Panic & muddleheadness

‘Think how the whole world wd be changed for me if I could get on with this novel, even though at no higher level than the present. I see that it was infinitely better to write The Beating, mediocre as that was, than to write nothing. But what’s holding me up anyway? Panic & muddleheadness. I must face up to the thing again with confident determination, with willingness instead of revulsion.’ This is from the private (and unpublished) diaries of Edward Falaise Upward, a British teacher and writer who died 10 years ago today, aged 105. He was part of the Auden generation in the 30s, producing poetry and surrealist stories, but then he lost his way, barely producing any work for decades. It was only after retiring that he produced his main work, The Spiral Ascent, an autobiographical trilogy. Soon after his death, his sister donated a lifetime’s worth of his diaries to the British Library. They document, in excruciating detail, the depths his literary and political angst.

Upward was born in 1903, in Romford, a large town now part of Greater London. His father was a doctor, and his mother a nurse. Aged 14 or so, he was sent to Repton School, where he published his writing in the school magazine and became a close friend of Christopher Isherwood. He moved on to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, reading history and then English. Isherwood, too, went to Cambridge, and together they created the fictional and surreal town of Mortmere, a vehicle for parodying the upper-classes. Upward’s poem Buddha won him the prestigious annual Cambridge poetry prize, the Chancellor’s Gold Medal.

On leaving Cambridge, Upward took up teaching, with posts at various schools, only settling in 1932 when employed as an English master at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, where he remained until his retirement. In 1932, he joined the Communist Party, and took part in a delegation visiting the Soviet Union. He also visited Isherwood and Stephen Spender in Berlin. In 1936, he married Hilda Percival, a fellow teacher and Communist. They had two children. Although they remained committed to socialism, they left the Communist Party in 1948, frustrated that it was trying to appease the Labour government, and was no longer revolutionary.

Upward published his first novel, Journey to the Border (Hogarth Press) in 1938. Full of poetic prose, it describes the rebellion of a private tutor against his employer and a nightmarish state, concluding with the idea that he must join the workers’ movement. Subsequently, he found it very difficult to write anything else. In 1952-1953, he took a sabbatical from teaching in order to focus on his writing, but fell into a cycle of depression. Having concluded grotesque and fantastical fiction was inappropriate in a post-Holocaust world, he destroyed most of his Montmere stories.

By the mid-1950s, Upward was writing again, and soon after his retirement (to the Isle of Wight) in 1961, he published In the Thirties, the first part of a autobiographical trilogy, The Spiral Ascent, that would take him until 1977 to complete (with The Rotten Elements and No Home but the Struggle). It tells of a poet’s efforts to be creative and politically committed, and ends, in the third volume, with the poet finding new meaning by joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and being able to write again. In old age, he returned to writing short stories which were published, along with reprints of his novels, by Enitharmon Press. In 2005, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded its Benson Medal. He died on 13 February 2009, aged 105, having been Britain’s oldest living author. Further information on Upward, as well as free-to-download pdfs of his books and poems can be found at the Edward Upward website. See also Wikipedia, The Guardian obituary, and The New York Times obituary.

Upward was a keen diarist, and he left behind a large number of journals (76 notebooks), many if not most full of his small cramped hand-writing. These were donated by his daughter to the British Library soon after his death in 2009. The British Library provides this description of its holdings: ‘A continuous run of journals, preoccupied in the main with Upward’s progress (and frustrations) as a writer. The journals record the planning and development of Upward’s novels in terms of plot and characterisation, and also record the psychological journey of their writing. The journals are not diaries as such, and therefore sometimes omit to record aspects of Upward’s life that diaries would usually include, but they record vividly the course of Upward’s inner life and particularly his determination to complete The Spiral Ascent.’

None of the journals have been published, even in part, although at least one biography quotes from them briefly: Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain edited by Benjamin Kohlmann (see Googlebooks). However, the 76 notebooks are available for public inspection at the British Library, and I have transcribed the following extracts from three of them. In particular, the extracts from 1952 show the extent of his encroaching depression, although, in fact, his feelings then seem to echo those he had been having for many years (as shown by the extracts below).

1 September 1936
‘In eight days I shall be thirty three. And I have not yet written a book.

A vile dog is basking in the next door garden.

I must get on with my work.

The pt is that the sp people are quite expensively dressed but their dress does suggest expense. Neither deliberately unassertive nor assertive.’

2 September 1936
‘Moments like last night that the B.L. is good make all my worries worth while. These can be rather compensative, no other satisfaction compares with such moments.

My life and my writing - what is the connection between them?

I ought to give my whole life to writing, but capitalism prevents me. Writing is the highest form of my fight, of my defiance.

Only writing whose content is anti-capitalist can be good.’

1 February 1944
‘Firewatching in the porter’s office office to-night. The rat-holed dado. String and keys and the bucket filled with damp coal dust. The coal-hole in the gothic turret. But my eye is stale. The complex telephone apparatus.

Prattle less in this book, if only to save paper. Think more.

Wd last night in the lab hut told of how he had been negotiating to buy the land on which it stands. The Co-op would not lend him the money but the Midland bank did. He is tenacious, pessimistic only in words. He got the hut against the opposition of most of his party. Now they hold the Fylde Divisional meetings there.

The substance of the sequel has I think passed the test. The problem now is the beginning.

Postage stamp the theme of the book. Imagination is needed to help action. But imagination is suspect because in the past it led away from action. But the present imagination is justified because it shows the faults of past imagination and shows the prime necessity for action.

Now don’t repeat that everywhere in this journal. It’s correct and the book must stand or fall by it.

If at the beginning he knows that imagination is needed then there’s no justification for the book.

“If only I cd use my imagination as I did in the past - but do so legitimately.”

He knows he wants to use his imagination; but he doesn’t know that he wd be justified in using it (i.e. that action needs it)?

Is that the initial position?’

15 June 1944
‘If only I cd write - then I’d put up with most things - my job for instance.

I want to write. But why? Simply because it is the only way I can justify my existence. Only when I am writing am I fully alive. Everything cd be borne if I had writing in hand which I felt was really worthwhile. And what is that constitutes worthwhileness in writing? I know it when I see it. Solidity, depth, feeling. Above all reality. But not my reality.

Something in the form of an essay, dealing not only with ideas but with places & persons. De Quincy.’

24 December 1952
‘Think how the whole world wd be changed for me if I could get on with this novel, even though at no higher level than the present. I see that it was infinitely better to write The Beating, mediocre as that was, than to write nothing. But what’s holding me up anyway? Panic & muddleheadness. I must face up to the thing again with confident determination, with willingness instead of revulsion.’

27 December 1952 [Last but one entry of ‘Journal of the Sabbatical Year’]
‘The only reason I am not in ill thoughts at present is that I’m not attempting to write the novel.

Is it worth writing something that one knows to be poor stuff? Possibly, for practice and in the tenuous hope that one day one will be able to write satisfactorily.

I’ve got to see this novel as in some way attractive, or I shall never write it? But I shall never see it as something attractive. Therefore I can only write it from a sense of duty.

There’s not one scene throughout the whole book that attracts me. Why? Because I have lost faith in the world of imagination.

I fool myself if I think that “the whole world wd be changed for me” if I could get on with the novel. Probably it wd make me feel even worse than quiescence.

What should I do? The best thing to do wd be to go on struggling, if only sanity will stand up to that. It’s the uncontrollable misery of the struggle that I fear.

Try common sense. Here I am with eight free months before me. I have started the novel for which I obtained a year’s leave of absence from teaching. The novel is, so far, poor stuff, and doesn’t look like getting any better, in fact it might well get worse. Shall I abandon it? Against such a line of action (inaction) there are several objections. 1) It’s a surrender and admission of failure. 2) What shd I do with my time? But on the other hand there are objections to continuing with the bk, the main one being that it makes me so miserable that I begin to fear for my sanity. A possible solution wd be to regard the novel as of no importance but to continue it as a daily task. But that wd be more miserable than anything.’

Mother of the Revolution

Deolinda Rodríguez de Almeida, Mother of the (Angolan) Revolution, was born 80 years ago today. She was a gifted individual, a poet and translator, but circumstances led her to become a militant nationalist. She was a defender of human rights, but also an activist enabling women to play a role in the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Aged only 29, she was captured, with others, by an opposing liberation movement, and tortured and murdered. She left behind a diary written during most of her adult years, although it was not edited and published until 2003.

Rodríguez was born in Catete on 10 February 1939 into a Methodist family. Her parents were teachers, and she was educated at Methodist missionary schools. In 1956, she joined the MPLA as a translator. She won a scholarship to study sociology at Methodist University of São Paulo; and from there, in 1959, she exchanged correspondence with Martin Luther King. Fearing political problems in Brazil (because of her support for growing Angolan independence movement), she moved to the United States, where she studied at Drew University. However, in 1961, before concluding her studies she returned to Angola. She took part in an MPLA attack on São Miguel fortress prison and police headquarters in Luanda at the start of, what would be known as, the Portuguese Colonial War.

