A deep dive into diaries

From varsity.co.uk/arts

Sadia Batool asks how we should read the diaries of great artists and whether or not we should read them at all 

In a practical criticism supervision on Mark O’Connell’s fourth issue of Tolka: The City of the Dead, the topic of diary writing came up. We began talking about the age at which we each took to the habit. One of my peers recalled first writing during the pandemic and imagining her work being featured in future history textbooks or archives. It is this thought that calls into question the very founding principle of the diary – the belief in its own privacy. If we’re beginning to write with publication in mind, the intimacy and freedom that distinguishes the diary as its own thing ceases to exist.

Instead, we might define the piece in terms of its commitment to the calendar. The English ‘diary’ or ‘journal,’ German ’Tagebuch,’ French ’journal intime’ and Russian ’dnevnik’ all derive from the same root word, meaning ‘day.’ Even as the addressee becomes ambiguous, the first person quotidian narrative style remains. With the exception of these qualities, it is difficult to say anything about diaries which is true for almost all of them. We realise this when we try to categorise by genre. Take its imbalances between literary and historical writing, the spontaneity of reportage and reflectiveness, selfhood and events and subjectivity and objectivity, for example. By disturbing attempts to summarise its characteristics within formalised boundaries, the diary proves to be a misfit form of writing.

Having derived from bookkeeping and the practice of daily religious self-examination, the early modern diary can be seen as an account of one’s personal economy – financial, emotional, and spiritual. In the age of the Enlightenment, Puritans and Pietists used diaries to monitor their sinful selves (and as far as the latter was concerned) to bring about an internal conversion that might lead to salvation. Romantic diarists were inspired by a new historicist sense whereas Fin de Siècle positivists used them for scientific self-observation, tracing connections between the physical and the psychological. Only in the twentieth century does the diary completely absorb itself in the modernist impulse for deliberate self-creation.

‘The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood… Therefore it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather – in many cases – offers an alternative to it’José Vieira Couto de Magalhães / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Clearly, pains are taken to produce pieces for historical testimony, self-fashioning, and self-improvement. The first of these motives gives the mundane tasks of everyday life a new colour. In times of distress, victims have sought to log incidents to fully understand their effects and make sense of what’s happened. In both cases, diarists write with the intention to publish for posterity. Only if the latter is primarily concerned with survival, there is little reason for their being inauthentic. Calamities strip individuals of their identity so their writing becomes at once, historical testimony, and a means of self-construction.

Susan Sontag describes the diary as that which enables her to express herself more openly than to any person:

“The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood… Therefore it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather – in many cases – offers an alternative to it.”

This alternative is what appealed to Virginia Woolf, who began diary writing at fifteen all the way up to her death at 59. Right before her suicide, she left a note asking her husband to destroy all her papers. Instead, he sorted and saved a vast mass of materials, including manuscripts, essays, and most pertinently, diaries. The many mean and offensive remarks made the publisher at Granta declare that the “language used and views expressed in the diary… are those of the respective authors in their time.” If her diary was never intended for reading, her thoughts were never supposed to be criticised. As such, we cannot police her thoughts without being wrong ourselves.

W.H. Auden is also among supporters of the diary for the sake of disciplining “laziness and lack of observation.” This concern is the reason Tolstoy kept a diary from age eighteen to 82. His early diaries tried to develop a narrative template that would create an ordered account of his time. Each evening, he made an account of how today measured against the plan for tomorrow made yesterday. Their never matching left him in search of himself. The old Tolstoy however, attempted to transgress the confines of the temporal order imposed by the first person narrative form. Plath too began keeping a diary at the age of 11. Six years before her suicide, she captures its role:

“Just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s (no less! – – – and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her – – – from reading Mrs. Dalloway for Mr. Crockett.”

