reading

introduction:

MY FIRST DIARY

When I was seven years old my mother sent me abroad, alone. I carried one small canvas bag containing a camera and a diary-notebook. My instructions were clear: ‘Take as many pictures as you can and write down everything you see. Switzerland is a very beautiful country and you’ll see lots of important things. Don’t waste it on rubbish. If you run out of pages, buy another notebook. Don’t skimp, and keep your handwriting nice.’

My mother’s brief was this: I was being sent to Switzerland as a reporter, a documentarian. My adventure, like my diary, was not my own. I was to bring all the big events, the sights and the sounds, back home and share them among those who were less fortunate than myself. As Pooh Bear might say, it would contain Very Important Things.

From the first, my diary was never private: it belonged to my mother, my aunt, my grandmother, my brothers and cousins. My diary was already public, already owned. It was never my friend. I could tell it nothing awkward, embarrassing, shameful or pathetic. I could not be homesick or lonely or afraid or bored. My diary forced me to be brave and heroic, to muster more of the grown-up than I could manage. It asked me to be extraordinary.

As the aeroplane lurched out of Gatwick, I pulled the new diary from my bag. My aunt had chosen it, as she had chosen my penpal and my host. Its purple satin cover was intimidating, too special and occasional. What could I possibly experience that would deserve such a thing? How could I really write anything in it? I had to edit out anything that would ‘let me down’ as my mother would say. ‘Don’t let yourself down, Sally. Make an effort.’ But surely a real diary doesn’t ask its keeper to make an effort? Isn’t the whole point of a diary that it does allow you to let yourself down; to let go of the coherent and intact story, the picture-postcard version of events? My seven-year-old self wanted to scribble in it; to draw pictures of the funny people on the plane; to cry over it when I felt homesick and lonely, as I often did over the next few weeks; to paste in all the chocolate wrappers from all the chocolate bars I was given by kind Swiss aunts and uncles; to draw rude pictures of people sounding too French. None of this was going to be very satisfactory for the family album or the Show-and-Tell session at school.

Over the course of four weeks I tried to impress my diary. I saved up lots of big words and big sights and I wrote them down. I tried to make everything sound like an Asterix adventure. Every day was filled with difficult and foreign things but I managed all of them: the Gauls, the Britons, the Romans and the Swiss. I took them all on. I ate rabbit and duck and lots of smelly cheese. I spoke my well-rehearsed French phrases and wrote down new ones. I shook everyone’s hand. I made friends with a boy called Michel in the village fromagerie. I kissed him. I watched his parents chop cheese and sausages. I watched my hosts make raclettes and fondue and homemade pasta. I even tried reading Daisy Miller in French and I wrote that down (a lie; I read it in English). I recorded a few conversations and then checked my French spelling, which took several nights with a dictionary and lots of crossing-out. Who was I trying to impress and was it working? When I went to Berne I took lots of photographs of the bears but most of them were smudgy and misty. So I tried to draw the bears and describe them but I couldn’t draw and my Berol pen kept running out and I was too tired to ask for another one (in French). I became anxious. I had promised my mother I would write up every day and this day of all days had been A Very Important Day. I mustn’t let it slip away. Today had been Berne, the Swiss capital. Today had been The Berne Bears.

But what happened in between all this perfectly edifying experience? Where did the real experience go, the off-the-
record moments when my diary-self was shut off and I was just a lost child in a Swiss village staying with a family she barely knew? I remember wandering around in a large garden full of knotted trees feeling like Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden. Where was the lonely and scared seven-year-old girl? The girl who knew how to ask for the loo and for directions to the bus station but could never say that she was too tired to stay up another hour and listen to boring adults talk about ‘Madame Peterman’ and her house at the top of the hill.

The diary I brought home from Switzerland held none of the things I remember now: eating too much chocolate under the bedcovers at night; the terrible anxiety that I might die from eating a shot rabbit; the shame of being sick over a croissant after a long car journey uphill (mountains). And the crushing loneliness of being alone all the time with adults speaking French. There was nowhere to be myself, not even in my diary. Perhaps this was what it was like to be an adult: in the adult world everything was about making an effort: about ‘s’il vous plaît’ and ‘merci’. Where was the diary I dreamed of, my best friend and confidante; the soft beautiful thing I slipped under my pillow at night?

