Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Keeping a Journal

4 November 1977. 9.30 a.m. The painter Keith Vaughan, dying of cancer, opens his journal and prepares to record the moment of his death: “The capsules have been taken with some whisky,” Vaughan writes and keeps on writing, quietly waiting for oblivion to arrive. “I don’t quite believe anything has happened though the bottle is empty. At the moment I feel very much alive… I cannot believe I have committed suicide since nothing has happened.” Vaughan writes on for a few more lines and then the editor adds, “At this point the words lapse into illegibility and stop.”

In December 1945, Edmund Wilson opens his journal to log the beginning of a love affair: “I loved her body which I had first seen in a bathing suit — taller than my usual physical type — there was nothing about it that displeased me — her breasts were low, firm and white, perfect in their kind, very pink outstanding nipples, no hair, no halo round them, slim pretty tapering legs, feet with high insteps and toes that curled down and out.”

On 1 May 1792, Gilbert White, a country curate, opens his journal to observe that, “Grass grows very fast. Honeysuckles very fragrant and most beautiful objects! Columbines make a figure. My white thorn, which hangs over the earth house, is now one sheet of bloom, and has pendulous boughs down to the ground.”

On 21 June 1918, Katherine Mansfield opens her journal to ask, “What is the matter with today? It is thin, white, as lace curtains are white, full of ugly noises (e.g. people opening the drawers of a cheap chest and trying to shut them again). All food seems stodgy and indigestible — no drink is hot enough. One looks hideous, hideous in the glass — bald as an egg — one feels swollen — and all one’s clothes are tight. And everything is dusty, gritty — the cigarette ash crumbles and falls — the marigolds spill their petals over the dressing table. In a house nearby someone is trying to tune a cheap cheap piano.”

Four journal entries by four compulsive journal-keepers, each journal functioning for its author in a different way, satisfying different needs. Why did these people feel the urge to write these observations down? What is the strange allure of the journal? What does it do to your life?

It’s hard to come to any conclusive answer, to explain why a journal is something you have to keep. The simple reason is that the journal is all things to all men and women, a kind of literary text that is famously hard to define, and whose raison d’etre has rarely anything to do with fame or notoriety, narrative excitement or exoticism. There are many sorts of journals: journals written with both eyes fixed firmly on posterity and others that were never designed to be read by anyone else but the writer. There are journals content to tabulate the banal and humdrum details of ordinary lives and journals meant expressly to function as a witness to momentous events of history. There are journals that act as erotic stimulants or a psychoanalytic crutch and there are journals designed simply to function as an aide-memoire, perhaps as a rough draft for a later, more polished account of a life, and so on. But buried within these varying ambitions and motivations is a common factor which unites all these endeavours — the aspiration to be honest, to tell the truth. The implication being that in the privacy of this personal record things will be un-censored, things will be said and observations made that couldn’t or wouldn’t be uttered in a more public forum. Hence the adjective “intimate” so often appended to the noun “journal.” The idea of secret diaries, of intimate journals somehow goes to the core of this literary form: there is a default-setting of intimacy — of confession — in the private record of a life that not only encourages the writing of journals but also explains their fascination to the reader.

In the case of Keith Vaughan this intimacy reaches unparalleled levels of candour. I can’t think of any other writer who has ever been writing deliberately at the very moment of his death, trying to record the last moments of conscious life. This in itself is enough to make Vaughan’s journal unique but it is typical of his tone of adamantine honesty throughout: his is the most unsparingly, harrowingly honest of the dozens of journals I have read over the years. I had the opportunity once to see the manuscript and the sight of that final page with the words tailing off into weakening squiggles freezes the soul. It is as if the terminal downward slash of the pen scarring the page (as his hand went limp and slid away) symbolizes the fall into the void that Vaughan longed for and had at that moment entered. And I wonder if there is something even more symbolic in that image that brings us closer to the root of the compulsion, the potent need that some of us feel to keep a journal. Vaughan’s marks on the page and their sudden cessation seem to me to sum up what is taking place in journal-keeping in a fundamental way: we keep a journal because we want to leave a trace of some kind. Like the prisoner who scratches the passing days on his cell wall, or the adolescent who carves initials into the trunk of a tree, or even an animal depositing his spoor, the act of writing a journal seems to say: I was here — here is some record of my journey.

