In celebration of Pepys

It’s Samuel Pepys’s birthday, his 390th. For a decade or so in the early part of his career - which would see him become Chief Secretary to the Admiralty - he kept a diary so brilliant that it would become one of the most important and famous of all diaries. With meticulous detail and literary skill, he recorded everything in his life, from the tragic to the comic, from grand affairs of state to the frailties of his own character. Moreover, in the diary, he left behind an immensely important account of the Restoration period in English history, as well as first-hand accounts of many major events, not least the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London,and the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that Pepys is to diaries what Shakespeare is to plays.

Pepys was born in London on 23 February 1633 above a shop, near Fleet Street, where his father provided a tailoring service for lawyers. He was schooled in Huntingdon at first, and at St Paul’s, London, and then was able to study at Cambridge University thanks to various scholarships and grants. In 1655, he entered the household of a relation, Sir Edward Montagu, and the same year married Elisabeth de St Michel, a descendant of French Huguenot immigrants, who was only 14 at the time. She would die young, in 1669, without having had children.

In 1658, Pepys moved to live in Axe Yard, near where the modern Downing Street is located, and underwent a painful and difficult operation to remove a large bladder stone.  Two years later, Montagu, by then an admiral, promoted him to secretary. In May the same year, he sailed with Montagu’s fleet to the Netherlands to bring Charles II back from exile. Pepys continued to rise in importance with Montagu’s success. When the Second Anglo-Dutch War dominated foreign affairs in the mid-1660s, Pepys proved himself an indefatigable and skilled administrator. However, in the years after the war, Navy Board practices, and Pepys himself, came under considerable and critical scrutiny. A virtuoso performance by Pepys in Parliament in March 1668 helped his cause, and, ultimately, the support of Charles II helped him keep his job.

In 1673, Pepys first became a Member of Parliament. He fell out of a favour for a few years in the late 1670s for allegedly betraying naval secrets, but the charges proved to have been fabricated, and by 1684 had been appointed King’s Secretary for the affairs of the Admiralty, a post he retained after the accession of James II. He was again an MP in the latter half of 1680s. For two years, starting in 1684, he was president of the Royal Society, a period in which Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica. With the deposing of James II and the subsequent succession of Mary II and her husband William of Orange, Pepys was again accused of political plots and imprisoned briefly. He never returned to public life, and died at his house in Clapham in 1703. Further information is available at Wikipedia, a virtual exhibition at the Magdalene College website, and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Pepys left his vast library to Magdalene College, Cambridge University, where the 3,000 tomes are shelved in his own bookcases in a building named after him. Though containing many important volumes, the most important by far are the six of Pepys diary. He started writing on New Year’s Day 1660, when still poor, without apparent prospects, and without having anything significant to write about. One of his modern biographers, Claire Tomalin (Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Viking), looks carefully at why he did this, suggesting possible reasons: his employers kept journals, he wished to give himself a serious task, he was a passionate reader and cared for good writing, he was aware of the high political and religious drama going on around him, and he was unrepentantly curious about himself. He stopped writing his diary in May 1669, fearing the activity was having a negative impact on his deteriorating eyesight.

Written in a shorthand code, with a meticulous hand (as beautiful as pieces of embroidery, for Tomalin) Pepys’s diaries were not deciphered or published until the 1820s. A second transcription of the original diaries was completed in 1875 by Mynors Bright and various published editions followed, some more complete than others. Even the most complete, though, omitted some passages which the editors thought ‘cannot possibly be printed’. The same editors do not explain but simply ask the reader to have faith in them. Some of these editions are freely available today on the internet - such as The Diary of Samuel Pepys website run by Phil Gyford, which also has a Pepys encyclopaedia, in-depth essays, and a lively forum for debate on all things Pepys. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Robert Latham and William Matthews transcribed and edited the complete diary for publication in nine volumes published by Bell & Hyman, London, and the University of California Press, Berkeley.

At least seven Diary Review articles have been based on Pepys’s diary:
- Pepys on Sir Edward Hyde (historian, statesman and grandfather to two queens)
- Mistress of the bedchamber (Barbara Palmer, the most famous of Charles II’s mistresses)
- 1st Duke of Albemarle (a soldier and a key player in the restoration of Charles II)
- John Blow’s bad singing (an English organist and composer)
- Speaker without his mace (about the disbanding of the Long Parliament)
- Height and raptures  (Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery, soldier, statesman and playwright)
- Pepys, fire and Parmesan cheese

Here, to celebrate with Pepys, are several short extracts from his great diary, including one sometimes cited as the first reference to Punch and Judy in English literature, several about Bartholomew Fair, and two about the plague.

9 May 1662
‘Thence with Mr Salisbury, who I met there, into Covent Garden to an alehouse, to see a picture that hangs there, which is offered for 20s., and I offered fourteen - but it is worth much more money - but did not buy it, I having no mind to break my oath. Thence to see an Italian puppet play that is within the rayles there, which is very pretty, the best that ever I saw, and great resort of gallants. So to the Temple and by water home, and so walk upon the leads, and in the dark there played upon my flageolette [a woodwind musical instrument], it being a fine still evening, and so to supper and to bed.’

25 August 1663
‘It seems this Lord Mayor begins again an old custome, that upon the three first days of Bartholomew Fayre, the first, there is a match of wrestling, which was done, and the Lord Mayor there and Aldermen in Moorefields yesterday: to-day, shooting: and to-morrow, hunting. And this officer of course is to perform this ceremony of riding through the city, I think to proclaim or challenge any to shoot. It seems that the people of the fayre cry out upon it as a great hindrance to them.’

4 September 1663
‘Thence Creed and I away, and by his importunity away by coach to Bartholomew Fayre, where I have no mind to go without my wife, and therefore rode through the fayre without ’lighting, and away home, leaving him there; and at home made my wife get herself presently ready, and so carried her by coach to the fayre, and showed her the monkeys dancing on the ropes, which was strange, but such dirty sport that I was not pleased with it. There was also a horse with hoofs like rams hornes, a goose with four feet, and a cock with three. Thence to another place, and saw some German Clocke works, the Salutation of the Virgin Mary, and several Scriptural stories; but above all there was at last represented the sea, with Neptune, Venus, mermaids, and Ayrid on a dolphin, the sea rocking, so well done, that had it been in a gaudy manner and place, and at a little distance, it had been admirable. Thence home by coach with my wife, and I awhile to the office, and so to supper and to bed.’

7 June 1665
‘Thence, it being the hottest day that ever I felt in my life, and it is confessed so by all other people the hottest they ever knew in England in the beginning of June, we to the New Exchange, and there drunk whey, with much entreaty getting it for our money, and [they] would not be entreated to let us have one glasse more. So took water and to Fox-Hall, to the Spring garden [later known as Vauxhall Gardens, opened a few years earlier and would stay open for around 200 years], and there walked an houre or two with great pleasure, saving our minds ill at ease concerning the fleete and my Lord Sandwich, that we have no newes of them, and ill reports run up and down of his being killed, but without ground. Here staid pleasantly walking and spending but 6d. till nine at night, and then by water to White Hall, and there I stopped to hear news of the fleete, but none come, which is strange, and so by water home, where, weary with walking and with the mighty heat of the weather, and for my wife’s not coming home, I staying walking in the garden till twelve at night, when it begun to lighten exceedingly, through the greatness of the heat. Then despairing of her coming home, I to bed.

This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and chaw, which took away the apprehension.’

12 August 1665
‘The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by day-light, the nights not sufficing to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at nine at night all, as they say, that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for ayre.’

6 September 1667
‘At Aldgate I took my wife into our coach, and so to Bartholomew fair, and there, it being very dirty, and now night, we saw a poor fellow, whose legs were tied behind his back, dance upon his hands with his arse above his head, and also dance upon his crutches, without any legs upon the ground to help him, which he did with that pain that I was sorry to see it, and did pity him and give him money after he had done. Then we to see a piece of clocke-work made by an Englishman - indeed, very good, wherein all the several states of man’s age, to 100 years old, is shewn very pretty and solemne; and several other things more cheerful.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 23 February 2013.

Only you, my diary

‘Only you, my diary, know that it is here I show my fears, weaknesses, my complaints, my disillusions. I feel I cannot be weak outside because others depend on me. I rest my head here and weep. Henry asked me to help him with his work. Gonzalo asks me to join political revolutions. I live in a period of dissolution and disentegration. Even art today is not considered a vocation, a profession, a religion, but a neurosis, a disease, an “escape”. I titled this diary “drifting”. I thought I too would dissolve for a little while, but ultimately I become whole again.’

