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FEBRUARY

‘I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.’

MAE WEST

1 February

1857 [New York]

An epidemic of crime this winter. ‘Garotting’ stories abound, some true, some no doubt fictitious, devised to explain the absence of one’s watch and pocketbook after a secret visit to some disreputable place, or to put a good face on some tipsy street fracas. But a tradesman was attacked the other afternoon in broad daylight at his own shop door in the Third Avenue near Thirteenth Street by a couple of men, one of whom was caught, and will probably get his deserts in the State prison, for life – the doom of two of the fraternity already tried and sentenced. Most of my friends are investing in revolvers and carry them about at night, and if I expect to have to do a great deal of late street-walking off Broadway, I think I should make the like provision; though it’s a very bad practice carrying concealed weapons. Moreover, there was an uncommonly shocking murder in Bond Street (No. 31) Friday night; one Burdell, a dentist, strangled and riddled with stabs in his own room by some person unknown who must have been concealed in the room. Motive unknown, evidently not plunder.

George Templeton Strong

1867

Tennyson is unhappy from his uncertainty regarding the condition and destiny of man. Is it dispiriting to find a great poet with no better grounds of comfort than a common person? At first it is. But how should the case be otherwise? The poet has only the same materials of sensation and thought as ordinary mortals; he uses them better; but to step outside the human limitations is not granted even to him. The secret is kept from one and all of us. We must turn eyes and thoughts to the finer and nobler aspects of things, and never let the scalpel of Science overbear pen, pencil and plectrum. A Poet’s doubts and anxieties are more comforting than a scientist’s certainties and equanimities.

William Allingham

1944 [Algiers]

We went to Hospital No.95. Incredible place, ex-boys’ school, miles and miles of it, vaulted, monastic, cool in summer and cold right now. 2500 there. Far grimmer than 94. How lucky the boys were at Taplow – air, light, space, newness and even gaiety. In the first ward (we did all orthopaedics yesterday) there were two of the illest men I have ever seen, I think. Just skulls but with living wide, very clear eyes. It was a huge ward and difficult to know where to put the piano. We put it in the centre in the end which meant that I had to keep spinning round as I sang. I tried a monologue, but it was no good in there – too big, too decentralised. While I was walking around talking before we began I said to the illest of the two very ill ones that I hoped he’d excuse my back when I had to turn it on him and he said he would if I’d excuse him for not being shaved. Oh, gosh. [He died two days later.]

Joyce Grenfell

1952 [Egypt]

We were at the El Mansur race course by 7a.m. to watch the trials from Colonel ‘Dickie’ Bird’s flat inside the grandstand. . . . ‘The person we must find is Madame Paris,’ Desmond said later as he shepherded us toward the betting hall: ‘All the jockeys slept last night at her brothel and she knows which horses are being pulled or doped!’ . . . We soon spotted Madame Paris, a short, fat woman with hennaed hair and puffy white cheeks, her red mouth a gash. She was shovelling money through the hatch with scarlet claws covered in rings. Desmond waylaid her and she whispered something in his ear. He came back beaming. ‘Don’t bet the favourite on the first race!’ he announced. ‘Madame P. says Mustapha is going to pull the horse!’ Mustapha is one of the older jockeys, a great frequenter of Madame P.’s brothel and a drug addict. He is riding a horse belonging to Tariq, a senior government official’s son, who doesn’t want it to win – he is betting heavily on the second favourite.

There was a wild cry of ‘Zerroff!’ and the little horses disappeared in a cloud of dust, the jockeys hanging on to the britches of the one in front – except of course for the ones who had been paid to lose, and they were pulling on the reins like mad. Inexplicably Mustapha seemed to be winning. . . . ‘Oh dear,’ said Desmond, ‘poor Mustapha will be in trouble! He wasn’t pulling near hard enough, and Tariq will have lost a packet.’

Sure enough, just as we were about to go, there was a wild outcry from the bar, where Tariq was drowning his sorrows with drink. He had struck Mustapha and Mustapha had struck him back. As two soldiers dragged the jockey from the grandstand and manhandled him through the crowds, he shouted obscenities against the government, reserving his choicest language for Tariq, a well-known queer. ‘OH FATHER OF PRICKS,’ he yells, ‘so many times has thine arse been breeched that . . .’The rest is so awful I really can’t write it! . . . ‘Not much like old Epsom, is it, dear?’ Desmond said as we drove back in his car. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but much more fun!’

Joan Wyndham

1971

Yesterday evening . . . Eardley and I spend some time goggling at the television – partly at yet another American moon shot, partly at a film about Anne of Cleves. The moon shots disgust me in some curious way; there seem such wide disparities involved – between the boredom of listening to a flat American voice reciting figures and distances, mixed with ‘OKs’ and ‘ERs’, and the horrifying human tensions and anxieties lying behind them – and between the courage and danger of the astronauts and the cowardly Eardley’s enjoyment of that courage and danger. Perhaps I malign him or exaggerate the nature of his emotion, but I take his feelings as typical of many people’s. So what is left but dismay and semi-disbelief as I loll back gazing with a sort of distaste at the infinitely brilliant mastery of space by men’s minds.

Frances Partridge

2 February

1751

Having received a full answer from Mr P— [Vincent Perronet], I was clearly convinced that I ought to marry. For many years I remained single, because I believed I could be more useful in a single, than in a married state. And I praise God, who enabled me so to do. I now as fully believe, that in my present circumstances, I might be more useful in a married state; into which, upon this clear conviction, and by the advice of my friends, I entered a few days after.

John Wesley

1821

I have been considering what can be the reason why I always wake, at a certain hour in the morning, and always in very bad spirits – I may say, in actual despair and despondency, in all respects – even of that which pleased me over night. In about an hour or two, this goes off, and I compose either to sleep again, or, at least, to quiet. In England, five years ago, I had the same kind of hypochondria, but accompanied with so violent a thirst that I have drank as many as fifteen bottles of soda-water, in one night, after going to bed, and been still thirsty – calculating, however, some lost from the bursting out and effervescence and overflowing of the soda-water, in drawing the corks, or striking off the necks of the bottles from mere thirsty impatience. At present, I have not the thirst; but the depression of spirits is no less violent.

Lord Byron

3 February

1826

This is the first morning since my troubles that I felt at awaking

I had drunken deep

Of all the blessedness of sleep.^*

I made not the slightest pause nor dreamd a single dream nor even changed my side. This is a blessing to be grateful for. There is to be a meeting of the Creditors to-day but I care not for the issue. If they drag me into the Court obtorto collo [‘by the throat’] instead of going into this scheme of arrangement they will do themselves a great injury and perhaps eventually do me good though it would give me much pain.

Sir Walter Scott

1973

Still reading Walter Scott’s journal. He, the least valetudinarian of men, recorded the incipient signs of his old age: ‘Terrible how they increase the last year.’ He clearly had little strokes, yet was not sure whether they were strokes or not. Found he could not marshal his words, and thought it was fear or nerves which caused this; that he must pull himself together and snap out of it. Reminders of mortality are indeed painful.

James Lees-Milne

1977 [Brussels]

Dinner at a very good fish restaurant enlivened, if that is the word, on the way out by sensing a slight feeling of embarrassment amongst the staff, which was indeed well founded, as we saw on the ground floor – we had been eating on the first floor – the upturned soles of a Japanese who seemed at least unconscious and possibly dead. When we got outside an ambulance drew up and a stretcher was rushed in. We asked Ron Argen, our inimitable driver, whether he knew what was happening. He said: ‘Oh, yes, certainly, oyster poisoning. Quite often happens, but the restaurant is insured against it, so there is no need to worry.’

Roy Jenkins

1989 [Dungeness, Kent]

For two months after moving here I spent hours each day picking up fragments of countless smashed bottles, china plates, pieces of rusty metal. There was a bike, cooking pots, even an old bedstead. Rubbish had been scattered over the whole landscape. Each day I thought I had got to the end of the task only to find the shingle had thrown up another crop overnight.

Sunny days were the best for clearing up, as the glass and pottery glinted. I buried the lot on the site of an old bonfire at the bottom of the garden in a large mound, which I covered with the clumps of grass I dug out when I built the shingle garden.

I was describing the garden to Maggi Hambling at a gallery opening. And said I intended to write a book about it.

She said: ‘Oh, you’ve finally discovered nature, Derek.’

‘I don’t think it’s really quite like that,’ I said, thinking of Constable and Samuel Palmer’s Kent.

‘Ah, I understand completely. You’ve discovered modern nature.’

Derek Jarman

4 February

1777

Dined at Lord Monboddo’s with a good deal of company; drank rather too much. Called in on my way home at Mr. John Syme’s to consult the cause, Cuttar against Rae. He followed the old method, and read over my paper from beginning to end. I was intoxicated to a certain degree. Met in the street with a coarse strumpet, went to the Castle Hill, was lascivious with her, but had prudence enough to prevent me from embarking. Was vexed that I had begun bad practices in 1777. Home and finished a paper.

James Boswell

1939

Vita and I go round to the Beales [tenant farmers on Nicolson estate] where there is a Television Set lent by the local radio-merchant. We see a Mickey Mouse, a play and a Gaumont British film. I had always been told that the television could not be received above 25 miles from Alexandra Palace. But the reception was every bit as good as at Selfridge’s. Compared with a film, it is a bleary, flickering, dim, unfocused, interruptible thing, the size of a quarto sheet of paper as this on which I am typing. But as an invention it is tremendous and may alter the whole basis of democracy.

Harold Nicolson

1947

During the night, New York was covered with snow. Central Park is transformed. The children have cast aside their roller skates and taken up skis; they rush boldly down the tiny hillocks. Men remain bareheaded, but many of the young people stick fur puffs over their ears fixed to a half-circle of plastic that sits on their hair like a ribbon – it’s hideous.

Simone de Beauvoir

1953

What could be funnier than the Goncourts’ exclamation when they learned that the earth would not last more than a few thousand centuries: ‘And what will become of our books?’ Yet after all, it wasn’t so stupid. Unless you write to eat, or to ‘succeed’ in the here and now, you wonder what impels you to exhaust yourself in the void and why you bother to seek distant friends, since you have them here at hand, the kind who read you like an open book without any need of paper and ink.

Jean Cocteau

1975

Thinking so much these days about what it is to be a woman, I wonder whether an ingrained sense of guilt is not a feminine characteristic. A man who has no children may feel personally deprived but he does not feel guilty, I suspect. A woman who has no children is always on the defensive.

May Sarton

1975

Late this afternoon in the House someone said to me, ‘Have you heard the news? Margaret Thatcher has swept to the top in the leadership poll.’ I fear that I felt a sneaking feminist pleasure. Damn it, that lass deserves to win. Her cool and competent handling of the cheaper mortgages issue in the last election campaign gave us our only moment of acute anxiety. All right, it was a dishonest nonsense as a policy, but she dealt with it like a professional.

Barbara Castle

5 February

1798

Walked to Stowey with Coleridge, returned by Woodlands; a very warm day. In the continued singing of birds distinguished the notes of a blackbird or thrush. The sea over-shadowed by a thick dark mist, the land in sunshine. The sheltered oaks and beeches still retaining their own leaves. Observed some trees putting out red shoots. Query: What are they?

