The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life 025304698X, 9780253046987

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The Diary

THE DIARY The Epic of Everyday Life

EDITED BY BATSHEVA BEN-AMOS AND DAN BEN-AMOS

INDIANA UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2020 by Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos Excerpt(s) from THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK: THE REVISED CRITICAL EDITION by Netherlands Institute for War Document, translation copyright © 2003 by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 730 words from THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, THE REVISED CRITICAL EDITION by Anne Frank, edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler, translated by Susan Massotty (Viking, 2003) copyright © The Anne Frank-Fonds, Basle, Switzerland, 1991. English translation copyright © Doubleday a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc., 1995. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data Names: Ben-Amos, Batsheva, editor. | Ben-Amos, Dan, editor. Title: The diary : the epic of everyday life / edited by Batsheva BenAmos and Dan Ben-Amos ; Description: Revised edition. | Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019055943 (print) | LCCN 2019055944 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253046987 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253046994 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253046963 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Diaries—History and criticism. | Authors—Biography— History and criticism. | Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. | Literature, Modern—19th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN4390 .D485 2020 (print) | LCC PN4390 (ebook) | DDC 809/.983—dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2019055943 LC ebook record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2019055944 1 2 3 4 5  25 24 23 22 21 20

CONTENTS



Acknowledgments ix

Introduction / Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos

1

Part I: Diary Theories 1  |  The Practice of Writing a Diary / Philippe Lejeune and Catherine Bogaert, translated from French by Dagmara Meijers-Troller

25



2  |  Feminist Interpretations of the Diary / Kathryn Carter

39



3  |  The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing / Julie Rak

58

Part II: The Creation of a Diary Canon 4  |  British Diary Canon Formation / Dan Doll

75

5  |  The Diary in France and French-Speaking Countries / Michel Braud, translated from French by Dagmara Meijers-Troller

88

6  |  The American Diary Canon / Steven E. Kagle

105







7  |  Personal Writings and the Quest for National Identity in Brazil / Sergio da Silva Barcellos

126

Part III: The Transformation of the Manuscript



8  |  The Complicated Publication History of the Diaries of Anne Frank / Suzanne L. Bunkers

147



9  |  Digitized Diary Archives / Desirée Henderson

163

Part IV: The Travel Diary

10  |  British and North American Travel Writing and the Diary / Tim Youngs

179



11  |  Travel Diaries in Australia / Agnieszka Sobocinska

195



12  |  Travel Diaries in Imperial China / James M. Hargett

209

Part V: The Private Diary 13  |  The Contemporary Personal Diary in France / Françoise Simonet-Tenant, translated from French by Dagmara Meijers-Troller

231



14  |  Writing the Self, Writing History in Palestine / Kimberly Katz

247



15  |  Sharing Secrets in Nineteenth-Century America / Marilyn Ferris Motz

261



16  |  The Literary Author as Diarist / Elizabeth Podnieks

274

vi | Contents

Part VI: The Diary in Political Conflict

17  |  The American Civil War: Confederate Women’s Diaries / Kimberly Harrison

299



18  |  The Archive as a Diary of Resistance: Hendrik Witbooi, Nama Revolutionary, 1884–1905 / Elizabeth R. Baer

317

19  |  Diary and Narrative: French Soldiers and World War I / Leonard V. Smith

333



20  |  The Stalin-Era Diary / Jochen Hellbeck

348



21  |  On Holocaust Diaries / Batsheva Ben-Amos

364

22  |  Estonian Women’s Deportation Diaries / Leena Kurvet-Käosaar

383

Part VII: Online Diaries

23  |  From Puritans to Fitbit: Self-Improvement, Self-Tracking, and How to Keep a Diary / Kylie Cardell

399



24  |  Online Diaries and Blogs / Jill Walker Rettberg

411



25  |  A Journey through Two Decades of Online Diary Community / Lena Buford

425



26  |  GeoCities and Diaries on the Early Web / James Baker

441



Index 457

Contents | vii

Acknowledgments

This volume was consolidated through many years of teaching and research on the diary at the University of Pennsylvania in the Departments of History, English, Comparative Literature, and the College of Liberal and Professional Studies. Batsheva Ben-Amos realized there was a necessity for a volume such as this in the rich and growing field of diary scholarship, from her contact with students and other scholars. We are grateful to all the authors who entrusted us with their most valuable essays that contribute to the breadth and depth of this volume and demonstrate the significance of the diary and its study to research in the humanities and social studies. We thank Philippe Lejeune, who offered valuable support and suggestions. And we thank Suzanne L. Bunkers, who helped with advice at the initial stages of the volume’s preparation. Dagmara Meijers-Troller translated three French articles into English. Sadly, we learned of her passing in 2018. Thanks go to Janice Meyerson for her editorial assistance. Special thanks go to the archivists of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—Ronald Coleman, Vincent Slatt, and Megan Lewis—for the tireless help they provided Batsheva Ben-Amos in her research on the Holocaust diaries. Very valuable was the technical assistance of our son Itamar Ben-Amos, who helped us navigate the maze of the digital world. The critical comments of the anonymous peer reviewers helped us shape the submitted manuscript into the current volume. Finally, we would like to note our gratitude to Janice E. Frisch from Indiana University Press, who accompanied the transformation of this anthology of essays from manuscript into a published volume with wise, insightful, and perceptive guidance.

 ix

The Diary

Introduction Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos

On January 4, 2018, the New York Times reported the discovery of a diary written in the Soviet gulag in Siberia in 1941–42.1 The palmsize 115-page diary lay in obscurity for nearly seventy years. It belonged to Olga M. Ranitskaya, a camp weather station worker. She combined whimsical drawings with rhyming couplets, portraying the physical and emotional hardships of a spirited stick figure, her alter ego. In writing her diary, Ms. Ranitskaya risked her life: anyone caught pen in hand was summarily executed in the Soviet gulag. Individuals have put their lives into words for many different reasons. But the forces that compel these individuals to script their daily life and write down their personal acts and emotions are irresistible and even lead some diarists to disregard any danger. Under the cover of the mundane, they record internal and external changes and conflicts in their own lives and in their societies, protecting these moments from the destructive vagaries of memory. These recorded moments could be periods of transition (such as into adolescence), change in relationships, relocation for pleasure or under pressure, illness, oppression or duress in combat, and captivity or exhilarating freedom. For many the compulsion to write is uncontrollable, and often the writing itself breaks literary and social conventions or, as in the case of Olga M. Ranitskaya, risks the diarist’s own life. Diary discovery and analysis are part of an interdisciplinary field of research. New diaries, as well as critical studies of earlier texts, frequently appear in print, and in the past fifty years, diary studies have come into their own. Scholarship has honed critical concepts, standards,  1

and theories. Diarists have responded to modern technologies, posting intimate entries on the internet, and archived diaries are now available online. Theories and technologies have revitalized diary research. The goal of this volume is to bring together some of the best of this research and offer an account of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. Our purpose is to synthesize decades of interdisciplinary study in order to further future research on the diary as both a literary form and a medium of historical documentation. Our orientation is global, aiming to address fundamental diary categories and theoretical and methodological issues that recent diary research has consolidated.

The Diary as a Genre In any cultural or literary tradition, the diary stands out as a unique narrative genre, linguistically designated with its own term. In English, we use the term diary; the modern Chinese use riji; the French, journal intime; and the Germans, Tagebuch. It is diario in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish and nikki in Japanese. The diary is an “ethnic genre,” empirical and cultural, rather than an analytical category.2 In the first essay of this volume, Philippe Lejeune and Catherine Bogaert offer a definition for the term that is used by all the contributors in this volume: “What is a diary? The word itself tells us that it is day-to-day writing: a series of dated written records.” Its sine qua non feature was, and still is, the date, which provides both a structure and a record of its formation. Lejeune previously proposed that “a diary is a series of dated traces.”3 While the dates are a basic requirement of the diary form, Lejeune argues that the traces are the bits of experience that the diarist chose to enter. Implicit in this observation is the basic paradox of diurnal writing: the diary chains subjective time in cages of objective time, and the two are in a constant state of collision. The distinction between time as experienced and as measured is part of a long Western tradition in science, philosophy, literature, and art. Objective time is “the concept of time in physics, expressed by the symbol ‘t’ in mathematical equations. It is also our ‘public’ time, which we use, with the aid of watches, calendars, etc., in order to synchronize our private experiences of time for the purpose of social communication.”4 Diary writing records time as a human experience; an entry’s length and brevity depend on emotions, not nature, fusing past memories with future expectations. Yet diary writing is done in the objective temporal segments of days, which gives the form its name, creating a situation in which subjectivity bursts through the seams of objectivity. For the diary, the imprint of its making is on its final form, and in this, the diary genre has no rival in the arts. By this we mean that the 2 | The Diary

everyday reality of its narrative interacts with its narrating practice. The very process of writing a diary shapes the diary text, making it both an art and an act. In contrast to literary authors, who present their works to their readers, hiding, destroying, or archiving any revisions, corrections, or changes they make in drafts or galley proofs, the diarists retain all of them, preserving the fragmentary process, the continuity and discontinuity that is involved in writing a diary.5 Therefore “the true authentic diary (meaning an honest diary) is . . . discontinuous, full of gaps [and] allusive.”6 Elizabeth Podnieks reiterates this observation in her more detailed description of the diary as a book of days presented in chronological sequence, though not necessarily recorded as such. It inscribes the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of its author and may depict the social, historical, and intellectual period in which she or he lives and writes. Aspects of the author’s character may be denied or repressed, or acknowledged and celebrated. . . . The diary is an open-ended book, but it may include internal closures and summations. By virtue of its status as a book of days, it is disconnected, yet it may offer structural and thematic patterns and connectives. Though likely written spontaneously, it is a consciously crafted text, such that the diarist often takes content and aesthetics into account. Finally, though composed in private, the diary is not necessarily a secret document. It may be intended for an audience: an individual, a small group of people, or a general public, and either contemporary with or future to the diarist’s lifetime.7

Though the prevailing view considers the diary to be a substandard literature, in fact the medium is a challenging form that integrates personal experience and its author’s personality with historical events and intellectual trends presented by a definitive first-person narrator in a genuine or spurious secrecy, in an anti-Aristotelian form, disregarding narrative sequencing. The retention of the traces of the process of writing shapes the diary’s poetics, creating a tension that energizes the diary as an art form, a narrative, and a drama. If the author and the poet strive at perfection, the diarist’s art is exhibited in its shabbiness (or in its elegance) and challenges readers who happen on its text to perceive beauty in the everyday life that the diarists describe. Acknowledging such a challenge, William Blake (1757–1827) famously urged, in his poem “Auguries of Innocence,” “to see a world in a grain of sand” and “the human form . . . in realms of day.” In minutes, the diarist records acts, thoughts, and emotions that have, at the time of recording, unseen consequences. To appreciate a diary, its reader needs to assume the position of the diary writer at the moment of writing. Lejeune argued that “this is an astonishing feature of the diary that makes it unlike almost any other type of text: no outside reader can read it in the same way as the author, even though the very purpose of reading it is to discover its private contents.”8 Introduction | 3

Assuming the position of the diarist, he stated, “You will never really know what the text of my diary means to me. The discontinuous made explicit refers to an implicit continuum to which I alone hold the key, and one that does not require any numbering system. To get close to the truth of another person’s diary, then, one must read a lot of it for a long time.”9 True, indeed, but is this not the quality of any profound literature?

The Individual and the Self in a Global Perspective The present volume consolidates recent scholarly efforts by bringing together diary studies that underscore its coherence as a literary genre in multinational and multiethnic contexts, and examines its transformation in the public spaces of print and mass media. Most diary anthologies and critical studies focus on a single country, nation, or language.10 The present volume views the diary through studies from and about different countries and cultures: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, Estonia, France, Germany, Namibia, Palestine, Poland, Russia, and the United States. The concentration of studies on diaries in central Europe and the United States reflects past diary research trends related to the perception that the individual self is a unique Western concept. Clifford Geertz proposed that “the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole. . . .[is] a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.”11 Peter Heehs reaffirmed this view and stated, “People living in traditional cultures in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia— virtually everywhere except Europe and North America—don’t see the self like this . . . people in traditional cultures give much more importance to social cohesiveness, much less to individual autonomy.”12 No doubt, more has to be explored in this direction, but even a limited number of diaries from non-Western societies demonstrate the need to rethink the causal relations between a specific culture and diary writing that claim that diaries are a result of the Western concept of self. Instead, we argue, together with Jack Goody and Ian Watt, that it is literacy that is instrumental in the emergence of diary writing: “By objectifying words, and by making them and their meaning available for much more prolonged and intensive scrutiny than is possible orally, [the diary] encourages private thought; the diary or the confession enables the individual to objectify his own experience, and give him some check upon the transmutations of memory under the influences of subsequent events.”13 Literacy, in either Western or Eastern culture, enabled diary writing and contributed to the shaping of individuality that would find such an activity meaningful, personally supportive, and rewarding. In the 4 | The Diary

last decade of the twentieth century, the model of a Western personality was still a subject for debate among psychologists and anthropologists, but in more recent years, ongoing studies have explored personality in cultures beyond the East-West dichotomy.14 In this collection, the essays of James M. Hargett, Kimberly Katz, and Elizabeth R. Baer support the breakdown of this dichotomy and highlight the individuality of diarists in non-Western societies. Diary writing is also a supportive activity for the self for individuals in any culture who find themselves embroiled in social and political conflicts. Sergio da Silva Barcellos’s chapter on diaries from Brazil (chap. 7) and Jochen Hellbeck’s chapter on Stalinist Russia (chap. 20) are case studies of diary writing by people who are entangled by historical political forces, as are the chapters of this volume in part 6, “The Diary in Political Conflict.” They highlight individuality in diary writing as a way of maintaining private and confidential space during times that threaten one’s physical and psychological survival. The chapters in part 4, “The Travel Diary,” demonstrate, among other things, the influence that exposure to different cultures and countries can have in forming individuals’ identities and how this experience serves as a motivator for diary writing.

Personal Diaries and Public Records The authors in this volume concentrate specifically on the personal diary in its many configurations. The personal diary is distinguished from documents of public record. While recording the date is an essential feature of both personal diaries and public records, the public record is concerned with public affairs; is managed by public institutions and authorities; deals with issues of governance, taxation, law, and trade; and is, in most part, available for public scrutiny. In contrast, the personal diary is individual, private, and confidential, and its public display is subject to the decisions of the diarists, their heirs, or the people or institutions that later discover the diary. A brief discussion of various historical documents will help to further illustrate the differences between these two forms of records. Chronicled public records are found from the earliest known instances of literacy. Ancient chronicles have been discovered in the cradle of literacy of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and countries in between. Individuals might also have made records of their private affairs, thoughts, and feelings in those times and places, but such texts are still unknown. Literature tells us about these ancient public records and suggests the potential for private diaries. For example, in the Hebrew Bible, the concluding formula reporting a royal death is “the other events of [monarch’s name], and all his actions, are recorded in the Annals of the kings of [name of Introduction | 5

monarchy: Judah or Israel.]”15 The Hebrew term that is translated as annals is divrei ha-yamim (words of the days); it is yet unknown whether the phrase is a metaphor or a literal description of a text format that would have been a public record. A possible private diary is recorded in the book of Esther, which likely dates from the fourth to second centuries BCE, where a functional appellation, sefer zikhronot (memory book), modifies the term divrei ha-yamim (6:1), suggesting that this royal record book stored memories as well as public events. Archaeological research yielded a valuable corpus of astronomical diaries from the seventh to the first centuries BCE, recording public as well as royal affairs from Mesopotamia, and diaries of public, political, and military natures from Egypt that date from even earlier periods.16 While this volume was in preparation, archaeologists discovered in Egypt the oldest papyrus ever found, and it was a diary—or, rather, a dated logbook that belonged to inspector named Merer, who supervised boatmen transporting limestone from their quarries to Giza for the construction of the Great Pyramid during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu [Cheops] (r. 2509–2483 BCE).17 Its diurnal structure served royal and public bureaucrats for millennia, and in early modernity, they adopted the format for their own personal diaries, establishing the genre form. While traces of public records are available and being discovered, the history of the personal diary in early antiquity is unknowable. Theoretically, it is in the realm of possibilities that literate individuals scribbled down their thoughts and events in their lives, yet such personal and confidential notes were lost forever. Personal meditative books are available from late antiquity, but they differ from diaries in that they are not diurnal. The biblical book of Ecclesiastes—which likely dates from the middle of the third century BCE, and the inclusion of which in the biblical canon still puzzles scholars18 —is, among its other aspects, a personal philosophical reflection on life. Extant from the second century CE is Meditation by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–80 CE), which is popularly considered to be a “personal and philosophical diary”19 yet also lacks the diurnal format. Its inclusion among the early diaries is anachronistic and is based on its title “To Himself,” which appeared on the version of the manuscript, now extinct, that was used for its first printed edition in 1559, 20 a period in which personal diaries were already written and known in Europe. The earliest syntheses of calendric records with the personal accounts of experience, thoughts, and emotions are found in Japan, China, and Arab lands from the eleventh century.21 Evidence that such calendric records were later consolidated into the personal diary in the West are available from the sixteenth century. Though some public diaries are mentioned, the essays in this volume mostly discuss personal diaries from different parts of the world and 6 | The Diary

written in diverse circumstance. Whether a personal diary is published is of a secondary importance. Phillipe Lejeune wrote, “I have avoided defining the diary in terms of privacy or secrecy; that is an important dimension, but a secondary one that is optional and recent [dating to the late nineteenth century].”22 As a rule, most diaries remain unpublished, and the authors in the part 5 of this volume, “The Private Diary,” focus on diaries that were not necessarily intended for publication by their authors but that became visible to the public eye. Such diaries become public through original research, as Kimberly Katz and Marilyn Motz demonstrate in their respective chapters; or by the marketing of a private diary, as Elizabeth Podnieks discusses; or through hybridization and the linking the private diary to other forms of writing about the self, as François Simonet-Tenant observes.

The Structure of This Volume The chapters in this volume explore the personal diary in society, examining the public face of private life on record through the perspectives of canonization, feminism, politics, literature, and social media. The volume has seven parts. The chapters in the first two parts, “Diary Theories” and “The Creation of a Diary Canon,” are primarily theoretical and historical, dealing with several analytical perspectives used in diary analysis, historical development of the genre and its definition. The essays in the first part examine the application of sociological, feminist, and literary theories and perspectives to the diary form. In the first essay, Philippe Lejeune and Catherine Bogaert, citing France as an example, address the social basis of modern diary writing. They continue by identifying the attributes of the diary genre, its relations to time both conceptually and technically, and its relation to personality. The diary is functional in the construction of the self and the protective isolation of the individual from pubic and social pressures, maintaining boundaries between private and public spaces. Diary is literature of the self and for the self; yet paradoxically, notorious past diaries that broke through these boundaries become models for subsequent diarists, infusing in them the desire to follow suit. Kathryn Carter’s chapter, “Feminist Interpretations of the Diary,” distinguishes between two schools of women’s diary interpretation: the psychoanalytic and the historical-materialistic approaches. Her interpretation of the latter concerns the diary materials, concentrating on the manuscript itself and relating the archival preservation of diary manuscripts as a material emblem of social class. Starting from a biographical standpoint, Julie Rak offers a unique analysis in “The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing.” She examines the relations between life writing Introduction | 7

forms in the literary autobiography of Alison Bechdel, who incorporates her childhood diary within her adult autobiography. Drawing on this case study, Rak expands her analysis into similar relations in the works of other authors and discusses the position of the diary among other life writing forms as an independent, autobiographical genre with distinctive features. The second part of this volume, “The Creation of a Diary Canon,” explores the ways in which crystallization of the modern diary as a distinctive genre has been a historical-literary process through four case studies. Dan Doll, Michael Braud, Steven E. Kagle, and Sergio Barcellos present the history of canon formation in four countries—England, France, North America, and Brazil, respectively. In any society that has such a canon, diaries in print and diaries in script interface with one another. The canon becomes a model for “real diaries,” for successive generations of diarists, and for editors who would like to publish them. Allowing for some social and historical variations, this process follows similar stages in the first three of those countries. In “British Diary Canon Formation,” Dan Doll constructs such a literary history from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, when the Puritan spiritual diary became the canon foundation. Doll demonstrates that individuals were already writing diaries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and that their use was sufficiently popular in England to be the subject of a joke in 1603 in Ben Johnson’s satiric comedy Volpone: The Fox (act 4, scene 1, lines 133–34). The term also appeared in print in 1581 in the writings of the judge, parliament member, and elected recorder of London William Fleetwood (1525–94).23 Like Samuel Pepys in the seventeenth century, bureaucrats who maintained public records in their offices, became agents of transition, transferring their skills and practice from public to private space. In France, diary writing began a century later. The style followed, as Michel Braud points out in “The Diary in France and French-Speaking Countries,” travel diaries rather than spiritual diaries, but by the nineteenth century, private diaries in print had become so prominent in French literature that they had a large following of diarists. The earlier building block of the diary canon in North America consisted first of spiritual diaries, followed later by secular, travel, and literary diaries. Steven E. Kagle highlights the philosophical diaries of the transcendentalists, prominent women, explorers, and Civil War soldiers as integral parts of the American diary canon. Sergio da Silva Barcellos demonstrates that in Brazil the creation of the diary canon, diary writing, and the scholarship surrounding it are connected to postcolonial and internal political developments. He argues that the Brazilian canon is still in the making, affected by the waning of the dictatorship (1964–85) 8 | The Diary

and the publication of diaries of those returning from exile alongside the translation of foreign diaries. The third part, “The Transformation of the Manuscript,” touches on methodological issues related to diary publication, different editions of the manuscript, and different modes of diary preservation. Suzanne L. Bunkers’s essay explores Anne Frank’s diary, which has become canonic globally, not only nationally, and established Anne Frank as a secular saint, symbolically representing all the Holocaust victims. The popularity of Anne’s diary, generated a preservation problem, protecting the materiality of the diary itself from over exposure. With the help of the facsimile edition, Bankers examines the complex transition of the diary from the hiding place of Anne Frank to the world stage as one of the “sacred” texts of the twentieth century. Her analysis is applicable to studies of other diaries. Texts of other diaries can still be found in archives, museums, and libraries, ranging from the internationally known institutions to county libraries and historical societies. In her chapter “Digitized Diary Archives,” Desirée Henderson reports about the prospects and hazards of diary research in a digitized world, taking scholarship beyond canonization and enabling scholars to explore diary manuscripts and apply to them rigorous analysis without travel. Her chapter outlines the possibility of future diary scholarship. The next four parts of this volume—“The Travel Diary,” “The Private Diary,” “The Diary in Political Conflict,” and “Online Diaries”— explore different diary types. The travel diary is one of the oldest forms of the genre and is still popular today. As such, it established several of the generic conventions of the personal diary: firsthand material, dated entries, precision and truthfulness, and an external gaze mixed with personal feelings and impressions. Travel diaries include different diurnal modes—bureaucratic, professional, and personal, both for pleasure and with purpose (for example, researching one’s roots)—and are often intended for an audience of readers. Tim Youngs’s “British and North American Travel Writing and the Diary” discusses personal and professional diaries, distinguishing between travel diaries and retrospective travel narratives. Diarists travel abroad of their own accord, for adventurous, missionary, or scientific purposes. On travelers’ returns, their diaries function as authentication narratives that serve, after publication, as corroborative documents, distinguishing them from fictional travel narratives. However, public response cannot be constrained. Youngs describes two cases in which the diaries of particular scholars led to vastly different public reactions: Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) diary authenticated his scientific reports, but the posthumous publication of the diary of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) caused an uproar in the field of anthropology. Introduction | 9

Although generally travel diaries record the search for the exotic, Agnieszka Sobocinska analyzes the search for the authentic in her chapter, describing how Australians from European descent traveled to Europe, and particularly to England, searching for their cultural roots. With the increase of migration and diaspora communities around the globe during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such travelers and likely their diaries are on the rise, and Sobocinska’s chapter will serve as a reference point for how to analyze these works in the future. China, the largest country in Asia, is a travel destination for its own people. Imperial China is an example of a literate society with a distinct language that was not colonized by European countries and was resistant to European cultural influence in the ninth century, when the first diaries were written in Chinese. China was a highly bureaucratic society, and its early travel diaries were record books of bureaucrats traveling to the provinces. In “Travel Diaries in Imperial China,” James M. Hargett analyzes travel literature and travel diaries in imperial China from 809 to 1911, demonstrating their relation to place, literary heritage, political stability, and sovereignty. In China, travel writing about Europe and North America appears only after its defeat in the First Opium War (1839–42), when diplomats, interpreters, and scholars began traveling and reporting about industrial, technological, and other developments in order to modernize China. While most personal diaries are written in private and remain so, they sometimes gain a role in public life. Individuals who practice diary keeping have to negotiate their practice with their immediate family and friends and with their community at large. Diarists record their thoughts, feelings, struggles, and secrets. Publication is of secondary importance. Diaries not originally intended for publication are sometimes published after the diarist’s death, and many of these diaries have been altered for publication. Literary authors often intended their diaries for publication, yet the diaries retain their personal and private function. The fifth section of this volume, “The Private Diary,” explores the ways in which the publication of a diary or the existence of an audience in the mind of the diarist and privacy and intimacy of writing are not mutually exclusive. Françoise Simonet-Tenant’s “The Contemporary Personal Diary in France” examines the literary and social position of the diary in a single country, whereas the three chapters that follow deal with particular cases describing the diarist’s use of the private diary in war, in a family, and in a literary profession. France is a country in which both diary writing and diary scholarship flourish, as three other essays in this volume by Lejeune and Bogaert, Braud, and Leonard V. Smith demonstrate. What are the contributing causes for the popularity of the genre? Simonet-Tenant points out that past stigma against diary keeping in France is now gone, 10 | The Diary

with diarists admitting to their practice. Is this because of the canonic presence of diaries in French literature or because major French authors’ diaries were published by them or posthumously? Or is it because the educational system endorses, and encourages diary writing? Or all these factors combined? Any attempt to single out one such a cause is likely to be speculative, but awareness of the state of the diary in the country opens paths for further studies and explorations into more specific segments of the population as defined either regionally, ethnically, or professionally. The social and historical situation that Kimberly Katz describes in her chapter about two Palestinian diarists living and writing during the two world wars of the twentieth century, contrasts sharply with the previous essay about the personal diary in France. Although, like most diarists, the two Palestinians had literary models to follow, they demonstrated high degrees of individualism that neither psychological nor anthropological scholarship associates with non-Western personality, let alone among the lower classes.24 Katz thus helps debunk notions about the personal diary and the non-Western self. Marilyn Motz reveals in her study of the use of the diary in romantic and family contexts among working-class people in the nineteenthcentury American Midwest. Her case study demonstrates how sharing privacy through a diary helped a young couple create intimacy in courtship, establishing a confidence in their partnership that continued through their married life. Her study is exceptional in that it is a case in which a man writes a diary without concern about his masculine image. The diaries of literary authors are unique within the category of personal diaries. With their professional understanding of writing, authors use the potentialities of the diary genre effectively by creating the personal diary as a private textual space that allows them to make public art. Even though the professional writer is never off duty, as Elizabeth Podnieks demonstrates in “The Literary Author as Diarist,” personal diaries of literary authors serve as confidants, as private spaces for introspection and catharsis, and as places where authors register personal and creative disappointments and successes, as well as reach their audiences, enhancing their reputations once their diaries are published. The personal diary acquires a political and often tragic dimension when written under occupation, in war, or during times of political terror. In response to external crises, diarists turn to writing as resistance, historical commemoration, evidence for future testimony, an outlet for their anger and hopeful revenge, and in desperation to leave traces of their own lives for an unknown supportive reader in the future. The sixth part, “The Diary in Political Conflict,” includes studies of diaries written in such historical contexts. These diaries are their diarists’ means for physical and psychological survival. External pressure and hostility limit Introduction | 11

individuals’ ability to explore their private selves and personal identities. Nevertheless, despite horrific circumstances, many diarists struggle valiantly to maintain their individuality and optimism and often write honestly and with astonishing intimacy, qualities not found in memoirs and autobiographies that are written retrospectively. This sixth section of the book also demonstrates the working method of corpus analysis. There are two types of corpus covered by the articles in the sixth part. Three of the chapters—those by Kimberly Harrison, Jochen Hellbeck, and Batsheva Ben-Amos—use a synchronous approach, analyzing whole corpuses of diaries. Corpus, in this case, refers to a cohort of diaries written under similar conditions, such as location, historical period, political reality, or life conditions, allowing for observation of collective trends in individual responses to similar compromising circumstance. Two chapters—by Elizabeth R. Baer and Leonard V. Smith— deal with another type of corpus: that of individual diarists who also produced other genres of writing on which the diaries shed light related to the process of writing. The corpus of writing of an individual writer has been used in genetic criticism of the diary since the 1990s, especially in France (see chapter 13). In each of the essays in this part, the diarist experiences the external pressure from forces from a different position. In her essay “The American Civil War: Confederate Women’s Diaries,” Kimberly Harrison explores the experience of civilian women whose backyards sometimes were the sites of military battles. The Civil War was one of the most traumatic conflicts in American history, and the diaries written during this time became, as Kagle points out, one of the building blocks of the American diary canon (see chapter 6). Though Confederate women can be said to have been on the side of power, individually, the diaries reflect the pain and terror that the women experienced during the war. They were observers of the external pressures that motivated them to write. Leonard V. Smith in his essay “Diary and Narrative: French Soldiers in World War I” structures his analysis as a contrast between diary and narrative and, in doing so, confronts one of the most crucial issues in diary writing. People may be subject to experiences for which words are insufficient. Diary writing is suitable for describing everyday life, but even a diary cannot contain nor a diarist describe everyday death. It is an experience beyond human cognition, and the diarists that Smith describes required the distance of time to enable them to turn their experience into a narrative. Smith claims that the historian can never consider the diary’s truth as completely interchangeable with the other modes of narrating but must be alert to its different conceptualization of time. Such a distance was not available to the diarists whom Batsheva BenAmos describes in her chapter “On the Holocaust Diary.” Ben-Amos 12 | The Diary

addresses two epistemological problems concerning the Holocaust diaries: how post-Holocaust scholars comprehend the human dilemma of Holocaust victims, and how the victims confronted their existential situation of “no exit.” The Holocaust was like no other period in human history, and as she writes, “the Holocaust diary was not an ordinary diary.” The diaries of the American Civil War, World War I, and the Holocaust were written during a time-bounded conflict. The three other essays in the sixth part are about diaries that are not war related; rather, they are about diaries that were written under a prolonged repressive government or political power. Jochen Hellbeck’s chapter, “The Stalin-Era Diary,” demonstrates, among other issues, the use of the diary genre for political and ideological suppression by the regime. His analysis demonstrates the power inherent in diaries to reveal the truth as the unwritten personal tragedy is exposed despite the diarists’ efforts to conform to the party’s doctrine and writing goals. The diary of Erna Nagel that Leena Kurvet-Käosaar discusses in her chapter, “Estonian Women’s Deportation Diaries,” was written for survival at the risk of death. Under repressive political conditions, diary writing is not only writing of the self for the self but also a means to retain the sanity of the self, to retain a semblance of personal integrity. It is an underground act of resistance. Elizabeth R. Baer states this diary function explicitly in her chapter, “The Archive as a Diary of Resistance: Hendrik Witbooi, Nama Revolutionary, 1884–1905,” albeit in this case the diarist struggles against not only political repression but also racism and dehumanization. In Africa the literacy that colonialism introduced became a means for reasserting human dignity of self and community. The last part of this volume is also the latest chapter in diary history. Already a quarter century long, the digital revolution has transformed the basic principles of diary writing, skipping over boundaries of privacy, intimacy, and individuality and generating a new grammar for performance of the self in paradoxical communities dominated by anonymity. Kylie Cardell, in her chapter “From Puritans to Fitbit: Self-Improvement, SelfTracking, and How to Keep a Diary,” focuses on a symptomatic publication phenomena, Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith, that appeared shortly after the diary digital revolution began. This is a parody of the self-help genre and a transitional volume into the digital age, targeting the traditional diary genre with humor.25 Cardell perceptively points out that through the “quantified-self-movement” the online diary made a full historical circle reaching to the initial phases of diary keeping as a record book. She concludes that how-to dairies are ideological texts that reflect social and cultural preoccupations with self-representation as a form of knowledge. Other essays in this part offer detailed historical, cultural, and literary analyses of online sites and blogs and their rise, fall, and transformation Introduction | 13

and present explicit and implicit fundamental questions about society, culture, and humanity. For example, after offering a detailed description of the early history of online diaries and blogs, Jill Walker Rettberg observes that the ways we write about and record our lives are changing. Next, we may ask whether we are changing as well. Writing as a secondorder linguistic representation of events did change human society;26 will digitizing do so as well? What are the possible changes that would occur in a society in which the internet becomes the primary mode not only of personal communication but also of writing, either about the self in private or in the performance of privacy in public? In her chapter “A Journey through Two Decades of Online Diary Community,” Lena Buford explores, with humorous intertextual reference to popular literature, the oxymoronic public intimacy of online diaries. Astutely, she follows their rise and fall on the web, delineating a typology and engaging in psychological and social functional analysis, following online diaries/web logs for a number of years. But she concludes her essay with an ominous diagnosis, observing the death of the online diary and diary communities as a consequence of the rise of the new technology of smart phones. If web blogs and platforms are functional, why do they not survive? GeoCities, a platform that flourished and had within two years of its existence over one million “homesteaders,” was terminated in 2009 by Yahoo after fourteen years because of the corporation’s profit motive and not due to any inherent features of its writing or writers. By focusing on its early years, from 1995 to 2001, in his article “GeoCities and Diaries on the Early Web,” James Baker explores the diarists’ own explorations of the new internet territory, where social rules are in their formative stage, the grounds of public and private spaces are shifting, and diarists test the boundaries of their self-presentation. The new internet territory of diary writing has not attracted all diarists to migrate from their pages to the desktops. Diary writing continues, yet modern storage facilities make it more accessible; it is quite possible that the digital age will become the golden age of diary scholarship. * * *

The diary is a private literature. When it is published, the diarist’s private thoughts, emotions, and actions expose his or her intimate self to the public eye. When real, imagined, or vague future readers are in the writer’s mind’s eye, the diary is still conveying the private self. The diaristic impulse is writing of the self for the self. The diary is also an existential literature, and as a narrative, it does not have a teleological design. Leading nowhere, it is confined by the obscurity of the future. Temporally, it 14 | The Diary

is a narrative of the present that, because of the circumstances of writing, may extend from a day to a longer period. Often the story line fumbles, thoughts are ill-inscribed, and wishes are vague, exposing the private humanity rather than the public face of the writer. Aesthetically, the diary is the literature of the mundane—but at times, of the sublime. Its heroes are writers from all walks of life, of any age, class, and occupation; it is a democratic literary form par excellence that does not require public approval to achieve notoriety. Diarists write to the furthest reaches of their knowledge: for the political leader, it might be a country, even the globe; for the teenager, it might be narrow circles of family and friends. During historical upheavals, the private diary assumes, for writers and subsequent readers alike, the role of testimony. Under all conditions, in war and peace, the diary is the epic of everyday life. Notes 1. Eva Sohlman, Neil MacFarquhar, and Sophia Kishkovsky, “A Diary from a Gulag Meets Evil with Lightness,” New York Times, January 4, 2018, C1. 2. Dan Ben-Amos, “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres,” in Folklore Genres, ed. Dan Ben-Amos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 215–42; Ralph Cohen, “History and Genre,” New Literary History 17, no. 2 (1986): 203–18. 3. Philippe Lejeune, “The Continuous and the Discontinuous,” in On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. Katherine Durnin (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009); originally presented in the series “Continu et discontinue,” Villa Gillet, Lyon, April 2, 2003, and printed in Signes de vie: Le pacte autobiographique 2 (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 73–90, 179. 4. Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 5. Voluminous literature is available about the subject. A selection is Honorat Aguessy et al., Time and the Philosophies (Paris: UNESCO, 1977); Patrick Baert, ed., Time in Contemporary Intellectual Thought (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2000); John Bender and David Wellbery, eds., Chrono­ types: The Construction of Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); L. Gardet et al., Cultures and Time (Paris: UNESCO Press, 1976); Frank Greenaway, ed., Time and the Sciences (Paris: UNESCO, 1979); Ernest J. McCullough and Robert Calder, eds., Time as a Human Resource (Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1991); Adam Abraham Mendilow, Time and the Novel (New York: Humanities Press, 1952); Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Michael Shallis, On Time: An Investigation into Scientific Knowledge and Human Experience (New York: Schocken Books, 1983); Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and the English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Rebecca Steinitz, Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13–38; S. H. Vatsyayan, A Sense of Time: An Exploration of Time in Theory, Experience and Art (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981); Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History Introduction | 15

and Meaning of the Week (New York: Free Press, 1985); Jirˇí Zeman, ed., Time in Science and Philosophy: An International Study of Some Current Problems (Prague: Academia, 1971). 5. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. Katherine Durnin (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 175–86. 6. Ibid., 170. 7. Elizabeth Podnieks, Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2000), 43–44. 8. Lejeune, On Diary, 170. 9. Ibid. 10. See for example, Harriet Blodget, Centuries of Female Days: English Women’s Private Diaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, eds., Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Kathryn Carter, ed., The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1996 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Philippe Lejeune and Catherine Bogaert, Le journal intime: Histoire et anthologie (Paris: Édition Textual, 2006); Arthur Ponsonby, English Diaries (London: Methuen, 1923); Arthur Ponsonby, Scottish and Irish Diaries (London: Methuen, 1927); Robert Moses Shapiro, ed., Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1999). 11. Clifford Geertz, “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 28, no. 1 (1974): 26–45; repr. in Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 55–70. 12. Peter Heehs, Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 4. 13. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” in Literacy in Traditional Society, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 62. 14. Melford E. Spiro, “Is the Western Conception of the Self ‘Peculiar’ within the Context of the World Cultures?” Ethos 21, no. 2 (1993): 107–53; Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98, no. 2 (1991): 224–53; Vivian L. Vignoles and Ellinor Owe, “Beyond the East-West Dichotomy: Global Variation in Cultural Models of Selfhood,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 145, no. 8 (2016): 966–1000. See also Maureen Perekins, ed., Locating Life-Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012). See also Franz-Josef Arlinghaus, ed., Forms of Individuality and Literacy in Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015); Claudia Ulbrich et al., eds., Mapping the “I”: Research on Self-Narratives in Germany and Switzerland, Egodocuments and History Series 8 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 15. It appears fifteen times in reference to the kings of Judah (1 Kings 14:29; 15:7, 23; 22:46; 2 Kings 8:23; 12:20; 14:18; 15:6, 36; 16:19; 20:20; 21:17, 25; 23:28; 24:5, 17; for the kings of Israel, 1 Kings 14:19; 15:31; 16:5, 14, 20, 27; 22:39; 2 Kings 1:18; 10:34; 13: 12; 14:15, 28; 15:11, 15, 21, 26, 31). Current

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biblical scholarship does not deal with this issue, and scholars often translate the term divrei as “events,” offering a meaningful rather than a literal translation. For studies of these formulas see Duane L. Christensen, “Chronicles of the Kings (Israel/Judah), Books of the,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1991–92; Menahem Haran, “The Books of the Chronicles ‘Of the Kings of Judah’ and ‘Of the Kings of Israel’: What Sort of Books Were They?” Vetus Testamentum 49, no. 2 (1999): 156–64; Benjamin Maisler, “Ancient Israelite Historiography,” Israel Exploration Journal 2, no. 2 (1952): 82–88; James A. Montgomery, “Archival Data in the Book of Kings,” Journal of Biblical Literature 53, no. 1 (1934): 46–52. 16. For selected studies see Abraham J. Sachs, Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia, ed. Hermann Hunger (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996–2006); Tom Boiy, “Date Formulas in Cuneiform Tablets and Antigonus Monophthalmus, Again,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 129, no. 3 (2009): 467–76; Markham J. Geller, “Babylonian Astronomical Diaries and Corrections of Diodorus,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 53, no. 1 (1990): 1–7: Dov Gera and Wayne Horowitz, “Antiochus IV in Life and Death: Evidence from the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117, no. 2 (1997): 240–52; Johannes Koch, “Zur Bedeutung von ina UGU t·ur-ri in zwei Astronomical Diaries, ” Die Welt des Orients 29 (1998): 109–23; Robartus Johannes van der Spek, “New Evidence from the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries Concerning Seleucid and Arsacid History,” Archiv für Orientforschung 44–45 (1997–98): 167–75. For a selection of studies of such documents, see John Baines, “Literacy and Ancient Egyptian Society,” Man, n.s., 18, no. 3 (1983): 572–99; Alan H. Gardiner, “The Delta Residence of the Ramessides,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 5, no. 2 (1918): 127–38; no. 3 (1918): 179–200; no. 4 (1918): 242–71; Ben Haring, “Oral Practice to Written Record in Ramesside Deir ElMedina,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 46, no. 3 (2003): 249–72; Anthony Spalinger, “A Critical Analysis of the ‘Annals’ of Thutmose III (Stücke V–VI),” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 14 (1977): 41–54; and Edward F. Wente, “A Prince’s Tomb in the Valley of the Kings,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 32, nos. 1–2 (1973): 223–34. See also about Pharaonic daybooks in Donald B. Redford, Pharaonic King-Lists, Annals and Day-Books (Mississauga, Ontario: Benben Publications, 1986), 97–126. 17. Pierre Tallet, Les papyrus de la mer Rouge I: Le “journal de Merer” (Papyrus Jarf A et B), MIFAO collection 136 (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2017), 27–98, 149–61; Pierre Tallet and Gregory Marouard, “The Harbor of Khufu on the Red Sea Coast at al-Jarf Egypt,” Near Eastern Archaeology 77, no. 1 (2014): 4–14; Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, Giza and the Pyramids: The Definitive History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017). 18. See Robert Gordis, Koheleth, the Man and His World (New York: Schocken, 1955); R. B. Y. Scott, Anchor Bible, vol. 18, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965). 19. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond, introduction by Diskin Clay (New York: Penguin, 2006), vii. 20. Ibid.

Introduction | 17

21. In Japanese literature there is a long diary tradition from the Middle Ages up to the modern time. A selection of diaries and their studies is Donald Keene, Modern Japanese Diaries: The Japanese at Home and Abroad as Revealed through Their Diaries (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); Marilyn Jeane Miller, The Poetics of Nikki Bungaku (New York: Garland, 1985); Fujiwara no Nagako, The Emperor Horikawa Diary (Sanuki no suke nikki), trans. Jennifer Brewster (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1977); Herbert Eugen Plutschow, “Japanese Travel Diaries of the Middle Ages,” Oriens Extremus 29, nos. 1–2 (1982): 1–136; Edwin O. Reischauer, “The Izayoi Nikki (1277–1280),” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 10, no. 3–4 (1947): 255–387; Mamiko Suzuki, “Between the Public Persona and the Private Narrator: The Open Space of Kishida Toshiko’s Diaries (1891–1901),” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 35 (2008): 6–25; George Makdisi, “Autograph Diary of an Eleventh-Century Historian of Baghdaˉd—I,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 18 (1956): 9–31; George Makdisi, “Autograph Diary of an Eleventh-Century Historian of Baghdaˉd—II,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 18 (1956): 239–60; George Makdisi, “Autograph Diary of an Eleventh-Century Historian of Baghdaˉd— III,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19 (1957): 13–48; George Makdisi, “Autograph Diary of an Eleventh-Century Historian of Baghdaˉd—IV,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19 (1957): 281–303; George Makdisi, “Autograph Diary of an Eleventh-Century Historian of Baghdaˉd—V,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19 (1957): 426–43; George Makdisi, “The Diary in Islamic Historiography: Some Notes,” History and Theory 25 (1986): 173–85. About Chinese diaries, see James M. Hargett’s “Travel Diaries in Imperial China,” chap. 12 in the present volume. 22. Lejeune, On Diary, 204. 23. J. D. Alsop, “William Fleetwood and Elizabethan Historical Scholarship,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25, no. 1 (1994): 155–76. 24. See notes 4–7 in this chapter. 25. Christie Davies, Jokes and Targets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 26. Naomi S. Baron, Speech, Writing, and Sign: A Functional View of Linguistic Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 149–200.

Bibliography Aguessy, Honorat, et al. Time and the Philosophies. Paris: UNESCO, 1977. Alsop, J. D. “William Fleetwood and Elizabethan Historical Scholarship.” Sixteenth Century Journal 25, no. 1 (1994): 155–76. Arlinghaus, Franz-Josef, ed. Forms of Individuality and Literacy in Medieval and Early Modern Periods. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015. Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Translated by Martin Hammond. Introduction by Diskin Clay. New York: Penguin, 2006. Baert, Patrick, ed. Time in Contemporary Intellectual Thought. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2000. Baines, John. “Literacy and Ancient Egyptian Society.” Man, n.s., 18, no. 3 (1983): 572–99.

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Baron, Naomi S. Speech, Writing, and Sign: A Functional View of Linguistic Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Ben-Amos, Dan. “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres.” In Folklore Genres, edited by Dan Ben-Amos, 215–42. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976. Bender, John, and David Wellbery, eds. Chronotypes: The Construction of Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Blodget, Harriet. Centuries of Female Days: English Women’s Private Diaries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Boiy, Tom. “Date Formulas in Cuneiform Tablets and Antigonus Monophthalmus, Again.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 129, no. 3 (2009): 467–76. Bunkers, Suzanne L., and Cynthia A. Huff, eds. Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Carter, Kathryn, ed. The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1996. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Christensen, Duane L. “Chronicles of the Kings (Israel/Judah), Books of the.” In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, edited by David Noel Freedman, 1:991–92. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Cohen. Ralph. “History and Genre.” New Literary History 17, no. 2 (1986): 203–18. Davies, Christie. Jokes and Targets. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Gardet, L., A. J. Gurevich, Alexis Kagame, Claude Larre, G. E. R. Lloyd, André Neher, Raimundo Panikkar, Germano Pàttaro, and Paul Ricoeur, eds. Cultures and Time. Paris: UNESCO Press, 1976. Gardiner, Alan H. “The Delta Residence of the Ramessides.” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 5, no. 2 (1918): 127–38; no. 3 (1918): 179–200; no. 4 (1918): 242–71. Geertz, Clifford. “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 28, no. 1 (1974): 26–45. Reprinted in Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, 55–70. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Geller, Markham J. “Babylonian Astronomical Diaries and Corrections of Diodorus.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 53, no. 1 (1990): 1–7. Gera, Dov, and Wayne Horowitz. “Antiochus IV in Life and Death: Evidence from the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117, no. 2 (1997): 240–52. Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt. “The Consequences of Literacy.” In Literacy in Traditional Society, edited by Jack Goody, 27–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Gordis, Robert. Koheleth, the Man and His World. New York: Schocken, 1955. Greenaway, Frank, ed. Time and the Sciences. Paris: UNESCO, 1979. Haran, Menahem. “The Books of the Chronicles ‘Of the Kings of Judah’ and ‘Of the Kings of Israel’: What Sort of Books Were They?” Vetus Testamentum 49, no. 2 (1999): 156–64.

Introduction | 19

Haring, Ben. “Oral Practice to Written Record in Ramesside Deir ElMedina.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 46, no. 3 (2003): 249–72. Heehs, Peter. Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Keene, Donald. Modern Japanese Diaries: The Japanese at Home and Abroad as Revealed through Their Diaries. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. Koch, Johannes. “Zur Bedeutung von ina UGU t·ur-ri in zwei Astronomical Diaries.” Die Welt des Orients 29 (1998): 109–23. Lehner, Mark, and Zahi Hawass. Giza and the Pyramids: The Definitive History. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017. Lejeune, Philippe. “The Continuous and the Discontinuous.” In On Diary, Phillipe Lejeune, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. Katherine Durnin, 175–86. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. ———. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Translated by Katherine Durnin. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. Lejeune, Philippe, and Catherine Bogaert. Le journal intime: Histoire et anthologie. Paris: Édition Textual, 2006. Maisler, Benjamin. “Ancient Israelite Historiography.” Israel Exploration Journal 2, no. 2 (1952): 82–88. Makdisi, George. “Autograph Diary of an Eleventh-Century Historian of Baghdaˉd—I.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 18, no. 1 (1956): 9–31. ———.“Autograph Diary of an Eleventh-Century Historian of Baghdaˉd—II.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 18, no. 2 (1956): 239–60. ———. “Autograph Diary of an Eleventh-Century Historian of Baghdaˉd— III.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19, no. 1 (1957): 13–48. ———. “Autograph Diary of an Eleventh-Century Historian of Baghdaˉd— IV.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19, no. 2 (1957): 281–303. ———. “Autograph Diary of an Eleventh-Century Historian of Baghdaˉd—V.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19, no. 3 (1957): 426–43. ———. “The Diary in Islamic Historiography: Some Notes.” History and Theory 25, no. 2 (1986): 173–85. Markus, Hazel Rose, and Shinobu Kitayama. “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation.” Psychological Review 98, no. 2 (1991): 224–53. McCullough, Ernest J., and Robert Calder, eds. Time as a Human Resource. Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1991. Mendilow, Adam Abraham. Time and the Novel. New York: Humanities Press, 1952. Meyerhoff, Hans. Time in Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955. Miller, Marilyn Jeane. The Poetics of Nikki Bungaku. New York: Garland, 1985. Montgomery, James A. “Archival Data in the Book of Kings.” Journal of Biblical Literature 53, no. 1 (1934): 46–52.

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Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Nagako, Fujiwara. The Emperor Horikawa Diary (Sanuki no suke nikki). Translated by Jennifer Brewster. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1977. Perekins, Maureen, ed. Locating Life-Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 2012. Plutschow, Herbert Eugen. “Japanese Travel Diaries of the Middle Ages.” Oriens Extremus 29, nos. 1–2 (1982): 1–136. Podnieks, Elizabeth. Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. Ponsonby, Arthur. English Diaries. London: Methuen, 1923. ———. Scottish and Irish Diaries. London: Methuen, 1927. Redford, Donald B. Pharaonic King-Lists, Annals and Day-Books. Mississauga, Ontario: Benben, 1986. Reischauer, Edwin O. “The Izayoi Nikki (1277–1280).” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 10, no. 3–4 (1947): 255–387. Sachs, Abraham J. Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia. Edited by Hermann Hunger. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996–2006. Scott, R. B. Y. Anchor Bible. Vol. 18, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965. Shallis, Michael. On Time: An Investigation into Scientific Knowledge and Human Experience. New York: Schocken Books, 1983. Shapiro, Robert Moses, ed. Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts. Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1999. Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and the English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Spalinger, Anthony. “A Critical Analysis of the ‘Annals’ of Thutmose III (Stücke V–VI).” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 14 (1977): 41–54. Spek, Robartus Johannes van der. “New Evidence from the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries Concerning Seleucid and Arsacid History.” Archiv für Orientforschung 44–45 (1997–98): 167–75. Spiro, Melford E. “Is the Western Conception of the Self ‘Peculiar’ within the Context of the World Cultures?” Ethos 21, no. 2 (1993): 107–53. Steinitz, Rebecca. Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Suzuki, Mamiko. “Between the Public Persona and the Private Narrator: The Open Space of Kishida Toshiko’s Diaries (1891–1901).” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 35 (2008): 6–25. Tallet, Pierre. Les papyrus de la mer Rouge I: Le “journal de Merer” (Papyrus Jarf A et B). MIFAO (memoirs published by the members of the French Institute of Oriental Archeology) collection 136. Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2017. Tallet, Pierre, and Gregory Marouard. “The Harbor of Khufu on the Red Sea Coast at al-Jarf Egypt.” Near Eastern Archaeology 77, no. 1 (2014): 4–14.

Introduction | 21

Ulbrich, Claudia, Kaspar von Greyerz, and Lorenz Heiligensetzer, eds. Mapping the “I”: Research on Self-Narratives in Germany and Switzerland. Egodocuments and History Series 8. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Vatsyayan, S. H. A Sense of Time: An Exploration of Time in Theory, Experience and Art. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981. Vignoles, Vivian L., and Ellinor Owe. “Beyond the East-West Dichotomy: Global Variation in Cultural Models of Selfhood.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 145, no. 8 (2016): 966–1000. Wente, Edward F. “A Prince’s Tomb in the Valley of the Kings.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 32, nos. 1–2 (1973): 223–34. Zeman, Jirˇí, ed. Time in Science and Philosophy: An International Study of Some Current Problems. Prague: Academia, 1971. Zerubavel, Eviatar. The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. New York: Free Press, 1985.

BAT S H E VA B E N -A MO S is Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Comparative Literature and the College of Professional and Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a practicing clinician and has written about Holocaust diaries. DA N B E N -A MO S is Professor of Folklore and Comparative Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of numerous titles, including Sweet Words, Folklore in Context, and Jewish Folk Literature (in Hebrew and Russian), and translator of In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (with Jerome R. Mintz). He is editor of Folklore Genres, Folktales of the Jews, (vols. 1–3), Folklore: Performance and Communication (with Kenneth S. Goldstein), and Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (with Liliane Weissberg). He is also editor of the Rafael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology at Wayne State University Press.

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part i

Diary Theories

1 The Practice of Writing a Diary Philippe Lejeune and Catherine Bogaert Translated from French by Dagmara Meijers-Troller1

Who Keeps a Diary? In present-day France, who keeps a diary? The question is difficult to answer for several reasons. It is a discreet activity. It is possible to keep a diary among family or in public without attracting notice, but more often, people do it out of sight, without mentioning it to friends and family. It is also an occasional or irregular activity. People keep a diary in times of crisis, during a phase of life, or to chronicle a voyage. They begin, let it slide, and then pick it up again. Few people adhere to a strict daily regimen of writing over a long period of time, recording as much as possible in detail. Most diaries follow a theme, an episode, a single thread of the fabric of a life. When the page has been turned, they are forgotten and sometimes even destroyed. And yet, in 1988, in answer to the question “Have you, in the course of the last twelve months, kept a diary of your impressions and thoughts?,” 7 percent of those questioned responded yes. The survey, conducted by France’s Ministry of Culture, was aimed at French people over the age of fifteen.2 This means that about three million individuals turned to writing as a complement to their lives. In 1997, the positive response to the same question was 8 percent. Clearly, then, the practice is not outmoded. There are no statistics before 1988, but we can hypothesize that more diaries are kept today than in the nineteenth century and that there is a practical connection between diary writing and the school attendance rates of adolescents. The extension of the mandatory schooling age from fourteen

 25

to sixteen, decreed in France in 1958, by virtue of keeping a considerable number of adolescents out of the workforce and carrying their notebooks instead, certainly favored the growth of the practice of writing a diary. Indeed, an analysis of the results shows that the practice of keeping a diary diminishes with age: 13 percent of adolescents between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, 11 percent of adults from twenty to twenty-four years, and 6 percent of the population thereafter maintain one. This descending curve can be seen as well for other forms of writing. It is true that when compelled by necessity, one may begin a diary at any time of life. But the practice is more likely begun during adolescence, especially among girls. The difference in journaling between girls and boys is huge: between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, 19 percent of girls said they kept a diary compared to 7 percent of boys. If the survey had considered the ten-tofourteen-year-old age group, the difference would have been even greater: at that age, diaries are a group culture and a rite of passage for girls, while most boys are indifferent or even hostile toward the idea (“a girl’s thing”). In adulthood, beginning at age twenty-five, the picture becomes more evenly balanced, with a slight female predominance. There is no surprise here: as a general rule, women read and write more than men. Why do adolescent girls have such a passion for keeping diaries? Is it natural or cultural or a little of both? Whatever the case, it parallels historical conditioning: during the nineteenth century in France, girls were systematically pushed to keep a diary, often supervised. Today, girls still often receive locked diaries as a gift for Christmas or birthdays, a rare practice for boys. Is there a psychological profile for a diarist? It is doubtful, because, as this chapter shows, keeping a diary can be the response to a number of compelling situations. There are as many different personality types among diarists as there are among nondiarists—especially since one is often a diarist on occasion, rather than by vocation, and because each one invents his or her own approach in a genre where there may be models but there are no rules. Nevertheless, all diarists have two undeniable things in common: a taste for writing and a preoccupation with the passage of time. Is there a social profile? Yes: diary keeping is most frequent among the educated or those who live in cities. In a survey of people “with a poor cultural capital,”3 sociologist Bernard Lahire was struck by his respondents’ incomprehension of the practice of keeping a diary, which they perceived as hypocritical: when you have something to say to others, you should say it to their faces! To sit alone in your corner writing things that nobody will ever read would seem abnormal. Is it possible that we retreat into a diary nowadays because the bonds of community are weakening or to compensate for the fragmentation and depersonalization of social life? This idea can be formulated in a 26 | The Diary

different way: the current development is part of a long-term trend. Since antiquity in the West, we have witnessed a gradual personalization of control over an individual’s own life and time management. It’s what was already spoken of poetically in the past as the “heart of hearts,” the shift from an external and social jurisdiction (the forum) to a purely inward and personal tribunal, that of the conscience. The current growth of diary writing undoubtedly corresponds to this delegation of power, with individuals in charge of managing themselves, with their own complaint departments and archives.

The Diary and Time What is a diary? The word itself tells us that it is day-to-day writing: a series of dated written records. For the moment, let us set aside the French expression journal intime (a diary). In German, it is simply referred to as Tagebuch. In English, it is either a diary or a journal. In Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, it is diario. In French, the distinction is often made between journal intime (diary) and journal (the news or newspaper) to avoid confusion, a problem that does not occur in other languages. But intimacy only became a part of the diary late in its history, as a secondary mode. If we need an adjective, we could speak of the “personal journal or diary.” The Greeks spoke of ephemerides (from hemera, or day); the Romans, of diarium (from dies, or day). The word diaire was still in use in Old French but disappeared in the course of the sixteenth century, while it persisted in the other Romance languages and in English. The French have recently borrowed the substantive diarist from English because French had no word to designate the person who keeps a journal (journalist is already taken and intimiste is too limited in meaning): this borrowed language is in fact a return to a lost tradition. As for the word journal, it was originally an adjective, diurnalis, meaning “daily.” In sixteenth-century France, one still spoke of registres journaux or of papiers journaux, which was then shortened to journal or journaux. The cornerstone of the diary is the date. The diarist’s first act is to note the date at the top of the page he or she will write on. The words that are written under a given date are called an “entry” or “note.” A diary with no dates is ultimately no more than a simple notebook. The dating may be more or less precise and spaced out over time, but it is of vital importance. A diarist writes an entry at a specific moment, without any knowledge of the future, and can be certain that it will not be modified. A diary that has been corrected or edited at a later time may gain in literary value, but it will have lost its essential characteristic: the authenticity of the moment. When the clock strikes twelve midnight, I can no longer change a thing. If I do so, I have left the genre of diary and strayed into autobiography. The Practice of Writing a Diary  |  27

The diary is a trace: almost always handwritten, in the first person, colored by the distinctive effects of individual handwriting. It is a trace on a medium: notebooks chosen or received as gifts or loose leaves diverted from their scholastic purpose. Sometimes, this written trail is accompanied by other traces—flowers, objects, diverse signs plucked from daily life and transformed into relics—or by drawings and designs. When you read “the same text” printed in a book, is it truly the same? Like a work of art, the diary only truly exists as a unique piece. A diary is a series of traces. It presupposes an intention to mark out a period of time by means of reference points. A single trace would have a different function: instead of accompanying the flow of time, it would fix it in a defining moment. Unlike a diary, a solitary trace would be a “memorial”: Blaise Pascal (1623–62) made note of only one single event in his life—his definitive spiritual conversion of Monday, November 23, 1654—on a dated parchment that he carried, sewn into the lining of his doublet, until the end of his life. A journal or diary, on the other hand, is a long-term affair. The series is not necessarily daily or regular. There are two types of diarist: those who adhere to regularity and worry if they miss a single day and those who write only when they actually have something to say. The diary can be either a tightly or loosely knit fabric of time. This initial definition leaves aside any considerations of purpose, content, or form of the diary. It outlines a fixed core that the accounting books of Jucundus, found in Pompeii, and the diaries of modern-day teens have in common: the mastery of time. The purpose of diaries has constantly varied throughout history. In the beginning, diaries were collective and public, before also spreading into the private, then individual, and finally the most secretive intimate spheres. Suffice it to say that a diary always serves at the very least to build or exercise the memory of its author (whether an individual or a group). As for the content of a diary, it depends on its function: all aspects of human activity can provide the occasion for keeping a diary. After all, the form of the entries is entirely free. Assertions, narrative, lyrical prose—anything goes, as does any level of language or style, though the diarist may choose these based on whether he or she is writing just as a reminder or with the intention of appealing to others. The only formal traits that are universal follow from the definition proposed above: fragmentation and repetition. A diary is first and foremost a list of days, a sort of cogwheel mechanism that allows you to lock into gear with time. But it has managed to evolve into much, much more.

The Diary and the Individual Since the end of the eighteenth century, the diary has come to serve individuals. And diarists have been among the first to analyze and critique 28 | The Diary

their own practice. From the seventeen thousand pages of Henri-Frédéric Amiel’s Journal (1821–81), it has been possible to extract a small, somewhat pessimistic treatise on the practice of keeping a diary.4 And there is another author, Eugène Dabit (1898–1936), who wonders, hesitantly, about taking the first step of keeping a totally sincere diary, but when doing so, immediately sets the precondition of absolute secrecy: June 3, 1932. . . . It’s always the same thing. I have little taste for keeping a diary. Laziness, cowardice, ennui—it’s a little of each. But, wouldn’t I get to know myself better by learning to think more clearly, and even improve my writing? Yet the idea of putting my most intimate feelings down in writing is something I dread; I do not feel free. If I stir up monstrous or crazy thoughts, weak, incoherent or lowly thoughts, that I should experience desires, passions, hatreds—no one is witness to these aberrations or to my inner mental life—even I am barely aware of them. If I set this world down in writing I will suddenly have to grapple with it—and possibly more. I don’t want anyone to lay eyes on this notebook. That is the only way I can confide in it completely. I have never dared to before; have never delved into the depths of my own being. If I don’t, what is the use of keeping a diary? The previous pages do not reveal much of my own self. It is about time to finish it or to quit. But wouldn’t it be better to pursue the adventure? Because what good is writing if it doesn’t serve to know oneself better?5

For individuals, keeping a diary has become a potential way of living through or conducting a particular period of their lives. The text that is committed to paper in this way becomes a record of this course of action. What purpose can it serve?

Preserving Memories We keep a diary primarily for ourselves: the author is his or her own future reader. I want to be able—tomorrow, in a month, or in twenty years—to find elements of my past: those I have noted and those associated with them in my memory (so much so that no one would be able to read my diary with the same understanding that I could).6 To offer a personal example, I remember having written, in my teenage diary, that I was writing for my later self, “For all Philippes of the future, I am sending myself a message to the future.” So I have left a legible wake behind me, like a ship for which the course has already been set in its logbook. I would avoid imaginary or reconstructed memories. I would have my life at my fingertips. I might rarely or never reopen these notebooks, but I would know that I can at any time. And then the act of making notes on a daily basis, even if they are never reread, helps build one’s memory: writing an entry presupposes that I have sorted through my experiences and organized them along axes; that I have given them a “narrative The Practice of Writing a Diary  |  29

identity” that will make my life easier to memorize. This is the modern version of the art of memory (Ars memoriae) cultivated since antiquity. The diary is at once archive and action, hard drive and random access memory.

Survival We keep diaries to anchor the past, which disappears behind us, but also in apprehension of our own future disappearance. Even if secret, unless we find the courage to destroy it or to take it to the grave, a diary calls out to be read at a later time: a transmission to some “alter ego” lost in the future or a modest contribution to the collective memory. A message in a bottle. It is also an investment: the value of the information in a diary grows over time. It’s like a life insurance policy that we feed a penny at a time, day after day, with regular payments. On December 31, 1910, a woman of the petite bourgeoisie began her diary. Her twenty-four quarterly datebooks are sleeping in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (City of Paris Historical Library), but her fresh voice cries out to us in the second decade of the twenty-first century from the depths of the last century: Why will I be writing these notes? Someone told me that they might be of interest to researchers in the year 2000 and, although I can hardly believe that, I have decided to proceed. So I shall recount my day-to-day impressions to my unknown readers, with a frankness all the more complete as they cannot intimidate me; but let them be forewarned that if they expect highly interesting details on the lives of Parisians in 1911, they may as well not even open these notebooks. . . . Today is December 31st. Custom requires me to address my good wishes to these atoms. I do not remember which philosopher said, “Happiness is never being born.” Since I fully agree with this gentleman, I therefore wish that they never come into this world; they may miss some small joys, including that of reading my words, but in exchange, they will be spared so many sorrows!

Confidences Paper is a friend. By using it as a confidant, you can release your emotions without troubling someone else. Your disappointments, your fits of anger, your sorrows, your doubts—but also your hopes and joys—the paper lets you give them a first airing without any restraint. A diary is a space where the self momentarily escapes from social pressures, takes refuge within a bubble, or a sealed chamber, where it can unfold without risk, before returning, relieved, to the real world. In a modest way, it contributes to 30 | The Diary

social peace and to individual equilibrium. These spontaneous words are also like a first draft, a rehearsal of words and acts that will follow in reality.

Knowing the Self Paper is a mirror. Once we have projected ourselves onto paper, we can step back and see. And the image of the self that takes shape has the advantage of developing over time: via both repetition and change, revealing contradictions, errors, and all the biases that allow us to start reexamining our certainties. Without a doubt, we cannot live without a certain degree of self-esteem, and the diary, like the autobiography, is like the construction site for this positive image. But it can also be the place for self-examination or questioning—a laboratory of introspection. In a diary, the self-portrait is never definitive, and any attention paid to the self will always be at the mercy of tomorrow’s refutations. So the adventure of diary-keeping is often experienced as an exploratory voyage, all the more so because this knowledge of the self is not just a matter of curiosity but will determine the course of the rest of the voyage: we must choose and act.

Deliberation The examination may concern not only that which is but also that which will be: a diary is oriented toward the future. I take stock today in order to be prepared to take action tomorrow. Within, there is a debate, a dialogue: I allow the different voices of my “innermost self” to speak. These discussions may be repetitive, leading to a decision or, on the contrary, urging hesitation. But writing compels us to formulate the issues and arguments, leaving traces we may return to on reflection. A diary also allows for following up on a decision made. This monitoring of conduct was one of the main arguments advanced by early Christians in favor of a written examination of conscience, and later journals of retreats always conclude with “resolutions.” So the diary is not necessarily just a passive undertaking but an instrument of action as well.

Resistance How do we “hold on” when life subjects us to terrible hardships? How do we transform the “innermost self” into an entrenched camp where we can gather our strength and recharge our batteries? On the day after Alfred Dreyfus’s (1859–1935) arrival at Devil’s Island, where he was unjustly condemned to prison and would endure crushing mental and The Practice of Writing a Diary  |  31

physical duress, he opened a notebook that would allow him to admonish himself, establish imaginary ties with those who were absent, keep track of time, and maintain his dignity. It is in exile, in prison, in grieving, and especially in illness that the diary reveals its usefulness. Particularly during illness, its purpose serves two seemingly opposite behaviors. The first presupposes secrecy: some patients spare their entourage their worries, keep them for their diary, and maintain a brave facade. That was the courageous approach of Johann Heuchel, a young boy who died of cystic fibrosis, whose diary I edited—a secret diary, discovered by his parents after his death.7 After the fact, his father analyzed this exchange of implicit reciprocal support in this way: We needed his courage in order to maintain our own, and he too needed for us to be brave, cheerful and peaceful around him, to keep from drowning in worry. This way, we reinforced this sort of reciprocal courage. But he was no fool. Even less so than us. He knew. And he knew that we knew he knew. But neither he nor we ever broke the spell that let him hold on. We felt that that must not happen. But what we could not say to ourselves, what he did not want to say to us, for fear of demolishing us, he was able to write. For afterwards.

The other, seemingly opposite behavior, consists of saying everything, of transforming an ordeal into a work of art to be shared with loved ones as it progresses, eliciting their admiration for the diarist’s talent and courage. I am thinking of the chronicle written, and distilled day by day with her entourage until the end, by my friend Marie Hélène Roques, victim of a generalized cancer.8

Thinking When opening the notebooks kept by Sartre during the Phony War (1939– 40), we discover another dimension of the diary: creation. At the outset, Sartre, like Dreyfus, began his diary in response to an ordeal—the mobilization that transforms an intellectual into a soldier. But it was the chance to embark on an original work, turning the observation of daily life into a laboratory for proving the validity of the ideas that he would later expound on in Being and Nothingness.9 The form of this diary shifts the attention to the creative process, rendering thought freer, more open to its contradictions, and communicating to the reader the progression of reflection as much as the result. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaïs, a mediocre philosopher but passionate diarist, was already sensitive to this new process and theorized on it this way: Sometimes I tell myself that, according to the form I have now given to this portrait of myself, I could never write any work that would be

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preferable to this one. Indeed, for some time now, I have been entering the thoughts, observations and feelings that I plan to bring together in a personal body of work. In my diary, these thoughts and observations are not always interconnected, but they are connected to me; they appear in the diary as they appeared to me, so they fall into place naturally, because it is my own nature that determined the time and the circumstances in which they entered my mind and my heart. This connection is more interesting and even more valid than an orderly, methodical approach.10

This aesthetic of rough drafts and the process of bringing a work into being explains in part the gradual integration of the diary into the canon of literary genres since the nineteenth century and the public’s taste for authors’ notebooks and for thinkers, from Joseph Joubert (1754–1824)11 to Emil Cioran (1911–95),12 who have merged diary and maxim and dated their thoughts. In a more general sense, we could say that the diary is a working method for many human activities.

Writing Lastly, we keep a diary out of a love for writing. It is fascinating to transform ourselves into words and phrases and to invert the relationship we have with life by self-engendering. Notebooks, or loose-leaf notes that we have bound, where we tell our stories comprise a sort of symbolic body that, unlike our actual bodies, will survive. The pleasure is all the greater because it is free. Each person feels authorized to handle the language as he or she sees fit. There is no inhibiting fear of mistakes. We can choose the rules of the game: have several notebooks, mix genres, make our diaries simultaneously an observation of life and a pivot of our writing. A diary is rarely corrected, yet we feel that we are making progress. We are not so vain as to think we are authors, but we enjoy the sweet taste of existing in words and have hopes of leaving an imprint.

Is It Good? Is It Bad? My definition has turned into a defense: Is the diary under attack? Does it need to be defended? Yes, in France there is a debate about diaries and, in general, a feeling of uneasiness with autobiographical writing. In English- or German-speaking countries, however, there is a different atmosphere. There, journaling comes as naturally as breathing. People speak openly about keeping a diary. Critics have been studying them for a long time. They do not give rise to controversy. The first hypothesis about this phenomenon is that Protestantism encourages the practice of journal writing. In general, northern European individuals early on adopted the

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habit of taking care of themselves, in an atmosphere that is both practical and severe, while a preoccupation with self is viewed with suspicion in southern Europe and around the Mediterranean basin. This is a rather simplistic view, of course. But I was surprised to observe that there is no real tradition of spiritual journal-keeping during the classical period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries): there was no encouragement, no model. Instead, there were incessant warnings about complacency toward the self and pride. “The self is hateful,” decreed Pascal in his Pensées.13 On July 14, 1762, writing to Sophie Volland, Denis Diderot presented the idea of writing a diary as utopian despite the fact that it had been a reality in England for a century and a half. In France in 1887, the publication of the diaries of Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–84) and those of the brothers Goncourt (1822–96 and 1830–70) were controversial.14 It took until 1952 for a critical book devoted to the diary to appear in France, and even then it was a psychologist, Michèle Leleu, who wrote it from a characterology perspective.15 The paradox is that this dubious genre is nonetheless widely practiced, and often by the very people who see it as suspicious: outward distrust leads to a guilty conscience. Is it good, is it bad? It is in fact by a form of inner debate, a sort of examination of conscience, that the diary is called into question. In the brief anthology of reflections by Amiel on his own diary, the cons largely outweigh the pros. Jules Romains, in book 18 of Hommes de bonne volonté, entitled La douceur de la vie,16 imagines that his protagonist, about to begin writing a diary, systematically reviews all of the arguments for and against, and this time it is the pros that win.17 But aside from these nuanced debates, we find severe texts, like the short essay by Maurice Blanchot in Le livre à venir (1959) or The Journalist, the satirical novel by Franco-American author Harry Mathews.18 Let’s examine the accusations before proceeding with the debate. Amiel wrote, “While carnivores already make mediocre game, because they live off other living beings, an animal that lives on itself would probably be the worst to eat. A cat chasing its tail is, furthermore, a rather ridiculous beast. Well, then, doesn’t a diary show us an individual devoted to these two sterile pursuits, chasing or dining on oneself?19 Blanchot was similarly critical: “There is, in any diary, the fortunate reciprocal compensation, one by the other, of a twofold nullity. Someone does nothing in his life but writes that he does nothing, and there, all of a sudden, something is done. One who lets himself be sidetracked from writing by the futilities of the day returns to these nothings to tell about them, bewail them, or take pleasure in them, and lo, there is a day fulfilled. . . . Finally, then, one has neither lived nor written, a double failure from which the diary wins its tension and its gravitas.”20

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Keeping a diary would thus be sign of introversion, of ignoring the world, and of futility. The great creative geniuses would presumably not keep a diary. Yet in the nineteenth century, there were passionate diaries kept by Stendhal, Eugène Delacroix, Jules Michelet, Victor Hugo, and Barbey d’Aurevilly, none of whom one could suspect of lacking creative spark or awareness of the world. And then, why wouldn’t psychological inquiry and spiritual adventure follow paths other than those of fiction or classic constructions? The diary is possibly itself the beginning of a new poetic and existential aesthetic, founded on fragmentation and resonance. Apparently, keeping a diary would be the sign of a weak character or a dubious personality. That may happen, but the opposite can too. Undoubtedly one of the effects of the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, was to provide a brilliant refutation of this bias. It would be difficult to find anyone with greater strength of character, healthy vitality and fervor for life than this young adolescent who forged her personality by keeping a diary under such extreme conditions. Finally, keeping a diary is seen as a form of cowardice with respect to others, an artful dodge, a “deferred punch,” a “delayed bomb,” as Romains has his hero Jallez say. In this case, the argument is not without relevance, and therein lies one of the true dangers or weaknesses, though often involuntary, of posthumous publications. But it is compensated for by a kind of boomerang effect: aggression is rarely pleasing to readers, who are taken hostage by quarrels that do not concern them. A diary, with its strengths and weaknesses, is simply human. And the forms it takes, the functions it fulfills, are so varied that it is quite difficult to address it as a whole. We must suspend our prejudices, which are often based on limited knowledge and sometimes on the anxiety that we all feel when confronted with our own inner life and the dizzying passage of time. Notes 1. Previously published in Philippe Lejeune and Catherine Bogaert, Un journal à soi: Histoire d’une pratique (Paris: Les Éditions Textuel, 2003), 8–11. 2. This survey was the basis of three successive publications: Olivier Donnat and Denis Cogneau, Les pratiques culturelles des Français, 1973–1989 (Paris: La Documentation française, 1990); Olivier Donnat, Les pratiques culturelles des Français, Enquête 1997 (Paris: La Documentation française, 1998); and Olivier Donnat, Les pratiques culturelles des Français à l’ère numérique, Enquête 2008 (Paris: La Découverte, 2009). The 2008 survey established that the advent of online diaries has not, in fact, diminished tra­ ditional handwritten diary practices in any way. Coauthor of this chapter Philippe Lejeune has personally conducted three surveys: the first in 1990, by

The Practice of Writing a Diary  |  35

questionnaire, La pratique du journal personnel: Enquête. Cahiers de sémiotique textuelle 17 (Paris: Université Paris X, 1990); the second by a call for testimonials, “Cher cahier . . .”: Témoignages recueillis et présentés (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); and the third by a call for testimonials and direct observations, “Cher écran . . .” Journal personnel, ordinateur, Internet (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000). 3. Bernard Lahire, La raison des plus faibles: Rapport au travail, écritures domestiques et lectures en milieux populaires (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1993), 148–53. 4. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Du journal intime, ed. Roland Jaccard (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1987). 5. Eugène Dabit, Journal intime, ed. Edmond Robert (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 84. 6. Autobiographical interventions using first-person pronouns are from Philippe Lejeune. 7. Johann Heuchel, Je vous ai tous aimés, Journal, preface by Philippe Lejeune (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998). 8. Marie Hélène Roques (1948–2015). Her diary consists of three small booklets deposited in the collections of the Association pour l’Autobiographie (APA, Association for Autobiography) in Ambérieu-en-Bugey (Ain, France): Carnet de voyage malade, Radionco, Sondages et faux tuyaux (call number: APA 3360). 9. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). 10. Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaïs, unpublished diary, October 6, 1801, cited in Philippe Lejeune, Aux origines du journal personnel: France, 1750–1815 (Paris: Champion, 2016), 626. 11. Joseph Joubert published nothing in his lifetime, but he wrote notebooks and notes on scraps of papers that were collected by his wife and published posthumously. In English, the following books include their texts and their analysis: Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection, ed. and trans. Paul Auster, afterword by Maurice Blanchot (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983); David P. Kinloch, The Thought and Art of Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); Patricia A. Ward, Joseph Joubert and the Critical Tradition: Platonism and Romanticism (Geneva: Droz, 1980). 12. A selection of studies about his work is Aleksandra Gruzinska, ed., Essays on E. M. Cioran (Rasinari 1911–Paris 1995) (Costa Mesa, CA: American Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences Publications, 1999); William Kluback and Michael Finkenthal, The Temptations of Emil Cioran (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); Nicolas Cavaillès, Cioran, écrire à l’encontre de soi (Paris: CNRS, 2011); Yun Sun Limet and Pierre-Emmanuel Danzat, eds., Cioran et ses contemporains: Essais (Paris: Roux, 2011). 13. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1961), 190n455. 14. See Philippe Lejeune, “The Diary on Trial,” in On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. Katherine Durnin (Manoa: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 147–67. 15. Michèle Leleu, Les journaux intimes (Paris: Presses Universitaires des France, 1952).

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16. Jules Romains, “The Sweets of Life,” bk. 18 in Men of Good Will, English ed., trans. Warre Bradley Wells and Gerard Hopkins, vol. 10 (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1939). 17. Jules Romains, Journal de Jallez (Paris: Éditions des Cendres, 2004), 29. 18. Harry Mathews, The Journalist (Boston: David R. Godine, 1994), 239. 19. December 19, 1867, in Amiel, Du journal intime, 45. 20. Maurice Blanchot, “Diary and Story,” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 185–86.

Bibliography Amiel, Henri-Frédéric. Du journal intime. Edited by Roland Jaccard. Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1987. Blanchot, Maurice. “Diary and Story.” In The Book to Come, translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Braud, Michel. La forme des jours: Pour une poétique du journal personnel. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006. Cavaillès, Nicolas. Cioran, écrire à l’encontre de soi. Paris: CNRS, 2011. Dabit, Eugène. Journal intime. Edited by Edmond Robert. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Donnat, Olivier. Les pratiques culturelles des Français à l’ère numérique, Enquête 2008. Paris: La Découverte, 2009. ———. Les pratiques culturelles des Français, Enquête 1997. Paris: La Documentation française, 1998. Donnat, Olivier, and Denis Cogneau. Les pratiques culturelles des Français, 1973–1989. Paris: La Documentation française, 1990. Fabre, Daniel, ed. Ecritures ordinaires. Paris: POL, 1991. Gruzinska, Aleksandra, ed. Essays on E. M. Cioran (Rasinari 1911–Paris 1995). Costa Mesa, CA: American Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences Publications, 1999. Gusdorf, Georges. Lignes de vie. Vol. 1, Les écritures du moi. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990. ———. Lignes de vie. Vol. 2, Auto-bio-graphie. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990. Heuchel, Johann. Je vous ai tous aimés, Journal. Preface by Philippe Lejeune. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. Joubert, Joseph. The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection. Edited and translated by Paul Auster. Afterword by Maurice Blanchot. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983. Kinloch, David P. The Thought and Art of Joseph Joubert (1754–1824). Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Kluback, William, and Michael Finkenthal. The Temptations of Emil Cioran. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Lahire, Bernard. La raison des plus faibles: Rapport au travail, écritures domestiques et lectures en milieux populaires. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1993. Lejeune, Philippe. Aux origines du journal personnel. France, 1750–1815. Paris: Champion, 2016. ———. “Cher cahier . . .”: Témoignages recueillis et présentés par Philippe Lejeune. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. ———. “Cher écran . . .”: Journal personnel, ordinateur, Internet. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000.

The Practice of Writing a Diary  |  37

———. La pratique du journal personnel: Enquête. Cahiers de sémiotique textuelle 17. Paris: Université Paris X, 1990. ———. Le moi des demoiselles: Enquête sur le journal de jeune fille. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993. ———. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Translated by Katherine Durnin. Manoa: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. Lejeune, Philippe, and Catherine Bogaert. Un journal à soi: Histoire d’une pratique. Paris: Éditions Textuel, 2003. Leleu, Michèle. Les journaux intimes. Paris: Presses Universitaires des France, 1952. Limet, Yun Sun, and Pierre-Emmanuel Danzat, eds. Cioran et ses contemporains: Essais. Paris: Roux, 2011. Mathews, Harry. The Journalist. Boston: David R. Godine, 1994. Pachet, Pierre. Les baromètres de l’âme: Naissance du journal intime. Paris: Le Bruit du temps, 2015. Simonet-Tenant, Françoise. Journal personnel et correspondance (1785–1939) ou les affinités électives. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Academia Bruylant, 2009. ———. Le journal intime, genre littéraire et écriture ordinaire. Paris: ­Téraèdre, 2004. Simonet-Tenant, Françoise, and Catherine Viollet, eds. “Journaux personnels.” Special issue, Genesis, no. 32. Paris: Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne, 2011. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Edited by Léon Brunschvicg. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1961. Romains, Jules. Journal de Jallez. Paris: Éditions des Cendres, 2004. ———. “The Sweets of Life.” Book 18 in Men of Good Will. English edition translated by Warre Bradley Wells and Gerard Hopkins. Vol. 10. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1939. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Ward, Patricia A. Joseph Joubert and the Critical Tradition: Platonism and Romanticism. Geneva: Droz, 1980.

PH I L I PPE L EJ E U N E is Professor Emeritus of French Literature at Université Paris-Nord. He is the author of On Autobiography and On Diary. He founded the French Association pour l’autobiographie (APA, the Association for Autobiography), which collects and archives unpublished ordinary autobiographical writings. C AT H E R I N E B O G A E RT is an active member of the APA. She curated an exhibition at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon dedicated to the diary and is coauthor (with Philippe Lejeune) of Un journal à soi: Histoire d’une pratique. DAGMARA MEIJERS-TROLLER (1956–2018) was an experienced translator from French into English. A member of the American Translators Association, she was educated at Indiana University Bloomington, Pantheon-Sorbonne University, and London Metropolitan University. 38 | The Diary

2 Feminist Interpretations of the Diary Kathryn Carter

“Feminist conclusions are not always the appropriate conclusions in our consideration of women’s life writing,” wrote Marlene Kadar, the noted critic of autobiography, provocatively at the start of a 1992 collection of essays.1 At the time, there was a critical history (explored here) that gave context to her statement. Since then a number of convincing arguments, broadening the scope of inquiry, demonstrate that feminist approaches have much to offer. However, let us begin by acknowledging that women’s diaries are more specific than Kadar’s general category of “women’s life writing.” In both popular and scholarly discussions, a diary stirs up something extra, especially if the diary was labelled “private.” Consider, for example, the following statement overheard by Jane Carlyle (wife of Thomas Carlyle) and recorded in her nineteenth-century diary: “What else could a husband do when his wife keeps a journal except murder her?”2 Although meant to be flippant, the intense and violent degree of control exerted on written expressions deemed to be “private” was evident to Carlyle and her later readers. As Carlyle noted, “There was a certain truth hidden in this light remark.”3 The “truth” of this remark emerges from assumptions that underpin some particular readings of diary writing, and Kadar’s comment highlights the fact that early feminist interpretations of diary writing fortified rather than challenged these same assumptions. The following overview traces early critical perspectives on diary writing and the challenges made against those perspectives. Generally, the debates break into two camps: one that finds the diary genre primarily  39

feminine, using a psychoanalytic approach, and another that insists on the diary as a cultural and discursive practice with historical specificities. The second camp favors a materialist or new historicist approach that asks readers to look at the ways in which economic and social realities shape the seemingly individualized and allegedly “private” act of expressing one’s thoughts in a diary. Both camps agree that gender is a factor when thinking about both the shape of the life recorded (what kind of life could the diarist lead given psychosocial constraints?) or the ways in which the life is represented. The question, in some ways, is whether to foreground in interpretive acts the “life” or the “text.” But surely the question is more complicated because the diary, as a text, is one that is constrained by unknown plot developments of a life yet to be lived. An imaginary future continuously shapes how the diarist will write about the present. Neither the life nor the text are static, but in a process of cocreation. Therefore, if “life” and “text” cannot be untangled, readers must search for an ethical relationship to the exigencies of the text-in-process and the reverberations of the life that it simultaneously documents and creates. Ethical readings of diaries, grounded in feminist methodologies, must pay attention to the ways in which diary writing calculates its strategies with respect to the gendered position of the diarist within a particular culture. This paper begins by mapping the complications that occur when life and text intersect in women’s diaries.

What Is a Woman’s Diary? Historically, women’s diaries have been consigned—literally or figuratively— to the dustbin of history, and many critical readings of women’s diaries remain alert to the consequences of recuperating women’s texts that might otherwise remain neglected. Evidence from around the world, including literary diaries written in tenth-century Japan,4 shows that since the Middle Ages, women kept records of their lives. Diaries, letters, journal letters, scrapbooks, and florilegium name a few of the manuscript formats. Not all of these manuscript forms were saved for posterity, and clearly the surviving examples of manuscript diaries deposited in public and private archives are fewer than the total produced. Fewer still escaped external or internal censorship. An illustrative example of censorship is the journal of Elizabeth Egerton. Written in seventeenth-century England, it might have remained wholly unknown except for the fact that it was transcribed after her death into a manuscript titled “True Coppies of Certaine Loose Papers left by the Right Honorable ELIZABETH Countesse of BRIDGEWATE[,] Collected and Transcribed together here since Death Anno Domini 1663.”5 Her husband’s signature on the papers suggests that he oversaw the transcription, and readers have no way to 40 | The Diary

know what was revised, edited, or thrown away. An eighteenth-century descendant observed that the limited circulation of the papers within the family demonstrated “a very uncommon piety” and celebrated the fact that Egerton’s manuscript would never “be unlocked to the profane eye of the public at large.”6 Her diaries, like many others, were likely edited, excised, and censored before finding their way into the archive. The fact that Egerton’s diary was saved, when so many are lost, and then the further alterations to the manuscript itself highlight the practical difficulties of making definitive and comprehensive statements about a body of writing called “women’s diaries.” When we talk about women’s diaries, do we mean the manuscript diary? A fair copy? An edited version? These factors complicate critical responses to the text.

What Gets Saved? Simply finding women’s diaries is a challenge for feminist scholars. To address the internal problems of archives and the paucity of published primary texts, early reclamation work by scholars sought to identify manuscript texts in archives. As a result, bibliographies produced throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s cataloged women’s diaries. Cynthia Huff, Cheryl Cline, Margaret Conrad, Kathryn Carter, Lillian Schlissel, Margo Culley, and Laura Arskey inventoried diaries that were extant in published or unpublished formats within the national contexts of the United States, Britain, and Canada.7 Elizabeth Webby did similar detective work to find writing by colonial women in Australia, and Christina Sjoblad traced women’s diary writing in Sweden starting in 1737.8 Diaries are often hidden in archival collections named for their husbands and fathers, a curatorial practice that drew fire from feminist historians. In 1978, for example, Canadian historian Veronica Strong-Boag urged archives to reassess their collection policies and reimagine “time-worn classification systems which emphasize the activities of political, military, diplomatic, and economic elites.”9 Her remarks remain salient but cannot address the gender-biased oversights that shaped archival holdings before that time. The challenges inherent in finding surviving diaries illuminates other challenges in turn. For one thing, the lack of a comprehensive or representative body of texts makes it difficult to properly define “diary writing” as a field of study, and the editing and excising that happened before a diary reached the archive makes it difficult to assess how much the diarist herself authored the final document. Is Elizabeth Egerton properly named as the only author of her diary? Diary editors—whether a well-meaning husband or a conscientious feminist scholar—exert a particular kind of control that modifies the text, even if their editorial eyes are calibrated to different value systems. Helen Buss, a prolific critic of Canadian autobiography, Feminist Interpretations of the Diary  |  41

reflects on this when she states, “As a twentieth-century feminist rescuing the female subject from the oblivion of the unread archive, I am as capable of malformation as any.”10 Critic Jane Hunter agrees that “the unviolated diary was rare,” so this material fact presents a significant hurdle for readers who hope to make comprehensive statements about this writing as a genre or those who hope to gain access to an unadulterated portrayal of inner life by way of a particular example.11 External editing was not the only factor that modified the content of a diary. In addition to the heavy hand of external censorship, the exigencies of imagined audiences exerted a compelling internal effect. Unspoken rules about what a woman should be writing infuse diary writing at every turn. Sometimes these audiences were immediately present and real. When the author Louisa May Alcott kept a childhood diary, her father (like many nineteenth-century parents) encouraged her but kept careful watch over what she wrote in its pages.12 Sometimes these audiences were imaginary. Fanny Burney’s diary, addressed to Nobody—which she began in 1768 and kept for seventy-two years—was at least twice revised: once when she burned the pages written before she was fifteen and a second time when she heavily edited the texts for publication.13 Likewise, Queen Victoria—in her highly visible role—would have been aware of a potentially public readership while writing her diary. “The private dimensions” of Victoria’s diary, explains Cynthia Huff in her analysis of that diary, “could never and cannot now be separated from public expression and political familial editing and censorship.”14 The diary of Anne Frank, arguably one of the most famous examples of the genre, underwent revisions at the hand of its author and then of her father. Anne Lister’s diary is another key example. Referred to by her nineteenth-century contemporaries as “Gentleman Jack” because of her way of dressing, Lister felt the need to conceal sexual liaisons and money issues (among other topics) in her diary by using code. Of course, it was not only a regard for a target reader but also for the normative cultural image of women in European societies that led to this kind of internal censorship. If the accidents of history predetermine which manuscripts make it into the archives, then a further, more profound silence emerges based on race and class. For example, archival collections in the Caribbean have few examples by women of color; the memoirs, journals, and letters by women that have survived are by “outsiders, British for the most part, or [women belonging] to the white Creole elite.”15 Some reclamation work has been attempted, such as Mary Helen Washington’s 1988 collection of writing by black women between 1860 and 1960. Her starting point is the autobiographical work of Harriet Jacobs, and she makes the case that private writing for black women “provides evidence of the rich cultural history of black women that is to be found in non-traditional sources.”16 42 | The Diary

Given the limitations of the archive with regard to race, historians have tried to evince nuanced readings from the documented experiences of white women settlers in colonial spaces that are more likely to be found in colonial archives.17 Notable critical work in this vein has been done by Australian scholar Gillian Whitlock, who is keenly attuned to the ways in which women’s life writing responds to the demands of writing occasions dictated and shaped by cultural and historical specificities.18 Even though Whitlock’s early work focused on autobiographical writing by Canadian emigrants Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie, who did not keep or publish “diaries” in the traditional sense, her critical approach works well for diaries. Predating Whitlock’s work, but using a similar approach, is Delys Bird’s examination of Australian women’s diaries of the nineteenth century. She demonstrates how diaries expose “the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in the Australian bush myth, primarily its exclusion of the feminine in any of its aspects.”19 An essay on a farm wife’s diary written in Prince Edward Island, Canada, 20 or Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s monograph on the diary of an American midwife show how the scant details of the most parsimonious diary can reveal historically rich details about the contributions of women in colonized spaces and the conditions of their lived experiences, 21 but what these works cannot do is correct the historical imbalance that already exists (and often persists) in the archives. Class is clearly another determining factor. Working-class diaries in early periods are rare partly because literacy rates were lower than they would be when universal education became mandatory. There is, however, the much-discussed diary of Hannah Cullwick, a Victorian maidservant who secretly married Arthur Munby, her employer, in 1873. Historians were initially excited to find a document that seemed to offer firsthand accounts of the daily activities of a maidservant, a job that often included dirty work such as chimney sweeping and blacking (or shining) boots. It promised a window into the world of the servant class, which is often only visible in testimonies and court records or in the margins of the biographies of the powerful (if there at all). However, Cullwick makes it clear that she is writing the diary at the behest of Munby, in yet another example of a response to the expectations of an audience.22 Because she was compelled by her employer to keep a diary and because he took voyeuristic pleasure from her descriptions of dirty work, critics disagree about the level of agency Cullwick brought to her acts of writing. Was she being manipulated by Munby? Would he have fired her if she did not keep a diary? Was she manipulating Munby through her writing? To what extent is she representative of working-class Victorian women? Can we regard her as both a constrained subject and an active agent in her own self-representation, as Helen Merrick asked?23 Surveying the analyses on Feminist Interpretations of the Diary  |  43

Cullwick’s diaries, historians summarized the critical debate in this way: “Hannah Cullwick’s diaries, and their contested use by feminist historians, speak eloquently of the problems and paradoxes of women’s private writing in history.”24 The diaries remain intractable, making it impossible to know exactly what she represents and for whom she speaks. Cullwick’s class position makes her an attractive subject for feminist reclamation, but the material complications of her writing situation make it difficult to assess how transparent and illustrative that writing might be within the realm of factual social history.

Why Should We Read Them? Undaunted by the limitations of the archives or altered documents, early feminist readers (like Mary Helen Washington, mentioned earlier) were undoubtedly correct to insist on the importance of diaries because they do offer firsthand insight into lives in a way that few other documents can. Additionally, feminist scholars saw political value in unearthing these records, in terms of the ways in which these documents might disrupt prevailing narratives about history or literature. Critic Rebecca Steinitz described the impetus thus: “As the field of women’s studies coalesced around the project of reclaiming women’s experiences for scholarship, women’s diaries, of which it turned out there were many, became essential source material for new work in women’s history and literature.”25 Reading for reclamation and reading for disruption are both situated in worthy motives, but they can both lead to misreadings. Readers who turn to diaries in search of unadulterated firsthand experience confront what Steinitz called the “theoretical desirability but practical difficulty” of assessing possibly altered records pulled from biased archives.26 The “theoretical desirability” and attraction to these documents is undeniable: reading about the minutiae of everyday life or universal emotions like love or longing can create strong bonds of empathy between the diarist and her reader. However, if the reader proceeds here only with good intentions and without ethical and critical consideration, a violent discourse emerges. Significant misinterpretation becomes a possibility, a misinterpretation that leads back to nineteenth-century assumptions about diaries. A poem by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer recounts the excitement of finding a manuscript diary, and it offers this evocative image: “Opening these little books / Is like opening clean graves.”27 The relationship formed at this moment of discovery between reader and diary writer is an interpretive relationship that is colored by, freighted by, heightened political or personal expectations and a tactile experience of “discovery.” Opening a grave, murdering a diary writer, degrading the sacred space of the diary,

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violating the “unviolated” diary—the language suggests invasiveness, as if the (private, secret, hidden) diary manuscript is a synecdoche for the body. While the relationship between reader and diary can be complicated by the motivations underlying interpretive acts, it is additionally complicated if the text is imagined as a metaphorical substitute for the body. A manuscript diary is a slippery object. Papers get loose and find their ways into the wrong hands. They are regarded as messy, in need of tidying up, editing, excising, censoring. If factual accuracy and transparency are made impossible by the ways in which diaries are created, saved, and circulated, and if there is an imaginary elision blurring together the text and the body, then feminist scholars are obligated to unpack the ethical relationship between diarist and reader; they are compelled to undertake more nuanced work in terms of parsing out motivations, audiences, readerships, and modes of production. Valerie Raoul, Veronica StrongBoag, and other feminist scholars urge readers to question their biases in acts of archival preservation or textual editing in order to understand that the task is never simply curatorial.28 What gets cleaned up? What do current readers want to tidy up? What is the ideal relationship between the curator or editor and the diarist? A feminist mode of analysis asks us to reflect on all of these material factors. The following sections tackle the predominant theoretical modes we have used to read diaries while attending to feminist concerns.

Theoretical Approaches: Psychoanalytic The diary, in critical discourse, becomes a malleable document that can be edited and interpreted to serve many political purposes, both those that are well intentioned and those that are not. Well-intentioned feminist critics went astray in early scholarship by suggesting that the fictions of gender coherence could map synchronously onto genre. These are the arguments in early scholarship that sparked a negative reaction from Marlene Kadar.29 Where early feminist interpretations went wrong was when they relied on stereotypes about women and their lives as a way to make generic arguments. For example, some early theories took direction from Paul Delany, who noted in his work on autobiography that women tend to identify with others and that this shaped the narrative voice in their acts of life writing.30 Following in this vein, diary critic Suzanne Juhasz wrote in 1984, “Women have always written in journals, not only because the journal was often the only kind of writing available to them . . . but because private writing is suited to private life.”31 In the same article, she suggests that “women’s lives, like the journal, show less a pattern of linear development towards some clear goal than one of repetitive, cumulative, cyclical structure.”32

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A 1974 anthology of women’s diary writing commented on the parallels between women’s lives and diary writing as both “emotional, fragmentary, interrupted, modest . . . private, restricted, trivial, formless, and concerned with self.”33 The approaches of these early critics dovetailed nicely with psychoanalytic approaches to autobiographical writing as described in the 1980s by Sidonie Smith or Shirley Neuman, among others. These critics identified the normative subject of autobiographical writing as male and the ideal story elicited by the generic demands of autobiography as maleoriented, leading Smith to state that “a woman’s subjectivity and therefore her text unfold narratively in patterns tied to her psychosexual development.”34 Not surprisingly, around the same time, Cynthia Huff lauded diary writing for knowing “no boundaries” and for demonstrating a “subversiveness that feminist critics have celebrated.”35 Valerie Raoul admitted hesitation about labeling literary genres as masculine or feminine but came to the conclusion in a 1989 article that diary writing, as influenced by the French journal intime, was “more demonstrably feminine . . . than the novel.”36 The “feminist conclusions” of early critics fortified rather than challenged stereotypical assumptions about the meaning of feminine. An interpretive approach that too closely aligns a woman’s text with her life or her psychosexual development is dangerous because it rests on the same assumptions about the synecdochic connection between (private) text and (writing) woman that led a nineteenth-century husband to laughingly suggest the murder of his diary-writing wife. It advances a popular notion of the diary as “feminine, emotive, private,” a notion that persists even to this day.37 Moreover, the robust and ongoing debate in the field of women’s literature has shown that it is impossible to characterize what it means to write as a woman. Feminist theorist Denise Riley convincingly argues that women “can be very differently positioned so that the apparent continuity of the subject ‘women’ isn’t to be relied upon; ‘women’ is both synchronically and diachronically erratic as a collectivity . . . for the individual ‘being a woman’ is inconstant.”38 Understanding the diary as a place to air grievances, to subversively counteract “literary” standards, to discover an inner self, or to chart a path to personal growth is to ignore the multiple ways in which diaries have functioned at particular historical moments; understanding the diary as a particularly feminine form of writing is to ignore the many purposes diaries have served for their writers; and understanding women as having an identifiably coherent and collective approach to writing is to misunderstand the variations between individual women and their experiences of what it means to write as a woman or, indeed, to be a woman. It’s just wrong, and it is underpinned by misunderstanding two key issues that emerge with respect to diaries: the first is that diaries reveal some kind of evidentiary truth because they are grounded in “experience,” and the second is that they are inherently 46 | The Diary

truthful because they are “private” and somehow at a remove from public strictures. We turn first to this issue of experience and then to the debates around privacy. Enthusiasm about reclaiming female voices from diaries leads critics onto treacherous ground when those personal narratives are mined for an explication of female “experience.” Historian Joan Scott illuminated the issues here when she wrote persuasively about “this kind of appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation.” Her concern was that a foundational framing around the primacy of experience would weaken “the critical thrust of histories of difference.”39 What she means is that there may be gaps and silences in a text that remain “unreadable” by me as an interpreter if I assume that I can read the diarists’ experiences through the lens of my own experiences. There may in fact be explicit descriptions of experience that remain illegible if I operate uncritically from a position of empathy. A heuristic appeal to “experience” in the case of women reading women’s dairies tends, in addition, to rely on the abstraction of a re-depersonalized “we women.” So Nancy Miller asked this simple but pointed question in an early work on women’s autobiography: Do all women share a single personal narrative?40 Of course not; therefore, there must be more nuanced readings of the ways in which women have sought to represent their lives in diaries. In summary, early feminist interpretations of diary writing were motivated by a desire to find the “subversive” and to challenge normative history; however, because they legitimized its claims on the authority of experience,41 they also erased the voices and viewpoints of other marginalized groups, and they erased any substantial reading of difference. There was and has been critical divergence from approaches that rely too heavily on essentialist narratives about women’s lives and women’s experience or uncritical empathic identification between reader and diarist. As early as 1991, Harriet Blodgett admonished readers of the New York Times Book Review that it was wrong to read the diary “as frank confessional or consciousness raiser”; she suggested it was misunderstanding “of recent vintage ripened by feminism.”42 In response, Valerie Raoul and Rebecca Hogan tried to tease out the political tasks that lay concealed in these early critical approaches to women’s diaries, as did Marlene Barr, who wrote that diary criticism ran the risk of separatism if it continued to focus only on feminist interpretations.43 In later responses, critics have tried to imagine the diary as a performative, iterative space where the writer can test out versions of identity. Shifting the emphasis from a presumed stability or coherence of identity to the constructedness of self as mobilized by the act of diary writing has been a very useful step forward. For example, Anne Marie Millim took this approach to British nineteenth-century diaries in a 2013 study to argue that “the Feminist Interpretations of the Diary  |  47

construction of the self does not simply happen in the diary but rather through the diary.”44 The diary must be read, she wrote, as a technology that affords a self-reflexive attempt to “grasp and collect different facets of an ever-changing self.”45 Millim, like contemporaries Rebecca Steinitz or Catherine Delafield, no longer reads the diary in an attempt to find the historical woman but examines what the generic features of the diary make possible for those who are constructing identity as they write it; the emphasis is on process. “The diary is performative in the nineteenth century because it is an element in gender signification within the ‘regulatory frame’ of femininity,” wrote Delafield in a concise statement that is representative of recent, carefully articulated feminist approaches to diary writing.46

Historical-Materialist Approaches Conceptually separating the manuscript diary from the diarist (and not assuming that one represents the other) has further productive effects in terms of scholarship: it enables scholars to consider the manuscript diary as a “thing.” Marxist and materialist feminist approaches that advanced in the 1990s, explained in the work of someone like Rosemary Hennessy,47 reoriented discussions so that scholars could imagine the manuscript diary as a token in particular kinds of economies, and more recent work (by feminist studies scholar Sianne Ngai in 2005, for example) has dismantled assumptions about how aesthetic classifications are applied within capitalist culture, why diaries might fall into a category marked as “lesser” than literature, and how diaries function within overarching economic systems. For example, Ngai wrote that in the nineteenth century, “the antebellum fiduciary system . . . provided a site for an instrumental yet highly unstable convergence between money, written texts, and feelings.”48 In this complex system, diaries operated as account books (economically, morally, and emotionally). This observation is given full investigation in an examination of account book diaries by Molly McCarthy entitled The Accidental Diarist.49 Not only did this critical turn enliven debates about the cultural meaning of the manuscript diary, but it also liberated scholars to focus on the haptic qualities of a manuscript. Manuscript studies have been enriched by a number of such investigations, including Ellen Gruber Garvey’s body of scholarship on nineteenth-century American scrapbooks over the last two decades, in which she read scrapbooks as a way for their makers to process and organize an overwhelming barrage of print material. She wrote in her 2013 monograph that “scrapbooks were a nascent technology forging a new way of thinking about materials and data”50 within a print culture of mass production that was unprecedented. Similarly, Samantha Matthews 48 | The Diary

framed the Victorian autograph album as a kind of technology that prompts acts of memorialization. The diary-as-object is a generic technology: it performs identifiable operations within specific economies, and it signifies as an object in all of the complicated ways that Bill Brown would have us understand of “things.”51 “The fascination of another person’s diary is . . . due to its factuality or historicity, its ‘being there-ness,’” wrote one author in the mid-1990s, and fictional diaries mimic or “stimulate the factuality and historicity of real diaries.”52 The diary-as-object in archival or fictional settings is a rich artefact for cultural investigation. What diaries are said to signify is the feminine, the emotive, and the private. The putative privacy of the diary is the last topic of this overview but a crucial one. Peter Gay expressed typical assumptions about the diary when he wrote that the diary was, for the bourgeois man, “the silent and discreet solace of his inviolable inner life”53 even though historical evidence strongly suggests that the diary is not always “private.” To understand the diary as a “private” document has particular consequences for diaries because of the underlying assumptions about who is (or who should be) at a remove from public life.54 Indeed, this assumption is often projected onto the diaries too, even though “as a general category, the nineteenth-century diary is something like a family history, a souvenir, meant to be shared like a Bible, handed down through the generations to be viewed not as an individual story but as the history of a family’s growth and course through time.”55 Scholarly discussion for the past twenty years, according to Jennifer Sinor, has debated “whether a diary is a public or private document.”56 She cited work by Kathryn Carter, Molly McCarthy, Amy Wink, and Cynthia Huff to show that “recent scholarship works from the assumption that diaries are both public and private, delighting in the ways such spaces are negotiated.”57 Rebecca Steinitz advanced the conversation when she stated that public and private may be the wrong binary on which to pin diary writing and that “domestic or intimate” writing may be a more accurate phrase: “Diaries slip back and forth across the boundaries of textual circulation, putting those very boundaries (and the typologies they generate) into question.”58 Reviewing the historical evidence, Steinitz concluded that “the diary flourished in a sphere most accurately termed intimate.”59 If there was ever confusion about the so-called privacy of the diary in general or the woman’s diary in particular, that confusion has been thoroughly obliterated in the wake of Web 2.0. No one can regard the diaristic features of Facebook, for example, and convincingly argue that it is a private genre. The privacy that might once have been taken for granted (if wrongly) has lost its foothold in a world where Facebook functions as a social diary and privacy no longer functions as it once did given new and constantly changing technological affordances. One recent scholar mining social Feminist Interpretations of the Diary  |  49

media in order to bring new insights the role of the personal diary in the digital age is Kylie Cardell, in her insightful 2014 work Dear World.60

Conclusion Feminine. Emotive. Private. These terms associated with diaries were the very categories that attracted feminist scholars in the first place, motivating them to scour the archives and reclaim these texts for scholarly study. Feminist investigations of diary writing shows that the silences—silences in the diaries as well as the silence of diaries that did not survive—can be more revealing than the explicit content. The investigations reveal gender-biased corruptions to a body of work that might have looked quite differently if other cultural conditions had existed, and they illuminate the intense degree of control exerted on “privately” written expressions. In the past three decades, each of the categories (feminine, emotive, private) has been dissected and turned inside out by successive waves of feminist insight and analyses. How can diaries be feminine if the term itself is so unstable? What damage do scholars unwittingly enact by insisting on a contiguous relationship between a diary and its writer? If the diaries are indeed emotive, do they operate within a discourse of affect or within libidinal economies, and how can we unpack those operations? They are most certainly not private and must be read as slipping “back and forth across the boundaries of textual circulation.”61 At the very least, recent developments in digital diaries—in blogs, on Facebook, or elsewhere— make it abundantly clear that “privacy” is an artifact modulated by the technologies used to record the life. Reading diaries through the lens of feminism has been proven to be a kind of Rorschach test eliciting strong opinions about privacy, the self in the community, the individual in society, the aspirational self, and the social and cultural self as well as requiring a consideration of where and how these concepts intersect with historically situated cultural attitudes about writing. Feminist literary theories offer new heuristics to help readers gain purchase on the “silences” and gaps in texts and encourage the next wave of critics to advance more nuanced arguments that do not rely on a notion of diary writing as an uncomplicated or transparent window into inner lives, nor a kind of genre that is ideally suited to a universal notion of women’s psychosexual development. The diary is not a “clean grave” because that speaks of absence, sterility, death. A diary is a cacophonous space where the author wrestles with imagined audiences, cultural expectations about gender, and historically freighted assumptions about writing. Ultimately, diaries resist and escape any totalizing theoretical approach because they are written about actual human lives; they are not fiction. The messiness of human life complicates interpretive 50 | The Diary

acts and awkward attempts at self-identification on the part of the critic; it interrupts the desire to speak with the dead or the absent. Despite all of that, and in concert with all of that, amidst the cacophony, feminist approaches to the diary offer increasingly precise language and a wide range of interpretive tools to imagine what is happening when a diarist picks up a pen and poises it over the empty page or when a reader opens the musty pages of a manuscript—and what those activities signify in the wider culture. Notes 1. Marlene Kadar, ed., Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 7. 2. Jane Welsh Carlyle, Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Thomas Carlyle and James Anthony Froude (New York: Scribner, 1913), 2:37. 3. Ibid. 4. Donald Keene, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 8. 5. Betty S. Travitsky, “Reconstructing the Still Small Voice: The Occasional Journal of Elizabeth Egerton,” Women’s Studies 19 (1991): 195. 6. Ibid. 7. Cynthia Huff, British Women’s Diaries: A Descriptive Bibliography of Selected Nineteenth-Century Manuscripts (New York: AMS Press, 1985); Cheryl Cline, Women’s Diaries, Journals and Letters: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Science, 1989); Margaret Conrad, Recording Angels: The Private Chronicles of Women from the Maritime Provinces of Canada, 1750–1950 (Ottawa: CRIAW Papers, 1982); Kathryn Carter, The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1996 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Kathryn Carter, Diaries in English by Women in Canada, 1753–1995 (Ottawa: CRIAW Papers, 1997); Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken Books, 1982); Margo Culley, A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1985); Laura Arskey et al. American Diaries: Diaries Written from 1492 to 1844, vol. 1 (Detroit: Gale Group, 1983); Laura Arskey et al., American Diaries: Diaries Written from 1845 to 1980, vol. 2 (Detroit: Gale Group, 1987). 8. Elizabeth Webby, Colonial Voices: Letters, Diaries, Journalism, and Other Accounts on Nineteenth-Century Australia (St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1989); Christina Sjoblad, “From Family Notes to Diary: The Development of a Genre,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 4 (1998): 517–21. 9. Veronica Strong-Boag, “Raising Clio’s Consciousness: Women’s History and Archives in Canada,” Archivaria 6 (1978): 73. 10. Helen Buss, “Constructing Female Subjects in the Archive: A Reading of Three Versions of One Woman’s Subjectivity,” in Working in Women’s Archives: Researching Women’s Private Literature and Archival Documents, ed. Marlene Kadar and Helen Buss (Waterloo, Ontario: WLU Press, 2001), 16. Feminist Interpretations of the Diary  |  51

11. Jane H. Hunter, “Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-Victorian America,” American Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1992): 60. 12. Kerry A. Graves, ed., The Girlhood Diary of Louisa May Alcott, 1843– 1946: Writings of a Young Author (Mankato, MN: Blue Earth Books, 2001), 7. 13. D. D. Devlin, The Novels and Journals of Fanny Burney (London: Macmillan, 1987), 54. 14. Cynthia Huff, “Private Domains: Queen Victoria and Women’s Diaries,” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 4, no. 1 (1988): 47. 15. Bridget Brereton, “Gendered Testimonies: Autobiographies, Diaries and Letters by Women as Sources for Caribbean History,” Feminist Review 59, no. 1 (1998), 145. 16. Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960 (New York: Anchor Books, 1987), xxvi. 17. For more discussion on this topic with regard to the silence around indigenous women’s diaries, see Kathryn Carter, “The Circulating Self: Frances Simpson’s 1830 ‘Journal of a Voyage from Montreal . . . ’” Australian Canadian Studies 22, no. 1 (2004): 9–34. 18. Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London: Cassell, 2000). 19. Delys Bird, “‘Born for the Bush’: An Australian Woman’s Frontier,” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 2 (1989): 13. 20. Kathryn Carter, “An Economy of Words: Emma Chadwick Stretch’s Account Book Diary, 1859–1860,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region 29, no. 1 (1999): 43–56. 21. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990). 22. Liz Stanley, “From Self-Made Women to ‘Women’s Made Selves’? Audit Selves, Simulations, and Surveillance in the Rise of the Public Woman,” in Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, ed. Tess Coslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield (London: Routledge, 2000), 46. 23. Helen Merrick, “‘A Story No-One Would Believe’: The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick,” Limina 2 (1996): 30. 24. Mary Spongberg, Ann Curthoys, and Barbara Cains, eds., Companion to Women’s Historical Writing (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 436. 25. Rebecca Steinitz, Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 100. 26. Ibid., 2. 27. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, “The Old Diaries,” in “Five Poems,” Boundary 25, no. 3 (1977): 882–84. 28. Valerie Raoul, “Women’s Diaries as Life Savings: Who Decides Whose Life Is Saved?” Biography 24, no. 1 (2001): 140–51; Strong-Boag, “Raising Clio’s Consciousness,” 73. 29. Kadar, Essays on Life Writing. 30. Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kagan Paul, 1969). 31. Suzanne Juhasz, “The Journal as Source and Model for Feminist Art: The Example of Kathleen Fraser,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 8, no. 1 (1984): 16. 32. Ibid.

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33. Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter, introduction to Revelations: Diaries of Women, ed. Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter (New York: Random House, 1974), 5. 34. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 13. 35. Cynthia Huff, “That Profoundly Female and Feminist Genre: The Diary as Feminist Practice,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 17, nos. 3–4 (1989): 7. 36. Valerie Raoul, “Women and Diaries: Gender and Genre,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 22, no. 3 (1989): 57. 37. Steinitz, Time, Space, and Gender, 2. 38. Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 2. 39. Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Historicize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 24. 40. Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge, 1991), 16. 41. Scott, “Experience,” 24. 42. Harriet Blodgett, “Dear Diary: How Do I Need You? Let Me Count the Ways,” New York Times Book Review, September 22, 1991, 24. 43. Raoul, “Women’s Diaries as Life Savings”; Rebecca Hogan, “Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as Feminine Form,” in Autobiography and Questions of Gender, ed. Shirley Neuman (London: Cass, 1992), 95–107; Marleen Barr, “Deborah Norris Logan, Feminist Criticism, and Identity Theory: Interpreting a Woman’s Diary without the Danger of Separatism,” Biography 8, no. 1 (1985): 23. 44. Anne-Marie Millim, The Victorian Diary: Authorship and Emotional Labour (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 25. 45. Ibid., 16. 46. Catherine Delafield, Women’s Diaries as Narrative in the NineteenthCentury Novel (London: Routledge, 2009), 3. 47. Rosemary Hennessy, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (London: Routledge, 1992). 48. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 58. 49. Molly McCarthy, The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 50. Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 249. 51. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. 52. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Diary as Narrative: Theory and Practice,” in The Search for a New Alphabet: Literary Studies in a Changing World, ed. Harald Hendrix et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996), 235. 53. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, vol. 1, Education of the Senses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 403. 54. For a full discussion of the gendered aspects of “privacy” as they intersected with diary writing, see Kathryn Carter, “The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain,” Victorian Review 23, no. 2 (1997): 251–67. 55. Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey, 11.

Feminist Interpretations of the Diary  |  53

56. Jennifer Sinor, The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray’s Diary (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 36. 57. Carter, “Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain”; McCarthy, Accidental Diarist; Amy Wink, She Left Nothing in Particular: The Autobiographical Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Diaries (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001); Cynthia Huff, “Private Domains,” 46–52; Sinor, Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing, 36. 58. Steinitz, Time, Space, and Gender, 82–83. 59. Ibid., 83. 60. Kylie Cardell, Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). 61. Steinitz, Time, Space, and Gender, 82–83.

Bibliography Arskey, Laura, Nancy Pries, William Matthews, and Marcia Reed. American Diaries: Diaries Written from 1492–1844. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale Research Group, 1983. Arskey, Laura, Nancy Pries, Marcia Reed, and William Matthews. American Diaries: Diaries Written from 1845–1980. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale Research Group, 1987. Barr, Marleen S. “Deborah Norris Logan, Feminist Criticism, and Identity Theory: Interpreting a Woman’s Diary without the Danger of Separatism.” Biography 8, no. 1 (1985): 12–24. Bird, Delys. “‘Born for the Bush’: An Australian Woman’s Frontier.” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, no. 2 (1989): 1–16. Blodgett, Harriet. Capacious Hold-All: An Anthology of Englishwomen’s Diary Writing. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1991. ———. “Dear Diary: How Do I Need You? Let Me Count the Ways.” New York Times Book Review, September 22, 1991. Brereton, Bridget. “Gendered Testimonies: Autobiographies, Diaries and Letters by Women as Sources for Caribbean History.” Feminist Review 59, no. 1 (1998): 143–63. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. Bunkers, Suzanne L., and Cynthia A. Huff. Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Buss, Helen. “Constructing Female Subjects in the Archive: A Reading of Three Versions of One Woman’s Subjectivity.” In Working in Women’s Archives: Researching Women’s Private Literature and Archival Documents, edited by Marlene Kadar and Helen Buss, 8–23. Waterloo, Ontario: WLU Press, 2001. ———. Mapping Ourselves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, University Press, 1993. Cardell, Kylie. Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. Carlyle, Jane Welsh. Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Edited by Thomas Carlyle and James Anthony Froude. Vol. 2. New York: Scribner, 1913. Carter, Kathryn. “The Circulating Self: Frances Simpson’s 1830 ‘Journal of a Voyage from Montreal . . .’” Australian Canadian Studies 22, no. 1 (2004): 9–34. 54 | The Diary

———. “The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain.” Victorian Review 23, no. 2 (1997): 251–67. ———. Diaries in English by Women in Canada, 1753–1995. Ottawa: Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women Papers, 1997. ———. “An Economy of Words: Emma Chadwick Stretch’s Account Book Diary, 1859–1860.” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region 29, no. 1 (1999): 43–56. ———. The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1996. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Cline, Cheryl. Women’s Diaries, Journals and Letters: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Science, 1989. Conrad, Margaret. Recording Angels: The Private Chronicles of Women from the Maritime Provinces of Canada, 1750–1950. Ottawa: Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women Papers, 1982. Culley, Margo. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1985. Delafield, Catherine. Women’s Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. London: Routledge, 2009. Delaney, Paul. British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge and Kagan Paul, 1969. Devlin, D. D. The Novels and Journals of Fanny Burney. London: Macmillan, 1987. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gay, Peter. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Vol. 1, Education of the Senses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Graves, Kerry A., ed. The Girlhood Diary of Louisa May Alcott, 1843–1946: Writings of a Young Author. Mankato, MN: Blue Earth Books, 2001. Hennessy, Rosemary. Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. London: Routledge, 1992. Hogan, Rebecca. “Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as Feminine Form.” In Autobiography and Questions of Gender, edited by Shirley Neuman, 95–107. London: Cass, 1992. Huff, Cynthia. British Women’s Diaries: A Descriptive Bibliography of Selected Nineteenth-Century Manuscripts. New York: AMS Press, 1985. ———. “Private Domains: Queen Victoria and Women’s Diaries.” A/B: Auto/ Biography Studies 4, no. 1 (1988): 46–52. ———. “That Profoundly Female and Feminist Genre: The Diary as Feminist Practice.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 17, nos. 3–4 (1989): 6–14. Hunter, Jane H. “Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-Victorian America.” American Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March 1992): 51–81. Juhasz, Suzanne. “The Journal as Source and Model for Feminist Art: The Example of Kathleen Fraser.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 8, no. 1 (1984): 16–20. Kadar, Marlene, ed. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Keene, Donald. Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Feminist Interpretations of the Diary  |  55

Lejeune, Phillipe. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Translated by Katherine Durnin. Manoa: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. McCarthy, Molly. The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Merrick, Helen. “‘A Story No-One Would Believe’: The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick.” Limina 2 (1996): 28–41. Miller, Nancy K. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge, 1991. Millim, Anne-Marie. The Victorian Diary: Authorship and Emotional Labour. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013. Moffat, Mary Jane, and Charlotte Painter, eds. Revelations: Diaries of Women. New York: Random House, 1974. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Riley, Denise. Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Raoul, Valerie. “Women and Diaries: Gender and Genre.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 22, no. 3 (1989): 57–66. ———. “Women’s Diaries as Life Savings: Who Decides Whose Life Is Saved?” Biography 24, no. 1 (2001): 140–51. Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg. “The Old Diaries.” In “Five Poems.” Boundary 25, no. 3 (1977): 877–86. Schlissel, Lillian. Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey. New York: Schocken Books, 1982. Scott, Joan W. “Experience.” In Feminists Historicize the Political. Edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott. New York: Routledge, 1992. Sinor, Jennifer. The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray’s Diary. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Sjlobad, Christina. “From Family Notes to Diary: The Development of a Genre.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 4 (1998): 517–21. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Spongberg, Mary, Ann Curthoys, and Barbara Cains, eds., Companion to Women’s Historical Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Stanley, Liz. “From Self-Made Women to ‘Women’s Made Selves’? Audit Selves, Simulations, and Surveillance in the Rise of the Public Woman.” In Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, edited by Tess Coslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield, 40–60. London: Routledge, 2000. Steinitz, Rebecca. Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Strong-Boag, Veronica. “Raising Clio’s Consciousness: Women’s History and Archives in Canada.” Archivaria 6 (1978): 70–82. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Diary as Narrative: Theory and Practice.” In The Search for a New Alphabet: Literary Studies in a Changing World, edited by Harald Hendrix, Joost J. Kloek, Sophie Levie, and Willie van Peer, 229–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996.

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Travitsky, Betty. “Reconstructing the Still Small Voice: The Occasional Journal of Elizabeth Egerton.” Women’s Studies 19 (1991): 193–200. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary 1785–1812. New York: Knopf, 1990. Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960. New York: Anchor Books, 1987. Webby, Elizabeth. Colonial Voices: Letters, Diaries, Journalism, and Other Accounts on Nineteenth-Century Australia. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1989. Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography. London: Cassell, 2000. Wink, Amy. She Left Nothing in Particular: The Autobiographical Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Diaries. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001.

K AT H RY N C A RT E R is Associate Vice President of Teaching and Learning at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. She is editor of The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada: 1830–1996.

Feminist Interpretations of the Diary  |  57

3 The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing Julie Rak

In her graphic memoir f u n Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel reproduces a variety of personal documents as a way to provide support for her story of family secrets: her father’s closeted identity as a gay or bisexual man and Bechdel’s growing into her identity as a butch lesbian. One of the most important ways that Bechdel folds together the beginning of her own work as a cartoonist, her concern with the importance of documentation, and the composition of Fun Home itself is in a section of the book about her “own compulsive propensity to autobiography,”1 as she struggles (and fails) to keep her first diary because she has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). When Bechdel was ten, her father—in a rare demonstration of care—gave her a wall calendar from one of his funeral home suppliers and showed her how to “just write what’s happening.”2 Bechdel began to do this, switching to an insurance agency book so that she could write more each day. But soon, Bechdel’s OCD manifested itself in her compulsion to tell the exact truth of what happened, accompanied by her fear of somehow misrepresenting events. She began to distrust language’s power of reference and inserted “I think” into her entries. Eventually, she invented a symbol as shorthand for “I think,” an inverted V. She drew the symbol at first beside, then over her words, and then over whole entries, casting into doubt her own ability to relate an event and leaving out the impact of major events as she did so. “My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such experiences,” notes one panel, depicting a scene where she and her brothers discover a giant snake that disappears by the time 58 

her babysitter Bill goes to kill it. Bechdel reproduces her diary entry for that day beside the scene of discovery. The entry mentions almost nothing about the profound impact of the event, saying only that “we saw a snake. We had lunch.” The “we” is obliterated by the upside-down V.3 Did the children really see the snake? Did Bechdel invent seeing it? Did she, as she thought at the time, feel like she “failed” an initiation rite for masculinity because she could not kill the snake herself? And if she did think this, why doesn’t this thought appear in her diary? Bechdel’s diary in Fun Home is meant to track these uncertainties. But it also is meant to show how Bechdel’s diary is what turned her OCD into a positive art practice and herself into a cartoonist who can represent the truth of an event in the midst of uncertainty, for Bechdel literally recreated every page of her childhood diary in Fun Home and even shot photographs of herself holding her original diary exactly as she would have done when she was ten years old. This process creates what Hillary Chute called “a shadow archive” that allowed Bechdel to document events and reflect on their meaning and to use Bechdel’s technique of diary composition as the method for constructing Fun Home itself.4 Bechdel’s act of making the V and then retracing that mark turns a moment of unintelligibility, uncertainty, and failure in her diary into a moment of realization. The V was cartooned: it represented what Bechdel has called a “triangulation” between unreliable language and appearances that can deceive.5 The V made Bechdel into a cartoonist who could draw the truth as a caricature and link the visual and the verbal, someone who could create from the space of OCD rather than letting it silence her.6 That moment of diary writing, Bechdel has said, is one of the key moments on which Fun Home itself is based: the book is “an expansion of my childhood diary, in that it’s this perseveration on detail.” Chute called this Fun Home’s “concern with representing the nature of the truth in its unusual attention to the archive.”7 The diary in Fun Home has received extensive treatment from a variety of perspectives, including a queer archival reading of diary making,8 Chute’s reading of diary production and trauma, and Cynthia Barounis’s recuperative reading of the diary through disability studies and research about OCD.9 Bechdel herself has reflected on how she understands diary making as a cartooning process in Fun Home and its sequel, Are You My Mother?10 For the purposes of this chapter, I am interested in how Bechdel’s diary, appearing as it does within a larger work of life writing that Bechdel claims grew directly from it, demonstrates the proximity of diary writing to other forms of life writing, such as autobiography, and at the same time demonstrates just how different the diary is from other ways to represent a life. The appearance of the diary form in Fun Home offers us a way to consider how diaries do and do not act like other types The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing  |  59

of life writing and what role diary analysis has played in life writing studies in the last three decades. To think about diary writing as life writing is to think about what affinities diaries have with other forms of self-writing but also to think about what was, as Philippe Lejeune said, “developed blindly by individuals,”11 a secret genre that was not learned formally, a form of writing often not meant to be read by anyone else but the writer. It makes the most sense to think about the diary form as connected to other self-making practices, some of which are also considered to be life writing. Diaries have affinities with these other ways to write about daily living. And, as we shall see, they have important differences that affect how we read and think about them.

