Pirate hunting expedition

Dr Edward Hodges Cree was born 200 years ago today. He lived a colourful life, travelling across the world as a ship’s surgeon, and is remembered largely thanks to a journal which he kept from his very first day with the Royal Navy. It was published in the early 1980s, along with many of his own delightful illustrations and watercolours, and gives a vivid description of life at sea and navy actions in the Far East, not least against pirates.

Cree was born on 14 January 1814 in Devonport, Devon. His father was a mercer, then he turned to being a minister in the Unitarian church in Preston, then Bridport, before returning to his former profession. Edward studied medicine at Dublin and Edinburgh Universities, graduating from the latter in 1837. That same year he entered the Navy as assistant surgeon, and spent most of his working life at sea, including ten years in the Far East (1840-1850). At the end of that period, he took leave for a year, and travelled in Europe. In 1852, he married Eliza Tanner Hancock, daughter of family friends.

Thereafter he served in various ships, stationed at Lisbon, in the Baltic and in the Crimea, but from 1856 to 1860 he served in home waters. Various land-based positions followed, with occasional maritime appointments. He concluded his naval career as Deputy Inspector-General of Hospitals and Fleets at Portsmouth Dockyard, retiring in 1869, and taking up general practice in London. He and Eliza had seven sons, most of whom followed him into medical careers, and a daughter who became a nurse. Cree lived to see the new century, dying early in 1901, and was buried with his wife, who had died five years earlier, in Highgate Cemetery.  Royal Museum Greenwich (RMG) holds an archive of Cree’s papers and sketches.

The Cree archive at RMG consists largely of 21 journals written between 1837 and 1861, comprising over a million words and 1,700 illustrations. According to RMG, ‘The journals account details of his sea voyages, experience whilst in foreign lands, his impressions of people and places, his recollections amongst family and friends and writings concerning his life at home and with his wife.’ In addition to the illustrated journals are ‘his “rough journals” 1841, 1847, 1849, 1851-1852 and 1854, his medical journal kept 1841-1847, journal notes (1837), sketchbook (1839), newspaper cuttings, service records and certificates and invitations.’

Michael Levien, a writer born in India but educated at Harrow, with a military career behind him, uncovered the journals, and edited them during the 1970s, working in the house of Cree’s descendant, Brigadier Hilary Cree. They were then published by the Exeter-based Webb and Bower in 1981 as The Cree Journals: The Voyages of Edward H Cree, Surgeon R. N., as Related in His Private Journals, 1837-1856. The book is lavishly illustrated with Cree’s illustrations, of life on board, of maritime scenes, of places he visited, of events and occasions. (The portrait above comes from the Cree One-Name Study website; but the painting below is one of the illustrations accompanying the diary, and is entitled Hurrah! for Canton.) Here are a few extracts from Cree’s diary as published in The Cree Journals (which can be freely borrowed from Internet Archive).

24 February 1838
‘Fine morning with breeze from south. Passed Zembra early and afterwards inside the Canes Rocks signalled the Rhadamanthus with mails for Gibraltar. In afternoon we were between Galite and the African coast going 7 knots. The wind hot and sultry and a lurid glare spread under a bank of inky clouds in the west. The barometer was falling rapidly. The clouds gradually formed an arch across the sky and suddenly the squall came on most furiously, taking us aback. Fortunately we had not many sails set and these were soon furled. The wind increased in violence and we made no headway by all our steaming. A heavy swell was getting up from the west. At night the storm raged most furiously and the wind screeched amongst the rigging, the vivid lightning flashed and thunder rolled and heavy driving rain. The sea ran very high and the poor little Firefly rolled as if she would have gone over. The night was very dark and we were not far from the black rocks of Galite. It was a night of trouble and anxiety.’

1 March 1840
‘We have been getting on well till two days ago when we had a dead calm we lost our poor Corporal of Marines, Copperwhite, who died from acute rheumatism, which suddenly left his limbs and attacked his brain - delirium and coma ended in death. He was one of the best men in the ship, sober and obliging and hard-working. His body was committed to the deep this day.’

2 March 1840
‘Today at noon the sun was vertical. The weather pleasantly hot, therm. 86°. A couple of sharks about 9 feet long were caught, to the great delight of the ship’s company, who cut them up and cooked parts. I tasted a bit and thought it remarkably nice. The sailors liked it, but few of the soldiers and none of the women would touch it, as they thought of the poor Corporal of Marines.’

15 February 1845
‘Wilcox and I went on shore [Hong Kong] to call on some of the ladies. Had a long chat with Miss Hickson, who is a pretty, fresh complexioned Devonshire girl, jolly and good. We lunched with Pitcher [a tea-taster from the firm of Thomas Dent] and Dent [from the same firm], and then went to see an amateur Portuguese play, a vagabond place, but we were in mufti. We met there that donkey Paterson, Royal Artillery, with his wife, who is daughter of the sergeant. She is a pretty little girl and well behaved, but ignorant. The rest of the company were mostly Portuguese and policemen, and their “ladies”.’

