"We are alone. We cannot know and we cannot be known," said Beckett in an essay on Proust. The makers of Big Brother will be hoping that the word doesn't get around, as will the publishers (but perhaps not the authors) of today's dominant literary genre: self-revelation. Beckett's truth is ignored every time an intimate, confessional, genital warts and all, account of a life is published in the hope of making the readers feel that far from being alone and unknowable, they are part of a sentimental community in which envy is banished, pain is shared and everyone is part of a homogenous soup of humanity.
Autobiographies and memoirs are a literary form open to all: no skill as a writer is essential, just a modicum of experience and a dash of celebrity. The form achieved its apotheosis a few years ago in the publication of the autobiography of an emergent 18-year-old snooker player, Stephen Hendry. It was called Nobody Knows My Name. Most celebrities employ a professional ghost writer to help them mediate their memories into prose, like an interior decorator translating a client's taste into furniture, fixtures and fittings. The amateur version, the DIY of autobiography, is the diary.
At some time in their lives most people have kept a diary. For teenage girls it's a more or less mandatory catechism of tastes and feelings; for boys it's more a litany of statistics. Adults record income and expenditure, dreams, lovers, weight losses, weight gains, cabinet meetings and sporting triumphs. Hoaxers write "secret" diaries - Hitler's or Elvis's - in the certainty that editors will be blinded by greed to the obviousness of the fraud. There's even a website - diaries.com - where you can share your "personal" diary.
I have also joined literature's B&Q by publishing National Service, a diary of the 10 years I was director of the National Theatre. I used to be asked whether, like my predecessor Peter Hall, I was keeping a diary and would I be publishing it? I used to respond shirtily that I was but wouldn't dream of it. I can see that my answer now appears sanctimonious and disingenuous, but it's what I thought at the time, a paradox in that I had started to write the diary some years before because I wanted to become a writer. The diary was my exercise book and like all first-time writers, I wrote about the subject I knew best and found most alluring: myself.
I didn't have a strategy. I wrote what overflowed from my mind at the end of the day or at a weekend, a solipsistic, Pooterish dialogue with myself. If I have a regret about my approach, it's not so much that I took myself too seriously and wrote too cautiously, but that I failed to record more of the inconsequential minutiae of life - conversations in corridors, phone calls, turns of phrases, faces in win dows, changes in fashion, the price of petrol - that make a diary so distinctively unlike fiction.
I kept the diaries compulsively while I had little enough time for my day and night job and I stopped when I had ample time and no job - when a feature film I was due to direct in the autumn failed to get financed. I was left with a continent of unexpected time to transcribe my diaries from my biro-written A5 black notebooks to my laptop computer. I had written a sizeable book (word count 190,000) which, despite a stuttering narrative, had a beginning, a middle, an end and a single tone of voice. Could it, should it, be published? Was it wise to put myself up for inspection? Was it dignified to offer advertisements for myself? Was it proper to betray confidences? My wife thought not, others disagreed; but encouraged by friends and by the publisher, Liz Calder, I went ahead.
"Confession is an act of violence to the unoffending," as Tom Stoppard says in The Invention of Love . In going ahead I had to recognise that there would be some people who, in finding themselves involuntary contributors to my book, would feel that their work was under-appreciated, their friendship unrecognised, their conversations misrepresented. Worse still, perhaps, they might find themselves left out of the story. My friend Nicholas Wright (who encouraged me to publish) said I couldn't help offending people, "even if it's just saying that they part their hair on the right side and it's really on the left". Or I could damn a life with a single entry like Auden's example of a diary which said: "In the evening went to a party at Mr Afnere's. Very slow - small rooms, piano out of tune, bad wine and stupid people." What of all the evenings at which the diarist wasn't present? When the piano was tuned, the conversation feverish with intelligence, the wine superb?
Whatever their merits, all diaries are self-vindicating, full of evasions, self-justifications and self-recriminations: quand je m'accuse, je m'excuse. But there's always a fascination - for the reader as much as for the author - in looking back at the blind and unknowing past in terms of the present. And the best diaries - Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Joe Orton - give the feeling of a life spilling out indiscriminately, innocent of self-censorship, as if the life is being lived through the diary.
A diary is a literary anomaly: it can't be rewritten with the triumphant irony or wisdom of hindsight. It can only be shaped or improved by subtraction. In my case there wasn't extensive editing, at least on the grounds of libel or gratuitous insult, because I had been restrained - even with myself - in objectifying most of my more disturbing, louche, disloyal, violent, and ungenerous thoughts. I surgically removed the malign bits that remained -possibly, some would argue, thereby draining the journals of whatever attraction they might have possessed. Even though I had written without the desire to please or appease, I can see now that I lacked the steel in the heart that Graham Greene deemed necessary to become a writer.
The biggest frustration for me in editing was that I couldn't change the way I appeared to, no did , amplify, exaggerate and magnify misery, while minimising happiness. I think I give the impression that I had a miserable time at the NT, infected by melancholy. It wasn't the case: it's a weakness in the writing. Happiness can only be done by exceptional writers, and even Tolstoy funked it. "All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." What a cop-out. What is most interesting in diaries is what is interesting in art: the description of specific words or actions that cause hurt or insult or joy or delight. Happiness is generalised: a mood of contentment, a state of satisfaction, an absence of pain. Happiness writes white.
