The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives at the Morgan Library

Some diarists turn their private writings into shared memoir. Fanny Twemlow (1881–1989), a British woman imprisoned in a civilian internment camp during World War II, recopied the illustrated diary that she kept secretly and transformed it into a cherished family memento. Lieutenant Steven Mona, who led a police rescue and recovery team after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, recast his private diary as a letter in order to share his experience with family and friends. "I don’t think I will ever look at anything in life the same way," he wrote.

The diary has long served individuals as a place of emotional haven. Fanny Twemlow's diary

Twenty-year-old Charlotte Brontë, working as a schoolteacher at Roe Head School in 1836, wrote diary entries in a minuscule script on loose sheets of paper, combining autobiographical narrative with flights of fictional fantasy that helped her endure emotional isolation. Some years later, sitting in a classroom in Brussels, she opened a geography textbook and scrawled a diary entry on one of the endpapers, confiding her loneliness and bitterness: "it is a dreary life — especially as there is only one person in this house worthy of being liked — also another who seems a rosy sugarplum but I know her to be coloured chalk."

Tennessee Williams, too, relied on his diary in times of loneliness. In February 1955 he made his first entry in a Italian exercise book with a cover featuring white polka dots on a blue background: "A black day to begin a blue journal." With Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in rehearsal and a new production of his acclaimed play A Streetcar Named Desire about to open in New York, Williams was anxious and increasingly dependent on drugs and alcohol. At the height of his literary success, he carried the journal from New York to Rome, Athens, Istanbul, Barcelona, and Hamburg, recording physical and emotional distress, sexual encounters, and a creative impasse. "Nothing to say except I’m still hanging on," he wrote.

The great Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) did not begin a diary until late in life when he was already a famous man, and shortly before a financial crisis forced him to spend the rest of his life writing himself out of debt. Over a period of six years, the journal became an outlet for the feelings of despair — the "cold sinkings of the heart" — that had agonized him since his youth. Even as he revealed his most intimate feelings, Scott made clear that he had decided to "gurnalize" (as he called it) not only for his own benefit but also for "my family and the public."

One of those who read and benefited from Scott’s revealing journal was English art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who kept a diary in 1878 leading up to a mental collapse. After he recovered he meticulously re-read his diary, marking it up and indexing it in search of warning signs to help him anticipate future breakdowns. He left several pages dramatically blank, heading them with just a few words — "February to April — the Dream" — an allusion to the nightmarish visions he had endured over several months.

The diary as a stimulus to creativity is represented by an extraordinary illustrated journal of American painter Stuart Davis (1894–1964), working journals of novelist John Steinbeck, a journal/sketchbook of English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), and a travel diary of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) that is full of mathematical jottings. A diary of Nathaniel Hawthorne includes this idea for a story subject: "The life of a woman, who, by the old colony law, was condemned always to wear the letter A, sewed on her garment, in token of her having committed adultery.” Hawthorne, of course, later developed this germ of a story — first documented in his diary — into one of the most celebrated of American novels.

While today’s new media facilitates ever more frequent diary entries — sometimes updated hour by hour — the exhibition features examples of diarists similarly committed to continuous life documentation. In Bob Dylan’s verbal and visual diary of his 1974 concert tour with The Band, he sketched a hotel room in Memphis and added a line of poetry: "Exploding galaxies of the red white & blue pulsing in the night of the big eye." Abstract Expressionist painter Charles Seliger (1926–2009) kept over 150 notebooks over many decades, rarely allowing a day to go by without recording activities, thoughts, and opinions, until his death in 2009. Seliger wrote in the tradition of the most famous English diarist — Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) — whose record of daily life in seventeenth-century London became a nineteenth-century bestseller. The Morgan holds the corrected proofs for the first published edition of Pepys’s diaries — evidence of the longstanding human impulse to read other people’s diaries.

In his working journal for The Grapes of Wrath, on view in the exhibition, John Steinbeck articulated the challenge of presenting an uncensored version of oneself: "I have tried to keep diaries before, but it didn’t work out because of the necessity to be honest." While today’s online diaries and social media profiles encourage the creation of carefully managed self-portraits, the impulse to deliberately craft one’s identity in the diary is nothing new.

The exhibition is accompanied by free weekly podcasts of readings from the diaries and an active blog that explores issues related to diary keeping both past and present.

Diaries at the Morgan

In 1909, at a single stroke, financier and collector Pierpont Morgan (1837 – 1913) became the keeper of the most extraordinary stash of American literary manuscripts ever assembled in this country. For the sum of $165,000, he purchased the collection assembled by Stephen Wakeman, which included dozens of notebooks kept by Henry David Thoreau and eighteen diaries of Nathaniel Hawthorne (two of them kept together with his wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne). Since Pierpont Morgan’s day, The Morgan Library & Museum has continued to acquire diaries of note, sometimes directly from their authors.

Recent acquisitions include diaries of Tennessee Williams, Stuart Davis, and Charles Seliger.

The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives is organized by Christine Nelson, Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at The Morgan Library & Museum.

Image One: Diaries of Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), 1837–61, with pencils made by J. Thoreau & Co., the Thoreau family pencil factory. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909.

Image Two: Engraved portrait of Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) by James Charles Armytage, after a painting by George Richmond (1809–1896). Purchased by Pierpont Morgan before 1913.

Image Three: Illustrated memoir by Fanny Twemlow (1881–1989), a British woman in a World War II internment camp in France, 1940 – 41. Gift of Julia P. Wightman, 2006.

Pages: 1 · 2

Culture and Arts, Relationships and Going Places, Literature and Poetry, History Add comments

The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives at the Morgan Library

More Articles