Rodríguez traveled to Guinea-Bissau and Congo Kinshasa, where she helped found the women’s division of the MPLA (Organização da Mulher de Angola - OMA). She underwent guerrilla training in Kabinda. Back in Angola in 1962, she emerged as a revolutionary leader and activist, but also campaigning for human rights. Later, she was given the honorary title of ‘Mother of the Revolution’. She was also associated with the Corpo Voluntário Angolano de Assistência aos Refugiados.

The following year Rodríguez and the rest of the MPLA leadership were expelled from Angola. They fled to Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, and then to Cabinda, an Angolan province within Congo. There, fighting intensified, and in 1967, she and four other members of OMA were captured by Holden Roberto’s National Liberation Front of Angola. They were tortured, dismembered and killed in a Zaire prison. The date of Rodríguez’s death, 2 March, came to be celebrated as Angola’s Women’s Day. A little further information is available at Wikivisually, Bookshy books, and in Immortal Heroes Of The World by M S Gill (at Googlebooks).

Deolinda left behind a diary - a rarity in African cultures -  that she had kept from 1956 to 1967. This was edited by her brother, Roberto de Almeida, and published first in 2003 (with an updated second edition in 2018). The book is titled Diário de um exílio sem regresso (Diary of an Exile without Return), and includes a letter sent by Martin Luther King to Deolinda. A short article about the book can be found in the Portuguese language Journal de Angola, and there is a film, based on the diaries, available at YouTube (from which I’ve taken two screenshots). In 2017, Roberto de Almeida handed over his sister’s diaries and letters to MAAN, the Memorial Dr. António Agostinho Neto in Luanda. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any extracts of the diary, in English or Portuguese.

John Ruskin’s birthdays

Today is the double centenary of the birth of John Ruskin, one of the greatest art and social commentators of the Victorian period in Britain. He was a man of many talents, also producing paintings and poems, and a diary which he kept for most of his life. Although many of the entries are fairly brief and even mundane (about the weather), there are plenty with interesting observations about society, architecture, nature and art.

Ruskin was born in London on 8 February 1819, the son of a wine merchant. His family moved to Herne Hill when he was but four, and to Dulwich when he was 20. In 1836, he began studying at Christ Church, Oxford University, and, while still in his early 20s, travelled with his parents to Italy and Switzerland. Thanks to funding by his father, Ruskin was able to indulge a passion for collecting art, in particular the paintings of Turner.

Aged only 24, Ruskin published Modern Painters, an important and controversial work arguing that modern landscape painters - and in particular Turner - were superior to the so-called Old Masters of the post-Renaissance period. Further volumes followed. In 1848, he married Euphemia Chalmers Gray, the daughter of friends of his parents, but the marriage did not last long. In the early 1850s, Ruskin became involved with the Pre-Raphaelites, one of whom, John Everett Millais, married Euphemia (after her marriage with Ruskin was annulled).

Ruskin went on to write many important and influential books, such as The Seven Lamps of Architecture. He became a great advocate for the Gothic style, and an opponent of the debasing effects of the industrial revolution. In the 1860s, he had a calamitous affair with a very young Irish girl, Rose La Touche, which dragged on until she died in 1875. In 1869, he was elected the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University, and achieved some success as a lecturer. He resigned his post after ten years, and, thereafter, was subject to more frequent bouts of the mental illness that had beset him through much of his life.

After the death of his parents, and for the last 30 years of his life, Ruskin’s main residence was at Brantwood, in the Lake District, which is where he died a few days after the start of the 20th century. Further information is available from Wikipedia, The Victorian Web, The Ruskin Society, The Ruskin Museum or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Ruskin’s diary, covering most of the timespan of his adult life, was published around 60 years ago (1956-1959) in three volumes by Clarendon Press (1835-1847, 1848-1873, 1874-1889). The entries for the book - The Diaries of John Ruskin - were selected and edited by Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse. They also included a good number of Ruskin’s small sketches which accompany some of the diary entries, of landscapes, nature or architecture. Some years later, in 1971, Yale University Press published The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin. This was based on some of Ruskin’s diaries, written while living at Brantwood, which had not been made available to Evans and Whitehouse. The Victorian Web has an informative review of The Brantwood Diary, and quotes from the diary itself. And the second volume of the Clarendon edition of the diaries is freely available online at Internet Archive thanks to Digital Library of India.

Meanwhile, here are some extracts form Ruskin’s diary taken from the Clarendon Press volume 2. The first, when Ruskin was 30, is representative of the more interesting parts of his diary. When he was abroad he sometimes wrote long entries, but at home and later in his life, there were often long gaps in his diary, and the majority of entries he did make were short, a sentence or two. I have included a selection of entries written on his birthdays, including the one for his 50th birthday, in 1869, which is rather maudlin.

3 June 1849
‘I walked up this afternoon to Bloney, very happy, and yet full of some sad thought; how perhaps I should not be again among these lovely scenes; as I was now and ever had been, a youth with his parents - it seemed that the sunset of to-day sunk upon me like the departure of youth.

First I had a hot march among the vines, and between their dead stone walls. Once or twice I flagged a little, and began to think it tiresome; then I put my mind into the scene, instead of suffering the body only to make report of it; and looked at it with the possession-taking grasp of the imagination - the true one; it gilded all the dead walls, and I felt a charm in every vine tendril that hung over them. It required an effort to maintain the feeling; it was poetry while it lasted, and I felt that it was only while under it that one could draw, or invent, or give glory to, any part of such a landscape. I repeated, ‘I am in Switzerland’ over and over again, till the name brought back the true group of associations, and I felt I had a soul, like my boy’s soul, once again. I have not insisted enough on this source of all great contemplative art. The whole scene without it was but sticks and stones and steep dusty road.’

2 June 1853
‘Sunday. Walking home from Dr. Cumming’s through Holborn and Oxford Street, note shops open: nearly all tobacco and cigar shops: tobacco pipe shops: small confectioners selling ginger beer - large confectioners modestly, and in sly corners of shutters; taverns of all kinds and eating houses.’

31 January 1854
‘To Mr. Melville’s. Wrote a little. Numbered Chamouni drawings. Quiet evening writing Giotto. Summary of month: nearly got Giotto done; Mr. Brown’s MS. a little, 13 pages only of Modern Painters, but house quite in order and everything set going, and a great deal done in learning MS. at Brit[ish] museum.’

8 February 1854
‘Began description of valley of Chamouni and finished my rocks at Glen Finlas [in the Ashmolean Museum]. Went up with Sophy to Mr Griffiths and saw a wonderful Turner, of a Diligence deep in snow by moonlight and firelight [probably The Dover Mail]. . .’

13 February 1854
‘Monday. All day at British museum, drawing Hebrew ornament for my book binding - hardly anything done.’

8 February 1857
‘Hear Mr Spurgeon on ‘Cleanse thou me from secret faults’ - very wonderful.’

8 February 1858
‘Brilliant intensely, with hard frost’

8 February 1863
‘Walked lazily in pine wood, and to Regny chateau. Talked with peasant.’

8 February 1869
‘How utterly sad these last birthdays have been, in 67 and 68. I am not much better today, but in better element of work. Wild wind and dark morning. I proceed to botanize.’

8 February 1872
‘Oxford, Corpus Christi College. Came into my rooms last night, after a lovely walk on Seven Bridge Road.’

8 February 1873
‘The sun does not rise by ten minutes, her to that time, we so westing, and the days last already till full six, with long twilights.

Yesterday glorious walk in snow to the tarn in hollow - Goat’s water - and not in the least touched with fatigue by a mile’s row and six mile’s walk up sixteen hundred feet; and write this and my Greek notes at 7 in the morning, sans spectacles. . . I must try to make my daily life more perfect as I grow old.’

16 April 1873
‘Wednesday. Y[esterday] a hot, thunderous day. I very languid and ill, hearing from Joanna of her mother’s death. My work all hanging fire sadly.

Primroses and periwinkles a great comfort.

Dreamed last night that I saw my Fluelen Turner blown down a steep bank into the sea; that I woke from my dream and said what a relief it was to find it was only a dream; that nevertheless I might as well go down to look at the sea; and there, sure enough, was my Turner floating in it, in its frame. When I took it out, the salt was crystallized all over the picture, moist, and I could not think how to wash it off, or carry the picture - for we were travelling. I was announcing my misfortune to my father, when I woke in reality.

Plagued also with letters from madmen and fools, whom I am mad and foolish enough to try to mend.’ 

This article is a revised version of one first published 10 years ago on 8 January 2009.

Montagu and the Indian tiger

‘When they came after the tiger, throwing at it hand grenades, firing blank cartridges, and so forth, in order to move it and prevent it charging back, flying foxes were disturbed from the trees, peacocks moved backwards and forwards, parrots flew about; four sambhur passed before my first shot at the tiger, but I am afraid I did not see them. It is a very artificial form of sport, but it gave me sufficient thrill to last me a lifetime.’ This is Edwin Montagu, an early 20th century British Liberal politician born 140 years ago today, best remembered for his stint as Secretary of State for India, or perhaps for his marriage to Venetia. Though the marriage was one of social convenience (she had had an illegitimate child beforehand, and continued to have affairs after), they remained together throughout Montagu’s short life; and it was Venetia that edited Montagu’s India diaries for publication.

