Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts

Monday, February 26, 2024

I am praying for your death

’The newspapers are attacking me more furiously than ever, for my speech on the 14th, and I have a swarm of abusive letters. One good lady says: “I am praying for your death; I have been very successful in two other cases.” The whole nation seems to be mad with rage and hatred. Nevertheless, on reading my speech again, I think it was rather unwise and provocative.’ This is from a diary kept by William Ralph Inge - who died 70 years ago today - during his time as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. He was a prolific author (being nominated three times for a Nobel Prize), and a very popular - if sometimes controversial - speaker.

Inge was born in 1860 in Crayke, Yorkshire, where his father, Rev. William Inge was then curate. He was educated at Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, where his academic brilliance was evident early on. He worked as an assistant master at Eton from 1884 to 1888, and also a Fellow of King’s College. He was ordained deacon in 1888, and priest in 1892. In 1905, he married Mary Spooner and they had five children.

Inge was a prolific author of articles, lectures, sermons and books. His writing spanned a wide array of subjects, including theology, philosophy, history, and social criticism, earning him the nickname ‘The Gloomy Dean’ due to his pessimistic views on modern civilisation and technology’s impact on society. He is probably best known for his works on Plotinus and neoplatonic philosophy, and on Christian mysticism. He was also a columnist for the Evening Standard for many years, finishing in 1946. 

In 1907, Inge moved to Jesus College, Cambridge, on being appointed Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity. However, in 1911, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith appointed him Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, a position he retained until his retirement in 1934. There he became a celebrated preacher - being often outspoken and provocative - who drew large congregations to the cathedral. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times; and he was awarded the Order of Merit in 1934, recognising his contributions to literature and philosophy. He died on 26 February 1954. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Encyclopedia.com.

Inge kept a diary during his time as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, which Macmillan published in 1950 as Diary of a Dean St Paul’s 1911-1934. This can be digitally borrowed from Internet Archive. Here is Inge’s own explanation for the book’s raison d’ĂȘtre.

‘When I resigned my office in 1934, Messrs. Longman published for me a small book of reminiscences called Vale, which I meant to be my ‘farewell’ to my public. The book was destroyed by enemy action, and several friends have expressed a wish that I would leave some recollection of my life at St. Paul’s. There have been threats that otherwise someone else might seek to draw my frailties from their dead abode, though I begged my family not to allow anything like a memoir to be compiled after my death, apart from the biographical notice which the British Academy prints of its deceased members. I had no suspicion, in 1934, that 1 should still be cumbering the ground fifteen years after my retirement, or I should have known that the cacoethes scribendi, the penman’s itch, is not to be resisted as long as publishers and readers are kind.

It was a strange experiment for a Prime Minister to uproot a shy scholar from his study table, and plunge him into the turmoil of London life. For I have no social gifts. I have inherited from my mother’s family, the Churtons, the faculty of being silent in several languages. I have been further handicapped by slowly increasing deafness, and by a ridiculous inability to remember faces. I have failed to recognise at least three duchesses, and a score of less exalted people. By rights I should have ended my days in college rooms, the world forgetting, by the world forgot. But I am glad to have escaped this fate. It was owing to my dear wife, who was greatly beloved in London, and had a singular power of winning the affection of all who knew her, that we were received into a circle of distinguished and wholly delightful friends, through whom we met many of the leading men and women in the national life.’

Here are several extracts from Inge’s diary.

18 April 1911
‘By the second post arrived a letter of great importance. Asquith tells me that he has the King’s consent to offer me the Deanery of St. Paul’s, vacant by the resignation of Dr. Gregory. I showed the letter to Kitty, and at first we could hardly believe it. I wrote to the Prime Minister to say that I felt rather overwhelmed by so unexpected an honour, and that I should like to consult the Archbishop of Canterbury before making up my mind. I did so, but I had really decided to accept. If the Prime Minister singles out a man who has never stirred a finger for preferment, who has no friends in high places and is not a political supporter, he must think that the choice is right. I ought not to refuse to go where I am sent. Kitty’s parents are in favour of my acceptance. My father-in-law said, “If you have no better reason for refusing than that you would rather live at Cambridge, it is your duty to accept.” ’

3 May 1911
‘I went to London and attended a party at Lambeth. The Archbishop and Mrs. Davidson were most kind. It was not altogether a pleasant beginning of my new work. I was incommoded financially by having to pay one-third of my stipend as pension. My nonagenarian predecessor had taken all the Dean’s appointments for the year in the first four months, so that I had no patronage of preachers till the end of the year. Worse still, he had refused to resign unless he was allowed to occupy the Deanery house till his death. This was a most improper arrangement, which not only put me to the greatest inconvenience, but made it very difficult for me to do my work properly. I went to a hotel; my wife and family remained at Cambridge.

In other ways the prospect seemed equally discouraging. Canon Pearce, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, said, “You have not even a casting vote. No one who is not an Anglo-Catholic has a chance of being appointed to a Chapter living.” I talked to the Archdeacon of London (Sinclair) about one or two things that I hoped to do. He said, “As long as Alexander and Newbolt are both here you are not going to be allowed to do anything.” These two men remained at St. Paul’s till near the end of my time there: one of them indeed much longer.

It is not generally known that Cathedral statutes differ widely. The older statutes give the Dean no independent power; those of the Reformation period give him a great deal. My friend Henson as Dean of Durham was under the statutes of Mary Tudor. He developed quite an affection for Bloody Mary, who would have made short work of him. I explained to Mr. Baldwin that at St. Paul’s the Chapter and not the Dean is what is called the Ordinary. “My dear Dean,” he replied, “nobody could suspect you of being the Ordinary.” I should not advise any man who loves power to accept the Deanery of St. Paul’s. The Dean is like a mouse watched by four cats.’

27 May 1911
‘I dined with the Prime Minister - a very mixed party, from royalties to journalists. Near me were Sir George Lewis the famous solicitor, and Sir John Hare the actor.’

10 June 1911
‘To Windsor, to preach before the King and Queen. I was met by a royal carriage drawn by two white horses, and by an enormous omnibus to carry my handbag. Two magnificent gentlemen escorted me to my apartments. The sitting-room contained portraits of Gladstone, Disraeli, Melbourne and other statesmen. In the evening a ‘page’, a splendid elderly personage, came to fetch me to the Red Drawing Room, where I was introduced to Lord Knollys, Lady Mary Trefusis, Lady Ampthill, and two pretty maids of honour. Then Their Majesties were announced. I took in Lady Ampthill, with the Queen on my left. The Queen, I heard afterwards, said, “What shall I talk about to this learned man?” and she said very little. I ought to have made conversation, though I had been told that it is not etiquette. The King afterwards talked to me mainly about his French tutor Hua, whom I remember as an Eton master. I do not know what they thought of my sermon next day, but they were very gracious to me.’ 

13 February 1912
‘I took the Chair at a meeting of the Sociological Society, where Dr. Saleeby read a paper on Eugenics. All through my time as Dean I took an active interest in Eugenics. I was a friend of Sir Francis Galton until his death. Vital statistics were an old hobby of mine, and I studied the population question in all its branches. After many years on the Council of the Eugenics Society I thought they were becoming too environmental, interested, in Galton’s phrase, in nurture rather than nature; and when they appointed Sir William Beveridge to give the Galton Lecture, I resigned my membership. To subsidise the teeming birth-rate of the slums is not the way to improve the quality of the population.’

19 April 1912
‘A great service for the victims of the Titanic. We were told that thousands were unable to get in.’

12 April 1917
‘I dined with the ‘Pilgrims’, invited by Sir Rider Haggard. I met Sir Charles Parsons, General Smuts, Lord d’Abernon, H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Page, the American Ambassador, made a fine speech.’ 

7 July 1917
‘We were warned of an approaching raid. During the Second Lesson people began to leave the church, and soon there was a series of tremendous explosions close at hand. The boys sang the anthem most pluckily. The Central Telegraph Office, 150 yards from the cathedral, was wrecked. I went round to the Choir House to thank the boys for their courage.’

30 November 1917
‘I lunched with Lady Vera Herbert, whose house is full of packing-cases for our prisoners in Germany.’

14 December 1917
‘A Meeting of the ‘League for promoting International Friendship through the Churches’. I took the opportunity to tell them some unpopular truths. “We cherish three impossible hopes: (1) that we can destroy German militarism. We cannot; they will only live for revenge. (2) A restoration of the balance of power. This means a mad competition in armaments and the suicide of Europe. (3) That we can force Germany to adopt our democratic system. They do not want government by mass-bribery, and will prefer a military dictatorship.” I do not want to be unduly discouraging. There is a real horror of war among the peoples; but in spite of the proverb it takes only one to make a quarrel.’

17 December 1917
‘The newspapers are attacking me more furiously than ever, for my speech on the 14th, and I have a swarm of abusive letters. One good lady says: “I am praying for your death; I have been very successful in two other cases.” The whole nation seems to be mad with rage and hatred. Nevertheless, on reading my speech again, I think it was rather unwise and provocative.’

31 December 1917
‘So ends another year of protracted nightmare. Whatever is the end of the war, Europe is ruined for my lifetime and longer. Nearly one-fifth of the upper and middle class of military age - the public school and university men, from whom the officers arc chosen, are dead, and there is no rift in the clouds anywhere. Our people, slow and reluctant to enter the war, are now mad with rage and hatred, and will sacrifice anything rather than make terms with the enemy. It is indeed a terrible time.’

