Private Confessions

Marianne Janack

The diaries I owned when I was in elementary and middle school were small and thick, covered in lovely patterned plastic or pleather—and they all came with a lock and key. The lock and the key suggested that the diary might contain secrets that only the writer should have access to, and that the contents are valuable—worth guarding and protecting. 

Some diaries are like that, I’m sure. But the secret that I discovered by reading my own diaries years later turned out to be really disturbing: I discovered that I was boring, and really had nothing worth recording in a diary that needed to be locked away from prying eyes. 

In my diaries, I recorded the weather, news items, snowfall totals, gifts I received, small slights I suffered at the hands of my friends and classmates.  I’d long ago lost the keys, but it turned out that the locks were mostly for show.  Though they were made to look like shiny gold, they were plastic—easy to open without the key.

I suspect that most diaries are like that: filled with boring reports about things that don’t really matter, or reminders to the writer that she is pretty much as boring as she’s convinced herself she is not.

I’ve found that my students are interested in diaries—at least the diaries of authors that they’ve read.  In my senior seminar, when we started to talk about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one student brought up the diaries that Wittgenstein was keeping as he wrote the Tractatus. “He masturbated a lot while he was writing that,” the student said. “He recorded that in his diary. Maybe masturbating was essential to his writing in the Tractatus.”

The next day I was talking with a student about Kafka, and the student told me that he’d read most, but not all, of Kafka’s diaries. “Most of the entries were boring,” he admitted, “so I didn’t read them all.  But I’m still glad that they’re available, even though Kafka didn’t want them published. Maybe it was a violation against him, but it helped those of us who read him now.”

Kafka didn’t lock his diaries, he didn’t burn them, but also didn’t want them published after he died.  His literary executor, Max Brod, published them anyway. 

Wittgenstein gave his literary executors the right to decide what to publish, though it’s not clear that he thought that his diaries might be part of his literary estate.  He wrote some of his entries in code, too, so it seems that he didn’t really want them to be easily accessed. Some of his literary executors didn’t want to expose his personal life to the public: “If, by pressing a button it could have been secured that people would not concern themselves with [Wittgenstein’s] personal life,” Elizabeth Anscombe said, one of Wittgenstein’s close friends, “I should have pressed the button…”. Rush Rhees, another executor, said, “I wished (and still do) that W. had not written those passages.  I do not know why he wanted to; but I think I do understand in a way, and I understand then also why he chose this ambiguous medium.  I fear especially…that what was a minor and occasional undertone to Wittgenstein’s life and thinking, will appear as a dominant obsession.” It’s an interesting question why someone would want to write about something in his own diaries, his own private writings.

Whether the “minor and occasional undertone” that Rhees worries about is Wittgenstein’s homosexuality (as Marjorie Perloff says in her discussion of the diaries he kept from 1914-16); his thoughts about cowardice and suicide (which show up frequently in the diaries); his nastiness about his fellow soldiers (whom he calls “a bunch of swine”); or the masturbation (which he records regularly) we cannot know.  All we have are Wittgenstein’s words:

August 16, 1914

Aboard the “Goplana”.  Again: the stupidity, insolence, and malice of this bunch knows no limits. Every job turns into a torture.  But today I did my own work again & will not let myself get discouraged.  Also, wrote a card to dear David. May heaven protect him and maintain our friendship!---The trip itself down the Vistula is beautiful and I am in a good mood.

August 17, 1914

A pack of rogues!  Only the officers are nice people & in part really very refined…. Because of the hard labor I’ve become quite asexual…God be with me. On deck it is too cold & below there are too many men who talk, scream, stink, etc., etc.

……….

March 22, 1915

Unwell.  Better toward evening

March 23, 1915

Full of desire.

March 24, 1915

---Did no work!  Will I ever work again?!!!!

March 28, 1915

Working again!---

……

March 28, 1916

…and must take my life.  I suffered the tortures of hell!  And yet the picture of life was so enticing to me that I wanted once more to live.  I will take poison only when I really want to poison myself.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which has become required reading for anyone interested in philosophy, is what he was working on while keeping these diaries. (You can find it here; like the diaries it was originally written in a version of German that was common in Austria, but the Tractatus was translated by C.K. Ogden, while the version of the diaries that I read was translated by Marjorie Perloff).

Perloff’s introduction to her translation of the diaries speculates that Wittgenstein’s homosexuality was what worried Rhees and Anscombe—that homosexuality was illegal at the time, and that Wittgenstein might be dismissed as a philosopher if people read his private diaries.  But it’s possible that what Rhees and Anscombe worried about was less Wittgenstein’s homosexuality and more the ways in which his philosophical work and people’s understanding of his published work might be used as keys to the meaning of what he wrote and published. And maybe they thought—as many philosophers and New Critics think—that the author should not be identified with the historical person who was the writer.

A key sometimes fits a lock. But sometimes the lock will open without the key which seems made for it.  Sometimes the personal information in a diary is interesting to others, though maybe not for the right reasons.  I must admit that I worry that interest in the diaries of others—in particular the famous—is prurient. 

But, of course, as it turns out, most diary entries—even when they’re written by famous people—are pretty boring.  

The locked diary suggests a guard against prying eyes; like the locked confessional door, it is meant to shield the confessor.  And yet, for many of us, what we confess is boring. The locked diary promises privacy for the truths of such banality.