Faber & Castell

I came across a cabinet of antiques in a shop called M. Goldstein recently, run by a maniacal character called Nathanial, with objects ranging from old business cards, to curious nuts and seeds (strictly not for sale), and among all this was a tiny Faber & Castell diary pencil, the lead worn down, the crooked nib sharpened by hand with a knife. But where was the diary? Among Irving Finkel’s collection of abandoned diaries is an entire box crammed with these little pencils: “I keep them for use as propaganda to show how diaries disappear; only their pencils survive”.

Sonar

In post war Germany the novelist Walter Kempowski began amassing diaries, letters, reports and other kinds of unpublished autobiographical documents by witnesses of the Second World War in an attempt to tap into stories and experiences which might otherwise be lost. He called it 'Das Escholot', meaning 'Sonar' or 'Echo-Sounder' - a method of using sound waves for underwater navigation.

The project became vast and sprawling, like many collectors, Kempowski appeared to be seeking for a higher form of order, or as the historian Philip Blom describes: "...a hidden law among the innumerable individual objects of his treasure trove. In the event, he has orchestrated the disparate voices into a gigantic and frightening whole ...things can be catalogued and arranged in patterns, but ultimately they lead the honest observer to an admission of defeat."

Novelistic touches gleaned from the evidence are never far away: birds building their nests from debris in bombed buildings, the hysterical rants of Hitler's testament juxtaposed cunningly with wild looting, Thomas Mann records a visit to the hairdresser, while Paul Valery catalogues phobias he shares with Goethe. It is these two aspects, the polyphonous and the individual, which mould Das Echolot into one of the great and tragic monuments of German post-war literature.

Dolphin Feasts, Fleas & Lord Flashheart

Edward Hall's collection of diaries are kept in a small archive in Leigh, a short bus ride from Wigan. Driving through this northern underbelly, past rows of ex-docker houses, George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) comes to mind; a memoir drawn from diary extracts and letters of a winter spent lodging in the back of a tripe shop, sharing a room with an elderly miner and a Scottish invalid. During his time there Orwell may well have come across bookseller and diary collector, Edward Hall on his book stall at Wigan market.

Today Wigan hums with afternoon ennui, people shuttling back and forth between the town centre and the outskirts, in no hurry; strip clubs and fish and chip shops streaking past the bus window. The Hall collection is currently being transcribed and uploaded onto the Wigan archive website by students and volunteers. The collection when gathered together is impressive. Each volume is mummified in muslin cloth to preserve them and the individual volumes are tied together with ribbon.

Highlights include a schoolboy's diary from 1813, which describes an infestation of fleas, as well as his unrelenting nosebleeds, the thick parchment pages occasionally reveal blood stains... Another diary from 1789, a naval log book, records a sea voyage to Jamaica, is inscribed on the opening page with only a few words that capture the sense of the author’s exultation in adventure:

Littleton Powis'... April the third 1789... Written at Sea... Remember... Farewell...

Light airs & calms with small flying showers _____

... a good many dolphins about the ship. Our boat-swain struck one... of which we made a hearty dinner next day. They are very good fish...

The archivist in charge of the collection, Alex Miller, has now fully transcribed the diaries of a fighter pilot from the First World War, whose narrative comes as "near to Lord Flashheart in Blackadder Goes Forth as is possible without becoming parody":

Thursday Feb 25th... Slept like a top! Bright Cloudless day. NW wind. Rather misty. I dug Shepherd out of bed at 7 am and he took me down to the aerdrome in his Rolls Royce. The engine still went round, so I pushed off. She was in a better mood today so I flew at 3000 in the sunshine & felt happy... I intended to circle over Ewhurst by way of a farewell to Gen BP, but over Robertsbridge my engine again got very tired. I had a second breakfast with the General & Lady BP who seemed quite pleased to be visited by air! The Gen had cut his knee, but hobbled out on two sticks to see the machine.

John Clare's Orison

There has been an ongoing literary obsession in the last few years with the diaries of 18th century poet John Clare, the self-taught 'Peasant Poet'. Clare famously describes his escape from a lunatic asylum in his evocative, fugue-like Journey Out of Essex (1841), racing through fields, sleeping in ditches, hallucinating old dead lovers, pursuing milk maids and following church spires on the edge of the horizon, or 'Orison', as he spells it.

Iain Sinclair went on to retrace Clare's footsteps in his memoir, Edge of the Orison (2005), followed by Adam Foulds' fictional account of the same journey, The Quickening Maze (2009). Sophie Scraplehorn's work with maps (2008), in which she cuts out all the names of places, creates a similar feeling of loss in a landscape; Clare's wandering 'in the blue mist' where 'the orisons edge surrounds'.

