MEMOIRS, CONVERSATIONS AND DIARIES
531
and the difficult response. The preface promises a
personal
book,
private
impressions, actual meetings and so on, but what we have is
a group of essays which might, with a few exceptions, appear any
time. The only rarity of the work is geographical: the comments by
people who have not even met Eliot come not only from England
and Europe, but from Bengal, Ceylon and Greece. Perhaps there is
another peculiarity- two of the essays are not primarily about Eliot,
but about Pound and Irving Babbitt. No one would wish to see this
sort of thing increased and multiplied. It is very clearly "against the
grain." The fear of toadying is so great nearly everyone celebrates
Eliot's birthday as he would celebrate his own, quietly, secretly,
hardly mentioning it for fear someone would think he wanted some–
thing.
Recently, when Edmund Wilson's "critical memoir" on Edna
Millay appeared one heard some literary people expressing a giggly
embarrassment. Watch out, there's something
personal
here! We
may breathlessly read this document, but we feel obliged in our
critical souls to discount it. After all, Wilson seems to have had an
"attachment" for his subject and literature is a court where personal
knowledge keeps you off the jury, unless you are all for hanging.
In the diary, the private journal, one is relieved of the problem
of seeming to debase himself in an undemocratic way before his
equals or superiors, but another and more crushing burden of con–
science cramps the fingers. This is the fear of outrageous vanity, of
presuming to offer simply
one's own ideas
and moods, speaking in
one's natural voice, which may appear-any number of transgressive
adjectives are exact: boastful, presumptive, narcissistic, indulgent.
There is no doubt that the diarist is the most egotistical of beings;
he quite before our eyes ceases to take himself with that grain of
salt which alone makes clever people bearable. Even the most gifted
of men must in his own circle be "just like everyone else," not stand–
ing upon his accomplishments, but putting them aside like an old
smoking jacket worn in private. The unhesitating self-regard of
Gide's
Journals
would involve us in so much pain, so great an effort
to strike the right note between merely rattling away on "trivialities"
and recording "serious" feelings that it will hardly seem worth the
while to most exceptional writers. Amateurs, like Pepys, not really
