Inspired by an article in The Times: Your diary won’t seem mundane in 100 years
You don’t have to be a waspish socialite to write what will become fascinating social history
Jenni Russell Wednesday March 10 2021, 5.00pm GMT, The Times
Sensation, spite, social climbing, high society, self-indulgence, sex; Chips Channon had the raw materials to make his uncensored diaries newsworthy a century after he began them. They shock, repel and compel because they don’t conceal.
Channon swoons over Hitler, goes to extravagant competitive parties thrown by Goering and Goebbels, has affairs with viscounts, princes and Tallulah Bankhead, gets spanked by an eminent priest over an altar, marries into the Irish aristocracy and becomes a friend of Edward VIII. He is calculating, selfish, amoral, vain, ambitious and deluded, and more of us should follow his example.
Not in the living, but in the recording of it. Few have such licence to behave badly; most of us will never encounter historical figures like those Channon was determined to know and who have ensured his own literary afterlife. Yet we don’t need to inhabit a grand stage to be an interesting chronicler of our own times, even if only for ourselves or our descendants.
One of the best reasons to keep a record is that while our days can often feel unremarkable, or — as in a war or pandemic — so widely experienced that they’re not worth marking, we cannot tell what will stand out in the future. The mundane and obvious shifts, vanishes and becomes social history. I’m already conscious of that. I read mocking references to a mythical past when roaming children had free-range childhoods, but that’s what I grew up with, and it is now already remote. When we read the diaries, memoirs and novels of earlier eras we can be amazed by what writers took for granted, observations that are peripheral to the narratives because they were part of the fabric of their lives.
The norms of working life is one. Today we assume important jobs require punishing hours. Duff Cooper, a statesman and pursuer of women, is a cipher officer in the Foreign Office in the First World War, a position so vital he is excused military service for two years. Yet he wanders into work at 11 after breakfast in bed and a shave from a visiting barber, frequently has excellent lunches or teas with friends at private clubs or the Ritz, expects every evening to be one of dinners and pleasure, and spends his weekends at grand house parties.
Perhaps we all need that private space. The public scrutiny of our behaviour has become intensely censorious. The rapidity and instant verdict of news and social media means people fear saying anything that might see them condemned or sacked. Context, intention, regret or naivety are rarely a defence.
We can create a shiny acceptable surface image on Instagram or Facebook but we are all subject to human nature, with the impulses of love, lust, anger, pride, generosity, cruelty and kindness that drive us. The important question for everyone is how we manage those drives in ways that are least damaging and most rewarding for ourselves and those we live among, not in how earnestly we can pretend that for us alone these tensions and uncomfortable emotions don’t exist.
Diaries allow us to explore those truths, hold our memories, give shape to our days. But until you’re ready to reveal yours, you might choose one with a key.
So my challenge is: if you keep a diary... extract something from it, just to see.
