Foreword Lately I have been dictating the diary that I've kept over the last thirty years. I wrote it in dozens of cheap notebooks, regularly during a few periods, but mostly very irregularly. Except for glancing at a few pages now and then, I have never read it, and in fact thought that I never would. Reading aloud—and imagining a typist hearing—a diary kept since age twenty is not as appalling an experience as one might expect. To have stories, in a way, is to have substance, and in thirty years there will be stories, and even some of the good ones are forgotten. Reading an old diary, too, you run across occasional incidents that you have long either actively misremembered or thought of as highly important when in fact it was only one of many such events—and not even the most piquant one. What is more intriguing, however, is how much you do in fact remember but have not thought about for so long that remembering feels like successfully competing in the neurological Olympics. Yes, I do remember this! one thinks, amazed that the memory is still there, unused, unlooked at, stuck away in some mental safety deposit box these twenty or thirty years. Obviously, diaries are no less subject to cosmetic altering and outright fantasy than any other kind of writing, but the reader can usually sense it wherever it happens. While in my own diary I didn't "invent" things, I did at age twenty-one fall into occasional fits of lyrical lunacy or transparent rationalizing. By forty my diaristic rationalizing became less transparent (to me, anyway) and my lyricism had settled into mild infrequent outbreaks. Considering the fact that I didn't start the diary until leaving home, it is surprising how much it includes about my parents and the parents of friends, as if my interest in their generation went deeper than I knew. Keeping a diary, oddly enough, serves not to intensify a person's self-involvement but the opposite, since the very act of putting things into words to some extent objectifies them. Even while the diarist writes, he is accomplishing this purpose, achieving perspective on thoughts and moods. One of the most common forms of self-imposed grief is going along with everything that pops out of the mind, so it is no small beginning to simply articulate one's experience. The great American playwright of inner turmoil and suffering, Tennessee Williams, kept a diary, and at times it was the thin paper wall keeping him from going over the edge. After a troubled student career at the University of Missouri and Washington University, Williams went to Iowa to finish his B.A. degree. While there, he wrote in his diary: A silly business has alienated me from the theater crowd. One of the girls had a pocket book stolen and I became quite embarrassed while they were talking about it. Was afraid they might think me guilty— for absolutely no reason!!1.—Idiotic—have felt uncomfortable with them and avoided them ever since. One of the silliest things I've ever experienced. But it isn't insanity since I realize how ridiculous it is—but perhaps my queer actions have actually made them suspect me. Sounds like dementia praecox, doesn't it? [Williams sister Rose had recently been diagnosed with dementia praecox] But it's just the old guilt complex—the feeling of social inadequacy in a new guise___ What do I want? I want love and creative power!—eh bien! Get it? This is a poignant example of self-observation at work, of someone choosing not to mindlessly identify with his fears and anxieties. While Williams knew that he could not simply shed his sense of "inadequacy" or magically alter his social awkwardness, at least in writing down the experience he could recognize it for what it was and set his sights beyond. In his diary Williams wrote openly about the great subjects of his plays, the flaws and sometimes pathology of families; his diary describes someone who was often simultaneously trying to escape from family, trying to understand it, yet desperately needing its support. The...
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Apr 1, 1995
Carolien H M Smits + 2
Open Access