This is Anaїs Nin writing in August 1936. The same year she would begin to edit her earlier diaries with a view to publishing them. However, it would be another three decades before a first volume reached print, and when it did, Karl Shapiro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, would write: ‘For a generation the literary world on both sides of the Atlantic has lived with the rumour of an extraordinary diary. Earlier readers of the manuscript dicussed it with breathtaking superlatives as a work that would take its place with the great revelations of literature. A significant section of this diary is at last in print and it appears that the great claims made for it are justified.’

Today - the 120th anniversary of her birth - seems a good day to remember Nin, one of the great literary diarists.

Anaїs Nin was born in France on 21 February 1903. Her parents, of mixed and partly Cuban heritage, were both music professionals. When they separated, their mother took Anaїs and her two brothers to New York City. At 20, she married a banker, Hugh Guiler, who later illustrated some of her books and went on to become a film maker. The couple moved to Paris in 1924, where Nin began writing fiction and where she fell in with the Villa Seurat group, which included the writers Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell (‘Larry’ in the diary). She had many love affairs, often with well known literary figures, but her relationship with Miller was more constant than most.

In 1932, Nin’s D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study was published with a limited print run. Also, in the mid-1930s, she began therapy with Otto Rank, a one-time pupil of Sigmund Freud. Despite Rank being 20 years older, she had an affair with him lasting several years (for more see The Diary Review article Nothing but the eyes). Thereafter, Nin published several novellas and collections of short stories, such as House of Incest (1936), Winter of Artifice (1939) and Under a Glass Bell (1944). Also in the 1940s, she began to write short erotic stories, though these were not published until the 1970s (Delta of Venus and Little Birds).

In 1939, Nin and Guiler relocated to New York. In 1946, Nin met the actor Rupert Pole, 16 years her junior; and in 1955 she married him in Arizona. The couple went to live in California, though Pole was unaware that Nin was already married; and Guiler, to whom Nin returned to in New York often, remained ignorant of the marriage to Pole. Nin, eventually, had her marriage to Pole annulled because of the legal complications of both husbands claiming her as a dependent on their tax returns. Nin continued to live with Pole, though, until her death in 1977, and Pole became her literary executor.

Throughout her life, starting aged 14, Nin was a committed, almost obsessed, diary writer. According to Wikipedia’s entry on The Diary of Anaïs Nin, the diary became ‘her best friend and confidante’. And, ‘despite the attempts of her mother, therapists Rene Allendy and Otto Rank, and writer Henry Miller, to break [her] of her dependence on the diary, she would continue to keep a diary up until her death in 1977’.

Already in the early 1930s, encouraged by her friends, especially Lawrence Durrell (see, also, A book out of these scraps), Nin began editing her diaries with a view to publication. However, it was not until 1966 that a first volume (covering the years 1931-1934) appeared, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Over the next decade or so, six more volumes in the same series would be published, each one edited by Nin herself; and these would later be referred to as the ‘expurgated’ version of Nin’s diary. (In the UK, they were published by Peter Owen and titled The Journals of Anaïs Nin.)

After her death, several volumes of Nin’s earlier diaries, i.e. from 1914 to 1931, were published, and then after Guiler’s death, in 1985, Pole commissioned unexpurgated versions of the journals. There have been several of these: Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer The Moon, all subtitled From a Journal of Love.

Further information on Nin is readily available across the web, at Wikipedia, The Official Anaïs Nin Blog, and Sky Blue Press. Excerpts from her diaries are also readily available, at Googlebooks for example, and on the fan sites.

The following extracts about diary writing itself are taken from The Journals of Anaïs Nin - Volume Two, i.e. the second published edition of the expurgated diaries.

August 1936
‘Conflict with diary-writing. While I write in the diary I cannot write a book. I try to flow in a dual manner, to keep recording and to invent at the same time, to transform. The two activities are antithetical. If I were a real diarist, like Pepys or Amiel, I would be satisfied to record, but I am not, I want to fill in, transform, project, expand, deepen, I want this ultimate flowering that comes of creation. As I read the diary I was aware of all that I have left unsaid which can only be said with creative work, by lingering, expanding, developing. [. . .]

After I wrote here the other day on art versus diary, I felt the danger of putting art into the diary. It might kill its greatest quality, its naturalness. I must split up and do something apart - it is a need. No consciousness of perfection must enter the diary. Good-bye completeness. My plan of writing up a Day and a Night until I reach perfection.’

Fall 1937
‘Larry began to look over the volumes I took out of the tin box. But I began to feel uneasy, agitated, and we talked first. His first remark was: “Why, that is as terrifying as Nijinsky.” We had all been reading Nijinsky’s diary. Larry went away with an armful of volumes after saying: “You are a strange person, sitting there, surrounded by your black notebooks.”

I feel right about the diary. I will not stop. It is a necessity. But why does Henry attack it? He says I give good justifications for it each time but that he does not believe them.

Nijinsky, writing just before all connections broke with human beings. . .

Larry with his keen eyes, saying: “I have only smelled the diary writing, just read a page here and there. You have done it, the real female writing. It is a tragic work. You restore tragedy which the world has lost. Go on. Don’t stop. I’m sick of hearing about art. What you have done nobody has done. It is amazing. It is new.” ’  (See The Diary Review for more on Nijinsky’s diary.)

November 1937
‘Because of Henry’s description of the whalelike diary, Larry calls me “the Whale”. And signs himself: “your ever-admiring limpet.” [. . .]

Have gone to work on abridged edition of the diary. [. . .]

Henry has been collecting subscriptions to publish the first volume of the diary, and the first one he received was from André Maurois, who added that, however, he did not want all of the fifty-four volumes, his house was too full of books. In between these visits I arranged all the diaries I want to edit in one box so I can plunge into them easily.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 21 February 2013.

A little pissoir

Joe Orton could have been celebrating his 90th birthday today had he not been murdered by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, in 1967! For a brief period in the mid-1960s, before his death, Orton was becoming celebrated among the London literati for his shocking but humorous plays, such as Loot, as well as for his promiscuous homosexuality. The raw details of Orton’s life with Halliwell and the extent of his sexual escapades were fully exposed when his diaries were published in the 1980s.

John Kingsley Orton was born on 1 January 1933 in Leicester, the oldest of five children. He left school at 16, but was admitted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1951 after an audition. There he met Kenneth Halliwell, with whom he to went to live in West Hampstead, and with whom he collaborated on writing novels. For a while, Orton worked as an actor and stage manager, but then he also began writing on his own. In 1959, the couple moved to an Islington bedsitter bought with money inherited by Halliwell.

In 1962, both Orton and Halliwell were sent to prison for a few months for defacing public library books. Once out of prison, Orton took up play writing in earnest. He sold one play to the BBC, and soon after was taken on by literary agent, Peggy Ramsay (who suggested he call himself Joe, rather than John).

By his early 30s, Orton had established a name for himself within a new theatre genre: black comedy. Entertaining Mr Sloane, first produced in London in 1964 and in New York in 1965, shocked audiences with its combination of genteel dialogue and violent sexual drama. Few other plays followed, notably Loot and What the Butler Saw, leading Orton to become something of a society darling. In August 1967, he was beaten to death by Halliwell, whose own failure as a writer and artist was in sharp contrast to Orton’s growing literary and social success. Halliwell committed suicide the same night, dying, in fact, before Orton. See Wikipedia or the Joe Orton website for more biographical details.

Orton first kept a diary between 1949 and 1951, and then again in the last year of his life. According to the Joe Orton website, the juvenile diaries, ‘reveal an unremarkable young man with a yearning for fame and to break away from the mundanity of everyday working life in Leicester’, while his later diaries chronicle ‘his literary success and many sexual encounters’. It was on top of the latter, a red-grained leather binder of diary pages, that Halliwell left a short note before killing his lover and himself: ‘If you read his diary all will be explained, KH, P.S. Especially the latter part.’

An interesting article, by the theatre critic Michael Thornton, on the Orton-Halliwell dynamic at the time of the murder/suicide can be found at the Daily Mail website. Thornton was a friend of Orton’s at the time, and the article draws on his own diary entries about Orton.

Joe Orton’s diaries were first edited by John Lahr, and published by Methuen in 1986 as The Orton Diaries: Including the Correspondence of Edna Welthorpe and Others. An unabridged republication of the original edition was brought out by Da Capo Press in 1996 - the introduction can be read online at Amazon. Many extracts of the diary are included in John Lahr’s Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton much of which is available to read online at Googlebooks.

