The fatal Dogberry tendency

In June 1959, A. L. Rowse was sitting on a train in the United States, writing up his journal. He was in the middle of describing an enjoyable encounter with Elizabeth Bowen in New York. Unfortunately, he was interrupted by a young woman asking if the seat beside him was vacant. Rowse indicated with his pencil that

‘There is a vacant seat, across the gangway.’ ‘But I want the one by the window.’ ‘I am sitting by the window,’ I replied, still not looking up. ‘Oh, I see’, she said, and moved on.

A trivial incident, and you might have wondered why the great Elizabethan historian, autobiographer and Cornish poet chose to record it in his diary. It was in order to distinguish himself from the unfortunate ‘human’, female at that, who had had the temerity to suggest she might sit in the window seat. I took in that she was young and good- looking, evidently used to having everyone make way for her. Not so me. American bitches don’t get their way with me by their bitchery.
I knew Rowse, and although his behaviour sometimes embarrassed me, especially if we were eating out together in public, and he was yelling like an excited macaw about ‘her’ – the Dark Lady of the Sonnets – I had an affection for him. The last thing one would have expected from his diaries would have been an undiluted stream of human kindness. Yet the published diaries have shocked me.

What was the point of writing down that coarse and unfunny reflection about the woman on the train? Granted, a diary is a useful vehicle for letting off steam, especially if, like Rowse, you are solitary, or what the police in search of psychopaths sometimes call ‘a loner’.