Severed heads drinking Coke

Happy birthday Eleanor Coppola, 80 today. Although her film director husband, Francis Ford Coppola is better known, Eleanor has made a career for herself directing films about films. But it was a diary she kept while Francis was filming Apocalypse Now, and later published, which set her on the course of documenting the art of movie making.

Eleanor Jessie Neil was born on 4 May 1936 in Los Angeles. Her father, a political cartoonist, died when she was 10, and her mother brought her up in Sunset Beach, 30 miles south of LA. After graduating in applied design from the University of California, Eleanor met Francis Ford Coppola while working as an assistant art director during the filming of Dementia 13 in 1962. They married in Las Vegas the following year. Their three children, Sofia, Roman and Gian-Carlo have followed them into the film industry. Eleanor, herself, has directed and/or been the cinematographer on several documentaries about the making of films. Otherwise, among her other activities, she helps manage the family winery in California, and has designed for a dance company in San Francisco. She also developed an art project, Circle of Memory ‘to inspire visitors to recall and commemorate children who are missing or dead.’ Further biographical information can be found at Wikipedia or the Note on the road website.

While Eleanor Coppola’s husband was working on Apocalypse Now, in the 1970s, with a shooting schedule in the Philippines, she kept extensive diary-like notes. These were published in 1979 by Simon & Schuster and simply called Notes, although subsequent editions were called Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now. This book, in turn, led to a film, co-directed by Eleanor Coppola, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Irene and Alan Taylor, authors of the anthology, The Assassin’s Cloak, say the diary is ‘an extraordinary record not only of making a movie but of the emotional and physical prices extracted from all who participated in it.’ Later, she published Notes on a Life, in a similar style, but with a much broader focus on her world. Further information and and extracts from Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now can be found at SF Gate, Los Angeles Times, and The Independent.

In her book, Coppola explains that she went with her husband and their three children to the Philippines in March 1976, where they rented a large house in Manila for the five-month scheduled shooting of Apocalypse Now. The film was conceived as an action/adventure structured on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, but rather than Africa in the 1800s, the film was set on a river in Vietnam during the late sixties. The story concerns a Captain Willard who is given an assignment to go on a classified mission up a river in Vietnam, cross into Cambodia and assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a Green Beret colonel who has apparently gone insane and is conducting the war by his own rules. When Willard finally arrives at his destination, he has been changed by the experience of making the journey. Coppola concludes her introduction by saying: ‘Many of the people who worked on the film were also changed.’ Here are several extracts from Notes.

24 June 1976
‘Napa. Yesterday Mike and Arlene saw two hours of rushes, and when they called to ask us if we would like anything from the city, Arlene said she thought the acting was kind of tentative. Francis went into a tailspin. He felt totally defeated. He has spent $7 million, and months of grueling production, and they didn’t say, “Hey, you’ve got some fantastic stuff there.” He really got into a black depression. As I see it, Francis has ninety hours of film, and no chunk can give you an idea of what fifteen minutes’ worth of moments he is going to select from it. What you finally see on the screen does not give the slightest clue of what was left out. For someone to just look at an arbitrary piece is meaningless. Francis felt hopeless and scared. We slept outside on the lawn. It was a beautiful night, so clear with stars. Francis tossed and turned most of the night, having nightmares. We woke up at dawn; there was a crescent of new moon rising near the horizon in the pinkish light. Francis said he had had a dream about how to finish the script, but now that he was awake it wasn’t really any good. Francis talked to Brando on the phone yesterday.’

15 October 1976
‘Thirty-eight takes, and Francis said it was never the way he wanted it. The people who were playing the severed heads sat in their boxes, buried in the ground, from eight in the morning till six at night. All day they were there in the hot sun, with smoke blowing on them. Between takes they were covered with umbrellas. They got out for lunch, but the rest of the time they were there in place.

During one take, Dennis Hopper backed up and stepped right at a girl’s cheek and collapsed part of the container she was in, nearly stepping on her face. The mud on both sides of the dolly track was deep and people kept slipping. Dennis and Fred Forrest both fell during takes. The sound man had someone hold on to his belt in the back and stabilize him as he followed the actors, so that he wouldn’t fall with the boom.

It was one of those days where the dry ice mist, or the orange smoke, or the performance, or the light, or something just never came together for a take that Francis was satisfied with.

At one point I was sitting there looking around. The severed heads were drinking Cokes. The Ifugao children were putting chunks of dry ice in film cans and making the lids pop off. Some Ifugao girls were picking lice out of each other’s hair. One girl had a wrapped skirt, bare breasts and pink plastic hair rollers. A man sitting down in his loincloth held up the fringed ends neatly so they wouldn’t get in the mud. The man with the boa constrictor was giving it a drink of water. Alex was talking about the fake blood . . . “It’s thirty-five dollars a gallon and they’re really using a lot today.” Special effects ran out of orange smoke and had to use red. My favorite old Ifugao priest wasn’t in costume today; he had on a loincloth and beige print, nylon jersey sport shirt. He came up close to the steps to take a look at the fake severed heads. They say his tribe were headhunters as recently as five years ago. Angelo had a tuna sandwich he was passing around, and people were saying, “You know how long its been since I had a tuna sandwich?” ’

17 October 1976
‘Pagsanjan. I shot an interview with Dennis Hopper. One of the things he said that interested me the most was that he thought filmmaking was in the same phase of development that art was during the cathedral-building period. When they built those great cathedrals in Europe, they employed stonemasons, engineers, fresco painters, etc., and created the work through the combined talents of many. By the nineteenth century, art evolved to the point where the major work of the day was being done by individual artists working alone at an easel. Dennis was making the point that now film-making involves the talents of many departments and perhaps eventually major films will be made by one person with a video port-a-pack.’

4 November 1978
‘Napa. Yesterday I went with Francis to a screening of the last half of the film to see some changes he was working on with the editors. I hadn’t seen any footage since June. There is no question in my mind, beyond all my personal feelings and connections, it is an extraordinary work. It feels like Francis’s level of desperation and fear is shrinking. The lawyers and United Artists are starting to talk more optimistically about the financial situation. There is still more work to do in the final sequence at Kurtz Compound, but each cut seems to improve, get closer.’

The Diary Junction

Breaking superstitious pictures

‘We brake down 28 superstitious Pictures; and took up 11 popish Inscriptions in Brass; and gave order for digging up the Steps, and taking of 2 Crosses of the Steeple of the Church, and one of the Chancel, in all 4.’ This is from the unique diary of William Dowsing, baptised 420 years ago today. He was a farmer by occupation, but for a short period when middle aged, during the Civil War, he took on the job of destroying ‘all monuments of superstition and idolatry’ in parts of East Anglia, as dictated by an August 1643 Parliamentary Ordnance.

Although there is some uncertainty about the place of his birth, it seems Dowsing was baptised in Laxfield, Suffolk, on 2 May 1596, the son of a yeoman farmer. It is likely he studied at grammar school because he knew Latin and Greek. He was married twice, having ten children by his first wife, Thamar. He was a working farmer, and was very religious, a puritan, establishing a large library of religious books. According to John Morril’s entry for Dowsing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required), he was ‘a grave, earnest, godly man who appears to have held no public office or sought any public notice over his seventy-two years of life, except for an explosive period of fifteen months at the height of the civil wars’.

Dowsing was middle-aged when appointed, by Edward Montagu, the Earl of Manchester, to be provost marshal of the armies of the eastern association. This appointment, Morril explains, was more the result of Dowsing’s puritan zeal than any experience for the job. He helped with supplies for the army and the care of prisoners of war. But, in December 1643, he surrendered that role in order to carry out the Parliamentary Ordinance which stated that ‘all monuments of superstition and idolatry should be removed and abolished’. He, personally, supervised the ‘cleansing’ of many churches in Cambridgeshire, and, in conjunction with deputies, many in Suffolk too. He visited over 250 churches in the two counties, ensuring the destruction of stained glass windows, alter rails, angels, crucifixes on roofs, etc. However, with the fall of Montagu from power, in late 1644, Dowsing, too, laid down his commission. He returned to farming, being troubled in later life by disputes between the children from his two marriages. He died in 1668.

Dowsing is remembered today solely because he documented, in a unique way, his work destroying the ornamentation in hundreds of churches. His original manuscripts have long since been lost, and there are complicated histories for various copies - hand copied and published - made of those manuscripts. These histories, along with all the surviving parts of Dowsing’s journals and much context and many notes, have been gathered together in a modern edition, edited by Trevor Cooper, and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd in 2001 as The Journal of William Dowsing - Iconoclasm in East Anglia During the English Civil War. Parts of this are available to view at Googlebooks. A substantial review of the book can be found at Michigan State University’s H-Net.

Although material from Dowsing’s manuscripts had found its way into other publications, the first book dedicated to his journal was published in Woodbridge in 1786 as The Journal of William Dowsing, of Stratford, Parliamentary Visitor, appointed under a warrant from the Earl of Manchester, for demolishing the superstitious pictures and ornaments of Churches, &c. within the County of Suffolk, in the years 1643-1644. A later edition, edited by Evelyn White, published by Pawsey & Hayes in 1885, is available at Internet Archive (and is the source of the following extracts)

23 January 1643
’14. DUNSTALL, JAN. the 23rd. We brake down 60 superstitious Pictures; and broke in pieces the Rails; and gave order to pull down the Steps.’