Here is an (x-rated) extract (just part of one day’s diary entry) from The Orton Diaries (which can also be found in Prick Up Your Ears). The day before, Orton and Halliwell had returned from a short visit to Tripoli.

4 March 1967
‘Spent this morning ringing up P. Willes, Peggy, Michael White and Oscar. [. . .]

I took the Piccadilly line to Holloway Road and popped into a little pissoir - just four pissers. It was dark because somone had taken the bulb away. There were three figures pissing. I had a piss and, as my eyes became used to the gloom, I saw that only one of the figures was worth having - a labouring type with cropped hair and, with cropped hair, wearing jeans and a dark short coat. Another man entered and the man next to the labourer moved away, not out of the place altogether, but back against the wall. The new man had a pee and left the place and, before the man against the wall could return to his place, I nipped in sharpish and stood next to the labourer. I put my hand down and felt his cock, he immediatley started to play with mine. The youngish man with fair hair, standing back against the wall, went into the vacant place. I unbuttoned the top of my jeans and unloosened my belt in order to allow the labourer free rein with my balls. The man next to me began to feel my bum. At this point a fifth man entered. Nobody moved. It was dark. Just a little light spilled into the place from the street, not enough to see immediately. The man next to me moved back to allow the fifth man to piss. But the fifth man very quickly flashed his cock and the man next to me returned to my side, lifting up my coat and shoving his hand down the back of my trousers. The fifth man kept puffing on a cigarette and, by the glowing end, watching. A sixth man came into the pissoir. As it was so dark nobody bothered to move. After an interval (during which the fifth man watched me feel the labourer, the labourer stroked my cock, and the man beside me pulled my jeans down even further) I noticed that the sixth man was kneeling down beside the youngish man with fair hair and sucking his cock. A seventh man came in, but by now nobody cared. The number of people in the place was so large that detection was quite impossible. And anyway, as soon became apparent when the seventh man stuck his head down on a level with my fly, he wanted a cock in his mouth too. For some moments nothing happened. Then an eighth man, bearded and stocky, came in. He pushed the sixth man roughly away from the fair-haired man and quickly sucked the fair-headed man off. The man beside me had pulled my jeans down over my buttocks and was trying to push his prick between my legs. The fair-haired man, having been sucked off, hastily left the place. The bearded man came over and nudged away the seventh man from me and, opening my fly, began sucking me like a maniac. The labourer, getting very excited by my feeling his cock with both hands, suddenly glued his mouth to mine. The little pissoir under the bridge had become the scene of a frenzied homosexual saturnalia. No more than two feet away the citizens of Holloway moved about their ordinary business. I came, squirting into the bearded man’s mouth, and quickly pulled up my jeans. As I was about to leave, I heard the bearded man hissing quietly, ‘I suck people off! Who wants his cock sucked?’ When I left, the labourer was just shoving his cock into the man’s mouth to keep him quiet. I caught the bus home.

I told Kenneth who said, ‘It sounds as though eightpence and a bus down the Holloway Road was more interesting than £200 and a plane to Tripoli.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 1 January 2013.

You feel like a knife

‘Late at night. Just back to the flat I’m staying in from reading the play at the [Glasgow] Citizens. It was sweet, sweet, sweet. A marvellous theatre. On its stage you feel like a knife. You can carve any word on any part of the auditorium.’ This is from a diary kept by Howard Brenton, the British playwright, while touring the country to raise funds to defend his play - Romans in Britain - against an obscenity suit. The master dramatist is eighty today - Happy Birthday.

Brenton was born on 13 December 1942 in Portsmouth, England, son of a policeman (and later a Methodist minister). Educated at Chichester High School, he read English literature at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He did well at poetry, and he wrote a play which was performed at the university’s theatre. In 1966, one of his plays was put on at the Royal Court in London, and in 1969 he joined Portable Theatre (founded by David Hare and Tony Bicat), for which he wrote Christie in Love. In 1970, he married Jane Margaret Fry, and they have two sons.

Through a long career, he has written more than 40 plays, some as recently as 2018, according to Wikipedia’s list of works. In 1973, he and David Hare were jointly commissioned by Richard Eyre to write a play for Nottingham Playhouse which resulted in Brassneck. In 1976, Hare directed Brenton’s Weapons of Happiness at the National Theatre’s newly commissioned Lyttelton stage; it won the Evening Standard award for Best Play. 

In autumn 1980, the National also staged Brenton’s controversial The Romans in Britain. The campaigner Mary Whitehouse brought a suit against the play’s director under the Sexual Offences Act. It caused a media storm, but was ultimately withdrawn. In 1985, Brenton again collaborated with Hare to bring the powerful Pravda to the National with Anthony Hopkins in the lead. Although Brenton wrote very little for the screen he did, oddly perhaps, write 14 episodes of the Bafta winning BBC spy series, Spooks (between 2002 and 2005). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. Further information can be found at Wikipedia and the Old Cicestrians website.

Brenton has written only two books, both published by Nick Hern. The first was a novel in 1989 (Diving for Pearls) and the second was a collection of articles he’d authored along with extracts from his diaries - Hot Irons (1995). The full work can be borrowed digitally and freely at Internet Archive. 

In a ‘Note’, Brenton explains the book contains four diaries: ‘three are travel diaries, one kept while on tour in England doing a reading of The Romans in Britain, one while travelling in Australia in Far North Queensland’s rain forests and one while visiting the Soviet Union towards the end of the Gorbachev era. The fourth diary is, I suppose, a kind of travel piece also: it is the headlong rush through a rehearsal period of a play of mine at the Royal Court in 1992. I made some cuts in the diaries, but they stand as they were written.’

According to the publisher’s blurb: ‘Howard Brenton has long been stuck with the label ‘controversial’. Early in his career he was misquoted as wanting his plays to be like ‘petrol bombs through the proscenium arch’. His Churchill Play foresaw a Britain where political dissidents were interned in concentration camps. His Romans in Britain was prosecuted by Mary Whitehouse. And there have been plays on Rudolf Hess, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Rushdie affair. . . This volume of essays and diaries, however, reveals a much more complex, humane and thoughtful person than the headlines and snap judgments would allow.’ 

Introducing the first of the diaries, Brenton explains: ‘In 1982 Michael Bogdanov, the director of my play The Romans in Britain, which had been premiered at the National’s Olivier Theatre in 1980, was charged under a section of the Sexual Offences Act in a private prosecution brought by a ‘moral campaigner’, Mrs Mary Whitehouse. She objected to a scene in Act One of the play, an attempted rape of a male Celt by a Roman soldier. The case was a bizarre affair that dragged on for well over a year, through three hearings in a magistrates’ court before we ended up in the Old Bailey. Though it was Michael who was going on trial, one of the most wretched aspects was that it was my play that had put him there. I wanted to do something and decided to go on a one-man tour, reading the play, to raise money for the Theatre Defence Fund, which had been set up to raise money for what we feared was going to be a hefty legal bill.’

Here are two extracts from Hot Irons.

21 February 1982 

‘Late at night. Just back to the flat I’m staying in from reading the play at the Citizens.

It was sweet, sweet, sweet. A marvellous theatre. On its stage you feel like a knife. You can carve any word on any part of the auditorium. For half an hour I felt myself overworking, a mess, sweating and straining, knowing that all I had to do was - do it.

You could let the book levitate out of your hand and make the play up on the spot.

I’m high, I must calm down.

The northern audience laughed at the southern dialects, the Legate and Tom Chichester. British audiences have perfect pitch when it comes to regional speech and class.

I did feel tonight I was performing the play. Really I’m only sitting there for two and three-quarter hours, reading it. But by some kind of sleight of hand, or mutual agreement, it’s a performance. Odd.

Someone said to me afterwards, ‘How the hell did they stage it?’ Good.

In the dressing room 1 remembered an acting exercise to fix on characters by thinking of them as animals. A crude but fierce ‘talisman’ of a character. I did that and it helped. I remember the director, Barry Kyle, after eight weeks’ work with Ray Westwell in the RSC rehearsals of The Churchill Play, saying one word to Ray, about to play my Churchill on the opening night: ‘Bulldog.’

