Pages from a diary kept by Hideki Tōjō, Japanese Prime Minister, in the days before Japan’s surrender in the Second World War have just come to light. They show that despite the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, he was in favour of fighting on. Tōjō, who was executed in 1948, also kept a prison diary, and this was first published in 1991. An English translation, which is freely available online, includes this extract: ‘It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general’.
Tōjō, born in 1884, entered the Imperial Japanese Army at a young age, and steadily worked his way up the ranks. In July 1941, he was appointed minister of war by the prime minister, Fumimaro Kondoye; and, a few months later, succeeded to the post of prime minister himself. Initially, he backed efforts to reach agreement with the US but then ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor in December. He also pressed on with advances throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific region. However, with the fall of Saipan in the Mariana Islands in 1944, he was forced to resign, and went into seclusion. After Japan’s surrender, in September 1945, he was arrested, found guilty of several war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and hanged.
Recently, the National Archives of Japan released approximately 20 pages of diary notes written by Tōjō in the final days of the war, and these were published for the first time in Nikkei newspaper earlier this week (to mark the 63rd anniversary of Japan’s surrender). The story was then distributed around the world by Associated Press and others, focused largely on the key point that Tōjō was keen for his country to carry on fighting even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed by the US’s nuclear bombs. The AP story quotes Kazufumi Takayama, curator of the Archives, who puts it like this: ‘The notes show Tōjō kept his dyed-in-the-wool militarist mentality until the very end’.
Various extracts of the diary have been published. The Daily Telegraph has this one from 10 August 1945, the day after the Nagasaki bombing: ‘The Japanese government has accepted the notion that Japan is the loser and it appears to be going to accept unconditional surrender. . . Such a position frustrates the officers and soldiers of the imperial armed forces. Without fully employing its abilities even at the final moment, the imperial nation is surrendering to the enemies’ propaganda . . . I never imagined such torpor in the nation's leaders and its people.’
The AP story has a couple of extracts from a few days later, 13 August 1945: ‘We now have to see our country surrender to the enemy without demonstrating our power up to 120 percent’; and, ‘we are now on a course for a humiliating peace, or rather a humiliating surrender.’ And here’s another extract: ‘Now that the diplomatic steps have been taken after the emperor’s judgment [for surrender], I have decided to refrain from making any comments about it, though I have a separate view.’
However, Tōjō also kept a diary while in Sugamo prison, after the war, awaiting trial. The text of this diary, in English, is available online thanks to VHO, which calls itself ‘the world’s largest website for historical revisionism!’ ! (the second exclamation mark is mine) and a 1992 issue of its Journal of Historical Review. (In the same issue is an article entitled Hoover-era American plan for war against Britain and Canada uncovered.)
The Journal of Historical Review says the Tōjō diary consists of several essays, and a reconstructed daily log of the critical period of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, and says that it was composed in part as an aid for his trial proceedings. Unknown to the world for 4o years apparently, it was first published in Japan in 1991 by historian Sanae Sato. The VHO translation was jointly prepared by General Hideo Miki, retired professor of Japan’s National Defense Academy, and Henry Symington, an American specialist of Japanese economic and social affairs.
There is not much diary-like material in the diary, but here is an interesting, but undated, extract: ‘It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general, and, needless to say, I am prepared to do so. Consequently, now that the war has been lost, it is presumably necessary that I be judged so that the circumstances of the time can be clarified and the future peace of the world be assured. Therefore, with respect to my trial, it is my intention to speak frankly, according to my recollection, even though when the vanquished stands before the victor, who has over him the power of life and death, he may be apt to toady and flatter. I mean to pay considerable attention to this in my actions, and say to the end that what is true is true and what is false is false. To shade one’s words in flattery to the point of untruthfulness would falsify the trial and do incalculable harm to the nation, and great care must be taken to avoid this.’
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Memories of Dylan Thomas
A diary written in a school exercise book by Caitlin Thomas, two years after her husband Dylan Thomas died, has been put up for sale by Rick Gekoski, an independent London bookseller. In a collection with other letters and books, he’s calling it ‘the finest Dylan Thomas material ever put together’ and is charging nearly half a million dollars (quarter of a million pounds), three times more than anything else in his current catalogue or on his sales website.
Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet born in 1914 but who died of alcohol poisoning before he was 40, became particularly well known for his speaking voice, captivating American audiences during tours in the 1950s, and recording over 200 broadcasts for the BBC. His most famous work is probably Under Milk Wood, a poetical radio play set in Llareggub, a fictional Welsh fishing village.
In July 1937, Thomas married Caitlin MacNamara, and they had three children. After Dylan’s death in 1953, she moved to Italy and had another child with Giuseppe Fazio. She died in 1994. According to Wikipedia’s article, she replied to a question on a talk show about how she remembered her husband, by saying he ‘was an utter shit’. There is also a widely reported anecdote which tells of Caitlin bursting into a hospital room where Dylan lay dying and asking, ‘Is the bloody man dead yet?’ In her autobiographical book - Caitlin: Life With Dylan Thomas - Caitlin not only revealed squalid details of financial distress, infidelity, and alcoholism, but claimed the marriage had turned from a love story to a tragedy and was close to breaking down at the time of Thomas’s death. All of which fits in well with the image of Dylan Thomas as a womanising drunk, which has endured since John Malcolm Brinnin’s 1955 biography Dylan Thomas in America.
Nevertheless, there is another side to the story. According to Library Journal quoted by Amazon and others, Caitlin’s book also recorded ‘the tenacity and tenderness, the barely defined homeliness and dependence gently simmering, like her perennial pot of soup, above the turbulence’. And now a diary written by Caitlin in 1955 in a yellowing exercise school book has turned up, and it reinforces the more positive sides of the marriage.
The diary is part of a larger collection of Dylan Thomas material being sold by a New York enthusiast through Rick Gekoski. On his website, Gekoski calls himself a ‘rare book dealer, academic, publisher, critic, bibliographer, and broadcaster’, and as having been described as ‘the Bill Bryson of the book world’. Gekoski has cleverly attracted substantial publicity from the media for the collection, perhaps by providing a number of extracts. He says it’s for sale at $480,000 or £250,000 million. The collection is not, though, listed on his catalogue yet, where the most expensive item at present is a James Joyce ‘typescript schema for Ulysses’ in a collector’s case and priced at £75,000. On Abebooks, his highest priced item is a first edition of T S Eliot’s Ara Vos Prec, priced at $39,351.
An article in The Independent gives one extract about Caitlin imagining Thomas in his grave: ‘Oh God, oh Dylan, it must be cold down there; it is cold enough on top, in November: the dirtiest month of the year that killed you on the ninth vile day. If only I could take you a bowl of your bread, and milk, and salt, that you always drank at night, to warm you up.’
And the The Times adds this: ‘I am not going into that waste allotment of a T. S. Eliot elegy of a cemetery. Dylan will have to move up, in his single ditch, snug under the cliff, and make room for me; then we can keep each other warm, or cold, or maggot breeding.’ It also quotes this passage: ‘And sometimes I have the nerve to pretend that this Dylan love never was. I can make myself believe in the superfluity of this love for quite a long time; then it catches up with me, and it is all the crosser for being ignored.’
According to WalesOnline, Gekoski said the diary ‘is frantically over-written and overwrought’ and that Caitlin ‘never used one clause when she could use three’. Although, in his opinion, the writing isn’t good enough to be published, it is very frank, and ‘very raw, beautifully so’. He told WalesOnline ‘none of this has ever been seen before’ and that it is ‘the finest Dylan Thomas material ever put together’. He added, ‘when you have material of this quality someone will want it - £250,000 is actually a very reasonable price.’
Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet born in 1914 but who died of alcohol poisoning before he was 40, became particularly well known for his speaking voice, captivating American audiences during tours in the 1950s, and recording over 200 broadcasts for the BBC. His most famous work is probably Under Milk Wood, a poetical radio play set in Llareggub, a fictional Welsh fishing village.
In July 1937, Thomas married Caitlin MacNamara, and they had three children. After Dylan’s death in 1953, she moved to Italy and had another child with Giuseppe Fazio. She died in 1994. According to Wikipedia’s article, she replied to a question on a talk show about how she remembered her husband, by saying he ‘was an utter shit’. There is also a widely reported anecdote which tells of Caitlin bursting into a hospital room where Dylan lay dying and asking, ‘Is the bloody man dead yet?’ In her autobiographical book - Caitlin: Life With Dylan Thomas - Caitlin not only revealed squalid details of financial distress, infidelity, and alcoholism, but claimed the marriage had turned from a love story to a tragedy and was close to breaking down at the time of Thomas’s death. All of which fits in well with the image of Dylan Thomas as a womanising drunk, which has endured since John Malcolm Brinnin’s 1955 biography Dylan Thomas in America.
Nevertheless, there is another side to the story. According to Library Journal quoted by Amazon and others, Caitlin’s book also recorded ‘the tenacity and tenderness, the barely defined homeliness and dependence gently simmering, like her perennial pot of soup, above the turbulence’. And now a diary written by Caitlin in 1955 in a yellowing exercise school book has turned up, and it reinforces the more positive sides of the marriage.
The diary is part of a larger collection of Dylan Thomas material being sold by a New York enthusiast through Rick Gekoski. On his website, Gekoski calls himself a ‘rare book dealer, academic, publisher, critic, bibliographer, and broadcaster’, and as having been described as ‘the Bill Bryson of the book world’. Gekoski has cleverly attracted substantial publicity from the media for the collection, perhaps by providing a number of extracts. He says it’s for sale at $480,000 or £250,000 million. The collection is not, though, listed on his catalogue yet, where the most expensive item at present is a James Joyce ‘typescript schema for Ulysses’ in a collector’s case and priced at £75,000. On Abebooks, his highest priced item is a first edition of T S Eliot’s Ara Vos Prec, priced at $39,351.
An article in The Independent gives one extract about Caitlin imagining Thomas in his grave: ‘Oh God, oh Dylan, it must be cold down there; it is cold enough on top, in November: the dirtiest month of the year that killed you on the ninth vile day. If only I could take you a bowl of your bread, and milk, and salt, that you always drank at night, to warm you up.’
And the The Times adds this: ‘I am not going into that waste allotment of a T. S. Eliot elegy of a cemetery. Dylan will have to move up, in his single ditch, snug under the cliff, and make room for me; then we can keep each other warm, or cold, or maggot breeding.’ It also quotes this passage: ‘And sometimes I have the nerve to pretend that this Dylan love never was. I can make myself believe in the superfluity of this love for quite a long time; then it catches up with me, and it is all the crosser for being ignored.’
According to WalesOnline, Gekoski said the diary ‘is frantically over-written and overwrought’ and that Caitlin ‘never used one clause when she could use three’. Although, in his opinion, the writing isn’t good enough to be published, it is very frank, and ‘very raw, beautifully so’. He told WalesOnline ‘none of this has ever been seen before’ and that it is ‘the finest Dylan Thomas material ever put together’. He added, ‘when you have material of this quality someone will want it - £250,000 is actually a very reasonable price.’
Friday, August 8, 2008
Simon Gray’s Coda
Simon Gray died on Wednesday aged 71. Already many obituaries have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, most of them focusing as much on his diary writing as on his plays. Earlier this year, a third volume of his so-called Smoking Diaries were published, entitled The Last Cigarette, and another volume - Coda - is scheduled for publication in November.
Gray was born in Hayling Island, Hampshire, and educated at Westminster School and Cambridge. He married twice, the first time to Beryl Kevern, with whom he had two children, and the second time to Victoria Rothschild. In December 2004, he was awarded a CBE for services to drama and literature, having not only written more than 30 plays but taught English for many years at London University’s Queen Mary’s College.
There are a multitude of obituaries of Gray already available online, each one noting how much of a diarist he had become of late. The Daily Telegraph obituary starts as follows: ‘Simon Gray . . . was a prolific playwright of black comedies, and thrived off professional and personal conflict; during the last decade he found a new audience with a series of memoirs . . .’ And The New York Times obituary begins: ‘Simon Gray, who wrote bitingly comic plays like Butley, Otherwise Engaged and Quartermaine’s Terms about the educated British middle class and whose almost manically confessional late-in-life memoirs turned his sardonic intelligence upon himself, died on Wednesday in London.’
The Diary Junction Blog mentioned Gray recently, when The Last Cigarette was published, in an article entitled Smoking, heroin and opium (and it pointed to several online extracts of Gray’s diaries). Now it seems another, and presumably final, volume of diaries is to be published later this year - Coda. Because Granta is also a publisher (like John Murray - see Lees-Milne’s centenary) that doesn’t bother with a website, here is the blurb from Amazon.
‘It’s coming up to 4 am on a Friday morning, and I’ve just promised myself, a self loaded with and lightened by a couple of sleeping pills, that I will go on with this tomorrow. So begins Simon Gray’s powerful account of the year in which he struggles to come to terms with terminal cancer. From heartbreaking reflections on his own mortality to characteristically outrageous asides - ‘everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who was given six months to live, and here they are, only just dead, eight years later or, in exceptional cases, here they still are, eating oysters and boring the shit out of people’ - Gray’s self-proclaimed ‘last written words on the subject of myself’ records his extraordinary emotional journey. . . Written with exceptional candour and a poignant reluctance to leave this world behind, Simon Gray’s Coda is as life-affirming as it is heartrending.’
Gray was born in Hayling Island, Hampshire, and educated at Westminster School and Cambridge. He married twice, the first time to Beryl Kevern, with whom he had two children, and the second time to Victoria Rothschild. In December 2004, he was awarded a CBE for services to drama and literature, having not only written more than 30 plays but taught English for many years at London University’s Queen Mary’s College.
There are a multitude of obituaries of Gray already available online, each one noting how much of a diarist he had become of late. The Daily Telegraph obituary starts as follows: ‘Simon Gray . . . was a prolific playwright of black comedies, and thrived off professional and personal conflict; during the last decade he found a new audience with a series of memoirs . . .’ And The New York Times obituary begins: ‘Simon Gray, who wrote bitingly comic plays like Butley, Otherwise Engaged and Quartermaine’s Terms about the educated British middle class and whose almost manically confessional late-in-life memoirs turned his sardonic intelligence upon himself, died on Wednesday in London.’
The Diary Junction Blog mentioned Gray recently, when The Last Cigarette was published, in an article entitled Smoking, heroin and opium (and it pointed to several online extracts of Gray’s diaries). Now it seems another, and presumably final, volume of diaries is to be published later this year - Coda. Because Granta is also a publisher (like John Murray - see Lees-Milne’s centenary) that doesn’t bother with a website, here is the blurb from Amazon.
‘It’s coming up to 4 am on a Friday morning, and I’ve just promised myself, a self loaded with and lightened by a couple of sleeping pills, that I will go on with this tomorrow. So begins Simon Gray’s powerful account of the year in which he struggles to come to terms with terminal cancer. From heartbreaking reflections on his own mortality to characteristically outrageous asides - ‘everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who was given six months to live, and here they are, only just dead, eight years later or, in exceptional cases, here they still are, eating oysters and boring the shit out of people’ - Gray’s self-proclaimed ‘last written words on the subject of myself’ records his extraordinary emotional journey. . . Written with exceptional candour and a poignant reluctance to leave this world behind, Simon Gray’s Coda is as life-affirming as it is heartrending.’
Famous flight at Le Mans
Although Orville Wright’s first controlled, powered and sustained flight famously took place on 17 December 1903, today, 8 August 2008, is the 100 year anniversary of a flight by Wilbur Wright which was the first official public demonstration of the Wrights’ invention. Both brothers kept diaries of their aviation experiments, and many of these entries are freely available online.
Wilbur and Orville, born into a large religious family, in 1867 and 1871 respectively, started their professional lives in Dayton, Ohio, as printers, but then opened a bicycle repair and sales shop in 1892. In less than five years they were manufacturing their own design and brand of cycles. The business brought in enough money for them to fund a growing interest in flying machines, and they set their focus on how such machines might be balanced and controlled in the air.
Before the end of the 1890s, the brothers were already deeply involved in the technicalities of flying, and were experimenting with gliders. But it was not until December 1903, that they made the first sustained, controlled flights in a powered aircraft (at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on the shores of the Atlantic). It was to be another five years before they would officially launch the idea of powered flight with a public demonstration (at Le Mans, France).