What might’ve been dull to Woolf is vibrant to Plath. Woolf’s diary is just as consolatory as her own and proves to be more than the mere ‘warm up’ she deemed it. What was once a superfluous feminine pastime has proven worthwhile – taking new form entirely.

https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/29345

How To Grieve a Stolen Diary

From cherwell.org

By Leila Moore

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘One Art’ is beautiful because of its hypocrisy. The speaker exalts loss – of places, names, houses, their mother’s watch – with an odd joviality. You’re sure, reading it for the first time, that there must be something disingenuous going on here. The act of writing exposes the chasm between speech and feeling, as Bishop squeezes out the painful final lines:

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Bishop’s voice here, before she lets the mask slip, seems to be reminiscent of some stoic and ancient philosophy, those that recognises the futility of attaching our worth and feelings to things you can have, whether it is a beautiful ring, or a city, or a person. She remains resistant to the hyper-consumption of modernity, when every time we open our phones, we are bombarded with an array of products that promise to make us feel a little better about ourselves if we buy them. But all of that is old news- we’ve all learned by now that ordering something off Amazon can’t replace those parts of ourselves we suspect have gone missing. 

Besides, isn’t it boring, not to covet anything? A friend texted me recently with the quote that ‘in capitalist societies, to love things is something of an embarrassment’, and I felt gratified that I did have material things in my life to treasure: my books, my favourite clothes, and my diaries. Treasuring physical objects, especially ones that you have dreamed of and laboured over, feels like an apt rebellion in the age of click and collect.

Of course, there is a more pertinent theme to ‘One Art’ than possession, and that is loss. The motion of it, its substance, its stubborn revival throughout our lives. Until recently, I was fairly sure that the loss of a possession could never truly devastate me- to do so seemed frivolous, spoiled, even a little unintelligent. I could lose my favourite pair of shoes, but I would still be me, I thought. That is, until I lost my diary.

Well, it wasn’t technically lost; it was stolen on the last night of term. I always find endings uncomfortably liminal, full of fluctuating emotions and swallowed goodbyes that live in your throat for weeks. That’s exactly why this Michaelmas I strategised something that would keep me occupied and not too existential: the faithful pub trip. Bundling into the Lamb and Flag on one of the first nights of December, I chatted with a friend about the last few days, and then briefly entertained some Americans who wanted restaurant recommendations from ‘two real Oxford girls’. It was a normal evening, and the infinite potential for disaster that ‘Friday of 8th week’ holds in my mind turned out to be, well, in my mind. That is, until I woke up the morning after and realised I had left my bag in the pub. After confirming nobody had turned anything in, I began to accept that the journal, stored inside, was truly lost.

The first stage of acceptance took place in Crewe train station, which is already one of the most depressing places in England, indeed only made more so by the sight of me wailing on the phone to my mother as I wandered aimlessly up and down a platform. The shock of receiving the message that, ‘No, no brown leather bag was handed in last night’, had sent me into a temporary frenzy, and I was sobbing unashamedly in public for the first time of my adult life. My mum has watched me grow into a person who cocoons herself with words. Closest to my heart is the dear-diary prose of the journal, the mode of writing I began with at age five, which I still swear by now. At twenty, the form of the diary is still sacred to me, the place where I express what I am and craft the person I hope to be. 

The notebook I lost spanned around six months of my life, including all my summer travels, even a few photos. But it wasn’t necessarily the memories I had recorded that hurt the most to lose- it was my feelings. My most private, most painful, and sometimes most shameful thoughts went into that notebook, the most previous entry dated only a few days prior to its loss. The thought tormented me, of a complete stranger rifling through the pages I had imprinted my heart onto. Would they be amused? Would they think I was silly, or reprehensible? My worst fear was that they would view it as entertainment, an opportunity to tour my mind as a burglar would stroll into an unlocked house. ‘I’m sure you feel as if you’ve been violated,’ my mum said over the phone when I had stopped crying. Her words twisted in my stomach, but I was grateful that at least she understood. 

When I arrived home for Christmas, I was drawn to the keepsake box stowed under my bed which contains all the diaries I have finished. My grief had subsided after a week, but I found myself thinking about writing more than I was actually writing. Why, I asked myself, had this habit endured for so much of my life, long enough to become instinct? Why did life not feel entirely real until I had written it down? Was it possible, I thought, that I had relied too much on these diaries to make my reality?

