To clarify my thoughts

RIP Oliver Sacks, a British neurologist, whose books about patients with neurological conditions sold widely, largely because of his literary flare and his ability to make medical science accessible. Indeed, his books were so popular that, despite their rather obscure content, some were turned into plays and films. Sacks was an inveterate keeper of journals and notebooks, amassing more than 1,000. However, only one has ever been published in book form, the record of a short trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, with a group of fern lovers!

Sacks was born in London, the youngest of four children, in 1933. His father was a physician, and his mother was one of the country’s first female surgeons. During the war, he was sent with a brother to a boarding school in the Midlands. Thereafter, he attended St Paul’s School in London and Queen’s College, Oxford. He graduated in 1956 with a degree in physiology and biology, and then continued to study medicine, with an internship at Middlesex Hospital, completing this in 1960. Uncertain of his next move, he travelled to Canada, and then the US where he took a residency in neurology at Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco, and fellowships in neurology and psychiatry at University of California, Los Angeles.

Sacks then moved to New York, where, in 1966, he became professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine, and consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. At the latter, he recognized a group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in a frozen state, as survivors of sleepy sickness pandemic in the 1910s and 1920s. He treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, enabling them to come back to life. He published their stories in a 1973 book, Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter and a film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

From 1966 also, Sacks worked as: an instructor and later clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (until 2007); a neurological consultant to various nursing homes run by the Little Sisters of the Poor; and a consulting neurologist at Bronx Psychiatric Center. From 1992, he held an appointment at the New York University School of Medicine (to 2007). In 2007, he joined the faculty of Columbia University Medical Center as a professor of neurology and psychiatry; and from 2012, he returned to New York University School of Medicine as a professor of neurology and consulting neurologist at the epilepsy center.

After Awakenings, Sacks published more than half a dozen more books based on case histories of his patients - such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and The Mind’s Eye - as well as several autobiographical memoirs, including Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. In 2015, he published On the Move: A Life, which revealed for the first time personal details about his adult life: a somewhat wild youth, full of drugs, motorbikes and obsessive bodybuilding, followed by several decades of celibacy and living alone. In 2008, he began a relationship with the writer Bill Hayes. Towards the end of his life, he wrote movingly about his own health issues. He died two weeks ago on 30 August. Further biographical information is available from the Oliver Sacks website and Wikipedia, or from obituaries in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Eonomist.

Oliver Sacks was an obsessive diarist and note taker. A dozen years or so before his death, he assessed his collection of journals as totalling over 1,000. Yet they were all written for himself alone without a thought for publication. Here is Sacks himself, writing on the last-but-on page of his autobiography On the Move: ‘They called me Inky as a boy, and I still seem to get as ink stained as I did seventy years ago. I started keeping journals when I was fourteen and at last count had nearly a thousand. They come in all shapes and sizes, from little pocket ones which I carry around with me to enormous tomes. I always keep a notebook by my bedside, for dreams as well as nighttime thoughts, and I try to have one by the swimming pool or the lakeside or the seashore; swimming too is very productive of thoughts which I must write, especially if they present themselves, as they sometimes do, in the form of whole sentences or paragraphs.

When writing my Leg book, I drew heavily on the detailed journals I had kept as a patient in 1974. Oaxaca Journal, too, relied heavily on my handwritten notebooks. But for the most part, I rarely look at the journals I have kept for the greater part of a lifetime. The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.

My journals are not written for others, nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are a special, indispensable form of talking to myself. The need to think on paper is not confined to notebooks. It spreads onto the backs of envelopes, menus, whatever scraps of paper are at hand. And 1 often transcribe quotations I like, writing or typing them on pieces of brightly colored paper and pinning them to a bulletin board. When I lived in City Island, my office was full of quotations, bound together with binder rings that I would hang to the curtain rods above my desk.’

In fact, Sacks did, during his lifetime, release a very few extracts for publication, including two articles for a magazine, and the diary he kept on a tour to Mexico to study ferns, published as Oaxaca Journal by National Geographic in 2001. Of this latter, Sacks says, on his website: ‘I have been an inveterate keeper of journals since I was fourteen, especially at times of adventure and crisis and travel. Here, for the first time, such a journal made its way to publication, not that much changed from the raw, handwritten journal that I kept during my fascinated nine days in Oaxaca.’

It is also worth reproducing Sack’s own introduction in the book (available to preview at Googlebooks), as it sheds more light on his diary habits.

‘I used to delight in the natural history journals of the nineteenth century, all of them blends of the personal and the scientific - especially Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago, Bate’s Naturalist on the River Amazons, and Spruce’s Notes of a Botanist, and the work which inspired them all (and Darwin too), Alexander von Humbolt’s Personal Narrative. It pleased me to think that Wallace, Bates, and Spruce were all crisscrossing in one another’s paths, leapfrogging, on the same stretch of the Amazon during the selfsame months of 1849, and to think that all of them were good friends. (They continued to correspond throughout their lives, and Wallace was to publish Spruce’s Notes after his death.)

They were all, in a sense, amateurs - self-educated, self-motivated, not part of an institution - and they lived, it sometimes seemed to me, in a halcyon world, a sort of Eden, not yet turbulent and troubled by the almost murderous rivalries which were soon to mark an increasingly professionalized world (the sort of rivalries so vividly portrayed in H. G. Wells’s story “The Moth”.

This sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egotism and a lust for priority and fame, still survives here and there, it seems to me, in certain natural history societies, and amateur societies of astronomers and archaeologists, whose quiet yet essential existences are virtually unknown to the public. It was the sense of such an atmosphere that drew me to the American Fern Society in the first place, and that incited me to go with them on their fern-tour to Oaxaca early in 2000. And it was the wish to explore this atmosphere which, in part, incited me to keep a journal there. There was much else, of course: my introduction to a people, a country, a culture, a history, of which I knew almost nothing - this was wonderful, an adventure in itself - and the fact that all journeys incite me to keep journals. Indeed I have been keeping them since the age of fourteen, and in the year and a half since my visit to Oaxaca, I have been in Greenland and Cuba, fossil hunting in Australia, and looking at a strange neurological condition in Guadeloupe - all of these travels have generated journals, too.

None of these journals has any pretension to comprehensiveness or authority; they are light, fragmentary, impressionistic, and, above all, personal.

Why do I keep journals? I do not know. Perhaps primarily to clarify my thoughts, to organise my impressions into a sort of narrative or story, and to do this in “real time,” and not in retrospect, or imaginatively transformed, as in an autobiography or novel. I write these journals with no thought of publication (journals which I kept in Canada and Alabama were only published, and that by chance, as articles in Antaeus, thirty years after they were written).

Should I have prettied up this journal, elaborated it, made it more systematic and coherent - as I was to do with my book-sized Micronesian and “leg” journals - or left it as written, as with my Canadian and Alabaman ones? I have, in fact, taken an intermediate course, adding a little (chocolate, rubber, things Mesoamerican), making little excursions of various sorts, but essentially keeping the journal as written. I have not even attempted to give it a proper title. It was Oaxaca Journal in my notebooks, and Oaxaca Journal it remains. December 2001’

And here is an extract (somewhat reduced) from the first (and undated) diary entry in Oaxaca Journal.

Friday
‘I am on my way to Oaxaca to meet up with some botanical friends for a fern foray, looking forward to a week away from New York’s icy winter. The plane itself - an AeroMexico flight - has an atmosphere quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen. We are scarcely off the ground before everyone gets up - chatting in the aisles, opening bags of food, breast-feeding babies - an instant social scene, like a Mexican cafe or market. One is already in Mexico as soon as one boards. [. . .]

My neighbor asks why I am visiting Mexico, and I tell him I am part of a botanical tour headed for Oaxaca, in the south. There are several of us on this plane from New York, and we will meet up with the others in Mexico City. Learning that this is my first visit to Mexico, he speaks glowingly of the country, and lends me his guidebook. I must be sure to visit the enormous tree in Oaxaca - it is thousands of years old, a famous natural wonder. Indeed, I say, I have known of this tree and seen old photos of it since I was a boy, and this is one of the things that has drawn me to Oaxaca. [. . .]

We have a leisurely three hours in Mexico City airport - lots of time before our connection to Oaxaca. [. . .]

5:25 p.m.: We taxi endlessly about the monstrous tarmac, joltingly, too joltingly for me to write. This giant city, God help it, has a population of 18 million (or 23 million, according to another estimate), one of the largest, dirtiest cities in the world.

5:30 p.m.: We’re off! As we rise above the smear of Mexico City, which seems to stretch from one horizon to the other, my companion suddenly says, “See that . . . that volcano? It is called Ixtaccihuatl. Its summit is always covered in snow. There, next to it, is Popocatépetl, its head in the clouds.” Suddenly, he is a different man, proud of his land, wanting to show it, explain it, to a stranger. It is an incredible view of Popocatépetl, its caldera nakedly visible and next to it a range of high peaks covered with snow. I am puzzled that these should be snow-covered, while the higher, volcanic cone is not - perhaps there is sufficient volcanic heat, even when it is not erupting, to melt the snow. With these amazing, magical peaks all around, one sees why the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán was established here, at 7,500 feet.

