Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (1934)

This is Mitchison's account in diary form of travelling to Vienna in the immediate aftermath of the civil war of early 1934. Social Democrats had been attempting an uprising against Dollfuss' increasingly right wing and authoritarian government. As far as I can understand, the fledgling Nazi party was as poorly thought of as the Social Democrats. There was a state of affairs where many cultural currents overlapped, either actually or notionally. The Nazis were still seen, as their name implied, as socialist. The Dollfuss government itself was anti-Jewish, seemingly 'owning' that standpoint; Nazi agreement with it being virtually a side issue. In this web of unclarity, the uprising had been crushed, initially by gun power, though to be fair the uprisers were armed and their socialist housing complexes, newly built post-war, became gun emplacements of their own. But subsequently, the crushing took a less obvious aspect. Known Social Democratic sympathisers were jailed without trial, some were 'quietly' shot in small altercations. Women and children, left behind in virtually mortar-bombed non-functioning flats and houses, were given no aid, no food, no medicine. Jobs, particularly in the government sector, were lost. Lawyers and solicitors were intimidated into not providing assistance in the few cases which actually came to court. There was an entire portion of the population left in a kind of non-belonging limbo, and struggling to get even the most basic necessaries for life. Into this desperately frightened and dangerous situation came a number of foreign activists and journalists, seeming to be simply travellers or harmlessly interested onlookers; Mitchison was one of them. As recorded in the diary she travels around surreptitiously examining conditions. The plan is to show solidarity with her fellow socialists and distribute assistance from Britain where it isn't forthcoming from anywhere else - the Quakers have a good operation already in place, but it's missing people it doesn't know about. Because this activity is necessarily on the quiet, the diary must be quite carefully written, just in case it is ever confiscated. So names are replaced, or become simple initials, or even just dashes. Lists of names needing help are passed from one activist to another in various forms - sewn into knickers for safekeeping, for example! The main thrust is quite clear; this diary is meant as a revelation of desperation. But she also allows it to be subjectively humanised - gives herself time out to record happy alcohol-soaked dinners at one or another of the journalists' hotels, or shows the picture of herself staring lovingly into shop windows at clothes she likes. The best way to explain the effect this book has is I think to call it a muddy mosaic - it has an impressionistic feel in many instances of particular knife-edge situations being represented, with travel or lighter feeling following, and then another heartbreak looked forcefully into. The writing is typically toughly straightforward, with contrarily redolent belief in a brighter future punctuating the darkness. So, between the passion and the straightness, the misery and the inconsequential lightness, a shifting picture appears of life and death in frightening times.

Commonplace Book

'Now, and it may be for another generation or fifty years, the old savage morality and the old forces of greed and possession and violence are trying to kill the new morality and the new idea of brotherhood and equality. Do not let us delude ourselves; the old forces still have the power; they are not any longer dressed up as kings and barons with gold on their necks and swords in their hands; they are dressed respectably, and their gold is in banks, and they pay other people to do the killing. And because, deep down, they have no faith in the future, and instead of loving mankind they despise and distrust it, they are becoming more and more vile and brutal. For cruelty is always caused by fear, and grows with it. More and more desperately they are trying to kill the idea of equality and love and freedom, more and more violently and forcibly they are trying to crush it out of the minds and spirits of men and women and children...'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 23rd)

Commonplace Book

'What I want to explain, if I can, is that these people's basic ideas of the universe have been shattered. And, when an idea is broken, that's much worse for the people concerned than death or pain. You see, she believed in justice; it was an apparently practical ideal. It was the thing she and her husband had been working for since they were young - the basis of their marriage, and of their bringing children into the world. They had been good people. And now this had happened. It had happened to her husband who was a good man - that was what she couldn't understand. She stood there by her kitchen stove - and it didn't look as if she had much to cook on it. And she was going to be turned out of her house, and she had no money, and she could do nothing. Nothing at all. She had to stand there with her neck bowed. I don't think I've ever understood about oppression before. I've written about it, and imagined it, but here it was [...] And, for thousands and thousands of years, men and women have had to stand under the whip, not even answering back. And they've really been people, not a kind of animal, not something different, or romantic or picturesque. It's all real. The damned thing's been going on all this time. And now I've seen it, and I will not accept it in my world.'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 21st)

