The Jones/Palin relationship

In the last ten days, two stalwarts of the British entertainment industry - Terry Jones and Nicholas Parsons - have departed the stage for the last time. Jones was a multi-talented writer, comedian and director, one of the key creators of the Monty Python shows and films. Parsons was an actor but became better known for presenting radio and TV shows, most particularly, Just a Minute which he hosted for over 50 years without missing an episode. As far as I know, neither men were diarists (certainly there are no published diaries by either of them). However, Terry Jones is a ubiquitous presence in Michael Palin’s diaries (for example, one entry reads, ‘Another meeting about the Jones/Palin relationship’. As it happens, Palin received a Special Recognition Award last night at the British Television Awards, and dedicated it to Terry Jones. Palin’s diaries also include at least one mention of Parsons - when Palin took part in Just a Minute as a panellist.

Jones, the son of a bank clerk, was born in 1942 in the seaside town of Colwyn Bay, on the north coast of Wales. He attended the Royal Grammar School in Guildford, and then read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he performed in the Oxford Revue with Michael Palin. He went on to perform in, and write for, many TV shows, not least Monty Python’s Flying Circus (with Palin and others) which ran for 45 episodes between 1969 and 1974. He also co-directed and directed several Monty Python films. Also with Palin, he co-wrote the comedy anthology series Ripping Yarns (1976-1979). Jones authored several medieval history works, and he presented television documentaries on the subject; he also wrote books for children. He died on 21 January aged 77, leaving behind two children by his first wife, Alison Telfer, and one by his second wife, Anna Söderström.  Further information is readily available at Wikipedia, IMDB, or from the many obituaries (BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Daily Mail).

Although there are no indications that Jones was ever a diarist, he figures prominently in the published diaries of his life-long friend Michael Palin. Palin has published three volumes of diaries - see Cleese, also in a bikini for more on Palin and his diaries. The following extracts all come from the first volume, Diaries 1969–1979: The Python Years. Some pages of this can be previewed at Googlebooks.

7 June 1970
‘Terry and I had to spend the morning working on another of our small-earning sidelines. This time it was a rewrite of a film called ‘How to Use a Cheque Book’ for the Midland Bank.’

18 June 1970
‘General election day. [. . .] The morning’s work interrupted by the delivery of a large amount of dung. We were sitting writing at Terry’s marble-topped table under a tree sheltering us from the sun. All rather Mediterranean. Suddenly the dung-carriers appeared. Fat, ruddy-faced, highly conversational and relentlessly cheerful, they carried their steaming goodies and deposited them at the far end of Terry’s garden. As they passed I gleaned that they had come from Reading, that they had started loading at 5 pm, that one of them was about to go on holiday to Selsey Bill - his first holiday for seven years. After about twenty-five tubfuls they were gone, but at least they had left a sketch behind.’

2 October 1972
‘Arrived back after rushes at about 7.45. There was a call waiting for Terry from Midhurst - it was Nigel to say that their mother had been taken to hospital. Terry was immediately on to BEA to book a plane back to England. He was in a rush and a hurry, but seemed to be in control. Al came upstairs and broke down and cried for just a moment - there was no flight back to London tonight from anywhere in Germany.

Thomas [Woitkewitsch] was fortunately here to help, and he started to ring charter flights and private air-hire firms. The irony of the situation was that we had all been invited to Alfred’s to watch an Anglo-Dutch comedy show which Thomas had produced. As Terry phoned Chichester Hospital from Alfred’s bedroom, the strident shouts from the telly grew louder and more disconcerting. I sat and talked to Graham in the neutral room. He had spoken to the ward sister and she had told both Graham and Terry that her chances of recovery were minimal. Graham argued clearly and reasonably, and yet still sympathetically, that it was not worth Terry’s while trying to charter a plane to London in order to see his unconscious mother.

It was about 10.00 when I saw Terry in his room. He was sitting in a wicker chair, he seemed composed, reflective and rather distant. I clasped him around the shoulders. He said he was happy just to ‘sit and think about her’. Graham and I left, and went next door to the Klosterl, for a meal with Alfred, Thomas and Justus [our cameraman]. Not a great meal. Back to the hotel at about 11.30.

A note from A1 was stuck in my door. ‘Terry’s mother died at 9.20. He has gone to sleep with the aid of a sleeping pill.’

For a moment I felt a strange stifling surge of sadness. My eyes welled with tears and for a few moments the news hit me really hard.’

26 September 1973
Terry and I went up to the Flask in Hampstead and had a good airclearing talk about the future. We both feel now (c.f. flight to Calgary three months ago) that another series of Python for the BBC - with John writing a regulation three and a half minutes per show - is not worth doing, certainly at present, if at all. I was not encouraged enough by the material we wrote for the record to believe that Python has vast untapped resources. I think we may be straining to keep up our standards and, without John, the strain could be too great. On the other hand, Terry and I do have another direction to go in, with a play in commission and another on the stocks. We work fast and economically, and still pretty successfully together. Python it seems is being forced to continue, rather than continuing from the genuine enthusiasm and excitement of the six people who created it.’

22 January 1976
‘Tomorrow I must be on the ball, for even more important discussions, this time about the professional future, must be raised with Terry as a result of a couple of calls from Jimmy Gilbert who has once again emphasised that he would like the Tomkinson series to be a Michael Palin series, written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones and starring Michael Palin.’

23 January 1976
‘Today, upstairs in Terry’s work-room, I told him of Jimmy’s attitude. TJ looked hurt - but there was a good, healthy fighting spirit there too. TJ feels that Tomkinson may well have been originally my project, but it worked as a team project and Terry is now very angry that the BBC want to break the team by institutionalising a hierarchy into our working relationship - i.e. The Michael Palin Show.

We talked ourselves round in circles. I couldn’t honestly say that I was prepared for TJ to take an entirely equal part in the acting, because this would involve me in a tussle with Jimmy over something I didn’t feel was in my own best interests. We break off for lunch with Jill Foster at Salami’s in Fulham Road.

It certainly seems that 1976 is all-change year. After almost ten years together, Terry and I are exploring and altering our relationship and Jill Foster and Fraser and Dunlop are doing the same. In short, Jill is leaving. She felt stifled at F & D, so now she wants to set up on her own.

We think we’ll stay with Jill, despite the various problems that have cropped up over our Python activities. She’s a good agent for us in many ways - a good talker, not renowned as vicious or hard in the business, but always seems to deliver an efficient, worthy, if not startling, deal.

After lunch we drive down to Terry’s, talking again about the series. A peripatetic day, in fact, both literally and metaphorically. We decide to meet Jimmy together, but he can’t make it until Monday. So I leave about 5.00 - with Terry still reeling slightly under a blow, which he hadn’t after all expected. It’s a rotten situation and rotten to see someone you like and whose friendship is so valuable being given a hard time. But it’s all got to be said and to be gone through.’

26 January 1976
‘Another meeting about the Jones/Palin relationship. This time at the BBC. Meet TJ for a coffee first and he, as I had expected, had taken stock of the situation over the weekend and come to an optimistic conclusion. He would write the series with me and then go off and make a film for children (a project he’s had his thoughts on before) whilst I was filming. He seemed very happy.

However, once in Jimmy’s office, TJ took a rather less accommodating line (quite rightly for, as he said afterwards, there was no point in the meeting if he didn’t try to change JG’s mind with a forceful view of his own).

I didn’t do a lot of talking - I let Terry say all he wanted to say and Jimmy say what he wanted to say. JG was excellent I thought. He held to his position, but was sympathetic to all Terry said so, at the end of one and a half hour’s meeting we were all still friends - and Jimmy adjourned us for a week to think about it. TJ did seem to be less angry than impatient with Jimmy and we went off for a lunch at Tethers.

I’m trying to avoid an utterly basic dissection of our relationship, because I think it’s a relationship that obeys no strict rules, it works without introspection - it’s an extrovert relationship based on writing and often performing jokes together. It’s instinctive and I don’t want to damage it by over-examination. I want (for such is my half-cowardly nature!) to solve this re-adjustment crisis without tears.’

27 January 1976
‘Spoke to Terry, mid-morning. Rather than pursuing the Children’s Film Foundation, TJ has instead revived that most hardy perennial - the Fegg film. He has rung John Goldstone, who reckons that The Nastiest Film in the World’ has distinct possibilities!’

28 January 1976
‘Another gorgeous day of clear, crisp, sharp sunshine. Terry comes up to Julia Street to talk about the Fegg film. We have some nice ideas - Fegg is a brooding and malevolent influence who lives in a corrugated iron extension up against a Gothic castle, near to the world’s prettiest village, where everyone is terribly nice to each other. But the presence of Fegg (whom we see in a sinister, opening buildup sequence letting the air out of someone’s tyres) is too much for them. They advertise for a hero. Scene cuts to a Hostel for Heroes, where unemployed heroes sit around in a sort of collegey atmosphere - occasionally getting jobs.

