Our Daily Dread – Frank McNally on the ups and downs of diary writing

There was a mixed reaction from readers when, as part of a recent redesign of The Irish Times website, this column was renamed “An Irish Diary”.

The gender-neutral title is confined for now to the online version. The print one remains unchanged. Hence the anomaly of two letters here last week lamenting the loss of the term “Irishman/woman’s Diary”, on a page that still carried those names. Most newspapers now adopt different strategies for online — where traditional page “architecture” makes little or no sense — and print. But if it’s not too grandiose an analogy, the historic compromise over the diary’s name has a parallel in geopolitics. A bit like post-British Hong Kong, this is now one column with two systems. Mind you, that’s not as reassuring a precedent as it used to be.

The decision to rename it was not mine, of course. As a senior editor once reminded me, I’m only the anchor tenant here, whose main concern should be to avoid bankrupting the column for those who inherit it. But I have long considered the original title a bit odd. Many newspapers and magazines still have, or once had, a column called simply “The Diary”. So, leaving aside the matter of gender, the question is why a newspaper called The Irish Times ever needed to stress the ethnicity of the person writing theirs. My guess is that, when the Irishman’s Diary first appeared in 1927, as a once-unionist paper adjusted awkwardly to life in the Free State, the title was a small exercise in overcompensation, The “man” part was a given then, although as early as 1952 — ahead of the curve — it also became periodically “An Irishwoman’s Diary”. No doubt there were a few readers then who thought that was the beginnings of a world gone mad.

But for many print readers at least, both names have gone on to become heritage items. When a few years ago, I quietly broached the subject of whether it was time for a simple “The Diary”, about 60 readers took the trouble to reply, voting two to one in favour of the status quo, some stridently.

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As well as calling their equivalents of this column “Diary/The Diary”, other publications also have the habit of hiring celebrities to write it, something that wouldn’t want to catch on here.

In the UK, this week’s Spectator magazine, for example, the guest writer is “Her Royal Highness Princess Eugenie”, who indulges in the typical diarist habit of shameless name-dropping, in her case mostly about her “grannie”, who has spent the week celebrating a jubilee. The Spectator version is still a miscellany of snippets, often unrelated, as this newspaper’s once was. Perhaps a few celebrities contributed to the early Irishman’s Diary — a young Samuel Beckett mentions it in his letters — but there were no bylines at that time. The main attraction for contributors was the minimum 10 shillings and sixpence per item it used to pay.

Then, after the war, the paper briefly employed a local aristocrat, Patrick Campbell (one of the Baron Glenavys) first to edit the column and later — much to the chagrin of the 10 shillings and sixpence brigade — to write the whole thing, drawing material from his own endlessly amusing life. But even Campbell’s life struggled to fit the bill occasionally. In his memoir, he claimed to have had regular nightmares in which the newspaper appeared with a blank space where his column was supposed to be.

Blank space can be a problem even for celebrity guest contributors. A recent incumbent in the weekly Literary Review (where the slot is also called just “Diary”) was novelist Ali Smith, a woman who has been called “Scotland’s Nobel laureate in waiting”. As with many guests, her appearance coincided with a book tour. The result did not impress at least one reader, who said it read “as if Ms Smith came up against a deadline short of inspiration”.

The letter writer went on to summarise her full-page diary as follows: “I was transported round London by scooter to various of my own book signings. Everyone was very nice and I had a good time.”

Even more damningly, the correspondent wrote that Smith’s diary confirmed his long-held suspicion that the glowing reviews of her novels had “a touch of the emperor’s new clothes”.

For us daily, non-celebrity diarists, this is both reassuring and worrying. On the one hand, there are few things as heart-warming as the news that a guest celebrity/emperor diarist has failed in the role. On the other, in a variation of Campbell’s nightmare, I may now have dreams in which there is a blank space where my wardrobe was supposed to be.