                                                                                                              Artwork by Yuan Yuan Foo

Diving headfirst into existentialism, I pulled out the first notebook from the box. A gift from my aunt when I was five, it came with a little lock and key that I quickly lost, but the notebook remains. It’s as battered as you would expect: some pages are ripped out, some just contain scribbles, or a  person without arms I had abandoned drawing when something more interesting came along. Progressing through earlier journals acquainted me with the mechanics of writing- how to avoid smudging ink, how to date, how to write in cursive. When I was six or seven, I began to chronologise, and increasingly to complain- about my annoying sister, or someone at school.

There’s little variety. I myself don’t find them that interesting, despite having actually written them. Nevertheless, I can appreciate them for what they represent; namely, the beginning of my discovery of a secret place I could reside. A place of my own creation, which both did and did not exist, which was everywhere but only for me to find- in short, privacy.

Childhood is not a time many would define by privacy. For a start, you are taken care of for most of it, watched by someone, whether it be a parent or teacher. Sharing a bedroom meant I hardly had any time alone until I was around ten- but a diary in childhood is one of the few places of solitude you can create for yourself. I was a quiet and at times strangely introspective kid, and I quickly learned that reading or writing meant people would leave me alone, and that being alone entailed a different kind of living than I had experienced before.

Also apparent from my writing is how expert the young diarist can become at mimicry; at age eight I strolled into a narrative voice heavily influenced by Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and I even accompanied my entries with drawings for a few weeks. Thankfully I gave that up quickly after realising whatever talents I possessed did not lie in visual art. At age ten, when I was writing in a red fabric-bound journal, I faithfully addressed it as ‘kitty’, hoping to emulate my new personal hero, Anne Frank. Beyond the diarists and diary-novels I was reading at the time, these entries are really an unconscious reflection of what I loved to read when I learned to love reading, from The Little Princess to The Hunger Games.

In May 2017, I picked up my journal to write an inventory of all my friends at school; what I liked and disliked about them, who was popular, who I admired and who I was jealous of. The teenage diarist is one of the most enduring images in pop culture; creative, disdainful and rebellious, the diary is an adolescent’s new playground. It’s clear I was revelling in the true range of my emotions when I was fourteen: one paragraph I’m dissecting the reasons for my parent’s divorce with surprising maturity, the next I’m describing the specific colour of my period blood. At this age I discovered how liberating it can be to simply write the unspeakable, something you would have never dared to articulate before that now exists just for you. 

At seventeen, Sylvia Plath’s collected diaries became my bible. I loved the passion she observed the world with, and tried to channel her diligent diarising into my own, fervently recording interactions I had with people in coffee shops and attempting to get down scraps of poetry. Now that I’m a few years older, and one stolen diary wiser, I can’t help but think of the trespass it is to treasure someone’s personal writings that were never intended for publication- that possibly would never have been in the public domain if their author had not committed suicide. But I fell in love with Plath’s writing about fish and chips before I was mature enough to consider the ethics of reading it-

‘The girl picked up the cracked metal tin of salt and snowed it into the bag. Then, taking the cut-glass bottle of vinegar, she showered it onto the fish, lifted the edge of it, and doused the potatoes. She handed the bag back to the woman, who wrapped it in a sheaf of newspaper.’

Today I still find it difficult, as a literature student, to know what I think about reading diaries as literary artefacts. The private self is indeed different from the self we construct to face the public; but it is still constructed nonetheless, and whether it is ‘truer’ I could not say. Apart from the fact that, if the stranger that stole my diary reads it instead of throwing it in the bin, I hope they would understand that although that notebook expresses important parts of myself, it hardly constitutes the whole of it. 