Affinities: The Development of a Self-Practice In the 1980s, diary practice was connected to the study of autobiography through its contribution to the development of contemporary identity. In a landmark collection by James Olney called Studies in Autobiography, Felicity Nussbaum made a strong argument for theorizing the diary form and its proliferation in Britain in the eighteenth century as part of a shift from oral communication to print literacy, a transition to a new sense of time measured by devices, and a development of selfhood as a practice connected to liberal ideals of privacy, empiricism, and idealism.12 Like other life writing forms in the eighteenth century, including the journal, the letter, and even the epistolary novel, the diary contributed to the development in its writers of a secret self, a private sphere where those with secrets could keep them. Building on ideas about privacy developed in the late seventeenth century, Nussbaum writes, the diary was a technology of self-confession when the increased importance of intimacy in family and other settings also created a need to articulate zones of privacy and autonomy. The diary developed at the same time as the dumbwaiter, the corridor and the ha-ha, a garden feature that marked off private property without appearing to disrupt the view. Diaries sold with locks on them have similar ways of materializing the need for privacy.13 Contemporary forms of autobiography and biography also developed at the same time and for similar reasons, connected as they were to delineating the boundary between private and public spheres and the operation of confession as a way to cross that boundary. Diaries can be understood as a parallel or even generative self-practice that created the kind of self capable of writing a life story or of a life that could be written about by others. The diary could have created the space of written secular confession, a consolidation and maintenance of the self, through reflexive practices, that depends on the revealing of a secret that helped form liberal ideas about identity and discourse during this period. If someone can confess, there must be a self 60 | The Diary

that confesses, whether that confession is in response to an institutional demand or a requirement of being public.14 In a similar investigation, Philippe Lejeune traced the development of the diary in France in his essay “Counting and Managing,” translated for the collection On Diary.15 The account book, the train timetable, the clock, and the calendar created ideas about time and personal management that developed in eighteenth-century Europe at the same time that the diary form came into use. In fact, just as Alison Bechdel used the calendar that her father gave her, some of these account books were actually used as diaries, connecting the management of time directly to the recording and dating of entries.16 This is probably why in English even today we “keep” a diary as an account of our lives and thoughts, much as we keep financial accounts. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) famously employed a similar practice of self-accounting and management in his chart of virtues, published for public edification in his autobiography,17 connecting the self-practice of diaries with the more public writing of a published work. In another essay, “O My Paper!,”18 Lejeune theorized that the direct address to a diary, or to the materiality of writing within an entry, marks an important point in the development of Western subjectivity because it is an instance when diary writers stop writing diaries as if they were letters to another person and began to directly address the diary itself, what Lejeune called “a new posture of self-address.”19 Alison Bechdel’s observation that her childhood diary practice marked the beginning of her becoming a cartoonist is another way to connect selfdevelopment to diary making. In the process, as many other diarists have discovered, she wrote and drew herself into being an artist who could work with words and images at the same time. Because her diary had no audience at first, Bechdel had to act as producer and consumer of it, until she could no longer write on her own.20 Bechdel has described her diary making and rereading practice as a way of making sense of her past but also as a replacement for a core self she did not sense she had as she was growing up. As she said, the diary and other forms of life writing act as a replacement self: “I do often still go back and reread it with great curiosity about what I was thinking or doing at an earlier moment in my life, still looking for some kind of answer to . . . I don’t know, ‘who am I?’ I mean, that’s ridiculous, I am lacking some kind of structure of the self that I’m hoping to replace with all this self-narration that I’m doing.”21 Life writing scholars who are interested in diaries have often noted that diary work—which includes writing, rereading entries, and even, in the case of Lejeune’s own practice, copying past entries22 —is associated with people who either were not allowed to participate fully in the public sphere or who were not taken seriously when they did occupy it. As a lesbian who came out before it was publicly “safe” to do so in the The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing  |  61

United States and as a child writer, Bechdel is someone who would not have been able to be public about her identity or who would not have been taken seriously because of her age and her sexuality. The diary form allowed her to explore events without external censure and, except for a few conventions, without rules other than those the writer imposed on herself. This is why, as Lejeune wrote, so many young female writers have kept diaries—because of all cultural producers, they are taken the least seriously. In France, diaries have even been characterized as dangerous for young people: a waste of time for them and a prelude to narcissism!23 In English studies, the advent of feminist literary criticism also created a rationale for studying the diary form as an expression of what Suzanne L. Bunkers called “the diversity of women’s lives and experiences,”24 a way of bringing into view diaries as more than historical documents. The feminist turn in literary criticism, history, and autobiography studies was central to diary scholarship. Feminist diary critics from the 1980s onward understood diaries as autobiographical, with their own concerns and rhetorical strategies, made by women who either could not have published their work in the public sphere or whose concerns about the domestic worlds they wrote about were not valued there. With many other critics, Bunkers has argued that diaries should expand our understanding of autobiography, opening it to consideration as life writing, as Marlene Kadar had argued should happen in feminist studies of letters, diaries, and other ephemera.25 This view of diaries by women not only chronicles their lives but also brings into focus the male-dominated character of much published autobiography that does not include their experiences.26 Rooted in these concerns, a robust critical industry about women’s diaries in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia sought to analyze the rhetoric and composition of diaries by women as life writing, often connecting the poetics of diary writing, and its emphasis on contingency, with women’s lives, whether they were farm women or writers who were diarists, such as Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, or Maria Bashkirtseff.27 Important feminist collections such as Shari Benstock’s The Private Self contain essays about diaries that understood them as life writing.28 Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff’s introduction to their collection Inscribing the Daily: Essays on Women’s Diaries has a detailed argument for taking women’s diaries seriously as life writing, connecting diaries to important feminist criticism of autobiography in its treatment of canonicity, gender, poetics, and the advent personal criticism.29 In addition to the critical introductions to important published diaries by established female authors like Woolf, Sylvia Plath, or Nin that read their diary practices through a feminist lens, collections of excerpts from women’s diaries implicitly contain the argument that diary writing connects its readers to the everyday lives of the women who wrote them. The 62 | The Diary

act of reading and writing about these diaries is in itself an act of feminist recuperation as these texts are made available.30 But this last mention of the importance of feminist recovery work and publication of women’s diaries within a feminist life writing context ultimately leads us to think about how unlike the diary is from published forms of life writing. As Anna Jackson argued, diary poetics does not resemble other types of life writing rhetoric and cannot be read in gender essentialist terms as simply reflective of women’s lives, an argument also made by Nussbaum in her discussion of women’s diaries and seventeenth-century commonplace books in Benstock’s collection The Private Self.31 The next section considers how diaries do not have an affinity with published autobiographical writing such as memoirs or biographies. The circumstances of their composition and circulation, of necessity, make them different, and different critical tools are required to read them effectively and sensitively.

Differences: Materiality and the Trace Let us return for a moment to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home to show how diaries are ephemeral, like letters or zines, and not as much like published forms of life writing.32 The young Bechdel begins a diary when she is ten years old because she is, in the words of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “coaxed” into taking up the genre when her father gives her that funeral supplies calendar and shows her how to write an entry, “as if he were giving me [Bechdel] a jumpstart.”33 Smith and Watson discuss autobiographical coaxing or coercion occurring when others ask for a life story to be told or for a life to be reproduced in a certain way.34 But unlike the more rhetorical gestures Smith and Watson discuss as part of coaxing, such as family requests for a life story or invitations by publishers, diary writing is connected to the material conditions of its making. The materiality of the calendar actually determines what can be written there. It contains what in genre theory are called exigencies, the discourses that create the rules for a genre that its user is expected to follow.35 Bechdel is given a calendar, a physical object, and it determines how she will write. The materiality (and torture) of diary keeping for Bechdel extends to her handwriting. In Fun Home, we read Bechdel’s handwriting as it grows increasingly erratic until we see the neat hand of her mother, taking dictation from Bechdel “until my ‘penmanship’ improved.”36 But the problem of partiality remains, even as her mother becomes a cowriter: Bechdel tells her mother to write “Dad and I watched the sunset. It was beautiful,”37 but the next panel describes “the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset” and shows Bechdel and her father in silhouette, watching a sunset that leaves her father “wordless” and that Bechdel cannot represent in the blue-wash palette she has chosen.38 Bechdel’s diary has The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing  |  63

become orderly, but it is no longer a diary, because it has become a performance for her mother and part of her OCD recovery regimen. It still cannot capture what it actually was like for her to watch a sunset with her father. Cartooning itself cannot capture the experience either, a reference to Bechdel’s ongoing struggle to represent events, even when the medium she uses cannot possibly represent things as they happened. Bechdel tries to respond to coaxing, but the material form of diary keeping contributes to her failure to live up to the goal of representation she set for herself. But conversely, the material of the diary is what eventually makes her an artist. Materiality within diary writing is both a possibility and a problem for the young Alison Bechdel, and no wonder, for diary discourse, its difficulties and its pleasures, is intimately connected to the materiality of writing. In English, diary can mean the book one writes in or the act of writing—sometimes called “keeping”—a diary; in French, the word for diary is journal intime, a term that closely resembles the diary’s other name in English, journal, which also describes a type of blank book. They can be handwritten, as Bechdel’s entries are, but even if they are not, the experience of keeping a diary is connected to how it feels to the writer to write and read: as Philippe Lejeune observed through his own experience in the essay “The Diary on the Computer,” keeping an online diary changed how he wrote because he could erase text or follow the lead of a blinking cursor, experiences he did not have when he wrote or typed on loose sheets of paper. “What remains of me, if I don’t write by hand?” he asked at one point.39 The act of writing a diary itself has the potential to leave a trace of the body in handwriting, or in the inclusion of sketches in a travel diary,40 but perhaps the writer leaves no trace of the body at all, typing one’s entries or even dictating them. As critics who connect the creation of blogs to online and paper diary writing have noted, the shift of diaries to online environments resulted in the evaporation of privacy that had been part of paper diary writing. However, the somatic sensations associated with paper writing survived in the design of digital environments, as did the confessional discourse and other rhetorical features contained within many of the earliest examples of personal diaries online.41 What is more, the diary itself is a trace of a process rather than the full representation of a life, a trace that approximates a gap between the thoughts and experiences of the writer. The diary entry cannot, as Alison Bechdel discovered, get at the kernel of an experience or even fully describe it. And yet diaries are bound up with confessional discourse and the need to describe. The author of a diary may not even want to fully describe an event, or he or she may record an emotion for therapeutic reasons that seem true enough when put on paper but then disappear. 64 | The Diary

But the trace remains. In the case of diary writing, the trace is partial in its rhetoric because there are no rules the writer must follow, unless we accept Lejeune’s suggestion that there is an obligation not to invent that is “like the law of gravity: inescapable.”42 The diary has no audience to impress or flatter, because those diarists not writing for publication only write, as Lejeune noted, for “a future self whom you do not know.”43 Although there are diaries written and edited with publication in view, as much of Anne Frank’s diary was, most diaries are by authors who will not publish them or who did not give permission for them to be published.44 They do not know who will read what they have written, if they themselves do not. The lack of audience for most diaries creates what Anna Jackson called the open-endedness of diary writing “as a formal characteristic in itself.”45 Jackson enumerated some of the rhetorical devices in diaries that create this open-endedness, speaking about parataxis, the use of incomplete sentences, and notations such as the ampersand. She even discussed the em dash as an important part of diary rhetoric not found in other life writing, because a writer does not have to complete her thoughts if she does not wish to; she is aware of the context in which she writes and does not need to provide it for others.46 Bunkers discussed gaps and silences in diaries as something that critics must learn to interpret, since most diarists did not intend for their diaries to be read by others. Diaries are, she argued, records of a process, not a finished product, and must be read that way.47 Lejeune characterized the diary “an art of the fragment” because of its emphasis on process.48 This quality is not shared by most published autobiographies. In fact, as Lejeune pointed out in the provocative essay “The Diary as Antifiction,” diaries kept for oneself perhaps do not have fictional qualities. Lejeune observed, providing an interesting illumination of the young Alison Bechdel’s struggle to be as truthful as possible in her diary, that even (and especially) when no one else is reading it, diaries may be partial in their accounts, but the traces they leave have a kind of veracity of their own, if only because no one is there to judge the author for what he or she decides to write. It is why diaries, when they are created within fictions or as part of a hybrid fictional form, do not seem to Lejeune to be convincing as diaries, for “the diary grows weak and faints or breaks out in a rash when it comes into contact with fiction. Autobiographies, biographies, and history books are contaminated: they have fiction in their blood.”49 Lejeune deliberately overstated his case here to make a point: Autobiographies contain fictional elements in their rhetoric—such as beginning with one’s birth—because they are published and edited for others to read, just as novels are. Diaries, meanwhile, can just begin where the diarist wants them to, pursue as winding a path as the writer wishes and, unlike autobiographies or fiction, do not end. They The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing  |  65

stop, sometimes without warning, suspended or exhausted or finished as the lives of their writers continue elsewhere, unless they themselves have died. But that death is not recorded, except in extraordinary instances when the author dies in the very moment of writing. Even that, according to Lejeune, can only be received as a trace, a pool of ink and an almost illegible word, followed by a scrawl, and even then, we cannot know if this was the author’s last mark.50

Conclusion: The Matter of Time Virginia Woolf famously called her diary “a capacious hold-all” and did try to record as much of her daily life as she could, chastising herself in the diary if she missed a day or did not describe something in enough detail.51 Woolf saw her diary as a way to practice writing and to experiment as well as to record the details of her life, almost as if she were afraid that without the “memory” recording of a diary, something precious would be lost. Alison Bechdel, too, longed to accurately and fully represent everything happening to her when she was a child, but the form of the diary itself—momentary, partial, unedited, unseen—works against this desire of hers. What the trace of a process came to mean for her, when she was an adult, was a way for her to reread her own diaries and even recopy them, much as Lejeune rewrote his, to discover what she has called “the mystery” of her own identity and the meaning of her experiences. Like Lejeune, Bechdel seeks to mine the trace of her diary, to recollect her diary within the genre of memoir without eradicating its alien nature. She has taken up what Lejeune called “a wager on the future,” a trace of the past left for that future reader so that “we are helping each other across time.”52 Diaries are not written in the past tense, but in what Margo Culley called “the continuous present of diary time” as they unspool, reflect on events, and perhaps gesture toward the future until they suddenly stop.53 As a practice more than a product (unless they are published), diaries are many things: private documents, historical accounts of someone’s life, traces of a life and of a writing practice, records of self-making, part of the history of confessional discourse, and a form of life writing that is closer to the letter in practice than to published forms. Uniquely, they can be created without anyone but the diarist knowing they exist, forming part of a secret history of genre, since diary writing can be (and is) done by anyone, at any age, without censure and without an audience. They can be literary but do not need to be. The authors can tell lies in them if they wish, but if Lejeune is right, this is rarely the case. They are bound to the conditions of their material production, whether they are typed, handwritten, or drawn; whether they are in notebooks, on a screen, or on 66 | The Diary

a single sheet of paper. After more than three hundred years, they form part of the history of the self that is still ongoing, every time a diarist begins a diary. Above all, diaries are records of the passing of time in their dated entries, and they can spur awareness of attempts to capture time, for the future. As Virginia Woolf said on January 20, 1919, when, at age thirty-seven she imagined herself as an elderly fifty-year-old using the diary to help her write her memoirs, “the lady of 50 will be able to say how near to the truth I come; but I have written enough for tonight (only 15 minutes, I see).”54 Woolf made her wager with the future, using her diary as a way to document her life for her memoir one day, helping her future self across time, even as she teased herself—as she often did—for not writing enough. She could not know that her biographers, and many others, would read the diary she imagined that her older self would use to create a memoir. And she could not know how many fifty-year-old readers would smile at her observation that ladies are elderly at that age, including this one, almost a century after Woolf wrote this to herself in her diary. Notes 1. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 140. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 143. 4. Hillary Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 188. 5. Ibid., 189. 6. Cynthia Barounis, “Alison Bechdel and Crip-Feminist Autobiography,” Journal of Modern Literature 39, no. 4 (2016): 146–47. 7. See Chute, Graphic Women, 188–203, for a complete discussion of Bechdel’s method of composition and diary making. 8. Valerie Rohy, “In the Queer Archive: Fun Home,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 3 (2010): 341–61. 9. Chute, Graphic Women; Barounis, “Alison Bechdel.” 10. Lynn Emmert, “The Alison Bechdel Interview,” Comics Journal 282 (2007), http://www.tcj.com/the-alison-bechdel-interview/; Marina Popova, “Alison Bechdel on Writing, Therapy, Self-Doubt, and How the Messiness of Life Feeds the Creative Conscience,” Brain Pickings, May 9, 2016, https://www .brainpickings.org/2016/05/09/alison-bechdel-are-you-my-mother-design-matters -interview/. 11. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. Katherine Durnin (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 93. 12. Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Towards Conceptualizing Diary,” in Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 131. 13. Ibid., 135. 14. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (1978; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 59. 15. Lejeune, On Diary, 51–60. The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing  |  67

16. Ibid., 59. 17. Benjamin Franklin, Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin écrits par lui-méme, et adressés a son fils; suivis d’un précis historique de sa vie politique, et de plusieurs pièces, relatives à ce père de la liberté, trans. Jacques Gibelin (Paris: F. Buisson Libraire, 1791); Benjamin Franklin, Works of the Late Doctor Benjamin Franklin: Consisting of His Life Written by Himself: Together with Essays, Humorous, Moral and Literary, Chiefly in the Manner of the Spectator: In Two Volumes, ed. Benjamin Vaughan and Richard Price (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1793); Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). 18. Lejeune, On Diary, 93–101. 19. Ibid., 94. 20. Judith Thurman, “Drawn from Life: The World of Alison Bechdel,” New Yorker, April 23, 2012, 48–54, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine /2012/04/23/drawn-from-life. 21. Kaulie Lewis, “Always This Mystery: The Millions Interviews Alison Bechdel,” The Millions, March 24, 2015, http://www.themillions.com​ /2015/03/always-this-mystery-the-millions-interviews-alison-bechdel.html. 22. Lejeune, On Diary, 326. 23. Ibid., 158–59. 24. Suzanne L. Bunkers, “Midwestern Diaries and Journals: What Women Were (Not) Saying in the Late 1800s,” in Olney, Studies in Autobiography, 190. 25. Marlene Kadar, “Introduction: What Is Life Writing?,” in Reading Life Writing, ed. Marlene Kadar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), ix–xv. 26. Bunkers, “Midwestern Diaries and Journals,” 191. 27. Critical analyses that have argued that women’s diaries should redefine how autobiography should be understood include Helen Buss, Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1993); Estelle Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present (Boston: Twayne, 1986); Judy Nolte Lesinke, “Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism: The Diary as Female Autobiography,” Women’s Studies 14 (1987): 39–53; Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Eighteenth-Century Women’s Autobiographical Commonplaces,” in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 147–72; Nussbaum, “Towards Conceptualizing Diary”; Personal Narratives Group, Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Significant feminist criticisms of women’s diaries include collections such as Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, eds., Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Margo Culley, ed., A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1985); Estelle Jelinek, ed., Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). Feminist arguments for connecting diaries by women to a discourse of dailiness and contingency include Penelope Franklin, ed., Private Pages: Diaries of American Women, 1830s–1970s (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986); Cynthia Huff, British Women’s Diaries: A Descriptive Bibliography of Selected Nineteenth-Century Manuscripts (New York: AMS Press, 1985);

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Cynthia Huff, “Private Domains: Queen Victoria and Women’s Diaries,” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 4, no. 1 (1988): 46–52; Cynthia Huff, “‘That Profoundly Female, and Feminist Genre’: The Diary as Feminist Practice,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 17, nos. 3–4 (1989): 6–14; Sarah Gristwood, Recording Angels: The Secret World of Women’s Diaries (London: Harrap, 1988); Judy Simons, Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990); Rebecca Hogan, “Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form,” in Autobiography and Questions of Gender, ed. Shirley Neuman (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 95–107; Katie Holmes, Spaces in Her Day: Australian Women’s Diaries in the 1920s and 1930s (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1995); and Elizabeth Podnieks, Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000). 28. Shari Benstock, ed., The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 29. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, “Issues in Studying Women’s Diaries: A Theoretical and Critical Introduction,” in Bunkers and Huff, Inscribing the Daily, 1–22, esp. 7–10. 30. See Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Bunkers, “Midwestern Diaries and Journals,” 190–210; Kathryn Carter, ed., The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1996 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Christl Verduyn, ed., Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005); Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken Books, 1982). 31. Anna Jackson, Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962 (New York: Routledge, 2010), 4–5; Nussbaum, “EighteenthCentury Women’s Autobiographical Commonplaces,” 147–71. 32. Anna Poletti, Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 4–5. 33. Bechdel, Fun Home, 140. 34. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 64–67. 35. Carolyn Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 3–42. 36. Bechdel, Fun Home, 149. 37. Ibid., 150. 38. Ibid. 39. Lejeune, On Diary, 286. 40. Susan Snyder, Beyond Words: 200 Years of Illustrated Diaries (Berkeley: Bancroft Library, University of California, 2011). 41. Laurie McNeill, “Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2003): 24–47. 42. Lejeune, On Diary, 204. 43. Ibid., 324.

The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing  |  69

44. Ibid., 237–66; Lynn Z. Bloom, “‘I Write for Myself and Strangers’: Private Diaries as Public Documents,” in Bunkers and Huff, Inscribing the Daily, 24–25. 45. Jackson, Diary Poetics, 19. 46. Ibid. 47. Bunkers, “Midwestern Diaries and Journals.” 48. Lejeune, On Diary, 325. 49. Ibid., 204. 50. Ibid., 198. 51. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols. (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 1:266; Jackson, Diary Poetics, 88–89. 52. Lejeune, On Diary, 324, 334. 53. Margo Culley, introduction to Culley, One Day at a Time, 20. 54. Woolf, Diary of Virginia Woolf, 8.

Bibliography Barounis, Cynthia. “Alison Bechdel and Crip-Feminist Autobiography.” Journal of Modern Literature 39 no. 4 (2016): 139–61. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Blodgett, Harriet. Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Bloom, Lynn Z. “‘I Write for Myself and Strangers’: Private Diaries as Public Documents.” In Bunkers and Huff, Inscribing the Daily, 23–37. Bunkers, Suzanne L. “Midwestern Diaries and Journals: What Women Were (Not) Saying in the Late 1800s.” In Olney, Studies in Autobiography, 190–210. Bunkers, Suzanne L., and Cynthia A. Huff, eds. Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. ———. “Issues in Studying Women’s Diaries: A Theoretical and Critical Introduction.” In Bunkers and Huff, Inscribing the Daily, 1–22. Buss, Helen. Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Carter, Kathryn, ed. The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1996. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Culley, Margo. Introduction to One Day at a Time. Edited by Margo Culley, 3–26. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1985. Emmert, Lynn. “The Alison Bechdel Interview.” Comics Journal 282 (2007). http://www.tcj.com/the-alison-bechdel-interview. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. 1978. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Franklin, Benjamin. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism. Edited by J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.

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———. Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin écrits par lui-méme, et adressés a son fils; suivis d’un précis historique de sa vie politique, et de plusieurs pièces, relatives à ce père de la liberté. Trans­lated by Jacques Gibelin. Paris: F. Buisson Libraire, 1791. ———. Works of the Late Doctor Benjamin Franklin: Consisting of His Life Written by Himself: Together with Essays, Humorous, Moral and Literary, Chiefly in the Manner of the Spectator: In Two Volumes. Edited by Benjamin Vaughan and Richard Price. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1793. Franklin, Penelope, ed. Private Pages: Diaries of American Women, 1830s–1970s. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986. Gristwood, Sarah. Recording Angels: The Secret World of Women’s Diaries. London: Harrap, 1988. Hogan, Rebecca. “Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form.” In Autobiography and Questions of Gender, edited by Shirley Neuman, 95–107. London: Frank Cass, 1991. Holmes, Katie. Spaces in Her Day: Australian Women’s Diaries in the 1920s and 1930s. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1995. Huff, Cynthia. British Women’s Diaries: A Descriptive Bibliography of Selected Nineteenth-Century Manuscripts. New York: AMS Press, 1985. ———. “Private Domains: Queen Victoria and Women’s Diaries.” A/B: Auto/ Biography Studies 4, no. 1 (1988): 46–52. ———. “Textual Boundaries: Space in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Diaries.” In Bunkers and Huff, Inscribing the Daily, 123–38. ———. “‘That Profoundly Female, and Feminist Genre’: The Diary as Feminist Practice.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 17, nos. 3–4 (1989): 6–14. Jackson, Anna. Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962. New York: Routledge, 2010. Jelinek, Estelle. The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present. Boston: Twayne, 1986. ———, ed. Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Kadar, Marlene. “Introduction: What Is Life Writing?” In Reading Life Writing, edited by Marlene Kadar, ix–xv. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy Popkin and Julie Rak. Translated by Katherine Durnin. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. Lesinke, Judy Nolte. “Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism: The Diary as Female Autobiography.” Women’s Studies 14 (1987): 39–53. Lewis, Kaulie. “Always This Mystery: The Millions Interviews Alison Bechdel.” The Millions. March 24, 2015. http://www.themillions.com/2015/03/always -this-mystery-the-millions-interviews-alison-bechdel.html. McNeill, Laurie. “Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2003): 24–47. Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as Social Action.” In Genre and the New Rhetoric, edited by Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, 3–42. London: Taylor and Francis, 1994. Nussbaum, Felicity A. “Eighteenth-Century Women’s Autobiographical Commonplaces.” In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock, 147–72. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing  |  71

———. “Towards Conceptualizing Diary.” In Olney, Studies in Autobiography, 128–40. Olney, James, ed. Studies in Autobiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Personal Narratives Group. Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Podnieks, Elizabeth. Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. Poletti, Anna. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008. Popova, Marina. “Alison Bechdel on Writing, Therapy, Self-Doubt, and How the Messiness of Life Feeds the Creative Conscience.” Brain Pickings, May 9, 2016. https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/09/alison-bechdel -are-you-my-mother-design-matters-interview. Rohy, Valerie. “In the Queer Archive: Fun Home.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 3 (2010): 341–61. Schlissel, Lillian. Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey. New York: Schocken Books, 1982. Simons, Judy. “Invented Lives: Textuality and Power in Early Women’s Diaries.” In Bunkers and Huff, Inscribing the Daily, 252–63. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Snyder, Susan. Beyond Words: 200 Years of Illustrated Diaries. Berkeley: Bancroft Library, University of California, 2011. Thurman, Judith. “Drawn from Life: The World of Alison Bechdel.” New Yorker, April 23, 2012. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/23 /drawn-from-life. Verduyn, Christl, ed. Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1977.

J U L I E R A K is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her latest book is Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. She is also coeditor (with Jeremy Popkin) of an English translation of Philippe Lejeune’s book On Diary.

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part ii

The Creation of a Diary Canon

4 British Diary Canon Formation Dan Doll

When Virginia Woolf began her diary (one of the great diaries in British or world literature) on January 1, 1915, her opening words were, “To start this diary rightly, it should begin on the last day of the old year.” In February 1923, she began another entry, “How it would interest me if this diary were ever to become a real diary.”1 But from what did she draw the certainty of these notions of starting a diary “rightly” or what a “real diary” was? By the early twentieth century, the canon of the British diary was generally well formed, with a clear set of conventions and many examples of printed diaries from the previous three centuries. But what did John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys think they were doing when they began their diaries in the mid-seventeenth century? They had few models in the way Woolf did; indeed, Evelyn’s and Pepys’s diaries were the first two personal diaries to see widespread publication (Evelyn’s in 1818 and Pepys’s in 1825), even if 160 years after they began them. Where did their expectations of a “real diary” come from? What were their models? And what of Margaret Hoby’s diary of 1606? In addition, what were the social forces, record-keeping precursors, and other textual models that led to the development of the personal diary into today’s canon? Did they grow from other forms of record keeping and storytelling? Did diarists read the manuscripts of others? Certainly each new diarist did not invent the genre out of nothing. And what technical and sociological developments aided in the shaping of the British diary canon?

 75

To discuss the canon or canon formation of a group of works that inhabited (and perhaps still inhabits) the margins of the larger British canons of literature and history requires delicacy. Although British diaries existed from at least the early sixteenth century (and indeed were familiar enough to be satirized in Ben Jonson’s Volpone in 1603), 2 the standard bibliographies of British diaries by William Matthews and Patrice Havlice suggest that very few diaries have survived from before the seventeenth century. The factors contributing to the rise and persistence of the British diary are many, some derived from other genres and some from social developments. However, as Robert Fothergill argued, “Diary-writing as a flourishing autonomous activity, and not a by-product or outgrowth of some other regular writing habit, emerges from no single source. It is best regarded as the coalescence of a number of pre-diary habits into a form that exceeds its component elements.”3 By the beginning of the seventeenth century, there were many kinds of governmental, religious, and commercial records and chronicles that shared with the diary the practice of regular periodical notation. So, for example, Pepys was already an inveterate keeper of records for economic and administrative purposes, even having learned shorthand for those purposes well before he began his diary, also kept in shorthand, in 1660. Similarly, there were other more personal texts, such as family Bibles, commonplace books, and familiar letters, that provided opportunities for the recording of private events. And while the travel journal predates the personal diary, it shows a similar pattern of development: early travel diaries often served as a form of justification—expense account, log of actions or transactions—to whoever was financing the voyage. In addition, the same developments that lead to the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century contributed to the rise of the diary: the increase in literacy; the Protestant impulse toward looking inward, as opposed to simply accepting authority; and the rise of individualism that saw the lives of common men and women as legitimate subjects for recorded narrative. What Felicity Nussbaum concluded of the eighteenth-century diary is true of the seventeenth-century diary as well: “In sum, the . . . diary produces and reflects an individual who believes she or he is the center of meaning.”4 In its relationship to recording that self, the British diary went through three stages, corresponding roughly to the three centuries this study considers: the diary begins in the seventeenth century, largely self-directed and focused on spiritual development; in the eighteenth century, it continues to concentrate on self-improvement and increasingly observes the secular world; and it culminates in the nineteenth century as even more concerned with the larger public world, both as subject and audience. In its broadest outlines, the early British diary was dominated by spiritual purposefulness, but by the eighteenth century, the purposes were far 76 | The Diary

more likely to be secular, and the diary took on the form of the personal diary familiar to us today: a blend of personal and public record, still often purposeful but perhaps equally recreational. With the publication and wider reading of diaries in the nineteenth century, the diary was seen increasingly as an aesthetic and potentially literary activity. This outline is indeed broad, with many counterexamples, but there were changes in the purposes, audiences, and models available as a result of the history of the circulation and publication of the British diary. Writers of spiritual diaries often asked their families to burn the diaries on their deaths, when the need for their spiritual bookkeeping to regulate their behavior was at an end. Certainly some writers of spiritual diaries also expected and even commanded that their children read their diaries, but they did not expect their diaries to go beyond their families or congregations. By the early nineteenth century and even before that, however, diarists had a greater awareness of the possibility that their diary might be published. Despite frequent claims that diarists know that “because no one will ever read this” they can write anything they want, the knowledge that strangers with no familial or other personal connection to the diarists might read their words nonetheless influenced how they conceived and performed their diaries. The mid-eighteenth-century diary of shopkeeper Thomas Turner is larded with such claims: “If any person should by accident or curiosity peruse my several memorandums, they may think it somewhat odd and profuse or extravagant in me to entertain one person so often”; the person he is meeting with is a shoemaker who is his social inferior, and while he claims to anticipate a public at large for his readership, his self-defense is clearly aimed at his own time and place, at his own family.5 On the other hand, by the nineteenth century we see that public figures—and particularly writers, whose diaries made up the majority of those published—presumed a new sense of audience. For example, we read in Sir Walter Scott’s diary that he recognized his diary was quite likely to be published, and also within Scott’s diary, we see that Scott is carrying around a portion of Lord Byron’s diary in order to advise Byron on its suitability for publication. The relatively widespread practice of diary keeping in England began in the mid- to late sixteenth century with the spiritual diaries that scholars today often label “Puritan” diaries. Although diary keeping extended to devout men and women of various religious denominations, Puritans and Dissenters wrote the majority of such diaries.6 They were viewed and promoted as part of the duty of rigorous spiritual self-examination enjoined on adherents of various Protestant groups: as Effie Botonaki noted, “Diary writing constituted a part of the devotional routine of the day rather than a casual pastime.”7 Often the diary entries followed a prescribed set of questions and prayers, serving as a kind of record of British Diary Canon Formation  |  77

God’s blessings and providences evidenced in the diarist’s day as well as a record of the writer’s moral backslidings. Early diaries also contained scriptural passages to be meditated on and a frank and often accusatory self-reflective tone. Among the best examples of such diaries is Margaret Hoby’s diary of 1599–1605, but comparatively fewer of these diaries have been subsequently published and often only in official organs of the various denominations. Although few were published, they were often circulated in manuscript form among members of the diarist’s religious communities, where they served as both inspiration and models for other diarists. Early spiritual diarists often mention reading the diaries of others and sharing their own diaries with fellow congregants, and Avra Kouffman points out that it was common to include passages from their diary in the course of a printed eulogy of the diarist.8 In addition, by the midseventeenth century, there were a number of published guides to devotion and self-examination that offered specific guidelines for keeping a diary, the most well-known of which was John Beadle’s The Journall or Diary of a Thankfull Christian (1656). This is not to suggest that all or even most diaries by the middle of the seventeenth century are spiritual diaries; as Elspeth Findlay has suggested, by the end of the seventeenth century the spiritual diary began to disappear.9 There are still spiritual diaries throughout the history of the British diary: anyone who reads Arthur Hugh Clough’s Oxford diaries of the early nineteenth century would find it hard to distinguish them from earlier spiritual diaries. However, by the mid-seventeenth century, there were many personal diaries that offered occasional religious reflections but were more secular in orientation, not devoted to rigorous spiritual bookkeeping. Among the best known of these from the period are the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, and there occurred a proliferation of secular diaries throughout the eighteenth century. The subjects of these diaries are as many as there are human interests. There was still self-examination and bookkeeping, but of a different sort. Many diarists used the last entry or first entry of the calendar to take stock of personal achievements and developments of the previous year. Other diarists employed their diaries for personal finances, keeping track of daily spending; Pepys used the last entry of each month to sum up his net worth. There was also a good deal of recording events beyond or outside the self and family: diaries occupy every position in the range from reporting events, both public and private, with little or no reflection (Pepys, Evelyn) to reporting few concrete events but a great deal of reflection (William Windham, Benjamin Robert Hayden). A parallel spectrum describes the range of travel diaries from those that describe the new places visited while paying little attention to the diarist to those that largely focus on the diarist against the backdrop of new places. A comparison of Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the 78 | The Diary

Western Isles to James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson LLD, written during their joint excursion, admirably illustrates the former and the latter. Although these secular personal diaries often concerned more worldly topics and communal relations, their writers were still motivated by many of the same impulses as keepers of spiritual diaries—particularly the diary as means to or monitor of self-examination and self-improvement. For example, Dudley Ryder’s preface to his diary resolves thus: “I intend also to observe my own acts as to their goodness or badness. I think there will be many advantages from this way of setting down whatever occurs to me. I shall then be able to review any parts of my life, have the pleasure of it if it be well spent, if otherwise know how to mend it. It will help me to know myself better and give a better judgment of my own ability, and what I am best qualified for. I shall know how the better to spend my time for the future.”10 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century diaries are full of self-improvement admonitions: Thomas Turner listed twelve rules to regulate his future behavior at dinner parties, and Charles Dodgson [Lewis Carroll] wrote “I wrote this to shame myself” after regretting that his lack of study cost him a scholarship and vowed to record his success at studying for the next year’s exam in an entry one year in the future.11 In his Life of Johnson, Boswell recorded Samuel Johnson’s advocacy of keeping a diary to examine and regulate one’s behavior, to which an auditor replied, “True sir. As the ladies love to see themselves in a glass; so a man likes to see himself in his journal”—to which Boswell added, “And as a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal.”12 We see diaries serving a similar purpose to the spiritual diaries in regulation of behavior (ignoring here the relegation of women to ornamental status and the fact that women used diaries for the same purposes as men and even to carve out a space in which the writers could express and examine themselves on matters far beyond social niceties). William Windham, an eighteenth-century diarist, offered an extreme example of the reliance on the diary to shape the writer’s actions in one lament, which sounds very much like a spiritual diary entry of the early seventeenth century: “It is . . . to be regretted that a habit, known at all times to be so salutary . . . should not have begun years and years ago. What a difference it would have made at the time! What a difference it would have made in my present condition, and in all the future fortune of my life! It is not too much to say . . . the whole difference may be ascribed of my being something or nothing.”13 Perhaps the inverse to Windham’s apostrophe is Byron’s observation of his sporadically kept diary: “If this had begun ten years ago, and faithfully kept!!!—heighho! There are too many things I wish never to have remembered, [so] it is as well.”14 But even this negative example testifies to a diary’s ability British Diary Canon Formation  |  79

to regulate behavior and shape a life. Perhaps the best example of the interrelatedness of diary and life is Boswell’s diary of the mid-eighteenth century. Boswell’s introduction to his first diary, the London Diary, offers a series of self-improvement goals: “It will give me a habit of application and improve me in expression; and knowing that I am to record my transactions will make me more careful to do well.”15 His diary is full of injunctions about how to act and whose behavior to imitate: Boswell started most days writing memoranda to himself prescribing his actions and then reviewing his successes and failures in evening memoranda that were then expanded into his full entries. In his diary Boswell also typifies a central change in the postspiritual diary—keeping a diary not as a duty but as recreation, the writing up of the day’s events being one of the pleasures of the day. R. C. Latham speculated on Pepys’s reasons for keeping a diary and concluded, “The diary is a by-product of his energetic pursuit of happiness. The process of recording had the effect, as he soon found out, of heightening and extending his enjoyment. It enabled him to relish every experience more than once—not only at the moment of its happening but also in his recollection.”16 John Byng took yearly trips on horseback through Britain and produced a diary replete with his own pencil sketches of places he visited and miscellanea such as dozens of itemized inn bills, in the way one might insert restaurant menus in one’s travel diary. He wrote up his diary from notes he took during the travel and reflected, “I enjoy . . . each Tour three times over; viz. by anticipation, by the present enjoyment, and by a record of the past,” resolving, “Here let me retaste my recollections.”17 A very high number of diary writers included the writing of the diary in their recording of their daily actions, often with a decided note of satisfaction. For many British diarists, the diary thus seems a valuable and enjoyable part of life rather than a burden or spiritual confession. This pleasure that leads to the equating of “diarizing” and living invoked Boswell to exclaim, “I should live no more than I can record, as one should not have more corn growing than one can get in. There is a waste of good if it be not preserved.” Boswell’s conflation of life and diary caused his friend William Temple to advise Boswell to stop keeping a diary because it caused him to go out in search of adventures to fill it.18 By the eighteenth century, there were still few widely available diaries to serve as models, nor were there guidebooks to secular diary keeping like those that directed the earlier writer of a spiritual diary. Certainly the sharing of manuscript diaries is one shaper of eighteenth-century diary conventions. For example, Ryder’s opening sentences of his diary are “Mr. Whatley told me the other day of a method he had taken for some time of keeping a diary. And I now intend to begin the same method and mark down every day whatever occurs to me in the day worth observing.”19 80 | The Diary

And there are many other instances of diarists exchanging their diaries or reading them aloud among family and friends. But in the eighteenth century, two new genres of writing both influenced and were influenced by the diary: journalism and the novel. These forms offered powerful and popular models of recording events and telling stories. Both arose in the later seventeenth century (journalism) and early eighteenth century (the novel) and quickly exploded in popular readership. It is important to note that journalism in this period is not the same as contemporary daily reporting of whatever occurs of note; there was less immediacy than characterizes the current field. Yet newspapers were still more immediately topical and did offer a kind of day-to-dayness that also defines the diary, and their strategy of casting a wide net to gather topics found itself replicated in eighteenth-century diaries; indeed many eighteenth-century diarists copied items straight from the newspaper into their diaries. Beginning in the eighteenth century, even more significant for the shaping of the diary was the introduction and rapid spread of the novel. Although there is considerable critical debate about when the novel originated in England, the majority of critics place it in the first quarter of the century, and its growth was rapid and widespread. Novels, particularly the realistic novel of the early part of the century, offered new models of telling stories by giving thick concrete details of human lives, often lives that had not been the subject of previous literature—those of individuals “of the middling sort.” The picaresque characteristics of the early English novel also provide a model of first-person narration and episodic structure that parallels the point of view and structure of the diary. Diarists of the eighteenth century very often listed what novels they were reading and often enough attempted to imitate the methods of these novels in their own entries.20 Esther Blodgett argued, for example, “The novel of sensibility . . . showed its readers that outside the devotional diary a first-person narrator could intensely explore consciousness and vent emotion directly. The secular diary of the later eighteenth century probably became a more expressive form than its predecessors partly under the influence of the novel.”21 The affinity between the two forms accounts for a number of novels of the eighteenth century, like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, taking the form of diaries: the concrete detail and purported transparency of the diary as true record aided the novels’ reality claim. Conversely, novelists gave diarists powerful and familiar models of how to capture life in text: in the eighteenth-century British diary, there was an increased emphasis on dramatizing events rather than simply recording them with flat chronicle narration. Boswell, for example, not only structured his diary for maximum novelistic effect, as when recreating dialogue from his many days with Johnson or giving accounts of intruding unannounced upon on Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau, British Diary Canon Formation  |  81

but he also sought to cultivate his storytelling skills in the expansion of his memoranda into the final daily entries of his journal. In his first diary, the London Journal, he made a weekly exercise of recording dialogues he overheard among ordinary citizens in London coffeehouses. This dramatization is also evident in the works of writers like Jonathan Swift in his Journal to Stella and Fanny Burney in her extensive diaries as well as in the works of ordinary diarists such as William Bagshot Stevens, whose diary recounts a failed love affair with a series of highly charged scenes of hope and despair, full of unresolved tensions, even though he wrote up the entries from brief notes after he knew the unhappy fate of the relationship. Novelistic rendering of this dramatic situation, rather than preserving a daily record of life, was Stevens’s primary concern. This pattern repeats throughout the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century diary. There is a similar pattern observable in the eighteenth-century travel diary: while many travel diaries employ the conventions of the travel journal from earlier examples and from travel guidebooks, a number of travel journals also imitated novels. Compared to other diarists of the eighteenth century, aspiring travel diarists had more print models to shape their work. Several travel diaries were published, but the genre was far from saturated: Byng began his 1789 tour of the English Midlands by wishing, “Oh that a critical tourist had minutely described, before the Civil War, the state of castles, and of the religious remains, and the mode of living of the nobility, and gentry,” and he noted elsewhere in his diary that the few diaries in print “are read greedily.”22 But there are other models in print available to travel diarists in their desire to record their journeys—particularly, the guidebook. It has perhaps always been true that travel is seen as a special occasion that heightens the desire to keep a diary as an aid to memory and a way to preserve the uncommon experience. There exist many diaries by writers who kept such an account only on their travels and not in the rest of their life, as for example Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Thomas Gray’s various tours, and William Beckford’s journal of his travels in Spain and Portugal. And then, as now, those diaries were often influenced by guidebooks aimed not only at those on the Grand Tour but also on an increasingly mobile class of British travelers visiting the Continent and unfamiliar parts of Great Britain for the purposes of leisure more than for business or education. Byng depended on the printed guides of Thomas Penant and Philip Thickness as models, and when he lost his “tour book,” his journey came to a full stop until it was retrieved. Sir John Percival evidences a similar reliance on guidebooks in his diary of his travels in England with William Byrd: his diary’s editor, Mark Wenger, noted the close similarity in entries in both men’s diaries and deduced that both were reading from the same travel guide and using 82 | The Diary

it to model their entries and even their ways of viewing the places they visited.23 In addition, Percival’s diary draws on another formative source: he employed the Royal Society’s widely disseminated instructions for what travelers should record in their diaries. His companion Byrd was a member of the Royal Society; Percival would soon become a member; and Percival’s uncle, who financed his travels, was a former Royal Society president. The guidelines were particularly observed by those who went on voyages of exploration but were often enough observed by other travelers. The interaction between diary and novel and the diary’s concomitant conscious literariness in the diary reaches fullness in the nineteenth century. Fothergill argued that by the beginning of the century, we see “the growing consciousness in the mind of the diarist of diary-writing as literary composition, a process in which the writer has an eye on himself writing, and in which increasingly he invests a deliberate literariness.”24 In addition, the practice of diary keeping became even more widespread: in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney teases Catherine Morland about how he will figure in her diary, and when she says she keeps no diary, he declares it impossible. And for the first time, printed diaries to serve as models became widely available. In Scott’s diary of the 1820s, he recorded that he was “working on” Pepys’s diary and he ended an entry on what Samuel Johnson thought should go into a diary with the phrase “and so to bed,” a repetition of Pepys’s now famous formula to end many of his entries. Elsewhere in his diary, Scott imitated Swift’s Journal to Stella and referred to a number of printed diaries as well. Because of these models and because of his own fame through the success of his Waverly novels, Scott wrote his diary knowing that it was likely the diary would be published. His editor, W. E. K. Anderson, stated that Scott expected publication and so adopted a kinder and more presentable tone, noting that Scott was “much franker and ruder in his correspondence.”25 In Beatrix Potter’s later nineteenth-century diary, she consciously employed the published diaries of Fanny Burney as her model. She called Burney “my hero” and addressed entries to “Esther,” not someone Potter knew or intended to have read her diary (in fact she kept her diary in code) but in imitation of Burney’s diary, which was addressed in letter form to her sister Esther. When visiting Teignmouth, Potter modeled her entries on Burney’s written from the same place: “I looked with interest across the muddy estuary at Teignmouth where Fanny Burney wrote her sprightly journal in 1771.”26 The influence of widespread publication of diaries from the nineteenth century onward cannot be understated for the formation of the canon of the British diary. As asked by a number of critics writing about when the canon of British literature was initially formed, how can there even be British Diary Canon Formation  |  83

a canon without printed texts?27 Nussbaum argued, “By the nineteenth century diaries were often published relatively soon after they had been written and without waiting for the death of the author. The diary, in other words, was largely a private document in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but by the nineteenth century, it was both a private and public document, no longer confined to secrecy.”28 The advent of wide publication of diaries in significant numbers caused changes in what went into diaries, diarists’ sense of audience, and the literariness with which they were written. In this way the canon of the British diary was formed. By the early twentieth century Virginia Woolf knew what a “real” diary looked like because she had read, and even reviewed, many printed diaries. Of course, the canon and the genre changed in the twentieth century, with new diaries being added and others allowed to fall out. So while Pepys is still likely the most famous of English diarists (if not Woolf herself), Evelyn’s is far less known and read. And the use of social media to serve as online diary will change the canon in the twenty-first century. But the seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century British diary had already seen the development from primarily personal, spiritual duty to a wider way to observe, examine, and order the larger world of British life. Notes 1. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1977–84), 1:3, 2:234. 2. Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Alvin Kernan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 4.1.129–49. 3. Robert Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 14. 4. Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 28. 5. Thomas Turner, The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754–1763, ed. David Vaisey (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), 4. 6. Elspeth Findlay suggested the alternative title “pious diary” and discussed the religious background of writers of such diaries in her “Ralph Thoresby the Diarist: The Late Seventeenth-Century Pious Diary and Its Demise,” Seventeenth Century 17, no. 1 (2002): 108–30. 7. Effie Botonaki, “Early Modern Women’s Diaries and Closets: ‘Chambers of Choice Mercies and Beloved Retirement,’” in Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Diary and Journal, ed. Dan Doll and Jessica Munns (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 43. 8. Avra Kouffman, “Women’s Diaries of Late Stuart England: An Overview,” in Doll and Munns, Recording and Reordering, 73. 9. Findlay, “Ralph Thoresby the Diarist.”

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10. Dudley Ryder, The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716, ed. William Matthews (London: Methuen, 1939), 29. 11. Turner, Diary of Thomas Turner, 26–27; Charles Dodgson, The Diaries of Lewis Carrol, ed. Roger Green, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 1:45. 12. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. J. D. Fleeman (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 898. 13. William Windham, The Diary of the Right Honorable William Windham, 1784–1810, ed. Cecilia Baring (London: Longmans, Green, 1866), 217. 14. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), 3:204. 15. James Boswell, London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick Pottle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 39. 16. R. C. Latham, introduction to The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. William Matthews and R. C. Lathanm, 11 vols. (London: Bell and Hyman, 1971), 1:xxviii. 17. John Byng, The Torrington Diaries, ed. C. Bruyn Andrews, 4 vols. (London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1934–38), 3:3, 2:219. 18. Boswell, London Journal, 265, 269. 19. Ryder, Diary of Dudley Ryder, 29. 20. See for example Thomas Greene, Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature (Ipswich, UK: John Raw, 1810). 21. Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 35. 22. Byng, Torrington Diaries, 2:29, 1:248–49. 23. John Percival, The English Travels of Sir John Percival and William Byrd II: The Percival Diary of 1701, ed. Mark Wenger (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 22. 24. Fothergill, Private Chronicles, 32. 25. Sir Walter Scott, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 3. 26. Beatrix Potter, The Journal of Beatrix Potter, 1881–1897, transcr. Leslie Linder (London: Penguin, 1989), 211, 242. 27. See for example Jonathan Kramnick, Making the English Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). 28. Nussbaum, Autobiographical Subject, 24.

Bibliography Anderson, W. E. K. Introduction to The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 3–16. Edited by W. E. K. Anderson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Blodgett, Harriet. Capacious Hold-All: An Anthology of Englishwomen’s Diary Writings. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. ———. Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. Edited by R. W. Chapman and revised by J. D. Fleeman. London: Oxford University Press, 1953.

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———. London Journal, 1762–1763. Editded by Frederick Pottle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Boswell, James. The Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell. Edited by Frederick Pottle, Charles Ryskamp, William Wimsatt, Irma Lustig, Frank Brady, Marlies Danziger, Joseph Reed, et al. 13 vols. London: Heinemann, 1950–91. Botonaki, Effie. “Early Modern Women’s Diaries and Closets: ‘Chambers of Choice Mercies and Beloved Retirement.’” In Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Diary and Journal, edited by Dan Doll and Jessica Munns, 43–64. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006. Burney, Francis. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay). Edited by Joyce Hemlow, Althea Douglas, Warren Derry, Edward Bloom, Lillian Bloom, George Falle, Patricia Hawkins, et al. 12 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972–84. Byng, John. The Torrington Diaries. Edited by C. Bruyn Andrews. 4 vols. London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1934–38. Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Byron’s Letters and Journals. Edited by Leslie Marchand. 12 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82. Dodgson, Charles. The Diaries of Lewis Carrol. Edited by Roger Green. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1954. Doll, Dan, and Jessica Munns. Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Diary and Journal. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006. Evelyn, John. The Diary of John Evelyn. Edited by E. S. de Beer. 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955. Findlay, Elspeth. “Ralph Thoresby the Diarist: The Late Seventeenth Century Pious Diary and Its Demise. Seventeenth Century 17, no. 1 (2002): 18–30. Fothergill, Robert. Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Greene, Thomas. Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature. Ipswich, UK: John Raw, 1820. Handley, Christopher. An Annotated Bibliography of Diaries Printed in English. 3rd ed. CD-ROM. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Hanover Press, 2008. Havlice, Patrice. And So to Bed: A Bibliography of Diaries Published in English. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987. Jonson, Ben. Volpone. Edited by Alvin Kernan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962. Kouffman, Avra. “Women’s Diaries of Late Stuart England: An Overview.” In Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth- and EighteenthCentury Diary and Journal, edited by Dan Doll and Jessica Munns, 65–101. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006. Kramnick, Jonathan. Making the English Canon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Langford, Rachel, and Russell West, eds. Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Matthews, William. British Diaries, 1442–1942. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Moore, Thomas. The Journal of Thomas Moore. Edited by Wilfred Dowden. 6 vols. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983–91.

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Nussbaum, Felicity. The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Edited by William Matthews and R. C. Latham. 11 vols. London: Bell and Hymen, 1971. Percival, John. The English Travels of Sir John Percival and William Byrd II: The Percival Diary of 1701. Edited by Mark Wenger. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. Potter, Beatrix. The Journal of Beatrix Potter, 1881–1897. Transcribed by Leslie Linder. London: Penguin, 1989. Ross, Trevor. The Making of the English Literary Canon. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1998. Scott, Sir Walter. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott. Edited by W. E. K. Anderson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Forms, 1660–1758. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Simon, Judy. Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. Windham, William. The Diary of the Right Honorable William Windham, 1784–1810. Edited by Cecilia Baring. London: Longmans, Green, 1866. Woodforde, James. The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758–1802. Edited by John Beresford. 5 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1935. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1977–84.

DA N D OL L is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Orleans. He coedited (with Jessica Munns) Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Diary and Journal.

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5 The Diary in France and FrenchSpeaking Countries Michel Braud Translated from French by Dagmara Meijers-Troller

The Diary Today In France nowadays, the diary might seem, on the one hand, like a literary genre practiced by recognized authors and, on the other, like an ordinary, rather outmoded practice. As much as the diary has become established as a literary genre over a century and a half, the everyday practice also seems archaic: Why tell the story of one’s day-to-day life without intending to share it, in this day of the internet and reality TV? Yet the practice of diary keeping is rather widespread throughout the population and has remained so for more than twenty years. This has been established by a number of surveys conducted by the French Ministry of Culture: around 7 or 8 percent of people say that they keep a diary or write personal notes. One might think that the success of blogs, which bear various similarities with diaries, would lead to diaries’ disappearance, but the persistence of diary keeping as a practice shows that is not the case. Because it is by nature a form of public communication, the blog does not fulfill the same needs as the diary; a blog is a public platform or narrative, while the diary remains confidential, in the background, and secretive. Nevertheless, while the ordinary practice is relatively widespread, it is not highly visible in the media or culturally valued. The diary receives more recognition as a form employed by authors, comparable to certain classic texts (such as the diaries of Stendhal [1783–1842] or André Gide [1869–1951]) and legitimized by the culturati as well as academic and university institutions. One might conclude that there are two distinct forms,

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one of them commonplace (the daily practice by millions of people) and the other literary (the type of works sold in bookstores). But it would be more accurate to see it as two different versions of the same form because no definitive line can be drawn between the two. This is repeatedly demonstrated by the history of the genre: many diaries written for oneself have become recognized works, and the critics who long condemned these personal writings later included them in the literary canon.

Birth of the Diary Compared to other literary genres, the diary is a recent form. The first texts that can be considered as such in France were written in the late eighteenth century. In the course of the year 1785, Rétif de la Bretonne (1734–1806) copied onto paper the inscripcions that he had been carving into the stone parapets of the Île Saint-Louis in Paris since 1779; then he continued, day after day, with the narrative of the writing and publication of his literary works as well as his troubles with his wife and sonin-law. That same year, Germaine Necker (1766–1817) wrote hers over a number of weeks before marrying Baron Éric Magnus de Staël-Holstein; she revealed her attachment to her father and her fears of death. Also in the same year, the young Mme. de Krüdener (1764–1824) confided her “excessively passionate feelings” and her conjugal sorrows in writing. Three years later, in 1788, a young Parisian bourgeoise, Lucile Duplessis (1770–94), documented her ennui, her existential anxieties, and her first sparks of love for a penniless young lawyer named Camille Desmoulins. No doubt, countless similar texts from that same period have disappeared: these few have survived because their authors became writers or, in the case of Lucile Desmoulins, because her husband took part in revolutionary events. Over just a few years, daily private writing spread to literary circles, both aristocratic and bourgeois. Personal confession could now be recounted and recorded for oneself. Prior to this period, journals were not personal diaries in the sense that we understand them today; they arose from other strongly socialized traditions that allowed little or no room for personal life or feelings, such as chronicles, travel journals, commonplace books, or spiritual journals. A chronicle resembles a memoir in that it records traces of history (political decisions, social movements, etc.) from a given, subjective point of view but without any description of the individual life of the diarist or mention of their inner life. The genre is well represented by A Parisian Journal, 1405–1449 (Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, 1405–1449) and, in particular, by the Mémoires-journaux (1574–1611) of Pierre de L’Estoile, the Journal (1684–1720) of the Marquis de Dangeau, and that of the Marquis de Bombelles from 1780–1822. Travel diaries are comparable to these

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chronicles, their primary purpose being the description of places visited and the customs of the countries traversed, but their subjectivity is often more marked. In 1690–91, Robert Challe wrote one about a trip to the “East Indies” where he inserted occasional glimpses of his melancholy. The commonplace book appeared in the sixteenth century. The head of the family used it to record the family accounts, births, marriages, deaths, and sometimes travels and encounters, as well as agricultural activities and the weather. In his Essays (1595), Michel de Montaigne alluded to the commonplace book of his father, who consigned to it “any remarkable occurrence and, day by day, the memoirs of the history of the household.”1 This statement served to preserve the memory of events for the diarist’s family circle and their descendants. One of the most striking examples is that kept from 1549 to 1562 by the sire of Gouberville, in Normandy. Lastly, the spiritual journal is probably the form that most closely resembles the personal diary, in that it records movements of inner life, but the diarist is motivated by a moral end, the examination of conscience and the transformation of his or her inner self and outward behavior, according to religious principles. It arose in the Catholic sphere in the course of the sixteenth century, during the Counter Reformation. French Jesuit followers of Ignatius of Loyola transcribed their dialogues with God, like Pierre Favre did from 1542 to 1545; a century later, several spiritual journals were kept by priests and the faithful at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, including Jean-Jacques Olier from 1642 to 1652 and Marie Rousseau from 1629 to 1649. The practice of keeping such spiritual journals gradually spread during the eighteenth century. In the English and German Protestant spheres, this type of journal was more widespread but does not seem to have extended into French-speaking Switzerland. In Geneva, there is only that of the scholar Isaac Casaubon, who kept a chronicle of his scholarly life in the eyes of God in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The modern form of diary that emerged around 1785 is also related to a series of social changes that occurred at the same time. The material conditions that allowed for the appearance of private writing gradually came together in the course of the eighteenth century: private spaces where individuals or couples could be alone, separated from the common areas, began to appear in homes; paper became more accessible; and time could be measured more precisely and reliably thanks to improvements in watch mechanisms. In parallel, subjectivity began to detach from divine and social order: people began to think of personal identity for its own sake. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac observed, “It is not the collection of qualities that make the person [but] the collection of feelings” experienced or remembered by 90 | The Diary

that person.2 Using the device of an imaginary statue capable of feeling, this philosopher wrote, “If it could say ‘I,’ it would say it every instance of its duration, and each time its ‘I’ would include every moment it remembered.”3 Together, all of these phenomena allowed for the appearance of intimate writing (about the body, feelings, and reflections about existence) removed from the world, separate from a religious context and with no other purpose than telling one’s story from day to day and analyzing oneself. In 1888, Duplessis observed, “I am like a person whose mind is absent. I do not understand myself, I do not know why I think or why I speak, I don’t know what causes me to act, I’m like a machine. I cannot express what I am. I cannot understand what my being is.”4 The diary is a protected space where, without fear of being seen by others, individuals can try to understand who they are and gain perspective on themselves and on the present moment and where they can explore their way of seeing the world as well as their emotions and feelings.

Nineteenth-Century Development of the Diary In the final years of the eighteenth century, Maine de Biran (1766–1824) recorded the “soul changes” that were occurring in him and kept a record of his daily activities as well as his “personal feelings, and way of being.”5 He could only observe “the fluctuations and the emptiness that [he] feel[s] inside,”6 without being able to grasp them, but he continued to assert that “the only true intelligence, or true activity, is found in introspection or the possibility of self-observation.”7 He rubbed shoulders with Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) in the Chamber of Deputies, without knowing that Constant also kept a diary. But although both diarists allow a glimpse of their own uncertainties, Constant recorded the events of his life in relation to their emotional impact on himself. He repeatedly wondered about his love interests, in particular the ties that bound him to Mme. de Staël, without managing to break free of them. He made formal commitments that he failed to keep and bemoaned his indecision: “If I knew what I wanted, then I would better understand what I do.”8 He let a plague of melancholy invade him to the point of “temptation to kill [himself].”9 Finally, he assessed the place of his diary in his life, “that little secret nobody knows about, the listener who is so discreet, who I can count on meeting every night,”10 in which he built the “approximate story”11 that he needed in order to feel that he existed. Influenced by contemporary philosophers like Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) and Pierre Jean George Cabanis (1757– 1808), Stendhal observed what happened in himself when he thought, acted, or reasoned.12 But despite his wish to remain natural, he constantly The Diary in France and French-Speaking Countries  |  91

clashed with the falsehood that arouse in his speech, the impossibility of rendering experience into language. He sensed that he is ruining the feelings by describing them: “All this is badly described, but it was a happy day.”13 He sought to record the fleeting feeling, the detail of the emotion, but he could not complete the entry of the day on the same evening before already needing to tell about the following day. Yet when he reread his writing, it was indeed his own life he had been writing about: “The dates [of the diary] easily show what composes the picture of [his] life.”14 Stendhal is undoubtedly the first to perceive this paradox so intensely: the truth of existence incessantly escapes the daily words about the self, and yet the diary does indeed present a narrative of this same life after all. These diarists of the early nineteenth century who left us the first great diaries gave way to a new generation who began writing between the years of 1820 and 1830, consisting of poets and authors such as Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863), Maurice de Guérin (1810–39), and George Sand (1804–76); artists such as Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863); historians such as Jules Michelet (1798–1874); and young aristocratic women like Eugénie de Guérin (1805–48) and Marie d’Agoult (1805–76). The diary served as a medium for reflections on literature (Vigny) or painting (Delacroix) in addition to catching on as a way of transcribing daily life (E. de Guérin), emotions and a general “weariness of life,”15 the pain of romantic breakups (Sand), or existential ruminations on the passage of time (Delacroix). In a more unconventional approach, Michelet used his to record all the events of the physical life of his spouse: here, the intimacy of a journal intime included sexuality and bodily functions. Finally, for Maurice de Guérin, the diary served for the first time in the history of the genre as a form of poetic elaboration. The daily entries present a picture of the natural landscape or an exploration of the motions of inner life: “Who has not surprised himself watching the shadows of summer clouds coursing over the face of the country? I do that very thing while writing this. I watch the shadow of my fancies, as it flies on this paper like scattered flakes forever swept along by the wind. Such is the nature of my thoughts, of all my intellectual endowment,—a little floating vapour which melts away.”16 Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–81) came along somewhat later than this group (he began keeping a regular diary in 1848) and did not belong to the Parisian—or even French—literary, artistic and intellectual world. Born in Geneva, he spent his entire life in that city, except for a period of study in Berlin, and worked as a university professor. His undertaking also stands out for its scale: his diary is one of the most voluminous in the history of the genre, counting nearly seventeen thousand pages. With the stamp of his Calvinist upbringing already evident in his first notebooks, Amiel set down a detailed report of his daily activities but also, most remarkably, made a point of noting his observations about the world 92 | The Diary

and himself: the spectacles of nature, the events of Genevan society, and especially his inner life. While his goal was to “be conscious of all things, have knowledge of all things,” he conducted above all a “phenomenology of the self” throughout the days: Bent over my old black desk, a wool scarf wrapped around my waist like an Arab at rest, dressed in my warm brown frock coat, I scribble these lines in between my high window and my small fireplace, my feet warmed in fox fur. . . . A few dictionaries and other books spread out on two folding bookrests within reach on a rustic table and an oldfashioned dresser, along with a few mismatched chairs, are all of the furnishings in this modest attic, where the mature man pursues without verve his student life, and the sedentary professor the habits of a traveler. Wherein lies the charm of this existence that appears so bare and empty? Freedom.17

Yet this freedom has a drawback: the contemplative diarist complained of a life removed from the world: “Through a lack of resolve and a taste for freedom, I do not take any stand, whether scientific, religious, political or personal, and I have kept myself at equal distance from all possibilities, dreaming, contemplating and meditating, like a hermit in retreat from the world.”18 There is a melancholic undertone to this contemplation; Amiel felt like a stranger to himself, plagued by anxiety and a sense of the emptiness of his existence. “I brood on darkness and chew on bitter herbs. Blue devils flit all about me,”19 he wrote vividly a few years before his death. He analyzed these worries on several occasions, on the one hand ascribing them to the loss of his mother when he was a child and, on the other, to his retreat into personal writing. Because his diary was the most important thing in his life and over the years (and many volumes) Amiel became aware of its literary value, he wished for a volume of excerpts to be published after his death. The executor of his will did have a volume compiled, called Fragments d’un journal intime (Amiel’s Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel, trans. Mrs. Humphry Ward [Mary Augusta Humphry Ward]), that appeared two years after his death, making him famous. The aim of the shared diary written by the brothers Edmond (1822–96) and Jules (1830–70) de Goncourt is the polar opposite of Amiel’s. For them, it was not an exercise in introspection but one of collecting snapshots of everyday life for their novels and chronicling the literary life of their time. The two brothers seized on living scenes of Parisian or provincial life, recounted dinners among writers that they attended, and drew portraits of people both unknown and famous. They also reported the words of the people they frequented, triggering controversy when their journal was published by Edmond in 1887. The Diary in France and French-Speaking Countries  |  93

Another vein emerged during the same period, in both France and Quebec: the young girl’s diary. In Quebec, between 1874 and 1881, Henriette Dessaulles (1860–1946), a teenage girl from a good family, recorded her longing for her late mother, her moments of sorrow, and the coldness and strictness of her stepmother in her diary. She was quite self-aware about the intent of her private writings: “[This scribbling] pleases you because you are full of yourself, you love yourself, you explore yourself, you enjoy learning about yourself, talking about yourself, portraying yourself as a little heroine! In your own eyes!”20 She awakens to love without always understanding what is happening within herself, and shares her feelings with her notebook as if it were a confidant: “I only know one thing, you see, and that is that I have a great mystery called me, that I don’t understand anything about me anymore, and that I would scribble in vain over every last one of your empty pages to write what I think and feel.”21 Henriette Dessaulles married the man she loved at the age of twenty-one and promptly quit keeping a diary. This examination of amorous emotion is echoed in the words one can read from the pen of Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–84) from the same period. This young aristocratic Russian woman had accompanied her family when they moved to France in the 1870s. In parallel with her study of painting, she wrote a diary in French from the age of fourteen until her death at the age of twenty-five, in which she gave a detailed account of her ardent conversations with a young man from fashionable Roman society and then of her dreams of love for a well-known politician who showed no interest in her, as well as of her musings about her art, her desire for glory, her quarrels with her family, her illness (she had tuberculosis), and her fear of dying. Bashkirtseff spoke of everything freely, in a very spontaneous style. She was also the first to raise the question of the outside reader’s place in a diary in such an explicit manner: “What is the use of lying or pretending? Yes, it is clear that I have the desire, if not the hope, of staying on this earth by whatever means possible. If I don’t die young, I hope to become a great artist. If I do, I want my journal to be published.”22 She even makes the prospect of publication the very condition for her sincerity: “It is just because I hope to be read that I am absolutely sincere. If this book is not the exact, absolute, strict truth, it has no reason to be.”23 During the years between 1880 and 1890, several diaries were published in posthumous volumes: Amiel in 1883, Bashkirtseff in 1887, Michelet and Stendhal in 1888, Rétif de la Bretonne in 1889, Delacroix in 1893, and Constant in 1895. During the same period, in 1887, Edmond de Goncourt began publishing the diary that he and his brother had been keeping since 1851. In the space of one decade, the diary achieved recognition as a genre, in various forms: the personal diary, the creative 94 | The Diary

artistic diary, the diary of a literary life. Fragments of these texts had appeared in journals during previous decades, but it was only during the last twenty years of the century that the diary acquired true visibility as a literary genre. The critical response was intense. According to Ernest Renan, writing in 1884, the diary is “a dangerous, sometimes unhealthy genre, a genre adopted by . . . those who have no other.”24 To Ferdinand Brunetière, true literature is impersonal; the author must “only put into it the part of self that consists of talent and ideas.”25 “What need do we have to know about their little stories,”26 he asked, in reference to Amiel, the Goncourt brothers, and Bashkirtseff. The literature of the classical period served as the yardstick to deprecate the diary because it was a threat to the hierarchy of literary genres: “In the 17th century,” observed the same critic, “one writes because one has something to say that is or should be interesting to everyone, but not to interest everyone in one’s own business, and even less in oneself.”27 To these critics, the diary is not of the same nature as other genres: the personal aspect precludes it from the pursuit of universality that distinguishes literary works in other types of writing. This critical response had no effect on readers’ interest and in no way diminished the influence of the published texts; even the virulence of the attacks was probably a sign that the public had already accepted the diary as a literary genre. The diaries of Eugénie de Guérin, Bashkirtseff, and the Goncourt brothers were best sellers, reprinted several times, and other diarists who began their own often referred to those that had been recently published: Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925) acknowledged that the idea to write his own diary came from reading that of Bashkirtseff, Jules Renard (1864–1910) referred to the Goncourts’ literary project to differentiate it from his own, and André Gide mentioned both the Goncourt and Amiel diaries to express his aggravation with the former’s social picturesque style and to dream of the landscape painted like the “state of soul” mentioned in the latter.28 Moreover, Amiel’s Fragments d’un journal intime was quickly recognized as a model of the genre. It was translated into English in 1885 and Russian in 1890, with a preface by Leo Tolstoy. In the early twentieth century, it was the subject of study for writers and critics (François Mauriac, 1885–1970; Charles Du Bos, 1882–1939; Albert Thibaudet, 1874–1936) and at least one doctoral dissertation, in 1925.29

Flourishing of the Diary in the Twentieth Century When Gide began his diary in 1887, he had not forgotten the enthusiasm he had felt when reading Amiel’s diary a few years earlier,30 but he did not actually follow in the footsteps of the Genevan professor. And apparently more surprisingly, while distancing himself from the Goncourt brothers, The Diary in France and French-Speaking Countries  |  95

he showed similar interests: he painted portraits of his contemporaries and represented himself at the center of a society of writers. Nevertheless, his Journal is not a chronicle of the literary life of that period but rather that of a writer who is fully absorbed in the story of himself from day to day. Where the Goncourts’ diary was an encounter with the world, Gide’s is primarily a daily quest for self-presence through writing. The need to write on a daily basis is the need for “immediate and involuntary transposition of sensation and emotion into words.”31 For him, it is a matter of sticking as closely as possible to the impression: “What do I care about writing well here? . . . I should like less polish, more broken edge and accent.”32 Therefore, banality is appropriate, as much as exchanges with other writers, reflections on his readings, or avowals of love. At issue in the diary is a struggle between masks and sincerity: “The only drama that really interests me and that I should always be willing to depict anew is the debate of the individual with whatever keeps him from being authentic.”33 At the time Gide began keeping his diary, around 1890, another diarist named Léon Bloy (1846–1917) started writing his own, in a much more inspired and convulsive vein. He was driven by the same insistence on truth but placed himself in the service of the word of God to denounce all the dishonest compromises of society and the Catholic Church. This “pilgrim of the absolute,” as he called himself, was the “enemy of all.”34 Rejected everywhere, he was condemned to a life of poverty, becoming an “ungrateful beggar” who recounted in his diary his combat against both false Christians and poverty.35 Although the urge to denounce an injustice or fight a false idea can be found as an undercurrent in many diaries, Bloy’s struggle was unequaled in its quest for the absolute and rebellion against the world. In the history of the genre, Bloy was also the first to publish his diary in stages, a few years after they were written. The first volume (covering the years 1892–95) was released in 1898, the second (1896–1900) in 1904, and so on. For authors from then on, the diary was no longer only a potential literary work of which the fate and the form were left to the judgment of executors but a literary work almost like any other, written for publication. The first half of the twentieth century was a period of prolific diary writing. World War I resulted in many accounts written by soldiers, some of which were published rapidly in an often revised version, and others of which (like that of Edouard Cœurdevey) were preserved and published in full many years later. Writers also latched on to the genre. Following their deaths, Paul Claudel (1868–1955), Valery Larbaud (1881–1957), Raymond Queneau (1903–76), Roger Martin du Gard (1881–1958), Louis Guilloux (1899– 1980), and Eugène Dabit (1898–1936) all left diaries, some of them voluminous, in which they blended to varying degrees personal confession 96 | The Diary

and thoughts about the world and the literary works that they were developing. In Quebec, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau (1912–43) recorded certain elements of daily life, his views on the world, and his meditations on the Catholic virtues, but also the sense of guilt and existential angst that gripped him, along with some allusions of a sexual nature. Women writers in France, like Catherine Pozzi (1882–1934), Mireille Havet (1898– 1932), Paule Régnier (1888–1950), and Marcelle Sauvageot (1900–1934), did not enjoy the same notoriety as men but produced diaries, often published much later, with a great deal of literary interest that, for some, posthumously saved them from obscurity. But publication during the author’s life was becoming more and more common. Gide published fragments over half a century before compiling a volume with his collected notes from 1889 to 1939.36 In 1956, during the final years of his life, Paul Léautaud (1872–1956) began to publish the immense Journal littéraire, which he had kept for sixty-three years, from 1893 until his death, in which he described his life as an office worker for the literary review Le Mercure de France and his immoderate love for cats.37 Julien Green (1900–1998), the Franco-American author of several novels and autobiographical stories, published his diary in installments, like Bloy, and narrated his melancholy, his discussions with Gide, and, more allusively, his carnal desires.38 In Switzerland, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878–1947) allowed a hidden personal tone to emerge in his diary that is somewhat reminiscent of Amiel. “Born shy,” alone and solitary, he felt porous, complex, adrift, “a stranger on the scene of his life.”39 He loved his life, surrounded by books and paper, “with his silence and nudity”40 and before the spectacles of nature. During the World War II, the diary reverted to being a form of testimony from diverse postwar perspectives: an intellectual who consigned the daily events of a historic period (Jean Guéhenno, 1890–1978), an imprisoned resistance fighter who would later be shot (Boris Vildé, 1908–42), and a Jewish female student who watched the growing threats against herself and her close relations (Hélène Berr, 1921–45).41 In a different tone, it was also the form given to the reflections on the situation of waiting imposed during the Phoney War (Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905–80).42 Yet again, it was a collection of ordinary or terrible tableaux produced by the war and then the occupation during daily life in Paris (Jean Cocteau, 1889–1963).43 Literary activity slowed during the war, but this did not diminish the influence of certain texts. The publication in the Pléiade collection of Gide’s Journal, 1889–1939 in 1939 was perceived as a major event that aroused admiration and imitation (notably by Sartre) as well as a new controversy somewhat reminiscent of the one in the 1880s. It was the first time that a well-known writer had published his diary in a prestigious The Diary in France and French-Speaking Countries  |  97

collection, and both Roger Caillois (1913–78) and Julien Gracq (1910– 2007) denounced the decadence of the practice and the absence of literary interest in the “empty moments” of life.44 That did not weaken the genre’s appeal to the public, however, and although literary critics kept it at a distance at first, it began to produce university studies in the 1950s and 1960s.45 During the second half of the twentieth century, the now-classic texts of the nineteenth century were republished with greater respect for the original works, and those of the first half of the twentieth century were published shortly after their authors’ deaths, if not already published by the author while alive. Beginning in the 1960s, the diary also became a form to be subverted: Marcel Jouhandeau (1888–1979) wove together anecdotes and thoughts more or less visibly in his Journaliers; Jacques Audiberti (1899–1965) turned Dimanche m’attend into a “literary game”; Eugène Ionesco (1912–94) mixed retrospection with daily writing in Présent passé, passé present; and Jacques Borel (1925–2002) wrote a continuous diary entry during a train trip from Lannemezan to Paris.46 But the most innovative transformation is undoubtedly that achieved by Claude Mauriac (1914–96) in the ten volumes of Temps immobile published from 1974 to 1988. In it, the author rearranged the entries of his original diary so they are no longer in chronological order but offer a journey through time, arranged by thematic echoes. The “telescoping of time” plunges the reader into a state outside of time, creating a haunting sense of oblivion.47 In the late twentieth century, certain writers, such as Hervé Guibert (1955–91), left behind diaries that were immediately recognized as classics, while others who began keeping one in the 1950s or ’60s published theirs in volumes while still alive (Henri Bauchau, Louis Calaferte).48 Among those, Charles Juliet (1934–) was one of the first writers to be recognized initially for his diary, with its desperate and suicidal tone, before publishing other works.49 Annie Ernaux (1940–) only published discontinuous fragments of her diary, presenting a given moment of her life or centered on a theme: a romance, the death of her mother, or life in the suburbs.50 Lastly, Renaud Camus (1946–) deliberately utilized the diary-chronicle genre for his published work.51 Like a new Léon Bloy, the diarist recounted his homosexual love affairs and his lack of money, while issuing snap judgments of contemporary society. He has published thirty volumes so far. While some writers blended retrospective with daily writing (José Cabanis, Jean-Baptiste Niel), the autobiographic fictional diary remained marginal: at best one might mention the writings of Jean-Benoît Puech (1947–), who kept the diary of a fictive author, Benjamin Jordane, who often seems to be his double.52 On the other hand, the proximity between 98 | The Diary

the daily diary entry and the poem has been put to good use by poets who compose their collections chronologically by including dates. Philippe Jaccottet, Gil Jouanard, Robert Marteau, and Antoine Emaz could be counted in this vein, in diverse forms.53 Lastly, the comic strip utilizes the resources of the day-to-day narrative, whether to chronicle a journey or keep personal notes.54 The permeable barrier between the diary and other genres demonstrates the assimilation of the genre in this early part of the twenty-first century. The fact that daily writing about the self has become widespread is the result of the forms of recognition mentioned previously: the emergence of private confession in the late eighteenth century, the publications of the late nineteenth century, the spread of the practice among writers in the early twentieth century, and the gradual integration of the genre with the literary field beginning with World War II. Notes 1. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 1:329. 2. Étienne de Condillac, Philosophical Writings of Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac, trans. Franklin Philip and Harlan Lane (New York: Psychology Press, 2014), 201. 3. Ibid., 200. 4. Lucile Desmoulins, Journal, 1788–1793 (Paris: Édition des Cendres, 1995), 143. 5. Maine de Biran, Journal, 3 vols. (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1954–57), 3:10. 6. Ibid., 1:87. 7. Ibid., 2:98. 8. Benjamin Constant, Journaux intimes (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 120. 9. Ibid., 423. 10. Ibid., 178. 11. Ibid., 179. 12. In the introduction to his Projet d’éléments d’idéologie à l’usage des écoles centrales de la République française, Destutt de Tracy wrote, “I want, in this writing, not to teach you but to lead you to notice everything that happens in you when you think, speak and reason.” See Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Projet d’éléments d’idéologie à l’usage des écoles centrales de la République française (Paris: Didot l’aîné, ca. 1800–1801), 18–19. 13. Stendhal, The Private Diaries of Stendhal: (Marie-Henri Beyle), trans. Robert Sage (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), 318. 14. Ibid., 215. 15. Comtesse d’Agoult, Mémoires, souvenirs et journaux (Paris: Mercure de France, 2007), 512. 16. Maurice de Guérin, Journal of Maurice Guérin, trans. Jessie P. Frothingham (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1901), 170. 17. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal intime, 12 vols. (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1976–94), 1:760, 4:580, 6:185. 18. Ibid., 6:585. The Diary in France and French-Speaking Countries  |  99

19. Ibid., 11:483. 20. Henriette Dessaulles, Journal (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1989), 280. 21. Ibid., 282. 22. Marie Bashkirtseff, I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, trans. Phyllis Howard Kernberger and Katherine Kernberger, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997). 23. Ibid. 24. Ernest Renan, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henriette Psichari, vol. 2 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy. 1948), 1141. 25. Ferdinand Brunetière, “La littérature personnelle,” Revue des Deux Mondes 85 (1888): 435. 26. Ibid., 439. 27. Ibid., 442. 28. André Gide, Journal, ed. Eric Marty, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1996– 97), 1:12. In 1888, André Gide cited the Journal intime (October 31, 1852) of Henri-Frédéric Amiel. 29. Léon Bopp, Amiel: Essai sur sa pensée et son caractère d’après des documents inédits (Paris: F. Alcan, 1926). The dissertation was defended at the University of Paris in 1925. 30. Gide, Journal, 1:1343. 31. Ibid., 1:438. 32. Ibid., 1:1178. 33. Ibid., 2:213. 34. Title of the sixth volume of his self-published diary, published in French as Léon Bloy, Le pèlerin de l’absolu, 1910–1912 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1914), published in English as Pilgrim of the Absolute, ed. Raïssa Maritain, trans. John Coleman and Harry Lorin Biusse, with an introduction by Jacques Maritain (New York: Pantheon, 1947); Léon Bloy, Journal, 2 vols. (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999), 1:120. 35. Title of the first published volume of his diary: Léon Bloy, Le mendiant ingrat: Journal de l’auteur, 1892–1895 (Brussels: Edmond Deman, 1898). 36. André Gide, Journal, 1889–1939, ed. E. Marty (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1939). 37. Paul Léautaud, Journal litteraire, 19 vols. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1954–66). 38. Julien Green, Diary, 1928–1957, ed. Kurt Wolff, trans. Anne Green (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1964). 39. C. F. [Charles Ferdinand] Ramuz, Journal: Journal, notes, brouillons, ed. Daniel Maggetti and Laura Saggiorato, 3 vols. (Genève: Slatkine, 2005), 1:12, 1:273. 40. Ibid., 1:263. 41. Jean Guehenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 1940–1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, trans. David Ball (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Boris Vildé, Journal et lettres de prison, 1941–1942 (Paris: Allia, 1997); Hélène Berr, The Journal of Hélène Berr, trans. David Bellos (New York: Weinstein Books, 2008). 42. Jean Paul Sartre, War Diaries: November 1939–March 1940, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

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43. Jean Cocteau, Journal, 1942–1945, ed. Jean Touzot (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). 44. See the citation of Nadja, by André Breton (Paris: Gallimard, 1928), in Julien Gracq, André Breton, quelques aspects de l’écrivain (Paris: J. Corti, 1948), 98. 45. See Maurice Blanchot, Le livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 271–79. For studies in the 1950s, see Michèle Leleu, Les journaux intimes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), and for studies in the 1960s, see Alain Girard, Le journal intime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). 46. Marcel Jouhandeau, Journaliers, 28 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1961–82); Jacques Audiberti, Dimanche m’attend (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 80; Eugène Ionesco, Présent passé, passé présent (Paris: Mercure de France, 1968), translated in English as Present Past, Past Present: A Personal Memoir, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998); Jacques Borel, Un voyage ordinaire (Cognac: Le Temps qu’il fait, 1993). 47. Claude Mauriac, Le temps immobile, 10 vols. (Paris: Grasset, 1974–88.), 1:193. 48. Hervé Guibert, Le mausolée des amants: Journal, 1976–1991 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); Henri Bauchau, Journal, 8 vols. (Arles: Actes sud, 1992– 2015); Louis Calaferte, Carnets (1956–1994), 16 vols. (Paris: Denoël, Gallimard, 1980–2010). 49. Charles Juliet, Journal, 1957–2008, 8 vols. (Paris: POL, 1978–2017). 50. Annie Ernaux, Journal du dehors (Paris: Gallimard, 1993); Annie Ernaux, “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit” (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); Annie Ernaux, La vive extérieure (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); Annie Ernaux, Se perdre (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 51. Renaud Camus, Journal (1976–2014), 30 vols. (Paris: Hachette/P.O.L./ Fayard and Plieux, 1976–2015). 52. José Cabanis, Journal, 1939–1953, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–87); Jean-Baptiste Niel, La Maison Niel (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). When the diary of Benjamin Jordane (L’apprentissage du roman: Extraits du journal d’apprentissage de Benjamin Jordane, ed. Jean-Benoıt Puech [Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1993]) was published, it was public knowledge, at least in French universities, that this was the editor’s diary, perhaps with minor changes, who in publication used a fictive name. 53. Philippe Jaccottet, La semaison: Carnets, 1954–1998, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–2001); Gil Jouanard, Moments donnés, 1965–1995 (Paris: Phébus, 2006); Robert Marteau, Fleuve sans fin: Journal du Saint-Laurent (Paris: Gallimard. 1986); Antoine Emaz, Os (Saint-Benoît-du-Sault: Tarabuste, 2004). 54. Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier, Le photographe, 3 vols. (Paris: Dupuis, 2003); Joann Sfar, Harmonica (Paris: L’Association, 2002); Joann Sfar, Ukulele (Paris: L’Association, 2003); Lewis Trondheim, Carnet de bord, 2002–2003 (Paris: L’Association, 2004).

Bibliography Agoult, Comtesse d’. Mémoires, souvenirs et journaux. Le Temps retrouvé collection. Paris: Mercure de France, 2007.

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Amiel, Henri-Frédéric. Journal intime. 12 vols. Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1976–94. Audiberti, Jacques. Dimanche m’attend. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. Bashkirtseff, Marie. I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff. Translated by Phyllis Howard Kemberger and Katherine Kemberger. Vol. 1. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997. Bauchau, Henri. Journal. 8 vols. Arles: Actes sud, 1992–2015. Berr, Hélène. The Journal of Hélène Berr. Translated by David Bellos. New York: Weinstein Books, 2008. Blanchot, Maurice. Le livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Bloy, Léon. Journal. 2 vols. Bouquins collection. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999. ———. Le mendiant ingrat: Journal de l’auteur, 1892–1895. Brussels: Edmond Deman, 1898. ———. Pilgrim of the Absolute. Edited by Raïssa Maritain. Translated by John Coleman and Harry Lorin Biusse, with an introduction by Jacques Maritain. New York: Pantheon, 1947. First published in French as Le pèlerin de l’absolu, 1910–1912. Paris: Mercure de France, 1914. Bopp, Léon. Amiel: Essai sur sa pensée et son caractère d’après des documents inédits. Paris: F. Alcan, 1926. Borel, Jacques. Un voyage ordinaire. Cognac: Le Temps qu’il fait, 1993. Brunetière, Ferdinand. “La littérature personnelle.” Revue des Deux Mondes 85 (1888): 433–52. Cabanis, José. Journal, 1939–1953. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1976–87. Calaferte, Louis. Carnets (1956–1994). 16 vols. Paris: Denoël, Gallimard, 1980–2010. Camus, Renaud. Journal (1976–2014). 30 vols. Paris: Hachette/P.O.L./Fayard and Plieux, 1976–2015. Cocteau, Jean. Journal, 1942–1945. Edited by Jean Touzot. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Condillac, Étienne de. Philosophical Writings of Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac. Translated by Franklin Philip and Harlan Lane. Vol. 1. New York: Psychology Press, 2014. Constant, Benjamin. Journaux intimes. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Desmoulins, Lucile. Journal, 1788–1793. Paris: Éd. des Cendres, 1995. Dessaulles, Henriette. Journal. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1989. Destutt de Tracy, Antoine. Projet d’éléments d’idéologie à l’usage des écoles centrales de la République française. Paris: Didot l’aîné, ca. 1800–1801. Emaz, Antoine. Os. Saint-Benoît-du-Sault: Tarabuste, 2004. Ernaux, Annie. “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit.” Paris: Gallimard, 1997. ———. Journal du dehors. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. ———. La vive extérieure. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. ———. Se perdre. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Gide, André. Journal. Edited by Eric Marty. 2 vols. Pléiade collection. Paris: Gallimard, 1996–97. ———. Journal, 1889–1939. Edited by E. Marty. Paris: La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1939. ———. The Journals of André Gide. Translated by Justin O’Brien. 4 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

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Girard, Alain. Le journal intime. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. Gracq, Julien. André Breton, quelques aspects de l’écrivain. Paris: José Corti, 1948. Green, Julien. Diary, 1928–1957. Edited by Kurt Wolff. Translated by Anne Green. London: Collins and Harvill, 1964. Guehenno, Jean. Diary of the Dark Years, 1940–1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris. Translated by David Ball. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Guérin, Maurice de. Journal of Maurice Guérin. Translated by Jessie P. Frothingham. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1901. Guibert, Emmanuel, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier. Le photographe. 3 vols. Paris: Dupuis, 2003. Guibert, Hervé. Le mausolée des amants: Journal, 1976–1991. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Ionesco, Eugène. Présent passé, passé présent. Paris: Mercure de France, 1968. Published in English as Present Past, Past Present: A Personal Memoir. Translated by Helen R. Lane. New York: Da Capo, 1998. Jaccottet, Philippe. La semaison: Carnets, 1954–1998. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–2001. Jouanard, Gil. Moments donnés, 1965–1995. Paris: Phébus, 2006. Jouhandeau, Marcel. Journaliers. 28 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1961–82. Juliet, Charles. Journal, 1957–2008. 9 vols. Paris: POL, 1978–2017. Léautaud, Paul. Journal litteraire. 19 vols. Paris: Mercure de France, 1954–66. Leleu, Michèle. Les journaux intimes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952. Maine de Biran. Journal. 3 vols. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1954–57. Marteau, Robert. Fleuve sans fin: Journal du Saint-Laurent. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Mauriac, Claude. Le temps immobile. 10 vols. Paris: Grasset, 1974–88. Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. 3 vols. Folio collection. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Niel, Jean-Baptiste. La Maison Niel. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. A Parisian Journal, 1405-1449. Translated by Janet Shirley. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968. Puech, Jean-Benoît [Benjamin Jordane, pseud.]. L’apprentissage du roman: Extraits du journal d’apprentissage de Benjamin Jordane. Edited by JeanBenoıt Puech. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1993. Ramuz, C. F. [Charles Ferdinand]. Journal: Journal, notes, brouillons. Edited by Daniel Maggetti and Laura Saggiorato. 3 vols. Genève: Slatkine, 2005. Renan, Ernest. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Henriette Psichari. Vol. 2. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1948. Sartre, Jean Paul. War Diaries: November 1939–March 1940. Translated by Quintin Hoare. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Sfar, Joann. Harmonica. Paris: L’Association, 2002. ———. Ukulele. Paris: L’Association, 2003. Stendhal. Journal. Folio classique collection. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. ———. The Private Diaries of Stendhal: (Marie-Henri Beyle). Translated by Robert Sage. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954. Trondheim, Lewis. Carnet de bord, 2002–2003. Paris: L’Association, 2004. Vildé, Boris. Journal et lettres de prison, 1941–1942. Paris: Allia, 1997.

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M IC H E L B R AU D is Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of Pau and the Pays de l’Adour in France. He is author of La forme des jours and editor of the anthology Journaux intimes. DAG M A R A M E I J E R S -T ROL L E R (1956 – 2 018) was an experienced translator from French into English. A member of the American Translators Association, she was educated at Indiana University Bloomington, Pantheon-Sorbonne University, and London Metropolitan University.

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6 The American Diary Canon Steven E. Kagle

For much of American history there were few ways in which American diarists could share their experiences and thoughts about the genre. Until the journal of David Brainerd (1718–47) was published in 1746, American diaries were only available in manuscript form.1 Diaries were exchanged and discussed but only among family members or close friends. Even after diaries began to be published, discussion of them was limited. Eventually, scholars and critics began to write about diaries, but until comparatively recently, they only discussed individual or small groups of diaries. Today, we can speak of a canon of American diary literature and see how individual diaries have contributed to the development of a literary genre. In identifying significant American diaries, it is important to recognize that the canon is not monolithic; there are subgenres with distinct features. However, it is also important to acknowledge that a geography, history, and society that is distinctly American has produced diaries that fit into patterns that transcend subgeneric divisions. One of the most prominent of these patterns is a move from diaries that are indebted to the traditions of Europe to ones that not only responded to the nation’s changes but also show an increasing acceptance of the idea of change.

Spiritual Journals Diary writing came to America with the first European settlers and quickly became an important and widespread practice. Religion was an  105

important factor, but religion, education, and politics are so interconnected that it is almost impossible to separate their influences. Literacy, so necessary to writing a diary, was encouraged by the Puritans and other Separatists whose religions held that all individuals needed to read the Bible. Moreover, in order to gain church membership, Puritans had to give evidence of a conversion experience or point to a series of subtler signs of salvation. A diary could provide such a pattern of evidence. Literacy required education. Schools needed political support. Only a few years after the Revolution, the idea that an educated citizenry is essential for a thriving democracy was recognized in the Land Ordinance of 1785, which included a provision that a substantial portion of the revenue from the sale of western lands be devoted to providing schools. Two of the earliest spiritual diaries—those of John Winthrop (1587– 1649), written between 1630 and 1649 but first published in 1790, and Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705), written from 1653–1657 but not published until 19512 —share much in common, but they represent very different types of diaries. Winthrop’s helped him use his life to influence the world while Wigglesworth’s helped him deal with the influence of the world on his life. Winthrop was the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his diary, the earliest surviving American diary of merit, is perhaps the most important document of its period.3 While the historical information in a diary like Winthrop’s cannot by itself merit a journal’s inclusion in the canon, the relationship between personal experiences and the development of the culture can, especially when the written record has style and cohesiveness. The diary’s controlling purpose is religious. A Puritan, Winthrop believed that all events are predetermined in accordance with a divine plan and that the purpose of his colony and each of its citizens was to advance that plan. Individual aspirations and actions, including diary keeping, were to be subordinate to those of the colony and its leaders. Winthrop’s diary is unusually depersonalized. He usually refers to himself in the third person, a feature that allowed him to appear objective even when writing about events in which he had a strong personal stake. Diaries are usually thought to serve the individual by expressing the mind of the diarist, but for Winthrop, church, state, and individual were connected. He believed that the individual should serve the state so that the state could serve God. It probably didn’t hurt that for many years Winthrop controlled the state. Even this early in the period of colonization, Puritans like Winthrop wanted their diaries to reveal a pattern of events that could help the diarist change not only his life but also society. Winthrop used his diary to show what God intended for his New England colony, which, as he had explained in his sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity,” was to be 106 | The Diary

a “city on a hill,” a place so holy that the world would want to emulate it. Even today, this image of America has been a subject for discussion.4 Wigglesworth’s diary is appropriately paired with Winthrop’s not so much because of what they have in common, a focus on faith, but because of how they differ. Winthrop’s longer diary is episodic; many entries might be reordered without doing much violence to the work. Wigglesworth’s much shorter diary has the clear plot, tight structure, and stylistic skill that invites a comparison to works of fiction. This connection should not suggest that Wigglesworth considered such features when creating his diary. For most Puritans, literary art was not important. Indeed, they saw most imaginative literature as frivolous at best and a temptation to sin at worst. They encouraged the development of stylistic skill but only to advance a religious objective, such as the composition of sermons. Poems, such as Wigglesworth’s own “Day of Doom,” were tolerated because of their religious subject matter.5 Another important distinction between the two diaries is that Winthrop’s is focused on experiences he wished to share, while Wigglesworth’s is focused inward on feelings, especially anxieties about sexual desires, that he would never have wanted made public.6 Wigglesworth’s diary is a coming-of-age story tracing the diarist’s progress from a youth, subject to the authority of a disapproving father, to an adult, father to his own child and to his congregation. It starts at the time of Wigglesworth’s graduation from Harvard and assumption of the position of tutor. Instead of marking his maturation, his graduation only started that process. Racked with religious and sexual guilt, he felt inadequate. His father still treated him as a child, criticizing even his smallest actions. But while he kept the diary, Wigglesworth’s life changed. He left college to become pastor to the church at Malden, his father died, and he married. It seems no coincidence that the diary terminates about the time his wife would have realized that she was pregnant. The transition from child to father complete, the motive for keeping a diary is resolved, and the diary ends. We expect this kind of neat resolution in a story or an autobiography where an author may arrange, slant, or even create events to fit some designed conclusion, but not in a diary, especially not in one whose writer is not anticipating a reader. The Puritans were not the only religious group that supported diary creation. Many Quakers kept and shared diaries, a practice consistent with the expression of an inner light at Quaker meetings and the practice of the religion’s founder, George Fox (1624–91). The diary of John Woolman (1720–72) is a good example. Appearing posthumously in 1774, the diary renewed attention to works Woolman published during his lifetime, particularly those dealing with slavery, and inspired other Quakers to keep diaries.7 The American Diary Canon  |  107

Travel Diaries Another category that appears early in American diary literature is travel. One of the best travel diaries is that of Sarah Kemble Knight (1666–1727). Published in 1825, the diary was edited by Theodore Dwight Jr., himself a diarist, who also edited his uncle Timothy Dwight’s Travels in New England and New York.8 Knight’s diary, which describes a journey she made from Boston to New York in 1704, merges Winthrop’s attention to his society and its people with Wigglesworth’s focus on a unifying subject. Some of Knight’s comments on class and race have drawn criticism, but greater attention has been paid to her diary as demonstrating the ability of a lone woman to handle a dangerous situation. Knight showed herself to be very different from the women portrayed not only in European literature but also in American fiction for many years to come. A James Fenimore Cooper heroine might show courage but ultimately needs a rugged frontiersman to rescue her. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Zenobia might have intelligence and strength, but she sacrifices her own desire to reshape America to that of a man. Knight had not only the courage to take a trip alone on horseback from Boston to New York in 1704, a time when roads, even where they existed, could be treacherous, but also the wit and learning to expose the follies of her countrymen. She read poetry and fiction, unusual in Puritan Boston, and used what she learned from her reading in her diary. She wrote poems about her experiences and modeled other sections of her diary after chivalric romances. In doing so, she transformed what might have been frightening incidents into humorous adventures. Margaret Van Horne Dwight Bell (1790–1834) was related to both Theodore Dwight Jr., editor of Knight’s diary, and Jonathan Edwards, editor of David Brainerd’s. Like Knight’s journal, Bell’s epistolary diary of a journey from Connecticut to Ohio in 1810 shows the ability of a woman to undertake a difficult journey. Not published until 1912, Bell’s diary could not influence the many fine diaries written by women facing the hazards of western migration in the nineteenth century, but it is one of the best examples of that experience.9 An underlying theme of the diary is the situation of an unmarried woman. Bell repeatedly had to deal with the assumption of others that because a woman is helpless without a man, she must be traveling west in search of a husband. Bell did not undertake her journey alone, but for all intents and purposes she might have. The deacon who escorted and was supposed to protect her proved worse than useless. Like Knight, Bell not only showed courage but also displayed a talent for humor and the kind of characterization that we find in fiction. A number of valuable travel accounts were written by Americans traveling abroad, several by Americans on diplomatic missions. Many 108 | The Diary

are contained in life diaries, diaries that are not focused on a particular situation. The diary of Governeur Morris (1752–1816), an important member of the committee that drafted the American Constitution, contains a portrait of France during the French Revolution that ranges from the violence of the Paris mobs to his liaison with a married countess who was simultaneously having an affair with a bishop.10 However, the most important diaries containing accounts of diplomatic missions are those of John Adams (1735–1826), John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), and Charles Francis Adams (1807–1886), each of whom kept a diary while serving as an American ambassador during a particularly crucial moment in America’s history: John during the Revolution, John Quincy during the War of 1812, and Charles Francis during the Civil War.11 Even taken individually, the diaries of the Adamses are among the most important life diaries. Each is well written with long regular entries, and each provides insights into some of the most important figures and events in American history. But the main reason why these diaries are so special is that they connect, offering an opportunity to see changes in not just one life but an entire family’s—and not just any family, but one whose experiences are connected to the development of the nation. No consideration of the canon would be complete without them, and when the autobiography of Henry Adams (1838–1918), is added, they form an unequaled autobiographical account spanning over a century and a half.12 It is important to note how these diarists embraced the idea that America was not about preserving the status quo but about improvement from generation to generation. John Adams hoped that his efforts in “politics and war” would give his children the “liberty to study [subjects such as] . . . mathematics and philosophy . . . commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, [and] architecture.”13 It was a formula for the parallel development of a family and a nation: political freedom enabling economic power, which in turn enables artistic achievement. This pattern of political enfranchisement, economic opportunity, and cultural advancement did not come at the same rate for all, and even for the Adamses, there were repeated struggles against entrenched power. John Adams called his diary an “instrument for ambition,” allowing him to choose between “two alternatives, the path of virtue, difficult and full of dangers, and the path of corruption, easy and full of pleasures.”14 His diary’s main function was to prepare him for such choices. Like his father, John Quincy Adams used his diary to choose principle over personal and political advantage. Late in life, when he might have sought a comfortable retirement, he fought to repeal the gag rule and argued the Amistad case before the Supreme Court. Charles Francis Adams’s huge The American Diary Canon  |  109

diary also shows a similar effort. These diaries invite study by anyone looking at changes over generations.

Exploration Diaries Though related to the travel diary, the exploration diary should be considered separately because the situations that prompted them are very different. Americans “were travelers before they were explorers.”15 Most diaries about the early exploration of America were written by Europeans who visited and returned to the Old World. Exploration by English-speaking colonists was first limited by French- and Spanish-controlled territories and later by the Proclamation of 1763, which forbade settlement west of the Allegany Mountains. In addition to these political limitations, there was a cultural one. Just as the Puritans who settled New England came to the New World not to distance themselves from Europe but to become a model for it, these diarists saw the wild as the land of the devil, and believed that it was their job to tame it and its native inhabitants. Early settlers looked back toward Europe, not toward the frontier, and to the extent that they did go to the wilderness, they did so to “civilize” it. The popularity of the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition created a climate for the publication of American diaries. But when they were written in 1804–6 the attitudes of their diarists were not distinct from those of earlier Americans of European origin. They saw themselves as part of the Age of Reason, civilized men bringing science and culture to a land marked by savagery and superstition. However, by the time the official edition of the journals was published in 1814, Americans’ attitudes had already begun to change. Lewis and Clark often presented Native Americans as savages, in one entry describing a group of starving natives as having “a shape . . . nearly allyed to the brute creation.”16 Later exploration diarists such as Henry Schoolcraft (1793–1864) and John C. Frémont (1813–90) were likely to suggest that any “savagery” was the result of environment, not race. Like other Romantic-period writers, they saw the natives as contributing to what Frémont called a “poetry . . . of the prairie.”17 Schoolcraft suggested that the “dark hemlock forests and yawning gulfs .  .  . [of the West while] dreary and forbidding to the eye,” possess the kind of wild beauty that could be found in the landscape paintings of the Hudson River school.18

Romance and Courtship Diaries Anne Home Shippen “Nancy” Livingston’s (1763–1841) record has ties to the works of Knight and Bell in both demonstrating the possibilities of the diary as a literary form and illustrating the problems that women have 110 | The Diary

faced in American society. Though only published in an excerpted edition, it is an amazing example of how the “plot” of a diary can rival that of the most fantastic works of fiction.19 It is so filled with dramatic events and characters that it is hard to believe it is a true account and not something copied from the pages of a tragic romance. The diarist’s story has much in common with those of the protagonists of Henry James’s novels, such as Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Bostonians (1886). The daughter of a prominent family in postrevolutionary Philadelphia, eighteen-year-old Nancy Shippen was courted by several suitors. One, Leftenant Henry Beekman Livingston (1750–1831), belonged to one of the richest families in North America. Another, Louis Guillame Otto (1754–1817), attaché of the French Legation, came from a noble family but was not wealthy or titled. When Nancy chose Otto, her parents reluctantly agreed to the match on the condition that the lovers postpone the engagement for a short while but used that period to pressure their daughter into a hasty marriage to Livingston. As the diary begins, they have realized their mistake. Livingston proved a philanderer with a mistress and an illegitimate child, while Otto, who had gone back to France, returned and still wished to marry Nancy. But Livingston would only grant Nancy a divorce if she surrendered their daughter to him. When Nancy was unwilling to give up her child, Otto married another and went back to France, ending both the diarist’s hope for the future and her journalizing.20 The diarist and her daughter ended their lives as religious recluses.

The Transcendentalists’ Diaries Another group of Romantics, the transcendentalists, not only produced many fine diaries but also shared them.21 Two of the best, those of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), support the identification of the diary as a literary form.22 Lawrence Rosenwald, in Emerson and the Art of the Diary, called Emerson’s journal his “chief literary performance” and argued that he was “a better journalizer than . . . an essayist.”23 Sharon Cameron, in Writing Nature, called Thoreau’s journal “the great nineteenth century meditation on nature” and, placing it above Walden, claimed that Thoreau himself “came to think of it as his central literary enterprise”24 Both journals are linked (Emerson encouraged Thoreau to keep a journal), and both deserve a place in the canon. What makes Thoreau’s diary more deserving of inclusion than Emerson’s is that it goes further in expressing a change in the American self-image. Thoreau does not merely reject Lewis and Clark’s idea that America would progress by bringing civilization to the wilderness; he reverses it, arguing that “the prevailing tendency” of America and, indeed, of all history was “toward the wild.” Consider the following passage from The American Diary Canon  |  111

Thoreau’s journal entry for November 16, 1850, which he incorporated almost unchanged into his essay “Walking”: “In literature, it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the untamed, uncivilized free and wild thinking in ‘Hamlet’ and ‘The Iliad,’ in all the scriptures and mythologies that delights us.”25 The diary form proved well suited to that wild literature.

Diaries and Slavery Slavery and the war that ended it were the subject of many diaries. Unfortunately, while former slaves wrote important autobiographies, almost no slaves could keep diaries.26 The dairies that give the best depictions of slavery were travel journals kept by people who went into the slaveholding South from other states. The two notable examples give very moving accounts of the brutality of slavery and serve to refute the many diaries written by southerners who tried to present slavery as a benign institution.27 Their qualities of description, characterization, plot, and structure make them stand out, but what is also important to note is that each chronicles an alteration in the views of its writer. In 1773, Philip Vickers Fithian (1747–76), who had completed his training for the ministry, left his home in New Jersey to go to Virginia as a tutor on the estate of the Carter family. It is doubtful that he would have taken the post had he fully recognized the enormity of the institution of slavery. At first, he was impressed by the grandeur of the plantation, “the balls, foxhunts and the fine entertainments,” but he soon saw beyond the splendor, behind the myths that slaveholders tried to create about themselves and their society. Hearing an overseer boasting about torturing a slave, Fithian tried to console himself with the belief that “a righteous God . . . will take vengeance” on such men.28 Charlotte Forten (1837–1914), an African American, had been raised and well educated in the North. During the Civil War, she traveled to Port Royal in the Sea Islands of South Carolina to teach the children of freed slaves. Forten recorded ample evidence of the hypocrisy and cruelty of the slaveholders. Her use of such details as the dialects of former slaves enhances the impact of her account. The way in which Forten personalizes her experiences is especially important. In one brief but particularly telling incident that could have come from a diary of romance and courtship, Forten recounts a flirtation with a white student from Brown who came to Port Royal. She wrote: “I like Mr. T[horpe]. Report says that he more than likes me. But I know it is not so. . . . Although he is very good and liberal, he is still an American, and w’ld of course never be so insane as to love one of the proscribed race.”29 The italicized American suggests

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that in Forten’s mind, members of her race were not American and that the restoration of a political union would not end a division by race.

War Diaries War has been the impetus for many American diaries, yet none of the best are by active combatants. Battles offer little opportunity for journalizing or a concern with style. Three of the better diaries of the American Revolution were written by doctors—Lewis Beebe (1749–1816), Albigence Waldo (1750–94), and James Thacher (1754–1844)—and a fourth is by Josiah Atkins (1750–81), who spent time as a hospital orderly.30 Dr. Thacher’s diary lacks the unity and consistency of some of the others, but it stands out because of its size and scope. He kept it from just before the Battle of Lexington until after the surrender of Charles Cornwallis, and he was at or near a number of the most important actions. He treated survivors from the Battle of Saratoga, witnessed the execution of Major John Andre at West Point, and went with George Washington’s troops to the final battle at Yorktown. There are gaps in Thacher’s record, but many are filled by the use of retrospective entries. The shorter records of Beebe, Waldo, and Atkins do not capture the scope of the war as Thacher’s does, but they do more to personalize their writers’ experiences. Each sets up a contrast between the ideals of the Revolution and the failings of some who conducted it. Beebe accused some American generals of “villainy, treason, & murder.”31 Long before Benedict Arnold’s (1741–1801) treachery at West Point, Beebe condemned the general for directing a regiment to march when many were infected with smallpox and for ordering that the sick be given only half-rations.32 He complained that many American soldiers enlisted only to gain “money . . . promotion & honor,” adding that “was we free from all; except those who have the cause of Liberty nearest their heart . . . our army would be reduced to a small number.”33 Seeing slaves while crossing Washington’s plantation, Atkins wrote “alas that persons who pretend to stand for the rights of mankind for the liberties of society, can delight in oppression, & even that of the worst kind.”34 Some war diaries were kept by prisoners. During the American Revolution, Charles Herbert (1757–1808) kept a record of his experiences in Old Mill Prison in England. It can be paired with another diary kept during the Civil War by John L. Ransom (1843–1919) when imprisoned at Andersonville, where “some of the most horrible sights that can possibly be” had become “common everyday occurrences.”35 But it is not the suffering in the prisons that makes these diaries so important for the canon, it is how a diary helped the diarists survive.

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A large number of diaries were written during the Civil War, but the best were by civilians. As in the Revolution, soldiers’ diaries provide a wealth of information, but few contribute to our appreciation of the diary as a literary form. With most of the Civil War fought in the South, it is not surprising that most of the better civilian diaries were written by Southern women. The most famous of these was Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823–86), but her A Diary from Dixie is a re-creation written in the 1880s.36 The diary of Eliza Frances Andrews (1840–1931) seems a better candidate for inclusion in the canon. Like Chesnut’s, not all of Andrews’s diary survived, but the portion that did is substantial and coherent with long, regular entries. What makes this diary particularly significant is that it shows the division in the nation. Andrews’s father was a strong unionist; her brothers fought for the Confederacy. While admittedly favoring secession and more ready to excuse Confederate atrocities than Union actions, Andrews came to see “what a horrible thing war is when stripped of all its pomp and circumstance.”37

Diaries of Illness Diaries of illness, works whose unifying subject is sickness, were rare until the last century because serious medical conditions usually interfered with diary keeping. Many early diaries mention illness but only briefly. An exception is that of Samuel Cole Davis (1764–1809), who in 1808–9 kept a diary for over a year before dying of cancer.38 Davis’s diary is also important as a Quaker spiritual diary. Davis, who broke from the church when he married outside the Quaker faith, was able to return through the help of his diary. Like unreliable narrators in fiction, Davis allows his reader to see what he himself had trouble recognizing. Initially seeking to use his diary to excuse his behavior, diarizing helped him see that much of his life had been conditioned on self-deception. He had accused his wife of infidelity in order to excuse his own and only an admission of his own guilt would allow him to reconcile with his wife and return to his faith. The most important diary of illness is that of Alice James (1848–92). James aspired to achieve the same artistic success as her brother Henry but feared that while she might perceive beauty, she would be unable to create it. She finally found a way to do so when, in 1889, she transformed her commonplace book into a full diary. Her record is more about emotional distress than physical ailments, its declared purpose to relieve melancholy, serve as a creative outlet, and “bring relief as an outlet to that geyser of emotions sensations speculations and reflections.”39 James’s meditations on death invite comparisons to some of Emily Dickinson’s poems, which she admired, but James had no desire to romanticize her situation. She refused to read Marie Bashkirtseff’s journal of illness, calling 114 | The Diary

its dramatization of oncoming death “dreary” and its author “perverse.”40 She longed for “some palpable disease, no matter how conventionally dreadful” that would keep her from being suspected of a manufactured invalidism.41 When James no longer had strength to write, she maintained her diary by dictating it and arranged to have her diary printed as a limited edition for her brothers. In this way, she acknowledged her diary as a work of art worthy of publication while maintaining the gap between private and public.

American Diaries in the Twentieth Century Almost every major American writer has kept a diary, often for use in creating other literary works. In the twentieth century this connection became more pronounced. An increasing number of authors kept diaries not just to aid their other writing but also to help them understand and document the creative process. Diaries by Jack Kerouac (1922–69), Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), and John Cheever (1912–82) deserve attention,42 but I would point to John Steinbeck’s (1902–68) Journal of a Novel as worthy of special attention because the relationship between the diary and a novel is central; it is a book about the writing of a book, and this makes the question of audience particularly interesting. Steinbeck may not have written his diary for the public (it was only published posthumously), but he must have recognized that it would someday be made public. Presented as an epistolary diary to his friend and editor Pascal Covici, it doesn’t seem written for him. In an early entry, Steinbeck claimed to be writing so his two sons might “know how it was” and “meet on the same ground,” but like Benjamin Franklin’s claim in his autobiography that he was writing so that his son might “know the circumstances of my life,” this seems a pose.43 The expectation that a diary would not remain secret is hardly new, but the boundary between the public and private has been breaking down and in the age of Facebook has almost disappeared. Even in the nineteenth century, successful writers knew that if they did not destroy them, their personal documents would likely be examined after their deaths. By the twentieth century, many writers not only suspected that their diaries would become public but also wrote with the intention of revealing even the most intimate details of their lives. Anaïs Nin (1903–77) became better known for her diaries than for her fiction and essays. While her unexpurgated diaries were only published after her death, even the versions published while she was alive had details about her sexual activities that brought her fame and helped to move America toward a modern worldview of the self, especially as it related to sexuality. We have seen sex considered in diaries as far back The American Diary Canon  |  115

as Wigglesworth’s, but Nin was the first to use a diary to openly argue for the liberating power of sexuality for both sexes. Nin maintained that the relationship between the sexes that had once been seen as protecting women had really left them “dependent and incomplete” but that woman’s power was “unspent, new,” leaving women like herself ready to lead a “woman’s revolution, the flower of revolt and injustice.”44 She looked to her diaries as a way to advance that revolution and to fulfill a personal need but admitted that she was still unable to confide to humans what she had to the journal.45 May Sarton (1912–95), another author who became most famous as a diarist, published her diaries during her lifetime.46 Sarton revealed her sexual orientation without shame and tied it to women’s issues in general. She warned that “no partner in love relationship (whether homosexual or heterosexual) should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable. But the fact is that men still do rather consistently undervalue or devalue women’s powers as serious contributors to civilization except as homemakers.”47 Sex was only one of the subjects that drew readers to Sarton’s diaries. Many of Sarton’s readers were also attracted by a romanticized view of her rural existence. But though one early volume was published under the title Journal of a Solitude, her life was not really solitary. Sarton worried that she might have given readers “a false view” and, trying to explain that her surroundings did “nothing to help balance . . . stress or depression,”48 warned that while her lifestyle “made possible the creation of some works of art . . . [it did] so at a high price in emotional maturity and happiness.”49 Another important subject in Sarton’s diaries was her medical condition. Starting with After the Stroke (1988), it took on prominence connecting her record to diaries of illness. Unlike Sarton, Glenway Wescott (1901–87), chose not to publish his personal record during his lifetime. However, he did envision “an eventual reader.”50 Wescott compared himself to “Moses looking down on the Promised Land, able to see a glorious future for his work [but one] that would only be possible after his death.” Wescott also saw an important place for the genre and frequently considered what it was and what it might become. He saw the diary as “an immensity that is always (and has to be) fragmentary.”51 This was related to his view of the world as fragmented, reflecting what Henry Adams, in The Education, described as a “movement from unity into multiplicity.” While diaries have always been fragmented because of their periodic entries, diarists’ have not always viewed the world as fragmented. The earliest American diarists, such as Winthrop and Wigglesworth, believed that there was an unchanging, interconnected order to things, one guided by a divine spirit. For them a diary’s purpose was to reveal that eternal, 116 | The Diary

universal order, not to impose a new one. They believed that despite its periodic divisions, a diary that faithfully showed the world God had created would be more ordered than any fictional creation could be and that a faithful diary would show an order that did not change from place to place or time to time. Diarists, like writers of other genres, have increasingly questioned that view of an ordered unchanging reality and come to create works that accept and even emulate a disordered and fragmented world. Instead of being seen as a difficulty to be overcome, they often viewed a diary’s division into entries as an advantage. No diarist has made this situation clearer than Sylvia Plath (1932–63). Plath has been far better known for her poetry and fiction than for her diary, but her personal record not only is an excellent example of the form but also offers insights into the future of the genre. When published in 2000, the unabridged version of her journal finally revealed what Plath achieved. While what Ted Hughes (1930–98) did with some of Plath’s manuscript books is a loss, it should not keep her record out of the canon because Plath’s journal is not as dependent on those missing portions as most diaries would have been. As Anna Jackson persuasively argued in Diary Poetics, the different sections have their own unifying elements and show a “sense of form that structures each of [her] . . . diary sequences.”52 Examining the way in which Plath almost starts a new diary with each new manuscript book, Jackson uncovers the true structure of the journals, one that created “a new form of the diary with a new form of continuity,” one more concerned with “being true to the higher reality of her creation than to the bare facts of the events she is portraying.”53 To fully appreciate Plath’s work one has only to notice the sequential, yet disjointed paragraphs offering Whitmanesque lists of images, in almost Whitmanesque rhythms, images which are at once separate, yet part of a new whole: “Little girl, feverish, tossed in sheets, held finger”; “Ancient black-clad woman, with one tooth, sunken gums baring it to the root”; or “milkman’s dog, still pup, tied under a fig tree; friendly tight brown fur.”54 Notice, too, the self-contradictory entries, such as the opening sentences “Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing” to an entry that is hundreds of words.55 Plath makes the diary’s divided format of periodic entries no more artificial than that of a poem divided into lines and stanzas. I conclude with a brief, well-written diary kept in 1968 by Joan Frances Bennett (1949–), a nineteen-year-old black college student at Barnard, where she wrote her diary as part of a class project. I selected this diary because it illustrates changes in America and the American diary. Bennett’s diary was written during a period of unrest and uncertainty about America and its future. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Bennett wrote that what had died was not just a man and his philosophy The American Diary Canon  |  117

but also “the kind of man who could implement that philosophy,” that the conditions that had produced King were gone and there would never again be “a chance for another little black boy in Atlanta to grow up believing in the innate goodness of man.”56 The Calvinism of Winthrop and Wigglesworth had rejected the idea that man was innately good, but it also denied man’s ability to change God’s creation. They believed that the New World might influence the old, but they did not want to create something new. They wanted to restore an old religious and social system, one that should never charge. Bennett’s diary shows that she never really gives up a belief in the possibility of social change. How could she? The idea that an African American woman might attend a prestigious college, no less take a course concerned with the personal experiences of young women instead of the writings of ancient scholars and theologians, was something that Winthrop and Wigglesworth could never have imagined. Notes 1. David Brainerd, Mirabilia Dei inter Indicos (Philadelphia: William Bradford in Second-Street, 1746), http://www.ntslibrary.com/brainerd​ _journal.pdf. Brainerd’s diary was first published in two parts by the Scottish Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. It became better known when included in Jonathan Edwards’s An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd (1749). 2. John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. James Savage, Richard S. Dunn, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Michael Wigglesworth, The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653–1657: The Conscience of a Puritan, ed. Edmund S. Morgan (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1951). 3. William Bradford (1590–1657) may have kept a diary and used it in creating Mourt’s Relation and Of Plimouth Plantation, but it has not survived. 4. John F. Kennedy (1917–63) referred to Winthrop’s sermon in 1961, but the references of Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) in the 1980 presidential campaign were the ones that brought it to prominence. 5. Michael Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom, or A Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement: With a Short Discourse about Eternity (London: J. G. for P. C., 1666). 6. David Brainerd, Memoirs of the Rev. David Brainerd; Missionary to the Indians on the Border of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, ed. Sereno Edwards Dwight (New Haven, CT: S. Converse, 1822; repr., Michigan Scholarly Press, 1970), 51. David Brainerd destroyed portions of his spiritual diary because they revealed too much of what he termed “imprudences and indecent heats.” 7. John Woolman, The Works of John Woolman in Two Parts (Philadelphia: Joseph Crukshank, 1774). Numerous subsequent editions appeared. 8. Sarah Kemble Knight, The Journals of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham, from the Original Manuscripts, Written in 1704 and 1710, ed.

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Theodore Dwight Jr. (New York: Wilder and Campbell, 1825). For scholarship about Sarah Kemble Knight’s journal, see Steven E. Kagle, American Diary Literature, 1630–1799 (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 59–63; Alan Margolies, “The Editing and Publication of ‘The Journal of Madam Knight,’” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 58, no. 1 (First Quarter, 1964): 25–32; Julia Stern “To Relish and to Spew: Disgust as Cultural Critique in The Journal of Madam Knight,” Legacy 14, no. 1 (1997): 1–12. 9. Margaret Van Horn Dwight Bell, A Journey to Ohio in 1810 as Recorded in the Journal of Margaret Van Horn Dwight (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1912). 10. Gouverneur Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, Minister of the United States to France; Member of the Constitutional Convention, ed. Anne Cary Morris (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888). 11. Each of their wives as well as many other members of the family kept diaries, some excellent. John Adams, The Earliest Diary of John Adams, June 1753–April 1754, September 1758–January 1759, ed. L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlander, and Wendell D. Garrett, Adams Papers, Series 1: Diaries (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966); John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, ed. L. H. Butterfield, Leonard C. Faber, and Wendell D. Garrett, 4 vols., Adams Papers, Series 1: Diaries (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961); John Quincy Adams, The Diaries of John Quincy Adams, 1779–1848, ed. David Waldstreicher, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 2017); Charles Francis Adams, Diary, ed. Aïda DiPace Donald, David Herbert Donald, and Marc Friedlaender, 8 vols., Adams Papers, Series 1: Diaries (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964–86). 12. Henry Adams kept brief diaries and used diary material in The Education of Henry Adams (Washington, DC: Adams, 1907). 13. Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, posted May 12, 1780, Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts Historical Society, http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/. 14. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 2:72. 15. Steven E. Kagle, Early Nineteenth-Century American Diary Literature (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 24–25. 16. William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, The Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806, ed. Ruben Gold Thwaites (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company 1904–5), 2:355. 17. John C. Frémont, The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont, ed. Donald Jackson and Mary Lee Spence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 1:185. 18. Henry R. Schoolcraft, Narrative Journal of Travels through the Northwestern Regions of the United States Extending from Detroit through the Great Chain of American Lakes to the Sources of the Mississippi River in the Year 1820, ed. Mentor L. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan University Press, 1953), entry for June 28, 1820. 19. Anne Home Livingston, Nancy Shippen, Her Journal Book: The International Romance of a Young Lady of Fashion of Colonial Philadelphia with Letters to Her and about Her, ed. Ethel Armes (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935). Ethel Armes tried to fill in gaps in the diary. The surviving manuscripts are in the Library of Congress in the “Shippen Family Papers, 1671–1936,”

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which are in the Ethel Armes Collection of Lee Family Papers 1671–1936 [MMC-0927] and the Brown University library. 20. Otto went on to a distinguished career as a diplomat and was later made Compte de Mosloy by Napoleon. 21. In the 1830s, the transcendentalists were centered in Concord, Massachusetts, home to many prominent writers, including important diarists such as Amos Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller. Other writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne were associated with transcendentalists and shared their interest in the diary form. 22. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–82); Henry David Thoreau, Journals, ed. Elizabeth Witherell et al., 8 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981–2009). 23. Lawrence Rosenwald, Emerson and the Art of the Diary (New York: Oxford University Press. 1988), 62. 24. Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3. 25. Thoreau, Journals, 3:141, entry for November 16, 1850. 26. See Christopher Hager, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 27. When published in 1863 as Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, Fanny Kemble’s moving account of slavery gave support to the Union cause at a crucial point in the Civil War. However, when she wrote her account, Kemble hadn’t been in the United States long enough to be considered an American diarist. Fanny Kemble (1809–93) was a British actress who lived in the United States from 1832 to 1847. In 1834, she married Pierce Butler (1806–67), a member of a plantation-owning family. She spent the winter of 1838–39 on the plantations and described in her diary the living and working conditions of the slaves and their inhumane treatment by their owners. Her journals appeared in several editions. 28. Philip Vickers Fithian, Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773–1774: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion, ed. Hunter Dickinson Farish (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968), 39. 29. Charlotte L. Forten, The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten: A Free Negro in the Slave Era, ed. Ray Allen Billington (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 207, emphasis in the original. 30. Lewis Beebe, “Journal of a Physician on the Expedition against Canada, 1776,” ed. Frederic R. Kirkland, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 59, no. 4 (1935): 321–61; Albigence Waldo, “Valley Forge, 1777–1778: Diary of Surgeon Albigence Waldo, of the Connecticut Line,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 21, no. 3 (1897): 299–323; James Thacher, A Military Journal during the American Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783 (Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1823); Josiah Atkins, The Diary of Josiah Atkins, ed. Steven E. Kagle (New York: Arno Press, 1975). 31. Lewis Beebe, Journal of Lewis Beebe, a Physician on the Campaign against Canada, 1776, ed. Frederic R. Kirkland, Pamphlet Series, Narratives and Documents, no. 2 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia, 1935), 341. 32. Ibid., 333–34.

