasm. While she is self-pitying in her diaries, she does it with so much wit and tact that we don’t mind. During an unhappy love affair with a writer-broadcaster, she wrote that ‘It is sometimes intolerable to be a woman and have no second bests or spares or anything.’ She also said, ‘What a lot one learns about the technique of misery!’ and ‘Now I can see how people get eccentric.’ ’

Here is one longish extract from A Very Private Eye and one which seems to touch briefly but pertinently on different strands of her life and personality.

20 February 1941
‘This evening I was looking for a notebook in which to keep a record of dreams and I found this diary, this sentimental journal or whatever you (Gentle Reader in the Bodleian) like to call it. Perhaps it is hardly a diary, for I keep a bald record of everyday happenings in a neat little book which has a set space for every day. And I write in this book only when the occasion seems to demand it. In the spring, when I think of past loves like Jay or when something momentous happens, like the invasion of Holland and Belgium (but not when France gave in - perhaps I’d got used to shocks by then. Now all I remember is sitting in deck chairs on the lawn with Hilary, the garden full of sweet williams.

It hasn’t been such a bad winter as last, although there has been all the frightful bombing. We’ve have sirens too and a few bumps in the distance (in August) but nothing worse than long nights at the First Aid Post, smoking, knitting, talking, eating and trying to sleep in the stuffy air, covered with scratchy Army blankets.

I have been doing quite a lot of writing lately which is satisfying and pleases me if nobody else. I have also been improving my mind - I’ve read Jane Austen - Emma most lately, Scott - Redgauntlet, Johnson’s Tour in the Hebrides with Boswell - I’ve had a Scottish craze lately. At the Tented Camp I grew fond of a young soldier who had been a waiter in many of the best Scottish hotels - LMS on the china, stags’ heads and palms. Anyway, because of that, or for some more subtle reason, I took to listening to the news in Gaelic and poring over maps of the West Highlands.

I’ve also read Vanity Fair, after hearing it as a serial on the wireless. That marvellous Waterloo chapter was especially appropriate this summer although I had nobody in France or at Dunkirk. But perhaps one could almost enjoy it for that reason - only enjoy isn’t at all the word.

This very evening on which I’ve written all this I was looking among my books and took out John Piper’s Shell Guide to Oxfordshire. I went all through it, a nostalgic pilgrimage in churches and churchyards - most of which I have never seen at all but shall one day - and lingered over the view of Blenheim’s park and lake by which are quoted some favourite lines of Matthew Arnold from Thyrsis.’

In love with Pinter

‘A very enjoyable dinner party at Rachel and Kevin’s house. I was slightly disappointed not to sit next to the playwright, who looked full of energy, with black curly hair and pointed ears like a satyr. Gradually the guests filtered away and some neighbours offered me a lift. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘I must just say goodbye to Harold Pinter and tell him I enjoyed the play; I haven't said hello all evening.’ I went over to where Harold was sitting. ‘Wonderful play, marvellous acting, now I'm off.’ He looked at me with those amazing, extremely bright black eyes. ‘Must you go?’ he said.’

Thanks to The Daily Mail for the above diary extract (dated 8 January 1975), taken from Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter by Antonia Fraser published today by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, part of Orion Books. Classified as a memoir, Orion says the book is ‘a marvellously insightful testimony to modern literature’s most celebrated marriage, between the greatest playwright of the age and a beautiful and famous prize-winning biographer’. Some might argue about calling Pinter the ‘greatest playwright of the age’ but for biographical information on Pinter and Fraser see their Wikipedia entries.

Orion’s promotional blurb explains the connection between the memoir and Fraser’s diaries: ‘Must You Go? is based partly on Antonia Fraser’s own diaries, which she has kept since October 1968 when she suffered from withdrawal symptoms after finishing her first historical biography, Mary Queen of Scots. Antonia Fraser has also used her own recollections, both immediate reactions (she always writes her Diary the next morning, unless otherwise noted) and memories. She has quoted Pinter where he told her things about his past, once again noting the source, and has occasionally quoted his friends talking to her on the same subject. Intriguingly her Diaries always pay special attention to any green shoots where Pinter’s writing is concerned, perhaps a consequence of a biographer living with a creative artist and observing the process first hand.’

Although both Pinter and Fraser were married when they met, their love affair did not take long to blossom - The Daily Mail article has a sequence of diary extracts from the book illustrating this - and it lasted until Pinter’s death over thirty years later in December 2008. To coincide with the book’s publication, Fraser is reading from it for BBC Radio’s Four’s Book of the Week. Here, though, are a couple more extracts taken from The Daily Mail.

26 January 1975
‘Thought of Harold. I suppose I’m in love with him, but there are many other things in my life. . .

9 February 1975
‘Joyous, dangerous and unavoidable - Harold’s three words to Kevin Billington about us, quoted by Harold to me on the telephone. Not bad Pinteresque words.’

11 March 1975
‘Everything is now all right. A knock. He was there. He clutched me and we clutched each other. At first it was almost desperate, he had suffered so much. Finally, he said: ‘I feel like a new man.’ ’

I let fly with my sprint

‘I took two very cautious peeps at Bill, swung out a fraction, and using the wind as best I could, let fly with my sprint.’ So wrote the great New Zealand middle distance runner Jack Lovelock in his diary about a 1935 ‘Mile of the Century’ race at the Princeton Invitational meeting. A year later he would win an olympic gold medal and Adolf Hitler would present him with an oak tree. Today is the centenary of the great runner’s birth.

John Edward (Jack) Lovelock was born on 5 January 1910 at Crushington, South Island, New Zealand, to an English immigrant in charge of a local goldmine battery. He was educated at Timaru Boys’ High School, where he became the school’s best boxer and cross-country runner, and then at the University of Otago where he studied medicine but also developed into a national level runner. He moved to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar in 1931, where he met various influential athletes.

In 1932, Lovelock set a new British and British Empire record for the mile, thereby becoming the fifth-fastest miler in history. He failed to make a mark at that year’s Olympic Games in Los Angeles, but the following year he broke the world record with a time of 4 minutes 7.6 seconds. In 1935, at the Princeton Invitational meeting, he beat two great American runners (Glenn Cunningham and Bill Bonthron). A year later, the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games provided, according to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, the setting for Lovelock’s ‘finest moment’: winning the 1,500 metre gold medal in a stunning race, and setting a new world record time of 3 minutes 47.8 seconds.

In London, Lovelock the doctor specialised in rheumatism, while also doing some freelance journalism and broadcasting. In the Second World War he served in the British Army as a medical officer on the home front, but a fall from a horse while hunting in 1940 left him with severely damaged vision and a propensity to dizziness. He married Cynthia Wells James, an American, in 1945, and they had two children. In 1947 they moved to New York, where Lovelock worked at Manhattan Hospital; but, in December 1949, he fell beneath a New York subway train and died instantly.

According to The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, an oak tree presented to Lovelock by Adolf Hitler in 1936 grows as his memorial in the grounds of Timaru Boys’ High School. Apart from the two online New Zealand dictionaries, further information about Lovelock can be found on the website of the New Zealand Olympic Committee and Wikipedia.

Unusually for an athlete, perhaps, Lovelock kept a diary, recording many details about his races and training schedules. This was published in 2008 by Craig Potton, a small independent New Zealand company. Here is the publisher’s blurb: ‘Throughout his running career, Lovelock kept a remarkable series of journals and diaries, until now unpublished. As If Running on Air: The Journals of Jack Lovelock reproduces his journals from late 1931 to the end of 1935 and extracts from his 1936 training diary in a beautifully presented volume with colour and black & white photographs throughout. There is an entry for every race: some are brief, little more than notes; others are eloquent and reflective. Collectively they constitute a unique record of a sporting life in the 1930s and offer insights into what it took to make a world champion.’

I can find only one review of the book online - in the magazine Running Times [Runner’s World]. It says Lovelock was ‘the best of the 1930s golden era of milers’ and that the Berlin race is ‘still celebrated for the split-second finesse of Lovelock’s tactics and the lyrical perfection of his running’. It’s a favourable review which concludes that the diary gives ‘many inside views of history, as do the amazing photographs’.

‘Best of all,’ Running Times says, ‘we can follow what is in [Lovelock’s] mind almost stride by stride as each race unfolds. In the 1933 World Student Games, shadowing Italy’s Luigi Beccali, the reigning Olympic champion, ‘I clung like a leech . . . and thought I might hold him at the finish, but my big kick was not there.’ Quietly (and prophetically) he adds, ‘Two wins to him, the third is mine.’ In the 1935 ‘Mile of the Century’ at Princeton, ‘Cunningham’s tactics and uneven pacing were disturbing, as Bonthron might catch us both from behind . . . I took two very cautious peeps at Bill, swung out a fraction, and using the wind as best I could, let fly with my sprint.’ After that victory Lovelock was in serious danger of being crushed by the admiring crowd. His journal comments dryly, ‘Such terrific enthusiasm seemed a little misplaced.’