Dorothy Wordsworth

1809

At noon today, the 5th, I found Elisa in bed, I got in: fine thighs, but a face that looks stupid and lives up to its promise; twenty-four livres.

Stendhal

1882

Mr [John Everett] Millais is going to paint the portrait of one of the Duchess of Edinburgh’s children. The Duchess is staying with Princess Mary, Kensington Palace. Mr Millais went to see her yesterday, doubtless very shy. She offended him greatly. She enquired where his ‘rooms’ were, evidently doubtful whether a Princess might condescend to come to them. ‘My rooms, ma’am, are in Palace Gate [Kensington],’ and he told papa afterwards, with great indignation, he daresay they were much better than hers. He is right proud of his house.

He says she speaks English without the slightest accent, the Russians are wonderful at languages. They say the late Czar prided himself on his good English, till he found when he came to England that, having learnt from a Scotchman, he spoke Scotch.

A pedestrian who had dropped half-a-crown before a blind person said, ‘Why, you’re not blind’! ‘I, oh no sir, if the board says so, they’ve given me the wrong one, I’m deaf and dumb’! Queer thing how fast some blind folks can walk when no one is about!

Beatrix Potter

1884

Today, at the Brébant dinner, we talked about the crushing of the minds of children and young men under the huge volume of things taught them. We agreed that an experiment was being carried out on the present generation of which it was impossible to predict the consequences. And in the course of the discussion somebody advanced the ironical idea that our present-day system of universal education might well deprive society of the educated man and endow it with the educated woman: not a reassuring prospect for the husbands of the future.

The Brothers Goncourt

1931

The mother-in-law of Davidson (who is making a bust of me and at whose house I lunch today), a charming old lady of eighty-four, when – on the point of lighting a cigarette after the meal – I ask her if smoking bothers her, tells us that a similar question was put to her, before 1870, by Bismarck, in a train between Paris and Saint-Germain in which she happened to be alone with him. To which she replied at once:

‘Sir, I do not know. No one has ever smoked in my presence.’

Bismarck immediately had the train stopped so that he could change to another compartment.

André Gide

1944 [Naples]

There have been newspaper accounts of urban buses seen careering away into the remote fastness of the Apennines, there to be reduced in comfort to their component parts. Trams, left where they had come to a standstill when the departing Germans wrecked the generating station, have been spirited away in the night. A railway engine, stranded in open country owing to the looting of rails and sleepers, was driven off when these rails and sleepers were quite incredibly relaid, to a place more discreetly located for its demolition.

No feat, according to the newspapers, and to public rumour, both of which dwell with great delight on such flamboyant acts of piracy, is too outrageous for this new breed of robber. In the region of Agropoli small ships left unguarded have been lifted out of the water and mysteriously transported away, and portions of their superstructures have later been discovered miles inland, hidden in orchards as if they had been carried there and left high and dry by some tidal wave. In revenge, said the newspaper reporting this case, a party of fishermen raided an isolated castle in the area and went off with tapestries which they used to repair their sails.

Nothing has been too large or too small – from telegraph poles to phials of penicillin – to escape the Neapolitan kleptomania. A week or two ago an orchestra playing at the San Carlo to an audience largely clothed in Allied hospital blankets, returned from a five-minute interval to find all its instruments missing. A theoretically priceless collection of Roman cameos was abstracted from the museum and replaced by modern imitations, the thief only learning – so the reports go – when he came to dispose of his booty that the originals themselves were counterfeit. Now the statues are disappearing from the public squares, and one cemetery has lost most of its tombstones. Even the manhole covers have been found to have marketable value, so that suddenly these too have all gone, and everywhere there are holes in the road.

Norman Lewis

6 February

1769

I spent an hour with a venerable woman, near ninety years of age, who retains her health, her senses, her understanding, and even her memory, to a good degree. In the last century she belonged to my grandfather Annesley’s congregation, at whose house her father and she used to dine every Thursday; and whom she remembers to have frequently seen in his study, at the top of the house, with his window open, and without any fire, winter or summer. He lived seventy-seven years, and would probably have lived longer, had he not begun water drinking at seventy.

John Wesley

1881

George Eshelby [local vicar] tells me that Mrs Travel’s girl has been confined in her cottage of a stillborn child and that Williams [groom] has confessed that he is the father. Mrs Travel came with the same story. I blame her very much after the experience she had with her other girl that she permitted the daughter to come home from service without sending Williams away. The cottage is too small. Williams says it was no seeking of his. She laid on the top of him when he happened to drop asleep over his book. Even young Morris [footman] was found in equivocal positions with her. It appears to Williams she has tried to entrap him.

Dearman Birchall

1922 [Rome]

Today the Pope was at last elected: Cardinal Ratti, now Pius XI. It rained. Consequently the crowd was smaller than yesterday and armed with umbrellas. Fifteen minutes before noon a wisp of smoke could indistinctly be seen rising from the stove-pipe, becoming thicker, then stopping altogether. ‘È nero!’ ‘È bianco! È fatto il Papa! È fatto il Papa!’ Immediately there was a highly dangerous folding of umbrellas and a rush for the church doors. But they proved to have been suddenly closed and a file of soldiers was drawn up in front of them. As the pushing from behind continued, the crush amidst the re-opened umbrellas became almost intolerable. Excitement was at a peak. Everybody tried to keep an eye, between the spread umbrellas, on the loggia high up the façade of St Peter’s from where the name of the elected Pontiff would be announced.

Almost three-quarters of an hour passed before there resounded abruptly cries of ‘Ombrelli, ombrelli!’ and, in a breathless tension, umbrellas (several thousand umbrellas) were snapped to. The glass door of the loggia was opened, attendants stepped forward and laid over the parapet a large velvet carpet embroidered with armorial bearings. Then there could be caught sight of a big golden crucifix and above the edge of the parapet the head and gesticulating hands of a cardinal. Deathly silence. The cardinal proclaimed: His Eminence – he paused – the Most Venerable Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Ratti, had been elected Pope and had adopted the name Pius XI. An immense jubilation broke out, hats and handkerchiefs were flourished, and shouts of E Viva! re-echoed.

The cardinal and the monsignori made signs to the crowd to wait. There was still something to come. And after about ten minutes a big surprise occurred. For the first time since 1870 the Pope showed himself to the people of Rome assembled in the open square. Above the parapet of the loggia could be discerned a white arm moving in a gesture of blessing and rather full, not specially remarkable, scholar’s features while at the same time there could be heard a deep, melodious, slightly unctuous voice very clearly pronouncing blessing upon the crowd. The latter, whenever the voice halted, answered with a resonant ‘Amen’.

Count Harry Kessler

1941 [Holland]

Today I wasn’t in the best of moods. A little disappointed in myself. I went to visit Miep, who didn’t go to school because she wasn’t well. A friend of theirs has been arrested. We’re all supposed to register, we can’t postpone it any longer, and I guess we’ll get a ‘J’ stamped on our papers. Anyway. Whatever happens, happens. I don’t want to think about it too much. Letter from Guus [her brother], dated December. He’s so happy there, he’s turning into a real American. Only he misses us, of course, but he says he thinks the country is even more beautiful and wonderful than our own lovely little country. Then it must be pretty special! He describes all sorts of domestic appliances, butter, tinned goods, advertisements, the bright lights, etc. and we meanwhile sitting here in the dark, simply drooling over his descriptions of the good life over there . . .

Edith Velmans

7 February

1682

I continu’d ill for 2 fitts after, and then bathing my leggs to the knees in Milk made as hott as I could endure it, and sitting so in it, in a deepe Churn or Vessell, covered with blanquets and drinking Carduus posset, then going to bed and sweating, I not onely missed that expected fit, but had no more.

John Evelyn

1856

Quarrelled with Turgenev, and had a wench at my place.

Leo Tolstoy

1943

Peter Blume – handsome, sweet, good, and, as a painter, the genius of our age – and his wife – also childishly good and devoted – had an enormous cocktail party. Two famous wits were present – James Thurber and S. J. Perelman – and this is the waggish dialogue that ensued, with me as a buffer.

(Enter Perelman.)

Perelman: Dawn, I hear your book is going like blazes. How many copies sold?

Me: (lying) Why, I imagine around fifteen thousand.

Perelman: Ah, here’s Thurber. You know Dawn.

Thurber: Hello, Dawn, how many copies did your book sell? Fifty thousand?

Me: Well, more like twenty.

Thurber: Understand you got $15,000 from the movies. Shoulda got more. Would’ve if you’d held out.

Me: Well, it would still all be gone now no matter what I got.

Thurber: (glancing around, though almost blind) Big party. Musta set Peter back about fifty bucks. What’d he get for his picture?

Perelman: Do you realize that bastard Cerf takes 20 percent of my play rights, same as he did for ‘Junior Miss’?

Thurber: Shouldn’t do it. Harcourt never took a cent off me. Had it in the contract.

Perelman: I’d like to have lunch with you and discuss that, Jim. Jesus, Jim – 20 percent!

Thus does the wit flow from these two talented fellows.

Dawn Powell

1980

Just in time for Joyce Grenfell’s Memorial Service. Westminster Abbey packed to the doors. What a well-loved lady she was; she had what the Zulus call ‘shine’. How typical of her that she always referred to the side-duties of a celebrity – charity openings, bazaars and lunches – as ‘fringe benefits’ and worked as hard at them as her professional work. ‘The lines’, she used to say, quoting the Psalms, ‘are fallen to me in pleasant places’. Bernard Levin and I (we the undersized) crouch behind two of the largest men I have ever seen. Bach, Mozart – her favourite composers – modest, touching tribute from her local vicar, a reading – disappointing unmoving – from Paul Scofield and then the rush for the West Door, waspishly envying those who seem entitled to chauffeurs (eg Peter Hall and Permanent Secretaries). Heavy establishment top-dressing but lovely to see so many less famous faces. Memorial services may be disliked by those they honour, but to those left behind they serve as a sort of surrogate encounter with death.

Sir Hugh Casson

8 February

1841

My Journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste, gleanings from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but in it for the gods.

They are my correspondents, to whom daily I send off this sheet postpaid. I am clerk in their counting-room, and at evening transfer the account from day-book to ledger. It is as a leaf which hangs over my head in the path. I bend the twig and write my prayers on it; then letting it go, the bough springs up and shows the scrawl to heaven. As if it were not kept shut in my desk, but were as public a leaf as any in nature. It is papyrus by the riverside; it is vellum in the pastures; it is parchment on the hills. I find it everywhere as free as the leaves which troop along the lanes in autumn. The crow, the goose, the eagle carry my quill, and the wind blows the leaves as far as I go. Or, if my imagination does not soar, but gropes in slime and mud, then I write with a reed.

H. D. Thoreau

1941 [Dresden]

Lissy Meyerhof sent six pairs of secondhand socks, presumably originally belonging to Erich’s sons – a mercy, since I am running around with holes and sore, dirty feet. The package and the letter was accompanied by a note, translated from the Italian, from Hans Meyerhof, I was able to establish his concentration camp, on the Deserto . . .

Cohn, congenial Winter Aid man of the Jewish Community, whom I was this time unable to grant any additional donation, saw my completely torn carpet slippers and supported my application for a pair from the Jewish clothing store; I am to fetch them there on Monday. Yet another mercy.