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33. Ibid., 351. 34. Atkins, Diary of Josiah Atkins, 24–25. 35. John L. Ransom, Andersonville Diary (Philadelphia: Douglas Bros., 1881), 100. 36. Much of the original diary was lost. The remainder was finally published in 1984 as The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries, ed. C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 37. Eliza Frances Andrews, The Wartime Diary of a Georgia Girl, 1864– 1865, ed. Spencer Bidwell King Jr. (Macon, GA: Ardivian Press, 1960), 79. 38. A typescript with my introduction and notes is available in printed and digital form from the Quaker Collection in the Haverford College Library: http://library.haverford.edu/file-id-1168. See also Kagle, Early NineteenthCentury American Diary Literature, 9–18, and Steven Kagle, “Samuel Cole Davis and the Diary of Illness,” A/B Auto/Biography Studies (1991): 17–25. 39. Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1964), 25. 40. Ibid., 125. 41. Ibid., 206. 42. Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947– 1954, ed. Douglas Brinkly (New York: Viking, 2004); Thornton Wilder, The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961, ed. Donald Gallup (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever (New York: Knopf, 1991). 43. John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (New York: Viking Press, 1969), 10–11; Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1307. 44. Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1932 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 116. 45. Ibid. 46. May Sarton’s diary volumes are After the Stroke: A Journal (New York: Norton, 1990); Among the Usual Days: A Portrait, Unpublished Poems, Letters, Journals, and Photographs, ed. Susan Sherman (New York: Norton, 1993); At Eighty-Two: A Journal (New York: Norton, 1996); At Fifteen: A Journal, ed. Susan Sherman (Orno, ME: Puckerbush Press, 2002); At Seventy: A Journal (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984); Encore: A Journal of the Eighteenth Year (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); A House by the Sea: A Journal (W. W. Norton, 1973); A Journal of Solitude (London: W. W. Norton, 1973); Recovering: A Journal (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980); and a diary-like memoir, Plant Dreaming Deep (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968). 47. Sarton, Journal of a Solitude, 122. 48. Ibid., 123. 49. Ibid., 216. 50. Glenway Wescott, Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott, 1937–1955 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 47. 51. Glenway Wescott, A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956–1984 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 215.

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52. Anna Jackson, Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915– 1962 (New York: Routledge, 2010), 103. 53. Ibid., 113. 54. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 255–56. 55. Ibid., 517. 56. Joan Frances Bennett, “Back There, Down There,” in Members of the Class Will Keep Daily Journals: The Barnard College Journals of Tobi Gillian Sander and Joan Frances, Spring 1968 (New York: Winter House, 1970), 136.

Bibliography Adams, Charles Francis. Diary. Edited by L. H. Butterfield et al. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961–. Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Washington, DC: Adams, 1907. Adams, John. Diary and Autobiography. Edited by L. H. Butterfield, Leonard C. Faber, and Wendell D. Garrett. 4 vols. Adams Papers, Series 1: Diaries. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961. ———. The Earliest Diary of John Adams, June 1753–April 1754, September 1758–January 1759. Edited by L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlander, and Wendell D. Garrett. Adams Papers, Series 1: Diaries. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966. Adams, John Quincy. The Diaries of John Quincy Adams, 1779–1848. Edited by David Waldstreicher. 2 vols. New York: Library of America, 2017. Andrews, Eliza Frances. The Wartime Diary of a Georgia Girl, 1864–1865. Edited by Spencer Bidwell King Jr. Macon, GA: Ardivian Press, 1960. Atkins, Josiah. The Diary of Josiah Atkins. Edited by Steven Kagle. New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1975. Beebe, Lewis. “Journal of Lewis Beebe, a Physician on the Campaign against Canada, 1776.” Edited by Frederic R. Kirkland. Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 59, no. 4 (1935): 321–61. Also published as Journal of Lewis Beebe, a Physician on the Campaign against Canada, 1776. Edited by Frederic R. Kirkland. Pamphlet Series, Narratives and Documents, no. 2. Historical Society of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia, 1935. Bell, Margaret Van Horn Dwight. A Journey to Ohio in 1810 as Recorded in the Journal of Margaret Van Horn Dwight. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1912. Bennett, Joan Frances. “Back There, Down There.” In Members of the Class Will Keep Daily Journals: The Barnard College Journals of Tobi Gillian Sander and Joan Frances, Spring 1968. New York: Winter House, 1970. Brainerd, David. Mirabilia Dei inter Indicos. Philadelphia: William Bradford in Second-Street, 1746. Via http://www.ntslibrary.com/brainerd_journal​ .pdf. Reprinted as Memoirs of the Rev. David Brainerd: Missionary to the Indians on the Border of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Edited by Sereno Edwards Dwight. New Haven, CT: S. Converse, 1822. Further reprint by Ann Arbor: Michigan Scholarly Press, 1970. Cameron, Sharon. Writing Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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Cheever, John. The Journals of John Cheever. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1991. Chesnut, Mary Boykin. A Diary from Dixie. Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905. ———. Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries. Edited by C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Clark, William, and Meriwether Lewis. The Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806. Edited by Ruben Gold Thwaites. 7 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1904–5. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by William H. Gilman, Alfred R. Ferguson, George P. Clark, and Merrill R. Davis. 16 vols. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–1982. Fithian, Philip Vickers. Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773– 1774: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion. Edited by Hunter Dickinson Farish. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968. Forten, Charlotte L. The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten: A Free Negro in the Slave Era. Edited by Ray Allen Billington. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. Franklin, Benjamin. Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings. Edited by J. A. Leo Lemay. New York: Library of America, 1987. Frémont, John C. The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont. Edited by Donald Jackson and Mary Lee Spence. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970. Hager, Christopher. Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Herbert, Charles. A Relic of the Revolution. Edited by Reverend R. Livesey. Boston: C. H. Pierce, 1844. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968. Jackson, Anna. Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962. New York: Routledge, 2010. James, Alice. The Diary of Alice James. Edited by Leon Edel. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1964. Kagle, Steven E. American Diary Literature, 1620–1799. Boston: Twayne, 1979. ———. Early Nineteenth-Century American Diary Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1986. ———. Late Nineteenth-Century American Diary Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1988. ———. “Samuel Cole Davis and the Diary of Illness.” A/B Auto/Biography Studies 6, no. 1 (1991): 17–25. Kemble, Frances Anne. Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838–1839. New York: Harper and Bros., 1863. Kerouac, Jack. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947–1954. Edited by Douglas Brinkley. New York: Penguin Group, 2004. Knight, Sarah Kemble. The Journals of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham, from the Original Manuscripts, Written in 1704 and 1710. Edited by Theodore Dwight Jr. New York: Wilder and Campbell, 1825.

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Livingston, Anne Home. “Journal.” In Nancy Shippen, Her Journal Book: The International Romance of a Young Lady of Fashion of Colonial Philadelphia with Letters to Her and about Her, edited by Ethel Armes. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935. Margolies, Alan. “The Editing and Publication of ‘The Journal of Madam Knight.’” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 58, no. 1 (First Quarter, 1964): 25–32. Morris, Gouverneur. The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, Minister of the United States to France; Member of the Constitutional Convention. Edited by Anne Cary Morris. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888. Nin, Anaïs. Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1932. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Edited by Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Ransom, John L. Andersonville Diary. Philadelphia: Douglas Bros., 1881. Rosenwald, Lawrence. Emerson and the Art of the Diary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Sarton, May. After the Stroke: A Journal. New York: Norton, 1990. ———. Among the Usual Days: A Portrait, Unpublished Poems, Letters, Journals, and Photograph. Edited by Susan Sherman. New York: Norton, 1993. ———. At Eighty-Two: A Journal. New York: Norton, 1996. ———. At Fifteen: A Journal. Edited by Susan Sherman. Orno, ME: Puckerbush Press, 2002. ———. At Seventy: A Journal. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. ———. Encore: A Journal of the Eighteenth Year. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. ———. Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. ———. A House by the Sea: A Journal. W. W. Norton, 1973. ———. A Journal of Solitude. London: W. W. Norton, 1973. ———. Plant Dreaming Deep. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968. ———. Recovering: A Journal. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980. Schoolcraft, Henry R. Narrative Journal of Travels through the Northwestern Regions of the United States Extending from Detroit through the Great Chain of American Lakes to the Sources of the Mississippi River in the Year 1820. Edited by Mentor L. Williams. East Lansing: Michigan University Press, 1953. Steinbeck, John. Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Stern, Julia. “To Relish and to Spew: Disgust as Cultural Critique in The Journal of Madam Knight.” Legacy 14, no. 1 (1997): 1–12. Thacher, James. A Military Journal during the American Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783. Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1823. Thoreau, Henry David. Journals. Edited by Elizabeth Hall Witherell, William L. Howarth, Robert Sattelmeyer, Mark R. Patterson, William Rossi, Leonard N. Neufeldt, Nancy Craig Simmons, et al. 8 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981–2009.

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Waldo, Albigence. “Valley Forge, 1777–1778. Diary of Surgeon Albigence Waldo, of the Connecticut Line.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 21, no. 3 (1897): 299-323. Wescott, Glenway. Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott, 1937–1955. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991. ———. A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956–1984. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. Wigglesworth, Michael. The Day of Doom, or A Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement: With a Short Discourse about Eternity. London: J. G. for P. C., 1666. First published 1662. ———. Diary of Michael Wigglesworth. Edited by Edmund Morgan. Gloucester, UK: Peter Smith, 1970. Wilder, Thornton. The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961. Edited by Donald C. Gallup. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Winthrop, John. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649. Edited by James Savage, Richard S. Dunn, and Laetitia Yeandle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Woolman, John. The Works of John Woolman in Two Parts. Philadelphia: Joseph Crukshank, 1774.

S T E V E N E . K AG L E is Professor Emeritus of English at Illinois State University. He is author of American Diary Literature: 1620– 1799, Early Nineteenth‑Century American Diary Literature, and Late Nineteenth‑Century American Diary Literature.

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7 Personal Writings and the Quest for National Identity in Brazil Sergio da Silva Barcellos

Introduction Any attempt to explore and understand the emergence of a personal literature in Brazil has to work in conjunction with the understanding of the formation of national or postcolonial identity. According to Homi Bhabha, “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eyes. Such an image of the nation—or narration—might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west.”1 Founding myths and political thought, however, are not the immediate answers to the origins of a Brazilian national identity. Many voices have been missing in the fabric of national identity narratives, such as the cosmogony of natives before the arrival of Portuguese colonizers. In Brazil’s case, the notions of nation and (or as) narration, as Bhabha argued, worked together to shape the current and insufficiently formed national identity and its narratives. In some cultures, most notably in France and England, personal writings flourished and became popular due to specific changes, whether in the ways of thinking about the existence or in the ways of being and living in a world in a radical transformation. The philosophy of the Enlightenment proposed a new way of thinking about the subject. The Industrial Revolution and the expansion of capitalism determined the priorities of modern man. In tandem with these new proposals, autobiographical 126 

writings in general and personal diaries in particular, have been transformed or adapted to attend to the demands of a new way of living and thinking of the self. The written life, therefore, mirrored the paradigmatic changes of the society. The Brazilian colonial period—which in theory lasted until the second decade of the nineteenth century but, in practice, lingered for at least six more decades after the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic—imposes itself as the unequivocal reason for the emphasis on national identity. Reflections on personal identity and its representation in the autobiographical writings became secondary when defining a national and collective identity was at stake. The urgency of this task not only permeated the national imagination but also became the guiding principle in the formation of the country’s cultural canon. The paradigmatic shift in the notion of self, brought by Jean Jacques Rousseau, resulted in the emergence of a new reflexive group of textual practices designated as self-writings or personal writings. The terminology used to operate within these texts already points to the transition from the private to the public dimension. Diaries and journals, which in their genesis were considered communal texts, began to appear with qualifiers: the terms personal, private, secret, and so on. Alan Girard explained that “the increasing flow of the diary, and especially the passage from intimacy to publication, that is, from private to public character, manifest a profound change in the individual’s conception of themselves.”2 Thus, it was not only the notion of self that had changed but also its textual representation. Beatrice Didier recognized a crucial problem in the terminology of these seminal autobiographical writings. According to her, the adherence of the adjective intimate in most of the literary production of the nineteenth century and the critical approaches of it poses a problem because “this notion of intimacy is rather unscientific and above all foreign to modern consciousness. Intimate, the diary, why does he need to escape the indiscretions of the other? But is not the other always present, finally? And some authors do not themselves organize a publication of their journals in their lifetime? . . . Finally, it seems that the term ‘intimate’ has not been preserved except to remove any misunderstanding with journalism.”3 Despite the inconsistent definition and meaning of intimate, diary and journal writing became a sort of space for refuge or retreat, away from public eyes and, in many cases, without the writer having any intention of the writing being published or read by someone other than herself or persons authorized by her. However, it is precisely publication and accessibility to reading that contribute to elevating these writings to a literary realm. Moreover, it is generally the promise of unveiling the intimate space of the subject that has so strongly contaminated the genre and Personal Writings and National Identity in Brazil  |  127

contributed to creating the fiction of a secret space where the subject can present herself unadorned. In some cases, this apparent solipsist nature of diaries and journals contained a more extensive relational characteristic. In spite of its egotistic self-absorption, any personal narrative comprises also the existence of the other through its inevitable and surprising presence in the core of the autobiographical writing practice. The subjectivity expressed in such narratives is not just a result of the influences of its time and space. The relational nature of identity, as proposed by theorists such as Paul John Eakin,4 helps to understand the autobiographical “I” not as an autonomous self but a self that encompasses also influences of the relation with others. Diary writing, therefore, occupies a privileged position as a source for investigating identity constitution through a relational approach because the forces of the subject and the other, of the intimate and of the private, are amalgamated there.

From Informational to Personal Literature Descriptions of the geography of the land as well as the culture and customs of its people proliferated in the first accounts of Brazil, mostly written by Portuguese or other foreign settlers, traders, and travelers on commercial, scientific, or artistic missions. Despite the inexistence of a nation in a broader and essential sense, the literature produced during the colonial time in Brazil was mostly viewed as historical document rather than literary work and contributed to the task of building a national identity.5 Although they are perhaps too premature to be evidence of a regular practice of personal writing, forms of self-narratives appear in the early texts of Brazilian colonial history. The so-called Literature of Information comprises old accounts that represent the foundations of a national literature.6 The genres of these first accounts were varied and included epistolary writings, ship logs, navigation journals, sermons, and general descriptions of the land. Within the particular domain of personal diary or journal writing and practice, the panorama is peculiar due to several political, sociological, and cultural aspects that added complexity to the core of what became a current auto/biographic narrative in Brazil. The Romantic period during the nineteenth century is the most acknowledged time when the meaning of nation started to be processed from the mind’s eyes into an artistic and literary manifestation. Moreover, that is when autobiographical expressions became narratological devices and tropes more than part of a functional, textual genre. The very notion of subject/person introduced at around the same time contributed to the expansion of the uses and practices of writing to a crucial level. The individual, instigated by the Rousseauian notion of singularity of the subject, began to operate in a self-reflexive mode in order to understand and find 128 | The Diary

answers regarding his or her own existence. It would not be wrong to affirm that the impact of the notion of subject/person altered significantly the way personal writing presented itself until today. The illusion of a monolithic self is present in the textual production of the time, but developments in psychology and linguistics at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries affected the ways in which personal writings were produced and read, as well as the ways they have been studied, from then on. It was only during the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first that auto/biographical accounts began to burgeon as a form of personal narrative not necessarily at the service of literary trends. The historical events are still the primary trigger to the ostensive production of personal stories, and many particular moments are even more prone to impel the practice of writing one’s personal history. Many public figures published their biographies and personal journals throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The period when Brazil transformed from colony to monarchy to liberal republic—abolishing slavery in 1888, establishing the republic in 1889, and instating liberalism in the new regime (1930)—accounted for the many autobiographical narratives of public figures. The diaries of war, for instance, rendered several books, such as the diaries of André Rebouças (1838–98), Alfredo Taunay (1843–99), and Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909) about Canudos’s war.7 In 1959, the publication of the travel diaries of Dom Pedro II, the second and last ruler of Brazil under the monarch regime, revealed his impressions during his trips to far away provinces in the north of the country.8 The efforts were clearly to galvanize the official version of these historical events that were deemed to define the national identity. Fate played a pivotal role in the case of the British traveler Maria Graham. Wife of a British navy officer, Captain Thomas Graham, Maria Graham accompanied her husband on an official trip to Chile with stops in Brazil. When crossing Cape Horn toward Chile, Thomas Graham died, and Maria Graham was invited to stay in Rio de Janeiro as a tutor of Pedro I and Empress Leopoldina’s daughter. Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil is much more ambitious than a simple personal account of a traveler. She wanted to be a chronicler of historical events and has the clear intention of publishing her diaries, which she did on her return to England, in 1824.9 In the introduction, Graham explained her goals as an author, referring to herself in the third person: “She trusts that if the whole truth is not to be found in her pages, there will not be nothing but the truth.”10 The journal was translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil in 1956.11 Personal Writings and National Identity in Brazil  |  129

Along with statesmen, writers invested in publishing their literary diaries, following in the steps of many French writers, such as Jules Renard (1864–1910) and Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), and contributed to the contemporary biographical criticism that oriented literary critics and historians.12 The translation into Portuguese of famous diaries—including the already mentioned journals of André Gide, the diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, and Anne Frank’s diary, among others—also marked the first half of the twentieth century. It is not certain that the publication of these diaries had a direct effect in the practice of diary writing among Brazilians. The strict literary circle had always been impermeable to outsiders. Regarding diaries, just the ones that followed their author’s successful literary career were acceptable to be published. The young nation still had a few obstacles to face to write its history. More political and social challenges and turmoil permeated the lives that would become the subject matter for the new wave of auto/biographical narratives in Brazil. Between the epilogue of a free and optimistic period of national history and the beginning of a long period of military dictatorship (1964–85), one improbable diary reached the top of the best-sellers’ list, was published in fourteen languages, and became certainly the first and most famous Brazilian diary to reach an unprecedented audience. Carolina Maria de Jesus’s Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus (1962) startled readers and critics in both positive and negative ways.13 A single mother of three children living in a slum and scavenging in the garbage for sellable materials, such as paper, metal, or wood, de Jesus started recording her life in stained notebooks she found in the trash. The diary, an unexpected narrative written by a woman with a little formal education, is considered the first voice from within the slums to describe the poverty and inequalities of Brazilian society in the mid-1950s. The publishing of auto/biographical narratives, and among them diaries, experienced a boom after the 1980s. With the loosening of the repressive regime, former political exiles were able to return to the country. From their personal experiences, described in memoirs, autobiographies, and diaries, yet a new facet of the autobiographical persona emerged. By regaining their voices to retell the official history of the twenty-five years of repression through their experiences, the narratives of the exiles brought back to the core of the auto/biographical production the subject of the formation or construction of a national identity. Several books published during the 1980s and 1990s illustrate what Benedict Anderson called the process of “coming into being”14 of both nation and social actors. This time, it was not the lives of the elite noble class that would serve as homage and example but those of the people who fought against repression; their vices and virtues are what new generations of 130 | The Diary

readers would judge. Along with these personal histories, the censored history of a country enduring military dictatorship also started being told and judged by younger readers.

The First Letters, Travel Narratives, and Diaries On the arrival of the Portuguese fleet on the coast of Brazil in 1500 and throughout the next three hundred years, an intense communication between the colony and its metropolitan state took place. An educated government official, Pero Vaz de Caminha, wrote the first letter back to Portugal, the one that became in a way the birth certificate of the new nation. In this letter to Manuel I, king of Portugal, Caminha described the scenery, the natives, and the potentialities of the newly discovered land. At the closing of this letter, a very respectful Caminha asked Dom Manuel for a personal favor in return to his loyalty to the kingdom. Other texts had the same function as Caminha’s and are still considered literary as well as historical documents, such as the two treatises by Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, which later became the book História da Província de Santa Cruz, published in Portugal in 1576.15 On the perspective of the religious task, the texts by Jesuits in missions, such as those by Manuel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta, figure in the list of founding documents of the future nation. Conversely, these are single accounts invested with the colonizer’s point of view and bias. The natives and the newly converted Christians are passive actors in these depictions. Curiously, among these original narratives of the land are several journals and diaries kept by foreign travelers during the first centuries of colonization. Perhaps the most well-known one is the account of Hans Staden (ca. 1574–76). This German soldier and explorer traveled to South America first in 1547 and then in 1549. In 1552, he was captured and taken hostage by the Tupinambá tribe, where he stayed until 1555, when he was released and sent back to Europe. Two years later, his story was published and soon became an international best-seller.16 During the next three hundred years, approximately 1,390 books were published in Europe about travels and expeditions to America.17 Quantifying the unpublished narratives is an arduous and perhaps impossible task, but the impressive existence of published accounts indicates how personal narratives describing the New World seduced many and fed the publishing market in Europe until the nineteenth century. The narratives never brought to the public eye might reveal even more about the building of the new continent. Historian Jean Marcel Carvalho França considered these same accounts a valuable resource to understanding how the self-image of the future nation was also built through the eyes of foreign travelers.18 França’s A Construção do Brasil na literatura de Personal Writings and National Identity in Brazil  |  131

viagem dos séculos XVI, XVII e XVIII (The construction of Brazil in the literature of voyages in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries) is a commentated anthology of travelers’ narratives to Brazil from 1591 until 1808. He divided them into four topics that cover not only the information collected in Brazil to be shared in the Old World but also the news from Europe and how it affected life in the colony. In addition to these two themes, he analyzed the image of Brazil built in the narratives of travelers and the influence of this model to the formation of the self-image of the incipient nation. França considered these narratives by European travelers to Brazil to be the only description of the country that gained widespread acceptance in Europe: “What little was recorded in Portuguese about Brazil, both in Portugal and in the colony, faced precarious distribution within the frontiers of the small peninsular kingdom when it came to be published.”19 Among the travelers’ narratives compiled by França that were published between the first decades of sixteenth and the start of the nineteenth century were forty-six journals by English navigators and navy officers (the majority), thirty-seven by French travelers, and the remainder by Italian, Spanish, German, and Dutch voyagers.

Family and Estate Books In her study about diary writing in Spain, Daniele Corrado reached the conclusion that the personality of the Spanish people, often described as outspoken and extroverted, could have been one of the reasons for the low popularity of diary writing in that country. 20 But it was not only the unwritten law of “better said than written” that prevented the diary form from flourishing in Spain. Corrado posited also that the scarcity of personal accounts in Spain might be related to the Counter Reformation movement’s repression of any exercise of individuality. This explanation for the lack of personal diaries seems to apply to Portugal and consequently Brazil. Both countries shared the same Catholic background and witnessed the rigorous advances of the Inquisition. As opposed to Protestant traditions of self-scrutiny, Catholicism was ambiguous regarding collective religious praxis. According to François Lebrun, Catholic faith pointed to an “inherently personal religion, which calls any individual to conversion and salvation.”21 However, with its institutional projection, the Catholic Church urged the community practices and reproached any expression of personal devotion. Thus, the intermediation between individual and God is made through confession and collective practices such as Sunday masses, whereas Protestant faith would privilege a silent and personal self-exam that could include the keeping of a personal journal. 132 | The Diary

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the process of colonization, the textual production had little concern for aesthetics, concentrating instead on practical matters. Among this production is the keeping of communal or family books, in Brazil called livros de assentos or assentamentos and the closest form of a personal, collective diary found in the country. The responsibility of such a task was left to the patriarch of the families and passed on to future male members of the family since the extensive illiteracy among women prevented them from assuming the task of writing the communal or family stories. Another temporary resident in Brazil during the beginning of the 1800s, the Englishman John Luccock, commented on the lack of access to education and information among local women: It would be absurd to affect an equally detailed account of the different orders of females, and of their various occupations. These must, of necessity, be chiefly of a private nature; and it must be remembered that women of the higher and middle classes, especially the younger part of them, are much more secluded than in our own country. The little intercourse with them, which custom allowed, soon displayed their want of education and knowledge. This, indeed, was a part of the avowed system; it was settled that their reading was not to extend beyond the prayerbooks, because it would be useless to a woman, no were they to write lest, as was sagely remarked, they should make a bad use of the art.22

A big contrast with that statement was that at almost the same time American women were writing diaries of their journeys moving to west by covered wagons between 1840 and 1870, according to scholar Lillian Schlissel in her work Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey. The author lists about ninety-six journals and diaries written on the overland trail. 23

Literary Criticism and the Reaction of Diaries Literary criticism in Brazil dealt with the subject of diary writing few times and always regarding diaries of writers, statesmen, and public figures. In an entry of 1943 of his Diário Crítico (Critical journal), literary critic Sergio Milliet expressed what he considered the value of autobiographies, diaries, and biographies: merely an attempt to establish a record for posterity. For Milliet, diarists and autobiographers tend to fantasize and sugarcoat their lives to impress readers. The overvaluation of simple facts would replace the nakedness of confessions; the author would be creating a hero out of his narrative. Moreover, publishing memoirs and diaries would also signal the end of a writer’s career. 24 Milliet’s point of view was the consensus within literary criticism’s circles at that time. Personal Writings and National Identity in Brazil  |  133

The sole exception seems to be the defense of the diary made by anthropologist and sociologist Gilberto Freyre. Thinking the diaries in Brazil and their singular characteristics in comparison with the French and Anglo-Saxon’s tradition of personal writing, Freyre tries to explore the many contributions of the genre to the understanding of society and culture. For him, the diary is not a practice of isolation as the religious tradition feared, but a place of coexistence: “A diary is not only the recording of successive meetings or mismatches of an individual. . . . It involves other persons. Other people. Institutions. Conflicts among individuals or groups, conventions, trends of their time and their social environment. Revolts. Resistances at time and medium. . . . Hence their records are not always an expression of an individual who could show and feel like a sovereign; the sovereign who would be concerning their environment and their time. Their family. Other institutions. To other conventions.”25 Freyre defended the value of diaries very often in his articles and essays. Additionally, he introduced many other diaries, such as the diary of the French engineer Louis Léger Vauthier (1815–1901), on his trip to Recife in the nineteenth century; the diary of Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909) on his assignment during the Canudo’s War, mentioned earlier; and Diário íntimo of the writer Lima Barreto.26 With an international reputation as an anthropologist, Freyre published his diary of adolescence and young adulthood at the height of his career, not fearing the immature and sometimes overconfident opinions about politics, sex, and religion. The number of published Brazilian diaries that reached a high degree of popularity is not impressive. The journals of statesmen, writers, and public figures had weak and restricted reception and certainly not enough effect on the practice of keeping a diary despite the leniency of literary critics. However, readers of diaries who once were seduced by a humane account of life—for instance, as is given in Marie Bashkirtseff’s or Frédéric Amiel’s journals—appreciated the publication in 1942 of Minha Vida de Menina: Cadernos de uma menina provinciana nos fins do Século XIX.27 Alice Dayrell (1880–1970), the real name of Helena Morley, was encouraged by her husband and her son-in-law, the poet Abgar Renaut (1901–95), to organize and publish her diary, written between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. The book was an immediate success among readers and later translated into English and French. Critics, however, doubted the authenticity of the diary because of the quality of the narrative, which to them was too good to have been written by a young girl. For some decades, libraries and bookstores have placed The Diary of “Helena Morley” in the young adult book section, ignoring its value as a serious literary work. In Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, Brett C. Millier revealed the relationship between Bishop, as translator of the diary, and the narrative and her appreciation of its literary value: 134 | The Diary

Elizabeth admired the diary for its accuracy and detail and for the fact that “it really happened; everything did take place, day by day, minute by minute, once and only once, just the way Helena says it did.” In her translation, she took pains to render Helena’s fresh, idiomatic Portuguese accurately as well, and none of that immediacy is lost. This book by a stranger, in a strange genre and a strange language, became an almost perfect expression of Elizabeth’s highest literary values. At the same time, her access to the child-consciousness of Helena helped give her access to her own.28

The popularity of this book never ceased to impress the critics. A movie version of the diary, The Diary of a Provincial Girl, Vida de Menina, was released in 2003, directed by Helena Solberg and the book is easily found in bookstores throughout the country, which proves its continued acceptance.29 The successful diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus also had its authenticity contested by the critics. The published version of her diaries in 1960 and 1961 was mediated by journalist Audálio Dantas through his extensive and sometimes invasive editing of the original text. To justify the tremendous success of the first book, when one hundred thousand copies were sold in the first year, critics accused Dantas of fabricating both the diary and the character of Carolina Maria de Jesus. In 1993, three decades later, critics still insisted on classifying Child of the Dark a “literary mystification.”30 In the meantime, Carolina’s diary received incessant praises from international critics and scholars. Robert M. Levine, from the University of Miami, promoted her work even further in the United States by publishing the unedited version of excerpts from her diaries. According to him, If in Brazil, Carolina’s celebrity derived from who she was rather than what she wrote, abroad she was lauded as an eloquent spokesperson for the ills of Third World poverty. Her diary appeared at the height of the Cold War: in North America and Western Europe it was considered a cry for help, a justification for economic aid to Latin America, a rationale for President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. In the Eastern bloc, where the book became equally popular, it was cited as evidence of the depravity of life under capitalism, a call for social justice. Carolina Maria de Jesus became a phenomenon unprecedented in the annals of publishing, a meteor in the contested skies between East and West.31

The year 2014 was the centennial celebration of Carolina throughout Brazil, with hundreds of events promoted by women’s groups, African Brazilian groups, community groups, universities, and libraries. New editions of her diary were released along with the first annotated guide to her complete collection of manuscripts dispersed among five different archival institutions in Brazil.32 In short, it was a significant accomplishment Personal Writings and National Identity in Brazil  |  135

for a woman and her diary in a country where illiteracy among women and poor people was always high and a sad reality for the practice of diary writing.

Diaries Studies and the Return of Personal Narrative The predisposition of the literary criticism circle against the diary and the poststructural and multicultural approaches to literature in Brazil has delayed the arrival of diary studies published in Europe and the United States since the 1960s. The studies of scholars such as Alain Girard, Béatrice Didier, Robert Fothergill, Georges Gusdorf, and Michele Leleu still do not have translations into Portuguese.33 Only in 2008 was Philippe Lejeune’s The Autobiographical Pact translated and published by a Brazilian university press.34 Academic interest in diaries appeared in a twisted way with the emergence of online diaries and weblogs. The misconception that blogs are equal to personal diaries allowed scholars to make a detour toward diary studies to understand the new phenomenon of personal online writing. Few exceptions, however, are found in the field of women’s studies, which produced important research investigating the practice of reading and writing among women from different social groups and times and some with a focus on schoolteachers and their class diaries. In Refúgios do eu: Educação, história, escrita autobiográfica (Refuge of the self: Education, history, autobiographic writing), published by Editora Mulheres, there is a valuable compilation of essays about women’s autobiographical writings.35 Five of them deal directly with diary writing at different times. One essay compares women’s diaries from the nineteenth century to those kept toward the end of the twentieth, with emphasis on the diaries that proliferated on the internet. There are also several essays investigating the practice of diary keeping by schoolteachers and teenagers. The majority of the essays, however, focus on the practice of some autobiographical writing and the role of women in society. Moreover, they analyze how women can free themselves from the rigid social norms and taboos by taking refuge in the autobiographical writings. The researcher Maria José Motta Viana, in a groundbreaking work entitled Do Sótão à Vitrine: Memórias de Mulheres (From the attic to the window: Memories of women) was the first to use the metaphor “refuge of the self” applied to women’s autobiographical writing.36 The book dedicates one chapter to investigating four diaries of obvious importance to the history of diary writing practice in Brazil: the diaries of Helena Morley, Cecília Assis Brasil, Carolina Maria de Jesus, and Maura Lopes Cançado. All of them have been published and somehow explored by academic scholars of women’s writings. In the last few years, more dissertations and theses are delving into the subject of personal writing in 136 | The Diary

different ways and unveiling unpublished archive material that will help understand the trajectory of the genre in the country from the perspective of a writing practice. Regarding the publishing market, diaries are still of some interest. Recently, a three-volume edition of Diários da Presidência (Diaries of presidency) by former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso has received attention by the general readership. The unveiling of behind-the-scenes facts and characters of political life has shed new light on official government narratives, which caused a noticeable effect on current readership amid a current troubled national political time. As mentioned before, writing diaries and memoirs is a tradition for Brazilian statesmen, and several such documents were handled carefully in the past. The diaries of Getúlio Vargas, twice president and dictator (1930–45 and 1951–54), are a clear attempt to maintain the original functions of diary writing and the registering of information for a future memoir. Vargas wrote his everyday life of a politician and a man, leaving evident the commitment to self-examination and the consideration of his responsibility as a public figure. A prolific writer of public speeches, Vargas brought to his diary the fluidity of his spoken words and the apparent simplicity of his thoughts. The thirteen volumes of the original diary are available at the website of Foundation Getúlio Vargas and were published in 1995. In Brazil, diaries or their variations in the contemporary digital sphere can also promote their authors as agents of social changes. If in the case of Carolina Maria de Jesus’s diaries this happened involuntarily, the same cannot be said about “Diário de Classe,” an internet “fan page” by a thirteen-year-old student at a public school in Florianópolis. On July 11, 2012, Isadora Faber started writing a fan page whose primary goal was to demand improvement and solutions by exposing the precarious situation of her school with texts and pictures taken with her cell phone. Local and national media quickly became aware of her fan page and Isadora herself. Local authorities worked to improve the conditions of the school, and Isadora became an inspiration to more than one thousand other students who also demanded a proper education and decent conditions for their public schools. Diário de Classe became a nonprofit organization,37 and a book by the same name was published in 2014, detailing Isadora’s story as a web activist.

Conclusion The early stages of the diary keeping tradition in Brazil were attached to its colonial past with a reemergence during contemporary political and social conditions, which reinforced the role of personal or auto/biographical writings in the quest for a national identity. Unlike the French Personal Writings and National Identity in Brazil  |  137

tradition of journals as a personal form of self-improvement—or, as Pierre Pachet called it “a barometer of the soul”38 —and unlike the English tradition of diaries as tool for time management, in Brazil the diary seems to have always been an underrated form of literature that needed a historical or social reason to receive attention. Luckily this imbrication between a personal account and historical or sociological values operated as an assessment that helped to preserve and explore the potentials of the genre beyond its value as document. From colonial letters to foreigners’ travel diaries and family and estate books to weblogs and fan pages, the development of diary writing practice and scholarship in Brazil has experienced rich and stimulating turns. Hopefully in the next few years, we will find a rich and extensive bibliography dealing with diaries in Brazil, despite the still high level of illiteracy and the advances of digital writing habits of modern life. Notes 1. Homi K. Bhabha, introduction to Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 1. 2. Alain Girard, Le journal intime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), vii. 3. Béatrice Didier, Le journal intime, Littératures modernes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976), 8 (my translation). 4. Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 5. Brazil started being colonized by Portugal in the sixteenth century and remained a colony until 1808, when the Portuguese crown transferred the kingdom to Brazil in an attempt to escape from Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal. In 1822, the country declared its independence and was governed by a monarchic regime until 1889, when it became a republic. For a comprehensive survey of Brazil’s history see Boris Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, trans. Arthur Brakel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6. Alfredo Bosi, História concisa da Literatura Brasileira (São Paulo: Cultrix, 1994), 13. 7. André Rebouças, Diário: A Guerra do Paraguai, 1866 (São Paulo: Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, 1973); Alfredo d’Escragnolle Taunay, Visconde de Taunay, Diário do Exército: Campanha do Paraguai, 1869–1870 (São Paulo: Biblioteca do Exército, 2002); Euclides da Cunha, Diário de uma expedição (1939) (Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio, 1939). 8. Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, 1825–59, Diário da viagem ao norte do Brasil (Salvador, Brazil: Livraria Progresso, Universidade da Bahia, 1959), and a more recent edition, Viagens pelo Brasil: Bahia, Sergipe e Alagoas, 1859 (Rio de Janeiro: Bom Texto; Letras e Expressões, 2003). 9. Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There during the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Ormes, Brown, and Green, 1824).

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10. Ibid., v. 11. Maria Graham, Diário de uma viagem ao Brasil: E de uma estada nesse país durante parte dos anos de 1821, 1822, 1823, trans. Americo Jacobina Lacombe (São Paulo: Ed. Nacional, 1956). 12. Jules Renard, Journal, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1935); Charles Baudelaire, Journaux intimes: Fusèes. Mon coeur mis à nu (Paris: J. Corti, 1949). 13. Carolina Maria de Jesus, Quarto de despejo: Diário de uma favelada (São Paulo: Francisco Alves, 1960); published in English as Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, trans. David St. Clair (New York: Dutton, 1962). 14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2009), 12. 15. Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, Discripção da província de Sancta Cruz a que vulgarmente chamão Brasil (n.p.: n.p., ca. 1575). For a modern edition, see Pero de Magalhães Gândavo,  A primeira história do Brasil: História da província Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Zahar, 2004). 16. Hans Staden, Warhafftig Historia Und Beschreibung Einer Landtschafft Der Wilden Nacketen Grimmigen Menschenfresser Leuthen: in Der Newen Welt America Gelegen Vor Vnd Nach Christi Geburt Im LAnd Zu Hessen Vnlckast Biss Auff Dise Ij, Nechst Vergangenejar (Frankfurt: Weygandt Han, 1557). A modern edition is Hans Staden, A verdadeira história dos selvagens, nus e ferozes devoradores de homens, trans. Pedro Süssekind (Rio de Janeiro: Dantes, 1999). 17. Gilles Boucher de La Richarderie, Bibliothèque universelle des voyages, ou notice complète et raisonnée de tous les voyages anciens et modernes dans les différentes parties du monde, publiés tant en langue français quen langues étrangères . . . (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1808). 18. Jean Marcel Carvalho França, A Construção do Brasil na literatura de viagem dos séculos XVI, XVII e XVIII (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012). 19. Ibid., 284 (my translation). 20. Daniele Corrado, Le journal intime en Espagne (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 2000). 21. François Lebrun, “As Reformas: Devoções comunitárias e piedade pessoal,” in História da vida privada: Da Renascença ao Século das Luzes, ed. Philippe Ariés and Roger Chartier (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2004), 3:71. The article appeared originally in François Lebrun, “The Two Reformations: Communal Devotion and Personal Piety,” in A History of Private Life, Volume III: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 69–109. 22. John Luccock, Notes on Rio de Janeiro, and the Southern Parts of Brazil: Taken during a Residence of Ten Years in That Country, from 1808 to 1818 (London: Samuel Leigh, 1820), 111. 23. Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken Books, 1982). 24. Sergio Milliet, Diário crítico de Sergio Milliet, ed. Antônio Cândido, 2nd ed., vol 1 (São Paulo: Editora Martins, 1981), 158. 25. Gilberto Freyre, Tempo morto e outros tempos: Trechos de um diário de adolescência e primeira mocidade, 1915–1930 (São Paulo: Global, 2006), 20.

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26. Louis Léger Vauthier, Diário íntimo do engenheiro Vauthier, 1840–1846, preface by Gilberto Freyre (Rio de Janeiro: Serv. Graf. Do Ministério da Educação e Saúde, 1940); Cunha, Canudos; Lima Barreto, Diário íntimo, ed. Gilberto Freyre (São Paulo: Ed. Mérito Graf., 1953). 27. Marie Bashkirtseff, I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, trans. Phyllis Howard Kernberger and Katherine Kernberger, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997); Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal intime, 12 vols. (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1976–94); see Helena Morley, The Diary of “Helena Morley,” trans. Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957). 28. Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 258. 29. The film won the Best Feature Film Award (International Jury Award) in the São Paulo International Film Festival in 2004 and the Best Film Award (Audience Award) in the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival in 2004. 30. Wilson Martins, “Mistificação literária,” Jornal do Brasil, sec. Ideias/ Livros, October 23, 1993, 4. 31. Robert M. Levine, introduction to Bitita’s Diary: The Childhood Memoirs of Carolina Maria de Jesus, by Carolina Maria de Jesus (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), xx. 32. While working on “Projeto vida por escrito: Organização, classificação e preparação do inventário de arquivo de Carolina Maria de Jesus” (Life in writing, organization, classification and preparation of a guide to Carolina Maria de Jesus’s collection), I was able to access all the documents of Carolina’s collection distributed in five different institutions and in different formats (autograph notebooks and microfilmed documents). The purpose was to index and describe the documents and publish a printed guide to her collection along with a website with all the collected information plus many other examples of Carolina’s works, such as the songs she wrote and sang or short movies made with her and about her. Both the printed guide and the website have been completed: Sergio Barcellos, “Vida por escrito: Guia do acervo de Carolina Maria de Jesus” (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Bertolucci Editora, 2015), https:// www.vidaporescrito.com. 33. Girard, Le journal intime; Didier, Le journal intime; Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); Georges Gusdorf, Lignes de vie, vol. 1, Les écritures du moi, and vol. 2, Auto-bio-graphie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990); Michèle Leleu, Les journaux intimes (Paris: Presses Universitaires des Frances, 1952). 34. Philippe Lejeune, O pacto autobiográfico: De Rousseau à internet, trans. Jovita Maria Gerheim Noronha and Maria Inês Coimbra Guedes (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2008). 35. Ana Chrystina Venancio Mignot, Maria Helena Camara Bastos, and Maria Teresa Santos Cunha, and Ana Cunha, Refúgios do eu: Educação, história, escrita autográfica (Florianópolis, Brazil: Mulheres, 2000). 36. Maria José Motta Viana, Do Sótão à Vitrine: Memórias de mulheres (Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 1995). 37. Isadora Faber, “ONG Isadora Faber,” Facebook, accessed August 24, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/ongisadorafaber. 38. Pierre Pachet, Les baromètres de l´ âme: Naissance du journal intime (Paris: Pluriel, Hachette Littératures, 2001).

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Bibliography Amiel, Henri-Frédéric. Journal intime. 12 vols. Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Âge d’homme, 1976–94. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2009. Bashkirtseff, Marie. I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff. Translated by Phyllis Howard Kernberger and Katherine Kernberger. Vol. 1. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997. Barcellos, Sergio da Silva. Vida por escrito: Guia do acervo de Carolina Maria de Jesus. Rio de Janeiro: Bertolucci Editora, 2015. Barreto, Lima. Diário íntimo. Edited by Gilberto Freyre. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1956. Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1990. Baudelaire, Charles. Journaux intimes: Fusèes. Mon coeur mis à nu. Paris: J. Corti, 1949. Bosi, Alfredo. História concisa da Literatura Brasileira. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1994. Corrado, Danielle. Le journal intime en Espagne. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2000. Cunha, Euclides da. Canudos: Diário de uma expedição (1939). Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio, 1939. Didier, Béatrice. Le journal intime. Littératures modernes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. França, Jean Marcel Carvalho. A Construção do Brasil na literatura de viagem dos séculos XVI, XVII e XVIII. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012. Fausto, Boris. A Concise History of Brazil. Translated by Arthur Brakel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Fothergill, Robert. Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Freyre, Gilberto. Tempo morto e outros tempos: Trechos de um diário de adolescência e primeira mocidade, 1915–1930. São Paulo: Global, 2006. Gandavo, Pero de Magalhães. A primeira história do Brasil: História da província Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2004. First published as Discripção da província de Sancta Cruz a que vulgarmente chamão Brasil. n.p.: n.p., ca. 1575. Girard, Alain. Le journal intime. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. Graham, Maria. Diário de uma viagem ao Brasil: E de uma estada nesse país durante parte dos anos de 1821, 1822, 1823. Translated by Americo Jacobina Lacombe. São Paulo: Ed. Nacional, 1956. Published in English as Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There during the Years 1821, 1822, 1823. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Ormes, Brown, and Green, 1824. Gusdorf, Georges. Lignes de vie, vol. 1, Les écritures du moi, and vol. 2, Auto-bio-graphie. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990. Jesus, Carolina Maria de. Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Translated by David St. Clair. New York: Dutton, 1962. Also

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published as Quarto de despejo: Diário de uma favelada.São Paulo: Francisco Alves, 1960. Lebrun, François. “As Reformas: Devoções comunitárias e piedade pessoal.” In História da vida privada: Da Renascença ao Século das Luzes, vol. 3, edited by Philippe Aires and Roger Chartier, 71–111. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2004. Lejeune, Philippe. O pacto autobiográfico: De Rousseau à Internet. Translated by Jovita Maria Gerheim Noronha and Maria Inês Coimbra Guedes Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2008. Leleu, Michèle. Les journaux intimes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952. Levine, Robert M. Introduction to Bitita’s Diary: The Childhood Memoirs of Carolina Maria de Jesus, by Carolina Maria de Jesus, xv–xxviii. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Luccock, John. Notes on Rio de Janeiro, and the Southern Parts of Brazil: Taken during a Residence of Ten Years in That Country from 1808 to 1818. London: Samuel Leigh, 1820. Martins, Wilson. “Mistificação literária.” Jornal do Brasil, sec. Ideias/Livros, October 23, 1993. Mignot, Ana Chrystina Venancio, Maria Helena Camara Bastos, Maria Teresa Santos Cunha, and Ana Cunha. Refúgios do eu: Educação, história, escrita autobiográfica. Florianópolis, Brazil: Mulheres, 2000. Millier, Brett Candlish. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Milliet, Sérgio. Diário crítico de Sergio Milliet. Edited by Antônio Cândido. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. São Paulo: Martins, 1981. Morley, Helena. Minha vida de menina. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998. Published in English as The Diary of “Helena Morley.” Translated by Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957. Pachet, Pierre. Les baromètres de l´ âme: Naissance du journal intime. Paris: Pluriel, Hachette Littératures, 2001. Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, 1825–59. Diário da viagem ao norte do Brasil. Salvador, Brazil: Livraria Progresso, Universidade da Bahia, 1959. ———. Viagens pelo Brasil: Bahia, Sergipe e Alagoas, 1859. Rio de Janeiro: Bom Texto: Letras e Expressões, 2003. Rebouças, André. Diário: A Guerra do Paraguai, 1866. São Paulo: Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, 1973. Renard, Jules. Journal. 4 vols. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1984. Richarderie, Gilles Boucher de la. Bibliothèque universelle des voyages, ou notice complète et raisonnée de tous les voyages anciens et modernes dans les différentes parties du monde, publiés tant en langue français quen langues étrangères . . . Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1808. Schlissel, Lillian. Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey. New York: Schocken Books, 2004. Staden, Hans. A verdadeira história dos selvagens, nus e ferozes devoradores de homens. Translated by Pedro Süssekind. Rio de Janeiro: Dantes, 1999. First published as Warhafftig Historia Und Beschreibung Einer Landtschafft Der Wilden Nacketen Grimmigen Menschenfresser Leuthen: in Der Newen Welt America Gelegen Vor Vnd Nach Christi Geburt

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Im LAnd Zu Hessen Vnlckast Biss Auff Dise Ij, Nechst Vergangenejar. Frankfurt: Weygandt Han, 1557. Taunay, Alfredo d’Escragnolle, Visconde de. Diário do Exército: Campanha do Paraguai, 1869–1870. São Paulo: Biblioteca do Exército, 2002. Vauthier, Louis Léger. Diário íntimo do engenheiro Vauthier, 1840–1846. Preface by Gilberto Freyre. Rio de Janeiro: Serv. Graf. Do Ministério da Educação e Saúde, 1940. Viana, Maria José Motta. Do sótão à vitrine: Memórias de mulheres. Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 1995.

S E RG IO DA S I LVA BA RC E L LO S is an independent scholar and writer, founding member of the International Auto/Biography Association Chapter of the Americas, and member of the editorial board of Lifewriting Annual, published by Open Library of Humanities.

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part iii

The Transformation of the Manuscript

8 The Complicated Publication History of the Diaries of Anne Frank Suzanne L. Bunkers

in 1947, a n ne fr a nk : t h e Diary of a Young Girl was published posthumously.1 Anne Frank; her sister, Margot; and their mother, Edith Hollander Frank, had perished in concentration camps; only Anne’s father, Otto Frank, survived. In July 1945, after Otto Frank learned that neither of his daughters had survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, his secretary, Miep Gies, gave him Anne’s manuscript diaries, which she had gathered up and saved in the hope that Anne would return. Given that these well-known diaries exist in several forms and that a number of editions (and scores of translations) of the diaries have been published since the first edition of fifteen hundred copies was printed in 1947, an analysis of literary, cultural, and legal processes of translation and mediation is timely. The complicated publication history of the diaries of Anne Frank also foregrounds the roles played by editors of manuscript diaries—roles that readers need to remember when turning the pages of the published book. When exploring the complicated publication history of Anne Frank’s diaries, I focus on issues of inclusion and exclusion: what is not said in a diary entry can be every bit as important as what is said. I acknowledge that shaping and selection, writing and rewriting, are integral to the diarist’s task. In the case of Anne Frank’s diaries, many factors influenced her handwritten entries, most of which she wrote while in hiding with her family in Amsterdam from July 6, 1942, to August 4, 1944; her work revising them into a form suitable for publication; and the roles of editors

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and other decision makers about what versions of Anne’s diaries would or would not be published. Many readers do not know that successive editions of Anne Frank’s diaries reflect a complicated publication history. How did the manuscript diaries that formed the basis for the first published edition have their genesis? How and by whom were the diaries revised and edited? In this portion of my chapter, I will offer information on these matters. Anne Frank kept several volumes of handwritten diaries from June 12, 1942, until August 1, 1944; during almost all of this period, her family was in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam. Although Anne stated that she kept diaries for herself, she also decided that, when the war was over, she would publish a book of stories based on people and events chronicled in her diaries. At that point, as Mirjam Pressler explained, “[Anne] began rewriting and editing her diary, improving on the text, omitting passages she didn’t think were interesting enough and adding others from memory. At the same time, she kept up her original diary.” Pressler referred to Anne Frank’s first unedited diary as version A to distinguish it from her second edited diary, version B.2 In total, the diaries of Anne Frank are comprised of three bound volumes (A) and 330 loose leaf pages (B). Volume 1 is a red-beige-and-tan plaid diary containing handwritten entries covering the period from June 12, 1942, to November 13, 1942. It measures approximately five and a half by six and a half inches. Any volumes that might have been kept from November 13, 1942, to December 22, 1943, are no longer extant. Volume 2 is a black notebook containing handwritten entries that cover the period from December 22, 1943, to April 17, 1944, as well as Anne’s story, “Cady’s Life.” Anne made some additions to this diary in 1943–44 when she used up pages previously left blank. This volume measures approximately six and a half by eight inches. Most entries are in cursive, written in a dark blue ink. No margins are kept, and little space exists between entries, choices indicative of the diarist’s need to conserve pages. Most entries are lengthier than those Anne made in the first volume of her diaries. Volume 3 has a greenish-black speckled cover and measures approximately five by eight inches. Its entries cover the period from April 18, 1944, to August 1, 1944. On the inside back cover is written, “Soit gentil et tiens courage!” The volume has faintly lined pages and is unpaginated; it is about two-thirds filled with Anne’s diary entries as paginated later (not by Anne, perhaps by her father), and the entries cover pages 1–128 of this volume. The loose leaf pages (version B), handwritten, contain Anne’s revisions of text A’s entries made from June 20, 1942, to March 29, 1944, 148 | The Diary

revisions made when she decided to try to publish the entries after the war. Although no first version of Anne Frank’s diaries exists for most of 1943, entries rewritten by the diarist, covering that period, exist among the loose leaf pages, indicating that at least one missing volume did initially exist. A number of critics (e.g., Gerrold van der Stroom, Mirjam Pressler, Philippe Lejeune, Laureen Nussbaum) have traced the steps that Anne took in her editing of the diary for publication and the process that Otto Frank followed as he worked to get his daughter’s manuscript diaries into print.3 Initially, Otto Frank translated diary passages from Dutch into German and created a typescript to send to his mother in Switzerland. When he set out to publish the first edition of his daughter’s diaries, he selected entries from both handwritten versions A and B, fashioning them into a third version (C) which was published in Dutch under the title Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 juni 1942–1 augustus 1944 (The Annex: Diary Notes from 14 June 1942–1 August 1944) by Contact Publishing in Amsterdam. For many years, the 1947 Dutch edition served as the basis for a number of translations. In 1950, German and French translations followed; in 1952, the first English edition was published in the United Kingdom.4 That same year, the first American edition was published under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.5 After Otto Frank’s death in August 1980, Anne’s manuscripts were donated to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) in Amsterdam; the copyright to the words in the diaries is held by the Anne Frank Fonds (AFF) in Basel, Switzerland. Indispensable to an understanding of all versions (A, B, and C) of Anne Frank’s diaries is The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, published in Dutch in 1986.6 This variorum edition, edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, continues to be widely used by scholars who wish to do comparative analyses; the edition contains not only the original extant text (A), the edited extant text (B), and the published text (C) of Anne’s diaries but also biographical and historical essays as well as an analysis of the process by which the diaries’ authenticity was verified. Based on this edition, Philippe Lejeune conducted, in his seminal article, a textual genesis study, reviewing the history of the book and following the transformations in the editions of the diary.7 The 1995 English translation of the 1991 German edition, Anne Frank Tagebuch, which lists Otto Frank’s name as first editor and which was prepared for publication by coeditor Mirjam Pressler, restores material originally omitted by Otto Frank. According to Pressler, the definitive edition contains “approximately 30 percent more material [than the first edition published by Otto Frank] and is intended to give the reader more The Complicated History of the Diaries of Anne Frank  |  149

insight into the world of Anne Frank.”8 Pressler used the real names of the individuals mentioned in the diaries instead of the pseudonyms substituted in the first edition. This edition is based on the B version of Anne’s diary, which she wrote when she was around fifteen years old.9 In 1998, five unpublished loose pages from the diary came to light. Before his death, Otto Frank had given them for safekeeping to a colleague and friend, Cornelius Suijk, at that time the managing director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.10 David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom’s The Revised Critical Edition of the Diary of Anne Frank includes the “missing” pages. Most recently, the Anne Frank Fonds published Anne Frank: Complete Edition, available in Dutch and in German, which includes stories, essays, letters, photographs, and “both versions of the diary written by Anne Frank herself, along with the internationally accepted standard reader’s edition compiled by Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler from the two original versions.”11 This edition also includes a version D of Anne Frank’s diaries, edited by Mirjam Pressler that is based on Het Achterhuis, version C, edited by Otto Frank.12 In addition, the book contributes contextual information on Anne Frank, her family, their lives in Amsterdam, and the history of her diary. Now a new project is in progress: The Diaries of Anne Frank: Research—Translations—The Critical Edition. This project is sponsored by Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the Georg August Universität Göttingen and the Fritz Bauer Institute, Frankfurt. The project’s objectives are the publication of a critical edition that features new translations into English and German that “convey Anne’s speech in her own literary quality instead of providing a literary translation.” Accompanying the critical edition will be a “research monograph” that will “focus on three themes: contextualisation, reception, and representation of Anne Frank’s diaries.”13 It is no secret that Anne Frank reread, revised, expanded, and even deleted entries that she had made in her original handwritten diaries. Many editors have, over the years, played roles in determining which versions of Anne Frank’s diaries readers would see in print. One cannot overestimate the importance of a major development in the history of the manuscript—the publication of the facsimiles of Anne Frank’s diaries, to which I turn next, offering insights based on the work of editors as well as on my own study. In January 2003, the Anne Frank House and the Anne Frank-Fonds published three-dimensional facsimiles of the multivolume diaries of Anne Frank. Two sets of these facsimiles were produced. The project was funded in part by the Mondriaan Foundation in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel. The booklet A Unique Set: Anne Frank’s Diaries in Facsimile (2002), published by the Anne Frank House, explains the process by which the replicas were produced.14 150 | The Diary

For a number of years, I have been analyzing the facsimiles alongside published editions of the diaries to assess how various editions—informed by various editors’ and translators’ perspectives—have served to mediate among manuscript and published versions of Anne Frank’s diaries. Because the facsimiles are noncirculating, I have undertaken my study at the Anne Frank Stichting and NIOD in Amsterdam. I would like to thank Yt Stoker, Karolien Stocking Korzen, René Pottkamp, and David Barnouw for their invaluable help. When I interviewed Yt Stoker, she explained that a panel of experts advised the team about choices to be made because a “romanticized” version of the diaries was not the goal.15 The team included an expert from a printing business specializing in stamps, graphic artists specializing in precise replication, and other professionals. Discussions were held concerning “primary” and “secondary” markings—primary ones done by Anne Frank, secondary ones done later by editors, along with stains, tears, and so on. Pau Groenendijk, the principal contractor on the project, explained that the facsimiles project represented a kind of “book archaeology” that began in 1997–98 and continued in secret for five years, until January 30, 2003, when the project was completed.16 The idea was conceived with the objective of protecting the original diaries and not with an eye toward commercialization. For Groenendijk, imagination and a high degree of precision were central parts of the project; she needed to imagine Anne Frank writing diary entries. She also needed to do extensive research to re-create the paper that would have been used from 1942 to 1944, when Anne Frank was writing diary entries, revising and editing, writing stories, and so on. The three-dimensional facsimiles of Anne Frank’s manuscript diaries include the famous red, beige, and tan plaid diary, two hardcover exercise books, a cashbook filled with quotations, the Mooie Zinnenboek (Book of beautiful sentences), and the Verhaaltjesboek (Storybook), which contains Anne’s short stories. In this essay, I discuss only selected aspects of the facsimile diaries rather than provide a comprehensive analysis. Excerpts from Anne Frank’s entries in her diaries are taken from the Revised Critical Edition. The diarist’s first entry is dated June 12, 1942; it begins with these words: I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me. Anne Frank, 12 June 1942

In her next entry dated June 14, 1942, Anne addresses her diary, explaining how she saw it among her birthday gifts. But in version A, the first The Complicated History of the Diaries of Anne Frank  |  151

entry is followed by a brief comment that was entered by Anne three months later, dated September 28, 1942: “I am, oh, so glad that I took you along.”17 The fact that these two entries are in proximity alerts readers to the fact that, three months after starting her diary, Anne Frank reread what she had written and chose to insert a comment on her first diary entry. The June 12 entry in version A is about the diarist’s thirteenth birthday and the gifts she received, including her first diary, which was not a surprise gift; in fact, Anne had accompanied her father when he purchased the diary for her. Version B, Anne’s revised manuscript, contains no entries for June 12 or June 14, 1942. When version C of Anne Frank’s diaries was published, the first volume begins with an abbreviated entry for June 14, 1942; version C omits Anne’s June 12, 1942 entry: “On Friday, June 12th, I woke up at six o’clock and no wonder; it was my birthday. But of course, I was not allowed to get up at that hour, so I had to control my curiosity until a quarter to seven. Then I could bear it no longer, and went to the dining room, where I received a warm welcome from Moortje (the cat).”18 In 1986, when The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition was published, readers learned for the first time that Anne Frank had begun writing her diary two days earlier than The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) had indicated. Anne Frank chose to omit portions of version A when she began revising entries for version B, as her diary entries from June 15 to 19, 1942 indicate. One of my objectives is to understand better how the diarist used and subverted traditional diary format as she adapted to the circumstances in which she wrote her diary entries. For example, the first plaid volume of the diary contains not only diary entries but also photographs, calling cards, a birth announcement, sketches, and (on the diary’s inside back cover) a photo of the diarist herself, along with a code (A = 3, B = 5, C = 4, D =1) that she might use in her diary. As she reached the last available pages of this first bound volume, the diarist expanded it by pasting or taping in lined sheets cut to size as well as unlined small white pages. The inclusion of extra pages reflects a resolve to continue her diary; given that the Frank family was in hiding, Anne must have been worried that she might not have access to another blank notebook for some time. She would need to make this first volume last as long as she could. Some added pages contain entries, while others do not. What is important is that the added pages provide evidence of forethought—the diarist planned to continue her writing—and she recognized in advance that she might not be able to get another diary in which to continue her entries. So she did something about it. The diarist also modified this first volume of her diaries by tearing or cutting several pages out of it and by pasting brown wrapping paper over 152 | The Diary

the pages between diary entries for September 28, 1942, and September 30, 1942.19 Only a few tiny ink marks provide evidence that words had been written on these pages before they were expunged from the diary. This self-editing (some would say self-censoring) is strikingly apparent when one examines the facsimiles of these pages in Anne Frank’s diary. Like countless other diarists, Anne Frank was determined to exert control over what would remain in her texts. Anne also glued artifacts into her diary; for example, she added numerous photographs, including several school photographs of herself, a snapshot (dated June 1939) of Anne and her grandmother at the seashore, and another (dated 1940) of Anne and her sister, Margot, at the seashore. On both sides of the page with the seashore photos is one small photo of Anne’s face (dated 1942) and photo corners for another photo that was removed. An unusual artifact that Anne Frank glued into her diary is a letter from her father enclosed in an envelope addressed to “Mej Anne Frank” at “Merwedeplein 37 Amsterdam.” A small snapshot of Otto Frank (wearing a hat) is pasted onto the front of the envelope. Inside is a letter dated May 12, 1939, from Otto to Anne.20 The letter’s salutation is “My dear little Anne” and the signature is “Your Pim.” In his letter, Otto reminds her, “You know we often have secrets from each other” and offers Anne encouragement. Although Otto’s letter to his daughter occupies a prominent place in version A of her first diary, when Anne Frank revised version A into version B, she omitted any mention of this letter and its contents. The letter is also omitted from version C, edited by Otto Frank and published in 1947. Anne’s decision not to include her father’s letter in version B might reflect her respect for confidentiality; it might also reflect her desire to no longer be considered “dear little Anne.” Numerous diary entries—some printed, others in cursive—are addressed to specific individuals, such as “Dear Jacqueline, “Dear Conny,” and “Dear Kitty.” One entry is addressed to “Dearest Pim,” another to “Dear Pop.” Anne’s September 25, 1942, entry is written as a letter to Jacqueline with the notation, “This is the promised fare-well letter.”21 Anne had not been able to say goodbye to friends before the family went into hiding, and she penned an unsent letter in version A of her first diary. Other letters to friends follow, and Anne’s use of the “Dear Kitty” or “Dearest Kitty” pattern begins with her September 26, 1942, entry. Like many diarists, Anne Frank used the device of writing individual entries as letters to specific individuals; in her research, Laureen Nussbaum calls such entries “diary-letters” that blend diary- and letter-writing techniques.22 Significantly, comments made by the diarist indicate that Anne Frank began to confide in her diary, a little at a time, and to acknowledge that The Complicated History of the Diaries of Anne Frank  |  153

she was selective in what she chose to include in her diary entries. At one point she wrote, “So something happens every day, but I am too lazy and too tired to write everything down.”23 At another point, Anne wrote that her older sister, Margot, had asked if she might read Anne’s diary some time; Anne said, yes, “at least bits of it” and then asked if she could read Margot’s diary.24 Several entries in version A made during the autumn and early winter of 1942 deal with Anne’s interactions with her parents and her sister as well as with Peter van Pels’s sixteenth birthday. 25 On November 10, 1942, Anne wrote that an eighth person, Fritz Pfeffer (Miep Gies’s dentist), would be joining the seven already in hiding in the secret annex. The final entry in this volume of the diaries is dated December 5, 1942; however, it is important to note that the diarist did return to reread this diary and pen a few additional entries, most notably one dated January 22, 1944.26 In this entry, printed below a photograph of her mother, Edith Frank, that Anne had glued into her diary, the diarist offers a retrospective, reflective perspective on her self-growth: Saturday 22 January 1944. It was stupid of me to have left all these lovely pages blank, but perhaps it’ll be all to the good if I am now able to put down my thoughts in general about what I have written. When I look over my diary today, 1 ½ years on, I cannot believe that I was ever such an innocent young thing. I cannot help but realize that no matter how much I should like to, I can never be like that again.27

Unfortunately, no first version of Anne Frank’s diaries exists for most of 1943, although entries for this year exist among the loose leaf pages of version B, which consists of rewritten and revised passages from the bound volumes of her diaries, handwritten on loose vellum pages the consistency of onionskin paper commonly used for carbon copies in offices at the time. Volume 2 of the diaries offers readers even more evidence that Anne intended to allow others to read her diary, especially her sister, Margot, who also kept a diary that did not survive. Perhaps Anne was addressing Margot when, at one point, she wrote, “Unfortunately, I skipped this page, so that to continue from the last page you have to go on to the next.”28 Otto Frank’s coworkers were running his business, and the official story was that the Frank family had fled to Switzerland when, in fact, they and four others were hiding in the secret annex. They were alarmed that a break-in had occurred in the downstairs office and warehouse. Someone suggested that if the police came, Anne’s diary should be burned, a suggestion to which she replied, “Not my diary, if my diary goes I go with it!”29 154 | The Diary

Anne’s growing interest in Peter van Daan (the pseudonym devised for Peter von Pels) is apparent in several entries contained in this volume of her diaries. On April 17, 1944, in the final entry in this volume, the diarist wrote about kissing Peter and confiding in him. In addition to many diary entries, this volume of Anne Frank’s diaries contains thirty-seven pages devoted to some of her fictional work, entitled “Cady’s Story”—which Anne planned to expand, polish, and publish after the war’s end. Version A of Anne Frank’s diaries contains an entry in which she expressed her opinions about her parents’ marriage, and her revised version B includes a similar entry dated February 8, 1944, in which she discussed what she views as an unsatisfying union between her parents. Anne concluded both versions by venting her anger toward her mother: So, should I actually feel more sympathy for Mother? Should I help her? And Father—I can’t, I’m always imagining another mother. I just can’t—How could I? She hasn’t told me anything about herself, and I’ve never asked her to. What do we know of each other’s thoughts? I can’t talk to her, I can’t look lovingly into those cold eyes, I can’t. Not ever!—If she had even one quality an understanding mother is supposed to have, gentleness or friendliness or patience or something, I’d keep trying to get closer to her. But as for loving this insensitive person, this mocking creature—it’s becoming more and more impossible every day. Yours, Anne30

The entire diary entry, omitted from Otto Frank’s 1947 edition, was among the pages given to Otto’s friend Cor Suijk, accompanied by Otto’s request that the pages not be published until after both Otto and his second wife, Elfriede (Fritzi) Frank, had died. Accordingly, these pages were kept secret until 1998, when Cor Suijk revealed their existence. Because The Critical Edition (1986) and The Definitive Edition (1991) had both been published prior to the revelation of the so-called missing pages, neither edition included these pages, which would eventually be included in The Revised Critical Edition (2003) and Verzameld werk (2013). The entries in the third extant volume run for a relatively short time, from April 18, 1944, to August 1, 1944, when Anne Frank made her final entry prior to the family’s arrest on August 4, 1944. The diarist’s entries continue to be mostly in cursive and are typically addressed to “Beste Kitty” (Dearest Kitty) or “Lieve Kitty (Dear Kitty).” Because Anne was able to revise, expand, and delete diary entries only up through the version A entry dated March 29, 1944, no version B of this final bound volume of her diaries exists. During May, June, and July 1944, she rewrote and revised intently, sometimes eleven to thirteen pages per day, according to editors’ estimates. During this period, Anne wrote few new entries in version A, including those dated July 15, July 21, and August 1, 1944. The Complicated History of the Diaries of Anne Frank  |  155

The discovery and arrest of the eight hiding in the secret annex halted Anne’s revisions. Version A of volume 3 includes an entry dated April 18, 1944, that spells out how Anne obtained a notebook for this volume of her diaries: “Dear Kitty, Someone’s been a real darling again and has torn up a chemistry exercise book for me to make a new diary, this time the someone was Margot.”31 In version A, Anne notes that she and Peter have been discussing sexuality and reproduction; most of this part of the diary entry was omitted from version C by Otto Frank. Volume 3 also contains several lengthy entries of four to ten pages, written in cursive, many of them reflecting on her relationship with Peter. Although version A entries indicate that Anne had romantic feelings for Peter, version B entries emphasize her self-growth and say less about her feelings for Peter. In her entry dated April 28, 1944, which appears in both version A and version C, Anne asked herself, “Am I only fourteen? Am I really still a silly little schoolgirl? Am I really so inexperienced about everything? I have more experience than most; I have been through things that hardly anyone of my age has undergone.”32 In her version A entry dated Wednesday, May 3, 1944, Anne remarked, “I hadn’t had a period for over 2 months, but it finally started again on Sunday. Still, in spite of all the unpleasantness and bother, I’m glad it hasn’t failed me any longer.”33 When version C of Anne’s diaries was published as The Diary of a Young Girl (1947), her comments on menstruation were deleted from this entry, reflecting editors’ discomfort with that subject and their worries that including it might offend or shock readers. In both versions A and C, this diary entry continues with Anne Frank’s observation on the war: “As you can easily imagine we often ask ourselves here despairingly, ‘What, oh, what, is the use of the war, why can’t people live peacefully together, why all this destruction?’ . . . There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage and until all mankind without exception, undergoes a great change wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and disfigured, to begin all over again after that!”34 Anne’s version A entry continues with her comments about her outlook on life and her desire to have a career after the war. When her father created version C of his daughter’s diaries, he retained this part of his daughter’s entry: I have made up my mind now to lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives. My start has been so very full of interest, and that is the sole reason why I have to laugh at the comical side of the most dangerous moments. I am young and I possess many buried qualities; I am young and strong and am living a great adventure; I am still in the midst of it and can’t grumble the whole day long. I have been given a lot, a happy 156 | The Diary

nature, a great deal of cheerfulness and strength. Every day I feel that I am developing inwardly, that the liberation is drawing nearer and how beautiful nature is, how good the people are about me, how interesting this adventure is! Why, then, should I be in despair?35

This reflection is important because it indicates not only that the diarist felt free to express her own opinions while in hiding but also that she fully intended to have a professional career as a writer after the war concluded. By including this part of Anne’s diary entry in version C, her father honored his daughter’s hopes for the future. It is enlightening to consider how the absence of version B entries for the period from March 30 to August 4, 1944, was dealt with when Otto Frank prepared the text of the first published version (C) of Anne Frank’s diaries. In his article, “How Anne Frank Rewrote the Diary of Anne Frank,” Philippe Lejeune noted of Otto Frank, “This time he no longer has Anne’s work to use as a basis, and is confronted directly and solely with the original diary. He must therefore take on both the rhetorical development (calibrating, centering, and pruning) and thematic selection, creating a text that is a precise continuation of period 3.”36 Otto Frank included his daughter’s entry dated May 5, 1944, which Anne begins with “Daddy is not pleased with me, he thought that after our talk on Sunday I automatically wouldn’t go upstairs every evening. He doesn’t want any ‘necking,’ a word I can’t bear.”37 After writing that her older sister Margot had offered advice to her, Anne spelled out what she intends to write to her father, namely, that she did not feel he helped her when she was lonely and unhappy early in their time in hiding; Anne continued, “I have now reached the stage where I can live entirely on my own, without Mummy’s support or anyone else’s for that matter,” concluding, “I shall not be sorry for what I have done, but shall act as I think I can. You can’t coax me into not going upstairs, either you forbid it, or you trust me through thick and thin, but then leave me in peace as well.”38 The next day, Anne wrote that she placed the letter into her father’s pocket and soon added that her father and she talked about the letter, that both cried, and that she regretted having written it: “Oh, I have failed miserably; this is certainly the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.”39 This diary entry indicates that, no matter what she wrote about being independent, Anne Frank still depended on her father for emotional support. The fact that this diary entry is retained in its entirety in The Diary of a Young Girl indicates that both she and her father wished to show the stages in her maturation in the two years since she began keeping diaries. Version B of Anne Frank’s diaries comprises 330 loose leaf pages containing Anne Frank’s revisions from June 20, 1942, to March 29, 1944. The facsimiles of the diaries list these four different colors of paper on which individual entries have been written: roze (rose), naturel (beige), The Complicated History of the Diaries of Anne Frank  |  157

blauw (blue), and grauw (gray). Each eight-by-eleven-inch page has been folded in half; in most cases, the halves of the pages have been separated, then placed inside individual plastic covers by archivists. Each diary entry in version B begins on the right-hand side of a half-sheet of paper, then continues on the back (left-hand side) of that half-sheet; if lengthier, the entry continues on the right-hand side of another half-sheet and concludes on the left-hand side of the first sheet of paper. Handwritten entries are in cursive; revisions, changes, deletions, and additions to the handwritten words on the loose leaf pages are not always in Anne Frank’s handwriting, and some corrections are printed rather than made in in cursive. On several pages, words and phrases have been crossed out, corrections are in a darker black ink than the original words. My study of the facsimiles continues. The issue that I am studying at present is whether Anne Frank revised her three volumes of version A entries not chronologically but thematically by using a specific color of loose leaf paper for each theme she devised. It is important to remember that the loose leaf pages were strewn across the floor of the secret annex by the individuals who discovered and arrested the eight in hiding on August 4, 1944. Of course, it is also possible that the diarist used the color of loose leaf paper most readily available to her, since all of the loose leaf paper was supplied to her by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Notes 1. Anne Frank, Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven van 12 Juni 1942–1 Augustus 1944 [The Annex: Diary Notes from 12 June 1942–1 August 1944], Met een woord vooraf door Annie Romein-Verschoor (Amsterdam: Contact Publishing, 1947). 2. Mirjam Pressler, introduction to The Diary of Anne Frank: The Definitive Edition, ed. Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler (New York: Doubleday, 1995), v. 3. Gerrold Van Der Stroom, “The Diaries, Het Achterhuis and the Translations,” in The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, ed. David Barnouw and Gerrold Van Der Stroom, trans. Arnold Pomerans and B. M. Mooyart (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 59–83. Van Der Stroom edited Anne Frank Tagebuch (1991) and The Diary of Anne Frank: The Definitive Edition (1995) with Otto Frank and the Verzameld Werk (2013) with Mirjam Pressler, Gerhard Herschfeld, and Francine Prose. See also Philippe Lejeune, “Comment Anne Frank a réécrit le journal d’Anne Frank,” in Les brouillons de soi (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), 331–65; Philippe Lejeune, “How Anne Frank Rewrote the Diary of Anne Frank,” in On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. Kathrine Durnin (Manoa: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 237–66; Laureen Nussbaum, “New Fragments of the Diary,” Anne Frank Magazine, 1999. 4. Anne Frank, Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank: 14 Juni 1942–1 August 1944, trans. Anneliese Schütz (Heidelberg, Germany: Schneider, 1950); Anne

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Frank, Journal de Anne Frank (Het Achterhuis), trans. T. Caren et Suzanne Lombard, preface by Daniel-Rops (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1950); Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, trans. B. M. Mooyart-Doubleday (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1952). 5. Eleanor Roosevelt, introduction to Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, ed. Otto Frank, trans. B. M. Mooyaart (Doubleday, New York: Modern Library, 1952). 6. Anne Frank, De dagboeken van Anne Frank, ed. Abraham Harry Paape, Gerrold van der Stroom et al. (‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsuigeverij; Amsterdam: Bakker, 1986). 7. Lejeune, “How Anne Frank Rewrote.” 8. Pressler, introduction to The Diary of Anne Frank: The Definitive Edition, vii. 9. Ibid., viii. 10. Cornelis Suijk, personal interviews, June 21 and 22, 2004, Amsterdam. 11. Anne Frank, Verzameld werk, ed. Mirjam Pressler et al (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2013); Anne Frank, Gesamtausgabe: Tagebücher—Geschichten und Ereignisse aus dem Hinterhaus—Erzählungen—Briefe—Fotos und Dokumente (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2013), accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.annefrank.ch/234/items/first-ever-complete-edition-of-all-anne​ -franks-texts.html (page no longer available). 12. Frank, Verzameld werk, 16–215. 13. “The Diaries of Anne Frank: Research—Translations—Critical Edition,” Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the Georg August Universität Göttingen and the Fritz Bauer Institute, Frankfurt, accessed June 30, 2016, http://annefrank​ -researchproject.eu/ (page no longer available). Most recently, the Anne Frank Fonds published Anne Frank: The Collected Works (New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019). 14. Tanja Jaap, A Unique Set: Anne Frank’s Diaries in Facsimile, trans. Lorraine T. Miller (Amsterdam: Anne Frank Stichting, 2002); also available as A Unique Set: Anne Frank’s Diaries in Facsimile, Anne Frank Forum, accessed June 20, 2016, http://annefrank.fr.yuku.com/topic/75/Info-on-the​ -diary-facsimilies#.V2r07o-cHIU. 15. Yt Stoker, personal interviews, December 5, 2003; March 19, 2004; December 17, 2004; March 17, 2008, Anne Frank Stichting, Amsterdam. 16. Pau Groenendijk, personal interview, March 18, 2004, Mooie Boeken, Amsterdam. 17. Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, ed. David Barnouw and Gerrold Van Der Stroom (Amsterdam: Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, 2003), 197. 18. Ibid., 197–98. 19. Ibid., 281. 20. Ibid., 211. 21. Ibid., 263. 22. Nussbaum, “New Fragments of the Diary.” 23. Frank, Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, 248. 24. Ibid., 298. 25. Ibid., 319. 26. Ibid., 324. 27. Ibid.

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28. Ibid., 585 (p. 142 in facsimiles). 29. Ibid., 617. 30. Ibid., 504. 31. Ibid., 635. 32. Ibid., 645. 33. Ibid., 649. 34. Ibid., 650. 35. Ibid., 651. 36. Lejeune, “How Anne Frank Rewrote,” 255. 37. Frank, Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, 651. 38. Ibid., 652–53. 39. Ibid., 658.

Bibliography Barnouw, David. Personal interviews. December 9, 2003; March 18, 2004. Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), Amsterdam. Beattie, Heather. “Where Narratives Meet: Archival Description, Provenance, and Women’s Diaries.” Libraries and the Cultural Record 44, no. 1 (2009): 82–100. Bunkers, Suzanne L. Introduction to Diaries of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers, 3–40. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. ———. “Midwestern Diaries and Journals: What Women Were (Not) Saying in the Late 1800s.” In Studies in Autobiography, edited by James Olney, 190–210. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ———. “Whose Diary Is It, Anyway? Issues of Agency, Authority, Ownership.” In “Private Lives/Public Texts: Women’s Literary Diaries and Journals.” Special issue, A/B: Auto/biography Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 11–27. Bunkers, Suzanne L., and Cynthia A. Huff. “Issues in Studying Women’s Diaries: A Theoretical and Critical Introduction.” In Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, 1–20. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Caplan, Nigel A. “Revisiting the Diary: Rereading Anne Frank’s Rewriting.” Lion and the Unicorn 28, no. 1 (2004): 77–95. Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The Collected Works. New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019. ———. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Translated by B. M. Mooyart-Doubleday. London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1952. ———. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Edited by Otto Frank. Translated from the Dutch by B. M. Mooyaart Doubleday, with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. New York: Bantam edition, 1993. First published 1952. ———. Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank: 14 Juni 1942–1 August 1944. Translated by Anneliese Schütz. Heidelberg, Germany: Schneider, 1950. ———. De dagboeken van Anne Frank. Edited by Abraham Harry Paape, Gerrold van der Stroom et al. ‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsuigeverij; Amsterdam: Bakker, 1986. ———. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition. Edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom. Translated to English by Arnold J. Pomerans and B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. New York: Doubleday, 1989. 160 | The Diary

———. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Definitive Edition. Edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler. Basel, Switzerland: The Anne Frank Fonds, 1991. English edition, New York: Doubleday, 1995. ———. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition. Edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom. Amsterdam: Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, 2003. ———. Gesamtausgabe: Tagebücher—Geschichten und Ereignisse aus dem Hinterhaus—Erzählungen—Briefe—Fotos und Dokumente. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2013. Accessed June 26, 2016. http://www​ .annefrank.ch/234/items/first-ever-complete-edition-of-all-anne-franks​ -texts.html. Page no longer available. ———. Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven van 12 Juni 1942–1 Augustus 1944 [The Annex: Diary Notes from 12 June 1942–1 August 1944]. Met een woord vooraf door Annie Romein-Verschoor. Amsterdam: Contact Publishing, 1947. ———. Journal de Anne Frank (Het Achterhuis). Preface by Daniel-Rops. Translated by T. Caren and Suzanne Lombard. Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1950. ———. Verzameld werk. Edited by Mirjam Pressler, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Francine Prose, and Gerda Meijerink. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2013. Groenendijk, Pau. Personal interview. March 18, 2004. Mooie Boeken, Amsterdam. Hampsten, Elizabeth. Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Hardy, H. J. J. “Document Examination and Handwriting Identification of the Text Known as the Diary of Anne Frank: Summary of Findings.” In The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, translated by Arnold Pomerans and B. M. Mooyart-Doubleday, 102–65. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Knoch-Mund, Christoph, and Chana Moshenska. “Anne Frank and the Use of Diaries in Holocaust Education.” Paper presented at “Dear Diary”: New Approaches to an Established Genre; An International Conference, University of Sussex, November 2001. Korzen, Karolien Stocking. Personal interview. March 17, 2008. Anne Frank Stichting, Amsterdam. Kugelman, Yves. Personal interview. March 15, 2011. Anne Frank Fonds, Basel, Switzerland. Lee, Carol Ann. Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Lejeune, Philippe. “Comment Anne Frank a réécrit le Journal d’Anne Frank.” In Les brouillons de soi, 331–65. Paris: Seuil, 1998. Paper originally presented at Le Journal Personnel, Nanterre, May 19, 1990. ———. “Genetic Studies of Life Writing.” A/B: Auto/biography Studies 25, no. 2 (2010): 162–71. ———. “How Anne Frank Rewrote the Diary of Anne Frank.” In On Diary, edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, translated by Katherine Durnin, 237–66. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. ———. “How Do Diaries End?” Biography 24, no. 1 (2001): 99–111. Lejeune, Philippe, and Catherine Bogaert. Un journal a soi: Histoire d’une pratique. Paris: Editions Textuel, 2003. Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the Georg August Universität Göttingen and the Fritz Bauer Institute, Frankfurt. “The Diaries of Anne Frank: The Complicated History of the Diaries of Anne Frank  |  161

Research—Translations—Critical Edition.” Accessed June 30, 2016. http://annefrank-researchproject.eu/. Page no longer available. Muller, Melissa. Anne Frank: The Biography. Translated by Rita Kimber and Robert Kimber. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Nussbaum, Laureen. “New Fragments of the Diary.” Anne Frank Magazine, 1999. ———. “Taken Seriously as a Writer at Last?” Anne Frank House. Accessed June 24, 2016. http://www.annefrank.org/en/Anne-Frank​ /A-diary-as-a-best-friend/At-last-seriously-taken-as-a-writer/. Pressler, Mirjam. Introduction to The Diary of Anne Frank: The Definitive Edition, ed. Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Prose, Francine. Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Roosevelt, Eleanor. Introduction to Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young Girl. Ed. Otto Frank. Translated from the Dutch by B. M. Mooyaart Doubleday. New York: Bantam edition, 1993. First published 1952. Shandler, Jeffrey. “From Diary to Book: Text, Object, Structure.” In Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler, 25–58. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Stoker, Yt. Personal interviews. December 5, 2003; March 19, 2004; December 17, 2004; March 17, 2008. Anne Frank Stichting, Amsterdam. Suijk, Cornelis. Personal interviews. June 21 and 22, 2004. Amsterdam. Tanja, Jaap. A Unique Set: Anne Frank’s Diaries in Facsimile. Translated by Lorraine T. Miller. Amsterdam: Anne Frank Stichting. Accessed June 25, 2008. http://www.annefrank.org/upload/downloads/auniqueset.doc. Page no longer available. ———. A Unique Set: Anne Frank’s Diaries in Facsimile. Anne Frank Forum. Accessed June 20, 2016. http://annefrank.fr.yuku.com/topic/75/Info-on​ -the-diary-facsimilies#.V2r07o-cHIU. van der Stroom, Gerrold. “The Diaries, Het Achterhuis and the Translations.” In The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, translated by Arnold Pomerans and B. M. Mooyart Doubleday, 59–83. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Wisse, Ruth. “A Romance of the Secret Annex: The Diary of Anne Frank, the Critical Edition.” New York Times Book Review, July 2, 1989, 1–2.

S U Z A N N E L . B U N K E R S is Professor Emerita of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She is author of In Search of Susanna; author (with Frank W. Klein) of Good Earth, Black Soil; editor of Diaries of Girls and Women: A Midwestern Sampler, A Pioneer Farm Girl, “All Will Yet Be Well”: The Diary of Sarah Gillespie Huftalen, 1873–1955, and The Diary of Caroline Seabury, 1854–1863; and editor (with Cynthia Huff) of Inscribing the Daily.

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9 Digitized Diary Archives Desirée Henderson

The field of diary studies is experiencing a significant paradigm shift due to the advent of digitization. In the past, scholars and students of the diary could only gain access to original, unpublished manuscripts by traveling to specialized archives, a privileged experience available to only a few individuals. The constraints of print publication meant that even facsimile editions of diaries could not fully reproduce the unique characteristics of handwritten texts. The digitization of diaries has begun to make access to diary manuscripts possible to a degree never before seen. Yet digitized diaries—like all digital archives—possess their own intrinsic limitations. The promise of widespread access to previously restricted materials is accompanied by a new set of problems both logistical and theoretical that will shape the future of diary studies. This chapter provides an overview of the opportunities and obstacles presented by the archive of digitized diaries, offers a case study of a nineteenth-century illustrated diary available in digital form, and recommends best practices for working with digitized diaries. Over the past few decades, large-scale digitization projects have dramatically reshaped the terrain of scholarly research. For the most part, the creation of digital databases, archives, and editions has focused on print materials such as books and periodicals; manuscript digitization has somewhat lagged behind due to the challenges that manuscripts present to digitization technologies—their fragility, lack of standardized format, use of illumination or illustration, and so forth. Yet as advanced imaging tools have become more prevalent, especially within research libraries and  163

archives, more and more manuscripts have been scanned and made available on open-access websites. Diaries are among the manuscript forms to benefit from these institutional practices, although to speak of a coherent digitized diary archive is misleading as these texts are disconnected and of varying quality. They are created using different software, employ different public-facing interfaces, and allow different kinds of searching or manipulation. Some are simply visual reproductions of manuscript diaries, some pair a visual reproduction with a print transcription, some offer keyword search options, and still others provide the contextual framing and support materials that define scholarly editions. Despite the diversity that characterizes the digitized diary archive, certain overarching issues take center stage when considering how to find and analyze these materials. Finding digitized diaries is no easy feat. Although databases like the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) and the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS) are intended to provide comprehensive catalogs of manuscript materials, they do not reliably indicate whether these materials are available in digital formats. Even global search engines like Google may not be useful. If you happen to know or suspect a specific individual wrote a diary, a keyword search of the individual’s name and the term “diary” may yield a productive result, but more general searching is often fruitless. For example, googling the phrase “nineteenth-century American woman’s diary” will result in some intriguing hits but will not lead you to the diary of Sarah Gooll Putnam, which I discuss later in this chapter, or many other primary source documents. Most digitized diaries are freely available online, but because they reside on institutional websites, often nested deeply within large and multifaceted archives, they simply do not turn up through keyword searches on public search engines. Numerous critics have pointed out that current research methodologies rely heavily on Google and similar search engines, without necessarily taking into consideration how the proprietary algorithms they employ impact scholarly knowledge. My own struggle to locate digitized diaries prompted me to create an index of the materials I identified, which I host on a personal website and which, though incomplete, serves as a public research tool.1 Such ad hoc resources are designed to redress what Ian Milligan called the “illusionary order” of online databases and search engines that present themselves as comprehensive but are often woefully inaccurate.2 One lesson of the digitized diary archive is that more creative and counterintuitive research methods may be necessary to merely uncover the existence of these objects of study. The question of which diaries have been or should be digitized is also subject to undefined and unpredictable criteria. It is perhaps to be 164 | The Diary

expected that many diaries by famous and important historical figures have been digitized, often as components of larger biographical archives, as can be seen in cases as diverse as George Washington, Queen Victoria, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. But a large number of diaries by ordinary individuals have also benefited from digitization, greatly expanding the representation of voices from the past. For instance, the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive presents diaries and journals written by Americans of Japanese ancestry who were placed in internment camps in the 1940s.3 Archives such as these provide readers with access to lives and stories that might otherwise disappear from the historical record. Nevertheless, the digitized diary archive—like all digitized archives—is characterized by blind spots and biases that may marginalize certain individuals and communities. Lauren Klein described these as “archival silences,” which scholars bear the responsibility to acknowledge and make visible; the flawed and incomplete archive should be, she wrote, “a site of action rather than . . . a record of fixity or loss.”4 The gaps in the digitized diary archive should serve as prompts to scholars and students to consider which voices remain inaccessible. While celebrating the impressive scope of digital archives, it is necessary to be attentive to the tendency to overprioritize digitized texts simply because they are accessible and searchable and thereby to reinforce, rather than dismantle, the silences of the archive. Having located a digitized diary, the challenges are far from over. As mentioned, the techniques employed to digitize diaries are highly variable and produce texts that are more or less readable. Simply put, not all digitized diaries are of equivalent quality. There are a growing number of digitized diaries that are full scholarly editions with contextual materials such as a critical introduction, biography of the author, explanations of terms and concepts, and chronologies—the kind of substantive work exemplified by the Fleischmann Diaries and Memorable Days: The Emilie Davis Diaries.5 However, most digitized diaries do not provide such extensive framing—and some provide little or no information about the diary’s author, its context, or its history, making it very difficult to interpret the text. James Mussell stated, “Every digitization project is also an editorial project” but not every digitization project is upfront about the editorial decisions that were made regarding why to digitize a particular text, which technological tools were employed, what level of oversight was applied, or who made these decisions.6 Generally, the digitization of diaries is not a commercialized practice, as is the case for many databases of print materials, and is instead driven by the institutional goals of research archives or university libraries to make their collections available online. Yet a quick survey of the digitized diary archive indicates that much of this digitization work is out of touch with the needs of readers Digitized Diary Archives  |  165

confronted with the uniquely challenging characteristics of diaries. For some time, Jerome McGann has called for the more systematic involvement of humanities scholars in the production of the digital resources used to conduct humanities research, writing, “The scholar’s interests ought to be determining ones. . . . [b]ecause it is the scholar’s vocation to monitor the cultural record as the indispensable resource for public education.”7 Digitization that occurs without the input of experts—even citizen scholars, as I go on to discuss—may result in texts that, despite being accessible in stunning visual formats, are essentially unreadable. As I have argued elsewhere, this may ironically result in digitized diaries being reprivatized rather than entering into the public discourse.8 Two of the most common challenges facing readers of digitized diaries are related to transcription and keyword searches. Many digitized diaries are presented through high-resolution visual reproductions, but even the sharpest photographic image does not make it simple to read handwritten documents. Therefore, a typescript transcription is an invaluable tool, but it too can present new hurdles. In many cases, transcription occurs through the use of optical character recognition (OCR) technology, but OCR was developed for use with standardized print materials and, even when translating print, has a high error rate. Handwritten manuscripts increase the error rate significantly and often result in inaccurate or garbled transcriptions. Compare this to the painstaking effort considered necessary for producing a print critical edition of a manuscript text; the field of textual editing has established rigorous criteria for transcribed editions, but OCR-generated transcriptions are often not subject to such scholarly oversight, neither double-checked nor corrected by a human reviewer trained in paleography. Readers may be tempted to rely solely on a print transcription because it is easier than grappling with a handwritten diary but, in doing so, may find themselves drawing conclusions based on a flawed text. This is also a problem when it comes to keyword search options. As mentioned above, critics have observed that keyword searches have become foundational to modern research methods but are often used uncritically, without consideration for how the results are achieved; in Ted Underwood’s influential statement, “We call this practice ‘search,’ but ‘search’ is a deceptively modest term for a complex technology that has come to play an evidentiary role in scholarship.”9 Those digitized diaries that provide readers with the ability to search by keywords typically scan the OCR-rendered transcription—which, again, may be flawed—or the text’s descriptive metadata. Although the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a scholarly consortium that develops guidelines for digital texts, has established essential standards for text markup, it can be challenging for a lay reader to confirm whether a digital text’s metadata conforms to these standards. Additionally, both OCR transcription and textual 166 | The Diary

metadata place an emphasis on words, whereas much of what characterizes a diary is its material form or nonlinguistic attributes, which can be difficult to render into machine-readable language. Readers are advised to exercise judgment in their reliance on transcriptions and search features when working with digitized diaries, cognizant of the extent to which the process of digitization shapes their encounter with the manuscript text. Despite these cautions, it is clear that digitization technologies enable readers to access and interpret diary manuscripts in ways that were unimaginable in the past. One of the most important contributions of digitization to diary studies is the way that this technology preserves and makes visible the material features of a handwritten manuscript. Diaries are uniquely material texts, their meaning conveyed equally through the words on the page and the page itself: size, shape, color, design, organization, layout, imagery, symbols, handwriting, codes, illustrations, excisions, additions, interleaved material, and so forth. Diarists take advantage of the flexible and highly idiosyncratic possibilities of these textual features in order to represent their lives. Digitization allows readers to explore these attributes, to look closely at the material dimensions of the diary, and to consider how the form of the text shapes its meaning. Tools like magnification, rotation, and color adjustment also present readers with the ability to manipulate the text in ways not possible even when handling the original—not to mention that the ability to record the digital text through download, screenshot, or bookmark allows readers to access it as often as they need. Some scholars contest that archival originals possess sensory information that cannot be reproduced through digital methods, such as texture, weight, smell, and sound, but digitization allows a general readership to explore the visual dimensions of diary manuscripts, which are critical to understanding and interpreting these texts. To explore this aspect of diary digitization in more detail, I offer a brief case study of the nineteenth-century diary of Sarah Gooll Putnam, digitized by the Massachusetts Historical Society and available as an open-access resource on its website. Putnam’s multivolume diary exemplifies the benefits of digitization as it is a text that would have suffered significant losses had it been simply transcribed and reproduced in a print edition; even a facsimile edition (had a publisher been persuaded to produce one) would not have been able to capture many of the defining characteristics of this text. Putnam kept a diary from the age of nine until her death at sixty-one. At the time of this writing, six volumes of Putnam’s diary have been digitized, spanning the years 1861 to 1865. (An additional twenty-two volumes are not yet available in digital form.) Later in her life, Putnam became a highly trained professional artist, but even the earliest volumes of her diary are full of sketches and illustrations. Although she most commonly drew in ink, some illustrations are Digitized Diary Archives  |  167

painted in bright watercolors. At times, Putnam also treated her diary like a scrapbook, pasting in images, bits of cloth, clippings from periodicals, and photographs, and personal letters are included as interleaved materials. In other words, Putnam recorded her life as often through image or object as through words. The ability to look at these images and objects, to view them in full-color reproductions, and to zoom in to study the details is invaluable to analyzing the text. Although Putnam’s diary is many hundreds of pages long and can be examined within a number of critical contexts (American women’s writing, children’s diaries, women and visual art, personal accounts of the US Civil War), my discussion focuses on the ways in which digitization enables us to see and appreciate the material characteristics of the text. Putnam displays an awareness of her diary as a material object in which the visual details are not simply illustrative but constitutive of the meaning of the text. Putnam takes deliberate steps to link the linguistic and visual components of the diary, particularly by relying on a number of devices borrowed from print culture. For instance, she numbers all the illustrations in the diary and then references them within her prose, using language like “see figure 2.” She employs captions for her drawings like those that were a common feature of periodical illustration in this era. She also draws a little hand with an extended finger that points to images, a device that resembles the punctuation mark known as a manicule. In these various ways, Putnam indicates that she perceived her prose diary entries and illustrations to work together; indeed, they often physically overlap or intersect to such a degree as to be indistinguishable as modes of representation. One instance demonstrates how Putnam manipulated the physical dimensions of her diary to increase the representational possibilities of the text. Putnam explained that she showed a new photograph of herself to her family; it was greeted with approval by her mother and sister, but not by her father. She wrote, “Father does not like so much front face,” meaning that he disapproved of the fact that the photograph captured Putnam looking directly at the camera.10 Art historian Erin Pipkin linked Putnam’s father’s reaction to cultural anxieties regarding the threatening nature of a direct female gaze—an issue, Pipkin argued, Putnam confronted later in her artistic career when she becomes a portraitist.11 Putnam’s reaction to her father’s critique at twelve years old is interesting: she inserted the photograph into the page, carefully scissoring four angled slots in the paper to hold the four corners of the photograph, similar to the method used in photograph albums of the era. She then decorated the surrounding page with ink lines and squiggles that make the photograph appear to reside in an ornate frame. She wrote the date “1863” on both sides of the image and, underneath, labeled it “S.G.P. / aged 12 / 1863.”12 These framing devices appear to celebrate the image and claim it as a 168 | The Diary

legitimate representation of the author. Indeed, it could be argued that Putnam’s direct photographic gaze parallels the authoritative voice of the diary itself as Putnam employed the genre to write her life without any apparent need to appease an external audience. On the other hand, the fact that Putnam placed the photograph within the pages of the diary instead of, say, including it in a family album or exchanging it with her friends (as she stated she had done prior to her father’s comments), may also be interpreted as using the diary as place of hiding. Did she secret the image here to prevent its wider circulation? Only a few pages later, Putnam drew a picture of herself in dancing class in which not only does she look directly toward the viewer but also a hand-drawn manicule points at her face for emphasis.13 In other words, Putnam’s self-representation through the layered discourses of prose, photograph, and illustration offer a complicated account of her understanding of female physicality, beauty, and authority. It is clear that the significance of Putnam’s diary can only be explored through access to these different dimensions of the text, wonderfully made available for study through digitization technologies. Yet even in this case, it is important to acknowledge that the Massachusetts Historical Society digital edition of Putnam’s diary has a number of drawbacks. Currently, the website does not provide a transcription of the text; Putnam’s handwriting is fairly clear and comprehensible, but a transcription would benefit readers greatly. There is also no keyword search function, which would serve to enhance the research options for the text. Equally challenging is the fact that the diary is presented through an interface that adheres closely to the structure of the codex; that is, readers are obligated to read one page at a time as if they were turning the pages of a book instead of accessing a digital text. The practice of reproducing digital texts as if they were governed by the rules of the codex is common across digital archives, but one that scholars characterize as “basically spill-overs from the print medium . . . [that] betray little ground-breaking re-conception.”14 In other words, despite the fact that digital texts are a capable of being reproduced in an array of innovative formats, the familiar conventions of the print book still exercise considerable influence. This can result in texts that are surprising static and inflexible—and in slow and cumbersome reading experiences. The adherence to codex formats also has the effect of privileging the page, as readers can access only one page at a time (or two facing pages, in the case of some interfaces). Arguably, other textual units have equal or greater significance within a diary, such as the dated diary entry, but for the most part it is not possible to search or sort digitized diaries according to these subdivisions. In the case of Putnam’s diary, the codex structure of the digital interface requires considerable time investment on the part of the reader and, as result, reduces the value of the text as an object of study. Digitized Diary Archives  |  169

Another challenging feature of the digital edition of Putnam’s diary is the presence of a watermark across each page, announcing the text as the property of the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS). The watermark speaks to a changing archival culture: once entrusted with enforcing copyright and issuing permissions, libraries are increasingly expected to make their collections public. This results in a tension over access and ownership; if an archival text is posted online, does the archive still possess the right to control its reproduction? Most digitized diaries are not marked with a watermark, making it possible to easily copy, circulate, and quote from these texts without acquiring permission from the archive that holds the original document. Some might say that it has become too easy to do so, contributing to an online culture that disregards copyright and tolerates plagiarism. The MHS has opted to employ a watermark to continue to exercise a degree of control over its digitized collections, even as they are made available as open-access texts. Putnam’s diary is still legible despite the watermark, but it would be necessary to secure permission from MHS to reproduce the diary without it. The presence of the watermark creates an opportunity to reflect on the questions surrounding privacy, publicity, and citation that remain unresolved in the digital age. Putnam’s diary, like other historical manuscript diaries, may appear to have little to offer regarding such modern concerns, but by virtue of its digitization, it enters into wider conversations regarding the use and misuse of texts online. As my abbreviated discussion of Putnam’s diary has been intended to demonstrate, diaries like this one gain new relevance to academic and public debates when they become accessible to a broad audience of readers through digitization. Putnam’s diary conveys both the groundbreaking promise of digital editions and the need for a critical engagement with the limitations of these resources. To develop a critical methodology for working with digitized diaries, it is necessary to proceed from the central premise that the digital edition is fundamentally different from the original text. Mussell succinctly stated, “Digitization achieves reproduction through a radical transformation.”15 Bob Nicholson elaborated on the nature of this transformation in his discussion of newspapers, writing, “The creation of a digital newspaper does not simply produce what archivists term a ‘surrogate,’ or a stand-in, for the original. Instead, it creates something new; sources are ‘remediated’ and not just reproduced. Though a digitised text may look familiar, it is not the same source; we are able to access, read, organise and analyse it in radical new ways.”16 Accepting that the same can be said about digitized diaries, I offer the following as best practices for the field of diary studies as our research becomes increasingly reliant on digitized materials.

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Acknowledge. Many critics have pointed to the practice, particularly egregious in published academic writing, of authors failing to acknowledge that they have accessed a digital version rather than a hard copy of a source. Tim Hitchcock reprovingly stated, “At the moment we are using [digital resources] to make our lives easier, while pretending that they do not exist.”17 This practice may reflect the prevalent belief within academic culture that research in brick-and-mortar archives grants one greater authority, or it may simply reflect the fact that citing digitized sources can be very complicated—and made more so by poorly designed and unclearly credited websites. Either way, such silences contribute to a lack of critical reflection about how digital tools and methods are impacting scholarly research across the disciplines. The alternate practice of acknowledging the use of digital texts is not only more accurate but also prefigures a developed self-awareness regarding the fact that working with digital texts is a distinct experience. Digital archives may allow new dimensions of the original text to come to light, or they may obscure or misrepresent key features of the original. The point is not to reposition the original as a pure or unmediated source, but to recognize that digitization is not simply a technological process but an interpretative one as well. To acknowledge this fact requires authors to demonstrate the ways in which their conclusions were facilitated by digital tools. Look around. Philippe Lejeune wrote that the major difficulty of reading a diary “lies in learning how to decipher the code or thematic framework within which the diary articulates itself.”18 This difficulty may be exacerbated when reading digitized diaries. Readers are initially confronted with the challenge of learning the “code” or internal logic of a diary when only minimal information is provided regarding the diarist or the text and when the tools for reading and searching the text may be inaccurate or inadequate. The challenge is compounded by the fact that the majority of digitized diaries are disaggregated from the larger literary or historical context. Scholars and students must engage in reading practices that cut across artificial and technological silos that isolate individual diaries in order to uncover links between the diary that interests them and other diaries, relevant literary texts, historical contexts, and the like. Lara Putnam described “side-glancing” as a research method that encourages readers to look beyond the results of keyword searches, and to explore along the edges of what can be easily or quickly discovered.19 Similarly, those working with a digitized diary need to look beyond the boundaries of the text to place it within and against other materials or bodies of knowledge. Here, of course, the field of diary studies serves as an invaluable resource for developing a deep understanding of the history, conventions, and uses of the diary genre.

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Collaborate. Digitization opens up remarkable opportunities for collaborative scholarship. It is possible for readers to engage with a digitized text through a variety of mechanisms, from sharing images or ideas on social media, to linking between websites, to contributing to wikis or other public resources. It is also possible for groundbreaking research to occur through online collaboration as readers annotate, critique, revise, or correct digitized materials, a process that results in what have been called “social editions”: “In a social edition, textual interpretation and interrelation are almost wholly created and managed by a community of users participating in collective and collaborative knowledge building using Web 2.0 technologies.”20 Hans Walter Gabler argued that such audience interventions might even rise to the level of being classified as “second-order editing,” radically restructuring conventional editorial hierarchies and making readers key contributors to, not simply consumers of, scholarly editions.21 An impressive model for this kind of collaborative work can be seen in the Smithsonian Institution’s Transcription Center, which invites volunteers to produce crowdsourced transcriptions of manuscript texts, including diaries. Thanks to the dedicated effort of volunteers from all over the world, numerous diaries, including those by American artists such as Cecilia Beaux, Blanche Lazzell, and Alberto Vargas (to name a few), are now available in a side-by-side, manuscriptand-transcription format.22 Projects such as these allow citizen-scholars to contribute to the production of new knowledge about diaries and diarists—and it need not stop at the transcription stage. Ideally, in the future it will be standard for digitized texts to provide simple ways for readers to annotate, tag, link, and correct texts, thereby ensuring that the digital edition is the best possible resource. The implications of digitization for the study of the diary are significant. Although more needs to be done to include scholars and users in the production of digitized diaries, and a more comprehensive and searchable record of which diaries have been digitized is still needed, already major advances have occurred. An unprecedented number of diary manuscripts are now accessible to a general readership than have ever been available before. Within the field of diary studies, this has the potential to make manuscript or textual study a cornerstone of future scholarship, shifting our focus from theoretical to material concerns. Digitization has the potential to make diaries more central within humanities scholarship generally, rather than residing on the margins of history and literature. It also means that the study of diaries might increasingly cut across historical, geographic, national, and linguistic boundaries, yielding new insights about the genre and its global impact. It is inevitable that these new resources and methods will give rise to new ways of interpreting the diary, opening up an innovative era within diary studies. 172 | The Diary

Notes 1. See Desirée Henderson, The Diary Index, last modified July 9, 2019, http://diaryindex.com. 2. Ian Milligan, “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010,” Canadian Historical Review 94, no. 4 (2013): 542. 3. Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive, University of California, accessed July 12, 2015, https://calisphere.org/exhibitions/t11/jarda/. 4. Lauren F. Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings,” American Literature 85, no. 4 (2013): 665. 5. See the Fleischmann Diaries, Róisín O’Brien, project director, University College Cork, Ireland, accessed August 3, 2015, http://fleischmanndiaries.ucc .ie/, and Memorable Days: The Emilie Davis Diaries, Judith Giesberg, project director, Villanova University, accessed May 12, 2014, http://davisdiaries .villanova.edu/. 6. James Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 4. 7. Jerome McGann, “Sustainability: The Elephant in the Room,” in Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come, ed. Jerome McGann (Houston: Rice University, 2010), n.p., accessed January 5, 2016, http://cnx .org/contents/[email protected]:AeBKUQq-@2/Sustainability-The-Elephant-in. 8. Desirée Henderson, “Reading Digitized Diaries: Privacy and the Digital Life-Writing Archive,” A/B: Auto/biography Studies 33, no. 1 (2017): 1–18. 9. Ted Underwood, “Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago,” Representations 127 (2014): 64. 10. Sarah Gooll Putnam, Diary, vols. 2–7 (1861–65), Massachusetts Historical Society, accessed June 25, 2016, http://www.masshist.org/collection-guides/view /fa0176. The quote is from vol. 4, p. 79. To assist readers in locating these quotes and images within the digitized edition of Putnam’s diary, I have followed the pagination of the web edition even when it differs from the page numbers marked on the manuscript. 11. Erin L. Pipkin, “‘Striking in Its Promise’: The Artistic Career of Sarah Gooll Putnam,” Massachusetts Historical Review 3 (2001): 100, 115. 12. S. Putnam, Diary, 4:79. 13. S. Putnam, Diary, 4:82. 14. Hans Walter Gabler, “Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition,” Literature Compass 7, no. 2 (2010): 48. 15. Mussell, Nineteenth-Century Press, 71. 16. Bob Nicholson, “The Digital Turn: Exploring the Methodological Possibilities of Digital Newspaper Archives,” Media History 19, no. 1 (2013): 64. 17. Tim Hitchcock, “Confronting the Digital: Or How Academic History Writing Lost the Plot,” Cultural and Social History 10, no. 1 (2013): 18. 18. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. Katherine Durnin (Manoa: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 132. 19. Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 380. 20. Ray Siemens et al., “Towards Modeling the Social Edition: An Approach to Understanding the Electronic Scholarly Edition in the Context of New Digitized Diary Archives  |  173

and Emerging Social Media,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 27, no. 4 (2012): 453. 21. Gabler, “Theorizing,” 49. 22. Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: Transcription Center, Smithsonian Institution, accessed August 14, 2015, https://transcription.si.edu/.

Bibliography The Fleischmann Diaries. Róisín O’Brien, project director. University College Cork, Ireland. Accessed August 3, 2015. http://fleischmanndiaries.ucc.ie/. Gabler, Hans Walter. “Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition.” Literature Compass 7, no. 2 (2010): 43–56. Henderson, Desirée. The Diary Index. Last modified July 9, 2019. http:// diaryindex.com. ———. “Reading Digitized Diaries: Privacy and the Digital Life Writing Archive.” A/B: Autobiography Studies 33, no. 1 (2017): 1–18. Hitchcock, Tim. “Confronting the Digital: Or How Academic History Writing Lost the Plot.” Cultural and Social History 10, no. 1 (2013): 9–23. Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive. University of California. Accessed July 12, 2015. https://calisphere.org/exhibitions/t11/jarda/. Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 85, no. 4 (2013): 661–88. Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Translated by Katherine Durnin. Manoa: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. McGann, Jerome. “Sustainability: The Elephant in the Room.” In Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come, edited by Jerome McGann, Houston: Rice University, 2010. Accessed January 5, 2016. http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:AeBKUQq-@2 /Sustainability-The-Elephant-in. Memorable Days: The Emilie Davis Diaries. Judith Giesberg, project director. Villanova University. Accessed May 12, 2014. http://davisdiaries​ .villanova.edu/. Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” Canadian Historical Review 94, no. 4 (2013): 540–69. Mussell, James. The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Nicholson, Bob. “The Digital Turn: Exploring the Methodological Possibilities of Digital Newspaper Archives.” Media History 19, no. 1 (2013): 59–73. Pipkin, Erin L. “‘Striking in Its Promise’: The Artistic Career of Sarah Gooll Putnam.” Massachusetts Historical Review 3 (2001): 89–115. Putnam, Lara. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 377–402. Putnam, Sarah Gooll. Diary. Vols. 2–7 (1861–65). Via Sarah Gooll Putnam Diaries, Massachusetts Historical Society. Accessed June 25, 2016. http:// www.masshist.org/collection-guides/view/fa0176. Siemens, Ray, Meagan Timney, Cara Leitch, Corina Koolen, and Alex Garnett. “Towards Modeling the Social Edition: An Approach to

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Understanding the Electronic Scholarly Edition in the Context of New and Emerging Social Media.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 27, no. 4 (2012): 445–61. Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: Transcription Center. Smithsonian Institution. Accessed August 14, 2015. https://transcription.si.edu/. Underwood, Ted. “Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago.” Representations 127 (2014): 64–72.

DESIRÉE HENDERSON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is author of How to Read a Diary: Critical Contexts and Interpretive Strategies for 21st-Century Readers (Routledge, 2019).

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part iv

The Travel Diary

10 British and North American Travel Writing and the Diary Tim Youngs

Diaries inform and impel much travel writing. They “show up in travel literature in numerous guises: as books, as part of books, as sources of books, not to mention as unpublished, though frequently shared, manuscripts.”1 They perform various roles for the traveler, including the recording of information, the preservation of memories, and the authentication of experience, as well as serving as a medium for personal reflection. They also chart the stability or transformation of the self during the course of the journey. Yet some studies of individual examples or of particular types notwithstanding, there has been little critical attention to the travel diary as a genre in itself. In his important collection of essays on the diary, Philippe Lejeune commented on the travel diary only briefly to suggest that it does not fit the dominant model of the life diary, as we might call it, that is his subject. Lejeune observed that “the idea of ‘finishing’ is alien to the idea of a diary.” He distinguishes this from “a limited project . . . like a travel diary or a vacation diary, which you naturally stop writing once you get home.”2 A travel diary has a conclusion in sight; it ends with the completion of the journey and thus lacks the open-endedness that Lejeune sees as an important characteristic of the less restricted diary that he takes as the norm. This is not to say that in all cases the full details of the travel diary or even its end date will be known or predictable, but that it is far from open-ended in the way that diaries of one’s life are. The difference in scope between the indefinite diary and what Lejeune appears almost to dismiss as “a limited project” is significant, and it is  179

not the only difference. Another is suggested by Lejeune’s statement— regarding his implied norm of the life-diary—that “for the person keeping a diary, it implicitly structures his days, providing an organizing principle for his behaviour.”3 On journeys, however, the itinerary and events themselves offer an additional structure: travel usually supplies a clearer sense of purpose and progress than day-to-day existence affords. While a traveler’s act of making a daily record still helps to shape the traveling life, the progress of and incidents on a journey lend a pattern that may not be apparent in ordinary life.

Authority and Authenticity We normally expect diary entries to be a daily record, usually written at the end of the day and perhaps aided by notes taken during it. The details they contain have an air of authenticity as they seem to have been recorded in the moment or very soon after the events they describe. The freshness of the telling makes it unlikely that the author’s memory has been distorted by the passing of time. Reflection appears to take place with minimal delay, a fact that strengthens our impression of the diary’s reliability. The words of the travel diarist assure readers that the author is on the spot when writing. The traveler-diarist’s authority is thereby heightened. Even periods of silence may contribute to this effect through the reader’s inference (or the author’s subsequent statement) that the gaps are due to illness, captivity, or other misfortune. The most extreme cause of incompleteness is the diary that is left unfinished because the traveler has perished en route. The survival of his or her papers and their transportation back home endows them with an aura, intensifying the sensation of their creator having been, and remaining, “out there.” Probably the best-known and one of the most poignant of examples is that of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who died on his 1911–12 Antarctic expedition, closing his diary on March 29, 1912, with the sentence “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.”4 A further factor that gives credence to the travel diary is that we usually envisage diary writing to be a direct and (initially, at least) private communication between writer and paper. This fosters a feeling that we have personal access to the author, who confides his or her thoughts and emotions in response to a particular place. There is a link between this sense of directness and that of note-taking on site. A guide to travel writing advises its readers that whatever their term for it, the contents of the diary, notebook, or journal are the “record of first impressions” and, “scribbled along the way, are invaluable in evoking atmosphere.”5 Scholars such as historian Roy C. Bridges identify the document made 180 | The Diary

on the spot as the first of various stages of a published account. Bridges delineated three categories of production in explorers’ documents, though his model may also apply more loosely to those of other types of traveler: “There is the first-stage or ‘raw’ record made as [the explorer] went along, the more considered and organised journal or perhaps letter written during intervals of greater leisure and finally the definitive account of the expedition, usually composed after his return to Europe with a view to publication.”6 Similarly, Leila Koivunen quotes from another historian, Ian MacLaren, who has shown that explorers’ texts were “often considerably changed during four stages of composition . . . and were thus not reliable records of what a traveler had experienced”7 These four stages are “the field note or log book entry which is written en route, the journal where the field notes are built into sentences and paragraphs, the draft manuscript for a book and the publication.”8 The travel diary seems to fit into the second stage in either schema. It is close to the “raw” record and, though not yet polished for publication, is crafted beyond note form. The raw record is treated in various ways. Some authors turn to it for authenticity; others depend on but obscure it, supplying instead a considered, polished narrative that removes any obvious trace of its origin.

Artfulness In addition to the various levels of reworking to which travel diaries are subject, the written voice of the diarist, like that of the autobiographer, is a literary construction. Some travel writers are aware of this and use the diary technique for their own ends. William Dalrymple spoke in an interview of how he “devised quite a complicated structure for City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi [1993], which is a narrative of a notional my wife and I spent in Delhi, but by the time it was written we had been there about four years, so it contained the best of the gleanings of my diaries.”9 That information is not presented in his book, though there may be a hint of it in the acknowledgments, which state, “This book, the story of one year in Delhi, has taken nearly four times that long to complete.”10 Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana consists of journal entries, prefaced with place and date.11 Although the impression is of spontaneity and immediacy, Byron worked at his prose carefully to create this effect, as Jonathan Raban pointed out: “The Road to Oxiana was the product of three years of constant writing and revision. Its casualness is an elaborate fiction.”12 A different method is evident in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. When Orwell wished to describe the new housing estates on the British and North American Travel Writing and the Diary  |  181

outskirts of industrial towns in the north of England and to show how they compare with slum houses, he wrote, “I can best give an idea by transcribing two more extracts from my diary.”13 He could simply have incorporated his descriptions into his narrative without reference to his diary, but his quotation from it enhances his authority as an eyewitness. It also adds another layer to his narrative by combining immediate observations with later commentary. Invoking his diary for support underlines its accuracy and reliability. In Steinitz’s words, the “impression of having been written in the thick of things, as the journey unfolds” can, in the published work, “be as artful as it is actual.”14 In Brazilian Adventure, Peter Fleming wrote thus: “‘I see no end to this journey,’ says my diary, half way between Conceição and Marabá; and indeed our progress always seemed to me to be maddeningly slow.”15 Here, Fleming turned to evidence of the situation as it was—even while testifying, through looking back, that he had emerged from it. In Through the Dark Continent, Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) recorded burning in front of Africans, in order to allay their superstitious fears, a wellthumbed edition of Shakespeare instead of the notebook in which they had seen him writing. It contained “a vast number of valuable notes” that “I could not sacrifice to the childish caprice of savages.”16 Yet in his diary account of the incident, Stanley wrote that he gave up to the flames not his copy of Shakespeare but a worthless piece of paper with careless scribbles.17 By whatever means travel writers draw on their diaries, the intimacy and immediacy of diary entries tend to command our attention, veiling the artfulness involved in their employment. Against such strategies designed with readers in mind, there is the case of diaries that are not meant for publication. A notorious instance is the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinoskwi’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, published posthumously in 1967 from the journal he kept of his fieldwork in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands in 1914–15 and 1917–18.18 To the shock of many who placed faith in the scientific status of the discipline, the diary showed Malinowski entertaining racist, ill-tempered, and lurid thoughts about his informants. For all its controversy, the publication of Malinowski’s diary contributed to a newly self-reflexive ethnography in which authors make themselves more visible in their texts. Including their emotions and interactions on the grounds that these play a part in and may influence the research is intended to convey a more realistic picture of fieldwork. Clifford Geertz declared, “The most effective way to bring field work as personal encounter and ethnography as reliable account together is to make the diary form, which Malinowski used to sequester his impure thoughts in scribbled Polish, into an ordered and public genre—something for the world to read.”19 182 | The Diary

Spaces, Writing, and Silences Malinowski’s is an example of a diary that sees its author undergo a transformation in a foreign place. His loss of temper, lecherous desires, and sense of disgust (including with himself) has drawn comparisons with Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 20 the parallel making him a figure who “goes native,” degenerating when away from Western civilization. By contrast, the travel diary may record a positive transformation in the visitor overseas. William Dalrymple, introducing a modern abridged edition of Fanny Parkes’s journals of her life in India for twenty-four years, starting in 1822, wrote approvingly that “the longer she stayed in India, the more [Parkes] became slowly Indianised,” to the extent that when she returned home, “her mother barely recognised her. . . . India had changed and transformed her.”21 Parkes’s entries over the years show her increasing engagement with the country and her sometimes dispassionate descriptions of rituals that attracted opprobrium from others. For those who move from one region or culture to another, the diary can aid the transition by managing it through the exercise of writing daily, even if the results are not always apparent at the time. Discussing the diaries of those who sailed from England to North America in the seventeenth century, Stephen Fender observed that the voyage “would interrupt the settled conventions of [their] usual prose style” but that “as soon as the crossing was turned into a story—not to mention ‘history’—it began to take on the rhetorical color of a foundation discourse.”22 In a study of the shipboard diaries of nineteenth-century British emigrants to Australia, Andrew Hassam claimed that these “were attempts to give a readable form to the literally unsettling experience of emigration.”23 The emigrants wrote “with an eye on the past, with an eye on the future, and with an eye on the present.”24 For them, to keep a diary was “to be looking towards when the journey would be over.”25 The diaries give order and shape to the months at sea between the old life in Britain and the new one in Australia. The ship may function as a liminal space, but similarly, the diaries of settlers traveling overland to the American West record and help facilitate the process of adjustment. In an analysis of women’s frontier diaries, Gayle Davis wrote of the diary as “a significant coping mechanism” and stated that “the diaries can be seen as mediators . . . between the familiar and the new, as each writer consciously or unconsciously used her journal to meet her specific needs for adjustment.”26 Davis looked at five unpublished diaries “intended solely for private use, and not for future publication.”27 She outlined five functions they performed. First, the diaries mediated between the past and the present. They were one of the women’s few possessions and allowed the writers to preserve their experiences for the future, serving as souvenirs. Second, the diaries mediated between the women’s British and North American Travel Writing and the Diary  |  183

self-perception as Victorian ladies and their fear of losing that identity in the wild, away from civilization. Third, the diary served as a means of overcoming the isolation that many were faced with in their new locales. Here, it acted as a substitute for communication with female friends or relatives: “For some women, diary-keeping addressed the often desperate loneliness and provided a kind of empathic ‘audience’ for the author’s private thoughts and feelings.”28 Fourth, the diary for the frontier writer “invent[ed] orderliness where there was none” and could thus help maintain the diarist’s mental equilibrium.29 Fifth, for their authors, the diaries mediated between feeling insignificant and feeling important, feeling forgotten and feeling remembered.30 In such situations, then, the diary becomes an important vehicle for the traveling self. It accommodates change but offers stability. The travel diary itself offers space to a range of discourses, including the missionary, the scientific, and the adventure narrative, sometimes within the same volume. One of the most prominent examples of the scientific is the journal of Charles Darwin (1809–82), published in 1839, recording his voyage on HMS Beagle from the end of 1831 to 1836.31 In it, the scientific and the personal record are combined. Scientific authors need to keep note of where they are and when and what they have observed. The information may then inform the worked-up published report, usually with the personal element subordinated or removed altogether unless a broader readership is targeted. By contrast, the popular adventure narrative brings the personal to the fore. There, the diary entries invest the writing with a steady sense of progress: in the course of a quest, obstacles are overcome and suffering is endured and transcended. A goal is either attained or replaced by self-knowledge. An infamous figure in this regard is Henry Morton Stanley, whose journalistic craft extended to a desire to control what others said. On his Emin Pasha Relief expedition (1887–89), Stanley made his companions sign an agreement that they would not publish their diaries of it until at least six months after the appearance of the official record. When their diaries did come to light, they heightened the controversy over Stanley’s conduct.32 Another type of silence is that which masks questionable behavior of various kinds. When preparing a diary for publication, editors or writers themselves may censor explicit, embarrassing, or illegal details. Authors may even, depending on the mores and laws of their time and nation, omit important information from the original diary or write it in code.33

Time and Structure Travel diaries can cover a period as short as a few days or as long as decades. Two publications by the same author illustrate each extreme. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre reports, as its title 184 | The Diary

suggests, on a week in Nicaragua.34 The same author’s Writing across the Landscape gathers material from his diaries of travel in several countries and across half a century. On occasion it allows the older self to revisit an earlier destination and to compare his newer with his older reflections. The connection between travel itself and journal writing is apparent in Ferlinghetti’s reference to his “peripatetic pages.”35 The idea that we gain a closer insight into an author through his or her diaries is exemplified by Ferlinghetti’s remark that he had never thought of publishing his diaries and by his reference to them as “interior monologues.”36 Both Ferlinghetti’s and his editors’ introductory comments present the journals and the travels they describe as formative to the author’s work and life. The editors stated that the “poet’s journeys around the world form one of his most crucial and rich sources of creative inspiration.”37 Ferlinghetti himself exclaims, “I see this book in the tradition of D. H. Lawrence’s travels in Italy or Goethe’s Italian journeys. . . . It is as if much of my life were a continuation of my youthful wanderjahr, my walkabout in the world.”38 Another feature of the duration of diaries or journals is that they may reveal inconsistencies and self-contradiction. These may complicate or undermine the idea of a self undergoing a steady, linear progression. A dramatic illustration is Captain James Cook (1728–79), who shifts between empathy and violence. On Sunday, August 14, 1774, he considered how his ship’s arrival must seem to indigenous people: “In what other light can they at first look upon us but as invaders of their Country; time and some acquaintance with us can only convince them of their mistake.”39 On June 1, 1778, near modern-day Anchorage, Cook sent Second Lieutenant James King of the Resolution with “two armed boats, with orders to land on the northern point of the low land on the SE side of the River [which he names Turnagain], there to display the flag, [and] take possession of the Country and River in his Majestys name.”40 There is little or no sense, in this second example, of Cook entertaining the indigenous people’s point of view. Alternatively, there might be inconsistency not so much within a diary as between it and other writings. The wealthy American communist heiress Kate Crane Gartz’s three travel diaries exhibit racial attitudes and national stereotypes at odds with her outlook on economic and social inequality; she championed socialism at great cost to herself.41 A truer reflection of Gartz’s radicalism is to be found in her moral and financial support of fellow socialists, in her correspondence with them, and (at personal risk) her activism. Her diaries are unrepresentative of these.42 Some travel books that seem episodic and that preserve the structure of the journey do not present themselves as composed of diary entries, even though they read very much as if they are based on contemporaneous daily records. Examples include John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley British and North American Travel Writing and the Diary  |  185

(1962) and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways: A Journey into America. Another example is V.  S. Naipaul’s A Congo Diary (1980), which makes reference to some days of the week and times of day but does not give dates.43 Their omission heightens the impressionistic effect of the trip, even though the writing combines historical with personal detail. In the context of the Congo, the absence of exact dates echoes the formlessness seen in fictional representations of the region, notably Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and reinforces the sense of it as a place that threatens Western order and timekeeping.44 Other narratives that are told in the form of a diary have an amount of detail or literary quality that divert attention from the division into entries by date. An example is Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), whose lyricism and Zen-inspired meditation on self and landscape transcend temporal attribution. Another type is the text in which there may be occasional references to dates but that is largely retold as a continuous narrative. For instance, chapter 5 of John Steinbeck’s Russian Journal opens thus: “In the morning we looked up the date, and it was August 9. We had been just nine days in the Soviet Union. But so many had been our impressions and sights that it seemed like much more to us.”45 The book has journal in its title and reads as if based on contemporaneous notes, but for the most part, a diary mode has been abandoned in the published work. The same author’s Travels with Charley was developed from his diaries of that trip across the United States, though with some artful deviation. An unusual narrative structure and handling of time is found in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, in which the author, in his sixties, recounted a journey he made across Europe in the 1930s. He wrote toward the end of his book, “Recently—after I had set down all I could remember of these ancient travels—I made a journey down the whole length of the Danube . . . and in Romania . . . I recovered a diary I had left in a country house there in 1939.”46 He then spent a paragraph describing his old diary from nearly forty years earlier, whose “320 closely-written pages in pencil .  .  . sporadically record my travels in all the countries between Bratislava and Constantinople, whence it moves to Mount Athos and stops.”47 Reading it brings back to his mind “faces I had forgotten for many years.” Although he found that the contents were not up to the standard he had imagined, he concluded: “With all its drawbacks, the text did have one virtue: it was dashed down at full speed. I know it is dangerous to change key, but I can’t resist using a few passages of this old diary here and there. I have not interfered with the text except for cutting and condensing and clearing up obscurities.”48 As we have seen, introducing extracts from a diary into one’s narrative is a common technique, but it is rare to include passages from one’s own retrieved diary, written decades earlier, of the same route. Doing so supplies Leigh Fermor’s book with an 186 | The Diary

archaeological texture that emphasizes the difference between the earlier and later traveling self but also exposes some continuities. Some people might not be perturbed by the loss of a diary. Lejeune commented that “the diary is the enemy of memory, because it keeps your past from changing!”49 Novelist and travel writer Jonathan Raban explained that when he returns from a trip, “I spend most of my time forgetting rather than remembering until I feel I can write about it, until I’ve got something very much like what I have inside my head when I’m writing fiction, in other words, a memory that is not overpolluted by irrelevant details.”50 Although he is not talking directly about diaries here, Raban’s comments allude to the distance and imaginative space that professional writers may feel necessary for their artful rendering of the travel experience: “It does seem to me that a kind of forgetting has to take place first, because otherwise you’re just landed up with the shapelessness of the journey instead of that imagined shape the journey begins to take on once you’re far enough away from it for the irrelevancies to have leaped out of it, and you’re left with various essential bits which you can then draw on when you write.”51 Of the different types of travel diary, then, we can classify ones that present dates and the diary format; ones that are evidently based on a diary but that dispense with dates while retaining an episodic structure and making some reference to dates or days or months; and ones that abandon the diary format in favor of a continuous narrative but that may retain the label diary or journal in their title. In practice, elements of each may seep into the other (as is appropriate since critics usually refer to travel writing as a mixed genre).

