Monday, February 27, 2017

Gabrielle, Celestine or Evangeline?

‘I know not what name to give it, not my new baby, but my new poem. Shall it be ‘Gabrielle,’ or ‘Celestine,’ or Evangeline’?’ This is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, once the country’s most popular poet, mulling over, in his diary, what name to give a work that would become one of his most famous. Longfellow, born 210 years ago today, kept a diary for most of his life, and though the entries are often brief, they are also very lyrical. By way of a postscript, I found the prologue to Evangeline in my own diaries, way back in 1975, and a reference to it 20 years later when I was visiting Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor.

Longfellow was born on 27 February 1807 in Portland, Maine, the second of eight children. His mother’s father had been a general in the American War of Independence and a Member of Congress, and his father was a lawyer. He went to private school where, among other subjects, he learned Latin, and published his first poem aged 13. At 15, he entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. There he met Nathaniel Hawthorne who would become a lifelong friend. While at Bowdoin, Longfellow published as many as 40 poems. Thereafter, he travelled to Europe and spent three years on a grand tour.

On returning to Maine in 1829, Longfellow took took up an offer from Bowdoin to teach languages and act as the college’s librarian. In 1831, he married Mary Potter, a childhood friend, but, during a second sojourn in Europe - at the behest of Harvard College - she had a miscarriage and died soon after. He returned to the US, and took up the professorship of modern languages at Harvard, renting rooms in Cambridge, at the Craigie House (once George Washington’s HQ during the Siege of Boston). He began publishing books of poetry, Voices of the Night (1939) and Ballads and Other Poems (1941). Soon after the former, he also published Hyperion, a prose romance inspired by his trips abroad and his hitherto unsuccessful courtship of Fanny Appleton (whom he had first met in Switzerland).

In 1843, after a seven year courtship, Longfellow and Appleton finally married, and Fanny’s father bought them Craigie House as a wedding present. They lived there for the rest of their lives, having six children. In 1847, Longfellow published his famous poem Evangeline, which helped increase his literary income. In 1854, he retired from Harvard to concentrate on writing, and five years later Harvard awarded him an honorary doctorate of laws. In the summer of 1861, a tragic fire led to Fanny’s death. In trying to save his wife, Longfellow burned his face, and subsequently wore a beard to cover the scarring. Biographers say he never fully recovered from his wife’s death. He spent several years translating Dante’s Divine Comedy; a weekly meeting with friends came to be known as the Dante Club.

During the last 15 years or so of his life, Longfellow’s fame continued to grow, and he was awarded many honours, and met many other famous figures. He supported the abolitionist cause and hoped for a reconciliation between the northern and southern states after the American Civil War. He published several more books; and he travelled to Europe, receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge, and meeting Queen Victoria in 1868. He died in 1882. For further information see Wikipedia, Maine Historical Society, Poets.org, Poetry Foundation, or a Houghton Library’s online exhibition.

Longfellow kept a diary throughout his life, rarely making long entries. Despite their brevity, they often exhibit his poetical and lyrical view (physically and metaphorically) of the world around him. The journal entries were first edited and compiled by his brother Samuel within a two volume biography - Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: with extracts from his journals and correspondence (1886, Ticknor and Co, Boston).


An extended version of the Life (dominated by the journals) was also included by Samuel Longfellow in The Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: with bibliographical and critical notes and his life, with extracts from his journals and correspondence (14 volumes, 1886-1891, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston). The journals in particular can be found in vol 12 (also labelled volume I of the Life) covering the years 1807-1842; vol 13 (volume II of the Life) covering the years 1843-1861; and vol 14 (volume III of the Life) covering the years 1862-1882. Here are several extracts from each of the three volumes.

17 October 1838
‘Face swollen with tooth-ache; look like King Henry VIII. A working day in college. Have I been wise to give up three whole days [in the week] to college classes? I think I have; for thus I make my presence felt here, and have no idle time to mope and grieve.’

18 October 1838
‘Wrote a chapter in Hyperion. Thus slowly goes on the work. Well or ill, I must work right on, and wait for no happier moments. This is a glorious autumn day. The coat of arms of the dying year hangs on the forest wall,as the coat of arras on the walls of a nobleman’s house in England, when he dies.’

7 December 1845
‘I know not what name to give it, not my new baby, but my new poem. Shall it be ‘Gabrielle,’ or ‘Celestine,’ or Evangeline’?’

20 May 1846
‘Tried to work at Evangeline. Unsuccessful. Gave it up and read Legard’s letters, which give one a favorable idea of his abilities and aims. In the afternoon drove to town. Dined at Prescott’s at five [the eminent historian 
William H. Prescott, author of The History of the Conquest of Peru among others]. He received us in his library, where I found Rev. Mr. Young, Rev. Mr. Ellis, and West the painter, looking at the two rival Mexican editions of the Conquest of Mexico. Near by, Theophilus Parsons and Alexander Everett talking together. Felton, Sumner, and Hillard came in later. We discussed the French liquid ll, whether it should be heard or sunk into a y. Then marched down to dinner. Many matters discussed at table; among others the Puritans; then the Fathers of the Revolution.’

6 July 1846
‘Examination in Modem Languages. The Spanish classes did very well; the Italian not so well; the German best of all, as is usually the case. A warm, weary day, made more weary by a long Faculty-meeting in the evening. So ends the college year with me, and vacation begins. Dear vacation, when alone I feel that I am free! I have a longing for Berkshire or the sea-side. Both Nahant and Stockbridge beckon; and Niagara thunders its warning and invitation. And now let me see if I cannot bring my mind into more poetic mood by the sweet influences of sun and air and open fields.’

9 July 1846
‘Idly busy days; days which leave no record in verse; no advance made in my long-neglected yet dearly loved Evangeline. The cares of the world choke the good seed. But these stones must be cleared away.’

17 November 1846
‘I said as I dressed myself this morning, “To-day at least I will work on Evangeline.” But no sooner had I breakfasted than there came a note from ___ to be answered forthwith; then ___, to talk about a doctor; then Mr. Bates, to put up a fireplace; then this journal, to be written for a week. And now it is past eleven o’clock, and the sun shines so brightly upon my desk and papers that I can write no more.’

15 May 1855
‘I am plagued to death with letters from all sorts of people, of course about their own affairs. No hesitation, no reserve, no consideration or delicacy. What people!’

17 May 1855
‘A beautiful morning. Went and sat an hour with Lowell in his upper chamber among the treetops. He sails for Havre the first of June.’

20 May 1855
‘Sumner just returned from New York, where he has been lecturing on Slavery to huge audiences in theatres. A great success, and a great sign of the state of the public mind.’

31 January 1859
‘Prescott’s funeral at the Chauncey-Place Church, at three in the afternoon. It was very impressive and touched me very much. I remember the last time I spoke with Prescott. It was only a few days ago. I met him in Washington Street, just at the foot of Winter Street He was merry, and laughing as usual. At the close of the conversation he said, “I am going to shave off my whiskers; they are growing gray.” “Gray hair is becoming,” I said. “Becoming,” said he; “what do we care about becoming, who must so soon he going?” “Then why take the trouble to shave them off?” “That’s true,” he replied with a pleasant laugh, and crossed over to Summer Street. So my last remembrance of him is a sunny smile at the comer of the street!’

8 August 1877
‘A lovely summer day; I wanted to be in many places at once.’

27 February 1879
‘My seventy-second birthday. A present from the children of Cambridge of a beautiful armchair, made from the wood of the Village Blacksmith’s chestnut-tree.’

 13 June 1880
‘Yesterday I had a visit from two schools; some sixty girls and boys, in all. It seems to give them so much pleasure, that it gives me pleasure.’

By way of a postscript, I, myself, as a young man was much enamoured of Longfellow’s Evangeline, and copied the prologue into my diary in 1975, and learned it off by heart. Here are the first few lines.

‘This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.’

And then, 20 years later, I remembered the poem when visiting Wistman’s Wood, an ancient patch of oak woodland on Dartmoor, and wrote this in my diary.

25 October 1996
‘[Wistman’s] wood was beautiful. The oaks were indeed small old and decrepit and covered in moss and lichens some of which was hanging down and reminded me of the Longfellow poem Evangeline. The clinging mist and rain added to the atmosphere making it seem, if anything, that much more of an ancient place. We clambered around the moss-covered boulders through which the trees had been growing for so many years and inspected the different trees, admiring the patterns of the gnarled and partly dead branches and the various flora they supported, not least good strong ferns growing among the lichen and moss.’

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

The Andy Warhol Diaries

Today marks 30 years since the death of the American pop artist Andy Warhol. A huge celebrity in his own lifetime, his fame seems to have continued unabated, several of his paintings having sold in the 21st century for around the $100m mark. Not a prolific writer, Warhol did produce a few best-selling books, although most of them were in collaboration with his friend Pat Hackett. Indeed, The Andy Warhol Diaries is a compilation of the typed-up daily conversations she had with Warhol over a ten year period.

Andrew Warhola was born Pittsburgh in 1928, the youngest child of working class immigrants from a village in the Carpathian Mountains(in what is now part of the Slovak Republic). He was sickly youth, which left him with hypochondriac tendencies. On leaving school, he studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. On finishing, in 1949, he moved to New York City, changed his name to Warhol, and worked as a commercial artist for magazines as well as at designing advertising and window displays. He gained some attention for his whimsical ink drawings of shoe advertisements, and he was one of the first to adopt the silk screen print-making process for artworks.

By the late 1950s, he was exhibiting in New York galleries, but 1962 saw his first solo exhibition of pop art at the Stable Gallery. It included some now very famous works, the Marilyn Diptych, 100 Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles, and 100 Dollar Bills. The same year saw Warhol open a New York studio, referred to as the Silver Factory, and later simple as The Factory, employing various assistants, and it also saw his first exhibition on the West Coast, in Los Angeles. Around this time, Warhol began experimenting with film, and, in 1963, he produced Sleep, an ‘anti-film’ with over five hours footage of his close friend, John Giorno, sleeping. Hundreds of art films were to follow over the next ten years. In 1967, he produced his first commercial book, Andy Warhol’s Index, and a couple of years later, with John Wilcock, he launched the magazine Interview.

When a radical feminist and hanger-on, Valerie Solanas, tried to murder Warhol in 1968, it marked the end of a period which had seen The Factory harbour an unconventional, alternative scene. Thereafter, Warhol himself sought more upmarket society - often finding himself in the company of other celebrities. His work in the 1970s shifted towards earning high fees for society portraits, leading some critics to argue he was prostituting his talent, and that his art was in decline. However, in 1973, Warhol did also produce his famous Mao series as a comment on President Richard Nixon’s visit to China. In 1979, Warhol was involved with the founding of the New York Academy of Art. In the 1980s, he returned to painting and collaborated with younger artists earning him renewed critical attention. He died on 22 February 1987 after suffering post-surgery complications - see a New York Times story on the health problems that led up to his death.

The Art Story website sums up Warhol’s legacy as follows: ‘[He] was one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century, creating some of the most recognizable images ever produced. Challenging the idealist visions and personal emotions conveyed by abstraction, Warhol embraced popular culture and commercial processes to produce work that appealed to the general public. He was one of the founding fathers of the Pop art movement, expanding the ideas of Duchamp by challenging the very definition of art. His artistic risks and constant experimentation with subjects and media made him a pioneer in almost all forms of visual art. His unconventional sense of style and his celebrity entourage helped him reach the mega-star status to which he aspired.’ More detailed information is also readily available from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Wikipedia, The Carpathian Connection, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books.

Warhol was not a diarist, but, from 1976 until the year of his death, he chatted, usually every weekday morning over the telephone, to his friend Pat Hackett who would then ‘sit at the typewriter and get it all down on paper’. Prior to 1976, Hackett had kept a ‘sketchy Factory log’ listing business visitors, key events, expenses and so on, often by talking to different individuals, and she was also collaborating with Warhol on his memoir: Popism - The Warhol Sixties. However, when Hackett wanted to quit The Factory, Warhol asked if she would continue to keep the log.

Hackett explains: ‘I told him that I didn’t want to have to continue calling everyone at the office every day to find out what had happened the day before - that if I were going to do that I might as well still be working there. So we agreed that from then on, the daily accounts would come from Andy himself. At this point the log became Andy’s own personal narrative. In the fall of 1976 Andy and I established a weekday morning routine of talking to each other on the phone. Ostensibly still for the purpose of getting down on record everything he had done and every place he had gone the day and night before and logging the cash business expenses he had incurred in the process, this account of daily activity came to have the larger function of letting Andy examine life. In a word, it was a diary.’

Two years after his death, in 1989, Warner Books published The Andy Warhol Diaries as edited by Pat Hackett. In her introduction (from which the above quotes also come) Hackett explains that she distilled the original length of the diaries, some 20,000 pages, down into one volume with what ‘I feel is the best material and the most representative of Andy’. It was republished as a Penguin Classic in 2010. A Guardian review of the latter starts: ‘The 90s bestseller that no one admitted having read, Andy Warhol’s diaries have long been the definition of a guilty pleasure, famed for their celebrity anecdotes, their triviality, their lack of engagement with world events. From 1976 to 1987, Andy tells us of parties attended, champagne drunk, cabs taken - and dollars spent. He hangs out with “everybody”: Bianca Jagger (“God, she’s dumb”), Jackie O (“thinks she’s so grand she doesn't even owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big”), Yoko (“We dialed F-U-C-K-Y-O-U and L-O-V-E-Y-O-U to see what happened, we had so much fun”) and “Princess Marina of I guess Greece”.’

More recently, in 2014, it was republished in the US, by Twelve (see Amazon), on the 25th anniversary of the original edition. An article on the Christie’s website about the latest reissue draws on a rare recent interview with Hackett. ‘The diaries,’ she says, ‘were cathartic for Warhol. Towards the end of his life, she asked him, “Have you ever thought about talking to a psychiatrist?” He said, “I don’t need one. I have you.” And Hackett recalls: ‘Everybody was reading [the diaries] like mad largely because we made a calculated decision not [to] publish an index, [. . .] A lot of people at the time were extremely upset. But [Studio 54 co-owner] Steve Rubell did something great. He went on TV and said, “We’re all going crazy because of what Andy said about us in the Diaries but nobody can do anything because it’s all true!” ’ Here are several extracts from the Penguin Classics edition.

19 December 1979
‘The ABC 20/20 camera crew was coming to the office to film. I worked until 7:30. Then at home I glued myself together. Bob called and said he was exhausted but he really wanted to go to the Alice Mason dinner, so he picked me up and we walked to 72nd Street and Lexington. I was next to Norris Church Mailer. I told her we were still interested in doing something with her for Interview but she said she’d put on weight and that she really liked eating better than staying thin for modeling. Then we got a cab to El Morocco, Norris and Norman and Bob and me (cab $5). It was a party for Margaux Hemingway’s engagement. I ran into Jamie Blandford there and had a fight with him, I don’t know why, I just always do, I hope I didn’t (laughs) offend him. And Mimi Trujillo was there. She was married to the son of that dictator and she’s a fashion designer. Victor sees her stuff then tells Halston about it - I mean, she does stuff like Halston, but she does it sort of first.

Millie and Bill Kaiserman were there. I introduced Norris to them, but I think I did it in a strange way, I guess I said, “This is Norris Church, she wants free clothes.” But they should have good-looking people walking around in their clothes for free. There were lots of funny young people, El Morocco’s back on its way again.’

11 February 1980, Zurich
‘Slept late and then Thomas Ammann woke me up to do a portrait. A beautiful wife with a fat husband. I said she didn’t need makeup. She was easy to do because she was a raving beauty. Her husband tells her she’s ugly - Thomas says that’s how Swiss people treat their wives because they never want them to get too secure. We gave them a book and an Interview and we sent out the film. It’s so hard to find anything but SX-70 film here, they’re phasing the other out. We bought English papers which I paid for ($5).

We had lunch downstairs in the restaurant with Loulou de la Falaise Klossowski and her husband Thadée and Thomas. We signed for it. The food was good. The place was so beautiful with a view of the lake and the mountains. We were the only people there and the sun was beating through the window on our backs. It’d been hailing in the morning. The weather has been so strange. Loulou told us that YSL really was such a genius that he just can’t take it, he has to take a million pills and the whole office gets so depressed when he’s depressed except for her. She said she acts happy no matter what. That’s why she gets sick, because she’s always trying to act happy and it’s really a lot of stress on her liver. She hasn’t had a drink in a year and a quarter but she doesn’t think cocaine is bad. I do, though. We talked about her stepfather, John McKendry. She said he had so many boyfriends. His idea of marrying Maxime was fantasizing that her son Alexis was going to live at home with them and that he could have an affair with him. But the son immediately got married and moved to Wales. Then he envisioned Loulou being there bringing home pretty boys every minute that he could fuck. And actually he did steal her boys.

Loulou said John McKendry was actually killing himself slowly because he’d always fantasized how great and romantic and wonderful and literary the aristocracy must be. Then when he met them, and married a countess - her mother - and got to meet Jackie O. and people like that every day through his job at the Met, he realized they were just normal dumb people like everybody else. There was nothing left for him to live for. Of course I think that Maxime just drove him crazy. I couldn’t say that to Loulou, though. Then we took a cab downtown ($10.50).’

19 February 1980
‘I got up before 9:00 to watch the Today Show and try to figure out why Gene Shalit hasn’t used the thing he did on me. He’ll use it after I die, he’ll say, “I spoke with Andy Warhol in 1980 and here is that clip.” I must be a really terrible guest. I mean, I must be too weird for TV because it’s always the same thing - they never know what to do with it. Well, the 20/20 thing that Karen Lerner shot during the Exposures tour is supposed to be on next week. The twenty-eighth.

We had office pizza lunch ($5).

Oh, and this guy from New York called about the first part of Popism that they’re running on the cover. Wouldn’t it be great if the book was a big hit and we didn’t have to work to promote it?

Ron Feldman came down and we looked at the Ten Jews. It’s really such a good idea to do that, they’re going to sell. And all the Germans want portraits. Maybe because we have a good person selling there, Hans Mayer. How come we don’t get many American portraits?

