My hungry hound

The Scottish poet William Soutar passed away seventy years ago today, his death having come slowly but inevitably after more than a decade of being bedridden and constantly confronted with his own incapacity. His poetry is considered to have made an important contribution to the Scottish Literary Renaissance, but it is because of his diaries, perhaps, that he is mostly remembered, at least outside of Scotland. One of his diaries contains a witty poem about how the diary is ‘a hungry hound’, yet his mind is so bare he has nothing to feed it. He started a new journal in the last months of his life, and this he named The Diary of a Dying Man.

Soutar was born in Perth, an only child in a religious family. His father was a master-joiner, and his mother wrote poetry. William studied at the local academy before joining the Royal Navy during the latter part of the First World War. While serving, he contracted a disease - later diagnosed as ankylosing spondylitis - which blighted the rest of his life. After the war he studied, first medicine, then English, at Edinburgh University. He contributed to the university magazine; and his father financed publication of slim volumes of poetry, the first being Gleanings by an Undergraduate.

Encouraged and inspired by Hugh McDiarmid, who is credited with developing a literary Scots style of writing, Soutar evolved into an important figure in the so-called Scottish Literary Renaissance. After contracting TB and an unsuccessful operation in 1930, Soutar spent the rest of his life confined to a specially-adapted room in his parents house, where he received many literary visitors. In the house, also, was an orphaned cousin who prompted Soutar to write for children (Seeds in the Wind, for example). He died on 15 October 1943. Further information is available from the Scottish Poetry Society, the William Soutar website, the BBC or Wikipedia.

Soutar’s extant diaries date from 1917, when he was still with the Royal Navy, but until his operation in 1930, they contain but brief notes of appointments and information on books read. According to Alexander Scott, another Scottish poet, who edited the diaries for their first publication in 1954, ‘from the date of the operation, [. . .] the entries extend greatly, both in length and in range, until they provide a fascinating and detailed picture of Soutar’s “still life” in the room where he was bedfast - a life unique in achievement as in environment.’

The diaries were published by W. and R. Chambers Ltd under the title Diaries of a Dying Man, and much of this is available to browse at Googlebooks. Joy Hendry, author of Soutar’s entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (login required), says it was unfortunate that Scott chose that title because, she felt, Scott had ‘appropriated’ the title that Soutar himself gave to his very last, and very special, diary, started just months before his death. Hendry says it is thanks to American diarist scholar Thomas Mallon, moved by the tragic story of the diaries and amazed at their literary quality and Soutar’s obscurity, that a process began that brought the diaries back into print (i.e. an edition published in 1991 by Chapman Publications).

4 April 1932
‘Writing and reading: continue to wrestle with words in a very sticky fashion. Perhaps my concentration on verse has made it difficult for me when I turn to prose - anyhow, there is often a strained sound about such prose as I write. Of course all men, I expect, come upon these periods of mental stiffness - but they are depressing at the time and bring with them the fear that they may not pass away. At such moments, the mood is disintegrated - a stimulating talk with a kindred spirit may also disperse it - but alas! I rarely enjoy that. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if much of the irritating tattle which is washed my way lies like a weight on the spirit.’

28 June 1932
‘Just realised to-day that it was round about this time, 10 years ago, when I was Mercer’s age (24) [Soutar’s cousin] that the pains and stiffness in my back began. We were on holiday at Montrose. When I look at Mercer I can scarcely accept the fact that my youth was actually dying then. Seeing him walking about in my clothes - I sometimes wonder what strange necessity brought about the humiliation of my body. Man must look for a reason, and when he has lost his old gods must peer into himself. It is not self-compliment to surmise that one had to sacrifice one’s body to make a self.’

29 June 1932
‘. . . Just now as I lifted my eyes to the hillside I saw the trees waving like a wall of fire. If only one could respond to life as the earth to the sun - but the heart is so often a trim little garden with neither luxuriance nor the conflict of the jungle. It is so easy to retreat within the safe walls of mediocrity.’

4 June 1935
‘TO MY DIARY (on a dull day)
Since verse has power to give a grace
Even to the commonplace
I shall, within a rhyme, declare
The cupboard of my mind is bare
Not only of an underdone
Cutlet of thought; the very bone
Of prosy platitude is gone.
And since for you, my hungry hound,
No meaty morsel can be found;
And since I would not have you own
A master who could proffer none,
I bleed myself to be your drink:
Is not the blood of poets - ink?’

3 August 1940
‘Jennie in emancipated mood this morning, dashing about at her window-cleaning with no stockings on: sometimes the glimpse of a free, young body gives me a sudden, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.’

6 October 1943
‘How snail-like the temp at which I seem to be living now - and yet my days are hurrying out of the world. I do not think any of my friends suspect as yet that I am under the sentence of death; and it will be fine if they continue for a good while yet to imagine that I have a touch of bronchitis, or something like that: when at last they know, an undefinable restraint will come between the free interchange of friendship.’

13 October 1943
‘Writing in the forenoon: G. G., with the concern of an elder brother, trotted in to find if I was more settled this morning: I could say that I was, but that that was due in the main to the fact I wasn’t attempting to get rid of the phlegm. The stuff was accordingly accumulating - and could not but be a factor in the increase of breathlessness and palpitation: thus one is threatened from all around, by night and by day: whichever way one may turn, the net is closing and cannot be evaded.’

14 October 1943
‘[. . .] Last night I must have been talking quite a lot; as the folks said they heard me making noises around 1:50.’


The Diary Junction

Beauty and the Beast

‘My method is simple; not to aim at poetry. That must come of its own accord. The very word whispered will frighten it away. I shall try to build a table. It will be up to you to eat at it, to criticize it, or to chop it up for firewood.’ This is the great innovative French film maker, Jean Cocteau, who died 50 years ago today, writing in the introduction to his published diary about the making of the famous film Beauty and the Beast.

Cocteau was born at Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris, in 1889, but his father, a lawyer and amateur painter, committed suicide in 1898. He left school young, and became friends with the actor Edouard de Max who encouraged his poetry writing. A first book, La Lampe d’Aladin, was published in 1909. The same year also saw the arrival of Ballets Russes and Sergey Diaghilev to Paris, who involved Cocteau in the theatre world. During World War I, Cocteau served as an ambulance driver; he also encountered many other writers and artists who had gathered in Paris.

In 1917, Cocteau met Picasso and they went to Rome where they joined up with Diaghilev and worked on a ballet called Parade, with music by Erik Satie and choreography by Leonide Massine. After the war Cocteau founded a publishing house which published his own writings and scores by Stravinsky, Satie and a group of composers known as Les Six. By 1923, and possibly because his intimate friend Raymond Radiguet had died from typhoid, Cocteau had become addicted to opium. While trying to recover, he produced various works, such as the play Orpheus, the novel Children of the Game, and a first film, Blood of a Poet.

Les Enfants Terribles, which is considered Cocteau’s finest work, was published in 1929. The same year, he was admitted to hospital with opium poisoning. In the 1930s, Cocteau focused increasingly on films, although in 1936 he undertook a journey round the world, one similar to that described in Jules Verne’s story. In the following year, he met the actor Jean Marais, with whom he had a close and fruitful friendship for the rest of his life.

During World War II, the Vichy government branded Cocteau a decadent; but he also took some unwise actions that led to claims he was a German collaborator. After the war, he made Beauty and the Beast and turned both Orpheus and Les Enfants Terribles into films. He died of a heart attack on 11 October 1963, apparently on hearing of the death of his friend Edith Piaf. Further biographical information is readily available on the web, try Wikipedia, The Poetry Foundation, and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Cocteau, it seems, often kept diaries, and many of these have found their way into publication, in French, obviously, and sometimes in translation. The two most well-known of his diaries translated into English are Diary of a Film (also Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film), first published in English in 1950 by Dennis Dobson; and Opium: The Diary of a Cure. More recently, in the 1980s, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in New York and Hamish Hamilton in London have published two volumes of Past Tense: Diaries, being Cocteau’s diaries from the last decade or so of his life.

The following extracts come from Diary of a Film, as translated by Ronald Duncan and published by Dennis Dobson Ltd. This can be digitally borrowed at Internet Archive; and a review by Tennessee Williams can be found in a 1950 edition of The New York Times. The first long extract comes from Cocteau’s own introduction

‘I have decided to write a diary of La Belle et la Bête as the work on the film progresses. After a year of preparations and difficulties, the moment has now come to grapple with a dream. Apart from numerous obstacles which exist in getting a dream on to celluloid, the problem is to make a film within the limits imposed by strict economy. But perhaps these limitations may stimulate imagination which is often lethargic when all means are placed at its disposal.