But I spied crabs

It is three hundred years to the day that Richard Newdigate, the Squire of Arbury, a Warwickshire gentleman, and father to 18 children, passed away. He might have been forgotten but for an extraordinary series of news-letters, written for and to him in the country from London, and the remnants of his diary. This latter becomes particularly interesting when Newdigate decides to take a trip to France, where, on his first day, he had trouble finding a decent supper. The news-letters and the diary extracts were collated two centuries after his death, by a relative, and published with the title Cavalier and Puritan.

Born in 1644, Richard Newdigate was the son of an eminent judge, Richard Newdegate, a distant relative of Oliver Cromwell. (The son took the surname spelling used by his grandfather, Sir John Newdigate, rather than his father.) He tried to get into politics, and was elected as MP for the county of Warwick, but Parliament was dissolved a week after the election. He settled down to manage his estates as Squire of Arbury, and had 15 children by his first wife, and three by a second. He died on 4 January 1701 - three centuries ago this very day.

The most comprehensive information about Richard Newdigate available on the internet can be found in the book Cavalier and Puritan, published in 1901 by Smith, Elder and Co in London, which is freely available at Internet Archive. Since then, it has been republished many times.

Cavalier and Puritan was originally compiled by Lady Newdigate-Newdegate from, as the sub-title explains, the private papers and diary of Sir Richard Newdigate, Second Baronet with extracts from MS news-letters addressed to him between 1675 and 1689. Further information on the historically-important Newdigate news-letters is provided by Philip Hines Jr. Also, The Diary Junction has some information and links.

Here is part of Lady Newdigate-Newdegate’s introduction to Cavalier and Puritan: ‘The private diary of Sir Richard Newdigate needs a word of introduction and explanation. It consists, for the most part, of fragments of torn sheets of folio paper containing unconnected and mutilated portions of what must have been a minutely kept record of daily life extending over some thirty years. When the manuscript volumes were doomed to destruction, certain parts were thought worthy of preservation, mainly because they noted matters of estate interest, or were of significance in other ways. Whole sheets were then rent apart from the diary at irregular intervals, interspersed in order of date with rough-edged slips of paper torn from the middle of a page. Some curious entries have been retained which might not have escaped destruction had not the folio sheets been closely written upon on either side. Thus a note on some matter of mere local importance has safeguarded a more interesting entry of candid self-revelation on the reverse side of the paper.

In these remnants of a day-by-day record there is no reference to politics or public life, not even during the period when Sir Richard was a representative of his county in Parliament. The diary is chiefly noteworthy for the naiveté and frankness of the writer, and for the fulness of detail with which he helps us to realise the private life of a country gentleman more than two hundred years ago.’

Among the interesting remnants of the diary are the parts that relate to a journey Newdigate undertook to Paris. Preparations for the trip had been under way for several days, but the trip itself started on 8 July 1699 when he set off from Harefield, about 15 miles northwest of London at the time (now part of Greater London).

8 July 1699
‘Rose at five, got out by seven. Rode to Bagshot. Baited. Took Coach. (Mem - Jack Royl rode away Tempest against my order.) Drove to Farnham, ten miles. Then to Alton, seven miles. Drove to Woodcote, eight miles. Went forty-four miles to-day. Was very weary and dry, and drank too much. Went to bed at twelve.’

9 July 1699
‘Went to church twice. Walked in Woodcot Grove.’

10 July 1699
‘Rose at six and went to Winton. . .Went to Southampton. There found Parker without, my Son Stephens, his brother Hodges, his Cousin Newland and Mr Scot, all waiting for my arrival. . . Embarked my Coach in a Hoy and then myself on the Governor’s yacht. West of Calshot Castle got into the long Boat; was tost, being rowed by four hands six mile and a half. Walked from Cowes, where we landed (having drunk a glass of Canary at Captain Newland’s), half a mile. There we met the welcome Coach. Found at Barton four of my dear Daughters; Moll, Nan that are married and Betty and July. Hasted to bed.’

11 July 1699
‘Took four Quarts of Posset Drink. . . At four afternoon eat boiled loin of Mutton, then drank burnt Wine, yet continued unwell. So discoursing several, spent this day.’

12 July 1699
‘Very hot. Rose pretty early. Agreed with Captain Radzee for his Yacht and with Thos. Harly and Wm. Cook for their Hoy (which is called the Success of Cowes) to carry our horses and Coach. Returned to Dinner and spent the rest of the day with our Company.’

13 July 1699
‘Rose at three. Rode to East Cowes, ferryed over; went thro’ West Cowes to Radzee’s, boarded the yacht, saw how my goods were stowed, went on board the Successe, prevented their spoiling the carriage of my Chariot, which they would have knocked to pieces. Stowed her aboard the Yacht, Slinged my three horses on board. Returned to Barton. Gave my Daughter Mary a Breast Jewel (Diamond) worth £40, and my Daughter Nan a Diamond Locket worth £16. Gave little Wm Stephens a half Jacobus, and little Dick Sedley a quarter Carolus. Yesterday gave the servants half Crowns apiece. Breakfasted, and embarked first on the Hoy, to which Captn Radzee had returned the Carriage of the Coach, which I required him to take aboard his Yacht again. But he said he could not. Then I went and fetched my goods from aboard him, and sending back Nan and July, my son Stephens and Mr Scot, who were on board, we set sail in the Hoy and got against South Sea Castle that night. Lay rough. All were sick but Dick and I. Next day were becalmed. Could not lose sight oth’ Island. Lay rough again. About two ith’ morning a North East gale blew fresh and sent us forward.’

‘After two days and nights,’ writes Lady Newdigate-Newdegate, ‘of much discomfort on a stormy sea, the little company of six arrived within reach of Cherbourg on the French coast. The appearance of the ‘hoy’ with its unknown freight caused no little excitement in the inhabitants of the town. Sir Richard, as usual, is found equal to all emergencies, and nothing seems to escape his ‘roving’ and observant eye.’

Here is Newdigate’s first day in France.

15 July 1699
‘About 4 ith’ afternoon landed at Chirburgh, being a Port where the “Sun”, the great French ship, was fired. The Sea shore had hundreds of people upon it, it being their St James’s Day. When they saw the English colors they drew near our boat, and the third man we met with addressed us in very good English. He was a Merchant of that place, knew our swearing Seaman, Abraham, his name John Baily, but entitled Cobizon, from a Village he possesses of that Name. He led us to Mademoiselle du Val’s house, the Sun, where there were Stone Steps as to our Steeples, no boarded Floors but bricked, two Beds in a Room, no blankets under, but first a Great Mattress of Straw, then a small thin Feather-bed, and then a large Quilt, then a Blanket and Counterpane, round Bolster, no Pillows.

Mr Cobizon advised me to wait upon the Commissary, who is their only Governor, the Sieur Menevill. He was very Civil. Then we went to the Inn, and Mr Cobizon undertook to finish all with the Master of the Vessel, Mr Harly. But I had a mind to go on board our Ship, where I found the Custom house Officers and many people on board, and hundreds on shore to see the Sight.

After two hours spent in shewing all our goods to the Custom house officers, who were very strict but very civil, we slung our Horses and Coach ashore and put it together, and four men carried our Goods in great Handbarrows. The Coach was accompanied by the multitude into town, who had (as Mr Cobizon said) ne’er seen a Coach before, and I was forced to take it off the Wheels and carry it into a Bachelor Merchant (Mr Bousselaer) his Yard, to have it safe. Otherwise it had been torn in pieces and those kept as Relics by the people. This held me till near eleven.

In the meantime I went to bespeak Supper, but could have no flesh; they durst not dress it. ’Twas Saturday, a Fish day, and tho’ to break the seventh Comandment is venial, eating Flesh is a mortal Sin. Nor could we have fish; Mrs Du Vail said ’twas all gone. But I spied Crabs, of which she bought six for three pence, and we got Thornback and made a pretty good Supper. Prayed and went to bed after twelve, I having read myself half asleep and then went to bed. After my first sleep I slept heartily, I thank God, till after eight.’

Nostalgia for lost poverty

‘What I mean is this: that one can, with no romanticism, feel nostalgic for lost poverty.’ So began the diary jottings of Albert Camus, the great Algerian-French writer who died 50 years ago today. He wasn’t a typical diarist, by any means, but he wrote in enough notebooks to produce three published collections (of which the above is the first line), and he kept two rather downbeat journals on trips to North and South America in the 1940s.

Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913 into a working class family. When he was still very young, during the First World War, his father was killed, and his mother suffered a stroke on hearing the news. Camus won a scholarship and studied at the lycée in Algiers until 1932. Thereafter, he took various jobs, joined the Communist Party, studied at the University of Algiers, and married Simone Hié. He also contracted tuberculosis.

A first collection of essays was published in 1937. The following year, Camus moved to France, divorced Hié who was a morphine addict, and wrote for several newspapers. During the Second World War he was a member of the French resistance, but he also found time to marry Francine Faure (with whom he had twins, born in 1945), to teach at Oran, Algeria, and to publish his first celebrated novel, The Stranger. With Sartre, in 1943, he founded, and subsequently edited, the left-wing paper Combat. After four years, he resigned from Combat and, at roughly the same time, published The Plague.

Camus continued to write novels and journalism, but also became involved in the theatre as both playwright and producer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957; but, he died tragically in a car accident on 4 January 1960, half a century ago today. There is no shortage of biographical information about Camus on the internet: try the Albert Camus Society, Wikipedia, Nobel Prize website, or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Although not a conventional diarist, Camus did keep notebooks and sometimes journals, and most of them have found their way into print. In 1987, Paragon House, New York, published American Journals (translated by Hugh Levick), which Camus wrote on two lecture tours to North and South America in the 1940s. Much earlier, in 1963, Knopf published a first English edition of Camus’s Notebooks 1935-1942 (translated by Philip Thody) and Notebooks 1942-1951 (translated by Justin O’Brien). It would be another 40 years before a third volume - Notebooks 1951-1959 - was translated by Ryan Bloom and published by Ivan R. Dee in Chicago.

The New York Times was not very enthusiastic about American Journals in 1987. It concluded that the book was ‘a downbeat performance’ and in a translation ‘that does not match the etched prose of the original’. However, it adds that the author’s finely developed sense of moral values is evident throughout. The Millions (a US website offering coverage on books, arts, and culture since 2003) is a bit more upbeat: ‘A slight volume, American Journals nevertheless reveals a fragile man at the height of his fame, who can still, through all of his medical and psychological problems, offer observations which are astute and often amusing, and it offers some personal context to the ideas that would show up in his later works of fiction.’

The Millions review includes a few (undated) extracts:

‘Obliged to admit that for the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse.’

‘Sad to still feel so vulnerable. In 25 years I’ll be 57. 25 years then to create a body of work and to find what I’m looking for. After that: old age and death.’

Of Rio: ‘Never have I seen wealth and poverty so insolently intertwined.’ Of a Brazilian poet: ‘Enormous, indolent, folds of flesh around his eyes, his mouth hanging open, the poet arrives. Anxieties, a sudden movement, then he spills himself into an easy chair and stays there a little while, panting. He gets up, does a pirouette and falls back down into the easy chair.’ In Bahia: ‘In bed. Fever. Only the mind works on, obstinately. Hideous thought. Unbearable feeling of advancing step by step toward an unknown catastrophe which will destroy everything around me and in me.’

The first few pages of a recent edition of Notebooks 1935-1951 can be read at Amazon.com. Here is the start of the first entry

May 1935
‘What I mean is this: that one can, with no romanticism, feel nostalgic for lost poverty. A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility. In this particular case, the strange feeling which the son has for his mother constitutes his whole sensibility. The latent material memory which he has of his childhood) a glue that has stuck to the soul) explains why this way of feeling shows itself in the most widely differing fields.

Whoever notices this in himself feels both gratitude and a guilty conscience. If he has moved into a different class, the comparison also gives him the feeling that he has lost great wealth. For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on other hand, can see it as it really is: an infinite grace.’

The last collection of Camus’s notebooks (1951-1959) were withheld from publication in France for nearly 30 years after his death, and did not appear in English until 2008. The publisher’s blurb says this: ‘Camus’s final journals give us our rawest and most intimate glimpse yet into one of the most important voices of French letters and twentieth-century literature. The first two volumes of his Notebooks began as simple instruments of his work; this final volume, recorded over the last nine years of his life, take on the characteristics of a more personal diary. Fearing that his memory was beginning to fail him, Camus noted here his reactions to the polemics stirred by The Rebel, his feelings about the Algerian War, his sojourns in Greece and Italy, thinly veiled observations on his wife and lovers, heartaches over his family, and anxiety over the Nobel Prize that he was awarded in 1957.’ Again, Amazon.com provides a few pages for view.

The New York Times says that the most interesting aspect of the book ‘is not politics but its personal substratum’, and that beneath Camus’s ideological quarrels there is ‘a deeper unhappiness with the critical bent of the Paris intelligentsia’. For example he calls the La Nouvelle Revue Française, a ‘curious milieu’ whose function ‘is to create writers’ but where, however, ‘they lose the joy of writing and creating’.

An account book of time

One of Britain’s greatest prime ministers, William Gladstone, was born 200 years ago today - a bicentenary which doesn’t seem to have attracted that much attention. Gladstone was a committed diarist, but his journals are rarely interesting - as The Diary Junction Blog commented 18 months ago when the family library came up for auction. However, the bicentenary seems a good enough excuse to sample a little more of what the great man called his account book of time.

Gladstone was born in Liverpool, the son of a prosperous merchant, and educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford. Although planning to enter the church, he decided instead on politics. He was elected a Tory MP for Newark in 1832, when only 23. His talent for public speaking led Prime Minister Robert Peel to give him appointments in the Treasury and then in the Colonial Office. After six years in opposition, he returned to government still under Peel, and was eventually appointed President of the Board of Trade.

In the late 1840s and 1850s, Gladstone’s political views changed. As a young man, he had been a Tory, and yet by 1859 he had joined the Whigs (or Liberals) and then become Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell. He succeeded Russell as leader of the Liberal party in 1867. He was Prime Minister on four separate occasions (1868-74, 1880-85, 1886, 1892-94), enabling many reforms, including, in his second term, the Reform Act, which extended the vote to many rural voters. His last two terms were dominated by the Irish Home Rule issue.

In July 1839, Gladstone married Catherine Glynne (who bore eight children) and, together they set up a ‘rescue’ home for prostitutes. Gladstone used to wonder the streets of London at night trying to persuade prostitutes to start a new life. Given Gladstone’s life and great achievements, it is disappointing to find his diary, kept for 70 years, largely bald and uninteresting. Many extracts were used by John Morley in his two volume Life of William Ewart Gladstone published by Macmillan in 1903 (freely available at Internet Archive).

Much more recently, the diaries - The Gladstone Diaries - have been published in full by Oxford University Press in 14 volumes - the first few edited by M. R. D. Foot and the rest by H. C. G. Matthew - between 1968 and 1994. They cost well over £100 apiece new, though some can be picked up for around £25 secondhand on Abebooks.

The introduction to the first of the 14 volumes starts as follows: ‘Morley rightly remarked, in his official Life of Gladstone, that his subject was not equipped with ‘much or any of the rare talent of the born diarist’. These diaries reveal much about Gladstone’s character, and illustrate the religious, political, and social life of his day; yet nobody will find in them either word-pictures of events, or analyses of personality, fit to be compared with Pepys’s or with Greville’s. Gladstone’s diaries were not written with a literary aim. ‘You may take’, he once said to Balfour, ‘the three proverbial courses about a journal: you may keep none, you may keep a complete and ‘full- blooded’ one, or you may keep a mere skeleton like mine with nothing but bare entries of time and place.’ The skeleton was not entirely bare of flesh; but primarily it was what Gladstone, a meticulous keeper of accounts, once called ‘an account-book of the all-precious gift of Time’.

Here are a few entries from Gladstone’s account book of time (all taken from Morley’s Life of Gladstone).

29 December 1832
‘On this day I have completed my twenty-third year . . . The exertions of the year have been smaller than those of the last, but in some respects the diminution has been unavoidable. In future I hope circumstances will bind me down to work with a rigour which my natural sluggishness will find it impossible to elude. I wish that I could hope my frame of mind had been in any degree removed from earth and brought nearer heaven, that the habit of my mind had been imbued with something of that spirit which is not of this world. I have now familiarise myself with maxims sanctioning and encouraging a degree of intercourse with society, perhaps attended with much risk . . . Nor do I now think myself warranted in withdrawing from the practices of my fellow men except when they really involve an encouragement of sin, in which case I do certainly rank races and theatres . . .’

21 July 1833
‘Sunday, - ... Wrote some lines and prose also. Finished Strype. Read Abbott and Sumner aloud. Thought for some hours on my own future destiny, and took a solitary walk to and about Kensington Gardens.’

