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Introduction

‘A diary is like drink,’ wrote the Scottish poet, William Soutar, ‘we tend to indulge in it over often: it becomes a habit which would ever seduce us to say more than we ought to say and more than we have the experimental qualifications to state.’ It must be said that Soutar, bedridden with a wasting illness, was a special case. Trapped from a young age in a small room in his parents’ house in Perth, his view of the world circumscribed by the size of his window, he was, in effect, a prisoner. His diary was his constant companion, a visitor who never went away. Thus the temptation to over-indulge.

For many people, however, a diary is like a reproach, a perpetual reminder of our indiscipline, lack of application, weakness of resolve. How many diaries, started in the first flush of a new year, peter out even before the memory of the annual hangover? We open the pristine book with enthusiasm but after a few days what had been a torrent turns into a drip. Soon, whole weeks go by unremarked, blank page followed by blank page. Humdrum life intrudes and the compulsion to memorialise in print evaporates. There are few things quite as capable of inducing guilt as an empty diary.

Soutar, his life cruelly condensed, came to depend on his diary. It was his friend, crutch, confidant, shrink, father confessor, mirror of himself, for a diary is the most flexible and intimate of literary forms. As Thomas Mallon noted in his formative book on the subject, A Book of One’s Own: People and their Diaries, diaries have been kept by everyone, from the barely literate to the leaders of men and women, from serial killers to conmen, kitchen maids to all-conquering heroes, children and nonagenarians, tinkers, tailors, soldiers and spies.

‘Some,’ wrote Mallon, ‘are chroniclers of the everyday. Others have kept their books only in special times — over the course of a trip, or during a crisis. Some have used them to record journeys of the soul, plan the art of the future, confess the sins of the flesh, lecture the world from beyond the grave. And some of them, prisoners and invalids, have used them not so much to record lives as create them, their diaries being the only world in which they could fully live.’

Into the last category falls William Soutar, who but for his diary and a few verses in Scots for children — ‘bairnrhymes’ — would now be forgotten. Though he began keeping a diary in 1917, when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Atlantic with the Navy, it comprised little more than brief notes of appointments and books read. His diary took on a fresh complexion, however, after February 1929, when he fell ill with pneumonia. His right leg became increasingly disabled. In hindsight, the prescribed treatment seems medieval; weights were put on the leg to counteract muscle contraction. When this failed, the only hope was surgery. In May 1930, Soutar was operated on, paraphrasing Milton as he went to his fate:

‘This is the day and this the happy morn.’ At 9.30 got morphine and atropine injection. Off to theatre — sine crepuscula toga — at 10 a.m. Never saw actual theatre — elderly doctor chloroformed me in the ‘green room’. Woke up again at 11.20 or so. Wasn’t sick. Not an extra lot of reaction. Plaster of Paris troubling me more than the leg — nasty nobbly part at back — can’t lie comfortably.

The operation was unsuccessful but the stoical, philosophical Soutar gives little indication of despair, of the hopelessness of his plight. As Alexander Scott, who edited his diaries, has observed, ‘Soutar’s main interest was not his own invalidism but the general human situation.’ On occasion, he felt frustrated and sorry for himself but more often he managed to transcend his illness, setting himself goals — reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example — and pursuing his ambitions. Due to his unusual circumstances, the world had to come to him, rather than the other way round. But unlike many other diarists who are consumed with themselves, egocentrics who seem to live only inside their own heads and are obsessed with their own troubles, Soutar managed to transcend the self, and enter an elevated state of being. Just a month before he died in October 1943, he wrote:

The true diary is one, therefore, in which the diarist is, in the main, communing with himself, conversing openly and without pose, so that trifles will not be absent, nor the intimate and little confessions and resolutions which, if voiced at all, must be voiced in such a private confessional as this.

That is one definition of a diary but there are countless others that are equally valid. The elasticity of the form is a large part of its appeal, which is perhaps why it is so difficult to pin down. When, truly, is a diary a diary? What is the difference between a diary and journal or, for that matter, a log or a notebook? Dictionary definitions are not much help. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, for example, says a diary is ‘a daily record of events, transactions, thoughts, etc., esp. ones involving the writer’. A journal, on the other hand, is defined thus: ‘A personal record of events or matters of interest, written up every day or as events occur, usu. in more detail than in a diary.’