Friday, February 9, 2024

Am I going crazy?

‘I guess I really am a queer fish. When I write poems, as I’ve done at a brisk rate for the past 4 hours, they come to me out of locked rooms - out of nowhere. It is the oddest thing! I feel hot, in the same way I imagine a poker player must feel hot. But what bothers me is my constant bouts of depression. Am I going crazy? What is wrong? Am I simply bitchy?’ This is an extract from the diaries of Alice Walker, the celebrated American writer and the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Today is her 80th birthday.

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker was born on 9 February 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. She grew up in a large sharecropper family during the era of segregation, but despite the challenges of her early life, including an accident that left her blind in one eye, she developed both an intellectual curiosity and a love of reading. She attended Spelman College, Atlanta, for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she graduated in 1965. Her college years were marked by active involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, and, in 1967,, she married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights attorney. The marriage took place in New York because interracial marriage was still then illegal in the South. They had one child, but would divorce ten years later. Following graduation, she briefly worked for the New York City Department of Welfare. After returning to the South, she took a job working for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Jackson, Mississippi.

Walker’s literary career began in the late 1960s, and led to the publication of a first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland in 1970 - with themes of family, racism, and the struggles of African Americans in the South. She moved to California which is where she wrote and published, in 1982, The Color Purple. The novel brought her international fame, and won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a critically-acclaimed film directed by Steven Spielberg and a successful Broadway musical.

Numerous novels, short story collections, essays, and volumes of poetry followed. However, Walker also involved herself wholeheartedly into various causes, including the civil rights movement, feminism, and environmentalism. Her work continues to inspire and challenge readers and writers around the world. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Walker’s official website, The Poetry Foundation, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Walker is a committed diarist having filled more than 60 journals through her life. In 2007, she placed these journals - along with hundreds of other documents and items from her personal archive - at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library in Atlanta. The journals, as well as certain business and financial files, were embargoed until 2040. However, in 2022, she chose to issue a collection of extracts from the embargoed journals in Gathering Blossoms Under Fire (Simon & Schuster), as edited by Valerie Boyd. She told The New York Times, ‘I want the journals to be used so that people can see this working through of disappointment, anger, sorrow, regret. So in that sense, it’s a medicine book.’ Much of the book can sampled at Googlebooks.

In her introduction, Boyd notes that the journal entries traverse an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., or “the King,” as she called him; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, partly to defy laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; the birth of her daughter; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the women’s movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, in sometimes equal measure, for her work and her activism; burying her mother; and her estrangement from her own daughter.’ The personal, the political, and the spiritual, she adds, are layered and intertwined in the revealing narrative that emerges from the journals. 

The journal extracts are divided up into four parts by decade: Marriage, Movement, and Mississippi - 1960s; The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom - 1970s; Be Nobody’s Darling - 1980s; You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down - 1990s. Here are several extracts from Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, mostly taken from the first part.

3 June 1966
‘Who cares to write stories “with punch?” Not I. Also I wonder if I could develop into an existentialist writer - actually I’m not sure what that means. An existentialist person understands the world is perhaps ending, and badly, and resolves to live a moral life anyhow.

I suppose I myself am an existentialist as much as I can understand its definition. All those months at Sarah Lawrence studying Camus, and Sartre, and it’s still rather vague - it would seem that whatever I wrote would probably be existential, doesn’t it? And yet it is not. I should probably become better acquainted with the potential of the short story. Right now I would like to do a story in the fashion of Ambrose Bierce. He is very much like Poe to me, even more terrifying, perhaps. Certainly more haunting than Ray Bradbury, whose stories I must also reconsider.’ 

27 June 1966
‘New York City. I have not left yet for Mississippi and feel so much anxiety about leaving my work that it seems almost absurd for me to go at all. But something draws me there, although I have no illusions about how much good I can do. I would like to go with Marian and Henry out through the woods and across those flatlands, going out so smoothly into the horizon.

The Upper East Side after the Lower East Side: too much glass, new cars, skinny girls and money. One must, I imagine, get used to both cleanliness and money and the fact that they are likely to make one sterile and sweet smelling, like a bar of soap.’

18 May 1967
‘I am afraid, worried, distracted, and it is an old-new feeling and quite unshakeable, although for Mel’s sake it must be overcome. There was a time when a mother-in-law’s shouts, as in a story, would have amused me; now they do not, of course. They fill me with dread for the knowledge that these shouts are unchangeable keeps me from being optimistic about a better future relationship.

I don’t think I know everything there is to know, but I do know that I love my husband. This pain each time he pains, sickness even in my body because he feels it, too. My life is double and our lives, one.

We are both nervous, jittery from caring so much about each other.’

4 December 1967
‘A lot has happened since my last entries, easily six or seven months ago. My life is more full than I ever thought it could be. And that is because of my love, not so much my work. Art will always copy life.

My husband has arrived and claimed me forever. He is The One; it is like a fairy tale in its finality - can there be any doubt that, no matter what we will live happily ever after? I did not believe I could become One with anyone - but now I am One. With M.

It seems true that one’s dreams might come true if one waits long enough and remains a hopeful virgin at heart.

The novel too is becoming a reality, albeit a slow one. Perhaps I should have stuck with Hemingway’s example - stories until the Novel was inevitable. I don’t know. Maybe I just write funny. In any case, I think I can see improvement in many themes, stories, “ideas.”

Mel and I are independent. No debts yet. I like this. It gives us freedom from people who only come to pry. Sometimes I wonder if we are more or less complicated (our lives) than when we were single. It is such a strange and sometimes fearful comfort: having someone to lean on.’

11 July 1968
‘After many months of wondering how I, as a married woman, could continue a personal diary, 1 found the answer (I think) quite by accident last night. And it happened when a third person, a girl we love, hurt my husband’s feelings. Then I realized, as I felt his pain, that he is my personal life and that the true joining has come about between us.

He was hurt because Barbara, our closest friend, still regards him on the nitty gritty level as white. I suppose I’m the only black person who does not. Indeed, we are shipwrecked on the American island, just us two against both black and white worlds, but how it makes our love keen! I am reminded of Voznesensky’s poem about pressured lovers being like two shells enclosing their pain but also their intense joy at being permitted by the gods such magnificent, almost heroic emotion.

How I would have been bored as a preacher’s wife!

Now that I’ve found my voice is big enough, occasionally, for two, there is so much to write about that I could not before. There is the growing animosity which blacks in Jackson have towards whites - but not towards the white Mississippi crackers who deserve it, but towards the white civil rights workers who in my opinion do not.

I am thinking now of how Ronnie’s head was split open by a young kid up in Bolivar. Ronnie! Who has worked his ass off every summer in Mississippi hauling black people to the polls -  because he is white and the black kid knew he wouldn’t fight back and wouldn’t call the police! It is so unfair. And then poor Ted Seaver, beaten to a pulp because he was a more effective organizer than his black “friend.” And then there is the black man from Boston who left his family to come work in Mississippi (wife, children; why didn’t he “work” in Roxbury, it needs it as much as Mound Bayou?) who threatened to beat up my husband? If he ever tried it I’d want to murder him and there’s no question I’d want Mel to press charges. Enough is enough! As far as I’m concerned, as long as Mel works to change this world into a better one he’s guilty of nothing. And of course to me there are no white people only white minds. Malcolm learned this, I suspect Baldwin knew it all along. How could my husband be white when we are together trying to make the world fit for our brown babies, our friends who are different colors outside but black by choice?

Barbara objected to Mel’s confidence in this country’s capacity to repress any black uprising. But she and I have said the same thing, made the same dour observation. After all this time though she resents hearing him say it as a white man. And though it is easy to understand her resentment, we are very hurt  - was it because we thought that among our small circle of friends we had abolished the concept of color based on skin color alone?’

11 April 1970
‘Jackson, Mississippi. I guess I really am a queer fish. When I write poems, as I’ve done at a brisk rate for the past 4 hours, they come to me out of locked rooms - out of nowhere. It is the oddest thing! I feel hot, in the same way I imagine a poker player must feel hot. But what bothers me is my constant bouts of depression. Am I going crazy? What is wrong? Am I simply bitchy? I think I will make an effort to get away for a little while. I feel locked inside myself. I feel cramped. And yet when did I ever have more? Somehow that is the problem. I am insecure or else a raging feminist. I resent so many small things - and god knows I don’t want to be picayune.

Hurray! The novel is done - the galleys done, the book jacket already printed (according to Hiram). I cannot believe it - How long it has been, almost three years!

Now I have so many questions going around in my head. Who to send what stuff to. Isn’t that a switch?

Who am I? Why did I lose my wedding ring? Why do I go passive & get headachy so often?’

21 August 1973
‘So now I know - it is possible to fall in love (all over again, or perhaps for the first time) with one’s husband! Because I am in love with Mel. I am becoming sexually awakened truly for the first time. Liking sex and easy about it. It has probably been hard work over the years for Mel - luckily it was work he enjoyed.

Ruth tells me that Mama says “nothing happened” when she made love with Daddy until after Curtis was born, when she was in her thirties. Perhaps it is true that women develop later than they seem to.’

