The pages of our lives

Illustration by Matthew Hancock

I began writing a diary nearly 25 years ago, and the books stretch along an entire shelf in my office: “a multi-volume monster”, as my wife calls it. I can’t remember why I started it, but nowadays compulsion keeps me going. Its usefulness is undeniable, for I notice how stray remarks, anecdotes and momentary gestures tend to reappear in my novels. If you keep a diary, you’re always working, topping up the material of observation that can be adapted years later. There is also, in the re-reading, that strange shock of encountering someone you don’t quite recognise from the person you are now. Diary-keeping furnishes an inadvertent picture not just of what you did but of who you were, and in their pages you may trace the “varieties of the self” as it changes through time. It can be an alarming experience, and makes me the more determined to shield my diary from anyone else’s inspection – at least while I’m alive.

And there’s the rub. A private diary should remain private. Living writers who allow their diaries to be published are surely acting in bad faith, because they sacrifice the essential qualities of the form: intimacy and honesty. There are exceptions to that rule: the London theatre critic James Agate wrote a brilliant sequence of diaries that were published from 1932 until his death in 1947, and his title for them acknowledged their inspiration: Ego. He had high hopes for them too, imagining their place alongside Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Alas, for him they fell out of print years ago, and Agate’s name outside of theatrical circles is barely known.

My other favourite diarists all kept theirs as a sideline that would eventually transcend anything they wrote for their day job. Only obligation would induce me to read Virginia Woolf’s novels, but in her diaries she is hair-raisingly good, at once brittle and doubting, droll and majestic. I love James Boswell’s journals for their energy and self-lacerating honesty. Siegfried Sassoon’s war diaries are superb, and even his moany later ones have merit. Arnold Bennett’s journals have a grave old-fashioned beadiness and shed an astonishing light on what literary success used to mean.

All of them feature in Diaries of Note, extracts from which are published on these pages, and whose cumulative force becomes irresistible. Usher nicely mixes tones of voice and types of character, as the best anthologies do. I liked finding Eric Morecambe sandwiched between Henry James and Queen Victoria, and Brian Eno between Elizabeth Smart and Ernest Hemingway. Themes emerge piecemeal. The multiplicity of nature is a frequent prompt. I was beguiled by the strange serenity of the Canadian artist Emily Carr, and by Gerard Manley Hopkins walking outside Oxford and trying out lines already furred with lyricism (“cowslips capriciously colouring meadows in creamy drifts. Bluebells, purple orchis”).

In an entry from March 1842, Frontierswoman Mary Richardson Walker gets through her daily chores – housework, baking – before concluding with magnificent offhandedness: “Nine o’clock P.M. was delivered of a son.” Captain Robert Falcon Scott, doomed with his team by the Antarctic weather, records the heroic farewell of his colleague Lawrence Oates, who said that he “may be some time”.

An earlier explorer, Isabelle Eberhardt, notes in June 1900, “I will only ever be drawn to people who suffer from that special and fertile anguish called self-doubt”, striking a chord that resonates through the book. Doubt is an inescapable part in understanding the self. Mary MacLane, whose frank journals scandalised America in 1902, asks reasonably: “can I be possessed of a peculiar rare genius, and yet drag out my life in obscurity in this uncouth, warped, Montana town?” The place is specific; the yearning universal. The poet George Crabbe puzzles in May 1780 over the need to stitch an elbow in his only coat, while hoping to finish his book: “Sometimes I think I cannot fail; and then … I am again desponding”. In May 1949, a young Susan Sontag asks herself what is preventing her from “taking off”, aside from fear of her family and her mother, and of sacrificing her “books and records”. Would she be sent back home by the police if caught? “God, living is enormous!”

Dying is too, and the disasters of war loom massively in these pages. From Zeppelin raids on London and civil strife in Russia to the D-Day landings and the first atomic bomb, death is everywhere. The enormity of the Holocaust comes back in heartbreaking confessions, notably in the diary of Éva Heyman, a Hungarian girl about to be transported to Auschwitz (“I want to live even if it means that I’ll be the only person here allowed to stay”) and that of a Dutchwoman, Etty Hillesum, bound for the same terminus and brave to the last, pitying not just her fellow prisoners but her Nazi persecutors: “every atom of hate we add to this world makes it still more inhospitable”.

Nobility of spirit is given its proper due by Usher, but I wonder if he’s rather skimped on the other things we read diaries for: mischief, meanness, malice. The Scottish poet William Soutar called the diary “an assassin’s cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen”, and indeed the phrase furnished Alan and Irene Taylor with a title for their comparable anthology of 2000, The Assassin’s Cloak. Kenneth Tynan, a waspish observer, is here accorded a meagre squib about the existence of ghosts. We don’t always want to see diarists in their best light, which is why I enjoyed Clara Schumann (August 1886) putting the boot into Franz Liszt, who’d died only the day before: “a bad composer”, she sniffs, whose work is “trivial, boring, and will surely vanish completely from the world after his death”. Charming valediction!

