James Sharples. "Elihu Smith." Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

"What happens when the stories people tell about their own lives, the ways they narrate their everyday experiences, are every bit as interesting as the stories they publish as literature? What happens when the two sets of stories overlap?"

Harry Potter, My Daughter, Elihu Smith, and Me Bryan Waterman

Part I | II | III

II

As an undergraduate English major in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was well trained by literary critics to discount any notion that we can recover an author's intentions. The "death of the author," we were informed, had been proclaimed and little mourned some twenty-odd years earlier. We were never to assume we could know what an author "really meant," and most of all, we weren't to attempt literary interpretation by recourse to an author's biography. If an author seemed to be writing autobiographically, we were to understand such declarations of "selfhood" as fictions, as performances. Coherent "selfhood" was out; "subjectivity," a more limited, perspectival notion, was in. With these principles in mind, we were to leave the author in the grave; the text would suggest its own meanings, or suggest to us how to create one. We were the authors. These cautionary tales have sometimes served me well. They remind me that any attempt to encounter the past is limited by fragmentary sources, if not by the inability of language to "represent" something perfectly in the first place.

Oddly, however, one result of these post-1970s currents in literary studies was a turn toward historical approaches to literature. Or toward a certain kind of history, anyway, since "literary history" still didn't include that most slippery of all historical enterprises, the writing of biography. Letting go of the quest to reclaim the "true" past (including the relationship between author and text) has lead literary scholars to treat all writing as literature, and to proclaim loudly that all history writing is akin to writing historical fiction. If diaries can't be relied on for accurate representation of the past, as this argument would maintain, then we need to read them much the way we read novels. Even as fictions, they can still give us some sense of history--especially of the history of human subjectivity--without forcing us to rely on them for the truth about what "really happened" or for insight into an author's intentions. If Harry Potter learned anything from his encounter with Tom Riddle's diary, it should be that things didn't necessarily happen the way the diarist would have you believe.

This sort of advice doesn't accord easily, though, with the kinds of (perverse) pleasures reading a diary can bring. For several years I've worked closely with one diary in particular, the diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith, a physician and poet who lived in New York City in the 1790s. Though I didn't find Smith's diary in a toilet, I did stumble across it (or into it?) in a way that felt like Harry's headlong fall. As a literary critic I had been grappling with the novels of Smith's sometime roommate and closest friend, Charles Brockden Brown, best known today as the author of Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799). Readers of Brown's gothic novels realize how frustrating his quirky writing can be: obscure, incomplete, dialogic, difficult to pin down in terms of its engagement with contemporary politics in particular. Reading criticism on Brown's novels I realized that critics had never abandoned biographical claims as fully as they advised. Literary historians often read the novels, which were produced during the partisan rancor of the late 1790s, as advocating one political position or another, often by associating Brown with Smith and his other friends who formed an intellectual circle they called the Friendly Club. Those who recognized Smith's conservative political bent assumed he must have won over Brown to Federalism. Those who knew that the club included the Jeffersonian politician Samuel Mitchill assumed the club--and therefore Brown and Brown's novels--must have had Republican allegiances. Early on in my study of Brown, when a computer search alerted me to the 1974 publication of Smith's diary, I headed into the library stacks to retrieve it, determined to settle the matter of Brown's politics once and for all.

What I found in Smith's diary--nearly four hundred thousand words written in just three years--was a text every bit as entrancing as Brown's bizarre novels. At random I opened the enormous quarto volume to a page near the center. Smith was drafting a long letter to a childhood friend, Theodore Dwight, in which he defended his loss of faith in Christianity. Something about the letter--its passionate defense of intellectual freedom, the courage it took to face down a fiercely evangelical Dwight, whose older brother, Timothy, was known as "Pope" Dwight of Yale University--made me feel almost as if I had tumbled through a miniature TV screen and landed in a candlelit New York bachelor's apartment two hundred years earlier. In addition to detailing these religious dilemmas, Smith's diary was packed with fascinating narratives of city social life, literary endeavors, scientific enterprises, and two yellow fever epidemics, the second of which took Smith's life when he was only twenty-seven. Before his early death, he had published the first anthology of American poems and founded the first American medical journal. In his diary he had drafted letters to famous Americans and to British literati; indulged crushes on married older women; fantasized about the notoriety he and his friends would gain if Brown's fiction generated scandal. While the diary only complicated, for various reasons, the issue of Brown's politics, it quickly raised for me questions that would alter my approach to literary history: What happens when the stories people tell about their own lives, the ways they narrate their everyday experiences, are every bit as interesting as the stories they publish as literature? What happens when the two sets of stories overlap?

Behind these questions was a recognition that I actually cared about the people who produced the texts I read. Sitting in the New-York Historical Society one summer afternoon, I held my breath, chills up my spine, as I read one of the last letters Smith had written before his death of yellow fever. The letter described the prevailing epidemic, but Smith had no way of knowing that within days he would be dead, just as he had no idea that the mosquitoes that kept him up at night were the carriers of the deadly disease. Was he already sick when he wrote this letter, now faded, yellow, brittle? What traces of his DNA might still be preserved in the document I was handling? Later I would walk the streets of lower Manhattan, feeling out the distances between Pine Street, where Smith had once lived, and the Battery, where he took his constitutional walks. Was this safe territory for a literary critic? After all, deep-rooted training taught me not to trust biographical approaches to interpreting texts, taught me that any biographical reconstruction was a "fiction." I shouldn't let my desire to piece together biographical information bear too heavily on my readings of the literature these people produced, including the diary.

Like most diaries, Smith's offers readers the sense that they are receiving exclusive information. Yet just as Tom Riddle only let Harry see what he wanted him to see, Smith often wrote with particular audiences in mind. Much of the diary is made up of letters like the one to Dwight: here Smith's audience awareness should be self-evident. His medical writing envisions its own set of readers, too. But the question of audience is more complicated the more one reads. Smith also frequently read aloud from his diary to friends, or swapped journals with them after long separations. He burned early volumes, unfortunately, to prevent their obsession with unrequited love from ever having an audience. And he intended, at some point, to publish his journals as a memorial not only of his own life and thinking, but as a record of the many illustrious people--Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Rush, or John Adams, the father of his friend Charles--he knew and observed. "To those into whose hands my papers may come, when I cease to exist," he wrote on one occasion, "they will be valuable: for my connections in many instances, have been with those, who either have been, or promise to be, in some good measure, distinguished actors in the scene around me." Perhaps Tom Riddle would remind us that such theatrical language is telling. "Audience beware," he might say. "The author of the diary you are about to read will likely come off as the hero of his story."