Montagu was born in London to Samuel Montagu, 1st Baron Swaythling, a rich banker and his Jewish wife Ellen, on 6 February 1879. He was educated at Clifton College boarding school and the City of London School before studying biology at University College London and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1902, he was elected president of the Cambridge Union. The following year he joined a firm of solicitors, but was soon more interested in politics than the law. He became friends with Raymond Asquith, son of H. H. Asquith, and was recruited as a speaker for the Liberal Party. Then, in the 1906 general election, he was elected Member of Parliament for Chesterton. Asquith, who was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, appointed Montagu as his parliamentary private secretary.

In 1910, Asquith, by now Prime Minister, promoted Montagu to the post of Under-Secretary of State for India, to Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and then to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (with a seat in the Cabinet). In 1915, he was sworn of the Privy Council, and a year later was appointed Minister of Munitions. Although initially left out of David Lloyd George’s coalition government at the end of 1916, he was appointed Secretary of State for India in mid-1917, a position he had sought, and which he then held until 1922. Wikipedia says, he was primarily responsible for the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms which led to the Government of India Act 1919, committing the British to the eventual evolution of India towards dominion status.

In 1915, Montagu married Venetia Stanley, a friend of Asquith’s daughter, after she had converted to Judaism. For several years prior to the marriage, she had been courted by Asquith as well as Montagu. The union was not a conventional one (Venetia had several affairs); it did however produce one daughter, though historians believe Montagu was not the father. A 2012 book, Bobbie Neate’s Conspiracy of Secrets, suggests that the marriage was one of social convenience, to cover Montagu’s homosexuality, and Venetia’s earlier affair with Asquith (which had produced an illegitimate child - Louis Stanley, who was Neate’s stepfather). Montagu is also remembered for his strident anti-zionist stance, and his opposition to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (for more on this see How I saved the Balfour papers!). Montagu lost his seat in the 1922 general election which delivered a landslide for the Conservatives. He died soon after, in 1924, aged only 45, from an unknown cause. Further information is available at Wikipedia, Liberal History, Spartacus, or the Zionism website.

From his first day on the sub-continent as Secretary of State for India - having arrived in Bombay in late 1917 - Montagu kept a detailed diary. His main purpose was to keep the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, informed of his progress: batches of his diary were regularly sent back to London by mail. After his death, Montagu’s wife, Venetia, edited the diary which was published by William Heinemann in 1930 as An Indian Diary (freely available at Internet Archive). In a short preface, Venetia explains: ‘Now that India is looming so largely in the public eye, I have thought it a fitting time to give this document to the world, hoping that it may help to make a little clearer the great part which the writer played in India’s destinies.’ ‘When he resigned in 1922,’ she adds, ‘he seemed, in saying good-bye to his work for India, to lose the greater part of his interest in life; he was never the same man again.’

The diary was dictated to a secretary ‘at all times and places, sometimes on the back of an elephant, miles out in the jungle’. These week-end shooting trips, Venetia says, ‘were the only way by which he could save himself from a severe breakdown, which indeed continually threatened him’. She continues: ‘Whether he was the guest of honour at a vast tiger-shoot, with 1,500 beaters in a Native State, or standing up to his waist in water for the chance of bagging a few couple of snipe, he was able for the moment to forget his troubles, which had usually redoubled themselves by the time the train steamed into Delhi on each successive Black Monday morning.’ She concludes: ‘I hope that the publication of this diary may [. . .] throw some light on an extraordinarily complex personality whom the great world never understood, but his intimate friends and colleagues knew to be passionately sincere and generous to a fault.’

Naomi B. Levine, in her biography Politics, Religion, and Love: The Story of H. H. Asquith, Venetia Stanley, and Edwin Montagu, rates Montagu’s diary highly. ‘[It] was more than a travelogue and a description of sunsets, flame trees, panther shoots and wild birds. Its chief importance lies in its political observations and warnings. The language of the diary was often sharp and brutally frank and included Montagu’s evaluation of the Indian Civil Service, the military, the police, the Viceroy and the Council, Muslims and Hindus, the abject poverty that existed side by side with the extraordinary luxury of the British raj and the Indian ruling classes and the attitude of the Muslims to Turkey. Most importantly, the diary was a condemnation of British snobbery and racism and the hostility it was creating among educated Indians, which Montagu correctly foresaw as encouraging extremism and ultimately destroying British rule.’

Here are several extracts.

18 November 1917.
‘Lord Chelmsford, Maffey and I left last night at a quarter to eleven for Gagrania. We slept in the train, had an early breakfast, and an excellent but very hard day’s snipe shooting. Net result, thirty-five brace. I think we all shot very well, considering it was very hot and we were up to our knees in water, having to pull our legs each time out of the mud, so that by half-past three we were all exhausted, Chelmsford and I physically, and Maffey being unable to shoot straight. It was a jolly, long gheel completely overgrown - the old bed of the Jumna. All the arrangements, including the carriage to drive five miles, and the bullock wagons, three, to drive one, had been made by a little local Nawab. Bitterns, demoiselle cranes, marsh harriers, fish eagles, big white-breasted blue kingfisher, a jackal, seven sisters, sparrow hawks, shrikes, innumerable doves were the chief birds we saw, and one cattle egret and a large heron. Two of the snipe were painted, and there was a large proportion of jacks in the morning.

The day was by no means wasted. I got far closer to Chelmsford than I have ever got before. I like him better than ever, but I cannot find any vigour or personality in him: great conscientiousness, eager desire for smooth running, complete armoury of consultation. He assured me that he was one of the majority of his Committee. He tells me that the Council were unanimous about Mrs. Besant. I am to see Tilak in a deputation, but not in an interview. He feels that the cross-examination which I submit people to is doing a lot of good. He seems hardening against the splitting of the Viceroyalty. I ventured to come closer to expressing the inadequacy of the Government of India scheme, but I would not express an opinion until I had seen my colleagues.

I forgot to record on Saturday night that we had just had the most depressing information that General Maude was critically ill with cholera. Just before leaving late on Saturday night we heard the news that he had taken a slight turn for the better. I gather that any improvement in cholera is usually hopeful.

We have just heard that General Maude died last night. It is a horrible tragedy at the most critical moment in the Mesopotamian trouble. After consultation with Lord Chelmsford, I felt that I should send a telegram to London suggesting that Sir Charles Munro should go at once to Mesopotamia, and that Kirkpatrick, whom Chelmsford assures me could carry on here, should act as Commander-in-Chicf, subject to the possibilities that the Acts of Parliament permit this arrangement. However, I saw Munro on Monday morning, and although he admits the advantage that he probably knew more intimately Maude’s plans than any other living man, he feels himself, with much regret, too old for Mesopotamia, and as he is very lame and looks very old, I think this is probably true. I hear to-night (Monday) that the War Office have appointed Marshall.’

3 December 1917
‘I suppose I must keep up this wretched practice, so boring to me, and so difficult to discharge efficiently, of recording my proceedings. I do not think I give a thought, waking, and, I fear, sometimes sleeping, to anything but Indian reforms, except for the hour a day which I try to keep for exercise. I read my papers before breakfast, and begin the serried series of deputations and memoranda, copies of which for yesterday and to-day are appended to these notes.

To-day began with four formal deputations. Here it is not necessary to go to a tent. We have a large room with two thrones on the first floor, the drawing-room at nighttime, and certainly under Gourlay’s management these formal deputations go very quickly.

One of these deputations was from the Anglo-Indian Association, which really repeated very much the same tale as we had heard from the All-India Association, this being the Bengal branch.

The other three were interesting. One was from the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, and contained the leaders of the great movement which so forcibly protested against my visit, headed by Sir Hugh Bray, all English; and another was the Calcutta Trades Association of retail traders, equally English and even more prejudiced. Sandwiched between them came the British Indian Association, a more or less conservative body, headed by the Maharajadhiraja Bahadur of Burdwan, the best type of conservative Indian.’

5 December 1917
‘To-day we have had the usual weary round - deputations from various Moslem bodies this morning, the Moslem Association, the Moslem League, and so on, and this afternoon we have had two deputations from Assam.

The Moslem Association pretends to be more conservative than the Moslem League, but submitted an appendix to its suggestions, which was really just as extreme. They were very nice people, and explained that we were to take no notice of the appendix, which really did not represent their views.

The Moslem League was very, very vehement, and I had a long and interesting argument - because he was a very intelligent man - with one of their members, Aminur Rahman, who is certainly very sincere, and does not see any of the difficulties of the Congress Moslem League scheme. He certainly helped me to come nearer to responsible government.’

