The Assassin's Cloak Read online

  He had the true writer’s ability to drop or raise his tempo as the situation demands. But more often than not he is most affecting when one anticipates it least, whether describing a chance encounter with a shepherd and his son whom he found reading the Bible to one another on Epsom Downs or relaying his disgust at the sycophancy shown to King Charles II when he plays tennis (‘to see how the King’s play was extolled without any cause at all was a loathsome sight’).

  In contrast to Pepys, John Evelyn was altogether more reserved and puritanical but while his diary pales in comparison with his more famous contemporary it has its own idiosyncratic appeal. Evelyn came from a family which had made its fortune in gunpowder and he was well enough off to live independently, travelling extensively around Europe, which he recorded colourfully. He made his name with Sylva, a Discourse of Forest Trees, a book on arboriculture, which proved very popular with landowners intent on improving their estates after the Civil Wars and Interregnum.

  His diary begins, precociously, in 1620, during the reign of James I, when he was born and from the first he seemed to possess uncanny powers of description. His mother, he recalled, was ‘of proper personage, well timber’d, of a browne complexion; her eyes and haire of a lovely black; of a constitution more inclyn’d to a religious Melancholy, or pious sadnesse; of a rare memory, and most exemplary life; for Oeconomiq pridence esteemed’d one of the most conspicuous in her Country.’

  Its final entry (‘The Raine and a taw upon a deepe Snow, hindred me from going to Church.’) was made in January 1706 in the reign of Queen Anne and the year of Evelyn’s death at the age of 85. A large part of it, however, was written in hindsight; only from 1684 onwards did it become a contemporary diary, with Evelyn’s eye for the exotic immediately to the fore. ‘I dined at Sir St: Foxes,’ he recorded on 2 January 1684/After dinner came a felow that eate live charcoale glowing ignited, quenching them in his mouth, and then chanping and swallowing them downe: There was a dog also that seemd to do many rational actions.’

  But assiduous though Evelyn was in keeping his diary, it was meant for his eyes only. No publication was ever intended and it only came to light through pure fluke in 1813 when Lady Evelyn, the widow of the diarist’s great-great-grandson, was talking to William Upcott, a librarian and bibliophile, at the family house in Surrey. Asked his hobbies, Upcott replied, ‘Collecting manuscripts and autographs,’ whereupon her ladyship opened a drawer and revealed a pile of manuscripts which had been used for cutting out patterns for a dress. Upcott instantly appreciated their significance and Lady Evelyn volunteered to show him more. ‘Oh,’ she declared, ‘if you like papers like that, you shall have plenty, for Sylva Evelyn and those who succeeded him kept all their correspondence, which has furnished the kitchen with an abundance of waste paper.’ And so the diaries — the Kalendarium — were discovered.

  Lady Evelyn herself was unconvinced of their worth, and was reluctant to publish them. But shortly before her death she gave permission to a local antiquary to make the first selection, which appeared in 1818 with the title Memoirs Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Evelyn, and while they sold well were soon eclipsed by Pepys’s earthier and more appealing diaries. Interestingly, the two men knew each other and commemorated their meetings. For his part, Pepys found the bee-keeping Evelyn to be a merry dining companion, a cut above him intellectually: ‘In fine, a most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness.’

  Evelyn, in turn, liked Pepys and visited him at the Tower, where he had been committed, unjustly in Evelyn’s view, for misdemeanours in the Admiralty. On his death, Evelyn wrote generously of him, describing him as ‘a very worthy, Industrious and curious person, none in England exceeding him in knowledge of the Navy’. Pepys had been his friend for almost forty years and requested that he be a pall-bearer at his funeral but Evelyn, himself incapacitated, was unable to attend.

  The successful publication of these two diaries in the nineteenth century undoubtedly proved a spur to others to follow in their tracks. A diary, at least to begin with, is not a daunting prospect, like an epic poem, say, or a play or a novel. There is no imperative to publish or show anyone how it is progressing. You don’t need to do any research or check facts. Entries can be long or short, factual or inaccurate, real or imagined. Though diarists, invariably, attempt to keep up a daily routine they just as invariably fail. Life has its insidious way of interrupting the flow. Some diarists take this in their stride while it throws others into a spin, as if they had forgotten to turn up for a dinner party or missed a job interview.

