Ego

James Agate

I mentioned at the beginning of last month diarist and theatre critic, James Agate (Men of Letters). I have the second volume of his diaries, Ego 2, but Lyttleton, Hart-Davis and Leigh Fermor have stopped me reading it.

So I thought I would open a page at random to get a flavour of his style and content.

Sunday Oct 27 1935

A dull day, like old age. Have been asking myself how many newspaper readers really read, in the sense of doing more than skim, what one takes so much trouble to write. One of my favourite passages in poetry is:

She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead,
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.

This was in my mind when I ended my Romeo and Juliet article with this sentence: “One felt that whenever such grief is heard in the theatre, Mrs Stirling’s heart will hear it and beat, though it has lain a century dead.” …

Thursday Oct 31 1935

Last night at the M. G. Office Jock asked James Bone whether George Mair had been a fastidious journalist. JB replied in a whisper: “Man, he once telephoned a semi-colon from Moscow.”

Lunched at the Savage with Herman Finck who was in terrific form. He showed me the programme for a forthcoming Sunday concert at Hastings, and when I objected to Bacchanalia as being too profane a subject he said: “All right, we’ll call it John Sebastian Bacchanalia.”

That’s it from James Agate, now it’s me again. I chose that page at random and didn’t need to cheat, which is promising, although I did skip quite a lot. I expect you recognised the poetry, although I didn’t; Come into the Garden, Maud by Alfred Tennyson. Mrs Stirling is an actress who died in 1895; M.G. Manchester Guardian I suppose; George Mair a journalist who died in 1926. Here is a film about Herman Finck.