The Pursuit of Parallels

I met academic Adam Smyth in his office in Bloomsbury, which turned out to be part of Virginia Woolf’s old house – his room perhaps once served as a bathroom to the Woolf household. It was a hot late-summer afternoon; light streamed in through the window, illuminating piles of books and papers – academia in a heatwave some how brings Philip Larkin to mind. 

I got in touch with Smyth after reading his excellent book Autobiography in Early Modern England, which describes how life writing began with financial account books. It is perhaps these origins that still lend the medium a sense of authenticity, truthfulness and the obsessive compulsive Pooterish quality of listing and dating specific events and quantities.

It's useful meeting someone in their office as you’re surrounded by their work and ideas – Smyth’s floor to ceiling bookshelves displayed the type of fragmentary, unorthodox, literary ideas that interest him. A side table was strewn with flyers for an upcoming conference he was organizing based on ‘Book Destruction’ and ‘Missing Texts’, as he explained: ‘I’m interested in obscured texts – defaced, cancelled, burnt– the pulping and cutting up of text... in some cases books have been eaten...’ I could see immediately that diaries fitted into this category as a form that is often thrown away, burnt, shredded, but eaten? More on this later...

During his research into the origins of autobiography he discovered that four kinds of text appeared at his desk with particular frequency: the printed almanac annotated with handwritten notes, the financial account, a common place book, and the parish register. Smyth goes on to describe in detail how these forms merged and bled into each other so that within an ordered conventional printed format individual personal comments would be added and life writing began.

Smyth argues however, that this didn’t exactly give way to a new culture of individualism often associated with the Renaissance, but instead perpetuated a culture of copying, or as Smyth eloquently puts it: ‘the pursuit of parallels’. People sought to explain themselves and shape their identitites by quoting others, by connecting their life with figures from the past, for example the “Royalist Sir John Gibson who was imprisoned in Durham Castle in the 1650s conceived of his life as a retelling...as one more iteration of a type from Ulysses and Ovid”. In our own collection I can see how this is true - many diarists quote from other texts and mysterious half-remembered sentences lifted from unknown sources appear, faintly penciled in - fleetingly you feel the pressing nature of a sentence that had obviously been running through their mind all day. I was struck recently by a series of pocket diaries from the 1950s written by a man on business trips between Stockholm and London, which included several drifting lines of romantic poetry.

Life writing began as an obscured form fighting its way out of the margins of prescribed text – the human need to articulate their own experience is felt here, but often placed behind smoke screens of other people’s language. 

The Dioramas

A few months ago, while recording material for a radio programme about the project we were introduced to Stefan Dickers, the magnificent librarian of Bishopsgate Institute in east London. It was excellent timing – not only does Stefan have a wonderful voice for radio but also a great passion for diaries, social history and dynamic ambitions for his library. We began meeting there to discuss the future direction of the project, started making a film and cataloguing some of the existing collection, as well as new diaries brought to us in response to the Radio 4 programme in June, which was brilliantly produced by Tamsin Hughes and highlighted on ‘Pick of the Week’...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhi9xKGGWX8&feature=plcp

The recent acquisitions include a series of elegant Christian Dior diaries written by a journalist working on News Chronicle in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, who notoriously declared in an article at the time that Marilyn Monroe was a frump ‘with a spare tyre’. Her precisely written, neat little volumes of appointment diaries came with a black and white Film Noir style photo of the writer looking glamorous – no spare tyre in sight. Another unusual arrival was a collection of diaries that spanned over 20 years depicting an almost identical daily sketch of the diarist’s face and a weather update.

At the same time as we began working at Bishopsgate, Stefan also invested in a set of beautifully restored dioramas depicting scenes of 19th century life in east London – dimly lit bars and markets on cobbled streets, inhabited by tiny gloomy looking figures complete with real human hair. The dioramas were brought in for display at Bishopsgate and given a launch party accompanied by a live soundtrack of Django Reinhardt style music. Here in the library the faded dioramas twinkled weakly across the room with their tiny Victorian lamplights – finally being gazed into again after years under dust in the back room of an east end pub. It seems possible to draw parallels between the diorama and the diary, which both give magical vignettes of small-scale scenarios, somewhat clumsily placed.

The Orphan Diaries

Just as Kate Summerscale and I were putting our coats on and getting ready to leave, she looked suddenly moved: ‘I like the idea of these diaries being ‘unwanted’, it makes them sound like orphans’. The comparison of diaries to helpless infants is also suggested in Summerscale’s new book, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, the true story of a high-profile Victorian divorce trial where the main evidence and witness used by the prosecution was a stolen diary. Like the heroines of romantic Gothic novels of the time, Isabella Robinson used her diary as a means of confiding the details of her melodramatic love life and adultery with a married man. Summerscale reveals the sanctity of the diary; the idea of destroying such an intimate object: ‘would feel something like dropping a child into this wild and wandering grave’.

