‘So Teach us to Number our Days’: diaries & diarists

At the year’s end it’s always a pleasure to read the latest excerpts from Alan Bennett’s dairy, published annually in the London Review of Books. There are things one always looks out for – name dropping, for instance. 2017 is a vintage year: Bennett begins with ‘Tony Snowden and Princess Margaret’ and ends with ‘the (much missed) Debo, Duchess of Devonshire’.  In between come Gielgud and Guinness, Derek Jarman and Patrick Garland, Cecil Beaton and Coral Browne – a veritable dramatis personae.

Bennett is surely the Eeyore of modern letters. He notes with equal resignation and pleasure that The Oldie has called him ‘trademark lugubrious’, but at the same time he can be endearingly funny. Reading in bed one night he contrives to fall asleep ‘with a very uncomfortable bunch of keys in my pyjama pocket’, the consequences of this left to the reader’s wincing imagination.

I enjoy spotting Bennett’s other trademark: his habit of ending sentences with an added, abbreviated, comment – abbreviated because the author has left out the verb one would expect to find there. Here are two examples from 2017:

(9^th June, about Theresa May): Notable that she keeps referring to ‘our country’ whereas an ordinary person as distinct from a politician would say ‘this country’ – ‘our’ paradoxically not an inclusive term.’

(29^th August, in Paris): ‘We go into a creperie opposite the St Germain covered market hoping for some tea, in the window a solitary piece of cake.’

What is missing from these examples is the active voice. I used to assume that this was just a form of diarist’s shorthand, thoughts and observations tagged on rather than incorporated into the sentence. But it crops up in different contexts too – in The History Boys (2004) for instance – where Hector is arguing with his VIth Form students about how to write an Oxbridge entrance essay on the Holocaust. ‘Why can’t you simply condemn the camps outright as an unprecedented horror?’ he asks. Lockwood cockily replies:

‘No point, sir. Everybody will do that. That’s the stock answer, sir …  the camps an event unlike any other, the evil unprecedented, etc., etc.’

Here Lockwood uses the Bennett ellipsis quite appropriately, as if reeling off headings for an essay. But Hector replies:

‘No. Can’t you see that even to say etcetera is monstrous? Etcetera is what the Nazis would have said, the dead reduced to a mere verbal abbreviation.’

‘Mere verbal abbreviation’ defines Bennett’s literary mannerism precisely, if inadvertently. But it’s when this ellipsis finds its way into the speech of other characters – albeit one such as Hector, in many ways a mouthpiece for Bennett himself – that I start to ask whether what began as diarist’s shorthand isn’t showing signs of repetitive strain. Might Hector’s denunciation not have been stronger if he’d actively condemned the Nazis for reducing the dead to an etcetera?

I have spent a lot of time with diaries recently. While writing my book on Charles Eamer Kempe* I have had access to the diary of Wyndham Hughes, a fine but forgotten artist, who was Kempe’s leading draughtsman during the 1870s. Hughes was a lifelong diarist, each volume prefaced with ‘The record of our days and years’ or ‘So teach us to number our days: that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom’ (Psalm 90). For me, his diary has been invaluable, describing his friendship with Kempe, listing many of his key commissions (previously unidentified) and sometimes containing precious ephemera slipped between the pages – this 1876 letter, for instance:

My dear Hughes

Thanks for the drawing which I hope, (& think it aught) will pass the Royal Critic. I think I should take with me in the morning the former drawing (charcoal) to remind H.R.H. of the architect[ural] background &c – as well as to show the changes in the figure. The Child is very successful now. Could you bring me the old drawing by 9.15. I have to be at the Palace by 10.

 Yours, C.E.K

This never-before-seen letter refers to the most significant commission Hughes ever undertook for Kempe: a memorial window for Queen Victoria’s grandson.^‡ The window established a friendship between Kempe and the Royal Family, his reputation thereby greatly enhanced. To find such a letter, in such a diary, is one of a biographer’s rewards.

