But it was no use – these memories were manufactured.
DIARIES
A convocation address to the students of Acadia University, June 1979
One of the hazards of diplomatic life is the possibility of contracting an occupational pomposity. This ailment is known in other professions, even the academic, but in the case of diplomats it takes a peculiar form. Perhaps pomposity is not the clinical word for it. It is rather that the role of representing your country can grow on you with the years until it absorbs the whole personality. In extreme cases the victim becomes indeed every inch an ambassador. He even brushes his teeth in a diplomatic manner. The role has taken over from the man. Proust, in his marvellous creation of M. de Norpois, Ambassador of France, has immortalized the type. To avoid such a fate some escape-hatch is essential. I was lucky in having one close to hand. I had been off and on since the age of twelve a diarist, and now my diary-writing came to my rescue. My job was public but my diaries were private.
Of course there are as many kinds of diaries as there are diarists. Some are political or social records written with an eye or half an eye to ultimate publication. Others, of which the classic example is that of Pepys, are private, even secret – in some cases partly in cypher. My own diaries are of the private kind. It is true that in my old age I went public or partly public and have published two books of excerpts from them, but when I wrote them they were for my eyes only.
Is there a diarist in the house? I look around the hall and ask myself the question. He or she may appear quite harmless – just like other people – but beware, for we diarists can be dangerous. We write things down – awkward things, indiscreet things – things better forgotten. There should be a law against us for anti-social activity – no doubt there soon will be – for we have no lobby or union to defend us. Diarists are by definition not joiners. Theirs is not a group activity. What then is the motive for this solitary vice which starts as a compulsion and may end as an addiction like smoking or jogging. What is the origin of the diary addiction? The de Goncourt brothers in speaking of their famous journal described it as a “Confessional.”
I use the words “compulsion” and “addiction” because they best describe the plight of the diarist. He can’t stop. Fortunately there are merciful periods of remission – sometimes for months or even years at a time – but then, one day – for no good reason – like the reformed drunk or cured smoker, he begins again. While adolescence is the dangerous age when diary-writing often begins, yet it is often the age at which it ends, and you hear people say with an indulgent, reminiscent smile, “Oh yes, when I was sixteen I wrote a diary – I wonder what has become of it?” So perhaps the confirmed diarist is one of those who have dreamed adolescent dreams too long. A deplorable fate.
Yet firstly I would put in a plea for the defence. The impulse to record the passing days has its roots in the sense that life, “ordinary life,” is not after all so ordinary that it should slip like sand through one’s fingers – that, as it is our only chance to look around us at the world from our particular angle of vision, what we see, hear, and learn is worth recording.
I once wrote in a boyhood diary of mine, “I prefer diaries to memoirs. They are less made up afterwards.” I still find in the immediacy of a journal a great part of its fascination. In these days we are inundated with a spate of memoirs – good, bad, and indifferent – some making a contribution to history, some to entertainment, many to neither. Political memoirs and autobiographies abound among us. (These are not generally of a very distinguished literary quality.) Possibly from the habit of speech-making, politicians tend when writing of their careers and activities to the self-congratulatory and to the verbose. Anxious to pass to a sometimes-indifferent posterity what they achieved for the human race, or at any rate for their electors, they laboriously and meanderingly recite incidents of political battles which, if useful to a student of the period, certainly cannot please for the sparkle or lucidity of their prose.
Cyril Connolly used to say that every fat man had a thin man inside him struggling to get out. Has every diarist a novelist inside him struggling to get out? If so, the struggle is likely to be a hard one. The born diarist with his passion for the Record – historical, social, or psychological – lacks the power of concentration and the storyteller’s art. Many writers, Byron, Julian Green, André Gide, Virginia Woolf, to name only a few, are marvellous diarists, but they tend to regard their diaries as the wastebasket of their art – material which is not yet fused by the creative imagination into a finished work.
Diaries sometimes merge into memoirs or autobiographies. Saint-Simon’s great tapestry of the Court of Louis XIV was woven later out of notes or journals written down earlier. In writing the story of their lives, some may utilize their diaries as aids to facts or stimulus to memory. The danger of this practice is that, if the facts as recorded in the diary later prove inconvenient or intractable, or the earlier style of writing later looks crude or clumsy, there is a temptation to tamper with the evidence – and a diary revised later is not a true diary. It has become what the French call demi-vièrge, neither one thing nor the other.
A diary need not depend for interest on the subject-matter of the Diarist’s life – one should not be discouraged by the notion that one’s daily existence is humdrum. The diaries of Kilvert, a nineteenth-century parson leading an uneventful life in rural England, are as absorbing as any. At the other extreme are the Goncourt journals with their pictures of the literary world of Paris in the nineteenth century or those of Harold Nicholson in which politics and society in the 1930s and ’40s are brilliantly reflected.
One problem that plagues the diarist – if he toys with the temptation of publishing – is the sensitivity of other people. One does not want to hurt the feelings of the living or cause distress to the friends and relatives of the dead by any unkind reference to themselves or their loved ones. Yet if one irons out all sharpness of comment, the sanitized text becomes so bland as to be unreadable. The only real answer would be either for the diarist to die before publication or for all the people mentioned in the diaries to die first. An extreme solution.
These are problems of publication, but a more drastic decision awaits the diarist as he contemplates the eventual fate of the material which, for one reason or another, he has not found fit to publish. Some of it may be damaging to the reputation of others, or worse still to his own reputation. Yet no sooner does he decide that it must be destroyed, than he has second thoughts and puts off once again the day of the Bonfire. Often he dies before he can decide to commit his offspring to the flames. Sometimes he leaves his papers to a relation or a trusted friend, sometimes to a university or archive; sometimes he leaves no instruction at all – preferring to pass the responsibility on to others. The history of the fate of private memoirs, letters, and diaries is full of tragi-comedies in which the double-mindedness of the testator, half-wishing to survive on paper, half-dreading the result, is reflected in the ensuing confusion and sometimes in needless destruction. The decision to destroy Byron’s memoirs was made in the interest of his reputation by his best friends and no doubt from worthy motives. It was an irreparable loss which even today exasperates. When a great Boswell scholar visited M.C. in Ireland to acquire some of Boswell’s journals left to his descendants, the current Lady de M (an ex-chorus girl), shocked by some of the contents which she felt would injure the good name of the family, tore out some of the pages and threw them into the fire before his eyes. To die before burning or burn before dying, therefore, is the unsolved problem of the diarist.
So to my unknown fellow-diarists here today I should say – Don’t give up. Giving things up is the kiss of Death. To any who are tempted by the vice, I would say give in to temptation. It is much more amusing than jogging and better for you – no strain on the heart and not too much on the head. But if you contemplate being both diplomat and diarist, keep diplomatic discretion out of your diaries and keep the diaristic indiscretions out o
f your diplomacy. Live a double life and you will find your life doubly enjoyable.
Appetite for Life : The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927 (9781551996776) Page 18
