SOURCE: Pudaloff, Ross. “‘A Certain Amount of Excellent English’: The Secret Diaries of William Byrd.” Southern Literary Journal 15, no. 1 (fall 1982): 101-19.

[In the following essay, Pudaloff explores Byrd's secret diaries and contrasts the persona revealed in those works with that presented in his public writings.]

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Since the earliest of the extant secret diaries of William Byrd dates from 1709 and the latest from 1741, we can assume that he must have possessed good reasons to keep these records of his life so rigorously for himself. Yet the use of a shorthand code seems, if not unnecessary, at the least excessive in light of the routinized and banal qualities of these journals. Most of their readers have admitted that the diaries are inane and trivial documents of less historical and critical interest than one might hope or expect. They conflate the intimate and the superficial, lack the wealth of detail to interest the social historian, offer no interpretation of his life by Byrd, and repeat in nearly every entry the same written form and daily routine. In the seemingly random mixture of the significant and insignificant, the diaries even fail to function as a permanent record for important economic, social, or political facts. Although he often told himself to remember something, Byrd typically did not write that fact down: “Mr. Custis told me several things concerning the overseers which I resolved to remember. I said my prayers and had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thank God Almighty.”¹ These characteristics, which have made the diaries so resistant to analysis, produce texts whose interpretation must explain the presence and function of banality, triviality, and routine within them and Byrd's life.

The diaries' lack of literary interest and meaning to the modern reader reflects their lack of a personality inscribed in the text, an omission which measures their great distance from the highly stylized qualities of Byrd's persona in his other and more public writings. The persona of the diaries becomes the personality expressed in Byrd's other writings and works through his manipulation of diction, syntax, style, and narrative structure. What we take to be the traits of the man are, in light of the affectless and empty persona of the diaries, better seen as the consequences of literary and linguistic choices. The man was and could be whatever the occasion demanded and language could supply. Byrd's identification of personal character with the arrangement of linguistic characters gave him authority over himself and then over the world. Ultimately both the subjectivity of one's self and the identity of others came to depend upon the master of Westover for the very shape and meaning of their existence. The absence of personal style created the conditions for the imposition of order through the choice of a literary style. For Byrd, language itself constituted the world of the master. Writing became especially important and necessary in colonial Virginia because the usual supports for a hierarchical, class-based society—history, religion, custom, heredity, and scarcity—were either absent or weak. Alone among the institutions of society, language remained for Byrd to legitimize and extend his dominion over the world. The secret diaries are both the genesis and the product of his transformation of a conflict-ridden world to one determined and defined by the authority of his word.

Typically, the entries are grouped chronologically in three periods: early morning, dinner and what followed in the afternoon, and evening with its ritual conclusion noting Byrd's health, spirits, and prayers. The only variations to this formula come, as one might expect, when Byrd is away from Westover and thus less in control of his schedule.² Usually Byrd states at what time he rose, what, if anything, he read, and what he had for breakfast: e.g. “I rose at 5 o'clock and read a chapter in Hebrew and some Greek in Lucian. About 7 o'clock the negro woman died that was mad yesterday. I said my prayers and ate boiled milk for breakfast” (TSD [The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover], p. 276; Dec. 25, 1710). No matter how disturbing or distinctive the events of the morning may seem to the modern reader, Byrd maintained the idea of order by the seemingly banal insertion of what he ate for dinner and a description of the activities which followed that meal, one which almost always began “In the afternoon …”: e.g. “The negro boy died while we were at dinner. God's will be done. I ate roast beef for dinner. In the afternoon Mr. Cary went away but Mr. Clayton and Tom Jones stayed” (TSD, p. 282; Jan. 3, 1711).

Although one might argue that neither the death nor the madness of slaves would drastically affect the master of Westover, the apparent lack of concern at least conflicts with Byrd's very real interest in the welfare of his dependents and certainly jars with his presentation elsewhere of himself as the benevolent patriarch of this community. Furthermore, the chronological order can be seen imposing order even and especially after an event Byrd admitted he found personally disturbing. In the entry for June 21, 1710, he reported a dream which had frightened him and, in doing so, perhaps reveals a psychological impetus of the commitment to order, rationality, and regularity in his life as well as his diaries: “About five nights since I dreamed I saw a flaming star in the air at which I was much frightened and called some others to see it but when they came it disappeared. I fear this portends some judgment to this country or at least to myself. I ate roast mutton for dinner. In the afternoon I settled the closer” (TSD, p. 194).³ Finally, regardless of the events of the day, Byrd concludes each entry with the formula “I said my prayers and had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thank God almighty.” Only rarely did he add comments after this statement and those were never of an evaluative nature. Instead he might summarize the month's weather or note such miscellaneous information as the news of a “colt dead soon after he was gelt” (TSD, p. 176; May 8, 1710).

