Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. Recently, John Dickerson talked with Roland Allen about his new book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper.
This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
John Dickerson: Is there a storyline about how you get from the first place that a person can write down their innermost thoughts to what we conceive of as journals and diaries now, which are more the location for our personal exploration? How do you see that story going?
Roland Allen: It’s really interesting. There’s one big question at the heart of it, which no one’s ever answered, which is why people who were using notebooks all the time—in Italy, for instance, but also Germany, France, everywhere in Europe—for hundreds of years, yet no one keeps what we think of as a personal diary.
So, when I go home tonight, I’m going to write a diary about our conversation, about my journey to work, about how I feel, about the argument I had with so-and-so, and how I feel about it. And that’s normal for me and it’s not an unusual thing to do. But it took people a long time to think of it, what we think of as a really simple idea. They didn’t do it in Florence at all; they didn’t do it in France or Germany. It seems to have started in rural England around the 1560s, which partly fills my heart with joy, because some innovation actually happens in England! So it was nice to bring the story back there.
But why it happens? I really struggle to put my finger on a reason why. And interestingly, the real historians of the diary—who tend to be French and who also locate it there—they really struggled as well. They can’t find anything particularly unusual about England in the 1550s, 1560s. It was not particularly turbulent. There was religious tension, but there was religious tension everywhere. People were reading and writing much more, ditto all over Europe—who knows?
What I love, is that you immediately see this same mixture of things, which, for instance, I saw centuries later in my grandfather’s diary, which were in my diary, which are this mixture of big global events—the weather, an argument you had with your neighbor, the king dies—and then “I’m not getting on with my wife or my husband.” And this, particularly that last one, the marital difficulties, nearly every time you read someone else’s diary, you’ll come across that and that’s a golden thread which runs through that story.
By 1600 or so in England there’s a play written, Volpone by Ben Jonson, in which two of the characters talk about diaries, and one of them reads the other’s diary out loud on stage. You have that horrible emotionally naked feeling of having your feelings displayed in public, awful, by 1600, and it’s happening on stage. So, by then everyone knows what a diary is in England, but absolutely not the case in Europe. It spreads over the following century or so.
A couple of things from this: When you talked about the writing of the big events and the tiny little events of the day, I was thinking of the Great Fire of London. One of the accounts of it is in Samuel Pepys’ diary, who would write for days, as I recall, about, “Went to the privy council and then went and had my morning draft, and then…” sort of basic, boring logbook of the day. And then suddenly there’s this account of watching London burn.
So here you have a great account that comes just from one of these diaries you’re talking about, and that’s, Pepys in the middle of 17th century, so it’s a little later than where this idea started.
He’s fantastic because he is a compulsive diary taker with absolutely no filter, so he writes it all, and he’s pleasantly human. He does bad things and he regrets them, he’s clearly a great bloke to know, he has loads and loads of friends, they’re constantly singing and playing music round at his house, there’s a lot of wine and women and song. But he’s also right at the heart of government. If you like, he’s one of the leading civil servants of his day. When he gets to deal with the Duke of York, it’s a big event for him, but it does happen. So, he’s right at the top of English society, or British society, as well as being this compulsive diary writer.
His account of the Great Fire is terrific, and the details in it are fantastic. You can track the whole thing, because he was so well-informed and he was there while decisions were being made about, “Are we going to blow up these houses before they burn down? Are we going to pull houses down to make fire bricks?” He was there for those conversations. And then he also says, “And then I raced off in order to bury my Parmesan cheese in the back garden, so in case the house burns down, at least my cheese will survive.”
Yeah. He also, I mean, what I loved, but to your point about the wine, women, and song, as I recall there were periods where he would go to work in the morning, and then he would play and drink in the middle of the day, and then he’d go to church, and then he’d go back to work again. The day, as it’s described by him, was just crazy. He goes to church constantly, and at time he feels guilt, and I think there’s one point his wife catches him.
But these aren’t diaries yet where there are places for deep introspection. I mean, you can see flashes of guilt, but he doesn’t wrestle for three pages with the inconsistencies between going to church and grabbing a married woman.
No, he doesn’t, and other people at the time did write very pious diaries. I think that’s a reflection of his personality rather than what other people were writing at the time. And John Evelyn, who was writing at the same time, certainly writes a much drier diary, which is quite useful as well for events, and goes on much longer, but he’s nothing like as emotionally available, if you like, as Sam is.
I love the Mark Twain notebook that had, was it three layers so that he could write notes about his travels and then rip out a page? It was like it had a mimeograph sheet and he would send it too-
It had carbon paper in it, yeah. Well, he wrote travel journals, which is a long, great tradition in its own right. And being Mark Twain, of course, his travel journals are really worth reading. But I think, presumably in order to make publication easier—actually, I’m thinking aloud, but—he wrote in these patent notebooks, which had a carbon paper sheet in them, so that every entry you made, you ended up with two copies, as you say. And then he would post one back, I think, to his wife, once he’d had a few days, once he had an entry. And whether or not they were then used for publication, I don’t know, but it’s a lovely way of sharing your experience with people without destroying your diary, which obviously no one wants to do that.
