Thirst after grandeur

‘What a delightful sight it is, after a shower of rain, to see the dear Women tripping along and tucking their drapery round their lovely hips, now & then giving one a glimpse of a lovely ankle & part of a full leg.’ This is Benjamin Haydon, an English painter born 240 years ago today. He was an artist with a significant talent, but his allegiance to 18th century trends, especially historical subjects, meant he was swimming against the Romantic tide, one which would make household names of William Blake and J. M. W. Turner. Chronic financial difficulties compounded his artistic frustrations, and he rarely managed to live within his means, especially after he had married and had children. His story is a sad one, but his characterful diary - initially published in five volumes - is superb because it not only tells us much about the man, but also gives picturesque insights into London life, whether the art and literary scene, chasing after girls or the trials of a day out with his family.

The following is a chapter on Benjamin Haydon taken from my (unpublished) book London in Diaries (see The Diary Review for more about this). Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. And the diaries, themselves, can be sampled in Neglected Genius - The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1808-1846 by John Jolliffe (Faber & Faber, 2012) at Googlebooks.

Benjamin Haydon and his thirst after grandeur

Though thriving in the early 19th century, the London art scene was very much in flux. Painters associated with the Romantic movement - William Blake, John Constable and J. M. W. Turner - were moving away from classicism and its focus on history favoured by, among others, Sir Joshua Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy, and popular interest was moving with them.

Benjamin Haydon, an ambitious young painter from the west country, arrived into this cauldron of change, his heart set on following in Reynolds’ footsteps, and re-establishing a grandeur of British art through historical painting. He wrote in his autobiography, ‘I thought only of LONDON - Sir Joshua - Drawing - Dissection and High Art.’ Unfortunately, Haydon’s life in London was to be beset with frustrations and difficulties, both artistic and financial, which would eventually lead him to take his own life. Today, his autobiographical writing and especially his diaries have saved him from obscurity, for they demonstrate an immense vitality of feeling and observation. They give brilliant insights into aspects of London, from its literary world - he was friends with the Romantic poets - to the trials of a day out to Gravesend with his family.

Haydon was born in Plymouth [on 26 January] in 1786. His father worked as a bookseller/publisher, and his mother was the daughter of a priest. He was schooled locally, but the relationship with his father, who had very different ideas for his career, was always strained. In 1804, he escaped to London. Initially thinking he would study alone, he soon became drawn into the Royal Academy, in particular through its recently-appointed keeper, Henry Fuseli. Aged 21, Haydon exhibited for the first time. The painting - Joseph and Mary Resting on the Road to Egypt - sold for £105. Two years later, he finished The Assassination of L. S. Dentatus, which sold for twice as much. Although it increased his fame, it also resulted in a lifelong quarrel with the Academy, which, he felt, had failed to hang it with sufficient prominence. An allowance from his father ceased in 1810, leading Haydon to start borrowing money, a habit that dogged him for the rest of his life. During the 1810s, he travelled to Paris and studied for a short while at the Louvre. Works such as Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem and The Raising of Lazarus followed, but so did his first arrest for debt.

In 1821, Haydon married Mary Hyman, a young widow with whom he had fallen in love some years earlier. Mary already had two children, and she bore eight more, although only three of these, including Haydon’s first born Frank, survived beyond childhood. In debt again, he was sent to prison for the first time in 1823 - other incarcerations followed at regular intervals. One of his most well-known paintings, from this time, The Mock Election, shows those in jail imitating an election taking place outside. King George IV gave him £500 for the work.

When not in prison or working on commissions, Haydon began to tour the country lecturing on painting and promoting his idea that important buildings should be decorated with historical representations of glory. In the late 1830s, he published a substantial essay - Painting and the Fine Arts - and soon after began writing his autobiography. This was edited by Tom Taylor in three volumes and published posthumously, in 1853. Today, it is considered one of Haydon’s most important achievements. 

Haydon continued to paint in the 1840s, sometimes very large pictures, like The Maid of Saragossa and The Anti-Slavery Convention, but his style was already long out of fashion, and he was chronically frustrated at the lack of public interest in his work. In May 1846, an exhibition he had organised closed with the loss of a considerable sum; a few days later a friend reneged over a promise of a £1,000 loan; and, on 22 June, he bought a gun and shot himself. The wound failed to kill him and left him conscious, so he resorted to a razor to cut his throat. A note to his wife said: ‘Pardon this last pang, many thou has suffered from me; God bless thee in dear widowhood. I hope Sir Robert Peel will consider I have earned a pension for thee. A thousand kisses. Thy husband & love to the last.’

Haydon began keeping a diary in 1808, and continued the practice throughout his life, the very last entry being on the day of his suicide. This diary was first quoted extensively in the three volume autobiography edited by Taylor, but publication of the complete text had to wait until the 1960s when Harvard University Press published five volumes, carefully edited and annotated by Willard Bissel Pope. In 1960, the Keats-Shelley Journal reviewing the diary called Haydon the only English romantic, not excepting Byron, to parallel ‘the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau’; and said of him that ‘a great writer was lost’ because again and again his sketches were more vivid than his novelistic contemporaries.

A more accessible collection of extracts from Haydon’s diary were edited by John Joliffe and published by Hutchinson in 1990 under the title, Neglected Genius: The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon 1808-1846. ‘His violent self-righteousness,’ Joliffe says, ‘may have frustrated most of his aims, but his sheer vitality and his quite exceptional powers of observation and description make him an irresistible subject.’

The capital of the world
14 May 1809
I began to study in London in lodgings in the Strand, 342, May 20th, 1804, and studied night [and] day, till I brought a weakness in my eyes, which obstructed me for 6 weeks. In January, 1805, I first entered the Academy. March, went into Devonshire, where I obtained bones from a Surgeon of Plymouth and drew nothing else for three months; returned to the Academy in July; met [David] Wilkie [Scottish painter] there first time. Studied incessantly, sitting up many nights, shattered myself so much obliged to leave off. Went into Devonshire for the recovery of health. Began to paint after two years’ application to Anatomy & Drawing, May, 1806. Commenced my first picture, October 1st, and finished it March 31st, 1807. Went into Devonshire for 6 months. Studied heads from Nature. Came to town. My dear Mother died at Salt Hill. January 1st, 1808, commenced by second Picture, Dentatus.

11 July 1810
In passing Piccadilly I observed in some horses galloping the various positions of their limbs - what was the position of the fore legs when the hind legs were in such a position, &c - it is astonishing how truly you get at their motions by thus scrutinizing; I made some sketches, after I arrived home, and they seemed to spring and had all the variety I could possibly wish - and such a look of Nature and activity!

9 September 1810
I walked to see Wilkie yesterday to Hampstead; as I returned about four o’clock the Sun was on the decline - and all the valley as I looked from Primrose Hill wore the appearance of happiness & Peace. Ladies glittering in white, with their aerial drapery floating to the gentle breeze, children playing in the middle of the fields, and all the meadows were dotted with cows, grazing with their long shadows streamed across the grass engoldened by the setting Sun. Here was a mower intent on his pursuit, with his white shirt and brown arms illumined in brilliancy; there another, resting one hand on his Scythe, and with the other wetting it with tinkling music - some people were lying, others standing - all animate & inanimate nature seemed to enjoy and contribute to this delicious scene, while behind stood the capital of the World, with its hundred spires - and St Paul’s in the midst towering in the silent air with splendid magnificence.

A delicious tumble in Greenwich
30 November 1812
Went to the House of Lords to hear the Prince open Parliament in State. It was a very grand affair - the beautiful women - educated, refined, graceful, with their bending plumes & sparkling eyes - the Nobility, the Chancellor - I could not help reflecting how long it was before society arrived at such a pitch of peace & quietness, that order & regulation such as I witnessed existed. What tumult, what blood, what contention, what suffering, what error, before experience has ascertained what was to be selected, or what rejected.

25 April 1813
I felt this morning an almost irresistible inclination to go down to Greenwich and have delicious tumble with the Girls over the hills. I fancied a fine, beamy, primy, fresh, green spring day (as it was), a fine creature in a sweet, fluttering, clean drapery, with health rosing her shining cheeks, & love melting in her sparkling eyes, with a bending form ready to leap into your arms. After a short struggle, I seized my brush, knowing the consequences of yielding to my disposition, & that tho’ it might begin today, it would not end with it.

A critique of Sir Joshua’s exhibition
8 May 1813
Sir Joshua’s exhibition opened. The first impression on my mind was certainly that of flimsiness. They looked faint, notwithstanding the effect was so judiciously arranged. Sir Joshua’s modes of conveying ideas were colour & light and shadow; of form, he knew nothing. The consequence was he hinted to his eye & untrained hand, and with great labour & bungling, modeled out his feelings with a floating richness, an harmonious depth, and a gemmy brilliancy that was perhaps encreased by his perpetual repetitions, and which renders him as great a master of colour as ever lived. Of poetical conception of character as it regards Portrait, he had a singular share. How delightful are his Portraits, their artless simplicity, their unstudied grace, their chaste dignity, their retired sentiment command us, enchant us, subdue us.

The exhibition does great credit to the Directors of the British Gallery. It will have a visible effect on Art; it will raise the character of the English School; it will stop that bigotted, deluded, absurd propensity for Leonardo Da Vincis & insipid Corregios, and as men who shared Sir J’s friendship and been soothed by his manners, it does credit to their hearts as men.

6 August 1815
What a delightful sight it is, after a shower of rain, to see the dear Women tripping along and tucking their drapery round their lovely hips, now & then giving one a glimpse of a lovely ankle & part of a full leg.

Nature in the park; marbles in the museum
2 June 1816
I rode yesterday to Hampton Court round by Kingston & dined at Richmond. The day is delicious, the hedges smelling of may blossom, the trees green, the leaves full & out, the Thames shining with a silvery glitter, & a lovely girl who loves you, [in] the dining room of the Star & Garter at Richmond, sitting after dinner on your knee, with her heavenly bosom palpitating against your own, her arm round your neck playing with your hair, while you are sufficiently heated to be passionately alive to the ecstasy without having lost your senses from its excesses - Claret on the table and the delicious scene of Nature in Richmond Park beneath your open window, moaty, sunny, out of which rises the wandering voice of the cuckoo, while the sun, who throws a silent splendour over all, sinks into the lower vaults & the whole sky is beginning to assume the tinged lustre of an afternoon.