My attempts at keeping a diary were inauthentic: a bad performance in being adult. I had missed the point: personal diaries don’t ask us to be good grown-ups. Our diary is the ideal boyfriend, girlfriend or best friend, someone who won’t abandon us, however bad our tantrums and misbehaviour. Even Greg Heffley, the touchy teenager of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, reluctantly admits to dumping his real feelings in his diary or ‘journal’ as he insists on calling it (N.B.: diaries are for sissies).1 True diaries contain overspill; they batten down thoughts and feelings for which, in the everyday world, there is little time and space. Diaries can bare souls and anchor lives. Emotionally speaking, they pick up the straying and splintering pieces of ourselves, those moods, atmospheres and secrets that might otherwise ruin situations and relationships. We can say to a diary what we wouldn’t dare say to anyone else. Diarising is free therapy, a place where we can project all the mess and maelstrom of our unresolved, teenage identities.

A diary is a form of identity-practice and self-production, a workshop for our future selves. Despite what they might say, most diarists believe, as they write, in a future. But diaries are also proficient escape artists, Houdinis of the present moment, and while they may diligently try to document and reflect upon the day, they are always and inevitably behind the times, always just a little bit belated. The life led and the life recorded are not the same thing and as such, diaries are radically selected and edited biographies; they are lives with many missing parts. This book will tell the story of the diary as a biography; the story of the diarist as they move through the stumbling plot of life.

We might think of diaries as failed coming of age novels, or such novels in parts. Certainly they are uneven and subjective narratives, often repetitive and interrupted. Sometimes they fail to conclude. But at their best they can offer brilliant shards of glistening, extravagant, entertaining, inimitable, unrepeatable insight. A diary entry is as long or as brief, as rich and as interesting as the whim and interest of its writer for its subject, which brings us back to life. When we read a diary we are assessing the quality and value of a life led. Diaries invite us to judge and criticise, to sneer and snigger, to giggle and to gasp. The diarists in this book are as absorbing as the moments they relate, which is the peculiar pathos of the diary-form. Within a diary the lived moment is tantalisingly close, so near and yet so far, just around the corner, just over the page, just over there, spied in a glimpse or a glimmer. Then gone.

A diary can make for bitterly nostalgic reading. Diaries can bring uncomfortable speculations, wishful thinking, sorrow and regret. ‘What if’ is the diary’s inevitable temporal mode. What if I had, what if I hadn’t, what if I were, what if I weren’t? The diarist who reads back his own diary after a lapse of time can never escape the ‘what if’ situation. Inexorably, diaries ask their keepers to dwell, as Emily Dickinson hinted, on the possibility of alteration and self-revision, of magical thinking. The unspoken philosophy of the diary is a terrifying philosophy of change.

Virginia Woolf and Samuel Pepys

For the young Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf), a diary was somewhere she could extract the day’s most difficult and irritating happenings.2 Her diary helped sort and smooth the day’s sharp edges, which, as a child, are often constituted by other people’s plans. Woolf’s early entries are full of the disturbances made by other people, a comic-book sequence of silly social arrangements:

Sunday 7 February

Got up about half past 10. Adrian and Nessa and I went out into the gardens, and so did Stella and Jack, but separately – The ice on the pond all thawed, and boats sailing – The dogs have all got their muzzles off by this time … Nessa waved her umbrella wildly and screamed at Shag and the spotted one, till they slunk away in dismay. Eustace Hill and Scamp for luncheon. After lunch, Mrs. Kay and her two little Kays came, and the two little Kays examined the bugs they are going to collect. Finished the 3rd vol of Scott, and began the fourth, and finished at last Queen Elizabeth – Now the question is what shall become of her – She is far too beautiful to lie about the nursery at the mercy of the ink pot or Pauline, and far too big to live in any of our bookshelves. Bognor settled on for tomorrow. Two vols. of Scott and the Newcomes shall go with me.3

Barely fifteen, Virginia Stephen knows only too well that adult society is harried, hurried and reliably absurd. Family life is a mess and a muddle. Nothing or no one is peaceful. Hallways and doorways are full of bodies and loud voices. Doors are opening and closing. Greetings and farewells are constant and draining. There are too many smiles and tears.