4 January 1918
‘Breakfast at nine, and the start for the scene of slaughter at quarter to eleven. Twenty miles drive through typical Gwalior country, along dusty roads, with sparse bushes in the sandy and rocky desert. No wonder that it is a good country for tigers, because a tiger, wandering round this detestable and appalling country, finds a beautiful ravine, with water in it, luxuriant, with trees and thick jungle, and remains there; so you know where to look for him. We got to our meeting place, where there were horses and three elephants with howdahs to ride, a dandy in which anybody could be carried who wished it, a whole group of coolies, and a regiment of 400 soldiers to beat. I got on to an elephant and was hurtled over the rocks for about one and a half miles - a very uncomfortable elephant to sit on. Then we got down and walked on tiptoe into the ravine. Right across this ravine stretches a high wall, or rather two high walls, with a passage down in the ravine between them. In the very bottom of this ravine on the wall is a three-storied tower, at the top of which, sheltered partly by a stone awning, sit the guns. The middle story is occupied by a luncheon-room, and the lower story by a sort of cellar. Beyond the tower comes an interruption, and then a smaller wall going up the other side. We got into the tower very quietly and stood whilst the beat came up to us from the shorter side of the ravine. It came quietly, making no noise, and there was no tiger. Nothing appeared, save one peacock and some squirrels. Then we turned round and faced the other way. This time a longer drive took place, accompanied by what the Indians call - a name which we have borrowed - a hullabaloo. Tomtoms beat; there were great shouts and dreadful noises, so that the tiger should start a long way off and come quietly. Nothing had apparently been expected from the first drive; from the second drive great things were hoped for, because a buffalo had been killed on the top and dragged by the tiger down to the valley. It was not long after the beat started before, right in the middle of the ravine, and by some water, I saw the tiger coming out, walking very slowly, about 60 yards away from me - walking towards me, showing his left side at an angle of 45 degrees. I aimed as carefully as my excitement would let me, and had the satisfaction of seeing the tiger sit down on his hind legs, put his head right up, and then roll right over. Before I could get in another shot, however, he was off, crawling lop-sidedly, and leaving behind much blood. The beat was then stopped; the elephants were obtained, but nobody was allowed to go on them because they were notoriously unsteady, and there were reported to be bees in the jungle. They soon sighted the tiger going back towards the beaters. These were then removed, and Gwalior went round to join the beaters. What happened afterwards took almost till dark, but I gather that the tiger was seen crossing a ride towards us, turned by a shot by one of Gwalior’s staff, which missed it. He is not popular for this. He then charged an elephant which was sent for in the middle of the beat. The elephant bolted, and has not been seen since, but a man on the elephant, who was much hurt in the flight, succeeded in getting two shots at it, one of which hit it. It then, now severely wounded, charged a man, and I fear hurt him, but not badly, and was finally despatched lying in some water. It is a fine male tiger, 9 ft. 5 in. long, with a short tail. I do not know how one ought to have dealt with the matter; certainly things were much bungled after the tiger was wounded, I think because of the extraordinary, almost impenetrable, nature of the jungle and the fact that we had no tracker. However, I looked at its body. No shot could have been better than mine; it hit the tiger in exactly the right place. I cannot think why it did not kill it. I am not at all sure that I am happy about Laverton’s split bullets. However, the day was successful. I cannot help thinking about the man, about whom I am sure everything is all right.

We came home thoroughly tired with excitement; could hardly keep awake for dinner, and went to bed immediately afterwards, where I slept from ten to six without moving, a great deal for me.
When they came after the tiger, throwing at it hand grenades, firing blank cartridges, and so forth, in order to move it and prevent it charging back, flying foxes were disturbed from the trees, peacocks moved backwards and forwards, parrots flew about; four sambhur passed before my first shot at the tiger, but I am afraid I did not see them. It is a very artificial form of sport, but it gave me sufficient thrill to last me a lifetime.’

Breaking the speed laws

‘Taking full advantage of the downward slope and a lack of traffic, I push Mule along at a good clip. I figure I’ve now broken the speed laws in every state we’ve touched so far.’ This is Michael Joseph Farrell Jr. - 80 years old today - writing in a journal he kept while on a five week tour of the United States. He is best known for his role as Captain B. J. Hunnicutt in the long running American TV satire M*A*S*H. I doubt he would describe himself as a diarist, but he does keep journals when travelling, either for himself or for any organisation he’s representing at the time. Some of these are available online at the official Mike Farrell website (now archived).

Farrell, one of four children, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on 6 February 1939, but after a couple of years the family moved to Hollywood where his father worked as a film studio carpenter. He was schooled locally, and then joined the United States Marine Corps serving at Camp Hansen, Okinawa. In 1963, he married the actress Judy Hayden, and they had two children. By the late 1960s, he was regularly working as an actor, for movies and television series, gaining ever more significant parts, such as a role in the soap Days of Our Lives. His big break came in 1975, when he was recruited for the fourth season of M*A*S*H to play the new role of B. J. Hunnicutt. He remained with the programme for the rest of its eight-year run, writing a handful of episodes, and directing another four.

Farrell went on to host several National Geographic Presents programmes, and to star in TV movies, including Memorial Day (which he co-produced). Having divorced Judy, he married another actress Shirley Fabares in 1984. In 1985, he joined up with television producer Marvin Mintoff to make, mostly, TV films, but also a few feature films. Their partnership lasted 25 years, until Mintoff’s death in 2009. He was elected first vice-president of the Screen Actor’s Guild in 2002 and served for three years. He has always been an active campaigner for various causes, not least for advancing human rights and opposing the death penalty. In 2004 he received the Donald Wright Award from California Attorneys for Criminal Justice. Further information is available form Wikipedia or from the official Mike Farrell website (though this is now archived and no longer being maintained).

When travelling, Farrell tends to keep a journal. His website explains: ‘Throughout the years Mike has been to many countries for organizations such as Concern America, the Committee on U.S./Central American Relations, Projects for Planetary Peace, Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East, Human Rights Watch, The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, The Christian Children’s Fund, Death Penalty Focus, and, the Center for International Policy. For each trip he has written a journal, either for personal purposes or to inform the organizations he’s travelled for, of the situation in the areas.’ Seven or eight of these journals (some are more notes or reflections than diaries) are available on the same website.

In 2007, Farrell published a first book, an autobiography Just Call Me Mike: A Journey to Actor and Activist. In May 2008, he undertook a long (five weeks, 9,000 miles) tour across the country to publicise the autobiography, but networking with political groups and friends as he went. He travelled alone in a rental car - a Prius nicknamed Mule - and kept a detailed diary of the whole trip. This led to his second book, published the following the year by Akashic Books as Of Mule and Man. Some pages can be previewed at Amazon and Googlebooks.

Here is one extract (reduced from the six pages of printed text).

16 May 2008
‘Up early again. Have to cover a lot of distance today and there’s a telephone interview to do first, this with a woman at the Iowa Press-Citizen, in anticipation of my arrival there (weeks from now, I assume).

The next gig is in Austin, Texas, almost 800 miles away, so I won’t plan to get there tonight, but want to take a good bite out of it in order to get into the city relatively early tomorrow. I’ve not been to Austin and am looking forward to it. I keep hearing that it’s the “Berkeley of Texas,” a bastion of liberalism in an otherwise conservative state.

With thanks to Bobby and Eugenie for their gracious hospitality I head back into Santa Fe, through the narrow lanes of that lovely town, and finally to U.S. Highway 285, which runs a pretty straight shot southeast to West Texas.

It’s beautiful heading down out of the highlands under a bright blue sky pebbled with cottony white clouds. Driving up from El Paso on Tuesday, the climb from Las Cruces to Santa Fe was so gradual as to not be obvious, but a climb it was. Like El Paso, Las Cruces is less than 4,000 feet above sea level (actually higher than I had thought), while Santa Fe is nearly 7,500, so Mule had work to do - and did it without complaint. It was a “beepless” day, thank heaven, without great panicky moments.

I filled up the tank in Taos last night despite the fact that I still had two squares showing on the gas gauge and could probably have easily made the sixty-five miles back down to Santa Fe, but since it was very dark and there wasn’t a lot of civilization until we got close to Bobby and Eugenie’s, I decided not to test Mule. And again this morning the gauge says it’s still full.

As we race southward the mesas become less prominent and the land flattens out. It’s interesting to watch the outside temperature rise (the one thing I can understand on the dash screen so full of complex diagrams and information) as our altitude falls. From the time we left Los Angeles and hit the desert, the outside temperature has been in the high nineties, only dropping into the high eighties in El Paso. Once we pushed up to Santa Fe it got into the sixties and fifties, dropping one morning into the forties, so having the connection between altitude and temperature spelled out before me is interesting. Taking full advantage of the downward slope and a lack of traffic, I push Mule along at a good clip. I figure I’ve now broken the speed laws in every state we’ve touched so far. [. . . several paragraphs follow about ‘President Stupid’ - George W. Bush]

Here we are in southeastern New Mexico, zipping along under the now-less-cloudy blue sky. The flat, scrub-covered land stretches as far as one can see on each side, and when I look to the left I note the entrance to a vast, fenced piece of property with a sign over the gate that reads, Victor Perez Ranch. When I say vast, I mean that the road under the gate runs straight away from the highway and disappears over the horizon without a single structure in sight. Somewhere off in the far distance beyond the edge of the earth I envision a huge, elaborate ranch house and attendant structures looking like something out of the movie Giant.

