‘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

Reading Stained Glass iii: ‘Ab Fab’ in Fairford

‘Absolutely fab guide to glorious stained glass windows’ gushed a recent Times headline (19 .7.14). The sub-heading was more informative: ‘St Mary’s, Fairford – famous for its stained glass – has launched an all-star audio-guide’. ‘All-star’ is about right, for Joanna Lumley (hence ‘Absolutely fab’), Mark Rylance, Zoë Wanamaker et al. have contributed to a new audio-guide describing arguably the most important set of stained glass windows in England. The Fairford windows are important because they are, uniquely, a complete set, made between 1500 and 1515, filling the whole church: a final flowering of late medieval art, fascinating alike for their colour, their composition and their content.

I discussed the Fairford windows earlier this month during a lecture in Salisbury about George Herbert and Stained Glass. I wanted to examine the different ways in which Herbert’s contemporaries, and Herbert himself, responded to stained glass at the beginning of the 17^th century. At this time, Fairford’s windows were only just over one hundred years old – more ‘modern’ than Victorian glass is to us today – but already celebrated:

Each pane instructs the laity

With silent eloquence, for here

Devotion leads the eye, not ear,

To note the catechizing paint,

Whose easy note doth so acquaint

Our sense with gospel that the creed

In such a hand the weak may read;

Such types even yet of virtue be,

And Christ as in a glasse we see.

               from ‘On Fairford Windows’

by William Strode (1600-1643)

Not everyone took it for granted that stained glass spoke ‘with silent eloquence’ Here is the Bishop of Oxford, in 1629, preaching at the consecration of the new Chapel of Lincoln College, Oxford:

This place above all the rest hath most need of consecration, the Pulpit. If this be not sanctifyed to the preacher, and the preacher to this, all the whole chappel is the wors for it  ….The Altar shall be called no more an Altar but a dresser. The reuerence [that] is done there shall be apish cringing, and all the seemly glazing be thought nothing but a little brittle superfluity.

How should the Fairford stained glass properly be described? I have called it ‘a final flowering of late medieval art’ but does ‘medieval’ really fit as a label for works of art commissioned during the reign of Henry VII and completed during the reign of Henry VIII? Technically, it’s Tudor art, and we think of the Tudors as post-medieval; but it hardly seems to belong to the world of Hans Holbein, nor even to the stained glass of King’s College Chapel, with which it is almost contemporary, any more than the stained glass of the great Victorian designer Charles Eamer Kempe (1837-1907) belongs to the world of his exact contemporary, the post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). It was in thinking about the impact of the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London that Virginia Woolf famously remarked, ‘On or about December 1910 human nature changed.’ But even she later admitted, ‘The change was not sudden or definite … But a change there was, nevertheless’.

In my lecture I tried to show how change is evident, even in the Fairford glass. I took as an example a scene showing Christ with his mother. This is a strange scene because it depicts Jesus visiting his mother immediately after the Resurrection – an event for which there is no biblical authority: it is to Mary Magdalene that he appears, in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea, where he is mistaken for the gardener. That scene appears any number of times in medieval and later glass, but a private meeting between Christ and his mother does not: indeed, it was the kind of ‘unauthorised’, apocryphal episode to which post-Reformation preachers took exception.

Look carefully at the window itself. At first it seems entirely conventional: a tableau in which the two figures are static and the text inscribed above the head of Jesus, ‘Salve Sancta Parens’ – ‘Greetings, holy parent’ – formal to a fault. (It was, I realise, medieval glass designers who invented the speech bubble.)  But unlike ‘Noli me tangere’ windows, which often vividly depict Mary Magdalene’s despair / shock / joy at encountering and finally recognizing Jesus in the garden, in this Fairford window the two figures seem almost embarrassed: Mary keeps her distance and Jesus, his feet poised on the very threshold of the scene, keeps his eyes down and looks as if he wants to walk out of the picture altogether.

And this is the problem. The artist has become so intent on ‘staging’ the scene that the scenery seems

to matter more than the subject. The room in which the meeting that never actually happened takes place is rendered in startling detail: delicate red shafts supporting the vaulted ceiling, leaded lights in the window of the back wall, three books on top of the tall settle next to the door through which Mary has entered – her bedroom door, since her bed can be glimpsed through the doorway. There is an extraordinary depth to the room, accentuated partly by the elaborate tiled floor but also by the fact that, though we look up from below to view the window, the artist’s POV is well above the heads of the two figures. Consequently, the perspective doesn’t quite work. You could say the same about the window as a whole: while the non-story it tells reflects the late medieval cult of the Virgin Mary, the setting for this story reflects the Renaissance fascination with the complexities of perspective. Somewhere between the scene and the scenery, the vitality of medieval stained glass has leached away.

You may say I’m missing the point; but my point is that the glass that came 250 years earlier (see for instance, my first post in this mini-series, Reading Stained Glass i: Rouen) and that which came only 25 years later (the stained glass of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge) had an artistic energy and authenticity that this window from Fairford, for all its interest, simply lacks.

© Adrian Barlow 2014

[illustrations: (i) Detail of a window in St. Mary’s, Fairford: Christ appearing to his mother after the Resurrection (ii) Detail of a window from King’s College Chapel, Cambridge: the Resurrection of Christ

I am also discussing the glass at Fairford in posts to my blog for the Kempe Trust. See for instance, Pevsner and Kempe (i)

My previous post in the ‘Reading Stained Glass’ series is Reading Stained Glass (ii): Wittersham in the Isle of Oxney.