Members and various penetrations

‘I’ve reached for the dictaphone in a humble attempt to keep up the diary. I’ll say that I’m in a pretty good mood today and the weather’s wonderful and we’ve got the kids and yes, I’m pretty keen . . . What else can I say? We’ve discussed with great enthusiasm the necessity of including several erect members and various penetrations in the film.’ This is from a film diary kept by the provocative Danish film director Lars von Trier - who turns 70 today - while making The Idiots.

Von Trier was born on 30 April 1956 in Copenhagen. He was raised in an unconventional, secular household by parents with strong left-wing views. As a child actor in the late-1960s, he had made his debut working on the Danish television series Secret Summer. Only in adulthood, biographies say, did he discover that the man who had raised him was not his biological father. He studied at the National Film School of Denmark, graduating in 1983. 

Von Trier’s career developed through formally experimental and often controversial films. Early features include The Element of Crime (1984) and Europa (1991). In 1995 he co-founded the Dogme 95 manifesto with Thomas Vinterberg, advocating stripped-down filmmaking methods. His major works include Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), and The House That Jack Built (2018). His films have been repeatedly selected for the Cannes Film Festival, where Dancer in the Dark won the Palme d’Or.

Von Trier has married twice, first to Cæcilia Holbek and later to Bente Frøge, with whom he has four children. He has spoken publicly about long periods of depression, anxiety and phobias, including a fear of flying that has shaped his working practices. In recent years he has continued to direct, including the television continuation of The Kingdom (2022), while also being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which he announced in 2022.

While not in the habit of keeping a diary, he did keep notes during the production of The Idiots, recorded on a dictaphone from pre-production through editing. He described it as ‘a kind of diary’ made without revision, consisting of spontaneous, unprepared reflections shaped by the emotional intensity of the shoot. The text itself acknowledges that it contains inaccuracies and should be read as a form of ‘self-therapy’, reflecting both the Dogme 95 method and the psychological conditions under which the film was made. This material was published in Danish in 1998 by Gyldendal alongside the screenplay (Dogme #2: Idioterne: manuskript og dagbog), combining script and diary into a single production document. The diary is therefore inseparable from the film’s conception and execution, documenting technical decisions, creative uncertainties and fluctuating emotional states during filming. 

A few extracts from this diary have been translated into English and published online by Peter Holm Jensen for his blog, Notes from a Room. Here are few extracts.

From Von Trier’s Preface

‘Without otherwise disavowing the text, I will merely note that all statements are unprepared and thus spontaneous. Since both the factual and analytical information probably contain quite a few inaccuracies (not to say untruths), it is advisable to read the text as a kind of self-therapy on the part of the author, born out of the agitated emotional state that was the very technique of the film.’

19 May 1997

‘It’s the 29th of May and there’s a kind of calm before the storm as far as Dogma is concerned. I can’t really pull myself together to do anything. I’ve thought a bit about the music, about finding some simple, childlike piece of classical music that can be played on the Pianola - at last free from rights. And I’ve talked about the sound with Per Streit, who’s the sound engineer, and impressed on him the importance of each camera having a separate track, in accordance with the Dogma rules. Apart from that, we talked about the fact that it’s actually pretty inspiring to have to decide on location whether a scene is going to be silent, or what the sound in general will be like in the finished film. We talked about recording some sounds on location that you’d normally create later on - these rules give you a very pure way of thinking. On Monday I start working with the actors.

I went canoeing yesterday and was attacked by an angry swan that sort of dived down towards me and finally boarded the canoe by jumping into the back of it. It was almost as if it was trying to capsize it, and of course I tried to retaliate with aggression. This was clearly unwise, but at least I got out of it all right. Maybe it was something of a symbolic meeting: if you see the swan as the actors and me in my unstable little canoe with my ass in the water . . . well, we’ll see what happens. But I must admit I’ve got a lot of confidence in it at the moment. To stay in the symbolic realm, wasn’t there something about Zeus being a swan when he impregnated Leda, who incidentally was a goose at that point. Well, there’s something to think about.’

7 June 1997

‘Today is the 7th of June and we’ve just had a week with the actors, sometimes one at a time, sometimes more . . . People have more or less started to spazz, and it actually looks better than I thought it would, I must admit. The actors have been to a home or a workshop and are now being further briefed at various hospitals or whatever we can find.