And I forgot to say that when I was walking along University Place a kid stuck his head out of a car window and said, “Aren’t boys cuter in cars?” ’

1 April 1980
‘Up at 10:00, interview with Expresso again. Lucio picked us up and took us to the gallery because we had a press conference with 400 people. Joseph Beuys loves the press now because he’s running for president of Germany under the Free Sky Party and with me he can get more coverage - no, it’s the Green Party, that’s it. Then São Schlumberger arrived and we invited her to lunch at this waterfront place. Then we were picked up for the opening and there were at least 3,000 or 4,000 people there, you couldn’t get in, it was horrible, and finally we slipped away, they were giving us a party at a place called something like City Hall, a drag nightclub. Finally after three hours of waiting, this drag queen with hair on his chest came in and I was talking so she told me to shut up, she did a couple of numbers and then all of a sudden pushed me aside and stormed out and we didn’t understand what had happened, but somebody said she was too emotional because she was singing for me, she gets that way. But it was too boring. Fred got insulted because the TV lights were shining on us too long, and told Lucio off, that it was the most ridiculous evening, and that Lucio had wasted our time because that kind of evening wouldn’t sell pictures, and that he was just using us to get into show business. We didn’t get into bed till about 4:00.’

2 December 1980
‘Richard Weisman called and invited me to the party for the famous Hollywood photographer George Hurrell at Doubles. Got there and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was coming out, and I asked him why he was leaving and he said because he’d stood in front of his photograph and had his picture taken by the press so then it was time to leave.

The big stars there were Lillian Gish, Maureen Stapleton. Tammy Grimes. I met Mr. Hurrell and he’s really strong and straight and Paul Morrissey had said that he was about to pop off any minute, but there he was and he knew all about me and he raved and he was sweet and I asked him if I could take a picture and he said sure.

Maureen O’Sullivan was next to me and she was saying. “Oh, I’ve just been throwing out so many Hurrells and Clarence Bulls, we’ve been moving.” I asked her what it was like to get so close to Johnny Weissmuller’s body and she said it was okay but that she only was interested in intellectuals, my dear. I said, ‘So is Mia really going to marry Woody Allen?’ And she said that she really didn’t know, and then I told her that I was only kidding, that I didn’t care. And I met Teresa Wnght and she looked good.’

24 December 1980
Cabbed up to Jerry and Mick’s apartment for Chnstmas lunch. Jerry’s pregnant sister Cyndy just married Robin Lehman, and so everybody was happy. Jerry’s mother was there. Jerry had an apron on that when you unzippered it a big cock came out, so I was taking funny pictures of that, her cooking a turkey with a cock in her hand.

Earl McGrath was there, and Ahmet Ertegun stopped by for a second. The food was ready at 5:00 but it was supposed to have been ready at 2:00. Everything was great, though, it was the best turkey and everything was fresh, the peas and everything, so I porked it up.

The limo came at 6:30 to take us out to the Guests’. We picked up Barbara Allen who was wearing a green taffeta YSL and then we went to the ‘hem of Harlem’ - that’s what Jerry Zipkin calls his neighborhood - and picked up Jerry and he had Nelson Seabra with him. It was a sit down dinner and the turkey was terrible. It was like canned stuff, and the cranberry sauce was canned and there were eighteen different desserts but none of them were good. I was next to ‘Suzy’ and Bob was next to Liz Smith and Iris Love, and Iris had a kilt on and let me feel if she was wearing underpants. Cornelia looked beautiful.

Then I had to get back to Halston’s in town and it had suddenly dropped from forty degrees to minus fifteen. Halston gave me a green beaded dress to hang in my closet. It’s like a $5,000 dress. It’s his art. But it’s not really my favorite green although it’s a nice green. I would rather have had a red one.

I felt another cold coming on and I wanted to go home to bed, but since the house was empty I didn’t. I gave Halston a chocolate box of art candy that I made, not too great, and a Diamond painting, and I gave Victor a Shoe one. I got home about 1:30 and opened my packages. Reinhold gave me a little TV set, a 2” x 2” Sony Trinitron.’

6 February 1983
‘Went to church. Worked some more on drawings. Went to bed early. The phone didn’t ring all day.’

11 February 1983
‘The snow hadn’t started at the beginning of the day and I just didn’t believe it would, the weather reports are always wrong. But by 12:30 it’d started (cabs $5, $3, phone$.50).

Interview was having a screening of The Lords of Discipline at Paramount and I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to get around so I hired a limousine. And then I went into Interview and invited some of the kids to ride up with me, and then Fred screamed at me that 1 had destroyed the office protocol. I keep forgetting that at Interview they have all these levels of who gets invited to what with who, based on how important your title is. Like a regular office. And I didn’t invite Robert Hayes to ride up with me because he was with his sister and his boyfriend Cisco, and Cisco has AIDS so I didn’t want to be that close to him.

People in the streets were laughing and throwing snow.

The movie was great, I enjoyed it so much, it’s so decadent. There are no girls in it, and all these boys fighting. Mitchell Lichtenstein looks great, just like his father, Roy, twenty years ago, and I do think David Keith is going to be the new John Wayne.’

17 February 1987 [the last entry]
‘In the morning I was preparing myself for my appearance in the fashion show Benjamin coordinated at the Tunnel. They’d sent the clothes over and I look like Liberace in them. Should I just go all the way and be the new Liberace? Snakeskin and rabbit fur. Julian Schnabel (laughs) would be so impressed with these clothes he would start wearing them

Oh, and Brigid is at the English fat farm and she’s going to be fired when she gets back. I’ll give her a pink slip. l’ll give her dogs pink slips - Fame and Fortune will be fired!

Vincent was going to tape the fashion show and he called to say a car would pick me up at the office at 2:00. Ken came and we went downtown (cab $6). Worked hard at the office.

Then went over to the Tunnel and they gave us the best dressing room, but still it was absolutely freezing. I had all my makeup with me. Miles Davis was there and he has such delicate fingers. They’re the same length as mine but half the width. I’d gone with Jean Michel last year to see his show at the Beacon, and I’d met him in the sixties at that store on Christopher Street, Hernando’s, where we used to go get leather pants. I reminded him that I’d met him there and he said he remembered. Miles is a clotheshorse. And we made a deal that we’d trade ten minutes of him playing music for me, for me doing his portrait. He gave me his address and a drawing - he draws while he gets his hair done. His hairdresser does the hair weaving, the extensions.

They did a $5,000 custom outfit for Miles with gold musical notes on it and everything, and they didn’t do a thing for me, they were so mean. They could’ve made me a gold palette or something. So 1 looked like the poor stepchild, and in the end they even (laughs) told me I walked too slow.

And the clothes in the show really stank. Alligator, fur, and lace. And I really worked my ass off. The Japanese crew was more interested in me than in Miles. They were doing the show again at 10:00 but I didn’t have to do the second one, I was only in the one that was for the press. And then afterwards Vincent had a taxi come.

When I got home I called Fred and explained that I was just too exhausted to go to the Fendi dinner, so when he called them to say I wouldn’t be coming with him and that he’d bring a girl instead, they said don’t bother, that they didn’t want him without me.

Got into bed and Wilfredo called and then Sam called and then I fell asleep. But I woke up at 6:30 and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I took some Valium and a Seconal and two aspirin, and I was sleeping so heavily that I didn’t wake up when PH called at nine o’clock. And when I didn’t answer she got scared because that had never happened before, so she called on the other line and Aurora answered in the kitchen, and PH made her come up to my bedroom to shake me but I wish she’d just let me sleep.’

The Diary Junction

Hertz and his radio waves

‘Before lunch I went to an optician to find out the price of a battery and an electromagnet; but he said he did not stock the inferior sort and those he had were too expensive for me. Therefore I went to Prof. Boettger after luncheon to ask him whether I might be allowed to use the instruments of the Physical Society. He told me to write to the president, which I did that evening. I have not yet received an answer. Perhaps I shall not get one, or only a refusal; then I shall wait till I am home for Christmas.’ This is from the diaries of the German physicist, Heinrich Hertz, then only 18 years old, but demonstrating a precocious enthusiasm for his subject. Hertz, born 160 years ago today, was the first to demonstrate the existence of radio waves and that they could be broadcast and received, but he died tragically young in his mid-30s.

Hertz was born on 22 February 1857 in Hamburg, the oldest of five children of a weatlhy and prominent family. He showed an early aptitude for maths and science, and started to study civil engineering. However, after time in Frankfurt and then Dresden, he left to do military service in Berlin. Subsequently, he continued to study in Munich though concentrating more on a physics research career. In 1878, he returned to Berlin, to work under Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann Helmholtz, where he received his doctorate in 1880. After, as Helmholtz’s assistant he focused on properties of mechanical hardness and stress, and produced a number of important research papers.

In 1883, Hertz moved to the University of Kiel as a lecturer, and directed his research more towards electromagnetism. In 1885, he accepted a full professorship at Karlsruhe’s Technische Hochschule. In the following year, he married Elizabeth, daughter of a colleague, and they had two daughters. By the end of the decade, Hertz’s research had overturned the existing paradigms for understanding electrical and magnetic phenomena: he demonstrated that electromagnetic effects take place in time, not instantaneously, and discovered the existence of radio waves, and that they behave like light. By doing so, he validated pre-existing theories put forward by the British scientist James Clerk Maxwell.

Hertz’s work on electromagnetic waves was first published in 1888 and elevated him to be counted among the leading physicists of the day. It also led to him moving, in 1889, to the University of Bonn where he continued research on the discharge of electricity in rarefied gases. His scientific papers were translated into English and published in three volumes, two of them posthumously - Electric Waves (1893), Miscellaneous Papers (1896) and Principles of Mechanics (1899). In 1892, he was diagnosed with an infection and underwent several operations, but he died in 1894 aged only 36. The unit of frequency - cycle per second –-was named the ‘hertz’ in his honour. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Engineering and Technology History, Magnet Academy, and MacTutor.

