Bashkirtseff’s inward fire

Marie Bashkirtseff, a precocious writer and artist, died 150 years ago today (probably) in Paris. Her most important legacy is a collection of remarkable diaries, out of which her personality - vivacious, self-obsessed, ambitious - shines so brightly they are still re-translated and reprinted regularly. They also show her to have been an early advocate for women’s rights.

Bashkirtseff was born in Ukraine in 1858. As a young girl she travelled widely in Europe with her mother, before settling in Nice, and then Paris, where she studied painting at the Académie Julian, one of the few establishments that took on female students. In just a few years she produced a large number of paintings, among the most famous of which are The Meeting (a portrait of slum children) and In the Studio (a portrait of fellow artists at work). But, in October 1884, aged only 25, she died of tuberculosis.

Bashkirtseff is also considered to have been an early feminist. This is partly because of the way she pushed herself into the art world, then dominated by men; and partly because of several articles she wrote under the name Pauline Oriel for a feminist newspaper, La Citoyenne. However it is her diary that provides most evidence for the way she struggled against the gender stereotypes of the age. This was published in France only three years after her death, and in England and the US in 1890. It caused a sensation. An article in the New York Times in 1900 (available online) begins as follows.

‘Most of our readers are probably familiar with the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff - that published diary of a young Russian woman which a dozen years ago was the talk of all Europe and America. Sensitive people were shocked at the freedom with which the girl’s soul was apparently laid bare. Cynics scoffed at her vanity, her egotism, and her conceit. Psychologists found in her a unique specimen for examination. Sentimentalists went raving over her strange cravings for the realisation of a sublime passion, which sometimes took the form of an ideal love and sometimes that of great fame. Men like Gladstone and Charles Eliot Norton, the statesman and the art critic, were among the first to recognise that Miss Bashkirtseff had been a most remarkable young woman. They saw revealed in the journal, as part of herself, a never-ending, never-satiated struggle against the commonplace, the inartistic, and the dwarfing provincialism that is too often mistaken for repose and dignity.’

This particular article goes on to explain how Marie’s mother censored the original diaries for publication, and to give some examples of ‘suppressed extracts’. A few days later, the New York Times published a further article about Marie, from a literary correspondent in London, William L Alden. He, it seems, did some research among those with whom Marie had studied at Académie Julian. She had great talent, and unlimited ambition, he says, but was ‘decidedly unpleasant’ in her attitude towards fellow students, and was even called an ‘hysterical minx’. Twenty years later, a further article in the New York Times records the death of Marie’s mother, and the finding of another diary in an old casket, and provides yet more extracts.

Bashkirtseff began writing her diary as a young teenager, and continued until 11 days before her death. There are over 106 notebooks. José H. Mito, in Argentina, who maintains a website lovingly devoted to her, gives a good history of the diaries and their publication (as well as much else besides). He says the complete manuscript was only discovered in 1964, in the French National Library, and that much had been left out of the earlier editions. Between 1991 and 2001, a complete version of the diaries were published in French in nine volumes and more than 3,000 pages. New editions of the diaries keep appearing in English also. One of the most successful in recent years was I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff. This was published by Chronicle Books in 1997 as a first volume, but there’s been no sign of a second volume (as far as I know).

The earliest editions of Bashkirtseff’s diary fell out of copyright many years ago, and some are available online - see The Diary Junction for links to these. Here, though, are some short samples from the diary, starting with a preface written by Bashkirtseff herself (they may, however, read very differently from modern translations).

Preface
‘Of what use were pretense or affectation? Yes, it is evident that I have the desire, if not the hope, of living upon this earth by any means in my power. If I do not die young I hope to live as a great artist; but if I die young, I intend to have my journal, which cannot fail to be interesting, published. Perhaps this idea of publication has already detracted from, if not destroyed, the chief merit that such a work may be said to possess? But, no! for in the first place I had written for a long time without any thought of being read, and then it is precisely because I hope to be read that I am altogether sincere. If this book is not the exact, the absolute, the strict truth, it has no raison d’etre. Not only do I always write what I think, but I have not even dreamed, for a single instant, of disguising anything that was to my disadvantage, or that might make me appear ridiculous. Besides, I think myself too admirable for censure.’

20 November 1878
‘I looked all of a sudden so beautiful, after I had taken my bath this evening, that I spent fully twenty minutes admiring myself in the glass. I am sure no one could have seen me without admiration; my complexion was absolutely dazzling, but soft and delicate, with a faint rose tint in the cheeks; to indicate force of character there was nothing but the lips and the eyes and eyebrows. Do not, I beg of you, think me blinded by vanity: when I do not look pretty I can see it very well; and this is the first time that I have looked pretty in a long while. Painting absorbs everything. What is odious to think of is that all this must one day fade, shrivel up, and perish!’

25 June 1884
‘I have just been reading my journal for the years 1875, 1876, and 1877. I find it full of vague aspirations toward some unknown goal. My evenings were spent in wild and despairing attempts to find some outlet for my powers. Should I go to Italy? Remain in Paris? Marry? Paint? What should I strive to become? If I went to Italy, I should no longer be in Paris, and my desire was to be everywhere at once. What a waste of energy was there?

If I had been born a man, I would have conquered Europe. As I was born a woman, I exhausted my energy in tirades against fate, and in eccentricities. There are moments when one believes one’s-self capable of all things. ‘If I only had the time,’ I wrote, ‘I would be a sculptor, a writer, a musician!’

I am consumed by an inward fire, but death is the inevitable end of all things, whether I indulge in these vain longings or not. But if I am nothing, why these dreams of fame, since the time I was first able to think? Why these wild longings after a greatness that presented itself then to my imagination under the form of riches and honors? Why, since I was first able to think, since the time when I was four years old, have I had longings, vague but intense, for glory, for grandeur, for splendor?’

The deeper you delve

Jacques Piccard, a pioneer of deep-sea exploration, has just died. Forty years ago he took part in an extraordinary experiment, a voyage on a submarine that was allowed to drift without power along the Gulf Stream for four weeks. A diary of that journey can be read online, as can Piccard’s own diary-like entries in a New York Times article.

Piccard, who died on 1 November, was a Swiss hydronaut and oceanographer of some repute. There is plenty of biographical information about him on the internet: Wikipedia has a good article; there is an excellent obituary by Marcus Williamson on The Independent website; and Jacques’ son, Bertrand Piccard, maintains a website with family information.

Jacques, born in 1922, came from a family of scientists, his father being a physicist, and his father’s twin a chemist, both of whom were also high-altitude balloonists. While Jacques was growing up, his father’s interests turned away from the sky and towards the sea, and in particular adapting the pressurised cockpit he had developed for ballooning for use in deep sea diving. Although Jacques studied and then taught economics for a while, he was soon working by his father’s side to build bathyscaphes (deep-sea diving submersibles).

With financial help from the US Navy, they built Trieste, the vessel in which Jacques and Lt. Don Walsh of the US Navy descended to the floor of Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench, seven miles beneath the surface of the Western Pacific. That historic dive, the deepest ever undertaken, took place in January 1960, and, so far, has not been bettered.

After his father’s death, Jacques continued the family work but focused on mesoscaphes - submersibles for medium depths. One of these was the Auguste Piccard, the first ever passenger submarine, which carried over 30,000 tourists to the depths of Lake Geneva during the 1964 Swiss National Exhibition.

The second was the Ben Franklin, also known as Grumman/Piccard PX-15, which was used for what SeaWiFS calls ‘the longest privately-sponsored undersea experiement of its kind’. There is much information about this submersible on Nasa’s SeaWiFS website. (SeaWiFS aims ‘to provide quantitative data on global ocean bio-optical properties to the earth science community’, and is part of Nasa’s Earth Science Enterprise.)

On 14 July 1969, the Ben Franklin slipped beneath the surface of the Atlantic off the coast of Palm Beach, Florida, the website says, its mission: ‘to investigate the secrets of the Gulf Stream as it drifted northward at depths of 600-2,000 feet; to learn the effects on man of a long-duration, closed-environment stressful voyage; to demonstrate the engineering-operational concepts of longterm submersible operation; and to conduct other scientific oceanographic studies.’ The experiment ended after more than 30 days and 1,444 nautical miles when the Ben Franklin and its crew of six surfaced some 300 miles south of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 14 August 1969.

