Showing posts sorted by relevance for query isherwood. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query isherwood. Sort by date Show all posts

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Isherwood giving thanks

It’s Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Exactly 50 years ago, the British-born writer, Christopher Isherwood, who had taken American citizenship by then, wrote in his diary about being thankful - thankful for being alive, having just crashed a car while drunk; and thankful for the sweetness of Don, his partner of five years, a young man all of 30 years his junior.

Isherwood was born in Cheshire, UK, the son of an army officer killed in the First World War. He studied at Cambridge, but did not take a degree. Thereafter, he earned a living as a private tutor. His first novel, All the Conspirators, was published in 1928. He spent several years teaching in Germany, a period which provided the material for his best-known novels, such as Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. During the 1930s, Isherwood collaborated with an old school friend, W H Auden, in three verse dramas. In 1938, the two of them went to China and jointly published Journey to a War.

From 1939, Isherwood settled in California, still working as a teacher but also as a script writer for Hollywood films. The Second World War inspired him to become a pacifist, and during the conflict, he worked at a Quaker hostel with refugees from Europe. He also began to follow the religious philosophy of Vedãnta, and write tracts. Several other novels followed, although Isherwood was never prolific. In 1953, he met and fell in love with a teenager, Don Bachardy, 30 years his junior, who would become an artist, and with whom he would have a relationship for the rest of his life. From 1959 to 1966, Isherwood taught at various US universities. By the 1970s, partly because of his autobiographical novels, he had become a leading spokesman for gay rights. He died in 1986.

Isherwood’s first diary dates back to 1949, and was published by Random House: The Condor and the Cows: A South American Travel-Diary. It tells of a journey Isherwood undertook with his lover Bill Caskey, at the behest of RandoM House, during 1947 through Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. University of Minnesota Press brought out a new edition in 2003 which includes additional photographs by Caskey and a new foreword by Jeffrey Meyers. The diary is said to be ‘unsentimental, rich, and wonderfully rendered’ - see Amazon.co.uk. However, The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities (RALPH), finds nothing commendable about the book: Isherwood was ‘too lazy to make the most of what could have been a true adventure into the depths of South America’, and his writing was ‘by rote - I did this, I saw that’.

A first and very substantial edition (over 1,000 pages) of Isherwood’s main diaries were not published until 10 years after his death, in 1996 - Diaries: Volume One 1939-1960 - by HarperCollins and Methuen. The promotional material on Amazon.com says that Isherwood ‘put at least as much of his genius in his diaries as he did in his writings intended for immediate publication’, and that the diaries ‘are beautifully written, gossipy, and indispensable for anyone who cares about writing, the creative process, and gay history’. There appears to be no sign yet of a second volume.

Wikipedia and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation website provide biographies of Isherwood, and The Diary Junction gives a few links to online information about, and quotes from, his diaries. But here, to coincide with Thanksgiving Day in the US, is an extract (taken from Diaries: Volume One 1939-1960) dated exactly 50 years ago today.

27 November 1958
‘What I chiefly have to give thanks for, this Thanksgiving, is that I’m still alive. The night before yesterday, bored after a long, long evening . . , and somewhat though not really drunk, I fell asleep at the wheel driving home and ran smash into a parked car. I guess I was knocked out. I remember nothing - until there was this very furious man, the owner of the parked car, yelling at me that he’d like to bash me to pulp - ‘And I’d do it too,’ he said, ‘if you hadn’t got blood on your face already.’ I had, as a matter of fact, hit the steering wheel, which was twisted up, cut myself between the eyes, bruised both eyes, maybe broken my nose, cut one knee and maybe hurt some ribs. The furious man . . . was eagerly expecting my arrest on a drunk, driving charge. But the police were very nice and sent me home in a taxi after I’d been fixed up at an emergency dressing station.

The other think to be thankful for is that Don and I have finished the rough draft of our play The Monsters, also the day before yesterday. We are cautiously starting the rewrite.
Don has hit a new high of sweetness. He is very happy about the play.’

Monday, August 12, 2013

Able at times to cry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

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.’

Friday, March 11, 2022

Waiting for Horace

‘Waiting for Horace to come home. The hours drag. I wait for his footsteps - his breathing - this long day at the college must be very exhausting. I feel ready to burst into tears with loneliness and worry.’ This is an extract from the diaries of the Russian-born American poet Marya Zaturenska about her poet husband Horace Gregory. She died 40 years ago in January (see The Diary Review), and he died just a couple of months later, 40 years ago today. 

Gregory was born in 1898 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and educated mainly at home. In 1918 he visited New York and Long Island but returned to Wisconsin to attend the university in Madison. He started to write poetry while studying Latin at college; he moved to New York in 1923 to earn a living as a copywriter and reviewer. During his years in New York, he married the poet Marya Zaturenska and they had two children. A first collection of his poems - Chelsea Rooming House - came out in 1930, and is said to have combined the idiom of modern life with literary influences. Seven or so more collections would follow. He also published translations of Ovid and Catullus.

