Perelman.)
Perelman: Dawn, I hear your book is going like blazes. How many copies sold?
Me: (lying) Why, I imagine around fifteen thousand.
Perelman: Ah, here’s Thurber. You know Dawn.
Thurber: Hello, Dawn, how many copies did your book sell? Fifty thousand?
Me: Well, more like twenty.
Thurber: Understand you got $15,000 from the movies. Shoulda got more. Would’ve if you’d held out.
Me: Well, it would still all be gone now no matter what I got.
Thurber: (glancing around, though almost blind) Big party. Musta set Peter back about fifty bucks. What’d he get for his picture?
Perelman: Do you realize that bastard Cerf takes 20 percent of my play rights, same as he did for ‘Junior Miss’?
Thurber: Shouldn’t do it. Harcourt never took a cent off me. Had it in the contract.
Perelman: I’d like to have lunch with you and discuss that, Jim. Jesus, Jim – 20 percent!
Thus does the wit flow from these two talented fellows.
Dawn Powell
1980
Just in time for Joyce Grenfell’s Memorial Service. Westminster Abbey packed to the doors. What a well-loved lady she was; she had what the Zulus call ‘shine’. How typical of her that she always referred to the side-duties of a celebrity – charity openings, bazaars and lunches – as ‘fringe benefits’ and worked as hard at them as her professional work. ‘The lines’, she used to say, quoting the Psalms, ‘are fallen to me in pleasant places’. Bernard Levin and I (we the undersized) crouch behind two of the largest men I have ever seen. Bach, Mozart – her favourite composers – modest, touching tribute from her local vicar, a reading – disappointing unmoving – from Paul Scofield and then the rush for the West Door, waspishly envying those who seem entitled to chauffeurs (eg Peter Hall and Permanent Secretaries). Heavy establishment top-dressing but lovely to see so many less famous faces. Memorial services may be disliked by those they honour, but to those left behind they serve as a sort of surrogate encounter with death.
Sir Hugh Casson
8 February
1841
My Journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste, gleanings from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but in it for the gods.
They are my correspondents, to whom daily I send off this sheet postpaid. I am clerk in their counting-room, and at evening transfer the account from day-book to ledger. It is as a leaf which hangs over my head in the path. I bend the twig and write my prayers on it; then letting it go, the bough springs up and shows the scrawl to heaven. As if it were not kept shut in my desk, but were as public a leaf as any in nature. It is papyrus by the riverside; it is vellum in the pastures; it is parchment on the hills. I find it everywhere as free as the leaves which troop along the lanes in autumn. The crow, the goose, the eagle carry my quill, and the wind blows the leaves as far as I go. Or, if my imagination does not soar, but gropes in slime and mud, then I write with a reed.
H. D. Thoreau
1941 [Dresden]
Lissy Meyerhof sent six pairs of secondhand socks, presumably originally belonging to Erich’s sons – a mercy, since I am running around with holes and sore, dirty feet. The package and the letter was accompanied by a note, translated from the Italian, from Hans Meyerhof, I was able to establish his concentration camp, on the Deserto . . .
Cohn, congenial Winter Aid man of the Jewish Community, whom I was this time unable to grant any additional donation, saw my completely torn carpet slippers and supported my application for a pair from the Jewish clothing store; I am to fetch them there on Monday. Yet another mercy.
On the evening of the fifth almost friendly contact with the corrupt and powerful Estreicher, with whom I clashed so violently in May because of the accommodation business. It was about reorganizing the billets, though we are spared. The Katzes on the ground floor are going to Berlin, in their place comes a homo novus, who appears to have given a very good bribe: He is not only to get two rooms just for himself, but a third one as well for his Aryan housekeeper . . .
On the fourth to Frau Kronheim for a touchingly nice short visit (real coffee, cake, a cigar) . . . A woman of about sixty, widow of a straw hat manufacturer, evidently once affluent, probably a little even now. Large room in Bautzener Strasse, of course bed and washstand y todo in the same room, most furniture in storage. Conversations naturally always the same: Affidavit – will America enter the war? – Recently: What is going to happen to Italy? – Here the English recovery is tremendous. Only yesterday I saw the December issue of The Twentieth Century at the dentist’s . . . There the Italian offensive against and in (in!) Egypt was discussed and there was a big map, and today Benghazi has already been taken. Will England succeed in defeating Italy? Hitler’s speech on January 30 (‘I shall force a decision this year’) had a different tone from all the previous ones. Nothing more about a seven years’ war, nothing more about friendship with Russia and the Balkans – now only: We are prepared for every eventuality, and submarine threat against the USA. The speech is supposed to have sounded like a cry of rage, his voice breaking. True security or Despair? – Rumors everywhere of new levies and troops sent eastward and motorization.
Victor Klemperer
1945 [Bergen-Belsen]
I had hung my coat in a cupboard. Someone has stolen the buttons.
Abel J. Herzberg
1948
Looked in on Tony and Violet Powell, and laughed much over Duke of Windsor’s Memoirs and Americanisms in them – for instance, ‘Fatty’ instead of ‘Tubby’. Wondered if Royal Family had been given advance copy, or if they opened Sunday Express each week apprehensively.
Malcolm Muggeridge
1983 [Dundee]
A day off from filming An Englishman Abroad and I go to Edinburgh with Alan Bates. We climb the tower near the castle to see the camera obscura. The texture of the revolving bowl and the softness of the reflection convert the view into an eighteenth-century aquatint in which motor cars seem as delicate and exotic as sedan chairs. The traffic is also rendered more sedate and unreal for being silent.
An element of voyeurism in it. The guide, a genteel Morningside lady, trains the mirror on some adjacent scaffolding where workmen are restoring a church. ‘I often wonder,’ she muses in the darkened room, ‘if one were to catch them . . . well, unawares. I mean,’ she adds hastily, ‘taking a little rest.’
Alan Bennett
9 February
1826
Methinks I have been like Burns’s poor labourer
So constantly in Ruin’s sight
The