Technology Technological developments have changed how people travel and how diaries are kept and disseminated, but the appeal of the diary to author and reader has not altered. Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas noted that “the diaristic style is still the most recognizable and popular kind of travel blog.”52 Indeed, the ability in our digital age to upload and publish photographs on the move only reinforces the sense of immediacy. One difference from the conventional diary—as Lena Karlsson, among others, pointed out—is that blogs have their entries “appearing in reverse chronological order so that the reader first encounters the latest posting.”53 Another distinction is that “in diary weblogs, with their instantaneous mode of publication, the acts of reading and writing feed into each other in a spiralling way.”54 This feature not only facilitates direct contact between author and reader—and the publication of readers’ responses—but can also help establish a community of readers. For example, Karlsson offered British and North American Travel Writing and the Diary  |  187

a case study of how “the online diary’s interactive capabilities enable communities to be formed around life-writing texts, a clear instance of when cyberspace generates a radical new form of social interaction.”55 Karlsson focused on the involvement in the Rice Bowl Journals web ring of twenty-five young Asian American women, most of them living in Southern California, who are “firmly territorially based and yet . . . privileged enough to be able to swiftly traverse the world both digitally and physically” and visit their “ancestral homeland” every few years.56 Karlsson found that their “tales of travel are highly crafted and written with a specific audience in mind. These are not spur-of-the-moment reports narrated whilst away; most often these travelogues are published a few weeks after the homecoming experience.”57 A further difference from conventional diaries is that online diarists can use hyperlinks to enable navigation across and beyond diaries in ways not available previously. It is this function that helped win over Lejeune from his initial disappointment with the online diary, though at the time of his writing (1999), Lejeune found that such examples were rare.58 Another way in which the internet has impacted the travel diary is to make even substantial volumes with scholarly annotations freely accessible online. An example is the University of Nebraska Press edition, edited by Gary E. Moulton, of the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s 1804–6 expedition to and in the American West. Digital publication provides more scope than print for adding supporting visual and audio material not in the original, but in this case, it also allows for the presentation of Native American perspectives.59 On the other hand, the ubiquity of blogs and the near uniformity of templates mean that their authors are generally more anonymous than diarists whose works appear in book form. Although weblogs are often thought of as being more multidimensional than pre-internet diaries, manuscript and print diaries do not all, of course, consist only of prose. For centuries they have included visual images and latterly photographs. Ferlinghetti’s The Mexican Night, for one, mixes prose, short poems, and drawings.60 David Hockney and Stephen Spender’s China Diary (1982) has images and text overlain across each other on some pages.61 These mixed forms convey the idea of travel as happening in several spheres and requiring multimodal representation, which one does not need computers to achieve.

Conclusion This brief discussion of selected British and North American travel diaries from the late eighteenth century to the present is premised on the observation that travel writing and the diary are not synonymous but that the one 188 | The Diary

very often informs the other and that they share structural affinities. The inherent chronology of the diary (even in the reverse chronology of the blog) complements the movement through space, so that we follow the authorprotagonist’s progress through both realms. Journeys through space and over time raise the question of whether and how far the traveling self will be altered by experience. A dynamic between stability and transformation is consequently introduced, whether implicitly or directly addressed. The form of the diary, while a tool to manage change, allows for contradiction and inconsistency that may cut across the sequential tendency. Travel diaries do not provide unmediated views of the world or the traveler, however. They draw on available literary models and they exhibit features of other literary genres, including autobiography, the letter, the adventure novel, and the scientific report. They are written with an audience in mind, even when they are ostensibly private. As Hassam puts it, “all diaries need an addressee because all writing makes assumptions about who will read it.” Thus “the most secret of diaries has to be directed towards an audience, even if it is the god of the seventeenthcentury Puritan diarists.”62 Consciousness of the addressee means shaping one’s self and one’s words accordingly, as indeed one is already shaped by social conventions of thought, conduct and appropriateness. The travel diary shows the author moving through form and medium as much as through space and time. Notes 1. Rebecca Steinitz, “Diaries,” in Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopaedia, ed. Jennifer Speake (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003), 1:332. 2. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. Katherine Durnin (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 173. Lejeune also reports trying to get out of a talk on the subject by telling the person who has invited him, “I abhorred travel diaries” (ibid., 317). 3. Ibid., 153. 4. Robert Falcon Scott, Journals: Captain Scott’s Last Expedition, ed. Max Jones (Oxford University Press, 2005), 412. The quoted sentence is the final one above his name, but underneath he added, “For God’s sake look after our people.” 5. Cynthia Dial, Travel Writing (London: Teach Yourself Books, 2001), 47. 6. Roy C. Bridges, “Nineteenth-Century East African Travel Records with an Appendix on ‘Armchair Geographers’ and Cartography,” Paideuma 33 (1987): 180. 7. Leila Koivunen, Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts (New York: Routledge, 2009), 7; see also I. S. MacLaren, “In Consideration of the Evolution of Explorers and Travellers into Authors: A Model,” Studies in Travel Writing 15, no. 3 (2011): 221–41. 8. Koivunen, Visualizing Africa, 233n39.

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9. Tim Youngs, “Interview with William Dalrymple,” Studies in Travel Writing 9, no. 1 (2005): 42, emphasis mine. 10. William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (London: Flamingo, 1994), 3. 11. Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (London: Macmillan, 1937). 12. Jonathan Raban, “The Journey and the Book,” in For Love and Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling, 1969–1987 (London: Collins Harvill, 1987), 255. 13. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, foreword by Victor Gollancz (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), 67. 14. Steinitz, “Diaries,” 1:333. 15. Peter Fleming, Brazilian Adventure (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), 313. 16. Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, or the Sources of the Nile around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1890), 571. 17. Norman R. Bennett, ed., Stanley’s Despatches to the “New York Herald,” 1871–1872, 1874–1877 (Boston: Boston University Press, 1970), 387. 18. Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, trans. Norbert Guterman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). 19. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988), 84. 20. Heart of Darkness was first published serially in 1899 in the February, March, and April issues of Blackwood’s Magazine and subsequently in Conrad’s Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902). 21. William Dalrymple, introduction to Begums, Thugs and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes, ed. William Dalrymple (London: Sickle Moon Books, 2002), vii, ix. Parkes’s journals were originally published as Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, During Four-and-Twenty Years in the East; With Revelations of Life in the Zenaˉna, 2 vols. (London: Pelham Richardson, 1850). 22. Stephen Fender, Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 126. 23. Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by NineteenthCentury British Emigrants (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 42. 24. Ibid., 43. 25. Ibid., 44. 26. Gayle R. Davis, “Women’s Frontier Diaries: Writing for Good Reason,” Women’s Studies 14, no. 1 (1987): 5. 27. Ibid., 6. 28. Ibid., 9. 29. Ibid., 12. 30. Ibid. 31. See Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, ed. Richard Darwin Keynes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Charles Darwin, Diary of the Voyage of the H. M. S. Beagle, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: New York University Press, 1987). 32. For a discussion of the expedition and its narratives see Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 113–81.

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33. On the journals of Roger Casement (1864–1916), for example, see Robert M. Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities: Eyewitness Accounts of Colonialism in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo (New York: Routledge, 2011). 34. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1984). 35. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Writing across the Landscape: Travel Journals, 1960–2010, ed. Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson (New York: Liveright, 2015), xvii. 36. Ibid., xvii, xviii. 37. Ibid., xix. 38. Ibid., xvii (ellipsis in the original). 39. James Cook, The Journals: Prepared from the Original Manuscripts by J. C. Beaglehole for the Hakluyt Society, 1955–67, ed. Philip Edwards (London: Penguin, 2003), 384. 40. Ibid., 557. 41. See Tim Youngs, “The Pacifist Traveller: Kate Crane-Gartz,” in American Travel and Empire, ed. Susan Castillo and David Seed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 200–216. 42. For discussion of another left-wing radical American’s (unpublished) travel diary, see Tim Youngs, “Underground Travels: Powers Hapgood and the Miners of the World,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 49, no. 9 (2013): 472–87. 43. William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America (Boston: Little Brown, 1982); John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Viking Press, 1962); V. S. Naipaul, A Congo Diary (Los Angeles: Sylvester and Orphanos, 1980). 44. See Tim Youngs, “The Congo: the Politics of Darkness,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 156–73. 45. John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal, photographs by Robert Capa (New York: Viking Press, 1948), 72. 46. Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (London: John Murray, 2004), 248. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Lejeune, On Diary, 169. 50. Jonathan Raban, “A Long Way from Home,” in A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk about Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration, ed. Michael Shapiro (Palo Alto, CA: Travelers’ Tales, 2004), 59. 51. Ibid., 59–60. 52. Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas, “Travel Blogs,” in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Carl Thompson (London: Routledge, 2016), 299. 53. Lena Karlsson, “The Diary Weblog and the Travelling Tales of Diasporic Tourists,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 27, no. 3 (2006), 301, https:// doi.org/10.1080/07256860600779303. 54. Ibid., 302 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 303. 57. Ibid., 305.

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58. See Lejeune, On Diary, 302–4. 59. Compare “Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska Press, and National Endowment for the Humanities, accessed December 3, 2016, http:// lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/, with Gary E. Moulton, ed., Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. 9, The Journals of John Ordway, May 14, 1804–September 23, 1806, and Charles Floyd, May 14–August 18, 1804 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 60. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, The Mexican Night: Travel Journal (New York: New Directions, 1970). 61. Stephen Spender and David Hockney, China Diary (New York: Abrams, 1982). 62. Ibid., 42.

Bibliography Bennett, Norman R., ed. Stanley’s Despatches to the “New York Herald,” 1871–1872, 1874–1877. Boston: Boston University Press, 1970. Bridges, Roy C. “Nineteenth-Century East African Travel Records with an Appendix on ‘Armchair Geographers’ and Cartography.” Paideuma 33 (1987): 179–96. Burroughs, Robert M. Travel Writing and Atrocities: Eyewitness Accounts of Colonialism in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo. New York: Routledge, 2011. Byron, Robert. The Road to Oxiana. London: Macmillan, 1937. Cardell, Kylie, and Kate Douglas. “Travel Blogs.” In The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Carl Thompson, 298–307. London: Routledge, 2016. Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness.” In Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, n.p. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902. Cook, James. The Journals: Prepared from the Original Manuscripts by J. C. Beaglehole for the Hakluyt Society, 1955–67. Selected and edited by Philip Edwards. London: Penguin, 2003. Dalrymple, William. City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi. 1993. Reprint, London: Flamingo, 1994. ———. Introduction to Begums, Thugs and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes, edited by William Dalrymple, v–xix. London: Sickle Moon Books, 2002. Darwin, Charles. Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary. Edited by Richard Darwin Keynes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ———. Diary of the Voyage of the H. M. S. Beagle. Edited by Nora Barlow. New York: New York University Press, 1987. Davis, Gayle R. “Women’s Frontier Diaries: Writing for Good Reason.” Women’s Studies 14, no. 1 (1987): 5–14. Dial, Cynthia. Travel Writing. London: Teach Yourself Books, 2001. Fender, Stephen. Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. The Mexican Night: Travel Journal. New York: New Directions, 1970. ———. Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1984.

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———. Writing across the Landscape: Travel Journals, 1960–2010. Edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson. New York: Liveright, 2015. Fermor, Patrick Leigh. A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople; From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube. London: John Murray, 2004. Fleming, Peter. Brazilian Adventure. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957. Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Oxford: Polity Press, 1988. Hassam, Andrew. Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by NineteenthCentury British Emigrants. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Heat-Moon, William Least. Blue Highways: A Journey into America. Boston: Little Brown, 1982. Jonathan, Raban. “The Journey and the Book.” In For Love and Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling, 1969–1987, 253–60. London: Collins Harvill, 1987. Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Accessed December 3, 2016. http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/. Karlsson, Lena. “The Diary Weblog and the Travelling Tales of Diasporic Tourists.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 27, no. 3 (2006): 299–312. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860600779303. Koivunen, Leila. Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts. New York: Routledge, 2009. Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Translated by Katherine Durnin. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. MacLaren, I. S. “In Consideration of the Evolution of Explorers and Travellers into Authors: A Model.” Studies in Travel Writing 15, no. 3 (2011): 221–41. Malinowski, Bronislaw. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Translated by Norbert Guterman. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. Moulton, Gary E., ed. Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Vol. 9, The Journals of John Ordway, May 14, 1804–September 23, 1806, and Charles Floyd, May 14–August 18, 1804. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Naipaul, V. S. A Congo Diary. Los Angeles: Sylvester and Orphanos, 1980. Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. Foreword by Victor Gollancz. London: Victor Gollancz, 1937. Parkes, Fanny. Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, during Four and Twenty Years in the East; With Revelations of Life in the Zenaˉna. 2 vols. London: Pelham Richardson, 1850. Raban, Jonathan. “A Long Way from Home.” In A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk about Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration, edited by Michael Shapiro, 253–60. Palo Alto, CA: Travelers’ Tales, 2004. Scott, Robert Falcon. Journals: Captain Scott’s Last Expedition. Edited by Max Jones. Oxford University Press, 2005. Spender, Stephen, and David Hockney. China Diary. New York: Abrams, 1982. Stanley, Henry M. Through the Dark Continent, or the Sources of the Nile around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1890. Steinbeck, John. A Russian Journal. Photographs by Robert Capa. New York: Viking Press, 1948.

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———. Travels with Charley: In Search of America. New York: Viking Press, 1962. Steinitz, Rebecca. “Diaries.” In Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia, edited by Jennifer Speake, 331–34. Vol. 1. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003. Youngs, Tim. “The Congo: The Politics of Darkness.” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 156–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. “Interview with William Dalrymple.” Studies in Travel Writing 9, no. 1 (2005): 37–63. ———. “The Pacifist Traveller: Kate Crane-Gartz.” In American Travel and Empire, edited by Susan Castillo and David Seed, 200–216. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. ———. Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. ———. “Underground Travels: Powers Hapgood and the Miners of the World.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 49, no. 9 (2013): 472–87.

T I M YOU NG S is Professor of English and Travel Studies and Director of the Centre for Travel Writing Studies at Nottingham Trent University, England. His books include The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (edited with Nandini Das) and The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing (edited with Alasdair Pettinger).

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11 Travel Diaries in Australia Agnieszka Sobocinska

Australia has long been a nation on the move, and that mobility has been enthusiastically inscribed. This chapter investigates the role of the travel diary in Australia, with a particular focus on travel diaries kept by Australians on overseas journeys. Rather than positing a unique Australian subjectivity, it highlights the importance of mobility in shaping Australian attitudes to the world and points to the role of travel diaries within that experience. Over the course of the twentieth century, Australian identity was forged in the tension between historical ties to Europe and geographical proximity to Asia. The tug-of-war between history and geography also took place at the level of the individual within the pages of travel diaries. As Richard White pointed out in 1981, Australians have been unusually preoccupied with discovering (or inventing) a national identity.1 During their travels, many reflected on what it meant to be Australian and whether proximity to Asia would play a more significant role in the nation’s future than its historical connections with Britain. Australians have long found meaning in travel. For tens of thousands of years, Australia’s Indigenous people inscribed country by narrating their movement across land. Although their motives were very different, European explorers (and later settlers) also carefully annotated their movements through “undiscovered” and, to their eyes, strange lands. Even into the twentieth century, Australians were conscious of the “tyranny of distance” that separated Australia’s towns and cities from each other, and from the rest of the world. Colonialism taught Australians to think that the people, places, and events that mattered were elsewhere.  195

By the early twentieth century, travel to the colonial metropole of London, to old-world capitals of Europe, or to the modern metropolises of New York and Los Angeles was a valuable commodity in the Australian status hierarchy.2 The inducement to travel proved irresistible for more and more Australians, particularly as new transport technologies made the annihilation of distance possible and affordable. Some Australian travel diaries reveal an incremental inching toward new perspectives. Over the twentieth century, Australian society and politics underwent a gradual and sometimes contentious shift from historical and sentimental ties to Britain toward a greater accommodation of its place in Asia. In Europe, Australian travelers were confronted with the places that had previously lived only in imagination. Some diaries reveal ecstasy, but others record anticlimax and a growing feeling of Australian nationalism. From midcentury, increasing numbers headed to Asia, and travelers were forced to negotiate new climates, cultures, and languages. Above all, they confronted the issue of race, often pausing to consider their views for the first time in their lives. In their travel diaries, we can see the gradual stirrings of significant shifts in Australian notions about Asia and the world. While some diaries recorded important insights, many others spoke to the banality of travel. Padding out pages between discoveries, of the world and oneself, were the minutiae of a traveler’s life. The commercial transactions that structure tourism are laid bare in the pages of a travel diary. For many, what they wanted to buy, how much it cost and how much baggage allowance remained was just as important as the bigger discoveries about culture, history, or geography.

Rediscovering the Old World Australia’s southeastern corner was the first part of the country to be extensively settled by Europeans; it remains the most populous part of the country today. It is also the farthest from any foreign destination apart from New Zealand. The distance between Sydney and London is some 10,500 miles; a similar distance separates Melbourne and New York. Historian Geoffrey Blainey has famously called this the “tyranny of distance.”3 Nowadays, the journey can take less than twenty-four hours, and although this can feel like a lifetime on a plane, it doesn’t compare to the journey times of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The earliest convict ships took somewhere in the vicinity of nine months to reach their destination; by the late nineteenth century, emigrants traveled on modern steam liners that had whittled the journey down to three months. In the interwar years this was further reduced to six weeks. Even so, the monotony of shipboard life was caesura during which travelers suspended 196 | The Diary

the patterns of the life they left behind. As Andrew Hassam has shown, many nineteenth-century emigrants bound for Australia began a new journal at the start of the sea journey. The shipboard diary not only provided much-needed entertainment during the months at sea but also allowed emigrants to make sense of their lives by narrating their journey as a symbolic break from the past.4 The late nineteenth century ushered in a new era of mobility. The same ships that brought migrants ashore departed with cabins full of Australian tourists eager to see the world. Shaped by the tyranny of distance and the accompanying sense that “real life” happened elsewhere, Australians were particularly eager travelers. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, around ten thousand Australians headed to London every year.5 Although tourists made a less dramatic break than migrants, typically departing for only a matter of months rather than the foreseeable future, many began a new diary to document their journeys. A forthcoming journey prompted some Australians to begin a diary for the first time in their lives; established diarists savored the opportunity to write about new horizons. Until the introduction of jet aircraft in the 1950s, an overseas journey was considered a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Travelers kept a journal to record their impressions of distant lands and customs, to improve themselves through reflection on what they had seen and learned, and as an aide de memoire for future recollection. Anticipation of cultural discovery was joined by the expectation of personal growth. Since the Grand Tour, travel had been linked with education and the attainment of knowledge. Australia’s historical ties with Britain imbued a journey to London with particular importance. The colonial mind-set idealized the imperial metropole, and a trip to London could function as a secular pilgrimage that simultaneously reinforced cultural ties between Britain and Australia. For many Australians, “complete spiritual fulfillment could only occur on the other side of the world.”6 This was imbued through formal institutions as well as private sentiment: as Richard White has noted, Australian schoolchildren in their final exams could be asked to “describe carefully the scenery, nationalities and types of trade commodities likely to be met with” in the ports along the way to London.7 While London was the most common destination for Australians seeking to make their fortunes, others sought out the old-world capitals of Paris or Berlin. As Angela Woollacott noted, “By the last decades of the nineteenth century, travel to Britain and other parts of Europe was a commodity rich in social and cultural meaning for Australians.”8 Famed children’s author Ethel Turner arrived in England in 1910. Turner was a lifelong diarist; her notebooks were a semipublic production that “later served as a guide for recounting her impressions and adventures.”9 The pages in Turner’s diaries devoted to England are full of Travel Diaries in Australia  |  197

delights discovered—or, more precisely, rediscovered. Rediscovery could be literal, as when Turner set off to find her childhood home (Turner had immigrated to Australia at the age of seven), but most often it was metaphorical, in the sense that London’s cobbled streets or Britain’s green pastures were already well known to Australians raised on British books, magazines, and cultural references. Many Australian travelers thought that reaching England was like entering some sort of preexisting imaginative world, as seen in a dream, painting, novel, or film.10 Even a walk in the park could evoke passions, as the English greenery Australian children read about (and which Turner perhaps remembered from her early childhood) came to life. In one entry, Turner described “a walk in Kensington Gardens, than which in their earliest spring green I can imagine nothing more lovely. The grass slopes, the lovely distances and haze among the trees, the trees themselves—oh these English trees—I shall never forget this first glimpse of Kensington Gardens.”11 The breathless admiration of England and Englishness, common to travel diaries at the time, was the product of historical and sentimental connections between Australia and England. Turner went on to publish an account of her travels but curiously, her diaries provide the only account of this visit to England. In 1911, Turner published a book detailing her travels through Italy, Germany, Holland, and Belgium, but in London, “at what might have been the climax of her tour, the travel writing suddenly stopped.” Curious as this is, Turner was not alone. As Richard White noted, Australian travel writers could be curiously silent about England. 12 Part of their reticence lay in the fear that their journeys—not off the beaten track but to the very heart of the known world—would not be interesting enough to warrant publication. In Ports and Happy Havens, Turner felt it necessary to explain that for the Australian visitor, like a blind man “only just possessed of the priceless treasure of sight,”13 exploration can take place even in places that were very well known. Another reason is that arrival in England could be a very emotional and personal event. Turner was profoundly moved by a London that “had begun to grip [her] very hard.” She depicted the visit as an almost religious experience. On the homeward journey, at the first sight of the “long wash of Australasian seas,” Turner wrote in her diary that “the holiday is ended, and the dream is dreamed, but like the pilgrims when they come from Lourdes, we, too, have round our neck rosaries that have been dipped in miraculous waters, beads that we can tell over and over to ourselves and never tire.”14 The reverence with which Turner held England became increasingly unusual over the twentieth century. Travel became more affordable in the postwar period, and Australian travel to Britain became so common it was referred to as a “phenomenon.” Mat Trinca has argued that the 198 | The Diary

process of travel to London helped Australians identify and celebrate a distinct Australian identity.15 Having arrived seeking “home,” many travelers found themselves on the margins; moreover, once the novelty wore off, the habits and proclivities of the British came to appear distinctly odd. A potent mix of alienation and homesickness led some to stress the differences, rather than the similarities, between Australians and Britons. Some of the brash Australian nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s had its roots in this experience, and it is in letters and diaries that references to Britain’s inferior plumbing, awful weather, and Londoners’ stuffy, outdated attitudes found fullest expression. Travel to England could be a personal reinforcement of national ties between Australia and Britain, but increasingly, it disrupted those ties too.

Beyond Britain Although London was the ultimate destination, many Australians had their first experience abroad during stopovers in Asia’s port cities. The most popular shipping routes called at Singapore and Colombo before going on to Europe via the Suez Canal, and those headed for the United States usually stopped over in Hong Kong or Tokyo. Although Asian stopovers were short—usually only a few days and occasionally even a few hours—they tended to evoke strong responses. Singapore and Colombo were often the first places outside Australia that travelers had seen, and the wonder of discovery is particularly strong in travel diaries. The page in the wealthy pastoralist Una Falkiner’s diary that marks her arrival in Colombo in 1929 is dotted with exclamation marks. After days of monotony and seasickness, even “the scent of the misty air was delicious!”16 Sydneysider Mabel Dowding was headed for England and France, as a delegate to the memorial ceremony commemorating the outbreak of World War I in 1928. Like Falkiner, she was excited to sight land after long, hot days of alternating seasickness and homesickness. She thought “it seemed strange this, our first view of something outside Australia,” and her diary is punctuated by statements of difference. The sight of palm trees and catamarans, of cows grazing in the open space, even of a new currency made her feel “how different everything seemed to those of us who had never been out of Australia.”17 Initial responses were often positive, reflecting a popular cultural tradition that inscribed the Orient as romantic and exotic. In Colombo, the glittering sea and majestic palm trees, as well as the carnival of hawkers and acrobats that greeted the arrival of every steamship, made for an enthusiastic first impression. Sometimes, the sight of dark-skinned men and women could trigger something deeper than enthusiasm. Orientalism was deeply imbricated with sex. Asian women were imagined as Travel Diaries in Australia  |  199

submissive and desirable butterflies, and Asian men were also rendered into objects of sexual fantasy in the figure of the sheik.18 However, the conventions of respectability often prevented the expression of desire for the Asian Other. The travel diary could provide a private space in which such desires could be admitted in a way that would be impossible in letters, let alone published writing. Una Falkiner was roused by the sensuous air, which “was magical,” smelling of coconuts and lush, tropical greenery. Early in the morning, the “scent of the misty air was delicious,” and she found her eyes drawn to the men unloading the ship’s cargo of Adelaide flour whose “chocolate skin shone” and who suggested a life of freedom removed from convention, as they “all shout and are so gay.”19 Observing Asia from the comfort of a steamship was one thing, but tangible contact was another. Many white Australian travelers were overwhelmed by the experience of being outnumbered by non-European “natives,” an experience mostly precluded back home by the White Australia policy. The shock was often expressed in negative terms. Falkiner’s erotic reveries were forgotten after a drive through town when she declared, “I never want to see or smell the blacks again.”20 Even more than memoirs or travel writing, which were produced retrospectively, diaries captured a tangible, almost physical repulsion to the disorder, noise, and dirt of Asia’s booming port cities. Dowding was also delighted by the scenery from aboard ship and from the train that took her on a day trip to Kandy, inland from Colombo. But admiration soon turned to disgust. On alighting, she found “it is a beautiful spot + one wished for a longer time here, only the natives + their begging thoroughly spoilt it all.” The sensory overload of Ceylon, with its perfumed flowers and colorfully dressed inhabitants, “left an impression one could hardly define, but we realised more than we would have thought possible what it was like to live in a clean wholesome country + we felt we wouldn’t mind sighting just a little patch of it to counteract the overcrowded feeling that was left on our minds.” The cadence of Dowding’s diary mapped her emotional state as she became overwhelmed by close contact with another race and culture. Sentences became longer and more breathless as impressions and curiosities piled up, until finally erupting in frustrated exclamations that reveal her powerlessness in the face of the Other: “Oh! They are most wily” or “Oh, the tawdriness of it all!”21 Channeling the racism of White Australia, Falkiner and Dowding’s rejection of the Other was reenacted by countless tourists on their first encounter with Asia. Some Australians went further afield. Like many Australians of his class, artist Donald Friend’s first overseas trip was to London, but before long, his avant-garde aesthetic sensibilities and Nigerian lover drew him to Africa. In Nigeria, any concern about treading well-worn paths was extinguished; rather, Friend’s diary took on the tone of a colonial 200 | The Diary

explorer. Watching a Yoruba procession, he declared “I believe I am the first European ever to witness it.”22 His diary recorded fascination but also the frustration of trying to understand a society different to his own. Following a ceremony, he inscribed his inability to access Yoruba culture. “It is simple to them,” he wrote, “yet I cannot pierce the veil to grasp the truth underlying these acts.”23 Increasingly, frustration at this inadequacy was targeted at the Yoruba. Friend’s tone became increasingly vicious, as dysentery and distance from Europe (where World War II was beginning) compounded his irritation. Although he was a guest of the Ogoga of Ikerre, his diary bristled at the corruption and “philosophy of egotism” of his court. His frustration bubbled over when, one day, he managed to gather a group of elders to tell him of the tribe’s past, but “unfortunately what they told was not much use. In fact it was hardly history, but deliberate propaganda. I asked for history and got a lot of biased babble. Though I dare say much of it is true enough.”24 While it promised adventure, traveling off the beaten track meant traveling without a script. For Falkiner and Dowding at Colombo and Friend in Nigeria, the lack of preconceptions (and guidebooks) left them unprepared. Reading their diaries, it is evident that the lack of a preexisting, imagined world could contribute to the shock of arriving in Africa or Asia, which led some overwhelmed travelers to reject the Other as incomprehensible and irrational. Personal diaries reveal that visiting destinations rich with preconceptions could be more pleasurable. After a lifetime of imagining, Donald Friend’s first experience of Florence was climactic and in direct contrast to his annoyance with Ikerre. Florence was “fantastically beautiful,” as “every house, every street shows something admirable, something one has known about as long as one was conscious of art.” Friend’s delight was notable for coming at a particularly dark period in the wake of a failed relationship. As he wrote, “I feel sick and lonely but at last in a place that pours over me the richness of the civilisation I need.”25 While travel writers increasingly encouraged travelers to scorn popular destinations, travelers’ diaries reveal that sometimes, getting off the beaten track was less than pleasurable. Diaries addressed various audiences, reflecting travel’s dual role as the means to spiritual fulfillment and of cultural capital. Some diaries were intensely personal, but others were written with the apprehension of being read by family, friends, or even distant acquaintances. Friend’s diaries, kept over a lifetime, underwent a fascinating shift as his selfknowledge, and his sense of the diary’s audience, firmed. Sections of his diary were published in 1943, while Friend was still in his twenties, and he expressed an intention to donate them to a cultural institution from this same period.26 Yet rather than becoming more circumspect, Friend’s diaries became increasingly frank during frequent and extended visits to Travel Diaries in Australia  |  201

London, Nigeria, Italy, Sri Lanka (where he spent five years), and, most famously, Bali (where he lived for twelve years). Sex, travel, painting, and writing were interconnected. Friend was to speculate whether “one’s personal view of geography [is] entirely coloured by sexual fantasies.”27 And, as Grey noted, “over the years, the diaries assumed a greater meaning and importance to him.”28 Like his art, the diaries were always by his side, an enduring companion despite the constant change of scene and company.

Discovering Asia From the 1950s, Australian tourists increasingly saw Asia as a destination in its own right.29 More Australians went to Asia than Europe for the first time in 1973 and have done so every year since 1981. By 1998, more Australians headed to Indonesia than the United Kingdom.30 Australians’ discovery of Asia coincided with a technological revolution that affected how travel diaries were produced and, increasingly, shared. Barrister Joan Rosanove typed the diary of her 1956 Southeast Asian cruise on a portable typewriter. This was intended to make it more legible, and it accompanied her legal papers to the National Library of Australia after her death.31 Like many travelers, Sydney businessman William Wade began to keep a diary during his Asian tour. Unlike most previous diary keepers, however, Wade’s diary was spoken into a cassette recorder purchased in Hong Kong. The novelty of the technology offered new opportunities for communication as well as personal reflection. Travel diaries were often regarded as semipublic productions. Wade’s tapes were equal parts travel diary and series of letters. Different sections came with instructions about whom they could be played to: Wade’s wife, his daughters, and even more distant relatives and friends.32 Such complex texts prefigured the blogs favored by later travelers, which combined the tasks of diary and letter. Their changing formats helped bridge the personal and public spheres, reflecting the multiple tasks performed by travel diaries. Discussions of the latest travel technology were common in many diaries, often written in the interstices offered by travel in an airplane or bus. The impact of a journey by air was particularly notable. Many came to feel that air travel brought Australia and Asia closer together; as Foreign Minister Richard Casey noted, “Now that we can move about so quickly from one part of the world to another, we have to pay much more attention to our nearest neighbours—the countries of Asia.”33 Flying allowed travelers a new perspective. William Wade set off to explore trading prospects in Hong Kong and Japan in 1962. In his audio diary, he ruminated that “when you’re in the air and you look down and you feel the immensity of it all . . . you can get somewhat of the feeling that these astronauts must have had when they were travelling around.” While 202 | The Diary

flying over populated areas, he thought, “It is all really very interesting, and so marvellous to imagine that all these various places are living their lives . . . and the world is sort of coming closer together in so many ways.”34 Even though the world seemed to be coming closer, encounters with Asia could still be overwhelming. The negotiations of day-to-day contacts jotted down in a diary can be more revealing than encounters retrospectively narrated for a broader audience, as in travel writing. This is particularly so for sensitive topics, in which comments for public consumption were often measured and restrained. But in the pages of a diary, immediate sensations take on full force. Isobel Gribble, wife of the general secretary of Methodist Overseas Missions in Australia, was an experienced traveler by the time she arrived in Colombo in 1965. Even so, Gribble’s revulsion was barely controlled, springing up to disrupt the syntax of her diary. An excursion to Kandy took her to “a Buddhist temple (I still feel my feet dirty),” where “we had to take our shoes off and walk around on gritty floors”; having left, “we were glad to put on shoes which I washed inside + also my feet as soon as I got to my room.”35 Gribble’s repeated reinscribing of dirt, mirroring the compulsive washing of feet and shoes, provided an insight into the disorder Asia had inspired in her mind. After another week of travel in Sri Lanka and India, Gribble noted with an almost tangible shudder, “Oh, the dirt of India.”36 Tourists were often overpowered the moment they stepped outside the grand colonial-era hotels that were a mainstay for Western travelers. Indeed, the contrast between Asia’s cities and the plush hotels could heighten the shock. For Gribble, “Colombo was dirty with people sitting all sitting in the streets + in front of stalls of food—but the bus dropped us off at the Galle Face Hotel + we have a room looking out on the Indian Ocean—our meal on a tiled verandah looking out on the big waves coming in + at night the coconut trees are floodlit.” Her diary, written in the evening over cups of tea brought by smiling, respectful waiters, captured the disjuncture between the colonialist fantasy of Asia produced by the Galle Face Hotel and the reality of postcolonial Colombo.37 Increasingly, Orientalist notions of Asian disorder jostled with new interpretations, as travelers marveled that parts of Asia were even more modern than Australia. Isobel Gribble went from a longhouse in Malaysia (where “we would get a dreadful smell from beneath where the pigs, fowls + dog were about) to the airport in Kuala Lumpur, which was “the most modern airport we have seen” and where “we spent 40 minutes . . . looking at very modern garb.” Two years later, in 1967, writer Gordon Bleeck wrote letters gushing about the speed of the bullet train in Japan and admired the convenience of automatic car doors that opened and closed at the push of a button.38 Travel Diaries in Australia  |  203

Some travelers’ diaries reflected a major historical process, as Australians reevaluated their preconceptions about racial and cultural difference. Decolonization demanded a conceptual shift. Over the course of several weeks, some diaries plot a slow and incremental path from shock and rejection, through a gradual and confusing period of acclimatization, to acceptance and a growing admiration for Asia. For some, this provoked a reevaluation of their views about race, and particularly the White Australia policy. Traveling to Malaya and Indonesia in 1955, prominent barrister Joan Rosanove mostly referred to local people as “natives,” but she occasionally departed from the script when describing local elites. At a cocktail reception in Surabaya, she was part of a mixed-race group that she described as “a United Nations . . . Australians, Americans, Swiss, Dutch, Indonesians, Indians and Eurasians.”39 The glamorous associations of international diplomacy and the racial equality conveyed by this image are both significant. William Wade’s audio diary plots a more dramatic shift. At the time of his visit to Hong Kong in 1962, both major political parties in Australia still supported the White Australia policy, and Wade had never thought to disagree. After only a few days in Asia, however, he began to think it “strange” that the White Australia policy restricted the entry of skilled migrants, and even forced Asian students to leave after finishing their courses. “We seem to be acting very foolishly,” he mused. Having witnessed the work ethic and good humor of the Chinese through brief personal encounters, Wade came to “think the right thing to do is for Australia to retain some of them.” Not only would this give Australia the benefit of some “outstanding” individuals, but it would also help secure its place in the region. By acting as a bridge between East and West, Asian students and migrants could help in “maintaining our sphere of influence in these countries” and would encourage “greater co-operation between Australia and the eastern neighbours.”40 In only a few short days, punctuated by regular moments of reflection with the audio diary, Wade had reconsidered one of the keystones of Australian policy.41 In such circumstances, personal travel diaries tracked an intimate and personal reevaluation of Australia’s relation to Britain, Asia, and the world, which mirrored broader shifts taking place at the national level.

Consuming the World It would be disingenuous to suggest that all, or even the majority, of travel diaries revealed a process of discovery. Unlike travel writing, which telescopes a journey into a coherent narrative, travel diaries can often appear quite banal. The prevalence of shopping in Australian travel diaries can hardly be ignored. Prices, shopping lists, accounts of meals, and descriptions of the weather often took up far more space in a diary 204 | The Diary

than descriptions of sights or discussions of racial politics. A 1966 survey found that no less than 94 percent of Australians in Hong Kong did some shopping, and astoundingly, 72 percent did nothing other than shop and eat during their visits—significantly higher proportions than the average for international visitors.42 William Wade was overawed by Hong Kong’s shops. “There’s so many shops, you can’t imagine,” he recorded in his audio diary. “Not just thousands of shops, there’s tens of thousands of shops. And they’re everywhere, all over the place, and some of them have the most delightful things, some beautiful, some things expensive, some things cheap.” Before departing Hong Kong, he was already laying down plans to return with his wife for a holiday devoted to shopping, which “would be a very, very interesting and very . . . happy holiday.”43 Wade was far from alone. Before she docked for the first stop on her Asian cruise, Joan Rosanove had composed a poem in which she listed not all the things she wanted to see but what she wanted to buy. Rosanove shopped at every port, and her diary lists purchases of jewelry, hats, shirts, bags, shoes, baskets, carvings, sarongs, and even razors, among other things. Unsurprisingly, she had to buy a new suitcase to carry her haul before the cruise was halfway over.44 Docking in Hong Kong in 1967, Gordon Bleeck wrote in his diary of having “arrived at Hong Kong, a fabulous place for shoppers.” As soon as he disembarked, “off we went to the legendary Ah Chuck,” a tailor. Then, it was off to King’s Photo and Radio Co., where he bought an Omega watch, a Carousel projector and a movie camera. The shopping continued once they returned on board, as “it was swarming with traders and looked like Paddy’s Markets.” Bleeck purchased some clothes before a trader convinced his party to disembark again and head to the Power Shoe Co., where they bought two pairs of shoes, then to a “Chinese shop,” where Bleeck bought more clothing. After dinner, Bleeck’s party was ready for more shopping, and purchased several pairs of slippers. After the frenetic day of shopping, Bleeck sat down to write his diary; more than anything else, the entry reads as a list of purchases.45 In their very banality, Australian travel diaries reflect one further revolution: the inexorable rise of consumer capitalism and its role in structuring contact across the world. For contemporary Australians, travel has become part of everyday life. Australians are the world’s leading consumers of international travel, spending more on a per capita basis than any other nationality. Going overseas, whether to Europe, the Americas, or Asia, has become part of what it means to be Australian.46 It also enmeshed Australians in the broader patterns of international commerce that, increasingly, structure global relations. These two processes—the negotiation of a meaningful national identity between “history” and “geography” and the imbrication of Australians into the global Travel Diaries in Australia  |  205

economy—are laid bare in the pages of travel diaries. Australian travel diaries provide a glimpse into the embodied negotiations of the contact zone and the money expended to get there. Notes 1. Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980 (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981). 2. Agnieszka Sobocinska and Richard White, “Travel and Connections,” in Cambridge History of Australia, vol. 2, The Commonwealth of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 486–88. 3. Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966). 4. Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 2–4. 5. Angela Woollacott, “‘All This Is Empire, I Told Myself’: Australian Women’s Voyages ‘Home’ and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness,” American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (1997): 1003. 6. Ros Pesman, David Walker, and Richard White, eds., The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), xix. 7. Richard White, “Overseas,” in Australians, 1938, ed. Bill Gammage and Peter Spearritt (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, 1987), 439. 8. Woollacott, “All This Is Empire,” 1009. 9. Philippa Poole, ed., The Diaries of Ethel Turner (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1979), 229. 10. Pesman, Walker, and White, Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing, xv. 11. Poole, Diaries of Ethel Turner, 233. 12. Richard White, “Australian Tourists in Britain, 1900–2000,” in Australians in Britain: The Twentieth Century Experience, ed. Carl Bridge, Robert Crawford, and David Dunstan (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2009), chap. 11, p. 3. 13. Pesman, Walker, and White, Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing, xii. 14. Poole, Diaries of Ethel Turner, 240. 15. Mathew Trinca, “Part of the Pageant: Australians Travelling to London, 1945–1975” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2010). 16. Una Caroline Falkiner, Travel Diary 1929, Papers of Una Caroline (Otway) Falkiner, MSS 423/14, Mitchell Library (hereafter ML), Sydney. 17. Mabel Dowding, Travel Diary 1928, Papers of Mabel Dowding, ML MSS 4249/8/710/C. 18. Hsu-Ming Teo, Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). 19. Falkiner, Travel Diary 1929. 20. Ibid. 21. Dowding, Travel Diary 1928. 22. Anne Grey, ed. The Diaries of Donald Friend, vol. 1 (Canberra: National Library of Australia [hereafter NLA], 2001), 66 (July 25, 1939). 23. Ibid., 69. 24. Ibid., 77 (September 10, 1939). 206 | The Diary

25. Paul Hetherington, ed. The Diaries of Donald Friend, vol. 3 (Canberra: NLA, 2005), 12 (June 3, 1949). 26. Grey, Diaries of Donald Friend, 1:xxxi. 27. Paul Hetherington, “Finding and Losing Eden,” Griffith Review 14 (2007): 232. 28. Grey, Diaries of Donald Friend, 1:xxxi. 29. Agnieszka Sobocinska, Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press/NewSouth, 2014). 30. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Year Book Australia, Demography Bulletin and Overseas Arrivals and Departures, various issues. 31. Joan Mavis Rosanove, Papers, 1952, NLA MS 2414. 32. Audio diary/letters of William Wade, Hong Kong and Tokyo 1962, copy in author’s possession. 33. R. G. Casey, Friends and Neighbours: Australia and the World (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1954), 3–7. 34. Audio diary/letters of William Wade, Hong Kong and Tokyo 1962, copy in author’s possession. See also Agnieszka Sobocinska, “Visiting the Neighbours: the Political Meanings of Australian Travel to Cold War Asia,” Australian Historical Studies 44 no. 3 (2013): 382–404. 35. Isobel Gribble, Diary, 1965, NLA MS 8391, December 6, 1965, entry. 36. Ibid., December 16, 1965, entry. 37. Ibid., December 2, 1965, entry. 38. Gordon Bleeck to Mr. and Mrs. D. L. Downs, March 28, 1967, Papers of Gordon Clive Bleeck, 1925–1971, NLA MS 9149. 39. Joan Mavis Rosanove, Papers, 1952, NLA MS 2414, August 16, 1955, entry. 40. Audio diary/letters of William Wade, Hong Kong and Tokyo 1962, copy in author’s possession. 41. See also Sobocinska, “Visiting the Neighbours,” and Agnieszka Sobocinska, “Innocence Lost and Paradise Regained: Tourism to Bali and Australian Perceptions of Asia,” History Australia 8, no. 2 (2011): 199–222. 42. Robert C. Hazell, The Tourist Industry in Hong Kong, 1966 (Hong Kong: Far Eastern Research Organisation for the Hong Kong Tourist Association, 1966). 43. Audio diary/letters of William Wade, Hong Kong and Tokyo 1962, copy in author’s possession. 44. Rosanove, Papers, 1952. 45. Bleeck, Travel Diary 1967, March 19, 1967, entry. 46. Sobocinska and White, “Travel and Connections,” 493.

Bibliography Blainey, Geoffrey. The Tyranny of Distance. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966. Bleeck, Gordon Clive. Papers, 1935–1971. MS 9149. National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA). Casey, Richard. Friends and Neighbours: Australia and the World. Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1954. Dowding, Mabel. Travel Diary 1928. Papers of Mabel Dowding. MSS 4249/8/710/C. Mitchell Library (hereafter ML), Sydney. Falkiner, Una Caroline. Travel Diary 1929. Papers of Una Caroline (Otway) Falkiner. ML MSS 423/14. Travel Diaries in Australia  |  207

Grey, Anne, ed. The Diaries of Donald Friend. Vol. 1. Canberra: NLA, 2001. Gribble, Isobel. Diary, 1965. NLA MS 8391. Hassam, Andrew. Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995. Hazell, Robert C. The Tourist Industry in Hong Kong, 1966. Hong Kong: Far Eastern Research Organisation for the Hong Kong Tourist Association, 1966. Hetherington, Paul, ed. The Diaries of Donald Friend. Vol. 3. Canberra: NLA, 2005. ———. “Finding and Losing Eden.” Griffith Review 14 (2007): 229–36. Pesman, Ros, David Walker, and Richard White, eds. The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996. Poole, Philippa, ed. The Diaries of Ethel Turner. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1979. Rosanove, Joan Mavis. Papers, 1952. NLA MS 2414. Sobocinska, Agnieszka. “Innocence Lost and Paradise Regained: Tourism to Bali and Australian Perceptions of Asia.” History Australia 8, no. 2 (2011): 199–222. ———. Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press/NewSouth, 2014. ———. “Visiting the Neighbours: The Political Meanings of Australian Travel to Cold War Asia.” Australian Historical Studies 44, no. 3 (2013): 382–404. Sobocinska, Agnieszka, and Richard White. “Travel and Connections.” In Cambridge History of Australia, vol. 2, The Commonwealth of Australia, edited by Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, 472–93. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Teo, Hsu-Ming. Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Trinca, Mathew. “Part of the Pageant: Australians Travelling to London, 1945–1975.” PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2010. Turner, Ethel Sybil. Ports and Happy Havens. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1900. Wade, William. Audio Diaries/Letters, Hong Kong and Japan 1962. Copy in author’s possession. White, Richard. “Australian Tourists in Britain, 1900–2000.” In Australians in Britain: The Twentieth Century Experience, edited by Carl Bridge, Robert Crawford, and David Dunstan, chap. 11. Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2009. ———. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. ———. “Overseas.” In Australians, 1938, edited by Bill Gammage and Peter Spearritt. Sydney: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, 1987. Woollacott, Angela. “‘All This Is Empire, I Told Myself’: Australian Women’s Voyages ‘Home’ and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness.” American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (1997): 1003–29.

AG N I E SZ K A S OB O C I N S K A is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Australia. She is author of Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia and editor (with David Walker) of Australia’s Asia: from Yellow Peril to Asian Century. 208 | The Diary

12 Travel Diaries in Imperial China James M. Hargett

Most dictionary definitions of the English word diary run something like the following: “a written record of events, experiences, or observations, kept on a daily basis, which often include personal matters, thoughts, or feelings.”1 The term for diary in modern Chinese—riji (lit., “daily records”)—is understood in much the same autobiographical way. But when referencing diaries dating from the imperial (or traditional) period in China (that is, before the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911), it is useful to distinguish between (1) diary-like documents written essentially for public distribution on the one hand and (2) personal diaries (understood in the modern, noncirculating, and private sense) on the other. As for “public” diaries, such works were first produced on a regular basis during the Song dynasty (960–1279). Examples of the second variety—the personal or private diary—do appear in China as early as the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 2 but the overwhelming majority of Chinese authors throughout the imperial period did not favor openly revealing their most intimate thoughts and feelings in prose works of any kind.3 Since the days of remote antiquity, lyric poetry has always functioned as the preferred literary vehicle for voicing personal emotions and concerns. At the risk of oversimplifying what is a complicated topic, the main source of this reticence about revealing one’s introspective thoughts in a diary or any other prose form is the influence of Confucianism, which stressed that biographical writing, self-written or not,4 should primarily reflect how well a person’s deeds and accomplishments matched (or did not match)

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the exemplary behavior of past paragons of Confucian moral virtue and demonstrate the results of virtuous action (or depraved moral behavior).5 Not surprisingly, then, the numerous Song dynasty diaries “written for public distribution” that have survived seldom reveal anything personal or self-revelatory about the author. Instead, Song diaries functioned primarily as records designed to chronicle daily events and experiences. The content of these texts, however, varies considerably. For instance, leading government officials like Sima Guang (1019–86) and Wang Anshi (1021–86) kept diaries of contemporary political and court matters,6 while Zhou Bida (1125–1204) maintained a detailed, dated chronicle of events concerning an attempted invasion of South China in 1161.7 Other diaries, such as the Yizhou jiasheng (Household activities in Yi County), written by the famous scholar-official, calligrapher, and poet Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), chronicle the quotidian activities of the author over a period of eight months in 1105. The main concern in this chapter is yet another type of diary dating from the Song dynasty: records, written by government officials in a dated, diary format, concerning journeys they undertook while traveling to and from office postings in the provinces.8 With just a few notable exceptions, virtually all travel diaries dating from the traditional period in China were written by such officials. Travel diaries from the Song and subsequent periods in Chinese history are almost always regarded as a subgenre of prose writing called youji (游記, lit., “records of travels”; often called “travel literature” in English). Early prototypes of youji first appear during the Six Dynasties period (220 or 222–589). Thereafter, travel writing was further articulated in the Tang dynasty (618–907), reached maturity in the Song, and proliferated in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911). Since the meaning of the term travel literature is often unclear to the modern reader, it will be useful at the outset to describe the general characteristics of the genre.9 First, youji in imperial China contains a coherent and indispensable narrative of a journey, written in prose, to a particular place (or places). In some pre-Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) texts in which travel plays a prominent role, the journey is mythical, symbolic, or imaginative. All of the works I identify as travel diaries in this essay, however, concern an extended physical journey to a geographically verifiable place. Unlike Western travel literature, with its focus on distant, “other” alien lands, the overwhelming majority of Chinese youji written before the nineteenth century describe places inside China. Second, Chinese travel literature is written either in essay (that is, a short piece of writing on a particular place) or diary format. Third, youji provide descriptive information on the places, phenomena, and conditions observed by the author during a journey. The content of these reports varies, depending on the geographical focus of the narrative and the author’s personal interests 210 | The Diary

and tastes. For instance, we might find descriptions of famous landmarks; prominent mountains and rivers; social, political, and religious practices and conditions; local customs and products; and even flora and fauna. And finally, authorial observations, comments, and reactions are also present in these reports—and this at once distinguishes youji from geographical and ethnographic accounts. But Chinese travel diarists do not write about their personal feelings while “on the road” (concerns such as missing a loved one or homesickness, however, appear regularly in traditional Chinese poetry). They essentially function as traveling historianreporters who seek to chronicle their observations in a reliable way for the interested reader and/or future traveler. Literary historians usually identify an early ninth-century text titled Diary of Coming South (Lainan lu) as China’s earliest, extant travel diary. This work describes a journey undertaken in 809 by a Tang dynasty official named Li Ao (773– or 774–836), from Luoyang (in central China) to Guangzhou (in the far south). His written record of the trip is terse, fact-based, and matter-of-fact. Here are a few sample entries: • Dinghai day10 (30 March): Our government junk developed a crack, water seeped in, and the boat was ruined. • Wuzi day (31 March): Reached Hang county. • Jichou day (1 April): Proceeded to the hills of Martial Wood (Wulin), which in fact is [home to] the Spirit’s Retreat and India Monasteries (Lingyin Tianzhu si).11 Li Ao also provides a useful addendum to his travel diary, listing the precise distances in li (里; one Chinese li equals about one-third an English mile) between various stops on his itinerary. This information is clearly earmarked for government officials like himself who one day might also be traveling to the remote reaches of South China. What is most important about Li Ao’s diary in the context of this chapter, however, is that he was the first Chinese writer to use a diary format to describe a journey. No doubt the reason he employed this prose form was because dated entries provided an efficient and convenient way of organizing an account of a lengthy trip and keeping track of the key places passed along the way. Later Chinese authors who kept records of extended journeys also followed this same practice.

Song Dynasty (960–1279) Judging by the number of extant works, travel writing was a widespread activity during the Song dynasty. Several reasons account for this new literary trend. For one thing, land and river travel lines were more Travel Diaries in Imperial China  |  211

extensive and convenient than they had ever been previously in Chinese history. Song writers were also more inclined than their predecessors to compose literary records concerning the sights, events, and experiences of everyday life. Also, as already mentioned, members of the Song government bureaucracy, whose numbers far exceeded that of any preceding era, quite often during their careers as public servants held numerous different positions in the provinces. It is not surprising, then, that many of them, in their travels to and from these postings, would keep records of their experiences. Some of these officials, while on longer journeys, wrote about their travels in a diary format. Most notable in this regard are two prominent officials of the Southern Song period (1127–1279), both of whom are also well-known lyric poets and prose stylists: Lu You (1125–1210) and Fan Chengda (1126–93). Travel diaries written during the Song dynasty can be conveniently classified into two, general categories: (1) the embassy account and (2) the river diary. As for the embassy accounts, those that have received the most attention from scholars and translators include Xu Jing’s (1091–1153) Xuanhe fengshi Gaoli tujing (Illustrated account of the Xuanhe embassy to Koryo˘), Fan Chengda’s Lanpei lu (Account of grasping the carriage reins), Zhou Hui’s (b. 1126) Account of Northbound Cart Shafts (Beiyuan lu), Lou Yue’s (1137–1213) Diary of a Journey North (Beixing rilu), and Cheng Zhuo’s (1153–1223) Account of an Embassy to the Jin (Shi Jin lu).12 As for the river diaries, two such works, both dating from the twelfth century—Lu You’s Ru Shu ji (Diary of entering Shu) and Fan Chengda’s Wuchuan lu (Account of the Boat Trip to Wu)—are the most important, mainly because of their length, rich contents, and belletristic content.

Embassy Accounts While the Song dynasty produced numerous cultural, intellectual, and especially technological advances such as the compass and movabletype printing, in the area of foreign affairs the era was characterized by uncertainty. The main reason for this uncertainty was the Song’s military weakness vis-à-vis several belligerent neighbors to the north and west, which menaced China with frequent incursions across its borders. At various times between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, China was compelled to conclude treaties and alliances with two of these foreign powers: the Liao (907–1125) and Xi Xia (1038–1227). In 1126–27, another foreign state—the Jin, also known in English as the “Jurchen”— undertook a full-scale military invasion of China that resulted in the Jin’s eventual occupation of the entire northern half of the country. One result of this catastrophic event was a treaty, negotiated and signed in 1142, 212 | The Diary

that established formalized diplomatic channels that shuttled government representatives back and forth between the Song exile capital in the south (in modern Hangzhou) and the Jin capital at Zhongdu in the north (in modern Beijing).13 Many of these embassies were ceremonial and perfunctory (conveying congratulations on the occasion of an emperor’s birthday, sending greetings on the arrival of the New Year, and so on); others concerned matters of importance and substance (an example follows). These are the only eyewitness accounts by Chinese of the post-Jin conquest of the urban centers of the north (especially, the former capital at Kaifeng), so they are invaluable as historical sources.14 The scholar-official Fan Chengda was one such envoy, who in 1170 served as a Song representative to Jin capital. His mission concerned the negotiation of important aspects of diplomatic protocol and the return of “lost” territory in the north that housed Song imperial tombs. Following the Jin-prescribed itinerary for all Song envoys, Fan passed through the former Song capital at Kaifeng (also known as the “Eastern Capital”), which now was under control of the alien Jin regime. The reportorial style of Fan’s prose is unmistakable. The following is a representative passage. Caitiff (lu [虜]; lit., “wretched,” “despicable”) is a derogatory term used by Fan Chengda when referring to the Jin. The Buddhist monastery mentioned in this passage was the foremost Buddhist monastery in the former Song capital: “Reached the Eastern Capital. The caitiffs have changed its name to ‘Southern Capital.’ Entered New Song Gate, which in fact is the Sunrise Aurora Gate. The caitiffs have changed its name to read: ‘Universal Humanity Gate.’ [The outer city of Kaifeng] is an overgrown wasteland as far as the eye can see. . . . Passed the Great Monastery of the State of Xiang. Its eaves are canted and its projections are broken-off. Never again will it regain its former look.”15 Other exile-generation literati dispatched to the north also employ a similar descriptive style when writing about Kaifeng and old Song landmarks, and Song ambassadors were never reluctant to voice criticism of the alien conquerors of North China. Lou Yue, for instance, described the Jin in very harsh terms: “The Jin squeeze the people [that is, the Chinese people now under their domination] of their sap and blood in order to load up their nests and dens, treasuries and storehouses.”16 And here is Fan Chengda’s description of the Jin effort to construct an opulent capital in the north and how, in the process, they conscripted and killed myriad works and desecrated Chinese graves: “Conscription laborers number 800,000, and military laborers numbering 400,000, worked and labored [on the project] for several years. [The number of] those who died is beyond calculation. The lands [excavated by the Jin] all [housed] ancient cairns and barrows [that is, graves], which were dug up and abandoned without exception.”17 Exile-generation literati in the south were certainly Travel Diaries in Imperial China  |  213

eager to read firsthand accounts of how conditions have changed in the north under the Jin occupation, and no doubt negative assessments of the Jurchen and how their occupation caused massive destruction of Kaifeng and Song landmarks and suffering among Chinese people still in the north stirred the hearts of Song patriots. But, as a general rule, Song embassy account diarists reserved poetry for expression of their innermost feelings.18 Ultimately, and beyond their reportorial function, the embassy diaries served a primary need of traditional Chinese historiography: in this case, to discredit the illegitimate and immoral nature of the alien Jin regime’s occupation of what was once sacred Song territory.

River Diaries Song dynasty river diaries are so called because they describe journeys taken along the course of a river. Only a handful of such works survive from the Song, but these texts are important because they established the prototype of the literary travel diary that would thrive in the subsequent Ming and Qing periods. Two works, mentioned earlier, are especially significant in this respect: Lu You’s Diary of Entering Shu and Fan Chengda’s Diary a Boat Trip to Wu. Both of these works describe lengthy trips (roughly, 1,800 miles) on the Yangzi River in the 1170s, but in opposite directions. Lu You’s trip took him from his home in Shanyin (modern Shaoxing, Zhejiang) to a new post in Kuizhou, located in eastern Sichuan, while Fan’s diary chronicles a long journey from Chengdu (in Sichuan), where he had just completed a two-year assignment as governor, to his home outside modern Suzhou (modern Jiangsu province). The content of the river diary is similar to that found in the embassy accounts. That is to say, Lu You and Fan Chengda provide descriptive accounts on geographical and topographical matters (in Song-controlled territory) such as famous mountains, historical landmarks, and renowned temples and pavilions, to name just several examples. For instance, during his boat trip home, Fan stopped in Jia county (modern Leshan in Sichuan) to undertake a ten-day sightseeing trip to nearby Mount Emei (Emei shan): Dinghai, Wuzi, Yichou, Gengyin, and Xinmao days (16–20 July 1177): Leaving my family on the boat moored on the banks of Jia county, I rode along toward Emei. . . . It is recorded in Buddhist texts that this is the place where the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra [Puxian dashi] makes his appearance and manifestation. We departed from the west gate of the commandery wall. Then crossed Swallow Ford [Yandu], where the river rushes and gushes and is most dangerous. . . . Crossed the ford and spent the night in Suji Market-town.19

As Lu You and Fan Chengda made their long journeys along the Yangzi, whenever their itinerary passed a notable or famous landmark (and time 214 | The Diary

permitted), they would stop to pay a personal visit. The entries in Lu and Fan’s river diaries are filled with reports of such sightseeing excursions. Here is an example from Lu You’s Diary of Entering Shu concerning a famous landmark called the Yellow Crane Tower (Huanghe lou): As for the Yellow Crane Tower, an old tradition has it that Fei Yi made his flight and ascension to immortality here. Later, he suddenly came back riding a yellow crane. Hence, the tower is so named. It is known for having the finest scenic view in the world. Cui Hao’s (d. 754) poem [about the tower] is the best known, and the marvelous lines [Li] Taibai [or Li Bai; 701–762] got here are especially numerous. Now the tower is already in ruins; its old foundation is also gone. I asked an old clerk about its location and he said it was between Stone Mirror Pavilion [Shijing ting] and South Tower [Nanlou], directly facing Parrot Isle [Yingwu zhou]. I can still imagine what it must have looked like. Only the tower’s name placard, written in seal script by Li Jian and engrave in stone is left. Taibai climbed this tower and sent off Meng Haoran [689–740] with a poem that read [in part]: “His solitary sail’s distant glare vanishes in cyan alps; I see only the Great River as it flows to sky’s horizon.” Presumably, the sail and mast shining against the distant mountains was especially worth viewing. Without traveling the River for a long time one cannot come to know this.20

Passages like this, in which the author provides an update on a landmark known to every educated person in Song China, are common in the river diaries. They are valuable not only for the historical and archaeological data included therein but also because they vividly highlight how historical and literary associations (and works) from the past play a key role in the river diaries. In this case, Lu You cites lines of famous verse on the Yellow Crane Tower by Cui Hao and Li Bai. He follows these citations with a comment of his own: “Without traveling the River for a long time one cannot come to know this.” In other words, one cannot truly understand these famous lines of poetry until he actually travels the Yangzi and observes these sights there first hand. Travel literature in China, including the travel diary, did not develop in a linear way—that is, from a simple to a more complex form over time. Rather, the single, most important factor that links individual travel works and travelers over time is place and the literary heritage associated with that specific location. We see a good example of this in Lu You’s description of, and commentary on, the Yellow Crane Tower. Since famous writers of the past had visited there and composed literary works about that place, Lu You was obliged to not only acknowledge and quote from the works of distinguished literary men who had visited the tower earlier and wrote accounts of it but also comment on or react to Travel Diaries in Imperial China  |  215

it in some way. By doing so, Lu You’s account then becomes part of the literary memory of that site, and future visitor-writers will likewise be obligated to recognize Lu’s observations and comments as being part of the literary heritage of the Yellow Crane Tower. Following the collapse of the Song dynasty in 1279 and the subsequent Mongol occupation of China, which lasted only about a century (until 1368), no major developments in youji and travel diary writing took place in China. This was largely because no imperial civil service examinations were conducted between 1279 and 1315. The examination system was revived in 1315, but various limitations concerning office eligibility (for Chinese scholar-officials) were imposed by the Mongols. Moreover, many ethnic Chinese refused to serve an alien, illegitimate political regime. The result was that fewer literate Chinese were traveling around the country, either as government officials or as private citizens, and so fewer travel accounts were written as a result. Of course, there are a few exceptions, such as Guo Bi’s (1280–1335) Diary of a Visit to Hang[zhou] (Ke Hang riji), which describes a sightseeing visit to the ruins of the imperial precincts of the old Song exile capital in Hangzhou.21 Judging from extant sources, however, travel writing diminished considerably during the Mongol occupation of China. This situation would change dramatically in the subsequent Ming period.

Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) The Ming was a watershed period in the history of Chinese travel literature. One important reason for this development was the growth of tourism, largely made possible by the long-term political stability of the period. Mei Xinlin and Yu Zhanghua, coauthors of Zhongguo youji wenxueshi (History of Chinese travel literature), identify several new directions in youji writing that appeared in the Ming. Among these new literary trends, two dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are especially important. The first is called the “prose vignette” (xiaopin) form of travel writing, the acknowledged master of which is Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610). His youji writings are typically brief and concern the author’s sightseeing experiences at a particular location, such as scenic West Lake in Hangzhou: “Across the Lake from Broken Bridge to Su’s Embankment is green mist and red haze spreading for almost seven miles. Songs to the sounds of flutes form a breeze; powdered drops of perspiration fall like rain. There are numerous people clad in gauze and silk, many of them on the grass lining the embankments. They are the epitome of seductive beauty.”22 As noted by Richard E. Strassberg, these “vignettes” often depict author-sightseers like Yuan Hongdao as an “autonomous consumer of sensual scenes who had liberated himself from 216 | The Diary

court politics and Confucian moralism.”23 The second major development in travel writing during the late Ming concerns the travel diaries of one author—Xu Xiake (1586–1641)—who is universally acclaimed as China’s greatest travel diary writer. Xu Xiake’s reputation as a travel diarist is based on several notable accomplishments. The first of these is the incredible distances covered in his many journeys: in all, Xu visited sixteen of China’s provinces. The second point is Xu’s amazing literary productivity while on the road. According to one source, Xu Xiake’s surviving travel diaries amount to over four hundred thousand Chinese characters, which in modern editions fill two hefty volumes.24 Xu never served as a government official. Instead, his many travels were undertaken as a private citizen. This status, in turn, allowed him to venture to more remote parts of China, including Yunnan in the far southwest. Moreover, Xu Xiake’s travel diaries should be seen as a reflection of a trend in the late Ming in which there was a “surge of interest in exploration accompanied by a desire for accurate depiction in detail.”25 To get some sense of Xu Xiake’s important contributions to the development of travel diary writing in China, let us take a look at a few representative entries from his accounts of two separate visits to the Yellow Mountains (Huangshan) in Anhui province, one of China’s most scenic travel destinations. These trips were undertaken in 1616 and 1618. I have selected these materials because they reflect a writing style that was established early in Xu Xiake’s career, and this style essentially defines all of his subsequent travel diary writing. One of the defining features of Xu Xiake’s prose is the manner in which he narrated movement over and through landscape: Second day of the month: Descended 10 li from White Marchmount [Baiyue] and then headed westward along the foot of the mountain, reaching South Stream Bridge [Nanxi qiao]. Crossed Big Stream [Daxi] and then followed along another creek as we headed north following the mountain. Ten li further on two mountains pressed together tightly like a gate, locking the stream between them. Crossed [the stream] and descended to some flat fields that were quite spacious. Another 20 li was Pig Trough [Zhukeng]. Followed a small trail and ascended to Tiger Ridge [Huling]. The trail was very steep. Another 10 li and reached the ridge. Crossed it and was at the foot [of the mountain]. Gazed northward at the various peaks of Yellow Mountain, in layer upon layer which seemingly could be plucked. Another 3 li was Old Tower Col [Gulou ao], where the stream was very wide and swollen, with no beam [to cross]. Wooden planks were spread across the entire stream. Forded across them with great difficulty. Another 2 li and stopped for the night at High Bridge [Gaoxi].26

The straightforward, bare-bones style of narrative in this passage can be traced back to earlier travel accounts, such as Li Ao’s Diary of Coming Travel Diaries in Imperial China  |  217

South and the river diaries of Lu You and Fan Chengda. One important reason Xu and other notable late Ming travel diarists such as Wang Shixing (1547–98) adopted this reportorial style of travel narration was their concern for detail, empiricism, and accuracy—especially about place names, distances between individual locations on the traveler’s itinerary, and the general conditions of those locations. And this concern was born, at least partially, from a desire that diaries and youji writings be suitable to function as a sort of “guidebook” to future travelers or sightseers following similar itineraries.27 Of course, this same writing style could also assist armchair travelers who might never have a chance to visit the places described by the travel author. Among the many youji texts and travel diaries dating from the late Ming and early Qing, there is also much aesthetic concern for the beauty of remote and pristine environments, especially mountains. A close reading of Xu Xiake’s journals reveals intense aesthetic appreciation of many of the sites he visited, but it is expressed in a manner different from that employed by most of his predecessors. And I would also argue that the register of language Xu used to convey his aesthetic delight in beautiful landscapes and scenic mountain areas is abundantly endowed with literary flavor and value. As an example, consider the following passage, written during Xu Xiake’s second visit to Yellow Mountain. One of the most outstanding scenic sights on the mountain is Heavenly Capital Peak (Tiandu feng). While approaching this destination, Xu’s servants were lagging behind because of the precipitous trail they needed to negotiate. Xu, however, excited by the “extraordinary prospect” (qijing), pressed on alone: After climbing to the top of the peak, a single retreat winging aloft was the Mañjus´rıˉ Cloister [Wenshu yuan] I have desired to climb [this peak] for many years, but never did [until now]. To the left was Heavenly Capital [Peak]; to the right was Lotus Blossom [Peak] [Lianhua feng]. Behind me they leaned against the Jade Screen [Hills] [Yu pingfeng]. The color of the two peaks was exquisite. Both seemed as if they could be clasped with the hands and pulled into one’s arms. In all four directions extraordinary peaks were crisscrossed and aligned. Masses of ravines swept to and fro. This is simply the most outstanding scenic spot on Yellow Mountain! If I had not come here a second time, how could I discovered that it is as extraordinary as this?28

The two passages I have cited from Xu Xiake’s travel diaries reveal some essential qualities of his prose style and purpose in keeping such detailed records of his journeys. I have argued elsewhere that his prose produces a veritable word picture of the human experience of moving across a landscape.29 To accomplish this, Xu used numerous action/ movement verbs (headed westward, followed along, crossed [the stream],

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descended to, ascended to, forded across, and so on), which give his prose a sense constant motion. Xu’s main idea is to re-create, via narration of physical movement and description of scene, the experience of the journey. Although his word picture makes appeal to various human senses, the emphasis in the Yellow Mountains diary entries is on the visual appeal of the landscape. No scenic detail is omitted; no physical difficulty of the ascent goes unmentioned. Xu Xiake essentially plays the dual roles of “narrator” (he tells readers in a narrative, literary way exactly what is going on) and “actor” (he is actively and physically engaged in all of the action). With a little imagination and a willingness to participate, then, the attentive reader can undertake the very same journey vicariously through Xu Xiake’s prose. Much of the youji composed during the late Ming dynasty falls in a general category of writing called caizi youji (才子游记), which might be translated as pedantic youji.30 The idea here is that prominent authors like Song Lian (1310–81) and Qian Qianyi (1582–1664) produced travel literature that sought to not only chronicle and describe a journey and the sights witnessed along the way but also display the literary prowess of the author within a context of the literary heritage of the site itself. For instance, Song Lian’s “Record of a Sightseeing Trip to Bell Mountain” (“You Zhongshan ji”),31 presents the reader with a detailed account outlining the history and literary importance of Bell Mountain (outside Nanjing), much of which is written in highly erudite language. Xu Xiake never wrote in this style, and if one compares Qian Qianyi’s prose account of his visit to the Yellow Mountains in 1641 with Xu’s diary entries for his trips he made there in 1616 and 1618, stylistically these texts are worlds apart. Since the language in Qian’s account is extremely rich in allusions to past works of history, philosophy, and literature; quotations from gazetteers; and references to various historical figures, in many ways the “record” of his trip to the Yellow Mountains seems more like a literary event than an account of a journey.32 Conversely, the straightforward and accessible prose style in Xu Xiake’s seems more appropriate for narration of a journey because the attentive reader could (as I have already written) in a way accompany Xu in his travels and visit places that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) Writing about one’s travels in a diary format was more popular as a literary activity during the Qing than in any other previous period of Chinese history. Thus, the content of this voluminous body of texts, much of which focuses on the daily events and the experiences of the author, varies considerably. And as was the case during the Song and Ming periods,

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most of these diaries were written by government officials in their service to the Qing government. Just one well-known example is Yu Yonghe’s (dates uncertain) Diary on Procuring Sulfur (Cailiu riji), which provides details of the author’s government-sponsored mission from Fujian to Taiwan to mine sulfur after fire destroyed a gunpowder storage facility in Fuzhou in 1696. Yu’s detailed account includes a wealth of information on the geography, local customs and products, and the aboriginal people of Taiwan, making it an invaluable historical source.33 In their history of Chinese travel literature, Mei Xinlin and Yu Zhanghua single out what they call xueren youji (學人游記), or “scholarly travel writing,” as the main early and mid-Qing dynasty contribution to the development of travel literature. The term xueren (lit., “scholar”) in this context refers to an influential intellectual current during the Qing in which scholars undertook careful investigative study, usually of ancient texts, in order to determine origin, textual accuracy, and proper authorship (in Chinese this approach and practice is typically called kaozheng [考證]or puxue [樸學]).34 Followers of this approach also undertook rigorous investigation of famous places. Three authors who wrote in this style of scholarly travel literature, all of whom are leading literary figures of the Qing, include Gu Yanwu (1613–82), Zhu Yizun (1629–1709), and Yuan Mei (1716–98).35 A good example of scholarly youji is Gu Yanwu’s Account of Five Terraces Mountain (Wutaishan ji).36 Since the Six Dynasties period, Five Terrace Mountain has functioned as the most sacred mountain associated with Buddhism in China. Pilgrims still flock there today, and tradition says that those who are most pious and worthy might even catch a glimpse of the bodhisattva Mañjus´rıˉ, who dwells there. In the opening paragraph of his account, however, Gu stated in no uncertain terms that his purpose in visiting the mountain has nothing to do with Buddhism: “I have investigated what men before me have said about Five Terraces and found it to be much exaggerated .  .  . and lacking in factuality.”37 A summary history of the mountain follows, in which Gu Yanwu outlined how the mountain “was taken over by this religion.” After citing several quotations from various authoritative historical sources, Gu concluded that the minds of followers of Buddhism “have long been deeply mired” in superstition but it is better to keep them confined in an isolated place like Five Terraces Mountain than to allow them into China’s towns and villages where they could “mix” (hun [混]) with normal people. Most scholarly youji dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries describe journeys to a single destination over a relatively short span of time (usually a day or two). Hence, there was no need to write in a diary format. One important exception, however, is Dai Mingshi’s (1653–1713) Diary of a Journey North in the Yihai Year (Yihai Beixing 220 | The Diary

riji). This account describes a three-week journey the author made in 1695 from Nanjing to the capital in Beijing. Dai’s travel diary is written in a prose style reminiscent of the river diaries of Lu You and Fan Chengda. For instance, each entry essentially concerns a single stop on his itinerary, providing information where he spent the night, weather conditions, the names of friends and people met along the way, and so on. But there is a personal aspect to Dai’s diary which, as Richard E. Strassberg correctly notes, reflects “the growth of autobiographical consciousness in the seventeenth century.” In passages like the following, Dai’s personality clearly emerges. “Pangruo” is the name of one of Dai’s friends: “Pangruo said that he possessed a technique for manufacturing gold and silver, telling me: ‘My friend, you are about to brave the summer heat and travel in order to sell your writings and support your parents. This world is vast indeed. Will anyone truly understand you? But if you practice this skill of mine successfully, my friend, will you ever have to worry about poverty?’ I laughed and nodded.”38 Later in the diary the author even reveals a bowel condition that seemed to be getting worse because of the difficulties of traveling in the intense summer heat. And on another occasion, Dai described some of the dreams he was having about a friend who had died earlier that year and how he deeply regretted not being able to attend the deceased friend’s funeral. Autobiographical content of this nature is unprecedented in earlier Chinese literary history. Perhaps the major development in travel diary writing during the Qing period is this: for the first time in Chinese literary history, diaries were being written by Chinese travelers to Europe, North America, and other parts of the world.39 Some of these sojourners were diplomats and interpreters, others were scholars, and still others were students. Speaking in general terms, one important driving force behind these various travels to destinations far from China’s borders was the disintegration of the Qing empire, especially after its defeat by Britain in the First Opium War (1839–42) and the subsequent unequal treaty system forced on China thereafter. Even before the final collapse of the Qing in 1911, it was evident to many observers in China that the country needed to reevaluate its view of the world and its place in that modern world, especially in regard to its militarily weakness vis-à-vis the Western powers. This necessitated the acquisition of specialized knowledge, preferably based on first-person observation. Although there are many travel diaries concerning journeys to the West,40 two are better known and available in English translation. The first was written by Lin Zhen (1824–?), a native of Fujian who served as a government interpreter. His fascinating account of a visit to America in 1849 is titled Draft of a Chronicled Trip across the Western Ocean Travel Diaries in Imperial China  |  221

(Xihai jiyou cao). Here is Lin’s take on the telegraph system he observed in America: An artful postal [telegraph] system transmits urgent and secret messages through a network far and wide; they use 26 encoded signs to reach every province in no time. Every 100 steps they erected two wooden piles [poles] on which they fastened iron wires. With things like vitriol, magnets and mercury, and by the use of a moveable track, they encode their 26 letters. At both ends of the connection somebody is on duty. As soon as there is movement at one end, the one at the other end will know about it, and regardless of subject matter, 10,000 miles can be overcome in a second.41

Lin’s diary is chock-full of similar observations, on everything from shipbuilding and stream power to photography and railroad construction and operation. The final diary to be considered, Li Gui’s (1842–1903) Diary of a Journey to the East (Dongxing riji), chronicles his trip to the United States in 1876 and attendance at the Centennial that year held in Philadelphia. Li was not an ambassador or high-ranking representative of the Qing government. Rather, he was a low-level customs clerk, and his charge from the Imperial Maritime Customs Service (in China) was to prepare a written record of what he observed at the Centennial. But what is most important about Li Gui’s visit to America is the factfinding tour he undertook of several major cities, including New York and Washington, DC. Thereafter, he toured Europe and returned to Shanghai via the Suez Canal. Throughout his travels—literally, around the world— Li kept a detailed travel diary, which is characterized by frank observation and straightforward commentary. Li Gui’s main interests were industrial and technological development, material culture, and social customs. The whole point of his account was to report on and evaluate what he observed so readers back home could determine whether it could be used to help modernize and strengthen China. For example, here is what Li Gui had to say about running water: All people place considerable emphasis on keeping their houses, clothing, food, and drink clean, and this is especially true of Westerners. Westerners are even more particular about water, and if it is sandy, turbid, or dirty, they believe this causes disease. Therefore, they do not drink all the river water, well water, or rain water that is collected. Rather, their method of obtaining water in metropolitan areas is to first carefully investigate the sources in the surrounding regions. Regardless of the distances involved these must be as pure as possible. It is then conveyed underground through iron pipes winding high and low, bending around, and drawn up into a reservoir. . . . From the reservoir the water is distributed around to every residence.

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Li then commented on the drinking water situation in China: China’s water comes from lakes, rivers, streams, and wells, and as such is [ultimately] rainwater. There are devices for water storage, but no methods of distribution and, from time immemorial, the people have had no control over whether there would be an abundance or lack of it. If there is too much, it overflows; too little, and it cannot be supplied, nor is it pure and clear. Some even go so far as to allow muddy water to settle and then drink it, as they seek to avoid illness and see this as a way to drive away pestilence!42

In the hands of Lin Zhen, Li Gui, and several contemporaries who also had chances to travel abroad and write about their experiences, the travel diary in China moved in a completely new direction. What is especially valuable about these works is not so much their literary value but rather the diverse nature of their observations and the forthright manner of their commentary. Of course, this material is of great value to historians because it provides a window to what travelers like Li Gui actually saw and how they really felt about it. For the first time, then, Chinese readers back home had direct access to eyewitness and fact-based accounts of lands and people on the other side of the world. Notes 1. Here I am paraphrasing and embellishing from Merriam-Webster Dictionary, s.v. “diary,” accessed July 21, 2016, http://www.merriam-webster .com/dictionary/diary. 2. On autobiographical writing in traditional China, see Pei-yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Therein he discusses, with great insight, the didactic function of biography and autobiography in ancient China, along with its close relation to historiography. 3. Personal diaries, as we understand that term today, did not appear on any regular basis in China until the nineteenth century and early Republican period (1912–49). 4. Here I follow Pei-yi Wu’s suggestion that biographies written by Chinese authors themselves are a form of autobiography, see Confucian’s Progress, x. 5. Pei-yi Wu’s discussion in Confucian’s Progress titled “The Ecology of Chinese Autobiography,” 3–15, offers great insight into the close affinity between earlier Chinese biographical writing and its relationship with Confucian historiographical principles and how this tradition relates to some autobiographical texts that appeared in the Ming period. As Wu pointed out, until about four centuries ago, there was a strong inhibition in China “against selfdisclosure and self-presentation without a religious context.” 6. On the diaries of Wang Anshi, Sima Guang, and several other Song government officials, see Deborah Marie Rudolph, “Literary Innovation and Aesthetic Tradition in Travel Writing of the Southern Sung: A Study of Fan

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Ch’eng-ta’s Wu-ch’uan lu” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996), esp., 145–54. 7. This text is titled Account of a Personal Expedition Led by the Emperor (Qinzheng lu). A portion of it is anthologized (with notes) in Chen Zuogao, ed., Gudai riji xuanzhu [Selected diaries from ancient eras with notes] (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji chubanshe, 1982), 11–17. 8. Transfers from one post to another usually took place about once every three years. On the transient lifestyle of government officials during the Song, see Cong Ellen Zhang, Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011), 19–42. 9. The description that follows is based on my article “Some Preliminary Remarks on the Travel Records of the Song Dynasty (960–1279),” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews 7 (1985): 67–93. 10. Days on the traditional Chinese lunar calendar were indicated by combining two sets of counters to form sixty different combinations. Dinghai (丁亥) was number twenty-four in the sequence. When converted to a Western (solar) calendar date, dinghai translates to March 30, 809. 11. For a complete translation of Li Ao’s diary, see Richard E. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 128–31. 12. Sem Vermeersch, trans., A Chinese Traveler in Medieval Korea: Xu Jing’s “Illustrated Account of the Xuanhe Embassy to Koryo˘” (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016); James M. Hargett, “Fan Ch’eng-ta’s Lan p’ei lu: A Southern Sung Embassy Account,” Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, n.s., 16, nos. 1–2 (1984): 148–49; Zhou Hui’s account has been studied and translated by Édouard Chavannes in “Pei Yuan Lou, Récit d’un voyage dans le Nord,” T’oung Pao 5, no. 2 (1904): 163–92; Linda Walton, “‘Diary of a Journey to the North’: Lou Yue’s Beixing rilu,” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 32 (2002): 1–38. 13. The Jin invasion of China in 1126–27 resulted in the capture of the Song emperor and heir apparent. Another son of the emperor, along with members of the Song government who found the means, fled south as refugees. Eventually, an exile capital was established in Hangzhou. Thus, China scholars usually refer to the period from 1127 until 1279 as the “Southern Song” to distinguish it from the “Northern Song” (960–1127), when the capital was in the “north” at Kaifeng. 14. On the importance of Song embassy accounts as historical documents, see Ari Daniel Levine, “Welcome to the Occupation: Collective Memory, Displaced Nostalgia, and Dislocated Knowledge in Southern Song Ambassadors’ Travel Records of Jin-dynasty Kaifeng,” T’oung Pao 99 (2013): 379–444. 15. Hargett, “Fan Ch’eng-ta’s Lan p’ei lu,” 148–49 (with minor changes). 16. Beixing rilu (Zhibuzu zhai congshu ed.), 1.17a; see also Linda Walton, “Diary of a Journey to the North: Lou Yue’s Beixing rilu,” 25. 17. Hargett, “Fan Ch’eng-ta’s Lan p’ei lu,” 170–71. 18. For instance, during his mission to the north Fan Chengda also composed seventy-two quatrains. Some of these moving poems are translated by J. D. Schmidt, Stone Lake: The Poetry of Fan Chengda (1126–1193) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 123–24. 19. James Hargett, Stairway to Heaven: A Journey to the Summit of Mount Emei (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 89 (with some minor changes).

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20. Ru Shu ji, in Lu Fangweng quanji (Taibei: Heluo tushu chubanshe, 1975), chap. 47, p. 288. See also Chun-shu Chang, and Joan Smythe, trans., South China in the Twelfth Century: A Translation of Lu Yu’s Travel Diaries, July 3–December 6, 1170 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1981), 134. 21. A portion of Guo Bi’s travel diary is reproduced in Zuogao, Gudai riji xuanzhu, 47–51. 22. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 310. 23. Ibid., 305. 24. Chang Chun-shu, “Hsü Hsia-k’o (1586–1641),” in Two Studies in Chinese Literature, ed. Chang Chun-shu, comp. and trans. Chi Li and Dale Johnson, Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies 3 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1968), 34. 25. Julian Ward, Xu Xiake (1587–1641): The Art of Travel Writing (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2001), 14. 26. Xu Xiake youji jiaozhu (Kunming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe, 1985), chap. 1, p. 17. 27. For a study of the “guide books” or “route books” that were inspired by a thriving tourist industry during the Ming and Qing, see Timothy Brook “Guides for Vexed Travelers: Route Books in the Ming and Qing,” Qingshi wenti 4, no. 5 (1981): 96–109. 28. Xu Xiake youji jiaozhu, chap. 1, p. 39. 29. See James M. Hargett, “Chongxin pinggu Xu Xiake zai Zhongguo gudai wenxue shi shang de diwei” [Xu Xiake and his place in the history of traditional Chinese travel literature: A reassessment], Xu Xiake yanjiu 28 (2014): 23–35. 30. Mei Xinlin and Yu Zhanghua, Zhongguo youji wenxue shi [History of travel-account literature in China] (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 2004), 255–60. 31. See Strassberg, Inscribed Journeys, 272–77. 32. A detailed study and complete translation of Qian’s account of his visit to the Yellow Mountains is available in Stephen McDowall, Qian Qianyi’s Reflection on Yellow Mountain: Traces of a Late Ming Hatchet and Chisel (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009). 33. See Macabe Keliher, Small Sea Travel Diaries: Yu Yonghe’s Records of Taiwan (Taibei: SMC Publishing, 2004). 34. Mei Xinlin and Yu Zhanghua, Zhongguo youji wenxue shi, 325–76. 35. Examples of their youji can be found in Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 357–60, 364–65, and 403–12, respectively. 36. Translated in Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 357–60. 37. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 357. 38. Ibid., 392–93. 39. Reports on Central Asia written by Chinese observers date back to the Han dynasty, and records kept by Chinese Buddhist monks of their travels to India survive from the Six Dynasties and Tang. For examples, see Jeanette Mirsky, ed., The Great Chinese Travelers: An Anthology (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965), esp. 14–25, 29–114. None of the texts, however, is written in diary format. 40. Numerous examples are translated in R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, eds., Land without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

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41. Marion Eggert, “Discovered Other, Recovered Self: Layers of Representation in an Early Travelogue on the West (Xihai jiyou cao, 1849),” in Tradi­tions of East Asian Travel, ed. Joshua A. Fogel (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 87. 42. Charles Desnoyers, trans., A Journey to the East: Li Gui’s “A New Account of a Trip around the Globe” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 238–39.

Bibliography Arkush, R. David, and Leo O. Lee, eds. Land without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Brook, Timothy. “Guides for Vexed Travelers: Route Books in the Ming and Qing.” Qingshi wenti 4, no. 5 (1981): 96–109. Chang, Chun-shu, and Joan Smythe, trans. South China in the Twelfth Century: A Translation of Lu Yu’s Travel Diaries, July 3–December 6, 1170. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1981. Chaves, Jonathan. Every Rock a Universe: The Yellow Mountains and Chinese Travel Writing. Warren, CT: Floating World Editions, 2013. Chen, Zuogao [陳左高], ed. Gudai riji xuanzhu [古代日記選註; Selected diaries from ancient eras with notes]. Shanghai: Shanghai Guji chubanshe, 1982. ———. Lidai riji congtan [歷代日記叢談; Collected remarks on diaries throughout the successive eras]. Shanghai: Huabao chubanshe, 2004. ———. Zhongguo riji shilue [中國日記史略; Brief history of the diary in China]. Shanghai: Shanghai Fanyi chubanshe, 1990. Cheng, Zhuo [程卓]. Shi Jin lu [使金錄; Register of an embassy to the Jin]. Rpt., Ji’nan: Qi Lu shushe, 1997. Dai, Mingshi [戴名世]. Yihai Beixing riji [乙亥北行日紀; Diary of a journey north in the Yihai year]. “Yihai beixingri ji.” Accessed September 5, 2019. https://baike.baidu.com/item/乙亥北行日记#1. Desnoyers, Charles, trans. A Journey to the East: Li Gui’s “A New Account of a Trip around the Globe.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Eggert, Marion. “Discovered Other, Recovered Self: Layers of Representation in an Early Travelogue on the West (Xihai jiyou cao, 1849).” In Traditions of East Asian Travel, edited by Joshua A. Fogel, 70–96. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. Fan, Chengda [范成大]. Lanpei lu [攬轡錄; Account of grasping the carriage reins]. In Fan Chengda biji liuzhong [范成大筆記六種; Six informal prose works by Fan Chengda], edited by Kong Fanli [孔凡禮], 11–23. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002. ———. Wuchuan lu [吳船錄; Diary of a boat trip to Wu]. In Fan Chengda biji liuzhong [范成大筆記六種; Six informal prose works by Fan Chengda], edited by Kong Fanli [孔凡禮], 187–242. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002. Gu, Hongyi [顧宏義] and Li Wen [李文], comps. Songdai riji congbian [宋代日記叢編; Compendium of Song-era diaries]. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 2013. Gu, Yanwu [顧炎武]. Wutaishan ji [五台山記; Account of Five Terraces Mountain]. In Zhongguo gudai youji xuan [中國古代記選; Selected travel

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accounts from ancient China], edited by Ni Qixin [倪其心] et al., vol. 2, 265–73. Beijing: Zhongguo lüyou chubanshe, 1985. Guo, Bi [郭畀]. Ke Hang riji [客杭日記; Diary of a visit to Hangzhou]. Rpt., Chengdu: Sichuan daxue chubanshe, 2007. Hargett, James M. “Chinese Travel Writing.” In The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Carl Thompson, 112–24. London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2016. ———. “Chongxin pinggu Xu Xiake zai Zhongguo gudai wenxueshi shang de diwei” [重新評估徐霞客在中國古代文學史上的地位; Xu Xiake and his place in the history of traditional Chinese travel literature: A reassessment]. Xu Xiake yanjiu [徐霞客研究] 28 (2014): 23–35. ———. “Fan Ch’eng-ta’s Lan p’ei lu: A Southern Sung Embassy Account.” Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, n.s., 16, nos. 1–2 (1984): 119–77. ———. On the Road in Twelfth Century China: The Travel Diaries of Fan Chengda (1126–1193). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1989. ———. Riding the River Home: A Complete and Annotated Translation of Fan Chengda’s (1126–1193) “Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (Wuchuan lu).” Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2008. ———. “Some Preliminary Remarks on the Travel Records of the Song Dynasty (960–1279).” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews 7 (1985): 67–93. ———. Stairway to Heaven: A Journey to the Summit of Mount Emei. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. Keliher, Macabe. Small Sea Travel Diaries: Yu Yonghe’s Records of Taiwan. Taibei: SMC Publishing, 2004. Levine, Ari Daniel. “Welcome to the Occupation: Collective Memory, Displaced Nostalgia, and Dislocated Knowledge in Southern Song Ambassadors’ Travel Records of Jin-dynasty Kaifeng.” T’oung Pao 99 (2013): 379–444. Li, Ao [李翱]. Lainan lu [來南陸; Diary of coming south]. In Li Wengong ji [李文公集; Collected works of Li Wengong], chap. 18, 78–79. Sibu ­congkan [四部叢刊] edition. Li, Chi. The Travel Diaries of Hsü Hsia-k’o. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press of Hong Kong, 1974. Li, Gui [李圭]. Dongxing riji [東行日記; Diary of a journey to the East]. Taibei: Guangwen shuju, 1962. Lin, Zhen [林鍼]. Xihai jiyou cao [西海記游草; Draft of a chronicled trip across the Western Ocean]. Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1985. Lou, Yue [樓鑰]. Beixing rilu [北行日錄; Diary of a journey north]. Rpt., Taibei: Guangwen shuju, 1968. Lu, You [陸游]. Ru Shu ji [入蜀記; Diary of entering Shu]. In Lu Fangweng quanji [陸放翁全集], chap. 43, 264–chap. 48, 298. Taibei: Heluo tushu chubanshe, 1975. McDowall, Stephen. Qian Qianyi’s Reflection on Yellow Mountain: Traces of a Late Ming Hatchet and Chisel. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. Mei, Xinlin [梅新林], and Zhanghua Yu [俞樟華]. Zhongguo youji wenxue shi [中國遊記文學史; History of Chinese travel literature]. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 2004. Mirsky, Jeannette, ed. The Great Chinese Travelers: An Anthology. London: Allen and Unwin, 1965.

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Rudolph, Deborah Marie. “Literary Innovation and Aesthetic Tradition in Travel Writing of the Southern Sung: A Study of Fan Ch’eng-ta’s Wu-ch’uan lu.” PhD diss., University of California, 1996. Schmidt, J. D. Stone Lake: The Poetry of Fan Chengda (1126–1193). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Song, Lian [宋濂]. “You Zhongshan ji” [游鍾山記; Record of a sightseeing trip to Bell Mountain]. In Song Lian quanji [宋濂全集; Complete works of Song Lian], vol. 1, chap. 4, p. 89. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2014. Strassberg, Richard E. Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Vermeersch, Sem, trans. A Chinese Traveler in Medieval Korea: Xu Jing’s “Illustrated Account of the Xuanhe Embassy to Koryo˘.” Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. Walton, Linda. “Diary of a Journey to the North: Lou Yue’s Beixing rilu.” Journal of Sung-Yuan Studies 32 (2002): 1–38. Ward, Julian. Xu Xiake (1587–1641): The Art of Travel Writing. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2001. Wu, Pei-yi. The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Xu, Jing [徐兢]. Xuanhe fengshi Gaoli tujing [宣和奉使高麗圖經; Illustrated account of the Xuanhe embassy to Koryo˘]. Beijing: Guoli Gugong bowuyuan, 1974. Xu Xiake youji [徐霞客遊記; Travel accounts of Xu Xiake]. Edited by Chu Shaotang [褚紹唐] and Liu Siyuan [劉思源]. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980. Yu, Yonghe [郁永河]. Cailiu riji [採硫日記; Diary of procuring sulfur]. Rpt., Beijing: Zhinghua shuju, 1991. Zhang, Cong Ellen. Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011. Zhou, Hui [周煇]. Beiyuan lu [北轅錄; Account of northbound cart shafts]. Rpt., Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1940. Zhu, Shuhe. From East to West: Chinese Travellers before 1911. Changsha: Yuelu Publishing House, 2008.

JAMES M. HARGETT teaches Chinese Language and Literature at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is author of Stairway to Heaven: A Journey to the Summit of Mount Emei and Riding the River Home: A Complete and Annotated Translation of Fan Chengda’s (1126–1193) “Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (Wuchuan lu).”

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part v

The Private Diary

13 The Contemporary Personal Diary in France Françoise Simonet-Tenant Translated from French by Dagmara Meijers-Troller

Is the personal diary an ordinary practice or a literary genre? Is it private writing that should stay private or a recognized literary activity? The personal diary may well be a literary genre, but it is readily acknowledged as a minor one because it could be considered easy to write and easy to read. Worse still, it can be seen as a bad genre that spreads disorder by detracting from the usual criteria for literary recognition (producing fiction and/or displaying a conscious aesthetic aim) or as an indefinable genre often met with prudent silence. There is no mention of the diary genre in The Logic of Literature by Käte Hamburger, which excludes anything pertaining to communicational reality from the field of literature.1 I am reminded of Jean Rousset’s lexical hesitations when he saw the diary as “a newcomer in the range of literature,” a “mixed breed that doesn’t know exactly where it belongs in literary classifications.”2 It fell to Jean-Marie Schaeffer, who proposed a practical approach to genres in his Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? (1989), to grant a place to the diary: by renouncing the illusion of a unified theory of genres, bringing to light the “heterogeneity of phenomena to which the names of genres refer,” Schaeffer rejected an exclusive, classificatory attitude and made the case for a shifting frontier between the canonical literary genres and those of discourse.3 According to Schaeffer, the diary might be characterized not only by its self-reflexive purpose but also by its “enunciative level (real enunciator)” as well as by its “pragmatic function (the aim of the text being of a mnemonic order).” While I can agree with him on the dual status of the diary, both a practice and a literary genre, this view—which  231

is the one I have adopted in this chapter—nevertheless took a long time to prevail, and only came to decisively in recent decades. The contemporary personal diary is at once that which one writes but also that which one publishes nowadays. This chapter concerns only diaries that are handwritten in a notebook or typed on loose sheets of paper or on a computer with a word processing program; it will not broach the topic of online diaries or blogs. My definition of contemporary is expansive, from the post–World War II period up to the 2000s, which allows us to appreciate the extent of the return to favor enjoyed by the personal diary during this period.

From Denunciation to a Return to Favor The Diary Denounced The diary’s detractors are legion, and it is revealing that Alain Girard, in one of the first works concerned with an analysis of the diary, devoted an entire chapter to it.4 In fact, this chapter is actually called “For and Against the Diary,” but partisans of the diary remain discreet about that fact, while its critics speak up loudly about it. It was no coincidence that criticism grew stronger when the diary, a private practice, asserted itself on the literary scene at the end of the nineteenth century when, one after another, the diaries of Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1882–84), Marie Bashkirtseff (1887), and the Goncourt brothers (1887) became public. Thus, beginning in the 1880s, the diary was subject to an all-out, and enduring, attack that continued bitterly until the end of World War II. The criticism, qualified as “intellectualist” by Alain Girard at the time, did not let up: it was Julien Benda who saw the diary as a derisory exaltation of the private and momentary to the detriment of the mind, the universal, and the timeless.5 Later, Roger Caillois (1913–78) responded to the publication in the prestigious Pléiade collection (Gallimard) of André Gide’s (1869–1951) Journal and harshly criticized, in Les lettres françaises of January 1945, “these notes, reflections, almost all without meaning or depth.” He redoubled his attacks in various articles, written in 1946, collected and republished in Chroniques de Babel.6 For Caillois, the diary signified the reign of the private individual, the facile and the complacent. Some ten years later, the diary was still being discredited and its literary status denied by Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). In L’espace littéraire (1955),7 the diarist is portrayed as someone incapable of facing the essential solitude of the writer, and of “losing his grasp upon himself in the interests of that neutral force, formless and bereft of any destiny, which is behind everything that gets written.”8 The indictment continued with a chapter of Le livre à venir (The book to come)9 entitled “Le 232 | The Diary

journal intime et le récit” (Diary and story). The misery of diary writing is that it is forever incapable of attaining the profundity of fiction, cowardly because it is a diversion from the challenge of writing, and totally illusory when it pretends to be a private commentary on a work—it turns out to be good for nothing but recording the scrapings of daily life and the roughness of vanity.10 Twenty years passed and the literary landscape changed imperceptibly. Roland Barthes (1915–80), adopting a far different tone from the merciless verdict issued by Blanchot, wrote an impassioned chapter called “Délibération” (Deliberation, in A Barthes Reader, 1982), an ambiguous and problematic text devoted to the diary genre.11 It is one of Barthes’s last texts and in it, his writing comes full circle; one of his earliest publications was “Notes sur André Gide et son ‘Journal.’”12 In between, this theoretician of writing, considered to be the pope of structuralism, had proclaimed “the death of the Author” and remained an unclassifiable heckler of the literary world, returning in the late 1970s to fragmentary texts, where a clandestine self palpitated in the shadows: a self-portrait (Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, 1975), a discourse vibrant with repressed self-confidence (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 1978), and an essay that aims to define the essence of photography (Camera Lucida, 1980), where once again Barthes’s relationship with private discourse arises, even though this evades the face-on exposure of self. “Délibération” takes the form of a tryptic. The chapter begins with Barthes skeptically wondering about daily writing, for which he had “a mild, intermittent but not too serious desire,” asking himself whether he could “make the journal into a ‘work,’” and enumerating the possible literary justifications for a diary: “poetic” (the diary as a place for style), “historical” (the diary as a record of the past), “utopian” (the diary as a means of luring the reader into believing in an illusory intimacy with the author), and “amorous” (the diary as a workshop of correct sentences).13 Next, Barthes provided two samples of his own diary. And finally, he resolved—as if reluctantly, after debating whether the two excerpts (which he had just offered for publication in the previous pages) were publishable—to denigrate the diary as “inessential” (that addition of pages that could all be deleted), “unnecessary” (a vain text, or rather nontext), and “inauthentic” (imitation of a stereotypical form). In the shadow of Stéphane Mallarmé, Barthes observed that “the Journal cannot achieve the status of the Book (of the Work),”14 yet he managed to propose, in extremis, a paradoxical form of redemption: “We must doubtless conclude that I can rescue the Journal on the one condition that I labor it to death, to the end of an extreme exhaustion, like a virtually impossible Text: a labor at whose end it is indeed possible that the Journal thus kept no longer resembles a Journal at all.”15 The self-consciously shameful fascination with diary The Contemporary Personal Diary in France  |  233

writing that is apparent in “Délibération” appears to be akin to the joy of writing for pleasure: “When I write the (daily) entry, I experience a certain pleasure: this is simple, this is easy. Don’t worry about finding something to say.”16 The diarist seems burdened by the guilt of writing drawn from life and that dispenses with the suffering of creation. The diary would be a sort of passing verbal spasm that could make no pretense to having any literary value whatsoever, since it is uncreated in a way: that is why the will to “labor the Journal to death” is asserted, to kill this illusion of a work in order to painfully replace it with a given form of the indefinable, which is life counted off day by day.

The Return to Favor We will leave it to a writer who does not publish his diary and who demonstrates the utmost discretion with regard to his private life to have detected, like a “highly sensitive seismograph .  .  . an inversion of the trends between the diary and the finished work.”17 Julien Gracq (1910– 2007) admits to being a reader of the intimate and fragmentary and recognizes that, in that, he is like his contemporaries: “It is remarkable that, at the end of this twentieth century, we nourish ourselves, often by preference, with what the great writers of the past would have regarded as the crumbs of their table. . . . Relinquishment of the masterpiece in favor of everything by the writer that still babbles and prattles freely around him (to prove this, it would suffice to weigh all the great writers’ published or reprinted Notes, Notebooks, Journals, Memoirs or Letters, and the Recollections gleaned from them, against the parsimonious reprints of their key books.)”18 After having been much maligned, the diary is now benefiting from a degree of recognition, and multiple signs point to a swing of the pendulum in its favor. The current state of diary publishing is both rich and varied. Vast editorial endeavors have been launched for the publication of unabridged versions of nineteenth-century diaries, such as those written by Amiel (1821–81), Bashkirtseff (1858–84), and Pierre Loti (1850–1923), and especially those of the first half of the twentieth century, including those of Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (1893–1945), Gide, Valery Larbaud (1881–1957), Michel Leiris (1901–90), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80).19 Diarists have continued to publish their diaries in serial form, volume after volume, whether they began keeping them in the 1950s or 1960s like Henry Bauchau (1913–2012), Louis Calaferte (1928–94), Julien Green (1900–1998), Charles Juliet (1934–), Gabriel Matzneff, and Claude Ollier, or in the 1970s and 1980s like Pierre Bergounioux and Claude Roy.20 Publishers are popping up to publish unknown diaries, some of which have become a must in the publishing market; since 1996, 234 | The Diary

Éditions Claire Paulhan have been carrying out an effort to rediscover autobiographical texts that are rare or have never been seen and, in particular, several important diaries by women; such is the case of the diaries of Mireille Havet (1898–1932), Hélène Hoppenot, and Catherine Pozzi (1882–1934).21 The practice of diary keeping, long considered a shameful malady, is now openly admitted: people keep their diaries, and they say so. The survey conducted in 1997 by Olivier Donnat for the French Ministry of Culture on Les pratiques culturelles des Français (French Cultural Practices), found that 8 percent of the French population were diarists. The practice is sometimes also encouraged by institutions. The diary has become a training tool. One of the pioneers of the institutional diary was Rémi Hess: “In the 1970s, as a teacher of educational sciences, I had observed that I had two types of students in front of me. Some of them, a small minority, entered easily and boldly into academic writing (abstract). These were the heirs of the code (Bourdieu). Most of the others (mainly working students), did not manage. For them, it was difficult to separate theoretical writing from life experience. . . . While developing the institutional diary technique, my first concern was therefore to allow people (who were previously excluded) to break into the field of writing and master it.”22 The practice of keeping an “institutional diary” consists of recording—if not daily, then at least regularly—the facts pertaining to a specific learning process experienced within an institution, as well as the reactions to it. As a springboard into analytical writing, the institutional diary upended old habits: keeping a logbook during a course or training period is now a recognized pedagogical practice. The diary is exhibited. In the fall of 1997, it was shown at the Municipal Library of Lyon (by means of two hundred original diaries, two-thirds of which were written after 1914), as had been done a few months earlier at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York in an exhibition entitled Private Histories: Four Centuries of Journal Keeping. It is drawing media attention: major national newspapers and the specialized literary press regularly report on the latest diary publications. Diaries are archived. In France, there are two associations that play an essential role in this area. Founded in 1992 at the initiative of Chantal Chaveyriat-Dumoulin and Philippe Lejeune, the Association pour l’Autobiographie et le Patrimoine autobiographique (APA—the Association for Autobiography and Autobiographical Heritage) has set a dual objective: that of preserving heritage (preserving and honoring all the unpublished autobiographical texts that anyone wants to give it) and culture (organizing and encouraging exchanges pertaining to autobiographical writing). Along with the three thousand deposits currently preserved, together with autobiographical writings and correspondence, there are The Contemporary Personal Diary in France  |  235

also numerous private diaries. Vivre et l’Écrire (Live and Write About It), an association promoting written expression by young people, initiated by Pierre de Givenchy (1920–2015), was officially founded in 1983. Among its activities, the association offers teenagers a chance to preserve their texts (poems, letters, and diaries) that they no longer want to keep but do not wish to discard. A private practice and a paradoxical genre, the diary is a kind of writing that is interwoven with the calendar, often considered to be banal and even stereotyped, yet it is a form that is open to all kinds of innovation, as witnessed by its history and the publications of recent decades.

Formal Innovations: Toward Hybridization For some, the diary that has been “labored to death,” as suggested by Barthes, will be their great work. That was the task that Claude Mauriac (1914–96), eldest son of François Mauriac, set for himself. Claude, who kept his diary from the age of sixteen (with a break between 1946 and 1951) made it the material of a veritable survey—ten volumes for Le temps immobile (1974–88) and four for Le temps accompli (1991–93). In 1970, he undertook the task of rewriting the initial diary according to a logic that was no longer strictly that of temporal progression. He proceeded with a nonchronological montage, telescoping different times according to a logic of association that could hinge on an event, a place, a person, or an image, invoking unexpected resonances. In this medley, he inserted excerpts of his ancestors’ diaries (his father, François, his grandfather Jean-Paul, etc.) and even those of other writers like Julien Green. This labyrinthine tableau, this encounter between moments ripped out of the orderly progression of time, was Claude Mauriac’s attempt at introducing the reader to his personal experience of time that is a palimpsest of memory. Linking the diary to another form of writing about the self appears to be a recurring theme in contemporary practice. Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) already attempted this hybridization beginning with the second volume of her memoirs, La force de l’âge.23 One of the functions of inserting her diary in her memoirs is to reinstate a vibrant feeling of the present within a mainly retrospective text: “It was now, in an agony of loneliness, that I began to keep a diary. Its entries strike me as more vivid and accurate than any narrative I could piece together out of them, so I give them here, omitting only certain boring or over-intimate details, and a mass of tedious repetition.”24 Inserting diaristic writing within the context of a memoir is not without interest or effect: the “fiction-like unity”25 in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is followed by volumes of more disparate memoirs where the insertion of diary excerpts produces 236 | The Diary

an effect of broken lines in an otherwise linear story. The diary excerpts added because they revive that which the memory no longer delivers, “the daily dust of my daily life,”26 restores the flesh to time, and this hybridization of memoir with diary is perfectly suited to the Beauvoirian call to adhere to the simmering of time: “My own prime allegiance was to life, to the here-and-now reality, while for Sartre literature came first.”27 It is not unusual for contemporary autobiographers to include in their narratives both autobiographical writing, which presumes a retrospective assessment, and diaristic writing, which is preoccupied with recording the present moment, and to marry the discontinuous with the fleeting and even inconsistent nature of inner reality: we can cite, among others, Marie Chaix in L’été du sureau, Jean-Baptiste Niel, François Nourissier, and Pierre Pachet, and others.28 The autobiography, which operates on a living, moving material (one’s life, self, and others never comprise a fixed tableau), introduces, by marrying daily diary writing, the play needed to capture the movement of life. Diary writing can also veer toward the poetic: the Semaisons series (1954–98) by Philippe Jaccottet provides an example. Using fragmentary and lyrical prose that is simultaneously a factual piece written in the first person, the subject strives to deliver snapshots of his sensory experience. That the personal diary can be invented and renewed beyond simple verbal language is also visible in its migration toward other vectors of expression and, in particular, toward that of the comic book. Fabrice Neaud published his Journal beginning in 1996 (collected edition, 2011). The life of a young gay man in a Provincial city was a new subject for the comic book format, treated by the author without any sense of taboo. Other authors then latched on to the comic book diary, notably Joann Sfar (Harmonica, 2002), Lewis Trondheim (Carnets de bord, 2002), and Julie Doucet (Journal, 2004; Dirty Plotte, 2018). Formal inventiveness characterizes the personal diary, which is a far cry from the refuge writing of suffering young girls. That it is emerging from the marginality where it was long confined is also apparent when we consider the place it holds as a subject of study in both literature and other human sciences.

The Diary as Subject of Study Sociology and History Until the 1980s, the prevailing approach in sociology had been an objectivation procedure in which subjective materials had no place. Gradually, a sociology of the individual emerged. From that viewpoint, personal diaries could now become the subject of study, and sociology, with an The Contemporary Personal Diary in France  |  237

interest in examining ordinary writing, took an interest: on this topic, we can cite, among others, the work of Malik Allam, Journaux intimes. For four decades, thinking about the analysis and historical research on the place and value of “I” has been thoroughly revised. Philippe Lejeune has observed the change in status of private writing: “The history of mentalities and the history of private life have habituated historians to take autobiographical texts as historical facts of interest in themselves, instead of merely suspect sources.”29 In Le moi des demoiselles: Enquête sur le journal de jeune fille, he himself initiates a practice highly appreciated by historians of private life, which is to work at serializing texts to avoid the risk of excessive generalization on the basis of a sole example. In a work entitled “Histoire et archives de soi,” Philippe Artières also underlined the growing attention drawn to personal testimony (written or oral), and fine-tuned this observation by periodizing the recognition given by historians to the accounts of ordinary individuals.30 Step one: a sacralization period during the 1970s during which the words of those formerly deprived of it became more valued and autobiographies as well as diaries of workers and marginal people were published. The personal archive was perceived, somewhat naively, as an alternative source telling about the reverse side of history. Step two, during the 1980s and 1990s: historical investigation took an interest in the silences of history and, in particular, all of the daily practices that history had heretofore ignored; during this phase, people took an interest not only in the content of discourse but also in the conditions in which it was produced. Personal archives themselves became historical objects. Step three, which is the current one: personal archives in this phase have become commonplace.

Genetic Criticism Literary criticism in France is gradually beginning to take the personal diary seriously and no longer views it with condescension. Since the mid-1980s, it has become an increasingly frequent topic of theses and work by recognized researchers and symposiums. Of note is the apparently paradoxical interest taken in personal diaries by genetic criticism,31 which calls for a new approach to the genre. A team called “Genèse et autobiographie” (Genesis and autobiography) was created in 1995, on the initiative of Philippe Lejeune, at ITEM (Institut de textes et manuscrits modernes, or Institute of Modern Texts and Manuscripts). Directed until 2014 by Catherine Viollet, it became “Autobiographie et correspondances” (Autobiography and correspondence) in 2015 and encompasses the personal diary among its research subjects. The first issue of the genetic criticism review Genesis included a study by Philippe Lejeune entitled “Auto-genèse, l’étude génétique des textes autobiographiques.” 238 | The Diary

Broaching the topic of the diary, Philippe Lejeune suggested it would be possible, despite the absence of rough drafts, to envisage a genetic study of the diary if one were to shift the meaning of the word or overturn conventional practices: there is genesis in the diary, first, because the diary shows, in action, the generation of writing by rumination or by variation, which leads to many an observation on the rhythm and frequency of the entries, on the evolution of the themes treated, and on the types of discourse maintained and, next, because the transition from manuscript to book implies the inevitable transformation of the initial text and that a diary in its published form is by necessity a construct (autobiographical or biographical, depending on whether it is self-published or published by another). The diary of photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894– 1986) is representative. Throughout a large part of his life, from 1911 to 1986, the photographer kept a diary. Three volumes of excerpts from this immense diary, covering various periods in the author’s life, were published during his lifetime (in 1975, 1981, and 1986). A comparative reading of the manuscript and the published volumes of excerpts shows that Lartigue cleaned up his diary manuscript in such a way that the published version would not tarnish the image of the man, a collector of happy moments, offered by his photographic works. He was even one of the rare diarists to have planned for the end of his diary, continuing to the end in a voice of naive lyricism, as one might imagine that of an eternal child. Thus, we can observe a genetic process that, from the manuscript to the published pages, demonstrates the persistent construction of the image of a happy man. In 2012, the publication of an issue of Genesis devoted entirely to “personal diaries” bestowed on the diary genre its credentials in the landscape of literary criticism. It was clearly demonstrated that there are close ties between the personal diary and the notion of genesis despite a reductionist image that associates diary writing with nothing more than an act of improvisation. The section of the review entitled “Enjeux” offered three interpretations of the notion of genesis applied to the personal diary. The diary is first studied by Catherine Viollet as the observatory of a genesis that takes place in other places, a case that is spectacularly illustrated by the Journal of the Counterfeiters (1927) by André Gide. Next, Philippe Lejeune poses the central question of the report—“Can a diary itself even have a genesis?”—and shows the personal diary to be a device that prevents us from going in circles in the realm of genetic criticism because it calls into question the “assumptions of genetic studies, particularly the central place that they give to the work as the ultimate end of a production process.”32 Last, the diary is examined as the place where the genesis of a work occurs. The personal diary is rich with an abundance of diverse forms, The Contemporary Personal Diary in France  |  239

liable to intervene at widely different moments in the genetic process of the work, from the prewriting to the preediting phase. As the battleground for the beginning of a work, the diary is undoubtedly a place that favors inventive effervescence, from the outlines of the idea-event to passages of obsessive, provisional writing. Because the diary is a place of writing where anything can be inscribed but nothing is irrevocable, it is a liberating space where one can let go of inhibitions and pursue infinite possibilities. This is where one can write the dazzling idea; one can lay out one’s intellectual and poetic obsessions, which may not immediately appear dazzling but are gradually inscribed in the diary until they emerge as an outline of the favored traits of a given imagination. The diary can also be utilized in a highly conscious manner and, in some cases, play the role of a precious reservoir for a work: it is this provisional function that Michel Leiris, for example, assigned to his diary, which serves as a repository for simple promises of works, reduced to their titles. The diarist sometimes goes beyond the title and moves from the promise on to the plans when he confides to the diary the argumentation for the work to come. Writing as an act and as research, the diary is thus a marvelous multifunctional tool in the genetic toolbox. While we have to seek the origins of the personal diary in the eighteenth century, as we saw in the latest work by Philippe Lejeune,33 it is still vigorously alive, both as a practice and as a literary genre. More challenged than ever at the height of structuralism, it has nonetheless remained on the landscape and has, since the 1970s, enjoyed an incontestable return to favor. Criticized by Benda, Caillois, and Blanchot, the diary experienced a paradoxical form of redemption with Barthes. During the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the state of diary publishing has been both rich and varied. Not only is the diary quite present in the editorial field, but it is also open to all kinds of innovations and can be linked to other forms of writing about the self (memoirs, autobiography) or ease into poetic writing. Long despised by academic criticism, it became a subject of study and inspired some innovative articles, especially in the field of genetic criticism. Rediscovered, read, analyzed, studied, and even transformed into a festival theme (a diary festival took place in Paris in September 2017), the diary occupies a prominent place in the contemporary expressions of the self. Notes 1. Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilynn J. Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). 2. Jean Rousset, Le lecteur intime: De Balzac au journal (Paris: José Corti, 1986), 13–14.

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3. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 79. 4. Alain Girard, Le journal intime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). 5. Julien Benda, La France byzantine, ou Le triomphe de la littérature pure, Mallarmé, Gide, Valéry, Alain, Giraudoux, Suarès, les surréalistes, essay d’une psychologie originelle du littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). 6. Roger Caillois, Chroniques de Babel (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1981). 7. Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), published in English as The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). 8. Blanchot, Space of Literature, 27. 9. Maurice Blanchot, Le livre à venir (1959; Paris: Gallimard, 1971), published in English as The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 10. Maurice Blanchot, “Le journal intime et le récit,” in Le livre à venir, 224–30; Blanchot, Book to Come, 185–86. 11. Roland Barthes, “Délibération,” in Tel Quel, no. 82 (1979): 8–18. 12. Roland Barthes, “Notes sur André Gide et son journal,” Existences, no. 27 (1942): 7–18; reprinted in Bulletin des amis d’André Gide 13, no. 67 (1985): 85–105. 13. Roland Barthes, A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), 479, 480. 14. Ibid., 492. 15. Ibid., 495. 16. Ibid., 479. See commentary on “Délibération” in Genette Gérard, “Le journal, l’antijournal,” in Figures IV (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 335–45. 17. Jacques Lecarme, “L’intime en librairie, 1970–1990,” in Le journal personnel, edited by Philippe Lejeune (Nanterre: Publidix, 1993), 205. 18. Julien Gracq, Reading Writing, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2006), 339–40. 19. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal intime, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Philippe M. Monnier, 12 vols. (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1976–94); HenriFrédéric Amiel, Du journal intime, ed. Roland Jaccard (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1987); Marie Bashkirtseff, I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, trans. Phyllis Howard Kernberger and Katherine Kernberger, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997); Michel Braud, ed., Journaux intimes: De Madame de Staël à Pierre Loti (Paris: Gallimard, 2012); Jean Cocteau, Journal, 1942–1945, ed. Jean Touzot (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Journal, 1939–1945, ed. Julien Hervier (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Journal d’un homme trompé (Paris: Gallimard, 1939); André Gide, Journal, 1889–1939 (Paris: La nouvelle revue française, 1939); André Gide, Journal édition établie, ed. Eric Marty, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1996–97); André Gide, Voyage au Congo: Carnets de route (Paris: Gallimard, 1928), published in English as Travels in the Congo, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929); Valery Larbaud, Journal, ed. Paule Moron (Paris: Gallimard, 2009); Michel Leiris, Journal, 1922–1989, ed. Jean Jamin (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Michel Leiris, Journal de Chine, ed. Jean Jamin (Paris: Gallimard, 1994);

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Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diaries: November 1939–March 1940, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 20. Henry Bauchau, Journal d’Antigone: 1989–1997 (Aries: Actes sud, 1999); Henry Bauchau, Dernier Journal (2006–2012) (Aries: Actes sud, 2015); Louis Calaferte, Carnets (1956–1994), 16 vols. (Paris: Denoël, Gallimard, 1980–2010); Julien Green, Journal, 19 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1938–2001); Julien Green, Diary, comp. Kurt Wolff, trans. Anne Green (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964). 21. Mireille Havet, Journal, 1918–1919: “Le monde entier vous tire par le milieu du ventre,” ed. Pierre Plateau, Dominique Tiry, and Claire Paulhan (Paris: C. Paulhan, 2003); Mireille Havet, Journal, 1919–1924: “Aller droit à l’enfer, par le chemin même qui le fait oublier,” ed. Pierre Plateau, Dominique Tiry, and Claire Paulhan (Paris: C. Paulhan, 2005); Mireille Havet, Journal, 1924–1927: “C’était l’enfer et ses flammes et ses entailles,” ed. Pierre Plateau, Laure Murat, Dominique Tiry, and Roland Aeschimann (Paris: C. Paulhan, 2008); Mireille Havet, Journal, 1927–1928: “Héroïne, cocaine! La nuit s’avance,” ed. Pierre Plateau, Patrick Kéchichian, Claire Paulhan, and Roland Aeschimann (Paris: C. Paulhan, 2010); Hélène Hoppenot, Journal, 1918–1933: Rio de Janeiro, Téhéran, Santiago du Chili, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Beyrouth-Damas, Berne, ed. Marie-France Mousli (Paris: C. Paulhan, 2012); Catherine Pozzi, Journal de jeunesse: 1893–1906, ed. C. Paulhan and Inès Lacroix-Pozzi (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1995). 22. Rémi Hess, “L’aventure du journal institutionnel,” in Lejeune, Le journal personnel, 77. 23. Simone de Beauvoir, La force de l’âge, Folio collection (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), published in English as The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green (London, Penguin Books, 1962). 24. De Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 378. 25. Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done, trans. Patrick O’Brian (Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1977), 23. 26. Simone de Beauvoir, After the War, Force of Circumstance, I, trans. Richard Howard (New York, Paragon House, 1992). 70. 27. De Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 145. 28. Marie Chaix, L’été du sureau (Paris: Seuil, 2005), published in English as Summer of the Elder Tree, trans. Harry Mathews (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013); Jean-Baptist Niel, La Maison Niel (Paris: Gallimard, 1995); François Nourissier, À défaut de génie (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); François Nourissier, Prince des berlingots: Récit (Paris: Gallimard, 2003); Pierre Pachet, Adieu (Belfort: Circé, 2001). 29. Philippe Lejeune, “Tenir un journal, une manière de vivre,” Chemins de formation 6 (2003): 46. 30. Philippe Artières and Dominique Kalifa, “Histoire et archives de soi,” special issue, Sociétés et Représentations, no. 13 (Paris: Credhess, 2002). 31. Genetic criticism is the trend of criticism that intends to follow a work upstream to its source; tirelessly scrutinize the preparatory notes, sketches, and early drafts of a text to reconstitute the steps in the genesis of the work; and propose a reasoned understanding of acts of verbal creativity. 32. Philippe Lejeune, “Le journal: Genèse d’une pratique,” Genesis 32 (2011): 29. 33. Philippe Lejeune, Aux origines du journal personnel: France, 1750–1815 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2016).

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Calaferte, Louis. Carnets (1956–1994). 16 vols. Paris: Denoël, Gallimard, 1980–2010. Campan, Véronique, and Catherine Rannoux, eds. Le journal aux frontières de l’art: La licorne 72. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005. Chaix, Marie. L’été du sureau. Paris: Seuil, 2005. Published in English as The Summer of the Elder Tree. Translated by Harry Mathews. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013. Cocteau, Jean. Journal, 1942–1945. Edited by Jean Touzot. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Doucet, Julie. Dirty Plotte. 2 vols. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2018. ———. Journal. Paris: L’Association, 2004. Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre. Journal d’un homme trompé. Paris: Gallimard, 1939. ———. Journal, 1939–1945. Edited by Julien Hervier. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Genette, Gérard. “Le journal, l’antijournal.” In Figures IV, 335–45. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Gide, André. Journal, 1889–1939. Paris: La nouvelle revue française, 1939. ———. Journal édition établie. 2 vols. Edited by Eric Marty. Paris: Gal­ limard, 1996–97. ———. Voyage au Congo: Carnets de route. Paris: Gallimard, 1928. Published in English as Travels in the Congo. Translated by Dorothy Bussy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929. Girard, Alain. Le journal intime. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976. Goncourt, Edmond de, and Jules de Goncourt. Journal de Goncourt: Mémoires de la vie littéraire. Paris: G. Charpentier, 1887–96. Gracq, Julien. Reading Writing. Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Turtle Point Press, 2006. Green, Julien. Diary. Compiled by Kurt Wolff. Translated by Anne Green. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964. ———. Journal. 19 vols. Paris: Plon, 1938–2001. Hamburger, Käte. The Logic of Literature. Translated by Marilynn J. Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Havet, Mireille. Journal, 1918–1919: “Le monde entier vous tire par le milieu du ventre.” Edited by Pierre Plateau, Dominique Tiry, and Claire Paulhan. Paris: Claire Paulhan, 2003. ———. Journal, 1919–1924: “Aller droit à l’enfer, par le chemin même qui le fait oublier.” Edited by Pierre Plateau, Dominique Tiry, and Claire Paulhan. Paris: C. Paulhan, 2005. ———. Journal, 1924–1927: “C’était l’enfer et ses flames et ses entailles.” Edited by Pierre Plateau, Laure Murat, Dominique Tiry, and Roland Aeschimann. Paris: C. Paulhan, 2008. ———. Journal, 1927-1928: “Heroine, cocaine! La nuit s’avance.” Edited by Pierre Plateau, Claire Paulhan, Roland Aeschimann, and Dominique Tiry. Paris: C. Plateau, 2010. Hess, Rémi, “L’aventure du journal institutionnel.” In Lejeune, Le journal personnel, 77–88. Hoppenot, Hélène. Journal 1918–1933: Rio de Janeiro, Téhéran, Santiago du Chili, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Beyrouth-Damas, Berne. Edited by Marie France Mousli. Paris: Éditions Claire Paulhan, 2012.