Everyone knows the story of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, a story often attributed to Perrault, because it comes from ‘Peau d’Ane’ between those bewitching covers of the Bibliothèque Rose.

The story requires faith, the faith of childhood. I mean that one must believe implicitly at the very beginning and not question that the mere gathering of a rose might involve a family upheaval, or whether a man can be changed into a beast, and vice versa. Such beliefs will offend the grown-ups who are always ready to condemn with derision those whose humble faith offends them. But I have the impudence to believe that the cinema which can depict the impossible may convince even them and turn such dreams into realities.

It is up to us, (that is, to me and my unit, in fact, one entity) to avoid those particular things which can break the spell of a fairy story, for when it comes to sequence, the world of make-believe is at least as susceptible as the world of reality.

For fantasy has its own laws which are as rigid as those of perspective. One can focus on what is distant, and hide what is near, but the style remains defined and is so delicate that the slightest false note jars. I am not saying that I have achieved this, but that is what I shall attempt within the means at my disposal.

My method is simple; not to aim at poetry. That must come of its own accord. The very word whispered will frighten it away. I shall try to build a table. It will be up to you to eat at it, to criticize it, or to chop it up for firewood.’

30 August 1945, 7am
‘I woke up with a start in the night. It was raining. I suddenly realized a mistake I had made, which I must correct without anybody noticing it. If they did they would lose confidence in me. I am not a real director and probably never shall be. I get too interested in what is happening. I begin to watch it as though it were a play. I become a part of the audience and then I forget all about the continuity. I have forgotten the continuity of movement where Marcel André mounts his horse. So that we can still use that shot, I shall have to cut a bit of Nane Gernon at the window. She will have to say her lines again and then leave the window, so that Marcel in the next cut can make his movement. This means I shall finish up behind the horse when he mounts it and says ‘And you, Beauty, what shall I bring you?’

30 August 1945, 7:30pm
‘First day that I have actually done what I wanted to do. Splendid sunshine and clouds. We took advantage of the clouds after lunch to work behind the house, and produced the effect of evening by using lamps.

But this morning we nearly lost the little time that we’d gained on our schedule owing to the flying school students looping the loop above us. Darbon went to the officers. They are to pay us a visit at ten o’clock. One of them is Mangin’s son. They’ve promised to make the pilots fly further off.

I’ve nearly finished the linen scene. With a bit of luck I should be through with it tomorrow, between nine and one o’clock. (Ludovic and his watering cans, Mila’s shadow; Beauty’s arrival in her Princess’s dress in the lanes of sheets, discovered by Jean Marais who lifts up the first sheet as though it were a stage curtain a l’Italienne to reveal the background behind the bench.)

In order to make sure of Mila and Nane’s laughter in the close-up (on Josette’s line, ‘bring me a rose . . .’) I asked Aldo to dress himself up as a hag. He made up his face under a veil, and wore long blond curls made of woodshavings. He was grotesque and looked like an old witch. I pushed him out in front of them after the clapper-boy. But they told me they laughed only because they didn’t find him funny.

After the linen tomorrow I shall go on to the orchard, and do the scene of Beauty appearing with her father, to link up with the settings of the sheet and the house. Lebreton is recording sounds of chickens and running water for me, so that the background noises have the correct atmosphere.

1 June 1946 (the last entry in this published diary)
‘Am writing these last lines of this diary in a country house, where I am hiding from bells of all kinds. Door bells, phone bells, and the Rouge est mis.

Decided to quit as soon as the film was finished. And it was yesterday that I showed it for the first time to the studio technicians at Joinville. Its announcement, written on a blackboard, caused quite a stir at Saint-Maurice. They had filled up quite a theatre with benches and chairs. Lacombe had even postponed his shooting so that his unit and artists could attend.

At 6:30 Marlene Dietrich was seated beside me. I tried to get up to say a few words, but the accumulation of all those minutes which had led to this one moment quite paralysed me and I was almost incapable of speech. I sat watching the film, holding Marlene’s hand, crushing it without noticing what I was doing. The film unwound and sparkled like a far-off star - something apart and insensible to me. For it had killed me. It now rejected me and lived its own life. And the only thing I could see in it were the memories of the suffering which were attached to every foot. I couldn’t believe that others would even be able to follow its story. I felt they too would become involved in these activities of my imagination.

But the reception of this audience of technicians was quite unforgettable. And that was my reward. Whatever happens, I shall never get such a touching reception as I did from this little village whose industry is the canning of dreams.’

The Diary Junction

Sinking so exceedingly

Jonathan Edwards, considered by some to be the most important of American philosophical theologians, was born 310 years ago today. He was a major figure in the revivalist movement of New England in the 1730s and 1740s - the so-called First Great Awakening - but fell out with his own congregation and went to minister at a Massachusetts mission outpost. Many of his sermons and essays were published, and old editions of his collected works, readily available online, tend to include a diary he kept when still a young man.

Edwards was born on 5 October 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut, into a large family; and, having been tutored by his father and sisters, entered Yale College aged 13. He worked as a pastor in New York, before returning to Yale as a tutor. He took a position, in 1737, as associate pastor to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in Northampton, Massachusetts. The same year he married Sarah Pierpont, and they had 11 children.

After Stoddard’s death, Edwards took over in sole ministerial charge of the large Northampton congregation, and began to criticise the moral ills of New England society, not least in published sermons and essays, such as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. He went on to produce many more tracts inspiring and supporting the revivalist movement, not least The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival (1742), and A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746).

According to Yale University’s web page on Edwards: ‘Perry Miller, the grand expositor of the New England mind and founder of the Yale edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards, described Edwards as the first and greatest homegrown American philosopher. If the student penetrates behind the technical language of theology, Miller argued, “he discovers an intelligence which, as much as Emerson’s, Melville’s, or Mark Twain’s, is both an index of American society and a comment upon it.” Although nineteenth-century editors of Edwards “improved” his style out of embarrassment for his unadorned, earthy, and earnest language, today Edwards is recognized as a consummate and sophisticated rhetorician and as a master preacher.’

In 1750, after a long-running dispute with his congregation, Edwards was dismissed by the church in Northampton for trying to impose strict qualifications for admission to the sacraments. According to Yale again: ‘His dismissal is often seen as a turning point in colonial American history because it marked the clear and final rejection of the old “New England Way” constructed by the Puritan settlers of New England. [. . .] Ironically, then, the colonial theologian who best anticipated the intellectual shape of modern America also was its first victim.’

in 1751, Edwards went to the mission post of Stockbridge, on the western border of Massachusetts, where he pastored a small English congregation, and wrote many of his major works, including A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will. In late 1757, he was lured back to mainstream society with the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) - because, according to Princeton, he was considered ‘the most eminent American philosopher-theologian of his time’. He died but a few months later. For further biographical information see Wikipedia, the Jonathan Edwards Center website (Yale University), Christian Classics Ethereal Library, or the Desiring God website.

Edwards has no claim to fame as a diarist, but his collected works do include some pages of a diary kept largely in his youth. A first section is made up of fairly regularly entries from December 1722 to September 1723; and a second section has frequent entries between October 1723 and June 1724, then intermittent entries to June 1725, one single entry in 1726, one in 1734, and finally three in 1735. The diary can be found in The Life of President Edwards by S. E. Dwight published by Carvill in 1830 (and in other general compilations of Edwards’ works) at Internet Archive, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, and Googlebooks.

