A.C. Benson enters the pantheon of great English diarists

All great diarists have something intensely silly about them: Boswell’s and Pepys’s periodic bursts of lechery and panic; Chips Channon’s unrealistic dreams of political greatness leavened with breathless excitement over royal dukes and handsome boys; Alan Clark’s fits of romantic, almost Jacobite, dreaming; James Lees-Milne’s absurd flights of rage. I dare say the mania that drove the Duc de Saint-Simon in his demented campaign against Louis XIV’s attempts to create a place in court hierarchy for his bastards seemed ridiculous to his more sober contemporaries. Often the silliness comes from a mad overestimation of the writer’s ability. There is no more fascinating diary than Benjamin Haydon’s. He was an indifferent painter who never achieved the success he dreamt of. But in every sentence of his diary it is apparent to us what he himself never realised: that, though a painter of mediocrity, he was a writer of genius.

A.C. Benson, born in 1862, had the sense to make arrangements for his diary to be published after his death. The rest of his writing, with the possible exception of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, pales to insignificance next to it. His published work is astonishingly bland. There is a screamingly funny parody of him by Max Beerbohm in A Christmas Garland: ‘More and more, as the tranquil years went by, Percy found himself able to draw a quiet satisfaction from the regularity, the even sureness, with which, in every year, one season succeeded to another.’ (Having read Benson’s staggeringly tedious Watersprings, I can report that Beerbohm does not exaggerate.) The diary, on the other hand, stretching to more than four million words, is vivacious, beadily observed and takes advantage of Benson’s position as a favourite of the great. In this beautifully edited two-volume selection by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam we see what a well-placed diarist can do.