Autobiography and the Intellectual

This chapter reveals how Keith Vaughan reconfigured his wartime journal-writing as a comprehensive autobiographical project that would record his memories and experiences and transform them into a creative product. Having declared a policy of full disclosure and a commitment to resist self-censorship, he embarked upon a programme of self-education, redolent of Bildung, that made his journal the record of a developing mind and that allowed him to fold influences from literature, philosophy, and modernism into his own writing. The first section of this chapter describes how Vaughan’s journal became a consciously literary autobiographical project concerned with time and memory, regarding the third volume as a distinct milestone wherein Vaughan first articulated his desire to write autobiography and began to fully recognize (and experiment with) the possibilities of life-writing. The second section focusses on Vaughan’s autodidacticism, which encompassed the reading of other life-writers and his discovery of seminal works (by such key figures as T. S. Eliot and Marcel Proust) that greatly influenced him and helped him to identify, albeit precariously, with Oxbridge intellectualism. The third section confirms the enduring importance of Vaughan’s journal as a continuous autobiographical document which he could refer back to and re-evaluate during periods of duress.

Society and the Observer

This chapter analyses how, in his wartime journal-writing, Keith Vaughan articulated the social differences and exclusions that he believed were preventing him from fully participating in British society. In his accounts of failing to connect with those around him, he romanticized his failures and dramatized his distance from others, thereby justifying his exclusion and ultimately ascribing himself the powerful (if lonely) role of observer – a position from which he could assert superiority over his fellow C.O.s and men of lower social class whilst representing them in his sketches, paintings, and bathing pictures. The first section of this chapter considers how Vaughan used the early volumes of his journal to record his difficulties in making contact with his fellow man and reinforce them through self-dramatization. The second section explores the strategies employed by Vaughan to emphasize his difference from other individuals and groups, particularly around his homosexuality and artistic inclinations, and therefore justify and maintain his distance from them. The third section argues that Vaughan constructed an empowering role that made use of his remove from male society: that of the observer, enabling him to laud his own powers of perception whilst evading the problems of social involvement and possible surveillance.

The Diaristic Impulse and Self-construction: An Afterword

This afterword reflects upon how the practice of journal-writing enabled Keith Vaughan to construct and re-construct himself through literary means, providing him with a sense of identification where previously there had been isolation. This afterword considers the diaristic impulse that compels an author-subject to write a journal or diary, before proffering why the journal or diary form is so appropriate as a site for self-construction; chiefly, that it allows the author-subject to establish their own space for identity formation, before they can begin construction with the literary materials and generic conventions available to them. This afterword progresses by considering the implications in the twenty-first century, with an explosion of diaristic behaviours facilitated by the range of available technologies, giving us an improved understanding of selfhood as a network. It closes by asserting that the further study of journal and diary forms is needed in order to develop our understanding of how identity is formed through response.

Art and the Artist

This chapter explores how Keith Vaughan overcame his disillusionment in the early 1940s and revived his hopes of being a painter through engagements with art theory that enabled him to construct through journal-writing an ideal type of the artist that he could emulate. Embracing this conceptualisation, Vaughan enjoyed a post-war period of success, but by the early 1960s was consumed by feelings of self-loathing which he explored in his resurgent journal-writing, resulting in a tumultuous period of unprecedented productivity and restless sexual experimentation. The first section of this chapter reveals how Vaughan constructed his ideal type of the artist during a crucial period in 1943, drawing inspiration from art history, art criticism, and appreciation of Paul Cézanne to laud the necessity of search and struggle to the artist’s mission. The second section describes how Vaughan neglected his journal whilst he enjoyed success in the British art world. The third section re-joins Vaughan in 1962, finding him profoundly dissatisfied with his life and work and attempting to re-assert control over both by drawing on sexology and psychoanalysis to make his journal an account of experiments in autoeroticism, subjectivity and sensation that once again reconfigured his conception of art and the artist.

Notes on the Text

The following notes apply where this book quotes directly from the original journal manuscripts: • All page numbers are conjectural as Vaughan did not number the pages of his journal. Tate Archive have numbered the surrogate sheets in their collection, but each sheet is a photocopy of a double-page and their numbering only applies up to and including volume thirty; due to these factors Tate’s numbering has not been used. Page numbers have therefore been calculated during the research for this book to assist as best as possible future readers of Vaughan’s original journal....

Self-editorship and ‘Keith Vaughan’

This chapter examines Keith Vaughan’s attempt to curate his own legacy with the publication of his self-edited Journal & Drawings (1966). At intervals throughout the 1950s he had been revisiting the wartime volumes of his journal and by the early 1960s his opinion of them had changed from scornful critique to aching nostalgia, so in 1965 he commenced (at the behest of Alan Ross) a long process of self-editing journal entries from 1939 to present to be published alongside previously unseen drawings and photographs. The first section of this chapter considers Vaughan’s practices of re-reading his journal and examines his typescripts as evidence of the extensive revisions made to the content and style of specific journal entries for publication. The second section reveals how Vaughan shaped the text of Journal & Drawings through processes of selecting, re-writing, and even devising entirely new material, resulting in a streamlined narrative at once confessional yet choreographed. The third section of this chapter surveys the placement of drawings and photographs in Journal & Drawings and how words and images work to communicate the interrelations between his journal-writing and visual practice – and to fix and control the image of ‘Keith Vaughan’.

War and the Objector

This chapter considers how the statement of conscientious objection with which Keith Vaughan opens his first ever journal entry in August 1939 develops from a political stance into a declaration of personal crisis centred around his homosexuality and feelings of being an outcast. Following the thread of Vaughan’s anti-war writing, it explores how Vaughan constructed his identity as an objector not only to war but to conventional expectations of masculinity and to the political establishment that upheld them. The first section of this chapter considers why the imminence of the Second World War was the catalyst for Vaughan’s journal-writing – a practice that would become a life-long project. The second section reveals how Vaughan’s anti-war writing developed his unwavering belief in the sanctity of the human body and his resistance to its distortion or destruction for the sake of warring ideologies. The third section argues that the uncompromising stance taken by Vaughan in his journal allowed him to position himself as an outsider through identification with neo-classicism and its ideals, conflating beauty with morality to advocate for an alternative vision of a peaceful and (homo)sexually permissive society.

Image of a Man: An Introduction

An introduction to Keith Vaughan, his life and visual work, his journal, and the unifying theme of the self-/image of a man as it relates to painting, journal-writing, masculinity and desire. This introduction asserts that Vaughan’s journal should be considered as a major literary work and as Vaughan’s chief creative project, detailing the process of researching the Vaughan archives and working with the journal manuscripts whilst drawing on life-writing theory to argue for employing the approach of close literary critical analysis. It reflects upon the challenges of following the threads of social, political, and aesthetic debate that make Vaughan’s journal such a rich and complex text. Crucially, this introduction establishes the book’s key argument that the writing of journals and diaries should be considered as a means of literary self-construction, a process key to the making and re-making of identity and subjectivity. This introduction closes by outlining the contents of this book’s chapters, which are organised to explore how Vaughan wrote himself into roles or positions that would add another necessary facet to his developing identity: the conscientious objector to war and war-going masculinity; the detached and perceptive observer; the self-aware and self-critical intellectual; and the striving, perpetually unsatisfied artist.