Assassin's Cloak

Description

'A diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen', wrote William Soutar in 1934. But a diary is also a place for recording everyday thoughts and special occasions, private fears and hopeful dreams. The Assassin's Cloak gathers together some of the most entertaining and inspiring entries for each day of the year, as writers ranging from Queen Victoria to Andy Warhol, Samuel Pepys to Adrian Mole, pen their musings on the historic and the mundane. Spanning centuries and international in scope, this peerless anthology pays tribute to a genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms. This new updated edition is published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the book's original publication.

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 05 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838852924
• Langue: English

Extrait

Alan Taylor has been a journalist for over thirty years. He was deputy editor of the Scotsman , managing editor of Scotsman Publications, and writer-at-large for the Sunday Herald. He has edited several acclaimed anthologies, most recently Glasgow: The Autobiography. He has been a Booker Prize judge. He is the author of Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark and, in 2018, series editor of the centenary editions of Spark’s novels. He is the co-founder and editor of the Scottish Review of Books.
Irene Taylor was born and brought up in Edinburgh. For many years she worked in public libraries. She has a degree in history from Edinburgh University and she now works for the National Trust for Scotland.

The new edition first published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by
Canongate Books Ltd
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by
Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books
Introduction, Selection and Biographies © Irene and Alan Taylor, 2000
The right of Irene and Alan Taylor to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
For details of copyright permissions, see pages 682—9
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 911 8 eISBN 978 1 83885 292 4
Book designed by Paddy Cramsie at etal-design.com
Contents
Introduction
Acknowledgements
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
MARCH
APRIL
MAY
JUNE
JULY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER
Biographies
Bibliography
Permissions Acknowledgements
Index of Diarists
Introduction
‘A diary is like drink,’ wrote the Scottish poet, William Soutar, ‘we tend to indulge in it over often: it becomes a habit which would ever seduce us to say more than we ought to say and more than we have the experimental qualifications to state.’ It must be said that Soutar, bedridden with a wasting illness, was a special case. Trapped from a young age in a small room in his parents’ house in Perth, his view of the world circumscribed by the size of his window, he was, in effect, a prisoner. His diary was his constant companion, a visitor who never went away. Thus the temptation to over-indulge.
For many people, however, a diary is like a reproach, a perpetual reminder of our indiscipline, lack of application, weakness of resolve. How many diaries, started in the first flush of a new year, peter out even before the memory of the annual hangover? We open the pristine book with enthusiasm but after a few days what had been a torrent turns into a drip. Soon, whole weeks go by unremarked, blank page followed by blank page. Humdrum life intrudes and the compulsion to memorialise in print evaporates. There are few things quite as capable of inducing guilt as an empty diary.
Soutar, his life cruelly condensed, came to depend on his diary. It was his friend, crutch, confidant, shrink, father confessor, mirror of himself, for a diary is the most flexible and intimate of literary forms. As Thomas Mallon noted in his formative book on the subject, A Book of One’s Own: People and their Diaries , diaries have been kept by everyone, from the barely literate to the leaders of men and women, from serial killers to conmen, kitchen maids to all-conquering heroes, children and nonagenarians, tinkers, tailors, soldiers and spies.
‘Some,’ wrote Mallon, ‘are chroniclers of the everyday. Others have kept their books only in special times — over the course of a trip, or during a crisis. Some have used them to record journeys of the soul, plan the art of the future, confess the sins of the flesh, lecture the world from beyond the grave. And some of them, prisoners and invalids, have used them not so much to record lives as create them, their diaries being the only world in which they could fully live.’
Into the last category falls William Soutar, who but for his diary and a few verses in Scots for children — ‘bairnrhymes’ — would now be forgotten. Though he began keeping a diary in 1917, when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Atlantic with the Navy, it comprised little more than brief notes of appointments and books read. His diary took on a fresh complexion, however, after February 1929, when he fell ill with pneumonia. His right leg became increasingly disabled. In hindsight, the prescribed treatment seems medieval; weights were put on the leg to counteract muscle contraction. When this failed, the only hope was surgery. In May 1930, Soutar was operated on, paraphrasing Milton as he went to his fate:

‘This is the day and this the happy morn.’ At 9.30 got morphine and atropine injection. Off to theatre — sine crepuscula toga — at 10 a.m. Never saw actual theatre — elderly doctor chloroformed me in the ‘green room’. Woke up again at 11.20 or so. Wasn’t sick. Not an extra lot of reaction. Plaster of Paris troubling me more than the leg — nasty nobbly part at back — can’t lie comfortably.
The operation was unsuccessful but the stoical, philosophical Soutar gives little indication of despair, of the hopelessness of his plight. As Alexander Scott, who edited his diaries, has observed, ‘Soutar’s main interest was not his own invalidism but the general human situation.’ On occasion, he felt frustrated and sorry for himself but more often he managed to transcend his illness, setting himself goals — reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica , for example — and pursuing his ambitions. Due to his unusual circumstances, the world had to come to him, rather than the other way round. But unlike many other diarists who are consumed with themselves, egocentrics who seem to live only inside their own heads and are obsessed with their own troubles, Soutar managed to transcend the self, and enter an elevated state of being. Just a month before he died in October 1943, he wrote:

The true diary is one, therefore, in which the diarist is, in the main, communing with himself, conversing openly and without pose, so that trifles will not be absent, nor the intimate and little confessions and resolutions which, if voiced at all, must be voiced in such a private confessional as this.
That is one definition of a diary but there are countless others that are equally valid. The elasticity of the form is a large part of its appeal, which is perhaps why it is so difficult to pin down. When, truly, is a diary a diary? What is the difference between a diary and journal or, for that matter, a log or a notebook? Dictionary definitions are not much help. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary , for example, says a diary is ‘a daily record of events, transactions, thoughts, etc., esp. ones involving the writer’. A journal, on the other hand, is defined thus: ‘A personal record of events or matters of interest, written up every day or as events occur, usu. in more detail than in a diary.’
It is a fine distinction and one which individual writers seem blithely to ignore. In his Devil’s Dictionary , for instance, Ambrose Bierce wrote: ‘Diary. A daily record of that part of one’s life which he can relate to himself without blushing.’ Oscar Wilde, however, went a step further. ‘I never travel without my diary,’ he had Gwendoline in The Importance of Being Earnest say. ‘One should always have something sensational to read in the train.’ For others, though, a diary serves more prosaic purposes. ‘If a man has no constant lover who shares his soul as well as his body he must have a diary — a poor substitute, but better than nothing,’ mused James Lees-Milne.
More often than not, writers question why they do or do not keep a diary. ‘Why do I keep this voluminous journal?’ asked the Rev. Francis Kilvert. ‘I can hardly tell. Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it almost seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me.’ Sir Walter Scott deemed not keeping a regular diary one of the regrets of his life. But perhaps one of the most curious comments on diary-keeping came from A. A. Milne when he remarked in 1919,“! suppose this is the reason why diaries are so rarely kept nowadays — that nothing ever happens to anybody.’
The idea that diaries are only worth keeping when great events are in train is barely worthy of examination. The human condition is such that there is always something happening somewhere, whether personally or politically, parochially or on the international stage. The most durable diarists have not always been those who mix in high society or are connected with the great and the good and have the opportunity to keek through the keyhole as momentous events unfold. The best diaries are those in which the voice of the individual comes through untainted by self-censorship or a desire to please. First, and foremost, the diarist must write for himself, those who do not, who are already looking towards publication and public recognition, invariably strike a phoney note. As Alan Clark, author of the most notorious twentieth-century fin de siècle diaries, said: ‘Sometimes lacking in charity; often trivial; occasionally lewd; cloyingly sentimental, repetitious, whingeing and imperfectly formed. For some readers the entries may seem to be all of these things. But they are real diaries.’
The first real diarist was Samuel Pepys, who may not have patented the form but was certainly instrumental in its development. In the popular imagination a typical entry by Pepys opens with ‘Up betimes’ and closes ‘And so to bed.’ In fact, Pepys was much less formulaic than is supposed, though there is an admirable, unaffected directn