The modern reader is left with writing apparently done for the purpose of writing itself. If so, then the most useful way to begin to understand the diaries is to be found in a comparison with other Americans perceived as writers, rather than with Byrd's peers in eighteenth century Virginia or English writers of the same era. Thus my title incorporates the conclusion Henry James reached after he had confessed his initial uncertainty as to the intent and utility of Nathaniel Hawthorne's notebooks. James finally decided that this “minute and often trivial chronicle” could best be understood as “compositions … in which the subject was only the pretext and the main point was to write a certain amount of excellent English.”⁴ The specifics of James' language offer an insight applicable to Byrd as well as Hawthorne. The notebooks were indeed an essential pre-text for the tales and novels, but not because they collected the raw material of life to pour into the predetermined forms of these works. Thus, although it appears to do historical violence to juxtapose Byrd and Hawthorne, the best possible reading of the secret diaries must emerge from our awareness that they too are an essential preliminary to and dialectical contrast with Byrd's other writings. Neither the psychological meaning of the entry for the author nor the communicative function of language can account for structure and content of the diaries. Instead it was the formal aspects of writing and the political functions of language which kept Byrd at the diaries for the duration of his adult life.

These suppositions have the advantage of addressing directly and for the first time the uncertainty and bewilderment that has been expressed about the purposes and uses of the secret diaries: “Why Byrd—or anyone—should keep the kind of diaries that he kept remains a mystery of human nature. In them he entered the stark and banal doings of each day with a minimum of comment upon them. … For reasons that puzzle us, Byrd felt a compulsion to write, even to write down his most trivial or most intimate actions.”⁵ Although this comment appears only to identify a mystery, it is, I believe, the most extensive interpretation of the diaries, a fact which only seems to confirm the mysteries of their origin and function. But a reading of the diaries in the context of Byrd's life and as simultaneously a preparation for and a text of that life can yield historically valid answers in the more familiar terms of literary and political commentary and criticism. In seeking historical validity and avoiding historical violence, we must, as Byrd most certainly did, refuse to separate the categories of literature and life, but rather regard them both as texts with the same author. However, rather than literature and life, a dichotomy of the post-romantic sensibility, I propose a consideration of William Byrd in terms of style and language, granting to each the meaning and extension he desired.

Buffon's celebrated aphorism, “Style is the man himself,” itself the essential Enlightenment conjunctions of visible order and the taxonomy of the world with identity, appears to describe both the contemporary perception of William Byrd and the presentation of the self in all his writings with the exception of the diaries. But the self-reflexivity of the aphorism, which merges outer and inner, dress and substance, and surface and depth, demands some revision before it is applied to Byrd. Whether we conceive the reader as one of those friends to whom he gave a manuscript of The History of the Dividing Line with a mention of his hopes for future publication—or if we extend our notion of the reader even so far as the tourist who visits and admires Byrd's mansion, Westover, an even more polished and complete display of the self Byrd presented to his contemporaries and posterity—it soon becomes apparent that Style is the narrator. At the center of both that text and that house, a metaphor itself for Byrd's public self, is a dominant and confident narrator who, as he guides the reader or viewer, always reminds him of the authority of the narrator. It is a commonplace of criticism concerned with William Byrd that his prose style (when directed at an audience other than himself) is consciously and deliberately artificial; we recognize him as an eighteenth-century gentleman insofar as we recognize the decorum with which he presents himself and his world. Less emphasized has been the fact that the reader is expected to recognize and admire not only that the dress fits the occasion, but also that skill with which the writer makes the narrator who makes the narrative.

Neither Westover nor The History of the Dividing Line is dependent for its meaning on the responses of the viewer or reader; they are closed systems which provide a totalized set of responses for the reader/viewer who comes to accept them on the basis of their perfection as artifacts. There are no passages in either which fail to be totally self-reflexive in intent and effect. To walk through the one or read the other is to see and experience the world through the eyes of their owner and author; the I of these objects becomes the eye of the reader/viewer. That is, the reader of William Byrd's narratives is created and manipulated by the self-reflexive and ironic style of those texts. The American writer in eighteenth century Virginia is not only the master of the plantation and the owner of the slaves, but also the author of the language and culture which impose their own terms as the basis for interpretation.

The beauty and power of those texts and works tend to mislead us insofar as we have come to believe they incorporate and reflect the whole of the man and the era. In this context, Richmond Croom Beatty's comments on the cellars of Westover are instructive and revealing: they were “a labyrinth of dark enclosures” more suited for a “Gothic romance” than the everyday life of a country gentleman and Enlightenment figure.⁶ Those who believe I am expanding the metaphoric dimensions of the text and house too far and insisting too much upon their equivalence as narratives will complain that the cellars were partially constructed in that manner to afford escape from threatened Indian attacks. But it seems to me that the cognitive value of the metaphor is strengthened if it demonstrates a capacity to explain the confluence of historical and esthetic reasons within one style. Perhaps the “labyrinth of dark enclosures” is too suggestive a term for those who come to Byrd and the eighteenth century with interpretive models of literature and life which incorporate the house of Gothicism, with its cellars, hidden passages, and towers, as a metaphor for a complex and multi-layered self. Yet Beatty's term does remind us that a man should be known by what he chooses to conceal as well as that he would reveal to himself, the public, and posterity.