It is a fine distinction and one which individual writers seem blithely to ignore. In his Devil’s Dictionary, for instance, Ambrose Bierce wrote: ‘Diary. A daily record of that part of one’s life which he can relate to himself without blushing.’ Oscar Wilde, however, went a step further. ‘I never travel without my diary,’ he had Gwendoline in The Importance of Being Earnest say. ‘One should always have something sensational to read in the train.’ For others, though, a diary serves more prosaic purposes. ‘If a man has no constant lover who shares his soul as well as his body he must have a diary — a poor substitute, but better than nothing,’ mused James Lees-Milne.

More often than not, writers question why they do or do not keep a diary. ‘Why do I keep this voluminous journal?’ asked the Rev. Francis Kilvert. ‘I can hardly tell. Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it almost seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me.’ Sir Walter Scott deemed not keeping a regular diary one of the regrets of his life. But perhaps one of the most curious comments on diary-keeping came from A. A. Milne when he remarked in 1919,“! suppose this is the reason why diaries are so rarely kept nowadays — that nothing ever happens to anybody.’

The idea that diaries are only worth keeping when great events are in train is barely worthy of examination. The human condition is such that there is always something happening somewhere, whether personally or politically, parochially or on the international stage. The most durable diarists have not always been those who mix in high society or are connected with the great and the good and have the opportunity to keek through the keyhole as momentous events unfold. The best diaries are those in which the voice of the individual comes through untainted by self-censorship or a desire to please. First, and foremost, the diarist must write for himself, those who do not, who are already looking towards publication and public recognition, invariably strike a phoney note. As Alan Clark, author of the most notorious twentieth-century fin de siècle diaries, said: ‘Sometimes lacking in charity; often trivial; occasionally lewd; cloyingly sentimental, repetitious, whingeing and imperfectly formed. For some readers the entries may seem to be all of these things. But they are real diaries.’

The first real diarist was Samuel Pepys, who may not have patented the form but was certainly instrumental in its development. In the popular imagination a typical entry by Pepys opens with ‘Up betimes’ and closes ‘And so to bed.’ In fact, Pepys was much less formulaic than is supposed, though there is an admirable, unaffected directness to his approach, seizing the day with uncommon zest. Born in London on 23 February 1633, he was one of eleven children. His father was a tailor; his mother had been a domestic servant. From such humble beginnings Pepys rose precipitously in the world, which may account for his frequent compulsive and unabashed bouts of stocktaking. He was, even if he said so himself, ‘a very rising man’.

Thus, typically, on 30 September, 1664, he reported: ‘Up, and all day both morning and afternoon at my accounts, it being a great month both for profit and layings out, the last being £89 for kitchen and clothes for myself and wife, and a few extraordinaries for the house; and my profits, besides salary, £239; so that this weeke my balance come to £1,203, for which the Lord’s name be praised!’

Pepys’s naive enthusiasm for self-reckoning has been echoed by diarists down the decades, be they writers counting the words they have produced or monies they have made. Arnold Bennett, for example, made it a New Year’s Eve ritual. Such record keeping is a valuable function of diaries but were they simply to consist of inventories they would be — as Robert Louis Stevenson said of books — ‘a mighty bloodless substitute for life’. Life, unvarnished and uncensored, is what makes Pepys’s diary such a constant source of wonder. In every entry, Pepys reveals something of his true self, from his disquiet at discovering that the food he had been served at a friend’s house was rotten (‘a damned venison pasty that stunk like a devil’) to his views on Shakespeare (‘the most insipid ridiculous play I ever saw in my life’, he called A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and his unalloyed and unequivocal delight at coming into a legacy.

Pepys, like Boswell in the eighteenth century and Alan Clark in the twentieth, was comically candid about the attractions of women, which he was not always able to resist. His diaries are perhaps at their most piquant when he describes close encounters of a sexual nature, not all of which were consummated. As Thomas Mallon observed, Pepys could forgive a woman almost anything — even spitting on him at the theatre — if she was pretty. At church, he risked groping a girl only to have her threaten to stick pins in him. Undeterred, he groped another. When he actually did succeed in satisfying his lust, he attempted to shroud it in a mongrel language, as he did on 31 March 1668, when he foisted himself on Deb, his servant girl: ‘Yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra mi genu and did poner mi mano sub her jupes and tocu su thigh.’

