Reading matters

Three-volume diary and friends

My Kilvert shelf is not exactly bristling with books, but these are the ones I really like. Most were bought from the Kilvert Society, but the three-volume diary took some tracking down. Happily it is now pretty freely available again.

My three-volume diary might be unique in that volume 1 was bound without pages 92 - 109. The entire section is missing. I do not know whether this makes it collectable or just annoying.

The box ? It is stuffed with ancient Kilvert Society Journals. They were called newsletters then, I think, and came unevenly typed on foolscap paper. Ah, those were the days when men were men, Kilvert was Kilvert, custard was custard, and newsletters were, er, basic. They had all the presentational pizazz a poorly-serviced typewriter could offer.

The tallest book on the shelf is Tony O'Brien's 'Who's Who in Kilvert's Diary'. It is an invaluable and encyclopedic book whose slim size holds an epic lifetime of painstaking research. Perhaps that should be the other way around. Either way, it's a great book.

What's striking, though, is how small the body of Kilvert's work is. The original diaries were very much longer, but only a tiny proportion of the original remains, and an even smaller proportion remains in its unedited form.

The posthumous editing that befell Kilvert was, at best, injudicious. The worst of it was hostile, ferocious, and destructive. 

Significant chunks of the original diary were excised by his widow, whose reasons are easy to imagine, and easier to lament. The remaining '22 old notebooks' (Introduction to the Diaries) fell into the hands of William Plomer. Plomer edited with vigour, and did at least succeed in publishing what is now known as the Three-Volume Diary. I editing he tells us that he cut out 60% of the material, reducing 8 notebooks into the first of the tree eventual volumes. But then he managed to lose both the original, unedited manuscript and the only typescript copy of it. So goodbye diaries, and only one grudging cheer for William.

If William gets just the one cheer, little hope for Essex Hope who then proceeded to destroy the original notebooks. Who knows why ? But a large GRRR to her. You begin to feel that the universe was not keen on Kilvert's diaries seeing the light of day.

Only a fraction of the original dodged the bullets and made it to publication. They had not been written for publication - unlike, say, the letters of the Elder Pliny, who always wrote with a watchful eye on posterity and a deep need to side with the winners - and of course Kilvert's writing is uneven. But some of the writing is just scintillating, and soars above the ordinary. Virginia Woolf herself admired Kilvert's account of his aunt's funeral, which is beyond hilarious (Friday, 2 December 1870).

By happy chance, part of what Plomer discarded survived elsewhere and came to light long after the 3VD came out. It lets us see some of the brilliance that Plomer jettisoned, like the stunning Dawn Chorus passage of 7 May 1870. It makes you wonder what other stunning vignettes were cut away. 

We will never know.