At the end of our day on Fegg - and with a possible commitment to writing on Fegg until we go to the US - I suddenly feel a touch of panic. Helen, with her usual down-to-earth perspicacity, provoked it by her reaction to the news of the Fegg film. I know she’s right - I am taking on too much. The Fegg film is going to take time and ideas away from what should really be my primary project of the next two years - the BBC series of thirteen. Helen forces me to confront the fact that I am in danger of losing what I am trying to save.’

12 December 1976
‘[. . .] Brief chat with EI, who seems concerned that Terry J should not have too much control of the next Python movie. He does blow hot and cold. It was only a few months ago that Eric wanted TJ to direct his TV series! But now he feels that TJ’s problem is that he doesn’t appreciate compromise.

Our chat was inconclusive, but I can see that the direction of the film will be a difficult issue looming up.’

29 November 1978, Stirling
‘[. . .] To Grant’s Bookshop in Stirling for my first signing session. [. . .] John Lennie, the Methuen rep for Scotland, drives me to Edinburgh.

Terry J arrives. He and I go for a nostalgic walk up to the Royal Mile. We nose around the Cranston Street Hall in the traditional manner. TJ remembers the thrill of seeing the feet of a forming queue through a small window down in the toilets . . . That was fifteen yean ago.

We find ourselves in a wonderful, small, grubby, friendly bar in Young Street - the Oxford Bar. This is the glorious opposite of all the carpeted ‘lounges’ where drinks are now taken. It’s small and gossipy and quite uncompromising with regard to comfort and decor . . . definitely a new ‘must’ when visiting Edinburgh.’

21 April 1979
‘Talk with TJ on the phone. Last Wednesday night he was attacked by an old gent in Soho who asked him where Charing Cross Station was. When he told him, the old man called our director ‘a lying bastard’ and belaboured him with his stick. TJ’s head was cut and bleeding. A ‘passer-by’, who TJ thinks may have been a plainclothes man from the Metropolitan force, leapt on the old bloke and hauled him off to the nick. Apparently he had just attacked someone else further up the street.’

***

Whereas one might consider Jones a heavyweight of British entertainment, Nicholas Parsons was more of a lightweight, though a long-lived and much-loved one. He was born in 1923, and grew up in Grantham, Lincolnshire. He attended St Paul’s School, London; and, with the war over, opted for acting as a career. He appeared in the West End, and toured with repertory theatres, but also ventured into film. In the 1950s and 1960s, he became well known to TV audiences as the straight man to comedian Arthur Haynes. During the late 1960s, he created and presented a satirical programme on BBC Radio 4 called Listen to This Space, which helped him earn the Radio Personality of the Year Award in 1967. From 1971 to 1983, he fronted the Anglia quiz show Sale of the Century. In 1967, he began presenting the radio panel show Just a Minute, and hosted every episode through to 2018. In 1994, he published his autobiography, The Straight Man: My Life in Comedy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). He married twice, firstly to Denise Bryer with whom he had two children, and subsequently to Ann Reynolds. He died yesterday, 28 January. Further information is available at Wikipedia, IMDB, and from obituaries (The Guardian, BBC). Here, though is Michael Palin reporting to his diary about the experience of being a panellist on Parsons’ show Just a Minute.

3 October 1975
‘At 5.15 arrived in taxi at the BBC’s Paris studio - which is not in Paris, of course, but in Lower Regent Street - for recording of Just a Minute. A few people from the queue came up and asked me for an autograph - and there was my face on a display board outside. Inside, the peculiarly non-festive air which the BBC (radio especially) has made its own - everything from the colour of the walls and the design of the furniture to the doorman’s uniform and the coffee-serving hatch seems designed to quell any lightness of spirit you may have.

Then I met Clement Freud. He stared at me with those saucer-shaped, heavy-lidded eyes with an expression of such straightforward distaste that for a moment I thought he had just taken cyanide. The producer, John Lloyd - a ray of light in the darkness that was rapidly closing in on me - hurriedly took my arm and led me aside as if to explain something about Clement F. It was just that he had a ‘thing’ about smoking - and for some inexplicable reason I had just taken one of John L’s cigarettes. Still, this blew over.

A depressingly half-full house filed quietly in and at 5.45 the 
contestants - three regulars, Freud, K Williams, the rather forbiddingly authoritative Peter Jones, myself, not exactly in my element any more - and quiz master Nicholas Parsons were introduced to friendly applause and took our places at our desks. The three regulars have been playing the game together for five years - Williams and Freud for eight - and it shows. They are smooth and polished, they know when to ad-lib, when to bend the rules a little, and when to be cross with each other. I buzzed Clement Freud when he was at full tilt and, when asked why, I apologised and said I was testing my buzzer. That’s the only time I saw him smile in my direction.

The game became easier, but I never mastered the technique of microphone-hogging which they all have perfected.

Before I knew it, two shows and about an hour and a half had passed and it was all over. I signed autographs. Peter Jones was very kind to me and complimentary, Freud I never saw again and Nicholas Parsons was the only one to come round to the pub and drink with us. Us being myself, Douglas Adams (who had recommended me to his friend, the producer) and John Lloyd. They seemed to be quite pleased with me and Peter Jones, as he left, said he would see me again on the show. I gather some guests manage it (Barry Took, Katharine Whitehorn) and some don’t (Barry Cryer, Willy Rushton) and at least I wasn’t considered amongst the don’ts.’

Plenty of ladies at the ball

150 years ago today, Alfred Doten, a journalist in Nevada, was celebrating Christmas with Charley Ockel’s eggnog, a supper of fried egg and oysters, and a trip to the theatre to see a San Francisco company performing on its last night in town. A day later, despite the ‘violent shock of an earthquake’ he was back at the theatre, this time to see the comedian John Max Thompson and his ‘Minstrels’. And, on New Year’s Eve, he was enjoying the company of ‘plenty of ladies’ at a ball being held in the Athletic Hall. We know all about Doten’s life not because he was famous to any degree but because he left behind such a detailed diary covering more than 50 years, from the age of 19 until his death.

Doten was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, but sailed to California in 1849 intent on making his fortune in the San Francisco gold rush. As a so-called placer miner he moved from one site to the next using inexpensive, movable wooden boxes called rockers to wash sand away in search of gold. By 1863, though, he had moved to Nevada to try his luck in the silver boom there. Unsuccessful again, he gravitated to journalism, working as a reporter on several Nevada newspapers. In 1872, he purchased the Gold Hill Daily News, and under his stewardship the paper became one of the most important in the silver boom region. Also in 1872, he met Mary Stoddard, who he married the following year, and with whom he had four children.

Apart from his journalistic output, Doten was very involved with the local theatre, and published reviews; he also wrote short stories, essays on Nevada journalism, and books. In time, however, he became increasingly dependent on drink, accrued much debt and eventually lost the News. His wife left him to take up a teaching post in Reno. He, meanwhile, moved to Austin (Nevada) where he edited the Reese River Reveille. He died in Carson City in 1903. Further information is available from the Nevada Press Association, the Online Nevada Encyclopaedia, or the Nevada Women’s History Project.

Doten’s name would surely have been lost to time but for the fact that he left behind 79 leather-bound volumes of diaries, kept from the age of 19. After his death, they were moved from one family attic to another until the University of Nevada acquired them in 1961. Walter Van Tilburg Clark spent years editing the manuscripts and, in 1973, the University of Nevada Press published The Journals of Alfred Doten, 1849-1903, in three volumes. The work become a classic of Western American history with its details of the gold rush and frontier life. The full text of the three volumes, in a searchable format, has been made freely available online thanks to the University of Nevada Alfred Doten project. In a further stage, the project aims to make the full text of the 79 volumes (only about half was included in Clark’s edition) available online.

Here are several extracts from Doten’s diary dating to exactly 150 years ago - from Christmas Day to New Year’s Eve.

25 December 1869
‘Christmas - Stormy - snow an inch deep this morning and 3 or 4 inches deep at noon - kept on till 4 PM when it sort of cleared up - at home - at noon I went down to Charley Ockel’s and got some of his eggnog - good - PM downtown - Dan is in the station house very sick with the delirium tremens - went there at his own request - so Doc Hoit tells me - Met many men celebrators of Christmas, some pretty tight - Home at 6 - supper of fried eggs & oysters mixed - Went to Mrs Garrity’s to get Ellen to go to theater - unwell, so couldn’t go - Came back & took Mrs M - good house - plays were the “Little Treasure,” and “Day after the Wedding” - Last night of the dramatic season - company leaves for San Francisco this night - go by a special stage at 10½ oclock - connect with 2 o’clock train tonight - Home at 10 - Bed at 11 - Cold & freezing - [erasure] -’

26 December 1869
‘. . . At 6 PM violent shock of an earthquake - heaviest yet here - followed within a few minutes by 2 others - shook houses terribly - shook fire wall down off Taylor’s brick building corner of B & Taylor st, etc, etc . . . down to theater - Johnny Thompson’s Minstrels - $190 house . . . Visited Dan in station house - getting better - staid with him 1½ hours talking - Home at 11½ - Bed at 12 . . . [erasure] -’

27 December 1869
‘Several shocks of earthquake felt this PM and evening . . . Evening Mrs M went with Ben Denton to a Masonic supper & ball . . . I was at Theater a short time . . .’

