This Is Christmas Eve and I Am in Tintah

Abstract

IN JOURNALS AND DIARIES, LETTERS AND SCRAPS, we hear the voices of our predecessors speaking for themselves. We read because we want to know what was on their minds. Historians and philosophers, and certainly the poets, have spoken more memorably about the human condition, but often a remark meant for no one in particular can bring us up short. Private chronicles can corroborate public ones; historians record and interpret, novelists imaginatively re-create, and diary writers show us what they meant. Many people would probably also agree that this connection between public and private writing has been fairly consistent through the ages. Autobiographical efforts of people in our or our grandparents' time differ little from, say, those of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in private writing, spurred, no doubt in America, by the Bicentennial, but also, and possibly more lastingly, by a new awareness of those whose public history has been scant-I mean such groups as native peoples, blacks, and women; workers, rural settlers, children, prisoners, the aged, sick and mad. Numerous private and government-sponsored bodies are trying now to make up for some of the silences of the past, and we are seeing a spate of oral history and other projects whose purpose is to record as much as is still retrievable of those who have not been thought of as the makers of history. Historical and literary criticism has grappled with the problem of helping readers, however wary, to decide whether or not to believe a given historian or fiction writer. The reader of private chronicles is also obliged to decide how far a given writer can be trusted (granting that all truths in art are not the same). We read private chronicles in the expectation that they will be true to life, though we do not expect them consistently to be true to fact or even to be always interesting. Inaccuracy and boredom are true of much of life. Nor are we necessarily looking for depths of self-knowledge or assuming that what people will have to say for themselves will be more accurate than the evaluation of an historian or biographer. In fact, wanting to know what people have had on their minds may lead us to the discovery that some have had very little. To find whatever it is they can truly tell us, these voices out of the past, is an effort which I think is urgently worth making if a genuine history is to be retrieved of