The Lost Diaries

Maritally, we sit in a fieldy meadow in an incipiently quiet time/space continuum observing the hush (huss in Somali) stretching far beneath us, down to the herd, team, group of cows below. ‘Ah, silence!’ I exclaim exclamatorily in simple wonderment. ‘Silence – the silence that is with us now – a silence golden as James’s Bowl, as Apuleius’ Ass, as Frazer’s Bough, that silence blessed by my original study, now translated into fifteen languages, taken up yet still not acknowledged by those whose academic reputations fall sadly short of my own. Ah, silence! A void, a circumstantial gap, a vivid diaspora, the sound, rare and provocative, created when one’s talk ceases. Silence, both metaphysical and actual, both concomitant and –’

‘Moo!’ enunciates a cow, bovine and cowlike, and the other cows follow suitly, ‘Moo! Moo! Moo!’

My antennae, exceedingly alert, like a lieder by Schubert or a poem by Pound, inform me that this cuddish interruption is part of a Friesian conspiracy intent on placing in jeopardy my seminar on the nature of la silencia. These animals possess all the professional jealousy and unctuous mooishness of the Oxford-educated. They have been put up to their loutish intervention by those in the English faculty less honoured than myself.

‘Shoo! Shoo! Shoo!’ I interpolate.

‘Moo! Moo! Moo!’ they respond.

I seize the opportunity to point out to my unspoken wife that in the Oubanji language there are fifteen words meaning ‘moo’, only one of them in common use by cows. But she cannot hear me. She has her earplugs in (arapluggi in Cameroon), as she has done since 1974, still perversely intent upon listening to the mute, smothering silence that lies somewhere beyond words.

GEORGE STEINER

Michelangelo died today, in 1564. I used to think he was a great artist. But then I looked again at his work. To my horror, it showed no skill or originality whatsoever. I was so embarrassed on his account. The failure is extraordinary. It is not so surprising that since his death his reputation has been in free-fall.

V.S. NAIPAUL

February 19th, 1943

TO WINSTON CHURCHILL

Darling Winnie,

Just the briefest of scribbles to congratulate you on a superb tour of the front, so heroic and sweet and STIRRING. As always, you had our boys in the palm of your hand, and, I may add, looked quite gorgeous in your little khaki two-piece! Bravo! Forgive me, Winnie, but might I add the smallest of suggestions? It occurred to me that, after delivering an encouraging word to the troops, and just before conducting your inspection, you could do some marvellous ‘stage business’ with your handkerchief – perhaps dropping it casually on the ground before retrieving it with a flourish, or waving it to-and-fro with an air of infinite melancholy, or perhaps, with a few deft flicks of the wrist, folding it in such a manner as to create a snow-white swan. It is a little trick I have employed with notable success in my hugely successful run of Tap-Dancing to Victory, currently at the Albery. I am delighted to pass it on.

Ever Yours,

Johnny

JOHN GIELGUD

February 20th, 1943

TO NOËL COWARD

Darling Nolly,

There is no doubting Winston’s brilliance, though I do wish he wouldn’t slur his words so, and he is a trifle…BULLISH for my tastes. And MUST he wear that ghastly khaki two-piece? What DOES he think he looks like, the poor old pet?

His performance is undoubtedly strong – none of us would deny him that – but it seems to me he could make much more of his hankie, and rather less of that simply dreadful cigar.

Your own,

Johnny

JOHN GIELGUD

February 21st

Writers are territorial, and they resent intruders. My sister Susan (who prefers not to be reminded that her first name is Susan, though Susan it is, and who prefers to struggle along under the pen-name of A.S. Byatt rather than Susan, even though those of us in her family know all too well that the tell-tale ‘S’ definitely stands for Susan) said in an interview somewhere (I didn’t read it myself, not having time to waste) that she was distressed when she found that I had written (many decades ago) about a particular tea set that our family possessed, because she had always wanted to use it herself. I had some sympathy with Sue, who felt I had appropriated something that was not mine, even though, as my lawyer pointed out, it was, strictly speaking, not exclusively hers either, and if she had really wanted to write about that tea set then why hadn’t she done so when she had the opportunity, and not wait until she knew that I had done so before opening her big fat mouth and complaining that I had got there first?

