The Read: Benjamin Anastas, "The Most Ambitious Diary in History", New Yorker Nov. 8 2021
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this article?
Well, technically, because the New Yorker comes to my house every week. Here the question is “Why did I read this article?” because I don’t read every article in every issue of the New Yorker. For example, when I see it’s a lengthy profile of Jake Paul, every fiber of my body says “No, I’m not reading that, no matter what.” In this case, I started reading because I’m interested in diaries, because the author of the diary in question was a professor whom I hadn’t heard of before, and because Anastas hooked me pretty strongly at the outset. Plus I’d seen a bit of social media chatter about the article.
Is it what I thought it was?
No strong preconceptions. I didn’t even know that the diary’s author was (maybe) the model for a character in The Secret History.
I think the thing that most stuck with me is not Claude Fredericks, the Bennington professor who wrote the diary, but Fredericks’ intense conviction that his diary was a replacement for the novel. More on that in a bit.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I could see teaching a historical methods class that had three or four weeks on diaries, which are mostly in archival terms the opposite of Fredericks’—they’re not reflective or revealing of secrets until the late 19th Century, and even then, not very much.
This article might be a great fit for a history of the novel course, leading into talking about autofiction, but that’s somebody else’s course.
I do think there’s something to be said about blogging vs. literary diaries, and more on that shortly as well.
Quotes
“Fredericks’s lecture, in fact, proposes dropping the illusions of fiction altogether. He makes a case for immersing readers in a subjective record of an individual’s experience, in ‘real time’, complete with all the errors, vagueness, lies and mystifications that we engage in when we try to justify ourselves to ourselves. A journal is a ‘living thing,’ he says; a novel is a ‘taxidermist’s replica.’”
“If and when Fredericks's journal is precisely catalogued, it may well prove to be the longest continuous record of an American life on paper—in any case, it’s certainly among the longest.”
“At once more addictively engrossing and fatally tedious than anything else I have read, it is the strange chronicle of a ‘great’ man whose genius is recognized almost exclusively by the chronicler himself.”
“‘How had Claude learned to love?’ Merrill asks in wonder. By this he means loving another man so intensely and unapologetically. As he describes it, Fredericks’s emotional capacities were strengthened by a daily regimen of self-education—Plato, Augustine, St. Francis, Freud.”
“It was an archive nearly as long, and as excruciating, as a human life.”
“‘I got a whole lot of Claude,’ he [Langdon Hammer] said. ‘More than I needed. There’s a prevalence of logorrheic, unfashioned writing. It was often confusing to wade through.’”
“The experience generated a profound dissonance. For all the effort that Fredericks put into completing his journal project—an essential element is missing: he was not a good writer. He did not instinctively make judicious choices on the page, whether recounting a dramatic episode or offering a lengthy evocation of the pleasures of gardening in Vermont at the height of summer.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
The article gave me a lot to think about. There’s Fredericks’ central idea: that fiction is artifice and journals are the complex truth of experience. I’m a bit drawn to the thought behind it even as I know it’s a naive (and not entirely original) thought. It reminds me of my own frequent objection to social science that I find reductionist, that trying to make human life something that can be hypothesized about and measured, trying to make it tractable for management and intervention, excises everything real and complicated about human beings—and thus ends up delivering policies or politics that fails because of that excision. It’s the something of the animating thought behind a book I’m trying to finish right now, that the way we talk about agency in modern African history tends to be attached to sketches of collective and individual life that are simplified, unidimensional, and far too instrumental.
So many problem, though. No matter how complete the journal, it’s still incomplete. It’s language outside the mind; it’s not a real-time record of consciousness. It’s a literary Hawthorne effect: the determination to record everything affects everything being recorded. (Anastas deals with this point at length several times, that Fredericks would interrupt experiences he was having because he’d accumulated more than he could describe in the journal in a timely way.) We edit our own memories and tell stories to ourselves not just because we’re self-deceiving, self-justifying, but because in some ontological sense, that’s how consciousness works: it is a post-facto storyteller. And because we are bored by stories which are too long and too detailed, even our own stories told only to ourselves in our own minds.
Understanding isn’t achieved simply by compilation of the most information. For that reason, we don’t entirely understand ourselves, journal-writing or otherwise. Even when we have all the information of our own lives available to us—no traumatic erasures, no self-deceptions, no memory loss—what happened to us and what we did as it happens require more than an archive to be meaningful. Fiction compresses not just to entertain but to interpret. Reading Anastas dissecting Fredericks’ journal, he can’t help but go to the themes that are repeated, the key inflection points where he made important decisions. Whatever we write or say or even think, we are doing it to make meaning. That takes more than transcription.
Some other thoughts. It’s hard to keep from coming back to Fredericks’ uncomfortable history of sexual relationships with male Bennington students. Anastas is discreet about this (I suspect a condition of being allowed to read, since much of the diary and other materials are sealed for some time yet) but it’s plainly a major theme. It’s why Fredericks left his position in 1992, as things began to change. At some point, I think someone’s going to be able to write a clear-headed social/cultural history of sexual relationships within the academy in the 1960s and 1970s that will reframe and reinterpret some of the debates of the 1990s but not yet.
The article made me really want to tackle more autofiction. I frankly hadn’t even heard of the term (though the idea, not named as such, has been around for considerably longer) not long ago, and my colleague Rachel Buurma explained it to me, resulting in me having a pile of autofiction novels waiting for me on one of my shelves.
It’s also hard not to think of what the archive of a long-running blogger like myself looks like compared to this. I’m not very diaristic, but I’m certainly logorrheic and not an especially polished writer in this format. At least some of the early blogs that ran 10+ years that were much more like Fredericks’ ambition or approach are now available only via the Wayback Machine; I was struck somewhat at a resemblance to the ambition of Justin Hall’s links.net in its early development.
One other thought about diaries and fiction alike. Anastas raises the point that Fredericks asked no one’s permission to include all sorts of material in his archive, including assessments of student work (which as a result is sealed longer than the diary itself). I’ve often thought about the question of whether to be true in the way that Fredericks wanted to be true, any writing about everyday experience, about individual life, has to be in some sense both cruel and indifferent to its cruelty. Novelists and short story writers have at times had to live after publication with the dismay, anger or pain of real-life friends and family who feel brutally exposed or revealed by a thinly fictionalized version of themselves.
I know that when I’m writing about something that happened to me that involved other people (as most such things do), I often feel a desire to blend the specifics with many other such events and experiences that I’ve heard about, witnessed, read described that involve people I know only slightly or even people who are complete strangers to me but who have shared public versions of their own lives or experiences, precisely so that I am not cruel in this sense—so that no one reads and says “that’s me he’s talking about, and it hurts me”. (Though I will say that you cannot stop people from thinking they are being subtweeted at or referenced, and in almost every such experience I’ve had, the person who asks, ‘Hey, are you talking about me?’ is absolutely not the person involved in the original story, frequently to the point that I can’t even understand why this person thinks they’re being referenced.)
The cost is the immediacy and specificity of a single event or experience that gives its retelling an intense authenticity. My experience may be my own, but not my experiences with others, not completely. My public writing is low-stakes, so that’s a fine trade-off, I think. (And the gain is another kind of truth, in any event: an anecdote that is rooted in more lives than mine.) In the wider sense, though, I think we would lose a lot if the only stories we felt good about telling were the stories that everyone felt good about being told. It may be that the only people who can routinely bear that sort of hurtful truth-telling are the people who have detached themselves already from the kind of sociality where every individual bears some responsibility to and for the feelings and well-being of others.
Image credit: "Diary" by Barnaby is licensed under CC BY 2.0