The Captive Reader

When I finished reading the last diary entry in Storm Signals by Charles Ritchie, I was reluctant to put the book down.  I have been a fan of Ritchie’s diaries since I was twelve years old and first discovered them on the shelf of my school library.  I always enjoy any time I spend reading his books and never tire of rereading them.  It is impossible not to grow attached to a diarist when you’ve followed him over the course of almost fifty years.  He is wonderfully familiar to me; I know him as a reckless, enthusiastic youth, a sophisticated, heartless bachelor about town, an eager new ambassador, and a middle-aged veteran who is granted the very best postings.  When I come to the end of the diaries, it is always difficult to say goodbye.

Since last autumn, I’ve reread all four volumes of Ritchie’s diaries in chronological order.  I started with An Appetite for Life, covering Ritchie’s late teens in Canada and England, moved on to The Siren Years, a record of Ritchie’s wartime experiences in London and easily one of my favourite books, and enjoyed Diplomatic Passport, chronicling Ritchie’s first years as a diplomatic representative (as opposed to staff member) in post-war Europe and America.  The final volume, Storm Signals, is a selection of Ritchie’s diaries between 1962 and 1971, during which time he served as Canadian ambassador to the United States before moving on to his final diplomatic posting, as Canadian High Commissioner in London.

As usual, the focus of the diaries is more personal than professional.  A reader looking for specific details about the business of the day would be disappointed.  Ritchie records his impressions and opinions without ever dwelling on anything that could be considered sensitive information.  For the general reader, this is more than enough detail.  We learn what he thought of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, of the political crises of the day, and of the tensions between the Canadian and American governments at the time that created a rather stressful working environment for Ritchie in Washington.  Both presidents kept their distance from Ritchie because of disagreements between the two nations about major issues like nuclear weapons, economic sanctions for communist nations, and the war in Vietnam.

These tensions did keep Ritchie busy during his US posting but he still had plenty of time to keep his diary, thankfully.  One of the delights of Storm Signals is that he takes this time to look back on his life and ponder the strange workings of fate.  Finally, the reader gets to learn a little of how Ritchie spent the undocumented decade between the end of An Appetite for Life and the start of The Siren Years.  He was briefly – and unsuccessfully – a schoolmaster and then in the early 1930s, with few other options available, applied for a fellowship at Harvard (where he had studied for a year after leaving Oxford) that would, as he says, ‘prove a turning point’:

There were two fellowships on offer: one to proceed to France to explore the significance of the word ‘sensibilité’ in eighteenth-century French literature, the other to advanced studies in the origins of the First World War.  I coveted the first and obtained the second.  It was to prove a turning point, for had I been delving into ‘sensibilité’ in the cafés of Montpellier I should not have been in Boston to take the examination for the Department of External Affairs and ergo I should not now, as an aging Ambassador, be sitting at my desk in Washington wasting the government’s time with this excursion into the past when I should be studying the statistics of Canadian lumber exports. (8 July 1963)

I would just like to say how enjoyable I think either subject would be, though I can easily understand how in 1931 he was more drawn to the idea of studying in Paris than in going back to Cambridge.

After Washington, the London posting was a dream.  Ritchie got to return to a city he loved, to live in a gorgeous house, and to be near many of his oldest and closest friends.  It was an undemanding, pleasurable appointment and Ritchie welcomed it:

I looked forward to it in a spirit best expressed by my friend Douglas LePan, who wrote, in congratulation, that my motto should be that of the Renaissance Pope – ‘God has given us the Papacy, now let us enjoy it.’