On the same website, can be found ‘a very condensed’ version of the captain’s log (a diary in fact), with a peculiarly absorbing text by Captain Don Kazimir and delightful drawings by Erwin Aebersold. Here are three entries:

14 July 1969
‘At 1025 hours the ‘Ready for Sea’ checkout was completed. It was hoped the BEN FRANKLIN could leave port quietly with little fanfare; however, quite a crowd was on hand. The BEN FRANKLIN got underway at 1043 hours and passed the sea buoy at 1123 hours . . . At 2030 hours, the hatch was secured with the crew aboard. ‘Rig for Dive’ was completed . . . The boat descended smoothly - dribbled shot occasionally to slow descent. Trim good, no propulsion needed. At 2150 hours, we bottomed in 510 meters of water . . .’

16 July 1969
‘We were drifting nicely at 200 meters. . . F. Busby, D. Kazimir, C. May, and J. Piccard have slight colds. The cabin temperature got up to a comfortable 66 °F. C. May checked iodine concentration in the number 1 and 2 fresh water tanks and found no iodine - cannot understand why, the concentration should be 6 ppm. The same for tanks 3 and 4. C. May was having difficulty with the bunk counters and some sleep monitoring caps. The number 1 hot water tank was cooling down fast since the vacuum was lost - will shift tanks soon. Good luck message was sent to Apollo 11 astronauts.’

3 August 1969
‘Approximately 120 miles east of Cape Hatteras; we drifted at shallow depths. Our drift speed has increased to close to 3 knots. J. Piccard caught a salp in the plankton sampler.’

Days after the historic voyage was completed, Piccard wrote a long feature for the New York Times based on his own diary-like entries. Here are a few.

16 July 1969
‘All during the night the Franklin has drifted slowly at about 600 feet. Nothing has been moved to adjust her stability. Everything is fine, we are at a point 69 miles southeast of Cape Kennedy. We send a message to the Apollo 11 crew, a few hours before they leave for the moon. At 9:32, we hear - indirectly by way of radio and underwater telephone - the countdown and departure of the most fantastic expedition ever undertaken by man.’

19 July 1969
‘. . . The assault occurred at 6:09, at 252 meters down. As a matter of fact, it was really an attack; short, precise. The swordfish was about five or six feet long. Another one was waiting for him at the limit of our visibility. The combatant rushed forward and apparently tried to hit our porthole, missing it by a few inches. Then he circled around for several minutes close to the boat. Content that his domination of this portion of his realm was not threatened, he joined his friend and left, never to be seen again.’

20 July 1969
‘There is no weekend underwater. The watches succeed the watches. The work has to be done as usual. A Bible is on board. During the day we wait with impatience for the news of the moon landing. The message arrives finally at 4:20 pm and it is short and precise without any comments. ‘Two Americans have landed on the moon.’ So that is all we are to learn about the most beautiful, technical achievement ever made by mankind. Save for some 800 million Chinese and Albanians, we are the only people on earth not to have witnessed this historic event on our television screens. We must wait to enjoy the moment vicariously. Tonight I saw at my porthole a big salp, a sea creature perhaps 10 inches long and two to three inches in diameter. I could see it swimming, ejecting water from within itself to propel itself in circles through the water.’

And to conclude the article, Piccard wrote this: ‘The Gulf Stream has been deeply studied and a few secrets have been uncovered. But it will probably always shield the majority of its mysteries from man. This is the law of universal science. The deeper you delve into it, the more you realise that it is endless, limitless, infinite.’

Barbin the hermaphrodite

It is Intersex Solidarity Day, thanks to Herculine Barbin born and designated a female 170 years ago today. She died tragically before reaching 30, having changed her gender to male and her name to Abel some years earlier. She left a diary, though, describing her short life which has been widely used by academics studying gender issues. In the 1970s and 1980s, Michel Foucault, a French intellectual, brought Barbin’s story to a wider audience, and it then became the inspiration for a Pullitzer Prize winning novel.

Barbin was born on 8 November 1838 in Saint-Jean-d’Angély, France, 100km or so southwest of Poitiers, and officially registered as female. She spent her childhood in a Catholic orphanage and then in a convent. In her late teens she studied to be a teacher, and then took up a teaching post. There she fell in love with another teacher, who was also the daughter of the headmistress. Subsequently, a doctor found her to have a masculine body, with a very small penis and testicles. In 1860, Barbin’s civil status was switched to male, and she changed her name to Abel.

At the time, newspapers carried reports of Barbin’s sexual reclassification, and branded her one of the preternatural monsters of the age. Eight years later, before she was 30 in early 1868, she committed suicide in the Theatre de l’Odeon, a seedy Parisian area, leaving behind only a manuscript diary. Medical History gives a few more details. The doctor who reported her death, also rescued the diary and gave it to Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, a medical scientist. He published some verbatim excerpts in a French academic journal. Thereafter, Barbin regularly appeared as a subject in medical and legal literature. She also inspired fictional works as early as the 1890s.

More recently, in the 1970s, Barbin’s story found a modern popular audience with the publication of Herculine Barbin (Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite) by Michel Foucault, who found the text in the French Department of Public Hygiene (although RE-discovered might be a more accurate word to use in the title!). Foucoult was a well-known French philosopher, intellectual and historian, author of The History of Sexuality, who died in 1984. Foucoult’s book on Barbin, translated into English by Richard McDougall, has three parts - the memoir or diary itself; a commentary, medical notes, press reports etc; and a story based on Barbin’s life.

Here is a translation of what Le Monde had to say about the book in July 1978: ‘Herculine Barbin can be savored like a libertine novel. The ingenousness of Herculine, the passionate yet equivocal tenderness which thrusts her into the arms, even into the beds, of her companions, gives these pages a charm strangely erotic . . . Michel Foucault has a genius for bringing to light texts and reviving destinies outside the ordinary.’ 

And here is some of Amazon’s promotional text ‘With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life as a hermaphrodite. Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, a passionate lover of another schoolmistress, she is suddenly reclassified as a man. Alone and desolate, he commits suicide at the age of thirty in a miserable attic in Paris.’

Barbin’s birthday today is celebrated by Organisation Intersex International, as Intersex Solidarity Day. It calls on ‘all human rights organizations, feminist allies, academics and gender specialists, as well as other groups and individuals interested in intersex human rights’ to show their solidarity by organizing workshops, lectures, discussions on several specified topics - one of these is ‘the sexism implicit within the binary construct of sex and gender’, and another is 'the life of Herculine Barbin’.

More popularly, Barbin’s life inspired the American Jeffrey Eugenides to write Middlesex, a novel that won the Pullitzer Prize in 2003. Interviewed by Mick Brown for Irish Independent, Ireland’s largest selling daily newspaper, Eugenides said Barbin’s memoir is less promising than it sounds: ‘She’s not a very good writer. She never talks about what her body is like, what she feels, what her sexual relations are like, and she’s very melodramatic.’ Nevertheless, he told Brown, reading it led to the idea of writing his own story about a hermaphrodite.

It seems there are no substantial extracts of Barbin’s diary anywhere online, but Amazon has a few pages viewable, and a few academic works available through Googlebooks, refer to or quote from it. Here is one sample of Barbin’s writing, taken from Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, by Margaret A McLaren.

‘At that age when a woman’s graces unfold, I had neither that free and easy bearing nor the well-round limbs that reveal youth in full bloom. My complexion with its sickly pallor denoted a condition of chronic ill health. My features had a certain hardness that one could not help noticing. My upper lip and a part of my cheeks were covered by a light down that increased as the days passed. Understandably, this peculiariaty often drew me to joking remarks that I tried to avoid by making frequent use of scissors in place of a razor. As was bound to happen, I only succeeded in making it even thicker and more noticeable still. My body was literally covered with it, and so unlike my companions. As for my figure it remained ridiculously thin. That all struck the eye, as I realised everyday.’

Deneuve on location

A book of film diaries written by Catherine Deneuve, the celebrated French actress, has just been re-published - with a very long title, longer indeed than the previous edition, which itself was much longer than the original! One of the earlier editions - viewable on Googlebooks - was dubbed by The Observer as ‘marvellously opaque’, but an Amazon reviewer said it was ‘very short and rather boring’. My Inner French Girl, though, thinks Deneuve’s writing is ‘stark, beautiful, metaphoric’.

According to Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, Pegasus is publishing - today in the UK, tomorrow in the US - a book of diaries written by Catherine Deneuve, each one written while she was on location filming. The new publication has a long, name-dropping title: The Private Diaries of Catherine Deneuve: My Life Behind the Camera with Luis Bunuel, Francois Truffaut, Roman Polanski, and Lars von Trier. Amazon says it is a ‘fascinating collection of seven previously upublished diaries’.

