There is one further fundamental stipulation I would make: no true journal worthy of the name can be published while its author is alive. Only a posthumous appearance guarantees the prime condition of honesty. However interesting, journals and diaries published while their author is alive seem to me (with very few exceptions) to be bogus in some crucial way. This is particularly true of politicians’ journals — Clark, Benn, Castle et al. They have a different agenda (their very publication makes that point) and thus they can’t be totally honest, certainly not about their author, and thus they lose their legitimacy as true journals — they’ve sacrificed that potent alchemy of confession and confidentiality that all great journals require — for the quick fix of controversy and renown. If you’re going to publish your intimate journal while you are still alive you reduce it to another category of writing — your journal becomes a form of bastard-journalism or bastard-autobiography. There’s something inherently contradictory about being a living writer acclaimed for your published journals: you have to be dead to escape the various charges of vanity, of special-pleading, of creeping amour-propre. More to the point, because of these suspicions, we can’t read such journals in the same way: only the posthumous journal can be read purely.
However parochial they are, however apparently insignificant the entries, the pages of a journal offer us, as readers, a chance to live the writer’s life as he or she lived it, after he or she has lived it. On occasion, we are provided with the curious godlike knowledge of their destiny. Reading Virginia Woolf on 26 February 1941, a month before she commits suicide, provokes a bizarre conjunction of subjectivity and objectivity. She comments: “Food becomes an obsession. I grudge giving away a spice bun. Curious — age or the war? Never mind. Adventure. Make solid. But shall I ever write again one of those sentences that gives me intense pleasure?” We actually know the negative answer to that question: we share the quiddity of her day and at the same time note that her vital clock is nearly wound down. Similarly, on 16 May 1763 James Boswell writes: “I drank tea at Mr Davies’s in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see. Mr Davies introduced me to him. As I knew his mortal antipathy to the Scotch, I cried to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come from.’” As he describes his first sight of Dr Johnson we participate in the thrill of the young man’s meeting with the literary lion but there’s an extra frisson delivered by the foreknowledge that the mortal antipathy won’t frustrate the riches that ensued from that encounter.
But often we read with the same ignorance as that of the journal-keeper as he writes. The mundane flow of the day engulfs us similarly. Francis Kilvert notes on 21 September 1870: “Went to the Bronith. People at work in the orchard gathering up the windfall apples for early cider. The smell of the apples very strong. Beyond the orchards the lone aspen was rustling loud and mournfully a lament for the departure of summer.” We are with Kilvert that day. “The smell of the apples very strong” bears a kind of witness to 21 September 1870 that has as cogent and undeniable a validity as any other. Which brings me to the final characteristic of journal-keeping: it is the most democratic form of writing available, perhaps even more so than a letter. The letter presupposes another person in order to function; the intimate journal is designed to be read by only one pair of eyes, the author’s (even though others may be hoped for one distant day). Therefore it is judged by standards of truth, integrity, honesty and immediacy that require no special education, talent or gift. Poetry, the novel, biography, the essay and journalism are weighed up by different criteria, different forms of evaluation — and therefore different categories of success and failure too. D. H. Lawrence defined the novel as “the bright book of life.” Not everyone can write a novel but everyone is, in theory, capable of keeping a journal. And if you keep a journal — a true intimate journal — then it becomes, in a real sense, the book of your life and is therefore a unique document. But there is more to it than simply that, I feel, for we all share the same fate and — as we live, as long as we live — we all submit to the same condition: the human condition. In that case, then, the book of a life, an intimate journal — if it is true, if it is honest — will speak to everyone who has a chance to read it: it will be, in a curious way, both completely individual and universal. This is what happens when we read a journaclass="underline" “The smell of the apples very strong” is, in its own way, perfect and unimprovable—21 September 1870 is fixed for us, for ever.
2003
Three French Novels
I write these words in France on the eve of war [the invasion and occupation of Iraq]. A few days ago I travelled from London to my house, not far from Bordeaux in the south-west, by train, stopping off, en route, for a few hours in Paris. Fortuitously, I have covered a great swathe of this country and the weather, for March, is sublime: cool, dry and sunny — the hedgerows and the plum trees are dense with blossom. And to sit on a wicker chair in a Parisian sidewalk cafe with a cold beer on the table and the sun slanting warmly on the façade of the Louvre is to reinforce the abiding impression that there is no city in the world as beautiful as Paris and that — surely, also — France is the best country in the world when it comes to the quality of life. The things that give us pleasure, the buildings we see, the landscapes we traverse, what we drink, what we eat, what stimulates us aesthetically, and so on, seem to have been sorted out better here, if I can put it that way. Centuries of refinement have created a country where even the simplest, most democratic pleasures — a loaf of bread, a café au lait, a glass of wine — have a depth of meaning, a quality of enrichment that is somehow lacking elsewhere.
But there is another side to France, a more complex, darker one that coexists with its sophisticated hedonism, and the three books I’ve chosen all in their own way exemplify this admixture. Rather than range through French literature and select a Molière with a Proust and a Sainte-Beuve, or a Rimbaud with a Racine and a Montaigne, I have deliberately limited myself to the twentieth-century novel. On no other country in Europe (with the possible exception of Germany) does the last century cast such a sombre shadow and each of these novels hints at or explores the three great traumas France has endured during those hundred years and still endures today.