in turn, liked Pepys and visited him at the Tower, where he had been committed, unjustly in Evelyn’s view, for misdemeanours in the Admiralty. On his death, Evelyn wrote generously of him, describing him as ‘a very worthy, Industrious and curious person, none in England exceeding him in knowledge of the Navy’. Pepys had been his friend for almost forty years and requested that he be a pall-bearer at his funeral but Evelyn, himself incapacitated, was unable to attend.
The successful publication of these two diaries in the nineteenth century undoubtedly proved a spur to others to follow in their tracks. A diary, at least to begin with, is not a daunting prospect, like an epic poem, say, or a play or a novel. There is no imperative to publish or show anyone how it is progressing. You don’t need to do any research or check facts. Entries can be long or short, factual or inaccurate, real or imagined. Though diarists, invariably, attempt to keep up a daily routine they just as invariably fail. Life has its insidious way of interrupting the flow. Some diarists take this in their stride while it throws others into a spin, as if they had forgotten to turn up for a dinner party or missed a job interview.
Time after time one comes across diarists chastising themselves for their laziness, their inconstancy, their lack of fidelity to a diary which they address as they might a lover. For communion with a diary is unlike any other literary activity. Once a diarist, always a diarist, it seems. A diary becomes part of a diarist’s routine, an integral part of his or her household, a member of the family which needs to be nurtured like a baby or a pet kitten. Neglect is conspicuous but it need not be harmful, for silence has its own eloquence. While many diarists write entries daily, as if brushing their teeth, others let weeks and months go by without so much as writing a few lines.
Some diarists, such as Walter Scott, write during times of emotional and financial crisis, others when they are at their most happy and socially active. Evelyn Waugh, one of the greatest twentieth-century diarists, kept a diary for diverse reasons, wrote the editor of his diaries, Michael Davie, as an aide-memoire and as a source of material for his novels and autobiography. ‘Fading memory and a senile itch to write to the Times on all topics have determined me to keep irregular notes of what passes through my mind,’ he wrote in i960, when he started his diary again after a break of some four years. Waugh, in common with most diarists, wrote with no intention of seeing his diary in the public domain and died before the decision was taken to publish it. He wrote privately and did not tell many of his friends that he kept a diary. Even his wife did not know. Though not by nature furtive, he seemed to want to keep his diaries to himself. Why, no one knows.
In contrast, the artist Andy Warhol, whose fame, among other things, comes from his saying that in future everyone in the world will be famous for fifteen minutes, liked to dictate his diary to an amanuensis, Pat Hackett. In her introduction to his diaries, she wrote:
I’d call Andy around 9am, never later than 9:30. Sometimes I’d be waking him up, sometimes he’d say he’d been awake for hours. If I happened to oversleep he’d call me and say something like, ‘Good morning, Miss Diary — what’s wrong with you?’ or ‘Sweetheart! You’re fired!’ The calls were always conversations. We’d warm up while just chatting — he was always curious about everything, he’d ask a million questions: ‘What are you having for breakfast? Do you have channel 7 on? How can I clean my can opener — should I do it with a toothbrush?’ Then he’d give me his cash expenses and then he’d tell me all about the day and night before. Nothing was too insignificant for him to tell the Diary. These sessions — what he referred to as my ‘five-minutes-a-day job’ — would actually take anywhere from one to two hours. Every other week or so, I’d go over to the office with the typed pages of each day’s entry and I’d staple to the back of every page all the loose cab and restaurant receipts he’d left for me in the interim — receipts that corresponded to the amounts he’d already told me over the phone. The pages were then stored in letter boxes from the stationery store.
Perhaps because of the way they were composed Warhol’s diaries read like an extended gossip column. Names are dropped with insouciance reflecting the diarist’s own celebrity. He moved in a world in which everyone was famous because they knew him. He was in the habit, says Pat Hackett, of referring to people as ‘superstars’, be they ‘the most beautiful model in New York or the delivery boy who brought her a pack of cigarettes’.
Would one be so interested in Warhol’s diaries if they did not contain the litany of rock stars, actors and artists, designers and writers? Perhaps not. But each diarist is an individual describing his or her life, for which they need make no excuses. As Kilvert indicated, curiosity is not the least of the attractions of reading a diary. Until the present age, when it is possible if one is so inclined to view every moment of complete strangers’ lives via the Internet, a diary was the closest one could get to understanding the way people lived and thought. Reading Kilvert, for example, is to get inside the mind of a nineteenth-century English country parson. His diary runs from 1870 to 1879, almost the same span as Pepys’s, but it came to light only in 1937 when the poet, novelist and critic William Plomer received 22 notebooks. His selection from them was published between 1938 and 1940.
So far, so straightforward. But Plomer, avowedly because he was pressed for space, destroyed the typed manuscript he had made of the notebooks, convinced that the originals would be preserved. They were not and out of the original 22 notebooks only two survive. We know, too, that Kilvert’s wife, to whom he was married only a matter of months before he died, destroyed others of his diaries. It is a very odd case and raises more questions than can be answered. What is particularly controversial, however, is Plomer’s assertion that he had retained everything of the diaries which was worth preserving. ‘I can assure you,’ he wrote in his selection, ‘that the best and most essential parts of the Diary are in print. I left out what seemed to me commonplace and trivial.’
It is hard to see Plomer’s action as other than arrogance. Without the commonplace and the trivial the best diaries would be bereft of much that makes them compelling and enduringly fascinating. Looking back over the diaries of the Rev. James Woodforde or Dorothy Wordsworth or even Josef Goebbels it is that which many people might not deem worth recording which sheds the most brilliant light on the diarist’s character or illuminates the times in which they lived. Often, one is struck by the ability of great diarists to combine in a single entry news either momentous or terrifying, or both, with some minor observation or irritation of everyday life. It is in a diary that our private world imperceptibly merges with the cataclysmic events which make headlines in every language.
There are around 170 diarists in this anthology. Many of those represented are well known and many are not. There are diaries, of course, everyone wishes had been written. What wouldn’t we give to read Shakespeare’s diary, or that of Jesus or Mozart or Michelangelo? If everyone left behind a diary many unsolved mysteries could be cleared up. Would the conspiracy theorists still be in a job if Marilyn Monroe or JFK had written diaries of their relationship? Sometimes we almost wish diaries into being, so overwhelming is the desire to peep behind the arras of history. There is the unfortunate case of the Hitler diaries which fooled an eminent historian and a group of overeager senior journalists who could scarcely believe their luck. Sadly, the diaries of him whose name is a byword for man’s inhumanity to man proved to be fakes, causing exquisite embarrassment to all involved in their authentication and publication. That there have been many other spoof diaries did not sweeten the pill. At least in the case of the Holocaust there were many unassailable witnesses to appalling actions of a state hell-bent on wiping out an entire race, many of whom are to be found in the pages that follow.
The idea of this anthology grew out of columns in two Scottish newspapers, Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman. Each week extracts from diaries for the corresponding period in the past were published, giving contemporary readers a flavour of what it was like in either the recent or the distant past. This book is an amplification of those columns. Entries are arranged day by day in chronological order throughout the year, an arrangement pioneered by Simon Brett in his diverting compilation The Faber Book of Diaries.
