A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries by Thomas Mallon

The small cabinet over my refrigerator is full to the brim with those wonderful black-and-white school composition notebooks. They are the journals that I have been writing in for years. Interspersed with that lot are other spiral bound notebooks, a few 'pretty' journals, and even some loose-leaf pages kept from an ill-fated attempt to keep a diary using a three-ring binder. 

I also have a drawer that holds journals that were started for a particular reason and abandoned - perhaps kept on a short trip or as the beginnings of a commonplace book. 

All this leads me to Thomas Mallon's A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries.  I first read it soon after its publication date in 1983. It is a book that I have been wanting to reread and finally got around to doing just that last month.

I had been sporadically keeping a journal for years before I first read this book - I still have two of the little diaries with locks from high school - but Mr. Mallon introduced me to people who were like-minded in wanting to keep a record of their days. 

Here were writers, artists, preachers, politicians, crooks and even an assassin who felt compelled to make note of their thoughts, dreams, desires, and events happening not only in their private lives but in the world around them. 

So we have samples from the famous diaries of Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Degas, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Thoreau. There are also entries from a whole raft of everyday people. Mr. Mallon has gathered all these keepers of the word into sections: Chroniclers, Travelers, Pilgrims, Creators, Apologists, Confessors, and Prisoners.  

This is not a series of entries one after the other. Mr. Mallon entertains the reader with his own witty and insightful comments and connections on the entries and their compilers. This book helped me to expand my own journals into more than just whining about whatever particular inconvenience life was handing out at the moment. I found reading this book to be a fascinating look into the minds and lives of so many. Fascinating, even more so now, rereading it some decades later and after many hundreds of journal entries of my own. 

My own journal keeping has developed, or maybe I should say declined, in the past few years to more of a nightly list begun as a way to remind me that I actually do accomplish some things each day. But I was inspired by one of the diarists in Mallon's book, Toni Bentley, a corps member of the New York City Ballet who kept a journal for one Winter Season begun on November 21, 1980 and finished on February 15, 1981. She used it to assess her career in dance and her commitment to her art. 

So I hunted up this attractive journal that I had tucked away for a special occasion...

...and began keeping what I am calling A Winter Journal on November 1, 2014. 

Of a late afternoon, I sit at my desk overlooking my small front yard and ponder and muse and write about whatever strikes my fancy. It may be a page describing the items on my desk, two pages bemoaning my fate at the mechanical problems my Jeep is experiencing (and have thankfully been repaired), or it may just be a list of cities I still want to visit. 

I might also include observations on the weather, the light, the leaves piling up, or the red cardinal at rest on the rim of the French blue birdbath. 

I write with a comfortable Lamay fountain pen that I purchased on a trip to Savannah a couple of years ago. (Fountain pens are my one weakness!) The pages are smooth and lined and the book has a nice heft to it so I know I mean business. I bought this one and a red one like it ages ago. I only paid $7 for each one. Now I wish I had bought a few more.

I realize this post has turned out to be more about me than A Book of One's Own, but I highly recommend Mr. Mallon's look at diaries and the people who keep them. It just might inspire you to pick up a notebook and begin to write. 

On This Day...

I have been entertaining myself this morning by thumbing through an assortment of diaries looking to see if anything exciting happened on this day in the lives of anyone. One book entitled English Diaries (1930) and edited by Elizabeth D'Oyley contains the musings of such worthies as Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, Fanny Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, and arctic explorer Captain Robert Scott.

I couldn't find any entries for December 22 by any of the diarists in that collection, so I turned to The Assassin's Cloak (2000) edited by Irene and Alan Taylor. This is a wonderful compendium of diary entries by a wild variety of folks and is both entertaining and thought provoking.

Here is one of the five entries included for today written down by J.R. Ackerley, a British writer and editor. Mr. Ackerley (1896-1967) was the literary editor of The Listener, the BBC's weekly magazine. I must say I have to agree with his sentiments... 

December 22, 1952

The Movietone News this week had a Christmas feature. A large number of flustered turkeys were driven towards the camera, and the commentator remarked that the Christmas rush was on, or words to that effect. Next they were seen crowded about their feeding trough, making the gobbling turkey fuss, and the commentator observed, with dry humour (again I do not remember his exact words), that it was no use their holding a protest meeting, for they were for it in the morning. Similar facetious jokes followed them wherever they went, hurrying and trampling about in their silly way; for to make them look as silly as possible was no doubt part of the joke and easy to achieve: turkeys, like hens, like all animals, are beautiful in themselves, and have even a kind of dignity when they are leading their own lives, but the fowls, in particular, look foolish when they are being frightened.

These jolly, lip-licking sallies, delivered in the rich, cultivated self-confident voice of one who has no sort of doubt of his own superiority to the animal kingdom, raised no laugh from the considerable audience, I was pleased to note. I took it from the silence that many other people besides myself would have been glad to be spared jeers and jibes at these creatures who, parting unwillingly with their lives, were to afford us pleasure at our Christmas tables. 

...How arrogant people are in their behaviour to the domestic beasts at least. Indeed, yes, we feed upon them, and enjoy their flesh; but does that permit us to make fun of them before they die or after they are dead? If it were possible, without disordering one's whole life, to be a vegetarian, I would be one; nothing could have been more disgusting and degrading than the insensitiveness displayed by the exhibition I have described.