A Book of One's Own." People and Their Diaries
Mallon, Thomas
different from Boswell the person. Most telling is the amount of forethought and calculation that went into Boswell's study of Johnson. Life of Johnson didn't pour out of Boswell as the natural...
...And, within its confines, no one is reckoned to be a patriot who does not join in a daily ritual of dung-throwing...
...The diary creates a private world in which we can let loose all those thoughts and feelings we ordinarily buckle-up when away from our secluded studies for fear of public collisions...
...And what variety there is...
...To confound matters, paranoia is at a Himalayan high in India these days, with the bizarre disclosure of a "multinational corporation" of spies operating at the center...
...Which is as it should be...
...But, in India, politics became the prerogative of a leisure class, a landed aristocracy...
...This is more than by Victor Anant a facetious observation: The curse of Indian politics, as with most former colonial nations, is that, with independence, politics became an economic activity...
...This is just the kind of unforced observation that makes this book hum, especially when MaUon draws out its implications with conversational ease He lets matters speak for themselves...
...Of course, even then there are limits...
...Mallon's selections are nothing if not telling...
...He has been priggish about the U.S...
...And what's a performance without an audience...
...Moreover, Johnson held the genre of biography in high esteem...
...Johnson himself had explored the dark side of Richard Savage in his brilliant biography of that minor Augustan poet who had been a close friend when he first came to London...
...He's not out to forge an aesthetic of diaries...
...Who will believe its pious rhetoric while India, as we all know, prides itself on its nuclear capability and membership in that same Nuclear Club...
...Mallon elaborates: Having been brought to life partly by the dour Puritans of the seventeenth century as a place in which the faithful might privately expiate their sins, the diary had become, by the late nineteenth century, more typically the place in which they could savor them . . . . By unburdening one's soul on paper, one could have one's sins and remember them, too...
...But he's had enough time to give us a few telling glimpses of his betters...
...Thy will be done: I see Thy mercies and Thy Graciousness in this, and am thankful...
...Gandhi has spun a "Khadi Curtain" (khadi, for those who don't wear it, is homespun Indian cotton) around him...
...Her murder is charged with mythic density...
...There is an essential ambivalence to the project...
...And Johnson certainly would have acknowledged that by completing his extraordinary biography Boswell had to some degree triumphed over his obvious infirmities...
...He says he is going to put India in "the twenty-first century...
...Pepys would have been pleased," Mallon adds, no doubt recalling some passages from the master diarist he has cited earlier, especially the one in which Pepys uses a bit of Spanish to cover his philandering tracks...
...About deception, no one was more honest...
...Vincent's College St...
...In the many diaries he's read and the one he keeps himself, he finds there's always a "you" turning up, a person addressed...
...It would be a tragic betrayal if, by the end of this century, India became a conglomeration of banana republics, or an unabashed Soviet satellite, only because, once again, for Victor Anant has written for the London Spectator and other publications...
...When he's weary, out it comes and "down goes everything...
...He came to preach, not to prosper...
...He does so to improve his handwriting...
...The diarist may not give conscious thought to it, but he cannot help but talk'to someone else when he writes...
...But he has also begun to show a weakness for Declarations--like his grandfather's Declaration of Panch-Sheela, the Five Principles of Non-Alignment, or his mother's "One Asia...
...Or can it hallucinate its way through history...
...R~ajiv Gandhi was given one chance in a million (or should we say one chance on behalf of 700 million) to free India from the rhetoric of the past and face contemporary reality...
...He is, by all accounts, a qualified pilot, and with the requisite flying hours could even get a job in an international airline...
...lack of muscular thinking it remains under the tutelage of another waffling Nehi'u...
...Indian politicians naively assumed that they were heirs to the politics of their colonial masters...
...Mallon's favorite diarist understood this and made no secret about it...
...the words have to start going someplace...
...Others can't wait to let go their daily screed...
...It can make MIGs and put men into space, but its agriculture is still at the mercy of nature, its housing is still city-sidewalks or cowdung-thatched huts, it still cannot talk to itself in one language...
...When I took lunch away," Tayler records, not without irony one must suppose, "she was reading a novel with the Bible laying by her, ready to take up if any body came in...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 47...
...But he does see one common feature in all his selections...
...It would be a shame if Rajiv Gandhi makes his first visit to the only country which understands India's potential, and can help India pull itself out of its mess, with all the inherited prejudices of the Nehrus...
...Biography is a mirror, not a peephole...
...Of course, diaries are kept for as many reasons as there are diarists, and Mallon's object is to take us on a tour, stopping to muse over this author and that, questioning motives and occasions in what he describes as his "ruminatingly undisciplined" way...
...A while is probably no more than a sentence...
...Because reading about others helps us learn about ourselves--learn especially how to conduct ourselves, how to control our baser impulses...
...The itinerary wanders but never flags...
...We are all prompted," Johnson said, "by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure...
...Rajiv Gandhi and his advisers on U.S...
...More than half the population lives below the poverty line...
...But even before publication, he didn't hold back...
...I don't believe one can write to oneself for many words more than get used in a note tacked to the refrigerator, saying 'Buy Bread.' Before another sentence is added it becomes a psychological impossibility...
