Diary Poetics

Form and Style in Writers� Diaries, 1915-1962

Anna Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000155549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The diary is a genre that is often thought of as virtually formless, a "capacious hold-all" for the writer's thoughts, and as offering unmediated access to the diarist's true self. Focusing on the diaries of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Joe Orton, John Cheever, and Sylvia Plath, this book looks at how six very different professional writers have approached the diary form with its particular demands and literary potential. As a sequence of separate entries the diary is made up of both gaps and continuities, and the different ways diarists negotiate these aspects of the diary form has radical effects on how their diaries represent both the world and the biographical self. The different published editions of the diaries by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath show how editorial decisions can construct sometimes startlingly different biographical portraits. Yet all diaries are constructed, and all diary constructions depend on how the writer works with the diary form.

1 Antonia White

The Diaries of Antonia White, in the volumes edited by Susan Chitty, opens with notes made in Paris, in 1926, listing "Canaries, wireless, heavy vans, incessant bells, piano with a sharp always recurring in wrong place."¹ These vivid details, apparently listed at random, powerfully evoke a sense of Paris and of the diarist observing, even though in this first extract White writes little about herself. The diary proper begins in 1933, with White recording an intention to write up a comparison between Carlyle and Lawrence. It is unlikely she ever did fulfil this intention and not only because of the way she describes herself "veer[ing] about so" (18) in her feelings towards Lawrence. White is always recording intentions for the future in these diaries and almost as often regretting her failure to carry her own resolutions out.

By insisting on the importance of form to a poetics of the diary, I am arguing against the general assumption, already discussed in the introduction, that the diary is a formless genre. It is this sense of the diary as formless which has kept the diary, until recently, from being included in studies of autobiography as a literary genre. As Donald Stauffer explains this position, "the diary has scant claim to consideration, for it makes no pretense to artistic structure."² Yet all diarists must work with the sequential form that the diary, by definition, has to take. A diarist cannot compose even a single entry without shaping it, and as soon as the diary consists of a sequence of entries the diarist begins to work with the effects of juxtaposition on the one hand, and, on the other, continuities of narrative and theme. Nevertheless, it is true that such necessary attention to form does not provide an artistic structure in the sense that a novelist might structure his or her work of fiction, or a poet a poem, editing and re-editing the material as they work to define its design. Arguably, this can be seen as the work of a diary's editor, perhaps most successfully though controversially in the case of John Middleton Murry's editing of the Mansfield papers. But an artistic structure might not necessarily only be understood in terms of editing. Woolf, for instance, was clearly alert to the ways in which a structure of accretion could have its own aesthetic, working across entries not only to provide continuity but to highlight continuity as a literary device (as I will explore further in Chapter 5).

No such "pretense to artistic structure" is shown in the diary of Antonia White, nor in its editing. Her diary is the most obviously "formless" of all the diaries I look at in this book, incorporating lists, accounts of dreams, plans, analysis notes, notes for future writing, and various approaches to recording autobiographical facts, but offering little in the way of a sustained narrative. Any sense of plot, or narrative momentum, is difficult to hang on to, as questions are raised, characters introduced, events interpreted and reinterpreted, without any follow-up or conclusion. In the chapter Elizabeth Podnieks includes on White's diary in Daily Modernism, which represents the only considered study of White's diary that has ever been published, she makes a case for the diary as more formally composed than it first appears.³ She gives an excellent account of how the diary was structured in relation to the particular material volumes White used, the hard or soft cover, spiral or ring-bound notebooks. She notes how often White records herself re-reading the diaries and argues that White clearly intended the diaries to be published, at least in some form, at some point. Podnieks' reading of the diaries takes a thematic approach, teasing out from the heterogeneous content four main themes: White's sexual relationships, her Catholicism, her relationship with her father, and her sense of herself as a woman, mother, and artist. In contrast, I want to return to the "formless" impression given by White's diary and look more specifically at how the diary structure might differ from the "artistic structure" Donald Stauffer requires of a literary work. White's diary can be seen as providing a particularly good example of the open-endedness that characterises the diary, and which I suggest can be analysed as a formal characteristic in itself.

