For so long I didn’t know what to do with these diaries, these notes on my quotidian as an unpublished woman writer and my studies of the mad wives, like Anaïs Nin wondering whether to frame her diary as fiction, or Jane Bowles with her novel trapped inside of her notebooks, her character Emmy Moore writing a fictionalized journal, hoping for publication. Throughout I was struggling like these women to transmute my memories and experiences into fiction. FICTION was the lofty, the only goal, the god. Other “characters”: not me. Perhaps this struggle contributed somewhat to Jane Bowles’ block. The struggle to transcend her life, how to fictionalize her own material.
Anaïs Nin also agonized over the material in her journal, how to convert it into fiction. Every year Nin applied for the Guggenheim fellowship (and was rejected) — proposing a project to convert all of her diaries into one long novel. That portrait of her in the vault at UCLA, her hair in the elegant chignon, surrounded by her diaries, which numbered 65 at the time. Her diaries were so easy and fluid for her. Anaïs Nin would spend hours, literally her days, writing in her diary. It was her chosen form, a form often considered illegitimate and dangerous as a compulsion, like Zelda’s dancing.
I think of how important a role the diary played in the processes of women writers that I adore (Jean Rhys, Emily Holmes Coleman, Elizabeth Smart, Virginia Woolf, all passionate diarists). There is now a movement coming out of feminism to appreciate and rediscover the private writings of women, to recover female authors and reappraise the brilliance of texts previously reduced to the ephemeral, the archival, such as Alix Roubaud’s notebooks, recently published by Dalkey Archive Press, or the collected writings of Laure, published at City Lights, or Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diaries. However there is still the sense that these works are valuable often because of their connection to a famous literary man (Jacques Roubaud, Georges Bataille, Henry Miller).
Yet the diary is often still considered an inferior form of writing by both critics and the culture-at-large. Elizabeth Hardwick especially is devastating in her dismissal of the scribbling sister, this definitively feminine literary tradition. In her essays on Jane Carlyle and Dorothy Wordsworth, she categorizes the diarist as the amateur, not the professional, ideas also echoed by Simone de Beauvoir.
This also makes me think of Hardwick’s vitriolic takedown of Anaïs Nin’s first book, Under A Glass Bell. Why does she hate me so much? Nin wonders in her diary after the review. There’s a lot of this disgust and hatred towards Nin by other women writers. I also wonder at this — perhaps it’s because Edmund Wilson was now courting Nin, and writing about her self-published book in The New Yorker, of all places. Perhaps Hardwick was playing mean girl/defensive best friend to Mary M. God I love literary gossip.
The diary especially is read through the context of modernism as a form of automatic writing, but worse, of automatic feeling, it is the intensity of emotions expressed that seems to render it unserious, unliterary, which connects in general to literature by women that comes out of the diary form. This is because girls write in a diary.
Rainer Maria Rilke in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge who laughs softly at the young girls writing in their diaries, imagining their hearts and animals drawn. But he was writing a diary too, or he distinguished it as a notebook and then fictionalized it, novelized it, based on his own journals he kept in his early, anonymous years in Paris. Yet it is read as great literature (quite deservedly), read as philosophy, as are Camus’ notebooks and Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet and Bataille’s Guilty. Why isn’t Colette Peignot’s name mentioned in Guilty? Perhaps to make his suffering about the war, about spirituality, into something universal — that attempt towards the transcendent in literature, which often involves erasing the girl.
But what about her book of disquiet? Often the girl-diarist’s efforts are read as necessarily cliché in the failed attempt to render something more original, to articulate a yearning emptiness and isolation. Yet can’t we also read her diary as a theater of potential great feeling and discovery, of experimentalism and play?
The keeping of the diary is seen as a girlish, self-involved act to Simone de Beauvoir, who writes, “The girl who speaks to her notebook the way she used to speak to her dolls, as a friend, as a confidant, and addresses it as if it were a person.” Yet girls write in diaries as a way to navigate and create who they are, the distance between their private agonistes and the self that is supposed to smile. A diary as a way for girls to be kept safe, to feel free to write her emotions and nascent ideas without being disciplined.
This is often the mode that allows her to come to writing — perhaps this is why it’s so widely derided as not literary or seen as raw material. Yet the diary is part of the girl’s process — a way to do the work. And of course now we write our diaries in public, for all to see.
First her LiveJournal. Now her Tumblr. So many of these Tumblr spaces are gorgeously written. Many of these girls identify intensely as writers, as artists. These visual notebooks fetishize the handmade, the handwritten, the deeply-felt, posting images of their own painfully scrawled notes, or reposting others’ love letters or diary entries or handwritten affirmations or pages of lovingly-kept journals, feeling a resonance in others’ words, which calls to mind the textdrawings of the plaintive scribble by Louise Bourgeois or Tracey Emin. An Arcades Project of her fragments, the girl at her locker, her own mood board — as diverse and fragmented as she is — often elegantly composed yet chaotic, at turns intense, emo, promiscuous, gorgeous, dizzying, jarring, anarchic, irreverent, cinephilic, consumed, consuming, wanting, witty, violent, self-loathing or self-doubting, suicidal, broken, brave, banal, brilliant, plaintive, porny, screaming, abject, authentic, starved, starving, sentimental.
On these Tumblrs, girls collage images of other girls in rapid succession, an ideal mirror, from polished starlets all evening-gowned to streetscenes of trainwreck yet still glamorous former child stars to 20s flappers to goth suicide girls to couture layouts to posed modelly pretty girls to film stills of French New Wave actresses like Anna Karina or screenshots of films like Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (and Coppola’s melancholy dreaminess in that film informs the aesthetics of many a Tumblr, interesting because the film and the novel it is based on, by Jeffrey Eugenides, is narrated by the neighborhood boys, who wonder after the interior life of the departed Lisbon sisters, who they imagine as mystic-muses). Also strung out with punk-rock or pithy slogans, quotes from Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath or Friedrich Nietzsche, or a quote from Fernando Pessoa next to a quote from, say, Nicholas Sparks or Twlight. Counterpointed with jokey dialogue in TV shows or visual mash notes to famous crush objects. I like this new model of the reader I see online: the girl as ecstatic and promiscous reader, both craving the radical thrust and the sentiment. And their authorship has as its dominating ethos homage and plagiarism (how Kathy Acker would have loved these Tumblrs).
And in this subsubcommunity of literary blogs I’ve come into contact with through FFIMS, many of us also read and write like girls. It is perhaps not “serious” criticism, but intensely personal and emotional. A new sort of subjectivity is developing online — vulnerable, desirous, well-versed in both pop culture and contemporary writing and our literary ancestors. We write in public (in our blogs, on our Tumblrs, in comments sections on other’s blogs, on Facebook) a new, glib, casual, entirely feminine form of criticism that takes the form at times of heroine-worship. A fan fiction. We read, intensely and emotionally, like Emma Bovaries. We read like girls, often prone to passion and superlatives — passing around books like love letters in the mail. These spaces operate as safe havens to be all sorts of identities at once, to be excessive, to feel and desire deeply.