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Jaccottet, Philippe. La seconde semaison: Carnets, 1980–1994. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. ———. La semaison: Carnets, 1954–79. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. ———. Taches de soleil, ou d’ombre: Notes sauvegardées, 1952–2005. Paris: Le Bruit du temps, 2013. Larbaud, Valery. Journal. Edited by Paule Moron. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. Lecarme, Jacques. “L’intime en librairie, 1970–1990.” In Lejeune, Le journal personnel, 187–219. Leiris, Michel. Journal, 1922–1989. Edited by Jean Jamin. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. ———. Journal de Chine. Edited by Jean Jamin. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Lejeune, Philippe. “Auto-genèse, l’étude génétique des textes ­autobiographiques.” Genesis 1 (1992): 73-87. ———. Aux origines du journal personnel. France, 1750–1815. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2016. ———. “Comment finissent les journaux.” In Genèses du “Je,” edited by Philippe Lejeune and Catherine Viollet, 209–38. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000. ———. “Le journal: genèse d’une pratique.” Genesis 32 (2011): 29–42. ———, ed. Le journal personnel. Nanterre: Publidix, 1993. ———. Le moi des demoiselles. Enquête sur le journal de jeune fille. Paris: Seuil, 1993. ———. “Tenir un journal, une manière de vivre.” Chemins de formation 6 (2003): 45–52. Lejeune, Philippe, and Catherine Bogaert. Un journal à soi: Histoire d’une pratique. Paris: Textuel, 2003. Mauriac, Claude. Le temps accompli. Paris: B. Grasset, 1991. ———. Le temps immobile. Paris: B. Grasset, 1974. Neaud, Fabrice. Journal: Coffer des tomes 1 á 4. Augoulême: Ego comme X, 2011. Niel, Jean-Baptiste. La maison Niel. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Nourissier, François. A défaut de genie. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. ———. Prince des berlingots: Récit. Paris: Gallimard. 2003. Pachet, Pierre. Adieu. Belfort: Circé, 2001. Pozzi, Catherine. Journal de jeunesse: 1893–1906. Edited by Claire Paulhan and Inès Lacrois-Pozzi. Lagresse: Verdier, 1995. Rousset, Jean. Le lecteur intime: De Balzac au journal. Paris: José Corti, 1986. Sartre, Jean Paul. War Diaries: November 1939–March 1940. Translated by Quintin Hoare. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil, 1989. Sfar, Joann. Harmonica. Paris: L’Association, 2002. Simonet-Tenant, Françoise, ed. Dictionnaire de l’autobiographie: Écritures de soi de langue française. Paris: Champion, 2017. ———. Journal personnel et correspondance (1785–1939) ou les affinités électives. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Academia Bruylant, 2009. ———. “L’autobiographique hors l’autobiographie: Le cas du journal personnel.” Elseneur 22 (2008): 61–77. ———. Le journal intime: Genre littéraire et écriture ordinaire. Paris: Téraèdre, 2004.

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———, ed. Le propre de l’écriture de soi. Paris: Téraèdre, 2007. Simonet-Tenant, Françoise, and Catherine Viollet, eds. “Journaux personnels.” Special issue, Genesis, no. 32. Paris: Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne, 2011. Trondheim, Lewis. Carnet de bord: 22–28 janvier 2002 / 17–27 février 2002. Paris: l’Association, 2002.

F R A NÇ OI S E S I MON E T-T E NA N T is Professor of French Literature at the University of Rouen, France. She is author of The Diary and Diary and Letters (1785–1939) or Elective Affinities and editor of Dictionary of Autobiography: Life Writing in the French Language. DAG M A R A M E I J E R S -T ROL L E R (1956 – 2 018) was an experienced translator from French into English. A member of the American Translators Association, she was educated at Indiana University Bloomington, Pantheon-Sorbonne University, and London Metropolitan University.

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14 Writing the Self, Writing History in Palestine Kimberly Katz

In his introduction to the World War I diary of Jerusalemite Ihsan Turjman (1893–1917), Salim Tamari describes the significance of incorporating the insights and observations of personal diaries into our understanding of large-scale historical moments. Tamari writes, “The power of wartime diaries lies in their exposure of the texture of daily life, long buried in the political rhetoric of nationalist discourse, and in their restoration of a world that has been hidden . . . the life of communitarian alleys, obliterated neighborhoods, heated political debates projecting possibilities that no longer exist, and the voices of street actors silenced by elite memoirs: soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds.”1 Having been conscripted in November 1914, Turjman served as a soldier in the Ottoman army and kept a diary for nearly two years, only ceasing when circumstances led to his untimely death. My work on another Palestinian personal diary, that of Sami ‘Amr (1924–98), adds to the modern history of Palestine the writings of a young man struggling to gain an education and make his way in the word while facing two overwhelming challenges: life under British imperial rule and life under the stress of a world war. Sami was from the southern Palestinian city of Hebron and worked as an errand boy and later a clerk in the British Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) in Jerusalem for a couple of years before learning the skill of welding.2 His training as a welder allowed him to change jobs and work making gallon drums for the British war effort, near Latrun and Ramle, before taking an office job in his hometown. Sami sustained his writing for four years during the war, from 1941 to 1945. The diaries of  247

Ihsan Turjman and Sami ‘Amr are striking examples of young Palestinian men who put pen to paper to help them process the events of their lives but also to document the trying periods of the world war. Though not necessarily intended for publication, these diaries provide historians with a rich source of nonconventional material that adds color and context to our understanding of the daily lives of individuals, and by extension societies, caught up in geopolitical conflict. Each of these individuals, Ihsan Turjman and Sami ‘Amr, wrote his personal diary during a period of great upheaval in his life and in the history of Palestine. While this chapter focuses on only two diaries, their authors reveal universal sentiments even as they wrote of their specific circumstances, during World War I (Turjman) and World War II (‘Amr). These two wars came to define a monumentally transformative period in the modern history of Palestine: the British Mandate for Palestine. In choosing these two diaries to analyze for this chapter, I introduce to the reader two distinct Arab voices. The publication of these diaries, each of which has been translated, annotated, and contextualized by a historical and historiographical introduction, presents non-Arabic readers an opportunity to access the thoughts and concerns of individuals during times of global conflict. Translating and publishing the diaries of these individuals in English has proven challenging due to their idiosyncratic language usage. Ihsan employed Arabic influenced by Ottoman Turkish, French, and English. Sami’s Arabic is derived from the less cosmopolitan environment of Hebron after more than two decades of British Mandate rule, during which the influence of Turkish had waned. He did include a couple of words in English to list the title of a film he saw. Sami’s limited knowledge of English reflects the influence of the British and their goal of trying to create a class of employees who could read and speak English but whose knowledge of English would not reach levels that might interfere with the overall goals of the mandate.3 Both Sami and Ihsan have grammar errors in their Arabic language. Sami’s writing also vacillates between Modern Standard Arabic and colloquial Arabic, which he used, for example, in the poetry he wrote in his diary. The two world wars of the twentieth century mark not only astounding periods of rapid change from the perspective of European history but also the end of long-standing empires for those living in colonial dominions far beyond the borders of Europe. Each of these wars ushered in periods of great rupture in Palestine. World War I, or the Great War, ended four centuries of Ottoman Muslim rule in 1918, and by 1922 the League of Nations had ratified the British Mandate for Palestine (and Transjordan).4 Britain, however, had been unable to fulfill its promises made during World War I in the Balfour Declaration. In it, His Majesty’s 248 | The Diary

government (HMG) promised a Jewish national home in the country but periodically had to call for limitations on Jewish immigration. Similarly, the declaration indicated the British intention not harm to the civil and religious rights of the Arab majority. Yet as the Jewish economy developed in Palestine, the British did little to protect Palestinians’ rights to their land or to ensure economic opportunities, let alone their right to selfdetermination. World War II ended in 1945, and reeling from the havoc wreaked by the war, Britain transferred its responsibility for Palestine to the United Nations just over two years later. By November 1947, the United Nations had voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. This quickly led to a civil war in Palestine, and by May 1948, the British had pulled out of the country, at which time the Zionists in Palestine declared an independent state of Israel. The surrounding Arab states sent their armies to try to prevent the establishment of this state; militia violence had been ongoing since the announcement of the United Nations Partition Plan in 1947. When the armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors concluded in April 1949, close to 750,000 Palestinians had fled or were expelled from their homes and lands. The Arab state called for in the partition plan never materialized. The historical documents penned by government officials, military leaders, and strategic thinkers tell historians little about the fabric of daily life during the British Mandate period, or what Philippe Lejeune describes as the “unfolding of time in life.”5 Ihsan and Sami’s personal diaries have provided later readers with unique access to aspects of society that range inter alia from the status of women and courtship rituals in Palestine to price gouging during wartime and family land and legal matters. These are among the many topics seen through the eyes of these young men, who unwittingly acted as participant-observers in their society as they grappled with the pressures of world war and its resulting structural and political transformations on Palestine. The diaries selected for this chapter bookend a critical era of modern Palestinian history and present the perspectives of young Palestinian men whose lives and stories capture a shared historical experience, with notable distinctions. Though majority Muslim and Arab with an important Christian minority,6 Palestine’s early twentieth-century population witnessed the demarcation of borders and an immigration policy to suit Britain’s colonial needs. The emergence of British imperial rule in Palestine opened the doors to Jewish immigration. Zionist Jewish settlement in Palestine, begun prior to the mandate, continued nearly unimpeded as a result of it. Palestinian Arab protests during the period, which tended to focus on ending British rule in the country and thus Jewish settlement, were unsuccessful until the Palestine War of 1948. Sami wrote briefly, but poignantly, about the problem between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Yet Writing the Self, Writing History in Palestine  |  249

he did so without mentioning the British per se. He warned the Arabs “not to overlook this issue because the Jews’ greedy aspirations in Palestine have no boundaries.” While he was convinced that “they want to bring all of their brethren from the European countries to settle in the ‘Promised Land,’” Sami, nevertheless, was firm in his belief that the Arabs of Palestine would prevail in preserving their place in Palestine.7 For Ihsan, writing more than two decades earlier and under a different imperial power, Palestine experienced war that would lead to the end of Ottoman imperial rule and the rise of British mandatory government. Sami was born into and lived through decades of British rule that extended into World War II. By the end of that war, Palestine’s indigenous Arab population, including the Turjman and ‘Amr families, fell under non-Palestinian rule: the Turjmans were subject to Israeli rule while the ‘Amrs were subject to Jordanian rule. While a long tradition of writing about the self exists in Arab-Islamic historiography, Ihsan and Sami more likely drew on contemporary, rather than historical, influences for their diary writing.8 Many people in Palestine kept diaries during the periods that Ihsan and Sami wrote. While elites—Palestinian, British, and Zionist Jewish—certainly kept diaries, recently the diaries of nonelites have emerged, people who wrote about their experiences and offer a sharp contrast to the diaries of officials and elites.9 Khalil al-Sakakini, the Palestinian journalist, educator, and founder of al-Dusturiyya College, kept a diary and influenced his protégé, Ihsan Turjman. Ihsan benefited not only from attending al-Dusturiyya College, which emphasized secularism and modernism, as an alternative to the well-established educational system of missionary schools in Palestine but also from visiting at the home of his teacher and mentor several times a week for gatherings of intellectuals. Al-Sakakini suggested that his young protégé, Ihsan, keep a personal diary.10 Ihsan also read the newspapers al-Hilal, published by Jurji al-Zaydan, and al-Muqtataf, edited by Yaqub al-Sarruf, which reached Jerusalem from Cairo.11 Sami’s son, Samir, served as an interlocutor for my research on his father’s diary, published under the title A Young Palestinian’s Diary.12 Both Samir and the translated, annotated diary portray Sami as a voracious reader. He shared Ihsan’s WWI reading choices, frequently turning to al-Hilal and al-Muqtataf. The young Sami also enjoyed Russian authors whose works were likely translated into Arabic. Sami’s immediate influences were members of his large family, about whom he wrote and who participated in politics. They do not, however, appear to have been part of a recognized intellectual salon such as al-Sakakini’s. While Ihsan benefited from advanced education, Sami did not attend middle or high school despite his desire to do so. At seventeen years old, Sami began working in Jerusalem, away from his family, while Ihsan, following a short period of military 250 | The Diary

service outside of his home city, lived with his family. Sami was cut off from his social network, and his diary entries chronicle the social challenges and loneliness he faced in securing living quarters as a Muslim who sometimes rented from Christians. Ihsan wrote a diary of daily life in a similar fashion to that of his mentor, Khalil al-Sakakini. By contrast, Sami’s literary sensibility is more variegated than Ihsan’s, and his diary does not seem to be influenced by other writers. Sami’s diary includes a variety of styles and genres, such as poetry, letters he wrote to girls and to his mother or brother, analyses of dreams, and summaries of trips. Diaries play a powerful role for these authors as they search for normalcy under the trying conditions of war. While they may have been writing for themselves at the time, these wartime diaries, when examined historically, serve a readership beyond the author’s immediate concerns. For Philippe Lejeune, the diary is a vehicle that allows the writer to write for a “future self” or for “an uncertain reader of the future.”13 Ihsan kept a daily diary to write “his intimate thoughts and activities as a way of venting his frustration at the drudgery of military life.”14 Yet in his case, he never became the “future self” of his diary. He was never able to return to his diary and reread what he wrote. For Sami, it seems clear from the subtitle of his diary, “The Battle of Life,” that he turned to his diary as a way to work through his personal struggles.15 His life circumstances allowed him to process his own writings as he grew older.16 Both of these diaries bear a central element of diary writing identified by Lejeune: personal distress.17 As readers of Sami’s and Ihsan’s diaries, we gain insights into the intimate, concrete particulars of individuals that can often be lost in the larger web of historical events and narratives. Ihsan and Sami write poignantly about matters of morality and social expectations. Islam and local customs guided the daily lives of these young men, and conservative attitudes regarding sexuality affected each in different ways. Ihsan was being romantically pursued by his military supervisor, a time Ihsan called “the ugliest and vilest months” in his diary entries. Ihsan wrote that his Turkish Albanian officer gave him a note but tore it up before the young soldier could read it. Minutes later he came over and said that he wanted to kiss me between the eyes. My face became pale, and I wanted to beat him up, but I decided to control myself and did not respond. He came back and said he wanted an answer. “Do not fear,” he said, “I do not want to harm you. I love you tremendously. God knows why, for I cannot bear this situation anymore, and I have been suffering [from your love] for over 20 days.”18

Ihsan’s distress, instigated by his officer’s unwanted advances, was so pronounced that he considered taking his own life. Although he valued his own life, Ihsan wrote that “honor is more precious” and that he “would Writing the Self, Writing History in Palestine  |  251

rather die than dishonor [himself].” Beyond Ihsan’s concerns for himself, he also wondered, “If I committed suicide, what would happen to my parents?”19 In a tragic twist of fate, Ihsan was murdered by an Ottoman officer at the end of 1917, prior to General Edmund Allenby and the British army’s arrival in Jerusalem.20 For Sami, his move to Jerusalem left him alone, and at times, he struggled to navigate the conflicting desires within himself and those around him. He was ambivalent regarding the affections of Umm Aldu, an Italian woman from whom he rented a room. Sometimes he thought that she treated him like a son, feeding him and inquiring about him on a regular basis. Then it seemed to him that she was trying to trap him into some kind of romantic relationship, a situation he continued to have trouble deciphering at his tender age of eighteen. He wrote, “She tires herself out making me content, and she finds happiness being near me, without my doing anything. She frequently visits me and asks me to come to her house. Will she turn my life upside down, or will she throw me to the ground, as happens to young men who follow their loves and follow their passions? Your mercy, O God, free me from this frightening nightmare that sits on my chest whenever I imagine myself in such a situation of moral depravity that weaves through my pure [virginal] mind, which has never before imagined such vices.”21 Indeed, Sami’s son, Samir, remarked that related situations seem to have occurred more frequently than the instances Sami actually recorded in his diary. Sami told Samir several times about how a Muslim landlady introduced him to attractive young women who were married to wealthy, older men who were unable to impregnate their wives. Young women who wanted to preserve their status were expected to bear children, and they were willing to turn to younger, more virile men outside of their marriages. Samir, a medical doctor, added that without DNA or blood group testing in those days, women did not seem to mind the risk of having their infidelity exposed if that risk might result in producing offspring for their older husbands. The episode referred to in Sami’s diary brings into sharp relief the often contradictory set of social expectations for men and women in a conservative patriarchal culture. Ultimately, Sami refused these advances and chose to protect his own sense of sexual morality. The subject of Sami’s purity appears throughout his diary.22 According to Lejeune, there are two types of diarists: “those who write each day out of discipline or habit,” which, according to Tamari, is characteristic of Ihsan’s meticulous account of his days during the war; and “those who write . . . when they need to,” which is characteristic of Sami’s diary.23 Due to considerable repetition in Ihsan’s entries, Tamari engaged in a substantial amount of editing.24 Sami sustained his diary for four years of the war but did not write daily. Weeks or even months could 252 | The Diary

go by without his writing a word, something he occasionally chastised himself for in the diary. He found comfort in his writing but got upset with himself when he did not write often enough.25 While Sami did not leave nearly the amount of text Ihsan did, nevertheless both left dates in their writing. Sami, however, had placed some of his later-dated entries with earlier ones, continuing long entries on blank pages opposite previous entries, making it seem like they were continuations of different entries. Like Ihsan’s diary, Sami’s needed reorganization and editing due to occasional lack of dating for some entries and their haphazard placement. While the sense of the present may be clear to the diarist as he writes, such clarity may be lost to later readers when experiencing the diary in its original form. Julie Rak remarks that diary writing is a locus of subjective temporality where the writer, and reader, seeks to make “sense of the present as it accumulates each day.”26 Diarists are engrossed in their own reality. They do not share all of the details about the individuals and situations they describe. Historical diaries include not only people but also events that may require research to establish meaningful context for situations and individuals for future readers. Diarists may have written in code, as the two diarists discussed here did. When writing about women they admired, for example, they sometimes used initials or a numerical code to indicate the objects of their affection in a society not permissive of relations outside of marriage.27 Editors can supplement the text by including a scholarly apparatus in the form of annotations, introductory overviews, and other paratextual materials making them digestible to readers trying to understand the historical context in addition to the diarists’ words. These two men wrote their diaries in their youth: Ihsan wrote from ages twenty-two to twenty-three and Sami from ages seventeen to twentyone. That these diaries have survived is remarkable considering the circumstances. First, as mentioned previously, the diaries were written during world wars.28 Second, the 1948 Palestine war turned most Palestinian families’ lives upside down and sent hundreds of thousands of people into exile as they lost livelihoods and property. Small items, such as the diaries of young people, might seem superfluous in the tumultuous upheaval of war. Indeed, Ihsan’s murder in 1917 came as a shock, leaving the diary to fate as his family members, it seems, were unaware of his daily writing habit. The family moved out of the Old City of Jerusalem during the period of the British Mandate, along with other families of means. The diary, unbeknownst to them, likely came with them to Musrara, a neighborhood just outside the Old City, which became the seam of divided Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967. In 1967, when Israel’s soldiers captured the eastern part of the city, the Turjman house, where the family had settled following its relocation from Writing the Self, Writing History in Palestine  |  253

the Old City, had been confiscated by Israel along with the surrounding area in the Turjman quarter (hayy al-Turjman). Israel then turned the Baramki House, built on land bought from the Turjman family in the quarter, into a museum, effacing almost entirely its Palestinian past.29 Sami’s family remained in the family home in Hebron following the 1948 war, now under Jordanian rule. In 1962, Sami and his wife, Suhayla, moved to Amman, on the East Bank, where they built a home and raised their family.30 Sami wrote about the instability of war in Hebron in a second, shorter diary in 1949 in which he chronicled the struggle between Jordan and Egypt over control over his home city, a topic I take up in a separate article.31 The region experienced war and uprising in each of the decades from the 1950s to 1980s, before the peace process took root in earnest between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the early 1990s, only to collapse within a decade. Because there is no official Palestinian state, and thus no official Palestinian archive, personal diaries, family papers, memoirs, and photographs constitute much of the fragmentary social history of Palestine.32 Sami and Ihsan both have start and end dates to their diaries, but for Sami, he began his diary as a new era at the end of April 1941. He wrote about having finished “higher elementary” school, probably when he was sixteen, and expressed his desire to further his education.33 The war affected his prospects. Sami wrote about the bombardment of Haifa leading to his family’s rejection of his dream to study in that city.34 Instead, he went to work for the NAAFI, which supplied British troops with British goods as well as recreational facilities. Sami got this job following his move from the conservative environment of Hebron to the more pluralistic city of Jerusalem, capital of the British Mandate for Palestine. It brought him into contact with Greeks, Jews, Britons, and other ethnic groups who might be living in the city or passing through as part of the war effort. He rented a room by himself, which elicited a poem in his diary that ruminates on the variety of people who walked by through his descriptions of the inhabitants’ clothing. Because Sami lived in a basement apartment, all he could see was the lower half of people, so his descriptions are of stockings, shoes, and legs.35 Sami wrote letters to family members, thoughts about girls who were the object of his affection, memoranda about what he might do if he were in a position to make changes in the country, and more standard “Dear Diary”–type entries, which he titled “Dear Friend.” For Sami, the diary was a personal friend to whom he could pour out his personal emotions, concerns, and reflections. But his diary also served as a space where he worked out more abstract thoughts on the shifting political landscape of the country. For Ihsan, his diary begins at the end of March 1915 as he wonders about Britain’s eventual rise to power and control over the country in the 254 | The Diary

wake of the Ottoman defeat.36 Ihsan wrote quite openly about his disdain for Cemal Pasha and Enver Pasha, two of the three members of a powerful triumvirate of Ottoman ministers that emerged from the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and who held anti-Arab sentiments. The former was the Fourth Army commander, based in Damascus but who visited Jerusalem often, and ran affairs like a military dictator. The latter served as minister of war and visited in Jerusalem. Ihsan made plain his hatred for these individuals, writing about their hypocrisy. He heard about a dinner at the Commissariat at which alcoholic drinks would be served. Ihsan noted, “It’s hard to take seriously Cemal Pasha’s (and his retinue’s) claim of devotion to Islam and of wanting to liberate Muslims from British yoke. Every day we read a circular warning soldiers and officers against frequenting cafés and beer halls [bira-khanat], upon threat of imprisonment and expulsion from service. All this while the commanders are swimming in debauchery and drunkenness.”37 Even as they narrate their own troubles, the diarists write passionately about their concern for the poor in Jerusalem, who struggled to feed themselves during the war. For Ihsan, his situation reflects that of a family. He lived at home, as an unmarried man, and he shared the experiences of his parents’ household with regard to food and staples. In December 1915, he wrote that flour and bread had nearly disappeared in the city, with people simply going without or fighting each other near the Damascus Gate to try to obtain flour. In the same afternoon, the number of those fighting had increased, most of them peasants from the countryside.38 While his father had a bit of money to buy bread, there was none in the market place to be had. Without an extended family to provide for them, Ihsan wrote that his family “would have gone hungry.”39 For Sami, living as a single man in the city, he wrote how he and other young people living without the support of a family dealt with the diminishing availability of staples, such as bread and rice. Sami wrote that food existed as he and his friends could usually find bread during their lunch breaks but that no one “among the food sellers admits to having any bread left” in the evening.40 Buying rice also became quite a challenge, and ultimately the goods seemed available only for the wealthy. Both diarists complained about the rich, who either had no problem buying (Sami) or hoarded food away (Ihsan). They felt a strong sense of social justice toward the poor. Each believed that the government—Ottoman Turkish for Ihsan and British for Sami—must play a role in relieving the harshness of poverty and hunger that the war had imposed on the poor. Each of them kept faith in the government to aid the people during war even when that faith was tested, as evidenced by each writer’s moments of disappointment with governmental complacency. Hope did not fray into disillusionment, even though neither could articulate the source of that hope. Writing the Self, Writing History in Palestine  |  255

While some Arabs fought on behalf of the Ottomans during the war, Ihsan supported the idea, not widespread, that Palestine might join in an Egypt-Palestine condominium.41 By the time he was killed, that idea was supplanted by a movement for an independent Palestine. For Sami, Palestinian nationalism had grown roots during the mandate period, and while his diary is not as overtly political as is Ihsan’s, he wrote that Palestinian Arabs would “not leave our country . . . bearing the pain of exile and dispersion.”42 Sami spoke of resistance, but in retrospect, it was prophecy. While the two diaries each offers an account of a young man’s life, they reveal personal circumstances and backgrounds from the perspective of middle- to upper-middle-class members of society, although they themselves experienced great difficulties. Ihsan came from a prominent family of court translators who owned property in Jerusalem (the Old City). His father had broken the tradition of translating, however, and become a merchant. The eldest son, Ihsan was conscripted into the Ottoman military on November 14, 1915, following a general mobilization. He was initially sent to serve in central Palestine but spent most of his service in Jerusalem, working in the headquarters of the mufattish manzil (residence inspector).43 Sami’s father was a tax collector for the Ottomans and, thus, like Ihsan’s father, was literate. The ‘Amr family, while living in Hebron, hailed from the nearby village of Dura and maintained strong ties to the village. Sami’s father died of complications from diabetes in 1929, making Sami and his siblings orphans. Sami remained close to his mother and wrote about her frequently in his diary, sometimes lamenting his perceived neglect of her.44 Sami’s father had owned some shops and land at the time of his death, but Sami’s mother and he and his brothers had to sell the family wealth over the years of the British Mandate as means of subsistence. Despite the seemingly more prestigious background of their fathers and ancestors, both of these young men wrote about personal financial struggles, difficulties with their jobs, and the challenges of dealing with their bosses. In these ways, their diaries reflect a universality that crosses ethnic and national boundaries, common themes we can all relate to: the challenges of transitioning from childhood to adulthood and accepting the responsibilities of society. The war surrounding each diarist compounded these challenges all the more so. Palestine underwent significant change during the period that Ihsan and Sami wrote and in the period leading up to their writing. By the time that Ihsan wrote, in 1915–16, infrastructural developments had emerged under the Ottomans in the realms of transportation, communications, and health, despite their often being attributed to the British.45 The late Ottoman period had witnessed the rise of the CUP in 1908, an organization whose members included various ethnic groups, including Arabs, and who opposed the authoritarianism of Sultan Abdulhamid II. Yet 256 | The Diary

supporters of the CUP maintained support for more than one ideology, including Arab nationalism. During World War I, supporters of Arab nationalism revolted against the Ottoman government, yet many Arabs, including Ihsan, also fought on the side of the Ottomans during the war. By reading Sami’s diary alongside Ihsan’s, the changes and similarities of life in Palestine can be felt across the decades. A distinct sense of Palestinian identity and nationalism emerged during the period of the British Mandate, and ties to place are distinct in Sami’s writings. This may be due to his ability to travel more freely during the period of war, as technology had made travel by car more accessible to many, including those at Sami’s socioeconomic level. The diarists may not have meant for future readers to know their deepest concerns, but in writing their diaries, Ihsan and Sami created a space for us, the readers, to inhabit their worlds decades later. In so doing, we realize that the stresses of war are shared fully on all sides.

Acknowledgments I am grateful for Salim Tamari’s encouragement in including the diary of Ihsan Turjman in this comparative study of Palestinian diaries. Thanks are also due to David Brookshire for his valuable comments on this chapter and to the editors for including this chapter in this volume. Notes 1. Salim Tamari, Year of the Locust: A Soldier’s Diary and the Erasure of Palestine’s Ottoman Past (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 4–5. 2. The NAAFI provided British goods and recreational facilities to British servicemen while employing local staff. 3. Kimberly Katz, A Young Palestinian’s Diary, 1941–1945: The Life of Sami ‘Amr (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 24–27. Sami’s diary appeared first in English. An Arabic version appeared in 2017: Yawmiyat Shab Filastini: Hayat Sami ‘Amr, 1941–1945. Beirut: Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 2017. 4. The British Mandate for Palestine was finalized in July 1922. Transjordan was attached to the mandate in September 1922. 5. Julie Rak discusses Lejeune’s understanding of time in diaries in her preface to the English translation of his collection of essays on diaries. See Julie Rak, “Dialogue with the Future: Philippe Lejeune’s Method and Theory of Diary,” in On Diary, Philippe Lejeune, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. Katherine Durnin (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 24. 6. These were the dominant communities in Palestine. The Christian community, for example, fragmented into sixteen different sects. The Jewish community has Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, the latter of whom had begun arriving from Europe in the 1880s; see Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Jerusalem (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 18–19. Writing the Self, Writing History in Palestine  |  257

7. Entry dated March 15, 1943, Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 116–17. 8. Dwight F. Reynolds, ed., Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001). See also Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 45–49. 9. Many former high commissioners and other British officials published their diaries, including Herbert Samuel (1870–1963), Henry Gurney (1898–1951), and Edward Keith-Roach (1885–1954). In Year of the Locust, Tamari discusses two important World War I diaries in addition to the diary of Ihsan Turjman (1843–1917), whose diary was published in translation in that volume. Lieutenant ‘Aref Shehadeh (1892–1973) of Jerusalem, writing in Arabic during his time as a prisoner of war in Siberia, and Second Lieutenant Muhammad [Mehmed] Fasih of Mersin, who wrote in Ottoman Turkish with a great deal of Arabic usage, provide excellent examples of personal wartime diaries that expand our understanding of the history of the World War I period. Several British policemen have published their memoirs, a related genre of self-literature, decades later from their time served during the British Mandate. See for example Robin H. Martin, Palestine Betrayed: A British Palestine Policeman’s Memoirs (1936–1948) (Ringwood, CT: Seglawi Press, 2007). 10. Tamari, Year of the Locust, 39. Al-Sakakini’s diaries have been published in seven volumes. Khalil al-Sakakini, Yawmiyat Khalil al-Sakakini: Yawmiyat, rasa’il wa-ta’ammulat [Diaries of Khalil al-Sakakini: Diaries, letters, and reflections], ed. Akram Musallam, vols. 1–7, Khalil al-Sakakini Cultural Center (Ramallah: Institute for Jerusalem Studies, 2003–10). 11. Jurji al-Zaydan and Yaqub al-Sarruf, both Lebanese, were living in Egypt. 12. Katz, A Young Palestinian’s Diary. 13. Rak, “Dialogue with the Future,” 23–24; Philippe Lejeune, “How Do Diaries End,” in Lejeune, On Diary, 324. 14. Tamari, Year of the Locust, 24. 15. The diary is titled “My Memoirs in This Life.” The first entry is “The Struggle Began” (Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 71–72). For an explanation on the use of the words memoirs (mudhakkirat) and diary (yawmiyyat) and their use among British Mandate–era diarists, including Sami, Ihsan, and musician Wasif Jawhariyya, see Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 45–49. 16. I did not have the opportunity to meet Sami in his life, so what I know about him, beyond reading his diary, has been come through conversations and correspondence with his eldest son. 17. Philippe Lejeune, “The Private Practice of the Private Journal: Chronicle of an Investigation (1986–1998),” in Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History, ed. Rachel Langford and Russell West (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 185, and Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 37. 18. Tamari, Year of the Locust, 157. 19. Ibid. 20. This information came in an interview by Tamari with Salih Turjman, a nephew of Ihasan (Tamari, Year of the Locust, 160). 21. Entry dated April 2, 1942, Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 86. 22. Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 88n51. 23. Lejeune, “How Do Diaries End,” 193. 24. Salim Tamari, Amm al-jarad: Al-harb al-‘uthma wa-mahu al-madi al‘uthmani min Filastin, yawmiyat jundi maqdisi ‘uthmani, 1915–1916 [Year of

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the locust: The Great War and the erasure of Palestine’s Ottoman past; Diary of an Ottoman Jerusalemite, 1915–1916] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2008), 73; Tamari, Year of the Locust. Ihsan’s diary appeared first in Arabic. An English translation appeared three years later, with fewer diary entries included in that publication. 25. An example of this is the entry on July 5, 1942. The previous entry is May 29, 1942. He wrote that he would make up for not writing, and then his next entry is not until August 10, 1942 (Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 94–98). 26. Rak, “Dialogue with the Future,” 24. 27. Ihsan also coded his writing about the theft of family jewelry perpetrated during a temporary move by his family outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls. The thieves turned out to be cousins, and Ihsan coded the writings about which he wanted to discuss with his father at a later date (Tamari, Year of the Locust, 21). 28. The story of Ihsan’s diary is one of disappearance and reappearance; it is told in Tamari, Year of the Locust, 18–19, and in greater detail in Tamari, ‘Amm al-Jarad, 17–23. How I came into possession of ‘Amr’s diary is told in Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, xv. 29. Tamari, Year of the Locust, 18–19; the “Turjeman Post” is mentioned briefly at the website for the Museum of the Seam, accessed August 24, 2019, https://www.mots.org.il/about. 30. Sami discusses his courtship to Suhayla in many entries of his diary. 31. Kimberly Katz, “The ‘Dual Era’ in Hebron through the Diaries of Sami ‘Amr,” Biography 38, no. 4 (2015): 523–42, http://doi.org/10.1353 /bio.2016.0001. 32. Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar, eds., Awraq ‘a’iliyya: Dirasat fi tarikh ijtima‘i Filatini al-mu‘asir [Family papers: Studies in contemporary Palestine social history] (Ramallah: Institute for Jerusalem Studies, 2009). 33. For a thorough explanation of the education levels and why Sami finished at this age, see Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 72n5. 34. Entry dated April 30, 1941, Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 72. 35. Entry dated January 20, 1942, Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 81. This was probably prepared as a bomb shelter, according to the poem. 36. Tamari, Year of the Locust, 91. 37. Ibid., 109–11. 38. Ibid., 142. 39. Ibid. 40. Entry dated March 10, 1942, Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 82. 41. Tamari, Year of the Locust, 91. 42. Entry dated March 15, 1943, Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 117. 43. Ali Rusen served as the mufattish manzil, Ihsan’s direct supervisor. 44. While it may have seemed like this to him since he had gone to live in Jerusalem and Ramle for a period of time during the war, and during his diary-writing period, eventually his mother came to live with him and his wife, Suhayla (entry August 15, 1942, Katz, Young Palestinian’s Diary, 102n80). 45. Tamari recounted that railroads, telephones, telegraphs, a postal service, and a piped water system all emerged under the Ottomans, along with public hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies to combat epidemics, such as malaria, cholera, and typhus. See Tamari, Year of the Locust, 10.

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Bibliography Campos, Michelle. Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Jerusalem. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Katz, Kimberly. “The ‘Dual Era’ in Hebron through the Diaries of Sami ‘Amr.” Biography 38, no. 4 (2015): 523–42. http://doi.org/10.1353 /bio.2016.0001. ———. A Young Palestinian’s Diary, 1941–1945: The Life of Sami ‘Amr. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Published in Arabic as Yawmiyat Shab Filastini: Hayat Sami ‘Amr, 1941–1945. Beirut: Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 2017. Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Translated by Katherine Durnin. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. ———. “The Private Practice of the Private Journal: Chronicle of an Investigation (1986–1998).” In Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History, edited by Rachel Langford and Russell West, 185–204. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Martin, Robin H. Palestine Betrayed: A British Palestine Policeman’s Memoirs (1936–1948). Ringwood, CT: Seglawi Press, 2007. Rak, Julie. “Dialogue with the Future: Philippe Lejeune’s Method and Theory of Diary.” In Lejeune, On Diary, 16–26. Reynolds, Dwight F., ed. Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. al-Sakakini, Khalil. Yawmiyat Khalil al-Sakakini: Yawmiyat, rasa’il wata’ammulat [Diaries of Khalil al-Sakakini: Diaries, letters, and reflections]. Edited by Akram Musallam. Vols. 1–7. Khalil al-Sakakini Cultural Center. Ramallah: Institute for Jerusalem Studies, 2003–10. Tamari, Salim. Amm al-Jarad: Al-harb al-‘Uthma wa-mahu al-madi al‘uthmani min Filastin, yawmiyat jundi maqdisi ‘uthmani, 1915–1916 [Year of the locust: The Great War and the erasure of Palestine’s Ottoman past; Diary of an Ottoman Jerusalemite, 1915–1916]. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2008. Published in English as Year of the Locust: A Soldier’s Diary and the Erasure of Palestine’s Ottoman Past. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. Tamari, Salim, and Issam Nassar, eds. Awraq ‘A’iliyya: Dirasat fi Tarikh Ijtima‘i Filatini al-Mu‘asir [Family papers: Studies in contemporary Palestine social history]. Ramallah: Institute for Jerusalem Studies, 2009.

K I M B E R LY K AT Z is Professor of Middle East History at Towson University. She is author of Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spaces and A Young Palestinian’s Diary, 1941–1945: The Life of Sami ‘Amr.

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15 Sharing Secrets in NineteenthCentury America Marilyn Ferris Motz

Diaries are poised precariously between keeping secrets and exposing them. Historically situated concepts of secrecy and privacy establish boundaries of social networks and regulate the circulation of information within them. As repositories for secrets, diaries can articulate and document these porous boundaries. Studies of nineteenth-century American women’s diaries have explored the role of interpersonal relationships in the construction of subjectivity.1 In a study of the diaries of about thirty upper- and upper-middle-class American girls living in northeastern cities in the late nineteenth century, Jane Hunter discussed how the diarists’ claims to privacy enabled them to construct a sense of self within their family relationships.2 As they transferred their primary ties from parents to peers, girls wrote about their friendships and shared their diaries with their friends, enhancing their autonomy while developing social networks. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Judy Nolte Temple examined the diaries of a nineteenth-century rural midwestern American mother and daughter, Emily and Sarah Gillespie, who read and commented on one another’s diaries that documented the private abusive behavior of the man who was Emily’s husband and Sarah’s father.3 Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff concluded that critical analysis of women’s diaries situates the act of writing in specific social positions, questions the dichotomy of private and public spaces, and suggests that self-construction is embedded in networks of relationships.4 Bunkers noted that midwestern female diarists often wrote about their relationships or envisioned a diary as a surrogate friend or a legacy for their descendants.5 Her edited collection includes  261

excerpts from three collaborative nineteenth-century diaries from Wisconsin: as young women, Ada James and her cousin read and wrote in one another’s diaries, while members of the Hamilton and Holton families recorded decades of family events in shared journals. Considering diary writing as a social practice embedded in networks of social relationships makes it possible to examine diaries as links between personal emotions and cultural norms. In her study of antebellum New England working-class families, sociologist Karen Hansen used diaries written by fifty-six men and women to reveal the daily practices of visits, exchanges, and conversations that constituted a social sphere mediating between the private and public spheres.6 Thomas Augst examined the literary practices of twenty young male clerks in nineteenth-century American cities who used diary writing as a technique for developing character traits needed for emotional intimacy in marriage as well as success in business.7 Maintaining a diary allowed these young men to practice expressing appropriate feelings, tastes, and sentiments that would prepare them for private domestic life in an emerging literate urban middle class. Lucia McMahon traced the development of an emotionally intimate romantic friendship based on shared reading by analyzing the diaries seventeen-year-old New Jersey resident Rachel Van Dyne exchanged in 1810 with her twenty-two-year-old male teacher.8 Mary and Ronald Zboray examined almost eight hundred diaries from antebellum New England in their study of socio-literary practices in everyday life. They noted that blank diaries were popular gifts and described the roles of diaries in family relationships, citing several examples of collaborative family diaries, diaries written for an absent spouse or sibling, and diaries ending with memorials written by family members after the diarist’s death. They also noted, however, that many diarists tried to prevent other people from reading their diaries or controlled the information they shared by reading selected portions aloud.9 These studies of nineteenth-century American diaries suggest that the extent to which diaries were shared varied according to the relationship between author and reader. Most diarists tried to control access to their diaries. Intentionally sharing a diary was an act of intimacy, while reading a diary without permission challenged the diarist’s autonomy, whether seen as an assertion of authority or a violation of privacy. Diary writers sometimes staked a claim for privacy in the diary itself, with a flyleaf inscription or coded entries. Limiting access to a diary not only kept the diarists’ personal feelings and experiences private but also allowed diarists to avoid disclosing assessments of other people that could disrupt social relationships. By describing their positive and negative observations of other people, diarists delineated the boundaries of their social group, situated themselves within networks of relationships, and defined 262 | The Diary

themselves in relation to the behavior and values of others. The content and circulation of a diary provide a map of the social world of its author and trace a trajectory that has both temporal and spatial dimensions. Diaries written simultaneously by members of a family can reveal how their intersecting social networks evolved and how the diarists used their writing practices to define and shape these interactions. The diaries Henry and Harriet Smith created in Ohio and Michigan in 1853–54 and in Missouri in 1862 illustrate how diaries could be embedded in networks of interpersonal relationships.10 When Harriet met Henry, a twenty-six-year-old clerk in a dry goods store, in November 1852, she was a twenty-year-old teacher in a oneroom rural school in southern Michigan. Henry had recently returned to his hometown after an unsuccessful attempt to accumulate capital by working as a store clerk in upstate New York and as a traveling salesman. Henry participated in the social life of the young men of his rural community, including such practices as horse racing, hunting, pitching pennies, card playing, serenading young women, and attending fairs, circuses, and political rallies. On March 18, 1853, Henry wrote in his diary, “Was up all night playing euchre with 7 others. . . . The oysters, cigars and apples suffered awfully.” He joined men and women of all ages at oyster suppers, dances, ice cream parties, picnics, rowing and fishing excursions, donation parties for clergy, and games of euchre, whist, and Old Maid. Henry sang in a church choir and a glee club and played the fiddle for community balls at local dance halls. Harriet enjoyed visiting with friends, but she agreed with her father, a Baptist minister, that cards, dancing, alcohol, theater, gambling, and most public amusements were immoral. Harriet preferred reading aloud with friends, exchanging books, and discussing literature. Shortly after becoming engaged to Henry in July 1853, Harriet accepted a teaching position in Maumee, Ohio, where she would spend a year living with her aunt and uncle while paying off her debts. Harriet’s aunt introduced her to a more fashionable social circle by including her in formal social calls and dinner parties. Harriet also socialized informally with her fellow teachers and other young men and women who gathered to sing popular songs, play parlor games, present papers at a community lyceum, and spend evenings in casual conversation. Harriet and Henry used their diaries to articulate their positions in the social environment, tracing a trajectory from their past experiences to the lives they anticipated in the future. They identified available options and considered the potential consequences of their choices. They related everyday practices to moral values and assessed the behavior of others in the community as well as their own actions. On January 11 and 12, 1854, Harriet criticized the “idle flatterers & heartless fashionables” at a large wedding: “I could not mingle my sincere wishes with the cold, formal Sharing Secrets in Nineteenth-Century America  |  263

nothings of gay butterflies.” She noted that she planned to take “life’s most solemn step” in a “quiet, dignified manner without ostentation.” Henry and Harriet used literary techniques to delineate social differences based on class, literacy, and wealth, as well as race, religion, and ethnicity. By distancing themselves from others according to these distinctions, they defined the boundaries of their social networks and naturalized their own social positions. Both Henry and Harriet tried to protect the privacy of their diaries. In previous years, Henry had used a simple numeric code (1=a, 2=b, etc.) to describe his sexual encounters. Shortly after she moved into the home of her aunt and uncle in Maumee, Harriet asserted the right to privacy in her correspondence and diary. She wrote in her diary: I must have independence. I must be left undisturbed, to take my own course, & not have any of my affairs, private or public, meddled with. I know that there is but little, very little sympathy between Uncle’s people & myself, therefore all I ask, is to be left alone—permitted to write as much as I choose & to whom I wish. Such things have always been indulged in without interference, & I cannot endure it now. I am old enough to know what is proper, & one thing is certain, I shall maintain my rights, even “at the point of the bayonet.” (September 7, 1853)

Two months later, when her father visited, Harriet again defended her writing: Aunt thought, as father was here, she would improve the opportunity to express her contempt for my writing “penchant.” She said she should “think I might spend my time to better advantage than in scribbling so much.” &c. I knew father approved of my journalizing, consequently I did not fear to speak about it, & I told her I thought she was wrong to talk as she did—that I should not give up my journal, and wished to enjoy such privileges undisturbed, &c. &c. (November 7, 1853)

Harriet felt personally violated when she discovered a month later that her aunt had been reading her diary without her permission. She wrote, “Have not sewed any this afternoon, but have had a long & singular talk with uncle’s people, who, according to the denouement, have been ransacking this journal, which like a treacherous friend, revealed secrets that should have been sacred. A pretty pass that I cannot confide in my Journal without having the confidence wrenched from it—my heart torn open, its pages read & all its secret workings betrayed, & I brought to an account for entertaining such feelings, & pouring them out upon these truthful pages” (December 3, 1853). Harriet and Henry claimed the right to decide when and to whom they would reveal the secrets they confided in their diaries. On May 1, 1853, Henry’s friend “got hold of this journal and I like a fool I read to him from it & told him all about my affairs.” 264 | The Diary

After Henry had proposed marriage but before Harriet had accepted his proposal, he had shared portions of his diary with her. On June 26, 1853, he wrote, “I have promised that she shall read from this next Sabbath eve. Perhaps she will think less of me when she knows more but it is not my wish to conceal anything from her.” The following Sunday, Henry noted, “Agreeable to my promise I put this journal into the buggy and as soon as we were out of the village we commenced reading from it. Read from the commencement to the last entry; not all but skipping here and there. She also read to me from hers but would not allow me to read all as she did in mine.” After reading one another’s diaries on July 3, Henry and Harriet “talked long and freely,” and Harriet accepted Henry’s proposal of marriage. The next day Harriet wrote in her diary, “By the by I saw Henrie’s last evening, and liked it well—I felt better acquainted with his heart— and loved him all the more for the knowledge—I do believe we are, in many respects, congenial—we certainly ought to be, if happy together.” A week later, Harriet shared more of her diary with Henry. He wrote on July 10, “I read in her journal more than I was permitted to before and find it a mutual feeling from the first. I can confedintly [sic] call her mine now though we may be separated for a long time. Thank God I have found a good and true heart at last.” Later that night, Harriet wrote in her diary that she and Henry were now “firmly engaged” pending her father’s consent the following weekend. Apparently Harriet suggested that she and Henry exchange diary volumes so that they could learn more about one another’s experiences and attitudes. On August 4, Henry wrote in his diary about a planned visit to Harriet and her family: “I will take along this tell tale of the past by her request, that we may look into each others [sic] hearts. Well, dear H theres [sic] no truth I would keep back from you, not even my lack of mind.” Two days later, Henry wrote that he had given Harriet his journal to take with her when she moved to Maumee “as a companion to help her pass otherwise weary hours when all alone.” He added, “I do hope she will still love me when she knows my whole nature thoroughly, but there are spots in it that no woman should read.” On August 14, Henry still worried whether Harriet would “continue to love me when she knows me as thoroughly as she will when [she] has perused my journal.” By August 18, Henry’s fears had been put to rest: “She writes that she has read my journal through and loves yet with all my faults.” Sharing their diaries provided a level of intimacy that would have been difficult to attain within the restricted conditions of courtship. At a time when rules of propriety strictly defined what could be said in conversation, especially between men and women, published fiction provided a model for the expression of emotion in the private context Sharing Secrets in Nineteenth-Century America  |  265

of the written text. At the time of their engagement, Henry and Harriet had known one another only seven months, with only a few opportunities for private conversation. Although they had met through mutual friends, their knowledge of one another’s reputation, character, and history was limited. An introspective daily diary maintained over a period of months or years provided some evidence of its author’s sincerity and moral values, as well as insight into his or her goals in life and expectations for marriage. A diary could also reveal how its author had acted in relationships with family members, friends, and neighbors as well as in previous courtships. Sharing their diaries could help young men and women predict how a prospective partner might act in the future as a husband or wife and as a father or mother. As Harriet suggested, reading one another’s diaries could also provide reassurance that a couple was “congenial,” sharing compatible taste, attitudes, intellect, and values. Henry and Harriet’s courtship progressed from reading selected diary passages aloud in June to giving one another their diary volumes to read in their entirety in August. Sharing their diaries enhanced feelings of intimacy and trust as they confirmed their commitment to one another and prepared for marriage. Harriet stopped writing in her diary when she married Henry in June 1854. Nine months later their daughter, Isa, was born. Henry continued his daily entries during the following years. By their third anniversary, Henry had grown discouraged at the prospect of remaining a clerk in the dry goods store. He decided that his best chance for financial security would be to move west to Missouri, but he found he could afford to buy only uncultivated land in a recently settled region of the prairie near the state’s western border. Although Harriet was apprehensive about moving to a community of illiterate subsistence farmers from southern states, Henry assured her that more congenial and literate “Yankees” would soon join them. In March 1858, the family moved into the one-room log house Henry built on the land he cleared and fenced to establish a farm near Montevallo, Missouri. During the following years, the Smiths developed close ties with neighbors from both southern and northern states. Henry was elected Justice of the Peace and appointed as a county judge. In 1861, when Southern states began to secede from the United States, the Montevallo community split into pro-Union and pro-Confederacy factions, with the latter in the strong majority. On February 9, Henry attended a “Union meeting” where he drew up resolutions against secession, but on April 20 he wrote that he would no longer speak out against Missouri joining the Confederacy. On May 9, Henry worried that as a “northern immigrant” he might suffer the same fate as several pro-Union neighbors who fled after threats of violence. He began to emphasize his Virginia birthplace rather than his Michigan upbringing and New 266 | The Diary

England heritage. Missouri voted to remain in the Union, but the governor refused to provide troops for the US military. The Missouri legislature called up state troops to confront Union forces sent to the state capital, and local communities, including Montevallo, organized home guard units. Missouri state troops led by the governor fled across the state, and past Montevallo, with the federal forces in pursuit. Soon there were several different militias fighting on each side, in addition to federal troops and local home guards. Unofficial bands of guerrilla fighters gathered in the wooded creek beds. They were sympathetic to the Confederacy but were not under military discipline. The guerrillas relied on their families and friends for food, clothes, and information. They stole horses and supplies from Union supporters, shooting men who resisted. Many local men moved into, out of, and between various militias and guerrilla bands. Troops on both sides foraged for food, and the Smiths and their neighbors were forced to cook for soldiers who appeared on their doorsteps. Some pro-Union military units from the neighboring state of Kansas used the opportunity to continue long-standing hostilities. Federal military leaders acknowledged that their behavior drove even Union supporters to take up arms to protect their families.11 The state legislature in exile seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy. Now there were two governors of Missouri and two legislatures, one in the state capital and one in exile. Citizens could claim loyalty to either state government, and many were uncertain whether they owed allegiance to their state or the federal government. President Lincoln imposed martial law in Missouri, and federal military policy brought increasingly harsh penalties on insurgents and civilians who supported them. By 1862, the courts, mail delivery, schools, banks, newspapers, stores, and even churches had stopped functioning. The Smiths were cut off from information and communication outside their community.12 On March 23, 1862, Harriet resumed the diary she had set aside when she married Henry eight years earlier. Now the mother of three children, she wanted to bear witness to wartime events. In her first entry, Harriet wrote, “War sits like some foul bird of prey above our pleasant prairie home. Savage scenes of violence are every day [sic] affairs—men steal & kill—women & children cower affrighted around their destitute firesides—Such is the present, but still blessed in our home—we are spared to each other—husband, wife & babes—We do not suffer for the actual necessities of life & love & hope still cheer us on. But the romance of the past has been sobered down, married life brings many realities & war reveals their sternness.” In these circumstances, social networks became a lifeline that filtered the sparse information and scarce material goods needed for survival. As individuals weighed conflicting loyalties, shifted allegiances, and tried to hide their affiliations, it became crucial to assess Sharing Secrets in Nineteenth-Century America  |  267

the character of neighbors and try to predict their actions. Accurate knowledge and understanding of unfolding events, and the role of individuals within them, was essential. Both Harriet and Henry used their diaries to track the intricate social networks surrounding them. However, a diary could provide damaging evidence of the partisan sympathies and activities of its author and others in the community. A young man from Henry’s hometown in Michigan had joined the Smiths in Missouri, sharing their small cabin and helping with farm work. He left abruptly after Henry read his diary, which confirmed Henry’s suspicion that the man might inform the federal troops about Henry’s assistance to members of local guerrilla bands. Henry kept his own diary hidden in a hollow log. On April 15, 1862, he acknowledged the need to “study our every word that we speak lest we expose ourselves to the wild wicked passions that now pervade every nook & corner” and protect his family by “concealing and dissimulating according to the best of my talents.” Harriet apparently trusted that the limited literacy of her neighbors and the reluctance of federal troops to search her private belongings would protect her diary from disclosure. Both may have described events in ways that could justify their actions and keep their motivations ambiguous. For the next four months both Henry and Harriet wrote daily entries in their diaries, but there is no indication that they shared them with one another. Henry recorded brief accounts of his own experiences, events he observed, and rumors he heard about military actions. His entries are factual rather than reflective, referring to ethical principles primarily to justify his own behavior. While Henry depicted himself responding to a series of challenges to his survival and the safety of his family, Harriet recounted anecdotes that personified the effects of war and related them to principles of morality and justice. She interpreted the impact of the war on the social fabric of the region, describing how individuals responded to an unprecedented breakdown of civil authority and moral guidelines. At this point in the conflict, women had considerable latitude to express their opinions in private. However, all men were assumed to be potential combatants: neutrality was not an option recognized by either side. Military scouts as well as guerrillas used trickery and disguise to discover the allegiance of civilian men, who risked losing their possessions and even their lives. By limiting himself to factual descriptions, justifying his actions, and attaching criticism of each side to the accounts of aid he provided, Henry may have tried to avoid creating incriminating evidence. Harriet and Henry were positioned differently by the geography of gender. Henry traveled around the region to trade goods, take grain to the mill, perform marriages and conduct judicial business, and visit military camps. With three young children, including a nursing baby, 268 | The Diary

Harriet left the farm only for occasional visits to neighbors, but her accounts of battles and troop movements often were more accurate than Henry’s, and she was usually correct in her assessment of the validity of rumors. Women in the community maintained their relationships with one another regardless of their allegiance, and they provided a conduit of reliable information. Many local women communicated with male relatives in Confederate military units and guerrilla bands. The Mayfield sisters, described in a county history published after the war as Confederate “scouts, spies, guides and couriers,” were especially valuable sources.13 By 1862, the Smiths had become part of a close-knit community whose residents relied on one another for exchanges of household goods, help in emergencies, and companionship. These relationships became even more crucial when civil institutions collapsed and the region was cut off from the outside world. The Smiths’ diaries reveal the intersecting social networks that linked them with the pro-Union Page family and the pro-Confederate Dade family. Henry Smith, Dr. Dade, and Maurice Page belonged to the Masonic Lodge, whose members pledged to aid and protect any fellow member in need. Additional obligations bound the Smith and Dade families. Henry counted on the doctor for the family’s medical care, and Dade owed Henry for the buggy and horses Henry had sold him on credit. When the state militia confiscated Henry’s rifles because he had been reported as pro-Union, Dade interceded and arranged their return. Then the Union troops took over, and Dade sent three men from the militia to stay with Henry to avoid capture. On April 14, 1862, Henry wrote, This morning the old man Tally drove up with Dr. Dade who was shot in the leg this morning in a skirmish with some federals who stayed in town last night. . . . these reckless fools must try to take them before they got up (for the sake of plundering their arms I guess) and Dade was fool enough to join them. The result proved that these southern Jayhawkers were whipped or at any rate ran after killing two federals and having one of their own men killed and two wounded. I could [not] refuse to take the Dr. in for he was writhing with a bullet wound in his thigh. I am sorry they came.

The next day Henry justified his actions: “I may be doing wrong in giving food & shelter to rebels but I must [not] turn a cold shoulder upon those that have befriended me.” Henry noted on April 19, “Dr. Dade with his little girl drove up to stay with me today while the Kansas troops are visiting Montevallo.” After federal troops imprisoned Henry’s neighbor on April 22 for “harboring jayhawkers,” Henry wrote on April 26, “Some one [sic] has informed the Col that I harbored Dr. Dade but I cannot help it nor could I refuse to take in a sick & wounded friend. I shall expect to be taken in now.” Along with many of his neighbors, Henry reported Sharing Secrets in Nineteenth-Century America  |  269

to the provost marshal but was released without being required to swear allegiance to the Union. Harriet described the same events. On May 2, she empathized with Mrs. Dade: “I could not keep back the tears when she thanked me for ‘our kindness’ to her husband—she wept & looked so sad. How should I feel to be in her place.” Harriet recorded an anecdote she had heard about Dr. Dade’s escape. He had left a house shortly before Dr. Culbertson arrived to see a sick woman: “Dr. C. was scarcely in when up rode the Feds in hot chase—nabbed their ‘little Dr.’ & made off—but lo & behold there are two ‘little Drs’ in the settlement, & they have been nicely ‘taken in’ themselves, while the Dr is taking himself off as fast as the old blind horse can go. He is now safe & his wife with her baby on horse back [sic], has gone to take him some clothing, a distance of only about a hundred miles. She is a little heroine” (May 19, 1862). The Smiths’ relationship with Dr. and Mrs. Dade was intertwined with their long-standing friendship with the openly Unionist Page family. Mrs. Page later told Harriet she had always liked and respected Mrs. Dade and appreciated her visits. Mr. Page was the principal who had hired Harriet to teach in Maumee in 1853. Henry and Harriet had encouraged him to follow them to Montevallo to direct the local academy. Harriet and Mrs. Page, her distant relative, became close friends. They carried their young children on horseback to visit one another, met at a spring shared by the two farms, and left notes for one another in a hollow tree. In her third diary entry, Harriet wrote about the difficulty of maintaining friendships during the conflict: “Mrs. Page and I had a long talk about sundry things. Surely no shadows ought to fall between us—She is like a sister to me & God grant the feeling may always be mutual. We have been too careless in our family & I trust ‘passing events’ will teach a lesson. No person should be permitted to enter a family & become conversant with its private affairs—a brother even is scarcely to be trusted” (March 25, 1862). The day after Dr. Dade left the Smith farm, while federal troops searched the area for guerrillas and their supporters, Henry traveled to Kansas to testify on behalf of a neighbor who was captured and “tried for his life.” While he was gone, Mr. and Mrs. Page, carrying their baby and young son, visited Harriet for the first time in four months. Harriet wrote on April 25, “Mr. P. has been busy the past few days trying to get out good citizens, whom the Feds have made prisoners. I am glad yet if the tide of power should turn I am afraid his acts would only be remembered as so much evidence of his being a Union man.” The next day, after Henry returned, Harriet noted that Mr. Page came to tell him “there is some talk in camp about his harboring Dr. Dade.” On May 1, she wrote that one of the “bush skulkers” asked Henry to “find out what the Federals would do with him if he should give himself up.” Henry wrote that he “offered to 270 | The Diary

ask Page to interceed [sic] for him” because, as Harriet explained, “he is a Union man & Henry is a Southern man.” The next day Harriet wrote that since Mr. Page “would do nothing unless H—— helped shoulder the responsibility,” both men went to the federal camp, where they ate dinner with several officers and arranged to meet them again on Sunday to sing together. In spite of the officers’ promise to release the fugitive if he swore allegiance to the Union and posted bond, armed men Henry described as “well trained scouts” searched the Smiths’ farm that evening. In the divided community of a border state during the Civil War, social interactions morphed into military ones. The Smiths’ intersecting social networks provided communication channels between local residents and military officers. Harriet and Henry used their diaries to depict a new reality in which decisions about what information to share, what secrets to keep, what rumors to believe, and who to trust could determine their survival. Their writing practices reveal the tenuous balance between secrecy and sharing inherent in a diary, at least for many nineteenthcentury midwestern American diarists. Diaries both document secrets and hide them: they always contain the risk of revealing the secrets they hold. When Harriet and Henry considered marriage and again when they negotiated their survival in the midst of civil disorder, they relied on their diaries to help them shape social selves by documenting and sharing secrets as the negotiable currency of their social networks. Notes 1. Suzanne L. Bunkers, “Midwestern Diaries and Journals: What Women Were (Not) Saying in the Late 1800s,” in Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 190–210; Cynthia Huff, “‘That Profoundly Female, and Feminist Genre’: The Diary as Feminist Practice,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 17, nos. 3–4 (1989): 6–14. 2. Jane H. Hunter, “Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-Victorian America,” American Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1992): 51–81. 3. Judy Nolte Temple and Suzanne L. Bunkers, “Mothers, Daughters, Diaries: Literacy, Relationship, and Cultural Context,” in Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write, ed. Catherine Hobbs (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 197–216. 4. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, “Issues in Studying Women’s Diaries: A Theoretical and Critical Introduction,” in Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, ed. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 1–20. 5. Suzanne L. Bunkers, introduction to Diaries of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler, ed. Suzanne L. Bunkers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 3–40. 6. Karen V. Hansen, A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Sharing Secrets in Nineteenth-Century America  |  271

7. Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in NineteenthCentury America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 19–61. 8. Lucia McMahon, “‘While Our Souls Together Blend’: Narrating a Romantic Readership in the Early Republic,” in An Emotional History of the United States, ed. Peter Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 66–90. 9. Mary Saracino and Ronald J. Zboray. Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), 5–16. 10. Their diaries are in the Henry Parker Smith Collection, Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 11. Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 11–25, 57–65. 12. Fellman, Inside War; Sutherland, Savage Conflict, 11–25, 57–65. 13. History of Vernon County (St. Louis: Brown and Co., 1887), 338.

Bibliography Augst, Thomas. The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in NineteenthCentury America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Bunkers, Suzanne L. Introduction to Diaries of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers, 3–40. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. ———. “Midwestern Diaries and Journals: What Women Were (Not) Saying in the Late 1800s.” In Studies in Autobiography, edited by James Olney, 190–210. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Bunkers, Suzanne L., and Cynthia A. Huff. “Issues in Studying Women’s Diaries: A Theoretical and Critical Introduction.” In Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, 1–20. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Fellman, Michael. Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Hansen, Karen V. A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. History of Vernon County. St. Louis: Brown and Co., 1887. Huff, Cynthia. “‘That Profoundly Female, and Feminist Genre’: The Diary as Feminist Practice.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 17, nos. 3–4 (1989): 6–14. Hunter, Jane H. “Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-Victorian America.” American Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1992): 51–81. McMahon, Lucia. “‘While Our Souls Together Blend’: Narrating a Romantic Readership in the Early Republic.” In An Emotional History of the United States, edited by Peter Stearns and Jan Lewis, 66–90. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Sutherland, Daniel E. A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

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Temple, Judy Nolte, and Suzanne L. Bunkers. “Mothers, Daughters, Diaries: Literacy, Relationship, and Cultural Context.” In Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write, edited by Catherine Hobbs, 197–216. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Zboray, Ronald J., and Mary Saracino Zboray. Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006.

M A R I LY N F E R R I S MOT Z is Emerita Associate Professor of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University. She is author of True Sisterhood: Michigan Women and Their Kin, 1820–1920 and editor (with John Nachbar) of Eye on the Future: Popular Culture Scholarship into the Twenty-First Century, among other titles.

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16 The Literary Author as Diarist Elizabeth Podnieks

English Literary Diaries: Emergence of a Public Tradition In 1923, after nearly a decade of diary keeping, the Cuban-French-American author Anaïs Nin (1903–77) recorded in her journal, “Someday I want to write about this, as a tribute to a much despised form of literature, as an answer to those who have shrugged their shoulders when they saw me bending over a mere diary. I shall try to give diary writing a definite character and a definite place in life, and for the sake of the practical people who have wept over the wasted hours, I shall demonstrate the uses, the purpose, the visibly beneficial effects, of the much deplored habit.”1 While a plethora of nonliterary authors have gained a literary reputation through the publication of their journals—for example, peeress Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676) and naval administrator Samuel Pepys (1633–1703)—this chapter focuses on professional creative writers in English in Britain, the United States, and Canada whose diaries have also been published. In particular, I analyze the diaries of Nin as well as Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935), John Cheever (1912–82), and George Fetherling (1949–) as exemplary twentieth- and twenty-first-century practitioners of the genre. Such a selection of authors allows me to trace generic trends across a range of geographic locations and a period of more than one hundred years, showcasing how diaries are both historically contingent and transhistorical. For Woolf, Dunbar-Nelson, Cheever, Nin, and Fetherling—as for other diarists throughout the centuries—the diary served as a means

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of situating one’s self within cultures and communities, a therapeutic outlet, and a testament to their lives. More specific to literary authors, the diary is a notebook or repository of ideas generating their creative material, an exercise in writerly discipline, and an artistic accomplishment in itself. In this chapter, I examine how writers manifest their aesthetic sensibilities and ambitions within and by the diary. Published diaries kept by English-language authors of fiction, poetry, drama, biography, and the essay from the nineteenth-century to the present constitute a rich and distinct life writing tradition.2 This tradition is traceable to the marketing of the private diary in published form in the early 1800s, a practice that permanently shifted the public and artistic directions of the genre. A key event was the release of sections of Pepys’s diary (1660–69) in 1825.3 Pepys has been hailed as the first “real” diarist by scholars who used him as their model to establish the equation between so-called spontaneity and truthfulness.4 However, in his introduction to The Diary of Samuel Pepys, William Matthews exposed how this tome is highly crafted: Pepys often wrote up to fourteen days at once; culled information not only from his personal notes but from news-books; and frequently revised his entries after rereading them. Pepys’s “great diary is no simple product of nature” but is rather “fashioned with some care.”5 The dissemination of authors’ journals underscores that by the nineteenth century, diarists increasingly viewed their habit—or occupation— as a literary one. With more and more samples entering the marketplace, published diaries inspired those like Marie Bashkirtseff to follow suit. Bashkirtseff, a French-Russian artist, began her journal in January 1873 and kept it until her death from tuberculosis in October 1884.6 Originally published in French in 1887,7 in 1891 the text was translated and introduced by Mathilde Blind as a “literary event.”8 In launching her book, Bashkirtseff announced her intentions: “If I do not die young, I hope to survive as a great artist; but if I do, I will have my Journal published, which cannot fail to be interesting.”9 This posthumous publication was complemented by the arrival of the journal of Bruce Frederick Cummings (1889–1919), under the pseudonym Barbellion, in 1919.10 A biologist, Cummings was also an aspiring but unsuccessful writer who determined that the only way to gain a literary foothold was via his journal. Lawrence Rosenwald foregrounded the impact of the personal diary being published by authors themselves: “Barbellion’s 1919 coup gave precedent for living diarists’ entering the literary marketplace; over the course of the century the precedent has become almost an obligation, as diaries have followed autobiographies in becoming not so much books published as intimate guides to famous men and

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women as books published by men and women interested in becoming famous.”11 Literary authors, already engaged with readers through their public oeuvres, would recognize the commercial potential of their private writings to enhance and sustain their professional reputations. By the twentieth century, with the publishing of journals an accepted and expanding phenomenon, diarists had an increasing number of models at their disposal. In a gesture that was becoming de rigueur for the genre, authors routinely refer to and even quote from other diarists they read. Nin, for example, was moved by Bashkirtseff, Eugénie de Guérin (1805–48), Washington Irving (1783–1859), Henri Frédéric Amiel (1821–81), and Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923).12 Woolf cited the diaries of, among others, Pepys, Frances Burney (1752–1840), James Boswell (1740–95), André Gide (1869–1951), and Alice James (1848–92).13 Fetherling, for his part, admired the diaries of Gide and Woolf, as well as those of Cecil Beaton (1904–80), Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), and Harold Nicolson (1886–1968).14 Practitioners of the form therefore perpetuate a self-conscious, intertextual literary network. Operating within an established life writing tradition, Woolf, DunbarNelson, Cheever, Nin, and Fetherling can be considered paradigmatic diarists who used their private textual spaces for both personal and professional ends, ultimately transforming those spaces into public art. In the sections below, I examine each diarist in chronological turn. By starting with Woolf, who among the five began journaling first, and concluding with Fetherling, the remaining living figure, my analysis evinces that despite the passage of time, and although the diary is a book of time, diarists engage with the genre in like-minded ways that transcend time.

Virginia Woolf: “Something Loose Knit, & Yet Not Slovenly” Woolf (née Stephen) was a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group, the London coterie of authors, artists, and intellectuals. She is one of the most famous writers of the twentieth century, canonized for novels like Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927) and the feminist treatise A Room of One’s Own (1929). She is also praised for her book reviews, literary criticism, and, of course, diaries. The fivevolume series The Diary of Virginia Woolf covers the years 1915 to four days before her suicide on March 28, 1941, and was published between 1977 and 1984. This complete work restores the portions removed by her husband, Leonard Woolf, in his selections for A Writer’s Diary (1953). Her first diaries from 1897 to 1909 were later published in 1990 as A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals. Woolf started her journal when she was fifteen in order “to keep a record of the new year,”15 and with the exception of a few gaps—most notably between 1910 and 1917, during 276 | The Diary

which she suffered severe depression following a suicide attempt—she sustained her project over her lifetime. From its inception Woolf’s diary was a profound therapeutic outlet, one that assuaged her grief over family deaths, sexual abuse trauma, and what she referred to as her “fear of insanity.”16 In typical spirit she confessed, “I want to lie down like a tired child & weep away this life of care—& my diary shall receive me on its downy pillow.”17 The diary was a “refuge” and “a kindly blank faced old confidante” that offered “solace.”18 When she felt her mind was “agitated,” she used the diary “to soothe these whirlpools.”19 Because of its function as such, Woolf regarded its upkeep as a duty to both herself and the text. She lamented, “This diary has been woefully neglected lately. . . . Improvement must be made!” and attested, “My conscience drives me again to write.”20 The diary also validates the support Woolf received from people closest to her. She celebrated her husband: “But my God—how satisfactory after, I think 12 years, to have any human being to whom one can speak so directly as I to L!”21 Her Bloomsbury friends offered her professional sustenance, too, as when Lytton Strachey called her “the best reviewer alive, & the inventor of a new prose style, & the creator of a new version of the sentence.”22 The diary was instrumental in helping her achieve her literary goals. She used it to chart her stringent work ethic, as this proposal for Mrs. Dalloway testifies: “I am now saying that I will write at it for 4 months, June, July, August & September, & then it will be done, & I shall put it away for three months, during which I shall finish my essays.”23 The diary was also a training ground for her fiction, as she explained: “(It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes & work at certain effects. I daresay I practised Jacob here,—& Mrs D. & shall invent my next book here.)”24 Woolf asked her diary, “Do I think I shall be among the English novelists after my death?”25 She feasibly wondered the same about her place among diarists, for even in its earliest days she referred to journal writing as “art.”26 In one of her most famous essays, “Modern Fiction” (1919), she proposed that the modern writer must “examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day,” because “‘the proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.”27 Earlier, in a 1906 diary entry, she had referred to her “use of words” as “a gift set down in the course of an ordinary day,” conflating her agenda for her novels and life writing.28 Woolf explicitly approached the diary itself as literature. She frequently imagined it in fictional terms, commenting on one entry, “Now there’s a chapter in a novel!”29 She edited the journal even at the moment of composition: “I will spend the last morning . . . in summing up the year. True, there are 10 days or so to run; but the liberty of this book The Literary Author as Diarist  |  277

allows these—I was going to say liberties, but my meticulous conscience bids me look for another word.”30 She also sought to preserve narrative continuity: she closed one report by noting, “London yesterday: a violent storm of wind all night,” and updated the diary a few days later: “Yes it was a terrific storm. . . . All the trees chocolate brown on the wind side; little leaves like chipped potatoes.”31 She was able to preserve this narrative flow due to her passion for rereading, as she admitted, “Oh yes, I’ve enjoyed reading the past years diary, & shall keep it up.”32 Woolf’s aesthetic concerns are connected to her sense of external audience too. She disclosed of the diary, “(I suppose a reader sometimes for the sake of variety when I write; it makes me put on my dress clothes such as they are).”33 To reach this reader, Woolf contemplated publication, wondering, “If I died, what would Leo make of them?” She concluded, “I daresay there is a little book in them.”34 Leonard Woolf published the “little book” A Writer’s Diary, but more substantively Woolf herself was preparing a much larger book for posterity. She theorized the genre on April 20, 1919: “What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly. . . . I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art.”35 As for any good novelist, she affirmed of the diarist, “a little effort is needed to face a character or an incident which needs to be recorded. Nor can one let the pen write without guidance; for fear of becoming slack & untidy.”36 She reiterated months later, “Even this unpremeditated scribbling, has its form, which one learns.”37 She spent her career learning—and conveying to her future readers—the literary tenets of the journal. Woolf’s diary ultimately inscribes her move toward death. Woolf had told her diary in July 1940, “We pour to the edge of a precipice . . . & then? I cant [sic] conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.”38 Succumbing to fears about a possible Fascist invasion as World War II advanced, coupled with anxieties about her forthcoming novel, on March 28 she drowned herself in the River Ouse, near her home in Sussex. In 1929, she had remarked on eighteenth-century biographer James Boswell’s work that “there are 18 volumes of Boswell’s diaries now to be published. With any luck I shall live to read them. I feel as if some dead person were said to be living after all.”39 Woolf deployed her journal in her battle against the “race of time” and to “stay this moment.”40 In this she was textually successful, for when we read her published diaries we feel that she is the one who continues to live on “after all.” 278 | The Diary

Alice Dunbar-Nelson: “Biggest Job of All” A contemporary of Woolf, Alice (Ruth Moore) Dunbar-Nelson was a writer and feminist activist associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the movement promoting the arts and culture of African Americans in New York and beyond during the 1920s and ’30s. Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, poems, and journalism appeared in her collections Violets and Other Tales (1895) and The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899), as well as in newspapers and journals such as the Washington Eagle, the Journal of Negro History, Crisis, Ebony and Topaz, and Opportunity. She started her diary in 1921, at forty-six-years old, and kept it for only six months; she returned to it in 1926 and maintained it sporadically until 1931, a few years before her death from heart trouble in 1935. She preserved this manuscript—consisting of approximately two thousand pages—with her other unpublished writings, which on her death passed from her niece Pauline A. Young to the University of Delaware and was edited by Gloria T. Hull into Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1984).41 The diary foregrounds her public life as it intersects with relationships with her mother, Patricia; and sister, Leila; three husbands (Paul Laurence Dunbar, Henry A. Callis, and Robert J. Nelson); nieces; stepchildren; and lesbian partners. Remarkably, at the time of its release, Dunbar-Nelson’s diary was only the second journal by a black woman published, it being preceded by The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten: Free Negro in the Slave Era (1953).42 Since 1984, there has been only one addition to this list, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995); Gathering Blossoms under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker is slated for publication in 2020.43 In Give Us Each Day, “the heart of the diary lies in what it reveals, through Dunbar-Nelson’s life, about the meaning of being a Black woman in twentieth-century America. These revelations include both the commonplace and the startling and add up to a picture whose cumulative impact is staggering.”44 The diary was a crucial private space where Dunbar-Nelson could articulate her racial selfhoods. Kristina Brooks theorized her identity in terms of W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness,” whereby the African American “feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.”45 These tensions were even stronger for Dunbar-Nelson as a mixed-race woman who could pass for white.46 Her emotions are summed up in this description of taking her step-daughter and niece to the movies in Atlantic City in 1921: “I had bought orchestra seats. . . . I was conscious of misgivings, and a pounding in my throat when we approached the ticket taker. Suppose he should not let us take our seats? Suppose the ticket seller had sold the seats to me thinking I was white, and seeing Elizabeth and Ethel should The Literary Author as Diarist  |  279

make a scene. I choked with apprehension, realized that I was invoking trouble and must not think destructive things, and went on in. Nothing happened. How splendid it must be never to have any apprehension about one’s treatment anywhere?”47 These apprehensions extended to Dunbar-Nelson’s literary standing. The diary was her confidant—the “you” who could hear anything48 —and to it she unburdened her pride and despair over her fluctuating reception. She told the diary in 1921, “Had a letter from Brascher [of the Associated Negro Press] complimenting me on my editorial, ‘The Negro as a Modern Literary Subject.’”49 She delighted that there was “much excitement about my poem ‘Violets’ having appeared in the Star on June 26th,” just as in 1931, her poem “Harlem John Henry” was featured in the January Crisis as “an epic of Negro Peace to which we give the whole of our poetry page.”50 In tandem with these successes, she decried, “My story back from True Stories and all six of my sketches from the Ledgers, Record, Inquirer, Daily News.”51 Rejections left her wondering, “Oh hell, what’s the use. No good. Nobody wants my stuff. Might as well kick out. Never thought I’d get so low that nigger papers would refuse to print my pennings.”52 Consistently dejected in spirit, she lamented, “Life is a mess. I am profoundly in the D’s—discouraged, depressed, disheartened, disgusted. Why does one want to live?”53 Dunbar-Nelson’s diary absorbed feelings such as these and became, through its very production, a measure of her artistic determination and ambition. As is common for literary authors, in the most basic sense she used her diary to keep track of her poetic activity. Across four days in April 1930 she documented, “Wrote a sonnet, ‘I could not even dream—’”; “Wrote a sonnet on the girls in the office and their chatter”; “Wrote a sonnet on my feverous condition”; and “I wrote a sonnet, ‘Lest I should worry you if day by day.’”54 More significantly, the activity of recording in the diary became an act of creativity itself. Hull emphasized that DunbarNelson was “an educated, culturally sophisticated Black woman writer. Being such, she was familiar with the form and tradition of English diary keeping.”55 Dunbar-Nelson entered this tradition self-consciously. After starting the journal on July 29, 1921, she added a preface for it six days later: “Had I had sense enough to keep a diary all these years . . . there would be less confusion in my mind about lots of things. Now I begin this day to keep the record that should have been kept long since.”56 Although determined to update it regularly, she was often remiss, and her frustrations became one of the diary’s themes. She depicted the journal as a burden, but her attachment to it verifies its personal and aesthetic worth. She complained on March 18, 1928, “I let this darn diary lapse from February 9. It has lain like a weight on my heart to get

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it up to date.”57 And yet, it is with an artist’s intention that she strove to maintain narrative flow: “I’ve copied the diary from the scraps I scribbled on”; and, “I tried to catch up by typing in this record book. This morning I cut, pasted and arranged.”58 She recounted, “And biggest job of all. Wrote up this diary from February 16 to today—12 days. Lord, but I’m shiftless!”59 Passages such as these invoke the literary spirit of Pepys, who composed his diaries from extraneous notes and crafted numerous entries in one sitting, just as her signature sign off, “And so to bed,” is the same phrase used by Pepys.60 Dunbar-Nelson frequently conjoined genres. Referring to one of her poems, she told her diary on January 3, 1928, “Copy ‘April is on the Way’ from Ebony and Topaz for my column.”61 That is, as she explained a few days later, on January 7, she substituted the poem for the column (“As in a Looking Glass”) she was writing for the Washington Eagle, because “I felt too bum to do any column this week.”62 Similarly, Hull finds that she often borrowed the diary itself for journalism. A case in point is her October 21, 1927, column “Little Excursions” (also for the Washington Eagle), which is copied from this October 7 entry about segregation: “This is the day to go to Portsmouth, Virginia to read for the Rev. Dr. Dance. . . . At Salisbury . . . betook my place meekly in the Jim Crow section of the boat. Such a gorgeous three hour ride on the Chesapeake and into a nice swell of the Atlantic sunset. Great black clouds. Then wonderful. Clear, lovely. The [Nordic] captain even grows sentimental in the lovely night and tries to be ‘fresh.”63 Dunbar-Nelson’s blending of the diary with other forms of writing is most generally evidenced by her frequent use of the phrase “produce literature.” She recorded, “Produce literature at night and get to bed late.”64 Elsewhere, she reported, “Put in a day at the office, producing literature. Do a free verse poem, ‘The Proletariat Speaks’”; and “Put in most of the day at the office making up my diary.”65 While “literature” can refer to her poems and other professional output, the fact that she was writing all this in the diary conflates private and public texts, elevating the diary itself to “literature.” In this latter entry, she followed with her most blatant avowal of her diary’s outward direction: “Seemed an awful thing to do just to spend that time, but my diary is going to be a valuable thing one of these days.”66 Hull concluded that “seen in relation to her other literary work, Dunbar-Nelson’s diary may be the most significant and enduring piece of writing that she produced.”67 The diary monitored her psychological as well as creative health, for just as she insisted, “I MUST GET MYSELF TOGETHER,” so she promised of her journal, “I shall try to fix this book up.”68 As a metaphor for herself, the diary helped her negotiate schisms of identity and, in the process, became a sustaining work of art.

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John Cheever: “Behind the Scenes” Fellow American John Cheever similarly found the diary a place to confront and resolve conflicted aspects of his personal and professional lives, especially as they unfolded in Manhattan and the suburbs of Westchester County in upstate New York. Cheever was acclaimed for his short stories, which appeared in eleven collections, including The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953), The Swimmer (1964), and The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories (1958), concurrent with novels like The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and Falconer (1977). Selections of his posthumously published diary were initially excerpted in the New Yorker between 1990 and 1991, while the more extended The Journals of John Cheever was published in 1991, both versions edited by Robert Gottlieb. The latter constitutes about one-twentieth of the complete manuscript kept by Cheever on a near-daily basis from the late 1940s to just a few days before his death on June 18, 1982.69 According to Cheever’s biographer, Blake Bailey, “When asked how he came to keep a journal, Cheever explained it as a typical occupation of a ‘seafaring family’: ‘They always begin, as most journals do, with the weather, prevailing winds, ruffles of the sails. They also include affairs, temptations, condemnations, libel, and occasionally, obscenities.’”70 Indeed, Cheever’s son Benjamin stated in his introduction to the published volume that his father’s diary shattered his “public image . . . of a courtly English gentleman who lived in an antique farmhouse and raised bird dogs,” exposing his paralyzing artistic self-doubt, alcoholism, marital infidelities (against his wife, Mary Winternitz) with both women and men, and sometimes contentious relationships with his children (Benjamin, Susan, and Federico).71 Benjamin Cheever believes that, with the diary, John Cheever “meant to show others that their thoughts were not unthinkable.”72 In that spirit, Herbert Mitgang reviewed the book for the New York Times as “a writer’s notebook, a family chronicle, a brutally honest autobiography and almost as an unfinished novel,” concluding that it is “a daring contribution to American letters.”73 Cheever voiced a prevailing theme in the opening lines of the journal: “In middle age there is mystery, there is mystification. The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness.”74 The diary, however, is an interlocutor who counters his feelings of being alone, and who facilitates his self-analysis. He referred to the book as “you,” anticipated “some sort of absolution in recording” in it, and stated, “Rows and misunderstandings, and I put them down with the hope of clearing my head.”75 As a confessional, the diary is privy to taboo admissions: “It is my wife’s body that I most wish to gentle, it is into her that I most wish to pour myself, but when she is away I seem to have no scruple about spilling it elsewhere” 282 | The Diary

and “I would like to come clean on the matter of homosexuality, and I think I can. I think I can see clearly the history and the growth of my anxiety.”76 Relief comes from using the diary: “To put down what I know as well as what I hope to know. To describe my alcoholic thirst beginning at nine in the morning and becoming sometimes unmanageable at eleventhirty. To describe the humiliation of stealing a drink in the pantry and the galling taste of gin.”77 The journal is also a space for confronting his anxieties about his literary identity. He positioned himself as a member of a like-minded community: “I read a biography of Dylan Thomas thinking that I am like Dylan, alcoholic”; “Thinking of Fitzgerald, I find there is a long list of literary titans who have destroyed themselves: Hart Crane, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Faulkner. There are those who lived, Eliot and Cummings, but there are few. Shall I dwell on the crucifixion of the diligent novelist?”78 He consistently measured himself in terms of other authors. He was “very pleased and excited by Mailer’s book ‘The Naked and the Dead.’ Impressed particularly with its size. Despaired, while reading it, of my own confined talents. I seem, with my autumn roses and my winter twilights, not to be in the big league.”79 Another time, he reread three of his own stories “and [doesn’t] much like them. Phony modesty, perhaps. I’ve never much liked my work.”80 Cheever reviewed his diary with similar regularity. For instance, he recounted, “Having nothing better to do—which is a mistaken position to have got into—I read two old journals. High spirits and weather reports recede into the background, and what emerges are two astonishing contests, one with alcohol and one with my wife.”81 While he was his first reader, he simultaneously projected a public audience for his journals: “At the back of my mind there is the possibility of someone’s reading them in my absence and after my death.”82 Cheever assimilated life with art as viable text, merging diary and fiction as forms of insight, entertainment, and aesthetic expression. The journals are, moreover, a testing-ground for Cheever’s stories and a site for honing his literary skills. Addressing his journal, he admitted of his difficulty with a story—“I make no headway, and yet it seems best to come here every day and try. It is not easy”—and with his novel, “The first page of a new journal, and I hope to report here soon that the middle section of the Wapshots has fallen into shape.”83 He later announced, “A new journal, and since more than half of the last novel was encompassed in the last journal I hope that something will be accomplished when I complete this,” emphasizing how the diary as notebook fuses with the novel as artistic product.84 This strategy is manifested in his often referring to himself in the diary in third person, so that he becomes a protagonist in a novel: “Observe this man, woken by his bladder at 3 A.M., The Literary Author as Diarist  |  283

and who, returning to bed, finds himself wakeful. . . . There seems to be some excitement in the darkness. There is a little sweat in his armpits. Something is happening, he thinks, and he thinks he hears a footstep in the gravel outside.”85 Cheever conflated the creative imperative of his diary and fiction when he proclaimed, “I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more interesting and sometimes more significant.”86 His son Benjamin observed of his father’s narrative outlook that the journals “were the workbooks for his fiction. They were also the workbooks for his life” and that the way his father dealt with the “problem” of life “was to articulate it. He made it into a story, and then he published the story. When he discovered that he had written the story of his life, he wanted that published, too.”87 Consequently, as he was dying of cancer, Cheever enlisted Benjamin to release the journals after his passing. Throughout this book Cheever longed for literary fame. He admitted, “To tell the truth, I bemuse myself at three in the morning with the day I win the Pulitzer Prize” and “I seem to yearn to live behind the scenes. But it is true that when I cannot sleep—when I am unhappy or lonely—I bemuse myself with imagining fourth and fifth printings and the ascent of my name on the best-seller list.”88 The diary is a text that captures life “behind the scenes,” but Cheever also realized that these private pages might themselves facilitate the “ascent” of his “name.”

Anaïs Nin: “The Story of My Great Adventure” Perhaps no one sought recognition through her diary more than Nin, a fixture of literary and cultural scenes around the Left Bank in Paris, Greenwich Village in New York, and Los Angeles. She authored the fivevolume novel Cities of the Interior (1959), short stories Under a Glass Bell (1944), and erotica Delta of Venus (1977), among other works, but she achieved brand recognition for her prolific and (in)famous diary that spans six decades, from 1914 to 1974, just two and a half years before her death. Nin prepared and launched six volumes of The Diary of Anaïs Nin for publication between 1966 and 1976. Posthumously released journals include a seventh diary volume (1980), four early diaries (1978–85), and six unexpurgated editions: Henry and June (1986), Incest (1992), Fire (1995), Nearer the Moon (1996), Mirages (2013), and Trapeze (2017). In describing Nin’s diary as a “legendary work,” editor Gunther Stuhlmann contended that its “significance” and “uniqueness” “lies in the fact that here, for the first time, we have a passionate, detailed, articulate record of a modern woman’s journey of self-discovery.”89 When Nin was a young girl in Europe, her father deserted the family for a younger woman. Nin’s mother consequently took her and her 284 | The Diary

two brothers by way of Barcelona to New York to make a new life. On board the ship in July 1914, an eleven-year-old Nin began a diary to communicate with him, copying entries from a notebook into her letters. As this childhood diary expanded, she intended that it would be read by others, too, for she admitted that she wrote it “to let those who want to understand my heart know it.”90 The diary became her “faithful confidant” who served her well: “You are the strongest help I have to fulfill my vision to achieve womanhood.”91 She summarized its value thus: “I owe to it what some people owe to psychology: knowledge of myself, extreme consciousness of what in others is vague and unconscious, a knowledge of my desires, of my weaknesses, of my dreams, of my talents.”92 Nin’s dreams and talents centered in large part on her childhood realization that she wanted to be a writer. She regarded her diary as a practice space, addressing her journal while drafting the novella House of Incest: “You may ask me what I am doing meanwhile if I am only preparing myself now. Why all this writing, these scattered thoughts, these descriptions? It is still the preparation.”93 While her diary facilitated this development, it became a literary site in itself. She described “how I love to sit alone thus, adding a chapter to the story of my great adventure,” and over time, the diary “swallowed up every theme” she “created during the years.”94 Her modus operandi was to blur the boundaries between the diary and fiction. For instance, the diary is akin to Marcel Proust’s seven-volume autobiographical novel Remembrance of Things Past, for she planned to “weave all [her] stories together like a Proustian epopée [epic].”95 She conceived her life, and the people in it, in literary terms. The first volume of Nin’s published diary opens in 1931 with this description of her home in a Paris suburb: “Louveciennes resembles the village where Madame Bovary lived and died.”96 And her lover, author Henry Miller, inhabits D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “Henry has done something to me, Henry the man. I can only compare what I feel to Lady Chatterley’s feelings about Mellors.”97 Nin’s literary sensibilities were increasingly motivated by her gendered and sexual ones. Eager to express herself in a mode that transcended the conventional, she determined to “write as a woman, and as a woman only.”98 This aesthetic involved her recognition that, “I do not delude myself as man does, that I create in proud isolation. I say we are bound, interdependent. Woman is not deluded. She must create without these proud delusions of man.”99 Such an agenda led her to state, “I have a feverish desire to invent a form for myself.”100 This form is, I would argue, the diary itself, as she attested: “The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relation to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.”101 The Literary Author as Diarist  |  285

Concomitant with the diary, Nin was laboring over her fiction. Although she had some successes, it was routinely rejected by publishers; by January 1931, she had recorded that it was “an accepted fact” that she produced “unsalable stuff.”102 She acknowledged the role of the diary in limiting her output: “This diary is my kief, hashish, and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. Instead of writing a novel, I lie back with this book and a pen, and dream.”103 Ironically, she increasingly came to privilege her diary as a means to commercial—and critical—ends, proving that it was all along the “new form” she was inventing. She mentioned making “a book on ‘Journals and Journal Writing’” and referred to this “booklet” as her “Bible” and “Commandments,” which dictate that a diary must be, among other things, a “self-confession, self-criticism,” “a following and unveiling of ideas, a development of philosophies,” and “a reminder of the clearer and higher moments in the intellectual life.”104 In her own theorizing of the genre, she illuminated her awareness of working within—and helping to (re)define—the diary as a literary form. In June 1931, Nin informed her diary that she had begun her “life’s real work, the transposition of [her] Journal into a printable form.”105 The “transposition” involved Nin preparing typescripts of her earlier journals for publication in tandem with composing entries in the “present.” She outlined her regime thus: “I have settled down to fill out, round out the diary. I am at work now on what I call the volume of superimpositions, which means that while I copy out volume 60, I write about the developments and conclusions which took place twenty years later.”106 In this way Nin was working like a novelist—inventing, controlling, editing, and revising her material. Although her focus was on the diary, over the years she had achieved a minor reputation with a handful of books, securing her first commercial contract in 1945. In later seeking a publisher for all of her novels, she stressed the symbiosis of diary and fiction: “I have always said whatever publisher puts out my novels I will give an option on the diaries (for the future).”107 Hiram Haydn of Harcourt Brace signed a deal, and the diaries found their market. Los Angeles Times reviewer Robert Kirsch called the first installment of Nin’s published diary “one of the most remarkable in the history of letters” and “a literary accomplishment,” helping to secure Nin’s place in a pantheon of literary authors as diarists.108 Consequently, she confirmed, “I am like a new woman, born with the publication of the Diary,” such that, “I no longer suffer from loneliness.”109 Having satisfied her desire to bridge the gap between herself and others, she confirmed of the text, “I gave it away to the world. It was open and shared;”110 she used it to initiate “a correspondence with the world.”111 Nin asserted, “The Diary is true to becoming and to continuum” and hence “will never be finished.”112 With unexpurgated segments being released well into the twenty-first century, Nin’s diary continues to converse with its readers. 286 | The Diary

George Fetherling: “Word-of-Mouth” Following Nin into the millennium is Fetherling, a Canadian author, editor, journalist, and cultural figure (especially within Toronto and Vancouver), whose books include the novel Jericho (2005), poem Singer, An Elegy (2004), and memoir Travels By Night: A Memoir of the Sixties (1994). Like Nin—and Barbellion before her—he also set about publishing his own diaries while living, the result being The Writing Life: Journals, 1975–2005 (2013). For this venture, Fetherling enlisted friend Brian Busby as external editor, who culled the entries from thousands of pages of notebooks. Unlike the more active Nin, Fetherling was less directly involved in shaping the edited version, contributing only brief introductions to each of the twenty-nine sections, “so as to help the reader along.”113 He also provided a preface, in which he outlined his rationale for keeping the text. Having suffered from a lifelong physiological speech disability, when he was twenty-six his therapist suggested he keep a diary to aid in his treatment. The journal was helpful as such but soon transitioned into “a working document by someone trying hard to grow up as a person and as a writer.”114 Fetherling’s immersion in his diary, from the 1970s on, was predicated on his literary background: he had been writing journalism and poetry for a decade beforehand and had been an avid reader of published diaries. He opened his preface with a nod to his predecessors: “I’ve always been attracted to writers’ diaries and the way they let us into the actions and thoughts of the persons doing the scribbling.”115 As mentioned earlier in my chapter, he eagerly situated himself within a well-known tradition, citing diarists like Woolf, Beaton, and Gide, who contributed to the early twentieth-century “vogue for the published journals of living writers”—a vogue in which he now participates.116 Locating himself and his text within “the period that is often referred to as Canada’s cultural renaissance (and continuing a bit into—what to call it?—the après-renaissance),” he emphasized that the diary “is about living the writing life and surviving thereby, but it deals as much with other people as it does me.” The diary is of value to readers interested in himself in particular, a writer’s life in general, and the broader terrain of Canadian culture propagated by “Canadian literary figures, and a few foreign ones, but also a seasoning of politicians, entrepreneurs, philosophers, actors, broadcasters, and so on,” like Margaret Atwood, Anne Collins, Robert Fulford, Dennis Lee, and Michael Ignatieff, to name a few.117 From the get-go Fetherling probed the status of his diary: “I don’t wish it to be a record of daily doings; I have my appointment book for that. Nor do I want it to become a polished rephrasing of current thoughts and anecdotes, though too often it is just this—I can’t help myself.”118 As The Literary Author as Diarist  |  287

a “polished rephrasing,” the text functions as a work of art in itself. At the same time, he recognized how the diary provides extensive service: “First, to reveal to me at some later time how I can improve, to explain better than I can now why my personality is as it is. Second, to allow me to permit the emergence of material that I can use elsewhere.”119 He reiterated, “Once again, what’s this journal supposed to be? Therapy, a source for other writing, an exercise in honesty? Perhaps all three.”120 He proved the affirmative throughout. The diary is a place of healing: “I get a sense of having at least begun to work through some personal woes in these pages, and this is comforting.”121 The diary is, as well, a stimulus for sincere reflection: “This evening, as I sit in the green chair reading and writing as I always do, I will perform an audit on the day, asking whether I have lived more than I have died in the past twenty-four hours, whether my account is in surplus or in deficit, and most importantly what the exact balance is.”122 Additionally, the diary provides literary inspiration: “I now have some sense of its usefulness, as I have several times pilfered ideas and observations from these pages for pieces I’ve been writing.” As such, the journal is “good discipline.”123 This discipline is manifested further by the constant charting of his writing schedules, and marking the progress of his stories—for example, “Jericho begins to take some rough shape, a front story and a back story, shuffled like a deck of cards.”124 These multiple functions of the diary intersect with its overarching narrative: Fetherling is a prolific and competitive but too-often neglected literary figure. He confessed in 1978, “What I want now is to be a success,” but he consistently logged his disappointments.125 Of his nonfictional The Book of Assassins (2001), he lamented, “A devastating review of Assassins in the Sunday Star in Toronto sends me into a frightening downward spiral.”126 Conversely, he recorded whenever possible his achievements, as when, “I’m greatly disappointed that Jericho has been a publishing failure yet I’m heartened by the reviews both it and Singer, An Elegy have received thus far.”127 Here and throughout, he used the diary to abate his failures and energize his confidence. Fetherling’s journal highlights that his moods and identity are shaped by literary concerns. His assertion in 1999 that “My whole point in living is to prolong life so that I can write more” signals the merit of the diary.128 In keeping this daily record, he ensures the prolongation of his life. The fact that he set about publishing it himself increases our understanding of his craving for immediate and subsequent attention. A dedicated selfpromoter, he often markets his own books, as with his 2005 novel Tales of Two Cities: “I have taken the Tales publicity into my own hands.”129 In so doing, he conceded, “It’s true what people say: that the best publicity is word-of-mouth.”130 By releasing his diaries to an audience, Fetherling has 288 | The Diary

taken the publicity of himself into his own hands. Speaking to us directly from within these private pages, he proves that the best “word-of-mouth” promotion is his own.

Conclusion Lynn Z. Bloom declared that “for a professional writer there are no private writings,” because “once a writer, like an actor, is audience-oriented, such considerations as telling a good story, getting the sounds and the rhythm right, supplying sufficient detail for another’s understanding, can never be excluded. All writers know this; they attend to such matters through design and habit. A professional writer is never off-duty.”131 Woolf, DunbarNelson, Cheever, Nin, and Fetherling appear consistently “on-duty” as their diaries negotiate private and public thoughts, feelings, and narratives. They wrote with an awareness of a tradition of literary diaries, just as they helped to define it and contribute to its expansion. Composed in light of Barbellion’s “coup” which heralded unprecedented opportunities for the genre in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their extensive published journals showcase how the literary author functions as diarist. As we heard at the start of this chapter, Nin sought to “demonstrate the uses, the purpose, the visibly beneficial effects” of diary writing. She is joined by figures like Woolf, Dunbar-Nelson, Cheever, and Fetherling in this meaningful endeavor. Set against the backdrop of their social and literary milieu, their exemplary journals serve their authors in strikingly comparable ways: as confidants who are privy to their introspections and who offer catharsis; as registers of personal and creative disappointments countered by recognitions of achievement; as notebooks, literary criticism, and disciplinary schedules; and through audience-outreach, as a means of enhancing reputations in the writing present while promising posthumous immortality. Their journals are repositories of art that become, in the end, works of art themselves. Notes 1. Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978–85), 3:32–3. 2. See, for example, Louisa May Alcott (1832–88), Vera Brittain (1893– 1970), Lewis Carroll (1832–98), Emily Holmes Coleman (1899–1974), Roberston Davies (1913–95), George Eliot (1819–80), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), E. M. Forster (1879–1970), John Fowles (1926–2005), David Gascoyne (1916–2001), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), Allen Ginsberg (1926–97), George Gissing (1857–1903), Charlotte Forten Grimké (1837–1914), Christopher Isherwood (1904–86), C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942), Joyce Carol Oates (1938–), Joe Orton (1933–67), The Literary Author as Diarist  |  289

George Orwell (1903–50), Sylvia Plath (1932–63), Ayn Rand (1905–82), Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Mary Shelley (1797–1851), Elizabeth Smart (1913–86), John Steinbeck (1902–68), Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978), Evelyn Waugh (1903–66), Antonia White (1899–1980), and Walt Whitman (1819–92), among many others. 3. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1970). 4. See, for example, Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 1–2; Arthur Ponsonby, English Diaries: A Review of English Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century with an Introduction on Diary Writing (London: Methuen and Co., 1923), 82; Kate O’Brien, English Diaries and Journals (London: William Collins, 1943), 16; and P. A. Spalding, Self-Harvest: A Study of Diaries and the Diarist (London: Independent Press, 1949), 33. 5. William Matthews, “Introduction,” sec. “The Diary as Literature,” in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1970), 1:cii–ciii. 6. A discussion of French literature is beyond my purview, but it is important to acknowledge that a comparable tradition of the diary (referred to as a journal intime) written by French authors was developing in tandem with that by English authors, with books often translated into English. In addition to Bashkirtseff, some notable diarists—and those cited by Barbellion, Nin, Woolf, and Fetherling within this chapter—include Eugénie de Guérin, Henri Frédéric Amiel, and André Gide. 7. Marie Bashkirtseff, Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, 2 vols. (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1887). 8. Mathilde Blind, introduction to Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, trans. Mathilde Blind (London: Cassell and Company, 1891), vii. 9. Marie Bashkirtseff, The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, trans. Mathilde Blind (London: Cassell and Company, 1891), xxix. 10. W. N. P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1919). 11. Lawrence Rosenwald, Emerson and the Art of the Diary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11. 12. Nin, Early Diary, 2:27–8, 2:48, 2:61, 2:291, 2:467, 4:151. 13. Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897– 1909, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1990), 62, 206; Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1977–84), 1:14; 3:237, 3:239; 4:241. 14. George Fetherling, preface to The Writing Life: Journals, 1975–2005, ed. Brian Busby (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), vii–viii. 15. Woolf, Passionate, 5. 16. Woolf, Diary, 3:264. 17. Ibid., 3:48. 18. Ibid., 2:53, 2:106; 1:237. 19. Ibid., 3:155. 20. Woolf, Passionate, 112; Woolf, Diary, 2:184. 21. Woolf, Diary, 3:49.

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22. Ibid., 1:277. 23. Ibid., 2:301. 24. Ibid., 2:319, emphasis in the original. 25. Ibid., 4:251. 26. Woolf, Passionate, 139. 27. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Common Reader, vol. 1, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1947), 189, 194–95. 28. Woolf, Passionate, 306. 29. Woolf, Diary, 2:137. 30. Ibid., 5:192. 31. Ibid., 4:342. 32. Ibid., 1:317. 33. Woolf, Passionate, 144. 34. Woolf, Diary, 3:67. 35. Ibid., 1:266. 36. Ibid., 1:266. 37. Ibid., 1:304. 38. Ibid., 5:299. 39. Ibid., 3:237–38. 40. Ibid., 1:304, 4:135. 41. Gloria T. Hull, editorial preface to Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, ed. Gloria T. Hull (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 33. 42. Gloria T. Hull, introduction to Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, ed. Gloria T. Hull (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 13. 43. Forten (1837–1914) was a poet and antislavery activist; Wells (1862– 1931) was a journalist, feminist, and civil rights leader. Walker (1944–), also an activist, is a critically acclaimed contemporary writer of novels, poems, and short stories. 44. Hull, introduction, 19. 45. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1969), 45. Quoted in Kristina Brooks, “Between Love and Hate, Black and White: Narcissism and Double-Consciousness in the Diaries of Alice Dunbar-Nelson,” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 113. 46. Dunbar-Nelson’s heritage included Anglo-American, African American, and Native American; see Brooks, “Between Love and Hate,” 101. 47. Dunbar-Nelson, Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, ed. Gloria T. Hull (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 69. 48. Ibid., 184. 49. Ibid., 93. 50. Ibid., 52, 465. 51. Ibid., 389. 52. Ibid., 429. 53. Ibid., 380. 54. Ibid., 366. 55. Hull, introduction, 17. 56. Dunbar-Nelson, Give Us Each Day, 45. 57. Ibid., 224. 58. Ibid., 51, 65. 59. Ibid., 170. 60. Ibid., 255.

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61. Ibid., 215. 62. Ibid., 218. 63. Ibid., 199. 64. Ibid., 243. 65. Ibid., 186, 266. From 1924 to 1928, Dunbar-Nelson worked in the public school department for the Industrial School for Colored Girls in Delaware, and in 1928, for the American Friends Inter-Racial Peace Committee in Philadelphia. 66. Ibid., 266. 67. Hull, introduction, 31. 68. Dunbar-Nelson, Give Us Each Day, 92, 95. 69. Robert Gottlieb, editor’s note to The Journals of John Cheever, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Vintage, 1990), 398. Gottlieb commented of Cheever, “He did not date most of the entries, which is why we didn’t” (ibid.). 70. Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 10. 71. Benjamin H. Cheever, introduction to The Journals of John Cheever, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Vintage, 1990), ix. 72. Ibid., x. 73. Herbert Mitgang, “Books of the Times: Reading the Notebooks of a Sad, Anguished Man,” New York Times, October 2, 1991, https://www.nytimes .com/1991/10/02/books/books-of-the-times-reading-the-notebooks-of-a-sad -anguished-man.html. 74. John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Vintage, 1990), 3. 75. Ibid., 214, 262, 170. 76. Ibid., 171, 218. 77. Ibid., 174. 78. Ibid., 204, 213. 79. Ibid., 13. 80. Ibid., 276. 81. Ibid., 245. 82. Ibid., 240. 83. Ibid., 148, 168. 84. Ibid., 335. 85. Ibid., 68. 86. Ibid., 156. 87. Benjamin H. Cheever, introduction, vii, x. 88. John Cheever, Journals, 82. 89. Gunther Stuhlmann, introduction to The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 1, 1931–1934, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann (San Diego: Swallow Press and Harcourt, 1966), v–vi. 90. Nin, Early Diary, 1:64. 91. Nin, Early Diary, 1:23; 2:165. 92. Nin, Early Diary, 4:95. 93. Nin, Early Diary, 2:262. 94. Ibid, 2:74; Nin, Early Diary, 4:14. 95. Nin, Early Diary, 4:359. 96. Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann, 7 vols. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966–80), 1:3. Madame Bovary (1856) is a novel by Gustave Flaubert.

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97. Anaïs Nin, Henry and June, 1931–32, ed. Rupert Pole and Gunther Stuhlmann (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 162. Oliver Mellors is the lover of the eponymous Lady Chatterley in Lawrence’s 1928 novel. 98. Nin, Diary, 1:128. 99. Ibid., 2:234. 100. Nin, Early Diary, 3:143. 101. Nin, Diary, 4:153. 102. Nin, Early Diary, 4:372. 103. Nin, Diary, 1:333. 104. Nin, Early Diary, 3:92, 3:123. 105. Ibid., 4:433. 106. Nin, Diary, 5:217. 107. Ibid., 6:253–4. 108. Ibid., 6:397–8. 109. Ibid., 7:35, 7:284. 110. Ibid., 7:219. 111. Ibid., 7:228. 112. Ibid., 7:109, 7:145. 113. George Fetherling, preface to The Writing Life: Journals, 1975–2005, ed. Brian Busby (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), xi. 114. Ibid., ix. 115. Ibid., vii. 116. Ibid., viii. 117. Ibid. 118. George Fetherling, The Writing Life: Journals, 1975–2005, ed. Brian Busby (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 16, emphasis in the original. 119. Ibid., 16. 120. Ibid., 52. 121. Ibid., 42. 122. Ibid., 299. 123. Ibid., 17. 124. Ibid., 246. 125. Ibid., 20. 126. Ibid., 266. 127. Ibid., 387. 128. Ibid., 220. 129. Ibid., 396. 130. Ibid., 394. 131. Lynn Z. Bloom, “‘I Write for Myself and Strangers’: Private Diaries as Public Documents,” in Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, ed. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 24–25.

Bibliography Bailey, Blake. Cheever: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Barbellion, W. N. P. The Journal of a Disappointed Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1919.

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Bashkirtseff, Marie. Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, 2 vols. Paris: G. Charpentier, 1887. Published in English as The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff. Translated by Mathilde Blind. London: Cassell and Company, 1891. Blind, Mathilde. Introduction to Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, vii–xxviii. Translated by Mathilde Blind. London: Cassell and Company, 1891. Bloom, Lynn Z. “‘I Write for Myself and Strangers’: Private Diaries as Public Documents.” In Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, 23–37. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Brooks, Kristina. “Between Love and Hate, Black and White: Narcissism and Double-Consciousness in the Diaries of Alice Dunbar-Nelson.” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 101–18. Cheever, Benjamin H. Introduction to The Journals of John Cheever, vii–xi. Edited by Robert Gottlieb. New York: Vintage, 1990. Cheever, John. The Journals of John Cheever. Edited by Robert Gottlieb. New York: Vintage, 1990. Clifford, Lady Anne. The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford. Edited by D. J. H. Clifford. Gloucestershire: History Press, 2009. Davis, Emilie. The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863– 1865. Edited by Judith Giesberg. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Dobbs, Brian. Dear Diary . . . Some Studies in Self-Interest. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974. Dunbar-Nelson, Alice. Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Edited by Gloria T. Hull. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Fetherling, George. Preface to The Writing Life: Journals, 1975–2005, edited by Brian Busby, vii–xi. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. ———. The Writing Life: Journals, 1975–2005. Edited by Brian Busby. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. Forten, Charlotte L. The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten: Free Negro in the Slave Era. Edited by Ray Allen Billington. New York: Collier Books, 1953. Gottlieb, Robert. Editor’s note to The Journals of John Cheever, edited by Robert Gottlieb, 397–99. New York: Vintage, 1990. Hull, Gloria T. Editorial preface to Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, edited by Gloria T. Hull, 33–35. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. ———. Introduction to Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, edited by Gloria T. Hull, 13–32. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Mallon, Thomas. A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries. London: Penguin Books, 1986. Matthews, William. “Introduction,” sec. “The Diary as Literature.” In The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols., 1:xcvii–cxiii. London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1970. Mitgang, Herbert. “Books of the Times: Reading the Notebooks of a Sad, Anguished Man.” New York Times, October 2, 1991. https://www​ .nytimes.com/1991/10/02/books/books-of-the-times-reading-the-note​ books-of-a-sad-anguished-man.html. Nin, Anaïs. The Diary of Anaïs Nin. Edited by Gunther Stuhlmann. 7 vols. San Diego: Swallow Press and Harcourt, 1966–80.

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———. The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin. Vol. 1, Linotte, 1914–20. Edited by John Ferrone. Translated by Jean L. Sherman. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. ———. The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin. Vol. 2, 1920–23. Edited by Rupert Pole. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. ———. The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin. Vol. 3, Journal of a Wife, 1923–27. Edited by Rupert Pole. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1983. ———. The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin. Vol. 4, 1927–31. Edited by Rupert Pole. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. ———. Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin. Edited by Rupert Pole and Gunther Stuhlmann. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. ———. Incest: From a Journal of Love; The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932–1934. Edited by Gunther Stuhlmann. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. O’Brien, Kate. English Diaries and Journals. London: William Collins, 1943. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews. Vol. 1. London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1970. Ponsonby, Arthur. English Diaries. London: Methuen and Co., 1923. Rosenwald, Lawrence. Emerson and the Art of the Diary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Spalding, P. A. Self-Harvest: A Study of Diaries and the Diarist. London: Independent Press, 1949. Stuhlmann, Gunther. Introduction to The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 1, 1931– 34, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann, v–xii. San Diego: Swallow Press and Harcourt, 1966. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Edited by Miriam Decosta-Willis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1, 1915–19. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2, 1920–24. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3, 1925–30. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4, 1931–35. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 5, 1936–41. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. ———. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897–1909. Edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1990. ———. “Modern Fiction.” In The Common Reader, edited by Andrew McNeillie, vol. 1, 184–95. London: Hogarth Press, 1947.

E L I Z A B E T H P ODN I E K S is Professor of English at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is author of Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin and editor of the critical edition Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929–1937 (2012), among others.

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part vi

The Diary in Political Conflict

17 The American Civil War Confederate Women’s Diaries Kimberly Harrison

During the Civil War, many Confederate women turned to their diaries to record and respond to the upheaval and uncertainty of national conflict. A large number of these wartime diaries survive, initially preserved in archives and by family members because of what they tell us about the Civil War, particularly about military history, with old card catalog entries referencing the generals and battles mentioned within the diary pages. More recently, women’s Civil War diaries have been valued as contributions to literary, rhetorical, and social history. They are sources for helping readers understand how the war impacted women’s identities, relationships, and faith, contributing also to a fuller understanding of women’s nineteenth-century literacy practices and of their contributions to a burgeoning Confederate identity. Before war began, many elite Southern women considered diary writing a common activity and one that they took seriously as indicative of their social standing and dedication to self-improvement. As Georgia slave mistress and aspiring writer Susan Cornwall Shewmake, whose surviving journal begins in 1857, summarized, “A journal rightly kept would be equivalent in its effects to a regular Class meeting.”1 For nineteenthcentury women, the diary served also as a family history, a place to commemorate births, deaths, and marriages. Its pages acted as a spiritual journal, chronicling the writer’s growth and setbacks in her faith, and it also was a tool to help women better understand their world and their place in it.2 Many elite Southern women had previously kept or were keeping a diary when states began seceding from the Union. Yet with Civil  299

War came urgency among many Confederate women to either begin or return to their diaries. For many, war altered the purposes and practices of keeping a diary. While most wartime diaries continued to serve their antebellum purposes, their function expanded and shifted in response to the national context and its impact on the individual diarists. Politics found its way into many women’s diaries, even if, for some diarists, it was filtered through their personal and familial concerns. In this chapter, I examine the diarists themselves, considering why they wrote, whom they envisioned as their readers, and how material conditions fostered or hindered their authorship. I argue that for many Confederate women diarists, diary writing was, at least in part, an effort to support the Confederacy, whether posited at times as a patriotic act in itself, as a record to account for the diarist’s contributions to the war effort, or as an aid to foster identification with their new nation and to perform often challenging wartime duties. The women whose wartime diaries survive were predominantly economically privileged with both the education and leisure time that made their writing possible. Many were of slaveholding families, some of the planter class with others of smaller farming families, and the time that they spent with their diaries was made possible by slave labor. Some were of the urban professional elite, with fathers and husbands who were judges, lawyers, educators, bankers, and merchants. Confederate women of all ages and marital status kept diaries.3 Largely, these diarists shared ideological assumptions about societal structure and their place within it. They defined themselves as “ladies,” a concept that assumed both racial and class privilege, and they expected to fulfill the roles of wife, mother, and often mistress, assumptions often disrupted by war. The daily lives of these “privileged” or “elite” women, however, could vary significantly. Even within the planter class, material conditions, slave culture, and wealth differed widely. For the elite women living on the established seaboard, life was often very different in comparison to that of women in the western states, which retained harsher characteristics of the frontier South. Yet despite differences in wealth and living conditions, elite Confederate women were immersed in a culture defined through the institution of slavery and hierarchical gender relations.4 The diarists who inform this article aligned themselves to varying degrees with the Confederacy. Despite the differences within the Confederate South, historians have argued that a sense of nationalism in the Confederacy persisted throughout the conflict, with many Southerners identifying collective loyalties beyond their state and local community, seeing themselves as distinct from the North and as sharing with other Southerners’ values and culture that differed from those predominate outside of their geographical locale. 5 In their diaries, many elite Southern 300 | The Diary

white women began to identify themselves as Confederates, no longer as Americans. For those women who encountered invading troops directly or who had loved ones fighting for the Confederacy, their loyalty to their new nation was likely to strengthen even as the war’s hardships increased.6 However, for some diarists, separation from family, displacement from home, and other suffering did diminish their support of the war effort. At times, diarists’ support of the Confederate cause vacillated. In some entries, they might wish for the end of the conflict and for loved ones to return home from battle, while in others, they continued to express support for their cause. For the majority of elite Southerners who supported secession, the Confederacy represented their hopes for preserving their power and privilege, along with the institution of slavery on which their way of life rested.7 For Confederate women diarists, facing what for them were uncertain, often uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous contexts, their wartime diaries served myriad purposes. Eighteen year-old Anna Maria Green, for example, writing in Georgia, stated that her diary was a chronicle for later review of “the great national events that are now transpiring” and a tool for “self-improvement and discipline.” For sixteen year-old Nannie Haskins Williams, writing in occupied Clarksville, Tennessee, her diary was an “old friend” to whom she could “lay [her] heart open.” 8 In these wartime diaries, individual entries range from one or two brief sentences to pages and pages of prose. At times, diarists vary short and long entries, depending on the entry’s content and purpose and their time constraints. Some diaries also contain copied poetry, scripture, prayers, cutouts from newspapers, and copied letters to family members or friends. At times, women copied or pasted war news and patriotic stories and songs. Most wartime diarists indicated the desire to write, regretting at times that they were not more prolific. “I wonder often why it is I do not write more regularly,” Green began an entry noting both the fall of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and her enjoyment of Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield. “It would be well for me could I collect and systematize my thought,” she explained.9 In contrast, in a minority of surviving Confederate diaries, the diarist wrote only brief, purely descriptive entries, as did Aurora Margueritte Morgan, a daughter of a Confederate colonel. She started her diary in 1854, when she began listing brief records of visitors to her home in Point Coupee, Louisiana. With the start of Civil War, her entries changed only in her noting the presence of Federal troops in her community.10 For many Confederate women diarists, as indicated by Green, one purpose for keeping a diary was to create a history and record of the conflict.11 Such initial entries often indicated the diarists’ expectations for bearing witness to what for them would have been a political and military success, one that meant continuity in their way of life. A number of Confederate Women’s Diaries  |  301

diarists expressed regret that they had not picked up their pens sooner to write of wartime events. Twenty-two-year-old Emma Holmes, who avidly recounted her experience in Charleston, South Carolina, wrote in May 1861, “How I wish I had kept a journal during the last three months of great political changes.”12 Likewise, young belle Sue Richardson, in Front Royal, Virginia, began her diary on October 1, 1863, stating, “I regret so much not writing some events of the past few years as they occurred that I’ve concluded to commence now.”13 In Tennessee, Nannie Haskins Williams had kept a diary until the war broke out, putting it away as conflict commenced, an act she regretted. She started writing again in 1863, with the lament, “I ceased to write in it [her diary] just when I ought to have continued.”14 Whether experiencing war firsthand as troops invaded their towns and cities or reading about the action in eagerly awaited newspapers, most Confederate women wartime diarists made efforts to record news of battles, along with the injuries and deaths of local men and boys. In Tennessee, for instance, Nannie Williams, noted in an 1863 entry that she had received a list of those recently killed and wounded in battle at Chancellorsville, Virginia. In her diary, she personalized the list, recording the names of those she knew among the dead and wounded. Often, diarists’ accounting of the facts of war was frustrated by the difficulty of obtaining news and the circulation of rumors. Williams, for example, recorded on July 12, 1863, conflicting reports about whether or not Vicksburg, Mississippi, had fallen. While her father believed that the strategically located city had succumbed to what had been a long and brutal siege, Williams did not, writing, “Of course, my opinion does not amount to much, yet I have a right to have one and express it.” While Confederate forces had surrendered on July 3, it was not until July 27 that she concluded a diary entry with one sentence noting Vicksburg’s fate.15 In addition to chronicling outcomes of battles, many diarists were explicit that they were writing not only a record of the war but their record, a personal history for family members and themselves. Such entries represented the diarists’ expectations, or perhaps hopes, that any wartime hardships they described were short-lived and that the future readers of their record, their families and future selves, would be reading from a position of comfort and privilege that was restored by the war’s outcome. For example, in Mississippi, Kate Foster, twenty-one years old, began her wartime journal explaining that it “may be read by my nieces and nephews for two or even three generations, as what Aunt Katie did when she was a young lady during the war of Independence.”16 In Virginia, fifty-two-year-old Margaret Brown Wight began her first diary in 1863, hoping it to provide “some gratification for my children and grandchildren, to read at some future day a record of the past.”17 302 | The Diary

Similarly, Emma LeConte, seventeen years old, in South Carolina, dedicated an entry to describing her course homespun clothes, the high prices and shortages of food, and the lack of fuel to heat her home, noting, “It may be of interest some day [sic] to recall the poor style in which we lived during the war, so I shall make a few notes.”18 As they wrote their personal histories of the Civil War, elite Southern women diarists made sure to record their own efforts to support the Confederacy. They chronicled their support of Confederate soldiers through sewing, knitting, collecting supplies, and writing encouraging letters. They noted their participation in national days of prayer and fasting. They also wrote about their political resistance.19 Whether they collectively wore Confederate colors to protest Union occupation, gathered in a group to throw flowers or shake handkerchiefs to support Confederate prisoners of war, voiced their political views to the enemy, or sang politically charged songs in the earshot of invading troops, women—often young women—recorded and analyzed their efforts in their diaries.20 Some women participated more directly in the conflict, and their work found its place in their diaries. For example, twenty-four-year-old Belle Edmondson, living near Memphis, Tennessee, recorded her activities as a Confederate scout who smuggled letters and goods across military lines, 21 and Mary M. Terry, forty-one years old, wrote during her imprisonment, accused of being a blockade runner and spy.22 Nineteen-year-old Baton Rouge, Louisiana, diarist Sarah Morgan, on the other hand, who held to traditional Southern gendered ideals and refused to express her political views publicly, indicated that her diary itself served as evidence of her political protest and her Confederate patriotism. After a long and vehement entry protesting Northern military action, she explained, “As no word of this has passed my lips, I give it vent in writing, which is more lasting than works, partly to relieve my heart, partly to prove to my own satisfaction that I am no coward; for one line of this, surrounded as we are by soldiers . . . would be a sufficient indictment for high treason.”23 Often Confederate women used their diaries to justify their wartime choices and actions, for themselves and at times for posterity. 24 For young women such as Morgan, often such justification involved their choice whether to publicly voice their political allegiances. While identifying themselves with their cause, young women faced the challenge of acting as both a Confederate patriot and a Southern lady, a concept based on traditional gender roles. Morgan, felt this challenge deeply, and it was in her diary that she defended her decision to uphold Southern gendered values at the expense of public political involvement. Because of her decision to treat those Union officers occupying her city as gentlemen, receiving their visits, acknowledging them in church, and supplying them with medical supplies, she and her family faced community censure and accusations Confederate Women’s Diaries  |  303

of Union sympathies. She addressed her critics in her personal writing, condemning local women who refused to politely engage occupying officers and who employed public forms of political resistance, labeling their actions as “the rabid, fanatical, abusive violence of our female Secession declaimers.” More often, however, young women justified their decisions to voice their political loyalties and their defiance of parental advice to silence their protests. Louisiana diarist Sarah Wadley, seventeen years old when the Civil War began, used her diary to refute her mother’s criticism that she was rude to Union cotton speculators visiting their home. In her diary, Wadley countered her mother’s criticism, stating her refusal to “conceal feelings which I consider it a principle to cherish.” Likewise, sixteen-year-old Nannie Haskins Williams defended her sharp rebuke of a Union lieutenant who kept interrupting her and other local women’s visit to prisoners of war who were confined locally. Although her mother warned her to “hush” to avoid any trouble, she asserted in her diary the success of her words in “shut[ting] him up considerably” and her intention to have spoken out further had he not left them alone.25 Additionally, as women found themselves in the position of defending their homes in lieu of absent men, they also defended their behavior in their diaries, often expressing surprise when appeals to traditional gender etiquette did result in their property being spared. Priscilla Bond, for example, with her husband away serving the Confederacy and her father-in-law bedridden, had the responsibility of meeting invading Union officers who wanted to search the family’s Louisiana sugar cane plantation. In recounting the event, twenty-three-year-old Bond emphasized her “prudence” and “lady like deportment,” ensuring herself and future readers that her actions could not be blamed for the fate of the family home, which was burned later that day.26 Slavery was also an institution that a number of Confederate women diarists justified in the pages of their diaries, working to reconcile abolitionist critiques with their own roles and actions as slave mistresses and thus to further strengthen their own Confederate identities. Often women turned to this defense as they anticipated crisis, usually nearby military action, seemingly hoping to feel absolved of any sins before coming danger.27 Commonly, they worked to silence their own misgivings and abolitionist critiques of slavery through arguments based on masculine authority, citing “good men,” such as their husbands, fathers, and pastors, who owned slaves. They referred to proslavery literature and cited scripture, frequently recounting the story of Noah’s curse on Canaan in the book of Genesis. They also maintained that while there were abuses in the system, they themselves were good mistresses. For example, Dolly Lunt Burge, a forty-seven-year-old widow, with over thirty slaves, employed various lines of defense as she anticipated Sherman’s march through her 304 | The Diary

home state of Georgia. Admitting that she had misgivings about slavery, she ultimately offered a defense of institution on which her family wealth rested, concluding, “The purest & holiest men have owned them & I can see nothing in the Scripture which forbids it. I have never bought nor sold & have tried to make life easy & pleasant to those that have been bequeathed me by the dead.”28 In addition to preserving a wartime record, Confederate women used personal writing to help them understand and cope with their tumultuous contexts.29 For the most part, elite Southern women received protection from the worst of war’s hardships because of their social standing, their wealth, and their identities as ladies. In contrast, lower-class white women and their children faced starvation and hard labor, as public relief could not meet the demand, while black women, negotiating when and how to claim their freedom, experienced hunger and frequent physical retaliation and harm even when they made it to Union lines.30 Though war spared elite Southern women the horrors faced by black and lower-class white women, it did at times bring them danger and loss. In such times, they turned to their diaries, seeing their books and the act of writing as solace. For those women who found themselves caught in the lines of battle, their books provided comfort, helped them organize and articulate their thoughts in times of trauma, and allowed them to voice their fears as war literally raged around them. In Arkansas, Mary Patrick, wife of a Confederate officer, picked up her pen in June 1862 in response to advice that she flee her home as it was in direct range of Union gunboats. Seeing smoke from the gunboats on the river outside her window, she penned, “I concluded to write and try to allay my anxiety and quiet my nerves but I find myself writing as tho’ for life.”31 Similarly, Mississippian Trudy Alston, not yet twenty years old, penned an entry as the Battle of Raymond took place near her home. The entry was a prayer, an expression of fear, and a report on the details of the engagement. As she expressed, “I am so confused I know not what I write the cannon are fireing [sic] insistently it joltes [sic] every window in the house. . . . Oh my god our men are retreating the battle is raging.”32 More so than ever, the act of writing became a method for catharsis and self-calming. For example, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, a fortyyear-old wife and mother, who was of Georgia’s elite planter class, turned to her diary on October 21, 1864, after her husband, a member of a local militia, was called to action. She put away her sewing and picked up her diary, explaining, “As dark came on I began to feel gloomy and instinctively I turned to my journal ‘ever present help in time of trouble.’” Likewise, on November 17 of the same year, she relied on her diary in times of anxiety. She had not written in three weeks, letting letters to her husband serve as a record of events. Yet on hearing a report that Union troops were Confederate Women’s Diaries  |  305

making their way to Macon, Georgia, where her husband’s militia were likely to meet them, she wrote, “I am in trouble and instinctively I turn to my journal,” beginning a long entry that detailed her fears for her family, herself, and the Confederacy.33 Similarly, the distraught Mary S. Patrick, after not writing in her diary for almost two months, found it an outlet after the death of her soldier son. Instead of dying in battle, he had died unexpectedly at home after paying his family a surprise visit and after the onset of a headache. “Once more in my neglected journal—now my only medium. I will relieve my burdened mind,” she wrote, pouring out prayers and laments for her son.34 A shift in the purpose of writing to self-consolation can also be seen in the diary of Priscilla Bond, who left her close-knit family to follow her new husband to the bayous of Louisiana just as war was breaking out. In her prewar entries, she frequently chastised herself about her religious and social shortcomings, but living as a refugee while battling tuberculosis, she turned to her diary more frequently to write of the solace and guidance she found in religion and in her friends, to keep a record of kindnesses she experienced for her family in Maryland, and to express on the page sentiments she did not think it prudent to share with her new in-laws.35 As wartime homes became tense due to material deprivation, fear, and the influx of refugees into communities and individual houses, diaries provided coveted personal space and allowed diarists to voice those criticisms, complaints, and disappointments that they deemed it better not to speak aloud. 36 By providing such a space, diary writing assisted in helping elite Confederate women fulfill their domestic responsibilities, maintaining composure and serving their duties as mothers, wives, and daughters. For example, in June 1864, twenty-year-old Pauline DeCaradeuc confided in her diary her frustrations and despair. Her family had opened their home near Aiken, South Carolina, to numerous relatives and friends who were refugees. In crowded and chaotic conditions while also mourning the death of two brothers and a former beau in the war, DeCaradeuc struggled to meet her responsibilities to her guests and longed for the privacy and space within which to deal with her grief. As she explained, Our family is some days numbered at sixteen, thirteen being now the usual number and I feel so like quiet, and only home around; it’s unamiable to feel so, but tho I never show it, I feel it. I write a heap here of what no one could dream I ever felt. . . . My heart most usually bleeds inwardly, and this Journal is the only thing in this world that ever gets a peep into it, it’s a comfort for me to write here sometimes; my desk is so private, so entirely my own.37

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so by providing an audience for words she silenced publicly. Similarly, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas used her diary to keep domestic peace. Living in uncomfortable refugee quarters, she gave vent in her diary, writing, “I expect I annoy Mr. Thomas by my frequent allusions to this subject [refugee housing] so hereafter my journal I think I shall tell you when any thing [sic] worries me for you know it is almost impossible for me not to have some one [sic] to talk to.”38 When women lacked physical living space due to wartime contexts, their diaries became even more important as private psychological spaces into which they could pour those complaints and concerns that their culture urged women to silence. While elite white women were expected to maintain gendered decorum during wartime, they were also required to carry out responsibilities usually held by their men. In such contexts, Confederate women also used their diaries to help them prepare for and envision themselves as capable of such roles. One notable context that Confederate women diarists frequently wrote about was when they were left alone to protect their home from Union forces, standing in place of their own men who were away fighting. In such entries, diarists envisioned and encouraged themselves to be brave, careful, and prudent, defining themselves as capable of their new roles. In July 1862, twenty-four-year-old Fannie Braxton Hume directed herself “to take care of matters & of ourselves” after her grandfather fled their Virginia home in anticipation of Union forces’ arrival to the area. Left alone with her grandmother and sisters, Hume penned prayers for strength and deliverance from her enemies, after which action, she claimed, “I feel perfectly calm & quiet as yet—though our situation promises to be uncomfortable enough, if not dangerous.”39 Likewise, in Virginia, Mary Eliza Powell Dulany wrote several entries in 1862 after hearing that Confederate forces had fallen back, leaving the area open to Union occupation. With her husband in the Confederate army, Dulany, only twenty-five years old, was left to defend the family’s large farm, and in her diary, she described herself as capable of doing so. Despite the excitement in the village with news that Union troops were only miles away, Dulany asserted, “I trust in God for protection and feel no fear.” As forces moved even closer, she continued to describe herself as unafraid and trusting to “Providence for further projection.”40 Women’s autobiography scholar Margo Culley found that “pages of the diary might be thought of as a kind of mirror before which the diarist stands assuming this posture or that.”41 Certainly some pages in Confederate women’s diaries take on this role, allowing the diarists to see themselves performing effectively in new and daunting wartime contexts. Within one woman’s Civil War diary, it is common to discern a variety of purposes for writing, both personal and political. The impact of the Civil War on the function of individual diaries depended on many factors. Confederate Women’s Diaries  |  307

The diarists’ age was a factor in how the diary functioned, with younger women still in their family home more likely to record evidence of their patriotic views and activities, while older women with more household responsibilities were more likely to write about events and issues more closely connected to their family and its well-being. Those diarists geographically located in lines of battle, those living in occupied territory, and those with family members in harm’s way turned to their diaries to help them cope with and navigate their troubling contexts more frequently than did their counterparts more securely situated.42 While Confederate women’s diaries fulfilled various purposes for their authors, at times, material conditions hindered or restricted the function of the diary. Due to Union blockades and the shortage of consumer items, women had trouble finding materials with which to write. Nannie Williams, for example, explained that her late start to keeping a Civil War diary was because she could not secure a book.43 Prolific diarist Sarah Morgan despaired of finding a replacement for her beloved diary, writing, “I am wishing this book was not drawing so very near its close as to force me to leave out many an incident I would like to mention.”44 Diarists scraped to make the most of their limited resources, adding loose paper to their books, writing in margins, and cross writing, penning lines both vertically and horizontally on the page. They turned old address books and register books into diaries, with the physical space available to them on the page at times hindering the development of their thinking on paper. At other times, Confederate women could not write when they hid their books in anticipation of invading Union troops to ensure protection from both invasion of privacy and retaliation for the political allegiances they expressed in their journals. For example, twenty-two-year-old Louisiana native Kate Stone chronicled in January 1863, “Preparing to run from the Yankees, I commit my book to the bottom of a packing box with only a slight chance of seeing it again.” It was over a month later that she unpacked her diary and wrote again. In addition to the difficult material conditions of writing and of securing writing utensils, many diarists also faced the increasing challenge of time. As the war continued, most had less time to write because of their increased domestic responsibilities as slaves left, encouraged by the presence of Union troops and the Emancipation Proclamation.45 Just as the function of Confederate women’s Civil War diaries varies at times by entry, so too does the assumed audience, and it is also common to find that these diaries defy easy classification as either “public” or “private.” As noted above, during the Civil War, some women stated that they were keeping records for family members. A few women, either during, but more often after the war, saw their diaries as opportunities for becoming published authors and for contributing to public memory

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regarding the conflict. Yet many women’s wartime diaries blur the boundaries between public and private. For example, twenty-year-old Lizzie Brown, in Natchez, Mississippi, self-censured herself in one of her entries, cutting short a complaint about the advances of a man she deemed an ill-fitted suitor. “Altho I keep this journal I cannot write down all my thoughts,” she explained. However, in a subsequent entry, she described writing in “the secret leaves of my journal.” Likewise, Nannie Haskins Williams noted it to be a “blessed thing that no one will see this book but myself,” while in a later entry, she considered “scratching out” her commentary on General Robert E. Lee, fearing to be judged as “silly.” Still in another entry, she described herself as her future audience, noting, “In my old age it will be so pleasant to read a manuscript written when in my ‘teens,’ compare this life with that.” In many Confederate women’s diaries, some entries seem written for future readers, likely family members, while others seem written for catharsis and to help the writers manage their current, often difficult, situations. Indeed, diarists themselves were important audiences for their own books, often writing of reading their previously written diary entries, intending to reflect on and learn from their past experiences.46 With the end of the Civil War, a number of elite white Southern women put away their books. Some no longer had the time to write. Without the labor of slaves, many formerly elite women struggled with domestic chores, and leisure time was scarce. Some no longer needed the companionship of their books with their families again restored. Others, with their cause lost, also lost enthusiasm for writing, finding it even to be painful. As forty-two-year-old Catherine Edmondston summed up, “This Journal is now but a pain and greif [sic] to me. It is a transcript of disappointed hopes, of crushed expectations, which have all the bitterness of death without the lively hope of a Resurrection.” For those formerly Confederate women who did continue to write and whose postwar diaries survive, the purpose of writing often shifted again, with political concerns no longer a priority. For example, while Nannie Haskins Williams vividly chronicled the Civil War and her support for the Confederacy, her postwar diary seldom refers to politics, often mentioning instead her family. Likewise, Emma LeConte, who had recorded her own acts of political resistance in the face of occupying troops, planned to write “only of personal and family matters, if I can keep back the expression of what fills my heart and thoughts.”47 While some wartime diarists, such as Ella Clanton Thomas, continued to write about politics, many others who had enthusiastically written about the Confederacy expressed their intentions to turn from politics and to focus on becoming better daughters, sisters, wives, and Christians, no longer Rebels.

