increasingly disabled. In hindsight, the prescribed treatment seems medieval; weights were put on the leg to counteract muscle contraction. When this failed, the only hope was surgery. In May 1930, Soutar was operated on, paraphrasing Milton as he went to his fate:
‘This is the day and this the happy morn.’ At 9.30 got morphine and atropine injection. Off to theatre — sine crepuscula toga — at 10 a.m. Never saw actual theatre — elderly doctor chloroformed me in the ‘green room’. Woke up again at 11.20 or so. Wasn’t sick. Not an extra lot of reaction. Plaster of Paris troubling me more than the leg — nasty nobbly part at back — can’t lie comfortably.
The operation was unsuccessful but the stoical, philosophical Soutar gives little indication of despair, of the hopelessness of his plight. As Alexander Scott, who edited his diaries, has observed, ‘Soutar’s main interest was not his own invalidism but the general human situation.’ On occasion, he felt frustrated and sorry for himself but more often he managed to transcend his illness, setting himself goals — reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example — and pursuing his ambitions. Due to his unusual circumstances, the world had to come to him, rather than the other way round. But unlike many other diarists who are consumed with themselves, egocentrics who seem to live only inside their own heads and are obsessed with their own troubles, Soutar managed to transcend the self, and enter an elevated state of being. Just a month before he died in October 1943, he wrote:
The true diary is one, therefore, in which the diarist is, in the main, communing with himself, conversing openly and without pose, so that trifles will not be absent, nor the intimate and little confessions and resolutions which, if voiced at all, must be voiced in such a private confessional as this.
That is one definition of a diary but there are countless others that are equally valid. The elasticity of the form is a large part of its appeal, which is perhaps why it is so difficult to pin down. When, truly, is a diary a diary? What is the difference between a diary and journal or, for that matter, a log or a notebook? Dictionary definitions are not much help. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, for example, says a diary is ‘a daily record of events, transactions, thoughts, etc., esp. ones involving the writer’. A journal, on the other hand, is defined thus: ‘A personal record of events or matters of interest, written up every day or as events occur, usu. in more detail than in a diary.’
It is a fine distinction and one which individual writers seem blithely to ignore. In his Devil’s Dictionary, for instance, Ambrose Bierce wrote: ‘Diary. A daily record of that part of one’s life which he can relate to himself without blushing.’ Oscar Wilde, however, went a step further. ‘I never travel without my diary,’ he had Gwendoline in The Importance of Being Earnest say. ‘One should always have something sensational to read in the train.’ For others, though, a diary serves more prosaic purposes. ‘If a man has no constant lover who shares his soul as well as his body he must have a diary — a poor substitute, but better than nothing,’ mused James Lees-Milne.
More often than not, writers question why they do or do not keep a diary. ‘Why do I keep this voluminous journal?’ asked the Rev. Francis Kilvert. ‘I can hardly tell. Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it almost seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me.’ Sir Walter Scott deemed not keeping a regular diary one of the regrets of his life. But perhaps one of the most curious comments on diary-keeping came from A. A. Milne when he remarked in 1919,“! suppose this is the reason why diaries are so rarely kept nowadays — that nothing ever happens to anybody.’
The idea that diaries are only worth keeping when great events are in train is barely worthy of examination. The human condition is such that there is always something happening somewhere, whether personally or politically, parochially or on the international stage. The most durable diarists have not always been those who mix in high society or are connected with the great and the good and have the opportunity to keek through the keyhole as momentous events unfold. The best diaries are those in which the voice of the individual comes through untainted by self-censorship or a desire to please. First, and foremost, the diarist must write for himself, those who do not, who are already looking towards publication and public recognition, invariably strike a phoney note. As Alan Clark, author of the most notorious twentieth-century fin de siècle diaries, said: ‘Sometimes lacking in charity; often trivial; occasionally lewd; cloyingly sentimental, repetitious, whingeing and imperfectly formed. For some readers the entries may seem to be all of these things. But they are real diaries.’
The first real diarist was Samuel Pepys, who may not have patented the form but was certainly instrumental in its development. In the popular imagination a typical entry by Pepys opens with ‘Up betimes’ and closes ‘And so to bed.’ In fact, Pepys was much less formulaic than is supposed, though there is an admirable, unaffected directness to his approach, seizing the day with uncommon zest. Born in London on 23 February 1633, he was one of eleven children. His father was a tailor; his mother had been a domestic servant. From such humble beginnings Pepys rose precipitously in the world, which may account for his frequent compulsive and unabashed bouts of stocktaking. He was, even if he said so himself, ‘a very rising man’.
Thus, typically, on 30 September, 1664, he reported: ‘Up, and all day both morning and afternoon at my accounts, it being a great month both for profit and layings out, the last being £89 for kitchen and clothes for myself and wife, and a few extraordinaries for the house; and my profits, besides salary, £239; so that this weeke my balance come to £1,203, for which the Lord’s name be praised!’
Pepys’s naive enthusiasm for self-reckoning has been echoed by diarists down the decades, be they writers counting the words they have produced or monies they have made. Arnold Bennett, for example, made it a New Year’s Eve ritual. Such record keeping is a valuable function of diaries but were they simply to consist of inventories they would be — as Robert Louis Stevenson said of books — ‘a mighty bloodless substitute for life’. Life, unvarnished and uncensored, is what makes Pepys’s diary such a constant source of wonder. In every entry, Pepys reveals something of his true self, from his disquiet at discovering that the food he had been served at a friend’s house was rotten (‘a damned venison pasty that stunk like a devil’) to his views on Shakespeare (‘the most insipid ridiculous play I ever saw in my life’, he called A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and his unalloyed and unequivocal delight at coming into a legacy.
Pepys, like Boswell in the eighteenth century and Alan Clark in the twentieth, was comically candid about the attractions of women, which he was not always able to resist. His diaries are perhaps at their most piquant when he describes close encounters of a sexual nature, not all of which were consummated. As Thomas Mallon observed, Pepys could forgive a woman almost anything — even spitting on him at the theatre — if she was pretty. At church, he risked groping a girl only to have her threaten to stick pins in him. Undeterred, he groped another. When he actually did succeed in satisfying his lust, he attempted to shroud it in a mongrel language, as he did on 31 March 1668, when he foisted himself on Deb, his servant girl: ‘Yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra mi genu and did poner mi mano sub her jupes and tocu su thigh.’
His delight in this adulterous act is as diverting as his disquiet at the vice at the royal court of d‘drinking, swearing and loose amours’. Pepys was a mass of contradictions which serves only to endear him to us further. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, who from her first appearance in his diary (when she burnt her hand dressing the remains of a turkey) to almost her last (when she was troubled with toothache), was the perfect foil for his waywardness and vanity. They were married in 1633, when he was twenty-two and she was just fifteen. So hard up were they that he had to pawn his lute for forty shillings. The route out of penury came through Sir Edward Montagu, later created Earl of Sandwich, who married an aunt to Pepys’s father. A close friend of Oliver