On the evening of the fifth almost friendly contact with the corrupt and powerful Estreicher, with whom I clashed so violently in May because of the accommodation business. It was about reorganizing the billets, though we are spared. The Katzes on the ground floor are going to Berlin, in their place comes a homo novus, who appears to have given a very good bribe: He is not only to get two rooms just for himself, but a third one as well for his Aryan housekeeper . . .

On the fourth to Frau Kronheim for a touchingly nice short visit (real coffee, cake, a cigar) . . . A woman of about sixty, widow of a straw hat manufacturer, evidently once affluent, probably a little even now. Large room in Bautzener Strasse, of course bed and washstand y todo in the same room, most furniture in storage. Conversations naturally always the same: Affidavit – will America enter the war? – Recently: What is going to happen to Italy? – Here the English recovery is tremendous. Only yesterday I saw the December issue of The Twentieth Century at the dentist’s . . . There the Italian offensive against and in (in!) Egypt was discussed and there was a big map, and today Benghazi has already been taken. Will England succeed in defeating Italy? Hitler’s speech on January 30 (‘I shall force a decision this year’) had a different tone from all the previous ones. Nothing more about a seven years’ war, nothing more about friendship with Russia and the Balkans – now only: We are prepared for every eventuality, and submarine threat against the USA. The speech is supposed to have sounded like a cry of rage, his voice breaking. True security or Despair? – Rumors everywhere of new levies and troops sent eastward and motorization.

Victor Klemperer

1945 [Bergen-Belsen]

I had hung my coat in a cupboard. Someone has stolen the buttons.

Abel J. Herzberg

1948

Looked in on Tony and Violet Powell, and laughed much over Duke of Windsor’s Memoirs and Americanisms in them – for instance, ‘Fatty’ instead of ‘Tubby’. Wondered if Royal Family had been given advance copy, or if they opened Sunday Express each week apprehensively.

Malcolm Muggeridge

1983 [Dundee]

A day off from filming An Englishman Abroad and I go to Edinburgh with Alan Bates. We climb the tower near the castle to see the camera obscura. The texture of the revolving bowl and the softness of the reflection convert the view into an eighteenth-century aquatint in which motor cars seem as delicate and exotic as sedan chairs. The traffic is also rendered more sedate and unreal for being silent.

An element of voyeurism in it. The guide, a genteel Morningside lady, trains the mirror on some adjacent scaffolding where workmen are restoring a church. ‘I often wonder,’ she muses in the darkened room, ‘if one were to catch them . . . well, unawares. I mean,’ she adds hastily, ‘taking a little rest.’

Alan Bennett

9 February

1826

Methinks I have been like Burns’s poor labourer

So constantly in Ruin’s sight

The view o’t gives me little fright.^*

Sir Walter Scott

1940

A letter came from Dan [her husband], dated January 29th: ‘We have arrived and our official address is Notts Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, Palestine. Letters by airmail take about a week.’ I also had a letter from Whitaker [her husband’s valet]. It was completely blacked out by a censor except for ‘My Lady’ at the top. I wonder what he wrote.

Countess of Ranfurly

1941 [POW Camp, Germany]

Last night’s rumour of thousands of parcels was apparently true – except that they were all for Obermassfeld. But however disappointing it may be for us, I’m extremely glad this hospital is at last getting them, as they have had a rotten time. Wounds were taking twice as long to heal because the patients hadn’t the food to build up on. Hunger must have cost hundreds of lives. However, tho’ no food parcels, we hear there are 21 smokes ones – and smoke is half the battle. It is extraordinary, looking round the room during meals the number of backs which are now rounded. Anybody sitting with a straight back looks enormous. I suppose due to hard benches and stools. How odd it will seem to sit in an armchair again.

Captain John Mansel

1991

‘Iraqi morale wilts under allied onslaught’. Mine has rather wilted too. And the country has disappeared beneath a blanket of snow.

Gyles Brandreth

10 February

1661

(Lord’s Day.) Took physique all day, and, God forgive me, did spend it in reading of some little French romances.

Samuel Pepys

1858 [New Orleans]

As all my paintings are finished and my easel packed up I seem to have unlimited hours in the day, so I went to a Slave Auction. I went alone (a quarter of an hour before the time) and asked the auctioneer to allow me to see everything. He was very smiling and polite, took me upstairs, showed me all the articles for sale – about thirty women and twenty men, twelve or fourteen babies. He took me round and told me what they could do: ‘She can cook and iron, has worked also in the fields.’ etc., ‘This one a No. 1 cook and ironer –,’ etc. He introduced me to the owner who wanted to sell them (being in debt) and he did not tell the owner what I had told him (that I was English and only came from curiosity), so the owner took a great deal of pains to make me admire a dull-looking mulatress and said she was an excellent servant and could just suit me. At twelve we all descended into a dirty hall adjoining the street big enough to hold a thousand people. There were three sales going on at the same time, and the room was crowded with rough-looking men, smoking and spitting, bad-looking set – a mêlée of all nations.

I noticed one mulatto girl who looked very sad and embarrassed. She was going to have a child and seemed frightened and wretched. I was very sorry I could not get near to her to speak to her. The others were not sad at all. Perhaps they were glad of a change. Some looked round anxiously at the different bearded faces below them, but there was no great emotion visible.

Before I went the young man of the house had said, ‘Well, I don’t think there is anything to see – they sell them just like so many rocking chairs. There’s no difference.’ And that is the truest word that can be said about the affair. When I see how Miss Murray speaks of sales and separations as regretted by the owners and as disagreeable (that is her tone if not her words), I feel inclined to condemn her to attend all the sales held in New Orleans in two months. How many that would be one may guess, as three were going on the morning I went down.

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon

1915

My neighbour talks for hours with the landlady. Both speak softly, the landlady almost inaudibly, and therefore so much the worse. My writing, which has been coming along for the past two days, is interrupted, who knows for how long a time? Absolute despair. Is it like this in every house? Does such ridiculous and absolutely killing misery await me with every landlady in every city?

Franz Kafka

1922

Not many remarks about art have so gripped one as Meier-Graefe’s comment on Delacroix: ‘This is a case of a hot heart beating in a cold person.’

Bertolt Brecht

1947

In three days I’m leaving New York. I have a lot of shopping to do and business to take care of, and all morning long I stride along the muddy streets of the better neighborhoods. In their windows, candy stores display huge red hearts decorated with ribbons and stuffed with bonbons. Hearts are also ingeniously suspended in stationery stores and tie shops. It’ll soon be Valentine’s Day, the day when young girls give gifts to their boyfriends. There’s always some holiday going on in America; it’s distracting. Even private celebrations, especially birthdays, have the dignity of public ceremonies. It seems that the birth of every citizen is a national event. The other evening at a nightclub, the whole room began to sing, in chorus, ‘Happy Birthday,’ while a portly gentleman, flushed and flattered, squeezed his wife’s fingers. The day before yesterday I had to make a telephone call; two college girls went into the booth before me. And while I was pacing impatiently in front of the door, they unhooked the receiver and intoned ‘Happy Birthday.’ They sang it through to the very end. In shops they sell birthday cards with congratulations all printed out, often in verse. And you can ‘telegraph’ flowers on one occasion or another. All the florists advertise in large letters, ‘Wire Flowers.’

Simone de Beauvoir

11 February

1938

All the women in the region are excised. ‘This,’ we are told, ‘is to calm their lust and ensure their conjugal fidelity.’

Immediately afterward we are told: ‘You understand: since these women feel nothing, they give themselves to anyone whatever; nothing stops them . . . Oh, of course, they never give themselves for nothing!’

Obviously the two statements seem contradictory. One is forced to admit that if the aim were conjugal fidelity . . . But no (it seems); rather this: keep the wife from making love for pleasure. For money, it’s all right! And the husband congratulates himself on having a (or more than one) wife who produces income.

This is one of the rare points on which all the Frenchmen, when questioned, agree. One among them, who has a great experience of the ‘moussos’ of Guinea, asserts that he has never met a native woman who sought pleasure in the sexual act; he even went so far as to say, not one who knew voluptuous pleasure.

André Gide

1941 [Holland]

‘Seize the day,’ says Mother. But I’m worried. At home everyone is so optimistic, but others are pessimistic. Many people are hanging around aimlessly in the streets, out of work. There are riots and demonstrations. It doesn’t bode well for us. Enfin Let’s hope that ‘Alles sal reg kom’ – soon! Actually, I’m an idiot to grumble on like this. I’m still enjoying my life as much as I can.

Edith Velmans

1975

Everyone agog at the news that Margaret Thatcher has been elected Tory leader with a huge majority. Surely no working man or woman north of the Wash is ever going to vote for her? I fear a lurch to the right by the Tories and a corresponding lurch to the left by Labour.

To Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s reception for the media, at least I suppose that’s what we were. Newspaper editors; television controllers; journalists and commentators; Heath looking like a tanned waxwork; Wilson; Macmillan a revered side-show, an undoubted star; a few actors (Guinness, Ustinov, Finney); and all the chaps like me – John Tooley, George Christie, Trevor Nunn. And Morecambe and Wise.

It was two and a half hours of tramping round the great reception rooms, eating bits of Lyons pâté, drinking over-sweet warm white wine, everyone looking at everyone else, and that atmosphere of jocular ruthlessness which characterises the Establishment on its nights out. Wonderful paintings, of course, and I was shown the bullet that killed Nelson.

As we were presented, the Queen asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn’t know. The Duke asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn’t know. The Prince of Wales asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn’t know. At least they all knew I was running the National Theatre.

Home by 2 am with very aching feet. Who’d be a courtier?

Peter Hall

12 February

1927

But I am forgetting, after three days, the most important event in my life since marriage – so Clive [Bell, art critic] described it. Mr Cizec has bingled me. I am short haired for life. Having no longer, I think, any claims to beauty, the convenience of this alone makes it desirable. Every morning I go to take up [my] brush and twist that old coil round my finger and fix it with hairpins and then with a start of joy, no I needn’t. In front there is no change; behind I’m like the rump of a partridge. This robs dining out of half its terrors.

Virginia Woolf

1938 [Nanking]

It really is high time for me to get out of here. At 7 o’clock this morning, Chang brought in Fung, a friend from Tientsin, who is watching the house of an American here and whose wife is expecting a baby, which for three days now has been struggling to see the light of this mournful world, and you really can’t blame him. The mother’s life is apparently in danger. Birth definitely needs to be induced. And they come to me of all people!

‘I’m not a doctor, Chang. And I’m not a kuei ma [midwife], either. I’m the “mayor”, and I don’t bring other people’s children into the world. Get the woman to Kulou Hospital at once!’

‘Yes,’ Chang says, ‘that’s all true; but you must come, otherwise won’t work, otherwise woman not get into hospital, she die and baby, too. You must come, then everything good. Mother lives and baby, too!’

And that puts an end to that – ‘Idiots, the whole lot of you!’

And so I had to go along, and who would believe it: As I enter the house, a baby boy is born, and the mother laughs, and the baby cries, and everyone is happy; and Chang, the monkey, has been proved right yet again. And the whole lark cost me ten dollars besides, because I had to bring the poor lad something. If this story gets around, I’m ruined. Just think, there are 250,000 refugees in this city!

