Privat (sic) Keep Out: The Diary as Secret Space

So far as I know I never wrote in it, not a single entry. Yet I dearly loved the diary I was given at the age of nine or ten. I recall with affection its green leather cover, the charm of its tiny lock, with its matching, minuscule key. Looking back, I think it was the lock that intrigued me most of all—the lock whose presence signaled the expectation that one might write in the diary what no one else would read.

I already knew about seeing my words in print. The school I attended was in the vanguard of experimental, progressive education. It was in keeping with the school's philosophy to instruct eleven-year-olds in typesetting and the safe operation of small presses, and then to give them the school magazine to edit and to print; it was part of the school's ethos to foster the view that if writing was something one happened to do well, its value was not as a source of personal gratification but rather insofar as it enabled contributions to the school as microcosm. From the time I was seven-years-old, my poems had been appearing in the school magazine. So, as I have noted above, I already knew about seeing my words in print. The lock, with its implicit recommendation that writing might be done for one's self, forthe sake of writing, must have intrigued me. But I doubt that I saw its presence as an invitation.

Subsequently, which is to say by the time I entered college, I became interested in physiology and then psychology with a special interest in child development. It was by this unlikely route that I became interested in children's books.

It is important to state that I do not offer these memories of the diary not used—the road not taken—with a sense of deprivation or of opportunity missed. My satisfaction in having become a writer has more to do with being able to say things that I care about to others—especially if they are children—than with joy in the writing itself. If this is in a direct, developmental line from early school experiences, so is my fascination with words per se. Thus, at age eleven, I and my classmates learned to set type and all the rest of it. At twelve, we moved from concrete involvement with language elements (the type) to abstract engagement with language through the study of words, their origin and history. This brought a fascination that has never left. I love to tell students that our word umbrella shares its etymological past with umber, the color, and umbrage, to take offense, and that all have to do with making or taking shade.

Other influences and circumstances were certainly of importance. Suffice it to say that it interests me that those aspects of early schooling are congenial, still, with the ways in which I think about my self, my work, my interests, and my values—and that I retain such a clear impression of that small, green leather book.

In 1980, to everyone's astonishment including my own, I received the John Newbery Medal, the American Book Award, and several other honors equally valued but less well known, for A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal 1830-32. As the title implies it was, and is, a work of historical fiction for children. At the time of the award I had been a teacher of graduate and undergraduate courses in language arts and children's literature for more than twenty years and was secure in that identity. The book began in an avocational mode and I had researched and written it slowly—mostly between semesters and during summer vacations.

Initially I had no intention to publish. I just wanted to see if I could so fully identify with the nineteenth century that I would be able to write from its perspective. This was part of the motivation for choosing the journal form. Another part was relief: if I cast my story as a diary, I wouldn't be required to know about details such as the floors of rural dwellings. Would they have been left bare, or decorated? And if so, how?

It seemed to me that this was the exactly the sort of thing that a truly omniscient (from the Latin omni= all, plus scientia = knowing) author would be required to know and describe but which, on the other hand, a diarist would not be expected to report. Eventually I changed my mind about not publishing the faux diary I had created. I did so even though I knew that it would require compromise on my part, for example the inclusion of dialogue and "opening up" the text in other ways as well. In its final form the manuscript bore less resemblance to a true diary than did earlier versions.

A Gathering of Days was well but quietly received. However, a much livelier flurry of interest followed the awarding of the Newbery Medal. And that was when I began to be asked if, like the book's central figure, I'd been a writer of journals. It didn't take long for me to discover that my honest answer was a disappointment. People wanted me to have kept a journal, to be a type that conformed to type, to have been a child for whom a diary's pages offered welcome solitude.

I could not satisfy them then. And now, having come on the idea that writing in a diary may be akin to inhabiting a secret space—to creating and furnishing it—I am again obliged to acknowledge that I do not and cannot speak from my own experience: no diary, no play house, no secret space; not even the longing for one.

But Clare Costello, who was then the children's book editor at Scribner's (a division which no longer exists, having been "folded into" Atheneum as a Simon & Schuster imprint), and the Newbery Committee for the 1980 award, and readers young and old seem to have found A Gathering of Days convincing as a diary, albeit a fictional one. In this connection I recall with special fondness a visit to a fifth grade classroom. I had talked about the process of writing the book and emphasized the preparatory phase—the reading, the field trips, the study of documents and artifacts in libraries and museums. For the benefit of these fifth graders and to dramatize my comments I showed and interpreted two nineteenth-century items—a shopkeeper's ledger and a doll-sized quilt. Then it was time for questions. A girl raised her hand at the far back of the room. "Where did you find the journal?" she asked. "Did you have to change it much?"