...I've seen some hysterical "purges" initiated by Nehru and by Indira...
...policy, as they prepare to talk turkey with a second-term Reagan Administration...
...Neither Nehru nor Indira were enthroned with a show of such overwhelming goodwill, from India and around the world, as Rajiv...
...Writing a journal becomes her only way of addressing her girl from the impoverished, solitary existence into which she's been forced...
...he has given ominous threats about U.S...
...It would be a Flemish portrait, providing details about his subject that most biographers would regard as inappropriate and unseemly...
...I know how scary it can be...
...For 'you...
...Your 'you' may be even less palpable than mine, but someday," he assures us, "like the one you love, he'll come along...
...he had a very clear idea of the type of biography he wanted to write...
...It is supposed to edify us rather than titillate us, and that involves looking at "domestick privacies, and.., the minute details of daily life," discussing the faults and failings of the subject...
...he has no use for the kind of self-congratulatory exaggeration that mars so many literary studies today...
...Some complain that keeping the damn thing is as irksome as it's futile, but they go on writing...
...Then there's Harold Nicolson, for whom keeping a diary was a routine to which he attached about as much emotion as brushing his teeth, or so he claimed...
...He doesn't try to bind it all together with some grand theory...
...The idea that it can be longer than that is a diarist's convenient fiction, an illusion that may keep him writing, but which, in his deeper recesses, he knows is false...
...But it doesn't keep her from making her peace with the God who "appears to have specially deprived me of all those things on which I could have set my affections...
...John's University...
...Yet at the same time it would be a heroic portrait, with Johnson as a modern hero who triumphed over poverty, disease, loneliness, melancholy, religious doubt, and fear of insanity to become the most important writer of his age...
...His Lady, it seems, is one who knows how to put on a good appearance for those who count...
...Language is like that...
...After all, before him was "the white goddess," affd, before her, the incorruptible Caesar...
...Gandhi's public utterances sound like a cracked record...
...In his immersion in the raw details of Johnson's life, Boswell examined not just Johnson but also himself...
...His grandfather came to tell the Americans what to do, not to learn from a nation which had freed itself from the same colonial values two centuries earlier...
...Indeed, India has yet to find itself in the twentieth century...
...Writing, even the relatively shapeless writing of a diary, is a performance meant to display our mastery over the disparate facts of our existence...
...And it still has a Nehru at the top who thinks of India as a piece of inherited real estate...
...Most Indians are like most Americans: They don't speak Russian or Albanian, they don't think in rubles, they don't want to work in Odessa or Azerbaijan, they prefer disco dancing to doing the gopek, and they like to vote their leaders into power...
...He cite~ Leon Edel's observation regarding Edmund Wilson, "After a while, you're always writing for a public," only to amend it...
...It begins as a private affair between you and your book conducted cosily out of sight and left behind in a locked drawer, yet how you long for an audience after a while...
...In fact, MaUon argues, we're "counting on it...
...Johnson, I think, would have approved of a Flemish portrait of his own life...
...The diarist may be squeamish about those pages on which he didn't spare himself, but he certainly craves an audience for those others from which his style suddenly and inexplicably has lifted his thought in effortless ascent to skim the treetops of his days, circling over a gaudy fact here, swooping to a delicious conclusion there, soaring once more to the sky's own view under which the rag-tag clutter of daily life comes wonderfully into focus if only for a moment, its patterns obvious, its problems as small and as manageable as the toy houses and toy cars left so far below...
...Neither his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, nor his mother Indira, so tragically gunned down in her own front garden, could tolerate it when I asked them a well-intentioned, simple question...
...Mallon has no idea who his "you" is, but he knows he or she is there...
...If I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to one's self than to anyone else), every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor...
...It is almost as if she staged it for her son and heir, psychomanipulated his succession just as the martyrdom of Mahatma Gandhi endowed his heir, Nehru, with a secondhand saintliness...
...Would Johnson approve of Boswell's having delved into the dark side of his character...
...God knows what contradictions it may contain...
...To cap it all, I happen to be writing these notes from Pakistan, "the other side" of a turbulent subcontinent, an ally of the U.S and of China, India's b&e noire...
...Mallon turns out to be that best of all tour guides...
...He came to plead, not to trade...
...In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Ellen Weeton, a very different sort of woman, turns to her diary for solace when her brutal husband dismisses her from his house and deprives her of her daughter...
...Unlike most of their friends, both were haunted by religious questions, especially the question of divine punishment...
...Sometimes when I'm writing on the right-hand leaf of a notebook I catch sight of a spelling or grammatical mistake I made on the left one the night before, and I correct it...
...George Templeton Strong, a nineteenthcentury New Yorker, remarks in his one...
...evening, "I'll be hanged if I am not in a humor for shedding ink tonight--feel as if I could scribble, scribble, scribble to the extent of a quart bottle full...
...Life of Johnson didn't pour out of Boswell as the natural result of his effusiveness...
...As a bit of calculated populism it's fine...
...AS Mallon takes us through this amazing variety, he resists what has become the common temptation of academics in recent years...
