It was two days after Christmas, school was out, and in the western Illinois town of Kewanee, Edward Robb Ellis, 16, and some of his friends were squirming with boredom. Finally Ellis had an idea: ”Hey, let`s have a contest to see who can keep a diary the longest.”
Two of the friends took up his challenge. One kept a diary for two weeks, another for three months. Sixty-one years later Ellis still keeps a daily diary, though at 18 million words on 35,000 pages in 60 bound volumes, it no longer fits into a school bag.
The Ellis diary tells the story of an ”ordinary man,” Ellis` own modest characterization. ”I`m terribly afraid of hubris, of being aggressively proud,” he explains, ”because whom the gods will destroy they first make prideful.” He says that repeatedly. ”The diary is important-I`m not,” he insists.
The diary tells of Ellis` life during the Depression and of his adventures as a journalist for more than 40 years, in New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Okinawa, Peoria, Chicago and New York City, where he lives now in a four-room apartment on the Lower West Side among 10,000 books, including three histories of his own: ”The Epic of New York City,” ”A Nation in Torment: A History of the Great Depression” and ”Echoes of Distant Thunder: Life in the United States, 1914-1918.”
The diary tells of Ellis` shortcomings, strengths and trials: three marriages; two divorces; the unexpected death of his third wife, Ruth, 23 years ago; his battle with alcoholism; his trusting relationship with his only daughter, Sandra, 45, born of his first marriage.
”Flaubert said there`s a novel in any life, and there is if one can just get all of the personal history-all of it, good and bad,” Ellis says.
”Keeping the diary is a daily confrontation with one`s conscience, and I`m always discovering things about myself. I`m a very introspective guy, and I`ve had psychoanalysis, which is very helpful. I`m an alcoholic who hasn`t had a drink in a long time. And I`m a compulsive guy, or I wouldn`t keep a diary so long. I sometimes call myself an alcoholic bookaholic workaholic.”
Since 1981 the Guinness Book of World Records has called Ellis the keeper of the world`s longest diary. Indeed the famous 17th and 18th Century British diarists were laconic by comparison. Samuel Pepys kept his famous diary for only 9 1/2 years, James Boswell for 35 years.
The Guinness editors learned of the Ellis diary from Gene M. Gressley, director of the Archive of Contemporary History at the University of Wyoming, Laramie campus. In 1980 Gressley persuaded Ellis to turn over the diary to the archive and sent a truck to New York to haul away the first 53 volumes.
”I didn`t want to give them up, but when Mr. Gressley said, `What about fire?` I was convinced,” Ellis says. ”When the truck pulled away, I suddenly felt empty. So the very next day I started making carbon copies. At the end of the year I send the top copies to Wyoming, and I have a dupe at home, so I can at least check on the last eight years to find out what I`ve been doing.”
Ellis takes notes in a checkbook-sized Letts of London diary as he goes about each day. The next morning he consults the notes as he types the day`s entry, usually one to four pages. He has no wish to reread the boyhood entries. ”I was such a jerk. So stupid. I don`t like that guy very much. And the style wasn`t too hot. It`s a much better diary than it used to be. I got the hang of it after 60 years.”
After examining the first 53 volumes, Gressley pronounced Ellis the ”the Pepys of 20th Century America.” The diary, he says, ”is much more than a history of our times; it really represents the history of civilization from one vantage point by one very erudite and perceptive commentator.” Ellis roars with laughter at the suggestion that the comparison to the relatively short-winded Pepys may be an insult.
Afflicted with emphysema, Ellis nonetheless laughs expansively at the slightest provocation. At 77, his hair gray, his beard white, Ellis is a jolly old elf in brown-checked jacket, blue French-cuffed shirt with curled collars and white-knit tie. Not without reason is he comfortable with himself.
”The older one becomes, the less one cares what others say about him,”
he says. ”What I`m concerned with is how do I regard myself? Am I a good guy or not? On balance, I`m a good guy, I`ve now learned. When I was drinking, I was a bad guy. I`m trying to forgive myself my sins and trying to build up a little karma before I go. A friend of mine paid me one of the best compliments I`ve ever had in my life. He said, `Ellis, you`re totally transparent.` I said, `Geez, Bill, thank you!` I want people to see right through me, because I`m not a phony, and I don`t pose, and if I tell you who I am, then you`ll tell me who you are, and we`ll get along fine.”
At the suggestion that Ellis may not pose but may tend to be, well, just a mite theatrical, he roars again. ”I think the word is ham !”
Then he dismisses archivist Gressley`s estimated value of $1.25 million on the diary by saying, ”Well, nothing is worth anything until somebody wants to buy it.
”As a historian, I know I`ve accomplished something, and I do take my work seriously, but I`m terribly afraid of-” He stops himself to recall with another roar the day he heard he would be in the Guinness book. He burst into the apartment of a friend with the news. ”I`m terribly afraid of hubris,” he began, but he was interrupted by a loud clap of thunder. ”I looked up and said, `No, God, not yet!`
”The point is, I`ve written three narrative histories. So I`m a historian, a journalist and a diarist-almost a split personality. As a historian, I look at this diary created by this character named Ellis and I`m forced to admit that it`s one hell of a piece of Americana.
”When I was writing `The Epic of New York City,` I leaned heavily upon the diary of George Templeton Strong, a Columbia graduate, a Wall Street lawyer and a big muckety-muck in 19th Century cultural circles in New York. He kept his diary for 40 years, and I leaned heavily on it. That`s why I think future historians will consult my diary, even if only for trivia, if you will.”
