Diary of Another Nobody

This column, one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" series by Elinore Standard, appeared in the August 12, 2005 Record Review.

Works mentioned: Diary of Another Nobody by Hubert Berry, Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Book of One's Own by Thomas Mallon. The Diary of a Country Parson by James Woodforde, Nightsong of the Last Tram by Robert Douglas, This Day: Diaries From American Women.

DIARY OF ANOTHER NOBODY


“The Diary of Another Nobody” by Hubert Berry, (Porlock, 2005) was set down as a real diary during the summer of 1952. Berry, the resident of a small town in Buckinghamshire, simply records the events in his everyday life. He talks about the weather, what he has for dinner, the progress of his tomato plants, life at the local pub. Although such uncomplicated happenings were recorded only 50 years ago, they seem today like the record of life lived hundreds of years earlier. We are reminded of how the pace of our present-day living has increased in such a short time.

Look at Berry’s entry for July 15, 1952: “The beer is not too good at the Mason Arms although the cider is excellent. This morning we went exploring to Castle Rock and I saw and tried to kill an adder. I expect I shall stay at home this evening to read ‘The Cruel Sea’ while Audrey goes for a drink.”

Another “Diary of a Nobody” can be found at www.gutenberg.org, in e-book #1026, written by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith and posted at Gutenberg in August 1977. It begins: “Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘somebody’ – why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.” This “diary” goes on for twenty or so pages and it continues in the same everyday vein as the Berry diary.

Project Gutenberg is the source of hundreds of diaries and other texts and, as of a year ago, it had over 10,000 contributions and more are welcome. It is a great place to find unpublished pioneer diaries, for example. The project is public and the work is free -- subject to various honor-system user stipulations.

“A Midwife’s Tale” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Knopf, 1990) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary kept faithfully between 1785 and 1812. This must-read for students of U.S. history, is the record of Ballard’s work as a midwife and healer as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. In her Introduction, Ulrich says, “Like many diaries of farm women, it is filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes. Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s book lies.”

I have my own Aunt Mary Bishop’s diary from 1866, a small green leather book, worn thin and minutely written in pencil. In the back is a pouch containing a flimsy bit of Confederate money: “The Farmers and Manufacturers Bank of Savannah will pay Twenty Dollars on Demand…” Mary Bishop was still in her teens when she kept it, unmarried and living at the family place in Ellisburg, PA, a hardscrabble Allegheny Mountain hamlet, barely on the map.

The June 5th entry reads: “Got breakfast, made the beds and swept. Commenced papering the sitting room, sewed a little and went for a walk this evening.”
June 7th: “Arose at 4 o’clock got breakfast and done up the work, made a cake, sewed carpet together. Got dinner and supper and went over to Mr. Ellis after supper and up to James’s to a dance in the evening.”

Nowhere does the diary use the word “I”. There is no color or description, no opinion, no personal reaction, not a word of dissatisfaction or satisfaction, pain or pleasure. The diary a stunning record of daily drudgery.

In the Introduction his “A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries,” (Penguin, 1984) Thomas Mallon describes diary keepers: “Some are chroniclers of the everyday. Others have kept their books only in special times – over the course of a trip or during a crisis. Some have used them to record journeys of the soul, plan the art of the future, confess the sins of the flesh, or to lecture the world from beyond the grave. And some of them, prisoners and invalids, have used them not so much to record lives as create them, their diaries being the only world in which they could fully live.”

Mallon says some diaries should be consumed slowly because certain lives, usually quiet ones,” seem meant to be slipped into for only a few minutes a day, like a footbath.” He uses as an example “The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758-1802” by James Woodforde, “a quiet, sentimental bachelor who had a dog named ‘Rover’.”

Robert Douglas, a former prison officer, has written “Night Song of the Last Tram: A Glasgow Childhood.” (Hodder, 2005). In the June 17. 2005 Times Literary Supplement reviewer Bernard Wasserstein, says Douglas writes “with a grace and assurance that turn everyday episodes into the stuff of romance.” Douglas is old enough to remember the notorious Victorian tenements of Glasgow, those squalid walk-ups just as awful as those on our own Lower East Side. As this last pre-WWII generation fades, Douglas recalls horse-drawn carts, gas streetlights, the cry of the rag-and-bone man, the drunken father, the saintly mother, the inspiring but cruel schoolmaster, and the trolley car.

A gem you may try to find is, “This Day: Diaries From American Women” published in 2003 by Beyond Words Publishing of Hillsboro, Oregon, a collection of 35 entries selected from more than 529 day-diaries. “They all lent a unique voice to the project. And that is why their contributions matter, because each woman offers readers a perspective,” as editor Joni B. Cole points out, “from one day in her life that no one else – no one else – could have contributed to this book...”

Here is an 8:00 pm entry by a South Carolina healthcare director: “I just sat down and took a breath. I’m drinking my fifth Diet Coke for the day. I should titrate the caffeine with some red wine. Life is all about finding balance, is it not?”

Everyday episodes. Dailiness. Dairies of nobodies. These works are so much closer to the way we live our own lives, they verify our own nobodyness. All those celebrity biographies and ghost-written tell-alls seem from Mars, like something we’d see in the movies or read in a novel.

* * *