John Rabe

1941

Early spring weather since yesterday. Grateful for every additional minute of daylight, for each degree of warmth, for each yard of ground that can be walked (this especially for Eva’s sake). Eva has declined, lost weight, aged so very much – and yet, as my own body declines, I love her ever more ardently, d’amour say the French.

Hopeful, although threatened by catastrophe. Charge because room not blacked out. That can mean a fine of so many 100M that I am forced to sell the house; it can also be disposed of with 20M. There are examples of both; I assumed the worst for a whole day, I am calmer now.

It was truly a misfortune, liability through negligence, as can happen with a car. We are usually both extremely careful with regard to the blackout, on our evening walks we often grumble about illuminated windows, say the police should really do something. And now we ourselves are caught in the act. On the Monday (the tenth) all kinds of things came together, which made me lose the thread. During the day I usually return from shopping at about half past four. Unpacking, hauling coal, a glance at the newspaper, blackout, going out for supper. On Monday I found Frau Kreidl, whom both of us greatly dislike, here. She wanted to be consoled: The whole house had been inspected by the Gestapo – new tenants? Confiscation of the house? (Cupboards opened in our rooms also – there was rather too much tobacco in the house! But they saw only five packets, as a precaution four others are already with Frau Voss.) It grew late. So blackout after the meal. In the Monopol the food so bad that Eva didn’t eat it. I wanted to get her something else at the station. Nothing there either. So I was very out of humor and distracted when we returned, immediately hurried into the kitchen to make tea. Against the night sky, once the light has been switched on, it is impossible to tell whether the shutters have been closed. When the policeman rang the doorbell at nine, we were quite unsuspecting, we led him to the window so that he could see for himself that it was blacked out. The man was courteous and sympathetic; he had to charge me because neighbours had reported the light. I had to state income and property: afterward ‘the chief of police’ will determine the level of the penalty. Until yesterday I was only expecting the worst; yesterday Frau Voss told me of a case in which someone had only paid 12M; admittedly the someone was the Aryan wife of a general, and I have a J on my identity card. Now I must wait, my mood going up and down.

Victor Klemperer

1951 [writing East of Eden]

Lincoln’s Birthday. My first day of work in my new room. It is a very pleasant room and I have a drafting table to work on which I have always wanted – also a comfortable chair given me by Elaine [his wife]. In fact I have never had it so good and so comfortable. I have known such things to happen – the perfect pointed pencil – the paper persuasive – the fantastic chair and a good light and no writing. Surely a man is a most treacherous animal full of his treasured contradictions. He may not admit it but he loves his paradoxes.

Now that I have everything, we shall see whether I have anything. It is exactly that simple. Mark Twain used to write in bed – so did our greatest poet. But I wonder how often they wrote in bed – or whether they did it twice and the story took hold. Such things happen. Also I would like to know what things they wrote in bed and what things they wrote sitting up. All of this has to do with comfort in writing and what its value is. I should think that a comfortable body would let the mind go freely to its gathering. But such is the human that he might react in an opposite way. Remember my father’s story about the man who did not dare be comfortable because he went to sleep. That might be true of me too. Now I am perfectly comfortable in body. I think my house is in order. Elaine, my beloved, is taking care of all the outside details to allow me the amount of free untroubled time every day to do my work. I can’t think of anything else necessary to a writer except a story and the will and the ability to tell it.

John Steinbeck

1962

Had supper at the Savoy. Ted Heath was of the party. A complete bachelor, with great qualities. I wonder whether he could become Prime Minister one day – he is one of those mentioned. He has a funny schoolboyish habit of giggling and shaking his shoulders up and down when he laughs – rather endearing, but odd. Yet perhaps no odder than Rab’s [Butler] strange hooting.

Cynthia Gladwin

13 February

1684

Dr. Tenison communicating to me his intention of Erecting a Library in St. Martines parish, for the publique use, desird my assistance with Sir Chr: Wren about the placing and structure thereof: a worthy and laudable designe: He told me there were 30 or 40 Young Men in Orders in his Parish, either, Governors to young Gent: or Chaplains to Noble-men, who being reprov’d by him upon occasion for frequenting Taverns or Coffè-houses, told him, they would study and employ their time better, if they had books: This put the pious Doctor upon this designe, which I could not but approve of, and indeede a greate reproach it is, that so great a Citty as Lond: should have never a publique Library becoming it: There ought to be one at St Paules, the West end of that Church, (if ever finish’d), would be a convenient place . . .

John Evelyn

1874

Yesterday I spent the whole day in the studio of a strange painter called Degas. After a great many essays and experiments and trial shots in all directions, he has fallen in love with modern life, and out of all the subjects in modern life he has chosen washerwomen and ballet-dancers. When you come to think of it, it is not a bad choice.

It is a world of pink and white, of female flesh in lawn and gauze, the most delightful of pretexts for using pale, soft tints.

He showed me, in their various poses and their graceful foreshortening, washerwomen and still more washerwomen . . . speaking their language and explaining the technicalities of the different movements in pressing and ironing.

Then it was the turn of the dancers. There was their green-room with, outlined against the light of a window, the curious silhouette of dancers’ legs coming down a little staircase, with the bright red of a tartan in the midst of all those puffed-out white clouds, and a ridiculous ballet-master serving as a vulgar foil. And there before one, drawn from nature, was the graceful twisting and turning of the gestures of those little monkey-girls.

An original fellow, this Degas, sickly, neurotic, and so ophthalmic that he is afraid of losing his sight; but for this very reason an eminently receptive creature and sensitive to the character of things. Among all the artists I have met so far, he is the one who has best been able, in representing modern life, to catch the spirit of that life.

The Brothers Goncourt

1902

Before me on my table there are Christmas roses in a chased metal bowl. Although this clearly sounds a very stylish note and though I have always imagined it as something very pretty I feel nothing, nothing at all.

And it’s the second day that the Christmas roses have stood before me.

Robert Musil

1926 [Berlin]

At one o’clock, just as my dinner-party guests were gone, a telephone call from Max Reinhardt. He was at [Karl Gustav] Vollmoeller’s and they wanted me to come over because Josephine Baker was there and the fun was starting. So I drove to Vollmoeller’s harem on the Pariser Platz. Reinhardt and Huldschinsky were surrounded by half a dozen naked girls, Miss Baker was also naked except for a pink muslin apron, and the little Landshoff girl was dressed up as a boy in a dinner-jacket. Miss Baker was dancing a solo with brilliant artistic mimicry and purity of style, like an ancient Egyptian or other archaic figure performing an intricate series of movements without ever losing the basic pattern. This is how their dancers must have danced for Solomon and Tutankhamen. Apparently she does this for hours on end, without tiring and continually inventing new figures like a child, a happy child, at play. She never even gets hot, her skin remains fresh, cool, dry. A bewitching creature, but almost quite unerotic. Watching her inspires as little sexual excitement as does the sight of a beautiful beast of prey.

Count Harry Kessler

1951

It must be told that my second work day is a bust as far as getting into the writing. I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and colour everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing. Almost no progress has taken place since it was invented. The Book of the Dead is as good and as highly developed as anything in the 20th century and much better than most. And yet in spite of this lack of a continuing excellence, hundreds of thousands of people are in my shoes – praying feverishly for relief from their word pangs.

And one thing we have lost – the courage to make new words or combinations. Somewhere that old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship. Oh! you can make words if you enclose them in quotation marks. This indicates that it is dialect and cute.

John Steinbeck

1965 [Singapore]

At 2100 the whole of our party went to the fantastic home of Run Me Shaw, the brother of Run Run Shaw of Hong Kong. The story goes that the elder brother used to hang about for messages, saying ‘Run run?’, and when he had been sent on a message the younger brother would say ‘Run me?’ At all events they are both multi-millionaire magnates now.

The house is set in an elaborate garden with a large swimming pool, fountains, etc., with continually changing lighting systems. We were shown into an immense private cinema and then with evident pride he said to Patricia, Solly and me, ‘Now I will show you my wonderful pink Toyland.’

Solly and I expected to see a display of toys, but in fact it was the most luxurious ladies’ loo imaginable with two pink WCs at the far end, indeed a pink toilet.

Earl Mountbatten of Burma

14 February

1752

This being Valentine Day gave to 52 Children of this parish, as usual 1 penny each 0. 4. 4. Gave Nancy this morning 1. 1. 0.

The Rev. James Woodforde

1941 [POW camp, Germany]

How sick and tired I am of the nightly visitors’ excited entry with ‘What’s the news?’ As if we knew any. To make matters worse I heard somebody in the room talking defeatism – ‘if we lose’ and ‘when we lose’. Slaving in salt mines in Silesia, etc. Hell, one tries to think of home, etc., to keep cheerful if possible, but it would drive one permanently mental if one had to contend with defeatism. Actually, I think half of us, if not the majority, are slowly going mental – tho’ we think we’re sane.

Captain John Mansel

1980 [Düsseldorf]

We had to take Hans Mayer’s car and drive out to the country to a small town to photograph a German butcher. His company is called Herta, it’s one of the biggest sausage companies in Germany. He was a cute guy. He had this interesting building. You could see all the employees. He had my Pig on the wall. Junk everywhere. A lot of toys. A lot of stuffed cows, stuffed pigs. Pigs, pigs, pigs all over the place. And there was art. There were funny things hanging from the ceiling. There were water-dripping paintings. He buys a lot of art, he said they sell more sausages that way because the people are very happy. Then he gave us a white smock and white hat. We went through and watched the ladies make the sausages. It was really fun. You could smell the sauerkraut cooking, but they didn’t give us any hot dogs there. He had the whole portfolio of Picasso that I did the Picasso print of Paloma in. We looked at that, then we had to look at more pigs and more salamis and more hams and more ham art.

Then we took Polaroids for the portrait and had some tea. And his wife came by. They didn’t offer us lunch. Then all of a sudden he asked us if we’d like to try one of his hot dogs. They cooked some up and we had two apiece. They were really good. He said he had to go have lunch back at the lunch room. We had to go off without lunch which we thought was really strange. We got in the car and drove to a restaurant in a place called Bottrop.

As soon as we came in they told us it was this crazy day where all the women chase the men. They cut off your ties. But since we knew that was happening – we saw these drunken ladies running round – we took our ties off and hid them in our pockets. But then they got my shirt tail and they cut it off and it was my good shirt and I was so mad. These women were really bullies. We got back in the car and drove back to Hans’s gallery. I was so tired, and I was really upset about my shirt.

Andy Warhol

1983

ST VALENTINE’S DAY

Got four cards: one from Pandora [his girlfriend], one from Grandma, one from my mother and one from Rosie [his baby sister].

Big, big deal!

I got Pandora a Cupid card and a mini pack of ‘After Eights’. My parents didn’t bother this year, they are saving their money to pay for the solicitor’s letter.

Adrian Mole

15 February

1869

I was in London. Saw Siamese twins. Born in Siam – visited England 1829. They are farmers in North Carolina, and are here to repair their loss of fortune by American war. All the surgeons concur in advising them not to attempt an operation. Chang has 6 girls and 3 boys. Hang has 6 boys and 3 girls. They have a melancholy cast of countenance but brighten up when spoken to. They walk with arms folded in what looks a painful position but is described as being ‘perfectly comfortable’.