9 August 1845
‘Weighed and proceeded into the Brunei River with the Admiral and a guard of honour consisting of 170 Marines &c., to return a visit from Badrudeen, a nephew of the Sultan of Brunei. We saw him as he passed yesterday in his boat, a long, low proa with eighteen paddles, a 4-pounder gun in the bow, red silk umbrella with green fringe, a large yellow ensign, with all the ragtag and bobtail of the place. Some of the nobs had on sku-blue jackets and yellow pyjamas, much like the worthies of Siak. The Agincourt saluted him with seven guns and the Admiral sent him back in the Nemesis steamer, which doubtless gratified his vanity much.’

22 September 1846
‘Returned to Honiton, and next day went on to Bridport. Stay at Mr John Hounsell’s, the dear old master [Cree’s tutor during his apprenticeship]. The same changes in the children here: Eliza, the eldest, grown into a pretty, clever girl of nineteen, well read and accomplished; Henry, the eldest boy, commenced medical studies at London University, and so nothing remains stationary. I had hosts of old friends to see at Bridport, which was a great pleasure, but some dear ones had gone to their last rest.’

3 October 1846
‘Left Bridport by the old four-horse coach “Forrester”, but in going down the hill into Winterbourn, one of the front wheels came off and we were overturned into the hedge, but no one was hurt, except a few scratches. We had to take a dogcart to Dorchester, getting to London at 9 p.m.’

6 October 1849
‘Coaling, preparatory to another pirate hunting expedition: this time to the west, where a large fleet of pirate vessels are said to be crusing, plundering junks trading to Hong Kong, and burning villages, &c. They are supposed to be in the neighbourhood of Hai-nan Island.’

8 October 1849
‘This pirate fleet is said to be a formidable one, commanded by an energetic Chinaman called Shap-‘ng-tsai, known to the Hong Kong people as a desperate robber. Embarked fifty Marines and fifty bluejackets, Captain Moore, [. . .]. At 9 a.m. left Hong Kong, taking steamer Phlegethon in tow, to save coals, with H. M. Brig Columbine, Captain J. Dalrymple Hay in command, as he is one day senior to Willcox. Looked into some of the numerous bays on the coast and anchored for the night at the small island Cow-kok.’

18 October 1849
‘5.30 weighed and made sail; rounded Go-to-shan Point. Noon, hove to in a pretty bay with sandy beach and fishing village, backed by wooded hills whose sides were cultivated with the sweet potato, a kind of convolvulus. The day was cloudy and pleasant, with a fresh breeze, and we enjoyed the sail along this beautiful coast lined with picturesque little islands. A high range of mountains of about 8,000 feet are seen far inland, lower ones near the coast, with serrated tops like enormous teeth.

On turning the point of another island the Columbine suddenly came on a fast boat, which Wang pronounced to be one of Shap-‘ng-tsai’s fleet. We immediately gave chase and all had long shots at her. She made all sail and got out her long sweeps and got away into shallow water, where we could not follow. The Phlegethon, which drew less water, followed her into the bay, putting some shots into her. She attempted a narrow passage between the islands, but seeing the steamer gaining fast upon her, ran her aground. All her crew escaped up the hill, which was covered with jungle, where a party of men searched in vain.

On returning to the junk she was found to stowed with smoke-balls, small arms and ammunition, and carried six guns, but no cargo, showing her character, so we set her on fire and she continued to blaze away all night on the beach.

We anchored here in the bay; it came on to blow and rain - a dirty night.’

23 October 1849
‘All the piratical fleet being destroyed except six, two large and two small junks, which escaped through some other branch of the river, we prepared to return to Hoy-how and Hong Kong.
Junks destroyed - 58; 6 escaped
Killed, Chinese pirates - estimated 1,700; escaped to the shore, to be captured, or killed, by the Tonquinese - 1,000
Prisoners - 49; women 8, children 6; most of the latter kidnapped from Hong Kong and the coast. (I fear there were many women destroyed in the junks, unfortunate prisoners of the pirates, who had been plundering and burning the villages along the coast.)
We received 40 prisoners from the mandarin at Chok-am, who had given themselves up to the natives. Forty guns taken are to be given to the Governor of Hoy-how.’

Everything is sunshining

‘At about quarter to five, after nothing but music in its dissected form, I did the only right and inevitable thing to do when the sky is singingly blue and the sun is showing up the nakedness of London and everything is sunshining and smelling of new-forgotten damp earth and crocuses - I went out.’ This is the Canadian Elizabeth Smart - born 100 years ago today - not yet 20, writing in her diary with youthful enthusiasm and literary precociousness.