But, in fact, the book seems to be a re-publishing of Close Up And Personal issued by Orion in 2006 (the first English version), as well as of The Private Diaries of Catherine Deneuve: Close Up and Personal, by Pegasus Books in 2007. (Intriguingly, the titles are getting longer and longer every time it’s published!) While there IS a trace of the 2006 version on Orion’s website, there is NO trace of the 2007 book, or the new one, on the Pegasus website. All very bizarre.

Deneuve, born in 1943, became famous through her portrayal of beautiful ice maidens for directors such as Roman Polanski (Repulsion, 1965) and Luis Buñuel (Belle de Jour, 1967). After more than 40 years in the business, and 100 films, she’s still working (see IMDB). A Cesar award winner twice, she has also been nominated for both an Oscar and an Academy award. She has two children - a son (born in 1963) from her relationship with Roger Vadim, and a daughter (born in 1972) from her relationship with Marcello Mastroianni. A marriage to the photographer David Bailey lasted from 1965 to 1972.

In the book, Deneuve charts the shooting of films such The April Fools (1968), co-starring Jack Lemmon; Tristana (1969), directed by Bunuel; Indochine (1991); and Lars von Trier’s acclaimed Dancer in the Dark (1999), co-starring Bjork. There is also the text of an interview with the director Pascal Bonitzer.

Few reviews of the earlier editions appear to be available online. A short quote from The Observer is widely quoted: ‘Marvelously opaque diaries of the great French cineaste’ (but I can’t find the original). Freelance journalist, Marjorie R Asturias, who writes a blog called My Inner French Girl, loved the book. She says: ‘Not to knock Deneuve, but who would have guessed that aside from her ethereal beauty and formidable acting talent, she also possesses a sharp, poetic writing ability? Her prose is stark, beautiful, metaphoric, but not florid.’ A couple of reviewers on Amazon, however, found the book boring. One said ‘even her entries about filming with Buñuel are dry and rather boring’; and the other called the book ‘short and rather boring’.

Judge for yourself. Much of the book is available to read on Googlebooks, including the interview with Bonitzer, with whom she talks a little about the diaries themselves: ‘[They] are a thing apart. To start with, they’re very disjointed, in that I wrote some of them a long time ago, and, apart from one, all on foreign shoots, on films where I wasn’t overly busy, or surrounded by too many people. I wrote them mostly in the evenings, unless we had to film early the next morning, or during lunch breaks. . . I have to say it [writing diaries] began with a lonely, rather difficult time. Going to film abroad, so far from home, and knowing I was so eagerly awaited, because according to the papers, the Americans saw me as the most beautiful actress around . . . I tried not to think about it, but it was a lot of pressure.’

And here is one short diary extract from that early time in her career (while filming Tristana in 1969).

Monday 8 November
‘Difficult start today. . . I’m so aware of Buñuel’s irritation and impatience with the slightest setback that I become completely paralysed. Even though this shot shouldn’t be difficult, I can’t seem to break it down. He settles for three takes. Grim lunch at La Venta de los Aires, I feel like crying. When a shot goes badly, I feel like a useless subject. Totally useless, because my dialogue is of no interest to him, he’s not even listening. This will be a proper Spanish film, I’ll be dubbed, which I sometimes find hard to accept. One shot this afternoon, a bit better. My first really bad day.’

Washington’s domestic felicity

Americans are voting today for a new president, the 44th in the history of the United States. About 220 years ago, in the few days before becoming the country’s first President, George Washington, was writing in his diary about having to ‘bid adieu’ to domestic felicity. He was also anxious regarding his ability to fulfil the country’s expectations of him. Although Washington kept a diary almost all his life, most of the writing is dull, a simple record, he himself noted, of ‘where & how my time is spent’.

Washington was born into a Virginia planter’s family in Westmoreland County. While still young he worked as a land surveyor, but during the French and Indian war he was commissioned as a lieutenant-colonel. In 1755, he became commander-in-chief of the Virginia forces. From 1759, the year he married the widow Martha Dandridge, to the outbreak of the American Revolution, he returned to agriculture, developing his Mount Vernon estate that had been inherited from a half brother. He also served in the Virginia House of Burgesses and as a justice of the peace.

In 1775, Washington was elected as commander-in-chief of all the forces, and over the next eight years successfully fought the British. Having resigned in 1783, he retired again to Mount Vernon, but public life was never far away. He presided at a federal convention in Philadelphia in 1787, and two years later was chosen to be President under the new constitution. He was re-elected in 1792 and served until 1797, but declined a third term, and died just two weeks before the end of the century.

Remarkably, given Washington’s importance in the history of the US, he wrote a diary from the age of 16 until the day before he died. Every word has been published, with extensive notes, in The Diaries of George Washington, edited by Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig (University Press of Virginia, 1979), and all six volumes are available online at The Library of Congress American Memory website. The same website also carries photographic images of the handwritten pages.

The beginning of the editors’ introduction is worth quoting: ‘The diaries of George Washington are not those of a literary diarist in the conventional sense. No one holding the long-prevailing view of Washington as pragmatic and lusterless, a self-made farmer and soldier-statesman, would expect him to commit to paper the kind of personal testament that we associate with notable diarists. Even when familiarity modifies our view of the man, and we find him warmer and more intense than we knew, given to wry humor and sometimes towering rage - even then we do not find in these pages what we have come to expect of a diary.’

‘But let us not be unfair to a man who had his own definition of a diary: ‘Where & How my Time is Spent.’ The phrase runs the whole record through. He accounts for his time because, like his lands, his time is a usable resource. It can be tallied and its usefulness appraised. Perhaps it was more than mere convenience that caused Washington to set down his earliest diary entries in interleaved copies of an almanac, for an almanac, too, is an accounting of time.’

A little further on the editors quote John C. Fitzpatrick, who first compiled the diaries, from a letter written in 1924: ‘Now that I have read every word of these Diaries, from the earliest to the last one, it is impossible to consider them in any other light than that of a most marvelous record. It is absolutely impossible for anyone to arrive at a true understanding or comprehension of George Washington without reading this Diary record.’

The introduction also provides useful information on the history of the diary manuscripts. It seems likely, the editors say, that Washington kept a diary during his presidential years (1789-1797), but very few have survived, which is ‘particulary vexing to historians’. More specifically, it is known that he kept diaries in the spring and summer of 1789, but that they have ‘disappeared’. Only two entries for this period survive, and they are among the most interesting to be found anywhere in his diaries, not least because he expresses such self-doubts. Both entries are in the two weeks prior to his inauguration as President on 30 April.

16 April 1789
‘About ten o’clock I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to private life, and to domestic felicity; and with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express, set out for New York in company, with Mr. Thompson, and colonel Humphries, with the best dispositions to render service to my country in obedience to its call, but with less hope of answering its expectations.’

23 April 1789
‘The display of boats which attended and joined us on this occasion, some with vocal and some with instrumental music on board; the decorations of the ships, the roar of cannon, and the loud acclamations of the people which rent the skies, as I passed along the wharves, filled my mind with sensations as painful (considering the reverse of this scene, which may be the case after all my labors to do good) as they are pleasing.’

Here is a more typical example of Washington’s diary, from exactly 220 years today.

4 November 1788
‘Thermometer at 58 in the Morning - 75 at Noon and 72 at Night. Morning clear, calm and very pleasant - as the weather continued to be thro’ the day. Mr. Herbert & his Lady, Mr. Potts & his Lady, Mr. Ludwell Lee & his Lady, and Miss Nancy Craik came here to dinner and returned afterwards.’

And here are the last three entries Washington wrote in his diary.

11 December 1799
‘But little wind and Raining. Mer. 44 in the Morning and 38 at Night. About 9 oclock the Wind shifted to No. Wt. & it ceased raining but contd. Cloudy. Lord Fairfax, his Son Thos. and daughter - Mrs. Warner Washington & son Whiting - and Mr. Jno. Herbert dined here & returned after dinner.’

12 December 1799
‘Morning Cloudy - Wind at No. Et. & Mer. 33. A large circle round the Moon last Night. About 1 oclock it began to snow - soon after to Hail and then turned to a settled cold Rain. Mer. 28 at Night.’

13 December 1799
‘Morning Snowing & abt. 3 Inches deep. Wind at No. Et. & Mer. at 30. Contg. Snowing till 1 Oclock and abt. 4 it became perfectly clear. Wind in the same place but not hard. Mer. 28 at Night.’

On 12 December, according to the editors’ diary notes, in the midst of that day’s severe weather, Washington rode out to supervise winter activities on the land, but he got cold and wet. The next day, despite a sore throat, he was outside again marking trees to be cut. On 14 December, he was attended by three doctors, and received various treatments, but died that evening in his bed at Mount Vernon.