When I was eighteen I started university and stopped writing for myself. At the same time I was writing more than I ever had in my life, and became quickly acquainted with the rhythm of churning out the weekly essay. People often don’t have the energy to write anything but their tutorial essays at Oxford, and this was true for me, but the bigger obstacle to my keeping a diary was actually the new version of my life I was struggling to become acquainted with. As I departed from adolescence, so I departed from the ways I wrote about my adolescence, and after many failed attempts at describing my new life, I got tired of staring at blank pages and angry at myself for being unable to fill them with anything but self-pity. So I put my pen down for ten months and learned how to have fun. 

But old habits are hard to break, and in my second year I inadvertently started writing about my feelings again when I was keeping a travel itinerary in Morocco. My diaries now look very different to what they did before; they are not such obviously precious objects, with pages ripped out, scribbled over, paragraphs abruptly broken off when I had to dash out of the house, and entries interspersed with shopping lists which remind me to buy a new pair of nail scissors. I’ve also taken to obsessively collecting ticket stubs, notes from friends, play programmes, and postcards, in an attempt to scrapbook. It’s an activity that I find profoundly feminine and novel, with its roots in the 19th century scrapbooking of wealthy and travelled women. Trying it myself only sheds light on my own shortcomings, and the unrecognised talents of women living centuries ago, who were able to create such beautiful works of art in their day-to-day lives. 

Diarising is one of the most socially accepted forms of vanity, a room which contains only your voice. When I lost mine, it was the loss of this privacy, the preserved parts of myself – shopping lists and all – that hurt the most to be parted from. But as the weeks have passed, I’ve forgotten most of what I wrote in the stolen notebook, and I think less and less about the anonymous thief who may be delighting in it. Most surprisingly, I’m still me, with the same ideas and feelings which I can record in my new journal (I treated myself to my first Moleskine to help me through the morning period).

I always assumed that I journaled to obtain self-discovery; that one day I might stumble across the clearly articulated source of all my problems in an entry dated ten years prior. How naïve it was, I realise now, to think I could be my own archivist. Writing about my life could never solve the question of who I am; that kind of work must be done away from the page. What I have learned is that these notebooks are aesthetic testimonies to the various chapters of my life. The greatest joy of keeping them is being able to flick through the filled pages and basking in the texture of my own existence: ‘I am, I am, I am.’

When I lost my journal, I was confronted with how much of a hoarder I am, of my emotions as much as my possessions. What I failed to realise before is that all diary keeping is loss. What’s present in my entries is the shedding of pain and worries, hopes and aspirations, so that I can move through life a little less encumbered by their weight. It is an endless labour of love that involves parting with my feelings in the hope that they can find a more bearable form in language. It demands me to trust that I have the ability to make something useful out of this separation.

Diaries are collections of our most noteworthy debris, and we keep them because, as long as they have blank pages to offer, they, in turn, offer the opportunity to lose whatever is causing weight on the mind and heart: an exercise in self-annihilation as much as self-creation. It took a forgotten bag and a healthy dose of thievery for me to realise this, and to know that Elizabeth Bishop is right after all; loss is an art, and I have been unwittingly practising it since the Christmas I received my first notebook. Once I got past the sensation of feeling as though I had lost a limb, I welcomed my diary’s disappearance as an opportunity to let go: of the feelings of inadequacy and guilt it sometimes stored, of unkind words about the people I love, of unfulfilled wishes. 

Of course, I could have taken a different route of cynicism and anger, that I can never keep the things I treasure safe. But so much writing has taught me that I do have free will in small matters such as these, so I’ve chosen to be kind to myself, to craft a story and a lesson out of the whole affair. Isn’t it what I’ve been preparing for all along?

https://cherwell.org/2024/03/04/diary-materialism-existentialism-plath-memories/ 

Sheila Heti’s Astonishing Reinvention of the Diary

From anothermag.com

As the Alphabetical Diaries is published, Sheila Heti discusses keeping a diary, her dislike of the term ‘autofiction’, and fragmenting time and place in her writing to extraordinary effect

Work, love and money: Sheila Heti believes these are the things that preoccupy us most as human beings. In the Canadian author’s new book, the Alphabetical Diaries, these make up the three main pillars of the narrative. There’s the act of writing, which, in Heti’s case, is work – “I should remember that literature is the dark arts, and is probably not going to save my life or wind me up in some pretty, happy, conventional place” – love – “I love his voice, and how much I want to just crack him open and climb inside him” – sex – “I love how he uses that word for it, cock, and I came, though mildly, just from fucking him last night” – and money – “make enough money to live”. Comprising excerpts from Heti’s own diaries over the past ten years, the Alphabetical Diaries is a baring, brazen window into the author’s life and mind as she ponders big questions about life, love, art, and selfhood (her 2010 breakout book, aptly titled How Should a Person Be?, was similarly soul-searching).

