48 The New York Review
means that, as with her fiction, there
is no datedness here: even the entries
written forty years ago feel as though
they could have been written last week.
In a sense, Garner’s diaries are the
culmination of her lifelong blurring of
the lines between fiction and nonfiction.
“I need to devise a form that is flexible
and open enough to contain all my de-
tails, all my small things,” she writes
in an entry from 1989. “If only I could
blow out realism while at the same time
sinking deeply into what is most real.”
It’s hard not to feel that Garner is giv-
ing us a knowing look here, since the
volumes we are reading appear to be
the solution to the very problem she is
describing. As Joan Didion once wrote,
“Our notebooks give us away, for how-
ever dutifully we record what we see
around us, the common denominator
of all we see is always, transparently,
shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’”
These diaries begin shortly after the
publication of Monkey Grip, in part
because Garner burned all of her ear-
lier notebooks decades ago: she has de-
scribed herself as being “so bored with
my younger self and her droning sen-
timental concerns that there was noth-
ing for it—this shit had to go.” (The act
of burning the earlier notebooks is, of
course, dutifully noted in the later di-
aries, in an entry from 1994.) Garner
edited her diaries, selecting the entries,
and though she doesn’t say how much
she cut, she claims to have made only
the most minor changes to what she left
in. “I could trim, I could fillet, yes, but
I was not to rewrite,” she has said about
the process.
To select, fillet, or trim is, of course, to
get a large part of the way toward creat-
ing, so it’s no surprise that the Helen of
the diaries is a semi- fictional construct,
a character in every sense of the word,
one who exists at the nexus of art and
autobiography. Helen is a sharp critic:
reviewing a collection of short fiction,
she notes that “the only woman in it is
the naked one on the cover.” She is un-
snobbishly catholic in her tastes, noting
her “rave review of Wayne’s World”
but also that she was “swept away” at
a production of Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde. Reading interviews from The
Paris Review, she gets annoyed by au-
thorial egotism—“Nabokov: too clever
and nasty. Kerouac: vain and noisy, a
show- off. Eudora Welty: a nice, dear
old lady full of respect and modesty”—
and disparages the idea of taking her
accomplishments too seriously.
But she is honest about her petty de-
sires, as when her second novel is short-
listed for a major award: “I don’t know
who I’m up against but I want that
prize.” Repeatedly, despite her success
as a writer, she questions her status:I’m worried about art, what it’s
for, whether what I do is any use to
anyone, whether I’ve been kidding
myself all these years that I’m any
good at it, that I’ve got anything
at all to offer the human race,
whether I should just chuck it in
and look for a job.Obviously, making an imaginary
friend out of the version of herself an
author presents in her own diaries is
probably not the appropriate response
for any critic who has been trained to
respect the treacherous gulf that lies
between text and creator—who has, in
other words, read some Barthes. But it
demonstrates how seductively Garner
creates her diaristic world, allowing
readers to enter her life—that “inter-
esting extra”—in ways that make it
difficult to maintain a proper critical
distance. Reading the published di-
aries of, say, Virginia Woolf, we are
constantly aware that we are in the
presence of genius, of someone whose
literary sensibilities and powers of per-
ception are far beyond ours. Woolf’s
diaries are full of self- doubt, pettiness,
and worry, but those passages feel like
the momentary lapses of a god or a
parent, or at least an indisputably
brilliant older sibling. We must work
to be worthy receivers of her private
musings.
Reading Garner’s diaries, we en-
counter someone much more human,
quick- tempered, and messy. Over the
course of the books, we get drawn into
her struggles—with men, with work,
with age, with burgeoning religious
urges, with her critical reputation—and
before we know it, we start responding,
assuring her that whatever book she’s
working on will be great, and not just
because we, to borrow an idea from the
comedian Mike Birbiglia, are in the
future. We commiserate with her over
professional slights (like when she is
mistaken “by three separate male writ-
ers for a staff helper” while attending
a literary festival in Toronto) and bite
our tongues when she fills us in on her
latest love affair—or affairs: Yellow
Notebook ends with Helen in the midst
of relationships with not one but two
married men. In One Day I’ll Remem-
ber This, we watch, helpless, as she
marries one of those men, who, as “V,”
gradually becomes the closest thing the
book has to a villain. (Most of the peo-
ple who appear in the diaries are given
an initial as a pseudonym, but it’s fairly
easy—with the help of Bernadette
Brennan’s book and Wikipedia—to
work out who the central people are.)
Garner’s diaries will not be much
use to future cultural historians; they
exist for readers right now, at a moment
when their author is alive and willing
to own up to what seems, on the sur-
face, to be an impressive act of self-
indulgence, but somehow feels like a
generous gift. As with the best literary
diaries, there is much here that is witty
and wise and quotable, but the heart of
these volumes are the moments when
our new friend acts out in sudden, emo-
tional, and downright silly ways. In an
entry from 1990, Garner notes that she
is reading an essay in which Woolf is
quoted as haughtily dismissing Rob-
ert Louis Stevenson’s use of adjec-
tives, of all things: “Ooh I was furious!
She’s a goddess, but at that moment I
wanted to kick her flabby Bloomsbury
arse.” QTHE COWSHED
MEMORIES OF
THE CHINESE CULTURAL
REVOLUTION
Ji Xianlin
Introduction by Zha Jianying
Translated from the Chinese
by Chenxin Jiang
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Available from booksellers and nyrb.com —Ki rkus Reviews“Elizabeth Taylor’s exquisi tely drawn character
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Elizabeth Taylor
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one very old—from neglect.”
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