p. 12 : introduction, de
l'origine du journal :
« The idea of a diary was first suggested by Orton's agent,
Peggy Ramsay in 1965.
‘I didn't write the Morocco diary as you wanted,’ Orton
wrote her on 30 August 1965.
‘I thought there might be difficulties in getting it
published.’ Ramsay continued to press for an account of
their Tangier adventures, if not from Orton then from Kenneth
Halliwell whose literary ambitions Orton had inherited then
surpassed.
‘I urge one of you, at least to start a journal à la Gide...
I'm sure it would be a good idea and the publishers would snap at it,’ she wrote [...]. »
p. 13 : à propos du
journal :
« ‘I'm keeping a journal,’ Orton wrote to Peggy
Ramsay from Tangier on 26 May 1967, five months
after he'd begun it, ‘to be published long after my
death.’ To Orton, the value of a diary was its frankness.
Reality, as his plays insisted, was the ultimate outrage. Orton
despised the bogus propriety – the
‘verbal asterisks’ – with which public
figures doctored the picture of their life. ‘It's
extraordinary,’ he complained to Peggy Ramsay,
‘how, as people grow older and they have less to lose by
telling the truth, they grow more discreet, not less.’ To
Orton, indiscretion was the better part of valour. »
22 septembre 1999