Raining death on earth

‘It is raining Death on earth,’ Hélène Berr, a French literary student, wrote in her journal 65 years ago today. Like Anne Frank, Berr was deported by the Nazis, suffered from typhus, and died in spring 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. However, the two girls’ diaries bear little similarity.

Hélène Berr, born in 1921, was the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, and was an English student at the Sorbonne. She began writing a journal in 1942 while Paris was occupied by the Nazis, and continued to fill its pages for two years until she and her parents were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Her parents died within six months, but Hélène was then forced to march to Bergen-Belsen, where she contracted typhus and died in April 1945 (only weeks after the death of the more famous war-time diarist, Anne Frank, and just days before the camp would be liberated).

Before being deported from Paris, Hélène entrusted the diary to the family’s cook, who then passed it on to an uncle, who gave it to her fiancé. Subsequently, it was kept as a family keepsake for more than half a century. Only in 2002 was the diary first shown to the public. And, earlier this year, it was published in France by Éditions Tallandier - to great acclaim. An English version has just been brought out in the UK by Quercus Publishing, and is about to be released in the US by Weinstein Books which says Berr was ‘a stunningly talented writer’, and her account of war-time Paris is ‘profoundly affecting and devastatingly lucid’.

Various reviews of Berr’s journal - such as that at Telegraph.co.uk or Spiegel Online - have pointed out the differences between it and the one written by Anne Frank. While Frank’s diary deals with life in hiding in Amsterdam, Berr’s account describes her enjoyment of life at the Sorbonne, walking in the Parisian sunshine, and the romance with her boyfriend. But the journal does get darker. On 8 June 1942, for example, the first time she has to wear a yellow star, she writes: ‘I held my head high and looked people so straight in the eye they turned away. . . But it’s hard.’

There are a few, though not many, extracts from Berr’s journal available online. The first few pages of the book can be read at Amazon.co.uk. Telegraph.co.uk has a few quotes, such as this one, from a few weeks before the Gestapo took her away: ‘To think that if I am arrested this evening (which I have been expecting for ages now), in a week’s time I’ll be in Upper Silesia, maybe dead, and my whole life, with the infinity I sense within me, will be snuffed out . . .’ It also quotes an entry from 1 November 1943 - exactly 65 years ago today - ‘It is raining Death on earth’. Weinstein Books quotes her very last entry, ‘Horror, Horror, Horror’, which, it adds, is ‘a poignant but heartbreaking echo of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’.

Slightly more substantial extracts are available thanks to the International Herald Tribune which published, last January, several quotes translated by Associated Press from the French edition. Here are two of them.

10 October 1943

‘I have a duty to accomplish by writing because people must know. Each hour of the day the painful experience is repeated, that of noticing that others don’t know, that they don’t even imagine the suffering of others and the evil that some inflict on others.’

30 October 1943

‘Place de la Concorde, I passed so many Germans! with women, and despite my wish for impartiality, despite my ideal . . . I was swept by a wave not of hate, because I don’t know hate, but of revolt, nausea, disdain. These men, without knowing it, took the joie de vivre from all Europe . . . And in this moment of disgust there was no consideration of my special case, I didn’t think of persecutions.’

See also Civilisation no longer exists about Abel J Herzberg author of Between Two Streams - A Diary from Bergen-Belsen; and The Diary Junction’s data pages for both Herzberg and Anne Frank.

Humph wasn’t joking

London-based publisher JR Books Ltd has just brought out a posthumous collection of writings by Humphrey Lyttelton who died earlier this year. Lyttelton, often referred to as Humph, was a man of many talents, not least playing the trumpet, but he’s most widely known and loved for chairing the long-running radio programme I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. The newly published book includes some diary extracts, and these suggest he tired of the programme 30 years ago.

Born at Eton college in 1921 where his father was a housemaster, Lyttleton grew up to be schooled there also. He served with the Grenadier Guards in the war, attended art college, then, in 1949, joined the Daily Mail as a cartoonist. He stayed there until the mid-1950s, by which time he had become a well-known jazz musician. For 40 years, from 1967 until 2007, he presented The Best of Jazz on BBC Radio 2; and then, in 1972, he was chosen to host a new radio programme I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, or just Clue, billed as an antidote to panel games. He remained its chairman until his death last April. Wikipedia gives a useful biography of Lyttleton, but it’s quite brief, especially in comparison to the article on Clue, which is about twice as long!

JR Books, which is based in Camden and describes itself as ‘an exciting new name in book publishing’, has just published Humphrey Lyttelton’s Last Chorus: An Autobiographical Medley. Unfortunately, JR Books does not have an exciting website, and it gives no information about the book other than that it is ‘a feast for all his many fans and admirers’. There is more on Amazon, which says the book draws ‘on some of Humph’s long-lost autobiographical writings, as well a wealth of other material, including his never-before-seen private diaries, plus cartoons and photos from the family album.’

According to New Camden Journal, which ran a short story on the forthcoming book earlier this year, Jeremy Robson of JR Books described the diaries as ‘beautifully written in his own fine hand’, as ‘often very revealing’, and as ‘a work of art in themselves’. He said Humph was ‘an absolutely wonderful writer - not a comma needed changing’. The article also referred back to when Humph had died and how fans had left many bouquets of flowers outside Mornington Crescent tube station. Why? Simply because Mornington Crescent was the name of a popular panel game on Clue (and it too has its own Wikipedia entry).

The day after the book’s publication last Saturday (25 October), The Independent ran a review with the headline: Humph’s diaries reveal he tired of ‘Clue’ 30 years ago. The article says there are a series of diary entries in the book in which Lyttelton ‘bemoans the quality of the show’. It gives an example. In 1975, three years after the programme was launched, he wrote: ‘I’m not sure that this game show hasn’t finally run its course - this has been a good series with better games than before, but there have been moments when it floundered. I shan’t be sorry if it expires. I’m rather tired of people coming up and saying ‘I enjoyed your programme the other day’ and finding out they mean this bit of nonsense!’

The article also looks at a new DVD, to be released shortly, of recorded sketches from a stage show the Clue’s regular panellists had been touring since 2007. Lyttelton is seen apparently ad libbing to an audience in Salford: ‘Listen, I’ll tell you something. If I’d known at seven o’clock in the morning on the 23rd of May 1921 that I would ever live to sit on the stage in Salford reading this codswallop, I would have turned around and crawled back in.’ The audience roared with laughter, as they always did, when he was slagging off the show, or its pannellists, or muttering under his breath about how bored he was with it all. His diaries now seem to suggest he wasn’t always joking.

Hughes fishing; Plath in quicksand

The British Library has just acquired a large archive of material written by Ted Hughes, the celebrated British poet who died ten years ago today. The heart of the archive is said to be manuscripts relating to Birthday Letters, a book of poems about his relationship with Sylvia Plath. However, the collection also includes personal diaries written across nearly half a century. Hughes’s diaries have never been published (as far as I can tell), but Plath’s diaries, first published nearly 30 years ago, are much admired.

Hughes, born in 1930 and christened Edward James, studied English, among other subjects, at Pembroke College, Cambridge. And it was in Cambridge that he published his first poems, and where he met the American writer, Sylvia Plath. Hughes and Plath married in 1956, and had two children before separating in 1962. The following year, Plath committed suicide. Hughes was then living with Assia Wevill, a German writer. Six years later she too committed suicide, but not before she’d killed the child she’d had with Hughes. Despite these personal traumas, Hughes went on to marry again, to become a celebrated poet and children’s writer, and to be Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998 (on 28 October). Wikipedia says that critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation.

Earlier this month, on 14 October, the British Library announced it had acquired a large archive of Hughes’ writings, at a cost of £500,000. At the heart of the archive, it says, are the manuscripts relating to Birthday Letters, Hughes’s poems about his relationship with Plath. However, it also includes personal diaries ‘which span the decades from the 1950s to the 1990s, recording daily events, accounts of dreams and reflections on his family and his past, alongside fragments of poems and writings on historical and literary figures’.

Particularly interesting, the British Library adds, are ‘the fishing journals’. In part, these are a conventional record of events, but they are interspersed with lengthy reflections inspired by specific locations such as Devon, where he lived for many years, Scotland, Alaska and Kenya. Fishing, both as physical pursuit and as metaphor, the Library explains, was supremely important in Hughes’s life and work. Unfortunately, it gives no examples of, or extracts from, the diaries. Poetry (and fishing) enthusiasts will have to wait until the end of next year, when the Library expects to open up access to the collection.