I’ve reached for the dictaphone in a humble attempt to keep up the diary. I’ll say that I’m in a pretty good mood today and the weather’s wonderful and we’ve got the kids and yes, I’m pretty keen . . . What else can I say? We’ve discussed with great enthusiasm the necessity of including several erect members and various penetrations in the film. We’ve discussed several solutions, as a last resort getting some of Trine Michelsen’s friends from the harder part of the industry to supply the close-ups. Everyone seems to be taking this side of things with relatively good humour, which of course is fantastic. On the whole, I have to say everything is pretty merry at the moment.

We were at the villa for the first time the day before yesterday with Jens Albinus and Bodil and Anne Louise. Everyone was glad to see the place. The advantage of having a place like that is of course that it becomes a kind of home, and everyone was happy and thought ‘this is where we live’ and ‘oh look, here’s a little room, and here…’ It’s exactly like moving into a house you’re going to live in, and I think it’s very good for the communal idea to have a place like that. It … well, it makes me very happy.

I’ve more or less abstained from dissecting my shit. The only disheartening thing is that I’ve now started looking for tumours in my scrotum …  I’ve sort of stopped now, but it’s been a pretty agonizing time. Now I’m running a bath for little Agnes. And Bente is getting enormous.’

10 June 1987

‘The 10th of June. We had the first actors’ day in the villa yesterday, and it was very good. Everyone got a chance to say what they knew about their character. It worked sort of theatrically and I sense a lot of enthusiasm … Bodil, who’s playing Karen, of course started crying when she was telling the whole group about her character. They’re all identifying with their characters to such an extent that it almost shines through stronger in the private sphere. It’s all exciting and invigorating and encouraging, so… yes, I’m looking forward to this with great pleasure. You can’t avoid feeling very closely connected to kindergarten teachers and the like.’

I am finally an Ambassador

‘I am finally officially an Ambassador. At eight-fifty yesterday morning, the Chief of Protocol from the Ministry of External Affairs called at the Residence where my principal colleagues had already assembled - the military men in an exceptionally high state of polish. We rode in an open procession - motorcycle and patrol car - to the President’s Palace (the Rashtrapati Bhavan) at the gates of which we were met by a detachment of mounted lancers on beautifully matched bay horses.’ This is John Kenneth Galbraith, a Canadian-American economist and diplomat who died 20 years ago today. Although not a diarist by nature, while US ambassador he did keep a daily diary, and this was later published as Ambassador’s Journal.

Galbraith was born in 1908 into a farming family of Scottish descent in Iona Station, Ontario. He studied agricultural economics at the Ontario Agricultural College (now part of the University of Guelph), graduating in 1931, and completed a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1934. He became a US citizen in 1937. In 1937 he married Catherine Merriam Atwater, with whom he had four sons. They resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had a summer home in Townshend, Vermont.

Galbraith’s career combined academia, public service, and writing. He taught economics at Harvard University for much of his career, while also serving in government roles during and after the Second World War. He was a prominent adviser to Democratic administrations and served as US Ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963 under John F. Kennedy. As such, he played a significant diplomatic role at a critical moment in the Cold War. He developed a close working relationship with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and sought to strengthen US-Indian ties while respecting India’s non-aligned position. During the Sino-Indian War, he acted as a key intermediary, helping to coordinate US military assistance to India. His dispatches and memoranda from New Delhi combined policy analysis with detailed personal observation, and were influential in shaping Washington’s understanding of South Asian geopolitics.

Galbraith wrote widely, publishing many books. His style was unusually accessible for an economist, and his books reached a broad public well beyond academia - thus helping make him a major interpreter of economics for general readers in the postwar era. Among his most important books were American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), The New Industrial State (1967), and Economics and the Public Purpose (1973), as well as the later synthesis A Short History of Financial Euphoria (1990). 

After leaving India, Galbraith remained an influential political figure and public intellectual. He continued to advise Democratic leaders, supported the presidential campaigns of Lyndon B. Johnson and later George McGovern, and became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. Within academia and public debate, he advanced a critique of corporate power and conventional economic theory, arguing for the importance of public investment and institutional analysis. He was honored with major civilian awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died on 29 April 2006. Further information is widely available, see Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the JFK Library.

Although there’s no evidence of Galbraith being a regular diarist, he did keep a day-by-day account of his service as US Ambassador to India. He recorded meetings with Nehru, Kennedy, Indian officials, diplomats and journalists, as well as the practical detail of embassy life and the pressures of the Sino-Indian War. Ambassador’s Journal - available to read online at Internet Archive - was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1969 and runs to nearly 700 pages. In later years he would write and publish two memoirs - A Life in Our Times (1981) and Name-Dropping (1999) - which drew on memory, papers and correspondence rather than any further diaries.

