The Assassin's Cloak. Группа авторов
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