Smart was born on 27 December 1913 into a privileged family in Ottawa, Canada. She was educated at private schools, and became very keen on poetry, before being sent to King’s College, London, where she studied piano. In her mid-20s, she was taken on as secretary by Margaret Watt, head of Associated Country Women of the World, and travelled extensively with her to conferences. It was during this period that she first became interested in the poet George Barker. She wrote for The Ottawa Journal for some months, and she travelled on her own, mostly in the US.

Eventually, Smart managed to arrange a meeting with Barker, with whom she launched a long-lasting affair. She returned to Canada to give birth to a daughter (by Barker), and then went to work for the British embassy in Washington. She fell pregnant again during the war, and travelled to the UK to join Barker. There she worked for the British Ministry of Defence while caring for her two children. Her best known work, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a semi-autobiographical novel about her relationship with Barker, was published in 1945. Thanks to the negative influence of her parents, the book was banned in Canada.

Thereafter, Barker visited Smart often in London, and they had two more children, although Barker never left his wife. Smart worked as an advertisement copywriter and as a magazine editor, living in Westbourne Terrace, where her flat is said to have been a magnet for the city’s bohemians. Retiring in the mid-1960s to a cottage in Suffolk, she took up writing poetry and fiction again, and also looked after her daughter’s two children (her daughter, having become involved with drugs, died in 1982). The early 1980s saw her publish - more than three decades since her last book - a few poems and The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, a kind of sequel to By Grand Central Station. She died soon after, in London in 1986. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, The Canadian Encyclopedia, ABC Bookworld, or Studies in Canadian Literature.

Two volumes of Smart’s diary were published posthumously, one in 1987 and the other in 1994, Necessary Secrets and On the Side of the Angels. Their editor, Alice Van Wart, believes ‘a remarkable personality’ emerges from the journals, ‘passionate, vibrant, extravagant, sensitive, yet subject to lethargy and self-doubt’. She says the entries were rapidly written, usually at night in bed, and ‘are the private record of the heart of a woman, a woman who never overtly rejects the standards and expectations placed upon her but quietly begins to construct her own personal values’.

The brightest, liveliest of Smart’s diary entries, in which one can sense her nascent literary talent and an interest in describing experiences of the world around her, were all written in her early diaries; later on her diaries become consumed by her difficulties, especially those in her relationship with Barker. (See also - O God George, can’t you see.)

7 March 1933
‘At about quarter to five, after nothing but music in its dissected form, I did the only right and inevitable thing to do when the sky is singingly blue and the sun is showing up the nakedness of London and everything is sunshining and smelling of new-forgotten damp earth and crocuses - I went out. [. . .]

The streets were full of tulips and narcissus and daffodils and it was spring - really. I passed by that little pool in Hyde Park by the Serpentine, cut from the bridge by bushes. A heron was standing dark and blue grey by the edge and there were sky and bushes shining in its bottom. The grass was bright green and fresh looking and on all the little hillocks purple and white and yellow crocuses are coming up.

I walked along the Serpentine - not on the bank because there were too many people there. Why do people when they go for a walk look at each other? - but up on the other side of the road - and there was a breezy wind enough to blow your hair and make you feel a little like mascots on motor cars - so I took my loose, loose hat off before the wind did. Before I came to the end, I took a new path across - on my right were two lovers walking away - he bending over and around her with his arm and head. The sparrows were making so much spring noise that I took off my gloves and scarf in spite of the brick red dress showing, and stuffed them in my purse. And then just as I thought I was alone I saw two more lovers on my left who thought they were alone. They were sitting on a seat under a gigantic trunk of a tree. [. . .]

I came out at a gate and crossed the bridge. There were boats on the water - people lazing - or working hard - and gulls flying and ducks in the water - just like summer. The wind blew my hair the right way. I forgave everybody their trespasses. I got into the gardens again and went down to the river past that mass of bushes that makes you so conscious of them and followed the water - watching the ducks and a child or two - until I came almost to Peter Pan. I had to pass a smug jealous woman sitting on a seat with some male. She tittered. Then I stepped over the low rail and walked on the grass which was quite muddy and hard to walk on in ladies’ heels. [. . .] I looked at the statue which turned out to be one by G. F. Watts called ‘Physical Energy’ - about twice life size of a huge horse. He was a god with naturally curly hair and a seductive Greek mouth. I saw that the path went in the same unbroken way - a sort of huge green path edged by huge trees on either side right up to the palace - in front of which sits the ‘Big Penny’ statue of the Good Smug Queen [Victoria]. By the time I got to the Round Pond it was quite dark and there were foreboding clouds over the palace - a shadowy purpleness more than an actual cloud - behind there was a pink light - and everywhere there was an expectancy as if something was about to be revealed - something too wonderful or too intangible.’