The Citizens have every show watched by the assistant director, Kim Dambaek, so notes are given every evening. My reading was no exception. A good system: the National have it, the RSC don’t. Kim said I could syncopate more, go further with throwing my voice about. He also soothed my paranoia about the reading being boring. It is not boring. (Why the hell isn’t it? It should be the most boring thing on earth, someone reading a play at enormous length. Perhaps the expectation is so low that you start on the floor, so everything and anything you can do for the audience, is a plus. I certainly sense the apprehension at the beginning of the reading: ‘Oh my God he’s going to read it - all of it.’ Then ten minutes on, ‘Oh. A woman with a strange hair-do and six dogs at her heels. Oh. I see.’ And you’re away.)

Now, food! Bath! The white wine the Citizens staff gave me to take to my lonely bed.’

1 March 1982
‘Now I’m at Warwick University, a guest of the Student Union. It’s raining. The concrete of the campus is sodden, and the windows are steamed up. I’m sitting in the Arts Centre coffee bar. It’s typical of the ‘Arts Centres’ built in the sixties on university campuses. It’s a white elephant, a car-drive away from any public and ignored by most of the students. It has an ugly main house but a good studio theatre.

I spent a happy and turbulent year here, 1978 to 1979, as ‘Resident Writer’. I got some free teaching. A maths teacher gave me an idea for my new play The Genius [premiered at the Royal Court in 1983], 1 ran a weekly workshop, wrote in the student newspaper, did a farewell improvised play and wrote most of The Romans, sitting in a sun-trap, concrete-walled, little garden at the back of my campus flat. It was an idyll. Rolf Lass, one of the teachers in the English Department and an old mentor from my Cambridge days, even got me reading Anglo-Saxon poetry for the first time.

Sadly all the students I knew in 1979 have left. The generations pass in a university, three years on and nothing of the young people I knew, what they did or thought, is left. There’s no transmission of memory amongst ‘the student body’. They have tradition, but no memory.

I’ve lost my tobacco. The rain’s drenched my trousers. There’s no advertising for the reading. Everything’s grey and smelling of rotting grass. And I have a premonition: they’ve got the day wrong!

Right. To the gents to clean up, to the University bookshop to cheer up, then I’ll go and find Dave Chumbley, organiser of this gig.’

It is also worth noting that Brenton appears often in the diaries of Peter Hall as edited by John Goodwin and published by Hamilton in 1983: Peter Hall’s diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle (also freely available at Internet Archive). Here are several extracts about Brenton.

11 July 1973
‘To the Royal Court to see Magnificence by the new writer Howard Brenton. This is bursting with talent although not fully achieved. He has no sense of overall form yet. But there is a great imagination at work and a wonderful power of speech and character. I also like the way he uses time: following a long first act when a group of young revolutionaries occupy a deserted house, there is an electrifying five minutes of action, a tumult of disaster, which overwhelms the audience after the naturalistic rhythm of what preceded it. Brenton is a writer worth watching. He is also very funny. He deals in caricature, but his voice is assured.’

17 June 1974
‘My first meeting with Howard Brenton. A huge man, shy, a little fat, delivering occasional knockout remarks like a gentle pugilist suddenly lashing out. He is very like his plays, a sure sign of a fine artist. He is the first of the new, young ones to be utterly enthusiastic about the new building and the possibilities of reaching a big audience at the new National. He will write a play for us and he wants David Hare to direct it.’

9 June 1975
‘Fascinating interview in Theatre Quarterly with Howard Brenton: I want to get into bigger theatres, because they are, in a sense, more public. Until that happens you can’t have any worth as a playwright... It’s like getting hold of a Bechstein, hitting a really superb instrument, when before you’ve been shouting about with a penny whistle or a mouth organ. You realise how powerful the new instrument is, and varied, and how much fun.

I think the Fringe has failed. Its failure was that of the whole dream of an alternative culture, the notion that within society as it exists you can grow another way of life which, like a beneficient and desirable cancer, will in the end spread through the Western world and change it. What happens is the alternative society gets hermetically sealed and surrounded. A ghetto-like mentality develops which is surrounded and in the end strangled to death. . . I think in that sense the Fringe was a historical thing. Where it went wrong was when the Fringe audiences became spuriously sophisticated. That was when it was time to get out - it was becoming arty.’

21 October 1978
‘Read Howard Brenton’s new play The Romans in Britain. It’s very exciting, and shattering in its power. The sequence where Caesar and his hordes suddenly turn into modem British troops in Northern Ireland sent shivers down my back. It sounds an obvious parallel, and cheap, but it’s not, and Howard takes no sides. But there is a lot of work on the play still to be done.’

For more extracts from Hall’s diaries see Happy days with Peggy.

A dead chicken in my chest

‘Suddenly, in the midst of all the people who crowded around me or spoke to me, I felt as if there were a dead chicken in my chest.’ This is Peter Handke - avant-garde writer and film-maker born 80 years ago today - writing in a diary he kept in 1976 during the early years of his literary fame in Austria. In recent years, he has courted much controversy by defending Slobodan Milošević, nevertheless, very recently, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Peter was born on 6 December 1942 in Griffen, then in the German Reich province Gau Carinthia, now in Austria. His Slovenian mother married Bruno Handke, a tram conductor (not Peter’s father), with whom she lived in the Soviet-occupied Pankow district of Berlin in 1944, and where she had two more children. In 1948, they moved back to Griffen. Peter was sent to a Catholic boarding school at Tanzenberg Castle. After high school in Klagenfurt, he began to study law at the University of Graz in 1961. There he teamed up with the Grazer Gruppe, an association of young writers, which published their own works in an avant-garde literary magazine -  manuskripte. He abandoned his studies in 1965 after the German publisher Suhrkamp Verlag accepted his novel Die Hornissen (The Hornets).

Handke came to public notice as an anti-conventional playwright with Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience) in 1966; several more plays - lacking conventional plot, dialogue, and characters - followed. In 1970, he published what would become his best known novel, Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick). After leaving Graz, Handke lived in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Kronberg, Paris, the US (1978 to 1979) and Salzburg (1979 to 1988). Since 1990, he has lived in Chaville near Paris.

Handke collaborated with director Wim Wenders on several films, including writing the script for Wings of Desire, and he has also directed films, including adaptations from his novels. In 1978, The Left-Handed Woman was nominated for the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival and it won the Gold Award for German Arthouse Cinema in 1980. From around 2006, Handke’s literary renown has been overshadowed by his public support for Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Yugoslavia accused of war crimes who died that year in a prison cell. 

The controversy surrounding Handke was rekindled in 2019 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literatur - even though four years earlier he had called for the prize to be abolished. The Swedish Academy chose it for being ‘an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience’. Further information on Handke can be found at Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The New Yorker, or in the Nobel Prize’s biobibliography.

In 1984, Secker & Warburg published Handke’s The Weight of the World (as translated by Ralph Manheim). This is described as: ‘A combination of professional notebook and personal diary that records - both in short, informal jottings and through more formal, extended meditations - the details of Handke’s daily life in Paris from November 1975 through March 1977.’ The book offers ‘a complete offering of Handke’s moods and insights, ranging from the outrageous, sarcastic, and bitter to the humorous and gentle’. But, it continues, ‘it is not, in the end, a retreat into himself, but a gesture of friendliness towards the world’.

Here is more from the publisher’s blurb: ‘Along with references to such mentors as Truffaut, John Cowper Powys, Robert DeNiro and Goethe, the journal recounts Handke's passing impressions of strangers; the deep and delicate nature of his relationship with his daughter; and a brief hospital stay which stirs his ever-present fear of death. Aspiring to a condition of “strained attentiveness”, Handke cultivates privacy and solitude, and deplores the all-too-frequent intrusion of the media (“Down with the news!”). His goal is to have a kind of creative “worksheet”, a vehicle through which he can preserve and explore sources of aesthetic inspiration, and also to have a place where he can “practice reacting with language to everything that happens”, a means of discovering a “universal moment of language”.

The Weight of the World can freely borrowed to read online at Internet Archive. Here are several extracts.

1 March 1976
‘Suddenly, in the midst of all the people who crowded around me or spoke to me, I felt as if there were a dead chicken in my chest

This evening I got back from Austria and Germany. Suddenly, at the dark Porte de la Muette on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, it seemed to me that my life - a kind of second, secret biography - was simultaneously continuing back home in southern Carinthia, continuing very concretely before the eyes of the villagers, and that my body at that moment was painfully, yet almost consolingly stretched over the length and breadth of Europe, that I became a standard of measurement and lost myself’

12 March 1976
‘Waking from sheltered sleep: like being tripped up while taking a quiet stroll

Waking with the thought that I’ve strangled the child; not daring to reach out and touch her; at last a sigh beside me

Ruins of memory: I try to remember the details of places, houses, faces, and all I see is ruins

Powdered sugar on my shoes from eating doughnuts (Austria)

The sensation of moving about like a sleeper who wants to look at the clock and in his dreams does indeed keep looking at the clock (because he has to get up soon), but never actually does look at the clock

If I could only look calmly at someone who hates me

A beggar holds out his hand in front of me and I shake my head angrily because he has put me into such a situation (other people just turn away in indifference)

People who have what’s needed for every emergency: umbrella, aspirin, etc.

