Talking to oneself.

I have been keeping a journal for more than thirty years, and if you were to ask me why I continue to do so, the best answer I can offer is that I cannot stop now. I consider scribbling a paragraph or two each morning in the notebooks that constitute my journal part of my intellectual hygiene. That the entries are made in the morning is important; I suspect that if I wrote late at night, when tired, my entries would be spiritually darker, and, I prefer to think, less true to life, or at least my life, which has been a lucky one.

As for the contents of my journal entries, they generally have to do with events, incidents, thoughts (more like notions) of the day before, though I am not above writing something genuinely vicious about something I've read, someone I've met, or some piece of gossip I've heard. A day's entry rarely runs longer than two paragraphs of six or seven sentences each, and seldom takes me more than fifteen minutes to compose. I also try to be charming, if only to charm myself. The trick, I have discovered, is not to make the keeping of a journal into a chore. My advice on journal keeping is, as Cosima Wagner neglected to instruct Richard, keep it light.

I began keeping my journal when I was thirty-three years old. I had attempted one earlier, but found that it was too filled with complaint and depression. The complaint chiefly had to do with the world, ignorant beast, not recognizing my obvious talent. But by thirty-three the rug of this complaint--a small Sarouk with a medallion pattern--had been pulled out from trader me by the world's modest acceptance, and so I knocked off the complaint and the depressive tone, and on September 25, 1970 began:

 
   This is to be a writer's notebook. In it I intend to put down everything I 
   find of interest about writing generally and about my own personal 
   development and problems as a writer. Everything I put into this notebook 
   shall be written out with a fair amount of care, for I half-hope that it 
   will be published some day --an expectation that assumes, of course, that 
   before I go to my grave I shall have accrued a respectable amount of fame. 
   False modesty will not be one of this notebook's strong strains. 
 
      I believe I am entitled to call myself a writer at all for two reasons: 
   I publish with a decent regularity in almost all the O.K. American 
   magazines; and if I did not have writing to look forward to, I could only 
   imagine the years ahead as flat and joyless. 

My earliest entries, read today, do not make me ashamed. They are about the writer's-this writer's--need for praise, about the death of an important novelist (John Dos Passos), about my own small reputation among editors, about placing and losing a $100 bet on a Detroit Lions-Chicago Bears football game. About the latter, I wrote:

 
   Screwing is nice, so is food, booze I can do without, drugs scare the hell 
   out of me--so my vice, I suppose, however inconstantly practiced, is 
   gambling. It affects me on every level, not least the physiological.... Win 
   or lose, when it's over I'm exhausted; having won, I am briefly elated; 
   having lost, I am remorseful, though, somehow, better concentrated on my 
   own inadequacy. It is awful and I can scarcely wait to do it again.... 
 
      Since the ordeal of gambling is by and large unpleasant, since the money 
   is not of primary significance (after all, thirty successive $100 wins 
   would hardly make me a free man), what's the big attraction? I think it has 
   something to do with the need for venturing forth, for striking out against 
   routine, for wanting an altogether unearned, wholly illicit reward out of 
   life. If you win, you feel that you have beat the system a little--earned 
   easy money on your nerve, while the masses down below have to sweat in the 
   sun for it. If you lose, well, that is a rotten shame, but at least you 
   made the attempt. But to break even, to have geared yourself up without 
   financial consequences--that is to know true impotence. 
 
      Another thing about gambling is that it is a marvelous antidote against 
   the most dread disease there is: fear of living. 

My early entries tend to be essaylets of this kind. They are on such subjects as the political lines of magazines, the filter that choosing to become a writer places on one's experience, the pleasures as a writer of attacking the rich and famous while being oneself poor and obscure. On the latter subject, I conclude that only a versatile prose style makes this possible, and that "less democratic theory and more English prose needs to be taught in the public schools."