9 March 1933
‘On the bus [. . .] there was only one seat on top which a nondescript man was trying to camouflage. However, I was resolute and made him move over - sitting uncomfortably and precariously on the edge. Soon, the seat in front was completely empty and I moved into it - it was the very front seat. In a couple of moments a lady who had been sitting beside someone else came and sat beside me. She was not startling, but if you looked into her face it was queer and uncanny - you could see she lived in a very different world from most people. [. . .] When the conductor came up to collect the tickets she said to him in a very loud voice, “Why don’t you stop there and get some petrol. We might get on a bit quicker.” I smiled at her when she seemed to be muttering her hates to me - but I didn’t speak for fear of bringing down on my head the accusations of an insane person - though I wished I had later when she left. [. . .]

I went to the Tate Gallery on a 2 bus and was inspired and thrilled and imagitated by William Blake’s illustrations - especially the one of Dante and Virgil approaching the angel who guards the gates of Purgatory - there are mystical yellow and red lights and rays upon the water - and you can look into it and into it - and you feel a sacred feeling like the light of twilights and dreams when you were little. Strange, lost beautiful things and imaginings and forgotten inspirations.’

31 March 1933
‘We took a bus from Sloane St to the Ritz and our white gloves began to look faintly grey at the tips. We walked along to Givans and tried on the blue checked blouse which was wrong and didn’t fit. We made an exit there - and London was making an awful noise. Men drilling and buses roaring and things falling - you couldn’t hear or think. [. . .] The noise and confusion was worse and worse - and then what should have been spring sunny air was filled with gas smells and dust and tired heat and hard dirty pavement - horrible dusty gas coming out of the bowels of dirty motors and buses.

O the clashing and jarring. It never seemed so bad. We went to Lilley and Skinners and sat in a fairly comfortable seat and Mummy tried on shoes that looked awful and cost pounds. [. . .] We took a taxi and came home and then Mummy and I had a sherry in the lounge and I was a little tight but I camouflaged it and she went out to lunch. Then I reeled into the dining room and had lunch. Then I took a bus to the Ritz and walked or rather strutted in a clipped sort of way up Dover St - and my hair was unspeakable and looked untouchable in fact - I wore a hanky under my new silk hat. The girl gave me a wash and wanted to pluck my eyebrows which made me mad - why should they want to standardize even me? I am sick of this Mayfair fashionable smart - socialness - Tatler-Spectator - jealousy - boredom - toeing the mark.’

28 February 1937
‘Hampstead still has that air of concealing just around the corner, the house I read about in some old book when I was a child, a different life. I know someday I shall find that family whose smell is in the very Hampstead mists, behind the clipped hedges, under the arched doorways. Keats walking with Leigh Hunt, or the whole Sanger family sitting in the sunshine in an untidy studio making music in the middle of the afternoon.’

The Diary Junction

The Amazing Mr Smith

Most of The Diary Review articles are pegged to an anniversary or publication of a book. This one, though, very sadly, has come about because I happened to be in West Bay, Dorset, on the morning of Sunday 8 December with my family when a body was being recovered from the beach. Later that week, local newspapers reported that a man named Derek Smith had died after falling from the cliff, whether accidentally or deliberately has not yet been reported. Curiosity led me to find out more about Derek Smith - or, as he was better known publicly, The Amazing Mr Smith - and to a book of his diary extracts.

Derek Smith was born in Croydon, south of London, on 1 April 1948 (I think), and, according to his own testimony, lived within 10 miles of the place for 47 years. In the 1960s, he performed in a band called Wild Oats, whose lead singer, Viva, he married in Torquay in 1982. They had one daughter, Rosie. After Wild Oats disbanded, Derek went on to a carve a career as a solo performer, while Viva moved into acting and then sang with a folk trio, Dangerous Curves. Derek was considered a talented guitar player and played in many comedy and folk clubs. He also toured the US five times, and appeared in shows in Holland, Germany, Norway and Jordan.

Smith’s own website quotes this comment: ‘The cardboard tube double bass, the musical shoelaces, the Nutcracker played on the tu-tu xylophone, the Blue Danube on the condom harp and his 3-minute rendition of Riverdance had to be seen to be believed.’ One reviewer said that his combination of mad inventions and brilliant acoustic guitar playing made him one of the funniest and most original entertainers around. In another, he was dubbed Monty Python’s answer to John Williams. Viva died in 2009, and Derek died on 8 December 2013. A service was held at Weymouth Crematorium on 20 December. There is not much information about Smith online, though some can be found in John Fleming’s blog piece, and in a film at Vimeo. There are many tributes to Smith at The Mudcat Cafe.

In 2005, Derek Smith self-published a book entitled 25 Year Diary of An Eccentric Musician 1980-2005. It is dedicated to ‘Viva, my long-suffering wife’. Among the acknowledgements is this one: ‘Thanks especially to my friend Steve Black for suggesting I should do something like this. The conversation ran roughly as follows: “I’ve got all these diaries of funny things that have happened to me since 1979, a lot of them at gigs.” - “Why don’t you publish some of them?” - “Because they wouldn’t be of general interest unless I was really famous.” - Maybe not, but people at your gigs might like to read about some of the things that happened at others.” - “Yes, maybe, I suppose I’d better give it a go then.’