It is the open form of the diary, as a succession of autonomous entries, that necessitates the use of a tense distinctive to the diary, described by Margo Culley as the "continuous present."⁴ This "continuous present" refers not so much to the grammatical tense of each sentence but to an overall "narrative" tense; that is, it is a structural quality of the text. Each entry of a model diary gives an account of the period from the time the last entry was written, up to and including the time of writing the current entry. If reminiscences dating back beyond the last entry are included, they are still anchored in the present tense of the writer reminiscing as he or she writes. The grammatical tenses used tend to be the present and the perfect, with the future tense used on occasion. The "continuous present," however, describes the narrative structure created by the succession of entries written in the present tense or the recent past of the moment of writing, with a periodically shifting position in time. The diary is, in its structure, typically endless, every entry the latest in a series that has no predetermined limit. While every diary does of course have an end, in the process of keeping it, the end is a continually shifting one. It is this endlessness that is often considered a lack of form.

White's published fiction suggests an unusual talent for form and for endings. Frost in May, her first and most successful novel and Virago'sn first "Modern Classic," is most memorable for the devastating impact of the ending,⁵ Although it was to be the first of a series of novels, White was always troubled by the difficulty of starting again, with the need to recapitulate the past. She changed the name of her heroine from Nanda to Clara, and the first novel is usually read alone.

Her skill with endings is apparent in her collection of short stories, Strangers.⁶ Most of the stories lead up to a revelatory ending, which throws light back onto the rest of the story. "The Moment of Truth" becomes the title of one story. "Strangers", the story which gives its title to the collection, could have equally well been called "The Moment of Truth": in this story, the wife discovers at the end that it is not her husband's body she has been weeping over but the body of a stranger. But White wrote far more beginnings than endings. "I have a superb collection of beginnings," she remarked once on her ability to start a novel and inability to finish it.⁷ And she wrote more easily in her diary than anywhere else, in that form without an ending.

Her preference for beginnings can be detected in a list of likes and dislikes she makes in 1934 (32-33). Her likes include "being out of debt," which for White means being free to start spending again, "clean clothes" that are ready to start wearing again, "sound of crockery when someone is getting tea for me" rather than the tea itself, "starting a relationship" and "decorating rooms" which means getting rooms ready. Her dislikes are many and various but include dirt in her clothes, her mother's "sweetish corruption", and "feeling fat" which she blames on overindulgence, or having already eaten. Her dislike of "being pregnant" might look like a dislike of a beginning, but given her indifference to her daughters as babies and her much greater attachment to the men she was involved with, I suspect "being pregnant" seemed more a consequence than a beginning to White. (She later blamed Sue's birth for ending her marriage with Eric Earnshaw Smith.) The lists she makes frequently throughout her diary are another form of writing without ending, since a list can go on as long as there are things to add to it and an interest in adding them. She Lists discouragements, interesting thoughts, characteristics of herself and other people, expenses, friends, and, most often, resolutions.

So many resolutions are striking in writing so irresolute. Her resolutions are often concerned about waste: in a list from 1933, she resolves "not to waste time, thought and money" on clothes, to read without waste "not frittering away my reading," to tidy "so as not to have these orgies of getting straight," and generally to "get as much time as possible out of each day" (23). She castigates a friend as "the most ruthless waster of other people's time I know" (26). She seems always to hold herself to account for her time, providing frequent summaries like balance sheets. One of her more thorough reviews in 1951 attempts to cover the last five years of her life (229).