My companion (now on his second rum and coke, in which I join him) inquires why I have come to Mexico. Business? Tourism? “Neither, exactly,” I say. “Botany. A fern tour.” He is intrigued, speaks of his own fondness for ferns. “They say,” I add, “that Oaxaca has the richest fern population in Mexico.”

My companion is impressed. “But you will not confine yourself to ferns?” He speaks then, with eloquence and passion, of pre-Columbian times: the astonishing sophistication of the Maya in mathematics, astronomy, architecture; how they discovered zero long before the Greeks; the richness of their art and symbolism; and how the city of Tenochtitlán had more than 200,000 people. “More than London, Paris, more than any other city on Earth at the time, except the capital of the Chinese empire.” [. . .]

As we descend from the plane in Oaxaca city I can see John and Carol Mickel - my friends from the New York Botanical Garden - waiting in the airport. John is an expert on the ferns of the New World, of Mexico in particular. He has discovered more than sixty new species of fern in the province of Oaxaca alone and (with his younger colleague Joseph Beitel) described its seven hundred-odd species of fern in their book Pteridophyte Flora of Oaxaca, Mexico. He knows where each of these ferns is to be found - their sometimes secret, or shifting, locations - better than anyone. John has been to Oaxaca many times since his first trip in 1960, and it is he who has arranged this expedition for us.

While his special expertise lies in systematics, the business of identifying and classifying ferns, tracing their evolutionary relationships and affinities, he is, like all pteridologists, an all-round botanist and ecologist too, for one cannot study ferns in the wild without some understanding of why they grow where they do, and their relationship to other plants and animals, their habitats. Carol, his wife, is not a professional botanist, but her own enthusiasm, and her many years with John, have made her almost as knowledgeable as he is.’

Finally, Lawrence Weschler, author and ex-staff writer at The New Yorker, recently wrote, for Vanity Fair, a moving appreciation of Sacks, and included a number of his own diary entries about his friend.

Hitler meets his mentor

‘In the evening from 9.30 to 10.30 visit from Hitler, uplifting!’ This is Houston Stewart Chamberlain, born 160 years ago today, writing in his diary about a first meeting with Hitler, then in his mid-30s. Chamberlain had been born in England, but was mostly educated on the Continent, and, as an adult, chose to live in Germany, where he developed a fascination with Wagner. In time, he published theories advocating the superiority of the so-called Aryan element in European culture, and these writings not only attracted the young Adolf Hitler, but influenced him also.

Chamberlain was born on 9 September 1855 in the Portsmouth area, the last of four children of Rear-Admiral William Charles Chamberlain and his first wife. His mother died soon after, and he spent much of his early childhood with his grandmother in Versailles. From 1867 to 1869, he was schooled at Cheltenham College. Thereafter, during travels and sojourns across Europe, he was privately tutored by Otto Kuntze, a Prussian, who is said to have filled his head with tales of German greatness. A tendency to nervous disorders prevented Chamberlain following a military career like his father, instead he went on to study natural sciences at the University of Geneva. Prior to this though, in 1878, he had married Anna Horst, daughter of a Breslau lawyer.

Chamberlain and his wife moved to live in Dresden from 1885 and, from 1989, in Vienna, where he continued his studies and work in the natural sciences. But, by 1892, he had become fascinated with Wagner and his music. He started publishing essays and books on the subject, notably Das Drama Richard Wagners (1892) and a biography (1896), emphasising the heroic, Teutonic aspects in Wagner’s compositions. During the later part of the 1890s, Chamberlain accepted a commission from Bruckmann, a Munich publisher, to prepare a historical work taking stock of the condition of civilization at the end of the century. Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts was published in 1899 in two volumes, and would make Chamberlain famous. In Germany, it was noticed by Kaiser Wilhelm II who wrote to Chamberlain that ‘it was God who sent your book to the German people’. It took a decade or so to be translated into English, as The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.

George Bernard Shaw rated it, and wrote in Fabian News: ‘It is a masterpiece of really scientific history. It does not make confusion, it clears it away. He is a great generaliser of thought, as distinguished from the crowd of our mere specialists. It is certain to stir up thought. Whoever has not read it will be rather out of it in political and sociological discussions for some time to come.’

Theodore Roosevelt also wrote about the book (in his History as Literature collection of essays in 1915 - see Googlebooks), demonstrating considerable respect for the author’s abilities, but with a deep concern about his ideas. He wrote: ‘Mr. Chamberlain’s thesis is that the nineteenth century, and therefore the twentieth and all future centuries, depend for everything in them worth mentioning and preserving upon the Teutonic branch of the Aryan race. He holds that there is no such thing as a general progress of mankind, that progress is only for those whom he calls the Teutons, and that when they mix with or are intruded upon by alien and, as he regards them, lower races, the result is fatal. Much that he says regarding the prevalent loose and sloppy talk about the general progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races, and the like, is not only perfectly true, but is emphatically worth considering by a generation accustomed, as its forefathers for the preceding generations were accustomed, to accept as true and useful thoroughly pernicious doctrines taught by well-meaning and feeble-minded sentimentalists; but Mr. Chamberlain himself is quite as fantastic an extremist as any of those whom he derides, and an extremist whose doctrines are based upon foolish hatred is even more unlovely than an extremist whose doctrines are based upon foolish benevolence. Mr. Chamberlain’s hatreds cover a wide gamut. They include Jews, Darwinists, the Roman Catholic Church, the people of southern Europe, Peruvians, Semites, and an odd variety of literary men and historians.’

In 1906, Chamberlain separated from Anna, and, on having the divorce formalised two years later, he married Eva Wagner, daughter of Richard Wagner and his second wife, Cosima. By this time he had moved to live in Bayreuth, the centre for all things Wagnerian since the opening of the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. Chamberlain continued to write books, including ones about Kant, Goethe, and Germany’s military efforts and aims during the First World War. Indeed, his wartime essays were widely read. As an Englishman who lived in, and supported, the Reich, he became an even more famous celebrity in Germany during the war than he had been before. In 1915, he was awarded the Iron Cross for services to the German empire, and the following year he became a German citizen.

With the fall of the Wilhelm II in 1918, Chamberlain, who was paralysed and largely confined to his bed by this time, continued to correspond with him in exile; but he also forged closer links with the emergent Nazi movement. Hitler and Chamberlain first met in 1923: Chamberlain was enamoured of Hitler, and saw great potential in him as leader; and Hitler, for his part, certainly admired Chamberlain, considered him a mentor. Also, in the early years, Chamberlain’s support helped Hitler attract supporters. In the post-war years, Chamberlain’s ideas became increasingly anti-semitic, and Hitler is known to have been influenced by his mentor’s tracts.

Chamberlain died in 1927. His funeral was attended by Prince August Wilhelm, son of the former Kaiser, and by Hitler. A few months later Alfred Rosenberg, one of the main architects of the National Socialist ideology, named Chamberlain as the ‘pioneer and founder of a German future’. For further information see the rather long entry at Wikipedia, a shorter one at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required), the dedicated Chamberlain website, The Occult History of the Third Reich, or The Foundations of the Twenty-First Century blog. The full text of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century can be read at Internet Archive.

Chamberlain must have kept a diary, at least some of the time, for a few extracts are quoted by Olivier Hilmes in his biography of Cosima Wagner (Yale University Press, 2010 - partly available to view at Googlebooks). Cosima, herself, was a diarist - see Music was sounding - though only diaries written during her life with Wagner have been published. Hilmes reference for the Chamberlain diary extracts is the National Archive of the Richard Wagner Foundation in Bayreuth, so it seems unlikely that any diary material has been published in its own right. Here are most of those diary entries - about Chamberlain’s first meeting with Hitler - within the context of Hilmes’ text.

- ‘In late September 1923, Bayreuth’s National Socialists organised a ‘German Day’ at which the main speaker was to be an as yet largely unknown Austrian politician by the name of Adolf Hitler. “Preparations for the German Day bring the house to life,” Chamberlain noted in his diary on Saturday 29 September. “Wheelchair ride through the flag-strewn town gave me a good deal of pleasure.” ’

- ‘The next day’s events began with a march past by some 6,000 Brownshirts, a procession that made its way past Wahnfried and the Chamberlains’ villa to an open-air service outside the town. Chamberlain was galvanised: “German Day with Hitler! Much activity from dawn till dusk.” From his open ground-floor window, he waved at the passing troops. And he was not alone, for Cosima was sitting beside him, her presence, hitherto unknown, attested by Chamberlain’s diary: “Processions a.m. and p.m. watched from window and terrace, Mama present!” ’

- ‘That Sunday evening Hitler gave a speech in the town’s packed Reithalle [. . .] Immediately afterwards, Hitler called on the ailing Chamberlain and received the blessing of the idol of his Viennese youth. He is even said to have knelt before Chamberlain and reverently kissed his hand. Whatever the truth of the matter, Chamberlain was delighted by the visit: “In the evening from 9.30 to 10.30 visit from Hitler, uplifting!” The two men met again at Wahnfried the very next day: “10.30 outside, waiting for Hitler in my wheelchair, moving welcome to Wahnfried: ‘May God be with you!’ ” ’

Finally, it is worth noting that Chamberlain is mentioned in the diaries of Josef Goebbels. One particular extract, from a few months before Chamberlain’s death, is quoted online in several places, such as in Johann Chapoutot’s article in Miranda, From Humanism to Nazism: Antiquity in the Work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. (The extract is sourced originally from The Early Goebbels Diaries - see We can conquer the world.)

