The Would-Be Diarist

Credit: Alexey Fedorenko

II have reached the point in life in which most of the Christmas gifts I get are ones I have gotten for myself. Consequently, I approach the task with a certain unsentimental efficiency. The question is less what I want than what I need: a new sweater, a better overcoat, a smarter wristwatch. To acquire these items at Christmastime adds a certain jolliness to what would otherwise be practical purchases.

This Christmas, however, I took the liberty of giving myself a Christmas gift that was less a reflection of a nagging need than an expression of a wish for myself for the coming year: that, after a lifetime of trying, I could turn myself into a writer who maintains a daily diary.

Among the little stack of presents waiting for me after church services Wednesday morning was a “ledger book” from the leading journal and stationary maker, Levenger. Bound in cloth, the book holds 200 sturdy ruled pages whose vast blankness cry out to be filled with their owner’s thoughts—and their owner now is me.

From Flannery O’Connor to Dawn Powell, many of my favorite writers kept diaries, though few can claim greater steadfastness in the practice than Herman Wouk. The author of The Caine Mutiny, Youngblood Hawke, and The Winds of War had long been one of my favorite modern American novelists, but he jumped to the front of the pack when he revealed, in a memoir published when he was 100, that he had been maintaining a diary for most of those years. 

“Until recently I kept a frank private diary, which ran to more than a hundred bound volumes,” Wouk wrote in Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author. “It will remain private. Call it my nature, or a pose, or what you will, the adjective often attached to my name has been ‘reclusive.’ Now it must stand.”

I remember savoring those words: one hundred bound volumes. That Wouk could document his daily joys and woes with such constancy—and with no expectation that they would ever be made public—was an inspiration for someone who has been, his entire life, a reluctant and often failed diary-keeper. (I should note that Wouk’s assertion that the diaries will “remain” private is not entirely accurate: The author, who died in 2019 at age 103, gave his diaries to the Library of Congress, though, according to the Finding Aid to the Wouk collection, access to them is restricted until 2039.)

As for myself, I could never muster the candor to write for myself and myself alone, so my infrequent and entirely unsuccessful attempts at diary-keeping have consisted of self-conscious, self-important entries obviously meant to be read by some future reader—a frankly hilarious notion for a little-known writer of arts criticism and chronicler of the passing political scene. 

Later, the reasons for my reticence shifted. As a professional writer, I found myself constitutionally incapable of putting pen to paper without the promise of a paycheck. I even find it difficult to write a piece on “spec”—that is, without the go-ahead from an editor at a fine publication such as The American Conservative (subscribe!) and thus without the assurance of remuneration—so the idea that I would take the time away from my paying work to write for myself was anathema. 

Apart from elementary school journals that were assigned and graded by the teacher (and thus not real journals at all), the first diary I tried to keep was a notable failure. It, too, began with a Christmas present: When I was 13, my parents gave me a beautiful leather-bound diary book. I endeavored to fill it, but for months, I filled it with quotations by favorite authors. The diary became not a repository for my own thoughts but a collection of creeds by others. I took most of the quotes from Jill Krementz’s photography book The Writer’s Desk—itself a gift that same Christmas, which meant I was essentially transcribing the wisdom from one book I owned to another book I owned. I still remember some of the quotes I copied into my diary, including this one by novelist William Styron, speaking of the labors of his trade: “I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.” Indeed.

Yet some diary-keeping instinct stayed with me. About 25 years ago, I began keeping a record of every movie I saw in a movie theater. I’m sorry to report that this diary is not an actual diary but a mere Word document that has survived multiple computer crashes and software upgrades, but it still constitutes something of a guide through my life in motion pictures. The first movie I noted having seen was Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, which I saw at a local multiplex on January 16, 1999. I saw Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner on December 6, 2003, Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur on June 15, 2005, and Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth on July 22, 2009—you get the idea. The most recent movie I saw was Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 earlier this month. (December 2, to be exact.) Alas, even this ersatz diary was not even my idea: I began keeping the log after reading that the moviemaker Peter Bogdanovich (What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon) had accumulated a massive “card file” of every movie he saw as an adolescent and young man. Clearly I had a need to memorialize things, but how to memorialize my own life rather than the movies I saw or books I read?

My diary-keeping remained a notable failure until the last 12 months, when, after the death of my mother, I found myself jotting down thoughts, impressions, memories in whatever vessel happened to be near me at my desk: a daily calendar, a small notebook ostensibly used for story ideas. This habit convinced me that, maybe, I was finally ready to keep a diary for real.

If I can maintain the habit with anything like the faithfulness of Herman Wouk, I already know what I am giving myself next Christmas.