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…