What We're Doing with Diaries

10 Nov, 2024

Somehow I’m reading diaries lately, or autofiction that could essentially serve as a diary. Maybe it’s the times; thrown into a period of multiple and profound uncertainties, I could just be seeking proof that (and probably guidance in terms of how) others have kept their heads, both literally and figuratively, by admitting on paper to much that would be considered dangerous or unacceptable or overblown or boring to others or even to themselves. It’s been a while since I read Victor Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich, but I found myself yesterday making a note to compare his World War II diaries both with an assertion found this week in Édouard Louis’s autobiographical History of Violence and with the sentence I’d just read in Thomas Mallon’s A Book of One’s Own: namely that “We look for events taking sinister turns, and strain to see not one culture unfolding, but two cultures clashing.”¹ Set aside that often too-hasty or unjustified use of a generalized “we,” and Mallon may be onto something, if not the sole reason people keep diaries in troubled times.

Louis’s account of a rape and his attempts to work through its aftermath do have an undercurrent of cultures clashing, one that rises to the surface when he notes cops’ racist assumptions about the man who’s attacked him, or even his own bout of racist fear that takes hold for a time. And as with Louis’s The End of Eddy, there are cultures unfolding and clashing all around as he makes his way through them: those of the working class that people outside (or maybe even inside) France forget exist, the upper-class attitudes and practices no one overtly teaches you how to read, the ways in which continuing legacies of colonialism creep into a nation’s assumptions about the people living inside it.² It all makes especial sense, given the fact that Louis’s not only lived it all, but is also a sociologist able to see and delineate the ways in which the guiding patterns of societies and communities more or less silently shape how one functions within them. But I don’t think Louis’s ever looking for events taking sinister turns—chipping away again at that all-encompassing “we”—he even seems to admit that he’s the kind of guy who’s continually trying to smooth things over, who’s doing his best to reason through situations in order to achieve some sort of peace.

So as a whole, his autobiographical work wasn’t what I wanted to compare with Mallon’s proposition—rather, it was a claim Louis makes early on in History of Violence, when at some point in the attack he accepts the fact that this man is going to kill him: “I accepted it the way one accepts and adapts to any situation; for as history shows, people do adjust and adapt, even to the most inhumane conditions, even in the face of atrocities.”³ And that’s also why I thought of Klemperer here, who decided he was going to keep a record of every last thing the Nazis did, whether in coming to power or holding onto and losing it—the way they used language, the way they wielded whatever they wanted to—as a means, as the diaries’ title has it, of bearing witness, while also trying to adapt to the lethal situation he was struggling to survive. Here, the hope is that some form of truth will reach whoever makes it through this all, and that some sort of justice, whatever that might mean, or however small, might be possible thereby. For painful autobiographies like Louis’s—or like Kate Hamilton’s Mad Wife, the account of her working through and getting out of an abusive marriage, which I’m considering reading next—it seems there’s a variety of the same thing going on here: not a desire to seek out sinister events for their own sake, to be a front-row witness to it all—not to exploit the situation for its titillating possibilities, and be able to say you were there. Instead, there appears to be some belief, in laying out how one’s mind functions in the only weird ways it can to survive, that some good may come to others in the communication of the events described and the author’s reaction to them. As stated in an interview, that’s Hamilton’s explicit hope.⁴

Part of this diary reading is also one more attempt to figure out why I can’t stop writing, whether here, in the notebooks I scrawl in, or at the few official platforms that publish my stuff from time to time. For the most part, yes, it’s an easily identifiable scattershot desire just to achieve some form of human connection, different only in kind from so many varieties of social media posting. And at first, I was tempted to make my own overly generalized statement that for most people—not political commentators or wildly successful Substackers or organizations’ long-form marketing ploys—blogs are simply the present-day form diaries take. That thought, though, doesn’t quite hold; after all, what I write in my journal doesn’t get posted here, and not only because that pen-and-paper scribbling is unfiltered and unedited, too raw to be interesting or coherent. But the question remains: what’s the point with that latter, utterly private activity—and does there need to be a point? Why do I hold onto those old notebooks, especially when the thought of peeking back into them makes me shudder in shame? We’ll most likely never have answers to these questions, and that’s why things like Mallon’s book—and the diaries he talks about—get written and are still read. And that, I think, is the other end of all this activity, the reader’s end: because much as all this writing often constitutes a stumbling about in search of connection, so too does the reading, the wanting to know that someone somewhere might have or might still understand or sympathize or empathize with you.

Here’s the bit that still nags, though: this writing in private, this admission of fear and anger and sense of helplessness: in these increasingly dangerous times, for me, at least, and undoubtedly for others, how much of this word production is some attempt to deal with our guilt at not doing anything more meaningful to counter what’s emerging or already rampaging at full throttle? How much, in other words, is not done out of a determination to save a bit of truth to hand over to the generations who will struggle to piece together a past they didn’t know, but rather boils down to some plea to absolve ourselves in their or our own eyes—to show that we were good people, really, that we wanted to do something, but didn’t know how, or were too (legitimately) afraid to? Or worse, that we were too lazy, hoping that keeping our heads down and praying for the best was the only realistic way to save our own skins?

Very few of us, I’ll bet, do more than passively monitor the sinister events all around us. That’s hardly anything new. But again, it’s not a situation that’s ever going to be resolved—so the best we can hope, I guess, is that all this writing brings those of us who do it to a point where we do have some new sort of courage that wouldn’t have been there had we not tried in one way or other to puzzle through it all in this fashion. For me, I suppose that means I’ll just keep at it.

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<sup>1. Lots of references here, made in the order in which they’re mentioned. First, Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021); Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, vols. 1 and 2, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Modern Library, 1999 and 2001); Édouard Louis, History of Violence, trans. Lorin Stein (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018); Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984). 70.↩
2. Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy, trans. Michael Lucey (New York: Picador, 2017).↩
3. Louis, History, 13.↩
4. See Anne Helen Peterson, “Abusers in Plain Sight,” Culture Study, 10 November 2024, https://annehelen.substack.com/p/abusers-in-plain-sight. Hamilton believes there people out there “who could greatly benefit from” the book. That book is Kate Hamilton, Mad Wife: A Memoir (Boston: Beacon Press, 2024).↩</sup>