  Time after time one comes across diarists chastising themselves for their laziness, their inconstancy, their lack of fidelity to a diary which they address as they might a lover. For communion with a diary is unlike any other literary activity. Once a diarist, always a diarist, it seems. A diary becomes part of a diarist’s routine, an integral part of his or her household, a member of the family which needs to be nurtured like a baby or a pet kitten. Neglect is conspicuous but it need not be harmful, for silence has its own eloquence. While many diarists write entries daily, as if brushing their teeth, others let weeks and months go by without so much as writing a few lines.

  Some diarists, such as Walter Scott, write during times of emotional and financial crisis, others when they are at their most happy and socially active. Evelyn Waugh, one of the greatest twentieth-century diarists, kept a diary for diverse reasons, wrote the editor of his diaries, Michael Davie, as an aide-memoire and as a source of material for his novels and autobiography. ‘Fading memory and a senile itch to write to the Times on all topics have determined me to keep irregular notes of what passes through my mind,’ he wrote in i960, when he started his diary again after a break of some four years. Waugh, in common with most diarists, wrote with no intention of seeing his diary in the public domain and died before the decision was taken to publish it. He wrote privately and did not tell many of his friends that he kept a diary. Even his wife did not know. Though not by nature furtive, he seemed to want to keep his diaries to himself. Why, no one knows.

  In contrast, the artist Andy Warhol, whose fame, among other things, comes from his saying that in future everyone in the world will be famous for fifteen minutes, liked to dictate his diary to an amanuensis, Pat Hackett. In her introduction to his diaries, she wrote:

  I’d call Andy around 9am, never later than 9:30. Sometimes I’d be waking him up, sometimes he’d say he’d been awake for hours. If I happened to oversleep he’d call me and say something like, ‘Good morning, Miss Diary — what’s wrong with you?’ or ‘Sweetheart! You’re fired!’ The calls were always conversations. We’d warm up while just chatting — he was always curious about everything, he’d ask a million questions: ‘What are you having for breakfast? Do you have channel 7 on? How can I clean my can opener — should I do it with a toothbrush?’ Then he’d give me his cash expenses and then he’d tell me all about the day and night before. Nothing was too insignificant for him to tell the Diary. These sessions — what he referred to as my ‘five-minutes-a-day job’ — would actually take anywhere from one to two hours. Every other week or so, I’d go over to the office with the typed pages of each day’s entry and I’d staple to the back of every page all the loose cab and restaurant receipts he’d left for me in the interim — receipts that corresponded to the amounts he’d already told me over the phone. The pages were then stored in letter boxes from the stationery store.

  Perhaps because of the way they were composed Warhol’s diaries read like an extended gossip column. Names are dropped with insouciance reflecting the diarist’s own celebrity. He moved in a world in which everyone was famous because they knew him. He was in the habit, says Pat Hackett, of referring to people as ‘superstars’, be they ‘the most beautiful model in New York or the delivery boy who brought her a pack of cigarettes’.

  Would one be so interested in Warhol’s diaries if they did not contain the litany of rock stars, actors and artist
s, designers and writers? Perhaps not. But each diarist is an individual describing his or her life, for which they need make no excuses. As Kilvert indicated, curiosity is not the least of the attractions of reading a diary. Until the present age, when it is possible if one is so inclined to view every moment of complete strangers’ lives via the Internet, a diary was the closest one could get to understanding the way people lived and thought. Reading Kilvert, for example, is to get inside the mind of a nineteenth-century English country parson. His diary runs from 1870 to 1879, almost the same span as Pepys’s, but it came to light only in 1937 when the poet, novelist and critic William Plomer received 22 notebooks. His selection from them was published between 1938 and 1940.