Many of the stories, Smith says in his ‘Foreword (not funny)’ are much longer that the bits reproduced in the book, and that one day he might ‘release’ the unabridged versions. ‘Perhaps the funniest part of the whole business,’ he adds, ‘is that I bothered to write any of it down in the first place.’ He estimates that there are 300,000 words in his nine diary notebooks, and that 90% of these are ‘funny things that happened to me’, and half of this 90% is gig related. The books were not intended to be a comprehensive day by day journal, he explains, and whole days or even weeks have nothing written about them, ‘presumably because nothing notably funny happened.’ Here are a few short extracts.

12 March 1981, Shoreditch College
‘Noisy, don’t know whether it was good or bad. Several enjoyed it but ‘Keith’ (black eye, allegedly only one ball) was 21 that day and drinking G&Ts out of a pint glass. He was very pissed and rather upstaged me by stripping except for a saucepan which he and a few others were wearing . . .’

15 December 1981, Half Moon, Putney
‘Bob told me about his trumpet in the boot of his Alvis. He was wearing a fur coat and was pissed when he was stopped by the Bill. They looked at his trumpet and started sniffing it (looking for drugs). Going home, I too was stopped by the Bill, this time for jumping the lights. Sarky remark by copper: ’This is why insurance premiums are so high for musicians if they do things like jump red lights.’

7 August 1987, Colchester Folk Club
‘. . . in the interval I accidentally dropped [my plastic] dog-turd out of my tail’s pocket which resounded when it hit the top of a metallic beer barrel. I reflected how nice this was in the church. I went into the gents’ and put on my tutu behind a screen such that I was able to hear the only other occupant, who was pissing and unaware of my presence, sing in falsetto and in its entirety, ‘I wanna be Bobby’s girl’. My ‘That was nice’ made him jump out of his skin.’

23 June 1989, Jongleurs
‘. . . midnight ‘open spot’. Nasty evening before but not as nasty as the gig - drunken bastards but they enjoyed yelling ‘fuck off’ etc. I was called a brave man by Arthur Smith (compere) who bought me a drink.’

13 July 1990, Deal Folk Club
‘. . . A dog barked outside at the end of the 1st verse of ‘The Seeds of Love’, so I stopped, got out one of my toy (bouncing) dogs and tried some black magic on it by stamping on it, but the dog outside carried on barking . . .’

Consuming concentration

‘I’m wondering if perhaps there isn’t some mean between the consuming concentration I formerly directed to the keeping of the entries and the comparative laxness of attention I have devoted to the diary since the atomic bomb fell upon history.’ This is a 1947 diary entry by Arthur Crew Inman, a rich, eccentric and obsessed diarist who died half a century ago today. His diaries - all 155 of them held by Harvard University - were edited for publication in the 1980s; and, since then, they have proved a compulsive inspiration for Lorenzo DeStefano’s plays and films.

Inman was born into a very wealthy family in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1895. He studied at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, but had some kind of serious breakdown at 21. He published several volumes of poetry without any success. In 1923, he married Evelyn Yates. They moved to Boston, where Inman rented several apartments in a residential hotel. He became increasingly obsessed with his health, and had his rooms darkened and soundproofed - his inherited wealth allowed him full rein to indulge the hypochondria. He employed individuals to talk to him (‘talkers’), tell him about their lives, and sometimes he seduced them. He attempted suicide on several occasions, and finally succeeded with a revolver on 5 December 1863. Further biographical information is available from the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Harvard Gazette or Wikipedia.

From his mid-20s, Inman began to keep a diary, somewhat obsessively, thinking it would bring him immortality. By the time of his death, he had written 155 volumes, making it one of the longest diaries on record. According to David Herbert Donald, a Pulitzer-prize-winning historian, it is also ‘the most remarkable diary ever published by an American’. An edited version was painstakingly put together by Professor Daniel Aaron, and published in two volumes by Harvard University Press in 1985 as The Inman Diary - A Public and Private Confession. Some pages from the first of these can be browsed online at Googlebooks; as can some pages from an abridged one volume edition in 1996 called From a Darkened Room.

Most publicity about Inman’s diaries in recent years has been focused on, or through, Lorenzo DeStefano, who states this: ‘I first discovered The Inman Diary through a New York Times book review. What began as a fixation has grown into a deep exploration of the American psyche. Through Inman’s obsessive efforts to capture time I have encountered a literary milieu and aspects of American and world history I had no inkling of before. As a result I now hold exclusive dramatic rights to the Inman Diary from Harvard University Press.’ DeStefano’s projects include Camera Obscura, a play about Inman, which has also been turned into a chamber opera; a documentary, From a Darkened Room; and a film, Hypergraphia. 