Byrd's style in life and letters can and should be perceived as effectively and intentionally masking the motive and the man through its polish, humor, and sophistication. That his “qualities of style seem to be acquired rather than innate, and … appear only when he writes for someone else” may hardly appear to need restatement at this point.⁷ Yet one is confronted by Byrd's language with at least the suspicion that, even if the labyrinth is absent or no longer can be retraced, there may be escape tunnels through which Byrd disappears, much like the Cheshire cat in Alice, leaving only his style behind. That style has beguiled and captivated modern critics; perhaps the delight in discovering a style characterized by “ease, urbanity, sprightliness, and charm,” a style valuable for literary as well as historical reasons, has sometimes sufficed for critics of early American literature.⁸ Possibly this should be so, but the effort of creating such unbroken and polished surfaces is itself interesting and revealing. Language, all language, has become a social and public discourse. Writing has created a world in which representation and meaning have their origin in society to the exclusion of the self. Whatever Byrd's feelings and impulses, his writing serves either to control them through the ironic perspective of The History of the Dividing Line or erase them through the flat and banal language of the diaries so that they cannot interfere with his life as a gentleman, planter, husband, and politician.

The lack of any significant challenge to the truth value of Byrd's writings supports the above contention. And Byrd's literary reputation rests upon his powers as a stylist and his veracity as a historian, with each buttressing the other. The rise in that reputation over the last several decades has partaken in and, in some ways, led the general upward reassessment of colonial literature, especially that of southern writing. Interestingly, this critical appraisal tends to include and, indeed, often repeats the highly favorable judgment of Byrd the man by Byrd himself. His self-description is found in the “character” piece, “Inamorato L'Oiseaux,” and is still present in twentieth century opinion; favorable attention and emphasis are given to his wit, his moderation, his sexual desire, and his penchant for irony. Of these, the most important is the last, and the manner in which irony was called upon to qualify and modify the hostility and anger he admitted to feeling. Their presence seems to indicate an unsparing self-disclosure, but the irony serves to re-impose the control of the author and his separate identity from the character: “If he reflected upon any one t'was by Irony, which a wise man wou'd take for a banter, and a fool for a complement [sic]” (ASD [Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover], p. 280).⁹

This self-judgment has remained the basis for the judgments of the man, as Westover has visibly represented the culture of paternalistic masters and dashing Cavaliers. Byrd's achievement in controlling his posthumous reputation takes on even greater significance, because he has come to be perceived as the exemplar of an entire culture and the model for its best and most typical attributes. In his biography of Byrd, Pierre Marambaud has offered a concise and useful formulation of these: “Byrd, like most members of his group, despised barbarity, disorder, idleness, intemperance, and selfishness. He valued industry, frugality, moderation, responsibility, justice, and respect for authority.”¹⁰ Order, which distinguished good from bad and right from wrong, has its beginnings and expression in the form and content of Byrd's diary entries; these provided a linguistic privilege from which Byrd might judge and be judged. He wrote:

I rose about 5, read Hebrew and Greek. I prayed and had milk porridge because I took physic. I was better, thank God. I put things in order and read news. I slept a little. My physic worked four times. I ate fish for dinner. After dinner I put things in order and read more news. We walked in the evening. I talked with my people and prayed.

(ASD, p. 166)

Order was the basis of Byrd's literary styles and social judgments. Nothing in which he failed to perceive the workings of order incorporated in industry, frugality, temperance, et al., could please the master of Westover. Since Byrd did constantly seek and impose order in his life, in politics, and in the landscape to be made farm, plantation, or city, it is somewhat surprising that more attention has not been placed elucidating the process by which order was discovered in and/or imposed upon his life and world.¹¹

The function and importance of order in the public writings and life is matched by the perfection of Westover; both reflect the ideal system rather than the actual conditions of composition and experience. Both, too, mislead the observer and reader insofar as he accepts the product as the necessary and total result of an inevitable system.¹² In the public writing, order was established by the insistent irony which always asserts Byrd's control of himself and circumstances, even and especially when he writes about himself to others. As the essential genesis of social activity, writing was a performance for the reader in which Byrd presented himself as a character—a constant reminder that he is puppeteer as well as puppet and that the author alone is free to order the world. The self-reflexive qualities of Westover, his letters, and his histories serve to warn the careful reader against taking their content as the unmediated expression of desire, fear, or belief. Only that which offered resistance to inclusion within written discourse might present a threat to the veracity and authority of the writer. Thus the seemingly more intimate or socially explosive a subject was, the more Byrd wrote about it in the diaries and the other writings. It is for this reason that his sexual desire and activity occupy such a prominent position; their transformation into written language negated the possibility for upheaval and chaos they might otherwise present. Slavery and the natural world fall within this category as well, because language marks the power of the master to control and condone social behavior by making it public. That “good words … are due even to slaves” is more than an expression of courtesy; it is, as well, the justification of the master and his power over them.¹³

Byrd's equation of language and culture led him to perceive writing as the necessary activity for the creation of human identity; the blank and silent page represented a danger insofar as it was a metaphor for a world without limits, decorum, and authority. In this context, perhaps the most famous letter Byrd wrote provides instructive and revealing insights because it offers a defense of the culture of slavery resting ultimately upon linguistic activity. In this letter to Charles Boyle, Byrd compared himself and his position to “one of the patriarchs.” That phrase has stimulated discussion in terms of its allegedly prophetic presentation of the plantation ideal as the telos of southern society. The major objection heretofore to the accuracy of the prediction has been that Byrd's metaphor is mechanical rather than organic; he continues and defines his role as that of the one who kept the “springs in motion.”¹⁴ Still, for Byrd, the social order had its origin and thus its justification, in linguistic action—i.e., writing—rather than in either a typology inspired by the Bible or an argument from design derived from Newtonian physics. He concluded this description of his world by appearing to devalue the worth of his activities: they were only “an amusement in this silent country” (Corr. [The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia], I, p. 355).