Meanwhile, though, there is always Sylvia Plath’s diary. She started writing when only 11, and continued throughout her life. Wikipedia gives some information about this, and The Diary Junction has some links to extracts. A first edition of her adult diaries were published in the early 1980s, but they were heavily edited by Hughes. During the last years of his life, though, Hughes began working on a fuller publication of the journals, and, shortly before his death, gave legal permission for the use of two journals that otherwise would have been sealed until 2013.

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath were published in 2000, with roughly two-thirds new material. A review by The Guardian gives examples of what Hughes orginally edited out, and another of its articles gives extensive extracts from the diaries. Also, there’s more information about the unabridged journals at Amazon.com, where one can read a few pages.

Here are two extracts from 1950 (I think).
‘Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems entitled RAIN pour in from across the nation.’

‘With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand . . . hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flesh, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.’

And here’s another from March 1956, about Hughes.
‘Please let him come, and give me the resilience & guts to make him respect me, be interested, and not to throw myself at him with loudness or hysterical yelling; calmly, gently, easy baby easy. He is probably strutting the backs among crocuses now with seven Scandinavian mistresses. And I sit, spiderlike, waiting, here, home; Penelope weaving webs of Webster, turning spindles of Tourneur. Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun.’

A king’s phallic doodles

A popular history magazine in Sweden has just disclosed that one of the country’s kings - Charles XIII - used to draw penises in his diary, possibly to record sexual activity! His queen’s diaries, however, are much better known, for their insight into late 19th century court gossip.

Swedish magazine, Populär Historia, has published a bizarre story about a diary written by King Charles (Karl in Swedish) XIII; and a synopsis has appeared on The Local website (which provides Swedish news in English). The diaries are owned by Anders Nyström, a school headmaster, who has revealed that they contain ‘a number of previously undisclosed details, including small illustrations of the male reproductive organ’.

Charles was born in 1748, and matured into a rather weak man, easily led and often pleasure-seeking. In 1774, he entered into an arranged marriage with his 15-year-old cousin, Hedwig Elizabeth Charlotte, but the relationship was never close, and they lived most of their lives separated and having extramarital affairs. Nor did they have children. 

Charles was appointed regent in 1792 for his nephew Gustav IV, but was so ineffectual that real power passed to court advisers until Gustav was old enough to rule in his own right. Charles, himself, was eventually made king in 1809, but by then he had prematurely aged, and the French-born Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, elected crown prince during the period of Napoleonic Wars, took over governing on his arrival in Sweden in 1810. Both Charles and his wife died in 1818.

The diaries in question date from 1785, a time when Karl was 37 years old, and contain entries about his travels, military duties and experiments in alchemy (carried out in his own laboratory). They also contain small drawings of penises which, according to the reports, ‘appear to coincide with sexually productive moments in the duke’s life’. On 23 October, for example, he attended an oyster supper with his wife, and the diary entry about this was accompanied by not one but two phallic doodles.

Swedish academic Ingemar Carlsson said that the diary was ‘a completely unique source’ and that he had never heard of any remaining diary notes written in Charles’s hand from such an early period. The leather-bound volume was passed to Nyström by his mother, who received the book as a gift in the 1950s. ‘I more or less grew up with it but never thought too much about it,’ he told The Local.

Much better known, however, are the diaries of Charles’s wife, Hedwig Elizabeth Charlotte. Indeed, she is best known for her diaries, Wikipedia says, which were published in their original language of French in nine parts from 1902. An exhibition on 18th century Stockholm, which included her diaries, at Stockholm City Museum opened in October 2007, but closed recently, at the end of August. The publicity for the exhibition said her diaries had become ‘treasures’ because of their gossip about the royals - even if they were just ‘a way to kill time between balls and card games’.

Rescuing the Emin Pasha

Arthur Jephson, a young adventurer and African explorer, died one hundred years ago today. He’s not well remembered, but he would be even less so if it were not for a diary he wrote while accompanying Henry Stanley on one of his expeditions in Africa. Unfortunately, the text of the diary does not appear to be available on the internet, although copies printed in the 1960s are available, at a price.

One of twelve children, Jephson was born in 1858 to the vicar of Childerditch in Essex, and Ellen, the daughter of the recorder of Norwich. He trained for the merchant navy, but then spent time in the Antrim regiment of the Royal Irish Rifles, before resigning his commission and living under the patronage of Helene, comtesse de Noailles. In 1886, a donation by the comtesse secured Jephson’s place on an expedition along the Congo, being undertaken by Henry Morton Stanley. On Jephson’s return from Africa, he published an account of the journey which was translated into French and German, and also lectured on the subject. Despite wanting to return to the continent, he never did due to ill-health. He was appointed Queen’s Messenger (one who carries important documents for the sovereign) in 1895; in 1904 he married and had one son. Four years later he died, while still relatively young, on 22 October 1908.

But it is the expedition to Africa for which Jephson is most remembered. It was organised to rescue a man invariably called Emin Pasha. A physician and explorer from Silesia, he was originally named Eduard Schnitzer, but after becoming a medical officer in the Turkish army, he adopted a Turkish mode of living with the name Mehmet Emin. He later served under General Charles Gordon in Equatoria (an Egyptian province in the upper Nile at the time, now Sudan) as a district medical officer, and then succeeded Gordon as governor. However, an Arab revolt, that started in the early 1880s, increasingly isolated him and his few troops. Nevertheless, he managed to keep lines of communication open, and his communiques to Europe eventually attracted considerable sympathy, especially after Gordon’s death in 1885.

Thus, in 1887, the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, led by Henry Morton Stanley, undertook to rescue the man by going up the Congo River and then through the Ituri Forest. Two-thirds of those who undertook the journey died. A Wikipedia article on Emin explains that Stanley did find Emin, in April 1888, but then spent a year arguing with him and his troops to leave for safer parts. During this time, both Emin and Jephson were imprisoned for some months by rebel officers, and only then was Emin finally persuaded to leave for the coast.

Jephson kept a diary during the expedition, but it wasn’t published until more than 50 years after his death, in 1969 (for the Hakluyt Society by Cambridge University Press). Its full title is The Diary of A J Mounteney Jephson: Emin Pasha Relief Expedition 1887-1889. It was edited by Dorothy Middleton, and has a preface, prologue and epilogue compiled by the editor in collaboration with Maurice Denham Jephson. As far I can tell there are no extracts available on the internet, but Abebooks has some copies for sale, starting at about £30. Wikipedia calls Jephson’s diary ‘frank, sensitive and open-hearted’.

A few more interesting details about Jephson and his diary are available at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography website (for which one needs a subscription, but UK public library membership allows for free access). The diary, it says, confirms ‘in graphic detail the extent of the violence and suffering’ that accompanied the expedition. It also argues that since Jephson had had no previous experience of either tropical travel or warfare, his very survival was considered something of an accomplishment. According to the AIM25 website (which provides information on archives in the greater London area), photocopies of the original diary is held at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Tales of executioners

The diaries of Britain’s last hangman - Harry Allen - are up for auction. Gruesome they maybe, but they also provide a fascinating if somewhat clinical insight into the mind of a person with one of the strangest of all professions. Around 400 years ago, another hangman - Franz Schmidt - was hard at work in Germany, executing more than 10 times as many criminals as Allen, and he too kept a diary.

The Knutsford Guardian revealed on 19 October that Harry Allen’s diary is to be auctioned by local auctioneers, Marshall’s, on 11 November, on behalf of Allen’s widow, Doris. The lot will also include tools of Allen’s trade, such as two black bow ties and a 25ft tape measure. The national press soon picked up the story. The Daily Mail, for example, ran a story on 20 October with the headline ‘Revealed: The macabre diaries of death penned by Britain’s last hangman’.

By the time Allen, born in Yorkshire in 1911, reached 30 years of age he was already working at Manchester prison as assistant executioner. Following the resignation of Albert Pierrepoint (the subject of a recent film) and the death of Steve Wade (both in 1956), Allen and another hangman, Robert Leslie Stewart, jointly became the country’s Chief Executioners. Allen performed the last execution in Northern Ireland in December 1961, and the last in Scotland in August 1963. He also performed one of the two final executions in Britain, in August 1964, when Gwynne Owen Evans was hanged in Manchester (at the same time as Stewart hanged Evans’ accomplice Peter Anthony Allen in Liverpool).

According to Wikipedia’s article on the man, Allen’s most controversial case was that of James Hanratty, hanged in 1962 for the A6 murder case. Efforts to clear Hanratty’s name continued until 2001 when DNA testing finally confirmed Hanratty’s presence at the crime scene. Allen himself died in 1992. True Crime Library has just published a first biography - Harry Allen: Britain’s Last Hangman - penned by Stewart McLaughlin who works for the prison service and had access to prison files.