A girl who for once does not ooze tears in that well-behaved way but lets the corners of her mouth droop and bawls out loud

The salesgirl in an empty shop that stays open at lunch hour is dreamily munching a sandwich (I wrote this outside the open shop door, which someone closed at that very moment)

The teacher who had just taken the children to the farm show (bus ride, street crossings) told me she was always in a bad humor on days when she was going to have to take the children out; at the beginning of the school year, she said, she refused to take them anywhere until she knew all about each one of them, their way of walking, etc.

The sheep at the farm show breathed mechanically, like pumps: it’s their sense of doom that turns them into machines 

“What would you like to accomplish by writing?” - “To make people laugh and cry” (I imagine being able to say such things in all seriousness)

Years ago, someone said the nice thing about me was that I had no habits. And now?

People are always claiming to be a mixture of “good and bad”; as for me, I am either all good or all bad

Nice, seeing my child with other children, as if she belonged with them

That day a pale, solemn, unknown child came in out of the rain with other children, and I didn’t recognize her as my own: horror, and at the same time marvel’

14 October 1976
‘Fantasy: an express train thundering through the suburban station; someone running ahead of it but refusing to scream

On the street today, the feeling that many people knew “who I am” but passed by without a thought of betraying me; some even tried to reassure me with a quick glance

The leaves racing over the ground; impression of a cavalcade, especially when I climb steps to reach the park where the leaves are blowing; there’s one place where the leaves disperse in all directions, leaving a clean empty circle in the middle of the park

How much more domesticated I am, after all, when I’m talking to someone than when I’m roaming around alone! (Fantasy: unaware that I’m watching them, some people, including my calm friends, made almost unrecognizable by their adventurous loneliness, race through the cities of the world with wild, glaring eyes)

Toward midnight, objects, seen out of the corners of my eyes, are starting to crawl again’

I flied the highest

‘I ran in the wind and played be a horse, and had a lovely time in the woods with Anna and Lizzie. We were fairies, and made gowns and paper wings. I “flied” the highest of all.’ This is Louisa Alcott - famous for being the author of the American classic Little Women - born 190 years ago today. She was writing in the diary then as a young girl, aged 11, but would go on to keep a diary for  much of her life. This diary, apart from documenting her own life, says much about the New England Transcendentalist movement her father was involved with.

Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on 29 November 1832. She spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, being schooled, with three sisters, at home by her father, a New England Transcendentalist. For three years, they were part of the Utopian Fruitlands community. When this failed, they were helped out by her father’s friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson; money problems, though, were never far away. Louisa started writing early, mostly poetry and short stories. Flower Fables, her first book, was published when she was just 22.

In 1862, Alcott, an avowed abolitionist, went to Washington to work as a nurse during the Civil War, but her service lasted only a few weeks, as she nearly died from typhoid. She never recovered full health again. A book of her letters at the time, called Hospital Letters, brought her a first taste of literary fame. She began writing stories for Atlantic Monthly. Her most famous work, Little Women, written in 1868, and set at Orchard House, is still popular today. Alcott continued writing children’s books - though she yearned to do more serious fiction - because the family needed the income. In all, she published over 30 books and collections of stories.

Alcott died, aged 55, in 1888, just two days after her father. Further information is available from Wikipedia, the website for Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House (‘one of the oldest, most authentically-preserved historic house museums in America’) or The Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography.

From an early age through to the end of her life, Alcott kept a diary which she never intended for publication. Parts of it first appeared a year after her death in Louisa May Alcott Her Life, Letters and Journals edited by Ednah D. Cheney and published by Roberts Brothers in Boston. This book was continually reprinted before and after the publisher was taken over by Little, Brown in 1898. A first unabridged edition of Alcott’s diaries appeared a century later in 1989 when University of Georgia Press brought out The Journals of Louisa May Alcott edited by Madeleine B. Stern. Her Life, Letters and Journals is freely available at Internet Archive, and some of the more recent publication can be previewed at Googlebooks and Amazon.

1 September 1843
‘I rose at five and had my bath. I love cold water! Then we had our singing-lesson with Mr Lane. After breakfast I washed dishes, and ran on the hill till nine, and had some thoughts, it was so beautiful up there. Did my lessons, wrote and spelt and did sums; and Mr Lane read a story, “The Judicious Father”: How a rich girl told a poor girl not to look over the fence at the flowers, and was cross to her because she was unhappy. The father heard her do it, and made the girls change clothes. The poor one was glad to do it, and he told her to keep them. But the rich one was very sad; for she had to wear the old ones a week, and after that she was good to shabby girls. I liked it very much, and I shall be kind to poor people.

Father asked us what was God’s noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad; babies never are. We had a long talk, and I felt better after it, and cleared up.

We had bread and fruit for dinner. I read and walked and played till supper-time. We sung in the evening. As I went to bed the moon came up very brightly and looked at me. I felt sad because I have been cross to day, and did not mind Mother. I cried, and then I felt better, and said that piece from Mrs Sigourney, “I must not tease my mother.” I get to sleep saying poetry, I know a great deal.’

14 September 1843
‘Mr Parker Pillsbury came, and we talked about the poor slaves. I had a music lesson with Miss F. I hate her, she is so fussy. I ran in the wind and played be a horse, and had a lovely time in the woods with Anna and Lizzie. We were fairies, and made gowns and paper wings. I “flied” the highest of all. In the evening they talked about travelling. I thought about Father going to England, [. . .]

It rained when I went to bed, and made a pretty noise on the roof.’

8 October 1843
‘When I woke up, the first thought I got was, “It’s Mother s birthday: I must be very good.” I ran and wished her a happy birthday, and gave her my kiss. After breakfast we gave her our presents. I had a moss cross and a piece of poetry for her.

We did not have any school, and played in the woods and got red leaves. In the evening we danced and sung, and I read a story about “Contentment.” I wish I was rich, I was good, and we were all a happy family this day.’

4 January 1863
‘I shall record the events of a day as a sample of the days I spend:

Up at six, dress by gaslight, run through my ward and throw up the windows, though the men grumble and shiver; but the air is bad enough to breed a pestilence; and as no notice is taken of our frequent appeals for better ventilation, I must do what I can. Poke up the fire, add blankets, joke, coax, and command; but continue to open doors and windows as if life depended upon it. Mine does, and doubtless many another, for a more perfect pestilence-box than this house I never saw, cold, damp, dirty, full of vile odors from wounds, kitchens, wash-rooms, and stables. No competent head, male or female, to right matters, and a jumble of good, bad, and indifferent nurses, surgeons, and attendants, to complicate the chaos still more.

After this unwelcome progress through my stifling ward, I go to breakfast with what appetite I may; find the uninvitable fried beef, salt butter, husky bread, and washy coffee; listen to the clack of eight women and a dozen men, the first silly, stupid, or possessed of one idea; the last absorbed with their breakfast and themselves to a degree that is both ludicrous and provoking, for all the dishes are ordered down the table full and returned empty; the conversation is entirely among themselves, and each announces his opinion with an air of importance that frequently causes me to choke in my cup, or bolt my meals with undignified speed lest a laugh betray to these famous beings that a “chiel’s amang them takin’ notes.”

Till noon I trot, trot, giving out rations, cutting up food for helpless “boys,” washing faces, teaching my attendants how beds are made or floors are swept, dressing wounds, taking Dr F. P.’s orders (privately wishing all the time that he would be more gentle with my big babies), dusting tables, sewing bandages, keeping my tray tidy, rushing up and down after pillows, bed-linen, sponges, books, and directions, till it seems as if I would joyfully pay down all I possess for fifteen minutes’ rest. At twelve the big bell rings, and up comes dinner for the boys, who are always ready for it and never entirely satisfied. Soup, meat, potatoes, and bread is the bill of fare. Charley Thayer, the attendant, travels up and down the room serving out the rations, saving little for himself, yet always thoughtful of his mates, and patient as a woman with their helplessness. When dinner is over, some sleep, many read, and others want letters written. This I like to do, for they put in such odd things, and express their ideas so comically, I have great fun interiorally, while as grave as possible exteriorally. A few of the men word their paragraphs well and make excellent letters. John’s was the best of all I wrote. The answering of letters from friends after some one had died is the saddest and hardest duty a nurse has to do.