28 May 1817
On Monday last there were one thousand and two people visited the Elgin marbles! a greater number than ever visited the British Museum since it was established. It is quite interesting to listen to the remarks of the people. They make them with the utmost simplicity, with no affectation of taste, but with a homely truth that shews they are sound at the core. We overheard two common looking decent men say to each other, ‘How broken they, a’ant they?’ ‘Yes,’ said the other, ‘but how like life.’

28 June 1817
Dined at Kemble’s farewell dinner [the actor John Philip Kemble had played his last stage role, Corialanus, a few days earlier, his retirement having been hastened, perhaps, by the rise in popularity of Edmund Kean]. A more complete farce was never acted. Many, I daresay, regretted his leaving us, but the affectations of all parties disgusted me. The Drury Lane actors flattering the Covent Garden, the Covent Garden flattered in turn the Drury Lane. Lord Holland flattered Kemble; Kemble flattered Lord Holland. [. . .] Anyone would have thought that the English Stage had taken its origin from Kemble - Garrick was never mentioned - when all that Kemble has done for it has been to improve the costume. Yet Kemble is really & truly the Hero of all ranting; all second rate ability find it much easier to imitate his droning regularity than the furious impulses of Kean, who cannot point out when they come or why, but is an organ for Nature, when she takes it in her head to play on him.

Of Walter Scott and Wordsworth; and Keats in Kilburn meadows
7 March 1821
Sir Walter Scott breakfasted with me with Lamb, & Wilkie, and a delightful morning we had. I never saw any man have such an effect on company as he; he operated on us like champagne & whisky mixed. It is singular how success & want of it operate on two extraordinary men, Wordsworth & Walter Scott. Scott enters a room & sits at table, with the coolness & self possession of conscious fame; Wordsworth with an air of mortified elevation of head, as if fearful he was not estimated as he deserved. Scott is always cool, & amusing; Wordsworth often egotistical and overbearing. [. . .] Scott’s success would have made Wordsworth insufferable, while Wordsworth’s failures would not have rendered Scott a bit less delightful.

29 March 1821
Keats is gone too! [A few weeks earlier, Haydon had written of the death of John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, after a duel.] He died at Rome, Feby. 23rd, aged 25. Poor Keats - a genius more purely poetical never existed. [. . .]

The death of his brother [in December 1818] wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour he began seriously to droop. He wrote at this time his beautiful ode to the nightingale. ‘Where Youth grows pale & spectre thin & dies!’ - alluded to his poor Brother.

As we were walking along the Kilburn meadows, he repeated this beautiful ode, with a tremulous undertone, that was extremely affecting! I was attached to Keats, & he had great enthusiasm for me. I was angry because he would not bend his great powers to some definite object, & always told him so. Latterly he grew angry because I shook my head at his irregularity, and told him he was destroying himself.

The last time I saw him was at Hampstead, lying in a white bed with a book, hectic, weak, & on his back, irritable at his feebleness, and wounded at the way he had been used; he seemed to be going out of the world with a contempt for this and no hopes of the other.

Gorgeous splendour of ancient chivalry
21 July 1821
What a scene was Westminster Hall on Thursday last! It combined all the gorgeous splendour of ancient chivalry with the intense heroic interest of modern times; every thing that could effect or excite, either in beauty, heroism, grace, elegance, or taste; all that was rich in colour, gorgeous in effect, touching in association, English in character or Asiatic in magnificence, was crowded into this golden & enchanted hall!

I only got my ticket on Wednesday at two, and dearest Mary & I drove about to get all I wanted. Sir George Beaumont lent me ruffles & frill, another a blue velvet coat, a third a sword; I bought buckles, & the rest I had, and we returned to dinner exhausted. [. . .] I dressed, breakfasted, & was at the Hall Door at half past one. Three Ladies were before me. The doors opened about four & I got a front place in the Chamberlain’s box, between the door and Throne, & saw the whole room distinctly. Many of the door keepers were tipsey; quarrels took place. The sun began to light up the old gothic windows, the peers to stroll in, & the company to crowd in, of all descriptions; elegant young men tripping along in silken grace with elegant girls trembling in feathers and diamonds. Some took seats they had not any right to occupy, and were obliged to leave them after sturdy disputes. Others lost their tickets. Every movement, as the time approached for the King’s appearance, was pregnant with interest. The appearance of the Monarch has something the air of a rising sun; there are indications which announce his approach, a whisper of mystery turns all eyes to the throne! Suddenly two or three run; others fall back; some talk, direct, hurry, stand still, or disappear. Then three or four of high rank appear from behind the Throne; and interval is left; the crowds scarce breathe! The room rises with a sort of feathered, silken thunder! Plumes wave, eyes sparkle, glasses are out, mouths smile. The way in which the King bowed was really monarchic! As he looked towards the Peeresses & Foreign Ambassadors, he looked like some gorgeous bird of the East.

After all the ceremonies he arose, the Procession was arranged, the Music played, and the line began to move. All this was exceedingly imposing. After two or three hours’ waiting, the doors opened, and the flower girls entered, strewing flowers. The exquisite poetry of their look, the grace of their actions, their slow movement, their white dresses, were indescribably touching; their light milky colour contrasted with the dark shadow of the archway. The distant trumpets & shouts of the people, the slow march, and at last the appearance of the King under a golden canopy, crowned, and the universal burst of the assembly at seeing him, affected every body.

A crowd of feelings but I cannot write
4 December 1821
I am married! Ah, what a crowd of feelings lie buried in that little word. I cannot write or think for the present. I thank God for at last bringing me to the arms of the only creature that ever made my heart burn really, & I hope he will bless me with health & understanding & means to make her happy & blessed. Dearest, dearest Mary - I cannot write.

17 September 1826
Walked into a delicious meadow, and sat down on an old stump behind some hay ricks, my back turned on the Edgware road. It was a beautiful seclusion; just after passing the Turnpike near West End Lane, you turn down a lane which leads to the Harrow road; about a dozen yards on the left is a style, & close to the style hay ricks & a fallen stump. Here I sat and read Xenophon’s treatise on riding & Cavalry exercise, in a French translation, which decidedly proves the Greeks did not shoe their Horses, as he gives instructions how to get the hoof so firm that it shall resist injury successfully.

London Bridge is opening
1 August 1831
Went to see the King’s procession to open the London Bridge, by particular desire, that is, of Master Frank, Alfred, Frederick, Harry, & Mary Haydon, not forgetting Mrs Mary Haydon the Elder. Well, I went, to the gallery of St Paul’s, and after waiting about 5 hours, a little speck with a flag and another little speck with a flag, and another speck in which I saw ten white specks, and 6 red & yellow specks, came by, & immediately 200,000 specks uttered a shout I could just hear, and some specks waved handkerchiefs, & other specks raised hats, and this, they said, was the King, and directly a little round ball went up in the air and that, they said, was an air balloon, and then they all shouted, and Mrs Mary Haydon the Elder had a pain in her stomach, and Master Frederick wanted to drink, and Miss Mary said she was faint, and Master Frank Haydon said, ‘is this all?’ - and Mr Haydon said he was very hot, and then they went down an infinite number of dark stairs and got into a coach & drove home, & each fell asleep and this was pleasure. Now if Mr Haydon had gone to work with his Xenophon, neither Master or Mrs or Mr Haydon would have had a pain in their bellies and Mr Haydon’s Back-ground would have been done, and his Conscience would have been quiet, & now he has spent 1.18.6 to get a pain in his belly, and has the pain without the money - and this is pleasure.

18 November 1831
This day my dear little child Fanny died, at 1/2 past one in the forenoon, aged 2 years, 8 months, & 12 days being born on March 6th, 1829. Dear Little Soul, she had water in the head, all the consequences of weakness & deranged digestion, and was one of those conceived creatures, born when the Mother has hardly any strength from the effects of a previous confinement. Good God! She never spoke, or was not able to utter syllable, & never walked. Reader, whoever thou are, shrink not from Death with apprehension. Death was the greatest mercy an Almighty could grant.

For this earthly happiness I paid 2.12.6
1 September 1838
Went to Gravesend with my family for a day of relief & pleasure. First we got into an Omnibus & were jolted & suffocated [to] the Bank. Second the Steamer at the Bridge had just gone. Third we had to wait amongst the Porters & Packages 3/4 of an hour for the next. 4th we got on board the sunny side in a cabin, close to the Boiler, & were alternately baked by the sun & broiled by the steam pipe. Fifth we got to Gravesend tired & hungry. 6th we walked to a romantic love lane, which was a garden straight walk with dirty wooden seats, and sundry evidences that people in Gravesend had good digestions & sound peristaltic motion. 7th we ordered Roast Beef for Dinner, and my dear Mary kept her appetite to enjoy a hearty meal, when the Landlord put down lamb she hated  & so did I. 8th we had rum as hot as aqua-fortis, & then old port as weak as children pap. We all got aboard with indigestion. I fell asleep on Deck & got a pain in my head, and we got home tired, grumbling, ill humoured, had tea & crept to bed.

Today I am heated, discontented, & indignant, & it will take 24 hours more to recover in. For this earthly happiness I paid 2.12.6. - enough to feed us for a week! - so much for pleasure.

20 May 1846
Continually attending to Exhibitions is dreadful and if you do not, you get robbed. These things an Artist should have nothing to do with; details of business injure my mind and when I paint I feel as if Nectar was floating in the Interstices of the brain. God be praised, I have painted today.

22 June 1846
God forgive - me - Amen. Finis of B R Haydon ‘Stretch me no longer on this tough World’ - Lear. End.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 26 January 2016.