The Knutsford Guardian gives a good flavour of the diary: ‘In his journal he recorded details of each prisoner’s age, weight, height and worked out how long the rope needed to be to ensure a swift death. In his earlier entries he had also recorded how he felt. Mr Allen was 29 when he witnessed his first execution on 26 November 1940 at Bedford Prison. William Cooper, 24, had been convicted at Cambridge of murdering John Harrison, an elderly farmer. The execution was, according to Mr Allen, a ‘very good and clean job’ despite Cooper’s ‘loss of courage’. ‘The culprit had to be carried to the scaffold owing to faintness,’ Mr Allen wrote in his diary.’

The Daily Mail gives more details from the diary, about how Allen was involved in the execution of five Nazi prisoners of war for murdering a fellow German soldier who had grassed on their escape plan. Of their crime Allen wrote: ‘It was a foul murder. They staged a mock trial, kicking the victim to death and dragging him by the neck to the toilet where they hung his lifeless body on a waste pipe. These five prisoners are the most callous men I have ever met so far but I blame the Nazi doctrine for that. It must be a terrible creed.’

Another hangman, Franz Schmidt, was writing about his executions in the late 1500s and early 1600s. His diaries were last put into print 80 years ago, under the title A Hangman’s Diary: Being the Authentic Journal of Master Franz Schmidt. Although Abebooks has copies for sale, I can’t find any information about the book on the internet, other than that in Wikipedia’s article.

Schmidt was executioner in Germany, in Bamberg from 1573 to 1578, and in Nuremberg from 1578 to 1617. His diary contains details of 361 executions and 345 minor punishments (floggings, ears or fingers cut off), noting for each the date, place, and method of execution, as well as the name, origin, and station in life of the condemned. In later years, the diary becomes more verbose and gives details of each criminal’s crimes.

His executions, again according to Wikipedia, were carried out by rope, sword, breaking wheel, burning, and drowning. However, the wheel was reserved for severely violent criminals, and burnings - of which there were only two - for homosexual intercourse and counterfeiting money. Drowning was prescribed for a woman committing infanticide but was regularly commuted to execution by sword, partly upon the intervention of Schmidt himself. Schmidt’s journal is considered unique as a source of social and legal history. A first printed edition appeared in 1801.

Bertrand’s diaries enmesh Sarkozy

Diaries written by a former head of the French intelligence agency, Yves Bertrand, are at the centre of scandalous allegations about President Nicolas Sarkozy. The story is particularly spicy since it was Sarkozy’s own moves against Bertrand that must have led to the diaries being seized by the police, and subsequently being leaked to the press.

On 9 October, the French political magazine, Le Point (a sort of French Time or Newsweek) published an article titled ‘The Black Books of the Republic’. It revealed, from notebooks or diaries kept by Bertrand between 1998 and 2003, a series of allegations about figures at the very top of France’s political establishment. For 12 years, until 2004, Bertrand was the head of Renseignements Généraux (RG), the intelligence service of the French police.

The Le Point revelations were widely taken up by other media, many of them focusing on the accusation that Sarkozy, while serving as interior minister, had had an affair with the wife of one of his current cabinet colleagues. However, according to Le Point, Bertrand’s diaries seem to confirm that once Sarkozy had taken over the Gaullist movement and was bidding for the Presidency, RG worked for President Jacques Chirac to undermine him. Other allegations concern former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who said he had tried to sack Bertrand (earlier than 2004) but had been prevented from doing so by Chirac.

The diaries, according to a report in The Times, are said to be ‘packed with other potentially explosive accounts of drug-taking, illicit sex, blackmail and corruption among French leaders’. Le Point said: ‘These notebooks are a terrifying journey under the skirts of the Republic,’ and added, ‘one could laugh if this exercise in underhand police work had not sometimes broken careers, thwarted democracy and sometimes destroyed lives.’

Ironically, Sarkozy himself seems to have opened up this particularly colourful show. He had Bertrand removed from RG in 2004, and then he acted against RG itself, which was finally closed down last July. Subsequently, French magistrates seized Bertrand’s diaries. I’m not sure as to why the action was taken, but most reports say it was as a direct result of allegations by Sarkozy against RG, but others say it was connected with a much wider investigation into long-term political and financial shenanigans, generally known as the Clearstream Affair (see Wikipedia for a long and detailed account of how wide and deep corruption in France seems to go).

However, it does appear that the leaking of Bertrand’s diaries to the press must have been connected in some way to their seizure by the police. Bertrand himself has said the notebooks were private and not meant to be made public or even taken as fact. He told Le Point that he had kept them for his own use, and that, although he did not write much about private lives, if he did so, it was ‘to protect members of the government’.

Following on from Le Point’s revelations, Sarkozy decided to sue Bertrand. The BBC says he is taking ‘legal action for libel and invasion of privacy’. (However, the BBC also says ‘Mr Bertrand’s agency reports to the government . . .’ - the use of the present tense implies the BBC thinks both Bertrand and his agency are still in place!) Sky News reports that the complaint has been filed with the Paris prosecutor and accuses ‘Yves Bertrand and others of invasion of privacy, malicious accusation, forgery and use of forgery and concealment’.

In a new twist this morning, various news organisations (such as The Straights Times) are running a story sourced from Agence France-Presse, in which Bertrand is quoted as saying Sarkozy’s lawsuit ‘does not stand up’. He says he is ‘the victim in this affair’ and that his notebooks were ‘stolen’. They were under ‘the protection of the justice system’, he claims, but they’ve ‘ended up in the public arena’. And a jolly good show they’re making!

Sean Lester and the League

Some diaries written by Sean Lester, one of Ireland’s most distinguished statesmen and the last Secretary General of the League of Nations, have just been donated to Dublin City University. They cover a period when he was working for the League of Nations, and his first years as its Secretary General. They will only be open to the public in five years time. However, other diaries of his, covering the same period, are held by the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) Library, and much of the text is available online.

Wikipedia gives a short biography of Lester, as does the UNOG Library website. Born in County Antrim, in 1888, he was an Ulster Protestant, but, already as a youth, turned to Irish Nationalism and joined the Gaelic League, and then the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He worked as a journalist for a number of northern papers, before moving to Dublin, where he rose to become news editor of Freeman’s Journal. After the War of Independence (ended 1921), Lester took a job in the Irish Free State government as Director of Publicity, and then, in 1923, moved to the Department of External Affairs.

In 1929, Lester was made Ireland’s permanent representative at the League of Nations in Geneva, but later was seconded to the organisation and became its High Commissoner for Danzig (a Free City, at the time, under the auspices of the League, and the scene of growing tensions between Germany and Poland) from 1933 to 1937. He was then appointed Deputy Secretary General, and, in 1940, to the top job, as Secretary General. Subsequently, he oversaw the League’s winding down and the transfer of its functions to the United Nations. On returning to Ireland, he declined to seek any permanent office; and died in 1959.

Earlier this month, Dublin City University Library announced that it had received a donation of ‘a collection’ of Lester’s diaries, covering the period 1935 to 1941. In a short statement, the university said it is ‘extremely grateful to Sean Lester’s daughters Ann and Patricia, and the Kilroy and Gageby families for this remarkable gift’, and that the documents will become publicly available after a period of five years - i.e. in 2013.

However, lots of Lester’s diary writing is already freely available on the internet, thanks to the UNOG Library, which already holds a collection of Lester material. At the heart of this collection, the Library says, is Lester’s diary written between 1935 and 1946, when he served with the League. His notes, the Library says, were inspired by ‘minor and major events, the working of the League of Nations, personalities he met, political developments, some family matters, and fishing’. A large part of the journal (1935-1941) was hand-written in note-books, the rest was typed on loose-leafs by Lester himself or his secretary, with date and place and often annotated ‘private’, or ‘secret’, or ‘confidential’.

After Lester’s death in 1959, these notes were mislaid and presumed to be lost. However, the Library explains, in 1980 an important part of his journal was found covering much of 1935-1941. It was then thought that this was all that had survived. They were, therefore, copied and bound together with some less interesting papers. Subsequently three more batches of papers turned up including the rest of his journal for 1934-1946, and all his other papers from 1929 to 1959. But even this material, the Library further explains, which was bound into a second volume, is by no means complete, even for the 1935-1941 period. Some time later, a further box of papers, covering most of Lester’s life, was found, including ‘private diary entries, general S. Lester’s notes, correspondence, press, etc.’ In fact, some of the most important papers for 1935-1941 were among them and are not therefore in the two volumes, the Library says (for instance, as regards ‘the 1936 crisis’).