His delight in this adulterous act is as diverting as his disquiet at the vice at the royal court of d‘drinking, swearing and loose amours’. Pepys was a mass of contradictions which serves only to endear him to us further. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, who from her first appearance in his diary (when she burnt her hand dressing the remains of a turkey) to almost her last (when she was troubled with toothache), was the perfect foil for his waywardness and vanity. They were married in 1633, when he was twenty-two and she was just fifteen. So hard up were they that he had to pawn his lute for forty shillings. The route out of penury came through Sir Edward Montagu, later created Earl of Sandwich, who married an aunt to Pepys’s father. A close friend of Oliver Cromwell, Montagu was Pepys’s mentor and secured his appointment in the Navy Office. From ‘clerk of the King’s ships’, Pepys — a diligent bureaucrat and ardent in stamping out corruption — rose to become secretary to the Admiralty.

In many ways, it was the ideal kind of post for a diarist. Though not hugely powerful himself he nevertheless had access to those charged with running the country. In that regard, Pepys is the predecessor of diarists like Harold Nicolson, whose career as a journalist and politician gave him a unique glimpse of Britain in the 1930s, including the rise of fascism, the influence of the Bloomsbury group and the Abdication crisis, and Sir Henry Channon, a charmer from Chicago who made a rapid rise in English society between the two world wars. Channon was well aware of the tradition in which he was following. ‘Although I am not Clerk to the Council like Mr Greville nor Secretary to the Admiralty like Mr Pepys, nor yet “duc et pair” as was M. de St Simon, I have, nevertheless, had interesting opportunities of intimacy with interesting people and have often been at the centre of things.’

Channon — or ‘Chips’, as he was nicknamed — was in no doubt that his diaries would one day be made available for public consumption. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ he wrote in November 1936, ‘why I keep a diary at all. Is it to relieve my feelings? Console my old age? or to dazzle my descendants?’ Some fifteen years later he added, ‘I feel that some day they may see the light of day and perhaps shock or divert posterity a little.’ With that in mind he deposited his diaries in the British Museum with the initial instruction that they should not be consulted or published until fifty years after his death. But in the last year of his life he had a change of heart, and he began to edit them himself.

Chips’s ambivalence is echoed by many other diarists, not least the great Pepys, who laboured over his diary in the wee small hours with the light weak and his eyesight failing. He began writing his diary on an auspicious date, the beginning of a new year and a new decade, 1 January 1660, and continued for almost ten years, bringing it to a reluctant close on 31 May 1669, believing that he was about to go blind. In the annals of diarists there has rarely been a more moving entry than that with which Pepys brought down the curtain on his work:

And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my Journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and therefore whatever comes of it I must forbear: and therefore resolve from this time forward to have it kept by my people in long-hand, and must therefore be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or if there be any thing (which cannot be much, now my amours to Deb are past, and my eyes hindering me in almost all other pleasures), I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add here and there a note in short-hand with my own hand.

And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!

Ironically, Pepys did not go blind and lived for another thirty-four years. His diary, his lasting memorial, which was written in shorthand, he had bound in leather in six volumes, not the act of a man who did not want to see them preserved. With the rest of his library, they were deposited at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where they lay undeciphered until 1825. In the opinion of O. F. Morshead, editor of a very popular but heavily censored edition of the diaries, the impetus to break the code may have been prompted by the publication in i8i8 of the diaries of Pepys’s contemporary John Evelyn. It is a tradition at Magdalene that Lord Grenville took one of the volumes to bed and by morning had worked out how to translate it. The entire diary was then handed over to John Smith, an undergraduate, who made a complete transcription. Working twelve hours a day, it took him more than three years to make a complete transcription of in excess of three thousand pages. It was, said Smith, ‘very trying and injurious indeed to the visual organs’.

But however onerous the task it was justified by the finished work. Pepys was a fluent, engaging and observant chronicler, combining history, reportage and autobiography in a style reminiscent of a superior novelist who can describe a scene and catch the essence of a character in a few broad and eloquent brush strokes. From his own quirky, irksome and fascinating domestic arrangements to the Great Fire of London and the misery of the Plague, Pepys illuminated the essence of his age better than anyone before or since. His curiosity was boundless, his lack of self-consciousness intoxicating. His diaries show him warts and all, holding back nothing that is unflattering, of which there was much, particularly in regard to his wife, who, in her own ‘diary’, inspired by the feminist scholar, Dale Spender, describes his meanness, infidelity, heavy drinking and abuse. But despite his failings Pepys was a loving husband.