...Hindus might proclaim the virtues of vegetarianism, but when it comes to ancestor-eating they're as cannibal as can be...
...And if you're talking, it means you're alive...
...Suffering from disseminated sclerosis that would cut him off at thirty, Bruce Frederick Cummings, writing as W.N.P...
...One should always have something sensational to read in the train," he had Gwendolyn Fairfax declare in The Importance of Being Earnest...
...Anais Nin burbles about "this quest for the self" and the need to "alchemize events" and locks her innumerable volumes in a Brooklyn bank vault not only to secure them for the admirers she never doubts will swell posterity's ranks, but also and more importantly to immortalize herself...
...Anyone who has ever kept a diary, however intermittent, however shortlived, knows Mallon is right...
...The hypochondriacal, phobic recluse, Arthur Crew Inman, writes ten million words, "fanatically" provides for their future stipulating they are to be published uncut, and then shoots himself to death in 1963...
...and has made predictable noises about the CIA's involvement with the Sikh movement...
...Both had overheated imaginations that drove them to morbid introspection...
...Sensational indeed...
...Yo did take h e r . . , sobra mi genu and did poner mi mano sub her jupes and toca su thigh...
...But at the same time, by putting our shame, pride, anger, and doubt on paper, we risk being 46 THE AMER1CAN SPECTATOR APR1L 1985 discovered...
...A discreet and sympathetic audience, to be sure, comprising those perceptive enough to take you at your own measure and honorable enough not to blab about those little quirks and failings you were brave and honest enough to share with them...
...When he invites a friend to dinner, he tells us that he will "with some show of deliberation select a volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, 'A little of 1912?' as if we were trying wines...
...Since he was sworn in as prime minister, Mr...
...I understand that Mr...
...Fortunately, Rajiv Gandhi is the first of the Nehrus who can actually earn a decent living if he is driven out of politics...
...Besides his life, his 150 typed volumes include his interviews with the strangers he hired at seventy-five cents an hour to tell him their stories while he listened behind a black curtain...
...Oscar Wilde knew...
...q~velve months later to the day, he writes his final entry: "I have at last finished the task which I have been heartily sick of long agoe and I think it will be a long time before I begin another of the kind...
...but I can't read it over," he confesses...
...But India simply does not have the economic wherewithal, the scale and reach, of an industrial imperial power...
...He has been forthright about India's "traditional" friendship with and everlasting debt to the Soviet Union...
...Confession was still good for the soul, but now it could be a positive delight to the eyes as well...
...To keep a diary is to conceal and reveal ourselves at once...
...The recent Delhi Declaration to put an end to the nuclear arms race would have been all right coming from anywhere except India...
...A necessary risk has not deterred me before...
...One wonders how many quarts he shed before he finished his life-time chronicle of four million words...
...At the other end of the scale, weighing in with a sixty-three page effort, William Tayler, a London footman, decides to keep a diary for the year beginning January 1, 1837...
...Barbellion, published The Journal of a Disappointed Man just months before he died, determined to have his diary become his monument...
...Stendhal, who kept his diary under lock, admitted at one point that he was writing for three or four like-minded friends only to add this warning to them a few paragraphs later: "Don't go any farther, you bastards...
...If Byron lets his diary flow where it will, Stendhal can't let his alone, reading it over and over, annotating his entries and then annotating his annotations...
...Diaries like vintage wines, meant to be shared--that's just what Mallon has done with a good deal of wit and even more understanding...
...No species of writing," he said, "seems more worthy of cultivation . . . . " Why...
...How true that was of Boswell, who saw so much of himself in his subject...
...Lord Byron thinks of his journal as a "relief...
...it connects us to others whether we will it or not...
...When Rajiv says he will run a clean government, no one asks who made corruption a way of life...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL NEHRU III Karachi--After his first hundred days in power the odds now are heavily against these observations being taken in the proper spirit by Mr...
...Gwendolyn makes her brief appearance in Thomas Mallon's A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries for what her remark tells us of the diary's evolution...
...he brings us to the landmarks, great and small, says a few helpful words, and steps aside to let us look for ourselves...
...But it has been tacitly forgotten that, before her assassination, her Congress Party was in jitters, and dreaded facing the electorate...
...George McCartney teaches English at St...
...Grandpa made grandiloquent promises to take India out of the bullockcart age, and we can all see where that has got the average sacred cow...
...Rajiv has been repeating, like a Sanskrit mantra, his pledge to follow in the footsteps of the Nehrus...
...A BOOK OF ONE'S OWN: PEOPLE AND THEIR DIARIES Thomas Mallon/Ticknor & Fields/S15.95 George McCartney What's the point of keeping a diary...
...weapons being made available to Pakistan...
...The question Rajiv Gandhi will have to answer is simple: Is he prepared to pilot his people safely into the future, or will he play Nehru all over again...
...It may be your greatgreatgranddaughter or the fellow who buys her house and then discovers your diary left behind in the garage, but "someone will be reading and you'll be talking...
...they continually had to wage war against a melancholia so powerful that at times it left them incapable of doing anything...
Vol. 18 • April 1985 • No. 4