I would like to be a man

Amy Lowell, a colourful and influential personality in American poetry during the first quarter of the 20th century, was born 150 years ago today. Apart from writing her own poetry, she also promoted contemporary and historical poets; and she authored the introduction to an anthology of very early Japanese diaries translated into English. She did not, it seems, keep a diary herself apart from during a few years when still a teenager. These youthful diaries have been used by biographers to show a marked youthful preference for friendship with, and love of, other girls.

Lowell was born on 9 February 1874 into a wealthy and prominent Brookline (Massachusetts) family. She was educated at home and at private schools, travelling widely with her family, but she never attended college. She had two brothers who went on to achieve some fame, one as an astronomer, and one as president of Harvard College. Amy is said to have compensated for a lack of university education by reading avidly, and through collecting books. In her late 20s, she turned to poetry, not publishing, though, until 1910 when a poem of hers appeared in Atlantic Monthly. Two years later she issued her first book of poems, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, which was followed by Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds.

From 1912 or so, Lowell and the actress Ada Dwyer Russell were reputed to be lovers, and Russell is said to be the subject of Lowell’s more erotic works. The two women travelled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who then became both an influence and a critic of her work. In particular, Lowell is considered to have displaced Pound as leader of the so-called Imagist poets (considered by some to be forerunners of the Modernist movement); and Pound, reportedly, considered suing Lowell over her use of the word ‘Imagist’ in the title of a series of anthologies.

During her later years, Encyclopaedia Britannica says, Lovell was the most striking figure in American poetry: ‘Her vivid and powerful personality, her independence and zest made her conspicuous, as did her scorn of convention in such defiant gestures as smoking cigars.’ Apart from publishing her own poems, Lowell was also a keen promoter of both contemporary and historical poets. She died in 1925; and the following year was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection, What’s O’Clock.

Further biographical information is available from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, Modern American Poetry, or Wikipedia.

Lowell did not leave behind, as far as I can tell, any adult diaries. However, biographers have made good use of a few teenage journals which are held in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Melissa Bradshaw, for example, in Amy Lowell, Diva Poet (Ashgate Publishing, 2011) says in her introduction (available to read online at Googlebooks):

‘[Lowell’s] adolescent journals show that she regards her friends’ obsessive interest in boys as curious, and their mistaken assumption that a diary entry confessing love for a girl ("Oh my darling!!!!! My darling!!!!!!”) is directed at a boy amusing (“Walter; oh it is too rich”). In the diary entries that follow, however, she concedes that she might marry “if I ever find a man I can love and who will love me equally and will have me,” showing that she does not view marriage as a given but rather a choice predicated on companionate love.’

Towards the end of her first chapter, Bradshaw adds: ‘Entry after entry, however, chronicles her intense, passionate, unrequited love for several female friends. In these entries, Lowell tries to imagine how a life devoted to loving women might unfold and what it might look like. Unable to quite conceptualise this, she instead wishes to be a man: “I can imagine falling in love with a woman, but not with a man, I should like to be a man, and fall in love with a woman.” In one particularly anguished entry, routinely ignored by biographers, Lowell clearly articulates her desire for women, her despair at ever being allowed to fulfil her desires, and her suspicion that others might feel similarly’:

26 January 1890
‘Nobody could ever love me I know. I am but a contemptible being, but I want love, love, love. I know I am making a fool of myself but shurely there are others who have such thoughts. . . If I were a man I’d ask [Patty Storrow, a friend] to be my wife. But I am a woman. I can only ask her to love me and and I cannot do that. . . Men I could not love. My ideal is too high. But I want, need, yearn, for the love of a strong, tender woman. Oh God! Bless her and help me! Amen!’

Elsewhere in Bradshaw’s book this extract is also quoted:

8 January 1889
‘Oh! Wouldn’t I like to be a man . . . [B]eing a man would be fine; no dependence, go where you please, do what you please . . . Oh well, what me be must be. I would like to be a man. Now.’

Amy Lowell, it is also worth noting, wrote the introduction to a 1920 book called Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan, translated by Annie Shepley Omori and Kochi Doi, and published by Houghton Mifflin in the US and Constable in the UK. The full text and illustrations are widely available on the internet, at Internet Archive and at A Celebration of Women Writers hosted by Penn Libraries. The book has twice featured in The Diary Review before - Japan, a millennium ago about Shikibu Murasaki and A lady of Old Japan about the Sarashina Diary.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 9 February 2014.

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

What’s in My Journal

‘Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean
Thing, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.
But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space for knickknacks, and for Alaska.’
This is part of a poem by the American writer, William Stafford, born 110 years ago today. He is said to have kept a daily journal for 50 years, but the only published extracts available online show the journal to be more a collection of epigrams and political/philosophical thoughts than a personal diary. 

Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, on 17 January 1914. During the Depression, his family moved around in search of work, and he contributed by doing odd jobs, often on farms. He studied at the University of Kansas, and was drafted into the armed forces in 1941. However, as a registered conscientious objector, he performed alternative service, forestry and soil conservation, until 1946 in the Civilian Public Service camps. While working in California in 1944, he met and married Dorothy Hope Frantz, with whom he later had four children. He received an M.A. also from the University of Kansas in 1947. His thesis - the prose memoir Down In My Heart describing his experience in the forest service camps - was published in 1948.

After moving to Oregon, Stafford taught English at Lewis & Clark College. In 1954, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. He was already 48 when his first major collection of poetry was published, Traveling Through the Dark, which won the 1963 National Book Award for Poetry. Despite his late start, he was a frequent contributor to magazines and anthologies and eventually published 57 volumes of poetry. His poetry often explored themes of peace, mindfulness, and the human experience. He believed in the power of everyday moments and the importance of observing the world with a keen and empathetic eye. His work is said to be characterised by its clarity, simplicity, and a reverence for the ordinary. He died in 1993. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia and the Poetry Foundation.

According to Wikipedia, Stafford kept a daily journal for 50 years. Although these journals do not appear to have been published in their own right some extracts can be found in Every War Has Two Losers edited by Kim Stafford and published by Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, in 2003. This can be borrowed digitally from Internet Archive.

‘In editing this unusual book,’ Kim Stafford says in his forward, ‘I have chosen in many instances to represent my fathers unpublished writing exactly as he penned it in the early morning, alone with his thoughts. The language is sometimes very compact, the thought line intuitive, and the effect both intimate and challenging. The poems are represented as he revised and published them, and most of the interviews he had a chance to review. Some of the Daily Writings, however, were never revised, and they live here with you in their native form. I invite you to read these as they were written: attentive, deliberate, in a spirit of welcome as thoughts come forth.’

Here are several extracts from Stafford’s journal as found in Every War Has Two Losers.

25 November 1970
‘When a war looms, the enemy emerges as wrong and a menace. How long before was it wrong and a menace? What was done then? Should more have been done earlier? Could it have been swayed earlier? Were the aggressive people now among those trying to sway earlier?’ 

1 December 1974
‘Divisions among groups bring forward aggressive leaders, whose function requires of them an emphasizing of positive qualities in their own group, a tolerance of distortion in regard to the “enemy,” a temporary using of means ordinarily frowned upon. War leaders are liars.’

11 October 1978
‘Living traditionally, the country life, we cultivate the ground. We know the seed will produce after its kind. Why then do we sow suspicion and hatred in some places? If we show goodwill, honesty, reliability, industry, thrift, cheer, will these tend to produce those qualities in others around us? And the contrary is true too?

But do we have enemies? Whence came their feelings toward us? Can a serenity view and understand?’

12 July 1981
‘You can’t help noticing these days that right hasn’t prevailed.’

12 September 1981
‘The wind you walk against but do not feel is ignorance. Your foolish face has happiness on one side, but the world pressed on the other.’

And, finally, here is a poem penned by Stafford in 1981

What’s in My Journal

‘Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean
Thing, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.
But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space for knickknacks, and for
Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can't find them. Someone’s terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine.’

Saturday, January 6, 2024

I must forget how to write

I must forget how to write. I must unlearn what has been taught me.’ This is John Wieners, an American beat poet born 90 years ago today, writing in his diary aged but 24. He would go on to become part of the poetic renaissance of the late 1950s and 60s. His poetry, some said, brought with it a new candour regarding sexual and drug-induced experiences.

Wieners was born on 6 January 1934, in Milton, Massachusetts. He studied at Boston College between 1950 and 1954, and then at Black Mountain College under the poets Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. He worked for a while as a stage manager/actor for the Poet’s Theater in Cambridge, and also began to edit the literary magazine Measure.

From 1958 to 1960 Wieners lived in San Francisco. He actively participated in the city’s so-called poetry renaissance, and published The Hotel Wentley Poems. He returned to Boston in 1960, where he was committed to a psychiatric hospital for a time. In 1962-1963, he lived in New York with Herbert Huncke, another poet, but again returned to Boston where he published his second book of poems, Ace of Pentacles.

Wieners enrolled in the graduate programme at the University of Buffalo, where he became a teaching fellow. After another period of institutionalisation, he moved to live in Joy Street, Boston, where he would remain; and he became more active politically, particularly against war and in support of the gay movement. In 1975, he published Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike, subtitled Cinema decoupages; verses, abbreviated prose insights, but produced little else after.