The ironic deprecation should not blind us from perceiving the importance of the purpose and performance of writing in the new world. The silence of America was mapped and filled with a language which marked not only the outer limits of society, but which also provided an interpretation of life in that society by making all relationships linguistic and social. The formula echoes and parodies the Lockean tabula rasa by relocating the blankness and emptiness onto the physical landscape of Virginia and making the process of education identical to the imposition of a language upon the beasts and the woods. For Byrd, the primary vocation of the American was to be a writer. In the order inherent in the idea of grammar, Byrd found a structuring principle for the self and the world. As the composer of “a certain amount of excellent English,” he found in writing, as a writer and as an American, a way to impose a grammar of relationships and value upon worlds which might otherwise prove rebellious or chaotic. Writing is the origin and equivalent of civilizing the natural world; ultimately the perception (i.e., creation) of the American West and the American future is the issue here.

Writing is also the most privileged activity because all else flows from it; no challenge to its accuracy nor any questions about its purview are permitted. Another letter clarifies both the purpose and necessity of writing, though here again irony intervenes, in this case to protect Byrd from the negative consequences of his metaphor. Although he had no “news” to write, Byrd nonetheless did so, claiming he was “forced like the spider, to spin something out of my own bowels for my dear sisters entertainment.” (Corr. I, p. 402) But the modern reader can see what may not have been apparent to “my dear sister”; it is Byrd's “entertainment” which is at stake here, and that word misrepresents the importance of writing. Rather, writing is identified as Byrd's deepest self and defined as the most fundamental expression of his existence, one given over to the care of others. Indeed, the barely concealed implications of the metaphor tend to identify language, and Byrd, with entrapment and aggression, though here his adherence to convention robs the metaphor of some of its impact.

Writing formed a network within which life and relationships were caught to nurture William Byrd. In and through language, Byrd confronted and resolved what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer found to be the essential dichotomy of the Enlightenment: “To choose between their subjection to nature or the subjection of nature to self.”¹⁵ The self to which all paid obeisance and which claimed dominance is the instrumental, rationalized, unreflective, and unfeeling being of the diaries. That self is composed of only the conscious and controlled persona and his actions because, when only the known and knowable are admitted to existence, what remains is, by definition, “susceptible to systemization.”¹⁶ This judgment, directed at the “pseudoscientific” claims of such contemporary systems as Marxism and Structuralism, is apropos for Byrd and the Enlightenment because the scale and nature of these interpretive and systematic claims derive in large part from those of the Enlightenment. In all, what can be systemized, self and world, can then be objectified, repeated, and dominated.

The impersonality of the secret diaries focuses attention on the origin and uses of objectivity and repetition within Byrd's life and actions. These most prominent aspects of the diaries direct the reader from the private life of William Byrd to a consideration of the significance of writing as preparation and creation of a self for a purely public life.¹⁷ The routinized and empty self of the diaries exists in a dialectical relationship of opposites with the fully articulated and articulate personae of Byrd's letters to friends, the literary exercises he composed while in England, the avowals of love and marriage proposals sent to likely candidates, his reports on interesting phenomena to natural historians and scientists, and, most significantly, the quasi-public narratives of eighteenth century Virginia. The difference in personae is a difference in structure and syntax, both of which are a function of the difference in audience; so we must ask what it was that William Byrd was telling himself and only himself in these otherwise banal records of his daily activities.

The secret diaries are those texts for which the only reader was the author, and in which there existed no disjunction between narrator and narratee. The modern reader, who may expect to find a similarity to Pepys' diaries, is doomed to disappointment and boredom. Furthermore, as the diaries have proven singularly resistant to literary analysis and psychological interpretation, they have also been much less useful as a source of data for social history than one might imagine or hope. Although Byrd will mention that he attended a play, he will usually omit its title, the names of the actors, the price of the tickets, the behavior of the audience, and his own reaction to the performance, leaving the reader only with the fact that Byrd did indeed attend some theater that night. Yet the London diary in which this example occurs presents a more varied and interesting narrative than the record of life in Virginia. In the latter, day after day is noted; neighbors die, slaves take sick and are treated by Byrd, discipline is meted out to insubordinate servants, an overseer is engaged or fired, the crop is planted and harvested, the latest price of tobacco is received, Byrd quarrels with and is reconciled with his wife, he reads “Latin, Greek, or English,” takes the evening walk in the garden, and commends his soul to the Almighty. Although not all these occurred on every day, the modern reader is unable to recall when any given event did, because they are presented as the elements of a formula rather than the reports of experience.