A first edition of Hertz’s memoirs, letters and diaries was arranged by his daughter Johanna Hertz and published in 1927. A second bilingual edition, revised and extended, was published in 1977 at the behest of Hertz’s youngest daughter, Dr. Mathilde Hertz - 
Heinrich Hertz: Memoirs, Letters, Diaries. This was translated by Dr Hertz herself, Lisa Brinner and Charles Susskind and published by Physik Verlag in the Federal Republic of Germany and by San Francisco Press in the US. A review can be read at the website of the University of Chicago Press Journals (Isis 70, no. 2 - June 1979). Although, as a younger man, Hertz wrote some longer entries in his diaries, later in life the entries were mostly very short and factual (see photo). Here are several extracts.

3 January 1867
‘I have a new satchel and a new pen case that I have already used at school, Mama hopes I shall bring home only good reports in the new satchel. I hope so too, but I do not believe it. Yet I will try hard.’

24 October 1875
‘The weather was so bad I could not go out. I read, mostly Wüllner’s Physics, and since I had previously known little about hydrostatics, I found it very interesting.’

8 November 1875
‘Before lunch I went to an optician to find out the price of a battery and an electromagnet; but he said he did not stock the inferior sort and those he had were too expensive for me. Therefore I went to Prof. Boettger after luncheon to ask him whether I might be allowed to use the instruments of the Physical Society. He told me to write to the president, which I did that evening. I have not yet received an answer. Perhaps I shall not get one, or only a refusal; then I shall wait till I am home for Christmas. There was a very interesting lecture by Prof. Boettger this evening. He talked about sulfur and phosphorus.’

11 December 1875
‘In the meantime the business with the Physics Club has been brought to conclusion, and I feel ashamed of my own rashness. For after receiving a letter on November 29, I went to the Senckenberg library and found Dingler’s Journal there; I leafed through it and soon found all sorts of articles about telegraphy, in fact I came to wonder whether my idea might not have been executed long ago. Therefore I did not go to Dr. Mappoldt right away, as I had intended, but decided first to return to the library on Tuesday. There I realized that it would be folly to set up experiments on something of which I knew as little as I did, and in the end I had to admit it was just as well that there had been some doubts about the propriety of my working in the laboratory, and I therefore withdrew my request. But from then on I went to the library almost every day, and I found a book listed there: Zetzsche, Development of Automatic Telegraphy. I ordered it and on receiving it yesterday I discovered that my idea was the fundamental concept of the entire field of automatic telegraphy; of course no part of it was executed as I had imagined, and the system that came closest to mine, that of Chauvassaigne et Lambrigot, was already obsolete. However, it seemed to me that even they did not formulate the idea that everybody could write his telegram at home on a paper strip supplied by the post office, which ought to have tremendous advantages. After leafing quickly through the periodicals in the reading room, I concentrated on The Development of the Chemical Industry from the Reports on the Vienna World Fair. At home I mostly read Tyndall, Heat as a Form of Motion. At the office I am occupied with copying the plans for the new stock exchange building in reproducing ink. Yesterday I had a new idea which I will perhaps test at home, at Christmastime; namely, to construct large-size lenses by introducing a liquid between two (if possible circular) glass plates of great elasticity and subjecting it to pressure, which will cause the glass plates to bulge out, and the central part of the bulge will probably come close to satisfying the conditions of a lens of large focal distance, at least close enough to collect a quantity of rays even if a clear image is not obtained. The question is only whether the glass is sufficiently elastic to withstand such deformation. To be sure, such a lens would lead to further difficulties in use.’

22 December 1875
‘This evening I am going to Hamburg for the holidays. Since my last entry I have had a very busy time at the office as the stock exchange roof neared completion, which entailed strenuous calculations, as did the new bridge across the Upper Main in the past few days. On the other hand, I did practically no work at home, because I did not want to start anything big before Christmas. Joyful anticipation of Christmas has been my main feeling. I have made so many plans of what to make on the lathe and in the laboratory while I am at home, that I fear very little of it will come to fruition. Yesterday and today were still full of interest. An unusually interesting lecture was held at the Physics Club, in which Prof. Boettger demonstrated a new piece of apparatus, in which a set of rotating vanes in vacuum is set in motion by light alone (radiometer).’

29 April 1885
‘Set the generator going and wanted to undertake some measurements with it, but the gas motor was not quite up to it.’

21 May 1885
‘Considered a current regulator for the generator.’

27 May 1885
‘Constructed a battery of 230 Planté cells and thought about electrodynamic experiments.’

22 December 1887
‘Experimented. Phase effect in the wire. Radical experiments on the velocity of propagation of the electrical effects.’

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Diary briefs

The Civil War Diary of Rev. James Sheeran - The Catholic University of America Press, Googlebooks

Miss Weeton Governess and Traveller - Alan Roby’s website, Lancashire Evening Post

Diary evidence in US stabbing case - Austin American-Statesman, The Sun

The Siege of Leningrad - Harvard University Press, The Spectator

Our Israeli Diary - OneWorld, The Spectator

George W. Pearcy’s POW diaries - Veterans History Project, Washington Post

They Called Her Cate - PRWeb, Union Leader

Lady Bird Johnson’s diaries online - Discover LBJ

WWI diary of gunner Lawrence - Soldier on the SommeMashable

Diary of wartime Shanghai - Earnshaw Books, Shanghai Daily

Australian weather history in diaries - The Conversation

Friday, February 17, 2017

The magnificent Sahara

‘Now that the torrid heat of summer has suddenly come again, now that Algiers lies in a glaring daze once more by day, the notion that I am back in Africa is slowly sinking in. Soon I will feel completely at home, especially if my plan to go to Bou Saada comes off. . . Oh, that journey! It will mean a brief return, not to the magnificent Sahara itself, but to a place nearby that has all the palm trees and sunshine one could want!’ This is from the diary of Isabelle Eberhardt, born in Switzerland 140 years ago today, but who only found peace when living in North Africa, wearing men’s clothes, and having converted to Islam.

Eberhardt was born on 17 February 1877 in Geneva, Switzerland, to an odd couple: her father, Alexandre Trophimowsky, was an atheist, anarchist and former Orthodox priest who had been hired as a tutor for the children of the widower General Pavel de Moerder. His aristocratic mother, Nathalie Moerder (née Eberhardt) was Moerder’s wife, some 40 years his junior. Eventually, Nathalie and Trophimowsky, who was also married, left their families, and had two children, one, Augustin, was accepted by de Moerder as his own, but, a few years later, Isabelle was registered as Nathalie’s illegitimate daughter. She grew up well tutored by Trophimowsky, and speaking several languages, including Arabic. Biographers say she disguised herself as a boy from an early age so as to enjoy more freedom, a trait not discouraged by her father.

From around 1895, Eberhardt began publishing short stories, some inspired by the letters from Augustin who had joined the French Foreign Legion and from Eugène Letord, a French officer stationed in the Sahara, who had advertised for a pen pal. Aged but 20, she traveled to North Africa with her mother, where they both converted to Islam. Soon after, her mother died, her father died also, and then a half-brother committed suicide. With family ties severed, Eberhardt called herself Si Mahmoud Saadi, began to wear Arab male attire all the time, and assumed a male personality. Residing in Paris, trying to pursue a writing career, she was offered money to return to the Sahara region and investigate the death of a friend’s husband.

By mid-1900, Eberhardt had settled in the oasis town of El Oued, some 650 miles southeast of Algiers, close to the border with Tunisia, but she made little headway with the investigation. However, she fell in love with an Algerian soldier, Slimène Ehnni, and they were soon living together openly. The French authorities began to suspect Eberhardt of being a spy or an agitator, and Ehnni was posted away, some 300km north. Eberhardt also became involved with a Sufi order, the Qadiriyya, and, in early 1901, at one of its meetings was attacked by a man with a sabre. She suspected her attacker had been hired by the French authorities, who, eventually expelled her from North Africa. In June the same year, she was allowed to return to Algeria briefly to give evidence against her attacker, who, she said, she forgave.

Back in France, Eberhardt lived with her brother Augustin and his wife, worked alongside him as a dock labourer, and continued writing. Ehnni, meanwhile, was reposted, this time to near Marseilles, where he was free to marry Eberhart (earlier, in Algeria, they had been denied permission to marry). In early 1902, Ehnni completed his military service, and the couple returned to Bône, Algeria, to live with Ehnni’s family, at first, and then in Algiers. There Eberhardt worked for the newspaper Al-Akhbar, publishing stories, including serialised chapters of her novel Trimardeur. In mid-1903, she was sent to report on the aftermath of the Battle of El-Moungar, and became friendly with a French officer, for whom she may have engaged in some kind of spying activity. She fell ill with fever, and travelled to Aïn Sefra to recuperate. Ehnni joined her there, and they rented a mud hut. When a flash flood struck, 
Ehnni escaped, but Eberhardt was killed - only 27 years old. Further information is available at Wikipedia, Pathos, Rejected Princesses, Atlas Obscura or from a biography review at The New York Times.

Eberhardt’s diaries - three cardboard notebooks and a small linen volume - were first translated by Nina de Voogd and published in English by Virago in 1987 as The Passionate Nomad: The Diary of Isabelle Eberhardt. More recently, in 2002, Summersdale has reissued the translation, as edited by Elizabeth Kershaw, under the title The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt. The book’s introduction can be read online here; and for a short review see The Guardian. According to Kershaw, Eberhardt used her diaries ‘for observation and introspection; to record literary ideas; as a ledger and as a portable library of copied material from her favourite writers’. Here are several extracts.