A large part of what makes Ritchie so irresistible to me is his tendency to spout rather romantic images.  He could be, I think, a rather reserved man, as befits a career diplomat, and certainly his early affairs were more about physical pleasure than any kind of spiritual fulfilment, though he did find that in his thirty-year long relationship with Elizabeth Bowen and in his happy marriage to wife Sylvia.  But his sentimentality does show up in his writing and I love when it does:

Voices and music from a next-door party sounding from behind the screen of heavy-leafed trees bordering the garden.  The music plucks at some lost feeling.  The women’s voices sound languorous and exciting.  It is true, no doubt, that the encounters between people at that party are as forced as at the party I have just left, that most are looking beyond each other’s left ear to sight someone more important to talk to.  The laughter in most cases does not contain in its volume one hundredth part of real laughter and is as tasteless as frozen ham, but perhaps it is worth coming to a garden setting under the glossy, unreal light of late evening if two people on the outskirts of the party remember it as the moment when they first met, and carry the memory that it was there that it all started.  (30 June 1962)

I also loved this image (and could certainly relate to his wish):

When I woke this morning and saw sun on the melting snow I closed my eyes, pulled the eiderdown over my head, and wished that I lived by myself in an isolated autumnal château in France with high walls round it, with books, a fire in the library, the smell of leaf mould in the garden outside.  (22 December 1962)

And, of course, there are Ritchie’s credentials as a reader.  He is always reading, frequently something I have never heard of.  His notes on reading remind me of Alberto Manguel, not because they read the same books (though there is some overlap) but there is something about the way both men approach reading and the way they both write about it that seems similar.  How could I not be drawn to someone who says “I can’t go on reading Vanity Fair as I am bogged down among Amelia’s tender tears and rhapsodies and I will not skip to get back to Becky Sharp”?  Or who finds Shakespeare’s plays so stirring that they hinder his recovery from illness: “I spent the afternoon recovering in bed.  Read Antony and Cleopatra and became so moved and inflamed by it that I could not get to sleep at night.”  Ritchie reacts to books like the best kind of reader.

Though Ritchie’s relationship with Elizabeth Bowen was intense and long-lived, it is rather nice to read about his appreciation of his wife Sylvia in these entries.  Though, it must be noted, he edited these diaries for publication himself and they are highly censored, holding back the most personal and potentially hurtful details about his affairs.  Still, both his casual and more thoughtful comments about how much he loves Sylvia are very welcome.  He seems to be almost surprised at his real affection for her and at how highly he values her company and misses her during her absences.  Theirs was a pragmatic marriage but, at least from his viewpoint, a very successful one – quite surprising given Ritchie’s heartless promiscuity in his youth.

As I finished reading, knowing that I had come to the end of Ritchie’s elegant and entertaining diaries once more, I felt the same way as I always do when I finish this cycle: thankful for Ritchie’s gifts as a diarist but frustrated that he did not publish more.

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My love for Charles Ritchie’s An Appetite for Life and The Siren Years is well documented.  I adore those books.  I wish everyone would read them, particularly The Siren Years, as examples of what really well-written, well-edited diaries can be like and if you, dear reader, take only one recommendation from me, let it be this: try Ritchie.  Just don’t start with Diplomatic Passport: More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962.

It is not that it is a bad book – far from it – but it is not a good introduction to Ritchie.  In his younger years, both as a student in Halifax and at Oxford (An Appetite for Life) and as an energetic and sociable staff member at the Canadian High Commission in London (The Siren Years), Ritchie had plenty of time for introspection and an active personal life, making for a number of both thoughtful and highly entertaining diary entries.  But Diplomatic Passport covers the first years of Ritchie’s very successful career as a diplomatic representative, when he was working all hours and barely had the time to have a personal life never mind write about it.  It’s a wonderful book if you already know Ritchie and are happy for him to talk very little about himself but I think it might prove frustrating for unfamiliar readers who would probably want to have some idea about the author.