Ellis recalls the day he began to take his own diary seriously.
”I was just having fun doing it. The way I phrased it, I was writing a diary with my left hand, until I became a reporter on the New York World Telegram. Another reporter there was a graduate of Dartmouth with a major in history. He was just crazy about history; he later went to Cambridge and got a Ph.D. We were having cocktails one afternoon, and I told him about my diary. I was about 35 years old. He said, `Geez, don`t you know what you`re doing?`
Then he explained to me what I was doing, and from that moment on I took it seriously.”
As a result, Ellis conscientiously enters in his diary the price of everything he buys. He records weather conditions. When he dines out, he records the name and address of the restaurant. ”I think the average life of a restaurant in New York City is only about seven years,” he says. ”So if a historian in the future is saying, `Xantippe`s Restaurant-where was that?`
he`ll find it in my diary.”
Inevitably, Ellis has drawn on his experiences as a reporter: morning walks with President Harry Truman, covering the United Nations and
interviewing hundreds of celebrities, from Hollywood stars to such geniuses as Frank Lloyd Wright.
Ellis warms to the memory of the day the New York Police Department captured bank robber Willie Sutton: ”The cops were very stupid. They didn`t search him, first of all. He was in the police station for 45 minutes before they discovered he was carrying a gun. I was on the night shift, and an editor walked back to my desk and said: `Okay, Eddie, I want you to write about Willie Sutton. And make it funny.`
”Well, he meant it, and I`m not a humorist, so it scared me to death. But I fell back on one thing I understood-satire: Praise that which you despise. So I heaped praise upon the Police Department for the magnificent way they had caught Willie Sutton. Next day our cop shop reporter said: `Ellis, don`t you dare spit on the sidewalk. The commissioner and all the cops are after you.`
”But when I went home that day, God, what a great moment it was in my life. I saw people on the subway reading my article and laughing aloud!
”And I like to write street scenes. For example, I live on a beautiful block that has trees and flowers. One sunny day I was walking on my block, and I saw a black woman who I knew was a prostitute because I`d seen her hanging around the bars where prostitutes hang out. Standing with her was a young white mother, about 24, and her little 3-year-old boy. This prostitute was bent over the boy, and the love was just pouring out of her! I thought: `My God, that`s beautiful! That`s absolutely beautiful.`
”I also write down jokes. I`m not a good raconteur. As a friend of mine once said, `Not only that, Eddie, but you don`t tell stories well.` But I take down the jokes I hear. First cannibal: I hate my mother-in-law. Second cannibal: Okay, so just eat the salad. Now that`s a nothing sort of thing. We hear the jokes, laugh and forget them. But they continue to exist in my diary. ”I still function as a reporter. I cover the news of the world, the country, the state, the city and my friends. Because I`m a reporter I try to be objective about the facts, but I also comment.”
All this we must take on faith, in Ellis and in archivist Gressley, because Ellis` monumental diary remains, by his wishes, a closed book at least until his death. Ellis doesn`t want to hurt people whose assessments of themselves are perhaps more flattering than Ellis` observations. When Ellis announces, ”You`ll be in the diary,” you wonder what impression he`s picked up, and it can be unnerving.
Ellis` late wife, Rose, had free access to the diary. His daughter, Sandra, who lives in Eugene, Ore., is reading from it now and has offered to write the last entry.
”I told her I would like the diary to be completed, and she said, `I`ll tell you what: If I get a call from you or hear that you`re on your deathbed, I`ll fly to New York and tape your last words.` I said: `You`re on.` It`s not because I`m important. It`s just because that will make it one human being`s life until the very end.”
The diary lately has been opened to David Hall, president of Letts of London Ltd., and Phyllis Calderaro, Letts` marketing-services manager. The company is the U.S. subsidiary of Charles Letts and Co. Ltd., which has been manufacturing leatherbound diaries since 1796.
”I`d like to sell my diary to the Letts people,” Ellis says. ”They have a diary collection in London, and, well, we`ll see what happens. I`ve told them, `Pay me $50,000 a year until I die, and you can have my diary.` I`m 77 and I have emphysema; so look at the actuarial tables. They`re getting a bargain.”
While the decision is being made, Letts has hired Ellis as a consultant, in which capacity he will design a line of diaries to be known as ”The Ellis Collection,” assist in the company`s search for antique Letts diaries and do what comes most naturally: urge everyone he meets to keep a diary.
”It`s never too late to start,” Ellis says. ”In my column for Diarist`s Journal (Yes, there is such a publication, a 16-page monthly edited and published by one Ed Gildea of Lansford, Pa.) I just wrote about Sir Walter Scott. He didn`t begin his diary until he was 54 years of age. And he kept it until he died. Of course, look at all the stuff we missed.
”But I like to tell diarists who are just beginning that they can always use the flashback technique of the novelist to recapture their early years.
”I have a big dream. Before I die I hope to create an American diary repository. If tens of thousands of diaries flood in, one or two of them are going to turn out to be masterpieces.
”The repository could publish this diary-10 years later, 15 years, 50-and split the royalties with the diarist or his descendants. Over a long period of time there would be so many diaries that you`d have Americana coming out of your ears.
”It would be a delight to any historian, and ultimately, in my opinion, it would change the very nature of history. It would make history less institutional and more personal; and, as Jung said, the individual is the only reality.”