28 December 1869
‘A few light shocks . . . Evening at home till 9 - went down town - snowing - Went up in Enterprise office & chatted with Dan awhile - He is all right, and went to work on the local again yesterday morning . . . Bed at 11 - still snowing - [erasure] -’

30 December 1869
‘I got a little keg today of about a quart of fresh Baltimore oysters just arrived per railroad yesterday, packed in ice with about 20 others - got them of Hatch Bros this morning $1.75 per keg - about 100 oysters . . . we had them for supper, both stewed and raw - The first good and fresh ones . . . I have yet had - Just as nice as they were when first out of the shell . . .’

31 December 1869
‘Clear & pleasant - As usual - got up my mining report - Home at 5½ (No earthquake shocks worth speaking of today - or last night) - Went to Shaney’s and got a pair of pants and a vest I have had made for Morton - out of blanket cloth, snuff colored - heavy - Cost $18 - got them this morning, & this evening took them to Woodruff to be forwarded together with a hat & other fixins that Mrs M sends him - I went down to Theater - Johnny Thompson’s Benefit - Slim house - Waited till show was over & collected the bills of the News - $17 - Home at 11 - took Mrs M to 4’s Ball at Athletic Hall - Best ball I have attended on the coast - good hall full - a little crowded at first - but thinned out after supper - Plenty of ladies - Enjoyed it very much - Danced every quadrille till after 4 oclock - Left at 4½ for home - Bed at 5 - [erasure] - clear & freezing - “Happy new Year” - No paper till next Monday -’

A hell of a night

Charles Graves, brother to the famous poet and novelist Robert, was born 120 years ago today. He was a Fleet Street reporter and columnist who wrote vividly for his newspaper from the streets of London during the Second World War. He was also a member of the Home Guard and, against official orders, he kept personal diaries. He published these in four volumes, and - although largely forgotten about today - these are in fact among the most informative, interesting and lively first hand reports of the war in London. Here’s a taster: ‘There was the roar of enemy bombers, the sound of machine-guns, the screaming of the wind as the Fighters dived after the bombers. The moon was blood red. It was a hell of a night.’ When not reporting on the latest bomb damage, he might be found in the morning with the Home Guard pretending to be a German parachutist landing in Regent’s Park’, watching cricket at Lords in the afternoon, and then dining at the Dorchester, Savoy or Ritz.

Graves was born in London on 1 December 1899, son of the Anglo-Irish poet and songwriter Alfred Perceval Graves. Alfred, himself the son of Charles Graves, bishop of Limerick and mathematician, had five children with his first wife Jane; and, after she died, he had five with his second wife Amalie von Ranke, including Charles and Robert who would become famous, notably for The White Goddess, about poetry and myths. In his autobiography, Goodbye To All That, Robert claimed the family’s pedigree dated back to the Norman Conquest, with one ancestor giving his name to Graves’ Disease.

Charles was educated at Charterhouse, and on reaching 18 in 1918, he joined the Royal Fusiliers but was still in training when the Armistice came. He studied at St John’s College, Oxford University, and then joined the staff of the Evening News as a reporter. Soon he was also the paper’s theatre critic, a line of work that enabled him to engage with London’s high society. He moved on, to the Sunday Express, where he worked variously as columnist, news editor and feature writer. In 1927, he switched again, this time to be a columnist again on the Daily Mail.

Graves’ gossipy autobiography, The Bad Old Days (Faber and Faber, 1951), reveals a great fondness for society in these years between the wars, and especially attending dances; but then, in 1929, ‘after nearly five years and a couple of hundred proposals (it may have been more because I have lost count)’ he finally persuaded Peggy Leigh to marry him. Also in the autobiography, Graves reveals how he felt the need to supplement his income now that he was married, which led to the idea of collecting his Daily Mail columns into a book. After failing to persuade G. B. Shaw to write a preface, he turned to P. G. Wodehouse an old family friend.

During the war, Graves continued to write a column and to socialise as much as he could - he was out at restaurants and the theatre whenever possible. But he also was an active participant in the Home Guard, and wrote and read propaganda scripts for the BBC. In addition, he spent time at RAF bases and with RAF personnel so as to write novels - such as The Thin Blue Line and The Avengers - promoting the armed services.

Before the war, Graves had begun to write travel-type books about Continental watering places for the rich, Switzerland and the French Riviera, and he took this up again after the war. He also wrote books on London, such as Champagne and Chandeliers about the Café de Paris, None but the Rich about the gambling cabal called The Greek Syndicate, and Leather Armchairs, a guide to the clubs of London. Under her pen name of Jane Gordon, Graves’ wife published the autobiographical Married to Charles in 1950. She died in the early 1960s, and Graves married Vivien Winch in 1966. The couple lived in her house on Guernsey. They then moved to Barbados, which is where Graves died in 1971. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, and Geni.

Among Graves’ many books are four diaries from the war years, all published by Hutchinson. The first two of these - Off the Record and Londoner’s Life - came out in 1942; and two more - Great Days and Pride of the Morning - in 1944-1945. These diaries are of particular interest because they include much detail about Graves’ Home Guard activities. Personal writing about the Home Guard was specifically made illegal (for security reasons), but Graves simply comments on this restriction coming into force with ‘Tut-tut and flutters’. In 2011, Viking published a book called The Real ‘Dad’s Army’ - The War Diaries of Lt.Col. Rodney Foster with great fanfare claiming it was the first such Home Guard diary to be published - see Huns flew over Hythe). But the long-since forgotten books by Charles Graves’s should claim that distinction.

In his introduction to Off the Record, Graves’ says this: ‘Timing the publication of a War Diary is a very tricky business. If you wait too long it becomes stale. If you bring it out too soon it is certain to be heavily censored. I prefer the deep blue sea of blue pencilling to the devil of staleness. When the diary began in November 1940 I had every intention of withholding publication until the war was over, but circumstances have dictated otherwise. This has automatically meant a censorship imposed by myself on the manuscript even before it went to the official censors. [. . .] I would like to point out that, with the exception of 400 words, nothing that appears in Off The Record has appeared in print beforehand. It is really the private diary of the public diarist. [. . .] Looking over the manuscript, I realize that I ought to have paid much more attention to the extraordinary change in domestic life caused by the war.’

19 November 1940
‘As I lay in bed it occurred to me that the Londoner’s ears are now accustomed to distinguish immediately sixteen different noises caused by the blitz. These are the 4.5s, the 3.7s, the Bofors, machine-guns, 1,000-lb bombs, 500-lb bombs, 250-lb bombs, incendiaries, shell-caps, enemy aircraft hit in the sky and ditto crashing on land, the two lots of sirens, time-bombs, air-raid and wardens’ whistles.’

30 December 1940
‘London is a city on its feet, but not out on its feet. In fact, it’s on its toes. This meant, however, that I had to walk all the way to Leicester Square before I was lucky enough to get a taxi to take me home. The queues for the Holborn Tube Station extended along Kingsway as far as Bush House. At every normal bus stop there were crowds of people waiting for omnibuses that were never going to appear. I should have thought the police might have told them.’

2 January 1941
‘Walked to the office, though it was bitterly cold, by way of the Embankment. The Temple has certainly caught it again, and there was a continuous sound of broken glass being swept from the pavement and knocked-down windows. [. . .] Lunched at the Press Club, where I was told that the crater near Piccadilly Circus has caused nine people to fall and break some limb during the past three nights. It is high time that Marylebone and Westminster improved their system of lighting where the road is blocked and bomb craters have been formed.’

31 January 1941
‘Then began a journey to London. This actually took four hours, and there were no taxis or omnibuses at Liverpool Street. The Underground being the only possible form of transport, I had a first-class view of the extraordinary subterranean life lived by so many Londoners at night. People were dotted everywhere except on the actual moving staircase. But there was a pleasant antiseptic smell and everything was clean and orderly. Some of the stations have already got bunks. Some of the people slept despite the rushing sound of the Underground trains. My own compartment was full of Scottish troops, seeing London for the first time. Their eyes positively goggled at the scenes on each station as they passed.’

9 March 1941
‘Paraded after six weeks’ absence with the Home Guard; secured my actual stripes from the Quartermaster’s Stores, after we were dismissed. Went to look at the Café de Paris [near Leicester Square]. The corpses are all out and there is very little show. Poor Poulsen. He always thought he was the luckiest man in the world, and behaved as such. Only the other night he was telling me that the Café de Paris was a complete escape from the war. Having been built as a replica of the Palm Court of the Lusitania, I always expected it to catch the blitz sooner or later.’ [80 people including Martin Poulsen, the proprietor, died when a bomb hit the day before. Graves wrote a newspaper column about Poulsen and the café, which he transcribed into his diary.]

10 March 1941
‘The Café de Paris still looks absurdly untouched. Poor Poulsen had fooled everybody into thinking that it had four proper floors above it [and hence had not been closed for safety reasons]. It hadn’t, and the bomb burst literally on the dance floor.’

