P.D. James - Time to Be in Earnest : A Fragment of Autobiography

Appendix
Emma Considered as a Detective Story

Photographic inserts follow .

A DIARY , if intended for publication (and how many written by a novelist are not?), is the most egotistical form of writing. The assumption is inevitably that what the writer thinks, does, sees, eats and drinks on a daily basis is as interesting to others as it is to himself or herself. And what motive could possibly induce people to undertake the tedium of this daily taskfor surely at times it must be tediousnot just for one year, which seems formidable enough, but sometimes for a lifetime? As a lover of diaries, I am glad that so many have found time and energy and still do. How much of interest, excitement, information, history and fascinating participation in anothers life would be lost without the diaries of John Evelyn, Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Fanny Burney and Francis Kilvert. Even the diary of a fictional Victorian, Cecily Cardew in The Importance of Being Earnest, simply a very young girls record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication, would have its appeal.

I have never up until now kept a diary, largely because of indolence. During my career as a bureaucrat, a working day spent mainly in drafting reports or speeches and writing letters or minutes left little incentive for further writing, particularly the recording of trivia.

And any writing, if it is worth doing, requires care, and I have preferred to spend that care on my fiction. My motive now is to record just one year that otherwise might be lost, not only to children and grandchildren who might have an interest but, with the advance of age and perhaps the onset of the dreaded Alzheimers, lost also to me. It will inevitably catch on the threads of memory as burrs stick to a coat, so that this will be a partial autobiography and a defence against those who, with increasing frequency, in person or by letter, announce that they have been commissioned to write my biography and invite my cooperation. Always after my refusal there is the response, Of course, once you have died there will be biographies. Surely its better to have one now when you can participate. Nothing is more disagreeable than the idea of having one now and of participation. Fortunately I am an appallingly bad letter-writer and both my children are reticent, but at least if they and others who enjoy my work are interested in what it was like to be born two years after the end of the First World War and to live for seventy-eight years in this tumultuous century, there will be some record, however inadequate.

I have a friend who assiduously keeps a diary, recording merely the facts of each day, and seems to find satisfaction in looking back over, say, five years and proclaiming that This was the day I went to Southend-on-Sea with my sister. Perhaps the reading of those words brings back a whole day in its entiretysound, sense, atmosphere, thoughtas the smell of decaying seaweed can bring in a rush the essence of long-forgotten summers. The diaries capturing adolescence, I suspect, are mainly therapeutic, containing thoughts that cannot be spoken aloud, particularly in the family, and a relief to overpowering emotions, whether of joy or sorrow. A diary, too, can be a defence against loneliness. It is significant that many adolescent diaries begin Dear Diary. The book, carefully hidden, is both friend and confidant, one from whom neither criticism nor treachery need be feared. The daily words comfort, justify, absolve. Politicians are great keepers of diaries, apparently dictating them daily for eventual use in the inevitable autobiography, laying down ammunition as they might lay down port. But politicians diaries are invariably dull, Alan Clarks being a notable exception. Perhaps all these motives are subordinate to the need to capture time, to have some small mastery over that which so masters us, to assure ourselves that, as the past can be real, so the future may hold the promise of reality. I write, therefore I am.

Perhaps some compulsive diarists write to validate this experience. Life for them is experienced with more intensity when recollected in tranquillity than it is at the living moment. After all, this happens in fiction. When I am writing a novel, the setting, the characters, the action are clear in my mind before I start workor so I believe. But it is only when these imaginings are written down, passing, it seems almost physically, from my brain down the arm to my moving hand that they begin to live and move and have their being and assume a different kind of truth.