He had the true writer’s ability to drop or raise his tempo as the situation demands. But more often than not he is most affecting when one anticipates it least, whether describing a chance encounter with a shepherd and his son whom he found reading the Bible to one another on Epsom Downs or relaying his disgust at the sycophancy shown to King Charles II when he plays tennis (‘to see how the King’s play was extolled without any cause at all was a loathsome sight’).

In contrast to Pepys, John Evelyn was altogether more reserved and puritanical but while his diary pales in comparison with his more famous contemporary it has its own idiosyncratic appeal. Evelyn came from a family which had made its fortune in gunpowder and he was well enough off to live independently, travelling extensively around Europe, which he recorded colourfully. He made his name with Sylva, a Discourse of Forest Trees, a book on arboriculture, which proved very popular with landowners intent on improving their estates after the Civil Wars and Interregnum.

His diary begins, precociously, in 1620, during the reign of James I, when he was born and from the first he seemed to possess uncanny powers of description. His mother, he recalled, was ‘of proper personage, well timber’d, of a browne complexion; her eyes and haire of a lovely black; of a constitution more inclyn’d to a religious Melancholy, or pious sadnesse; of a rare memory, and most exemplary life; for Oeconomiq pridence esteemed’d one of the most conspicuous in her Country.’

Its final entry (‘The Raine and a taw upon a deepe Snow, hindred me from going to Church.’) was made in January 1706 in the reign of Queen Anne and the year of Evelyn’s death at the age of 85. A large part of it, however, was written in hindsight; only from 1684 onwards did it become a contemporary diary, with Evelyn’s eye for the exotic immediately to the fore. ‘I dined at Sir St: Foxes,’ he recorded on 2 January 1684/After dinner came a felow that eate live charcoale glowing ignited, quenching them in his mouth, and then chanping and swallowing them downe: There was a dog also that seemd to do many rational actions.’

But assiduous though Evelyn was in keeping his diary, it was meant for his eyes only. No publication was ever intended and it only came to light through pure fluke in 1813 when Lady Evelyn, the widow of the diarist’s great-great-grandson, was talking to William Upcott, a librarian and bibliophile, at the family house in Surrey. Asked his hobbies, Upcott replied, ‘Collecting manuscripts and autographs,’ whereupon her ladyship opened a drawer and revealed a pile of manuscripts which had been used for cutting out patterns for a dress. Upcott instantly appreciated their significance and Lady Evelyn volunteered to show him more. ‘Oh,’ she declared, ‘if you like papers like that, you shall have plenty, for Sylva Evelyn and those who succeeded him kept all their correspondence, which has furnished the kitchen with an abundance of waste paper.’ And so the diaries — the Kalendarium — were discovered.

Lady Evelyn herself was unconvinced of their worth, and was reluctant to publish them. But shortly before her death she gave permission to a local antiquary to make the first selection, which appeared in 1818 with the title Memoirs Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Evelyn, and while they sold well were soon eclipsed by Pepys’s earthier and more appealing diaries. Interestingly, the two men knew each other and commemorated their meetings. For his part, Pepys found the bee-keeping Evelyn to be a merry dining companion, a cut above him intellectually: ‘In fine, a most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness.’

Evelyn, in turn, liked Pepys and visited him at the Tower, where he had been committed, unjustly in Evelyn’s view, for misdemeanours in the Admiralty. On his death, Evelyn wrote generously of him, describing him as ‘a very worthy, Industrious and curious person, none in England exceeding him in knowledge of the Navy’. Pepys had been his friend for almost forty years and requested that he be a pall-bearer at his funeral but Evelyn, himself incapacitated, was unable to attend.

The successful publication of these two diaries in the nineteenth century undoubtedly proved a spur to others to follow in their tracks. A diary, at least to begin with, is not a daunting prospect, like an epic poem, say, or a play or a novel. There is no imperative to publish or show anyone how it is progressing. You don’t need to do any research or check facts. Entries can be long or short, factual or inaccurate, real or imagined. Though diarists, invariably, attempt to keep up a daily routine they just as invariably fail. Life has its insidious way of interrupting the flow. Some diarists take this in their stride while it throws others into a spin, as if they had forgotten to turn up for a dinner party or missed a job interview.

Time after time one comes across diarists chastising themselves for their laziness, their inconstancy, their lack of fidelity to a diary which they address as they might a lover. For communion with a diary is unlike any other literary activity. Once a diarist, always a diarist, it seems. A diary becomes part of a diarist’s routine, an integral part of his or her household, a member of the family which needs to be nurtured like a baby or a pet kitten. Neglect is conspicuous but it need not be harmful, for silence has its own eloquence. While many diarists write entries daily, as if brushing their teeth, others let weeks and months go by without so much as writing a few lines.