There is a wealth of information on the Wright brothers’ story available on the internet: Wikipedia’s article is extensive and informative but a bit dense; the Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company has good resources on its First-to-Fly website; and the National Air and Space Museum (Washington DC) maintains an excellent online exhibition about the brothers.
Very usefully for aviation historians, the Wright brothers kept technical diaries about their experiments. Two websites provide good extracts from these diaries. Wikisource has extracts of Orville’s diaries of 1902 and 1903, including a long extract from 17 December 1903, the day of the first flight. Here’s a part of that entry:
‘When we got up, a wind of between 20 and 25 miles was blowing from the north. We got the machine out early and put out the signal for the men at the station. . . . After running the engine and propellers a few minutes to get them in working order, I got on the machine at 10:35 for the first trial. The wind, according to our anemometers at this time, was blowing a little over 20 miles (corrected) 27 miles according to the Government anemometer at Kitty Hawk. On slipping the rope the machine started off increasing in speed to probably 7 or 8 miles. The machine lifted from the truck just as it was entering on the fourth rail. Mr. Daniels took a picture just as it left the tracks. I found the control of the front rudder quite difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center and thus had a tendency to turn itself when started so that the rudder was turned too far on one side and then too far on the other. As a result the machine would rise suddenly to about 10 ft. and then as suddenly, on turning the rudder, dart for the ground. A sudden dart when out about 100 feet from the end of the tracks ended the flight. Time about 12 seconds (not known exactly as watch was not promptly stopped). The lever for throwing off the engine was broken, and the skid under the rudder cracked. After repairs, at 20 min. after 11 o'clock Will made the second trial. . .’
Unfortunately, I cannot find any diary entries online for 8 August 2008, the day of the first official public flight. There is, though, a good description of the event on the WrightStories website.
Joyner Digital Library, at East Carolina University, has a digital exhibit on the Wright Brothers which includes many diary extracts by Orville and Wilbur, as well as their brother Milton, and these cover more than a decade from 1900 to 1911. Here is Wilbur on 2 May 1908:
‘We spent a comfortable night, the air being more quiet than the preceding night. We spent the day on actuating devices, &c. As this is all new work it takes much time. Charley worked most of the day on track and finished up a dozen rails each about 14 ft. long. The sitting position for the operators will probably be more comfortable but will require practice before we can tackle high winds. The N.Y. Herald has telegraphed the Weather Bureau operator at Manteo for information regarding us. Mr. Dosher also telephoned the K.D. Station today for information. He evidently had been asked by some paper to get news.’
As a postcript, and apropos of nothing but my inner bicycle being, I’d like to include a link to a photo of one of the beautiful Wright bicycles at the National Air and Space Museum. Only five still exist in the world.
Wilbur and Orville, born into a large religious family, in 1867 and 1871 respectively, started their professional lives in Dayton, Ohio, as printers, but then opened a bicycle repair and sales shop in 1892. In less than five years they were manufacturing their own design and brand of cycles. The business brought in enough money for them to fund a growing interest in flying machines, and they set their focus on how such machines might be balanced and controlled in the air.
Before the end of the 1890s, the brothers were already deeply involved in the technicalities of flying, and were experimenting with gliders. But it was not until December 1903, that they made the first sustained, controlled flights in a powered aircraft (at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on the shores of the Atlantic). It was to be another five years before they would officially launch the idea of powered flight with a public demonstration (at Le Mans, France).
There is a wealth of information on the Wright brothers’ story available on the internet: Wikipedia’s article is extensive and informative but a bit dense; the Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company has good resources on its First-to-Fly website; and the National Air and Space Museum (Washington DC) maintains an excellent online exhibition about the brothers.
Very usefully for aviation historians, the Wright brothers kept technical diaries about their experiments. Two websites provide good extracts from these diaries. Wikisource has extracts of Orville’s diaries of 1902 and 1903, including a long extract from 17 December 1903, the day of the first flight. Here’s a part of that entry:
‘When we got up, a wind of between 20 and 25 miles was blowing from the north. We got the machine out early and put out the signal for the men at the station. . . . After running the engine and propellers a few minutes to get them in working order, I got on the machine at 10:35 for the first trial. The wind, according to our anemometers at this time, was blowing a little over 20 miles (corrected) 27 miles according to the Government anemometer at Kitty Hawk. On slipping the rope the machine started off increasing in speed to probably 7 or 8 miles. The machine lifted from the truck just as it was entering on the fourth rail. Mr. Daniels took a picture just as it left the tracks. I found the control of the front rudder quite difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center and thus had a tendency to turn itself when started so that the rudder was turned too far on one side and then too far on the other. As a result the machine would rise suddenly to about 10 ft. and then as suddenly, on turning the rudder, dart for the ground. A sudden dart when out about 100 feet from the end of the tracks ended the flight. Time about 12 seconds (not known exactly as watch was not promptly stopped). The lever for throwing off the engine was broken, and the skid under the rudder cracked. After repairs, at 20 min. after 11 o'clock Will made the second trial. . .’
Unfortunately, I cannot find any diary entries online for 8 August 2008, the day of the first official public flight. There is, though, a good description of the event on the WrightStories website.
Joyner Digital Library, at East Carolina University, has a digital exhibit on the Wright Brothers which includes many diary extracts by Orville and Wilbur, as well as their brother Milton, and these cover more than a decade from 1900 to 1911. Here is Wilbur on 2 May 1908:
‘We spent a comfortable night, the air being more quiet than the preceding night. We spent the day on actuating devices, &c. As this is all new work it takes much time. Charley worked most of the day on track and finished up a dozen rails each about 14 ft. long. The sitting position for the operators will probably be more comfortable but will require practice before we can tackle high winds. The N.Y. Herald has telegraphed the Weather Bureau operator at Manteo for information regarding us. Mr. Dosher also telephoned the K.D. Station today for information. He evidently had been asked by some paper to get news.’
As a postcript, and apropos of nothing but my inner bicycle being, I’d like to include a link to a photo of one of the beautiful Wright bicycles at the National Air and Space Museum. Only five still exist in the world.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Lees-Milne’s centenary
Today is the centenary of the birth of James Lees-Milne, one of the most celebrated and prolific literary diarists of the 20th century. To mark the anniversary, the ‘official James Lees-Milne website’ says, an exhibition has been organised near Oxford, and a new edition of the diaries is about to be published. This blog, however, will mark the day by using Lees-Milne’s own words, taken from birthday diary extracts.
Lees-Milne was born on 6 August 1908 into a wealthy family in Worcestershire, and was educated at public schools and at Oxford University. After working at Reuters for a while, a job he hated, he joined the National Trust, and was instrumental in its acquisition of many important buildings, not least Sissinghurst. He also pursued a writing career, producing novels, some of them autobiographical and books on architecture. However, he is best remembered for his diaries, initially published with some hesitation. They cover more than 50 years of his life, and have been published in many volumes.
Lees-Milne’s private life, involved with men and women, was colourful from an early age. In 1951, though, in his 40s, he married Alvilde Chaplin, a prominent gardening and landscape expert, and a lesbian. Their marriage is said to have been similar to that of Harold Nicolson (another famous literary diarist) and Vita Sackville-West, who lived at Sissinghurst, both of whom were, in fact, witnesses for James and Alvide at their wedding. They were also their lovers at one time - James with Harold in the 30s, and Alvide with Vita in the 50s! James and Alvide lived an unconventional life, only partly together, in France, and then at Alderley Grange where Alvilde created a garden, in Bath, and finally at a property on the Badminton estate. She died in 1994, and he in 1997.
The Diary Junction and Wikipedia have short biographical summaries on Lees-Milne, but the ‘official James Lees-Milne website’ created by Michael Bloch, Lees-Milne’s literary executor, carries a much more detailed biography. It also notes that two events will take place in August 2008 to mark the writer’s centenary.
Firstly, the third and last volume of a new edition of the diaries - edited by Bloch himself and covering the years 1984-1997 - will be published by John Murray. Incidentally, I am astonished to find that John Murray - one of Britain’s ‘most distinguished literary publishers’ - has no website presence, other than a small paragraph on Hodder Headline’s website. Thus, it is necessary to go to Amazon to find the publisher’s blurb which says: ‘Witty, waspish, poignant and self-revealing, James Lees-Milne’s last diaries contain as much to delight as the first, and confirm his reputation as one of the twentieth century’s great English diarists.’ Secondly, the centenary is being celebrated, apparently, by the calligrapher Andrew Moore giving an exhibition devoted to Lees-Milne at St Katherine’s Church, Chiselhampton near Oxford.
Here, though, are a few of Lees-Milne’s own words, extracted from birthday diary entries.
1943 - ‘My birthday. I am thirty-five. The horror of it! Except for my incipient baldness, fortunately on the crown of my head and on account of my height not always noticeable, I do not think I have changed much. My figure is the same as it was fifteen years ago.’
1944 - ‘My birthday, and the less I think about it the better. Only members of the family remember; for I suppose they are the only people to whom one’s existence does matter just a little.’
1973 - ‘Today I became a pensioner. If I wished to get a job I couldn’t. Henceforth I receive a pension from the state.’
1988 - ‘I am eighty. Have been so since 1:30 this morning. A beautiful day dawns, misty sunlight. . . . On front page of literary section [of The Daily Telegraph] an article about me by sweet Hugh Massingberd, which gives me enormous pleasure. Too eulogistic, but most welcome.’
1990 - ‘My eighty-second birthday. Heralded by Hugh Massingberd’s interview with me yesterday in The Daily Telegraph, which I can’t fault for kindness and understanding.’
(Massingberd was an Editor of Burke’s Peerage and considered an innovative obituaries editor for The Daily Telegraph. He died almost exactly 10 years after Lees-Milne, last December, and most of the obituaries about him, such as the one in The Independent, mention Lees-Milne for one reason or another.)
Here is a last Lees-Milne entry, not one from his birthday but just two days before it in 1973, which exemplifies both his high literary pretensions and his interest in sex: ‘It is too easy to be impatient with and censorious of sex when one is 65: the squalor of it, the repetition, the inanity. Yet there’s ground for disagreement that to be in communion with God all carnal appetites should be eschewed because the very actions of fornicating, over-eating, over-drinking are ephemeral, finite. Lusts being mortal are in consequence negative, without injury to man’s immortal gnosis. Whereas cerebration, devotional exercise, worship being perdurable and victorious remain unaffected by them. I daresay the old Fathers would dispute this ratiocination.’
Lees-Milne was born on 6 August 1908 into a wealthy family in Worcestershire, and was educated at public schools and at Oxford University. After working at Reuters for a while, a job he hated, he joined the National Trust, and was instrumental in its acquisition of many important buildings, not least Sissinghurst. He also pursued a writing career, producing novels, some of them autobiographical and books on architecture. However, he is best remembered for his diaries, initially published with some hesitation. They cover more than 50 years of his life, and have been published in many volumes.
Lees-Milne’s private life, involved with men and women, was colourful from an early age. In 1951, though, in his 40s, he married Alvilde Chaplin, a prominent gardening and landscape expert, and a lesbian. Their marriage is said to have been similar to that of Harold Nicolson (another famous literary diarist) and Vita Sackville-West, who lived at Sissinghurst, both of whom were, in fact, witnesses for James and Alvide at their wedding. They were also their lovers at one time - James with Harold in the 30s, and Alvide with Vita in the 50s! James and Alvide lived an unconventional life, only partly together, in France, and then at Alderley Grange where Alvilde created a garden, in Bath, and finally at a property on the Badminton estate. She died in 1994, and he in 1997.
The Diary Junction and Wikipedia have short biographical summaries on Lees-Milne, but the ‘official James Lees-Milne website’ created by Michael Bloch, Lees-Milne’s literary executor, carries a much more detailed biography. It also notes that two events will take place in August 2008 to mark the writer’s centenary.
Firstly, the third and last volume of a new edition of the diaries - edited by Bloch himself and covering the years 1984-1997 - will be published by John Murray. Incidentally, I am astonished to find that John Murray - one of Britain’s ‘most distinguished literary publishers’ - has no website presence, other than a small paragraph on Hodder Headline’s website. Thus, it is necessary to go to Amazon to find the publisher’s blurb which says: ‘Witty, waspish, poignant and self-revealing, James Lees-Milne’s last diaries contain as much to delight as the first, and confirm his reputation as one of the twentieth century’s great English diarists.’ Secondly, the centenary is being celebrated, apparently, by the calligrapher Andrew Moore giving an exhibition devoted to Lees-Milne at St Katherine’s Church, Chiselhampton near Oxford.
Here, though, are a few of Lees-Milne’s own words, extracted from birthday diary entries.
1943 - ‘My birthday. I am thirty-five. The horror of it! Except for my incipient baldness, fortunately on the crown of my head and on account of my height not always noticeable, I do not think I have changed much. My figure is the same as it was fifteen years ago.’
1944 - ‘My birthday, and the less I think about it the better. Only members of the family remember; for I suppose they are the only people to whom one’s existence does matter just a little.’
1973 - ‘Today I became a pensioner. If I wished to get a job I couldn’t. Henceforth I receive a pension from the state.’
1988 - ‘I am eighty. Have been so since 1:30 this morning. A beautiful day dawns, misty sunlight. . . . On front page of literary section [of The Daily Telegraph] an article about me by sweet Hugh Massingberd, which gives me enormous pleasure. Too eulogistic, but most welcome.’
1990 - ‘My eighty-second birthday. Heralded by Hugh Massingberd’s interview with me yesterday in The Daily Telegraph, which I can’t fault for kindness and understanding.’
(Massingberd was an Editor of Burke’s Peerage and considered an innovative obituaries editor for The Daily Telegraph. He died almost exactly 10 years after Lees-Milne, last December, and most of the obituaries about him, such as the one in The Independent, mention Lees-Milne for one reason or another.)
Here is a last Lees-Milne entry, not one from his birthday but just two days before it in 1973, which exemplifies both his high literary pretensions and his interest in sex: ‘It is too easy to be impatient with and censorious of sex when one is 65: the squalor of it, the repetition, the inanity. Yet there’s ground for disagreement that to be in communion with God all carnal appetites should be eschewed because the very actions of fornicating, over-eating, over-drinking are ephemeral, finite. Lusts being mortal are in consequence negative, without injury to man’s immortal gnosis. Whereas cerebration, devotional exercise, worship being perdurable and victorious remain unaffected by them. I daresay the old Fathers would dispute this ratiocination.’
Monday, August 4, 2008
A mad housewife’s daughter
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is 50 today. She’s a native American writer and poet, and a literary performer of some power it seems. Interestingly, though, in the midst of the most terrible childhood, aged only 11, she wrote a diary - Diary of a Mad Housewife’s Daughter - and tells a very affecting story about it in her memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer.
Hedge Coke was born in Texas, on 4 August 1958, with cerebral palsy and temporal lobe epilepsy; and her childhood was dominated by one serious illness after another, by one kind of abuse after another, and by having a chronic schizophrenic for a mother. As a teenager and young adult, she lived outside for periods, and moved around, sharecropping tobacco, breaking horses, waiting tables, working in construction and commercial fishing. The Pen American Center website gives details of her colourful but disturbing biography.
However, for many years, Hedge Coke has been a celebrated writer with various books to her name. The Pen article says she has been called ‘a passionately unique and compelling writer’, and a Wikipedia articles suggests that ‘if William Blake were a twenty-first-century American Indian woman, he would be Hedge Coke’. Like Blake declaiming against soul-destroying ‘dark Satanic mills’, the article explains, ‘Hedge Coke calls for us to recognise the sanctity of ancestral land and to protect it, for ‘no human should dismantle prayer’. ’
In 2004, University of Nebraska Press published a memoir by Hedge Coke - Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, subtitled A Story of Survival - which looked back over her early life. ‘A name creates life patterns,’ Hedge Coke says, ‘which form and shape a life; my life, like my name, must have been formed many times over then handed to me to realise.’ Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer is Hedge Coke’s narrative of that realisation, the publisher explains. In it the author describes the horrors of her early life: ‘her schizophrenic mother and the abuse that often overshadowed her childhood; the torments visited upon her, the rape and physical violence; and those she inflicted on herself, the alcohol and drug abuse’. Nevertheless, the publisher adds, Hedge Coke ‘managed to survive with her dreams and her will, her sense of wonder and promise undiminished’.
In Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, Hedge Coke provides a small (but I think very interesting) anecdote about a diary. Aged 11, she was inspired by an English teacher to write stories. So, she wrote one, with the title, Diary of a Mad Housewife’s Daughter taken from the title of a film she’d never seen (Diary of a Mad Housewife). She explains in the memoir how she worked diligently in her father’s toolshed, compiling the book from diary notes. Her teacher, not realising that Allison was, as she says of herself, ‘living the diary’, praised it as fiction, called her ‘unusually talented’, and suggested she meet some people involved in writing.
‘A stinger lodged deep in my spine and I panicked’, she writes in the memoir, ‘my English teacher intended to share this book with other adults. People who didn’t already know my mother would find out about her mental illness. Grabbing the pages, I ran from the classroom and raced home. . .’ Once there, she burnt the manuscript in an old stove. ‘Pages curled toward my face, paper blackening around the words, flames taking hold of the stories . . . I carried the ashes to the garden, hoping something could grow of it. Staying inside almost all night, I prayed my teacher wouldn’t tell anyone my story. I never mourned this book, but sometimes I wonder about the lost contents: hazardous, unaffordable.’
Hedge Coke was born in Texas, on 4 August 1958, with cerebral palsy and temporal lobe epilepsy; and her childhood was dominated by one serious illness after another, by one kind of abuse after another, and by having a chronic schizophrenic for a mother. As a teenager and young adult, she lived outside for periods, and moved around, sharecropping tobacco, breaking horses, waiting tables, working in construction and commercial fishing. The Pen American Center website gives details of her colourful but disturbing biography.
However, for many years, Hedge Coke has been a celebrated writer with various books to her name. The Pen article says she has been called ‘a passionately unique and compelling writer’, and a Wikipedia articles suggests that ‘if William Blake were a twenty-first-century American Indian woman, he would be Hedge Coke’. Like Blake declaiming against soul-destroying ‘dark Satanic mills’, the article explains, ‘Hedge Coke calls for us to recognise the sanctity of ancestral land and to protect it, for ‘no human should dismantle prayer’. ’
In 2004, University of Nebraska Press published a memoir by Hedge Coke - Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, subtitled A Story of Survival - which looked back over her early life. ‘A name creates life patterns,’ Hedge Coke says, ‘which form and shape a life; my life, like my name, must have been formed many times over then handed to me to realise.’ Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer is Hedge Coke’s narrative of that realisation, the publisher explains. In it the author describes the horrors of her early life: ‘her schizophrenic mother and the abuse that often overshadowed her childhood; the torments visited upon her, the rape and physical violence; and those she inflicted on herself, the alcohol and drug abuse’. Nevertheless, the publisher adds, Hedge Coke ‘managed to survive with her dreams and her will, her sense of wonder and promise undiminished’.
In Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, Hedge Coke provides a small (but I think very interesting) anecdote about a diary. Aged 11, she was inspired by an English teacher to write stories. So, she wrote one, with the title, Diary of a Mad Housewife’s Daughter taken from the title of a film she’d never seen (Diary of a Mad Housewife). She explains in the memoir how she worked diligently in her father’s toolshed, compiling the book from diary notes. Her teacher, not realising that Allison was, as she says of herself, ‘living the diary’, praised it as fiction, called her ‘unusually talented’, and suggested she meet some people involved in writing.
‘A stinger lodged deep in my spine and I panicked’, she writes in the memoir, ‘my English teacher intended to share this book with other adults. People who didn’t already know my mother would find out about her mental illness. Grabbing the pages, I ran from the classroom and raced home. . .’ Once there, she burnt the manuscript in an old stove. ‘Pages curled toward my face, paper blackening around the words, flames taking hold of the stories . . . I carried the ashes to the garden, hoping something could grow of it. Staying inside almost all night, I prayed my teacher wouldn’t tell anyone my story. I never mourned this book, but sometimes I wonder about the lost contents: hazardous, unaffordable.’
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Orwell's DOMESTIC diaries
The Orwell Prize website has cleared up the mystery it created when teasing readers with a story about an Orwell diary blog. According to tidbits given to national newspapers, it intended to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the start of Orwell’s diaries. But Orwell certainly wrote a diary over 72 years ago, The Road to Wigan Pier Diary, in 1936 - see yesterday’s blog. In fact, it turns out, the website is celebrating the 70th anniversary of what it calls Orwell’s ‘domestic diaries’.
Here is the site’s announcement: ‘ ‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens. From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.’
In The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, the authors note that Orwell wrote two diaries covering the periods 28 May 1940 to 28 August 1941 and 14 March 1942 to 15 November 1942. The Orwell Prize website is clearly including these two in its blog, but, given the 9 August 1938 start to these ‘domestic diaries’, there must be others, dating from between The Road to Wigan Pier Diary and the so-called war-time diaries.
Here is the site’s announcement: ‘ ‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens. From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.’
In The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, the authors note that Orwell wrote two diaries covering the periods 28 May 1940 to 28 August 1941 and 14 March 1942 to 15 November 1942. The Orwell Prize website is clearly including these two in its blog, but, given the 9 August 1938 start to these ‘domestic diaries’, there must be others, dating from between The Road to Wigan Pier Diary and the so-called war-time diaries.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
When DID Orwell start a diary?
From tomorrow (Wednesday 30 July), the diaries of George Orwell, the famous British author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, will begin to appear online and be freely available. The Orwell Prize website, which is taking this initiative, says it is to mark the 70th anniversary of the day Orwell began writing a diary in 1938. Orwell’s diaries have never been published in collected form, nevertheless the Orwell Prize website should know better - Orwell was certainly keeping a diary already in 1936, as evidenced by his Road to Wigan Pier Diary.
The Orwell Prize calls itself ‘the pre-eminent British prize for political writing’ and awards annual prizes for a book and for journalism. This year the book prize was won by Raja Shehadeh for Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape; and the journalism prize was awarded to Johann Hari of The Independent.
The Orwell Prize website is run in conjunction with the Orwell Trust, Political Quarterly and Media Standards Trust. It gives much information about the Prize, as well about Orwell himself. It also provides a few photographs of his publications and manuscripts (including diaries). The site has now announced that tomorrow, on Wednesday 30 July, it will officially launch ‘an exciting new addition, which will be a must-read for all lovers of Orwell and a valuable historical resource’. As of today, Tuesday, it gives no further information other than to provide links to two news organisations which have published teasers about the forthcoming ‘addition’.
The Guardian’s Browser blog reveals that the Orwell Prize will begin publishing Orwell’s diaries as a daily blog, 70 years after he began writing them. This is the first time the diaries, it says, which cover Orwell’s thoughts on everything from communism to cookery, will be published in full. But, the Browser asks, ‘does a blog by a dead person count as a real blog?’ Not sure I care about the answer to that one.
The Times teaser is more confusing: ‘The website for the Orwell Prize . . . is to mark the 70th anniversary of the release of George Orwell’s diaries by running them as a blog. It begins with Orwell’s first entry in 1938. ’ Personally, I don’t understand the reference to an anniversary ‘of the release of’ the diaries; and, surely, the ‘release’ and ‘the first entry’ cannot have been on the same day! The Times makes up for the confusion by having found a cute short extract from Orwell’s 29 August 1939 entry: ‘It appears from reliable private information that Sir O. Mosley is a masochist of the extreme type in his sexual life.’
I am not clear as to when Orwell started writing a diary, nor when he finished. There appear to have been no published editions exclusively devoted to his diaries. However, what are called his two war-time diaries were published in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (in the second of four volumes). These are discussed at some length by L J Hurst who also looks at the links to the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, within which the main character Winston also keeps a diary. See also the Orwell Today website for more on Winston’s diary
Hurst begins his essay as follows: ‘George Orwell’s war-time diaries were a book that failed. Their failure provides an interesting study of how Orwell thought and wrote because the Second World War provided him with much of the material for his last two novels, and one might have expected his diaries to record the development of his ideas, but those developments are more conspicuous by their absence.’
However, also within The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, in volume one, is The Road to Wigan Pier Diary. A one sentence introduction in the book, says it was a typescript found among Orwell’s paper, and, along with other notes, formed the basis of The Road to Wigan Pier, a sociological analysis of pre-war living conditions in the industrial north of England. This was written in the first three months of 1936, more than two years before 30 July 1938, the date being celebrated by the Orwell Prize website.
Some have argued, it seems (Bernard Crick in George Orwell: A Life), that the diary was not a real day-to-day diary but something that was ‘worked up afterwards’, and perhaps this is why the Orwell Prize website is ignoring it. However, Robert Pearce, writing in 1997 for The Journal of the Historical Association, argued cogently, with many examples, that Orwell treated his journal writing as a personal record not intended for publication, and therefore WAS a real diary. The full text of Pearce’s essay, entitled Revisiting Orwell’s Wing Pier, is available online for a price.
Here is a sample of Orwell’s diary from 13 February 1936: 'Housing conditions in Wigan terrible. Mrs H tells me that at her brother’s house (he is only 25, so I think he must be her half-brother, but he has already a child of 8), 11 people, five of them adults, belonging to 3 different families, live in 4 rooms, ‘2 up 2 down’. All the miners I meet have either had serious accidents themselves or have friends or relatives who have. Mrs H’s cousin had his back broken by a fall of rock - ‘And he lingered seven year afore he dies and it were a-punishing of him all the while’ - and her brother-in-law fell 1200 feet down the shaft of a new pit. Apparently he bounced from side to side, so was presumably dead before he got to the bottom. Mrs H adds: ‘They wouldn’t never have collected t’pieces only he were wearing a new suit of oilskins.’
And here’s another sample, from 12 June 1942, when he was working at the BBC: ‘The only time when one hears people singing in the BBC is in the early morning, between 6 and 8. That is the time when the charwomen are at work. A huge army of them arrives all at the same time. They sit in the reception hall waiting for their brooms to be issued and making as much noise as a parrot house, and then they have wonderful choruses, all singing together as they sweep the passages. The place has a quite different atmosphere at this time from what it has later in the day.’
The Orwell Prize calls itself ‘the pre-eminent British prize for political writing’ and awards annual prizes for a book and for journalism. This year the book prize was won by Raja Shehadeh for Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape; and the journalism prize was awarded to Johann Hari of The Independent.
The Orwell Prize website is run in conjunction with the Orwell Trust, Political Quarterly and Media Standards Trust. It gives much information about the Prize, as well about Orwell himself. It also provides a few photographs of his publications and manuscripts (including diaries). The site has now announced that tomorrow, on Wednesday 30 July, it will officially launch ‘an exciting new addition, which will be a must-read for all lovers of Orwell and a valuable historical resource’. As of today, Tuesday, it gives no further information other than to provide links to two news organisations which have published teasers about the forthcoming ‘addition’.
The Guardian’s Browser blog reveals that the Orwell Prize will begin publishing Orwell’s diaries as a daily blog, 70 years after he began writing them. This is the first time the diaries, it says, which cover Orwell’s thoughts on everything from communism to cookery, will be published in full. But, the Browser asks, ‘does a blog by a dead person count as a real blog?’ Not sure I care about the answer to that one.
The Times teaser is more confusing: ‘The website for the Orwell Prize . . . is to mark the 70th anniversary of the release of George Orwell’s diaries by running them as a blog. It begins with Orwell’s first entry in 1938. ’ Personally, I don’t understand the reference to an anniversary ‘of the release of’ the diaries; and, surely, the ‘release’ and ‘the first entry’ cannot have been on the same day! The Times makes up for the confusion by having found a cute short extract from Orwell’s 29 August 1939 entry: ‘It appears from reliable private information that Sir O. Mosley is a masochist of the extreme type in his sexual life.’
I am not clear as to when Orwell started writing a diary, nor when he finished. There appear to have been no published editions exclusively devoted to his diaries. However, what are called his two war-time diaries were published in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (in the second of four volumes). These are discussed at some length by L J Hurst who also looks at the links to the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, within which the main character Winston also keeps a diary. See also the Orwell Today website for more on Winston’s diary
Hurst begins his essay as follows: ‘George Orwell’s war-time diaries were a book that failed. Their failure provides an interesting study of how Orwell thought and wrote because the Second World War provided him with much of the material for his last two novels, and one might have expected his diaries to record the development of his ideas, but those developments are more conspicuous by their absence.’
However, also within The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, in volume one, is The Road to Wigan Pier Diary. A one sentence introduction in the book, says it was a typescript found among Orwell’s paper, and, along with other notes, formed the basis of The Road to Wigan Pier, a sociological analysis of pre-war living conditions in the industrial north of England. This was written in the first three months of 1936, more than two years before 30 July 1938, the date being celebrated by the Orwell Prize website.
Some have argued, it seems (Bernard Crick in George Orwell: A Life), that the diary was not a real day-to-day diary but something that was ‘worked up afterwards’, and perhaps this is why the Orwell Prize website is ignoring it. However, Robert Pearce, writing in 1997 for The Journal of the Historical Association, argued cogently, with many examples, that Orwell treated his journal writing as a personal record not intended for publication, and therefore WAS a real diary. The full text of Pearce’s essay, entitled Revisiting Orwell’s Wing Pier, is available online for a price.
Here is a sample of Orwell’s diary from 13 February 1936: 'Housing conditions in Wigan terrible. Mrs H tells me that at her brother’s house (he is only 25, so I think he must be her half-brother, but he has already a child of 8), 11 people, five of them adults, belonging to 3 different families, live in 4 rooms, ‘2 up 2 down’. All the miners I meet have either had serious accidents themselves or have friends or relatives who have. Mrs H’s cousin had his back broken by a fall of rock - ‘And he lingered seven year afore he dies and it were a-punishing of him all the while’ - and her brother-in-law fell 1200 feet down the shaft of a new pit. Apparently he bounced from side to side, so was presumably dead before he got to the bottom. Mrs H adds: ‘They wouldn’t never have collected t’pieces only he were wearing a new suit of oilskins.’
And here’s another sample, from 12 June 1942, when he was working at the BBC: ‘The only time when one hears people singing in the BBC is in the early morning, between 6 and 8. That is the time when the charwomen are at work. A huge army of them arrives all at the same time. They sit in the reception hall waiting for their brooms to be issued and making as much noise as a parrot house, and then they have wonderful choruses, all singing together as they sweep the passages. The place has a quite different atmosphere at this time from what it has later in the day.’
Monday, July 28, 2008
Gladstone’s library and diaries
An auction of William Gladstone’s books at the weekend raised far more for the sellers than expected, partly because a single lot of original Gladstone family diaries sold for over ten times the auctioneer’s estimate. Gladstone, himself, of course was a prolific diarist, keeping near daily entries for 70 years. Unfortunately, they are not as interesting or as colourful as the man himself.
Last Saturday (26 July), Taylors Auctions of Montrose in Scotland, auctioned a large collection of books from the library of Fasque House, the former Gladstone home in Aberdeenshire. The library comprised many books collected by William Gladstone, four times a Liberal prime minister in the 19th century. According to Scotland on Sunday, the auctioneer, Jonathan Taylor, estimated the sales takings as in excess of £65,000, ‘a bit more than we were hoping for’.
Lot 204 was described as ‘a large collection of handwritten diaries and other papers by the Gladstone family in tin deed box, wooden box and cabin trunk and various boxes’, and was estimated at £100-£200. According to the Press Association, also quoting Taylor, some of the handwritten diaries were by Gladstone’s brother, Thomas, and were in a distressed condition having been kept in an attic. The lot sold to an unnamed Edinburgh professor for £3,400. A second auction, including another 2,000 books from the library at Fasque, is likely to take place in October.
Apparently, according to Taylor interviewed by The Times before the auction, William Gladstone was once told by his father, ‘If you want a library at Fasque, go and get it started.’ And some of the earliest books at Fasque were those bought by William while still a student at Oxford.
Gladstone, himself, began writing a diary while still a teenager at Eton, and he kept on doing so for 70 years, until the last years of his life. An extraordinary man in many ways, he won his first term as Prime Minister in 1868, and held the position until 1974, and then served three more times as Prime Minister, the last time being 25 years after the first, in the 1890s. He had a particular interest in prostitutes. He used to wonder the streets at night trying to persuade them to start a new life; moreover, he and his wife, Catherine Glynne, started a home to rescue prostitutes.