In 1933, Gregory published Pilgrim of the Apocalypse, a study of D. H. Lawrence;  and in the late 1950s, he would also write biographies of Amy Lowell and James McNeill Whistler. Together with Zaturenska he compiled A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940. He taught modern poetry and classics at Sarah Lawrence College until 1960. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1965. His collected essays, Spirit of Time and Place, were published in 1973. Over the decades his work appeared in many magazines, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Contemporary Poetry, and Poetry Magazine. He died on 11 March 1982. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, The Poetry Foundation and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Gregory does not seem to have been a diarist but Zaturenska kept diaries throughout her life. A selection of her diary entries - replete with references to her husband - were published in 2002 as The Diaries of Marya Zaturenska 1938-1944. This can be previewed at Googlebooks and borrowed digitally from Internet Archive. See also Diary Review article on Zaturenska - Obsessed by new poems

Here’s a few sample extracts in which Zaturenska is close to obsessing about her husband. 

14 December 1938
‘Endless days in which the tension lifts when dear Horace comes in the house again after a hard day’s work. Count the days when the Christmas holidays will begin and we can be together. I feel safe and secure when he is near me.’

19 January 1939
‘Horace exhausted with overwork. When he returns he talks over and over again of the difficulties and strains at the school. It’s as if he couldn’t shake off the load from his shoulders.’

13 April 1939
‘Horace went to a dinner at the Oxford University Press for Auden, Isherwood and MacNeice. He had a very good time, the crowd, as is usual in these things, was diverse and curious. Freddy Prokosch, who H. says has gotten very fat in the behind, was a sort of social hostess or master of ceremonies. Auden, says Horace, was very gay and witty and Isherwood, utterly delightful. He thought that Auden bore the most amazing resemblance to the portraits of Oscar Wilde. The Boys were surrounded by fawning satellites so Horace, his curiosity satisfied, left early, having had a pleasant enough time. This must have impressed the Boys, for the next day Isherwood phoned and said they all wanted to see him again. Would he come this Sunday to a small party at Selden Rodman’s? Selden, who had been chilly for a long time, phoned too to tell Horace how much the Boys liked him and would I come to the party too. Horace said that no doubt he may have pleased them by talking lightly and cheerfully about nothing in particular and avoiding “shop” and “politics.” ’

13 May 1940
‘A rainy Saturday - closing a difficult week. Work on my book, overcome with dissatisfaction at it - do not dare to lean too heavily on Horace for criticism on it, since I feel he resents my taking his time. When he drinks nowadays I prepare for torment. He is not unjustified. I have become a complete parasite on him and my looks are going. He is nerve-wracked, overworked - no time for his own writing - isolated (and as a good wife I should build some social life around him - and I don’t seem to be able to do it). My only excuse is that I too am far from well - but my ill health has lasted so long that I may as well learn to adapt myself to it. Have had more infected teeth pulled recently. An ordeal.’

16 August 1940
‘Left for Europe on the eleventh - a hot day. Helen McMaster and my brother Max seeing us off. Excited and trembling with joy. Even Horace worn out with last-minute work at Columbia lightened up as the boat came in view. We shall never get over the delight, the joy of traveling.

Horace and I working on our poetry history book, and I’ve just finished a piece on Lizette Reese and am almost through with a piece on Adelaide Crapsey. Though Horace’s critical pieces are sounder than mine, yet I do think my little essays are well written and with a fine narrative sense and a real feeling for the form of the thing. I’m enjoying doing prose very much. And if only Horace had more time for collaboration our book would be going along at a great rate.’

15 December 1940
‘Horace turned in the manuscript of his selected book of verse, Poems, 1930-1940. Have much hope and fear for it. It’s a beautiful and powerful book.’

10 April 1941
‘Dear Horace’s birthday and the first day of real spring weather. The gold, the brightness of the green utterly astonishing. One is taken by surprise every year.

Muriel is giving a birthday party for Horace today. Dread facing people. Wish only to be with Horace. The rest of the world is full of horror, murder, poisonous spirits; the air drips blood, the ground is wet with it and the streets smell like a jungle.

Took a bus ride to town with Joanna, very lively, pretty and gay. We met Horace in front of the Forty-second Street library looking a little guilty because he had bought a new English ash walking stick at a sale. My poor dear, he needs a stick badly and he has bought almost nothing for himself.

Waiting for Horace to come home. The hours drag. I wait for his footsteps - his breathing - this long day at the college must be very exhausting. I feel ready to burst into tears with loneliness and worry.’