Wieners gave one of his last readings in 1999, at the Guggenheim Museum, celebrating an exhibit by the painter Francesco Clemente - the two of them having published Broken Women together. Wieners died in 2002. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, and The Poetry Foundation has this assessment: ‘Wieners’ poetry combines candid accounts of sexual and drug-related experimentation with jazz-influenced improvisation, placing both in a lyrical structure. In [one interview], Wieners stated, “I try to write the most embarrassing thing I can think of.” As Robert Creeley observed, “His poems had nothing else in mind but their own fact.” ’

In an obituary published by The Independent, John Ward summarised Wieners’ influence: ‘[He] was a key figure in the poetic renaissance of the late 1950s and 60s. In his work a new candour regarding sexual and drug-induced experience co-existed with both a jazz-related aesthetic of improvisation and a more traditional concern with lyric form.’

A few extracts from Wieners’ diaries were published while he was still alive, in 1996, by Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, under the title The Journal of John Wieners is to be called 707 Scott Street for Billie Holiday 1959. It starts with ‘Two Short Histories’ on ‘How This Book Came To Be’.  Lewis Warsh writes: ‘ln 1972, William Corbett and I visited John in his apartment at 44 Joy Street in Boston with the hope of getting poems from him for our new magazine (edited with Lee Harwood), The Boston Eagle. I remember John opening a trunk filled with ledger-sized journals with old-fashioned marble covers. “I’d love to read them someday,” I said, thinking out loud, but Wieners caught the genuine interest in my tone and presented one to me. [. . .]

When I was finished [transcribing] I had 77 manuscript pages, a book. On the inside cover of the ledger there was the title: 707 Scott Street, for Billie Holliday. I published a few pages of the journal in an issue of The World, the literary magazine of the Poetry Project (an issue devoted to autobiographical writing which I was guest-editing); then, for almost twenty years, the transcript of the journal disappeared. It was the interest of the poet Peter Gizzi who had heard that such a journal existed, that made me go searching for it. I never presented John with a finished copy of the transcript, though I do remember visiting him again and returning the original, not that it would have mattered (or so he led me to believe) whether I’d kept it or not.’

And in the other Short History, Fanny Howe writes: ‘In 707 Scott Street [Wieners] writes, “and if I cannot speak in poetry it is because poetry is reality to me, and not the poetry we read, but find revealed in the estates of being around us.” John’s poetry has always been the closest thing possible to a new form of speech, one that narrows the gap between longing and calling. These pages from the fifties live in that “estate” as much as his spoken words to others do now.

Estates of being exist as streets, seasons, people, songs and while the placement of his poetics could be cordoned off by a period in “the limbo of contemporary America that has passed - a poetics that predates post-modern rhetoric and the strange fixation with an Otherness that he would not recognise - his unembittered position as an “unknown” witness of the dispossessed is absolutely present across time.’

The Wikipedia entry on Wieners makes reference to three books, all published posthumously, which also contain extracts from his diaries. Kidnap Notes Next is a 2002 collection of poems and journal entries edited by Jim Dunn in 2002. A Book of Prophecies (2007, Bootstrap Press) contains a manuscript discovered in the Kent State University archive’s collection by poet Michael Carr. It was a journal written by Wieners in 1971, and opens with a poem titled 2007. Thirdly, in 2005, City Lights Books published Stars Seen in Person: selected journals. This can be digitally borrowed from Internet Archive.

Here are several entries from 707 Scott Street thanks to Green Integer (which evolved out of Sun & Moon Press and, for a while, made the book freely available online as a pdf).

8 March 1958
‘The sun shines. Miss Kids is across asleep on the couch. She wakes and says “I dreamt I just put on...” I cant hear the rest. She goes back to sleep. Dana is asleep in the bedroom beside this one where the sun fills three windows. Miss Kids’ dark glasses sound/crack on the floor.

I must forget how to write. I must unlearn what has been taught me.

Last night I dreamed Alan appeared in a hallway where I leaned against a lintel; there were open doors on all sides and he presented me with a doll, his doll, the country one whose dress he ironed 3000 miles away. He was smiling, a great smile and I still see his white teeth and the black beard on his face. She was dressed in black, the doll, and her long thick hair was tied back the way I had left it. He had put it on top of one of those innumerable chests he had around his house. And I take it as a sign that all is well, I am and he is, today with the doll handed between us, he wanted me to have what he named was his. It is only Miss Kids and Dana who have hangovers. I must not let them hang me up.

She awakes again and asks “Is it cloudy outside yet?” I say “No” and an automobile horn busts our ears and the Chinese kids overhead beat and stomp on the floor.

These days shall be my poems, these words what I leave behind as mine, my record up against time. It is all very sad that we have to fight it. Possibly I may come to love time and its taking of my days.

“It well may be, I do not think I would.”

Right now, it is very fine. The cable car track shuttles in right inside the street and they empty the mail-box. A motor-scooter or motorcycle guns its motor and what bright flesh runs on Leavenworth Street. The 80 bus stops. Miss Kids has the Mohawk blanket that we (Dana and I) bought in the Morgan Memorial up to her eyes and her hair, her yellow hair is all over the pillow and her shut eye-lids. The cable car conductor rings the bell twice. It also stops. Only man and time move. And the space we are given to inhabit, so fast it is thru our fingers.

I must learn how not to write. I must watch with my 5 senses.

“the 5 perfections that are the 5 hindrances” and I must nail down those who would, all that would hang me up.

The 80 bus going the other way, to Market Street, sounds its squashed beep, peculiar to San Francisco, where they are afraid any loud noise would start another earthquake. And yet we all go around screaming.

There is not enough sound in the air. Miss Kids and Dana have headaches from last night.

I must stop being wise. Miss Kids wakes and says “Is it late?”

“Almost two.”

“Another day ruined.” She stretches her long wax arms (paraffin) on the mohair couch. “I feel fine now, Kids.” The sun puts gold on her nose. “Kids, they’re after me.” I tell her “Kids, you look like a fucked Alice-in-Wonderland. And your hands are swollen,”

She looks at them. “Dana did it.” ’

18 June 1958
‘Miss Lollipop is full of pain this morning. Her wing bone in the back. Her legs are black and blue. She ran her hands over me showing me where the pain is. We sat up all night listening to jazz and then at dawn, rock and roll. Her history as far as I know it consists of 8 arrests, 4 husbands. Her father was chief of the narcotics bureau in Sacramento. She lives in the Broadway Hotel with an Armenian piano player. She bends her neck as one of her boys rubs his hands into her. She wears a black bra. She does not complain.

Miss Lollipop has one of the most rare diseases known to medical history. A form of low grade bacteria that causes her shape to change every day. One day pregnant and full of gas, the next shapely. As she puts it, “I’ve had a lot of trouble with my insides.” ’

26 July 1958
‘On the road again. America does not change. Nor do we, Olson says. We only reveal more of ourselves. Riding in the car with all the windows open. How can I rise to the events of our lives. I am a shrew and nagging bitch as my mother was. I am filled with doubt and too passive. I go where I am told. Anywhere. Take pleasure in doing what I am told. There is no comfort in Nature or God except for the weak. It is my fellow men that deliver me my life. Otherwise I wrap up in myself like an evening primrose in the sun. Nature is good for analogy. We think we learn lessons from her but she deserts us at the moment of action. That is why we remain savages. Underneath. And our civilization remains a jungle. Live it at night and see.

But traveling on the road to Sausalito, San Francisco then Big Sur, I see how much the earth still surrounds us. Willow Road juts out in my memory. Mission San Rafael Archangel. Redwood Highway. Where man is going now, who knows. The earth no longer need be his home. Maybe this means the end of the old world. And man, on the minutest of planets may and can range thru all of space. To the very frontiers, limits, barriers of outer worlds. Lucky Drive. End construction project. With what frightening speed we move ahead. This must be necessary: Paradise Drive. The children are quieting down now. The witch drives her old Chevrolet, her long black hair blowing out the window.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 6 January 2014.

Thursday, December 28, 2023

An anguish of suffering

‘On way home, at night, an anguish of suffering in the thought that I can never hope to have an intellectual companion at home.’ This is George Gissing, a British novelist, a purveyor of unrepentant gloom according to some, who died 120 years ago today. As a young man he became disastrously involved with a prostitute, and, later, he married a woman who went mad. His diaries were published in 1978, and are said to shed light on his extraordinary life. However, Gissing’s gloomy novels are very much out of fashion at present, and the diaries have long been out of print.

Gissing was born in Wakefield in 1857, where his father was a chemist. Although apparently destined for a brilliant academic career, he failed to complete his education at Owens College, Manchester, because of a disastrous involvement with a prostitute, for whom he stole money. He was caught and imprisoned for a month. After his release, he went to the US for a year where he undertook literature and philosophy studies.

On returning to England in 1878, Gissing worked both as a tutor and a journalist while also writing and publishing novels such as Workers in the Dawn, The Unclassed, and Demos, which focused on the degrading effects of poverty. He was married twice, once to the prostitute and once to a servant girl, Edith Alice Underwood, but neither marriage brought him happiness. Edith gave him two children, but she was eventually certified insane.

In total, Gissing wrote over 20 novels (New Grub Street and The Odd Women being among the most well known), some of which, with a writer as the main character, were quite autobiographical. He also wrote more than a hundred short stories, literary criticism, essays, and many letters. Commentators say there is an unrepentant gloom about much of his writing. He travelled abroad several times; and, on one journey to Italy, was accompanied by H. G. Wells.