Some diarists, such as Walter Scott, write during times of emotional and financial crisis, others when they are at their most happy and socially active. Evelyn Waugh, one of the greatest twentieth-century diarists, kept a diary for diverse reasons, wrote the editor of his diaries, Michael Davie, as an aide-memoire and as a source of material for his novels and autobiography. ‘Fading memory and a senile itch to write to the Times on all topics have determined me to keep irregular notes of what passes through my mind,’ he wrote in i960, when he started his diary again after a break of some four years. Waugh, in common with most diarists, wrote with no intention of seeing his diary in the public domain and died before the decision was taken to publish it. He wrote privately and did not tell many of his friends that he kept a diary. Even his wife did not know. Though not by nature furtive, he seemed to want to keep his diaries to himself. Why, no one knows.

In contrast, the artist Andy Warhol, whose fame, among other things, comes from his saying that in future everyone in the world will be famous for fifteen minutes, liked to dictate his diary to an amanuensis, Pat Hackett. In her introduction to his diaries, she wrote:

I’d call Andy around 9am, never later than 9:30. Sometimes I’d be waking him up, sometimes he’d say he’d been awake for hours. If I happened to oversleep he’d call me and say something like, ‘Good morning, Miss Diary — what’s wrong with you?’ or ‘Sweetheart! You’re fired!’ The calls were always conversations. We’d warm up while just chatting — he was always curious about everything, he’d ask a million questions: ‘What are you having for breakfast? Do you have channel 7 on? How can I clean my can opener — should I do it with a toothbrush?’ Then he’d give me his cash expenses and then he’d tell me all about the day and night before. Nothing was too insignificant for him to tell the Diary. These sessions — what he referred to as my ‘five-minutes-a-day job’ — would actually take anywhere from one to two hours. Every other week or so, I’d go over to the office with the typed pages of each day’s entry and I’d staple to the back of every page all the loose cab and restaurant receipts he’d left for me in the interim — receipts that corresponded to the amounts he’d already told me over the phone. The pages were then stored in letter boxes from the stationery store.

Perhaps because of the way they were composed Warhol’s diaries read like an extended gossip column. Names are dropped with insouciance reflecting the diarist’s own celebrity. He moved in a world in which everyone was famous because they knew him. He was in the habit, says Pat Hackett, of referring to people as ‘superstars’, be they ‘the most beautiful model in New York or the delivery boy who brought her a pack of cigarettes’.

Would one be so interested in Warhol’s diaries if they did not contain the litany of rock stars, actors and artists, designers and writers? Perhaps not. But each diarist is an individual describing his or her life, for which they need make no excuses. As Kilvert indicated, curiosity is not the least of the attractions of reading a diary. Until the present age, when it is possible if one is so inclined to view every moment of complete strangers’ lives via the Internet, a diary was the closest one could get to understanding the way people lived and thought. Reading Kilvert, for example, is to get inside the mind of a nineteenth-century English country parson. His diary runs from 1870 to 1879, almost the same span as Pepys’s, but it came to light only in 1937 when the poet, novelist and critic William Plomer received 22 notebooks. His selection from them was published between 1938 and 1940.

So far, so straightforward. But Plomer, avowedly because he was pressed for space, destroyed the typed manuscript he had made of the notebooks, convinced that the originals would be preserved. They were not and out of the original 22 notebooks only two survive. We know, too, that Kilvert’s wife, to whom he was married only a matter of months before he died, destroyed others of his diaries. It is a very odd case and raises more questions than can be answered. What is particularly controversial, however, is Plomer’s assertion that he had retained everything of the diaries which was worth preserving. ‘I can assure you,’ he wrote in his selection, ‘that the best and most essential parts of the Diary are in print. I left out what seemed to me commonplace and trivial.’

It is hard to see Plomer’s action as other than arrogance. Without the commonplace and the trivial the best diaries would be bereft of much that makes them compelling and enduringly fascinating. Looking back over the diaries of the Rev. James Woodforde or Dorothy Wordsworth or even Josef Goebbels it is that which many people might not deem worth recording which sheds the most brilliant light on the diarist’s character or illuminates the times in which they lived. Often, one is struck by the ability of great diarists to combine in a single entry news either momentous or terrifying, or both, with some minor observation or irritation of everyday life. It is in a diary that our private world imperceptibly merges with the cataclysmic events which make headlines in every language.