The only option is to go outside, but even outside nothing is very seemly. Gestures are exaggerated and overdone. Umbrellas are as wild as excitable dogs. Dogs, people and objects all merge. It doesn’t really matter where we are – inside or outside – because nothing is still or calm. People are coming and going, conversations and plans are interrupted, the day is all at sea.

Having grown up in a house full of people, I recognise the choreography of chaos that is daily family life. Hallways and doorways are permanently stuffed with people and their belongings: wellies, anoraks, bikes, buckets and spades, prams and babywear. There are always obstructions and interruptions. Moments are precarious and invasions are imminent. Space is never yours and there is never enough. As my mother liked to put it of ‘us lot’ (twelve children, of whom four were hers), ‘There’s never a moment’s peace with you lot hanging about … pests, that’s what you are … pests! For God’s sake go and play outside!’ For my mother, who hated bugs and insects – they ruined her beloved roses – her children were just something else she’d prefer to spray away.

Diaries plunge us into the whirlpool of other people’s lives. Before long we are up to our reading-waist in it, whatever ‘it’ is. Reading Woolf’s early diary, I sense that something seismic is going on in her family life. Emotion is charged, feelings are fraught, familial patterns are suddenly shifting. A young man has stepped across the threshold; an engagement has just been announced. Virginia’s beloved half-sister, Stella Duckworth, has recently become betrothed to Jack Hills. Soon twenty-six-year-old Stella will disappear into a new life and Virginia’s only remaining maternal presence will be as good as dead and gone.

Stella’s marriage is a threat to the old way of family life. Categories of existence are no longer so neat. Where does Virginia fit without Stella? This is a moment of painful revision. So far knowledge and experience have been built upon sets and lists: of people (and their dogs), books and places. Virginia clings to her categories as a mainstay. Her diary helps her with that.

Categories and lists are a means of dealing with the precarious shifts and movements in adult life. One way of dealing with this family schism is to begin to record people separately; to remember in what order they left the house for Hyde Park pond; to draw up a list of moving parts, then carefully parse them into phrases. To remember who you love better and best; to turn your diary into a geometry of affection.

Who you are in relation to others is important for understanding your place in the world. ‘Adrian, Nessa and I’ now move about separately from ‘Jack and Stella’. New sets have formed. When she writes, ‘Now the question is what shall become of her’, teenage Virginia is not only speaking of her cherished biography of Queen Elizabeth. She also means Stella. Stella is her far too beautiful volume, her most precious lived chapter, her motherly monarch. ‘Now’ is also the beginning of losing Stella: Stella is still there but Stella, in some sense, has already gone.

Diaries are discreet managers of gaps and intervals in thinking and feeling, where thinking and feeling become too painful. The most unorthodox of narrators, our diary voice permits all sorts of breakdowns in method of being, all kinds of inconsistency and irrelevancy, all manner of distraction method and technique. ‘Now’ is the extended moment that is Stella gone for ever. Now is the beginning of mourning.

Yet there is something beyond the silly and hysterical parts of Virginia’s social world, something more steady and civil than the arrival of bothersome people with pesky-sounding dogs: Virginia’s beloved books, her constantly circulating library, her easy traffic with books. Her list of books ends most days. Books seal off her world and comfort her mind. It is more important to consider where she might store her large history of Queen Elizabeth than to think too much about the dreaded trip to Bognor. Bognor is more Stella and Jack; Bognor is betrayal.

For fifteen-year-old Virginia Stephen, diary writing is a form of note-taking during a period of painful familial flux. Observations are geared towards social adjustments and new arrangements. But beneath the social recording there is a very serious cataloguing of books read and raced through, books offering a solid bedrock of words, books bringing calm. Her diary is a place for recording her massive mental advance by reading, her conquistador-style raid on the history of England through George Babington Macaulay, Rome through Livy and the French Revolution through Thomas Carlyle. Reading and recording social history can help her face the familial flux. Tucked at the bottom of her diary entries is her private archive, her deepest storeroom, her library-museum, her ever expanding set of shelves, her future, secret self.

After Bognor – filled mainly with wind and rain and difficult bicycle rides – Virginia and her brothers and sisters return to their house at Hyde Park Gate. Among a general atmosphere of gloom, preparations for Stella’s wedding begin. Losing Stella is another form of losing her mother, her mother who died two years before. Losing Stella and beginning her first (surviving) diary are closely related. Stella, in a sense, is Woolf’s first diary, Stella and her sister Nessa. Entry after entry begins with a roll call of her sisters’ names, reminders of the structure of her affections, the source of her deepest feelings: ‘Nessa went to drawing in the morning. Stella and I meant to go to High St. but she insisted upon putting the books in the nursery tidy, so that it was too late to do anything, but bicycle once or twice up and down the road.’4 As much as you might love them, sisters take up your time. They boss you about. Sisters have their own ideas and plans. Who and where you are in the sibling line determines who you will be later in life. Virginia’s diary reminds her of this. Nessa always sounds far more important because she is always going ‘to drawing’. Nessa is also drawing herself away.

For much of her life Virginia Woolf will be a mourner of lost sisters, sisters who once arranged her, sisters she arranged herself around. Later there will also be lost brothers. But for now, and perhaps for ever, she will be enthralled to the idea of Stella and Nessa, her sisterly sweethearts, her first diary loves.

Then, in the midst of all this packing and compressing of lives, arrives Samuel Pepys, great naval administrator and diarist, talented overseer of chaos.

Pepys is Virginia’s appointed household god and historical intercessor. He is her ‘dear Pepys’. Among the turmoil of Stella leaving, we learn that Virginia has been taking comfort in reading the diaries of Samuel Pepys, all six volumes. Pepys is her diary hero and role model, another father figure who slips in from the calm recesses of her reading life. It seems appropriate that the chronicler of the most seismic shift in English history – the reinstatement of Charles II following the traumatic events of the interregnum period and the execution of Charles I – should preside over this shaky moment in family history. Dear Pepys, she tells herself, will be ‘the only calm thing in the house’.5

Pepys arrives at the end of a family era. On Friday, April 2nd 1897, Virginia Stephen tells her diary: ‘This is the last Sunday of Stella Duckworth.’ The sentence reads like an execution. Next week Stella will be part of the entourage of ‘Mr and Mrs Hills’ waiting to cross France for their honeymoon. The house is in chaos, the ‘drawing rooms are still topsy turvey and will not recover’. It is ‘the beginning of the end’, the end of the precocious child, Virginia Stephen, and the beginning of the future novelist, essayist, critic, playwright, diarist, letter-writer, wife, friend, lover and sister still, Virginia Woolf.6

Diaries are repositories for moments often missed in the humdrum routine of daily life. They tell small stories unheard and unspoken. They keep secrets. They tell separate, hidden histories. But all stories need good tellers, and, together, Woolf and Pepys might be considered the ideal godparents of the diary’s story and its long, historical habit. Taken together, the diaries of Woolf and Pepys seem to do everything: order space and time; collect information; reflect upon history both near and far; join the gaps between the life lived and the life upon reflection. But more than this, Woolf and Pepys include us in conversation; they are, above all, good conversationalists. They talk as generously to us, their snooping readers, as they talk to themselves. We read their diaries because they seem to invite us in; because so much of what their diaries cover is the petty and the personal as much as the larger picture. We feel human in their company and so we are grateful, relieved.

Diaries need not always be grand. On the contrary, they allow us to stoop quite low. The diaries of Samuel Pepys and Virginia Woolf are littered with complaints – snipes and jabs at servants, lovers, husbands and wives, domestic arrangements, the small and petty details of daily circumstances, the bother of life. At the same time their diaries offer generous historic panoramas, they pay attention to grander schemes. In Pepys’s case this is the Dutch wars of the 1660s and the Great Plague; in the case of Woolf it is two world wars, one of which she lived through and the other whose looming terror she recorded until days before her death. In their doting commitment to the precarious art of diary writing, Woolf and Pepys are this book’s heroes.