May 1926
‘Shattering scene: Chamberlain on a couch. Broken, mumbling, tears in his eyes. He holds my hand and won’t let me go. His big eyes burn like fire. Greetings to you, spiritual father. Trailblazer, pioneer! I am deeply upset. Off we go. He mumbles, wants to speak, he can’t - and then weeps like a child! Long, long handshake! Farewell! You stand by us when we are near despair. Outside the rain patters! I want to cry out, I want to weep.’

Sci-fi writer’s double life

The American science fiction writer, Alice B. Sheldon, aka James Tiptree, Jr., was born a century ago today. She is revered among sci-fi fans for her role in breaking down gender writing stereotypes - indeed her pseudonym lives on in the name of a sci-fi literary prize awarded to work that contributes to the understanding of gender. Although Sheldon did keep diaries, these have not been published. However, Julie Phillips quotes from them extensively in her 2006 biography.

Alice (Alli) Bradley was born on 24 August 1915 in Chicago. Her father was a lawyer and naturalist, and her mother an author of fiction and travel books. From an early age, she travelled a lot with her parents. In 1934, she eloped with, and married, William Davey, a student she had met a few days earlier. After trying college and also working as an artist, she divorced Davey in 1941 and returned to Chicago, where she was taken on as art critic at the Chicago Sun. The following year, she joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, and from 1943 she worked at the Pentagon as an interpreter of aerial reconnaissance photographs.

With the war over, Bradley was transferred to a different unit; and before long she had married her commanding officer, Colonel Huntington Sheldon. They left the army in 1946, and for several years ran a chicken farm in New Jersey. In 1952, they both joined the Central Intelligence Agency, though Bradley left in 1955. She also separated from Sheldon for a while, and went to study at the American University, and then at George Washington University, achieving, in 1967, a doctorate in experimental psychology. That same year she began submitting short science fiction stories - to magazines such as Analog Science Fact & Fiction, If and Fantastic - under the pseudonym of James Tiptree Jr.

According to Alice B. Sheldon’s biographer, Julie Phillips, ‘Alli chose her male pseudonym on a whim, in a supermarket, where a jar of Tiptree jam caught Alli’s eye. She was sending out some science fiction stories as a joke, and she wanted a name “editors wouldn’t remember rejecting.” But the male name turned out to have many uses. It made her feel taken seriously when she wrote about what she knew: guns, hunting, politics, war. It let her write the way she wanted to write, with an urgency that was hers. It gave her enough distance and control to speak honestly about herself.’ As Tiptree became more successful as a science fiction writer, there was an increasing amount of speculation about her identity and her gender: some thought the author rather macho, while others thought he was unusually feminist for a male writer. Thus, over time, her stories served to break down perceived ideas of gender-specific writing.

The first of her short story collections - Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home - came out in 1973, with others following every two to three years (four more in her lifetime). Although she tried writing novels, these were not considered as successful as her short stories. Tiptree’s identity was only uncovered in the late 1970s, but she continued to use the pseudonym for the rest of her life. Her later years, though, were not happy ones - Huntington became an invalid, incapable of caring for himself, and Alice herself suffered health problems. In 1987, having advised friends she wanted to end her life while still active, she shot her husband and then herself. They were found hand-in-hand in bed. For further biographical information see Wikipedia, National Public Radio, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Also, Julie Phillips’ James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon attracted many reviews when published by St Martin’s Press in 2006, and these can still be read online, at Book Forum, for example, or The New York Times. The book itself can be previewed at the book’s own website and at Googlebooks.

I have not been able to find out much about Alice B. Sheldon’s diary writing habits. Indeed, the only reference I can find to them comes in Phillips’ biography which says that Alice Sheldon’s friend, Jeffrey D. Smith, holds her professional papers including journals. (Smith is involved in the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, an annual literary prize for science fiction/fantasy that contributes to the understanding of gender). Phillips clearly had access to Sheldon’s diaries and journals, but although she quotes from them often, she gives very little information about the diaries themselves (nor does she give dates for all the quotes). Here are a couple of extracts from Sheldon’s diary as found in Phillips’ biography.

[From Chapter 12: War Fever]
Undated, 1941
‘My work doesn’t support me. I am a drain on my parents. They don’t mind, but it’s wrong. I should look for marriage. They don’t want me to marry, but I can’t live this way much longer. I’m no prize, either, I’m young, and pretty, and smart, but there are younger and prettier women, and what brains I have are a handicap. [. . .] All that must mean I can’t hope for one of the more desirable husbands. Shall I settle for age, ugliness or stupidity? . . . Of love I say nothing. . . I should try more salable work; “commercial” art. The times being what they are, art is a failure financially, in case I fail to marry. . . As to the mind, my lazy nature demands endless solitude and leisure to try and think, and between being nice to my parents, and these other affairs I have none. . . I could just try to make money and the devil with marriage, but my mind will crack in this unnatural life.’

[Instead, Phillips says, Sheldon found another outlet for her self-sacrifice.]
8 December 1941
‘Have given up painting for the war. There are two kinds of artists, those who paint during a war, and those who don’t. The second kind is me. There will be something to do soon.’

[From Chapter 38: I live in my body as in an alien artifact]
26 November 1977
‘I feel the sf writing is at, or coming to, an end. [. . .] But what do I DO inside? Try for ‘mainstream’ writing? A theory-research book? A diary? Some kind of weird autobiography? (Why, why?) I will NOT return to being a Bradley appendage. I feel I have one more go inside me, but what, what?’

2 February 1978
‘The distasteful proof of my sexuality is bound up with masochistic fantasies of helplessness [. . .] depressed me profoundly. I am not a man, I am not the do-er, the penetrator. And Tiptree was “magical” manhood, his pen my prick. I had through him all the power and prestige of masculinity, I was - though an aging intellectual - of those who own the world. How I loathe being a woman. Wanting to be done to. [. . .]

Tiptree’s “death” has made me face - what I never really went into with Bob [Harper] - my self-hate as a woman. And my view of the world as structured by raw power. [. . .] I want power. I want to be listened to. [. . .] And I’ll never have it. I’m stuck with this perverse, second-rate body; my life.’

Julie Phillips goes on to say: ‘What she needed, she kept thinking was “to change in some way inside myself.” She decided she should try lesbian sex. [. . .] She wrote in her journal, “I want to make love to young women, to make them come, and happy. Maybe then masturbate myself. Sex as activity. It could work. I shall start to mix it with women’s groups, looking to actualize this. I really believe I shall. I think I could make my aged self palatable enough. It was all straight-arrow.” But she didn’t do it.’

Calhoun in the Black Hills

James or Jimmi Calhoun, soldier in the US Army, was born 170 years ago today. He married George Custer’s sister, and was transferred to Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment. When the regiment was sent to explore the forbidding Black Hills, Calhoun kept an official diary of the expedition. Two years later, aged but 30, he was killed, along with his boss, at the Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as Custer’s Last Stand.

Calhoun was born on 24 August 1845 in Cincinnati, Ohio, into a rich merchant family. When the Civil War broke out, he was travelling in Europe, but on returning to the US, in 1864, he enlisted in the Union Army. By 1867, he had been commissioned as second lieutenant in the infantry. In 1870, he met Maggie, the sister of General George Custer, and they were married in 1872. By this time, Custer had promoted Calhoun to first lieutenant, had transferred him to his own regiment, the 7th cavalry, and had made him his adjutant. Custer and many of his men, including Calhoun, died in 1876, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn - famously remembered as Custer’s Last Stand - an overwhelming victory for the Native Americans against the US government. Subsequently, the site of the battle was named Calhoun Hill.

Two years earlier, in 1874, Custer had embarked on an expedition to the unexplored Black Hills, in what is now South Dakota, tasked with finding locations for a fort, seeking out a route to the southwest, and investigating the possibility of gold mining. He set off with around a thousand men, several Native American scouts, over a hundred wagons, artillery, and two months food supply. Calhoun kept a detailed diary of the expedition. This was edited by Lawrence A. Frost and published in 1979 by Brigham Young University Press as With Custer in ‘74: James Calhoun’s diary of the Black Hills expedition. For more on Calhoun see Wikipedia or Custer Lives, and for more on the Black Hills expedition see Wikipedia or Dr Brian Dippie at the Friends of the Little Bighorn Battlefield website. Here, though, are a few extracts from the published diary.

