I would like to read the diaries of Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. Maybe they have to remain at Yale under lock and key until a certain date. The rumor is that his margins contain doodles of a homoerotic nature. It is said that Harold Jackman's diaries have disappeared for reasons along that line. Jackman was Cullen's best man at his wedding to the daughter of W.E. B. Du Bois in 1928. Jackman also went on the honeymoon cruise. That marriage didn't last very long.
       I hope diaries of this sort have survived after all and will be published one day. Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography isn't very good mostly because of what she could not say in 1942. As charming as Langston Hughes' memoirs are, he had a lot to hide as well. Even so, I can't see what harm the publication of Harlem Renaissance diaries, if there really are any in the vaults, would do to the image of the period. It was an essentially romantic movement, during which a good deal of drinking went on. Youthful zeal didn't fizzle when the lights went out and if it took polymorphous directions, who could be surprised? There's a story going around, possibly apocryphal, that among the papers philosopher Alain Locke left to Howard University was a vial that had contained some of Hughes' sperm. Black writers of the past are writers, not role models. But we demand that every black celebrity stand for something.
       Diaries, even the gossipy ones, tell us about the writer's times. I couldn't imagine not having the journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke, the well-born Philadelphia black woman who went south in 1862 to teach liberated blacks. Not too long ago the diaries of Alice Dunbar Nelson came out. She'd been married to Paul Laurence Dunbar when they were young. Then he went home to Ohio and died of tuberculosis in 1906, at the age of 34, I think. Alice survived Dunbar by some 30 years. She married again, taught, wrote journalism. Her diary begins in 1921 and ends in 1931. It's not about her lost young poet. It shows her struggle not to fall out of the middle class. She didn't succeed, and trips from Wilmington, Del., down to Negro society in Washington, D.C., where her old friends took in the state of her hat and clothes, were painful to her.
       I suppose I want diaries from black writers because such publications let me know they have arrived. Arnold Rampersad's brilliant biography of Hughes goes a long way toward reviving interest in his work, but diaries and letters say something else about a writer's place and reputation. Maybe this attitude comes from what I read after college. I don't think I read any other kind of book back then. I remember when Leslie Marchand's edition of Byron's journals started to appear. Virginia Woolf's letters started coming out in the middle of Byron's journals and then her diaries started coming out in the middle of her letters. Perhaps this is a matter of class: For three generations Woolf's family has been handling papers as though they were so much acreage of which they were mere stewards. Sylvia Plath's estate comes off as middle class by comparison, wanting to publish and control. Maybe Woolf was just lucky in the temperament of her nephew, Quentin Bell, and that of the woman he married. She could have had someone like Fanny Burney's niece, who reclaimed at auction the Regency diaries of the clergyman's brave daughter, then got out the Victorian scissors and paste. The times have a lot to do with it. Who can fault Ted Hughes for resisting the blood cries of certain feminists? Sometimes a journal makes you decide. People expected answers from Plath's and got some they didn't want. Awful girl.
       The diary was the first literary form I imitated, even before poetry. As an adolescent black Anglophile out in the sticks I had a "de luxe" edition of Pepys, highly edited. Not long after college I burned down my apartment and lost everything, including my journals. Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer who had changed my life, said, "Good. Probably everything I ever said." How right she was. Could Cassandra Austen and Charlotte Brontë and Madame Gide--all of whom burned journals or drafts--have been entirely wrong? Yes.