15 January 1723
‘About two or three o’clock. I have been all this time decaying. It seemed yesterday, the day before, and Saturday, that I should always retain the same resolutions to the same height. But alas! how soon do I decay! O how weak, how infirm, how unable to do any thing of myself! What a poor inconsistent being! What a miserable wretch, without the assistance of the Spirit of God! While I stand, I am ready to think that I stand by my own strength, and upon my own legs; and I am ready to triumph over my spiritual enemies, as if it were I myself that caused them to flee: when alas! I am but a poor infant, upheld by Jesus Christ; who holds me up, and gives me liberty to smile to see my enemies flee, when he drives them before me. And so I laugh, as though I myself did it, when it is only Jesus Christ leads me along, and fights himself against my enemies. And now the Lord has a little left me, how weak do I find myself! O let it teach me to depend less on myself, to be more humble, and to give more of the praise of my ability to Jesus Christ! The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? The occasion of my decaying, is a little melancholy. My spirits are depressed, because I fear that I lost some friendship the last night; and, my spirits being depressed, my resolutions have lost their strength. I differ to-day from yesterday in these things: I do not resolve anything to-day half so strongly. I am not so perpetually thinking of renewing my resolutions as I was then. I am not half so vigorous as I was then; nor am I half so careful to do every thing with vigour. Then, I kept continually acting; but now, I do things slowly, and satisfy myself by thinking of religion in the mean time. I am not so careful to go from one business to another. I felt humiliation about sun-set. What shall I do, in order that I may, with a good grace, fall into christian discourse and conversation? At night. The next time I am in such a lifeless frame, I will force myself to go rapidly from one thing to another, and to do those things with vigour, in which vigour would ever be useful. The things which take off my mind, when bent on religion, are commonly some remarkable change or alteration - journeys, change of place, change of business, change of studies, and change of other circumstances; or something that makes me melancholy; or some sin.’

17 January 1723
‘About three o’clock, overwhelmed with melancholy.’

1 January 1724
‘Not to spend too much time in thinking, even of important and necessary worldly business, and to allow every thing its proportion of thought, according to its urgency and importance.’

2 January 1724
‘These things established, That time gained in things of lesser importance, is as much gained in things of greater; that a minute gained in times of confusion, conversation, or in a journey, is as good as minute gained in my study, at my most retired times; and so, in general, that a minute gained at one time is as good as at another.’

3 January 1724
‘The time and pains laid out in seeking the world, is to be proportioned to the necessity, usefulness, and importance of it, with respect to another world, together with the uncertainty of living, and of retaining; provided, that nothing that our duty enjoins, or that is amiable, be omitted, and nothing sinful or unbecoming be done for the sake of it.’

6 January 1724 [At Yale College]
‘This week has been a very remarkable week with me, with respect to despondencies, fears, perplexities, multitudes of cares, and distraction of mind: it being the week I came hither to New-Haven, in order to entrance upon the office of tutor of the college. I have now abundant reason to be convinced of the troublesomeness and vexation of the world, and that it will never be another kind of world.’

7 January 1724
‘When I am giving the relation of a thing, remember to abstain from altering either in the matter or manner of speaking, so much, as that if every one, afterwards, should alter as much, it would at last come to be properly false.’

2 September 1724
‘By a sparingness in diet, and eating as much as may be what is light and easy of digestion, I shall doubtless be able to think more clearly, and shall gain time; 1. By lengthening out my life; 2. Shall need less time for digestion, after meals; 3. Shall be able to study more closely, without injury to my health; 4. Shall need less time for sleep; 5. Shall more seldom be troubled with the head-ache.’

12 September 1724
‘Crosses of the nature of that which I met with this week, thrust me quite below all comforts in religion. They appear no more than vanity and stubble, especially when I meet with them so unprepared for them. I shall not be fit to encounter them, except I have a far stronger and more permanent faith, hope, and love.’

30 September 1724
‘It has been a prevailing thought with me, to which I have given place in practice, that it is best sometimes to eat or drink, when it will do me no good, because the hurt that it will do me, will not be equal to the trouble of denying myself. But I have determined to suffer that thought to prevail no longer. The hurries of commencement and diversion of the vacancy, has been the occasion of my sinking so exceedingly, as in the last three weeks.’

The Diary Junction

Paddy’s broken road

John Murray has just published the final part of a trilogy by Patrick (Paddy) Leigh Fermor concerning his epic journey on foot across Europe in the mid-1930s. The first two parts, thought by some to be classics of travel literature, were written from memory 40-50 years after the journey and not published until the 1970s-1980s. Leigh Fermor died in 2011 and never completed the third part, but the new book - The Broken Road - has been compiled from early pieces of his writing, including a diary he kept during the latter stages of his walk.

Paddy was born in London in 1915, the son of a distinguished geologist then working in India, and spent the first four years of his life with a family in Northamptonshire while his mother and sister stayed with his father in India. Subsequently, he had trouble with schools, being expelled from some, and being sent to one for difficult children for a while. Nevertheless, he managed some learning, including Greek.

By the summer of 1933, still only 18, Paddy had tired of education and decided to live in London and become a writer. A few months later, though, he was off on the first of his many travels: a walk across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. The journey lasted from December 1933 to January 1935, and thereafter he travelled around Greece, settling with a Romanian noblewoman, Balasha Cantacuzène, first near Athens then in Moldavia.

Paddy served with the Irish Guards during the Second World War, and then joined the Special Operations Executive in 1941, helping to coordinate resistance in German-occupied Crete. He led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated a German commander. Captain Bill Stanley Moss, his second in command at the time, later wrote about the events in Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe, which was adapted into a film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger with Dirk Bogarde playing Paddy.

In 1950, Paddy published his first book, The Traveller’s Tree, about post-war travels in the Caribbean, and he went on to write several further books, including Mani and Roumeli, of his travels on mule and foot around remote parts of Greece. He was friendly with Lawrence Durrell, another writer on Greece (see The Diary Review - A book out of these scraps) who wrote of him in his Cyprus book, Bitter Lemons: ‘After a splendid dinner by the fire he starts singing, songs of Crete, Athens, Macedonia. When I go out to refill the ouzo bottle. . . I find the street completely filled with people listening in utter silence and darkness. Everyone seems struck dumb. “What is it?” I say, catching sight of Frangos. “Never have I heard of Englishmen singing Greek songs like this!” Their reverent amazement is touching; it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes.’

In 1968, after many years together, Paddy married Joan Elizabeth Rayner (née Eyres Monsell), daughter of the 1st Viscount Monsell. She accompanied him on his travels (until her death 2003) and the two were based partly near Kardamyli in the southern Peloponnese and partly in Gloucestershire, England. They had no children. Paddy was knighted in 2004, and he died in 2011. Further information can be found from Wikipedia, The New Yorker, various obituaries (The Guardian, for example, The Independent, the BBC), or from reviews of a ‘magnificent’ biography by Artemis Cooper published last year by John Murray (The Telegraph, The Daily Mail).

In 1977, John Murray published Paddy’s A Time of Gifts, often considered to be a classic of travel literature. This was a memoir of the first part of his journey on foot across Europe in 1933-1934. (Much of it can be read online at Googlebooks.) Nearly a decade later, a second volume appeared, Between the Woods and the Water; and a third, covering the final part of the walk to Constantinople (Istanbul), was promised but never completed: he laboured at this third book for years but never produced a manuscript. Now, in September 2013, John Murray (part of Hodder) has brought out a third volume edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper - The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos - by way of trying to complete the trilogy.

But this is a very different book to the first two since it is made up of two documents written by Paddy much earlier in his life, and not crafted by him to be the third book of the trilogy. The first, called ‘A Youthful Journey’, was inspired by a commission for a magazine on the pleasure of walking; and the second is a diary Paddy lost but, oddly, recovered in 1965.

In the book’s introduction - which can be read on the Hodder website - the editors provide a full explanation of the convoluted story behind The Broken Road, and some background on Paddy’s diaries. They also explain the genesis of the title chosen to indicate Paddy’s unfinished written journey, and the fact that the work is not the polished version he would have desired, ‘only the furthest in the end we [the editors] could go.’

‘One of the astonishing facts about A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water,’ the editors say, ‘is that they were written from memory, with no diaries or notebooks to sustain them. Paddy’s first diary was stolen in a Munich youth hostel in 1934, and those that succeeded it, along with his picaresque letters to his mother, were stored during the war in the Harrods Depository, where years later they were destroyed unclaimed. It was a loss, he used to say, that “still aches, like an old wound in wet weather”.’

However, in 1965, while researching an article on the Danube, he met up again with Balasha Cantacuzène, who he had not seen since the start of the war in 1939. She had saved his fourth and final diary, and returned it to him during this visit.

The editors continue: ‘Written in faded pencil, the Green Diary, as he called it, carries his life forward to 1935 after his walk was over, and is appended with sketches of churches, costumes, friends, vocabularies in Hungarian, Rumanian, Bulgarian and Greek, and the names and addresses of almost everyone he stayed with. But strangely, although the diary covered all his walk from the Iron Gates to Constantinople and more, he never collated it with ‘A Youthful Journey’. Perhaps its callowness jarred with the later, more studied manuscript, or their factual differences disconcerted him. The two narratives often diverge. Whatever the reason, the diary - which retained an almost talismanic significance for him - did nothing to solve his dilemma.’

