In 1959 I kept a diary. An image of a pensive, green-uniformed Girl Scout with pencil poised at the corner of her mouth dominated the puffy plastic cover of the small book. The legend “My Own Diary” appeared at the bottom. Of course there was a lock and key. Just to be sure, however, on the first page I wrote in assertive block letters, “Keep out Nosey. Private & you know it.” On the next page in cursive script was an undated apology, written as an afterthought: “Before reading this book, I would advise you to remember that when I wrote this I was only 11 & I didn’t realize what I was saying about a lot of things.”
Perfunctory accounts of activities with family and friends peppered my diary. Nothing deep, no searching insights into the psyche of my eleven-year-old self. The cautionary warnings to potential snoopers no doubt stemmed from acknowledgements within of a secret crush I had on a certain classmate. Examining this little volume more than sixty years later, I found that the content held less interest for me than my attempt to ward off uninvited readers. Instinctively I knew that the lock and key were more an invitation than a deterrent, that because my diary was private, people would want to read it.
Two recent happenstances have caused me to reconsider the violation of secret diaries and their literary cousins: personal letters. The first occurred more than a decade ago. I discovered in a Roman flea market a large collection of intimate letters between a Gilded-Age mother in New York and her eldest daughter and closest confidante, who had married an Italian nobleman and lived on the periphery of Rome. The letters spanned thirty-five years, from the time the daughter, Mary, was seventeen until her mother, Julie, died in 1937. Separated by an ocean for most of their lives, both women had no recourse but to converse in ink. They verbalized in their letters their aspirations and concerns, their triumphs and anxieties—and their deepest feelings about love. Some of their letters were so intensely personal that they bore the ignored command, “Destroy this.” No third-person narrative could capture the immediacy of Julie’s and Mary’s living, distinctive voices.
The second unexpected happenstance occurred six years ago, when the executor of the modernist poet May Swenson’s literary estate invited me to write a biography of May sourced from her correspondence and her then unarchived diaries.
May was a lifelong diarist who used her uninhibited writing to help her understand and define herself, her ambitions and her relationships with others. The eldest of ten children, she had been raised by Swedish immigrant parents in a loving Mormon family in Utah and dreamed of becoming a professional poet in New York City. Her earliest surviving diary dates from the fall of 1935, when she was twenty-two years old. May chronicled her move from her home in Logan to Salt Lake City, where she sold advertisements for a local magazine, wrote poetry, and planned her escape to New York the following spring. May recorded quotidian events of her life and her struggle to remain financially afloat as well as her aspirations for recognition and respect as a poet. In this and subsequent diaries May also explored the deeper issues of understanding herself and her sexuality and her quest to find fulfillment in love.
Like me at age eleven, May was fiercely protective of her privacy. Potential violators of her early diaries were sternly warned that only she understood her words, that others would be misled by them. In later years, however, she loosened her restrictions and permitted diary access to select readers. As in my collection of Gilded-Age letters, May’s own voice adds that vital dimension to her story which third-person phrasing could never convey.
Twice now I have in adult life become the “nosey” unintended reader so abhorred by my eleven-year-old self. But my voyeuristic discomfort has been appeased in each instance by the words of my subjects themselves, who wanted their story told.
Mary’s granddaughter, as though sensing my ambivalence about prying, sent me a letter she had recently come across written in 1944 by her grandmother.
Mother’s letters are all together at the bottom of the big wooden box, which was made in 1915 to hold sugar, but has held old letters, etc., ever since. Some day I hope the children will make a book of them. They have the most extraordinary quality and read so well, the noble, rich warm style flowing as easily as her handwriting.
And May Swenson herself lamented in her 1952 diary about her unfulfilled desire to tell publicly the story of her life, including her Swedish ancestry, her Mormon upbringing, her lesbianism, and her eventual hard-won success as a poet.
Private, intimate diaries and letters inevitably entice researchers, some of whom may be inspired to write biographies. For such biographies to resonate with readers, those whose lives are reported must be allowed as often as possible to represent themselves in their own authentic voices.
Margaret A. Brucia is a Fulbright scholar, the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Trained as a classicist, she has a special interest in women’s diaries and letters.