Diaries and journals are a means of becoming, an aid in growing up or growing older. Diaries also assist in our favourite patterns of regression. In the company of Pepys (the fourth volume already), young Woolf admits to going to bed ‘very furious and tantrumical’.7 Her days are not going as she would wish, and so she supplements them with a furious amount of historical reading. Pepys is part of this, for Pepys reminds her of the longevity of the diary’s promise, its confident, rather bolshie handling of history. Pepys takes her away from the petty dilemmas of what going-away dress would best suit Stella; what colour of bridesmaid’s dress she should wear. Woolf tells us that ‘it is a miracle that I escape to write this.’ But escape she does, consistently and persistently. What inspires the miracle – the daily commitment to recording herself in time – is Pepys: ‘Gave back Sterling and got Pepys diary.’ It is Monday, March 29th 1897.8 Already she has managed three full months of her diary life. She has another fifty to go. Pepys spurs her on.

Spending Your Personal Time

Historically speaking, diaries emerge from a system of account-keeping: the public world of work and production. In the fourteenth century Florentine merchants kept ‘family books’ or ‘libri di famiglia’, as extensions of their household accounts. The roots of the modern-day diary emerge from this practice.10 The father of the diary, Samuel Pepys, was a good diarist perhaps because his professional life asked him to be a good accountant. As the navy’s leading administrator and keeper of its books, diary writing was but a step away. We will never know exactly why Pepys began to keep a diary, but certainly there must have been some sense of wanting to say something about the tumult of contemporary events – the dramatic restoration of Charles II – as well as an urge to reflect upon his own life. Political history was urgently felt and Pepys wrote himself, quite literally, into the documentary scheme of things.

Whatever the case, on January 1st 1660 he began writing in a brown calf-bound notebook, a cut above the common memorandum book. Pepys framed its pages with red ink, ruling margins along the top and outer limits of the pages: seven inches down, five inches across. Supplementing the diary with separate sheets of paper or what he later called a ‘by-book’, Pepys often made notes on his diary entries before writing them up.11 We might think of this as a form of preparation before the final composition, before he poured the substance of his day into that red-ruled frame.11

As Pepys demonstrates so well, the modern diary emerges from a mentality of expenditure, a system of daily account-keeping in which time and the unit of the day are the chief resource. Suddenly a day could mean something not only chronologically but also fiscally. A day became a unit of time worth noting but also worth spending well.12 Pepys’s visit to John Cade’s Cornhill stationers in December 1659 marked the beginning of a new relationship with dailiness.

In its crudest form, the diary is a series of dated recordings.13 Dates hover over the beginning of any entry, anticipating stories and events, something worth recording. To a great extent, a diary entry is not complete unless christened by a date. Samuel Pepys and Virginia Woolf, central characters in this book’s story, both dutifully dated their entries. Diaries begin with thinking about the time and date, the place and space of a moment, an event; the modern-day date diary or personal organiser is simply an extension of the eighteenth-century almanac. By 1792 America’s The Old Farmer’s Almanac was selling as well as the Bible. Designed to fit inside a pocket, the almanac was the eighteenth-century equivalent of the iPhone or Filofax.14 With the arrival of the modern calendar, the day was secured as the conventional unit of lived time. The diary privileges personal moments. Take London’s Plague year of 1665: Pepys turns the year into his moment. Reading Pepys that year we are comforted by the extraordinary difference between his circumstances and those of his fellow citizens. But diaries privilege difference. They produce individual strands of life – or ‘ligatures’ as Woolf put it – which tie themselves into unique formations.15 Diaries produce inimitable cycles of life such that one year can never be read like another. They are begun in the belief that life is a unique and interesting business.

In the late sixties, John Lennon submitted a ‘diary for the future’ to Aspen, the self-styled ‘multimedia magazine in a box’. It began like this:

January 1 Wednesday, 1969

Got up – went to work – came home

Watched telly – went to bed.

January 2 Thursday, 1969

Got up – went to work – came home

Watched telly – went to bed.