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Notes 1. Susan Cornwall Shewmake, Diary, March 18, 1857, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 2. Giselle Roberts, The Confederate Belle (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 11; Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 103. 3. On age as a category for better understanding white women’s wartime experiences, see Roberts, Confederate Belle; Victoria E. Ott, Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age in the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008); Anya Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and Jane Turner Censer, Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). 4. On the frontier South, see Joan E. Cashin, A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); on gender roles, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 22, 28, and chapter 1, along with Laura F. Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 16–31. On the concept of the southern “lady,” see Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), and Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 5. Regarding Confederate nationalism, see Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 70; Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Ott, Confederate Daughters. For discussion of southern women who did not support the Confederacy, see Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), and Victoria Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 6. On Confederate women’s support of the war effort, see Blair, Virginia’s Private War, 79, 132; Gallagher, Confederate War, 76; Jacqueline Glass Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 75–92. 7. For arguments that Confederate women’s support of the Confederacy waned with war’s hardships, see James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 133–40; Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention, Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 114–38; Drew Gilpin Faust, “‘Trying to Do a Man’s Business’: Gender, Violence, and Slave Management in Civil War Texas,” Gender and History 4, no. 2 (1992): 197–214, repr. in Drew Gilpin Faust, Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 174–92; George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

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1991). For arguments that Confederate patriotism was frequently sustained throughout and even after the war, see Rubin, Shattered Nation; Ott, Confederate Daughters; Gallagher, Confederate War; William Alan Blair, Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea. 8. Anna Maria Green, The Journal of a Milledgeville Girl, 1861–1867, ed. James C. Bonner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964), 9, 20; Nannie Haskins Williams, The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863–1890, ed. Minoa D. Uffelman et al. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014), 4. Green’s existing diary spans from 1861 to 1867. Williams’s existing diary spans from 1863 to 1866, starting again in 1869, with sporadic entries until 1890. She also wrote that she kept a diary prior to the beginning of the Civil War. 9. Green, Journal of a Milledgeville Girl, 36. 10. Aurora Margueritte Morgan, Diary, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge. Morgan’s existing diary spans from 1854 to 1864. Her age is not clearly indicated in the archival records. 11. For further discussion of women’s Civil War diaries as writing history, see Randall C. Jimerson, The Private Civil War: Popular Thought during the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 56. 12. Emma Holmes, The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 1861–1866, ed. John F. Marszalek (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 1. Holmes’s existing diary spans from 1861 to 1866. 13. Sue Richardson, Diary, October 1, 1863, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Richardson’s diary spans from 1863 to 1865. While it is clear the Richardson is a young woman, her exact age is unclear. 14. Williams, Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams, 1. 15. Ibid., 26, 35, 41. 16. Kate Foster, Diary, June 25, 1863, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University Libraries, Duke University, Durham, NC. The majority of Foster’s entries are written between June and November 1863. She does not write again until July 1865, and entries are sporadic until 1872. 17. Margaret Brown Wight, Diary, undated entry April 1863, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond. Wight’s diary spans from 1863 to 1865 and 1878 to 1879. 18. Emma LeConte, Diary, January 23, 1865, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. LeConte’s existing diary entries were written from December 1864 to August 1865. 19. For discussion of the common types of Confederate women’s political resistance, see Kimberly Harrison, The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 63–78. 20. For example entries recounting the diarists’ political resistance, see Sarah Morgan, Sarah Morgan: The Civil Diary of a Southern Woman, ed. Charles East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 67; Kate Carney, Diary, May 7, 1862, Documenting the American South, University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, accessed September 12, 2002, https://

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docsouth.unc.edu/imls/carney/carney.html; Ellen Renshaw House, A Very Violent Rebel: The Civil War Diary of Ellen Renshaw House, ed. Daniel E. Sutherland (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 85; Lucy Rebecca Buck, Shadows on My Heart: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Rebecca Buck of Virginia, ed. Elizabeth R. Baer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 74. 21. Edmondson kept a diary from January to November 1864. 22. Terry’s diary spans from May 1864 to January 1865. 23. Morgan, Sarah Morgan, 142–43. Morgan’s entries are from 1862 to 1865 and resume from 1868 to 1871, with evidence that she continued to write but destroyed the pages. 24. See Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 346, for further discussion of how Southern women justified their cause and their wartime actions in their diaries. 25. Morgan, Sarah Morgan, 111; Sarah Lois Wadley, Diary, February 3, 1865, Southern Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth Century: Papers and Diaries, ed. Anne Firor Scott; Williams, Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams, 11. Wadley’s existing diary spans from 1859 to 1884. 26. Priscilla Bond, A Maryland Bride in the Deep South: The Civil War Diary of Priscilla Bond, ed. Kimberly Harrison (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 210–20; Bond’s diary spans from 1858 to 1865. 27. See Harrison, Rhetoric of Rebel Women, 135–41. 28. Dolly Lunt Burge, The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge, 1848–1879, ed. Christine Jacobson Carter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 156. Burge’s diary spans from 1848 to 1879. 29. For discussion of how women have used diary writing in contexts other than the American Civil War to cope with hardship and to navigate challenges to identity, see particularly Gayle R. Davis, “Women’s Frontier Diaries: Writing for Good Reason,” Women’s Studies 14, no. 1 (1987): 5–14; Margo Culley, A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1985); Suzanne L. Bunkers, “Diaries and Dysfunctional Families,” in Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, ed. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 220–35; Amy L. Wink, She Left Nothing in Particular: The Autobiographical Legacy of NineteenthCentury Women’s Diaries (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001). For discussion related to diaries of Confederate women, see Sheila R. Phipps, Genteel Rebel: The Life of Mary Greenhow Lee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 103, and Sarah E. Gardner, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 16–22. 30. For further detail on lower-class and black women’s experiences and hardships of war, see Drew Gilpin Faust, Thavolia Glymph, and George Rable, “A Woman’s War: Southern Women in the Civil War,” in A Woman’s War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy, ed. Edward D. C. Campbell Jr. and Kym S. Rice (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 9–27. 31. Mary S. Patrick, Diary, June 16, 1862, Arkansas History Commission, Little Rock. Patrick’s diary spans from 1862 to 1864. 32. Trudy Alston, Diary, May 12, 1863, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Alston’s diary

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spans from 1861 to 1864. Alston’s exact age is not clear, though she notes her twentieth birthday in an undated entry. 33. Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, Diary, November 7, 1864, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. Thomas’s diary chronicles from 1848 to 1889. 34. Patrick, Diary, May 22, 1862. 35. See, for example, entries from October 16, 1858, and May 13, 1859 in Bond, Maryland Bride, 82, 94–95. 36. For further discussion of this argument, see Harrison, Rhetoric of Rebel Women, 83–117. 37. Pauline DeCaradeuc Heyward, A Confederate Lady Comes of Age: The Journal of Pauline DeCaradeuc Heyward, 1863–1888, ed. Mary D. Robertson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992). The diary spans from 1863 to 1888. 38. Julia LeGrande, The Journal of Julia LeGrand, New Orleans, 1862– 1863, ed. Kate Mason Rowland and Mrs. Morris L. Croxhall (Richmond: Everett Waddey, 1911), 130, 195; Thomas, Diary, July 4, 1864. For discussion of refugee complaints about crowded and small living conditions, see Mary Elizabeth Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 95–117. 39. Fannie Page Hume Braxton, Diary, July 30, 1862, Virginia Historic Society, Richmond. Braxton’s diary covers from April to September 1861. 40. Mary Eliza “Ida” Powell Dulany, In the Shadow of the Enemy: The Civil War Journal of Ida Powell Dulany, ed. Mary L. Mackall, Steven F. Meserve, and Anne Mackall Sasscer (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 69–70. Dulany’s diary covers from 1861 to 1865, with a gap between 1863 and 1864. 41. Margo Culley, “Women’s Vernacular Literature: Teaching the Mother Tongue,” in Women’s Personal Narratives: Essays in Criticism and Pedagogy, ed. Leonore Hoffmann and Margo Culley (New York: MLA, 1985), 219. 42. Morgan, Sarah Morgan, 117. 43. Williams, Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams, 4. 44. Morgan, Sarah Morgan, 161 45. Kate Stone, Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868, ed. John Q. Anderson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 169. Stone’s existing diary spans from 1861 to 1865, with sporadic entries in 1867–68. 46. Wight, Diary, April 25, 1863, May 29, 1863, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; Williams, Diary, 4, 13, 33, 116. Brown’s diary spans from January to September 1863. 47. LeConte, Diary, May 17, 1865.

Bibliography Alston, Trudy. Diary. Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Blair, William Alan. Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Bond, Priscilla. A Maryland Bride in the Deep South: The Civil War Diary of Priscilla Bond. Edited by Kimberly Harrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

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Braxton, Fannie Page Hume. Diary. Virginia Historical Society, Richmond. Buck, Lucy Rebecca. Shadows on My Heart: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Rebecca Buck of Virginia. Edited by Elizabeth R. Baer. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Bunkers, Suzanne L. “Diaries and Dysfunctional Families: The Case of Emily Hawley Gillespie and Sarah Gillespei Huftalen.” In Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, 220–35. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. ———. Introduction to The Diary of Caroline Seabury, 1854–1863. Edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Burge, Dolly Lunt. The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge, 1848–1879. Edited by Christine Jacobson Carter. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Bynum, Victoria. The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Campbell, Jacqueline Glass. When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Carney, Kate. Diary. Documenting the American South. University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Accessed September 12, 2002. https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/carney/carney.html. Cashin, Joan E. A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Censer, Jane Turner. Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865– 1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Culley, Margo. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women Writers from 1764 to the Present. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993. ———. “Women’s Vernacular Literature: Teaching the Mother Tongue.” In Women’s Personal Narratives: Essays in Criticism and Pedagogy, edited by Leonore Hoffmann and Margo Culley. New York: MLA, 1985. Davis, Gayle. “Women’s Frontier Diaries: Writing for Good Reason.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no. 1 (1987), 5–14. Dulany, Mary Eliza “Ida” Powell. In the Shadow of the Enemy: The Civil War Journal of Ida Powell Dulany. Edited by Mary L. Mackall, Steven F. Meserve, and Anne Mackall Sasscer. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Edmondston, Catherine Devereux. Journal of a Secesh Lady: The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, 1860–1866. Edited by Beth G. Crabtree and James Welch Patton. Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, Department of Cultural Resources, 1979. Edwards, Laura F. Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. ———. “‘Trying to Do a Man’s Business’: Gender, Violence, and Slave Management in Civil War Texas.” Gender and History 4, no. 2 (1992), 197–214. Reprinted in Drew Gilpin Faust, Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War, 174–92. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992.

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Faust, Drew Gilpin, Thavolia Glymph, and George C. Rable. “A Woman’s War: Southern Women in the Civil War.” In A Woman’s War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy, edited by Edward D. C. Campbell Jr. and Kym S. Rice, 1–27. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Foster, Kate. Diary. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University Libraries, Duke University, Durham, NC. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Gallagher, Gary. The Confederate War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Gardner, Sarah E. Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Green, Anna Maria. The Journal of a Milledgeville Girl, 1861–1867. Edited by James C. Bonner. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964. Gorham, Deborah. The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Harrison, Kimberly. The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. Heyward, Pauline DeCaradeuc. A Confederate Lady Comes of Age: The Journal of Pauline DeCaradeuc Heyward, 1863–1888. Edited by Mary D. Robertson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992. Holmes, Emma. The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 1861–1866. Edited by John F. Marszalek. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. House, Ellen Renshaw. A Very Violent Rebel: The Civil War Diary of Ellen Renshaw House. Edited by Daniel E. Sutherland. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. Jabour, Anya. Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Jimerson, Randall C. The Private Civil War: Popular Thought during the Sectional Conflict. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. LeConte, Emma. Diary. Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. LeGrande, Julia. The Journal of Julia LeGrand, New Orleans, 1862–1863. Edited by Kate Mason Rowland and Agnes E. Croxhall. Richmond: Everett Waddey, 1911. Massey, Mary Elizabeth. Refugee Life in the Confederacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. McPherson, James M. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Morgan, Aurora Margueritte. Diary. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge. Morgan, Sarah. Sarah Morgan: The Civil Diary of a Southern Woman. Edited by Charles East. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.

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Ott, Victoria E. Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age in the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Patrick, Mary S. Diary. Arkansas History Commission, Little Rock. Phipps, Sheila R. Genteel Rebel: The Life of Mary Greenhow Lee. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Rable, George C. Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Richardson, Sue. Diary. Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Roberts, Giselle. The Confederate Belle. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Rubin, Anne Sarah. A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Scott, Anne Firor. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Shewmake, Susan Cornwall. Diary. Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Stone, Kate. Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868. Edited by John Q. Anderson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. Thomas, Ella Gertrude Clanton. Diary. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham. Varon, Elizabeth R. We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Wadley, Sarah Lois. Diary. Southern Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth Century: Papers and Diaries. Edited by Anne Firor and William H. Chaft. Microfilm Edition. Series A, Reels 5 and 6. Lanham, MD: University Publications of America, 1991. Wight, Margaret Brown. Diary. Virginia Historical Society, Richmond. Williams, Nannie Haskins. The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863–1890. Edited by Minoa D. Uffelman, Ellen Kanervo, Phyllis Smith, and Eleanor Williams. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014. Wink, Amy L. She Left Nothing in Particular: The Autobiographical Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Diaries. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001.

K I M B E R LY H A R R I S ON is Professor of English and Director of Writing Programs at Florida International University. Her most recent book is The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion.

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18 The Archive as a Diary of Resistance Hendrik Witbooi, Nama Revolutionary, 1884–1905 Elizabeth R. Baer All I see in your peace is the extermination of all of us and our people. —Hendrik Witbooi, 1905

“As a capacious genre, which elaborates an open, improvised self, the diary has, over many centuries, been readily pulled into a variety of shapes to embrace new forms and widely various experiences of subjectivity. For the individual diarist, too, it lends itself to a multiplicity of functions, and makes room for diverse selves, taken up at various times and places, distinct yet mutually dependent.” This generous and flexible definition of a diary comprises the concluding paragraph of the section “Diaries and Journals: General Survey” in the Encyclopedia of Life Writing.1 It is invaluable for my purposes in this chapter, as I intend to argue that a particular archive, composed of letters and journal entries, is in fact a political diary that yields to astute readers a vivid sense of the author’s state of mind, his anxieties and decisions, his struggles with his oppressors, and his relationships with those he leads as well as his enemies. This political diary, written by a victim of a German genocide committed in Africa between 1904 and 1907, stands as witness to Germany’s abuse of imperial power and to the author’s articulate resistance to that abuse. Who is this author? His name will be unfamiliar to most readers: Hendrik Witbooi, a Nama revolutionary in southern Africa during the period of German colonization, which lasted from 1884 to 1915. The colonized country was called German Southwest Africa (hereafter, GSWA); today, this land is called Namibia. This chapter is largely devoted to reading excerpts of Witbooi’s diary and demonstrating the powerful way in which both the act of writing itself, while making significant political moves, and the record it produced, affirmed Witbooi’s humanity. I have  317

integrated background historical information on Witbooi and on German aggression in GSWA to contextualize the diary, and I use the terms archive and diary interchangeably. Hendrik Witbooi came of age against what George Steinmetz has called the “vast and repugnant repertoire of European, and particularly German, images” of the indigenous people in GSWA.2 The Germans denied the humanity and cultural identity of the Africans through a sordid ideology that imagined them as subhuman. German missionaries, from the 1840s onward, had referred to the Nama as “Hottentots” (a term now viewed as derogatory and inaccurate), and their reports back to Germany contained the entire panoply of racist stereotypes, resulting in a portrait of “abject and ignoble savagery.”3 These characterizations included “barbarian,” “wild and raw,” “laziness and filthiness,” and that “civilization seems to have no attraction at all for them.”4 One German Rhenish missionary opined, “The Hottentots . . . are nomads, but they are not even competent herdsmen .  .  . Their instability [Unbeständigkeit] . . . is due especially to the fact that the Namaquas don’t know how to make anything orderly out of their country.”5 The “failure” of the indigenous people to dig wells and build homes prompted harsh condemnation by the German military and ultimately served as a justification for genocide. These racist characterizations cast the Herero and Nama into the category of the expendable; their extermination was justified in the eyes of the imperialists, who believed they needed and deserved the land (lebensraum), which they would put to “good use” after it was cleansed of its original inhabitants. Witbooi maintained his diary for twenty years in the face of this racist ideology; subsequently “African voices [in GSWA] were forgotten and their witness statements actively erased.”6 It is crucial that these voices, these subjectivities, be restored, that we acknowledge the humanity and dignity of the Herero and Nama. Hendrik Witbooi is one such voice; he was a leader of the Nama people who fought and died in 1905 in the war with the Germans; he has been called a hero in a recent book on Namibian resistance.7 Some missionaries saw Witbooi as the “great exception” to the socalled Hottentot race’s shortcomings, while others deplored his “ever greater regression into Jewishness, superstition, delusion, fanaticism, and reverie.”8 The linkage here between indigenous people and Jews is telling in terms of what historians call “the continuity thesis”—that is, the linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and the Holocaust. In 1886, the Cape Colony Blue-Book on Native Affairs summed up the prevailing attitude toward Hendrik Witbooi as behaving “in a way which with any other human being but a Hottentot would be a manifestation of complete insanity.”9 The Germans acknowledged neither humanity nor 318 | The Diary

sovereignty on the part of Witbooi but rather depicted him as an inconvenient upstart deserving of elimination. Witbooi was a Nama chief born around 1830 into a long line of Nama chiefs and described as “one of the most powerful African leaders at the time when European imperialism began to carve Africa up into colonies.”10 Witbooi’s diary allows us to trace his fierce resistance to German hegemony. The initial goal of the Schutztruppe (i.e., the German military) and the settlers was to wrest the land from the Herero, the Nama, and other Southwest African peoples and to compel these people into forced labor or enslavement. Hendrik Witbooi came to be seen by the Germans as the most stubborn obstacle to their successful colonization of Southwest Africa and to their establishment of orderly control over the inhabitants and their land. Witbooi’s Nama name was !Nanseb Gâbemab; he was the third son of Moses and Lena Witbooi. Scholars have proposed various explanations for the designation of “Witbooi.” Most agree that the term derived from the white headscarf that the Witbooi (literally, “white boy”) troops fashioned on their hats, with a corner creating a peak that may have imitated the comb of a fighting cock.11 Witbooi was educated at missionary schools in Southwest Africa and South Africa. He married !Nanses (Katharina) and the couple had at least a dozen children over two decades, roughly from 1858 to 1879; some of Hendrik’s sons subsequently took up arms with him. Witbooi was baptized, with his wife, as a Lutheran in 1868 and remained devoted to his religious beliefs while, as we will see in his diary, using them adroitly to both chastise the Germans and explain his motivations. Witbooi’s early years were occasionally spent in intertribal warfare, primarily against the Herero with the object of the wars being to capture cattle rather than land. Cattle were the primary form of cash and were used as a source of food and drink, as well as to pay off traders for goods, including guns and ammunition.12 During this period, Witbooi’s following increased to the hundreds. But Witbooi had the foresight to see that such internal struggles among indigenous people distracted them from the larger struggle against encroaching German imperialism. Witbooi also had the foresight to create a diary, and so we have the enormous benefit of his perceptions about the German invaders. This diary is available to contemporary readers in an English-language version entitled The Hendrik Witbooi Papers, edited by Brigitte Lau. Using a large red leather notebook, Witbooi kept a voluminous archive of his correspondence with missionaries, other African leaders, and the Germans. Both the letters from these correspondents and Witbooi’s responses were included in the archive as well as his journal, minutes of meetings with German officials, and miscellaneous other documents. All told, the archive contains 197 entries, 9 of which can be termed “diary entries” in The Archive as a Diary of Resistance  |  319

the traditional Western sense, while the remaining are letters. Witbooi wrote in the colonial Cape Dutch language. There is some evidence that he had sustained a battle wound that resulted in the loss of his right thumb; this perhaps explains his frequent use of secretaries to maintain his archive.13 So valuable is this diary that UNESCO deemed it a Memory of the World object in 2005 and describes it thus: “Witbooi’s insights into the nature of colonialism, about the fundamental difference between conflict with African competitors and with European invaders, his attempts at formulating African legal concepts, and the visionary and poetic power of some of his texts are the qualities that set his letters apart and above the bulk of contemporary and earlier African texts of the same genre. The texts include probably the first written formulation of the concept of Pan-Africanism.”14 This red leather notebook was captured in April 1893 by German commissioner Curt von François during an unprovoked German raid on Witbooi’s encampment at Hoornkrans; von François carried the leather notebook to Germany, but it was subsequently returned to Namibia. Today, Witbooi’s personal writings are kept in the National Archives of Namibia in Windhoek. Two other journals belonging to Witbooi, kept between 1893 and 1903, were recently unearthed in a museum in Bremen, Germany.15 This extraordinary document, or collection of documents, provides the reader with a clear idea of Nama resistance. “The papers of Henrik Witbooi are the only archival documents to have been published that present an African perspective on the German colonial period.”16 The significance of this diary, both for the history it provides and its symbolic value, cannot be overestimated. The Africans under German rule had to unsettle or deny racial hierarchies. Witbooi achieved just such resistance by demonstrating skills Germans denied that Africans could have: by the very act of writing, which is an accomplishment of the educated; by speaking in terms of Christian religious beliefs when the Germans assigned Africans to barbarity; and by the act of creating a diary, which proved that Witbooi had and recognized a history, understood historical concepts, and valued the creation of records for future generations. The first item in the original red notebook—entitled “Diary entry” and dated June 18, 1884, the year the Germans began colonizing GSWA— opens, “Yesterday, 17 June, we spotted Herero in Oub. They were spies, and we chased them like game.”17 These two sentences are characteristic of much of the archive: through both letters and such diary entries, Witbooi maintained a running account of his political conflicts with both other indigenous people/groups and with the Germans. He was also given to poetic language. Here he used a simile; metaphors are also common in his prose, as are frequent references to scriptural verses, traditional Nama 320 | The Diary

stories, and lengthy quotations from the Bible. This first entry, which runs to five pages, recounted a series of skirmishes with the Herero from June 17 to 27, 1884. The pronouns are variously “we,” “he” (referring to Witbooi), and “I,” Witbooi’s first-person voice. This variation suggests his use of scribes, as mentioned. Witbooi also recounted very touchingly the wounding of one of his men, his death, and his funeral service. A lengthy recording of peace negotiations with the Herero comprises a significant portion of the entry. It concludes with a copy of a letter penned by Witbooi on June 27, 1884, addressed to Captain Maharero (Kamaharero, paramount chief of the Herero from the 1870s until his death in 1890). Witbooi prefaced the letter with the following explanation, demonstrating how much he valued words: “I have penned these few lines in order to let your honor have my full decision in writing, so that you shall understand my position, for I cannot be sure whether the interpreters have understood and interpreted everything properly.”18 He then set out his conditions for creating a lasting peace between the Nama, who were Witbooi followers, and the Herero. Subsequent early entries include correspondence between Witbooi and Heinrich Göring, the father of the Nazi henchman, Hermann Göring. Göring’s letters are condescending and reveal his adherence to racial hierarchies; in an effort to get Witbooi to capitulate to a so-called German protection treaty, Göring denigrated Witbooi, telling him in a letter dated November 21, 1885, “In civilized countries you would be regarded as a rebel and dealt with accordingly.”19 Witbooi and his followers, called a “Namaland Commando Group” by Lau, were feared by the Germans who realized “that no colonization of the country could be effected unless Witbooi was conquered.”20 In turn, Witbooi “clearly perceived from the outset [that] the treaties were aimed at creating dependency and subordination to the German empire of independent rulers.”21 In letters during 1888–89, Witbooi appealed in an increasingly desperate manner to several individuals for ammunition and guns. In a March 1889 letter to Jan Jonker Afrikaner, the chief of another branch of Nama, Witbooi revealed his keen reliance on the written word: You ask me why I have sent you copies of my own and your letters. I will tell Your Honor why I did this. I did it to let you judge for yourself how I dealt with Paul [Visser] concerning the [breaking of the] peace. And I sent you your letter so that you may realise that the uprising of the other nations was brought about by you. Because you invited them to crush me. You sowed this seed in their hearts, the fruit of which is that they have risen against me. You touched the spring of the Lord’s decree that all men should rise against me.22

He used his carefully kept archive to defend himself and, adopting biblical references and metaphors again, to accuse and persuade others. Jan The Archive as a Diary of Resistance  |  321

Jonker Afrikaner replied, stating that Witbooi had made false accusations and offering to serve as mediator. Witbooi’s reply of March 22, 1889, again revealed his reliance on, and trust of, the written word: “Of all the accusations against me you simply state that ‘people say.’ You cannot bring written proof.”23 Afrikaner was rebuffed. At this time, Witbooi resumed his correspondence with Göring, boasting of his recent exploits and taunting Göring by writing, “I must inform you that at Achenib I captured the [German] flag that you had presented to Manasse [another Nama chief]. It is now in my keeping . . . I should like to know what to do with this flag; I ask because it is an alien thing to me.”24 Witbooi’s resistance could be cast in sarcasm as well as terms of Christianity. Continuing to worry about the hostilities between the Herero and Nama, Witbooi dispatched a long epistle to Kamaherero in May 1890, chastising him for renewing his protection treaty with the Germans: “You will eternally regret that you have given your land and your right to rule into the hands of White men.”25 Using a Nama folk tale, Witbooi predicted that surrendering to government by another “will become to you like carrying the sun on your back.”26 Lau’s footnote explains, “In the Nama cautionary tale, the jackal accepts the sun as a rider and barely survives with a permanently scorched back.”27 Witbooi continued chastising, appropriating a biblical example: “You are already completely in his [Göring’s] power. I am aware that you and Dr. Göring are of different nationalities, and that you have never been good friends, and that you formed this friendship solely in order to crush me. So did Herod and Pilate, in order to get rid of the Lord Jesus, suspend and postpone their hostility and their true interests.”28 In 1890, Kamaherero died and Samuel Maherero, his son, assumed the role of chief. This occasioned an exchange of several long and thoughtful letters between Maharero and Witbooi. They warily tested each other in regard to the possibility of pursuing peace. In this sequence appears the second “Diary entry” (entry no. 35). Witbooi mused here, recounting recent fighting with the Herero and efforts at peace negotiations. He seemed to be making notes for himself, toting up insults and injuries, reminding himself of the key conditions he would demand in future negotiations. It is an entry that sets down history and complains of the lack of ammunition to settle the disputes once and for all. Witbooi also often referenced water; fighting in the desert conditions of GSWA was often sparked by the need for water sources. Entry no. 61, the third diary entry, with the heading “Explanatory note to accompany the copy of the letter below,”29 is a kind of preface written by Witbooi to a letter he included just below these introductory remarks: “This is the letter. One of my men riding on his way came upon the letter in the most remarkable way. It is a letter written by my enemy 322 | The Diary

[Daniel Dausab] to my friend. . . . Since I felt that this letter by my enemy had fallen into my hands in a providential manner, I read the first few lines. Then I decided to steal the letter, read it through and keep it. In this way it came to be written into my big book. The letter was already open, that is why I decided to read it.”30 Here, Witbooi seems to be addressing a future audience for his diary rather than himself, as was the case for entry no. 35. He believed that the presence of the letter in the archive required explanation and justification. The letter itself told of recent Witbooi exploits against the Herero and contained a plea to the recipient to come armed to the next fight against the Nama. In June 1892, Witbooi took up his red notebook to write minutes of an important meeting he had with Curt von François, who had replaced Göring as the imperial German commissioner in the country (no. 68 comprises the fourth diary entry). Von François urged Witbooi once again to “yield to German Protection,”31 to which the ever alert Witbooi philosophically replied, “What is ‘protection’? What are we being protected against? From what danger, or difficulty, or suffering can one chief be protected by another?”32 After a hypocritical response from von François to the effect that Witbooi’s rights would not be abrogated, Witbooi replied that it made no sense to him that a chief who surrendered to the Germans would keep his autonomy. He further asserted his hegemony and his PanAfrican sensibility: “This part of Africa is the realm of us Red chiefs. If danger threatens one of us which he feels he cannot meet on his own, then he can call on a brother or brothers among the Red chiefs, saying, ‘Come, brothers, let us together oppose this danger which threatens to invade our Africa, for we are one in colour and custom, and this Africa is ours.’ For the fact that we various Red chiefs occupy our various realms and home grounds is but a lesser division of the one Africa.”33 Such a union of the various ethnic groups in GSWA against the Germans was exactly what the imperialists feared. In this one passage, Witbooi simultaneously issued a threat and signaled his resistance to the Germans. A few weeks later, Witbooi corresponded with a Nama chief who had already signed a protection treaty with the Germans. Witbooi scolded him, declaring, “I see the Germans quite differently. They claim that they want to protect you against other mighty nations, but it seems to me that they themselves are the mighty nation seeking to occupy our country by force. . . . I see nothing good in the coming of the Germans: they boast of their power and they use it.”34 Here, Witbooi characterized the Germans’ hypocrisy, and his own astute perception and defiance, differentiating himself from some of his countrymen who appeared to have deferred to the German vision of the indigenous people. In this sequence appears the fifth diary entry (no. 82) in which Witbooi recorded his discussions with a member of the Baster ethnic group The Archive as a Diary of Resistance  |  323

about the conditions Witbooi would demand in peace negotiations; his earlier entry (no. 35) clearly had prepared him for this conversation. The sixth diary entry follows closely behind, written most likely in October 1892 (no. 94). Simply entitled “Statement,” it begins, “I, the undersigned Hendrik Witbooi, Supreme chief of the Great Namaqualand, herewith declare that I have seized eight rifles.”35 Once again, Witbooi took up his pen to address a future reader and to take the blame for a theft of weapons, thus saving another man from an unfair accusation. “Formula Lease Contract” is the heading for the seventh diary entry (no. 107), which is a transcription of an agreement Witbooi reached with a man to whom he was leasing property. The lease is dated January 9, 1893, and contains four clauses that set out Witbooi’s understanding of rent, expected behavior of the renter, and the warning that, if misbehavior is witnessed, the renter would “be turned off [his] land.” “For,” Witbooi continued, “I cannot abide two dogs who will not drink from the same bowl. That I cannot.”36 Here again, Witbooi deployed vivid poetic language to make clear his meaning. By 1893, the Germans were beginning to lose patience with the slow progress against the Herero and Nama, who together had reached a peace agreement in November 1892, furthering German frustration.37 Chancellor Count Leo von Caprivi, in Berlin, declared, “South West Africa is ours . . . and it must remain so.” To ensure that that happened, he sent 214 soldiers and 2 officers to GSWA as reinforcements.38 Witbooi, by this point, was increasingly convinced of the true aim of German imperialism— destruction of the indigenous people—despite the hypocritical appeals made to him by a series of German leaders. His intuition was confirmed when, on April 12, 1893, he and his community, lodged at his Hoornkrans stronghold, suffered a surprise nighttime attack by von François and 200 German troops. The attack was completely unprovoked. “Von François’s new orders were to ‘destroy the tribe’. . . . The ferocity of the attack is suggested by the fact that the German troops, armed with two hundred rifles, used sixteen thousand rounds of ammunition in thirty minutes.”39 According to Witbooi, 10 men and 75 women and children were killed; Witbooi escaped.40 The Germans proceeded to loot the camp; it was in this attack that the red notebook archive was taken by the soldiers. But Witbooi’s next entry in his archive came just six days later, on April 18, 1893. He had somehow availed himself of more paper and pen and wrote to his peer Hermanus van Wyck to urge him to join Witbooi in taking up arms against the Germans. His letter is galvanizing: “The Germans have set fire to this whole country to crush all of Namaqualand and Hereroland, in order to possess themselves of our land, and to subject and enslave us.”41

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In September 1893, five months after the Hoornkrans raid, Witbooi made the eighth diary entry, which, according to Lau, is a “combination of what appears to be a draft and a letter.”42 In this entry (no. 124), Witbooi confided his bafflement at van Wyck’s continued recalcitrance to join forces. Witbooi knew that fifty of van Wyck’s men were actually fighting with the Germans at the attack on Hoornkrans. Why wouldn’t van Wyck join him then in the war against the Germans? he wondered. “Are you truly committed in your heart to killing me?” he entreated van Wyck.43 By 1894, German presence had increased in GSWA from the initial three officials a decade earlier to hundreds of military troops. Witbooi clearly grasped the threat that such a military buildup represented to indigenous people. The final diary entry (no. 129) was not dated but most likely was made in March 1894. Witbooi entered a copy of the draft conditions presented to him by Curt von François as the basis for achieving peace: in reality, these were conditions for Witbooi’s surrender. They were brief but onerous: subject himself and his people to the German emperor, surrender all rifles, cede much of his land, and live in a kind of reservation. Witbooi, by this time sixty-four years old, was not ready to give up the fight against imperialism. Two months later, in May 1894, he revealed his powerful ability to use language against the Germans as effectively as they have deployed it against him. In a letter to the recently appointed German commissioner, Theodor Leutwein, he blamed the previous German leader, von François, for his unreasonable behavior: “Von François demanded from me what is mine, and I refused: for I alone have the right to dispose of what is mine. Such conduct by von François I never expected, because you White people are the most educated and civilized, and you teach us truth and justice.”44 Here Witbooi turned the German imperial gaze back on itself, using it as an accusation thrust in Leutwein’s face. The attack at Hoornkrans was properly understood by Witbooi as an act of war, and he moved into action, demonstrating his skills as a guerrilla fighter as well as a writer. Having lost their Hoornkrans stronghold, the Witbooi troops entrenched themselves in the Naukluft Mountains. Correspondence back and forth between Leutwein and Witbooi continued with increasing threats from Leutwein, who was still insisting on a protection treaty. On August 21, 1894, Leutwein dropped all pretense and starkly made his final demand: “You must subject yourself, or I must fight you until you do.”45 The Germans attacked. Witbooi, outgunned, conducted a guerrilla war; eventually, with enormous regret, he agreed to a ceasefire. He addressed Leutwein plaintively: “Now I ask: If I do according to your wish and word, shall my life, my land and all my possessions remain

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safely mine: and will my chieftaincy be safe?”46 He succumbed to the socalled protection treaty; the prose in his subsequent letters is poignant and dignified. The terms of a subsequent 1895 amendment to the treaty required that Witbooi troops fight with the Germans against other indigenous groups, and Witbooi, in his upright manner, abiding by the rules of war as he saw them, complied with this requirement. Leutwein described him in a report to Berlin as “the kind of man who . . . has a certain pride in keeping his word.”47 The Witbooi troops served as trail guides and sharpshooters for the German military; Hendrik Witbooi recognized that he no longer had the power or weaponry to remain independent. For the next decade, from 1894 to 1904, Witbooi and his troops were accorded special privileges in return for his agreement to the “protection” of the Germans; Leutwein created a reservation for the Witbooi people in 1898, allowed them to keep their weapons, and began to view them as “noble savages” rather than “barbaric” ones. But by the early twentieth century Berlin was again impatient with its leadership in GSWA. Rather than regulating the Herero, the Schutztruppe engaged in a war with them, beginning on January 11, 1904. The war dragged on without any significant German successes in the field; the Herero valiantly conducted a guerrilla war against the Germans, who had superior weaponry but were less familiar with the geography and climate and had inefficient ox wagons delivering supplies. After five discouraging months, Emperor Wilhelm II appointed Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha as supreme commander of the military forces in GSWA. Von Trotha was an experienced leader of colonial wars, having ruthlessly suppressed rebellions in German East Africa and China prior to his deployment to Southwest Africa. He had a reputation as a brutal and racist soldier. Arriving in GSWA in June 1904, von Trotha had no patience for diplomacy and treaties. He was determined, from the outset, to exterminate the indigenous people in the service of making GSWA a permanent space for German settlement. “I know enough tribes in Africa. They all have the same mentality insofar as they yield only to force. It was and remains my policy to apply this force by unmitigated terrorism and even cruelty. I shall destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood and money. Only thus will it be possible to sow the seeds of something new that will endure,” declared von Trotha.48 Because of his treaty with the Germans, Witbooi sent his own men into battle as allies of the Germans in the early days of the 1904 war with the Herero. The decisive Battle of Waterberg took place on August 11, 1904, in which the Germans, under the leadership of von Trotha, soundly defeated the Herero, killing many and driving the remaining men, women, and children into the Omaheke Desert to die of thirst or starvation. “The decision . . . to continue pushing [the Herero] further 326 | The Diary

into the Omaheke marked a shift toward an explicitly genocidal strategy, since ‘death from thirst did not distinguish between men, women and children.’”49 Not satisfied with this “victory,” as some heroic Herero managed to survive in the implacable desert and some even began to trickle back to their homelands, von Trotha issued his infamous order of annihilation—Vernichtungsbefehl—on October 2, 1904, making it absolutely clear that the Herero were targeted for extinction. Though von Trotha was forced by the Berlin government to withdraw this order in December 1904, by then it was too late. Thousands of survivors had been imprisoned in camps where the death tolls from starvation, forced labor, disease, sexual abuse, and murder were enormous. Hendrik Witbooi, just the day before the order of annihilation, wrote wrenching letters to Hermanus van Wyk and other Nama chiefs, informing them of his intent to wage war against the Germans. Here is the full text, dated October 1, 1904: I send this letter to inform you of the following. As you are aware I have for a long time now been abiding under the law and in the law, following it, as have we all, in obedience—but also in the hope and in the faith that God our Father would in the fullness of time deliver us from the wretchedness of this world. So far I have borne the burden peacefully and meekly; whatever wrenched my heart, I have let pass, trusting in the Lord. I shall not write at length—merely this. My arms and shoulders have grown weary, and I perceive and believe that the time is now at hand when God the Father shall deliver the world by His grace. When you read this letter, know that you shall appear as you must appear. I trust you understand this message well. I tell you that I have given up my position. That is the main point: I have come to the end. I shall also write to the Major [Leutwein], to tell him what I have done: I have also written to all the other chiefs that the time has come.50

Though his language here was somewhat coded, Witbooi made it clear that he had chafed under German domination, that he had relied on his religion as a source of comfort, but that his patience had come to an end. He will no longer abide German law but will follow the Herero in rebelling. With the Herero defeated, as he had predicted a decade earlier, Witbooi broke his treaty with the Germans and initiated a guerrilla war against them that lasted until 1907. The final letter we have from Witbooi was penned in July 1905, in response to one from a German customs officer well known to him, urging Witbooi to make peace for the sake of his people and warning Witbooi that “you simply cannot prevail against the German nation.”51 Ever the shrewd and honorable man, Witbooi responded, “To your remarks on peace I reply, don’t lecture me like a schoolchild on your peace. You know The Archive as a Diary of Resistance  |  327

very well that I was right there with you many times during your peace, and have come to see in it nothing but the destruction of all our people. For you have got to know me, and I have got to know you, through the hard experiences of my life. Here I conclude.”52 In this final salvo, Witbooi recognized and refused the racist trope of infantalization. With bravado, he declared his intent to fight on, recognizing that the Germans never meant “peace” in the way he, and the world, understood it. In the end, Witbooi was true to himself and the prerogatives of the Nama people. On October 29, 1905, at the age of seventy-five, he died on the battlefield from a German bullet to his thigh. “Because I did not create men, nor did you, but God alone. Thus I now sit in your hand, and peace will be at one and the same time my death and the death of my nation. For I know there is no refuge in you” he had written in that final letter. And his predictions, again, were realized: the Germans subjugated the Nama people; those they did not kill in battle were sent to labor camps and Shark Island, a prototype of the death camp. The figure often supplied for the number of Nama who perished at the hands of the Germans is 50 percent of the original twenty thousand; 80 percent of the eighty thousand Herero perished in the genocide. Hendrik Witbooi’s archive is certainly a Memory of the World object, as UNESCO has deemed it. Witbooi’s collection of documents is a hybrid form that may not always conform to Western definitions of diary. Yet his very first entry was comprised of an account of travel, of matters of conscience, of personal memoranda, and of a public statement in the form of a letter penned to his enemy. As such, Witbooi’s diary can be said to encompass all four categories of diaries that Robert Fothergill, in his groundbreaking book Private Chronicles, defined.53 Also in this initial entry, as described earlier, Witbooi provided the recipient of the letter with his motive for writing. In this manner, each of the nine diary entries I have examined serve a metafunction, alerting the reader to both Witbooi’s consciousness and his consciousness about writing. Fothergill was the first scholar to liberate diaries from the requirement that they be spontaneous: “Most theoretical considerations of diary-writing proceed deductively from the assumption that its defining characteristic is an unpremeditated sincerity. . . . But when this quality is made out to be the essential attribute of the species, so that to swerve from it is to appear somewhat disreputable, an ethical standard is coming into conflict with literary considerations and asserting a rigid and unrealistic scale of merit.”54 Witbooi’s diary is studied, chronological, and inflected with Western ideas as a result of his missionary education. He understood the mortal and moral stakes of such diary keeping: through his archive, he claimed his literacy and humanity, he deployed Christianity against his enemies, he refused to be deferential, and he declared his resistance 328 | The Diary

against German imperialism. We are indeed fortunate, in the twentyfirst century, to have this diary and to benefit from its anticolonial discourse. Notes 1. Margaretta Jolly, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001), 1:269. 2. George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 75. 3. Ibid., 114. 4. See ibid., 114–15, for a thorough analysis of precolonial German conceptions of the indigenous groups of Southwest Africa, with a focus on the Nama, the Herero, and the Rehoboth Basters. Steinmetz has meticulously combed precolonial travel narratives, early anthropology studies, missionary reports, and other primary documents to create these portraits. 5. Ibid., 116. 6. Jeremy Silvester and Jan-Bart Gewald, eds., Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2003), xiv. 7. Werner Hillebrecht, “Henrik Witbooi and Samuel Maharero: The Ambiguity of Heroes,” in Jeremy Silvester, Re-viewing Resistance in Namibian History (Windhoek: UNAM Press, 2015), 39. 8. Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 120. 9. Ibid., 121. 10. Brigitte Lau, ed., The Hendrik Witbooi Papers, trans. Annemarie Heywood and Eben Maasdorp, 2nd ed. (Windhoek: National Archives of Namibia, 1996), i. Biographical information in this section is taken largely from Lau and Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting. 11. Lau, Hendrik Witbooi Papers, viiin22. 12. Hillebrecht noted that the extent of “continuous tribal wars between mutually hostile ethnic groups” has been exaggerated by German historians; the reality, he continues “is much more complex, as it must be realized that ‘pre-colonial’ Namibia was already a colonial frontier zone” due to the impact of indigenous peoples from South Africa relocating in Namibia”; see “Hendrik Witbooi and Samuel Maharero,” 41. 13. Lau, Hendrik Witbooi Papers, vi; Hillebrecht, “Henrik Witbooi and Samuel Maharero,” 39. 14. “Letter Journals of Hendrik Witbooi,” UNESCO, Memory of the World, accessed October 20, 2014, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication -and-information/flagship-project-activities/memory-of-the-world/register/full -list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-5/letter-journals-of-hendrik -witbooi. 15. Contents of all three journals, plus invaluable appendices, were published in an English edition, edited by Lau in 1989 in Windhoek. Hillebrecht gave an ample account of the various segments of the Witbooi archive, which ones have been lost and recovered and where they are now housed. 16. Silvester and Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found, xiv. The Archive as a Diary of Resistance  |  329

17. Lau, Hendrik Witbooi Papers, 1. 18. Ibid., 5. 19. Ibid, 11, emphasis mine. 20. Ibid., xix. 21. Ibid., xviii. 22. Ibid., 28. 23. Ibid., 30. Another instance of Witbooi’s use of his archive by forwarding a letter as proof of his claim can be found in letter 28, dated January 3, 1890, and addressed to the Reverend Johannes Olpp, a mentor of Witbooi’s who remains loyal to him until the end. 24. Ibid., 33. 25. Ibid., 51. 26. Ibid., 52. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Lau, the editor of the archive, did not clarify in her “On This Edition” notes (xxviii–xxix) who wrote the headings to each entry, but I assume it was her rather than Witbooi himself. 30. Ibid., 78–79, emphasis mine. 31. Ibid., 84. 32. Ibid., 85. 33. Ibid., 86. 34. Ibid., 90. 35. Ibid., 113. 36. Ibid., 124. 37. See the exchange of correspondence between Samuel Maherero and Hendrik Witbooi as they negotiate this peace in Lau, Hendrik Witbooi Papers, 115–18. 38. Horst Drechsler, “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (1884–1915), trans. Bernd Zöllner (London: Zed Press, 1980), 69. First published in German in 1966. 39. Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 151, emphasis mine. 40. Lau, Hendrik Witbooi Papers, 129. 41. Ibid., 127. 42. Ibid., 138n165. 43. Ibid., 139. 44. Ibid., 151, emphasis mine. 45. Ibid., 177, emphasis in the original. 46. Ibid., 180. 47. Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 159. 48. Drechsler, “Let Us Die Fighting,” 154, emphasis mine. 49. Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 193. 50. Lau, Hendrik Witbooi Papers, 189–90. 51. Ibid., 194. 52. Ibid., 195, emphasis mine. 53. Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 14. 54. For an analysis of Fothergill’s dismissal of spontaneity as a requirement for diaries, see Steven Rendall’s review of Private Chronicles in an article entitled “On Diaries” in Diacritics 16, no. 3 (1986): 56–65.

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Bibliography Baer, Elizabeth R. The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. Berman, Nina, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang, eds. German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Bley, Helmut. South-West Africa under German Rule, 1894–1914. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971. Conrad, Sebastian. German Colonialism: A Short History. Translated by Sorcha O’Hagan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Drechsler, Horst. “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (1884–1915). Translated by Bernd Zöllner. London: Zed Press, 1980. First published in German in 1966. Erichsen, Casper W. “The Angel of Death Has Descended Violently among Them”: Concentration Camps and Prisoners of War in Namibia, 1904– 1908. Leiden, Netherlands: African Studies Centre, 2005. Fothergill, Robert. Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Frenssen, Gustav. Peter Moor’s Journey to Southwest Africa. Translated by Margaret May Ward. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908. Gugelberger, Georg M., ed. Nama/Namibia: Diary and Letters of Nama Chief Henrik Witbooi, 1884–1894. Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University, 1984. Hartmann, Wolfram, ed. Hues between Black and White: Historical Photography from Colonial Namibia, 1862 to 1915. Windhoek: Out of Africa Publishers, 2004. Hillebrecht, Werner. “Henrik Witbooi and Samuel Maharero: The Ambiguity of Heroes.” In Re-viewing Resistance in Namibian History, edited by Jeremy Silvester, 38–54. Windhoek: University of Namibia Press, 2015. Jolly, Margareta, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing. 2 vols. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. Katjavivi, Peter. A History of Resistance in Namibia. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990. Lau, Brigitte, ed. The Hendrik Witbooi Papers. Translated by Annemarie Heywood and Eben Maasdorp. 2nd rev. ed. Windhoek: National Archives of Namibia, 1995. Moses, A. Dirk, and Dan Stone, eds. Colonialism and Genocide. New York: Routledge, 2007. Rendell, Steven. “On Diaries.” Diacritics 16, no. 3 (1986): 56–65. Schaller, Dominik. “‘Every Herero Will Be Shot’: Genocide, Concentration Camps, and Slave Labor in German South-West Africa.” In Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory, edited by Rene Lemarchand, 51–70. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Silvester, Jeremy, and Jan-Bart Gewald. Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Steinmetz, George. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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Timm, Uwe. Morenga. Translated by Breon Mitchell. New York: New Directions Press, 2003. UNESCO. “Letter Journals of Hendrik Witbooi.” Memory of the World. Accessed October 20, 2014. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication -and-information/flagship-project-activities/memory-of-the-world/register /full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-5/letter-journals -of-hendrik-witbooi.

E L I Z A B E T H R . BA E R is Research Professor of English and African Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. She is editor (with Hester Baer) of Shadows on My Heart and (with Myrna Goldenberg) of Experience and Expression and author of The Golem Redux and The Genocidal Gaze.

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19 Diary and Narrative French Soldiers and World War I Leonard V. Smith

We will never know ex actly how many French soldiers wrote diaries of their experiences in the trenches of World War I or exactly what these diaries comprised. Certainly, soldiers felt an inexhaustible need to express themselves through the written word, from the first days of the war to the last and long thereafter. But diaries meant very different things to different people. Some wrote private thoughts only for themselves. Others jotted down seemingly insignificant details almost obsessively, as if to mark the passing of time as an end in itself. Still others wrote of impressions, feelings, and events that would emerge some time later in a variety of genres. Some authors would publish their diaries years later, presumably heavily redacted or rewritten into some form of memoir. Still others plainly used diaries much more indirectly, as the foundation of another form of war writing altogether. Whatever the forms through which they eventually entered the public sphere, and even if they did not, diaries sought to record experience in time. This chapter explores the fundamental tension between the immediacy intrinsic to keeping a diary and the requirements of narrative. It further contends that writing “experience” as something comprehensible depends on the conventions of narrative and emplotment, or assembling events into a plotted narrative structure. The task of the war writer depended on finding a means of combining the immediacy of the diary with those conventions. The task of the historian, in this chapter, revolves around finding the traces of the war diary in other forms of war writing.

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Disentangling diary and narrative can prove a challenging enterprise. Roland Dorgelès (1885–1973) wrote what to this day stands as the secondbest-selling French novel of World War I, Les croix de bois (Wooden crosses). In 1929, ten years after the publication of his 1919 novel, he published a series of reflections on how he had written the book. Dorgelès expressed a general contempt for efforts to emplot experience as it was happening. He disdained keeping daily diaries and claimed he consigned to a fire all the notes he had taken himself, “so as not to lie.”1 Yet in this subsequent account, he recalled his own baptism of fire in 1915, near Neuville-Saint-Vaast in the Artois. Dorgelès was lying in a first-line trench under a horrible bombardment. To overcome his fear, he forced himself first to read one of the books in his haversack and then to take out pencil and paper and begin to write about what was happening to him. As he explained, “The soldier was perhaps going to die, the man feel himself become a coward. But something still resisted: the writer, this maniac of a writer whose curiosity did not leave him and which in fact even separated itself from him, to see him tremble in his skin.”2 His time of direct encounter with mutilation and death had to be recorded immediately, in “real time.” He claimed to have “reproduced” the 1915 version in the 1929 reflections, though it is hard to understand just how he could have done so, given his claim to have destroyed the earlier version. Indeed, he considered this transcription of the liminal experience so authentic that it could enter the public domain directly, from the consciousness of the narrator to the printed page. The text could speak for itself: “I had only to recopy what I had written, without subtracting a word, without adding a comma. When today you pick up Les croix de bois, in the chapter entitled ‘Victory,’ you will find these notes, hardly changed at all.”3 Dorgelès’s claim is all the more extraordinary for being demonstrably untrue. The “transcription” of his notes in the 1929 reflections and the relevant passage in the novel are certainly similar but differ in significant ways. The version in the novel concentrated on an array of bodily reactions to the bombardment—such as a tightened facial expression, a head that felt at once empty and heavy, a curiously regular heartbeat. After summing up this variety of somewhat contradictory physiological responses, Dorgelès mused, “Is all this fear?”4 The 1915/1929 version is actually more than twice the length of the version in the novel and ended with an answer rather than a question. The shells landed closer and closer and gave his head additional weight on his neck. “A sort of dazed resignation overcomes you,” he concluded in the later version.5 Why would Dorgelès claim that the version in the 1919 novel and the 1915 “notes” published for the first time in 1929 are almost exactly the same thing? At stake, I would argue, is not insincerity but rather a specific 334 | The Diary

authorial position produced by putting experience into writing. Dorgelès overtly subjugated the emplotment of the story to its moral and to the universal truth that his narrative sought to illustrate. As he wrote in 1929, his goal had been “not to recount my war, but the war.”6 Here, the truth in question involved the liminal experience of first combat: “My soul, my thoughts, my flesh,” he wrote, “were completely full of the war. All I had to do was draw it out.”7 The diarist turned himself into an author. The author represented himself simply as the scribe of experience rather than its creator and arbiter. By his own authority, if the words revealed the same inner truth, the texts were the same. It is not my purpose here to denigrate fictional testimony, or in some way to proclaim it less “valid” or “authentic” than nonfictional testimony. Yet clearly, a tension existed between recounting the immediacy of the experience as expressed in a diary and structuring that experience into some kind of coherent narrative. How then to evaluate this tension historically and the historical documents steeped in it?

Experience, Time, and Narrative At a theoretical level, the question of experience has been a fraught one in scholarly circles for some time. Long gone are the days when “experience” was simply “what happened” to people and explained by them in stories either accepted or rejected according to objective standards of truth or falsehood. Particularly at the hands of post–World War II French intellectuals, as Martin Jay put it, “‘l’expérience vécu’ [lived experience] was stigmatized as an ideologically suspect, discursively constructed, and woefully outmoded concept.”8 In her now classic investigation of the question, Joan Scott concluded, “It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience.”9 Perhaps the most heated disputes have revolved around whether or not “experience” has any independent standing apart from the identity it creates. Jay himself has waxed artistic on the matter, turning to song as a metaphor in a survey of debates about experience that focused on why such debates have been so deeply felt.10 Dominick LaCapra observed an “experiential turn” in historical writing and became interested in connecting theories of experience to psychoanalysis and particularly to trauma.11 Yet these inquiries have paid more attention to the epistemological status of experience than the means through which it came to be construed as such. I have argued that in a sense, all war writing is of a piece, whether it is daily diaries; redacted reflections set down days, months, or years after the fact; or even novels.12 All war writing testifies to something. The task for historians lies in discerning what that something is. Most commonly, the historical value of a given testimony lies beyond empirically demonstrable reality, as was assuredly the case for Dorgelès. In all war writing, Diary and Narrative: French Soldiers and World War I  |  335

the author claims to present in one way or another the authentic voice of experience. To represent experience is to represent a coherent identity that has had that experience. The text thus simultaneously emplots the identity of the witness and the experience of that witness. Experience makes sense through narrative, through the emplotment of events in time. Following Martin Heidegger on this point, Paul Ricoeur argued against what he called “the crude conception of time imagined as a succession of instants succeeding one another in an abstract line oriented in a single direction.”13 Of course, it is precisely this conception of time that animates the writing of a diary. But such a conception of time does not help it make sense. Rather, to Ricoeur, time as experienced by everyday people exists as complex structures understood through language. Language structures narrative, which in turn structures time. Time and narrative are thus inseparable. To Ricoeur, narrative figures as prominently as it does in literature and in history because time itself exists as a lived human experience largely through narrative.14 Narrative requires a structure commonly referred to as the plot, which situates events as they unfold. The challenge of narrative, then, lies in situating the events of experience in a way that brings them under a structure of time, with a distinct relationship to past, present, and future. The diary might seem a transparent representation of “crude time,” in the sense of a succession of “nows” structured by the calendar or even the clock. But this chronological structuring of time swiftly proved an inadequate means through which to represent the experience of the war of the trenches. The most “accurate” rendering of experience is not necessarily the most meaningful. What could a soldier such as Dorgelès, by his own account keeping a diary under heavy bombardment and in all but paralyzing fear of mutilation and death, expect to put in writing? Writing requires reflection that seems at best problematic in such a situation. Indeed, there is no story to tell until the experience of his initiation to combat is “over.” By definition, only an author who survived could declare in writing that his initiation to combat was complete. Immediacy and narrative seem structurally at odds with each other. The remainder of this chapter explores two radical resolutions of this tension.

Henri Barbusse and Marc Bloch French soldiers Henri Barbusse and Marc Bloch left both diaries and narrative accounts. At first, comparing them might seem an odd choice. Barbusse was the most famous left-wing writer of his day. He became a committed Communist after 1920 and remained so until his death in 1935. He is best known as the author of Le feu (Under fire, 1916), to this day the best-selling French novel of the Great War. Marc Bloch achieved 336 | The Diary

renown in two capacities, as one of the great medieval historians of the twentieth century, and as a resistance hero in World War II who was tortured and killed by the Gestapo in 1944. The fragmentary yet fascinating diaries of Barbusse and Bloch would likely never have been published had their authors not achieved considerable stature for other reasons. Yet the existence of two peculiar yet invaluable sets of documents offers historians an exceptional opportunity to see how the most literal and immediate rendering of personal experience becomes narrative. Through considering the representation of time first in the diary and then in the published versions, we can understand how narration evolved differently from similar origins. Barbusse left two versions of a diary, both published well after his death. The first covered a five-and-a-half-month period (August 1, 1914, to January 15, 1915) in only nine printed pages. The diary follows in its entirety from the mobilization to Barbusse’s departure for the front lines. 1 August 1914.—Drum Aumont. Mobilization 4h1/2 2 August.—Return to Paris. Recruitment. Engagement. 14 August.—First voyage to Melun. 19 August.—Second voyage to Melun. Thursday, 10 September.—5 o’clock, convocation for Albi. I leave at 9 o’clock. Saturday, 12 September.—Arrival at Albi. 10 October.—Hélyonne [his wife] in Albi. Home of Juéry. Monday, 21 December.—Departure from Albi with the 231st –5h. 3/4 in the evening15

Barbusse represented his experience simply by noting time and place, sometimes indicating day and time, sometimes simply date. Even his profound transition from civilian to soldier is marked by single words, mobilization, recruitment, and engagement. Why might Barbusse, already an established writer by August 1914, tell the story of his war in such a manner, even to himself? Certainly, he was not uninterested in the details of daily life or in the broader issues of the war. His letters to his wife recounted his time in Albi, compared his 1914 encounter with military life with his life as a conscript twenty years previously, and testified to his conviction that Germany would seek peace before its destruction by the Entente.16 Like a medieval annalist, Barbusse recounted his war in a way that appeared haphazard, inconsistent, and, above all, elliptical.17 Yet if medieval annals rested on the ultimate narrative conclusion of the Second Coming, which would transform time itself, so too did Barbusse’s diary rest on a transformative event—his arrival at the front. Before then, he could demarcate his experience simply by measured time and geographical location. His arrival at the front recalibrated his personal time and required a different genre of narration. Diary and Narrative: French Soldiers and World War I  |  337

Marc Bloch kept a diary from the first to the last days of the Great War.18 His diary began in a regular notebook rather than a personal calendar, in which he transcribed the dates in his own hand. At the beginning, Bloch’s diary provided more detail than that of Barbusse, though nothing seemed to combine that detail into an actual narrative. With equal emphasis and nonexplanation, Bloch noted data as diverse as the assassination of Jean Jaurès (August 1), the contents of his pockets (August 2), and a description of a corporal as a “neurasthenic man of the world, not much of a warrior” (August 23). Bloch’s recounting of his war in the diary appeared to have been written in close proximity to the experience described. When his unit reached the front, his writing switched from pen to pencil.19 He seldom wrote in complete sentences. The longest single entry in the diary recounted Bloch’s initiation to combat, on September 9–10, 1914: The next day we will count 89 wounded, killed or missing in the company; noise, artillery, fused; case shot like a swarm of wasps—episodes I leave and find again the section, Corporal Scalbre; I am lightly wounded and in dressing the wound Oriol caught a bullet in the leg, the section panics and the horses hauling the machine guns; the trench with Samuel and the adjutant; the colonel and the last rush, lost! no contrary a bit less bad; the next morning I will find a hole like a point in my canteen, a tear on my greatcoat on the right at the shoulder, a bullet-hole in my greatcoat between the two legs; night-time, the German machineguns (finally!) are reduced to silence by our own we turn around in the forward direction last slope of the night; the wounded, the smell, sleeping on the ground, sardines; relieved toward morning, visit of the field ambulances.

Bloch provided intriguing and reflective but nevertheless confused details. The excerpt began with the balance sheet—the total casualties suffered by his company. He then recounted the chaos that followed, the noise, the slight wound he suffered and the wounding of Corporal Scalabre, the ensuing panic. Finally, he returned to some sort of “present,” his discovery of his near miss with death, his observation that the Germans had finally been silenced, his having slept on the ground, and his departure from the battlefield. For all its detail, the entry is as problematic as the medieval annals, a genre of writing that the young medievalists surely already understood.20 Lacking here is not so much detail as much as the structuring of that detail into a narrative, as Hayden White put it, “in which endings can be linked to beginnings to form a continuity within a difference.”21 After 1916, Bloch’s diary continued in a skeletal form until November 30, 1918. The daily diary represents experience according to chronologically measured time, demarcated either by a printed agenda or by the

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combatant himself. The diary is thus “authentic” in that it was written in proximity to the experience described. As in the case of Marc Bloch, the diary could also mark the exceptional experience of combat. But by definition, a diary cannot provide a narrative, at least not one that properly presents experience to a broader public. It looks inward toward the author rather than outward. Diaries, at least as Barbusse and Bloch wrote them, were intensely private documents. They remain of interest primarily to their author and as artifacts—not unlike debris on the battlefield found by archaeologists. Something else is needed for experience denoted in time to reach the public domain, a different and more clearly narrative ordering of temporality.

Narrative Practice and the Public Sphere War authors could publish works based on diaries for themselves, friends and family close to them, an academic or artistic elite, or the audience of mass-market publishing. The interplay among the individual and social requirements of narration helped determine the genre within which the “truth” of a given account would reside. Barbusse and Bloch left behind enough documentation to show how this interplay occurred. Both used the experience delineated in their diaries as a foundation for other forms of war writing. For Barbusse, the “true” emplotment of time, the witness, and his experience in his diary culminated in a novel, Le feu. For Bloch, paradoxically, assembling the meaning of his experience in narrative culminated in a return to medieval history. The two diaries of Barbusse tell their own story of the evolution of his novel, which came to supersede the diary itself. Of the nine printed pages of the first diary, six and a half cover the period of January 7–18, 1915. This corresponded to Barbusse’s first period of service in the front lines, in a dangerous sector in miserable weather.22 As in the first part of the diary, Barbusse scrupulously noted dates and the movements of his unit, sometimes hour by hour. These writings also avoided the gruesome description for which Barbusse became best remembered. The first diary terminated without explanation on June 29, 1915, at 3:00 pm. Barbusse’s began his second diary, a much longer work published as thirty-seven printed pages, on October 14, 1915.23 Clearly, he intended the second diary to serve as the basis for a larger work. He noted only three dates (October 14, October 15, and November 2), though it is clear from internal evidence that he continued to write in the diary into the fall of 1916, after Le feu had begun to appear in a serialized form in L’Oeuvre before its publication in a single volume in December 1916. In this second diary, Barbusse embarked on the great narratological task of Le feu, linking the experienced horrors of the Great War to

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ideological remobilization. For Barbusse, this meant transforming the conflict into a crusade leading to a world founded on deeply felt (if diffuse) international socialism. In his second diary, Barbusse’s personal time transformed into a time that was supposed to record change on a global scale. After November 1915, Barbusse renounced dates and specific locations, and filled the diary with pieces of dialogue, and with reflections on the meaning of the great struggle. By the fall of 1916, Barbusse was out of physical danger, serving behind the lines as a staff secretary. His thoughts could turn to the literary world. In the second diary, Barbusse began to give himself literary and political advice.24 The “realism” of Le feu also has its origins in the second diary, in Barbusse’s fascination with torn and putrefying flesh as the physical site where global change would originate.25 The last sections of the second diary mark the transition to the novel. The last pages of the diary include a list of “Great Books,” and a list of prominent individuals to be sent a copy of Le feu.26 Like the first diary, the second terminated without an explicit conclusion. In this respect, it has similarities to the medieval chronicle, in which the narrator recounts fragments of a story but does not tie them together into a proper ending. Rather, as White argued, a chronicle terminates when the external conditions that initially brought forth the narrative change around it.27 The second diary of Barbusse stopped by juxtaposing a penultimate list of chapters from the integral version of Le feu with a paragraph on the silent soldier, for whom Barbusse wished his novel to speak.28 The diary did not need a proper conclusion, or it can be interpreted, rather, that the novel itself served as the conclusion by supplanting the diary, by bringing the experience sketched out there into the public domain. Paradoxically, Bloch ultimately communicated the “truth” of his experience first expressed in his diary by returning to medieval history.29 He began to turn his diary into a proper memoir after his evacuation from the front in 1915 for typhoid fever. Bloch never made clear the public he envisaged for this more narrative rendering—himself, his close associates, or a future academic audience. Certainly, there was no way to know in 1915 that the future famous historian and resistance martyr would achieve such a stature that his own life would become a matter of historical interest. His stated objective was both explicit and imprecise— to prove the exceptional character of his experience. He began by presenting his thesis, asserting the fragility and unreliability of human memory. I intend to use this respite to fix my recollections before their still fresh and vibrant colors fade. I shall not record everything; oblivion must have its share. Yet I do not want to abandon the five astonishing months through which I have just lived to the vagaries of my memory, which has tended in the past to make an injudicious selection, burdening itself 340 | The Diary

with dull details while allowing entire scenes, any part of which would be precious, to disappear. The choice it has exercised so poorly I intend this time to control myself.30

The memoir version of Bloch’s initiation to combat imposed a kind of narrative order on the chaotic events through proving the thesis of the academic. He began with another frank confession of both the precision and the narrative confusion of his own memory: “It is likely that as long as I live, at least if I do not become senile in my last days, I shall never forget the 10th of September 1914. Even so, my recollections of that day are not altogether precise. Above all they are poorly articulated, a discontinuous series of images, vivid in themselves but badly arranged like a reel of movie film that showed here and there large gaps and the unintended reversal of certain scenes.”31 As in the diary, events themselves resist narration. Ever the careful scholar, Bloch’s plot line followed more or less the same form it took in the diary. But he provided continuity through his thesis. The events of that day were exceptional because he witnessed and experienced great danger and survived. Indeed, Bloch closed his story of this extraordinary day with a moral, which revolved around the ferocious joy he took in having lived, in having won, for the time being, the bet combat soldiers placed with violence and death. Despite so many painful sights, it does not seem to me that I was sad on that morning of September 11. Needless to say, I did not feel like laughing. I was serious, but my solemnity was without melancholy, as befitted a satisfied soul; and I believe that my comrades felt the same. I recall their faces, grave yet content. Content with what? Well, first content to be alive. It was not without a secret pleasure that I contemplated the large gash in my canteen, the three holes in my coat made by bullets that had not injured me, and my painful arm, which, on inspection, was still intact. On days after great carnage, except for particularly painful personal grief, life appears sweet. Let those who will condemn this self-centered pleasure. Such feelings are all the more solidly rooted in individuals who are ordinarily only half aware of their existence.32

Bloch established his authority as author by mildly scoffing at those who would disparage his satisfaction of the day after the battle. He alone could discern the meaning of his experience. But Bloch would shortly interrogate this claim of authority. The gaps and the peculiarities in Bloch’s failed attempts to turn his diary into prose prove as revealing as the results themselves. He ceased writing the memoir version of his diary at the end of his sick leave but began again about two years later, when his unit was stationed in Algeria. Part of his stated reason was simple boredom. He wrote a few more pages and then stopped again without comment, never to begin his memoir again. But he continued to write in his skeletal diary, to the end of the Diary and Narrative: French Soldiers and World War I  |  341

war. The issue is certainly not that “nothing happened” to Bloch or his regiment after the fall of 1914.33 At stake here was nothing less than a reconceptualization of time and Bloch’s own statement on the structures of time that he did and did not consider himself qualified to narrate. Simply put, Bloch rejected the immediacy of his own diary in favor of historical narrative. In so doing, he also came to reject the authority of the witness as arbiter of experience.34 His earlier concern with the fragility and unreliability of memory had come to the forefront. In a private letter, Bloch made a crucial statement about time, itself wrapped up in an anguished statement of his confidence in an eventual French victory.35 To Bloch, the basic structure of historical time was something the Annales school would one day call la longue durée (the long run). The task of narrating time began with a confession of humility toward the position of any given individual within historical time. Bloch’s statement on narration in the Great War found its most complete statement in his 1921 article on false news stories of the war.36 Witnesses, he concluded, could only recount time according to momentary preoccupations, which would prove disjointed and contradictory. Ipso facto, they would resist narration. Inevitably, stories would get better with the telling as they got further from the empirically demonstrable truth. The temptation to invent specific knowledge when needed to complete a narrative would prove irresistible, even among witnesses most preoccupied with reliability. This did not mean that firsthand testimonies such as diaries lacked value for historians. Quite the contrary, for Bloch’s article concluded with an impassioned plea to collect as much testimony from combatants of the Great War as possible as quickly as possible.37 But witnesses themselves would always remain too close to this material themselves to sift through it “scientifically,” separating what was empirically “true” from what was “false”—or rather, what mattered as folklore rather than as empirical documentation. Bloch believed that as a historian, he had established the necessary critical distance from the “false news stories” of the Middle Ages.38 But for himself, Bloch overtly renounced the task of narrating the war and his experience in it, at least in the public domain. But why, then, did Bloch continue his skeletal private diary until the end of November 1918? Like Barbusse, Bloch wrote various annexes to the diary, such as his list of what he read, notes on his readings, and even a work schedule for his delayed doctoral thesis. In so doing, Bloch sought to normalize his intellectual life, even while he remained in uniform. Bloch narrated his experience at the front in three forms of writing. His diary and his memoir narrated his personal experience. The memoir proved a form of narration he came to consider unsatisfactory, one in which he

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would shortly lose interest. But two other forms of emplotment continued: his scattered writings on his historical work, notably what would become his 1920 doctoral thesis, “Roi et serfs (King and Serfs),” and his diary—or, strictly speaking, the recitation of places and dates that upon first inspection seems so meaningless to historians. Surely, Bloch understood the genre of medieval annals, which his diary had come so much to resemble. In the diary, the passage of historical time was the narrative, the plot and the moral of the story. The witness had only to note time, measured by date and place. Historical time would continue, whatever happened to Marc Bloch, the French army, or even France itself.39 The Annales school of French social history, for which Bloch had done so much to provide the intellectual foundations, would concern itself with longue durée change determined by deep structures. The historian could narrate this conception of time and, in so doing, could reframe proper understanding of les événements (events) set down in such apparently haphazard ways in the diary. For Bloch as witness to the Great War, the private genre of the diary and the simple recording of dates and places sufficed as testimony. For Bloch as historian and intellectual, his encounter with temporality and narration meant returning to the writing of medieval history. The diary, by definition, records experience “as it happens.” Also by definition, a diary is not a narrative, in the sense of a text that provides an emplotment of experience in time with a beginning, middle, and end, which somehow relates to the beginning. The story of a diary is ongoing. Keeping a diary and turning a diary into a narrative are related but distinct tasks. Diarists of the Great War who constructed narratives created themselves as war authors in the process, through turning the “raw materials” of the diary into texts that tell stories. For some authors, simply redacting the diary sufficed. For others, the diary provided a framework for the conceptualization of time that would provide the author with the context for the proper narration of experience. Through narration, experience in the Great War entered the public sphere. In his 1936 essay on the narrator, Walter Benjamin argued that the Great War shattered the social transmission of experience. He lamented the passing of a world in which experience as an individual and social phenomenon seemed unproblematic.40 Once upon a time, stories passed orally from narrators to communities, shaping the memory of those communities. If such a world ever existed (and Benjamin seems sure it did), the Great War catalyzed its demise. Fighting the war of the trenches, he argued, rendered silent those who survived it. In putting to the flame his own immediate recollections, Roland Dorgelès had helped establish Benjamin’s contention as a truism.

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At a certain level, we can certainly prove Benjamin wrong and Dorgelès mistaken. An unknown number (though probably millions) of combatants kept diaries of their experience, hundreds of which found their way into the public sphere through publication. Thousands more remain in archives, museums, and private hands. The critical distance Marc Bloch deemed essential to examining diaries and other fragmentary forms of war writing would seem now to exist. Diaries, furthermore, had their own longue durée impact, as some entered public discourse through becoming narratives of various genres. Historians should never consider testimonies of any genre completely interchangeable or completely disregard “truth” in an empirical sense. But debates about that kind of truth showed their limitations long ago. Rather, historians might best devote their efforts to discerning why so many combatants looking to emplot their experience did so according to so many different conceptualizations of time. In examining the diversity of diaries of the Great War, and their future transformations, we better comprehend the opportunities they present as historical sources. Notes 1. Roland Dorgelès, Souvenirs sur les croix de bois (Paris: À la Cité des livres, 1929), 19. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 2. Ibid., 31. 3. Ibid., 33. 4. See Roland Dorgelès, Les croix de bois (Paris: Albin Michel, 1919), 221. 5. Dorgelès, Souvenirs sur les croix de bois, 33. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 34. 8. Martin Jay, “Roland Barthes and the Tricks of Experience,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 2 (2001): 469. 9. Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 779. 10. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 11. Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 3. 12. Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). 13. Paul Ricoeur, “La fonction narrative et l’expérience humaine du temps,” Archivio de filosofia 80, no. 1 (1980): 349. 14. On this point, see Hayden White, “Ricoeur’s Philosophy of History,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 169–84. 15. “Le carnet de notes,” published as a preface to Lettres d’Henri Barbusse à sa femme (Paris: Flammarion, 1937), v. 16. Ibid., 15–20.

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17. I am indebted here to the analysis of medieval chronicles in Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in Content of the Form, 1–25. 18. Marc Bloch, Écrits de guerre, 1914–1918, ed. Étienne Bloch, with an introduction by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (Paris: Armand Colin, 1997), 41–68. 19. Broken grammar preserved from the original. Ibid, 43. 20. As Hayden White observed of annals, “there are too many loose ends— no plot in the offing—and this is frustrating, if not disturbing, to the modern reader’s story expectations as well as his desire for specific information.” White, “Value of Narrativity,” 8. 21. Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” in Content of the Form, 52. 22. “Le carnet de notes,” preface to Lettres d’Henri Barbusse à sa femme (Paris: Flammarion, 1937), vi–xii. 23. “Carnet de guerre d’Henri Barbusse,” ed. Pierre Paraf, published as an annex to Le feu (Paris: Flammarion, 1965), 439–76. 24. On November 2, he advised himself “to deepen the tragic character of the banal side of the war. It is the more shameful, because the other, the danger, the apprehension of violent death, is not completely separate. All this is emphasized in the future.” Barbusse, “Carnet de guerre,” 446, 451. 25. For example, see Barbusse, “Carnet de guerre,” 442. 26. These included works as diverse as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Émile Zola’s Gérminal and Les Paysans, and Rudyard Kipling’s first and second Jungle Books, and many others. The prominent individuals included Paul Adam, General Paul Maistre, Roman Rolland, Albert Thomas, and Joseph Caillaux. 27. See White, “Value of Narrativity,” 19–20. 28. Barbusse, “Carnet de guerre,” 476. 29. Before his death in 1944, Bloch had published only one article specifically about the Great War, “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre,” Revue de synthèse historique 33, no. 97 (1921): 13–35. 30. Marc Bloch, Memoirs of War, 1914–1915, trans. Carole Fink (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 77. 31. Ibid. 89. 32. Ibid. 94. 33. His regiment returned to France in May 1917 and rotated in and out of the front lines in more and less active sectors until the end of the war. See Carol Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 4. 34. “But as for formulating through writing confessions and judgments, truly I am hardly up to the task. I would have too many things to say, which would be too mixed up and sometimes too self-contradictory; and besides I don’t have enough distance.” See Bloch to Georges Davy, September 1917, Écrits de guerre, 117. 35. “I believe in victory, but it will come slowly. I still know enough history to know that great crises are long. And the poor embryos that we are can only seek their pride in resignation.” Ibid., 118. 36. See Audoin-Rouzeau, introduction to Bloch, Écrits de guerre, 5–33, esp. 22–26. 37. Bloch, “Réflexions d’un historien,” 34–35.

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38. Carlo Ginzburg and Audoin-Rouzeau have noted the profound if indirect influence of the Great War in Bloch’s Les rois thaumaturges (The Royal Touch, 1924). See Audoin-Rouzeau, introduction to Bloch, Écrits de guerre, 5. 39. As White wrote of the annals as a genre, “the modern scholar seeks fullness and continuity in an order of events; the annalist has both in the sequence of the years”; “Value of Narrativity,” 9. 40. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 143–44.

Bibliography Barbusse, Henri. “Carnet de guerre d’Henri Barbusse.” Edited by Pierre Paraf. Published as an annex to Le feu, 439–76. Paris: Flammarion, 1965. ———. Le feu. Paris: Flammarion, 1916. ———. Lettres d’Henri Barbusse à sa femme. Paris: Flammarion, 1937. Benjamin, Walter “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” Translated by Harry Zohn. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 143–66. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Bloch, Marc. Écrits de guerre, 1914–1918. Edited by Étienne Bloch, with an introduction by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau. Paris: Armand Colin, 1997. ———. Memoirs of War, 1914–1915. Translated by Carole Fink. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. ———. “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre.” Revue de synthèse historique 33, no. 97 (1921): 13–35. Dorgelès, Roland. Les croix de bois. Paris: Albin Michel, 1919. ———. Souvenirs sur les croix de bois. Paris: À la Cité des livres, 1929. Fink, Carol. Marc Bloch: A Life in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. LaCapra, Dominick. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Jay, Martin. “Roland Barthes and the Tricks of Experience.” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 2 (2001): 469–76. ———. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Ricoeur, Paul. “La fonction narrative et l’expérience humaine du temps.” Archivio de filosofia 80, no. 1 (1980): 343–66. Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–97. Smith, Leonard V. The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. ———. “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory.” In Content of the Form, 26–57. ———. “Ricoeur’s Philosophy of History.” In Content of the Form, 169–84. ———. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” In Content of the Form, 1–25.

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LEONARD V. SMITH is Frederick B. Artz Professor of History at Oberlin College. He is author of The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I, and (with Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker) France and the Great War, 1914–1918.

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20 The Stalin-Era Diary Jochen Hellbeck

Until recently, scholars assumed that personal diaries in the true sense of the word were rarely kept under the Soviet regime. Some believed that the Communist state had succeeded in creating a robot-like Homo sovieticus that did away with the complexities of the human soul. In the words of literary scholar Georges Nivat, “The new man has no more interiority. A diary? He doesn’t even know what this means.”1 Others imagined the Soviet regime as a paradigmatic totalitarian state, bent on suppressing the private realm, which is where individuals supposedly harbored their true thoughts and aspirations. Only preciously few individuals, the story goes, were courageous or reckless enough to keep a diary, an act that by its very logic defied the totalitarian state. One of them was Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984 by George Orwell (1903–50). In the novel’s opening pages, Winston slips home during lunchtime from the Ministry of Truth, his workplace. He carefully positions himself in a small alcove outside the range of the monitoring cameras employed by the Thought Police and opens a drawer to pull out a notebook. In clumsy letters, he begins to keep a diary. With tremors passing through his bowels, Winston writes a long and garbled entry that culminates in a frantic exclamation, repeated four times: DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER! Diary keeping in the Big Brother state, the narrator comments, “was reasonably certain” to be “punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced labour camp.” Beyond imposing such sanctions, the state went to great lengths to deprive individuals of time, space, and even the necessary tools—paper and pencil—to articulate any personal thought. Winston’s diary was “a 348 

peculiarly beautiful book,” with “smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age . . . of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past.” He had bought it in a “frowsy little junk shop in a slummy quarter of the town.” The message is clear: a personal diary—a fact of daily life in the bygone liberal age—has no place in a totalitarian state.2 Diaries, which thrived in prerevolutionary Russian culture, were presumed to have become extinct in the postrevolutionary climate of terror and distrust. Most of those who kept their journals through the revolution and the early Soviet years were thought to have ceased to do so in the Stalin era, when possession of a personal text could easily become self-incriminating. As the Soviet archives began to open their gates during perestroika, public attention focused on the secrets from the Stalin era that would come to the fore. Scholars—this author among them— especially searched for diaries from this period, expecting to find in them evidence of “spiritual resistance” toward Stalinism.3 The surprisingly great number of personal documents from the first decades of Soviet power— diaries, letters, autobiographies, poems—that turned up in the archives confounded these expectations. Diaries appear to have been a popular genre of the period, especially during Stalin’s reign. Diarists included writers and artists as well as engineers and scientists, teachers, university professors and students, workers, peasants, state administration employees, party officials and Komsomol activists, soldiers, schoolchildren, and housewives. Their personal chronicles map an existential terrain marked by self-reflection and struggle. Many Soviet diaries were distinctly introspective, but introspection was not linked to individualist purposes. In contrast to Winston Smith, whose diaristic I turns against the goals and values propagated by the state, these Soviet diarists revealed an urge to write themselves into their social and political order. They sought to realize themselves as historical subjects defined by their active adherence to a revolutionary common cause. Their personal narratives were so filled with the values and categories of the Soviet revolution that they seemed to obliterate any distinction between a private and a public domain. The search for self-transformation that many of the diarists shared was rooted in the revolution of 1917, which promoted a new thinking about the self as a political project. All political actors who sided with the revolution, whatever their ideological differences, linked it to the goal of remaking the life of society as well as of each individual according to revolutionary standards of rationality, transparency, and purity. The overthrow of the czarist system was to inaugurate an enlightened political order that would deliver Russia from the “darkness” and sluggish acquiescence that characterized its peasant masses and lay at the core of the country’s cursed backwardness. The revolution marked the threshold separating the old from the new life. It pointed toward a perfect future The Stalin-Era Diary  |  349

dictated by the “laws of history,” a future that appeared within reach through the application of rationalist science and modern technology. This future was widely imagined as the habitat of a perfect human being, the new man, whom revolutionary actors described as a human machine, an untiring worker, or an unfettered, integrated “personality.” Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) expressed these expectations in an article in his newspaper, New Life, in April 1917: “The new structure of political life demands from us a new structure of the soul.”4 The Bolshevik regime that came to power in October 1917 and prevailed over the course of a bitter civil war, appropriated this transformative, emancipatory agenda for itself as it sought to mobilize the population and harness it into the policies of the revolutionary state. With its stress on subjective involvement in the revolutionary cause, the Soviet regime was pursuing a quintessentially modern agenda of subjectivization, of molding individuals into active citizens who would consciously identify with the socialist program. Through a multitude of political-education campaigns, the regime prodded Soviet citizens to consciously identify with the revolution (as interpreted by the party leadership) and thereby to comprehend themselves as active participants in the drama of history. They were summoned to internalize the revolution and grant it an interpretation defined not only by the objective laws of history but also by the spiritual unfolding of their subjective selves.5 In the course of this process, the autobiographical domain—hitherto limited to a relatively small segment of educated Russian society—expanded dramatically. It reached entirely new layers of the population, thereby creating a new, specifically Soviet, subgenre of authors groping for a language of self-expression at the same time they were learning how to read and write. The most widespread medium was the avtobiografiia (or autobiography), a short account of an individual’s life, submitted in prose and presented orally to a collective to which the candidate was applying for membership—a party cell, a factory board, or a university committee. The autobiography listed a person’s educational and professional achievements, but in its core, it focused on the formation of his or her personality.6 Among other autobiographical practices, Soviet revolutionaries also promoted the diary as a subjectivizing technique. Consider the case of the “Red Army man notebook” of the civil war period, a booklet designed for each individual Red Army soldier, for the sake of recording the ammunition, food, and clothing supplies distributed to him. The booklet contains a blank page at the end bearing the heading “for personal notes.” A caption below reads, “If possible, keep a diary of your service in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army.”7 The industrialization drive, launched by Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s to remake Soviet Russia into an industrial great power, saw renewed 350 | The Diary

public pleas to encourage popular diary keeping. Soviet officials called on the literary profession to enter the industrialization campaign and serve its mobilizing and transformative goals. Factories established their own literary circles in which experienced writers imparted the skills of the craft to proletarian workers, who were to become chroniclers of both the building of socialism and their own transformation in the course of industrialization. The best of these “production diaries”—highly personal narratives, presented in the context of the local and international class struggle—were to be published in lavish histories of the Soviet factories to document the purposeful transformation of the Soviet economic and social landscapes, as well as of workers’ souls. Yet the initiative proved disappointing and was shelved in the course of the 1930s. Only a fraction of the workers heeded the appeal to write diaries. Many of those that were submitted were barely literate, filled with orthographic errors and clumsy expressions. Hardly any of them reached the interpretive depth sought by the editors. The few volumes that eventually saw the light were mostly filled with workers’ oral accounts, culled and edited by the professional writers.8 Far from all Bolshevik activists endorsed the diary for their transformative political project. Some viewed it with unease and suspicion, believing diary keeping to be an inherently bourgeois activity. Writing a diary was legitimate as long as this practice helped develop a socialized consciousness and a will to action, but there was also the possibility that it could breed empty talk or, even worse, “Hamletism”—brooding thought instead of revolutionary action. Diarists writing on their own, outside their comrades’ gaze, risked cutting themselves off from the nurturing collective. Unchecked, the diary of a steadfast comrade could turn into a seedbed of counterrevolutionary sentiment. Not accidentally, diaries were among the materials most coveted by the secret police during searches of the premises of suspected “enemies of the people.”9 These reservations help explain why diaries were not of central significance—and ranked far below the avtobiografiia—for the subjectivization policies carried out by the Bolshevik state. They also meant that Soviet diarists wrote their personal records in the absence of a distinct prescriptive culture. Diarists were unsure about the benefits of diary keeping and of how to keep a “correct” diary. Most of them wrote diaries on their own initiative, and some in fact lamented the absence of official precepts for how to achieve the work of self-transformation. Last but not least, there were also the shortages and poor quality of available notebooks to contend with. In outward appearance, Soviet-era diaries contrasted markedly with prerevolutionary diaries. This contrast is put in sharp relief in the case of diarists who wrote across the revolutionary divide: at some point they had to abandon their leather-bound volumes for coarse school notebooks produced by the Soviet regime.10 Emblematic The Stalin-Era Diary  |  351

of the way diarists were jolted from orderly lives into a state of impoverishment and violent upheaval, the image of the two forms of the journal also encapsulates another transition: from diary-keeping as a pursuit of privileged members of society to a democratic agenda of universal literacy, schooling, and recording of the self. An investigation of these diaries thus highlights the extent to which individuals, acting on their own, creatively wove themselves into a loose matrix of subjectivization produced by the Soviet Revolution, and how these individuals themselves supplied some of the core categories and mechanisms of self-realization in a Soviet vein. Anatoly Ulianov, a seventeen-year-old worker and communist youth activist from Moscow, began to keep a journal in February 1930. As he concluded the first entry in his diary project, which for years to come would revolve around his unhappy love for a girl called Katya, he chided himself for his “stupid” inability to write about a more significant purpose in life: “Is the saying correct that keeping a diary is petit-bourgeois? Yes and no, I think. If you write only about love, about how you suffer in love, that probably is a foul petit-bourgeois trick.” Realizing that he was somewhat infected by such a spirit, Ulianov vowed to stop practicing “babbology” and henceforth focus only on the “facts” of “real life.” By this he meant “the life people write books about,” the life of the heroes who were building the new socialist world. His life, by contrast, as exemplified by his diary, was empty, filled with brooding thoughts, void of the “essence of existence.”11 Anatoly Ulianov’s sense that he was living in an exceptional, historic period and had an obligation to record it was shared by many other Soviet diarists writing at the same time. “When will I finally write my memoirs about the 1930s?” one diarist asked.12 The fact that this author posed the question in 1932, when the decade had barely begun, illustrates how much of a notion there already existed of the Stalinist industrialization campaign as a distinct epoch in the making. More than just the record of an observing chronicler, the diary frequently had the additional task of writing its author into the age, of creating a dialogue between the self and the age in historicist terms and of thus raising the self to the level of a historical subject. It took work and struggle to align the self with history. Diaries documented this process as much as they helped bring it about. They were deployed as tools of psycho-physical monitoring and, ultimately, of selfchange. To articulate this work, diarists repeatedly invoked the concepts of “planning,” “struggle,” and “consciousness,” core Communist values of the period of the first five-year plans. Writing in 1931, Vera Pavlova, a young schoolteacher working in a village near Moscow, noted that she had divided her personal life into five-year plans, the dates of which 352 | The Diary

corresponded to the official five-year plans established by the Soviet state. The construction targets she outlined for “my self,” as well as her proud statements of production quotas met and exceeded (“on this front the Five-Year Plan has been met in two and a half years”), illustrate Pavlova’s assumption that her personal life had to develop as part and parcel of the wider general plan of socialist construction. Repeatedly she voiced the need to control and rationalize her life, hoping to bring to light the realm of her “subconscious feelings.” She also confided to the diary her dreams and fantasies, all her “crazy” thoughts, but above all a desire to “systematize” impressions and, ultimately, to live her life in “planlike,” “systematic” fashion.13 Like Pavlova, the Moscow worker and Communist Youth activist Anatoly Ulianov invoked the plan as a structure to bring order to his life and increase his work performance: “I want to transmit the planning of work to my daily life, both for my mental-physical [activities] and for leisure. I will try to make my work more manageable this way. Fewer of the usual tricks (walks with the ‘perfidious’ Katya, etc.).” Ulianov resolved to fight the entanglements of intimate relationships: “I must position myself on real rails, switch myself toward a rational mind, correct mental activity, a system.” The writer Vera Inber advocated what she called “‘technicizing the soul’ . . . in other words, constructivism,” to fight the “disorder in my soul” that she repeatedly diagnosed in her diary. In keeping with this mechanical imagery, she remarked elsewhere, “Man is a factory. And the mind is the director of this factory.” Consciously or not, Inber echoed Vladimir Lenin, who had described the Communist Party as a factory with the Central Committee as its director.14 Diarists established a variety of related dichotomies to describe the composition of their selves and the mechanisms of self-transformation in which they saw themselves engaged. These binaries included the opposition between the mind and the body, a diarist’s “will” and his “heart,” or individuals’ “ideology” and their “psychology.” “Psychology,” in diaries of the early Soviet period, invariably had a negative ring. It was a lowly, chaotic, and dangerous force operating in the dark recesses of spirit and body, a force that diarists occasionally admitted to harboring in themselves. Psychology could effectively be mastered only with the joint powers of the rational mind and the will. These two forces organized the individual’s psycho-physical apparatus. As soon as they rendered psychology transparent and rational, it ceased to be psychology, rising to the level of pure ideology. The height of ideological clarity was attained through a person’s conscious struggle against psychology. On the individual level it represented a subjective insight into a realm of higher knowledge of the laws of historical and social development, an insight that was institutionally claimed by the Communist Party. The Stalin-Era Diary  |  353

While the concepts of plan, consciousness, struggle, psychology, ideology, and willpower were general attributes of diaries from this age, they proceeded from two qualitatively different notions of self. Diarists from the lower classes, chiefly workers and peasants, labored to construct a sense of self where they believed previously none had existed. Members of the educated and propertied classes, meanwhile, saw themselves as possessing a developed yet problematic self that required analysis and intervention in order to be transformed. Every Soviet citizen, to be sure, traveled from an old to a new life. Workers and peasants, too, voiced a conflict between old and new codes of thinking and behavior, but they rarely reified their unfortunate “old” habits—such as heavy drinking, cursing, or abusing their spouses—into a full-fledged figure of an “old man” who had to die in order for the new man to emerge. Their habits were the fruits of backwardness, results of the feudal-capitalist enslavement of the laboring people’s souls, an enslavement that had kept them on the verge of a subhuman existence. A worker like Anatoly Ulianov regarded his ingrained coarseness as an indication of his “animal”-like existence, the beast within. Another diarist, the peasant-worker Leonid Potemkin, described the need to work on his self in terms of material construction: he had to lay a foundation and build a frame surrounded by a scaffolding before he could proceed with setting up the factory, his finished self. His emphasis was on construction, rather than reconstruction, of the self: he did not foresee a need to tear down established old frames or accommodate preexisting building parts.15 By contrast, members of the educated classes—including representatives of the bourgeois intelligentsia as well as staunch Communists—had to cope with the fact that they inhabited problematic “personalities” shaped by prerevolutionary culture. They conceived of self-transformation in terms of killing the old man and rearing the new man within. Unlike workers or peasants, who were weighed down by an uncultured past, members of the intelligentsia suffered from an excess of culture that needed to be stripped of its non-Soviet properties. In the words of the poet Johannes R. Becher, who converted to Communism in the 1920s, the intellectual, before joining the “proletarian fighting army,” had to “burn most of what he owes to his bourgeois genealogy. . . . Down with the vaunted and sacralized ‘personality.’ Down with its artificial inner and outward comportment, its exaggerated and paradoxical nature, all the capricious and moody posturing characterizing a ‘personality.’”16 When Becher and others spoke derogatively of personality, the term encapsulated a set of attributes marking the “old” intelligentsia: individualistic, narcissistic, passive, soft, and unfit for struggle—in a word, bourgeois. The stakes of self-reconstruction were particularly high for offspring from classes that were officially deemed anti-Soviet. Stepan Podlubny 354 | The Diary

was one of them. An eighteen-year-old print shop apprentice in Moscow, Stepan hailed from a village in Ukraine that he had fled two years earlier to escape the deadly wave of the collectivization campaign. His father had been deported as a kulak peasant on charges of exploitation and the pursuit of selfish gains. Stepan sought refuge in Moscow where no one knew him. Claiming to be of working-class stock, he quickly found work in the typography of the Pravda newspaper, where he also joined the Communist youth organization. A frantic search for class enemies in disguise, “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” accompanied the Stalinist industrialization campaign, and Stepan used the proletarian mantle to hide from the Communist zealots. But he also embraced his new urban life as an opportunity to become a genuine industrial worker and an educated citizen and, in the process, outgrow what he believed to be his ingrained kulak “psychology.”17 Since arriving in Moscow, Stepan had kept a diary. The diary appears to have originated in the literary circle in which he had enrolled soon after joining Pravda. Dreaming of becoming a writer, Stepan kept the diary as raw material for an autobiographical writing that he intended to publish one day, a novel for which he had already come up with a title: “the life of an outdated class, its spiritual rebirth and adaptation to new conditions.” He knew that this memoir couldn’t be produced during the current witch hunt against class enemies, but he hoped that as a successfully reformed citizen, he would one day find absolution and integration in the socialist state order. The longer he wrote, however, the more Stepan cherished yet another motivation for keeping the diary: it had become his “sole friend.” Only to the diary could he confide the secret of his past and the fears and doubts that accompanied his attempt to fit into the new society. His hope was to free himself from his torments by releasing them on paper. The diary served as a “rubbish heap” onto which he could discard all the “garbage” that had accumulated in his mind. Stepan’s secret and his recording of it in his diary interfered with the projected use of the diary as a literary training ground. Other members of the circle read aloud from their diaries and showed them around. Stepan kept his own locked away and even concealed its existence, being acutely aware of what might happen to him if it fell into the wrong hands. Stepan’s diary—as well as the diaries of other Soviet authors from the same period—were replete with critical comments on official policies and statements of ideological doubt, disbelief, and despair. But what is so striking about these critical expressions is that frequently they were in turn rejected as “black,” “rotten,” or “polluted.” Dissenting individual musings formed a dark recess cast by the Soviet striving for maximum light; they were illegitimate gestures of concealment in the context of an The Stalin-Era Diary  |  355

all-embracing purificatory zeal. They were not—or not yet—a source of positive self-identity or the proud founding moment of a tradition of autonomous thinking. What is more, dissenting thoughts were often disowned as soon as they were recorded on paper. They were denigrated as expressions of an old intelligentsia self that had yet to be eradicated, of a lingering “kulak psychology,” or of a landowner’s mentality. These moods had to be resolutely fought and disowned because otherwise they had the capacity to recast their authors as class alien subjects. To avert the final consequence of this logic, diarists proceeded by splitting themselves up into two distinct voices, one Soviet and one antiSoviet, and they asserted that the critical voice did not express the totality of their selves but was the voice of an enemy within. In acts paralleling the show trials staged by the Soviet regime at around the same time, Soviet citizens thus used their diaries to hold trial over themselves and to expose the enemy within, in the service of restoring the purity and integrity of their Soviet selves. These often desperate practices peaked with the outbreak of the Great Purges—Stalin’s relentless campaign against suspected counterrevolutionary elements inside the Communist Party. The year 1937, which in popular understanding symbolizes the end of free self-expression in the Soviet Union, produced an avalanche of confessional, self-expressive texts. Among them was the diary of Julia Piatnitskaya, the wife of a high-ranking Communist official. Piatnitskaya began to keep her diary just when her husband was being arrested in July 1937. By means of the diary, she sought to come to terms with her conflicted state of mind: Was her husband really a longtime imperialist spy, as the prosecution maintained, or was he a decent Communist who had been brought down by a hidden enemy in the state administration? Piatnitskaya kept oscillating between these poles, fearing she was losing her mind. Meanwhile, she lost her job as an engineer, was ostracized by former friends, and spent her time at the library, leafing through technical journals and enviously reading about the achievements of the Soviet collective. She had two sons, ages eleven and fifteen. While the younger son would come home from school demanding that his father be finally shot for his counterrevolutionary crimes, the older son almost never left the apartment and spent his time obsessively washing and ironing—displaced, desperate attempts of self-purification.18 There were moments when Julia Piatnitskaya successfully summoned herself to observe her personal life through the lens of history and its imperative of revolutionary action. “Your near and dear perish,” she noted in March 1938, “you’re tormented, you see on all sides suffering and death, but you walk on, standing tall, you look straight ahead to the future of society—your life will be brighter and richer, and more useful to others. You must live in action, not in contemplation, and if it becomes 356 | The Diary

impossible not to see the old, dark life, then rise above it, sever yourself from it, and strive for the joyful and radiant path.” But as time went by, she could not fail to notice that her struggle to regain herself was not succeeding: “There were months when my head was clear. I could hold myself together, I tried to struggle for my life, and I had no conflicts with Soviet Power. But now something new has happened: either I am sick, or I have to be isolated from my citizens. I see a lot of disgusting things in the newspapers” (May 28, 1938). If she was “sick,” she could still entertain hope of being cured, although this was difficult, now that she had no healer of souls to turn to anymore—neither her husband, who had acted as her confessor prior to his arrest, nor the secret police (NKVD), which failed to step in and take up this role for her. At the same time, Piatnitskaya saw herself confronted with increasing evidence—some of it on the pages of the diary itself—that she was an irredeemable counterrevolutionary. This would mean not just that a part of her self was infected and could be healed but also that she had become consumed with an incurable, evil essence. Julia Piatnitskaya was arrested later that year. She died in a labor camp in 1940 after doctors in the camp had officially diagnosed her as suffering from a strong mental disorder. The NKVD officers who came to arrest Piatnitskaya also searched her apartment and confiscated her diary. In the 1990s, Piatnitskaya’s grandson discovered the diary in the former NKVD archives. Underlined passages in the text and comments on the margins of Piatnitskaya’s journal—as well as in the diaries of many other Soviet citizens who were arrested under Stalin—indicate how Soviet prosecutors read these texts. Invariably they zeroed in on statements of doubt, interpreting them as expressions of the diarist’s total self. In some cases they even marked expressions of loyalty as distrustful: the more loyal a given narrative appeared, the more the presumed enemy was able to dissimulate behind the mask of a good Soviet citizen. In 1939, the poet Olga Berggolts was released after a six-month prison term as a suspected enemy of the people. With her release, she also received her diary, which had been confiscated during her arrest. Berggolts despaired when she saw how wrongly the prosecutor had interpreted her thoughts, how he had read her exclamations of sorrow about the murder of Stalin’s deputy, Sergey Kirov, as a clever counterrevolutionary pose. For the future, this meant that any utterance might be second-guessed by a hostile state reader. Berggolts plainly realized that she could not continue to keep her diary as a tool of moral self-cultivation. The outbreak of the Great Patriotic War (1941–45) saw a renewed burst of diary writing in the Soviet Union. Scores of Leningraders kept private journals, in which they recorded the nine-hundred-day-long siege of their city. Faced with brutal hunger, cold, and uncertainty, daily record The Stalin-Era Diary  |  357

keeping expressed their struggle to survive and persevere against all odds.19 The fifteen-year-old Yuri Riabinkin kept his diary as a medium of character building even as he confessed moral degradation and sins. In December 1941, he repeatedly noted that on the way back from the bakery, he had eaten not only his own meager ration but also devoured his mother’s and sister’s rations, only to lie to them about this. “I have fallen into an abyss, the abyss of degradation, of complete lack of conscience, of dishonour and shame. I am an unworthy son and brother. I am an egotist. . . . I desire two things at the moment: that I should die now, and that Mother should find this diary and read it. Let her curse me, a vile, heartless and two-faced beast, let her renounce me—I have fallen too low” (December 15, 1941).20 Yuri most likely died from exhaustion in January 1942, just as he and a contingent of other children were about to be evacuated from Leningrad. The writer and critic Lydia Ginzburg began to keep a diary a few months into the siege.21 She used it to document how the people reacted to the war and how human traits fared under extreme challenges. In the course of writing, Ginzburg began to observe a distinct “siege ethic” that prevented many people from breaking down. They might fight, complain, and on occasion despair, but they also knew what it meant to be “a Leningrader.” Since being founded by Peter the Great, St. Petersburg/Petrograd/ Leningrad had been a city overdetermined by history, and this historical consciousness structured many siege diaries and, indeed, in good part explains their mass existence. Soviet soldiers were not allowed to keep diaries for fear that their records might betray sensitive military information if discovered by the enemy. But as part of its mobilization for the war effort, the Soviet regime at once encouraged popular letter writing and attempted to monitor it down to the last word. Military censors scanned every single letter that passed from the front to the rear—a unique feature among all warfaring nations in World War II—to gauge what it revealed about the author’s “moral personality.” A person’s moral features were sound if the person showed signs of growth under the impact of the war. By contrast, letters that indicated a person’s moral regression, his or her turn away from the Soviet cause, were repressed, often along with their authors.22 These values were widely propagated. Writing for the Red Army newspaper, the writer and critic Ilya Ehrenburg published excerpts from the personal writings of Soviet soldiers and civilians alike that testified to the growth of their moral “personalities” in response to the challenges of the war. For Ehrenburg and other wartime propagandists, the Soviet-German war amounted to another chapter in the construction of the new man of socialist society. Significantly, Ehrenburg applied this biographical reading of the war to the enemy as well. Many of his wartime articles and columns were 358 | The Diary

devoted to analyses of the “Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens” that he received from army intelligence units at the front, who in turn had retrieved them from captured Germans or the bodies of dead enemy soldiers. Ehrenburg’s articles presented an image of Germans as degenerate beings, in the throes of sadism and greed. His explicit aim in publishing these accounts was to dismantle the “pseudo-civilized” facade of German culture. A diary, Ehrenburg believed, produced selfreflection; it indicated a culture of interiority, which should be a sign of a developed moral consciousness. To keep a diary in this true sense meant to scrutinize oneself in a quest for moral self-improvement. And yet, the German soldiers parading on the pages of his newspaper columns engaged in self-reflection without any moral self-scrutiny. They were “worse than wild beasts”—worse because they were modern and in possession of tools that enabled them to engage in self-reflection, and yet they failed to use their capacity of moral reflection and action. “Beasts of prey do not torture for pleasure; they do not keep diaries. One does not hold them responsible for their actions. But it is quite another story when a corporal from Wiesbaden tortures a man and then writes about it in his diary.”23 Ilya Ehrenburg was but one of hundreds of Soviet writers who served as a military correspondent during World War II. His case illustrates an important continuity that defined the entire Stalin era, straddling the prewar and wartime periods. All along, Soviet writers worked as “engineers of the soul.” In this work, the diary never assumed more than an auxiliary role. Writers themselves used them as literary sketchbooks, and they encouraged their readers to keep journals in order to intervene in and rework their selves. But these diaries were rarely meant to be published—at best they served as quarries from which to carve material for a complete, novelistic presentation of the self. At worst they were a surrogate for historical action, embraced by individuals who felt excluded from the general stream of life and wrote in their journals sought to create a substitute sense of belonging to society and history. The most popular literary product of the Stalin period was How the Steel Was Tempered (1934)—a novel about a civil war hero whose supersized will easily and unproblematically overcomes his bodily needs, so far that in the end he is all consciousness residing in a broken physical carcass. The marginal position of the diary in the Soviet context also explains why Joseph Stalin did not keep a journal—or at least not in the earthly sense. In fact, Stalin practiced a form of writing or, rather, editorship that was reserved for him alone and that established the totality of his consciousness. This was the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (1939), a collectively authored history textbook that was widely known to have been extensively edited by the The Stalin-Era Diary  |  359

Soviet dictator.24 Requiring neither critical introspection nor perfection, Stalin’s subjectivity soared like G. W. F. Hegel’s World Spirit, disembodied and coterminous with the course of history. After Stalin’s death, Soviet culture underwent a revealing shift. Within a few years, the diary rose to become the emblematic literary form of the thaw era (1953–64). Leading Soviet writers abandoned the novel to centrally engage with the diaristic form. On the one hand, the diary expressed the primacy of individuality, a neo-Romantic concept that had roots in the Stalin era but flourished in the 1950s, as critics called for an interrogation of received social dogmas. To that extent, the diary seemed to indicate the growth and emancipation from party tutelage of the individual Soviet citizen. On the other hand, however, writers’ avowed embrace of the diary as a means of establishing a new, hesitant truth through empirical observation also expressed a crisis of sorts: the belief that the history legislated by the Communist Party leadership had suffered a crack. By necessity fractured and open-ended, the diaristic form expressed the uncertain prospects of life and self-definition following Stalin’s death.25 Notes 1. Georges Nivat, Russie-Europe: La fin du schisme; Etudes litteraires et politiques (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1993), 146. 2. George Orwell, 1984 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 7–8. 3. These are words of Valentin Oskotskii, in “Dnevnik kak pravda” [The diary as truth], Voprosy literatury, no. 5 (1993): 3–58. 4. Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and Bolsheviks, 1917–1918, trans. Herman Emolaev (New York: S. Eriksson, 1968), 7. 5. Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 57–60. 6. Halfin, Terror in My Soul, 43–95. 7. Knizhka krasnoarmeitsa [The Red Army soldier’s booklet] (Ekaterinoslav: Tipografiia gubernskogo voennogo komissariata, 1919). 8. Katerina Clark, “The ‘History of the Factories’ as a Factory of History,” in Autobiographical Practices in Russia, ed. Jochen Hellbeck and Klaus Heller (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2004), 251–78; Josette Bouvard, “Une fabrique d’écriture, le projet de Gorki L’Histoire des fabriques et des usines (1931–1936),” in Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux dans le monde communiste, ed. Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal (Paris: Belin, 2002), 63–83; S. V. Zhuravlev, Fenomen “Istorii fabrik i zavodov”: Gor’kovskoe nachinanie v kontekste epokhi 1930-kh godov (Moscow: In-tut rossiiskoi istoriii RAN, 1997). 9. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 47–50. 360 | The Diary

10. See, for instance, the diaries of Zinaida Denisevskaya, discussed in Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 115–64. 11. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 57–58. 12. Ibid., 55. 13. Ibid, 67. 14. Ibid., 67–68. 15. Ibid., 73–74. 16. Ibid., 75–76. 17. Ibid., 165–222. 18. Golgofa: Po materialam arkhivno-sledstvennogo dela No. 603 na Sokolovu-Piatnitskuiu Iu. I., ed. V. I. Piatnitskii (St. Petersburg: Palitra, 1993); Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 107–8. 19. The literature on diary keeping during the siege of Leningrad is massive. For recent explorations, see Alexis Peri, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), as well as the forum “Siege of Leningrad Revisited: Narrative, Image, Self,” in Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (2010): 277–355; for an English-language presentation of documents, see Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin, A Book of the Blockade (Moscow: Raduga, 1983). 20. Adamovich and Granin, Book of the Blockade, 410–17. 21. Lydiya Ginzburg, Blockade Diary (London: Harvill Press, 1995). 22. Jochen Hellbeck, “‘The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens’: Personal Writings from the German-Soviet War and Their Readers,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 3 (2009): 571–606. 23. Ibid., 594–95. 24. History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (Moscow: International Publishers, 1939). The Russian original first appeared in 1938. On the making of the book, see Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course, ed. David Brandenberger and Mikhail V. Zelenov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). 25. Anatoly Pinsky, “The Diaristic Form and Subjectivity under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 73, no. 4 (2014): 805–27.

Bibliography Adamovich, Ales, and Daniil Granin. A Book of the Blockade. Moscow: Raduga, 1983. Bouvard, Josette. “Une fabrique d’écriture, le projet de Gorki L’Histoire des fabriques et des usines (1931–1936).” In Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux dans le monde communiste, edited by Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal, 63–83. Paris: Belin, 2002. Brandenberger, David, and Mikhail V. Zelenov, eds. Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Clark, Katerina. “The ‘History of the Factories’ as a Factory of History.” In Hellbeck and Heller, Autobiographical Practices in Russia, 251–78. Cohen, Yves. “La co-construction de la personne et de la bureaucratie: De la subjectivité de Staline et des cadres industriels soviétiques à travers The Stalin-Era Diary  |  361

de nouveaux usages des sources (années 30).” In The Relations between Individual and System under Stalinism, ed. Heiko Haumann and Brigitte Studer, 175–96. Munich: Chronos, 2005. “Diaries and Intimate Archives” (Forum). Russian Review 63, no. 4 (October 2004): 561–747. Figes, Orlando. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Garros, Véronique, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen. Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s. New York: New Press, 1995. Ginzburg, Lydiya. Blockade Diary. London: Harvill, 1995. Golgofa: Po materialam arkhivno-sledstvennogo dela No. 603 na SokolovuPiatnitskuiu Iu. I. Edited by V. I. Piatnitskii. St. Petersburg: Palitra, 1993. Gorky, Maxim. Untimely Thoughts. New York: S. Eriksson, 1968. Griesse, Malte. Communiquer, juger et agir sous Staline: La personne prise entre ses liens avec les proches et son rapport au système politicoidéologique. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 2011. Halfin, Igal. Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Hellbeck, Jochen. “‘The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens’: Personal Writings from the German-Soviet War and Their Readers.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 3 (2009): 571–606. ———. “Formovka soldatskogo ‘ia’” [Forging the soldierly self]. In XX vek: Pis’ma voiny [Twentieth century: War letters], edited by Serguei Oushakine, Alexey Golubev, Irina Rebrova, and Elena Goncharova. Moscow: NLO, 2016. ———. “Galaxy of Black Stars: The Power of Soviet Biography.” American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (2009): 615–24. ———. “The Last Soviet Dreamer: Encounters with Leonid Potemkin.” In “Écrits personnels: Russie XVIIIe –XXe siècles.” Special issue, Cahiers du monde russe 50, no. 1 (2009): 139–52. ———. Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. ———. “With Hegel to Salvation: Bukharin’s Other Trial.” Representations 107, no. 1 (2009): 56–90. Hellbeck, Jochen, and Klaus Heller, eds. Autobiographical Practices in Russia. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2004. History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: International Publishers, 1939. Kharkhordin, Oleg. The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Knizhka krasnoarmeitsa. Ekaterinoslav: Tipografiia gubernskogo voennogo komissariata, 1919. Kondakova, I. A., ed. Otkrytyi arkhiv: Spravochnik opublikovannykh dokumentov po istorii Rossii XX-go veka iz gosudarstvennykh i semeinykh arkhivov (po otechestvennoi periodike, 1985–1995 gg.). Moscow: n.p., 1997. Nivat, Georges. Russie-Europe: La fin du schisme. Etudes litteraires et politiques. Lausanne: n.p., 1993. Orwell, George. 1984. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Oskotskii, V. “Dnevnik kak pravda.” Voprosy literatury, no. 5 (1993): 3–58.

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Paperno, Irina. Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Peri, Alexis. The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pinsky, Anatoly. “The Diaristic Form and Subjectivity under Khrushchev.” Slavic Review 73, no. 4 (2014): 805–27. Podlubnyj, Stepan. Tagebuch aus Moskau, 1931–1939. Edited by Jochen Hellbeck. Munich: dtv, 1996. Prozhito. Accessed October 1, 2019. http://prozhito.org. “Siege of Leningrad Revisited: Narrative, Image, Self” (Forum). Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (2010): 277–355. Zhuravlev, S. V. Fenomen “Istorii fabrik i zavodov”: Gor’kovskoe nachinanie v kontekste epokhi 1930-kh godov. Moscow: In-tut rossiiskoi istoriii RAN, 1997.

JO C H E N H E L L B E C K is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. His most recent book is Stalingrad: The City That Defeated the Third Reich (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015).

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21 On Holocaust Diaries Batsheva Ben-Amos

During the Holocaust, many Jews kept diaries. These diarists were of all ages and all walks of life, not only the publicly prominent.1 Most came from sociocultural backgrounds in which writing was valued.2 Many diaries were lost, but several hundred have survived and are kept in archives and libraries around the world; many of these were published, and some are still held in private hands, making up a diary corpus written in one of the darkest periods of human history.3 Holocaust diaries are those kept between 1939 and 1945 by writers with direct experience of the horror and uncertainties during the Nazi occupation in Europe. These diaries are distinguished from survivors’ memoirs written after liberation.4 Most Holocaust diaries were written during the war period alone because many diarists began writing only when the war was imminent and many were murdered before the war ended. Nevertheless, some diarists started writing before the war. Among them were Chaim Kaplan (1880–1942), who began writing his Hebrewlanguage diary in Warsaw in 1933, and Victor Klemperer (1881–1960), who started a diary in German in 1918 and continued writing in 1933 in Dresden and in Russian-dominated East Germany until shortly before his death. Klemperer’s diary includes the Holocaust period; Kaplan started to write in the year the Nazis came to power in Germany. Possibly, this event even sparked him to start the diary, but because the first two years of his notes are in private hands and unavailable to researchers, it is not possible to confirm what prompted Kaplan to begin writing. In addition, he never indicated in his diary, as did some diarists who wrote during the 364 

Holocaust, that he intended to stop writing when the war ended; on one occasion, he wrote that he hoped to continue writing after the war’s end. Jews under the German occupation wrote in the ghettos, in hiding, at large, and in the various camps—holding camps, labor camps, and Nazi concentration camps. Diary notes were even found in the AuschwitzBirkenau crematorium, written by Jewish prisoners who worked in the gas chambers. The harder the physical conditions of confinement, the greater the terror, the weaker the tormented body, and the larger the personal loss, the more difficult it was to keep a diary; yet diarists resolutely continued to write. Diary manuscripts were discovered after the war in the rubble of ghettos and camps and in empty dwellings and hiding places. For example, Yitzhok Rudashevski of the Vilna ghetto escaped en route to execution in Ponar and joined the partisans and then returned to the ghetto in July 1944. His diary was discovered by a cousin in a melina (hiding place) in the attic of their apartment. She wrote, “What pains the boy has taken with it. He carried it everywhere with him, always hid it. He showed it to no one. So important, so dear it was to him.”5 A number of important diaries were uncovered in the underground archive of the Warsaw ghetto, established and overseen by Emanuel Ringelblum; among hidden documents in the Vilna ghetto; and in the official Judenrat chronicle of the Łódz ghetto. Some, like Chaim Kaplan’s diary, were given by their authors to non-Jewish friends for safekeeping and eventually made their way to the diarists’ family members and museum archives. People often start to write diaries when an imbalance occurs in their lives, between a previously coherent social situation with clear social norms and a new, normless situation.6 Holocaust diaries certainly fit into that category, but their writers had additional goals: to bear witness, to sound an alarm to the world, to seek future revenge, or to leave traces of their existence.7 They employed various literary models, including literature, confession, lamentation, journalism, jurisprudence, and correspondence.8 Among extant diaries, two general types can be distinguished: chronicles and personal diaries. Chronicles logged daily external events, vital statistics, and communal issues and excluded personal material; personal, or intimate, diaries included private life as well as historical and community events. Of special interest are personal diaries written by children as young as ten and by adolescents.9 Documents bearing witness, ghetto and camp diaries, individual chronicles, and ghetto archives such as Ringelblum’s, known as the Oyneg Shabat archive, and the Łódz ghetto chronicle have been treated by scholars as part of a large cache of Holocaust testimonies, together with postwar testimonies collected in Poland and in European DP camps by the Central Committee of Polish Jews and its fifty subcommittees On Holocaust Diaries  |  365

and documentation centers from 1944 to 1948.10 The group includes Yizker-bikher (memorial books) and Yiddish poetry, as well as survivors’ memoirs.11 This all-inclusive classification has sometimes led to interpretive impasses, since personal diaries and testimonies employ different and conflicting generic expectations. Postwar interpretations questioned whether Jewish war diaries could be considered intimate, personal diaries or public, impersonal diaries and whether they fulfill the autobiographical function of dealing with the “self” of the diarist. Although Holocaust scribes were passionately committed to bearing witness, many Holocaust diaries also fulfilled the functions of a personal diary for their writers: the private and the public, the testimonial and the emotional, the personal and the communal—all were present. Nevertheless, interpreters have tended to focus on the testimonial, public aspects and to understate the private aspects of the personal diary. Private and personal experiences were relegated to the realm of overwhelming trauma and subsequently seen as usurped by the trauma and thus unavailable for interpretation. Yet the personal aspect of the diary needs to be further studied. This paper seeks to emphasize the personal aspect of the diary and the importance of these diaries for their writers. I submit that diarists wrote about what they thought was important for their survival and that their writing reflected their feelings, decisions, and actions. Moreover, there are ways to decode the emotions and experiences that they did not write about. When approaching Holocaust diary research, one must distinguish between diary texts written in real time and the critical works that have been written about them. In his book about soldiers’ testimonies in World War I, Leonard Smith commented that postwar protracted narratives are based on cultural work that has been done on the metanarrative of the war and the meaning that it took on after the war.12 Such is the case for interpretive works that followed the Holocaust, including Jewish war diaries, testimonies, and survivors’ memoirs. The very same critical literature is part of the cultural work on the metanarrative of the Holocaust that has been going on for the past seventy years.