I used the tea set in my novel The Chest of Drawers,

(#litres_trial_promo) but employed the power of my imagination to change it from a tea set to a coffee set, in an attempt, sadly misguided, to prevent an indignant outburst from Sue. Incidentally, the ‘chest of drawers’ in the title was originally not a chest of drawers at all but a small occasional table, of the type common in the East Midlands immediately after the 2nd World War; I changed it from a small occasional table to a chest of drawers for reasons that I no longer remember, but which (knowing her!) may have had something to do with not wishing to upset my big sister Sue. For the purposes of fiction, in this particular novel I used my imagination to transform Sue into a cut-price washing machine with an unreliable timing mechanism which the heroine, Meg, eventually throws away, for reasons I now forget.

MARGARET DRABBLE

February 22nd

One reason that people used to vote Tory was that Tory MPs always wore lovely tweed suits. And they respected them for it. But nowadays they see them in off-the-peg grey or black suits, many of them two-piece and without watch-chains, and consequently they have no one to look up to. And we wonder why so many unmarried teenagers have triplets and nose-rings!

CHARLES MOORE

PM very buoyant. ‘The funny thing is that we are going to win the ’79 election by over 100 seats,’ he says. He adds that ‘ordinary people have no time for Mrs Thatcher. She just doesn’t understand them like we do. The last thing they want is to own their own homes, they much prefer them to be owned by us.’ He tells Cabinet that once the North Sea oil revenue starts coming in, we’ll be able to bury all those dead bodies everyone’s going on about.

Denis Healey pipes up that the corpses have only got themselves to blame. ‘Bloody layabouts,’ he says.

Tony Benn puts forward a major new plan he has drawn up to allow corpses to form a union of their own – ‘Something along the lines of The Union of the Recently Departed and Technically Deceased, or RDTD for short,’ he says. Cabinet agree that if we allowed them to feel a vital part of the wider Labour movement then when it came to making a fuss they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

The lovely Shirley Williams suggests that if the corpses are going to remain unburied, then it might be nice to decorate them, or wrap them in bright colours, so that ordinary, decent passers-by could feel better about themselves. The PM points out that Peter Jay thinks that corpses are good as a hedge against inflation. ‘And let’s face it, Peter’s dreadfully clever, they tell me he knows all about money.’

Lovely dinner at Mon Plaisir with Harold Lever who advises me to invest in the development of technology to turn unburied corpses into fuel. Finish with a lovely crème brûlée over which he kindly suggests that I might care to be the next but one Governor of the Bank of England (‘It would be very you, Bernard’), and taxi home by midnight.

BERNARD DONOUGHUE

February 23rd

Well, the Oscars are over for another year. Thousands of friends and well-wishers insist I was the belle of the ball on Oscar night, but I’d also like to pay tribute to the real efforts made by good friends Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie. They did their best, and that’s good enough for me. We can’t all be winners, girls!

Not many people know this – it’s not something I go on about – but the Academy were pressing me to accept a Lifetime Special Achievement Oscar for all the amazing work I’ve done in the fields of cinema and music and the arts and worldwide peace and that. But I’m like, ‘I was busy with my charity work, guys – and anyway my good friends lovely ladies Kate Winslet and Penelope Cruz need their egos massaged a bit more than I do!’

Close friends and total strangers have been coming up to me in the street ever since. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t win an Oscar, Heather!’ they all say. But my lips are sealed. When I saw my good friend the Pope for lunch today, I’m like, ‘You know what, Ben? Some things are best kept to yourself.’

HEATHER MILLS MCCARTNEY

February 24th

Dear Diary, It is February the 24th 1974 and I am seriously smitten. Martin Amis (or, as he styles himself, Martin: Amis) is everything I have ever wished for: moody, ironic, dishy, and, in his own characteristically brilliant words, ‘f—ing clever’.

He is, again in his own words, a ‘word-magician in velve’ (a reference to his beloved velvet jacket, or ‘jacky-jack’ as he sometimes calls it). He has admitted me into his magical circle of brilliant intellectuals like legendary écriviste Anthony Holden, the funny, flirtatious Clive James (whose TV criticism is an art form in itself) and that doyen of wicked wordplay, Robert Robinson. Sometimes Cyril Fletcher, the éminence grise of television’s fabled That’s Life, graces us with his presence, and, urging us all to ‘Pin back your lug ’oles,’ brings the table to its feet with one of his immortal ‘Odd Odes’.

Martin is working at the TLS, and sometimes sends me love letters he has written on TLS notepaper. ‘I love you Martin’ he once wrote. I remember mentioning that he must have left out a dash between the ‘you’ and the ‘Martin’, but he denied it. Is he in love with someone else?

JULIE KAVANAGH

I’m warming my slippers in front of the log fire when I turn to my wife. ‘There’s a funny sort of ringing in my ears,’ I complain.

‘It’s the telephone, Dukey,’ she explains.