I had imagined that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison & that a days journey was able to find it so I went on with my heart full of hopes pleasures & discoverys expecting when I got to the brink of the world that I could look down like looking into a large pit & see into is secrets the same as I believd I could see heaven by looking into the water.

John Clare

From Beacon's Gutter

Wigan, 1925. The newly wed Edward Hall, while establishing himself as a dealer and collector of manuscripts and books, discovered the surviving papers of Ellen Weeton, estranged mother, governess, companion and early suffragette, writing from 'Beacon's Gutter' near Liverpool in 1807. Enthralled by Weeton's stories and independent style of writing: "Women are something better than potatoes", Hall began collecting diaries in large quantities, as well as cataloguing and editing them.

His collection was eventually gathered together and donated to the Wigan Archives where they can now be viewed upon request. The diaries range in subject and origin, from across the 18th and 19th centuries. Among them, are the travel journals of Samuel Williamson, from 1820, who describes journeys in Italy, Greece and Turkey, with particular focus on the people he met along the way, such as Henry Venn Eliot, a well known 'divine' and Lord Byron's banker, Douglas Kinnaird. Hall was fascinated by the curious nature of the diary form, such as Joshua Horner's handwriting from 1868, described by Hall as a "unique calligraphic item... impossible to read without the use of a very strong magnifying glass", written in an uncomfortable "microscopic hand". Another diary from 1821 recognizes a 6th vowel: "a, e, i, o, u, and y".

A few photographs of Edward Hall recently found at the Wigan Archives, by archivist Alex Miller, were shown to a couple of volunteers "...who half-remembered the man, they confirmed it was Hall who had a bookstall at Wigan market for some years after the second world war. Neither of the volunteers could ever recall him standing up, but always sitting, bespectacled, hunched over a book!"

http://www.wlct.org/Culture/Heritage/Edward%20Hall%20Collection%20Public%20Catalogue.pdf

Tennessee's Black Day

A new exhibition of diaries opened last month at the Morgan Library in New York. It’s an understated show, carefully researched and yet openly confused about the form itself – the curator, Christine Nelson, attempts to conclude: “Perhaps it comes down to just two points: the subject of a diary is oneself, and the structure of a diary is incremental, building over time”.

The show features a sweeping range from Bob Dylan's touring sketch books, to Charlotte Bronte’s (1816–1855) childhood diaries in which she describes a secret kingdom, called ‘Angria’, which she invented with her beloved frail brother Branwell. Her sister Emily on the other hand, deceptively “seems a rosy sugar plum”. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the seminal journal of Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), which stands alongside the first editions of the confessions of St. Augustine (354–430) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), both transformative figures in the history of self-examination and self-revelation.

However, the curators of the show are clearly aware of the absurdity of the self as a subject. Tennessee Williams’ diaries for instance, begin as he means to go on, in a whirl of melodrama: “a black day to begin a blue journal”. They form an atmospheric record of his creative and social anxiety in 1950s New York at a peak time in his career – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had just gone into rehearsal and a new production of his acclaimed A Streetcar Named Desire was about to open. A later entry simply states: “Nothing to say except I’m still hanging on”.

http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/default.asp

New York Salvage

Manhattan is renowned for its street-looting ethos. Walking down the street it’s hard to resist taking a look at the latest detritus left out on the sidewalk for potential hidden treasure. A scrimmage broke out on the Upper West side in New York a few years ago as a basement clearance was taking place outside an old apartment building.

…Some passers-by jimmied open the locks of the trunks in search of old money, others stared transfixed at the treasures spilling out: a red kimono; a beaded rose flapper dress; a cloth-bound volume of Tennyson’s poems; the top half of a baby’s red sweater still hanging from its knitting needles …

Among this load was the lost diary of 14 year old Florence Wolfson, a couture heiress from the 1930s. The diary then fell into the hands of New York Times journalist Lily Koppel, who became obsessed by the stories within its red leather locked covers – illicit affairs with men and women, riding horses in Central Park, and a fastidious account of the different outfits she wore – she would often keep her jodhpurs and breeches on for school, because she thought she looked so dashing. Koppel tracked down Wolfson, now in her nineties and returned the diary to her; a strange journey she then went on to describe in a biography of this young girl who was a direct product of the roaring twenties and yet remarkably untouched by the Great Depression: “I feel like a ripe apricot – every thing is so exotic”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/nyregion/thecity/16diar.html

