From telegraph.co.uk
By Jane Shilling
The featureless monotony of recent weeks has made me avid for non-fiction accounts of life as it used to be – full of incident and variety
The publication of an unexpurgated edition of Sir Henry “Chips” Channon’s diaries may just be the answer to my current pressing anxiety.
I say “pressing” but, like many people over the past 11 months, I have had to construct an elaborate hierarchy of concern. At the top of the list are the worries that haunt me in the small hours: shall I ever see my ninetysomething father and aunt again? Will my son, crossing London daily by public transport for his work, be safe?
These are questions whose answers lie entirely beyond my control: I write letters to my father and aunt, send WhatsApp messages to my son about trying not to breathe more than strictly necessary (and get eye-roll emojis in return).
Meanwhile, I try to concentrate on more manageable problems, such as what am I going to read next? In the past year, more than 200 million print books were sold – the highest number since 2012, confirming that along with baking and cross-stitch, an awful lot of us were turning to comfort reading to beguile the locked-down days. At the beginning, I was happy to read novels: the publication of Hilary Mantel's great Cromwellian doorstopper last spring couldn’t have been better timed. But with the renewed incarcerations of winter, fiction lost its consoling charm.
The featureless monotony of recent weeks has made me avid for non-fiction accounts of life as it used to be – full of incident and variety. I could have turned to the diaries of Pepys or Boswell, Woolf, Waugh or Julien Green, but I knew them too well; instead, I ordered James Lees-Milne’s diaries, acclaimed as one of the great journals of the 20th century. The character who emerges from these pages is in equal measure dislikable and fascinating – a posh Mr Pooter with an eye for disobliging detail. But, like all the best diarists, he turns that beady eye as harshly on himself as on his contemporaries (many of whom were bitterly offended by his mordant descriptions).
Approaching the last pages of the final volume (where he is, at 91, still keenly noticing the “curtain of rich, pea-green moiré silk” in his guest bedroom at Chatsworth), I find myself reluctant to part from this preposterous and touchingly flawed diarist who has been my companion since the new year. But perhaps, with the prospect of some freedom soon to be restored, it may be good for me to stop living vicariously through other people’s journals.
There is a sense in which we are all diarists now, dutifully recording the detail of our lives, from sourdough loaves to divorce, on social media. But while the diaries of the pre-internet age may have been written with half an eye on posterity, they were not composed, as our own carefully curated posts are, for instant publication and a gratifying harvest of “likes”.
The historians of 2071 will find a fascinating record of this latter-day plague year in such posts. But anyone seeking solace or companionship will surely struggle to find it among the artfully filtered images and beatific hashtags.
WH Auden wrote that “Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places”, but he hadn’t foreseen the internet. Public faces in the private places of their journals may not be wise or nice – but they are great company in hard times.
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