Considering this as we roll along gets me thinking about the whole idea of owning property. As a city boy from a working-class background, I know the satisfaction that comes from owning a home and a piece of property, but thinking of Victor Perez and his rancho, or people like the characters in Giant, or so many others with huge landholdings - the kind of acreage that makes one understand the use of the word “spread” - gives me pause. It brings to mind the Native American concept of living in harmony with the land, perhaps as a visitor, or as one who is granted a kind of stewardship over it because it cannot be owned, as such; one lives in partnership with it.

Closing in on the Texas border we pass through the New Mexican town of Encino. Unlike the wealthy San Fernando Valley community of the same name, this Encino (meaning evergreen or a kind of oak tree) is a shambles. A virtual ghost town, to say it has fallen on hard times is to understate it by miles. Shuttered stores, overgrown yards, huge weeds covering the front of what was once a filling station mark some kind of tragedy in the lives of the people who once resided here - and the few who perhaps still do. Very sad to see this; shocking, in a way. And, not to make Victor Perez out to be a villain, because he’s probably a nice man who worked hard for what he has, the disparity between some lives and others in this country is writ large for me in these two sets of circumstances.

Crossing into Texas the clouds have come together and turned gray. Soon there is a steady sprinkle on us that continues down to and through the town of Pecos, Home of the World’s First Rodeo, per the signs. And as we cross the Pecos River I note that Mule and I are no longer “west of the Pecos.” [There follows a lengthy anecdote - inc. a conversation with the Mule - about nearly running out of petrol.]’

I just want a friend

‘Why did I decide to start a diary today? Has something important happened? Have I discovered that my friends are keeping diaries of their own? No! I just want a friend. Somebody I can talk to about my everyday worries and joys.’ This is Renia Spiegel, a Polish teenager, writing in her diary exactly 80 years ago today. But her everyday worries would soon encompass the horrors of being forced to live a Nazi-controlled Jewish ghetto. Renia has been hailed as one of the ‘new voices of the holocaust’, and her diary has recently been celebrated by The Smithsonian.

Renia was born in 1924, in Uhryńkowce, Tarnopol province, then part of Poland now in Ukraine. She had one younger sister, Ariana, who became a child star actress (the ‘Polish Shirley Temple’). By 1939, Renia and Ariana were living with their grandparents in Przemyśl, and studying at the local Gymnasium, where Renia contributed poems to the school magazine. Following the start of the Second World War and Germany’s invasion of Poland, the family were initially located in city’s Soviet zone, but when the Germans overran the city, they became confined to a Jewish ghetto. Renia was shot dead on the street shortly after her 18th birthday on 30 July 1942.

Ariana and her mother survived the war and moved to the US. In the 1950s, Zygmunt Schwarzer, who had been Renia’s boyfriend, and who had survived several concentration camps, gave them a diary that Renia had kept from January 1939 until her death. The diary remained untouched for decades, until, very recently, Ariana’s daughter, Alexandra, had it translated. Subsequently, she showed it to the documentary film-maker Tomasz Magierski who then planned to make a film about Renia; he also helped to have the diary published in Poland.

The recently-founded Renia Spiegel Foundation describes the diary as follows: ‘This nearly seven hundred-page journal by Renia Spiegel, which spans the years 1939 to the summer of 1942, presents a powerful insight into the life of a young woman, whose life was tragically cut short shy of her eighteenth birthday. The diary is an eyewitness account of the horrors of day-to-day life during the Nazi occupation. There is incredible maturity in her observations and insights. Her account of her personal life is poignant, heart breaking, and often amusing with her expression of adolescent infatuation exposing the raw emotion of a teenager. This powerful diary is not only a primary historical source of the Holocaust, but also a true and outstanding work of literature.’

Renia and her diary received international attention when, last November (2018), the Smithsonian published both a biographical article about her and substantial extracts from the diary. The Times of Israel and The Guardian also have substantial articles on the diary, with extracts. St Martins Press (Macmillan) in the US and Ebury Press (Penguin) in the UK (see The Bookseller) are due to publish the English translation later this year as Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of the Holocaust. See also the Renia Spiegel Facebook page.

31 January 1939
‘Why did I decide to start a diary today? Has something important happened? Have I discovered that my friends are keeping diaries of their own? No! I just want a friend. Somebody I can talk to about my everyday worries and joys. Somebody who will feel what I feel, believe what I say and never reveal my secrets. No human being could ever be that kind of friend.

Today, my dear diary, is the beginning of our deep friendship. Who knows how long it will last? It might even continue until the end of our lives.

In any case, I promise to always be honest with you. In return, you’ll listen to my thoughts and concerns, but you’ll remain silent like an enchanted book, locked up with an enchanted key and hidden in an enchanted castle. You will not betray me.’

15 July 1942
‘Remember this day; remember it well. You will tell generations to come. Since 8 o’clock today we have been shut away in the ghetto. I live here now. The world is separated from me and I’m separated from the world. The days are terrible and the nights are not at all better. Every day brings more casualties and I keep praying to you, God Almighty, to let me kiss my dear mamma.

Oh, Great One, give us health and strength. Let us live. Hope is shriveling so fast. There are fragrant flowers in front of the house, but who needs flowers? And Zygmunt - I saw him from a distance today, but he hasn’t come over yet. Lord, please protect his dear head. But why can’t I cuddle up next to him? God, let me hug my dear mamma.’

16 July 1942
‘You probably want to know what a closed-off ghetto looks like. Pretty ordinary. Barbed wire all around, with guards watching the gates (a German policeman and Jewish police). Leaving the ghetto without a pass is punishable by death. Inside, there are only our people, close ones, dear ones. Outside, there are strangers. My soul is so very sad. My heart is seized with terror.

I missed Zygus so much today. I thought about him all the time. I’ve longed so much for his caresses, nobody knows how much. After all, we face such a terrible situation. You will help me, Bulus and God.’

The League is the solution

‘Today may be epoch marking in the history of the World. The Peace Conference opened its sessions in Paris with the representatives of the civilized world assembled around the board. It is announced there that the League of Nations will be one of the first - the first - number in the order of business.’ So wrote Breckinridge Long, an American civil servant, on 18 January 1919. A week later - exactly a century ago today - the Conference formally agreed to set up the new international organisation.

A history of the League of Nations can be found at the website of United Nations Office at Geneva. It says the League was ‘born with the will of the victors of the First World War to avoid a repeat of a devastating war’, and that its objective was ‘to maintain universal peace within the framework of the fundamental principles of the Pact accepted by its Members - to develop cooperation among nations and to guarantee them peace and security’.

Wikipedia, of course, also has an article on the League. It explains that even while the First World War was still underway a number of governments and groups had already started developing plans to change the way international relations were carried out. The idea for the League itself appears to have originated with the British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, but was taken up by US President Woodrow Wilson. The Paris Peace Conference, convened to build a lasting peace, approved a proposal for the creation of a League of Nations on 25 January 1919; and it came into formal existence a year later on 10 January 1920 (holding its first assembly - see photo - the same month).

In 1919, Breckinridge Long, an American civil servant, was working for the US state department, though he would soon leave it to campaign (unsuccessfully) to become a senator.  Later, in 1933, he would be appointed ambassador to Italy by his friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt). He is largely remembered, Wikipedia says, for obstructing - not always legitimately - the inflow of refugees during the Second World War, a policy for which he was subsequently criticised and demoted. A PBS profile on the man says this: ‘Ultimately, the effect of the immigration policies set by Long’s department was that, during American involvement in the war, 90 percent of the quota places available to immigrants from countries under German and Italian control were never filled. If they had been, an additional 190,000 people could have escaped the atrocities being committed by the Nazis.’

In 1966 University of Nebraska Press published a selection of his diary entries from 1939-1944 - The War Diary of Breckinridge Long. Long’s papers are archived at the Library of Congress, and a further unpublished selection of his diary entries, from much earlier, about the Paris Peace Conference, have been made available online thanks to Charles T. Evans, Professor of History at Northern Virginia Community College. Here are a couple of them.

18 January 1919
‘Today may be epoch marking in the history of the World. The Peace Conference opened its sessions in Paris with the representatives of the civilized world assembled around the board. It is announced there that the League of Nations will be one of the first - the first - number in the order of business. President Wilson has won the first of his fights, and will no doubt prevail in establishing a League. It is necessary to the successful work of the Congress that the Nations represented should be in accord. How then could they be bound except by a League? Reverting to the Democratic platform of 1916 it is evident the President had in mind early in 1916 the general terms of peace and the evolution of a League of Nations. He has worked skillfully toward that object ever since.’