17 July 1874
‘The command moved at 5 o’clock. Two more rattlesnakes added to the family. Saw an Indian trail.

In full view of the Black Hills.

Two extensive fires from the direction of the Black Hills - at midnight the very heavens seemed on fire. Marched 18 miles. Arrived at Camp No. 16. No wood, very little water.’

7 August 1874
‘Travelled through a rich country - high rolling prairie - good arable land, extensive forests of fine timber, principally pine of large growth. Passed several small valleys with beautiful streams of crystal water running through them. A large mountain (grizzly) bear was killed late this afternoon. I should judge its weight to be about 800 lbs. The following named persons shot him: General Custer, USA, Capt W. Ludlow, Engineer Corps, USA, Private Jno Noonan, Co. L. 7th Cavalry, Bloody Knife, Indian scout.

Mr. Illingworth, a photographer of St. Paul, Minn., acompanying the Expedition, took a photograph of the hunters on a high knoll behind the tent of the Commanding Officer.

The Indian also killed a bear.

Abundant supply of wood. In the Black Hills there is no scarcity of timber. Extensive forests of large timber run all through this country, and for this reason I have not mentioned for several days past the fact of wood being found at our camps.

Marched 16 half miles, arrived at Camp No. 29. An excellent stream of water running through camp.

Good grazing.’

16 August 1874
‘Saw Indians on the right intercepted by Bloody Knife and Cold Hand, who report that six (6) bands of hostile Indians are encamped on the east side of the Little Missouri awaiting to attack this command on its return march. These Indians, four (4) in number, belong to Cheyenne Agency.

Travelled nearly north. At noon arrived at the “Belle Fourche River.” The wagons were loaded with wood and water. Our general direction is towards “Slave Butte.”

28 August 1874
‘The General obtained two (2) porcupines. March 16 quarter miles. Arrived at Camp No. 47. Abundant supply of wood, water and grass.’ [Although this is the last of the diary entries, the diary is supplemented in the published book by Calhoun’s letters.]

Happy Birthday Roy

Roy Strong, 80 today, was once such a precocious and brilliant arts administrator that he was appointed the youngest ever director of, first, the UK’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and then the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) - bringing modern ideas and change to both institutions. In fact, the NPG is celebrating his birthday with an exhibition of photographs of Strong dressed as historical figures! Following his V&A years, he focused on writing, mostly popular books on history and gardening, while the arts establishment kept him at arm’s length - even more so, perhaps, after 1997 when he published his diaries, called ‘bitchy and hilarious’ by one journalist, and ‘venomous’ by The Economist.

Roy Strong was born on 23 August 1935, in Winchmore Hill, now in North London, into a poor and, by his own account, unhappy family. He attended Edmonton County School, and then Queen Mary College, University of London, before going on to work for a Ph.D at the Warburg Institute, which focuses on the influence of classical antiquity on European civilisation. Subsequently, he became a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. In 1959, he took up a post as assistant keeper of the NPG, and in 1967 was appointed its director, aged but 32. He set about transforming its conservative image with a series of shows, one of the most important and successful being 600 Cecil Beaton portraits - 1928-1968.

In 1971, Strong married Julia Trevelyan Oman, a television and theatre set designer. They soon moved to live at Much Birch, Herefordshire, where they created the celebrated Laskett Gardens, one of the country’s largest post-war formal gardens. In 1973, Strong became the youngest ever director of the V&A, remaining until 1987. One of his first and most memorable events was the exhibition The Destruction of the Country House, considered a landmark show for the V&A and a watershed in heritage politics (see Ruth Adams). On leaving the V&A, he focused on writing - publishing many books on British cultural history, but also on gardens, such as The Renaissance Garden in England, Creating Small Gardens, and Gardens through the Ages. Among his other books, The Spirit of Britain: A Narrative History of the Arts (1999) and Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (2005) have been very successful.

Julia died in 2003, but Strong has continued to publish widely. Most recently, he has been in the news because of a spat over the legacy of his Laskett Gardens. Having always said he would bequeath them to the National Trust, the Trust told him last year it did not want them - because they failed to ‘reach the high rung of historic and national importance’. In response, Strong let the media know that his will would be changed, to ensure the destruction of the gardens one year after his death (see The Telegraph, for example.)

In a 1996 profile, The Independent gave this assessment: ‘Opinions of Sir Roy have always differed and still do. To passers-by in the street, he is a harmless old buffer; to academic historians he is at best a populist, at worst a charlatan; to gender analysts he’s a puzzlingly camp heterosexual (happily married for 25 years to Julia Trevelyan Oman, the theatre designer); to gardeners he’s a godsend; to his former staff at the Victoria and Albert Museum (of which he was director for 14 years) he was a chilly martinet; to the Queen Mother he’s an affable dinner companion; to AN Wilson, who wrote a gushing encomium in the Evening Standard the other day, he’s a kind of national monument (“part of Our Island Story”) who will be admired forever. To the visiting interviewer, he’s gossipy, tremblingly fastidious and rather a crosspatch.’

For more biographical information on Strong try Wikipedia, Dictionary of Art Historians, Debretts, an autobiographical article in the Daily Mail (taken from his book, Roy Strong: Self-Portrait As A Young Man) or The Laskett Gardens website.

In 1997, Weidenfeld & Nicolson published The Roy Strong Diaries 1967-1987 (see Googlebooks). In his introduction, Strong says the diary began on 9 November 1967, five months after taking office at the National Portrait Gallery, because a lady at a dinner had suggested the idea ‘because I would meet so many interesting people’. A few ‘juvenile jottings’ followed, but the following year, the diary went in ‘a totally different direction’ because of his friendship with Cecil Beaton whose diaries were, at the time, in the process of publication. Beaton’s diaries, Strong explains, were made up of set pieces describing particular events and people or retrospective miniature essays - more concerned with the social panorama than the day-to-day technicalities of his professional life. ‘It was that type of diary which I decided to keep.’ After marriage, he adds, he stopped keeping the diary for a year or two but his wife encouraged him to take it up again. (For more on Cecil Beaton’s diaries see Nerves before a sitting.)

The diaries, Wikipedia says, became infamous for Strong’s often critical assessments of figures in the art and political worlds. The Economist said of the diaries on publication: ‘They are not particularly well written, and Sir Roy is too conceited as well as too insecure to poke fun at himself as some of the best diarists do. But his comments are as venomous, his vignettes as shrewd and his barbs as well directed as anybody’s, even Alan Clark’s.’ And later, Jan Moir in the The Telegraph said his ‘bitchy, hilarious diaries caused a storm when they were published’. According to Knight Hayton Management, Strong is currently working on preparing his more recent diaries for publication. Here, meanwhile, are a few extracts from The Roy Strong Diaries 1967-1987.

18 November 1975
‘I took Dame Bridget D’Oyly Carte, a lively and distinguished lady, out to lunch to celebrate the gift of things to the Theatre Museum. She was fascinating on the subject of Harold Wilson who was now a Trustee of the Company and had been asked to their hundredth anniversary at the Savoy Theatre. He loved it, made a speech on stage and now she needed him to help save the Company. So he keeps on ringing her up, much to her embarrassment, denouncing the elitism of Covent Garden as against the populism of Gilbert and Sullivan.’

7 April 1981
‘The opening of the exhibition of ballet costumes, Spotlight, went off with aplomb. Princess Margaret in gold embroidered ethnic red did an hour’s tour. We couldn’t find Fred Ashton, who turned up after she’d gone, seated at the bottom of a statue quaffing champagne which he loves. There was a wonderful encounter between Marie Rambert and HRH, a rare occasion when the person being presented was shorter. Spotlight is a gorgeous spectacle and everyone loves it, apart from complaints either about the lights and/or the loudness of the music.’

17 October 1984
‘The diary is very thin this year. I should have written much much more. Too much is happening. This is the first year when I have felt restless, a feeling that the V&A period is drawing to its close, but what next? That is the problem. It is not fleeing from problems, it is moving away from the same ones. Even my secretary admitted that nothing new came in any more. It was a recycling of the same old projects and problems. In other words, boredom. That is why the Times articles have been such a joy to do.’

18 June 1985
‘After a weekend of trying to cope with the V&A on the telephone picking up the debris, I returned to Monday’s Evening Standard, which had a whole-page spread on the theme ‘Has the Strong magic gone?’, lunging into the dreariness of the Museum, its sad displays, filthy restaurant, lack of signposting, et al. No one else attracts these pieces, and they could was easily have been written about the National Gallery, the British Museum or the Tate Gallery. In a way I’m not surprised, for there is no doubt that for the next eighteen months we have to go through a major dislocation in building terms in order to put things right. [. . .]

What irritates me is that it was about two years ago that this great series of works began: the Henry Cole Wing, the restoration of the Cast Court, the redisplay of the Dress Collection, the restoration of the Italian Cast Court and the front entrance hall. Then there is to follow in sequence, the Medieval Treasury, the Japanese Gallery, the Indian Gallery, the reopening of the vista laterally across the V&A. A new restaurant in fact opens in September. What more can I do?’