The two bound volumes (as described above) were donated to the UNOG Library in 1981 by ‘Sean Lester’s daughters: Dorothy Mary Gageby, Patricia Kilroy and Ann Gorski’. And the text of these diaries, at least from 1935 to 1941, is available on the Library’s website. Here are two short extracts from nearly 70 years ago.

14 November 1938
Mother died on November 7th, just over 86 years of age. I had been with her a week before, but had returned to Geneva. She was the sweetest, the most unselfish, and most Christian soul, I have known. Her kindness and charity, unswerving faith, devotion, and love made her shine like a lamp in darkness.

16 November 1938
Following the assassination of a Secretary at the German Embassy in Paris by a frenzied Polish-Jewish youth of 17, whose parents had been maltreated, the Nazis launched a pogrom, burning synagogues and destroying houses and shops and imprisoning thousands of poor wretches. Then a fine of 1,000,000,000 marks as a levy on what is left of Jewish property, compulsory restoration of property destroyed, prior to turning it over to Aryans, expulsion from all retail trades, etc, etc. The world has been aghast - horrified once more by the monster. And one looks to see Chamberlain’s difficulties in a policy of appeasement still further increased.

Tragedy in Antarctica

Sir Douglas Mawson, an Australian geologist and explorer, died 50 years ago today. But he might have expired nearly 50 years earlier - as did colleagues - during a first Australasian expedition to Antarctica. His diaries were not published until the 1980s, but they were used by Mawson himself in writing a classic account of the expedition The Home of the Blizzard, which is freely available online.

Mawson was born in Bradford, England, but his family moved to Australia when he was only two. He studied geology at the University of Sydney, and lectured in petrology. Aged 26, he joined a team headed by British explorer Ernest Shackleton which was the first to climb to the top of Mount Erebus, Antarctica’s active volcano, and the first to reach the magnetic South Pole.

Then, starting in late 1911, Mawson led the first Australasian expedition to Antarctica. Having wintered at a place they named Cape Denison, the party split up into different groups. Mawson and two companions - Lieutenant Bellgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz - set off in November 1912 for an exploratory trek eastward. On 14 December, Ninnis, his sledge and all of the dogs fell through a snow bridge into the crevasse below. Paul Ward’s Cool Antarctica site takes up the story.

‘Mawson and Mertz rushed to the edge of the crevasse, and stared down into a deep, gaping hole. About 150 feet below on a ridge was a dog, whining, its back seemingly broken. Beneath this was only the dark open void of the crevasse. Mertz and Mawson called into the depths for over three hours. They gathered all the rope they had but still could not even reach as far as the dog. As well as the loss of their companion Ninnis, they had also lost the sledge, the six fittest dogs, most of the indispensable supplies, the tent, and most of the food and spare clothing. The remaining sledge had only 10 days of rations for the two men and nothing for the six dogs, they were 315 miles from the main base at Cape Denison.’

On the way back to base, Mertz also died (later it was diagnosed that both Mertz and Mawson had been suffering the effects of vitamin A poisoning after eating the livers of the husky dogs). Mawson did make it back to Cape Denison, in February, but he had just missed the ship - the Aurora - that had come to collect him. However, a party of six had stayed behind to look for the missing men. They tried to recall the Aurora by radio but the sea had iced up, and so all seven of them were confined to stay put until the Aurora could return the following December (1913).

While recuperating, Mawson wrote an account of the ill-fated expedition - The Home of the Blizzard - which was first published in London in 1915. A year earlier, Mawson had been knighted, and become a professor at Adelaide University. In 1929 and 1931, he headed two more voyages to the Antarctic, concentrating on oceanography and marine biology. He died on 14 October 1958

Mawson wrote various other books about Antarctica, but it wasn’t until the 1980s, I think, that his diaries were published - Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries - by Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Copies of the book are available, but they’re not cheap, starting at £50 - see Abebooks.

However, Mawson used extracts from his diaries in writing The Home of the Blizzard. The full text is available from Cool Antarctica or Project Gutenberg. More information about Mawson is available from Wikipedia, or The Diary Junction, or Australian National Dictionary of Biography.

But here is Mawson describing the day of Mertz’s death, interweaving diary entries with his commentary. The text can be found in Chapter 13 of The Home of the Blizzard - Toil and Tribulation.

‘During the evening of the 6th I made the following note in my diary: ‘A long and wearisome night. If only I could get on; but I must stop with Xavier. He does not appear to be improving and both our chances are going now.’

‘January 7 - Up at 8 A.M., it having been arranged last night that we would go on to-day at all costs, sledge-sailing, with Xavier in his bag on the sledge.’

It was a sad blow to me to find that Mertz was in a weak state and required helping in and out of his bag. He needed rest for a few hours at least before he could think of travelling.

‘I have to turn in again to kill time and also to keep warm, for I feel the cold very much now.’

‘At 10 A.M. I get up to dress Xavier and prepare food, but find him in a kind of fit.’

Coming round a few minutes later, he exchanged a few words and did not seem to realize that anything had happened.

‘Obviously we can’t go on to-day. It is a good day though the light is bad, the sun just gleaming through the clouds. This is terrible; I don't mind for myself but for others. I pray to God to help us. I cook some thick cocoa for Xavier and give him beef-tea; he is better after noon, but very low - I have to lift him up to drink.’

During the afternoon he had several more fits, then became delirious and talked incoherently until midnight, when he appeared to fall off into a peaceful slumber. So I toggled up the sleeping-bag and retired worn out into my own. After a couple of hours, having felt no movement from my companion, I stretched out an arm and found that he was stiff.

My comrade had been accepted into ‘the peace that passeth all understanding’. It was my fervent hope that he had been received where sterling qualities and a high mind reap their due reward. In his life we loved him; he was a man of character, generous and of noble parts.

For hours I lay in the bag, rolling over in my mind all that lay behind and the chance of the future. I seemed to stand alone on the wide shores of the world--and what a short step to enter the unknown future!’

Love in Pyrghos

I am in Greece, on holiday, until the 14th. By coincidence, exactly 30 years ago this week, I was also in Greece on holiday. I’d gone to visit a friend, Marielle, who had moved to a place named Pyrghos (at least that’s how I spelled it) with friends to build and live in a large communal house. So, for a change, I thought I’d simply reproduce a few paragraphs from my own diary (more of it is available on the Pikle website).

7-14 October 1978
‘The only flies I feel are flies, and the mosquitoes are the only mosquitoes, and a firefly is too hot to hold, too red to stare at, too proud to ignore. My body moves slowly, treading along pathways that maze around the village, along pathways that become doorways, houseway entrances, entrance halls; crumbling steps lead to crumbling arches lead to crumbling walls and rooves. My foot will (I know it will) disturb the grasshopper on the path that will spread its wings and reveal to a crimson fright, a crimson flight. My eyes will dart with it (I know they will, I feel them ready) to the stone or bush the other side of where I walk.

After a night of long white love, the acute essence of morning is a kaleidoscope of pure colours and sounds. Sea and sky blue, mountains with mysterious greens. Houses old and cold stone. Birds - the twitter tunes. The sun slowly rises and melts my perception or my imagination that might have come in the night. I am a receptacle for the slight sensations that will pass. The horn of the bus, for instance, becomes a sound for to fill the oceans and the lands as far as I can see. The swaying of a tree or the wind itself diverts at least three senses from the sea-wizards that dance in my head. My forehead furrows to capture, to catch a thought, my eyelids would prefer to fall and to let each lash be caressed by the grandeur of the weathers. My love is a momentary dance of tortoises, or is.

Nudity on the rocks, more than nudity, a bareness to the waves and their impressive depths, their heights and depths, the tunnels of rocks that frighten and leave you gasping with a little sense of magnificence.

Robert Crisp is blunter and more like a child this noon-time. He was a foreign correspondent, writer, journalist. He wears shorts and a bright yellow t-shirt; a napkin is tied around his neck. He sits, placed at a table for one, in front of a television; his head bent back, eyes enthralled. His hands play with a knife, fork, chips, a glass and a bottle of retsina. Here is age and freedom and the wrinkles that were moulded, hardened and set by fear. Any trembles he shows now are in the shake of the folds in his skin, not in his voice or eyes. He is fascinated by Marielle’s group, curious. He tempts the members of the group a little with his stories, or the promise of white beard wisdom.

It is four on Monday afternoon. I know it is Monday because two days ago it was Saturday, Friedl told me, and I know it is four in the afternoon because the clock in this cafe says so (even though the post office isn’t supposed to open until five, but it seems to be open now).

I am too high, too infatuated to realise the glory of this all. My stomach still flutters when I think of Marielle walking around the corner and the smile of a thousand nights missed in our separate flights, our different travels.