Here is the opening paragraph to Galbraith's introduction for Ambassador’s Journal, followed by three extracts.

Introduction: ‘In the autumn of 1960, after John F. Kennedy had called to tell me that I was to be his Ambassador to India, I decided it would be an interesting time and that I would keep a full account of what happened. It was a taxing decision. At the end of a long day, the temptation to say to hell with it and go to bed can be overwhelming. Even worse is the temptation to take care of one’s high resolve with a few perfunctory words. The more important the events, the wearier you are and the better the seeming excuse for dismissing it all. Nevertheless, I persisted and this is the result. Sometimes I wrote in the evening, more often when I got up next morning. If I had a journey in prospect, I saved up and wrote on the plane. And I also wrote more faithfully of travels than of sedentary days at the Embassy so the journal gives an exaggerated impression of movement. However, I did travel a lot. The date and place of the entry refer, in each instance, to the date and place of writing and not necessarily of the events described.’

12 April 1961

‘After lunch Kitty and I were photographed at great length looking at birds, flowers and each other and at five I called on the Prime Minister. This involved some ceremony.

First, I went to the Foreign Office where I picked up the Chief of Protocol. Then we went to Nehru’s Parliament office where we made our way through the crowded antechamber. Then after a short wait we were ushered in. It was the same smallish, slightly used-looking and not very handsome office in which I had visited him two years before. I presented myself as the most amateur of diplomats. He proclaimed himself an amateur prime minister. I think that truth will not be a barrier to our association - both of us were professing a modesty no one else would find creditable. We then chatted about our respective books, Cambridge University in our respective days there, and the improvement in India which I told him I measured by the number of bicycles. He agreed on the value of this index. He said that he had heard that the new Administration was dominated by Rhodes Scholars. I said that the key positions in the world were still held by Cambridge men. Then, as I was about to go, he said he wanted to talk of the Congo. This continued for half an hour or more - rather to the discomfort of the new French Ambassador who was waiting his turn. He mentioned the misunderstanding of Lumumba - “not a Communist and he probably doesn’t know what Communism is”, the delays in transporting Indian troops; the insufficiently hard stand against the white irregulars and Belgians, the mistreatments of Dayal by the U.S. papers “with some official inspiration”; the shortcomings of Timberlake, the United States Ambassador in the Congo, and the prediction of some unspecified American that India intended to colonize the Congo. Despite all the briefing, I would have handled myself better if I had been informed. Where I could respond, as in the case of the reference to colonization, I did. “I am sure you know that no responsible member of the American Government ever made any such statement.” For the rest, I found silence golden but uncomfortable. Afterward, I sent off my first cable to the Department and then went to dinner pleasantly with my chief Political Counselor.’

13 April 1961, New Delhi

‘I displayed my exceptionally modest administrative talents this morning - I reviewed plans to build offices in the basement of the new Chancery which seemed insane, I considered the Residence which is under construction but on strike - the contractor seems to be chiseling on the minimum wage and is paying something less than two rupees (about forty cents) a day; and I went into the matter of a swimming pool for our staff and youngsters. I also sent a note of congratulations to the Soviet Ambassador on “the epochal journey of Major Gagarin” I was officially advised that the household staff is competent in all matters and included even one or two experts in imaginative larceny. “They stole the Bunkers blind” (This was a grave exaggeration. Ellsworth Bunker emerged quite solvent.) I borrowed some books from USIS for the empty bookshelves at the Residence and had lunch with my Cultural Counselor, and dinner with Maffitt and my old classmate at California, Robert Carr, who is now Consul-General in Bombay. Maffitt’s cooking, as also his wine, improves greatly on that of the Residence.’

19 April 1961, New Delhi

‘I am finally officially an Ambassador. At eight-fifty yesterday morning, the Chief of Protocol from the Ministry of External Affairs called at the Residence where my principal colleagues had already assembled - the military men in an exceptionally high state of polish. We rode in an open procession - motorcycle and patrol car - to the President’s Palace (the Rashtrapati Bhavan) at the gates of which we were met by a detachment of mounted lancers on beautifully matched bay horses. They escorted us to an open courtyard where an honor guard of Sikhs was drawn up in two ranks - perhaps the best turned-out soldiers in the world. I mounted the reviewing block while the national anthems were played. Then I inspected the guard, nothing seemed seriously wrong. I drew heavily on old newsreels for my protocol, but the Commanding Officer was there to nudge me if I needed it.

