Aug 9 Fog

Kathryn Scanlan

Aug 9 Fog

New York, MCD/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019

ISBN: 9780374106874

I have found a few personal diaries in my life… Some in small shops, hidden in amongst the printed books. These are superb finds because the shopkeeper usually has no idea what to do with what is technically a blank diary whose utility has been, in their eyes, exhausted by the writing that fills it. They see it as a used-up thing, rather than a motherlode of personal confessions – one that any poet would happily mine for, perhaps, eternity.

The greatest of these finds I made during a Saturday afternoon book trawling session down through the second-hand stores of South King Street in Newtown, Sydney. Here the stores in this rent-cheap neighbourhood overflow with once-new things. I showed my find to the shopkeeper guarding his hoard. His eyebrows raised themselves. The very existence of this small black book confused him – he looked over the small diary, saw that it was full of scrawl and asked me for ten dollars. It is now one of the more precious things I own. It covers the life of a young man who documents his move to the big smoke of Sydney from the North Coast of New South Wales. The diary covers the whole of 1967 and every page is full of upper-case printed handwriting. At first, this diarist seems to be innocence personified. He hangs out with his local pastors. He has an enthusiasm for magic tricks and tells the reader (which is no doubt himself) of the magic equipment he’d like to buy and the new tricks he’d like to learn. It is a boyish enthusiasm mixing delight and confusion into the process of his life. Then, suddenly all the little details of his existence are interrupted (October) by the speedy illness and death of his mother. Once this event is revealed to the reader, the entries both before and after this sad event become laced with a new layer of either foreboding or tragedy. The passages that come after her death are stained with both dread and a new sense of adult responsibility. I’ve read this little black diary dozens of times, and the clear, careful handwriting gives me a precious little window into a life that no one else can access but me. I take my privileged readership seriously. I keep the diary safe. I feel for the voice in this work more personally that any other book I own. This sense of custodianship increased when, a few years after I bought it, my own mother died. Now I have memories of reading this little diary before she died, and then after. The sense of foreboding that I detect in this little book becomes my own. This little diary then turned into a gift of human solidarity through grief between us. One that not all humans can share – especially if you are still lucky enough, reader, to enjoy your mother’s living company. Enjoy that while it lasts.

So, me and this young man who had put all his thoughts down in upper case script with a blue biro had something profound to share – even though I was not yet born when it was writ. So I have a rather profound sense of what Kathryn Scanlan means when she says in her own tribute to a found dairy in the opening note to Aug 9, Fog:

At first, I loved the physicality of the diary – the author’s cramped hand, the awkward, artful way she filled the page. I liked its miserable condition. Its position was tenuous – yet there it was. I didn’t try to read it. I kept it in a drawer. I assumed it illegible.

But then I did read it – compulsively. I hunched over it, straining my neck. I read it front to back – perhaps a dozen times by now (vi).

Scanlan finds her old diary at a public estate auction. “It was amongst the unsold items. I removed it from a box on its way to the garbage. It looks like garbage…”(v). The diary she finds is written by Cora E. Lacy and seems to be one of those Five Year diaries that have each date/each page divided into five sections. It covers the years 1968 to 1972 [the first 5 years of my own life]. The diary that I bought in Newtown that day tantalisingly carries the address and phone number of its writer, but not his name. At least Scanlan has a name, she also has something else that I do not possess in my example - entries that are given in a remarkable idiolect that already lends itself to poetry – the poetry of the profoundly quotidian:

Tippy better, wants out. Sits in

window, looks out. Fog out. I sure

slept. Took a Nytol (25).

I think Mrs Lacy’s remarkable way of putting things is the star of this book. Its poetic potential is then gently sculpted by Scanlan. She explains

…as you might expect – the diarist’s voice, her particular use of language, is firmly, intractably lodged in my head. I often say to myself, “some hot nite” or “flowers coming fast” or “grass sure growing” or “everything loose is travelling.” (vii)

She typed up blocks of Mrs Lacy’s text into her computer and started arranging them. Five sections in the book take us from winter, through the next three seasons and back to winter again. Along the way cats (or humans) stay out, are lost, or move on, neighbours die, new year’s eves are modestly celebrated, visits to cemeteries are made, gifts given, dinners consumed, and Vern, a constant companion, slowly withers across these year-divided pages and dies. The few words that take us on this journey are modest and sparsely provided. Great personal events are quickly noted. Life goes on in all its quiet majesty. This book is powerfully elegiac not by means of poetic plenty, but through paucity of context, and hyper-efficient expression.

If you don’t make of yourself a custodian of other people’s diaries, then Aug 9 Fog might seem a strange piece of poetry to you. A found text worked over and re-presented and concisely laid out – and not much else. But if you have ever found such a text as a diary like this and been touched by how personal a thing it is to gaze at someone’s handwriting and to watch how they unveil themselves in the recording of their lives, then this little book by Scanlan (and, of course, Mrs Lacy) makes for very original poetry, makes for something deeply touching. It is life and words intermingling humbly, discretely, but also as majestically as words and lives can.