27 May 1900
‘Geneva. Back to this gloomy diary of mine in this evil city in which I have suffered so much. I have hardly been here a week and once again I feel as morbid and oppressed as I used to in the old days. All I want to do is get out for good.

I went to have a look at our poor house, with the sky low and sunless; the place was boarded up, mute and lost amongst the weeds. I saw the road, white as ever, white like a silvery river, straight as an arrow, heading between those tall, velvet trees for the Jura’s great mountaintops.

I saw the two graves in that faithless cemetery, set in a land of exile, so very far away from that sacred place devoted to eternal repose and everlasting silence . . . I feel that I have now become a total stranger in this land, and tonight I feel an unfathomable and indescribable sadness, and increasingly resigned before my fate . . . What dreams, what enchantments and what raptures does the future still hold in store for me? What dubious satisfactions, and what sorrows?

And when will the clock strike the hour of deliverance at long last, the hour of eternal rest?’

8 June 1900
‘Over there in Africa, above the great blue gulf of unforgettable Annaba, the graveyard on the hill is asleep under the blazing sky of a summer day’s sunset. The white marble tombs and those made of glazed and multicoloured tiles must look like bright flowers among the tall, black cypresses, creepers and geraniums the colour of blood or pale flesh, and fig trees from the Barbary Coast. . .

At that same moment, I was sitting in the low grass of another graveyard. As I sat facing the two grey tombs set among the spring weeds, I thought of that other grave, the White Spirit’s resting place . . . And in the midst of all that indestructible nature, my thoughts turned once again to the mystery of the end of people’s lives.

Birds sang their innocent, peaceful song above the untold amount of human dust accumulated there . .

So far, this diary can be summed up as follows: an endless record of the unfathomable sadness there is at the bottom of my life, it consists of increasingly vague allusions, not to people I have met or to facts that I have observed, but to the invariably melancholy effect these facts and people have upon me.

How useless and funereal are these notes of mine, and how despairingly monotonous, without even the slightest hint of lightness or of hope. The only consolation they contain is their increasing Islamic resignation.

At long last I do find that my soul is beginning to show signs of indifference to pedestrian things and people, which means that my strength is on the increase. I find it contemptible and unworthy of myself that for so long I have put so much store by pitiful things and by futile, meaningless encounters. At long last, the realisation that I am utterly incapable of joining any coterie whatsoever, and of feeling at ease with people whose only reason for being together is no mere happenstance but rather the fact that they share their lives.

For the time being at least I know what I want: I would like it if Archivir understood the things I said and wrote to him. I would like him to smile at me as only he can, to hear him tell me in that tone of voice of his, the way he did the day I came so close to baring my soul: “Go Mahmoud, and do great, magnificent deeds . . . Be a hero . . .”

It is true that of all the men I have come across, this one, whose beloved picture I have in front of me, is the most bewitching of all, and that his charm is of the most elevated and noble sort: he speaks to the spirit rather than to the senses, he exalts whatever is sublime and stifles the base and lowly. No one has ever had such a truly beneficial effect upon my soul. No one has ever understood and bolstered those blessed manifestations that, since the White Spirit’s death, have slowly but surely begun to take root in my heart: faith, repentance, the desire for moral perfection, the longing for a reputation based on noble merit, a sensuality that makes a mockery of my suffering and abnegation, a thirst for great and magnificent deeds. I judge and love him for what I have seen of him so far.

Time will tell whether I have been perceptive, whether I have seen him as he really is, or whether I have made another mistake. I will not swear to anything, but nothing has so far given me reason for suspicion, even though I have become terribly, incurably wary. If he is but another dissembler and a sham . . . that will be the end of it once and for all, for if what I hold to be pure turns out to have a hidden blemish, if what looks to me like true beauty masks the usual horror, if the light I take to be a beneficial star showing me the way or a beacon in life’s black maze is but a trick meant to lead wayfarers astray - if so, what can I expect after that? Yet, once again, nothing, absolutely nothing has so far suggested there might be anything to such unthinkable conjecture ... if he is the way I think he is, he may well put me through terrible but magnificent paces . . . he may well turn out to be responsible for sending me off to die, but spare me the worst of fates, namely disillusionment.’

1 December 1900
‘El Oued, at the house of Salah ben Taliba. The beginning of this month of December is curiously reminiscent of the same time in that deadly year of 1897. Same weather, same violent wind lashing against my face. In those days, though, I had the vast, grey Mediterranean for a horizon, breaking furiously against the black rocks with a deafening, cataclysmic sound. I was still so young, and even though recently bereaved, I still had a full measure of joie de vivre.

Since then, however, everything has changed, everything; I have aged and matured thanks to this strange destiny of mine.

Yes, everything has changed indeed. Augustin has found his haven at long last, and it does look as if he is meant never to leave it again. After all those ups and downs and twists of fate have settled down at last, however oddly.

I could never be content with the genteel pleasures of city life in Europe. My idea of heading for the desert to satisfy my need for both adventure and peace required courage, but was inspired. I’ve found domestic happiness, and far from diminishing, it seems to grow stronger every day.

Only politics threatens it . . . But alas! Allah alone knows what is hidden in the sky and the earth! and no one can predict the future.

Barely two weeks ago I went to meet my beloved in the night, as far as the area south of Kouïnine. I rode Souf in a darkness so dense it made my head spin.

Lost my way several times. Had strange impressions down in those plains, where the horizon seems to rise in the shape of dunes, and villages look like hedges made of djerid.

I was thinking about the passage in Aziyade about Istanbul graves lit by dim and solitary lights, when I suddenly spotted the gate to the Teksebet cemetery’s dome.

Every afternoon for several days in a row I have been along the road to Debila, either with Khalifa Taher or by myself. One day, as I was on a solitary outing, I had a strange feeling of familiarity [i], of a return to a past that was dead and buried. Going through the shott I stopped my horse beneath the palm trees. I closed my eyes, and listening to the sound of the wind rustling in the foliage, I was off in a dream. I felt as if I were back in the big woods along the Rhone and in the Parc Sarrazin on a mellow summer evening. The illusion was almost perfect. It was not long before a sudden movement of Souf’s brought me back to reality, though. I opened my eyes . . . an endless succession of grey dunes rolled out before me, and above my head the foliage rustled on the tough djerids.

At the foot of the dune behind our house, next to an enclosure containing three low palm trees, stands a small African-looking mosque built of ochre-coloured plaster that looks like mud. It only has a tiny, fortified dome, a koubba, ovoid in shape. Behind it stands a splendid date palm which, seen from our rooftop, seems to grow out of the koubba itself.

Yesterday, I went up there at maghreb time. In the blaze of the setting sun I could see grey silhouettes drenched in scarlet light move by the post office in the distance. While the little dome seemed to be on fire and the muezzin’s slow and languorous voice recited the evening prayer in the direction of every corner in the sky, men came down the dune on my right-hand side in the splendour of that melancholy hour.

Poignant memories of the end of the White Spirit’s life have come to haunt me these last few days.’

9 February 1901
‘Around five o’clock this afternoon, Abdallah ben Mohammed [her attacker] was put in a prison cell. I saw him arrive and studied him while he was being searched by soldiers . . . I had a profound feeling of pity for this man, the blind instrument of a destiny whose meaning he does not understand. And seeing that grey silhouette, standing with his head bowed, flanked by the two blue uniforms, I had perhaps the strangest and deepest impression I have ever experienced of mystery.

Much as I search my heart for hatred towards this man, I cannot find any. Even less contempt. What I do feel for him is curious: it seems to me that I am close to an abyss, in the presence of a mystery whose last word - or rather whose first word - hasn’t yet been spoken, and which would contain the whole meaning of my life. As long as I do not know the key to this enigma - and shall I ever know it! God alone knows - I shall not know who I am, or what is the reason or explanation of my destiny, one of the most incredible there has been. Yet, it seems to me that I am not meant to disappear without having plumbed the depths of this enigma, from its strange beginnings to the present.

“Madness,” sceptics will say, who like easy solutions and have no patience with mystery. They are wrong, because to see the chasms that life conceals and that three-quarters of the population don’t even suspect exist cannot be treated as folly, in the same way that an artist’s descriptions of sunset or of a stormy night would seem ridiculous to a man born blind.

If the strangeness of my life were the result of snobbery of a pose, yes, then people could say, “She brought those events on herself”, but no! No one has ever lived more from day to day and by chance as I have, and it is very much the events themselves, inexorably linked to one another, which have brought me to where I am and absolutely not me who has created them. Perhaps the strange side of my nature can be summed up in a single trait: the need to keep searching, come what may, for new events, and flee inertia and stagnation.’

8 June 1902
‘Life goes on, monotonous as ever, yet there is the hint of some future direction in the midst of all this dreadful emotional turmoil. I am going through another slow period of gestation, which can be quite painful at times. I am beginning to understand the character of the two people, Barrucand and Mme ben Aben, who have helped us here, both of them good people and very tactful. Barrucand, a dilettante in matters of thought and in particular of sensations, and a moral nihilist, is, however, a man who is very positive, and knows how to live. Mme ben Aben is the second woman I have known after my mother who is good to the core, and enamoured with ideals. Yet in real life, how ignorant the two women are! Even I, as someone intimately convinced that I do not know how to live, even I know more than they do.

Augustin is now gone from my life. As far as I am concerned the brother I used to love so much is dead. That shadow of him in Marseilles who is married to ‘Jenny the work-horse’ does not exist for me, and I very rarely think of him.

