The Godfather: Peter Corris on keeping a diary
I first began keeping a diary in London in 1970. I was there on a post-doctoral travelling fellowship from the ANU to continue my research into aspects of Pacific history.
I rented a room in a flat on Brompton Road in South Kensington. The lessee of the flat, on the second and third floors of the building, operated a shop on the ground floor. I can’t remember what the shop sold but the business was not doing well apparently and he was renting rooms in the flat to others and sleeping in a cubby-hole himself. I can’t imagine that his subletting was legal but he was a nice bloke and we got along.
I was away at the Public Record Office most of the time, lonely when not working (I knew no one in London) and became a devotee of BBC radio. One evening I heard a program about Joyce Grenfell – the toothy comedienne with the impossibly pukka accent. She said she’d started a diary on New Year’s Day one year and made an entry in the approved clipped style, omitting pronouns. Then she let a few days go by before abandoning the exercise after writing ‘Forget what did’.
I was amused by this and began a diary that I kept for the whole of my stay in Britain (about nine months). I then went to Fiji for more research and didn’t keep one there. Back in Canberra I put the British diary away somewhere and felt no impulse to be a diarist until I went on my travels again. This time it was to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and, perhaps prompted by loneliness again, I kept another diary.
Back in Canberra, in the turmoil of a relationship break-up and the establishment of a new one – no diary.
I didn’t resume diarising until about ten years later when, embarked on a writing career with a partner and three children, living on the Illawarra coast and acquainted with writers, publishers, journalists, artists and ‘characters’ from my Sydney days and having a feeling for the therapeutic benefit of writing, I began again to record my days.
I’ve kept a diary ever since, documenting events in my writing and personal life, traversing, sometimes in almost encoded form, the ups and downs, betrayals and loyalties, conflicts, successes, disappointments and travels. Inevitably, as I got older, dramas, such as they were, receded and tranquillity – with occasional glitches – became the norm. These days, apart from the too-frequent medical appointments and notes on what I’m reading and writing, the entries are merely social – eg ‘Lunch with Michael Wilding’ – or a record of visits from family members and the births of grandchildren.
When talk of an autobiography from the ‘Godfather of Australian crime fiction’ comes up, mention is made of the diaries. Apart from not wanting to do it, I have the answer – ‘I’m too blind to read the bloody stuff.’ It’ll still be here when I’m gone. Let someone else have a go if they can persuade a publisher – which has always been my modus operandi – that there’s a quid in it.