11 March 1941
‘Home Guard parade with a lecture [. . .] about the tommy-gun. It seems quite fool-proof, and I have applied to be tommy-gun expert in my platoon.’

10 May 1941
‘Went down to play golf at Royal Wimbledon. [. . .] returned at 12pm, twenty minutes after the blitz began. In half an hour it was quite sensational. We were on fire. I ran into the street shouting the news and asked for assistance. A gunner subaltern from next door dashed in. Eleanor, in the meantime, had thrown some sand at the fire-bomb, which promptly exploded. I dashed up with the stirrup-pump, while the officer stuck the nozzle into the pail. We were in the dark. I couldn’t see what was happening but realized that something was wrong. I pumped away wildly and then said: “Don’t be a bloody fool. Bring the pail up and squirt the water on the bomb.” In a few minutes we had got it sufficiently under control to enable me to put an inverted pail on it. So that was that. We had previously had a fire-bomb on the doorstep and put it out with sandbags. The wardens’ whistles blew again and another twenty or thirty incendiaries came down in the street, as well as on one house two doors away from me and one three doors away.

The first caught fire immediately, and a fire-brigade crew that happened to be passing was diverted by us to it. We ran out and put out the bombs in the street and then hurried to the house three doors away on the right with stirrup-pump and pails of water. After twenty minutes this was dealt with, but as we were standing on the corner we suddenly heard a bomb coming straight at us. We threw ourselves on the ground as it burst forty yards away. Lumps of masonry came crashing down all around us. Altogether most unpleasant. This bomb landed on a house, trapping three people. But they were rescued within an hour, bent but not dead.

By this time a complete block was on fire eighty yards away, towards Portman Square, and there were some other fires about, but three fire-engines were on the job within 200 yards of me. I particularly admired the fireman on the top of a ladder with the bombs falling all round. But I suppose he thought he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.

Druce’s was on fire about 600 yards away. Clouds of smoke billowed across the street in the high breeze. There was the roar of enemy bombers, the sound of machine-guns, the screaming of the wind as the Fighters dived after the bombers. The moon was blood red. It was a hell of a night.’

11 May 1941
‘Today it was possible to get a slight preliminary idea of the damage. Druce’s has been completely burnt out. The House of Commons got a direct hit. Goodness knows where they are going to sit in future. The House of Lords was hit, so was Westminster Abbey. One of the chief rubber-necking points was Serjeant’s Inn, off Fleet Street, which is still on fire, though completely destroyed already. No omnibuses run past the Aldwych. There is gas all round the Daily Mail from burst mains, so everyone will have foul headaches tonight. I saw a man injured at the corner of Bouverie Street when a manhole blew up and out just as he was passing. Lunched at the Savoy. For the first time in the history of the Savoy we had our vegetables served à la Lyons, already placed on the dish.’

15 May 1941
‘Albany Street Barracks [near Regent’s Park] at 7:30am, where I found six corporals of the Guards and Sergeant Kirk. [. . .] The first thing we did was detonate our hand-grenades. [. . .] We next proceeded to the range from the throwing-pit and I was allowed to fire several rounds with a Lee-Enfield, lying, sitting, kneeling and standing. After that came the Bren gun [and] the anti-tank rifle. [. . .] Driving back in the truck we stopped at a pub, had a few pints each, and then lunched off bully-beef and cold cabbage in the sergeants’ mess. [. . .] Dined at home and then took Peggy to the Dorchester.’

7 June 1941
‘Went to Lord’s, where the Eton Ramblers played the Forty Club. Four ex-Test captains were performing, but the scoring was very low. This is because bowlers get back to form much sooner than batsmen. [. . .] Went on parade and took a tommy-gun course at Wormwood Scrubs. Sergeant Kirk was there and told us to fire a foot below the bull’s-eye. [. . .] I now learn that I am to be battalion bombing instructor unless I take care.’

8 June 1941
‘Another Home Guard parade. My mob were supposed to be German parachutists landing in Regent’s Park. The rest of the local Home Guard was supposed to contain us. Instead of that we contained them. It was all very wet. I hear that there is to be an ACI forbidding anyone in the Home Guard writing about the Home Guard in future. Tut-tut and flutters.’

15 June 1941
‘Called at 7:30am for 8:15 Home Guard exercise. A variegated show, either hanging around Baker Street or running madly through mews near Gloucester Place. At least we are unselfconscious as we dive down areas. All over by 1pm.’

5 July 1941
‘Went on Home Guard parade, where we were photographed, and then took part in a new scheme for defending Regent’s Park from parachutists. Was informed that I am now second-in-command of the new headquarters platoon, and that we will have flame-throwers, Molotovs, hand-grenades, tommy-guns, anti-tank rifles and sticky bombs. In fact, we have them already. The men were delighted at the new order whereby they can now take their rifles home with them. This is to save time in the event of being called out for an invasion.’

6 July 1941
‘The moon was almost full, London looked lovely, and a distant barrage balloon was silhouetted against the moon like Hitler’s moustache.’

20 July 1941
‘Took a slow train back to London, arriving late for lunch. Changed into uniform and hurried off to Hampstead Heath, where a demonstration by the Royal Tanks Corps was being provided. An officer with a loud-speaker described to everyone present - hundreds of civilians, perhaps Quislings among them, in addition to the 3,000 Home Guards - all the best ways of destroying our latest Valentine tank. Actually it seems it takes a tank to kill a tank, but still . . . Today is the great V day. You see Vs on walls and posters, even chalked inside restaurants.’

24 August 1941
‘Home Guard parade, in which once again the Headquarters Section acted as Germans, but without all our fire-crackers, which was rather dull.’

This material for this article has been taken from a chapter on Graves in the unpublished book London in Diaries.

Pulsing like a python

‘I have just finished my modest airline nosh when Ali plops down beside me. He has short sleeves and his enormous bicep rests near mine with the vein in it pulsing like a python.’ This snippet about the boxer Muhammad Ali is from the gossipy and entertaining diaries of Irish writer and historian Ulick O’Connor who died three months ago.

O’Connor was born in 1928 in Rathgar, County Dublin, to the dean of the Royal College of Surgeons and his wife. He attended Catholic secondary school in Galway and Dublin counties, before studying law and philosophy at University College Dublin. He was keen on sports, especially boxing, rugby and cricket, and was an active member of the Literary and Historical Society. He went on to attend Loyola University, New Orleans, and was called to the Irish bar in 1951. Although he practised in Dublin until 1970, he increasingly turned to writing - biography, poetry, history and literary criticism - for his day job. He was a regular contributor on sport to various newspapers, but also published a regular poetry column.

O’Connor is best known for his  biographies of Oliver St. John Gogarty and Brendan Behan, for his studies of the early 20th-century Irish troubles and the Irish Literary Revival, and for several plays. He became something of a personality, appearing on radio and television as an outspoken commentator on social, cultural and political issues. He never married (see the Irish Mirror on incorrect rumours that he was gay), and lived to the age of 91. Further information is available at Wikipedia, The Irish Times or Ricorso.

O’Connor was a keen and interesting diarist. He decided to keep a diary, he said, so as ‘to keep an eye on myself and so as not to let material that might be useful to me as a writer be erased from memory’. His agent eventually suggested to John Murray that some extracts be published in book form. The Ulick O’Connor Diaries 1970-1981: a cavalier Irishman (with a foreword by Richard Ingrams) came out in 2001.

According to the publisher, O’Connor evokes ‘the streets and bars of Dublin with their now legendary characters, the world of the Abbey Theatre and that of the Gate Theatre’; he ‘recreates the atmosphere and talk of the Anglo-Irish country houses [. . .], where he often stayed as a guest of the Guinnesses and the Longfords’; and he ‘reveals the secret part he played as a go-between for the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch’. Furthermore, the diaries show him to be an inveterate traveller: ‘In New York he makes friends with Viva, the star of Andy Warhol’s infamous Blue Movie, he talks to Robert Kennedy and witnesses the anti-Vietnam protests and the growth of the Civil Rights movement. In London he appears on Wogan, in Tangiers he dines with Alec Waugh and Paul Bowles, and in Stockholm he plays a practical joke on Edna O’Brien that unhappily misfires. Ulick O’Connor’s diaries are funny and entertaining, gossipy and a good read.’ Here are several extracts, including the first.

3 January 1970
‘Peter Sellers, the film actor, at dinner, at Aileen [the Hon. Mrs Brinsley] Plunket’s, Lutterellstown Castle. Seems down after his separation from Britt Ekland. Tears stream down his cheeks.

‘Knife in my heart, excuse me if I cry.’

I suggest that all men cry for the lost belief in the goodness of womanhood. Lolita. He tells me that when Britt ran out of money, he went back to her.

‘I didn’t kick her when she was down.’

