Diaries of Note

1 January 1968

JOHN HOPKINS

Morocco in the 1960s was a haven for artists, musicians, and bohemians, who were lured there by its exotic charm and a lifestyle that promised adventure and indulgence. American novelist John Hopkins arrived in 1962 and didn't leave for seventeen years. On New Year's Eve 1967, he found himself in Marrakesh at the opulent home of the Gettys - a veritable playground for the rich and famous.

Last night Paul and Talitha Getty threw a New Year's Eve party at their palace in the Medina. Ira, Joe and I went to meet the Beatles. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were there, flat on their backs. They couldn't get off the floor let alone talk. I've never seen so many people out of control.

2 January 1942

JAMES AGATE

When he wrote these resolutions on the second day of 1942, James Agate was sixty-four and widely known and celebrated as the Sunday Times drama critic, a role he would fill until his death five years later. The Leo who was testing Agate's patience was Isidore Leo Pavia, a dear friend and accomplished pianist who had also been working as Agate's secretary since 1941.

New Year Resolutions

1. To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.

2. To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

3. To be more patient with Leo. To bear with that all-pervading aroma of stale Vapex, those scented yet acrid plugs, twists, and flakes, that October-to-March sniffling and snuffling, the sneezing and coughing with which he draws attention to himself whenever I am telephoning, the eternal jeremiads, and the physical clumsiness which, one day last week, caused the following incident. Too blind to see whether the fire was alight or not, he lifted a live coal in his fingers, found it was hot, and let it roll under the piano ten feet away where it burned a hole in my carpet the size of a five-shilling piece. And then the typing! At this very moment Lady Macbeth looks up at me from my desk and intones:

'O, never shall son that moral sea!'

Today, January 2nd, 1942, I resolve henceforth to tolerate all this, and to set against it the feast of malice, the flow of wit, and the fine temper of the musician who, when he has driven me half frantic, will go to the piano and play Beethoven more Beethovenishly than any living virtuoso, sing in a cracked voice the tuttis to the concertos, and improvise his own cadenzas.

3 January 1968

NOËL COWARD

Noël Coward was ten years old when he first took to the stage professionally; less than a decade later, he'd written the first of more than fifty plays. In late 1959, on the advice of his financial advisor, Coward moved to Switzerland to live in what he describes elsewhere in his diaries as 'a fairly hideous chalet in the mountains above Montreux'. It was there, nine years later, with his health beginning to fail and his seventieth birthday on the horizon, that he wrote this diary entry. Much to his delight, despite the 'excessive' smoking, Coward lived for another five years. He was knighted in 1970.

Les Avants

Well, Christmas is over and, what is more, very successfully over. Binkie and John and Gladys arrived as planned on the twenty-third, and we all had a lovely time with lots of present-giving and receiving and seasonable merriment. They went back to London yesterday, so Graham, Coley and I are left until next Monday when we too go to London for a week. Then heigh-ho for New York, California and Tahiti. A pleasant prospect.

The weather has been entirely satisfactory - a lot of snow and sleds and jingle-bells. I feel a little curious about being only two years off seventy! My health is all right and my heart is pure, which I put down to excessive smoking. However, a reckoning will probably come. It usually does. I read in one of my journals of a few years ago a triumphant account of giving up smoking for ever; after a few weeks I decided I could bear it no longer so back I went to the darling weed and have felt splendid ever since. It may, of course, shorten my life by a year or two, but I haven't got all that longer to go anyhow and I couldn't care less. It's been a nice and profitable buggy ride and I've enjoyed most of it very much. The loss of a few years of gnarled old age does not oppress me. I hope the South Sea Bubble won't burst. I am longing to show Coley and Graham all those lovely places.

Peter Bridge is about to do a revival of Hay Fever with Celia [Johnson]. She is charming in it so it ought to have a reasonable success. Good old Hay Fever certainly has been a loyal friend. Written and conceived in exactly three days at that little cottage in Dockenfield in 1922! What a profitable weekend that was.

4 January 1915

KATHERINE MANSFIELD

As 1915 began, Katherine Mansfield set herself two clear wishes for the year ahead: to write and to make money. Living in London, far from her native New Zealand, she was determined to finish 'The Aloe', a novella that would later be reworked and published by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press as Prelude. But distractions were inevitable - chief among them her future husband, John 'Jack' Middleton Murry.

Woke early and saw a snowy branch across the window. It is cold, snow has fallen, and now it is thawing. The hedges and the trees are covered with beads of water. Very dark, too, with a wind somewhere. I long to be alone for a bit. I make a vow to finish a book this month. I'll write all day and at night too, and get it finished. I swear. Told Jack who understood. But did not start that night, for we were lovers, and at 12 o'clock I was dead tired and what [French poet] Anatole calls sèche. Dreamed of [famous model] Lilian Shelley's legs.

5 January 1981

TONI BENTLEY

Toni Bentley was four years old when she was taken to her first ballet class by her mother. Six years and many lessons later, she was accepted into the New York City Ballet's prestigious School of American Ballet, and at the age of seventeen she was chosen by its legendary founder, George Balanchine, to join the company itself. A few years into that unique artistic experience, with her confidence waning after so much tireless dedication, Bentley began a diary in an attempt to sort through her fluctuating feelings about her career. A short section of that diary became her first book, recording a single winter ballet season: November 1980 to February 1981. The brutally honest and insightful book that resulted was first published in 1982 and is now a classic in the genre. This particular entry sees her imagining a reset that would eventually be forced upon her when osteoarthritis in her right hip ended her dance career prematurely at the age of twenty-five.

I'm truly sad today. I'm twenty-two, and feel that my career is at a standstill. For eleven or twelve years it has moved forward, and now it is stagnating and going nowhere. What can I feel but at some sort of ending? Twenty-two and my career, a big section of my life, feels over. I suppose I should be happy I am still young enough to begin again, but I've no money, no lover, no future I can see, only the same ballets, season after season. I am not alone. I'm sure forty other girls feel the same at times. But on we go day by day, rehearsing the same ballets. When the curtain goes up, there is fifteen minutes of joy and pleasure; the next day the same thing happens all over again.

6 January 1871

EDMOND DE GONCOURT

During the month of January in 1871, Prussian forces fired more than twelve thousand shells into Paris and brought a wave of death and destruction to the magnificent city. This deadly bombardment marked the end of a four-month-long siege and in turn the Franco-Prussian War, with Germany emerging victorious. On 6 January, as that shelling began, noted French writer Edmond de Goncourt described the experience in his journal.

The shells have begun falling in the Rue Boileau and the Rue La Fontaine. Tomorrow, no doubt, they will be falling here; and even if they do not kill me, they will destroy everything I still love in life, my house, my knick-knacks, my books.

On every doorstep, women and children stand, half frightened, half inquisitive, watching the medical orderlies going by, dressed in white smocks with red crosses on their arms, and carrying stretchers, mattresses, and pillows.

7 January 1937

DANIIL KHARMS

Daniil Kharms was a leading Russian absurdist famed for the surreal poetry, short stories, and plays he composed during a life of repeated misfortune that ended with him starving to death in prison in 1942. He best described his creative outlook in 1937, when he wrote, 'I am interested only in nonsense; only in that which has no practical meaning. Life interests me only in its most absurd manifestations.' Thankfully, this extended to the many diary entries that peppered his notebooks.

There was a...