What we do remember is Byrd's frankness about sex; whether it is masturbation, a prostitute in London, a maid in a Williamsburg inn, or his own wife, Byrd faithfully, and we assume truthfully (a reflection of the importance of sexual frankness as a measure of truth in the twentieth century), recorded each encounter. But the diaries actually lack all affect except insofar as the reader illegitimately supplies that in the form of personally and culturally determined fantasies which are not even remotely hinted at in the texts and which indeed are the products of an urbanized and industrialized world. The contrast between the lack of affect in the diary and modern responses is easily seen in the famous instance in which Byrd made love to his wife on the billiard table. The entry notes the location as an afterthought: “In the afternoon my wife and I had a little quarrel which I reconciled with a flourish. Then she read a sermon in Dr. Tillotson to me. It is to be observed that the flourish was performed on the billiard table. I read a little Latin. In the evening …” (TSD, pp. 210-11; July 30, 1710). In addition to the disjunction of the place from the act, the sentence's passive construction deserves attention. Byrd here departs from the usual subject-predicate structure in which he is the agent. Instead he becomes a passive participant within the regularity of a routine which is more disrupted by where the lovemaking took place than by the act itself.

Of course many of the diary entries do report the occurrence of anger, love, desire, hate, and many other manifestations of feeling by Byrd and others. Those who know little else about William Byrd are usually aware of the extent and variety of his sexual experiences (which has had the interesting effect of testifying to the accuracy and veracity of Byrd's other writings). Especially as a young man in Virginia, living with an apparently hot-tempered first wife, Byrd admitted again and again to extremes of feeling as a husband and master. But even when the facts and feelings seem highly charged with emotion, the language remains calm and calming. The entry for May 22, 1712, not only gives insight into the sometimes tempestuous life at Westover during those years, but also demonstrates Byrd's use of a facade to mask his feelings in the most intimate circumstances, much as he used language in the diaries to re-establish control and to create literary and personal styles which are totally artifacts.

My wife caused Prue to be whipped violently notwithstanding I desired not, which provoked me to have Anaka whipped likewise who had deserved it much more, on which my wife flew into such a passion that she hoped she would be revenged of me. I was moved very much at this but only thanked her for the present lest I should say things foolish in my passion. I wrote more accounts to go to England. My wife was sorry for what she had said and came to ask my pardon and I forgave her in my heart but seemed to resent, that she might be the more sorry for her folly. She ate no dinner nor appeared the whole day. I ate some bacon for dinner. In the afternoon I wrote two more accounts till the evening and then took a walk in the garden. I said my prayers and was reconciled to my wife and gave her a flourish in token of it. I had good health, good thoughts, but was a little out of humor, for which God forgive me.

(TSD, p. 533; my emphasis)¹⁸

The attitudes implied and expressed about language in this entry deserve close attention. I have underlined the phrase “lest I should say things foolish in my passion” because I think it shows that Byrd utilized language as an instrument of order and decorum even when such a use misrepresented the emotional state of the writer; or rather, Byrd distinguished author from actor as clearly as he did order from chaos and intellect from feeling. After another quarrel, Byrd wrote “I spoke my mind with calmness” as if that were the significant resolution to the difficulty (TSD, p. 574; Aug. 23, 1712). Here again what matters and what is written is the control gained through language rather than the content and resolution of the actual dispute.

Byrd's statement that he “seemed to resent” his wife's actions although she had already apologized and “I forgave her in my heart” is, strangely enough, of the sort which have brought praise for the candor with which the diary was composed. Of course, given the fact that the diary was written in a shorthand code, what is surprising is the lack of personal detail and feeling rather than the presence of self-admitted duplicity. Furthermore, a man willing to record his deception of his wife would have little compunction about the use of language to guide (if deceive is too strong) the thoughts and attitudes of his reader in those texts which circulated among his friends and acquaintances, and which he considered publishing. Such guidance would be especially important in those cases where the writing refers to the performance of a social role and was intended to be read outside a group sharing a similar and rigid code of behavior. The separation between thought and emotion is absolute; language has become the means of mastery, of husbandry, and of order. Although the use of sex to be reconciled is common enough then and now, for Byrd the sexual act substituted for an unwillingness and/or inability to present a language expressive of the emotional life of the author. Perhaps it is relevant that the only written apology made by Byrd was one to Governor Spotswood and was written under the threat of losing his position on the Council.

The rigidity and narrowness of purpose which are all that Byrd allowed to language have their structural extension in the form of this and almost every other entry in the diaries. Each day is reported as a chronological series of events, a sequence which is never violated. Byrd imposed and asserted the value of order simply by interjecting that he wrote accounts between the fight and his wife's apology, and then again between the dinner at which she failed to appear and the eventual reconciliation in the bedroom. The diaries both serve as and represent the application of order to defuse and subvert the expression and value of emotion. They are not the history of a person, so much as they are the record of the creation of a personae which is, in turn, a phenomenon of language. Style not only makes the man into the narrator, but does so by identifying him as the avatar of a culture of decorum, propriety, and the acceptance of hierarchy. Although Byrd, like Thomas Jefferson and many another writer, believed that the most deleterious effects of slavery were those which happened to the master and not to the slave, the power to create a life out of language may well derive from the total power of the slave owner.¹⁹ In the diaries we encounter the emergence of the patriarch and the plantation as the expected and accepted models for the leader and society in the South. Their triumph as normative depends on the illusion of the plain style that there exists a linear, limited, and clear relationship between words and things. However, a paradox arises: the plainer the style and the nearer it approaches to (apparently) no style at all, to becoming transparent, the greater the original necessity for a written language to contain the now-identified pair of expression and chaos. The spartan and repetitive narrative of Byrd's diaries tells all by attempting to say as little as possible. What is missing haunts the narrative, but no longer the narrator.