Supper at five sets every one to running that can run; and when that flurry is over, all settle down for the evening amusements, which consist of newspapers, gossip, the doctor’s last round, and, for such as need them, the final doses for the night. At nine the bell rings, gas is turned down, and day nurses go to bed. Night nurses go on duty, and sleep and death have the house to themselves.

My work is changed to night watching, or half night and half day, from twelve to twelve. I like it, as it leaves me time for a morning run, which is what I need to keep well; for bad air, food, and water, work and watching, are getting to be too much for me. I trot up and down the streets in all directions, sometimes to the Heights, then half way to Washington, again to the hill, over which the long trains of army wagons are constantly vanishing and ambulances appearing. That way the fighting lies, and I long to follow.

Ordered to keep my room, being threatened with pneumonia. Sharp pain in the side, cough, fever, and dizziness. A pleasant prospect for a lonely soul five hundred miles from home! Sit and sew on the boys’ clothes, write letters, sleep, and read; try to talk and keep merry, but fail decidedly, as day after day goes, and I feel no better. Dream awfully, and wake unrefreshed, think of home, and wonder if I am to die here, as Mrs R., the matron, is likely to do. Feel too miserable to care much what becomes of me. Dr S. creaks up twice a day to feel my pulse, give me doses, and ask if I am at all consumptive, or some other cheering question. Dr O. examines my lungs and looks sober. Dr J. haunts the room, coming by day and night with wood, cologne, books, and messes, like a motherly little man as he is. Nurses fussy and anxious, matron dying, and everything very gloomy. They want me to go home, but I won t yet.’

27 April 1872
‘Mr Emerson died at 9 P.M. suddenly. Our best and greatest American gone. The nearest and dearest friend Father has ever had, and the man who has helped me most by his life, his books, his society. I can never tell all he has been to me, from the time I sang Mignon’s song under his window (a little girl) and wrote letters a la Bettine to him, my Goethe, at fifteen, up through my hard years, when his essays on Self-Reliance, Character, Compensation, Love, and Friendship helped me to understand myself and life, and God and Nature. Illustrious and beloved friend, good-by!’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 29 November 2012.

Shakespeare’s name William

It is four centuries to the day since the death of John Manningham, a lawyer at Middle Temple. There was nothing much remarkable about his life, but he is remembered thanks to a diary he kept for a year or two at the dawn of the 17th century; and this diary happens to mention Shakespeare, and to give an historically important account of the death of Queen Elizabeth I.

John was born around 1575, the son of Robert Manningham of Cambridgeshire. When Robert died, John was formally adopted by his grandfather’s younger brother, Richard, a prosperous London mercer. He studied at Cambridge, graduating in 1596 before entering the Middle Temple.

Manningham married Anne Curle in 1605, and they had at least six children. He practised law throughout his life, and had a position at the court of wards and liveries. He inherited, from Richard Manningham, the manor house of Bradbourne in East Malling, Kent. He died on 22 November 1622. There is a little more biographical information available at Wikipedia or the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900.

Undoubtedly, Manningham is remembered today because of a diary he kept for a short while at the start of the 17th century while he was still a student at Middle Temple. Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, and of Bradbourne, Kent, Barrister-at-law, 1602-1603, was first edited by John Bruce and published by the Camden Society in 1868. It is freely available at Internet Archive.

Bruce suggests Manningham’s text ‘is scarcely what is generally understood by a Diary. It is rather a note-book in which the writer has jotted down from time to time his impressions of whatever he chanced to hear, read, or see, or whatever he desired to preserve in his memory. The result is a curious patchwork. Anecdotes, witticisms, aphoristic expressions, gossip, rumours, extracts from books, large notes of sermons, occasional memoranda of journeys into Kent and Huntingdonshire, with some little personal matter of the true Diary kind, are all thrown together into a miscellany of odds and ends.’

The Dictionary of National Biography describes it thus: ‘The work is an entertaining medley of anecdotes of London life, political rumours, accounts of sermons, and memoranda of journeys. The gossip respecting Queen Elizabeth’s illness and death and the accession of James I is set down in attractive detail, and Manningham often supplies shrewd comments on the character of the chief lawyers and preachers of the day. He also gives an interesting account of the performance of Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ [. . .] in the Middle Temple Hall. [. . .] The familiar anecdote of Shakespeare’s triumph over Richard Burbage in the pursuit of the favours of a lady of doubtful virtue rests on Manningham’s authority [see Shakespeare Online for example]. Sir Thomas Bodley, John Stow, and Sir Thomas Overbury are also occasionally mentioned by Manningham.’

Here are several extracts, including those that mention Shakespeare and the dying/death of Queen Elizabeth I.

18 January 1602
‘I rode with my cosen’s wife to Maidstone; dyned at Gellibrands.

As we were viewinge a scull in his studye, he shewed the seame in the middle over the heade, and said that was the place which the midwife useth shutt in women children before the wit can enter, and that is a reason that women be such fooles ever after.

My cosen shee said that the Gellibrands two wives lived like a couple of whelpes togither, meaninge sporting, but I sayd like a payre of turtles, or a couple of connies, sweetely and lovingly.

Mr. Alane, a minister, was very sicke. Gellibrand gave him a glyster, and lett him bloud the same day, for a feuer; his reason was, that not to have lett him bloud had bin verry dangerous; but to lett bloud is doubtfull, it may doe good as well as harme.

My cosen shee told me, that when shee was first married to hir husband Marche, as shee rode behinde him, shee slipt downe, and he left hir behinde, never lookt back to take hir up; soe shee went soe long a foote that shee tooke it soe unkindly that shee thought neuer to have come againe to him, but to haue sought a service in some vnknowne place; but he tooke hir at last.

Wee were at Mrs Cavils, when she practised some wit upon my cosen. Cosen she called double anemonies double enimies.’

2 February 1602
‘At our feast wee had a play called “Twelue Night, or What you Will,” much like the Commedy of Errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practise in it to make the Steward beleeve his Lady widdowe was in love with him, by counterfeyting a letter as from his Lady in generall termes, telling him what shee liked best in him, and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparaile, &c., and then when he came to practise making him beleeue they tooke him to be mad.’

13 March 1602
‘Vpon a tyme when Burbidge played Richard III, there was a citizen grone soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night vnto hir by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare ouerhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then message being brought that Richard the Third was at the dore, Shakespeare caused returne to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third. Shakespeare’s name William.’

23 March 1603
‘I dyned with Dr Parry in the Priuy Chamber, and understood by him, the Bishop of Chichester, the Deane of Canterbury, the Deane of Windsore, &c. that hir Majestie hath bin by fitts troubled with melancholy some three or four monethes, but for this fortnight extreame oppressed with it, in soe much that shee refused to eate anie thing, to receive any phisike, or admit any rest in bedd, till within these two or three dayes. Shee hath bin in a manner speacheles for two dayes, verry pensive and silent; since Shrovetide sitting sometymes with hir eye fixed upon one obiect many howres togither, yet shee alwayes had hir perfect senses and memory, and yesterday signified by the lifting up of hir hand and eyes to heaven, a signe which Dr Parry entreated of hir, that shee beleeved that fayth which shee hath caused to be professed, and looked faythfully to be saved by Christes merits and mercy only, and noe other meanes. She tooke great delight in hearing prayers, would often at the name of Jesus lift up hir handes and eyes to Heaven. Shee would not heare the Arch[bishop] speake of hope of hir longer lyfe, but when he prayed or spake of Heaven, and those ioyes, shee would hug his hand, &c. It seemes shee might have lived yf she would have used meanes; but shee would not be persuaded, and princes must not be forced. Hir physicians said shee had a body of a firme and perfect constitucion, likely to have liued many yeares. A royall Maiesty is noe priviledge against death.’

24 March 1603
‘This morning about three at clocke hir Majestie departed this lyfe, mildly like a lambe, easily like a ripe apple from the tree, [. . .] Dr Parry told me that he was present, and sent his prayers before hir soule; and I doubt not but shee is amongst the royall saints in Heaven in eternall joyes.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 22 November 2012.