24 January 1643
’15. ALDBOROUGH, JAN. the 24th. We gave order for taking down 20 Cherubims, and 38 Pictures; which their Lecturer Mr. Swayn (a godly man) undertook, and their Captain Mr. Johnson.’

25 January 1643
’16. ORFORD, JAN. the 25th. We brake down 28 superstitious Pictures; and took up 11 popish Inscriptions in Brass; and gave order for digging up the Steps, and taking of 2 Crosses of the Steeple of the Church, and one of the Chancel, in all 4.

17. SNAPE, JAN. the 25th. We brake down 4 popish Pictures; and took up 4 Inscriptions of Brass, of ora pro nobis, &c.

18. STANSTED, JAN. the 25th. We brake down 6 superstitious Pictures; and took up a popish Inscription in Brass.’

26 January 1643
’19. SAXMUNDHAM, JAN. the 26th. We took up 2 superstitious Inscriptions in Brass.

20. KELSHALL, JAN. the 26th. We brake down 6 superstitious Pictures; and took up 12 popish Inscriptions in Brass; and gave order to levell the Chancel, and taking down a Cross.

21. CARLETON, JAN. the 26th. We brake down 10 superstitious Pictures; and took up 6 popish Inscriptions in Brass; and gave order to levell the Chancel.

22. FARNHAM, JAN, the 26th. We took up a popish Inscription in Brass.

23. STRATFORD. We brake down 6 superstitious Pictures.

24. WICKHAM, JAN the 26th. We brake down 15 popish Pictures of Angels and Sts; and gave order for taking 2 Crosses; one on the Steeple, & the 2nd on the Church.

25. SUDBURNE, JAN. the 26th. We brake down 6 Pictures, and gave order for the taking down of a Cross on the Steeple; and the Steps to be levelled.’

A fuller set of Dowsing’s diary entries can be read freely online at a website created in parallel with, and to promote, Trevor Cooper’s The Journal of William Dowsing. The online version offers all the journal entries but very few of the many extras offered by the book itself (see its contents here).

The Diary Junction

Of Napoleon, and a turtle

Sir Neil Campbell, a British army officer who rose to become a colonial governor, was born 240 years ago today. He is largely remembered for a detailed and informative diary he kept while in charge of Napoleon Bonaparte during his exile on the island of Elba. That diary, first published in 1869, is the only extant diary left by Campbell, however a biographical memoir by his nephew, mentions another journal, and provides a single extract from it, about the capturing of a turtle at sea.

Campbell was born on 1 May 1776. His father was described as a ‘Highland gentleman of ancient lineage, and fair landed estate’. After being nurtured in his ‘wild ancestral home’, he began his army career by joining the 6th West India Regiment in 1797. After three years service in West Indies, he returned to England and was promoted to lieutenant, and then to major. He returned to the West Indies, to Jamaica, in 1807, and then, after a sojourn in England for health reasons, journeyed again to the West Indies in 1808, this time being appointed Deputy-Adjutant-General to the Forces in the Windward and Leeward Islands. He was present at the captures, from the French, of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

During the Peninsular War, Campbell was appointed colonel of the 16th Portuguese infantry, but in 1814, he was severely wounded at Fère-Champenoise in France. Later, the same year he was chosen to accompany Napoleon from Fontainebleau to Elba (where he had been exiled under the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau) with express orders from the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereigh, that he was in no way to act as his jailer, but rather to allow the ex French emperor to take control of the island as a sovereign prince. Although, Campbell’s instructions also implied that he should not remain in Elba longer than necessary, he did promise to stay, at Napoleon’s request, until the termination of the congress of Vienna (which aimed to provide a long-term peace plan for Europe). It is thought that his presence on the island put the English naval captains off their guard, and thus enabled Napoleon to escape rather easily.

Campbell went on to serve at the battle of Waterloo, and during the occupation of France, from 1815 to 1818, he commanded the Hanseatic Legion, consisting of 3,000 volunteers. In 1825, he was appointed major-general, applied for a staff appointment, and was given the governorship of Sierra Leone, reaching the colony in May 1826. The following year, however, he died of a fever. Further information is available online from Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 or The Napoleon Series.

Campbell is largely remembered today because of a diary he kept while in charge of the force escorting Napoleon to exile on Elba, and while remaining with him there - until his escape. The diary - published in 1869 by John Murray and freely available at Internet Archive - is titled: Napoleon at Fontainebleau and Elba being A Journal of Occurrences in 1814-1815 with Notes of Conversations by the late Major-General Sir Neil Campbell C. B. With a Memoir of the Life and Services of that Officer, By his Nephew Archibald Neil Campbell Maclachlan M. A.. The book, as the title implies, contains a biographical memoir about Campbell, rather formally written, as well as the journal kept by Campbell himself for a year from April 1814 to March 1815. The latter, in particular, is a valuable first hand account of Napoleon during his exile on Elba.

According to Ravenhall Books, which brought out a modern edition of Campbell’s diary in 2004: ‘It records events as Napoleon builds an empire in miniature on Elba and it keeps an eye on the coming and going of agents and would-be assassins. Frank and enlightening it also reveals much about the personality of Napoleon and of the tensions and subterfuge within the exiled community as Napoleon devises and implements his plans for an escape.’ Here are several extracts from the original 1869 publication.

5 May 1814
‘From daylight to breakfast at 10 P.M. Napoleon was on foot, inspecting the castles, storehouses, and magazines.

At 2 P.M.. he went into the interior on horseback, a distance of two leagues, and examined various country-houses.’

6 May 1814
‘At 7 A.M. he crossed the harbour in Captain Usher’s boat, proceeded on horseback across the island to Rio, and examined the mines, then ascended a number of hills and mountain-tops upon which there are ruins. After a ‘Te Deum’ in a chapel, we had breakfast. On our return we re-embarked in Captain Usher’s boat, but, instead of returning direct. Napoleon visited the watering place, the height opposite the citadel on which he proposes to establish a sea-battery, and a rock at the mouth of the harbour on which he also thinks of placing a tower.

In talking at dinner of his intention to take possession of a small island without inhabitants, which is about ten miles off the coast of Elba, Napoleon said, ‘Toute l’Europe dira que j’ai fait une conquête déjà.” He laughed at this.

Already he has all his plans in agitation; such as to convey water from the mountains to the city, to prepare a country-house, a house in Porto Ferrajo for himself, and another for the Princess Pauline, a stable for 150 horses, a lazaretto for vessels to perform quarantine, a depot for the salt, and another for the nets belonging to the fishery of the tunny.’

7 May 1814
‘From 5 to 10 A.M. Napoleon visited other parts of the town and fortifications on foot, then embarked in boats, and visited the different storehouses round the harbour.

In making the excursions into the country, yesterday and the day before, he was accompanied by a dozen officers. A captain of gendarmes and one of his Fourriers de Palais always rode in front; and, on two occasions, a sergeant’s party of gendarmes-à-pied went on about an English mile before.

On taking our places in the boat, some of us, following Bertrand’s example, kept off our hats; on which he told us to put them on, adding, ‘Nous sommes ici ensemble en soldat!’

The fishery of the tunny is carried on by the richest inhabitant of the island. This person, by his own industry, has, out of a state of extreme poverty, amassed a fortune. He employs a great proportion of the poor, and has much influence. The removal of the stores by Napoleon to a very inferior building, merely for the convenience of his horses, is likely to cause disgust; but this shows how little Napoleon permits reflection to check his desires.’

8 May 1814
‘Before landing from the frigate, Napoleon requested that a party of fifty marines might accompany him to remain on shore. This intention was afterwards changed; and one officer of marines and two sergeants, to act as orderlies, together with a lieutenant of the navy, were sent.

One of the sergeants, selected by himself, sleeps outside the door of his bedchamber, upon a mattrass, with his clothes on, and a sword at his side. A valet de chambre occupies another mattrass at the same place. If he lies down during the day, the sergeant is called to remain in the antechamber.’

22 May 1814
‘Napoleon told me that he had taken Malta by a coup de main; that the inhabitants were so intimidated ‘par le nom de ces républicains, mangeurs d’hommes,’ that they all took refuge within the fortifications, with cattle and every living animal in the island. This created so much confusion and dismay, that they were incapable of opposition.

He requested me to write to the consul at Algiers, to secure the respect due to his flag, agreeably to the treaty.’

23 May 1814
‘I have received a letter from the Admiral, dated Genoa, May 19, in which he states that he had sent transports to Savona for the Guards of Napoleon. He expects to be off this place in a few days, on his voyage to Sicily, with Lord William Bentinck on board. I shall take that opportunity of waiting upon them, to give every information in my power, and to obtain the advantage of their counsel.’

