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  Sir Walter Scott

  1866

  Travelling in France, it is a misfortune to be a Frenchman. The wing of the chicken at a table d’hôte always goes to the Englishman. He is the only person the waiter serves. Why is this? Because the Englishman does not look upon the waiter as a man, and any servant who feels that he is being regarded as a human being despises the person considering him in that light.

  The Brothers Goncourt

  1902

  What I have to write today is terribly sad. I called on Gustav – in the afternoon we were alone in his room. He gave me his body – & I let him touch me with his hand. Stiff and upright stood his vigour. He carried me to the sofa, laid me gently down and swung himself over me. Then – just as I felt him penetrate, he lost all strength. He laid his head on my breast, shattered – and almost wept for shame. Distraught as I was, I comforted him.

  We drove home, dismayed and dejected. He grew a little more cheerful. Then I broke down, had to weep, weep on his breast. What if he were to lose – that! My poor, poor, husband!

  I can scarcely say how irritating it all was. First his intimate caresses, so close – and then no satisfaction. Words cannot express what I today have undeservedly suffered, and then to observe his torment – his unbelievable torment!

  My beloved!

  Alma Mahler-Werfel

  1914

  What a vile little diary! But I am determined to keep it this year.

  Katherine Mansfield

  1915

  We were kept awake last night by New Year Bells. At first I thought they were ringing for a victory.

  Virginia Woolf

  1970 [Ardnamurchan, Scotland]

  As I was up long before the other members of the household I carried out the old ritual of going out by the back door, and bringing in a lump of coal by the front door. After that I did my usual daily stint of lighting the fire and making their morning tea for the sleepers! Some showers before daylight. Forenoon damp with intermittent smirr and hill fog. Wind Westerly, light to moderate, at first but veered Northwesterly in the evening. Showers from mid-day onwards. Afternoon and evening raw and cold. No sunshine. Apart from [his wife] Eliz’s illness, the year just ended was a good one for us in every way. No post tonight.

  Ian Maclean

  1983

  New Year’s Day

  These are my New Year resolutions:

  1. I will revise for my ‘O’ levels at least two hours a night.

  2. I will stop using my mother’s Buff-Puff to clean the bath.

  3. I will buy a suede brush for my coat.

  4. I will stop thinking erotic thoughts during school hours.

  5. I will oil my bike once a week.

  6. I will try to like Bert Baxter again.

  7. I will pay my library fines (88 pence) and rejoin the library.

  8. I will get my mother and father together again.

  9. I will cancel the Beano.

  Adrian Mole

  2 January

  1763

  I got dinner to be at two, and at three I hastened to my charmer.

  Here a little speculation on the human mind may well come in. For here was I, a young man full of vigour and vivacity, the favourite lover of a handsome actress and going to enjoy the full possession of my warmest wishes. And yet melancholy threw a cloud over my mind. I could relish nothing. I felt dispirited and languid. I approached Louisa with a kind of an uneasy tremor. I sat down. I toyed with her. Yet I was not inspired by Venus. I felt rather a delicate sensation of love than a violent amorous inclination for her. I was very miserable. I thought myself feeble as a gallant, although I had experienced the reverse many a time. Louisa knew not my powers. She might imagine me impotent. I sweated with anxiety, which made me worse. She behaved extremely well; did not seem to remember the occasion of our meeting at all. I told her I was very dull. Said she, ‘People cannot always command their spirits.’ The time of church was almost elapsed when I began to feel that I was still a man. I fanned the flame by pressing her alabaster breasts and kissing her delicious lips. I then barred the door of her dining-room, led her all fluttering into her bedchamber, and was just making a triumphal entry when we heard her landlady coming up. ‘O Fortune why did it happen thus?’ would have been the exclamation of a Roman bard. We were stopped most suddenly and cruelly from the fruition of each other. She ran out and stopped the landlady from coming up. Then returned to me in the dining-room. We fell into each other’s arms, sighing and panting, ‘O dear, how hard this is.’ ‘O Madam see what you can contrive for me.’ ‘Lord, Sir, I am so frightened.’

