I’m looking at dying

Harold Frederick Shipman, one of the most prolific serial killers in modern times, would have turned 80 today had he not committed suicide in prison on the eve of his 58th birthday. Subsequently, the prison authorities produced a report on the circumstances surrounding his death, and this became the source for widespread publication of extracts from a diary, mostly concerning his suicidal thoughts, Shipman had kept while incarcerated.

Shipman was born in Nottingham on 14 January 1946, the son of Methodist parents. His father was a lorry driver, and his mother died of cancer when he was only 17. Aged 20, he married Primrose Oxtoby, and they would have four children. He studied at Leeds School of Medicine, graduating in 1970, and began work at the general infirmary in Pontefract, Yorkshire. Four years later, he took up a GP position at the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre in Todmorden, and then, in 1977, at the Donneybrook Medical Centre in Hyde near Manchester. While still in Todmorden, he had been caught self-prescribing pethidine, had been fined, and had attended a drug rehabilitation clinic.

In 1993, Shipman set up his own surgery, also in Hyde, at 21 Market Street. It was not until 1998, that concerns were raised about the high number of deaths among his elderly patients. A police investigation in March was abandoned for lack of evidence, but then, in June, after the death of, what proved to be, his last victim, Kathleen Grundy, the police exhumed her body to find traces of diamorphine. They also established that Grundy’s will, leaving everything to Shipman, had been forged by Shipman himself. The police went on to investigate a number of others deaths, and found that Shipman had systematically killed many of his patients and falsified medical records to cover his tracks.

In 2000, Shipman was prosecuted for a sample 15 murders, and found guilty of them all. The judge sentenced him to 15 concurrent life sentences. Subsequently, the government set up an inquiry, chaired by Lord Laming of Tewin, to look into the case. Though it released its findings in various stages, The Shipman Inquiry, which took evidence from 2,500 witnesses and cost £21m, did not conclude its work until 2005. It found that Shipman had probably committed 250 murders in total, but that the true number could be more. Shipman consistently denied his guilt, and declined to comment on his actions. His wife, Primrose, also appears to have considered her husband innocent.

Shipman killed himself, using bed sheets tied to prison bars, in Wakefield Prison on 13 January 2004, the eve of his 58th birthday. Researchers believe he probably committed suicide to ensure Primrose’s financial security: had he lived to the age of 60 she would not have received a full NHS pension. The British press had a field day: The Sun celebrated with the headline ‘Ship Ship hooray’; the Daily Mirror called Shipman a coward and condemned the prison service for allowing it to happen; and the broadsheets proposed there be investigations into prisoner welfare and changes to prison sentencing. For further information see Wikipedia, BBC, or Murderpedia.

Following Shipman’s suicide, the Director General of the Prison Service, asked the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, Stephen Shaw, to look into the circumstances surrounding Shipman’s suicide. He produced a preliminary report in March the same year, and a final report in May 2005 (using the standard procedure of reporting the facts without identifying the person in question). In his report, Shaw notes that the police gave him a summary of everything they had removed from Shipman’s cell ‘including some entries from the man’s diary’. He quotes these diary entries in his report, and makes considerable reference to them.

The Shipman diary extracts were first obtained by The Sunday Telegraph in April 2005, and then they were widely reported in most newspapers later that year, in August. At the same time, the media reported that Shipman, while still alive, had tried to copyright his letters and ‘diary of despair’ in an effort to stop their contents being sold to the press (see the BBC or The Telegraph). 

Shaw’s report is available online, through the BBC website, and is the source of the Shipman diary extracts reproduced below. Apart from these, however, there is no other evidence I can find of what might have been in Shipman’s diary - there is no mention of it, for example, in any of several published biographies of Shipman.

13 January 2001
‘So depressed. If ?[illegible] says no then that is it. There is no possible way I can carry on, it would be a kindness to [].’

14 January 2001 (Shipman's 55th birthday)
‘[My wife] and the kids have to go on without me when it is the right time. Got to keep the façade intact for the time being.’

27 March 2001
‘. . . I’m looking at dying, the only question is when and can I hide it from everyone?’

13 April 2001
‘If I was dead they’d stop being in limbo and get on with their life perhaps. I’ll think a bit more about it. I’m desperate, no one to talk about it to who I can trust. Everyone will talk to the PO’s [prison officers] then I’ll be watched 24hrs a day and I don’t want that.’

26 June 2001
‘. . . As near suicide as can be, know how and when, just not yet.’

14 January 2002
’56 today, cards from everyone - very very sad day, not what life is about at all. [ ] not very good, it must be dreadful for her.’

31 July 2002
‘[Wife] - chat, no notes sent in yet. She’s getting no money off the DHSS, supported by the kids. What a terrible set up. How is she coping?’

17 October 2002
‘No money. [Wife] not able to get DHSS to see the poverty she is in. Only the kids who have been absolutely brilliant - the pension appeal.’

7 January 2003
‘A new year, a visit from [wife]. Still no money off DHSS. . . If this year doesn’t get anywhere I know it is not worth the effort. I have to lock down this overwhelming emotion or else I’d be on a suicide watch or drugs.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 14 January 2016.

Speaking of The Possessed

‘To London, mainly for another Prime Minister’s dinner party [. . .] I continue to find Mrs Thatcher very attractive physically. Her overhanging eyelids, hooded eyes, are the only suggestion of mystery (a characteristic I like in women). This is Anthony Powell - born 120 years ago today - the British author of A Dance to the Music of Time, making a somewhat surprising confession to his diary. He was not far off 80 at the time, and she was closing in on 60.

Anthony Powell was born in London on 21 December 1905, the son of an army officer. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, and then worked at the publishers Gerald Duckworth and Company for ten years. In 1934, he married Lady Violet Pakenham, sister of Lord Longford. They had two sons, one in 1940 and one in 1946. After leaving Duckworth, Powell did some script writing and some travelling in the US and Mexico. On returning to England in 1937, he lived in London and worked as a full-time writer, producing novels and literary criticism.

During the Second World War, Powell joined the army and rose from the rank of second lieutenant to major, serving first in the Welch Regiment and then in the Intelligence Corps as a liaison officer with Czechs and Poles among others. In 1951, he published A Question of Upbringing. This was the first novel in what would be 12 volumes, written over a quarter of century, making up A Dance to the Music of Time for which Powell is most remembered. In 1952, he moved to Somerset where he spent the rest of his life.

Powell also wrote other novels, two plays, many literary reviews, and autobiographical works. He served as a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in the 1960s and 1970s, and was also a vice-president of the Society of Genealogists. In 1956 he was awarded a CBE, and, in 1988, was made a Companion of Honour. But, in 1973, he declined a knighthood. He died in 2000. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, the Anthony Powell Society or The Guardian.

In the early 1980s, when already in his 70s, Powell decided to begin keeping a daily journal, and, in time, these were published by William Heinemann in three volumes, each one spanning 3-5 years. The first to appear in 1995 was Journals 1982-1986, then came Journals 1987-1989 (in 1996), and finally Journals 1990-1992 (in 1997). According to his wife, Violet, who provided an introduction to the first volume: ‘The idea of keeping a journal appealed to Anthony Powell as bridging the gap when a novel was not in immediate production.’ She adds, the five years covered by the volume ‘make an effective sequel to the author’s memoirs, the last volume of which was published in 1982.

Further information about Powell’s diaries is available online in Chapter Six of Understanding Anthony Powell by Nicholas Birns (University of South Carolina Press, 2004) at Googlebooks; or in an article by Christopher Hitchens for The New York Review of Books. Two volumes of the diaries themselves can be previewed freely at Googlebooks (Journals 1982-1986, Journals 1990-1992). Here, though, are several extracts.

28 March 1985
‘To London, mainly for another Prime Minister’s dinner party [. . .] At dinner, to my great surprise, I was put on Mrs Thatcher’s right, with Vidia Naipaul on her left; on my other side was John Vincent. At one time or another I had read a lot of reviews by Vincent, some of them no great shakes, so far as I remembered, others pretty good. He has a notably prognathous jaw, perfectly civil manner. We did not have much talk, as I was fully occupied keeping my end up with the Prime Minister, while Vincent probably thought he had to make some sort of showing with his fellow don, Tony Quentin, on his other side.

