NOT TO BE MISSED
A FINE ESSAY ABOUT DIARIES
Luis Menand, writing in the Dec. 10 New Yorker, has an incisive essay about the writing of diaries. The first half of the piece, which could stand alone, also serves as a frame for Menand’s thoughts on two recently published diaries: those of Arthur Schlesinger and Leo Lerman.
Menand’s essay has much to enjoy, including his “three theories of diaries”; a tour of diary styles and modes, from Virginia Woolf to Samuel Pepys to Ronald Reagan; and his usual wit. Menand takes pains to distinguish the diary as a literary form, noting that it is distinct from the journal or writer’s notebook. This is a point that comes up in my writing classes, and I only wish Menand had elaborated on the distinction.
I encourage my students to keep a journal (and even require it for a week or so), the kind that can be a useful tool for a writer. Some my students are already veteran diarists, and I have to point out that I do not want them to hand in their diaries. What I am trying to steer them toward is something closer in spirit to a kind of journalism – a notebook filled with close observation and regular writing.
Here’s one of my favorite ways of thinking about it, from Ron Powers’s wonder-ful 2005 biography of Mark Twain. On page 69, Powers tells how in 1855, Sam Clemens, then almost 20 years old, made his first venture into journal-keeping about the time he made his first attempt to get a job piloting boats on the Mississippi:
“Probably on that downriver trip, he began a practice that would prove incalculably useful to his literary career: he started keeping a notebook, the first of fifty that survive; others, probably dozens, have been lost. Into these, over four decades, he poured “found data”: wisps of experience and anecdotes; bursts of indignation, opinion, regret; newly minted aphorisms; maps real and imagined; German vocabulary; timetables and laundry lists; notes on the works of Shakespeare and Matthew Arnold; the listing of facts of all kinds; and, as always, the stunning harvest of intense noticing (“Sailors walk with hands somewhat spread & palms turned backward”) that made his writing burn truer and more mimetic of life-as-lived than anyone else’s in America or Europe.”
Luis Menand, writing in the Dec. 10 New Yorker, has an incisive essay about the writing of diaries. The first half of the piece, which could stand alone, also serves as a frame for Menand’s thoughts on two recently published diaries: those of Arthur Schlesinger and Leo Lerman.
Menand’s essay has much to enjoy, including his “three theories of diaries”; a tour of diary styles and modes, from Virginia Woolf to Samuel Pepys to Ronald Reagan; and his usual wit. Menand takes pains to distinguish the diary as a literary form, noting that it is distinct from the journal or writer’s notebook. This is a point that comes up in my writing classes, and I only wish Menand had elaborated on the distinction.
I encourage my students to keep a journal (and even require it for a week or so), the kind that can be a useful tool for a writer. Some my students are already veteran diarists, and I have to point out that I do not want them to hand in their diaries. What I am trying to steer them toward is something closer in spirit to a kind of journalism – a notebook filled with close observation and regular writing.
Here’s one of my favorite ways of thinking about it, from Ron Powers’s wonder-ful 2005 biography of Mark Twain. On page 69, Powers tells how in 1855, Sam Clemens, then almost 20 years old, made his first venture into journal-keeping about the time he made his first attempt to get a job piloting boats on the Mississippi:
“Probably on that downriver trip, he began a practice that would prove incalculably useful to his literary career: he started keeping a notebook, the first of fifty that survive; others, probably dozens, have been lost. Into these, over four decades, he poured “found data”: wisps of experience and anecdotes; bursts of indignation, opinion, regret; newly minted aphorisms; maps real and imagined; German vocabulary; timetables and laundry lists; notes on the works of Shakespeare and Matthew Arnold; the listing of facts of all kinds; and, as always, the stunning harvest of intense noticing (“Sailors walk with hands somewhat spread & palms turned backward”) that made his writing burn truer and more mimetic of life-as-lived than anyone else’s in America or Europe.”
posted by Chris Daly at 6:21 PM
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