Milk from united diaries

Spectator, The, Dec 16-Dec 23, 2000 by Hillier, Bevis

I am in best looks. Marie Bashkirtseff is always apologetic when she makes a similar entry in her diary, but why should one be? Today I could really pass a great deal of time very happily just looking at myself in the glass.

The Mr Toad vanity of Earl Mountbatten and Woodrow Wyatt may not have won them high marks at the pearly gates, but its free exposure is part of what makes their diaries enjoyable.

I have not yet mentioned the quality that is needed most of all in a diarist: unguardedness. He or she should not be trying to create a work of art. He should just be slapping down what he remembers about the day, including the trivia. In October 1762 James Woodforde, then at New College, Oxford, listed the things he had packed to take back to college. The list would have been of no interest to a contemporary but it is bread and butter to a social historian today. You must write what you really felt, not what you'd like people to think you felt. And you must not be discreet, a self-censor. 'Chips' Channon wrote in 1934:

Once or twice in the past I have dictated a few harmless paragraphs to a secretary and they have never been the same, becoming impersonal and discreet immediately. And what is more dull than a discreet diary? One might just as well have a discreet soul.

In a jest now almost too hackneyed to repeat, the indiscreet Mae West advised, `Keep a diary and some day it'll keep you.' It might be truer to say that your diaries will support an army of lazy hacks, cobbling together anthologies. I must exempt Irene and Alan Taylor from this category. While I do have some reservations about their editing, in general they have not only chosen the right diarists, but picked out choice and varied extracts from them. They have arranged them, not in chronological order, but under specific days of the year - so that, on 1 January, for example, we have Pepys writing on that date in 1662, Boswell in 1763, Sir Walter Scott in 1829 and so on. Many will be tempted to look up their own birthdays. On mine, 28 March (which I share with the late Flora Robson, the late Dirk Bogarde, Michael Parkinson and - born on the same day as myself in 1940 - Martin Neary, the organist sacked from Westminster Abbey), I find John Evelyn going to the Royal Society in 1667 to witness a blood transfusion from a sheep to a dog, an affecting 'obituary' of Arnold Bennett, by Virginia Woolf, in 1931, and James Lees-Milne being moved to tears by a Schubert Impromptu in 1973.

Nearly all the obvious diarists are safely garnered in, but the editors have also been adventurous in including lesser names, such as William Soutar. In 1930 a spinal disease left him bedridden for the last 13 years of his life. As the Taylors write, he used his diary not to record a life, but to create one. He had time to think a lot and - aside from the `assassin's cloak' remark - his journal is a brave and profound document. A delightful revelation to me is the diary of Cynthia Gladwyn (1898-1990), whose publication I somehow missed. Though I never met her, I had always had an unfair prejudice against her. I was a friend of Andrew Graham, sometime wine correspondent of The Times, who had served as comptroller (sort of catering manager) of the British embassy in Paris when Cynthia's husband, Gladwyn Jebb, was ambassador. Graham told me how irritated he was when service in a restaurant was slightly slow and she would squawk, `Make a row, Andy! Make a row!' I can see that she might not have been the easiest of people - she quite often avails herself of the assassin's cloak - but there is not a single dud among the selections from her journals.