TIMES SQUARE: One of the regrettable aspects of the long debate over Roger Casement's infamous Black Diaries is that it has taken attention away from some equally important but perhaps less controversial Irish diaries.
Patrick Pearse's Beige Diaries, for example, dramatically reveal the patriot's hidden interest in interior design, when he was not busily planning revolution. The details of Patrick's avant-garde plan for the restoration of St Enda's School in Rathfarnham, involving multi-coloured glass awnings, brocade-covered ceilings, a vast solarium, a Grecian games room and an Olympic-size swimming pool, will pleasantly surprise many, though predictably enough, Patrick is endearingly hazy on the financial arrangements.
On the other hand it seems the Pearse family firm (monumental sculptors) was not so taken with the prototype moulds in mauve perspex which Patrick made for headstones, and some strong arguments with his brother Willie are recorded.
W.B. Yeats's Green Diaries include some hitherto-unpublished and unusually aggressive ballads, intimating that he was more of a nationalist than many of us would have realised: the phrase "Brits out" may have made its first appearance in these pages.
Apart from Yeats's light-hearted revelations of how he and Lady Gregory attended Irish traditional dancing lessons together, the diaries also indicate that Yeats was quite taken with what he called the "mystic aura" of Catholicism, attending Mass on a number of occasions, and even going to Confession, an amusing episode in which the poet apparently asked the priest to tell him his sins. In the end, Yeats turned back to Rosicrucianism, which he believed "shows a firmer grasp of inessentials".
Michael Collins's Off-White Diaries reveal a man unhappy with his own heroic status, who wished only to live a quiet life as a stamp-collector, and spend more time with Harry Boland. The manuscripts include some interesting if rather unflattering drawings of somebody who may or may not be Éamon de Valera: those who have seen the diaries insist that these Satanic images are no more than casual doodlings.
James Joyce's Snotgreen Diaries appear on first viewing to be little more than a collection of the eminent writer's discarded phrases, lovingly hoarded mis-spellings, puerile puns, betting slips, white wine bills, Dublin tenement housing lists, Trieste street names, river sounds, semi-colons, and impossibly tenuous associations of every kind.
Joyceans however are already pointing out that these may well be merely the fourth or fifth draft of the diaries, and much work remains to be done. Indeed, accusations of textual revisionism have already been made, with a particularly bitter row brewing between the "Green Pencils" and the "Red Pencils" as the two main factions are known. It may be that Joyce's final meaning will forever remain unclear.
Oscar Wilde's Pink Diaries reveal - well, little we don't already know, though it seems that the poor man grew weary of his quip-a-day image, and longed to write "sagas of gritty realism about the ordinary man on the street". While in prison, Oscar apparently acquired rather a fearsome reputation among the other lags, and became a sort of "Godfather" figure in terms of settling rows among the inmates.
Jim Larkin's Black-and-White Diaries are a rather short-tempered account of the Dublin Lock-Out, wherein the Dublin working classes of the day are described unexpectedly as "a crowd of lazy fekkers". Jim describes in vivid language the lengths he had to go to in order to hide the fact that he had a lifelong subscription to the Freeman's Journal.
Samuel Beckett's Blank Diaries have delighted and intrigued the few scholars fortunate enough to have seen them. According to Hiram Scratchit, the eminent professor of Interior Monologues at Okinawa University, the diaries are "excitingly empty, but all the more full of suggestion for that".
The diaries are written, or unwritten, on separate pages of old Irish vellum, on which no numbers appear. "It appears", says Prof Scratchit, "that Beckett wished the pages to be read (or if preferred, unread) at random, rather than be turned over one by one in the traditional manner, which would of course suggest a beginning and an end, hardly a concept to have appealed to him."
bglacken@irish-times.ie