The language of the diaries is the bland, colorless, and neutral writing defined and discussed in our time by Roland Barthes as “a style of absence which is almost an ideal absence of style.”²⁰ Even the most pronounced characteristic of the diaries, the use of the first person pronoun, which we conventionally take to indicate a writing of affect, intention, and personality, is better comprehended as linking and directing a series of possessive relationships—my wife, my slaves, my crops, my house, my friends—and not as an expression of being and/or essence because these have been excised in order to master the world better. The blank, neutral writing prepared Byrd as a character to be both representative and arbiter of social mores and customs. Through the creation of the empty persona in the diaries, the various and varied persona of the letters, narratives, and histories could be created without fear of contradiction or ambiguity. Not the world but the self had to be mastered first, and in order to do so, Byrd sacrificed the content of life to the forms of language. Once that was accomplished, Byrd could and did send forth his narrators to beguile, if they could not conquer, with style, irony, and wit.

The total reliance upon the simple past tense in the diaries permitted Byrd to present the I as a character and granted to the author the omniscience and omnipotence he sought through writing. For Byrd, here as elsewhere, grammar and value are knotted together; his use of the grammatical preterite expresses a theological relationship between the persona of the author and a fallen world—only William Byrd, the author, is not numbered among the fallen. A god because he is a writer, William Byrd would agree (but oh how ironically) with Barthes' statement that “the writer's time is not a diachronic but an epic time; without present and without past, … this active time of writing develops well within what is commonly called an itinerary.”²¹ But the ontological validity which Barthes asserts is true for all writing turns out, in this case at any rate, to be a historical product generated to meet specific social and political needs; it describes the process by which Byrd reconstituted character, nature, and history as exteriority and relationships dependent upon him. In the diaries William Byrd is an actor, a figure, who exists only through his relationship to the routines and forms which define him. The chronological form sets the “itinerary” which Byrd applied to his travels and histories and allowed him to impose an ideology of progress, prosperity, and expansion upon his society.

Since the I of the diaries no longer retained the privilege of expressing affect, it became instead a sign directing the reader (as we must remember, Byrd himself) away from interiority and introspection and toward the series of relationships through which the I ruled over the world. Writing served to repress the potential for opposition by others outside the writer and demanded that he empty himself of content as the price to be paid for this power. In the context of the economic and social systems of eighteenth century Virginia, the ideology of paternalism concealed the development of an entrepeneurial capitalism and the reduction of the individual to an economic entity. Style and personae conceal the actual nature of these bonds because a frank avowal—i.e. a different grammar and language—would subvert the justification for Byrd's position as husband and master within the social order as well as the rationale for the order itself.

The ideological importance that Byrd attached to the link between language and social hierarchy is clarified and extended by the significance to him of his membership in the Royal Society. In a 1741 letter to Sir Hans Sloane, the secretary of the Society, Byrd had complained about his omission from the list of members and offered “my long absence” as the reason for his placement “in the number of the dead” (Corr. II, p. 586). The absence was more than geographic since Byrd had not contributed anything to the Society since 1697 and had not written to Sloane since 1738. Byrd's high estimate of the value of membership reflects, among other things, his agreement with the revised attitudes about language and style that were so much a part of the Royal Society's origins and development. In his 1667 history Thomas Sprat had praised the resolution of the members “to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when man deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words.”²² For both Sprat and Byrd, the primitive served to structure the present and the future, and their use illustrates the political function of nostalgia to order the world. Although they invert the relationship of words and things, Byrd's diaries certainly present and depend upon the plain style in which these become equivalent. Words and their referents have become objects, and once that ontological shift has occurred, there remains no check upon the power of the author to create and arrange the world as he sees fit.

Byrd turned to writing with the perceptive awareness that the act of writing, as opposed to oral communication, can be psychologically and socially repressive. As perhaps the most extreme example of the plain style, one which was composed during the period written English was being standardized, the diaries of William Byrd support the conclusion about the nature of writing reached by the German writer and critic, Hans Magnus Enzensberger: “The formalization of written language permits and encourages the repression of opposition.”²³ The psychological and political consequences of the transformation of life into language are nowhere better illustrated than in the conventions and tropes which the culture of industrial society shares with Byrd's language. To leave a “hand” to work in a field, as Byrd does in A Progress to the Mines, no longer strikes us as anything more than a perfectly acceptable synecdoche; the reduction of the individual has succeeded so well that the visual image, which is grotesque, fails to occur to most readers. Nor did it occur to Byrd because he had already divided himself into author, character, and reader, this formal division created and then reconciled him to the inevitable success of the ideology and culture implicit in his writing and language.