In the last decade of his life, Gissing became involved with Clara Collet. She helped take care of him and his two children, but was then disappointed when Gissing fell in love with a French woman, Gabrielle Fleury. Unable to get a divorce from Edith, he moved to France to live with Gabrielle. He died from emphysema - after catching a chill during a winter walk - aged only 46 on 28 December 1903. Further biographical information on Gissing can be found at Wikipedia, The George Rylands Library (University of Manchester), The Victorian Web, Victorian Secrets, and also in a 1948 article by George Orwell and reviews of a recent biography, George Gissing: A Life by Paul Delany, in The Telegraph or The Guardian.

More than 70 years after Gissing’s death, in 1978, The Harvester Press Limited (UK) and Bucknell University Press (US) published London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England - The Diary of George Gissing as edited by Pierre Coustillas. At the time of publication, the publishers stated: ‘Very few major novelists have left personal diaries. Where these exist they are a record of great interest, to the student of society, of literature and to the psychologist. George Gissing’s diary is probably the only one covering the late-Victorian period that has so far remained unpublished.’

There is also this from the publishers: ‘Professor Pierre Coustillas, perhaps the best known of all Gissing scholars, has edited and introduced the diary and placed it in its general social and literary context while also relating it to Gissing’s life and work. The editorial apparatus, including a ‘Who’s Who’ in the diary throws light on several hundred people contemporary with Gissing, and on many events which played a significant part in the writer’s extraordinary life. Professor Coustillas relates the diary to the themes and spirit of Gissing’s work.’ The published diary can be freely borrowed digitally from Internet Archive (log-in required).


1 March 1888
‘Let me describe this room. It was the first floor back; so small that the bed left little room to move. She [his mother] took it unfurnished, for 2/9 a week; the furniture she brought was: the bed. one chair, a chest of drawers, and a broken deal table. On some shelves were a few plates, cups, etc. Over the mantelpiece hung several pictures, which she had preserved from old days. There were three engravings: a landscape, a piece by l.andseer, and a Madonna of Raphael. There was a portrait of Byron, and one of Tennyson. There was a photograph of myself, taken 12 years ago - to which, the landlady tells me, she attached special value, strangely enough. Then there were several cards with Biblical texts, and three cards such as are signed by those who “take the pledge” - all bearing date during the last six months.

On the door hung a poor miserable dress and a worn out ulster; under the bed was a pair of boots, linen she had none; the very covering of the bed had gone save one sheet and one blanket. I found a number of pawn tickets, showing that she had pledged these things during last summer - when it was warm, poor creature! All the money she received went in drink; she used to spend my weekly 15/- the first day or two that she had it. Her associates were women of so low a kind that even Mrs. Sherlock did not consider them respectable enough to visit her house.

I drew out the drawers. In one I found a little bit of butter and a crust of bread, - most pitiful sight my eyes ever looked upon. There was no other food anywhere. The other drawers contained a disorderly lot of papers: there I found all my letters, away back to the American time. In a cupboard were several heaps of dirty rags; at the bottom there had been coals, but none were left. Lying about here and there were medicine bottles, and hospital prescriptions.

She lay on the bed covered with a sheet. I looked long, long at her face, but could not recognize it. It is more than three years, I think, since I saw her, and she had changed horribly. Her teeth all remained, white and perfect as formerly.

I took away very few things, just a little parcel: my letters, my portrait, her rent-book, a certificate of life-assurance which had lapsed, a copy of my Father’s “Margaret” which she had preserved, and a little workbox, the only thing that contained traces of womanly occupation.

Came home to a bad, wretched night. In nothing am I to blame; I did my utmost; again and again I had her back to me. Fate was too strong. But as I stood beside that bed, I felt that my life henceforth had a firmer purpose. Henceforth I never cease to bear testimony against the accursed social order that brings about things of this kind. I feel that she will help me more in her death than she balked me during her life. Poor, poor thing!’

26 September 1891
‘Clouded. Read Robertson’s life. Letter from Lawrence & Bullen, the new publishers, saying that Roberts had told them that I am engaged on a 1-vol. story, and offering to publish it for me at 6/ -, giving me 1/- on each copy; also willing to pay £100 on account. Note from Roberts, who is near Corfe Castle. The Illustd London News of to-day, in an article called “London in Fiction”, has this passage: “In such a book no inconsiderable part would be played by the Temple, which has been the happy hunting ground of so many of our novelists, from Sir Walter Scott to Mr. George Gissing”. The mention is good, but I have never made use of the Temple.’

6 October 1891
‘Reply from Watt. Longman won’t make an offer; MS sent on to Bentley. Wrote answer, saying I couldn’t wait after October, but on second thoughts decided not to send it, as I still possess £27. From Willersey came a basket of fine pears, addressed to Edith. Last night a furious gale, with heavy rain, and rain all to-day. In evening got the first page of new novel written.’

24 January 1893
‘Dull, warm. Wrote 4pp. of story. On way home, at night, an anguish of suffering in the thought that I can never hope to have an intellectual companion at home. Condemned for ever to associate with inferiors—and so crassly unintelligent. Never a word exchanged on anything but the paltry everyday life of the household. Never a word to me, from anyone, of understanding sympathy—or of encouragement. Few men, I am sure, have led so bitter a life.- Read half Bk III St Augustine, and some pages of [Cicero’s] “De Oratore”.’

7 February 1895
‘Terrible weather. Reports of 35° of frost from the Midlands. Worked well, though against terrible odds - hands frozen and feet like stones. Did 4pp. Got from lib. “Children of the Ghetto”[by Israel Zangwill]. Received Crabbe. Present of parkin from Mother. New servant seems satisfactory.’

9 February 1895
‘Frost harder than ever. Wrote only 1/2 p. Article of 2 cols, in Spectator to-day, an attack on me for my “perverse idealism”. Roberts writes to ask if he may write a critical article on me for the Fortnightly.’

9 August 1896
‘Nothing could be more difficult than my position as regards the boy Walter. All but every statement made to him he answers with a blunt contradiction; to all but every bidding he replies “I shan’t”. As I sit in the room, where the nurse-girl is present, he calls me all manner of abusive names. I said to him this afternoon, that, as it was too windy to go out, he had better rest an hour. “Not in your bedroom”, was his harsh reply. “I’ll rest in mother’s room, but not in yours.” And to-morrow, on some trifling provocation, he would make precisely the opposite reply. He knows there is no harmonv between his mother and me, and he begins to play upon the situation - carrying tales from one to the other, etc. The poor child is ill-tempered, untruthful, precociously insolent, surprisingly selfish. I can see that Wakefield may have a good influence, but only the merest beginnings show as yet. I should like to know how the really wise and strong father would act in this position. But no wise and strong man could have got into it. Talk of morals! What a terrible lesson is the existence of this child, born of a loveless and utterly unsuitable marriage.’

20 December 1898
‘Fine, frosty. Did 3pp. Eczema greatly better, George Whale advises me to send the sheriff a doctor’s certificate as excuse for non-attendance at Kingston. Wrote to Childcott for one. Reed circular from a Committee getting up fund for Harold Frederic’s widow and four legitimate children. As the youngest of these children is 10, and the eldest 20, I wrote to the Sec[retary, John Stokes,] asking whether anything is to be done to help the other family of young children, whose position is in every way much harder.’

10 December 1899
‘Have been up all night. A furious gale blowing. E. in long miserable pain; the Doctor has just given her chloroform, and says that the blackguard business draws to an end.

5.15. Went to the study door, and heard the cry of the child. Nurse, speedily coming down, tells me it is a boy. Wind howling savagely. So, the poor girl’s misery is over, and she has what she earnestly desired.

Sent notes to E.’s people in London, and one to Mother. Got through day without going to bed. Corrected some proofs. The wind, after lulling at mid-day, grew furious again towards night.

The baby has a very ugly dark patch over right eye. Don’t know the meaning of it.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 28 December 2013.

Friday, December 22, 2023

Beatrix and Benjamin

Beatrix Potter - author and illustrator of the much-loved Peter Rabbit books - died 80 years ago today. As a teenager and young woman, Potter kept a secret diary written in code. This was not deciphered and published until more than 20 years after her death, but it shows how (long before publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit) she was already writing to herself about her rabbit, Mr Benjamin Bunny - very much the star of her diary - in a style similar to that of the books she would publish later on.

Beatrix Potter was born in London in 1866, the only daughter in a cultured family with inherited wealth. She was educated at home, and spent much time painting, using specimens from the nearby Natural History Museum. The family regularly spent summer and early autumn in rented houses in the Lake District and Scotland. She kept rabbits and other animals as pets. Her parents entertained many guests, including Hardwicke Rawnsley who was to become one of the founders of the National Trust. He, in particular, encouraged her drawing.

Another friend, Frederick Warne, published, in 1902, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, a book which came about because of the illustrated letters Potter had been sending to a sick child. Other books - now famous around the world - followed, as did her engagement to Warne’s son Norman. However, Norman died tragically in 1905. That same year, Potter bought Hill Top Farm near Sawrey in the English Lake District, though she continued to be based in London. And then, in 1909, she bought Castle Farm over the road from Hill Top Farm (now a Potter museum).

Potter remained single until 1913, when she married William Heelis, a solicitor in Hawkshead. They moved to live at Castle Cottage, the renovated house at Castle Farm, and together, ran the farm; later they enlarged it with the help of an inheritance from Beatrix’s father (see Lancashire Life for more on Castle Cottage). Though all of the Peter Rabbit books had been published by this time, she continued to produce occasional books, some of them Peter Rabbit related, for her publisher, Frederick Warne.

