Anne Frank’s voice

Awriter’s voice is something readers instinctively respond to but don’t pay much attention to, unless they also happen to be writers. Voice is what makes Hemingway sound like Hemingway and why, after a few sentences, we can tell the work of Alice Munro from that of Flannery O’Connor. Complicated, mysterious, difficult to define, voice is the result of every major and minor choice an author makes, decisions about point of view, tone, style, diction, vocabulary, which details to include or omit, whether a sentence should end in a period or an exclamation point. As a student, I was taught that the story is less important than the way it is told, and later I often said the same thing to my students.

When I decided to write about the diary of Anne Frank, I noticed that, in all the commentary that the diary has generated, relatively little had been said about Frank’s literary voice. I had been thinking about the diary not as a historical Holocaust document so much as a work of art, a memoir with the virtues of a great novel: a plot, a dramatic arc, suspense and vivid, memorable characters. I planned to discuss the difficulty of finding a tone -- especially when one is writing about one’s self -- that sounds so fresh, unaffected, authentic. And I wanted to emphasize what, by now, we have mostly come to take for granted: Namely, that the most widely read and enduring masterpiece about that brutal era was written by a girl between the ages of 13 and 15.

My idea was to look at how Frank paced her narrative, alternated passages of action and reflection, chose to use summary or dramatized scenes and, above all, at how she established and maintained her appealing, unique voice. I would consider the way our experience of her diary is affected by her having framed it as a series of letters to Kitty, the imaginary friend outside the secret annex in Amsterdam where the Franks and four other Jews hid for 25 months. How did that decision help her find the forthright, intimate voice in which she confides in Kitty and makes her readers feel as if we too are her confidantes?

Everyone who has read the diary knows there are passages in which Frank expressed her hopes of becoming a writer. But few realize that she wanted her writing to be published as a novel in diary form. And fewer still know what was, for me, the most surprising thing I learned in the course of my research: During her final months in the attic, Frank returned to the beginning of the diary and, using more than 300 sheets of loose colored paper, rewrote the earlier entries, clarifying, filling in gaps, adding and deleting whole sections, making all-important changes in the way she described her spiritual development and her daily life. After the war, her father, Otto -- returned from Auschwitz, the only annex resident to have survived -- combined his daughter’s two drafts to produce the version that appeared, in 1952, as “The Diary of a Young Girl.”

In 1986, the Dutch Institute for War Documentation published all three drafts, printed in parallel bands across the pages of the massive “Critical Edition,” which was published three years later in English. But its complex design makes it so demanding to follow that few readers have noticed how much it reveals about Anne Frank’s creative process. Or perhaps adults are simply resistant to the idea that a 15-year-old girl could have been a literary genius. According to Harold Bloom, “One cannot write about Anne Frank’s ‘Diary’ as if Shakespeare, or Philip Roth, is the subject.” In any case, critics and readers have preferred to assume the diary is a printed edition of the spontaneous scribblings in the cloth-covered book that the Nazis left behind when they arrested Frank and her family.

Had more readers taken Frank seriously as a writer, more might have considered the vast difference between the voice of a 13-year-old and that of a 15-year-old. They might have asked why, though we can watch her mature throughout the diary, the style and tone of the writing don’t change all that much from beginning to end. And they might have been curious enough to seek out the answer: Working rapidly in the spring of 1944, Frank revised earlier sections partly so their tone would be more in keeping with later entries. In fact, the decision to call the diary Kitty was not made until she began revising -- almost two years after she started writing.

The story, of course, is the same from draft to draft. Yet the contrast in confidence, in ability, in style -- in voice -- is remarkable. Frank’s first and second accounts of the Sunday afternoon when her sister, Margot, was called up for deportation, the event that propelled the family into hiding, are very different. The first was jotted down by a shocked, anguished 13-year-old soon after her whole existence was violently disrupted. The other was composed by a 15-year-old who had had time to process what had happened to her, and why. What makes the second draft so much more polished and eloquent is that Frank had found -- as all writers do, through trial and error -- the clearest voice in which to report what occurred.

Among the many reasons why the diary remains beloved is that it has so much to teach its readers: how to view the self and the world, how to navigate the painful transition from childhood into adulthood, how to remain loving, dignified and decent in the face of the most barbaric cruelty and horror.

But there is another lesson that Anne Frank’s diary can offer: how much work and effort is required to make language speak to us from the page, and how, word by word, a young writer found the lucid, beautiful voice that we continue to hear long after the living voice of the teenage girl was silenced.