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Britten’s firecracker crits

A new collection of Benjamin Britten’s diaries are being published today by Faber and Faber. They portray, according to the publisher, an ‘intimate self-portrait of a young boy’s journey to adulthood, and the growth of his creative genius’. More colourfully, The Guardian writes of the diaries that they reveal a young man ‘exposed to a glamorous world of metropolitan homosexuality’. But the real firecrackers in the diaries - if there are any, for today is the 5th of November - seem to come from Britten’s youthful opinions of other composers.

Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk. When only 11 he began studying with the composer Frank Bridge, and then, aged 16, entered the Royal College of Music, London. During the 1930s, he worked for the GPO Film Unit. One of his compositions for the GPO - the famous Night Mail - brought him into contact with W H Auden who wrote the words. In 1937, Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge brought him international acclaim. The same year, he met the singer, Peter Pears, with whom, subsequently, he lived for the rest of his life.

With the onset of war, Britten followed Auden to the US where they composed the operetta Paul Bunyan. In 1942, he returned to the UK, and, together with Pears, toured the country giving recitals. In 1945, Britten completed Peter Grimes, a major opera set in the fishing village of Aldeburgh, Suffolk. It was a huge success, and other operas - such as The Rape of Lucretia and Billy Budd - followed.

Before the war, Britten had bought a house at Snape, near Aldeburgh, and, in 1948, Britten, Piers and Eric Crozier launched the first Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. Twenty years later, the Snape Maltings was converted to a concert hall to host the annual festival. In 1955, Britten went on a world tour, and in 1961 he conducted the first performance of his War Requiem, commissioned for the opening of Coventry Cathedral which had been damaged in the war. Britten was much feted during his life, and received many honours, including being appointed a member of the Order of Merit in 1965. See MusicWeb International, the Britten-Pears Foundation, or Wikipedia for more information.

Extracts from Britten’s diaries (and letters) were edited by Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed and first published in the early 1990s by Faber and Faber in two volumes: Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten (one volume covering the years 1923-1939 and the other 1939-1945). And both were republished together as paperbacks in 1998 - see Faber’s website (here and here) for more details. A third companion volume, covering the years 1946-1951 and containing only letters, was published in 2004.

Today, Faber is publishing a new collection of Britten’s diaries: Journeying Boy - The Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten, 1928-1938, selected and edited by John Evans. Britten kept a daily journal for a decade, the publisher says, and ‘this intimate self-portrait of a young boy’s journey to adulthood, and the growth of his creative genius, offers us a fuller understanding of the man and the artist Britten was to become, and of the age in which he lived’.

From his arrival as a boarder at Gresham’s School and his private lessons in London with Frank Bridge, the publisher adds, to his student days at the Royal College of Music and subsequent apprenticeship in London with the GPO Film Unit, the Group Theatre and at the BBC, the book traces the progress of ‘this journeying boy through the turbulent 1930s’. Collaborations with Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice and Grierson helped define Britten as an artist, while international acclaim at home and abroad soon followed. But these were difficult times, Faber adds, not least for Britten, ‘who lost both parents within three years, and began to feel an outsider: a young man struggling with his homosexuality and with being a pacifist at a time of imminent war.’

Evan’s introduction to the first section of the book, concerning Britten’s life in Lowestoft and at Gresham’s, can be read on the Amazon website.

A review in The Guardian, by Charlotte Higgins, says the diaries reveal ‘a lonely but driven schoolboy; a young man exposed to a glamorous world of metropolitan homosexuality; and an artist of stupendous talent, with uncompromising opinions of fellow musicians.’ Some of the most entertaining material in the diaries, Higgins says, stems from Britten’s unguarded opinions of other musicians: Adrian Boult is by turns ‘slow, dull & ignorant’ and ‘suetlike’; Sir Henry Wood is ‘an absolute vandal’; Brahms First Symphony is ‘ugly and pretentious’; of Edward Elgar, he writes ‘How I wish I could like this music’; and he says of Vaughan Williams that he ‘repulses me’.

Here are a couple more snippets from the diary, filtered out of The Guardian’s review:

(Of Isherwood)
‘He is an awful dear & I am terribly tempted to make him into a father confessor.’

(Of Lennox Berkeley who, according to the editor John Evans, was besotted with Britten)
‘He is a dear & I am very, very fond of him; nevertheless, it is a comfort that we can arrange sexual matters at least to my satisfaction.’

(Of a brothel in Paris)
‘ . . . about 20 nude females, fat, hairy, unprepossessing; smelling of vile cheap scent, & walking round the room in couples to a gramophone. It is revolting.’

Friday, November 4, 2016

Ackerley and his women

‘Today Queenie bit my hand. I do believe she was horrified as soon as the accident occurred. She grovelled on the pavement before I had rebuked her; no doubt she both tasted and smelt the blood that was dripping from my hand. I was angry and upset and gave her a number of cuts from the lead. [. . .] Indeed, she loves me so much, it must have been dreadful for her to have hurt me.’ This is the celebrated mid-20th century English writer, J. R. Ackerley - born 120 years ago today - writing in his diary about his dog, who he counted as one of his three women (the others being his sister and an aunt) and his closest friend for 15 years!

