Delving into the private lives of the great and the good

Journals have been in the literary news recently, or more accurately the long awaited journals of John Cheever have been. A short story writer and novelist of transcendence among American suburban domesticity, one may have presumed him to be an Updike-esque housecat, happy to resolve his doubtless intriguing inner battles across the pages of his manuscripts.

Far from it though, as his lifetime of extensive journals, soon to be posthumously released (it is unclear whether this was his intention) contain years of intermittently repressed sexual confusion, brutally destructive alcoholism, and tortured family life, though this last part was largely in the public domain thanks to extensive biographies and family memoirs. So far, so classic twentieth century novelist, even if these demons did come as a mild surprise considering the nature of his work. The real surprise is that rumour has it these journals represent Cheever’s very finest literary crop.

Cheever is not the first writer to write readable journals. Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Anais Nin among scores have had theirs published to reasonable acclaim. What intruiges is that, if certain reviewers are to be believed, Cheever stands with only Samuel Pepys and the Danish literary philosopher Soren Kierkegaard as a writer who kept his very best work for the underside of the bed.

Bizarre. The immediate reaction is that the writer had every intention of being published, as a posthumous monument to their literary art. What self-discipline this must take! What patience, knowing one could never see the proceeds of the harvest! I don’t entirely buy this; Pepys wrote in a brutally tangentential code, Kafka famously asked Max Brod to construct a bonfire for all his work, any number of authors kept their own secrets hidden, and the masterpieces we discover are only the foiling of these best laid plans. The quality of the small cross section we know of is remarkable.

However, reading such work certainly puts me, and I would tentatively suggest you, to shame. Drawing on a mixture of personal experience and voyeurism, uniquely personal journals (in comparison to blogs, which are singularly for attention seekers who can’t get published) are largely immature nonsense, a mixture of the hideously embarrassing, banal, and indecipherable. The contents of the day, whether as a second-year undergraduate in a one horse town or as John Cheever, will inevitably be hideously dull. Meals and walking between buildings are the facts. What goes on between the ears is, on paper, utter nonsense. I don’t think anyone cares that my fourteen year old self read too much into some poor girl on the bus accidently leaving her schoolbag against my knee. And neither do I particularly feel the need to share this with anyone (note I give a rather old example). Best to keep silent.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with putting to paper what you wish; on the contrary it’s as good a release as punching inanimate objects and better than stewing all night with the lights out.

Perhaps though, hope beyond hope, greater ambition could change not just memories, but the present itself. Woolf, Kierkegaard, John Cheever. All managed to stay truthful to their lives, and it is essential to not self consciously build grand narratives across the prosaic curvature of another grey day.

But life can be well expressed in a number of ways, and we should not be scared to attach beauty and importance to our own trials and experiences. Life can be something more important than the cold logic of hour by hour digressions and putting it on paper with an artistic approach may well express this better than any cold mental analysis could.

Perhaps I could communicate, not necessarily by showing my work but by self-realisation, that my life, slow as it may seem, is a life like any other of a hero or a villain or a nobody I read about. Perhaps, by putting my life down on paper, I could change it. It could attain a structure, a poignancy in its quiet moments, an appreciation of the forces that otherwise lead me buffeted around with no direction. As John Cheever showed, what may leave the pen of the author as a mess may reach the eye of the reader as a transcendence.