After congratulating the O.C., we went into the palace and rehearsed the ceremony. Then we had the ceremony. A slow approach to the President, my speech, his reply, presentation of credentials, then down to his study for a private chat, and finally on to a state room for a public reception for all present. It was exceedingly well done, the Indians approach ceremony as though they meant it, rather than, as in the United States, in a kind of abashed reluctance. And the soldiers, band and military aides were all sparkling by our standards. My speech, in which I urged accomplishment as distinct from conversation and noted that the warmest words of friendship were exchanged just before the breaking of diplomatic relations, was evidently well-regarded. When we emerged to come home, my automobile flag was unfurled for the first time.

After some champagne for the staff, I got into the TCM [a meeting room] again and spent the afternoon on routine matters ending up with a meeting with Stebbins. The question is whether I should see the principal exiled leader from Nepal. Obviously I should. He is a liberal and a democrat — and the American Ambassador should be available to any leader of importance.

The Cuban business (the Bay of Pigs) has come and the effect here is not good. I am afraid that even if we win, we will lose. Castro would eventually have died on his vine. His army was not a threat and now we lose prestige and esteem where it counts. This inability to balance small Rover Boy gains against large general loss was the prime weakness of the Eisenhower Administration. The same people who erred before are diligently promoting error again.’

Win the world or to reject it

‘The best thing that occurs to me is a kind of diary . . . I mean, it wouldn’t be letters or an ordinary diary. It could be divided into two or three parts. One dedicated to love, the other to anxiety, the third to, mon dieu!, here already would be the issue of making up your mind, of choosing: either to win the world or to reject it.’ This is from the diaries of Alejandra Pizarnik an Argentinian poet born 90 years ago today. She lived in Paris for a while and associated with avant-garde literary figures before returning to BA. Suffering from mental issues, she committed suicide in her mid-30s.

Alejandra Pizarnik was born on 29 April 1936 in Avellaneda, a port city in the province of Buenos Aires. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, she grew up in a Spanish-speaking household marked by cultural displacement and personal insecurity, later recalling difficulties with speech and self-image. Educated in Buenos Aires, she studied philosophy and literature at the University of Buenos Aires but did not complete a degree. During these early years she began publishing poems and moved in avant-garde literary circles, influenced by French symbolism and surrealism as well as by writers such as Arthur Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud.

In 1960 Pizarnik moved to Paris, where she lived until 1964, working for journals and publishers while deepening her literary connections. There she associated with figures including Julio Cortázar and Octavio Paz, the latter writing a prologue to one of her books. Her poetry matured rapidly in this period, marked by compression, intensity, and recurring themes of silence and absence. After returning to Buenos Aires, she continued to publish and gained recognition as a distinctive poetic voice in Latin American literature.

Pizarnik’s principal works include La tierra más ajena (1955), La última inocencia (1956), Las aventuras perdidas (1958), Árbol de Diana (1962), Los trabajos y las noches (1965), Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968), and El infierno musical (1971). Alongside poetry she wrote prose pieces and essays, though her reputation rests chiefly on her short, intense lyric output. Her life was marked by recurring psychological difficulties, periods of institutional treatment, and a persistent preoccupation with death and identity. She died on 25 September 1972 in Buenos Aires, aged only 36. Further information is available at Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Poetry Foundation, and Princeton University.

Pizarnik kept diaries from her late adolescence, beginning in the mid-1950s. Written in notebooks, the diaries are not conventional narratives but fragmented, self-analytical texts in which she explores language, creativity, solitude, and despair. They document her reading, literary ambitions, and relationships, while also revealing the intensity of her inner life; many entries read as drafts or extensions of her poetry rather than private reflections. The Paris years are particularly rich, combining artistic aspiration with acute isolation, while later entries become increasingly spare and troubled.

The diaries were published posthumously in Spanish, edited by Ana Becciu, notably in Diarios (Lumen, 2000), later expanded in subsequent editions - see Penguin Random House. These volumes, running to well over a thousand pages, draw on manuscript notebooks now held in archival collections. There is no complete English translation; instead, selections have appeared in journals and anthologies, with occasional standalone excerpts translated for literary magazines and the like: Tumblr (the source of the extracts below), Music & Literature, Liverpool University Press, and Muses.

5 July 1955

‘Thinking about literary work.

The best thing that occurs to me is a kind of diary directed at (we suppose, Andrea). I mean, it wouldn’t be letters or an ordinary diary. It could be divided into two or three parts. One dedicated to love, the other to anxiety, the third to, mon dieu!, here already would be the issue of making up your mind, of choosing: either to win the world or to reject it.