I continue to find Mrs Thatcher very attractive physically. Her overhanging eyelids, hooded eyes, are the only suggestion of mystery (a characteristic I like in women, while totally accepting Wilde’s view of them as Sphinxes without a secret). Her general appearance seems to justify Mitterrand’s alleged comment that she has the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe; the latter a film star I never, in fact, though particularly attractive. Mrs Thatcher has a fair skin, hair-do of incredible perfection, rather dumpy figure, the last seeming to add a sense of down-to-earthiness that is appropriate and not unattractive in its way. She was wearing a black dress, the collar rolled up behind her neck, some sort of gold pattern on it. On her right hand was a large Victorian ring, dark red, in an elaborate gold setting. She only likes talking of public affairs, which I never find easy to discuss in a serious manner. In fact I felt myself taken back to age of nineteen, sitting next to a beautiful girl, myself quite unable to think of anything to say. Mrs T. is reputed to have no humour. I suspect she recognizes a joke more than she is credited with, if probably jokes of a limited kind, and confined to those who know her well. [. . .]

The talk at this Downing Street dinner, as before, was introduced at a certain stage by Hugh Thomas. It ranged over East Germany, to the condition of Young People in this country, topics on which I am not outstandingly hot. Mrs T. did, however, please me by saying that everything from which we are now suffering is all discussed in the plainest terms in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (as I prefer, The Devils); a fact I have been preaching for decades. I wonder when, how, she got round to this. Did she read the novel, see its contemporary relevance herself, or was that pointed out to her by someone? I fear probably the latter.’

4 April 1986
‘My agent John Rush rang in the afternoon to say the BBC (i.e. Jonathan Powell) have decided not to do Dance [to the Music of Time] on TV. Rush says he is going to try Granada with the Ken Taylor/Innes Lloyd script as a package. After the last eight or nine years of BBC ineptitudes about Dance nothing surprises me, I feel one of the commercial companies certainly would be no worse to deal with, probably better. Why Dance should now appear unsuitable after ‘passing’ three scripted episodes is beyond comprehension. For that matter, after reading the sequence itself, a quiet beginning leading up to deeper matters is an essential aspect of the construction. Rush rather distraught. He has taken a lot of trouble about Dance over the years, and is understandably disappointed at this.’

7 April 1986
‘Main reviews of The Fisher King are now in; a generally satisfactory press, important thing is to let people know book is out, what it is about. Reviewers mostly approving, tho’ one is always struck by the ingrained philistinism, illiteracy, humourlessness, their fear and hatred of literary references. [. . .]

British reviewers tend to hate writing as such. This also applies to most interviewers. I always say the same thing to interviewers, because they always ask the same banal questions. They subsequently write facetiously, desperately anxious to show they are not in the least impressed by anyone or anything.’

25 November 1990
‘I wrote to Mrs Thatcher expressing regret at her resignation, saying that at one of her dinner parties where I met her she had spoken of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (in Russian The Devils), i.e. those that entered into the swine, which then rushed over the cliff. This seemed a perfect example of what had happened to her, the swine being her betrayers in the Tory Party.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 21 December 2015.

Life and fate

‘Stalingrad is burned down. I would have to write too much if I wanted to describe it. Stalingrad is burned down. Stalingrad is in ashes. It is dead.’ This is from the diary notebooks kept by Vasily Grossman, born 120 years ago today, during his 1,000 days with the Red Army during the Second World War. After the war, he fell foul of the Stalinist regime which prohibited publication of his novels, and he died without knowing how famous one of them would become.

Iosif Solomonovich Grossman was born on 12 December 1905 in Berdychiv, Ukraine (then in the Russian Empire) into a Jewish family. A Russian nanny is said to have been responsible for first calling him Vasya (a diminutive of Vasily). His parents separated, and for several years he lived in Switzerland with his mother, before returning to Kiev to stay with his father. He studied physics and mathematics at Moscow State University, and married Anna (Galia) Petrovna Matsuk from a Cossack family in 1929. They had one child, born in 1930, but divorced two years later.

Grossman went to work in Donbass as an engineer-chemist, writing occasional articles for the Literary Donbass. After recuperating from tuberculosis, he returned to Moscow and worked in a pencil factory. However, he was determined to pursue a literary career and, in 1934, published a much-admired short story, In the Town of Berdichev, and a novella, Glyukauf, about the Donbass miners. In 1936, he married Olga Mikhailovna, days after her divorce from a friend of his. During 1937, Grossman was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers, but also Olga was arrested for not having denounced her former husband, considered an enemy of the state. Grossman first registered himself as guardian of Olga’s two children, and then bravely wrote to the state authorities arguing for, and winning, Olga’s release. Grossman’s first full novel Stepan Kolchugin was published in instalments between 1937 and 1940.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman’s mother was murdered in Berdychiv along with thousands of other Jews, and although exempt from military service he volunteered for the front, becoming a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). He used his experience - covering many of the battles of the war years, not least Stalingrad - for novels such as The People are Immortal and For a Just Cause (not fully published until after Stalin’s death). Also, he is credited with reporting some of the first eyewitness accounts - as early as 1943 - at Treblinka of what later became known as the Holocaust. He worked with other writers on a project known as The Black Book to document the horrors suffered by Soviet Jews at the hands of the Nazis, but became disillusioned with Stalin’s regime when it suppressed the work.

Grossman became critical of other Soviet policies, a dissident, and few of his works thereafter were published. After submitting, what is now considered his magnum opus, the novel Life and Fate (a semi-autobiographical sequel to For a Just Cause), the KGB raided his flat and confiscated all related manuscripts. He appealed to Nikita Khrushchev, but to no avail, and he died in 1964, not knowing whether Life and Fate would ever see the light of day. In fact, it was finally published in 1980 in Switzerland thanks to dissidents smuggling out photographs of the text, and then in the Soviet Union in 1988. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, New World Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia of Soviet Writers, and Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature (page 64, viewable at Googlebooks).

During the war, while embedded with the Red Army, Grossman kept detailed diaries or notebooks. These were edited, translated and woven into a narrative by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova for publication by The Harvill Press in 2005 as A Writer at War - Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945. The authors say: ‘The notebooks reveal a good deal of the raw material which he accumulated for his novels as well as his articles. Grossman, a special correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, or Red Star, proved to be the most perceptive and honest eyewitness of the Soviet frontlines between 1941 and 1945. He spent more than a thousand days at the front - nearly three out of the four years of war. The sharpness of his observation and the humanity of his understanding offer an invaluable lesson for any writer and historian.’ The book (now in paperback under the Pimlico imprint) can be previewed at Random House or Googlebooks. And a review by Andrey Kurkov can be read in The Guardian.

Much of Grossman’s writing, as translated, in the book does read like a diary. However, as all of his words are woven into the authors’ text, particular entries are rarely given a specific date (whether or not there was one in the originals) - thus all the extracts below are undated.

1941
‘The headquarters has been set up in the Paskevich Palace. There is a wonderful park, and a lake with swans. Lots of slit trenches have been dug everywhere. Chief of the political department of the front, Brigade Commander Kozlov, receives us. He tells us that the Military Council is very alarmed by the news that arrived yesterday. The Germans have taken Roslavl and assembled a great tank force there. Their commander is Guderian, author of the book Achtung-Panzer!.

We leafed through a series of the Front newspaper. I came across the following phrase in a leading article: ‘The much-battered enemy continued his cowardly advance.’

We sleep on the floor in the library of the ‘Komintern’ club, keeping our boots on, and using gas masks and field pouches as pillows. We have dinner at the canteen of the headquarters. It is situated in the park, in an amusing multicoloured pavilion. They feed us well, as if we were in a dom otdykha [Soviet house of rest] before the war. There’s sour cream, curds, and even ice-cream as a dessert.’

***

‘We came under fire near a cemetery. We hid beneath a tree. A truck was standing there, and in it was a dead rifleman-signaller, covered with a tarpaulin. Red Army soldiers were digging a grave for him nearby. When there’s a raid of Messers, the soldiers try to hide in ditches. The lieutenant shouts: ‘Carry on digging, otherwise we won’t finish until the evening.’ Korol hides in the new grave, while everyone runs in different directions. Only the dead signaller is lying full length, and machine guns are chattering above him.’

