Anne Frank (15 page)

Anne’s diary is a symphonic composition of major and minor themes, of notes and chords struck at sufficiently regular and frequent intervals so that they never leave the reader’s consciousness for very long. It’s possible to trace each thread as it weaves through the diary, periodically reappearing to
heighten and sharpen our understanding of a character or situation.

How amazing, a casual reader might say, how thoroughly unlikely that such a penetrating, dramatic, and structurally ambitious work should have evolved, on its own, from the natural and spontaneous jottings that a young girl added, every day or every few days, to her diary. Such a reader would have been right, or partly right, to wonder about that naturalness and that offhand improvisatory spirit.

INCLUDED IN
THE CRITICAL EDITION
ARE NUMEROUS PHOTOS
documenting the childish printing of Anne’s first diary entries and the fluid cursive scrawled over the final pages. Forensic handwriting experts engaged by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation have charted the alterations in each upswing and loop as her handwriting developed from that of a child into that of an adolescent. But even more pronounced than the changes in penmanship are the differences in maturity and sensibility that separate the little girl who printed those awkward letters from the young author who covered the colored sheets with confident script.

The gap between the giddy River Quarter social life that Anne describes at the start of the diary and the self-searching meditations that conclude it is so immense that it has distracted readers and critics from something they might otherwise have noticed had they been thinking more clearly—that is, had they taken the diary more seriously. Though the
content
of the final
pages is appropriately more somber and mature than that of the first entries, the
style
and the
voice
of the diary don’t change all that much from the diary’s beginning to its end.

The explanation is that, as we have seen, Anne rewrote the early sections two years after their initial composition, and that Otto combined the first draft with her revisions to produce a manuscript that told Anne’s story in the most affecting and
consistent
way. Had we considered the differences in the ability to comprehend and articulate that one would expect from the most precocious thirteen-year-old and the intellectual and literary capabilities of a girl of fifteen, we might have concluded (even in advance of the 1986
Critical Edition)
that the diary was not precisely what it seemed.

Indeed, a glance through
The Critical Edition
confirms how much work Anne herself—and later her father—did on the manuscript. Had the original diary not been edited by Anne and Otto, it seems less likely that it would have been published. Readers might have been put off by the sections that were (unlike many of the passages that open the diary, but which were written after the dates under which they appear)
actually
written when Anne had just turned thirteen. Here, for example, is the list of birthday gifts from the checkered diary, which does not appear in
The Diary of a Young Girl:

“From Mummy and Daddy I got a blue blouse, Variety, which is the latest party game for adults, something like Monopoly, a bottle of grape juice, which to my mind tasted a bit like wine and which has now begun to ferment so that I can’t drink it any more and I may have been right, since wine is made from grapes after all; then a puzzle; a bottle of peek-aroma ‘with acorns’ (I got that later, I mean ‘the acorns’); a jar of ointment; a 21/2 guilder bank note; a token for two books; a book from Katze, the Camera Obscura, but Margot has got that already, so I swapped it.”

Though we can do without most of this, it might have been instructive to learn that Anne received gifts from Peter van Pels and from Fritz Pfeffer’s “wife.” But it is only interesting
after
we’ve read the book, and it’s hard to imagine even the diary’s most devoted fans working their way through this, or any, of the bubbly longueurs of the “a” version.

Indeed, the first pages of the red, gray, and tan checked book are full of jottings that would have dissuaded most adults—and most children, for that matter—from continuing. In passages that both Anne and her father cut from
Het Achterhuis,
Anne lists her teachers for every grade and her daily activities. An inventory of her classmates annotated with gossipy commentary engages us, if at all, only because it reveals a bit more about Anne’s personality during that relatively carefree time. “Miss J. always has to be right. She is very rich and has a wardrobe full of gorgeous dresses, but they’re much too old for her…. Henny Mets is a nice, cheerful girl, except that she talks much too loudly, and is very babyish when she plays in the street…. Rob Cohen was also in love with me, but now I can’t stand him any more he is a hypocritical, lying, whining, crazy, boring little boy, who thinks he’s the cat’s whiskers.”

Months after life in Amsterdam had become nearly untenable for the city’s Jews, and five days before her sister received the decisive call-up notice, Anne wrote an unadorned account, which she cut and which Otto did not restore, of a trip to an ice-cream parlor, Oasis, with two boys, Hello and Fredie, and a girl named Wilma:

“We went to oasis and bought an ice cream for 12 cents, then Wilma came, and they wanted to stand us another ice cream but Wilma and I didn’t want to, but they bought us each one for 12 (cents) anyway, but we didn’t accept it, so Fredie and Hello had 2 more 12-cent ice creams.”

Anne Frank was a prodigy, but her gifts had not yet de
veloped, at thirteen. The evidence of those gifts would come only later, brought about at least partly by what John Berryman called “the special pressure” of her incarceration in the secret annex.

A
NNE
intended
Het Achterhuis
to begin with the June 20, 1942, entry, in which she decides to write to Kitty and wonders who will be interested in the “unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.” The passage was composed at some point during the spring of 1944. Anne was about to turn fifteen and was revising her journal, recalling—and writing as—her thirteen-year-old former self, a popular girl with lots of boyfriends surreptitiously peeping at her in the mirrors on the classroom walls. She describes sitting with her chin in her hands, too enervated and bored to decide whether or not to stay home or go out. In reality, the decision about whether to go outside had been made for her two years before, and thinking her way back to that point required such an effort of the imagination that, at least once, Anne overdoes it and begins to gush, referring in the revision to “the dearest darling of a father I have ever seen.” Sagely, Otto simplified it to “father” in the published version.

In another entry, dated Sunday, June 21, 1942, and also written two years afterward, Anne reflects on the surprising notion that a girl of her age should be so obsessed with boys. For the sake of
Het Achterhuis,
she pretends to still be the flirty chatterbox puzzling over how to discourage overeager suitors. But here too she is remembering what it was like to allow a boy to walk her home from school and to expect him to fall madly in love with her. When a boy blows kisses at her or tries to take her arm, Anne tells Kitty, she gets off her bicycle, pretends to be insulted, and orders him to leave her alone. Even if Anne
had
been writing this on June 21, 1942, the entry would still have
been outdated. Nine days before, all Jews had been required to turn in their bicycles.

In this ghostly collaboration between the living and the dead, Anne and her father seem to have agreed that her diary should start with a sketch of how she lived before she vanished into the attic. But the breathless tone in which the diary, as we now know it, opens—“On Friday, June 12th, I woke up at six o’clock, and no wonder; it was my birthday”—was not how Anne wished her readers to first hear her voice. Revising, Anne excised the description of her joy at receiving the diary and of the birthday party that featured a Rin Tin Tin film.

Otto chose wisely in restoring these accounts of childish pleasures enjoyed in freedom. But with the exception of those few paragraphs rescued from the original draft, the diary’s early pages are the work of the fifteen-year-old Anne writing more thoughtfully than she could have two years before. Anne herself retained—and expanded upon—the references to her Ping-Pong club, her trips to the ice-cream parlor, to the anxiety that grips her fellow students before a teacher’s meeting, and of being assigned to write an essay as punishment for her excessive chattering.

If the innocent thirteen-year-old sets off by listing her presents, and noting which friends gave her which gifts, the fifteen-year-old begins by reflecting on the oddness of a girl like herself keeping a diary. As Anne knew, plenty of girls keep diaries. More to the point, even as Anne was asking Kitty who would want to read about her life, she understood that, given the extraordinary circumstances under which she was living, the idea of
her
keeping a diary wasn’t odd at all. Even as she is writing that she doesn’t “intend to show this cardboard-covered notebook” to anyone, she is not only revising a book that she hopes to get published, but she is no longer writing in the cardboard-covered diary except to fill in blank pages.

Aware that strangers might read
Het Achterhuis,
realizing that she needed to explain how “Anne Robin” came to be confined to the house behind, she added the section in which her father suggests they might have to go into hiding, reproducing the essence if not the letter of their conversation. One can understand why Anne chose not to record this scene soon after it happened; perhaps this grim possibility seemed too alarming to dwell on. Only later, for clarity, does she return to the moment when she heard about the plan that might shortly be put into effect. In the revised version, Otto tells Anne that they want to avoid being arrested and having their possessions seized by the Germans. So they have decided to disappear before they are tracked down and deported.

“‘But, Daddy, when would it be?’

“He spoke so seriously that I grew very anxious.

“ Don’t you worry about it, we shall arrange everything. Make the most of your carefree young life while you can.’

“That was all. Oh, may the fulfillment of these somber words remain far distant yet,” is how Anne ends the scene, though the truth is that, by then, the warning of those somber words had already been fulfilled.

Hoping that she is telling a story that will interest, among others, the Dutch minister of education in exile, she writes the June 20 entry as an introduction to herself and to Kitty. Promising “to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart,” she describes a feeling that will be familiar to many, perhaps most, adolescents—the sense of being solitary even when she is surrounded by friends and loved ones. By the time she is describing her alienation, she
is
alone, or at least cut off from the “thirty people whom one might call friends.” Her diary has become a weapon in her struggle against the isolation that has increased in the absence of companions her own age, and de
spite (or exacerbated by) the close quarters in which she and her family and the others have been living.

Here is Laureen Nussbaum’s commentary on the June 20 diary letter: “Anne, putting herself in her state of mind of two weeks before she went into hiding, explains why, despite all her popularity, she feels lonely and in need of a true friend to whom she can direct her outpourings. That friend she decides to call Kitty and after a terse version of her original autobiographical sketch, she proceeds immediately to write her first ‘Dear Kitty’ epistle. In just four letters she summarizes both her school and her social life in the spring of 1942 and ends with a beautiful transition: an evening stroll with her father, during which he broaches to her the subject of hiding and all the drastic change which the move will entail.”

Putting herself in her state of mind of two weeks before she went into hiding.
That is precisely what Anne is doing—that is how memoirs are written, in this case in the form of a diary, or a series of letters. Anne was not trying to fictionalize but rather to give the most accurate chronological record of the person she was and the person she became, and of everything and everyone that helped bring about that change.

I
N GENERAL,
comparisons of the first entries and their counterparts in the second draft persuade us that Anne was right to trust her instinct for self-editing. Typically, the revised version is clearer, more readable, and free of the sketchiness and haste that muddle some early passages. The differences between Anne’s initial efforts and her revisions vary from trivial to profound, and deepen our respect for her as a writer. The first versions are in many cases more impulsive and spirited, the second more distanced, cooler, even abstract. The revisions may trade immediacy for clarity, raw emotion for reflection, but they are
nearly always better
written
—more condensed, descriptive, fully dramatized, and evocative. Only very rarely, when Anne overthinks her own reactions to events, does the writing become more literary or “interesting” in ways that seem less faithful to what she might have thought and felt at the moment.

In Anne’s original March 12, 1944, entry, we learn that she has just heard about the arrest of someone she knows and about the illness of Bep’s father—bad news that makes her want to fall asleep as a release from thinking. After a reference to her isolation and to the divide between her inner and outer selves, she explains why she is unable to turn for help to her sister: “Margot would so much like to be my confidante, but I can’t. She’s a darling, she’s good, she’s pretty, but she lacks something I need. Nor could I bear to have someone about all day long who knew what was going on inside me. I can’t have my confidant around me all day long, except for…Peter!”

The differences in the second version are subtle but all important. “Margot is very sweet and would like me to trust her, but still, I can’t tell her everything. She’s a darling, she’s good and pretty, but she lacks the nonchalance for conducting deep discussions; she takes me so seriously, much too seriously, and then thinks about her queer little sister for a long time afterwards, looks searchingly at me, at every word I say, and keeps on thinking: ‘Is this just a joke or does she really mean it?’”

Only in this draft has Anne found the phrase (“she lacks the nonchalance for conducting deep discussions”) that Philip Roth singled out as indicative of her complexity of mind and grace of expression. Charitably, Anne concludes, “I think that’s because we are together the whole day long, and that if I trusted someone completely, then I shouldn’t want them hanging around me all the time.” The mention of Peter as the ideal confidant—the outburst that ends the first draft—has disappeared completely.