Ackerley was born 4 November 1896, the second son of a fruit merchant and an actress he met in Paris. The couple, who also had a daughter, did not, apparently, set up home together until 1903, in London, and did not marry until 1919. Joe was educated at public school in Fleetwood, Lancashire, and his study at Cambridge was interrupted by service in WWI as an officer in the 8th battalion of the East Surrey regiment. He was wounded twice, and imprisoned by the Germans, but assigned to an internment camp in neutral Switzerland, which is where, biographers say, he first acknowledged his homosexuality. His older brother, Peter, was killed just before the end of the war.

After leaving Cambridge with a poor degree, Ackerley moved to London, wrote poetry, saw his play - The Prisoner of War - produced, and came into contact with other literary figures, not least E. M. Forster who became a close friend. Indeed, it was Forster who helped arrange for Ackerley to work for five months in India as secretary to the Maharaja of Chhatarpur. His experiences there, tinged by a dislike for several Anglo-Indians, fuelled his comic memoir, Hindoo Holiday. Back in London, in 1928, he joined the nascent British Broadcasting Corporation to work in the Talks department; and, in 1935, became editor of the Corporation’s publication The Listener, a position he held until 1959. During this time, he is credited with championing many young writers, including Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

In his early 30s, Ackerley discovered that his recently-deceased father had led a double life, supporting another household with several children. He subsequently took over financial responsibility for his sister, Nancy, and for an elderly aunt, Bunny. He, himself, lived an openly homosexual life, paying male prostitutes, and never finding a long-term relationship. Aged around 50, he acquired an Alsatian named Queenie, a pet that became his primary companion for the next 15 years; the day she died he called the saddest of his life. His later years at the BBC are when he wrote his most well-known books: My Dog Tulip (1956), We Think the World of You (1960), and My Father and Myself published posthumously 
(1968). He died in 1967. Further information is available at Wikipedia, Gay History and Literature, The New Yorker, and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Ackerley clearly had a tendency to keep a diary. Hindoo Holiday presents as a journal, albeit a well-worked one - ‘as perfectly constructed as A Passage to India’ for Eliot Weinberger, and, posthumously, in 1982, Hutchinson published My Sister and Myself - The Diaries of J. R. Ackerley, as edited by Francis King. Hindoo Holiday has never been out of print for long, although it was not until 2000 that an edition edited by Weinberger, by the New York Review of Books (see a few pages at Amazon), revealed the full, unedited text for the first time in English (ironically, an Indian edition had done this earlier, restoring cuts made to the original about the Maharajah’s sexual preferences).

In his introduction to My Sister and Myself, King explains how, when his friend Ackerley died, he left him a large brown paper parcel with 17 small notebooks and five larger notebooks without any instructions as to what to do with them. After Ackerley’s sister, Nancy, had also died, King edited the diaries (all from the smaller notebooks) to be published as My Sister and Myself (the title echoing Ackerley’s own memoir, My Father and Myself). In preparing the book, King says that most of the entries he omitted were about Queenie, his walks on Putney Heath, and travels around London. ‘What I have concentrated on in this selection is the extraordinary relationship between Joe and what he would call, in the tones of a sultan speaking of his often refractory harem, “my women”: meaning by that not merely Nancy and his ancient, twice-married Aunt Bunny, but also the Alsatian bitch.’

‘At the time covered by these diaries,’ King summarises, ‘Joe’s and Nancy’s symbiosis was a ghastly caricature of the kind of marriage, devoid of sex, that is held together merely by feelings of obligation, pity and guilt. But, as in many marriages, the two participants, exhausted by their conflicts, eventually reached an understanding and even mutually helpful modus vivendi.’ Here are several extracts from
 My Sister and Myself.

30 September 1948
‘Today Queenie bit my hand. I do believe she was horrified as soon as the accident occurred. She grovelled on the pavement before I had rebuked her; no doubt she both tasted and smelt the blood that was dripping from my hand. I was angry and upset and gave her a number of cuts from the lead. Then I took her back to the flat so that I could bathe and bandage the wound. She went straight down the passage into my dark bedroom and stayed there, not coming out again for some time, which she would ordinarily have done, hearing me moving about (in search of bandages, scissors, etc.) outside. It was only when I had finished attending to my wound and, feeling slightly faint, sat down for a moment on the stool in the bathroom to rest, that she came in, looking very unhappy, and, gently putting her front paws on my lap, rose up, smelt my face and then licked it. I petted her and said it didn't matter. I felt awfully sorry I'd hit her. After that I took her down the towing path a short way, so that she could do her shits. There were dogs about so I put her on the lead, but they followed us back to my front door, Queenie barking at them and then looking up into my face as though to say, ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’ Indeed, she loves me so much, it must have been dreadful for her to have hurt me.’

