There’s something fragile, accidental, almost cruel about the literary diary. Some other accident has to bring us into contact with it. Its classics are limited, which is to say there aren’t many of them, but by nature, those that exist are quite long. A great diary or set of notebooks can occupy a scholar or reader for almost a lifetime. Great diarists are, in my opinion, almost inevitably great writers in general. By definition, a literary diary is something you open because you’ve read something else by that writer—because you want to see under the lid of a great mind. This is a circular justification, but it explains why diaries come down to us. I do not know Edmund Wilson the diarist unless I know Edmund Wilson the critic and novelist. We read Kierkegaard and Kafka’s diaries because we love Either/Or and The Trial. We read the diaries of Alice James or Dorothy Wordsworth because we’re obsessed with their brothers.
We may call the names on my highly idiosyncratic list “The Samuel Pepys All-Stars.” We should not forget that Pepys—who commenced the tradition of great diary writing in the Western world in 17th-century England—was inspired by the influx of commerce and activity and science, the explosive world of a booming London. The diary is a way of coping with overstimulation, with modernity, with science, with technology. It’s a wonderful, woolly, strange form. I proudly practice the art of the modern, public diary too, showing that our wonderful, woolly, frightening century is not wholly new—and that its concerns, and the pressure that is exerted on our brains, our consciousness each day, are of the same character, if not of the same intensity, that were exerted on the brains of sensitive literary people in 1950, 1850, or 1750.
Outside the canon, surely, there must be thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of fascinating diaries sitting in filing cabinets, stuffed into storage, bookshelves, or in drawers next to nightstands. I have no doubt that a wider and more capacious literary genius lives in the world outside the domain of sanctified “great minds.” Below is a list of diaries that, in a sense, made it: the tip of the iceberg of the human mind.
Diaries by Robert Musil
Robert Musil, most intellectual and critical of novelists, tracks, in his diaries, not only his own novelistic process, but the breakdown of the old world, the world of Franz Joseph, the chaotic world of Weimar. Musil’s diaries reveal not only a novelistic mind, but a philosophical and sociological one; we can see, in a plain, simple sense, how The Man Without Qualities emerged out of a process of deep thinking. “Only when placed in the context of casual observation is such a person irrational. The things he does are irrational, too, the way things happen, indicate sickness, etc. But such people are aware of the open countryside around, after all, knowing that melancholy is caused by a sluggish digestive tract does not tell us anything about it. Unless one wants to destroy it, i.e., heal it.” Musil is urbane, caustic, and dialectical. “Thesis: the difference between a genius and a sharply critical gifted person lies not in their capabilities, but in the objects in which these are expended.”
Diary by Witold Gombrowicz
This diary is one of the great literary projects, one of the great literary works of the post-war West; Gombrowicz is a master of the form. Gombrowicz’s diary was published between 1953 and 1969 in the Polish expat literary journal Kultura, and became a running chronicle of his gripes, readings, rivalries, aphorisms, fears, desires—a blog precursor. Gombrowicz began his diary when he was 49 years old, living in Buenos Aires (he had a fake job at a bank thanks to a sympathetic Polish employer who let him write at work), recreating his Polish homeland and culture through language. His Kultura diary was, in many ways, Gombrowicz’s attempt to refashion himself for the second half of his life, creating his own legend, his myth as a writer. “Yesterday, Thursday, a cretin began to bother and worry me all day. Perhaps it would be better not to write about this, but I do not want to be a hypocrite in this diary.”
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1: 1915–1919 by Virginia Woolf
I’ve chosen Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Volume I, because they represent, or show us, Woolf’s mind during her apprentice years as a novelist, and during the years of the Great War, when she watched so many of her male friends, including her brother, get exterminated in the trenches. We should see a theme here, that all these great 20th century diaries come from terrible contact with reality, from upheaval and change and destruction. Should we start to think that the diary is a 20th century form? It is very possible. The great and wonderful, the liquid and syllabic prose of Woolf gets developed here in the diary-laboratory. “She led him to describe a Romanian prince, whose voice, he said, was the loveliest in London. He rang him up to account for not coming punctually to dinner, and I listened and heard a soft and hesitating voice stumbling over long words, rather romantic, down the telephone.”
Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector’s Crônicas are a perfect companion to Gombrowicz’s diaries. Like Gombrowicz, Lispector was a European (Ukrainian) who fled to South America. The difference between Gombrowicz and Lispector is that Lispector arrived in Brazil as a girl and wrote in Portuguese; Gombrowicz never ceased to be a Polish aristocrat. From what I understand, this liminal quality gives Lispector’s Portuguese an unusual, alien, and unique texture and quality. The language of an almost-native speaker. Crônicas was (like Gombrowicz’s diary) a public project. These chronicles, dashed off for publication in Brazilian newspapers, are a public chronicle of a sinfully profound mind. “How at forty she managed to be so cheerful I really don’t know. She was full of loud laughter. I knew too that she had wanted to kill herself not because she had left the convent but out of love. She explained that at the time she didn’t know love was like that. Like what? She didn’t answer.”
Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II by Ralph Waldo Emerson
We’ve finally arrived at an American, and one might say, the greatest of all diarists. If you want to understand the heart of what Harold Bloom, by way of Wallace Stevens, calls the American sublime, you have to go here. “Chemistry, entomology, conic sections, medicine—each science, each province of science will come to satisfy all demands. The whole of poetry, mythology, of ethics, of demonology will express by it. A new rhetoric, new methods of philosophy, perhaps new political parties will celebrate the culmination of each one.” Emerson’s great synthesizing slime mold-like mind woke up one day and wrote that down in 1842 and continued in the same journal the same day: “It pains me never that I cannot give you an accurate answer to the question what is God, what is the operation we call providence and the like. There lies the answer, there it exists, present omnipresent to you, to me.”
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume I: 1931-1934 by Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin’s diaries are a fantastic confession machine of the twentieth century: desire, psychoanalysis, and artistic ambition. She begins in Paris, in media res in flight from American puritanism, in the process of constructing herself as a literary sensualist. She undergoes analysis with a genius analyst (Otto Rank). Nin’s diary is both performance and erotic meth lab, a mask and a Real Me at the same time. She writes herself into existence daily, hourly. The diary becomes her primary work, the novels disappointing offshoots. “Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another.”
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag’s early journals show us the construction of an American intellectual (and Sontag is the Platonic ideal of an intellectual): the ultra-self-conscious making of a significant critical mind. Beginning at age fourteen, these notebooks track Sontag’s voracious reading, her similarly voracious sex life, her marriage at seventeen, her time at Chicago and Harvard and Oxford. Self-analysis is productive of desire in Sontag’s case. “My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.”
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