The more finished and public writings of William Byrd, which culminate in The History of the Dividing Line, are convincing and persuasive because their language appears fully to describe and exhaust the world presented within the text and represents it as coterminous with the world outside the text and the self. More specifically, the language is sophisticated and humorous enough to convince the reader that it completely depicts all actions taken, people seen, landscape traversed, and the future to be created. In the diaries we are able to see how William Byrd constructed the personae and language which accomplished these tasks. He rigidly organized his life and words so that the words seemed to reflect all that had happened by being all that could happen. This process originated in the structure of each sentence written. An action reported in these outwardly simple declarative sentences is, implicitly or explicitly, a choice made by the author for his character. Once the choice was made, any record, and therefore any awareness of alternatives, vanished from the public realm and writings. Privately, however, Byrd often listed those alternatives, usually separating them by a “but.” For example, the entry for July 5, 1741, a typical and representative sentence, reads “I wrote to the Falls, but went not to church, but read French” (ASD, p. 171). The short, flat sentences which appear to report only the most banal and often tedious daily activities served, instead, a much larger purpose; they made possible the organization of the self and the world. Any feelings or reasons which influenced a decision remained, deliberately so, unknown and unknowable because to present them would imply a separation of the word and the world. Rather, a selection was made from alternatives within the same moment of time, and once the choice was made and the time and space occupied; motive and intent no longer existed.

The closed temporal narrative of the diaries denies that writing is discontinuous and, in doing so, denies the distinction between surface and depth. Words have become purely self-referential by raising things (nature, others, identity) to the same level. In the diaries there exists no category of being prior to language and society; the public writings depend upon this conception of writing as the world. Grammar creates a world in which the temporal and spatial become identical. So Byrd substitutes space for time, as in the entry for May 10, 1711. He continued his list of daily activities by writing “In the next place I read some Greek in the new edition of Homer” (TSD, p. 342).

Such substitutions as French for church and space for time indicate that the rigid chronological order of the diaries was in fact a model of historiography and made a form of written history possible for Byrd. They permitted the imposition of a progressive and linear narrative upon the experiences he reports in other texts. Each day was an empty page, yet another parody of the Lockean tabula, here a metamorphosis from landscape to page, on which the same sequence and form were placed by the author for his own Enlightenment. But the histories Byrd creates are only parodies because they omit the elements of a valid historical narrative: the relationship between prior cause and later effect is deleted except insofar as the grammar supplies it at the cost of losing all content, interest, and feeling—losing all, in fact, save the anonymous and omniscient author and the limited I of the character. The temporal frame in which Byrd set each of his prose works—A Progress to the Mines in the Year 1732, A Journey to the Land of Eden Anno 1733, The Secret History of the Line, and The History of the Dividing Line, Run in the Year 1728—is more than a convenience and demonstrates the power of a convention to structure reality. As the diaries chronicled his days in a linear order, so do these writings present narratives which, in form and content, are proto-histories of the man, his country, and his times.

William Byrd composed more than an “excellent English” through the principles of order, reduction, and selection which governed the writing of the diaries. He removed affect, ambiguity, and ambivalence from identity, politics, and history by making the latter a product of his grammar. Only then did style, irony, and wit invent William Byrd, plantation society, and the American landscape. With these caveats in mind, we can turn to the public writings, admiring even more the craft of the author, but remembering for ourselves Byrd's complaint to an unknown lady he had renamed “Panthea”: “But stil I cant forgive your ill-nature, tho I must commend your skil in setting it off” (ASD, p. 196).

Notes

1. The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709-1712, ed. Louis Wright and Marion Tinling (Richmond: The Dietz Press, 1941), p. 485. Hereafter cited in the text as TSD. This entry specifically refers to Byrd's assumption of the estate of his wife's grandfather, Daniel Parke, in exchange for responsibility for the debts against the estate. Hence there is nothing casual about the agreement, despite the seeming unimportance of the diary entry.

2. The formulaic qualities are especially evident in the entries contained in Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739-1741: With Letters & Literary Exercises, 1696-1726. Maude H. Woodfin, ed., trans. Marion Tinling (Richmond: The Dietz Press, 1942)—hereafter cited in the text as ASD. The entries of the elderly William Byrd are not just considerably shorter than those in the earlier diaries; they even more rigidly maintain and repeat the chronological pattern established earlier. They are hardly more than a log of events which omits both the content and the feeling attached to any given activity.

3. The entry for Dec. 31, 1710, reports a similar dream of a “flaming sword” and then the appearance a week later of a cloud in the shape of a dart. Byrd's fear of “some misfortune to me” was verified for him by “the death of several of my negroes after a very unusual manner” (TSD, pp. 279-80). For my purposes in this paper, what is significant is the inclusion of potentially disturbing and disruptive events within a linguistic framework whose structure mastered such fears. A psychologically oriented critic might very well use this and similar entries to re-create the conflicts of the man rather than, as here, the intention of the writer.

4. Henry James, Hawthorne (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1879). p. 40, p. 117. The parallel is all the more interesting because we assume the existence of a much closer link between James and Hawthorne than between Byrd and the modern reader.