  Her brother then came in. I recollected that I had been at no place of worship today. I begged pardon for a little and went to Church . . . I heard a few prayers then returned and drank tea . . . I went home at seven. I was unhappy at being prevented from the completion of my wishes, and yet I thought that I had saved my credit for prowess, that I might through anxiety have not acted a vigorous part; and that we might contrive a meeting where I could love with ease and freedom.

  James Boswell

  1926

  I went to tea at Sumner Place and we went on to dinner at a new restaurant called Favas which Richard has discovered which is very cheap indeed. I gave Richard the ties I had bought in Paris. I enjoyed the evening very much.

  On Sunday I was bored.

  On Monday I went to luncheon at Sumner Place and to a cinema in Shaftesbury Avenue to see the new Harold Lloyd film. Richard found an harlot who took us to drink at a club called John’s in Gerard Street where there was a slot machine which gave me a lot of money and Alfred Duggan who gave me a lot of brandy. We went to dinner again at Favas with Anthony Russell. He brought me back and I made him drunk.

  Evelyn Waugh

  1926 [Paris]

  Talk turned largely on mutual acquaintances: Diaghilev, Cocteau, Radiguet. When I spoke about the Russian Ballet’s miraculous salvation and rejuvenation through war and revolution, Misia told us how badly off Diaghilev had been during the war. In Spain he nearly starved. It took months before the French Government granted him an entry permit, but at last Sert was able to fetch him from Barcelona. On the way to the frontier he asked Diaghilev whether he had anything compromising on him. No, nothing at all, he never carried anything compromising on him. Well, at any rate look whether you haven’t anything in your pockets, Sert urged him. Only a few old letters. Yes, but what letters? Finally Diaghilev brought out a fat wad of papers, including two letters from Mata Hari. The French had just arrested her for espionage. There was barely time to destroy the correspondence before they reached the frontier.

  Count Harry Kessler

  1952

  After tea I went to visit Khalid’s surgery, where he treats the poor of Baghdad for free – a really horrifying experience which I could hardly bear to watch. Half the men were suffering from stab wounds and broken heads, but there were also wretched women with ulcerous breasts and babies with rickets. Khalid was examining a woman who had some problem with her womb when her mother burst in screaming and shouting and dragged her out of the surgery. Apparently because the operation might mean she could bear no more sons, it was forbidden, so she will probably die in childbirth.

  Maurice’s students at the college are much more emancipated. They arrive shrouded in black abbas which they throw off to reveal tight-fitting skirts and sweaters with ‘Wisconsin’ printed on them. All the girls are in love with Mo because he is tall and blond. Unfortunately he has an awful habit of scratching his crotch when carried away by his own eloquence, and halfway through a lecture on Chaucer he’ll notice fifty pairs of beady eyes glued to his trousers. Their work is excellent but erratic as they have a great desire to be colloquial – a splendid analysis of Hamlet’s Act 1 will be followed by ‘Well cheerio, so long, old sport – see you in Act 2!’

  Joan Wyndham

  1966

  Went out and got the papers. The usual load of rubbish, apart from an interesting piece by Philip Toynbee on
the boring pointlessness of the writing of Beckett and Burroughs. He should have cast his net wider, to include Osborne. He made the point that this kind of writing treats of despair despairingly. He rightly says that this is a fundamental misconception of Art.

  Kenneth Williams

  1978 [in Barlinnie Prison]

  3.14am. I’ve been wakened for over an hour, am irritable and restless. The Radio Clyde disc jockey is speaking to people in their homes via telephone. I get the atmosphere of home parties from it. Pop music is blasting in my ears and I marvel at radio and how it must comfort lonely people. It’s almost as though it’s reassuring me I’m not alone. 3.55am. One of these days I won’t be ‘still here’. It’s amazing how difficult I find it to think of myself being anywhere else.