1 April 1987
‘The opening of the Clore Gallery. The rain fell as though Noah and his ark were due. Julia and I went to two of the openings, the first of which, very select, was in the afternoon with about a hundred and fifty and the Queen to open it. Her Majesty was dressed as usual to be seen, in red with a red boater with a feather askew to one side. She wore glasses the whole time, which may have brought her a sense of relief because she was able to see everything and everybody, although vanity is not part of her make-up. [. . .]

The evening opening took the form of a reception at 8.30 p.m., a time which normally signals sustenance, but on enquiring practically everyone established that it only meant nibbles. We were bidden in black tie none the less. Nancy Perth, on to the same ploy, rang and asked us to dinner before, so we went. I love her dearly and in spite of the fact that the dinner turned out to be tinned soup and a plate of prosciutto with a roll, there was a bottle of 1953 vintage champagne to compensate. [. . .]

Compared with twenty years ago I was struck by how few people looked extraordinary. Fashion now is so unimaginative. There was certainly an explosion of shoulders, the wider for women the better, and a great amount of beadwork and glitter in the art deco vein. Men are very dull these days. Timothy Clifford in a green velvet smoking-jacket with black frogging just looked a curiosity. The look otherwise is sharp and shiny with hair well gelled, shirt with a wing collar, and immaculate blacks, but no bizarre opulence compared with such a gathering ten or twenty years ago.’

My imagination flies

‘I just said - “My imagination flies, like Noah’s dove, from the ark of my mind . . . and finds no place on which to rest the sole of her foot except Coleridge - Wordsworth and Southey.” ’ This is a young Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of English Opium-Eater, born 230 years ago today, confessing to his diary how he yearned to meet the Lake Poets. Later, of course, he would meet them; and some of his most important contributions to literature would be writing about those very poets. Unfortunately, it seems, he only kept that one diary - not published until the 20th century - for a few months in 1803.

Thomas was born in Manchester on 15 August 1785. His father, Quincey, also Thomas, was a successful merchant. In 1796, three years after the death of an elder sister and then his father, his mother moved to Bath and changed the family name to De Quincey. Thomas was enrolled in a series of schools, and proved a precocious student. During 1800-1801, he came into contact with various literary figures, and became keen on the poets Coleridge and Wordsworth. Having been refused permission to enter Oxford early, he absconded from Manchester grammar in 1802. His family, accepting the decision, allowed him one guinea a week, and he set off on a walking tour in North Wales.

De Quincey, however, soon lost his regular guinea by failing to write letters home. He borrowed money, went to London, where he preferred destitution to the prospect of family constraints. He later claimed to have been protected and comforted, innocently, by a young prostitute whom he celebrated in Confessions. Eventually, though, in early 1803, he was found by friends, and returned home. He was sent to stay in Everton, near Liverpool, for several months, and was then allowed to go to Worcester College, Oxford, on a reduced income. On the final day of his exams in 1808, he suffered a loss of nerve, and fled to London. During his student years, he had become acquainted with Coleridge and Wordsworth, and, in 1809, moved to Grasmere, in the Lake District, where he lived in Dove Cottage (once occupied by the Wordsworths - see Daffodils so beautiful). He studied German literature, planned an ambitious philosophical work, and travelled occasionally to London or Edinburgh.

De Quincey had first tried opium during a visit to London in 1804, apparently to ease the pain of toothache. By 1813, or so, his irregular use of the drug had become a daily habit. By the following year, he had begun an affair with Margaret, 18 at the time, who bore him a child in 1816. They married the following year, and would go on to have seven more children. However, De Quincey’s meagre income was failing, so he turned to journalism, finding employment as editor for a weekly Tory newspaper, The Westmorland Gazette. He proved poor at meeting deadlines, and, after a little more than a year, he relinquished the post. A position writing for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was even more short-lived.

In the summer of 1821, he took lodgings in London, where he worked on Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, an account of his early life and opium addiction that appeared in the September and October issues of the London Magazine. His Confessions were an immediate success, and attracted nationwide attention. They were published in book form in 1822, and regularly reissued in his own life time, and ever since. Over the next five years, he published upwards of 20 essays for the magazine, but money problems persisted. In 1825, he was evicted from Fox Ghyll, Rydal (which he’d taken on when more money was coming in from the London Magazine), and went to live with Margaret’s parents. By 1830, the family had relocated to Edinburgh, where De Quincey was regularly contributing to Blackwood’s Magazine, but then mostly to Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine - often but a hair’s breadth from debtors’ prison.

From 1840 or so, De Quincey’s life became more stable, as his eldest daughter, Margaret, took charge of her father’s affairs and finances. Over the next decade and more, he published regularly: a series of reminiscences of the Lake Poets in Tait’s is considered one of his most important works. He also went back to Blackwood’s contributing several works including a sequel to Confesssions. From 1850, most of his work was being published by James Hogg in The Instructor. Ticknor and Fields of Boston, US, undertook to publish a collected edition of De Quincey’s works. The 22 volumes were poorly organised and flawed, which prompted Hogg to suggest that De Quincey himself work on a revised edition of his own writings. This task - including a much lengthened Confessions - took up most of the rest of his working life. It was while working on the fourteenth and last volume that he died, in 1859. Further information on De Quincey can be found at Wikipedia, Robert Morrison’s De Quincey website, reviews of Morrison’s biography (The English Opium Eater) such as at The Guardian or The Washington Post, or Notable Biographies. Confessions of an Opium-Eater is freely available at Internet Archive.

De Quincey kept a diary for a few short months, during his sojourn in Everton, before going to Oxford. It was first edited by Horace A. Eaton, Professor of English at Syracuse University in the US and published by Noel Douglas in 1927 as A Diary of Thomas De Quincey - Here reproduced in replica as well as in print from the original manuscript in the possession of the Reverend C. H. Steel. According to the book’s editor, the diary, 101 pages long, is contained in ‘a shabby little volume in quarto, with torn leaves and untidy scribbled pages, partly filled with a list of books’. Substantial further information about the diary can be found at the National Archives website. Here are a few sample extracts from the 1927 edition.

4 May 1803
‘Read 99 pages of “Accusg Spirit; - walked into the lanes; - met a fellow who counterfeited drunkenness or lunacy or idiocy; - I say counterfeited, because I am well convinced he was some vile outcast of society - a pest and disgrace to humanity. I was just on the point of hittg him a dab on his disgustg face when a gentleman (coming up) alarmed him and saved me trouble.’

5 May 1803
‘Last night I imaged to myself the heroine of the novel dying on an island of a lake, the chamber-windows (opening on a lawn) set wide open - and the sweet blooming roses breathing yr odours on her dying senses.[. . .]

Last night too I image myself looking through a glass. “What do you see?” I see a man in the dim and shadowy perspective and (as it were) in a dream. He passes along in silence, and the hues of sorrow appear on his countenance. Who is he? A man darkly wonderful - above the beings of this world; but whether that shadow of him, which you saw, be ye shadow of a man long since passed away or of one yet hid in futurity, I may not tell you.’

3 June 1803
‘Rise between 11 and 12 - go to W’s; - read out “Henry the Fourth”; (part 1st) which Mrs. E. pronounces “a very pretty play.” Almost immediately after this is finished  . . . dinner is announced; - I go without seeing Mr. W.; walk, by French prison and lane, to windmill on shore; - turn back along shore; cross over to French prison; - go to C’s; - dine there again by myself; - open a volume of the Encyclopaedia; read 2 pages of the life of Frederick the Great of Prussia . . . containing the origin of his acquaintance with Voltaire - his mode of spending the time as described by Voltaire; then read the article “French” (language) in the same volume; - open no other book; - go to W’s; ring and ask if the ladies are really gone, as they talked of doing, to Mossley; - find they are gone in spite of the rain; - walk to Everton; - find postman at door; - decypher a letter; - lend Miss B. 2s 3d to pay the postage of one; - the other (2s 2d) she leaves unpaid, though I offered to lend her the money; - both come from the coast of Africa; - Miss B. seems wild with joy; - has received money I suppose; I drink coffee.’

15 June 1803
I just said - “My imagination flies, like Noah’s dove, from the ark of my mind . . . and finds no place on which to rest the sole of her foot except Coleridge - Wordsworth and Southey.” This morning (and indeed many times before) I said - “Bacon’s mind appears to me like a great abyss - on the brink of which the imagination startles and shudders to look down” - Of that gilded fly of Corsica - Bonaparte - I said just now (what I have applied to others too - using it as a general curse) “May he be thirsty to all eternity - and have nothing but cups of damnation to drink.” ’

Shooting with Antonioni

‘I fall into bed exhausted. I dream that Jeanne Moreau wants to come out of the painting too, but for some reason I can’t do it for her. I know I’ll be dreaming of the filming for weeks to come; I always do when I’ve finished a shoot.’ This is Wim Wenders - today celebrating his 70th birthday - writing one of the last entries in his diary of an ‘extraordinary experience’ filming with the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni.

