Book of the Week: She wrote about all her lovers

When I was a much younger woman I wrote letters each week to my mother. I had moved away from one town to another, leaving her behind, and the almost daily conversations I had had with her all my married life had become toll calls. I was ashamed of the bills and so I took up an almost day by day written account of my life. This was the nearest I ever got to keeping a serious register of it. I was going through a bad patch, for want of a better phrase, I told her things mothers don’t want to hear. Still, my mother kept those letters, in bundles held together with rubber bands
Before she died, she said, I suppose you will want to read those letters again. The expression on her face told me that, really, I shouldn’t.
And, when it came to it, they had vanished. Not a trace, not a word of those years left behind. Like it or not, my voice had become a secret, hers and mine.
But by that time I had learned the dictates of silence anyway; there were some things you said and some you shouldn’t. I had to find out how to say them anyway. That interior life of mine was being translated into poems and fictions, lent to my characters, most of whom soon developed independent lives of their own. There was simply no time to write what could not be used. No secret diaries, very few letters that will reveal much of the inner self, although my email sometimes wanders into the confessional. But who keeps emails?
Nevertheless, I am immensely drawn to the private lives of others. Earlier this year, Kirsty Gunn sent me a very large hard backed green book called Secret Voices, A Year of Women’s Voices (lord knows what it cost to post from London); she thought I might find it fascinating, and I do. The editor, Sarah Gristwood has created a collection of random diary entries by hundreds of women, organised under headings for each day of a fictitious year. What, I asked myself, did these women feel the need to record of their daily lives? And who were they?
Not surprisingly, Katherine Mansfield looms large, but so does the politician Barbara Castle, and an 18th century wife dealing with an unreasonable husband; VIrginia Woolf – of course, and of course Anne Frank. There’s the actress Rachel Roberts, tracing the disintegration of her marriage to Rex Harrison, right up until the night before she took her life, Alice Walker reflecting on finding grey in her hair, the private sorrows of Audre Lorde after mastectomy. There are entries from very young women and women at the end of their lives, and for the most part it’s impossible to tell from one entry to another, whether these were ever meant to be read by others, or whether these were their own hearts’ ease, words written in solitude intended for the writer alone. Take Patricia Highsmith, acclaimed crime writer, musing on the pleasure of meeting her lover, whose husband is ‘spiteful’ about their relationship. The couple are to meet in Paris, and Highsmith says how wonderful it will be that “we can therefore be alone at least for these few days without anyone knowing”. I see that this was written in October, 1962, and so I can imagine the lovers holding hands in Café La Rotonde, the light falling through the golden foliage of the trees beyond, their walks in the Luxembourg Gardens past tubs of russet chrysanthemums, the chilly breath of autumn as the nights grew colder. And I am glad to know of this secret tryst.
On the same page, Lady Cynthia Asquith, contemplates peace at the end of the First World War. “I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace,” she writes. “I think it will take more courage than anything that has gone before … one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.” Highsmith, we might assume, had no intention of allowing her diary entries to be seen, Asquith probably did.
I knew two diarists who had clearly intended their private thoughts to be revealed. One was an aunt of mine who lived with her sister, another of my aunts. The first one was a semi-invalid, a former nurse who had once been beautiful, never married, always mysterious. I believed there were secrets in her life, but no telltale mention was made of them. The second aunt, widowed and without descendants, was brisk, efficient, dogmatic. They rarely spoke to each other. I loved them both, they were other mothers when my own mother was missing in action through illnesses. The first one had a long shelf in her room holding her diaries, which were never referred to in conversation. When she died, she left me all she owned, about $85 in cash, some worn jewellery, her diaries. Only, when I went to claim these journals, they had gone. “‘Oh,’ said my second aunt, ‘you didn’t want that stuff, I burned them’.” I saw then the family pattern of silences, later repeated by their younger sister, my mother, and her letter burning habits. One aunt had entrusted me with the truth, the second had again protected me from it.