The other diary I’ve been reading recently is my grandfather’s. Edward Barlow, a Baptist minister, was not a diarist by habit; however, in 1917 he went to France as a YMCA padre and kept a diary of the two most remarkable years of his life. Working in a transit camp near Rouen, he met and recorded conversations with ordinary soldiers on their way to the Front. Here is one such encounter, from 100 years ago today: 1st January 1918:

A draft of men from the Camp for Base missed their train by 30 mins. & consequently had a long wait in our Hut. One spoke to me in great trouble about his home in a colliery village (Northumberland). He showed me a letter from his wife’s mother which he received last Friday saying that his wife was going out with another man & cared no more for him than she did for her. The children had for a time been with her mother but now they were taken off by a black woman. His wife had gone to the dogs & was a disgrace to them. She hadn’t got any money but wasted it on dressing herself like a fairy & going with the man in the evenings to picture houses and the theatre.

The man was greatly upset & said he would try to get home without anyone knowing it & catch his wife with the man. It would pay the man to keep out of his way & he would get his wife, who was in munitions, out of the town. She was 29.

My grandfather never revealed that he had kept this diary; my father found it among his papers after his death, and I have it now.

Adrian Barlow

* Kempe: the life, art and legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe will be published by Lutterworth Press in Summer 2018. Further details to follow in due course.

^‡Prince Friedrich (Frittie) von Hessen-Darmstadt (1870-1873) was the second son of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Alice, wife of the Grand Duke of Darmstadt and Hesse. A haemophiliac, Frittie was the first of Victoria’s grandchildren to die. He was buried in the Neues Mausoleum at Rosenhöhe, on the outskirts of Darmstadt, and it was for the window in the mausoleum that Kempe was commissioned to produce the stained glass designed by Wyndham Hughes. The commission was brokered by Alice’s brother, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and he is the ‘Royal Critic’ referred to by Kempe in his letter to Hughes.

Illustrations] (i) Alan Bennett (National Theatre); (ii) Window (1877), designed by Wyndham Hope Hughes for the Royal Mausoleum in Darmstadt. The image of the child is a likeness of Prince Friedrich. (iii) Edward Barlow’s Diary for 1918, while serving with the YMCA at No. 11 Convalescent Depot, Buchy (Nr. Rouen).   Photos (ii) and (iii) © author

On The Waggoner

 Reading before sleeping, I ponder the slim volume I have just found on my shelves, hidden between Undertones of War and Overtones of War.  It’s a collection of poems by Edmund Blunden, and I’m searching the book, and my memory, to recall how and when I came by it. It seems to have a history, this copy of The Waggoner and other Poems (1920), long pre-dating my ownership of it.

It’s genuinely slim - 70 pages - a blue, crown 8vo book. Today you’d say it was a hardback, but that word did not exist in 1920. So, call it cloth-bound. Its spine has faded to a pale grey; it’s been well-read, too, the top edge bent back by the pressure of many fingers and the printed title label rubbed and faded; but, in keeping with a long-gone convention, the publisher (Sidgwick and Jackson) has slipped a spare label inside the back cover. And this isn’t the only label: inside the front a discreet little sticker announces that the book has been sold by

THE DAVENANT BOOKSHOP

NEW AND SECOND-HAND BOOKS

2 & 3 THE TURL, OXFORD.

Blunden was only 24 when this book was published, but his reputation as a poet was already high. Four years before, in 1916, an earlier volume had been well reviewed, as Blunden would later record in Undertones of War:

I had written and left with a publisher in London a trifling collection of verses: I had forgotten about them, but they entered my story again at Givenchy. The scene is bright in my mind’s eye.

He and his friends in the trenches are discussing a lucky escape – a friendly fire incident that almost demolished their dug-out – when a message summons him to dinner at battalion headquarters:

A review of my poems has been printed in The Times Literary Supplement (a kind review it was, if ever there was one!), and my Colonel has seen it and is overjoyed at having an actual author in his battalion.