***

‘Cucumbers. Four men from the fruit and vegetable store load cucumbers at the station, during a bombing raid. They are crying with fear, get drunk, and in the evenings they recount, with Ukrainian humour, how scared they were and laugh at one another, eating honey, salo [pork lard], garlic and tomatoes. One of them imitates wonderfully the howling and explosion of a bomb.

B. Korol is teaching them how to use a hand grenade. He thinks they’ll become partisans under German occupation, while I sense from their conversation that they are ready to work for the Germans. One of them, who wants to be an agronomist for this area, looks at Korol as if he were an imbecile.’

1942

‘Spent the night  in the house of the RAIKOM chairman. He talks about collective farms, and about chairmen of collective farms who take their livestock far into the steppe and live like kings there, slaughtering heifers, drinking milk, buying and selling. (And a cow now costs 40,000 roubles).

Women talking in the kitchen of the RAIKOM canteen: ‘Oh this Hitler, he’s a real Satan! And we used to say that communists were Satans.’

***

‘Stalingrad is burned down. I would have to write too much if I wanted to describe it. Stalingrad is burned down. Stalingrad is in ashes. It is dead. People are in basements. Everything is burned out. The hot walls of the buildings are like the bodies of people who have died in the terrible heat and haven’t gone cold yet.

Huge buildings, memorials, public gardens. Signs: ‘Cross here.’ Heaps of wires, a cat sleeping on a window sill, flowers and grass in flowerpots. A wooden pavilion where they sold fizzy water is standing, miraculously intact among thousands of huge stone buildings burned and half destroyed. It is like Pompeii, seized by disaster on a day when everything was flourishing. Trams and cars with no glass in their windows. Burned-out houses with memorial plaques: ‘I. V Stalin spoke here in 1919’.

Building of a children’s hospital with a gypsum bird on the roof. One wing is broken off, the other stretched out to fly. The Palace of Culture: the building is black, velvety from fire, and two snow-white nude statues stand out against this background.

There are children wandering about, there are many laughing faces. Many people are half insane.

Sunset over a square. A terrifying and strange beauty: the light pink sky is looking through thousands and thousands of empty windows and roofs. A huge poster painted in vulgar colours: ‘The radiant way’.

A feeling of calm. The city has died after much suffering and looks like the face of a dead man who was suffering from a lethal disease and finally has found eternal peace. Bombing again, bombing of the dead city.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 12 December 2015.

Art but no artists

René Maria Rilke, one of the most intense of German-language poets and considered by some to be a founder of modernist poetry, was born 150 years ago today. During a two year period - when he was in love with the married Russian-born Lou Andreas-Salomé and then meeting his future wife Clara Westhoff - he kept a series of diaries. The editors of the English edition of these diaries claim they span a crucial period in the artistic growth of the young poet.

Rilke was born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, on 4 December 1875. His father worked as a railway official having retired from the military, and his mother was considered socially ambitious. René’s childhood was not especially happy, and he was sent to military academy for five years until 1891. He left on account of ill health, only to find his parents had separated. He was tutored for university entrance, and then began studying philosophy at Charles-Ferdinand University. But, by this time, he had already published a first volume of poetry, Leben und Lieder, and was intent on a literary career. Disenchanted with his academic studies, he left, travelling to Munich to study art. There he mixed with artistic types, managed to get some of his plays produced, and published more poetry.

In 1897, Rilke fell in love with the much-travelled Lou Andreas-Salomé, a married woman many years his senior. She appears to have had a major influence over the still-young Rilke, persuading him to change his first name to Rainer, and introducing him to the ideas of psychoanalysis (she had studied with Freud). After a brief stay in Florence, he twice travelled to Russia with Salomé in 1899 and 1900, meeting Leo Tolstoy in 1898, and Leonid Pasternak (the painter and father of Boris Pasternak) and Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet, in 1899. The following year, Rilke stayed at the artists’ colony at Worpswede, where he met Clara Westhoff. They married early in 1900, and had one daughter, Ruth, in late 1901.

In 1902, Rilke travelled to Paris, where he would stay for much of the rest of the decade. Clara left Ruth with her parents and joined him there. He became fascinated by Rodin, writing and lecturing on the sculptor, and even acting as his secretary for a period, and later by Cezanne. Apart from two or three more collections of poetry, he also completed his only novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. In the early 1910s he visited Ronda in Spain and Duino/Trieste in Italy, but the outbreak of WWI found him in Germany and unable to return to Paris. He managed to avoid active service, with the help of influential friends, by being assigned to the War Records Office.

AIn Switzerland he completed the Duino Elegies and, in a burst of 1922 inspiration, wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia late in 1926, highly respected in literary and artistic spheres but barely known by the general public. The Poetry Foundation provides this modern assessment: ‘Widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets, Rainer Maria Rilke was unique in his efforts to expand the realm of poetry through new uses of syntax and imagery and in the philosophy that his poems explored.’ While Encyclopaedia Britannica (1979 edition) calls him ‘a major Austro-German poet regarded as one of the founders and giants of modern literature.’ Further information can be found at Wikipedia, the Academy of American Poets, The Atlantic, or Picture Poems. For samples of Rilke’s poems see All Poetry.

Between April 1898 and December 1900, Rilke kept three diaries. The first of these, while in Florence, was probably written for or inspired by Salomé, since it is known that her own mental regimen included keeping a diary, and she is said to have asked Rilke to bring her back a diary. Biographers suggest the second diary, kept after his return to Schmargendorf, might also have been written with her in mind. The third diary was written during his sojourn at Worpswede. (However, it is worth noting that despite the diary names, Rilke visited Worpswede during the time of the Schmargendorf diary, and stayed at Schmargendorf during the time of the Worpswede diary.) They were first edited and published in German in 1942 by Ruth and her husband Carl Sieber.

A first English edition, translated and annotated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler, was published by W. W. Norton & Co in 1997 - Rainer Maria Rilke - Diaries of a Young Poet. In their introduction, Snow and Winkler explain: ‘Rilke’s diaries do maintain a certain chronological flow, albeit one with breaks and longer interruptions, but they are not directly the immediate account of a specific time; it is not their intent to record the minutiae of day-to-day life. For this reason they have not become identified by their chronology. Rather, they are usually titled after three places where Rilke lived and, at least for a time, felt at home: Florence (and the Tuscan countryside), the village of Schmargendorf just outside Berlin, and Worpswede, an artists’ colony in the moors near Bremen.’

The editors claim that the diary period spans a crucial period in Rilke’s artistic growth: ‘At the beginning of this phase the young poet had perfected, if not yet exhausted the rhetorical techniques and mannerisms of his early, impressionistic style. His verse was still prone to the gossamer and was given more to a flirtation than a sustained artistic engagement with the exquisite and the delicate. [. . . He] had come to realise only too well that he needed to constrain his busy games of make-believe and learn how to control his ingenious lyricism. This made it necessary, most of all, to free himself from the rapturous self-indulgence that could spin mellifluous lines and intricate rhymes with prolific ease. He had to submit himself to the kind of self-discipline that comes with the ascetic solitude of regular, arduous work. Rilke’s three early diaries reflect this search for a language that might capture the specificity of things natural and crafted and at the same time convey their intrinsic spirituality. They chronicle, in other words, the emergence of the “sachliche Sagen,” the objective and visually precise language that will come to characterise his “poetry of things.” ’

Although diary entries - many dated but not all - do predominate in Diaries of a Young Poet, there is also a good deal of poetry as well as some letters. The book can be previewed online at Google Books. Here, though, is one extract from each diary.

17 May 1898 [Florence diary]
‘No human being can raise so much beauty out of himself that it will cover him over completely. A part of himself will always gaze out from behind it. But in the peak times of art a few have erected before themselves, in addition to their own beauty, so much noble heritage, that the work no longer needs them. The curiosity and custom of the public will seek and of course find their personality; but that misses the point. In such times there is an art, but there are no artists.

There is an ever-recurring cycle of three generations. One finds the god, the second arches the narrow temple over him and in doing so fetters him, while the third slides into poverty and takes stone after stone from the sanctuary in order to build meagre and makeshift huts. And then comes one which must seek god again; and to such a generation these belonged: Dante and Botticelli and Fra Bartolommeo.

The element of reconciliation and loveliness that one treasures in the works of Raphael is a triumph that only seldom occurs; it signifies a high point of art, but not a high point of the artist.