14 February 1949
‘A dreadful, dreadful week of worry and self-torment. I have not been able to sleep at night without aspirins, and only patchily then. It has gradually emerged, from phone conversations with Brodie, that Nancy’s present condition is little better than that of a lunatic, that she can hardly walk or hold her water, has gone quite out of her mind. She is having this electrical convulsion treatment. Dr Brodie would not let me see her; he told me that he would send me word when I might go if I would keep in touch with him.

Alas, in my guilty mind, I see what happened as surely as though I had deliberately willed it to come to pass. She has been accusing me lately of never being the same, as always being different whenever she sees me; and of course it is true. I am deeply attached to her, my sister, in my way, and in emergencies, when I am deeply touched by her, or frightened for her, as when I took my letter down to Worthing after Haywards Heath, or burst into tears in Worthing Hospital, or saw her, so gentle and sweet in Chichester, I can love her and am ready to do or promise anything. But then I leave her, and remember the past, and become worried and anxious, and see, for instance, old Bunny, quietly and uncomplainingly packing up her gear to go and live elsewhere, and my consideration and affection or feeling turn elsewhere, or simply withdraws, and Nancy sees it going, and feels it gone.’

14 March 1949
‘Graylingwell again yesterday. And I was astounded by the improvement which Nancy showed since I last saw her. She walked in, not altogether steadily, but by herself and sat with me, and conversed in a comparatively sensible way. Though still vague in many respects, she was now in possession of much of her mind. She asked for some money, complained about the food, and seemed to expect to be able to come and join me quite soon. Some of her luggage, she said, was missing, and she was concerned about that. She asked after my health, and seemed to take an interest in my replies. Her head was still too heavy for her neck and hung forward rather, but she was altogether, excepting for a cold, a well woman compared with what she had been before. She had even written me a letter, which I had not then got, but have since received - uncertain in writing, and rather rambling in thought, but wonderfully encouraging. She said she was having insulin now every day except weekends. I asked her if she had had electrical treatment too; she said no, not to her knowledge.

Oh dear. What was it that sent her down and out at the Acre? What thought, what anxiety, what revulsion - if any? And when her mind is able soon to embrace once more all the problems of her life, will she come up against that thought, that anxiety again, and fade out once more? At the moment there seems no reason why she should not be with me in a week or two - as Dr Brodie prophesied.’

19 September 1949
‘I see there is a correspondence between tapeworms and my sister - perhaps women generally. Tapeworms are two or three yards long and composed of segments. A well-grown worm may consist of 800-900 segments. Each of these segments is hermaphrodite, and though it is not certain how fertilization occurs, it must sometimes be incestuous. A ripe segment, ready to fall off the end of the worm, contains 30,000-40,000 eggs, each already developed into a little six-hooked embryo and protected by a shell.

To the worm’s monstrous body is attached a blind and mouthless head no bigger than a pin’s, by a neck as thin as sewing cotton. But how aggressive it is, grappling itself to the wall of its host’s gut by four strong muscular suckers, and a circle of rose-thorn hooks to make doubly sure. What chance has one to get rid of a thing like that? As it lives a long time - probably its length of life is only limited by the death of the host. One man was known to keep the same tapeworm for thirty-five years. It is stubborn, resisting all attempts to get rid of it; even if you manage to get rid of the main body, the head remains and soon grows a new one, inch by inch. However, it takes no holidays, and Nancy is going off for one on Wednesday for three weeks. Bunny comes to take her place.’

4 March 1950
‘Never a dull moment, I think to myself when I look back over four years with Queenie. What a rare thing to be able to say of any relationship.

That is why one is never free from anxiety and fear. Life is so insecure. Happiness is so insecure. At any moment, some disaster. Now, travelling to Notts., I look at my watch and say, “She’s having a fine walk on Wimbledon Common with Nancy.” Then I think, Perhaps at this very moment she has been run over and is screaming in her death agony.

Georges [DuthuitJ said of dogs: “How sad and frustrating for them: never quite able to say, to convey, what they wish and try to convey.” Georges also said, about women: “Each one believes herself to be the centre of the cosmos.” ’


The Diary Junction

Sunday, May 12, 2013

The Diary Review’s fifth birthday

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the launch of The Diary Review. During its five years, the column has included extracts from the diaries of over 450 diarists. The Diary Review and The Diary Junction together can claim to provide the internet’s most extensive and comprehensive online resource for information about, and links to, diary texts. Here listed are all the diarists that have been written about in The Diary Review. Copy any name into the Blogger search box (above) to access the article(s). All the articles are also tagged with keywords (below right) by century, country, and subject matter.