In 1930, Potter purchased half of Monk Coniston, a romantic Gothic-style house, with the National Trust agreeing to purchase the other half. Potter, however, managed the whole estate and its many farms - with an increasing interest in conservation - for seven years, until the Trust was able to buy most of it back. Today, Monk Coniston is leased from the Trust for use as a hotel. When Potter died - on 22 December 1943 - she left several other farms and much land to the National Trust, together with some celebrated flocks of Herdwick sheep.

Further biographical information is readily available online at Wikipedia, the Beatrix Potter Society, Frederick Warne & Co’s Peter Rabbit website, the Visit Cumbria website, or the V&A which holds the extensive Linder (see below) archive of Potter work.

From the age of fifteen until her early 30s, Potter kept a detailed diary of her life written in a secret code. This code remained un-deciphered until the late 1950s, when Leslie Linder, an engineer and collector of Potter drawings, found the key and then worked painstakingly to decipher and transcribe the diaries. The Journal of Beatrix Potter - 1881 to 1897 was finally published by Frederick Warne in 1966.

A chapter towards the front of the book, written by Linder, describes the code in some detail, and how he cracked it. The chapter starts: ‘From about the age of fourteen until she was thirty, Beatrix Potter kept a Journal in her own privately-invented code-writing. It appears that even her closest friends knew nothing of this code-writing. She never spoke of it, and only one instance has come to light where it was mentioned. This was in a letter to her much-loved cousin [. . .] written five weeks before Beatrix Potter died, in which she described it as “apparently inspired by a united admiration for Boswell and Pepys”, continuing, “when I was young I already had the itch to write, without having any material to write about (the modern young author is not damped by such considerations). I used to write long-winded descriptions, hymns (!) and records of conversations in a kind of cipher shorthand which I am now unable to read even with a magnifying glass.” ’

From January 1987, Linder explains, Potter put her journal aside. He concludes the chapter as follows: ‘From now onwards the keeping of a Journal appears to have been put aside as Beatrix Potter became more and more absorbed in the planning of her books. It is of interest to note, however, that in later years she sometimes wrote odd notes and even fragments of stories in code-writing, but it was never used again for the purpose of a Journal.’ Much of The Journal of Beatrix Potter can be read online freely at Googlebooks.

From July to October 1892, Potter stayed at Heath Park, Birnam, Perthshire
20 August 1892
‘Still somewhat disposed. After breakfast taking Mr. Benjamin Bunny to pasture at the edge of the cabbage bed with his leather dog-lead, I heard a rustling, and came a little wild rabbit to talk to him, it crept half across the cabbage bed and then sat up on its hind legs, apparently grunting. I replied, but the stupid Benjamin did nothing but stuff cabbage. The little animal evidently a female, and of a shabby appearance, nibbling, advanced to about three strap lengths on the other side of my rabbit, its face twitching with excitement and admiration for the beautiful Benjamin, who at length caught sight of it round a cabbage, and immediately bolted. He probably took it for Miss Hutton’s cat.’

21 August 1892
‘Went into the garden immediately after breakfast, but saw nothing of the wild rabbit except its tracks. Benjamin’s mind has at last comprehended gooseberries, he stands up and picks them off the bush, but has such a comical little mouth, it is a sort of bob cherry business.’

22 August 1892
‘Very hot. Went to Mrs. McIntosh’s to try and photograph Charlie Lumm’s fox at Calley, but with very little advantage except that I was touched with the kindness of Mrs. McIntosh. She let the pony stand in their stall, gave me a glass of milk, and tramped up the wood with me to the Under-keeper’s cottage.

The wood is very beautiful at the bottom of Craigie-barns, such tall Scotch firs, and the Game keeper’s cottage with its bright old-fashioned flowers and a row of bee hives. The fox proved a tyke, tearing round and round the tree, in the absence of Charlie Lumm, but as things turned out, it did not signify.

Coming down we passed Eel Stew, with high post railings where her Grace’s supply of eels are preserved, having been trapped in the Lochs. Her Grace will have two or three cooked for supper every evening almost, when she is at home, at which information I was much amazed.’

30 October 1892
‘When I was walking out Benjamin I saw Miss Hutton’s black cat jumping on something up the wood. I thought it was too far off to interfere, but as it seemed leisurely I went up in time to rescue a poor little rabbit, fast in a snare. The cat did not hurt it, but I had great difficulty in slackening the noose round its neck. I warmed it at the fire, relieved it from a number of fleas, and it came round. It was such a little poor creature compared to mine. They are regular vermin, but one cannot stand by to see a thing mauled about from one’s friendship for the race. Papa in his indignation pulled up the snare. I fancy our actions were much more illegal than Miss Hutton’s.

After dinner I was half amused, half shocked, to see her little niece Maggie hunting everywhere for the wire. I just had enough sense not to show the stranger to Benjamin Bounce, but the smell of its fur on my dress was quite enough to upset the ill-regulated passions of that excitable buck rabbit. Whether he thought I had a rival in my pocket, or like a Princess in a Fairy Tale was myself metamorphosed into a white rabbit I cannot say, but I had to lock him up.

Rabbits are creatures of warm volatile temperament but shallow and absurdly transparent. It is this naturalness, one touch of nature, that I find so delightful in Mr. Benjamin Bunny, though I frankly admit his vulgarity. At one moment amiably sentimental to the verge of silliness, at the next, the upsetting of a jug or tea-cup which he immediately takes upon himself, will convert him into a demon, throwing himself on his back, scratching and spluttering. If I can lay hold of him without being bitten, within half a minute he is licking my hands as though nothing has happened.

He is an abject coward, but believes in bluster, could stare our old dog out of countenance, chase a cat that has turned tail. Benjamin once fell into an Aquarium head first, and sat in the water which he could not get out of, pretending to eat a piece of string. Nothing like putting a face upon circumstances.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 22 December 2013.

Saturday, December 2, 2023

A very provincial lady

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the death of E. M. Delafield, a British writer much loved for The Diary of a Provincial Lady, first published in 1930, and its sequels. Although classed as fiction, the books - a journal of the life of an upper-middle class Englishwoman living in a Devon village - are considered to be thinly-veiled autobiography.

Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture was born in Steyning, Sussex, in 1890, the elder daughter of a count and a novelist. During the First World War, she worked as a nurse, and she published her first novel Zella Sees Herself. In 1919, she married Major Paul Dashwood, and after two years in Malay States they returned to England and lived in Devon, where Dashwood became a land agent. They had two children, Lionel and Rosamund.

Delafield (Mrs Dashwood’s pen name) became a prolific novelist, writing one or two books a year. But she is best remembered for The Provincial Lady, a series she wrote for
Time and Tide, a political and literary weeklyAlthough ostensibly fiction, the diary is considered to be barely-disguised autobiography.  The sketches were first published in book form under the title Diary of a Provincial Lady by Macmillan, in 1930, with illustrations by Arthur Watts. Several sequels followed, including The Provincial Lady Goes Further, The Provincial Lady in America and The Provincial Lady in Wartime. These books have remained popular and have never been out of print.

During the Second World War, Delafield did some work for the Ministry of Information, and she spent time in France, but she died on 2 December 1943. Further information about her, and/or some extracts from the diaries can be found at Wikipedia, The Guardian, Starcourse, and Amazon. The full text of the first book - Diary of a Provincial Lady - with Watts’s illustrations can be read freely at Project Gutenberg Australia. And various other editions can be freely borrowed from Internet Archive (with log-in). The following extracts come from The Diary of a Provincial Lady published by Virago Press in 1984 (which is a compilation of three of the original books).

7 November 1929
‘Plant the indoor bulbs. Just as I am in the middle of them, Lady Boxe calls. I say, untruthfully, how nice to see her, and beg her to sit down while I just finish the bulbs. Lady B. makes a determined attempt to sit down in armchair where I have already placed two bulb-bowls and the bag of charcoal, is headed off just in time, and takes the sofa.
   
Do I know, she asks, how very late it is for indoor bulbs? September really, even October, is the time. Do I know that the only really reliable firm for hyacinths is Somebody of Haarlem? Cannot catch the name of the firm, which is Dutch, but reply Yes I do know, but I think it is my duty to buy Empire products. Feel at the time, and still think, that this is an excellent reply. Unfortunately, Vicky comes into the drawing room later and says: “Oh, Mummie, are those the bulbs we got at Woolworths?”

Lady B stays to tea. (Mem: Bread-and-butter too thick. Speak to Ethel.) We talk some more about bulbs, the Dutch School of Painting, Our Vicar’s Wife, sciatica, and All Quiet on the Western Front.

(Query: Is it possible to cultivate the art of conversation while living in the country all the year round?)

Lady B enquires after the children. Tell her that Robin - whom I refer to in a detached way as “the boy” so that she shan’t think I am foolish about him - is getting on fairly well at school, and that Mademoiselle says Vicky is starting a cold.

Do I realise, says Lady B., that the Cold habit is entirely unnecessary, and can be avoided by giving the child a nasal douche of salt-and-water every morning before breakfast? Think of several rather tart and witty rejoinders to this, but unfortunately not until Lady B.’s Bentley has taken her away.

Finish the bulbs and put them in the cellar. Feel that after all the cellar is probably draughty, change my mind, and take them all up to the attic.

Cook says something is wrong with the range.’

