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A journey through the more interesting parts in the scribblings of more than
a hundred diarists, including Samuel Pepys, Leonardo da Vinci, Virginia
Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, and Lee Harvey
Oswald. The book is organized in seven chapters, categorizing
diarists into chroniclers, travelers, pilgrims, creators,
apologists, confessors, and prisoners.

I found the book somewhat disorganized.  The author deliberately does not
mark the point where he is shifting from one diarist (and space and
time) to another, and also the occasionally futile attempt to join them.
The page falls open on someone, and maybe you find it interesting - more a
sort of book roulette.

Chroniclers

* Samuel Pepys (1660-1669) p.1-6, he has his hands full - of the pliant
   flesh of servant girls and married ladies about town.  His exploits are
   cloaked in broken French and Italian:
   with Mrs. Martin on June 3 1666: "Did what je voudrais with her, both
   devante and backward, which is also muy bon plazer."
   "with the servant girl Deb on March 31 1668: "Yo did take her, the first
   time in my life, sobra mi genu and did poner mi mano sub her jupes and
   toca su thigh."

* Samuel Sewall (Puritan judge, Massachussetts 1674) the only judge at
   the Salem trials to admit his mistakes publicly.  fourteen childbirths,
   most of them to die within two weeks or six months.

* Parson Woodforde, Diary of a country parson, 1785-1802, p.11, who lives a
   colourless life, occasionally playing Crikett with his clubb. Food appears
   to be one of the few pleasures of his bachelor life.

* Elizabeth Wynne p.15 - 68 year long diary (25 volumes), aristocratic life,

* the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, jointly kept a diary from 1851 to
   1870, the Goncourt _Journal, recording interactions with Gautier,
   Flaubert, Zola, Hugo, et al.  Edmond goes on to found the Academie
   Goncourt, which still gives the prizes.

* George Templeton Strong, New York, 1836 (student at Columbia) - keeps up
   for 40 years - 4 mn words.

* Virginia Woolf, chronicling the Bloomsbury group - selections published
   1953 by Leonard Woolf, with whom she has a "detached, free, harmonious"
   marriage.

* Evelyn Waugh - is constantly drunk, in England and Paris and in Abyssinia,
   and his swings through depression.

Travelers

* Stephen Burrough's expedition to Russia,

* Lewis and Clark,

* Amelia Stewart Knight, early pioneer, on travails such as crossing the
   Missouri - take the wagon to pieces, pull each bit across by rope using
   the wagon-bed as raft, swim the cattle and horses, and then re-assemble.

* Lydia Allen Rudd, also goes to Oregon in 1852, and Jane Gould, to
   California in 1862.

* black box from an aircraft crash at Washington, 1982

* Boswell goes to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson

* Queen Victoria's journals, a bestseller when published, on her Scottish
   travels, including a carriage accident in which she is "precipitated to
   the ground."

* Julia Newberry - Chicago business family (Newberry Library) - Europe
   tours.

* David Gascoyne, English poet, Paris Journal 1937-39

* Louis Philippe, future King of France, visits America in 1797, where he
   encounters a strange bedroom arrangement - parents in one bed, grown
   daughter with paramour in another - later, the other daughter joins them,
   while the guests are sleeping on the floor in the same room, hearing and
   observing all.

Confessors

* Stendahl's diary: p. 220-1:
   [The countess' niece, \pi] hasn't much in the way of breasts or wit, TWO
   GREAT WANTS! Likewise for want of something better to do, I took a few
   liberties, there wasn't any resistance. ... I went out on the terrace, the
   little girl followed me, I took her arm and put mine around her a bit;
   later, in the salon, her knees and thighs.  Her eyes thanked me by their
   look of love, outside that it was innocence itself.  But, on the terrace,
   I became conscious of a great truth. Novelty is a great source of
   pleasure, you must give yourself up to it.  I was sure of sleeping in the
   evening with Angeline, but I can only do anything with her now by making
   an effort, and by thinking of another woman. On the other hand, \pi, who
   is inferior in every respect, put me in a superb state. 220

* Byron: This journal is a relief. When I am tired--as I generally am--out
   comes this, and down goes every thing. But I can't read it over; and God
   knows what contradictions it may contain. If I am sincere with myself (but
   I fear one lies more to one's self than to any one else), every page
   should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor. 221

