– a splendid analysis of Hamlet’s Act 1 will be followed by ‘Well cheerio, so long, old sport – see you in Act 2!’
Joan Wyndham
1966
Went out and got the papers. The usual load of rubbish, apart from an interesting piece by Philip Toynbee on the boring pointlessness of the writing of Beckett and Burroughs. He should have cast his net wider, to include Osborne. He made the point that this kind of writing treats of despair despairingly. He rightly says that this is a fundamental misconception of Art.
Kenneth Williams
1978 [in Barlinnie Prison]
3.14am. I’ve been wakened for over an hour, am irritable and restless. The Radio Clyde disc jockey is speaking to people in their homes via telephone. I get the atmosphere of home parties from it. Pop music is blasting in my ears and I marvel at radio and how it must comfort lonely people. It’s almost as though it’s reassuring me I’m not alone. 3.55am. One of these days I won’t be ‘still here’. It’s amazing how difficult I find it to think of myself being anywhere else.
Jimmy Boyle
1990
I seem to be the only Western playwright not personally acquainted with the new President of Czechoslovakia [Václav Havel]. I envy him though. What a relief to find oneself head of state and not have to write plays but just make history. And no Czechoslovak equivalent of Charles Osborne snapping at your ankles complaining that the history you’re making falls between every possible stool, or some Prague Steven Berkoff snarling that it’s not the kind of history that’s worth making anyway. I wonder whether Havel has lots of uncompleted dissident plays. To put them on now would be somehow inappropriate. Still, he could write a play about it.
Alan Bennett
3 January
1853
I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.
H. D. Thoreau
1870
I went to see old Isaac Giles. He lamented the loss of his famous old pear tree. He told me he was nearly 80 and remembered seeing the Scots Greys passing through Chippenham on their way to Waterloo. They looked very much down, he said, for they knew where they were going.
Rev. Francis Kilvert
1902
Bliss and rapture.
Alma Mahler-Werfel
1915
It 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.