Now that the torrid heat of summer has suddenly come again, now that Algiers lies in a glaring daze once more by day, the notion that I am back in Africa is slowly sinking in. Soon I will feel completely at home, especially if my plan to go to Bou Saada comes off. . . Oh, that journey! It will mean a brief return, not to the magnificent Sahara itself, but to a place nearby that has all the palm trees and sunshine one could want!’

31 January 1903 [the last entry]
‘Bou Saada. We arrived here from El Hamel yesterday at three in the afternoon.

Every time I see Lella Zeyneb I feel rejuvenated, happy for no tangible reason and reassured. I saw her twice yesterday in the course of the morning. She was very good and very kind to me, and was happy to see me again.

Visited the tomb of Sidi Muhammad Belkassem, small and simple in that large mosque, and which will be very beautiful by the time it is finished. I then went on to pray on the hillside facing the grave of El Hamel’s pilgrim founders.

I did some galloping along the road, together with Si bel Abbes, under the paternal gaze of Si Ahmed Mokrani. Some women from the brothel were on their way back from El Hamel. Painted and bedecked, they were rather pretty, and came to have a cigarette with us. Did fantasias in their honour all along the way. Laughed a lot. . .

The legend of El Hamel’s pilgrims appeals to my imagination. It must be one of Algeria’s most biblical stories . . .

I began this diary over in that hated land of exile, during one of the blackest and most painfully uncertain periods in my life, a time fraught with suffering of every sort. Today it is coming to an end.

Everything is radically different now, myself included.

For a year now I have been on the blessed soil of Africa, which I never want to leave again. In spite of my poverty, I have still been able to travel and explore unknown regions of my adoptive country. My Ouïha is alive and we are relatively happy materially.

This diary, begun a year and a half ago in horrible Marseilles, comes to an end today, while the weather is grey and transparent, soft and almost dream-like here in Bou Saada, another Southern spot I used to yearn for over there!

I am getting used to this tiny room of mine at the Moorish bath; it is so much like me and the way I live. I will be staying here for a few more days before setting off on my journey to Boghar, through areas I have never seen; living in this poorly whitewashed rectangle, a tiny window giving out on the mountains and the street, two mats on the floor, a line on which to hang my laundry, and the small torn mattress I am sitting on as I write. In one corner lie straw baskets; in the opposite one is the fireplace; my papers lie scattered about . . . And that is all. For me that will do.

There is no more than a vague echo in these pages of all that has happened these last eighteen months; I have filled them at random, whenever I have felt the need to articulate. . . For the uninitiated reader, these pages would hardly make much sense. For myself they are a vestige of my earlier cult of the past. The day may come, perhaps, when I will no longer record the odd thought and impression in order to make them last a while. For the moment, I sometimes find great solace in rereading these words about days gone by.

I shall start another diary. What shall I record there, and where shall I be, the day in the distant future when I close it, the way I am closing this one today?

Allah knows what is hidden and the measure of people’s sincerity!” ’

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

A great day!

“A great day! How I wish Aunt Susan had been here and yet she must know. Heaven could not be heaven if such a thing could happen and she not know it.” This is from the diary of Anna Howard Shaw, born 170 years ago today, who was one of the leaders in the US women’s suffrage movement. In the entry, she’s referring to the fact that House of Representatives had finally passed the so-called Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which, once ratified, would prohibit any US citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex - Anthony, a pioneer women’s right activist, had been Shaw’s mentor but had died more than a decade earlier.

Shaw was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK on 14 February 1847, but, when she was four, her family emigrated to the US. They settled, first, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and then, when she was 12, in the frontier territory of northern Michigan. By the age of 15, she had become a teacher and was helping to support her family - her father and brothers were fighting in the civil war, and one of her sisters had died in childbirth. After the war, she lived with a married sister, studied further, and became active in the Methodist church.

By her mid-20s, Shaw had been licensed as a preacher, and was paying for an education at Albion College by preaching and giving lectures on temperance. From 1876 to 1878, she studied at Boston Theological Seminary, the only woman in her class, and then took charge of a church in East Dennis, Massachusetts. However, she found herself in a dispute with the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church which refused her application for ordination, and even tried to revoke her preaching license. By 1880, though, she had been ordained by the Methodist Protestant Church and was able to maintain her ministry in East Dennis. At the same time she continued studying for a medical degree at Boston University.

By the mid-1880s, Shaw had finished her studies but had also given up on pursuing her ministry or medicine as a career, preferring, at first, to focus on the temperance movement, and then on women’s suffrage, lecturing for the Massachusetts Suffrage Association. Later, she was encouraged by the women’s rights campaigner, Susan B. Anthony, to work for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Around the same time, she became involved with Anthony’s niece, Lucy E. Anthony, who would become her secretary and lifetime companion. In 1904, Shaw became president of NAWSA, remaining so for more than a decade.

Increasingly at odds with a membership that saw militancy - following the UK example - as the way forward, she resigned in 1915. During World War I, she was head of the Women’s Committee of the US Council of National Defense, for which she became the first woman to earn the Distinguished Service Medal. For the rest of her life, though, she continued to lobby for the suffrage cause. She died in 1919. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Biography.com, American National Biography Online, a New York Times obituary, and National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Shaw kept diaries for much of her life, and these are now held at the Harvard University Library part of the Mary Earhart Dillon Collection. They are described in Subseries B as follows: ‘Diaries and appointment books [. . .], contains books of both Shaw and Lucy Elmina Anthony. Most of Shaw’s diary entries (1898-1919) are brief, though some are full pages. Many pages are blank; these have not been [micro]filmed. Diary entries for November 1901 to February 1902 describe Shaw’s travels to various countries in and around the Caribbean, especially Cuba, Jamaica, and Venezuela. A few “diaries” are essentially appointment books, but the processor has not changed Lucy Elmina Anthony’s original designations. While some appointment books (1889-1911) are inscribed “Anna Howard Shaw” and others “Lucy E. Anthony,” Lucy Elmina Anthony’s writing appears in both; the engagements are apparently those of Shaw. The 1900 diary and 1904 appointment book originally received with the collection are currently missing; there were no diaries for 1907 or 1909, and no 1908 appointment book.’

I can find no sign of Shaw’s diaries having been published, but Trisha Franzen quotes from them occasionally in her biography - Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage (University of Illinois Press, 2014). According to Franzen: ‘The diaries and appointment books not only trace Shaw’s travels for thirty years, but they also contain records of the lectures she gave, the people she met, and, in some cases, the money she earned.’ Here are several extracts from the diaries embedded in Franzen’s text.

‘From March 8th until Anthony’s death on March 13th, Shaw kept a vigil. She recorded the days in her diary. “Another day full of loving little visits with precious Aunt Susan. Oh, how can we let her go?” Anthony was intermittently conscious, and when she was, Anna sat at her bedside. “This is more than I deserve and the sorrow of it is so hard to bear. It will inspire my life with a longing for the cause I have never known before.” It was during one of these deathbed exchanges that Anthony demanded from Shaw that she stay at the head of the struggle as long as she was physically able. “She asked me if I could promise to never give it up and I gladly made the promise. . . In the night she pressed my hand and laid hers in blessing on my head kissing me three times. It was my work’s benediction and charge.” [9 March 1906] On March 13th, the end came. Shaw wrote, “Early this morning, in the darkness, the spirit of the greatest woman and most noble patriot flickered like a fading light. Slowly her life ebbed away and dark as the night darker still is the night of our sorrow. What shall we do without her?” [Though Anthony died on 13 March, Shaw wrote this entry beginning on the page printed “March 12, 1906”]’

‘Shaw started her campaigning this year in South Dakota. This state was always hard to face after the first horrendous campaign there with Anthony and Catt in 1890. On September 7th, one of her last days in this state, Shaw rode six hours on a freight train to a town only to arrive and find no one to meet her. The next day she finally reached the end of her usually amazing patience with the rigors and problems of such campaigning. In the semi-shorthand she used in her diary, Shaw wrote, “The meeting here was the limit. I do not think So Dak women have improved one inch since 1890. They don’t know how to get up a meeting anymore than their grandmothers did. . . Farewell Redfield forever with joy.” 
[8 September 1914] Yet the sixty-seven-year-old activist still had fifty-six days on the road until she was home.’

‘Yet January 1, 1915, brought little relief for Shaw. It was in her words, “a day of joy and grief.” Shaw had received the news that her brother James was ill several days earlier. She had gone to New York in case “he wanted her.” James was the oldest of her remaining siblings, the one who had believed in her when she had first chosen her nontraditional path, but also the brother Shaw recalled as always youthful and full of the enthusiasm of a curious child. On New Year’s Day, Shaw first received word that her brother was holding his own. Then by noon came the call that he had passed peacefully at the age of seventy-six. Shaw boarded the train in New York and journeyed to Boston to attend his funeral. Shaw wrote, “It is the break in our last group, soon we will all be gone. I wonder why we ever came. It has not been easy for any of us. Life is such a mystery and yet across the sea men are slaughtering each other like sheep.” [3 January 1915] Several days later Anna was startled to find out that her brother had left a will in which she was coheir with his second wife.’

