Monday, March 17, 2008

12 March 1985

A fairly busy day. I visited a lecture and a tutorial session. I wrote a fairly longish memo to Seagrave about some student discontent. I met with a delegation of students before and after writing the memo about their complaint, which seems altogether justified to me. I made a trip into Banbury to replace the battery in my wristwatch, which stopped at 2:03 this morning. In the afternoon I met with Christopher Fitter, to whom I had to send the termination-of-appointment notice Seagrave has been eager to have me write.
     After my talk with Fitter—seeking, perversely a dreadful pun, one could nickname him "Steam" because of his intensity, which I commend him for, I met with two other tutors. I told David Luker, the historian who lives in Wroxton House with his pregnant American wife, Ann, that I had talked with Seagrave about getting a better cooking stove in the Lukers' flat. I met with Nicholas Baldwin to compliment him on his conduct of the tutorial session I attended and to talk, playfully, with him about a multi-disciplinary study of the power and influence of the Prime Minister as it would be treated by an anthropologist concerned with tribal governance, a socio psychologist interested in leadership dynamics, and a Lorenz like biologist studying pack or flock leadership.
     Late in the afternoon, I got around to reading Kilvert's Diary again. Emboldened by a warm gin and tonic—warm ones are much more full of "Dutchman's Courage" than iced ones—I occasionally edited some of his lines as a little exercise.
     I approached the activity with an assurance close to arrogance because of some fooling around I had done a day or so ago with a line of Yeats'—the one in which he referred to life as "a long preparation for a day that never comes." I readjusted it with an almost juvenile confidence. "Life is a long preparation for the day that Never comes," I wrote down on a pad smugly admiring the subtlety of the effect I achieved by putting special stress on the and not only stressing never but using it as a noun, not an adverb, making Never equivalent to the eternity that follows death.
     Kilvert's line that caught my editorial attention was this one: "...and as I passed Cross Ffordd the frogs were croaking, snoring and bubbling in the pool under the full moon." It was so close to perfection, I decided, that it deserved revision. "...croaking, snoring and bubbling under the full moon in the pool" would be, rhythmically, an improvement I imperiously declared. Why didn't Kilvert see that? I was disappointed by his insensitivity. I read his version, then mine. Yes, mine was better. Oh oh! But what about the modification? I've got the moon in the pool! He was right. I was wrong. (I am not sure that I was equally wrong with my attempt at a pair of lines from Addison’s Cato. I edited them, too, the other day as I had a cocktail-hour gin and tonic that justified my presumption. Addison’s lines were these: “When by just vengeance guilty mortals perish, The gods behold their punishment with pleasure.” Good, I thought, as I sipped again at my drink, but there is something wrong. I listened to several different versions of them in my mind and decided that the trouble was the hypermeter ending both lines. This, I magisterially decided as I pressed my glass against my cheek, would be better: “When by just vengeance guilty mortals die, The gods behold their fate with gladdened eye.” Of course, I have made a heroic couplet of Addison’s blank verse, but no matter.)
     How does someone achieve the instinctive rightness of a Kilvert? How did he come by the simplicity of his description of a storm: “A wild stormy night. The Dulas, Clyro, roaring red, and the Wye surging broad yellow and stormy." Or the absolute power of a sentence like this: "At Rhos Goch Lane House no one was at home, so I stuck an ivy leaf into the latch hole"? I remember Picasso saying something like "It took me five years to learn to paint like Rembrandt. It took me a lifetime to learn to paint like a child."
     I wish that just once I could write with the sort of honesty and innocence of loving fidelity to the object that Kilvert displays. I think that then I would be content. Someone, someday, might then look up and pause over my words, as I do over Kilvert's, reverent, grateful, and full of a renewed belief in the worth of the long conversation that makes then now, now then, and hereafter both here and heretofore. That would be proof that I had lived, at least for my sudden and improbable friend, that reader of a later day. (Being able to build that bridge from here to there, from this time to that, could give anyone a solid sense of what the young Sam Shepard felt when, quite new to his writing craft, he told himself that "with words you could do anything.")