23 July 1833
‘Read L’Allemagne, Rape of the Lock, and finished factory report.’

26 July 1833
‘Went to breakfast with old Mr Wilberforce, introduced by his son. He is cheerful and serene, a beautiful picture of old age in sight of immortality. Heard him pray with his family. Blessing and honour are upon his head.’

30 July 1833
‘L’Allemagne. Bulwer’s England. Parnell. Looked at my Plato. Rode. House.’

31 July 1833
‘Hallam breakfasted with me. . . . Committee on West India bill finished. . . German lesson.’

2 August 1833
‘Worked German several hours. Read half of the Bride of Lammermoor, L’Allemagne. Rode. House.’

3 August 1833
‘German lesson and worked alone. . . Attended Mr Wilberforce’s funeral; it brought solemn thoughts, particularly about the slaves. This a burdensome question.’

9 August 1833
‘House . . voted in 48 to 87 against legal tender clause. . . Read Tasso.’

11 August 1833
‘St James’s morning and afternoon. Read Bible. Abbott (finished) and a sermon of Blomfield’s aloud. Wrote a paraphrase of part of chapter 8 of Romans.’

15 August 1833
‘Committee 1-3¼. Rode. Plato. Finished Tasso, canto 1. Anti- slavery observations on bill. German vocabulary and exercise.’

16 August 1833
‘2¾-3½ Committee finished. German lesson. Finished Plato, Republic, bk. v. Preparing to pack.’

17 August 1833
‘Started for Aberdeen on board Queen of Scotland at 12.’

18 August 1833
‘Rose to breakfast, but uneasily. Attempted reading, and read most of Baxter’s narrative. Not too unwell to reflect.’

19 August 1833
‘Remained in bed. Read Goethe and translated a few lines. Also Beauties of Shakespere. In the evening it blew: very ill though in bed. Could not help admiring the crests of the waves even as I stood at cabin window.’

20 August 1833
‘Arrived 8½ am - 56½ hours.’

29 December 1873
‘Sixty-four years completed to-day - what have they brought me? A weaker heart, stiffened muscles, thin hairs; other strength still remains in my frame.’

Such an idle man

Today is the 150th anniversary of the death of Thomas Babington Macaulay, politician, writer and historian. He served two shorts terms as a high-level minister in the Whig governments of the 1840s, but is best remembered for his learned and innovative History of England. However, he also wrote much else besides, essays and poems, and he kept a diary. Although not published in full until 2008 (and at a price!), it was quoted frequently by Macaulay’s nephew in a 19th century biography. More of Macaulay’s character, however, is revealed in extracts from the diary of his sister, Margaret, who writes often of Macaulay complaining about his own idleness.

Macaulay was born in Leicestershire in 1800, and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became friends with Lord Grey and Charles Austin, and developed an interest in utilitarianism. Significantly, his father, Zachary Macaulay, had been a colonial governor and was an active anti-slavery campaigner. After university, Macaulay began contributing to the Edinburgh Review, was called to the bar, and, in 1830, was elected to Parliament (for a pocket borough, thanks to Lord Lansdowne), where he distinguished himself as an orator.

In the mid-1830s, Macaulay went to India to serve on the Supreme Council, apparently because it was a lucrative job and his father was in debt. Partly because of his role in reforming the education system there and in developing the use of English language, people born of Indian ancestry but who adopted a Western lifestyle came to be known - disrespectfully - as ‘Macaulay’s Children’. On his return to Britain, he was elected to Parliament again, this time for Edinburgh, and was appointed Secretary of War in 1839 by Lord Melbourne, a post he held till the fall of Melbourne’s government in 1841; he also served as Paymaster-General between 1846 and 1848.

Thereafter, Macaulay focused on writing The History of England from the Accession of James II, five volumes of which were published to great acclaim between 1848 and 1855. In 1857, Lord Palmerston made him a lord. He died on 28 December 1859 - a century and a half ago today. Some further information is available at Victorian Web, Wikipedia, the Age-of-the-Sage, or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

For some of the last twenty years of his life, Macaulay kept a diary. He began it in 1838 to record a tour of Italy, and continued for a short while after that, but then the habit lapsed in mid-1839 once he had returned to Parliament and become a minister. He restarted writing a diary in late 1848, and wrote in it more or less regularly from then until five days before his death. The original manuscripts are kept at Trinity College.

Although the diaries were used extensively by George Otto Trevelyan, Macaulay’s nephew, in writing Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, published in the mid-1870s, they were only published in their own right for the first time in 2008 by Pickering and Chatto. The five volume set - The Journals of Thomas Babington Macaulay - was edited by William Thomas and costs a mere £450.

Macaulay, it seems, was acutely aware of the verdict of posterity and would not publish anything not carefully revised and polished, but, the publisher says, his masks were were put aside when writing the journal. Moreover, since he knew the leading Liberal politicians of the day, as well as many writers and scholars (not least Thackeray and Dickens), the diaries are a ‘valuable resource for researchers interested in the mid-nineteenth-century British political and cultural landscape’.

The full text of William Thomas’s introduction to the Journals, as well as 16 pages of diary entries from the first volume, taken from Pickering and Chatto’s website. Here is Macaulay waxing lyrical on the sites of Genoa.

31 October 1838
‘One of the most remarkable days of my life. A day of interest and enjoyment. We were not required to be on board of the steamer again till six in the evening. Soon after seven in the morning I was in the streets of Genoa. Never had I been more struck and delighted. The Strada Balbi, the Strada Nuovissima, above all the Strada Nuovà quite enchanted me. Nothing mean or small to break the charm. One huge massy towering palace after another - forming an assemblage in which the finest houses of London would have seemed contemptible. What would Northumberland House, Lansdowne House, or Norfolk House have been there? Change Northumberland House from brick to variegated marble, and raise it to twice its present height and it might perhaps pass muster as a second-rate palace in Genoa. The vestibules beautiful - the flights of marble steps and the colonnades within far superior to anything in London or Paris. True it is that none of these magnificent piles is a strikingly good architectural composition. But the general effect is majestic beyond description. . .

I went over the Royal Palace - both that I might see the interior of one of these superior mansions, and that I might see the famous Paul Veronese. The house is very noble - magnificent flights of steps of the finest marble - long suites of gilded rooms - galleries adorned with a profusion of glasses - and many good pictures and tolerable sculptures. Of the pictures the Paul Veronese of Mary Magdalene anointing the feet of Christ is by far the most celebrated. . . The softness of Mary’s hands is much admired but there is no use in lying to one’s own self and I must say that I want taste to see the transcendant merit of the picture. The expression of the two principal countenances is quite insipid. Mary might be washing her hands and Christ might be sitting to be measured for shoes. There is no love or adoration on her side, nor has he the air of a superior being accepting graciously a sacrifice offered by sincere reverence and affection. The dog under the table is, I think, as well painted and seems as much interested in what is going on as any other character in the piece. . .

The terrace of the palace commands an incomparable view of the city, the port, the shipping and the Mediterranean. The sun was bright and the sea blue so that I saw this fine sight with every advantage.

Next to the huge palaces of Genoa - or rather quite as much as those palaces I admired the Churches - not outside for they are mean and bad, and are seldom so high as the stately houses which surround them, but the interior dazzled and pleased me more than I can express. It was like the awakening of a new sense. It was the discovery of a new pleasure. I had drawn all my notions of classical interiors of churches from such buildings as St Paul’s and St Genevieve’s - cold, white, naked edifices, fine undoubtedly, but without richness and variety. I now found that the classical orders might be used in such a manner as to produce the most gorgeous effects - that an outline like that of St Genevieve might be filled up with all the richest colouring of Rogers’s painted cabinets. The first church door that I opened at Genoa let me into a new world. Variegated marbles, gildings - paintings in fresco occupied every inch. One harmonious glow pervaded the whole of the long Corinthian arcade from the entrance to the altar. These Churches, I am told, do not stand high among Italian Churches, but their effect on me was very great, particularly the effect of the Church of the Annunziata and of the Church of San Siro. I hardly know which of those two I liked the more. In this way I passed the day, greatly excited and delighted. . .’

And here are a few diary extracts culled from the Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay which is freely available online, at Fullbooks for example.

8 April 1849
‘Lichfield. Easter Sunday. After the service was ended we went over the Cathedral. When I stood before the famous children by Chantrey, I could think only of one thing; that, when last I was there, in 1832, my dear sister Margaret was with me and that she was greatly affected. I could not command my tears and was forced to leave our party, and walk about by myself.’