No! I won’t be able to do it because of my heart with two faces. (Today I accept something, tomorrow reject it.) It would be a question of writing it all in one night. Impossible!

(Let’s continue making poems.)

I inherited from my ancestors the desire to flee. They say my blood is European. I feel that every drop originates from a distinct point. From this nation, that province, this island, that gulf, accident, archipelago, oasis. From every piece of land or sea they stole something and so formed me, condemning me to the eternal search for a place of origin. With my outstretched hands and my wounded bird babbling and bleeding. With my lips expressly drawn to utter complaints. With my forehead crumpled by doubts. With my eager face and messy hair. With my trailer without brakes.

With my instinctive hatred of prohibition. With my black breath got by endless crying. I inherited a hesitant step meant to keep me from ever being firmly nationalized anywhere. Everywhere and nowhere! Nowhere and everywhere!

(Today a fellow student in my French course told me that in Paris “there is a lot of degeneracy” because she’d been told that couples in love kiss on the street “in public!”.)

I think people like that make life even harder. And this without saying what those same people do when they’re not “in public”. And these people are “society”. The representatives of order, rectitude, morality. Morality! The morality they establish to their criteria and without any right to. And we are the exiled, the rejected, the spiritual syphilitics! As if our very faces emitted putrid stuff. As if we don’t deserve the innocent blue sky covering us, behind which sits God, fountainhead of imaginary narrow-mindedness and meanness.

God!, who if he exists is limited in his employment to the cover of the Civil and Penal code. I don’t care about proving something as vulgar as the existence of God, because I’m satisfied with feeling my own being. The Civil Code doesn’t matter except to the extent that it dirtied my soul when I made that pilgrimage for it during my first years. I want to erase their filthy stains! Leave my bird glossy! (Like a piece of propaganda for infinite beauty.)

One of the questions I can’t answer: “But. . . where have you come from you who are like this?”

(Right now I feel like the product of a cross between the Minotaur and an embittered Martian.)

Buenos Aires is like the sewing basket of a dressmaker who’s worked in the profession for thirty years. Every time she wants to find the golden thread she’s inevitably hurt by countless pins whose existence she didn’t notice.

To live like Jarry! Mme. De Beauvoir would talk to me here about my situation as a woman. To want to live like Jarry when it isn’t possible to spend a single hour in a café without two worms springing forth every minute to disturb the life this poor female is trying to develop!’

19 July 1955

‘What is it that matters in an action, its content or its form?

Alejandra: you have forty days of unspeakable anguish. Forty days of suffocating loneliness with no chance of confession. With no beloved face to complain to of the misfortune attached to your fate. Alejandra: that beloved face is only one and it has left. It’s as if they’d ripped everything from you. It’s as if they’d submerged you in the cold sum of the days so that you might be shocked into trying to forget its absence. Alejandra: you must fight terribly. You must fight yourself and this notebook. You must fight both, because your beloved’s eyes say if not all will be lost. Perhaps there will be something still to save! What? questions! Your soul, Alejandra, your soul!

Plans for forty days: 1) Begin the novel. 2) Finish Proust. 3) Read Heidegger. 4) Don’t drink. 5) No violent actions. 6) Study grammar and French.’

Life in Richmond under siege

The American diarist Emma Mordecai died 120 years ago today, leaving behind a rare and detailed civilian record of life in the Confederate capital during the final year of the Civil War. Written in Richmond as military pressure tightened around the city, her diary captures both the routines of domestic life and the growing strain of conflict, offering a contemporaneous account of a society under siege.

Mordecai was born in 1812 in Richmond into a prominent Jewish mercantile family long established in the city. Her father, Samuel Mordecai, was a successful merchant, and the family occupied a respected position within Richmond society. She received a solid education for a woman of her background and remained closely tied to her extended family throughout her life, never marrying and instead living within a network of siblings and relations whose fortunes were intertwined with those of the breakaway Confederacy states.

During the American Civil War, Mordecai remained in Richmond, then the Confederate capital, and experienced the conflict at close quarters. Her household life was shaped by wartime shortages, the presence of enslaved servants, and the constant proximity of military activity. Like many in her social circle, she supported the Confederate cause, and her perspective was conditioned by both her class position and her investment in the South’s social order.

