Intimate Writings

FRANZ KAFKAS entry in his diary on the August 1, 1914 reads: "Germany has just declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon. "How delightful to be reminded that back in 1914, when history was happening, there were still people--great people--swimming in the afternoons. As Evelyn Waugh wrote, "Nobody wants to read other people's reflections of life and religion and politics, but the routine of their day, properly recorded, is always interesting. "The reader of diaries and letters often finds an unexpected fascination in the mundane, in the record of an actual life as it is being lived.

Thomas Mallon, the author of an original survey of diarists and a teacher of English at Vassar, points out that five million blank diaries are sold in the United States each year. Whether for posterity or therapy or peace, these diary-keepers commit to paper some version of their lives--great or small, public or personal. As Mallon's diverse range of examples shows, anyone's life can capture the reader's imagination if it is honestly and freshly told.

In a book published in 1982, Toni Bentley, a dancer for the New York City Ballet, made vivid the ecstasy and stress of working and living under George Balanchine's rule: it is a very direct and involving book--one which, Mallon suggests, helps Bentley "to find the way back to her art." Unfortunately, in the compiler's one-page synopsis that includes a few brief quotations, the force of this particular diary is all but lost and in a few awkward words the reader is abruptly shuttled across one of the many connecting bumps in Mallon's text and is confronted with Charles Darwin's account of life at Cambridge. For someone who has read Bentley's book, Mallon's commentary adds nothing; for someone who has not, this brief glance fails to capture the subtle qualities that might encourage further investigation of the diary.

The problem, then, is in Mallon's presentation of what remains a fine and broad selection of diarists and journal-keepers. There is an impressive span in the book from the expected to the unknown, from Samuel Pepys and Dorothy Wordsworth to the diaries of ordinary pioneer women undergoing extraordinary hardships. This host of diarists is sifted into sections--one for prisoners, one for travelers, one for creators, and the like. The resulting juxtapositions could be enlightening and provocative and could make for an absorbing book. Unfortunately, Mallon's text leaves us without any resounding insight into the curious business of diary-keeping and his prose is, at best, bland, and more often intrusive for its carelessness, its cliches and its poor attempts at being witty. For example, "Boswell was a veritable American Express card; Johnson could never have left home without it." Or, more seriously, and perhaps more typical of the sort of casual turn of phrase that irritatingly litters Mallon's text: when remarking on a sentence from the adolescent diaries of the German psychologist, Karen Horney, Mallon writes, "One can hear the girl turning into the doctor right at the comma."

MALLON'S DISC-JOCKEY style of tour through his chosen diarists is amply anticipated by an introduction that rambles on (without any of that great Rambler Samuel Johnson's wit) about the progress of his own diary and his own rather banal generalizations about the practice of keeping a diary. Also included by way of introduction are generous quotations from his own diaries, such as a passage which he agrees is "pretty self-pitying stuff" written while Mallon lived near Harvard Yard and was "tired out from a semester of trying to learn Greek." It seems quite inappropriate that the compiler of this "literary" collection should assume to present his own mundane preamble in the introduction although, admittedly, a "personal" introduction by Evelyn Waugh would have been welcome had he made such a collection.

Some readers may enjoy Thomas Mallon's light tour-guide approach. For those who do not, the book is nevertheless redeemed by its superb selection of diarists from all walks of life. In his extensive reading of the obscure as well as the class.., Mallon has stumbled upon some marvelous passages and some intriguing characters. His book is "populated by writers, dancers, madmen, statesman, lovers, assassins, philosophers, housewives, soldiers, and children"--all in all a rich host o: "selves." It is a pity that they are all sapped and leveled by the author's uninteresting prose. We can only hope that there will soon be an Oxford Book of Diaries where Thomas Mallon will be able to exercise his fine discretion if not his pen