When I told him he looked in good shape he said he worked out in the gym every day with weights. Was this wise since he had had heart surgery? He said not only was it safe but it actually improved his condition. He had always been interested in sport anyway. He talked of his uncle Brian Sellers, Captain of Yorkshire and England Selector, who he said used to take him to matches when he was a small boy. I was surprised at this because I always assumed Peter was a Bow Bells boy. Not so. I am touched by his affection for Uncle Brian and put a note about the relationship in my Sunday Mirror column. Later I receive an angry note from Brian Sellers denying he is related to ‘that bloody little cockney’. How extraordinary to invent a sporting pedigree on the spur of the moment.’

23 November 1972
‘To Dublin Airport to see Jack Lynch off. He’s addressing the Oxford Union on the motion ‘That this House would favour Irish Unity.’ Hugh McCann, Secretary to the Department of Foreign Affairs, is on the tarmac when the Taoiseach gets on the steps to enter the plane. Lynch shakes my hand warmly and ignores McCann who is left with his paw ‘all bright and glittering in the smokeless air’. This is authentic Jackspeak.’
 
7 May 1973
‘To Washington to interview Teddy Kennedy. Arranged by John Hume through a Kennedy aide, Carey Parker. Washington in early summer is beautiful. Lush green trees lining the drives. Spectacular after New York, where in Central Park still the bare branches anatomize the sky.

Kennedy himself is well versed in Northern Ireland. He corrects me when I give the wrong number of internees in Long Kesh: ‘Around 2,000, I think.’ (I checked, he was right.)

He is on top of his brief. Would that his English counterparts were the same. I tell him I was on the Kennedy election plane on Bobby’s last jaunt, just before he died. He showed me a picture of Bobby in his Harvard football kit.

‘Great little guy wasn’t he.’

He looked wistful for a while. He has had two brothers cut down in their prime who, when he was a baby, used to affectionately toss him between them like a football, two handsome Micks with a dash and brightness that were specially theirs - all gone.’

14 April 1974
‘Flying back to New York from Chicago where I had gone to promote Irish Liberation on the Kupcinett Show, I pass a truly enormous black man in first class as I board. He is sitting with another black.

‘Hi,’ says Muhammad Ali, ‘How’s it going?’

I met Ali a number of times in the late Sixties and also covered his fight in Dublin in 1970 against Al Blue Lewis when we had become well acquainted over three weeks.

‘Come down and see you later,’ Ali said.

I have just finished my modest airline nosh when Ali plops down beside me. He has short sleeves and his enormous bicep rests near mine with the vein in it pulsing like a python.

‘I’d like to show you some poems.’

This is the guy that put Sonny Liston away in round two so I listen. To my credit, I don’t nod acquiescently but try to remain detached. Fortunately, two lines come up which I can approve:

The same road that connects two souls together
When stretched becomes a path to God.

I nod and he doesn’t stop for half an hour. His face is unlined, miraculously free from the damage that boxers can acquire. Of course, in the ring he bobs like a bamboo and it is almost impossible to land a clean punch on him. His ears are close to his head, neat and well formed. When he straightens up you can see his trousers stretched tightly over gigantic thighs, each more than two feet in circumference. I asked him was he never afraid he’d get shot when he was a Vietnam protester and had his title taken away from him because he wouldn’t join the army.

‘A true Muslim doesn’t fear, neither does he grieve. I was happier than I had ever been then in my little car, riding round the States. I never sold out. I was no Uncle Tom.’

He goes back to his chum. I don’t see him again till I am getting off the plane. He introduces me to the man he is with.

‘This is Kid Gavilan.’

I am impressed. Kid Gavilan is the inventor of the bolo punch and one of the great all-time world middleweight champions. Ali says he’ll give me a ride into town in his chauffeur-driven limousine. He sits in front while he puts me in the back of the car with the Kid who starts to sing for me, in Spanish, bits of a musical he is composing about the boxing ring. He says he was down and out recently in Alabama when Ali saw him at a petrol station where he was working and took him on board for a month’s holiday. As we roll into Manhattan, the Kid is singing away at his own songs, while Ali’s well shaped head rolls from side to side in the front seat. Out for the count.’
 
28 May 1974
‘Horrors on horror’s head accumulate. Hear at four o'clock that the Northern Ireland Assembly has been dissolved. Faulkner has resigned as Chief Executive. It seems the bullies have won. I go down to the Dail to see Jack Lynch. Meet Eugene Timmons TD in the hall. He seems to accept the news with equanimity. Then I see David Andrews. He does not seem as downcast as he should be (I wonder has he something up his sleeve?). Brian Lenihan passes us with a cheery smile. Then I go into the Dail chamber. Afterwards I meet Jack Lynch. Exhausted. He looks like an old man, shrunk. He puts off our meeting until Thursday. I go to discuss what’s happened with George Colley (former Minister for Finance). He says we were closer to trouble in 1969. I point out that then the British Army were regarded as peacekeepers by the Nationalists, now this is not so. Therefore the situation is significantly worse. Rory Brugha TD who is also with us remarks that the British will always suit themselves. George Colley says he thinks the real danger is unilateral declaration of independence by the Unionists. I suggest that we should consider sending in the Irish Army as a protective force with a view to getting the UN to come in at a later stage. The general feeling is that the Irish Army should have gone into Northern Ireland in 1969 after Lynch had said that the South would not ‘stand idly by’ when the Nationalist population in Northern Ireland were being attacked and burned out of their homes. If they had gone across the border at Derry then to protect civilians they could have remained in situ and refused to evacuate until the UN came in with a peacekeeping force.

My thinking. The British will now get very tough with the Unionists. They may cut Harland & Wolff’s subsidy and that of other industrial jewels in the British Crown.’

Dunlap, painter and playwright

‘Glenn my Landlord comes to tell me that he will have his two daughters painted in Oil, the Girls so preferring, and I am to do them at $25 each. This restores me again.’ This is from the diary of William Dunlap, who died 180 years ago today. He was a pioneer playwright and theatrical manager in New York City until bankruptcy - money was a chronic concern - forced him into painting society portraits for a living. His main claim to fame is an encyclopaedic history he wrote on the arts, but his diary is also considered an important primary source of information on American society and culture during the first half century of the Republic.

Dunlap was born in 1766 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, the son of an army officer. He left school at the age of 12 when an injury left him blind in the right eye, but he soon developed an interest in drawing and began copying prints and executing portraits in pastel. Aged 16 he began painting portraits in oil, and indeed painted one of George Washington which is now owned by the US Senate. Dunlap was then sent to London to study with Benjamin West - an artist born in North America but who had settled there some 20 years earlier and had been instrumental in launching the Royal Academy. Dunlap returned to New York City in 1787 where he completed a first major canvas, The Artist Showing a Picture from Hamlet to His Parents. However, he had picked up the theatre bug in London, and soon found himself focusing mostly on writing plays, and then producing them. His first, The Father, or American Shandyism, was performed in 1789.  That same year, he married Elizabeth Woolsey, and they later had two children.

For the best part of the next two decades, Dunlap worked exclusively in the theatre, writing (more than 60 plays, many adaptations or translations from French or German originals) and managing, only to resume painting (miniatures) after he became bankrupt in 1805. He continued to invest his time in the theatre world until 1812 when he turned to executing portraits on commission. After working as assistant paymaster general in the New York militia for a couple of years, he began to paint large canvases of religious and historical subjects. He exhibited regularly at the American Academy of the Fine Arts in New York, and was a member from 1817 to 1828, and well as keeper, librarian, and a member of the board of directors from 1817 to 1819. In 1826 he helped found the rival National Academy of Design, where he served as vice president from 1832 to 1838. He exhibited there from 1826 to 1838, and from 1831 to 1838 was the professor of historical composition.

Dunlap is best remembered for his encyclopaedic three-volume History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, published in 1834, which is still considered today an important source of information about artists, collecting, and artistic life generally during the colonial and federal periods. He died on 28 September 1839. Further information is available online from the National Gallery of Art, Wikipedia, Encyclopedia.com, or American Art Gallery.

Dunlap kept a diary for much of his life, and may have left behind 30 or more small volumes. However, only 11 of them - extending over a period of 48 years - were found when, in the late 1920s, The New York Historical Society decided to publish them. Issued in 1930 as Diary of William Dunlap (1766-1839) - The Memoirs of a Dramatist, Theatrical Manager, Painter, Critic, Novelist, and Historian, all three volumes are freely available at Internet Archive (Vol 1 1786-1798, Vol 2 1806-1822, Vol 3 1832-1834). In its preface, the Society noted that Dunlap’s diary had been consulted in manuscript form to good purpose, by historians of drama and painting, but that now, by printing it in a more ‘convenient form’, the diary ‘should be an invaluable source for many phases of American society and culture during the first half century of the Republic.’

In its introduction, the Society goes on to explain that the three printed volumes represent three periods of Dunlap’s life:‘The first includes two years of great importance to the history of the New York stage, when Dunlap was manager of the Old American Company of Comedians, and a lessee of the Park Theatre. The second volume is devoted more particularly to his life as an artist, when, after his bankruptcy, he painted portraits throughout the eastern states as a means of livelihood, returning to the theatre for only a short time as a salaried manager to Abthorpe Cooper. The third volume [. . .] finds Dunlap, old, ill, and impoverished, summing up the knowledge and experience of a life time, in his histories of the American theatre and American arts.’ 