After the war, Mordecai continued to live in Richmond, adjusting to the profound social and economic changes brought by defeat and emancipation. In later life she copied out and preserved her wartime diary, producing a fair version in 1886. She died on 8 April 1906. Further information is available from Wikipedia and the Jewish Women’s’ Archive.

Mordecai’s diary covers the period from April 1864 to May 1865, one of the most intense phases of the war in Virginia, including the siege conditions in Richmond and the city’s eventual fall. The entries vary considerably in length, from brief factual notes to extended passages running to several hundred words. Alongside records of weather, household routines, and visits, Mordecai develops fuller scenes - in hospitals, on the roads, and in the surrounding countryside - combining close observation with moments of personal reflection and judgement, particularly as the pressures of war intensify.

The manuscript survived among the Mordecai family papers and was preserved in archival collections before attracting sustained scholarly attention. A full edition, The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai, was published by New York University Press in 2024, edited by Dianne Ashton with Melissa R. Klapper, and accompanied by a substantial scholarly introduction situating the text within the history of the Civil War and American Jewish life.

The path to publication was unusually prolonged. Ashton, a specialist in American Jewish history, had worked on the project for more than a decade and left behind a substantial draft on her death in 2022. Her colleague Melissa R. Klapper took on the task of completing the manuscript, drawing on Ashton’s research while updating the scholarship and preparing the diary for press. The project had already been committed to publication, and Klapper described finishing it as an effort to ensure that years of work did not ‘disappear’. More about the book can be found here, and some pages can sampled at Googlebooks. Moreover, a few of the diary extracts can be found in a pdf thanks to the Rosenbach Museum.

28 May 1864

‘A most beautiful morning, took a sweet little ramble in the woods about Laurel Branch, after breakfast. Got honeysuckle, laurel, lupin & other flowers. Grape vines not quite in bloom yet. How tranquil it was in the wooded pasture, where the cows look as if they would tire themselves with grazing, so uncommonly luxuriant is the growth of grass & clover in the woods around. The negro boys who mind them are happy, careless little beings - as free as Robin Hood’s men “under the green wood tree”. How much better off will they be in the North? Our ruthless invaders do full as much injury to the poor negroes, as to their owners. Spent the day in quiet, grateful rest. It turned very cool and rained in the afternoon. Ate the first strawberries - a few out of the Garden, & some that Fanny Young sent George, but ladies have brought me some to the Hospital all the week.’

29 May 1864

‘Another most beautiful day; so cool as to make our wood fires quite acceptable if not necessary. Rose & Gusta went to church. George & I staid at home, he reading & I writing all the morning, a very long letter to Peggy Mordecai in Raleigh, in answer to one from her rec’d yesterday. When Rose came from Church, she told us that Lee’s Army is very near Richmond. There has been a Cavalry skirmish at Atlee’s Station, about six miles from here. Ewell’s wagon train was passing Mr. Stuart’s, for hours yesterday, going down on the Meadow - Bridge road. The Battle grounds of 1861 seem to be selected by Grant for his next failure, & Genl. Lee is arranging to meet him in his new position. Hear that much of our artillery is in Atlee’s Station, & we may see Willie & John here at any moment. Had an excellent dinner of nice fried chicken, asparagus, boiled onions & rice, with a dessert of cool clauber. After dinner George drove Rose and me in to see Lawrence Young & take buttermilk to the Hospital. I carried my favorite patient, Mr. Horton, of Georgia, a breast of chicken, & a slice of bread & butter. Found him less well than when I left him Friday. He ate part of it, & seemed to relish it, but has little appetite. He has much to contend with. Has lost his left foot, and was severely wounded in the right leg. Poor fellow! so brave & so handsome! - with his white forehead, soft chestnut hair, clear steel blue eyes - strait nose & expressive mouth.

Lawrence Young is not thought to be improving. His surgeon, Dr. Montague (who afterwards married Rosa Young - Lawrence’s sister, with whom he fell in love around her brother’s cot], thinks his condition very discouraging. George saw his wound, & thinks it looks dreadfully. He is said to be the idol of his mother. Several of the men had died since I was there on Friday - all were hopeless cases. Many ladies visited the Hospital this P.M. One brought a large basket of strawberries & dispensed them. The poor invalids enjoy them much. On our way to town we saw several families moving with their servants, cattle, horses, and sheep &c to take refuge within the lines of fortification, as we returned, some were preparing to camp out a common, near the road. Ladies & children seated round a camp - fire, while their carts, wagons and a carriage were drawn up round them, with counterpanes arranged so as to make a sort of tent. Families east of the turnpike, (we are a mile to the west of it) have sent everything they can dispense with, to the City, for safety.’