But there’s a catch: instead of publishing her diaries in chronological order, Heti has rearranged them from A to Z, so that every sentence in each chapter begins with a specific letter (all the sentences in the ‘A’ chapter begin with ‘a’, for example). The result is an extraordinary blurring of time and place, where, freed from the conventions of narrative and chronology, readers get to roam around in Heti’s mind freely and at random. Like the stream-of-consciousness narratives deployed by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce – Woolf said of the style, “In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder” – Heti’s writing in the Alphabetical Diaries also comes remarkably close to capturing the experience of being alive; rattling around her subconscious as she oscillates from thought to thought, many of them ten whole years apart, reading the book is a fragmented, chaotic, and truly astonishing experience.

When I ask Heti why she didn’t just publish her diaries as they are, she seems shocked. “There’s no universe in which I would have wanted to do that,” she says. “I mean, what’s the literary value of that?” Instead, she likes to play with literary devices and constraints; there was the flipping of a coin in Motherhood to answer philosophical questions, the recording and transcribing of real-life conversations with friends in How Should a Person Be?, the narrator of Pure Colour getting stuck in a leaf for 40 whole pages, and most recently, her collaboration with an AI chatbot in her story in The New Yorker – which she says could wind up being her next book. Across all her work, she draws from her own life, but nowhere more directly than in the Alphabetical Diaries. “I guess I write about things close to me because I can see them better,” Heti says. “I like the limitations of writing from from within a life. I’m interested in how writing about a life changes the life, or how writing about the self changes how you are.”

                                                         LEAD IMAGESheila HetiPhotography by Angela Lewis

Below, Sheila Heti talks about the ideas behind the Alphabetical Diaries.

Violet Conroy: How did you come up with the idea for the book?

Sheila Heti: It was 2010, and I was just curious about what would happen if I looked at my diaries in a completely different way. Like, what would I learn about the self? Is there a self that stays consistent, or does it change over time? Is there a way to analyse that by alphabetising? These were all the questions that were in my mind as I started the project.

VC: Have you kept a diary for all of your life?

SH: On and off, with a lot more emphasis on off. I mostly write when I have to.

VC: Have to what?

SH: Like, if I have to think through something, or I’m just trying to untangle things in my mind, or if there’s something I really want to remember. But mostly it’s when I have a problem and I need to think something through, and there’s nobody I really want to talk about it with.

VC: Why did you want to do something experimental with form, instead of just publishing your diaries as they are?

SH: I never would have done that. That’s not interesting to me. There’s no universe in which I would have wanted to do that. What would be the point?

VC: Why not?

SH: They’re private. I wouldn’t want to give myself away to people in that way. It’s not interesting, just publishing your diaries. I mean, what’s the literary value of that?

VC: So did using the alphabetical constraints make it feel less revealing?

SH: I don’t think it’s anywhere near as revealing as it would have been if it was just plain diaries. It’s not what I was going for – I’m not trying to reveal. I’m trying to do something with form, I’m trying to do something with language, I’m trying to look at the self in a different way and look at time in a different way. These are my concerns. I’m not trying to tell people about myself. That’s not interesting to me.

VC: When you published an excerpt of your diaries in the New York Times, you wrote that the self is anchored by shockingly few characteristic preoccupations. What did you mean by that?