Pre-Raphaelites: simply a caprice. Tired of smooth beauty, one seeks the effortful - not so? How facile a proposition! Tired of art, one seeks the artist, and in each work looks for the deed that elevated the man, the triumph over something within him, and the longing for himself.

In notes jotted down day after day vis-à-vis the paintings of the quattrocento, I could have offered nothing more than the tourists’ handbooks do. For they have formulated with unsurpassable cogency the measure of abstract beauty that inheres in the things. So much so that in fleeting consideration one employs quite unconsciously those infamous half-scientific terms that, once sharp and pregnant, have through so many mindless uses become dull and vacuous.

A handbook on Italy, if it wanted to teach pleasure, would have in it but one single word and one single piece of advice. Look! Whoever has a certain culture in him must make do with this guidance. He will not acquire pearls of knowledge and it will scarcely occur to him to ask whether this work is from the late period of an artist or whether in that work “the broad manner of the master” holds sway. But he will recognize an abundance of will and power that came from longing and from apprehension, and this revelation will make him better, greater, more thankful.’

11 September 1900 [Schmargendorf diary]
‘A fine evening at the Overbecks’. The blond painter was with me for the length of the twilight; I showed her some Russian books, the pictures of Nadson and Garshin, Droshin’s portraits, and other mementos. In the evening she sat next to me, and there was much conversation between us. The table was nicely set; small chamomiles slanted to one side framed the simple white runner, which was accented by blue-and-red-embroidered signatures of guests who had preceded us. Dr. Hauptmann and I added our names to this roll. Hauptmann was in rare form, made many cutting remarks regarding the temper of our time, always in the most charmingly ingenuous way. [. . .]

Clara Westhoff had come on her bicycle, But she walked almost the whole way back to Westerwede, since while we were talking I had passed by my gate and continued on at her side. It was about two hours past midnight. The skies were gray, quiet, and the landscape could be seen, completely without color, stretching far in the distance . . . The birch trees stood like candles beside long trails. The only thing white was a white cat, which would appear from behind the bushes in silent leaps, then vanish in the mistless meadows. It was a melancholy cat that staged a solitary dance. In the garden everything green was a shade darker. Almost black, the full bushes leaned against the white railing of the forecourt. Around the urns there was depth and air.’

14 December 1900 [Worpswede diary]
‘Sometimes I remember in exact detail things and epochs that never existed. I see every gesture of people who never lived a life and feel the swaying cadence of their never-spoken works. And a never-smiled smiling shines. Those who were never born die. And those who never died lie with their hands folded, repeated in beautiful stone, on long level sarcophagi in the halflight of churches no one built. Bells that never rang, that are still uncast metal and undiscovered ore in mountains, ring. Will ring: for what never existed is what is on its way, on its way over to us, something in the future, new. And perhaps I’m remembering distant futures when what never existed rises up in me and speaks.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 4 December 2015.

Robertson Davies as diarist

‘Bouts of sinus, headache, nausea, and cold sweats have left me unwell for the day. Brenda and I lay on sofas and read. Went for short walk. What a hateful winter! Every winter has its low point and I hope this it: is it age or bodily rot that brings this appalling tedium vitae?’ This is from the diaries of Robertson Davies, who died 30 years ago today. He was one of Canada’s most important literary figures and its leading man of letters in the mid-20th century. The diaries, which were embargoed for 20 years after his death, provide a wealth of detail about his daily life, but they do not provide evidence for the publisher’s claim that Davies must be considered ‘one of the great diarists’.

Davies was born in Thamesville, Ontario, in 1913, third son to William Davies, a Welsh-born Canadian publisher and politician. He was schooled at Upper Canada College and then went to Queen’s University, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a BLit in 1938. He wished to make a career in the British theatre world, and joined the staff of the Old Vic, led at that time by Tyrone Guthrie, and worked alongside the likes of Ralph Richardson and Vivien Leigh. 

In 1940, Davies married the Australian-born Brenda Mathews, whom he had met at Oxford, but who had also worked at the Old Vic. Shortly after war broke out, Davies was advised to return to Canada. Because of poor eyesight, though, he was unfit for military service. He worked as a literary journalist in Toronto until, in 1942, his father pressed him to take over one of his company’s newspapers, the daily Peterborough Examiner.

Davies, despite his full-time job, and Brenda continued to be involved in the theatre world, with Davies writing (and directing) several plays during the 1940s. He also collected his humorous essays for publication under the pseudonym, Samuel Marchbanks. Frustrated by an inability to get his plays noticed outside of Canada, Davies began writing novels in the 1950s, alongside more plays, publishing what came to be known as the Salterton Trilogy (Tempest-Tost in 1951, Leaven of Malice in 1954, and A Mixture of Frailties in 1958). A major turning point for Davies came in the early 1960s, when he began teaching at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and two years later was appointed Master of the new Massey College.

In all Davies’ endeavours, Brenda was a constant companion - stage managing her husband for six decades, according to an obituary in The Globe and Mail. Together, they had three daughters, one of whom, Jennifer (Surridge), would become her father’s literary executor. And Brenda helped organise many of the Master’s functions at Massey College during Davies’ near-20 years tenure - despite being excluded, as were all women, for the early years. In the 1970s, Davies again found form with the novel, publishing Fifth Business in 1970, The Manticore in 1972 and World of Wonders in 1975 - collectively known as The Deptford Trilogy.

Davies retired from academic life in the early 1980s, but continued to write novels, some of his best. What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), which became the middle book of The Cornish Trilogy, was short-listed for the Booker Prize for fiction. He published two books in the 1990s, but failed to finish the third of what would have been The Toronto Trilogy. He died in 1995. There are no dedicated Robertson Davies websites that I can find, and thus surprisingly little detailed information about him on the web, other than at The Canadian Encyclopaedia or Wikipedia (and in a few obituaries - The New York Times or The Independent, for example). The Paris Review has the text of an audience interview with Davies from 1986.

Although a great fan of Robertson Davies, having read most of his novels over the years, I never knew he was a diarist. Indeed, it seems, he dictated that, after his death, the plethora of his diary material - many different volumes and around three million words - should not be published for at least two decades. When those 20 years had passed, McClelland & Stewart published A Celtic Temperament: Robertson Davies as Diarist, as prepared and edited by Jennifer Surridge and Ramsay Derry. From his teens and throughout his life, Davies kept a variety of diaries: a personal daily diary, a ‘big’ diary for more considered entries, a theatre-going diary, travel diaries on trips, and, occasionally, other diaries for a specific topic, such as one kept during production of his play Love and Libel, and another about Massey College. Surridge and Derry say of their book that it covers ‘a particularly busy time in his immensely productive career’ when he was already known as Canada’s leading man of letters.

The editors have eschewed the idea of identifying the exact provenance of each diary entry ‘in order to maintain an easily readable ongoing narrative’ - though I, personally, would have liked to know which entries came from which diary. However, and very interestingly, there is a project, well under way, to create digital editions of all the diaries. The Davies Diaries project, as it is known, is under the guidance of James Neufeld, Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Trent University, and is being funded by Editing Modernism in Canada and Library and Archives Canada. Ambitiously, the project expects to allow readers to browse and search not only digitised images of all diary pages, but verbatim transcripts, corrected transcripts, and annotated texts. That said, I can find little evidence of much progress in recent years.

Surridge and Derry conclude their introduction to A Celtic Temperament by claiming: ‘[T]he diaries are more than social history, as we hope this introductory selection shows. In their variety, intimacy, and honesty, they present an extraordinary rich portrait of the man and his times and an entertaining account of a life as it is being lived.’ All of which I can agree with. However, I don’t buy the publisher’s claim that this first book of Davies’ diaries establishes him ‘as one of the great diarists’. Far from it. Much, if not most, of the diaries are filled with, if not banal then, straightforward records of his daily activities. These records are, as a whole, hugely important, because Davies is one of the greatest of Canadian authors, but in the detail they are fairly dull. Davies was a decent, hard-working, family man - privileged and successful - and the detail of his daily life reflects these realities. A review in Canada’s The Globe and Mail calls the diaries ‘delightful’ but complains that there is ‘no dirt, little gossip’ and that, though fun and whimsical, they reveal little more than ‘the banalities of a privileged life in letters’.

Here are a few short extracts from A Celtic Temperament - and many thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.