  Jimmy Boyle

  1990

  I seem to be the only Western playwright not personally acquainted with the new President of Czechoslovakia [Václav Havel]. I envy him though. What a relief to find oneself head of state and not have to write plays but just make history. And no Czechoslovak equivalent of Charles Osborne snapping at your ankles complaining that the history you’re making falls between every possible stool, or some Prague Steven Berkoff snarling that it’s not the kind of history that’s worth making anyway. I wonder whether Havel has lots of uncompleted dissident plays. To put them on now would be somehow inappropriate. Still, he could write a play about it.

  Alan Bennett

  3 January

  1853

  I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.

  H. D. Thoreau

  1870

  I went to see old Isaac Giles. He lamented the loss of his famous old pear tree. He told me he was nearly 80 and remembered seeing the Scots Greys passing through Chippenham on their way to Waterloo. They looked very much down, he said, for they knew where they were going.

  Rev. Francis Kilvert

  1902

  Bliss and rapture.

  Alma Mahler-Werfel

  1915

  It is strange how old traditions, so long buried as one thinks, suddenly crop up again. At Hyde Park Gate we used to set apart Sunday morning for cleaning the table silver. Here I find myself keeping Sunday morning for odd jobs – typewriting it was today – and tidying the room – and doing accounts which are very complicated this week. I have three little bags of coppers, which each owe the other something. We went to a concert at the Queen’s Hall, in the afternoon. Considering that my ears have been pure of music for some weeks, I think patriotism is a base emotion. By this I mean that they played a National Anthem and a hymn, and all I could feel was the entire absence of emotion in myself and everyone else. If the British spoke openly about WCs, and copulation, then they might be stirred by universal emotions. As it is, an appeal to feel together is hopelessly muddled by intervening greatcoats and fur coats. I begin to loathe my kind, principally from looking at their faces in the tube. Really, raw red beef and silver herrings give me more pleasure to look upon.

  Virginia Woolf

  1932

  On my way back to Missouri I stopped in St Louis and I saw my first bread line – 200 starving men forming a gray line as they waited for food. The sight of them disturbed me.

  Edward Robb Ellis

  1940

  James Thurber of the New Yorker is in Baltimore this week, revising a play. It is being performed at the Maryland theatre, and apparently needs considerable rewriting. Paul Patterson entertained Thurber at the Sun office yesterday, and I had a chance to talk with him. He was full of curious stuff about Ross, editor of the New Yorker. He said that Ross never reads anything except New Yorker manuscripts. His library consists of three books. One is Mark Twain’s ‘Life on the Mississippi’; the second is a book by a man named Spencer, falsely assumed by Ross to be Herbert Spencer, and the third is a treatise on the migration of eels. Despite this avoidance of reading Ross is a first-rate editor. More than once, standing out against the advice of all of his staff, he has proved ultimately that he was right. Thurber said that he is a philistine in all the other arts. He regards painting as a kind of lunacy, and music as almost immoral.

  H. L. Mencken

  1973

  It has been nearly three weeks since I last wrote in this diary. At Christmas time the world goes dead and this now extends into the New Year. Ireland remains as violent as ever; we continue to offer the other cheek to Uganda and Iceland; labour relations have been relatively quiet over the holidays, the Vietnam war is on again, off again; Nixon begins his new term of office with an appalling world press; the newspapers, of course, are filled with our joining the European Community. I supported this cause in the Daily Mirror, long before other newspapers or Macmillan took it up. I still think it is not the best policy, but it is the only one, and the antics of Wilson and the Labour party are contemptible. But is it not mistimed? All European countries are faced with uncontrolled inflation and, as well, we have many problems unsolved from Ireland to labour relations, Italy is hanging on the edge of civil war and France is not all that much better. May we not have signed the Treaty of Rome just before the collapse? Official comment is so widely optimistic on every subject that it is hard to judge what is really happening. We even have a new doctrine that optimism is a patriotic duty – criticism or even cautious comment are little better than sabotage. And in the meanwhile every problem is to be settled by negotiation and goodwill. No one must actually stand firm on anything – except in a demand for more money.