All the more disappointing then to find the man’s extensive diaries rather bald and unemotional. Here is an online extract, thanks to Portsmouth University’s geography department, from 3 Dec 1879: ‘Wrote to Miss Rose - Sir J. Watson - Eytinge (Tel.) Worked hard on my Glasgow Address: perhaps 6 hours or more. Walk after luncheon: fine bright frost all this time. Mr Campbell sang incomparable comic songs in evg. Conversation with Pr. Tulloch - & others.’
Arthur Ponsonby, in his book, English Diaries, says this about Gladstone’s diaries: ‘It is all strenuous, lofty and profound to an extreme degree, ‘with few reflections on life’. And he gives an example of how, even at a young age, his diary pattern was already set fast. Gladstone delivered a speech at the Oxford University Union in 1831 which a contemporary thought was so powerful that he wrote ‘we all of us felt that an epoch in our lives had occurred’. But all Gladstone wrote in his diary was: ‘Cogitations on reform etc. Difficult to select for a speech, not to gather it. Spoke at the adjourned debate for three quarters of an hour immediately after Gaskell who was preceded by Lincoln. Row afterwards and adjournment. Tea with Wordsworth.’
Last Saturday (26 July), Taylors Auctions of Montrose in Scotland, auctioned a large collection of books from the library of Fasque House, the former Gladstone home in Aberdeenshire. The library comprised many books collected by William Gladstone, four times a Liberal prime minister in the 19th century. According to Scotland on Sunday, the auctioneer, Jonathan Taylor, estimated the sales takings as in excess of £65,000, ‘a bit more than we were hoping for’.
Lot 204 was described as ‘a large collection of handwritten diaries and other papers by the Gladstone family in tin deed box, wooden box and cabin trunk and various boxes’, and was estimated at £100-£200. According to the Press Association, also quoting Taylor, some of the handwritten diaries were by Gladstone’s brother, Thomas, and were in a distressed condition having been kept in an attic. The lot sold to an unnamed Edinburgh professor for £3,400. A second auction, including another 2,000 books from the library at Fasque, is likely to take place in October.
Apparently, according to Taylor interviewed by The Times before the auction, William Gladstone was once told by his father, ‘If you want a library at Fasque, go and get it started.’ And some of the earliest books at Fasque were those bought by William while still a student at Oxford.
Gladstone, himself, began writing a diary while still a teenager at Eton, and he kept on doing so for 70 years, until the last years of his life. An extraordinary man in many ways, he won his first term as Prime Minister in 1868, and held the position until 1974, and then served three more times as Prime Minister, the last time being 25 years after the first, in the 1890s. He had a particular interest in prostitutes. He used to wonder the streets at night trying to persuade them to start a new life; moreover, he and his wife, Catherine Glynne, started a home to rescue prostitutes.
All the more disappointing then to find the man’s extensive diaries rather bald and unemotional. Here is an online extract, thanks to Portsmouth University’s geography department, from 3 Dec 1879: ‘Wrote to Miss Rose - Sir J. Watson - Eytinge (Tel.) Worked hard on my Glasgow Address: perhaps 6 hours or more. Walk after luncheon: fine bright frost all this time. Mr Campbell sang incomparable comic songs in evg. Conversation with Pr. Tulloch - & others.’
Arthur Ponsonby, in his book, English Diaries, says this about Gladstone’s diaries: ‘It is all strenuous, lofty and profound to an extreme degree, ‘with few reflections on life’. And he gives an example of how, even at a young age, his diary pattern was already set fast. Gladstone delivered a speech at the Oxford University Union in 1831 which a contemporary thought was so powerful that he wrote ‘we all of us felt that an epoch in our lives had occurred’. But all Gladstone wrote in his diary was: ‘Cogitations on reform etc. Difficult to select for a speech, not to gather it. Spoke at the adjourned debate for three quarters of an hour immediately after Gaskell who was preceded by Lincoln. Row afterwards and adjournment. Tea with Wordsworth.’
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Princess Mary’s marathon
According to a detail in her diary, Princess Mary, wife of the Prince of Wales, soon to be King George V, watched the start of the Olympics marathon one hundred years ago today and then went for a drive to Virginia Waters. That marathon has become famous for various reasons. Not only did Princess Mary herself affect the distance of the marathon (which subsequently became the standard), but the Italian winner was disqualified for being helped over the line.
The 1908 Olympics had been scheduled to take place in Rome. However, the eruption of Vesuvius in 1906 led the Italian government to divert funds for the reconstruction of Naples. London was chosen in Rome’s place, and the games were held at White City. They opened on 13 July that year, and on 24 July, exactly 100 years ago, the famous marathon race was staged.
A Wikipedia article explains how the marathon distance was established: ‘The original distance of 25 miles was changed to 26.22 miles so the marathon could start at Windsor Castle and then changed again at the request of Princess Mary so the start would be beneath the windows of the Royal Nursery.’ The marathon distance was altered again in 1912 and 1920, but from 1924 on reverted to the 1908 distance of 26.22 miles.
Born Victoria Mary of Teck in 1867, Mary was chosen to marry Albert Victor, eldest son of Edward (himself Queen Victoria’s eldest son), and in direct line for the throne. According to Time Magazine’s review of Queen Mary (a biography written by James Pope-Hennessy), she was approved of by Victoria because of her ‘lineage, decorum and diligence (constant letter writing and diary keeping)’. But Albert died, so she married the second son, George, Duke of York, in 1893. In 1901, Edward succeeded to the throne, and later the same year George was created Prince of Wales, and Mary became Princess of Wales. On King Edward VII’s death, in 1910, they became King George V and Queen Mary.
I cannot find any evidence on the internet that Mary’s diaries have ever been published, but I am sure they were used by James Pope-Hennessy in his biography. However, the ‘Official Website of the British Monarchy’ carries a photo of one page of the diary - from 24 July 1908. It reads as follows: ‘Lovely day. Sat out. At 2 we went to see the start for the Marathon Race from the East Terrace - there were 56 [sic] runners. Later we all drove to Virginia Water for tea and went on the lake. Mr Waddington arrived. We heard first that an Italian had won but he was disqualified owing to his having been helped in - an American won.’
The Italian was Dorando Pietri, and the American Johnny Hayes, but, according to an excellent Los Angeles Times article on the race, there were only 55 runners.
‘Tens of thousands of spectators lined London’s roads to cheer on the 55 runners (from 16 nations) sweltering in the afternoon heat,’ the article states. ‘Longboat held the lead at the 17-mile mark, when he suddenly dropped out. Unconfirmed reports indicated that he had ingested strychnine, the performance-enhancer of choice during this era. Wearing red pantaloons that reached his knees and a white kerchief to shield his dust-covered hair, Pietri took control at the 25-mile mark. But he had reached the edge of human endurance; he collapsed repeatedly, only to be aided to his feet. ‘He was helped by the officials,’ says Olympic historian Bill Mallon, ‘in clear violation of the rules.’ A groundbreaking photograph captured Pietri‘s desperate last effort at the finish, supported by two attendants (one of whom was falsely identified as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes). Medical staff carried away Pietri as the Italian flag was hoisted. Meanwhile, Hayes entered the stadium and completed his lap. The U.S. team lodged a protest. Pietri was disqualified and Hayes awarded the gold medal.’
In London today, apparently according to the Inside the Games website, the race is being re-enacted by the Flora London Marathon organisation, and the Royal Mail and Royal Mint are releasing a specially-designed commemorative stamp and coin cover respectively.
The 1908 Olympics had been scheduled to take place in Rome. However, the eruption of Vesuvius in 1906 led the Italian government to divert funds for the reconstruction of Naples. London was chosen in Rome’s place, and the games were held at White City. They opened on 13 July that year, and on 24 July, exactly 100 years ago, the famous marathon race was staged.
A Wikipedia article explains how the marathon distance was established: ‘The original distance of 25 miles was changed to 26.22 miles so the marathon could start at Windsor Castle and then changed again at the request of Princess Mary so the start would be beneath the windows of the Royal Nursery.’ The marathon distance was altered again in 1912 and 1920, but from 1924 on reverted to the 1908 distance of 26.22 miles.
Born Victoria Mary of Teck in 1867, Mary was chosen to marry Albert Victor, eldest son of Edward (himself Queen Victoria’s eldest son), and in direct line for the throne. According to Time Magazine’s review of Queen Mary (a biography written by James Pope-Hennessy), she was approved of by Victoria because of her ‘lineage, decorum and diligence (constant letter writing and diary keeping)’. But Albert died, so she married the second son, George, Duke of York, in 1893. In 1901, Edward succeeded to the throne, and later the same year George was created Prince of Wales, and Mary became Princess of Wales. On King Edward VII’s death, in 1910, they became King George V and Queen Mary.
I cannot find any evidence on the internet that Mary’s diaries have ever been published, but I am sure they were used by James Pope-Hennessy in his biography. However, the ‘Official Website of the British Monarchy’ carries a photo of one page of the diary - from 24 July 1908. It reads as follows: ‘Lovely day. Sat out. At 2 we went to see the start for the Marathon Race from the East Terrace - there were 56 [sic] runners. Later we all drove to Virginia Water for tea and went on the lake. Mr Waddington arrived. We heard first that an Italian had won but he was disqualified owing to his having been helped in - an American won.’
The Italian was Dorando Pietri, and the American Johnny Hayes, but, according to an excellent Los Angeles Times article on the race, there were only 55 runners.
‘Tens of thousands of spectators lined London’s roads to cheer on the 55 runners (from 16 nations) sweltering in the afternoon heat,’ the article states. ‘Longboat held the lead at the 17-mile mark, when he suddenly dropped out. Unconfirmed reports indicated that he had ingested strychnine, the performance-enhancer of choice during this era. Wearing red pantaloons that reached his knees and a white kerchief to shield his dust-covered hair, Pietri took control at the 25-mile mark. But he had reached the edge of human endurance; he collapsed repeatedly, only to be aided to his feet. ‘He was helped by the officials,’ says Olympic historian Bill Mallon, ‘in clear violation of the rules.’ A groundbreaking photograph captured Pietri‘s desperate last effort at the finish, supported by two attendants (one of whom was falsely identified as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes). Medical staff carried away Pietri as the Italian flag was hoisted. Meanwhile, Hayes entered the stadium and completed his lap. The U.S. team lodged a protest. Pietri was disqualified and Hayes awarded the gold medal.’
In London today, apparently according to the Inside the Games website, the race is being re-enacted by the Flora London Marathon organisation, and the Royal Mail and Royal Mint are releasing a specially-designed commemorative stamp and coin cover respectively.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Yes, Minister, thanks to Hunt
Lord Hunt of Tanworth has just died. Lord who? Tam Dalyell starts his obituary of Lord Hunt for The Independent by remarking that, alas, people often lodge in the public mind and are remembered by posterity on account of comparatively minor episodes in the course of their otherwise long and distinguished lives in public service. For Lord Hunt, a Cabinet Secretary, the episode concerned his attempt to stop the publication of Richard Crossman’s diaries. If he had been more successful (which might have been the case if he'd been less rigid a negotiator), there might have been no Yes, Minister.
John Hunt was born in 1919, and after serving in the Royal Navy joined the civil service in 1946. In 1973, he was appointed Cabinet Secretary by Edward Heath, but then served under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan before retiring in 1979. According to The Daily Telegraph obituary he was ‘percipient, considerate and businesslike’ and his ‘self-confidence and zest for a workload were a by-word among his Civil Service colleagues’. After retiring, he worked for various businesses, including Prudential Corporation and Banque National de Paris, and headed various official committees, such as one looking into cable television and another on European Union issues. He was made a life peer in 1980. He died last week, on 17 July.
Richard Crossman, who died over 20 years ago in 1974, was a prominent left-wing intellectual, an MP for nearly 30 years, and a writer/editor for the New Statesman. From 1964 until 1970, he served in Harold Wilson’s cabinet, and his diaries of that time were posthumously published. Today, those diaries are much celebrated for being the first to reveal the inner workings of government, and, slightly less intellectually, for being a key source of one of the BBC’s most-loved comedy series - Yes, Minister.
But if Hunt had had his way there would have been no Yes, Minister. In 1974, after the election of a Labour government under Harold Wilson, Crossman’s diaries were sent to No 10 and passed to Hunt for clearance. But Hunt objected to their publication because of detailed references to cabinet meetings. Nevertheless, in January 1975 the first extracts of the book were published in The Sunday Times without Hunt’s consent. The Attorney General immediately sought an injunction to prevent publication of the book or extracts from it on the grounds that cabinet proceedings were confidential.
An informative House of Commons report in 2006 on the publication of political memoirs looks back at the Crossman affair. It recalls that the court did in fact uphold the principle that there was an obligation of confidentiality imposed on a cabinet minister in the public interest of collective responsibility. However, it also found that there was a time limit on this obligation. As ten years had passed between the events described and publication of the Crossman diaries, it was judged that the book would not undermine cabinet confidentiality. The report also notes, however, that no injunction was sought against the latter volumes of the text, even though they were published less than ten years after the events they described.
Interestingly, Dalyell in his obituary, remembers Graham Greene, then managing director of Jonathan Cape, publishers of the diaries, telling him that if John Hunt had not been so rigid he would have been prepared to make cuts in the diaries. Hunt was so difficult, so uncompromising, the obituary says, that Jonathan Cape decided to publish without alteration. Dalyell also writes about how, years later Hunt had told him that he himself had been ‘agog to read Crossman’s diaries’.
Here are a couple of snippets from Crossman’s diaries. This one is from his introduction (as reproduced in the House of Common’s report): ‘Memory is a terrible improver - even with a diary to check the tendency. And it is this which makes a politician’s autobiography (even when he claims his rights and uses official Cabinet papers) so wildly unreliable . . . If I could publish a diary of my years as a minister without any editorial improvements, I would have done something towards lightening up the secret places of British politics and enabling any intelligent elector to have a picture of what went on behind the scenes between 1964 and 1970.’
And thanks to the BBC for this one which provides the genesis of a now-famous catch phrase: ‘In a way it is just the same as I had expected and predicted. The room in which I sit is the same in which I saw Nye Bevan for almost the first time when he was Minister of Health and already I realize the tremendous effort it requires not to be taken over by the Civil Service. My Minister's room is like a padded cell, and in certain ways I am like a person who is suddenly certified a lunatic and put safely into this great, vast room, cut off from real life and surrounded by male and female trained nurses and attendants. When I am in a good mood they occasionally allow an ordinary human being to come and visit me; but they make sure that I behave right, and that the other person behaves right; and they know how to handle me. Of course, they don't behave quite like nurses because the Civil Service is profoundly deferential, ‘Yes, Minister! If you wish it, Minister!’ ’
John Hunt was born in 1919, and after serving in the Royal Navy joined the civil service in 1946. In 1973, he was appointed Cabinet Secretary by Edward Heath, but then served under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan before retiring in 1979. According to The Daily Telegraph obituary he was ‘percipient, considerate and businesslike’ and his ‘self-confidence and zest for a workload were a by-word among his Civil Service colleagues’. After retiring, he worked for various businesses, including Prudential Corporation and Banque National de Paris, and headed various official committees, such as one looking into cable television and another on European Union issues. He was made a life peer in 1980. He died last week, on 17 July.
Richard Crossman, who died over 20 years ago in 1974, was a prominent left-wing intellectual, an MP for nearly 30 years, and a writer/editor for the New Statesman. From 1964 until 1970, he served in Harold Wilson’s cabinet, and his diaries of that time were posthumously published. Today, those diaries are much celebrated for being the first to reveal the inner workings of government, and, slightly less intellectually, for being a key source of one of the BBC’s most-loved comedy series - Yes, Minister.
But if Hunt had had his way there would have been no Yes, Minister. In 1974, after the election of a Labour government under Harold Wilson, Crossman’s diaries were sent to No 10 and passed to Hunt for clearance. But Hunt objected to their publication because of detailed references to cabinet meetings. Nevertheless, in January 1975 the first extracts of the book were published in The Sunday Times without Hunt’s consent. The Attorney General immediately sought an injunction to prevent publication of the book or extracts from it on the grounds that cabinet proceedings were confidential.
