This is the final entry, dated 19 November 2012, of a diary that is the longest piece of life-writing held by the Library, and possibly one of the longest in
existence. Three weeks later the author, John Reed, died in Manchester aged eighty-two.

His first diary entry was written over seventy years earlier in the winter of 1939, shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. His journal comprises an unbroken diary consisting of 140 ledgers and 20 box files of loose leaves. In the early 1950s Reed settled on a routine for diary keeping. He would get up early and write up his account of the previous day’s events before breakfast. How much he wrote varied, but for the last thirty or so years of his life he averaged two pages of A4, approximately a thousand words, for every day of his life. He wrote fluently and seldom crossed out or altered a word. This is a chronicle of a
life not so much lived as reported. Everything was to be documented – his reading, his opinions as well as an account of what he did, who he met and what he said.

Reed’s diaries are peppered with the names of famous friends and colleagues: his schoolfriends the actor Dennis Quilley and the composer Raymond Warren, politicians, including Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, both of whom who he taught in Rhodesia in the 1950s and ’60s, and Kenneth Kaunda, President of Zambia, with whom Reed eventually fell out, when, in 1974, he resigned his chair in English at the University of Lusaka and left Africa after eighteen years of teaching and political struggle. Fifteen ledgers of his journal document the three years he spent reading English under C. S. Lewis at Magdalen, Oxford. Reed had a high view of Lewis and the diaries offer much about Lewis as scholar and teacher. Lewis in turn regarded Reed as one of the very best students he ever taught. Reed’s contemporaries at Oxford included the poets Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Thwaite, Al Alvarez and George MacBeth, and a couple of Reed’s own poems were published alongside early works of his fellow undergraduates in student anthologies. Poetry dominated his life. He translated Lucretius and Bonnefoy, and, with Clive Wake, published a number of translations of African verse, including Léopold Sédar Senghor’s poetry for Oxford University Press. A volume of Reed’s verse was published after his death.

But it is for prose rather than poetry that Reed will be remembered; for the journal which documented his life in remarkable, overwhelming detail. Like all diaries it is to be dipped into rather than read in full: diaries are seldom for public consumption and the tens of millions of words written in his scrawled handwriting would probably take the reader longer to read than it took John Reed to write. Perhaps Reed knew this. By writing so compulsively and so exhaustively and yet so utterly effortlessly he made the task of reading his journal beyond anyone’s capabilities. When it comes to other people, perhaps the
book of life, like the book of love, is just simply too long and boring.

IMAGE A selection of John Reed’s childhood diaries. Photograph © Chetham’s Library,  2017.