I very much enjoyed Chips Channon’s Diaries, the 1967 edition. I was aware it was incomplete out of respect for people still alive.
I was unaware that the published diaries of about 250,000 words were extracted from 2 million words. More importantly, the editor, Robert Rhodes James, was not allowed to read the diaries he was editing. He only saw the transcription submitted by Peter Coats that was both redacted and re-written.
Simon Heffer, editor of the new edition, comments “some who wrote about the original edition, while not denying the diaries were entertaining and gripping reading, nonetheless branded Channon vain, trivial, snobbish, shallow and profoundly lacking in judgement”. I concur. Since I only read what was deemed acceptable by Peter Coats it is likely that Chips will be less likeable, unexpurgated and un-bowdlerised. Heffer is more encouraging.
“They will also find a man who was intensely loyal (sometimes in spite of himself) to his friends, easily wounded, often insecure, capable of exceptional kindness, well read and immensely civilised. Above all, Channon was a natural observer, and would have made a superb journalist.”
No doubt I will have further comments on Chips as I revel in his writing, opinions, short-comings and rectitude. There may not be much rectitude. Meanwhile you can have a lick of my ice cream.
Saturday 26th January, 1918: Dined with comtesse d’Hautpoul … it seems she takes drugs. I must find out what kind.
I hope Heffer has all hands to the pumps to get out the next volume while I’m alive and almost sane. Let’s keep fit, put your hands in the air.
The unexpurgated diaries are unputdownable, though as Christopher surmises, the portrait they paint of the diarist is even ghastlier than that given by the 1967 edition. What’s entirely new here is the chronicle of the young American on the make in London high society of the Roaring Twenties. He bizarrely accuses half the people he meets of being snobs, vulgarians, hypocrites and homosexuals! He was one of a circle of young men met at Oxford who seem to have been passionately attached (ordinary chaps such as Prince Paul of Serbia, Viscount Gage, the Hon. Ivo Grenfell & Lord Curzon’s stepson Hubert Duggan), and who gave sexual expression to their feelings for one another by going to brothels & watching each other ravish women.