The diaries begin in 1946 in an uneasy post-war world.  The changes wrought by the Second World War only put more pressure on the men and women trying to rebuild and to create a lasting international peace. The strain is intense and the worst of it, Ritchie thinks, is borne by the young men who not only have the anxiety of tending to their young careers but also of searching out or attending to their wives:

International affairs have become a battlefield where the rules of war are relevant, and the strains on the combatants are as gruelling as on the battlefield.  You need physical, mental and nervous strength.  But, hardest of all, you cannot afford too many distractions.  That is not so bad for the old men who live only for ambition.  It is hard on the young; they tire more easily and are more vulnerable to their own mistakes.  The Old Boys have made so many that one more or less does not matter to them.  Then the young ones have the other battles of love to contend with.  They are fighting on two fronts.  They must have time to sleep with their wives or someone else will do it for them.  (21 August 1946)

In the years documented in Diplomatic Passport, Ritchie covers a lot of ground.  It is a short book, with some years barely mentioned and others only captured with a handful of entries, but it tracks Ritchie from Ottawa to Paris to Bonn (West Germany) to New York and finally to Washington.  Exhausting.  He also picks up a wife, Sylvia, along the way and, though she is barely mentioned in these diaries, there is a noticeable lack of female conquests (which took up a considerable amount of his youthful energy).  I am sure these years were a whirlwind to live through, as each move brought with it a more impressive job title: counsellor at the Canadian Embassy in Paris; Ambassador to West Germany; Permanent Representative to the United Nations; Ambassador to the United States.  Because Ritchie preferred to focus on his personal life when he published these diaries, there are very few details about his work and achievements, just impressions of those who he worked with, general thoughts on the issues of the day, and humorous anecdotes from various events, like this one from his time in West Germany:

I went over today to Dortmund to open an exhibition of Eskimo art.  I have already opened three exhibitions of Eskimo art and am becoming sick of the sight of it.  This exhibition was in the museum at Dortmund and the museum officials had told me that they had very few funds to provide refreshments, so I sent over several cases of rye whisky.  The people at the museum had never seen rye before and the Director asked me if it was ‘a kind of liqueur or a sort of wine.’  After the speeches were over, tall glasses filled with undiluted rye whisky were handed round on trays and drunk recklessly, so that before the reception was over everyone was more or less drunk.  It was by far the most successful exhibition of Eskimo art I have ever attended… (21 February 1957)

The most enjoyable, light-hearted entries are from Ritchie’s time in post-war Paris.  The country may have been devastated but the company of fellow diplomats was excellent and always entertaining.  Ritchie’s observations of the social and political changes taking place (and the telling quotes he took down from others) made for some fascinating reading.  I particularly loved this account of a dinner party for the Dominion delegations at the British Embassy in Paris, with the uneasy melding of classes after Labour had come into power:

The prevailing social tone of the evening was British lower middle class.  Since Labour came in in England they are the rulers – the politicians.  Their servants of the upper class – the professional diplomats and officials – joined benevolently in the fun, taking the attitude ‘they are really rather dears and it is nice to see them enjoy themselves in their simple fashion and we must not seem patronizing,’ except for one who remarked to me, ‘This is where experience at Servants’ Balls and Sergeant’s Messes comes in so useful.’ (13 October 1946)

I already mentioned the greatest, most bizarrely fantastic Parisian escapade here a few weeks ago, but it bears repeating.  Ritchie had counted Lady Diana Cooper, wife of Duff Cooper, Britain’s then ambassador to France, and Nancy Mitford as friends during his days in London (both show up several times in The Siren Years) and they all found themselves together again in Paris.  I can only wish I had friends this glamourous or extravagant:

Not long ago I was sitting next to Diana at a lively luncheon party where the cross-five of conversation was sizzling away. Twice – three times – I attempted to join the fray without success. Turning to Diana I said: ‘I cannot understand it. Am I invisible, or inaudible? I have so much to say and no one pays attention to me.’ She fixed me with her azure eyes. ‘Something,’ she said, ‘must be done about that.’ Something was – with Nancy Mitford acting as her lieutenant, Diana organized Ritchie Week, a week of non-stop parties, dinners, even a ball in Ritchie honour. She roped in half Paris – surprised French hostesses found it was the smart thing to join in this charade. Old and new friends showered us with invitations. Whenever we appeared, a special anthem was played to signal our entrance. Verses were addressed to us – on the walls of the houses in our street someone had by night chalked up in giant letters the slogan ‘Remember Ritchie’. Nancy I think it was who had an even more daring inspiration – a clutch of coloured balloons inscribed ‘Ritchie Week’ were let loose over Paris. (The newspapers reported that one of these had floated as far as Boulogne, where it was picked up by the mystified inhabitants, who asked themselves what it might portend.) It was an apotheosis of a kind, and who but Diana could have devised such a fantasy? (21 June 1948)