Wenders was born in Düsseldorf on 14 August 1945, into a traditional Catholic family. His father was a surgeon. He went to school in Oberhausen, then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf, but dropped out of university to go to Paris to paint. It was to the film world, though, that he was soon drawn. Returning to Germany, he took a job in the Düsseldorf office of United Artists, before studying for three years (1967-1970) at Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München  (Munich’s university for TV and film). At the same time, he wrote film reviews for national magazines, including Der Spiegel.

With other directors and writers in 1971, he founded the company Filmverlag der Autoren; and then, later, he set up his own production company, Road Movies. In 1978, he went to Hollywood to direct Hammett, but disputes with the executive producer Francis Ford Coppola, resulted in a delayed release and a truncated version. Wenders first international successes came in the 1980s, especially with films like The State of Things (1982), Paris, Texas (1984) which won him several significant awards, including the Palme d’Or and Baftas, and Wings of Desire (1987). His films are known for their lush visual imagery, much of which stems from the work of his longstanding collaborator, the Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller.

Wenders has directed several well-received documentaries, such as Buena Vista Social Club (1999), and The Soul of a Man (2003), many music videos for bands, as well as television commercials. He is a member of the advisory board of World Cinema Foundation, founded by Martin Scorsese. Alongside his film work, Wenders has also forged a major reputation as a photographer, exhibiting regularly and widely. The Wim Wenders Foundation, Düsseldorf, was created in 2012 to bring together his artistic work in film, literary and photographic fields, so as to make it publicly accessible. Among many other honours, he was presented with the Honorary Golden Bear at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2015.

A happy 70th birthday message on the official Wim Wenders website starts as follows: ‘The long and winding road. So sang the Beatles in 1970. Wim was just 25 years old then and since then what a journey it’s been. Along the way we’ve witnessed his images, words and sounds. A photographer, painter, observer, explorer, storyteller, collector and cartographer. The journey with Wim allows us to see a new world. A world that encompasses his art. And whilst not all of his portraits show people, there’s a sense of humanity we can all feel part of. Ingmar Bergman talks about the wonder of silence. Wim’s imagery instills silence and yet if we get lost on our journey his music guides us back.’ For more on Wenders see Wikipedia, Senses of Cinema, Villa e Collezione Panza, or Images Journal.

I can find no obvious evidence that Wenders is a diary keeper by nature, but for a few months in the winter of 1994-1995, he did keep a diary, with the specific purpose of recording time spent with Antononio. A decade earlier, the renowned Italian director had suffered a stroke, and lost the ability to speak or write, though he could draw with his left hand. After much negotiation, and many delays, he and his wife, Enrica, had assembled finance, actors and crew to make a last film - Beyond the Clouds - comprising four of his own stories about romance and illusion. A condition of the producers was that another director be on hand - hence Wim Wenders’ nominal role as co-diretor.

The diary kept by Wenders was first published in German in 1995, and then translated by Michael Hofmann for publication in English in 200 as My Time with Antonioni - The Diary of an Extraordinary Experience. (A few pages can be sampled at Amazon.) Wenders wrote about the project in an article for The Guardian; but what comes across most forcefully when reading Wenders’ book is the huge effort - as well as compromises in Wenders’ case - made by so many people to bring Antonioni’s vision to the screen. Here are two extracts, from the first and last entries - the first and last days of shooting - in the English edition of the diary.

3 November 1994
‘First day of shoot. At last. Because the shoot has been put back from spring to summer and now to autumn, I’ve been able to be with Michelangelo and the crew during the last week of preparations in Portofino, the location for the first episode, ‘La ragazza, il delitto’, but on the very eve of the shoot I have to be in Paris. The French edition of my book Once is coming out, and there’s an exhibition in the FNAC, press-conference and interviews, and the whole thing is due to end so late there’s no chance of getting back to Italy the same night.

There was a lovely, unexpected ending to the day when we were driven back to the hotel by Martine and Henri Cartier-Bresson. How attentive, kindly and alert the old gentleman was, always so careful not to appear ‘old’: he’d rather hold open a door himself than have it held for him.

Yesterday morning we went to see a demonstration of the latest HDTV-to-film transfer from Thomson’s, who are interested in working with Michelangelo and me. The images on screen, recorded digitally and then put on film, are really impressive, and only barely distinguishable from real film images. They might actually be the perfect language for Michelangelo to shoot his final episode, ‘Due telefaxi’. The electronic medium would match the atmosphere of the story. And wouldn’t it be appropriate, too, for Michelangelo to make the last part of his last film using the technology of the next century, seeing as he was one of the very first directors with a positive attitude to video, and was never shy of new technology? [. . .]

Today, then, the first day of the shoot, Donata and I got up bright and early, took the first plane from Paris to Milan, and drove to Portofino through mist and occasional rain, afraid the weather might make us late. But we arrive on time. The first clapboard is an hour later. The rain has delayed everything, and indeed it will dominate the day’s events.

First off, big excitement, not least among the producers: it appears that the moment he got on set, Michelangelo announced that everything is being changed around, so it’s not John Malkovich who’s going to come out the door and walk down into town, but Sophie Marceau. That means changing the bedroom, where we’re going to film later, from a ‘man’s room’ to a woman’s. ‘Here we go . . .’ you can see the producers thinking. But on closer inspection, the change makes sense. Michelangelo just hadn’t been in a position before to clear up our misunderstanding. It often seemed to me in our discussions that it was simply too much of an effort for him to make his intentions clear to us, and so occasionally he left us under some misapprehension, fully knowing that the moment of truth would dawn once we were filming. Also, Michelangelo has trouble differentiating between ‘he’ and ‘she’ when speaking, so we were often uncertain whether he was talking about the male or the female character in a story. [. . .]

Having this huge crew and these actors assembled here - all of us ready to give everything we have over the coming weeks - to make a film out of this shooting script and this schedule is Enrica’s personal triumph. And today, on the first day of the shoot, there she is standing in front of the monitors next to Michelangelo, beaming all over her face. Of course everyone is making a fuss of him, but we know that Erica was and is the driving force behind him. A great dream is becoming reality, for both of them. Now it is up to us to sustain the dream to the end, so there is no rude awakening.

In looking for my own niche, I keep in the background, and leave various initiatives and suggestions with Michelangelo’s helpers [. . .] I will have succeeded in my task if I find the right balance between staying out of it and, where absolutely necessary, taking a hand. And above all, I need to learn to keep my own ideas on how I would shoot a scene to myself, because they’re not helpful in this situation.[. . .]

I take a few stills photographs, with the Fuji 6x9, rather sheepishly. Donata dusts off her new Nikon F4 and takes some pictures of the shoot and the crew, in black and white. I’m sticking to colour.

It’s very late, and I feel totally exhausted. Being at a shoot without being in charge is much more taxing than I had imagined.

Over supper we laughed till we cried while Tonino regaled us with the story of how Fellini was the first person who managed to get food stains on his back while eating. Tonino demonstrated how Fellini broke a roll in half, and a piece of mortadella flew up in the air and landed between his shoulderblades. He kept imitating Fellini standing there, with the slice of meat sticking to his back, worrying about how cross Giulletta would be when she’d get to hear about his foolish adventure.’

29 March 1995
‘Sixty-fourth day of shoot. The last day. My shoot ends on the day all the newspapers are carrying photographs of Michelangelo with Jack Nicholson. They’re all full of reports of Oscar night, and I buy all the newspapers I can lay my hands on, especially the Italian ones. [. . .]

My first thanks are due to Robby and Donata. As the evening goes on, with all of us eating at a buffet in a hall off the studio, it gradually sinks in that this adventure is over for the moment. There’s still the editing and the post-production to come, but they can’t be as risky or as onerous as the shooting.

Someone turns up the music, and we dance ourselves off our feet.

I fall into bed exhausted. I dream that Jeanne Moreau wants to come out of the painting too, but for some reason I can’t do it for her. I know I’ll be dreaming of the filming for weeks to come; I always do when I’ve finished a shoot. And they’re always dreams where something impossible has to be done, too. I’ve never been on a shoot where I haven’t been plagued by these nightmares afterwards.’ [See Jonathan Rosenblaum’s blog for a review of the film, and for an interesting take on the Moreau scenes].

Missing Tom and Kate

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the death of the British mountain climber, Alison Hargreaves. Having scaled Everest without the aid of sherpas or bottled oxygen, she was intent on completing similar climbs of the second and third highest mountains, K2 and Kangchenjunga, but she died on the descent from the K2 summit. Her diaries, as used by David Rose and Ed Douglas in their biography, Regions of the Heart, reveal a woman constantly torn between love of her two children and her obsession not only to climb, but to make her mark as a mountain climber.

Hargreaves was born in 1962, and grew up in Belper, Derbyshire, the middle child of three. Her family were often out walking on the English hills, and aged nine she had raced ahead of them to be the first to the summit of Britain’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis. She was introduced to rock climbing aged 13, preferring to climb than to study for Oxford as her parents had done. Aged 16, while working in a climbing shop, she met amateur climber Jim Ballard, nearly twice her age. She left home two years later to live with him. The couple ran an outdoor equipment shop, while Hargreaves trained and climbed in her spare time. By her mid-20s, she had climbed in the Himalayas, but in 1988 - the year she married Jim - she was back in the Alps, notably climbing the north face of the Eiger while six months pregnant with Tom. Her second child, Kate, was born two years later.