The following extracts are all taken from the second volume, exactly as published (inc. spelling errors etc.).

18 October 1819
‘Take the Steam boat for Bristol to see Cooper for information respecting the south & for letters. Sully has not had a portrait to paint for Phil: since May last & but four for Strangers, he is painting Washington crossing the Delaware, for Exhibition - a fine Composition. In conjunction with [James] Earl[e] he has erected a Gallery & they Exhibit some good pictures but with out success as to profit. Leslie’s Death of Rutland, bold, broad, fine. Horse & Snake. Landscapes by Shaw, good, colouring like Loutherburg. A small Landscape by Gainsborough beautiful & bold. [Charles B.] King is at Washington he will show me some machines for preserving Colours when ground. I called on Warren yesterday, who is always the same good natured, fat, friendly creature, he has 4 or five children by his last wife - politely invites me to the Theatre & greenroom. They have played 12 nights to some profit. I understand that it is to Newcastle 40 miles, by land to hd of Elk 18, by water to Baltimore.

Arrive at Bristol & find that Cooper had gone to Philadelphia. Walk to the Shamony & returning to Dinner, find Cooper landing from Steam Boat and return to his house with him - pass the day & followg night. He gives me letters to [blank] in Fayetteville, Newburn, Wilmington, Raleigh.

To ask S respecting Mr S’s push I did so, and he said he began the business unknown to Trumbul, but soon told all & T appeared pleased to instruct him.’

25 October 1819
‘Prepare to paint a Miniature, but to my great chagrin my Landlord tells me he cannot give me employment, for if one is painted all must be painted. Morse comes to see me & mentions a little loan of money I made him when I last saw him, with promise of repayment before I go. F. Lewis calls to see me. Morse says his situation in the Navy is secure, it is 55 dols pr month. He only needs an arrangement with his former creditors in Massachusetts, to enable him to take orders & obtain a good living. They call him here Doctor Morse. Glenn my Landlord comes to tell me that he will have his two daughters painted in Oil, the Girls so preferring, and I am to do them at $25 each. This restores me again. Returning from a walk to the north over the same arid plain cover’d with pine which is seen in every direction except where water diversifies the prospect, I found the following polite note: “Chas H Graham will be pleased to see Mr Dunlap at the Theatre whenever that place offers any amusement for him. Monday afnoon 25th Oct 1819.”
 
I wrote a note in answer and leaving it at the door of the Theatre went in & saw a Comedy new to me called “The sons of Erin. I was pleased with it, and found unexpected good acting in some men whose names I had never heard to remember. Mr Finn is natural, has good judgment, good voice, pretty good person, expressive countenance, an easy genteel manner without being graceful. Mr Brown played an Irish servant extremely well. Mr Dalton, a coxcomb in pretty good style. Mr Thomas was above mediocrity. The ladies were my old acquaintances Mrs Young, Mrs Clarke (formerly Miss Harding) Mrs Hayes (formerly Claude & once Miss Hogg) Mrs Wheatley. Mr Pritchard, whom I met yesterday, is to play Othello on Wednesday, first time of appear here.’
 
8 November 1819
‘Call at Mr Southgates (to whom I was last night introduced) and pass half an hour with Bishop Moore. He is visiting his Diocese, returns here in about a fortnight & then goes home to Richmond. I am to paint his picture gratuitously, he being pleased with the offer, to be given to some friend to the North. He has children in Philadelphia. He recommends my being in Richmond during the session of the Legislature, promisses me his assistance & thinks I shall have employment. Mrs Southgate talks of a picture. Paint on the two Misses Glenn. Evening meet Gilfert at the Theatre. He says he can promise me 2 or 3 portraits to paint in Richmond. I have engaged a room to paint in, at a house but a short distance from my Hotel.’

18 November 1819
‘Mr More, the painter above mentioned as introducing himself to me, hearing that I was going towards Richmond, suggested my stopping at Surry Court house to paint the family of a Mr Price & a Doctor Graves, who wished him to do it, but he had no oilapparatus, he asked 50 dolls for a portrait. On talking to Mr Glen he knowing Price, I write to day to him, & offer to come thither on an engagement for at least 4 portraits at 30, 50, or 75 dolls according to size. Paint on Glen. We have in the house Mr Wrifford a teacher of writing, a New England man, a character, he affords me entertainment, by shrewd remarks & eccentric manners. He is a singer & has a noble voice. Evening read in Kings. How does Elisha’s words “take my life for I am not better than my fathers” agree with the notion of his being an incarnate Angel? The book says 7000 had not bowed the knee to Baal, the Commentator says 7000 does not mean 7000 but a great many thousand, a majority of the nation, soon after the fighting men of Israel are number’d at 7000 & the commentator laments that Israel was so thinned, so reduced in number. “A Wall fell upon 27000 men & crush’d them” says the Com: “probably a burning wind is meant” We are told that what is translated ashes may mean bandage or fillet. Again ‘‘Gan Yirek may mean Garden of herbs or Grass plat. “Naboth did blaspheme God & the King” may be render’d “Naboth hath blessed God & the King” and the word barac may mean either bless or curse. How then is a sincere man to read this book? Again Ahab walked softly may be “barefooted” or groaning or with down hanging head. This curious Book must then it would appear be read with constant doubt as to the meaning of the original independent of all other doubts.’

A director’s loneliness

Happy 70th birthday Pedro Almodóvar. He is surely the most famous of Spanish filmmakers alive today, and second only to Luis Buñuel in importance in the history of Spanish cinema. He is not a diarist, by his own admission, but on one occasion, while making the film Volver, he kept a diary of sorts. It’s full of confessional thoughts - but these are far from private as they were written to be shared with his public, as in this example: ‘A director’s loneliness is sacred. And the director himself should be the first to respect it, without sharing it with you as I am doing right now.’

Almodóvar was born on 25 September 1949 in Calzada de Calatrava, a small rural town in the province of Castile-La Mancha. When he was about nine, the family, moved to Madrigalejo, a town in Extremadura, where he was sent to study at a religious boarding school to prepare him for a life in the church. Aged 18, though, he left home for Madrid where he began to pursue his dream of becoming a filmmaker. Thwarted by the closure of the national film school, he purchased a Super-8 camera and began making his own short films, all the while supporting himself with a variety of odd jobs. At the time, he was much involved with experimental cinema and theatre. In 1980, he produced his first feature film (Pepi, Luci, Bom), and then Laberinto de pasiones, the first of several films with the Spanish actor Antonio Banderas.

In 1986, he joined forces with the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez to make Matador, and in 1987, he and his brother Agustín Almodóvar established their own production company: El Deseo, S. A. His first major critical and commercial success came the following year, with Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). Almodóvar’s reputation continued to soar, not least with Todo sobre mi madre in 1999 (All about My Mother), which won an Academy Award for best foreign-language film. He was also honoured as best director at the Cannes film festival. He continued to direct films, roughly one every two years, many of which won prizes and were nominated for many more. Volver in 2006 won him the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, and the Best Actress prize for his entire female cast. His most recent film - Dolor y gloria - was released in March 2019. Almodóvar is gay, and has been with his partner, actor and photographer Fernando Iglesias, since 2002. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, IMDB, and The New Yorker.

There is no indication among these biographical details that Almodóvar is a diarist. Indeed, Paul Julian Smith in an essay entitled Almodóvar’s Self-Fashioning (to be found in A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar - see Googlebooks, page 31) quotes Almodóvar himself as saying ‘I’m not a diary writer.’ Nevertheless, on at least one occasion, he did keep a diary of sorts - during the making of Volver. This was published as Volver: A Filmmaker’s Diary in a collection of essays, All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema, as edited by Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Some pages can be read online at Googlebooks. It is worth nothing, though, that the ‘diary’ does not meet a couple of the requirements usually applied to diaries: firstly, none of the entries are dated, and, secondly, they are often addressed directly to his reading audience (rather than to himself). Here are several extracts from the ‘diary’.

‘On the other side of my desk, in my office in El Deseo, sit three of the actresses who will star in Volver. Each of them embodies an important return. The most anticipated is that of Carmen Maura, but there are two additional returns, full of sense and sensibility: Penelope Cruz, with whom I’ve worked twice before [in Live Flesh and All about My Mother], an actress and a woman whom I adore both on and off the set; and Lola Dueñas, with whom I worked in Talk to Her (she was a nurse, a fellow worker of Javier Camara, and I felt like repeating the experience).

I am extremely agitated about the meeting. Despite the fact that the role assigned to me in this circus is that of the master of ceremonies, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy for me to break the ice. But that’s what it means, among other things, to be a director - at least, in a European country. I’m the icebreaker, the chimney that warms the atmosphere, the mother-father-psychiatrist-lover-friend who, with a simple word, can help you regain your self-confidence.’