An informative House of Commons report in 2006 on the publication of political memoirs looks back at the Crossman affair. It recalls that the court did in fact uphold the principle that there was an obligation of confidentiality imposed on a cabinet minister in the public interest of collective responsibility. However, it also found that there was a time limit on this obligation. As ten years had passed between the events described and publication of the Crossman diaries, it was judged that the book would not undermine cabinet confidentiality. The report also notes, however, that no injunction was sought against the latter volumes of the text, even though they were published less than ten years after the events they described.
Interestingly, Dalyell in his obituary, remembers Graham Greene, then managing director of Jonathan Cape, publishers of the diaries, telling him that if John Hunt had not been so rigid he would have been prepared to make cuts in the diaries. Hunt was so difficult, so uncompromising, the obituary says, that Jonathan Cape decided to publish without alteration. Dalyell also writes about how, years later Hunt had told him that he himself had been ‘agog to read Crossman’s diaries’.
Here are a couple of snippets from Crossman’s diaries. This one is from his introduction (as reproduced in the House of Common’s report): ‘Memory is a terrible improver - even with a diary to check the tendency. And it is this which makes a politician’s autobiography (even when he claims his rights and uses official Cabinet papers) so wildly unreliable . . . If I could publish a diary of my years as a minister without any editorial improvements, I would have done something towards lightening up the secret places of British politics and enabling any intelligent elector to have a picture of what went on behind the scenes between 1964 and 1970.’
And thanks to the BBC for this one which provides the genesis of a now-famous catch phrase: ‘In a way it is just the same as I had expected and predicted. The room in which I sit is the same in which I saw Nye Bevan for almost the first time when he was Minister of Health and already I realize the tremendous effort it requires not to be taken over by the Civil Service. My Minister's room is like a padded cell, and in certain ways I am like a person who is suddenly certified a lunatic and put safely into this great, vast room, cut off from real life and surrounded by male and female trained nurses and attendants. When I am in a good mood they occasionally allow an ordinary human being to come and visit me; but they make sure that I behave right, and that the other person behaves right; and they know how to handle me. Of course, they don't behave quite like nurses because the Civil Service is profoundly deferential, ‘Yes, Minister! If you wish it, Minister!’ ’
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Diary twist in Ron Arad story
Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force navigator, was shot down over Lebanon in 1986 and captured by Amal, a Shia militia. For more than 20 years, Israel has been trying to rescue him, or to find out what happened to his body, and his story has gripped a generation of Israelis. Now, in one more excruciating twist, sections of a diary he wrote in 1987 have been returned to his family as part of a wider Israel-Hezbollah prisoner swap deal.
Wikipedia provides an excellent resumé of the uncomfortable Arad story. After being captured by Amal, he was bartered in negotiations for the release of Shia and Lebanese prisoners held by Israel. Letters Arad had written and photos of him were used to prove he was alive, but, in 1988, the talks broke down. Since then, the Israelis have never stopped trying to find him. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they captured and interrogated first Abdul-Karim Obeid, a member of Hezbollah, and then Mustafa Dirani, Amal’s security chief. Dirani indicated that Arad had been handed over, in some way, to the Iranians. In 2003, Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, admitted that an intelligence agent had been killed during an operation to find Arad.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (also recently the source of this blog’s Kafkaesque diary story) gives a detailed explanation of the various theories about Arad’s fate, and the ongoing debate within Israeli about whether to accept Arad is dead. Other Haaretz articles have followed the brokering of a new deal (by German negotiators over two years) which culminated yesterday in the exchange of five live Lebanese prisoners, including a notorious murderer, and the remains of many others, for the remains of two dead Israeli soldiers. The BBC called it a day of great emotion on both sides of the Lebanon-Israel border - of triumph and defiance in Lebanon, but of grief and anger in Israel.
Interestingly, though, it seems that a comprehensive report from Hezbollah on Arad paved the way for the prisoner/remains swap - even though the report was considered inadequate. According to Al Jazeera (which, like Haaretz, quotes Israel’s Channel 10), the Hezbollah report is simply an updated version of a similar one in 2004. It details further efforts to find Arad, but the conclusion remains the same: he went missing on the night of 4 May 1988.
However, the new Hezbollah report does also include previously unseen photographs of Arad, from 1987, and letters, as well as sections from his diary, and these seem to have been an important element in making the prisoner deal work. In the last couple of years, one or two photographs and bits of video footage of Arad, dating from the 1980s, have turned up, but this appears to be the first time diary fragments have been returned. According to Haaretz, Israeli officials said the diary and the pictures had only sentimental value and did not shed light on Arad’s fate. Nevertheless, it is thought there might be more of the diary still in Lebanon’s possession.
Wikipedia provides an excellent resumé of the uncomfortable Arad story. After being captured by Amal, he was bartered in negotiations for the release of Shia and Lebanese prisoners held by Israel. Letters Arad had written and photos of him were used to prove he was alive, but, in 1988, the talks broke down. Since then, the Israelis have never stopped trying to find him. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they captured and interrogated first Abdul-Karim Obeid, a member of Hezbollah, and then Mustafa Dirani, Amal’s security chief. Dirani indicated that Arad had been handed over, in some way, to the Iranians. In 2003, Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, admitted that an intelligence agent had been killed during an operation to find Arad.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (also recently the source of this blog’s Kafkaesque diary story) gives a detailed explanation of the various theories about Arad’s fate, and the ongoing debate within Israeli about whether to accept Arad is dead. Other Haaretz articles have followed the brokering of a new deal (by German negotiators over two years) which culminated yesterday in the exchange of five live Lebanese prisoners, including a notorious murderer, and the remains of many others, for the remains of two dead Israeli soldiers. The BBC called it a day of great emotion on both sides of the Lebanon-Israel border - of triumph and defiance in Lebanon, but of grief and anger in Israel.
Interestingly, though, it seems that a comprehensive report from Hezbollah on Arad paved the way for the prisoner/remains swap - even though the report was considered inadequate. According to Al Jazeera (which, like Haaretz, quotes Israel’s Channel 10), the Hezbollah report is simply an updated version of a similar one in 2004. It details further efforts to find Arad, but the conclusion remains the same: he went missing on the night of 4 May 1988.
However, the new Hezbollah report does also include previously unseen photographs of Arad, from 1987, and letters, as well as sections from his diary, and these seem to have been an important element in making the prisoner deal work. In the last couple of years, one or two photographs and bits of video footage of Arad, dating from the 1980s, have turned up, but this appears to be the first time diary fragments have been returned. According to Haaretz, Israeli officials said the diary and the pictures had only sentimental value and did not shed light on Arad’s fate. Nevertheless, it is thought there might be more of the diary still in Lebanon’s possession.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Temptations and weaknesses
Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Henry Edward Manning, one of the most influential Roman Catholic figures in England during the second half of the 19th century. Manning was also a diarist, and, after his death, his diaries - which are full of unguarded introspection - caused some controversy among biographers.
Manning was born on 15 July 1808 at Totteridge, Hertfordshire. His father was a Tory MP, and a governor of the Bank of England. After studying at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford (which now holds his archives), Manning went on to be ordained in 1832. He was appointed to the curacy and then to the living at Lavington-with-Graffham in Sussex, and, in 1840, to the archdeaconry at Chichester. He married in 1833, but his wife died four years later. In 1842, Manning, who had become a member of the Oxford Movement, published The Unity of the Church, and, in 1844, Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, espousing his high church beliefs.
Subsequently, in 1851, after much soul-searching, he switched to the Roman Catholic Church, was re-ordained, and went to study in Rome, where he met the pope. Back in England, he rose rapidly in the church to become Archbishop of Westminster, in 1865. Ten years later, he was elevated to cardinal. He is remembered today for his work in founding orphanages and schools, and for his successful intervention in the 1889 London dock strike.
According to Arthur Ponsonby, author of English Diaries, the publication of a large number of extracts from Manning’s diaries in a 1896 biography written by E S Purcell, caused ‘some controversy on the ethics of biography’. Purcell stated that Manning had given him the diaries, but Shane Leslie, in his later biography (Henry Edward Manning - His Life and Labours), reveals that, in fact, Manning never did entrust the diaries to Purcell, and that Purcell was also guilty of many inaccuracies.
A 1921 review of Leslie’s book, by The New York Times (which has usefully digitised many of its archives), includes this introspective quotation from Manning’s diaries (probably dating from the 1840s):
‘- Self-complacency, high aims and professions in the spiritual life. (Give me to see myself).
- Sins of the tongue, as in London that morning, and also in repeating a Spanish blasphemy. (Set a bridle on my tongue.)
- Ostentation of learning and mean concealment of ignorance (Show me Thy light and in it my darkness.)
- Envy, especially in spiritual offices and state.
- Vainglory and self-flattery. Picturing and talking to myself. (Real love of Christ’s name.)
- Censuring others with an aim. (Charity and simplicity.)
- Anger, especially with J L Anderdon. (Patience.)
- To this I must add fearful want of love toward God; fearful want of repentance; fearful absence of mind in prayer. Dead, sluggish, obstinate, unwillingness to pray. It is a feeling like nightmare when one cannot move.’
Ponsonby has a high opinion of Manning as a diarist. We find, Ponsonby says, ‘in Manning a genuine diarist who confided at the very moment to the private pages of his journal his passing thoughts and impressions and his changing views and who did not hesitate to expose himself to charges of inconsistency and to accuse himself of faults and failings which could not be to his credit, all with an apparent disregard for the verdict of prosperity. Here was a man seemingly bent on the attainment of power and position, who appeared to lay great store on public regard and fame. He might have written himself up in his diary, or at any rate he might have destroyed any papers that would expose him in an unfavourable light. He did not do either . . .’
Ponsonby gives a few extracts from Manning’s diaries, including some that foretell his conversion: ‘The Church of England after 300 years has failed 1) in the unity of doctrine 2) in the enforcement of discipline 3) in the training of the higher life’; and, ‘I am conscious that I am further from the Church of England and nearer Rome than ever I was’. There is, though, very little about his actual conversion, or - surprisingly - his interviews with the pope.
Here’s another extract about diary writing itself, from 1851: ‘Since I lost my journals I have no heart to begin again. Also keeping a journal 1) led to self contemplation and tenderness 2) kept alive the susceptibilities of human sorrow. Yet it was of use to me in remembering and comparing sessions and in recording marked events.’
Ponsonby concludes that, in Manning’s diaries, ‘the dignified, stern, ascetic almost saintly Cardinal is shown to be an ordinary human being, struggling sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully with the temptations and weaknesses which all flesh is heir to.’
Manning was born on 15 July 1808 at Totteridge, Hertfordshire. His father was a Tory MP, and a governor of the Bank of England. After studying at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford (which now holds his archives), Manning went on to be ordained in 1832. He was appointed to the curacy and then to the living at Lavington-with-Graffham in Sussex, and, in 1840, to the archdeaconry at Chichester. He married in 1833, but his wife died four years later. In 1842, Manning, who had become a member of the Oxford Movement, published The Unity of the Church, and, in 1844, Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, espousing his high church beliefs.
Subsequently, in 1851, after much soul-searching, he switched to the Roman Catholic Church, was re-ordained, and went to study in Rome, where he met the pope. Back in England, he rose rapidly in the church to become Archbishop of Westminster, in 1865. Ten years later, he was elevated to cardinal. He is remembered today for his work in founding orphanages and schools, and for his successful intervention in the 1889 London dock strike.
According to Arthur Ponsonby, author of English Diaries, the publication of a large number of extracts from Manning’s diaries in a 1896 biography written by E S Purcell, caused ‘some controversy on the ethics of biography’. Purcell stated that Manning had given him the diaries, but Shane Leslie, in his later biography (Henry Edward Manning - His Life and Labours), reveals that, in fact, Manning never did entrust the diaries to Purcell, and that Purcell was also guilty of many inaccuracies.
A 1921 review of Leslie’s book, by The New York Times (which has usefully digitised many of its archives), includes this introspective quotation from Manning’s diaries (probably dating from the 1840s):
‘- Self-complacency, high aims and professions in the spiritual life. (Give me to see myself).
- Sins of the tongue, as in London that morning, and also in repeating a Spanish blasphemy. (Set a bridle on my tongue.)
- Ostentation of learning and mean concealment of ignorance (Show me Thy light and in it my darkness.)
- Envy, especially in spiritual offices and state.
- Vainglory and self-flattery. Picturing and talking to myself. (Real love of Christ’s name.)
- Censuring others with an aim. (Charity and simplicity.)
- Anger, especially with J L Anderdon. (Patience.)
- To this I must add fearful want of love toward God; fearful want of repentance; fearful absence of mind in prayer. Dead, sluggish, obstinate, unwillingness to pray. It is a feeling like nightmare when one cannot move.’
Ponsonby has a high opinion of Manning as a diarist. We find, Ponsonby says, ‘in Manning a genuine diarist who confided at the very moment to the private pages of his journal his passing thoughts and impressions and his changing views and who did not hesitate to expose himself to charges of inconsistency and to accuse himself of faults and failings which could not be to his credit, all with an apparent disregard for the verdict of prosperity. Here was a man seemingly bent on the attainment of power and position, who appeared to lay great store on public regard and fame. He might have written himself up in his diary, or at any rate he might have destroyed any papers that would expose him in an unfavourable light. He did not do either . . .’
Ponsonby gives a few extracts from Manning’s diaries, including some that foretell his conversion: ‘The Church of England after 300 years has failed 1) in the unity of doctrine 2) in the enforcement of discipline 3) in the training of the higher life’; and, ‘I am conscious that I am further from the Church of England and nearer Rome than ever I was’. There is, though, very little about his actual conversion, or - surprisingly - his interviews with the pope.
Here’s another extract about diary writing itself, from 1851: ‘Since I lost my journals I have no heart to begin again. Also keeping a journal 1) led to self contemplation and tenderness 2) kept alive the susceptibilities of human sorrow. Yet it was of use to me in remembering and comparing sessions and in recording marked events.’
Ponsonby concludes that, in Manning’s diaries, ‘the dignified, stern, ascetic almost saintly Cardinal is shown to be an ordinary human being, struggling sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully with the temptations and weaknesses which all flesh is heir to.’
Abduction diaries
The Palestinian campaigner, Jaweed Al Ghussein, has just died; it would have been his 78th birthday this Friday. Persecuted by the Palestinian Authority (PA) for many years because of attempts to draw attention to corruption in Yassar Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), he was also abducted twice. His daughter, Mona Bauwens, a journalist in London, runs a website about her father which, in particular, aims to publicise the injustice suffered by him and to extract an apology from the PA. Right now though, she says, she’s working on what she calls the Abduction Diaries.
Ghussein was born in Gaza in 1930 to a wealthy family. With the creation of Israel in 1948, he was sent to the American University in Cairo, where he first met Arafat. In 1964, he moved to London with his famil to pursued his (successful) business career. Nevertheless, he held on to his Palestinian heritage, and, in particular, helped finance the education of young Palestinians. In 1984, he was appointed chairman of the Palestinian National Fund, the PLO’s financial arm. Subsequently, though, he began to suspect Arafat of serious financial corruption. Millions of pounds given by Saddam Hussein, for example, were neither acknowledged or audited, according to Sandra Harris’s obituary of Ghussein in The Guardian. And then, when Ghussein criticised Arafat’s backing of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, their relationship broke down.
Ghussein persevered under Arafat until May 1996, but then resigned very publicly on Abu Dhabi TV calling for ‘accountability and transparency’. Thereafter, according to the Ghussein website, he was ‘a marked man’. A vicious media campaign orchestrated by the PA followed, as well as two abductions, one from Abu Dhabi, and the other from a hospital in Cairo. Eventually, international pressure, not least from Amnesty International, secured his release, and allowed him to return to London. However, the period of persecution permanently damaged his health and left the family stripped of its wealth. He died on 1 July, leaving his wife Khalida, a son Tawfiq, and a daughter Mona (Bauwens).
Since his death, several obituaries and many messages of condolences have been added to the Ghussein website, as have copies of campaign letters still being sent out. One from 7 July, for example, to the office of President Mahmoud Abbas starts as follows: ‘Mr Jaweed Al Ghussein passed away July 1. It is a sad indictment on the Palestinian cause, which is a noble one that the Palestinian Authority has failed to honour him and acknowledge the tremendous contribution he has made to the Palestinian people. Mr Al-Ghussein may have passed away but his legacy remains and we will continue to request from the leadership and the Palestinian Authority for ‘RAD ITBAR’ and a public acknowledgment to gross injustice he underwent. I once again remind you of UN Secretary General Koffi Annan said ‘those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it; those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it.’
