The Assassin's Cloak. Группа авторов
Harold Nicolson
1941 [Dresden]
A couple of weeks ago at the Jewish tea downstairs with the Katzes and Kreidles, Leipziger, an elderly medical officer and insurance doctor, garrulously and somewhat boastfully and conceitedly monopolized the conversation; recently Frau Voss comes back enchanted from one of her bridge parties: The medical officer had read so interestingly from a book about the doctor, it is his own life. So now all the Jews who have been thrown out are writing their autobiography, and I am one of twenty thousand . . . And yet: The book will be good, and it helps me pass the time. But then the old doubt also revived again, whether it would not have been better for me to learn English. Now on the one hand the new reduction in our money is in the offing, on the other the block on American visas has been lifted and it will soon be the turn of our quota number, and Sussmann . . . has passed on my documents by airmail to Georg. Wait and see . . .
It continues to be cold with snow (without interruption since December), apartment difficult to heat, bad chilblains on my chapped and swollen hands.
Victor Klemperer
1995
Travel back to Dublin. Do the Late, Late Show with Gay Byrne. For those who don’t know, this is the Irish equivalent of Dave Letterman and Jay Leno rolled into one. And it has been running since they have had television in Ireland. I’ve avoided it for years, because it is the one thing that makes your face known here. As it is, I’m generally confused with Jim Sheridan and complimented for My Left Foot, which is fine by me. Actors and rock stars deserve that recognition since they’re paid so much. Writers and directors are paid to be anonymous. And halfway through the show I realise that anonymity here for me is gone for ever. The interest in this Collins film is turning it into a national institution. My problem now is how to make a film that won’t feel like a national institution.
Neil Jordan
21 January
1664
Up, and after sending my wife to my aunt Wight’s to get a place to see Turner hanged, I to the office, where we sat all the morning. And at noon going to the ‘Change, and seeing people flock in the City, I enquired and found that Turner was not yet hanged. And so I went among them to Leadenhall Street, and to St. Mary Axe, where he lived, and there I got for a shilling to stand upon the wheel of a cart, in great pain, above an houre before the execution was done; he delaying the time by long discourses and prayers one after another, in hopes of a reprieve; but none came, and at last was flung off the ladder in his cloake. A comely-looked man he was, and kept his countenance to the end: I was sorry to see him. It was believed there were at least 12 or 14,000 people in the street.
Samuel Pepys
1854
Here is a fact which needs to be remembered more often. Thackeray spent thirty years preparing to write his first novel, but Alexandre Dumas writes two a week.
Leo Tolstoy
1858 [New Orleans]
I am astonished more and more at the stupid extravagance of the women. Mrs H. (who gains her living by keeping a boarding house) has spent, she says, at least £60 on hair dyes in the last ten years. All the ladies, even little girls, wear white powder on their faces and many rouge. All wear silk dresses in the street and my carmelite [woollen material] and grey linen dresses are so singular here that many ladies would refuse to walk with me. Fashion rules so absolutely that to wear a hat requires great courage. Leather boots for ladies are considered monstrous. I never saw such utter astonishment as is depicted on the faces of the populace when I return from a sketching excursion. I do not like to come back alone so the Dr [her husband] always comes for me.
The people in the house would lend me any amount of flower garden bonnets if I would but go out in them. This is so like the Americans – they are generous and kind but will not let you go your own way in the world. My little plain bonnet and plaid ribbon is despised, all my wardrobe considered shabby and triste. I never saw people dress so much, and I must confess, too, with a certain taste which is caught from the French.
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
1915
A stormy day. We walked back this morning. J. [John Middleton Murry; they married in 1918] told me a dream. We quarrelled all the way home more or less. It has rained and snowed and hailed and the wind blows. The dog at the inn howls. A man far away is playing the bugle. I have read and sewed today, but not written a word. I want to to-night. It is so funny to sit quietly sewing, while my heart is never for a moment still. I am dreadfully tired in head and body. This sad place is killing me. I live upon old made-up dreams; but they do not deceive either of us.
Later I am in the sitting-room downstairs. The wind howls outside, but here it is so warm and pleasant. It looks like a real room where real people have lived. My sewing-basket is on the table: under the bookcase are poked J.’s old house shoes. The black chair, half in shadow, looks as if a happy person had sprawled there. We had roast mutton and onion sauce and baked rice for dinner. It sounds right. I have run the ribbons through my underclothes with a hairpin in the good home way. But my anxious heart is eating up my body, eating up my nerves, eating up my brain, now slowly, now at a tremendous speed. I feel this poison slowly filling my veins – every particle becoming slowly tainted. Yes, love like this is a malady, a fever, a storm. It is almost like hate, one is so hot with it – and am never, never calm, never for an instant. I remember years ago saying I wished I were one of those happy people who can suffer so far and then collapse or become exhausted. But I am just the opposite. The more I suffer, the more of fiery energy I feel to bear it. Darling! Darling!
Katherine Mansfield
1918
[On Sunday] Lytton [Strachey] came to tea; stayed to dinner, and about 10 o’clock we both had that feeling of parched lips and used up vivacity which comes from hours of talk. But Lytton was most easy and agreeable. Among other things he gave us an amazing account of the British Sex Society which meets at Hampstead. They were surprisingly frank; and fifty people of both sexes and various ages discussed without shame such questions as the deformity of Dean Swift’s penis; whether cats use the w.c., self abuse; incest – incest between parent and child when they are both unconscious of it, was their main theme, derived from Freud. I think of becoming a member. Lytton at different points exclaimed Penis: his contribution to the openness of the debate. We also discussed the future of the world; how we should like professions to exist no longer; Keats, old age, politics, Bloomsbury hypnotism – a great many subjects.
Virginia Woolf
1936
The King is dead – Long live the King. The eyes of the world are on the Prince of Wales, the new King Edward VIII. This morning everyone is in mourning, and the park is full of black crows. I went to the House of Commons at 6, which had been summoned by gun-fire – and unofficially, by radio. About 400 MPs out of 615 turned up, then the Speaker came in, and took his oath to Edward VIII, and we followed; the Prime Minister first . . . it took hours and I sat in the smoking room with A. P. Herbert and Duff Cooper waiting my turn. We talked of Royalty. Today is the anniversary of Lenin’s death; tomorrow that of Louis XVI and Queen Victoria . . . Duff had just come on from St James’s Palace where he attended the Privy Council to announce the accession of the King, and there they witnessed the King’s Oath. 60 or 70 patriarchs, and grandees, in levee dress or uniform, presided over by Ramsay MacDonald as Lord President of the Council. They make an impressive picture, it seems, not unfunny and reminiscent of charades in a country-house; then they processed into yet another Long Gallery where they were received by the Princes . . . a few moments later the new King was sent for, and he entered . . . solemn, grave, sad and dignified in Admiral’s uniform. Everyone was most impressed by his seeming youth and by his dignity. Much bowing, and he in turn swore his Oath. When he left some of the Councillors were overcome by their emotions . . . all this from Duff.
‘Chips’ Channon