Diary Keeping: An overview of 20 Years: 1984-2004

INTRODUCTION
VOLUME 4


In these graceless hours
when faith strains feebly against an unbelieving night
........
my nurtured imperfections not so epically egregious,
as to embarrass the seraphim ruefully yawning
at their mention;
nor will shame, as once I thought,
topple the cities, arrest the sun's climb.
What assault on heaven guarantees attention?
Inured to the banality of pain
and the ordinariness of suffering(sanctified or plain!)
it is joy that is remembered.
-Roger White, "Lines from a Battlefield," Another Song Another Season, George Ronald, Oxford, 1979, pp.111-112.
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After twenty years of haphazard diary keeping(1984-2004) there looms ahead of me the shadow of a type of diary that my work may attain to: part of the shadow is prospective and the other retrospective. What, indeed, will I make of this loose, drifting material of my life, as Virginia Woolfe calls the material for her diary and which very accurately describes mine, however incomplete, however irregular are my entries, however superficial is their content. Do I want this diary to be so elastic as to embrace anything solemn, slight, beautiful or ugly that comes to mind, sort of a capacious hold-all? Will this diary, this journal, this particular way of conveying my memoir, when all is said and done and the roll is called up yonder, resemble a place where I have flung a mass of odds and ends, some with reflective ardour and great meaning, some with fatigue and sadness, some with guilt and shame, some with a sense of their utter triviality, their tedium and life's.

On the basis of what I have written here in these seventeen years, it would appear that a collection of flotsam and jetsam has been put on record. This material has been born from a collection of life's flotsam and jetsam, meaningful to me in the moment or at least hopefully so but, ultimately and probably, about as useful and valueable to others as the eye of a dead ant. I hope this is not the case but, as T.S. Eliot once wrote, one has to be prepared that all of which one has written may become a dead letter. I get a sense of order in putting all this on paper. That is its own reward.

I certainly think there is potential in these folders that unfold my life, a potential I have hardly begun to realize as yet in these first four diary-volumes. But there is something unique, some unique contribution to my overall autobiographical opus: Pioneering Over Four Epochs, that has begun to reveal itself. A description of “a life without secrets and without privacy” wrote Boris Pasternak; describing only the life that is on display in society in its different forms like in some “show window” is simply “inconceivable,” he concluded. For me, this privacy is essentially the life of the mind and many things I have not revealed in the other forms of autobiography. Such things are those elements of human experience that seem most private, most hidden, most personal, most shameful, most embarrassing, a source of most guilt and those things that do not tend to be divulged in the normal course of interpersonal life. That is what has just begun to be revealed, at least in part, in these journals when time and the inclination combine to allow me to make some entry of this kind. I have tried to eliminate the trivial, but this is difficult for so much of life seems to amount to that particularly when one tries to put one's experience on paper.

The retrospective side, begun with some enthusiasm to deal with the years before 1987, has yet to really amount to much other than to make a few entries. Going back to the start of the Heroic Age, as I do in that first volume of my journal, is an imaginative thrust of 143 years. But whether it will yield much of an autobiographical nature, yield much of value for this journal, this diary, only time will tell. My idea, my plan, in my first volume, was to recreate the years before 1984, the year I began the periodic entries into the journal. I have added some photographs going as far back as 1908 and a brief sketch of my family history going back to 1844. But there is little flesh on the bones of this long period and its five stages: 1844-1921, 1921-1944, 1944-1962 and 1962-1984. It is my hope that in the years of my late adulthood(2004-2024) and old age(2024-2044) I may take advantage of this diary-form and enrich this autobiographical account by means of the several advantages this form of autobiography possesses over all the other forms. But, as anyone following my various writings will realise, much of what I want to say is being said in my poetic narrative, in my narrative, in my many volumes of letters, essays, biographical pieces, attempts at novels, inter alia. And it may remain so. I shall wait until those mysterious dispensations of Providence and their complex interaction with my own life reveal the patterns that lie ahead and those that have already transpired.

The prospective side of these journals has received only the occasional visit in recent years. And so it may be that this volume becomes, in the end, my last volume. I hope this is not the case for, as I've said above, I think there is potential here in this autobiographical form: the diary. But an early demise of this diary will certainly be the case unless I feel moved to add more than I have in the last several years. I am only too aware that, although I can produce what might be called an autobiographical self in these pages, I have been unable to reproduce, thusfar, the real self who lived, except in part. If much more is to be achieved--the revelation of a real self--perhaps the diary can offer a royal road. I trust there are depths and depths and greater depths to life's ocean.

Hermann Kesten, in his introduction to the diaries of Thomas Mann, informs us that Mann's interest in himself was based on his desire to know others better. His penetrating interest in himself helped him portray others more convincingly. Many of his diaries he burned because he wanted to be rid of part of his past; they were "a mass of secret-very secret-writings lying around." Although secret, although intimate, and the most human of what he had written, much of their content he felt was best left concealed from any public scrutiny. I have come to feel less concern in recent years about revelations from the domain of the personal and the private. I achieve most of what I want in various literary forms other than the diary. Whatever degree of self-revelation I want to achieve has been achieved hitherto through poetry. But I find the diary has slowly been coming to occupy a particular role, a role that poetry has not yet come to occupy. But the process is slow and I am not confident yet in what I will achieve. Dealing, as I indicated above, with the most intimate and private, the diary has just begun to unveil its potential. I am as interested as probably many readers are in this most intimate of diary subjects. We shall see what is revealed in the years ahead.

I do not feel the same way that Mann did about the general details of a passing day. Mann wrote that: I love this process by which each passing day is captured, not only its impressions, but also, at least by suggestion, its intellectual direction and content as well, less for the purpose of rereading and remembering than for taking back, reviewing, maintaining awareness, achieving perspective. Mann wanted to record the smallest impulses, the most trivial details, of everyday life. Consequently his extant diaries came to occupy a great bulk. The banality, the indiscriminate agglomeration of everyday detail, the constant repetition of physical and psychological detail and everyday happenings, what for Mann was the photograph of a life, is impossible for me to record. It simply seems pointless and, more importantly, it is largely painful to record. I actually feel physically quite uncomfortable recording so much of this mundane material, however insightfully written down.

Perhaps part of the reason for my discomfort is an attitude similar to that of the twentieth century writer and philosopher H.L. Mencken who wrote that "in the end every man of my limited capacities must be forgotten utterly. The best he can hope for is a transient and temporary postponement of the inevitable." I think, at last, I can see a way of countering the discomfort associated with the trivial by entering the risky and vulnerable world of the private, a world that is uncomfortable in a different way from the trivail and the mundane, but one I have only begun to see through a window on how to enter after 20 years on the road of diary-making. Like myself, Mencken spent endless hours at a typewriter and his words struck a chord of both familiarity and concern that one's life could be ultimately so irrelevant to one's epigone. Surely, the significance of life can exceed--at least on paper--the eye of a dead ant!

After more than four years of making the occasional contribution to this Volume 4 of my diary and after 20 years, 3 months, 1 week and 1 day since the outset of the process of diary-making on January 19th 1984, I leave this introduction at this point. Perhaps I will return to the themes above at a future date when this diary has begun to assume a form consistent with the directions and intentions I have outlined but in more detail than I has thusfar attained.

April 27th 2004.