Crusell the clarinettist

Today marks 250 years since the birth of Bernhard Henrik Crusell, the Finnish-Swedish clarinettist and composer whose travel journals and autobiographical fragments give a rare glimpse into the life of a Scandinavian musician moving through Europe at the dawn of the Romantic era. Although best remembered for his three clarinet concertos and chamber works, Crusell also left behind a small but valuable body of personal writings.

Crusell was born on 15 October 1775 in the coastal town of Uusikaupunki, then part of the Swedish kingdom. Aged 8, the family moved to Perttula, a village in the Nurmijärvi region some 20 miles north of Helsinki. In 1788, when he was 13, a family friend, aware of the his natural musical ability, took him to see Major O. Wallenstjerna at Sveaborg, a Swedish fortress. Wallenstjerna, impressed with Crusell’s playing, recruited him as a volunteer member of the Sveaborg military band and gave him a place to live with his own family. Crusell received an education at Sveaborg and excelled in music and languages. In 1791, when Wallenstjerna transferred to Stockholm, Crusell went with him. There, he became a professional musician and eventually principal clarinettist of the Royal Court Orchestra.

In 1801 Crusell married Anna Krougius, the daughter of a Stockholm merchant. They had one son, Adolf. Crusell travelled widely, studying in Berlin, Leipzig and Paris, and built a reputation as the leading clarinet virtuoso of northern Europe. He also worked as a translator, adapting French opera libretti into Swedish for the Royal Theatre. His reputation rests above all on his compositions for the clarinet: three concertos and several chamber works. As a performer he was admired throughout northern Europe, not only for the elegance of his tone but also for his command of the instrument at a time when clarinet design was still evolving. In later life his health declined, though he continued to compose and perform until the mid-1830s. He died in Stockholm in 1838. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Swedish Musical Heritage, and Interlude.

Crusell is known to have kept travel diaries during his journeys in 1798-1799, 1803, and 1822. They combine everyday notes of journeys with reflections on the music and society he encountered, providing an unusually personal commentary from a professional instrumentalist of the period. These writings remained in manuscript until 1977, when the Royal Swedish Academy of Music published Bernhard Crusell: Dagböcker, studier, verkförteckning m.m. as part of its scholarly series. More than thirty years later, in 2010, the Finnish Literature Society issued the first Finnish translation of the travel diaries under the title Keski-Euroopan matkapäiväkirjat 1803-1822. No English edition has ever appeared, and references in English-language studies rely on these Swedish and Finnish publications. Here are just a couple of translated extracts I found embedded in the biographical links above.

1798, Berlin

‘The city [Berlin]astonishes me with its military precision and its glittering society. But it is the music which most excites me - here, clarinet playing is not a curiosity, it is a profession and an art.’ 

June-July 1822

‘Felix [Mendelssohn]is a most beautiful child, and he is also said to be very unassuming. In his compositions one immediately recognises the signs of genius and good training . . . People here think he may even become another Mozart.’

Shooting with Antonioni

‘I fall into bed exhausted. I dream that Jeanne Moreau wants to come out of the painting too, but for some reason I can’t do it for her. I know I’ll be dreaming of the filming for weeks to come; I always do when I’ve finished a shoot.’ This is Wim Wenders - today celebrating his 80th birthday - writing one of the last entries in his diary of an ‘extraordinary experience’ filming with the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni.

Wenders was born in Düsseldorf on 14 August 1945, into a traditional Catholic family. His father was a surgeon. He went to school in Oberhausen, then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf, but dropped out of university to go to Paris to paint. It was to the film world, though, that he was soon drawn. Returning to Germany, he took a job in the Düsseldorf office of United Artists, before studying for three years (1967-1970) at Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München  (Munich’s university for TV and film). At the same time, he wrote film reviews for national magazines, including Der Spiegel.

With other directors and writers in 1971, he founded the company Filmverlag der Autoren; and then, later, he set up his own production company, Road Movies. In 1978, he went to Hollywood to direct Hammett, but disputes with the executive producer Francis Ford Coppola, resulted in a delayed release and a truncated version. Wenders first international successes came in the 1980s, especially with films like The State of Things (1982), Paris, Texas (1984) which won him several significant awards, including the Palme d’Or and Baftas, and Wings of Desire (1987). His films are known for their lush visual imagery, much of which stems from the work of his longstanding collaborator, the Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller.

Wenders has directed several well-received documentaries, such as Buena Vista Social Club (1999), and The Soul of a Man (2003), many music videos for bands, as well as television commercials. He is a member of the advisory board of World Cinema Foundation, founded by Martin Scorsese. Alongside his film work, Wenders has also forged a major reputation as a photographer, exhibiting regularly and widely. The Wim Wenders Foundation, Düsseldorf, was created in 2012 to bring together his artistic work in film, literary and photographic fields, so as to make it publicly accessible. Among many other honours, he was presented with the Honorary Golden Bear at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2015.

Ten years ago, a happy 70th birthday message on the official Wim Wenders read as follows: ‘The long and winding road. So sang the Beatles in 1970. Wim was just 25 years old then and since then what a journey it’s been. Along the way we’ve witnessed his images, words and sounds. A photographer, painter, observer, explorer, storyteller, collector and cartographer. The journey with Wim allows us to see a new world. A world that encompasses his art. And whilst not all of his portraits show people, there’s a sense of humanity we can all feel part of. Ingmar Bergman talks about the wonder of silence. Wim’s imagery instills silence and yet if we get lost on our journey his music guides us back.’ For more on Wenders see Wikipedia, Senses of Cinema, Villa e Collezione Panza, or Images Journal.

I can find no obvious evidence that Wenders is a diary keeper by nature, but for a few months in the winter of 1994-1995, he did keep a diary, with the specific purpose of recording time spent with Antononio. A decade earlier, the renowned Italian director had suffered a stroke, and lost the ability to speak or write, though he could draw with his left hand. After much negotiation, and many delays, he and his wife, Enrica, had assembled finance, actors and crew to make a last film - Beyond the Clouds - comprising four of his own stories about romance and illusion. A condition of the producers was that another director be on hand - hence Wim Wenders’ nominal role as co-diretor.

The diary kept by Wenders was first published in German in 1995, and then translated by Michael Hofmann for publication in English in 200 as My Time with Antonioni - The Diary of an Extraordinary Experience. (A few pages can be sampled at Amazon.) Wenders wrote about the project in an article for The Guardian; but what comes across most forcefully when reading Wenders’ book is the huge effort - as well as compromises in Wenders’ case - made by so many people to bring Antonioni’s vision to the screen. Here are two extracts, from the first and last entries - the first and last days of shooting - in the English edition of the diary.

3 November 1994
‘First day of shoot. At last. Because the shoot has been put back from spring to summer and now to autumn, I’ve been able to be with Michelangelo and the crew during the last week of preparations in Portofino, the location for the first episode, ‘La ragazza, il delitto’, but on the very eve of the shoot I have to be in Paris. The French edition of my book Once is coming out, and there’s an exhibition in the FNAC, press-conference and interviews, and the whole thing is due to end so late there’s no chance of getting back to Italy the same night.

There was a lovely, unexpected ending to the day when we were driven back to the hotel by Martine and Henri Cartier-Bresson. How attentive, kindly and alert the old gentleman was, always so careful not to appear ‘old’: he’d rather hold open a door himself than have it held for him.

Yesterday morning we went to see a demonstration of the latest HDTV-to-film transfer from Thomson’s, who are interested in working with Michelangelo and me. The images on screen, recorded digitally and then put on film, are really impressive, and only barely distinguishable from real film images. They might actually be the perfect language for Michelangelo to shoot his final episode, ‘Due telefaxi’. The electronic medium would match the atmosphere of the story. And wouldn’t it be appropriate, too, for Michelangelo to make the last part of his last film using the technology of the next century, seeing as he was one of the very first directors with a positive attitude to video, and was never shy of new technology? [. . .]

Today, then, the first day of the shoot, Donata and I got up bright and early, took the first plane from Paris to Milan, and drove to Portofino through mist and occasional rain, afraid the weather might make us late. But we arrive on time. The first clapboard is an hour later. The rain has delayed everything, and indeed it will dominate the day’s events.

First off, big excitement, not least among the producers: it appears that the moment he got on set, Michelangelo announced that everything is being changed around, so it’s not John Malkovich who’s going to come out the door and walk down into town, but Sophie Marceau. That means changing the bedroom, where we’re going to film later, from a ‘man’s room’ to a woman’s. ‘Here we go . . .’ you can see the producers thinking. But on closer inspection, the change makes sense. Michelangelo just hadn’t been in a position before to clear up our misunderstanding. It often seemed to me in our discussions that it was simply too much of an effort for him to make his intentions clear to us, and so occasionally he left us under some misapprehension, fully knowing that the moment of truth would dawn once we were filming. Also, Michelangelo has trouble differentiating between ‘he’ and ‘she’ when speaking, so we were often uncertain whether he was talking about the male or the female character in a story. [. . .]

Having this huge crew and these actors assembled here - all of us ready to give everything we have over the coming weeks - to make a film out of this shooting script and this schedule is Enrica’s personal triumph. And today, on the first day of the shoot, there she is standing in front of the monitors next to Michelangelo, beaming all over her face. Of course everyone is making a fuss of him, but we know that Erica was and is the driving force behind him. A great dream is becoming reality, for both of them. Now it is up to us to sustain the dream to the end, so there is no rude awakening.

In looking for my own niche, I keep in the background, and leave various initiatives and suggestions with Michelangelo’s helpers [. . .] I will have succeeded in my task if I find the right balance between staying out of it and, where absolutely necessary, taking a hand. And above all, I need to learn to keep my own ideas on how I would shoot a scene to myself, because they’re not helpful in this situation.[. . .]

I take a few stills photographs, with the Fuji 6x9, rather sheepishly. Donata dusts off her new Nikon F4 and takes some pictures of the shoot and the crew, in black and white. I’m sticking to colour.

It’s very late, and I feel totally exhausted. Being at a shoot without being in charge is much more taxing than I had imagined.