9 February 1961
‘Bill Broughall lunched with me at the University Club. He tells me Vincent Massey says “a gentleman never takes soup with luncheon at his club” because Lord Curzon said it. I fear I shall run into many things a gentleman does not do, and which are unknown to me; but I am writer, and therefore a bit of a bounder.’

25 February 1961
‘Nothing in the Globe and Mail about my appointment because I write for the Star: what small behaviour! Write a Star column in the morning and a critique of Saint Joan. In the afternoon, loaf and read Jung; Rosamund comes for the weekend, very lively; in the evening go through Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto” with her and read Rabelais.’

27 February 1961
‘Now that the news is out, and the world has received it with exemplary calm, and my Proposals are out of my hands, I feel a deep depression, a regression of the libido, what might be called the Hump. What have I let myself in for? What am I, a mere magpie of leaning and certainly no scholar, doing with a learned appointment in that collection of medieval schoolmen and learned but vulgar thrusters, the University of Toronto? My one desire is to crawl into a hole and work on the novel which has been in my mind since before A Mixture of Frailties.’

20 August 1961
‘Lay late reading Final Curtain by Ngaio Marsh. Dye my beard too dark - must look into this. Loafed all day never stirring from the place and found this very refreshing: my condition of mind asks for inactivity; worked on my speech. I am indeed changing: trying to purge my writing of ornament and mere eccentricity and my thinking of bile, emotionalism, and vulgarity. Oh! that I may make some progress in these things!

13 November 1961
‘Worked on Saturday Night piece “Pleasures of Love.” In the evening looked over old MSS of novels and plays and reread diary of Love and Libel a year since: still painful, and it might have succeeded; useless to repine.’

25 February 1962
‘Bouts of sinus, headache, nausea, and cold sweats have left me unwell for the day. Brenda and I lay on sofas and read. Went for short walk. What a hateful winter! Every winter has its low point and I hope this it: is it age or bodily rot that brings this appalling tedium vitae?’

19 December 1962
‘Minor bothers: car goes crook; parcels get mislaid, etc. Rosamund is out of school at 12. Give a good lecture at 2. We call on the Edinboroughs and have mince pies and rum punch. In the evening to Kind Hearts and Coronets, my favourite film.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 15 November 2015.

The father of neurology

‘The floor is made of tile mosaics as are the walls - no seat - only a hole which seems narrow to me at ground level. One has to be agile - but the Arabs certainly are in this respect. They do everything squatting. It is perfect, a paradise for the sense of sight and smell.’ This is Jean-Martin Charcot, born two centuries ago today, the great physician of France’s early Belle Epoque, the so-called ‘father of neurology’ and/or the ‘Napoleon of the neuroses’, writing about a Moroccan toilet in his one and only significant diary.

Charcot was born in Paris on 29 November 1825 into a modest artisan family. He seems to have been a gifted school child, mastering several languages, and was selected by his father as the one child to receive a higher education and enter medical school. He received his M.D. from the University of Paris in 1853 with a dissertation on arthritis. In 1860, he was named associate professor in medicine, and two years later, he was appointed head of a hospital service at Salpêtrière, a complex in the 13th arrondissement near the Seine. Aged 39, he married Augustine-Victoire Durvis, a young widow, with whom he had two children.

Charcot began to publish many books and articles on infectious illnesses, geriatrics, diseases of the internal organs. And, in 1872, he was elected to the Paris Medical Faculty as professor of pathological anatomy. During the 1870s, he turned increasingly to the new discipline of neurology, becoming one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject, publishing on a wide range of neurological conditions, MS, Parkinson’s disease, Tourette’s, aphasia etc. He was the first to describe several conditions, including multiple sclerosis and the disintegration of ligaments and joint surfaces (Charcot’s disease, or Charcot’s joint) caused by locomotor ataxia and related diseases or injuries. In particular, he was known for his work on hysteria, and he developed the practice of using hypnosis as a means to study his patients, often using the technique in public demonstrations.

This - the early years of the Belle Epoque - was a heyday for the medical profession in France, as a group  progressive physician-scientists - among whom Charcot was the most famous - sought to modernise medicine more in line with scientific understanding. Apart from his medical discoveries, he also pioneered the art and science of medical photography. Charcot’s second-to-none reputation as a teacher attracted students from all over the world, not least, in 1885, Sigmund Freud.

Meanwhile, in their grand home on the boulevard Saint-Germain, the Charcots would give lavish parties, attracting the cream of Parisian society, politicians, artists, writers and, of course, other physicians. In 1882, Charcot was named Chair for the diseases of the nervous system, the first such professorial post in the world. Financing followed his fame, with the government resourcing a new neuropathological institute at Salpêtrière. Charcot died, relatively young, in 1893. Further information is available at Wikipedia, National Center for Biotechnology Information, Science Museum, and inside Medical Muses: Hysteria in 19th-Century Paris by Asti Hustvedt (some pages of which about Charcot are viewable at Googlebooks).

Charcot was not a diarist, though he did occasionally keep note-books when on holiday or travelling. One such note-book so stood out from the rest for Toby Gelfland (Department of History, University of Ottawa) that he decided to translate, edit and publish it - as Charcot in Morocco (University of Ottawa Press, 2012). In July 1887, Charcot went south to Spain for his annual summer holiday, but, on this occasion, concluded the voyage with a week in Morocco, and while there kept a detailed personal diary, amounting to 14,000 words, 95 manuscript pages, and various sketches, maps and watercolours.

The journal is a unique document, says Gelfand, because of its sheer length and detail but also because of ‘the intimate, relaxed, colorful, at times frankly exuberant quality of a first-person narrative written primarily for oneself, even if it were later to be shared with family and friends’. Furthermore: ‘The journal offers rare access to an otherwise elusive figure who said little of a spontaneous nature in public. [. . .] Historians, following most contemporary accounts, tend to portray Charcot as an authoritarian and rather austere medical leader, a “grand patron” who was at once intimidating and shy, if not secretive. The Moroccan journals reveals a less pretentious figure possessed of a rough and ready sense of humor, someone who did not always take himself or others so seriously.’

10 August 1887
‘Soon we reach the 1st Moroccan doorway, a square house, which sits atop a high hill. Two Moors of the Emperor who are to accompany us emerge; one carries a gun, the other a bag. These 2 do not join in with our group. Sometimes they approach, then at other times they disappear - only to reappear a little afterwards at a turn in the way . . . they are definitely strange; as well they have a rather unhealthy look about them with their caped robes that seem to be soaked with sweat.

We have been walking perhaps 2 hours when suddenly the plain widens out. In the middle we see a castle in ruins covered with ivy - not far off, some stones are piled up in a way that marks off an oval shape of earth. It is a tomb. There are many others. On a few of the tombs, red rags hang from sticks planted in the ground, rags now faded which must have formerly had a beautiful red color. They mark the tomb of a chieftain, more or less canonized and elevated to the level of a saint. It was here that the battle against the Moroccans took place which led to the march on Tetuan. More than 20 years ago, all that. The name Prim returns to mind. We walk on and keep on walking. From time to time I look at my watch. We’re going to get to the Moor’s place soon, no doubt! By this time hunger and thirst have set in. But where is this the devil of a house of the Moor? We don’t see it. Here are a few trees and rocks. We have lost sight of the sea. Anxiously, we walk on for nearly an hour; devil of a house gone astray. We begin to berate the Moors of the Emperor who led us down this wrong path. At last, there it is, a hut scarcely above the ground, hidden among the underbrush and tall cactus. [. . .]

I get up and rejoin the group drinking water, who are sharing a watermelon. On the mound where they are sitting, there is no more space. One of the Moors of the King noticed; he goes up to my son and, tapping him gently on the shoulder, says to him, in Spanish, “Your father is not seated.” My son gets up and I sit down in his place. An example of Arab manners that is in sum very edifying and which demonstrates that, even if we are among the people of Barbary, we are not with barbarians.’

