I’ve written several times about my father’s notebooks here. Last weekend, my mother brought out a stash of empty ones for me to take away and their blank pages have been taunting me all week, shouting:
‘What a fucking cliché, writing a book in your dead father’s unused notebooks.’
So I will not be doing that, not least because I write better on the computer anyway.
Professionally, though, I have been thinking about or around notebooks for a long time. My first article was about a set of diaries written in reporters’ notebooks in the 1930s and 1940s. I have an unfinished article relating to the notebooks of several British interwar socialist intellectuals. Perhaps as someone who has specialized in the history of reading and writing in a time before the personal computer, this is unremarkable. But I am clearly drawn to notebooks as primary sources, and not just to their contents but to their form and the ways in which they are both shaped by and shape their authors.
I don’t think authenticity is the attraction. I don’t really believe it exists and I am too well-trained to fall into that trap, thank you very much. But neither are they artifice. Perhaps they are something in-between: a moment where connections are made that might never be made again; the moment before the censor intervenes and tells you to reign it in. These are not necessarily original thoughts but they resist separation: in the notebook they are brought together in an attempt at making meaning.
I returned (again) to one of my favourite novels, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, first published in 1962. If you have not read it, you absolutely should. I can’t do it justice here but suffice to say that the protagonist is a writer, Anna Wulf, who is writing a novel, but the chapters of her novel in a novel are accompanied by ‘extracts’ from several notebooks of different colours, representing different part of the writer’s life. She attempts to bring all of them together in one notebook – The Golden Notebook – to understand the connections between them, to break down the boundaries between self and other, to understand, as Lessing puts it in a 1971 preface ‘implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things off, must not compartmentalize’.
In another passage in the same preface, Lessing provides a passage that I realise has become a manifesto for my career and, in a roundabout way, has led to here, to this bothering of ancestors. For a long time, I resisted the idea of personal writing having any connection with my professional life, before realizing that they were one and the same, the former just being much more transparent than the latter:
At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease of writing about ‘petty personal problems’ was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is not uniquely one’s own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains pleasures, emotions – and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas – can’t be yours alone. The way to deal with ‘subjectivity’, that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible and marvelous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does …
Maybe I shall copy this into one of Dad’s blank notebooks. After all, we’re all fucking clichés in the end.
My favourite novel about notebooks is I Capture the Castle. I love the way the narrative and her experience becomes more complex as she shifts from the notebook and pencil stub to the beautiful paper and fountain pen. But, she says, it seems like writing was easier when it was a cheap notebook.
I used to old used reporter notebooks stacked high for years, or at least until I moved on to another newspaper job. Although, more fascinating may be discovering your grandfather’s diaries. My grandmother shared with me a diary my grandfather kept on a tour of Soviet Union wineries in 1963. That turned out to be one of my favorite Substack posts so far. I enjoyed your post. Thanks for triggering the memories. 😀