Here are three partial extracts from the diary section of The Broken Road.

24 January 1935
‘I left Salonika last night; Patullo and Elphinstone came along with me to the boat, and we bought some bread, and salami and cheese by the harbour gates. I was glad they came, as it was already sunset, and it’s very lonely starting off on these journeys alone. The ship was surprisingly small; very dirty and overloaded with every kind of cargo, all of which was hauled on board in a surprisingly unworkmanlike way. The boat was a shambles inside too, with enormous banks of coal in the passages, and peasants lying in their blankets in despondent groups everywhere. We stood in the passages and smoked, and chatted, waiting for the bells to ring to announce departure, so they could get off; but the boat was nearly two hours late, and they nearly came away with me, which would have been rather serious for Patullo has to join a troopship for Hong Kong in a day or two at Port Said. [. . .]’

27 January 1935
‘I left Koutloumousiou early yesterday, and started off downhill, the road winding beside a rushing torrent, breaking over great boulders, and dashing on in a lather of white foam. The peninsula here is entirely forested with evergreens, so that it is difficult to believe it’s only January; among the ilexes and oleanders are many olives, aspens, cypresses and cedar. The higher slopes are almost entirely fir.

Coming round a corner I saw a funny little grey-haired man sitting on the edge of an old stone well, with some big brown paper parcels beside him. He wished me good day in French, and giving me a cigarette, began to tell me all about himself. He was from Kavalla, and had lived on the Holy Mountain for four years, making maps of it, and copying ikons on wood. He showed me a few of these, they were good.

The sea soon came into sight round a bend, and the large monastery of Iviron, the high walls appearing above the trees. These walls are lofty, and have the effect of being much higher than they are long, as they are divided into sort of rectangular bastions, rising sheer to quite a height without a single window, then suddenly branching out into an overhanging balcony, with undulating tiled roofs, and the plaster painted bright colours - red, blue, green, in crude designs.

Several monks were sitting on benches in the big, sunny cobbled courtyard, half asleep, stroking their beards. [. . .]’

28 January 1935
‘I left Iviron after an early lunch yesterday, the track running close along the shore, sometimes over the high rocks, sometimes over the pebbles and sand of the beach, and sometimes winding away inland, a little footpath between the trees. It was really a succession of Devonshire combes, but full of wildly growing evergreens, with now and then a squat stone hermitage standing on a ledge of the mountainside, surrounded by dark cypresses. [. . .]’

13 Lincoln’s Inn Field

Sir John Soane, an architect best remembered for his house in Lincoln’s Inn Field, now a famous museum, and for rebuilding the Bank of England, was born 260 years ago today. Though not known as a diarist, he did keep a notebook during the rebuilding of 13 Lincoln’s Inn Field. To celebrate the building’s 200th anniversary last year, the Soane museum scanned and transcribed the notebook so as to make it publicly available on its website.

Soane was born in Goring-on-Thames on 10 September 1753. His father, a bricklayer, died in 1768, after which he went to live with his much older brother. Aged 15, he began training as an architect under George Dance the Younger, and in 1771 he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. He did well there, gaining a silver medal the following year, and a gold medal in 1776 for designing a triumphal arch. He spent three years in Italy studying the ancient remains, and making original designs for public buildings. On returning to England in 1780, Soane struggled at first to find commissions to design country houses, but by the mid 1780s his services were in constant demand.

Soane married Elizabeth Smith, niece to the successful builder George Wyatt, in 1784. They had two sons that survived infancy. On the death of Wyatt in 1790, the couple inherited money and property, leading Soane to purchase 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He demolished the existing house, and rebuilt it to his own design. In 1788, he won the coveted post of architect to the Bank of England, a lucrative position that kept him busy for many years, and involved rebuilding most of the existing bank and doubling its size. Between 1789 and 1994, he also designed a new prison at Norwich Castle. He was noted, generally, for an original and personal interpretation of the Neoclassical style.

Among other appointments, Soane became professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, and architect for the Office of Works. His success enabled him, over the years, to buy and rebuild 13 and 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Number 13 is today the world famous Sir John Soane’s Museum. Soane was knighted in 1832, and the following year obtained an Act of Parliament through which his house became a national architecture museum. He died in 1837. Further information is available at Wikipedia, Royal Berkshire History or HistOracle.

Soane is not known as a diarist - indeed he is not listed in the extensive Annotated Bibliography of Diaries Printed in English, compiled by Christopher Handley. However, during the rebuilding of 13 Lincoln’s Inn Field - between July and October 1812 - he did keep a notebook. This is held by Sir John Soane’s Museum, and, in celebration of the building’s 200 anniversary last year (2012), it published the diary on its website. For each day, there is a scan of the original, a transcript, and a commentary. Here are some sample extracts and commentaries.

13 July 1812
‘Mr Tyndale gave up the possession of No. 13 this evening’

14 July 1812
‘Mr Tyndale compl. the removing his goods, wine etc.’

17 July 1812
‘Began pulling down’

1 August 1812
‘Completed pulling down and removing the old Mat. except a small part of the front wall and the back front wall’

28 August 1812
‘The floor was put on the floor of the Study and the walls of the Court raised several feet above the Ground floor of the House

Between the fascia over the Kitchen window and the paving of the Area are four course of stones in Height, the whole of the third and part of the fourth was completed this 29th Aug.’

Commentary: ‘Work has progressed rapidly at the back of the house. By this date the basement on the west side of the central courtyard was complete enabling the floor to be laid in the ‘Study’ (the Breakfast Room today). [. . .]’

6 October 1812
‘The two statues were brought here this morning punctually to Mr Sealy’s promise between 10 and 11 and in the course of the afternoon they were raised into their proper places and the workmen began to remove the upper part of the Scaffolding’

Commentary: ‘The two statues are the Coade Stone female figures after those on the Erechtheion in Athens, visible on the facade of No. 13. On November 6th Soane paid for them, noting in his accounts ‘Coade & Sealey £40’.’

13 October 1812.
‘The whole of the building covered in completely’

Commentary: ‘The final entry in Soane’s notebook marks the end of the project to build No.13, at least for this phase.  Soane would continue to make additions and alterations for the rest of his life, as his collection grew. [. . .]’

After private prayers

Margaret Hoby died all of 380 years ago today. She married three times, kept a rich household, and was a very religious person. There is nothing remarkable about her life except for the fact that she kept a diary, and that this is the oldest known extant diary - written over four centuries ago - by any English woman. Unfortunately, it is more a record of her private prayers than her private thoughts.

Margaret was born in 1571, the only child of a landed gentleman, Arthur Dakins of Linton, East Riding, and his wife Thomasine Gye. Margaret was educated at a school for young gentlewomen in a Puritan household. She married Walter Devereux, the younger son of Essex, and a court favorite of Queen Elizabeth I. The manor and parsonage of Hackness near Scarborough were purchased for the couple, and remained Margaret’s property after Devereux died at the siege of Rouen in 1591. She married Sir Thomas Sidney, but he died in 1595, and she then married Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby, son of the translator and English ambassador to France, in 1596. They lived at Hackness, but had no children. Margaret spent much of her time tending the sick and infirm in her own community, as well as running her household. She died on 4 September 1633.

A little further biographical information about Hoby can be found at Wikipedia, in A Historical Dictionary of British Women by Cathy Hartley, or in Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-representation, 1500-1660 (several authors).

Between 1599 and 1603, Margaret kept a diary fairly regularly. According to Arthur Ponsonby, editor of More English Diaries (1927), ‘she was no doubt instructed to keep a diary for the sake of religious discipline.’ He continues: ‘Her piety is very pronounced. Not only does she go to church frequently and listen to many sermons, but she has private prayers, writes out sermons, writes notes in her Testament, sings psalms, listens to lectures and nurses the sick. [. . .] But the diary is not exclusively confined to her religious exercises. We learn much of her daily occupations. How she gathers “apples”, exercises her “body at bowles a while of which I found good”; is busy “preserving quinces” and damsons, busy in the kitchen, busy dyeing woold, “stilling”, “working some fringe”, “dressing sores”, taking “the aire in my cocsh”, out fishing or relining “a sute of blake satan for Mr. Hoby”.