26 May 1814
‘This morning, at 6 A.M., Napoleon went quite unexpectedly on board of the French frigate ‘Dryade,’ and the crew hailed him with cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ This, I am told, placed the captain in a very awkward situation. It was not a visit to the captain personally, for he had anchored on the preceding afternoon, and then Napoleon declined seeing him, when he waited upon him, until the following morning at 10 a.m. So that it was certainly done to try the disposition of the Navy, and to keep up a recollection of him in France.

Napoleon also visited the British frigate ‘Undaunted,’ and made a speech to the crew. He thanked them for the good-will with which they had performed their duties during the voyage, said that he felt himself under obligations to them for the period he had been on board, which he had passed so happily, and that he wished them every success and happiness. He sent them, in the course of the day, 1,000 bottles of wine and 1,000 dollars, and presented Captain Usher with a box containing his portrait set in diamonds. Napoleon speaks most gratefully to everyone of the facilities which have been granted to him by the British Government; and to myself personally he constantly expresses the sense he entertains of the superior qualities which the British nation possesses over every other.

Five British transports arrived here this morning from Savona, with about 750 volunteers of Napoleon’s Guards, his horses, and baggage.

To-day I informed General Bertrand that, in case either Napoleon himself or others might ascribe any underhand motive to my remaining here, I was ready to quit the island at once, should such be his wish; that I had only remained after the other Commissioners in order to procure for him those facilities which he had requested, through me, from the British Admiral.

After repeating my conversation to Napoleon, General Bertrand was directed to assure me that my remaining with him after the departure of the other Commissioners was indispensable for his protection and security, in obedience to Lord Castlereagh’s instructions; that even after the arrival of his troops and baggage, there was another article of the treaty not fulfilled, although guaranteed by the Allied Sovereigns, and the execution of which depended entirely upon His Britannic Majesty’s ships in the Mediterranean, viz. the security of his flag against insult from the powers of Barbary; that it would be necessary for me to communicate with the Consul at Algiers and the Admiral, as soon as possible, for that object. I requested that he would address the application to me in writing, and stated that I would prolong my stay in the hope of receiving further instructions from Lord Castlereagh, not having heard from his lordship since I left Fontainebleau.’

13 March 1815
‘About one in the morning a person with a lanthorn entered my room very silently, and told me that the prefect requested to see me immediately. In order to avoid all noise and observation, he led me by a back way, and through a stable, into the house. I found the Count in a state of extreme dismay, and occupied with his secretary. I sincerely participated in his feelings on hearing from him the intelligence he had just received from Aix and Valence, viz., that Napoleon had entered Grenoble upon the 7th at 8 p.m., and that General Marchand, with the staff and most of the officers, had retired. It may be inferred from this that the rest and the private soldiers have betrayed their duty.

This state of affairs is so serious, that I determined to go off immediately to Nice, in order to convey the earliest intimation of these melancholy circumstances to Lord William Bentinck at Genoa. I shall also report to him my observation as to the bad disposition of the troops at Antibes, and the little reliance that can be placed upon the regular army, so that he may prepare for the worst.

No actual disposition has been made by the Piedmontese for the passage of the long bridge over the Var, which separates them from Antibes.

Set off from Draguignan at 3 A.M., and arrived at Nice at 5 P.M. At 10 P.M. went on board of H.M.S. ‘Partridge’ at Villa Franca, but it blew so hard that she could not with safety attempt to beat out.

Lord Sunderland has arrived from Marseilles. There it is universally believed that  the English had favoured Napoleon’s return, and the people are furious against us.  the same idea also prevails everywhere in the South of France and in Piedmont. A newspaper of Turin, just arrived at Nice, states positively this to be the case!’

14 March 1815
‘Sailed out of Villa Franca at 6 A.M., and arrived at Genoa at 8 P.M.’

15 March 1815
‘Wrote Lord Burgbersh with news from Draguignan of the 13th inst., and mentioned a report of Napoleon having entered Lyons.

Madame Mère, as I am informed, states that Napoleon had three deputations from France before he consented to quit Elba.’

18 March 1815
‘H.M.S. ‘Aboukir’ sailed for Leghorn.’

19 March 1815
‘H.M.S. ‘Partridge’ left Genoa for Leghorn and Sicily.’

20 March 1815
‘Left Genoa. During the night robbed of my watch and between fifty and sixty guineas by brigands near Novi.’

21 March 1815
‘4 P.M. at Milan.’

22 March 1815
‘7 A.M. Domo d’Ossola. 7 P.M. Left the Simplon.’

23 March 1815
‘11 A.M. Sion. Carriage-wheel broke. 8 P.M. Vevay.’

24 March 1815
‘Midday, Morat. Overtook Mr. Perry, the courier, who had left Genoa the morning before me.’

25 March 1815
‘11 A.M. Basle. 7 P.M. Fribourg.’

26 March 1815
‘2 P.M. Rastadt. 5 P.M. Carlsruhe.’

27 March 1815
‘3 A.M. Manheim. Passed the Rhine.’

28 March 1815
‘10 A.M. Lisère; passed the Moselle in a flat.

4 P.M. Treves. At midnight, Luxembourg. Stopped four hours to pass through the fortress.’

29 March 1815
‘4 A.M. Left Luxembourg.’

30 March 1815
‘6 P.M. Brussels. Remained three hours.’

31 March 1815
‘6 P.M. Ostend. Sailed at 8 P.M. in H. M. brig ‘Rosario,’ Captain Peak.’

1 April 1815 [Last entry in published diary.]
‘9 A.M. Landed at Deal, and at 9 P.M. arrived in London. Next day had interviews with Lord Castlereagh, and with H. R. H. the Prince Regent at Carlton House.’

It is worth noting that in the biographical memoir section of the book, there is mention of another journal kept by Campbell during his journey to the Windward and Leeward Islands in 1808. Here is what the memoir says about that journal, including an extract from it (although I can find no further information about this journal anywhere else).

‘A Journal kept by him during the voyage, and illustrated by plans and drawings, relates the usual incidents on board a troopship of that period, sailing from Woolwich to Barbadoes, and passing by Porto Santo, Madeira, and Teneriffe. The ‘Creole’ mounted twelve six-pounders and two nine-pounders; had a crew of twenty-four men, including master and mate; and carried, besides Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell and his servant, a detachment of Artillery, consisting of five officers and forty-six men. At the Downs she joined company with 150 sail, many of them transports destined for Spain; but soon after, weighing anchor from thence, the convoy was caught by a tremendous gale, which effectually dispersed it, and blew over several of the vessels - the ‘Creole’ among them - to the French coast near Boulogne, though with no ultimate loss. On November 2nd, off Lymington, a detachment of Foreign Artillery, consisting of one sergeant and twenty-sis men, was taken in.

On the 4th the ‘Creole’ passed through a fleet of light transports beating up Channel. ‘These are probably,’ Colonel Campbell notes, ‘the ships returning from France, after landing the French troops agreeably to the Convention of Cintra.’ ‘On the 18th, the day being a dead calm, the boat was lowered to pursue a turtle, which was spied 800 yards from the ship. Two hands rowed, I took the helm, and the master sat in the bow of the boat ready to seize him. As he seemed to be asleep upon the surface of the water, we approached him with as little noise as possible. When the boat almost touched him, the mate suddenly grasped him by one of his fore-fins, and tossed him into the boat. The exploit being witnessed from the ship, we were welcomed by a loud cheer in exultation of our success. The appearance of the ship with all its sails set, indolently bending from one side to another, her deck and sides crowded with men, the sea clear and smooth as glass, and the delightful warmth of the day, were truly beautiful and cheering to our spirits. There was no small anxiety to view the prize - sailors and soldiers, women and children, all crowding about us to satisfy their curiosity. The turtle was laid on his back upon the deck, to the joy of every one. In course of the evening we made three attempts after other turtle, but none of them succeeded. They were not asleep, and, when we approached within a few yards, lifted up their heads, surveyed us, and disappeared.’

The Diary Junction

From real to fantastical

Today marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë. Although she was the most prolific of three sisters, all writers, she is remembered mostly for one novel, a classic of English literature, Jane Eyre. The Brontë Parsonage Museum, which holds the most important Brontë archives, owns a journal Charlotte kept intermittently, and for a short time, while living at Roe Head School. It is interesting, commentators says, since it can be seen to have served ‘as a gateway from the real world into the fantastical’.

Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 near Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire. She was the third of six children. In 1820, the family moved to Haworth, also in Yorkshire, where her father was curate. The following year, her mother died, and Charlotte’s aunt joined the household to look after the children. In 1824, the four eldest daughters were sent to a clergy daughters’ school in Lancashire, but soon after both of Charlotte’s older sisters died of tuberculosis. She and her sister Emily returned to live at the Haworth Parsonage with their younger siblings Bramwell and Anne. Brontë biographers note how the children at home encouraged each others imaginative games and creative writing.

