Life & Letters | 12 September 2009

Sad, but for the most part the newly published edition of Orwell’s Diaries is a bore. Not altogether, of course, but much of what is interesting — some of the wartime stuff — isn’t new, but has already appeared in the Collected Essays, Letters, Diaries etc. And what is new, the Domestic Diary, a record of the kitchen garden at his Wallingford cottage, isn’t interesting — though it may come to be so in time. I suspect that contemporaries would have found little of interest in Parson Woodforde’s journal, which nevertheless delights many today, with its picture of a vanished way of life.

Orwell, however, lacked the two things which make for a great diary: a keen interest in other people and their individual quirks, and an equally keen interest in himself. He is not much interested in gossip — except in the form of political rumours, which he was often a sucker for — and he is even less interested in self-examination. The best diarists offer both, though one or other may be uppermost.

Alan Clark, for instance, is very evidently an egotist, but he has an imaginative sympathy which enables him to bring other people alive for the reader. ‘What is to become of her?’ he asks on the evening after Margaret Thatcher’s last defiant speech in the Commons. ‘Acclimatisation will be agony, because she is not of that philosophic turn of mind that would welcome a spell at Colombey. . . ’ Then, after the leadership election, we get this snapshot: ‘At the last turn in the landing I heard the top door open in a rush and there, quite alone, and head to head, stood Heseltine … he was a zombie, shattered.’ To which vivid image, Clark appends these lines of Emily Dickinson’s: