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Paris Was My Paramour & Other Lost Diaries By Lawrence Millman
PREFACE SEVERAL YEARS AGO I was traveling in a remote area in the Middle East when I happened to notice a foreign object sticking out of an abandoned termite mound. The object looked a bit like a papyrus scroll. Indeed, that's precisely what it was, as I realized after I gently removed it from the mound and began studying it. The scroll was brittle with age. Likewise, it contained writing in a primitive and, to me, wholly indecipherable script. Sensing I'd made a significant discovery, I put it in my rucksack. A week or so later I showed the scroll to a Biblical scholar at the University of Jerusalem. His eyes immediately widened. "This is God's handwriting," he said in a hushed voice. The scroll turned out to be a diary God had written during his last days in power. In this diary, the Supreme Being comes off as a very vulnerable, very human sort of guy. He describes his inadequacies as a father, the stressful nature of his job, and his uneasy relationship with his constituents. Unlike Anais Nin, God is not writing with an eye to later publication, so he makes no attempt to censor himself. Thus his diary provides an unusually intimate window on his life. Before this discovery, I'd been flailing about in search of a raison d'être. Now all of a sudden I had one: to find similarly lost, missing, or misplaced diaries and journals. The gods (not God: according to his diary, he had stepped down) seemed to endorse my search. At a beach near Gloucester, Massachusetts, I picked up a tin of Skoal chewing tobacco and on a whim decided to open it; inside was a crumpled diary that chronicled the struggle between a local fishing boat and a very lucrative North Atlantic storm. A short-order cook at a Wendy's in Brooklyn turned out to be a lineal descendant of the Biblical Job; he handed me his ancestor's grease-stained diary, saying, "Here, mister, take dis before we t'rows it in da trash." And then there was the Lost Generation diary I found in a hog wallow in Kansas--a seemingly improbable place for a literary text. Serendipity even accompanied rejection. I sent an earlier version of this book to a New York publisher, and they promptly turned it down. The manuscript came back to me with the editor's diary accidentally tucked between its pages. The diary exposed the inner workings of the publishing trade like nothing else I had ever read. Luckily, I didn't need to get permission to include it in my book because the editor in question had become a street cleaner and was thus in the public domain. (I wasn't so lucky with Jack Kerouac's journal of his secret life as a dentist, which the Kerouac estate refused to relinquish for fear it might damage Kerouac's reputation as a hipster.) Diaries are the unclean laundry of literature. They reveal the private, the disreputable, and even the smutty aspects of their authors' lives. Yet they're also documents of truth in a world devoted primarily to flash and filigree. Where else but in a diary would we learn that Attila the Hun--one of history's leading macho personalities--was a henpecked husband? So it is that I offer you these diaries of the eminent, the not-so-eminent, and the justifiably obscure. Whatever their defects as literature might be, at least they tell the truth . . . Lawrence
Millman
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CONTENTS
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Some of our favorite New Hampshire writers from outside our catalogue.
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