Between 1831 and 1832, Charlotte was educated at Roe Head in Mirfield, less than 20 miles southeast of Haworth, where she made friends with Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor who became lifelong correspondents. From 1835 to 1838, she returned to Roe Head as a teacher, and thereafter took positions as governess in various families. In 1842, she moved to Brussels to attend a school, where she taught music in exchange for her tuition. It was not a happy experience and she was back at Haworth in 1844. By this time, she had written a number of stories (posthumously published as her juvenilia), but in 1846 the three sisters paid for the printing of a collection of poems, published under assumed names - though, biographies say, only two copies were ever sold.

The following year, Charlotte Brontë sent her second draft novel to Smith, Elder & Co. (a first novel, called The Professor, not having found a publisher) which published it almost immediately as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography under Charlotte’s pen name Currer Bell. The book was a commercial success, leading to speculation as to the identity of its author, speculation that only increased when Emily published Wuthering Heights under the pen name of Ellis Bell, and Anne published Agnes Grey under the pen name of Acton Bell. Tragically, over the next year or so, all three of Charlotte’s remaining siblings died - from tuberculosis also - Bramwell and Emily in 1948, and Anne in 1949. Although Anne had published her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1948, Charlotte, as her heir, refused to allow it to be reprinted (and it was not until 1854 that a new edition, much edited, was published).

Shirley, the second of Charlotte’s novels to emerge, came out in late 1849, and a third, Villette, in 1853. Given the success of Jane Eyre, she was persuaded to visit London now and then, for a few weeks at a time, and, with her true identity now known, was received in literary circles. She became acquainted with Harriet Martineau, William Makepeace Thackeray, for example, and Elizabeth Gaskell. In June 1854, she married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate, becoming pregnant soon after. But she, too, was to die tragically young, the following March, with her unborn child. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, The Brontë Society, Victorian Web, The Poetry Foundation, or Online Literature. Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1857 biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë is freely available at Internet Archive or here.

The Brontës were not diarists by nature, but there are fragments of diary material left by Emily and Anne - see Emily Brontë peels apples - and Charlotte. Charlotte’s diary-like texts, six of them amounting to around 2,000 words, were written during her years at Roe Head school. Most of the entries are quite long, and undated - and some of them can be previewed at Googlebooks in The Brontës: Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal - Selected Writings edited by Christine Alexander (Oxford University Press 2010). The British Library website mentions ‘Charlotte Brontë’s journal’, and gives one extract. However, more information as well as images of the journal itself with transcriptions can be found as part of the online exhibitions The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives at The Morgan Library & Museum. The exhibition notes say: ‘Having begun writing a straightforward diary entry - a real-time description of her life at Roe Head - Brontë had stepped seamlessly into fiction. She allowed her high-flown storytelling to provide an antidote to the dreary everyday, her diary serving as a gateway from the real world into the fantastical.’

The following extracts are taken from The Morgan Library Museum exhibition website, which says the text has been ‘lightly punctuated for readability’.

4 February 1836
‘Well, here I am at Roe-Head. It is seven o’clock at night, the young ladies are all at their lessons, the school-room is quiet, the fire is low, a stormy day is at this moment passing off in a murmuring and bleak night. I now assume my own thoughts; my mind relaxes from the stretch on which it has been for the last twelve hours & falls back onto the rest which no-body in this house knows of but myself. I now, after a day’s weary wandering, return to the ark which for me floats alone on the face of this world’s desolate & boundless deluge. It is strange. I cannot get used to the ongoings that surround me. I fulfil my duties strictly & well, yet, so to speak, if the illustration be not profane, as God was not in the wind, nor the fire, nor the earth-quake, so neither is my heart in the task, the theme or the exercise. It is the still small voice alone that comes to me at eventide, that which like a breeze with a voice in it [comes] over the deeply blue hills & out of the now leafless forests & from the cities on distant river banks of a far & bright continent. It is that which wakes my spirit & engrosses all my living feelings, all my energies which are not merely mechanical, & like Haworth & home, wakes sensations which lie dormant elsewhere.

Last night I did indeed lean upon the thunder-wakening wings of such a stormy blast as I have seldom heard blow, & it whirled me away like heath in the wilderness for five seconds of ecstasy, and as I sat by myself in the dining-room while all the rest were at tea the trance seemed to descend on a sudden, & verily this foot trod the war-shaken shores of the Calabar & these eyes saw the defiled & violated Adrianopolis shedding its lights on the river from lattices whence the invader looked out & was not darkened. I went through a trodden garden whose groves were crushed down. I ascended a great terrace, the marble surface of which shone wet with rain where it was not darkened by the mounds of dead leaves which were now showered on & now swept off by the vast & broken boughs which swung in the wind above them. Up I went to the wall of the palace to the line of latticed arches which shimmered in light, passing along quick as thought, I glanced at what the internal glare revealed through the crystal. 

There was a room lined with mirrors & with lamps on tripods, & very darkened, & splendid couches & carpets & large half lucid vases white as snow, thickly embossed with whiter mouldings, & one large picture in a frame of massive beauty representing a young man whose gorgeous & shining locks seemed as if they would wave on the breath & whose eyes were half hid by the hand carved in ivory that shaded them & supported the awful looking coron[al?] head—a solitary picture, too great to admit of a companion—a likeness to be remembered full of luxuriant beauty, not displayed, for it seemed as if the form had been copied so often in all imposing attitudes, that at length the painter, satiated with its luxuriant perfection, had resolved to conceal half & make the imperial Giant bend & hide under his cloudlike tresses, the radiance he was grown tired of gazing on. 

Often had I seen this room before and felt, as I looked at it, the simple and exceeding magnificence of its single picture, its five colossal cups of sculptured marble, its soft carpets of most deep and brilliant hues, & its mirrors, broad, lofty, & liquidly clear. I had seen it in the stillness of evening when the lamps so quietly & steadily burnt in the tranquil air, & when their rays fell upon but one living figure, a young lady who generally at that time appeared sitting on a low sofa, a book in her hand, her head bent over it as she read, her light brown hair dropping in loose & unwaving curls, her dress falling to the floor as she sat in sweeping folds of silk. All stirless about her except her heart, softly beating under her satin bodice & all silent except her regular and very gentle respiration. The haughty sadness of grandeur beamed out of her intent fixed hazel eye, & though so young, I always felt as if I dared not have spoken to her for my life, how lovely were the lines of her small & rosy mouth, but how very proud her white brow, spacious & wreathed with ringlets, & her neck, which, though so slender, had the superb curve of a queen’s about the snowy throat. I knew why she chose to be alone at that hour, & why she kept that shadow in the golden frame to gaze on her, & why she turned sometimes to her mirrors & looked to see if her loveliness & her adornments were quite perfect. 

However this night she was not visible—no—but neither was her bower void. The red ray of the fire flashed upon a table covered with wine flasks, some drained and some brimming with the crimson juice. The cushions of a voluptuous ottoman which had often supported her slight, fine form were crushed by a dark bulk flung upon them in drunken prostration. Aye, where she had lain imperially robed and decked with pearls, every waft of her garments as she moved diffusing perfume, her beauty slumbering & still glowing as dreams of him for whom she kept herself in such hallowed & shrine-like separation wandered over her soul, on her own silken couch, a swarth & sinewy moor intoxicated to ferocious insensibility had stretched his athletic limbs, weary with wassail and stupefied with drunken sleep. I knew it to be Quashia himself, and well could I guess why he had chosen the queen of Angria’s sanctuary for the scene of his solitary revelling. While he was full before my eyes, lying in his black dress on the disordered couch, his sable hair dishevelled on his forehead, his tusk-like teeth glancing vindictively through his parted lips, his brown complexion flushed with wine, & his broad chest heaving wildly as the breath issued in spurts from his distended nostrils, while I watched the fluttering of his white shirt ruffles starting through the more than half-unbuttoned waistcoat, & beheld the expression of his Arabian countenance savagely exulting even in sleep, Quashia triumphant Lord in the halls of Zamorna! in the bower of Zamorna’s lady! while this apparition was before me, the dining-room door opened and Miss W[ooler] came in with a plate of butter in her hand. “A very stormy night my dear!” said she. 

“It is ma’am,” said I.’

5 February 1836
‘Friday afternoon. Now as I have a little bit of time, there being no French lessons this afternoon, I should like to write something. I can’t enter into any continued narrative—my mind is not settled enough for that—but if I could call up some slight and pleasant sketch, I would amuse myself by jotting it down. 

Let me consider the other day. I appeared to realize a delicious, hot day in the most burning height of summer, a gorgeous afternoon of idleness and enervation descending upon the hills of our Africa, an evening enfolding a sky of profoundly deep blue & fiery gold about the earth. 

Dear me! I keep heaping epithets together and I cannot describe what I mean. I mean a day whose rise, progress & decline seem made of sunshine. As you are travelling you see the wide road before you, the field on each side & the hills far, far off, all smiling, glowing in the same amber light, and you feel such an intense heat, quite incapable of chilling damp or even refreshing breeze. A day when fruits visibly ripen, when orchards appear suddenly change from green to gold.