Over supper we laughed till we cried while Tonino regaled us with the story of how Fellini was the first person who managed to get food stains on his back while eating. Tonino demonstrated how Fellini broke a roll in half, and a piece of mortadella flew up in the air and landed between his shoulderblades. He kept imitating Fellini standing there, with the slice of meat sticking to his back, worrying about how cross Giulletta would be when she’d get to hear about his foolish adventure.’

29 March 1995
‘Sixty-fourth day of shoot. The last day. My shoot ends on the day all the newspapers are carrying photographs of Michelangelo with Jack Nicholson. They’re all full of reports of Oscar night, and I buy all the newspapers I can lay my hands on, especially the Italian ones. [. . .]

My first thanks are due to Robby and Donata. As the evening goes on, with all of us eating at a buffet in a hall off the studio, it gradually sinks in that this adventure is over for the moment. There’s still the editing and the post-production to come, but they can’t be as risky or as onerous as the shooting.

Someone turns up the music, and we dance ourselves off our feet.

I fall into bed exhausted. I dream that Jeanne Moreau wants to come out of the painting too, but for some reason I can’t do it for her. I know I’ll be dreaming of the filming for weeks to come; I always do when I’ve finished a shoot. And they’re always dreams where something impossible has to be done, too. I’ve never been on a shoot where I haven’t been plagued by these nightmares afterwards.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 14 August 2015.

Midges very troublesome

‘Long walk without a shot. Gun did not pull at a snipe. Shot 1 grouse not picked up till after lunch. Lunch. Midges very troublesome.’ So reads a terse but vivid entry from the diary of Edward Linley Sambourne, a celebrated cartoonist and illustrator for Punch magazine. Sambourne died 115 years ago today, but his voice endures through nearly three decades of handwritten diaries, now freely available online thanks to the Sambourne Museum, which has transcribed and digitised the full collection.

Sambourne was born in London in 1844 into a middle-class family of Huguenot descent. His father, Edward Mott Sambourne, was a furrier and businessman. Young Linley attended several schools, including the City of London School, and later received training at the South Kensington School of Art, although he never completed a formal degree. From an early age, he showed considerable talent for drawing, particularly in technical illustration, which he combined with an interest in mechanical subjects and social observation.

In 1867, Sambourne began working for Punch magazine, initially as a junior artist producing decorative capitals and borders. He swiftly rose through the ranks to become one of its leading cartoonists, known for his detailed and finely wrought drawings. His style, heavily influenced by engraving techniques and photographic realism, became a hallmark of late Victorian illustration. Over the years he contributed thousands of cartoons, political satires, and social commentaries, often with a conservative bent. Outside of Punch, Sambourne also illustrated books and advertisements, and his work appeared in The Illustrated London News and other periodicals.

In 1874, he married Marion Herapath, the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, and they settled at 18 Stafford Terrace in Kensington, now preserved as a museum. The couple had two children, including Maud, who became the mother of Anne, Countess of Rosse, and grandmother of Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon. Sambourne was deeply involved in London’s artistic and social circles, associating with fellow illustrators, writers, and members of the aristocracy. He was also a passionate amateur photographer, whose glass plate negatives reveal a private fascination with costume, the female form, and personal documentation. He died on 3 August 1910. For more information see Wikipedia, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and Victorian Web.

Sambourne began keeping a diary in 1871 and then appears to have stopped until restarting in 1882; thereafter he maintained the habit until his death. The diaries were written in small, printed almanacs and detail his social life, professional commitments at Punch, family interactions, and observations of the period. They form part of the broader Sambourne Family Archive, preserved in the museum at 18 Stafford Terrace. All his diaries can be freely consulted online in an Issu file (with nearly 2,000 pages) uploaded by Sambourne House Museum. This is a digitised facsimile of Sambourne’s handwritten entries, released as part of the museum’s public engagement and archival accessibility efforts. Although the file lacks traditional publication metadata, it directly reflects the museum’s holdings and has not been edited or annotated for publication.

Here are several extracts.

‘1871

Thursday 8 June - Went to Ascot with King & wife M(illeg) & Miss Millington. Cold day. Mortimer won Cup. Home to supper at King’s & home after.


Friday 9 June - Rather seedy. Got up late. Worked. Played Quoits. In Chequers after.


Saturday 10 June - Worked a little. Walked with Farina to Drayton. Saw Blondin. Home & played Quoits afterwards.


Sunday 11 June - Went to see Brown at Latimore House Maidenhead. Taken up to town in train.


Monday 12 June - Worked on Ascot block. Played match at Quoits after. Lost.


Tuesday 13 June - Worked. Went up to town for first Punch Dinner. Home after. Met Garner. Walked from Drayton. (Red ink: 1st Punch Dinner.)


Wednesday 14 June - Did Essence Block.


Thursday 15 June - Worked on Pocket Book. Went to Uncle’s. Played double dummy. Pool & home.


Friday 16 June - Worked. Sent Pocket Book block off. Played quoits with William Heron. Home. Hutton & Farina there.


Saturday 17 June - Worked hard. Did three blocks.


Sunday 18 June - Worked hard. Did Thimble & Needles. At Uncle’s in evening afterwards.


Monday 19 June - Worked all day. Did Croquet girl.


Tuesday 20 June - Did Bee Wright. Went to Ealing in afternoon, there all night.


Wednesday 21 June - Went to Greenwich. Saw Gosling etc. Dined at Sydney’s. Took sketch, home by 9.30.’

5 March 1891, Stafford Terrace

‘(Red ink: Lovely day in town.) Up 10.0am. Head on after Ball. Dozed. Wrote M. Very little breakfast. Skemed drawing for Gendarme and Book maker. Saw Nash's foreman & foreman plasterer. Very little lunch. After at 2.30 Emma helped me with photos of self for Gendarme & Betting man, also Pirate being stabbed. Developed them, 6 photos. At 4.30 took cab to Turkish bath. Bought papers & flower. In bath read Indian story & Quarterly. Margullah of Spins(?). Out & cab on to Costers. Met Boughtons, Stones & Dewey. Good dinner. Talk with Marcus S after. Boughton amusing about D. Murray. Left 10.50. Home by cab. Redcliffe Road. Bed. Lovely fine day. Bright sun & light on new screen in matchboarding. Sat next Miss Macnamara at dinner. Maud dined at the Goulds. Her 1st dinner out. (Red ink across page: 1st photograph from new screen in yard.)’

18 March 1894, Stafford Terrace


‘Up at 8.30am. Down. Cold morning but bright. Breakfast. At 10.30 rode Cob along Hammersmith Rd to Mortlake & thro’ Richmond Pk. Crowd of cyclists. Down Putney Hill. Most curious dense black fog on one side of bridge, the other quite bright. Trotted home. Got stables 1.15. Changed. Lunch. Rested in chair. Read Major Griffith’s book on Prisons. At 4.15 Bret Harte & after Miss Holland & Mr Carlisle called. Slipped out & developed 8 or 10 plates taken at Knowlton Court last June. Up again & wrote many letters. After at 7.45 Welman came & dined. Had 2 bottles of Romanée Burgundy. Long talk & cigar. Welman looking very much older. He left at 10.0. Read & to bed at 12.15am. (Red ink: Blackish fog came on at 1.0pm. Very bad at Fulham.)’

11 June 1898, Stafford Terrace

‘Up at 8.20. Walk with Tip. Had to whip him. After put photos away & printed some. Very dense ones. Bright hot sun the whole day. M out. Very much annoyed by Otley & Emilie dragging heavy box over the floor cloth. Left at 12.15 & by buss to Piccadilly. Got hat at Lincoln & Bennetts (straw) & ties at (blank). On to C.C & Garrick. Lunch & talk to a gent. After to C.C. Up in hot Studio. Waited till 3.30. No one came. Tea & to Athenaeum. Saw Dr Robins. After to Bath Club. Again saw Robins. Bored by talk & in bath. Left 7.30 & home by buss. M & self dined quite quietly. Felt very tired & thirsty. Bed 12.0. (Red ink: Turkish bath. Very hot bright day. Hair cut.) (Cuttings glued in: Walter Palmer-Samborne to Bertha Taylor. June. Death of Frederick Eckstein.)’

19 August 1904, Drumlanford, Ayrshire.

‘Up at 8.30. Good breakfast. After the Factor came. Left in break at 10.0, Factor, 4 guns etc. Shot over moor past Col Hay-Boyd’s. Long walk without a shot. Gun did not pull at a snipe. Shot 1 grouse not picked up till after lunch. Lunch. Midges very troublesome. No, grouse picked up just before lunch. After continued walk by fishing ground of yesterday. Got a grey hen, 3 snipe & 1 golden plover after just at the last. Beale disappointed at bag of grouse. Home by 6.0. No news. Tea. Wrote letters etc. Let a fine old black cock off. Terribly bitten by midges. Bath & dinner. Bridge after. Bed 11.0. (Red ink: Lack of grouse at shoot. Good snipe day. Let a black cock off.) (Cuttings glued in: In Memoriam Thomas Hamp. The wife of Arthur Scawen Blunt, of a son.)’

22 November 1908, Stafford Terrace


‘Slept up to 6.45. Better night. Condal. Tea. M in room. Thankful for better night. Bath. Swelling better. Breakfast. Fair turn out. Shave. Masseur. At 12.0 went for drive with M, Hampstead Heath. Beautiful clear cold day. Back 2.0pm. Lunch. Mite with us. Up in room. Finished cuttings. Tea. Masseur. Doctor said stomach was worse. Chicken broth. In room 7.0. Punch, Westminster. Flatulence. Dinner. Roy dined downstairs. Had bad night, very little sleep. Not much flatulence. (Red ink: Dr came. Went for drive with M in 1 hr brougham up Fitzjohn’s Avenue & Hampstead Heath. Doctor said my stomach was worse. Being overfed by milk etc. Should pop off. Clear cold day.)’