I dare say Clara would have been mortified if this judgment had become known. But that’s one of the boons of keeping a diary: the only person who’ll read it, in this life, should be the one holding the pen. Posthumously, who knows? You’d have to be pretty high-minded to reject outright the idea of your diary ever being published, and if it happens that people are shocked by what you’ve written about them, too bad: you will be elsewhere. A good diary should offend, amuse and intrigue. The abiding pleasure for the diarist is that you can write whatever the hell you like, all the time.

Diaries of Note by Shaun Usher (Faber, £25). Order a copy at The Observer Shop for £21.25. Delivery charges may apply

2 Sept 1952

Salvador Dalí, born in Spain in 1904, was the mustachioed maestro of surrealism, with a flair for the fantastical in both his life and work. Like his art, Dalí’s diary offers an often-baffling journey into his mind, filled with wit, imagination, and the unapologetic quirkiness that made him one of the most memorable artists of his time.

Again this morning, while I was on the toilet, I had a truly remarkable piece of insight. My bowel movement, by the way, was perfectly exceptional this morning, smooth and odourless. I was thinking about the problem of human longevity, because of an octogenarian who works at this problem and who has just parachuted over the Seine, using a red-silk parachute. My intuition is that if it were possible to make human excrement as fluid as liquid honey, man’s life would be extended, because excrement (according to Paracelsus) is the thread of life, and each interruption or fart is but a moment of life flying away.

It is the equivalent in time of the Fates’ snip of the scissors, who in the same way cut the thread of existence, divide it up and use it. Temporal immortality must be looked for in refuse, in excrement and nowhere else... And since man’s highest mission on earth is to spiritualise everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most. As a result, I increasingly dislike all scatological jokes and all forms of frivolity on this subject. Indeed, I am dumbfounded at how little philosophical and metaphysical importance the human mind has attached to the vital subject of excrement. And how distressing it is to note that among so many lofty minds there are quite a few who give vent to their needs like everybody else. The day I write a general treatise on this subject, it is quite certain that I will astonish the whole world. For that matter, that treatise will be the exact opposite of Swift’s essay on latrines.

9 September, 1948

When Jack Kerouac wrote the following journal entry in September 1948, he was 26 and his first novel, The Town and the City, was yet to find a publisher. It would be another seven years until he achieved widespread acclaim with the publication of On the Road.

Got form-rejection card from MacMillan’s. I’m getting more confident and angrier each time something like this happens, because I know The Town and the City is a great book in its own awkward way. And I’m going to sell it. They won’t fool me with their editors who want to skimp everything down to the shallow formulas of this age. How many “forgotten-in-one-month” books must they publish before they realise what they’re doing? Just like the movies, and like countless cheap goods that are used up as fast as they’re produced, they turn out these cheap “topical” or “human-interest-small-village-in-Mexico-representing-the-human-undying-spirit stories” by the week, or books by celebrities, or “angry” novels full of sex and violence. I’m ready for any battle there is, against anybody, in defence of this excellent book I have written, which comes from the heart and from the brain – it being only incidental, in a significant sense, that it should come from my heart and brain – and even if I have to go off and starve on the road I won’t give up the notion that I should make a living from this book: because I’m convinced that people themselves will like it whenever the wall of publishers and critics and editors is torn down. It is they, by Christ, who are my enemies, not “obscurity” or “poverty” or anything like that. It is they, the talking class (trying to rationalise itself out of a base materialism) who are the enemy of the people of this country. It is they who build New Yorks and Hollywoods, and flood our radios with inanity, and our papers and magazines with sterilised ideas… I mean the great “Upper White Collar” class, the Commuters, the Whatnot, the people with snotty “progressive” daughter six years old and sons who call their fathers “daddy”. By God, I guess maybe I ought to go back to Canada. But I won’t – I’d much rather make the rounds with that baseball bat. Tonight I finished and typed the final chapter. Last sentence of the novel: “There were whoops and greetings and kisses, and then everybody had supper in the kitchen.” Do you mean that the folks of this country won’t like this last chapter? – or would it be better if I said, “everybody had dinner in the dining room”. But the work is finished.

21 September, 1978

Groundbreaking poet Audre Lorde famously described herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”. In 1978, she faced one of the greatest challenges of her life: breast cancer. Following the diagnosis, the day after writing this diary entry, she underwent a mastectomy.