I always see the ruin of Italy

‘Am listless and sleepy, as I have never been before. I sleep little at nights: before me I always see the ruin of Italy, . .’ This is from the diaries of the Italian writer and philosopher Benedetto Croce, who died 70 years ago today. Reluctantly, he took on, briefly, active political roles before and after Mussolini’s rise and fall, but he is best remembered for his philosophical works and contributions to liberal political theory.

Croce was born in 1866 in Pescasseroli (Abruzzi region of Italy) into a Catholic and wealthy landowning family. In 1883, he lost his parents in an earthquake on the island of Ischia, and went to live with an uncle in Rome, where he studied law at university. There he abandoned his religious faith, but also became disillusioned with the university, returning to Naples. Having inherited his family’s fortune, he had the freedom to devote time to personal studies, such as on historical realism. He traveled in Spain, Germany, France, and England, but in 1893, influenced by the Neapolitan-born Gianbattista Vico, he turned his learning towards philosophy (even buying the house in which Vico had lived). Friends persuaded him to read Hegel, and in 1907 he published a commentary on the German philosopher - What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel - which brought him increased attention.

Croce published other significant works around this time, not least Aesthetic (1902), Logic (1908), and Philosophy of the Practical (1908). In 1903, he also founded (in collaboration with his friend the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) La Critica, a journal of cultural criticism in which, over the next 40 years, he would publish nearly all of his writings. Hitherto, he had eschewed interest in politics, but in 1910 he was persuaded into a more public role, being appointed to the Italian Senate. In 1914, he married Adela Rossi, with whom he had four daughters. He opposed Italy’s participation in the First World War. In 1919, he supported the government of Francesco Saverio Nitti, and was appointed Minister of Public Education - a position he held between 1920 and 1921. 

Initially, he supported Mussolini’s fascist government, but by 1925 he had written and signed a Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. After Mussolini’s fall, in 1943, he became Minister without Portofilio of the new democratic government and a member of the Constituent Assembly. From 1943 to 1947, he was President of the reconstituted Liberal party. In 1947, he retired from politics and established the Institute for Historical Studies in his Naples home, where he had an extensive library. From 1949 until 1952, he was president of PEN International, the worldwide writers’ association, and he was nominated 16 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died on 20 November 1952. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica and the New World Encyclopedia.

Croce kept a diary for much of his life; and at some point had them privatively printed in six volumes. But after the Second World War, a year’s worth of his diary entries in 1943/1944 were published in Quaderni della Critica. These were then translated into English by Sylvia Sprigge for publication by George Allen & Unwin in 1950 as Croce, the King and the Allies: Extracts from a diary by Benedetto Croce July 1943 - June 1944. This was re-published in 2019 by Routledge - an edition which can be sampled at Googlebooks. Extracts of Croce’s diaries from other periods in his life can also be found in the biography Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism by Fabio Fernando Rizi (which can be digitally borrowed from Internet Archive).

A foreword to the 1943/1944 diary extracts provided by Croce for Quaderni della Critica was also included in the English editions. He wrote: ‘Historical accounts are beginning to appear in print of the nine months from early September 1943 to June 1944, a period when Government and political party activity could only take place in southern Italy and in the islands. I thought I might correct and integrate certain errors and certain omissions not easy to avoid in such accounts, with these notes from a diary, which I have been keeping these last forty years in a fairly brief form, at the beginning or end of my day, and whose purpose has been to note the course of my literary work. But after July 25th 1943, owing to the rush of events, the diary gradually filled with notes on political matters. In the following pages are extracts without the literary and private notes, of which I have left only a few in the early pages so that the character and nature of the Diary may be kept in mind. The political notes were a part of it, and at first were entered occasionally and almost involuntarily. Some details of little importance I have left in, being desirous and careful not to offend the susceptibilities or rouse the resentment of any one, for my purpose is solely that which I have already outlined. I do not know whether I have always succeeded in this, despite the goodwill which I have put into it.’

And here are three extracts (including the first) from Croce, the King and the Allies.

25 July 1943, Sorrento
‘In the morning, historical reading; but in the afternoon, visits from friends. Parente, both the Morellis, Zanotti Bianco, Petaccia. The Dohrns are here too. I was tired and had gone to bed at eleven o’clock when a telephone call from Signorina Elena di Serracapriola’s villa brought the news that Mussolini had resigned and that the new Government had been entrusted to Badoglio by the King. Parente and the Morellis, who had gone away half an hour ago, on hearing the news also arrived, jubilant, and we talked of the event. Back to bed, but I could not close my eyes till four o’clock or later. The feeling I have is of liberation from an evil which weighed upon the heart’s core; derivative evils and dangers remain, but that evil will not return.’

20 August 1943
‘Am listless and sleepy, as I have never been before. I sleep little at nights: before me I always see the ruin of Italy, and the news of Giovanni Laterza’s bad health, rapidly deteriorating, depresses me. When they brought the news of the fall of Fascism to his sick-bed on July 26th, he ordered the words “God be praised” to be written at the head of all letters and bills of that day. In the afternoon, as best I could, took up the threads of work in hand, including the revised elaboration of Blanch. The Giornale d’ltalia has printed my article on the Italian Academy despite the veto of the censors which Bergamini has overridden. But other articles on the subject are forbidden. I am told that the King said, “The Academy is not to be tampered with any more than the Senate.” But the Senate too, unworthy and corrupt as it is, will have to be ‘tampered with.’

17 September 1943
‘In the morning a visit from an American journalist, Kearney, who asked me some political questions, which I answered as best I could, what with being tired, not having slept and it being stiflingly hot. While Elena was helping to translate my answers into English, the English Admiral, J. B. Morse, came to visit me with his aide, Richard Long, and we had a short conversation. The lieutenant asked me who were the dangerous or Fascist people in Sorrento, and I asked to be excused because I could not, in my old age, begin doing things I had never done in the course of my life, to which the lieutenant agreed and said he well understood. The Germans left over there were mentioned in the conversation; but the Dohrn family, although attached to their country, has been noted as ‘neutral.’ In the evening a much famed journalist, Knickerbocker, came to say a lot of kind things to me, and then talked for a long time with my daughters, and wanting to give proof of his admiration, he wrote some lines by which to remember him in a copy of Shakespeare which they had with them.’

22 September 1943
‘Raimondo has left again. Suffocating heat continues. Tight feeling about the heart for Naples in the hands of the Germans. From here we hear explosions and see fires, and get rumours of people killed, devastation and looting. General Donovan and a journalist called Whitaker, together with an American officer called Tomkins, whom I got to know in the last few days and who has been in Italy previously for a long time, came to see me. The General told me that large supplies have been prepared for Naples, to be landed ten or fifteen days after the occupation. He said it might be a good thing if I let this be known in Naples. I said I would spread the news among people I shall see, but that I have no means of communicating with Naples. Similarly, with another of his suggestions that the Neapolitans should try to prevent the Germans from destroying the port. Whitaker offered me presses, paper and ink with which to print a paper here! General Donovan asked me how the spirit of the Italians was, and I said that what all the best Italians wanted, and what would most encourage them, would be permission to form a combatant legion under the Italian flag to co-operate with the Anglo-American armies in liberating Italian soil from the Germans; and then, when he asked me whether there was anybody who could command such a legion, I gave him General Pavone’s name, a man of an old southern family, a patriot and a liberal, and presently a member of the Party of Action.’

Secondary arias were omitted

‘We obeyed and stood at the walls for forty minutes. Anti-aircraft guns were firing somewhere in the distance. After the lights out, the performance continued, albeit at an accelerated pace: secondary arias and duets were omitted . . .’. This is the celebrated Russian poet Vera Inber - who died 50 years ago today - writing in her diary about an air raid during a visit to the opera. It was the early days of Germany’s siege of Leningrad, an offensive that would last for 872 days and take the lives of 1.5 million people. Inber’s diary of those desperate times was subsequently published, and later translated for publication in English.

Vera Moiseyevna Shpenzer was born in Odessa in 1890. Her father (a cousin to Leon Trotsky) ran a scientific publishing house, and her mother was a teacher of Russian. She briefly attended classes in history and philology. Her first poems were published in 1910 in local newspapers. Until 1914, she lived, together with her husband Nathan Inber, in Paris (where she paid for her first collection of poems to be printed), Switzerland and then Moscow. She worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent, traveling across the country and sometimes living abroad. In her literary writing, she associated with the constructivist movement. 