A Short History of Scholarship on Holocaust Diaries Since the war, there have been several interpretive approaches in Holocaust diary research. Initially, these diaries were of interest primarily as historical sources of information about the war and as documents that could provide legal evidence in the war tribunals. Private details that were important to the diarist were simply dismissed. For example, the editors of the Hebrew edition of Kaplan’s diary commented, “Passages concerning C. A. Kaplan’s family, safely settled [in Israel] during the Holocaust 366 | The Diary

years, which are private in nature and without any historical significance, were dropped from the diary text.”13 In the 1980s, a second critical approach, that of James Young, considered diaries not as documents of necessarily objective facts but rather as the rendering of subjective perceptions and experiences of their writers, mediated by language, culture, religiosity, political stance, and even the tropes and structures of the narrative used. Such perceptions provided evidence in their mere existence and in their impact on subsequent actions of the writers.14 Young commented on attempts by scholars to sanctify Holocaust writings that use the experiences that victims and survivors wrote about as facts and as the referential core to which commentary (the interpretation) was appended.15 A third, similar approach was used some years later by Jacek Leociak, who sought to provide a “universal framework of images and language of cultural symbols” geared to “remove barriers between the diarist and the reader.” He selected various textual images that writers “must have seen through the window” in Warsaw—masses of people, death scenes, corpses—and described estrangement from a previously familiar environment, assembling diaries, memoirs, official documents, articles, and letters en masse to create a collective text.16 A fourth approach analyzed the uniqueness of diaries in comparison with memoirs and survivors’ testimonies.17 Yet the bulk of scholarship was related to survivors’ oral testimonies and memoirs.18 The representation and ethics of Holocaust narratives and scholarship were discussed by historians, philosophers, and literary critics into the 1990s and the 2000s.19 One example is Lawrence Langer’s refusal to find collective redemption or individual resolution or adventure-type narrative in any of the memoirs (and, by extension, diaries) of the Holocaust. Langer insists that readers or listeners cannot draw any meaning from them and that historians will never fully explain the Holocaust.20 In the 1990s, a fifth approach emerged, applying psychoanalytic theory and therapy of trauma and posttraumatic conditions to the analysis of survivors and their testimonies and memoirs. Psychiatrist Dori Laub interviewed survivors, stating that although victims wrote diaries and chronicles, took secret pictures, and escaped from camps to warn the world, these attempts to inform themselves and others were doomed because the necessary awareness and comprehension were beyond the human ability and willingness to grasp and transmit the events. Since assimilation and knowledge did not occur for the victims, only therapists and interviewers, by listening and validating the survivor’s experience, will elicit, via the repetition, the testimony of the traumatizing experience, becoming themselves secondary witnesses in the process.21 Establishing the victim’s subjectivity through another increases the ethical and interpretive authority of the listener. On Holocaust Diaries  |  367

The notion that the Holocaust was an event without witness was challenged by Sara Horowitz, who claims that the psychoanalytic model is not sufficient as an interpretive framework to analyze Holocaust testimonies, especially within the therapeutic paradigm, as it dismisses and trivializes all other forms of recording such as diaries and memoirs. 22 This clinical, therapeutic approach evolved further when it was used in literary analysis. The trauma—or, rather, posttrauma—explanations that began with postwar survivors’ interviews and memoirs were applied in the 2000s to diaries and chronicles written during the actual events.23 In examining two major Holocaust diaries—Chaim Kaplan’s and Victor Klemperer’s—Amos Goldberg argued that they depart from traditional notions of autobiographical narratives. The traumatic experience shutters and deconstructs the autobiographical autonomy of the individual self, the conceptual frameworks of linear life stories, and the linear organization of time, resulting in a collapse of the self and the person’s narrative identity through the breakdown of narrative time. In reading Kaplan’s diary, Goldberg proposed that the big “other,” the Nazi, substituted for a sadistic and arbitrary paternal, even godly, authority that replaced the law. The Nazi voice takes over the language and self-definition of the victim, and, in this sense, the subjective self and its life story collapse. Yet another, sixth approach analyzes the diaries as a historical-cultural phenomenon with important emotional undertones. This approach has two variations. The first is a chronologically based interpretation that distinguishes two periods in diary writing, using 1942 as the dividing line. That was the year when mass transports and mechanized murder were moving into full gear. Horowitz argued that before mid-1942, ghetto diarists described in detail individual, daily experiences, along with political and communal cultural experiences but that the later diaries were muted. And much like later Holocaust survivors’ memoirs, these diaries were unable to convey feelings and subjective experience.24 Alexandra Garbarini, who looked into Jews’ meaning-making in their diaries determined by the war period, claimed that until late 1942, Jews focused their diaries on what they saw as helpful for survival, on news from the front— even optimistic rumors. During this period, diary writing was therapeutic. After 1942, the diarists, informed about the extermination, became indifferent to the Allies’ victories, thought that future readers might not understand their experiences, sometimes lost their faith in God, and felt that writing was not an uplifting cultural activity but a duty. Writing did not help transcend reality and sustain a sense of identity; it ceased being therapeutic.25 The second variation (my own) is a study of relations between the language of writing employed by an anonymous diarist from the Łódz ghetto (Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and English) and thematic focus.26 It 368 | The Diary

also highlights the internal ethical conflict that motivated him to begin writing an intimate diary—in which he shared intense feelings—rather late in the war (May 5, 1944), even though he indicated that he knew about the mass exterminations and was skeptical about whether the Nazis would allow the remaining ghetto residents to live.

Testimonial Aspect Holocaust diaries are simultaneously personal diaries and testimonies. The power of the witness develops after the event. This bearing witness is the evidentiary part that keeps the past alive.27 The diarists who knew the limits of their perspective had to relegate some experiences to future readers and interpreters, hoping for understanding and justice. But personal experiences were harder to communicate and must be read on the writers’ terms. Some diarists, such as Fela Szeps, understood this concept: she realized that she needed time to gain perspective in order to describe the daily flow of her captivity, but she also knew that her deep, difficult feelings, an important part of her daily experiences, would be forgotten. So she started to write about past details of her captivity and present feelings and thoughts.28 Abraham Lewin was not as cognizant of the role that feelings played in his days during the great aktzia in the Warsaw ghetto.29 He was determined to write dispassionately about witnessing the Nazis’ murderous activities; but his entries from July 22, 1942, to January 16, 1943, were bursting with intense suffering.30 Bella Brodzki commented that first-person accounts of collective trauma, such as Holocaust narratives, test the autobiographical writing genres because they exceed the experiences of an individual life. Representing circumstances of war, repression, poverty, the struggle for survival, and people whose voices would otherwise not be heard, these accounts constitute language events with claim for truth and authenticity.31 Brodzki observes that three aspects of the testimony are in sync with the diary form in general, especially the Holocaust diary: the present-time orientation through the entries; the ties to death; and the importance of audience as a link in the narrative. Holocaust diaries, written in a present time, bear witness to the death of others and anticipate one’s own death. Brodzki addressed the reader’s perception of authenticity, authority, and immediacy but added that all testimonial narratives, including diaries, are mediated; each has its interpretive contexts and constraints: “The articulation . . . of personal consciousness under siege is . . . powerful and tragic . . . because it lacks the dimension of historical knowledge, and retrospective understanding, of distance. . . . It is the reader who provides the missing ending. . . . [Thus] more than any other kind of autobiographical expression, testimony needs an audience to fulfill itself.”32 On Holocaust Diaries  |  369

Needless to say, under the Nazi occupation, personal writing about oneself under such harsh oppression, as well as ideas about privacy and intimacy, changed. There was greater anonymity, a common fate, and no privacy. Intimacy and relations were destroyed. Leociak pointed out that writing itself becomes a manifestation of separateness and defiance under such conditions and that one speaks for others, not only for oneself. 33 The personalized discourse of the I now has obligations to history, a future reader, those who died, and those still alive. The frequent use of the first-person plural we in Holocaust diaries demonstrates a shift in emphasis away from the writing self, typical in a personal diary, and may be understood as an attempt to clarify the reality of the writer. The writer shows that such is the fate of a whole community. By showing the pervasiveness of the horrific reality of the writer’s life, the reader better understands the circumstances of the diarist. In addition, the use of we reduces some of the anxiety of the writer. The diarist does not have to deal directly with his or her own tragedy; moreover, in such situations, acknowledging the fate of others justifies writing about one’s own tragedy. One cannot ignore the fate of others. Yet the writing remains personal. Chaim Kaplan, for instance, was interested in documenting the life and realities of the Jewish community and the historical truth and saw his diary as an important historical document. In describing his life experiences, he knew that he projected the panorama of a whole period. That was a basic premise of his diary before, as well as during, the war. Yet for Kaplan—especially in the period after his decision not to immigrate to Palestine, as well as during the war—the diary itself became an extension of his person, a trusted friend.34 The study of Holocaust diaries needs to return the texts to their authors and try to understand what is unsaid and what is suppressed. The important role of the emotions accompanying any verbal communication (spoken or written), was discussed by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, who saw the emotional aspect as helping to determine the text’s meaning.35 In the rest of this chapter, I will discuss methods for accomplishing that goal, such as emphasizing the generic aspect of the diary in its own right, as a diary; studying the emotions and feelings of the diarist and accompanying themes; and examining changes that occurred in the process from diary manuscript to publication.

Diarists in Their Own Words When Does a Diary Begin? It is a given that diaries written during the war are different in their time orientation from survivors’ memoirs, which are written retrospectively about survival experiences. Every beginning has a context; so, we may 370 | The Diary

ask, when does the diary begin? The question arises when a certain amount of time passes between the experience and the writing about it, a lapse that researchers perceive as a deviation from the diary generic norm.36 Diary entries are usually not written as the events are occurring. In most cases, there are breaks between events, reflections about the events, and then writing. It is part of the writing process to postpone writing, to recall events of previous days and even to leave space for a more careful future recording of events for which there was no time or place to write. In wartime, postponement of writing may occur frequently because of conditions during the experienced events. A number of Holocaust diaries were written in hiding, after the diarist escaped the ghetto and crossed to the Aryan side. As a result, diarists wrote about events that had occurred in the recent past, but they were not able to begin writing about them until after they had escaped. These events, and possibly the diarists’ actions at the time, determined the location and existential state of mind of these diarists. For example, the diary of Calel Perechodnik, a Jewish policeman from the Otvock ghetto, was written while he was in hiding in Warsaw between May 7, 1943, and October 9, 1943. The diary contains an introductory presentation of the self and his personal history as well as the dated traumatic events during the aktzia in the ghetto during August 15–19, 1942. It also includes undated apologies and political analyses that Perechodnik probably wrote over a period of several days or weeks. Though some consider the text a memoir, its structure remains that of a diary: there are dated entries with details about his concerns and the state of his existence when he was writing. Naturally, individual idiosyncrasies exist among diarists involving the manner in which they choose to write. The poet Yitzhak Katzenelson’s diary that was written in the Vittel concentration camp between May 22 and September 16, 1943, was almost all about events that occurred in the ghetto during 1942–43 and earlier. Yet this diary reflected the overwhelming impact of these events on him during the time of writing. His inner struggle to work through his experiences, so that he could write his requiem for the murdered Jewish people determined his thoughts and feelings at the time of writing.37 A diary begins when “a series of dated traces attempt to capture the movement of time.”38

Entries and Silences: The Diary’s Time As opposed to the retrospective time perspective of the autobiography, the temporal dimension of the diary is the present, and its organizing principle is the passage of time. The diarist, lacking temporal distance and On Holocaust Diaries  |  371

perspective, cannot weigh the relative significance of the events that he records. The diary’s beginning and, more often, its end are arbitrary, and its completion does not derive from a resolution of its themes; each entry is a provisional ending.39 There is neither plot by design nor a story. Jennifer Sinor correctly pointed out that diary entries follow the principle of the pendulum: “an endless succession of measured . . . moments. Blank space in the diary replicated the minutes on the clock. . . . The diurnal form runs tick, tick, tick. . . . No beginning, no ending, just equal bits of time waiting to be filled.”40 This is why diarists often write about a day or a period that they skipped. After skipping seven days, Chaim Kaplan wrote, during a school vacation, “The diary has been neglected a little bit because of physical negligence and a bit from lack of material . . . a spiritual boredom” (April 21, 1935). About a month later, he wrote, after four days of silence, “My diary was silent for a few days, not because of lack of impressions; on the contrary, there is an abundance of impressions” (May 16, 1935).41 The Holocaust diary was not an ordinary diary. People could not depend on the continuous and predictable motion of the pendulum. Measurement of time became increasingly arbitrary, determined by Nazi actions, not the clock, and victims lived in constant fear that the next tick might not be heard. Avraham Golov (Tory), secretary of the Jewish council in the Kovno ghetto, wrote in his diary, “It is always like this in the ghetto; suddenly, everyone becomes morose, and an abyss without exit opens. But then, a message or a hint or a promise is received from a Gestapo man that, for the time being, nothing bad will happen to the [ghetto] residents, and they see it as a temporary relief.  .  . . Let there be quiet just for today, since tomorrow something can happen” (April 21, 1943). At that time, five thousand people had already been killed in Ponar.42 Emotions under Nazi occupation were intense, and the expression of feelings in writing became an important indicator of how people tried to manage their lives. Blank spaces in the diaries may have replicated the silence of unmanageable feelings rather than minutes on the clock. After not writing in his diary for two months, Katzenelson wrote, “Today, after two months, I continue to write in this notebook. .  .  . I stopped writing because I feared madness, that I would kill myself. . . . [Writing the play Hannibal did not help] in stopping the attacks of sorrowmadness. . . . Crying rivers and mourning over the irrevocable loss [of his wife and two of his three sons] . . . saved me!”43

Decoding Emotions Holocaust diaries, like all diaries, are characterized by thematic repetitions, time lapses, and a fragmented quality that stems from the form but also from the fact that the writing is allusive. Words and sentences 372 | The Diary

work as mnemonic signs for the diarist but not for the reader; thus, some things are left implicit. The writing is not constructed like a story but in a rhythm comprising repetition and variations of themes. It is measured by the frequency and length of entries per period.44 In other words, writing a diary does not have the final product as a goal. In analyzing a diary, we look at a process of variations in theme and pace, “the creation of thematic web and stylistic developments.”45 As the war began and they were forced into ghettos, Jews understood that unusual events were occurring. Diarists spoke determinedly about a daily life of hardships, hunger, starving children, their national identities, and cultural and communal activities.46 The young were concerned about their studies. Diarists wrote about writing in their diaries. Chaim Kaplan, like many diarists, wondered whether he would be able to cover all that there was to write about. He felt that to write truthfully and comprehensively, one needed to be a poet or someone who regularly interacted with Nazi authorities. But still, he was able to chronicle people’s suffering (October 17, 1940). The importance of the diary for diarists grew as the war progressed. Even when life became more difficult and Kaplan’s motivation to write diminished (November 26, 1940), a “hidden voice” forced him: “Record!” (December 16, 1940). His writing saved him from total despair. “The journal is my life, my friend and ally. I would be lost without it. . . . When my nerves are frayed and my blood is boiling, when I am . . . shaken by inner distress, I drag myself to my diary, and instantly, I am covered by the inspiration of a creative Shekhina—even though I doubt whether [this is “creation”; let others judge in the future]. The important thing is that I find spiritual peace here. And this is enough for me” (November 13, 1941).47 Diarists criticized their Jewish councils, the police, and the low morals and hygienic standards among Jews. They wrote in detail about family conflicts, work, war news, and rumors. Members of the Jewish councils, like Adam Czerniakow in the Warsaw ghetto and Avraham Tory in Kovno, wrote about interactions with the Gestapo. The Warsaw ghetto diary of Emanuel Ringelblum, in the first four months of the war (November is missing), contains seventy-four themes, along with subthemes (his diary, with its greater thematic detail, is not a typical ghetto diary). Themes that recur most often, with variations, include deportation and expulsion; movement into and within the city; Jewish property; organizations, such as Jewish councils and police as well as informal Jewish self-help and family organizations and Nazi organizations; relations with family members, children, Jewish officials, friends, and Poles; women; pregnancy; daily life; routine; and Nazi regulations. These themes fall into two main groups: attempts to adapt and somehow normalize life and the onslaught of Nazi terror, which broke On Holocaust Diaries  |  373

down such attempts. In the diaries, we find explicit and implicit traces of these attempts. Repeatedly, we find in the Holocaust diaries the tension between efforts to introduce some routine and organization into one’s life and the forced confrontation with increasingly sinister, unrelenting, unpredictably chaotic, and horrific personal, as well as witnessed, events.48 On November 17, 1939, David Sierakowiak wrote in the Łódz ghetto, “It is hard to get accustomed to persecution. . . . [We] are afraid of acts of harassment.” Yet on April 22, 1941, he wrote, “So I’ll go to school again. . . . There will finally be an end to the anarchy in my daily activities . . . and . . . to too much . . . depression.”49 An even more striking example is a diary entry (in English) of the aforementioned anonymous young man, less than a month before the liquidation of the same ghetto: Though I am quite unable to write, let alone concentrate my disturbed mind [so] as to be able to produce any literary description of what I feel at the present moment, I cannot forgo putting some scattered words upon paper. I have been in my only recreation place in my ghetto—at the old bookshop: a woman came in to buy a buckle for her rucksack that she is preparing for her exile. [She did not like the buckle and walked out.] Then the merchant uttered a few words that made me shiver and shudder all over: “She will not have to carry her rucksack a long time because those who go to heaven have no need for the like.” To say that this is unimaginable, indescribable, unspeakable, un . . . , un . . . , un . . . , et cetera is to have said nothing! Such terrible showers on the poor platforms of the human heart can be experienced only in modern ghettos (there is no proper plural indicated in non-Hitlerian grammar). (July 12, 1944)50

A bookstore was still operating in the ghetto, and people were purchasing items for deportation and seeking diversion. But as the youth attempted to forget, the shopkeeper uttered the unimaginable, causing him extreme anxiety. Even in the Greenberg labor camp, Fela Szeps wrote, “Here all goes as if usual, despite the strange things that happen here, and these strange events are accepted as if they are normal phenomena.”51 Monika Schwarz-Friesel analyzed the connection between, and verbalization of, cognitive and emotional processes as they appear under conditions of extreme suffering, fear, and humiliation in the diaries of Victor Klemperer and other Holocaust victims. She distinguished between emotions, of which the person may not be aware, and feelings expressed in writing, in order to study states of awareness and verbal coping strategies.52 Schwarz-Friesel found verbal indications of pain and suffering accompanied by a repressive mechanism that blocked the

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unbearable reality, using defense mechanisms such as repression, denial, and silence to limit the impact of deep emotions. Metaphors and the use of language that attempts to engender feeling and anchor a sense of normalcy—chronicling daily routines, juxtaposing hopelessness with hope, distancing oneself from the derailed reality and reports of apathy and frigidity toward others—function as defense mechanisms. SchwarzFriesel analyzed the “language of the victims,” documenting linguistically “the desperate attempt to cling to normal life, shifting moments of despair and fear of death mingled with hope and optimism, and the effort to keep and express normal life feelings, on the one hand and, on the other hand, the total emotional indifference in order to cope with the horror.”53 Distinguishing between emotions and feelings helps explain this state of emotional turmoil. One example is the diary entry on May 15, 1944, by the anonymous youth from the Łódz ghetto, where he commented on his own “inhumane” state of mind, where pangs of hunger were greater than the pain of losing his parents. He and a friend decide that “now we cannot feel the depth of the tragedy because our senses are all invested in the question of eating.”54 Such defense mechanisms had limits because the struggle was not only for physical survival but also for moral survival. In addition to horrors imposed from the outside, guilt and shame for one’s own actions or inaction often had a devastating impact. French psychoanalyst Rachel Rosenblum wrote about Holocaust survivors’ memoirs that revealed ambivalence for other victims and rekindled a sense of guilt so strong that it may have led to suicide, as in the cases of Primo Levi and Sarah Kofman.55 But such guilt was experienced earlier even during the war, by many Holocaust diarists. Calel Perechodnik is the most prominent example—a Jewish policeman who, after putting his wife and daughter on the train to the extermination camp, went into hiding. But then there was the anonymous diarist in the Łódz ghetto, whose diary was prompted, at least in part, by a moral failure and the guilt that drove him to begin to write. In the diary’s first entry, written in English on May 5, 1944, after eating his sister’s bread ration for the entire week, he wrote, “All I can say is that I shall always suffer on the remembrance of this ‘noble’ did [sic] of mine. And I shall always condemn myself.” Often, being in a humiliated victim’s position caused shame, guilt, and self-hate.

Ending the Diary A diary is written in the present but is oriented toward the future. Often the diarist has no control over the narrative and how it will end. Yet “all journal-writing assumes the intention to write at least one more time.”56

On Holocaust Diaries  |  375

For a dying person, writing in a diary is a shield against death57—even in instances where the diarist controls the moment of death. For example, Adolf Guttentag (1868–1942), a Jewish physician in Berlin, started a diary on August 22, 1942, in which he planned to write about his and his wife’s life, health, and plans. The diary was written for his son, Otto Guttentag, already in America at the time.58 When he and his wife received an evacuation number to Theresienstadt on September 19, Dr. Guttentag anticipated the end of the diary. And after the suicide of a relative threw him into a deep depression, he began to talk about ending his life on October 10. His handwriting becomes weak and jittery but later firms up again.59 On October 12, Guttentag was “visited” by the secret police, and his diary entry indicates that he finalized a decision to commit suicide. On October 12, he wrote, “Our lives are complete. We had imagined it all differently, but that was not to be. That Muti could not have a beautiful service with music is very painful to me. Life was happy and beautiful . . . Vati.” Two additional entries are scrawled over the next two pages. The exact time of the entries is not known. They might have been written on October 12 or later: “On August October 16, the . . . physician Dr. A. Guttentag died. He had a happy and good life. Dr. Adolf Guttentag. On October 16, the physician Dr. Adolf Guttentag died. He had a happy and good life. Announcements are to be sent, sealed to . . . letters.” Guttentag finished his diary at this point two or three times; it was a parting ceremony. He first eulogized the end of his wife’s life, but it was very difficult for him to acknowledge his own death. He still could not relinquish the shield of writing. He wanted to add to the positive onesentence summary of his life a statement about his presence after death. This ending has both perseverance and resignation. For Holocaust diarists, even when their situation was hopeless, they always hoped to survive. Diary writing became a form of perseverance.60 Philippe Lejeune wrote, “In contrast to the end of one individual life is the fact that the species continues; their reading will connect them to your agony. While I am writing, I survive. And then, as my body selfdestructs, I reconstruct myself in writing by noting this destruction. I who suffer become active again. I get the upper hand. This mastery is not imaginary, even if it does not spare me from death. Lucidity. Black comedy. Self-image intact. Perhaps a diary sometimes helps you to ‘die well,’ the way religion used to do.”61 These dynamics apply to several Holocaust diaries—for example, the Łódz diary of David Sierakowiak, who died from hunger in the Łódz ghetto, and the Greenberg laborcamp diary of Fela Szeps, who held on until the end of the war but perished in an American hospital on liberation, weighing less than sixty-six pounds.

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From Manuscript to Book A scholarly publication of a diary requires scientific tools similar to those used in analyzing any primary text. Often, when editors prepare diary manuscripts for publication, they unfortunately do not adhere to this principle; they often cut complete sections for literary, economical, or other reasons, thus altering the meaning of entries. For example, in the Hebrew edition of Chaim Kaplan’s diary, Megilat yisurin yoman ghetto varsha, the period between April 4, 1941, and May 3, 1942, is missing; it is, however, not lost but available in the Moreshet archive. Similarly, in the English editions of the same diary, notebook 10 (April 3, 1941, to October 8, 1941) is missing; yet its original manuscript is readily available in the Z   ydowski Instytut Historyczny archive in Warsaw and digitally in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Furthermore, many entries found in its English version are abridged or changed in translation. Such editorial infidelities have also occurred in the published versions of other Holocaust diaries. For example, Victor Klemperer’s diary has been significantly abridged in its original German and in its English editions. If the manuscript is abridged for publication, the criteria of selection and the size of sections that were removed, along with their location and their content, should be specified by editors. When a manuscript is altered by diarists themselves, a comparison between the earlier and later versions could be instructive, illuminating changes in the diarist’s life circumstances and altered goals, as well as revised perspectives. Anne Frank began to make changes in her diary during the war, after she realized that it had publication potential. After the war, her father made alterations for the published edition. Any such editorial changes, by the diarist or by the diary’s executor, deserve careful consideration. In the transformation process of the Holocaust diary from manuscript to print, it is necessary to preserve the integrity of the original text, respecting the diarists and their words. Notes 1. Emanuel Ringelblum, in Last Writings and Polish-Jewish Relations, January 1943–April 1944 [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1944), wrote about diary writing in the Warsaw ghetto, “In this war, everybody wrote and, in particular, kept diaries” (19). Women with children rarely wrote, according to Amos Goldberg, in a personal communication. 2. Marcus Moseley, “Life, Literature: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 3, (2001): 27–29. 3. Ringelblum, Last Writings, 19: “Most of these diaries were destroyed during the great deportation. . . . Hundreds of diaries were lost.” Major archives in Israel: Ghetto Fighters’ House, Moreshet archives (Givat Haviva),

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Yad Vashem archives (Jerusalem); in the United States: YIVO archives (New York), USHMM (Washington, DC); in Poland: Z   IH (Z   ydowski Instytut Historyczny, Warsaw). For lists of published diaries, see the bibliography in James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 207–9. For a list of unpublished and published diaries, see Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 227–32. For a list of diaries in private hands, see Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), appendixes. 4. Israel Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 1:371. 5. Yitzhok Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943, trans. Percy Matenko (Israel: Ghetto Fighters’ House and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1973), appendix C, 148. 6. Malik Allam and Philippe Lejeune, Journaux intimes: Une sociologie de l’écriture personnelle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), 121–23. 7. Jacek Leociak, “Why Did They Write?,” in Text in the Face of Destruction: Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto Reconsidered, trans. Emma Harris (Warsaw: Z   ydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2004), 77–104. 8. Garbarini, Numbered Days, 11–12. 9. For diaries, abridged in some cases, and a list of diaries of children and youth, see Laurel Holliday, Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries (New York: Washington Square, 1955); Zapruder, Salvaged Pages, appendix 1 (list of sixty-four diaries), 425–50. 10. Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 11. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 12. Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimonies of the Great War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 185. 13. C. A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: Hebrew Diary of Ch. A. Kaplan, Written in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1 September 1939–4 August 1942 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1966), 29. 14. James E. Young, “On Reading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs,” in Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 15–39. 15. Ibid., 21–22. 16. Leociak, “Searching for Formula,” in Text in the Face of Destruction, 11–26. 17. Barbara Foley, “Facts, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives,” Comparative Literature 34, no. 4 (1982): 330–44; Sara R. Horowitz, “Voices from the Killing Ground,” in Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 47–69. 18. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

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19. Important examples of interdisciplinary dialogues about appropriate representations of the Holocaust can be found in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 20. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies. 21. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 80–85. 22. Sara Horowitz, “Rethinking Holocaust Testimony: The Making and Unmaking of the Witness,” Cardozo Studies Law and Literature 4, no. 1 (1992): 45–68. 23. Amos Goldberg, “The Helpless ‘I’: Diary Writing during the Holocaust” [in Hebrew] (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004). The dissertation was later published in Amos Goldberg, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 24. Horowitz, Voicing the Void, 47–70. 25. Garbarini, Numbered Days. 26. Batsheva Ben-Amos, “A Multilingual Diary from the Łódz Ghetto,” Gal-Ed: On the History of Polish Jewry 19 (2004): 51–74. 27. Smith, Embattled Self, 196–97. 28. A similar pattern in other texts is reported by Garbarini, Numbered Days, 146. 29. The great aktzia (from the German Aktion, operation) was the round-up of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in the summer of 1942 for transport to the extermination camp Treblinka. 30. Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 135–242. 31. Bella Brodzki, “Testimony,” in Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, ed. Margaretta Jolly (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), 870–72. 32. Ibid., 871. 33. Leociak, Text in the Face of Destruction, 111. 34. Batsheva Ben-Amos, “The Dialogical Dimension in the Diary of Chaim Kaplan: 1935–1942,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 13 (2019): 1–36. 35. M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 84–88. 36. Garbarini, Numbered Days, 16. 37. Yitzhak Katzenelson, “Vittel Diary,” in Last Writings in the Warsaw Ghetto and Camp Vittel [in Hebrew] (Israel: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1988). 38. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. Katherine Durnin (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 179. 39. Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 111–13. 40. Jennifer Sinor, “Reading the Ordinary Diary,” Rhetoric Review 21, no. 2 (2002): 123–49. 41. Kaplan, USHMM, R6-02.208.

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42. Avraham Tory, Ghetto Everyday: Diary and Documents from the Kovno Ghetto [in Hebrew], ed. Dina Porat, 2nd ed. (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1992), 253. 43. Katzenelson, “Vittel Diary,” 30. 44. Lejeune, On Diary, 178–81. 45. Philippe Lejeune, “Genetic Studies of Life Writing,” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 25, no. 2 (2010): 168. 46. For discussions of themes covered by ghetto diarists, see Horowitz, Voicing the Void, 54–55, and Garbarini, Numbered Days, 58–128. 47. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 278. (In the Hebrew edition, 1941 has entries only up to April 3, and then they continue from May 3, 1942; the English edition picks up entries from October 8, 1941, the first missing months in 1942 through the end of the diary.) 48. Monika Schwarz-Friesel, “Giving Horror a Name: Verbal Manifestations of Despair, Fear, and Anxiety in Texts of Holocaust Victims and Survivors,” in Emotion in Language Theory, ed. Ulrike M. Lüdtke (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015), 289–303. The author relies on research of the language of victims subjected to extreme circumstances of degradation and elimination. 49. Alan Adelson, ed., The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódz Ghetto, trans. Kamil Turowski (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 83. 50. Yad Vashem archives, 033/1032, July 12, 1944, entry by an anonymous young man from the Łódz ghetto. 51. Fela Szeps, A Blaze from Within [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002), 23. 52. Schwarz-Friesel, “Giving Horror a Name,” 292–95. 53. Ibid., 289. 54. Ben-Amos, “Multilingual Diary,” 68. 55. Rachel Rosenblum, “Distancing Emotions: Surviving the Account of Catastrophe,” Passions in Context: International Journal for the History of Emotions 2 (2011): 119–50. 56. Philippe Lejeune, “How Do Diaries End?,” in On Diary, 190. 57. Ibid., 189. 58. USHMM archive, Guttentag Erika Collection, 2001.42. 59. This was a comment by his daughter-in-law, Erika Guttentag, who delivered the diary to the USHMM after her husband’s death. 60. Writing about endings of diaries, Lejeune discusses the tension between perseverance and resignation; see Lejeune, “How Do Diaries End?,” 197–200. 61. Ibid., 197.

Bibliography Archival Collections United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Washington, DC. Guttentag Erika Collection, 2001.42. ———. Kaplan, Chaim, R6-02.208. Yad Vashem. Jerusalem. 033/1032.

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Published Texts Adelson, Alan, ed. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódz Ghetto. Translated by Kamil Turowski. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Allam, Malik, and Philippe Lejeune. Journaux intimes: Une sociologie de l’écriture personnelle. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Ben-Amos, Batsheva. “A Multilingual Diary from the Łódz Ghetto.” Gal-Ed: On the History of Polish Jewry 19 (2004): 51–74. ———. “The Dialogical Dimension in the Diary of Chaim Kaplan: 1935– 1942.” European Journal of Jewish Studies 13 (2019): 1–36. Brodzki, Bella. “Testimony.” In Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, edited by Margaretta Jolly, 870–72. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. Des Pres, Terrence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Foley, Barbara. “Facts, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives.” Comparative Literature 34, no. 4 (1982): 330–44. Friedlander, Saul, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Garbarini, Alexandra. Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Goldberg, Amos. “The Helpless ‘I’: Diary Writing during the Holocaust.” [In Hebrew.] PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004. ———. Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Gutman, Israel, ed. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Vol. 1. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Hartman, Geoffrey H., ed. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. ———. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Holliday, Laurel. Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries. New York: Washington Square, 1955. Horowitz, Sara R. “Rethinking Holocaust Testimony: The Making and Unmaking of the Witness.” Cardozo Studies Law and Literature 4, no. 1 (1992): 45–68. ———.“Voices from the Killing Ground.” In Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, 47–69. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Jockusch, Laura. Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Kaplan, C. A. Scroll of Agony: Hebrew Diary of Ch. A. Kaplan, Written in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1 September 1939–4 August 1942. [In Hebrew.] Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1966.

On Holocaust Diaries  |  381

Katzenelson, Yitzhak. “Vittel Diary.” In Last Writings in the Warsaw Ghetto and Camp Vittel. [In Hebrew.] Israel: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1988. Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Lejeune, Philippe. “Genetic Studies of Life Writing.” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 25, no. 2 (2010): 168. ———. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Translated by Katherine Durnin. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. Leociak, Jacek. Text in the Face of Destruction: Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto Reconsidered. Translated by Emma Harris. Warsaw: Z   ydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2004. Lewin, Abraham. A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Moseley, Marcus. Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. ———. “Life, Literature: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland.” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 3 (2001): 27–29. Ringelblum, Emanuel. Last Writings and Polish-Jewish Relations, January 1943–April 1944. [In Hebrew.] Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1944. Rosenblum, Rachel. “Distancing Emotions: Surviving the Account of Catastrophe.” Passions in Context: International Journal for the History of Emotions 2 (2011): 119–50. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Rudashevski, Yitzhok. The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943. Translated by Percy Matenko. Israel: Ghetto Fighters’ House and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1973. Schwarz-Friesel, Monika. “Giving Horror a Name: Verbal Manifestations of Despair, Fear, and Anxiety in Texts of Holocaust Victims and Survivors.” In Emotion in Language Theory, edited by Ulrike M. Lüdtke, 289–303. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Sinor, Jennifer. “Reading the Ordinary Diary.” Rhetoric Review 21, no. 2 (2002): 123–49. Smith, Leonard V. The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimonies of the Great War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Szeps, Fela. A Blaze from Within. [In Hebrew.] Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002. Tory, Avraham. Ghetto Everyday: Diary and Documents from the Kovno Ghetto. [In Hebrew.] Edited by Dina Porat. 2nd ed. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1992. Wieviorka, Annette. The Era of the Witness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Young, James E. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Zapruder, Alexandra, ed. Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

BAT S H E VA B E N -A MO S is Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Comparative Literature and the College of Professional and Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a practicing clinician and has written about Holocaust diaries. 382 | The Diary

22 Estonian Women’s Deportation Diaries Leena Kurvet-Käosaar

The first preserved entry in the diary of Erna Nagel, an Estonian woman, who, on June 14, 1941, was deported together with her parents during the first wave of Soviet mass deportations from the Baltics, reads: July 6th, early in the morning—We receive an order to move out of the boxcars, we have reached the River Ob. A huge waiting lounge of the barge that is like a floating house awaits us. Novosibirsk. We struggle to carry our luggage and pay huge fees to the porters, 3–6 rubles for a piece. Some [people] are wearing beach attire and beautiful fashionable coats. With my big boots and old coat I feel like a young kolkhoznik. The barge is big. We are taken down to the furnace rooms. The floor here is dirty. In the evening we move up to the cabins with old Mrs. Simbirskaja and I sleep very well.1

Erna was twenty-seven years old and a student of the faculty of philosophy at Tartu University. Her father was sent to a labor camp, and after a monthlong journey, Erna and her mother ended up in the remote resettlement village of Bondarka near Kargassok in Siberia, approximately five thousand kilometers from their home in the vicinity of the city of Tartu. The diary covers Erna Nagel’s life with relative regularity from July 6, 1941, to January 22, 1945. On January 23, 1945, Erna was assigned to forestry work, caught under a falling tree, and instantly killed. Little is known about what happened to the diary after her death. More than half a century later, Erna’s papers, including her diary, were sent by Siberian Estonians to Erna’s only surviving relative, her brother, Karl Nagel.2 In 2007, the diary was published by a small independent press, titled Erna  383

Nageli päevik: Olen kui päike ja tuul (The diary of Erna Nagel: I am like the sun and the wind). In addition to all surviving diary entries, the published diary contains letters from Erna’s father from the labor camp, letters by Erna and her mother to their relatives in Estonia, Erna’s letter to her brother giving an account of their mother’s death on July 12, 1944, and a short letter by Erna’s best friend, Hilda Põltsamaa, notifying Karl Nagel of Erna’s death. Documenting in detail the harsh daily life in a remote Siberian village, the struggle to fulfill the unrealistic work quota on which her family’s food rations depended, the constant hunger and poor health caused by those quotas and the climate, the longing for her homeland and family members, and most importantly, the author’s moods and reflection on her situation, which she often referred to in terms of imprisonment, the diary is a powerful record of one woman’s resistance to the regime’s repressions and an efficient means of coping with the trauma of deportation. As it was forbidden by the Soviet authorities to make any record of the deportee life, Erna’s decision to keep a diary in itself can be viewed as resistance to the regime. On the one hand, the author’s ironic comments about the organization of deportee life and her detailed descriptions of nonsensical work chores that had to be carried out with no proper equipment or attire; the suffering of the deportees from hunger, cold, and extreme poverty; and the gradual wearing out of mental and physical resources can be summed up as quite straightforward criticism of the regime’s operation. On the other, the diary’s sense of selfirony and humor, the author’s reflections on the resourcefulness of herself and the deportee community as a whole in coping with their lives, and a focus not only on the harshness of life but on its enjoyable moments and small celebrations can also be viewed as proof resistance in terms of preservation of human dignity and moral fiber. In turn, this highlights the value of diary keeping as a practice—a way of life—that in extreme conditions can become an important means of survival.

Testimonial Contexts of the Diary Life stories reflecting the systemic repression of the Soviet regime and its effects on the repressed people and their families, including the two waves of deportations in the Baltic states, in 1941 and 1949, are archived in the life story archive in the Estonian Literary Museum. 3 The archive was started in the late 1980s, when different forms of mediation of the Soviet regime became an important public aspect of the process of regaining independence and reconceptualizing the past. Today, the life story archive contains over four thousand personal narratives accumulated in response to over twenty public requests issued by the Estonian Literary Museum and the Estonian Life Stories Association. Personal experience 384 | The Diary

of the Soviet regime has been the main focus of several life story calls, in particular in the mid-1990s, but other life stories that touch on related topics have also been submitted outside the framework of a specific call. Deportations do not constitute the only aspect of the repressive nature of the Soviet regime, yet due to its extensive scope, the reflections of this experience have assumed a particular role in the cultural memory of the Soviet period, attesting to the terror, which “during Stalin’s reign, . . . reached a scale which scarcely left any family untouched.”4 Deportation stories, the majority of which have been retrospectively recorded in the early to mid-1990s, highlight the large-scale destructive effects of the Soviet regime while also demonstrating a capacity for individual and national survival in the face of harsh experiences. In the introduction, the diary of Erna Nagel is described as “an elegy that via the record of the life of one person provides an authentic account of the harsh fate of thousands of Estonians deported to ‘the cold country.’”5 Such an account highlights the testimonial value of the diary, presenting it simultaneously as a unique document (since few immediate records of deportation have been preserved) and as a representation of the fate Estonia and its people during Soviet occupation as a whole, including those who—like Erna Nagel—did not survive. By first observing cultural and historical contexts of the diary as well as different critical considerations of the diary genre itself, I will analyze the function of the diary as a mechanism for coping with the extreme experience of deportation. Nancy Miller and Jason Tougaw, who considered the Holocaust as “the focus of a great deal of contemporary thinking and writing about the nature of extreme experience,” argued that it “has produced a discourse—a set of terms and debates about the nature of trauma, testimony, witness and community—that has affected other domains of meditation on the forms of the representation [that] extreme human suffering seems to engender and require.”6 Scholars working on the Stalinist repressions and the Gulag have also argued for the need of discourses and methodologies that would cater to the specificity of traumatic experience in the case of Soviet totalitarianism, taking into account the “substantially different order” of the Gulag, its extensive duration, and “the long-term affective states purposefully and masterfully engendered by [Soviet] totalitarianism in its particular historical forms.”7 For Tzvetan Todorov, both “the Nazi lagers and the Soviet gulags . . . represent the extreme of the totalitarian regime: they are its quintessence, its most intense and concentrated manifestation” that, however, assume a particular importance “for the truths they reveal about ordinary circumstances.”8 The Soviet repressive measure of deportation, “the banishment of people from their places of permanent residence to fixed locations under the control of a security apparatus” followed a different order of Estonian Women’s Deportation Diaries  |  385

organization from that of the camp system.9 Marking an abrupt break with normal everyday life in its most basic manifestations, a dissolution of one’s identity as a citizen, and the destruction of immediate familiar and familial community, the deportations entailed equally harsh living and working conditions, resulting in particularly high mortality rates for those deported from the Baltic states in 1941. Erna Nagel’s diary, which provides an insider’s account of the everyday lives of deportees over a period of two and a half years, can be considered a unique document of high cultural and historical value. The diary unveils the struggles faced by deportees in a detailed and nuanced manner: the traumatic loss of structure, organization, and everyday expectations of a normal life within a matter of hours; the lack of resources necessary to meet minimum human requirements, such as shelter, clothing, and nutrition; and the pervasive feeling of fear and insecurity about the future. 10 The entries also offer proof that the diary functioned as a site of endurance for its author, as she withstood the harsh living conditions and resisted the ideology of the regime, which viewed the deportees as enemies of the people and a cheap source of labor worthy only of minimal upkeep. Although the first entries of Erna Nagel’s deportation diary have not been preserved, the first entry from July 6, 1941, demonstrates Nagel’s tenacity and composure as she handles her current situation with selfreflection, awareness, and humor. In fact, apart from references to settling down in the furnace room of the barge, the description of the beginning of the journey with the author complaining of preposterous porter fees and reflecting critically on her outfit reads more like a regular travel journal. Although Nagel had no knowledge at this point of the kind of life she would lead, its duration, or its ultimate consequences, the entry offers an example of the capacity of the diary genre to function as a site for coping with and fighting against the trauma and shock of deportation. In most retrospectively recorded deportation narratives, the description of the deportation journey assumes a central role in testifying to the repressive nature of the Soviet regime. Details of the deportation journey included in the narratives—the sometimes months-long journey in cattle carts, unbearably hot and crammed full of people, with insufficient food and water and lacking the most basic sanitary conditions and, before that, the dramatic life change that the deportees experienced in the matter of few hours—make the journey to Siberia an important thematic focus of the depiction of deportation as a violent, inhumane, and unjust repressive measure of the Stalinist regime. Erna Nagel’s diary contains altogether seven diary entries written during the deportation journey that do not reflect on the moment of deportation or the first weeks of the journey in cattle carts toward the deportation location. However, in the preserved entries that do focus on the journey, expressions of grief, anger, and 386 | The Diary

homesickness alternate with appreciation of local views and the pleasure of simple amenities as well as comments of the situation filled with ironic humor: We are still continuing our journey toward Tomsk. . . . I am angry, my eye hurts, tears run down my cheeks, soldiers yell at us. . . . We are leaving when it’s already dark and the moon is out. A huge disk of moon casts its light over the slum dwellings—how romantic this is!11 Isn’t my life here, far out in Siberia, like a fairy tale!12

Physical Materiality of the Deportation Diary Diaries are often written in relatively stable everyday life circumstances that take for granted certain temporal, spatial, and material conditions for pursuing the practice. Diaries recording the deportation experience are taken up or pursued in conditions characterized by a crucial loss of the most basic material and psychological criteria of stability of everyday life, which extends to the material form of the diary. According to the foreword, Erna Nagel’s diary was written with pencil in small, extremely dense handwriting in thin checkered notebooks that made its transcription an extensive task that could be carried out only with the help of a magnifying glass.13 Philippe Lejeune proposed that the selection of the notebook as the physical medium of the diary can be viewed as “a sort of life insurance [that is] not only a guarantee of unity [of life] but also of duration” and the use of loose pages can point to a wish to highlight discontinuity.14 As a deportee, Erna Nagel lived in conditions of extreme poverty and had no access to the proper clothing needed in harsh climatic conditions, tools, cookware, or furniture. Thin checkered notebooks were most probably the only choice of stationery available to Nagel, in itself “emblematic of . . . the way diarists [in Stalin’s era] were jolted from orderly lives into a state of impoverishment and violent upheaval.”15 Although few Estonian deportation diary manuscripts are available for research in the archives, some information is available about diaries and other written records kept during deportation. Many were written on whatever material was available, including in the margins and the spaces between the lines of books, newspapers, letters, random scraps of paper, envelopes, and sometimes even official documents. As keeping any record of deportee experience was forbidden, the use of such mediums may have made it easier to hide such records from the authorities. Nagel’s ability to keep her diary in a notebook can be considered a small luxury that, in the midst of such uncertainty and upheaval, may well have fashioned a sense of continuity for her in her life. It may also indicate that Erna did not fear going against regulations forbidding the keeping of any written record of Estonian Women’s Deportation Diaries  |  387

deportee life and, if discovered by authorities, was prepared to face the consequences. As far as can be deduced from the diary, Erna made no effort to hide it from her fellow deportees or even from the local people with whom they shared their modest living space in a tiny hut. There is also no record indicating she faced any issues with the authorities. The physical materiality of Erna Nagel’s diary is important from yet another perspective: it brings into focus its status and distinct history as a material object, functioning in culture as a “testimonial object,” a term introduced by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer referring to “material remnants” of the Holocaust that “carry memory traces from the past . . . but . . . also embody the very process of its transmission.”16 As a testimonial object, the diary manuscript that Erna’s brother Karl Nagel received more than half a century after his sister’s death is material proof of her day-to-day existence, with its last entry on January 22, 1945, marking the end of both the diary and her life. The reader of the published diary receives factual confirmation of this through the inclusion of the letter by Erna Nagel’s friend Hilda Põltsamaa to Karl Nagel, notifying him of Erna’s death. Hilda’s beautiful commemoration of Erna’s life offers closure and consolation for the reader of the published diary. Hilda’s letter reminds the reader that in its literal meaning, survivor cannot describe Erna Nagel. Her diary, however, with its display of Erna’s rebellious, even mischievous spirit and endless optimism in the face of adversity, is a record of her survival, year after year. Although quite a few of Erna’s diary entries illuminate the traumatic impact of deportation on her—harsh workloads, constant hunger, the bitter mourning of her mother’s death, and acute homesickness—no entry even so much as implies the possibility of giving up, of not being able to cope, of not surviving. Erna Nagel’s bodily fate is represented from the outset with the information in the foreword and concluded with Hilda Põltsamaa’s final letter, but the representations found there do not extend to or embody the many diary entries that so memorably testify Erna’s will to survive—and her ultimate survival within the textual sphere.

A Site for Facilitating the Future For Erna to resist her situation, the diary functions as a site where “one’s sense of being a self, with an autonomous and significant identity” is (textually) sustained,17 first and foremost accomplished through the listing of trivial thoughts and mundane daily activities. “But I shall go on writing,” declared Victor Klemperer in his diary documenting the daily life of Jews under the Nazi terror, “that is my heroism. I will bear witness, precise witness!”18 Erna Nagel never discusses the purpose of keeping a diary other than simply to carry on with a habit from her 388 | The Diary

predeportation life, nor does she dwell on the act of writing or contemplate the possible future readership of the diary.19 “This is how I subsist here; I eat, and then think about what to eat. Once my stomach is full, I think about what to eat tomorrow and then I want to sleep—this way one needs to think less,” she wrote on July 13, 1941, approximately one month after her deportation. 20 This entry seems almost self-conscious and doubtlessly ironic in highlighting her engagement with the diary as a self-indulgent practice, “caught in the banality of everyday existence.”21 Erna’s existence is reduced to concerns of satisfying basic physical needs for nutrition and rest at a moment when there is (as yet) no shortage of either. However, in another entry from September 1942, Erna reassessed the status of herself and her identity, this time with more overt political connotations: “Is this really me, this creature who eats, drinks, sleeps, is forced to slave away and is numb to all other thoughts and feelings?”22 This entry directly connects her mode of self-presentation and frame of mind with the context of her life dominated by a struggle to meet work quotas to earn minimal food rations. Although Erna cannot subsist beyond the framework of the labor requirements, Erna’s diary highlights her sustained effort to resist these requirements and their effects on deportees, such as exhaustion and death. The diary entries show how Erna uses every possibility to avoid the most excruciating work tasks or invents pastimes and activities that she enjoys, which help her maintain her physical and mental health. This can be viewed as her way of refusing to be defined by the repressive regulations of the regime, of “retain[ing] the freedom to choose autonomously one’s attitude to extreme conditions,” which for Tzvetan Todorov can be viewed as an “act of ordinary virtue” attesting that the continuation of moral life in the extreme is an essential component of humanity.23 The entry from November 18, 1941, provides a detailed overview of the chaotic, unsystematic manner in which the deportees are assigned different tasks: “In the morning a woman tells me that I need to join the haymakers. How so? I get upset. I was harvesting the potatoes. . . . I take my bucket and head to the Põltsamaas. When I pass the office, I hear that I am expected to make hay. . . . Why am assigned to a new task every day? . . . [But] if I still go harvesting potatoes [the authorities] would not count it as work anyway. I am upset and return home, deciding never to work anywhere ever again.”24 In reality, Erna would not be able to manage without working in the kolkhoz as number of workdays and fulfilling the quota for different tasks is the basis of food distribution to the deportees. Yet she also often enjoys working, in particular in the same brigade with her friend Hilda Põltsamaa and her mother, and she gets along quite well with several local authorities who are sympathetic to the Estonian Women’s Deportation Diaries  |  389

condition of the deportees and try to assign them to easier tasks where more nutritious lunches are provided during the workday. The deportees were not given any free days—they were supposed to work seven days a week. Sometimes, however, Erna managed to take an occasional holiday without getting into trouble with the authorities. On October 12, 1941, a Sunday, she and her mother “invented” a religious holiday that required them to stay at home and pray, and they even managed to convince the authorities (who may secretly have practiced religion themselves) that they should be relieved from work duties on that day. “I am quite calm and even happy,” Erna wrote. “How can anyone be happy in prison? But don’t even think about it . . . the sun is shining and I feel so good. Today I feel . . . as if I am the sun and the wind. I am one with all the hope, joy and suffering of this world.”25 Erna’s self-ironic remarks about her food and sleep-centric concerns do not aim to highlight these themes per se but rather function to draw attention to the abrupt and limiting changes in her life that used to be filled with issues concerning her studies, burgeoning social life, and romantic interests. In a diary entry from July 17, 1941, Erna recounted a meeting where the local authorities inquired about the agricultural and industrial skills of the deportees. “I have graduated from the faculty of philosophy,” she noted ironically.26 In another entry from October 1942, Erna nostalgically reminisced about her life back home: “My dear Tartu, the town where I used to live, heart full of joy, sometimes full of sadness, [where] I was unhappy in such a happy life. How trivial all this seems now!”27 Although Erna expressed hope of being able to return home soon, the first sections of her (preserved) diary indicate that she also feared that her departure—and all its substantial associations—may be irreversible. Recording the meals she and her mother eat each day seems to be a welcome distraction, keeping her thoughts from more serious matters. In a diary entry from July 28, 1941, Erna recorded a nightmare: “I am in some kind of cave and suddenly the ceiling and the walls start crumbing. I cry for help! I can still see some light. . . . I sit on my bed and look out the window. My mother has her arms around me and says that I cried in my sleep. I wake up completely and realize I’m in our room. That’s the dream I had.”28 The diary entry offers no further comments about the nightmare but ends with a casual remark: “We had fried fish for dinner. In the evening I will buy two fresh cucumbers.”29 On July 30, after an even more detailed description of her meals, she added in an almost humorous tone, “I just hang around and dream of delicious dishes.”30 According to Irina Paperno, who has conducted an extensive study of dreams and nightmares in life writings during the Stalinist period in Russia, such dreams, political in essence, offer insights into “what one knows or fears without being fully aware and what defies 390 | The Diary

control.”31 One may interpret Erna’s nightmare as having been triggered by fear of an unknown future, one that is soon determined when, according to the diary, only a few days later, she and her mother are forced to sign a document that sentences them to their deportation location for twenty years. Descriptions of meals are a textual means of diverting her attention from the overwhelming and unmanageable questions of her future life to the comparatively more trivial (at least at this point) details of her daily routine and both the real and imaginary enjoyment it can bring her. Despite the twenty-year sentence, Erna’s entries continue to express, until the diary’s end, her hope of returning home in the near future. When hunger gradually sets in toward the end of 1941, securing food, often by exchanging personal items with local people who dictate the terms of these exchanges, and its rationing through culinary resourcefulness become central themes in her diary.32 When hunger becomes a constant struggle, her diary endures as an important textual site of coping with it: the detailed records of each bite she and her mother take can be viewed as textual confirmation of not surrendering to hunger and a means of keeping up her spirits. Yet the word hunger itself appears only once in the diary. On February 27, 1942, Erna was suddenly overwhelmed by a foreboding of a dark future: “We need potatoes; there is not enough bread—and what is 200 grams a day? I fall on my knees and pray. What if my dear mother dies? Something haunts the stove, hunger perhaps? Could it be that our real torment is only about to begin?”33 As Erna’s mother was too frail to fulfill the excruciating work tasks assigned by the local authorities, Erna became the main breadwinner of their household, quite literally, as bread was the most cherished and highly valued food product and one to which they would have no access without work. For shorter periods, Erna’s mother also worked, sometimes assisting Erna, sometimes standing in for her, sometimes fulfilling extra tasks, so that between the two of them they managed enough to secure some food rations. The following description of Erna, her mother, and Erna’s friend Hilda from March 1943, a little more than one year before Erna’s mother’s death, sums up Erna’s perspective on her life: “Every morning with the first sun, our ‘trio’ sets off to work in the forest, Hilda with an ax stuck to her belt, me with a long saw across the shoulder, and my mother wearing big birchbark shoes, . . . [with] one flap of her fur cap slightly higher than the other, my mother comically resembles Mickie Mouse. Staved off from its right track, our life is both comic and tragic, but we still willingly go to the forest, because the stomach, the monarch of Siberia, demands its share.”34 This entry offers a good example of Erna’s “daily heroism,” ranging from nuanced poetic descriptions of Siberian nature and nostalgic recollections of her life back home to witty self-irony and dark humor. Her diary is a site for the development and realization of a Estonian Women’s Deportation Diaries  |  391

strategy to distance herself from her immediate contexts, thus allowing her to maintain an individual and autonomous selfhood that resists a repressive system determined to destroy autonomy.35 It can be found in the eloquent mediation of her daily experience, from humorous to absurd anecdotes of her ineffective attempts to fulfill different agricultural tasks she has been assigned by the authorities of the kolkhoz; in her resourcefulness in procuring food products and culinary inventiveness in the face of hunger; and in her enjoyment of her last pretty clothes, the celebration of holidays, and even the slight flirting with some of her more likeable superiors. As Philippe Lejeune’s assertion reminds us, “the diary is first and foremost an activity. Keeping a diary is a way of living before it is a way of writing.”36 Erna Nagel’s diary is powerful evidence of committing to a way of life, where the thematic threads and rhetorical, poetic, and narrative devices structuring the diary constitute a powerful situational resistance and a way of maintaining “a horizon of expectation,” or, in Julie Rak’s words, of making “a wager on the future” that, for Erna Nagel, was never meant to happen.37

Conclusion As an extensive and detailed textual record, the diary of Erna Nagel is a unique source of observation in sociopolitical and cultural contexts. Readers experience the general actions and operations of the Stalinist regime as well as gain insight into the particular collective and individual struggles of deportation and its aftermath. It is an intricate example of the complex interactions between the genre of the diary and extreme living conditions. As a diaristic text, it capitalizes on mundane and trivial realities in their diverse manifestations, yet emphasizes its importance as a site of survival and resistance. As an elaborate and detailed textual record and a testimonial object, it places its readers directly within the perceptions and daily life of a singular author, which in turn point to greater specific historical and political contexts, yet also observes both the fundamental human experience and the ways an extreme and traumatic “past comes down to us in the present,” reverberating.38 Erna Nagel’s diary is a detailed example of the ways in which ordinary people, who, like Erna, often become writers not by choice but by necessity, relate to the process of textual production. The genre of the diary in particular offers rich and varied insights into the process of developing an intimate familiarity with the written word and the poetic dimensions of language. As the entries of her diary so richly demonstrate, for Erna, the diary functioned not only as a site for recording her daily experience but also as a site for the upkeep and cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities. In the conditions of the extreme, both of these functions of 392 | The Diary

the diary reveal an immediate, vibrant connection between life and art, both as a lived experience and as a mode of textual self-expression of mundaneness.

Acknowledgments The article was written with the support of institutional research grant IUT22-2, “Formal and Informal Networks of Literature, Based on Sources of Cultural History” from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research and by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies). Notes 1. Erna Nagel, Erna Nageli päevik: Olen kui päike ja tuul (Tartu: Hotpress, 2007), 6. 2. Exact information about the preservation of Erna Nagel’s papers in Siberia is not known. Most likely fellow Estonian deportees kept her papers. As Erna’s papers were sent to Karl Nagel from Siberia in the late 1990s, they were most probably preserved by those deportees who, after the end of their sentence, did not return to Estonia but settled down near their former deportation location in Siberia. 3. The years of the Soviet occupation are 1940–41 and 1944–91, but in terms of the violent repressive nature of the regime, the most important periods cover the years 1940–41 and from 1944 until the mid- or late 1950s. 4. Olaf Mertelsman and Aigi Rahi-Tamm, “Soviet Mass Violence in Estonia Revisited,” Journal of Genocide Research 11, nos. 2–3 (2009): 308. Summing up the current state of research on Stalinist repressions in Estonia, Mertelsman and Rahi-Tamm pointed out that “out of a population of 1.1 million, approximately 47,000 were arrested for political reasons and 35,000 were deported. 34,000 were mobilized in 1941 into the Red Army and spent several months in labor camps where about one third perished. . . . Roughly 12–14 percent of the population thus fell victim to Soviet persecution and four percent lost its life due to unbearable conditions or was executed. . . . the majority of deaths can be traced to criminal neglect in the camps, prisons or special settlements” (308–9). The 1941 deportations in Estonia included 9,146 persons: 3,173 of them were arrested and sent to the Gulag or executed, and 5,973 were subjected to forced resettlement. See Aigi Rahi-Tamm “Küüditamised Eestis,” in Kõige taga oli hirm: Kuidas Eesti oma ajaloost ilma jäi, ed. Sofi Oksanen and Imbi Paju (Tallinn: Eesti Päevaleht: 2010), 68. 5. Valdek Kiiver, “Haruldane päevaraamat,” in Erna Nageli päevik: Olen kui päike ja tuul (Tartu: Hotpress, 2007), 5. The phrase “the cold country” comes from the title of a novel of a well-known Estonian author Eduard Vilde published in 1896 that later became a popular metaphorical reference to deportations and the Gulag. 6. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, “Introduction: Extremities,” in Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, ed. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 3, 4. Estonian Women’s Deportation Diaries  |  393

7. Jehanne Gheith, “‘I Never Talked’: Enforced Silence, Non-narrative Memory, and the Gulag,” Mortality 12, no. 2 (2007): 160; Maria Tumarkin, “The Long Life of Stalinism: Reflections on the Aftermath of Totalitarianism and Social Memory,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 4 (2011): 1053. 8. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 27–28. 9. Aigi Rahi-Tamm, “Deportations in Estonia, 1941–1951,” in Soviet Deportations in Estonia: Impact and Legacy, ed. Kristi Kukk and Toivo Raun (Tartu: Filiae Patriae Society, 2007), 22. 10. The 1941 deportations were carried out in the early hours of the morning of June 14 with no information provided to the deportees about where they were being taken or for how long. Sometimes as little as twenty minutes were given for packing their things. The deportees were loaded into boxcars, and their journey to the final deportation location sometimes lasted several months, during which many lost their lives, especially young children and the elderly. In resettlement locations, the deportees had to face extremely poor living and harsh climatic conditions and a shortage of food that was only distributed as payment for work for which the deportees had neither proper skills nor appropriate clothing. It is estimated that 60 percent of the deportees died in the resettlement areas (Mertelsman and Rahi-Tamm, “Soviet Mass Violence in Estonia Revisited,” 310). 11. Nagel, Erna Nageli, 8. 12. Ibid., 10. 13. Kiiver, “Haruldane,” 5. 14. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 176. 15. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 54. 16. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 355. 17. Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 8. 18. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942–1945 (New York: Random House 1999), 61. 19. In one entry, Erna Nagel expressed regret that she had no access to her diaries from the period before deportation, suggesting that keeping a diary was a habit carried over from her predeportation life. Erna Nagel’s manuscript diary that was published under the title Erna Nageli päevik. Olen kui päike ja tuul covers only the years of deportation. 20. Nagel, Erna Nageli, 9. 21. Rachel Langford and Russell West, “Introduction: Diaries and Margins,” in Diaries in European Literature and History, ed. Rachel Langford and Russell West (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 6. 22. Nagel, Erna Nageli, 108. 23. Todorov, Facing, 61, 62. Todorov divided the acts of ordinary virtue into three categories: the preservation of dignity, caring, and preservation of aesthetic sensibilities. While the entry discussed here falls into the first category, the diary also contains abundant examples of the others as well, visible, for example, in Erna’s devotion to her mother and the development of different communal networks of care without which the likelihood of survival for any

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deportee would be virtually impossible. Her many eloquent descriptions of the beauty of Siberian nature reveal its function as a powerful countermeasure to the poverty, lack, and distress shaping so many aspects of her everyday life. 24. Nagel, Erna Nageli, 45. 25. Ibid., 38. 26. Ibid., 11. 27. Ibid., 116. 28. Ibid., 14. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 162. 32. For detailed consideration of thematization of food in Baltic women’s deportation stories, see Kurvet-Käosaar, “‘Is That Hunger Haunting the Stove?’ Thematization of Food in the Deportation Narratives of Baltic Women,” Journal of Baltic Studies 46, no. 3 (2015): 337–52. 33. Nagel, Erna Nageli, 68. 34. Ibid., 136. 35. Todorov, Facing, 61. 36. Lejeune, On Diary, 153. 37. Ibid., 188; Julie Rak, “Dialogue with the Future: Philippe Lejeune’s Method and Theory of Diary,” in Lejeune, On Diary, 16. 38. Hirsch and Spitzer, “Testimonial,” 355.

Bibliography Blodgett, Harriet. Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Gheith, Jehanne. “‘I Never Talked’: Enforced Silence, Non-narrative Memory, and the Gulag.” Mortality 12, no. 2 (2007): 159–75. Hellbeck, Jochen. Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Hirsch, Marianne, and Leo Spitzer. “Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission.” Poetics Today 27, no 2 (2006): 353–83. Kiiver, Valdek. “Haruldane päevaraamat.” In Erna Nageli päevik: Olen kui päike ja tuul, 4–5. Tartu: Hotpress, 2007. Klemperer, Victor. I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942– 1945. New York: Random House, 1999. Kurvet-Käosaar, Leena. “‘Is That Hunger Haunting the Stove?’ Thematization of Food in the Deportation Narratives of Baltic Women.” Journal of Baltic Studies 46, no. 3 (2015): 337–52. Langford, Rachel, and Russell West. “Introduction: Diaries and Margins.” In Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History, edited by Rachel Langford and Russell West, 6–21. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Honolulu: Hawai‘i University Press, 2009. Mertelsman, Olaf, and Aigi Rahi-Tamm. “Soviet Mass Violence in Estonia Revisited.” Journal of Genocide Research 11, nos. 2–3 (2009): 307–22.

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Miller, Nancy K., and Jason Tougaw. “Introduction: Extremities.” In Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, edited by Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, 1–22. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Nagel, Erna. Erna Nageli päevik: Olen kui päike ja tuul. Tartu: Hotpress, 2007. Rahi-Tamm, Aigi. “Deportations in Estonia, 1941–1951.” In Soviet Deportations in Estonia: Impact and Legacy, edited by Kristi Kukk and Toivo Raun, 9–54. Tartu: Filiae Patriae Society, 2007. ———. “Küüditamised Eestis.” In Kõige taga oli hirm: Kuidas Eesti oma ajaloost ilma jäi, edited by Sofi Oksanen and Imbi Paju, 63–94. Tallinn: Eesti Päevaleht, 2010. Rak, Julie. “Dialogue with the Future: Philippe Lejeune’s Method and Theory of Diary.” In Lejeune, On Diary, 16–26. Paperno, Irina. Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Tumarkin, Maria. “The Long Life of Stalinism: Reflections on the Aftermath of Totalitarianism and Social Memory.” Journal of Social History 44, no. 4 (2011): 1047–61. Todorov, Tzvetan. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.

L E E NA K U RV E T- K ÄO SA A R is Associate Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Tartu, Estonia, as well as a Senior Researcher at the Estonian Literary Museum and also the leader of the research group on migration and diaspora studies of the Center of Excellence of Estonian Studies at the Estonian Literary Museum. She has published widely in life-writing studies, specializing in particular on post-Soviet life writing, personal narratives of Soviet deportations and the Gulag, and trauma studies.

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part vii

Online Diaries

23 From Puritans to Fitbit Self-Improvement, Self-Tracking, and How to Keep a Diary Kylie Cardell

Introduction In 2007, self-styled “guerrilla artist” Keri Smith published Wreck This Journal, a hugely successful journal guidebook phenomenon. Wreck This Journal is described on its Penguin UK publisher’s website as “the anarchist’s Artist’s Way—the book for those who’ve always wanted to draw outside the lines but were afraid to do it” and as a how-to journal workbook with a “subversive” intent: the subtitle and mantra is “to create is to destroy.” Smith’s book is self-consciously positioned as an antidote to a more earnest self-help tradition of how-to journaling (for example, Julia Cameron’s best-selling early 1990s creativity journal workbook The Artist’s Way, which is referenced both strategically and ironically) and is replete with playful instructions such as “Lose this page. (Throw it out.) Accept the loss”; “Tie a string to the spine of this book. Swing wildly let it hit the walls”; and “FIND A WAY TO WEAR THE JOURNAL.” Wreck This Journal updates diary-writing practices for modern readers and connects to a contemporary moment in which acts of self-representation are creative, multiple, and automedial.1 Wreck This Journal is an Instagram account, a website, and it can be purchased as a physical book (in various formats) or as a mobile app. Playful and subversive in style, Wreck This Journal is nonetheless and quite distinctively an instructional guide: the premise is that keeping a journal in the way that Smith recommends will unlock a particular (novel, “anarchic”) experience of journal writing, but crucially, the mandate of

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the text is access to a certain kind of creative self. The how-to diary is a distinctive cultural form. Presented as a set of instructions for diary keeping, the genre makes visible historically and culturally shifting assumptions or beliefs about serial first-person writing as a form of authentic self-knowledge. In this chapter, I reflect on the development of the how-to diary as it has evolved historically and as it is developing in the twenty-first century. For example, wearable technologies like Fitbits, self-tracking devices that capture biometric data in order to visualize individuals’ daily fitness habits; or LifeCams, miniature cameras that take a photograph every three minutes; as well as mobile apps that present the diary as a digital format, such as Memento, Day One, or My Diary, all represent new ways for individuals interested in serial self-documentation to account for their experiences over time. However, while the technology is new, the impulse is not: evolving methods for self-tracking are part of a history of written and recorded self-observation that stretches back to “styli and wax tablets.”2 Significantly, moral discourses that circumscribe daily self-writing practice among historical religious communities, or in midtwentieth century self-help culture, also continue to attach to practices of contemporary self-surveillance. All “self-tracking regimes,” as Deborah Lupton has argued, figure into a common goal: “a better self.”3 In the present, diverse technologies for self-documentation have become part of the everyday. The diary, a method of self-documentation that has a long historical trajectory, has both persisted and evolved in the online context and within digital cultures. Contemporary uses of the diary are evolving in a context of rapidly shifting digital technology, enabling a variety of forms for serial documentation and new habits of self-observation and self-representation (for example, on social media). In this chapter, I explore the how-to or template diary as a form that historically has shaped and coaxed certain kinds of diary practice and a particular experience (or ideology) of self or identity. Given current developments in various diary-like self-tracking technologies, in which data-driven self-observation is positioned ontologically, I argue that a discursive understanding of how the diary has functioned as a how-to mode reveals useful context for understanding the ways technologies for self-observation are now emerging (and being shaped) in the present. Methods for self-observation are not neutral. The dominant technologies through which individuals are encouraged to guide or document their understanding of self-experience also encode assumptions about the rightness and virtue of such practice. From the Puritans to Fitbit, an impulse to record and document self-experience drives the individual to track and record daily, serial experience and to reflect on meaning, a practice that has clear origins in the seventeenth 400 | The Diary

century. The commensurate and increasing presence of various templates and mass-circulated formats for doing so amplifies and shapes this impulse in various significant ways.

“Otherwise, Why Do You Keep Such a Journall?”: The Spiritual Diarist The how-to diary, as self-help authors in the mid-twentieth century or early twenty-first century characteristically construct it, draws on a long association of the diary form with religious and secular practices of confession and self-scrutiny and with contiguous cultures of accounting and commerce. In both cases, accounting for the self (whether tallying one’s sins before God or tracking the expenditure of time and money) is discursively an act of self-improvement, and daily serial writing is the key technology through which this is achieved. For example, Robert Fothergill has noted the significance of the seventeenth-century “journal of conscience” in shaping expectations of diaries in both form and content. Practiced by Puritans, Quakers, and “other dissenting groups,” the spiritual diary at this time reflected a new sense of individuality and an orientation toward personal experience as a valid basis for self-knowledge.4 For Fothergill, “something of the Puritan motive for diary keeping, and the ensuing character of the written document, can be seen to survive in diaries well beyond any conscious responsiveness to Puritan spiritual discipline. In fact, it may be argued that the practice of self-examination in moral terms, which is seldom absent from even the most ‘secular’ diaries, may derive in part from the Puritan equation of serious self-communing with strict examination of conscience. What other business has man with his inner secret self, if not the business of improving it?”5 For the Puritan, the only right business an individual could have with their inner self was spiritual; daily writing was a form of self-abasement, and it was an act of atonement before God, a commitment further encoded in the labor itself of writing and preserving the diary as an ongoing practice. In 1656, no doubt responding to the interest in diary keeping among his community, as well as anxiety about right purposes for individual diary practice, the Puritan John Beadle published one of, if not the, earliest examples of an instruction manual for diary keeping. At the height of Puritan religious fervor, Beadle’s The Journall or Diary of a Thankfull Christian was a best seller of its time.6 In eight chapters of detailed instructions, the English clergyman and avid diarist proposed various methods for diary keeping. For example, rereading often is key: “Especially if we look often into it, and read it over will be a notable means to increase in us that self-abasement & abhorrency of spirit that is most acceptable in the sight of God.”7 However, while keeping track of and accounting for From Puritans to Fitbit  |  401

sin is one function of the diary, counting “mercies” is another: “To keep a Journall or Diary by us, especially of all God’s gracious dealing with us, is a work for a Christian of singular use.”8 Crucially, keeping a diary is in itself a spiritual act, it functions as both confession and atonement, and it is a discipline enacted through serial writing. In an instruction from a chapter on “more rules” for practice, Beadle wrote, “You make it . . . your very work to be thankfull for all God’s mercies; otherwise, why do you keep such a Journall?”9 The Puritan how-to journal embeds a conception of self-writing as a practice with a proper purpose that is influential throughout the history of the diary as a genre. By the mid-twentieth century, for example, the idea of self-improvement as an act of ongoing labor finds visibility in the emergence of mass market how-to-write-a-diary manuals promoting serial-writing as a means to self-realization. Just as the mass-market pocket calendar shaped the ways that individuals paid attention to previously less perceptible aspects of their daily life, materializing cultural expectations for behavior in relation to time management and the proper distribution of one’s individual experience over the span of calendar time, preformatted self-help diaries offer a literal template for right practice and “proper” self-observation within a framework of improvement of the self as the mandate and goal.

Accounting for the Self: Calendars and Planners The diary as a mode of accounting for the self—of “tallying,” as Beadle’s contemporary John Fuller put it in his foreword to Beadle’s Diary or Journal of a Thankful Christian—finds a new symbolic expression in the rise of the commercial planner.10 The account or ledger diary was already an important form in the Puritan era, and it is, for example, a bookkeeping mode that the famous English diarist Samuel Pepys and his predecessors are responding to when they begin constructing their long chronological narratives in the late seventeenth century.11 It was in the nineteenth century, however, that the daily planner became a popular mass-market mode and that this format of diary keeping became widely available. Molly McCarthy has noted that “by the time the daily planner was born in the early nineteenth century,” a significant number of Americans had access to commercial daily planners, mass-manufactured systems for accounting for time and other daily expenditures: “Their store-bought diaries made it so simple. The page-a-day format kept the days moving forward and never stopped asking for, or expecting, an entry each day no matter how mundane.”12 In pocket calendars, almanacs, and daily planners, texts that might otherwise be dismissed, McCarthy read for a slippage between accounting 402 | The Diary

and representation, between recounting and interpretation, between submitting and selecting material that maps both a cultural development of self-consciousness and the format that facilitates this. Diarists “might have started with the weather or the sum they spent at the butcher, [but] they never stopped there, often broaching how they were feeling or taking a moment to reflect on the march of days. . . . This is how so many customers became accidental diarists.”13 The commercially produced diary-planner embeds and visualizes a set of instructions and protocols for the proper, optimal management of time and money. It is an instructional mode that the diarist uses to better organize their daily affairs. However, the daily planner is also a branded commercial object, and it is a premade form that reflects certain intentions and convictions of its makers as well as cultural values of the time; the layout is available to be read ideologically.14 Diarists who resist or reinterpret the protocols of the diary format are literally making space for a subjective, individualistic representation. The diarist who moves from recording an expense, completing a category identified by the manufacturer, to reporting how they feel about the expense, as marginalia or overwriting, is both responding to and remaking the diary form they are encountering. Of course, the ease of the daily planner also belies a disciplinary function. Diarists who detour into self-reflection must do so on their own impulse and in contradiction (or as a reinterpretation) of the preformatted page. A moral discourse that attaches to diary keeping in other contexts is present here: properly accounting for oneself is a virtuous act that crystallizes whole sets of cultural conventions, including anxieties and concerns about the “proper” subject of daily writing and for discipline of the self in relation. The effects of the emergence of the mass-produced daily planner in the nineteenth century thus offer some useful antecedents for thinking through the how-to diary in a contemporary context, not least of which is the significance of the preformatted page and the implications of coaxing and affordances in representation that attend to this. For example, within social media or as wearable technology, such affordances are often far more rigid or opaque.15

Templates for Transformation: Self-Help and Diaries Financial and spiritual metaphors of “accounting” underpin the kinds of how-to journals that emerged in the mid-twentieth century and mark the how-to instructional diary’s height of mass popularity, albeit as a “lowbrow” self-help genre.16 At this time, too, the how-to diary arose specifically as a workbook mode—a preformatted manual that guides the diarist with prompts and exercises and that encloses subsequent writing within the manual itself. The progenitor of this tradition is Ira Progoff’s At a Journal Workshop, first published in 1975.17 From Puritans to Fitbit  |  403

Written as an accompaniment to the Intensive Journal workshops Progoff held all over America during the mid-1970s, At a Journal Workshop establishes a psychological context for daily writing that fits to the dominant cultural understanding of the self at this time. Nonetheless, for Progoff, like the Puritan Beadle, there is a danger in the diary as an “uncontrolled” practice, one that Progoff links unequivocally to narcissism— a charge that diarists, more than other kinds of writers, seem to routinely face. In his introduction to the text, Progoff emphasizes certain right uses of daily writing and primarily, as a pseudoscientific method that turns the self into an object of inquiry: “A private journal is then drawn upon first as an instrument for recording and then for evaluating how far he has attained his goals and to what degree he has failed. Such a use of a journal becomes a self-testing device.”18 While Progoff warns that this kind of journal can also be “negative” and cautions against using the journal only in a “self-contained way”—that is, only furthering desired goals (versus a more exploratory, self-critical style)—the journal as instrument is a prime objective of Progoff’s method. Progoff’s vision is furthered in the workbook that appears as an appendix in At a Journal Workshop: “The Registered Intensive Journal Workbook.” The workbook curates a set of psychology-informed reflective writing prompts and allocates a specific amount of page space for each response—as a format it is a hallmark of the how-to as a mass-market genre and characteristic of a hugely diverse range of popular how-to journal texts, including those for fitness regimes, targeted therapeutic programs, or spiritual development, that are available to buy currently. These forms remediate the technology of the pocket calendar with its apportioned daily or weekly allotments, and they amplify a discourse of self-knowledge as self-improvement that is seen by advocates like Progoff as available in acts of personal, self-reflective writing. Of course, where the pocket calendar distributes time for activity or expenditure, Progoff’s journal template is a format for self-discovery based on serial acts of inward-looking writing. In his exploration of the how-to-write-an-autobiography manual, also an emerging genre in the late 1970s, Philippe Lejeune has discussed his resistance to format autobiography: “From the opening pages the author of the manual seems to already know the context of my uniqueness, and he knows the means that will allow me to communicate it. Here I am brought back to a generality: my uniqueness is . . . a standard production. On the whole these books are simply manuals of morals and treatises of elementary rhetoric, situated and dated. Opening them is like going to a ready-to-wear store, submitting to a sort of ‘Body-graph.’”19 For Lejeune, the how-to genre in this context contradicts what he has felt are some inherent principles of autobiographical work—namely, it provides a template to which subjects must “fit” their experience. This is a ready-made 404 | The Diary

story: the plot is anticipated and the individual’s “uniqueness” already imagined, and so it is autobiography as “a standard production” that precludes and obscures, or actively resists, the variety and deviations of individual experience, and for Lejeune, it devalues the purpose and point of this kind of writing and so the authenticity of the genre. Autobiography is the practice of crafting a story from personal experience, and it is a canonical literary genre. The diary, however, has a different cultural history and has far less often been perceived as a literary form. For this reason, instructional diary guides can appear counterintuitive. That is, in popular imagination, and ostensibly unlike memoir or autobiography, the diary is seen as the least complicated of literary genres. Virginia Woolf famously reflected on her diary-writing practice as “like taking a bath,” an antidote to the hard graft of her literary output (and an understatement of the actual complex sophistication of her journal writing).20 Conversely, the prolific American diarist Anaïs Nin repeatedly lamented a resistance to her diary writing as a serious literary or artistic form.21 Since the twentieth century, the diary has had a strong association with the writing of children and adolescent girls in particular.22 Resistance to the diary as a serious practice is at least part of what how-to diaries both challenge and deploy. For example, as Progoff insists, the diary is serious because it can be “misused” without proper guidance.23 The how-to diary manual is a thus imagined and marketed as a solution, a disciplinary program that guides the reader through the pitfalls of selfreflection and a method for avoiding charges of self-aggrandizement or narcissism—as work on the self and not “indulgence.”

Tracks of the Self: Digital Developments In the self-help diary genres that emerged in the mid-1970s and became established as a trend by the late 1990s, the diary is positioned as a timebased methodology for releasing the unconscious self from an internal censor. Through the discipline of regular self-reflective writing, the individual will accumulate a record—habits, preoccupations, confessions— that can be read and interpreted. The diarist in this scenario strives to record objectively, but the method is the key: document for long enough and the “true self” will emerge. In such a conception, the idea is to think of diary writing as a set of data that the individual uses to visualize and interpret the self; the diary is a technology, a format that coaxes this material for analysis. It is not surprising, then, that digital self-tracking technologies that have emerged in the last decade might discursively rely on a framing of serial documentation as a methodology for self-knowledge. As Melissa Greg has observed, there is an ideological paradigm around “data” that is linked to a powerful fantasy of “visual spectacle, namely, From Puritans to Fitbit  |  405

the fantasy of command and control through seeing that characterises contemporary digital culture.”24 In the fast-moving network cultures of the twenty-first century, information as data has a special authority and a distinct appeal: “Data’s power lies in the assumption that it is synonymous with fact.”25 Wearable technology like the Fitbit, a device that measures various biosensory metrics, automates a process through which individuals can access and produce a record of bodily activities that the user can interpret within a narrative of fitness. Through the native app, users visualize and quantify this data, constructing a story of fitness that is available to be read and interpreted by the individual, as well as by others. As a mode of capture, the Fitbit is a technological apparatus that also intersects with a certain dominant cultural belief: data equals knowledge about experience.26 Promising to measure both more accurately and more objectively, the Fitbit “records” experience as data, thus ostensibly circumventing various well-established problems of memory and selection or overcoming individual bias and faultiness in the context of personal observation. For devotees like those of the Quantified Self movement, the presumed “objectivity” of such data directly facilitates a sense of power and control in relation to personal self-knowledge—a conviction that, for example, Lupton has argued is inevitably precarious.27 Technological advances in data capture also speak to amplifying desires for facts and objectivity, and it is significant that these are emerging very strongly in connection to acts of recounting or understanding personal experience. This is evident in the persistence of the diary as a formal and symbolic antecedent within the design and promotion of new self-observational tools. The makers of the digital Affective Diary, for example, cite “the conventional diary,” which they define as “a book in which one keeps a regular record of events and experiences,” as a starting point for conceptualizing a new digital technology that will allow users to “scribble their notes” but also allow for “bodily memorabilia to be recorded from body sensors and mobile media to be collected from users’ mobile forms.”28 Much like the commercially produced daily planner, the Affective Diary is presented as a template for an ideal “layout” of individual experience. As part of a tradition of how-to diary practice, affective technologies and digital diaries present an evolving space for the representation of cultural obsessions with data and visualization in relation to self-knowledge. There is no doubt that people develop “affective ties” to the data they track, just as diaries, blogs, photo albums, and other material archives are meaningful to those who keep them.29 Seen within traditions of forms like diaries, it is significant to observe that affective digital modes continue to invoke the conventions of daily planners and other preformatted kinds 406 | The Diary

of diary genres, guided forms designed to produce or amplify particular kinds of self-attention and knowledge.

Conclusion Crucially, not all lives are visible, not all stories are told at any one time; templates for experience and representation are shifting and historical, connected also to the ebbs and flows of various commercial markets. What kinds of reflection, experience, and knowledge do how-to diaries make available to the individual and how is this also about the format of self-representation? What is the “right” way to collect, display, and present a life? The diary is an intimate technology in discourses of productivity and control, and it is embedded in the everyday lives of a mass of individuals. Tracking the discourse of diary that how-to forms promulgate is an opportunity to see certain dominant cultural ideologies of self and genre that have evolved and are evolving in this context. Historical forms of self-tracking have evolved in connection to advances in material technology and in relation to shifting cultural conventions for the “right” purpose of serial personal documentation. Particularly since the nineteenth century, such documentation has a role as a form of self-expression. The mass development and circulation of serial formats like the pocket diary or ledger streamlined and normalized daily writing and constructed authoritative formats for this practice. The emergence of the self-help diary in the mid-twentieth century crystallizes a set of assumptions relating to virtue and organization that are already visible in the marketing of pocket calendars and planners, and this is amplified through psychological discourse that instates serial daily writing as a specific method for work on the self. Tracing some of the permutations of the how-to diary as a rhetorical mode reveals an ideology of self that is further linked to the diary as a form of writing. In various ways, the how-to diary reveals and instates shifting historical discourses of selfimprovement and virtue as well as therapy, confession, and accountability that are still relevant. For example, how might “new” technologies for self-knowledge be discursively connected to metaphors of “surveillance” and “improvement” that have characterized diaries historically, and what is the significance of these as ideas that continue to resonate in diary practices that are emerging in the twenty-first century? How-to diaries are ideological texts that reflect, both discursively and materially, social and cultural preoccupations, anxieties, and desires around serial personal self-observation as a form of authentic self-knowledge, and these concerns are both persisting and changing in the proliferating digital contexts that are currently shaping the evolution of the diary as a dynamic cultural practice and a distinctive autobiographical form. From Puritans to Fitbit  |  407

Notes 1. The term automedial has been discussed by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson as a crucial way of understanding self-presentation in online contexts. Automediality indicates that “the materiality of the medium constitutes and textures the subjectivity presented.” See Smith and Watson, “Virtually Me,” in Identity Technologies, ed. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 77. 2. Peter Heehs, Writing the Self: Diaries, Memories and the History of the Self (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 8. 3. Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 75. 4. Robert Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 17. 5. Ibid. 6. Heehs, Writing the Self, 51. 7. John Beadle, The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian: Presented in Some Meditations upon Numb. 32.2 (London: Printed by E. Cotes for Tho. Parkhurst, 1656). Digital edition sponsored by Princeton Theological Sem­inary Library, Internet Archive, accessed October 1, 2019, https://archive.org/details /journalor00bead. 8. Beadle, Journal, 10. 9. Ibid., 140. 10. “God kept a Diary in the Creation of the world, Gen. 1. to present this practice to us. . . . Bring in your tallies of old, if you look for new mercies to be put upon your account”; John Fuller in Beadle, Journal, 5. 11. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 12. Molly McCarthy, The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 7. 13. Ibid., 8. 14. See Rebecca E. Connor, for example, who observed that in eighteenthcentury account books marketed explicitly for women, the apportioned space for designated entries (financial versus social, for example) revealed certain coercive expectations for female behavior. The daily planner was one more example of “the numerous routinized and ritualised means by which the labile, addicted, and recklessly consuming female body could be controlled and contained.” Connor, Women, Accounting and Narrative: Keeping Books in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 2004), 18. 15. See Aimée Morrsion, “Facebook and Coaxed Affordances,” in Identity Technologies, ed. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2014), 112–31, for a discussion of coaxing and affordances in the context of online autobiographical practice. 16. Anne Whitney, “Writing by the Book: The Emergence of the Journaling Self-Help Book,” Issues in Writing 15 no. 2 (2005): 188–215. 17. Ira Progoff, At a Journal Workshop (New York: Dialogue House Library, 1975). 18. Ibid., 24. 19. Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Kathryn Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 217.

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20. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1980), 179. 21. Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future (New York: Collier Books, 1969). 22. The appeal is in both the privacy of the genre and the “undemanding” nature of the form, which has gendered connotations: “Unlike a friend, sibling, or mother, a diary will not feel hurt and angry at the expression of direct feelings. Girls can express themselves at their own pace. Diaries do not demand logical thought and do not interrupt.” Jane Greer and Miriam Forman-Brunell, “Diaries,” in Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia, vol. 1, A–I, ed. Miriam Forman-Brunell (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO 2001), 210. 23. Progoff, At a Journal Workshop, 24. 24. Melissa Gregg, “Inside the Data Spectacle,” Television and New Media 16, no. 1 (2014): 1. 25. Ibid., 6. 26. See, for example, my discussion on the limitations of data as knowledge in “Is a Fitbit a Diary? Self-Tracking and Autobiography,” M/C Journal of Media and Culture 21, no. 2 (2018), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index .php/mcjournal/article/view/1348. 27. The Quantified Self (QS) as a distinct movement has evolved alongside the development of computer technology during the 1970s and has emerged strongly in the twenty-first century. The QS community is defined through a commitment to using and making (not only, though often, digital) tools for self-tracking and seeing self-tracking as a mode for self-knowledge. See also Lupton, Quantified Self, 83. 28. Anna Ståhl et al., “Experiencing the Affective Diary,” Pers Ubiquit Comput 13, no. 5 (2009): 356. 29. Jill Walker Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs, and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 87.

Bibliography Beadle, John. The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian: Presented in Some Meditations upon Numb. 32.2. London: Printed by E. Cotes for Tho. Parkhurst, 1656. Digital edition sponsored by Princeton Theological Seminary Library, Internet Archive. Accessed October 1, 2019. https:// archive.org/details/journalor00bead. Cardell, Kylie. “Is a Fitbit a Diary? Self-Tracking and Autobiography.” M/C Journal of Media and Culture 21, no. 2 (2018), http://journal.media-culture .org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1348. Connor, Rebecca Elisabeth. Women, Accounting and Narrative: Keeping Books in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 2004. Fothergill, Robert. Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Greer, Jane, and Miriam Forman-Brunell. “Diaries.” In Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia, edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell, 206–11. Vol. 1, A–I. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2001. Gregg, Melissa. “Inside the Data Spectacle.” Television and New Media 16, no. 1 (2014): 1–15.

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Heehs, Peter. Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Edited by Paul John Eakin. Translated by Kathryn Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Lupton, Deborah. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. McCarthy, Molly. The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Morrison, Aimée. “Facebook and Coaxed Affordances.” In Identity Technologies Constructing the Self Online, edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, 112–31. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2014. Nin, Anaïs. The Novel of the Future. New York: Collier Books, 1969. Progoff, Ira. At a Journal Workshop. New York: Dialogue House Library, 1975. Rettberg, Jill Walker. Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs, and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Ståhl, Anna, Kristina Höök, Martin Svensson, Alex S. Taylor, and Marco Combetto. “Experiencing the Affective Diary.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 13, no. 5 (2009): 365–78. Smith, Kerri. Wreck This Journal. New York: Penguin, 2007. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, 70–95. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. Whitney, Anne. “Writing by the Book: The Emergence of the Journaling SelfHelp Book.” Issues in Writing 15, no. 2 (2005): 188–215. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2, 1920–1924. Edited Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth, 1980.

K Y L I E C A R DE L L is a Senior Lecturer in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Flinders University, Australia. She is author of Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary and editor (with Kate Douglas) of Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth.

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24 Online Diaries and Blogs Jill Walker Rettberg

I stood on the balcony of a city apartment in Melbourne. There was a party inside on this autumn evening in 2001, and I had just met the woman who stood next to me. She leaned over the balcony railing, holding a black device in her outstretched hands. She gazed from the clouds overhead to her device, anxiously peering at its tiny display. She frowned and held the device up toward the sky. “What are you doing?” I asked her. “I can’t get the coordinates,” she replied, distractedly. “Maybe the clouds make it harder to connect to the satellites.” The device, she explained, was a GPS tracker, a primitive turn-of-thecentury consumer version of the technology that is now built into every smartphone. Curious, I asked her why she wanted to know her location. We knew where we were, after all. On a balcony in a friend’s apartment. We weren’t lost. She laughed a little. “Well,” she said, “it’s like a diary. I log places I’ve been, and then I can see them on a map. It’s a way for me to remember my life.” She looked a little defensive, as though others had scoffed at this, but I smiled. I understood immediately. As technologies and cultures change, so do the ways we record our lives. Philippe Lejeune noted that diaries depend on the availability of paper, a technology, but also on the existence of a culture with a notion not only of the self but of accounting and keeping track of items and changes.1 In his book Writing the Self, Peter Heehs described how the Renaissance accountants began to annotate the numbers they recorded  411

in their ledgers by adding personal details that in time grew into diaries.2 Cameras led to photo albums, which are a kind of family diary that combines photographs with written descriptions. The web and smartphones have made new genres possible, like online diaries, blogs, self-tracking apps, and social media. In the last decade, social media use has become mainstream, and while internet access is still unevenly distributed, as of this writing, about 40 percent of people worldwide and 80 percent of people in developed countries have internet access. The woman on the balcony’s GPS tracker allowed her to keep a new kind of diary, similar to the diary that is automatically written for us by our computers and phones, as our devices log our actions and movements. We may or may not examine, curate, and share these automatically recorded traces of our lives. We may keep deliberate online diaries: a dedicated blog, photographs regularly posted to Instagram with careful descriptions, or just the occasional Facebook post about something that happened today—“I met a woman, on a balcony, and she made me think differently about what a diary might be.” In this chapter, I give an overview of the early history of online diaries and blogs and examine how technology shapes the way we record our lives and how it records our lives for us. One of the most important differences between paper and online diaries is the size of the potential audience, and I discuss how people manage that publicity, either by embracing it or by using ephemeral platforms, donning pseudonyms, or allowing only a limited audience to read their posts. When the internet was new, that wasn’t necessary, because the likelihood of meeting a neighbor or acquaintance from everyday life online was so very low.

Early Online Diaries The first online diaries appeared around 1994, and were hand-coded by people who had taught themselves to create websites. One of the first online diaries was Justin Hall’s Justin’s Links, which is still active at links.net, though the style and content have changed considerably over the years. At first, the website was written as a meandering hypertextual story about Hall’s life, but in 1996, Hall began posting dated diary entries that still linked and intermingled with his hypertextual autobiography. Hall didn’t call his site a weblog until much later, because web log at that time was used to refer to the statistics available to website administrators showing the number of visitors to a website. In 1997, Jorn Barger proposed that the term weblog be used to refer to websites that post links to interesting material with commentary.3 Around that time, a number of hand-coded weblogs became popular. Posts in these early weblogs were brief, and although the comments usually had a clear individual voice 412 | The Diary

and offered personal opinions, the content was typically commentary on news stories and online finds rather than stories from the writer’s life. Weblogs tended to be seen in opposition to online diaries, which were more confessional. In 1998, Open Diary became one of the first sites to provide easy web publication without users needing to know how to code or edit HTML.4 Instead, users picked a layout from a set of templates and wrote their entries into text boxes. The year 1999 saw the launch of sites for easily publishing weblogs—or blogs, as they had become known— including Pitas and Blogger. Within a few years, the once quite separate genres of online diaries and blogs merged. Blog posts became longer and more essayistic, often using a more personal voice, and online diaries came to include more essayistic material and commentary in addition to the autobiographical content. By 2004, blogs were so popular that blog was named word of the year by Merriam-Webster, much as selfie was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries in 2013, and both declarations were much discussed in the mainstream media. Around the same time that blog became the word of the year, commercial blogging took off, and we saw corporate blogging as well as individuals who created their own profitable businesses by blogging about their lives or about products. Today microcelebrities and influencers tend to use multiple platforms rather than a single blog, as early bloggers did.5 A popular contemporary fashion blogger may have hundreds of thousands of readers a day, but they are often spread across platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and a blog. Celebrities and influencers often use elements of personal diary writing to forge connections with their fans and audiences. Viviane Serfaty’s 2004 study of blogging connects blogs to the traditions of the English Puritans, who used diaries as “a requirement of religious self-discipline,” recounting “a spiritual journey towards personal salvation.”6 During the same period, the Libertines developed the idea of “an inner space devoted to internal deliberation,” which may be said to be one of the sources of the modern divide between the private and the public.7 Serfaty noted that both blogs and diaries were usually written more for the sake of the writer than for the sake of the reader. They were used as mirrors, she argued, to reflect on the self more than they are used to project a particular image to the public, as might, for instance, be the case in an autobiography intended for publication. However, Serfaty’s book was published in 2004, before the commercialization of blogs and before social media went mainstream.8 Although much of what she wrote is still true of today’s blogs, clearly many blogs are now much more about branding, monetization, or constructing a particular image of the self, and much other social media use is more focused on keeping in touch with friends or sharing quick jokes or observations Online Diaries and Blogs  |  413

than on self-improvement or developing ideas. A lot of the discussion that previously happened in self-hosted blogs has shifted to corporate-owned spaces like Twitter and Facebook, where the space to write is far more limited than in a traditional blog. Another shift is the increased emphasis on metrics, such as impressions, reach, and engagement. In the early days of blogging, these elements were not visible to readers. You could see where discussions were taking place, but you couldn’t calculate how important a blogger was based on numbers at the bottom of each post. There are still noncommercial personal diaries online, and there are social media outlets that allow users to share personal and intimate experiences similar to the content of early online diary communities, although these options mainly use video or still images with little text. But perhaps the heyday of online diaries, or of diaries at all, is past. If you go to the Google Ngram Book Search and search all the books Google has digitized for the word diary, or dear diary, you will see the words are used more and more frequently until about the year 2000, when usage begins to drop. That autumn evening on the balcony in Melbourne, just before blogs went mainstream, I caught a glimpse of a shift from a time when we wrote diaries to a time where we record our lives through technology.

How Technology Shapes Diaries There are many different ways to keep a diary. My grandmother’s diary from the cruise she took in the 1960s consists mostly of sparse notes: “Arrived Hong Kong about 10 pm.” Two days later, she wrote two words, “Shopping Kowloon,” followed, a couple of days later, by “Left Hong Kong 10:30 am bound for Kobe.” Her cruise diary is jotted down in a pocket-sized notebook covered in floral-patterned silk. Dates are printed on the pages: two days on each small page. There is not room for much more than notes of quick facts, and only rarely are there more personal notes. It is not that different from the woman on the balcony’s GPS diary. It’s a record of facts, not personal experiences—though for the person who records them, those facts may evoke a world of intimate details. Many diaries, both online and on paper, include explicit prompts. Dates printed on the pages create an expectation of short but daily notes. A pregnancy journal, baby book, or wedding album may have prompts that structure how the diarist records his or her life: describe baby’s first smile, first tooth, first birthday; glue in a photo of the groom waiting for the bride, the bride walking down the aisle, the kiss at the altar, the first dance. These material structurings of diary writing are all founded on cultural practices and rituals, whether marking the passing of days by naming them or celebrating life events in certain ways. 414 | The Diary

When scrapbookers create albums documenting a baby’s first year or a wedding, they are likely to include the same highlights even without the explicit prompts. Filters can be technological, as we see in the prompts and templates of a preprinted baby journal or the constraints and affordances of Instagram or Facebook or Blogger.com. Filters can also be cultural: we expect to take a photo of baby’s first birthday and to write down baby’s first steps and first tooth, whether or not the baby album specifically asks for this information.9 In the mid-twentieth century, Pierre Bourdieu wrote about certain things as being photographable by families and amateurs: happy families, sunny vacations, and celebrations.10 Photo albums, baby albums, and wedding albums are intended for sharing and, being semipublic, are curated in a different way than private diaries. Today, we see a similar divide between semipublic media like Facebook or a blog and more private spaces for sharing personal experiences, such as Snapchat, an anonymous blog on Tumblr, or a private Instagram account. We share different things depending on who we expect will see what we share. Anonymous or pseudonymous diaries are an important part of online diary culture. Although commercial diarists and bloggers often use their full names, there is a strong parallel culture of people writing about their lives with no interest in monetizing their writing, and these people often use pseudonyms. This anonymity was one of the mainstays of popular early sites like OpenDiary.com, which was online from 1998 to 2014 and was important to many online diarists. The site relaunched in 2018, allowing previous users to reclaim their old diaries. In a study of Open Diary users in 2006–8, Annamari Martinviita found that many of these diarists felt that the anonymity allowed them to write about very intimate details of their lives and that the ability to communicate openly about their lives, with no fear of the conversations affecting their everyday lives, was very important to them.11 With Facebook, using real names has become increasingly common in social media, but there are still many platforms where people share diary-like material either using a pseudonym or completely anonymously. For instance, there are communities on Tumblr where people discuss sensitive topics like self-harm or sexuality.12 Are these diaries, though? Many of the Tumblr logs include diaristic posts, describing what the writer has experienced that day, but they also tend to include many other kinds of posts: images with little or no written description, reposted memes and excerpts from mass media content, and responses to other users’ posts. In her ethnography of OpenDiary.com, Annamari Martinviita argued that diarists were able to write about quite intimate experiences because they were already familiar with writing personal diaries on paper. The design of the site was also based on the idea of a private, paper diary: “On Open Diary, the traditional understandings Online Diaries and Blogs  |  415

related to diary-writing—total privacy and hiddenness—influenced the design to a much greater extent than seen in modern-day blogs.”13 The commercialization of blogs and the emphasis on quantified measures of popularity such as likes, shares, and reads mean that bloggers not only expect their blogs to be public but also want as many readers as possible.14 On OpenDiary.com, as Martinviita wrote, “the more closed nature of the community meant that it was rare for a diarist to gain exposure outside the site, and for the majority of members the experience and aim of writing remained purely personal.”15

When Technology Writes for Us Many of the photographs and personal stories that parents share on Facebook are not dissimilar to the images Bourdieu saw as photographable in the 1960s: a newborn baby, a wedding, a happy family on vacation. As we collect more and more data about our personal lives on our phones and on social media platforms, services are appearing that promise to stitch together all our personal information into overviews, narratives, or visualizations of our lives. In effect, these are a kind of automated diary, or perhaps automated memoirs.16 Facebook’s Timeline feature, released in 2011, is one example. The video made to promote the feature begins with a blank, gray screen.17 Two white boxes with text in Facebook’s signature blue fade in: “Andy Sparks was born,” says the first. The second specifies the date: “Aug 14, 1974.” A gray line leads our eyes up the screen, and as though we are scrolling up a page we see photos move past: a mother and baby (Andy and his mother, we assume), childhood photos, photos from school, and then a video of graduates in red gowns throwing their red caps in the air. We speed past photos without being able to really see them; then the scroll pauses to show us a photo of Andy Sparks with an early 1990s hairstyle and a girl next to him. His relationship status is shown beside the photo, and as we watch, it shifts from “Single” to “In a relationship.” Years flash by (1997, 1998, and into the 2000s), and we start seeing more recent photos of the adult Andy with his girlfriend and then a wedding photo with the words “Married Rachel Hudson.” Icons on a map show where he checked in during his honeymoon. Then we start seeing photos of Rachel, pregnant and smiling at the beach, followed, of course, by baby photos and then lots of photos and video clips of Andy and his growing child. The video ends with the words “Introducing Timeline” on a blue background. Facebook’s “Introducing Timeline” video also gives us a perfect example of Bourdieu’s photographable images and shows how short, diary-like Facebook posts can be combined into a story of a life, a form of automated autobiography or memoir.18 However, in 2016 Facebook 416 | The Diary

quietly removed its Timeline feature. Perhaps we no longer want such neatly packaged lives? Instead, Facebook began showing users “Memories,” photos they had shared on that date but a year (or several years) ago. These memories are private unless the user chooses to share them and are shown individually rather than being made part of a narrative. A parody of the “Introducing Timeline” video shows many of the problems involved in combining day-to-day recordings of life with the overall narrative of an autobiography or carefully curated wedding album.19 Most of our Facebook posts are banal, and sometimes embarrassing, in hindsight. The parody shows the life of Andrea Sparks, a fictional character. Like Andy’s timeline, Andrea’s quickly moves toward love, but for her, relationships are a lot more serial than for Andy. “My first breakup” is the caption of a photo accompanied by the broken heart icon of a relationship status change from “In a relationship” to “Single.” There are photos of drunken nights out and a photo a friend posted to her Timeline of her zipping up her jeans after a one-night-stand. We see the “In a relationship” and “Single” statuses flipping back and forth. “Why live in the past? Goodbye, old Andrea Sparks,” the voiceover says, as we see the cursor move to the account settings and select “Deactivate account.” Frivolous or embarrassing sharing, or “oversharing,” is one of the many stereotypes of online diaries and self-representation in social media. But often this dismissal is evidence of a failure to recognize the value of the social. Social media posts are phatic, and a lot of what happens on Facebook and even in blogs is about establishing and maintaining social connections. Social media and apps increasingly write our diaries for us, and they focus on the quantifiable rather than the emotional or confessional, because that is what computers are good at. Individual apps keep track of your activities: Runkeeper or Endomondo tracks your runs, at the end of the year Spotify generates a report of what music you listen to, and Google Photos generates photo albums for you every time you take a trip, complete with maps of your journey and the photos you have taken, neatly organized by time, date, and place. When we connect apps to social media platforms, like Facebook, they can even update each other. In her study of how Facebook users experience their apps automatically posting to their Facebook profile, Tanya Kant found that users see their identity on Facebook as a “carefully-crafted performance” and that inadvertent automatic posts can upset this—for example, if a person was listening to something they think of as embarrassing on Spotify and it were posted to his or her Facebook feed. On the other hand, one of Kant’s informants admitted to deliberately listening to songs so that they would be posted and their friends would see their good taste.20 There are an increasing number of apps that promise to write your diary for you, and their marketing is remarkable. Consider these lines Online Diaries and Blogs  |  417

from STEP Journal’s iTunes app store pitch: “STEP Journal assists you in capturing and telling the amazing story of your life. Life poetry told by sensors—minimal efforts and 100 percent privacy. The true power of Automatic Journaling!” Or perhaps you would be more interested in the app Saga: “Be bold. Embrace your authentic self. Record your life automatically and share it effortlessly with the people you care about.” As I discuss elsewhere, the idea of automated diaries seems at odds with the notion that we use diaries to make sense of our lives by telling our own stories.21 However, as Minna Ruckenstein found, we narrativize our data as well as our lives. When we are shown quantified information about our days, such as steps walked or calories burned or heart rate variability (an indicator of stress), we retell our stories of what happened that day, adjusting memories to data and data to memories to create a story that will fit.22

Pseudonymous Diary Writing A popular group of blogs is the general sphere of domestic blogs: mommy blogs, craft blogs, cooking blogs, home design blogs, gardening blogs, and so on. These blogs can be highly professionalized, but most contain personal, diary-like aspects. Posts tend to be image-rich and tell stories from the bloggers’ everyday lives. Over the years, bloggers have grown increasingly adept at telling a general public about their days in a way that retains their own and their families’ privacy. These blogs are not private diaries where everything is told. Far from it, bloggers often give pseudonyms to children and family members (“dd” for “dear daughter” or more personalized pseudonyms like Miss A., Mr. 13, or My Princess) and images are often framed and cropped to hide identifying characteristics. This elusion of identity is almost the opposite of Bourdieu’s idea of the photographable: happy, smiling families. It is also a different mode of self-representation to the face-centric selfies that are so common in other kinds of social media feeds. Photos and stories in mommy blogs in particular often evoke an atmosphere or an emotion more than an exact sequence of events. For instance, a photo may show chubby toddler hands building a mud pie, but the child’s face is not visible. Or you may see a teenager and a dog running through a field of flowers, but they are photographed from behind. Writing public diaries while maintaining privacy isn’t only a concern for parents protecting their children, and it can be seen both in words and images. There is, for example, a whole genre of professors writing pseudonymous blogs about the challenges of combining academic work and a personal life.23 On Tumblr or Reddit, you’ll find young adults discussing sensitive topics like depression, self-harm, or their sexual identities 418 | The Diary

using similar strategies: they write using a pseudonym, photographs are cropped to hide the face, and there are no references to places or names in the text.24 This allows them to find a community without exposing their identity. The communal aspect of these blogging communities is very reminiscent of the way many religious groups encouraged journaling as a spiritual practice for self-improvement although the topics are very different.25 On the internet, this shared work can be done quite separately from the social environment you inhabit at home, school, or work.

Ephemerality Online diaries also exist in a conflict between ephemerality and permanence. The Facebook Timeline spoof video shows this perfectly: sharing photos of a drunken binge can be perfectly appropriate between friends, but it is not necessarily something you want to be a permanent part of the online, publicly accessible narrative of your life. While traditional photo albums are visual, shared, family diaries that are intended to be passed down through generations, personal paper diaries are often more temporary. Of course they are often saved, and the very format of the book means that individual entries will usually not be thrown out. But many diaries are eventually burned or thrown away when their writer is embarrassed from rereading them years afterward, or they may be destroyed to protect the privacy of the writer. Snapchat is used by many as a social diary that self-destructs every day. This kind of disappearing diary might be what we need now that diaries have become social. In its first years, Snapchat was a visual messaging system where messages disappeared once read. Now it also allows users to post stories that are visible either to the user’s friends or to everyone, and that disappear after twenty-four hours. Stories are sequences of snaps—that is, sequences of still images and ten-second-or-less videos. Images can have writing and drawings on them, and people often narrate a voiceover on their videos. In practice, Snapchat stories are often used as a kind of shared diary. Most people who create stories share individual snaps from their day: quick photos of where they are and what they are doing, a series of selfies with text explaining a disappointment, a surprise or something they are looking forward to—for example, a series of videos showing how the Snapchatter gets on the bus on their way to a party, building up anticipation. Snapchat is also increasingly being used by marketers, celebrities, and influencers who tend to create more structured stories, stringing together a series of snaps to make a short cohesive video about something they did that day. Perhaps because of the inherent impermanence of Snapchat, you will sometimes see quite confessional posts there. When studying Online Diaries and Blogs  |  419

Snapchat stories, I followed a lot of people who had posted their Snapchat usernames on public forums on the web, asking people to follow them.26 One was a schoolteacher who posted mostly happy snaps of her home and her husband and her cat, until one day she posted a string of crying snaps, speaking into the camera with tears streaming down her cheeks as she told us how she hated her job, how the kids she taught were great but the boss was crazy and she was going to quit. She and her husband were planning to move back to the small town where his parents were from and live in their basement. After that day, her snaps went back to the standard happy fare, and there have only been a few references to the move or to her job. A new follower, or someone who hadn’t checked Snapchat on that day, would never have known. Another person I followed had been creating complex, quite artistic stories almost daily, but then posted a series of very emotional snaps about how his friend had been in a car crash. He stopped posting at all after that. Snapchat storytellers (who might be thought of as video diarists) have to repeat information from previous days if they want to be sure that all current viewers know about it. You start afresh every day—unless you are a major celebrity, in which case you may find key Snapchat stories have been screencaptured and republished. That happened with one of Snapchat’s most popular users, DJ Khaled (@djkhaled), whose snaps from when he got lost on his Jet Ski were reposted by a number of media outlets and, of course, posted to YouTube.27 Although Snapchat may be particularly conducive to this kind of confessional, intensely emotional honesty, confessional posts also can be found on blogs. In the early years of blogging, there were several cases heavily reported in the media where bloggers were fired for indiscreet blog posts. In part this was due to “digital dualism,” the sense that the internet was a separate domain from our everyday lives, with few consequences flowing between the two spheres.28 In the early days, so few people were online that you were very unlikely to meet a neighbor or colleague online. Obviously this has changed. Dooce was probably the first and most famous of the bloggers to be fired “for blogging”: she wrote an angry post about her employer without considering that as she was blogging using her full name, her employer was likely to see what she wrote.29

A Time of Transition Online diaries and blogs are genres in transition and have been for the last twenty years. Words merge with images, video with text, allowing people to spread their stories across different platforms: Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat, a blog. On another level, things haven’t really changed that much. Online and offline, we record aspects of our lives. We share our records 420 | The Diary

with some people. Sometimes we destroy our diaries; sometimes we publish them. We start a diary and forget about it. We log every location we are at for a while and then get bored with that. We find the diaries we wrote as teenagers and burn them. Or we delete our old Facebook posts. As technologies change, we record and share our lives in different ways. Today, many young people share videos and images on Snapchat or Instagram, telling their friends about their lives. Photographs and videos have become far more central in our self-representations than they were when my grandmother jotted down notes from her cruise. Data about our lives is recorded automatically as well, to an extent that I did not imagine back in 2001 as the woman on the balcony told me she thought of her GPS device as “a sort of diary.” The ways we write about and record our lives are changing. But we don’t stop writing. Notes 1. Philippe Lejeune, “Autobiography and New Communication Tools,” in Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, trans. Katherine Durnin, Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 247. 2. Peter Heehs, Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 8. 3. Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 8. 4. Ibid., 9. 5. Theresa M. Senft, “Microcelebrity and the Branded Self,” in A Companion to New Media Dynamics, ed. John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and Axel Bruns (Chicester: Wiley, 2013), 347–55; Alice Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Crystal Abidin, “Communicative ♥ Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, no. 8 (2015), http://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/. 6. Viviane Serfaty, The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies, 2004), 5. 7. Ibid. 8. Rettberg, Blogging, chap. 5. 9. Jill Walker Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (Basingbroke: Palgrave, 2014), 22. 10. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 11. Annamari Martinviita, “Online Community and the Personal Diary: Writing to Connect at Open Diary,” Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016): 672–82, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.089. 12. Yukari Seko and Stephen P. Lewis, “The Self—Harmed, Visualized, and Reblogged: Remaking of Self-Injury Narratives on Tumblr,” New Media and Online Diaries and Blogs  |  421

Society (July 28, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816660783; Katrin Tiidenberg, “Boundaries and Conflict in a NSFW Community on Tumblr: The Meanings and Uses of Selfies,” New Media and Society (January 14, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814567984. 13. Martinviita, “Online Community and the Personal Diary,” 680. 14. Benjamin Grosser, “What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook,” Computational Culture, no. 4 (2014), http://computationalculture.net/article/what-do-metrics-want; Marwick, Status Update. 15. Martinviita, “Online Community and the Personal Diary,” 680. 16. Jill Walker Rettberg, “Apps as Companions: How Quantified Self Apps Become Our Audience and Our Companions,” in Self-Tracking: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations, ed. Btihaj Ajana (Basingbroke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65379-2_3. 17. Facebook, “Introducing Timeline,” Vimeo (Facebook, 2011). 18. Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves, chap. 4. 19. Jahnna Lee Randall [Why Wait Productions—Jahnnalee, pseud.], “Introducing Facebook Timeline—(Spoof/Parody),” YouTube video, 1:30, February 14, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4LMhYcglFY. 20. Tanya Kant, “‘Spotify Has Added an Event to Your Past’: (Re)Writing the Self through Facebook’s Autoposting Apps,” Fibreculture Journal, no. 25 (2015), https://doi.org/10.15307/fcj.25.180.2015. 21. Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves, 47–49. 22. Minna Ruckenstein, “Visualized and Interacted Life: Personal Analytics and Engagements with Data Doubles,” Societies 4, no. 1 (2014): 68–84, https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4010068; Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves, 69–70, 87. 23. Rettberg, Blogging, 125–28. 24. Emily van der Nagel and Jordan Frith, “Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and the Agency of Online Identity: Examining the Social Practices of r/Gonewild,” First Monday 20, no. 3 (2015), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i3.5615; Tiidenberg, “Boundaries and Conflict.” 25. Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves, 5–6. 26. Jill Walker Rettberg, “Snapchat,” in Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps, ed. Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 188–95. 27. YoungJizzle [pseud.], “DJ Khaled Jet Ski Adventure 12.14.15 ORIGINAL VIDEO,” YouTube video, 3:36, December 14, 2015, https://www​ .youtube.com/watch?v=kkuR8ODzo1Q. 28. Nathan Jurgensen, “Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality,” Cyborgology (blog), February 24, 2011, https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology /2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/. 29. Rettberg, Blogging, 18.

Bibliography Abidin, Crystal. “Communicative ♥ Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Inter­ connectedness.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, no. 8 (2015). http://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/. Bourdieu, Pierre. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.

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Facebook. “Introducing Timeline.” Vimeo. Facebook, 2011. Grosser, Benjamin. “What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook.” Computational Culture, no. 4 (2014). http://computationalculture.net/article/what-do-metrics-want. Heehs, Peter. Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Jurgensen, Nathan. “Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality.” Cyborgology (blog), February 24, 2011. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology /2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/. Kant, Tanya. “‘Spotify Has Added an Event to Your Past’: (Re)Writing the Self through Facebook’s Autoposting Apps.” Fibreculture Journal, no. 25 (2015). https://doi.org/10.15307/fcj.25.180.2015. Lejeune, Philippe. “Autobiography and New Communication Tools.” In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, translated by Katherine Durnin, 247–58. Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. Martinviita, Annamari. “Online Community and the Personal Diary: Writing to Connect at Open Diary.” Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016): 672–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.089. Marwick, Alice. Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Nagel, Emily van der, and Jordan Frith. “Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and the Agency of Online Identity: Examining the Social Practices of r/Gonewild.” First Monday 20, no. 3 (2015). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i3.5615. Randall, Jahnna Lee [Why Wait Productions—Jahnnalee, pseud.]. “Introducing Facebook Timeline—(Spoof/Parody).” YouTube video, 1:30. February 14, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4LMhYcglFY. Rettberg, Jill Walker. “Apps as Companions: How Quantified Self Apps Become Our Audience and Our Companions.” In Self-Tracking: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations, edited by Btihaj Ajana. Basingbroke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65379-2_3. ———. Blogging. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. ———. Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. Basingbroke, UK: Palgrave, 2014. ———. “Snapchat.” In Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps, edited by Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray, 188–95. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Ruckenstein, Minna. “Visualized and Interacted Life: Personal Analytics and Engagements with Data Doubles.” Societies 4, no. 1 (2014): 68–84. https:// doi.org/10.3390/soc4010068. Seko, Yukari, and Stephen P. Lewis. “The Self—Harmed, Visualized, and Reblogged: Remaking of Self-Injury Narratives on Tumblr.” New Media and Society (July 28, 2016). https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816660783. Senft, Theresa M. “Microcelebrity and the Branded Self.” In A Companion to New Media Dynamics, edited by John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and Axel Bruns, 347–55. Chicester, UK: Wiley, 2013. Serfaty, Viviane. The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies, 2004.

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Tiidenberg, Katrin. “Boundaries and Conflict in a NSFW Community on Tumblr: The Meanings and Uses of Selfies.” New Media and Society (January 14, 2015). https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814567984. YoungJizzle [pseud.]. “DJ Khaled Jet Ski Adventure 12.14.15 ORIGINAL VIDEO.” YouTube video, 3:36. December 14, 2015. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=kkuR8ODzo1Q.

J I L L WA L K E R R E T T B E RG is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen–Norway. She is editor (with Hilde G. Corneliussen) of Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader and author of Blogging and Seeing Ourselves through Technology. Her blog is at http://jilltxt.net.

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25 A Journey through Two Decades of Online Diary Community Lena Buford

Looking for online diary communities is a little like diving down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. The internet of the late 2010s is a www.dreamworld that, like Alice’s, is constantly transforming itself into something unrecognizable, populated with characters both wondrously strange and perfectly ordinary and both shrinking and growing exponentially. Lewis Carroll’s murderous Queen of Hearts meets her modern-day match in Elizabeth Clay’s DearDementedDiary.1 Duchesses breastfeeding their pig babies might as well be the 1865 version of the mommy blog. And the Cheshire Cat? No era in the history of the world has more lauded that aloof, whiskered creature than our World Wide Webbed one. In this chapter, I follow three Alices down the rabbit hole, through the last two decades of an internet wonderland. First I describe some of the difficulties of counting and categorizing online diaries by sketching a brief history of the ever-evolving form and of the web platforms that have both enabled and shaped this evolution. I will then note some of the online diary’s clearest defining features and suggest three categories into which the communities that form around online diaries fall. Lastly I will follow our three Alices, and others, through this evolving history and trio of community types, in an effort to better understand why and how online diary communities form, what shapes they take, and why and how they end. The three Alices are Justin Hall, self-proclaimed “oversharer” and widely credited as one of the first bloggers (if not the first), who has been posting personal stories from his online and offline

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lives since 1994; Mippy, who, with that username and the title “A True Story about Nothing Much,” posted 2,187 journal entries between 2003 and 2010 on the online journaling site LiveJournal and who eloquently describes that site’s decline as a place of online diary community; and me, a longtime paper diarist and short-lived blogger, with motivations, experiences, and cautionary tales that echo many I found in my online adventures in diaryland.2

Volume and the Vanishing Diary: Methodological Problems In 1999, diary scholar Philippe Lejeune undertook a study of a “phenomenon that was just beginning to appear in the French-speaking world: online diaries.”3 After a month of searching, he found sixty-nine. Quantifying how many online diaries there are today, or how many have come into existence, however briefly, since their beginnings in the mid-1990s, is no easy thing. Part of the difficulty comes from the nuanced definitional edge around the term online diary, at least for the purposes of sorting and counting them in mass quantities, and the fact that this elastic edge has had to stretch, possibly to the breaking point, in order to keep pace with a rapidly evolving autobiographical internet. Early online diaries, which started to appear around 1995, were more like their paper counterparts than later versions of the form: longform, textual, personal narratives.4 The early to mid-2000s saw the rise of online diary aggregator sites like LiveJournal and Diarist.net, where these longer-form, text-based entries were still the norm, but commenting on others’ “journals” and forming communities became more central to the diarist’s online experience. The latter 2000s brought the explosion of the “blogosphere,” with Merriam-Webster declaring blog the word of the year in 2004, and one report counting 173 million blogs worldwide by 2011.5 More and more people were writing about themselves online, but this volume, coupled with the vast, loose, and overlapping categorical boundaries around and within the blogosphere, and the increasing use of blogs for sales and brand promotional purposes over the years, made counting “online diaries” within the blogosphere nigh on impossible. No one, for example, would consider the Huffington Post blog to be an online diary, but what about a knitting blog that happens to be very personal and diary-like in its content? More recently, blogging has, in its turn, been usurped by the rise of shorter-form and more image-based bursts of self-expression found on social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr, which began their ascendance in the later 2000s and dominated the social internet of the mid- to late 2010s. Is the term online diary elastic enough to stretch around these vast new autobiographical landscapes? 426 | The Diary

One could argue that many of the over three hundred million microblogs on Tumblr are too short, or photo-centric, or pornographic, or fragmented (readers rarely see the whole story of a person chronologically), or too full of nonnarrative elements to be considered online diaries.6 Alternatively one could argue that forms like this are just online diary’s newest incarnation. It is certainly possible for someone to keep an online diary, even in the most traditional sense, on Tumblr, or any of these sites.7 If only 1 percent of Facebook’s 1.09 billion daily active users could be considered online diarists, it would mean ten million online diaries on just that one platform.8 Regardless of the actual number, however, it is clear that over the last two decades, online diaries have picked up the cake labeled “eat me,” and expanded exponentially. The form specifically labeled online diary, however, has been vanishing since the mid-2000s, as many online diarists and online diary websites have disappeared altogether, lost forever in the increasingly crowded mausoleum of broken links and “object not found” errors that is the World Wide Web of today.9 Diaries written down on paper have their own longevity problems, of course. They can get lost, or moldy, or destroyed in fits of embarrassment over the ramblings of our earlier selves. Online diaries, and the communities that spring up around them, are no less and perhaps even more ephemeral. Of the twenty “online diary lists, webrings, ’burbs, and publishing venues” that Madeleine Sorapure studied around the millennium, only one (LiveJournal) was still active when she checked in again in 2015, and LiveJournal had by that time morphed into a social networking site popular in Russia.10 Diarist.net, GeoCities, OpenDiary, MyDearDiary, Xanga—the list of dead or near-dead websites that once hosted thriving online diary communities is long. Reflecting on his own millennial exploration of online diaries, Lejeune noted, just eight years after his study, in 2008, “Things are moving so fast that my study already has a sort of archeological value.”11 Of the forty-one online diaries that a Personalweb site describes as “fantastic and alluring online journals of women who want you to get to know them better”—with titles like “Beyond the Mask,” “The Junkbox,” “Dad’s Lung Cancer,” “Spoonland,” “Liz’s Web Portal,” “Love Me as I Am,” and “Unicorn Meat”—twenty-two are either blank, broken, go nowhere, point to a generic domain hosting page, or redirect to websites completely unrelated to women’s online diaries.12 The autobiographical internet is strewn with these ghosts and traces and hiding a host of others that have come and gone without leaving any trace at all. I suspect that as internet use spreads to more and more age groups, social classes, cultures, and corners of the globe (a 2014 Pew survey has 87 percent of American adults using the internet, up from 14 percent in 1995), and as the wonderland of online autobiographical content continues to both disappear and Two Decades of Online Diary Community  |  427

grow exponentially, that slippery thing called an “online diary” is, and will continue to be, an increasingly difficult rabbit to catch.13

Online Diary: Features and Form Online diaries share many qualities with their offline counterparts, but they diverge in a few key ways that relate to a fundamental difference between online and offline versions of the form: online diaries are written to be read. To orient their audience of readers, online diarists often include explanatory features that their offline counterparts have no need for, such as profile pages with autobiographical info, “casts of characters,” dated archives of previous posts, links to previous posts for background and context, and titles on both individual entries and the journals themselves.14 Another “public performance” aspect of online diaries is that they are often edited, both before and after posting, and, through comment areas and other online feedback mechanisms, become sites of interaction with both readers and other diarists and, thus, sites of online diary community.15

Three Types of Online Diary Community: Location, Celebrity, and Tribe Communities form around online diaries in three distinct ways. The first type of community forms geographically (in the virtual sense) around a shared internet place, on a single web platform, at a single URL. LiveJournal, Facebook, Tumblr, and the now defunct GeoCities and Diarist. net are all communities of online location. In these virtual “places” many users post entries and form connections within the bounds of the online “neighborhood.” These are “many-to-many” communities where, although “celebrities” with lots of friends or followers can emerge, the community is formed around and, to a certain extent, contained within the shared online space, defined by a single URL and mode of interface.16 The second type of online diary community is the celebrity type: a stand-alone diary or personal blog site with its own URL, that achieves community by attracting readers who interact both with the diarist and, if the diary is popular and the comment section lively enough, with each other. This type of community has a “one-to-many” connectivity structure and relies much more heavily on the personality, posting frequency, and whims of the website’s author and main character.17 If the diarist takes down his or her site, or turns off comments, the community vanishes. Justin Hall’s links.net and many personal blogs with their own URLs exemplify this type.