‘The Lennon Diary 1969’16

A facsimile of a pocket diary, Lennon’s contribution was designed to be a projection of the following year. Almost every entry was filled with the same banal report: ‘Got up – went to work – came home – Watched telly – went to bed.’ The only relief to this tedious litany comes with a holiday entry on July 14th: ‘Went to Majorca’, followed by a series of blank days and then, on July 26th, the cheeky, ‘Came back’.

Lennon’s arty attack on the diary is also an attack on the humble unit of the day, steeped as it is (for most of us) in ordinariness. The diary, after all, celebrates ordinariness and embraces wholeheartedly what Lennon’s former band mate Paul McCartney lyricised as ‘just another day’. So why bother recording it? Why trespass upon someone’s private life, even if he is John Lennon, with the presumption that we will find something interesting? In Lennon’s pop-art world the unit of the day has become so dispensable, so fashionably wasteful as to be completely blank. The future is nothing more than a mechanical repetition of the past. Life has no mystery and days can never be anything special or sacred.

As Daniel Defoe’s most deprived of diarists Robinson Crusoe reminds us, counting days is a rather desperate form of survival; certainly it is not living, but, rather, getting by. In the twenty-first century our sense of time is at once so precious and debased, so far removed from the sacred liturgical order of the day divided into prayers – the medieval tradition of the Book of Hours – that one day is pretty much like any other. Today, diary-keeping is an endangered species of experience; the time and space for the diary’s reflective art has been lost in our compulsion to dash through our hours and days.

Some of us still keep pocket diaries – the equivalent of a pocket watch or egg-timer – as a means of keeping ourselves in temporal check. But since the late nineties pocket diaries have gradually turned digital, from the BlackBerry or Palm operating systems – once reserved for the smart corporate business man or woman – to the now almost socially ubiquitous smartphone.17 These days, from my iPhone or iPad I can keep track of my future movements and obligations through slick digitalised calendar and diary functions.18 I can also, if I wish, upload ‘Chronicle’ to my iPad or iPhone, a journaling app that allows me to paste images alongside my typed text. If I use PhatPad, an app suitable for iPhones, I can generate, by means of a stylus, the feel and effect of handwriting.19 In 2015 the intimate world of paper has all but disappeared. Only a few of us cling to the old-fashioned notebook or journal in which to write our thoughts. I do so mainly as a form of indulgent nostalgia for the child I once was, flitting about the world with a pretty notebook and Berol pen, a butterfly with paper. I write on paper in order to feel something more visceral, more real. I remember the weight of paper on bare skin as I sat, perched, at the end of the pier looking out to sea, paper crinkled at the edges from a salt wind.

At the university where I teach, I see my students reverting, particularly during exam time, to the comfort of rainbow-
coloured pens, ornate journals and notebooks. Paper is human, and something like skin; it is reminiscent of schooldays and childhood and earlier forms of learning. Writing inside their A4-sized notepads my students take comfort from close contact with paper and pen, the structure of carefully ruled lines. They carry notebooks around like close companions and friends; theirs is a private world of words placed in the right place at the right time. There is something magical in their thinking.

But how much of this culture of tight temporal organisation is dedicated to actual thinking? If we were to ask John Lennon, he’d probably say that few of us are in the business of thinking because none of us has anything much to say; we can leave the saying to pop stars. But then Lennon is making fun of our sense of self-appointment: none of us is doing anything particularly important, certainly nothing sacred. What we are doing is watching time shuttle by. A diary then is also a form of elegy. Anticipating its blank pages, we mourn for what we have just had, what we will never have again.

Diary Life Cycles

At the heart of this book is the delicate membrane between public and private life, a place requiring subtlety and discretion where even in a mature stage of life, and with wisdom on your side, one can falter and fall. This is the place of the diary’s spine, the thin vertebrae holding together, but also separating, the joints of public and private life. In public, one cannot afford to fantasise or fictionalise. To do so is to grant your adversaries too many words to play with. Other stories might be written: false ones. Pepys understood this and tucked his diary safely away, encoded in Shelton shorthand, on the dusty shelves of his library.

