I have made definite plans, a list of things I must do before I reach complete mental and physical infirmity.
Since I was 14, I have recorded my thoughts and feelings and feeble attempts at poetry in a series of notebooks. Now I have a stack of them-spiral-bound college-ruled notebooks, composition books with black-and-white marbled covers, artists’ sketchbooks, cloth-covered bound books-and I have not yet been able to give them up. I continue to tote the collection from one residence to the next, but before I am too old to remember to do it, and how to do it, I must burn these notebooks.
To look at them, they appear quite harmless. And yet within their green and red and orange covers are imprisoned my juvenilia, an embarrassingly detailed recording of the obsessive concerns and unrestrained emotions that marked my route through adolescence.
Therein lies their threat-the flaccid poetry, puerile observations and maudlin complaints could potentially strip me of any self-respect I have achieved in adulthood. It is bad enough remembering that I once thought and wrote in this manner; worse still is the possibility that, rather than commit these books now or soon to the flames, I may later forget to burn them and thus leave them to be “discovered.”
I can just imagine the scenario: The community mourns my untimely passing-I’m killed by a city bus while jaywalking a downtown street-and my bereaved friends take it upon themselves to tidy my affairs and dispose of my few possessions. One particularly helpful buddy finds the notebooks in a cardboard box and speculates on their literary merit. She decides to send them on to Larry McMurtry in the hopes that the famous author may secure for my memory the fame that eluded me in life. Suddenly, Waldenbooks is displaying the hard-cover edition of my complete juvenilia, and there are even negotiations for the film rights. From the depths of my grave, I am certain I would be embarrassed posthumously.
A quick glance at the titles of the pieces is enough to make me cringe. Here are my pompous discourses, one titled “On Beauty,” another “On Truth”:
Truth is something that is lasting and eternal. Once the truth is learned, it cannot be altered. A truth is something that can be found in all areas of life. It is a broad, reaching word that inspires great and not-so-great minds alike.
There’s a poem, dedicated to an actor I once saw on stage, “Ode to a Shakespearean Actor”:
I have known you near me, within reach, ordinarily close,
Like a read book or a worn chair or a slept bed,
And then you behold a stage, piercing lights, sweating audience,
And instead of grocery-bill complained or foul-language stained,
Your mouth becomes an orifice, recounting deeds of warriors
Or disclosing murderous plots of politicians or confessing a concealed love . . . .
Obviously I did not think my poem would suffer in comparison with the odes of John Keats.
The essay “I am the Savior of the World” is too bad to reproduce even here, its title suggesting that my ego bulged more significantly than my body. While I realize that my perspective is less than objective, I struggle to detect the smallest traces of literary genius. When I read my notebooks, however, I see only the fumbling and stumbling of an awkward, younger version of myself, trying to write and unaware that she is making a complete fool of herself.
Of course, there are aspects of the collection, notwithstanding its content, that I find rather interesting. Of the 13 notebooks, six have green covers, including the first one I wrote in, beginning, on Oct. 7, 1974, with the words “Dear Diary.”
I wrote in this book from 1974 to 1977, the middle of my junior year in high school. Unlike other adolescent girls who inscribe their thoughts in pink or powder-blue diaries with flimsy gold locks on their covers, I secreted my words in a nondescript book that did not announce its contents so loudly. After all, I had a younger brother and sister, both of whom would have ripped any lock away with their teeth if they had found a “diary” in my room.
I continued to use green notebooks, but the type of such green notebooks varied. One is covered with green-striped Marimekko fabric; three are spiral-bound. Perhaps I find green notebooks friendly and familiar; I know that when I started a new notebook last fall, I unconsciously bought a green spiral-bound one.
In addition to my preference for green covers, I can make a few generalizations about the type of notebooks I used and how they affected my writing. The three bound books are good-looking, and in them my writing is neat, without the customary blots and scribbles. It seems that the formal appearance of the books forced me to be careful and cautious with my pen. In contrast, the three artists’ sketchbooks represent an experimental, exploratory period, from 1980 to 1982, and their sturdy white pages are covered with purple ink and multicolored crayons, pencil sketches and crude watercolor paintings. It is hard to say, however, if the art work is as bad-or worse than-the written work.
Whatever the variety in color or type or content, one element remains consistent: I have kept these notebooks. My first book has survived 19 changes of residence-four different houses in Chattanooga, Tenn.; three different dorm rooms on college campuses in Texas, Ohio and Tennessee; assorted apartments from Texas to Ireland to Georgia; and finally a rented house in Bloomington, Ind. This book’s cover is partially ripped, and its pages are no longer white. I was not consistent enough to write every day, and at times I had two or three notebooks going simultaneously-one for personal thoughts, one for essays I was working on and one for recording quotations from important books I was reading at the time.
But cover colors and irregular entries and varying states of decrepitude are merely surface qualities. I value my notebooks simply because they exist, in defiance of time and moving and my own sense of mortification in knowing that I keep them. Perhaps this is what stays my hand when I consider reducing my collection to ashes. I value these notebooks for the effort that went into their creation and their preservation. For 20 years, I have found solace in recording my thoughts, my feelings, my meager literary aspirations. For this reason alone, they constitute a vivid record of how I developed into myself.
Maybe I am making too big a deal out of the entire issue. Would anyone even care about my adolescent poetry about boys and God? Are the descriptions of dates and drunken weekends interesting reading? Will I eventually get a grade for the trite and unoriginal prose pieces?
Have you got a match?
