JOURNAL/DIARY FILES, 1956-2007
Series
Scope and Contents
I have kept journals off and on since age fifteen. My first three pocket journals from 1956, 1957, and 1958 (see high security materials) are remarkable for their tiny print and all the words I crammed onto the miniscule pages. I next kept a large daily handwritten journal the summer of 1960, when visiting my grandmother, Mamita, in Barcelona, Spain, and traveling around Europe with my friend Bill Willis. After that there's a gap until 1968 in New York, when my life had seriously changed and I began journaling again. Since I moved to New Mexico in 1969 I have journaled a lot. These journals helped in writing some of my books.
The older I got the more the journals seemed to be aimless, indiscreet, full of complaints and health problems, and monotonously repetitive with too many obscenities and banal erotica. I made almost no attempt to "write" my journals. There's a vast paucity of intellectual content. They tend rather to be blow-by-blow accounts of my days and, sadly, not even that humorous. "I got up, I ate breakfast, I took a crap, went to the Post Office, I climbed Devisadero." I typed a lot. I have edited the journals, attempting to make material accessible and restricting what seems indiscreet.
Outwardly, my public persona has usually tried to be friendly, cheerful, funny, energetic, upbeat--I put on a happy face. Inwardly, as these journals show, I often kvetched and wallowed in despair. Who knows why I kept such a voluminous record.
In the 1990s and 2000s I transcribed thousands of pages of field notes made during hiking, hunting, and alpine climbing excursions. These may yet help me to write another book. Despite their monotonous repetition, they contain valuable information for me.
In a Paris Review interview (Winter 2010) Jonathan Franzen said, "Exhibitionism is a problem for any writer." He talks about a writer investigating "the shame of self-exposure, the fear of ridicule or condemnation, the fear of causing pain or harm."
In choosing not to destroy these journals I risk plenty of self-exposure, ridicule, condemnation. For better or worse, these diaries are part of the record I kept.
Spring of 2015, age 75, I decided to type up my 1956-1958 Loomis School diaries, which are written in very small journals, and fairly illegible. These fragile and precious diaries are not easily handled or accessible because they are kept in archival box 142 shelved in high security. So to make them accessible, I typed up my Little Green Diary 1956; my Little Red Diary 1957; my Little Blue Diary 1958; my Last Night of Sophomore Year 1956; and also many loose, and funny, pages that were lodged in the diaries. This typed manuscript is 271 pages long. The pages read as if they were written by Holden Caulfield, Max Shulman, and Damon Runyon channeled through an immature, wiseguy, 15-17 year old.
Included are descriptions of frosh-sophomore raids; extreme love for my puppy love girlfriend and tragedy of our breakup; my life in hockey, football, track; my horrendous grades and flunking courses; crazy daily life in an all-boy New England prep school jail; sophomore spring vacation in Vermont making out with--gasp!--high school girls; miraculously getting voted to Loomis Student Council; the crazy chaotic 1956 summer of my parents' divorce as I turned 16; my fanatical rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers; major league dicking around autumn of junior year (playing football, then hockey); descriptions of moronic kids, moronic teachers, boring chapels, flunking tests, shooting illegal guns into the Connecticut River; Xmas vacations with family; flunking French and Algebra; losing every game in hockey; another cool spring vacation, Junior year, in Montpelier, VT. (booze! girls! rock and roll!); running the mile in track; reading Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, etc.; a bus out west to Taos, New Mexico, end of June 1957; adventures in Taos, then a month at a Natural History Museum research station in Portal, Arizona, and fighting forest fires in the Chiricahuas; bullfights, booze, hookers, and switchblade knives in Agua Prieta, Mexico (across border from Douglas, AZ); great makeout session with Indiana girl on bus going back East in August. Then senior year at Loomis, playing varsity football, hockey (I was captain), track (I ran low hurdles and the mile); meeting the love of my life on November 23, 1957; and our relationship the first month and a half of 1958.
After that come some typed miscellaneous papers: asking for a job, at 18, in Hartford Insurance industry; a funny 9-page riff on taking the bus to Albuquerque the past summer; and a final 9 pages describing goofy conversations with pals at Loomis, obviously practicing nutty dialogue for my future as a comic writer.