30 May 1864

‘Beautiful, cool morning, cars not running yet on Fredsbg. Rd. Gusta went in with her uncle John, to school. I could not get to the Hospital. Took a walk in the woods after breakfast. Sewed all the morning mending clothes. Rose felt poorly & lay down most of the time. A perfectly quiet day. No sounds of War. After dinner read a little & took a long nap. Got up & dressed. Mrs. Young sent a large bowl of strawberries, and in the cool of the evening, walked over with the children. Gusta could not get home from school. Willie came about 8 o’clock from Mechanicsville, having ridden ten miles since sunset. He constant expression of his countenance. He had no one to attend to him except at stated periods. No one to keep off the swarming flies, or to answer the many urgent requirements of such a sufferer. Comfortless & perhaps without any one’s knowing it, he will die. The sisters do not allow any outsiders to remain with a patient but 15 minutes, so I had to leave him after this short time. I shall probably not find him there when I go again. I have prayed for him - May God pardon and take him to Himself.’

10 June 1864

‘I had intended visiting the Hospitals to day, but on consulting my Heb. Calendar, I found it was the 1st day of Pentecost, so I remained at home to observe the day as well as I could by reading the services, and reminding myself of my peculiar duties as an Inheritor of law given to us by Him who said “I, the Lord, change not”. Blind & foolish are those children of Israel, who persuade themselves that the laws given to them by the Unchanging One, for them & their descendants to observe forever, are not binding on them. I omitted to mention yesterday that Willie took us by surprise yesterday at Westbrook. He came home & finding we were at his uncle’s he dressed himself decently & went over. Rose sent for Gusta who was still in town, & Mary Chiles, with whom she was staying, came out with her to stay until Monday. Willie spent the night at home, & returned to camp after breakfast. A wagon train camped in the woods in front of the house today - the headquarter train of Stuart’s, now Hampton’s Cavalry. Horses are constantly passing on their way to & from the horse - recruiting camp up the river.’

William Godwin’s diary

The English writer and philosopher William Godwin, an early proponent of idealistic liberalism, died 190 years ago today. He is, perhaps, better remembered for his daughter, Mary, who married the poet Percy Shelley and wrote Frankenstein. Godwin kept a diary throughout his life. Although the daily entries are little more than lists of names and places and books read, the diary as a whole is considered of ‘immense importance to researchers of history, politics, literature, and women’s studies’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 7 April 2016.

Up from slavery

‘We talked over together the general interests of the school . . . He promised to give something and said that he thought that he could get one or two other gentlemen to give $100 each.’ This is from a short diary kept by the once-enslaved Booker T. Washington, born 170 years ago today, who grew up in conditions of poverty before emancipation enabled him to pursue an education. This diary, which dates from 1882, can be found online in a multi-volume scholarly edition of all Washington’s writing.

Born into slavery in Virginia on 5 April 1856, Washington worked in salt furnaces and coal mines while teaching himself to read and write. His formal education began at the Hampton Institute, where he studied under General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, graduating in 1875. Hampton’s emphasis on industrial training and self-reliance shaped Washington’s educational philosophy and his later career.

After a period teaching in West Virginia and studying further at Hampton, Washington was appointed in 1881 to lead a new school in Alabama, soon known as the Tuskegee Institute. There he developed a programme combining academic learning with vocational training; and he remained principal for the rest of his life. He married three times - first to Fannie N. Smith (who died in 1884), then Olivia Davidson (who died in 1889), and finally Margaret James Murray, who survived him. 

By the early twentieth century Washington was a nationally known public figure, advising politicians and securing funding for Tuskegee from both Northern philanthropists and Southern supporters. His autobiography Up from Slavery (1901) brought him international recognition. He died in 1915. See Wikipedia for further biographical information. His legacy is preserved in a large body of correspondence, speeches, and institutional records, later edited and published as The Booker T. Washington Papers, a multi-volume scholarly edition drawing on manuscripts held chiefly at the Library of Congress and Tuskegee.

The published papers contain very little that can be described as a diary. Apart from retrospective autobiographical writing, there survives only a brief series of contemporaneous entries from 1882, printed under the heading ‘Diary, May 1-May 8, 1882’. These entries - in volume 2, see Internet Archive - appear to have been written while Washington was travelling in the North raising funds for Tuskegee, and they are closely linked to accounts of money received and visits to potential donors. No continuous journal is known beyond this short sequence.

