Word: mallone
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...Thomas Mallon, the author of an original survey of diarists and a teacher of English at Vassar, points out that five million blank diaries are sold in the United States each year. Whether for posterity or therapy or peace, these diary-keepers commit to paper some version of their lives--great or small, public or personal. As Mallon's diverse range of examples shows, anyone's life can capture the reader's imagination if it is honestly and freshly told...
...writing, and the question was rhetorical. Of course the entries could stop time, by providing a mirror of the self and a method of recapturing the past. That is a truth every diarist apprehends, first instinctively and then with the evidence of the page. In this critical anthology, Thomas Mallon, a professor of English at Vassar, offers hundreds of such proofs, from diaries as old as Samuel Pepys' and as contemporary as Graham Greene's and Jean Harris...
...Pepys cannot be said to have invented the diary form, Mallon observes, "he more or less perfected it." Crack open his daybooks anywhere and a surprisingly modern figure emerges, with his ambition, flaws and lust intact. ) He plays up to the powerful, pans a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, watches a cockfight, tells the story of how his wife burned her hand. Always on the prowl for a likely wench, he writes, in his easily decipherable code, about Deb, a servant: on March 31, 1668, "Yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra me genu...
...Mallon lists Pepys as a chronicler, one of seven categories of note takers. The others: travelers, pilgrims, creators, apologists, confessors and prisoners. To some degree these are arbitrary distinctions; the 19th century British painter Benjamin Haydon recorded his financial and artistic woes in 26 confidential volumes. As one of his last exhibitions fails, he laments, "They rush by thousands to see (Tom) Thumb. They push, they fight, they scream, they faint . . . They see my bills, my boards & don't read them." Months later he quotes King Lear, "Stretch me no longer on this tough World," and commits suicide...
Entrants in this dense and unprecedented volume range from the heroic to the villainous, from Albert Camus to Lee Harvey Oswald. Mallon welcomes them all to his vast storehouse. Some neighbors provide deep ironic contrasts: Anne Frank tells her diary, "I twist my heart . . . so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would like so to be." Four pages later a Nazi architect bitterly considers himself in the third person: "Hitler . . . would have been keenly delighted by the role Albert Speer...