26 November 1909, Stafford Terrace


‘Sleep from 7.0 to 8.20am. Grapes. Great turn out. Green. After breakfast Electricity. Dr Kingscote here 11.30am. Oxygen. Exhausted. To have exercise this afternoon. Good lunch. 1 hrs sleep. Mite & M in room. Tea. Letter from Lawrence Bradbury. Raven-Hill called. Exercise. Enjoyed dinner. Took much apple. Legs rubbed. Night nurse late in evening. Terrible night with obstinate flatulence & cough, supposed from apples. Great turn out. Slept to 4.30am & nine am. Nurse washed me in night. Terribly sore & shocking state. (Red ink: Dr here 11.20am. Bad night from apple. Cough & flatulence. Washed. Bad state & sore in night.)’

The rock and roll life

‘Today is my birthday and it’s the first one I ever spent on a train. Arrived Chicago at 1pm. Had a three-hour layover then caught the 4pm train for home. Should be there at 6.35 tomorrow morning. Happy birthday Bill. What a life.’ This is Bill Haley, the great - and some say forgotten - rock and roll star of the 1950s writing in a diary he kept for a few months at the height of his fame. Today, also, would have been his birthday - his 100th!

Bill Haley was born on 6 July 1925, into a musical family - his father played the banjo, and his mother keyboards. They moved from Highland Park, Michigan, to near Chester, Pennsylvania, during the Great Depression, but, by the age of 15, Bill had left home and was making money where he could by playing guitar. At some point during the 1940s, he was considered one of the top cowboy yodelers, known as Silver Yodeling Bill Haley.

For six years, Haley was a DJ and then musical director of Radio Station WPWA in Chester, Pennsylvania. He married his first wife, Dorothy Crowe, in 1946, and had two children with her. He led his own band - Bill Haley’s Saddlemen - which played at clubs around Philadelphia as well as on the radio. In 1951, the group made its first recordings on Ed Wilson’s Keystone Records. These included a cover of Rocket 88, a rhythm and blues song first recorded by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats earlier the same year in Memphis, Tennessee, (considered by some to be the first ever rock and roll record). The following year, the Saddlemen changed its name to Bill Haley and the Comets. Success soon followed, with many top 20 hits over the next few years. Already divorced, Haley married his second wife, Barbara Joan Cupchack, with whom he had two children, though only one survived through infancy.

Crazy Man, Crazy and a cover version of Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll were the group’s first big hits; and the latter was the first rock and roll song to enter the British singles charts (December 1954). Rock Around the Clock, said to have been written for Haley, released in 1954, did not become a number one single, on both sides of the Atlantic, until a year later, after it appeared as the theme song for Blackboard Jungle starring Glenn Ford. History has settled on Rock Around the Clock, and specifically Haley’s recording of it, as the key record that brought rock and roll into mainstream culture around the world, thus in time displacing the jazz and pop standards performed by singers such as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Bing Crosby.

Bill Haley and the Comets continued to record hits through the later 1950s, and Haley starred in the first rock and roll musical films Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock, both in 1956. It wasn’t long, though, before Elvis Presley arrived on the scene, eclipsing Haley, whose life, by the early 1960s, was falling apart: the Comets were in trouble, as was his marriage, and he had problem with tax debts. He fled to Mexico where he married his third wife, Martha Velasco, a dancer. They had one child together. There, he also signed up with a domestic record label, Orfeon, and his group released many songs recorded in Spanish.

As the 1960s progressed, Haley toured in Europe with fans keen to discover rock music’s roots, and the Sonet label gave him a lucrative deal. In the US, so-called revival concerts, first staged by promoter Richard Nader in 1969, brought Haley back into the limelight. By the early 70s, Rock Around the Clock was again a hit: re-recorded by Haley for a popular TV show, while the original recording appeared on the soundtrack of American Graffiti. Having been dogged by alcohol problems, Haley’s health deteriorated quickly. After performing in front of Queen Elizabeth II in late 1979 at a Royal Variety Performance, he went on tour to South Africa where he gave his very last performances - a tour to Germany was cancelled. He may, or may not, have had a brain tumour, but his mental and physical health collapsed in the months following, and he died in early 1981. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

Further biographical information can be found at Wikipedia, in a Guardian re-assessment of Haley as a forgotten pioneer of rock and roll, Rik Hull’s fan site, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or the Pennsylvania Center for the Book.

At the height of his early fame, Bill Haley decided to keep a daily diary. Edited extracts were first published (as far as I know) in three editions of the Now Dig This magazine (Nos. 154 and 155 in 1996, covering Haley’s 1956 diary, and No. 166 in 1997, covering Haley’s 1957 diary). Although these diary entries are not available anywhere online, they are quoted extensively in Otto Fuchs’s biography - Bill Haley - The Father of Rock and Roll. This was first published in German, and then in an English language version (900 pages) by Wagner Verlag in 2011. Here are some extracts from Haley’s diary as quoted by Fuchs from Now Dig This.

7 January 1956
‘Started second day on picture at 9.30 am. Everything going well. Saw some re-runs on first scenes. I look terrible I think, but everyone is giving me compliments. Hope we get through this. Quite an experience. Glad to have Cuppy with me.’ [Bill Haley and His Comets were with a large entourage in Hollywood to star in a film named after their greatest hit - Rock Around The Clock.]

9 January 1956
‘Reported at 9.30 am for third day at Colombia lot. Shot more scenes on the picture. Today did ‘Rock Around The Clock’ and ‘Rudy’s Rock’. That makes 5 songs so far we’ve done in the picture. So far the picture is going great. This is a big break for us. Keeping my fingers crossed. To bed early and up at them tomorrow at 7.30 am.’

13 January 1956
‘Finished picture. $20,000 for picture. Started 7.30 am on sixth day of picture. Had my big talking scenes today. Finished work on picture at 3 pm. Now it’s up to the public whether we’re movie stars or not. Worked in El Monte, California tonight - $1,500. Poor crowd. Promoter says disc jockeys are mad at me because I haven’t been able to see them. You can’t win. Hope I can straighten things out. Met Harry Tobias today. He gave me some songs for our firm.’

21 January 1956
‘Salt Lake City, Utah. Rainbow Rondeau - $1,900. Spent day doing D.J. promotion. Treated us like royalty here. Very nice hotel. Worked two shows tonight. Drew over 2,500 people. Very good crowd, Record of ‘Later Alligator’ already in Top 10 here. Looks like we have a big hit. This has been a good day.’

26 January 1956
‘Got my new 1956 Fleetwood Cadillac today. It’s pink and the most gorgeous car I’ve ever seen. Everyone loves the car. The sad part is I leave tomorrow morning for a 10-day tour of one-nighters. I hate to leave home again. But maybe soon we can slack off work.’

22 April 1956
‘3rd day [of 45 day tour]. Weather good so far. All the acts are behaving. Mosque Theatre, Richmond, Virginia. $1,430. Both shows sold out and turned thousands away. 9,600 people for two shows. This tour is like sitting on a keg of dynamite. The show is all coloured but our act. With the racial situation in the south broiling plus the newspapers and magazines like ‘Variety’ stirring up everyone about rock and roll, anything can happen. I hope my nerves hold up.’

28 May 1956
‘Left Miami at 9.30am on Eastern Railroad for Savannahm Georgia where we are tonight. Arrived Savannah at 7.25pm Sports Arena, Savannah, Georgia $1,420. 2,500 people here. Segregation problem is strong here as we expected. This time the negroes refused to come to the second show. Results: 2,500 people first show, second show cancelled. This race problem is not mine. I’ll be glad to finish this tour and let the south alone for now.’

6 July 1956
‘Today is my birthday and it’s the first one I ever spent on a train. Arrived Chicago at 1pm. Had a three-hour layover then caught the 4pm train for home. Should be there at 6.35 tomorrow morning. Happy birthday Bill. What a life.’

The diary entries for 1957 cover tours to Australia and Europe (inc. England), but Haley’s commitment to the diary is waning by then, and his entries get briefer and briefer.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 6 July 2015.

Dallam travels to Constantinople

‘The 11th day, being Tuesday, we carried our instrument over the water to the Grand Signor’s Court, called the Seraglio, and there in his most stately house I began to set it up.’ This is from a diary kept by Thomas Dallam, organ maker, who travelled to Constantinople in 1599 expressly at the wish of Queen Elizabeth 1, to present and deliver an organ to the Ottoman sultan. Dallam died 360 years ago today, but the diary was not published until the late 19th century.

Dallam was born in Flixton, Lancashire, and trained as an organ maker in London, where he became a member of the Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths. This guild oversaw various trades, including organ building, and Dallam eventually attained the status of liveryman within the company. 

Dallam’s first notable commission came from Queen Elizabeth I who trusted him to construct an elaborate mechanical organ as a diplomatic gift for Sultan Mehmed III of the Ottoman Empire. The organ, which played music automatically and featured moving figures, was a marvel of engineering and artistry. Dallam personally accompanied the instrument on its long and perilous journey to Constantinople. During his time there, he was tasked with assembling and demonstrating the organ at the Topkapi Palace, impressing the Sultan and his court with both the instrument and his ingenuity. See Historic UK for much more on this inc the above sketch.

Upon his return to England in April 1600, Dallam married (but his wife’s name is unknown) and fathered six children. He continued his work as an organ builder, undertaking commissions across the country - Windsor, Worcester Cathedral, St John’s College, Oxford, and Eton College among others. 

In 1626, Dallam was fined by the Blacksmiths’ Company for refusing the office of steward for the lord mayor’s feast, likely due to his professional commitments. He later negotiated to pay the fine in instalments to retain his livery status. His last major commission was the great double organ and choir organ for Bristol Cathedral in 1630, completed with his son Robert. Dallam died on 31 May 1665. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says, ‘his achievement was the consolidation of the two-manual ‘double organ’ with twelve to fourteen flue stops (without reeds, mixtures, or pedals) as the norm for English cathedrals and for larger collegiate churches during the pre-civil war period.’

Dallam is probably mostly remembered thanks to a diary he kept on his travels to the Ottoman Empire. His account provides a vivid and rare first-hand glimpse of Constantinople and the Ottoman court at the turn of the 17th century. The diary was first published in 1893 by the Hakluyt Society in Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant. I. The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam, 1599-1600. II. Extracts from the diaries of Dr. John Covel, 1670-1679, as edited by Theodore Bent. (See My dear Lord Harvey’s body for extracts from Covel’s diary.

Although many entries are dated, much of Dallam’s diary reads more like a memoir - the full text can be read at Internet Archive. Moreover, the language and spelling in the 1893 edition is rather old-fashioned and awkward to read. The following longish extract has been rendered more readable by Perplexity AI. 

11 September 1599

The 11th day, being Tuesday, we carried our instrument over the water to the Grand Signor’s Court, called the Seraglio, and there in his most stately house I began to set it up. This water which we crossed from Galata to Seraglio is a stream that comes from the Black Sea, and is called the Hellespont, which separates Asia and Thrace. As it comes down by Galata, a creek of that river goes up into the country about six miles, which separates the two cities of Constantinople and Galata; they may go between them by land, but it is 12 miles, and to cross the water it is only one mile.

At every gate of the Seraglio there always sits a stout Turk, about the rank or degree of a justice of the peace, who is called a chia; nevertheless, the gates are fast shut, for no one passes in or out at their own pleasure.

Having entered within the first gate, there were placed right against the gate five great pieces of brass, with Christian arms upon them. Then we passed through very delightful walks and gardens; the walks are, as it were, hedged in with stately cypress trees, planted at an equal distance from one another, between them and behind them, smaller trees that bear excellent fruit; I think there is nothing good that is missing. The gardens I will omit writing about at this time.

The way from the first gate to the second wall is somewhat rising up a hill, between walls about a quarter of a mile and more. The gates of the second wall were also shut, but when we came to the gate, my interpreter called to those who kept it within. Though they had knowledge of our coming, yet they would not open the gates until we had called and told them our business. These gates are made all of massive iron; two men, whom they call jemeglans, opened them.

Within the first walls there are no houses but one, and that is the bustanjebasha’s house, who is captain of a thousand jemeglanes, who do nothing but keep the gardens in good order; and I am persuaded that there are none so well kept in the world. Within the second walls there are no gardens, but stately buildings; many courts paved with marble and similar stone. Every odd corner has some excellent fruit tree or trees growing in them; also there is great abundance of sweet grapes, of diverse sorts; a man may gather grapes every day of the year. In November, as I sat at dinner, I saw them gather grapes from the vines, and they brought them to me to eat. For the space of a month I dined every day in the Seraglio, and we had grapes every day after our meat; but most certainly it is true that grapes grow there continually.

Coming into the house where I was appointed to set up the present or instrument; it seemed to be rather a church than a dwelling house; to tell the truth, it was not a dwelling house, but a house of pleasure, and likewise a house of slaughter; for in that house was built one little house, very curious both within and without; for carving, gilding, good colours and varnish, I have not seen the like. In this little house, that emperor who reigned when I was there, had nineteen brothers put to death in it, and it was built for no other use but for the strangling of every emperor’s brethren.

This great house itself has in it two rows of marble pillars; the pedestals of them are made of brass, and double gilt. The walls on three sides of the house are walled but halfway to the eaves; the other half is open; but if any storm or great wind should happen, they can suddenly let fall such hangings made of cotton wool for that purpose as will keep out all kinds of weather, and suddenly they can open them again. The fourth side of the house, which is closed and joined to another house, the wall is made of porphyry, or such kind of stone that when a man walks by it he may see himself in it. Upon the ground, not only in this house, but all others that I saw in the Seraglio, we tread upon rich silk carpets, one of them as much as four or six men can carry. There are in this house neither stools, tables, or forms, only one couch of state. There is one side of it a fish pond, that is full of fish that are of diverse colours.

The same day, our Ambassador sent Mr. Paul Pinder, who was then his secretary, with a present to the Sultana, she being at her garden. The present was a Coach of six hundred pounds value. At that time the Sultana took great liking to Mr. Pinder, and afterwards she sent for him to have his private company, but their meeting was prevented.’

Weeds don’t spoil

‘My [90th] birthday. [. . .] It is unusual, I believe, for persons of this age to retain possession of their faculties, or so much of them as I do. The Germans have an uncomplimentary saying: “Weeds don’t spoil” ’. This is Henry Crabb Robinson, one of the most interesting and entertaining of 19th century diarists, who was born a quarter of a millenium ago today. He trained as a lawyer, but an inheritance left him wealthy enough to pursue a life of cultured leisure. He was a great theatre-goer, knew a lot of literary types - was on very good terms with William Wordsworth, for example, with whom he travelled often - and was one of the first to recognise William’s Blake’s genius.

Robinson was born in Bury St Edmunds on 13 May 1775, the son of a tanner. He attended private schools, and was articled to a lawyer in Colchester when 15, and subsequently to another in London. In 1796, he was left an inheritance which allowed him to travel to the Continent frequently. Between 1800 and 1805 he studied in Germany, meeting, among others, Goethe and Schiller. He operated as a war correspondent for The Times for a short while during the Peninsular War, and, on his return to London, finished his legal training and was called to the bar.

Through an old friend, Catherine, who had married the writer and abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, Robinson was introduced into London literary society; and, in time, his own breakfast parties became famous. After retiring in 1828, he continued to take part in public affairs and to travel often. In 1828 he was one of the founding members of London University; and, in 1837, he revisited Italy on a tour with Wordsworth. He never married, but lived to an old age, dying in 1867. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, or Peter Landry’s Bluepete website. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has a good short biography (but requires a login).

Robinson left behind a large amount of papers including the following: brief journals covering the period to 1810, a much fuller home diary (begun in 1811, and continued to within five days of his death - 35 volumes), and a collection of 30 tour journals. The papers were edited by Thomas Sadler and published by Macmillan in 1869 in three volumes as Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson. And it is thanks largely to these volumes that Robsinson is remembered today, for his diaries are full of important detail about the central figures of the English romantic movement, not only Wordsworth, but Coleridge, Charles Lamb and William Blake. Of the latter, he was an early admirer, writing in his diary: ‘Shall I call Blake artist, genius, mystic or madman? Probably he is all’. Moreover, his diaries are also prized for their information about the London theatre in the first half of the 19th century (see the Society for Theatre Research’s 1966 volume: The London theatre 1811-1866: Selections from the diary of Henry Crabb Robinson.)

All three volumes of Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence can be read at Internet Archive (Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3). Here are a few extracts.

7 December 1831
‘Brighton. Accompanied [John James] Masquerier [a British painter] to a concert, which afforded me really a great pleasure. I heard Paganini [Niccolò Paganini, an Italian musician and composer]. Having scarcely any sensibility to music, I could not expect great enjoyment from any music, however fine; and, after all, I felt more surprise at the performance than enjoyment. The professional men, I understand, universally think more highly of Paganini than the public do. He is really an object of wonder. His appearance announces something extraordinary. His figure and face amount to caricature. He is a tall slim figure, with limbs which remind one of a spider; his face very thin, his forehead broad, his eyes grey and piercing, with bushy eyebrows; his nose thin and long, his cheeks hollow, and his chin sharp and narrow. His face forms a sort of triangle. His hands the oddest imaginable, fingers of enormous length, and thumbs bending backwards.

It is, perhaps, in a great measure from the length of finger and thumb that his fiddle is also a sort of lute. He came forward and played, from notes, his own compositions. Of the music, as such, I know nothing. The sounds were wonderful. He produced high notes very faint, which resembled the chirruping of birds, and then in an instant, with a startling change, rich and melodious notes, approaching those of the bass viol. It was difficult to believe that this great variety of sounds proceeded from one instrument. The effect was heightened by his extravagant gesticulation and whimsical attitudes. He sometimes played with his fingers, as on a harp, and sometimes struck the cords with his bow, as if it were a drum-stick, sometimes sticking his elbow into his chest, and sometimes flourishing his bow. Oftentimes the sounds were sharp, like those of musical glasses, and only now and then really delicious to my vulgar ear, which is gratified merely by the flute and other melodious instruments, and has little sense of harmony.’

9 June 1833
‘Liverpool. At twelve I got upon an omnibus, and was driven up a steep hill to the place where the steam-carriages start. We travelled in the second class of carriages. There were five carriages linked together, in each of which were placed open seats for the traveller, four and four facing each other; but not all were full; and, besides, there was a close carriage, and also a machine for luggage. The fare was four shillings for the thirty-one miles. Everything went on so rapidly, that I had scarcely the power of observation. The road begins at an excavation through rock, and is to a certain extent insulated from the adjacent country. It is occasionally placed on bridges, and frequently intersected by ordinary roads. Not quite a perfect level is preserved. On setting off there is a slight jolt, arising from the chain catching each carriage, but, once in motion, we proceeded as smoothly as possible. For a minute or two the pace is gentle, and is constantly varying. The machine produces little smoke or steam. First in order is the tall chimney; then the boiler, a barrel-like vessel; then an oblong reservoir of water; then a vehicle for coals; and then comes, of a length infinitely extendible, the train of carriages. If all the seats had been filled, our train would have carried about 150 passengers; but a gentleman assured me at Chester that he went with a thousand persons to Newton fair. There must have been two engines then. I have heard since that two thousand persons and more went to and from the fair that day. But two thousand only, at three shillings each way, would have produced £600! But, after all, the expense is so great, that it is considered uncertain whether the establishment will ultimately remunerate the proprietors. Yet I have heard that it already yields the shareholders a dividend of nine per cent. And Bills have passed for making railroads between London and Birmingham, and Birmingham and Liverpool. What a change will it produce in the intercourse! One conveyance will take between 100 and 200 passengers, and the journey will be made in a forenoon! Of the rapidity of the journey I had better experience on my return; but I may say now, that, stoppages included, it may certainly be made at the rate of twenty miles an hour!

I should have observed before that the most remarkable movements of the journey are those in which trains pass one another. The rapidity is such that there is no recognizing the features of a traveller. On several occasions, the noise of the passing engine was like the whizzing of a rocket. Guards are stationed in the road, holding flags, to give notice to the drivers when to stop. Near Newton, I noticed an inscription recording the memorable death of Huskisson.’

