Journals

Journal: It appears there are several definitions. The first and most commonly used defines a  newspaper, (true to the French root word jour - day - and its offspring noun journaliste) or magazine. The second denotes a diary or private record of daily events, observations and thoughts. There is a third, more obscure definition, relating to that part of an axle or shaft that rests on bearings. If you're interested in mechanics, feel free to look it up, but here we're sticking with newspapers and diaries.

Not counting a number of what are called 'freesheets', the UK's national daily news publications currently number eleven. The oldest established is The Times (1785) and the most widely read is The Sun (1.2 million copies daily). Some even have the word daily in their names (Express, Mail, Mirror, Star and Telegraph). For the sake of completeness, the other national dailies are the Financial Times, Guardian, I and Morning Star. Then there is a host of daily newspapers at a regional or local level, like the Blackpool Gazette (for which I write a monthly football column during the season). 

Of course, not all news journals are daily. The titles listed above actually only appear on week days, but most of them also have a weekly companion, featuring the word Sunday in their names. The exception is the Observer, which also happens to be the longest established (1791).

Beyond newspapers, there are also hundreds of journals, more usually called magazines or periodicals, that are published sometimes weekly but usually monthly, devoted to specific areas of general interest. such as aviation, cars, cookery, fashion, gardening, geography, history, knitting, music, photography, politics, sailing, science, and various sports too numerous to mention.

Finally under the first definition come the rather more high-brow journals devoted to specialist rather than general interests, where university academics publish research papers, unveil discoveries, debate theories, intellectualise in refined ways about arcane or leading-edge knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, linguistics, literature, medical science, physics or whatever floats their cranial boats.

journal entry

However, what I really want to write about is journal as in diary, or as the French would call it, journal intime as opposed to agenda or engagement calendar. I have kept one at various times in my life. I've destroyed them all, just as Ted Hughes burned Sylvia Plath's last diary shortly after she committed suicide.

Many famous people  have had their journals made public (often after their death). Among the earliest was the  English diarist Samuel Pepys, who kept a dairy of his daily life from 1660 for ten years (it runs to over a million words). Then there was Daniel Defoe, whose 'Journal Of The Plague Year' recounts the awful events of 1665/1666. The latter is not a true journal, given that Daniel was only five years old at the time of the Great Plague, but it is based on the contemporary diaries of his uncle Henry Foe.

Over the last few hundred years, the journals of many famous artists, authors, politicians, scientists and society figures have been published, and not always posthumously, from Dorothy Wordsworth and Charles Darwin to Captain Scott, Virginia Woolf, Anne Frank, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and Edwina Currie. They differ from autobiographies and offer interesting insights into the authors and their milieu. if one has the inclination and the luxury of time to read them.

I mentioned the poet Sylvia Plath just now, and it was Cynthia Kitchen's blog about a favourite poet (or two) that made me home in on Plath - and by extension Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath wrote a diary from January 1st 1944 (aged eleven) until her death in February 1963 (aged just thirty). The early volumes of diaries remain unpublished and are currently housed at Indiana University in Bloomington, for research purposes. Her adult diaries, commencing in 1950 when she became a student at Smith College and covering the next dozen years, were first published in abridged form in 1982 as 'The Journals of Sylvia Plath'. They were edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor. Hughes withheld two diaries from that publication, in addition to the final diary that he claimed to have destroyed because it contained passages he didn't want her children to have to read. Eventually, the two withheld diaries were yielded up and in 2000, the publication of 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath', containing 50% previously unpublished material, was hailed as a true literary event, giving as it did a fascinating insight into the woman, the writer and her ultimately tragic life.

posthumously published diaries

For anyone unfamiliar with the tangled web that was the relationship between Plath and Hughes, here's a quick overview. Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, USA in 1932. She was a bright and precocious young lady (IQ of 160) who started writing poetry aged eight. At eighteen, she went to college to study Literature, developed a habit of self-harming and made her first attempt at committing suicide. She won a scholarship to come to the UK and study at Newnham College, Cambridge. She met Ted Hughes at a party in February 1956. They admired each other's poetry. Hughes was a couple of years older than her, had studied English at Pembroke College, Cambridge and had just had his first work published. They were married four months after they met. As Plath put it:

"We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on."

