Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us

When it comes to writing, the idea is to keep a diary. Why, you ask? Consider what the British poet Peter Scupham found in what the London Review of Books (Aug. 27) called “a carrier bag of diary entries and other bits and bobs.” The diary writer’s name: Avies Platt; she died in 1976. In the diary she writes about a memorable evening in 1937 when she attended a lecture of the Sex Education Society in London.

Here’s some of what she wrote in that diary:

“Two rows back stood the most striking-looking man I had ever seen: tall, somewhat gaunt, aristocratic, very dignified: a strong, yet sensitive face, crowned by untidy locks of white hair: horn-rimmed glasses, through which shone strange, otherworldly eyes. He wore evening dress, with a soft shirt. He leaned slightly forward, resting both hands on the chair in front of him, and on the little finger of his left hand was a large, exotic-looking ring.”

Wonderful. (Of course, my thought is that how special it is to be a woman observer. My wife, MM, is similarly gifted. As a man, I always feel uncomfortable staring at a person for as long as Avies must have stared to get this glorious description … )

Who was the man? None other than the poet, W.B. Yeats (1865-1939). Of course, Platt and Yeats would spend the evening together in conversation: Here’s a second gem, from Yeats himself:

“If you would write, you must get away, by yourself, into another world and write according to the vision you see there. You must write what you believe and not mind what people say. It is the only way. You know, when I come down to breakfast in the morning after writing all night, it is coming back into another world. It is as though I am not the same man, yet I am.”

Here’s a twist. Avies Platt is no longer with us. But a thoughtful poet with a great ear for a story wonderfully told has restored to us a memoir so that this amazing encounter between perfect strangers lives on, seventy-eight years after that singular evening in London, England.


Next: Running for Your Life: Marseilles Mood