AMIEL, HENRY FRÉDÉRIC (Geneva, 1821–1881). Owes his literary fame almost exclusively to the book Amiel’s Journal, published posthumously in 1883, in which this Swiss writer displays a rare talent as a highly astute psychological observer. He examines himself very well, although as a reader, on finishing his diary, I was left with the suspicion that to know oneself well is a bore and leads nowhere. I remembered a character of Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, who says, or rather cries, “I know myself, but that is all.” That aside, a remark of Amiel in his diary has always made me laugh: “These pages act as confidant, by which I mean as friend and wife.”
To tell the truth — and let’s not forget that I have commended myself to the god of truthfulness — I would never have been able to say, for example, “These pages act as confidant, by which I mean as Tongoy and Rosa.”
This diary has never served as my confidant, and I don’t think I have ever wanted it to. But the truth is that it has served for other things. Last year, to go no further, it served as a refuge for me when I suffered a tragic case of writer’s block after publishing Nothing Ever Again, my book about writers who give up writing. I spent several months devoid of ideas for a new book, as if I were being punished for having written about those who stop writing. But the diary helped me to survive, I began to record all kinds of trivialities, which are so common in this genre, and I went so far as to describe in minute detail, for example, the cracks in the ceiling of my study. I would write about anything just to avoid feeling completely blocked. And it worked, the diary helped me.
Somebody might think that this block which made me take refuge in the diary is very similar to what happened to Amiel, but this is not the case, far from it. Amiel spent his whole life blocked as an artist and taking refuge in his diary, whereas I was tragically unable to write only for a very short period. I soon overcame my problem, I overcame it in November of last year, in the city of Nantes, when, driven by a mysterious impulse, I began to turn my diary into a literary work that might easily require a reader. In fact I went to Nantes with the idea that this city — where I had been invited to some Rencontres littéraires espagnols, the city of Jacques Vaché, one of the heroes in my Nothing Ever Again and a character I have always believed to bring me good luck — could be an ideal place to start having ideas for new books again. So I traveled to Nantes with some hope — not a lot — that this city could be a key factor in my artistic recovery, I went to the city of Vaché with a certain timid hope, but without ever losing sight of a sentence Amiel wrote in his diary, which kept up my spirits, but also my guard, in the face of possible new events: “Every hope is an egg that may produce a serpent instead of a dove.”
DALÍ, SALVADOR (Figueres, 1904–1989). An infinitely better writer than painter. When I was very young, I used to have a great time in Cadaqués reading Diary of a Genius a few steps away from his house. I knew some of its passages by heart and would recite them in gatherings with friends, I remembered passages like this one: “How can I doubt that everything that happens to me is enormously exceptional?” I liked this excerpt very much, because in it he was laughing at the diaries of writers with mediocre experiences. “Today I received the visit of three perfectly stupid Swedes.” I write this sentence down from memory, because I didn’t manage to find it in my copy of Diary of a Genius. Might I have invented it? If so, I beg the Swedes’ pardon.
From this diary I also recall a reference to an illness of the stomach and bowels which he considered heaven-sent: “Bravo! This illness is a gift from God! I wasn’t ready yet. I wasn’t worthy yet to undertake the bowels and thorax of my Corpus Hypercubicus.”
This vision of illness as something particularly positive and heaven-sent reminds me a lot of what happened in Nantes when I arrived in this city out of sorts, sick in soul, though with my hopes pinned on the Vaché factor, and very soon my evil was turned to good. But I shall deal with this in GIDE, ANDRÉ (Paris, 1869–1951), the next entry in this dictionary.
To tell the truth, I prefer the diary that Dalí wrote as a young man and which was published recently in Catalonia. These adolescent pages are superior to Diary of a Genius, they are more spontaneous, and the permanent display of talent is less forced.
An hour ago, I called the poet Pere Gimferrer to ask him which of Dalí’s two diaries he likes more: “Why do you want to know?” Gimferrer, who always wants to know everything, asked me. “I don’t know if I want to know,” I told him, “really I called you so that you would appear in the diary I’m writing, which has turned into a novel and dictionary and looks less and less like a diary, especially since I started talking about things from the past, maybe that’s why I rang you, perhaps to have something to relate that occurred today, that happened this Thursday in real life, I need a bit of the present.”
Short silence at the other end of the line.
“If you want,” Gimferrer suddenly spoke, “I’ll tell you what for me most defines and distinguishes a writer’s diary.” “Excellent idea,” I replied. “What defines and distinguishes it,” he told me, “is the perspective it adopts, the tone or timbre of voice, and therefore the moral existence of the individual writing.”
“I understand you, I understand you very well,” I told him. Renewed silence. “Do you want to add something else?” I asked. “Don’t forget,” he told me, “that a diary’s real substance is not external events, but the author’s moral evolution.”
“Thanks, Pere,” I replied. “Thank you, now I can include some daily life in the diary, thanks a lot.”
“No problem. La vie est belle,” the poet said. And hung up.
GIDE, ANDRÉ (Paris, 1869–1951). In an unintentional way, this writer’s diary tells the story of someone who spent his life seeking to write a masterpiece and did not achieve it. Or perhaps he did achieve it, and paradoxically that great book would be the diary in which he reflected the daily search for that masterpiece.
With the possible exception of Paludes—a short work of genius, which could have been written by Queneau — the rest of what Gide wrote is fairly illegible nowadays, the modern reader sees it as something strange, archaic, distant. The diary, on the other hand, though it falls short of the masterpieces of Proust and his contemporaries, is today a literary milestone, one of the great writers’ diaries that exists, it is a pleasure to read, most of all because it is connected with a highly intelligent tone or timbre of voice and because it presents, with all its light and shade and going beyond this—“the excellent and the worst. Too easy, ah! not to see more than the one or the other”—the fascinating complexity that can arise in the soul of a man seeking to find an end to the search, to the spirit’s agitation.
Unlike so many mediocre diarists who tediously hand out their notebooks as if they were the parish newsletter, Gide is always a set of essential newsletters, he never confuses literature with literary life. It is also possible to read the pages of his diary like a novel — Gide transformed the genre, he was a pioneer in the use of the fictitious diary — which recounts, over a period of no less than sixty-three years, the intimate and spiritual path of a man who throughout his life inquired into the premise that upholds the principle of morality, although he also inquired into that which upholds the principle of immorality.
I have always noted his sympathy for illnesses, I think he saw in them the starting point for feverish creative activity. “I believe that illnesses,” he writes in his diary, February 6, 1944, “are keys that can unlock certain doors for us. There is a state of good health that does not allow us to understand it all […]. I have yet to meet someone who boasts that he has never been ill who is not also a bit stupid; the same as someone who takes pride in having never traveled.”