My own serious journal-keeping has two distinct phases. The first began when I was nineteen, in 1971. I kept an almost daily journal for two years and then suddenly stopped, for reasons I now can’t recall — the journal gives no clue. I took it up again ten years later in 1981, and have kept it going steadily (though not daily) ever since. So, approximately half my life has now been set down in journal-form, but what’s interesting to me is that the two journals have quite different intentions. The first was motivated by a drive for total candour: it’s an urge common to many journal-keepers, that impulsion to set down on paper exactly what was going on in your life with no shame, prudery or cover-up. The second journal is of the aide-memoire variety: in 1981 my first novel had just been published and I thought it would be intriguing simply to record the everyday details, the ups and downs, the checks and frustrations, successes and failures of my writing life as time went by — and the second novel was published and then the third and then the fourth, the fifth and the sixth, should I ever reach those numbers. And so it has gone on over the last twenty-two years: it’s now a document of close to 2,000 pages and of abiding interest to its author. I refer back to it constantly.

But a couple of years ago I decided to reread the journal I had kept between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one. It was a disturbing experience, like encountering a total stranger, a doppelgánger who had lived my life, but whom I barely recognized. The account I would give now of the factual events of those years would be essentially the same but the psychological and intellectual content seem to belong to somebody else. The journal is full of the usual undergraduate pretensions and musings and faithfully recalls the torrid roller-coaster that was my emotional life at the time. But there was also a kind of pitiless self-examination of almost everything I did that I could not remember ever undertaking. And I was very hard on myself — often insulting myself crudely and ruthlessly in the second person (and not very imaginatively: “you bloody fool,” “you stupid cretin,” sort of thing). Clearly, I had been much unhappier then than I thought, much more troubled and insecure. Yet if I had been asked before I reread the journal what I had been like in my late teens I would have said carefree, easy-going, relatively content.

But the hard evidence of my journal is irrefutably there and I value its honesty and have to acknowledge its truth. However, this schism between my memory of my earlier self and the historical facts made me wonder if the journal served another, more covert purpose for its keeper, namely to chart that progression of selves that we are at various stages of our life. We do change as people — even though our fundamental natures may remain the same. Whether we are in love or out of love, rich or poor, happy or sad, healthy or beset by illness will affect the self that we are at any given moment. Ageing and the getting of wisdom contribute to this constant metamorphosis as well but, as we move through time, it’s as if we shed these selves in the way a snake will slough off its skin: the glossy new scales bearing no imprint of the weathered, dull integument that was once there. And it seems too that we can be certain that our memories will play us false about our past: only the journal remains as witness to the series of individuals we were in our lives.

This thesis that we are an anthology, a composite of many selves, was put into practice when I decided to write my last novel, Any Human Heart, as the fictional intimate journal of a fictional writer. Over 500 pages, from 1923 to 1991, the protagonist ages from a seventeen-year-old schoolboy to an eighty-five-year-old man. The various journals he keeps during his life, among other things, record these transformations in himself. It was a paradoxical exercise because in writing the fictional journal I had to remain true to another constant that is a defining feature of the journal-form. For the journal — relating as it does a life-story, or part of a life-story — does so in a manifestly different manner than the other forms available, whether biography, memoir, or autobiography. All these last three are fashioned by the view backward, informed by the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Only the journal truly reflects, in its dogged chronology, the day-by-day, week-by-week progress of a life. Events have not yet acquired their retrospective gloss and significance; meetings and people, projects and schemes have not matured or developed. The impenetrable judgements of the future more often than not undermine the honest analysis of the present. That job you were so excited about has not yet turned tedious; that thriving dot-com company you sunk your savings into has still to go belly-up; that pretty woman/good-looking man you met at the party last night has not become your wife/husband — and so on. The journal has to have the same random shape as a human life: governed by chance and the haphazard, by that aggregate of good luck and bad luck that everybody receives. Biography and autobiography dilute this inexorable fact, shaped as they are by the wisdom of hindsight and the manipulations of ego, and are literary forms that are, in many ways, as artificial and contrived as fiction. But, by definition, a journal cannot do this: it’s written as the future unspools into the present. There are glances backward, true, but in its essence it mimics and reflects our own wayward passage through time like no other form of writing.