The metaphor of having things on account, which is in fact how she literally acquired most of her possessions, is one she uses frequently. She associates writing with money, making a curious slip in one passage:

I spend money recklessly in a fantasy ot unlimited wealth. Perhaps it is the same with writing. I want the certain consciousness of unlimited talent without the necessity of having to give any evidence of money at all. Now that was quite unconscious. I meant to write talent. (75)

It is as if she wants to have talent "on account" with writing being the payment she must make for it. Even her relationship with her daughter she analyses in terms of a debt owed: "I have got to 'earn' Sue. I've had her 'on account' as you might say. Now the bill has come in" (198).

Resolutions can be seen as a way of ordering future behaviour on account, but in White's case, the behaviour rarely follows. The diary is full of broken resolutions: "It is breaking a resolution though perhaps not an important one to write in this book in pencil" (77), and "I rang him on an impulse though I had resolved not to" (85). She recognises that it "is no good my making resolutions," yet it does not stop her making them, any more than does her resolution to make "no new year resolutions, however tempting" (27).

White in fact refers to the future more often than any of the other five diarists of this study, with Cheever coming closest with about a third as many references. She also refers to the past more often than average, though to a far less striking degree. Perhaps this quantity of writing in the future tense accounts in part for a certain lack of substance to the writing. The novelist Jenny Diski criticised Antonia White's diaries in a review article in The London Review of Books(in which they are grouped, curiously enough, with Andrew Morton's biography of Princess Diana and Lyndall Gordon's auto/biography Shared Lives), complaining of their "shapelessness." ⁸ In this review, Diski contrasts the "sharp eye" of the writer as a novelist with "the miasma of self-deception and silliness" she finds in the diaries. She concludes the article, "What we own of Antonia White is her published fiction, stories and novels, and that is all we can ever own." Ownership is an interesting idea to bring in, a further extension of the term "mastery" to mean understanding. Diski mentions a desire to "get a grip" on the writing and on the writer. There is a real difficulty in getting a grip on so formless a genre, so piecemeal a representation of "self."

Yet it would be more fair to write of a "miasma of self-awareness" than a "miasma of self-deception," or at least of a "miasma of self-examination." White is always examining herself, with at least the intention of honesty. She undergoes clinical analysis a number of times and uses the techniques of analysis throughout her diary. She tries to see herself from all angles: recording what other people say about her, summing up her sense of herself, interpreting her unconscious. She picks up on slips of the pen, such as the substitution of "money" for "talent", as a way of getting in an extra glimpse of self-awareness on the sly. Yet Diski argues, "It is in the fiction that we see most clearly what White increasingly doubts the existence of through this period of the diary: the 'core' of herself." The difference seems to me less one of honesty than of perspective and tense.

Hermione Lee, in her introduction to White's collected stories, contrasts "the controlling writer, digging up her past" with "the unredeemed, 'untreated' self in the fiction, unable to make coherent shape of, or distance herself from her state of mind."⁹ The past as shaped by the fiction is at a remove from its analysis. A section of time is set apart and written of in a narrative which moves in a steady chronology, looking neither backwards nor forwards. The heroine is defined by her thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, in the present tense of the story.

Secondary characters in White's fiction, like the heroines, are not analysed but simply presented. Nanda, the heroine of Frost in May, resists analysis, "always reverent towards the people she liked." Her best friend Leonie is described as peculiarly static in appearance: "her deeply cut mouth and beautiful sallow brows seemed like the stamp of a medal rather than the changing growth of a face." ¹⁰ This strange yet vivid description reveals how the absence of a relationship to past and future is linked with clarity and definition.