Ponsonby concludes the chapter in his book on Hoby by explaining that her manuscript is in the British Museum (now the British Library), but that he was able to read a transcript with full notes in the possession of the Librarian of the House of Lords. He, Ponsonby, recommends the diary ‘should be published in full’. In fact, it was edited a few years later by Dorothy M. Meads and published as Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599-1605 by George Routledge & Sons in 1930. Meads, however, can’t help but give vent to her own frustration that Hoby did not write more extensively on issues other than her religious devotions.

In her introduction Meads writes: ‘This daily record is of great value as a contemporary document, though it is not nearly so full as we would have it. The religious element is prominent, to the exclusion of much else, for the record seems to have been kept largely as a means of assisting in the religious exercise of self-examination, and only partly because it was useful in other ways. [. . .] Her daily personal record is very introspective, yet she shows no real capacity for self-knowledge or ability in self-analysis, for she sets down more or less conventional religious expressions of self-disparagement. A perusal of the contents of the diary gives one to think that she may have written with an eye on a possible reader, for we are rarely allowed a glimpse of the living woman. In spite of this barrier which she herself has raised, every detail of the record increases our acquaintance with her and our sympathy for her. She is interesting because she matters so much to herself.’

More recently, in 1998, Sutton Publishing brought out a new edition, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605 by Joanna Moody. The following extracts, though, come from Meads’ edition, which includes over 600 annotations (for 150 pages of diary text). In one of these notes - linked to the first extract below -  Meads cannot help but repeat the frustrations voiced in her introduction: ‘If only Lady Hoby had committed more of her feelings, impressions, and offences to paper, her diary would have increased greatly in interest’.

18 July 1600
‘After priuatt praers I went about the house and deliuered some directions to Iurden: after, I talked with my Cosine Isons and about his goinge to yorke, and then I went to diner: after, I was busie pouidinge some thinge to be carried to York: afte, I wrought and, lastly, I went to priuate examenation and praier: after, I went to supper, then I walked abroad: after, I Came in to publeck praers and, after, to priuate, wher I pleased the lord to touch my hart with such sorrow, for some offence Cometted, that I hope the lord, for his sonne sake, hath pardoned it accordinge to his promise, which is ever Iust: after, I reed apaper that wrought farther humiliation in me, I thanke god.’

17 October 1600
‘from thence I tooke my Iurnie to London wher, in the way, I was tould that order was giuen to fetch all the stuffe from york, and and to giue ouer house ther, vpon which and about we had laied forth 18li, which newes did much touch me, so that I procured Contrarie directions forth with: after I Came to london I praied, and was viseted with all my Cosines Cookes: then I praied after supper and went to bed, wher I was more meanly lodged, with so great Cost, then to my remembrance I was euer in my Life: and yet I was Glad of my brothers house’ [Meads believes this house was in The Strand or nearby].

5 May 1601
‘After praers I went to the church, wher I hard a sermon: after, I Came home and hard Mr Rhodes read: after diner I went abroad, and when I was come home I dressed some sore: after, I went to see a calfe at Munckmans, which had: 2: great heades, 4 eares, and had to ether head a throte pipe besides: the heades had long heares like brisels about the mouths, such as n’other Cowe hath: the hinder legges had no parting from the rumpe, but grewe backward, and were no longer but from the first Ioynte: also the backe bone was parted about the midest bicke, and a rowne howle was in the midest into the bodie of the Calfe: but one would haue thought that haue comed of strocke it might gett in the Cowes bely: after this I Came in to priuat medetation and praier.’

13 May 1603
‘his Majestie remoued from the Tower to Grennige’ [Greenwich]

7 June 1603
‘this day Mr Hoby and my selfe remoued from London in kent, to Mr Bettnames house, wher, I praise god, I had my health very well’ [those not with a need to remain at court had been ordered to leave London because of the plague, Meads explains, because James was alarmed at the multitudes besieging the court]

20 June 1603
‘this day we removed from thence towards Yorkshere, and the first night lay at Barnett’

21 June 1603
‘this day we lay at Noth hamton’

22 June 1603
‘at Ashbye, wher I kissed the Queens hand’

23 June 1603
‘we lay at Notingame’

24 June 1603
‘we lay at Dankester’

25 June 1600
‘at Yorke, wher we staied all the Lordes day’

27 June 1603
‘we lay at Linton wt my Cosine Dakins’

28 June 1603
‘we Came safe, I praise god, to Hacknis’

27 September 1603
‘thes day we hard from Hacknes that all there was well, But that the sicknes was freared to be at Roben Hood bay, not farr off: I Continewe my accostomed exercises but my increasinges in goodes waies is not as I thirst for’

The Diary Junction

The workings of Delacroix

‘The craft of the painter is the most difficult of all and it takes longest to learn. Like composing, painting requires erudition, but it also requires execution, like playing a violin.’ This is the great French romantic painter, Eugène Delacroix, who died 150 years ago today. The quote comes from his diary, almost as famous in art circles as his painting, for it provides so much insight into the painter’s life. Early diary entries, for example, show his youthful passion for women; and running through all the journal there are rich references to his opinions on other artists (living and dead), as well as to the work on his own paintings and his thoughts on artistic techniques.

Delacroix was born at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, near Paris, in 1798. As a school boy, he won awards for drawing, and in 1815 began to study under the painter Pierre Guérin, and was trained in the neoclassical style of Jacques Louis David. His first painting - The Barque of Dante, also known as Dante and Virgil in Hell - was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1822. Though largely disliked by the public it was purchased by the government, and now hangs in the Louvre. That same year, he received the backing of Louis Thiers, the statesman and historian who, as interior minister in the 1830s, would put Delacroix in charge of architectural decorations.

In 1825, Delacroix travelled to England, where he had contact with, and was influenced by, the painters J. M. W. Turner and John Constable. Thereafter, he achieved popular success with canvasses of vivid colour, the most well-known of which, Liberty Leading the People, came in 1830. A year later he was awarded the Legion of Honour, and then, in 1832, he travelled to Morocco, a journey which inspired his painting hugely.

In Delacroix’s mature years, he received many government commissions for murals and ceiling paintings, and he also illustrated many works of literature. In 1857, after several unsuccessful attempts, he was finally elected to the Institut de France. Delacroix never married (despite his early interest in women - see below) and for the last two decades of his life was cared for by a housekeeper. He died on 13 August 1863. His paintings are considered to characterise 19th century romanticism, while his bold technical innovations strongly influenced the development of later modernist movements. Further biographical information is readily available from, for example, Wikipedia, Artble, or Musée Eugène Delacroix.

Delacroix was not only a great painter, but he was a first class diarist too. His journal is thought by some to be among the most important works in the literature of art history, and certainly provides much insight into his life, his painting and his pictures. Although extracts had been published earlier, a full version in four volumes did not appear until 1893, compiled from hand-written copies by Paul Flat and René Piot. A new version, in three volumes, came in 1932. This led to a translation in English by Walter Pach in 1937, and another in 1951 by Lucy Norton. This latter version was edited and annotated by Hubert Wellington, and published by Phaidon. Much more recently, José Corti in Paris has published a new version in French of the journal, as edited by Michèle Hannoosh.

Writing for the website 19th Century Art Worldwide, David O’Brien says this of the new version: Eugène Delacroix’s Journal is one of the most famous and influential texts ever written by an artist, and yet, its contents and form have never been entirely stable. It has appeared in many, very different versions. The new edition under consideration here, edited by Michèle Hannoosh, completely revises those that have preceded it. It brings a new standard to documentary research on Delacroix and significantly changes our understanding of him.’ O’Brien goes on to give many details from Hannoosh’s introduction, including a synthesis of the complicated history surrounding Delacroix’s journals, and he explains in some detail why he believes the new version is so valuable.

The earliest editions of Delacroix’s journals in French can be found at Internet Archive. Wikiquote has a generous collection of extracts in English, and the Painting OWU blog has a few too. The following extracts from Delacroix’s diary (including the very first) are taken from the printed version translated by Lucy Norton and edited by Hubert Wellington. Wellington’s introduction concludes as follows: ‘There is one unifying quality in all that Delacroix did - his passionate quest for nobility, grandeur and the sublime, in art and in the lives of the great men who had formed his standards. It runs through his painting from ‘Dante and Virgil’ to ‘Jacob and the Angel’: the Journal shows it behind all the workings of his mind.’

3 September 1822
‘I am beginning my journal; the Journal I have so often planned to write. My keenest wish is to remember that I am writing only for myself; this will keep me truthful, I hope, and it will do me good. These pages will reproach me for my instability. I am beginning in good spirits.