***

‘Films, the collection of all the processes that make up a film, entail a wide array of questions - hence the adventurous nature of a shooting. The adventures worth isn’t proportional to the number of answers one finds along the way, it is proportional to the resistance of the people involved. What happens is that the director is driving a train with no brakes, and his job is to make sure that the train doesn’t derail. That’s how Truffaut saw it.

My first question is always similar: Will I feel the same passion I felt the last fifteen times about the new story? Without an answer to this question, it is best to avoid getting involved in a new project.

With Volver the answer is certainly, “yes.” Once again, I have the feeling of handling a story - a fable, a treasure, and a secret - in which I am anxious to engross myself.’

***

‘The first week of shooting is over. I came to Madrid on Friday, at the end of the days work. The “girls” and most of the team stayed behind in Almagro. I miss them, and I like that. I can concentrate better in the solitude of Madrid and I prefer to feel homesick for the shoot and to see it from a distance, in perspective. I leave Almagro in order to miss it. I feel that my films are getting progressively more autobiographical. At least, I am much more aware of how my memories stroll along the sets, like the breeze along the streets of Almagro at night.’

***

‘We leave Almagro today. I am writing from a patio that is swamped with electric material and rocking chairs with “No sitting” signs. It is one in the afternoon and all the shots we have to do today take place in the street and its impossible to shoot until at least four because the sun multiplies on the white walls; the light is blinding and far too flat. We have to wait. The team has disbanded; at this point I like to stay in one of the lifeless interior sets and enjoy the solitude, the clutter of objects, and the silence.

During these two weeks, contact with the villagers has been wonderful. Both with those we cross in the streets and with those who have worked with us as extras. In most of the sequences of La Mancha there are groups of women and men, and, I must say, I’ve never had better extras. There is something priceless about them; everything that they are supposed to do in front of the camera mirrors their own lives. Their presence has given depth and truth to the sequences in which they participate. Women from this land know well what it is like to clean a tombstone, to pray at a wake, to greet the neighbors. And the faces of the men, slowly weathered by the sun and the wind, have a weight and an expressiveness that would be impossible to improvise.’

***

‘Do you like films with ghosts?

Not normally. I am interested in how Buñuel or Bergman treats the apparition of the dead without changing the light or resorting to special effects. Ghosts appear in front of the person who is thinking about them without pyrotechnical effects. They are inner ghosts. I like Hitchcock’s Rebecca [1940] and Vertigo [1958]. And Sunset Boulevard [Billy Wilder, 1950], where the leading character, who is floating dead in the pool, talks about himself when he was alive, as if he were a ghost trapped by the desires of another ghost (Norma Desmond, who in turn is cared for by the phantasmagorical Erich von Stroheim). William Holden when alive is the ghost of the drowned William Holden. A wonderful use of the offscreen voice, endlessly imitated since then. I also like Tourneur, when he tells stories about beings of other species. In general, I don’t like horror stories with ghosts (M. Night Shyamalan), or films with angels, or with U.S. presidents who keep on saving the world.

What ghost does Volver evoke?

It isn’t a ghost, but the whole film is infused with the presence of my absent mother.’

***

‘This week is less intense; we are shooting many of those sequences necessary for credibility, where actors go in and out of houses, stop cars and park them, etc. Everything is important in them, but these sequences, required to locate the action and establish its geography, are hard for me. In La Mancha there were doors also, but people left them wide open so they didn’t interrupt action, but allowed it to flow instead. Those shots of entrances and exits from cars or houses are a requisite of him orthography, even if in quite a number of thrillers the screenwriter and the director decide to make characters appear at each others spaces effortlessly, disregarding all obstacles. Take a look at Basic Instinct [Paul Verhoeven, 1992] and you will see what I mean. Characters show up inside other people’s houses as if they walked through walls. And that’s not right.’

***

‘There is a moment, during each of the processes involved in making a film, when I go to pieces and think that I have irretrievably lost control of my movie. It happens when I write it, while we are shooting (when editing I suffer more that one crisis) and, certainly, when the film is ready and no one has seen it yet, that’s when I truly shit myself.

In order for the crises to be short-lived, you need to have a very close relationship with what you are shooting. I know these crises; I’ve experienced them in every single one of my fifteen previous films. Always. As with all passions - and for me, making movies is essentially a passion - crises evaporate when one irrationally loves what one is doing. (And it has nothing to do with whether the film afterwards turns out to be good or bad, whether the crises were justified or not; often crises arise out of very specific problems. I’m talking about the crises that surface without a justifiable reason and still manage to drag you down into a sea of confusion.)

I am currently living one of those moments. I feel (and I am sometimes absolutely positive) that all I am doing is a mistake, including this “dear” diary. Experience tells me that the only thing that I can do is to take the plunge and closely watch every movement, every shot, every phrase, every pause, every tear, and every joke. I shouldn’t be talking about this. A director’s loneliness is sacred. And the director himself should be the first to respect it, without sharing it with you as I am doing right now.’

Our Time of Day

The British actor and political activist Corin Redgrave was born 80 years ago today. He kept diaries some of the time, and his second wife Kika Markham has used these, along with her own diaries, to write a memoir - Our Time of Day: My Life with Corin Redgrave. ‘With great empathy and wit,’ the publisher says, ‘Kika records their lives on and off stage - two great actors from two theatrical families.’ As it happens, I have a vague personal connection with Corin and Kika in that they first met while working on a famous 1930s film produced by my grandfather.

Redgrave was born in northwest London on 16 July 1939, to the famous actor Michael Redgrave and his actress wife Rachel Kempson. He had two sisters, Vanessa who was older, and Lynn who was younger. Michael was educated at Westminster School, and King’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first in English. (Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Trevor Nunn were among his friends there.) He joined the Royal Court Theatre as an assistant director in 1962. That same year he married Deirdre Deline Hamilton-Hill, and they were to have two children.

Redgrave soon turned to acting, and through the 1960s appeared on stage and in films, not least in Fred Zinnemann’s Oscar-winning A Man for All Seasons. In the 1970s, acting began to take second place to his involvement in radical politics: encouraged by Vanessa, he joined the Workers’ Revolutionary Party founded by Gerry Healy. He became increasingly involved with the group as a full-time organiser; and when it split, he remained loyal to Healy and his new Marxist Party. Redgrave’s marriage had been dissolved some while earlier, and, in 1985, he married his second wife, Kika Markham, also an actress, and they had two children.

Only with the ending of the Cold War did Redgrave return wholeheartedly to acting, enjoying significant roles such as in In the Name of the Father (1993), about the wrongful imprisonment of the Guildford Four, and in the romantic comedy, Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). He also had success in the West End and on Broadway, especially with Tennessee Williams’s Not About Nightingales (receiving a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play in 1999). In the mid-1990s, he wrote an acclaimed memoir of his father (whom he had helped with his autobiography a decade earlier) Michael Redgrave, My Father, which incorporated extracts from Michael’s diaries. Corin Redgrave was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000, and in 2005 suffered a heart attack, but, nevertheless, made a triumphant return to the stage in 2007, with the one-man play Tynan, and as the lead in Trumbo in 2009. He died in 2010. Further information is available from Wikipedia, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required), or IMDB.

Like his father, Corin kept a diary, at least sometimes. I have not been able to establish how regularly he did so, or what diary material he might have left behind. However, Kika Markham in her memoir - Our Time of Day: My Life with Corin Redgrave (Oberon Books, 2014) - includes many extracts from his diary as well as from her own. Some pages can be previewed at Amazon or Googlebooks. and a review can be read at The Guardian. The publisher’s blurb states: ‘Our Time of Day was inspired by Corin’s revelation that after suffering brain damage he could remember little of his marriage - despite the fact that for over thirty happy, passionate and turbulent years he and Kika had shared their love of acting, family and left-wing politics with ceaseless energy and commitment. With great empathy and wit, Kika records their lives on and off stage - two great actors from two theatrical families. She draws upon intimate records of the thoughts and feelings that they had both expressed in personal diaries, writing with often brutal honesty. Finally she charts the poignant trajectory of Corin’s illness, from the moment he suffered a near-fatal heart attack during a speech on behalf of the Dale Farm gypsies, to severe memory loss, cancer and his eventual death from an aneurysm in the brain. Throughout these troubled years both continued acting in plays and films, as well as strenuously pursuing the human rights causes they held so dear.’

I, myself, have a distant connection with Corin and Kika. In the second paragraph of chapter one in Markham’s memoir, she explains how she knew Corin: ‘Michael Redgrave, Corin’s father, and David Markham, my father, had worked together in a film about the struggle of the miners in the 1930s: The Stars Look Down, based on the novel of the same name by A. J. Cronin.’ My grandfather, Igee Goldsmith, was the producer of that film - see my 2011 Diary Review piece on Cronin.

Here are several extracts from Corin Redgrave’s diaries as reproduced in Markham’s memoir.

9 February 1999
‘It’s an age since I wrote this diary. All my good intentions to write it at least every other day have been sabotaged by the unusually heavy workload of writing for the magazine [The Marxist].