There are around 170 diarists in this anthology. Many of those represented are well known and many are not. There are diaries, of course, everyone wishes had been written. What wouldn’t we give to read Shakespeare’s diary, or that of Jesus or Mozart or Michelangelo? If everyone left behind a diary many unsolved mysteries could be cleared up. Would the conspiracy theorists still be in a job if Marilyn Monroe or JFK had written diaries of their relationship? Sometimes we almost wish diaries into being, so overwhelming is the desire to peep behind the arras of history. There is the unfortunate case of the Hitler diaries which fooled an eminent historian and a group of overeager senior journalists who could scarcely believe their luck. Sadly, the diaries of him whose name is a byword for man’s inhumanity to man proved to be fakes, causing exquisite embarrassment to all involved in their authentication and publication. That there have been many other spoof diaries did not sweeten the pill. At least in the case of the Holocaust there were many unassailable witnesses to appalling actions of a state hell-bent on wiping out an entire race, many of whom are to be found in the pages that follow.

The idea of this anthology grew out of columns in two Scottish newspapers, Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman. Each week extracts from diaries for the corresponding period in the past were published, giving contemporary readers a flavour of what it was like in either the recent or the distant past. This book is an amplification of those columns. Entries are arranged day by day in chronological order throughout the year, an arrangement pioneered by Simon Brett in his diverting compilation The Faber Book of Diaries. Some days have more entries than others, depending on what our reading turned up. No day, unlike a real diary, has been left blank. The overriding principle of inclusion was enjoyment. Each of the 1800 or so entries was chosen because we believe it to be complete in itself, though some contribute to running stories which unfold as the year progresses. The book may be read continuously or dipped into as the days drift by. You pays your money and you takes your choice, but it’s worth bearing in mind that pleasure delayed is pleasure doubly heightened.

All the diarists have been published commercially, whether or not that was their intention, but some are now out of print. Having sampled them, readers may like to seek them out in their original context. Every attempt has been made to keep the scope of the anthology as wide as possible. Diverse nationalities, ranging in date from the seventeenth century to the present day, are represented but not out of any sense of duty. Nor was there any thought of who made the ideal diarist. Here be cads and countrymen, wits and drones, neurotics, nymphomaniacs and narcissists.

All human life is here. But not every diarist. Some were excluded because they are dull (George Gissing and Søren Kierkegaard being notable examples) others because their diaries are not dated (John Cheever and Fyodor Dostoyevsky to name but two who are conspicuous by their absence) and therefore proved unsuitable for extraction. Still others, while diarists of a high order, such as Anne Frank, have fewer entries than might be expected because their diaries work as complete entities whose potency is diminished when quoted selectively. A few fictional diaries, including Adrian Mole and George and Weedon Grossmith’s classic Diary of a Nobody, have been used, but sparingly.

The diary, as Thomas Mallon concluded, is a genre to which ‘it is impossible to ascribe formulas and standards’. Ultimately, any attempt at definition is defeated by the diarists themselves, who are the most singular of species. More than any other branch of literature, diaries revel in otherness. Like a chameleon, a diary can change its colour to suit the mood of its keeper. It can be whatever the diarist wants it to be. Kafka used his to pour out his angst and limber up for his novels and short stories; Dorothy Wordsworth brought her botanical eye to the landscape of the Lake District, providing rich source material which her brother William mined for his poetry; Virginia Woolf spoke to hers as she might to an intimate friend, in so doing etching a portrait of the artist on the edge of the abyss.

All contributed to the mosaic that is life. But one keeps coming back to William Soutar, lying on his back in bed as his health evaporated. His diary is an inspiration; it may be the work of a dying man but he lived for the moment. Soutar sagely realised better than most the ambiguous potential of a diary, imbued as it inevitably is with secrecy, and all it implies. A diary may be like drink, but it is also only as reliable as the diarist, who may be honest or corrupt or deceitful or a self-delusionist. Not only can it persuade us to betray the self, wrote Soutar, ‘it tempts us to betray our fellows also, becoming thereby an alter ego sharing with us the denigrations which we would be ashamed of voicing aloud; a diary is an assassin’s cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen. And here is this diary proving its culpability to its own harm — for how much on this page is true to the others?’

Alan Taylor

August 2000