An extraordinary record of life’s minutiae

In the penultimate entry of Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary, an autofictional daily record of a writer named Toby Litt (which first appeared from Substack), he admits he began the project wanting to write “the best book that has ever been written about writing — about the physical act of writing, and the metaphysical act.” He may not have succeeded (Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art might fit this description), but substitute the word “living” for “writing” and he might be closer to an apt summary. It’s an extraordinary record of life’s minutiae, oscillating from the trivial to the transcendent, often on the same page.

Which isn’t to say the book doesn’t contain a treasury of wisdom about the writing life. Beginning in the January of an unnamed year (Sonntag 1 January), the German diary, a gift from his partner Leigh, reveals that Litt is about to become a father, while his mother is dying of cancer. These two life-changing events, keenly anticipated and dreaded, are the twin plot motors that underwrite the epic digressions on fountain pens, desks and teaching an MA in Creative Writing. There are riffs on his desk that’s nota desk; the welcome and unwelcome interruptions from his cat (named Mouse); the motivational quote from Mandelstam pinned to a corkboard; and the child’s plastic rhino he keeps for inspiration: “The qualities of the rhinoceros are the qualities you need in order to write a novel. Physical robustness, four feet on the ground, eyes straight ahead, the horn.”

There is also much lamentation about his place in the literary pecking order. “Since being dropped by my major label, and going indie,” he agonizes over whether he’s ever written trash or “stolen air.” The verdict of posterity looms large: “Writing is extremely easy; it’s writing anything that’s anything that kills.” Embarrassed as he is by his own candor, he’s sure these meditations will find an answering echo in anyone who’s ever picked up a pen: “How do you know if you’re any good? You don’t… How do you know if the voice of doubt isn’t bang on? You don’t… Do you quit? You don’t.” There are droll passages on how he’ll be remembered personally (“Oh God, I always really fancied him”), or how his literary reputation will fare (“Brilliant writer, terrible sales… If only he’d been a bit more popular, he’d have been a lot more popular”). Ultimately, he worries he might be the victim of his own extraordinary fecundity: “If only I could have been like Donna Tartt and fucked glamorously off for a decade between novels.”

As Litt and Leigh attend antenatal scans, their anxiety increases. After three miscarriages, he becomes painfully aware that hoping for a successful pregnancy might be dangerously delusional. “I have been trying not to remember our grief after the third.” To add to the sense of impending catastrophe, the baby, whom Litt nicknames “Flipper,” is due the same month his mother is put into palliative care. This gives a book largely made up of virtuoso navel-gazing a piercing sense of urgency, involving the reader emotionally as well as cerebrally: “Put formally, I am afraid to mourn for my mother and also my child. But I’m also anxious about mourning and celebrating on the same day.”

Luckily, the latter doesn’t occur, but the book’s sense of drama and candid confession remains until the last page. What one takes away from A Writer’s Diary is an impression of a brilliantly associative mind weighing up daily what it means to exist. There are observations that a conventional novel could only miss. On the song of a blackbird: “There are phrases I’d like to have rendered as carved wood… And there is always one startling note that is sounded far inside the heart.” Or on his tinnitus: “A tiny man in a tiny orchestra playing a tiny triangle, on a loop, forever-until-I-die.”

Towards the end of the book, encroaching fatherhood reminds him that the writer’s life is one of incessant practicalities, perhaps all the more important now: “I’ve spent too much time on this [diary], instead of sale-able fiction. I should write, instead, a gripping but moving story with a sympathetic central character readers can root for.” But Litt is self-aware enough to know the kind of writer he is (“my mainstream is other people’s niche”), and that he will never write anything so lazily commercial. He might never be lionized like his more successful peers, but he can create something inimitable like this, with its parodies and longueurs, its meditations and linguistic games, its discourses about the correct way of eating an almond, or Keats’s poetry. Nestled among these riches are gems on the paradoxes of writing, garnered from a lifetime as a practitioner and teacher: “If I sharpen one emphasis, I melt another… By adding drama, I simplify thought.” Wise words. Posterity teaches us that only the most vivifying works survive, and A Writer’s Diary is nothing if not fiercely alive.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.