I am staying with my brother. It is evening, and the church clock in Louroux has just struck nine or ten. I am sitting for a while in the moonlight, on the little bench by the door, trying to collect my thoughts. But although I feel contented enough this evening, I cannot recapture the mood of last night. Then there was a full moon, and seated on the bench outside my brother’s house I spent some hours of perfect happiness. Some friends had been dining with us, and after seeing them home we walked round the pond and came back to the house; my brother read the newspaper and I took up some of the Michelangelo engravings which I have brought with me. These wonderful drawings moved me deeply and put me into a happy frame of mind. In the clear sky a big red moon was slowly climbing between the trees, and in the midst of my meditations, and just as my brother happened to be talking about love, I heard Lisette’s voice in the distance. It has a sound that makes my heart beat faster and is her greatest charm, for she’s not exactly pretty, yet there is something about her of that quality which Raphael understood so well. The line of her arms is pure, like bronze, strong-looking yet delicate, and this girl, who is really not pretty, has a beguiling way with her, an enchanting mixture of sensuality and modesty - for instance, when she came in, and although I don’t usually care for her in tight Sunday clothes, I found her irresistibly attractive at that moment, especially for that heavenly smile I was speaking about. Someone was telling a bawdy story; it amused her yet caused her to look down and sideways in embarrassment. She was quite genuinely embarrassed, for when she answered some trivial question of mine her voice trembled a little and she avoided looking at me; besides, I could see the fluttering of her breast under her kerchief. I think it was on that same evening that I kissed her, in the dark passage as we came through the house into the garden on our way back from the village. I had stayed behind with her and allowed the others to go on ahead. She kept telling me to stop, but very softly and sweetly. But it all means very little; this is not important. The thought of her will not haunt me like a violent love affair. It will be nothing but a charming memory, a flower by the wayside. Her voice reminds me of Elizabeth Salter [an English girl in service with his sister] whom I’m already beginning to forget.

On Sunday morning I had a letter from Felix telling me that my picture had been hung in the Luxembourg [Dante and Virgil exhibited at the 1822 Salon in Paris]. Today is Tuesday, and I am still full of it. I must confess that it has done me a lot of good and that when I think about it the day brightens quite appreciably. At present I can think of nothing else; it has made me long to be back in Paris, where in all probability I should find nothing but concealed envy, and would soon be bored with what makes me feel triumphant now - and where there would be no Lisette, no moonlight, and none of this peaceful atmosphere.

Must try to remember all that I have planned to do in order to keep myself busy when I get to Paris, and all the ideas I’ve had about subjects for pictures.’

5 September 1822
‘Went out shooting with my brother; the heat was stifling. I shot a quail as I swung round and Charles congratulated me. What is more, it was our only success, although I had three shots at rabbits.

In the evening we went to meet Lisette, who was coming to mend some shirts for me. I took advantage of being a little behind the others to kiss her; she struggled, and it vexed me because I could see she meant it seriously. When we next met I tried again, but she quickly shook me off saying that if she wanted to she’d be sure and let me know. Then my feelings were really hurt and I pushed her away and strolled up and down in the lane under the rising moon. I came across her once more as she was drawing water for supper, but although I felt inclined to sulk and not go back to her I finally yielded to temptation. ‘Then you don’t love me?’ - ‘No!’ - ‘Do you like anyone else?’ - ‘I don’t love anybody’, or some such ridiculous answer, meaning, ‘Let me alone!’ This time, hurt and annoyed, I crossly let go her hand and turned my back on her. She gave a faint laugh, it was not really a laugh but the remains of her half-serious protest, but it has left a disagreeable taste.’

3 March 1847
‘Today, Wednesday, repainted the rocks in the background of the ‘Christ’ and finished the lay-in, the Magdalen, and the naked figure in the foreground. I wish I had applied the paint rather more thickly in this lay-in. It is incredible how time smooths out a picture; my Sibyl seems to me to have sunk into the canvas, already. It is a thing I must watch carefully.’

6 March 1847
‘After a good night’s rest I went back to the studio where I recovered my good humour. I am looking at the ‘Hunts’, by Rubens. The one I prefer is the hippopotamus hunt; it is the fiercest. I like its heroic emphasis, I love its unfettered exaggerated forms, I adore them as much as I despise those gushing empty-headed women who swoon over fashionable portraits and M. Verdi’s music.’

10 July 1847
‘Painted the Magdalen in the ‘Entombment’.

Must remember the simple effect of the head. It was laid in with a very dull, grey tone. I could not make up my mind whether to put it more into shadow or to make the light passages more brilliant. Finally, I made them slightly more pronounced compared with the mass and it sufficed to cover the whole of the part in shadow with warm and reflected tones. Although the light and shadow were almost the same value, the cold tones of the light and the warm tones of the shadow were enough to give accent to the whole.’

18 September 1847 ‘The craft of the painter is the most difficult of all and it takes longest to learn. Like composing, painting requires erudition, but it also requires execution, like playing a violin.’

The Diary Junction

Able at times to cry

The British Library has just put on display - in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures’ Gallery - one of only three journals kept by the great Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden. The Library recently paid nearly £50,000 at auction for the single volume, written in 1939, and says it ‘provides a fascinating juxtaposition of personal and political preoccupations’ and ‘gives an intimate insight into Auden during one of the most important periods in his life’. Although there is no particular link with the diaries, I cannot resist appending a few lines of Auden’s poetry from my favourite poem, Able At Times To Cry.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, in 1907, the third of three sons, though the family moved to Solihull soon after, when his father took an appointment as a school medical officer. He was educated at boarding schools in Surrey (where he met Christopher Isherwood) and Norfolk, before entering Christ Church, Oxford, to study biology at first, then English. At Oxford, he made friends with, among others, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, all of whom would go on to find artistic or literary fame.

From the mid-1920s, through the 1930s, Isherwood acted both as Auden’s literary mentor and occasional lover. After a sojourn together in Berlin, Auden returned to Britain and took work teaching. T. S Eliot at Faber and Faber accepted his first book of poems, published in 1930. In 1935, Auden married Erika Mann, the daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann. It was a marriage of convenience to enable her to gain British citizenship and escape Nazi Germany. From the mid-1930s, Auden worked as a freelance lecturer and writer, and, for a while, he was employed by the GPO Film Unit, for which he wrote the famous Night Mail. Through his work for the GPO, he met the composer Benjamin Britten, with whom he went on to collaborate on many projects.

In early 1939, Auden sailed, with Isherwood, for the United States (the photograph shows them both in February 1939), and there met the poet Chester Kallman. Although their affair only lasted two years, they remained lifelong friends, and, from 1953, shared a home. During the war, Auden taught at various colleges. He was called up to be drafted in 1942, but was rejected on medical grounds; in 1945 he worked briefly with the US Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany studying German morale. In 1946, he became a naturalised American, and the following year he published The Age of Anxiety for which he won the Pullitzer Prize.

From 1948, Auden began to spend his summers in Europe, in Ishchia, Italy, and then in Kirchstetten, Austria. He was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973; and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University between 1956 and 1961, though this latter post only required his presence for three weeks a year. He returned to live in Oxford in 1972, and died the following year. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Poets.org, and the Poetry Foundation.

Auden is admired, Poets.org says, ‘for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. . . His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.’

The Poetry Foundation says this: ‘Much of [Auden’s] poetry is concerned with moral issues and evidences a strong political, social, and psychological context. While the teachings of Marx and Freud weighed heavily in his early work, they later gave way to religious and spiritual influences. Some critics have called Auden an “antiromantic” - a poet of analytical clarity who sought for order, for universal patterns of human existence. Auden’s poetry is considered versatile and inventive, ranging from the tersely epigrammatic to book-length verse, and incorporating a vast range of scientific knowledge.’

Auden is known to have kept only three journals, and one of them came up for auction last June at Christie’s in London. The lot was described as follows: ‘Autograph manuscript journal and notebook, 30 August - 26 November 1939 (chiefly September and early October), autograph title ‘Journal August 1938 [sic]’, in pen and pencil, many passages lightly cancelled in pencil (?after copying), written primarily on rectos, the facing blanks often used for aphorisms, quotations, reading notes, metrical experiments and other fragmentary lines, the last c.20 leaves almost entirely verse drafts, quotations and records of popular phrases, the verse including drafts and sketches for at least eight sections of ‘New Year Letter’, as well as unpublished material, 93 leaves, 4to (258 x 198mm), plus a few blanks, in a notebook (label of ‘Eye-ease paper ... “Easy on the Eyes” ’), cloth-backed boards.’