This anecdote is a reminder of how quickly Blunden had made his name as a poet. No wonder, then,

that Sidgwick & Jackson thought highly enough of him to have printed The Waggoner on fine laid paper: holding the book up to the light, I can read the watermark, Abbey Mills Greenfield, on page after untrimmed page. These have all been cut by the first reader – using a short-bladed penknife, I should say, for the cutting is sometimes jagged.

I start reading. The book is dedicated to the poet’s first wife, Mary Daines Blunden. They had met in 1918, in Suffolk where Blunden had been sent on an army course, and had married in 1919 as soon as he was demobbed. Just last week, the poet and critic John Greening posted an excellent Carcanet blog in defence of Blunden. He ended by saying that

we need to find a better way of reading Edmund Blunden. Perhaps someone should stand up … and tell us he is not a complacent pastoralist; he is terrifying.

Quite so, and it is indeed easy to misread The Waggoner as the work of a complacent pastoralist safely home from the trenches. Here, it may seem, is Blunden burying himself in his beloved Wealden countryside, turning out bucolic poems like ‘The Barn’ or ‘Sheepbells’. But this is a book of ghosts, and not only the ghostly waggoner himself, nor the Silver Bird of Herndyke Hill (subject of Blunden’s long opening poem, dedicated to his new friend Siegfried Sassoon). Much more unsettling is the ghost of John Clare:

I see him there, with his streaming hair

And his eyes

Piercing beyond our human firmament,

Lit with a burning deathless discontent. (‘Clare’s Ghost’)

As it happens, Blunden in 1920 was actually bringing the poet Clare back to life: in the same year as The Waggoner appeared, he published John Clare: Poems Chiefly from Manuscript, and this volume did much to speed the revival of interest in Clare’s poetry and his life. But Clare’s is not the only ghost Blunden summons.

Perhaps the most terrifying – certainly the most distressing – poem in The Waggoner is ‘Sick-Bed’. ‘Half dead with fever, here in bed I sprawl’ the poem begins, and in the opening stanza Blunden watches ‘the odd flies crawl / Above the ceiling’s white desolation’. Although 1920 was the year that really established his reputation as poet and editor (Thomas Hardy and Walter de la Mare were only two of those praising his latest books), it was also the year he abandoned his degree course at Oxford – postponed because of the War – and found himself with no steady income and a young wife to support.

So now the books that mockingly surround his sick-bed, with titles like On Choosing a Career and Ten Thousand a Year, make him almost suicidal:

And I stare for my life at the square black ebony block

Of darkness in the open window-frame.

Then it gets worse:

my thoughts flash in one white searching flame

On my little lost daughter …

                                               Her stony fate denies

The vision of her, though tired Fancy’s sight

Scrawl with pale curves the dead and scornful night.

Blunden’s daughter, Joy, had died the previous year - after living only forty days. Her loss left him desolate, and the one poem in The Waggoner dedicated to her is entitled simply  ‘Wilderness’.

But there is one other ghost in this book: Blunden himself, the soldier from the wars returning. Wilderness is how he now sees the English countryside, and in ‘The Estrangement’ (for me, the key poem in this book) he describes himself as ‘A hounded kern in this grim No Man’s Land’: trees that were once ‘my friends’ now ‘madden’ him; the wind in the ivy ‘whirs like condor wings’ (and like the sound of shells overhead?) and

The very bat that stoops and whips askance

Shrills malice at the soul grown strange in France.

Greening is right: Blunden is terrifying. I strongly recommend The Waggoner – but not, after all, as a book at bedtime.

Adrian Barlow

[illustrations: the title page and title label of The Waggoner.

I have written before about what Blunden’s writing means to me and why I think his remains an important voice. See, for instance, Edmund Blunden Today and Mistaking Magdalen for the Menin Gate; Edmund Blunden November 1st, 1931 on the Edmund Blunden website.

I shall be writing and lecturing rather more often than usual about the literary contexts of the First World War.  I hope readers might be interested in the major international conference on British Poetry of the First World War, to be hosted by English Association in Oxford from 5 – 7 September. For full details, click here.

I am now also writing a regular blog about my researches into the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe. You’ll find this blog on the Kempe Trust website.