The Diary Review diarists: May 2008 - April 2013 (most recent first)

John Addington Symonds; Henry James; Edwina Currie; Alan Clark; Tony Benn; Idris Davies; William Henry Jackson; Adam Winthrop; Noël Coward; Richard Hurrell Froude; Deborah Bull; Joseph Warren Stilwell; King Edward VII; William Cobbett; John Evelyn Denison; William Macready; Michel de Montaigne; Joseph Goebbels; George Barker; Anais Nin; Thomas Crosfield; Alec Guinness; Amrita Sher-Gil; Gordon of Khartoum; Hugh Gaitskell; Swami Vivekananda; Albert Jacka; Joe Orton; William Bray; Anthony Wood; William Cole; Henry Greville; Louisa Alcott; Dang Thuy Tram; John Rabe; John Manningham; Mary Berry; Edmund Franklin Ely; Sergei Prokofiev; Guy Liddell; Richard Burton; Marina Tsvetaeva; Rutherford B Hayes; John Thomlinson; Elizabeth Simcoe; August Gottlieb Spangenberg; George Croghan; William Booth; Iris Origo; George H Johnston; Dawn Powell; Arthur Hamilton Baynes; Roger Twysden; William Cory; William Grant Stairs; Celia Fiennes; Edmond de Goncourt; August Strindberg; Edward Lear; Charles Abbot; May Sarton; Ralph Waldo Emerson; A C Benson; George Cockburn; George William Frederick Howard; Frederick Hamilton; Clifford Crease; Father Patrick McKenna; Robert Musil; Michael Spicer; Chris Parry; Rick Jolly; Tony Groom; Neil Randall; Peter Green; Samuel Sewall; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Isabella Augusta Persse Gregory; Mochtar Lubis; Alice James; John Byrom; Lawrence Durrell; Thomas Moore; Beatrice Webb; Alexander Hamilton Stephens; William Charles Macready; Charles Dickens; John Baker; William Swabey; Derek Jarman; Edith Wharton; Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen; William Tayler; Robert Boyle; Roald Amundsen; Henry L Stimson; Victor Andrew Bourasaw; Robert W Brockway; Louis P. Davis; Robert Hailey; Sydney Moseley; Rodney Foster; Xu Zhimo; Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov ; David Livingstone; Christopher Columbus; George Whitwell Parsons; Arthur Schnitzler; Thomas Edison; Nathaniel Dance Holland; Frederic Remington; Lady Mary Coke; Henri-Frédéric Amiel; Engelbert Kaempfer; Henry Melchior Muhlenberg; Walter Scott; Alan Lascelles; Lord Longford; Thomas Isham; Hiram Bingham; Earl of Shaftesbury; Hannah Senesh; Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville; Allan Cunningham; Thomas Asline Ward; Robert Lindsay Mackay; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Queen Mary; King George V; John Reith; Philip Toynbee; Robert Wyse; Tappan Adney; Brigham Young; Gideon Mantell; Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz; Alfred Domett; Alfred Kazin; Joseph Hunter; George Jackson; Prince Albert; 7th Earl of Shaftesbury; William Dyott; Ford Madox Brown; William Brereton; Adam Eyre ; Aubrey Herbert; Anne Chalmers; Walter Powell; Ron Hubbard; Taras Shevchenko; Xu Xiake; Cecil Harmsworth King; Henry Martyn; Countess of Ranfurly; Anne Morrow Lindbergh; Charles Crowe; Mary Shelley; Hester Thrale; Queen Victoria; Eliza Frances Andrews; Ananda Ranga Pillai; Abraham de la Pryme; Henry Fynes Clinton; Jane Carlyle; Jacob Bee; Paul Bowles; José Lezama Lima; Stendhal; Ludwig van Beethoven; Benjamin Constant; Charlotte Bury; Hugh Prather; Leo Tolstoy; Eric Gill; Ernst Jünger; Thomas Cairns Livingstone; George Bernard Shaw; King Chulalongkorn; Julia Ward Howe; Richard Boyle; Charles Ash Windham; Elizabeth Gaskell; Étienne Jacques Joseph Macdonald; Leonard J Arrington; Takehiko Fukunaga; Porfirio Díaz; William Holman Hunt; John Hutton Bisdee; Mother Teresa; Graham Young; Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; Florence Nightingale; Elizabeth Percy; Luca Landucci; Timothy Burrell; William Lyon Mackenzie King; William Byrd; Marius Petipa; Conrad Weiser; Lester Frank Ward ; Minnie Vautrin; Tsen Shui-Fang; Katherine Mansfied; Peter Pears; Richard Pococke; Axel von Fersen; Gonzalo Torrente Ballester; Li Peng; Robert Schumann; Chantal Akerman; William Windham; Anne Lister; Alan Brooke; Guy Liddell; Hugh Casson; Jules Renard; Alastair Campbell; Fridtjof Nansen; Ricci the sinologist; Matteo