Isn’t that extraordinary?  Part of what makes Ritchie’s diaries such a delight are these unexpectedly sensational moments, which happen with greater frequency than you would believe.  The people he collects around him or just encounters are extraordinary.  It’s thrilling enough to come across the truly famous names but he is also wonderful at introducing me to people I’d never heard of before (generally diplomats or journalists) and making them seem completely marvellous, convincing me that I must track down all the information I can about them.

Though I would recommend new readers start with one of the earlier volumes of Ritchie’s diaries, this is nonetheless an excellent book.  As usual, Ritchie provides a captivating, intelligently observed perspective on the events of the day.  As Ritchie’s jobs change and he becomes more important, the focus does shift more towards his work, his thoughts on political and diplomatic matters becoming the most common topics while friends and family are largely unmentioned – a change in priorities for both Ritchie and the reader!  But, more importantly, the diaries never become dull.  Where he once wrote about drunken nights at university (excellent training for a career as a diplomat) or affairs with ballerinas, he now writes with equal animation about Suez and the Congo.  Though his topics may have changed, his diaries remain just as entertaining as ever, chronicling a truly fascinating life.

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I cannot invent.  I shall never, never be a novelist.  At the same time, I must write.  Why?  God knows.  So that I’m left with this diary, this useless, driveling diary.  If that is all I have, I had better get on with it.  (19 September 1924)

How wonderful it was to reread An Appetite for Life: The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927 by Charles Ritchie!  I’ve read The Siren Years, Ritchie’s diaries written while working at the Canadian High Commission in London from 1937 to 1945, so often that I long ago lost count but I think I’ve only read this earlier volume once or twice, which is a shame but also a delight since everything seemed fresh to me.  Ritchie is, as always, marvelously candid and his daily ponderings – here, unsurprisingly given his youth, focused on women, sex, and school – manage to be both amusing and touching.

I shall let Ritchie introduce himself as I certainly could not do any better:

I am seventeen years old at the moment but will be eighteen next week.  By occupation I am a freshman at King’s University here in Halifax.  I have no character that I know of.  I try to be the characters I read about or the people I admire, to enter into their skins and act as they would, but no one notices.  They think I am just the same as ever.  My main vices are selfishness, vanity, self-consciousness, and talking too much.  Also, what the masters at school used to call ‘impure thoughts’, but I don’t know if that is a vice or not.  I am not altogether lacking in intelligence but I do not care about that.  I want to be handsome and dashing and self-assured, but I am angular, beak-nosed, narrow-chested, and wear glasses.  I am quite tall, but where is the good of that?  I am a compulsive diarist and a greedy reader.  (19 September 1924)

While the diaries do technically range from 1924 to 1927, only 1925 and 1926 are covered in any depth.  They follow Ritchie through his studies at King’s University in Halifax and, of more concern to the diarist, his romantic sufferings, on through to his first term atOxford, which proves to be very different than what he had imagined and planned for.

Ritchie’s pursuit of and conflicted feelings over his first love definitely enliven his time in Halifax.  Part of the joy of reading diaries from any period is recognizing that no, really, most things don’t change, that people are essentially the same with the same feelings and urges whatever century or country they may be from.  Ritchie’s group of young Haligonians seem to spend most of their time paired off in the back seats of cars, on sofas in dark rooms, or, when the weather allows, in remote outdoor settings.  Even as he’s pining over his fickle love, that doesn’t prevent Ritchie from enjoying what else is on offer (and, it must be said, there do seem to be a fair number of girls willing to do almost everything without any expectation of emotional attachment, which, clearly, is irresistible to the teenage boy).  But poor Ritchie, his libido is a trial to him, though his angst over it makes for amusing reading:

Wouldn’t it be nice if for one day and night I could stop thinking of sex.  I wonder if other people think of that one subject as often as I do, and not only thinking it.  I sometimes wonder whether I am a bit crazy and this spring weather makes it worse.  What would it be like to be castrated?  A jolly good idea I should think, then I could concentrate on my work, pass my exams, save money, and have a brilliant career.  People say that playing games takes your mind off it: ‘A healthy mind in a healthy body’ and all that stuff.  Certainly I don’t think fencing will make much difference.  Anyway I have not got a healthy mind and I am not sure that I want to have one.  (19 March 1925)

And just as it was interesting to know what young people were doing in the backs of cars in Halifax in 1925, it’s equally interesting to read Ritchie’s observations on how different things were among his British acquaintances once he arrived in Oxford in 1926:

It is quite true that these English undergraduates do seem incredibly young.  It’s the way they have been brought up.  For one thing, they have never had anything to do with girls except sisters and the odd girl they met at a tennis party or a dance.  They have never talked to a girl about anything.  They are mostly virgins though they would rather die than admit it, and they don’t know anything about petting as we practice it at home.  They talk about sex a lot but it is mainly smut and endless limericks.  There don’t seem to be any available girls at Oxford, only undergraduates and whores.  (30 October 1926)

What is particularly interesting to me is how the reality of Ritchie’s life at Oxford completely disregards the dreams and expectations he had built up for it.  Looking back regretfully at the end of his first term, Ritchie can only sigh over what has happened to him:

I went into the musty, empty Union to write a letter to Mother, and could think of nothing to say to her that would not be a lie.  She has an idea of my Oxford life that I used to have before I came up here – that I am taking advantage of a wonderful opportunity for which she is making sacrifices, and how can I explain to her what is really happening to me, especially as I don’t understand it myself.  Perhaps it is a sort of education, but not what we planned.  (15 December 1926)

On first arriving, Ritchie chose to ignore the established, close knit groups of other Canadian students and fell in with a fast set of assorted characters.  He developed a fondness for gambling, which he could not afford, started to be interested in a young married woman, “an enthusiastic amateur” prostitute popular among undergraduates, and, to cap it all off, hosted a disastrous dinner party that saw the guests taking pot shots at street lights from his window, one of which hit a young lady (happily, only a flesh wound).  If nothing else, his life offered variety: one day he’s tagging along when a flamboyantly gay friend goes to a notorious local pub looking to pick up, the next he’s off to a meeting of the Oxford Group.  Oh, Oxford in the 1920s.  Through all of this, he constantly laments his actions in his diary, vowing to turn over a new leaf every few weeks: to devote himself to hours of steady reading each day, interrupted only by exercise, tutorials, and lectures (which he confesses to finding pointless and quickly developed the habit of skipping in favour of reading the lecturers’ books).  The excitement, the guilt, the disappointment, the giddiness – it is an intoxicating mix, the essence of youth and particularly those first few months at university:

I wonder where the notion of ‘carefree undergraduates’, as described for instance by E.F. Benson in his novels, ever came from.  Most of my friends are hag-ridden by debts; dreading exams; and sexually frustrated in one way or another.  Yet who would want to be any where but at Oxford?  Certainly not I.  (14 December 1926)

These diaries were edited by Ritchie himself after the success of The Siren Years and there are obviously passages that were consciously selected because of how they reflected the course of his life: his lament at having no adventures, affairs, or encounters with famous people to record; his mother’s hope that he will people a great, important man of the world; and his own thoughts at various points on entering the diplomatic service:

So little happens to me that is worth recording.  No great adventures or tremendous experiences, or passionate love affairs.  I know no famous people whom I came describe for posterity.  (19 September 1924)

Ritchie went on to become one ofCanada’s most influential diplomats.  Among other postings, he was ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1966 and was the Canadian High Commissioner to the UK from 1967 to 1971.  He came to have all the adventures and experiences he’d hoped for as a child, met countless people of note, and had a lengthy, very passionate love affair with the writer Elizabeth Bowen.  And, thankfully, it’s all very well and entertainingly documented through his diaries.

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