The diary opens with a brief self-description: ‘At 32½ I suppose I shall not change physically very much for some time except in weight which is now 154 lbs . . . I am happy, but in debt . . . I have no job. My visa is out of order. There may be a war. But I have an epithalamion to write and cannot worry much’. Inevitably, Christie’s description says, ‘the early pages are written in the shadow of the impending outbreak of the war in Europe, and include a substantial narration (running to 8½ pages) of his activities and preoccupations on 1 September 1939, which sheds light on the composition and content of his famous poem of the same name’.

The lot description gives further information on the diary’s content: ‘Auden is perhaps not a natural diarist - the journal is always more preoccupied with thoughts and reflections rather than activities and observations, and in the latter pages takes on rather the character of a commonplace book or verse notebook; nevertheless, it reveals much about the poet’s associations at this pivotal period of his life (including with Kallman, George Davis, Gerald Heard, Archibald MacLeish, and others), his reading (Milton, Laura Riding, Flaubert), the importance to him of music (especially Wagner), his drinking, smoking and consumption of Benzedrine and Seconal, his dreams (including one of having a wasp down his trousers) and his intellectual preoccupations, including reflections on fascism/communism, sex, marriage (‘One wants marriage ... so that one does not feel abandoned. Apart from that one takes what is handy’), Thomas Mann, the Founding Fathers, science and medicine and much else.’

Christie’s quotes the following aphorisms and observations found in the diary:
- ‘All the great heretics Pascal, Rousseau, Lawrence, Kafka etc have been sick men’;
- ‘Mean like the American habit of washing one’s hands after pissing, as if the penis were an object, too filthy for any decent person to touch’;
- ‘All bureaucrats should be obliged to prove that they have a happy love-life, and immigration officials most of all’;
- ‘Tried to read Milton’s Apology for a Pamphlet but couldn’t. The adjectives are wonderful but there are too many of them’;
- ‘My hatred of women is such that if I am not afraid of them . . . I am cruel’;
- ‘It is impossible to listen to music and get an erection at the same time’.

The auction house description concludes: ‘Providing an incomparable insight into the poet’s activities and reflections at the turning point in his life, this is the most substantial and significant Auden manuscript to have been offered at auction.’

On 12 June, the British Library purchased the diary at Christie’s for £47,475. In a press release, it stated that ‘the journal, which provides a fascinating juxtaposition of personal and political preoccupations, gives an intimate insight into Auden during one of the most important periods in his life.’ It further adds: ‘Auden’s reflections in the diary are particularly interesting as they were written during the turbulent period which saw the outbreak of war in Europe and after Auden leaves England for the United States with novelist Christopher Isherwood, a decision considered shamefully unpatriotic by the British media and which even occasioned strong criticism in Parliament.’ The journal is now on display in the Library’s Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery.

1 September 1939
‘Woke with a headache after a night of bad dreams in which C[hester] was unfaithful. Paper reports German attack on Poland ... 6.0 pm. Benjamin [Britten] and Peter Piers [sic] came to lunch. Peter sang B’s new settings of Les Illuminations and some H. Wolf ... which made me cry. B played some of Tristan which seems particularly apposite today. Now I sit looking out over the river. Such a beautiful evening and in an hour, they say, England will be at war ... 10.30 Went to the Dizzy Club. A whiff of the old sad life. I want. I want. Je ne m’occupe plus de cela. Stopped to listen to the news coming out of an expensive limousine’

3 September 1939
‘War declared this morning at 7 a.m. Listened in the afternoon to a broadcast of the first 1½ acts of Tristan. Everyone very kind, some rather drunk. The frogs sang all night. We sang spirituals out on the lawn.’

Several of the famous (and gay) writers/artists associated with Auden were regular diarists, and have, previously, been the subject of Diary Review articles: Christopher Isherwood (Isherwood giving thanks), Benjamin Britten (Britten’s firecracker crits), and Stephen Spender (The ghost of a reader). Finally, on a personal note, my own favourite poem of all time is one by Auden, written in June 1937. Originally called As He Is, it was later also titled Able At Times To Cry, and - as I cannot find it anywhere else on the web - I can’t resist appending a couple of verses here.

‘Wrapped in a yielding air, beside
The flower’s soundless hunger
Close to the tree’s clandestine tide
Close to the bird’s high fever,
Loud in his hope and his anger,
Erect about his skeleton,
Stands the expressive lover
Stands the deliberate man.

Beneath the hot incurious sun,
Past stronger beasts and fairer
He picks his way, a living gun,
With gun and lens and bible
A militant enquirer,
The friend, the rash, the enemy,
The essayist, the able
Able at times to cry.’

Nooteboom in Berlin 1963

Happy Birthday Cees Nooteboom, eighty today. A noted Dutch novelist, Nooteboom has won various awards, not least the prestigious Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, but is equally well known for his travel journalism. Recently, a translation into English of his writing about Berlin has been published in English, and this contains several diary entries about his first experiences of the Berlin Wall in 1963. They are so readable and interesting that one hopes Nooteboom has a stash of diaries to be published one day.

Cornelis (Cees) Nooteboom was born on 31 July 1933 in The Hague, Netherlands, the middle child of three. His parents separated, then his father died as a result of a bombing in 1945. After the war, Nooteboom’s mother took the family to live in Tilburg, and she remarried. Nooteboom was educated largely at religious schools. He made use of some early experiences hitchhiking around Europe for his first novel, Philip en de anderen (Philip and the Others), which, subsequently, became a classic of Dutch literature. After various clerical jobs, he found work as a journalist, with the weekly magazine Elsevier, then with the newspaper de Volkskrant, and then, in 1967, he became travel editor of the magazine Avenue. Meanwhile, he also published further novels and books of poetry.

In 1980, Nooteboom published Rituelen (Rituals) which was later made into a film. This book, Nooteboom himself says, marked the beginning of the second phase in his career as a writer, in which he produced many more poems, novels, novellas and anthologies of pieces on travel and art. In 1987, he taught for six months at the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1989 the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) invited him to live for a year in Berlin, from where he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and wrote about it for many European newspapers. In 1991, his novel Het volgende verhaal (The Following Story) was given away free for Dutch Book Week.

Nooteboom has lived in Amsterdam since 1954. He married Fanny Lichtveld in 1957, but the marriage was annulled in 1964. For some years he was in a relationship with the singer, Liesbeth List, but is now married to Simone Sassen, and they divide their time between Amsterdam and Minorca. In 2009, Nooteboom was awarded the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, the most important literary award in the Dutch-speaking world. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia or Encyclopaedia Britannica own website.

I do not know if Nooteboom keeps a diary or not - I hope so - but one of his recent books translated into English - Roads to Berlin - contains a few early diary entries. His first Dutch book on Berlin - Berlijnse Notities - was published in 1990 and a second book - Terugkeer naar Berlijn - in 1997. Texts from both these books were collected with new material for a more recent publication, Berlijn 1989/2009. This has now been translated by Laura Watkinson, and published in English by Maclehose Press, London (2012) as Roads to Berlin.

The Maclehose Press website quotes a few reviews: ‘It is a wonderful voyage of self-discovery, and a psychological exploration of a nation in turmoil’ in the Financial Times; ‘Nooteboom wears his erudition lightly, and weaves personal anecdote into memorable reportage’ in The Sunday Telegraph; ‘there is a melancholy in his writing and a nostalgia for the past, both of which are very German - or at least used to be’ in The Spectator; and ‘his Berlin reportage, from a 1963 Khrushchev rally in East Berlin to the tearing down of the Palast der Republik, brilliantly captures the intensity of the capital and its associated layers of memory,’ in The Economist.

Several pages of the Kindle edition (by Quercus) can be read freely online at Amazon. Here is one diary extract to be found in the Prologue.

15 January 1963
‘West Berlin. You drive down Kurfürstendamm, which is bedecked with high, white lights, to the corroded, mutilated Gedächtniskirche, and then onwards. To your surprise, you see that the West has its own ruins: magnificent, hollowed-out monuments and empty windows with no rooms behind them, chunks of fossilised war, bricked-up doors that no smiling father will ever pass through again, off for a walk with Werner the dog. The only crossing point for non-German, non-military personnel is in Friedrichstraße, but we end up at the Brandenburger Tor by mistake. Snow and moonlight. Nothing on the frozen square in front of the gate: no people, no cars. Along the edge of that space, the black columns topped by the quadriga, the triumphal chariot. Four horses race along, pulling a winged figure that holds aloft a wreath, towards the east. Beneath, a quarter of the height of the columns, the blunt teeth of the Wall. A West German policeman signals that we are not allowed to drive on. So we stay where we are and watch things not happening. Two Russian tanks stand up high on huge pedestals, a reminder of 1945. We see two Russian sentries, shadows amidst the marble.