August 1857
‘I sent the carriage home, and walked to the Museum. Passing through Great Ormond Street I saw a bill upon No 50. I knocked, was let in, and went over the house with a strange mixture of feelings. It is more than twenty-six years since I was in it. The dining-room, and the adjoining room, in which I once slept, are scarcely changed - the same colouring on the wall, but more dingy. My father’s study much the same; - the drawing-rooms too, except the papering. My bedroom just what it was. My mother’s bedroom. I had never been in it since her death. I went away sad.’

8 July 1858
‘Motley called. I like him much. We agree wonderfully well about slavery, and it is not often that I meet any person with whom I agree on that subject. For I hate slavery from the bottom of my soul; and yet I am made sick by the cant and the silly mock reasons of the Abolitionists. The nigger driver and the negrophile are two odious things to me.’

8 August 1859
‘We passed my old acquaintance, Dumbarton castle, I remembered my first visit to Dumbarton, and the old minister, who insisted on our eating a bit of cake with him, and said a grace over it which might have been prologue to a dinner of the Fishmongers’ Company, or the Grocers’ Company.’

Also in Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay can be found some revealing diary entries about ‘Tom’ Macaulay, when still a young man his early 30s, by his sister, Margaret.

3 March 1831
‘Yesterday morning Hannah and I walked part of the way to his chambers with Tom, and, as we separated, I remember wishing him good luck and success that night. He went through it most triumphantly, and called down upon himself admiration enough to satisfy even his sister. I like so much the manner in which he receives compliments. He does not pretend to be indifferent, but smiles in his kind and animated way, with ‘I am sure it is very kind of you to say so,’ or something of that nature. His voice from cold and over-excitement got quite into a scream towards the last part. A person told him that he had not heard such speaking since Fox. ‘You have not heard such screaming since Fox,’ he said.’

24 March 1831
‘By Tom’s account, there never was such a scene of agitation as the House of Commons presented at the passing of the second reading of the Reform Bill the day before yesterday, or rather yesterday, for they did not divide till three or four in the morning. When dear Tom came the next day he was still very much excited, which I found to my cost, for when I went out to walk with him he walked so very fast that I could scarcely keep up with him at all. With sparkling eyes he described the whole scene of the preceding evening in the most graphic manner.

‘I suppose the Ministers are all in high spirits,’ said Mamma. ‘In spirits, Ma’am? I’m sure I don’t know. In bed, I’ll answer for it.’ Mamma asked him for franks, that she might send his speech to a lady who, though of high Tory principles, is very fond of Tom, and has left him in her will her valuable library. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘don’t send it. If you do, she’ll cut me off with a prayer-book.’

Tom is very much improved in his appearance during the last two or three years. His figure is not so bad for a man of thirty as for a man of twenty-two. He dresses better, and his manners, from seeing a great deal of society, are very much improved. When silent and occupied in thought, walking up and down the room as he always does, his hands clenched and muscles working with the intense exertion of his mind, strangers would think his countenance stern; but I remember a writing-master of ours, when Tom had come into the room and left it again, saying, ‘Ladies, your brother looks like a lump of good-humour!’

30 March 1831
‘Tom has just left me, after a very interesting conversation. He spoke of his extreme idleness. He said: ‘I never knew such an idle man as I am. When I go in to Empson or Ellis their tables are always covered with books and papers. I cannot stick at anything for above a day or two. I mustered industry enough to teach myself Italian. I wish to speak Spanish. I know I could master the difficulties in a week, and read any book in the language at the end of a month, but I have not the courage to attempt it. If there had not been really something in me, idleness would have ruined me.’

I said that I was surprised at the great accuracy of his information, considering how desultory his reading had been. ‘My accuracy as to facts,’ he said, ‘I owe to a cause which many men would not confess. It is due to my love of castle-building. The past is in my mind soon constructed into a romance.’ He then went on to describe the way in which from his childhood his imagination had been filled by the study of history. ‘With a person of my turn,’ he said, ‘the minute touches are of as great interest, and perhaps greater, than the most important events. Spending so much time as I do in solitude, my mind would have rusted by gazing vacantly at the shop windows. As it is, I am no sooner in the streets than I am in Greece, in Rome, in the midst of the French Revolution. Precision in dates, the day or hour in which a man was born or died, becomes absolutely necessary. A slight fact, a sentence, a word, are of importance in my romance. Pepys’s Diary formed almost inexhaustible food for my fancy. I seem to know every inch of Whitehall. I go in at Hans Holbein’s gate, and come out through the matted gallery. The conversations which I compose between great people of the time are long, and sufficiently animated; in the style, if not with the merits, of Sir Walter Scott’s. The old parts of London, which you are sometimes surprised at my knowing so well, those old gates and houses down by the river, have all played their part in my stories.’ He spoke, too, of the manner in which he used to wander about Paris, weaving tales of the Revolution, and he thought that he owed his command of language greatly to this habit. I am very sorry that the want both of ability and memory should prevent my preserving with greater truth a conversation which interested me very much.’

21 May 1831
‘Tom was from London at the time my mother’s death occurred, and things fell out in such a manner that the first information he received of it was from the newspapers. He came home directly. He was in an agony of distress, and gave way at first to violent bursts of feeling. During the whole of the week he was with us all day, and was the greatest comfort to us imaginable. He talked a great deal of our sorrow, and led the conversation by degrees to other subjects, bearing the whole burden of it himself and interesting us without jarring with the predominant feeling of the time. I never saw him appear to greater advantage - never loved him more dearly.’

Drug cops are dummies

The great American trumpet player, Chet Baker, might have been celebrating his eightieth birthday today had he not been so addicted to drugs, and had he not fallen out of a window a few months before his sixtieth birthday. He left behind a skimpy diary, apparently, which was tailored, by his estate, into a memoir - but not a very good one by many accounts!

Baker was born on 23 December 1929 - eight decades ago today - into a musical family. He left school at 16, inducted into the army, and was posted to Berlin where he joined a military band. He left the army for a short time to study music at El Camino College in Los Angeles but re-enlisted before leaving again to pursue a career as a professional musician in San Francisco. There he also played for an army band, but appeared in jazz clubs too. In 1952, he played with Charlie Parker in a series of concerts, and then joined the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. That band became popular very quickly, partly thanks to how Baker’s trumpet playing counterpointed Mulligan’s saxophone playing so well. Wikipedia says the Quartet’s version of My Funny Valentine, with a Baker solo, was a major hit.

The Quartet floundered before long thanks to Mulligan’s arrest and imprisonment on drug charges, but Baker’s career continued apace, not least with his 1953 record Chet Baker Sings. Thereafter, Baker formed various bands, and his 1956 release, The Route, with Art Pepper, helped popularise the West Coast jazz sound, later becoming a staple of so-called cool jazz. Indeed, Baker, with his good looks and singing talent, became something of a jazz icon.

However, thereafter Baker’s career was interrupted by a series of drug-related incidents, including a year-long term of imprisonment in Italy. Other incidents led to him being expelled from European countries, and eventually deported back to the US, where he settled in Milpitas in northern California. A problem with his teeth - possibly as the result of a fight, or of drug-taking - also affected his trumpet-playing. He learned to play with dentures, but most of the time between 1966 and 1974 he used the flugelhorn and stuck with smooth jazz.

Subsequently, though, he returned to the trumpet and his previous style, playing a lot with guitarist Jim Hall. From 1978, he lived and played mostly in Europe. This is a period in which he recorded many albums for many labels (since he was always in need of money to fuel his drug habit), and, according to some, played the best music of his life. He died in 1988 after a fall from a second-story hotel room in Amsterdam. An autopsy found heroin and cocaine in his body. There are several biographies scattered around the web, try Allmusic, Chetbakertribute, or the Chet Baker fan site.

Ten years later, in 1997, St Martin’s Griffin in New York published Chet Baker: As Though I Had Wings - The Lost Memoir. A few pages can be read at Amazon.com, and although it doesn’t appear to read like a diary, Amazon says this about the book: ‘Chet Baker, poster child for West Coast Cool Jazz and patron saint of its notorious lush life, kept a diary. Published by his estate and introduced by his widow, his entries have been tailored to a memoir of his life from 1946 to 1963. These are the years of his rise to stardom in music and movies - and his tumble into the trenches of incarceration and drug abuse. The book is divided into 13 quick-reading chapters in which Baker writes of his life as a musician, all seasoned with tales of drugs, prison terms, and a laundry list of romances.’ The term ‘diary’, though, might not be so accurate. Allaboutjazz calls it a notebook that was unearthed by a magazine writer and that it contained ‘casual writings about [Baker’s] life set in more or less chronological order’.

The book did not garner the best reviews. Kirkus says it is a ‘sliver of autobiography’ and that ‘even when discussing his peak years, Baker concentrates more on drug busts than music’. Still, it concludes, ‘this is a morbidly fascinating window onto his hobbled genius’. Dwight Garner at Salon listed it as one of the worst books of 1997: ‘From its first banal sentence . . . to its last (including the phrase ‘we were so stoned and so sleepy’), it never comes close to the blue velvet of Baker’s singing voice or the sheer breathiness of his trumpet playing.’