Morning in Pyrghos, sun shines low under the mass of grey clouds that appear so low. Contrasting against the white stone walls of the streets. Wind is expectant in gusts. A rainstorm is probable.

I awake slowly from a night of howls by sipping coffee. Above me rises a cobbled street; below, another runs to the church, and to the side another to the plaza. From the latter, a small woman comes, dressed in a black blouse, black skirt, black slippers and carrying a bundle of firewood on her back; it is twice as large as she. Away up the central alley a younger woman carries a similar bundle, but of hay this time. The wind threatens, the vines tremble, leaves form small whirlpools on the concrete.'

Of briars, thorns and an angel

Exactly a quarter of a millennium ago, on 7 October 1758, a Sussex shopkeeper named Thomas Turner turned to his diary to moan and groan at some length about his wife, and about domestic disquietude, and a marriage that had turned to ‘briers and thorns’. Three years later his wife was dead, and he was writing in his diary, ‘Let them whoever lost an angel, pity me.’

Thomas Turner was born in Kent in 1728, but when still a child his father took over a shop in Framfield, Sussex. Little is known of Turner’s education, but it seems he soon followed in his father’s footsteps by running a general store in East Hoathly. He married his first wife, Margaret ‘Peggy’ Slater, in 1753, but she died before reaching the age of thirty (their only child having also died, in infancy). Turner went on to marry again, and have several children, three of whom survived into adulthood.

For eleven years, starting soon after his first marriage and ending soon after the second, Turner kept a daily diary, often very trivial, but also sometimes very revealing, filling 116 memorandum books, of which 111 are extant and held by Yale University Library. Angst, guilt, depression and too much drinking are all recurring themes in the diary, as is the failure of his marriage to live up to expectations. Charles Dickens quoted from Turner’s diary in All the Year Round; and Arthur Ponsonby (author of English Diaries) says the diary ‘is an amazing production, containing, as it does, the most outspoken confessions combined with almost ridiculous penitence and pretentious moralising’.

Wikipedia and Vulpes Libris have a little information about Turner, and The Diary Junction has some links to online texts of the diary. Here is Turner, writing exactly 250 years ago, bemoaning his life, wife and marriage, with colourful reference to his ‘tumultuous breast’ and the ‘purple current in his veins’!

7 October 1758
‘Oh, how happy must that man be whose more than happy lot it is to whom an agreeable company for life doth fall, - one in whom he sees and enjoys all that this world can give; to whom he can open the inmost recesses of his soul, and receive mutual and pleasing comfort to sooth those anxious and tumultuous thoughts that must arise in the breast of any man in trade! On the contrary, - and I can speak from woful experience - how miserable must they be, where there is nothing else but matrimonial discord and domestic disquietude! How does these thoughts wrack my tumultuous breast, and chill the purple current in my veins! Oh, how are these delusive hopes and prospects of happiness before marriage turned into briers and thorns! But, as happiness is debarred me in this affair, I sincerely wish it to all those that shall ever tye the Gordian knot. Oh woman, ungrateful woman! - thou that wast the last and most compleatest of the creation, and designed by Almighty GOD for a comfort and companion to mankind, to smooth and make even the rough and uneven paths of life, art often, oh too, too often, the very bane and destroyer of our felicity! Thou not only takest away our happy ness, but givest us, in lieu thereof, trouble and vexation of spirit.’

But life with Peggy can’t have been all bad. Two years earlier, Turner had written this.

15 October 1756
‘This is the day on which I was married, and it is now three years since. Doubtless many have been the disputes which have happened between my wife and myself during the time, and many have been the afflictions which it has pleased GOD to lay upon us, and which we have justly deserved by the many anemosityes and desentions which have been continually fermented between us and our friends, from allmost the very day of our marriage; but I may now say with the holy Psalmist, ‘It is good for us that we have been afflicted;’ for, thanks be to GOD, we now begin to live happy; and I am thoroughly persuaded, if I know my own mind, that if I was single again, and at liberty to make another choice, I should do the same - I mean, make her my wife who is so now.’

And here is Turner writing on the day his wife died.

23 June 1761
‘About five o’clock in the afternoon, it pleased Almighty GOD to take from me my beloved wife, who, poor creature, has laboured under a severe tho’ lingering illness for these thirty-eight weeks, which she bore with the greatest resignation to the Divine will. In her I have lost a sincere friend, a virtuous wife, a prudent good economist in her family, and a very valuable companion. . . I have lost an invaluable blessing, a wife who, had it pleased GOD to have given her health, would have been of more real excellence to me than the greatest fortune this world can give. I may justly say, with the incomparable Mr Young, ‘Let them whoever lost an angel, pity me.’

Scandal and Chips

Henry Chips Channon died 50 years ago today. Although American-born, he became a British MP, but is mostly remembered today for his diaries, which have been dubbed ‘wonderfully indiscreet’ for their revelations about high society between the wars. Wallis Simpson, for example, was a friend, and he was privy to her secret affair with the future king. But there may be more scandalous revelations to come, if and when the original diaries are fully published or made available to the public.

The Diary Junction gives a short biographical summary for Channon. Born in Chicago, he was educated both in the US and France. He served with the American Red Cross during the First World War, and after the war returned to Europe, to study at Christ College, Oxford. He was given the nick-name Chips because he shared a house with a friend called Fish. After Oxford, Channon, who had inherited wealth, spent his time travelling and socialising. During the 1926 General Strike he became a Special Constable and promoted The British Gazette , an anti-strike newspaper.

In 1933, Channon married Honor Guinness, the eldest daughter of the second Earl of Iveagh, a previous Conservative MP, who helped his son-in-law become a Conservative MP. Channon and Honor had one child, Paul, born in 1935 (see diary extract below), but the marriage did not survive. Channon was having homosexual affairs, and Honor eventually ran off with a Czech airman. In Parliament, Channon was a supporter of Franco during the Spanish Civil War and, later, an advocate of appeasement. Neville Chamberlain appointed him parliamentary private secretary to Rab Butler, and he remained a junior minister throughout the Second World War.

Channon kept a diary all his life - said to amount to 30 volumes with over three million words - and it is for this that he is most remembered. He moved in the very highest social circles, being friends with the Duke of Kent, younger brother of King George VI, and privy to the secret affair between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. Irene and Alan Taylor said, in The Assasin’s Cloak, that Channon is ‘wonderfully indiscreet’. And Channon himself wrote: ‘What is more dull than a discreet diary?’ A carefully edited version of the diaries - Chips:The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon - did not appear until nearly 10 years after his death in 1967. A few extracts can be found on the Spartacus Education website, and a few pages can be viewed on Amazon’s website.

According to the will of Paul Channon, who died in 2007, full publication of the diaries is to be delayed until 2018. However, The Independent on Sunday ran a story, by Andy McSmith, in April 2007 suggesting that Chips’ grandson, Henry Channon, is considering bringing the date forward. McSmith wrote: ‘Until we have seen the full version, we cannot know what has been hidden - whether it is merely titbits about the sex lives of long forgotten socialites, or something as juicy as a royal scandal. One of the great conundrums that the diaries may answer is the nature of the friendship between Chips Channon and the Duke of Kent, younger brother of King George VI. We know that, coincidentally, they had sons born on the same day in 1935, who grew up together, but what went on between the fathers, in the privacy of a royal bedroom, is still a matter of speculation.’

And here, in one apt extract (from Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon) dated 7 October - the same day as his death 50 years ago - can be found mention of Wallis Simpson, the Duke of Kent, and his only son (born, like the Duke of Kent’s two days later, on 9 October).

7 October 1935
‘Diana Cooper rang early; she had been to the Fort last evening to dine with the Prince of Wales, who was, she said, ‘pretty and engaging’. Mrs Simpson was glittering, and dripped in new jewels and clothes.

I went to Claridges to have tea with the Nicholas’ of Greece who are here for the royal confinement. The Duchess of Kent was there in brown dress and much bejewelled, and rather large but not so large as Honor. Her curls were faultlessly done at the back. She was sweetness itself, but she has not become in the least bit English. We had many pregnancy jokes, and she asked tenderly for Honor, and said it would be ‘so amusing’ if her baby was born first, or on the same day as ours. This unlikely coincidence now seems possible. Hers is due on 16 October, and ours was on 24 September. I adore this family, and loved them when they were down on their luck; now their star is rising, especially since the Kent wedding (these damned, inefficient and all too numerous servants never fill my ink-stand). At one point the Grand-Duchess sent her daughter into the next room to fetch her spectacles and the Duchess went meekly. She has been well brought-up in an old-fashioned affectionate way.

I feel confident that my son will be born before morning.’