11 August 1887
‘Soon we arrive at one of our “wealthy Moors”. [. . .] The young ladies go into the women’s quarters. Employing a searching gaze, we look into everything open to us. I think they were expecting us; most certainly, they were waiting for us. However a flurry of emotion, doubtless feigned, a pretended surprise, took place when we entered. A lady of mature years, who appeared beautiful to me, quickly fled, but not before showing us her face. That left 4 or 5 negresses, who shamelessly stayed where they were. Moreover, they were very beautiful, their arms and legs nude, their bodies lightly clothed in a clear fabric. They certainly do not belong to the religion whose acolytes cover up. As always, the first floor with balcony is just about the same as the lower floor. But it seems we cannot visit since the private living quarters are there. I look everywhere for a certain spot which interests me from a hygienic perspective. Instinct guides me. Here water flows on the ground - one certainly cannot go in without clogs. The floor is made of tile mosaics as are the walls - no seat - only a hole which seems narrow to me at ground level. One has to be agile - but the Arabs certainly are in this respect. They do everything squatting. It is perfect, a paradise for the sense of sight and smell.’

12 August 1887
‘It is agreed that I will give a few medical consultations; they implored me to do so. A few people have been referred by the consul, or by M. Alvans, the military envoy, who never tires of being helpful.

Here come the patients, 5 or 6 of them, all Jews. They file into the patio. I sketch one who presents a beautiful case of Parkinson’s. Nothing very interesting from the point of view of diagnosis. But all are nervous cases. Yesterday, on the square, they showed me a Jew who remained mute, so they say, during his entire childhood but who eventually began to speak. Was he a case of hysteria?

The consultation is over. I must see the town some more so as to take with me an indelible visual impression. Along the way, on one of the most densely inhabited streets, we hear in the distance a sort of chanting, mixed and monotonous at the same time: the voices of men. They appear in a cortege of about a hundred persons; they are walking quickly, they seem to be in a hurry. “The dead go quickly.” In fact it is a burial. The deceased is carried on a kind of cot, nude in a white shroud which hides him completely, the head too. It seems to me that no one stirs nor extends greetings. We don’t either: that is not the custom here. We let the cortege pass, we will meet it again momentarily, in the cemetery.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 29 November 2015.

We hope for better times

‘Our Co for the first time have the sad duty to perform of burying one of their number. Jane is also quite sick of a Diareah but we hope not dangerous. [. . .] many are complaining & the dust is the greatest hardship to endure we have found on our whole journey. But we hope for better times.’ This is the heartfelt diary writing of Polly Lavinia Crandall Coon - born two centuries ago today - travelling with others on the long and arduous trail across the North American continent, from Wisconsin to Oregon, in search of a better life.

Polly Lavinia was born on 24 November 1825 in Alfred, Allegheny, New York, the eldest child of Paul and Sally Crandall. In 1838, the family moved west to Lima, Rock County, Wisconsin where they settled. Paul became one of the members of the Wisconsin constitutional convention in 1847, and was dubbed a ‘Father of Wisconsin’. But, in 1952, they set off, west again, overland in wagons to Oregon, with most of their several children, including Polly and her daughter. Polly’s husband, Thomas, and her brother had already made the journey a year or two earlier.

Once settled in the new land, Thomas died, in early 1854, and two months later Polly gave birth to their second child. Soon after, Polly had her claim of land surveyed. She sold it off in lots to form a new town, called Silverton - on the banks of Silver Creek. She taught at a school in Silverton, and also in Salem and other nearby communities. In 1855, she married Stephen Price, a carpenter and millwright, who built them a new home. They had one son, before moving, in 1856, to Salem; and much later they lived in Hood River, on the south bank of the Columbia River. Both Stephen and Polly died in 1898. Not much is known of Polly, though a little more information can be found at the Liberal University of Oregon website.

A daily diary kept by Polly on her journey was published by A. H. Clark, in 1983, within Covered Wagon Women - Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1852: The Oregon Trail, as edited and compiled by Kenneth L. Holmes and David C. Duniway. This was the fifth volume of an eleven-volume series: Covered Wagon Women - Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1890. Some pages of Polly’s diary - Journal of a Journey Over the Rocky Mountains - can be read at Googlebooks. Here are a few extracts (they are as originally published except for a few full stops).

29 March 1852
‘Started from the town of Lima Rock Co. Wis. on our long contemplated journey to seek a home on the Pacific coast, in the territory of Oregon. Passed through Janesville to the town of Plymouth where we struck our camp for the first time, & found that we had truly left all comfort behind at least as far as the weather is concerned. But all are in health & spirits seeming determined to manufacture as much comfort as possible from what material we have.’

8 April 1852
‘All are well & in excellent spirits. We traveled yesterday 16 miles and camped on a vast prairie in Lafayette Co where nothing but land & sky were to be seen save one little log house. But to make up the absence of other interesting matter we found a wedding party assembled in the aforesaid “log house”. The “old Man” came up and gave us all an invite to attend the dance in the evening. We all went down but none of us joined in the exercises but Ray & Stallman. They reported to have had a very fine time and staid till morning the others returned at 9 o’clock. We have tonight a beautiful camping ground near the line between G[r]ant and Lafayette pleasant weather but still wet under foot.’

9 April 1852
‘Rained all day consequently we have laid by - improving the time in doing some baking. At night the ground being very wet we were obliged to take shelter in the house.’

10 April 1852
‘Reached the Mississippi at Eagle Ferry 2 miles above Dubuque found a number of teams in wait to go over.’

11 April 1852
‘After being delayed all day in getting all crossed over we at length reach Dubuque. We made a few purchases & excited not a little curiosity nor a few remarks from the good people of the city by our “Bloomer Dresses.” Left this town about 3 o’clock passing out some 2 miles through the deepest mud & worst roads I ever saw. Camped in a field & got about half enough poor hay for which the Man charges 30 cts per yoke. I record this as a demonstration of the depth of the heartlessness to which the human heart is capable of arriving.’

12 April 1852
‘Our brother Ray left us this morning - It was with deep regret and tearful eyes we left him to plod on alone towards his home. We feel sad that we leave him behind but hope another year will bring him to Oregon. This after noon it is quite pleasant except the chilling winds which sweep furiously across the endless praries of the state of Iowa. All well and judging from the talking and laughing we hear from the adjoining tent all are in good spirits. The roads continue very bad otherwise we get along very finely.’

11 May 1852
‘Traveled near about 16 miles & camped again on a large Prarie near a beautiful spring which we consider a great treat. After getting our tents pitched & supper nearly in readiness a heavy thunder shower struck us & we were nearly drenched but succeeded in keeping our beds tolerable dry.’

28 May 1852
‘We have all felt much distressed today at witnessing a scene truly heartrending. About noon we came by a Camp where yesterday all were well & today one man was buried - another dying & still another sick. The disease was Diareah which which they had not medicine to check & the result from death. The man that was buried left a young wife to either return through a savage country or go on alone and heartbroken. Many of our Company are complaining but none very sick.’

13 August 1852
‘Dr Weber grew worse after stoping, medicine had no effect & about 1 o’clock at night he died. Our Co for the first time have the sad duty to perform of burying one of their number. Jane is also quite sick of a Diareah but we hope not dangerous. Samuel does not not improve much. The weather is so very hot & dusty that very many are complaining & the dust is the greatest hardship to endure we have found on our whole journey. But we hope for better times.’

17 August 1852
‘Our Co commenced crossing - having stretched a rope across the river & coupled two wagon boxes together, towed over the cattle first & then carried our wagons, luggage & people. We got over quite early with the sick ones in order to make them as comfortable as possible.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 24 November 2015.

Comarnescu and Eugene O’Neil

Petru Comarnescu, one of the most original Romanian critics and cultural historians of the twentieth century, was born 120 years ago today. His journals, written over many years, chart his inner life with painful candour; however, they also contain one of the richest first-hand records of a transatlantic literary friendship - with the American playwright Eugene O’Neill.

Comarnescu was born in Iași on 23 November 1905. He studied philosophy at the University of Bucharest and completed his doctorate abroad, steeped in the ideals of Hellenistic balance and the American pragmatist idea of life as continual experience. He married Gina Comarnescu in the mid-1930s, though the marriage disintegrated painfully. 

A long research stay in the United States in the 1930s laid the foundations for his career as Romania’s foremost interpreter of American culture; on his return he joined the editorial and academic world centred on the Royal Foundations. War and the arrival of Communism disrupted his work. Many of his projects were blocked, staged productions suppressed and correspondence delayed or cut. Yet he persisted, publishing studies, teaching, translating and defending a broad humanistic view of art until his death in Bucharest in 1970. A little further biographical information is available at Wikipedia.