30 June 1930
‘The Sweep comes, and devastates the entire day. Bath water and meals are alike cold, and soot appears quite irrelevantly in portions of the house totally removed from sphere of Soot’s activities. Am called upon in the middle of the day to produce twelve-and-sixpence in cash, which I cannot do. Appeal to everybody in the house, and find that nobody else can, either. Finally, Cook announces that the Joint has just come and can oblige at the back door, if I don’t mind its going down in the book. I do not, and the Sweep is accordingly paid and disappears on a motor-cycle.’

7 October (1931?)
‘Extraordinary behaviour of dear Rose, with whom I am engaged - and have been for days past - to go and have supper tonight. Just as I am trying to decide whether bus to Portland Street or tube to Oxford Circus will be preferable, I am called up on telephone by Rose’s married niece, who lives in Hertfordshire, and is young and modern, to say that speaker for her Women’s Institute to-night has failed, and that Rose, on being appealed to, has at once suggested my name and expressed complete willingness to dispense with my society for the evening. Utter impossibility of pleading previous engagement is obvious; I contemplate for an instant saying that I have influenza, but remember in time that niece, very intelligently, started the conversation by asking how I was, and that I replied Splendid, thanks - and there is nothing for it but to agree.

(Query: Should very much like to know if it was for this that I left Devonshire.) Think out several short, but sharply worded, letters to Rose, but time fails; I can only put brush and comb, slippers, sponge, three books, pyjamas and hot-water bottle into case - discover later that I have forgotten powder-puff, and am very angry, but to no avail - and repair by train to Hertfordshire.

Spend most of journey in remembering all that I know of Rose’s niece, which is that she is well under thirty, pretty, talented, tremendous social success, amazingly good at games, dancing, and - I think - everything else in the world, and married to brilliantly clever young man who is said to have Made Himself a Name, though cannot at the moment recollect how.

Have strong impulse to turn straight round and go home again, sooner than confront so much efficiency, but non-stop train renders this course impracticable.

Niece meets me - clothes immensely superior to anything that I have ever had, or shall have - is charming, expresses gratitude, and asks what I am going to speak about. I reply, Amateur Theatricals. Excellent of course, she says unconvincingly, and adds that the Institute has a large Dramatic Society already, that they are regularly produced by well-known professional actor, husband of Vice-President, and were very well placed in recent village-drama competition, open to all England.

At this I naturally wilt altogether, and say Then perhaps better talk about books or something - which sounds weak, even as I say it, and am convinced that niece feels the same, though she remains imperturbably charming. She drives competently through the night, negotiates awkward entrance to garage equally well, extracts my bag and says that It is Heavy - which is undeniable, and is owing to books, but cannot say so, as it would look as though I thought her house likely to be inadequately supplied - and conducts me into perfectly delightful, entirely modern, house, which I feel certain - rightly, I discover later - has every newest labour-saving device ever invented.

Bathroom especially - (all appears to be solid marble, black-and-white tiles, and dazzling polish) - impresses me immeasurably. Think regretfully, but with undiminished affection, of extremely inferior edition at home - paint peeling in several directions, brass taps turning green at intervals until treated by housemaid, and irregular collection of home-made brackets on walls, bearing terrific accumulation of half-empty bottles, tins of talcum powder and packets of Lux. [. . .]

Evening at Institute reasonably successful - am much impressed by further display of efficiency from niece, as President - I speak about Books, and obtain laughs by introduction of three entirely irrelevant anecdotes, am introduced to felt hat and fur coat, felt hat and blue jumper, felt hat and tweeds, and so on. Names of all alike remain impenetrably mysterious, as mine no doubt to them.

(Flight of fancy here as to whether this deplorable but customary, state of affairs is in reality unavoidable? Theory exists that it has been completely overcome in America, whose introductions always entirely audible and frequently accompanied by short biographical sketch. Should like to go to America.)

Niece asks kindly if I am tired. I say No, not at all, which is a lie, and she presently takes me home and I go to bed. Spare-room admirable in every respect, but no waste-paper basket. This solitary flaw in general perfection a positive relief.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 2 December 2013.

Wednesday, November 8, 2023

Flying into an abyss

Ivan Bunin, the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, died 70 years ago today. Though admired for his short stories and poems, it was his diaries, written in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and published in the 1920s, that brought him fame among his compatriot emigrés in France as well as wider attention within European literary circles. It was not until the 1990s that parts of his diaries began appearing in English versions.

Bunin was born in 1870 into an old, noble family with a literary heritage, in the province of Voronezh, Central Russia. Having been tutored at home, he was sent to a public school in Yelets in 1881, but left in 1886 due to financial difficulties caused by his father’s gambling. The following year, he published his first poem in a literary magazine. He followed his brother to Kharkov, where he worked for a local paper, and then moved further south to Oryol where he became editor of a local newspaper, enabling him to publish his own stories, poems and reviews.

His first book - Poems 1887-1991 - appeared in 1891, and thereafter he managed to place some of his writing in St Petersburg magazines. In 1892, he moved, with his lover Varvara Paschenko, to Poltava settling in the home of his brother, Yuly. From there he travelled all over Ukraine, and, in 1895, visited St Petersburg for the first time. Thereafter, dividing his time between Moscow and the Russian capital, he made friends with Chekhov and Gorky, and was much inspired by Tolstoy.

Bunin married Anna Tsakni in 1898, but left her two years later. By the end of 1906, he had fallen in love with Vera Muromtseva, and the two then lived together, travelled in the Middle East, and married in 1922. Bunin, meanwhile, was making his literary name with short story collections, such as Bird’s Shadow, as well as translations - one of Longfellow’s Hiawatha earned him a Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy. Another Prize, and membership of the Academy followed in 1909. He also translated D. H. Lawrence, Byron and Leonard Woolf.

In 1910 Bunin published his first short novel, The Village, which gave a bleak portrayal of Russian country life, caused controversy, and brought him fame. Its harsh realism, Wikipedia’s bio notes, prompted Maxim Gorky to call him ‘the best Russian writer of the day’. After winters in 1912-1914 with Gorky on the Italian resort island of Capri, he wrote what has become his most famous short story, The Gentleman from San Francisco. Bunin did not greet the 1917 October Revolution with enthusiasm. He left Moscow first for Odessa, and then, in 1920, to settle in France, where he had another grand affair, with the poetess Galina Kuznetsova, 30 years his junior, though they were both married.

In France, Bunin was hailed as one of the most important living Russian writers, and soon became the figurehead for a generation of expatriates. In 1933, he was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, ‘for following through and developing with chastity and artfulness the traditions of Russian classic prose’. Russipedia says, though, that ‘everyone knew the real reason behind his winning the prize was the publishing of The Accursed Days, which voiced his aristocratic aversion to the harsh realties of the Soviet state’. In 1934-1936, Petropolis published, to Bunin’s approval, his complete works in 11 volumes.

Although friends arranged for the Bunins to move to the US during the Second World War, they chose to stay in their isolated house in Grasse, often with other long-term residents, and sometimes sheltering fugitives from the Nazi regime, which Bunin hated. The Bunins returned to Paris in 1945, and from around 1948 Bunin focused his creative time on writing memoirs and a book about Chekhov which he never finished; but he was often disillusioned and bitter. He died on 8 November 1953. Further biographical information is available from Russiapedia or Wikipedia.

Bunin kept a diary for most of his life. Parts of it - 1918-1920 - first appeared in print in the mid-1920s when Bunin published them in a Paris-based Vozrozhdenye newspaper under the title The Accursed Days (later put in book form by Petropolis). It was not until 1998 that this was translated by Thomas Gaiton Marullo and published in English, by Rowman & Littlefield, as Cursed Days: Diary of a Revolution. Much of it can be freely read online at Googlebooks.

Substantial extracts from Bunin’s diaries have also appeared in translation by Marullo (published by Ivan R. Dee, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield) in three biographical volumes all subtitled A Portrait from Letters, Diaries, and Fiction: Russian Requiem, 1885-1920 (1993); From the Other Shore, 1920-1933 (1995); The Twilight of Emigre Russia, 1934-1953 (2002). 

Of the first volume, Rowman & Littlefield says: ‘Mr. Marullo gives us a compelling picture of a writer searching for himself amidst a society experiencing momentous change. Bunin alternated between periods of despair and joy throughout most of his life. He stood for traditional Russian values in a time of complete upheaval - in the “dark night” between the twilight of imperial Russia and the dawn of the new Soviet state - and he despised the revolutionaries who sought to overturn the ways he cherished. His life and art come alive in this immensely successful book.’

Of the second volume, it says: ‘Mr. Marullo gives us a vivid picture of a man suddenly and agonizingly without a country. Bunin’s life and art, which depended so heavily on traditional Russian values, seemed to be overthrown in a moment, and the writer found himself marooned amidst Western culture, clinging to his old ideals. Through his writings we are also provided a window on the lively but despairing and often fractious community of Russian emigrĂ©s in Paris in the twenties, which included Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff Chafiapin, Prokofiev, Chagall, Kandinsky, Pavlova, Diaghilev, and Zamyatin.’

Here are several extracts from Bunin’s diary as translated by Marullo for Cursed Days.

18 February 1918
‘Beginning February 1st we have been ordered to observe new style. So according to the Soviets, it is now February 18th.