Through the 1920s and 1930s, her writing focused on Moscow, the Revolution, and Vladimir Lenin. She wrote short stories - depicting the clash between old and new Soviet life - and for the theatre. During the Second World War, she joined the Communist Party and began producing patriotic works. In 1941, she moved with her second husband, Ilya Davydovich Strashun, to Leningrad, where Strashun had been appointed director of a medical institute. Her poem Pulkovo Meridian, which details daily life in Leningrad during the siege, won a Stalin Prize in 1946. After the war, she continued to live in Leningrad. She died on 11 November 1972. A little further information is available from Wikipedia, The New York Times, Encyclopedia.com, and the Jewish Virtual Library.

Inber kept a diary during the siege of Leningrad; this was published in 1945. Some time later, in 1971, it was translated into English by Serge M. Wolff and Rachel Grieve for publication by Hutchinson in 1971 as Leningrad Diary. I cannot find much about this online, though Carol Harrison uploaded the following review for Good Reads:

‘A remarkable diary, describing the siege of Leningrad during World War II. The author, an eminent Russian poet, tells the daily struggles and tragedies, from the extreme food and water shortages to the relentless shelling, from the sudden terrible deaths to the persistence of concerts and lectures even when going across the street was a risk to life (but so was staying at home). At the end of the book, although the war is still going on, Leningrad is beginning to rebuild, and there is already a museum commemorating the long siege. Trees are being replanted, and the botanical gardens are planning new trips to re-gather plants from around the world. 90% of their collection died from the cold during the siege, and the loss of tadpoles and frogs also meant the loss of some plants dependent on them. The overall message of the book is summed up by a fifteen-year-old boy who is mortally injured: “a waste”. War is always a waste of lives and of nature and of beautiful, purposeful buildings.’

And I found a substantial article about Inber and her poetry in English on a Russian website (with trigger-happy adverts!) which also had a few extracts from her diary.

26 August 1941
‘Our apartment on Pesochnaya, on the fifth floor, is high, light, half-empty. Only bookshelves and plates on the walls are plentiful. Unfading Elizabethan and Catherine’s roses, nicholas, blue and gold ornament. Gray-white faience. A fragile economy. Where with him now ?! Bedroom windows and balcony overlook the Botanical Garden. Although it is still hot, some trees are already preparing for autumn: they have dressed up in all gold and scarlet. And what else will happen in September! From the balcony one can clearly see a huge palm greenhouse, all of glass. There are few people in the garden. I haven’t been there yet. Let's go on Sunday . . .’

9 September 1941
‘In the afternoon, as usual, there were several alarms, but we nevertheless decided to go to the Musical Comedy, to the “Bat”. . . In the intermission between the first and second acts, another alarm began. The administrator came out into the foyer and, in the same tone as he probably announced the replacement of the performer due to illness, he said clearly: “I ask the citizens to get as close to the walls as possible, since there (he pointed to the huge span of the ceiling) there are no ceilings here”. We obeyed and stood at the walls for forty minutes. Anti-aircraft guns were firing somewhere in the distance. After the lights out, the performance continued, albeit at an accelerated pace: secondary arias and duets were omitted . . . As the car rounded the square, we suddenly saw black swirling mountains of smoke, illuminated from below by flames. All this piled up in the sky, swelled, let out terrible curls and spurs. Kovrov (the driver) turned and said in a dull voice: “The German threw bombs and set fire to the food depots.” . . . The houses stood on the balcony for a long time, everyone looked at the burning Badayev warehouses. We went to bed at eleven. But at two o’clock in the morning I had to (for the first time in Leningrad) go down to the shelter. . .’

17 September 1941
‘Our room is very small: a desk by the window, two iron beds, a bookcase, an armchair and two chairs. To wash, you have to bring in a stool and a basin. On the walls are portraits of scientists. There is a round iron stove in the room. Outside the window are mighty poplars. We have convinced ourselves that they will protect us from the fragments. And the room itself is well located. In the depths of the letter “P”, between the wings of the house . . .’

12 February 1942
‘The view of the city is terrible. Met six or seven dead on a sled. (In “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign” there is a “mortal sleigh.” ice, drinking water. An early, early premonition of spring.

5 August 1942
‘In general, I have a feeling that only while I am working, nothing bad can happen to me.’

See also Only Tanya is left

La Foce is liberated

Today marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of the celebrated English biographer, Iris Origo. She spent most of her life in Italy; there she married, and there, with her husband, she developed a ramshackle farming estate at La Foce, in Tuscany. Famously, during the Second World War, the estate took in refugee children and sheltered escaping prisoners. Her diary of that time has become a classic of war literature.

Iris Margaret Cutting was born on 15 August 1902 in England, the child of an Anglo-Irish mother and a rich American father. She was educated privately in Florence, Italy, and, with inherited wealth, spent much time in her youth travelling. She married an Italian nobleman, Antonio Origo, and together they developed a rundown farming estate, La Foce, some 150km north of Rome. They had one son who died young of meningitis, and two daughters.

In the 1930s, Origo turned to writing, publishing biographies of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi and Cola di Rienzo, a fourteenth century Roman politician. During the war, the family stayed at La Foce where they secretly took in refugee children and helped escaping Allied prisoners. After the war, the Origos lived in both Rome and La Foce, and Iris continued writing biographies and autobiographical books. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died in 1988. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, The Florentine and The Guardian.

Origo’s first published autobiographical work was a diary she kept during the war - War in Val d’Orcia (Jonathan Cape, 1947, but reissued several times since then, most recently by Pushkin Press). The book’s publicity material says: ‘In a corner of Tuscany, one woman - born in England, married to an Italian- kept a record of daily life in a country at war. Iris Origo’s compellingly powerful diary, War in Val d’Orcia, is the spare and vivid account of what happened when a peaceful farming valley became a battleground.’ Some pages can be previewed online at Googlebooks.

 9 June 1943
‘At four am in the Clinica Quisisana, my second daughter, Donata, is born. During the long night before her birth I heard from the room, through my own pain, the groans for morphia of a young airman whose leg had been amputated.’

10 June 1943
‘The third anniversary of Italy’s entry into the war. No celebrations. A rumour had spread that there were to be air-raids all over Italy, and all day many mothers have kept their children at home. Nothing, however, occurred until six pm, when a few enemy planes flew over the town - and a few more during the night. The air-raid warnings in the hospital (even though nothing happens) are rather uncomfortable, owing to one’s enforced immobility and the jumpiness of some of the patients.’

24 January 1944
‘The German officer turns up: a parachutist, covered with medals of both this war and the last, in which he served as a volunteer at the age of sixteen. He inspects the Castellucio, is unfortunately delighted with it, and a notice, stating that the castle has been requisitioned, is placed on the door. Mercifully, our own house is not required - as yet. In the afternoon we walk up to Pietraporciana - a lonely farm on the hill-top at the top of our property - to see if we could take all the children there, if we are turned out. There would be thirty-six of us.’

26 January 1944
‘Spend the day sorting furniture and books to be hidden in outlying farms. Schwester Marie, the babies’ charming Swiss nurse, who was to have returned home at this time, decides to stay on with us and see us through, in view of the possibility of our being arrested and the children left alone. Our relief is very great, but she may soon be completely cut off from her home.’

29 June 1944
[. . .] The Germans have gone. [Later] Not only have they gone, but the Allies are here! The first good news came to Antonio, who (while standing beside one of the Germans who are still left in town) was hurriedly summoned by a partisan: some English soldiers, he said, were looking for him. He accordingly hurried down into a wheatfield, and there found a small patrol, headed by a subaltern in the Scots Guards, who had actually come from La Foce. He wanted information as to the number of Germans who are still in town, the lie of the land, the bridges that had been blown up, and so on, all of which Antonio gave him, and in return, he gave us fairly good news of La Foce. The house has only been hit in two or three places, and though the damage inside is considerable, it is not irremediable. All this conversation took place hurriedly, hidden in the wheat, with sentries posted, and just as it was over, a pretty peasant-girl came up with a basket on her head, on her way to town. What next? She said she would hold her tongue, but it seemed safer for the soldiers to take her off with them for a few hours, to which indeed she agreed very willingly. The plan is for the regiment to occupy the town this afternoon. Meanwhile, we are having some German shelling for a change, and Palazzo Ricci and some other buildings have been hit. La Foce has had the honour of being mentioned in the midday bulletin as ‘liberated’ - together with Pienza and Montalcino. But we can hardly listen to the news now: we want to see with our own eyes. Every minute, now, the Allies may arrive!

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 15 August 2012.