Three centuries of diaries at the Morgan in New York

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who keep diaries and those who don't. I do. I can't tell you why. I've kept a diary virtually all my adult life, and it's probably as long as all the books I've written combined. Yet no one reads it, including me. Isn't that a laugh?

Some people use a diary as a kind of ledger, to keep dates and accounts. Some keep it as a commonplace book, recording the interesting thoughts of others. Writers use it to sketch projects, record stray imaginings or try out new ideas.

These are all utilitarian purposes. So were those of the Puritans, who kept diaries as a means both of expressing piety and aspiring toward greater perfection in it.

The Puritans were probably the fathers (and mothers) of the modern diary. But they weren't diarists in the true sense. For the purist, the diary is an end in itself, the ultimate acte gratuit.

Clubs for diarists?

Today journal-keeping is a strategy in many creative writing courses. But how do you teach the unique? No two diaries are alike. Diarists don't form clubs or unions. They keep to themselves, like anyone else with a private vice.

Some diaries, of course, are intended for publication. Andre Gide's is the most famous example. Some writers publish their diaries selectively. Virginia Woolf's husband published her diary reflections on the craft of writing, which meant that the juicy parts were mostly left out.

They've since been published. Unless you destroy your diary, you'd better be prepared to have anything in it exposed. Leaving instructions in your will won't suffice. No testamentary instructions are more disregarded than those that concern literary remains.

AnaÓ¯s Nin's "'full' truth

The only diarist I've known outside my immediate family is AnaÓ¯s Nin. Her diary was legendary before the first volume of it was published, when she was 63. Six volumes followed in her lifetime. They were, shall we say, heavily reworked.

After Nin's death in 1977, her executor published an entirely new set of "unexpurgated" diaries. These aren't the full truth either. But getting to the truth in a diary is like peeling an onion: You'll weep before you ever find it.

An exhibition of diaries may sound like a contradiction in terms, but the Morgan Library in New York has mounted one. Some of the authors are famous, some obscure. Many, like Emerson and Gide, are missing. Virginia Woolf is represented by her Diary of a Writer, and AnaÓ¯s Nin by a meticulous typescript of what was originally kept by hand. She presented it to her friend Daisy Aldan with an inscription assuring her that it was the real truth of what couldn't be spoken. It wasn't.

How about Plato?

The oldest item on display is a very handsome edition of Augustine's Confessions from c. 1465-70, one of the earliest print volumes extant. This isn't a diary, of course, but a literary work that may or may not be based on diaries or diary-like notes.

We know of no ancient diaries for sure, but they must have existed, as aides-mémoires if nothing else. I'd bet money that Plato kept one, and of course Marcus Aurelius. Literary letters, like those of Cicero and Pliny, probably served a similar purpose.

The sketchbook of Gherardo Cibo (1512-1600) is called a diary in the exhibit, but it appears to be more a series of annotated drawings. Of course diaries are occasionally illustrated, but it's words that make them what they are.

Painters, a notoriously self-absorbed lot, often keep diaries to talk about their work, Delacroix being a notable exception. He isn't in the Morgan show either, but Stuart Davis is, remarking rather portentously, "To draw freely is like going out into the street unshaved."

The Tolstoys' joint venture

Naturally, most diarists worth reading are professional writers. The only exception I know is Arthur Inman, who kept a voluminous lifelong diary but never wrote a word for publication.

Nathaniel Hawthorne kept a joint diary with his wife Sophie; unsurprisingly, they reported great connubial bliss. This diary is on display too, but not those of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy. Not only did the Tolstoys keep diaries as foils in their great marital duel, but Tolstoy kept two of them at once— one for Sonya's eyes and another for his alone.

Needless to say, marriage is the great challenge for any diary. Queen Victoria's published diary— the only diary ever published by a British monarch— is a hymn of praise for her consort, Albert. But Albert was dead.

Thoreau as aphorist

Pepys and Gibbon are represented here— Pepys kept his diary in code— but pride of place goes to Thoreau, several of whose original journals, large and covered in marbled paper, occupy a full case. Thoreau was the first writer to consider his diary as a literary life's work. A sample from 1837, written in a fine, flowing hand, shows him as a budding aphorist on the model of Vauvenargues or Joubert; a late entry, from 1858, is hasty and slapdash, the recorder of nature immersed in his work (he was ill by this time, too).

Whitman is present as well, but recording a scene very different from the seasons at Walden, a Civil War hospital where he served as a nurse.

Among the nonprofessional writers are Bartholomew Sharpe, a 17th-Century pirate, and Dominique Jean Larrey, Napoleon's personal physician, whose diary of the Russian campaign of 1812 is an important (and harrowing) source for the most disastrous military campaign of all time.

Horror of 9/11

The last diaries in the exhibit are those of 9/11 responders, one of which records the horror of seeing couples leap to their deaths hand in hand from the burning towers. That image, I suspect, will stay with us for a long time.

Not all diaries are continuous, and few are life-long. Some reflect illness or trauma, and others are halted by it. Ruskin's 1878 diary is open to a pair of blank pages; he left three of them blank in recognition of a severe three-month nervous breakdown he suffered that year, and they are eloquent enough.

Thomas Merton's Secular Journal records the spiritual crisis that led him to join a Trappist monastery: "Give up everything, give up everything!" That included, at least temporarily, the diary itself. But Merton couldn't renounce it forever; few diarists can. It's the often the first vice they acquire, and the last they renounce.

Some writers use large journals (Steinbeck's was huge) and some small ones; some write in a large hand, and some are almost illegibly cramped and tiny. Some, too, tell us a little more than we need to know, for example Tennessee Williams's: "Then love— came twice, both ways."

Perhaps a truthful line. Not the most elegant, though.