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’.