Such a day I saw flaming over the distant Sydenham Hills in Hawkscliffe Forest. I saw its sublime sunset pouring beams of crimson through magnificent glades. It seemed to me that the war was over, that the trumpet had ceased but a short time since, and that its last tones had been pitched on a triumphant key. It seemed as if exciting events—tidings of battles, of victories, of treaties, of meetings of mighty powers—had diffused an enthusiasm over the land that made its pulses beat with feverish quickness. After months of bloody toil, a time of festal rest was now bestowed on Angria. The noblemen, the generals and the gentlemen were at their country seats, & the Duke, young but war-worn, was Hawkscliffe. 

A still influence stole out of the stupendous forest, whose calm was now more awful than the sea-like rushing that swept through its glades in time of storm. Groups of deer appeared & disappeared silently amongst the prodigious stems, & now and then a single roe glided down the savannah park, drank of the Arno & fleeted back again.

Two gentlemen in earnest conversation were walking along in St Mary’s Grove, & their deep commingling tones, very much subdued, softly broke the silence of the evening. Secret topics seemed to be implied in what they said, for the import of their words was concealed from every chance listener by the accents of a foreign tongue. All the soft vowels of Italian articulation flowed from their lips, as fluently as if they had been natives of the European Eden. “Henrico” was the appellative by which the talker & the younger of the two addressed his companion, & the other replied by the less familiar title of “Monsignore.” That young signore, or lord, often looked up at the Norman towers of Hawkscliffe, which rose even above the lofty elms of St Mary’s Grove. The sun was shining on their battlements, kissing them with its last beam that rivalled in hue the fire-dyed banner hanging motionless above them.

“Henrico,” said he, speaking still in musical Tuscan, “this is the 29th of June.” Neither you nor I ever saw a fairer day. What does it remind you of? All such sunsets have associations.” 

Henrico knitted his stern brow in thought & at the same time fixed his very penetrating black eye on the features of his noble comrade, which, invested by habit and nature with the aspect of command & pride, were at this sweet hour relaxing to the impassioned & fervid expression of romance. “What does it remind you of, my lord,” said he briefly. 

“Ah! Many things, Henrico! Ever since I can remember, the rays of the setting sun have acted on my heart, as they did on Memnon’s wondrous statue. The strings always vibrate, sometimes the tones swell in harmony, sometimes in discord. They play a wild air just now, but, sweet & ominously plaintive Henrico, can you imagine what I feel when I look into the dim & gloomy vistas of this my forest, & at yonder turrets which the might of my own hands has raised, not the halls of my ancestors like hoary morning [illeg.]. Calm diffuses over this wide wood a power to stir & thrill the mind such as words can never express. Look at the red west—the sun is gone & it is fading. Gaze into those mighty groves supernaturally still & full of gathering darkness. Listen how the Arno moans!’

Gouty old gentlemen

‘The hippos were delightful. They seemed so aristocratic, like gouty old gentlemen, puffing and blowing and yawning, as though everything bored them.’ This is from the diary of Richard Harding Davis - the colourful American journalist-adventurer who died a century ago today. He was a prolific writer, turning his experiences and travels - often instigated by his work as a war correspondent - into books of stories, whether fiction or non-fiction. Only a few short diary fragments written by Davis have ever been published - thanks to a biography by his brother - and several of these concern the hunting of hippos!

Davis was born in 1864 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Both his parents were journalists, though his mother achieved some fame as a novelist also. He studied at Lehigh University, where his uncle was a professor, and he contributed short stories to the student magazine, The Lehigh Burr, eventually becoming its editor. His first published book was a collection of these stories The Adventures of My Freshman. In 1885, he transferred to Johns Hopkins University. After university, he worked on various Philadelphia newspapers, before moving to New York and The Evening Sun. Increasingly, he became noticed for writing on controversial and high profile subjects, as well as for his Van Bibber stories of city life. In addition, he was writing short stories for other publications. In 1890, he switched jobs, to become managing editor of Harper’s Weekly.

During the 1890s, Davis was publishing two or three books every year, some were collections of his travel and journalistic writing - like The Rulers of the Mediterranean and Three Gringos in Central America and Venezuela - while others were collections of his short fiction. He also turned, increasingly, to war reporting, making a name for himself following the Spanish-American War, with the 1st US Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the Rough Riders (second in command, one Theodore Roosevelt, later US president). He went on to cover the Second Boer War, becoming one of the world’s best known war correspondents. By then he was writing for the New York Herald, the New York Times and Scribner’s Magazine.

Davis reported on the Russo-Japanese War, and on the Salonika Front in the First World War (being arrested as a spy briefly by the Germans). A large number of his articles can be read at the Historic Journalism website, which, incidentally, says of him, ‘The well-traveled and photogenic Richard Harding Davis represented all that was edgy and glamorous about that new breed of American journalist: foreign correspondent. Fearlessly tramping by rail, road and horseback to the front lines of the “Great War”. He continued writing a great many books - most of these can be found online, freely available, at Internet Archive. His 1897 novel Soldiers of Fortune was turned into a play and, later on in the 1910s, to two films. He also wrote more than a score of plays, Including Ranson’s Folly, The Dictator, and Miss Civilization. In 1899, he had married Cecil Clark, but they divorced in 1912, and he then married Bessie McCoy, an actress, with whom he had one child. Davis died on 11 April 1916. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, The Spanish American War website, PBS, or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Another biographical source is Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis, a book written by his brother Charles Belmont Davis and published originally by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1917. Although there are no details in the biography about any diaries Richard Davis might have kept during his life, Charles does include half a dozen or so extracts from a diary his brother kept in 1907. Here are several of them.

24 January 1907
‘Last day in London. Margaret Frazer offered me gun from a Captain Jenkins of Nigeria. Instead bought Winchester repeating, hoping, if need it, get one coast. Lunched Savoy - Lynch, Mrs. Lynch, her sister-very beautiful girl. In afternoon Sam Sothern and Margaret came in to say “Good bye.” Dined at Anthony Hope’s-Barrie and Mrs. Barrie and Jim Whigham. Mrs. Barrie looking very well, Barrie not so well. As silent as ever, only talked once during dinner when he told us about the first of his series of cricket matches between authors and artists. Did not have eleven authors, so going along road picked up utter strangers one a soldier in front of embracing two girls. Said he would come if girls came too - all put in brake. Mrs. Barrie said the Llewellen Davis’ were the originals for the Darlings and their children in Peter Pan. They played a strange game of billiards suggested by Barrie who won as no one else knew the rules and they claimed he invented them to suit his case. Sat up until three writing and packing. The dinner was best have had this trip in London.’

22 February 1907
‘Spent about the worst night of my life. No mattress, no pillow. Not space enough for my own cot. Every insect in the world ate me. After a bath and coffee felt better. It rained heavily until three P. M. Read Pendennis, and loved it. The picture of life at Clavering and Fairoaks, and Dr. Portman and Foker are wonderful. I do not know when I have enjoyed and admired a work so much. For some reason it is all entirely new again. I will read them all now in turn. After rain cleared took my slaves and went after “supplies.” Met a King. I thought he was a witch doctor, and the boys said he was a dancing man. All his suite, wives and subjects followed, singing a song that made your flesh creep. At Hatton and Cookson’s bought “plenty chop” for “boys” who were much pleased. Also a sparklet bottle, some whiskey and two pints of champagne at 7 francs the pint. Blush to own it was demi Sec. Also bacon, jam, milk, envelopes, a pillow. Saw some ivory State had seized and returned. 15 Kilo’s. Some taken from Gomez across street not returned until he gave up half. No reason given Taylor agent H. & C. why returned Apparently when called will come down on the ivory question. Cuthbert Malet, coffee planter, came call on me. Only Englishman still in Service State. Had much to say which did not want printed until he out of country which will be in month or two. Anstrossi has given me side of cabin where there is room for my cot, so expect to sleep.’

27 February 1907
‘Saw two hippos. Thought Anstrossi said they were buffalo. So was glad when I found out what they were. I did not want to go home without having seen only two dead ones. In a few minutes I saw two more. Anstrossi fired at them but I did not, as thought it not the game when one could not recover them. Before noon saw six in a bunch - and then what I thought was a spit of rock with a hippo lying on the end of it, turned out to be fifteen hippos in a line! Burnham has told he had seen eleven in the Volta in one day. Before one o’clock, I had seen twenty-six, and, later in the day Anstrossi fired at another, and shot a hole in the awning. That made twenty-seven in one day. Also some monkeys. The hippos were delightful. They seemed so aristocratic, like gouty old gentlemen, puffing and blowing and yawning, as though everything bored them.’

28 February 1907
‘When just going up for coffee, saw what was so big, looking at it against horizon, thought it must be an elephant. Was a young hippo. Captain Jensen brought boat within eighty yards of him, and both Anstrossi and I fired, apparently knocking him off his legs, for he rolled on his side as though his back was broken. I missed him the second shot, which struck the water just in front of him. The other three shots caught him in the head, in the mouth and ear. He lay quite still, and the boys rushed out a gang plank and surrounded him singing and shouting and cutting his tail to make him bleed and weaken him. They don’t die for an hour but he seemed dead enough, so I went to my cabin to re-load my gun and my camera. In three minutes I came out, and found the hippo still quiet. Then he began to toss his head and I shot him again, to put him out of pain. In return for which he rolled over into the water and got away. I was mad. Later saw four more. Just at sunset while taking bath another was seen on shore. We got within sixty yards of him and all of us missed him or at least did not hurt him. He then trotted for the river with his head up and again I must have missed, although at one place he was but fifty yards away, when he entered the water, a hundred. I stepped it off later in the sand. I followed him up and hit him or some one of us hit him and he stood up on his hind legs. But he put back to land for the third time. Captain said wait until moon came out. But though we hunted up to our waists saw none. One came quite close at dinner. Seven on the day.’

