AS ANOTHER New Year approaches, I am reminded of all those ones in the past when I was given a diary. I have one here in front of me. It was my first. I was five years old. On January 1 is a crayoned self-portrait and two letters that just say “Be”. I guess that was as far as I could manage in the alphabet and the rest of the book is blank.
It was always like that with diaries. I would resolve to write in them every day, make them honest and interesting but, of course, it never happened. Honesty always seemed too dangerous, in case they got read, and pouring our my heartfelt feelings never seemed, when I read them through again, to be accurate.
I wonder what will happen to the diary. Now we have internet chat rooms to use as our confessionals, and blogging online to record daily trivia and vent our wrath. Are they doomed like the Dodo to become instinct?
It’s a special sort of person who writes a diary. Who is able to record events as they happen and then not squirm afterwards at their own vanities and mistakes (books like Adrian Mole and Bridget Jones exploit that embarrassing exposure). Must be such a temptation to rewrite or edit them, and yet in some ways they are the most revealing exposure of how someone else thinks.
One can’t imagine a world of literature without the diaries of Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank. Both giving us the human insight in to the history that was being made around them. And politicians seem particularly fond of keeping diaries, I suppose it is their way of setting the record straight and marking their place in it. Alan Clark’s diaries make wonderful reading, with all their infidelities, intrigues and acid humour. Of course they tell us more about him as a personality than those around him; even as we read them we are aware that they need filtering, they are a partial view of the world. In many ways they are a work of fiction.
Tony Benn has written, “I don’t read diaries, I just write them.” He sees part of the role of his prolific diary writing as keeping a record of changing democracy. Now on his seventh volume, probably apart from Queen Victoria’s diaries, they are the longest ever political commentaries. One wonders if the younger generation of politicians will keep diaries with such integrity. Will Bush and Blair leave evidence of their follies over the Iraq war? I somehow doubt it. I think if they leave diaries they will be edited and whitewashed for posterity.
Diaries are as honest or corrupt, as entertaining or as boring as their writers. I bet Jeffrey Archer’s is a hoot. Like travel writing it is not the journey but the quality of the observation that matters. Virginia Woolf used hers as an intimate friend, painfully recording the events and the inner turmoil that would lead to her suicide. Andy Warhol had an amanuensis, Pat Hackett, who would call him every morning around 9am to record the chatter about his life. He called her “Miss Diary”, the result was a stream of consciousness gossip column.
But without diarists, there will be a great loss to future historians as emails replace letters and texts replace notes: all the inconsequentialities of life will disappear with the touch of the delete button. When my 80-year-old aunt was dying this summer, she made me promise that on her death I would burn all her diaries; she had assiduously kept them from the 1940s.
When I asked her why, she told me that, “they weren’t just her secrets”, but I am sure there were other reasons too. Sometimes the person revealed in diaries is not the one we would want remembered. I did destroy them, I didn’t burn them them, there were too many. I bundled them in a black dustbin liner and took them to the local skip. As the big Council truck chewed them up with other people’s sacks of garden rubbish and life detritus I did wonder what they would have told me about my family and my past. It seemed right to respect her wishes, but part of me was curious as to why she
Hadn’t destroyed them herself or why she had written them if she didn’t want to share them eventually.
The poet Philip Larkin famously asked for all his diaries and papers to be burnt on his death. Andrew Motion his executor and biographer was criticised for not sticking to the total letter of the law on this and although the diaries were eventually destroyed, many of his personal papers and letters were kept and used by Motion in his controversial biography. So one must assume that if one writes a diary it will be read and may well live to haunt you and those you have written about long after you have gone.
The final word must go to Oscar Wilde who, as we know, told us he never travelled without his diary as one, “should always have something sensational to read on the train”. Ah… may you have an interesting 2006 indeed and a diary to record it in.