‘On January 10, 1918, Shaw, now a Washington political insider, had lunch with Speaker of the House Champ Clark and his wife before proceeding with them to the Capitol. It was from her place in the speaker’s box that she listened to the members of the House of Representatives debate the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. On this day in January, seventy years after the Seneca Falls Convention, the House of Representatives voted 274 to 136 for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment [prohibiting any US citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex]. They just made the two-thirds needed to pass the legislation for which so many women - and men - had fought for so many years. This was the first of the final three steps by which women would achieve equal citizenship. “A great day! How I wish Aunt Susan had been here and yet she must know. Heaven could not be heaven if such a thing could happen and she not know it.” 
[10 January 1918] Next would have to come the Senate vote and states’ ratification. ’

Sunday, February 5, 2017

A sort of Christmas present

‘When Freud said laughingly “I really think you look on analysis as a sort of Christmas present,” I could only agree.’ This is from the diary of Lou Andreas-Salomé, a Russian born writer, psychoanalyst and lover, who died 80 years ago today. She had very significant relationships/associations with several of the most important turn-of-the-century figures in Continental Europe - not least Nietzsche, Freud, and Rilke - and wrote about them in her autobiographical works. Diaries from only two short periods have been published, one concerning a journey with Rilke, and the other about her association with Freud.

Louise von Salomé was born in St Petersburg in 1861, the sixth child and only daughter of a former general in the Imperial Russian army. She grew up speaking French and German as well as Russian, and as a teenager found her first mentor, a Dutch-born minister named Hendrik Gillot. He taught her philosophy, theology and world religions. He confirmed her in the German Lutheran church, gave her the nickname of Lou, and nurtured in her a spirit of independence and self-regard. However, when the relationship broke down, her mother went with her to Zurich first, and then Rome. There she met two young philosophers, Paul Rée and Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom fell in love with her. The three of them and Salomé’s mother travelled through Italy with the idea of finding a place to launch a commune, but they never did.

After a time, Salomé and Rée separated from Nietzsche and moved to Berlin to live together. Nietzsche’s work Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) was written soon after the break-up, and was inspired by 
Salomé: According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, he wrote, ‘My disciple became my teacher - the god of irony achieved a perfect triumph! . . . She inspired me with the thought of Zarathustra: my greatest poem celebrates our union, and our tragic separation.’ In 1885 she published, under a pseudonym, her first book, an autobiographical novel (Im Kampf um Gott). That same year, the relationship with Rée came to end. Two years later, she married linguistics scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas. She remained married to him until his death his 1930, though the marriage was never consummated, and the two separated in the late 1890s.

Andreas-Salomé continued to publish books, a study of Nietzsche in 1894, another novel in 1895, and collections of stories, often erotic. She had an affair with the Viennese doctor, Friedrich Pineles, and another, famously, with the much younger poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1911, she met Sigmund Freud, with whom she studied and collaborated, writing essays on psychoanalytic theory. In 1913, she began to practice psychoanalysis, and by the early 1920s was widely recognised as an analyst. Partly as a result of an ongoing friendship with Rilke, she wrote several essays on psychology and creativity; she also wrote a play and further studies of authors she had known. She died on 5 February 1937. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Brainpickings, Encyclopedia.com or 3:AM Magazine.

Andreas-Salomé started keeping notebooks when still a girl, and she certainly kept journals at some points in her adult life. However, I can only find published texts in English relating to two periods in her life: in 1900 during a trip to Russia with Rilke, and in 1912-1913 while studying with Freud. The former was published in George C. Schoolfield’s Young Rilke and His Time (Camden House, 2009) - for more on Rilke’s own journals see Art but no artists.

The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salomé, translated and with an introduction by Stanley A. Leavy, was published much earlier, in 1964, by Basic Books. The whole book can be read/downloaded freely from Monoskop (a wiki for collaborative studies of the arts, media and humanities). Here are two extracts.

9 December 1912
‘Adler writes me complaining of Stekel’s “disloyalty” - which I think is funny; it could not have been documented with greater speed. But he also complains of mine, and justly. We met and talked for two hours while racing all over town. But really it is perfectly possible to overcome all the differences between Freud and Adler insofar as Adler’s feeling of inferiority already comprises a primal repression experienced as a basic slight, and also insofar as Freud’s “repressed” is founded on psychized material which had already in the past attained consciousness. If we call this material “sexual” we do so by assuming it to be distinguished from “mental”; the two belong together to emphasize their duality. On the other hand, when Adler emphasizes the “ego protest,” he does so only by contrasting it with the murky totality which in a certain sense is sexuality. The mark of sexuality is that it may be viewed from two sides, from both the mental and the physical; it is here where all mental disorders and neuroses meet, as if at the point of intersection which exemplifies the whole. But only Freud has appropriated the word “compromise” for this, and only he has done justice to the double character of the process, even though he has predominantly emphasized the sexual side (especially in the beginning, when hysteria was under consideration). Only he has uncovered the intermediate range of unconscious mental functions, and only thereby has he succeeded in making room for the positive mechanisms of the process; and only this is important. Beyond merely elucidating illness, and led that far by the pathological process, we find our way into the mystery of the normal unconscious state, in which sexuality and the ego maintain their narcissistic union and the true enigma of mankind begins. For Adler there can be no enigma strictly speaking; he secs the ego confronted only by its own game.’

2 February 1913
‘Spent Sunday afternoon until evening at Freud’s. This time much more personal conversation, during which he told me of his life, and I promised to bring photographs next time. Most personal of all perhaps was his charming account of the “narcissistic cat.” While Freud maintained his office on the ground floor, the cat had climbed in through the open window. He did not care much for cats or dogs or animals generally, and in the beginning the cat aroused mixed feelings in him, especially when it climbed down from the sofa on which it had made itself comfortable and began to inspect in passing the antique objects which he had placed for the time being on the floor. He was afraid that by chasing it away he might cause it to move recklessly in the midst of these precious treasures of his. But when the cat proceeded to make known its archaeological satisfaction by purring and with its lithe grace did not cause the slightest damage, Freud’s heart melted and he ordered milk for it. From then on the cat claimed its rights daily to take a place on the sofa, inspect the antiques, and get its bowl of milk. However, despite Freud’s increasing affection and admiration, the cat paid him not a bit of attention and coldly turned its green eyes with their slanting pupils toward him as toward any other object. When for an instant he wanted more of the cat than its egoistic-narcissistic purring, he had to put his foot down from his comfortable chaise and court its attention with the ingenious enticement of his shoe-toe. Finally, after this unequal relationship had lasted a long time without change, one day he found the cat feverish and gasping on the sofa. And although it was most painstakingly treated with hot fomentations and other remedies, it succumbed to pneumonia, leaving naught of itself behind but a symbolic picture of all the peaceful and playful charm of true egoism.

Freud also talked about why I had become so deeply involved in psychoanalysis. To begin with, it was nothing but the kind of neutral objective interest that one feels when embarking on new researches. Then the opportunity came in all its liveliness and personal urgency to stand in the presence of a new science, again and again to be at a beginning and thus related to the problems of the science in an increasingly intimate way. What settled the matter for me, however, was the third and most personal reason that psychoanalysis bestowed a gift on me personally, its radiant enrichment of my own life that came from slowly groping the way to the roots by which it is embedded in the totality. When Freud said laughingly “I really think you look on analysis as a sort of Christmas present,” I could only agree, since for me it was not a question of resolving conflicts between the depth and the surface. And quite possibly neither joy nor anguish are ever so vividly impressed on us as when they proceed from the unconscious to the level of experience; just as bliss once enjoyed can be horribly transformed into pain in the course of the night, so too it is likely that the memory of hours of crucifixion may be transformed to a life beyond, a resurrection glistening with the stars. In the homeland of our emotional life it is true that heaven and hell - in other respects only fictions - are preserved for us in the unconscious as our eternal reality.’

Saturday, February 4, 2017

Alongside Carl Rogers

‘I forgot in my last entry to say anything about the river life here in South China. It is one of the most interesting things I have seen. [. . .] I have seen five and six people, a whole family, living on a little covered sampan not more than twenty feet long and six feet wide. How they do it is a mystery. [. . .] The bareness of their existence must be beyond comprehension.’ This is a Carl Rogers, who died 30 years ago today, writing in a travel journal long before he became one of the most influential of 20th century psychotherapists. One review says it ‘offers a great opportunity to be alongside him as his philosophies form and develop.’

Rogers was born in 1902 in Chicago into a family of Pentecostal Christians. He was a studious child, by all accounts, and went to study at the University of Wisconsin, where he joined the YMCA. Aged 20, he was selected as one of ten students to go to the World Student Christian Federation conference in Peking. On returning, he switched to studying history. After graduating, in 1924, he moved to New York and began to study at the Union Theological Seminary, while taking psychology lectures at Columbia University That same year he married Helen Elliott and they had two children.

After two years, though, Rogers left the seminary to attend teachers college at Columbia obtaining an MA and then, in 1931, a PhD. While completing his doctoral work, he had begun studying children, and he had been appointed director of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester, New York. From 1935 to 1940 he lectured at the University of Rochester and wrote his first book, The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child (published 1939). In 1940, he became a professor of clinical psychology at Ohio State University, where he wrote Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942). From 1945, Rogers was a professor at the University of Chicago, where he founded a new counselling centre; this allowed him to pioneer research into what goes on in therapy sessions, and led to his 1951 book, Client-Centered Therapy.

In 1956, Rogers became the first President of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, and from 1957 he taught psychology at the University of Wisconsin, and wrote one of his best-known books, On Becoming a Person. With Abraham Maslow, he pioneered a movement called humanistic psychology. In 1963, he became a resident at the new Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) in La Jolla, California, but then left WBSI, though remaining in La Jolla, to help found the Center for Studies of the Person in 1968. He died on 4 February 1987, a few days after a bad fall. For further biographical information see WikipediaEncyclopædia BritannicaNew York Times obituary, the Norwich Centre.