  So far, so straightforward. But Plomer, avowedly because he was pressed for space, destroyed the typed manuscript he had made of the notebooks, convinced that the originals would be preserved. They were not and out of the original 22 notebooks only two survive. We know, too, that Kilvert’s wife, to whom he was married only a matter of months before he died, destroyed others of his diaries. It is a very odd case and raises more questions than can be answered. What is particularly controversial, however, is Plomer’s assertion that he had retained everything of the diaries which was worth preserving. ‘I can assure you,’ he wrote in his selection, ‘that the best and most essential parts of the Diary are in print. I left out what seemed to me commonplace and trivial.’

  It is hard to see Plomer’s action as other than arrogance. Without the commonplace and the trivial the best diaries would be bereft of much that makes them compelling and enduringly fascinating. Looking back over the diaries of the Rev. James Woodforde or Dorothy Wordsworth or even Josef Goebbels it is that which many people might not deem worth recording which sheds the most brilliant light on the diarist’s character or illuminates the times in which they lived. Often, one is struck by the ability of great diarists to combine in a single entry news either momentous or terrifying, or both, with some minor observation or irritation of everyday life. It is in a diary that our private world imperceptibly merges with the cataclysmic events which make headlines in every language.

  There are around 170 diarists in this anthology. Many of those represented are well known and many are not. There are diaries, of course, everyone wishes had been written. What wouldn’t we give to read Shakespeare’s diary, or that of Jesus or Mozart or Michelangelo? If everyone left behind a diary many unsolved mysteries could be cleared up. Would the conspiracy theorists still be in a job if Marilyn Monroe or JFK had written diaries of their relationship? Sometimes we almost wish diaries into being, so overwhelming is the desire to peep behind the arras of history. There is the unfortunate case of the Hitler diaries which fooled an eminent historian and a group of overeager senior journalists who could scarcely believe their luck. Sadly, the diaries of him whose name is a byword for man’s inhumanity to man proved to be fakes, causing exquisite embarrassment to all involved in their authentication and publication. That there have been many other spoof diaries did not sweeten the pill. At least in the case of the Holocaust there were many unassailable witnesses to appalling actions of a state hell-bent on wiping out an entire race, many of whom are to be found in the pages that follow.

  The idea of this anthology grew out of columns in two Scottish newspapers, Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman. Each week extracts from diaries for the corresponding period in the past were published, giving contemporary readers a flavour of what it was like in either the recent or the distant past. This book is an amplification of those columns. Entries are arranged day by day in chronological order throughout the year, an arrangement pioneered by Simon Brett in his diverting compilation The Faber Book of Diaries. Some days have more entries than others, depending on what our reading turned up. No day, unlike a real diary, has been left blank. The overriding principle of inclusion was enjoyment. Each of the 1800 or so entries was chosen because we believe it to be complete in itself, though some contribute to running stories which unfold as the year progresses. The book may be read continuously or dipped into as the days drift by. You pays your money and you takes your choice, but it’s worth bearing in mind that pleasure delayed is pleasure doubly heightened.

  All the diarists have been published commercially, whether or not that was their intention, but some are now out of print. Having sampled them, readers may like to seek them out in their original context. Every attempt has been made to keep the scope of the anthology as wide as possible. Diverse nationalities, ranging in date from the seventeenth century to the present day, are represented but not out of any sense of duty. Nor was there any thought of who made the ideal diarist. Here be cads and countrymen, wits and drones, neurotics, nymphomaniacs and narcissists.

  All human life is here. But not every diarist. Some were excluded because they are dull (George Gissing and Søren Kierkegaard being notable examples) others because their diaries are not dated (John Cheever and Fyodor Dostoyevsky to name but two who are conspicuous by their absence) and therefore proved unsuitable for extraction. Still others, while diarists of a high order, such as Anne Frank, have fewer entries than might be expected because their diaries work as complete entities whose potency is diminished when quoted selectively. A few fictional diaries, including Adrian Mole and George and Weedon Grossmith’s classic Diary of a Nobody, have been used, but sparingly.