By 1993, Alison and Jim were in so much debt they had to leave their house. They relocated to live in Switzerland, in an old Land Rover, so that Hargreaves could continue to climb. That year she became the first person ever to scale the six north faces of the Alps alone and in one season. This brought her media and sponsorship attention. She wrote a book about the feat - A Hard Day’s Summer - but it was poorly received, and money problems continued.

Hargreaves decided that her next project - for personal and financial reasons - should be Everest. She bailed on a first attempt in 1994 fearing frostbite, but a second attempt in May 1995 succeeded, making her the first woman to reach the summit alone and without supplementary oxygen (the first man was Reinhold Messner - see Death on Nanga Parbat). She quickly made further plans to conquer the second two highest mountains in the world (K2 and Kangchenjunga). After a brief trip back to see her family in the UK, she returned to the Himalayas in June to join an American team with a permit to climb K2. For weeks, stormy weather kept the team at base camp. By August, remnants of the team had joined up with members of other teams from Canada and New Zealand. Peter Hillary, son of Edmund who along with Tenzing Norgay completed the first successful ascent of Mount Everest (see On top of Mount Everest), was also there with a Spanish team.

On 13 August, Hillary decided to turn back and go down, forecasting a change in weather conditions. However, Hargreaves and Spaniard Javier Olivar saw fine weather and made for the summit, reaching it at 6.45pm, making Hargreaves the first woman to conquer both Everest and K2 without supplemental oxygen or support. Four other climbers reached the summit behind them; but then all six died in a violent storm on the way down. A seventh climber that had turned back below the summit died later from the effects of exposure. The next day two other Spanish climbers, lower down, saw debris equipment, and a body in the distance, and concluded it was Hargreaves who had been blown off the mountain in the storm.

Hilary, in an interview with The Independent, noted that a bizarre chemistry had developed among the several expeditions on the mountain ‘that meant they were going for the summit no matter what’. Of Alison, in particular, he said: ‘[She] was a brilliant climber but she had tremendous commercial pressures on her and she became obsessed. When you spoke to her it was clear that climbing came first and everything else was secondary.’

Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopedia.com, a Guardian interview with Jim Ballard, the BBC, or The Independent’s obituary. Alison and Jim’s son, Tom, has been in the news recently, since he became the first person to climb solo all six major north faces of the Alps in one winter - see The Telegraph, for example.

Hargreaves left behind a large volume of diary material which, apparently, were fought over by her husband on one side and her parents on the other. In any case, two journalist/climbers, David Rose and Ed Douglas were given access to them for their sympathetic biography Regions of the Heart - The Triumph and Tragedy of Alison Hargreaves (Michael Joseph, 1999).

The authors say: ‘Alison’s diaries provide a record of her life which is well in excess of a million words. For the period 1973-92, the quotations from them found here were copied by us from the originals, which were left at Meerbrook Lea when the house was repossessed in 1993 and rescued by her parents. Later diary entries were published in her own A Hard Day’s Summer (Hodder & Stoughton, 1994) and Jim Ballard’s One and two Halves to K2 (BBC Books, 1996).’

Unfortunately, their book quotes very few actual diary entries, and rarely do they come referenced with a date. The following diary-focused extracts in Regions of the Heart can all be found in the last chapter, Nemesis.

‘ ‘I’ve been missing Tom and Kate today,’ she wrote in her diary as early as 3 July, ‘probably because I have had time to think about them. I’ve half felt like not wanting really to stay and finish this “job off” - but I don’t know if or when I’ll get another chance, so I might regret it.’ ’

‘Cooney remembers her returning in tears on 11 July from one of the agonizingly short telephone calls she made on the satellite phone to her children. ‘I spoke for two and a half minutes,’ she wrote miserably in her diary.’ ’

‘ ‘I am feeling pressure back home,’ she wrote in her diary on 5 August at the height of her crisis. ‘Why I failed, what went wrong. Personally it doesn’t matter but I worry about how everyone else will see it.’ Except, of course, that how others saw her was very important indeed to her self-esteem, and for Alison failure was bitterly personal.’

‘On 5 August, with the porters ready to start carrying her equipment down the glacier next day, she wrote of how she missed the children. She’d now spent more than a hundred days of 1995 away from Tom and Kate. Yet there was still a desire for the mountain, too. ‘It eats away at me - wanting the children and wanting K2,’ she wrote. ‘I feel like I’m pulled in two. Maybe they’d be happier if Mum was around but maybe summiting K2 would help make a better future for them. Long term, having me back safe and sound is surely more important.’ ’ [It’s not clear from the authors’ text whether this last is an actual diary entry or not.]

The Hookers of Kew

Sir William Jackson Hooker, one of the most important British botanists of the 19th century, died 150 years ago today. The anniversary is being celebrated by Kew Gardens - Hooker was its first official director, and he did much to expand and develop the royal botanic gardens. His son, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker became an even more eminent botanist, a close of friend of Charles Darwin, and the successor to his father at Kew. Although father and son were not diarists as such, journals of their botanical expeditions have been published.

Hooker was born in Norwich, England, in 1785. His father, Joseph, was a confidential clerk and amateur botanist. William was educated at Norwich grammar school and then attended Startson Hall to study estate management. Aged 21, he inherited the estate of his godfather, a wealthy brewer and farmer. By this time, he had already become a keen botanist and entomologist, an obsession that his inheritance would help finance. As early as 1805, he found a species of moss not previously recorded in Britain. The following year he was elected to the Linnean Society, and a year or two later he made his first foreign botanical expedition, to Iceland. Although his notes and drawings were destroyed by fire on the way home, he still managed to produce, and circulate a privately printed journal of the tour.

Hooker invested considerably in a planned tour to Ceylon with Sir Robert Brownrigg, but the project was abandoned. In 1814, he spent nine months on excursion in France, Switzerland and Italy. The year after, he married Maria Dawson Turner (sister-in-law of the historian Francis Palgrave), and they settled at Halesworth, Suffolk, where he built an herbarium that, in time, gained an international reputation. Various scientific publications followed in the 1810s: British Jungermanniae, a new edition of William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis, for which he wrote the descriptions, and Muscologia, an account of the mosses of Britain and Ireland, prepared in conjunction with Thomas Taylor.

In 1820, Hooker became the regius professorship of botany in the University of Glasgow, and he worked with the botanist Thomas Hopkirk to establish the Royal Botanic Institution of Glasgow and to develop the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. He also published Flora Scotica. Hooker was able to convince the British government that botanists should be appointed to expeditions, and subsequently his herbarium profited from samples brought back from all parts of the globe.

In 1836, he was made a Knight of Hanover, and in 1841 he was appointed the first full-time director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Under his direction the gardens expanded to 75 acres, with an arboretum of 270 acres, and many new glass-houses erected. He died on 12 August 1865; and was succeeded at Kew by his son Joseph Dalton, who had already become famous as a botanist and botanical explorer, and who, like his father, would be knighted. In accordance with William Hooker’s will, his herbarium and library were offered for sale to the nation, and were purchased for Kew in 1866; they contained over one million herbarium specimens, 4,000 volumes of publications, and about 29,000 letters from over 4,400 correspondents. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, Parks and Gardens UK, or Kew’s website.

Hooker published extensively through his life. One of his early books, in the first instance printed and circulated privately in 1811, was called Journal of a Tour in Iceland in the Summer of 1809. However, as most of his papers (and all but a few weeks of his journal) had been lost in a fire on board the return vessel, the book is mostly based on his recollections. He put together Niger Flora, ‘an enumeration of the plants of western tropical Africa, collected by the late Dr. Theodore Vogel’ in 1841, which includes Vogel’s diary of the voyage. Hooker was very keen on publishing academic botanic journals. There was The Journal of Botany (1830-1842), The London Journal of Botany (1842-1848), and Hooker’s Journal of Botany and Kew Garden Miscellany (1949-1857).

Most of the very first volume of the latter (Hooker’s Journal of Botany - Kew Garden Miscellany Vol 1, Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1849) is taken up with a diary kept by his son, Joseph, and sent as letters, during his long expedition to India and the Himalayas in 1847-1851. This was later published as Himalayan Journals in 1854. Here are a couple of extracts from Joseph Hooker’s diary as found in Hooker’s Journal of Botany.

7 March 1848
‘Left my kind friend Mr. Felle’s house for Amoee, en route for Miraapore, myself mounted on an elephant of the Rajah’s, and my goods on Mr. Felle’s camels. Passed through Goorawul, a large village twelve miles due west of Shahgung. The road to it lay over a very flat monotonous country. Thence turning north, in a direction crossing the table-land, the country began to undulate and become more barren, with noble Mahoua trees and a few Fici, the former resembling oaks; and with the sandstone cropping out on the surface, I was occasionally much reminded of scenery in the forest of Dean. Sterile tracts, with their typical trees, alternate with cultivated fields, whose accompaniments are the Tamarind and Mango.

