Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts
- 1 The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group
- 2 The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility
- 3 Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life
- 4 Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War
- 5 The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation
- 6 All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War
- 7 The Secret Life, or, The Soldier's Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War
- 8 Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib
- 9 It's All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror
- 10 Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror
- Index
7 - The Secret Life, or, The Soldier's Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts
- 1 The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group
- 2 The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility
- 3 Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life
- 4 Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War
- 5 The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation
- 6 All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War
- 7 The Secret Life, or, The Soldier's Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War
- 8 Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib
- 9 It's All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror
- 10 Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror
- Index
Summary
In war, keep your own counsel, preferably in a notebook.
General Sir Ian HamiltonLet no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
Walter BenjaminFor diarists as for other deviants, the fundamental question is the question of motive. Why? The natural supplementary is the question of audience. Who? To keep a diary is to posit a reader. Whether they recognise it or not, all diarists, especially dedicated diarists, hope to be read one day – read and understood – though not necessarily by anyone they already know or can identify. Some diarists, perhaps, write for themselves – their future selves – a wager on survival. Some may not know exactly what impels them. Some may be a little coy. ‘I sometimes wonder why I keep a diary at all,’ the Parliamentary socialite ‘Chips’ Channon recorded self-indulgently. ‘Is it to relieve my feelings? Console my old age? Or to dazzle my descendants?’ Several volumes later he could feel that ‘some day they may see the light of day and perhaps shock or divert posterity a little’.
Channon kept a diary almost continuously for nearly forty years. His companionable contemporary, Harold Nicolson, performed a similar feat. When the idea of publication was first mooted – a version edited by his son Nigel – the venerable Nicolson was asked the ‘why’ question by Nigel and his brother Ben. He replied, ‘Oh, because I thought I would.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- On Art and War and Terror , pp. 146 - 171Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009