Diaries embody life cycles. For Pepys, the day is a comforting cycle of routine events, a familiar genus of experience. His day typically begins, ‘To my office’, ‘Up and to my office’, ‘This morning I was sent for’, ‘To the coffee club’, ‘This morning’, ‘This noon’, ‘Up early’ and ends more often than not with, ‘And so to bed’. In Pepys’s ‘Up and to’ there is the sound of swift and efficient action, a body marshaling itself through a fastidious routine. Pepys moves through his day with rigour, so that when the mischief comes, when the cycle goes off course, we relish it. Pepys waking to the sound of the rain at 3am, Pepys startled by the loud mewing of his cat locked in the chamber, his cat leaping upon his bed, are delightful and picaresque disruptions. Suddenly, the day is more 3D.20 Unexpectedly, we are in the intimate middle of real life.

Virginia Woolf lived and moved through her diary from adolescence to maturity, and though she did not die old, her diary did grow up. As a sort of living organism, it is a textual relative of the green caterpillar lying snug and hidden in the hollow on the Sussex Downs Woolf writes of in her Asheham house diary soon after she is married. Over the course of the days, the caterpillar becomes a chrysalis. A careful and patient entomologist, Woolf watches its slow daily transformation. Not everything she sees is pretty. Metamorphosis, in this case, is a truly ‘horrid sight’: a monstrous ‘snake in movement’ with its ‘head turning from side to side’.21 Life as it is born is often grotesque, immobile and helpless. It changes colour, acquires spots. For a moment, perhaps longer, it seems quite monstrous. Woolf’s caterpillar is insect life transforming itself, a species coming into a coherent form of being, moving through the peculiar phases of its life cycle.

Woolf’s diary enacts a similar process: eventually, by the end of its cycle, an entire life will have spun out through its pages. A coherent species of living and being will have been produced. All the fluttering paper and nervous movements of the hands, the quick scribbling, the peculiar elegance of the handwriting, will produce inky spots and markings of peculiar rarity. Nothing quite like it will have been seen before. Here is a unique record of life as it was lived, with enough speed, carelessness, gaps and exaggeration to feel real.

Diaries, like life, go through stages. This book traces those stages of life as they move and spin, often fleetingly, and with some flutter and trepidation, from chrysalis to butterfly, from youth to old age. Diaries run back and forth between private and public worlds, reporting on both. This book will do the same. Loosely speaking, the first part deals with the diary as a private entity: what Woolf called, in relation to Pepys, her ‘secret companion’.22 The second will focus on the diary as it reports on the public world: Pepys in the hurly-burly world of naval administration and royal affairs, Woolf commenting on the horrifying advance of Hitler.

Diaries establish an identity. They can help us find a place in the world. A diary can provide space for contemplation of the wider world through exploration of nature and through travel. I start by looking at youthful and confessional diarists, such as Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag and the young Ralph Waldo Emerson, who use their diaries as a form of self-creation. I then turn to diarists writing about time spent in a particular place, home and away, such as Virginia Woolf in her Asheham home in Sussex, and James Boswell in London. Nature brings comfort and a moment of pause; it yields a period of reflection. In natural spaces, the diarist often finds an ideal diary habitat.

But private dalliances cannot last for ever. Diaries rely upon a period of daily solitude which life does not always grant. Events rudely interrupt. In the second, more public part of this book, we encounter diarists entering the public and political world, including America’s second President John Adams, British politician Alan Clark and diarists of war such as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh. Just as public life brings with it all the possibilities of sparkling success and self-
promotion, so it also brings all the threat and danger of a rapid fall from grace. In the world of politics and celebrity, scandal is lurking closely around the corner. The final chapter examines what happens when diaries contain dangerous information, the pain and disorder of scandal. Will the diarist survive with his reputation intact, and, if so, who will curate and control how much of his story is told?

By 1668, and at the height of his public success, Pepys is struggling to contain a stressful amount of potential scandal. His affair with his former servant, Deb Willet, has reached a damaging crisis. Elizabeth, his wife, is threatening to tell the world about it, and his days are spent running to and fro between wife and lover. In desperation, he turns to his diary to confess his continuing folly, hoping that the ritual of confession will bring it to an end. But diaries, though they might help us begin projects, cannot stop the ongoing mess and muddle of life.