The anger that I felt for my right breast last year has faded, and I’m glad because I have had this extra year. My breasts have always been so very precious to me since I accepted having them it would have been a shame not to have enjoyed the last year of one of them. And I think I am prepared to lose it now in a way I was not quite ready to last November, because now I really see it as a choice between my breast and my life, and in that view there cannot be any question.

Somehow I always knew this would be the final outcome, for it never did seem like a finished business for me. This year between was like a hiatus, an interregnum in a battle within which I could so easily be a casualty, since I certainly was a warrior. And in that brief time the sun shone and the birds sang and I wrote important words and have loved richly and been loved in return. And if a lifetime of furies is the cause of this death in my right breast, there is still nothing I’ve never been able to accept before that I would accept now in order to keep my breast. It was a 12-month reprieve in which I could come to accept the emotional fact/truths I came to see first in those horrendous weeks last year before the biopsy. If I do what I need to do because I want to do it, it will matter less when death comes, because it will have been an ally that spurred me on.

I was relieved when the first tumour was benign, but I said to Frances at the time that the true horror would be if they said it was benign and it wasn’t. I think my body knew there was a malignancy there somewhere, and that it would have to be dealt with eventually. Well, I’m dealing with it as best I can. I wish I didn’t have to, and I don’t even know if I’m doing it right, but I sure am glad that I had this extra year to learn to love me in a different way. I’m going to have the mastectomy, knowing there are alternatives, some of which sound very possible in the sense of right thinking, but none of which satisfy me enough. Since it is my life that I am gambling with, and my life is worth even more than the sensual delights of my breast, I certainly can’t take that chance.

7:30PM. And yet if I cried for a hundred years I couldn’t possibly express the sorrow I feel right now, the sadness and the loss. How did the Amazons of Dahomey feel? They were only little girls. But they did this willingly, for something they believed in. I suppose I am too but I can’t feel that now.

26 September 1773

In 1773, Dr Samuel Johnson, the eminent intellectual and moralist, and James Boswell, a young Scottish lawyer captivated by Johnson’s brilliance (and who would later write his biography), embarked on a journey through the Highlands of Scotland. The night before he wrote the following entry in his journal, Boswell had stayed up until 5am drinking punch with his hosts – a decision he would soon come to regret.

I awaked at noon, with a severe head-ach. I was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid of a reproof from Dr Johnson. I thought it very inconsistent with that conduct which I ought to maintain, while the companion of the Rambler. About one he came into my room, and accosted me, “What, drunk yet?” His tone of voice was not that of severe upbraiding; so I was relieved a little. “Sir,” said I, “they kept me up.” He answered, “No, you kept them up, you drunken dog.” This he said with good-humoured English pleasantry. Soon afterwards, Corrichatachin, Col, and other friends assembled round my bed. Corri had a brandy bottle and glass with him, and insisted I should take a dram. “Ay,” said Dr Johnson, “fill him drunk again. Do it in the morning, that we may laugh at him all day. It is a poor thing for a fellow to get drunk at night, and sculk to bed, and let his friends have no sport.” Finding him thus jocular, I became quite easy; and when I offered to get up, he very good-naturedly said, “You need be in no such hurry now.” I took my host’s advice, and drank some brandy, which I found an effectual cure for my head-ach. When I rose, I went into Dr Johnson’s room, and taking up Mrs M’Kinnon’s prayer book, I opened it at the 20th Sunday after Trinity, in the epistle for which I read, “And be not drunk with wine, wherein there is excess.” Some would have taken this as a divine interposition...

10 October, 1794

Esteemed midwife Martha Ballard was 50 when she began to keep a diary – a detailed record of life in 18th-century rural America that would grow to 10,000 entries over 27 years. On the day of the this entry, Ballard successfully delivered one of the 816 babies she would bring into the world during her career, but this one was not the smoothest of births. To her frustration, the family had also called on the services of one Benjamin Page, an inexperienced 23-year-old male doctor who had decided to introduce opium when it wasn’t needed.

Birth David Sewalls Son

Cloudy. At Mr Sewalls, they were intimidated & Calld Dr Page who gave my Patient [20] drops of Laudanum which put her into Such a Stupor her pains (which were regular & promising) in a manner Stopt till near night when Shee pukt & they returnd & She was Delivd at 7h Evn of a Son, her first Born. I left her Cleverly at 10 & walkt home. I receivd 12/ as a reward.

15 October, 1930

Aged 15 when she began her first diary, by the time of her death in 1941, English novelist Virginia Woolf had filled more than 30 handwritten volumes with reflections, observations, and personal struggles that offer a window into her complex mind. When she wrote the following entry, Woolf was 48. Two years after the publication of Orlando, she was now working on the second draft of what would become one of her masterpieces, The Waves.

