From the Letter to the Journal
If the letter is intended for a particular reader and the diary generally kept for personal reasons, the journal straddles the two. But to what effect?
Welcome Readers. Taking up where I left off last time, discussing the death of the letter and its loss for creative writers, I’d like today to consider an extension of that form, the diary or journal. So popular is the journal now that it has given rise to its own verb, ‘journalling’. Stationery and gift shops are full of beautiful notebooks for the journal-writer, not to be confused with the journalist.
I have been the grateful recipient of many a stylish notebook, which has confronted me with the discomfiting prospect of writing about myself, discomfiting chiefly because I do not know where to start. That in itself has been salutary and I have managed in various ways to fill their pages.
By contrast, Henry Thoreau, whose Walden (1854) is one of the classic journals, wrote ‘I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.’ He writes about himself in relation to his environment, alone in a wooden house he had built himself, beside Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.
This is a delicious evening when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. . . . Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.
Some fifty years earlier Dorothy Wordsworth wrote copiously and sensitively about the natural world, and her family, friends and neighbours, in her journals:
I sate a long time to watch the hurrying waves & to hear the regularly irregular sound of the dashing waters. The waves round about the little [Island] seemed like a dance of spirits that arose out of the water, round its small circumference of shore. Inquired about lodgings for Coleridge, & was accompanied by Mrs Nicholson as far as Rydale. This was very kind but God be thanked I want not society by a moonlit lake—
(Monday 2 June 1800)
The journal is a place to explore spiritual leanings, insights and apprehensions, within the context of the lived daily life. After all, the word comes from the French ‘jour’, day. It might or might not be written for publication. Thoreau’s was, Dorothy Wordsworth’s was not.
Betsy Sheridan’s Journal (1784-6, 1788-90) is a cross-over form, a journal composed as letters to her sister Alicia in Dublin. Betsy was the sister of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author notably of School for Scandal and The Rivals. Her letters observe the life of the theatre crowd and politicians with whom her brother mixed. Edited by a great-great nephew, William Le Fanu, they were first published in 1960. (And, yes, Betsy Sheridan and William Le Fanu were related to Sheridan Le Fanu whose story ‘Green Tea’ featured here a few weeks back.)
Introducing his ancestor’s journal Le Fanu says that he has cut out a lot of the women’s stuff (not that he quite put it like that!) about health and other personal matters. That editorial policy enraged me for its assumption that the matter of a woman’s life should not be interesting to a reader.
Now, however, that act of editorial excision has rebounded and women, and men, publish frank and unabashedly intimate memoirs and journals. Reaching back to the eighteenth century, in A Ghost in the Throat (2020), poet Doireann Ni GhrÃofa traces connections between her life and that of EibhlÃn Dubh Nà Chonaill, author of a searing lament for her husband Art Ó Laoghaire. Of her own domestic days Nà GhrÃofa writes:
A family calendar scrawled with biro and pencil marks each in the same hand – this is a female text. Month after month after month of appointments, swim lessons, half-days, bake sales, fundraisers, library returns, a baby’s due-date, birthday parties, and school holidays. Tick. Tick. Tick. Each November, I choose a new calendar from the supermarket. By January, the old one will be added to the stack; these are my sweetest years, archived in paper and ink, in white and black. 2012. 2013. 2014.
When EibhlÃn or Nelly as Nà GhrÃofa enters her first husband’s home all the strings in the harp there snap and Ni GhrÃofa enacts that event with the words ‘Tick. Tick. Tick.’ echoing the marks on her calendar. Later as she researches her historical muse, she writes, ‘How I wish that someone had thought more women’s words worthy of a place in that old secretaire.’ At the end of her narrative Ni GhrÃofa imagines opening a new notebook and instead of writing a list of domestic chores using it to begin translating the Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire. Her journal is a journey towards this work. Â
Love, your blood was spilling in cascades, and I couldn’t wipe it away, couldn’t clean it up, no, no, my palms turned cups and oh, I gulped. (Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire, viii)
Ni Ghriofa’s return to her journal and poetry signals one of the other important uses of ‘journalling’, the ‘morning pages’, prescribed by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (1992). Here, Cameron advises writers, or indeed creators in other media, to write, for a short time first thing every morning, whatever comes into their heads. This might begin with a note on the view, the weather, the domestic, work or social obligations lined up for later in the day and carry on from there in a sort of free fall. After a few days, or weeks, the writer’s half-waking half-dreaming pen will happen on a story or character and take it away from there. In effect it is a warm-up exercise for the writer or artist, clearing the mind of its preoccupation with worldly responsibilities and opening the doors of the imagination.
If the journal can unleash creativity what role can it play as a fictional device? Unlike the letters that can be used to tell two different or duplicitous stories in parallel, the journal remains confined to one perspective but new angles can be found by which to read its egocentric contents.
For example, in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Samuel Beckett brilliantly plays off the old Krapp against his younger version as heard on tapes. The young man speaks of his flash of insight:
--great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality—
And of his love for Effi:
I said again it was hopeless going on and she agreed without opening her eyes. (Pause) I asked her to look at me and after a few moments – (pause) – after a few moments she did but her eyes just slits because of the glare. Â
The older Krapp plays, replays and skips certain passages then tries to dismiss the ‘poor fool’ he was thirty years before. Yet he cannot efface the memory of his lover, ‘the eyes she had’ and in a rage at himself says of the younger man ‘perhaps he was right’. Apart from the skill of this writing there is genius in Beckett’s inventive use of a relatively new technology. Â
More recently, the discovery of a journal marks a brutal turning point for the narrator of Megan Nolan’s novel, Acts of Desperation (2021). The journal is almost a commentary on the main story, articulating the unnamed narrator’s attempt to understand her own desires and perverse obsession with her controlling lover. It is also an act of self-destruction, or self-liberation, written in the not quite subconscious hope that her lover will find it and call out their growing estrangement.
This is the modern journal, an exploration and expression of one’s confusion, aspirations, self-recrimination, dreams and daily preoccupations. Far from Thoreau’s certainty that he knew no one better than he knew himself, the contemporary writer prefers to pursue the idea of oneself through the journal, teasing out the strands of the ego and the id, plumbing the hidden corners of the personality to find ways to change one’s attitude to life.
As a device the journal offers a deeper sense of interiority in a first-person narrative and creates an ironic underpinning for that overarching story. As in Nolan’s case it can also be used to heighten the drama or bring about the denouement of the plot. In effect, the journal is a letter to oneself.
Are you a journal-writer or ‘journaller’? If so how do you approach the act or art of journal writing? As ever your comments are what make What’s the Story? live so please share your thoughts and ideas here.