Here are a few extracts:

‘I felt uncomfortable and very nervous as Bird asked the crowd if I was in the club, and would I come up and play something with him. . . After Cheryl he announced that the audition was over, thanked everyone for coming, and said that he was hiring me. . .’

‘Moving quickly toward the noise, as did everyone else, I saw Dick lying on the floor. He had passed out cold, and several people were trying to figure out what was wrong with him. We located a doctor and cleared the stage area. I should point out that Dick had always taken care of business; always at work on time and always playing exceptionally.’

‘The cops who busted me were complete dummies who loved to harass and bust musicians, actors, and celebrities of all kinds; people who were an easy bust, and who would get their names in the paper. They never arrested the pushers or anyone who might be really dangerous. It wasn’t their style.’

And again of drug cops: ‘I hated those bastards and all they stood for.’

In Brighton with George IV

It is a century and a half today since Henry Edward Fox, the fourth Baron Holland, died. He was a fairly unremarkable aristocrat, and sired no children, thus causing his baronies to expire. Nevertheless, he was an interesting diarist, gossipy, observant and happily acerbic at times. He had no qualms, for example, in calling the King (George IV) a fool, or in describing the English countryside as being full of ‘Lilliput ostentation’! But he liked Brighton, and was there for the opening of the Chain Pier which he described as ‘a great ornament and convenience to the place’.

Fox, the third son of the third Baron Holland, was born in 1802 at Holland House in London. He was educated privately and then studied at Christ Church, Oxford. He briefly held the parliamentary seat of Horsham before eschewing politics and joining the diplomatic service, taking posts in Italy and Austria. He married the daughter of the Earl of Coventry in 1833, and succeeded to become (the fourth) Baron Holland in 1840 on the death of his father.

On returning permanently to England in 1846, Baron Holland launched himself into renovating and altering Holland House. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attended parties there in 1849-1850. He had no children, and so his baronies became extinct when he died on 18 December 1859. Thereafter, the estate passed to a cousin, the fifth Earl of Ilchester. Further biographical informaiton is available at Wikipedia, or the History of Parliament.

Diary writing, it seems, was a family habit. The diaries of both Fox’s parents were published, seven decades apart: The Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland in two volumes by Longmans, Green and Co in 1908; and The Holland House diaries, 1831-1840 in 1977 by Routledge and Kegan Paul. This latter was based on the diaries of the Third Baron Holland, but also included extracts from the diary of Dr John Allen, a physician and writer, and a significant figure brought into the Holland household by the third Baron.

The fourth Baron Holland’s diaries - The Journal of the Hon. Henry Edward Fox, afterwards fourth and last Baron Holland - were published after his mother’s and before his father’s in 1923 by Thornton Butterworth. Somewhat bizarrely, they cover a 12 year period before those of his father in the Holland House diaries. Having been found among the manuscripts at Holland House, the fourth Baron’s diaries were edited by the sixth Earl of Ilchester, who also gives a short introduction with some biographical details. All 400 pages of the diary are freely available online at Internet Archive (as are both volumes of Lady Holland’s journal).

Arthur Ponsonby, a British writer and politician, who wrote two excellent books on English diaries in the 1920s says this about the fourth Baron’s diaries: ‘He has style, great facility of expression, terse and epigrammatic powers of portraiture and gives unreserved disclosure of candid opinions. So we get at the man through the gossip. This does not prevent the gossip of high society being very exhausting, nor does it prevent him from suffering from the common delusion that association with prominent people must necessarily mean gaining wide experience.’

Here are several extracts from the fourth Baron’s diary, all of them concerning visits to Brighton (for no other reason than that’s where I happen to live).

October 1823
‘We went back to Petworth for two days, and arrived at Brighton on the first of November. For the first three nights we slept in that wretched place, the York Hotel, and dined almost every day with Lady Affleck, who brought Mary from St Ann’s. Our life at Brighton was just what all lives must be in a wateringplace. Some agreable people were there, and latterly when Charles and Henry Webster came it was more agreable: Bedfords, Vernons, Cowpers, Ponsonbys, Duncannons, Hopes, Kings, Aberdeens. Our house was pleasantly situated immediately opposite the Chain Pier, which was twice the scene of gaieties. One night upon its’ being publickly opened there were fireworks, and afterwards, in honor of King’s arrival, illuminated. It is a delightful walk, and a great ornament and convenience to the place. Nothing very particular occurred in the world except that Ld Granville was appointed to The Hague as Ambassador, and that all London has been occupied with the murder of Mr Weare in Hertfordshire one of the most barbarous ever known; and the publicity of it and of all the proceedings has been so great that they thought it but fair to the prisoners to put off the trial, as they had been so much prejudged. . .

My father and I dined one day at the Pavilion. Nothing could be more civil than the King was to him, and the whole conversation after dinner was meant to be gracious to him, praising Holland House, General Fitzpatrick; and even what he did not address to him was meant as implied civility. To Ld Aberdeen he was almost rude. Lf Aberdeen fainted from the heat and looked quite lovely. Nothing could surpass the excellence of the dinner and the splendour of the whole establishment. The King after dinner talked about Junius, which he believes to have been written by Sir Philip Francis, and gave some strong corroborations of that suspicion. The rooms are splendid, and when lighted up look like the palaces of Fairies or Genii. After dinner the King played at écarté with the favorite and Lf Cowper, and all the rest of the company remained in the outer room. Afterwards there were several evening parties and a child’s ball, to which I went. The music is so loud and the heat so overpowering, that they generally gave me a headache. Charles met Lady Errol for the first time one evening there. My father and mother went away on Xmas Day, but Charles and I staid on some time longer. Charles, however, got tired and left me.

One evening I was suddenly sent for to the Pavilion. My dismay was not small at finding myself ushered into a room where the K. and Rossini were alone. I found that I was the only person honored with an invitation to hear this great composer’s performances. A more unworthy object than I am could not have been selected. H.M. was not much pleased with his manner, which was careless and indifferent to all the civilities shown him. The K. himself made a fool of himself by joining in the choruses and the Halelujah Anthem, stamping his foot and overpowering all with the loudness of his Royal voice.’

29 November 1829
‘30 Old Steyne, Brighton. I was called a little after seven and got up immediately. The morning was foggy, damp and cold. I left London before 9 and stopped to hear how Miss Vernon had passed the night at Little Holland House. I was happy to find that the new medicine and a blister had in some measure relieved her and given her a few hours’ sleep. I cannot, however, help apprehending that all ultimate hopes of her recovery must be very faint. My journey was rapid and had no other merit. The country (indeed like almost all the country in this island) is tame and uninteresting; perpetual small country-houses with their mean trimness and Lilliput ostentation. There are few of those worst of all sights on this road - a vast green field, dotted with trees, surrounded by a wall, and damped by a variety of swampy ponds, which call themselves country seats. I arrived at half past 2. My mother was on the pier. I sat with my father, who was, as he always is, very lively. He talked of the Grenvilles, and tho’ he admitted all the faults which make them so unpopular in the world, he praised them for many merits, especially Tom Grenville for his disinterested generosity about Lord Carysfort’s guardianship. I took a bath before dinner. Our guests were, The Lord Chancellor, Lady Lyndhurst, Duke of Devonshire, Sir James Mackintosh, Mr Whishaw, four selves. I never had met the Chancellor before; he is agreable in his manner and voice, and his language is choice and elegant. After dinner we talked of Napoleon and Bourrienne’s Memoires. Sir James said that the conversation there given between the Emperor and Auguste de Stael (at that time only 17 years old), is quite correct. That he has seen Auguste’s letter to his mother, detailing it just as it is told in Bourrienne. He went to meet Napoleon on his return from Italy, in order to solicit for his mother to be allowed to go nearer Paris - but in vain. The D. of D. is grown more absurd in his costume, more obtuse in hearing, and much duller than he used to be. I had a curious conversation after coffee, in which I dissipated the ill-grounded apprehensions of ___. Edward Romilly and Sir James Macdonald came after tea. The room was hot and the evening fatiguing. It is very painful to see and be in the room with someone one wishes excessively to speak to, without the possibility of doing so without becoming the gaze of the whole party. I went to bed at 12.’

