Want something good to read? Try a diary
If everyone has a book in them, for most of us that book is written in the form of a diary. Here we record the triumphs, humiliations and observations which evolve into the chapters of our lives.
Of course, there are diaries and diaries: it can be a mere record of how we’ve organised our time, an anguished confessional, or a gift to posterity – but whatever the purpose, the fun of it is to cast ourselves as the stars of the show. Hence Oscar Wilde’s quip, ‘‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.’’
In the right hands, no detail – a missed bus, a lost key – is too banal to be transformed into high drama. Samuel Pepys, for example – who kept his diary between 1660 and 1669 – describes himself (to himself) as a put-upon husband, a clubbable friend, a dutiful courtier. His diary is an invaluable resource, giving eyewitness accounts of the Fire of London and the return of Charles II, but it is also the great Restoration novel, a pioneering example of what we now call ‘‘autofiction’’, which has made a literary star out of the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard.
While readers await the English translation of the sixth volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, the sixth volume of The Alastair Campbell Diaries, which covers the last days of the Blair government, is currently rolling off the press.
Campbell’s own struggle has always read more like a Jeffrey Archer novel than an autobiography. His diaries are speckled with odd discrepancies – alternative facts, you might call them. In June 2003, for instance, Campbell noted that he did not apologise to intelligence chiefs in the wake of the publication of the dodgy dossier, but in his own evidence to a committee given a few weeks later, he swore that he did. Which is true? The ‘‘private’’ diary or the public statement?
Piers Morgan’s slipperiness in The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade is so clumsy it becomes part of the fun. Indeed, at times The Insider seems as fake as The Hitler Diaries, the hoax that embarrassed historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1983.
Impressively, Morgan is able to riff on a joke that does not yet exist, amusing Cherie Blair and Fiona Millar (Alastair Campbell’s partner) with the gag that Campbell is ‘‘the real axis of evil’’, even though George W Bush would only coin the phrase ‘‘axis of evil’’ in his State of the Union Address two months later. Visionary stuff.
Anais Nin, the Cuban-French pornographer, claimed that her diaries were written ‘‘at white heat’’, but they were in fact carefully pruned and censored. At one point she kept two at the same time, the first for her husband to read, in which she pictured herself as a faithful spouse, and a second in which she described her numerous sexual liaisons, including one with her own father.
Our most prolific diarist, Nin began her journal aged 11 and wrote in it every day, sometimes all day, for the next 65 years, filling 150 notebooks. ‘‘I name you my prince of princes,’’ she wrote in the first notebook. ‘‘I am madly in love with you.’’
Her diary was a love affair with her own writing in which she recorded her other love affairs, and every compliment she ever received. The bored wife of a rich banker, her life, Nin wrote, ‘‘would be more bearable if I looked at it as an adventure and a tale’’.
Nin tried to thrill her future readers, but the mundanity of other people’s lives can make the best reading. As Leonard Cohen puts it in Book of Longing, ‘‘Sometimes just a list/ Of my events/ Is holi-er than the Bill of Rights/ And more in-tense.’’ It is this treatment of events – and themselves – as holy that makes diarists such satisfyingly complicated characters.
The best diaries unfold like tragic novels. In the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, apparently a record of pies, skies, headaches and daffodils, the tale that unfolds is of a woman horribly in love with her own brother: ‘‘Oh, the darling!’’ goes one entry. ‘‘Here is one of his bitten apples! I can hardly find in my heart to throw it into the fire.’’
Or take Leo and Sofia Tolstoy, whose marriage was shaped by their diaries. Sofia described in her diary how their final row, before Tolstoy’s death in 1910, was because he was ‘‘hiding’’ his diary from her.
Their first row, on the eve of their wedding in 1862, was because Tolstoy had made the mistake of showing Sofia his diary, in particular the entries describing his homosexual longings.
In her own diary she recorded her horror: ‘‘My husband’s past is so ghastly that I don’t think I shall ever be able to accept it.’’ Sofia Tolstoy’s diaries cover the birth of 13 children, the death of four of them, her transcriptions of War and Peace and the rise of her husband’s cult status, but the subject she returns to like a mantra is her terror of losing his love. ‘‘These fears have remained in my heart throughout my life,’’ she writes, and her diaries document how she brought about the situation she most feared.
It isn’t all grim. Some of the best comic novels have been written as diaries, because the tone in which other people talk to themselves is always funny.
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 and begins with his list of New Year resolutions, which includes a promise to ‘‘help the poor and ignorant’’. Bridget Jones, whose diary also begins on January 1, resolves not to drink more than 14 units of alcohol a week or to ‘‘behave sluttishly around the house, but instead imagine others are watching’’. But others are always watching, as the diarist well knows. – Telegraph Group