  The diary, as Thomas Mallon concluded, is a genre to which ‘it is impossible to ascribe formulas and standards’. Ultimately, any attempt at definition is defeated by the diarists themselves, who are the most singular of species. More than any other branch of literature, diaries revel in otherness. Like a chameleon, a diary can change its colour to suit the mood of its keeper. It can be whatever the diarist wants it to be. Kafka used his to pour out his angst and limber up for his novels and short stories; Dorothy Wordsworth brought her botanical eye to the landscape of the Lake District, providing rich source material which her brother William mined for his poetry; Virginia Woolf spoke to hers as she might to an intimate friend, in so doing etching a portrait of the artist on the edge of the abyss.

  All contributed to the mosaic that is life. But one keeps coming back to William Soutar, lying on his back in bed as his health evaporated. His diary is an inspiration; it may be the work of a dying man but he lived for the moment. Soutar sagely realised better than most the ambiguous potential of a diary, imbued as it inevitably is with secrecy, and all it implies. A diary may be like drink, but it is also only as reliable as the diarist, who may be honest or corrupt or deceitful or a self-delusionist. Not only can it persuade us to betray the self, wrote Soutar, ‘it tempts us to betray our fellows also, becoming thereby an alter ego sharing with us the denigrations which we would be ashamed of voicing aloud; a diary is an assassin’s cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen. And here is this diary proving its culpability to its own harm — for how much on this page is true to the others?’

  Alan Taylor

  August 2000

  Acknowledgements

  Many people have contributed to this anthology, sometimes unsuspectingly. Throughout its long genesis countless suggestions have been made. Some bore fruit; others were added to the compost heap of rejection; all were very welcome. Two newspapers, Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman, were enlightened enough to run diary columns for some years and their then editors deserve our thanks. In an enterprise such as this libraries play an essential role, none more so than Edinburgh City Libraries, principally the Central Lending Library whose long-suffering staff were unfailingly helpful. From the outset, our publisher, Canongate, provided enthusiasm, commitment and ideas, many of which have significantly improved the quality of the book. In particular, Jamie Byng and Judy Moir ferreted out diarists we had overlooked or never heard of and were a constant source of advice. Our biggest debt of gratitude, however, is to the diarists whose personal revelations and indiscreet observations made this anthology such fun to compile.

  Irene and Alan Tayl
or

  August 2000

  JANUARY

  ‘The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with that he vowed to make it.’

  J. M. BARRIE

  1 January

  1662

  Waking this morning out of my sleep on a sudden, I did with my elbow hit my wife a great blow over her face and nose, which waked her with pain, at which I was sorry, and to sleep again.

  Samuel Pepys

  1763

  I went to Louisa at one. ‘Madam, I have been thinking seriously.’ ‘Well, Sir, I hope you are of my way of thinking.’ ‘I hope, Madam, you are of mine. I have considered this matter most seriously. The week is now elapsed, and I hope you will not be so cruel as to keep me in misery.’ (I then began to take some liberties.) ‘Nay, Sir – now – but do consider–’ ‘Ah, Madam!’ ‘Nay, but you are an encroaching creature!’ (Upon this I advanced to the greatest freedom by a sweet elevation of the charming petticoat.) ‘Good heaven, Sir!’ ‘Madam, I cannot help it. I adore you. Do you like me?’ (She answered me with a warm kiss, and pressing me to her bosom, sighed, ‘O Mr Boswell!’) ‘But, my dear Madam! Permit me, I beseech you.’ ‘Lord, Sir, the people may come in.’ ‘How then can I be happy? What time? Do tell me.’ ‘Why, Sir, on Sunday afternoon my landlady, of whom I am most afraid, goes to church, so you may come here a little after three.’ ‘Madam, I thank you a thousand times.’

  James Boswell

  1829

  Having omitted to carry on my diary for two or three days, I lost heart to make it up, and left it unfilld for many a month and day. During this period nothing has happend worth particular notice. The same occupations, the same amusements, the same occasional alterations of spirits, gay or depressd, the same absence of all sensible or rational cause for the one or the other – I half grieve to take up my pen, and doubt if it is worth while to record such an infinite quantity of nothing. But hang it! I hate to be beat so here goes for better behaviour.