Also on the website is a page about Mona. It says she is based in London and writes regularly for magazines and journals in the UK and the Middle East. And then it says this: ‘Right now I am working on the Abduction Diaries, which recounts my detailed experiences at the time of my father’s abductions. For years I have found it difficult to even open them let alone write about them as they reminded me of the dark period of continual threats from Abu Dhabi and the PA. But ultimately what has emerged in spite of the ordeal is all the many instances of kindness and help I was shown, sometimes by total strangers or people who knew of my father . . . I hope readers will find the diaries both heart-warming as well as informative.’
Ghussein was born in Gaza in 1930 to a wealthy family. With the creation of Israel in 1948, he was sent to the American University in Cairo, where he first met Arafat. In 1964, he moved to London with his famil to pursued his (successful) business career. Nevertheless, he held on to his Palestinian heritage, and, in particular, helped finance the education of young Palestinians. In 1984, he was appointed chairman of the Palestinian National Fund, the PLO’s financial arm. Subsequently, though, he began to suspect Arafat of serious financial corruption. Millions of pounds given by Saddam Hussein, for example, were neither acknowledged or audited, according to Sandra Harris’s obituary of Ghussein in The Guardian. And then, when Ghussein criticised Arafat’s backing of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, their relationship broke down.
Ghussein persevered under Arafat until May 1996, but then resigned very publicly on Abu Dhabi TV calling for ‘accountability and transparency’. Thereafter, according to the Ghussein website, he was ‘a marked man’. A vicious media campaign orchestrated by the PA followed, as well as two abductions, one from Abu Dhabi, and the other from a hospital in Cairo. Eventually, international pressure, not least from Amnesty International, secured his release, and allowed him to return to London. However, the period of persecution permanently damaged his health and left the family stripped of its wealth. He died on 1 July, leaving his wife Khalida, a son Tawfiq, and a daughter Mona (Bauwens).
Since his death, several obituaries and many messages of condolences have been added to the Ghussein website, as have copies of campaign letters still being sent out. One from 7 July, for example, to the office of President Mahmoud Abbas starts as follows: ‘Mr Jaweed Al Ghussein passed away July 1. It is a sad indictment on the Palestinian cause, which is a noble one that the Palestinian Authority has failed to honour him and acknowledge the tremendous contribution he has made to the Palestinian people. Mr Al-Ghussein may have passed away but his legacy remains and we will continue to request from the leadership and the Palestinian Authority for ‘RAD ITBAR’ and a public acknowledgment to gross injustice he underwent. I once again remind you of UN Secretary General Koffi Annan said ‘those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it; those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it.’
Also on the website is a page about Mona. It says she is based in London and writes regularly for magazines and journals in the UK and the Middle East. And then it says this: ‘Right now I am working on the Abduction Diaries, which recounts my detailed experiences at the time of my father’s abductions. For years I have found it difficult to even open them let alone write about them as they reminded me of the dark period of continual threats from Abu Dhabi and the PA. But ultimately what has emerged in spite of the ordeal is all the many instances of kindness and help I was shown, sometimes by total strangers or people who knew of my father . . . I hope readers will find the diaries both heart-warming as well as informative.’
Monday, July 14, 2008
Grizzlies and a smoking monkey
Animal Planet, a US TV company, announced last week that it is to broadcast a new eight-part series called The Grizzly Man Diaries. The programmes will document the last ten years in the life of Timothy Treadwell, a rather extraordinary man who lived and died with grizzly bears. Treadwell has already been the subject of a film, made by the German director, Werner Herzog, who is, in fact, a bit of a collector of extraordinary subjects. There was Fitzcarraldo, who had a steamship pulled over a mountain in Peru (Herzog’s diaries on his film about this man are due to be published in English soon), and then there was my own uncle, Mike Goldsmith, the subject of Echoes From a Somber Empire.
Treadwell, born in 1957, spent much of the 1980s involved with drugs, but then found bears. He turned himself into amateur naturalist and documentary film maker, and for 13 seasons lived among the grizzly bears of Katmai National Park in Alaska. In 2003, towards the end of the 13th season, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by one or possibly two of the bears. A film about Treadwell featuring his own video footage and photos, called Grizzly Man, made by Herzog was released in 2005. In it, Herzog suggests that Treadwell was a disturbed individual with a deathwish. The film includes a scene in which Herzog himself is listening, with earphones, to an audio tape that was recording while Treadwell and Huguenard were being killed.
Animal Planet, a US satellite and cable television channel, part of Discovery Communications, says it is dedicated to programmes that highlight the relationship between humans and animals. It launched in 1996, but earlier this year ‘relaunched’ itself under a new image that supposedly sheds a 'soft and furry side' for 'programming and an image with more bite’. The more bite, presumably, includes this new eight part series about Treadwell - The Grizzly Man Diaries. The programmes are based on Treadwell’s diaries, as well as archived video footage and still photographs, and are being made by the same producers as Grizzly Man. According to PR Newswire, Marjorie Kaplan, Animal Planet president and general manager, says the series ‘really digs deep into the glory that Timothy saw in these magnificent creatures’.
Herzog, himself, is rather partial to disturbed individuals. At the height of his fame in the early 1980s, he made Fitzcarraldo, a film based on the real-life Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald. In the film, Fitzcarraldo is portrayed as a bit mad, not least for transporting a steamship by land over a big hill. The actor playing the lead, another German, Klaus Kinski, was considered a major source of tension, as he fought with Herzog and other members of the crew and upset the native extras. In a documentary, My Best Fiend, Herzog says that one of the native chiefs offered to murder Kinski for him, but that he declined because he needed Kinski to complete filming.
In 2004, Herzog published Eroberung des Nutzlosen (Conquest of the Useless). According to the ‘only authentic and official website of Werner Herzog’, this is the ‘mysterious and already legendary diary, written before, during and after the production of Fitcarraldo.’ An Italian version already exists, and English version is in preparation apparently.
I can’t leave Herzog and his disturbed individuals and extraordinary subjects without mentioning another of his films, made about my uncle, Mike Goldsmith. Mike was an Associated Press journalist based in Paris and Morocco, but Africa was his beat. In 1977, he went to Central Africa Republic to report on the elaborate preparations being made by Jean-Bédel Bokassa for his own coronation. While there, Mike was arrested and charged with spying, and Bokassa personally beat him. After an intervention by the French government, I believe, partly based on the fact that Mike’s mother (my grandmother), Dolly, was dying in London, Mike was released, and arrived in time to see her before she passed away. I remember, though, that he was black and blue. Much later, in 1990, Herzog released Echoes From a Somber Empire in which Mike is filmed revisiting Central African Republic, and interviewing Bokassa’s wives, children and lawyers. A classic last scene shows a monkey smoking.
Treadwell, born in 1957, spent much of the 1980s involved with drugs, but then found bears. He turned himself into amateur naturalist and documentary film maker, and for 13 seasons lived among the grizzly bears of Katmai National Park in Alaska. In 2003, towards the end of the 13th season, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by one or possibly two of the bears. A film about Treadwell featuring his own video footage and photos, called Grizzly Man, made by Herzog was released in 2005. In it, Herzog suggests that Treadwell was a disturbed individual with a deathwish. The film includes a scene in which Herzog himself is listening, with earphones, to an audio tape that was recording while Treadwell and Huguenard were being killed.
Animal Planet, a US satellite and cable television channel, part of Discovery Communications, says it is dedicated to programmes that highlight the relationship between humans and animals. It launched in 1996, but earlier this year ‘relaunched’ itself under a new image that supposedly sheds a 'soft and furry side' for 'programming and an image with more bite’. The more bite, presumably, includes this new eight part series about Treadwell - The Grizzly Man Diaries. The programmes are based on Treadwell’s diaries, as well as archived video footage and still photographs, and are being made by the same producers as Grizzly Man. According to PR Newswire, Marjorie Kaplan, Animal Planet president and general manager, says the series ‘really digs deep into the glory that Timothy saw in these magnificent creatures’.
Herzog, himself, is rather partial to disturbed individuals. At the height of his fame in the early 1980s, he made Fitzcarraldo, a film based on the real-life Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald. In the film, Fitzcarraldo is portrayed as a bit mad, not least for transporting a steamship by land over a big hill. The actor playing the lead, another German, Klaus Kinski, was considered a major source of tension, as he fought with Herzog and other members of the crew and upset the native extras. In a documentary, My Best Fiend, Herzog says that one of the native chiefs offered to murder Kinski for him, but that he declined because he needed Kinski to complete filming.
In 2004, Herzog published Eroberung des Nutzlosen (Conquest of the Useless). According to the ‘only authentic and official website of Werner Herzog’, this is the ‘mysterious and already legendary diary, written before, during and after the production of Fitcarraldo.’ An Italian version already exists, and English version is in preparation apparently.
I can’t leave Herzog and his disturbed individuals and extraordinary subjects without mentioning another of his films, made about my uncle, Mike Goldsmith. Mike was an Associated Press journalist based in Paris and Morocco, but Africa was his beat. In 1977, he went to Central Africa Republic to report on the elaborate preparations being made by Jean-Bédel Bokassa for his own coronation. While there, Mike was arrested and charged with spying, and Bokassa personally beat him. After an intervention by the French government, I believe, partly based on the fact that Mike’s mother (my grandmother), Dolly, was dying in London, Mike was released, and arrived in time to see her before she passed away. I remember, though, that he was black and blue. Much later, in 1990, Herzog released Echoes From a Somber Empire in which Mike is filmed revisiting Central African Republic, and interviewing Bokassa’s wives, children and lawyers. A classic last scene shows a monkey smoking.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Brod’s diaries in Kafkaesque story
Kafka - author of The Trial and The Castle - is always good for a story, and so much the better if it’s a Kafkaesque one. The Guardian has a full page Kafka news story in its international section today (9 July), but it’s sourced, I’m sure, from a story in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. While The Guardian uses a completely spurious lead, Haaretz pegs its story to the 125th anniversary of Kafka’s birth on 3 July. Of interest to this blog, though, is Brod, Max Brod who is credited with first promoting Kafka’s work. Like Kafka, Brod was also a diarist, but unlike Kafka’s diaries, Brod’s diaries are missing.
Here is the first paragraph of this morning’s Kafka story in The Guardian: ‘Scholars of the 20th-century writer Franz Kafka were in a state of suspense last night at the news that the remains of his estate, which have been hoarded in a Tel Aviv flat for decades, may soon be revealed.’ Unfortunately, there’s nothing in the article to explain the use of the phrase ‘in a state of suspense last night’.
Here is the first paragraph of the more sober story published by Haaretz a day earlier: ‘On a quiet street in the heart of Tel Aviv, not far from Ben-Gurion Boulevard, stands an old apartment building with a well-tended garden in front. The exterior does not reveal the exciting story that has been hidden for decades inside the building, to which the eyes of scholars and lovers of literature are now turned: Many researchers believe that in a ground-floor apartment there can be found the remnants of the estate of the great 20th-century writer Franz Kafka, whose 125th birthday was celebrated on July 3.’
Kafka died in 1924, leaving his estate and papers in the hands of his friend Max Brod, another Jewish writer, who then did much to promote Kafka’s writing. It is well known that Kafka despite being asked by Brod to destroy his unpublished works, did not do so. Brod defended his action by saying he had told Kafka of his intentions not to comply, and that, therefore, if Kafka had truly wanted the works burned, he would have left them to a different executor.
With Hitler’s advances, Brod moved to Israel in 1939, taking Kafka’s papers with him. Many of these were eventually transferred to archives, but Brod kept hold of ‘a great deal of varied material’. Brod died in 1968, leaving his estate, including whatever Kafka papers he still held, to his secretary, Ilse Esther Hoffe. And it is Hoffe who lived in the Tel Aviv flat, ‘the old apartment building with a well-tended garden', but who died last year, aged 101. According to Haaretz, she had sold a few of the Kafka papers, but had jealously held on to rest, refusing to show them to any one.
Haaretz talked to Nurit Pagi, who is currently writing her doctorate on Brod at the University of Haifa. She said: ‘Everyone was trying to get to this material, but came away empty-handed. . . It’s like a Kafkaesque detective puzzle that someone doesn't want solved. All the people who are doing research on Brod are telling each other: If you hear anything, let me know.’ (The Guardian article, incidentally, said Haaretz called the story ‘Kafkaesque’, another slight inaccuracy.)
Among Kafka’s works saved by Brod, and later published, were his diaries. Kafka started writing a diary in 1910, aged 27 (possibly at the suggestion of Brod) and continued until near the end of his life. Wikipedia has information on the diaries, and The Diary Junction provides links to both German and English versions freely available online.
Interestingly, however, Brod was also a keen diarist, and his diaries formed part of the estate left to Hoffe. According to Haaretz, a German publisher, Artemis and Winkler, paid Hoffe a five-figure advance for Brod’s diaries in the 1980s, but never received them. In 1993, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that Hoffe had removed the Brod diaries from her apartment and transferred them to a safe at a bank in Tel Aviv, where they remain to this day. Artemis and Winkler is now owned by a large publisher, apparently, who is still negotiating access to the diaries. They are thought to contain intimate details about Brod’s life, and may well provide interesting information on Kafka’s life.
Here is the first paragraph of this morning’s Kafka story in The Guardian: ‘Scholars of the 20th-century writer Franz Kafka were in a state of suspense last night at the news that the remains of his estate, which have been hoarded in a Tel Aviv flat for decades, may soon be revealed.’ Unfortunately, there’s nothing in the article to explain the use of the phrase ‘in a state of suspense last night’.
Here is the first paragraph of the more sober story published by Haaretz a day earlier: ‘On a quiet street in the heart of Tel Aviv, not far from Ben-Gurion Boulevard, stands an old apartment building with a well-tended garden in front. The exterior does not reveal the exciting story that has been hidden for decades inside the building, to which the eyes of scholars and lovers of literature are now turned: Many researchers believe that in a ground-floor apartment there can be found the remnants of the estate of the great 20th-century writer Franz Kafka, whose 125th birthday was celebrated on July 3.’
Kafka died in 1924, leaving his estate and papers in the hands of his friend Max Brod, another Jewish writer, who then did much to promote Kafka’s writing. It is well known that Kafka despite being asked by Brod to destroy his unpublished works, did not do so. Brod defended his action by saying he had told Kafka of his intentions not to comply, and that, therefore, if Kafka had truly wanted the works burned, he would have left them to a different executor.
With Hitler’s advances, Brod moved to Israel in 1939, taking Kafka’s papers with him. Many of these were eventually transferred to archives, but Brod kept hold of ‘a great deal of varied material’. Brod died in 1968, leaving his estate, including whatever Kafka papers he still held, to his secretary, Ilse Esther Hoffe. And it is Hoffe who lived in the Tel Aviv flat, ‘the old apartment building with a well-tended garden', but who died last year, aged 101. According to Haaretz, she had sold a few of the Kafka papers, but had jealously held on to rest, refusing to show them to any one.
Haaretz talked to Nurit Pagi, who is currently writing her doctorate on Brod at the University of Haifa. She said: ‘Everyone was trying to get to this material, but came away empty-handed. . . It’s like a Kafkaesque detective puzzle that someone doesn't want solved. All the people who are doing research on Brod are telling each other: If you hear anything, let me know.’ (The Guardian article, incidentally, said Haaretz called the story ‘Kafkaesque’, another slight inaccuracy.)
Among Kafka’s works saved by Brod, and later published, were his diaries. Kafka started writing a diary in 1910, aged 27 (possibly at the suggestion of Brod) and continued until near the end of his life. Wikipedia has information on the diaries, and The Diary Junction provides links to both German and English versions freely available online.