22 April 1907
‘A blackmailer named H_ called, with photos of atrocities and letters and films. He wanted 30 Pounds for the lot. I gave him 3 Pounds for three photos. One letter he showed me signed Bullinger, an Englishman, said he had put the fear of God in their hearts by sticking up the chiefs head on a pole, and saying, “Now, make rubber, or you will look like that.” Went to lunch with Pearson but it was the wrong day, and so missed getting a free feed. Thinking he would turn up, I ordered a most expensive lunch. I paid for it. Evening went Patience, which liked immensely and then Duchess of Sutherland’s party to Premiers. Saw Churchill and each explained his share of the Real Soldiers row.’

Waugh’s appalling diaries

Evelyn Waugh, author of such famous novels as Brideshead Revisited, Scoop, and Decline and Fall, died 50 years ago today. He was a committed diarist, throughout his life from the age of seven, and his diaries have become an invaluable source for biographies. However, when they were first published, in the 1970s, the literary world found them rather dull, and one US critic even called them ‘appalling’.

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was born in London in 1903, and educated at Heath Mount, Lancing College and Hertford College, Oxford. After leaving university, he taught at a private school in Wales. He also attempted suicide by swimming out to sea, but turned back when stung by a jellyfish. He then tried carpentry and journalism before, in 1928, finding literary success with Decline and Fall. During the next ten years, he published several more novels, including A Handful of Dust and Scoop.

In 1929, Waugh married Evelyn Gardner (the couple becoming known as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn among their friends), but the marriage was annulled in 1936. The following year, he married Laura Herbert and they had six children. During the war, he served with the marines and then as a commando in the Mediterranean. In the latter years of the war, he was assigned to Royal Horse Guards and had time to write what became his most important novel, Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945. Thereafter, he settled in the West Country, and wrote several satirical novels based on his war experiences, as well as travel books (based on trips to Africa and the Middle East) and biographies. He died on 10 April 1966. Further information can be found at The Evelyn Waugh Society, Doubting Hall, Wikipedia, The Atlantic, or The Paris Review.

For most of his life, indeed from the age of 7, Waugh kept a diary, though he stopped about a year before his death. However, there are only 340,000 words in the extant diary material, not a great volume for so long a period. The manuscripts - many on loose sheets, some bound - are kept by the University of Texas where they were transferred after Waugh’s death. There is no evidence that he kept the diary with publication in mind, rather that he wrote it, later on any way, as an aide memoire to assist him in his travel journalism and other writings. The decision to publish his diaries was taken in 1973 by his second wife, Laura, in conjunction with their son Auberon.

The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, as edited by Michael Davie, were first published in 1976 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, the book running to over 800 pages. Although portions of Waugh’s early diaries were left out, Davie retained as much of Waugh’s text as he could, apart from twenty or so libellous passages and a similar number of references which could be considered ‘intolerably offensive’.

A short while before publication of the diaries, Collins had published Evelyn Waugh: A Biography written by Christopher Sykes who had had full access to the diary material. Frank Kermode, reviewing the diaries in The New York Times, noted: ‘Sykes, who can hardly have thought it would occur to anybody to publish them almost entire, described the diaries as often tedious and unreliable - tedious because the detailed record of drunken excess must be so, unreliable because of a natural tendency to confer fictive shape and point on facts even at the moment of setting them down in the diary. The general reader might have been better served with a 200-page volume of extracts, leaving the remainder to scholars. Still, here it all is, and readers will have to discover for themselves which parts will shock, amuse or instruct them.’

And Kermode concludes: ‘He constructed for himself a coherent and highly rational world with clear religious, political and esthetic laws. It was a narrow, even a bigoted construction but, like Waugh’s prose, it was a constant and authoritative reproach to the venality and disorder of his contemporaries, or of all but a tiny remnant - his honorable, amusing or wicked friends. The diaries are architect’s notes on the construction and maintenance of this world; that was their value to Waugh. We have the novels, and so need them less.’

John W. Aldridge, the US literary critic, judged Waugh’s diaries even less kindly, titling an essay on them The Appalling Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (this can be found online at Googlebooks in his essay collection Classics & Contemporaries). ‘Waugh,’ Aldridge writes, ‘seems to have been interested solely in keeping a record of his daily experiences and impressions - of public events and private scandals made public, people known and incessantly dined with, parties attended, his own frequently appalling behaviour at them, and monstrous hangovers suffered the morning after. If his portraits of friends and enemies are often harsh, his self-portrait is absolutely uncompromising and presented in strict conformity to his own obnoxious dictum: “Never apologise. Never explain.” ’

3 September 1927
‘How I detest this house and how ill I feel in it. The whole place volleys and thunders with traffic. I can’t sleep or work. I reviewed the books and have begun on a comic novel. Mother is away at Midsomer Norton where Aunt Trissie is dying. The telephone bell is continually ringing, my father scampering up and down stairs, Gaspard barking, the gardener rolling the gravel under the window and all the time the traffic. Another week of this will drive me mad.’

29 November 1927
‘I am getting infinitely tired of London and its incessant fogs. Very little has happened lately. I see Evelyn a lot and a certain amount of Olivia. On Sunday I went to the first night of the Sitwell but was bitterly disappointed and bored. There had been a Sitwell party at Balston’s on the preceding Tuesday. I am getting on with the carpentry - Henry Lamb knows of a place in the country where I might work.’

22 October 1928
‘I had my hair cut and met Martin Wilson. He seems to bear no malice for Decline and Fall. From there to the exhibition of Maillols. The sculpture magnificent but the wood engravings not particularly meritorious. Alathea lunched with me at Taglioni’s, very lovely and vague, with an air of just waking up after an uneasy night. Extraordinarily ingenuous with a fluttery eagerness to skate and go to the theatre and see the latest pictures. After luncheon to my tailor’s to try on a check suit.’

30 June 1955
‘The television people came at 10 and stayed until 6.30. An excruciating day. They did not want a dialogue but a monologue. The whole thing is to be cut to five minutes in New York and shown at breakfast-time. They filmed everything including the poultry. The impresario kept producing notes from his pocket: ‘Mr Waugh, it is said here that you are irascible and reactionary. Will you please say something offensive?’ So I said: ‘The man who has brought this apparatus to my house asks me to be offensive. I am sorry to disappoint him.’ ‘Oh, Mr Waugh, please, that will never do. I have a reputation. You must alter that.’ I said later, not into the machine: ‘You expect rather a lot for $100.’ ‘Oh, I don’t think there is any question of payment.’ ’

18 August 1955
‘The original day’s visit to Birmingham to see the Pre-Raphaelites became extended. With Laura, Teresa, Margaret and £30 we drove off in the afternoon. A letter to propose our stopping at Stanway brought no answer so I presumed Letty Benson to be away. I also wrote to Lady Olivier telling her we shall be in the audience on Friday. We stopped in Evesham while the children had tea. As we approached Birmingham the evening became hotter and heavier. Birmingham was humid and over- powering. We arrived at Queen’s Hotel where I found that our rooms for the night would cost £9. The children had ‘bubble’ baths, the salts for which we had purchased in Cheltenham. Laura and I drank Pimm’s No. 1 Cup in the cocktail bar where there was a cool breeze and an intoxicated dwarf. A ham sandwich and then on foot to the theatre where we sweated through a tedious farce. Back to dinner. The servants very civil in the hotel, the rooms poky, airless and shabby. But the girls in high spirits.’

The Diary Junction

William Godwin’s diary

The English writer and philosopher William Godwin, an early proponent of idealistic liberalism, died 180 years ago today. He is, perhaps, better remembered for his daughter, Mary, who married the poet Percy Shelley and wrote Frankenstein. Godwin kept a diary throughout his life. Although the daily entries are little more than lists of names and places and books read, the diary as a whole is considered of ‘immense importance to researchers of history, politics, literature, and women’s studies’.

Godwin was born in 1756 in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, into a large family of religious dissenters. Educated into a strict Calvinism, he finished his schooling at the Hoxton Academy, and served as minister in several places before returning to London. But by then he had shed his religion in favour of an idealistic liberalism based on the sovereignty and competence of reason to determine right choice. In order to further his new ideas, he set out on a writing career, contributing to political journals and associating with radical societies. He also tried setting up a school, and writing novels, though these early ventures did not come to much.

In 1793, Godwin published Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness - now considered his greatest work - setting out his positive vision for an anarchist society of small self-subsidising communities. After the writings of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, it was the most popular written response to the French Revolution. He followed this with a (hugely successful) novel - Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams - which some consider the first ever thriller. In 1795, Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, who he had first met some years earlier and who now had a daughter, became intimately involved. She fell pregnant by Godwin, and the two married in London in 1797. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born within a few months, but her mother died ten days later.

