Journal 1868–1878 (review)

Pierre Loti (1850–1923) was a well-known author by 1880, when his second novel, Le Mariage de Loti, scored a major commercial success. Over the next twenty-six years he produced ten more novels, almost all of them best-sellers and some of them, like Pêcheur d'Islande, real masterpieces. As a result the French Academy in 1891 elected him to their august company, Henry James in 1893 hailed him as a "remarkable genius," and Willa Cather confessed that she would "swoon with joy if anyone saw traces of Loti in [her] work." After 1906 he gave up novels for travelogues and journalism, compromising his reputation badly with his uncritical Turkophilia during the Armenian massacres. Younger novelists such as Gide and Proust, who much admired him, pursued the experimentation with form that he had abandoned after his early narratives.

Still, and in part because of his own efforts, he remained very much in the limelight for the rest of his life. Indeed, and like what Michael Lucey has shown in his new book, Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust, with regard to Loti's contemporary, Colette, Loti worked to control the public's visual as well as verbal image of him. He therefore became a regular subject of interviews and articles in the illustrated magazines, such as L'Illustration, that were so popular during his later years.

And, like Gide, Julien Green, and other subsequent novelists whom the public saw as homosexual, he also took a real interest in posterity, not simply that people would continue to read his works after his death, but how they would conceive of and view him as well. As Gide and others who followed him would also conclude, Loti found that one of the best ways to do this was to publish his diary. Since a diary supposedly contains one's innermost thoughts, uncensored, unlike in a work of literature, either by a concern with what readers might dislike or aesthetic considerations, and since, unlike a memoir, a diary is supposedly written at the time of the events and thoughts it records, it is an ideal vehicle for convincing posterity to adopt particular views of oneself. Loti was in a good position to use that vehicle, since he had mentioned the existence of a diary repeatedly in his works and had even published fragments of it. So, near the end of his life, he began preparing his diary for publication. The first three volumes, covering the period 1870–1885, came out in the years immediately following his death.

As with the published diaries of Gide and others who would follow him, those volumes sometimes differ, even radically, from what Loti had originally written. In Loti's case this was in part because he and his son did considerable rewriting before turning the work over to Calmann-Lévy. But it was also because, like Proust after him, Loti had regularly used parts of his diary as material for his novels and travelogues. In his case this meant that he had often worked on the diary pages themselves as he started to transform his original entries into something that coincided with his aesthetic and personal views. As Lucey shows for Proust and his never quite named first-person narrator, Loti, who also used first-person narration in half his novels, was very conscious of his public's identification of his protagonists with their author and very careful to present them in a way that would contribute as it suited him to his own public image, even though, like Proust, he could argue that they were not necessarily and always one and the same. While the diary pages as we have them now differ considerably from the three volumes published after Loti's death, therefore, they may also, and at certain times definitely seem to, differ from what must have been in the original entries.

This does not mean that they...