Dearman Birchall

1913

Tried to kiss her in a taxi-cab on the way home from the Savoy – the taxicab danger is very present with us – but she rejected me quietly, sombrely. I apologised on the steps of the Flats and said I feared I had greatly annoyed her. ‘I’m not annoyed,’ she said, ‘only surprised’ – in a thoughtful, chilly voice.

We had had supper in Soho, and I took some wine, and she looked so bewitching it sent me in a fever, thrumming my fingers on the seat of the cab while she sat beside me impassive. Her shoulders are exquisitely modelled and a beautiful head is carried poised on a tiny neck.

W. N. P. Barbellion

1915

We both went up to London this afternoon; L[eonard, her husband] to the Library, and I to ramble about the West End, picking up clothes. I am really in rags. It is very amusing. With age too one’s less afraid of the superb shop women. These great shops are like fairies’ palaces now. I swept about in Debenham’s and Marshall’s and so on, buying, as I thought, with great discretion. The shop women are often very charming, in spite of their serpentine coils of black hair. Then I had tea, and rambled down to Charing Cross in the dark, making up phrases and incidents to write about. Which is, I expect, the way one gets killed. I bought a ten and elevenpenny blue dress, in which I sit at this moment.

Virginia Woolf

1943

Hester the cook has a daughter, Elsie, who is the wife of a colored letter-carrier and the mother of two children. Some time ago I endorsed her application for a job at the Edgwood Arsenal, and she got it. She was graded as an unskilled laborer, and paid $3.60 a day. This morning Hester told me that she had been promoted to the rank of spray painter, and her pay lifted to $5.76 a day. It is amazing, with such opportunities open to colored women, that any of them go on working as domestic servants. Hester herself is probably too old for a government job; moreover she is lame. But Emma Ball, the maid, could get one easily, and be sure of rapid promotion, for she writes a good hand and is pretty intelligent. I am paying her $17 a week, which is considerably above the scale for housemaids in Baltimore. In addition, I give her a bonus of $150 a year, a present of $20 at Christmas and another of $20 when she begins her annual vacation of two weeks. Hester is paid $22 a week, with the same bonus and presents. Thus Emma receives $1,074 a year, besides her meals, and Hester $1, 334. They have Thursday and Sunday afternoons and evenings off, and do not come to work until noon on Saturday. When I am out of town in August I often let them off all day. They eat precisely what I eat.

H. L. Mencken

16 February

1798

Went for eggs into the Coombe, and to the bakers; a hail shower; brought home large burthens of sticks, a starlight evening, the sky closed in, and the ground white with snow before we went to bed.

Dorothy Wordsworth

1912

12.5m. Lunch Temp. +6.1º; Supper Temp. +7º. A rather trying position. Evans has nearly broken down in the brain, we think. He is absolutely changed from his normal self-reliant self. This morning and this afternoon he stopped the march on some trivial excuse. We are on short rations, but not very short, food spins out till tomorrow night. We cannot be more than 10 or 12 miles from the depôt, but the weather is all against us. After lunch we were enveloped in a snow sheet, land just looming. Memory should hold the events of a very troublesome march with more troubles ahead. Perhaps all will be well if we can get to our depôt tomorrow fairly early, but it is anxious work with the sick man. But it’s no use meeting troubles halfway, and our sleep is all too short to write more.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott

1932 [after the death of her partner, Lytton Strachey]

At last I am alone. At last there is nothing between us. I have been reading my letters to you in the library this evening. You are so engraved on my brain that I think of nothing else. Everything I look at is part of you. And there seems no point in life now you are gone. I used to say: ‘I must eat my meals properly as Lytton wouldn’t like me to behave badly when he was away.’ But now there is no coming back. No point in ‘improvements’. Nobody to write letters to. Only the interminable long days which never seem to end and the nights which end all too soon and turn to dawns. All gaiety has gone out of my life and I feel old and melancholy. All I can do is to plant snow drops and daffodils in my graveyard! Now there is nothing left. All your papers have been taken away. Your clothes have gone. Your room is bare. In a few months no traces will be left. Just a few book plates in some books and never again, however long I look out of the window, will I see your tall thin figure walking across the path past the dwarf pine past the stumps, and then climb the haha and come across the lawn. Our jokes have gone for ever. There is nobody now to make ‘disçerattas’ with, to laugh over our particular words. To discuss the difficulties of love, to read Ibsen in the evening. And to play cards when we were too ‘dim’ for reading. These mouring sentinels that we arranged so carefully. The shiftings to get the new rose Corneille in the best position. They will go, and the beauty of our library ‘will be over’. – I feel as if I was in a dream, almost unconscious, so much of me was in you.

* * *

And I thought as I threw the rubbish on the bonfire. ‘So that’s the end of his spectacles. Those spectacles that have been his companions all these years. Burnt in a heap of leaves.’ And those vests the ‘bodily companions’ of his days now are worn by a carter in the fields. In a few years what will be left of him? A few books on some shelves, but the intimate things that I loved, all gone.

And soon even the people who knew his pale thin hands and the texture of his thick shiny hair, and grisly beard, they will be dead and all remembrance of him will vanish. I watched the gap close over others but for Lytton one couldn’t have believed (because one did not believe it was ever possible) that the world would go on the same. [She shot herself on 11 March.]

Dora Carrington

1947 [staying in College accommodation while on a lecture tour]

Upon waking, I wonder just why I’m staying here in this sanatorium. The room is white and fluffy, like the one at Vassar. With nurselike attention, a woman has placed a breakfast platter beside me. Last evening, to spare me any fatigue, they brought my dinner to my room. Without leaving my bed, I drink the orange juice, eat the crusty rolls, and savor the charms of convalescence in the café au lait. Nothing is stranger to me than these restrained pleasures. Amid such attentive care I feel so fragile and precious I almost frighten myself. Perhaps I’ve undertaken a detox cure; no alcohol, no noise, no movies, no music, no fever. I draw an armchair up to the table. I’ve stayed here today to write an article before hurrying back to New York and going north. But I like to nurse the illusion that I’m restrained by force and working to distract myself. There’s nothing more restful on a trip than to imagine you’re in prison.

Simone de Beauvoir

17 February

1763

I dined at the Chaplain’s table upon a roasted Tongue and Udder. N.B. I shall not dine on a roasted Tongue and Udder again very soon.

Rev. James Woodforde

1888

Today a dinner was given in Rodin’s honour by his friends and admirers, a dinner at which I presided, with a draught in my back.

I found myself sitting next to Clemenceau with his round Kalmuck head, and he told me some anecdotes about the peasants in his province and how they would stop him out in the open during his tours of the department to consult him about their illnesses. He described one huge woman who, just as the horses of his brake were about to gallop away from some place or other, leaned on their cruppers and called out: ‘Oh, Monsieur, I suffer from wind something awful!’ To which the Radical deputy, giving his horses a crack of the whip which sent them on their way, replied:‘Then fart, my good woman, fart!’

The Brothers Goncourt

1912

A very terrible day. Evans looked a little better after a good sleep, and declared, as he always did, that he was quite well. He started in his place on the traces, but half an hour later worked his ski shoes adrift, and had to leave the sledge. The surface was awful, the soft recently fallen snow clogging the ski and runners at every step, the sledge groaning, the sky overcast, and the land hazy. We stopped after about one hour, and Evans came up again, but very slowly. Half an hour later he dropped out again on the same plea. He asked Bowers to lend him a piece of string. I cautioned him to come on as quickly as he could and he answered cheerfully as I thought. We had to push on, and the remainder of us were forced to pull very hard, sweating heavily. Abreast the Monument Rock we stopped, and seeing Evans a long way astern, I camped for lunch. There was no alarm at first, and we prepared tea and our own meal, consuming the latter. After lunch, and Evans still not appearing, we looked out, to see him still afar off. By this time we were alarmed, and all four started back on ski. I was first to reach the poor man and shocked at his appearance; he was on his knees with clothing disarranged, hands uncovered and frost-bitten, and a wild look in his eyes. Asked what was the matter, he replied with a slow speech that he didn’t know, but thought he must have fainted. We got him on his feet, but after two or three steps he sank down again. He showed every sign of complete collapse. Wilson, Bowers, and I went back for the sledge, whilst Oates remained with him. When we returned he was practically unconscious, and when we got him into the tent quite comatose. He died quietly at 12.30 a.m. On discussing the symptoms we think he began to get weaker just before we reached the Pole, and that his downward path was accelerated first by the shock of his frost-bitten fingers, and later by falls during rough travelling on the glacier, further by his loss of all confidence in himself. Wilson thinks it certain he must have injured his brain by a fall. It is a terrible thing to lose a companion in this way, but calm reflection shows that there could not have been a better ending to the terrible anxieties of the past week. Discussion of the situation at lunch yesterday shows us what a desperate pass we were in with a sick man on our hands so far from home.

At 1 a.m. we packed up and came down over the pressure ridges, finding our depôt easily.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott

1931

Finished reading The Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin. Very fresh mind – he at once joins the company of those whom we wish we could have met. Such a distinctive French book makes a Scot feel that he is rather a dog-collared dog. We cannot recall Mary Stuart without seeing the shadow of Knox at her back.

William Soutar

18 February

1814

Is there any thing beyond? – who knows? He that can’t tell. Who tells that there is? He who don’t know. And when shall he know? Perhaps, when he don’t expect it, and, generally when he don’t wish it. In this last respect, however, all are not alike; it depends a good deal upon education, – something upon nerves and habits – but most upon digestion.

Lord Byron

1852

I have a commonplace-book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in my mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success. They are translated from earth to heaven. I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant, – perhaps transmuted more into the substance of the human mind, – I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all.

H. D. Thoreau

1867

Mist. Steamer to Yarmouth. Flags flying. The Queen expected from Osborne, coming to take a look at this part of the island. I say to Tennyson, ‘Perhaps the Queen will visit you to-day.’ He thinks it possible.

‘Then I had better go?’

‘No, stay by all means.’

Talking of the Queen, when Tennyson was at Osborne Her Majesty said to him, ‘Cockneys don’t annoy us,’ to which Tennyson rejoined, ‘If I could put a sentry at each of my gates I should be safe.’

‘She was praising my poetry; I said, “Every one writes verses now. I daresay Your Majesty does.” She smiled and said, “No! I never could bring two lines together!”’

The Queen, I find, has steamed past Yarmouth, landed at Alum Bay, and lunched there at the hotel.

William Allingham

1925 [while teaching at Arnold House school, Wales]

On Sunday I started on an awful thing called week’s duty. It means that I have no time at all from dawn to dusk so much to read a postcard or visit a water-closet. Already – today is Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday – my nerves are distraught. Yesterday I beat a charming boy called Clegg and kicked a hideous boy called Cooper and sent Cooke to the proprietor. Yesterday afternoon I had my first riding lesson and enjoyed it greatly. It is not an easy sport or a cheap one but most agreeable. No letter from Olivia.

Yesterday in a history paper the boy Howarth wrote: ‘In this year James II gave birth to a son but many people refused to believe it and said it had been brought to him in a hot water bottle.’