Online Archive of California provides this assessment of the man: ‘Rogers was a psychologist and psychotherapist who initiated what Abraham Maslow later called the “third force” of psychology, following the behaviorism of Pavlov (and later B. F. Skinner) and Freudian psychoanalysis. This “third force” of humanistic psychology has been so closely identified with Rogers that it is often called Rogerian, a term its namesake objected to. His innovation was to treat clients as if they were essentially healthy, and he felt that growth would occur when a non-judgmental, non-directive (later, “client-centered”) therapist created a warm, accepting environment to nurture the client and allow self-knowledge and self-acceptance to occur. Rogers is considered by many to be the most influential psychologist after Freud.’

Rogers was an occasional diarist, but only one of his diaries has been published - the one kept in 1922 during his six month travels to China and the Far East. Another dozen or so diaries are held in the Carl R. Rogers Collection at The University of California, Santa Barbara, but they all date from the latter years of his life, and remain restricted to public view. The Collection describes the diaries as follows: ‘Fourteen notebooks from the period of 1977-82. Eleven notebooks contain travel notes, primarily concerning workshops. In addition to practical notes and narrative description, these diaries contain observations on the workshops and thoughts on Rogers’s relationships with women. One notebook relates dreams, memories, and personal musings unrelated to travel, and two others are purely records of dreams.’

The China Diary, however, as edited by Jeffrey H. D. Cornelius White, was published in the UK in 2012. It is a direct copy (Rogers wrote the diary on a typewriter he lugged around) with spelling and grammatical mistakes included. Rogers’ daughter Natalie provides a foreword, in which she says of the diary that it is a ‘doorway to [Rogers’] heart, mind and soul in his most formative year’. A review - in Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies Vol 13 No 1 (2104) - says the diary is ‘a really valuable insight into Carl Rogers, and offers a great opportunity to be alongside him as his philosophies form and develop.’ Here are several examples - though there’s not much forming of philosophies apparent!

20 March 1922
‘This has been one of the most beautiful days that we have had since we left home. The trip from Kobe down to the end of the Island has been simply one grand panorama of changing scenes; rice paddies, mountains, hills, fishing villages, great broad rivers, and the beautiful inland sea.

There were many interesting things in the morning; the train was taking us rapidly into warmer country and it looked more and more like summer. For the first time we saw rice growing in the fields, and the men and more often the women out in the water up to their ankles, weeding the rows. The rice is a very slender wiry looking plant when it is small, and a darker green even than the winter wheat.

During the afternoon we rode for a long time within sight of the inland sea. The little thatched huts of the fishing villages were most interesting. They were the same general type as the farmers houses, one storied, with thin wooden walls, and a very neatly thatched roof, but they were not as prosperous looking as the farmhouses. In many places there were ponderous stone or earth dikes to keep the sea from rushing in on the little rice fields. The fishermen in many places have placed weirs, crude little bamboo traps, across the mouth of the rivers that empty into the sea, and catch the fish as they go up the river to spawn.

The scenery along the coast is the best I have seen anywhere since I have started. The mountains and jagged rocks formed a “stern and rockbound coast,” and the rocky islands off the coast were about as fine as anything of that sort I have ever seen. In some places there were rocky reefs where the breakers were breaking and casting great clouds of spray into the air, for the wind was very strong.

The craft were as interesting as the sea itself. There were many of the large, clumsy fisherman’s dories being sculled along by means of the large orr at the stern; there were little native coasting boats, with patched old sails; and now and then we would see a larger freighter steaming along.

We got to Sheminoseki right on time (all Japanese trains seem to be right on time) and got our baggage transferred to the boat. We were all prepared for a rough night, for we knew how strong the wind was, but we were a little surprised to find that the passenger steamer that had set out for Fusan in the morning had had to give up and come back, because it was too rough to cross. However the officers of the boat thought we could make it all right, and they were going to make another try, anyway, so we steamed out of the long harbor. There was surely some gale blowing, but it didnt bother most of us. Austin, Mildred, Jean, and myself even went so far as to have some bread and jam and tea before we went to bed. I slept like a log, though every now and then when I woke up, the boat seemed to be doing its best to stand on its head. It didnt roll so badly, but it pitched and bucked as badly as I have ever wished to try it.’

29 March 1922
‘Last night we had dinner, we being the men of the American delegation, with Jack Childs and five Chinese, leaders in YM work. We had an interesting discussion about the Chinese Student Movement, but the most interesting part of the discussion for me was to see the way in which the Chinese worked. Two of them, Dr. Lew and Mr. Koo, were, I think, the keenest men there. All the Chinese were fully the equals of the Americans. There surely is no doubt in my mind that the Y is following the right policy in turning over the leadership of the work to the Chinese Just as fast as that is possible.

We had a Chinese dinner, with about twenty courses. They eat in even a more informal way than the Japanese, putting the bowl of food in the center of the table, and going after it with their long chopsticks. We had more queer stuff than I ever hope to see again. We had preserved eggs, which had been burled for years in the dirt. They were alright, though I failed to get very enthusiastic over them. We had fish eggs, and fish, and rice and chicken, and bamboo sprouts, and various kinds of sweet dishes, and tea, and finally ended up with a lotus seed pudding. It was some feast. I dont think that I liked it quite as well as the Japanese guenabi dinners that we had. The food all seems to have a rather insipid taste, without much spice of any kind.

The only thing that I didnt like was that it kept us until midnight - at least the feast and discussions did, and as the next day was the opening of the work of the General Committee, I thought that was too bad.’

27 May 1922
‘Here we are still in Hongkong, I in the hotel and Ken in the hospital. He is getting better, but rather slowly, and I expect that we will be in town for at least three days more. He had dysentery on his last trip out here, and this seems to be a mild return of it. It is too bad he had to get sick here. It is one of the most uninteresting towns we have struck, and we also know very few people here, so that it isnt an awfully exciting time I am having. I wish we were up at Canton. Hongkong is about as provincial a city as I have ever seen. In their newspapers nothing but Hongkong news is printed. I dont suppose there has been a total of one column of U.S. news in the five days we have been here. Even the North China news is very scanty. They had chucked off in one inside column what may very possibly prove to be the most important bit of news in China since the Revolution, namely, that Wu Pei Fu, being now of course the master at Peking, is planning to call together the Old Parliament of 1913, is trying to reconcile Sun Yat Sen, and is suggesting Li Yuan Hung for president as a man who can reconcile both parties. If he can put those things thru, it will reunite China under one govt, and perhaps do away with her civil war for some time. Incidentally Dr. C.T. Wang told Ken when we were in Peking that that was what he thought Wu Pei Fu would do if he beat Chang Tso Lin. I expect that C.T. had quite a little to do with formulating that policy, too. You see, the South will not consider uniting with the North unless they recognize the Parliament which was illegally dismissed several years ago, and which fled to Canton to set up the southern govt as the only legally constituted govt in China. So it may be that this proposition of Wu Pei Fu’s, including as it does the recognition of the Old Parliament and the suggestion of a strong moderate like Li Yuan Hung, may really be very Important, I sure hope It works out.

No shipping has been going out of this port until yesterday on account of a typhoon which has been moving northwest from Manila, and also partly on account of the launchmens strike. I guess it is becoming normal again, tho. The Empire State left yesterday, and the Pinetree State will be leaving Wed, so you ought to get lots of mall.

I forgot in my last entry to say anything about the river life here in South China. It is one of the most interesting things I have seen. Thousands of people dont know what it means to spend 24 hours on land. They form a kind of separate caste from the land dwellers, and they live on their boats all the time. It is an inexpensive life, and they earn a little money by ferrying people across the river, and doing a little freight work. I have seen five and six people, a whole family, living on a little covered sampan not more than twenty feet long and six feet wide. How they do it is a mystery. They have a little place in the back for a fire to cook their food, and they sleep on the bare boards, with a wooden block to put under their necks for a pillow. They often have a brood of little chicks in a tiny yard on the boat, and on the larger boats they often have a dog. They dont have to worry about space to keep their property. Their wardrobe consists of the clothes on their back, their cupboard is a place big enough to hold a bowl apiece and an iron bowl for cooking, their washtub, and bath, and dishwashing sink, and toilet, are all found in one place - the river - and that is about all there is to their lives. The bareness of their existence must be beyond comprehension.’

8 June 1922
‘Well, our wind didnt develop into a typhoon after all, tho it was fairly rough. It was a great sight to watch the little fishing junks trying to get to shore from way out five or ten miles where they had been fishing. They would sink almost out of sight in the trough of the waves, and then be lifted way up on the crest, with the dripping prow just balanced in empty space, and then they would plunge nose down into the next wave, raising a cloud of spray that would hide the whole boat for a second or two. I sure admire the nerve of their skippers.

This morning we arrived at Amoy. We wound around several fine islands into the harbor of Amoy, which is itself located on an island. As the ship was only going to stop three hours, we had very little time to see things. We went off onto Kulangsu, the island where most foreigners live, and saw some of the mission schools, and had a long talk with Mr. Elliott, the Y secretary there, but we didnt get over to the city itself, partly because our time was so short, and partly because the plague was a little worse there than in most of the cities we have been in, and Ken was a little scared to risk it, tho there was no real danger, I think. We pulled out of the harbor shortly after noon, and got under way for Foochow.’