MY OWN PARTICULAR CUSTOM

Reginald Gibbons

I looked through a journal of mine from several years ago to get a little distance on what I have written in this mode, and I noticed a few entries that would illustrate how my journal keeping feeds my writing of poetry and fiction, and my thinking about them, as well. Amid other jottings to which they were not related, the description of a pet crow and of a rainstorm in the entry of November 8, 1990, were the first germs of what became chapters of my novel, Sweetbitter, which I had begun nearly two years earlier, on January 1, 1988. I see the crow and rainstorm in my journal as hints of what was already moving in my memory and unconscious; my writing down these few words was not really my first attempt to begin to create a scene for the larger work, but rather a kind of marker buoy that I threw into the waters to remind me to go back and search the depths beneath it:

The weather was gathering, threatening rain. A thunderstorm had been building, far off to the west, and now it was going to fill the quiet night with its threats. A sizzling bolt of lightening burst out sideways above them, searing its thick knotted length on the dark sky for a long instant like an engorged vein on the very arm of God. She was blinking up where the flash had been. The immense darkness of the woods around them had turned in the moment of the bolt into a frightening innumerableness of detail and in that lit instant every leaf and twig, every thread of their clothes and hair on their heads, was counted and recorded. Then came the blasting thunder, pushing through their bodies as if they were nothing, and beyond them echoing away over half the world.

In memory and feeling, as yet unexplored by my conscious mind, either in pure thought or already in the wonderfully complex process of writing, lay these subjects that I sensed, on that day, were important to my novel. I didn’t end up pouring rain down on my characters, only threatening to. At the same time, a fallen leaf I’ve described in my writing journal remains where it fell, not yet used for anything more in my writing.

A little quatrain I jotted down in January 1991 was the seed of something that took a long time to come fully into being, as my writing usually does, and finally became a poem called “White Beach” (collected in Sparrow: New and Selected Poems). The finished poem preserves only a few words from the dull, original quatrain; but a mood that struck me, or into which I fell, that the quatrain marked, again like a buoy, was at the heart of the poem. Later came a process of drafting and revision, but, without having written down these four lines, I would probably never have written the poem. I have the impression that this is the way many poets work.

When I was still an undergraduate student, I started intermittently keeping a journal that was partly an analytical diary of things that happened and sometimes a trying out of ideas about what I was reading and writing. I have kept writing both sorts of entries, all these years, and added fragments that are those floating markers of my unconscious, which become more frequent as the years go by.

I use notebooks that I carry with me nearly everywhere, and I make several different sorts of entries in them—from fragments and even single words and unusual (but not comic) rhyme pairs that I almost never use but that I like to discover, to long passages of essayistic complete sentences—almost as if written for different audiences, although these initial audiences are all within myself. I write irregularly about my own life events; I sort out my observations about others; anatomize my relationships with others; record occasionally a dream; I comment to myself on what I’m reading; I try to figure out what poetry is, or fiction; I wonder about what I’m writing and what sort of writer I am; I record anecdotes, observed moments among strangers, acquaintances and friends; I work out lines of thought about what I see happening around me in our common life as a society. I try to articulate my thoughts and feelings about American life, and especially life inside the American ideology created and sustained by media, politics, and religion. I write down notes for poems and stories. (I keep separate notebooks for those projects that have become well defined.) I hastily scrawl scraps of language and writing that feel like beginnings or endings or possibilities of poems or stories and that have arrived, finally, from their origins in my unconscious. I write down things I hear others say. I sketch (and use these sketches as bases of larger drawings).

I’m not able to write capsule character sketches like those at the heart of the diaries of Victor Klemperer, especially the portions written just before and during World War II; I don’t record the course of larger events, although I wish I knew how to do so.

And from time to time—but not particularly often, because something about the reading of my own entries disturbs me, embarrasses me, makes me feel like an especially intrusive voyeur of my own life—I go back through the pages. I scan for, and recopy into a working notebook, the first drafts, the isolated phrases, sometimes a few words out of the middle of something else—live words with feeling and thought still pulsing in them even though the mood of the moment of writing has long since passed. Especially when the mood has passed. These are the tatters, bits, and shards I want to make more of, and sometimes I do, although only of a few.

A number of years ago I was very taken by the published journal of George Seferis (and I included some especially striking excerpts from it in my anthology, The Poet’s Work). Seferis gave me permission to acknowledge feeling baffled or thwarted somehow, when the poem won’t go forward—or anywhere—yet not losing hope of eventually finding a way to write what I could sense I wanted to write. Seferis encourages patience and a deep sense of the body as the source of symbolic thinking. He records anecdotes of experience as if to confirm or even shape his sense of poetry. I have also been moved by the power of Witold Gombrowicz’s uncompromising and hard self-presentation and thinking in his diary, and also by the journals of Thoreau, Kafka, and Woolf. They are like black-and-white candid or news photos that seem to seize, out of what happens to happen, an inevitability of witness. The keeping of a journal is a peculiar form of writing practice; whether deliberate or hasty, formal or casual, whether more or less honest (depending on one’s mood and motives), it seems not quite fully meant to be private, even at its most private.

Another value of reading back over a journal, as well as old poems or fiction, is that over time you can see patterns of feelings, perceptions of the world and the people in it, of thinking, that help bring your unconscious life into view. That level of my inner life is where the feelings and thoughts first arrive. For me, such inquiry into my own unconscious, however unavoidably incomplete, helps me to find my way toward writing that excites me, perhaps even to move deliberately beyond past obsessions, or at least move toward new ones. I have long believed Keats’s assertion, and later restatements of it by other writers, that writing is selfmaking.

Another way of journal keeping is nicely described by Thomas Mann in the journal he kept in the 1930s, after the Nazis forced him from Germany and he lost all the routines and places that had been home to him. Having already won the Nobel Prize, having married money and made more of it, he was a materially cosseted public figure who enjoyed an esteem shared by only a handful of other writers, then or now—admired by great minds, always attended by well-wishers, expected to make public statements on politics as well as art, spending all his working time on his books and correspondence, with few, if any, of the practical daily duties and responsibilities, which were managed by his wife, Katia, and even by his daughter, Erika. Nevertheless, his diary is very matter-of-fact, and I hear a voice that is kindred to our ordinary ones in this passage that he wrote on Sunday, February 11, 1934:

These diary notes, resumed in Arosa during days of illness brought on by inner turmoil and the loss of our accustomed structured life, have been a comfort and support up to now, and I will surely continue with them. I love this process by which each passing day is captured, not only its impressions, but also, at least by suggestion, its intellectual direction and content as well, less for the purpose of rereading and remembering than for taking stock, reviewing, maintaining awareness, achieving perspective….

If I urge others to keep a journal for writing, I am only urging on them my own particular custom. Not only some writers, but also some politicians, sycophants, lovers of the powerful, torturers and victims, doctors and patients, bird-watchers, fly fisherman, dreamers, blessed lovers, and all sorts of other persons keep journals. The keeping in itself refines no virtue, enforces no honesty. But then personal honesty and virtue are not required of a writer, even though they can add immeasurably to what a person can accomplish as a writer. A writing journal is only a process by which one looks at life and a way with words and symbols, with the possibilities of image and story, or the unfolding of a sequence of rhythms and discoveries of feeling.