It’s the second very long day of technical rehearsal. I have a nice spacious dressing room, with a shower and loo. When I get the chance I’ll get a divan brought in, and a fridge, and put some of our beautiful photos on the wall. They made me cry with joy, and a little bit with pain, because they make you seem so close and yet you’re so far. At night I play your “I’m beginning to miss you”, and I could swear you must be thinking of me, except I know - or I hope - you’re asleep.

My dresser, Dino, has been dressing Uta Hagen. She’s on in a play off-B’way, which will run for another three weeks. Another good reason you should hurry on over if humanly possible, to catch her while she’s still here. Dino says she’s a ‘miracle’ and I’m sure he’s right.’

28 March 2009
‘We took part in a rally in Trafalgar Square.

I read Robert Fisk.

We stood together on the platform - Kika read the diary of Zena el Khalil.

It was an honour to take part in such a dire, dreadful situation. It was important to feel that we could contribute, even in a small way.

We met Harvey and Jodie which was delightful. And Arden was there, dear Arden.’

16 June 2009
‘Lying in bed is not necessarily tiredness, but finding a way to start the day. Arden told us some wonderful news. He got a 2:2 for his degree!! BRAVO ARDEN!!!! It hasn’t been easy for him, with me being ill, and with him changing course in mid-stream. Tony Kushner came to supper. We talked a lot about writing.’

He distorted body parts

‘Wolverton was a master in caricaturing the human face and body. He distorted body parts while multiplying others. Noses hang on necks, ears stick out of eye sockets, teeth point out in all directions, skins droop to the ground and virtually everyone has blisters or freckles. His characters seem to be made from plasticine rather than bones.’ This how a comic encyclopaedia describes the work of Basil Wolverton, born 110 years ago today. He was one of America’s great mid-20th century comic artists, working for Stan Lee’s (pre-Marvel) Atlas Comics, and for MAD in its early days. But he was also very religious and produced many a biblical illustration. He kept diaries for a year as a child and then regularly during the second half of his life. Although these have not been published, they have been exploited by Greg Sadowski in his recent two-volume and highly illustrated biography of Wolverton.

Wolverton was born on 9 July 1909 in Central Point, Oregon, but his family later moved to Vancouver, Washington. His parents, though religious, divorced when he was a teenager. An older sister died around the same time, which led the young Wolverton to abandon his faith for a decade or more. Aged 11, he drew a weekly cartoon of famous comic characters to sell at the local farmers’ market, and aged 16 he sold his first nationally published work. His comic strip, Marco of Mars, was accepted by the Independent Syndicate of New York in 1929 though it was never distributed.

Wolverton made a living as a vaudeville performer for a time, with a special act where he sang in a baritone voice, played ukulele and tap danced. Other income came from his job as a journalist/cartoonist for the Portland News. He was baptized into Herbert W. Armstrong’s Radio Church of God in 1941 and was ordained as an elder in 1943. As a board member of the church, he was one of six people who re-incorporated the church in 1946 when it moved its original headquarters from Oregon to California. Later, he drew many illustrations for Armstrong’s religious publications, and then for The Plain Truth. But, in the comic world, he was building up a portfolio of clients: his first major success came with Powerhouse Pepper, from 1942 to 1948, a humorous boxing series. In 1946, he won a competition in Life Magazine which brought his name to a wider public.

Lambiek Comiclopedia gives this assessment: ‘Wolverton was a master in caricaturing the human face and body. He distorted body parts while multiplying others. Noses hang on necks, ears stick out of eye sockets, teeth point out in all directions, skins droop to the ground and virtually everyone has blisters or freckles. His characters seem to be made from plasticine rather than bones, but Wolverton knew how to draw it all with a sense of fun, elegance and innocence.’ It was only a tiny step, the encyclopaedia adds, for him to go from monstrous faces to drawing actual monsters and extraterrestrial aliens. In the early 1950s, he drew many and varied horror and science fiction stories for Stan Lee’s Atlas Comics (preceding what would become Marvel Comics) as well as for the comic books published by Stanley P. Morse. And, in 1952, he was among the pioneering artists working for Harvey Kurtzman's new satirical magazine MAD. Later in his career, Wolverton illustrated several covers for Joe Orlando’s satirical comic book Plop! (DC Comics, 1973-1975), and in 1974 he turned briefly to self-publishing. He suffered a stroke that same year, and died in 1978. Some further biographical information can also be gleaned from Wikipedia and Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr’s Illustrators.

Recently, in 2014, Fantagraphics released the first volume of an illustrated biography of Wolverton’s life - the most comprehensive biography ever published, it claims: Creeping Death from Neptune - The Life and Comics of Basil Wolverton (Volume 1: 1909-1941). The second volume, Brain Bats of Venus: The Life and Comics of Basil Wolverton (Volume 2: 1942-1952) is due to be published this coming autumn.

Throughout both books - authored by Greg Sadowski - there is a liberal sprinkling of extracts from diaries Wolverton kept at different points in his life. The first volume, for example, draws on a childhood diary. It was given him for Christmas in 1923, and, Sadowski says, ‘sheds light on his time in high school and his advancing interest in Christianity, cartooning, scientific magazines, vaudeville, and movies’. In it, he writes of 'escapades with his friends, which include building tunnels with secret passages, diving oft piers, and spying on wandering drunken men, with public intoxication being particularly scandalous during the Prohibition era.’ Several pages can be read online at Googlebooks, Amazon and Issuu. Wolverton didn’t resume keeping a diary until 1941, but when he did would write down each day’s events, occasionally punctuated with a wry remark. He kept up the habit for the next 30 years. Sadowski notes that from 1941 onwards his biography of Wolverton is ‘anchored’ by the diaries. Further information on the forthcoming second volume can also be found at Googlebooks and Amazon. (Incidently, the original comic Brain Bats of Venus can be viewed online at Internet Archive.)

Here are several extracts from Wolverton’s diaries as found in the two volumes.

24 December 1923
‘Hello folks, my name is Basil Wolverton and the first writing in this book was put here Dec. 24, 1923, the night before Christmas. I live in Vancouver, Washington. I have one sister, one mother, one father and no brothers. Thus only four in the family. I was born in Central Point, Oregon, July 9, 1909. I am now fourteen years old.

I got all my Christmas presents tonight and I sure am happy. I got a necktie, a pair of arm bands, a pair of swell gloves with gauntlets, a Tarzan book, two pounds of plaster paris, a hair brush, this diary book, two dollars, and some candy. I think that’s a good bunch of swell presents.’

1 January 1924
‘I ate a lot of dinner and then went to the show and laughed so much at the comedy that I’d of liked to split the front of my shirt and the seat of my pants and maybe my collar or my stockings. The comedy was so funny that I was behind in my laughs when funny things came along and I didn’t get to laugh enough at everything, but when I got home I made up tor it by laughing a lot.’

6 July 1924
‘Great lapse of time. Pardon me for leaving out so much of my diary but I have forgotten and neglected to write it. Well, it is summer and school has just been out for a month. Therefore only two months left. I went to Sunday School and Church today. I have been working in the cannery. I have earned sixteen dollars in seven days. I guess all the work is over now. I went to the show yesterday that is the second show in 1924.’

29 July 1925
‘Seven months is quite a long time. It is almost August already, and vacation is going fast I was elected president of the Lower Junior Class for the coming semester and will be president of the Upper Juniors during the last semester. I am sixteen years old now. Mom wanted to take her trip back East this summer but there is not enough money. I thought sure we were going to get to take it but I guess now we are not. I worked a little over a month now in the cannery, right after school and earned $96.88, which helps a little bit.

I am now trying to sell my cartoons to some syndicates. I made a few strips and called them Simple Simon and These Modern Inventions, and sent them to the King Features Syndicate at New York. The King Features Syndicate sent them to the International Feature Syndicate, just a block away. They both had no use for the cartoons, so sent them back and I made some more, only they were not in strip form but were just one big picture, and were called Funny Features. I made a four line verse to go with each of them and then sent them off to the N.E.A. Service at Cleveland, Ohio. I haven’t got them back yet, though. I sent them sixteen days ago. This mornings mail hasn’t come yet; they might be coming this morning.

Dad has been gone for about six weeks. He lives in Portland now. I will go out and saw some more wood and then come back and write down whether my pictures came this morning.

My pictures are coming tomorrow, I guess. I got a letter today saying that the syndicate had no use for them. C. N. Landon of the Landon School of Cartooning is the art director of the syndicate, so of course he wants me to take a course in his school, and then I’ll get a job. I won’t do that but I’ll make eight more pictures and send them to another syndicate.’

23 February 1942
‘First enemy shells (from submarine off California coast) landed on U.S. continent in this war. One wonders what will happen a week, a month, or a year from now.’

Early March 1942
‘Phone rang at 3:35 A.M. Was dreaming of air raid. Phone call was from Warden Farrell: alert alarm. I dressed and dashed over to Ben Wells’ place. Couldn’t rouse him. Went to Bettesworth’s place and got him up. Reported to Farrell. He told me to rout out neighbors who might help. I went after Frank Wanamaker and called Sollie. Then all-clear signal came. Went back to bed.’