Interestingly, however, Brod was also a keen diarist, and his diaries formed part of the estate left to Hoffe. According to Haaretz, a German publisher, Artemis and Winkler, paid Hoffe a five-figure advance for Brod’s diaries in the 1980s, but never received them. In 1993, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that Hoffe had removed the Brod diaries from her apartment and transferred them to a safe at a bank in Tel Aviv, where they remain to this day. Artemis and Winkler is now owned by a large publisher, apparently, who is still negotiating access to the diaries. They are thought to contain intimate details about Brod’s life, and may well provide interesting information on Kafka’s life.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Che’s last days
The Bolivian government has just announced its intention to publish a fascimile edition of Ernesto Che Guevara’s handwritten diaries. They concern his time in Bolivia, where he was trying to spark a revolution, and where he was eventually caught and shot. Some photos of the diaries are available online, as is some information about Che’s very last diary entry in which he is worrying about the reliability of an old woman goat herd.
Guevara is one of most iconic revolutionary figures of the 20th century. He was born into a middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina, and studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1953, he moved to Guatemala, joined the pro-communist regime until it was overthrown, and then fled to Mexico, where he joined Fidel Castro and other Cuban rebels. In the first half of the 1960s, he served as Cuba’s minister for industry in Castro’s government, but then in 1965, he left for Bolivia where he became involved again in revolutionary activities. He was captured by the Bolivian army and executed.
According to Reuters, the documents just unveiled by the Bolivian authorities include a diary of his time fomenting revolution in Bolivia, written in two frayed notebooks, a logbook and a few black-and-white photographs. Apparently, they disappeared from an army vault in the early 1980s, but resurfaced when put up for sale at a London auction house, and were then bought by the Bolivian authorities. Since then, they’ve been locked away, in Banco Central de Bolivia.
Guevara’s reputation as a diarist soared with The Motorcycle Diaries. Originally, the book was published in Cuba in 1993, and then an English version came out in 2003. The following year, a film version was released and became a huge success. However, the Bolivian diary was first published much earlier, the year after Guevara’s death, in 1968, by Stein & Day, and has been reproduced in various versions since then - see Abebooks for example.
Although the text of the diary is well known, the Bolivian government has now asked Plural Editores to publish a fascimile of the handwritten books, and this should be available later this year. According to Pablo Groux, Bolivia’s vice-minister for culture, it is one of the projects put forward by Comité Bolivia to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Guevara’s death (9 October 1967).
As far as I can tell there are no substantial extracts of Che Guevara’s diaries available on the web, but The Diary Junction does provide a couple of useful links. One of them is for a page by Peter Kornbluh called The Death of Che Guevara: Declassified. Here is the paragraph about Che’s last diary entry:
‘October 7, 1967: The last entry in Che’s diary is recorded exactly eleven months since the inauguration of the guerrilla movement. The guerrillas run into an old woman herding goats. They ask her if there are soldiers in the area but are unable to get any reliable information. Scared that she will report them, they pay her 50 pesos to keep quiet. In Che’s diary it is noted that he has “little hope” that she will do so. (Harris, 126; CIA Weekly Review, “The Che Guevara Diary,” 12/15/67)’
Guevara is one of most iconic revolutionary figures of the 20th century. He was born into a middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina, and studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1953, he moved to Guatemala, joined the pro-communist regime until it was overthrown, and then fled to Mexico, where he joined Fidel Castro and other Cuban rebels. In the first half of the 1960s, he served as Cuba’s minister for industry in Castro’s government, but then in 1965, he left for Bolivia where he became involved again in revolutionary activities. He was captured by the Bolivian army and executed.
According to Reuters, the documents just unveiled by the Bolivian authorities include a diary of his time fomenting revolution in Bolivia, written in two frayed notebooks, a logbook and a few black-and-white photographs. Apparently, they disappeared from an army vault in the early 1980s, but resurfaced when put up for sale at a London auction house, and were then bought by the Bolivian authorities. Since then, they’ve been locked away, in Banco Central de Bolivia.
Guevara’s reputation as a diarist soared with The Motorcycle Diaries. Originally, the book was published in Cuba in 1993, and then an English version came out in 2003. The following year, a film version was released and became a huge success. However, the Bolivian diary was first published much earlier, the year after Guevara’s death, in 1968, by Stein & Day, and has been reproduced in various versions since then - see Abebooks for example.
Although the text of the diary is well known, the Bolivian government has now asked Plural Editores to publish a fascimile of the handwritten books, and this should be available later this year. According to Pablo Groux, Bolivia’s vice-minister for culture, it is one of the projects put forward by Comité Bolivia to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Guevara’s death (9 October 1967).
As far as I can tell there are no substantial extracts of Che Guevara’s diaries available on the web, but The Diary Junction does provide a couple of useful links. One of them is for a page by Peter Kornbluh called The Death of Che Guevara: Declassified. Here is the paragraph about Che’s last diary entry:
‘October 7, 1967: The last entry in Che’s diary is recorded exactly eleven months since the inauguration of the guerrilla movement. The guerrillas run into an old woman herding goats. They ask her if there are soldiers in the area but are unable to get any reliable information. Scared that she will report them, they pay her 50 pesos to keep quiet. In Che’s diary it is noted that he has “little hope” that she will do so. (Harris, 126; CIA Weekly Review, “The Che Guevara Diary,” 12/15/67)’
Friday, July 4, 2008
Blood and Judd
A short post about Blood and Judd, because they’re such great names and they rhyme. A history student, Steven St Onge (not a bad name in itself), has been digging around in the Special Collections & Archives at Wesleyan University and discovered a couple of interesting diaries from the 19th century. One is by Lorenzo Whiting Blood who, it seems, had a bit of rough childhood, and then some trouble finding a job and a wife; the other is by Mrs Judd who wrote about travelling with her husband and children.
Wikipedia tells me that Wesleyan University is ‘a highly selective private liberal arts college’, in Middletown, Connecticut. Although founded, in 1831, by Methodists, it is now secular. The Special Collections & Archives department is located in Olin Library and claims an extensive collection of rare books and materials related to the university and Middletown. St Onge has been digging around in this archive, and prepared notes and finding aids for two interesting diaries. These notes have just been publicised through the Special Collections & Archives blog.
Lorenzo Whiting Blood, a Methodist minister, was born in 1812 and died in 1881. For about ten years, as a young man between 1835 and 1844, he wrote a diary. It begins, according to the Special Collections & Archives website notes, with a look into his past as he explains about being raised by Hindal, a cloth trader, who used to beat him regularly. There is a lot in the diary about his time at Wesleyan, and his struggles to become a Methodist minister. There are entries about his failed attempts to set up a school, about preaching to prison inmates on good behaviour, and about visiting a school for the deaf where he was amazed to see ‘conversations with their hands’. More personally, he describes how, at one point, he rushes home to try and stop his brother taking up a job on a whaler. According to St Onge, once Blood leaves university, the journal then describes ‘the troubles [he] faces trying find a job, marrying his hometown love, and ends with him becoming deacon of Mystic [Connecticut]’.
The second diary, for which the Special Collections & Archives website now has extensive notes thanks to St Onge, is that of Harriet Stewart Judd, wife of Orange Judd a former Wesleyan student. Born in 1822, Harriet married Judd in 1855, and she was around 50 when she wrote the diary now in the archives. It is titled Notes of Travel – No. 5, which indicates there were or are others - but nothing is known about them. This diary was written from 30 October 1872 to Christmas Day 1873 and chronicles three trips taken by the Judd family (Harriet and Orange, and three children) across the Eastern coast of the US States and to Europe. While Harriet mentions the tourist sites they visit (Naples, Pompeii, Paris, London, and Liverpool), she also writes about the family’s dynamic and her husband’s ongoing sicknesses. An interesting event occured, the online notes say, when the family visited a Genoa hospital housing thousands of poor people including many orphans. These orphans were trained in furniture making, and seemed content. Judd writes that she was relieved to see charity in Genoa but surprised to see so many ‘dwarfs’ in the hospital.
Wikipedia tells me that Wesleyan University is ‘a highly selective private liberal arts college’, in Middletown, Connecticut. Although founded, in 1831, by Methodists, it is now secular. The Special Collections & Archives department is located in Olin Library and claims an extensive collection of rare books and materials related to the university and Middletown. St Onge has been digging around in this archive, and prepared notes and finding aids for two interesting diaries. These notes have just been publicised through the Special Collections & Archives blog.
Lorenzo Whiting Blood, a Methodist minister, was born in 1812 and died in 1881. For about ten years, as a young man between 1835 and 1844, he wrote a diary. It begins, according to the Special Collections & Archives website notes, with a look into his past as he explains about being raised by Hindal, a cloth trader, who used to beat him regularly. There is a lot in the diary about his time at Wesleyan, and his struggles to become a Methodist minister. There are entries about his failed attempts to set up a school, about preaching to prison inmates on good behaviour, and about visiting a school for the deaf where he was amazed to see ‘conversations with their hands’. More personally, he describes how, at one point, he rushes home to try and stop his brother taking up a job on a whaler. According to St Onge, once Blood leaves university, the journal then describes ‘the troubles [he] faces trying find a job, marrying his hometown love, and ends with him becoming deacon of Mystic [Connecticut]’.
The second diary, for which the Special Collections & Archives website now has extensive notes thanks to St Onge, is that of Harriet Stewart Judd, wife of Orange Judd a former Wesleyan student. Born in 1822, Harriet married Judd in 1855, and she was around 50 when she wrote the diary now in the archives. It is titled Notes of Travel – No. 5, which indicates there were or are others - but nothing is known about them. This diary was written from 30 October 1872 to Christmas Day 1873 and chronicles three trips taken by the Judd family (Harriet and Orange, and three children) across the Eastern coast of the US States and to Europe. While Harriet mentions the tourist sites they visit (Naples, Pompeii, Paris, London, and Liverpool), she also writes about the family’s dynamic and her husband’s ongoing sicknesses. An interesting event occured, the online notes say, when the family visited a Genoa hospital housing thousands of poor people including many orphans. These orphans were trained in furniture making, and seemed content. Judd writes that she was relieved to see charity in Genoa but surprised to see so many ‘dwarfs’ in the hospital.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Unsecret secret diaries
I love books and news stories about secret diaries. There’s one today, and there’s going to be another in three weeks. The diaries may have been secret once upon a time, but my headines would be Angelina Jolie’s pregnancy diary - no longer under wraps; and Abigail Titmuss’s diaries - no longer secret. Everybody knows!
News.com.au is reporting a story today that Angelina Jolie, who has three adopted children and one natural child and is now expecting twins, has a ‘secret pregnancy diary’. The story originates, I think, from the National Enquirer (but its website does not appear to be working as I write) and from an anonymous source who said the ‘journal is very special to her and she's keeping it private, even from Brad’. The source added that Angie jokes in the journal that she's ready for her twins to ‘just come out and get it over with’.
Hardly a secret diary, though, especially if I know about it.
And three weeks from today, on 24 July, Headline Review (which astonishingly lacks a website at the moment) is due to publish The Secret Diaries of Abigail Titmuss: How to Play the Fame Game and Come Out on Top. According to the publisher’s blurb (see Amazon), Titmuss ‘tells it like it is’. The diaries follow Titmuss’s life from nurse, to model, to business woman, and to her obsession with being a celebrity. Her diaries, the blurb promises, are ‘fabulously racy, scorchingly honest and always just a little bit tongue in-cheek’.
But - after 24 July - no longer secret!
News.com.au is reporting a story today that Angelina Jolie, who has three adopted children and one natural child and is now expecting twins, has a ‘secret pregnancy diary’. The story originates, I think, from the National Enquirer (but its website does not appear to be working as I write) and from an anonymous source who said the ‘journal is very special to her and she's keeping it private, even from Brad’. The source added that Angie jokes in the journal that she's ready for her twins to ‘just come out and get it over with’.
Hardly a secret diary, though, especially if I know about it.
And three weeks from today, on 24 July, Headline Review (which astonishingly lacks a website at the moment) is due to publish The Secret Diaries of Abigail Titmuss: How to Play the Fame Game and Come Out on Top. According to the publisher’s blurb (see Amazon), Titmuss ‘tells it like it is’. The diaries follow Titmuss’s life from nurse, to model, to business woman, and to her obsession with being a celebrity. Her diaries, the blurb promises, are ‘fabulously racy, scorchingly honest and always just a little bit tongue in-cheek’.
But - after 24 July - no longer secret!
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Servigliano Calling
‘Even to this day the diary has a slight aroma of cocoa,’ says Steve Dickinson about a diary kept by his uncle Robert Dickinson while a prisoner at Servigliano, an Italian war camp, in the 1940s. Substantial extracts from the diary have just been made available online at the Survivors of Camp 59 website, hosted by Indiana University.
A large holding camp was built at Servigliano, 60km south of Ancona, in 1914, at the start of the First World War, and was re-used from January 1941, a few months after Italy entered the Second World War. In September 1943, once Italy had signed the armistice with the allies, there was a mass breakout. The Germans, however, soon re-established control of the camp, using it not only for recaptured prisoners but for Jews too.
Robert Dickinson, a gunner with the Royal Artillery, was interned at Servigliano, Camp 59, from 23 November 1941 but escaped after the armistice in September 1943. He spent time with an Italian family in Gassino, northern Italy, but by October 1944, was fighting with the Partisans against the German army. He was killed in March 1945.
Some time after the war, Dickinson’s diary was discovered during renovations to the farmhouse in Gassino where he’d stayed. It was returned to his family, and is now held by Steve Dickinson, who has made it publicly available. The diary itself has a cover made of old cocoa tins (hence the smell) with a broadcast aerial design incorporating the title Servigliano Calling. It begins with his capture by the Germans in November 1941, and finishes, about six months before his death, in September 1944.
According to the Survivors of Camp 59 website, Dickinson’s diary details day- to-day activities and events at the camp, including football matches, camp cooking recipes, mail and food parcels received, special holiday activities, and escape attempts. There are many extracts on the site, including this one from 8 September 1943: ‘Continued evening! Playing bridge and in comes the long awaited news Armistice! Spoilt a perfect 3 trump hand; but why worry. Hit my fist such a whopper up the wall; skin off the knuckles. No sleep.’
Last year, a Servigliano survivor, Dennis Sweeney, was reunited with his diary - sixty years on, according to a Chicago Tribune report (originally sourced at the Allentown Morning Call, although I can find no trace of the story on its website). Like Dickinson, Sweeney had escaped after the 8 September armistice, but he then entrusted his diary to a fellow prisoner Carl Valentine. Valentine, in fact, escaped Italy, while Sweeney was recaptured and shipped to Germany (but unlike Dickinson, he survived the war). A few years ago, Valentine died, and his nephew inherited Sweeney’s diary, and eventually decided to trace the owner. Sweeney’s jottings - which end on the day of the armistice, 8 September 1943 - are not as entertaining as Dickinson’s. Here is one, thanks to Richard Annotico, from 29 May 1943: ‘I received my first letter. It was the first letter I received in 7 months and believe me I was the happiest boy in camp. I must have read that letter 10 times that day.’
A large holding camp was built at Servigliano, 60km south of Ancona, in 1914, at the start of the First World War, and was re-used from January 1941, a few months after Italy entered the Second World War. In September 1943, once Italy had signed the armistice with the allies, there was a mass breakout. The Germans, however, soon re-established control of the camp, using it not only for recaptured prisoners but for Jews too.
Robert Dickinson, a gunner with the Royal Artillery, was interned at Servigliano, Camp 59, from 23 November 1941 but escaped after the armistice in September 1943. He spent time with an Italian family in Gassino, northern Italy, but by October 1944, was fighting with the Partisans against the German army. He was killed in March 1945.
Some time after the war, Dickinson’s diary was discovered during renovations to the farmhouse in Gassino where he’d stayed. It was returned to his family, and is now held by Steve Dickinson, who has made it publicly available. The diary itself has a cover made of old cocoa tins (hence the smell) with a broadcast aerial design incorporating the title Servigliano Calling. It begins with his capture by the Germans in November 1941, and finishes, about six months before his death, in September 1944.
According to the Survivors of Camp 59 website, Dickinson’s diary details day- to-day activities and events at the camp, including football matches, camp cooking recipes, mail and food parcels received, special holiday activities, and escape attempts. There are many extracts on the site, including this one from 8 September 1943: ‘Continued evening! Playing bridge and in comes the long awaited news Armistice! Spoilt a perfect 3 trump hand; but why worry. Hit my fist such a whopper up the wall; skin off the knuckles. No sleep.’
