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The Supreme Diarist?

At 20, mad about the theatre but living as far from Shaftesbury Avenue as you could get without tumbling into the Atlantic, I knew all about the latest productions in the West End. Moreover, I could have told you about Noël Coward’s 1924 triumph with The Vortex, John Gielgud’s 1935 shot at Romeo, and Olivier’s 1944 stage triumph as Richard III.

This was courtesy of James Agate. Though he had died in 1947 I had many of his books of collected theatre criticism, from Buzz Buzz (1914) through Brief Chronicles (1943) to the wonderful evocation of musicals and light comedies, Immoment Toys (1945). It was some time, however, before I came across Ego, his diary, the first volume of which came out in 1932. In the first entry, he says that he started writing it ‘because there seem to be a lot of things I want to say that other writers put into novels and accepted essayists into essays. Because it will be a relief to set down just what I do actually think, and in the first words to hand, instead of pondering what I ought to think and worrying about the words in which to express the hammered-out thought.’ Rebecca West claimed that she would ‘keep these journals as I keep the Goncourt Journals, as records of their time more truly historical than history’, while in an obituary broadcast Alistair Cooke called Agate ‘the supreme diarist’.

Agate’s is a diary in the widest possible meaning of the word. He naturally records his daily activities, but he also sometimes includes letters he has written to the press and to his friends – and their replies. Very occasionally there will be a terse line, ‘Dined with John [Gielgud], [Laurence] Olivier and Emlyn [Williams]’ – but that will usually be followed by four pages of their conversation and followed up by the letters they exchanged next day carrying further the arguments they had had – about a play or an actor or a concert.

But first thin

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At 20, mad about the theatre but living as far from Shaftesbury Avenue as you could get without tumbling into the Atlantic, I knew all about the latest productions in the West End. Moreover, I could have told you about Noël Coward’s 1924 triumph with The Vortex, John Gielgud’s 1935 shot at Romeo, and Olivier’s 1944 stage triumph as Richard III.