I should also note that although my personal experience may be limited to the creation of a fictional journal, I have certainly heard about the real ones! I know how important it is that they not be invaded and that unauthorized readings by parents, siblings, and others may lead to tantrums and tears. I understand that young diarists whose journals are not equipped with locks often protect them with fierce notices: DO NOT READ (twice underlined), PRIVAT (sic) KEEP OUT.[1]

It appears that although there is a long tradition of diary-keeping by girls, the privacy part is new. Perhaps this is because at one time maintaining a journal was not about expressing the personal. Rather it appears to have been regarded as a genteel means for improving one's language skills, including penmanship. Maybe, when nineteenth-century girls submitted their journals to their mothers for review, it didn't feel very different from presenting their compositions to their teachers for correction. I have recently had occasion to read excerpts from diaries kept by Louisa May Alcott as a young woman and by "young ladies" (girls) who sailed on whalers and merchant ships captained by their fathers, and the "journal letters" kept by their mothers. In an excellent article on the remarkable diary kept from 1810-11 by seven-year-old Marjory Fleming, Alexandra Johnson speaks of the diary as "so long the approved forum for a girl's creativity."[2] But that doesn't answer the question about when it became a personal record not to be seen by others. Nor can I.

I am going to make the guess that young (female) diarists began to guard their words at about the same time that their mothers got the vote, entered the workplace, shortened their dresses and bobbed their hair. But I am not going to make a case of it because what matters here is that today the expectation of privacy is characteristic and important: girls who keep diaries expect them not to be read by others and are outraged if they are invaded.

As to why diary-keeping typically begins for third and fourth graders, having sufficient skills to make it possible must be one factor. Also, retiring to write of one's self and for one's self may be the reciprocal of reading's escapist value. This, too, is a reward reserved for the reasonably proficient and again the age at which it is typically attained suggests third and fourth graders.

It must be wonderful to come newly upon the idea that stories take place in places, and that you go there when you read! I am reminded of Emily Dickinson who celebrated the book as a "bequest of wings" and put into words the thought that:

 
And I have always felt indebted to Nancy Mitford for the story she tells of a conversation she once had with an old fellow up in Maine:

 
But I have to admit that a part of me objects. "Yes, of course," I want to say, "but the really best thing about reading is how books let you understand what's right in front of you, including your own self!" Alice may not have put it very nicely but pragmatism as well as romanticism has its place in this world.

Paul Klee once said something to the effect that the function of art is not to reproduce the visible, e.g., reality, but to render it visible. Do young readers sense this? A young Abraham Lincoln is said to have chosen as a flyleaf inscription:

 
Taken from the anonymous, block-printed alphabet that appeared in edition after edition of The New England Primer, the lines suggest that there is privacy and closeness in the relationship to a book. Connection. Possession. Permanence. Love. And if this can be true of feelings related to the books one reads, what transpires when one writes, when one returns to the same, bound set of pages to set down observations, thoughts, feelings?

For readers and writers alike, some possibility of "re-entry" is certainly and enjoyably there. But the writer's role, being the creative one, is necessarily more active. I suggest that what happens when one writes is more like play than reading, and that when a diarist—young or old but typically female—quietly and privately returns to her diary's pages, it is very like returning to one of childhood's special, secret places—well loved and well guarded. And I think that that kind of writing, as is true also of play, provides rather more than distraction and more, also, than escape.

So let us tiptoe away from the youthful diarists I've conjured up, leaving them to their writing. I want to turn, if briefly, to an actual diary which for reasons intrinsic and otherwise, has probably become the best-known diary of the twentieth century. It was composed as secret writing in a secret place. It was made public by excruciating circumstances, its pages exposed, scattered on the floor from which they were rescued—a saving denied the writer. I am, of course, talking about The Diary of a Young Girl and of Anne Frank.

Until the writing of this essay called her diary to mind as a most fitting example, I had not reread it in a good many years. An element I had forgotten is that each entry is addressed to Kitty, to "Dear Kitty" in fact, and each one closes as a letter does, "Yours, Anne." It is as if Anne, in the enclosed society of "the secret annex," and lacking a confidante, has taken a fictional character as a friend.[4]

Having established this epistolary premise, Anne's tone, as she examines feelings and reports events, is absolutely consistent. She describes things as if continuing to hold up her end of an ongoing correspondence. On the other hand, if one disregards the formulaic salutations and closings, one can hear Anne's words as a conversation that has only one side and which can be relied upon to be held in confidence. Even more salient is the very real and significant way in which the engagement, however unilateral and fictional, enhances her self-awareness.[5]

 
While not knowing what to make of it, I find it interesting that the reality of the diary is recognized by Anne ("I turned over some pages of my diary") within the conceit of the letter which itself contains reference to prior letters which were, of course, diary entries.