  Cecil King

  4 January

  1664

  To the Tennis Court and there saw the King play at Tennis, and others; but to see how the King’s play was extolled without any cause at all was a loathsome sight, though sometimes indeed he did play very well and deserved to be commended; but such open flattery is beastly.

  Samuel Pepys

  1848

  Such a beautiful day, that one felt quite confused how to make the most of it, and accordingly frittered it away.

  Caroline Fox

  1902

  Rapture without end.

  Alma Mahler-Werfel

  1903 [Discovery expedition to Antarctica]

  Epiphany Sunday. Good juicy brown beef dripping is one thing I long for, and a large jugful of fresh creamy milk in Crippetts dairy. Killed another dog today as he was too weak to walk. We turned out at 6 a.m., had breakfast and were on the march by 8.30 a.m. And though the surface was very heavy with ice crystals, soft and deep and smooth, there being no sun to glaze the surface, we did 4 and a half miles by lunch time, when the Captain [Scott] took a sight, but it was too overcast all over the land for me to sketch. We had an hour’s rest and then made 3 and a half miles more in the afternoon. We have now only 8 dogs and they are good for no work at all. We camped at 4.30 p.m., when sky cleared over the land, but a cold breeze from the north made sketching impossible. We are all now pulling on foot in finnesko all day, heavy work for 7 hours or more, soft ice crystals with no crust. The sledges go very heavily when there is no sun, but run easily as soon as the sun comes out. I think much on the march of our return to the ship, when we shall I hope, find all our letters waiting for us. Le bon temps viendra.

  Edward Wilson

  1922

  The snow is thicker, it clings to the branches like white new-born puppies.

  Katherine Mansfield

  1935

  Now that I am growing older and can see young folks isolated from me by a number of years, I am sometimes halted by the thought, when looking on them: ‘Is it a fact that my own youth ended at 24?’ This, of course, is a time when the joys of physical freedom are emphasized, and the pleasures that gather around a home of one’s own. And with this emp
hasis comes the thought that we are but human once, and that to be able to joy in action is a great privilege. The thought, of course, is but fleeting – for it is folly to brood: and has not one known the joy – which is enough; and are there not many who have never known it?

  William Soutar

  1953

  I think that people who manifest their love for you, physically, when they know your lack of reciprocation, are abominably selfish. Sooner or later, the relationship must suffer, however noble its beginnings. I must be comparatively under sexed or something for I have never particularly wanted to make physical love to anybody. All this touching and kissing which seems so popular among others passes me by. Denis Goacher knows I’m virgin, and is always saying that I make up for it by flirting continually. He says I should do something. He can’t believe I could be abnormal. To him, everyone must do something or die! Perhaps I am dead.

  Kenneth Williams

  1958

  New year four days gone, along with resolutions of a page a day, describing mood, fatigue, orange peel or color of bathtub water after a week’s scrub. Penalty, and escape, both: four pages to catch up. Air lifts, clears. The black yellow-streaked smother of October, November, December, gone and clear New Year’s air come – so cold it turns bare shins, ears and cheeks to a bone of ice-ache. Yet sun, lying low on the fresh white paint of the storeroom door, reflecting in the umber-ugly paint coating the floorboards, and shafting a slant on the mauve-rusty rosy lavender rug from the west gable window. Changes: what breaks windows to thin air, blue views, in a smother-box? A red twilly shirt for Christmas: Chinese red with black-line scrolls and oriental green ferns to wear every day against light blue walls. Ted’s job chance at teaching just as long and just as much as we need. $1000 or $2000 clear savings for Europe. Vicarious joy at Ted’s writing which opens promise for me too: New Yorker’s 3rd poem acceptance and a short story for Jack and Jill. 1958: the year I stop teaching and start writing. Ted’s faith: don’t expect: just write: what? It will take months to get my inner world peopled, and the people moving. How else to do it but plunge out of this safe scheduled time-clock wage-check world into my own voids. Distant planets spin: I dream too much of fame, posturings, a novel into print. But with no job, no money worries, why, the black lid should lift. Look at life with humor: easy to say: things open up: know people: horizons extend . . .