Last year, a Servigliano survivor, Dennis Sweeney, was reunited with his diary - sixty years on, according to a Chicago Tribune report (originally sourced at the Allentown Morning Call, although I can find no trace of the story on its website). Like Dickinson, Sweeney had escaped after the 8 September armistice, but he then entrusted his diary to a fellow prisoner Carl Valentine. Valentine, in fact, escaped Italy, while Sweeney was recaptured and shipped to Germany (but unlike Dickinson, he survived the war). A few years ago, Valentine died, and his nephew inherited Sweeney’s diary, and eventually decided to trace the owner. Sweeney’s jottings - which end on the day of the armistice, 8 September 1943 - are not as entertaining as Dickinson’s. Here is one, thanks to Richard Annotico, from 29 May 1943: ‘I received my first letter. It was the first letter I received in 7 months and believe me I was the happiest boy in camp. I must have read that letter 10 times that day.’
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
A clubbable gentleman-parson
This week, Boydell Press is due to publish, for the first time, the diaries of John Longe, a suffolk vicar, described as an affluent and clubbable gentleman-parson.
Historically, in Britain, priests have been among the most prolific of diarists. The Diary Junction, for example, carries more data pages on ‘priests’ than any other profession (with the exception of ‘writer’ which diarists are any way), the majority of them in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Religious diarists do often leave behind endless records of their duties and practices, but they also make interesting observations on the society and culture in which they function.
John Longe, the vicar of Coddenham, kept careful records of his activities, relationships and possessions in pocket-books and inventories. These are held by the Suffolk Records Society. Boydell Press, part of Boydell & Brewer Ltd, a US and UK publisher specialising in historical (and music) titles, is about to publish (3 July) a compilation of this material, edited by Michael Stone - The Diary of John Longe, Vicar of Coddenham, 1765-1834.
Longe is described as ‘an affluent and clubbable gentleman-parson of the Georgian age’ who ‘enjoyed the company of his peers, both as host and guest, and travelled throughout the region’. He ran a household with 10 servants and a farm. Besides preaching and leading worship, he also trained young curates, marshalled his parishioners under threat of Napoleon’s invasion, and served as a magistrate.
Boydell Press does a whole range of interesting diary titles. There’s Diary of John Young, Sunderland Chemist and Methodist Lay Preacher, covering the years 1841-1843, full of subjective passages about his faith, but also giving insight into his social, religious and business. The Bousfield Diaries give an inside view into middle-class family life in the late Victorian era, in particular showing the family’s dependence on their servants. And then there's The Diary of Thomas Giordani Wright, Newcastle Doctor, 1826-1829, which tells of a doctor’s arduous life in the collieries.
Historically, in Britain, priests have been among the most prolific of diarists. The Diary Junction, for example, carries more data pages on ‘priests’ than any other profession (with the exception of ‘writer’ which diarists are any way), the majority of them in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Religious diarists do often leave behind endless records of their duties and practices, but they also make interesting observations on the society and culture in which they function.
John Longe, the vicar of Coddenham, kept careful records of his activities, relationships and possessions in pocket-books and inventories. These are held by the Suffolk Records Society. Boydell Press, part of Boydell & Brewer Ltd, a US and UK publisher specialising in historical (and music) titles, is about to publish (3 July) a compilation of this material, edited by Michael Stone - The Diary of John Longe, Vicar of Coddenham, 1765-1834.
Longe is described as ‘an affluent and clubbable gentleman-parson of the Georgian age’ who ‘enjoyed the company of his peers, both as host and guest, and travelled throughout the region’. He ran a household with 10 servants and a farm. Besides preaching and leading worship, he also trained young curates, marshalled his parishioners under threat of Napoleon’s invasion, and served as a magistrate.
Boydell Press does a whole range of interesting diary titles. There’s Diary of John Young, Sunderland Chemist and Methodist Lay Preacher, covering the years 1841-1843, full of subjective passages about his faith, but also giving insight into his social, religious and business. The Bousfield Diaries give an inside view into middle-class family life in the late Victorian era, in particular showing the family’s dependence on their servants. And then there's The Diary of Thomas Giordani Wright, Newcastle Doctor, 1826-1829, which tells of a doctor’s arduous life in the collieries.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
The fascination that is China
Not long after his 50th birthday, in 1974, George Bush senior went to China to take up a diplomatic position. On the way there, he began dictating a diary, and this has now been published for the first time. China seems to be a popular place for Westerners to indulge in a spot of diary writing: a few years back, the UK’s Prince Charles ended up suing a national newspaper for revealing some of his (private) China diary; five centuries ago a Korean official wrote an impressive journal about journeying across China; and, more than a millennium ago, a Japanese Buddhist monk wrote one of the very earliest of travel journals, yes, to China.
George H W Bush was Vice-President of the US from 1981 to 1989 under Ronald Reagan and then President from 1989 to 1993. Having made a fortune from oil before his 40th birthday,he turned to politics during the 1960s. In 1974, he became head of the US Liaison Office in Beijing, and, on the way out to China that year, in October, he started recording a diary. This has now been published by Princeton University Press with a slightly overblown title: The China Diary of George H. W. Bush: The Making of a Global President.
A few pages of the book are available to read on the Amazon website. In the first chapter, called Everybody in the United States Wants to Go to China, this president-to-be muses a bit. It’s 21 October 1974: ‘Am I running away from something?’; ‘Am I leaving what with inflation, incivility in the press and Watergate and all the ugliness?’; ‘Am I taking the easy way out?’ The answer I think is ‘no’, because of the intrigue and fascination that is China. I think it is an important assignment; it is what I want to do; it was what I told the President [Gerald Ford] I want to do; and all in all, in spite of the great warnings of isolation, I think it is right - at least for now.’
The publisher says Bush reveals ‘a thoughtful and pragmatic realism’, one that would ‘guide him for decades to come’. Not only does he, in this diary, formulate views on the importance of international alliances and personal diplomacy but he even describes his explorations of Beijing by bicycle, and experiences with Chinese food, language lessons, and ping-pong. Heady stuff.
Also heady stuff is this: Chinese diplomats being described as ‘appalling old waxworks’. According to the BBC, this allegedly comes from a private diary written by Prince Charles during a visit to China in 1997. In 2005, the UK’s Mail on Sunday printed extracts from the diary, and, then, when the Prince sued, lost the legal battle. According to The Guardian, the Mail on Sunday said ‘it had acted in the public interest by publishing the diaries because they contained the political beliefs of the UK’s future head of state’. Apparently, Prince Charles regularly writes journals of his official visits and then circulates around 100 copies to various relatives, friends and contacts.
Keeping a diary on a trip to China has been fashionable for centuries. Five hundred years ago, in 1488, a high-level Korean official called Choe Bu was shipwrecked on his way back to the mainland from the island of Jeju. Washed up on the coast of China, Choe Bu made his way overland to Beijing. During the journey, he kept a diary which modern historians find invaluable for its perspective on Chinese culture in the 15th century and for the information on China’s cities and regional differences. According to Wikipedia, his ‘description of cities, people, customs, cuisines, and maritime commerce along China’s Grand Canal provide insight into the daily life of China and how it differed between northern and southern China during the 15th century’.
And going back even further, a Japanese Buddhist monk, Jikaku Daishi or Ennin, travelled to China in 838 to act as a Japanese representative to the T’Ang court. He stayed for 10 years, travelling to monasteries even though Buddhists were being persecuted at the time. Among the many books he wrote is a diary of the time in China. This was translated into English by Edwin Reischauer, a US ambassador to Japan. Reischauer claimed it - Ennin’s Diary: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law - was one of the world’s three great travel books.
Just for the record, when George Bush senior was heading for Beijing, my own diary records that on 21 October 1974 I was not that far away, in Penang, Malaysia, visiting a snake farm: ‘I . . . bus out to the university it’s fairly modern, with a nice hilly setting in the forest-covered hills around Penang. In 1980, I learn, the main language will change to Malay. I bus a bit further out to the snake temple - a small Chinese temple which, a long time ago, became a refuge for snakes. A few are now kept on twigs inside the temple - poisonous pit vipers - hardly worth the trip except maybe to see a tourist with snakes on his head and a photographer looking happy.’ But no China diary from me, at least not yet.
George H W Bush was Vice-President of the US from 1981 to 1989 under Ronald Reagan and then President from 1989 to 1993. Having made a fortune from oil before his 40th birthday,he turned to politics during the 1960s. In 1974, he became head of the US Liaison Office in Beijing, and, on the way out to China that year, in October, he started recording a diary. This has now been published by Princeton University Press with a slightly overblown title: The China Diary of George H. W. Bush: The Making of a Global President.
A few pages of the book are available to read on the Amazon website. In the first chapter, called Everybody in the United States Wants to Go to China, this president-to-be muses a bit. It’s 21 October 1974: ‘Am I running away from something?’; ‘Am I leaving what with inflation, incivility in the press and Watergate and all the ugliness?’; ‘Am I taking the easy way out?’ The answer I think is ‘no’, because of the intrigue and fascination that is China. I think it is an important assignment; it is what I want to do; it was what I told the President [Gerald Ford] I want to do; and all in all, in spite of the great warnings of isolation, I think it is right - at least for now.’
The publisher says Bush reveals ‘a thoughtful and pragmatic realism’, one that would ‘guide him for decades to come’. Not only does he, in this diary, formulate views on the importance of international alliances and personal diplomacy but he even describes his explorations of Beijing by bicycle, and experiences with Chinese food, language lessons, and ping-pong. Heady stuff.
Also heady stuff is this: Chinese diplomats being described as ‘appalling old waxworks’. According to the BBC, this allegedly comes from a private diary written by Prince Charles during a visit to China in 1997. In 2005, the UK’s Mail on Sunday printed extracts from the diary, and, then, when the Prince sued, lost the legal battle. According to The Guardian, the Mail on Sunday said ‘it had acted in the public interest by publishing the diaries because they contained the political beliefs of the UK’s future head of state’. Apparently, Prince Charles regularly writes journals of his official visits and then circulates around 100 copies to various relatives, friends and contacts.
Keeping a diary on a trip to China has been fashionable for centuries. Five hundred years ago, in 1488, a high-level Korean official called Choe Bu was shipwrecked on his way back to the mainland from the island of Jeju. Washed up on the coast of China, Choe Bu made his way overland to Beijing. During the journey, he kept a diary which modern historians find invaluable for its perspective on Chinese culture in the 15th century and for the information on China’s cities and regional differences. According to Wikipedia, his ‘description of cities, people, customs, cuisines, and maritime commerce along China’s Grand Canal provide insight into the daily life of China and how it differed between northern and southern China during the 15th century’.
And going back even further, a Japanese Buddhist monk, Jikaku Daishi or Ennin, travelled to China in 838 to act as a Japanese representative to the T’Ang court. He stayed for 10 years, travelling to monasteries even though Buddhists were being persecuted at the time. Among the many books he wrote is a diary of the time in China. This was translated into English by Edwin Reischauer, a US ambassador to Japan. Reischauer claimed it - Ennin’s Diary: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law - was one of the world’s three great travel books.
Just for the record, when George Bush senior was heading for Beijing, my own diary records that on 21 October 1974 I was not that far away, in Penang, Malaysia, visiting a snake farm: ‘I . . . bus out to the university it’s fairly modern, with a nice hilly setting in the forest-covered hills around Penang. In 1980, I learn, the main language will change to Malay. I bus a bit further out to the snake temple - a small Chinese temple which, a long time ago, became a refuge for snakes. A few are now kept on twigs inside the temple - poisonous pit vipers - hardly worth the trip except maybe to see a tourist with snakes on his head and a photographer looking happy.’ But no China diary from me, at least not yet.
Monday, June 23, 2008
The veriest drudge
Tonight (23 June) at 9pm the UK broadcaster, Channel 4, is screening the final part of its Victorian Passions documentary season. This episode is entitled Upstairs Downstairs Love, and focuses on the relationship between a trained solicitor, Arthur Munby, and a servant woman Hanna Cullwick. Apart from the cross-class nature of the relationship, two other factors make this a worthy documentary subject. Firstly, the two had a long-term and complicated sexual relationship based on their real master/servant roles; and, secondly, they both wrote about it in some detail in diaries.
Cullwick had humble origins, although, unusually, she did learn to read and write. From the age of eight, she worked as a servant in various situations. In 1854, she met Munby, a trained solicitor acting for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners Office. He had a long-standing interest in working class women, and became fascinated with Cullwick. Subsequently, she took a variety of part-time servant jobs so as to be near him in London. In 1873, they married secretly, and Cullwick went to live in Munby’s lodgings. Nevertheless she retained her maiden name, and her servant’s job, and her servant’s salary. In the early 1880s she left him, and took a position in her home county of Shropshire. However, Munby was a regular visitor until her death.
Wikipedia has entries on both Munby and Cullwick. According to the one on Cullwick, she proudly referred to herself as Munby's ‘drudge and slave’. For much of her life, she wore a leather strap around her right wrist and a locking chain around her neck, to which Munby had a key. She wrote letters almost daily to him, describing her long hours of work in great detail, and she would arrange to visit him ‘in my dirt’, showing the results of a full day of cleaning and other domestic work.
According to Wikipedia’s entry on Munby his interest in working class women led him to collect hundreds of photographs of, for example, female mine workers, kitchen maids, milkmaids, charwomen, and acrobats. These were left, along with his and Cullwick’s diaries, to Trinity College, Cambridge, but were not opened to the public until 1950, as per the terms of Munby’s will. Since then, they’ve been used extensively by researchers, especially those examining the role of women during the Victorian period.
There is good information about the diaries and a few extracts on the website of Adam Matthews Publications, which promotes a digital version of the Munby papers held by Trinity College. There is also quite a lot from the diaries in Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives by Joy Webster Barbre much of which can be browsed at Google Books.
Finally, an interesting article by Helen Merrick in Limina, a journal of historical and cultural studies, can be found at the University of Western Australia website. Merrick refers to several Munby diary extracts of which this is one, from 19 August 1860: ‘. . . let me look on this hardworking simplicity, this humble unselfish devotion, which finds its highest expression in the doings of a sweep or a lapdog, and feel, unreservedly, what I always meant to prove - that the veriest drudge, such as she is, becomes heroic when she truly loves.’
Cullwick had humble origins, although, unusually, she did learn to read and write. From the age of eight, she worked as a servant in various situations. In 1854, she met Munby, a trained solicitor acting for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners Office. He had a long-standing interest in working class women, and became fascinated with Cullwick. Subsequently, she took a variety of part-time servant jobs so as to be near him in London. In 1873, they married secretly, and Cullwick went to live in Munby’s lodgings. Nevertheless she retained her maiden name, and her servant’s job, and her servant’s salary. In the early 1880s she left him, and took a position in her home county of Shropshire. However, Munby was a regular visitor until her death.
Wikipedia has entries on both Munby and Cullwick. According to the one on Cullwick, she proudly referred to herself as Munby's ‘drudge and slave’. For much of her life, she wore a leather strap around her right wrist and a locking chain around her neck, to which Munby had a key. She wrote letters almost daily to him, describing her long hours of work in great detail, and she would arrange to visit him ‘in my dirt’, showing the results of a full day of cleaning and other domestic work.
According to Wikipedia’s entry on Munby his interest in working class women led him to collect hundreds of photographs of, for example, female mine workers, kitchen maids, milkmaids, charwomen, and acrobats. These were left, along with his and Cullwick’s diaries, to Trinity College, Cambridge, but were not opened to the public until 1950, as per the terms of Munby’s will. Since then, they’ve been used extensively by researchers, especially those examining the role of women during the Victorian period.
There is good information about the diaries and a few extracts on the website of Adam Matthews Publications, which promotes a digital version of the Munby papers held by Trinity College. There is also quite a lot from the diaries in Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives by Joy Webster Barbre much of which can be browsed at Google Books.
Finally, an interesting article by Helen Merrick in Limina, a journal of historical and cultural studies, can be found at the University of Western Australia website. Merrick refers to several Munby diary extracts of which this is one, from 19 August 1860: ‘. . . let me look on this hardworking simplicity, this humble unselfish devotion, which finds its highest expression in the doings of a sweep or a lapdog, and feel, unreservedly, what I always meant to prove - that the veriest drudge, such as she is, becomes heroic when she truly loves.’
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