I say to myself “But I cannot write another word”. I say “I will cut adrift—I will go to Roger [Fry, painter] in France—I will sit on pavements & drink coffee—I will see the Southern hills; I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage & let it swim—this fine October”. I say all this; with energy: but shall I do it? Shan’t I peter out here, till the fountain fills again? Oh dear oh dear—for the lassitude of the spirit! Rarely rarely comest thou now, spirit of delight. You hide yourself up there behind the hotel windows & the grey clouds. (I am writing this with a steel pen which I dip in the ink, so as to forestall the day when my German pens are extinct). It is dismal to broach October so languidly. I rather think the same thing happened last year. I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; & my legs pounding along roads; & sleep; & animal existence. My brain is too energetic; it works; it throws off an article on Christina Rossetti; & girds itself up to deal with this & that.

17 October, 2016

Alexei Navalny was Russia’s most prominent opposition leader – a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin who, in 2024, after years of imprisonment, paid the ultimate price for his defiance. This diary entry was written in 2016 by Lionel Barber, then editor of the Financial Times, during a visit to Moscow.

Moscow

The dimly lit office of Russia’s most famous political opponent of Vladimir Putin is located on the third floor of a shopping mall in central Moscow. Alexei Navalny is a tall, burly man with a spiky cowlick fringe, piercing pale-blue eyes and the hint of a paunch. He speaks good English, with a heavy accent. Friendly but watchful, he is dedicated to a twin mission: to expose state corruption and mount a serious bid for the Russian presidency in the 2018 election. “Please, do not describe me as a dissident,” he tells his FT visitors. “A dissident does not take part in the political system. I want to take part in the presidential election.” Navalny has been arrested, beaten and jailed. His brother, he notes with a shrug of broad shoulders, has been stuck in a prison psychiatric ward in the latest official bid to shut him up. Navalny’s courage is not at issue, even if his political company is sometimes less than savoury. Apart from attracting a cult status among Russia’s youth following, he has also won support from ultra-nationalists, a charge met with another shrug of the shoulders. The goal, he insists, must be to use every inch of political space which Putin has afforded the opposition, from the nationalists to the liberals.

To that end, Navalny and his team are using social media and data analytics to build a serious campaign. A video exposé of prime minister Dmitry Medvedev’s secret property empire near the Black Sea, along with vineyards and yachts, has attracted 24 million views. As we exit past a row of young workers head-down over laptop computers, Navalny points to a tabulated list of all his supporting groups around Russia. He has 130,000 dedicated campaign volunteers, tens of thousands of activists who have shown up for protests, and more than 1.7 million subscribers to his online video channels. Proud and defiant, Navalny is the last (visible) man standing in opposition to Vladimir Putin.

27 October, 1969

In October 1969, Elton John was yet to become the superstar we now know. Still only 22, his debut album had been out for four months, and it would be another three years until he legally changed his name from Reginald Dwight.

SESSION DE LANE LEA 9:00 BOBBY BRUCE

STAYED HOME TODAY.

WENT TO SOUTH HARROW MARKET

THE SESSION WAS HILARIOUS.

DIDN’T NO ANYTHING IN THE END

WROTE ‘YOUR SONG’

1 November, 1868

The second volume of Little Women, a seminal work in both American literature and feminist canon, came on 1 January 1869, two months after Louisa May Alcott wrote the following entry in her diary.

Began the second part of Little Women. I can do a chapter a day, and in a month I mean to be done. A little success is so inspiring that I now find my “Marches” sober, nice people, and as I can launch into the future, my fancy has more play. Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any one.

Edited extracts from Diaries of Note: 366 Lives, One Day at a Time edited by Shaun Usher, published by Faber & Faber on 9 October. Salvador Dalí: from Diary of a Genius, translated from the French by Richard Howard © Éditions de La Table Ronde, 1964. Jack Kerouac: from Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954, edited by Douglas Brinkley (Penguin) © 2004 by The Estate of Stella Kerouac, John Sampas, Literary Representative. Audre Lorde: from The Cancer Journals (Aunt Lute Books) © 1997 by Audre Lorde estate. All Rights Reserved. Virginia Woolf: from The Diary of Virginia Woolf (Granta Books) © 1982 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. Elton John: from Elton: The Biography (Andre Deutsch) © David Buckley. Reproduced with permission of Hachette. Lionel Barber: from The Powerful and the Damned (WH Allen) © Lionel Barber 2020. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Limited.

Photographs: Salvador Dali, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS, courtesy of Sothebys, Courtesy of Faber, The Society of Authors as the literary representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf/Henry W and Albert A Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, dohistory.org, Getty Images