Many of the exposed slabs of sandstone are beautifully waved with the ripple-mark, like small specimens seen at Rotas.

Amoee, where I arrived at nine p.m., was an open grassy flat, about twenty miles from the Ganges, along whose course the dust clouds were coursing.

Mr. Monney, the magistrate of Mirzapore, kindly sent a mounted messenger to meet me here, the finest-looking fellow I had seen for a long time, wearing a brilliant scarlet surtout and white turban. He was a very active fellow, equally proud of his master (with good reason) and his horse; but he had vast trouble in getting bearers for my Palkee, which, after being carted for so long, was now to take its turn in carting me. Those he did procure (eight) carried me (for the greater part of the way) and the Palkee the whole twenty-two miles in eight hours, over very bad and stony paths, and down the ghaut, which is, however, an excellent road.

To the top of the ghaut the country was nearly level (and here called the Bind hills). There I saw for the first time the Ganges, rolling along the plains, through a forest of green trees, among which the white houses, domes, and temples of Mirzapore were scattered in every direction.

Unlike the Dunwah pass, this, to the level of the Ganges, is wholly barren. At the foot the sun was intensely hot, the roads rocky or smothered with dust by turns, the villages crowded with a widely different looking race from those of the hills, and the whole air of the outskirts, in a sultry afternoon, far from agreeable.

Mirzapore is, however, an exceedingly pretty, a moderately cool, and very pleasant station, especially the geographically east, but socially speaking west-end, which runs along the banks of the Ganges, and whither I proceeded to the house of my friend Mr. Claude Hamilton, where I received a most cordial welcome.

Mirzapore is celebrated for its manufactory of carpets (of a kind like our dining-room one), which are admirable looking, and in all respects save durability I am told are equal to the English. Indigo seed from Bundelkund is also a most extensive article of commerce, the best coming from the Doab, and lac. For cotton, sugar, and saltpetre, it is the greatest mart in India. Bundelkund indigo seed is good and larger but not equal to the Doab. The articles of native manufacture are brass washing and cooking utensils, and stone deities worked out of the sandstone.

There is little native vegetation, the country being covered with cultivation and extensive groves of Mango, and occasionally of Guava. English vegetables are abundant and excellent, and the strawberries rival in size the European fruit, but hardly in flavour.

The atmosphere is extremely dry and electrical, the hair constantly crackling when combed. Further west, where the country is still drier, the electricity of the air is even greater. Griffiths mentions that in filling his barometer tubes in Affghanistan, he constantly experienced a shock.

Here I had the pleasure of meeting Lieut. Ward, one of the assistant suppressors of Thugge (Thuggee, in Hindostan, signifying a deceiver, fraud, not open force being employed). This gentleman kindly showed me the approvers or king’s evidence, of his establishment, belonging to those three classes of human scourges, the Thug, Dakoit, and Poisoner. Of these the first was the Thug, a mild-looking man, who was born and bred to the profession: he has committed many murders, sees no harm in them, and feels neither shame nor remorse. His organs of observation and destructiveness were large, and the cerebellum small. He explained to me how the gang waylay the unwary traveller, enter into conversation with him, and have him suddenly seized, when the superior whips off his own linen girdle, throws it round the victim’s neck and strangles him, pressing the knuckles against the spine. Taking off his own cummerbund, he passed it round my arm (not neck) and showed me the turn as coolly as a sailor once taught me the hangman’s knot. The Thug is of any caste, and belongs to any part of India. The profession have particular stations, where they generally murder, throwing the body into a well. The Dakoit (dakhee, a robber) is one of a class who rob in gangs, but never commit murder - arson and housebreaking are also their profession. These are all high-class Rajpoots, originally from Guzerat, who, on being conquered, vowed vengeance on mankind. They talk both Hindostanee and the otherwise extinct Guzerat language. This latter the Dakoit spoke to me: it was guttural in the extreme, and very singular in sound. These are a very remarkable people, found all over India, and called by various names, as Buddacks (butchers), Sear Marwa, or Shighal Khof (jackall-eaters in pure Persian, i.e., a barbarian with no prejudice against the unclean). The women dress peculiarly, and are utterly devoid of modesty. The specimen I examined was a short, square, but far from powerful Nepalese, with high arched eye-brows, and no organs of observation. These people are great cowards. The poisoners all belong to one caste of Pasie, or dealers in toddy: they go singly or in gangs, haunting the travellers’ resting places, where they drop half a rupee weight of pounded or whole Datura seeds into his food, producing a twenty-four hours’ intoxication, during which he is robbed, and left to recover or sink under the stupifying effects of the narcotic. He told me that the Datura seed is gathered at any time, place, or age of the plant. He was a dirty, ill-conditioned looking fellow, with no bumps behind his ears, or prominence of eyebrow region, but an undeniable cerebellum.

As you may care to hear more of these celebrated Thugs, I will give you what information I picked up. (All this and better, too, you will find in Sleeman’s Reports). Though now all but extinct (except in Cuttack), through ten or fifteen years of increasing vigilance on the part of our Government, and incredible activity and acuteness on the officers employed, they were till then a wonderfully numerous body, who abstained from their vocation solely in the immediate neighbourhood of their own villages. These villages, however, were not exempt from the visits of other Thugs; so that, as Major Sleeman says, “The annually returning tide of murder swept unsparingly over the whole face of India, from the Sutledge to the sea-coast, and from the Himalaya to Cape Oomorin. One narrow district alone was free, the Concan, beyond the ghauts, whither they never penetrated.” In Bengal, river Thugs, of whom I shall tell you hereafter, replace the travelling practitioner. Khandush and Bohilcund alone harboured no Thugs as residents, but they were nevertheless haunted by the gangs.

Their origin is uncertain, but supposed to be very early, soon after the Mahommedan conquest. They now claim a divine original, and are supposed to have supernatural powers, and to be the emissaries of the divinity, like the wolf, the tiger, and the bear. It is only lately that they have swarmed so prodigiously, - seven original gangs having migrated from Delhi to the Gangetic provinces about 200 years ago, and from these all the rest have sprung. Many belong to the most amiable, intelligent and respectable classes of the lower and even middle ranks: they love their profession, regard murder as sport, and are never haunted with dreams, or troubled with pangs of conscience during hours of solitude, or in the last moments of life. The victim is an acceptable sacrifice to the Goddess Davee, who by some classes is supposed to eat the lifeless body, and thus save her votaries the necessity of coucealing it.

They are extremely superstitious, always consulting omens, such as the direction in which a hare or jackall crosses the road; and even far more trivial circumstances will determine the fate of a dozen of people, and perhaps an immense treasure. All worship the pick-axe, which is symbolical of their profession, and an oath sworn on it binds closer than on the Koran. The consecration of this weapon is a most elaborate ceremony, and takes place only under certain trees. They rise through various grades to the highest of strangler; the lowest are scouts; second, sextons; the third are holders of the victims’ hands.

Though all agree in never practising cruelty, or robbing previous to murder, - never allowing any but infants to escape, and these are trained to Thuggee, - and never leaving a trace of such goods as may be identified, - there are several variations in their mode of conducting operations. Some tribes spare certain castes, others none: murder of woman is against all rules; but the practice crept into certain gangs, and this it is which led to their discountenance by the Goddess Davee, and the consequent downfall of tbe system. Davee, they say, allowed the British to punish them, because a certain gang had murdered the mothers to obtain their daughters to be sold to prostitution. [. . .]’

16 March 1848
‘We arrived at Benares. The Ganges is here a broad stream, and rises 43 feet during the rains, with a current of eight miles an hour, and, I am informed, carries along one-quarter per cent, of sediment. The fall from hence is 300 feet to the junction of the Ganges and Hooghly, which is one foot to every hundred miles. My observations make the fall from Mirzapore to Benares very much greater.

Benares is the Athens of India. The variety of buildings along the bank is incredible. There are temples of all shapes, in all stages of completeness, and at all angles of inclination; for the banks give way so much that many of these edifices are fearfully out of the perpendicular. It is a most quaint river-frontage; and perhaps, to a long resident in India, it may look magnificent; but I was much disappointed. As an eastern city it is incomparably inferior to Cairo. [. . .]

The general appearance of an oriental town is always more or less ruinous; and here there was nothing to be seen of architecture but crumbling house-tops beyond the banks of the river. The eye is fatigued with pigeons, parrots, pots, plaster, pan-tiles, the ear with prayer-bells and Poojahs; whilst the Peepul and Parkimonia are the only green things to be seen on this side of the bright meadows and green trees which adorn the European residents’ dwellings, some four miles back from the river. The streets are so narrow, that it is difficult to ride a horse through them; and the houses are often six stories high, with galleries crossing above, from house to house. These tall, gaunt edifices sometimes give place to clumps of cottages, and a mass of dusty ruins, the unsavoury retreats of vermin and filth.’