That same year, 1797, Godwin published a collection of essays entitled The Enquirer; and he wrote a biography of his wife, published as Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (though it was not very well received for being too revelatory). After producing a third and final edition of Political Justice, he turned to literature and history, trying his hand at plays, another novel and a life of Chaucer. In 1801, he married his neighbour Mary Jane Clairmont, who brought two children into the household (in addition to Godwin’s daughter and step-daughter). However, she proved an ill-tempered stepmother and was inhospitable to some of Godwin’s friends. This union produced a son for Godwin, David, who went on to become a journalist but died young from cholera.

In 1805, to secure a better financial situation, the Godwins, with help from friends, began running a children’s bookshop. Godwin wrote a variety of books - fables, histories, dictionaries - for the shop, while his wife saw to the business end, and translated books from French. In 1812, Godwin became a kind of mentor to Percy Shelley, who then visited the house often, and who provided much needed funds (borrowed against his future expectations) in support of Godwin and his family. In 1814, however, Shelley eloped with Godwin’s 16-year-old daughter Mary to the Continent. They returned to England and married in 1816 (after the death of Shelley’s first wife). Only a couple of years later, Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein, dedicated to Godwin, would be published.

The most notable publications of Godwin’s later career were Of Population, a belated attempt to refute Thomas Malthus’s 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population - itself a response to Godwin’s ideas (see more on Malthus’s diary at The cost of men and food); History of the Commonwealth of England, from its Commencement to the Restoration of Charles II in four volumes; and Thoughts on Man, his Nature, Productions and Discoveries. Godwin died on 7 April 1836. For more information see Wikipedia, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, The History Guide, The Wordsworth Trust or University of Oxford podcasts.

Godwin kept a diary for most of his life, leaving behind 32 octavo notebooks now held by the Abinger Collection of manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Although each diary entry - 1788-1836 - is no more than a short list of names, places etc., and often no more than a few words, the entire text has been considered important enough to be fully digitalised, analysed and uploaded to a dedicated website hosted by the Bodleian  This was funded, between 2007 and 2010, by the Leverhulme Trust and others under the direction of Oxford’s David O’Shaughnessy and Mark Philp and Victoria Myers from Pepperdine University, California.

According to the project: ‘The diary is a resource of immense importance to researchers of history, politics, literature, and women’s studies. It maps the radical intellectual and political life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as providing extensive evidence on publishing relations, conversational coteries, artistic circles and theatrical production over the same period.  One can also trace the developing relationships of one of the most important families in British literature, Godwin’s own [. . .]. Many of the most important figures in British cultural history feature in its pages, including Anna Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles James Fox, William Hazlitt, Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charles and Mary Lamb, Mary Robinson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, William Wordsworth, and many others.’

The website offers - freely - an image of every page and a transcription of the text. Moreover, for every person, place, publication, play, meal etc. mentioned in the diary, there is a link to further detailed notes and collated lists of other mentions in the diary of the same subject. Often times, nearly every word of a diary entry is a highlighted link to further information. An introduction to the website can be found here, a more detailed intro to the complexities of the text can be found here, and an example of how the diary has been used can be seen at the Shelley’s Ghost exhibition website. (See also Write. Read Homer about Mary Shelley’s diaries.)

Although they make little sense divorced of the links and explanations provided by the William Godwin Diary website, here are a few examples of Godwin’s diary entries.

8 March 1790
‘House of Commons: Tobacco act, Capt. Williams’s Petition, Quebec’

13 November 1791
‘Correct. Dyson & Dibbin call; // talk of virtue & disinterest. Dine at Johnson’s, with Paine, Shovet & Wolstencraft; talk of monarchy, Tooke, Johnson, Voltaire, pursuits & religion. Sup at Helcroft’s:’

28 July 1792
‘Write 2 pages, on prosperity. Finish Merchant of Venice: Much Ado, 3 acts. Miss Godwin at tea.’

23 August 1792
‘Walk to Rumford, 3 hours: stage to town, breakfast at miss Godwin’s: dine at Mr Marshal’s. See Cross Partners’

4 February 1795
‘Call on mrs Jennings: tea Johnson’s, Kentish Town.’

9 July 1795
‘Breakfast at Buckingham: dine at Watford: tea Fawcet’s, Hedge Grove, sleep: see Wilson, Smith, &c.’

7 September 1808
‘Church-yard: walk to Thatcham: dine at Woolhampton: tea Theal, sleep. George Dandin.’

10 April 1816
‘Dine at Darlington: pass Durham: sleep at Newcastle—intelligent bailiff, pleasing gentleman, Cumberland farmer.’

27 April 1816
‘Breakfast at Carlisle: coach to Penrith: chaise along Ulswater: dine at Wordsworth’s: call, w. him, on Jackson; adv. Wakefield: circuit of Grasmere. Derwent Coleridge dines: write to M J & Thos Moore.’

1 November 1830
‘Essays, revise. Homer, v. 395. Museum; Du Bartas: theatre, Henry V. 60 / 65’

Nature of the diarist

‘What a diary must preserve - the attitudes and nature of the diarist. Therefore, all excision, amendment, clarification, cleaning; one must think. The language can be cleaned, perhaps; but every change from the written word is a lie.’ This is John Robert Fowles, British author of The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, born 90 years ago today. In the last years of his life, he revealed himself as one of the 20th century’s most interesting diarists, publishing two volumes of intimate and very revealing journals.

Fowles was born on 31 March 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, an only child until his sister was born 15 years later. His father ran a tobacco firm in London. Schooled locally, and much interested in nature, he won a scholarship to board at Bedford School, which he didn’t much like at first, though in time he excelled at sports and became Head of School. His parents, meanwhile, had moved to Ipplepen in Devon, where he spent his holidays in a rural idyll, and where he lived during the early war years. After completing his national service in the Royal Marines, at the tail end of the war, he went to New College, Oxford, in 1947 to read modern languages, completing his degree in French. His university years, biographers suggest, led to a flourishing of experiences, social and cultural, that set him on a road far removed from that of the youth that had been a head boy and a marine.

Although receiving an offer of a job from Winchester College, Fowles chose to become English master at a school on the Greek island of Spetses. There, he began an affair with Elizabeth Christy, wife of another teacher. After a couple of years he and other staff were dismissed for trying to bring in reforms, and Fowles ended up in Hampstead, London, teaching English as a foreign language at St. Godric’s College, where he remained for a decade. In 1954, he married Christy; her daughter, Anna, lived with them. His first published book, The Collector (1963), was a literary hit and was quickly adapted into a film (1965), allowing Fowles to forego teaching for full-time writing. The year 1965 saw a move to Dorset and publication of The Magus, a long and complex novel he had written (before The Collector) based on his experiences in Greece. He and his family lived first at Underhill Farm, west of Lyme Regis, but when a section of their land eroded into the sea they moved to the town itself, to Belmont House.

Fowles remained in Lyme for the rest of his life, although occasionally he took long trips to Greece and France. In 1969, he published The French Lieutenant’s Woman (described as a ‘postmodern historical fiction novel’), his most famous book, and critically acclaimed film, which established his international reputation (and, incidentally, did wonders for Lyme Regis tourism). This was followed by a collection of long stories, The Ebony Tower (1974), and then his most autobiographical novel Daniel Martin (1977). From 1979 to 1988, when he had a stroke, Fowles served as curator at the Lyme Regis Museum. During this time, he also published his last two novels, Mantissa and A Maggot. Elizabeth died in 1990, and Fowles married Sarah Smith in 1998. After several years of poor health, he died in 2005. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, The Paris Review, or The London Review of Books.

Although Fowles was considered something of a recluse in his later years, intriguingly his last published works were two volumes of private journals, which are among the most intimate and revealing of any literary diaries. John Fowles - The Journals - Volume 1 was published in 2003 by Jonathan Cape (edited and with an introduction by Charles Drazin). A second volume followed posthumously, in 2006. According to Drazin: ‘The diary itself supplanted a future novel by becoming the major literary preoccupation after the death of his first wife Elizabeth in 1990. At this critical stage, it provided the obvious means to look back over his life, to attempt the self-understanding that was an important aim of the novels themselves.’

In his introduction, Drazin explains that he made a conscious effort not to censor the diaries in any way, though ‘it was impossible not to have qualms about many passages that were bound to upset people’. ‘I thought it was important,’ he goes on to say, ‘that John should have the opportunity to consider whether there were any comments that he regretted and wished to remain private. From our resulting conversations it quickly became clear that there were many comments he regretted, but he had made them and, however foolish or wrong or hurtful they might seem now, the vital quality of the journal was to record how he had felt at the time. The decision to leave such comments, even when they tended to be particularly hurtful to his closest friends - who after all were the most readily available victims - stems from his deepest instincts as a writer.’

Extracts from the journals can be read at the John Fowles Books or Penguin Random House websites or at Amazon; and The Guardian website has an interview with Fowles about publishing his diaries. Here, though, are several extracts from the first volume.