The surviving entries are concise and factual. On the opening day Washington records: ‘Started from N.Y. at 8 a.m. and arrived at Farmington at noon. Called on Mr. Fessenden who rec’d me kindly and gave me valuable advice, also a general letter and a number of letters of introduction.’ Later the same day he notes his reception at Plantsville: ‘At 8½ p.m. I called on Mr. H. D. Smith who rec’d me more kindly than I had ever been by any white man.’ Staying overnight, he records: ‘We talked over together the general interests of the school . . . He promised to give something and said that he thought that he could get one or two other gentlemen to give $100 each.’

The following days continue in the same manner, recording travel, meetings, and small successes. On 3 May: ‘He rec’d me kindly, but did not care to give any money for real estate. He said that he would help one or two needy students when school began.’ On 4 May: ‘Did not collect any money. Things looked rather gloomy.’ A more successful day follows on 5 May: ‘Collected from individuals $40 . . . gave me encouragement and several good names.’ The entries conclude with brief notes on further efforts and public speaking: ‘Spoke in the evening . . . to an appreciative audience. Rec’d several small gifts.’

How Nobile was saved

Born 130 years ago today, the Swede Einar Lundborg would become, for a brief moment in 1928, one of the most celebrated aviators in Europe - the man who first reached the stranded survivors of the crashed airship Italia and flew its commander to safety. His own account of that rescue, based closely on a diary kept during the expedition, was published that same year.

Lundborg was born on 5 April 1896 in Calcutta, the son of a Swedish missionary, and educated in Sweden before embarking on a military career. He served first in the Swedish army and then, in the turbulent years after the First World War, volunteered in both the Finnish Civil War and the Estonian War of Independence, experiences that brought him decorations from several countries and helped shape his reputation as a disciplined and resourceful officer.

By the mid-1920s he had transferred to aviation, joining the Swedish Air Force at a time when flying was still experimental and hazardous. It was this combination of military experience and technical skill that led to his selection for the 1928 Arctic rescue effort. His life was cut short only a few years later, in 1931, when he was killed during a test flight, leaving behind a brief but intensely dramatic career. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia.

The episode that secured Lundborg’s place in history followed the crash of the airship Italia, commanded by Umberto Nobile, on its return from the North Pole in May 1928. The disaster triggered one of the first large-scale international polar rescue operations, involving aircraft, ships, and expeditions from several countries, see Wikipedia for more details.

Lundborg’s account was published in English in 1928 by Viking Press as The Arctic Rescue - how Nobile was saved. This can be freely read online at Internet Archive. It records, in practical detail, the conditions faced by the rescuers: uncertain ice, extreme cold, and the constant risk that any landing might be the last. When Lundborg finally locates the survivors on the ice, he describes the landing with characteristic understatement, focusing on technical challenges rather than heroics. The central dilemma - that his small ski-equipped aircraft can carry only one passenger - becomes the defining moment of the narrative. The decision to rescue Nobile first, though controversial, is presented in the diary as a matter of operational necessity rather than personal judgement.

The only diary entries actually quoted are brief and functional. The earliest of these comes not from the ice, but from the voyage north. Describing a violent storm in which the ship ‘rolled so terrifically that it defies all description’, Lundborg notes, ‘a very bad night.’ Later, on the ice, the diary captures something more personal, though still in an understated way. Lundborg explains that he had once objected strongly to cigarettes, but, deprived of pipe tobacco and worn down by long watches, he began smoking continuously. In the book’s narrative, Lundborg, says: ‘My diary for that day reveals: “My first fag.” But it was by no means my last.’ 

The most substantial quoted diary extract comes at a moment of strain within the camp. As tempers fray among the stranded men, Lundborg records not heroism or endurance, but discord: ‘Hard words are exchanged, especially between Viglieri and Behounek. Biagi brazenly sputters something about me and the field, and altogether it looks like the beginning of the most ghastly thing that could happen - abusiveness and dissension.’ Introduced as ‘typical of the mood that prevailed among us’, the entry stands out for its relative fullness, yet it remains observational rather than introspective - a record of behaviour rather than feeling.

Alongside these fragments are a few glimpses of the diary as an object. Lundborg notes, for example, the meticulous record-keeping of Viglieri, whose own large diary tracked provisions ‘down to the very gramme’, with columns for daily use and even ‘Receipts’. And near the end of the episode, he remarks that a map case left behind on the ice ‘contained my diary’ - a passing detail that confirms how closely the act of recording accompanied the events themselves.