2 December 1829
‘A cold, raw day. I got up late and took no bath. I called on Lady Webster and Miss Monson. The former is a fine, open-hearted, cheerful woman, perfectly good-humoured and devoid of any affectation. She has remains of very extraordinary beauty and is still very handsome. I then went to Lady L. The Chancellor is gone. Before he went she received another anonymous letter from London, threatening to expose her to him, and accusing her of an embrace with me on the steps leading to the Chain Pier on Saturday last, on which day I was in London and she was in her bed. This takes off any apprehension we might feel, for it proves the ignorance of our enemies. Great God! What a dreadful country this is to live in, and how much better for the peace of society and for the agrémens of life is the despotism of one man to the inquisitive tyranny and insolent exactions of a whole nation. She very wisely instantly showed the letter to her husband, at the same time showing The Age with a paragraph about her and Cradock, and desired him to direct her future conduct, which he has done in advising her to continue exactly as if she had never received such letters and not to allow the avarice of blackguards to harass and torment her. . .’

Italy’s Town of the Diary

Some 250km north of Rome and 70km east of Florence, in Tuscany but not far from the borders with Umbria and Romagna, lies Pieve Santo Stefano, otherwise known as the Town of the Diary. For over two decades, it has been the centre of an astonishing project to archive and publicise the diaries of, what the archive calls, common people, and in so doing has developed what might be termed a diary culture.

Pieve Santo Stefano was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War, though an L-shaped town hall survived, and it is there that the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale - or ‘house of memory’ - began to evolve 25 years ago, at the initiative of the journalist and writer Saverio Tutino. A full history can be seen here in Italian, and here translated into English. Today, all the roads into the town bear not only a sign saying its name, but another sign saying ‘Citta del Diario’.

Over the years, many thousands of diaries (and letters) have been deposited in the Archive. A few of their authors are highlighted on the Archive’s website: an architect who was victim to a terrorist attempt in the seventies; a ‘naif writer’ who described his work in a mine and his amorous adventures; a Venetian farmer with a poetic but ungrammatic style; a girl who wrote with deep sorrow to her mother from a drug-addicted community before her suicide; a Sicilian farmer who emigrated to the US; a bricklayer from the south of Italy; and a robber from Rome.

But the Archive is more than just a depository for diaries. There are two panels of readers, one consisting of people ‘on the spot’, i.e. in the locality (‘teachers and attendants, clerks and students, a [vet], an engineer, a trader and some housewives’), and the other consisting of ‘experienced people’(!), such as writers, sociologists and historians. And, each year, these readers select a prize text. By the early 1990s, Italian publishers were already sourcing new titles from the Archives, and since 1999, Mursia has been publishing the prize-winners texts.

Every year now, in September, the town hosts a celebration - the Annual Festival of Autobiography - based around the prize giving. The night before there is a meeting between the two groups of readers, and the following morning the authors and the readers get together. Representatives of similar archives in other European countries also visit and together have formed the European Association for Autobiography. The town hall regularly hosts exhibitions of the rarest diaries and of the original manuscripts sent to the Archives during the year.

Here is part of the Archive’s English page which explains, albeit in a rather awkward translation, some of its philosophy:

‘We have spread the idea that also some personal documents, not connected with market interests, are a new genre of not learned literature (or maybe a ‘semi-learned’ literature). Without doubts, this is a lively cultural genre which is fit for the age we live in. In the meanwhile, students, journalists, writers, scenarists, have come to the Archives and have consulted the texts. When the diaries are collated, we often find parallelisms and convergences. Sometime, we assist to a kind of meeting among the past events which are told in the texts. The micro-history we find in our writings emphasizes every aspect of life, even if some texts were originally written for different aims. Besides, around the Archives, which are sources of memory, an attention to old relationships and new friendships revives. It seems that people, whose memoirs are written on the paper, have the possibility of talking over their past loneliness and of communicating with the world in a new real atmosphere.

Philippe Lejeune, the author of Le Pact Autobiographique, agrees with us in using the word ‘magic’ to explain the combination between the poetics of the past and the scientific study of all autobiographic stories. Lejeune says: ‘The autobiographic texts must not considered to be interesting and meaningful documents which are useful only to the study of past events’. For this reason, we thought right to place the texts at public’s disposal and to confront them, in order to make the personal documents revive. We had an intuition like Lejeune. We wondered how it was possible to localize ‘All the anonymous texts which were passed unnoticed by some local institutions and had survived the loss and the material destruction. The aim was to avoid that one day or another these texts were forgotten by the very authors and by the author’s descendants’. Since when we have founded the Archives, the authors give us their diaries to read them and to keep them after their death. One day, a eighty years old woman, who gave her diary to the Archives of Pieve Santo Stefano, said: ‘I would like that at least a person read my memoirs. Otherwise, I would pass over my life in silence and nobody would notice my presence, because I have not a husband nor children. I would have lived without leaving a little trace’.’

The spirit of millipedes

Three centuries ago to the day, a physician named David Hamilton was treating Queen Anne for gout. He reported in his diary that she was taking spirit of millipedes for the condition, and was feeling much better. Hamilton, who was particularly known in London for his midwifery skills, was also a friend of Mary Cowper, a diarist of some note.

Hamilton was born in 1663 in Lanarkshire, the tenth and youngest son of James Hamilton of Boggs, the first Laird of Boggs and Dalzell, by his third wife. He studied at University of Leyden and the College of Physicians in London. He married in 1689 and again in 1694, fathering two sons with his second wife. He is said to have had a flourishing medical practice, largely because of his skills in midwifery. Indeed, it is possible that he was first brought to the notice of Queen Anne when asked to see if she were pregnant, though there seems to be no evidence that he ever attended her in childbirth - since the last of her many stillborn children predated Hamilton’s appointment.

In 1703, Hamilton was knighted and elected a Fellow of the College of Physicians. The same year he was also appointed Third Physician-in ordinary to Queen Anne but did not attend her until 1708. By 1712, he had been appointed Second Physician-in ordinary. Two years later he was appointed physician to the Princess of Wales, but was not summoned for either of her pregnancies (one was a stillborn child, and the other child died in infancy). There is not much information about David Hamilton online, all the above comes from a lengthy introduction in The Diary of Sir David Hamilton 1709-1714, edited by Philip Roberts and published in 1975 by Clarendon Press.

Hamilton attended the Queen often in the last five years of her life, and so his diary provides not only details of her medical state, but records her ideas and opinions, her relationships with friends, ministers and foes, and gives a good impression of the mood of the times. A short review of the book, found on Pub Med Central, says it provides ‘a valuable account’ of events towards the end of Queen Anne’s reign and gives ‘an excellent portrait of the queen’.

The review, however, is more critical of the book’s (or the diary’s) medical content. It notes that Hamilton is especially exercised over Anne’s gout and discusses the contemporary ideas of etiology and therapy, but complains that ‘the index carries only one reference to any medical treatment of the Queen’ (which, as it happens is to Tipping’s water for urinary lithiasis, and this concerns the Duchess of Marlborough, not the Queen!).

Indeed, Hamilton writes in his diary about the Queen’s gout on one of his first visits. Here is an extract from exactly 300 years ago today, as well as the subsequent entries for 1709.

9 December 1709
‘I’ll begin therefore with an uneasiness which her Majesty appeared to have, about the beginning of December 1709. The particular occasion I was not made acquainted with. But the seeing her inwardly affected, gave me an opportunity to Caution her against disquiets, and as her Phisitian, suggest the Ill consequences that might happen at that time from it. Her receiving this advice with so much Goodness, (I may say Thankfullness) convinc’d me how right my conjecture was. But visiting her the 9th. of that Month I was farther confirm’d therein, for entering the Back stairs I found my Lord Godolphin, then Lord High Treasurer, waiting till her Majesty came out of her Closet, and upon my comming in, he came to inquire for the Queens health (the first time of his doing so, and indeed his great gravity, passing with me as a forbidding Countenance, gave me no inclination to Converse with him). I answerd‚ ‘that her Majesty was better of the Gout that it had been more regular than usual, that she took nothing but spirit of Millepedes, and that since the use of it she had taken few medecines than before’; to which he Replyd the oftner the boards are wash’d, the sooner they are impair’d. Upon this Freedom of Conversation I told his Lordship that it was in his Power to prolong his Majestys life, by laying before her as few disquieting things as possible, but if there was an absolute necessity for it, to shun it at least at some certain seasons. Which he with wonderfull good nature, and seeming pleasure undertook, adding, that if I would send him a line to inform him of every such season, he would do his utmost to keep her easy.

After his returning from the Queen, and my going in, I told her Majesty what had pass’d which She received exceeding kindly; thank’d me, and desir’d me to go on, and do according as he had appointed, only not to trouble too often least he should think it came from her.’

22 December 1709
‘The 22nd. her Majesty acquainted me that she knew I had been with my Lord Treasurer, because he had been with her, and told her, he was not come to discourse of any affairs with her, for if he had occasion to do it, he knew it was not a proper time.’