Evelyn Waugh

1947 [during miners’ stoppages crisis]

Another arctic day, colder than ever. I went to shop in Harrods, knowing that they generate their own electricity. At the centre of Harrods is a large hall with rows of armchairs, in which a posse of weary elderly people had come to roost, to spend the hours in comparative warmth by a glimmering light. What were they thinking of in this twilight? I suppose of past comforts, of houses with servants who answered bells and put coals on the fire and drew the blinds and curtains when dusk fell, and brought tea, and polished silver. But now they were grateful for this refuge, where it was too dark even to read.

I returned home, put on my best hat, and armed with a bicycle lamp against the black-out, set out to see Sybil Colefax. Rose Macaulay was there today. She said it was monstrous that the BBC had cut the Third Programme because of the fuel crisis, as it is the one good thing we get, and only broadcasts from six to eleven in the evenings. We all urged her to take the matter up. [V. S.] Pritchett was there, at a loose end because the New Statesman, like other periodicals, has been suspended.

Cynthia Gladwyn

19 February

1665

At supper, hearing by accident of my mayds letting in a rogueing Scotch woman to helpe them to washe and scoure in our house, I fell mightily out, and made my wife, to the disturbance of the house and neighbours, to beat our little girle, and then we shut her down into the cellar, and there she lay all night.

Samuel Pepys

1860

Sitting by his fireside, Flaubert told us the story of his first love. He was on his way to Corsica. Till then he had done no more than lose his innocence with his mother’s chambermaid. He happened on a little hotel in Marseilles where some women from Lima had arrived with sixteenth-century ebony furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl at which everyone who saw it marvelled. Three women in silk dressing-gowns falling in a straight line from the back to the heels, together with a little Negro dressed in nankeen and wearing only Turkish slippers: for a young Norman who had hitherto travelled only from Normandy to Champagne and from Champagne to Normandy, all this was very tempting and exotic. It conjured up visions of a patio full of tropical flowers, with a fountain singing in the middle.

One day, coming back from a bathe in the Mediterranean and bringing with him all the life of that Fountain of Youth, he was invited into her bedroom by one of the women, a magnificent woman of thirty-five. He gave her one of those kisses into which one puts all one’s soul. The woman came to his room that night and started making love with him straight away. There followed an orgy of delight, then tears, then silence.

He has gone back to Marseilles several times since then, but nobody has ever been able to tell him what became of these women. The last time he went through, on his way to Tunis to collect material for his Carthaginian novel, he went as usual to have a look at the house, but could not find it. He looked for it, hunted for it, and finally noticed that it had been turned into a toyshop, with a barber’s on the first floor. He went upstairs, had himself shaved, and recognized the wallpaper of the bedroom.

The Brothers Goncourt

1932

Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was here for dinner last night. Later in the evening Paul Patterson, Hamilton Owens, and John W. Owens dropped in. When Sedgwick left, along about midnight, Patterson and John Owens remained, and I finally got to bed a little after two o’clock.

Sedgwick was full of curious anecdotes. He told about being at a dinner party with the late Moorfield Storey. The name of Hearst came up, and Storey said: ‘Hearst married a prostitute, and then gradually dragged her down to his own level.’

H. L. Mencken

1981

In the evening I distributed the prizes at the Prendergast School in Lewisham. The school, with nearly six hundred girls, is in the process of changing from grammar to comprehensive and has a high academic reputation, which the young, vital and very pretty headmistress has no intention of allowing to decline. I predict a brilliant career for her. She told me hair-raising stories of threats to the staff in her last school. The headmaster was pursued with a gun. She was visited by two thuggish-looking men, who said that they had come to ‘do’ her because of the way she had treated one of their relatives. She informed them coolly that there was a policeman in the next room (by some lucky chance, but perhaps not entirely by coincidence, there was). The two thugs took to their heels.

I distributed a number of prizes to black girls and asked the headmistress why they seemed to be specially applauded. Did the other girls feel sorry for them? No, I was told, it’s because they are such good athletes. I am not an observant person, but I had noticed their long graceful limbs. ‘The athletes and the naughty ones are always cheered the loudest.’

Lord Longford

20 February

1841

When I am going out for an evening, I arrange the fire in my stove so that I do not fail to find a good one when I return though it would have engaged my frequent attention. So that, when I know I am to be at home, I sometimes make believe that I may go out, to save trouble. And this is the art of living, too, – to leave our life in a condition to go alone, and not to require a constant supervision. We will then sit down serenely to live, as by the side of a stove.

H. D. Thoreau

1890

K. told me these two tales when she was here. On her way North she overheard at the table a father and mother and two daughters talking. Father – ‘It’s delightful to be in a hotel where you can eat dinner without gloves on.’ Daughter – ‘Why, Father, I think it’s quite rulable to do so when the family is alone.’ Father – ‘Your mother doesn’t think so. I always have to eat my dinner and play whist with my gloves on.’ This she actually heard, so there must exist a gloved and ‘rulable’ race somewhere in the broad land. Kath. also told me that she was on one of the big Mississippi steam-boats. In the evenings they used to have a hop in the saloon off which the state-rooms opened. At the doors of their rooms the Mammas sat matronizing their daughters; as they grew tired, they gradually ‘retired,’ put themselves in their berths, re-opened their doors and continued their duties from that vantage point!

Alice James

1898 [India]

Today we went to visit the Maharajah, for when he is well enough he likes to see his English guests. The palace is squalor itself and a labyrinth of narrow dark passages; I think nearly all royal palaces are that except those in the large cities. We were ushered into a room that was darker than any of them and in the centre, in the dim light, the Rajah sat, a tiny being, in the very middle of a plain charpoy [bedstead] with various nondescript people in attendance; round three sides of the room were small wooden cages of canaries whose voices made those of any other created being inaudible. The Maharajah is a dwarf, a cripple and paralysed in his legs, but his disabilities have not prevented him being a good ruler and loved by his subjects. He sat like some strange, half human creature with wholly human eyes, shaking hands with us all before we took our seats on the four chairs, two on either side of His Highness. Close to him sat the heir, a boy of perhaps eleven years old who is his nephew, very grandly dressed. It was rather trying, for the Maharajah said nothing after some mumbled civilities and we could not think what to say and some of us were not able to say it even if we could. Captain Stewart seemed nonplussed; the Bankwallah’s sister knew no word of Hindustani, except perhaps how to ask for hot water, I, very little and that not of a sort to suit Maharajahs. The Bankwallah made some effort but His Highness’ replies were hardly audible; I thought I ought to do something to try to relieve the strain, so, having carefully spread it out in my mind, I lifted up my voice and said, ‘Ap ka misag kaisa hai, Maharajah Sahib? [How is your health, Sir Maharajah?] There was a kind of murmur and silence fell again. By this time I was flattened out by embarrassment and the pathos of the sad little figure on the charpoy and the loneliness and gloom of it all. We felt at our wits’ end and I think the feeling ran round us like hysteria. Then, without the smallest warning the youthful heir, who had not uttered, prompted I suppose by some satellite behind the Maharajah, raised a piercingly shrill voice and screamed (there is no other word for it) in one long, sustained breath ‘Howdoyoudomadam!’ It was as sudden as the stab of an assassin’s knife and almost as fatal, and we could not imagine what this cryptic cry could mean till it dawned on us that it was a belated acknowledgement of my words to the lad’s uncle.

After this we took our leave and, as we left, His Highness gave me and Miss K. each a couple of silver bangles and we were wreathed with jasmine and tinsel garlands. We were all rather shattered. We knew that the old man liked visits and took them as a compliment and we had meant to please him, and felt at the same time that such a possee of fools as we must have seemed could please nobody. It was Captain Stewart’s fault for he knew the language well and was the responsible person among us. The Maharajah drives every day in the same direction along the road past the guest home but at a certain point he turns back because a few paces further on would bring him in sight of the cenotaphs of his forebears and he considers that unlucky.

Violet Jacob

1902

Four days ago a group of us went off sledding to Kiritein. Besides Herma, Hauer and Hannak were in my sledge. Return journey pretty. Fir branches against the bright night sky; singing in the telegraph wires. Because of the cold, drank a lot of schnapps and Herma got tired. Hauer recited all kinds of verse fragments. Herma and I were princess and prince. She lay in my arms with her eyes shut like a little child. A kiss – fleeting – secret – positively unnerving.

Robert Musil

1934

Am I wise to embrace a parliamentary career – can I face the continued strain? James Willoughby told me that he nearly gave up his parliamentary campaign in November, as he just could not stand the ordeal of speaking: when he confessed this to his agent, the man replied, ‘Don’t let not speaking well dishearten you: I have known candidates who could not even read.’

‘Chips’ Channon

1967

A party to meet our new Leader, Jeremy Thorpe. A huge crowd came and drank much champagne. Paul Hislop took Yehudi Menuhin for a Liberal candidate; David Frost kissed Violet Bonham Carter; Lord Gardiner, who looks so impressive when dressed in his Lord Chancellor’s robes, came; but neither George Brown nor the Prime Minister did – just as well, I thought. Jeremy won’t be as good as Jo [Grimond], whose wonderful looks, voice, and integrity, were a tremendous asset to the Party, especially on television. Jeremy is a bit of an actor; in fact, he would have made a marvellous actor. His imitations of Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, even Jo, are terrifyingly funny; and best of all is that of Ted Heath saying, ‘Out of the House’. Admittedly Ted has behaved rudely to Jeremy, walking ‘out of the House’ when Jeremy took his place there as Liberal Leader.

Cynthia Gladwyn

21 February

1826

Corrected the proofs of Malachi this morning – it may fall dead and there will be a squib lost; it may chance to light on some ingredients of national feeling and set folk’s beards in a blaze and so much the better if it does – I mean better for Scotland – not a whit for me—

Attended the hearing in P. House till near four o’clock so I shall do little to-night for I am tired and sleepy. One person talking for a long time, whether in pulpit or at the bar or anywhere else, unless the interest be great and the eloquence of the highest character, always sets me to sleep. I impudently lean my head on my hand in the Court and take my nap without shame – The Lords may keep awake and mind their own affairs – Quae supra nos nihil ad nos [‘What is above us is nothing to do with us’]. These Clerks’ stools are certainly as easy seats as are in Scotland, those of the Barons of Exchequer always excepted.

Sir Walter Scott

1885

I saw a most extraordinary tricycle pass today. A bath chair made of wicker work in which reclined a smart lady, and behind, where one should push, a gentleman treadling, puffing and blowing and looking very sheepish. I wonder any one will make such an exhibition of themselves. How the bicycles swarm now, and yet a few years since, every one turned round to stare at a velocipede!

Beatrix Potter

1902

Went to the variety theater with Jacques and Hannak. Jacques – what a character – no one could beat him. One of the chanteuses wasn’t bad-looking. Underwear all in grey. After the performance, however, we decided against inviting anybody. Flirted a little with the girl with grey underclothes who had her mother with her. If she had come to our table I’d certainly have behaved decently toward her. Because of that. While I was deep in conversation with Hannak, Jacques beckoned to her and went outside. In the garden he had his way with her – genius!

Robert Musil

1904 [Paris]

This afternoon, Lamoreax concert, to hear, chiefly, Richard Strauss’s Life of a Hero. It came at the end of an exhausting programme, but I was much impressed by its beauty. I heard it under difficulties, for the audience grew restive, talked and protested. One old man insisted on going out. There is a rule about not entering or leaving during a piece, but this old man cried so loud and shook the doors so that the pompiers were obliged to let him through. Applause and hisses at the end, from a full audience. One more exhibition of the bêtise of an audience when confronted by something fresh, extravagant and powerful. It would be absurd to condemn this or any other particular audience, for all audiences are alike. The sarcastic and bitter opposition must be taken as a tribute to the power of the art. Was not Tannhäuser simply laughed off the stage at the first performance? I like the piece better than I thought I should – a great deal. The first thing of Richard Strauss that I have heard.