26 January 1919
‘The League of Nations. I think I see so clearly the President’s purpose in trying to establish it. The allied and associated governments have been held together by the danger of the common enemy. Now that has ceased to be a binding force. The centripedal forces are exchanged for centrifugal ones. Each nation, except us, has special and in many cases conflicting claims. They are impossible of settlement in detail by the present Conference because it will take too long. It must soon (in 2 or 3 months) adjourn. People are tired of war. They all want peace proclaimed. That means public opinion will soon force it to sign a peace and adjourn. That peace can in the nature of things be only a settlement of 1) The guilt of Germany, including the official persons; 2) The indemnities Germany & Austria must pay and the reparation they shall make; 3) General principles each nation can and will subscribe to as fundamental doctrines, the specific applications of which to certain cases will be determined by sub-committees which will report their findings and recommendations to the next succeeding body, the World Congress, which will receive them and determine the rights, and which will be the League of Nations in Congress assembled. It will be the authoritative body which will work out the details of the matters now before the Peace Conference. He sees the necessity of committing each nation to the general principles but first of having their agreement to the League and their concurrent acceptance of the condition that they shall submit all their differences to the court of last resort. Once the League is subscribed to, they are bound. Without that obligation they might not be able to agree to terms of Peace; one would be trading its desires and claims for the support of another; combinations, of which special interests of each of the combining parties would be the cement, would jeopardize the successful conclusion of all rights on a just basis. The League, once created, is the solution - & is the prime consideration. He sees it. His critics, who demand ‘peace first & then let’s consider the League’ do not see there can be no peace without it - at least no reasonable prospect of an immediate and proper peace without it.’

For another story connecting diaries and the League of Nations, but this time its latter days, see Sean Lester and the League.

This article is a revised version of one first published 10 years ago on 25 January 2009.

The father of anarchism

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, considered by some to be the father of anarchism, was born 210 years ago today. He came from humble, rural origins, was largely self-taught, but nevertheless became one of the ideology’s most influential theorists. Intriguingly, although he kept a diary for the last 20 years of his life, it has never been edited or published, and only a few extracts are available in English - thanks to a biography by the Canadian writer George Woodcock.

Proudhon was born in Besançon, France, on 15 January 1809, the son of a poor tavern keeper. He lacked any early schooling, and was set to work as a cowherd, and in the tavern. Later, funds were found to send him to Besançon school for a while, when they ran out he was apprenticed to a printer. A thirst for learning, though, led him on to self-study at the local library, not least Latin. He went to work at the Gauthier press, becoming a proofreader. As such, his interest in politics was sparked by meeting the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, also from Besançon, whose book was being prepared for publication. Similarly, he also became friends with Gustave Fallot, a scholar from Montebéliard.

In 1830, Proudhon became certified as a journeyman compositor, but work was hard to come by. He spent a while in Paris, at the behest of Fallot, where he mingled with Fallot’s learned friends. When a cholera epidemic hit the capital, he returned to Besançon. After a printing venture failed, he decided to pursue a scholarly career, and subsequently won a bursary from the Academy of Besançon allowing him to return to study in Paris. In 1840, he published his first work Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (What Is Property?). In 1943, he moved to Lyon to work for a water transport company, and there became involved with a secret society of weavers called The Mutualists. He adopted some of their views on how associations of workers could bring about change, and later adopted the term Mutualism for his own form anarchism. In 1846, he published his most important work: Système des contradictions économiques ou philosophie de la misère (The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty), in which he opposed some of the ideas of Karl Marx.

In early 1848, Proudhon travelled to Paris, where he edited anarchist periodicals and participated in the February uprising. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly of the Second Republic in June that year, but confined himself mainly to opposing the emergence of authoritarian tendencies. He tried to set up a people’s bank, but was imprisoned in 1849 for criticising the president, Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (later Napoleon III). The terms of his imprisonment were light, and he still managed to marry, have a first child, continue editing his papers, and even author two more books: Confessions d’un révolutionnaire (1849) and Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle (1851).

Proudhon was released in 1852, but found his professional life hampered by the imperial police. His three volume De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’église was seized, and he fled to Belgium. He was sentenced to prison in absentia, and remained in exile until 1862. Returning to Paris, he was again gaining influence among Paris craftsmen, and was among the founders of First International (or International Workingmen’s Association) aiming to unite a wide range of left-wing groups. He died in 1865. Wikipedia provides this summary assessment: ‘He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist, using that term and is widely regarded as one of the ideology’s most influential theorists. Proudhon is even considered by many to be the “father of anarchism” ’. Further biographical information is also available at Encyclopaedia Britannica, Anarchy Archives, Encyclopedia of Marxism or Spartacus Educational.

Proudhon was a committed diarist. He left behind 11 manuscript diaries covering the years from 1843 to 1964. They have never been edited or published (apart from a few extracts in the French periodical La Grande Revue in 1908). However, the Canadian writer and ‘anarchist thinker’, George Woodcock, used the diaries extensively in his 1956 work Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: a biography (Black Rose Books). This ran to a second and third edition (1987); the latter is freely available to view at Libcom.org (‘a resource for all people who wish to fight to improve their lives, their communities and their working conditions’ - i.e. anarchist communism).

Woodcock embedded the diary extracts into his prose, and so mostly they are undated. I’ve chosen the following extracts from the biography to provide examples of Proudhon’s diaries (which I’ve italicised).

‘Nothing is known about his first love beyond the references he himself makes, and these are inexplicit. “I know today,” he was to write in his diary for 1846, “what at twenty made my spirit so full, so loving, so enraptured: what made women seem to me so angelic, so divine; what in my dreams of love (wherein faith in God, in the immortal soul, in religious practice, mingled and combined with faith in infinite love) made my religion so precious to me. . . I was Christian because I was in love, in love because I was Christian - I mean religious.” ’

‘A second reason for doubting Marx’s influence lies in the marked difference between the methods advocated by the two men in connection with the idea of association. Proudhon was opposed to political action, and he hoped, unlike Marx, that the desirable changes in society could be brought about without violence. On the first point he remarks categorically in his diary for the spring of 1845: “The social revolution is seriously compromised if it comes through a political revolution.” On the second point he notes: “The workers, once they are organised and marching through work to the conquest of the world, should in no event make an uprising, but become all by invading all through the force of principle.” Again, he remarks: “No hatred, no hatred. Eliminate by principle.” And he adds a hope of being able “to dispossess the proprietors, at their solicitation and without indemnity.” The latter end he expects to achieve by the creation of economic associations for the exchange of products and for co-operative work, and the scene of the struggle he locates, not in the streets or the parliament house, but in the workshop. “The new socialist movement will begin by . . . the war of the workshop.” ’

‘A new interest which his increased prosperity allowed him to follow at this period was the stage, and many of the more interesting entries in the diary he began this year are concerned with the theatre. He regularly attended the Opera and the playhouses, and wrote perceptive and caustic comments on the performances. After hearing Rossini’s William Tell, for instance, he noted with discrimination: “Tragedy, comedy and music have independently reached a high point of perfection, but as they have not arrived there simultaneously, the performance cannot attain completeness.” And towards the great actress Rachel, whom he saw in Phedre, he reacted in shocked hostility. She seemed to him a personification of the romantic excesses which he regarded as the great disintegrating factor in French art and literature. “From the beginning to the end of the tragedy she acted like an old tart in love with a handsome boy, and in the grip of an attack of hysteria ... When Rachel moves you, it is by grating on your nerves, not by touching your feelings.” ’

‘Yet if he was never led into transports of love, there are enough indications to suggest that he was a more hopeful and a happier man for having met Euphrasie. A passage in his diary for July, 1847, indicates this in an oblique way. “A man marries a woman ten or twelve years younger than himself, in order that his youth may be prolonged all life long ... Up to 15 or 16 years, he has his father, mother and teacher, from 16 to 30 he is young, from 30 to 40 he is young again through his wife, after 40 he is so through his children. Thus youth exists always for man; it is a miracle of love and sympathy.” Euphrasie was fourteen years younger than Proudhon, and he was clearly hopeful of a renewal of mental vigour from his relationship with her.’

‘On the 23rd June he entered in his diary: “The Terror reigns in the capital, not a Terror like that of ’93, but the Terror of the civil and social war . . . What is happening here is what has always been seen: each new idea has its baptism; the first to propagate it - misunderstood and impatient, get themselves killed for too much philosophic independence.” ’

‘A much more disconcerting visitor was George Sand, who, in February, 1852, embarrassed Proudhon by calling on him and Marc Dufraisse. He was surprised to realise that this detested personification of feminist romanticism was not lacking in good qualities, and there is a certain compassion in the way he described her in his diary: “A long, cold, tired face; a woman of great good sense, great good heart and little passion, her speech curt, clear, positive and simple. G. Sand has burnt the candle at both ends, rather, I believe, from fancy than from sensuality or passion. . . . She is too mannish, too poised, too sedate. . . . Nothing in her, nothing, nothing of the feminine!” Yet these impressions seem to have been too fleeting to soften Proudhon’s hostile estimate of George Sand’s performance and influence, and in De la Justice a few years later he was to judge her work with extreme harshness.’

