A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries - Softcover

Mallon, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593687736 ISBN 13: 9780593687734

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A literary tour through the notable diaries of history, giving us a window into the private lives of the famous and infamous, with a new introduction by the author

“Charming, diverting, and exceptionally intelligent.” —The New Yorker

Before the age of social media, chronicling one’s life was a private matter. In this literary tour through the notable diaries of history, Thomas Mallon is a witty guide to the personal journals of the famous and infamous, bring­ing to life their neuroses, artistic practices, and preoccupations. Virginia Woolf casts her sharp eye on friends and acquaintances. Samuel Pepys chronicles political life in Restoration England. Sylvia Plath’s notebooks are filled with images she will turn into poems. F. Scott Fitzgerald records overheard conversation while Leonardo da Vinci scribbles down his dreams. Anaïs Nin treats her diary as a tell-all, reflecting on love, sex, and death across several volumes and decades.

In A Book of One’s Own, Mallon is a sympathetic, stylish, and insightful companion, transporting us across eras and continents with infectious joie de vivre. Here is a profound and compelling case for the diary as the quint­essential literary art form, an act of defiance against being forgotten, and a stab at immortality.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

THOMAS MALLON is the author of eleven novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Landfall, and Up With the Sun. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In  2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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I

Chroniclers

Oh yes, I’ve enjoyed reading the past years diary, & shall keep it up. I’m amused to find how its grown a person, with almost a face of its own.

—Virginia Woolf, December 28, 1919

The first thing we should try to get straight is what to call them. “What’s the difference between a diary and a journal?” is one of the questions people interested in these books ask. The two terms are in fact hopelessly muddled. They’re both rooted in the idea of dailiness, but perhaps because of journal’s links to the newspaper trade and diary’s to dear, the latter seems more intimate than the former. (The French blur even this discrepancy by using no word recognizably like diary; they just say journal intime, which is sexy, but a bit of a mouthful.) One can go back as far as Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary and find him making the two more or less equal. To him a diary was “an account of the transactions, accidents and observations of every day; a journal.” Well, if synonymity was good enough for Johnson, we’ll let it be good enough for us.

The idea of the diary as carrier of the private, the everyday, the intriguing, the sordid, the sublime, the boring—in short, a chronicle of everything—seems to have occurred accidentally, and not much before Samuel Pepys began what may still be the best-­known diary of all. If he cannot be said to have invented the form as we now think of it, he very nearly did, just as he more or less perfected it within months of starting his book on January 1, 1660. The start of a decade always seems ten times as auspicious as the beginning of a mere new year, and the dawning of January 1, 1660, may have been just what Pepys needed to push him over the top of an idea that had been kicking about in his juicy mind for some time.

He can’t be sure that this will be the year of the King’s restoration, much less the decade of the Great Fire and the Great Plague, but he hardly needs those extra historical inducements to record once he gets rolling. He is a natural: he may not always write up each day before it is over (it feels good to know he can get twelve days behind), but during the next 3,438 of them he will miss giving words to only eleven. He sets to work in Thomas Shelton’s tachy­graphy, which looks a little like Pitman shorthand and a little like hieroglyphics, and he keeps going for more than a million words.

Pepys passes the 1660s in the Navy Office, and is just close enough to great events to make his diary a part of history. But he is never about to leave himself on the cutting room floor of the scenes he films just for the sake of the bigger picture. When Charles II is crowned in Westminster Abbey, Pepys sees it all—except those moments when he is relieving his great “list to pisse”; his next morning’s hangover, the result of the evening’s festivities, isn’t left out either. To Carlyle history amounted to the biography of great men; to Pepys it consists of the advancement of Pepys. He may deplore the court’s sycophancy toward the King during tennis matches, and he may not record examples of his own influence with the pomposity of his contemporary diarist John Evelyn, but you don’t exactly see him turning down any invitations, either. On April 17, 1665, he realizes the King knows his name, and he feels terrific.

Pepys feels terrific so often in this decade of increasing prosperity that he can’t help but make a reader feel terrific, too. He is forever taking stock of himself, not in the spiritual columns of debit and credit that the Puritan diarists of his time are totaling, but in ones of earthly prosperity. And he’s almost never in the red. Birthdays, New Year’s Eves, the anniversaries of his successful kidney stone operation: they all make him pause and cluck about his own good luck. In 1662 Pepys delights to find himself “a very rising man,” and three years later he can’t believe the extent to which he’s made it: “Lord, to see how I am treated, that come from so mean a beginning, is a matter of wonder to me.” He realizes in 1667 that none of his old classmates at Magdalene College, Cambridge, has done any better than he, and he unabashedly puts down his joy. The diary gurgles like a full stomach and jingles like a full pocket. Never was there a man more difficult to begrudge his own vulgarity. His success has made him happy; and it’s come, after all, from hard work and calculation: “Chance without merit brought me in, and . . . diligence only keeps me so, and will, living as I do among so many lazy people, that the diligent man becomes necessary . . . they cannot do anything without him.”

Along with a great job, he’s got a swell wife. She’s prettier than Princess Henriette, so pretty that he’s jealous of first her dancing master and then her painting instructor. The Pepyses argue over the accounts, and they bite and scratch and belt each other, but they always call a truce and end up “pretty good friends.” He knows how to let her bad temper burn itself out by paying it no mind, and when he’s been too free with the servant girls she makes sure the next one they hire has plenty of pock marks. Even their most serious row, in 1668 over the servant girl Deb, pays some connubial dividends: “I must here remember that I have laid with my moher as a husband more times since this falling-­out then in I believe twelve months before—and with more pleasure to her then I think in all the time of our marriage before.” This last sentence is one illustration of Pepys’s knack for stumbling upon psychological truths long before psychology was invented.

Goodness knows Elizabeth Pepys has her hands full, mostly because her husband’s always are—of the pliant flesh of servant girls and married ladies about the town. Pepys believes in substituting appetite for logic in these matters. He can forgive a woman for accidentally hitting him with her spittle in the theater, once he discovers how “very pretty” she is; and after he’s made an assignation with Deb he can take “great hopes by her carriage that she continues modest and honest.” He goes for “the main thing” with Mrs. Lane, but she says no, “for which God be praised; and yet I came so near, that I was provoked to spend.” He suffers the same fate when he reads L’Escholle des Filles, “a lewd book, but what doth me no wrong to read for information sake.” He’ll even risk groping a girl in Saint Dunstan’s Church—and when she threatens to stick pins in him, he goes off and gropes another one.

Being a man of some taste and standing he finds it fitting to cloak his amours in a code of broken French and Italian. Of course, one needn’t be bilingual to figure out what he does with Mrs. Martin on June 3, 1666: “Did what je voudrais avec her, both devante and backward, which is also muy bon plazer.” Or what happens between him and Deb on March 31, 1668: “Yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra mi genu and did poner mi mano sub her jupes and toca su thigh.” If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, this lunatic “secrecy” is a little bonbon virtue throws to vice. Its purpose isn’t concealment; it’s to give a little extra thrill to Pepys as he writes. When you’re twelve and someone offers to show you a dirty postcard, you’re interested. But when you’re told it’s a French dirty postcard, then, boy, you’re really interested. In matters of the flesh, Pepys was permanently twelve.

He is blessed with a child’s avidity for any new...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593687736
• ISBN 13: 9780593687734
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 337
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar