Dear Diary
Caldwell, Christopher
Dear Diary . . . The art of speaking to yourself. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL An anthology of diary entries may seem a silly idea, rather like an anthology of everything. But, in fact, diaries are...
...he hollers at a cab driver...
...The latter, thinking the time had come to economise, got into a bus...
...Then it was the most difficult thing to control oneself, and I know that if I had been alone I couldn't have done...
...There is the epicene preciosity of Gerard Manley Hopkins ("Young elm leaves lash and lip the sprays"), alongside the preening anality of Sylvia Plath ("Yet sun, lying low on the fresh white paint of the storeroom door, reflecting in the umber-ugly paint coating the floorboards, and shafting a slant on the mauve-rusty rosy lavender rug from the west gable window...
...At the height of Great War austerity in 1917, Lady Asquith writes: "Moira told me an amusing story of Lady Wolverton...
...Pepys's diaries "are perhaps at their most piquant when he describes close encounters of a sexual nature," note the editors—who appear to think all diaries are at their most piquant when they describe such close encounters...
...in respect to the adornment of their heads...
...She is so stupid," the old lady says of a California neighbor...
...A diarist, after all, is someone who seeks freedom, attention, and companionship—and finds it locked in a room all by himself...
...Diaries, of course, allow first stabs at aphorisms, descriptions, and other constituent parts of what will later be better-thought-out literature...
...The snow is thicker, it clings to the branches like white new-born puppies," writes Katherine Mansfield in January 1922...
...It's riddled with misspellings, as if it had been typeset by drunks...
...You're black, aren't you...
...Many of the writers here owe their literary fame largely, even primarily, to their diaries (Pepys, Boswell, Gide, Count Harry Kessler...
...Norman Lewis, who wrote an excellent book on Naples in wartime, describes the scene in his diaries from 1944: "Nothing has been too large or too small—from telegraph poles to phials of penicillin—to escape the Neapolitan kleptomania...
...The socialist Beatrice Webb, in 1890, describes her first meeting with her future husband Sidney in terms that would have precluded further contact, never mind marriage, had they been voiced openly: "His tiny tadpole body, unhealthy skin, lack of manner, Cockney pronunciation, poverty, are all against him...
...You can see why people would want to keep such dirt to themselves...
...There are lousy metaphors...
...and Scottish invalids (like William Soutar, who gets more entries than anyone else in the book...
...The woman replied: 'Yes, but I never lends it in a bus.'" The Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie, noting with disgust the persistence of the London "season" even in 1939, opines that "snobbery must indeed be a lusty plant that grows even on the edge of the precipice...
...The war entries are some of the most moving in the book...
...And the editors' curiosity runs along very British lines...
...World War I nurse Florence Farmborough describes a German breach of Russian lines in April 1915 that leads to a horrifying all-out retreat and an order to abandon the wounded in the field hospitals where they lay...
...More often than not these are dead ends, and far too many private literary failures make it into this book...
...The novelist Barbara Pym, for instance, listens on the wireless to news of the Nazi invasion of Holland and Belgium, and writes: "The Dutch and Belgian Ministers spoke and the Dutch Minister sent a greeting to his wife and children and grandchildren...
...Think of it...
...Still others are exercises in esprit de l'escalier, meant to guard the writer from repeating his most egregious social blunders and committing those of others...
...Andy Warhol marvels at the way the fashion designer Halston berates employees for sport...
...But all diaries are, after a fashion, therapeutic...
...is even more self-absorbed than he...
...But, in fact, diaries are not infinitely varied...
...He went to consult [former Lord Chancellor] Birken-head...
...A week or two ago an orchestra playing at the San Carlo, to an audience largely clothed in Allied hospital blankets, returned from a five-minute interval to find all its instruments missing...
...The selection of diarists is skewed heavily towards English gossips (who exactly is Gyles Brandreth...
...This self-compliant egotism, this disproportionate view of his own position, is at once repulsive and ludicrous...
...He has the conceit of a man who has raised himself out of the most insignificant surroundings into a position of power...
...She has lived next door to me for 28 years and still can't speak a word of Armenian...
...Others are extended brags, storing up triumphs against future blue episodes...
...This is a very British book...
...it hurts me terribly...
...Second, sex...
...First of all, there's the preoccupation with class...
...Printed on stock used only for paper towels in other Western countries, it is three inches thick and light as a book of matches...
...She sat beside a woman who kept loudly sniffing and she asked her aggressively if she hadn't got a handkerchief...
...It is a sentiment that, in revealing the constraints placed on English people in public, helps explain why the English have always made such particularly good diarists...
...It should not surprise us that non-novelists are better at using their diaries to describe the world outside of their own heads...
...We had to wrench our skirts from their clinging hands...
...How different are men and women, e.g...
...Do you ever see an old or jammed bonnet on the head of a woman at a public meeting...
...Dawn Powell is shocked to find that the egomaniacal author William Saroy-an has an immigrant grandmother who Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...But the diaries of those renowned for other things (Goebbels, Alec Guinness, Che Guevara) are, if anything, even more rewarding...
...Tolstoy belittles his son for having "the same castrated mind that his mother has," but adds, "If you two should ever read this, forgive me...
...That's why the modern diary dates only from the mid-seventeenth century, or roughly when modernity made therapy a priority...
...Some are to-do lists in living color...
...Excuse me, my lord, but could you tell me—What do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?' 'Oh, 30 shillings or 2 pounds—anything you happen to have on you.'" Finally, war...
...And it's why the 1,500 entries the Scottish journalists Irene and Alan Taylor have assembled in The Assassin's Cloak never seem like the mere grab-bag they are—even though the Taylors' selection, organized by calendar date, spans 170 writers and four centuries...
...And there is the consistent mental mediocrity of Henry David Thoreau...
...What do you mean you don't know where the black [radio] station is...
...This is the case only for certain writers, such as Evelyn Waugh, who recounts, in 1924: "Mr Justice Phillimore was trying a sodomy case and brooded greatly whether his judgment had been right...
...There is much more on war than one would expect—particularly on World War II, that great collision of world history and British temperament...
Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 14