SH: I don’t know how similar those two things are, the diary self and the self. But at least in a diary, there appear to be certain themes that one returns to over and over and over again. One thinks about relationships, one thinks about work, one thinks about money, or at least I do. And that takes up the bulk of it, like 90 per cent of it. I mean, what else is there? Freud said the only things that really matter in life are work and love, but I think work, love and money is maybe a little more accurate. Who I’m obsessing over, who didn’t email me back, some man you’re trying to figure out, where money is going to come from, how I’m going to write this book ... it’s quite narrow when you look at it without narrative, just sentence by sentence. People are probably more interested in hearing a little bit more about love than they are in hearing about whether I want to live in Toronto or New York … there are just certain themes that are more interesting, more universal, and have more angles to them. I was always trying to think about the balance. 

VC: You also wrote that “the self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction”. Are we guilty of self-mythologising in our diaries?

SH: You’re constantly telling yourself stories about who you are and who other people are. And your story of who you are is different from your partner’s story of who you are. There’s just so much invention. You can’t live without having some idea about who you are and why you’re doing things, but somebody else comes along and thinks you’re a completely different person from the person you think you are. Where’s the truth? So that’s what I mean by the self being an invention. And then the report on oneself [a diary] would also be an invention. You are inventing the self.

VC: In your previous books like Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?, you blur fiction and nonfiction together. Do you see the Alphabetical Diaries as a mix of the two as well?

SH: I don’t really think about things in terms of fiction or nonfiction. Those seem like publishing categories to me, not thinking categories. One doesn’t think: now I’m thinking in a fictional way, now, in thinking in a non-fictional way. You’re just thinking, and it’s always a mix of fact and invention and interpretation, and what you can remember happened and what you think you remember but aren’t remembering accurately. And I feel like writing is an extension of thinking, so if those categories, fiction or nonfiction, are not present in thinking, for me, they’re not really categories that I think about when I’m writing. I’m just trying to think about what’s interesting, what’s engaging, what’s revealing, what’s beautiful.

VC: What keeps bringing you back to autofiction? And how do you feel about that label?

SH: It’s not a label that I feel a lot of connection to. I guess I write about things close to me because I can see them better. And I want to think about life, I’m more interested in life than imagination. I don’t want to be making things up out of whole cloth because there’s a kind of limitlessness to that that doesn’t feel interesting. I like the limitations of writing from from within a life. I’m interested in how writing about a life changes the life, or how writing about the self changes how you are. And I’m interested in writing with material that already exists. I find the limitlessness of the imagination kind of hard to work with.

VC: You also use literary constraints and devices, like the alphabetical formation with the diaries, or the coin in Motherhood. What draws you to play? 

SH: I don’t know ... I like games. It makes it into a game. [Laughs]. I like playing, I like editing. I like the puzzle of it. I don’t know how to explain it, it’s just what seems fun to me.

VC: I felt like the book came really close to capturing the experience of being alive. Did you want to capture life in a more true way, away from the conventions of chronological structure?

SH: That’s always something I’m interested in. Because our minds do skip around a lot, and we do move through space and time very quickly in our minds. Memory is also very fragmented and crosses time and space very quickly. So yeah, I think it does represent something that feels true, which is a surprise since you wouldn’t think that alphabetising your diary would make something feel more true than narrative, but in some strange way, it does. 

VC: Are there any writers in particular who have inspired you with their innovations in form and writing?

SH: I really like the American writer Kenneth Goldsmith. He wrote a book called Soliloquy which really inspired me. Each book tries to do something new and they’re all reports on the self, or reports on the news or culture in some very unliterary, unwritten way. There’s a lot of found material in his work. I was definitely thinking a lot about his books and Soliloquy in particular when I was working on the Alphabetical Diaries.

VC: What are you working on next?

SH: I’ve been playing around with this AI book that I published a little bit of in The New Yorker and a bit in The Paris Review. I feel like that is something that I’m going to want to finish and figure out, but I go back and forth on it. But that’s just the stage I’m at, you know, the back-and-forth stage. I’d rather not feel compelled, but I do feel compelled. 

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and is out now.

https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/15395/sheila-heti-alphabetical-diaries-interview-fitzcarraldo-editions-pure-colour