There is a little codicil to this story. On the same day that I discovered the loss of the diaries, we opened another piece of my legacy, a suitcase with rusted locks. Something inside it rattled. What the contents revealed was perhaps forty or fifty wire-framed spectacles, presumably removed from the dead. And there were dozens of sturdy glass syringes with long sharp needles, half-filled with morphine.
And, I thought, memory is not confined to the written word, it is also about the sensory perceptions of what we see and smell and touch and hold that triggers memory, the relics of our past reminding us of particular days. My aunt’s secret voice had somehow escaped the flames, and I saw in vivid outline nights spent with the dead in country hospitals, relief from the pain that followed her throughout her life in the plundered morphine. But still I wonder, how would she have explained it all to me in those diaries? The ones she meant me to read. They are still a loss.
The other diarist who intended her entries to be read was the poet, my friend Lauris Edmond. Lauris cut a dashing figure in the Wellington literary scene of the 1970s, and beyond, until her death in 2000, both in person with her blonde weekly ‘set’ hair raining curls, her floating scarves (she left over 500 of them), her laughter, and her reputation for dalliances with a retinue of lovers. She wrote about them all, and named the names in her diaries, breathy delighted narratives, anguish when one eluded her fancy, regrets, there were a few of those. She deposited those diaries in the Alexander Turnbull Library. Her archive contains numerous folders of letters from adoring swains, many of them “explicitly, as well as implicitly, sexual,” as her daughter, the late Frances Edmond wrote, in a book about her mother called Always Going Home: a mother and daughter story.
These accounts did not appear in her celebrated autobiography. Frances “admired her exuberant lust for life, for adventure, for experience … While I understand her reasons,” Frances wrote, “I cannot help thinking it a pity that she chose to conceal this aspect of herself.” But hold on, actually,  she didn’t. She put her diaries where they could be read by others, albeit permission has to be sought from her literary executors. Frances was her executor, and her view was that if these revelations were not made by her, they might never appear. And that is where things get tricky, because several of her descendants, and the descendants of some of her lovers, would prefer that they never did. They may have a point, it’s one thing to reveal one’s own secrets, it’s another to disclose those of others, a fine line, what to leave in, and what to leave out.
 But, one might argue, that’s the whole point, surely, about diaries, the writer puts in everything that comes to mind, leaving out nothing. It’s somehow pleasing to know that seemingly prim Queen Victoria and her husband Albert did not sleep much on their wedding night, and that when she woke and “beheld his beautiful angelic face by [her]side, it was more than she [could] express! He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen.” It’s hard not to see the spent prince slumbering by her side, as she scribbles away in her diary, supported by a stack of silk pillows.
From a feminist perspective, the release of women’s voices into the open is a cause for celebration, this ragged chorus of reflection becoming a full-throated roar about what truly matters to women, stripping away the polite veneers that stifled affirmative action for so long. Though, tilting my hat to a slightly different angle, I did find myself asking if the privacy of some women had been breached. People, women in particular, need safe spaces to express themselves wholly. The decision as to whether diaries will be read in the future is something that will be decided after the act of writing, sometimes by the writer, sometimes by others, often by men. Death has its own way of invading privacy.
No such qualms can be raised about the still very living novelist, Amy Tan, who is quoted in Secret Voices: “We write to prolong the time between our two deaths: the physical death of our being when we cease to exist, and the death of us when no one remembers us … I write to prolong my memory of life now … By writing it down it is engrained, and my thoughts continue, are part of some stream and not just discrete bits from the day’s menu, the same offerings, and my eating the same things I liked last time.”
There are echoes of Tan’s sentiments in one of Mansfield’s entries, written just before Christmas in 1920. Mansfield, did not intend her diaries to be read and had, in fact, implored her husband to do away with them. “Have a clean sweep, Bogey, and leave all fair – will you?”, she had famously written to him. Yet here was her voice, more than a hundred years later, recalled from a place of her agony: “Oh Life! Accept me – make me worthy – teach me. I write that. I look up. The leaves move in the garden, the sky is pale, and I catch myself weeping. It is hard … it is hard to make a good death.”
Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries edited by Sarah Gristwood (Batsford, $62.95) is available by in selected bookstores.