Comarnescu kept diaries for much his life, from 1923 to 1968. A three-volume set of these journals - titled Pagini de jurnal - was published in Romania by Editura Noul Orfeu in 2003. There is also a separate publication titled Jurnal, 1931‑1937 (1994) published by Institutul European. A review in Romanian of this can be found here. However, generally, there is a paucity of information online and in English about Comarnescu and his diaries. My only source, thus, is a 10-page paper by Adriana Carolina Bulz in HyperCultura (Vol. 1 No. 1/2015)- the journal put out by Hyperion University’s Department of Letters and Foreign Languages. Bulz’s paper is entitled: Eugene O’Neill’s Romanian Memory Revisited through Petru Comarnescu’s Diary and Correspondence. (To find this online google search: Eugene O’Neill’s Romanian Memory.)

The journals show, says Bulz, a mind continually drawn to the classical idea that goodness and beauty are inseparable, and to a belief in destiny that was not passive but combative. In a revealing entry he notes that ‘my existence is determined by an irrational play of contrary forces,’ yet insists that because fate is unknowable ‘we must fight, as the ancient heroes fought.’ These tensions animate his most creative years and frame the long passages where he reflects on the artists who sustained him. The diaries are also the key to understanding why he recognised something of himself in Eugene O’Neill’s tragic vision. Early entries describe his desire to ‘pour all the feelings, problems and contradictions’ of recent years into writing - a formulation that echoes O’Neill’s own practice of turning personal conflict into drama. 

The correspondence reproduced in the article shows how deeply O’Neill valued him. In May 1938 O’Neill praises Comarnescu’s article in Revue Hebdomadaire as ‘much superior to other criticism of my work,’ gives him permission to publish his translation of Strange Interlude and even declines copyright payment, asking only for a copy of the book. In November that year he appoints him his legal representative in Romania, grants him full rights to translate Mourning Becomes Electra – ‘the best thing I have done,’ he writes - and expresses confidence that it would have ‘the greatest success’ on the Romanian stage. Later letters reveal O’Neill’s delight at the Bucharest production of Mourning Becomes Electra, his gratitude to the theatre company, and his continuing trust in Comarnescu as ‘sole representative and translator.’ 

Against these letters, the diaries provide essential context. Translating Strange Interlude during the collapse of his marriage, he describes working ‘in these terrible times for me, so as not to go mad,’ finding in O’Neill’s characters ‘so many situations similar to those I was going through.’ When Communist cultural authorities began blocking productions and banning plays on ideological grounds - at one point invoking O’Neill’s Catholicism as justification - the diaries record his despair: ‘tragedy itself was no longer in fashion… destiny considered a bourgeois diversion.’ Yet even at his lowest, he sets his own anguished reflections beside O’Neill’s tragic characters, writing that between Hamlet, Hickey and himself ‘it would have been better never to be born,’ a formulation remarkably close to Edmund’s lament in Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play Comarnescu had never read at the time. 

In his final letter to the O’Neills in 1947, Comarnescu describes sending new volumes of translations, outlines the structure of his major study on the revival of tragedy and confesses, without false modesty, that he feels ‘nearer to [O’Neill’s] philosophy and art than any of his critics.’ The diaries confirm that this was not arrogance but a conviction built from years of immersion, affinity and hard scholarship.

The gay diaries of Mr Lucas

‘Today I was tried before a brigadier and four other officers - a very shattering ordeal, in the latter part of which I felt sick and ill. The prosecution was fair; the judge advocate was fair, and his summing up favourable; my defending officer, though he bungled his job, was at least moderately convincing. Yet the court (swayed, I believe, by the brigadier) found me guilty (which I had expected) and sentenced me to be cashiered and to serve six months’ imprisonment - which I had not expected.’ These words were written exactly seventy-five years ago today by Russell Lucas, a British officer whose private diaries have survived as one of the clearest, most candid records of mid-century gay life. It is thanks to the journalist Hugo Greenhalgh that the diaries have been edited and published.

Lucas was born in the interwar years and spent most of his working life in Whitehall, moving through clerical and administrative posts typical of the postwar civil service. He lived largely alone, with a small and cautious circle of friends, and confronted the long period during which homosexual acts remained criminalised in England. He began keeping a diary in 1949 and continued for decades, chronicling nights in London pubs and clubs, friendships and infatuations, encounters with the law, the rhythms of office life, and the gradual liberalisation of attitudes from the 1950s onwards. He died in relative obscurity, leaving behind a bundle of notebooks that remained with his family until they were passed to Greenhalgh, who edited them for publication as The Diaries of Mr Lucas - Life in 1960s Gay London. Some pages can be previewed at Googlebooks.

Greenhalgh, who grew up in London and studied Modern Languages at Exeter College, Oxford, first came to prominence after leading the campaign that forced the university to recognise same-sex partnerships on equal terms with heterosexual ones. He later built a career in financial and business journalism, including long periods at the Hugo before shifting towards cultural reporting and LGBTQ history. 

Greenhalgh’s editorial work on the Lucas diaries involved reconstructing missing sequences, deciphering coded passages and cross-referencing names, dates and incidents against public records. The result is a vivid portrait of a man navigating a society that permitted him little honesty, and of a gay world stretching from pre-decriminalisation shadows to the beginnings of modern visibility (see The Guardian or The New Humanist for reviews).

What follows are several extracts from Lucas’s diaries (as edited by Greenhalgh) focusing on the events of autumn 1950, when Lucas - having rejoined the army after his National Service - was stationed in Düsseldorf and arrested by the German police after an encounter in a public lavatory. His account of the arrest, the days in custody, the return to barracks and the court martial that ended his military career must be counted among the most sustained personal descriptions of such a case.

18 October 1950

‘At 6 p.m. I was a useful and respected staff officer taking a walk; at 7 p.m. I was under arrest for an alleged indecent assault offence with a young German who reported me. After interrogation by Finnerson [of the Special Investigations Branch of the military police] until after midnight, I was removed to the 1st Norfolk barracks to spend the remainder of the night in a dismal guardroom under escort of a 2nd lieutenant Sanderson - an agreeable, bespectacled subaltern who no doubt found the situation as disagreeable as I did. So my career as an officer comes to an end, sordidly.

Our hapless lieutenant was released the following morning from ‘close arrest at 11 a.m.’, to my relief and, I should fancy, that of poor second lieutenant Sanderson. Lunch at the Rhine Centre was followed by the journey to Bad Oeynhausen, during which I sat with my thoughts, except for a few words with an elderly civilian in my carriage. How I envied him.’

20 October 1950

‘I must say, Major Miller has been wonderfully kind. As I waited for Lt. Col. Alexander this morning, he remarked that ‘no man knows what another man has to bear’, spoke a few consoling words about the comforts of our religion, and shook my hand. The colonel, too, though he said little, was most kind in his manner. Until my re-arrest and court martial, I am carrying on with my normal duties. My colleagues believe I have been recalled for a Court of Inquiry on the traffic accident in which I have recently been involved. What they will say when they learn the truth, I prefer not to think. Meanwhile, work goes on . . .’

21 October 1950

‘On Wednesday evening last, at seven, I was in the hands of the Düsseldorf police, accused of an indecent assault on a young German in a lavatory on the Kleverplatz. In point of fact, the young fellow was one that, coming back and forth to this lavatory several times, had persuaded me he was comme ça. When I perceived him masturbating, I was sure of it, and approached him, whereon he departed and presently two Kriminalpolizei men in plain clothes arrive, arrest me and, after much talk at the police station, hand me over to the military police. [. . .]

Yet in the face of the German’s positive testimony and the absence of any reason why he should lie, no court martial can but find me guilty. I expect three years’ gaol at most, nine months at least; thereafter, God knows. I must be dismissed from the civil service as well as discharged with ignominy from the military.’

His sense of injustice is tempered, perhaps amusingly for us today, by the fact that not only did he not actually do what he was accused of, but his chances of proving that were virtually nil.’

18 November 1950

‘On Monday, after thirty-three days of waiting, is my trial by General Court Martial for gross indecency. I have no doubt of the outcome - I shall be convicted and dismissed from the service, and my career ruined, all because of a moment’s imprudence. The young German who for some sinister motive of his own reported me to the police after acting in the most suggestive manner, and masturbating in front of me, has done more than he expected - though I appreciate my dangerous situation and realize that in no long time I shall, for the first time in my life, have no occupation and no source of income, I cannot yet feel more than a general apprehension. Terror and dismay will no doubt come later; at present regret that this catastrophe should come so soon and that the occasion of my fall should be so mean and sordid are my chief emotions, mixed with anger and contempt for my denouncer and gratitude to my soldier friends for their sympathetic letters. Had I been arrested for sodomy with, say, Gunner McAdam, I’d have been better pleased - the affair would have been on a nobler and more romantic plane.’