Twelve thousand five hundred words written this week.

Arnold Bennett

1970

Last night in Birmingham, giving a political speech to the local Monday Club. They were professional people, the chairman a very able young barrister of twenty-seven, one of the women a doctor, another a solicitor. The woman who sat on one side of me at dinner told me she busied herself collecting money for the Conservative Party and it was made clear to her that the businessmen of Birmingham looked to Powell more than to Heath. One man said she could have a cheque for £5 for the Conservatives but £1,000 if it was for Enoch. She said the racial feeling in Birmingham is very ugly. She had a small accident because she was driving while painting her nails! The car she ran into was driven by a coloured man and immediately about twenty people collected including a policeman and accused the coloured man of causing the accident. She had some difficulty in convincing them that she was entirely to blame.

Cecil King

1989

I finished Roy Jenkins’s European Diary. An entertaining picture of the EEC world. There are some convincing portraits, notably Giscard [d’Estang], a somewhat unattractive figure, who, one feels, could well be accommodated in fiction. At first I was unable to put a finger on which novelist (for Giscard) when I wrote to Roy. Giscard’s alleged affair with the Sorbonne student suggests perhaps a potential Stavrogin [character in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed], tho’ clearly he is without Stavrogin’s (characteristically Russian) willingness to throw everything overboard according to mood. On reconsideration, Giscard is essentially a French figure, Stendhal or Balzac. Giscard’s apparently phoney claims to noblesse is typical of characters in novels of either of the last. Proust less so. One certainly does not see Giscard in Proust’s grand circles, nor Marcel’s family, nor for that matter the Verdurins, where he would essentially have been regarded as a ‘bore’. Perhaps M. de Norpois might have made some revealing comment on him as an ambitious young politician.

Roy’s self-portrait is amusing, his taste for the arts, good living, smart society, appreciating such things as being given the Spanish Order of Charles III, because its blue-and-white riband often figures in Goya pictures of Spanish royalities and notabilities. That is absolutely the right reason for wanting the decoration. One recognizes that Roy was born into the purple of the Labour Party, even so his ease, unaffected pleasure in the beau monde is remarkable in its total lack of strain, to which I can think of no parallel on the Left; often missing in those of a higher bracket. At one point Roy’s Diary records going to the loo with James Callaghan, then Prime Minister, after some dinner. Callaghan ‘made me a most fanciful offer’. I think Roy deliberately worded the entry so that one would think Callaghan suddenly gasped in a broken voice: ‘Roy, have you never guessed after all these years what I feel for you?’ It was, in fact, proffer of the Governorship of Hong Kong. Interesting that appointments are made in such circumstances.

Anthony Powell

22 February

1855

We saw 26 of the sick and wounded of the Coldstreams . . . There were some sad cases; – one man who had lost his right arm at Inkermann, was also at the Alma, and looked deadly pale – one or two others had lost their arms, others had been shot in the shoulders and legs, several, in the hip joint . . . A private, Lanesbury, with a patch over his eye, and his face tied up, had had his head traversed by a bullet, penetrating through the eye, which was gone, – through the nose, and coming out at the neck! He looked dreadfully pale, but was recovering well. There were 2 other very touching and distressing cases, 2 poor boys. I cannot say how touched and impressed I have been by the sight of these noble brave, and so sadly wounded men and how anxious I feel to be of use to them, and to try and get some employment for those who are maimed for life. Those who are discharged will receive very small pensions but not sufficient to live upon.

Queen Victoria

1944

Go for the day to Montepulciano and help to serve lunch at the communal kitchen started by Bracci, the Mayor, at which four hundred people are given lunch daily in two shifts. They usually get soup or macaroni, followed by vegetables or chestnuts, with a piece of bread of fifty grammes, and meat once or twice a week – all for half a lira – and a glass of wine for an extra half lira. To-day, being Shrove Tuesday, there was a slice (smallish) of roast beef in a plate of macaroni, followed by a small slab of chestnut-cake – and a glass of wine free. All this in addition to the usual scanty food ration, which thus remains available for the evening meal. The food was well cooked, and hot, the rooms clean and cheerful. Everyone who has applied – whether evacuees or the poor of the district – has been admitted. An admirable enterprise.

Iris Origo

1962 [San Francisco]

Coley [his secretary/manager] saw me off in Kingston on Tuesday, and I sped off through the bright skies at approximately the same moment that John Glenn Junior sped off in his capsule into outer space. He had been round the world three times before I landed at Miami airport. I did a little shopping and had my hair cut, and while this was going on I heard over the radio that Glenn had landed safely. It was a tremendously exciting moment, ruined for me by a blonde manicurist with a voice like a corncrake who made it almost impossible to hear what had happened.

Noël Coward

23 February

1938

I wonder every now and then, whether it is really worth it – this endless poverty, borrowing, uncertainty, frustration – all for the sake of a possibility that I may one day write something that will have value. Is my talent big enough to justify my leading this sort of life? If I were never to become a writer of very much importance, what would be the sense of my making this attempt to live on nothing but what each day brings, to devote myself to nothing but trying to understand the sense of existence and to make words live on paper – this prolonged refusal to submit to everyone else’s way of life? What small excuse, then, would there be for not coming to terms with the world, and gaining the security of an income earned in an ordinary way. How far more sensible it would be to work in a regular job, as everyone else has to who has no means of support and no other raison d’être – if I do not succeed, if I end by having nothing to show for all this struggle, the disgrace will be twofold, I shall be doubly raté, and the responsibility for a wasted life will be all my own.

David Gascoyne

1970 [Tangier]

On undressing, I discovered the infestation again! So I had to get dressed and procure the taxi and he knew where I wanted to go, and he waited for me! The all-night chemist in the Rue de Fez gave me the Benzyl Benzoate & I returned to the hotel. Put it all on and lay in bed with my balls on fire. Really it can’t be an accident! This happened last time I was here! All these boys must be dirty. The only one who I’ve known with no mishap is Mohammed Halimi and he seems to have left Tangier. One thing is certain – it puts one off for years as far as I’m concerned! All the attraction flies out of the window and one just feels total revulsion.

Kenneth Williams

1977

I really had to pee. Fred [Hughes] came back from the bathroom and I asked him if there was anybody in there and he said no, that it was empty. I went in and was peeing and suddenly there was someone next to me saying, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m standing next to you, let me shake your hand,’ and then he realized and said, ‘No, I’ll wash my hands and then we can shake.’ I lost my concentration and had to stop peeing. And then more and more people started coming in and saying, ‘Is it really you?’ I got out.

Andy Warhol

24 February

1916 [Russia]

Yesterday I was commissioned to buy some coarse white cloth; accordingly, I walked to town and went into a small draper’s shop. The Jewish owner was cleaning away the snow from the pavement, but seeing a customer, he put down his spade. Just as he was pulling down a roll of the material from the shelf, the shop-door opened and a fierce, bearded Russian face, with a fierce, thundering Russian voice, ordered him out into the street – ‘immediately!’ to continue sweeping the snow. I was annoyed at the Russian’s rude interference; so I, too, suddenly became loud and rude. Facing the infuriated soldier, I told him that I would not allow the Jew to leave the shop until my purchase was made. ‘Durak [fool!]’ I cried. ‘What right have you to interfere? I am carrying out an official commission. When I am ready, and not before, this man shall leave the shop.’ It worked! The soldier turned and walked out into the street. Thinking it over afterwards, I was puzzled to decide what I should have done if it had not worked!

Florence Farmborough

1934

Tonight I danced in my room with the furniture pushed back, in my bathing suit. Jazz, Ravel, Mozart, Jazz. The compelling rhythms. You must dance. Abandon all else.

Elizabeth Smart

1981

The papers tell us that Prince Charles’s engagement to Lady Diana Spencer will be announced today. [His wife] Elizabeth’s book on the Queen Mother will be out in June; there will be just time to insert a statement that the engagement will give special pleasure to Prince Charles’s grandmother. It all fits in very well with Elizabeth’s conception of the Queen as a sublime exemplar of the family principle. We learn that Lady Diana’s parents have a house next door to Sandringham and that her father was an equerry of King George VI. Elizabeth thinks of saying in her book that ‘Lady Diana will fit into the royal family like a hand into a glove.’ This, however, is too much of a cliché – can I think of another, better simile? I rack my brains hopelessly. She then comes up with this: ‘She will fit in like a royal crest into its nest.’ It is this which gives Elizabeth, in addition to all her academic qualities, the edge on other biographers.

Lord Longford

25 February

1808

Since the last entry I’ve killed three hares, the first quadrupeds in my life.

Stendhal

1942

Heart hurt for first time in years.

Dawn Powell

1942 [Holland]

It is now half-past seven in the morning. I have clipped my toenails, drunk a mug of genuine Van Houten’s cocoa, and had some bread and honey, all with what you might call abandon. I opened the Bible at random, but it gave me no answers this morning. Just as well, because there were no questions, just enormous faith and gratitude that life should be so beautiful, and that makes this a historic moment, that and not the fact that we are on our way to the Gestapo this morning.

Etty Hillesum

1957

Ted’s book of poems – The Hawk in the Rain – has won the first Harper’s publication contest under the 3 judges: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender & Marianne Moore! Even as I write this, I am incredulous. The little scared people reject. The big unscared practising poets accept. I knew there would be something like this to welcome us to New York! We will publish a bookshelf of books between us before we perish! And a batch of brilliant healthy children! I can hardly wait to see the letter of award (which has not yet come) & learn details of publication. To smell the print off the pages!

Sylvia Plath

1970

Today was Gladwyn’s [Sir Gladwyn Jebb, her husband] motion in the Lords on the changes in the BBC’s radio programmes, particularly in the Third Programme, which I urged him to table and so felt very responsible about the success of the debate. It went very well, there were seventeen speakers. G spoke very well, so I felt gratified. What a strange man Lord Annan is. Anxious to keep in with the government, he rose to his feet to state that he wondered why the BBC had bothered to announce the changes, since had they not done so they might have got away with it; a most deplorable argument, as orchestras might have been disbanded without anyone knowing. I could see the jaw of that philistine and uninspiring figure, Lord Hill, who had been responsible for it all, drop in astonishment.

Cynthia Gladwyn

1981

Norah [Baroness] Phillips joined us at lunch . . . She has a great deal to do with the Palace and hopes that her place is assured for the royal wedding [of Prince Charles and Princess Diana]. Elizabeth and I were (admittedly to my surprise) not asked to the wedding of Princess Anne. I being a Knight of the Garter to which order Prince Charles belongs, we might have a chance this time.

No doubt it all depends partly on whether it is a State occasion or a private wedding. Partly also on where it takes place. Most people seem to be assuming that it will be in Westminster Abbey. But Elizabeth sat next at dinner last night to the Dean of Westminster, Edward Carpenter. He said that they ‘had heard nothing’ which makes them fear that it will be in St Paul’s. The latter holds an extra four hundred. Our chances of squeezing in would then be improved.