5. Louis B. Wright, ed., The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives of a Colonial Virginian (Cambridge: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 35. Wright's recognition of the problems the diaries pose is the genesis of this essay. In “William Byrd's Histories of the Line: The Fashioning of a Hero,” American Literature, 47 (January 1976), pp. 535-51, Donald T. Siebert, Jr. does suggest that Byrd wrote his diary “to give his life a shape and form, an order, an illusion of regularity” (p. 550). But Siebert asserts the genesis of such an attempt lay in Byrd's “fears and self-doubts” (p. 536), an assertion for which he offers only the evidence of Byrd's “Inamorato” read without consideration of intention, audience, and occasion. See below and Note 9.

6. William Byrd of Westover (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), p. 179. Beatty does not pursue the implications of his language and the seeming contradiction it offers to our portrait of Byrd. But he pauses at the cellars precisely because the house is both metaphor for the self and the intersection of private and public in Southern society, American literature, and William Byrd.

7. Pierre Marambaud, William Byrd of Westover. 1674-1744. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971), p. 274.

8. The judgment of the style is that of Jay B. Hubbell in The South in American Literature, 1607-1900 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1954), p. 51. It represents, as does Hubbell's book, the accepted opinion. I have added the conclusion.

9. The audience for this piece was a lady Byrd was wooing; hence it is not surprising that he simultaneously stresses his sexual drive, his social graces, and his ability to speak in an ambiguous manner about personal and intimate details.

10. Marambaud, p. 200. Again I cite an opinion because it represents the consensus of critical and historical judgment.

11. An important exception to this generalization is Robert D. Arner, “Westover and the Wilderness: William Byrd's Images of Virginia,” Southern Literary Journal, 7 (Spring 1975), pp. 105-23, which concentrates on The Secret History of the Line. As well, Kenneth Requa, “‘As Far as the South Seas’: The Dividing Line and the West in William Byrd's Histories,” in The Westering Experience in American Literature: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Merrill Lewis & L. L. Lee, (Bellingham, Wash: Bureau for Faculty Research, Western Washington University, 1977), pp. 59-68, stresses the degree to which Byrd sought, “like God himself to create order in so chaotic a landscape” (p. 59).

12. Stanley Elkins' distinction between the fully developed ideology and the actual etiology of slavery is instructive and relevant: “There was nothing ‘natural’ about it; it had no necessary connection with either tropical climate or tropical crops.” See Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 37.

13. The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684-1776, ed. Marion Tinling, 2 Volumes (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia for The Virginia Historical Society, 1977), I, p. 387. Hereafter cited by volume and page number in text as Corr.

14. In Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1978), p. 117, Garry Wills cites Byrd's mechanical metaphor to support his argument about Jefferson's complete participation in the essential Enlightenment activities of observation, analysis, and mechanization. This also serves, as Wills is aware, as an attack upon paternalism as the social and intellectual model of life in the eighteenth-century American South.

15. Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 32. Adorno and Horkheimer do, however, grant too much autonomy and power to their concept of the self in their usual usage; it resists culture in ways they do not explain.

16. Claude Lefort, “Then and Now,” Telos, 36 (Summer 1978), p. 30.

17. An interesting parallel is offered by Baird Tipson's discussion of the diary of Thomas Shepard. The “detached attitude” there is attributed to the Puritan compromise of the clash between the Reformed tradition of conversion as a lifelong process and the Pietist concept of it as a tumultuous “breakthrough.” See “The Routinized Piety of Thomas Shepard's Diary,” Early American Literature 13, 1 (Spring 1978), pp. 64-80.

18. In fact, the quotation as given in my text tends to distort by heightening the actual entry. It omits the formulaic opening sentences, which in this case are: “I rose about 6 o'clock and read two chapters in Hebrew and some Greek in Lucian. I said my prayers and ate boiled milk for breakfast. I danced my dance. It rained a little this morning. My wife caused. …”

19. As an ideology paternalism imposes as well a check upon abuses by locating all power and responsibility in the master alone. Within it, slaves could demand and to some extent receive the promise of fair treatment and punishment by insisting upon their claims as humans rather than their legal status as property. See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll. Jordan. Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974). But see especially the critique of Genovese's description of paternalism offered by Herbert Gutman in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), pp. 309-326. Gutman notes that paternalism only emerged as dominant after 1830; thus attempts to understand earlier behavior, whether of master or slave, in terms of the later myth, does violence to the historical reality as it ignores Byrd's own explanations for his attitudes and behavior.

20. Writing Degree Zero (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 77. For Barthes zero degree writing arises in response to the conventional narratives of bourgeois society. I obviously have a different concept of its relationship with history; in fact, that this empty writing establishes the autonomy of narrator and text, sometimes at the expense of politics as Barthes argues, and sometimes, as with Byrd, as the preparation for a very definite kind of politics.

21. “Preface,” Critical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. xiii-xiv. Thus for Barthes, the temporal nature of bourgeois literature is contrary to the ontology of writing itself. Without attempting to resolve that issue, the contrast between this concept of the origins of writing and the importance of historical narrative for Byrd certainly presents interesting questions.

22. History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St. Louis: Washington University Studies; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 97.

23. “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” The Consciousness Industry (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974), p. 123. Enzensberger's quote is apropos not only because he is studying the consequences of the Enlightenment but also because, like Byrd, he is interested in the realm of “ordinary” experience and how it is shaped.