The following extracts are taken from The Inman Diary - A Public and Private Confession.

5 September 1944
‘I am forty-nine. There is no hope in my heart that I shall ever recover from a state of limited semi-invalidism.

My day is divided somewhat as follows: The curtains in my bedroom are dropped some fifty minutes before sunrise to keep the room dark so that I may avoid headaches. Breakfast is at 6:30am, after which I wash and go back to bed unto 8:10am, when I get up. I ride at nine or ten for varying amounts, after having scanned the newspapers, listened to the news and waltzes on the radio, perhaps written in here without using my glasses, though I use them when driving. On returning home, I eat something, work, dictate, write in here. Lunch comes shortly after noon. I nap in my darkened room for a few minutes around one o’clock. Then Janice massages the soft tissue in my neck. With myself still in the dark and Evelyn or Janice on the other side of a curtain where the light is, I correct from three until shortly before six. Then I play the talking-book and the radio until 7:15pm, when Fulton Lewis’ talk ends, when I eat my supper. Thereafter, I listen to the radio, the talking-book or am read to or talked to for the evening, which extends until midnight or twelve-thirty.

My principle pleasure consists of writing in here, correcting, studying. I cannot work a tithe of the time I would wish to. I have no faith in God, the reality of progress, the predominance of good. I feel myself born under an unlucky star. I value my friends. I place more value upon money than formerly. I fear many things up to a certain point - always anticipating trouble and usually getting it. People, by and large, are very good to me, and I strive to return as I am able their affection and their efforts in my behalf. I am bitter and disillusioned with existence and wait for it to end but until it does attempt to achieve some measure of normality, to be cheerful and equable.’

24 September 1947
‘I’m wondering if perhaps there isn’t some mean between the consuming concentration I formerly directed to the keeping of the entries and the comparative laxness of attention I have devoted to the diary since the atomic bomb fell upon history. I have often thought about cooks. They plan; they work. In a trice the result of their efforts vanishes down the red lane, and if a remembrance of their culinary art remains in the mind of the one who has eaten, that is generally the apogee of reward any cook can expect. Cooks come and go, and people eat on, and very seldom in history does a name or reputation survive. Yet often the most inconspicuous and unappreciated cooks take real pleasure in their remunerative labour.

So it should be, perhaps, with the keeping of a diary. If the long record of private thoughts, emotions, experiences, observations ends by being annihilated, the mind should not dwell upon that probability but permit itself, as a traveler journeying to no destination yet enjoying the act of traveling, to enjoy the simple daily exercise.’

25 September 1947
‘Could I quite surrender to the idea that some historical and psychological value attaches itself to my efforts and believe accordingly that they were absolutely vain and trifling, I could at least be more at peace with myself, consider each entry a pleasurable venture in idle scribbling only. But I can’t, and for the simple reason that, when I come across a record such as this, I’m enraptured by it. The New York Times Book Section of week before last carries a front-page review of the journals of André Gide. I must read them. “My mind is becoming voluptuously impious and pagan. I must stress this tendency.” Did famous persons march across my pages, their merit might be differently weighed. Well, they don’t. Only nonillustrious persons of no consequence artistically or historically. Myself, I detest reading about the famous in memoirs and journals. Is that sour grapes?’

The Diary Junction

Let us go gracefully

‘Today I was filled with terrible despair, and I shall have to come to terms with that as well. [. . .] Even if we are consigned to hell, let us go there as gracefully as we can. I did not really want to put it so blandly.’ This is Etty Hillesum, a young, passionate Dutch woman, writing in her diary about ‘our impending destruction and annihilation’ at the hands of the Nazis. A little more than a year after writing this, she died at Auschwitz, 70 years ago today.

Esther (Etty) Hillesum was born in 1914 in Middelburg to a mother of Russian descent and a Dutch father who taught classical languages. In 1932, she moved to Amsterdam to study law, and then Slavic languages. As a student, she moved in left-wing circles, which included many Jews who had fled Hitler’s Germany. One of these was Julius Spier, a psychoanalyst and, apparently, an expert at reading hands, who became a mentor for Hillesum, and her great love. Their relationship eventually became physical, even though she was living with another man, and even though she knew he had similar influence over other women.

In July 1942, Hillesum took a job at the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, but after two weeks asked for a transfer to Camp Westerbork, a transit camp used by the Nazis to assemble Roma and Dutch Jews. There she became ill in the winter, and, on recovering, refused offers of help to go into hiding, preferring to continue working at Westerbork. In September 1943, she and most of her family were transferred to Poland. Etty Hillesum died on 30 November in Auschwitz. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, the Etty Hillesum Research Centre, and Catholic Ireland.

