Is the book — the solid, rectangular repository of the whole damn thing, from Chapter 1 to Chapter 32 — always and in principle the superior vehicle for a story?
Is the book — the solid, rectangular repository of the whole damn thing, from Chapter 1 to Chapter 32 — always and in principle the superior vehicle for a story? I ask because among readers of a reactionary cast of mind (among whom I sometimes count myself) an assumption has arisen that ‘the book’, the physical book, that satisfying lump of a thing you can hold in your hands, is the ideal, the Platonic ‘form’, the ultimate reality; while all other vessels for words — the Kindle, the audiobook, the broadcast or electronic instalment — are but shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave.
But travelling on the Continent over the past two weeks I have wondered not only whether the physical book is always the best but, more radically, whether it is in fact the primal Platonic form; or whether, rather, the book is not just another shadow on the cave’s wall; and in the Beginning is the Word.
I’ve been reading Mabel Eden’s diaries, transmitted in daily instalments (every midnight) online. I’ve been following a life lived in the late 19th century and early to mid-20th century, at about the same rate as she was living it. I don’t think of this as a book. Her diaries have never been and may never be printed as a book. How you first come to something may determine what it is you consider the ‘real’ thing; and the real thing for me is the midnight ping on my laptop promising the breakfast pleasure of living another day in somebody else’s life.
That is the peculiar felicity of experiencing a diary in small daily chunks. For this is how it was written. You do not, of course, have to subscribe to Mabel’s diaries this way (see www.edendiaries.co.uk) but I’m glad I chose to. I’m glad, too, that I neglected to find out much about the diarist before I started reading. All I knew was that she was an English aristocrat, raised partly in America, belonging to the rich and privileged family that produced Sir Anthony Eden; and that in 1878, aged 12, she began a contemporaneous chronicle of a life lived in New Jersey, Kent and London until her death in the year of my birth, 1949.
Her style is startlingly spare and modern. She never beats about the bush, and she falls into many of the grammatical errors and stylistic vulgarities that some Spectator readers think of as recent lapses: Christmas is sometimes rendered Xmas, ‘ever so’ is used for ‘very’, and she gets muddled with her apostrophes. I am meeting and coming to know Mabel as she grows from being an opinionated and rather snobbish little girl into a charming, caring and quite flirtatious young woman, and then into middle and old age as a more solitary, increasingly free-thinking yet always conservative lady.
It is a life (save one spell as a government censor) almost entirely of leisure. Lunches, parties, dances, picnics, church services and visiting other rich people are all she and her friends do. It is a life, too, no less mobile for lacking jets and motorways as she zaps back and forth across the Atlantic. Trains, cars, hotels, ocean liners and travel are part of the rhythm. From the Queen Mary to the Goring Hotel, to the shooting estates of Scotland, to tending her garden and her beehives in Kent, she is always active yet never really works, in the modern sense. I’ve been seeing the rest of the world — the millennium (celebrated, correctly, in 1899), the end of the Boer War, the first world war, the great depression — simply as a backdrop to a class of Englishmen’s lives lived in quite astonishing idleness.
But amid all this hedonism, wealth and privilege, four elements in Mabel’s nature emerge from the start and never waver: what she is and what she would have been whoever she was. There’s a brutal private honesty; a thoughtfulness emerging in a curious combination of a sharp and prosecuting intellect with an underlying open-mindedness; kindly sociability and a wary susceptibility to handsome and dashing men; and an ever-present sensitivity to place: houses, gardens, landscapes, atmospheres.
Today as I write it is (in Mabel’s life, and in my life in her) June 1934: ‘…grave news from Germany, a plot against Hitler… So ends all the disarmament conferences, the League of Nations, and all the flimsy idealism of statesmen…’. She does not know that she has now 15 years left to live, and neither she nor I yet know how they will work out. There’s no paging forward to the end for either of us.
Or not exactly. But here’s the aching twist to this tale of e-publication. Her editors have divided the life into a first and second section. Each midnight instalment falls into two parts, one from the first and one from the second section, both proceeding chronologically and in tandem; so (I assume) I shall reach the end of her life just as I reach the middle. The little girl and the young lady are growing older side by side.
The effect of this counterpoint is painfully moving. I follow Mabel’s daily hopes and dreams as a girl simultaneously with her resignation in middle age at ambitions unfulfilled. She is tending her bees and musing on her life as a spinster at the same time as I am following her pounding teenage heart on being shown attention by a dishy and clever young man. In 1903 (her mid-thirties): ‘I feel that my ambitions are boundless, and that there is no height to which I cannot ascend. I always feel I have a brilliant career, although it is somewhat late in starting.’ Nearly 30 years later, in 1932: ‘very ill with this cough and don’t go out… amusing myself by reading right through all my old diaries. It is a humiliating experience. Such a revelation of character and such a silly unbalanced character, and such a wasted life.’
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