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Alan Taylor has been a journalist for over thirty years. He was deputy editor of the Scotsman, managing editor of Scotsman Publications, and writer-at-large for the Sunday Herald. He has edited several acclaimed anthologies, most recently Glasgow: The Autobiography. He has been a Booker Prize judge. He is the author of Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark and, in 2018, series editor of the centenary editions of Spark’s novels. He is the co-founder and editor of the Scottish Review of Books.
Irene Taylor was born and brought up in Edinburgh. For many years she worked in public libraries. She has a degree in history from Edinburgh University and she now works for the National Trust for Scotland.
The new edition first published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by
Canongate Books Ltd
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by
Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books
Introduction, Selection and Biographies © Irene and Alan Taylor, 2000
The right of Irene and Alan Taylor to be identified as the
authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
For details of copyright permissions, see pages 682—9
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 911 8
eISBN 978 1 83885 292 4
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Contents
Introduction
‘A diary is like drink,’ wrote the Scottish poet, William Soutar, ‘we tend to indulge in it over often: it becomes a habit which would ever seduce us to say more than we ought to say and more than we have the experimental qualifications to state.’ It must be said that Soutar, bedridden with a wasting illness, was a special case. Trapped from a young age in a small room in his parents’ house in Perth, his view of the world circumscribed by the size of his window, he was, in effect, a prisoner. His diary was his constant companion, a visitor who never went away. Thus the temptation to over-indulge.
For many people, however, a diary is like a reproach, a perpetual reminder of our indiscipline, lack of application, weakness of resolve. How many diaries, started in the first flush of a new year, peter out even before the memory of the annual hangover? We open the pristine book with enthusiasm but after a few days what had been a torrent turns into a drip. Soon, whole weeks go by unremarked, blank page followed by blank page. Humdrum life intrudes and the compulsion to memorialise in print evaporates. There are few things quite as capable of inducing guilt as an empty diary.
Soutar, his life cruelly condensed, came to depend on his diary. It was his friend, crutch, confidant, shrink, father confessor, mirror of himself, for a diary is the most flexible and intimate of literary forms. As Thomas Mallon noted in his formative book on the subject, A Book of One’s Own: People and their Diaries, diaries have been kept by everyone, from the barely literate to the leaders of men and women, from serial killers to conmen, kitchen maids to all-conquering heroes, children and nonagenarians, tinkers, tailors, soldiers and spies.
‘Some,’ wrote Mallon, ‘are chroniclers of the everyday. Others have kept their books only in special times — over the course of a trip, or during a crisis. Some have used them to record journeys of the soul, plan the art of the future, confess the sins of the flesh, lecture the world from beyond the grave. And some of them, prisoners and invalids, have used them not so much to record lives as create them, their diaries being the only world in which they could fully live.’
Into the last category falls William Soutar, who but for his diary and a few verses in Scots for children — ‘bairnrhymes’ — would now be forgotten. Though he began keeping a diary in 1917, when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Atlantic with the Navy, it comprised little more than brief notes of appointments
