Dear Reader, Dear Diary . . .

Whether it’s a journal, a blog, a vlog or a DiL on TikTok, the impulse to document our own lives has always been with us, but what about sharing it?

Lately I’ve discovered that friends of mine keep a daily diary, some since childhood. For my ninth birthday my grandmother gave me a cute diary with a gilt clasp. The first of very few entries was a list of my other gifts, mercenary brat that I was! As teenagers my sister and cousin wrote diaries which they swapped at the end of each week, which was fine until they discovered a mutual interest in the same boy.

Occasionally, since then, I have urged myself to keep a diary, as a writerly exercise. I have even tried Julia Cameron’s ‘morning pages’, the brain dump recommended in her wildly popular book, The Artist’s Way, a Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (1992). I was thwarted, however, by what Cameron would call my inner Censor. Hence, people who manage to keep a diary, no matter how perfunctory, have my respect. It takes discipline and an ability to look at one’s life, mind, heart, soul with a degree of unembarrassed detachment.

Last week, Radio France collated several podcasts about diaries, one hosted by Anaïs Aupeix, an IT researcher who has studied the phenomenon. She concludes that there is a paradox at the heart of this intimate and, usually secret, exercise, ‘the wish to be read and the fantasy of leaving a mark’ [my translation].

A public expression of this paradox is the Association for autobiography and autobiographical heritage, APA, in Ambérieu-en-Bugey in France, an archive of assorted personal writings, available to the public for as long as the donors permit. The French minister of culture estimates that 4 million people keep a journal of some kind, which makes the archive a mine of social history.

Photo by Eugenia Ai on Unsplash

Books of history and biography come to life when the authors quote firsthand accounts of major events, especially as experienced by the private individual. How poor, for example, would be our knowledge of the Great Plague and the Fire of seventeenth century London without the diary of Samuel Pepys. It is interesting to see that just as we were subjected to the daily toll from Covid-19, so Pepys notes the numbers falling victim to the Great Plague.

Being a civil servant, an MP, and a man interested in all manner of things, he is a knowledgeable and entertaining guide to society and politics spanning 1660-9, including Court gossip, changing fashions and the revival of theatres.

November 2^nd 1667

To the King’s playhouse, and there saw Henry the Fourth; and, contrary to expectation, was pleased in nothing more than in Cartwright’s speaking of Falstaffe’s speech about ‘What is Honour?’ The house full of Parliament-men, it being holyday with them: and it was observable how a gentleman of good habit sitting just before us, eating of some fruit in the midst of the play did drop down as dead, being choked; but with much ado Orange Mall [Moll] did thrust her finger down his throat, and brought him to life again.

A friend, (and reader of What’s the Story?) told me about the diary of an Irishwoman called Mary Leadbetter between 1758 and 1826. The Annals of Ballitore, begun when she was aged eleven, include her eyewitness account of the 1798 rebellion:

One of our servants entered the room, and said the doctor was shot. I started up and contradicted her; just then the trumpet sounded a retreat. The window near my bed-side had for some time caused me a dread which I could not account for, save by having heard of persons being shot through windows. But to this window I now went mechanically, and saw stretched before it, lying on his back, the friend I had known from childhood – my neighbour, my physician. His arms were extended; there was a large wound in the lower part of his face; and his once graceful form and intelligent countenance were disfigured with more than the horrors of death. I took but one look; I cried aloud and Anne Doyle led me away.

These accounts are certainly intended to be read by someone, if not by the public at large. The very fact of their being written suggests a reader over the shoulder, no matter how personal the account, yet, and here’s the paradox again, the writers are obeying an inner compulsion to create these records which accounts for their freshness and personality. There are no limits to what one can include in a diary and no formal rules to be obeyed.

Photo by Matheo JBT on Unsplash

The tragic story of The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, is well-known and documented. For her, the diary was a refuge within the hiding place she was confined to for two years before being transported to Bergen-Belsen. It was published by her father after the war. She wrote it in the form of letters addressed to people, some real, some fictional, chiefly one called Kitty, a device that many diary writers favour as it feels more natural to imagine they are speaking to someone, rather than themselves.

Radio France interviewees offered diverse motives for keeping a diary, some wanted to recall what they did or experienced, others to deal with difficult feelings, particularly in adolescence. One addressed hers as Myosotis (aptly, the forget-me-not) because she loved flowers, although this was not her favourite flower.

Photo by Sabine Ojeil on Unsplash

The author, Anaïs Nin, interviewed in 1969, on the publication of her diaries, said she had wanted to describe her new life in America to her father who remained in France. When her mother nixed that she turned to her diary. Later, she explained, it offered respite from the work of writing fiction. When the interviewer asks her to explain some lines she comments that they are badly phrased, fault of her youth. For example, she corrects her claim that reality is coarse and untrue by saying she was referring to realism in writing, a sign that she did not doctor the diaries before publication.

Many readers regard Virginia Woolf’s diaries as her greatest work, although they were not published until ten years after her death. They dramatize vividly the workings of her voracious intellect and imagination. Critics dismiss her as a snob, and I am not immune to the truth in that charge but she was a woman of her time, when British class boundaries were ironclad. She was also a woman who had been abused as a child, and who suffered a debilitating mental illness.

From the latter perspective her diary is a remarkable achievement. She not only records daily events, her reading and her social circle (‘Shaw, dwindled shanks, white beard; striding along . . . Very friendly. That is his art, to make one think he likes one.’) with great wit but also elaborates her ideas about writing:

Wednesday, November 28^th [1928]

And what is my own position towards the inner and the outer? I think a kind of ease and dash are good; — yes: I think even externality is good; some combination of them ought to be possible. The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity; to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry — by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novelists? that they select nothing?

She is painfully honest too about her mental fragility. This entry comes shortly after her recovery from two months of ‘catastrophic illness’:

Sunday, June 21^st [1936]

After a week of intense suffering— indeed mornings of torture—and I’m not exaggerating— pain in my head— a feeling of complete despair and failure— a head inside like the nostrils after hay fever — here is a cool quiet morning again, a feeling of relief, respite, hope.

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Diaries come in many other forms, including poetry and painting. For two years after his wife’s death in 1962, French artist Roger Bissière (1886-1964) made a ‘Painted Diary’, comprising 152 images. Using squares of wood which he could set on his knee he captured his impression of the day in paint and felt tip. To see a group of the paintings is to witness and be affected by his changing moods in their shifting light and colour.

A similar current of melancholy underlies Charles Wright’s ‘Journal of the Year of the Ox’ which weaves history, literary predecessors and spiritual apprehension as encapsulated in the natural world:

. . .

April, stretched out at ease above the garden,

                                                                              that rises and bows

To whatever it fancies:

Precious stones, the wind’s cloth, Prester John or the boy-king of

             Babylon,

April,

             dank, unseasonable winter of the dead.

                                                                                                     --27 April 1985

New technology offers us new locations for the diary or journal but by their nature – the blog, the vlog, Instagram, or TikTok videos of a day in the life – they are created with the intention of being shared. Even when the day in the life purports to show the messiness of that person’s day and life it is a self-conscious performance.

The essence of the diary or journal resides in the privacy of its creation no matter if it is later shared with strangers. Spontaneity cannot be replicated or rehearsed. So, dear Readers, dust off those old notebooks and get scribbling!

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