Newspapers and diarists: the literature of unhappy writers

The reading of newspapers poses a curious paradox and that is that the reader knows the outcome of the story that, on the other hand, the author still ignores while writing.

When the young Kafka or the young Thomas Mann have doubts about their literary vocation and fear they do not have the strength to carry it out, one already knows that they will become references in 20th century literature.

When Marguerite Duras anguishes over the life of her husband, recently released from the concentration camp, one already knows that she is going to save herself from it.

This situation, of course, does not include the category of

who publish their newspapers every two or three years.

Two live, two publish.

This type of writer, regardless of his talent, turns the newspaper into a kind of delayed time social network.

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An old classification of human characters made in the 20th century by the French psychologist and philosopher René Le Senne — today more literary than scientific — divides people into the following types: passionate, choleric, sentimental, nervous, phlegmatic, sanguine, apathetic and amorphous, and, in turn, each of these in assets or liabilities.

For Le Senne, the diary writer would be the natural product of the nervous passive.

Who and how is this character?

Why are diaries written?

What types of newspapers are there and at what point in history do they become relevant?

The writer Anaïs Nin working in her printing press in the 1940s. Anaïs Nin Trust

Nervous and passive are the pages of Virginia Woolf or Silvia Plath, true treatises on sadness and the "black sun" of melancholy, which casts its strange light on things;

or those of Gombrowicz, halfway between the diary and the essay and, above all, the settling of scores.

The most relevant question is once again the one from the beginning: do these authors know that sooner or later their diary will be published?

Some are better known for their diaries than for the rest of their work, such as Anaïs Nin or Paul Leautaud, not to mention the strange case of the Goncourts, two brothers eight years apart and a single four-handed diary.

Tolstoy would have allowed at least two of his different parallel diaries to be published, but perhaps not the most intimate and sincere one, the one he kept sewn into his boots.

In Spanish, the diaristic tradition is less than in other languages.

Andrés Trapiello frequently publishes thick volumes, and also his reflections on the genre in

.

Nervous and passive, of course, the great Alejandra Pizarnik, whose diaries are a defense of her own fragile life until nothing was enough.

Or the very notable ones by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, published with the superb title of

, a school of skepticism, humor and observation, and at the same time a novel in installments.

Also those of my compatriot Héctor Abad Faciolince, where the vocation of the writer and his infinite fears occupy a large part of his pages, comparable only to his love dilemmas.

Will I or will I not be happy at the end of this story?

Difficult question, because all human beings yearn for a different type of happiness.

Thomas Mann decided that his diaries could not be read until 50 years after his death.

A great gesture of self-confidence.

Will I be read so long after?

As Trapiello says, in them he makes it clear to posterity that he prefers strawberry jam.

But it is that Mann kept secrets that at that time were unspeakable and he was right in thinking that, in time, humanity would be understanding with homosexuals.

Andrés Trapiello, at his home in 2021. Santi Burgos

And since we are: when reading the amazing

of Rafael Chirbes, the conclusion is the same again: no matter how purist he pretends to be, the writer knows, deep down, that they will be read.

Is it perhaps the secret desire of him?

Chirbes is very tough, sincere to the core, implacable with some colleagues (Belén Gopegui or Pérez Reverte, among others), but it is easy to guess, in the background, a certain evil smile.

He doesn't write all that, in that superb style, thinking that he will be buried in the attic.

He writes it for others.

And that gives a different tone to his confessions, some of them creepy.

Descriptions of pain from injections in the abused anus give anyone goosebumps.

The

by Patricia Highsmith, already published in English and about to be released in Spanish, raise doubts about its true intention.

She wrote them from her teens, but she always kept them hidden.

Now, so much secrecy is suspicious.

Does not he who hides much long to be discovered?

Some newspapers, as is often the case today with any type of writing —even essays or biographies—, are presented by their authors as “novels”.

It can be assumed that the reason is to reach more readers.

This is the case of

, by Mario Levrero, one of the most depressing and, for that very reason, the most interesting newspapers in recent years.

It only becomes tiresome when he indulges in that rite so frequent in authors from the Southern Cone that consists of narrating in detail and with much enthusiasm his sophisticated dreams.

But everyone dreams!

About this, Martin Amis wrote in his book

: every dream told alienates a number of readers.

Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero.

Diaries are usually depressing, because as a general rule happy people do not write, or diaries or anything that has to do with literature.

The permanent feeling of tragedy and the guilt that haunts those of Marguerite Duras, after the war, move to tears.

Also those of the unfortunate John Cheever, who recorded each day the time he poured his first drink trying to get sober, almost always without success, until eleven in the morning.

What is attractive about this point of view?

For a newspaper to have literary value, the culture must first validate the importance of the

.

Pascal strongly attacked "the pathetic self", but then Rousseau writes and publishes his

of him, in the wake of Saint Augustine, which open the way to emancipation from intimacy.

Now yes: Welcome, Mister Ego!

Through this book, Rousseau was the precursor of two things: the French Revolution and the rise of Romanticism, where there is a true liberating explosion of the

that will allow, from there, to give free rein to daily life.

And so immediately after, in the 19th century, which is the century of great explorations and explorer heroes, the genre of travel diaries reaches a peak.

One of the first is

by Flora Tristán, a diary and memory (sometimes the second presupposes the first) about a trip to Peru by her ancestors, or those of Sir David Livingston, an explorer famous for getting lost in Africa. Equatorial and because his colleague Henry Morton Stanley found him, saying the well-known phrase: “Mr.

Livingston, I guess."

A special category is the journals of non-writers.

Those of Andy Wharhol, for example, with the amazing peculiarity that he dictated them over the phone, with their parties and the fashionable drugs in New York and the sexual imminence and the money spent daily on dinners and taxis, as if it were a notebook of accounting.

Or those of actor Richard Burton.

While in Mexico, he comments on

, by Octavio Paz, and says that the only objection is that "Mr. Paz believes that all Mexicans act and think in the same way."

Burton also comments on Elizabeth Taylor's readings and of course records the parties and boisterous drunkenness of both.

German writer Victor Klemperer.

In this same category would be the most famous diary in the world, that of Anne Frank, a harrowing testimony of the Holocaust.

Or those of the Jewish Romanist Victor Klemperer, who recounts the Third Reich and the entire war from the perspective of a Dresden Jew.

In the opposite corner are those of Joseph Goebbels, published in Spain in 1949 and of restricted circulation.

In them, incidentally, he gives an astonishing description of Mussolini's Italy: "He has an excellent appetite, but lousy teeth."

If war diaries are considered to be a separate genre, those by Ernst Jünger stand out, published in Spanish under the title of

, on the German occupation of Paris.

And an amazing story revealed by the Colombian writer Juan Esteban Constaín in his latest book,

.

In December 1915, on the western front of Douchy, two enemy soldiers met: a German and an Englishman.

There is a kind of Christmas truce, so they put down their weapons, come out of their trenches and exchange cigarettes in the "no man's zone".

They talk for a while and both write it down in their diary.

The two point out that in the background the ringing of some bells can be heard.

Who are these two soldiers?

The German is Jünger and the English is Robert Graves.