These entries - here as found in Woodcock’s biography - were all written in 1851.
‘3rd December. “Never has such an assault been committed on the good faith of a nation. . . . The insult is too sharp, the nation is lost if it gives in!”
4th December. “I rise at 5.30 in the morning: I have had a feverish and inflammatory sleep, with intolerable beating of the arteries. . . If I were free, I would bury myself under the ruins of the Republic with her faithful citizens, or else I would go to live far from a land unworthy of liberty.”
5th December. “How right I was, in 1843, to cry out against that absurdity of universal suffrage. No, the masses are not and will not for a long time be capable of a good action for themselves.”
10th December. “Through the defection of the working class, Paris has lost the battle.”
14th December. “She [Mme Suchet confirms the news of the] shooting of citizens taken at the barricades. . . Thus, he is not content to defend himself; he has not even recoiled before massacre, before crime. France is under oppression. The insolence of the conquerors knows no bounds; indignation is growing.”
15th December. “A sign of Parisian stupidity. Most people go about repeating, with B’s newspapers, that without the coup d’état, we should have had the revolution, that is to say, pillage, arson, murder, robbery. And they have under their eyes the atrocities, the nameless atrocities of the army!” ’

Philippine hero’s birth date

Carlos P. Romulo, one of the most decorated Filipinos in history, was born 120 years ago today. Although there is widespread disagreement across the web about the date of his birth, it’s a diary clue that seems to provide the most reliable date. He was a president of the United Nations General Assembly in its early years, and a long-term foreign minister at home - he served, in one capacity or another, eight Philippine presidents. There is no evidence that he was diarist, but he does feature in the diaries of various other leading politicians of the day, as revealed by The Philippine Diary Project - a database of diary entries concerning Philippine history.

Romulo was born in Intramuros, the historic centre of Manila, on 14 January 1898, though his well-off parents soon moved to live in Camiling, Tarlac, some 150km north of Manila. After graduating from the University of the Philippines in 1918, he studied for a masters at Columbia University. Back in Manila, he was appointed professor of English, and chairman of the English department at University of the Philippines, eventually succeeding to become, first, a regent of the university, and then president. In 1924, he married Virginia Llamas, and they had four sons.

In 1931, Romulo was made editor-in-chief of TVT Publications. In the late 1930s, he helped found the Boy Scouts of the Philippines movement. In 1941, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a series of pioneering articles on the politics of Southeast Asia; and that same year he joined the staff of General Douglas MacArthur as press relations officer. He also served as secretary of information and public relations in the wartime cabinet of Manuel Quezon (for whom he’d acted as secretary earlier in their careers). As aide-de-camp to MacArthur, he rose from the rank of colonel to brigadier general.

In 1945, Romulo acted as Philippine delegate to the United Nations Organization Conference in San Francisco; and he was then Philippine ambassador to the UN from 1946 to 1954 (including a period as president of the General Assembly). In 1950-1951, he acted as secretary of foreign affairs and, from 1952 on (with some gaps) he served as Philippine ambassador to the US. Terms as president of the University of the Philippines and as secretary of education followed, before he returned to the post of secretary/minister of foreign affairs, a position he held from 1968 to 1984. He died in 1985, having become one of the most decorated Filippinos in history. He also published nearly 20 books, politicial, historical, autobiographical and even fiction. Further information is available from a website hosted by The Carlos P. Romulo Foundation, and maintained by Romulo’s great granddaughter (Liana Romulo), Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, or the United Nations.

There seems to be an interesting controversy over when Romulo was actually born. The UN website gives his year of birth as 1901, Encyclopaedia Britannica says 1899, and Wikipedia says 1898 at the top of its biography but 1899 in the side box of facts! However, the Romulo website displays several pages from the diary of Romulo’s father, Gregorio Besacruz Romulo. One of the pages, in translation, reads: ‘On 14 of January 1898 at 3:45 pm (Friday) my wife, thank God, happily gave birth to a boy in the house Legaspi No. 19 (Intramuros) and nine days after his birth he was baptized, his godfather Don Enrique Llopis y Becerra (lawyer).

Another entry reads: ‘On Wednesday 23 of March 1898 at 10 am I had my two children Lourdes and Carlos vaccinated - the first was one year and 10 months old; the second [. . .] two months and 9 days old. The doctor who vaccinated them was my friend Don Jose R. Torres, recently licensed.’

There is no evidence that Romulo himself kept a diary, but he does feature in the diaries of several other leading politicians of the time. The excellent Philippine Diary Project contains many diary extracts from Philippine history, and a search for Romulo brings up the following extracts, among others.

Diary of Francis Burton Harrison

24 August 1942
‘Quezon, whom I had not seen for nearly a month, looks well but complains that he cannot make any great effort; and that his blood pressure is still very high. He spends most of the day in a silk dressing wrapper. He was closeted in his room for some time with Carlos Romulo, whom he afterwards characterized to me as politically “foolish” but adds that Romulo is a man who carries out everything entrusted to him.’

9-10 January 1943
‘Bernstein then presented the question of a movie drama in Hollywood, now in course of preparation, showing an American nurse and an American officer’s adventures on Bataan. A Filipino doctor had been proposed, and Romulo considered it, and insisted that he should appear as himself! Quezon said quietly that Romulo did not look sufficiently like a Filipino - was more like a Chinese. Proponed Dr Diño, his personal physician instead - said he was a real Malay type and also had had previous experience of acting.

Knowing as I did, from another source, of the terrific row Romulo and Quezon had recently had over Romulo’s book I saw the Fall of the Philippines, I was somewhat diverted by this calm discussion. Quezon had been so angry with Romulo that he had told him, “to get the hell out of here, and never come back” and had deprived him of his uniform as a Lieutenant Colonel of the Philippine Army when he was on the lecture platform.’

Diary of Antonio de las Alas

19 May 1945
‘Don Vicente Madrigal talked also of Gen. Carlos P. Romulo. He said that Romulo is even rougher and more uncompromising than Confesor and Secretary Cabili. One day he saw copies of the Philippines Herald being sold in the streets. He learned that the newspaper’s daily publication started a week before. Romulo appears as Chief Editor. Don Vicente sent word to Romulo stating that he was glad that the Philippines Herald was already being published. It must be remembered that Don Vicente is practically the owner of the Philippines Herald as he owns the majority of the stocks. Romulo offered his regrets and apology to Don Vicente for not having informed him. Romulo added that the publication of the Herald would have to be suspended as Gen. MacArthur did not want any of the old newspapers to begin publication. Later the Free Philippines began its publication.

When Romulo arrived from the U.S., he did not visit Madrigal nor offer any help to him. Madrigal considers Romulo the most ungrateful man he has ever known. He bought the Herald upon the entreaty of Romulo who did not want the Herald to fall into the hands of the Roceses. He made Romulo the Editor. Romulo wanted to go to Chunking and other places in the Orient to be able to write on the conditions in those places. He had no money, however. Don Vicente granted him an unlimited credit that allowed Romulo to visit many places in the Orient and write a series of articles. These made him very famous in the literary world. The articles earned him the Pulitzer Prize, which also brought in some cash. After all he has done for Romulo, as Mr. Madrigal puts it, Romulo’s attitude of indifference towards him was the height of ingratitude.’

4 July 1945
‘In connection with Romulo again, after the nomination for candidates for Senator in 1941, Romulo, who was an intimate friend of mine, showed coolness towards me. I attributed it to the fact that I was nominated and he was not. His resentment was absolutely unjustified. We all worked for him and we were able to get a big majority in the convention promise support for Romulo. Although Pres. Quezon always said that he wished the convention to act freely, the fact was that he controlled the nominations. He was the one who prepared the list of candidates and the names in his list were the ones nominated in the convention. When we submitted the name of Romulo, the President flatly refused for two reasons: he belonged to the same organization (Philippines Herald) as Don Vicente Madrigal. As Madrigal had already been chosen, Romulo could not be a candidate. The other reason was that he was not supported by a majority of the delegation from his own province, Tarlac. How could he expect other provinces to support him when his own province would not even vote for him? But there was a clear majority in favor of Romulo in the convention. It was probably influenced by the Free Press poll in which he got first place among an array of big men. Because of this, I had been calling him “Senator”. When later I was nominated and he was not, I noticed that he changed, probably believing that if I had not been included he would have been nominated. But it was all in accordance with the desire of President Quezon.’

17 July 1945
‘It was reported that there was a plan to launch a team composed of Osmeña for President and Romulo for Vice President. It is also said that Romulo had declined. It is too bad. We wish Romulo were a candidate so that the people can show that they do not consider Romulo the hero he seems to think he is.’

Diary of Ferdinand E. Marcos

20 February 1970
‘But Romulo is getting senile. That note of his in answer to the stiff protest of the Americans was off the beam. It speaks of there being valid ground for the attacks against the Americans and the Americans to ponder on the solution of the problems between the two countries. I have to replace Romulo soon. This is not the way to treat a wounded ally.’

Curzon’s fate was sealed

‘[Leo] Amery related the important part he played in choice of Baldwin as PM in 1923. [. . .] Amery did not think Curzon suitable on personal grounds as PM. He went round to see Salisbury, who confessed that he had not previously thought that any alternative to Curzon was possible. But eventually he agreed to accepting Baldwin. Amery and Bridgeman immediately went round to Stamfordham’s house: he was already on way to Palace. They caught up with him in St James’s Park. There, standing for about twenty minutes, they convinced Stamfordham, and Curzon’s fate was sealed.’ Today is the 160th anniversary of the birth of Lord Curzon, he who had an illustrious career in India, and then, famously, fell out with Lord Kitchener. Twenty years later, Curzon looked to be a shoe-in for prime minister to replace the dying Bonar Law, but - as this anecdote from the newly-published diaries of Kenneth Rose shows - a few senior Tories with the ear of the Sovereign’s private secretary (Stamfordham) were able to change the course of history.