This was courtesy of James Agate. Though he had died in 1947 I had many of his books of collected theatre criticism, from Buzz Buzz (1914) through Brief Chronicles (1943) to the wonderful evocation of musicals and light comedies, Immoment Toys (1945). It was some time, however, before I came across Ego, his diary, the first volume of which came out in 1932. In the first entry, he says that he started writing it ‘because there seem to be a lot of things I want to say that other writers put into novels and accepted essayists into essays. Because it will be a relief to set down just what I do actually think, and in the first words to hand, instead of pondering what I ought to think and worrying about the words in which to express the hammered-out thought.’ Rebecca West claimed that she would ‘keep these journals as I keep the Goncourt Journals, as records of their time more truly historical than history’, while in an obituary broadcast Alistair Cooke called Agate ‘the supreme diarist’. Agate’s is a diary in the widest possible meaning of the word. He naturally records his daily activities, but he also sometimes includes letters he has written to the press and to his friends – and their replies. Very occasionally there will be a terse line, ‘Dined with John [Gielgud], [Laurence] Olivier and Emlyn [Williams]’ – but that will usually be followed by four pages of their conversation and followed up by the letters they exchanged next day carrying further the arguments they had had – about a play or an actor or a concert. But first things first: I doubt whether any non-theatre-buff much under 50 is more than vaguely aware that someone called James Agate once existed. He was born in Manchester in 1877, the son of a linen draper – but a linen draper who was also prominent in the Manchester arts world: Mrs Agate was an accomplished pianist and Sarah Bernhardt came to dinner. The boy went to Manchester Grammar School, but instead of university joined his father’s business. In the early years of the new century he began writing theatre notices for the Manchester Guardian; but then came the war. He was already 37 but volunteered for service and was posted to France, whence he sent back to the Guardian a series of letters later published as L. of C. (Lines of Communication) which, though now forgotten, was regarded in its time as a classic of war literature. He married a French girl; but he was homosexual, and the marriage did not last – though he remained friends with his wife. Back in England he set about his real career. Within a couple of years he had become theatre critic of the Saturday Review (a post previously held by both Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm), and in 1923 he moved to the Sunday Times where he remained until his death, the most influential British theatre critic. He published many volumes of collected criticism, which addicts of the genre continue to treasure. But it is the Ego series, covering the years 1932 to 1947, which anyone interested in English diaries should try to collect. The diaries differ from most because despite what he wrote about putting down the first words that came to hand, in fact in the end he wrote his journal as carefully as he wrote anything else – something to which he confessed in Ego 8:
Shall I lose face if I confess that the Ego books are not the careless jottings of idle half-hours? That I think Ego, talk Ego, dream Ego? That I get up in the middle of the night to make a correction? That before the MS of any of my Egos reaches the publishers it has been through at least a dozen revisions? That it is only when the galley proofs arrive that the real work begins? I suppose that when I had finished with the galleys of Ego 7 it would have been difficult to find fifty unaltered sentences . . . [and] actually I made over two thousand corrections on the page proofs of Ego 7.
He was meticulous about punctuation: ‘Millais once confessed that the only thing he enjoyed about portrait painting was putting the highlights on the boots of his subjects; the only thing I really enjoy about writing is the punctuation.’ He took infinite trouble: on one occasion, in May 1943, he wrote a notice of a play for the Sunday Times, ‘went home, then decided the notice wasn’t good enough: went down to the ST office, rescued the script, took it to the Café Royal, wrestled still further with it, took it back to the flat, and sat up till four still wrestling. The trouble with the thing was that there were too many words and too few ideas . . . Had another go this morning in the intervals of reading the week’s books for the Daily Express . . . Shall doubtless have another go when the proofs arrive tomorrow. Who says I am not a spontaneous writer?’ A critic is surely nothing if he or she is not opinionated, and Agate needed no lesson from anyone about that. In the theatre he had no truck with ‘producers’, as directors were then called – he saw them merely as ‘persons engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act’. Writing to Tyrone Guthrie about his production of Macbeth in 1944:
If the producer thinks he can best interpret Shakespeare’s woodland comedy by giving the fairies glass noses and sealing wax ears I do not very much mind because in that instance production is the play . . . But I’m horribly annoyed when your highbrow producer makes a surrealist Lear emerge from a factory chimney wearing a stovepipe hat and using an umbrella to ward off, while apostrophising, the elements . . . What enrages me even more than his insanity is the pitiful ambition of the producer who must add his self-expression to his actor’s, and so forces me to get my Shakespeare at two removes.
He loved to épater, and though the term ‘politically correct’ wasn’t then in vogue, he certainly usually woke up in the morning with the idea of upsetting someone, and usually succeeded.
If I had my will, young girls would be taught nothing but cooking, sewing, and how to keep a house clean, and young boys no more than the trades by which they ultimately hope to support the young girls. This as to nineteen-twentieths of the youthful population. It would be left to the discretion of teachers to pick out the odd five per cent who can be educated. For note this. Before you can educate a mind you must have a mind to educate. It is a part of democratic cant to pretend that Nature has been fair and equitable in her distribution of mind. She has not; she has been infinitely capricious. Nineteen-twentieths of the population in this country has no more mind – I am not talking of soul – than a lamp-post.
He especially appreciated the advantage of upsetting the readers of the Egos. Among other things, this attracted an enormous amount of correspondence – with some correspondents, if they were sufficiently intelligent and witty, he would exchange letters for months, and for pages. These writers were often obscure, though he also corresponded voluminously with fellow authors and distinguished actors. His exchange of letters with George Lyttelton (later celebrated for his published correspondence with Rupert Hart-Davis) goes on spasmodically through the Egos for several years. Mrs Patrick Campbell said: ‘I did so enjoy your book. Everything that everybody writes in it is so good.’ Witty himself, he was a provoker of wit in others, and a great snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. An entry for 20 March 1934:
To see Peter Page, laid up with gout and saying, ‘I wish I had the pluck of old Lord K – I met him just before the last war, hobbling up the Haymarket. I hailed a cab and helped him in. He said “Thankee, m’boy. Tell the fellow to drive to Hyde Park Corner and stop at the first blonde.”’
The Egos are full of small felicities. He was delighted for instance to find a description of Southend in The Tempest:
The approaching tide Will shortly fill the reasonable shore That now lies foul and muddy.
He saw everything through the prism of literature. There is a sketch of the Rattenbury trial – the famous 1935 trial of Alma Rattenbury for the murder (with her young lover) of her husband – which he thought a living novel, the plot by Balzac. ‘In the box Mrs Rattenbury looked and talked exactly as I have always imagined Emma Bovary looked and talked. Pure Flaubert . . . and there was that part of her evidence in which she described how, trying to bring her husband round, she first accidentally trod on his false teeth and then tried to put them back into his mouth so that he could speak to her. This was pure Zola.’ He was an extremely clubbable man – that was one of the reasons for his incessant financial difficulties. He would keep a cab waiting for hours while he dined his friends – always caviar and champagne, of course (though on one occasion he noted that he only had enough money for one half-bottle, so of course ‘I drank it myself. One must have a proper sense of self-esteem.’). He loved cricket and boxing, was a goodish golfer and a knowledgeable horse-fancier (he owned two Hackney show horses, both of them winners). He liked to dress the part, whether as a man-about-town or something different: in one Ego, ‘Composed costume suitable for gent. on fine Sunday at Southend in April. Light blue shirt and collar, same colour stockings, violet and maroon tie, sporting small check jacket and waistcoat, Harris tweed plus fours large check, soft light-brown felt hat. Old brown shoes, nondescript handkerchief, and monocle.’ (He asked his valet Fred, ‘How do you like the tout ensemble?’ Fred replied, ‘Too much toot, and not enough of the other thing!’) James Agate died of heart disease in 1947, just after completing his ninth Ego. No one who enjoys diaries – from those of Pepys and Fanny Burney to Arnold Bennett’s and Noël Coward’s – can afford not to find even more room on their groaning shelves for the nine volumes of James Agate’s Ego.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 40 © Derek Parker 2013


About the contributor

Derek Parker has one autograph note from James Agate, who offered in the Daily Express to comment on readers’ writing. Aged 15, Parker sent in a short story. Agate wrote: ‘Save your pennies and buy a decent typewriter – I can’t read the stuff.’

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