Of Lines, Letters and Blank Pages
(In Memory Studies, the concept of ‘agents of memory’ is a significant one. During my research, I realized that notebooks are priceless agents of memory. This essay was inspired by that realization, and it deals with the notebooks of writers).
We were in the process of de-cluttering the storage cupboard at home, when I found a discarded shoe-box; sturdy, and seemingly unaffected by dampness. As I held the box in my hand, its emptiness didn’t feel right. I wanted to fill the box with something valuable, and I did just that. I filled the box with notebooks.
I have been an avid note-booker for the past few years. My notebooks have colourful personalities of their own. Between themselves, they preserve an astounding diversity of thoughts- frenzied scribbles of to-do lists, excited jottings of unexpected ideas, titles of books that I wish to read, and, rough outlines for blog posts, from several months ago. I also maintain a research notebook, a rather disciplined affair. Here, my usually uneven and scattered thoughts get streamlined into a proper sense of direction, quite like the ironing out of creases from shirt collars. Memo pads, spiral notebooks, notebooks with fancy jackets- in my shoebox, one is bound to find an immaculate existence of the Democratic Republic of Notebooks.
Notebooks have played an indispensable role in intellectual traditions across the ages. Human thoughts were always profound. But, with the advent of the 1900s, a period that witnessed the two world wars, startling revelations about the human consciousness and unconsciousness and massive upheavals in culture and society, human thoughts were caught in a web of chaos, a chaos that persists even today.
Hence, it is not surprising that many writers belonging to this period maintained personal notebooks, upon which they heavily relied in order to navigate the catacombs of their mind.
In his book, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway passionately declares: “I belong to this notebook and pencil”. He always carried a notebook and a pencil in his pocket. In fact, it is widely believed that Hemingway was rarely photographed without a notebook in his hand. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known and widely beloved as Mark Twain, maintained pocket notebooks filled with lists of potential names for characters of his stories. I can absolutely imagine Twain’s firm grip on a pencil, striking off names that weren’t of particular appeal to him. Most of Twain’s notebooks were leather-bound, and it is said that he designed the notebooks himself, a practice that he religiously maintained in the forty notebooks he owned during the last forty years of his life.
In her notebooks, the famous writer and illustrator of children’s books, Beatrix Potter, wrote down her thoughts on a slew of topics, right from Philosophy to Politics. Staying true to the illustrator’s spirit within her, Potter’s notebooks were dotted with hand-drawn sketches and cut-outs. If this wasn’t interesting enough, here is another trivia: many phrases in her notebooks appear to be coded, a deliberate move on Potter’s part to ensure absolute privacy.
We find another set of eccentric notebook habits in John Steinbeck. Steinbeck had a large notebook with the first drafts of many of his novels, which have since gone on to become enduring masterpieces of Literature. Many writers, before and after him, have cultivated this habit. However, Steinbeck went an extra mile and invented a wholesome ritual involving his notebooks. The left-hand side and right-hand side pages of his notebooks had special functions of their own: every morning, Steinbeck liked to ‘warm up’ by writing a note to his editor at the Viking Press on the page towards his left. The page towards his right was dedicated to his novels, the writing of which, in his own words, helped him “dawdle”. He considered his notebook as a tool of self-discipline, and was immensely aided by it in his writing process. It was Steinbeck’s request that his notebooks be handed over to his sons, so that they could “look behind the myth and hearsay and flattery and slander a disappeared man becomes and know to some extent what manner of man their father was.”
Like bottles of wine, notebooks become valuable with the passage of time, as, with time, the contents of the notebooks transform into memories. Perhaps, it is this promise of memories that underlies my incredible fondness for notebooks.
Daphne du Maurier, whose works have dominated my reading lists for the past few months, was also a great believer in the usefulness of notebooks. She used to jot down her initial ideas on a small, blue exercise book. When Alfred Hitchcock’s film based on du Maurier’s Rebecca was released, she faced a plagiarism charge from writer Edwina MacDonald. By presenting her notebooks as evidence, du Maurier successfully defended herself, and Hitchcock’s film went on win the 1941 Academy Award for Outstanding Production.
Despite technology’s tempting offerings to veer the public towards digital note-taking methods, writers of today continue to remain faithful to the tradition of physical notebooks. Paul Theroux, a rather renowned American travel writer, in his interview to The Guardian, reaffirmed the indispensability of notebooks: “A travel book is not possible without a daily account of what’s happened…depends on the notes we take en-route- dialogue, description, insights”.
A few weeks back, I traded a set of blue pens with my brother, in exchange for a small, yet elegant notebook he had. On the front page, I tried describing the notebook, an idea I later abandoned. But, I feel Susie Boyt’s description of her notebooks might serve the purpose. She called her notebooks “messy little attics of the mind”, and continued the description by saying: “they feel private and tender, a bit like night clothes”. Boyt’s notebooks, an exciting jamboree of poetry, prose, criticism, lists, plans and personal anecdotes, are just as promising as the description attached to them.
Closer home, we have the writer Amit Chaudhuri, our very own connoisseur of notebooks. A red A4 Silvine notebook is where he pens down his thoughts. The layout of his notebook his quite unusual. Usually, the first few pages are left untouched, preserved for when he begins to write a novel. The latter half of the notebook hosts his poems, essays and thoughts. When he opens his notebook, he usually flips from back to front, similar to the manner one adopts while “reading an Arabic script”.
Writers not only use their notebooks to maintain an intimacy with their own writing process; quite often, they convert their notebooks into chambers where they can openly reflect upon the writing of their peers. I chanced upon this while glancing through a digital archive of Marianne Moore’s notebooks, one of the entries of which contained Moore’s deep engagement with the writings of fellow poet, Mina Loy.
For me, it is essential that a major portion of my notebooks remain private. I consider them to be the pen-and-paper maps of my mind’s deepest recesses, markers of destinations that I prefer to traverse alone. It appears I am not alone in wishing so. In 1922, when T.S. Eliot sold a notebook full of early poems for $140 to his friend, John Quinn, he begged him to ensure that the poems remain private, and that they are never printed. Although the poems were never printed, at present, his notebooks are at the New York Public Library, their residence since the late 1960’s.
Between the years 1892 and 1949, W. Somerset Maugham kept a notebook that had a little bit of everything: autobiography, confessions, observations, confidences, experiments and fragments of random thoughts.
I cherish my notebooks very much. It brings me great joy to decorate them with post-it notes, scrapbook sheets, stickers stolen from my brother’s drawer, and ribbons. I consider my notebooks like family. Rather inevitably, writers have formed powerful bonds with their notebooks.
Joan Didion commemorates the relationship she has with her notebooks in the essay, On Keeping a Notebook. The essay is packed to the brim with carefully written sentences, sentences that are tender enough to preserve the rawness and honesty of her feelings. Didion believes that “keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted, apparently at birth, with some presentiment of loss”. For notebook keepers across the world, these words invoke a strong feeling, akin to watching honey dripping from a plate of waffles. Her notebooks helped her “remember what it was to be me: that is always the point”. She is of the opinion that our notebooks always “give us away”. Didion never kept notebooks to remember the lives of other people. She was primarily keen on recollecting the memories. Like ribbons tied around birthday presents, her essay ends with a poignant nugget of expression: “It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about”.
Keeping a notebook is an art form in its own right, an art that promises to be a great partner for every writer. It is in recognition of this, that Ralph Fletcher authored Breathing In, Breathing Out: Keeping a Writer’s Notebook. In this book, he helps writers with their notebooks, and aids them in processing what’s happening in their world (breathing in), while also teaching them how to express their thoughts (breathing out).
Like Joan Didion, Josephine Wolff authored a column in the Washington Post, speaking of her experiences as both, a keeper of notebooks and a reader of books on notebooks. The column, appropriately titled Why I’m Obsessed with Reading Books About Writing in Notebooks, is a treasure trove of notebook related epiphanies. What I found particularly memorable in the essay was the part where she writes, “This maybe key to the appeal of note booking: in an increasingly algorithmic world, these systems let us crack open the black boxes of our lives, allowing us to develop systems of our own and helping us figure out what matters to us along the way”.
Even novels provide us with fictional characters who are avid notebook keepers. In that respect, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is the trail-blazer. In the novel, the story of Anna Wulf is told through five notebooks: black, red, blue, yellow and golden. Amongst themselves, the notebooks cover every aspect of Anna’s life: personal, professional, political and emotional. The Golden Notebook was a tremendous achievement, partly because of how diverse the contents of the notebooks were: there were diary entries, newspaper clippings, stories, and outpourings of the heart. Lessing’s The Golden Notebook single-handedly champions the cause of notebooks, while proving how effective they can be, as narrative techniques.
One of Nicholas Sparks’ best-selling novels, The Notebook, follows closely in Lessing’s footsteps and narrates the tear-jerking love story of Noah Calhoun and Allie Hamilton. In her final years, Allie suffers from Alzheimer’s, and Noah visits her at the hospital, reading out from the notebook that contained their past. The notebook allows Allie to cling on to memories that her mind no longer retained, reaffirming the role of notebooks as potent agents of memory.
Aibileen, the black maid who appears in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help also presents a very compelling case for maintaining notebooks. She maintains a notebook in which she composes her own prayers every day, and adds names to her ‘prayer list’, a roster of people who would become the beneficiaries of her prayers. When Aibileen was faced with the daunting task of telling Miss Skeeter her experiences as a black maid working for a white family in Jackson, Mississippi, she chose to write down her experiences in a spiral notebook. The act of writing soothed her nerves, and, with the notebook as her confidante, Aibileen’s task seemed a little less impossible than before.
Mario Vargas Llosa’s Don Rigoberto, from The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, is a bored executive at La Perricholi Insurance who returns from ten-hour bureaucratic days, longing for solitude and his notebooks, into which he pours out his cranky musings on art.
There are many writers’ notebooks that are waiting to be discovered, and many notebooks of fictional characters waiting to be given the recognition they deserve. The contribution of notebooks to the literary tradition since the modern age is massive, and their roles as guiding stars in a worlds of chaos that we inhabit in our lives, both, within and without, is infinitesimally indispensable.
The other day, I visited Amazon India, frantically hunting a birthday gift for my aunt. Google Ads, being ever so persistent, tried to tempt me by displaying ads of notebooks. I clicked on a particularly attractive one, a notebook sold by Penguin, with a cover inspired by the book covers of Penguin Random House’s best-selling titles. Amazon and Penguin wanted to sell it to me as a product, but I understood it as the perfect symbol of what this essay is all about.
The notebook which contains my blog outlines has nearly run out of pages. There is a pretty red note-pad patiently awaiting its turn at the bottom of my drawer. This time, I know what to write on the front page:
“We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage, with a meaning only for its maker”. — Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook.
Sources:
2. www.tonyriches.blogspot.com
3. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/06/tales-masters-notebooks-stories-henry-james
4. https://medium.com/the-1000-day-mfa/10-books-that-will-make-you-want-to-keep-a-notebook-759219773677