Hillesum began to write a diary in March 1941, probably encouraged by Spiers who she had consulted for the first time a few weeks earlier, and she continued to do so for 18 months until October 1842. Knowing she was unlikely to return from the camps, Hillesum gave her journals (eight closely-written exercise books - see a picture of them here) to the only writer she knew, Klaas Smelik, and his daughter. They tried to have them published, but were unsuccessful at the time.

Only in 1980, when the journals were shown to the journalist and publisher Jan G. Gaarlandt did they make it into print, in two volumes in 1981-1982, since when many editions and translations have followed. The first English versions, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, were published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in 1983 and 1987. The following extracts are taken from An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943 published by Persephone Books in 1999. Some pages of the diary can be read online in a different edition at Googlebooks.

9 March 1941
‘Here goes, then. This is painful and well-night insuperable step for me: yielding up so much that has been suppressed to a blank sheet of lined paper. The thoughts in my head are sometimes so clear and so sharp and my feelings are so deep, but writing about them comes hard. The main difficulty, I think, is a sense of shame. So many inhibitions, so much fear of letting go, of allowing things to pour out of me, and yet that is what I must do if I am ever to give my life a reasonable and satisfactory purpose. It is like the final, liberating scream that always sticks bashfully in your throat when you make love. I am accomplished in bed, just about seasoned enough I should think to be counted among the better lovers, and love does indeed suit me to perfection, and yet it remains a mere trifle, set apart from what is truly essential, and deep inside me something is still locked away.’

4 July 1941
‘I am full of unease, a strange, infernal agitation, which might be productive if only I knew what to do with it. A ‘creative’ unease. Not of the body - not even a dozen passionate nights of love could assuage it. It is almost a ‘sacred’ unease. ‘Oh God, take me into Your great hands and turn me into Your instrument, let me write.’ This all came about because of the red-haired Leonie and philosophical Joop. S [Julius Spier] reached straight into their hearts with his analysis, but I still think people can’t be reduced to psychological formulas, that only the artist can render human beings down to their last irrational elements.

I don’t know how to settle down to my writing. Everything is still much too chaotic, and I lack self-confidence, or perhaps the urgent need to speak out. I am still waiting for things to come out and find a form of their own accord. But first I myself must find the right pattern, my own pattern.’

24 April 1942
‘[. . .] And this, too: how can I explain that, whenever I have had physical contact with S. in the evening, I spend the night with Han? Feelings of guilt? In the past, perhaps, but no longer. Has S. unleashed things deep down inside of me that can’t yet come out but carry on their subterranean existence with Han? I can hardly believe that. Or is it perversity? A matter of convenience? To pass from the arms of one into those of the other? What sort of life am I leading?

Last night when I cycled home from S., I poured out all my tenderness, all the tenderness one cannot express for a man even when one loves him very, very much, I poured it all out into the great, all-embracing spring night; I melted into the landscape and offered all my tenderness up to the sky and the stars and the water and to the little bridge. And that was the best moment of the day.’

26 April 1942
‘Just a small red, faded anemone. But I like the idea that in years to come, I shall chance upon it again between these pages. By then I shall be a matron, and I shall hold this dried flower in my hands and say with a touch of sadness: ‘Look, this is the anemone I wore in my hair on the fifty-fifth birthday of the man who was the greatest and most unforgettable friend of my youth. It was during the third year of World War II, we ate under-the-counter macaroni and drank real coffee, on which Liesl got “drunk”, we were all in such high spirits, wondering if the war would be over soon, and I wore the red anemone in my hair and somebody said, “You look a mixture of Russian and Spanish”, and somebody else, the blonde Swiss with the heavy eyebrows, said “A Russian Carmen”, and I asked him to recite a poem about William Tell for us in his funny Swiss burr.’

1 July 1942
‘My mind has assimilated everything that has happened in these last few days. So far the rumours have been infinitely worse than the reality, for us in Holland at least, since in Poland the killers seem to be in full cry. But though my mind has come to terms with it all, my body hasn’t. It has disintegrated into a thousand pieces, and each piece has a different pain.’

3 July 1942
‘Yes, I am still at the same desk, but it seems to me that I am going to have to draw a line under everything and continue in a different tone. I must admit a new insight into my life and find a place for it: what is at stake is our impending destruction and annihilation, we can have no more illusions about that. They are out to destroy us completely, we must accept that and go on from there. Today I was filled with terrible despair, and I shall have to come to terms with that as well. [. . .] Even if we are consigned to hell, let us go there as gracefully as we can. I did not really want to put it so blandly.’


The Diary Junction

For Mrs Moore

C. S. Lewis, a British writer of Christian tracts and fantasy novels, died 50 years ago today (the news of his death being somewhat eclipsed by the assassination of J. F. Kennedy on the same day). He is most well remembered for his seven novels in the Chronicles of Narnia series, but less so for a diary he kept during his early years, before he became a Christian, at the behest of his intimate, but much older, friend Mrs Moore.

Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1898, with the first names Clive and Staples, but he is always known as C. S. Lewis. His mother died when he was only ten. He studied at Cherbourg School, Malvern, and University College, Oxford, but his student life was interrupted by service in the army during the latter stages of the First World War (during which he was wounded in the Battle of Arras). After the war, he returned to Oxford and gained several degrees. From early in the 1920s, he lived with Mrs Janie King Moore, the mother of a friend of his who had been killed in the war, and her daughter. Mrs Moore was more than 20 years Lewis’s senior but, nevertheless, the two had some kind of long-term relationship.

Lewis remained at University College as a tutor, and, in 1925, was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College. In 1930, Lewis, his brother and Moore jointly purchased a house called The Kilns; and, the following year, he became a committed Christian. By 1933, Lewis and a group of literary friends, dubbed the Inklings, were meeting regularly. Lewis’s first major work, An Allegory of Love: Study in Medieval Tradition, was published in 1936 (later, it won a Gollancz Memorial Prize). The Screwtape Letters, in 1942, published as installments in a magazine, was one of many Christian works he penned.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - the first of what became known as the Chronicles of Narnia, for which C. S. Lewis is probably most famous - was published in 1950, and the last - The Last Battle - in 1956. In 1954, Lewis was elected Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge. In 1956, he married the American Joy Davidman in order to allow her to stay in the country. Although she was ill with cancer and expected to die quickly, she survived until 1960. Three years later, Lewis himself died, on 22 November 1963, the same day as Aldous Huxley died, and President Kennedy was assassinated (see JFK’s assassin in Moscow for a Diary Review article on Lee Harvey Oswald). For more biographical information on Lewis visit Wikipedia, John Visser’s fan site, or the official C. S. Lewis website.

According to Walter Hooper, editor of All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922-1927 (HarperCollins 1991), Lewis made a number of attempts to keep a diary when he was a boy, but all were short lived: ‘Then, at the age of 23, when an undergraduate at Oxford, he began a new diary which runs to over a quarter of a million words and covers the years 1922-27. This was the pre-Christian Lewis, an atheist whose objections to the Faith were ventilated in this attempt. He persevered because it was meant to be, not just about his life, but that of his friend Mrs Moore. Several times he records how he fell behind and how Mrs Moore insisted that he pick it up again. Much of its documentary content was dictated by her interest in recording the pleasures and disappointments caused by the many visitors to their house. And, as the diary makes clear, Mrs Moore was its primary audience. Lewis often read it aloud to her, and she could have looked at it at any time.’

Some pages from All My Road Before Me can be read online at Amazon and Googlebooks.

21 February 1924
‘Immediately after breakfast I tood Biddy Anne in to Gillard to be vetted. Biddy Anne is a yellow cat that has recently adopted us. I walked in from the Plain, called at College and went to the Union, coming home again by bus.

I then made up my diary since my illness. After lunch the weather changed. A startling mildness came over the air and it was like spring though there were heavy black clouds to the east. After D [Moore] and I had strolled in the garden to enjoy this, I came in and read over my diary for this time last year. It is dully written - I recover the horrors from memory and not from the words.’

22 February 1924
‘I had an unusually nasty dream connected with my father in the night - a dream of the clinging sort.

After breakfast I took down all the gas globes for D to clean. I spent the morning working on Henry More’s Defence of the Cabbala, a fantastic, tedious work. After lunch I crumbled ham and swept the kitchen and scullery and then went out for a walk with Pat.’

27 February 1924
‘A letter from my father this morning, answering my last, in which I had pointed out that my scholarship had now ceased and that I should need a little supplement to carry on. This question had been raised before. He replied with a long and pleasant letter with a sting in its tail: offering what was necessary, but saying that I had £30 extra expenses last year (which I cannot account for at all) and remarking that I can always put money in my pocket by spending more time at home. There comes the rub - this cannot be answered: yet to follow his suggestion would be nerves, loneliness and mental stagnation.

I finished More’s Philosophical Works this morning and made out a table of chronology from Ward’s Life and my old table done for the English school. After lunch I went first to the Union where I extracted several facts from the Dictionary of National Biography subvoce More and then to Wilson to borrow his Theological Works . . . In the evening I began The Mythology of Godliness’.

1 March 1924
‘I spent most of the morning in the kitchen cutting up turnips and peeling onions for D, and then went for an hour’s walk in the fields. After lunch and jobs I took Euripides from his shelf for the first time this many a day, with some idea of reading a Greek play every week end (when I am not writing) so as to keep up my Greek. I began the Heracleidae. Coming back to Greek tragedy after so long an absence I was greatly impressed with its stiffness and rumness and also thought the choruses strangely prosaic. The effort to represent a scuffle between Iolaus and the Herald is intolerably languid. After the first shock, however, I enjoyed it.’


The Diary Junction