never allowed to contribute one thing to the conversation, and if I even began a sentence he interrupted it. For most of the evening Julia and I sat in bored amazement. The only remarks tossed my way took the form of periodic incoherent denunciations of the Gallery’s purchase of the Hill-Adamson albums: ‘What do you want them for? Got drawer-loads of old photographs at home.’ He really wasn’t human and there was not a single comment he made which wasn’t about himself. He was a caricature arch-reactionary, enough to make me want to vote Communist.
Roy Strong
1975
The sixties are marvelous years, because one has become fully oneself by then, but the erosions of old age, erosion of strength, of memory, of physical well-being have not yet begun to frustrate and needle. I am too heavy, but I refuse to worry too much about it. I battle the ethos here in the USA, where concern about being overweight has become a fetish. I sometimes think we are as cruel to old brother ass, the body, as the Chinese used to be who forced women’s feet into tiny shoes as a sign of breeding and beauty. ‘Middle-aged spread’ is a very real phenomenon, and why pretend that it is not? I am not so interested in being a dazzling model as in being comfortable inside myself. And that I am.
May Sarton
31 January
1932
There is a dead and drowned mouse in the lily-pond. I feel like that mouse – static, obese and decaying. Vita [Sackville-West, his wife] is calm, comforting and considerate. And yet (for have I not been reading a batch of insulting press-cuttings?) life is a drab and dreary thing. I have missed it. I have made a fool of myself in every respect.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God?
Very glum. Discuss finance. Vita keeps on saying that we have got enough to go on with. But when one goes into it, that represents only two months. I must get a job. Yet all the jobs which pay humiliate. And the decent jobs do not pay. Come back to Long Barn. Arrange my books sadly. Weigh myself sadly. Have put on eight pounds. Feel ashamed of myself, my attainments, and my character. Am I a serious person at all? Vita thinks I should make £2,000 by writing a novel. I don’t. The discrepancy between these two theories causes me some distress of mind.
Harold Nicolson
1938
As was to be expected, criticism of the parade step [the ‘Roman step’, similar to the German goose-step] has started up. The old soldiers are particularly against it, because they choose to regard it as a Prussian invention. The Duce is very angry – he has read me the speech he is going to make to-morrow, explaining and extolling the innovation. It seems that the King too has expressed himself unfavourably. The Duce’s comment was: ‘It is not my fault if the King is half size. Naturally he won’t be able to do the parade step without making himself ridiculous. He will hate it for the same reason that he has always hated horses – he has to use a ladder to climb on to one. But a physical defect in a sovereign is not a good reason for stunting, as he has done, the army of a great nation. People say the goose-step is Prussian. Nonsense. The goose is a Roman animal – it saved the Capital. Its place is with the eagle and the she-wolf.’
Count Ciano
1947
What makes daily life so agreeable in America is the good humour and friendliness of Americans. Of course, this quality has its reverse side. I’m irritated by those imperious invitations to ‘take life easy’, repeated in words and images throughout the day. On advertisements for Quaker Oats, Coca-Cola, and Lucky Strike, what displays of white teeth – the smile seems like lockjaw. The constipated girl smiles a loving smile at the lemon juice that relieves her intestines. In the subway, in the streets, on magazine pages, these smiles pursue me like obsessions. I read on a sign in a drugstore, ‘Not to grin is a sin.’ Everyone obeys the order, the system. ‘Cheer up! Take it easy.’ Optimism is necessary for the country’s social peace and economic prosperity. If a banker has generously lent fifty dollars without guarantee to some Frenchman in financial straits, if the manager of my hotel takes a slight risk by cashing his customers’ cheques, it’s because this trust is required and implied by an economy based on credit and expenditure.
Simone de Beauvoir
1947 [New York]
I went to the drugstore and asked for Dial [sleeping pill]. I learned later that New York State has lately become alarmed at the suicides and has enforced a strict ban on the sale of barbiturates. The chemist said I must have a doctor’s prescription.
‘I am a foreigner here. I have no American prescription.’
‘We have a doctor on the 17th floor.’
‘I have to go out. I can’t go and see him.’
‘I’ll fix it for you.’
He telephoned the doctor, ‘Dere’s a guy here says he can’t sleep. OK to give him Dial, doc?’ Was given a box of twenty tablets ‘to the prescription of Dr Hart’. ‘$3 medical attention.’ That was the best piece of service I have yet met in the USA.
Evelyn Waugh
1987
Eddie Brown [barber] and Mrs Wilson, manicurist, were amused in the morning when I told them a true story about Enoch Powell. There is a very chatty barber in the Commons who never stops telling MPs whose hair he cuts about politics and what his views are on the world. Enoch Powell went to have his hair cut by him one day, sat down and the barber said, ‘How would you like your hair cut, sir?’ ‘In silence,’ Enoch replied.
Woodrow Wyatt
FEBRUARY
‘I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.’
MAE WEST
1 February
1857 [New York]
An epidemic of crime this winter. ‘Garotting’ stories abound, some true, some no doubt fictitious, devised to explain the absence of one’s watch and pocketbook after a secret visit to some disreputable place, or to put a good face on some tipsy street fracas. But a tradesman was attacked the other afternoon in broad daylight at his own shop door in the Third Avenue near Thirteenth Street by a couple of men, one of whom was caught, and will probably get his deserts in the State prison, for life – the doom of two of the fraternity already tried and sentenced. Most of my friends are investing in revolvers and carry them about at night, and if I expect to have to do a great deal of late street-walking off Broadway, I think I should make the like provision; though it’s a very bad practice carrying concealed weapons. Moreover, there was an uncommonly shocking murder in Bond Street (No. 31) Friday night; one Burdell, a dentist, strangled and riddled with stabs in his own room by some person unknown who must have been concealed in the room. Motive unknown, evidently not plunder.
George Templeton Strong
1867
Tennyson
