The Assassin's Cloak

  Alan Taylor has been a journalist for over thirty years. He was deputy editor of the Scotsman, managing editor of Scotsman Publications, and writer-at-large for the Sunday Herald. He has edited several acclaimed anthologies, most recently Glasgow: The Autobiography. He has been a Booker Prize judge. He is the author of Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark and, in 2018, series editor of the centenary editions of Spark’s novels. He is the co-founder and editor of the Scottish Review of Books.

  Irene Taylor was born and brought up in Edinburgh. For many years she worked in public libraries. She has a degree in history from Edinburgh University and she now works for the National Trust for Scotland.

  The new edition first published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  First published in Great Britain in 2000 by

  Canongate Books Ltd

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by

  Publishers Group Canada

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books

  Introduction, Selection and Biographies © Irene and Alan Taylor, 2000

  The right of Irene and Alan Taylor to be identified as the

  authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  For details of copyright permissions, see pages 682—9

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 911 8

  eISBN 978 1 83885 292 4

  Book designed by Paddy Cramsie at etal-design.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  JANUARY

  FEBRUARY

  MARCH

  APRIL

  MAY

  JUNE

  JULY

  AUGUST

  SEPTEMBER

  OCTOBER

  NOVEMBER

  DECEMBER

  Biographies

  Bibliography

  Permissions Acknowledgements

  Index of Diarists

  Introduction

  ‘A diary is like drink,’ wrote the Scottish poet, William Soutar, ‘we tend to indulge in it over often: it becomes a habit which would ever seduce us to say more than we ought to say and more than we have the experimental qualifications to state.’ It must be said that Soutar, bedridden with a wasting illness, was a special case. Trapped from a young age in a small room in his parents’ house in Perth, his view of the world circumscribed by the size of his window, he was, in effect, a prisoner. His diary was his constant companion, a visitor who never went away. Thus the temptation to over-indulge.

  For many people, however, a diary is like a reproach, a perpetual reminder of our indiscipline, lack of application, weakness of resolve. How many diaries, started in the first flush of a new year, peter out even before the memory of the annual hangover? We open the pristine book with enthusiasm but after a few days what had been a torrent turns into a drip. Soon, whole weeks go by unremarked, blank page followed by blank page. Humdrum life intrudes and the compulsion to memorialise in print evaporates. There are few things quite as capable of inducing guilt as an empty diary.

  Soutar, his life cruelly condensed, came to depend on his diary. It was his friend, crutch, confidant, shrink, father confessor, mirror of himself, for a diary is the most flexible and intimate of literary forms. As Thomas Mallon noted in his formative book on the subject, A Book of One’s Own: People and their Diaries, diaries have been kept by everyone, from the barely literate to the leaders of men and women, from serial killers to conmen, kitchen maids to all-conquering heroes, children and nonagenarians, tinkers, tailors, soldiers and spies.

  ‘Some,’ wrote Mallon, ‘are chroniclers of the everyday. Others have kept their books only in special times — over the course of a trip, or during a crisis. Some have used them to record journeys of the soul, plan the art of the future, confess the sins of the flesh, lecture the world from beyond the grave. And some of them, prisoners and invalids, have used them not so much to record lives as create them, their diaries being the only world in which they could fully live.’

  Into the last category falls William Soutar, who but for his diary and a few verses in Scots for children — ‘bairnrhymes’ — would now be forgotten. Though he began keeping a diary in 1917, when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Atlantic with the Navy, it comprised little more than brief notes of appointments and books read. His diary took on a fresh complexion, however, after February 1929, when he fell ill with pneumonia. His right leg became increasingly disabled. In hindsight, the prescribed treatment seems medieval; weights were put on the leg to counteract muscle contraction. When this failed, the only hope was surgery. In May 1930, Soutar was operated on, paraphrasing Milton as he went to his fate:

  ‘This is the day and this the happy morn.’ At 9.30 got morphine and atropine injection. Off to theatre — sine crepuscula toga — at 10 a.m. Never saw actual theatre — elderly doctor chloroformed me in the ‘green room’. Woke up again at 11.20 or so. Wasn’t sick. Not an extra lot of reaction. Plaster of Paris troubling me more than the leg — nasty nobbly part at back — can’t lie comfortably.

  The operation was unsuccessful but the stoical, philosophical Soutar gives little indication of despair, of the hopelessness of his plight. As Alexander Scott, who edited his diaries, has observed, ‘Soutar’s main interest was not his own invalidism but the general human situation.’ On occasion, he felt frustrated and sorry for himself but more often he managed to transcend his illness, setting himself goals — reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example — and pursuing his ambitions. Due to his unusual circumstances, the world had to come to him, rather than the other way round. But unlike many other diarists who are consumed with themselves, egocentrics who seem to live only inside their own heads and are obsessed with their own troubles, Soutar managed to transcend the self, and enter an elevated state of being. Just a month before he died in October 1943, he wrote:

  The true diary is one, therefore, in which the diarist is, in the main, communing with himself, conversing openly and without pose, so that trifles will not be absent, nor the intimate and little confessions and resolutions which, if voiced at all, must be voiced in such a private confessional as this.