23 December 1709
‘And on the 23rd. repeated that he would not trouble her with any affairs till after Christmass, which shews how readilly he came in to keep her from disquiet and to act the part of a kind friend as well as a Minister of State.’

24 December 1709
‘The 24th. he sent to me to give him in writing the times he was to omitt Business, at least disquieting business to her Majesty, vid the History. Then he express’d great pleasure in the prospect of keeping her Majesty quiet this way. His after care, and the success of it, prov’d that his words were not complimental, that Freedom from disquiets contributed exceedingly to her health, and consequently that disquiet must injure it. With concern he broke out, saying, You think I disquiet the Queen; what trouble can that give her Majesty for me to read a letter or two to her, or to make her walk to the Councill and hear her Lords discourse upon her affairs; Its Uneasiness from Tattles that injures her most, and craving from her Majesty that which would not look so well for her to grant.’

Philip Roberts, the editor of Hamilton’s diary, provides a note about the ‘spirit of millipedes’ taken from The Essays of Sir William Temple published by Blackie in 1910. This book is freely available online at Internet Archive, and here is what Temple says about the medical benefits of millipedes: ‘The next specific I esteem to be that little insect called millepedes: the powder whereof, made up into little balls with fresh butter, I never knew fail of curing any sore throat: it must lie at the root of the tongue, and melt down at leisure upon going to bed. I have been assured that Doctor Mayerne used it as a certain cure for all cancers in the breast; and should be very tedious if I should tell here, how much the use of it has been extolled by several within my knowledge, upon the admirable effects for the eyes, the scurvy, and the gout; but there needs no more to value it, than what the ancient physicians affirm of it in those three words: Digerit, Aperit, Abstergit. It digests. It opens. It cleanses.’

Finally, it is worth noting that Hamilton’s diary itself has not survived into the modern day, but only a copy made by his friend Mary, Countess Cowper, who herself was a diarist of note - see The Diary Junction. This copy is kept with the Panshanger Manuscripts at the Hertfordshire Records Office, along with a faithful copy of that copy by Mary’s daughter Sarah. In her diary, Cowper mentions Hamilton, and specifically that the stillborn child of the Princess of Wales would have ‘infallibly been alive if she had been laid by Sir D. H.’

Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries

It is sixty years to the day that the Republic of China (ROC), having been defeated by the Communist Party in the country’s civil war, relocated to Taiwan. To celebrate the event, Academia Historica, home to Taiwan’s national archives, is presenting an exhibition based on the 1949 diary of Chiang Kai-shek, the ROC’s leader for many years. The original of that diary, and indeed a lifetime of diaries kept by Chiang, are housed in the US, at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, copies of which have only recently been made available for public inspection under stringent conditions.

Chiang Kai-shek was born in 1887 in a place called Xikou which lies roughly 100 miles south of Shanghai and 300 miles directly north of Taipei. His father was a salt merchant, though he died while Chiang was only eight. An arranged marriage followed, and two children. Chiang trained for a military career, partly in Japan, where he served in the imperial army from 1909 to 1911. On returning to China, he took part in various revolutionary activities, until, in 1918, he joined Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, which was trying to overthrow the warlords and unify the country.

Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, leaving something of a power vacuum, but the following year Chiang won control of the revolutionary forces, and continued the campaign against the warlords. However, he had to fight a bloody battle against a Communist wing within the Kuomintang - involving the murder of thousands - before marching into Peking in 1928 and establishing a new central government. To further consolidate his power base, he married Soong May-ling, the sister of Sun Yat-sen’s widow, but first he had to convert to Christianity, and divorce his wife and concubines, because of the demands by Soong’s parents. Chiang’s government made many advances in the subsequent decade - economic, social, industrial - but was constantly harried by surviving warlords and the ousted Communists.

From 1937, and during the Second World War, Chiang’s resources were focused on repelling and stemming a Japanese invasion. With the help of the Allies, Japan eventually surrendered and withdrew from China. By then, however, Chiang’s rule was suffering badly from corruption and economic inflation, while the Communists, led by Mao Zedong, were growing in strength and influence. The US took a stand and suspended aid payments, but encouraged Chiang to negotiate with Mao Zedong. Wikipedia’s extensive biography of Chiang provides this note: ‘In his diary on June 1948, Chiang wrote that the Kuomintang had failed, not because of external enemies but because of disintegration and rot from within; and it was this, more than any alleged foreign intrigue, that contributed to his defeat.’

In the autumn of 1949, the ROC, defeated by the Communists, moved from mainland China to exile on Taiwan, and exactly sixty years ago today - on 7 November 1949 - its government resumed office there. However, it would be some months before Chiang himself made it to Taiwan and took up his duties as president. He was re-elected several times in subsequent decades, and remained leader of the ROC government in exile, formally claiming sovereignty over all of China, until his death in 1975. In the context of the Cold War, Wikipedia says, most of the Western world recognised this position, and the ROC represented China as a whole in the United Nations and other international organizations until the 1970s.

In memory of that day 60 years ago, Academia Historica is presenting an exhibition of Chiang Kai-shek’s 1949 diary, according to Taiwan Today, quoting from a story in China Times. The special exhibition - Critical 1949: President Chiang Kai-shek’s Resignation and Return - is running in conjunction with a documentary using material from microfilms of Chiang’s diary. The microfilms are in the care of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Taiwan Today explains, where readers are only allowed to make handwritten copies, and therefore, their display in the exhibition and documentary is ‘especially valuable’. The documentary film crew, it adds, took a year going back and forth between mainland China, the US and Taiwan, consulting the diary and drawing on the Academia Historica’s files, as well as on films in the US National Archives and Records Administration. The Taiwan Today story gives one quote from Chiang’s diary, dated New Year’s Day 1949: ‘The enormity of the failures and ignominy of the past year has never been surpassed.’

In fact, Chiang wrote diaries for much of his life, and these are all held by the Hoover Institution. It divides them into four groups: Earliest Diaries, 1917–1931; World War II Diaries, 1932–1945; Postwar Diaries, 1946–1955; and Final Diaries, 1956–1972. But it also provides a detailed inventory of the diaries in pdf form, along with three pages of notes about them and their provenance. In particular, it notes that the diaries were given to the Institution by Elizabeth Chiang Fang Chih-yi, the wife of one of Chiang Kai-shek’s grandsons, and that the diaries will remain in the archives for 50 years ‘or until a permanent repository is found on the territory of China’.

The Journal of the Overseas Young Chinese Forum has an interesting article about the diaries, with many short quotes. It concludes: ‘What is the importance of Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries? This is a lively collection of papers. On August 25, 1929, he wrote: ‘my wife was suffering terribly after an abortion,’ fueling speculation of Chiang and Soong’s family life, for, by the time Chiang married Soong, he had contracted venereal disease and become sterile. In October 1933, when the central This article is a revised version of one first published 10 years ago on 16 November 2009. Communist activities, he ‘watched the moon with wife and sang Manjianghong [a Chinese tragic opera],’ a sensational moment quite different from the typical image of his seriousness and toughness. The diaries, therefore, provide scholars not only with details of major historic events but also insights into the ‘human element’ of history.’

Here is one quote included in the article, dated 14 October 1928: ‘I am so idle and self-indulgent that I have not been keeping my diaries for ten days! With such an unbridled and wanton attitude, how can I endeavor to wash away our national indignity and realize the success of the Chinese revolution?’

The Hoover Institution has kept Chiang’s diaries carefully archived, and only opened them to the public in stages. The Earliest Diaries were opened for inspection in March 2006, and since then one new group of the diaries has been made available each year until the final set was opened last July. However, there are stringent conditions applying: ‘Before examining the paper copies of the diaries, users must sign an agreement stating that (1) quotations from the diaries may not be published, broadcast, or redistributed in any form, without the written permission of the Chiang family, which retains copyright; (2) the diaries may not be photocopied nor photographed, so only handwritten notes may be taken; (3) cameras, cell phones, computers, scanners, and other image capture devices, as well as tape recorders and other recording devices, are not allowed while using the diaries; and (4) violations of the agreement may result in forfeiture of the privilege to access materials at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives.’

Diary briefs

Scott’s diaries to be blogged and twittered - Scott Polar Research Institute

A Times man recalls the buying of Hitler’s ‘diaries’ - The Times

Carl Crow’s The Long Road Back to China - UPI Asia, Earnshaw Books

More on Turkish coup diary - Today’s Zaman

Danish witness to Armenian Genocide - The Armenian Weekly

Jay Parini on Sofia Tostoy’s diaries - The Guardian

Sam Hanna Bell’s A Salute from the Banderol - The Irish Times, The Blackstaff Press