chapter one:
TEENAGE CONFESSIONS
My Diary-Self
As a teenager, I didnāt yet know about Cassandra Mortmain, the roaming diarist of Dodie Smithās whimsical novel, I Capture the Castle. But I wish I had. I would have wanted to be like her. Most of all I would have wanted to sound like her. I like to think I already did.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dogās blanket and the tea cosy. I canāt really say Iām comfortable, and there is the depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left.
Cassandra Mortmain sounds like my fourteen-year-old self. She sounds like someone who knows exactly what she wants. She also sounds as though she knows that she doesnāt have it yet, not in the muddled, dirty space where she lives. Cassandra Mortmain is someone who knows how to make the best of a bad lot. Sheās an improviser of untidy relationships and, unlike me ā or rather me, my eight cousins and three brothers in our ramshackle house by the sea ā she isnāt forced outside. Instead, she camps out in the kitchen sink with her diary-ally.
Cassandra Mortmain keeps a diary because she wants to make some extra room for herself. Sheās digging a hole through those diary passages, digging down and out of the dilapidated, broken home she finds herself in ā a home where the kitchen sink is the only clear space ā to a new world. All the space in my house was taken too. And because there was no storage space, except in the dark, damp cellar where we kept our bikes and Mum kept her spring bulbs, everything was always out on show, highly visible, ready to fall over and break. Even in the cellar things sat on the surface, strange names scratched into the mouldy walls, letters surrounded by boxy shapes, letters shut up in prison.
āNazis,ā my aunt said, āNazi symbols ā¦ the Luftwaffe ā¦ they kept prisoners of war down there.ā We believed her, because everything my aunt said sounded like God speaking from the clouds. So it must be true.
The cellar was where the Nazis had buried ā¦ what? I wasnāt quite sure. The men who tried to deliver the coal down the back stairs? My grandmother told me that our house used to have back stairs. Perhaps when the Germans came over on their rowboats at night they found men with dirty black faces creeping about with sacks of coal and they thought maybe these men had murdered some Germans and now theyāre storing their bodies in our coal-hole.
The coal-hole was our big secret. It was where everything was buried that nobody wanted to think about any more; it was where no one dared look.
*
Writing was the only way I knew of keeping something secret. I had to start carrying a notebook. Women, I noticed, had small notepads and diaries they kept in their handbags and purses; my grandmother had her small pocket-sized red notebook with thick, wide lines where she kept her shopping list; my mother had her posh gold and silver foil-covered date diary, a small book called āLettsā where she wrote down important dates in her long, thin scrawl that tipped sideways (towards the sea, I always thought, towards the beach, out the front door, across the road, and down to the sea). Mumās handwriting looked like it was always running away. I wanted to copy it and run away too.
So I went to the charity shop on the corner of the Arcade to see if I could find a cheap notebook, something that looked like a diary, but with more room than Mumās small, flat, hard shiny oblong. I wanted something softer; a book with thick pages I could fall into, somewhere I could start to write stories. Oxfam was where Mum went to find new things, things that had been tossed away.
Oxfam was always full of old bicycles and second-hand toys, bashed-up plastic push-along tricycles whose wheels had fallen off and lots of old, scratched records dumped inside squashed cardboard boxes. I turned to the shelves. Everything on the floor was junk. But the shelves held books and cards, things kept in cellophane wrap, things with more prestige. Two shelves up I found a plastic box of cards and notepads, writing paper and exercise books, paper books covered in sunflowers and tulips and daisies, books that wanted to be flower-arrangements. I pulled them down and started to poke through.
āFound what youāre looking for?ā
The voice behind me didnāt sound very pleased. It was the sort of voice that was bound to say next, āAre your hands nice and clean?ā
āIām looking for a notebook ā¦ a diary ā¦ something with lines.ā
āWhat sort of diary? Do you mean a diary or a journal? If you mean a journal then youāll have to have a rummage over there. Weāve got a few old notebooks you could turn into a journal if thatās what you mean. Are you trying to practise your handwriting?ā
The lady looking at me had a funny smell, the sort of smell that came out of toilets when you were trying to make them smell better. She sounded like Mrs Moose who was in charge of the library at school. Mrs Moose always suspected dirty hands and kept sending us to the toilet.
āThe only diaries we have are the ones donated from the Christmas raffle ā¦ theyāre still nicely wrapped up, so donāt pull them open unless youāre sure youāre going to buy one. Theyāre all about 50 pence or a pound. I hope you have your pocket money with you, young lady?ā
Her eyebrows had started wiggling like worms. I thought they might jump off and eat up her face, but before I could keep watching she swished around and walked off, back to the cash register, back to the lady in the pink jumper who was beckoning her to sort out the prices. I turned back to the plastic box and felt through the slippery cellophane. I wanted a book that nobody would bother to pick up if they found it. At the bottom of the pile I found one without plastic. Instead it was covered in a brown paper bag that had been smoothed out along the wrinkles. I touched the surface; it reminded me of the brown paper bags my grandmother brought back from the greengrocers filled with Coxās apples, treats for Mum. Somebody had covered this book very carefully with brown paper, given it a new skin.
I opened it up and studied the paper. The lines were reassuringly thick and bold, but not too thick I couldnāt write over them. They ran delicately off the side of the pages, down the sides, off the edge of the papery cliff.
I took the book to the register. āIād like to buy this please. Could you wrap it up?ā
The lady with the pink jumper looked at me. āWe donāt gift wrap in here. This isnāt a gift shop.ā She said the word āgiftā harshly, like she was spitting out a pip in an orange.