Yesterday there was a meeting “Wednesday [a literary group]. Many of the “young people” were there. Mayakovsky behaved rather decently most of the time, though he kept acting like a lout, strutting about and shooting off his mouth. He was wearing a shirt without a tie. The collar of his jacket was raised up for some reason, just like those poorly shaven people who live in wretched hotel rooms and use public latrines in the mornings.’

19 February 1918
‘The newspapers report that the Germans have begun their attack. Everyone says: “Oh, if it were only so!”

We took a walk to Lubyanka. There were “meetings” everywhere. A red-haired fellow talked on and on about the injustices of the old regime. He was wearing a coat with a round, dark-brown collar. His face was freshly powdered and shaven; he had red curly eyebrows and gold fillings in his mouth. A snub-nosed gentleman with bulging eyes kept objecting hotly to what the red-haired fellow was saying. Women were fervidly adding their two cents’ worth, but always at the wrong time. They kept breaking into the argument (one that was based on “principle,” so the red-haired fellow said) with details and hurried stories from their own lives, by which they felt compelled to prove God-knows-what. Several soldiers were also there. They acted as though they understood nothing; but, as always, they had their doubts about something (or more accurately, everything) and kept shaking their heads suspiciously. [. . .]

A lady complained hurriedly that now she didn’t have a piece of bread to her name, even though once she had had a school. She had had to let all her students go because she had nothing to feed them. “Whose life has gotten better with the Bolsheviks?” she asked. “Everyone’s worse off and we, the people, most of all!”

A heavily made-up little bitch interrupted her, breaking in with naive remarks. She started to say that the Germans were about to arrive and that everyone would pay through the nose for what they had done.

“Before the Germans get here, we’ll kill you all,” a worker said coldly and took off. The soldiers nodded in agreement: “If that isn’t true!” they said, and they also left.’

21 February 1918
‘Andrei (my brother Yuly’s servant) is acting more and more insane. It is even horrifying to watch. He has served my brother for almost twenty years, and he has always been simple, kind, reasonable, polite, and devoted to us. Now he’s gone completely crazy. He still does his job carefully, but it is apparent that he’s forcing himself to do so. He cannot look at us and shies away from our conversations. His whole body inwardly shakes from anger; and when he can keep silent no longer, he lets loose with wild nonsense.

For instance, this morning, when we were visiting Yuly, N. N. said, as always, that everything has perished and that Russia was flying into an abyss. Andrei was setting the table for tea. He suddenly began waving his arms, his face aflame: “Yes, yes, Russia’s flying into an abyss, all right! But who’s to blame, who? The bourgeois, that’s who! Just you wait, you’ll see how they’ll be cut to pieces!” ’

5 March 1918
‘I went to Nikolaevsky Station. It was very sunny out, almost too much so, with a light frost. From the hill behind Myasnitsky Gates - I saw a blue-grey haze, clusters of homes, and the golden cupolas of churches. Ah, Moscow! Snow was melting on the square in front of the station. The entire place shone like gold, mirrorlike. I was taken by the massive, powerful sight of carts with boxes on them. Can it really be that all this power, this wealth is coming to an end? There were a great many peasants, soldiers in many kinds of old overcoats, wearing them any old way, and with various types of weapons - one had a saber at his side, another had a rifle, another had a huge revolver in his belt . . . These are now the masters of everything, the heirs of colossal heritage . . .’

Sunday, October 15, 2023

We came home we had Words

‘I walkd by my self after tea finished the French Novel _ then Mr Inchbald and I walkd, he was dull and after we came home we had Words.’ These are the words of Elizabeth Inchbald, an 18th century actress and writer, born 270 years ago today. She kept diaries all her life, but only a dozen or so have survived -  these have recently been edited and published in three volumes for the first time.

Elizabeth Simpson was born on 15 October 1753 at Stanningfield, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, the eighth of nine children born to a Catholic farming family. She was educated at home, and despite a speech impediment and her parents’ advice, she wanted to become an actress. Aged 18, she left home for London. Within two months she had married a fellow actor, Joseph Inchbald, twice her age and father to two illegitimate sons. In September 1772, they appeared on stage together for the first time in King Lear, and soon after undertook a four year tour in Scotland with West Digges’s theatre company. After a brief and unsuccessful sojourn in France, they moved to Liverpool where she joined the Joseph Younger company and befriended Sarah Siddons and her brother John Philip Kemble, both of whom would become famous actors.

The Inchbalds moved again, to Canterbury and Yorkshire, and in 1777 were hired by Tate Wilkinson’s company. Just two years later, Joseph died suddenly. Inchbald, by this time was already beginning to write. She stayed on with Wilkinson until, in 1780, she joined the Covent Garden company. She made her debut on the London stage as Bellario in Philaster, a male role. A young widow, still only 27, she attracted attention from suitors but, instead of re-marrying, she sought to educate herself through reading novels, literary letters and essays, poetry and philosophy. 

By the mid-1780s, Inchbald was writing successful farces: A Mogul Tale and I'll Tell You What both at the Haymarket, and Appearance is Against Them and Such Things Are at Covent Garden. By the late 1780s, she was earning a good living from writing, and was thus able to give up acting. She continued to write new plays, amend her earlier works, and adapt translated plays. However, it is for two novels that she is best remembered - A Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796) - both of which have been reprinted frequently and garnered interest among modern scholars of 18th century women’s writing.

In 1806, the publishers Longman asked Inchbald to write the critical and biographical introductions to a series of 125 plays from the sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries, an unusual request to a woman. By this time she was in semi-retirement and financially comfortable, gaining much comfort from her faith. In her last years, she wrote several volumes of memoirs though, on the advice of her confessor, she destroyed them before her death. In 1819, she moved into a Catholic residence where she died in August 1821. Further information is available online at Wikipedia and the Chawton House website.

Inchbald appears to have kept annual diaries from the age of 16 for most of her life, although only 11 exist today. These are held by the Folger Shakespeare Library (which acquired them over the years in four separate transactions). Brief excerpts of the diaries appeared in Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald (1833) by James Boaden (who had access to at least some of the now-missing diaries) and in a recent biography by Annibel Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (2003). The Folger Library, itself, has included a few sample transcriptions from the diaries in exhibitions over the last 20 years. Also, at some point, Adam Matthew Publications made available some of the contents of Inchbald’s literary remains in digital form - though, this material does not seem to be available any longer. 

Most recently, however, in 2019, The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald were edited by Ben P. Robertson and published by Pickering & Chatto in three volumes, as follows: Volume 1: The Early Years on the Stage, 1776-1781 - Scotland, France, Ireland, the Provinces, and London; Volume 2: The Height of Fame, 1782-1793 - Acting, Playwriting, and Novel Writing; Volume 3: The Introspective Years, 1807-1820 - Drama Criticism, Napoleonic Wars, and the Queen's Trial.

A good deal of the first volume can be sampled online at Googlebooks, the source of the following extracts (as found).

8 January 1776
‘a very Cold snowy Day _ I was at the Reading of Philastcr _ while my Hair was dressing Mr Inchbald heard me my part _ I playd [Rossaland] Mr Inchbald Clown in As you like it _ then he in the Pantomine _ {Corcreen Faris} Benifit _ I went to Bed Crying &c& for Playing very ill.’

31 January 1776
‘Mr Inchbald went to the Flag _ then I called at my Sisters and my Bro: walked with me to Mr Inchbald then he and I called at the [Fary’s] _ George Inchbald drank tea here _ then Mr Inchbald went to the Flag and I saw a piece of the B Opera in Mr Diggcs Box _ my Bro:received a Letter from my Mother much about me _ my French Master called then I saw some of the Deserter Mrs [Baris] first appearance.’

17 February 1776
‘A very fine Day _ we were at Rehearsal some Gentlemen there _ between my scenes I called at Miss Blackadders_ Then walked with Mr Inchbald and was at the French _ after dinner Dr Macclogan called _ I played Lady Anne Mr Inchbald Henry in Richard  _ farce Sham Doctor.’

7 May 1776
‘Mr Inchbald began Garricks Picture and was at it all Day _ in the Morning Bob and Mr Johns called and I walkd by my self after tea finished the French Novel _ then Mr Inchbald and I walkd, he was dull and after we came home we had Words.’

14 July 1776
‘Rose at six to see Yarmouth then went to Bed again _ at nine oclock (the Wind against us) we anchored seven Miles from Yarmouth _ Mr Inchbald went a on shore with the Captain and brought fruit c& I cryd &c& while he was a  shore _ after tea we all went on shore and was at a Little Cottage I was very dull there and more so after in the ship c&c. we had no supper _ talked of Ghosts c&c _ a very hot night.’

21 July 1776
‘did not go to Bed till Day Light for the Violent tossing of the ship _ the Dark Lights were put in _ I was very sick _ after sleeping found the sea smooth but a bad Wind _ eat nothing and did not rise till after dinner _ then was a little on Deck _ after tea I was purely and the Wind was better and I was on Deck again _ we sat up with the Captain till after his Watch was called.’

15 September 1776
‘a Wet Day _ the Young Man at the Doctors called and he and the Landlady went to Church with me _ her Sister dind with us _ in the afternoon I finished Horace and Read L epreuve reciproque _ Mr Inchbald was at a Minature and walked to Sea for the Packet Boat _ saw very grand Processions _ in the Evening went out Old Walk when we came back the Landlady was crying _ we sat with them _ at supper a Gentleman called _’