Commonplace Book

'...It seemed to me then how simple and easily attainable the elements are that make up human happiness, the thing which makes our years of living valid. Bright sun, mountains in the distance, and in the foreground scrubby fields of vine-stocks, and here and there a willow coming into bud; going somewhere on a job - the pause and gathering up of the spirit before work starts; the rush of air; above all the Solidaritaet, the comradeship. It seemed to me that any civilisation which was worth the price of its existence ought to be able to give us that. We were travelling third, wearing oldish clothes; we had a couple of oranges, and a bit of chocolate - that was all in the way of amenities. But it was spring all right. I hope I shall die when I stop feeling the spring.'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 21st)

Commonplace Book

'...As for me, I have the Kirk a generation back - further back still, John Knox, beaten up in the galleys - and Glyndwr was Chapel till three years ago, and now neither of us are even vaguely deists. But the forms and the words are familiar to us. A century ago, in the dark times after the Napoleonic wars, the hungry 'forties, this man and I would have prayed together. As it was, we discussed Marxism ; but there's nothing in that but a difference of time. No, there is a difference. One way is looking out at a reflection of oneself in the empty skies ; the other way is looking inward at mankind, and the laws that govern the thoughts and action of men. But the intensity of looking, though not the same way, has the same effect on the soul.'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 14th)

Commonplace Book

'...So odd, this newspaper world - writers, and yet how unlike highbrow writers! Applied writing. But can writing be ever "pure", like "pure" science? Perhaps some of the experimenters. Gertrude Stein, Joyce - and at the moment I simply can't feel they matter two pins...'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 8th)

The Cleansing of the Knife and other poems by Naomi Mitchison (1978)

This was Mitchison's extremely belated second volume of verse, following The Laburnum Branch in 1926, and I have to say that, largely, it wasn't "worth the wait". There is a quality in this work of vagueness and inattention to detail which pushes the reader to one side. This is most evident in terms of rhyming schemes - they are wandering, variable, and sometimes inept. It's also evident in her treatment of the subject matter, but this reveals itself in a complex way: any given small set of lines reads reasonably, but the overall hit in the memory, the picture-making and emotion-revealing, seen as a whole, is limp and pale. There are some concessions to greater beauty; three poems from deep inside the Second World War entitled The Farm Woman: 1942, The Farmer and Her Cows and The Burial of Elie Gras (the last a translation from Diamant-Berger) are more strongly coloured and pinpointed in their telling. But that war also produced the most disappointing piece, the long title poem, which unfortunately palely stutters on about Scotland and its future, and vaguely mumbles over its harsh past, with short sequences here and there being much more effective.

The Laburnum Branch by Naomi Mitchison (1926)

This is the first of Mitchison's two volumes of published poetry, set so far apart at either end of her career. It is full of her classic brand of natural exuberance. What makes it remarkable is the fact that the poetry is occasionally technically quite poor, with bad overruns of line-length marring the rhythm and lack of finish causing fatal trailoff. Her inimitable enthusiasm saves it. Ranging through all sorts of subjects from history to childbirth to friendship to politics, she sometimes effuses in a unmeasured way which survives its own lack of foresight mysteriously. At other times the work is strongly fortified with rhyme and rhythm and just as affecting. The poems are divided into nine sections which are vaguely thematic. I remember reading, I think in one of the volumes of her autobiography, that she had loads of unpublished poetry in a bottom drawer at home. I hope that this has been saved following her death at the age of 101 in January 1999. And the reading of The Cleansing of the Knife, the extraordinarily-belated 1978 successor to this volume, will take on extra meaning. Mitchison is not known for poetry, or for poetry in her prose, but it's there. Just, in her usual and low-key way, it gleams from behind her emanations of stalwart personality.