āI just mean could you wrap it inside another bag so that that bagā ā I pointed to the surface of my notebook ā ādoesnāt get dirty.ā I looked back hard at her. āIām going to be taking it outside.ā
*
āIn the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself,ā says American writer, philosopher and aesthete, Susan Sontag, in her published Early Diaries, aged sixteen.23 Sontagās bold statement dispenses with the notion of the diary as a dumping ground for personal stuff. In her diary she will do something rather more formal and serious: she will devise and cast herself; she will play at artist and God.
Of course Sontagās statement is also largely egoistic swagger, something the diaryās blank page encourages. Hers is a performance, or rather an audition, in who or what she will become. And so her diary is a place for preening and posturing, for large poses; it is a much-repeated dress rehearsal in selfhood.
Unfortunately for her reader, Sontagās juvenile diaries leave little room for irony or self-parody; there are few if any comic subplots. But then she has a loftier intention, to master what the sixteenth-century poet Philip Sidney called āselfnesseā: something close to our contemporary āself-involvementā. Sontagās only subject is herself, and as such her diaries often turn into a disappointing and tiresome read. Where, we ask, is the intellectual gumption and critical imagination of her essays, the scorn for the ordinary, the snobbish intellect of Sontag, lover of the decadent outsider? Stuck in the middle of Sontagās pimple-ridden narcissism, those of us who read her journals are uncomfortable with what we find there, embarrassed. Should we really be reading this stuff? we wonder. Probably not.
The secondary and more generous reading of āselfnesseā is āessenceā or āindividualityā, even āpersonalityā.24 In this latter sense the young Sontag is presenting the essence of what she is in the here and now, a record of her personality as it develops moment to moment. Hers is a live record of her living and growing self; an almost biological, you might even say, hormonal development. If we read her young journal this way we can perhaps redeem her from some of the embarrassment. We might say that in the tradition of the coming-of-age novel, Sontag plots herself; the disappointment for the reader comes with realising that the personal plot of the young Sontag, although intellectually ambitious, is terribly self-involved. But we must remember: Sontag is only sweet sixteen.
Still, Sontag is very knowing about the diary genre and her relationship to it. She realises that any diary writing forces an absurd split between the life led within the diary and the life without. āThere is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions towards a person and what we say we feel towards that person in a journal,ā she confesses.25 A journal, in other words, encourages the hypocrite in us. It frees us from the necessities of daily life where we regularly swallow our words, bite our tongues and generally try to behave ourselves.
Diaries indulge the weaker parts of our ego. Consequently, our diary persona is often poorly socialised, veering between overly sincere and insincere poses. You wouldnāt introduce this personality to your parents. So what does this amount to for the reader? In Sontagās case this often means enduring dramas largely involving her sexual identity, dramas soaked in outbursts of confessional clichĆ©: āI am almost on the verge of madness ā¦ tottering over an illimitable precipice.ā26 It is hard to take such self-dramatising seriously, and while it might be labelled confessional there is little that is ritualised or sacred.
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
Wednesday January 14, 1981.
Joined the library. Got Care of the Skin, Origin of Species, and a book by a woman my mother is always going on about. It is called Pride and Prejudice, by a woman called Jane Austen. I could tell the librarian was impressed. Perhaps she is an intellectual like me. She didnāt look at my spot, so perhaps it is getting smaller. About time! ā¦ None of the teachers at school have noticed that I am an intellectual. They will be sorry when I am famous.
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13Ā¾27
Miss Clements read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole to us to finish off the day. Thatās what she called it; āfinishing off the dayā. Mum said it was skiving to read Adrian Mole out loud in class like that (well, she didnāt say āskivingā, but thatās what she meant).
āWhat a waste of time ā¦ That isnāt literature ā¦ what on earth is she playing at? Youāre too old for that babyish rubbish.ā
My mum spent a lot of time being indignant. But then so did Adrian Mole.
Of course we all understood that Miss Clements was trying to make us feel better about being eleven or twelve, āthe awkward ageā, my grandmother said. We thought it was terribly grown-up to hear someone talking about their pimples so much, and in any case, Adrian Mole did read books. He was an intellectual. Miss Clements read us Adrian Mole because she wanted to show us that you can have spots and still be clever. You can talk obsessively about your skin and the way you look, but also go to the library and read books. (Now that I think of it that isnāt really a very clever thought.) But Miss Clements was sweet and she was trying to make us feel better. She suggested that we all start keeping diaries to help us āprocess our feelingsā. When I heard that all I could think of was processed sausages and processed cheese, which my grandmother said were āfull of rubbish ā¦ put it straight in the bin!ā
We didnāt need to show anyone our diary, Miss Clements said. In fact it was better that we didnāt. They might be things we want to keep to ourselves, private things, like Adrian Mole telling his diary that he likes this girl called Pandora.
āItās perfectly natural to start liking girls at your age,ā said Miss Clements. Michael Roberts started to snigger very loudly when she said that. Miss Clements turned to him and said, āI realise that speaking about feelings is embarrassing, Michael, but itās all perfectly natural and I want to encourage you to stop feeling bad about your feelings.ā Personally, I donāt think Michael Roberts felt bad about anything.
When I told Mum about the diary idea she said that Miss Clements was just being āvery silly and self-indulgentā. Mum didnāt like the idea of people spending too much time on their feelings. āThe diary of a thirteen-year-old boy is not proper thinking ā¦ itās bound to be full of twaddle [Mum loved the word ātwaddleā]. At your age you need something proper to think about.ā
Confession
As journal-writers go, Sontag is a direct descendant of the Christian confessional tradition. The history of confession begins in public, with the early Church fathers, whose culture of hierarchical paternalism encouraged clean, shameless public confession. By the time of St Augustine in the fifth century AD, confession had become a form of autobiography, something far more personal. ...