The Assassin's Cloak. Группа авторов
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 emphasis 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,