Frankfurters and beer in Venice, 1946

…It was very pleasant, at 11 o’clock in the morning to go down to the Piazza San Marco, and we’d have frankfurters and Italian beer in these small glasses. Then I’d go and get my trunks and a towel and head down to San Zaccaria where I’d catch a ferry across to the Lido, go down to the beach, where Death in Venice was filmed, and have a swim. After about an hour at around 1.30 I might think about going into the office and doing a bit of sub-editing for this newspaper The Eighth Army. It didn’t take very long, we’d work until 4.30 maybe and then head out for the evening… of course the one newspaper contact I didn’t make in Venice at this time was James Morris, who was working there at exactly the same time, he was in charge of the water taxis, that was a missed opportunity I’ve always regretted it…

This story about drifting around Venice in the aftermath of the war was somehow made distinctly real by the slightly surreal detail of the frankfurters and beer. Partly because frankfurters seem a bit of a throwback in social history – the kind of trivial reference we might record in a diary. The ex-editor of the Evening Standard, Roy Wright, told the story brilliantly – it was all the more incredible as a floating anecdote, unrecorded and on the brink of disappearance.

Impossible Buildings

Having just read a long dissertation about the difficulties of creating a new archive or museum for diaries, I began imagining other kinds of impossible buildings, inspired by the designer Azusa Murakami’s architectural drawings, such as a bath house with bathtubs installed on the outside of the building (shown here), or an embroidery factory in Portugal made entirely from threads. De Quincey writes about the dream-like spiraling architecture of Piranesi in his Confessions of an Opium Eater, which he compares to his own opium reveries, also described by Coleridge in his experimental and surreal diaries. At the moment libraries are closing down all over the country due to lack of funding and innovation. As they disappear one by one, there is a double life of reinvention for these spaces waiting to happen.

In the early stage of my malady, the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural: and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic halls…Creeping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher on which again Piranesi is perceived…Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld…and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.--With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater, De Quincey 1821

1 Wig for 2 Boxes of Wood

While researching the history of the diary for a potential radio documentary, I came across a reference to Edmund Harrold, a wigmaker from Manchester, who began a record of his daily battles with drink in 1709. Written in a strange early 18^th century Manc dialect, the diary swings wildly between euphoria and gloomy descriptions of sobering up while walking through the rain, across muddy tracks on business to inspect hair. The wig trade was a competitive business (one wig was worth 2 boxes of wood); at one point Harrold mentions seeing one of his clients wearing a wig made by someone else: "I was vexed to see him have wigs of others".

…20^th June wak’d at 8, shav’d, yn eat som poritch, yn sucked aunt Beron, yn drank a pint, yn had a hurrey with wife on bed, yn went into ye Hanging Ditch for a ramble at the keys… I made myself a great foole, etc …24^th June remarkable for 3 things: seeing fine hair; Christening of aunt Beron’s daughter Mary; curling Robert Bradshaw’s wig of his own hair mostly…

The Italian Job

Diary Archives already exist in Italy, France, Belgium, Finland, Germany and Spain. The dynamic Italian archive in Tuscany, The National Diary Archive of Santo Stefano, was set up 1985, with a complete catalogue published in 2003, which is now available online. The archive is connected to an extraordinary museum showcasing different aspects of the collection - individual diaries can be viewed by appointment. The organisation stages frequent events and discussions focusing on the history of the diary and its role in Italian culture, documented in their magazine, Prima Persona.

www.archiviodiari.it

Diary Dealers

A few years ago, a historian from The British Museum, Irving Finkel was introduced by a dealer to a vast collection of diaries spanning from 1879 to 1955, written by Godfrey Williams. The diaries had no where to go - The Imperial War Museum was only interested in the parts which covered the wars and the dealer who held them did not want to separate the collection. Out of curiosity Finkel decided to buy the complete volumes and so began a new kind of reading experience – he was hooked: “Each close-written and absorbing volume …as gripping as a novel… a winding inky narrative which observed and appraised the unpredictable unrolling of a good part of the twentieth century”. Finkel has been collecting and salvaging lost and unwanted diaries ever since, which he believes reveal the lives of otherwise undocumented and unknown individuals, trades, words and behaviour, which have slipped through the net. His ever-expanding collection is crammed into cabinets and boxes, threatening to take over his entire office behind the scenes at the British Museum, tucked away within a maze-like network of winding staircases and secret libraries. What is needed is an archive where all diaries could be sent and catalogued for future research or exhibition.