     But keeping journals is a risky business, unless those who keep them succeed in convincing themselves that the notes are absolutely private, permanently. (My experience with this one sharpens my appreciation of Boswell’s comment: “It is a work of very great labour and difficulty to keep a journal of life, occupied in various pursuits, mingled with concomitant speculations and reflections.”) Start thinking, as I came close to doing just above, about an audience larger than yourself, and you are in trouble: either you egotistically assume that whatever you say is well worth any sensitive and intelligent reader's time or you begin to bend not only the context of what you get down but also the context of what you observe as possible material to be gotten down.
     You also begin to adopt the voice that you think your once and future reader will be pleased to hear and thus run the risk of losing whatever honesty and spontaneity you may be capable of, of becoming a performer who "popularizes his or her own experience," renders it suitable for public consumption.
Once you start doing that, can you really distinguish between what you do and think and what you think you should do and think to win the approval of your reader? Can you keep everything from becoming "material" before it truly becomes experience? Can you keep yourself from becoming material, grist out of which you fashion the many different selves you see yourself becoming on the different pages that you fill up? [1]
     Can you, as you reread entry after entry, recognize your self among the many me's and I's you meet in them? Are you the all powerful figure who shapes the people you meet and makes them "fit" the places in which you've set them, or the chameleon who takes its color from its surroundings, who rather desperately seeks for some definite shape of identity by rubbing up against the edges of the basics of daily existence? Can you bear the burden of self awareness, the implicit concentration upon self that a journal involves?
     What do you do about the feeling you often get, scribbling away, making sentences and paragraphs out of nothing but a look out a window, when a thought like this comes to you, reminding you that you have language but no real theme: "I always know my subject. What I lack is a predicate." Must everything I get down be subjective, devoid of all objectives? Thoughts like these give me, I think, full understanding of what Henrik Ibsen felt when he said once, “To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.”
     Example: I stood with Patty on the edge of the ocean one moonless New Year's Eve, very near midnight, comforted by the total blackness of the vast water and at the same time awed and somewhat frightened by an acute awareness of time and timelessness. The flat laughter of three or four people drinking outside a nearby hotel mixed with the sound of the surf. In the darkness of the beach, large clumps of cold-stiffened white sea foam rolled across the sand, ghosts of dead crests, riding night winds, then tumbling again into the incoming water and slowly disappearing in the barely visible waves. "Say something about this," I told myself, but the speaking, itself, though soundless, drew me away from what I had been before the words, what I had felt then. And I knew at once that I would not ever get past the nouns to the verb that roiled the water and quickened the air.)
     Some of these thoughts run through my head because I read somewhere the other day, Leonard Woolf's comment in The Journey Not the Arrival Matters on dealing with autobiographical material: "If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable." I've also been reading not only Kilvert's but also Byron's journal. (Another potentially fatal peril facing any of us who keep journals is reading predecessors like those two, or Pepys, say. Even worse, perhaps, would be to keep in mind the statistics on A. C. Benson's journal-keeping: "From 1897 to 1925," according to the Oxford Companion, "he kept a diary, amounting to five million words...")
     Coming from such collections to the blank pages of your own tablet is a little like, well, carefully clipping a lengthy hair from one of your nostrils or putting salve on a small bleb or canker while a glossy photograph of some exquisite film star or international fleshly icon is fresh in your memory. "Does this really make any difference at all?" you are just about certain to ask yourself as you peer, eyes widened beneath quizzically arched brows, at the snippers or the tube of salve. Should you ever again even think of seeking some way to do something about brightening your blank countenance—or pages even more blank?
     Byron, himself, you may try to console yourself by remembering, confessed some misgivings about his daily, or periodic, entries. The December 6, 1813, comment in his journal (which ran from November 14, 1813, to April 19, 1814), went like this: "This journal is a relief. When I am tired..., out comes this, and down goes everything. But I cannot read it over; and God knows what contradictions it may contain. If I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to oneself than to anyone else), every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor."
     In another place—I forget which page of it I have transcribed from in John D. Jump's Byron (London, 1972), he reveals his own uncertainty about what he has committed to his journal's pages:

"People have wondered at the melancholy which runs through my writings. Others have wondered at my personal gaiety; but I recollect once, after an hour, in which I had been particularly and sincerely gay, and rather brilliant, in company, my wife replying to me when I said (upon her remarking my high spirits) `And why, Bell, I have been called and mis called Melancholy—you must have seen how falsely, frequently,' `No, B,' (she answered) `it is not so: at heart you are the most melancholy of mankind, and often when apparently gayest.' ¶ ...if I could explain at length the real causes which have contributed to increase this perhaps natural temperament of mine, this Melancholy which hath made me a bye word, nobody would wonder; but this is impossible without doing much mischief. I do not know what other men's lives have been, but I cannot conceive anything more strange than some of the earlier parts of mine. I have written my memoirs, but omitted all the really consequential and important parts, from deference to the dead, to the living, and to those who must be both. I sometimes think that I should have written the whole as a lesson, but it might have proved a lesson to be learnt rather than avoided; for passion is a whirlpool, which is not to be viewed nearly without attraction from its vortex. ¶ I must not go on with these reflections, or I shall be letting out some secret or other to paralyze posterity."

     Passages of this sort can comfort us lesser scribblers of dull daily doings. But not for long. For very soon in what a real journal keeper like Byron bequeaths to us we see, even in some of his most casual places—the memorable bits he records from his own direct experience, not at second hand as most of us do—that we can keep going with our jottings only if we have the assurance of everlasting secrecy, that what we wrote will get mercifully lost, or that, although it may survive, nobody will subject it to a later reading.
     "Then why write any entries at all?" is a question most of us may want to leave to metaphysicians puzzling also about infinity or a kind of invaginated time space universe turning in upon itself.
     Here are just two anecdotes Byron shares with us:

"Monk Lewis was observed one morning to have his eyes red, and his air sentimental: being asked why? he replied, `that when people said anything kind to him, it affected him deeply; and just now the Duchess has said something so kind to me that...' here tears began to flow again. `Never mind, Lewis,' said Colonel Armstrong to him, `never mind, don't cry. She could not mean it.'" [Jump, 66 67]

"I forgot to mention that she [he is speaking of Margarita Cogni's ascendancy over him--and, specifically, about her occasional odd behavior during his coupling with her] was very devout, and would cross herself if she heard the prayer time strike—sometimes when that ceremony did not appear to be much in unison with what she was then about." [Jump, p. 61 62]

     Well, we say, forget all that—while we're making our notes. (Making love, dreaming a future into being, denying our mortality, creating, all of them require us to trick ourselves into believing, in the midst of the most slavish sort of reflex acts, the happy lie that this has never happened before. Not like this.) So I will forget, and rashly record along with Byron's anecdotes three items that have diverted me today. (I will also remind myself not to feel too reverent about the sacred text of a journal like Byron's, to keep in mind his hammy kind of role playing that led him to demonstrate rare sensitivity by ostentatiously eating only biscuits and soda water in public but stuffing in potatoes and chops when he thought he was unobserved.) Two of them came to me from Nick Baldwin.
     The first is his account of an event that occurred on one of the many single lane roads that twist between thick hedges on the Devonshire moors: A young man speeding along braked to a stop behind a car driven by an elderly lady. As she moved toward him in reverse, he backed up. She moved further toward him, and he retreated more rapidly. The retreating continued for more than half a mile, the woman waving her arms in warning and flashing her lights as she pursued him at an accelerating rate. Irritated, the young man moved backward even faster. So did the woman. Finally furious, the young man at last found a slight widening in the road, permitting him to try squeezing past the other car. As he drew abreast of the woman, she wound down her window and shouted, "Pig! Pig!" The young man cranked his window down and retorted, "Cow!" as he floored the accelerator. Still looking backward in indignation as his car rushed back into the ruts ahead of the woman's car, he crashed into a pig that had apparently been delaying the car behind which the young man had for so long been trapped.
     The second is Nick's favorite headline that appeared in a small local circulation Devon newspaper: "Snail found in milk bottle."
     The last one I'll include in this day's entry concerns a hand lettered sign Patty saw on a high wooden gate on a property just off Warwick Road in the Neithrop section of Banbury: "Beware of dog or else."
     I particularly value this last threatening placard as capable of providing real insight into one fairly prominent component of the English character, at least as I see it: full of blustering hostility discouraging approaches, because there is actually nothing altogether dreadful inside to protect the private fastness from incursion.
     In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion asked herself some of the same sort of questions about journal-keeping that I have been asking here. Looking back over some of her old notes, she admits to trouble in seeing why some of them found their way into her pages. She confesses that "our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable `I.'" Experiencing difficulty finding the relevance of many of her jottings, she finally sees their point: as access to time and self past:
     "I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the pepole"—that’s the way it's spelled in my copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and I think the typo is an inspired one—“we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were..."
     Maybe the greatest comfort a journal keeper like me can find is in remembering Willa Cather’s comment about authors: “I think people often write...for just one person…” Who is listening to me? I am. I am an audience I can deal with.
     Joseph Brodsky, I found almost a dozen years after finishing the lines above, had other comments about the practice:

”...once one realizes how much somebody's life is a hostage of one's own memory, one balks at the jaws of the past tense. Apart from anything else, it's too much like talking behind somebody's back, or like belonging to some virtuous, triumphant majority. One's heart should try to be more honest—if it can't be smarter—than one's grammar. Or else one should [p. 66] keep a journal whose entries, simply by definition, would keep that tense at bay." [p. 67] Joseph Brodsky, "Life and Letters: English Lessons from Stephen Spender," The New Yorker, 1/8/96, pp. 58-67.

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