In quite a different connection, the editors of Louisa May Alcott's journals note that their publication complements the prior publication of her letters because:

 
With regard to Anne's juxtaposed use of the two forms, one senses that some very complex thinking and fantasizing (thefictional Kitty as personal friend and exterior persona) are going on here and that they seem interdependent.

But what is it about diaries? Not just Anne Frank's diary, written as it was under extraordinary circumstances by a gifted adolescent (who might, or might not, have become an outstanding adult writer). If any life is "ordinary" in the usual sense of the word once one begins to examine it, what is the meaning and importance of diaries written by ordinary girls in ordinary circumstances?

Somewhat presumptuously but not, I hope, preposterously, I turn to A Gatheringof Days, the book I wrote entirely as a thirteen-year-old's journal. One of the glories of writing about fiction is that no one—not even a ghost—can complain, "That's not how it was at all." All the better if the fiction exampled is one's own, for who can better the authority of the one who wrote it?[8] It must be acknowledged, however, that this alters the situation so that the questions posed above (What is it about diaries, etc.) now ask something else: What, if anything, did I learn from the writing of this book (including the extended research phase) that might shed light on the subject of youthful diaries?

I cite first of all the realization that the documents which were the most compelling, and which gave the greatest impression of intimacy, were made of the most mundane statements: so many rows planted today (spring); so many jars put up today (fall). So-and-so to visit. Where the references are to events as familiar as the passing of seasons, domestic activities, or social exchanges, it doesn't take sophisticated writing to create (imply) the whole.

Another insight: an important element in finding and maintaining a literal secret space (which then becomes the location of individual or peer group play) is being able to return to it so that it is possible to pick up and go on from wherever one left off. The same is true of diaries—cf., Anne's turning over "some pages" of hers.

Are there other commonalties? I think so. When groups of children form clubs, one of the first things they do is invent a sign or password. Then they find a space to which only those who know the sign (or password) are to be admitted. Whether by lock or notice, diaries, too, are guarded.

It further strikes me as pertinent that the diarist chooses what will be included; only that which she wants to include will be included in the record she is creating. The same is true when a child, or children, play. They decide what will happen, who will/will not be present. This is not to say that all will be bright. That is a different matter. Just that consciously or otherwise the content as written or played out has been selected as a fitting element of an ongoing narrative. Its very ongoingness affords opportunity for reflection, examination, and trial (imagined) correction—the interior processes that may enable actual coming to terms. In the fragment quoted above Anne reveals that her writing helped her in her struggles with her mother. Catherine, the diary-keeping protagonist of A Gathering of Days, notes that, "This year, more than others, has been a lengthy gathering of days wherein we lived, we loved, were moved; learned how to accept."[9]

Are diaries "secret spaces" in the sense intended by the editors of this collection? Does the writing of them constitute withdrawal to a somewhere that is wholly one's own, that no one else can enter? Is withdrawal, which has a rather melancholy ring, the right word to use? Presumably, for some, diary writing is joyous.

It seems to me that there is good basis for thinking that the diary is (or can be) a secret (Keep Out) space. And I would like to suggest that for those who can make it so, it is not necessary to live in a house with an attic, have a yard with a tree big enough to support a tree house or, as an urban dweller, be born into a family sufficiently affluent to have extra residential space even if only the bottom part of a closet. A diary takes up very little room. Once secluded within the process of writing, what can happen on those pages is truly without limit.

NOTES

1. Statement, complete with misspelling, reported by a friend.

2. Alexandra Johnson, "The Drama of Imagination: Marjory Fleming and her Diaries," Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature, Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle & Naomi Sokoloff, eds. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 81.

3. Nancy Mitford, "De Memoria," The Writer and Her Works, Janet Sternberg, ed. (New York: Norton, 1980), 37.

4. In a personal communication from Dr. Heiman van Dam I recently learned that Kitty is the name of one of the characters in a series of books written for girls that was extremely popular in the Netherlands at the time of Anne's childhood. And was, in fact, her favorite reading. The series is still read there today. The author was Cissy van Marxveldt. The series is named after the protagonist Joop ter Heul. I understand that van Dam plans to include a summary of pertinent aspects of this series in his forthcoming book Anne Frank's Diaries: A Developmental Study, to be published by International Universities Press.

5. The thought that this very much resembles the patient's side of psychotherapy is inescapable.

6. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 167.

7. Joel Meyerson, Daniel Shealy & Madeleine B. Stern, eds., The Journals of Louisa May Alcott (New York: Little, Brown, 1989), 38.

8. This is an attractive but specious remark. Others have commented on elements of my books of which I was not aware.

9. Joan W. Blos, A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32 (New York: Scribner, 1979), 140.