The passage of time is deftly handled in Frost in May. The reader is never allowed ahead of the heroine. Time passing is barely referred to: the reader is always in the present tense of the narrative, which, when necessary, simply skips over a week (as it does between the first and second chapters) or two years (as it does after the death of Theresa Leighton). The reader's attention is focused, as is Nanda's, on immediate material details, such as the hair on Clare's arms and on Nanda's struggle to learn and to resist the intricacies of the convent rules and ideology. Nanda's response is, like the response called for in the reader, emotional rather than analytical. The narrative, written in the past tense, looks back with immediate feeling, belonging always to the present tense of the story itself.N

The short stories are even more focused than the novel. Each has a single viewpoint and chronological narrative. Even the shifts in self-perception recorded in the story based on White's memory of her psychosis, "The House of Clouds," are described simply, with no analysis, each development given its place in a lucid chronology. While the heroine of this story may be "unable to make coherent shape of, or distance herself from her state of mind," the reader has only to follow the narrative of it to have possession of the whole story.

In the diary, White is writing from inside experience. There is relatively little narrative, compared to the amount of analysis. While she frequently reviews a past year, she can gain no perspective on the present, which will depend on future developments for its context. Her state is always conditional: at most she can state, "At the moment, thank goodness, I am not in that miserable and familiar state of being between two men," making no claims beyond the "moment".¹¹ Even this conditional state she hopes might be temporary, writing in 1936, "I have a feeling that in a year's time a great many things may be clear to me which I now only apprehend in the dimmest, most erratic way. If I can hold on, I really do believe . . . that I shall have learnt a new language and that at last I may have a base on which to build" (73).

In the meantime, and throughout her diary, she asks questions: "What things have made me happy lately?" (33); "Shall I go all out for freelancing?" (122); "What can one say to the dying who do not know and who do not believe?" (291). Some of these questions are rhetorical, but usually White attempts to answer her questions, often surprising herself with what she comes up with. It is as if she needs to distance herself from her thoughts by writing them out, to find out what she thinks.

She finds out too what she feels. By concentrating on her feelings, she anchors her analysis in the present tense: whatever the meaning or future development of an event, she has complex feelings about it now. She notes her feelings in careful detail: "I am feeling aggressive, bitter and impotent" (111). Yet the feelings she records perhaps the most often are relief and disappointment: feelings in relation to the past and to past anticipation of the future. Her feelings themselves are subject to resolutions. She resolves to be grateful, to enjoy writing, to be calm, to "try as he [Spinoza] says to convert passive emotions into active ones" (171).

Her frequent use of the phrase "of course" is an attempt to regulate her emotions. She uses it most often about something that is painful to her, something she minds about, often something that would not normally be thought of as a matter of course at all but a matter of tragedy. Thus she can write a sentence like, "Tom, of course, is like someone partly hypnotised" (240). She often writes of her disappointments in her daughters as if they are a matter of course. Her pleasure in Sue's financial independence from her is tempered by the realisation that "Sue is of course relying not on her pay but on the 21st birthday money and that of course came from the family so is indirect support from parents" (231). Of her daughters' relations with the Church, a subject she cares very strongly about, she writes, "I do think even now she takes a sort of interest in it. Lyn of course takes none" (234). Sue's estrangement from her becomes a continual source of pain which she notes in postscripts: "I have been quite extraordinarily blest and fortunate for the past six months. Except, of course, for Sue" (270). At the same time, she uses the same technique to regulate her emotions over much smaller tragedies: "lack of boxroom is a nuisance, of course" (234). She uses the word "obviously" (or sometimes "certainly") in a similarly prescriptive, rather than descriptive, fashion. What she declares "obvious" is never literal fact, but rather the much less obvious interpretation she gives fact. Usually, it is her self, and her unconscious, she is interpreting. She states, for instance, "I am obviously still terrified of being disapproved of" (225).

In many of White's stories, interpretations of fact seem "obvious". Often, interpretation is guided by religion. In Frost in May, the children...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Form and the Diary
• 1 Antonia White
• 2 John Cheever
• 3 Joe Orton
• 4 Katherine Mansfield
• 5 Virginia Woolf
• 6 Sylvia Plath
• 7 The Dash
• 8 Sentence Fragments
• 9 “I” and “you”
• Conclusion: “And coming here this morning ...”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index