Last month, there was a surprise in the sometimes predictable round of literary prizes. The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction – the UK’s leading non-fiction award, which is typically won by a work of history or biography – went for the first time to a set of diaries.
Then again, it was not so shocking. How to End a Story, the collected diaries of the Australian novelist Helen Garner from 1978 to 1998, has been attracting a groundswell of praise since it was published earlier this year, from figures as diverse as Anne Enright and Nigella Lawson. And winning a prestigious prize seems to galvanise not just its success, but the literary credentials of diaries generally. No longer, it says, scraps from the table; our daily thoughts can be a coherent and complete work of literature.
What is the appeal of published diaries anyway? Are they, with their bite-sized portions and moreishness, just a form of scrolling social media that you don’t need to feel bad about?
The first and most obvious draw of the diary is that it’s the only time when you really do feel you’re curling up with an author. You’re reading their direct thoughts and inner secrets – or at least that’s the hope.
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Garner’s book serves this purpose admirably. She is one of the most acclaimed Australian writers of the last 50 years, but in her diary she is vulnerable, exposed, uncertain. “I am not good at constructing major pieces of work,” she writes. “I haven’t got any women friends here,” she writes. “It disgusts me that I am so lazy,” she writes – and all these are in the first two pages.
In other words, we see a different side of the diarist – and we secretly hope it won’t be flattering, to offset their fame and success. Here, Garner also obliges. “Wrote myself off, accidentally, two nights ago, in various bars with my students after our final class,” she wrote in 1993, when she was in her early 50s. “In the bathroom I passed out. When I came to I was face down in vomit.”
Other diarists only reveal themselves posthumously, such as the comic actor Kenneth Williams, whose diaries, published five years after his death in 1988 following an overdose of barbiturates, were blotted with the tears of a clown. Williams, best-known for the nudge-nudge innuendo of the Carry On films, off screen was racked with self-loathing. “I am nauseated by my own company,” is a typical entry, and he hated the “witless vacuity” of his most famous work.
Or take Alan Bennett, one of Britain’s most prolific living diarists (three fat volumes to date, and another coming next March). His reputation is of a national treasure, and his diaries are full of his characteristically phrased wit: “R has won his first ever prize at school,” he wrote in 1989. “It is for the boy who kept his head in the hole longest while others threw wet sponges at him.” But Bennett is not always so cuddly: on politics he is sharp-tongued. “I detested Margaret Thatcher and deplore her legacy,” he wrote. Or, as Tony Blair announced his resignation in 2007, “The real importance of his premiership was as a stage in his spiritual journey.” With the next volume of diaries, covering the years 2016 to 2024, we will know his views on Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. It won’t, I predict, be pretty.
Diaries of prominent figures are better, too, when they feature other famous people, so they look inward and outward at the same time. Who doesn’t want to get the lowdown on the man or woman behind the public face? For examples of these, it helps to go back in time, when the strata of society were more concentrated. Take the Goncourt brothers, French novelists whose books are all forgotten now but for their diaries, covering the second half of the 19th century.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt knew everyone. “A ring at the door. It was Flaubert.” They have lunch with Émile Zola, who complains about what long hours he has to work: “That is what is necessary nowadays, with talent and something of a reputation, in order to earn a living.” They have dinner with Flaubert, Zola and Ivan Turgenev. “We began with a long discussion on the special aptitudes of writers suffering from constipation and diarrhoea.” Edmond catches pneumonia at one of Flaubert’s dinners. Turgenev complains about his inability to make love. “I am quite incapable of it. And when that happens to a man, he is as good as dead.”
It was about the Goncourt brothers’ diaries that Christopher Isherwood – in his own diary, in 1940 – wrote, “Here, gossip achieves the epigrammatic significance of poetry. To keep such a diary is to render a real service to the future.”
We see a similar pantheon of literary celebrity – 20th-century English variant – in Virginia Woolf’s five volumes of diaries. “I shall write my memoirs out of them one of these days,” Woolf recorded in her diary in 1927 – she never did, but they remain as thorough account of literary life as we could ask for.
Woolf was well-connected – her status as a publisher as well as author helped – and knew TS Eliot, EM Forster and many more. One of her contemporaries, Katherine Mansfield – who was published by Woolf’s Hogarth Press – also kept a journal, and it’s doubly revealing to see how each writer’s account of the other differs.
“I saw Virginia on Thursday,” wrote Mansfield in 1918. “She was very nice.” But Woolf’s account of their first meeting, the previous year, was not quite so nice. “We could both wish that one’s first impression of KM was not that she stinks like a civet cat that had taken to streetwalking. In truth, I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight.”
But then Woolf was an inveterate snob, dismissing Joyce’s Ulysses in her 1922 diary as “an illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating.”
This brings us to a weakness of diaries historically: they tended to be kept by the wealthy, so it’s not until the middle of the last century that we see diaries of working men and women, and even these tend to be collated by others for their socio-historical interest, like the diaries of Nella Last (best remembered by Victoria Wood’s portrayal in Housewife, 49) or Donall Mac Amhlaigh’s 1950s diary of an Irish construction worker, Dialann Deoraí (Diary of an Exile).
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The other question is: how reliable are diaries anyway? We celebrate them as the unfiltered truth. But diaries are, by definition, both a concentration and a distortion of life. The diarist records only the things they think interesting – which is one way to tell us what people really thought about during key historical periods. A few years ago, newspaper reader Dinah Hall sent in an extract from her July 20th, 1969 diary written as a teenager, which showed her priorities at the time.
“I went to the arts centre (by myself!) in yellow cords and blouse. Ian was there but he didn’t speak to me. Got rhyme put in my handbag from someone who’s apparently got a crush on me. It’s Nicholas I think. UGH. Man landed on moon.”
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The question of self-consciousness also arises. Novelist Ian McEwan kept a journal until the early 2000s, but stopped when he realised that his increasing fame meant “that one day it might be public matter”. “The innocence began to drain out of them” and “that ruined everything for me. I lost interest”.
This is doubly a shame, since it’s fair to say that novelists do usually make good diarists. They have the professional toolkit, and a good diary can give us just as big a hit of their best side as a novel. The American novelist and short story writer John Cheever is a good example: if it might be going too far to suggest, as Geoff Dyer does, that Cheever’s journals represent his “greatest achievement, his principal claim to literary survival,” there’s no doubt that they stand up beautifully.
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Like his stories and novels, Cheever’s diaries are all about what in a 1966 entry he called “the clash between my instincts and my pleasures”, his nature torn between suburban respectability and his concealed homosexual desires. And like Garner and Wolff, he is tormented by the belief that his “flighty, eccentric and sometimes bitter” work is not good enough, “with its social disenchantments, somersaults and sudden rains”.
But it’s the somersaults and sudden rains – the wild variety – in diaries generally that make them so good. One of the best diarists at presenting the sheer variety of life and thought was French novelist Jules Renard, whose journals are among the best I’ve read. What bibliophile could argue with this assessment? “I have acquired a taste for very short books, easy to read, large type with a lot of white space – so that I can toss them into my bookcase, one after another, and move on to the next.”
And, finally, it’s the variety and surprises in Garner’s diaries that make them so appealing both to reader and prize juries. Amid the torments of her failing marriage, the self-loathing of the never-satisfied novelist, we unearth eye-opening gems such as this. “At home all evening,” she wrote in 1992, “polishing my rave review of Wayne’s World.”