20 November 1950

‘Today I was tried before a Brigadier and four other officers (one major and three captains) - a very shattering ordeal, in the latter part of which I felt sick and ill. The prosecution was fair; the judge advocate was fair, and his summing up favourable; my defending officer, though he bungled his job, was at least moderately convincing. Yet the court (swayed, I believe, by the Brigadier) found me guilty (which I had expected) and sentenced me to be cashiered and to serve six months’ imprisonment - which I had not expected. Lieutenant ‘Porky’ Gale, RWK, tried before me, has the same sentence for nine charges of selling stores: and he, I, and our two escorts will occupy the mess until our sentences are confirmed and we are removed to gaol. God be compassionate to all poor souls in prison or awaiting imprisonment.’

Sense and senselessness

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Zygmunt Bauman. He published prolifically across the spectrum of sociology and social theory, and is considered one of the world’s most influential sociologists. Not known as a diarist, he did publish a work provocatively called, This is Not a Diary, with entries dated as if it were a diary - each one being a mini-essay on whatever sociology-related subject happened to come to mind that day. The first dated entry is titled, On the sense and senselessness of diary-keeping. Another - On the friends you have and the friends you think you have - is about the evolutionary anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, under whom I, personally, studied many years ago.

Bauman was born to Jewish parents in Poznań, Poland, on 19 November 1925. When the Nazis invaded, in 1939, his family fled to the Soviet Union where he enlisted in the Polish division of the Red Army, working as a political education instructor. He was involved in the battles of Kolberg and Berlin, and in May 1945 was awarded the Military Cross of Valour. In the early post-war years, he served as a political officer in the Internal Security Corps (KBW) formed to combat Ukrainian and Polish insurgents, and as an informer for military intelligence. In parallel, he studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw. In 1948, he married Janina Lewinson, and they had three daughters.

Having risen to the rank of major, Bauman was dishonourably discharged from the KBW, in 1953, when his father - a Zionist - sought permission to emigrate to Israel, even though he, himself, held anti-Zionist views. The following year he became a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. A visit to the London School of Economics led to his first major book, in 1959, on the British socialist movement, some years later translated into English. Other books followed, notably the popular Socjologia na co dzień in 1964, later forming the basis for his English-language text-book Thinking Sociologically in 1990.

By the late 1960s, an orchestrated anti-semitic campaign was leading many Poles of Jewish descent, not least the intellectuals, to emigrate. At the same time, Bauman’s politics had fallen out of line with that of the communist government; so, in 1968, he gave up his Polish citizenship in order to be allowed to leave the country. He went first to Tel Aviv University, but, by 1972, he had taken up a chair in sociology at Leeds University. He retired in 1990, but since then has published over 40 books, on subjects such as globalisation, modernity and postmodernism, consumerism and morality. His wife, Janina, who also wrote a few books on her wartime memories, died in 2009. The following year, the University of Leeds launched The Bauman Institute in Bauman’s honour. Bauman himself died in 2017. There is further biographical information at Wikipedia, University of Leeds, The Guardian, The Culture Society, and The American Task Force on Palestine. The photo was found at Culture.pl.

There is no obvious evidence that Bauman kept a diary through his long life - although he might have done. However, in 2010 and 2011 he took it into his head to keep a kind of journal, with dated entries, but with all the entries more like mini-essays on current issues of interest or concern to him. Some of these were clearly inspired by things he had read, in the news or elsewhere, and so the dates do have some occasional relevance. The collection of mini-essays were published by Polity Press in 2012, and somewhere along the publishing road acquired the playful title: This is Not a Diary. A few pages can be read at Amazon.

Each dated entry starts with its own title, such as On the quandries of believing, On hurting flies and killing people, On glocalisation coming of age, On immoral axes and moral axemen, etc. Each entry is too long to quote in full, and, unfortunately, given the essay structure, any cutting back reduces, in every sense, Bauman’s little essays. Nevertheless, here are extracts from two sections. I’ve chosen the opening entry, partly because it is the first, and partly because it is, ostensibly, about diary keeping (though more about writing in general). I’ve chosen the second because it’s about a Robin Dunbar theory, and Robin was my tutor, some decades ago (when I was preparing an MSc biological anthropology thesis - on paternal care in primates; see my own diaries - November 1989).

3 September 2010
‘On the sense and senselessness of diary-keeping. I confess: as I am starting to write (it is 5 a.m.), I haven’t the slightest idea what, if anything, will follow, how long it will go on and how long I’ll need, feel the urge and wish to keep it going. And the intention, let alone the purpose, is anything but clear. The question ‘what for’ can hardly be answered. At the moment when I sat down at the computer, there was no new burning issue waiting to be chewed over and digested, no new book to be written or old stuff to be revised, recycled or updated, no new interviewer’s curiosity to be satiated, no new lecture to be sketched out in writing before being spoken - no request, commission or deadline . . . In short, there was neither a frame nailed together waiting to be filled, nor a plateful of podgy work in search of a mould and a form.

I guess the question ‘because of what’ is more in order in this case than the question ‘what for’. Causes to write are abundant, a crowd of volunteers line up to be noted, picked and chosen. The decision to start writing is, so to speak, ‘overdetermined’.

To begin with, I’ve failed to learn any other form of life except writing. A day without scribbling feels like a day wasted or criminally aborted, a duty neglected, a calling betrayed.

To go on, the game of words is for me the most heavenly of pleasures. I enjoy that game enormously - and the enjoyment reaches its peak when, after another reshuffle of the cards, the hand I get happens to be poor and I need to strain my brains and struggle hard to make up for the blanks and bypass the traps. Forget the destination; it is being on the move, and jumping over or kicking away the hurdles, that gives life its flavour. [. . .]

What, after all, is the difference between living and reporting life? We can do worse than take a hint from José Saramago, my lately discovered fount of inspiration. On his own quasi-diary he reflects: “I believe that all the words we speak, all the movements and gestures we make . . . can each and every one of them be understood as stray pieces of unintended autobiography, which, however involuntary, perhaps precisely because it is involuntary, is no less sincere or truthful than the most detailed account of life put into writing and onto paper.”

Exactly.’

27 December 2010
‘On the friends you have and the friends you think you have. Professor Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist in Oxford, insists that ‘our minds are not designed [by evolution] to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world’. Dunbar has actually calculated that number; he found that ‘most of us can maintain only around 150 meaningful relationships’. Not unexpectedly, he’s called that limit, imposed by (biological) evolution, the ‘Dunbar number’. This hundred and a half is, we may comment, the number reached through biological evolution by our remote ancestors, and where it stopped, leaving the field to its much nimbler, more agile and dexterous, and above all more resourceful and less patient successor - called ‘cultural evolution’ (that is, triggered, shaped and driven by humans themselves, and deploying the teaching and learning process rather than changing the arrangement of genes). [. . .]

Electronic sustained ‘networks of friendship’ promised to break through recalcitrant, intrepid limitations to sociability set by our genetically transmitted equipment. Well, says Dunbar, they didn’t and will not: the promise can’t but be broken. ‘Yes.’ says Dunbar in his opinion piece for the New York Times of 25 December, ‘you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life.’ Among those thousands of Facebook friends, ‘meaningful relationships’, whether serviced electronically or lived off-line, are confined as before within the impassable limits of the ‘Dunbar number’. [. . .]

Dunbar is right that the electronic substitutes for face-to-face communication have brought the Stone Age inheritance up to date, adapting and adjusting the ways and means of human togetherness to the requirements of our nouvel age. What he seems to neglect, however, is that in the course of that adaptation those ways and means have also been considerably altered, and that as a result ‘meaningful relationships’ have also changed their meaning. And so must the content of the ‘Dunbar number’ concept have done. Unless it is precisely the number, and only the number, that exhausts its content. . .’

NB: As usual in Diary Review articles, trailing dots enclosed by square brackets (i.e. [. . .] ) indicate text I have left out from the source published text. Trailing dots not enclosed by square brackets are as found in the original text.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 19 October 2015.