Book Review : Sagas of an Ordinary Mixture of Women: Martyrs and Bores

Private Pages: Diaries of American Women 1830s-1970s, edited by Penelope Franklin (Ballantine: $8.95)

Toward the end of her introduction to these diaries, the editor admits “Journals in the raw can be hard to read. They are repetitious; they make no sense at times; they talk in circles, never getting to the point. They go on interminably about some details while leaving out others.”

Though anyone who has read the private diaries of the great, the gifted or the notorious may have been frustrated by cryptic references and unidentified characters or by gaps and omissions, the rewards compensate for the exasperations. We may not be sure who X or Y is, but when the encounters are described with enough wit, style and malice, the mystery becomes intriguing. If the context is vibrant, the life dramatic, the author amusing, we’ll be fascinated.

Assiduous feminist scholars recently have been ransacking libraries for women’s diaries in the fond belief that these obscure journals should be riveting just because the writers were neither celebrated, literary, nor anywhere near the seats of power and glory; that such material is inherently important precisely for its negative qualities. Look, these scholars seem to be saying, how drab, how dull, how humdrum women’s lives were; how narrow their world, how limited their horizons, how restricted their opportunities. Doesn’t that prove something? Shouldn’t we be moved and touched by their plights?

Though Penelope Franklin has assembled a representative ethnic, geographical and chronological mix of women, the problem is compounded because she has deliberately sought out and concentrated upon “ordinary” diarists; the more “introspective,” the better for her purposes. She has winnowed out travel diaries, pioneer journals, well-known personalities, and anything previously published. Because “introspective” seems only a euphemism for “self-centered,” the resulting anthology is diligent, conscientious and ultimately monotonous.

Perfect Therapy

While there are two or three naturally expressive writers among the 13 chosen, even they didn’t stretch their imaginations only to consign their efforts to a trunk or a desk drawer. If you’re writing for oblivion, you tend to get careless. A diary meant for oneself alone becomes self-indulgent, even self-pitying. The private diary, after all, is the perfect therapist; endlessly patient, non-judgmental, always available and all-forgiving. It permits the writer to ramble, to digress, to justify and complain, to be a martyr or a bore.

Take the saga of Martha Van Orsdol Shaw, 1867-1924, who married an alcoholic and tubercular mail carrier and lived in Topeka, Kan. She wrote 4,000 diary pages, 20 of which are reproduced here; the editor chose the three unhappiest years of the writer’s life, a pathetic chronicle of morning sickness, the birth and death of the child, and finally, deliverance in the death of her abusive husband. “I feel as if a great load had been lifted from off me and my freedom is actually a joy, tho I sincerely grieve, that death should be the means of this thrill of pleasure, at being free from such a miserable life.” Thereafter, Franklin tells us poor Martha’s life improved, but we’re not invited to share her joys.

If Martha Shaw is the most depressed voice here, Winifred Willis, 1902-1982, is the most exuberant. As an ambitious young writer whose early poems and stories appeared in various popular journals, she’s giddy with joy. “My pen seems charmed these days; my brain a flashing meteor that I cannot check in its plunging flight through unguessed realms.” Unfortunately, the meteor seems to have consumed itself, and Willis’ journal, revised by her for posthumous publication, is all that survives of her brief literary career.

The diary of Eleanor Cohen Seixus, who endured the siege of Columbia, S.C., by Union troops, somehow eluded Franklin’s criterion of ordinariness. Though Eleanor occasionally gives way to despair, she shows a marvelous resilience of spirit, so involving the reader that we’re sorry when her diary stops just as she’s adjusted to life in New York and is awaiting the birth of her first child.

Carole Bovoso, a contemporary writer and painter, has contributed a diary composed almost entirely of recorded dreams. While some of Bovoso’s dreams apparently furnished inspiration for her artistic productions, others, like this 1973 entry--”At college again-am taking a coed course in football--realize after first class that perhaps I should have taken a karate or jujitsu class but it’s not too late to get into one”--neither inform nor enlighten.

If Franklin had provided a distinct point of view, an expanded context and a definite structure, this compendium might have been appealing to the general reader, but in its present form “Private Pages” seems merely background research for a book not yet written. You can leave Samuel Pepys alone, but some judicious tampering would have done these artless diarists a world of good.