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A Great Hope fell.
You heard no noise.
The Ruin was Within.
Sometimes a great journaliser has excelled in other fields, or is also a great writer, Gide and Kafka being examples. He may have written a great book such as Boswell’s Life of Johnson, but, apart from it, Boswell was generally, and justly, accounted a failure in his own time. Yet his Journals remain fresh, delightful, fascinating, and make him known to us while his successful contemporaries are forgotten. Chips Channon was, politically, a nonentity, but open his Diaries at almost any page, and you are caught.
Though the post-war new order, I fear, rather bores me, Rab [Butler] is obsessed by it. And I suppose I shall have to adapt myself to it when the time comes.
Where else would you learn that Emerald Cunard declared that Tiberius’s Capri was ‘Only the Chequers of the time’. Or that the ruling family of Yugoslavia
all talk English among themselves, read the Tatler, barely understand Slovenian and Serb, and dream of their next visit to London.
The temptation is to go on reading and quoting — not one that will assail you in reading Orwell’s. Yet Orwell was a man of stature, Channon, in his own judgment, was ‘able but trivial’. When a selection from his Diaries was published in 1967, the editor, Robert Rhodes James, declared that they contained ‘much material that must be forbidden fruit for present generations’. Isn’t it time we were allowed to taste it?
You don’t have to like the diarist, though it may help if you do so. Ambivalence about many of James Lees-Milne’s social attitudes doesn’t prevent one from revelling in his diaries. Likewise Harold Nicolson, described by Channon as ‘dear, sentimental, hard- working, gentle … always a victim of his loyalties’, often irritates me with his assumption that he and Vita and their friends are superior people, but I find his diaries irresistible, because of his curiosity about other people and his occasional moments of self-reproof. I wonder if we will ever have an unexpurgated edition of his diaries too, and if that might record his encounter, at Maugham’s Villa Mauresque, with Gerald Haxton’s teenage boyfriend Loulou, to whom he wrote to thank for ‘une soirée délicieuse’?
Finally, the great diarist is honest with himself, and so he may upset whatever picture of him you had previously formed. Who would not be surprised to find Walter Scott writing in a moment of bleak misanthropy, ‘If at our social table we could see what passes in each bosom around, we would seek dens and caverns and shun human society’?Because you read about george orwell
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