The Wit's Guide to Diaries
Or, embroidered ego
Keep a diary, Margot Asquith said and Mae West repeated, and someday it will keep you. This assumes your personal recollections are full of spice and scandal. It also makes the significantly larger assumption that one day someone will care to read your chicken scratch. They might!
“Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don’t have the time.”
— Tallulah Bankhead
In Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know — his best since Sweet Tooth, I’m gonna say! — historians in the year 2119 have a wealth of information on the minutiae of present-day lives, thanks to what we “airily called ‘the cloud’, ever expanding like a giant summer cumulus, though, of course, it simply consisted of data-storage machines.” Through all this digital ephemera, biographers can “track daily trivia, give an accurate record of friends and acquaintances, of poems completed, and trace the rise and dip of mood.” They brag that they’ve robbed the past of its privacy. And yet it spoils nothing to say the novel has an analog twist. The cloud doesn’t get everything! Diaries matter!
“What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it, dull to the contemporary who reads it, invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it!”
— Ellen Terry
The greatest diarist of the last century, certainly by his own estimation, was James Agate. The British theatre critic wrote hundreds of reviews but his true achievement was nine volumes of diaries published at regular intervals from 1935 to 1948 under variations on the accurate title Ego; later selections include The Shorter Ego, The Later Ego, and The Selective Ego. It’s from the latter that I plucked his wonderful New Year’s Resolutions for 1942:
1. To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.
2. To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
— James Agate
“Why am I keeping this diary?” he asks early on. “Because it is part of the insane desire to perpetuate oneself.” In practice, that means entries in which he’ll tell a friend that Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor is noisy rubbish, to which he records his friend replying, “You’re wrong, James! Some of it is quiet rubbish.” His editors note that “he was inclined to soar into something which he defined and defended as ‘the higher truth.’ It consists in embroidery upon, or elaboration of, what actually happened or was said.” And that may be the single best predictor of an interesting diary.
“Query: Is the vulgar thing that works better than the exquisite thing that doesn’t? This is a matter for the highbrows: I made up my mind about it years ago.”
— James Agate
Agate launched his Ego in a low, dishonest decade, and though he was on the right side of history, he wasn’t overly concerned with it. When the Second World War breaks out, a friend argues that if he continues the project, “it means you regard your Diary as more important than the war.” To which Agate responds, “Well, isn’t it? The war is vital, not important.” When Paris is liberated, he is incensed that the BBC ended their report in the middle of the Marseillaise and phones them up to say so. And on VJ Day, he notes that “the English win wars because they like musical comedy, and the Germans lose wars because they like music.” The best review of Ego is one that Agate gives to a book titled Experience: “It’s a bad title but the stuff is as readable as pie-crust is eatable.”
“Why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy & every man is grave alone.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everyone knows a diary is generally pink and frilly and sealed with a heart-shaped padlock, whereas a journal is leather-bound and tough and full of taciturn truisms. There is a proven therapeutic benefit to keeping such a record, so long as it’s not just wallowing in your own juices. If you keep the habit year over year, as Tamara Shopsin’s 5 Year Diary encourages, you can observe that what feel in the moment like novel urges and ideas actually bubble up on a fairly regular schedule. You also learn the best reason to keep a diary is not for posterity — because what has posterity ever done for us? — but rather a thought best captured by the motto of the stationery brand Field Notes:
“I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”
“DIARY, n. A daily record of that part of one’s life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.”
— Ambrose Bierce
Every week for the last two months, I’ve offered my readers the opportunity to vote for a Grab Bag. I borrow the term from trivia night at the High Park Curling Club, where mention of this popular category leads the room to chirpily repeat “Grab Bag!” But if I constantly threaten a Grab Bag that never appears, it transmutes into a MacGuffin. So next week, to start 2026, I’m gonna need you to choose.
I was delighted to field a request from a Lisbon-based entrepreneur for a Portuguese translation of one of my Aphoristicks, the special stickers mailed out to all my wonderful paying subscribers. She plans to put them around the office to boost morale. And if that doesn’t work, more custard tarts! And then more whippings. Subscribe today to get this in the language of your choice!
Get Wit Quick No. 350 adheres to Agate’s rule of theatre: “A play which doesn’t make you yawn or fidget is a good play relative to you. A play at which only a numskull would yawn or fidget is a good play absolutely.” Yawning numskulls, you are the measure of all quality! This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. I’ll painstakingly record every tap of the ❤️ below in my diary.