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A third type of online diary community is formed by like-minded souls around an interest or belief or characteristic they hold in common, often referred to on the internet as “finding one’s tribe.”18 In this type of community, groups of individual diarists or personal bloggers, and their readers, from many different online “places” and URLs, form many-tomany communities around the shared interest or proclivity.19 Talking about his use of early online bulletin boards in a 2015 video about his twenty-some years of “oversharing,” Hall says, “I may have felt like a weird and lonely kid, but using these early networks, I could find other weird and lonely people to hang out with.”20 My first blog, which fell into the “minimalist” topical subcategory, was featured by a prominent blogger in that thematic subgroup, Miss Minimalist, on her blog.21 Her large following flocked to my blog that day, causing my usually sluggish daily “hit” count to spike dramatically. With its increasingly worldwide reach, diarists and bloggers have formed tribes around every interest and subculture imaginable (dieting, knitting, parenting, and sexual orientation, to name but a tame and tiny few). A 2009 study by Mary Gray found that gay teens, especially those in small, rural towns without local queer networks, seek out online stories of “queer realness” to “expand their sense of place, home, and belonging within queer social worlds” online.22 There are many areas of overlap between these three types of community. Francine Jay (aka Miss Minimalist) exemplifies the second celebrity type but also participates in her minimalist tribe by linking to and promoting other minimalist bloggers, as she did for me. Diarists in placebased communities like LiveJournal who opt for liberal privacy settings and publish publically can be read and responded to by readers outside those URL-based communities. Diarists can also participate in two or more communities of location at the same time, via “cross posting,” which is when you post a single journal entry to multiple location-based accounts. LiveJournal celebrity TheFerrett writes on his “real blog” and then cross-posts to both Dreamwidth.org and LiveJournal.23

Motivations: Historical Beginnings “Begin at the beginning,” Lewis Carroll’s King says, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”24 In the pages that follow I describe a number of reasons online diaries and the communities around them begin, thrive, and either change or come to an end. To understand such trajectories, it is important to understand what the internet was like before and after roughly 2004, when Web 2.0 came into being. Web 2.0 generally refers to a “phase two” of the internet, characterized by ease of use, greater interactivity, and the proliferation of user-generated content.

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The formation and rise in popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube between 2004 and 2010, along with the replacement of slower dial-up connections with faster broadband and the rise of mobile connectivity through smartphones, resulted in more and more people spending more and more time online.25 The early internet was a smaller, slower, harder-to-navigate, less populous place. “In December of 1993,” says Justin Hall in his 2015 video, “there were maybe only 600 websites and you could surf the entire thing in like two weekends.”26 He decided to collect his favorite ones at a site he named “Justin’s Links from the Underground.” By 1995 he had twenty-seven thousand daily readers, although he lost twenty thousand of them in one day when he took down his interactive sex links section. Hall, like many other early diarists, began as a curator and “link trader” and only later “decided to focus on sharing stories from my life instead.” Not all online diary fodder is quite as sensational as his, but that year, Hall was arrested, caught a sexually transmitted disease, and got in a “physical altercation with author Kurt Vonnegut.” 27 In September 1995, Willa Cline wrote in her online diary, “So why am I doing it? Because I can. The web grabbed my attention from the first time I saw it. . . . When I found out that anyone who was willing to put in a little work learning a fairly simple language could put up a website, I couldn’t contain my excitement. The idea that anyone in the world could publicize anything they wanted and anyone else could look at it just staggered me. Think of the possibilities!”28 Mary Anne Mohanraj began her online diary, in December 1995, like this: “No promises on this one, but I thought I’d try a diary, since I’ve really enjoyed reading some other ones I’ve found on the net.”29 In the early days of the internet, when very few people were online, and even fewer had the technical skills to create and post online content, the earliest online diary communities were small groups of those who took the time to learn how to make websites, saw others writing about their personal lives online, thought “I can do that,” and did.

Ego and Thrills Early online diarists wrote and read diaries because they suddenly could, but there were egocentric motives as well. “As a kid I grew up with access to technology and a deep need for attention,” says Hall.30 In a June 1999 email exchange between two online diarists about what to call their new tribe of folks writing personal things on the web, the term escribitionist was coined.31 This combination of the Spanish word for writing (escribir) and the English word for showing off one’s private parts in public perfectly captures the vain, compulsive, and self-obsessive aspects of online diary writing, as well as the thrill of it. 430 | The Diary

When my obscure and mostly unread minimalist blog suddenly got fourteen hundred hits in one day instead of two or three, it was exhilarating. Exposing ourselves to the world via the web is exciting; attracting the attention of others with stories of ourselves feeds our egos and makes us feel important. “When I wrote a good blog post, one that prompted readers to respond,” wrote Diane Josefowicz, in a 2015 article about her experiences with blogging, “I was happy, energized.”32 It is this moment of connection, when the creatively constructed online I reaches and resonates with the online you and crackles with the excitement of a virtual we, that is the birthplace of online diary communities.33

Sharing Trouble: Relief Function Another reason for writing and reading online diaries is simply that it feels good to share bad things. “Releasing emotional tension” is the fifth of five blogging motivators observed in a 2004 study by Bonnie Nardi, Diane Schiano, and Michelle Gumbrecht.34 In my own thirty-odd years of paper diary writing, I have tended, as many diarists do, to write much more when I am feeling miserable. Describing her most prolific days of diary writing on LiveJournal, Mippy wrote, “Yeah, my peak LJ years were during a very turbulent time in my life—unemployment and living with warring parents feeling stuck, moving . . . mental illness, weird friendship, weird relationship, parent dying, difficult breakup, nervous breakdown and recovery . . . all in the space of about two years. I’m not sure how much it saved me in therapy bills, and it made me feel like I wasn’t alone even if I was sat in my bedroom afraid to leave the house, or isolated in a home-town I hated.”35 Unlike Facebook, which studies are showing makes us sadder—possibly because of all the cheerful quotes, just-completed 5K races, and false, curated, “happy faces only” that predominate there—reading other people’s angsty online diary entries can actually make us feel a little better about ourselves.36 MetaFilter user PhoBWanKenobi wrote, about her experiences on the site diaryland.com, “I fell in love with my husband on there . . . it was the deep, sad, introspective journaling that stole my heart.”37

Making Friends Many online diary writers and readers cite “making friends” as one of the things they loved and, in some cases now miss, about online diary communities. Looking back, in 2000, on five years of online diary writing, Mary Anne Mohanraj wrote, “What I didn’t expect was how much I would get out of the journal. It became a way for me to become friends with my readers. . . . There were nights when I was having a rough time Two Decades of Online Diary Community  |  431

with my life, when my real world friends were asleep or just felt too distant, and it really helped to be able to talk to my journal readers.”38 Speaking of her LiveJournal experience, Mippy wrote, “A lot of my online friends now I met via LJ. . . . There was a tight-knit group of smart, funny people, mostly based in London, who wrote beautifully about their lives, their interests and their favourite songs. I got my first London place to live via LJ friends, kept in touch with the person who is now my boyfriend of almost five years, and had a little support group and a place to rant.”39 Mippy, via an online community of location, had found her tribe.

Readership One of the main reasons people write online diaries is desire for a reader. Is there a “hidden author” in every diarist, yearning for an audience? Philippe Lejeune thinks so. After putting out a call for nineteenth-century diaries for his diary archive, he received frequent requests from presentday diary keepers asking if one or two people could please read their diaries. “It took me some time,” Lejeune wrote, “to realize the huge demand for a readership which our society fails to meet.”40 Many writers of the most secret sort of unpublished paper diaries deep down crave and even assume some kind of reader. I certainly did and would often muse longingly in my offline diaries about what would happen if someone read my scribblings one day. This hoped-for future audience, however wishful and imaginary, undoubtedly shaped what I was writing. The rise of the free-for-all public space of the internet made it suddenly possible for writers of all stripes, diarists included, to reach an audience without passing through the gateway of the mediating agents (editors and publishers) who control the print world. For those brave enough to share their secrets with an internet of faceless strangers, and who managed to attract readers in the increasingly crowded and cacophonous internet space, the most basic of the online diarist’s needs, that of a readership, was met.

Feedback And not only did those internet readers read, but they friended, liked, linked, pinged back, emailed, and commented, which the silent and unknowable readers of paper diaries could never do. Online diarists and their readers were pioneers in the brave new world of the instant feedback loop, cocreators in a collaborative project of both community and identity formation. “I crave feedback, I live for feedback,” wrote “Terri,” one of the diarists Viviane Serfaty read for her 2004 overview of online diaries.41 “Blogging is as much about reading as writing, as much about 432 | The Diary

listening as talking,” wrote Nardi, Schiano, and Gumbrecht.42 Before the internet, the readers of our unpublished diaries were either furtive or posthumous. We never knew what our readers were thinking as we were writing. One outcome of this exchange is encouragement. “Bloggers who started their own blogs reported that they gained momentum when they realized others were actually reading their posts,” wrote Nardi, Schiano, and Gumbrecht. “Blogs create the audience, but the audience also creates the blog.”43

Anonymous Intimacy In one final motivator of online diarists, one can see signs of both the beginning and the end of early online diaries. That motivator? An attraction to the idea of “anonymous intimacy” or “privacy in public.”44 Carolyn Burke, describing why she started one of the first online diaries, “Carolyn’s Diary,” in 1995, wrote, “I needed an outlet to talk about myself, privately, and with someone listening.”45 Amanda, one of the queer teens in Gray’s study, described her experiences online as “pretty much the only place I can Google stuff or say my true feelings and not have everyone know about it.”46 These are strange, oxymoronic statements, but in the early days of personal life writing on the internet, there was a real sense of both intimacy and anonymity in a very public sphere. “It felt private, cozy, secure, under-the-radar, and yet there were so many ways to happen across interesting people and to slowly build a relationship with them,” wrote MetaFilter user Coatlicue about LiveJournal.47 This capacity to be both private and public, both inward and outward-looking at the same time, is one of the most fascinating features of the online diary and, to a certain extent, a luxury of the relatively unpopulated and inaccessible early web. The rise of web searching technologies in the late 1990s such as Google and Ask Jeeves blew the lid off these private/public spaces and caused the first mass extinction of online diaries, as bosses and family members started to find the diaries they were appearing in as characters and didn’t always like it very much.48 Discovery and negative feedback are a major reason many online diaries end. A note on the home page of “Shmuel’s Soapbox” reads, “WARNING: If you’re related to me, you’re going to find out more about me than you wanted to know.”49 Hall’s uncle complained about reading his dinner table conversations on the internet the next day. “I was learning that a more popular internet meant more scrutiny for my personal writing project,” says Hall.50 I hung up my blogging togs for good when a post I’d written about an actress in a musical led to an unexpected onslaught of angry comments and emails from her family and friends because I had (quite unintentionally) hurt her feelings. Josefowicz scaled back her Two Decades of Online Diary Community  |  433

blogging when her posts led to trouble with the jealousy of a childhood friend. “When good things happened, I didn’t tell anyone,” she wrote. “I had learned to keep my news to myself.”51

The Death of an Online Diary “Discontinuity,” wrote Philippe Lejeune in an essay about how offline diaries end, “is part and parcel of the diary’s rhythm.”52 Online diaries are no different. On the disappearance of her beloved LiveJournal community, Mippy wrote, “A few weeks ago, I went back to have a look. The active communities I went on—no posts since 2008, dwindled to a trickle of bi-monthly ‘is anyone still there’ shouts into the ether, or the same people arguing on about the same things to an audience of themselves. Maybe it’s just full of Russians and high-school students these days.” Another MetaFilter user, Griphus, wrote, “Man, I basically spent ages 17–23 (~2001–2007) on LiveJournal. Made internet friends, made reallife friends, romance, mystery, danger, etcetera. I still pull up my friends’ page sometimes and it’s like a ghost town: automated twitter postings, spam, a few hangers-on but that’s about it. Everyone’s gone to greener pastures, but they’re all very, very different pastures.”53 Why do online diaries end? Besides discovery and negative feedback, one reason is simple fatigue. It is hard to keep up a public diary performance, daily, for years on end. Comments sections can get too populous to moderate, crowded with trolls and spam, and have to be shut down. Others just grow out of online diary writing as they get older, as many grow out of writing offline diaries. MetaFilter user MartinWisse wrote, “The ‘death’ of LiveJournal hasn’t so much happened, as that people grew out of it and moved on. . . . You start out in your teens or early twenties finding one or more online communities full of your kind of people, you hang out together, meet in real life, fall in love, fall out of love, get a career going, start a family, slowly drop out.”54 In her 2013 book about blogging, Jill Walker Rettberg noted two major changes that have affected personal life writing on the web. The first is centralization, or the coalescing of many formerly scattered voices into single mega–web platforms like Facebook. The second is the rise of the smartphone, with its small screen, tiny keyboard, and shorter time windows in which we now write and read things, a movement away from the longer, introspective journal entries that characterized earlier online diaries. Smartphones have also made our online world more visual, as phone cameras have improved dramatically and picture-based apps like Instagram and Snapchat have risen in popularity.55 There is competition. We can no longer surf the entire web in two weekends, and in an online

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world where everyone and, quite literally, their mother is shouting into the ether, it is harder and harder to be heard. Finally, there is evolution. “Blogging—I mean, honey, don’t even say the word,” wrote Robinson Meyer in a 2015 Atlantic article. “No one actually blogs anymore, except maybe undergrads on their first week of study abroad.”56 The angsty kids of today, it seems, are mostly posting disappearing selfies on Snapchat.57 In another ten years they’ll be using a platform some enterprising college student hasn’t even dreamed up yet. The early internet was a club of strangers free to reveal the most intimate details of their lives with a sort of anonymity and impunity. They formed communities with each other, the other diarists. They read each other’s diaries, followed, friended, liked, linked to, and commented on them. They even met each other in real life. In the heyday of sites like LiveJournal, lively, cozy communities sprang up and thrived around anguished personal narratives and shared private lives. Then came the exploding blogosphere, the exposure of the Google search box, spam, identity theft, catfishing, online stalking, and the rise of the shorter-form Twitter and Facebook, packed with advertising, and suddenly the internet was a more dangerous, faster-paced, and crowded place.58 “Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?” Alice asks the Cheshire Cat. “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” the cat replies. “I don’t much care where,” replies Alice, “as long as I get somewhere.”59 Online writing and reading and connecting around tales of ourselves will undoubtedly continue. Writing online diaries feeds our ego, meets our desire for readers and thrills, and helps us form online and offline bonds with other human beings. I can’t wait to check back in another decade or two and see what curiouser and curiouser roads through www.wonder​ land all the Alices of online diary writing have traveled. Notes 1. Elizabeth Clay, Dear Demented Diary (blog), accessed July 2016. http:// deardementeddiary.com/. 2. Justin Hall, Links.net (blog), accessed July 2016, http://links.net/. LiveJournal is an online community built around personal journaling, founded in 1999. “Frequently Asked Question #4,” LiveJournal support, accessed July 2016, http://www.livejournal.com/support/faq/4.html; “Tracking LiveJournal’s Decline,” MetaFilter (blog), September 2012, http://www.metafilter .com/119695/Tracking-LiveJournals-decline. MetaFilter, founded in 1999, is a community weblog where users link to content and post commentary in a group setting in the way that individuals did on early weblogs, which were filtration websites consisting of lists of links to other sites and commentaries. These led to the now ubiquitous blog format, which is typified by short, dated journal entries in reverse chronological order.

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3. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. Katherine Durnin (Manoa: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 299. 4. See Carolyn Burke, Carolyn’s Diary (blog), accessed July 2016, http:// diary.carolyn.org/Overview.html. 5. Mathias Brandt, “The Blogosphere Expands,” Statista, March 12, 2012, https://www.statista.com/chart/161/number-of-blogs-worldwide/. 6. “Tumblr Is Where Your Interests Connect You with Your People,” Tumblr, accessed July 2016, https://www.tumblr.com/about. A microblog is a short form of blogging where individual entries can be a single sentence or a photo. Tumblr describes itself as a place where it is “really, really simple for people to make a blog and put whatever they want on it.” 7. An example of a Tumblr online diary: Ramona, Diary (blog), Tumblr, accessed August 2019, https://jamausis.tumblr.com/tagged/diary. 8. Facebook Newsroom, “Our Mission,” accessed July 2016, http://newsroom .fb.com/company-info/. 9. A Google trends search on the term online diary shows a steady decline since 2004 (which is as far back as its tracking goes). See “online diary” search term, Google Trends, accessed July 2016, https://www.google.com /trends/explore#q=%22online%20diary%22. 10. Madeleine Sorapure, “Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the Web,” Biography 26, no. 1 (2003): 1–23; Madeleine Sorapure, “Autobiography Scholarship 2.0?: Understanding New Forms of Online Life Writing,” Biography 38, no. 2 (2015): 267. 11. Lejeune, On Diary, 299. 12. “Women’s Diaries Online,” Personalweb, accessed July 2016, http:// personalweb.about.com/od/womensonlinediaires/ (site discontinued). 13. Pew Research Center, “Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet,” PewInternet.org, accessed July 2016, http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/internet-use /internet-use-over-time/. 14. See Justin Hall’s “autobio” (“Vita,” Links.net [blog], accessed July 2016, http://links.net/vita/), and Mippy’s LiveJournal profile (A True Story about Nothing Much [blog], LiveJournal, accessed July 2016, http://mippy.livejournal .com/profile). 15. See Lois Ann Scheidt, “Adolescent Diary Weblogs and the Unseen Audience,” in Digital Generations: Children, Young People and New Media, ed. David Buckingham and Rebekah Willett (Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 193–210, for a discussion of blogging as performance. 16. Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern, “Online Lives 2.0: Introduction,” Biography 38, no. 2 (2015): xi. 17. Ibid. 18. See Marshall McLuhan’s initial 1960s development of the idea of a “global village,” or widely expanded social spheres due to electronic communication technologies, and also Howard Rheingold’s exploration of “virtual community” (Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962], 31; Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World [Boston: Addison-Wesley Longman, 1993]). 19. McNeill and Zuern, “Online Lives 2.0,” xi. 20. Justin Hall, “Overshare: The Links.net Story,” Links.net video, 2:24, posted by Justin Hall, July 31, 2015, http://overshare.vhx.tv/.

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21. Fancine Jay, “Real Life Minimalists: Lena Wetherbee,” Miss Minimalist (blog), December 6, 2010, http://www.missminimalist.com/2010/12/real-life -minimalists-lena-wetherbee/. 22. Mary Gray, “Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the Coming-Out Story,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14, no. 4 (2009): 1162–89. 23. TheFerrett is the fifth-most popular LiveJournaler of all time as of July 2016. See Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferret’s Journal (blog), LiveJournal, accessed July 2016, http://theferrett.livejournal.com/profile, and also The Ferrett (blog), accessed July 2016, http://www.theferrett.com, and The Ferrett (blog), Dreamwidth, accessed July 2016, https://theferrett.dreamwidth​ .org, (page no longer available). Dreamwidth Studios is “a home and community for all kinds of creative folk” where you can “share your writing, your artwork, or your innermost thoughts.” It was formed in 2008 by two ex-LiveJournal employees. See “What Is Dreamwidth Studios?,” Dreamwidth, accessed July 2016, https://www.dreamwidth.org/. 24. Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland (New York: Firefly, 2006), 122. 25. See the excellent timeline of online autobiographical technologies in McNeill and Zuern “Online Lives 2.0,” vi; Pew Research Center, “Three Technology Revolutions,” PewInternet.org, accessed July 2016, http://www .pewinternet.org/three-technology-revolutions/. 26. Hall, “Overshare,” 04:29. 27. Ibid., 14:59. 28. Willa Cline, Willa’s Journal: A Box of Stars (self-pub., Smashwords, 2012), 69. 29. Mary Anne Mohanraj, “(New Year’s . . . ,” Mary Anne Mohanraj (blog), December 31, 1995, http://maryannemohanraj.com/1995/12/. 30. Hall, “Overshare,” 01:08. 31. Shmuel of Shmuel’s Soapbox (blog), accessed July 2016, http://babeltower .org/soapbox/, and Erin Venema of the Treacle Well (blog), accessed July 2016, http://treacle.net/ (title dropped and older entries no longer available as of July 2016); Erin Venema, “The Email That Started It All . . . ,” Escribitionist (blog), June 20, 1999, http://www.escribitionist.org/. 32. Diane Josefowicz, “On (Not) Talking in the Dark: Why I Stopped Blogging,” Biography 38, no. 2 (2015): 308. 33. Viviane Serfaty, The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs, Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies 11 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 40. 34. Bonnie Nardi, Diane Schiano, and Michelle Gumbrecht, “Blogging as Social Activity, or Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary?,” in Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (New York: ACM Press, 2004), 223. 35. “Tracking LiveJournal’s Decline.” 36. See Ethan Kross et al., “Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults,” PloS One 8, no. 8 (2013): e69841. 37. “Tracking LiveJournal’s Decline.” 38. Mary Anne Mohanraj, “Mary Anne Mohanraj,” Online Diary History Project, accessed July 2016, http://www.diaryhistoryproject.com/recollections /1995_12_22.html. 39. “Tracking LiveJournal’s Decline.”

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40. Philippe Lejeune, Pour l’autobiographie: Chroniques (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 43. As translated in Serfaty, Mirror and the Veil, 52. 41. Serfaty, Mirror and the Veil, 39. 42. Nardi, Schiano, and Gumbrecht, “Blogging as a Social Activity,” 231. 43. Ibid., 224. 44. Laurie McNeill, “Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet,” Biography 26, no. 1 (2003): 24–47. 45. Carolyn Burke, “Carolyn Burke,” Online Diary History Project, accessed July 2016, http://www.diaryhistoryproject.com/recollections/ 1995_01_03.html. 46. Gray, “Negotiating Identities,” 1173. 47. “Tracking LiveJournal’s Decline.” 48. Ask Jeeves was an online question-answering and web search engine founded in 1996. It now goes by Ask.com, http://www.ask.com/. See Heather Armstrong’s blog (Dooce [blog], accessed July 2016, http://dooce.com/about/) for a famous example of a blogger who was fired, in 2001, for writing not-sonice things about her bosses online. 49. Shmuel’s Soapbox (blog). 50. Hall, “Overshare,” 19:54. 51. Josefowicz, “On (Not) Talking in the Dark,” 310. 52. Lejeune, On Diary, 193. 53. “Tracking LiveJournal’s Decline.” 54. Ibid. 55. Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 14. 56. Robinson Meyer, “What Blogging Has Become,” Atlantic, February 26, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/what-blogging -has-become/386201/. 57. Snapchat is a mobile messaging program used to send pictures, videos, drawings, and text, launched in 2011. 58. Catfishing is luring someone into an online relationship using a fake online persona. 59. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 67.

Bibliography Armstrong, Heather. Dooce (blog). Accessed July 2016. http://dooce.com /about/. Brandt, Mathias. “The Blogosphere Expands.” Statista. March 12, 2012. https://www.statista.com/chart/161/number-of-blogs-worldwide/. Burke, Carolyn. “Carolyn Burke.” Online Diary History Project. Accessed July 2016. http://www.diaryhistoryproject.com/recollections/1995_01_03.html. ———. Carolyn’s Diary (blog). Accessed July 2016. http://diary.carolyn.org /Overview.html. Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. New York: Firefly, 2006. Clay, Elizabeth. Dear Demented Diary (blog). Accessed July 2016. http://dear dementeddiary.com. Cline, Willa. Willa’s Journal: A Box of Stars. Self-published, Smashwords, 2012. Dreamwidth. “What Is Dreamwidth Studios?” Accessed July 2016. https:// www.dreamwidth.org/. Hall, Justin. Links.net (blog). Accessed July 2016. http://links.net/.

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———. “Overshare: The Links.Net Story.” Links.net video, 2:24, posted by Justin Hall, July 31, 2015. http://overshare.vhx.tv/. ———. “Vita.” Links.net (blog). Accessed July 2016. http://links.net/vita/. Facebook Newsroom. “Our Mission.” Facebook. Accessed July 2016. http:// newsroom.fb.com/company-info/. Jay, Fancine. “Real Life Minimalists: Lena Wetherbee.” Miss Minimalist (blog), December 6, 2010. http://www.missminimalist.com/2010/12/real-life -minimalists-lena-wetherbee/. Ferret, The. The Ferrett (blog). Accessed July 2016. https://www.theferrett .com/. ———. The Ferrett’s Journal (blog). Dreamwidth. Accessed July 2016. https:// theferrett.dreamwidth.org/. Page no longer available. ———. Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferret’s Journal (blog). LiveJournal. Accessed July 2016. http://theferrett.livejournal.com/profile. Google Trends. “Online diary” search term. Accessed July 2016. https://www .google.com/trends/explore#q=%22online%20diary%22. Gray, Mary, “Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the Coming-Out Story.” Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, 14, no. 4 (2009): 1162–89. Josefowicz, Diane. “On (Not) Talking in the Dark: Why I Stopped Blogging.” Biography 38, no. 2 (2015): 307. Kross, Ethan, Philippe Verduyn, Emre Demiralp, Jiyoung Park, David Seungjae Lee, Natalie Lin, Holly Shablack, et al. “Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults.” PlosOne 8, no. 8 (2013): e69841. Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Translated by Katherine Durnin. Manoa: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. ———. Pour l’autobiographie: Chroniques. Paris: Seuil, 1998. LiveJournal. “Frequently Asked Question #4.” LiveJournal support. Accessed July 2016. http://www.livejournal.com/support/faq/4.html. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. McNeill, Laurie. “Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet.” Biography 26, no. 1 (2003): 24–47. McNeill, Laurie, and John David Zuern. “Online Lives 2.0: Introduction.” Biography 38, no. 2 (2015): v–xlvi. Meyer, Robinson. “What Blogging Has Become.” Atlantic, February 26, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/what-blogging-has -become/386201/. Mippy. A True Story about Nothing Much (blog). LiveJournal. Accessed July 2016. http://mippy.livejournal.com/profile. Mohanraj, Mary Anne. “Mary Anne Mohanraj.” Online Diary History Project. Accessed July 2016. http://www.diaryhistoryproject.com/recollections /1995_12_22.html. ———. “(New Year’s . . .” Mary Anne Mohanraj (blog), December 31, 1995. http://maryannemohanraj.com/1995/12/. Nardi, Bonnie, Diane Schiano, and Michelle Gumbrecht. “Blogging as Social Activity, or Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary?” In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 222–31. New York: ACM Press, 2004.

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Pew Research Center. “Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet.” PewInternet.org. Accessed July 2016. http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/internet-use /internet-use-over-time/. ———. “Three Technology Revolutions,” PewInternet.org. Accessed July 2016. http://www.pewinternet.org/three-technology-revolutions/. Poleti, Anna, and Julie Rak, eds. Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. Ramona. Diary (blog). Tumblr. Accessed August 2019. https://jamausis.tumblr .com/tagged/diary. Rettberg, Jill Walker. Blogging. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World. Boston: Addison-Wesley Longman Pub. Co., 1993. Scheidt, Lois Ann. “Adolescent Diary Weblogs and the Unseen Audience.” In Digital Generations: Children, Young People and New Media. Edited by David Buckingham and Rebekah Willett, 193–210. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006. Serfaty, Viviane. The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs. Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies 11. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Shmuel. Shmuel’s Soapbox (blog). Accessed July 2016. http://babeltower.org /soapbox/. Sorapure, Madeleine. “Autobiography Scholarship 2.0?: Understanding New Forms of Online Life Writing.” Biography 38, no. 2 (2015): 267–72. ———. “Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the Web.” Biography 26, no. 1 (2003): 1–23. “Tracking LiveJournal’s Decline.” MetaFilter (blog), September 2012. http:// www.metafilter.com/119695/Tracking-LiveJournals-decline. Venema, Erin. “The Email That Started It All . . .” Escribitionist (blog). June 20, 1999. http://www.escribitionist.org/. ———. The Treacle Well (blog). Accessed July 2016. http://treacle.net/. Title dropped and older entries no longer available as of July 2016. “Women’s Online Diaries.” Personalweb. Accessed July 2016. http://personalweb .about.com/od/womensonlinediaires/. Page no longer available.

L E NA B U FOR D is Director of Finance for the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She formerly maintained blogs at the URLs www.garbaj.com and www.fatdiaries.com, ghosts of which can still be found via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

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26 GeoCities and Diaries on the Early Web James Baker

GeoCities was a web hosting service that launched in 1995. It appealed to people because at a time when the World Wide Web was in its infancy, it offered them the ability to create websites about themselves, their interests, and their lives. Within two years, GeoCities acquired over one million homesteaders, the term used for page owners who—as per the “cities” in the service’s title—located their webspace in neighborhoods that contained comparable content: EnchantedForest contained sites for and by children, HollywoodHills sites focused on celebrities, MotorCity centered on motor vehicles, and so on. By 1998, geocities.com uniform resource locators (URLs) were among the most visited online. In 1999, GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo, beginning a slow decline that ended in its abrupt closure in 2009. Although now defunct, for many people in the late 1990s and early 2000s, GeoCities was an important part of everyday life. In turn, it played host to their everyday beliefs, interests, and concerns. The thirtyeight million pages that constitute the GeoCities archive can and have been used to track near historical social, political, and cultural trends.1 They can also be used to reconstruct how individual homesteaders created and shared aspects of their lives. As GeoCities was an early example of a hosting platform for “user-generated content,” there were few precedents for what content to share or established web design standards to guide homesteaders. In this vacuum, they experimented with the material they put online, the way their pages looked, and how their site was made navigable. Diaries were a feature of that experimentation. This chapter  441

examines the character and form of a selection of diaries hosted on GeoCities between 1995 and 2001. In these diaries, GeoCities users tested the boundaries between public and private on the early web. This chapter proceeds in four parts. The first part offers some contextual background and the second, a discussion of method. Third, it looks at web diaries whose creators experimented with self-projection by combining aspects of the diary form with the nascent web technologies that GeoCities offered. Fourth and finally, it examines those GeoCities diaries that—in variety of ways—replicated private, paper-based diaries. This blend of experimental and conservative, and of public and private diary writing provides a valuable window into the ways in which identities were negotiated and performed circa 1995–2001.

Background It is not the purpose of this chapter to situate diary writing on GeoCities in the rich history of internet use, bulletin board systems, and the like. As the historian Adrian Johns articulated, any serious attempt to do so must also consider the longitudinal intersections between early internet users and other twentieth-century techno-centric communities: home tapers, telephone phreaks, radio enthusiasts.2 If we instead concentrate on near contemporary contexts, we observe that in 1993, shortly before GeoCities launched, Howard Rheingold’s book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier established and popularized the notion that communities could exist online.3 As Stephanie Schulte has argued, American film, television, and media referred to these internet and web communities—terms that were then as now often erroneously conflated—as teenaged communities.4 The role in turn of society and of instrumental policy was, Schulte continued, to harness those rebellious teens to the benefit of capital. The reality was that web communities represented a much broader spectrum of society than their teenage stereotype. As Ian Milligan argued, GeoCities was a crucial site of global, nonelite expression during the first decade after its inception. By borrowing Rheingold’s homesteading nomenclature, GeoCities located the activities of users in everyday offline activity. And by emphasizing the variety of topics users were interested in, contemporary publications on GeoCities underscored the everyday, mundane interests of its users: Creating GeoCities Websites, an official guide published in 1999, highlighted examples of GeoCities webpages that focused on—among other things—sport (117), family (129), baking (136), travel agencies (154), and Gillian Anderson (222).5 In short, GeoCities played an important role in shaping the web we know today. It was the first major web publishing platform that enabled 442 | The Diary

users to put text, images (still and moving), and audio online without having to learn Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), although a familiarity with HTML gave users more control over the appearance of their pages. As the homesteaders on GeoCities were treading virgin ground, they used the platform to explore the possibilities of web publishing. The now derided “Under Construction” notices, blinking text, visitor counters, and musical accompaniments were features of that experimentation, signifiers of the complex transition taking place in society and culture away from publishing yoked to print and toward the fluid, always provisional publishing on the web. As Stephen Wilson observed in his 1995 World Wide Web Design Guide, “The Web transfers the main responsibility for deciding what should be on the Web from large institutions to individuals. . . . Since the Web represents such an experiment in culture, the answers are not always clear-cut.”6 One important aspect of this “experiment in culture” was, according to Wilson, that the “evolving culture of the Web . . . challenges old assumptions about relevance.”7 The user-generated content on GeoCities was then at the heart of a challenge to assumptions about who controlled flows of information. Homesteaders’ experiments with the diary form, both a private record and a mainstream publishing genre, provide a valuable window into the intersections between the web and everyday life circa 1995–2001.

Method The pages made by homesteaders are no longer accessible at their original URLs. To view these pages I used the GeoCities collection assembled by Archive Team in 2009. To find diaries within this collection, I queried the GeoCities seed list derived from the collection and held by the Internet Archive.8 This seed list is an aggregated list of URLs from the 2009 geocities.com closure crawl. I used Unix shell tools to search for instances of the word diary in the listed URLs and to sort the results by date.9 Any diary not listed in English as a “diary” in the URL seed list was missed by this search method. While this was not ideal, it had the advantage of isolating web diaries whose creators clearly had the diary form in mind: GeoCities users, after all, had control over the name of the URLs of their webpages. To view each page, I entered the URL into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.10 In some cases multiple captures of URLs captured on different dates were held in the archive. In these cases, I used the capture closest to when the diary was posted online. Some of the diaries found by this method raise ethical issues. Today we routinely consider material published online as publications: websites are formally defined as such, for example, by UK nonprint legal deposit legislation.11 And yet while GeoCities websites were published online GeoCities and Diaries on the Early Web  |  443

and have been archived as though they were published material, usergenerated content created online before the rise of iterative algorithmic web search engines may well not have been intended as “published.” To read any of the diaries this chapter discusses a contemporary web user would have had to either browse to the relevant pages via the hierarchical structures of GeoCities neighborhoods or navigate to them via a link in another page or sent to them in an email. An author of a web diary, therefore, could write in semiprivate on the open web, their personal writing always available via a URL but likely only accessible to small, local, and intended readerships in possession of that URL. As Ian Milligan wrote, “Users relied on each other to find content: from living next to each other in neighbourhoods, to linking to each other using Web rings. In an era before the widespread adoption of search engines, which often required explicit SEO [search engine optimization] techniques and effort to be part of, these were important.”12 Contemporary literature on the internet and the World Wide Web underscores the difference between social interactions with networked technology in the 1990s and today. Wilson’s World Wide Web Design Guide includes the advice—now redundant—that if you are publishing online with the intention of reaching a small, local, and intended readership “you should probably treat them [your webpages] as quasi-private and not announce these sites to the public in order to keep them out of the indexes.”13 The work-in-progress tenor of this advice chimes with Ed Krol’s 1994 The Whole Internet, which likens the internet to a frontier territory wherein “individualism is honoured and fostered” but, like any frontier, is also a place where the rules of individualism are shaped by interaction with novel terrain.14 Sherry Turkel invoked this sense of uncertainty in her classic study, Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Writing in 1995, Turkel noted of early 1990s internet use, “In the real-time communities of cyberspace, we are dwellers on the threshold between real and virtual, unsure of our footing, inventing ourselves as we go along.”15 The normalization and certainty of internet use since Wilson, Krol, and Turkel were writing are visible in our changed use of language toward network technologies. As the historian Stephen Jones observed, the “virtual,” “cyber,” and “e” nomenclature common to 1990s commentaries on network technologies sound odd today. Language should then alert us to the negotiations with novelty that were taking place during this decade.16 In light of these observations, this chapter describes in detail only those GeoCities diaries whose authors appear to have seen their diaries as part of the wider web: that is, those diaries that link often to other web pages, contain markers of community affiliation, and assume a wide readership. These pages I treat as publications. Those that do not contain 444 | The Diary

these markers I treat as sensitive contemporary manuscripts. In turn, I do not provide references to these pages and only describe them in the broadest terms. Following Sara Hodson, I deem these web diaries to be “an obvious red-flag category, since the diary is the ultimate in private writings, ostensibly intended for no eyes but those of the writer.” Private writings of this nature must be treated ethically, Hodson wrote, as they “contain frank statements and revelations about one’s self and about other people.” Indeed, it might be considered problematic that these diaries are available at all. As Hodson continued, an archivist would ask whether any born-digital diaries “held in an archival repository [should] be opened for research, even when people mentioned in them are still alive? Or should they be sealed for a reasonable period? If so, what constitutes a ‘reasonable period?’?”17 In short, just because we lose privacy the moment we log on, and just because GeoCities archives exist, it does not follow that subsequent researchers have no ethical responsibilities toward early web diaries.18

The Diaries of GeoCities: Experiments with Projection Of course, pace Hodson, not all web diaries were “intended for no eyes but those of the writer.” Indeed, a number of GeoCities diarists made conscious attempts to construct permanent and broadcasted records of moments in their lives. The diaries they created were a component of a wider public expression of self and functioned both as reports designed to be shared and as diaries constructed in the process of self-reflection and self-fashioning. Between 1998 and 2001, Our Humble Abode! was maintained by the Singaporean couple Jess and Su.19 The site was published in WestHollywood, the “gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender” neighborhood of GeoCities. Here Jess and Su posted entries on their holidays, Starcraft habits, and “Petz.” The use of flashing graphics, brightly decorated backgrounds, colored text, GIFs, and jarring shifts in page layout were playful and experimental. Within the site, Jess and Su each had their own pages, and Jess used her pages to make seven diary entries, one each for 1998 and 1999 and four for 2000. The entries for 1998 and 1999 had similar layouts and content: each background contained a block of color bordered left and right with a single repeating image (a pair of unicorns and angels, respectively), and the text in each described Jess and Su’s relationship during the year. The narratives were punctuated by web mannerisms: sentences that trail off with or are joined by two or more full stops, repeated exclamation marks, and emotions bracketed by asterisks for exaggeration. The writing was largely honest and open and yet, at the same time, knowingly public—for example, an individual Su was courting in 1998 is GeoCities and Diaries on the Early Web  |  445

described in both the 1998 and 1999 entry as “XX.” Elsewhere content ranged from the precise (“on the 1st of March 11.50pm, down at Brewwerks, while sipping raspberry beer, I wrote Su a postcard”) to the vague (“It was months later that she confessed in being scared that night”).20 The 2000 entries contained greater detail.21 Two were headed with entry dates (“22nd Feb 2000” and “2nd March 2000”) and two with the dates referred to in the entry (“Thoughts on June 2000” and “27th May 2000 (Sat)–4th June 2000 (Sun)”). These entries addressed specific events such as the start of the new millennium, a barbecue, Chinese New Year, watching the films The Bachelor and The Duel, Su moving rooms, and chickenpox. Together the entries show a maturing but nevertheless piecemeal engagement with diary writing as a form. Indeed, the diary form is used above all to frame experimentation with web publishing: how to color and style entries, how to handle post publication edits—on a puzzle Jess and Su had failed to complete on February 22, Jess added the next day “(We just finished it on the 23rd Feb with frames and all.. it’s now hanging at Su’s living room. Just above her aquarium.)”—how best to hyperlink to other pages on the site, and how to handle community responses to their writing. On the latter, Jess used sidebars to reflect on comments she had received. She published alongside one entry, “Or you simply can’t stand Lovey Dovey Couples?!! Hee hee.. well, people have commented that we are too sticky at times.. Maybe . . . Hmm.. Hope we don’t end up like this gif thou.. =P.” Like Jess, William Connolley used the diary form to frame his experimentation with web publishing. Williams World of Werrets combined biography and recommended reading with content aimed at his extended family.22 As William wrote on the site’s front page in 1999, “Family folk should look in the family directory. Others can look there too, but 1000 photos of our newborn are unlikely to interest strangers.” There is then a clear sense here both that there were strangers who might look at the pages and that semipublic spaces could be crafted on GeoCities. An example of the latter were William’s diary entries. Created between 1998 and 1999, each summarized and reflected on a period of time. The August 1998 post comprised eleven photographs and seven paragraphs, four dedicated to single topics—keeping bees, garden flowers, his tenmonth-old son, and a visit to London, respectively—and three to a mountaineering club trip (in keeping with the site’s location in the Yosemite district of GeoCities, an area for outdoor recreation enthusiasts).23 The September 1998 diary entry, entitled “Miscellaneous Nice Pictures from the Holiday,” merely captioned pictures taken at his holiday home and in Carpentras and Vaison-la-Romaine, in so doing inverting the relationship between word and image and distancing the entry from established diary forms.24 446 | The Diary

In Pipers World, Vicky Herman used a diary to narrate the life of a dog between 1996 and 1999.25 Each short entry was “written” by a Shih Tzu dog called Piper. These are formulaic homages to the diary form, reinforced by the use of a ring notepad graphic to frame the prose and a dog bone motif to divide each entry. In January 1999, Piper wrote about his birthday (“Birthday months are always so much fun!”) and his relationships with “Mommy” and “Daddy,” telling us—in the tone of an unloved child—that “the only thing good that did happen is that Mommy has been working from home much more that [sic] she ever did before. . . . It much harder to be at home by myself all day.”26 This mix of excitement, curiosity, and uncertainty played out through the rest of the entries: in April Piper discussed a new car (“I love riding my new truck!”); in May, a trip to see “Mommy’s roommate from college and her husband” (“They also had 3 cats! I was outnumbered but I held my own”); and in June and July, his illness (“So, Mommy decides that I need to go to the Vet. I tried to talk her out of it but, would she listen? Of course not. No one listens to me. Who am I, but the dog?”).27 Of course, for all its fictive framing, Pipers World—much like Our Humble Abode! and Williams World of Werrets—was an experimental projection of the self: Vicky diarized landmarks in her life—buying a car, visiting friends, her dog getting sick—through the medium of both her dog and web publishing, externalizing in fictional form an internal anthropomorphization of Piper’s life. It is telling that she twice interjected when Piper’s narrative voice was deemed unable to communicate adequately. On the first occasion, in May 1998, she relayed to her readers the experience of looking after three dogs for a week. “Mommy’s perspective of that week” described how Vicky “went completely insane” keeping the dogs still, dealing with their attention, and administering their medicine.28 On the second occasion, in June 1999, “Mommy’s Note” briefly mentioned that Vicky had bought a pill crusher to give Piper his medicine and that it had worked “like a charm!”29 Both interjections breached the fourth wall to address dog owners, indicating an expected readership of fellow dog owners for Piper’s World and its anthropomorphized genre. Babyz Parade played with fantasy in a similar manner. The site was situated in the children-focused EnchantedForest district of GeoCities. It contained a diary that recorded the activities of the children Shelbi and Andy from the perspective of a parent. At the top of the page Cynthia, the author, described the motivations for and intentions of the diary entries: “I’ve always wanted to have a place where I could record the growth/life of my two little angels, Shelbi and Andy. A place where I could record their lives . . . and what better place to have it, but right here at Babyz Parade where you can read it yourself! The Babyz Diary is updated often, so check back if you want to know what my Babyz are GeoCities and Diaries on the Early Web  |  447

up to! Please enjoy the always exciting adventures of Shelbi & Andy.”30 Recording and sharing, both tropes of the diary form, are thus front and center. The entry for January 3, 2000, described Andy’s cold and Shelbi learning to count. By the January 8, 2000, entry, Andy has recovered from his cold and stands up for the first time. However, Shelbi and Andy were not real people. Both were characters in the baby training videogame Babyz (1999) and the diary, therefore, written as an extension of the videogame experience. Cynthia used the diary form to give this fictional narrative authenticity and a situatedness in real-world—that is, nonmedia mediated—experience. The authenticity trick is convincing and would only have been revealed as a conceit—at least for those outside of the Babyz community or unaware of the videogame—by the descriptions of keyboard commands and the availability of new downloadable content that Cynthia wove into the prose. In an echo then to Pipers World, this experimentation with the diarized projection of self breached the fourth wall to address a peer community, an expected readership interested in webpages that delivered content through the diary form.

The Diaries of GeoCities: Dear Diary Homesteaders also used GeoCities to publish diaries whose format and style replicated entries in paper diaries. Their diaries underscore the varied ways in which GeoCities users negotiated the intersections between web publishing and diary writing. Andrew France published twenty-six pages of diary entries to GeoCities between August 26, 1997, and May 7, 1998, the period during which he studied at Regent Bible College, a private evangelical postgraduate university in Vancouver, Canada. The pages were posted at approximately five- to seven-day intervals in 1997 and at greater intervals in 1998. Each page covered events and reflections since the previous page. Until early November 1997, temporal subheadings were used to divide pages into individual entries. It is unclear if these entries were written and posted individually or all together. While the header “An awesome week . . . . .” on the October 3–9, 1997, page indicates that the entries were considered as a coherent whole, the Monday entry on the October 10–16, 1997, page began, “As I write this it is 12.07 am on Tuesday morning,” suggesting that some entries were certainly written as events occurred. Located in the Tropics neighborhood, an area dedicated to travel, the first entry described Andrew’s journey from Australia to begin his studies. The diary begins then as a travel journal connected to, if not steeped in, a literary genre that has its roots in James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LLD (1785).31 From the November 7–15, 1997, page onward, pages diverged from this form and were written 448 | The Diary

together as reflections rather than accounts. Indeed by late 1997, the author’s commitment to diary writing had clearly wavered. As Andrew wrote at the start of the November 23–29, 1997, page, “Here are a few key events and thoughts from this week. I was going to stop doing my entries, but I have been encouraged by a few people that have said they have been encouraged by reading my reflections. Please feel free to use anything that I include in here if it is of use. Please also feel free to tell me if you think I am full of it.”32 By the February 1–14, 1998, page, Andrew had, by his own admission, become “slacker and slacker with getting my diary entries onto the net.”33 Andrew’s diary covered many topics: spirituality, the differences he observed between Canadian and Australian culture, snowboarding, the weather, study, and when he got up and went to sleep. It was written informally and used multiple full stops to trail out of thoughts and into others. The pages were interspersed with images and links to other web pages, including essays Andrew wrote. Different colored backgrounds and text were used to distinguish between pages. Occasional typographic errors indicate that the diary entries were written quickly and that entries were not routinely reviewed prior to publication. And his readers noticed this. The header to the September 14–18, 1997, page read, “I have received a number of comments regarding my spelling. If it was perfect you would doubt whether it was me writing the diary . . . . . .”34 Such interactions reveal Andrew negotiating the fluidity of diary writing on a web publishing platform like GeoCities. In so doing he used the diary to acknowledge family and friends in Australia who had written to him (“Thanks for the letter and the photo Deb . . . .”) and to encourage them to call him (“I have been disappointed that more of you have not been using the voice mail. It only costs you a local call and you can talk until you get cut off . . . 1–2 minutes . . . and it is easier than writing a letter and I get to hear your voice”).35 We see then that Andrew’s web diary did not replace the use of letters, emails, and telephone conversations to stay in touch with distant friends and family. Rather, it added another communication channel wrapped up in a form of personal writing that would have been familiar to his readers. Not all GeoCities diaries covered long periods of time. “Neil’s 1998 Eurovision Diary”—subtitled “A Dream Coming True . . .”—used the diary form to describe on a single webpage events that took place over three days: Friday, May 8, to Sunday, May 10, 1998.36 On this page Neil Mathur, a sixteen-year-old from London, described the visit he and his mother took to Birmingham to watch the Eurovision Song Contest final. After remarking on his long-standing interest in the competition, Neil— writing after the event—recounted his experience. On the Friday he traveled to Birmingham, explored the city, met with his internet friends, and GeoCities and Diaries on the Early Web  |  449

went to the contest’s dress rehearsal. On the Saturday afternoon, Neil and his friends met a contestant at their hotel and in the evening went to the contest. On the Sunday, Neil met some contestants, said farewell to his friends, and traveled home. The entries focus on how he felt (“my stomach was beyond control. I kept thinking I was in a dream!!” May 9, 1998), what he and other people wore (“After nearly a month of deciding, it was down to a pair of black trousers, with a black under-shirt, and a yellow shirt. To go with that, some really shiny black boots!!” May 8, 1998), and the personalities of the people he met (“I met Anders Berglund [the Swedish conductor] in the shopping centre. He was a lovely man,” May 10, 1998). Like other GeoCities diaries we have seen, Neil’s use of language and syntax are indicative of the informality and expressiveness possible to both personal writing and web publishing: sentences end with multiple exclamation and question marks, emphases are capitalized (“My first impression of the set was—‘WOW!!’” May 8, 1998; “I WAS SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HAPPY!!!!” May 9, 1998), and thoughts trail into and are connected by strings of full stops (“I’ll admit, I had a tear in my eye when Chiara sang, it made me think . . . . . . . And of course one of the biggest cheers went to Imaani,” May 9, 1998). The diary here is then both formal and informal, both conservative and exploratory, both yoked to traditional publishing forms and embracing of online mannerisms. This interplay between forms is shared by surviving entries of “My SeeD Diary,” written by Leslie between February 21, 2001, and March 7, 2001.37 Organized under dated headings, Leslie described her friends, art, and interest in Japanese culture. Drawing on the diary form, the entries were personal. They record events, feelings, and reflections: a friend being given a new CD, finding education boring, her progress learning Japanese. The language and syntax of these entries are again informal, littered with trailing full stops (“I’m sick . . . . . again,” February 21, 2001), capitalization (“WHY CAN’T I TAKE THIS?!” February 27, 2001), and conversation-cum-onomatopoeic word forms (“(yawn),” February 21, 2001; “It’s . . . it’s . . . . . . . it’s . . . . . . . . . AHHH!!!” February 27, 2001; “(sigh),” February 21, 22, and 27, 2001). And yet informal and personal as Leslie’s entries were, they were intended to be public: “this is my boring page about me and my life.” Leslie noted in the header, “. . . . bla bla bla . . . . . . yaaawn . . . . Oh well . . . . read on if you want!” Other diaries published on GeoCities had smaller, quasi-private audiences in mind. One diary by a teenager published in the WestHollywood neighborhood, the area dedicated to LGBTQ sites, intimately described feelings of gender dysphoria, efforts to hide an exploration of trans identity from family and friends, and depression. A later diarist used GeoCities to describe in the third-person an act of cross-dressing, what 450 | The Diary

the diarist did during that period, and how people reacted to them. The diary included photographs and linked to both CrossDress WebRing and a TV/CD/TS/TG directory hosted on GeoCities. By publishing their diaries as GeoCities pages these two diarists were experimenting with writing about their lives in public, and yet as they chose to locate their diaries within hierarchical web communities, they anticipated that only a restricted public would have access to their writing. The use of these semiprivate web diaries in this way was not, however, restricted to individuals who identified with subcultures. A diary published over six months in the Research Triangle neighborhood (an area for sites on research and technology), covered the life of a businessman living in Germany. With the exception of one entry, the diary described mundane matters: living arrangements, sports, career progression. The exceptional entry elaborated on the latter and was outspoken about both the failure of individuals and his employer to deliver a project on time and how he was treated as a result. As both the individual and their employer are identifiable from previous entries, the entry is a striking example of a homesteader testing the boundaries of what could or could not be said online and, in turn, how the organization of the early web shaped and constrained the content of web diaries.

Conclusion Writing in 1998, social psychologists Katelyn McKenna and John Bargh reported that individuals with concealable-marginalized identities (such as those associated with homosexuality, drugs, and spanking/bondage) saw the World Wide Web as important because it offered opportunities to demarginalize their identities that were otherwise rare.38 The LGBTQ diaries this chapter has described appear to support McKenna and Bargh’s findings. Nevertheless, it is clear that between 1995 and 2001, diarists from outside these groups who published to the early web also valued community-orientated web platforms as venues in which they could experiment with projections of the self. In these venues, informal language coexisted with established time-based framing devices, formulaic recollections and reflections were interspersed with revisions to entries and notes on reader responses, and fantasy was used to frame the sharing of real life activities that were in some cases only known about online and in other cases web-based extensions of everyday life. The remnants of GeoCities offer, therefore, fascinating insights into diary writing in the mid- to late 1990s. They offer the opportunity to better understand how people were changing the diary form in light of the availability of new and untested web technologies, the elements of that form that endured during this period of rapid communicative change, and the value to individuals GeoCities and Diaries on the Early Web  |  451

of semiprivate web publication venues in the era before the emergence of the iterative algorithmic web search engine. This chapter only scratches the surface of these complex and significant near contemporary shifts to how we presented and constructed ourselves. More work is needed both to grapple with the richness and volume of the material available and to situate that material within the wider social, cultural, and technological contexts in which early web diaries were written. Notes 1. Ian Milligan, “Finding Community in the Ruins of GeoCities: Distantly Reading a Web Archive,” Bulletin of IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries 11, no. 2 (2015): 1, http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers /milligan.pdf. 2. Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 3. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993). 4. Stephanie Ricker Schulte, Cached Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 5. Ben Sawyer and Dave Greely, Creating GeoCities Websites (Cincinnati: Muska and Lipman, 1999). 6. Stephen Wilson, World Wide Web Design Guide (Indianapolis: Hayden Books, 1995), 22. 7. Ibid. 8. [email protected], “GeoCities Seedlist,” the Internet Archive, August 11, 2008, http://archive.org/details/webcrawl-geocities-seedlist. 9. For an introduction to using the Unix shell in historical research, see James Baker and Ian Milligan, “Counting and Mining Research Data with Unix,” Programming Historian, September 20, 2014, http://programming historian.org/lessons/research-data-with-unix. 10. Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, accessed June 27, 2016, http:// archive.org/web/. 11. “Non-Print Legal Deposit: FAQs,” British Library, accessed June 27, 2016, http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/search/non-print_legal_deposit.html. 12. Milligan, “Finding Community in the Ruins of GeoCities,” 1. 13. Wilson, World Wide Web Design Guide, 25. 14. Ed Krol, The Whole Internet: User’s Guide and Catalog, 2nd ed. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 1994), 40. 15. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 10. 16. Steven E. Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (New York: Routledge, 2014). 17. Sara S. Hodson, “Archives on the Web: Unlocking Collections While Safeguarding Privacy,” First Monday 11, no. 8 (August 7, 2006), http:// firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1389. 18. Angela M. Cirucci, “Redefining Privacy and Anonymity through Social Networking Affordances,” First Monday 20, no. 7 (2015), http://firstmonday .org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5465.

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19. Jess and Su, “Homepage,” Our Humble Abode! (2001), http://wayback .archive.org/web/20090805152153/http://geocities.com/WestHollywood/Club /4652/tribute.htm. 20. Jess, “Diary 1998,” Our Humble Abode! (1998), http://wayback.archive .org/web/20090805152151/http://geocities.com/WestHollywood/Club/4652 /diary_1998.htm; Jess, “Diary 1999,” Our Humble Abode! (1999), http:// wayback.archive.org/web/20090805152151/http://geocities.com/WestHollywood /Club/4652/diary_1999.htm. 21. Jess, “Diary 2000,” Our Humble Abode! (2000), http://wayback.archive .org/web/20091021124747/http://geocities.com/WestHollywood/Club/4652 /diary2000.htm; Jess, “Thoughts,” Our Humble Abode! (2000), http://wayback .archive.org/web/20091021064445/http://geocities.com/WestHollywood/Club /4652/thoughts.htm. 22. William Connolley, “Homepage,” Williams World of Werrets (1999), http://wayback.archive.org/web/19990221011039/http://www.geocities.com /Yosemite/3206/. 23. William Connolley, “Diary: August 1998,” Williams World of Werrets (August 1998), http://wayback.archive.org/web/20091027050221/http://geocities .com/Yosemite/3206/diary/1998-aug-1/. 24. William Connolley, “Diary: September 1998,” Williams World of Werrets (September 1998), http://wayback.archive.org/web/20091027050219/http://geocities .com/Yosemite/3206/diary/1998-09/. 25. Vicky Herman, “Welcome to Piper’s (Shih Tzu) Dog House,” Piper’s World (1998), http://wayback.archive.org/web/19990202130103/http://www .geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/7649/. 26. Vicky Herman, “Piper’s Diary: 1999,” Piper’s World (1999), http:// wayback.archive.org/web/20091020080943/http:/geocities.com/Heartland /Hills/7649/diary.html. 27. Ibid. 28. Vicky Herman, “Piper’s Diary: 1998,” Piper’s World (1998), http:// wayback.archive.org/web/20091020194804/http://geocities.com/Heartland /Hills/7649/diary_1998.html. 29. Herman, “Piper’s Diary: 1999.” 30. Cynthia, “The Babyz Diary,” Babyz Parade (2000), http://wayback .archive.org/web/20091020070050/http://geocities.com/EnchantedForest /Cottage/1997/babyzdiary.htm. 31. James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LLD, (London: Henry Baldwin, 1785). 32. Andrew France, “November 23rd–November 29th,” Francey (November 1997), http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010524025214/http://www.geocities .com/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary16.html. 33. Andrew France, “February 1st–February 14th,” Francey (February 1998), http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010503113410/http://www.geocities .com/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary22.html. 34. Andrew France, “September 14th–September 18th,” Francey (1997), http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010529032309/http://www.geocities.com /TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary4.html. 35. Andrew France, “September 22nd–September 27th,” Francey (September 1997), http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010529221236/http:// www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary6.html; Andrew France,

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“January 24th–January 31st,” Francey (1998), http://wayback.archive.org /web/20010503060938/http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Cabana/1516 /diary21.html. 36. Neil Mather, “Neil’s 1998 Eurovision Diary,” Neil and Paul’s Eurovision Euphoria (May 1998), http://wayback.archive.org/web/20001004195356/http:// www.geocities.com/~euro-song/1998/diary98.htm. 37. Leslie, “My SeeD Diary,” Miang of Solaris (2001), http://wayback​ .archive.org/web/20021202081239/http://www.geocities.com/miang_of​ _solaris_1999/diary.html. 38. Katelyn Y. A. McKenna and John A. Bargh, “Coming Out in the Age of the Internet: Identity ‘Demarginalization’ through Virtual Group Participation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, no. 3 (1998): 681–94, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.3.681.

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Joinson, Adam N. Understanding the Psychology of Internet Behaviour: Virtual Worlds, Real Lives. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Jones, Steven E. The Emergence of the Digital Humanities. New York: Routledge, 2014. Krol, Ed. The Whole Internet: User’s Guide and Catalog. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 1994. Leslie. Miang of Solaris. 1999–2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20021122074105 /http://www.geocities.com/miang_of_solaris_1999/. Mather, Neil. Neil and Paul’s Eurovision Euphoria. 1998–99. http://web.archive .org/web/20000619060123/http://www.geocities.com/~euro-song/index.htm. Markham, Annette, and Elizabeth Buchanan. “Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research.” Association of Internet Researchers. 2012. http://www .aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf. McKenna, Katelyn Y. A., and John A. Bargh. “Coming Out in the Age of the Internet: Identity ‘Demarginalization’ through Virtual Group Participation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, no. 3 (1998): 681–94. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.3.681. Milligan, Ian. “Automated Downloading with Wget.” Programming Historian. June 27, 2012. http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/automated-down loading-with-wget. ———. “Finding Community in the Ruins of GeoCities: Distantly Reading a Web Archive.” Bulletin of IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries 11, no. 2 (2015). http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers/milligan.pdf. ———. “Mining the ‘Internet Graveyard’: Rethinking the Historians’ Toolkit.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 23, no. 2 (2012): 21. https:// doi.org/10.7202/1015788ar. Owens, Trevor. “Interface, Exhibition and Artwork: Geocities, Deleted City and the Future of Interfaces to Digital Collections.” The Signal: Digital Preservation (blog), January 28, 2014. http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreserva tion/2014/01/interface-exhibition-artwork-geocities-deleted-city-and-the -future-of-interfaces-to-digital-collections/. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993. Sawyer, Ben, and Dave Greely. Creating GeoCities Websites. Cincinnati: Muska and Lipman, 1999. Schulte, Stephanie Ricker. Cached Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2013. [email protected]. “GeoCities Seedlist.” The Internet Archive. August 11, 2008. http://archive.org/details/webcrawl-geocities-seedlist. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Turner, Alwyn W. A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s. London: Aurum, 2014. Wilson, Stephen. World Wide Web Design Guide. Indianapolis: Hayden Books, 1995.

JA M E S BA K E R is a Senior Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the University of Sussex, England, specializing in the history of archiving, power, and the self.

GeoCities and Diaries on the Early Web  |  455

Index

account book diaries, 48, 61, 78, 402, 408n14, 411–12 Adams, Charles Francis (1807–86), diary of, 109–10 Adams, Henry (1838–1918), The Education of Henry Adams, 109, 116, 119n12 Adams, John (1735–1826), diary of, 109 Adams, John Quincy (1767–1848), diary of, 109 adolescents and diary writing, 25–26, 365, 405. See also Frank, Anne; Freyre, Gilberto Affective Diary, 406 African American diaries: black women’s diaries, 42–43; Gathering Blossoms under Fire (expected 2020), 279; of Joan Frances Bennett, 117–18; The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten (1953), 279; The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995), 279; of slaves, 112. See also Dunbar-Nelson, Alice (1875–1935) Afrikaner, Jan Jonker, 321–22 d’Agoult, Marie de (1805–76), diary of, 92 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 120n21 Alcott, Louisa May, diary of, 42 Allam, Malik, Journaux intimes, 237–38 Alston, Trudy, diary of, 305, 312–13n32

American diary canon: Civil War diaries as building block of, 12; diaries of illness, 114–15; exploration diaries, 110; integral parts of, 8; romance and courtship diaries, 110–11; slavery and diaries, 112–13; transcendentalists’ diaries, 111–12; travel diaries, 108–10; in the twentieth century, 115–18; war diaries, 113–14 Amiel, Henri-Frédéric (1821–81): on diaries, 34; diary as model, 276; Fragments d’un journal intime, 93, 94, 95; Journal, 29, 92–93; publication of diary, 232, 234 ‘Amr, Sami (1924–98): background of, 250, 256; characteristics of, 251; home and family of, 254, 256, 259n44; relationship with landlord, 252 ‘Amr, Sami (1924–98), diary of: challenge of finding food, 255; characteristics and content of, 252–53, 254, 259n25, 259n30, 259n35; context for, 247–48; diary as personal friend, 254; language use and translation of, 248; “My Memoirs in this Life,” 258n15; political views in, 249–50, 256; A Young Palestinian’s Diary, 250 ‘Amr, Samir, 250, 252 Anchieta, José de, 131 Anderson, Benedict, 130

 457

Anderson, W. E. K., 83 Andrews, Eliza Frances (1840–1931), diary of, 113 Anne Frank Fonds (AFF), 149, 150 Anne Frank House, 150 antiquity, the personal diary in, 6 Arab lands, calendric records and personal accounts in, 6 archives: archival practices for women’s diaries, 41; archives in France, 235–36; as a diary, 317 Arnold, Benedict (1741–1801), 113 Arskey, Laura, 41 Artières, Philippe, “Histoire et archives de soi,” 238 artifacts, inclusion in diaries, 152, 153. See also Putnam, Sarah Gooll, diary of Association pour l’Autobiographie et le Patrimoine autobiographique (APA), 235 astronomical diaries, 6 Atkins, Josiah (1750–81), diary of, 113 Audiberti, Jacques (1899–1965), Dimanche m’attend, 98 audiences: diarists’ expectations for, 77, 115, 278, 283, 289, 432; and digitization, 170; effect on diary writing, 42, 43; the future self as audience, 65, 309; and lack of, 65; for online diaries, 412, 428, 432, 433, 450; for testimonial diaries, 323, 340, 369; and travel diaries, 9, 188, 189, 201, 203. See also blogs and blogging; literary authors; publication of diaries; readers of diaries Augst, Thomas, 262 Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, 83 Australians: and national identity, 195–96, 198–99; and relationship to Asia, 196 Australian travel diaries, 196; and importance of mobility to Australians, 195–96, 197, 205–6; on London, 198; on shopping, 204–5; on travel to Asia, 202–4; on travel to England and the Old World, 197–99; and White Australia policy, 200, 204, 204

458 | Index

Australian women’s diaries, 43, 199–200 authenticity: in trauma diaries, 369; in war writing, 335–36 autobiographical coaxing, 63 autobiography, 8; in China, 209–10, 223n2, 223nn4–5; compared to diaries, 27, 65–66; French uneasiness with, 33; practice of, 405; psychoanalytic approaches to, 46; retrospective time perspective of, 371; understanding of, 62 automatic journaling, 417–18, 421 automediality, 408n1 Azaïs, Pierre-Hyacinthe, 32–33 Babyz (videogame, 1999), 448 Babyz Parade, 447–48 Bailey, Blake, 282, 339 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 370 Barbellion’s “coup,” 275, 289 Barbusse, Henri: diaries of, 336–37, 339–40, 345n24, 345n26; Le feu (Under fire, 1916), 336, 339–40 Barger, Jorn, 412 Bargh, John, 451 Barnouw, David, 149 Barounis, Cynthia, 58–59 Barr, Marlene, 47 Barreto, Lima, Diário íntimo, 134 Barthes, Roland (1915–80), 236, 240; “Délibération,” 233–34 Bashkirtseff, Marie (1858–84): diaries of, 34, 62, 94, 114, 232, 234; diary as model, 130, 276; intentions in diary writing, 275 Bauchau, Henry (1913–2012), diary of, 234 Baudelaire, Charles (1821–67), 130 Beadle, John: The Journall or Diary of a Thankfull Christian (1656), 78, 401–2 Beaton, Cecil (1904–80): as diarist, 287; diary of, 276 Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–86): La force de l’âge, 236; Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 236–37 Beaux, Cecilia, diary of, 172 Bechdel, Alison, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, 58–59, 61, 63–64, 66

Becher, Johannes R., diary of, 354 Beckford, William, diary of, 82 Beebe, Lewis (1749–1816), diary of, 113 Bell, Margaret Van Horne Dwight (1790–1834), diary of, 108 Ben-Amos, Batsheva, 368–69 Benda, Julien, 232, 240 Benjamin, Walter, 343–44 Bennett, Arnold (1867–1931), diary of, 276 Bennett, Joan Frances (1949–), diary of, 117–18 Benstock, Shari, The Private Self, 62 Berggolts, Olga, diary of, 357 Bergounioux, Pierre, diary of, 234 Berr, Hélène (1921–45), 97 Bhabha, Homi, 126 Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, woman’s diary in, 30 Biran, Maine de (1766–1824), diary of, 91 Bird, Delys, 43 Blainey, Geoffrey, 196 Blake, William (1757–1827), 3 Blanchot, Maurice, 240; Le livre à venir (1959), 34, 232–33; L’espace littéraire (1955), 232 Bleeck, Gordon, diary of, 203, 205 Blind, Mathilde, 275 Bloch, Marc: and authority of the witness, 342, 345n34; details of war experience in diary, 338–39, 345n19; diary experience and medieval history, 339, 340, 343, 345n29; and exceptional character of his experience, 340–41; memoir version of diary, 340–41; narration of war in three forms, 336–37; narrative style in diary of, 338, 341; renowned for, 336–37; skeletal version of diary, 338, 341–42; on soldiers in war, 345n35 Blodgett, Esther, 81 Blodgett, Harriet, 47 blogs and blogging: blog as word of the year, 413, 426; commercialization of, 413–14, 416; compared to diaries, 88; domestic blogs, 418; early weblogs,

412–13; evolution of, 435, 435n2; microblogs, 436n6; motivation to participate in, 431 Bloom, Lynn Z., 289 Bloomsbury Group, 276, 277 Bloy, Léon (1846–1917), diary of, 96 Bombelles, Marquis de, journal of, 89 Bond, Priscilla, diary of, 304, 306 Borel, Jacques (1925–2002), diary of, 98 Boswell, James (1740–95): diaries of, 276, 278; Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LLD (1785), 79, 448–49; Life of Johnson, 79; London Diary, 80, 82; use of novelistic writing in diary, 81–82 Botonaki, Effie, 77 Bourdieu, Pierre, 414–15, 416, 418 Bradford, William (1590–1657), diary of, 118n3 Brainerd, David (1718–47), diary of, 105, 108, 118n1, 118n6 Brasil, Cecília Assis, diary of, 136 Brazil, diary writing in: colonial accounts, 128, 131–32; and development of diary canon, 8, 128–31; diary studies and return of personal narratives, 136–37; family and estate books, 132–33; literary criticism and successful diaries, 133–36; and national identity, 126– 27, 137–38 Bridges, Roy C., 180–81 British diary canon: diary types in, 77–79, 82; models for diary writing, 80–83; overall development of, 76–77; recreational motivation in, 80; widespread publication of diaries and, 83–84 Brodzki, Bella, 369 Brooks, Kristina, 279 Brown, Bill, 49 Brown, Lizzie, diary of, 309, 313n46 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 95 Bunkers, Suzanne L., 62, 261–62 Burge, Dolly Lunt, diary of, 304–5 Burke, Carolyn, “Carolyn’s Diary,” 433

Index | 459

Burney, Frances “Fanny” (1752– 1840), diaries of, 42, 82, 83, 276 Busby, Brian, 287 Buss, Helen, 41–42 Byng, John, diary of, 80, 82 Byrd, William, diary of, 82–83 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), diary of, 77, 79 Byron, Robert, The Road to Oxiana, 181

diary tradition, 289; published works by, 282; role of diary for, 274–75, 282–84 Cheng Zhuo’s (1153–1223), Account of an Embassy to the Jin, 212 Chesnut, Mary Boykin (1823–86), A Diary from Dixie, 113, 121n36 China: about Imperial China, 10; calendric records and personal accounts in, 6; historical contexts for travel writing, 212–13, 216, Caillois, Roger (1913–78), 98, 232, 221, 224n13; lyric poetry in, 240 209, 224n18; and modernization Calaferte, Louis (1928–94), diary of, technology, 221–22; public and 234 private diaries in, 209, 223n3; calendars and planners, 402–3, 407, tourism in, 216; travel outside of, 408n14 221–22, 225n39 Cameron, Julia, Artist’s Way, 399 Chinese travel literature (youji): Cameron, Sharon, Writing Nature, overview of, 210–11; during the 111 Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 216–19; Caminha, Pero Vaz de, 131 during the Qing dynasty (1644– Camus, Renaud (1946–), 98 1911), 219–23; during the Song Cançado, Maria Lopes, diary of, 136 dynasty (960–1279), 211–16, 224n8 canonization, 7, 8. See also Brazil, chronicles, 89–90, 340 diary writing in; British diary Chute, Hillary, 59 canon; French diary canon Cioran, Emil (1911–95), 33 Caprivi, Leo von, 324 citizen-scholars, 172 Cardell, Kylie, 50, 187 Civil War. See Confederate women’s Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, Diários diaries da Presidência, 137 Clark, William. See Lewis and Clark Carlyle, Jane, diary of, 39 Expedition, diaries of Carroll, Lewis. See Dodgson, Charles, class: and Civil War experiences diary of based on, 305; diary as material Carter, Kathryn, 41 emblem of, 7; as factor in survival Casaubon, Isaac, 90 of diary writing, 43–44; and Casey, Richard, 202 notions of self, 354 Catholicism and diary writing, 132 Claudel, Paul (1868–1955), 96 celebrities and influencers, 413, 419 Clay, Elizabeth, DearDementedDiary, celebrity communities, 428, 429 425 censorship and editing of diaries, Clifford, Anne (1590–1676), 274 40–42 Cline, Cheryl, 41 Central Committee of Polish Jews, Cline, Willa, 430 365 Clough, Arthur Hugh, Oxford Chaix, Marie, L’été du sureau, 237 diaries, 78 Challe, Robert, diary of, 90 Coatlicue, 433 Chaveyriat-Dumoulin, Chantal, 235 Cocteau, Jean (1889–1963), diary of, Cheever, Benjamin, 282 97, 234 Cheever, John (1912–82): diary of, codex formats and digitization, 169 115, 282–83; The Journals of John collective memory, diaries’ Cheever (1991), 282; and literary contribution to, 29–30

460 | Index

comic book diaries, 99, 237 coming-of-age diaries, 94, 107 commonplace books, 90 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 90–91 Confederate women’s diaries: and bearing witness, 301–2; as building block of American diary canon, 12; catharsis and self-consolation through, 305–6, 309; diarists’ support for Confederacy, 300–301, 303, 308; diary writing process in, 301; expression of Southern values through, 303–4; as family history, 302–3; and fortitude in new roles, 307, 308; intended audiences for, 308–9; justification of slavery in, 304–5; material conditions’ impact on, 308; nature of women who kept diaries, 300; as personal space, 306–7; post-war writing in, 309; purpose of, 300, 307–8; as record of war news, 302, 308; scholarship value of, 299. See also Smith, Henry and Harriet, diary writing of confessional discourse, 64, 282–83, 419–20 confidant, diary as, 30–31, 280, 355 Confucianism, 209–10, 223n5 Connolley, William, 446 Connor, Rebecca E., 408n14 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 183, 186, 190n20 Conrad, Margaret, 41 Constant, Benjamin (1767–1830), diary of, 91, 94 control, personalization of, 27 Cook, James (1728–79), diary of, 184 copyright issues, 170 corpus analysis, and corpus types, 12 Corrado, Daniele, 132 Counter Reformation and diary writing, 132 Creating GeoCities Websites, 442 creative process in diary writing, 32–33 criticism of diaries, 95, 98, 232–33 Culley, Margo, 41, 66, 307 Cullwick, Hannah, diary of, 43–44 cultural capital, and keeping of diaries, 26

cultural experiences: in Africa, 200–201; lack of preparation for, 201; and Orientalism, 199–200, 203; and reevaluations of racist attitudes, 204; revulsion at, 203. See also travel diaries cultural symbols as framework, 367 culture, relationship with diary writing, 4 Cummings, Bruce Frederick (pseud. Barbellion; 1889–1919), 275 Cunha, Euclides da (1866–1909), diary of, 129, 134 Czerniakow, Adam, diary of, 373 Dabit, Eugène (1898–1936), 29, 96 Dai Mingshi’s (1653–1713), Diary of a Journey North in the Yihai Year, 220–21 Dalrymple, William, 183; City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi [1993], 181 Dangeau, Marquis de, Journal (1684– 1720), 89 Dantas, Audálio, 135 Darwin, Charles (1809–82), diary of, 9, 184 data as knowledge, 406 d’Aurevilly, Barbey, diary of, 35 Davis, Gayle, 183–84 Davis, Samuel Cole (1764–1809), diary of, 114 Day One, 400 Dayrell, Alice (Helena Morley; 1880– 1970), Minha Vida de Menina (1942), 134 DeCaradeuc, Pauline, diary of, 306– 7, 313n37 de Jesus, Carolina Maria, Child of the Dark (1962), 130, 135–36, 140n32 Delacroix, Eugène (1798–1863), diary of, 35, 92, 94 Delafield, Catherine, 48 Delany, Paul, 45 deportation stories, 385, 387–88. See also Nagel, Erna, diary of Dessaulles, Henriette (1860–1946), diary of, 94 diaries: characteristics of, 27–28, 65; development of form, 60–61;

Index | 461

diaries: characteristics of (cont.) ending the diary, 375–76; as feminine, emotive, private, 46, 49, 50, 408n14; as genre, 2–4, 7–9, 14–15, 39–40, 231–32; global perspectives on, 4–5; hybrid forms of, 328; and literacy, 4–5; as places of coexistence, 134; as a practice, 66, 231–32; and public records, 5–7; purposes of, 29–33; subjectivity of, 367; as synecdoche for the body, 45; terms and definitions, 2–3, 27, 28, 64, 317, 328; thematic webs in, 372– 73; types of, 9. See also American diary canon; Brazil, diary writing in; diary keeping, practice of; diary studies; diary writing; digitization of diaries; Frank, Anne, diaries of; French diary canon; how-to diaries; online diaries; Palestinians’ diaries; political conflict, diary writing in; travel diaries “Diaries and Journals: General Survey” (Encyclopedia of Life Writing), 317 Diarist.net, 426, 427, 428 diarists: and compulsion to write, 1; dealing with disorder, 116–17; as narcissistic, 404; profiles of, 25–27; and self-critique, 28–29, 79–80; types of, 252; and use of calendars and planners, 402–3; use of code in writing, 253; and yearning for readers, 432. See also literary authors; self, construction of diary editors: and abridgement of diaries, 377; and control over what is saved, 41–42; enhancements to diaries by, 253 diary keeping, practice of: in France, 88–89, 235; tensions between immediacy and narrative structure, 333–35, 342, 343; in a totalitarian state, 348–49 (See also Holocaust diaries; Stalinist Russia). See also how-to diaries The Diary of a Provincial Girl, Vida de Menina (film, Solberg, 2003), 135, 140n29

462 | Index

Diary of Coming South (Lainan lu), 210 diary studies: approaches to scholarship, 238; and citizen scholars, 172; in digital age, 14, 163–64, 170–72; feminist perspective in, 62; future of, 9, 172; sociological approach to, 237–38; and tendency toward cultural perspectives, 4 diary writing: as affirmation of humanity, 317; to articulate social relationships, 261–64; by females, 62, 285; as a flourishing activity, 76; hybridization in, 236–37; investigation of identity construction through, 128; models for, 275, 276; open-endedness of, 65; paradox of, 92; postponement in, 371; process of, 3; as retreat, 127; skipped days in, 372; as social practice, 262; subjectivity and temporality in, 253; varying views of, 33–34. See also feminist scholarship on diary genre; how-to diaries Diderot, Denis, 34 Didier, Béatrice, 127, 136 digital archives: archival silences in, 165; availability of transcriptions in, 166; development of critical methodology for, 170–72; diversity of, 164; and online searching problems, 164, 166–67; and use of watermarks, 170; variable quality of, 165–66 digitization of diaries: criteria for selection for, 164–65; drawbacks in, 169–70; as editorial project, 165–66; and material features of diaries, 167; and scholarly research, 9, 163–64; side-by-side formats for, 172 discontinuity in diaries, 3 discovery as interpretive relationship, 44 Dodgson, Charles, diary of, 79 Donnat, Olivier, Les pratiques culturelles des Français, 235 Dooce, 420

Dorgelès, Roland (1885–1973): claim of authenticity in 1929 reflections, 334; diarist turned author, 335; Les croix de bois (1919), 334; silence of survivors, 343–44; and structuring experience in time, 336 Doucet, Julie, diary of, 237 Douglas, Kate, 187 Dowding, Mabel, diary of, 199, 200, 201 Dreamwidth Studios, 437n23 Dreyfus, Alfred (1859–1935), 31–32 Du Bois, W. E. B., 279 Du Bos, Charles (1882–1939), 95 Dulany, Mary Eliza Powell, diary of, 307, 313n40 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice (1875–1935): about, 291n47, 292n65; conjoining of genres by, 281; diary of, 279–81; diary’s function for, 274–75, 280, 281; Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1984), 279; and literary diary tradition, 289; writing output of, 279 Duplessis, Lucile (Lucile Desmoulins; 1770–94), diary of, 89, 91 Dwight, Theodore, Jr., 108 Dwight, Timothy, Travels in New England and New York, 108 Eakin, Paul John, 128 Ecclesiastes, book of, 6 Éditions Claire Paulhan, 235 Edmondson, Belle, diary of, 303, 312n21 Edmondston, Catherine, diary of, 309 Edwards, Jonathan, 108 Egerton, Elizabeth, journal of, 40–41 Egypt, diaries in, 6 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 358–59 Emaz, Antoine, 99 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82), diary of, 111 emigration diaries, 183 emotions: and diary writing, 431; role in communication, 370 Endomondo, 417 Enlightenment and personal writing, 126–27

ephemerality in online diaries, 419–20 Ernaux, Annie (1940–), 98 escribitionists, 430 Esther, book of, 6 Estonian diaries, 387, 393n3. See also Nagel, Erna, diary of Estonian Life Stories Association, 384 Estonian Literary Museum, 384 ethical readings of diaries, 40 ethics, in researching online diaries, 443–44 ethnographic diaries, 182 L’Etoile, Pierre de, Mémoiresjournaux (1574–1611), 89 Evelyn, John: diary of, 78; fame of, 84; models for diary, 75 exhibitions of diaries, 234 exploration diaries, 110, 180–81, 195, 200–201 Faber, Isadora, “Diário de Classe,” 137 Facebook: constraints and anonymity on, 415; Memories feature, 417; nature of posts on, 426; as online community, 428; parody of Introducing Timeline video, 417, 419; and privacy, 49; and sadness, 1, 431; shift from blogs to, 414; Timeline feature, 416–17; updates to, 417 Falkiner, Una, diary of, 199, 200, 201 family histories, 49, 299, 302–3 Fan Chengda (1126–93), 218, 224n18; Lanpei lu (Account of grasping the carriage reins), 212, 213–14; Wuchuan lu (Account of the Boat Trip to Wu), 212, 214–15 Fasih, Muhammad [Mehmed], diary of, 258n9 Favre, Pierre, 90 female behavior, expectations for, 408n14 feminine, use of term, 46, 50 feminist scholarship on diary genre: approaches to diaries, 39–40, 50; curation and archiving diaries, 41–44; diary analysis, 7; and diversity of women’s experiences,

Index | 463

feminist scholarship on diary genre (cont.) 62; and explications of the female experience, 47; historicist and material approaches to diaries, 48–50; importance of reading diaries, 44–45; and issues of race and class, 41–42; psychoanalytic approaches to diaries, 45–48; in reading and writing about diaries, 62–63 Fender, Stephen, 183 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence: The Mexican Night, 188; Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre, 184–85; Writing across the Landscape, 185 Fermor, Patrick Leigh, A Time of Gifts, 186–87 Fetherling, George (1949–): diary’s function for, 274–75, 287–88; and literary diary tradition, 289; published works by, 287; and selfpromotion, 288–89; The Writing Life: Journals, 1975–2005 (2013), 287 Fielding, Henry, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 82 Findlay, Elspeth, 78, 84n6 Fitbit, 400, 406 Fithian, Philip Vickers (1747–76), diary of, 112 Fleetwood, William (1525–94), as agent of transition, 8 Fleischmann Diaries, 165 Fleming, Peter, Brazilian Adventure, 182 Forten, Charlotte (1837–1914): about, 291n43; diary of, 112–13, 279 Foster, Kate, diary of, 302, 311n16 Fothergill, Robert, 76, 83, 136, 401; Private Chronicles, 328 Fox, George (1624–91), diary of, 107 França, Jean Marcel Carvalho, A Construção do Brasil na literatura de viagem dos séculos XVI, XVII e XVIII, 131–32 France, Andrew, diary of, 448–49 France, diary writing in: and criticism of diary genre, 95, 98, 232–34; emergence of, 8; innovations in,

464 | Index

236–37; popularity of, 10–11, 235, 240; state of diary publishing in, 234–35; statistics and profiles of diary authors, 25–27; studies of, 237–40. See also French diary canon von François, Curt, 320, 324, 325 Frank, Anne: Anne’s editing of her diaries for publication, 147–48, 151–52, 153–54, 155–56; contents and process of keeping a diary, 152–53, 156, 157–58; expectations for her future, 156–57; as secular saint, 9 Frank, Anne, diaries of: alterations to, 377; Anne Frank: Complete Edition, 150; Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl (American edition, 1947), 35, 65, 130, 152, 156, 157; revision of, 42; Anne Frank Tagebuch (ed. Otto Frank, 1991), 149–50, 155, 156–57; description of manuscript volumes for, 148–49; The Diaries of Anne Frank: Research-Translations-The Critical Edition, 150, 152; The Diary of Anne Frank: Revised Critical Edition (2003), 155; The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition (ed. Barnouw and van der Stroom, 1986), 149, 150, 155; The Diary of Anne Frank: The Definitive Edition (1991, 1995), 155; editions of, 149; facsimile editions, 150–51; facsimile editions, comparisons of, 151–58; Verzameld werk (2013), 155 Frank, Otto, 147, 148–50, 153, 157 Franklin, Benjamin (1706–90), diary of, 61, 115 Frémont, John C. (1813–90) , diary of, 110 French diary canon: birth of diary genre, 89–91; nineteenth century development of, 91–95; twentieth century flourishing of, 95–99 Freyre, Gilberto, 134 Friend, Donald, diary of, 200–202 Fritz Bauer Institute, 150 Fuller, John, 402, 408n10 Fuller, Margaret, 120n21

Gabler, Hans Walter, 172 Gândavo, Pero de Magalhães, História da Província de Santa Cruz (1576), 131 Garbarini, Alexandra, 368 Gard, Martin du (1881–1958), 96 Garneau, Hector de Saint-Denys (1912–43), 97 Gartz, Kate Crane, diaries of, 184 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 48 Geertz, Clifford, 4, 182 gender: and autobiography, 46; and corruption of diaries, 41–44, 50; diaries and adolescent girls, 405, 409n22; and differences in keeping a diary, 26; impact on diary writing, 40 Genesis, 238, 239 genetic criticism, 238–40, 242n31 GeoCities: about, 14; experimentation with selfprojection on, 442, 445–48; homesteading on, 441, 442; and insights into diary writing, 451; intersection of the web and everyday life, 443; method for studying, 443–45; short life of, 427, 428; “traditional” style diaries on, 448–51; use and popularity of, 441; user-generated content on, 442–43 geography in online diary communities, 428 ghetto diaries, 367, 371, 372, 373–74. See also Holocaust diaries Gide, André (1869–1951): as diarist, 95–96, 287; diary as model, 276; Journal, 1889–1939, 97, 232; Journal of the Counterfeiters (1927), 239; and publication of his diary, 97, 234; translations of, 130 Gies, Miep, 147, 158 Gillespie, Emily and Sarah, diaries of, 261 Ginzburg, Lydia, diary of, 358 Girard, Alain, 127, 136, 232 Givenchy, Pierre de, 236 Goldberg, Amos, 368 Golov (Tory), Avraham, diary of, 372, 373

Goncourt, Edmond (1822–96) and Jules (1830–70), diary of, 34, 93, 94, 95, 232 Goody, Jack, 4 Google Photos, 417 Google searches, 164 Göring, Heinrich, 321 Gorky, Maxim (1868–1936), 350 Gottlieb, Robert, 282 Gracq, Julien (1910–2007), 98 Graham, Maria, Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1956), 129 Gray, Mary, 429 Gray, Thomas, diaries of, 82 Great War. See World War I, diaries of French soldiers in Green, Anna Maria, diary of, 301, 311n8 Green, Julien (1900–1998), diary of, 97, 234 Greg, Melissa, 405–6 Grey, Anne, 202 Gribble, Isobel, diary of, 203 Griphus, 434 Groenendijk, Pau, 151 Guéhenno, Jean (1890–1978), 97 Guérin, Eugénie de (1805–48), diary of, 92, 95, 276 Guérin, Maurice de (1810–39), diary of, 92 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” diary of, 165 Guibert, Hervé (1955–91), 98 guidebooks as models, 82 Guilloux, Louis (1899–1980), 96 Gumbrecht, Michelle, 433 Guo Bi (1280–1335), Diary of a Visit to Hang[zhou], 216 Gurney, Henry (1898–1951), diary of, 258n9 Gusdorf, Georges, 136 Guttentag, Adolf (1868–1942), diary of, 376, 380n59 Gu Yanwu (1613–82), Account of Five Terraces Mountain, 220 Hall, Justin and online diary of, 425–26, 428, 429, 430, 433; Justin’s Links, 412; “Justin’s Links from the Underground,” 430

Index | 465

Hamburger, Käte, The Logic of Literature, 231 Hamilton family diary, 262 Hansen, Karen, 262 Hassam, Andrew, 183, 189, 197 Havet, Mireille (1898–1932), diary of, 97, 235 Havlice, Patrice, diary of, 76 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 120n21 Heat-Moon, William Least, Blue Highways, 186 Hebrew Bible, reporting a royal death in, 5–6, 17n15 Heehs, Peter, 4; Writing the Self, 411–12 The Hendrik Witbooi Papers (ed. Lau), 319 Hennessy, Rosemary, 48 Herbert, Charles (1757–1808), diary of, 113 Herman, Vicky, 447 Hess, Rémi, 235 Heuchel, Johann, diary of, 32 Hillebrecht, Werner, 329n12, 329n15 Hirsch, Marianne, 388 historians and first-person accounts, 342, 344 Hitchcock, Tim, 171 Hoby, Margaret, diary of, 75, 78 Hockney, David, China Diary (1982; with Spender), 188 Hodson, Sara, 445 Hogan, Rebecca, 47 Holmes, Emma, diary of, 302, 311n12 Holocaust: critical approaches to, 366–69; diary keeping during, 364, 365, 368, 377n1; interpretive works following, 366 Holocaust diaries: abridgement of, 377; bearing witness in, 366, 369– 70; beginnings of, 370–71; coming to an end in, 375–76; definition of, 364; discovery locations for, 365; emotional turmoil and search for normalcy in, 373–75; epistemological problems of, 13; importance of personal diaries during, 366; nature of personal writing in, 370; sense of time in,

466 | Index

371–72; survival of, 377n3; themes in, 373; types of, 365 Holton family diary, 262 homesteading. See GeoCities Hoppenot, Hélène, diary of, 235 Horowitz, Sara, 368 how-to diaries: as ideological texts, 13; instruction guides, 399–400; and self-realization, 402; and self representation, 407; and use of calendars and planners, 402–3; use of templates for, 403–5, 406 Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), Yizhou jiasheng (Household activities in Yi County), 210 Huff, Cynthia, 41, 42, 46, 62, 261 Hughes, Ted (1930–98), 117 Hugo, Victor, diary of, 35 Hull, Gloria T., 279, 280, 281 Hume, Fannie Page (later, Braxton), diary of, 307, 313n39 Hunter, Jane, 42, 261 hybridization efforts, 236–37 identity: and construction of self, 47–48; demarginalization of, 451; elusion of, 418; literary identity, 283; and national identity, 126, 128, 132– 33, 195; relational nature of, 128 illness, diaries coping with, 32, 91, 114–15, 116 Inber, Vera, 353 individualism: on the internet, 444; in post-Stalin diaries, 360; rise of, 76, 90–91, 128–29 Industrial Revolution and personal writing, 126–27 Instagram, 412, 413, 415, 421, 426, 429 institutional diaries, 235 internet: autobiographical ghosts in, 427; centralization on, 434; and demarginalization of identity, 451; increased participation on, 430; and online communities, 442; search technologies and privacy, 433, 435, 438n48; as separate from everyday life, 420; uncertainty on, 444. See also online diaries; social media; World Wide Web

intimacy: anonymous intimacy, 433– 34; in diary genre, 49; notion of, 127; public intimacy, 14; through diary sharing, 265–66; through diary writing, 11 introversion, diary as sign of, 35 Ionesco, Eugène (1912–94), Présent passé, passé present, 98 Irving, Washington (1783–1859), diary of, 276 Jaccottet, Philippe, 99; Semaisons series, 237 Jackson, Anna, 63, 65; Diary Poetics, 117 Jacobs, Harriet, autobiographical work of, 42 James, Ada, diary of, 262 James, Alice (1848–92), diary of, 114–15, 276 Japan, diary tradition in, 6, 18n21 Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive, 165 Jay, Francine (aka Miss Minimalist), 429 Jay, Martin, 335 Jesuit diarists, 90 Johns, Adrian, 442 Johnson, Samuel, 79, 83; A Journey to the Western Isles, 78–79 Jones, Stephen, 444 Jonson, Ben, Volpone: The Fox, 8, 76 Jordane, Benjamin. See Puech, Jean-Benoît Josefowicz, Diane, 431, 433–34 Jouanard, Gil, 99 Joubert, Joseph (1754–1824), 33, 36n11 Jouhandeau, Marcel (1888–1979), Journaliers, 98 journal, term of, 27 journalism, effect on diary writing, 81 Juhasz, Suzanne, 45 Juliet, Charles (1934–), diary of, 98, 234 Kadar, Marlene, 39, 45, 62 Kant, Tanya, 417

Kaplan, Chaim (1880–1942), diary of: diminishment of self in, 368; documentation of Jewish life in, 370; editorial changes to diary of, 366–67; German context for, 364–65; silences in, 372; variations among editions of, 377, 380n47; writing as survival, 373 Karlsson, Lena, 187–88 Katzenelson, Yitzhak, diary of, 371, 372 Keith-Roach, Edward (1885–1954), diary of, 258n9 Kemble, Fanny (1809–93), diary of, 120n27 Kennedy, John F., 118n4 Kerouac, Jack (1922–69), diary of, 115 Kirsch, Robert, 286 Klein, Lauren, 165 Klemperer, Victor (1881–1960), diary of, 364, 368, 374, 377, 388 Knight, Sarah Kemble (1666–1727), diary of, 108 Kofman, Sarah, 375 Koivunen, Leila, 181 Kouffman, Avra, 78 Krol, Ed, The Whole Internet (1994), 444 Krüdener, Madame de (1764–1824), diary of, 89 LaCapra, Dominick, 335 Lahire, Bernard, 26 Langer, Lawrence, 367 Larbaud, Valery (1881–1957), diary of, 96, 234 Lartigue, Jacques-Henri (1894–1986), diary of, 239 Latham, R. C., 80 Lau, Brigitte, 319, 321, 322, 325, 329n15, 330n29 Laub, Dori, 367 Lazzell, Blanche, diary of, 172 Léautaud, Paul (1872–1956), Journal littéraire, 97 Lebrun, François, 132 LeConte, Emma, diary of, 303, 309, 311n18

Index | 467

Leiris, Michel (1901–90), diary of, 234, 240 Lejeune, Philippe: The Autobiographical Pact, 136; “Counting and Managing,” 61; and critical analysis of Anne Frank’s diary, 149; and deciphering thematic frameworks, 171; on dependencies for diaries, 411; on diaries and memory, 187; on diaries as an “unfolding of time in life,” 249; on diaries’ materiality, 387; on diarists’ need for readers, 432; on diary form and genre, 60, 65; on diary writing, 66, 251, 376, 392; on ending of diaries, 380n60, 434; founding of archival association by, 235; and genetic criticism, 238–39; on historians’ interest in diaries, 238; “O My Paper!,” 61; and personal diaries, 240; on privacy in diaries, 7; on reading a diary, 3–4; and resistance to templated autobiography, 404–5; study of online diaries by, 188, 426, 427; surveys by, 35–36n2; “The Diary as Antifiction,” 65; “The Diary on the Computer,” 64; on travel writing, 179–80, 189n2; on types of diarists, 252 Leleu, Michèle, 34, 136 Leociak, Jacek, 367, 370 letters to individuals as diary device, 153 Leutwein, Theodor, 325–26 Levi, Primo, 375 Levine, Robert M., 135 Lewin, Abraham, diary of, 369 Lewis, Meriwether. See Lewis and Clark Expedition, diaries of Lewis and Clark Expedition, diaries of, 110, 188 LGBTQ diaries, 445–46, 450–51 Li Ao (773– or 774–836), Diary of Coming South (Lainan lu), 210 Libertines, 413 Lichtenberg-Kolleg (Georg August Universität Göttingen), 150 LifeCams, 400 life writing and diaries, 60, 66–67

468 | Index

Li Gui (1842–1903), Diary of a Journey to the East, 222–23 Lin Zhen (1824–?), Draft of a Chronicled Trip across the Western Ocean, 221–22 Lister, Anne (Gentleman Jack), diary of, 42 literacy: and diary writing, 4–5, 76; encouraged by Puritans, 106 literary authors: in the American diary canon, 115; in Brazilian diary canon, 134; in Chinese travel literature, 218–19; as diarists, 287– 88, 289; in French diary canon, 130; and memory of events, 187; role of diary writing for, 11, 115, 277, 280; use of diary as practice space, 285. See also Cheever, John; Dunbar-Nelson, Alice; Fetherling, George; Nin, Anaïs; Woolf, Virginia literary criticism, 238–39 literary diary tradition, beginnings of, 96, 275 Literature of Information, 128 LiveJournal, 426, 427, 428, 429, 434 Livingston, Anne Home Shippen “Nancy” (1763–1841), diary of, 110–11, 119n19 Lódz ghetto chronicle, 365 Loti, Pierre (1850–1923), diary of, 234 Louÿs, Pierre (1870–1925), 95 Lou Yue (1137–1213), Diary of a Journey North, 212, 213 Luccock, John, 133 Lupton, Deborah, 400, 406 Lu You (1125–1210), 218; Ru Shu ji (Diary of entering Shu), 212, 214–16 MacLaren, Ian, 181 Malinowski, Bronislaw (1884–1942), diary of: anthropology’s reaction to, 9; A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, 182–83 Mansfield, Katherine (1888–1923), 276 manuscript diaries: curation of, 45; as objects, 48–50

Marcus Aurelius (121–80 CE), Meditation, 6 Marteau, Robert, 99 Martinviita, Annamari, 415–16 MartinWisse, 434 Massachusetts Historical Society, 167, 169 materiality of diaries, 63, 167–69, 173n10, 387–88 Mathews, Harry, The Journalist, 34 Mathur, Neil, “Neil’s 1998 Eurovision Diary,” 449–50 Matthews, Samantha, 49 Matthews, William: diary of, 76; on Pepys’s diary, 275 Matthiessen, Peter, The Snow Leopard, 186 Matzneff, Gabriel, diary of, 234 Mauriac, Claude (1914–96): diaries of, 236; Temps immobile, 98 Mauriac, François, (1885–1970), 95 McCarthy, Molly, 48, 402–3 McGann, Jerome, 166 McKenna, Katelyn, 451 McMahon, Lucia, 262 Mei Xinlin, 220; Zhongguo youji wenxueshi (History of Chinese travel literature; with Yu Zhanghua), 216 Memento, 400 Memorable Days: The Emilie Davis Diaries, 165 memory: preservation of, 29–30, 187; unreliability of, 340–41 Memory of the World object (UNESCO), 320, 328 Merrick, Helen, 43–44 Mertelsman, Olaf, 393n4 MetaFilter, 435n2 Meyer, Robinson, 434 Michelet, Jules (1798–1874), diary of, 35, 92, 94 Miller, Nancy, 47, 385 Millier, Brett C., Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, 134–35 Milliet, Sergio, Diário Crítico, 133 Milligan, Ian, 164, 442, 444 Millim, Anne Marie, 47–48

Ming dynasty (1368–1644): personal diaries in, 209; travel writing in, 210, 216–19 Ministry of Culture (France) survey, 25, 35n2, 88, 235 Mippy, “A True Story about Nothing Much,” 426, 431, 432, 434 misinterpretation, danger of, 44 Mitgang, Herbert, 282 models for diaries, 80–83, 95 Mohanraj, Mary Anne, 430, 431–32 Mondriaan Foundation, 150–51 Montaigne, Michel de, Essays (1595), 90 Moodie, Susanna, autobiographical work of, 43 Mooie Zinnenboek (Book of beautiful sentences), 151 moral consciousness, 358–59 Morgan, Aurora Margueritte, diary of, 301, 311n10 Morgan, Sarah, diary of, 303, 308, 312n23 Morley, Helena, diary of, 134–35, 136 Morris, Governeur (1752–1816), diary of, 109 Moulton, Gary E., 188 Munby, Arthur, 43–44 Municipal Library (Lyon) exhibition, 235 Mussell, James, 165, 170 MyDearDiary, 427 My Diary, 400 “My SeeD Diary,” 450 Nagel, Erna, diary of: coping with hunger, 391; deportation journey in, 383, 386–87; dreams and nightmares in, 390–91; Erna Nageli päevik, 383–84; expectation of survival in, 388– 89, 390; materiality of, 387–88; pre-deportation entries, 386, 388–89, 394n19; preservation of, 393n2; as resistance to Soviet regime, 384; subsistence and work in, 389–90; and surviving letters, 384, 388; testimonial value of, 385, 386, 392 Nagel, Karl, 383

Index | 469

Naipuaul, V. S., A Congo Diary (1980), 186 Namibia. See Witbooi, Hendrik narcissism of diarists, 404 Nardi, Bonnie, 433 narrative style: in Marc Bloch’s diary, 338; in online diaries, 445–46; war’s effect on, 337 National Archives of Namibia, 320 National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS), 164 National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC), 164 Native Americans, 188 Nazi concentration camps, diary writing in, 365. See also Holocaust diaries Nazi occupation, personal writing under, 370, 372 Neaud, Fabrice, Journal, 237 Necker, Germaine (1766–1817), diary of, 89 Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), 149 Neuman, Shirley, 46 New York Times, on discovery of Ranitskaya diary, 1 Ngai, Sianne, 48 Nicholson, Bob, 170 Nicolson, Harold (1886–1968), diary of, 276 Niel, Jean-Baptiste, 237 Nin, Anaïs (1903–77): diaries of, 62, 115–16; The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 284; diary’s function for, 274; diary’s publication, 286; on diary writing, 274, 405; importance of diary to, 285–86; and literary diary tradition, 289; published works of, 284 Nivat, Georges, 348 Nóbrega, Manuel da, 131 Nourissier, François, 237 novels, effect on diary writing, 81 Nussbaum, Felicity, 60, 63, 76, 84

Ollier, Claude, diary of, 234 Olney, James, Studies in Autobiography, 60 online diaries: automated additions to, 416–18; in Brazil, 137; commonalities in diary keeping, 420–21; disappearance of, 427, 433, 434; early examples of, 412–13, 426; effect of search technologies on, 433; effect on handwritten diaries, 35n2; endings of, 434–35; ethical issues in researching, 443–44; features and forms of, 428; feedback on, 449; as genre in transition, 420–21; Google trends search on, 436n9; heyday of, 414; rise and fall of, 14; self-presentation in, 408n1; somatic traces in, 64; technology’s impact on, 414–18; thrills of keeping, 430–31; and use of hyperlinks, 188; writing style in, 445–46, 450. See also blogs and blogging online diary communities: and anonymity, 433–34; difficulties in finding, counting, and categorizing, 425, 426–28; formation of, 425, 435; historical beginnings of, 429– 30; and making friends, 431–32, 435; and readers, 432–33, 435; and relief of tension, 431; three types of, 428–29 Open Diary, 413, 415–16, 427 optical character recognition (OCR) technology, 166–67 Orwell, George: 1984, 348; The Road to Wigan Pier, 181–82 Our Humble Abode!, 445 Oyneg Shabat archive, 365

Pachet, Pierre, 138, 237 Palestine: colonialism in, 249; diaries and social history of, 254; diary keeping in, 250; dominant communities of, 249, 257n6; effect of world wars and British Mandate on, 248–49; Israel’s establishment obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and, 253–54 58–59 Palestinians’ diaries: access to nature Olier, Jean-Jacques, 90 of Palestinian daily life through,

470 | Index

249; common themes in, 256; comparison of Palestinian life across history afforded by, 257; concerns for poor reflected in, 255; and hopes for independence, 256; individualism demonstrated by, 11; language and problems of translation in, 248; process and structure of, 252–53; and search for normalcy, 251; survival of, 253–54; use of code in, 253, 259n27; use of terms in, 258n15; value in understanding life during conflict, 247–48; writing from position of class privilege, 256 Pan-Africanism, diary articulation of, 320, 323 Paperno, Irina, 390 A Parisian Journal, 1405–1449, 89 Parke, Fanny, diary of, 183, 190n21 Pascal, Blaise (1623–62): diary of, 28; Pensées, 34 Patrick, Mary, diary of, 305, 306, 312n31 Pavlova, Vera, diary of, 352–53 Pedro II (Dom), diary of, check names, 129 Pei-yi Wu, 223n2, 223nn4–5 Penant, Thomas, 82 Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703): as agent of transition, 8; craft in diary writing of, 275; as keeper of records, 76 Pepys, Samuel, diary of: accounting in, 78, 402; “and so to bed” in, 83, 281; cited by Woolf, 276; fame of, 84; literary reputation through, 274; models for, 75; as secular, 78 Percival, John (Sir), diary of, 82–83 Perechodnik, Calel, diary of, 371, 375 person, Western conception of, 4 personal diaries, use of genetic criticism to study, 238–40 philosophical diaries, 8 PhoBWanKenobi, 431 photo albums as diaries, 415, 419 photographs: in blogs, 418, 419; inclusion in diaries, 152, 153, 168–69 Piatnitskaya, Julia, diary of, 356–57

Pierpont Morgan Library (New York), Private Histories: Four Centuries of Journal Keeping, 235 Pipers World, 447 Pipkin, Erin, 168 Plath, Sylvia (1932–63), diary of, 62, 117 pocket diaries, 407 Podlubny, Stepan, diary of, 354–55 Podnieks, Elizabeth, 3 poets, diary practices of, 99 political conflict, diary writing in, 1, 4–5, 7, 11–12, 130–31. See also Confederate women’s diaries; deportation stories; Holocaust diaries; Stalinist Russia; Witbooi, Hendrik (1884–1905) Põltsamaa, Hilda, 384, 388 Portugal, diary writing in, 132 Potemkin, Leonid, diary of, 354 Potter, Beatrix, diary of, 83 power: in diaries, 13; and personalization of control, 27 Pozzi, Catherine (1882–1934), diary of, 97, 235 preservation of diaries, 9 Pressler, Mirjam, 147, 149–50 privacy: assumptions of, 49; and authenticity, 180; and delineation of social groups, 262–63; diarists’ expectations of, 115; diary as protected space, 91; and online diaries, 50, 418 (see also Snapchat); and the secret self, 60, 261; and semi-private writing online, 444, 450–51, 452; and web diaries, 442, 445. See also literary authors private writing: external control over, 50; personal diaries as genre or practice, 231; as suitable for private life, 45–46; use of genetic criticism to study, 238–40. See also literary authors; Palestinians’ diaries; Smith, Henry and Harriet, diary writing of production diaries, 351 Progoff, Ira, 405; At a Journal Workshop (1975), 403–4 Protestantism and diary writing, 33, 76, 77–78, 132

Index | 471

pseudonymous diaries, 415, 418–19 psychoanalytic approaches to diary writing, 367–68 publication of diaries: and abridgements, 377; authors’ desires for, 94, 116; of Brazilians, 129–30; as commonplace practice, 97; and intention, 65; as literary works, 94, 127; methodological issues, 9; motivation for, 10; posthumous publication, 94–95; Puritan spiritual diaries, 78 public records, 5–7 public response to published diaries, 95, 98 Puech, Jean-Benoît (as Benjamin Jordane; 1947–), 98, 101n52 Puritan spiritual diaries. See spiritual diaries Putnam, Lara, 171 Putnam, Sarah Gooll, diary of: digitization of, 167; drawbacks of digital edition of, 169–70; material features of, 167–69, 173n10 Qian Qianyi (1582–1664), travel writing of, 219 Qing dynasty (1644–1911), travel writing in, 210, 219–23 Quakers’ diaries, 107, 114 Quantified Self (QS) movement, 406, 409n27 Queneau, Raymond (1903–76), 96 Raban, Jonathan, 181, 187 race and racism, 318; Orientalism, 199–200; and stereotypes, 182–83, 185; views of Native Americans, 110; in the White Australia policy, 200, 204; and women’s diaries, 42–43 Rahi-Tamm, Aigi, 393n4 Rak, Julie, 253, 257n5, 392 Ramuz, Charles Ferdinand (1878– 1947), 97 Ranitskaya, Olga M., discovery of diary of, 1 Ransom, John L. (1843–1919), diary of, 113 Raoul, Valerie, 45, 46, 47

472 | Index

readers of diaries: assumptions about, 189; and Civil War women’s diaries, 308–9; and perspective of writer, 3–4; relationships with diaries, 44–45 Reagan, Ronald, 118n4 Rebouças, André (1838–98), diary of, 129 recreation and enjoyment, 80 Red Army man notebook, 350 Reddit, 418 “refuge of the self,” 136 Régnier, Paule (1888–1950), 97 Renan, Ernest, 95 Renard (1864–1910), Jules, 95, 130 research methods, 170–72 resistance through diary writing, 13, 31–32, 384, 392 Rétif de la Bretonne (1734–1806), diary of, 89, 94 Rettberg, Jill Walker, 434 Rheingold, Howard, The Virtual Community, 442 rhetorical devices, 65 Riabinkin, Yuri, 358 Rice Bowl Journals, 188 Richardson, Samuel, Pamela, 81 Richardson, Sue, diary of, 302, 311n13 Ricoeur, Paul, 336 Riley, Denise, 46 Ringelblum, Emanuel: on diary keeping in Germany, 377n1; diary of, 365, 373–74 Rochelle, Pierre Drieu la (1893–1945), diary of, 234 Romains, Jules, La douceur de la vie, 34 romance and courtship in diaries, 112; in the American diary canon, 110– 11; in the French diary canon, 94 Roques, Marie Hélène, diary of, 32, 36n8 Rosanove, Joan, diary of, 202, 204, 205 Rosenblum, Rachel, 375 Rosenwald, Lawrence, 275–76; Emerson and the Art of the Diary, 111 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 127

Rousseau, Marie, 90 Rousset, Jean, 231 Roy, Claude, diary of, 234 Royal Society guidelines, 83 Ruckenstein, Minna, 418 Rudashevski, Yitzhok, diary of, 365 Runkeeper, 417 Ryder, Dudley, diary of, 79, 80

self-knowledge: diary as introspection toward, 93, 184, 283, 288, 356– 57; discovery and rediscovery of the self, 61, 209–10, 223n5, 404; emergence of the true self, 405; exploration of identity and relationships through diary writing, 285; inconsistencies and self-contradictions revealed, Saga, 418 185; and innermost self, 31; and al-Sakakini, Khalil, diary of, 250, maintenance of selfhood, 391–92; 251, 258n10 self-improvement, 352–56, 401; Samuel, Herbert (1870–1963), diary transformation of, 183 of, 258n9 self-observation: cultural Sand, George (1804–76), diary of, 92 preoccupation with, 407; methods Sarton, Mary (1912–95), diary of, for, 400 116 self-tracking, 400; digital devices for, Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80): Being and 406; GPS anecdote, 411, 414, 421; Nothingness, 32; diary of, 97, 234 origins of practice of, 400–401 Sauvageot, Marcelle (1900–1934), 97 Serfaty, Viviane, 413, 432 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, Qu’est-ce Sfar, Joann, diary of, 237 qu’un genre littéraire? (1989), 231 sharing of diaries, 80–81, 261–66, Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg, 44 268, 271, 419 Schiano, Diane, 433 Shehadeh, ‘Aref (1892–1973), diary Schlissel, Lillian, 41; Women’s of, 258n9 Diaries of the Westward Journey, Shewmake, Susan Cornwall, 299 133 “Shmuel’s Soapbox,” 433 Schoolcraft, Henry (1793–1864), side-glancing, 171 diary of, 110 Sierakowiak, David, diary of, 373, 376 schooling, correlation with diary silences: and authenticity, 180; writing, 25–26 learning to interpret, 65; as Schulte, Stephanie, 442 revealing, 50; and unmanageable Schwarz-Friesel, Monika, 374–75, feelings, 372; as unreadable by 380n48 others, 47 scientific diaries, 184 Sima Guang (1019–86), diary of, 210 Scott, Joan, 47, 335 Sinor, Jennifer, 49, 372 Scott, Robert Falcon, diary of, 180, Sjoblad, Christina, 41 189n4 slavery and diaries, 112–13, 120n27, Scott, Walter (Sir), diary of, 77, 83 308, 309 scrapbookers, 415 smartphones, 434 scrapbooks, 48 Smith, Henry and Harriet, diary self: consolation of, 356–57, 373; writing of: Civil War context for, construction of, 47–48, 261; and 266–67, 269–71; and concealment secret self, 60; Soviet notions of, of, 268; gender differences in, 268– 354–55; sustenance of, 388; as 69; Harriet’s resumption of diary Western concept, 4 writing, 267; importance of privacy self-address, 61 in, 263–64; and sharing with each self-help genre, 13 other, 265–66, 268, 271; social selfie as word of the year, 413 relationships tracked through, 263– self-improvement diaries, 79–80 64, 269–71

Index | 473

Smith, Keri, 399 Smith, Leonard, 366 Smith, Sidonie, 46, 63, 408n1 Smithsonian Institution’s Transcription Center, 172 Snapchat, 419–20, 421, 434, 438n57 Snapchat storytellers, 420 social media: and changes in diary writing, 13–14; as genre, 412; and social connections, 417; use of real names in, 415. See also Facebook; Instagram; Snapchat; Tumblr; Twitter social relationships: and Civil War complexities in, 269–71; and diary writing, 261–64; gender differences in maintaining, 268–69; as lifeline during wartime, 267–68 Song dynasty (960–1279): embassy accounts, 212–14; public diaries in, 209, 210; river diaries, 212, 214– 16; travel writing in, 211–16; types of travel writing in, 212 Song Lian (1310–81), “Record of a Sightseeing Trip to Bell Mountain,” 219 Sorapure, Madeleine, 427 Soviet regime: deportations under, 385–86, 394n10; diaries forbidden under, 384, 387; life story archive reflecting, 384–85; and repression in Estonia, 393n4; scholarly attention to, 385; timeframe of, 393n3 Spain, diary writing in, 132 Spender, Stephen, China Diary (1982; with Hockney), 188 spiritual diaries: in the American diary canon, 114; American spiritual journals, 105–7; blogging’s similarity to, 413, 419; British spiritual diaries, 77–78; Confederate women’s diaries, 299; in diary canon, 8; in the French diary canon, 90; instruction manual for, 401–2; Puritan spiritual diaries, 77–78, 106–7, 401–2, 413 Spitzer, Leo, 388 Spotify, 417 Staden, Hans (ca. 1574–76), diary of, 131

474 | Index

Stalin, Joseph, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), 359–60, 361n24 Stalinist Russia: danger of diary writing in, 349; diarists’ use of binaries in describing the self, 353; diary keeping in, 348, 349, 350–52, 356, 357–58, 361n19; diary’s status after Stalin, 360; dissenting thoughts in diaries under, 355–56; Five-Year Plan structuring of diaries in, 353; How the Steel Was Tempered (1934), 359; nature of autobiographical writings in, 350; notions of self in, 354–55; officials’ reading of personal writing in, 357– 58; and the promise of the Russian Revolution, 349–50; reservations about diary keeping in, 351; Russian image of Germans in, 358– 59; self-transformation through diaries in, 352, 354; soldiers’ letter writing in, 358; Soviet writers’ use of diaries in, 359; subjectivization policies of, 350, 351 Stanley, Henry Morton (1841–1904), 184; Through the Dark Continent, 182 Steinbeck, John (1902–68): Journal of a Novel, 115; Russian Journal, 186; Travels with Charley (1962), 185, 186 Steinitz, Rebecca, 44, 48, 49, 182 Steinmetz, George, 318, 329n4 Stendahl, (1783–1842), diary of, 35, 91–92, 94 STEP Journal, 417 Stevens, William Bagshot, diary of, 82 Stoker, Yt, 151 Stone, Kate, diary of, 308, 313n45 Strassberg, Richard E., 216, 221 Strong-Boag, Veronica, 41, 45 Stuhlmann, Gunther, 284 subjective and objective time, 2 subversion of diary form, 98 Suijk, Cornelius, 150, 155 survival, role of diaries in, 5, 11–12, 29–30, 31–32, 358, 384, 392. See

also Holocaust diaries; Nagel, Erna, diary of; Palestinians’ diaries Swift, Jonathan, Journal to Stella, 82, 83 Szeps, Fela, and diary of, 369, 374, 376

Todorov, Tzvetan, 385, 389, 394–95n23 Tougaw, Jason, 385 traces: diaries as series of, 28, 66; and gaps between diaries and thoughts and experiences, 64–65 Tracy, Destutt, 99n12 Tamari, Salim, 247, 252, 258n9, Traill, Catharine Parr, 259n45 autobiographical work of, 43 Tang dynasty (618–907), travel transcendentalists and diary keeping, writing in, 210 111–12, 120n21 Taunay, Alfredo (1843–99), diary of, transcriptions, using optical character 129 recognition (OCR) technology, 166 technologies and diaries, 400, 411–12 trauma: and collective first person Temple, Judy Nolte, 261 accounts, 369; coping with Temple, William, 80 through diaries, 372; deportees’ Terry, Mary M., diary of, 303, experience of, 386, 392; effect on 312n22 autobiographical writing, 368; testimonial diaries: characteristics of, normalcy seeking in diaries, 373, 369; materiality of, 388; of Soviet 375 period, 384–85, 392; during World travel diaries: in the American War II, 97. See also Confederate diary canon, 108–10; authority women’s diaries; Holocaust and authenticity in, 9, 180–81; in diaries; Nagel, Erna, diary of; the British diary canon, 78–79, Witbooi, Hendrik, archive (diary) 82–83; from expeditions and travel of; World War I, diaries of French to America, 131–32; functions soldiers in performed by, 183–84; as limited Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), 166 projects, 179–80; literary qualities Thacher, James (1754–1844), diary in, 181–82; models for, 82–83; as of, 113 record of facts, 414; in search of TheFerrett, 429, 437n23 heritage, 10; spaces and silences theoretical approaches: historicist and in, 183–84; temporal structures material approaches, 48–50, 66; in, 184–87; travel blogs, 187–88; psychoanalytic approaches, 50–51; use of recordings for, 202. See also resistance of diaries to, 45–48 Australian travel diaries; Chinese therapy through diaries, 368 travel literature (youji); chronicles; Thibaudet, Albert (1874–1936), 95 exploration diaries Thickness, Philip, 82 Trinca, Mat, 198–99 Thomas, Ella Gertrude Clanton, Trondheim, Lewis, diary of, 237 diary of, 305, 307, 309 truth in diaries, 46–47, 58–59, 65 Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62), Tumblr, 415, 418, 426–27, 428, 436n6 diary of, 111–12 Turjman, Ihsan (1893–1917): class time: diaries as continuous present, background of, 256; death of, 252; 66; during Holocaust, 372; longue education of, 250; support for durée in historical time, 342, 343, Egypt-Palestine condominium, 256 345n35; as structured by language, Turjman, Ihsan, diary of: 336; subjective and objective characteristics of, 248, 251; context time, 2; use of non-chronological for, 248, 250; as disciplined habit, organization of, 98 252; honor and officer’s unwanted time management, 61 advances, 251–52; importance of

Index | 475

Turjman, Ihsan, diary of (cont.) wartime diaries, 247; on Ottomans and their hypocrisy, 254–55; publication languages of, 259n24; and scarcity of food, 255; survival of, 259n28; translation of, 258n9; use of code in, 259n27 Turkel, Sherry, Life on Screen, 444 Turner, Ethel, diaries of, 197–98; Ports and Happy Havens, 198 Turner, Thomas, diary of, 77, 79 Twitter, 414, 426, 429, 435

Wang Shixing (1547–98), travel writing of, 218 war diaries: in the American diary canon, 113–14; authenticity in, 335–36; from Brazil, 129; chronological structuring of, 336; and postponement of writing in, 371; as testament, 335; as testimony, 97. See also ‘Amr, Sami (1924–98), diary of; Confederate women’s diaries; Holocaust diaries; Turjman, Ihsan (1893–1917), diary of; Witbooi, Hendrik, archive Ulianov, Anatoly, diary of, 352, 353, (diary) of; World War I, diaries of 354 French soldiers in Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 43 Washington, George, diary of, 165 Underwood, Ted, 166 Washington, Mary Helen, 42 A Unique Set: Anne Frank’s Diaries watermarks, use of, 170 in Facsimile (2002), 150 Watson, Julia, 63, 408n1 US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 377 Watt, Ian, 4 Web 2.0, 429 van der Stroom, Gerrold, 149 Webby, Elizabeth, 41 Van Dyne, Rachel, diary of, 262 weblog, coining of term, 412. See also Vargas, Alberto, diary of, 172 blogs and blogging Vargas, Getúlio, diary of, 137 Wells, Ida B. and diary of, 279, Vauthier, Louis Léger (1815–1901), 291n43 diary of, 134 Wenger, Mark, 82–83 Verhaaltjesboek (Storybook), 151 Wescott, Glenway (1901–87), diary Viana, Maria José Motta, Do Sótão à of, 116 Vitrine, 136 White, Hayden, 338, 340, 345n20, Victoria (queen), diary of, 42, 165 346n39 Victorian autograph albums, 49 White, Richard, 195, 197 Vigny, Alfred de (1797–1863), diary Whitlock, Gillian, 43 of, 92 Wigglesworth, Michael (1631–1705), Vildé, Boris (1908–42), 97 diary of, 106, 107, 116–17 Vilde, Eduard, 393n5 Wight, Margaret Brown, diary of, Viollet, Catherine, 238, 239 302, 311n17 virtue, ordinary, 389, 394–95n23 Wilder, Thornton (1897–1975), diary Vivre et l’Écrire, 236 of, 115 von Trotha, Lothar, 326, 327 Williams, Nannie Haskins, diary of, 301, 302, 304, 308, 309, 311n8 Wade, William, diary of, 202–3, Williams World of Werrets, 446 204, 205 Wilson, Stephen, World Wide Web Wadley, Sarah, diary of, 304 Design Guide (1995), 443, 444 Waldo, Abigail (1750–94), diary of, Windham, William, 79 113 Winthrop, John (1587–1649): “A Walker, Alice, and diary of, 279, Modell of Christian Charity,” 106, 291n43 118n4; diary of, 106–7, 116–17 Wang Anshi (1021–86), diary of, Witbooi, Hendrik (1884–1905): 210 biographical information about,

476 | Index

319; comment by, 317; death of, 328; German attitudes toward, 318–19; as hero of resistance, 318, 319; use of archive by, 321, 330n23 Witbooi, Hendrik, archive (diary) of: about, 317, 319–20; actions under protection treaty with Germans, 326–27; character of, 328–29; correspondence of, 321, 322, 325–26; publication of, 329n15; relationships with other indigenous groups reflected in, 320–24; resistance to German imperialism reflected in, 323, 324–25, 327–28; significance of, 320; use of poetic language and metaphor in, 320, 324 womanhood, diversity in, 46 women’s diaries: of the American West, 133; critical analysis of, 62, 261; diary keeping by Southern women, 299–300; editing and censorship of, 40–42; novelistic characteristics in, 110–11; and psychosexual development, 46–48, 50; race and class and, 42–44; Refúgio do eu (Refuge of the self), 136; and sexuality, 115–16; survival of, 40, 41; value of reading, 43–44; women’s courage in, 108. See also Confederate women’s diaries; Nagel, Erna, diary of; Nin, Anaïs (1903–77); Putnam, Sarah Gooll, diary of; Woolf, Virginia women’s studies, diaries as source material for, 44 Woolf, Leonard, A Writer’s Diary (1953), 276, 278 Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941): as diarist, 287; diary of, 62, 274–75, 276–78, 278; The Diary of Virginia Woolf (1977–84), 276; on diary writing, 405; diary writing approach of, 277–78; and literary diary tradition, 289; notions about diaries, 75, 84; novels of, 276; A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals (1990), 276; publication intentions of, 278; purpose of diary writing, 66, 67

Woollacott, Angela, 197 Woolman, John (1720–72), diary of, 107 working class, diaries of, 43–44 World War I, diaries of French soldiers in: critical mass of, 344; and silence of survivors, 343; variability of, 333. See also Barbusse, Henri; Bloch, Marc; Dorgelès, Roland (1885–1973) World Wide Web: and changes to diary form, 451; experimentation with publishing on, 445–48; publishing on, 443, 444; testing the boundaries of allowable speech on, 451; and user-generated content, 441, 442–43 Wreck This Journal (Smith), 13, 399–400 writing, love of, 33 Xanga, 427 Xu Jing’s (1091–1153), Xuanhe fengshi Gaoli tujing (Illustrated account of the Xuanhe embassy to Koryo˘), 212 Xu Xiake (1586–1641), travel writing of, 217–19 Young, James, 367 YouTube, 429 Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610), travel writing of, 216–17 Yuan Mei (1716–98), 220 Yu Yonghe, Diary on Procuring Sulfur, 220 Yu Zhanghua, 220; Zhongguo youji wenxueshi (History of Chinese travel literature; with Mei Xinlin), 216 Zboray, Mary and Ronald, 262 Zhou Bida (1125–1204), diary of, 210 Zhou Hui’s (b. 1126), Account of Northbound Cart Shafts, 212 Zhu Yizun (1629–1709), 220 . Zydowski Instytut Historyczny, 377

Index | 477

BAT S H E VA B E N -A MO S is Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Comparative Literature and at the College of Professional and Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a practicing clinician and has written about Holocaust diaries. DA N B E N -A MO S is Professor of Folklore and Comparative Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of numerous titles, including Sweet Words, Folklore in Context, and Jewish Folk Literature (in Hebrew and Russian), and translator of In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (with Jerome R. Mintz). He is editor of Folklore Genres, Folktales of the Jews (vols. 1–3), Folklore: Performance and Communication (with Kenneth S. Goldstein), and Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (with Liliane Weissberg). He is also editor of the Rafael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology at Wayne State University Press.