There is one further fundamental stipulation I would make: no true journal worthy of the name can be published while its author is alive. Only a posthumous appearance guarantees the prime condition of honesty. However interesting, journals and diaries published while their author is alive seem to me (with very few exceptions) to be bogus in some crucial way. This is particularly true of politicians’ journals — Clark, Benn, Castle et al. They have a different agenda (their very publication makes that point) and thus they can’t be totally honest, certainly not about their author, and thus they lose their legitimacy as true journals — they’ve sacrificed that potent alchemy of confession and confidentiality that all great journals require — for the quick fix of controversy and renown. If you’re going to publish your intimate journal while you are still alive you reduce it to another category of writing — your journal becomes a form of bastard-journalism or bastard-autobiography. There’s something inherently contradictory about being a living writer acclaimed for your published journals: you have to be dead to escape the various charges of vanity, of special-pleading, of creeping amour-propre. More to the point, because of these suspicions, we can’t read such journals in the same way: only the posthumous journal can be read purely.

However parochial they are, however apparently insignificant the entries, the pages of a journal offer us, as readers, a chance to live the writer’s life as he or she lived it, after he or she has lived it. On occasion, we are provided with the curious godlike knowledge of their destiny. Reading Virginia Woolf on 26 February 1941, a month before she commits suicide, provokes a bizarre conjunction of subjectivity and objectivity. She comments: “Food becomes an obsession. I grudge giving away a spice bun. Curious — age or the war? Never mind. Adventure. Make solid. But shall I ever write again one of those sentences that gives me intense pleasure?” We actually know the negative answer to that question: we share the quiddity of her day and at the same time note that her vital clock is nearly wound down. Similarly, on 16 May 1763 James Boswell writes: “I drank tea at Mr Davies’s in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see. Mr Davies introduced me to him. As I knew his mortal antipathy to the Scotch, I cried to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come from.’” As he describes his first sight of Dr Johnson we participate in the thrill of the young man’s meeting with the literary lion but there’s an extra frisson delivered by the foreknowledge that the mortal antipathy won’t frustrate the riches that ensued from that encounter.

But often we read with the same ignorance as that of the journal-keeper as he writes. The mundane flow of the day engulfs us similarly. Francis Kilvert notes on 21 September 1870: “Went to the Bronith. People at work in the orchard gathering up the windfall apples for early cider. The smell of the apples very strong. Beyond the orchards the lone aspen was rustling loud and mournfully a lament for the departure of summer.” We are with Kilvert that day. “The smell of the apples very strong” bears a kind of witness to 21 September 1870 that has as cogent and undeniable a validity as any other. Which brings me to the final characteristic of journal-keeping: it is the most democratic form of writing available, perhaps even more so than a letter. The letter presupposes another person in order to function; the intimate journal is designed to be read by only one pair of eyes, the author’s (even though others may be hoped for one distant day). Therefore it is judged by standards of truth, integrity, honesty and immediacy that require no special education, talent or gift. Poetry, the novel, biography, the essay and journalism are weighed up by different criteria, different forms of evaluation — and therefore different categories of success and failure too. D. H. Lawrence defined the novel as “the bright book of life.” Not everyone can write a novel but everyone is, in theory, capable of keeping a journal. And if you keep a journal — a true intimate journal — then it becomes, in a real sense, the book of your life and is therefore a unique document. But there is more to it than simply that, I feel, for we all share the same fate and — as we live, as long as we live — we all submit to the same condition: the human condition. In that case, then, the book of a life, an intimate journal — if it is true, if it is honest — will speak to everyone who has a chance to read it: it will be, in a curious way, both completely individual and universal. This is what happens when we read a journal: “The smell of the apples very strong” is, in its own way, perfect and unimprovable—21 September 1870 is fixed for us, for ever.

2003