Ricci; John Carrington; Gustave Flaubert; Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; Anne Frank; Virginia Woolf; Marie Louise of Austria; Dorothy Wordsworth; Antera Duke; Edward Hodge; Jeffrey Archer; Vaslav Nijinsky ; John Poindexter ; Cosima Liszt Wagner; Lady Cynthia Asquith; Thomas Clarkson; William Marjouram; Roland Barthes; Franklin Pierce Adams; Murasaki Shikibu; Caroline Herschel; Mikhail Bulgakov; Han Feng; William Griffith; Casanova; Victor Klemperer; Nelson Mandela; Josef Mengele; Ted Koppel; Henriette Desaulles; Ole Bull; Anton Chekhov; Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen; Cecil Beaton; Douglas Hyde; Donald Friend; Barbara Pym; Antonia Fraser; Fanny Burney; Jack Lovelock; Richard Newdigate; Albert Camus; William Gladstone; Thomas Babington Macaulay; Chet Baker; Paul Klee; Henry Edward Fox; Peter Scott; David Hamilton; Chiang Kai-shek; Washington Irving; Fanny Kemble; André Gide; Edwin Hubble; Tomaž Humar; William Howard Russell; Pehr Kalm; Gareth Jones; Anatoly Chernyaev; Leon Trotsky; Bernard Berenson; Benjamin Britten; Jacob Abbott; Otto Rank; Gurdjieff; Itō Hirobumi; George B McClellan; Jack Kerouac; Benjamin Roth; Lee Harvey Oswald; Roger Boyle; Meriwether Lewis; Abel Janszoon Tasman; Alfred Dreyfus; Alfred Deakin; John Narbrough; Gandhi; Arnold Bennett; Jim Carroll; Mahmoud Darwish; George Rose; Maria Nugent; James Fenimore Cooper; Henry Hudson; Kim Dae-jung; Georges Simenon; Henry Peerless; Drew Pearson; Earl Mountbatten of Burma; William Wilberforce; Alfred A Cunningham; Rosa Bonheur; Hana Pravda; Isaac Albéniz; Marie Curie; Dr Alessandro Ricci; John Skinner; General Patrick Gordon; Alexander von Humboldt; Charlotte Grimké; Christian Gottlieb Ferdinand Ritter von Hochstetter; General Hilmi Özkök; George Eliot; Aurora Quezon; Ludwig Wittgenstein; Stafford Cripps; Edward Bates; Alexis de Tocqueville; Elizabeth Lee; John Steinbeck; Harvey Cushing; Robert E Peary; John Rae; Dwight Eisenhower; Thomas Mann; A E Housman; Joseph Liouville; Lady Anne Clifford; Harold Nicolson; Neville Chamberlain; Edward Abbey; John Lennon; Georg Wilhelm Steller; Derk Bodde; Joe DiMaggio; Raoul Wallenberg; Leonard Woolf; Howard Carter; Stephen Spender; Chris Mullin; August Derleth; Olave Baden-Powell; William H. Seward; Charles Darwin; John Ruskin; Felix Mendelssohn; Alexander Selkirk; Ken Wilber; Jacob Roggeveen; Christopher Hibbert; Breckinridge Long; Sir George Rooke; Jeremiah Dixon; David Garrick; Sir John Moore; Abraham Plotkin; Steve Carano; William Keeling; Naomi Mitchison; Susan Sontag; Hanazono; Emily Brontë; Mary Leadbeater; Pope John XXIII; Robert Coverte; George Monck; Johann August Sutter; Sir George Hubert Wilkins; Christopher Isherwood; Charles Everett Ellis; Edmund Harrold; Selma Lagerlöf; Elizabeth George Speare; Georgy Feodosevich Voronoy; Edith Roller; Henry Machyn; Jedediah Hubbell Dorwin; Piseth Pilika; Marie Bashkirtseff; Jacques Piccard; Herculine Barbin; Catherine Deneuve; George Washington; Hélène Berr; Humphrey Lyttelton; Ted Hughes; Sylvia Plath; Charles XIII; Arthur Jephson; Harry Allen; Yves Bertrand; Sean Lester; Douglas Mawson; Thomas Turner; Henry Chips Channon; John Blow; Robert Louis Stevenson; Abel J Herzberg; Elizabeth Fremantle; August Möbius; John Churton Collins; Krste Misirkov; Mika Waltari; Bernard Donoughue; William Bray; Cesare Pavese; John Home; Samuel Pepys; Edward Walter Hamilton; Bernard Leach; Max Brod; Che Guevara; Lorenzo Whiting Blood; Harriet Stewart Judd; Angelina Jolie; Robert Dickinson; John Longe; George H W Bush; Jikaku Daishi; Choe Bu; Arthur Munby; Hanna Cullwick; Mary Blathwayt; Alexander MacCallum Scott; Walt Whitman; Helena Morley; Carolina Maria de Jesus; Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant; Rachel Corrie; Lady Nijo; Paul Coelho; Sir Henry Slingsby; Edgar Vernon Christian; Dorothy Day; Mary Boykin Chesnut; Lord Hailsham; Nia Wyn; Rutka Laskier; Tom Bradley; Richard Pearson; Barbellion; Pekka-Eric Auvinen; Chester Gillette; James Giordonello; Simon Gray; Harry Telford; Özden Örnek; Anna Politkovskaya; Serge Prokofiev; Rasputin