They moved to America for a couple of years and Plath taught briefly at her alma mater, while Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, but returned to the UK in 1959 and bought a flat in London. 1960 had all the hallmarks of a propitious year. Hughes published 'Lupercal' a prize-winning poetry collection, their first child was born, and Plath published 'The Colossus', her first poetry collection. 

By 1961, Sylvia was confiding that she was in an abusive relationship, and that Ted's physical violence towards her. caused her to miscarry her second pregnancy. That summer they bought a house in rural Devon, where their second child was born at the beginning of 1962. They had let their London flat to a couple of writers, David and Assia Wevill and soon Hughes was embroiled in an affair with Assia (with whom he was also to have a child). Plath's reaction was to try and commit suicide again by deliberately crashing her car. Ted and Sylvia separated in the autumn of 1962 and she moved back to London with her two small children to rent a flat in Primrose Hill, in a house that W.B. Yeats had formerly occupied.

The winter of 1962–1963 was one of the coldest on record in the UK. It was dubbed The Big Freeze. In her tiny flat Sylvia went into a burst of creativity, completing a novel and most of the poems that would comprise the posthumous collection 'Ariel', but the flat was a miserable place, the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone. She sank into a deep depression. Her novel, 'The Bell Jar', was published in January 1963 and was met with critical indifference. She wrote to Hughes in early February saying she was planning to return to the USA with her children. Maybe she was hoping that would bring him back. He did visit her, but clearly it didn't go well. By then he was already in a relationship with another woman in addition to Assia. In fact he was with this third amour on the night Sylvia decided to take her own life.

On the morning of Monday 11th February, with her children still sleeping soundly, she sealed herself in her kitchen, with towels and tape to stop the fumes from spreading to the rest of the flat, turned on the gas oven and put her head deep inside it. 

cancelled passport

As Plath lay dying in her freezing Fitzroy Road flat on that Monday morning, barely a mile away on the other side of a snow-covered Primrose Hill, the Beatles commenced  recording their debut LP 'Please Please Me' at Abbey Road studio 2. They laid down the whole album in a single long day, fuelled by milk to keep their voices functioning, and finished late in the evening. A leading Beatles chronicler (whose first wife, I was told, also committed suicide) later wrote: "There can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music" 

Ever since I've known that two such culturally significant events - a bright beginning, a sad ending - happened so very close together in space and time, I've been fascinated by the fact. I've been mulling over the possibility of writing a poem that imaginatively ties the two events of that singular day together, and now I've realised the opportunity, with the slightest sprinkling of poetic licence.  I hope I've succeeded. You'll be the judges of that.

A Singular Day (11th February 1963)

Milk bottles stand frozen sentinels

on a doorstep at 10 am as the Beatles plug in,

first take of the day: There's A Place.

Some dark tragedy begins when pipes,

passion, hopes freeze. 23 Fitzroy Road also

home to WB Yeats, a blue plaque attests.

Does she, too, cast a cold eye, Medea like,

then decide to spare her babies her fate, even as

icy talons grip her wearied heart?

Do You Want To Know A Secret?

What horrors that final journal could spill,

a truth too awful to tell. Misery.

She seals the room with deliberation,

turns on that slow, monoxide hiss and lays

head deep within the stove as peace

comes dropping slow, a woozy whirling

blackness into the run-out groove of eternity,

earthbound, no more play.

Over the hill, barely a snowy mile away,

the Beatles tear into A Taste Of Honey, and how

Sylvia had loved her bees,

those messengers between Gods

and men, symbolic of a rustic idyll that proved

illusory, happiness beyond reach.

All afternoon, shocked friends come

and go, woeful chorus to this dreadful drama,

some wracked by tears, some with guilt

while in Abbey Road the Beatles

power on though Chains, Anna  and Hold Me Tight.

They're shredded, getting very near the end.

A bottle of milk hastily downed,

one last Twist And Shout belted out

at full throttle. Job done

...except for reverberations in the ether of 

Love, Love me do. The Beatles board their train

to Lime Street. A hearse cruises the night.

Sylvia Plath and child 

As a footnote, Ted Hughes didn't write another poem for three years after Sylvia's death, but as her widower, he became the executor of his wife's personal and literary estates. Assia Wevill also committed suicide by gassing herself and her child some six years later. Ted Hughes eventually remarried and  became Poet Laureate.

Thanks for reading, S :-(