The older I got the more the journals seemed to be aimless, indiscreet, full of complaints and health problems, and monotonously repetitive with too many obscenities and banal erotica. I made almost no attempt to "write" my journals. There's a vast paucity of intellectual content. They tend rather to be blow-by-blow accounts of my days and, sadly, not even that humorous. "I got up, I ate breakfast, I took a crap, went to the Post Office, I climbed Devisadero." I typed a lot. I have edited the journals, attempting to make material accessible and restricting what seems indiscreet.
Outwardly, my public persona has usually tried to be friendly, cheerful, funny, energetic, upbeat--I put on a happy face. Inwardly, as these journals show, I often kvetched and wallowed in despair. Who knows why I kept such a voluminous record.
In the 1990s and 2000s I transcribed thousands of pages of field notes made during hiking, hunting, and alpine climbing excursions. These may yet help me to write another book. Despite their monotonous repetition, they contain valuable information for me.
In a Paris Review interview (Winter 2010) Jonathan Franzen said, "Exhibitionism is a problem for any writer." He talks about a writer investigating "the shame of self-exposure, the fear of ridicule or condemnation, the fear of causing pain or harm."
In choosing not to destroy these journals I risk plenty of self-exposure, ridicule, condemnation. For better or worse, these diaries are part of the record I kept.
Spring of 2015, age 75, I decided to type up my 1956-1958 Loomis School diaries, which are written in very small journals, and fairly illegible. These fragile and precious diaries are not easily handled or accessible because they are kept in archival box 142 shelved in high security. So to make them accessible, I typed up my Little Green Diary 1956; my Little Red Diary 1957; my Little Blue Diary 1958; my Last Night of Sophomore Year 1956; and also many loose, and funny, pages that were lodged in the diaries. This typed manuscript is 271 pages long. The pages read as if they were written by Holden Caulfield, Max Shulman, and Damon Runyon channeled through an immature, wiseguy, 15-17 year old.
Included are descriptions of frosh-sophomore raids; extreme love for my puppy love girlfriend and tragedy of our breakup; my life in hockey, football, track; my horrendous grades and flunking courses; crazy daily life in an all-boy New England prep school jail; sophomore spring vacation in Vermont making out with--gasp!--high school girls; miraculously getting voted to Loomis Student Council; the crazy chaotic 1956 summer of my parents' divorce as I turned 16; my fanatical rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers; major league dicking around autumn of junior year (playing football, then hockey); descriptions of moronic kids, moronic teachers, boring chapels, flunking tests, shooting illegal guns into the Connecticut River; Xmas vacations with family; flunking French and Algebra; losing every game in hockey; another cool spring vacation, Junior year, in Montpelier, VT. (booze! girls! rock and roll!); running the mile in track; reading Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, etc.; a bus out west to Taos, New Mexico, end of June 1957; adventures in Taos, then a month at a Natural History Museum research station in Portal, Arizona, and fighting forest fires in the Chiricahuas; bullfights, booze, hookers, and switchblade knives in Agua Prieta, Mexico (across border from Douglas, AZ); great makeout session with Indiana girl on bus going back East in August. Then senior year at Loomis, playing varsity football, hockey (I was captain), track (I ran low hurdles and the mile); meeting the love of my life on November 23, 1957; and our relationship the first month and a half of 1958.
After that come some typed miscellaneous papers: asking for a job, at 18, in Hartford Insurance industry; a funny 9-page riff on taking the bus to Albuquerque the past summer; and a final 9 pages describing goofy conversations with pals at Loomis, obviously practicing nutty dialogue for my future as a comic writer.
Dates
- 1956-2007
Language of Materials
From the Collection:
English
Access Restrictions
The collection is open for research, however, researchers must sign consent form prior to gaining access to materials. Calavera drawings, proofs, and etchings as well as "little diaries" (Boxes 14, 125, 126, 129, 142) are housed in high security and may require up to 24 hours for retrieval. Enlarged photocopies and typed transcriptions of "little diaries" in Box 142 are located in Box 184.
Extent
From the Collection: 184 boxes (172 cu. ft.)
General
Note: Comments and description provided by John Nichols.
Repository Details
Part of the UNM Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections Repository
Contact:
University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections
University Libraries, MSC05 3020
1 University of New Mexico
Albuquerque NM 87131
505-277-6451
cswrref@unm.edu
University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections
University Libraries, MSC05 3020
1 University of New Mexico
Albuquerque NM 87131
505-277-6451
cswrref@unm.edu