Saturday, February 28, 2009

The ghost of a reader

‘The journal writer, like the poet, is haunted by the ghost of a reader; but a ghost is very different from some palpable flesh-and-blood reader whom the writer imagines looking over his shoulder with his expectations, standards and demands.’ So wrote the British poet Stephen Spender, born a century ago today, in trying to explain why he had decided to publish his diaries, even though they were not written with publication in mind. The diaries themselves contain similar self-analysis (about his role as a poet for example) as well as many interesting anecdotes about other literary figures of the 20th century.

Spender was born in London, exactly 100 years ago today, to a mother of German-Jewish descent and to a liberal journalist. He was educated at University College School, Hampstead, and at Oxford where he became acquainted with other poets such as Auden, Isherwood and MacNeice. After Oxford, Spender lived in Hamburg for a while and then Berlin. From the start of the 1930s, he began to publish poetry and literary criticism, much of it flavoured by his left-wing politics. One of his poems, The Pylons, gave rise to the label Pylon Poets.

During the Spanish Civil War, Spender helped write propaganda for the Republican side; during the Second World War he worked for the National Fire Service. In the early 1950s, he published an autobiography giving an account of his relationship with the Communist Party. He went on to be editor of Encounter from 1953 to 1967, and to be involved with Index on Censorship. At times, he also lectured in the US. He was knighted in 1983 (the same year he appears to have stopped writing a diary) and he died in 1995.

More information on Spender can be found at Wikipedia; and The Diary Junction has some diary-related links. The Stephen Spender Memorial Trust, which says it aims to widen knowledge of 20th century English literature with particular focus on Spender’s circle of writers, has a biography, a bibliography and photos.

Although best remembered for being a poet, and, to some extent for literary criticism, Spender did produce other kinds of writing, travel books, a couple of plays and a handful of novels. For much of his life, he also wrote journals intermittently, often for specific purposes. These were compiled and edited into a single publication by John Goldsmith - Stephen Spender’s Journals 1939-1983 - and published by Faber and Faber in 1985. Spender, himself, however had some control over which entries were included in the volume, and provides a biographical commentary before each chapter.

In his introduction, Spender explains his journal-writing philosophy: ‘The essential of the journal for me is that I can put down whatever I like without consideration of fulfilling the expectations, or catering for the taste of, an editor or a reader. ‘But after all,’ the reader may protest, ‘here you are, publishing your journals.’ The answer to this objection is, I think, that the journal writer, like the poet, is haunted by the ghost of a reader; but a ghost is very different from some palpable flesh-and-blood reader whom the writer imagines looking over his shoulder with his expectations, standards and demands. The writer of the journal need only set down what is interesting to himself, his own truth, and much of this will conform to no standards of publication that he is aware of at the time. Much of it will, indeed, be unpublishable.’

In the 40 years and more covered by Stephen Spender’s Journals 1939-1983 there is only one entry dated 28 February, i.e. on his birthday. It’s from 1970: ‘I drove to New York and dined with Auden. My sixty-first birthday: his sixty-third was two days ago, 26 February.’ And there follows a poem which starts ‘Dined with Auden. He’d been at Milwaukee . . .’

Here, however, are two other extracts from the book, forty years apart.

20 October 1939
‘It must now be three weeks since my weekend at the Woolfs. They live in a very pleasant house at Rodmell near Lewes . . . I arrived in time for tea. After tea, we went out on to the lawn and played a game of bowls. . . Virginia and I walked about the garden talking about writing, which she said she wanted to discuss with other writers. She was pleased that I kept a journal because she said she found it was the only thing she could do, too. She thought that every day an occasion arises in which one sees things in an entirely new and different way, that these moments of transformation are one’s grasp of reality. This is the experience she tries to catch hold of in her journal.’ (NB: See The Diary Junction for more on Woolf’s diary.)

5 October 1979
‘I wrote a poem about Derwentwater. One of my best, at this moment, I think. Why do I have such resistance to writing poetry? Since when I am writing it I can become very absorbed, happy, fascinated. The resistance comes first from the sense not so much of failure as of non-recognition. I can’t really convince myself my poetry gives pleasure to anyone. I feel apologetic sending it to a friend, humiliated sending it to an editor, as though asking for a favour. Next, writing it is a test in which all one’s best qualities are brought in confrontation with all one’s incapacitiy. Next, poetry is not ‘work’. And there is always ‘work’ elbowing its way in and pushing poetry aside. . .

Being a minor poet is like being minor royalty, and no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that.’