The Monstrous Personal Chronicles of the Thirties

Abstract

My epigraph from D.H. Lawrence is partly intended as a nod to my old friend and colleague, Mark Spilka, a major advocate of Lawrence in a time that has grown less sympathetic to him. But it is also meant to introduce my theme, which is the rise, in the period between the two World Wars, of certain narratives-forms of the diary, the journal, and the travelogue (or thinly fictionalized versions of these personal narratives)-to a position of preeminence with, if not domination over, the novel itself. Many of these texts are in fact as vast as Lawrence's enormous mother whales, but my choice of metaphors is motivated by more than size, as I hope to demonstrate later on. However, since we are dealing here with a sub-genre-or quasi-genre-of prose narrative, it may help, at the outset, to make some preliminary distinctions between this kind of text and its closest relatives, the autobiography and the memoir. What I am aiming for is not, in any case, a perfectly closed generic category but a description of certain features of a family resemblance, shared by a set of narrative texts. autobiography is a retrospective narrative. It tells a that has a certain completeness, of which the writer is aware when the writing begins. My monstrous personal are as personal as autobiographies, but they are written closer to the events recounted, before a conclusion is available that would turn such a mere chronicle into a history or story with a definitive ending. memoir resembles these chronicles more closely, in that it, too, lacks a strong narrative structure, but, as its name clearly implies, it is normally based on recollection, with the author looking backward from some distance of age with its implied wisdom, and it attends more to the people and events the writer is recalling than to the writer's own personality. branch of this family of personal narratives that I am attempting to describe consists of diaries and journals rather than memoirs or autobiographies, but diaries that have metamorphosed into something rich and strange, often monstrous. In response to modernism's cultural imperatives-especially the privileging of the artistic genius-these diaries function to establish the author's credentials as a genius or artist, while refusing the responsibility of creating an aesthetic masterpiece. thirties were haunted by the imperative Cyril Connolly expressed so powerfully in the opening sentence of Unquiet Grave (1945): The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a