26 December 1836
‘Brighton. This was a remarkable day. So much snow fell, that not a coach either set out for or arrived from London - an incident almost unheard of in this place. Parties were put off and engagements broken without complaint. The Masqueriers, with whom I am staying, expected friends to dinner, but they could not come. Nevertheless, we had here Mr Edmonds, the worthy Scotch schoolmaster, Mr and Mrs Dill, and a Miss Robinson; and, with the assistance of whist, the afternoon went off comfortably enough. Of course, during a part of the day, I was occupied in reading.’

28 December 1836
‘The papers to-day are full of the snow-storm. The ordinary mails were stopped in every part of the country.’

3 May 1850
‘I read early a speech by [Frederick William] Robertson [a charismatic preacher] to the Brighton Working Class Association, in which infidelity of a very dangerous kind had sprung up. His speech shows great practical ability. He managed a difficult subject very ably, but it will not be satisfactory either to the orthodox or the ultra-liberal.

I went to Mr Cookson, who is one of the executors of Mr Wordsworth, and with whom I had an interesting conversation about Wordsworth’s arrangements for the publication of his poems. He has commissioned Dr Christopher Wordsworth to write his Life, a brief Memoir merely illustrative of his poems. And in a paper given to the Doctor, he wrote that his sons, son-in-law, his dear friend Miss Fenwick, Mr Carter, and Mr Robinson, who had travelled with him, “would gladly contribute their aid by communicating any facts within their knowledge.” ’

18 February 1851
‘At Masquerier’s, Brighton. We had calls soon after breakfast. The one to be mentioned was that of [Michael] Faraday, one of the most remarkable men of the day, the very greatest of our discoverers in chemistry, a perfect lecturer in the unaffected simplicity and intelligent clearness of his statement; so that the learned are instructed and the ignorant charmed. His personal character is admirable. When he was young, poor, and altogether unknown, Masquerier was kind to him; and now that he is a great man he does not forget his old friend.’

29 November 1852
‘I went to Robertson’s, and had two hours of interesting chat with him on his position here in the pulpit; also about Lady Byron. He speaks of her as the noblest woman he ever knew.’

17 August 1853
‘Dr King wrote to me, informing me of the death of Robertson, of Brighton. Take him for all in all, the best preacher I ever saw in a pulpit; that is, uniting the greatest number of excellences, originality, piety, freedom of thought, and warmth of love. His style colloquial and very scriptural. He combined light of the intellect with warmth of the affections in a pre-eminent degree.’

13 September 1853
‘Brighton. Dr King called, and in the evening I called by desire on Lady Byron - a call which I enjoyed, and which may have consequences. Recollecting her history, as the widow of the most famous, though not the greatest, poet of England in our day, I felt an interest in going to her; and that interest was greatly heightened when I left her. From all I have heard of her, I consider her one of the best women of the day. Her means and her good will both great. “She lives to do good,” says Dr. King, and I believe this to be true. She wanted my opinion as to the mode of doing justice to Robertson’s memory. She spoke of him as having a better head on matters of business than any one else she ever knew. She said, “I have consulted lawyers on matters of difficulty, but Robertson seemed better able to give me advice. He unravelled everything and explained everything at once as no one else did.” ’

13 May 1865
‘My birthday. To-day I complete my ninetieth year. When people hear of my age, they affect to doubt my veracity, and call me a wonder. It is unusual, I believe, for persons of this age to retain possession of their faculties, or so much of them as I do. The Germans have an uncomplimentary saying : “Weeds don’t spoil.” ’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 13 May 2015.

Gustavus von Holst

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Gustavus Theodore von Holst, British composer of The Planets, one of the Western world’s most famous and popular pieces of music. He was a consummate man of music, not only a composer, but a conductor, a concert trombone player, and a pioneering teacher. From his early 30s, he began to keep appointment diaries which, from the end of World War I, according to one biographer, ‘become true diaries’. The title of the biography promises ‘Diary Excerpts’, unfortunately there are so few quoted extracts, and none of any length, it is impossible to get a sense of Holst the diarist.

Holst was born in Cheltenham, England, on 21 September 1874. His father, a professional musician, was of mixed European ancestry with many musicians among his forefathers. His mother, too, was talented musically. When she died in 1882, his father remarried. Gustav was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School, where he learned various instruments and began composing. On leaving school, he studied counterpoint in Oxford for a short time with George Frederick Sims, before taking his first job as an organist and choirmaster. In late 1891, he gave a first public piano recital (by when he was using the shortened name Gustav), with his father, in Cheltenham. And, the following year, music he had written for a Gilbert and Sullivan-style operetta was performed in the town.

Holst moved to London in 1893, to study at the Royal College of Music, winning a scholarship in his third year, and supporting himself by playing trombone in London theatres, and at seaside resorts during the summers. At the College, he studied, in particular, composition under Charles Villiers Stanford. Richard Wagner’s music soon became an important influence on his emerging style; but, it was Ralph Vaughan Williams, who he met in 1895, and who become a lifelong friend, who would have more influence on his music than anyone else.

Although he had had some compositions performed and published, Holst needed to earn money, and he wanted to work as a performer. He took posts as organist in various London churches, and, on leaving the College in 1898, he played the trombone in the Carl Rosa Opera Company and he toured with Scottish Opera. He married Isobel Harrison in 1901, and they had one child, Imogen. (Imogen, who died in 1984, was a successful composer and teacher in her own right, and also kept a diary for a while when she was working with Benjamin Britten.)

By 1903, Holst had decided he wanted to focus on composing, but, as money was still tight, he took up various teaching posts, at girls’ schools in Dulwich and Hammersmith, at Morley College, and at Passmore Edwards Settlement (now the Mary Ward Centre). His teaching would come to be seen as pioneering new ways in musical education. In composing, Holst was often inspired by literary texts - Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, the Ramayana (having studied Sanskrit, he made his own translations). He also drew on national folk music (although his friend Williams became a more passionate exponent of folk song) and on new European music, such as that by Stravinsky. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘the cosmopolitanism of Holst’s style, rare in English music of his period, lends him a special historical significance’.

Holst tried to enlist at the outbreak of the First World War, but was rejected as unfit for military service. He continued teaching, and it was during this period (1914-1916) that he composed what would become his most famous piece of music - The Planets. In 1918, he was taken on by the YMCA to be a volunteer musical organiser for troops, based in Thessaloniki, Greece. His teaching employers gave him a leave of absence, but the YMCA were worried about his German-sounding name, von Holst, so he changed it by deed pole to Holst. On returning to Britain, he took up additional teaching posts, at Reading university, and, with Williams, at the Royal College of Music.

In the early 1920s, Holst found himself immensely popular, not only because of The Planets, which had found success across the Atlantic, but with The Hymn of Jesus and The Perfect Fool. He undertook a lecturing and conducting tour in the US, but then the strain of being in demand for conducting, teaching, and working on his compositions, led to a kind of breakdown. On the instructions of his doctor, he cancelled all professional engagements in 1924, after which he only resumed teaching at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith. Some later works, such as the First Choral Symphony and Egdon Heath, were not so well received by critics and audiences as his earlier works. In 1927, Cheltenham organised a Holst Festival.

In his final years, Holst continued to make gruelling conducting and lecturing tours to the US (including at Yale in 1929 and at Harvard in 1932) and to compose (A Choral Fantasia, for example, and, for the pupils at St Paul’s, Brook Green Suite). After his 1932 trip, however, he fell ill; and he died in early 1934. Further biographical information can be found at Wikipedia, Kenric Taylor’s Holst website, or Music Sales Classical,

Holst left behind a large volume of letters which were employed by Jon Ceander Mitchell (professor at University of Massachusetts Boston) to construct a biography. This was published in 2001 by the New York-based Edwin Mellen Press (which describes itself as a non-subsidy academic publisher). In this book - A Comprehensive Biography of Composer Gustav Holst with Correspondence and Diary Excerpts - Mitchell states: ‘In addition to the letters, Holst left a plethora of other primary sources of information. Extant diaries begin in 1912. At first Holst used these simply as appointment books but, beginning with his eight-month stint with the British YMCA at the end of World War I, they become true diaries which give us details about daily events in the composer’s life. Closely related to the Diaries are Holst’s surviving Notebooks, which begin in 1913. These contain Holst’s “laundry lists,” often referring to plans for international travel, but sometimes containing some of the composer’s innermost thoughts.’

However, in apparent contradiction to his title, Mitchell rarely includes any diary excerpts in the book. He does use the diaries extensively to source facts about Holst’s movements and activities, and, very occasionally, includes a quoted phrase. As for actual excerpts, a sentence or more long, I could find only one! Here is that one diary excerpt, and a couple of extracts from Mitchell’s book where he mentions Holst’s diary.

16 November 1915 [waiting for a boat from southern Italy to Corfu]
‘Visit officials and buy food for boat in morning. Get on board 2PM via small boat.
Boat supposed to start at 5 PM
Passage [supposed to] last 15 hours
Boat does not start at all. Hung up all night.’

1932
Mitchell says Holst took his teaching at Harvard seriously: ‘He followed through, keeping tabs not only with the progress of the individuals, but also with the progress of the classes as a whole. Diary entries confirm this, from “small class and little work” [23 February] to “good class with lots of work.” [25 February] Holst’s concerns for and frustrations incurred from his students affected him more and more as the term progressed. His diary entry for Wednesday, March 2 confirms this: “evening concert of my pupils’ music with subsequent bad nights.” ’

1933
Mitchell says: ‘The classical symphonic cycle had always interested Holst, yet it had always befuddled him. To this point he had made four attempts [. . .] His fifth and final attempt was to have been an orchestral symphony. In late 1932, possibly at Durham Cathedral, he had written sketches for an Allegro, an Adagio, and a Finale. Preliminary sketches for the Scherzo came later, on March 22, 1933, when he was bedridden at Elm Crescent. According to his Diary entries, Holst began actual work on the rough draft on Sunday, July 30th and finished it on Friday, August 18th. One month later, on September 16th, he finished the two-piano version of the Scherzo. [. . .] In spite of a rather abrupt ending, the Scherzo, at just over five minutes, is long enough to stand on its own as an independent composition. As such, it is Holst’s last completed work.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 21 September 2014.

