Awkward member of the squad

Peter Hall and Richard Eyre both published diaries about their time running the National Theatre, edited in Hall’s case by his head of PR, John Goodwin. Alan Bennett’s diaries are a bestseller. So are Joe Orton’s, with their devotion over a mere eight months to extra-curricular, often subterranean activity. The ‘celebrity diary’ as a literary phenomenon benefits from the current profitable obsession with biography. But Lindsay Anderson’s diaries are another thing.

He kept them intermittently for about 50 years, if he could be bothered — which he couldn’t during the depression of his last two years. When he died suddenly ten years ago, with his accountant Monty White as his executor and his brother Murray’s two children as his main heirs, there was no rush into print. Friends who helped go through his papers and sort his things into a large archive that included books, videos and photos as well as voluminous writings felt they were probably too private and should remain so. (The archive was eventually lodged at Stirling University, which owns the copyright of the Diaries.) Did Lindsay even intend them for publication?

Of course, for history, an unconstrained witness is very useful. These essentially private diaries are in the form of 93 separate notebooks or collections of hand-written sheets. They represent an extended introspective conversation with himself. Initially their purpose at age 18, I think, was as a disciplinary aid — about what he was doing and who he was. Early entries labour over his sexuality, which he felt to be a serious and disabling problem. His obsessions (call them crushes if you must) were shortly to be with the French actor and filmstar Serge Reggiani, with Richard Harris agonisingly and masochistically, with Malcolm McDowell (though by then there was never any question of anything happening or even being desired) and with Frank Grimes (ditto).