The scene that originally drew Summerscale to this story was the moment in which Isabella’s diary was seized by her husband, as she lay in bed delirious with fever, tossing and turning, muttering the names of other men. Prowling around this flickering candlelit sickly room, Henry Robinson’s suspicions were roused and he began rummaging through her writing desk, where he discovered the diary. Summerscale’s imagination was ignited by this image of the book being ‘lifted’ from the desk, like an infant from its cot, a living creature untapped of its stories and secrets.

The diary was ‘beguiling’ to Summerscale as a source that hovers on the ‘edge of fact and fiction…distorting and engaging… a reflection of social confusion’. Summerscale’s own work treads this fine line between reality and fantasy, as she strives for objectivity while imaginatively stalking the past in vivid detail: ‘fiction seems a waste – there’s a frisson about something being true’.

There is a masterful omniscience about this biography, which at times feels like having an aerial view over the places and characters described. The diary is one of many tangible objects, which make up the fabric of this story. Isabella was at the centre of great scientific and artistic breakthroughs in the 1850s. The man she was accused of having an affair with, Edward Lane, set up the first health spa, which was frequented by Darwin and Dickens; one enthusiast remarked that the vapour bath treatment was: ‘...exactly that of being baked very gently and soothingly in a pie’ from which you emerge ‘as warm as a toast, as fresh as a four-year-old, and as ravenous as an ostrich’.
Isabella was also friends with the phrenologist George Combe, who diagnosed her as being highly 'amative' after inspecting the shape of her head. This cast a shadow over Isabella, who from then onwards in her diary refers to her sexuality as if it were scientifically proven to be abnormal. Isabella’s diary was part of this era of experimentation and reveals the infancy of a more modern vision for female sexuality and the role of women. In writing this book, Summerscale felt that finally: ‘we could read her diary in a way that the Victorians could not have done. I wanted to be the reader she was reaching for".

What do scout girls do? "We'll have a gay time"

I was first bewitched by scout diaries after discovering one for sale on eBay, with a tantalizing page that read in large chaotic child's handwriting: 'Lost kite up a telegraph pole'. The scout diaries from our collection reveal another world through the smallest amount of information, leaving the imagination to fill in the rest. Like a heavy velvet curtain of the past drawing up, behind which the scouts can be found playing out their days in an era of innocent games, churchgoing and role models, where best friends have nicknames like Hoppie Pantyweist and Pussy Cummings.

An 8 year old from Norfolk, called Jean, has a section in her scout diary where she is meant to list 'Entertainments I have been to' - instead she writes in capital letters underlined in thick black ink, the boldest stand-out statement of the entire diary: 'I do not go to such things I am a religious Minister's daughter'. Alongside moral guidelines and attempts to 'do a good deed every day' dark undercurrents emerge. The diary of a 12 year old girl scout, called Kay, from Massachusetts, in 1937 is pepped up with Coca-Cola and visits to the movies, as well as casual remarks that reveal the prejudices of the time, ingrained in her culture:

September 30th 1937

Jigg's birthday. Played a game of field hockey. That's a wonderful game! Lost 3 pounds since school started Believe it or Not Ripley. Dartmouth play Amherst Sat. Got a letter from Dovie. She is a Jew. I wasn't sure before.

At the back of Kay's diary there are song lyrics from the 1927 musical 'Show Boat' about the struggles of African Americans in the US at the time. The lyrics to this song were changed several times during this period as people debated the use of the word 'nigger'. Kay chooses to stick to the original and records it in the diary perhaps for singing around the campfire on a balmy night with Pussy and Hoppie:

Niggers all work on the Mississippi,

Niggers all work while de white folks play,

...Don't look up an' don't look down

You don' dar'st make de white boss frown

Bend your knees an' bow your head

An' pull dat rope until you're dead

Strange Spells in Illinois

A collection of diaries from the 1870s - 1900, kept by a landlady called Ms Love, who ran a boarding house in Carbondale, Illinois, begin as a robust, domestic account of the residents coming and going: "buckwheat cakes and coffee for breakfast as usual"... laundry arriving by sled in the snow, making peach shortbread and pickled beans. Lodgers take tea and supper together and play music afterwards in the front parlour, usually the weather is storming outside with severe Southern thunder and gales - often it's "too cold to quilt".

The diaries are rich in detail and visual, but there's a disappointing lack of bootlegging or drama; all is reassuring bustle, moving furniture about, hanging stag antlers above doorways. Nostalgia is the only creaking detail which foreshadows the darker direction the diaries take on in later years: "Remember 27 years ago tonight, Mother and I stood in the front room and heard the East wind roar over the tree tops".

In 1885 a shift occurs, after Ms Love suffers "strange spells between 3 & 4 AM... a Babel, a tangled brain - could not speak a word... have not had such a spell since I was 12 years old..." From then on the diaries become weighted towards long descriptions of the household cats, as Ms Love starts adopting strays and invalid kittens, who she nurses in "rockers" on the front porch. There is an elliptical quality about the gradual emptying of the boarding house, unremarked by Ms Love, so that the reader, over a hundred years later, is left with a picture of a once bustling house, now overrun by cats crying, limping from room to room, beneath the howling storms of the deep South.