“We
were kept awake last night by New Year Bells,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her
diary for 1 January 1915, with the First World War five months old. “At first I
thought they were ringing for a victory.” There is something oddly affecting
about historical diary entries for the first day of January, so full of hope
for a year that has long since vanished into the past, and often beginning the
diary-keeping habit itself - for this was Woolf’s first entry in a diary she
kept for another 26 years. In an age when social networking sites host
perpetual updates on the mundane details of our lives, this unbending
commitment to private writing feels heroic.
Now
there is an archive to house these messages in a bottle from the past. The
Great Diary Project, recently installed at the Bishopsgate Institute in the
City of London, comprises Irving Finkel’s private collection of about 1500
diaries and is inviting members of the public to augment the archive by
depositing their own or their relatives’ diaries in it. A curator in the
Department of the Middle East at the British Museum, Finkel see diaries as a
“rescue corner for the human spirit” and believes that their seemingly banal
subject matter will be transformed by time into significance, just as the
cuneiform written on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia is now charged with
meaning.
Finkel’s
conjuring up of a future historian who might find momentousness in today’s
banal entries about “changing the tax disc or mending the fence” is part of a
growing awareness of the private diary as vivid historical evidence, also
apparent in the work of authors such as David Kynaston, Juliet Gardiner and
Virginia Nicholson. Anthologies of diaries, particularly focusing on the Second
World War and the era of post-war austerity, have proliferated in recent years.
Many have titles- London Was Ours, We Are At War, Our Hidden Lives, We Shall
Never Surrender, Our Longest Days – which suggest that these private thoughts
have somehow become repositories of our collective memory.
But
to write a diary for any extended period is an exceptional and eccentric act.
If historians wanted to relate a truly representative history through diaries,
they would have to include the vast, forgotten majority that do not see January
out. It would be an eternal winter in this alternative history, populated by a
tribe of initially loquacious people who suddenly become monosyllabic and then
lapse irrevocably into silence.
While
I find diaries fascinating, it isn’t for what they might tell us about our
national story. It is for their strangeness, the way they go off at weird,
unexpected tangents that pull you up short. On 1 January 1939, an obscure civil
servant called Walter Musto began keeping a diary by recording that he had
slipped off his nightshirt and stood naked in his Surrey back garden, “rubbing
my body and limbs until I am aglow in the cold, sweet air”. In the diary he
wrote for the next 6 years, Hitler gets barely a mention. Diaries are ruled by
fleeting frustrations and passing piques. “The only papers were evening
ones!”complained Kenneth Williams on 1 January 1974. “It is little short of
scandalous.” The diarist’s default mode is bathos. “As I reluctantly swung out
of bed I noticed my feet,” wrote Alec Guinness on the first day of 1995, “never
something on which I like to dwell.”
Private
diaries tell us that history is made up of billions of separate
consciousnesses, all swayed by their moods, caprices and animal instincts from
one day to the next, and ultimately impenetrable to other human beings. My only
sustained effort at the genre manages to stutter on until Tuesday 25 April
before ending abruptly with the single, gnomic utterance: “Watched Goober and
the Ghost Chasers and made a different tent.” God knows what historians of the
future will make of that. But I am happy to bequeath my Paddington Bear Diary
for 1978 to the Great Diary Project, just in case.
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