3 October 1952
‘To Greece again: at the last moment I packed this diary, unable to cut myself off from such bitter-sweet memories. Here the sun and strange existence is already burning the past away. Never so much difficulty in writing as here; a constant temptation to be idle in lotusland.’

6 October 1955
‘This diary has suffered these last two years. It no longer - it seems to me - adequately reflects either my physical or my mental life. It does all - this period - seem something of a desert, in any case. I lack no confidence that the desert will end. I can think. I can write; I know that. But waiting-rooms are always dull.

Writing: the Greek book has been criticized by the agent’s reader - he calls it ‘shapeless, discursive’; but Paul Scott thinks it worth a trial with the publishers. I have just finished an opuscule - ‘For a Casebook’ - which I intend to try on the London Magazine and Encounter.

Meanwhile, this:; I’ve decided to keep, for a month, a ritual day-to-day account of events; what’s interesting me; what we do.’

28 April 1958
‘What a diary must preserve - the attitudes and nature of the diarist. Therefore, all excision, amendment, clarification, cleaning; one must think. The language can be cleaned, perhaps; but every change from the written word is a lie. In my case, if I ever revised, I should want to hide the self-excusing, the priggishness.’

2 April 1957
‘We got married today; a grey day, a grey day, but mist-grey; and the mist cleared when we went off; E in a pale yellowy-green suit, olive shoes, an egg-custard-yellow hat. We met the Kemps, whom we haven’t seen for months, but they do not change; if we saw them after a thousand years it would be like a week - we met them at Belsize Park, had a drink. I felt nervous; didn’t want to be seen, as no one at the college knows. I’m going back tomorrow; and couldn’t stand the odd looks such unromantic behaviour would bring me. But no one saw us; we slipped in. A sort of boardroom with canvas and steel tube pile-chairs; a large gilt basket of faded flowers; two men, one rather bored and beery, the other suave. The silly little ritual, so short, so empty. Outside a tired little garden, and the chimney of the hospital furnace gently smoking in the pale blue sky. I paid the 11/3, we slipped out, up the road to the nearest pub. Then home to our nice new flat, and a nice good lunch, and Asti Spumante, and the sun in the room, and a feeling that it is good to be married, because it was fundamentally unnecessary - marriage won’t alter our relationship which is outside anthropology; because none the less we are now what the others think, or expect, or hope, we are - legal; and as a sort of symbol, a crowned, sealed look-we-have-come- throughness.

The Kemps gave us a pepper-mill; and a friend of E’s, a Canadian architect, brash, glossy, like a sober American car, bought a nice Persian vase.

So we’re married.’

7 November 1964
‘The Magus. First complete draft finished.’

15 March 1965
‘Miserable cross-currented days, windless above and seething below, waiting for the first reactions to The Magus. Tom Maschler came the other night and took away a typescript of it. As usual, he was full of himself, of the excitement of publishing - but full less in a natural than an aggressive way. Some strange drive in him forces him to humiliate, to depress the writers he comes in contact with - Edna O’Brien said the same thing the other day. As if you are the writer he mistrusts, has no confidence in. Instead of joining his writers, he isolates them.

Anthony Sheil came to lunch today. He has been reading the typescript in bits all through the week, as he has to fly to the States tomorrow. ‘It’s superbly written and I’m sure it will be a success, but.. .’ and there followed a long list of criticisms. I don’t doubt he means them sincerely, I don’t doubt, even, that quite a lot of them are valid, but no one realizes the ludicrously tender state of the writer at this stage. One is the shorn lamb, and even the warmest breezes cool. And then too, as soon as one enters the literary world, all motives are suspect. Tom M would never say good of the book, because it might prejudice the buying price. A. Sheil has his agent’s prerogative to protect - his right to ‘guide’ and ‘criticize’ - and in our age inability to find fault is almost synonymous with lack of intelligence.

Meanwhile my nerves jangle I don’t lose whatever fundamental confidence I have in John Fowies the novelist, but if lose all confidence in novel-writing as a significant activity, I feel like giving up that side of writing, of concentrating on poetry, think-pieces - even learning to paint. Partly this is because I have a fascinated horror of the showbiz side of writing (rather, a horrified fascination!) The other day we took Edna OB, and Terry Stamp and his girlfriend. Jean Shrimpton the model, out to dinner; and then the next evening we went to a party at Edna’s, where she has a sort of microcosm of All London - all artistic London, anyway. Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard and Mordecai Richler and Wesker and the film directors Clayton and Donner and Desmond Davies. Edna thrives in all this glitter of names; this demi-paradise of celebrity. And at one level I feel envious of her (though I like her as well as any writer I have met). But I distrust intensely that drive to be in the limelight, in the okayest current of the age: where the cinema and the novel meet. Everyone in this world is driven frantically to destroy his or her nemo; all the talk is half vainly of one’s own prospects, or half enviously of other people’s. Who has an option on So-and-so’s book, who will direct this, who will act in that. All this must be inimical to good writing, let alone good living.’

Worse by training

Roger Black, the mid-distance British runner who was internationally successful in the 1980s and 1990s, is 50 years old today. He must keep a diary, or at least have kept a diary during his competitive years, for he quotes from one in an autobiography published in the year he retired from competitive athletics. As one might imagine, health and injuries, trainers and training often dominate the diary entries.

Black was born in Gosport, Hampshire, with a twin sister Julia, on 31 March 1966. He went to Portsmouth Grammar School, becoming head boy, and then to University of Southampton to study medicine (his father being a doctor). However, he left college after a few months to pursue a career in athletics. Aged 19, in 1985, he won the 400m European Junior Championships, and the following year, no longer a junior, he won gold medals at the Commonwealth Games and the European Championships for both the 400m individual race (breaking the British record in the process) and the 4x400m relay. Despite suffering injuries and illness over the next few seasons, he again won gold medals for both races at the 1990 European Championships.

At the 1991 World Championships, Black won silver for the individual 400m, and gold with the 4x400m relay team creating a new British and European record. Five years later, he also won a silver medal at the same distance, coming second only to Michael Johnson, and he won silver with the relay team at the 1997 World Championships (though more than a decade later this silver was upgraded to gold because an athlete in the winning US team admitted to drug use at the time). Subsequently, injuries and illness again hampered his form; and, after not being selected for the 1998 European Championships, he retired from competitive athletics.

Black has a daughter from his marriage, in 1999, to Elsa de Vassoigne, and has twin boys with his second wife Julia Burgess. He is often to be found presenting for the BBC, but also has made a career for himself as a motivational speaker. He says: ‘My standard speech is designed to engage the audience in the lessons learnt throughout my athletics career, which resulted in me achieving my dream of standing on the Olympic rostrum in Atlanta in 1996.’ Further information is available from his own website, Wikipedia or British Athletics.

In 1998, Andre Deutsch published How Long’s the Course? - My Autobiography written by Black with the help of Mike Rowbottom, athletics correspondent at the time for The Independent. In the book, Black refers to, and quotes from, a diary, though there are no more than a score of such references, and most are incorporated into the text.

Here is Black explaining an aspect of his training philosophy followed by a supporting extract from his diary.

‘The balance of training and rest is crucial in athletics, and the careers of too many athletes have been destroyed because they haven’t had the confidence to do nothing when it is necessary. The belief is, ‘I get better by training. No pain, no gain.’ What many people have found out is that you actually get worse by training because your body doesn’t get time to recover, so you never really run to the best of your ability. Jenks [David Jenkins] really believed he didn’t rest enough in his career. Steve Cram too has said the same thing to me. Here’s another diary entry [17 July 1986], ‘Jenks phoned me tonight and thinks I can win the Commonwealth Games if Clark is unable to handle the rounds. He says that I mustn’t train tomorrow, so I won’t. There’s so much he wants to tell me but he is unable to do so over the phone. He says I mustn’t do the opening ceremony.’ ’

And here are several more quotes from Black’s diary as found in his autobiography.

14 April 1989
‘Mike Smith cannot now become as big a part of me as he was before because he hasn’t stood by me. He will still be my coach, but not my controller. I must use the right formula of myself, Kriss, Mike Smith, Mike Whittingham and Joe Picken. I must do what I feel to be best for me, and I can no longer rely entirely on Mike Smith’s judgement - but I do need the group.

I hope Mike will be able to step back a little with me. Remember those who have stood by you, they are the only ones you need to involve. The rest mustn’t have the pleasure of association with your success.’

On 4 August 1989
‘Mike Whittingham has been working with me one-to-one since 18 June. His contribution has been invaluable. We work well together and I know I’m getting it right. Mike Smith could never relate to me like this because of the size of the group . . . A CT scan yesterday showed the bone in my foot has repaired.’

23 February 1994
‘I’ve moved on in leaps and bounds since October. My body still gives me problems but I can run with them. The left foot is much better due to the taping and the orthotics and the exercises.

My hip is still very sore but that’s life. In January I confronted the reality that my hip will never be 100 per cent and I have a choice. It can stop me running or I can run with it. Only the clock can tell me if I can get better.’