Lord Longford

26 February

1832

This day arrived, for the first time indeed, answer to last post end of December, arrived an epistle from Caddell full of good tidings. Castl[e] Dangerous and Sir Robert of Paris, neither of whom I deemd sea worthy have performed 2 voyages, that is each sold off about £3400 and the same of the curr[e]nt year. It proves what I have thought almost impossible, that I might write myself [clear]. But as yet my spell holds fast. I have besides two or three good things in which I may advance with spirit. And with palmy hopes on the part of Caddell and myself. He thinks he will so[o]n cry victoria on the bet about the bet on his hat. He was to get a new one when I had paid off all my debts. And I, uncorrected by misfortune, supposed our who[le] plan had gone to the Devil and seriously thought of thinking [shrinking?] from the affair of my own exertions. Yet even when I was meditating all this I had sure enough to remark that it was a base cowardly think and that I should lose all the insurances which must come to £20,000 if I die without self Agency. I can hardly, now that I am assured that all is well again, form an idea to myself that I could think it was otherwise.

Sir Walter Scott

1985

I don’t understand why Jackie O[nassis] thinks she’s so grand that she doesn’t owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big. You’d think she’d want to scheme and connive to get into history again.

Andy Warhol

1989

1950 millibars, the lowest pressure recorded in the last 120 years. A long walk round the Ness to the power station; then up to the coastguard cottages, which I’ve never explored before. They are set in the middle of a moated mound which encloses a large area – once kitchen gardens.

It’s difficult to find a good vegetable garden; even in the marshes I came across only one last autumn, as I travelled round with my camera filming the countryside for War Requiem – the supermarkets have wiped them out. Once all these little cottages grew their own, before the road was constructed during the war. Now no-one does.

Derek Jarman

27 February

1814

There is something to me very softening in the presence of a woman – some strange influence, even if one is not in love with them – which I cannot at all account for, having no very high opinion of the sex. But yet, – I always feel in better humour with myself and every thing else, if there is a woman within ken. Even Mrs. Mule, my firelighter, – the most ancient and withered of her kind, – and (except to myself) not the best-tempered – always makes me laugh, – no difficult task when I am ‘i the vein’.

Lord Byron

1941

There is a rumour floating round today that we are going to a worse camp as a reprisal for the bad treatment of German prisoners at home – this from an officer. I can’t really credit it. Granted we have been treated exceptionally well here, I own, but if the intention is reprisals – which I don’t believe – this could equally well be made a Strafe Lager.

Scottie came into our room at 4.0 o’clock with news that we have to be packed by 9.0 a.m. tomorrow. Knowing Scottie, we took not the slightest notice – didn’t even look up – but it proved shortly to be true.

Captain John Mansel

1942 [Holland]

How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses. You cannot know another’s inner life from his circumstances. To know that you must know his dreams, his relationships, his moods, his sickness, and his death.

Very early on Wednesday morning a large group of us were crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives were the same. All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned. What distinguished each one of us was only our inner attitudes. I noticed a young man with a sullen expression, who paced up and down looking driven and harassed and making no attempt to hide his irritation. He kept looking for pretexts to shout at the helpless Jews: ‘Take your hands out of your pockets’ and so on. I thought him more pitiable than those he shouted at, and those he shouted at I thought pitiable for being afraid of him. When it was my turn to stand in front of his desk, he bawled at me, ‘What the hell’s so funny?’ I wanted to say, ‘Nothing’s funny here except you,’ but refrained. ‘You’re still smirking,’ he bawled again. And I, in all innocence, ‘I didn’t mean to, it’s my usual expression.’ And he, ‘Don’t give me that, get the hell out of here,’ his face saying, ‘I’ll deal with you later.’ And that was presumably meant to scare me to death, but the device was too transparent.

I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave, but because I know that I am dealing with human beings and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does. And that was the real import of this morning: not that a disgruntled young Gestapo officer yelled at me, but that I felt no indignation, rather a real compassion, and would have liked to ask, ‘Did you have a very unhappy childhood, has your girl-friend let you down?’ Yes, he looked harassed and driven, sullen and weak. I should have liked to start treating him there and then, for I know that pitiful young men like that are dangerous as soon as they are let loose on mankind. But all the blame must be put on the system that uses such people. What needs eradicating is the evil in man, not man himself.

Something else about this morning: the perception, very strongly borne in, that despite all the suffering and injustice I cannot hate others. All the appalling things that happen are no mysterious threats from afar, but arise from fellow beings very close to us. That makes these happenings more familiar, then, and not so frightening. The terrifying thing is that systems grow too big for men and hold them in a satanic grip, the builders no less than the victims of the system, much as large edifices and spires, created by men’s hands, tower high above us, dominate us, yet may collapse over our heads and bury us.

Etty Hillesum

1948

In Gide’s Journal I have just read again how he does not wish to write its pages slowly as he would the pages of a novel. He wants to train himself to rapid writing in it. It is just what I have always felt about this journal of mine. Don’t ponder, don’t grope – just plunge something down, and perhaps more clearness and quickness will come with practice.

Denton Welch

28 February

1805

Yesterday and today, I saw the lovable Mélanie. My love increased amazingly. Tonight it was my whole life. I believe that M. Blanc, far from keeping her, is merely a man of letters who talks over her roles with her, but has exacted secrecy. In that case, what an angelic soul! She was far from even imagining my suspicions, and how far my coarse words are from interpreting her delicacy! She’s in love with me and won’t tell me so; tomorrow, I should let her see that I’m sad.

I’m going to bed at half-past nine tonight because I feel che mi distruggo pensando a ella [that I am wearing myself out thinking about her].

Stendhal

1935

How did she hurt me? Was it the day when she raised her arm to wave at someone across the street? The day when no one came to open the door to me, and then she appeared with her hair all ruffled? The day when she was whispering with him on the embankment? The thousands of times she made me hurry here and there?

But this has nothing to do with aesthetics; this is grief. I wanted to count my memories of happy moments, and all I can remember is the pangs I suffered.

Never mind, they serve the same purpose. My love story with her is not made up of dramatic scenes but of moments filled with the subtlest perceptions. So should a poem be. But it is agony.

Cesare Pavese

1956

This morning I went with Cressida [his daughter] to the H.M.V. place in Oxford Street to buy records and the following amusing incident occurred:-

It was terribly crowded, and we had great difficulty in getting anybody to attend to us. However eventually I managed to get some records to try – jazz records – and we found a young girl – I think she can’t have been more than 17 – to shepherd us to a cubicle where one could play the records. She left me there to play the records while Cressida went off in search of other ones. As I was listening to the jazz, more or less dancing up and down to the rhythm, the door of the cubicle opened and who should put her head in but Elaine Burton, the Labour Member of Parliament for Coventry. Slightly embarrassed at being caught dancing on my own, I welcomed her. She said, ‘I must tell you what the girl has just said to us. She said, “Do you know, I believe the Chancellor of the Exchequer is next door.”’ This is not the first time that, so long after I held the office, people have still regarded me as Chancellor. I suppose it is because I have so frequently broadcast and appeared on T.V. on financial questions.

Hugh Gaitskell

1958

Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures died yesterday. I shall always remember him for having paid $750 for the title of ‘Washington Merry-go-Round’ [the title of one of Pearson’s newspaper columns] in 1931 and made a milliondollar movie out of it. He used to laugh when he saw me in later years. My share was $375. Latterly he has been chiefly famous around Broadway for paying $25,000 to the Negro nightclub singer Davis [Sammy Davis, Jr] not to sleep with Kim Novak. Cohn claimed he discovered her first.

Drew Pearson

1983

Benjamin [Liu] picked me up and we tried to feed the big gingerbread house that little Berkeley Reinhold had given me for Christmas to the pigeons in the park. But they didn’t like gingerbread and they didn’t like candy. And I tried to get rid of some fruitcake, too, and they didn’t like that, either, so I feel like just letting them starve. I mean, what do they want? They do like nuts, though, so maybe I’ll bring them some peanuts sometime. Okay, so then we went downtown. (cab $6).

Andy Warhol

1989

My sense of confusion has come to a head, catalysed by my public announcement of the HIV infection. Now I no longer know where the focus is, for myself, or in the minds of my audience. Reaction to me has changed. There is an element of worship, which worries me. Perhaps I courted it.

Derek Jarman

29 February

1872

At half past four drove in open landau and four with Arthur, Leopold, and Jane C[hurchill], the Equerries riding. We drove round Hyde and Regent’s Parks, returning by Constitution Hill, and when at the Garden Entrance a dreadful thing happened . . . It is difficult for me to describe, as my impression was a great fright, and all was over in a minute. How it all happened I knew nothing of. The Equerries had dismounted, [John] Brown had got down to let down the steps, and Jane C. was just getting out, when suddenly someone appeared at my side, whom I at first imagined was a footman, going to lift off the wrapper. Then I perceived that it was someone unknown, peering above the carriage door, with an uplifted hand and a strange voice, at the same time the boys calling out and moving forward. Involuntarily, in a terrible fright, I threw myself over Jane C., calling out, ‘Save me,’ and heard a scuffle and voices! I soon recovered myself sufficiently to stand up and turn round, when I saw Brown holding a young man tightly, who was struggling. They laid the man on the ground and Brown kept hold of him till several of the police came in. All turned and asked if I was hurt, and I said, ‘Not at all.’ Then Lord Charles [Fitzroy], General Hardinge, and Arthur came up, saying they thought the man had dropped something. We looked, but could find nothing, when Cannon, the postillion, called out, ‘There it is,’ and looking down I then did see shining on the ground a small pistol! This filled us with horror. All were as white as sheets, Jane C. almost crying, and Leopold looked as if he were going to faint.

It is to good Brown and to his wonderful presence of mind that I greatly owe my safety, for he alone saw the boy rush round and followed him! When I was standing in the hall, General Hardinge came in, bringing an extraordinary document which this boy had intended making me sign! It was in connection with the Fenian prisoners!

Queen Victoria

1920

Oh, to be a writer, a real writer given up to it and to it alone! Oh, I failed to-day; I turned back, looked over my shoulder, and immediately it happened, I felt as though I too were struck down. The day turned cold and dark on the instant. It seemed to belong to summer twilight in London, to the clang of the gates as they close the garden, to the deep light painting the high houses, to the smell of leaves and dust, to the lamp-light, to that stirring of the senses, to the langour of twilight, the breath of it on one’s cheek, to all those things which (I feel to-day) are gone from me for ever . . . I feel today that I shall die soon and suddenly: but not of my lungs.

Katherine Mansfield

1928

Very much worn down, these last few days, by an absurd grippe that my petty daily occupations have not given me time to treat as I should have, by two days in bed. Cannot get myself to give up smoking. I had got out of the habit for two months, helped by Marc’s example. Then both of us in Berlin allowed ourselves to be led into it again.

Despite this stultifying cold, I am not much aware of getting older, and have even rarely felt my mind more fit, my whole being more full of aspirations and desires. But I am constantly computing my age and telling myself that the ground may suddenly give way under my feet. I manage to get myself not to feel too melancholy over this.

André Gide

*Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, pt. 2, 11. 375–6.

*Burns’s ‘Twa Dogs’, slightly adapted.