Personals

By Stefan Kanfer

"I wonder why I do it," Virginia Woolf mused on Oct. 7, 1919. "Partly, I think, from my old sense of the race of time 'Time's winged chariot hurrying near'--Does it stay it?" "It" was diary writing, and the question was rhetorical. Of course the entries could stop time, by providing a mirror of the self and a method of recapturing the past. That is a truth every diarist apprehends, first instinctively and then with the evidence of the page. In this critical anthology, Thomas Mallon, a professor of English at Vassar, offers hundreds of such proofs, from diaries as old as Samuel Pepys' and as contemporary as Graham Greene's and Jean Harris'.

If Pepys cannot be said to have invented the diary form, Mallon observes, "he more or less perfected it." Crack open his daybooks anywhere and a surprisingly modern figure emerges, with his ambition, flaws and lust intact. ) He plays up to the powerful, pans a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, watches a cockfight, tells the story of how his wife burned her hand. Always on the prowl for a likely wench, he writes, in his easily decipherable code, about Deb, a servant: on March 31, 1668, "Yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra me genu and did poner mi mano sub her jupes and toca su thigh." Yet Pepys' journals are far more than an account of appetites satisfied or denied; along his way the diarist recounts the coronation of Charles II, the Great Plague and the Great Fire.

Mallon lists Pepys as a chronicler, one of seven categories of note takers. The others: travelers, pilgrims, creators, apologists, confessors and prisoners. To some degree these are arbitrary distinctions; the 19th century British painter Benjamin Haydon recorded his financial and artistic woes in 26 confidential volumes. As one of his last exhibitions fails, he laments, "They rush by thousands to see (Tom) Thumb. They push, they fight, they scream, they faint . . . They see my bills, my boards & don't read them." Months later he quotes King Lear, "Stretch me no longer on this tough World," and commits suicide. Is he a creator, a prisoner or merely, as Mallon has it, an apologist?

Yet most of the author's large cast of characters are happily categorized. Chronicler Evelyn Waugh offers seedlings of his farces: "Alastair . . . at some stage in the evening lost my waistcoat. Audrey made declarations of love to me, and Richard to Elizabeth and I to Olivia. I do not think Black Torry seduced anyone." When Winston Churchill's son is operated on for a benign tumor, Waugh decides, "It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it."

A Book of One's Own is filled with such arch utterances. F. Scott Fitzgerald plants a definition in his notebook: "Debut--the first time a young girl is seen drunk in public." Choreographer Martha Graham admits, "I am a thief --and I am not ashamed. I steal from the best wherever it happens to me --Plato--Picasso--Bertram Ross--the members of my company never show me anything--except (to) expect me to steal it."

Entrants in this dense and unprecedented volume range from the heroic to the villainous, from Albert Camus to Lee Harvey Oswald. Mallon welcomes them all to his vast storehouse. Some neighbors provide deep ironic contrasts: Anne Frank tells her diary, "I twist my heart . . . so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would like so to be." Four pages later a Nazi architect bitterly considers himself in the third person: "Hitler . . . would have been keenly delighted by the role Albert Speer played as a defendant."

The disclosures, the introspections and secret desires give diaries their special appeal. This assemblage compounds the interest; reading it is like screening other people's dreams--at once intriguing and familiar. For Sylvia Plath's need to write in her notebook when she is "at wits' end, in a cul-de- sac. Never when I am happy" is not unique to depressed poets. Lord Byron notes, "Clock strikes--going out to make love. Somewhat perilous, but not disagreeable." Boswell reports, "I awaked at noon, with a severe head-ach. I was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot . . ." These and scores of similar entries defy decades and space. They might have been written centuries ago by candlelight or last night by fluorescent lamp. As A Book of One's Own amply demonstrates, a diary is a kind of looking glass. At first it reflects the diarist. But it ends by revealing the reader.