More from Pepys' diary: he has a swell wife, Elizabeth. when he's been too
free with
the servant girls she makes sure the next one they hire has plenty of pock
marks.  Even their most serious row, in 1668 over his wife's maid Deb
Willett, pays some connubial dividends: "I must here remember that I have
laid with my mother as a husband more times since this falling-out then in I
believe the twelve months before -- and with more pleasure to her then I
think in all the time of our marriage before." 3

after supper, to have my head combed by Deb., which occasioned the greatest
sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world, for my wife, coming up suddenly,
did find me imbracing the girl con my hand sub su coats;
and endeed I was with my main in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it
and the girl also... (October 25, 1668)

'I up with Mrs Pierce to Knipp, who was in bed; and we waked her and there I
handled her breasts and did baiser la and sing a song.' -
http://books.guardian.co.uk/whitbread2002/story/0,,842756,00.html

So having set her down in the palace I to the Swan, and there did the first
time 'baiser' the little sister of Sarah that is come into her place,

Mrs. Clerk of Greenwich and her daughter Daniel, their business among other
things was a request her daughter was to make, so I took her into my chamber,
and there it was to help her husband to the command of a little new pleasure
boat building, which I promised to assist in. And here I had opportunity
'para baiser elle, and toucher ses mamailles' . . .

meeting Nan Wright at the gate had opportunity to take two or three 'baisers'
23 dec 1666

November 18 I could not be commanded by my reason, but I must go this very
night, and so by coach, it being now dark, I to her, and she come into the
coach to me, and je did baiser her . . . and so bid her good night with much
content”

Thence to the Swan at noon, and there sent for a bit of meat and dined, and
had my baiser of the fille of the house there, but nothing plus.  20 jan 1664

--- http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html

In Oscar Wilde's "Importance of Being Earnest" Cecily Cardew says that she
keeps a diary "in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I
didn't write them down I should probably forget all about them." We are all
convinced of our own uniqueness, and all conscious of our own impermanence;
the impulse to keep a diary begins at the point where the two forms of
awareness intersect. But beyond that, diaries defy generalization. They come
in all shapes and sizes, they reflect an endless variety of temperament and
experience.
... it remains pleasantly unacademic in its approach. ...

The result is a kind of lucky dip. If many of the classic diarists, from
Pepys to Evelyn Waugh, make an appearance, Mr. Mallon also finds room for a
fair sprinkling of curiosities, ranging from the grievances of the
Elizabethan astrologer-cum-sexologist Simon Forman (whom he describes as an
"Ur-Californian") to the student radicalism (1968 vintage) of James Simon
Kunen's journal "The Strawberry Statement." A Victorian footman discusses
his employers (Upstairs seen through the eyes of Downstairs); Louis Philippe,
the future King of France, spends a night in an overcrowded log cabin in
Tennessee under circumstances worthy of Li'l Abner...

Along with the picturesque incidents there are plenty of telling
quotations. Charles Darwin, voyaging aboard the Beagle, gives a bleak account
of the Falkland Islands (they were uninhabited at the time, and few
possessions can ever have been made to sound less worth fighting over). A
Yugoslav diplomat, writing in 1956, describes what it was like to greet a
Soviet delegation and find himself unexpectedly kissed and hugged by Georgi
Malenkov ("my nose sank as if into a half-inflated balloon").
... you have the sensation of traveling on a roller coaster - a beautifully
precise piece of natural description from Gerard Manley Hopkins's journal is
immediately followed by some huffing and puffing by Allen Ginsberg.

Exactly what that ingredient is remains a mystery, but there can be no
doubt that the most effective diarists are obsessed - driven on above all,
Mr. Mallon suggests, by the need to assert a threatened existence. He ends
with an account of a neglected classic, W. N. P. Barbellion's "Journal of a
Disappointed Man," originally published in 1919. Barbellion, a scientist who
worked in the Natural History Museum in London, suffered from disseminated
sclerosis; from the age of 30 he knew that he was doomed, and he used his
diary to fight back. "He was determined to flood the land with his lunatic
vitality," says Mr. Mallon. "So he wrote his ludicrously moving journals,
never unaware of their crazy bravura."

For Mr. Mallon, "The Journal of a Disappointed Man" is the greatest of
all diaries. An exaggeration, but an interesting one; and the discussion of
Barbellion provides an eloquent close to an enjoyable book.