  That is one definition of a diary but there are countless others that are equally valid. The elasticity of the form is a large part of its appeal, which is perhaps why it is so difficult to pin down. When, truly, is a diary a diary? What is the difference between a diary and journal or, for that matter, a log or a notebook? Dictionary definitions are not much help. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, for example, says a diary is ‘a daily record of events, transactions, thoughts, etc., esp. ones involving the writer’. A journal, on the other hand, is defined thus: ‘A personal record of events or matters of interest, written up every day or as events occur, usu. in more detail than in a diary.’

  It is a fine distinction and one which individual writers seem blithely to ignore. In his Devil’s Dictionary, for instance, Ambrose Bierce wrote: ‘Diary. A daily record of that part of one’s life which he can relate to himself without blushing.’ Oscar Wilde, however, went a step further. ‘I never travel without my diary,’ he had Gwendoline in The Importance of Being Earnest say. ‘One should always have something sensational to read in the train.’ For others, though, a diary serves more prosaic purposes. ‘If a man has no constant lover who shares his soul as well as his body he must have a diary — a poor substitute, b
ut better than nothing,’ mused James Lees-Milne.

  More often than not, writers question why they do or do not keep a diary. ‘Why do I keep this voluminous journal?’ asked the Rev. Francis Kilvert. ‘I can hardly tell. Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it almost seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me.’ Sir Walter Scott deemed not keeping a regular diary one of the regrets of his life. But perhaps one of the most curious comments on diary-keeping came from A. A. Milne when he remarked in 1919,“! suppose this is the reason why diaries are so rarely kept nowadays — that nothing ever happens to anybody.’

  The idea that diaries are only worth keeping when great events are in train is barely worthy of examination. The human condition is such that there is always something happening somewhere, whether personally or politically, parochially or on the international stage. The most durable diarists have not always been those who mix in high society or are connected with the great and the good and have the opportunity to keek through the keyhole as momentous events unfold. The best diaries are those in which the voice of the individual comes through untainted by self-censorship or a desire to please. First, and foremost, the diarist must write for himself, those who do not, who are already looking towards publication and public recognition, invariably strike a phoney note. As Alan Clark, author of the most notorious twentieth-century fin de siècle diaries, said: ‘Sometimes lacking in charity; often trivial; occasionally lewd; cloyingly sentimental, repetitious, whingeing and imperfectly formed. For some readers the entries may seem to be all of these things. But they are real diaries.’

  The first real diarist was Samuel Pepys, who may not have patented the form but was certainly instrumental in its development. In the popular imagination a typical entry by Pepys opens with ‘Up betimes’ and closes ‘And so to bed.’ In fact, Pepys was much less formulaic than is supposed, though there is an admirable, unaffected directness to his approach, seizing the day with uncommon zest. Born in London on 23 February 1633, he was one of eleven children. His father was a tailor; his mother had been a domestic servant. From such humble beginnings Pepys rose precipitously in the world, which may account for his frequent compulsive and unabashed bouts of stocktaking. He was, even if he said so himself, ‘a very rising man’.

  Thus, typically, on 30 September, 1664, he reported: ‘Up, and all day both morning and afternoon at my accounts, it being a great month both for profit and layings out, the last being £89 for kitchen and clothes for myself and wife, and a few extraordinaries for the house; and my profits, besides salary, £239; so that this weeke my balance come to £1,203, for which the Lord’s name be praised!’

  Pepys’s naive enthusiasm for self-reckoning has been echoed by diarists down the decades, be they writers counting the words they have produced or monies they have made. Arnold Bennett, for example, made it a New Year’s Eve ritual. Such record keeping is a valuable function of diaries but were they simply to consist of inventories they would be — as Robert Louis Stevenson said of books — ‘a mighty bloodless substitute for life’. Life, unvarnished and uncensored, is what makes Pepys’s diary such a constant source of wonder. In every entry, Pepys reveals something of his true self, from his disquiet at discovering that the food he had been served at a friend’s house was rotten (‘a damned venison pasty that stunk like a devil’) to his views on Shakespeare (‘the most insipid ridiculous play I ever saw in my life’, he called A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and his unalloyed and unequivocal delight at coming into a legacy.

  Pepys, like Boswell in the eighteenth century and Alan Clark in the twentieth, was comically candid about the attractions of women, which he was not always able to resist. His diaries are perhaps at their most piquant when he describes close encounters of a sexual nature, not all of which were consummated. As Thomas Mallon observed, Pepys could forgive a woman almost anything — even spitting on him at the theatre — if she was pretty. At church, he risked groping a girl only to have her threaten to stick pins in him. Undeterred, he groped another. When he actually did succeed in satisfying his lust, he attempted to shroud it in a mongrel language, as he did on 31 March 1668, when he foisted himself on Deb, his servant girl: ‘Yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra mi genu and did poner mi mano sub her jupes and tocu su thigh.’