George Nathaniel, 1st Marquess Curzon, the eldest son of Lord Scarsdale, was born on 11 January 1859, at the family home, Kedlestone Hall, Derbyshire. He was ignored by his parents, and had a tyrannical governess. As a teenager, while riding, he suffered a serious spinal injury which left him needing to wear a corset for the rest of his life. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was President of the Union. Curzon was soon researching and writing speeches for Lord Salisbury, who, on becoming prime minister, made him assistant private secretary. In 1886, he entered Parliament as Member for Southport. With Salisbury’s approval, Curzon spent much of the next four years travelling widely, largely in Asia, and publishing books on his findings.

In late 1891, Salisbury appointed Curzon to the post of under secretary of state for India. In 1895, he married Mary Victoria Leiter, the daughter of a Chicago millionaire, and they had three daughters before Mary died, tragically young, in 1906. Also in 1895, Curzon was promoted by Salisbury to under secretary of state for foreign affairs. Four years later, in 1899, he was appointed Viceroy of India. Although his career in India is described as illustrious, at the end he stood down from the Viceroyship following an acrimonious dispute with Lord Kitchener over the organisation of the Indian army. The dispute left him a political outcast for the best part of a decade. He remained busy, however, winning an election to be chancellor of the University of Oxford, a role he took on with zeal.

With the onset of war, Curzon joined the coalition cabinet of Herbert Asquith, and, then, under Lloyd George, took over as leader of the House of Lords with the office of lord president. In 1917, he married Grace Duggan, widow of a rich Argentinian rancher. In the postwar government led by Lloyd George, and then Bonar Law, he was appointed foreign secretary, and painstakingly dealt with the problems of postwar Europe and the near east. Many expected him to become prime minister when the ailing Bonar Law stepped down, but Stanley Baldwin was chosen instead. Curzon died two years later in 1925. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, or Gov.uk.

Although there is no obvious evidence among Curzon’s archived papers (as listed by the National Archives) that he left behind any diaries, the Richard Cocks Society (about which I can find nothing online) published, in 1985, a book called Lord Curzon’s Japan Diaries, as edited by Anthony Farrington (about which I also know nothing).

However, Kenneth Rose, who wrote a formidable biography of Curzon published in 1969 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) called Superior Person; a portrait of Curzon and his circle in late Victorian England, was a diarist, and his diaries include several substantial entries about Curzon. Rose, who also penned an award-winning biography of King George V, died in 2014, but it is only now that a first collection of his diaries has just been published: Who’s In, Who’s Out: The Journals of Kenneth Rose: Volume One 1944-1979 (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) edited by D. R. Thorpe. Some pages can be previewed at both Googlebooks and Amazon.

Jane Ridley’s review of Journals in Literary Review says: ‘As a history of the Establishment in the second half of the 20th century, these journals will become indispensable and definitive. They are the equivalent for that period of the journals of Harold Nicolson and Chips Channon for the first half, combining sharp observation and anecdote with political and social insights. They are also extremely entertaining.’ And Philip Ziegler in The Spectator has this to say: ‘Kenneth Rose’s diaries do not make history and do not set out to do so. There are no significant revelations which will change the way we look at events or radically alter our judgments of important public figures.  But they do illuminate history and give it life. If one cannot be there oneself then Rose provides as good an apparatus for eaves-dropping as can well be conceived. He deserves our gratitude.’

Here are four extracts from Rose’s diaries about Curzon.

13 July 1950
‘Conversation with Count Sforza [Italian minister of foreign affairs] at Palazzo Chigi, Rome. I asked Sforza for an estimate of Curzon’s character and work. ‘I liked and respected Curzon, but I have never known a man of such blue blood who was so great a snob. Curzon worshipped titles, orders and decorations.’

I asked Sforza whether he had ever spoken to Curzon on subjects other than politics. ‘Generally I enjoy talking to British statesmen on outside subjects. I have talked to Bonar Law of the Canadian temperament, and to Ernest Bevin on religion. But Curzon was a monument, and one cannot speak informally to a monument!’

I asked Sforza how far one should take L.G.’s constant interference into consideration. ‘It is impossible to judge Curzon alone, because L.G. constantly opposed him. I know of no parallel case in which a PM so attacked his Foreign Minister. There was an immense difference in temperament. L.G. was an adventurer and loved confidential talks and secret agents. L.G. wanted his revenge on the upper classes.’

We discussed the conference at Lausanne, 1923. ‘To achieve success, a conference with a beaten enemy must be quick. But Curzon was very verbose, and while he talked, the Turks grew stronger.’ ’

1 May 1951
‘Conversation with Leo Amery [retired Conservative politician] in Eaton Square about Curzon. Amery saw little of him before World War I when the university was appealing for a large fund. Curzon was Chairman of the committee, and asked all its members to write begging letters to friends. Two or three weeks later he summoned them again, and like a schoolmaster asked each person in turn how many they had written. One replied three, another two, etc. And Amery was proud at having sent twenty (dictated) letters. Curzon looked round the committee in scorn. ‘I have written 3,000 letters,’ he said, ‘and all in my own hand!’

Curzon played a great part in bringing about conscription, but by the time he became Foreign Secretary in October 1919 he had lost his grip, and could only argue or write memoranda, never taking bold and immediate action.

Amery was a Secretary to Cabinet Committees. First Cabinet he ever attended was in December 1916. Curzon cleared his throat and began, ‘You may not be aware . . .’. At this point he was interrupted by Balfour. ‘It’s all right, George, we all know you have written a monumental work on Persia!’

In the Conservative Party, Curzon was mistrusted, e.g. House of Lords reform. Amery wanted Asquith to make extra peers and so be forced to reform compositions of the second chamber. But Curzon wanted exclusive H of Lords. In coalition from 1919 to 1922, the government was really in the hands of four men - Winston, Lloyd George, F.E. Smith and Austen Chamberlain. Curzon was rather out of it, and so felt no doubts about leaving coalition in 1922.

Amery related the important part he played in choice of Baldwin as PM in 1923. Amery had gone skiing and met Bonar Law passing through Paris on his return. Amery was told by Bonar Law that he must shortly resign premiership [owing to ill health]. Back in London as First Lord of the Admiralty, Amery was visited by Bridgeman, who had just seen Salisbury. Bridgman told Amery that Curzon was definitely to be PM. This was not unexpected as Curzon had been presiding over Cabinets in absence of B.L. (although B.L. would have preferred Cave to do so). Amery did not think Curzon suitable on personal grounds as PM. He went round to see Salisbury, who confessed that he had not previously thought that any alternative to Curzon was possible. But eventually he agreed to accepting Baldwin. Amery and Bridgeman immediately went round to Stamfordham’s house: he was already on way to Palace. They caught up with him in St James’s Park. There, standing for about twenty minutes, they convinced Stamfordham, and Curzon’s fate was sealed. Later that day Balfour arrived and suggested that Curzon being a peer should be offered as reason for choice of Baldwin: real reason was Curzon’s domineering temperament. Unfortunately, Stamfordham sent a clumsily worded telegram to Curzon, which caused him much unnecessary distress. Curzon was wonderfully magnanimous to Baldwin. Also to Amery, who had thought it his duty to deny Curzon’s greatest ambition.’

13 March 1952
‘Saw the Earl of Halifax about Curzon. Curzon was pathetic in his later years. He was often overruled by the Cabinet and that hurt him very much.

When Curzon laughed he did so from the waist and shook all over.

One day the Cabinet was discussing Oswald Mosley. Curzon expressed the hope that the Cabinet would not be deflected from its proper course by ‘the conduct of my sinister son-in-law’.

Even if Curzon had been in the House of Commons in 1923 he would still not have become Prime Minister. He was too unpopular in his own party.

Halifax agrees that Chamberlain wanted him, Halifax, to be Prime Minister in 1940 - ‘but this was a stupid plan for a variety of reasons'.

The day Curzon died in 1925, Halifax met Lord Salisbury in the street and said to him: ‘Were you a great friend of Curzon?’ Salisbury replied: ‘Yes, I suppose I was, if he had any.’

Halifax once casually mentioned to Curzon that he was going to look at the chateaux on the Loire. The next day he received sheets and sheets and sheets of information about them in Curzon’s own hand.’

24 August 1952
‘Conversation with Sir Thomas Beecham at his Edinburgh hotel, after hearing him conduct the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He drinks iced milk, and I am given sherry and a cigar at 5 p.m.

Much talk about politicians and music. On Curzon - ‘A great statesman, the last of the statesmen. Sometimes, owing to fatigue, he was reticent, restrained and brief. In congenial company, he shone. The three best conversationalists in England were Curzon, Balfour and Harry Cust. Delius was good in argument. George Bernard Shaw did not shine in conversation.

Neither A.J.B. nor Curzon were good at public speaking. Lansdowne was the worst of all at it - but the most charming. Winston Churchill spoke as if with pebbles in his mouth, and had an irritating trick of letting his voice rise at the end of a sentence.

What a pity Curzon did not succeed Bonar Law as PM. Instead, there was Baldwin, who led us onto the rocks, and Neville Chamberlain, who led us into the quicksands.’