Friedrichstraße is not far from here. The same checks as at Helmstedt: documents, pieces of paper, money being counted, barriers, a classic copperplate engraving through which we move, remaining as human as possible. Two low walls have been erected across the road so that a driver would have to perform a dramatic swerve if he wanted to get through quickly. When all the German boxes have been ticked, we are allowed through, and the city continues, the way cities do after walls: the same, yet different. It is probably just me being oversensitive, but it smells different here, and everything looks browner. [. . .]

Not much traffic. Lots of neon signs. Is it a disappointment? Would I have liked it to be more dramatic? And why do I think I have any right to expect something? Two motionless soldiers stand guard in front of a monument. At Alexanderplatz, a steam train passes over a viaduct, but otherwise there is nothing to report - the occasional sign with words that look rather unread, slogans talking to themselves.’

Haig and Wordsworth

The diaries of Field Marshal Douglas Haig and of Dorothy Wordsworth have just been added to the UK Memory of the World Register, a Unesco initiative to list documentary heritage of cultural significance. Haig’s diaries are considered important for the insight they provide into army operations during the First World War; and Wordsworth’s journal is judged a literary work of international significance, as well as having been an inspiration to her more famous poet brother.

Unesco announced on 9 July that 11 items had been selected from the UK’s libraries, archives and museums to represent the outstanding heritage of the United Kingdom. From the Domesday Book to Hitchcock’s Silent Films, it said, these priceless items span nearly 900 years, come from across the country and embody pivotal moments in the history of their communities and the UK as a whole. Included among the 11 new items are two diary-based collections: the Haig diaries, held by the National Library of Scotland, and the Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal, held by the Wordsworth Trust.

This was the third group of inscriptions to Unesco’s UK Memory of the World Register, an online catalogue created to help promote the UK’s documentary heritage across the UK and the world, and follows two earlier groups of inscriptions in 2010 and 2011 - the latter of which included Anne Lister’s diaries. See The Diary Junction for more on Lister’s diaries.

As well as country-specific registers, Unesco also administers an International Member of the World Register (‘a catalogue of documentary heritage of global significance and outstanding universal value’) which includes a number of UK collections.

For the UK Memory of the World Register, Unesco’s announcement said this of Haig’s diaries: ‘The role of the British Army in the First World War and the competence or otherwise of her generals continues to be a subject of debate. As Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Field Marshal Douglas Haig commanded the largest British Army ever assembled and, for his role in the war, has become arguably the most controversial general in the Army’s history. Haig kept a diary throughout the war, and this momentous document now forms part of Haig’s personal papers at the National Library of Scotland.

The diary is vital to understanding key battles such as the Somme and Passchendaele through Haig’s own words, recorded on an almost daily basis. It is of national importance because, although no one single document can tell the whole story, it is at the heart of the documentary evidence that has informed modern opinion on the First World War. Whilst research in more recent years has begun to move away from focusing on the successes or failures of a small number of generals, the diary has remained central to an understanding of not just the role played by Haig, but of the British Army, her generals and her allies. It offers an insight into how and why decisions were made as events unfolded in the fields of Belgium, France and beyond. Regardless of one’s viewpoint on Haig’s own character or abilities, the diary is an essential element of the documentary heritage of the First World War. Written in these circumstances, the diary offers an immediacy that few documentary sources can in the day-to-day record and analysis of this cataclysm.’

Haig was born in Edinburgh in 1861, and educated at Clifton School, Bristol, and Oxford University. He entered the army in 1885, serving as a cavalry officer in the Sudan and distinguishing himself in South Africa during the Boer War. He served under Lord Kitchener in India. From 1905 to 1909 he played an important role in reforming the British Army. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Haig served as Commander of the First Army Corps of the British Expeditionary Force, and shortly after, in 1915, was promoted to Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force.

Although greatly admired among his fellow officers, Haig was mistrusted by the Prime Minister, Lloyd George who considered he was wasting soldiers’ lives without any prospect of victory. During 1919, Haig served as Commander-in-Chief Home Forces in Great Britain; he retired in 1920, devoting much energy to improving the welfare of ex-servicemen; and he died in 1928. His role during the war remains controversial to this day, with some claiming he was a butcher, a class-based incompetent commander, unable to grasp modern tactics and technologies, and others maintaining that his role was crucial in defeating the German army through a war of attrition.

Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia and the National Library of Scotland website. Here is part of Haig’s diary entry for the day the war ended.

11 November 1918
‘Fine day but cold and dull. –

Reports from Foch’s H.Q. state that meeting with German delegates (which took place in train in the Forest of Compiègne, not in Château as previously reported) began at 2 a.m. and at 5 a.m. the Armistice was signed. The Germans pointed out that if the rolling stock & supplies of the Army (which have to be handed over by the terms of the Armistice) are given up, then Germans East of the Rhine will starve. Report says Foch was rather brutal to the German delegates, and replied that that was their affair!

The Armistice came into force at 11 a.m.

The state of the German Army is said to be very bad, and the discipline seems to have become so low that the orders of the officers are not obeyed. Capt[ai]n von Helldorf who tried to get back to Spa from Compiègne with the terms of the Armistice by night was fired at deliberately by the German troops [ ] and could not pass, while on another they broke up the bridges so that he could proceed.

At 11 a.m. I had a meeting in Cambrai with the 5 Army Com[mande]rs’ and Gen. Kavanagh Com[mandin]g Cavalry Corps. I explained that for the moment my orders are to advance onto a sector of the German frontier 32 miles wide extending from Verviers (exclusive) to Houffalize in the South. The Northern half of this sector would be held by the 2nd army; South[er]n half by 4th army. The other armies w[oul]d for the present either stand fast, or send back behind railheads such divisions as could not be easily supplied. Each army sent forward would consist of 4 Corps = 32 Div[isio]ns. The remaining 28 Div[isio]ns w[oul]d be under the command of the 1st, 3rd, & 5th Army Commanders. The selection of Div[isio]ns had been made for reasons of man-power & recruiting, but I sh[oul]d be glad of any suggestions from Army Com[mande]rs in the subject.

I then pointed out the importance of looking after the troops during the period following the cessation of hostilities – Very often the best fighters are the most difficult to deal with in periods of quiet! I suggested a number of ways in which men can be kept occupied. It is [as much] the duty of all officers to kept their men amused, as it is to train them for war. Staff officers must – If funds are wanted, G.H.Q. should be informed & I’ll arrange for money to be found.

After the Conference, we were all taken on the Cinema! Gen. Plumer, whom I told to ‘go off and be cinema’ed’ went off most obediently and stood before the camera, trying to look his best, while Byng, & others near him were chaffing the old man and trying to make him laugh.’

‘Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journal,’ the Unesco announcement said, ‘is a work of literature of international significance. It was also the inspiration for her brother William, one of the leading figures of British Romanticism. The journal gives readers today a unique insight into the lives of these two remarkable people.  William and Dorothy Wordsworth arrived at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, in 1799, when they were both in their late twenties. In May 1800, William left Grasmere for a short absence and Dorothy decided to write a journal for his ‘pleasure’ when he returned. So began a journal that she continued to write for the next thirty or so months.

Four notebooks survive; a fifth, covering most of 1801, is now missing. The journal was written largely within the Dove Cottage household and describes in Dorothy’s beautiful prose her observations of domestic life, her neighbourhood and the natural world. It also records one of the world’s greatest poets at work.  From the journal we can picture the scene of brother and sister walking, talking, reading and writing together. It is an intimate portrait of a life in a place which, to them, was an earthly paradise.’

Further information on Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal can be found at the Wordsworth Trust website, The Diary Junction and The Diary Review. Here is one extract from the diary considered particularly interesting for it is known to have inspired Wordsworth’s most famous poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.

15 April 1802
‘The wind was furious... the Lake was rough... When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up -- But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here & there a little knot & a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity & unity & life of that one busy highway... -- Rain came on, we were wet.’


The Diary Junction