  His delight in this adulterous act is as diverting as his disquiet at the vice at the royal court of d‘drinking, swearing and loose amours’. Pepys was a mass of contradictions which serves only to endear him to us further. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, who from her first appearance in his diary (when she burnt her hand dressing the remains of a turkey) to almost her last (when she was troubled with toothache), was the perfect foil for his waywardness and vanity. They were married in 1633, when he was twenty-two and she was just fifteen. So hard up were they that he had to pawn his lute for forty shillings. The route out of penury came through Sir Edward Montagu, later created Earl of Sandwich, who married an aunt to Pepys’s father. A close friend of Oliver Cromwell, Montagu was Pepys’s mentor and secured his appointment in the Navy Office. From ‘clerk of the King’s ships’, Pepys — a diligent bureaucrat and ardent in stamping out corruption — rose to become secretary to the Admiralty.

  In many ways, it was the ideal kind of post for a diarist. Though not hugely powerful himself he nevertheless had access to those charged with running the country. In that regard, Pepys is the predecessor of diarists like Harold Nicolson, whose career as a journalist and politician gave him a unique glimpse of Britain in the 1930s, including the rise of fascism, the influence of the Bloomsbury group and the Abdication crisis, and Sir Henry Channon, a charmer from Chicago who made a rapid rise in English society between the two world wars. Channon was well aware of the tradition in which he was following. ‘Although I am not Clerk to the Council like Mr Greville nor Secretary to the Admiralty like Mr Pepys, nor yet “duc et pair” as was M. de St Simon, I have, nevertheless, had interesting opportunities of intimacy with interesting people and have often been at the centre of things.’

  Channon — or ‘Chips’, as he was nicknamed — was in no doubt that his diaries would one day be made available for public consumption. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ he wrote in November 1936, ‘why I keep a diary at all. Is it to relieve my feelings? Console my old age? or to dazzle my descendants?’ Some fifteen years later he added, ‘I feel that some day they may see the light of day and perhaps shock or divert posterity a little.’ With that in mind he deposited his diaries in the British Museum with the initial instruction that they should not be consulted or published until fifty years after his death. But in the last year of his life he had a change of heart, and he began to edit them himself.

  Chips’s ambivalence is echoed by many other diarists, not least the great Pepys, who laboured over his diary in the wee small hours with the light weak and his eyesight failing. He began writing his diary on an auspicious date, the beginning of a new year and a new decade, 1 January 1660, and continued for almost ten years, bringing it to a reluctant close on 31 May 1669, believing that he was about to go blind. In the annals of diarists there has rarely been a more moving entry than that with which Pepys brought down the curtain on his work:

  And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my Journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and therefore whatever comes of it I must forbear: and therefore resolve from this time forward to have it kept by my people in long-hand, and must therefore be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or if there be any thing (which cannot be much, now my amours to Deb are past, and my eyes hindering me in almost all other pleasures), I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open,
to add here and there a note in short-hand with my own hand.

  And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!

  Ironically, Pepys did not go blind and lived for another thirty-four years. His diary, his lasting memorial, which was written in shorthand, he had bound in leather in six volumes, not the act of a man who did not want to see them preserved. With the rest of his library, they were deposited at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where they lay undeciphered until 1825. In the opinion of O. F. Morshead, editor of a very popular but heavily censored edition of the diaries, the impetus to break the code may have been prompted by the publication in i8i8 of the diaries of Pepys’s contemporary John Evelyn. It is a tradition at Magdalene that Lord Grenville took one of the volumes to bed and by morning had worked out how to translate it. The entire diary was then handed over to John Smith, an undergraduate, who made a complete transcription. Working twelve hours a day, it took him more than three years to make a complete transcription of in excess of three thousand pages. It was, said Smith, ‘very trying and injurious indeed to the visual organs’.

  But however onerous the task it was justified by the finished work. Pepys was a fluent, engaging and observant chronicler, combining history, reportage and autobiography in a style reminiscent of a superior novelist who can describe a scene and catch the essence of a character in a few broad and eloquent brush strokes. From his own quirky, irksome and fascinating domestic arrangements to the Great Fire of London and the misery of the Plague, Pepys illuminated the essence of his age better than anyone before or since. His curiosity was boundless, his lack of self-consciousness intoxicating. His diaries show him warts and all, holding back nothing that is unflattering, of which there was much, particularly in regard to his wife, who, in her own ‘diary’, inspired by the feminist scholar, Dale Spender, describes his meanness, infidelity, heavy drinking and abuse. But despite his failings Pepys was a loving husband.