Anderson and Free Cinema

‘The pages are a challenge, and though often people think that writing a diary is unhealthy - as it certainly can be, when it confirms a tendency to turn in on oneself - it can also be the reverse, forcing one to objectify, to pursue one’s thoughts, to marshal them and use them.’ This is from the acclaimed diaries of the film maker and theatre director Lindsay Gordon Anderson, who died 30 years ago today. A major cultural figure of his time, he was a leading light in the so-called Free Cinema movement that foreshadowed social realism in British film making. 

Anderson was born in 1923 in Bangalore, South India, where his father had been stationed with the British Army. His parents separated in 1926. Lindsay was educated at Saint Ronan’s School in Worthing, at Cheltenham College (where he met his lifelong friend and biographer, Gavin Lambert), and at Wadham College, University of Oxford. He served in the Army from 1943 until 1946, latterly working as a cryptographer for the Intelligence Corps. Returning to Oxford, he switched from classics to English, graduating in 1948.

Anderson worked as film critic writing for the influential Sequence magazine, which he co-founded with Lambert, Peter Ericsson and Karel Reisz, before contributing to the British Film Institute’s journal Sight and Sound and the left-wing political weekly the New Statesman. By the late 1940s, he had begun to experiment with film-making himself, directing the 1948 Meet the Pioneers, a documentary about a conveyor-belt factory.

With Reisz, Anderson organised, for the Institute, a series of screenings of independent short films by himself and others. He developed a philosophy of cinema for which he coined the term Free Cinema - to denote a movement in the British cinema inspired by John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger. Anderson and other members of the movement allied themselves with left-wing politics and took their themes from contemporary urban working-class life.

One of Anderson’s early short films, Thursday’s Children (1954), concerning the education of deaf children, won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1954. And, in 1963, he directed This Sporting Life based on a novel by David Storey and produced by Reisz. These films are seen as among the forerunners of an emergent cinema of social realism. Anderson is best remembered for his ‘Mick Travis trilogy’, all of which star Malcolm McDowell as the title character: If.... , O Lucky Man!. and Britannia Hospital. Anderson was also a significant  theatre director, long associated with the Royal Court Theatre, where he directed many plays, especially those by Storey.

Anderson never married, but he seems to have yearned for male relationships, especially with his leading men such as Richard Harris (star of This Sporting Life). Some in his circle found it difficult that he did not publicly acknowledge his sexuality (despite, one can conclude, a growing acceptance of homosexuality, especially in the creative industries). He died on 30 August 1994. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the BFI.

In 2004, Methuen published The Diaries: Lindsay Anderson as edited by Paul Sutton. The publisher states: ‘Throughout his life Anderson stood in opposition to the establishment of his day. Published for the first time, his diaries provide a uniquely personal document of his artistic integrity and vision, his work, and his personal and public struggles. Peopled by a myriad of artists and stars - Malcolm McDowell, Richard Harris, Albert Finney, Anthony Hopkins Brian Cox, Karel Reisz, Arthur Miller, George Michael - the Diaries provide a fascinating account of one of the most creative periods of British cultural life.’ The full work can be borrowed digitally online at Internet Archive, or sampled at Goooglebooks. Several extracts from the diaries can be found in the Diary Review’s Happy Days with Peggy; more about the diaries themselves can be found at the University of Stirling website.

From Paul Sutton’s introduction to the Diaries:

‘Anderson started writing his diary in 1942, when he was eighteen years old, preparing for active service in the Second World War and about to study Classics at Oxford. For much of the rest of his life, he used the diary as a means to organise his thoughts, to spur himself into action, and to pass the time on long international flights. As with any diary, there are omissions. For example, there are no diary records from August 1955 until January 1960 (thus missing out his first theatrical triumphs); only four diary days of 1960 have survived; only three days in 1961 have any record; and no diary has yet surfaced for 1968 (the year he made If . . .). In his last years, the diary took the form of notebook jottings and copies of letters dictated to his secretary. [. . .]

In the most poignant passages, the diary becomes a self-analytical tract, or poem, that reaches into the heart of light and shade within himself. In the diary we can trace, too, the genesis and the growth of a body of films and plays with a clarity and a thoroughness that is rarely possible. For example, in 1987, in Maine, he closed his feature film career, making good a promise to a friend by directing Bette Davis in The Whales of August. In the diaries, many years earlier, we read of boyhood visits to the cinema to see films starring Bette Davis; in the Second World War, stationed, like his father before him, in India, we read of a bicycle trip into New Delhi to see Davis in Mr Skeffington, and in the busy year of 1965, he was a guest of Bette Davis in New England, coaxing her into a new play on Broadway that was never to be. This is all a part of the fabric of life, an artist’s life, a half-century of weavings of work-thoughts and meetings that coheres into a portrait not just of an artist, but his art, and his time.

So that the diaries could be published in one volume, they have been edited down from perhaps a million words into the current form. [. . .] I’ve included what I feel to be the essential Anderson: the entries that give the clearest picture of a remarkable man, the society in which lived, and a body of work that up till now has never been given the attention it deserves.’

Here are several extracts including the first of the published entries.

1 January 1942
‘One of my principal New Year’s resolutions is to keep a journal. In this journal I shall write only when I have something to say; its purpose is both to remind me in after years of how I felt and what I did at this time and also - quite unashamedly - to give me literary exercise. It should help improve my style and my ability to express myself and many of the incidents it records will no doubt prove excellent copy. I will however not tell lies in order to improve a story.

I am not sure whether or not it will be absolutely frank: I am not used to writing solely to myself - and that perhaps is why I am so quick to mistrust published diaries. So at first at any rate I will probably be fairly reserved. And yet this is absurd: either I am writing for myself, or for a friend or friends or for publication. I can cross out the last - though, of course, I can easily expurgate it if necessary. Nor am I writing for my friends. I will therefore resolve to be utterly frank - a resolution which I do not think I can possibly keep! So here we go.’ 

4 June 1945
‘Ah sex! How obvious it is that without a satisfactorily adjusted sex life, a full and happy life is impossible: and I am chiefly frightened now that the repressions and introversion inevitable for me may end in twisting me, incapacitating me somehow as a person or as an artist (if I am an artist). I feel an increasing need to come out into the open - I have no more to be ashamed of than anybody else - though this of course is impossible.

And the deeper in I get, the further I am from spontaneity and simplicity, and the more difficult relations will become. Besides there is a very positive need for physical intercourse which, if continually repressed, may seep in and poison all my friendships.
I need the help probably of a technician in this sort of thing, a psycho-analyst. I need to find out whether I am irredeemably homosexual. Whether my instincts can or should be repressed or allowed scope or subliminated. How? All very simple really. The only danger seems to be a tendency to treat sex as a mere physical act like excreting. That must be guarded against.

I shall certainly do this when I get back to England.’

19 June 1963
‘The pages are a challenge, and though often people think that writing a diary is unhealthy - as it certainly can be, when it confirms a tendency to turn in on oneself - it can also be the reverse, forcing one to objectify, to pursue one’s thoughts, to marshal them and use them. And although, at the age of forty it is a little chilling to think one is starting again, it is still possible one may yet improve.

I think of Richard, of that side of him which has a somewhat insidious appeal to me: the dark, powerful and sadistic side, proud and narcissistic, to which I play the servant while he plays the king. . . He has just read the proof copy of Radcliffe and rang me up to say it’s marvellous: where did David [Storey] get it from? I wonder for an instant if there’s anything in it of him and me. . . is there? Not too much I imagine. When did he start the book? I told him David had spoken of it before we met. . . He talked of the idea of filming it and, momentarily, I wonder also if he would like to direct it.

Knowing Richard, and experiencing these extremes of warmth and cold, the gentleness and the violence, the reason and the hysteria, has certainly been an education for me . . . making real and comprehensible much that before was only theoretical. It is a battle of wills, and it is something of an experience to find myself in a relationship where my will is the weaker, where, intermittently, I am made to accept domination, and made to accept behaviour - treatment - I would accept from none other, through fear of losing favour. It’s interesting that for all my masochism in fantasy, I am not able (so far) to enjoy consciously the treatment in practice. When on the stage of the Royal Court, Richard grasps me by the throat - I am conscious only of the will to stand firm, to survive . . . In little, I suppose this does crystalise the Radcliffe relationship . . . But how far from (for instance) the relationship we had at Cannes where he was all kisses and appreciation: “I don’t know how you put up with me.”

Of course it is precisely this duality of nature, this comprehension of evil and goodness, that gives Richard a quality of genius as an actor. So that to wish that he were always ‘nice’ is to wish him other than he is - an impossibility anyway. And since it is what he is that attracts me so: why should I wish him otherwise?’

My own diaries have mentioned Anderson a few time, most recently in this extract.

12 February 2018
‘For once, I found something to read in The Guardian on Saturday. The obituary of a writer called David Sherwin. I didn’t have any memory of him (nor does his name occur anywhere in my diaries) but he was the writer of the three remarkable and radical films directed by Lindsay Anderson in the 1970s and 1980s all starring Malcolm McDowell: If. . ., O Lucky Man and Britannia Hospital. For much of my youth, Anderson was one of my favourite directors (second only to Nicolas Roeg) because of these films, but, I read, it was Sherwin who was the instigator and creative energy behind them - although all three films were very much a collaboration between Anderson, Sherwin and McDowell. The Guardian also published a few thoughts by McDowell himself on Sherwin. Here’s one para: ‘Our production company was called SAM Productions, for Sherwin, Anderson and McDowell. With the Mick Travis [McDowell’s character] trilogy, David wrote three amazing films. Crusaders (which became If…) was David’s original idea, which Lindsay took and made mostly about his own life. Coffee Man (which became O Lucky Man!) was mainly my story. Britannia Hospital is more David’s.‘

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 30 August 2014.