Diaries and Loneliness

By Tim Holman

Can loneliness be the real reason why someone keeps a diary?

Usually - no, or not very likely. But for someone who has difficulties with personal relationships, or a sadness that they don't wish to share, then putting their feelings into writing can ease the pain whilst telling their true story.

The more detailed the diary, the greater the sense of hurt behind it. Perhaps.

This thought occurred to me recently when watching a documentary about the late comedian Kenneth Williams, who died in 1988. He kept a diary for over 40 years; after his death this was superbly edited by Russell Davies and published. Its tone was often bitter and immensely self-critical, in stark contrast to Williams's public persona when he was alive.

The diary's true story is Williams's inability to come to terms with his homosexuality. Throughout his life he shunned intimacy and any form of close relationships, and the diary became his confidant. Davies expressed the view that "..Diaries are fundamentally about loneliness... It's having some sort of echo in your head of a voice which otherwise would have been someone else's voice..."

In other words, without a companion to say, "How was your day? How are you?" and so on, Williams had those conversations in writing, in private, in his diary.

This argument can be carried only so far. It implies that if a person is happy, there is no need to keep a diary at all. There have been, and still are, plenty of cheerful souls in the world who keep writing. Perhaps most famously, Samuel Pepys's epic work revels in food, drink, money and illicit sexual encounters. Not only that, but his word count probably exceeds that of Williams.

For myself, I don't recall ever being massively lonely, but during my late teens and early 20s I certainly wrote a very full diary. I have always tended to be a bit of a 'lone wolf' and live slightly adrift from the mainstream. Perhaps this explains the compulsion to write during my younger days (and again now, perhaps surprisingly).

Kenneth Williams's situation was rare, possibly unique, so with loneliness and diary-writing one doesn't necessarily follow the other. Still, it's food for thought.

More Quotes About Diaries

"In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance." —Franz Kafka, The Diaries 1910-1923

"In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather — in many cases — offers an alternative to it." —Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

"The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. ... Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss." —Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook," Slouching Toward Bethlehem

"I am anxious, and it soothes me to express myself here. It is like whispering to one's self and listening at the same time." —Mina Murray in her journal in Dracula, by Bram Stoker

"If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair." —Madeleine L'Engle

"Never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things — childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves — that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.” —Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991